Out of the Dark (62 page)

After all.

“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Sharon murmured, and he looked down and smiled at her.

“Always believe three impossible things before breakfast every morning,” he told her.

“That’s silly, Daddy,” another voice said, and he turned to look at his son. Malachai Dvorak had a dark mustache of hot chocolate from the supply of instant still tucked away in the cave and broken out for the occasion, and he shook his head, red hair gleaming in the light of the quietly hissing Coleman lantern.

“Impossible things aren’t real,” he informed his father with impeccable six-year-old logic. “And if they aren’t real, you shouldn’t believe in them.”

“You think?”

Malachai nodded firmly, and Dvorak took his arm from around Sharon to ruffle the boy’s hair, then looked across at his daughters. Maighread looked back at him, but Morgana appeared to be bobbing for marshmallows in her huge mug of hot chocolate. She had her face buried in it, anyway.

“What do you think, Maighread?” he asked. “Should you believe in impossible things?”

“Well . . .”

His daughter cocked her head to one side, obviously pondering, then turned to the even smaller, blond-haired girl standing beside her. Zinaida Karpovna was looking down into her own hot chocolate with an almost reverent expression.

“What do you think, Zinaida?” Maighread asked.

“About what?” Zinaida responded, looking up from the mug. “I wasn’t listening.”

The Russian girl spoke flawless English, but that was fair enough. Maighread could have asked the question in equally flawless Russian if she’d wanted to, thanks to the neural educator installed in the cave. They’d pulled a few strings—Dvorak was prepared to admit it, if anyone asked—to get that educator, but there hadn’t been too much argument about it. There were upward of three thousand of them scattered about the world at the moment, and producing more of them would be one of the first priorities of the world’s rebuilt infrastructure. In the meantime, Dave Dvorak had every intention of going ahead and realizing his desire to be a history teacher . . . especially now that he had the history of a whole interstellar civilization (such as it was) at his mental fingertips.

The kids certainly thought it had been a good idea, too. They’d come to think of the neural educator as the biggest and best encyclopedia in the entire known universe, and their craving for knowledge seemed bottomless. In fact, the adults had to be careful about cramming knowledge too quickly into children; there were physiological limitations on how much neurally delivered information a still-maturing brain could absorb without cognitive and psychological damage. Besides, the educators provided only
knowledge,
not the ability to
grasp
that knowledge or handle complex concepts. It would be some time before any of the kids were old enough for a
complete
neurological education, and they didn’t seem to have fully realized—yet, at any rate—that they were still going to have to go to school to develop those cognitive skills, learn to handle those concepts. But they already had a well-developed set of
language
skills, and since Zinaida and her family were going to be living with them for a while, all of the parents involved had decided it only made sense to make all the children bilingual.

“Daddy was asking if people should believe in impossible things,” Maighread explained now, and Zinaida shrugged.

“Of course they should,” she said simply. “If we didn’t believe in impossible things, we wouldn’t be here. I mean, if anyone had asked if I thought I’d ever drink something like this . . . hot chocolate,” she pronounced the words cautiously, despite her new English fluency, “I would’ve thought
that
was pretty impossible.”

She shrugged again, and Dvorak nodded.

“Good answer, kid,” he told her, reaching out to tug teasingly on her right earlobe. Then he looked at his son again.

“You know, Malachai,
everything’s
impossible until somebody believes in it enough to
make
it real.”

“An excellent observation,” another voice said, and the adult Dvoraks turned just a bit quickly as they realized the night’s guest of honor had arrived.

He smiled at them, and reached out his left hand to Zinaida. She smiled back, then cuddled her cheek into his palm, catching his hand between her face and shoulder in a handless embrace that was somehow unutterably tender.

“And as Zinaida has observed,” Pieter Ushakov continued, looking across her bent head at Dave and Sharon Dvorak, “if we did not believe in impossible things, we would not be here, would we?”

