Sixth Watch

by Sergei Lukyanenko

  “Gesar, it’s immoral!”

  “It’s immoral when there’s a war going on and guns and planes bombard a city,” Gesar barked. “It’s immoral when people call other people subhuman and herd them into a concentration camp. To involve a minor in a police operation—in which, by the way, nothing happened to him—is perfectly permissible.”

  “As a result he refused to become an Other.”

  “On average, fifteen percent refuse,” said Gesar. “He’s not the first, he won’t be the last.”

  “Is he still a potential Mirror?” I asked.

  Gesar nodded.

  “Yes, Anton. It’s his destiny. Nothing can be done about that. If he becomes an Other, he’ll forfeit that destiny. But he has refused.”

  “Are there any other uninitiated Others with an indefinite aura?” I asked. “Capable of becoming a Mirror?”

  “We’re searching,” said Gesar. “We’re searching all around the world.”

  “You mean we don’t know if there are any?” I asked.

  “I was certain that some Watch would already have one in its sights,” said Gesar. “After all, there doesn’t have to be just one Mirror. Egor was simply getting on with his life when Vitaly Rogoza came to Moscow.”

  “He came after Egor refused to become an Other,” I pointed out. “Perhaps it’s a ‘floating’ kind of ability. It jumped from Egor to Vitaly, then back from Vitaly back to Egor again.”

  “Hiccup, hiccup, go away, come again another day,” Gesar muttered gruffly. He took a sip of cognac. “We’re looking, Anton.”

  “But you haven’t found anyone,” I said.

  “No. And since the Mirror hypothesis is now the main one, we need Egor.”

  I nodded.

  “Anton, go home,” Gesar told me gently. “You grasped the situation very quickly and very clearly. And you found him quickly too. But now let me have a word with the lad.”

  “Did you talk to him sixteen years ago?” I asked.

  “Anton!”

  “Gesar, it’s my operation,” I said. “You go to Moscow and think about the other points. Find out about the Two-in-One—who he is and what he is. But Egor’s for me to deal with.”

  “Will you persuade him to come to us?” asked Gesar.

  “No, I’ll give him the choice.”

  “Anton, I order you . . .” Gesar began.

  “Boris Ignatievich, you can’t order me. First, I’m equal in Power to you and I’m conducting my own investigation on the basis of my own information and hypotheses. You have no right to take my case away from me.”

  “And second?”

  “I can leave the Watch at any moment.”

  “And is there a ‘third’?” Gesar asked.

  “Just you try to stop me, Great One,” I said.

  Gesar sighed.

  “Oh, it’s so hard dealing with someone who hasn’t been an Other for at least two hundred years! All right. Work away. But bear in mind, we don’t need a Light Egor. We need Egor the potential Mirror.”

  He downed his cognac in one gulp and set the glass on the armrest between our seats.

  And disappeared.

  I sighed and closed my eyes.

  Then I opened one eye and squinted at the armrest.

  Gesar’s glass, the one he had been drinking from, was still full.

  It had been an illusion after all, not the boss in the flesh.

  Simply a very, very convincing illusion.

  I picked up Gesar’s glass and took a small sip. After that I closed my eyes and fell asleep.

  Customs control, border control, the control point for Others . . . I walked out of the Charles de Gaulle terminal, joined the end of a short queue for taxis, and called our duty officer.

  Pavel was still on duty.

  “What, already in Paris?” he asked with unconcealed envy. “Have you got warm weather there?”

  “Oh yes, they do. About five degrees warmer than at home. Where’s Egor?”

  “You want the address?”

  “No, I want to know where he is right now. Or rather, where he will be in an hour.”

  Pavel sighed ostentatiously.

  “You could have warned me sooner . . . In an hour Egor will be dining near the Bourse. But remember that this is not precognition, it’s from an intercepted conversation. He’s meeting a friend and they’re going to have dinner together.”

  “Well, well,” I said. “Simple Russian conjurors live the good life! They settle in Paris, and dine in the center of town . . .”

