Red Star Tales

by Yvonne Howell

  “Have you had an adventurous night with someone?” Turning to her coworkers, Yeremeeva said, “Half an hour ago the door opens and in comes our lovely Ksenya. I say hello and she looks at me like I am some kind of poltergeist and shuts the door on me – can you imagine?”

  “Ksenya,” Galina Petrovna gasped, “what is going on with you, sweetheart?”

  Alex, the youngest, only snorted.

  “I… did—” Ksenya began. Then she noticed that Alla Grigoryevna really was wearing denim.

  Fortunately, a phone rang and the workday began. They were the purchasing department of a large trust, so they were kept rather busy, and in under half an hour everyone – except Ksenya – forgot about her strange comings and goings.

  She, however, kept mulling it over. There was nothing unnatural in a woman coming to work early. Perhaps she had spent the night at a friend’s. Being almost a divorcee, she had a right to stay overnight anywhere she pleased… Let’s say she had rushed to work. She had wanted a quiet moment there all by herself. And let’s say she saw Yeremeyeva and bolted, instinctively. Ah, when she was young, it used to be so cool to say to her girl friends: “I was so drunk I don’t remember that!” Even though the girls hadn’t really known what it was like to be drunk.

  Presently Ksenya reconstructed her “teleportation.” How she’d been unwilling to go outside and how her mind traveled to a warm office where soft house-shoes waited for her, and where a shawl so huge you could wrap your whole body in it was kept on a hook behind a cabinet, just in case. It was that and a china rose on a sill she’d had in front of her mind’s eye when she’d opened her door…

  And then of course that boatswain Gangrene, on the run from a gang of cutthroats, had tampered with the door. And, as a matter of fact, he had installed some kind of a thingamajig in the lock. The big question: was there a link between today’s teleportation adventure and yesterday’s mischief by the boatswain?

  Ksenya was burning with impatience to go home and find the answer. But she had to pick up the kids first, entertain them before supper, and then again after supper. At last, having tucked Mishka in, she was left alone with her front door.

  Which place should she visualize in her experiment? She chose her mother-in-law’s apartment. Since she’d lived there once, she knew the place well. She summoned an image of a futon, a cocktail table in front of it, two ugly armchairs – your standard relaxation corner, which her mother-in-law for some reason deemed sacred. Maybe she was just keeping up with everybody else, thinking a proper apartment simply had to have this impractical monstrosity of furniture?

  With trepidation, Ksenya pushed on the door –

  “Is that you?” said the mother-in-law. She was in the armchair, knitting, and Ksenya was standing in a doorway to the bedroom. “How did you get here?”

  Climbing out of the armchair was not so easy for the mother-in-law, while Ksenya could shut her door in a flash. That’s why she took her time to watch how the astounded mother-in-law groped for the armrests, as a ball of yarn dropped off her lap.

  Back home, Ksenya figured out why she had been standing in the bedroom doorway just now: it had been her most customary vantage point. She went to the kitchen, brewed herself a cup of strong tea and leaned on the windowsill, deep in thought. Fate had handed her something inexplicable. It seemed random and had nothing to do with her virtues and achievements, yet the strange gift gave her power. Yes, power. Up until now, everyone had ordered her around: her parents, neighbors, husband, mother-in-law… She’d been enduring it, seeking solace in adult versions of the same fairy tales she’d been feeding to her Mishka.

  You had to give her credit, though: she didn’t think up anything unlawful. Even settling scores wasn’t on her mind, at first. She just wanted to stay out of the rain and overcrowded trolleys. That’s all.

  The next morning, that dream came true. Well, not without a small glitch.

  In the office, Alex marveled, “You must be a fast runner. How did you keep your coat and your umbrella dry?”

  “A friend gave me a ride,” Ksenya said.

  Little by little, as she experimented with the door, she figured out the rules by which the boatswain’s contraption operated. She could visualize any place and then open her door – and she would enter that place through whatever portal was available, be it a window or even a fridge door. Also, she could return only to her own apartment. Once, when she saw an endless line to a visiting exhibition of the French impressionists and decided to sneak in at night and have the place all to herself, she accidentally set off the alarm. She had to flee. She was certain the security guards banged on the door that she had fled through, though she heard no banging.

