Electric Velocipede 27

by John Klima

  The maid asked, “Can I help you, Miss?”

  “No, thank you," Ondine said. “I must have the wrong house.”

  #

  The jeweler had given him quite the princely sum for the pearls, which more than paid for a lovely engagement ring for Vanessa. The jeweler also promised to take the ring back if she said no, which Lawrence thought was a friendly and sporting touch.

  So he headed off to Vanessa’s, ring in pocket. She’d set him up nicely as a respectable gentleman. His life as a person of no consequence was over. He proposed to her on his knee in her parlor, and she wept tears of joy and said yes. They discussed whether they wanted a big wedding, and decided on something small and intimate. He suspected she didn’t want to give her family time to talk her out of it, which was quite clever of her, really.

  The wedding was small, mainly attended by his father and Vanessa’s sister. His father scowled when introduced to Vanessa, scowled at the minister, and scowled at him. Lawrence didn’t care. His father would come around soon enough, in the face of his new money and title. Vanessa’s sister said it was lovely to meet him, but she clearly didn’t mean it.

  As the minister said, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to join this man and this woman in holy matrimony,” Lawrence saw a woman wearing black, who slipped in the back. She was wearing a veil, like a widow, but the hair stood up on the back of Lawrence’s neck.

  She was also wearing a magnificent set of pearls.

  As the ceremony continued, Lawrence felt like there was a rock in his stomach. He didn’t know why Ondine would be there, but he couldn’t imagine it was for any positive reason.

  Finally, the minister said, “If anyone present knows of any reason why this man and this woman should not be joined in holy wedlock, speak now or forever hold your peace.”

  Ondine stood. She said, “This man is a thief.”

  “Please don’t,” Lawrence said.

  “I would have given you anything you wanted,” Ondine said. “I would have given you the pearls if you’d asked me for them. I have more.”

  “You can’t give me what I want,” Lawrence said.

  He thought he saw Vanessa preen next to him out of the corner of his eye, but didn’t dare take his eyes off Ondine. Let Vanessa think whatever she wanted, as long as she still married him.

  Ondine removed the veil, and her hair spilled out and cascaded down to her waist. She wore pearls in it, and what looked like seaweed. “What are you, Lawrence?” A stiff breeze rushed up the aisles, lifting her hair.

  Lawrence realized that there was nothing he could say that would mean anything to Ondine. She wouldn’t understand. She was too innocent, too unworldly. She didn’t understand men, particularly men of a certain quality, or polite society. She really was a creature completely outside civilization.

  “What are you?” he asked Ondine.

  “You know what I am,” she said. Thunder sounded outside.

  “What’s happening?” Vanessa asked. “Who is this woman?”

  “You look so innocent asleep,” Ondine said. She was paler than he remembered, and her hair looked almost damp. “You fooled me.”

  He didn’t have an answer for that.

  “If you ever sleep again, you’ll die,” Ondine said, and lightning struck so close that his hair literally stood on end. Then she turned and walked away.

  Vanessa burst into tears and ran out of the church.

  He chased Vanessa out the door. “Wait!”

  “Clearly, your morals are as loose as your father’s,” Vanessa said. “I have no desire to marry a libertine.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “What manner of man are you, Lawrence?”

  He didn’t have an answer for that, either.

  #

  Ondine went home, to the ocean, where she belonged. Where she had a tail instead of legs. Where things made sense. To her father, old and bearded and wise, and full of good sense.

  “I didn’t think I needed to warn you about mortals again,” he said.

  Later, he said, “I went up on land to look for him.”

  Ondine scowled.

  “I didn’t speak to him.” He smiled, a dark wicked smile. His blue eyes flickered amusement from behind his heavy silver eyebrows. “He looked tired.”

  She would never understand mortals and what they had become. Never.

  And yet, she knew instantly when Lawrence had thrown himself overboard. Mouth below the waterline, arms pressing the body up out of the water for a breath. He didn’t cry out for help, but they never did. Breathing took precedence. He didn’t kick, didn’t thrash, just kept pushing his body upwards.