  “He has less than a hundred euros in his account,” Pasha said skeptically. “So the magic trick didn’t work.”

  My turn came, I got into a taxi, and spoke in French.

  “Emmenez-moi à Bourse de Paris, s’il vous plaît.”

  I don’t know if I looked like someone who had just rushed from Moscow to Paris in order to do something on the Stock Exchange. Sell a couple of oilfields, for instance, and buy an eau de cologne factory and a vineyard.

  Probably not.

  The dark-skinned driver made a couple of attempts to strike up a conversation with me. He asked if it was my first time in Paris, where I’d flown in from, and if I liked it in France. I answered in curt monosyllables, admitting that it wasn’t my first time, that I’d flown in from Moscow, and that I liked it in France.

  The last reply immediately sparked the driver’s enthusiasm. So much so, that he started singing something about “la belle France,” obviously a classic, because even I had heard the song before.

  A hundred years or so ago, this French patriotism from a man of dark skin would probably have been regarded ironically. Now it seems perfectly natural.

  Maybe the Others ought to reveal themselves? Well, the fifteenth century was too early—they would have burned us at the stake. And in the nineteenth century it might not have been received too well. But why not in the twenty-first century? Differences in race and sexual orientation are tolerated now. So what’s so special about the Others?

  Well, there are a few things we can do. Certainly, the atom bomb will always be more powerful in any case, but when it comes to the secret services, things get a bit interesting.

  The driver carried on prattling without a break. He sang the praises of Paris, expressed his pride in France, and told me that I should definitely drink wine and not vodka. Because Russians drink a lot of vodka, but what you should drink a lot of was wine. Only it had to be French. No one else in the world really knew how to make wine. Algeria was the only other place where they knew how. But nowhere else. The Russians made vodka, the Brits made whisky, the Americans made bourbon. This was all bad, although vodka wasn’t really too bad. But the French made wine, cognac, and calvados. Although he didn’t drink any of it, because he was a Muslim. Except maybe a little bit of wine and a little bit of calvados. Only not during the fast. But he was always ready to tell a passenger about good drinks. Especially when he could see that the passenger enjoyed a drink or two.

  “So you’re in on this conspiracy too, are you,” I said in a low voice. Taking out my smartphone, I opened the mirror app, chuckling ironically to myself at the associations of the word. And I looked at my face.

  A rather battered face, it was true. Bags under eyes that were red from lack of sleep.

  That visit to the school had taken a lot out of me.

  Well yes, I could be taken for a burned-out alcoholic.

  “Thanks for the advice,” I said. We were already driving through the center of Paris; I had to pull myself together. “I’ll definitely try everything you suggested.”

  Closing my eyes, I dragged up the image of Egor from the depths of my memory—the way he was at that moment when I first saw him. But the face, the figure, the clothes—none of that was important.

  The aura stays with a person forever. Its development is completed by the age of two or thereabouts (sometimes a little earlier, sometimes a little later), and after that its form is more reliable than fingerprints. Yes, the colors c
hange, depending on a person’s mood and condition, but the overall pattern is invariable.

  That’s the way it is with everyone, except for individuals with an indeterminate destiny. At twelve years old, the age Egor was when I first met him, you very rarely come across auras like that. After the age of twenty, it’s simply impossible to find any. But Egor, as far as I could recollect from a chance encounter several years earlier, still had an indeterminate aura.

  His aura was multicolored, it shimmered and shifted constantly. All the colors in it kept changing; for a long time. At one moment he could look like an out-and-out villain, at another like the kindest man in the whole world, and a minute later he blazed with the apparent intellect of a scientific genius, but only a moment after that there was nothing but a feeble intellectual glimmer.

  Even for a human being this was way over the top.

  But Egor was also a potential Other. And that changed everything. Of course, he could simply be initiated, and depending on his condition at the time, he would become either a Light One or Dark One. But the indeterminate aura made him also a potential Mirror. Egor could be initiated by the Twilight itself. He would partially lose his memory and acquire the ability to work at any level of Power, automatically matching the level and abilities of his opponent. And then, having fulfilled his purpose by living a short life as a Dark One or Light One and removing the “imbalance” in the forces of the two sides, he would be disembodied. Totally and completely.