  Soon the contraption delivered another surprise. Ksenya was kind of sweet on Alex, her co-worker. If one’s husband had moved out, was it so wrong to attempt to take care of one’s personal life? Naturally, it wouldn’t have even occurred to her to show Alex that she was interested, if not for the door. One time, very much disbelieving that it would work, she visualized Alex’s pleasant face (she had never been inside his home), and found herself in his bathroom, of all places. He was taking a shower and had his hair all lathered up, so luckily, his eyes were closed.

  “Babe, is that you?” Alex asked through the foam.

  Ksenya closed the door. That’s how she learned the contraption could work off a single detail.

  At first, she had fun with her new role of ghost, and didn’t think of any other uses for the door. Don’t we all use things in our own way? Let’s say you gave a rock to a housewife, a construction worker, an artist, and a thug. A housewife would use it to weigh down the lid of her pickling barrel; a construction worker would use it in a foundation; an artist would whisk it off to his rock garden, and a thug… oh, no, let’s not give a rock to a thug.

  Anyhow, being a ghost was quite all right by our fairy tale-loving, drudgery-enduring Ksenya. She really had very little time to experiment anyway. It was the fault of the bad weather that she had to extend the uses of the door.

  One day Mishka returned from preschool with a runny nose. Later in the night the malaise worsened. He developed a fever – and not a single pill of aspirin could be found in the apartment. Ksenya cursed herself: what a failure! Her husband, who’d scolded her for poor homemaking, had been right. Maybe that’s why he’d dumped her in the first place. Now she needed aspirin and hot compresses – at one thirty in the morning.

  At first it didn’t occur to her to use the door, and when she remembered it she was in such a rush that she wasn’t about to stop to congratulate herself.

  She entered a dark pharmacy. She didn’t know where the light switch might be, so she had to go back for a candle. Then she snatched the aspirin from a display case. The hot compresses were past their expiration date. She had to search all over. Before she left, she put the money for the medicines in the display case from which she had taken the aspirin.

  A few days later there was another hurdle. Suddenly, plain old cream of wheat had turned into a rarity in the grocery stores. It’s not that Mishka was that fond of cream of wheat, but it was the item his mother cooked best, compared to some others, like cream of rice,1 for example.

  Ksenya rationally concluded that stashes of cream of wheat were squirreled away in every grocery store. She visualized shelves with bags and boxes of it – and opened the door.

  It appeared that the storeroom she entered did not belong to a grocery store. Rather, it was some kind of cellar. There were shelves made of splintery boards, and a potato bin in a corner. In search of cream of wheat, Ksenya went through every box and chest – and oh my God, the foodstuffs she discovered! Choice but inexpensive sausages, buckwheat, canned delicacies; at first Ksenya stubbornly insisted that cream of wheat was all she needed, but when she ran into canned pineapple juice, she gave in to pure rage.

  Her Mishka had never once tasted pineapple juice in his life, and he didn’t even know what a pineapple was. Moreover, if Ksenya ever tried t
o feed him as prescribed by all these child development manuals, she would have no money left to put clothes on his back. That’s on the one hand. And on the other – where the heck did people even get all this yummy stuff?

  Her child rightfully deserved to eat fruits and vitamins, just as the neighbor’s girl Angelica did. Moreover, he was recovering from a serious cold, so fruits and vitamins were absolutely essential. Feeling no reservations whatsoever, she grabbed two jars of pineapple juice, some cans of cod liver and a couple of other delicacies, and once again left the money on the shelf, fair and square.

  Never mind cream of wheat.

  The convalescent Mishka demanded attention, and Ksenya used up her sick days doting on him – and visiting the door. But those visits just couldn’t go on unnoticed forever. Sooner or later Mishka would find out, and frankly she was getting tired of keeping it a secret. Besides, she was terrified by the thought of him learning about the door from someone other than her.

