Taschenka - Harry's Quest - The Trek Begins
Taschenka Tassi' Kirescu was nineteen, small and slim, completely unpolitical and very frightened.
Her skin was a little darker than that of the rest of her family; her eyes were large and very slightly tilted in an oval face; her hair was black and shiny to match her eyes, and she wore it in braids. Tassi's father, Kazimir, whom she hadn't seen since the night they were arrested, had used to explain jokingly that she was a throwback. There's Mongol blood in you, girl,' he'd told her, his eyes sparkling. 'Blood of the great Khans who came this way all of those hundreds of years ago. Either that ... or I don't know your mother as well as I think I do!' Following which Anna, Tassi's mother, would invariably sputter furiously and chase him with whatever she could lay her hands on.
That, of course, had been in the good times, all of a few weeks ago, which now felt like several centuries.
Tassi had known nothing of Mikhail Simonov's real reason for coming to Yelizinka in the Ural foothills; the story she'd heard was that he was a city boy who'd been something of a wild one, that he'd always been getting himself into one sort of trouble or another, until finally he'd been sent logging as a punishment, a penance guaranteed to cool him off. Well, places didn't come much cooler than Yelizinka, not in the winter, anyway; but Tassi wasn't at all sure that Mikhail's blood had been cooled by it. In fact they'd very quickly become lovers, in a strange sort of way. Strange because he'd always been quick to warn her that it couldn't last, and that therefore she mustn't fall in love with him; strange, too, in that she'd felt exactly the same way about it: he'd serve his time here and wipe his record clean, and then he'd move on, probably back to the city, Moscow, and she would find herself a husband from the logging communities around.
The attraction had been the loneliness she'd felt in him, and a contradictory bowstring tension lying just beneath the surface of him. For his part: once, in a dreamy, faraway moment, he'd told her that she was the only real thing in his life right now, that sometimes he felt the entire world and his place in it were just an enormous fantasy. And now she'd been told that he was a foreign spy, which to Tassi had seemed like the greatest possible fantasy - at first. But that had been before they took her down into the Perchorsk Projekt.
Since then... everything had turned into a real fantasy, a horror story, a living nightmare.
Her father had been incarcerated in the cell next door to hers and she knew he had been tortured on a number of occasions. She'd heard it all coming right through the sheet-steel walls. The hoarse, terrified panting, the sharp slapping sounds, his anguished cries for mercy. But there'd been precious little of that last. Then, three days ago, there'd been one especially bad session; in the middle of it, at its height, the old man had screamed... and then, he'd stopped screaming - abruptly. Since when Tassi had heard nothing from him at all.
She couldn't even bear to think what might have happened; she hoped the silence meant that her father was now in a hospital somewhere, recovering; she prayed that's what it meant, anyway.
Almost as bad had been Major Khuv's questioning. The KGB Major had not once laid a hand on her, but she'd had the suspicion that if he did he would hurt her terribly. The awful thing was that she didn't have - didn't know - anything to tell him. If she had then fear on its own would have obliged her to tell it, or if not fear certainly the desire to stop them hurting her father.
And then there had been the beast Vyotsky. Tassi hadn't stood so much in fear of that one as in horror of him. And she had sensed - had known instinctively - that he enjoyed her horror, feeding upon it like a ghoul on rotting flesh! There had been little or nothing sexual about his treatment of her that time when he'd had her photographed naked with him. It had all been done for effect: partly to shame her, underline her vulnerability and make her feel the lowest of the low; partly to show her the power of her tormentor - that he could strip her naked, leer at her and paw her body, while she was incapable of lifting a ringer to stop him - but mainly to aid him in the mental torture of someone else. The sadist Vyotsky had told her that the photographs were for the 'benefit' of the British spy, Michael Simmons, whom she had known as Mikhail Simonov: 'to drive the poor bastard out of his mind!' Plainly the idea had delighted Vyotsky. 'He thinks he's so cool - hah.r he'd said. 'If this doesn't get him boiling, then nothing will!'
The KGB bully was quite mad, Tassi was sure. Even though he hadn't been back to torment her for quite some time now, still she would freeze whenever she heard someone approaching the door of her cell; and if the footsteps should pause... then her breathing would go ragged at once, and her poor heart begin beating that much faster.
It had started to beat that way just a little while ago, but on this occasion her visitor was only Vyotsky's superior officer, Major Khuv.
