Текст книги "Shinie’s Ritual"

Strategic Mistake

That was an act Trent could not have expected from the rival. He pulled the collar of his uniform coat. The move seemed robotic, and the body was signaling fatigue and oxygen deficiency. However, his conscience kept ordering him to stay calm. In any case, a response action would follow in minutes.

The general nodded to signify that the information had been admitted for examination and then nodded his subordinate out of the room.

Goddamn it! GODDAMN ALL THESE ANALYSTS – the analysts, who had sworn to him that the blacks had invested all their stuff in defensive weapons! And now he had to generate some IDIOT way of solving a puzzle, to which there was actually no good solution.

Trent felt a drop of sweat run down his temple. They had been plotting the operation for two years, and now it was on the brink of failure. Everything had been precalculated. No, Trent corrected himself, they just had THOUGHT that everything had been precalculated. Now that the budget had been set up to the tiniest detail and all orders had been distributed… there was no way to change it.

Certainly, there would be ‘emergency expenses’ that would allow him to occasionally deviate from the agreed budget sum. However, the blacks had not exercised their right so far and, GODDAMN THEM ALL, he did not feel like revealing his weakness to them.

Minutes went by, but General was aware that he’d better give vent to his anger. Give vent to his fury, his rage, and not until he did would he look at the disposition map.

To start with, the blacks had gained the right to choose territory (they were all so damnably lucky this time!). Surely, they would have chosen the woodland grass – an area, which they all had at their finger-tips. Happily, we did have a good thing to offer, but for this, as it turned out, strategic mistake! The balance of powers did not seem in the whites’ favor at all.

Trent felt the hot band, which had been squeezing around his head from the moment he heard the officer’s words, finally let go of his temples, relieving the raging headache, which had pursued him all these days.

I just hope this won’t happen during my duty time… It suddenly struck him that he was thinking about a defeat as an inevitable thing. What’s wrong with worrying about your clear name? This is all but life instinct. An instinct, which was subject to suppression at that point. Now all thoughts about himself, his honorable ranks and his ancestors’ lineal nobility were to be brushed aside. There is no Trent, there is just the General. And he, BLAST HIS GIZZARD, will fight to the last!

Trent turned his face to the group of five men, who seemed to have missed the war raging inside of him. While he was torturing himself with self-reproach, fumbling for excuses and wondering who of those around him would be good as a substitutive victim, they were talking quietly, discussing the response actions. These guys are not to be messed with – they are all freelancing civies.

“So”, Trent forcedly stretched out his lips in a suggestive smile, ‘so, dear chessmen, do we still have a chance to make this game a draw?”

“Sir”, the one who was considered the chief said in a twang, “we think that if we start our combination with moving infantry to f3, the whites will get a chance”.

The Day of Silence

Una woke up at 7 a.m. as she usually did, although today she could afford a longer stay in bed. There was quite a reason – the day of vacation! Definitely, that was not a day to start with lounging idly in a bed. Every single minute of her well-deserved (and it really was!) vacation was scheduled.

A quick glance at the interface. Mom was still in bed, since she had watched a talk show well past midnight, which meant that she would be up by lunch time. Wow, Kris had already slipped out. That was strange, since the little sister had usually stretched her bedtime to the longest possible point, and then she jumped up to rush about like crazy, leaving you no choice but to dodge in time. Una had to program breakfast for two and drive the little idler to school.

Una blindly dialed the breakfast combination. She did not advocate diversity, and since she had developed a menu that fitted her ideally, there was no turning back. However, programming her kitchen printing machine for a month ahead, as some of her friends did, was not something she really wanted to do, as if she enjoyed this daily ritual.

Mom said that she had been just as consistent and judicious in girlhood too. That gave her peace. So she was now, as she hung her legs from the bed and adroitly got her slippers on her feet. The breakfast will be ready to serve in five minutes. There were seven minutes for a shower. Just enough time for the protein soufflé to cool down a little.