My, oh my, but have you got
that
one right
, Dvorak thought wryly.
Legends and myths and monsters, oh my! Count—I’m sorry
, Prince—
Dracula?
Good guy
vampires riding to the rescue of all humanity? Who would’ve thunk it?

He looked at the blond-haired, blue-eyed man whose breath wasn’t producing the vapor clouds everyone else seemed to be exhaling. Which had a little something to do with the fact that Pieter Ushakov no longer exhaled. Or inhaled, for that matter, unless he needed the air to speak.

Dvorak glanced back up at the sky. Most of humanity’s heavens were still blacker than black, without the high-tech sky glow which had once been so much a part of its major cities. There were places where those cities were already coming back, though, and whatever human authority had managed to preserve itself through the nightmare of the Shongair invasion was trying desperately to bring some sort of order to a world coping with starvation, disease, and—for the northern hemisphere, at least—the rapid onset of winter.

It was going to be bad, he knew. Not as bad as it could have been, but even with all the goodwill in the world, and with all of the captured Shongair resources which were being converted and applied to the problem as
quickly as possible, millions more were still going to die. It couldn’t be any other way with the planetary infrastructure so hammered and battered and broken.

But bad as this winter was going to be, spring would follow, and new growth would emerge from the killed-back winter roots. And perhaps—just perhaps, he thought, following up that metaphor—something newer and stronger and better would grow out of the rich, sustaining soil of the past.

God knows it’s been manured with enough blood,
he thought soberly.
And we know we’re not alone, anymore. Not only that, I don’t think we’re going to like our neighbors very much. So, since humans seem best at burying their differences in the face of some mutual, outside threat
. . . .

He watched the larger of the two bright, shining motes sweeping slowly across the night sky. He thought it actually looked bigger to the naked eye than it had just the night before, although that could be only his imagination. After all, he knew it
was
getting bigger, even though nobody’s unaided vision should be able to pick that up just yet.

The Shongair industrial vessels didn’t care that they’d changed ownership and management. They just went steadily ahead, completing their automated assembly process, preparing to begin construction of an entire Hegemony-level industrial infrastructure for Earth’s tattered survivors. By the time the various planetary governments got themselves reorganized, that industrial infrastructure would be just about ready to begin rebuilding mankind’s home, and an old line from a not particularly great science-fiction television series ran through the back of Dave Dvorak’s brain.

“We can rebuild it, we can make it better,” he misquoted quietly, and Sharon laughed.

“Thank you, Colonel Austin!” She shook her head at him. “You do realize none of our kids—or our guests—are going to get that one, don’t you?”

“They don’t have to understand the
original
reference,” he replied, and her smile faded.

“No, they don’t,” she agreed softly. “The question is whether or not we can pull it off this time.”

“We can,” Ushakov said, facing them squarely. “I need my hand, Zinaida,” he said, and she smiled up at him and released it.

He smiled back, then used his liberated hand to stroke the small, sleepy bundle of night-black fur cradled on his right forearm. The puppy stretched
and opened his mouth in a prodigious yawn, showing needle-sharp little white teeth, and Ushakov chuckled. Then he looked back at his hosts.

“We can, and we shall,” he said simply. “I believe the English idiom is ‘Failure is not an option.’” He shrugged, still stroking the back of the puppy’s delicate skull. “Vlad and Stephen will deal with the Shongairi. That will still leave the remainder of the Hegemony, however, and I doubt they will react calmly to the notion that someone far worse—as
they
see things at any rate—than the Shongairi has burst upon the scene. Worse still, from their perspective, I think with the lesson of the Shongairi before us here on our own world, we will not be quick to accept the Hegemony’s authority. I doubt they will react calmly to that, either.”

He shrugged again.