Only Major Khuv! Tassi thought, as the suave KGB officer entered her cell. That was a laugh! But she wasn't even close to laughing as he cuffed her wrist to his own, then told her:
Taschenka, my dear. I want to show you something. It's something I feel you really ought to see before I question you again at any great length. You'll understand why soon enough.'
Stumbling along behind him, she made no effort to even guess where he was taking her. Essentially a peasant girl, to her the Projekt was a maze, a nightmare labyrinth of steel and concrete. Her claustrophobia had so disoriented her that she was lost from the first step she took across the threshold of her cell.
'Tassi,' Khuv murmured, leading her on through the almost deserted, dimly lit night corridors, 'I want you to think very carefully. Much more carefully than you've been thinking so far. And if there's anything at all you can tell me about the subversive activities of your brother, your father, the people of Yelizinka in general - and in particular about the underground, anti-Soviet organization to which any or all of them belonged ... I mean, this really is going to be your last chance, Tassi.'
'Major,' she gasped the word out, 'sir, I know nothing of any of these things. If my father was what you say he was -'
'Oh, he was,' Khuv glanced at her and nodded gravely. 'You may be sure that ... he was!'
It was the way he said the last word, its ominous emphasis. And in a moment it had Tassi's free hand flying to her mouth. 'What... what have you done to him?' Her question was the merest whisper.
They had arrived at a door bearing a legend familiar to Khuv but one which Tassi had never seen before. She only glanced at it; it said something about a keeper and security classified persons only. Using his plastic ID tag, and as the door's mechanisms were activated, Khuv turned to Tassi and answered her question:
'Done to him? To your father? Me? I have done nothing! He did it all himself - with his refusal to cooperate. A very stubborn man, Kazimir Kirescu...'
The door opened with a click. Khuv held it open a crack, called out: 'Vasily, is all in order?'
'Oh, yes, Major,' came back an unctuous reply. 'All ready.'
Khuv smiled at Tassi. The smile of a shark on its attack run. 'My dear,' he said, shoving the door open wide and leading her into the room of the creature, 'I'm going to show you something unpleasant, and tell you something even more unpleasant, and finally suggest the most unpleasant thing of all. Following which you shall have the rest of the night and all day tomorrow to think about where you stand. But no more time than that.'
The room was in near-darkness, to which the ceiling lights added only an eerie red glow. Tassi could make out the figure of a small man in a white smock, and the shape of a large oblong box or tank covered with a white sheet. The tank must be of glass, for a small white light in the wall behind it shone right through, casting on the sheet a milky, ghostly outline, the silhouette of something that flopped sluggishly inside the tank.
'Come closer,' Khuv drew Tassi toward the tank. 'Don't be afraid, it's perfectly safe. It can't hurt you - not yet.'
Standing beside the KGB Major, unconsciously clutching his arm in her innocence as she stared wide-eyed at the weird silhouette on the sheet, Tassi heard him say to the scientist in the white smock: 'Very well, Vasily, let's see what we have here.'
Vasily Agursky tugged at one corner of the sheet and it began to slide slowly from the tank, letting a little more of the subdued light shine through. Then the slide accelerated and the sheet whispered to the floor. The thing in the tank had its back to the three; feeling their eyes upon it, it glanced over one hunched shoulder. Tassi looked at it, stared at it in disbelief, shuddered and clung to Khuv that much more fiercely. He patted her hand almost absent-mindedly, in a fashion which in other circumstances might almost have seemed fatherly. Except this was not her father but the man who had let Karl Vyotsky terrorize her.
'Well, Tassi,' he said, his voice very low, very sinister, 'and what do you think of that?'
She didn't know what to think of it, and later she would give anything to be able to forget it entirely. But for now: the shape of the thing was vaguely manlike, though even in this poor light it was quite obviously not a man. It appeared to be feeding, using taloned hands to tear its food and stuff strips of raw red meat into its mouth. Its face was mainly hidden, but Tassi could see the way its jaws worked, and the baleful glare of the very human eye that peered back over its shoulder.
Hunched down, crouching or squatting there on the sandy floor of its tank, the thing might have been an ape; but its leprous skin was corrugated and its feet gripped the floor with too many hooked, skeletal digits. An appendage like a tail - which was not a tail - lay coiled behind it; Tassi gasped as she saw that this extraneous member, too, was equipped with a rudimentary, lidless, almost vacant eye.
The thing was entirely freakish, and as for what it fed upon...
