Pletnev blew out his breath and wiped his red face with a scrap of towel, dropping the ax into a tree stump. A few meters away, a stack of notched logs waited assembly into a cabin.
Pletnev had also made a trough for mixing mud to daub into the cracks between the logs, and cleared a site in the woods near the beach.
Beside him, Garabedian and Annenkovsky stood with arms crossed, faces intently surveying the ground.
“Are you saying,” Pletnev began, after blowing out again, “that he has changed so much we can no longer rely on him?”
“He isn’t concentrating on his command,” Armenkovsky said. ”He holds us back.”
“Holds you back from doing what?”
“For one thing,” Armenkovsky continued, “he treats Vielgorsky’s followers as if they were merely errant children, and not dangerous subversives.”
“Well, perhaps that’s wise. There are too few of us to purge willy-nilly.”
“That is not the only problem,” Annenkovksy said. ”He frequently leaves the compound, takes the train and a truck to the library, and just sits there, looking confused. We think his brain is addled.”
Pletnev looked to Garahedian. ”What do you think, Comrade Major?”
“He is not the same man,” Garahedian said. ”He himself admits it. And he keeps claiming he is dead. Resurrected. It isn’t appropriate.”
“Is he still General Pavel Mirsky?”
“Why ask that? Ask if he is a good leader,” Annenkovsky said. “Any of us could do better.”
“He’s been negotiating with the Americans ... has he negotiated badly?” Pletnev asked.
“No,” Garabedian said. ”Smoothly, if anything.”
“Then I don’t understand what we have to complain about. He’ll return to normal. He’s had a traumatic experience--and a mysterious one. We can’t expect it not to change him some.”
Annenkovsky frowned and shook his head. ”I disagree that he’s negotiated well for us. He’s made many concessions he shouldn’t have.”
“And he’s gained concessions very useful to us,” Pletnev said. ”I know. Because of the agreements, we may be able to move into the cities soon.”
“He is no longer in his right mind!” Annenkovsky said heatedly. “He talks about not being the same person—he does not have the ... the touch a commanding general should have!”
Pletnev looked between the two majors and then glanced up at the plasma tube, squinting. ”What would Vielgorsky and Yazykov and Belozersky have done for us? Nothing. Made things worse. Killed all three of us, more than likely. I say, do not trade the devil you know for the devil you don’t. Mirsky’s a mild son of devil.”
“He’s a lamb, not a devil,” Gambedian said dubiously. ”I regard him as a friend, but ...”
Pletnev raised his eyebrow in query.
“Well, in a crisis, I do not know how he would behave.”
“I think the crises are over,” Pletnev said. ”Now forget this talk. Go. Do not rock the boat. Let me build my cabin in peace.”
Garahedian nodded, stuck his hands in his pockets and turned to walk away.
Annenkovsky stayed for a moment, watching Pletnev trim a notch in a log.
“We were thinking of making you our leader,” Annenkovsky said quietly. “We would not harm General Mirsky.”
“I do not accept,” Pletnev said without looking up.
“What if he goes completely crazy?”
“He won’t,” Pletnev said.
“Where are you?” Mirsky shouted for the dozenth time.
He stood in the middle of the array of library seats and data pillars, fists raised in the air. His cheeks were red and wet and his neck was ribbed with anger and frustration.
“Are you dead, like me? Did they execute you?”
Still no answer.
“You murdered me!”
He clenched his jaw and struggled to control his breathing.
He knew if he tried to say anything more, the words would come out in mangled fragments. The little signal in his mind—a brief, explanatory warning, You are now using material not native to your personality, was about to drive him over the edge. So much of what he thought and did was punctuated by this message. He had explored those boundaries thoroughly--lying in his sling at night, trying to sleep, realizing he did not need to sleep.
He had the sensation that much of what he remembered about his life consisted of logical reconstructions. The entire left side of his body felt fresh and new, had a different odor, as it were. He realized it wasn’t the body that was new, but the corresponding section of his head.
The first few days, Mirsky had thought all might go well.
He believed he could become used to his status as a Lazarus; he made it seem like a joke, that he was back from the dead, this to gently discredit Pogodin’s testimony that Vielgorsky had blown Mirsky’s brains out. But the joke had not worked..
To the soldiers who had stood guard outside the library, it had seemed as tightly sealed and oppressive as a tomb. And what did you find in a tomb ... ?
His joke had then become a grim evaluation of reality.
Nobody dared flout his rule now; he was a ghost, not the freshly-promoted Colonel suddenly made Lieutenant General, not Pavel Mirsky, but a stranger from the depths of the third chamber city.
