Lenin of the Stars Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Also by Robert Jeschonek

  Title Page 2

  Story: Lenin of the Stars

  About the Author

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  Novel Preview - Battlenaut Crucible

  Lenin of the Stars:

  A Scifi Story

  by Robert Jeschonek

  LENIN OF THE STARS:

  A SCIFI STORY

  Copyright © 2016 by Robert Jeschonek

  www.thefictioneer.com

  Cover Art Copyright © 2016 by Ben Baldwin

  www.benbaldwin.co.uk

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published in January 2012 by arrangement with the author. All rights reserved by the author.

  A Pie Press book

  Published by Pie Press Publishing

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  Johnstown, Pennsylvania 15904

  www.piepresspublishing.com

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  Also by Robert Jeschonek

  Battlenaut Crucible

  Beware the Black Battlenaut

  Day 9

  Scifi Motherlode

  Six Scifi Stories Volume 1

  Six Scifi Stories Volume 2

  Six Scifi Stories Volume 3

  Six Scifi Stories Volume 4

  Universal Language

  Lenin of the Stars:

  A Scifi Story

  As we sit on the terrace in the oppressive jungle heat, I slide a shot of crystal clear vodka across the glass table. The man who was once Senator Joseph McCarthy taps the rim with one index finger and chuckles.

  "Come on now." He shakes his head, smirking. "You know I don't touch that stuff, Vladimir."

  I shrug and throw back my own shot. Feel the burn rolling down my throat like a slow-motion solar flare. "I've had lots of names," I say as I pour another. "Why do you insist on calling me by that one?"

  "Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov." McCarthy says it with grand sarcasm. "You'll always be Lenin to me."

  "Ha." I down the second shot and clap the glass on the table. "And you'll always be an incompetent fear-mongering bastard to me."

  "You talk like I didn't just kill your hand-picked Red Guard." He gestures at the twelve charred corpses strewn about the terrace. Five are still smoking in the blazing mid-morning sun. "Like it isn't just you and me here now."

  I smile and raise the vodka bottle. The rays of the sun play through it on my face, refracted by the uneven crystal. "How 'bout if I drink you for it?" I shake the bottle. "I'll drink you for the revolution."

  Something screeches in the treetops (bird, cat, monkey?) and McCarthy stops smirking. "You've led your last revolution, Lenin. End of story." He spreads his hands, exposing the octagonal barrels of the fusion guns mounted in his palms.

  "And what if I'm not done here?" This time, I drink my shot straight from the bottle.

  "Don't you think you've done enough to screw up this planet? And ours?" McCarthy aims his fusion guns at my head. "You're done, all right. Just as soon as we clear up some unfinished business."

  I watch a flock of flamingos drift up into the turquoise sky. The scene reminds me of our homeworld, thousands of light years away. "What might that be?"

  "I need to know where she is," says McCarthy. "Where is Irina?"

  I laugh and shake my head, unwilling to tell him the truth. Because the truth is, I don't know where the love of my life has gone.

  *****

  The first time I met Irina, I was blown away by how beautiful she was. The purple-and-green-tinted crystalline clusters of her body glittered in the auditorium's ever-flowing fireworks. Two of her six multifaceted eyes were silver, and four were gold, a mark of great passion and intelligence. Even her parasites had a special look about them as they danced around her body, multicolored tongues of flame weaving in and out of her vent slits.

  I was never the same after that first glimpse of her. I had never seen anyone so beautiful in all my life.

  "I believe we can help the humans." Those were the first words I heard her say. "I believe our way of life can change their world for the better and make them civilized enough to be welcomed into the community of worlds."

  This was one of our pre-mission briefings on the homeworld. Sixty-five of us in one room, getting ready to take another crack at the problem children of the galaxy--human beings. Other species had tried and failed to help humanity get its act together, but we honestly believed we'd be different.

  To tell you the truth, just watching and listening to Irina was enough to make me believe with all my hearts.

  "It's not their fault, you know." Irina (her name wasn't Irina then, it was unpronounceably alien) glided around the stage as images of human violence flickered in the air above her. "They've evolved in a hyper-competitive ecosphere. 'Eat or be eaten' is written deep in their genetic code."

  "And it's up to us to teach them how the rest of the galaxy lives." As I spoke, I hoped she wouldn't pick up on the nervous quaver in my voice.

  "Share and share alike, yes." Irina smiled. "No more 'dog eat dog,' as the humans say."

  "What about 'kill or be killed?'" This time, it was the one who later became Joseph McCarthy who spoke--all ice blue crystals swirling with pink tongues of flame. Even then, he was a contrarian. "What if the humans kill us all as part of their 'ecosphere?'"

  "As you know," said Irina, "they won't see us as beings from another world. We'll be altered to look like them."

  McCarthy made a disparaging sound like pebbles clacking together in a glass vase. "And you don't think that will increase our chances of being killed?"