Tassi gave a massive start, jumped back from the tank. The creature had snatched up more food from the floor of its glass cell - and a human arm had suddenly flopped into view, dangling from its terrible hands! As Tassi's eyes bulged in horror, so the thing commenced munching on the dismembered arm's hand and fingers.
'Steady, my dear,' said Khuv quietly, as the girl moaned and reeled beside him.
'But... but... it's eating a... a -'
'A man?' Khuv finished it for her. 'Or what's left of one? Indeed it is, yes. Oh, it will eat any sort of meat, but it appears to like human flesh the best.' And to Agursky: 'Vasily, do you have something for Tassi?'
The strange little scientist came forward, pressed something - several somethings - into her hand. A wallet? A ring? An ID card? And however familiar these things were, for a long moment her mind wouldn't recognize them, refused to make the final, terrible connection. Then-
She felt dizzy and put her free hand on the glass wall of the tank to steady herself, and her eyes went from the items in her hand to the thing where it crouched. Horrified but at the same time fascinated, she stared and stared at it. Were these men trying to tell her that... that this creature was eating her father?!
Agursky had gone to one side of the room, where suddenly he switched up the lighting. Everything sprang into sharp, almost dazzling definition. The creature threw its food to one side and turned snarling toward Khuv and Tassi where they both shrank instinctively back.
And that was when she fainted and would have fallen to the floor if her wrist hadn't been cuffed to the Major's, and if he hadn't turned quickly to catch up her sagging body in his arms.
For the thing in the glass tank was ... oh, it was something hellish, yes, nightmarish. But the greater nightmare was this: that however monstrous and warped, however altered and alien that thing's caricature of a face was when it had snarled at her, still she'd recognized it as the face of her father!
Jazz Simmons's Georgian terrace bachelor flat in Hampstead was colourful, cluttered, and when Harry Keogh had first moved in a little over twenty-four hours ago it had been bitterly cold and the telephone was off. He'd had E-Branch clear it for him to use the place as his base, and he'd warned them not to come bothering him. He had Darcy Clarke's word that he could play the entire game his way, without interference.
His way had been to attempt to absorb something of the atmosphere of the place first. Maybe he could get to know Simmons by understanding how he'd lived: his tastes, likes and dislikes, and his routine. Not his work routine, his private routine. Harry didn't believe that a man was what he did professionally; he believed a man was what he thought privately.
The first thing that had impressed itself upon him was the clutter. Privately, Jazz Simmons had been a very untidy man. Maybe it was his way of relaxing. When you're trained to a knife-edge you have to have a place where you can sheathe yourself now and then, or else you might cut yourself. This had been Jazz's unwinding place.
The 'clutter' consisted of books and magazines dropped any and everywhere, more off the bookshelves than on them. Spy-thrillers (not unnaturally, Harry supposed) lay alongside piles of foreign language publications, most of the latter being Russian. There was also, beside Jazz's bed, a dusty, foot-thick stack of Pravdos - topped by a copy of the latest Playboy. Harry had had to smile: hardly the most compatible meeting of ideologies!
Also in the bedroom were dust-free framed photographs of Jazz's father and mother; on the wall a life-size Marilyn Monroe poster; a cabinet standing close to the window, containing cups won in various ski events; and again affixed to the wall a battered pair of bright yellow skis and sticks which must be of some special significance. A recessed cupboard in a narrow passageway had showered Harry with an accumulation of skiing requisites, and beside Jazz's video cassette recorder were haphazardly stacked films of all the main winter athletics for the last five years. While Jazz hadn't been available to participate, still he hadn't been willing to miss out entirely.
There were photographs of girls, too, quite a pile of them, in one corner of a bedroom drawer; a scrap-book contained a photographic record of Jazz's military term; perhaps significantly, a second album carefully wrapped in an old pullover consisted of faded letters to Jazz from his father.
Harry had let the feel of all of these things sink in. He'd slept in Jazz's bed, used his kitchen and bathroom, even his dressing-gown. He discovered several phone numbers of old girlfriends, called them and asked about Jazz, discovered them to be a mixed bunch with little in common except their obvious intelligence, and the fact that one and all they thought Jazz was 'a very nice guy'. Harry was starting to think so, too; and where before Michael J. Simmons had been merely a means to an end - hopefully to the discovery of Harry's family - now he had become something of an issue in his own right. In short, the horizon of Harry's obsession was expanding beyond purely personal interests.
