“Y’all, I’m greatest country star in Nashville!” boomed little Tallulah’s voice as she twirled about in her costume: off-white cowgirl boots adorned with curly golden motifs extending up almost to her knees, and a sable leather riding dress, undergown, the same off-white color as the boots, peeking out to form the fringes of her hem and her sleeves, the whole ensemble finished off with a golden buckle for an off-white belt.
Making poses and expressions under the spotlight, glow soft as the moon yet brilliant next to the inky darkness of her environs, her brothers watched in admiration, mood between wistful and gushing, as she finished her miniature modeling session with a giggle. Sasha nodded as he appreciated the visage of his sister at center stage, saying “It’s uncanny. Like watching mother. Only younger.”
Draža quipped “Yeah, you can tell from the hemline!” Tallulah giggled at that, adding “And I can tell from the boots!” Sasha commented, half-absent-mindedly as he stared at her, “Mother’s costumes are still big on you.” Tallulah said, a bright grin on her face, “They get smaller every year, though!”
Standing up from his perch in the stone amphitheater, Sasha said “I wonder…it’s been a while since I tried on one of the hats…”, and ambled over to one of the mannequins surrounding the stage who was sporting a black-colored cowgirl hat of the style worn by country music performers. Looking up into her eyes, Sasha said “You don’t mind if I try this on, do you, mother?” as he fetched it off her head. It was not only because it was his mother’s costume he said that; the mannequin, like all its counterparts on that stage, was a life-like replica of his mother’s visage, from her facial features down to her body’s dimensions. For him, it was like staring at a projection of her frozen in time, her youthful beauty preserved for all eternity.
Laughing as he tried on the hat, he turned to the stone ramp of the amphitheater where his brother was descending from to join him, saying “Come on, Draža, try it. I know it’s not a rock star look, but it’s not like anyone else is watching.” “Except Tallulah!” Draža quipped, eliciting giggles from his sister, who said “I promise, I won’t make any pictures and post them anywhere!” as her brother fetched from another mannequin one of their mother’s cowgirl hats and tried it on.
As he played around with it, Draža turned to his siblings and said “Holy pneuma! It fits perfectly!” Sasha pondered “I wonder if all this stuff will fit Tallulah perfectly when she grows up. We’ve still got some growing to do. It’ll probably be too small on us boys.” Tallulah slyly said “Then I’ll be the only one of us who can try it on, as God and Nature intended.” Everyone giggled at that. Sasha added “And most importantly, as mother intended!”
Draža thought for a bit, then added “Hmm…if you’re all grown up wearing that stuff out and it fits you perfectly it won’t leave much to the imagination!” Tallulah went “Oh?”, before realizing “Ooh…yeah, these outfits do show more skin with each passing growth spurt, don’t they? You can already see most of my thighs, and I haven’t even come into womanhood yet!” She paused and pondered “Maybe it’s different when you’re a grown-up, but as for me…there’s no way I’d take any of this stuff to Lower Broad Street.”
Motioning across where the outfits were extra-loose on her own dimensions, she added “It’ll be nice to be grown up enough to fill out the curves in all these outfits someday. They were so pretty on mother. Remember?” Draža replied “Yeah, but even mother couldn’t fill them out originally! She had to get herself plumped up for that! Got her body sculpted like these statues or something. Freaky stuff!” Sasha said “Pneumatic, though.” Tallulah added, wistfully, “Awfully pneumatic” as they paid special attention to the stone carving of their mother, laid out horizontally, at the head of the stage, in all her beautiful splendor.
Getting into a reminiscing mood, Draža said “Hey, maybe while you’re in there you could…well, I was thinking would it be possible for you to sing one of the ones mother used to sing to us?” Tallulah gave a cute quizzical expression, as if she was thinking it over, then her face flashed into a more agreeable visage as she said “I’ll do it…one of those pieces where some male singers come in and back her up.” Pointing at her brothers, she said “You two will have to participate too!”, prompting Sasha to go “Deal!”.
She warmed herself up and got into the mood as she burst into a country-western song, the hard-charging electric anthem that accompanied the original playing in their heads, the air seeming to vibrate with the real presence of those instruments – or was it all an illusion? Tallulah’s was not the only spot on center stage a light shined down upon – true, hers was the most important, being near the center, cradled on either side by stone hands three meters tall, fashioned from molds of her mother’s hands; but surrounding her were ten other circles on the floor illuminated by spotlights, each one of the others surrounded by stone statues of instrument players and backup singers. Two of those, the ones to the right and to the left of her, were soon occupied by her brothers, the siblings belting out the final half or so of the song all together.
After it was over, they bowed to the amphitheater, empty of flesh-and-blood viewers, but, they thought, perhaps suffused with a more ineffable audience. They clapped and hollered intermittently, with Draža musing “Wow, the acoustics in here are great. It never gets old.”
Sasha gushed “Mother did such a great job designing this place. It’s almost like you can feel the path of the flaming sword.” That referring to the jagged line, resembling a lightning bolt, which glowed from under the floor and connected all eleven circles that were lit up by spotlights from the ceiling and surrounded by stone memorials. Draža said with a bored note “Through the Tree of Life, I know. I even know which sephirot I’m on. I’m on Chesed.” Sasha said “I’m on Binah.” Tallulah then finished with “And I’m on Da’ath.” She added “That’s…no, that’s not the most important.” Sasha giggled and said “Mother’s at Keter.” With a sigh, Tallulah said “I know.”
The children then moved out of performance mode and put the costumes back on the mannequins they took them from. Draža gazed into one of the replicas’ eyes as he put his cowgirl hat back where it belonged, noting wistfully, “All those people out there…I wonder how many of them actually believe that if they disturb this place these mannequins will really come to life and attack them.” Tallulah answered “Not as many as should believe it!” Sasha said “Mother made very sure all this wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands. It’s ours and ours alone for as long as we shall live.”
The children looked over all the costumes, both on the mannequins and displayed on the inner wall of the Gothic dome, hewn out of solid rock, to make their next selection. For Tallulah, another set of cowgirl boots and a white dress befitting a Southern Belle in the bloom of young womanhood, considerably too big on her juvenile form, but with a hem so high it looked appropriate on her nonetheless. For Sasha and Draža, hot pink jackets with rhinestones all over them.
Tallulah giggled as she said “Boys, that’s barely even country!” Draža said “I like it!” Tallulah nodded side to side and said “Hot pink and glittering rhinestones, which is already blinding enough, but with your red hair, Draža? Not a chance! That pink will be like camouflage! And as for your blonde hair, Sasha, it’ll be outshined by those rhinestones, easily. They’ll think you’re girls!”
Draža said “Not a chance!” Sasha said “You see, Tallulah, as long as you wear pants they’ll think you’re a boy. Doesn’t matter what else you wear; all anyone pays attention to is the legs.” Tallulah, a bemused note to her voice, commented “You two are the only boys I know who’ve figured out you can get away with waist-length ringlets, makeup, and heels as long as you wear pants.”
Sasha said “I’m into rock, it’s in the blood! I can’t help it!” Draža interjected “Besides, come on, Tallulah, admit it: you like it when we go on stage and perform and all three of us have the waist-length ringlets. You do!” Sasha said “We’re a complete set: me blonde, Draža redhead, you brunette! When we strut out onto stage, everyone goes, there goes the Kovačević triplets!” Tallulah said “We are all that…”, before pulling her brothers to center stage, smiling as if for a close-up photograph.
Darting her eyes left and right, a thought passed into her head that she couldn’t help but speak: “You know, I wonder how that’ll work when we’re grown-ups. All of us having the same style. I don’t know.” Draža wandered off from her embrace, saying with a dismissive wave of his hand “Blech, who wants to think about that?” as he moved toward the crown of the tree of life at the head of the stage, where the stone-carved image of their dear mother was.
Sasha followed, saying while on the way “We should enjoy it while it lasts. You never know how much time you might have left.” Pointing toward the inscription, he said “Like this here. Zara Kovačević. Stare at that and think about that for a minute: just twenty-one years between these dates.” Tallulah sighed as she placed her hand over the stone image of her ancestress, musing “Mother had so little time to be a grown-up, didn’t she?” All three children’s eyes darted down toward the inscription on her sarcophagus, minds weighed with contemplation, hearts heavy with mourning.
After a while, Draža ambled over to a grave in front of Zara’s, placing his hand on the top side of the blank sarcophagus, saying “Hopefully the dates on this one will be much longer.” Sasha and Tallulah went to sarcophagi beside the one Draža had his hand over. Nodding his head side to side, Sasha admonished “Draža!” Tallulah said, patting the sarcophagus she was next to, “I hope this one’s much longer too.” Sasha added “Not to mention this one”, as he patted the sarcophagus beside him for good luck, in an almost unconscious gesture.
First Sasha and then the other siblings minced over to the front of the sarcophagi. Draža gazed at the inscription on his wistfully, eventually saying “Mother really had style. How many children can boast that they learned to read by tracing out the letters on their own tombstone? I can!”
Tallulah quipped “Of all the things to boast about…” Draža said teasingly, “Come on, admit it, it’s pneumatic, learning like that! You did too! You traced them out.” Tallulah grinned and said “I did…” Sasha said “You had it on easy mode. No nickname. Just trace it out and that’s what you write to everyone else. Me? I trace Alexander and I have to write Sasha everywhere.”
Draža said “And I traced Dragomir and have to write Draža. And everyone else has to write Draža too. ‘D – R – A – Z – A, with a strešica!’. How many people here even know what a strešica is?” Sasha says “Lucky for you, robots know.” Draža says “There are times I think they’re smarter than locals.”
Tallulah, meanwhile, made her way to their mother Zara’s sarcophagus, and pushed some spots on the stone in a certain order, deliberately and mincingly, and a drawer popped out, revealing a stone storage container harboring artifacts. Tallulah said slyly as she grasped the letter, forged from a metal sheet, “Would be nice if we could get away from the locals.”
Her brothers looked at it with her, Sasha shaking his head and grasped a compass-like artifact backlit in glowing red, pondering the metal sheet and going “Is creepy, how this compass points to the place described in the letter.” Draža said “You think that’s creepy? This is all we have left of our donor.” Tallulah said, whispering for reasons unknown even to her, “Well, by blood he’s our father.”
Sasha asked “Why do you think mother thought this was so important; these two artifacts?” Draža replied with creepy realization, even though he’d said it a hundred times before, “What makes you think mother knew?” Tallulah added “I don’t think she did. I remember when I was really little I played with this stuff in our penthouse, and mother snatched it away from me and made it clear that was not to be played with, because it was the only message from our donor, our only inheritance from our father’s side.”
Draža snapped out of it and grinned, saying almost dismissively “From mother we get penthouse right on top of Grand Old Opry Tower and a trust fund so big we want for nothing. From father? We get doodlebug! That’s life for you.”
Sasha, studying the artifacts more intently, commented “It says right here in the letter to guard it well, and for Zara’s children to follow the compass someday to that spot. I know the coordinates: they’re off the coast of Kamchatka.” Tallulah wondered “Why would he want us to go there?” Draža shrugged and said “Beats me. Maybe the nicer weather?”
They all giggled at that and Tallulah said “I can believe that!” Sasha said “You know, sometimes I think country music stars bury themselves miles under the Opry so their fans can beat the heat! Always nice and cool down here.” Tallulah said “Dank, though. So clammy.”
Draža said, looking at the artifacts quizzically, squinting his eyes a bit to look them over closer for what had to be the thousandth time, “Do you think there’s anything to this? Or do you think it’s all nonsense?” Tallulah said “Well, what was that you said the other week, Sasha? There’s only one way to find out?” Sasha sighed and said “Someday, yes, but not today.” Then he yawned, afterward going “Yikes. Must be getting late. Wouldn’t want to miss the big party.”
Tallulah gasped a bit and said “Yes, Decca’s party! We can’t be late for that!” Draža said impulsively “Let’s go!”, before they all remembered to take off their costumes and fit them back onto the mannequins. Tallulah looked into the replica’s eyes as she fastened the last part of the costume back onto her, saying “Keep it all safe until I come back, mother”, kissing the hard porcelain that were her ancestress’s cheeks, just like she did when she was still with her.
Hand-in-hand, the triplets practically skipped out of the tomb, whistling and singing little notes to enjoy the acoustics one last time before they left for the night, paying the deep-underground dome one last glance backward before departing the inner sanctum through a long arched corridor.
Reaching the end of it, where they first came in earlier that afternoon, pushing on it so as to hinge open into the outer sanctum, Draža pushed on the stone as Sasha and Tallulah gazed for a moment at the stone archway, lined with carvings of their mother in the nude captured singing twelve musical notes, each pair of figures in the wall swelling with child until at the end, flanking the final portal to the inner sanctum, she was depicted holding her baby in her arms, as proud a mother as she was a singer.
Emerging out onto the altar, the stone door closed in behind them, and Draža chuckled as he said “So much easier going out than it is coming in. Coming in…” Tallulah continued “Yes, I know, you have to push the stone in the right order and sing the notes in the right order as they’re written to get this thing to open.” Sasha added “And not just any of these notes”, pointing his arm to the musical notes backlit on the dome-like wall of the outer sanctum, containing every note of every song ever wrote and sung by Zara in her concerts, “but these specifically”, referring to the notes contained on the door.
Tallulah swiveled her head around, taking in the sight of the much larger outer sanctum, before turning around to the altar and saying “Mother, you were more of an evil genius than you let on”, saying that with a smirk, taking pride in the whole idea, as she took in the sight of the statue of Zara, depicted in her mature full-figured splendor, being raptured off to heaven by Terpsichore, gesturing as if accepting the gifts placed for her on the altar, which there were a few of that day.