One, two, three… the habit of counting seconds had pursued her since her years in the nursing school. She had had a lot on her plate back then, so she was trying hard to spend her time with maximum efficiency. Every minute scheduled. One hundred and ten… Water smelled weird on that day, and some extraneous and long-forgotten smell had stuck to her favorite jasmine too. Later Una remembered her mom’s threat to call a technician to clean out the pipes.

The house was fed by a deep water well, not a public water main, and that did take its fee. They could have fixed an UV filter, but it was hardly possible to convince her mother that it would have been less costly than annual clean-outs… Four hundred… Una decided not to use the fog mode today. There was no telling how skin would react to the supplement to plain water, and she did not want to inhale an unknown chemical.

Strangely enough, the dining room did not smell like what she was accustomed to either. Raising her eyebrows perplexedly, Una decided that she’d better put up with it. “That’s strange”, it occurred to her, and she even frowned to check her observation, “although there is nobody around, I’m experiencing this sort of reaction anyway”. Was that a habit?

She sat down at the table and dug her spoon in the soufflé. The breakfast did not seem to succumb. Well, well. This little jacko Kris had used the 3D kitchen printing machine to produce some stuff like new earrings for herself!!! Now Una could see the source of the strange smell. The food. It was all plastic. The little sibling had just failed to replace the cartridge after using the printer for a purpose that was in no way related to cooking.

“Happily, I don’t eat sandwiches for breakfast” Una giggled to herself. She would not be angry to her sister, Kris was her little sweetheart. Still she had to wait for another five minutes before she could finally get her soufflé and coffee. Having made the standard manipulations with the kitchen machine’s interface, she stared at the window. Strictly, that was a projection, but it was calibrated to display the landscape outside, so it was quite possible to figure out the weather.

Everything promised a perfect day, and even the weather forecast in the corner of the projection was beaming with a cheerful golden circle – not even a cloud, as if on cue! Una recalled the feelings she had experienced a month ago, when, looking at the projection (as she had used to do for all of five months’ mornings preceding the vacation day), she had seen the sun, not the usual lead-colored drop. Oh, she made quite a jump! How come the forecasters could have messed up a short-term forecast such as this! Definitely, that day was meant to be the happiest one in the year! After finishing her breakfast and changing into her loose overall, she recorded a verbal message, addressing it to her mother. She was not going to return before evening. The handbag, the ID bracelet… wow, she nearly forgot her vacation card. Una felt infuriated imagining that all her plans could be ruined just because of her failure to take the card out of the pocket of her office suit. Eventually, the card was dangling on her thin neck chain. Una hoped that she would not have to use it too often.

She walked out five minutes later than she had planned to. Immediately a number of vizors made a straightaway to her eyes, and torrent of data obliterated the girl. Ads, news, latest job ads, a message from her friend and the overdue message from Kris… 364 days of year – that was an everyday duty of all citizens. Commonly, there was no escape from the escort.

Surely, the ad boys were a little louder than it was permitted by law, and usually that had made Una want to crinkle without feeling really annoyed. There was no way to prove anything to anyone. Nevertheless, today she is not going to put up with that!

Una undid the top button of her overall, took out the card and put it beneath the vizors’ scanners. The devices faded out instantly and disappeared into the recharging slots. That’s it! That was her day. Her well-deserved vacation. Just one day in a year. The Day of Silence.

Shelter

– 1 —

“Daaad, it won’t turn on hot water. It’s ice cold.”

“Jack, I have to leave, you’re a big boy. Come on, no follies.”

Jack’s father had raised five kids and he knew how to make rejections. There was no sense in being insistent. However, there was Bryan who might have agreed to stay with Jack in the bathroom while he would be washing himself and cleaning teeth, couldn’t he? He heard his father’s voice outside:

“Bryan, hurry up, last time your friends had to wait for us.”

No hope… Today his father was driving Bryan’s friends to school, so they were leaving first. Jack would not turn to his mother or sisters for the world. He was already seven, he was a man. Now he was in for another cold shower.

