Pandemonium (10 page)

His daughter frowned under her mop of blond hair and squinted at him skeptically. “Where’s Alexei?” she asked.

“Your brother will be here, very soon.”

“Papa?”

“Yes?”

“Thanks for kicking the guards out of the palace. I don’t like them. They look at me funny.”

“Who?”

“All of them.”

“Have they ever done anything to you,
malishka
?”

“No. But I do not like their guns!”

“They’re here to protect you. But from now on, they will stay in front of the palace. They will still have to use bathrooms, though. OK?”

“OK, Papa. Papa?”

“Yes?”

“They won’t hurt anybody, will they?”

“Who?”

“The guards. I mean, they won’t … The scientists will be all right, won’t they?”

“Of course,
malishka
.”

“Promise?”

“Yes.”

“Good!”

“Why do you ask?”

“I just miss the other ones. They were nice.”

“I told you, Sasha, they had to leave. They had to go back home. That’s all.”

“OK.”

“Now,
bedtime
!” he roared comically with a monster growl as he waved his arms.

She hugged her mountainous father around the neck and kissed him on his furry cheek before jumping away and running toward the tram dock on the far side of the penthouse. “
Bonsoir,
Papa!”

Her voice receded around the central column of natural stone that supported the Star Tower. When he heard the motors engage, he knew that she had made it to the tram car and was on her way back to the palace. The tram rode a cable from the Star Tower in the center of the city to a private passageway through the north wall of Sector One. Stalin had escape routes from all his escape routes. He had anticipated every means of egress.

Maxim sipped a tumbler of Scotch and water, leaning back on the curving leather couch, tortured by the waiting. Then, at last, like an explosion, the phone rang, and he snagged it like a panther. “What’s happening?”

“Sorry, Max,” came Galia’s voice. It was the only voice that always told him the truth, no matter how dangerous. It seemed grim now, already. “The men you sent to start the power plant … are dead. Including Klaus Reiner.”

Maxim exhaled, deflating on the couch.

“Thirteen men, Maxim. That’s twenty-two so far, in Sector Four alone. Five more in the rest of the city…”

“They are
sabotaging me, Galia
!” Maxim bellowed.

“The team was attacked, Maxim! We don’t know by what, but it wasn’t men and it wasn’t sabotage. The workers are demanding to be let go of their contracts. They say they’ve seen ghosts. They say Sector Four is haunted. They refuse to go in there again!”

“Chush’ sobach’ya!”
Maxim cursed. “Double their bonuses, Galia.”

“It won’t work this time.”

“If they discover I’m here,” Maxim yelled, “they will cut off our power, Galia! It could happen at any time. We must get the power plant
online
!”

“Maxim!” Galia cried, and paused. “I understand. But we need those scientists to tell us what is happening in Sector Four right now or we may never get the power turned on,” he implored. “You have to tell them the truth. You have to tell them why they’re really here!”

“It’s too soon,” Maxim said, gazing through the window. “Maybe it’s a breach. From Pandemonium…”

“You know what has happened,” Galia reproached him.

“They did this to me! The fucking KGB!”

“No! You brought this on yourself.”

Maxim scoffed. “They set me up!”

Galia sighed. “If they did, you fell for it. You must face it now, my friend! I have more bad news. Your dearest friend, Akiva—”

“What?” Maxim roared, jolting upright and holding the phone like a gun to his head. “No!…”

“Akiva was killed yesterday. Shot down in the streets of Majorca. He and his son, Visali.”

Maxim fell back as though shot through the heart. “I told him to come here,” he sobbed, clenching his teeth.

“This is their reply to you. Don’t you see?”

“They can go to
hell
!”

“You can’t bargain with them. They have your son, Maxim!
They have Alexei.
He will be next!”

Maxim’s seventeen-year-old son had disappeared eleven days ago while hiking in the Himalayas. Russian newspapers had quoted anonymous officials who speculated that Maxim Dragolovich had many enemies, and if he wanted to see his son again, he should turn himself in and face justice in Russia. Though it had been delivered by television and newsprint, it was not a subtle ransom note. His friend Akiva had published Maxim’s “response” to them in his own newspaper last week, quoting Maxim’s declaration that Russia would reap what it had sown if his son was not returned to him unharmed.