Her brothers, meanwhile, took in the amphitheater that dominated the Gothic dome that was the outer sanctum, Draža commenting “It looks so much like the inner sanctum. Tree of Life spotlights, statuary, the path of the flaming sword, the mannequins, the costumes, even the graves! Only it’s all much bigger and accessible to public.”
Sasha said “Ah, Draža, it’s not exactly the same. The costumes on display? Less precious than the ones in our inner sanctum. The mannequins? Not animated. The graves? They’re just cenotaphs, not sarcophagi, even if they do look identical from the outside. No bodies in there now, or ever! Well, unless we want to be buried in here instead of in there.” He phrased that last part almost as if it was a rhetorical question.
After a pause Tallulah started giggling, “Oh, Sasha, we know better than that. Pharaohs got their graves robbed even without making them public performance arenas for fans of the dead. Nobody in their right mind would have themselves be buried in here.” Draža asked, teasingly, “Do you think Nashville has grave robbers like ancient Egypt did?” Sasha quipped “Well, Tennessee does have a city literally called Memphis…and there are those who say nomenclature is destiny.” Tallulah agreed: “Why take the chance? I dare say our graves will be much better protected than our Egyptian precursors’ were!”
Sasha said “Only test of that will be time, though. Hopefully a long time.” Darting his eyes, Sasha sighed and rolled his eyes, commenting “A whole huge tomb and mother couldn’t have put in some wood for us to knock on three times.” Tallulah suggested “Maybe we could add some in someday. It does belong to us, you know. We could!” Sasha, with a look of realization, said “Not a bad idea.” Draža interjected with a hint of frustration “You two can talk about that later. We need to get going to the party! We don’t want to be late!”
They then moved to depart, but not before Sasha and Tallulah gave a lingering glance back to the altar from whence they came. The sight pleased them, putting soft smiles on their faces before Draža ahemed behind them, leaving the shrine to their beloved mother behind and turning their thoughts toward the party that was to take place that evening.
Ascending out of the dome via the amphitheater, the triplets proceeded to the elevator which brought them in, taking them up and up and up, but not to the tower housing the Grand Ole Opry itself. Though they could have traversed those several vertical miles in air-conditioned comfort, it was not Opry Tower that was their destination tonight, but rather the Grand Ole Opry metro station.
The triplets gazed out as they exited from their elevator, the roof of the station structured to resemble a guitar, strings larger than life evoked by great cables that spanned the ceiling, the material evoking a rich wood – hickory, of course, or at least so the designer said. Tallulah took a deep breath, beholding the crowds milling about in the multiple levels of the stations, trains coming and going over the course of the few minutes they sauntered around and took in the ambience of a familiar location that never got old.
Craning his head up, Draža said “Too bad we’re not going to The Hermitage.” Sasha added “Same wood as this, only it’s cut in such a way as to show scenes of Andrew Jackson all over the ceiling.” Draža said “Kinda like that thing they have in Washington.” Tallulah asked “The Capitol?” Draža answered “Yes, that thing in the federal capitol where Washington becomes God or something?” Sasha nodded and said “The Apotheosis of Washington. Kinda surprised they haven’t done something like that with McEwen over in Franklin.” Draža mused “McEwen’s house is a bit out of the way, though. Not like ours”, pointing straight up toward their own penthouse, eliciting giggles from his siblings.
Aside from the footfalls and everyone talking the station was a rather quiet and tranquil place, the trains’ magnetic levitation producing very little noise aside from the rushes of air as they entered and exited the tubes that flitted underground. Color-coded trains, shaped liked bullets – or, perhaps more to the point, like the conical lifting-body aircraft optimized for hypersonic flight that studded the skies in many a spaceport – ferried passengers from the Grand Ole Opry to destinations throughout the region.
Calling them out as they saw the colors and symbols of each train – symbols taken from among the more than eighty letters of the Cherokee syllabary, as if the culture buzzing about them was a pale-faced echo of some alternate history where the local civilization was not Western, but Native American – they recognized their provenance and their destiny: not just other sites downtown like Union Station, the hub for transferring to destinations across North America and beyond, but also the edge cities in Brentwood, Hermitage, Madison, Whites Creek, and Bellevue, and the satellite towns like Franklin, Murfreesboro, Lebanon, Gallatin, White House, Springfield, Clarksville, and Dickson.
For Sasha, and perhaps his brother and sister as well, here was where you could saunter up to a railing on the top floor and gaze down and see the real Nashville – not the Opry, not the Ryman, not any party or concert or even a surface street, no; this was where you could see all those masses of men and women who might not be inclined to shop at the mall in-person, go see a music concert, or strut outdoors in the heat, humidity, and mosquitoes just to see buildings extending so far up the human eye can make their spires out not, but who might still want or need a form of transportation that’s not an automobile, who might have flown in without a car or have even driven one into the parking garages extending miles down into the dirt like latter-day catacombs and decided they’d rather just not brave the sublime terror of Music City’s underground freeways again.
Not that Sasha, Draža, or Tallulah would know much about those – they drove never, and rode barely more than that, instead taking the train to every city they went. Coast to coast and back again they spent their late childhoods, magnetic levitation lending their means of transportation a ghostly quality, when they weren’t busy performing or, like on days such as this one, drinking in the world mother left behind when she joined the silent majority.
They smiled when they saw trains flitting to and fro from the Grand Ole Opry to Antioch, some connecting directly to the airport, but others bound for Murfreesboro, stopping by at the malls of Antioch, the triplets’ destination. Sauntering over down a few levels to their platform, they awaited a train, standing as if in the eye of the storm as people in business suits, dress gowns, tourist outfits, and even a few in outlandish costumes carrying musical instruments flowed in and out of the station.
Pointing out a blue guitar they spotted among the crowd headed for another train, Draža laughed as he said “Get a load of that! Sky-blue guitar. Just like the one mother had in that music video of hers, remember?” A smile broke out on his brother’s and sister’s face as they turned their heads knowingly to each other, as the rush of air of an oncoming red-colored train – different, alas, from the sky-blue-colored trains that were bound for the airport and that featured in the video, but of the same design profile as that one was – blew their ringlets aflutter and Tallulah sang, in imitation of Zara’s voice, “Watch the gap!” in country fashion, then, holding her hands by her mouth and singing as if screaming into the microphone, “Watch the gaaaaaaap!” as the train came to a halt beside them on the platform and its doors opened, and the recording went “Watch the gap…watch the gap…watch the gap” as everyone boarded the subway, including the triplets.
They overheard someone with a robotic drum set in a transparent case following them onto the train muse to no one in particular “Boy, that was a great Zara Kovačević impression…” As the children filed to the back of their train car, searching for one of the more private little cabins, since it was a bit of a ride by subway – 10 miles of stop-and-go – Draža teased “You’re famous, Tallulah!” Tallulah sighed and said “Can’t even fill mother’s shoes yet I’m already expected to. Maybe that’s why I like doing rock.”
As they shuffled down the aisle and peered through the open doors and slitted-out window blinds of each cabin, Sasha smiled as he found them an empty one, sliding the door open into a little alcove clad in dark rich woods, big glass window giving them a view of the outside, the Opry station platform, through opened blinds. The lighting was turned off in the cabin, so all that was coming in was filtered from the station through the slits of the window blinds, alternating stripes of light and darkness overshadowing the orphans’ faces. If anyone were viewing them they no doubt would have been struck by their blue eyes, lit by the station light on all three of them, setting their olive-white skin tone almost aglow, sitting side by side on the dark deep leather bench seat, Sasha’s ringlets in blonde, Draža’s in copper, Tallulah’s in brunette.
It crossed Sasha’s mind that the bench seat was most likely designed with two lovers in mind to share ample space – or was that just a rumor? – but it worked for brotherly love as much as that other kind reserved for grown-ups. Like budding little gentlemen the brothers took the seats closest to the aisle, letting their girl have the window seat.
As they settled in Draža smiled as he beheld the station, reminiscing “Watch the gaaaaap!’ That was an awesome song mother sang.” Sasha mused “I think it was her most rock-like. Certainly her most hard-charging.” Tallulah “Hard-charging, nothing! In the video, you know, she sings ‘Watch the gaaaaap!’ and falls off the platform, she hits her butt on the maglev track, then a recording of the Nashville subway ‘Watch the gap…watch the gap…watch the gap’ recording plays in that local Southern accent it has as she just stares into the camera with an oncoming sky-blue airport train, mouth slightly open, collecting herself with those dazed brown eyes, then she’s wacked on the head by a sky-blue guitar right as a train comes out of the tunnel.”
Draža added, creepily “And then she’s run over”, as they felt the train start to accelerate and they were enveloped in shadow for a split-second before the rush of the subway tunnel’s lights illuminated their cabin almost as if they were in a strobe light filtered through the window-blind slits.
Sasha said, whispering for some reason, “Well, a split-second later and we cut to her in some romantic low-cut sky-blue dress still on the platform, and she goes on singing.” He added, as he worked a dial-shaped touchscreen interface, automatically set, given the lighting conditions it sensed, in a faint glowing red so as to not disrupt the human eye’s adaptation to darkness too much, “Fan lore holds that that means she died and became a ghost…or perhaps was a ghost from the beginning, throughout the video.”
As if to punctuate that statement, the underslots of their cupholders on each side of the bench opened up, and rushing up through the pneumatic tubes to fill the cupholders was what Sasha ordered on his dial: as he said, “Caffè latté?” His brother and sister shrugged as Tallulah fetched her thermos and sipped on it, and Sasha took his, and a second cup coming through under his, that one earmarked for Draža.
As they started sipping their coffee – with really more milk in it than coffee, but still enough of the good stuff to get that trademark taste and aroma – Draža inquired “Recline?”, to which his brother and sister nodded in agreement, and Sasha pushed that throttle forward that lunged their bench forward, to where they were laid back and relaxed, sipping their cups and watching the people come and go in the aisle through the sliding door to their cabin, and each station they stopped at on their journey to Antioch – people, platforms, trains, even the architecture caught their interest at different points in time, Sasha putting on some music that put them in a relaxed state, the notes a dreamy evocation of the machine-like pulse of city life.
They drank all of their coffees by the time the subway train pulled up to a place very familiar to all three of them – “This is Hickory Hollow Station” the automated announcement in their cabin went. Sasha got up from his reclined seat and said “Let’s go!”, the coffee providing all three kids with some fresh energy. Sliding the door open, he peered out, swinging his head – and tossing his blonde ringlets – to the left, to the right, then leading his brother and sister in a fast walk off the train and onto the platform.
Sauntering through the station, they beheld the escalators connecting the multiple levels, opened up to the spaces above and below as if they’re balconies, hickory trees studded in planters throughout the station, the roof and floor appearing as if hewn out of hickory wood. Apprehending the view from the one of the balconies, Draža sighed and commented “You know, the way they make this station actually look like a hickory hollow, like it’s optical illusion. I’m always disoriented, no matter how much I come here.”
Tallulah looked at Sasha and teased “He’s had too much coffee…” Draža said “Bah. Lead the way, Sasha. You always know where you’re going.” Sasha grinned and said “This way!” as he made his way toward an escalator heading upward. They went on quite a few flights of escalators, feeling, like always, that they were climbing a stairway to heaven; certainly the platform they walked onto off the train was out of sight by the time they arrived at one of Antioch’s meccas, almost directly above the subway station: Hickory Hollow Mall.
Looking down, Draža, after squinting to see how many floors beneath him he could catch sight of that day, said “Crazy to think Decca’s car is down there. Like, much further down than subway station is.” Tallulah commented “Well, I don’t think the garages are exactly beneath the station. Didn’t Decca tell us that it was adjacent to the interchange of Old Hickory Freeway and Chickamauga Freeway?” Sasha nodded, saying “I think she did.”
Draža reminisced as they sauntered into the mall “Hot pink electric convertible. Super pneuma.” Tallulah teased “You’ve always liked her car, Draža. But just imagine having to drive that thing all the way down the freeway for an hour every day! Each way! That’s what Decca does!”
They took a few moments to gaze into each storefront and observe all the people coming and going, milling about among the hickory trees and under the fading light from the midsummer skylights for shopping, for business, for pleasure…even, in the case of a few of Hickory Hollow’s guests, for dance, which is where, after a few minutes’ walk, the triplets found themselves: the windows that let mall walkers take in a view of Decca Roadhouse’s dance floor.
The triplets smiled as they saw the studio all decked for the party, the ballroom studded with azaleas, along with all things festive and pink, white, or purple, some couples and singles finishing up their private lessons in the arts of dance before the big event was to begin, others sitting at the rows of chairs and tables spending the time chatting each other up.
As they made their way toward the lobby where the door was, they all beamed as they saw Decca herself manning the front desk. As she signed one partygoer in and he held his metal-clad credit card over the desk so it could read it, Decca’s face beamed positivity as she noticed the Kovačević triplets outside the door, so much so she tossed her copper ringlets a bit. Tallulah gushed at that, saying “Isn’t she gorgeous?” Sasha said “I just don’t see it. She is sweetheart, though.” Draža said, mischievously, “She reminds me a lot of mother.” Tallulah said “Oh, stop it, you two” as they made their way into the lobby.
There was only one person in line ahead of them, an old man with white hair and a local accent, half-joking with Decca “I heard a lot about this place, but I had no idea it was so…ominous.” Decca said, in a noticeably more Appalachian accent, though still local enough to blend in to the undiscerning ear, “You mean the guns?”, referring to her collection of craftmade pistols and rifles – antique in style but, for the most part at least, not truly antique in provenance…or in capability – that adorned the light hardwood wall at the back of the computerized desk, adding a laugh after her statement.
“No, no”, he said, digressing “Well, to be honest, the guns too. But I was thinking about that!” He pointed to the centerpiece of the wall, a much-smaller-than-life bronze statue of a robust yet still rather feminine woman in Roman garb, one breast exposed, tromping over a man prostrate on the ground, his chains broken, a crown beside him, the woman holding a spear to the ground and a sheathed dagger.