“Jack, hurry up!”

That was his mother. She was pushing him, since the school bus was coming in thirty minutes. Jack squared shoulders and dove into the dark bathroom, as if into an ice-hole…

– 2 —

When Jack took his seat in the bus, he was still shivering. He chose the most sunlit seat and kept silent all the way to school trying to absorb as much heat as he could. The school kids around him made a lot of noise outshouting each other, and he would not say a word. That was a silence of understanding that he could not bear it for long

Jack Oldrich, seven years old, a second-grade student of the Printstown Elementary School. A little boy, who had fallen out with his own house. What an absurd thing! That was the kind of thing he wouldn’t dare discuss with someone, because nobody would believe him.

He was just a boy. Yes, he did fail to clean his shoes at the porch at times. On a couple of occasions, he had forgotten to close the refrigerator doors… A homeless dog locked in the cellar for a night… Would the house really take revenge for stuff like that? Indeed, it all had started gradually, and it was not before a good portion of time passed that he understood what was happening.

Later, when the house downright refused to fulfill its obligations in relation to Jack, he recalled that there had been vestiges of it before. Doors would have closed faster behind him than behind other family members, and toasts would have burnt inevitably – he had noticed that about six months before. But his lean body could slip through the narrowest openings, and he was not a fan of toasts either, so he would not have cared much about them.

Also, there had been what one could call minor accidents like a window opening on a rainy day, or a dryer not functioning and leaving Jack struggling with a prospect of going to school in damp socks; stale milk in the room fridge, and many more. The house was intent on resource saving, and it seemed full-on thrifty with Jack.

However, none of such things matter much for kids, so Jack would forget about these annoying accidents instantly. Except for his collection of stamps, which he had really grieved for. The house ‘forgot’ to close the window exactly when they were lying on the window sill.

Later his father said that Jack had immobilized the window lock himself, but he already knew what the matter was. And by the time he was really scared.

– 3 —

The school day flew by. Elis, his elder sister, was to drive him back home. She loved Jack more than everyone else in the house, so he felt like she was the one he could tell about the house. However, he was so happy to ride and chat and let the shade cast by tree crowns and mingled with streaks of sunlight engulf them, that he would not dare break this placid order.

Elis let him in and followed. Jack, the youngest one in the family, had hardly stayed alone once, and he was all so happy that he was not going to this time either. All the more so, Elis was there. He could ask her to make him a cup of cocoa and a sandwich with jam.

He could remember himself trying to make a cup of cocoa the day before, when the MW roared intimidatingly enough to make him want to switch it off right away and drink it cold. And the water was cold. Ice-cold. The house knew something about people’s physiology, and it must have drafted an elaborate plan about Jack.

As Jack watched Elis fuss over his little snack, he thought: could that be my fault? Here is Elis – she is all so kind and sweet – and the house won’t treat her that way. Does it really have a good reason to love Jack? What for? For failure to turn off the tap and flooding the bathroom? For cutting scripts on the attic beams? Or maybe for scratching the Robin Hood’s riflemen’s emblem on its window?

It had used to be the most ordinary house on the outskirts of a typical twenty-second century American small city. Jack had been all so glad to have moved there! The only thing that had scared him was a blind built-in wardrobe in his room. It was big and dark and devastatingly dusty.

His mother had to clean it with her hands, because it did not feature any automatic indication or clean-up systems. Light had to be switched on manually too, and to do so, one would have to almost reach its end through pitch darkness. One day, Brayan had put him inside the wardrobe, and while he was blocking the door, Jack was crying with horror and banging his fists on the inside of it experiencing the most terrible moments in his life.

Later, there were a couple nightmares featuring the wardrobe, following which Jack confessed to his mother that he would under no circumstances ever use it. Eventually, it was surrendered mercifully to oblivion after being stuffed unnecessaries. But now the entire house was haunting Jack.

