The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds

by Ian Tregillis

  “It’s all in my report, sir.”

  “Yes . . . but I believe they should hear it straight from you. Indulge me.”

  Marsh did. He took care to emphasize the peculiar nature of the fire, its rapidity as well as the conspicuous absence of petrol, oil, and other smells. For their part, his audience appeared to take the story in stride. But Marsh felt a subtle disdain in the silence, a tacit acknowledgment among these men that he was not one of them. Still, they listened without interruption until:

  “What do you mean this fellow was on fire?”

  “Blazing like the Crystal Palace. Spouting flames which quickly spread from his body to the furniture to the walls, and in moments the entire hotel was ablaze. In other words, he was on fire.”

  Stephenson touched Marsh’s arm as if to say, Easy, lad. Don’t get your dander up. Marsh wrapped up with his arrival in Barcelona, describing the film fragments and the Frankensteined gypsy girl.

  The flare of a match briefly silhouetted the profile of a rotund man in the corner as he lit a cigar. Before the light faded, Marsh also glimpsed Commander Pryce, and Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, who was Stephenson’s superior and the head of SIS.

  Sinclair spoke up next. “Leaving aside the more improbable portions of this tale . . .” He trailed off into another coughing fit before continuing. “What do you make of this, Stephenson?”

  Stephenson’s shrug was a peculiar lopsided gesture on the one-armed man. “I don’t know what to make of it, sir. But I’d say we have a bloody great problem on our hands.” He enumerated the points of his argument on his fingers. “First, we know Krasnopolsky witnessed things that frightened him half-dead. Second, he died in a fire that arose quite spontaneously. If Commander Marsh says there was no external fuel, I assure you gentlemen there was none. And third, the circumstantial evidence on the film suggests the Jerries have tapped into something rather unnatural.”

  Unnatural. The old man’s comment jarred something loose at the back of Marsh’s mind. The half-forgotten memory of a drunken misad-venture back at university. He’d long since attributed the hazy recollections of that night to drink—he had been rather pissed. But now recent events conspired to resurrect the memory, casting it in a new light.

  It took Marsh back to Oxford, and a long night spent searching the Bodleian for anthropodermic volumes with an irrepressible friend. A grisly night, but harmless . . . until Will found the object of his quest and read aloud from it. Marsh crossed his arms, warding off a frisson of disquiet. He’d never returned to the Bodleian after that night. Nor had they ever spoken about it. One sensed that Will had committed a whopping great indiscretion, even by his standards.

  Unnatural. Marsh had comforted himself with hopeful self-delusion, disregarding the whole affair as a faulty memory and perhaps a lesson on the perils of drinking to excess. Except, of course, Will had been sober as a deacon. And now as he listened to Stephenson and reflected upon the events in Spain, Marsh confronted the possibility that his memory was unscathed.

  Marsh returned his attention to the conversation at hand. Somebody had turned on another lamp. The room had split in two factions: those who believed Stephenson and Marsh were crazy, and those who believed they were merely mistaken. Arguments flew back and forth until Admiral Sinclair clapped his hands for silence.

  “Gentlemen! This is leading nowhere. I’ll issue an all-section directive to flag and compile any information regarding this von Westarp character. Until we know more, there is nothing we can do. I suggest we table the issue.”

  Marsh’s thoughts were still in Oxford. “That’s a mistake,” he blurted.

  Stephenson coughed, the corners of his mouth turned up behind his hand. He loves it when I make an ass of myself.

  Somebody muttered something about “Stephenson’s pet gorilla,” Marsh’s nickname back at SIS. They saw him as a rough fellow, brutish, and—because of his class—no doubt endowed with disgraceful manners. A gorilla.

  The Admiral leaned forward, fixing Marsh with a cold stare. He coughed again into his handkerchief before responding. “I beg your pardon, Commander?”

  “Forgive me, sir, but I was there. And I’m telling you, the Jerries are on to something here. If we wait on this, it’ll be too late to do anything.”

  “Well, then,” chimed the First Lord. “Thank you so very much for sharing your vast wisdom and expertise.” He shifted in his chair, turning his attention fully on his peers. A none-too-subtle indication that Marsh was dismissed and disregarded.

  Thinking of Will, Marsh murmured to Stephenson, “We need to recruit specialists.”