Decca swiveled her chair so she could look back to where he was pointing, and she went “Oh, that’s my Sic Semper Tyrannis.” At once he asked “Your what?” Lapsing a bit into teaching mode, she asked rhetorically “What’s the name of this studio I have up there in the mall?” He went “Old Dominion Dance Studio?” and she went “Uh-huh” before he realized “Ohh…Virginia. I get it now. Got some connection to the place?” Decca answered “It’s where I came from. Still live there, actually. Got a bedroom suite back in here too, but my real home’s in Virginia.”
He asked “What part of Virginia, if I may ask?” She answered “Abingdon.” He commented “Say, that’s a ways, isn’t it?” Decca shrugged and said “Meh, about an hour up the Long Hunter Freeway.” Tallulah whispered “I told you!” to her brothers as they observed the conversation.
Decca went on “Halfway to Washington from here. About the same distance to Atlanta, come to think of it. But that family of mine over in Virginia, they were like ‘Oh Decca, you want to open a dance studio; are sure you wouldn’t want to open one closer to the rest of us, maybe trick out some of our big ol’ house in Abingdon into a dance floor, or even put the thing in Atlanta or Washington, it’s just as close as Nashville! Are you sure, Decca?’ and I was like ‘nah, I wanna be right in the middle of Music City, where all the fun is!’.”
The old man nodded and said “That’s what I’m talking about!”, before apprehending the statue again, along with the veritable arsenal of guns surrounding it on display, and saying, teasingly and only half-jokingly “The ladies in here aren’t going to give me the good ol’ fashioned Virginia stomp, are they? Because if they are, I’m leavin’ now.”
Decca laughed loudly at that, before coming to and saying, a smile still on her face, “I promise ya, the ‘Sic Semper Tyrannis’ is one dance our ladies don’t do.” They both laughed at that, as the man handed her a coin out of his wallet; as she absent-mindedly took it, she said in cheery fashion “Oh…what’s this, a pretty coin?”, only for a startled expression came over her face “Hmm…sterling.” Glancing back up at him, she said “Been to any Commonwealth territory lately?” He nodded and affirmed “Caribbean.” Decca commented “I thought I spotted a bit of a tan.”
Holding the coin up, she marveled “I like this one. King Alec never looked better.” Looking toward the customer, she went on “All our money just has goddesses on it, so when you see something different it’s kinda fun, you know.” Working the tablet screen at her desk, including a surreptitious weighing of the coin, she nodded her head as she confirmed to him “It’s exactly the right amount. You’re good to go!”
The old man motioned to walk into the studio proper, but his eye was caught by the rack of trophies on the wall perpendicular to Decca’s gun collection, the wall above graced by a big framed portrait painting of two green-eyed fair-skinned blondes in the full bloom of youth, trim, fit, and athletic, in an intimate pose and gesture, lovingly gazing into each other’s eyes.
Decca explained “Fintan and Fia. They dance the Angelena together. Based right here at Old Dominion, but they’re usually out competing, performing, or traveling, or something, so they’re not home too often. When they come in, though, you’ll be in for a real treat, so keep a sharp eye out for ‘em.” Taking a moment to look over the showcase of Fintan and Fia some more, he had a quizzical expression, Decca saying, in a tone that would be almost seductive were it not also so abrasiely businesswomanlike, “See ya around.”
As the old man walked into the studio proper, Decca put her arms on her hips as she regarded the triplets quizzically, saying in an affectionate tone “Now, you three know you’re always good to go”, referring to how they were welcome at her studio sans payment or check-in, with Draža replying off the cuff “But then we wouldn’t be able to drop eaves, would we?”, causing them all, Decca included, to laugh in enthusiastic fashion.
Sasha then realized “Oh, um…did the robots bring in our stuff?” Decca nodded “Yep, those ‘droids of yours are in there with your stuff all snug as a bug in a rug.” Tallulah replied, a mischievous smile on her face, “Excellent.” Draža noticed two spots on the gun display where artifacts would usually be displayed, and smiled even more mischievously as he said “Looks like it’ll be a great show.” Decca glanced toward Fintan and Fia’s portrait and then toward the triplets, telling them “Looking forward to seeing y’all together again. It’s been too long.”
The orphans filed back to the dance floor, hand in hand, with Tallulah thinking about that portrait, whispering “I still think there’s something creepy about that portrait.” Sasha asked “What do you mean, creepy?” Tallulah clarified “They don’t really seem like brother and sister, but something…more.” Draža said “They look like husband and wife, that’s what. And not just in the portrait either…”
Sasha replied dismissively “Are you kidding? They look just alike. Anyone can tell they’re twins.” Tallulah whispered “She does have a really wifely look toward him, though.” Sasha shook his head and went “Oh, please; next thing I know you’ll be saying I have a wifely look!” Draža continued “What better match than twin brother to twin sister?”
After they paused for a while as they passed by a group of people chatting on the dance floor – though, since they were speaking in their native Slovenian, they need not have worried much about anyone else ‘dropping eaves’ on them – Draža pointed out “The Ptolemies did it!”. Sasha shook his head and said “Last I checked, their name was McThurston, not Ptolemy”, as they climbed up on the barstool at the near wall of the dance floor (close to where one entered it from the lobby, with Decca’s bedroom suite behind the wall) and looked longingly at the wine racks across the (at that time) unpeopled bar, filled with bottles for the party that night, with an inordinate proportion of them being the favorite vintage of both Decca and the triplets – Slovenian reds.
The siblings scanned the wines and then looked at each other, with Tallulah asking “Do you think we should?” Draža answered “And be buzzed for the show? No thanks.” They instead got off their barstools, snuck into the bar, and used the water fountain within – intended when originally built to fill glasses for customers, but the triplets long ago figured out it worked just as well to drink from directly.
After getting their glasses of water the orphans climbed back up onto the barstools and watched people filter in from the mall through the window, the central median of hickory trees in the walkway dominating the view but somehow – no matter how much they grew decade over decade – never rendering illegible from the bar the glowing insignia of the department store directly across from Old Dominion Dance Studio: “Cain-Sloan Co.”, its wares changing by the day but its essence seeming to the casual observer to have been unchanged since its foundation in 1903, if not earlier, despite its Antioch location being of considerably more recent provenance; back then there was only one Nashville, a downtown of buildings that were naught more than rowhouses, rather than the Nashville the orphans had known all their lives: downtowns both original and ringing the Old Hickory Beltway, all with skyscrapers stretching miles into the sky, and infrastructure stretching miles into the ground. What a century earlier was science fiction, to them was everyday fact.
Soon it was time for the group dance class. Quite a few children, both big and small, had filtered in in the interim along with their families, all getting ready for the big party. Decca herself came out, making the first set of announcements from the station at the edge of the dance floor where the music was controlled, setting it to play music appropriate for the style to be explored in the group class.
At the very end, she announced “You’ll be taught by me and none other than Hernando! Please give him a warm round of applause!” They saw her husband emerge from behind the French doors that connected the lobby with the ballroom, and the crowd did indeed give him a respectable round of applause.
Olive skin and dark hair betraying Spanish ancestry, accent betraying North Georgian origin, slight wrinkles in the face and stiffness of gait betraying an aging into mid-life, Hernando took the microphone and said “Those of you newer here or who don’t come too often might not know me. I’m Hernando McThurston, probably better known in these parts as ‘Decca Roadhouse’s husband, what’s-his-name’. I prefer ‘Mr. Hernando’ or ‘Mr. McThurston’, but I answer to that too, among other things. Anyway, some of you have heard this before, so I’ll keep it brief: by passion and by trade, I’m a storm chaser, so I spend an awful lot of my time stalking tornadoes on the Plains, especially during the peak season which is in the spring, but as the old joke around here goes when the tornadoes get sick and tired of me I remember I have a wife and come back to her.”
Decca laughed at that, holding up her finger with her wedding ring on it – a diamond that was green in color, matching her eyes, so vivid and big the whole crowd could see it clearly – pointing to it, saying to Hernando for the benefit of the crowd “Don’t worry, I know you’re mine!”, adding a laugh at the end of it. Hernando finished up by saying “The dance of the night is Angelena, so let’s get this ball rollin’.”
At the direction of Decca, those participating in the group class formed up, Decca and Hernando at the front of the class next to the wall of greenery opposite to the window that looked out to the mall, ladies forming a row next to Decca, and gentlemen linking up with the ladies the next row down; quite a few were beginners, but a portion were more advanced and sought to deepen their understanding and liven it up a bit by helping to teach others, serving as assistants to Decca and Hernando. The system kept people loyal to Nashville’s slice of the Old Dominion: the head teacher could offer advanced instruction and show off even as beginners could focus on the fundamentals as much as they needed to.
Tallulah linked up with Sasha, leaving Draža without a partner – three is not an even number – and due to a relative shortage of ladies, was unable to procure anyone else. So Draža shrugged and said “So I guess I will be assistant teacher for you today.” Tallulah went “Yeah, until they rotate partners.” Sasha says “That’s always hardest part of class”, prompting them all to giggle.
Decca lectured “We’re dancing the Angelena tonight. Now, Angelena is a style that started out in the ragtime era, when that syncopated jagged rhythm that rang out from those pianos–“ She then emulated such a song with her voice – “evolved into a style that emphasized what’s traditionally called the ‘off-beat’, which was called ‘swing music’.” She then emulated a swing song with her voice, before going on “People danced along to all that, and that’s what we now call ‘swing dancing’. The ragtime age becomes the jazz age, and then out on the West Coast, they start dancing in a slot, they start emphasizing the push and pull more in their connections, and deeper into it they start incorporating influence from other dance styles, like traditional ballroom, Latin American styles, even ballet, but most important of all you had this emphasis on subtlety and musicality, to the point that you weren’t just dancing to ragtime or jazz anymore, but any music that has 4/4 timing, which covers an awful lot of territory. In fact, go online and look it up: you’ll see at least as much Angelena danced to electronica as jazz and ragtime put together.”
Hernando added “Yeah, it’s…really quite distinct from traditional swing dancing. On someone like me it might be a bit harder to tell, but just look at my kids Fintan and Fia sometime and you’ll really notice the difference. If you’re in this class and you feel like you don’t get any of this at all, I know where you’re coming from. I’m not a natural at any of this; god knows where Fintan and Fia got it from, because it certainly wasn’t from me. Ever since they came in here and brought Decca and y’all into my life I’ve had to work really hard to get to where I’m at now.
The leading couple then demonstrated and explained the pattern they were working with for the class, and they jazzed it up and got deeper into technique as the hour went on, assistant teachers doing their stuff with the beginners, the triplets meeting and chatting up quite a few of their fellow children who were bold enough to join the all-ages group class that night, some of whom were impressed with how well they could dance, though none of them, even Draža, ever had much interest in teaching, or even pursuing dance at a high level, for that matter. Their mission in life was song and music, and to that end they checked their watches regularly, mindful of the time they needed to depart the group class, no matter how much it might have been enjoyable to dance under Decca’s tutelage – and enjoyable it was, with her voice, very different from but perhaps sufficiently reminiscent of mother’s to strike a chord, and what she was teaching that day practically putting them under a spell as they absorbed it – to change their clothes and get themselves ready for the appointed hour.
Then – the time came – a few of the students on the dance floor noticed the departure of three of the kids, but even fewer had any inkling what exactly that meant. Until class time was over, the lights dimmed so it was almost dark in the azalea-studded ballroom, and Decca got back to the station and made the announcements right before social dancing was to begin, ending with: “I know y’all are eager to get out there and dance, but before we let you out on the floor we’ve got a very special group who were of a mind to give us a performance tonight. So without further ado let’s give them a warm welcome!”
Applause rang out from the crowd as first Tallulah, in a classically feminine sparkling black dress, and then Sasha and Draža side-by-side in all black formal suits with bow-ties, came out with microphones in tow, assuming positions toward the back of the dance floor from the partygoers’ point of view, closer to the lobby. A recorded instrumental song started to warm up on the speakers, fading in to the sound of an orchestra that could have passed as classical were it not for the addition of electronic instruments, forming the base of the rather hard-charging, if still somewhat subtle, beat and much of the flourishes, tension heard in every note as it built up to some pivotal moment in the song.
Which, after a pause in the music, interrupted only by a loud metallic drum, sounding almost like industrial machinery, turned out to be the beginning of the lyrical passages, sung by Sasha and Draža, as metallic instruments, ranging from little hammers to big hammers striking metal, evocative of a blacksmith’s forge from the old myths, and electronic instruments, evocative somehow of both piston engines and a cybernetic modernity, started to dominate the soundscape, the intensity of the instrumental turned up.
In that moment, rolling out from the lobby, were two figures dressed in tight black outfits, a man in an all-black formal business suit with a necktie, a woman in a little black minidress with fine fishnet stockings on her legs, both of them sporting light blonde hair that, along with their fair skin tone, contrasted starkly with the black garb, the man in a pompadour, the women in loose pigtails – the old-timers in the audience either gasped or grinned, as they saw that blonde hair streak before them almost in a blur, and the way the dancers were moving, and knew there was only one possibility as to their identity.
In time with the music, pausing for each of the moments as the big metallic drum rang out and the brothers belted out the lyrics into the microphone in true rocker fashion, the performers circled around each other as they danced, giving looks, gazes, and poses like stalking predators ready to pounce. Mincing steps toward each other, they linked up and danced out some choreography that the untrained eye would find difficult to tell was Angelena, but that still had all the essential elements, expressing the story the instrumentals and the vocals – the latter supplied by the kids – were telling.