Of course, it was not Jack’s fault. He was no more scrupulous or concentrated than many of his peers. A nut from his toy construction kit falling into the floor cleaning system seemed to have become the last straw. After half the day of digging the ground, Jack’s father did eventually repair the system, but the house’s formidable appearance was much eerier than his frowning father.

While what had been happening prior to that constituted all but minor damage to his life, the nut made the house pick on him to a high standard. There was a fairly broad spectrum of tools for that, as long as the electronic intellect had permeated the house from top to bottom and seized control over all amenities, home appliances and, partially, furniture. Jack put his hand to the top of his head, on which the lid of the veranda drop-table had ‘landed’ yesterday. It hurt.

– 4 —

Elis put a plate with two neat sandwiches and a glass of hot cocoa in front of him. Excellent! But…

“Can you sit here by yourself for half an hour? I need to go to Inna and take some magazines. Just a little round trip, I won’t even use the car.”

“May I go with you, Elis? Please, wait, I’ll be right back. Please!”

“You silly little boy!” Elis ruffled his hair and then smoothed it gently with her hand, looking her brother in the eye. “Don’t worry, I’ll lock the door.”

Now I have to stay face to face with the house for half an hour… maybe I’ll be all right.

– 5 —

When the door closed behind Elis with a dry and much-promising click, Jack was still chewing on his sandwich. Well, it seems to be ok. If I sit right over here without standing up, he thought, I’ll be all right. Jack looked around for a sign of danger.

The tea-kettle is safely far away. The ironing board was fixed in the corner of the room, so it wouldn’t get him. What about the robotic vacuum cleaner? Lately, it had sought to get under his feet and trip him up where he would have least expected. No signs of that. Jack shivered, since it was a little cold.

He could add a bit of temperature, since the console was right there on the wall, but the house would not listen. Oh, no, it’s getting too cold. He began to shiver. Was that how it was?.. He climbed cautiously off from the chair having thoroughly checked it for possible threats. This is it! The temperature was dropping, since the conditioner was in cooling mode. Jack gave a sigh. He’d have to go and get some clothes on.

Suddenly, something small and dark lunged at him from the corner. Jack screamed and fled from the kitchen. He would not bother calculating the direction any more, since all he had to do was dodge the household items attacking him. The flick coat-hanger all but hit him in the eye as he evaded a jet of air freshener issued by a spray bottle, and there was the robotic vacuum cleaner stalking him at the top of the stairway – a barrier, which Jack eventually cleared in a giant leap.

Finally, he got to the room. The window was open, and there was a whole heap of dry leaves on the floor, and there was even some earth, wasn’t there? Had it been brought from the cellar? The stuff was neatly strewn all over the room, and there was a huge pile of dust – the vacuum cleaner’s nasty little poo, Jack thought. Something began to knock at the door.

Jack blocked it with a chair and began to dash frantically about the room, wishing there were a place to hide and Elis were coming back right now, right over here! “I hope I’ll live”, it suddenly rang out in his mind, and he felt horror coming up from deep inside.

He hesitated in front of the wardrobe’s door for a moment – oh, no! Not for the world! – and dashed under the bed.

– 6 —

Elis was returning from her friend in high spirits. First, she had just received a good stack of magazines, and they had spent about ten minutes chatting about their routine matters. Second, she was fitting well in the thirty minutes she had pledged to Jack. The high spirits were gone once she entered the hallway.

It looked like a disaster area. Also, she could hear the thudding and cracking of furniture being smashed. Jack!!! She grabbed the stick, which their uncle had left in their house after his last visit, and rushed upstairs.

There was a huge hole gaping in the door, which led to Jack’s room. Elis ran slap into it, but there was something on the other side that would not let go. Dismissing any thoughts of danger, she thrust her arm into the hole and groped the chair. After what he felt like was a lengthy effort, Elis pushed off the chair and broke into the room. It was sheer hell. All home appliances, which might have been carried over there, were either moving by themselves or lying on the floor in leaves, dirt and debris. The walls looked as if somebody had just tried to comb them with a rake. Bed sheets lay crumpled on the floor, and the bed was upside down.