  “Specialists?”

  Well, hell. In for a penny, in for a pound, thought Marsh. He nodded at Stephenson. The old man regarded his protégé through narrowed eyes.

  “Yes,” said Marsh. “Experts in the unnatural.”

  There was no point in Marsh announcing the idea. But Stephenson had the respect of these men, and so he voiced Marsh’s suggestion as though it were his own.

  The room erupted in pandemonium.

  “Right, then. We’ll just open our doors to every crank we can muster, shall we? Press them into service?”

  “—may as well issue faerie wands to the troops while we’re at it—”

  “—off his rocker—”

  “—wasting our time—”

  The rotund man in the shadows cleared his throat. “Hmm. Let the man have his say.”

  Marsh recognized the voice. And what the hell is he doing here? He holds no office . . . although if war breaks out on the continent, Stanhope may be ousted.

  Stephenson looked at Marsh. “What do you have in mind?”

  Marsh shook his head. “First let me talk to somebody. Discreetly. Then I’ll get back to you.”

  7 March 1939

  Reichsbehörde für die Erweiterung germanischen Potenzials

  Klaus abandoned his plan to actively humiliate Reinhardt at the award ceremony after learning none other than Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler would pin the Spanish Cross on Doctor von Westarp’s chest. Had it been a lower-level functionary presiding over the ceremony, Klaus would have gone ahead and knocked Reinhardt down a few rungs. But embarrassing Reinhardt on today of all days would also mean disgracing the doctor in front of his patron. Contemplating the inevitable retribution was enough to make Klaus tremble. Instead, he resolved to outperform Reinhardt during the day’s demonstrations.

  All of which he kept to himself while marching behind Reinhardt, alongside Heike and Hauptsturmführer Buhler. The imbecile Kammler shambled along at the end of his leash. Theirs were the visually spectacular abilities, and thus they led the procession. Reinhardt in front, of course, because in the doctor’s eyes, he was complete: the pinnacle of his achievement.

  We’ll see about that, thought Klaus.

  Behind them, his sister marched alongside the Twins. Her power, like that of the identical psionicists, had a quiet potency that didn’t lend itself to pomp and flash. Although Gretel had survived the errant shell in Spain without a scratch: she had known exactly where to huddle, and when. But like the Twins’, her demonstration was scheduled later in the day.

  Klaus sneaked a glance at her. Like the rest of them, she wore a crisp, perfect new uniform. But in one hand she also carried a bent, ragged, black-and-white umbrella. The old thing jarred with her uniform. It seemed so out of place that for a moment he couldn’t help but check the sky. But the day had dawned clear and blue and bright. So bright, in fact, that sunlight glinted on the newly created insignia pinned to their collars: SS siegrunen cleaving a skull, like lightning bolts energizing the Willenskräfte.

  The munitions range where the most rigorous skill testing took place had been transformed into a makeshift parade ground. White-coated technicians had taken up shovels and filled the craters. Everything received a new coat of paint. Bunting hung from every sill, swastika flags from every eave.

  The doctor had started the program that eventually became the Reichs behörde on his
family farm. It was fitting, then, that the dozen buildings now comprised by the complex huddled around the original house. The wood-and-brick farmhouse with blue trim was the nexus of the Reichsbehörde. The doctor lived on the third floor, where he enjoyed an unobstructed view of the surrounding training grounds. Klaus and the doctor’s other children lived in his shadow, on the second floor. And the original laboratory still occupied the first floor, although it had fallen into disuse as the complex had expanded. The other buildings—the laboratories, barracks for the mundane troops, machine shops, chemical huts, toolsheds, the ice house and pump house—flanked the farmhouse, forming the arms of a U.

  The farm’s greatest virtue was its isolation. It was surrounded on all sides by oak and ash trees.

  Klaus and his companions marched to the center of the training grounds, turned in formation, and came to a halt in front of the riser where the doctor sat with his two distinguished visitors. For all the pomp, it was a small ceremony. Only Himmler, the doctor’s patron of many years, and one of his subordinates, SS-Obergruppenführer Greifelt, had arrived from Berlin. The nascent Götterelektrongruppe was the Reich’s greatest weapon. As such, its true nature was, for the time being, a closely guarded secret. The mundane troops attached to the REGP knew a single untoward comment could land them in contempt of the Gestapo.