At a high moment in the music, she struck – as he went into a free spin, she gave him a karate kick, which he evaded, spinning on the floor in artistic fashion and drawing a gun from his suit – none other than one of Decca’s pistols she usually had on display at the studio – as he froze in place on the floor, the girl in his sights, as she drew at ninja-like speed her own pistol – again, one of Decca’s – and put him in her sights. A moment’s pause in the music let them showcase a standoff; then they played cat-and-mouse with each other, spy versus spy, assassin versus assassin, Tallulah at last singing the song’s refrain, in whispered but somehow still in the all-but-screaming-into-the-microphone rock style, “You’ll never know my name!”, as the performers danced and posed against each other, growing more and more frantic as the song approached a crescendo, pivoting and spinning so close to each other they grabbed onto each other into partnership one last time as they spun through the most intense part of the song, finally detaching and spinning away from each other, suddenly freezing with the last metallic drum sound, ending the song, their guns pointed at each other.
The crowd erupted into an applause for all of them as all the performers, dancers and singers included, strutted forward to take their bows. Decca announced from her station after the applause died down “What a great way to kick off a namechoosing party. Give it up for the girl singin’ our refrain, Tallulah Kovačević!” Tallulah bowed as the crowd cheered her, her face a beaming smile. Decca went on “And for the boys singin’ all those lyrics. Give it up for Sasha Kovačević!” Sasha bowed as the crowd cheered him, followed by his brother as Decca went “And Draža Kovačević”, the crowd cheering him likewise.
Decca then announced “And for our two star dancers who streaked across our little corner of Music City tonight. Fintan Fiachra McThurston!” Fintan took a few bows as the crowd erupted into the loudest cheers yet, though the biggest applause of the night was reserved for his sister, taking a few bows after Decca announced “And last but not least, Fia Fionnuala McThurston!”.
They all held hands together after that and all took a bow at once, eliciting more cheers from the audience before they picked up their microphones and all made their way back into the lobby, giving each other high-fives and congratulating each other on a performance well done. Fia said, still in a kind of daze from all the attention, “We really should perform together more often, all five of us.” Draža nodded along eagerly “Maybe we should!”.
As Fia and Fintan motioned to put their guns back on the lobby rack where they belonged, all five of them were startled when a man entered the lobby, snuck up on them, and said, in that characteristically southern Louisiana accent that’s so like yet not quite like enough New Yorker, “Those real guns!?”
Fia smirked her pretty face and pointed her pistol right at the newcomer, going “Boo!” before holding it in both her hands pointed away from him, rolling her eyes, and saying “Yes, they’re real guns. Not loaded, though.” Fintan added “Good thing too. If they were, we’d have more bullets in us now than Old Hickory himself did.”
“Playing around with your pistols, huh?” the newcomer said, Fia answering “For a performance. This is a dance studio, after all.” He replied “Well, all they advertised was a party. Looks like I missed out.” Fintan clarified “And they’re not our pistols. They’re Decca’s. She owns the place.”
The man commented “So I’ve heard”, before turning his gaze to the orphans, who just had their mouths open the whole time, prompting the man to say “You three see me off a boat just once and you look like deer in a headlight.” Fia asked “You know one another?” Sasha answered “He’s our sailing instructor!”
Tallulah asked, puzzled, “I thought you were on vacation now?” He answered “Why, I am on vacation! I checked myself in on a jazz boat heading up from New Orleans, and today we reached Nashville. It’s been a while since I saw so much of the rivers. We’ve got an old-fashioned jazz show going on on the boat tonight, but I figured rather than socialize at that function for the dozenth time why not head over to Antioch and check myself in to this Old Dominion Dance Studio I’ve heard so much about.”
Fintan gazed over to the kids and teasingly asked “Good news, I hope?” Draža nodded and said “We always put in a good word for Decca!” Looking around the place and listening to the music being played in the adjoining ballroom, the sailing instructor smiled and said “Well, so far I’m liking it.”
Then, startled a bit, he said “Oh, I don’t think I’ve introduced myself properly.” Fia nervously giggled and said “No worries. I’m Fia Fionnuala McThurston.” Her twin brother added “And I’m Fintan Fiachra McThurston.” The new guest said “I’ve heard quite a bit about you, actually. Big-time dancers on the competitive circuit”, to which they started nodding in the affirmative, with the man going on “And I gather you’re neighbors or some such with the kids?”
Fintan clarified “We all live in the Grand Ole Opry Tower downtown. Well, when we’re at home anyway, which for us isn’t terribly often. You’re actually rather lucky today.” Draža added, a note of pride in his voice, “Yeah, only we live in penthouse; we rent that. But Fintan and Fia come up and visit us a lot”, eliciting chiding glances from the twins.
The orphans were quite independent and did well enough for themselves, with Decca, and to a lesser extent Fintan and Fia, being the closest things they had to guiding lights in their lives, but the twins couldn’t help but wonder if their social development was…off as a result of not having any parents past the age of juvenility; most children as big as they were would have long ago figured out that it was rude to gloat about how much poorer your friends are than you to someone else while standing right in front of them. Not that Fintan and Fia were ones to thumb their noses at lacking a whole family life…
The new guest from the jazz boat went on “Anyway, it’s nice meeting you two. My name’s June Bug Arceneaux.” Fintan said almost perfunctorily “Nice meeting you as well.” He then showed June Bug how to check himself in for the party, telling him he was good to go once it was all completed. Turning his gaze to all five of them in the lobby, he said “Well, see you around!”.
When he was out of sight in the ballroom, Fintan and Fia looked at each other quizzically, then at the triplets, with Fia whispering “’June Bug’?” to them. Tallulah told her, also in naught but a whisper, “It’s short for junior! Junior…June…June Bug.” Fia went “Oh!” Sasha clarified “Another reason he got that nickname is he was crazy about bugs as a kid. One of his first phrases was ‘june bug!’ when he saw one. Sketching them, photographing them, and all that good stuff, all kinds of bugs; he does it a lot still when he’s out sailing to pass the time.”
Draža added “The name part, though…it took us getting around Cape Horn to finally get him to admit how he got it, so I wouldn’t mention it to him. It’s like, secret.” Fintan and Fia nodded that they understood that. Sasha added mischievously “But you can mention to him about his book.” “Book?” asked Fia. Sasha nodded and said “He’s worldbuilding a whole made-up ecosystem for the planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, all insects. He says air there is good for huge ‘creepy crawlies’ that could be bigger than a man. But nobody’s been there so nobody yet knows what kind of life lives there. He’s planning to make it into a book and post it.”
They all processed that thought, as the triplets listened to the music, and Tallulah went “Well, I think we should get to the party! We’ve already missed a few dances!” Sasha “Yeah, let’s go dance!” Turning toward the twins, he said “See you later!”, and the orphans walked out into the ballroom.
Only a moment after that, though, they saw a gorgeous girl who caught their eyes, long luscious blonde waves bouncing along to the beat as she walked in a tight red dress as romantic as it was feminine, beaming a smile. Strutting right up to Fintan, she said when she caught his gaze “You were magnificent, darling!” in her Russian accent, that always was like music to Fintan’s ears, right before she walked up to him and, making sure to give him a brief gaze with her blue doe eyes, gave him a big deep kiss, lingering with so much passion it was like Fintan forgot the rest of the world even existed, even his twin sister; no kiss from Fia, let alone any other girl, ever made him feel as hot, electric, and ready as hers did.
The triplets thought that was really interesting, so they snuck up right next to the doorway and, as they charmingly say it, ‘dropped eaves’ on the blonde trio. Fia looked apprehensive, darting her emerald eyes back and forth as her brother came to and wrapped his arm around the new girl’s waist, hugging her close.
Fintan said “Oh, uh, Fia, this is my date…Katenka.” The date said “Katerina, actually, but loved ones call me Katenka. I’m pleased to finally meet you!” Fia nodded along but noticed that Fintan had taken out from under his collar, placing around his neck for all to see, a heart-shaped locket that matched the one his date had around her neck, resting on her ample cleavage bared by her glamorous dress.
Fia said to Fintan, a note of despondency in her voice as her eyes drifted down, “I see you have a new locket.” Katerina said with enthusiasm “He has a lock of my hair in his and I have a lock of his hair in mine.” Fia’s eyebrows raised as she looked at Katerina’s voluptuous figure and went in a downbeat tone to Fintan “I see you have a new girl too”, motioning away from him, as if she wanted to sulk away and never see him again.
At once her brother detached himself from his date and took his sister’s hand, spinning her around and taking her face in his hand. Looking her in the eye he said “No, no, it’s not like that.” Fia said, nervously and with her voice almost cracking, “It’s just…I’ve always been the woman in your life, and you’ve been the man in my life, and we’ve been together always, a now I’m going to lose you—”
Her utterance was interrupted by her Fintan planting a kiss on her lips, showing her his full measure of affection, making sure to linger until her worries seemed to have melted away from her pretty face. When those emerald eyes opened after he broke the kiss there was only relief and devotion to be found in them.
Still holding her face in his right hand, Fintan said as he held up his sister’s hand in his next to her face, making sure both their rings – identical diamond rings inscribed with poetic verses in ancient Irish, written in Ogham script, professing their undying love for both each other and for the art of dancing – were right in front of her eyes, along with the locket he shared with his sister – her picture and her lock of hair inside, complementary to the locket she always wore around her neck, bearing her brother’s picture and a lock of his hair – “You’re my first girl, my best girl; there will never be any other for me.”
Fia grinned and purred at that thought, as Katerina said, nodding her head slightly almost in unconscious time to the music outside, “Yes, my Fintan was very clear about that from our first date, when he showed me his locket. You two are not severable. If I love him, which I do”, adding a kiss on Fintan’s forehead to that, “I love you too, which I do”, kissing Fia’s forehead too, which caused her to blush at the effusive affection as Katenka went on “I know nothing can come between the love of brother and sister.”
Sinking into a fog of love as she smiled absent-mindedly and scanned her body, her face, her hair, and her dress from top to bottom, Fia asked her brother “I can see how you fell in love with her. Where did you find her?” Fintan said “The ballroom overlooking Santa Monica Beach. She came in there to take a lesson with me, but as soon as I saw her I was starstruck, and, well, we hit it off and here we are, beloved and beloved.”
They kissed each other on the lips, as if to emphasize that last statement. Katenka said “It was like magic!” After a pause, she told Fia “Oh, and while I have heart to mention it I would like to say I’m so pleased to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you from Fintan. And I saw your performance…I so wish I could move my body like yours. You’re so athletic and such a dancer! I’ve pledged to Fintan that I want to learn, and he’s going to teach me best he can from now on. Maybe you could teach me too? I don’t know.”
Fia, a curious expression on her face, asked her brother “How far along is she?” Waving her hand dismissively, she said “Oh, I’m just beginner.” Fintan added “She’s a natural, though. I’ve been up-front with her: it’ll be a long while if ever before she can move like you can, but I’ll push her to her limits! Like putty in my hands!” Katenka giggled and said “Oh, Fintan, you have the best sense of humor!”.
Fia, meanwhile, just shook her head to side to side and sighed, saying “Everyone seems to envy my body, but to tell you the truth, Katenka, I wish I had a body like yours. That soft hourglass figure, buttocks as big as your head, breasts as big as your head…ah…to make love with a body like that.”
That elicited an involuntary giggle from the triplets, prompting Katenka to look behind the door and see the children. “Oh?” she said, “Who’s this?” Fia and Fintan rushed over and said “Three of our regulars. Sasha, Draža, and Tallulah Kovačević.” Katenka asked “The ones who were singing earlier?” Everyone nodded yes.
Katenka, sweetheart she was, bent down a little bit to their level and said “Very pleased to meet you. You did magnificent job singing!” Tallulah asked “You liked it?” Katenka said “Especially you! That’s not something you see every day, a kid doing like this!” She then imitated the close-hold microphone and screaming gesture typical of rock stars, eliciting a giggle from everybody.
Drifting back into the lobby so as to avoid any dancers spinning around the floor next to them and to tamp down the noise from the music, Tallulah suggested unprompted “Maybe you could get your body plumped up, Fia!” Everyone gestured in agreement with that idea, thinking it was a sound suggestion, but Fia just blushed, looking a bit flustered as she went “Oh, I don’t know. It would change the feel of my body, and it would be a while before I could compete again. I’d lose that routine and my momentum…but I have been wanting to do it.”
Tallulah went on eagerly “Mother Zara got all that done at fifteen, and she said that was the best decision she ever made, getting it done early. You’re already seventeen! If I were you I’d go for it!” Fia laughed at that, saying “Tallulah, you have no idea what it’s like to be seventeen. You are still a child, you know.”
Tallulah said, a bit dejected, “I’m sorry.” Fia bit her lip and thought for a moment, before saying “Don’t be, Tallulah. I do so want it, and I know I’ve been putting it off. Maybe…maybe now’s the right time.” Fintan said “Well, we don’t have to think about that tonight, do we? I know I do it too, but I can’t help but think it’s a bad habit; we go to social dances and all we ever do at these parties is work on business!”
Katenka was like “But this important! This is your sister’s future we’re talking about!” Fia said to Fintan, a smirk on her face, “You know, you two are really just alike. All three of us, really.” Fintan gushed “She’s like the sister I never had.” Fia went “Hmph”, sighing before saying “Somehow when I think of my future I’m now suddenly picturing being a third wheel. Or you being a third wheel. Or Fintan being a third wheel. Someone somehow being the third wheel.”
Draža blurted out “But if you got a date!?” Fia swiveled her head toward the triplets, nodding her head side to side, bouncing her blonde pigtails along, “But I’ve never even found a boy I like enough to even want to go out with. And I’m seventeen…at seventeen years of age that starts to get old.”
