“For a long time, all the paths I saw were parallel. No matter what I did, the result would be the same. But in the distance— months or years, I couldn’t tell—there was a branching with a death entangled in it, like a skeleton that a tree’s root has embraced. I watched this branching all the time that my man-self sat here motionless, and during the interminable chess games, and in physical therapy, as one pair or another of hands supported my flopping form in the shallow water. It seemed to get no closer. At times I would have sworn it was receding. And then one day, at the chessboard, I looked down to calculate a move, and when I looked back up, the moment was at hand.
“Derzhavin had always had trouble getting lab assistants. His project was so high-security that few could get clearance, and of those who could, hardly any were interested in mere assistantship. But many of his experiments had to be watched all night, so he made do with what help he could get. Finally one evening, when he had finished his work for the day and was just sitting down for another session of that idiotic game he was obsessed with, the graduate student who had served as his night assistant for the past two years came in early, with a worried expression on his face. They went into Derzhavin’s office. I stared at the board, blind to the chessmen, seeing only paths of light.
“When they came out, Derzhavin was falsely jovial. He ushered the relieved young man out, telling him not to worry, he’d make do, he’d make do. ‘You’d be a fool even to think twice about such an opportunity,’ he said in parting, firmly squeezing the student’s hand.
“When the elevator doors had closed, he sighed and sat down at the table again, pressing the back of his wrist to his forehead. ‘Well,’ he said to himself, ‘I guess I’ll have to train one of the guards from the camp. Or one of the chimps from the lab, whichever turns out to be smarter.’ And there was the branching. I had to draw his attention to me, just at the proper instant, but without betraying any eagerness. So, without thinking the position through, I recklessly advanced my bishop. ‘Check,’ I said quietly, keeping my eyes on the board.
“He looked up at me slowly. ‘Voskresenye,’ he said, ‘do you think you could watch things for me at night?’
“I looked at the floor, as if afraid to meet his eyes. ‘I will do as you like,’ I said. We began that night; and two weeks later, I was able to explore the lab alone.”
The audience was quiet enough for me to risk a pointed question: “So that’s where you got the information that went into your book.” (Here Keishi replayed the memory of the old book snapping shut.) “You didn’t just see those things done, did you? Or hear about them? You did them.”
I expected him to turn away. But he looked straight into my eye and said with fierce determination: “Yes. Many of those things I did myself, at his command, yes.”
“When you could have stopped them.”
He nodded. “Some of them. I could at least have put them off. I certainly had more chance to do real good in Derzhavin’s lab than I ever had when I worked with the Underground Railroad. Yet I did nothing.”
“You don’t sound as though you feel very guilty about it.”
“Maya Tatyanichna,” he said, “I have been watching people die for longer than you have been alive, and I have seen many things, but I have not yet seen the dead come back to life because their murderer felt guilty.”
“You call it murder, then.”
“Of course I call it murder,” he said irritably. “I bled them, cut them to bits, and injected them with poisons. If you have some other name for that, I would be glad to hear it.”
He dispensed tea from the samovar on the table beside him, and sipped briskly. I felt a sudden desire to laugh, which puzzled the audience mightily. I don’t know why; it just seemed funny that, when inviting a camera into the hidden lair where he had kept a whale in secret lo these many years, he should lay in supplies against cottonmouth. It was altogether too prosaic for the melodrama I had fallen into. His hands on the cup were quite steady, I noted, but then you’d expect them to be.
“How did you kill Derzhavin?”
“The method I chose was poison,” he said, resting his teacup on the cage around his hand. “My physical therapy was not yet complete, so I lacked the coordination for a more direct approach. But Derzhavin was cautious. He never let me handle dangerous chemicals unless he was there to watch me. It was agonizing: all those colors and kinds of death passing through my hands every day, and I could use them to kill anyone except the one person who deserved it. At night, when I had the whole place to myself, I could find nothing lethal; it was all locked up. I began to read Derzhavin’s books, looking for a solution. At last I hit upon it: insulin. A poison I could refine from the very bodies of the people that Derzhavin tortured and killed. The symbolism would be almost as satisfying as the death itself.
“I wasn’t sure how much I’d need—strangely enough, most medical books are geared toward saving people, not killing them; short-sighted, I call it. But I assumed that what I could harvest from twenty bodies would suffice. The fact that this would give me a death count three times that of Jack the Ripper was a regrettable, but, I thought, a necessary byproduct of this plan.
“From then on, whenever I saw that a prisoner was scheduled for surgery, I would come to him in the night and sit with him. I tried to persuade them to tell me their stories; not an easy task, once they began to realize that my approach meant death. But sometimes they were so afraid that they would talk to me—to anyone. If they would not, I studied the lines of their faces and the calluses on their hands, trying to deduce who they had been. And what I could not deduce, I invented.
“At dawn I left them. Hurriedly, in the last hours before Derzhavin arrived, I wrote down their stories and carefully hid the papers away.
“Derzhavin’s experiments did not have a high survival rate. However, on those rare occasions when a patient might have pulled through, I made sure that he did not. Then, again at night, I would begin those portions of the autopsy that I was permitted to perform myself—always most scrupulously, checking off ‘autoimmune complications’ for the man who rejected his head transplant, and ‘natural causes’ for the woman whose heart attack might conceivably have been induced by waking up to find a cable trailing from her skull. And when the last of the paperwork was done, I would remove the patient’s pancreas and go to work. I think nothing else has given me such joy as taking those lumps of flesh and refining them, with hands and glass and centrifuge, into a liquid as clear as the water that Katya had poured into my head.
“Finally, after months of work, the drug was ready, and so was I. All I needed was a clear shot at a vein. But that day he came in worried, and he paced and would not sit down. I asked him if he wanted tea, but he ignored the offer. I suggested a game of chess— anything, if he would just hold still—but he refused. Finally he said, ‘Sit down, Voskresenye. You may as well know what’s happening.’ It was the autumn of 2246.”
“The Awakening had already happened.”
“Yes.” Voskresenye looked into the distance. “Of course I didn’t see it. I was down here, cut off; and though some of the prisoners may have known, I was the last person they would have discussed it with. But from Derzhavin’s description, I thought it must have been a little like the Rapture, the way the evangelists used to talk about it on Guardian radio. Four people would be riding in a car, and suddenly the driver would hit the brakes, get out, and walk away, deaf to all shouts. A man would wake from sleep to see his wife going out the door, carrying, for reasons only the Army knew, a hockey mask, a spaghetti strainer, and a cuckoo clock. They all walked out into the streets and mustered into clumps, and each clump lifted up a memory cell and began to march.