  "Not for we brilliant few." Irina's voice was full of conviction. Her green and purple clusters pulsed with an electric neon tinge. "Not for those of us with all that's right and just on our side. Not for the denizens of the galactic workers' paradise."

  With that, sixty-four of us went wild in the auditorium, singing and clattering with inspired elation. Passing silvery gellid packets of pure, noble emotion back and forth. At least in my case, inspired by pure and growing love.

  Only McCarthy stood apart and pouted, a clear sign he should have been drummed out of the mission. But Irina always said we crystal saviors needed all facets to catch the light.

  Though the truth is, a single cracked facet can ruin the view completely.

  *****

  It was the happiest day of my life.

  A massive movement of people swelled the streets of Petrograd, Russia, flowing down every byway in an irresistible human tide. The roar of cheers and song filled the cold October air, the sound of change rising amid the ancient onion-domed towers.

  Change that we had brought into being.

  Irina's hands slid up over my shoulders. "We've done it," she said. "We've begun the world revolution."

  I turned from the window and swept her into my arms. "Yes, milaya moya." I called her that for the first time, called her my sweet. And then I did something else for the first time, too. "Ya tebya lyublyu." I love you, I said, and then I kissed her.

  She did not push me away.

  The moment washed over me, and I reveled in it. My makeshift
pseudo-human heart thundered in time with the marching feet outside my window.

  I had traveled thousands of light-years from my homeworld to get to this moment. I had toiled five decades on Earth in a myriad of human identities to make this happen, as had all of us. Now here I was, in the Earth year 1917, playing the role of a human named Lenin, calling history's shots from my headquarters in the Smolny Institute in Petrograd.

  Kissing the greatest love I'd ever known outside my service to humanity and the universe.

  "Laskovaya moya." Irina said it in a whisper. She kissed me again, then leaned back to gaze at me with dancing green eyes. "Your timing is auspicious, my darling. Our greatest work is yet to come."

  I caressed the side of her face. "Together, we cannot help but succeed."

  "Come on." Eyes twinkling, she backed away, pulling me with her. "Let's drink it in. Let's go outside."

  Changing our features so we wouldn't be recognized, we slipped out a back door of the Institute. Merging with the vast crowd in front of the building, where people were cheering my name, we laughed and held each other close.

  "Don't let it go to your head," said Irina.

  "Of course not!" I said it with a grin.

  "Not that you'll get the chance." Irina shrugged. "You'll be somebody new in a couple of years, and so will I."

  As the crowd continued to cheer and sing around us, I stared at her face. Even disguised, it couldn't conceal her radiance, her passion, her certainty. As ever, she held me mesmerized.

  "Who will we be in five years, Irina?" I said. "In ten years? Do you know?"

  She tipped her head and smiled. "The plan is fluid, of course, but yes. I have some idea."

  "Will we be together?" I took a deep breath. "Can you tell me that much, at least?"

  She looked at me for a long moment as the crowd continued to cheer my name. The currents of history roiled around us like whitewater, churning and seething, overflowing their banks. Thanks to us, the mass of humanity was thrashing closer to a glorious communal destiny among the proletariat of the stars.

  "We will not always be together." Irina wrapped her arms around me. "But we will not always be apart."

  It wasn't the answer I'd had in mind, but I let it pass as she drew me against her. As she pressed her full lips against mine, and we kissed in the pulsating heart of the revolution.

  Both of us knowing we were breaking a fundamental rule of our mission. Not because we were falling in love.

  But because we were being selfish.

  *****

  The next time I saw Irina was nearly four decades later, standing over the dead body of Josef Stalin.

  Stalin lay on the floor of his private quarters in Kuntsevo, sprawled at Irina's feet. She stood with her hands on her hips, shaking her head as she looked down at him.

  "I'm starting to notice a pattern here." She said it without looking up when I entered the room. She knew it was me, after all; she'd summoned me here from China. "Human gets power. Human abuses power. Human subverts the cause of the workers' revolution."

  I crouched beside Stalin's body, letting the mask of my current prime identity--Mao Zhedong, President of the People's Republic of China--melt back into the face I'd worn so long ago as Vladimir Lenin. "I thought he was a great choice, too, Irina. Just like everyone else did."

  "Maybe that's the problem." Irina sounded tired. "We make lousy choices."

  Placing my hand over Stalin's face, I slid his eyelids shut. "Or it's just going to take longer than we thought, dragging these people into the age of communal civilization."

  "There's another possibility, as well," said Irina. "Perhaps we need to modify our strategy."

  I got to my feet and shrugged. "That's always a possibility when dealing with complex sentient beings." Face to face with Irina, I gazed into her eyes. They were darker than I remembered and no longer sparkling. "Sentient beings can be highly unpredictable." Like you, I thought.

  As I watched her stare into space, I wondered why she'd shut me out for forty years. I wondered if she still felt anything for me at all.

  "I've been thinking." She turned away and paced across the room. "I've been working on a new approach."

  "Tell me," I said. Anything to keep her talking, to spend more time with her.