  She lifted him out of the water. He looked worn and haggard.

  “Stupid mortal,” Ondine said. “You don’t have to drown yourself to die. You only have to fall asleep.”

  Lawrence burst into tears, like a spoiled toddler. “I’m afraid.”

  She felt a flicker of pity despite her anger. He was such a child. She supposed he was really very young.

  “Please,” he said. “Please. Lift the curse. For pity’s sake, please. I’ll do anything you want.”

  She could take him to Capri, she supposed. Ironic, considering how Ondine had wanted to set him up in a villa here. Not that she wanted that any more.

  “What do you want from me?” he asked. “I can’t give you your pearls back. The jeweler said you already had them.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the ring. Vanessa’s ring. “Take it.” His voice turned accusing. “It’s not like I have any further use for it. You’ve seen to that.”

  Ondine let go of Lawrence, and he slipped beneath the waves. Peacefully, like he was falling asleep.

  THE END

  The Beasts We Want to Be

  by Sam J. Miller

  Two things were wrong with the Spasskaya assessment. The first was the painting: a tiny square in a simple frame, something I barely noticed at the time, but which would go on to cause us so much suffering. The second was the woman.

  Wailing greeted us when we arrived, almost at midnight. Assessment teams had to come without warning. Snow fell in great marching waves, helpless in the hands of the wind off the Moscow River. Barely three weeks old, the winter of 1924 seemed to know how desperate and hungry we were, and to be conspiring with the Western imperialists to slaughter us.

  Twelve people lived in the Spasskaya mansion. Mere blocks from the Kremlin, big enough that thirty families would be moved in once we had stripped it. Our soldiers herded those twelve fat parasites into one room and encircled them while we did our work.

  They had been expecting us, of course. Every aristocrat and landlord and other assorted enemy of the people could anticipate a visit from an assessment team. We came in the night, and we stole the things we could sell abroad.

  Fabergé eggs and German expressionist sketches and errant Rembrandts passed through my hands; decadent filth that nonetheless could be turned into tens of thousands of rubles to feed the starving Soviet state. A watercolor by Kandinsky could buy us ten cows. The engagement ring of a century-dead empress could bring back two tractors. And these parasites, every one of them, actually believed they deserved these foul treasures bought with other men’s sweat and blood. No matter where we went in the mansion, we could hear them wailing.

  #

  I didn’t like it anymore, when they wept. Joy in the suffering of others was the first habit Apolek broke me of, sparing me a couple hundred hours in a Pavlov Box in the process. Class enemies saw us coming and attacked, or begged, or burst into tears, but I no longer singled them out for special brutality.

  “Lenin says we need to punish the parasites,” I had said, the first day I was assigned to Apolek’s detail, when he urged restraint.

  “Not with violence,” he had said. “Not with cruelty.”

  Apolek was a blond and ruddy peasant, younger than me, the youngest assessment team leader in the Red Army. Soft-spoken, earnest, above human emotion. I was an illiterate bloodthirsty street urchi
n, the son of steel workers who starved to death in the famine of 1910. Plucked out of the orphanage by the Ministry of Human Engineering, I was reconditioned into a species of man they said was “slightly smarter than a dog but just as vicious.”

  “They treated us with violence and cruelty,” I said, pouting, plotting.

  “Do it if you want,” he said. “We’ll see which one of us Volkov puts in a Box.”

  Back in the orphanage I’d beaten boys like him bloody on an almost daily basis, but his words were well-chosen. I’d just emerged from a Pavlov Box, suffering unending hours of electric shocks and chemical burns, pharmaceutical fumes and super-high-speed recordings, three times a day for months and months. And the mere possibility of escaping further torment was worth a try.

  And Apolek was right, of course, as he would always be about everything. I didn’t understand it, how a man as savage as Commander Volkov would reward us for not being savage, but I didn’t need to understand. I just had to do what Apolek told me.