Turning herself to her beloved Fintan, she said “Fintan, we simply must find her a good date, someone she can really fall in love with. Then we could all be complete together! We could all be lovers!” Her enthusiasm caused the twins to both blush, but when Fintan gathered his thoughts he said “It’ll be a project, but Fia, we need to find you a beloved too. I’ll do the best I can, I promise.” Katenka said “We will make it our next big project, all together!”
Getting wrapped up in an enthusiastic spell of daydreaming, Fia said, practically beaming, “And we can do that after I get my big makeover! Nothing will be better for me than upgrading my appearance. Just think of how attractive I’ll be…the boys won’t stand a chance.” Sasha nodded along and said “That’ll get you curves and confidence. Those are two of the three C’s every man wants!” Katenka asked “Oh? And that’s the third C?” Sasha answered “Class, but Fia already has that.” They all giggled at that, with Katenka asking “Fintan, is that what Americans say?” Fintan shrugged and said “Not as far as I know. No idea who told him that.” That elicited more laughs from the five of them.
Draža asked after the laughter died down “Oh. Katenka, you said ‘Americans’? You are not American?” Katenka giggled as she nodded and shook her long loose blonde waves around, “No, no. I’m from Russia. My nephew, he wants to be hotshot in the video games industry, so he moves to Santa Barbara. I go with him for moral support – he’s very young, you know, about same age as me – and I do best I can to help him out, and be good companion, and be good aunt for him, but I look over that Santa Barbara-Ventura area and I’m like ‘no, I’m living here, I’m going to live in Malibu close to where all the fun is!’, so I get myself home in Malibu. Such a nice place, very happy atmosphere. I try out what they have to offer there, and I decide ‘While I’m here I’m going to learn to dance good, really good! I’m going to become good dancer!’, and then I meet my Fintan.”
Everyone went “Aw” at that, with Sasha adding, reflecting how the orphans had acclimatized to her presence “I’m glad you’re here. I know it’s pretty far from Russia.” Katenka shrugged and said “It is, yes, but not quite as far from my part of Russia. It’s big country, you know.” Draža asked “What part do you come from, if I may ask?”
Katenka answered “Far East”, with the triplets going in breathless unison “Far East?”, with Katenka nodding and specifying “Kamchatka.” The triplets even more breathlessly went “Kamchatka!” Sasha added “We’ve been wanting to go to Kamchatka for years! Bering Strait Tunnel, the great North Pacific…white nights…cool summers…Bering Strait Tunnel…”, trailing off at the end as he daydreamed a bit, his interest in the trip unexpectedly reignited by meeting this angelic woman who stood before him: if it spawned someone as nice and sweet and pretty as her, it had to be paradisiacal, right?
Katenka gushed over that, as if reading his mind and echoing his thoughts as she said “Ohh…it’s a wonderful place, Kamchatka! Take it from me, who comes from there: it’s absolutely beautiful. You should go when you have chance. I know you’ll love it!” The kids got all dreamy-eyed at the firehose of new information about their ever-mysterious paternal inheritance, as if not just Sasha but all three of them felt called there by some spirit, but were of a heart and mind that blocked even taking one step in that long journey.
Giving Fia some time to think, and subtly grinning as she plotted, darting her eyes back and forth, she had a hunch that dances with her brother, assurances to her that she was his true love notwithstanding, might be scarce tonight, so she took his hand and suggested “Time flies when you’re having fun, but we don’t want the party to fly away from us. Let’s dance!”
Katenka said “You should! Have fun!” as Fintan and Fia went out onto the dance floor and indeed had some fun…a lot of fun, showing off some moves that caused a noticeable tenor in the mood and noise of the crowd even from the point of view of the lobby; they were, after all, the most skilled and creative of all the regulars at Old Dominion Dance Studio.
Extending her hand out after a moment’s thought, Katenka asked “Would you like dance, Sasha?” Sasha took her hand silently and escorted her out onto the dance floor, dancing her around to the music as best as his young self could, the full-grown young woman being hefty compared to the little girls he usually danced around the floor.
His fellow little girl, meanwhile, looked at her remaining brother, Draža giggling as he said “I know that look! Let’s dance”, as the last couple in the lobby too succumbed to the allure of the rhythmic social affair that was the opening act of the namechoosing party – the festivities, properly considered, hadn’t even begun yet, but this period was always, at such occasions, Decca’s way of unwinding the tensions from the group class, getting the partygoers settled in, and warming up everyone for a rip-roaring good time.
Dancing around the floor they went, spin after spin, swing after swing, duck after duck, in between mingling with the crowd. Once, all three of the triplets happened to be gathered together with June Bug, who introduced himself as “their sailing instructor.” Quite a few of the assembled crowd looked with rapt interest, especially those who weren’t regulars at the dance studio and hadn’t heard much about them, with one of those who did regularly frequent the studio asking him “So what kind of sailing do the kids do, exactly?”
June Bug, not knowing that the asker of the question was someone the triplets already knew, disclosed “Oh, short pleasure hops along the coast, crossing the sea, circumnavigations of the whole planet, we do it all, really.” Everyone’s eyes widened as an acquaintance asked “They sail around the world!?” June Bug said “Yeah. All by themselves too. First time they went I helped them out on board, but they’ve made the voyage since all by themselves. They took to it really well, if I do say so myself.”
The acquaintance asked “All by yourselves? Around the world?” The orphans nodded yes. “Wow” some of them went, with the acquaintance asking the triplets “You never told us about any of that!” June Bug, puzzled, looked at the orphans and asked “You never told them?” Sasha shrugged and said “No. We didn’t have heart to tell about all that. Besides, we like to come here and dance.” Tallulah added “We don’t like crowds and socializing so much.”
June Bug turning his gaze toward the acquaintances, one of them clarified “I mean, we knew they sailed, but not like that!” Draža said “Everyone says it’s so tough, but it really isn’t if you work up to it.” Tallulah added “Well, except the Drake Passage.” Draža said “Ya. Off Cape Horn, between South America and Antarctica? That’s where it starts to get rough. Especially when there’s a big storm going on like we were in once…” Draža grimaced at that thought.
One person assembled in the crowd said “I know that area has quite a reputation!” Sasha said “Believe me, it lives up to it!” June Bug said “If I may be honest, there were times in that storm when after each call they made to me I thought to myself ‘You know, that might be the last call they ever make…’, if you know what I mean.” One of the people assembled said breathlessly “I do.”
June Bug went on, reminiscing “Must have given them even better training than I thought I did when I was in charge of their program”, before explaining, lapsing a bit into teacher mode, “People think the Drake Passage felling people is a relic of the age of wooden ships and iron men, but even today, some of these sailors on the recreational yachting circuit, sometimes, if they’re unskilled, or unlucky, or both, they go in…and they never come out. It was really quite a feat, what these kids accomplished.” Turning to the triplets, he told them “You know, Sasha, Draža, Tallulah, you might not be chatterboxes, but you’d do well to be less modest. You’ve got a lot to be proud of!”
After an awkward pause where the triplets were a bit bashful, one of their acquaintances said “I had no idea you were so hardcore. I mean, right here, in our very own studio, we might have the best and most hardcore sailors in town. Of any age, but especially child sailors…” Draža said “Oh, you meet a lot more kids out sailing by themselves than you might think.” Said acquaintance raised her eyebrow and went “Really? How interesting.”
Sasha said “I think it’s because so many of the first cosmonauts spent their childhood and youth sailing solo.” Tallulah nodded “Especially the woman cosmonauts!” Sasha went on “Yeah. Like Carlotta von Frey. On the Artemis 1 expedition she was the only cosmonaut left standing in the command module, and she had to do a dead-stick re-entry all by herself with just a sextant to navigate with. Oh, and it was also like 20 degrees below zero the whole time. She said without all those years in her teens sailing solo she wouldn’t have made it. Nobody was as tough as they were!”
Tallulah pointed out “And don’t forget Polina Valentinova. She might not have been early cosmonaut, but she was the first man to reach Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Three planets in one expedition! Faraway outer planets at that. And get this: when she reached Neptune she entered the atmosphere, flew around the planet, refilled her propellant tanks from the ambient air, and then turned around and went all the way back to Earth. She even visited the inner planets on the way back. And she did all that with nuclear thermal rockets; no cushy pulse drive for her!”
June Bug added “She was out for something like a decade at a stretch too, all alone. Makes sailing around Earth look like mincemeat.” Turning around to the kids, he added “Uh, no offense.” The kids then giggled at that, before Tallulah said “I think it still stands as the most grueling expedition in the history of spaceflight.”
A man among the crowd commented “I don’t doubt it. Tell me, do you think you’d ever like to follow in their footsteps? Become a cosmonaut? You seem to really admire them.” The triplets looked at each other and Tallulah said “Nah. I love the spray of the sea, the rock of the waves, the liquid of the water…space just isn’t the same.”
Perking up, she thought a bit and said “Though…I think sailing on Titan might be fun.” Draža nodded, saying “That would be totally pneuma!” Sasha said “Well, yeah, but even then that’s not like being a cosmonaut. Cosmonaut’s like where you go where no man has gone before.”
June Bug grinned and said mischievously “Well, there’s always Thalassa. Lots of sailing to be had there, I bet.” One of the people assembled in the little crowd asked “Aren’t they sendin’ a probe over there?” Draža answered “Yeah, but Sasha told me once it takes like 40 years to get there! To nearest star, Proxima Centauri! 40 years!”
June Bug replied “Step one really ought to be finding a way to make these interstellar spacecraft go faster. I mean, 40 years? That’s ridiculous! I’ll be a wrinkled-up old man by the time I can even set out at the rate they’re building that manned fleet, and by the time they get there and anybody can do any sailing with the aliens it’ll probably be too late for me. And I haven’t even really hit midlife yet…”
Sasha pointed out “They’re working on the problem, though. They say breakthrough technology could shorten trip time to 20 years.” Draža blurted out “Yeah, but who would want to be on a starship and not even see anything for 20 years? Not me!” Tallulah offered her take: “Would be nice, though, if they could make like the movies and put you to sleep. Just drift off nice and easy and dream of mother, and then bam, you’re awake! It’s 20 years later this morning!”
Draža swiveled his eyes to the side and told his sister “Yeah? In half the movies I see that in they never wake up again! You really will be dreaming with mother then!” Tallulah put her hands on her hips and, pointing her finger at her brother, “Draža, just for that you owe me a dance! Come!” She grabbed a hold of him and they started dancing the rest of the song that was playing…and the next one too, as the little crowd went their separate ways.
Finding a kid partner to twirl around the dance floor for a song, after it ended Sasha found his way to where the lucky girl that night, the center of attention for the party, the reason they were all there, was with both her parents, all three of them being regulars at the dance studio he already knew, albeit not terribly well.
Having thought about it for a while and having taken in the décor, so studded with azalea flowers as to make it blatantly obvious that was the theme of the evening, Sasha was of a mind to mischievously ask the three people assembled in the little family gathering off the dance floor “It’s going to be Azalea, isn’t it?” The little girl blushed and giggled a bit bashfully, while her mother put a hand on her hip and sighed, saying in a local accent “You know, everyone’s been askin’ us that. You’ll have to find out same time all the rest of y’all do. Which won’t be long now.”
The little girl said to him “I’m not dancing with anyone until after I choose my name, but save me a dance for after my ceremony! You owe me one!” Her father glared at Sasha looking like “you’d better do as my daughter says!”, with Sasha getting the message, and vacating the area. Thinking it over and meeting up with his brother Draža after the next song was over and he had walked off the dance floor (making sure to take his little lady arm-in-arm back to the sidelines), Sasha commented to him “Girls are weird, aren’t they, Draža? First you insult them, then they all want you to dance them around the floor.” Draža looked puzzled, turning his head toward his brother and asking “What are you getting at?” Sasha thought for a moment and then waved his hand dismissively, saying “Never mind.”
The next song then came on, and the brothers linked up with their sister on the sidelines of the dance floor, holding hands with each other, moving along to the beat for a bit before Draža realized “Hey, it’s the vampire waltz from ‘Blood Empire’!” Tallulah gasped a bit as she realized “It is!” as they slow-danced to it with each other all the more enthusiastically as they watched the waltzers spin each other around the dance floor.
Sasha reminisced “Remember that first episode? The one we saw in theater?” Tallulah gushed “Oh, yes. It was so pneumatic. A whole galaxy of vampire covens plotting and scheming for power…in the most elegant ballrooms. What more could you ask for? And it’s such a good serial.” Draža “From the moment I saw it it was like they had their fangs in me! I’ve been a fan ever since.”
Draža went on “Decca’s pneumatic, isn’t she, with the playlist? Think she put it on just for me?” Sasha answered “She just might have. But she just might have put it on for Trey. You know how dramatic he can be sometimes!” They pulsed out the rest of the song, electronic notes evocative of a heartbeat – of bloodflow, as the serial’s composer pointed out in one of the making-of documentaries – blended with the piano tones of a classic waltz played at an aristocratic ball.
As if on cue, after the song was over, Decca herself got back to her station, microphone in hand, with the parents of the lucky girl right by her side. “Alright, alright, y’all, listen up!” she said, before the crowd quieted down and all turned their gaze toward her, going on “We’re gathered here tonight for this moment, a very special time in a child’s life: namechoosing. Where’s our lucky girl?”
She peeked out a bit meekishly from the crowd, raising her hand. Decca beckoned her to the middle of the dance floor, where she stood as Decca went on, approaching her slowly with microphone in hand, “From the time you first took the breath of life every name you had – your forenames, your surnames, all of them – have been given to you by your parents, by your family. Until tonight. Tonight, for the first time in your young life, you will add a name of your own choosing. You might elect to be called by that new name from here on out, or you might just make it a keepsake, or anything In between, but no matter what, it will be yours, and yours alone. Daughter, what is your choice?”