  "I've developed a new identity over the past decades." She stopped pacing and changed shape over Stalin. Until that moment, she'd worn the form of a young woman with long, brown hair. Before my eyes, she became a middle-aged man in a dark suit, stocky and bald. "Meet Nikita Krushchev. I'll be taking the reins now that Stalin is dead."

  I folded my arms over my chest. I'd known she was Krushchev, though I hadn't heard it directly from her. I hadn't heard anything from her in forty years.

  Irina tapped her chin with a forefinger. "Meet the new face of the revolution. The harbinger of a bold new era."

  "So you're following in my footsteps?" I shifted my face to look like my past identity of Vladimir Lenin. "Doing the driving yourself instead of trusting a flawed human?"

  Irina the bald middle-aged man nodded. "The USSR has been turned inward against itself for too long. Why punish and purge the very workers we need to advance the revolution? Better to secure their allegiance with incentives while working to weaken the outside institutions that seek to oppose the proletariat."

  I looked down at the body of Stalin and frowned. "You're talking about reversing the policies of the past thirty-one years."

  "I call it De-Stalinization," said Irina. "Let up the pressure at home, increase the pressure abroad. Speed up the timetable of the worldwide revolution."

  I listened and nodded. Even in the body of a middle-aged human male, she could sway me. Even after forty years apart, my feelings for her hadn't changed.

  "China is coming along nicely." I switched my face back to Chairman Mao's, pear-shaped and heavy-jowled, with a dark fringe of hair around the back and sides of my head. "I think Earth will reach a tipping point soon, and the international proletariat will unify."

  "All the more reason to press forward strategically," said Irina.

  Reaching over Stalin's body on the floor, I clapped a hand on Irina's shoulder. "Tell me what you need me to do." I gave her shoulder a squeeze and gazed deep into her eyes. "You know I will stand by your side."

  Irina held my gaze for a long moment, then laid her hand on my forearm. "Stay the course. That's all."

  "I'll have one of the others take my place as Mao," I said. "You'll need my help to consolidate power here."

  "I need your help most in China right now," said Irina. "The People's Republic is at a formative, vulnerable stage."

  Instead of giving up and letting go, I took hold of her other shoulder. "No." It was the first time I'd ever said that to her. "I'm staying with you."

  "That's sweet." Irina lightly touched my face. "But no. You have your orders."

  "Orders?" I pulled away from her. "I don't understand. Why did you call me here if you didn't want my help?"

  "To warn you," said Irina. "Our own people are working against us."

  I was stunned to hear it. "Who?"

  "Senator Joe McCarthy, for one. Our U.S. operations are in a shambles thanks to him." Irina sighed. "And there are others. I don't know who yet."

  "Unbelievable." I shook my head in amazement. "How could any of us turn against the revolution?"

  Irina moved closer, shifting back to the form she'd worn earlier, that of a brown-haired woman. Taking hold of my arms, she gazed into my eyes with blazing intensity. "You would never betray me, would you?"

  I met her gaze with unshakeable steadiness. "Of course not." Her fingers dug painfully into my arms, but I refused to flinch. "How could you even ask me that?"

  Irina held me a moment longer, then leaned forward and kissed me softly on the lips. "That is why I summoned you." Her voice was a whisper in my ear. "Because I had to be sure."

  The scent of her mesmerized me. I could barely think straight. "That's it?"

 
"For now." When she drew away from me, she was Krushchev again.

  Standing there, I felt shaky and disoriented. I'd been so close to her for the first time in forty years, and now she was moving out of reach again. She'd kissed me, but the kiss had felt empty, intended only as a guarantee of my loyalty.

  There was so much I wanted to say to her, so much I should have said...but all I managed was this: "When will I see you again?"

  "Every time you open a newspaper," said Irina/Krushchev. "I'm going to take the world by storm."

  *****

  Nine years later, in October 1962, Irina/Krushchev leaped up from behind her desk as I burst into her office in the Kremlin. She came up with revolver in hand, leveled right at me.

  Irina got off two shots without a word. They both missed as I bolted across the office.

  Dropping as another shot exploded from the gun, I rolled over the floor and stopped behind a chair with fat red cushions. "Irina! Don't shoot!" I thought hearing that name might make her hold her fire.

  But no. She cracked off another shot, straight through the chair, barely missing me.

  Taking a breath, I prepared to charge. I'd known this would be the hardest part of my mission. That was really saying something, considering how many times I'd had to change shape and use force to get through security in the heavily fortified inner sanctum of the Kremlin.

  But it had to be done. Irina was on the verge of making a horrible mistake, and I had to stop her.

  I had to stop her from destroying humanity.

  Crouching, I hoisted the chair off the floor and heaved it at her. As it crashed down on her desk, I darted after it.

  Irina sidestepped, firing wide. As I dove across the desk at her, though, she got off one more shot.

  This time, the bullet struck its target. I caught the lead in the meat of my shoulder, and my body flared with sudden pain.