  “The Soviet Union needs beasts,” he said, after that first assessment, carefully logging newly nationalized statues in the basement of the Kremlin Armoury. “It needs savage men to die in distant border skirmishes, or to torture kulaks. Is a beast what you want to be?”

  “No,” I mumbled, and in that moment I saw that I didn’t want that at all.

  “What do you want to be, Nikolai?”

  I shrugged. I looked at Apolek, too dazed to hide the desperation on my face. I wanted him to answer my question for me.

  “But not a beast,” he said.

  “No.”

  “We’ll work on that, then.”

  I was nineteen and he was seventeen, but in that moment I gladly and wholeheartedly attached myself to him as his protégé. And while the lean and hairy Commander Volkov came sniffing around our unit several times a week, for a year and a half he never found a reason to Box me up again.

  #

  Our soldiers were Broken. Eight of them accompanied us on our runs, to deal with the parasites when the parasites fought back. The Broken were boys who had been left too long in the Boxes, or test subjects who snapped beneath the weight of some new regimen of flashing lights and film strips and toxic fumes and prototype medicine. They were useful for the terror they caused, and for the savage violence they would break into with the proper command from their conditioned leader. They were also useful as a constant warning to other revolutionary soldiers.

  There was no more terrifying prospect, for those of us who had passed through a Pavlov Box, than the thought of being locked in one with no hope of reprieve. I dreamed of it endlessly. Probably it was programmed into all of us. Gnawing my lips open, screaming until I gagged on my own blood and puke and pounding my fists against spiked metal walls until the skin was all gone. Begging and pleading while the machines worked me over—and knowing that it would not end until my mind was completely gone.

  #

  I followed Apolek through the Spasskaya mansion, scuffing mud into carpet that had long ago ceased to be beautiful.

  “Worthless,” he said, after walking past ten gloomy paintings of Old Testament patriarchs.

  “How so?” I asked. “They look nice to me.”

  “The names,” he said. “The painters are not notable. Collectors in the West will only pay for the work of famous artists.”

  I never paid any attention to the signatures scrawled into the corners. Apolek probably told me that ten times before, but my Pavlov-Boxed brain has a hard time holding onto things. And a hard time concentrating, surrounded as I was by the smell of anger all the time.

  No two men emerged the same from any one reconditioning regimen. People were too complex. Their own experiences conditioned them to respond to stimuli so differently.

  Most reconditioned soldiers came away with “offshoots,” unanticipated consequences that could be good or bad. Crippling fears of perfectly harmless sights and sounds, or a sudden faculty for foreign languages, and so on. The social engineers spoke openly of their desire to breed men who could read minds or move objects with only thought, but so far those men only existed in rumor.

  I had an offshoot. I could smell violence. I could smell anger, could feel the heat of it wash over someone, before they said a word or even acted. No other emotion had any effect on me. Most of the time it was more of a liability than a gift; standing near an angry crowd could cripple me.

  Apolek was a reconditioning marvel, a specimen who emerged from the Pavlov Box with astonishing strength and willpower. That’s part of why Volkov gave him so much power so young. Apolek hinted he had conducted other missions, significantly less honorable ones, in which he had distinguished himself. “But that was the beast in me,” Apolek said, “and if we are to succeed as men we must not feed the beast.”

  “I like the worthless paintings,” he said tonight. “Especially when they’re good. If they’re worthless, they’ll stay here. It’s shortsighted to sell our most beautiful art to the countries that wish us all dead.”

  “Beauty can’t feed people,” I said, surprised I needed to spout Bolshevik clichés at him. “‘A good pair of boots is worth more to a peasant than all of Shakespeare.’”

  “On the contrary,” Apolek said, stooping to retrieve something hidden behind a curtain, propped up on the sill of a tall window. “Beauty is as necessary as oxygen. And don’t scowl so much, Nikolai. You look like an angry black bear when you do that.”