“Jack!!! Jack!!!” – Elis yelled, feeling panic gradually evolve into a much more terrible thing. – “Jack!!!”

“Elis!” – she heard his brother’s voice from inside the wardrobe. – “Elis, I’m here!”

“Jack!” – Elis burst out crying at the realization that her brother was all right. She pulled at the wardrobe’s door, but it would not go. “Get out of there now!”

After a few moments of silence, Jack, finally, answered:

“I don’t want to get out, Elis… I… I like it better here…”

Shinie’s Ritual

– 1 —

“Once upon a time there lived a little bug, and what was its name?”

“Little Shinie”

“And who named him so?”

“Mummy!”

Misha’s mother smiled, pausing for a few of seconds, and Misha moved under the blanket, making himself comfortable. That was their ritual, which they carried out every night unless the mother was really busy. The fairy tale about little Shinie. Well, come on!

Now the mother was the only person to speak.

“One day Shinie went for a walk without warning his mother. When she came back home from work, Shinie was not there. First, she did not worry much, not until it began to get dark, and she walked outside to look for him. She went to aunt Ant, uncle May Beetle, but Shinie was not there.”

“Mummy, why didn’t she phone him?”

“They did not have phones, baby, I told you. Well, she continued to look for him and felt very scared. Shinie got so engrossed in playing that he could not see it was already dark. He went home, but his mother was not there. Then Shinie…”

Misha’s mother continued her story about the kind lightning bug, who was (what a coincidence!) six years old, just like Misha, and how he had gone to look for his mother, and about their reunion, how she had reprimanded him and cried… And she was asking herself: what would happen when Misha turned sixteen, not six, like he had the day before? Would these sweet stories help him, actually a grown-up boy, understand his own life?

– 2 —

Misha was going to the ‘base’ with his pals. That was what they called a classified military installation, which was located in close vicinity of their town. Classified? Ha-ha! Yes it was, but not for a bunch of seven-to-eight-year-old boys!

They took Misha along as a fill-in boy, because thus they would make the dozen, which for small fry was a special kind of pageantry. Then they met girls in the way, who delightedly accepted the idea to ‘take a ride’ to the base, and Misha’s mission in the bunch lost all significance right away; however, he had a kind of cunning, which helped him blend into the bulging crowd of schoolchildren, so none of them remembered about him. It was not before they actually reached the ‘base’ that they did, but at this point his presence was the last thing they’d care about.

The base was classified for the military, but there was nothing classified for the little boys, as they had crisscrossed it, so long as the majority of objects were underground and scattered pretty far away from each other, and there were a fairly sufficient number of observation bunkers in the forest.

The bunkers were monolithic concrete domes with edges buried deep into the barren woodland soil. They looked like a flock of giant turtles burrowing between the crooked birches and pines, scanty light from the polar sun refracting dimly in their glossy shells barely peeping through the gray moss.

However, all the ‘turtles’ were guarded. Sentries stood at the entrances all the time, yes, all the time… but not today. The nearest ‘turtle’ remained unguarded.

– 3 —

…one day, Shinie’s friends treated him to a pear when he was taking a walk. It did not occur to him to wash his hands, so he ate the pear and it gave him a bad stomach ache. Shinie’s mother would give him camomile tea and carbon… Shinie lay sick for two days, and his mother even had to call a doctor…

– 4 —

While the older boys were deciding whether or not they’d have to ‘reconnoiter’ the bunker and, if they would, who would be the one to do that, Misha was settling his own inner disputes. On the one hand, he knew that if they got caught, they’d be in for hard time, very hard. And his mother would be very upset. Although she had never thrashed him, there’d definitely be a couple of days of guaranteed silence. Misha gave a sigh. Maybe they wouldn’t go anywhere.