“Maxim,” Galia coaxed.

“No one can leave,” Maxim whispered. “Guard every entrance. Send this message, through one of Akiva’s newspapers,” he growled quietly like a dormant volcano, alarming Galia now. “If they touch my son, vengeance for their fifty million murders will rise up across Russia and swallow them all. No one, and nothing, will be spared.”

“Chief, I can’t—”

“Tell them!”

“Boss…”

“Tell them to check their fucking mail!”

MARCH 17

3:32 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

Four hendros and three humans watched the news with the volume muted.

On the seventy-two-inch screen in Hender’s living room, a red chyron flashed in the lower corner:
KREMLIN FIRE!
Onscreen a fire blazed out of control over the white façade of a stately building by the banks of the Moskva River. Black smoke and red flames poured from hundreds of windows as cameras in helicopters panned the scene.

Kuzu pointed. “Fire on building,” he grumbled.

“Building on fire,” Andy Beasley corrected absently.

“Huh?” Kuzu recoiled. He didn’t like English; it was stupidly inflexible.

“Yes,” the other sels said between mouthfuls of popcorn, correcting Kuzu. “Building on fire.”

Kuzu pursed his lips, his bristling fur flushing purple.

“Turn it up,” Joe said.

A hendro snagged the remote with one hand and raised the volume:

“… the iconic building, one of eighteen in the Kremlin complex, now seems to be a total loss.”

“I must say, it seems almost impossible that such a building could perish.”

“Do you believe foul play was involved in this, Dr. Aaronson?”

“Who can say, but a building as important to the operation of the Russian state—well, it’s simply inconceivable that in this day and age such a structure could be totally destroyed by fire. At the very least, it’s a grave embarrassment for the Russian government. I think we simply must allow the possibility of some kind of deliberate action.”

“Do you suspect terrorists might be involved?”

“As I said, I don’t think we can rule anything out at this time.”

“Thank you, sir. Noted Kremlinologist and author, Dr. Mitchell Aaronson. We now move to our Moscow correspondent, Amy Schuster. Amy?”

“Wow,” muttered Andy. “That sucks!”

“Yeah,” Bo grumbled, frowning.

Officially, the isolated base that was the hendros’ undisclosed location had been out of use for decades. In fact, it had steadily hosted top secret research programs right up to the present day. Visited daily by unlogged flights ferrying unlisted employees to and from Las Vegas, this dry lake bed in the Nevada highlands was encircled by high-tech surveillance devices that could detect approaches and departures of any living thing larger than a rabbit for miles around. Almost inaccessible due to its geography alone, this godforsaken spot was centered in a sun-broiled wasteland larger than Connecticut. Moreover, “Area 51,” as it was designated, had been credited with too many tall tales for anyone to believe the hendros were here, which made it the perfect place to hide them.

One of the base’s giant hangars had served as home for the sels before their large habitat was erected near an airstrip along the northern edge of the lake bed. The stadium-sized Mylar tent they now lived in was inflated with cooled air and resembled a Jiffy Pop popcorn package. To ufologists who spied it through telescopes sizzling on the desert flat it looked like the mother ship itself, which military intelligence had concluded would evoke the most advantageously hysterical response. Those who worked there dubbed it “the Zoo”—some because of their disdain for its inhabitants and some because of their respect for them.

“Hey! Call Hender so we can start the movie,” Bo said.

Joe nodded and reached for the intercom.

3:34 P.M.

The 1st Darkness

Clouds came before the waves came, 142,221,201 years ago. The waves tore one of the nine petals of our land, which I will call Henderica for humans, into the poison sea. Only songs speak for those lost sels, written down in the Books long after they were all gone.

