The Quantum Solution by Eric Van Lustbader

Author:Eric Van Lustbader
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

28

MOSCOW, RUSSIAN FEDERATION

No one said a word. Petrov risked a glance at Kusnetsov, as if to say, Do you have any idea what’s going on? Kusnetsov should have been amused by the other’s clear discomfort, but for some reason he wasn’t.

All at once the Sovereign started talking about his last hunting expedition, the gray wolf he had tracked on horseback for a day and a half until cornering it and shooting it through the heart. “That’s a difficult shot. Not very many hunters can manage it.” He looked from Petrov to Kusnetsov and back again. What was he looking for? Kusnetsov asked himself. Affirmation? Appreciation? Applause? “You can’t shoot an animal through the head, it’s disrespectful,” he went on. “Never forget the animal is a worthy enemy. Also”—here he laughed, a raw, metallic noise more like a gunshot than anything that should be coming out of a human being’s mouth—“a headshot will ruin the trophy. The head is meant for display, a testament to one’s prowess.” He spread his stubby-fingered hands. “And of course one’s prowess is the entire raison d’être of the exercise.”

He sat back, crossed one ankle over his opposite knee. “You know, when I was asked to come to Moscow from St. Petersburg, where I grew up and trained day and night, it was to join the government in the Kremlin under the auspices of a president who understood nothing about the Russian people. Curious, no?” He shook out a cigarette from a pack he kept hidden in his breast pocket, lit it, inhaled. He never smoked in public.

“Here in Moscow,” he continued in a haze of bluish smoke, “I spent some months observing, keeping my mouth shut. I saw what others inside the Kremlin—especially this president—did not. We—the people of Russia—had had enough of democracy. We didn’t know what to do with it and so it failed. Miserably.” His cigarette, Turkish in origin, produced a sharp, acidic odor that permeated the carriage in less than a minute. As if he hadn’t already marked his territory, Kusnetsov thought.

“Russia does not want or need democracy. The people have experienced for themselves the chaos, the decadence democracy breeds. They have universally rejected dermokratia—shit-ocracy. Our citizens have lived under an autocracy for longer than they can remember. Their fathers and mothers, their grandfathers and grandmothers all lived, worked, procreated, and died under regimes that tightened the screws on choice. They like that now, they’re used to it, comfortable with it.”

He inhaled, held the smoke as if searching for the way forward, didn’t continue until his lungs soaked up all the nicotine the tobacco had to offer. “Like fools, we sat back, allowed NATO to expand its influence, we twiddled our thumbs when Belgrade was bombed, we turned a blind eye on the American incursions into Libya and Iraq. So here we are now with democracy squatting on our doorstep in Ukraine, in Poland, in territory that not so long ago belonged to the Soviet Union before we were downsized by the world to the Russian Federation.

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