Handing the microphone up to her mouth, the lucky girl turned backward to the crowd, grinning as she said “Azalea.” Applause erupted, as Sasha blurted out in the assembled crowd next to his brother and sister “I knew it!”, before absent-mindedly joining in the applause and cheering, not wanting to seem impolite or disapproving – on the contrary, all three of the orphans thought it was a lovely name.
Her mother shouted “Azalea, catch!” as she threw a flower crown, all azaleas of course, from Decca’s station all the way over to where her daughter was. She caught it with a start, putting it on her little head, before taking the microphone, and, all giggly, said “I’m surprised I caught it that far!”, eliciting a laugh from the audience as she bowed to cheers.
Hernando came out with a cake in the shapes and colors of azalea flowers, parading it before the crowd as he crossed the dance floor, Decca going “We’ve got cake tonight. So if you’re not full and cravin’ somethin’ sweet, dig in!” Before going “Oh, Hernando, we’ve got to give the namechooser the first helping!” Swiveling around so the cake was next to the lucky girl, she pointed to which part she wanted for her own slice, and Decca carved it out for her, putting it on a plate that was helpfully on the platter Hernando was carrying.
Taking the microphone before she dug in, the newly-christened Azalea said “Hopefully this’ll all keep y’all remembering to call me Azalea from now on. First boy who calls me Isabel still owes me a dance!” She winked at that, as Decca withdrew the microphone and the little girl got to eating her big slice of cake, staying right in the middle of the dance floor, though drifting in a sauntering sort of way toward the station where her parents were at, Hernando taking what remained of the cake over to one of the tables by the side of the dance floor proper.
Isabel’s – ahem, Azalea’s – father took the microphone at the music player’s station and commented “Great name you picked out, Azalea. That’s father’s opinion. Let’s hear what mother has to say.” His wife, her mother, picked up the microphone and practically gushed “Oh, I think it’s wonderful”, pausing for a bit before going “Oh well, it might not be such an original take but my daughter said it was okay for me to say this to y’all: she chose Azalea because she wanted to be a Southern flower too like her mother Magnolia. I’m really so, so touched.” Everyone erupted in applause at that.
After they died down, Magnolia said half-jokingly “But Isabel is such a charmingly old Spanish name. Sure you wouldn’t want to use that one too? Wouldn’t make you sound too out of place on one of Ponce de Leon’s expeditions?” Her daughter just laughed at that as she munched down her cake, as she nodded side-to-side, signaling no. Waving her hand dismissively, she said in a lighthearted tone “Well, in that case I’m still holdin’ out for you using Isabel on one of your own daughters one day.”
Grabbing the microphone, the father said “Well, then she might have to be named Isabel Codewright II. Well, it wouldn’t be the worst question of nomenclature we could have confronted; if we had any boys we would have had to decide whether or not to name a son the forth; I’m Trey Codewright, and Trey stands for third. My grandfather fancied himself something of an amateur linguist, so he thought the occupational surnames like the one he inherited should evolve with the times rather than be frozen back in the medieval, so he renamed himself Codewright, since he programmed computers and made that code for a living, and, uh, the family stuck with it ever since. Until now. You’re a trailblazer, dear daughter!”
Magnolia grabbed the microphone from Trey, saying “But Azalea, I know I like Isabel better than you did, but maybe you could use one of the other old Spanish names even!” Her daughter giggled along and nodded up and down, signaling yes, at that. Mother went on “But really, what difference does it make, Azalea? If you keep up the flower theme for your own kids you know I’ll melt at it as soon as you tell me what we’re all gonna call them, so you just name them whatever that lovely little head of yours thinks up. You’ve got good taste, daughter! I believe in you.”
She then passed the microphone to Trey, who said “As does your father.” Pausing for a moment, he went on “We all love the azalea décor, but I know a lot of y’all were able to guess what the new name was gonna be because of it.” He glared at the triplets after he made that statement, sending their hair standing up a bit. Trey might be dramatic, but he could all but summon the evil eye when he wanted to.
He went on “But what fun would a namechoosing party be without a little surprise?” He caught everyone’s attention to a greater or lesser degree with that comment – surprise, they thought? What did he mean by that? He then gave a little speech in overly dramatic fashion “We have mad honey in the house. For those not in the know, ‘mad honey’ is a variety of the good stuff made by bees when they collect the nectar of azaleas, which contain substances called ‘grayanotoxins’. Since antiquity this devil’s nectar been known for intoxication and hallucination. Xenophon wrote once that an army of Greek invaders in Asia Minor accidentally harvested and ate mad honey, which was local to that area, which was later weaponized by King Mithridates when he deliberately poisoned Pompey’s army when they attacked the Heptakometes. The soldiers were tricked into eating it, and they quickly succumbed to delirium, nausea, and, oh yes, King Mithridates’s army, which was lying in wait for just the right moment to attack them: when they were at their most vulnerable. This is the stuff that knocked the Roman army out! So go ahead and try it…if you dare.”
Decca laughed at that, taking the microphone and saying “That was pretty good”, before adding “But seriously, uh, the stuff we’ve got is a lot weaker than what Mithridates fed to the Romans. You won’t get poisoned with our mad honey. But if you eat enough of it you will be sent on a trip for the rest of the night, so beware. We not only have that delicious reddish bitter honey in its original form, but we also have some wine laced with mad honey tonight over at the bar. I like to drink a lot, so I’ve already tried it. Take it from me: it’s rough stuff. We’ve got some weaker blends where the wine is basically just grape juice but the intoxicating element is provided by the mad honey content. I’ve tried that too, it’s weird stuff; if we’re being frank here, it’s not to my taste, but for the adventuresome among you you might want to try it out. It is an azalea party after all, so I encourage all of you to take at least a sip. That’s what we’re here for, to have fun! So in that spirit, let’s dance some more!”
She then put on some music, and before long couples were twirling each other around and stomping in sync across the dance floor once more. After she finished savoring her namechoosing cake, everyone, especially the children in attendance, made sure to grab at least one dance with the lucky girl. She was spun around the studio for one song…then another…and another, until quite some time had passed.
The orphans didn’t even indulge in any of the mad honey that night, but they nevertheless felt ever-so-slightly out of it by the time they found themselves ‘dropping eaves’ – albeit right out in the open rather than remotely covertly – on Fintan, who had finally had his fill of dancing with his sister Fia and then his date Katenka without stopping for even one song, instead now introducing her to his father.
“Katenka, this is my father, Hernando” he said, before turning his gaze away from his dream girl to his father, telling him “And father, this is my date, Katerina.” She smiled and said “I’m so glad to meet you. I’ve heard some about you.” Hernando said “I’ve heard quite a bit about you too.” Looking over her heart-shaped locket, he said “And I’d venture to say I’ll be hearing quite a bit more about you. I know that look, and I’ve never seen it on him before; you’re a keeper. I’m sure of it.”
Katenka turned to her date and asked, almost giddy, “What does it mean, keeper? Are you going to—?” She was then shut up by her man Fintan kissing her on the lips, making sure to go deep and passionate, melting her thoughts away, before letting her come up for air. She just sighed in dreamy contentment at that, not even being cognizant that her date’s father was standing right next to them until a few moments later, gushing “He’s very good lover.” Hernando grinned a bit and said “See what I mean?” Katenka nodded yes.
After a few moments, Fintan said “I just wish…mother could see us. I’m sure she’d be proud of me…and of you, Katenka. You’re such a good girl.” That elicited a gush from her, before she chimed in “Yes, darling, you said your mother is, how do you say it, join silent majority?” Draža blurted out “That means she’s dead. Just like our mother is. In fact both our mothers were killed in the same tornado!”
Katenka darted her eyes and her head, thinking out loud “Tornado? Both of you? All of your mothers?” Fintan, Fia, Sasha, Draža, and Tallulah all nodded yes at that, causing Katenka to go “Good heavens. I’ve heard of Tornado Alley but I didn’t know tornadoes killed that many people. Especially in Nashville.” Puzzled, she asked “Are we even in Tornado Alley? I see, like, video from there but it looks nothing like it does here. Here’s it’s so woodsy…and humid too, but that’s another question.”
Hernando gathered himself and said “No, we’re not in what’s called ‘Tornado Alley’. That’s roughly the same area as the Great Plains; those are a few hundred miles away from us in the Midwest. Flat to rolling hills with prairie on them, that’s the landscape out there. Very different from around here. You see a very pronounced tornado season out there in April, May, and June – spring into early summer. In fact you see the greatest concentration of tornadoes in any one time of the year anywhere on the Earth there, especially the strong violent tornadoes. That’s why everybody from here clear to Siberia and back again knows about it. It’s very famous, Tornado Alley.”
Hernando went on “But that’s not the whole story. Here in the South we actually get just as many tornadoes on average as Tornado Alley itself does.” Katenka asked “So we are in Tornado Alley? I don’t understand.” Hernando said “No, no, here’s the deal: we get just as many tornadoes in any given year, but they’re spread more throughout the year, so we get more in the summer, more in the autumn, especially more in the winter, but not nearly as many in the spring as the Plains do. That’s one reason we’re not as well-known as Tornado Alley proper: because we don’t have nearly as much of a ‘tornado season’.”
Katenka turned to Fintan and said “Year-round tornadoes? You never told me you came from such a rough place!” Fintan blushed a bit at that. Hernando continued “These distinct characteristics mean we’re called ‘Dixie Alley’, instead of being included in ‘Tornado Alley’.” Katenka said “I’d like to ask a question: if there’s more year-round tornadoes, wouldn’t storm chasers come here during the off season? So why aren’t there…”
Hernando cut her off “So why aren’t there more videos? Why isn’t it as well-known? Well, it’s not just the lack of a season here that’s a difference. It’s also a difference in the kind of tornadoes we get here. Here in the South tornadoes are very often what we call ‘rain-wrapped’, they’re ensconced in rain, which means you can’t see them as well. That doesn’t make for a pretty picture or a video. And because they’re harder to spot they’re also harder to avoid, so they’re much more likely to kill people in our part of the country. Especially since tornadoes much more frequently strike at night in our region; over in the Plains they usually strike in the daylight. Again, you can’t see them as well over here. And it also doesn’t help that the terrain here is hills and mountains with trees covering them up; so you’re not really able to see much of anything anyway.”
Katenka said “That all sounds so brutal.” Hernando said “Try being in it, instead of just hearing about it. Actually, strike that: don’t try it. I remember it vividly; on one of my earlier chases, once my kids had gotten a bit older and could take care of themselves a bit, I was shadowing a large and extremely violent tornado – the thing had to have been a mile wide – and I was driving down the road through a hollow in the driving rain, I couldn’t see much of anything, but I came across a gap in the hills and the lightning just happened to flash bright enough for me to see that monster. It wasn’t where I thought it was: it was headin’ right toward that stretch of road where I was speeding to, thinking I was paralleling it, and it was a lot closer than I thought it was. I hit the brakes and within seconds the thing grazed me; I got the edge of it. And let me tell you: that was bad enough. If I hadn’t gotten lucky that night, I probably would’ve died, and poor Fintan and Fia here would have been just as orphaned as the Kovačević triplets here. That was in Mississippi. After that night I vowed that I would never chase tornadoes off the Plains again. It’s not worth it.”
Katenka said “Wow”, before pausing for a bit and asking “I am curious, and this is a personal question; you don’t need to answer if you don’t want to. But…it seems to me, your wife killed by a tornado…why would you want to chase them? Were you into it beforehand, or what?”
Hernando explained “No, I wasn’t into it before. And I confess for years after Dymphna was killed I could barely stand to be in the house when the thunder started to roll, it was that bad. And I had to focus on taking care of Fintan and Fia; I was all they had left in the world, their sole surviving parent. But as time went by, I felt somethin’…different. It was like as my mind cleared and the fear ebbed, every storm, every funnel cloud, every tornado was exerting some kind of magnetic pulling on me, like they were calling me, challenging me to come out and play in the field of battle, like some chessboard, only instead of man and beast it’s a battle of god and spirit. I knew, I just knew, I had to pursue it further; I had to go out to the storms, to the tornadoes most of all, and confront them face-to-face. And as I did, it dawned on me: it was my wife callin’ me. It was like…her very soul was rent from her lovely body during that tornado, and every time one touches down, a little piece of her touches the ground again with it. If I could only reach out and touch one of those tornadoes…I could be with my girl again.”
Everyone, but especially Katenka, who involuntarily went “Wow”, was creeped out by that statement as Hernando trailed off toward the end in his delivery, seeming so wistful, so when Decca strolled in, saying in a voice that was somewhat loud and had that trademark Decca intonation, always somewhere between totally abrasive and totally fun-loving, “Telling all the family secrets, Hernando?”, everyone was startled, the kids especially all but jumping up where they stood, quite a few of them gasping involuntarily.
Hernando just slyly smiled and said “I have more”, before strolling off to go about his business. Katenka asked Decca quizzically “Family secrets? My darling always just says you’re ‘father’s wife’, so I didn’t think…” Decca laughed a bit and nodded her head side to side, tossing her red ringlets, telling “No, no, Katerina, I…I never thought of Fintan and Fia as belonging to me; they just belong to Hernando. Never had any interest in having any kids myself, and even if I did they were too old for that stepmother nonsense anyway.”
Fia added “Father marrying her was basically our idea. We’re the ones who found Decca!” The queen bee of the dance studio went on “Not that I’m unwillin’ to help out Fintan and Fia where I can – I do, and I am devoted to them both – but at the same time I was never going to be any kind of surrogate mother for them.” Fintan said “Well, I thought – I know, darling Katenka, that you have more experience with this sort of thing than I do – but I always thought having a Decca was a lot like what having an aunt would be like.” Tallulah smiled, blurting out “Yeah, Decca’s a lot like the aunt we never had too.” Katenka laughed a bit and said “Seems you’re surrogate aunt, not surrogate mother.”