Read from tablets copied from poems based on legends, sung, remembered, written, and repeated through a dozen darknesses, our history is now stored in tunnels deep in the sinking fragment of our world. The Books are there, but no one can retrieve them for a hundred years, since the humans dropped their bomb.

It was my job, passed down from forever, to copy each chain of pages before they crumbled. It took me 3,000 years. And I remember every word.

Hender read over the first entry of his book, making corrections with three hands clicking the keyboard simultaneously on his MacBook Pro. He could speak and write more than two hundred sel languages, most of which were now long dead. Yet, after mastering all those archaic languages, in all their quirks and mutations, English was still a daunting challenge for him.

Sels were solitary souls. They usually had children when they were tens of thousands of years old, so language had become a tool more for thinking than for communicating. For the last seventeen thousand years, Hender had been the only interlocutor among them, as each spoke a different language. They had paid him a yearly tribute in case they needed him to translate some rare interaction or dispute between them. At times, one of them had found an ancient artifact with writing that they had brought to him to translate.

To humans, Hender spoke English shockingly well after only six months. He was, the humans quickly realized, a linguistic savant. He seemed to have learned some French, a little Italian, German, and even Russian and Japanese during this same time. He continuously taught the other sels English, since they had decided they needed a common language, something they had never had before, in order to communicate with humans and each other in their new and disturbing circumstances.

Hender signed his entry
Shenuday Shueenair.
It was the nearest phonetic spelling of his short name. He didn’t mind being called Hender, as Andy had named him. He liked it, actually. And he didn’t mind being referred to as
he
or
she
or
hendro,
either. Humans used all those names, and many others, to refer to the sels, even though sels were hermaphrodites. He had suggested that humans use
sel,
which was simple enough to say and ancient enough to have a connection to the languages of all five sels, each of whom was the last of an ancient tribe.

Hender was used to many names that meant the same thing. When the
things
that words named were changed, however, they became lies, he realized now. If a sel lied to another on Henders Island, it could mean instant death. Lies were murder in the world he came from. All this had been troubling him lately.

Hender scanned the crude imitation of his treno tree around him that was made of concrete, rebar, and gunite. Under the Mylar sky, humans had re-created five scaled-down treno trees like the ones they had lived in on Henders Island. The sels were bewildered with gratitude by the strange gesture. But they were beginning to wonder whether humans had liberated them or imprisoned them, instead. They were not allowed to leave, though the humans kept telling them it was for their own good and that it was temporary—a concept that was difficult for them to understand, especially as the days marched by.

A beam of sun swept through the oculus of blue sky in the center of the silver dome. The gold shaft of light poured through Hender’s window over the translucent fur on the back of four of his hands that framed fossils he had collected from his island, which he had laid out on his desk next to his computer. Nell, Geoffrey, and Andy had helped him rescue the fossils while they were escaping from the island. Illuminated by the sun, the fragments of Henders Island were “museum-quality replicas” of the originals, Andy told him. The humans were keeping the “real ones” for study. The ones they returned to him seemed exactly the same, but they were made of something else. They were like food made of stone, or stones made of food. Everything in his world was being replaced with something else that humans called by the same name.

Most of the sels’ possessions had never been returned to them. Andy, who was the first person they had met on Henders Island and who was now one of their full-time companions, explained to Hender that their things were “pilfered” somewhere along their journey from Henders Island and that some had been sold for huge prices on the “black market” and on online auction sites before the “authorities” were able to stop it.

The voice of Joe, one of the two navy officers assigned to the sels, buzzed through Hender’s intercom.
“It’s showtime in three minutes, Hender!”

Hender closed his MacBook. “OK, Joe.” He descended from his room, his six hands doubling as feet. His legs rolled like a pianist’s hand down the winding stairs until he emerged into a replica of a B-29 fuselage—a little larger than the real one that had pierced his tree house over half a century ago on Henders Island. The others were waiting for him.

Hender scanned the magazine pages and product packages he had stuck to his walls and ceiling, on which he had plastered the garbage he had collected on his beach while studying humans from afar, to remind him of his home. He felt disoriented, his arms reaching out like buttresses to steady himself.