  Klaus had never seen Himmler in person. He was surprised to find the Reichsführer was a chinless baby-faced man.

  Klaus and the others stood at attention while Himmler heaped glowing praise upon the doctor’s lifelong dedication to the pursuit of knowledge. It had begun with the doctor’s brief flirtation with the Thule Society twenty years earlier. But while the theosophical underpinnings of the Society’s belief in the vanished “Aryan supermen of lost Atlantis” had resonated with many, the doctor had quickly rejected the society’s meaningless preoccupation with mysticism and struck out on his own. His guiding stars were science and rationality, and between them he charted a course not for pointlessly lamenting lost greatness, but actively re-creating it. And so he built his orphanage, reasoning that children were closest to the wellspring of greatness, the least corrupted by everyday existence.

  He believed in human potential, thought Klaus, and so he created us.

  Back then, Klaus and the others had been little more than striplings. Formless bricks of clay waiting to be molded by the potter and tempered by the kiln. Klaus occasionally wondered, with idle curiosity, if he and Gretel once had other siblings.

  The orphanage had been in place for years when Himmler and von Westarp were introduced by a former colleague in the Thule Society. Doctor von Westarp’s eminently practical approach earned an enthusiastic supporter in Himmler. Thus, when Himmler became the leader of the SS, one of his first actions was to create the Institut Menschlichen Vorsprung, the Institute of Human Advancement, to house the doctor’s research. He also made the doctor an SS-Oberführer, senior colonel, enabling him to work without interference.

  A few years later, the IMV became the Reichsbehörde für die Erweiterung germanischen Potenzials, the Reich’s Authority for the Advancement of Germanic Potential. For administrative purposes, Himmler shoehorned this into the RKF Hauptamt because on paper, von Westarp’s research fell under Greifelt’s purview: the “strengthening of Germanism.” But this was an administrative formality, and in reality, the doctor continued to report directly to the Reichsführer.

  And today the doctor’s many years of work had come to fruition. He had transformed a handful of mewling babes into the vanguard of a new SS, men and women so great that a new unit of the Verfügungstruppe had been created for them, complete with their own insigne. Today von Westarp’s children became officers of the new Götterelektrongruppe. And so, Himmler concluded, the spiritual and intellectual father of the REGP deserved the Reich’s gratitude and its highest honor.

  Hollow-cheeked Greifelt listened to these remarks with alternating looks of boredom and puzzlement. He had never been to the REGP, had never seen the doctor’s work. Klaus suspected that Himmler had discouraged any such visits. Greifelt was a technocrat, an accountant in soldier’s garb.

  Herr Doktor von Westarp became the first recipient of the Spanish Cross, First Class, for superior contributions to the struggle against communism in Spain: sword-bearing eagles surrounding a golden Iron Cross, at the center of which diamonds ringed an opal swastika. It sent splinters of sunlight across the grounds every time the doctor’s chest swelled with pride.

  His children received the much smaller bronze Victory in Spain medals intended for members of the Condor Legion.

  Then it came time for the demonstrations. Today the doctor could revel in the glory of his achievements, as his children personally showcased their abilities to the doctor’s patron and putative superior officer for the first time. The show would also serve as a rehearsal for the private demonstration planned for the Führer’s fiftieth birthday next month.

  Reinhardt strode across the munitions range while two technicians readied the bipod of an MG 34 machine rifle. He cloaked himself in flames and motioned for them to begin.

  Reinhardt stood at attention, head high and chin thrust out, unfazed by the ammunition vaporizing against his chest. The bullets disappeared as violet coruscations within a man-shaped corona of blue fire. Himmler’s expression went blank. He adjusted his round wire-rimmed glasses and leaned over to say something to the doctor. The doctor nodded. Greifelt’s mouth and eyes went wide. He gaped at Reinhardt, unblinking, even after Doctor von Westarp helped him to his seat.

  In true combat, the barrage would have knocked Reinhardt on his ass. Klaus had seen it—and laughed—many times. Although the salamander’s willpower could subvert lead, strip it of its strength and render it harmless to flesh, it could not subvert momentum. The stream of superheated vapor would have sent him sprawling across the parade ground, mussing his hair and new uniform.