Decca laughed too, saying “Well, in that case the kids’ terms were acceptable.” She went on “To tell you the truth, I mostly thought in my youth I’d never even get married; the whole idea of having a husband never really appealed to me much. Went on the odd date or two every so often, so when Fintan and Fia set me up with Hernando I was like, sure, why not, I’ll go out with him. But then he grew on me pretty quick, and I felt like ‘I want to keep dating this guy forever’. Yet it didn’t feel right for us to be just dates forever. So…we got married.”
Decca held up her ring on her finger for Katerina and the others to see, with Katenka gazing at it for a moment and commenting “That’s an interesting ring”, as the big green diamond glistened under the party lights, strung like little suspension bridge cables between each wall, under the ceiling, a disco ball projecting festive lights that rippled through the dance floor, and off the gemstone.
Decca explained to Katerina, though the message was directed as much to Fintan as her, “The ring a man gives you when he proposes to you tells you a lot about him, what kind of a man he is. A big rare gemstone like this is just dreamy, especially when it matches your pretty eyes, and shows a real sense of commitment to you, but uh, in the case of my ring the interesting part’s this.”
She took it off and showed it to Katenka close-up, as she thought out loud “The band has markings all around it that are patterned like lightning bolts. And are those runes they consist of?” Decca said “Yep. Runic verses engraved on the ring. At first I was puzzled why he chose runes; I mean, his nationality is something like part Spanish, Portuguese, Irish, and Scottish, and what do any of them have to do with Norse runes? But he explained to me that he actually has Viking heritage on his Scottish side; the very name McThurston means son of Thor’s stone, and that’s obviously not Scottish, that’s Norse.”
Katenka pondered “Do the lightning bolts have anything to do with storm chasing?” Decca answered “You’re a smart girl. No wonder Fintan likes you so much.” That caused her to blush, making Decca think she was going to see a lot of Katerina in the future – they were just too perfectly matched. Decca then answered the question: “As a matter of fact it does. And even more than that. You know all that stuff he was telling you earlier? He really believes it. All of it. And that just scratches the surface, really. He once told me he’s a child of the lightning; family legend has it that he was born during a lightning storm, and he even has a recurring dream that he’ll die in one.” That caused the assembled bunch to become so quiet they could have heard a pen drop were it not for the music blaring – Decca concluded “But hopefully that won’t happen anytime soon1”
“Wow” is all Katenka could muster as Decca slipped her wedding ring back onto her finger. Decca said “Now, Katerina, be aware I’m tellin’ you some secrets here, so it would be best if you didn’t tell Hernando any of this or anything about me telling you. But I have a feeling you’ll be with us for a long time to come, so best for you to know what you’re getting into.”
Katerina said “Oh, don’t worry, I believe in my Fintan!”, adding a kiss to his cheeks, which sent him into almost a rapture for a split-second, as Katenka squinted her eyes as something caught her eye – on the triplets. Specifically their wrists. “Speaking of jewelry”, she said, mincing toward Tallulah, “What’s that?” Draža, puzzled and a bit concerned, asked “What’s what?”
Katenka answered, pondering as much as answering, “Your watch bands. What kind of material is that? It looks like…”, before she motioned to feel of it, Tallulah nodding her head saying “You can touch it!”, before Draža said “It’s human hair. From the mane of our mother. When she died.” Sasha said “Yes, we fashioned some locks of her hair into bands for our smartwatches, that way a part of her would always be with us no matter what – even if something happened to our clothes, and the lockets of her picture and her hair in those we always carry on us. That way every time we glanced at our wrists and checked the time or did whatever, it would be just like when we were babies and we played with those locks of her black hair. They were so beautiful…”
Katenka practically swooned over that thought, embracing her beloved and saying “Oh, Fintan, we simply must do something like that. From me to you. For you to wear always. A blonde watch band?” Fintan looked a bit stunned, before Katenka thought she realized something, turning her head toward Fia and asking “Unless sister would object?” Fia answered “Give him as much as you want. One lock was plenty for me.”
Katenka gushed “It would be perfect. That way you could show your love for me and keep your sister’s locket at your heart too!” Fintan blushed, saying “I hope you won’t expect me to make you a hair art watch band too. I’m not sure I have enough hair on me!” Katenka petted his hair, saying half-jokingly “Well, we could always grow it out some more”, before clarifying in a serious tone “Oh, I’m just kidding. I can keep my locket around my neck. I don’t have brother-sister beloved like you do, so I’m good for heart-shaped locket necklace.” She kissed him rather long and deeply after that, with Fintan just saying, after he came up for air, “Yes, let’s do that. Just…just like you said”, an absent-minded smile on his face.
As if on cue, after a pause while the latest song ended, and everyone else was strutting off the dance floor arm-in-arm – well, except those more hardcore specimens intent on dancing the next song with each other too – a particularly bold man reached out his hand to Katerina and said “I don’t think I’ve gotten to dance with you tonight yet.” Katerina turned to her beloved and asked “Is it alright, darling?” Fintan said “We’ve danced an awful lot, just the two of us, as much as I did with my sister earlier. You can have some fun with other people now.” Katenka pecked her Fintan on the lips before walking off to the dance floor with her new partner, as the next song warmed up.
Decca and Fintan then exchanged glances, with Decca saying in a whisper “I’ve seen enough. Marry her”, before strutting off. The triplets were snapped out of their conversational reverie and dispersed, making sure to grab dances with their fellow big kids, especially the lucky girl Azalea, Draža confessing to her during their dance “You know, don’t tell Fintan and Fia I said this, but I think it’s a lot more pneuma to make clean break and get whole new name and just use that only. Fintan chose Fiachra at his namechoosing, and Fia chose Fionnuala at her namechoosing, but everyone still calls them Fintan and Fia or uses double-barreled names now.”
Azalea giggled, saying “I don’t see you or your brother or sister getting any new names!”, referring to them being well past the usual age bracket a person does namechoosing, prompting Draža to say “We have to keep the ones our mother gave us, in honor of her memory.” Azalea said slightly in awe “It must be pneuma to have a mother like yours”, prompting Draža to be a bit out of it for a while, as he processed her comment – such a good mother, yet such a dead mother – while looking at his wristwatch band, fashioned out of her locks of black hair, a memento of her always being with them, yet also a memento of how, at least in this plane, they would always be apart, eventually sighing and saying “Super pneuma.”
Spin and spin, twirl and twirl, round and round they went, partner after partner after partner, as the clock ticked to midnight, then one…then two, as the crowd became thinner and thinner, the original guests, the reason the party was held in the first place, long since vacated, home and snug in their beds, but with the social dancing going on as long as the partygoers pleased. That was a Decca Roadhouse touch – as much due to devotion to her attendees as her own tastes, sipping red wine as she enjoyed, as she was wont to do come party time, the unique ambience of the post-midnight hours of the early morning, when the world is most asleep, yet the hardcore were wide awake.
Even the hardcore fell in the fullness of time, however, and at the end, well into the wee hours of the morning, when the greatest larks of Music City were waking up for a brand new day, only Sasha, Draža, and Tallulah remained, together with Decca. As was customary at Old Dominion Dance Studio, two songs were last – Decca’s choice from the catalogue sung by Zara Kovačević, the first song danced between Sasha and Tallulah, the second and last danced between Draža and Tallulah, as they owned the dance floor the best their sleepy selves could. All three of them bowed their tired bodies to Decca as she clapped, their last remaining audience.
Hugging her as they went out and said good night, they ventured forth into the Hickory Hollow Mall, skylights black with the night sky, walkways and shops sparse, with more robots ambling about than people, the machine that was the city seeming as if under the influence of a lullaby. Descending once again into Hickory Hollow Station, they found people and their personal machinery – locals who the diurnal would look upon as subaltern, and, more commonly, jet lag – but in thinner numbers than during the daytime and the evening hours. Even the municipal machinery was thinner in number – display boards showing train schedules indicated longer intervals between the arrival of trains on each line.
Once, the triplets stopped, taking in the ambience of a moment when there were very few noise-making people in the station, especially anywhere near them, and no trains were arriving or departing, or even audible in the long boreholes that extended to and fro the wood-clad station. Tallulah smiled, the sleepiness temporarily leaving him, and said “It’s nice, isn’t it? So quiet. You can really take it all in.”
Sasha grinned and agreed “Yes…”, before thinking out loud while gazing at the crowd “I wonder how many of these people are even local. Your average everyday intercontinental jet plane goes at Mach 5, and you get around the world in what, 3 hours? So you’re on opposite end of the Earth and you’re still on the time you came in from. Even if it’s the middle of the night where you are now.”
Sasha looked around, pointing toward a couple of men he spotted in traditional white desert robes and said “Just take them as an example. They look like they’re still on Arabian Time.” Draža asked “What would it be on Arabian Time now?” Sasha went “Uh..what time is it now, anyway?” Tallulah waved her hand dismissively, sighed, and said “It’s probably like noon in Muscat by now. Let’s get home. I’m sleepy.”
As they waited for the next train on the line to the Opry to come in, Sasha commented “You know, they used to say New York was the city that never sleeps. But now, half the world wanders as tourists with jet lag, so every city is now the city that never sleeps.” Tallulah commented, as the first signs of the next train incoming could be heard through the boretube, “Mother said to me once she used to talk to the old-timers here. Before they built all this,” the little girl gesturing as if to encompass everything around them, “nothing stayed open past like eight. Even the bars on Lower Broad Street didn’t serve all night like they do now.”
The train then became visible, gliding to a halt, with very few passengers in there compared to the size of the vehicle, prompting them, as they sleepily sauntered in, to the tune of the ever-ubiquitous “Watch the gap” message playing on the speakers, to forget about finding a private cabin and just plunk themselves down on the seat right out in the open of one of the subway cars, holding each other’s hands as they sunk into the leather booth and the train accelerated along its course…then decelerated, stopped, accelerated again, in what, given their tiredness and the lack of any people bothering them or even people available to overhear conversing, was almost a lulling pattern, broken up only by the announcement playing “This is…Grand Ole Opry Station”, which prompted them to make the effort to get their little selves out of their seats and off the train, once again being reminded to “Watch the gap”, Tallulah drowsily smiling as she emulated mother Zara’s voice “Watch the gaaaap!”.
Seeing much the same level of activity as in Hickory Hollow Station – much the same level of activity they were used to seeing on a late night like this after one of Decca’s parties – they ambled across the expanse of the station and its level-linking escalators to where they boarded one of the elevators which could boast of direct entry to their home: Grand Ole Opry Tower, the tallest building in all of Middle Tennessee.
“This never gets old!” Draža went as he pressed the button indicating the very topmost floor of the tower above them, knowledgeable of the fact he could have just given the on-board computer a voice command, something like “Elevator, take me to the penthouse, the topmost floor”, but what would be the fun of that when you could press a tangible physical button and feel like you were really operating machinery that might as well have sprung fully-formed out of the pages of the Jules Verne novels they loved when they were little kids – well, still loved now when they were big kids too, but when read to by the mouth of mother herself before the age of namechoosing, it just hits differently.
The elevator and its tube were largely made out of glass, resembling a pneumatic capsule, much like those that had long been used by post offices everywhere, including in Middle Tennessee, only for sending people instead of small packages. The triplets quite liked that privilege – once in the mists of time the preserve of urbanites but now enjoyed clear out to Frozen Head for those more discriminating denizens willing to invest in a pneumatic post line: order a new smartwatch from the back stockroom of some store in Antioch, and it would appear out of a tube right in their penthouse apartment in a matter of minutes.
Sure, they could get a delivery drone to fly it up to them, but why spoil the view with yet another small aircraft buzzing around like a bug when you could see it appear in your own home as if by magic? For the rusticated hordes surrounding the cities and off the mountaintops, another aircraft would be lost in the shuffle amid the woods, the birds, the beasts of the countryside, but for those who actually had a view, be it the concrete jungle or the be-she-balsamed slopes? No compromise could be abided, for that – life lived without compromise – was the very reason why spires the world over reached miles into the sky, the raison d’être for the orphans’ habitat.
Accelerating at an aggressive yet not uncomfortable velocity, the triplets saw the transparent glass glory of the Grand Ole Opry Tower in the soft lighting and lower – but still present – level of buzz that defined the overnight hours, the city lights from skyscrapers adjacent to their own clearly visible shimmering through the windows of each floor, the decidedly low-rise Ryman Auditorium, far smaller and older than the miles-high guitar-shaped monstrosity adjacent to it, but still a working chamber of the Opry, all lit up for nighttime admirers – and, dare the orphans thought, a performance as the ghosts of country stars past danced in its hallowed halls – clearly visible from the elevator throughout its ascent, until they rose so high it passed below their sight.
The halfway mark was reached – Sasha once asked Chip, their concierge from early childhood who worked for the tower, to confirm the exact specifications of the elevator as it rode the shaft clear up from the subway station to their penthouse – along with its peak speed of 178 miles per hour, and then the deceleration started, halting with almost maternal gentleness as the bell rang, and the door opened – the penthouse of the Grand Ole Opry in all its glory.
Lit by the light of the moon from above, the nearly-vertical spire with nobody above them offering a view of the night sky unmatched in Downtown. Despite conservation efforts the city was no place to see the Milky Way, but many a star, and – and this was Sasha’s favorite part – aircraft, fixed-wing and zeppelin alike, were clearly visible, their high-key strobe lights, and even their low-key red and green navigation lights clearly visible as they wandered to and fro, their paths unknown but in the dreams of their mysterious passengers.