  “Mom, fairy tale time,” Mishka said, pointing at the clock.

  “You want one about a fairy?”

  “Yes, again.”

  “All right. But after that – sleepy time. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She stroked his curly hair and thought she better give him a haircut once he got well – his hair had grown so long that he already looked like a girl.

  “Once upon a time, there was a fairy who lived in a faraway country,” she began. “When she was little, her mother noticed that she was lonely. ‘What would you like to have?’ the fairy’s mother asked. The fairy wouldn’t answer. ‘Do you want candy? Tangerines? A kitten? A puppy?’ The fairy kept mum. Then the fairy’s mother got it. ‘I know what you want,’ she said. ‘You want a baby brother to play with.’

  “At once the little fairy cheered up and said, ‘Yes, please, bring me a baby brother right away!’

  “But you do know, Mishka, how hard it is to find a good baby brother. The fairy’s mother thought and thought about it, and she got an idea. She called up her loyal servants, the white swans, and told them, ‘Fly to the Kingdom Beyond the Seven Seas. Their king and queen have three sons. Take the youngest and bring him here. He’ll be a baby brother to my daughter.’

  The white swans flew on, found the king’s palace, and stole his youngest prince. They brought the baby prince to the little fairy, and the children went on to grow up as brother and sister. Once, the fairy had a birthday party. Every guest brought a present. One old fairy gave her a magic mirror, another gave her an invisibility hat, and the third one said, ‘I will give you a new name.’ ‘What is it?’ asked the birthday fairy. The old one said, ‘From this day on you will be mistress of all doors in the world. You will be able to enter the door to your bedroom and exit into Bluebeard’s castle, a hundred miles away. And so they will call you the fairy Doorinda…’”

  First published in Russian: 1990

  Translation by Julia M. Sidorova

  * * *

  1. In the hierarchy of breakfast cereals during Soviet times, buckwheat was considered the most nutritious and hard to acquire. Cream of wheat was the next most favored, for its pleasing taste and texture. The cans of cod liver Ksenya grabs are a Russian delicacy that was much sought after in times of (artificial) scarcity.

  SERGEI LUKYANENKO

  1992

  MY DAD’S AN ANTIBIOTIC

  Half asleep, I heard the quiet rumble of a flyer touching down. The thin, fading song of the plasma engines, the rustle of the wind straying around those smooth surfaces. The window to the garden was open, and our landing pad was right by the house. For a long time, dad had been threatening to haul off the ceramic slabs that made up that five-meter circle and move them further away, into the garden. But he probably had no intention of doing that. Because if he needed to land without any noise, he could just shut off the power. That’s a no-no – it’s too dangerous and complicated, but dad pays no attention to little things like that.

  And that’s because my dad is an antibiotic.

  My eyes still closed, I sat up in bed, fumbling on the table for my folded clothes. Then I changed my mind and shuffled to the door in my pajamas. My feet tangled in the carpet’s long, warm nap, but I deliberately tried to keep them in contact with the floor. I really liked that chunky, soft carpet; you could turn somersaults, jump and do whatever else on it without risking a broken neck.

  The thudding outside the window was from the flyer’s landing skids. The dull red light of the brake exhaust seeped through my eyelids.

  Keeping my eyes tightly shut, I opened the door, and began going down the stairs. If dad had done a loud landing, that meant he wanted me to know he was back. But I wanted to show that I knew it too.

  One step, another step. The unpainted wooden steps were pleasantly cooling to my feet. Not with the dead dampness of metal, not with the uncaring, icy chill of stone, but with the living, affectionate coolness of wood. A real house, if you ask me, has to be made of wood. Otherwise, it’s not a house but a fortress. Just a shelter from bad weather.

  One step, another step… I came down off the last tread and stood on the smooth parquet of the hallway. It’s fun to use the flooring to figure out where you are. One step, another step. I ran face-first into something hard and smooth, like steel. Slippery and supple, like fish scales. Warm, like human skin.

  “Sleep-walking?”

  My father’s hand ruffled my hair. I peered into the darkness, trying to make out anything at all. Of course dad had come in without turning on any of the lights.