  But that would have been undignified. Reinhardt had demanded a concrete slug be buried in the ground, with tungsten-alloy stirrups for his toes. And lately what ever Reinhardt demanded, he received.

  A shame. Sabotaging the stirrups would have been simplicity itself. On a different day, a less auspicious day, Klaus would have done it without reservation.

  The doctor gave the order to cease fire. The machine gunner stopped. The last echoes of gunfire died away, and then quiet befell the parade ground but for the ticking of the rifle barrel and the whoosh of superheated air in Reinhardt’s updraft.

  The flames disappeared. Reinhardt looked as though he hadn’t moved a hair, although now the chest of his uniform exhibited the metallic sheen of vapor-deposited lead. Perhaps as much as a kilogram. His dignity might have been preserved, but the uniform was ruined anyway.

  Greifelt marveled at the sight of the bullet slag. He cocked his head toward the doctor, though he continued to stare at Reinhardt. His voice small and uncertain, he murmured, “But why wasn’t his uniform scorched away?”

  Reinhardt presumed to answer for the doctor. “Because I willed it not to be so, Herr Obergruppenführer.”

  It was the same reason Klaus didn’t fall through the earth when he became insubstantial: because doing so would contradict his Willenskräfte. Some things were trickier than others in this matter of the mind. Klaus’s lungs did not absorb oxygen in their ghost state. Heike had yet to fully master her own Willenskräfte, to make her ability encompass her clothing as well as her body.

  Unlike Reinhardt, Klaus required no tricks to preserve his dignity. The bullets winged through his wraith-body and shredded the wall behind him. Their momentum presented no problems. And when the barrage ended, his uniform was pristine.

  Yet Himmler seemed less pleased than he had been with Reinhardt’s presentation. He did not return Klaus’s sharp salute when the demonstration ended. Instead he leaned over to whisper to the doctor again. The doctor shook his head.

  He’s concerned because my skin is too dark for an Aryan, thought Klaus. A mongrel shouldn’t be
able to do what I can. It was maddening, and disappointing, but he knew his chance to prove himself would come soon enough.

  Buhler cringed behind Kammler during their turn in front of the gun. Kammler’s face turned red and his eyes bulged slightly as Buhler savaged his leash. “Wall. Wall!” Lead splattered against an invisible barrier and tinkled to the fire-glazed earth at Kammler’s feet.

  Rudolf’s ability had never lent itself directly to dodging bullets—at least, he hadn’t yet mastered it before the accident—but the sight of him swooping over the range would have gone over extremely well.

  Stupefied, Greifelt broke out of his trance. His lips moved, but he made no sound. Formality failed him. “My God,” he said. “I can’t believe what I’m seeing.”

  Himmler slapped von Westarp on the back. “You’ve done it, my friend. You’ve created a new breed of man.”

  The doctor’s chest swelled. He smiled. Smiled. “Watch it all. Watch my children at work.” He pointed to the truck rumbling onto the field.

  It puttered to a stop. A layer of cotton duck, mottled green and brown like a forest canopy, hung over the ribs of the cargo bed. A pair of mundane troops from the LSSAH hopped out of the cab. They threw the tailgate open with a clang. A half dozen men climbed out of the truck, shivering in the breeze, blinking at the sun. Unkempt, threadbare, emaciated. Jews, Communists, Roma, and other enemies of the state from one of the labor camps. The truck pulled away.

  Klaus, Reinhardt, and Heike joined Kammler and his handler on the field. Heike unsheathed her knife. Reinhardt blew her a kiss. She vanished, leaving her uniform suspended in midair.

  The prisoners scattered.

  Buhler pointed to the fastest one. “Hurl!” An invisible hand slapped the fugitive across the field. He landed atop another of the condemned men. They crumpled to the ground in a tangle of broken bones.

  Flames engulfed another man before he’d run ten yards.

  Heike disrobed amidst the chaos. The last of her clothing hit the ground as Reinhardt torched another fugitive.

  Over the years, they’d killed many in training. But in all that time, Klaus mused, Reinhardt had never once looked a victim in the eye. Klaus knew how to make a much better show for the doctor and his guests. Normally he crept up to his targets like a wraith, then finished them quietly. Knives were easier, but they weren’t impressive. And today was Doctor von Westarp’s day.