At this stage, too, Harry had felt that he now must get a little closer to Simmons himself. Or if not the real man, then at least his metaphysical echo. Simmons no longer existed in this universe, but he had once existed in the past...
In Harry's incorporeal days he had been able to travel into the past and 'immaterialize' there: he'd been able to manifest a ghostly semblance of himself on the bygone event screen. Now, embodied and fully corporeal once more, this was no longer possible; it would create unthinkable paradoxes, perhaps even damage the structure of time itself. He could still travel in time, but while doing so he must never attempt to leave the metaphysical Mobius Continuum for the real world.
Not that this was a necessity; to achieve his aim on this occasion, time-travel itself should suffice. And so he entered the Mobius Continuum, found a past-time door and journeyed back a little way, less than two years into the past. In doing so Harry had altered his position in time but not in space; he still 'occupied' Jazz Simmons's flat. And so, when as he judged it he had journeyed far enough and reversed his direction to head once more for 'the future', he knew beyond a reasonable doubt that the strong blue life-thread which travelled parallel to his own must be that of Simmons. For after all, he'd picked it up in Simmons's flat. And following that life-thread into the future, he also knew that he was now about to prove one way or the other any similarity between Simmons's -transference? - and those of his wife and son.
The proof wasn't long in coming, and temporaneously it agreed exactly with the time Darcy Clarke had specified in defining Simmons's exit point. Although he expected it, still Harry didn't see it coming, just an eyeball-searing blaze of white light; following which ... he journeyed on alone. Jazz Simmons had gone - elsewhere! The same elsewhere, presumably, as Harry Jnr and Brenda before him.
Harry didn't need to go back and play it all over again; he'd seen the same thing plenty of times before, and it was always the same. There was nothing new here, the only difference being that Simmons had gone in a single white instantaneous blaze, while the departure of Harry Jnr and his mother had been accompanied by twin bomb-bursts. As for what those terminal flares signified, Harry was at a complete loss. He only knew that before the white dazzle blue life-threads raced for the future, and that after it those life-threads no longer existed. Not in this universe, anyway.
Which led to his next line of enquiry: Mobius himself.
August Ferdinand Mobius (1790-1868), a German mathematician and astronomer, lay in his grave in a Leipzig cemetery. His dust was there, anyway, which to Harry Keogh, Necroscope, was one and the same thing. Harry had been to see Mobius before, to discover the secret of the Mobius Continuum. In life Mobius had invented it (though he personally had denied that, telling Harry that in fact he'd merely 'noticed' it) and in death he'd gone on to develop his theories into precise sciences, albeit sciences no living person would ever comprehend. None, that is, except Harry Keogh himself. And Harry's son, of course.
The last time Harry was here he'd come by rather more conventional means: by air to Berlin, then through Check-Point Charlie to the east - as a tourist! But mundane as his arrival had been, his exit from Leipzig had been along an entirely different route - through a Mobius door. That had been Harry's first experience of the Mobius Continuum, since when he'd become an expert in his own right.
But there had been far more than that to Harry's visit, and even now he might not have discovered the correct mental formulae but for the spur he'd received at that time. Harry had been on the 'wanted' list of the Soviet E-Branch. The emerging vampire Boris Dragosani, a member of that branch, had wanted to take Harry - alive if possible - and draw from him the secret of his weird talents. Dragosani was a necromancer who ripped the private thoughts of the dead out of their ravaged bodies, who read their secrets in brain fluids and torn ligaments, in ruptured organs and eviscerated guts. It would be so much easier if he could simply talk to the dead, like Harry. They might not respect him as they did Harry, but the threat of defilement should suffice to open them up. If not... well, there was always the other way.
Dragosani had issued a detention warrant, ordering the East German Grenzpolizei to pick Harry up on trumped-up charges. They had tried, and out of necessity Harry had solved the final equation of Mobius's metaphysical space-time dimension, with which he could summon 'doors' on the entire space-time universe. Barely in time, Harry had used one of these doors. Ironically, perhaps, it had floated into view (but only Harry's view) across the face of Mobius's headstone!
From then on Harry's invasion of the Soviet E-Branch and the destruction of Dragosani had been an inexorable process, in the course of which his own body had been destroyed and abandoned as once more he escaped to the Mobius Continuum. There, as an incorporeal being, a bodiless mind and soul, eventually he had discovered and entered into the drained shell of Alec Kyle. This had been an almost involuntary event - Kyle's body, a living vacuum, had seemed to reach out and suck Harry in - but it had given him a place among men again and ended what was otherwise an interminable existence in the matterless Mobius Continuum.