  “Put the light on,” I said huffily, trying to duck my father’s hand.

  Yellow-orange lights began burning in the hallway corners. The darkness cowered, escaping into the broad rectangles of the windows.

  Dad looked at me, smiling. He was still wearing the assault force’s protective suit, and the pitch-black bioplastic that fit his body so snugly was beginning to brighten. It was adapting to its new circumstances.

  “Did you come straight from the cosmodrome?” I asked, eyeing him admiringly. How annoying that it was night and none of the guys in my class would have seen him.

  The suit seemed thin, probably because the muscles stood out so sharply under the chameleon cloth. But that was just an illusion. Bioplastic can take 500-degree temperatures and deflect a burst from a large-caliber machine gun. It’s flexible on one side. I don’t know how that’s done, but if you touch the outside, it’s hard. It might as well be made of metal. And then, when you put it on (dad let me do that sometimes), it’s soft and stretchy.

  “We landed an hour ago,” dad said distractedly, still ruffling my hair. “We handed our weapons in and headed for home.”

  “Is everything OK?”

  Dad winked at me, looked around furtively.

  “Everything’s better than OK. The disease has been eliminated.”

  That was what he always said. But still, he couldn’t manage a smile. Even his suit was restless, with the sensors scattered across the fabric twinkling and the indicator panel on his left wrist glimmering in a multicolored pattern that meant nothing to me. The color of the suit was by now impossible to distinguish from the pale-blue wallpaper. If dad stepped over to the wall, he’d drop out of sight.

  “Pop,” I whispered, feeling the sleepiness slipping away, “was it rough?”

  He gave a silent nod. And frowned. And that was absolutely for real.

  “Quick march, now, back to bed! It’s two in the morning.”

  That was probably the voice he used to give orders out there, on the diseased planets. And no one dared argue.

  “Yes, sir!” I replied in the same crisp tone. But I still had one last thing to ask him: “Pop, did you see?”

  “No. But never mind. Now you’ll be able to gab with your friend again. The planet will be back online by morning.”

  I nodded and went upstairs. In the doorway, I turned and saw my dad standing on the threshold, stripping off the flexible, light-blue armor. Leaning over the railing,
I watched the taut coils of muscles rippling across his back. I could never be that ripped; I don’t have the patience. Dad noticed me and waved me away.

  “Go to bed, Alik. I won’t show you your present until the morning.”

  That’s cool, I like presents. Dad had been giving them to me since I was just a little kid and didn’t know what he did for a living.

  When mom left us, I was five years old. I remember her kissing me; I was standing by the door with no idea what was going on. Then she left. For good. She said I could go and spend time with her whenever, but I never did. Because I had found out what she and dad had been fighting about, and I was ticked. It turned out that mom didn’t like dad serving in the Assault Force Corps.

  Once I accidentally heard them fighting. Mom was saying something to dad, quietly, wearily, the way people talk when they’re trying to persuade themselves rather than the other person.

  “Don’t you see what you’ve become, Boris? You’re not even a robot. They have their Three Laws, but you don’t have any. You do what you’re told, and never think about the consequences.”

  “I’m defending Earth.”

  “I don’t know… It’s one thing when your corps is fighting the Pilgrim Saboteurs. It’s something else altogether when the assault forces are pacifying the colonies.”

  “I have no right to think about that. Earth decides. It diagnoses the disease, it prescribes the cure. And I’m just an antibiotic.”

  “An antibiotic? That’s true. They lash out indiscriminately too, at the person as well as the disease.”

  They were silent. Then mom said, “I’m sorry, Boris, but I can’t love... an antibiotic.”

  “Good enough,” dad said calmly. “But Alka stays with me.”

  Mom was quiet then, and a month later dad and I were on our own. To be honest, I didn’t feel it at first. Even before, mom had been away a lot. She’s a journalist and travels all over Earth. Dad was home a lot more, although once or twice a month he left for several days at a time. And when he came home, he’d bring me presents, amazing things that nobody sells in any store.