“By noon on that first day, the Army had seized the entire world socket industry, and was drilling people fast enough to add ten thousand recruits every hour. Every boat and plane in America was on its way to the Eastern Hemisphere, its holds tessellated with soldiers. By the time the Guardians found out what was happening, they faced an army of thirty million soldiers without fear— not along a border where they might be held back, but in every city. America and Japan, with nearly a third of their populations already socketed, were under Army control within a month. It was a threat like nothing the Guardians had ever faced, or even imagined. The Russian Heptarch, and he alone, still had a usable army and a populace largely intact—but half the world was marching to his doorstep.
“And through all this, Derzhavin was unaffected. His confidence in the Guardians approached the status of religious faith; he had assumed that they would find some way to stop the Army’s progress. But now, he said, he could not put off telling me any longer. The order to evacuate had come. The Army was about to reach Arkhangelsk.
“All this he told me as he paced around the room like Rilke’s panther. And as excited as I was to find that the Guardian regime might be over, the first thing on my mind was to make that man stand still. So I began to brew some tea, to calm his nerves, I said; surely he would at least sit down to drink it. As I was making it I asked him whether I would be evacuated. He looked away. ‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said sadly. ‘You, I could take easily. But I don’t know what to do about the whale, and without—’
“‘We’ll work it out somehow,’ I said. ‘Just sit down and relax. It’s no use trying to make plans while you’re this tense.’
“At last he sat down at the chess table. He fidgeted with the pieces for a while, then began to set them up. ‘Once more—for old time’s sake?’ he said.
“‘Of course, if that’s what you want,’ I answered, taking the strainer from the teapot.
“‘I suppose we’ll have to euthanize the subjects and start fresh,’ he said regretfully. ‘We can’t move them all. But we’ll still have the data. Voskresenye, we must keep the data secure.’
“‘Of course we will,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry about that now.’ I stood behind him, set down a cup and saucer on the gaming table, and picked up the teapot. ‘Think about—’ And I poured the whole pot of scalding tea onto his lap. He jumped up, driving his neck against the needle I was holding behind him. I pressed the plunger, and he was as good as dead.
“Since I hadn’t hit a vein, the poison would take some time for its effect. So I ran into the next room and locked myself into an empty cell. In case he had an extra key I didn’t know about, I took out a knife that I had earlier secreted under the mattress; I could not use it effectively, but in his insulin stupor, it might scare him off. I expected him to come after me, to rage at me, perhaps to call a guard—in which case I would die with him. But for a long time he did not come. And when he did, it was only to lean his head against the bars of the cage, look at me in bewilderment, and ask ‘Why?’ He had no idea why I had killed him. He had murdered thousands, and he had never believed in his heart that somebody might take it amiss.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “When we talked before, you said you were ‘a good deal more’ to Derzhavin than just a lab assistant. What did you mean by that?”
“I suppose I could have phrased that better. You imagined— what? Steamy sexual encounters? Male bonding rituals? Fishing trips?” He laughed, then grew serious, stroking the wires of his hands. “I was his murderer. What relationship could be more intimate?”
To the audience, all this was another revenge drama—something off a soap channel. To them, protected from the action as they were, Voskresenye’s behavior might have seemed perfectly rational. But in the chambers of my mind that were my own, I began to wonder just how dangerous a man I was a thousand meters underground with.
“Derzhavin died as I was trying to find words to answer him,” Voskresenye said. “And so I never got to ask him the question that had haunted me since I awoke: What was I for? I knew the purpose of his research: he was looking for a way to heal the brain-damaged, and to resurrect the brain-dead. But you do not perform basic research with whales; it is not cost-efficient. I was designed to do something; and I do not know what, to this day.”
“What do you suspect?”
“I suspect,” he said, “that I was to be a military strategist. I suspect I was designed to outwit the Army. I suspect that is what the chess games, and certain other tests, were for.”
“Then why weren’t you ever put into service?”
“Yes—that is the question: why was I not used, why was I not even given a trial run? Why did I never face the Army, even in a simulation?” He looked down at his carapace, his mouth curling in scorn at its crudeness. “The Army was already coming,” he said. “Perhaps time did not permit.” But there was no conviction in his voice.
“Where did you wait out the Army?” I asked. “Down here?”
“No; that proved impossible. The Guardians were trying to stop the Army with a scorched-earth policy, depriving it of what it needed to survive. Nothing was to be left intact that it could use; especially not people. It is, in fact, a miracle they left the whale alive—they must have thought that she would be of no use to the Army. Or perhaps they knew no way of killing her without breaking the glass of her tank, and so drowning themselves. Certainly they would have destroyed her if they had known, as I know now, that the last beluga whale in captivity was carried by one column of the army for twenty miles, and then, the flesh being eaten up, discarded.
“In any case, they did not harm the whale. But the day after I killed Derzhavin, they came down and herded all us prisoners upstairs. We were gathered next to an enormous pit and taken, in groups of thirty, to the edge of it to be shot. I saw ten groups of prisoners killed as I waited for my own turn, and not one of them made any motion of defiance. I couldn’t understand it. They knew they were about to die; why didn’t they run, make the fig at them, anything? I tried to suggest to the man standing next to me that we should all charge them together, that they could never get us all. He only shrank from me, as I suppose anyone would have. But I determined that when my own time came, I would not go quietly.
“The next time they counted off, I was one of the thirty. I looked down into the pit as we marched up to it: it was a long way to fall, five or six metres. But I couldn’t run, not now, nor could I hope to reach the Guardians before they shot me. So I stood there, crouching down a little, and watched their trigger fingers. The instant before they fired, I jumped backward into the pit.
“My first discovery was that human bodies make a much harder landing surface than you’d expect. I was sure I had broken at least three bones. But it was not bones I was worried about. When I tried to move, I confirmed my worst fear: my exoskeleton was damaged. I could move my arms, but my legs were useless.
“Dragging my legs behind me like a beached merman, I crawled down the slope of bodies. I had only gotten a few metres when I heard gunshots again. The falling bodies set off an avalanche, which carried me the rest of the way down the slope. I was out of the way—safe, until another avalanche, or until the Guardians decided to set the pit on fire. But my arms were pinned. I couldn’t move.”