And now Harry was back in Leipzig, standing by Mobius's grave as before. Almost nine years had passed since last he was here, but he hadn't forgotten those events which terminated his first visit. And so on this occasion he'd come by night.
A moon hung low over the city's skyline, and the stars were very bright between streamers of fast-fleeing cloud. The night wind, moaning through the headstones, sent wrinkled leaves scurrying like mice, and Harry felt a chill in his bones which was born partly of the natural cold of a November night, and partly of his feeling of alienation here in this place. But the cemetery gates were closed for the night, the lights in the city subdued, and apart from the scrape of leaves all was silence.
He sought Mobius out and found him, and as before the great mathematician was busy with his formulae and his calculations. Tables of planetary mass and motion, the 'weights' of the sun and her satellite worlds in their careening round, were balanced against orbital velocities and gravitic forces; formulae so complex that even Harry's intuitive grasp found their purpose elusive, together with simultaneous equations whose answers filled themselves in even as he watched; all of these figures and configurations beat on Harry's awareness like the ever-changing results of an on-going process on the screen of some vast computer. And Harry saw that the problem was so complex and so close to completion that he let it go on undisturbed by his presence to the end. At which time the screen went blank and Mobius sighed. It was a strange thing, even now, to hear the 'sigh' of a dead man.
'Sir?' said Harry. 'Are you available now?'
'Eh?' said Mobius, in that moment before he recognized Harry's thoughts. Then: 'Is that you, Harry?' he continued eagerly. 'I thought there was someone here. You very nearly put me off just then, and I was working on something which is very important!'
'I know,' Harry nodded. 'I saw it, but I didn't want to disturb you. Those are very wonderful discoveries!'
'Oh?' Mobius seemed surprised. 'You could understand my working, then? Very well, and what have I discovered?'
Harry drew back a little, hesitating. He was in the presence of genius and he knew it. Mobius had been a great mathematician all his life, and after that life he had continued his work unabated. Where Harry's mathematical skills were intuitive, Mobius had worked hard to achieve his results. No quantum leaps for him but dogged trial and error and an unwavering, all-consuming passion for his subject. It seemed somehow improper for Harry to have come here at this time, spying on the man in his triumph.
'Not at all,' Mobius tut-tutted him. 'What? - a man who can impose his physical being on the metaphysical universe, and use it at will? Spying on me? I consider you a colleague, Harry, an equal! And truth be told, you couldn't have come visiting at a more opportune time. Now come on, tell me what I've been doing. What is it that I've proved with my numbers, eh?'
Harry shrugged. 'Very well,' he said. 'You've shown that instead of the nine planets we believed to exist in the solar system, there are in fact eleven. Both of the new worlds are small, but true planets for all that. One occupies a position exactly behind Jupiter, with the same rotation period, so that it's always occluded, and the other's a non-reflector and lies about as far out again as Pluto from the sun.'
'Good!' Mobius applauded him. 'And their moons?'
'Eh?' Harry was taken by surprise. 'I read only the problem you'd set yourself and the answers to the problem as you arrived at them! There were slight deviations -percentages of error, I suppose - but...' He paused.
'But? But?' Harry could almost picture Mobius raising his eyebrows. 'All the clues were there in the equations, Harry. No? Very well. I'll tell you:
The inner world has no moon, but the "percentage of error", as you call it, for the outer world was just too big to be ignored. I have checked it and it indicates an almost spherical nickel-iron moon three kilometres in diameter orbiting the parent at a distance of twenty-four thousand planetary circumferences. Now that is what we call a calculation! Of course, I shall prove it by going there and seeing it for myself.'
Harry shook his head in defeat, offered a wry grimace. 'You're too good for me,' he said. 'You always will be.' And after a moment: 'Do you want me to let this "leak out", as it were? I could do that easily enough, with just sufficient information to set the entire astronomical fraternity jumping! It could be done anonymously, by an "amateur", you understand, on the solemn promise that when the calculations are shown to be correct, then one of the two worlds should be named Mobius!' Mobius was stunned. 'Could you really do that, Harry?' 'I'm sure I could find a way.'
'My boy... God!' Mobius was overjoyed at the prospect. 'Harry, how I wish I could shake your hand!'
'You can do rather more than that,' Harry told him, growing serious in a moment. 'You remember the last time I came to see you I had a problem? Well, now I have an even bigger one.'