  Why the Twilight was so cruel in these cases and didn’t allow its instrument to return to his former condition, either human or Other, I didn’t know. But to judge from all previously known instances, the Mirror disappeared completely. When there’s an Other, there’s a problem; when there is no Other, there is no problem . . .

  I relaxed. I imagined an immense, gray plain. I studded it thickly with the silhouettes of buildings. I tossed in a countless number of different-colored points of light.

  That was more or less how Paris ought to look in the Twilight . . .

  And then I imagined that a blinding light was shining down on me, that my shadow had acquired sharp outlines and I was sinking down into it, as if I was falling through a tear in reality . . .

  And I was in the Twilight.

  The crudely constructed, crooked wagon trundled smoothly along the country road. There were other carriages, wagons, and carts traveling in the same direction as us and coming toward us.

  Without any horses.

  The spectral silhouette of the driver—a wagoner in this world—flashed a white-toothed smile at me from his box. He was holding the reins, but the far ends were just dangling in the air.

  Of course, the Twilight isn’t full of self-powered wagons.

  But every level of the Twilight repeats our world in one way or another; the first level to the greatest degree. Sometimes it’s like our world, only blurred and colorless. With the experience that comes from entering the first layer of the Twilight more frequently, it starts to look different, like a kind of projection, a certain “idea of things.” So a modern car can look like a colorless modern car. Or it can look like an old carriage. Or it can look like a wagon. Possibly it could even look like a saddled dinosaur.

  When I once asked Gesdar about this, he simply replied: “The visible in the Twilight is the result of an interaction between the external world and human consciousness. When the external world changes unpredictably and fantastically, the consciousness is filled with fantasies.”

  That’s probably the way it is.

  I’m still in the car, in an old but decent Renault that’s driving through Paris. But on the first level of the Twilight the picture my eyes see has changed so much that I can’t grasp it. So I see something else . . .

  So okay. If it’s a wagon, it’s a wagon.

  The important thing is that people don’t change in the Twilight, they are just slowed down.

  I ran my eye over the Parisian evening, deliberately registering the warm green light. It was peacefulness, calmness—the rarest feelings that people have in a big city. You only come across them in drug addicts and lovers whose bodies have only just separated from each other.

  Right . . . We register that . . . Hold it . . . Remove the green . . .

  Now the yellow. First a sunny yellow, bright and pure. An innocent, childish joy. A declaration of love and a first kiss. A wonderful book just read. I remove it too.

  Now the blue. From transparent sky blue to a deep indigo. Intellectual work. Insights, conjectures, the joy of learning and discovery. Also not frequently encountered in large cities.

  The white. Selflessness and self-sacrifice. A man signing a document to donate a kidney to his little nephew. A policeman advancing with reassuring words and open arms toward a psychopath with a gun at the ready as he holds his own son hostage. I remove that.

  The red. From the dawn light to aventurine. From pastel pink to crimson, in case you have never been interested in the names of all that we see. Red is the most varied and brilliant color. Love and passion. Orgasm and pain. The righteous fury of the soldier and the base lust of the rapist.

  I washed away the colors one after another. I sieved out and cast aside all the established, settled auras. All the people and all the Others within reach of my gaze. Only a few multicolored, trembling, childish auras remained, and I forced myself not to see the ones that were too small and weak.

  The world became totally colorless, flickering between gray and sepia, as if it was trying to acquire color but failing.

  There was just one single aura blazing ahead of me. Shimmering and multicolored. An indeterminate destiny.

  “Arrêtez ici,” I said, emerging from the Twilight. I held out a fifty-euro note (the meter said forty-three). “C’est pour vous.”