“One may quibble about the historical forces in play at any single moment—for example, Marx was a dunce, in my own opinion, although I admit that may be prejudice on my part—but the dialectic remains a valid method of analysis, does it not? In this instance, the thesis is the Hegemony’s prejudices and mania for stability, while humanity’s insatiable hunger for change and our fury over what was done to us represent the antithesis. I do not think they can coexist for very long. So the question becomes who will survive in the coming synthesis, and I believe the Hegemony will discover that humanity is very, very
good
at surviving.”

Yes, we are,
Dvorak thought, then looked up quickly as he heard a soft, whooshing sort of sound and Keelan Wilson suddenly squealed with laughter.

Boris Karpov still didn’t talk a lot, but he and Keelan had been almost inseparable ever since his mother and his siblings had arrived to join Ushakov. Now the two of them were “helping” Jessica and Veronica set the table while Rob and Alec lit the bonfire. Normally, that was Dvorak’s job, but with only one good arm, he’d agreed—reluctantly—to delegate it to Wilson.

Apparently his reluctance had been well placed.

It had rained heavily for the last couple of days, and he and his brother-in-law had somewhat different approaches to coaxing recalcitrant, wet wood into flame. It looked to Dvorak as if Wilson must have used the better part of a quart of their precious gasoline to “encourage” the kindling. At any rate, when he’d tossed in the match, he’d gotten a
most
impressive ignition.

He jumped back, expressing himself in vehement Marine-ese and
smacking hastily at the tiny dots of flame busy singeing his Mackinaw’s fuzzy surface, and Keelan laughed again.

“You’re all
sparky,
Daddy!”

“Yeah, and he doesn’t have any
eyebrows
anymore, either!” Alec put in. He sounded rather less amused than his much younger half sister. Probably because he’d been in closer proximity to ground zero and his own eyebrows had just gotten a little frizzy-looking, Dvorak decided, shaking his head with resignation.

“Only in America,” he muttered, and it was Ushakov’s turn to chuckle.

“Oh, I think you could find his like elsewhere.” His smile faded and he looked back at Dvorak. “And a good thing, too. A strong man, your brother-in-law. The kind we need more of.”

He met Dvorak’s eyes levelly, the implication unstated, and Dvorak nodded slowly, thinking of a conversation he’d had with another strong man.

A good man.

•  •  •  •  •

“Are you sure about this, Stephen?” Dave Dvorak asked. “I don’t like lying to your dad, even by omission.”

“Yeah.” Stephen Buchevsky gazed up at the silver disc of the moon. “Yeah, I’m sure, Dave.” He turned back from the moon, folding his arms across his massive chest. “Maybe the time will come to tell him—and Mom—I’m still alive . . . in a manner of speaking, anyway. Right this minute, though, I don’t think he’d be ready to deal with it.”

“What? Why
ever
would you worry about that?” Dvorak shook his head. “A Methodist pastor with a vampire for a son . . . Where could the problem possibly be in
that
?”

“Exactly.” Buchevsky shook his head, but he also smiled very slightly. “I love my dad and my mom more than anything else in the world.” His smile faded as he remembered the only people who had ever matched his parents’ place in his heart, but his voice didn’t falter. “I love them, but it’s going to take them time to adjust, and I don’t want them worrying about it, agonizing over it, when I’m not even here.”

“
Should
they adjust, Steve?” Dvorak asked very quietly.

“What? You mean all the ‘damned souls of the undead’ and like that?”

Buchevsky sounded more amused than anything else, but Dvorak faced him squarely and nodded.

“Don’t think for one moment I’m not grateful,” he said. “And don’t think I didn’t go down on my knees and thank God when I heard about
what happened. But, you know, that’s kind of the point of my concern. I take God just as seriously as your dad does. And that means I can understand why he might have some of the same . . . questions I do.”

“Course you do.” Buchevsky nodded. “Couldn’t be any other way. But. . . .”

Stephen Buchevsky reached inside his shirt. When his hand came back out, it held the small, beautiful silver cross Shania had given him less than a year ago. It lay across his broad, dark palm, shining in the moonlight, and he held it out to Dvorak.