Superstition. An incredible force among soldiers.
And so, after a week of rule, of struggling to be what his past demanded he be, he had returned to the library. He had been afraid to come back until now, worried that the three political officers would be there to greet him, shoot him all over again.
Superstition.
He had waited for those inside to leave—first, the Chinese man and woman, and then a single Russian, Corporal Rodhzhensky. Only when the library was empty had he entered.
And he had shouted himself hoarse.
He sat in a chair, hand fumbling at the data pillar controls, lifting the lid and dropping it. Finally, he inserted his fingertips into the five hollows. ”Law,” he demanded. ”Law in a deserted city.”
The library asked more questions, narrowing his search to a manageable subject.
“Murder,” he said.
The materiai was rich and detailed. Murder was an offense punishable by psychological evaluation and retailoring of the personality, if such was called for.
“What if there is nobody to carry out the punishment?”
It is not punishment, the research voice said, it is redemption, a refitting for society.
“What if there’s no law, no police, no judges, or courts or psychologists?”
Suspects can be detained for nineteen days. If that time passes and no judgment is made, or charges specified, suspects are released to the custody of a reintegration counseling clinic.
“And if there’s no clinic?”
Suspects are released on their own recognizance.
“Where will they be released?”
Unless otherwise requested, at the scene of their incarceration.
“Where are they taken after capture?”
If they are captured in a structure of adequate size for an emergency medical facility--He saw a portion of the library, behind a seamless door in the north wall, used as an example: two small, equipment-packed rooms—then they are held under sedation until authorities retrieve them or nineteen days have passed. Medical workers serve as police units in emergency.
He had two more days.
Mirsky returned to the fourth chamber and made a pretence of being the commander for a few hours. He met with Hoffman and Rimskaya to continue discussions about opening the second and third chamber city spaces to “settlers.”
He then sneaked away, picked up an AKV and returned to the third chamber. Five people were in the library, Rodhzhensky again and four NATO people, one of them a United States Marine. Mirsky patiently waited for them to go, and entered the library with rifle in hand.
He had given the political officers one chance. If they were released, they would only come for him again. He would stay in the library for the next two days, waiting patiently...
The library remained deserted for several hours. In that time, he realized that his plan was useless. The library would not stay deserted for long. He had to carry out his executions—murders--in secret, or they would be worse than useless. Unless he destroyed the three political officers even more thoroughly than they had destroyed him, they would be resurrected, and he would be incarcerated for nineteen days, and it would all begin again—a cycle of insanity and violence beyond the dreams even of Gogol.
He walked to the wall behind which the three political officers waited, unconscious, and lowered the rifle to the floor at the northern edge of the array of seats, blinking rapidly.
“I’m not the same person you killed,” he said. ”Why should I take revenge?”
Even if he felt that he was the same person, this could be an excuse.
He could do what he realized he had wanted to do for years.
Perhaps the clarity had been brought on by the destruction of some irrational section of his thinking, releasing another impulse, truer and cleaner.
Mirsky had always wanted the stars, but not at the price of his soul.
And working within a Soviet system--even one such as he would have tried to establish—would always mean working against people like Belozersky, Yazykov and Vielgorsky.
Their faces kept reappearing throughout Russian history: the vicious lackeys and the capable but cruel and slightly askew leader.
He would break from the cycle. He had the chance now. His homeland was gone. His duty was over; he had already died for his men once.
Perhaps if Major General Sosnitsky had survived ... But then, if the Major General were still alive, Mirsky wouldn’t be in this position.
Sosnitsky would be.
He left the library and rode the train to the fourth chamber fort.
There, he gathered supplies into a truck—nobody questioning his intentions, not even Pletnev, who regarded him from some meters away with a look of mild puzzlement.
“They’ll be glad to be rid of me,” Mirsky thought. ”They can get on with their intrigues and cruelties. The political triumvirate will return to take their rightful places. I’ve been an impediment all along ... “ His last duty was to write a message for Garabedian.
Viktor : The three political officers will return. They will be in the third chamber library sometime within the next forty hours. Accept them as your leaders if you wish; I will no longer impede them.
Pavel
He left the message in an envelope in Garabedian’s tent.
Mirsky drove the truck into the woods, heading for the as-yet-unexplored 180 point. There he could be alone, perhaps build a raft and pole across a shallow lake to a tree-covered island, or just explore the thick woods visible fifty kilometers directly overhead.
And he would decide what to do next.
He did not think he would return.