  The Bourse was a little bit farther on—a huge, beautiful building, already illuminated against the background of the dark sky. I walked about five yards and came to a wide opening in the wall, almost like a large garage with the doors standing open. Only in this garage there were tables with lamps and lighted candles standing on them. There were various people sitting at the tables, some dressed smartly, some simply. A strange sort of place, not out of the Michelin list of luxurious restaurants, but not exactly a cheap joint either.

  I spotted Egor. He was sitting with his back to me, in the center of the space, discussing something with a respectable-looking middle-aged man who was kneading his steak tartar with leisurely movements of his fork.

  Unfortunately there were no free tables. The little table behind Egor had just been taken by a young couple.

  I felt very awkward about it, but I didn’t hesitate. I looked at the couple and reached out through the Twilight.

  They immediately stopped feeling hungry. They jumped up and fused together in a kiss. The waiter (who also seemed to be the owner of the little restaurant) applauded at the sight of such passion. Some of the customers supported him.

  The couple tore themselves away from each other, gazing around in confusion at the other customers.

  Perhaps they had come in here to clarify their relationship before they broke up. Or perhaps simply to chat before parting for a while.

  But now everything had changed. The only thing they really wanted was to be alone together without any clothes on.

  Apologizing in their embarrassment and turning away from curious glances, the couple slipped out of the little restaurant. I knew that they wouldn’t go back to his place or to hers. They would take a room in the little hotel on the corner, right now, and the creaking of the bed would prevent their neighbors from sleeping and delight them at the same time.

  Well then. At least they would have an absolutely magical night in Paris.

  I sat down at the table that was now free. The man who apparently owned the place obviously wasn’t expecting this, but he didn’t try to argue. He came over to me with a smile on his face—a very professional kind of smile.

  “Je voudrais une bouteille de vin rouge,
” I said. “Je prends ce que vous recommandez.”

  The waiter, or perhaps the owner, nodded and disappeared through a small door at the back of the room.

  I looked for smokers and confirmed that there weren’t any. Europe . . .

  At that moment Egor started speaking. In Russian.

  “It is certain to be popular, Monsieur Roman. As you can see, there are no free seats here.”

  “A couple has just run out,” said “Monsieur Roman,” chewing raw minced meat and washing it down with red wine. What a jerk this “Monsieur Roman” was—how could he possibly stand to be addressed like that? “And what’s more,” he went on, “the owner is a famous clown, even if he did retire a long time ago. It’s a very convenient spot, but the rent is cheap. And it’s only a small restaurant.”

  “The last point is a rather dubious advantage,” Egor said tensely.

  “My dear man,” Roman responded condescendingly. “This little restaurant is not kept afloat by its elegant dishes—they are extremely ordinary—nor by its décor, or even the location. It all comes down to the owner. To the fact that he sits on the ladies’ knees and drinks out of your glass of wine. He falls down, without anything slipping off the tray. He dances and sings “La Danse des Canards” as he brings you a duck breast with apples.”

  “But also . . .”

  “Egor, you’re a wonderful illusionist and prestidigitator,” Roman said, sounding patronizing. “And I’ll be happy to present your act in my restaurant. But I have to tell you straightaway that you won’t be able to repeat what this clown has done. You won’t be able to amuse all the customers in the restaurant at the same time. Your illusions are individual work. From five steps away there’s nothing interesting to be seen. And if you go around to every customer, pulling coins out of their ears, you’ll soon go crazy.”

  “I don’t pull coins—”

  “Egor! Let’s drop the subject,” Roman said gently. “If you find yourself a small space, like this one, and a good team, then I’m prepared to buy in. Fifty-fifty. A large hall’s not for you.”

  The waiter came over and put down a bottle of red wine in front of me. He gave me a mysterious glance, flicked his finger against the bottom of the bottle, and the cork shot up into the ceiling like a bullet. Someone nearby laughed. I applauded theatrically. A glass of wine was poured for me, and then the waiter took a lighted cigarette out of his pocket. He took a drag, breathing the smoke up toward the ceiling, then handed the cigarette to me and I took a couple of drags. He took the cigarette back with a smile—and disappeared back through the service door.