In five minutes, despite all fears and doubts, the kids made a chain and started toward the nearest “turtle’s” gaping mouth. After moments of hesitation at the entrance, they promptly walked downstairs. Promptly enough to reach the second underground level and hide from the squad of soldiers, who had arrived to the bunker on a truck.

As they peeked from beneath a network of metal flights, they saw the soldiers quickly unload the truck and carry in heavy crates, blocking the entire first underground floor. The men were in a hurry, with faces crimsoned and all sweating, and they would not so much as fan away gnats and mosquitoes circling them or hint at a smoking break.

One of the drivers – the senior one – jumped out of the truck and silently, just like the rest of the squad, joined the mission of carrying and stacking the crates.

“Is that all?” his raucous voice finally rang out. “Let’s go for the last bit now.”

“Can we really make it in time?” a soldier said in a feeble voice. “There’s enough food to last one for a thousand years…”

“Carry on!” the driver croaked in reply. “We’ll make it in time!”

And off they went.

– 5 —

…Shinie’s friends were fishing, and Shinie had already caught a bucketful. Then he decided to go home. His friends tried to talk him out of that, but Shinie wanted to take his fish to his mother right away, and off he went alone. And he got lost. His mother and his neighbors went out to look for him, and it was not until late at night that he was found… oh, you’re my little trouble…

– 6 —

The soldiers’ agitation passed on to the kids, and, honest, that was a great risk, which everyone realized. A quick decision was made in a whisper – let’s get out of here!

Misha was getting the goosebumps – so much he wanted to leave, and, deep inside, the little Shinie had long been howling with fear. So, once the truck’s motor sound dissipated in the distance, he was the first boy to dart toward the stairway. Too late. A plaintive howl, which they all knew from war movies, filled the ‘base’, and down went a concrete slab – the bunker’s door, cutting off the route back home for the kids.

Lamps went on instantly, and distant engines started, forcing a light breeze past the petrified children. It was no longer dark or quiet, but it felt much creepier. Then a rumbling sound came, gradually building up, and the ground shook – one, two, three times…

The kids rushed along the corridor, which led further down. Boys tore ahead, and Misha was the youngest boy, so he fell behind, unable to keep up with even the girls. Finally, he stopped, and cried as loudly as his shaky voice could handle:

“Stop! Stop! We can’t, we can’t… we must stay together…”

“Stop! Stop!..” the girls backed him, since they were now too exhausted to run.

The kids grouped. They took their wind and decided to send scouts ahead, but Misha started yelling again. To be exact, it was Shinie – the unreasoning little bug, wishing he were with his mother right now…

“We can’t walk around one by one, because we may go astray. We must choose the direction and go together!” The boy burst out crying, feeling sorry for his decision to disobey his mother and follow the older boys, but staying alone would be worse. “Listen: once upon the time there lived a little bug…”

…

Although the sobbing ruined the effect, the kids did eventually listen…

– 7 —

Sasha was assertive by nature and he always knew what he was heading for. Yulia bit on her lip. Every time she had to all but persuade him.

They were the twelfth generation of the Descended living in the dark caves, and so far the ritual was followed strictly. But Sasha… She had repeatedly seen her husband off the premises and into the cold lands, and she knew that he’d do his uttermost to leave without permission.

“Sasha, please, for my sake,” she put out feelers, when they were still far from reaching the destination.

Imagine – that happened every month!!! How could she have married a getter? But experience did its job well, and by the time they reached the cold land’s boundary, they had fallen out and made it up, and she did eventually convince him.

As they stood in front of the door with REFRIGERATOR written on it in huge orange caps, he stared at her for a very long time. “For your sake,” his eyes told her. “Thanks,” she responded with hers.

The young man turned his back to the door and raised his hands in a ritualistic pleading gesture. Yulia stepped back into the shade.

“Mama, may I go take a walk?” Sasha said.

“Yes, you may,” Yulia uttered a ceremonial phrase. “Yet, don’t be late, my little Shinie.”