  I tried to smile, but Apolek did not see me. He held up a tiny painting, and his eyes widened.

  “Jesus,” Apolek whispered, reverent as any Old Believer. I stood on tiptoe to see, but it meant nothing to me. Two human-shaped stretches of bare white skin. Tears filled his eyes and then overflowed, and I looked again, but still saw nothing.

  A woman watched us from a doorway across the hall, older than us but not by much, dressed all in black. Why was she not with the others? Apolek did not see her. When he took the painting, his lips trembled. Hers went white.

  #

  The Broken found her, and brought the woman with the rest of her family to the camps. The Spasskaya assessment was otherwise without incident. No heroics, no bloodshed, and only a handful of art objects worth selling.

  I shuffled through my weekend the way I always did: miserably, unsure even of the ground I stood on. My dreams were all of Pavlov Boxes.

  Apolek told me I was lucky to even have a weekend, and I suppose he was right. Soldiers in totalitarian armies rarely get time off, especially in the bloody hunger chaos of the capitol, but Apolek actually treated his team like human beings. To me, a lowly grunt who had been told his whole life that savagery was his only strength, he gave a shocking amount of liberty. And a secretary. He took a big risk in doing all that. Apolek said he saw something in me.

  My nightmares had been getting worse. This time I dreamed I was inside a Box, my whole body spasming from electric shocks, and one of them caused my jaw to slam shut with such force that I woke myself up—and found that I had shattered a tooth.

  But then, Monday morning, when Apolek normally banished the darkness, I arrived at the Kremlin Armoury and he was not there. This had never happened before; every other day he arrived well before me, to study books on foreign art, or keep up on the latest social engineering successes. Sometimes he slept under his desk.

  No one knew the last time he was there. Not even the guards, who barracked there all weekend, remembered seeing him.

  I tried to do work. I had assessment deployments to plan out, backlogged incident reports to complete and submit, all the orderly rational work that Apolek said would help me tame my inner beast. And none of it worked.

  I did something I had never done before. I went down to the basement, alone, and consulted the logbook. An entry for every assessment, describing each item seized and a brief notation of the plans for it. I was proud of myself, heaving it down off the high shelf with only a glimmer of suspicion what I was chasing.

  Besides the ten worthle
ss Bible scenes, there were no paintings registered under the Spasskaya assessment.

  Memory was not an important thing for a grunt, so my own reconditioning had not encouraged it. As a result my mind did not hold memories well, although my body did: weapons work, martial arts, even plumbing and mechanics came easy and stayed. Apolek had tried hard to help me reclaim my memory, by telling me things again and again. Stories. Fairy tales. Dirty jokes. Things that happened to him when he was a child. Some things had stayed. I could hear his voice in my ear, soothing and wise:

  “It’s a legend. No one knows if it’s true or not. One day, an assessment officer found a painting that was simply priceless. A Leonardo thought lost, or something else that any Western museum would ransom half its collection for. Well, the assessment officer who discovered it, he told his commanding officer what he had. And the man murdered him, and erased the painting from the logbook, and fled to Paris. Remember, our superiors are no further from being beasts than we are. Some are a lot closer.”

  Apolek would never have concealed a painting. If it wasn’t there, it was because someone removed it.

  I did not think about it for long. Apolek would have counseled caution, but he was not there to do so. I climbed the stairs to Volkov’s office two at a time. I girded myself for a fight, prepared to barrel past guards and secretaries, but the officer sat alone in a small room with no door.

  “Comrade,” he said, eyeing me suspiciously.

  “Commander,” I said, saluting. “It’s Apolek, sir. He’s gone.”

  Volkov frowned. “Barely noon on a Monday,” he said. “I am sure he is merely—”

  “No,” I said, and stamped my foot. “He’s never late. We found something Friday night. A painting. And it’s not in the logbook. And now he’s gone. I think something terrible happened to him. I think someone—”

  His face showed no surprise. Why should he be surprised? Apolek would have told him about the painting.