Tallulah went straight to her bedroom downstairs, after an affectionate hug with and a little kiss on the cheek by both of her brothers, but the boys stayed out in the penthouse’s common room, situated on the top floor, for a while longer, gazing their sleepy eyes downward and outward toward Lower Broad Street, and the urban canyons that stretched out only a short distance away from them, rapidly fading out to dark forest toward the moonlit horizon, though the skylines of the edge cities were all easily visible, their penthouse’s windows on that floor providing a 360-degree view, impressing upon any inhabitant of this apartment that they were in the very core of Downtown, right at the center, the cities studding the Old Hickory Freeway appearing as a luminescent necklace of pearls surrounding them, just below the horizon in all directions.
Sasha and Draža just smiled as they took in the view for the latest time out of nights too numerous for them to even remember, before they too hugged each other and said “Good night”, ambling downstairs into each of their bedrooms, slipping, even as big as they were, into the same frame of mind as a tired baby, plunking down onto their soft cushy beds, silk sheets cradling them, all three snug in their own bedrooms, ambient light totally dark but for the illumination from the rest of Downtown shining up from several miles below, and the Moon a quarter million miles above, bright enough to see by but soft and dim enough to lull them to sleep.
Particularly lulling were their blankets – covered in silk, fibers of plutonium-238 woven deep enough in for the alpha radiation to be absorbed, and close enough to the surface for the radioisotope to heat up the blanket, giving it a unique sort of warmth the orphans loved, a warmth that needed no heating element, electricity, or outside power source of any kind.
Though the material was quite synthetic, manufactured in mankind’s most advanced laboratories, nuclear reactors that could transmute the very nuclei of the chemical elements, bringing to life the “philosopher’s stone” of the ancient alchemists, the kids couldn’t help but feel the heat was purer than any artificial source, as if the plutonium fibers were plucked off a tree from nature herself.
They wouldn’t even be wrong to suppose so – after all, the power source of the Earth’s very core, the energy which had carried and nurtured life from the beginning, had always been the heat given off from radioactive decay. Gaia herself had fashioned full-fledged natural nuclear fission reactors on young Earth, now lost to all except those sapients who could peer back through the mists of deep time, and hear the whispers of the most ancient strands in that double helix of genetic code coursing through their bodies, that little piece of themselves that, deep down, yearned for that primordial reactor pool, the warm bosom of a vein of U-235.
The best kind of heating, mother nature’s, kept them cozy as they breathed in the chilly air that night – although Music City, hot and humid even on average days, was in a midsummer heat wave, the penthouse of Grand Ole Opry Tower rose so high up it might as well have been on another planet. Three miles above the surface, the air was only half as thick, chilled to well below zero year-round, winds as often as not screaming at a full gale.
The orphans’ building took advantage of what local engineers had long since taken to calling “the grade”, taking in the rarefied frozen air above the clouds and dispersing it throughout the building, nowhere more so than the uppermost floors right next to the air intakes, expertly hidden as components of the guitar-mimicking glass structure of the tower, keeping its inhabitants more comfortable and better ventilated with more wholesome air than those on the surface could ever hope to feel bar a rogue Siberian airmass that might grace the region once every few winters.
The pure air of these heights never failed to at once rejuvenate and relax the orphans, the soft light coursing up from the city, the heat radiating out from their blankets, and the cool crispness of their air lulling them deeper and deeper down with every breath, soon all three of them drifting off, as they always did in their penthouse, into a deep contented sleep.
The Moon arced across the sky, setting as the Sun rose, haze building over town as the cities woke up for another summer’s day, triplets awakening only when the Sun had begun its descent, its light through the glass warming their ringleted hair, the sides of their face, and even, as they tossed and turned, their eyes, until the brilliance of the solar system’s only natural nuclear fusion reactor had dispelled the shadow of slumber from their little selves.
Stretching their arms out and ever-so-gradually making their way out of bed, and after they completed their morning (or rather “morning”) routine they beheld their penthouse suite in the full light of the early-afternoon sun, looking at each other almost despairfully; as Draža commented, “We don’t really have anything to do today.” Sasha pondered “Nothing fun…nothing even not-so-fun.” Tallulah suggested “Well, we have been spending all our time when we’re not partying or dancing or performing lately inside. Let’s go outside!”
Her brothers looked at her like she was crazy, Sasha going “Outside?” Tallulah opined “It’s good to get outside! It feels like forever since we haven’t been indoors.” Draža reminisced “Well, there was that time last week I went out on the balcony up here…” Sasha cut him off, saying “Yeah? You said then all it did was give you altitude sickness.” Draža nodded yes, adding “And not only that, I couldn’t even feel my fingers, it was so cold.”
Tallulah rolled her eyes, saying “That doesn’t really count. Come on, let’s go on our bicycle or something. I want to get out of here, and outdoors.” Draža sighed, saying “I know it’ll be good for me, but how hot is it exactly today?” Tallulah answered “It’ll probably be better if you don’t think about it.” Sasha added “For once I agree with that.”
They all went out of their penthouse suite, boarding the glass-cased elevator that came up after a while. Descending, they noticed, as Draža put it, “Wow, Opryland sure is active today!”, referring to the buzz of crowds enjoying the vertically-oriented amusement park that took up a substantial fraction of the tower, drawing local merriment-seekers and tourists from all over eastern North America, the orphans taking in the view of the assembly for the bumper-car ride, looking almost akin to a ball of yarn, or – in Sasha’s delightfully nerdy mind – electrons buzzing about an atomic nucleus, the labyrinthine tracks permitting multiple dimensions of attack for kids – and, though some might have been loath to admit it, grown-ups – after a bit of fun on a hot summer’s day in Music City.
Surrounding the assembly for the bumper cars was the track for Opryland’s rock-and-roll coaster, boasting of a corkscrew death dive of a course that stretched a full vertical mile – as the elevator made a close pass of where the coaster was screaming by, the orphans gasped, and then giggled as their conveyance worked its way down in altitude, to where the more clement rides were located, the triplets’ own favorites when they were little.
They looked upon it with nostalgia, but deep down they all knew it wasn’t as fun for them as it once was; the prospect of forcing it yet another time was too unappealing compared to just taking in the view and holding those good memories close as they decelerated onto the ground floor, where, with a ring of the bell, the elevator opened up its doors, letting them out into the lobby, the state’s tri-star emblem, incorporated into the interior architecture here, looming over them from the wall above the tower’s front desk, well-trafficked for bookings with the amusement park, the hotel suites, concerts, and everything in between.
Wandering over to the revolving doors that made up the front entrance, Sasha went “Ugh, I can feel that humidity from here” as they approached, then passed through one-by-one and emerged onto the sun-scorched cobblestone. Their bicycle chirped a bit, letting them know it was there, as it sensed the proximity of their smartwatches, and all three of them smiled as they made their way onto their bicycle, a single vehicle with three seats and three sets of pedals, so they could all ride in tandem.
As they mounted their bike, Draža commented “Hello Broad Street!”, taking in the pedestrians out walking and their fellow bikers out in bicycles and some rather more exotic light vehicles – all the heavy machinery of the transportation system that served Downtown had long been decamped to underground tunnels, which together with the summer heat discouraging outdoor wanderings in Nashville made the urban canyon that was Broad Street even more sublime than it usually was.
Sasha made sure to take in the skyline viewed from the ground – spires of glass stretching over a mile into the sky, so high up they passed beyond how high his sight could discern. Even for as seasoned an urbanite as he, the juxtaposition of massive buildings with surface streets more lightly trafficked than even a small town’s would have been a century before was disorienting, lending life an ever-pervasive touch of the industrial age’s inherent terror, the passing of a frontier into a world that was in some sense not quite human.
Tallulah broke Sasha’s reverie by noting “I’m already sweating!”, prompting Draža to say “Stop complaining, it was your idea! Let’s go, Sasha!”. Sasha led the way, taking them to the end of Broad Street, where it met the left bank of the Cumberland River, turning northward along the riverfront, where the big cruise boats docked, bringing visitors in for a fun day in the city. Draža blurted out as he gestured toward a particularly long convoy of riverboats docked before them, “Maybe June Bug is somewhere down there!”, before going “Hello, June Bug! Bon voyage!” Tallulah said “I think the heat’s making you delirious already…”
Ascending as Sasha took them away from the Riverfront and into Germantown, intriguing his brother and sister with his chosen course, he passed out of Downtown and into a woodsier section of bottomland, as they biked up onto a mile-long suspension bridge, built just for bikers and pedestrians – its twin span some distance beside them carrying cars and trucks emerging from the downtown tunnels already speeding along well into the triple digits – that kept them all high above the river, linking directly the hillier neighborhoods up from the banks – the automotive span instead linking Downtown with Whites Creek – and permitting, at least in principle, even quite tall boats to pass under.
Tallulah enjoyed herself once she had a view stretching from the hills of Nashville’s wooded suburbia at her fore to the skyline of Downtown, now much more clearly visible in full glory, at her aft, not to mention the thickly-wooded bottomland under them. She gushed “Remember last spring when we biked over this thing – the whole bottom was flooded. So much brown water.” Draža said “I think it was pretty!”, causing Sasha to roll his eyes as he navigated forward, toward a part of town they hadn’t visited in a long while.
Passing where the last of the bridge’s cables passed under the concrete pavement, Sasha laughed a bit, perhaps a bit delirious from the sun andcertainly very sweated, and said “Goodbye, Cumberland Freeway!” as they were enveloped by the woods of the right bank’s hills, their automotive twin road’s span passing out of sight.
Tallulah suggested “Let’s stop!” “Stop?” Draža said, before she clarified “Let’s take a look at the skyline from here!” Sasha shrugged and put on the brakes, causing them to come to a halt on the upslope, skyline clearly visible behind a deep-green grove surrounding the road on either side, obscuring part of the city on the right side, the left side obscured a bit by the suspension bridges, leaving a little window of visibility, a gentle breeze from the river rocking the branches, and its right boundary, back and forth.
Taking the pair of binoculars they had stowed on their bike, Tallulah went “Ooh…” and “Ahh…” as she took in the air traffic and the little details of the buildings, most especially their upper floors, which were obscured from their own neighborhood right in the middle of it – it was easier to view them from a more horizontal angle out there than it was to peer straight up at them.
She soon handed the binoculars over to Draža, who peered through the heat haze and said “I think I can make out the strings from here!”, referring to the great strings of the Grand Ole Opry Tower, stretching up the guitar-shaped structure for its upper two miles or so, sighing as he realized “I don’t think they’re singing much today”.
Sasha took the binoculars, and commented “Yeah, the wind just isn’t strong enough. It usually isn’t in the summer.” The building was designed to ring out pleasant musical notes, slightly audible throughout Downtown’s streets, when the winds blew fast, everything precisely calibrated so the upper levels would only ring out if the lower levels had wind too, so as to counteract the wind shear that was an inherent issue of towers that spanned such a wide variety of altitudes.
Once they had their fill of that, they continued up toward Whites Creek, though one wouldn’t know it was anywhere near an urban area to look at it: from side to side as far as they could see on that road the whole path was ensconced in thick woods, including branches and leaves covering them on top as if a canopy, taking the edge off the heat, though with the high humidity the protective effects of shade were much more limited than they would be in a place like Zion Canyon.
But appearances could be deceptive: every so often there were turn-offs through the woods, concrete pathways peeking through the thicket of brush and branches, a grid rather than a maze, yet labyrinthine enough to be intimidating to outsiders. The Kovačević triplets, on the other hand, had been here many times before, though not recently.
Tiring of all the exertion, Sasha decelerated their bicycle, turning it left onto one of those cobblestone streets, finding a canopy of shade trees broken up into segments, growing behind hedges of kudzu twice as tall as they were covering the road, the only hints the place ever had any population being the driveways that might as well have been peekabooing the orphans as they sped by, the odd address number emerging from kudzu overgrowth as they passed by.
Tallulah commented “These abandoned houses are so creepy.” Draža countered “They’re not abandoned, Tallulah. People store stuff in them, they have workshops in them, they even play in them, these kids!” Sasha commented “Like us.” Tallulah tried to focus her attention on the address numbers going up, up, up, one after the other, the ones she could make out anyway: “Is this one of those meter neighborhoods you were talking about that time long ago?”
Sasha “Yes, the addresses are marked in meters down from where the street begins here. Remember when I first biked us here? I was so excited when I looked all this up and I was like ‘we have neighborhoods in meters, just like in the old country, I have to go visit!’.” That caused them all to giggle, in between panting in light of the hot sun blazing down on them through the haze, obscuring thunderheads building above them.
As they biked, they counted them up, before they reached the first junction, a mini-roundabout with a slightly raised hump of cobblestone, a different color than the main street, Tallulah saying “You know, it’s funny, without these roundabouts at every junction people would be able to go a lot faster on these things…would preclude children playing without risk of being run down or something. As it is these curves, they’re designed to force everyone to bleed off that speed…keep slower.”
Draža raised his eyebrow and retorted “Oh yeah? Sasha, show her that trick I did with the roundabout hump!” Sasha smirked as he pedaled faster, his brother and sister keeping time but growing ever-more-terrified as they approached the stone hump at the center with nary a hint of Sasha slowing down.
Then, they took it at the fastest speed they usually went down cobblestone, giving everyone a whoop-de-doo as the triplets slowed themselves down while getting their bearings again. “Woo!” Draža said, Tallulah shaking her head from side-to-side, saying “That’s why we don’t let you be the lead driver”, adding a slight pinch on her brother’s back to that.
Sasha turned them around and actually took them down a different street, perpendicular to the one they entered on and parallel to the main bike route, houses here as on the other street shrouded in slightly overgrown kudzu, Draža pondering “Meters…like they use in the old country”, before going on “This weather makes me miss the old country!”
Tallulah said “Yeah, it’s not nearly as bad there in the summer.” Draža reminisced “I’m just thinking about all those fun summers we spent there with Decca…we tasted all the best wines in the world, and then we went up in the alps for skiing. Decca even taught us how to do biathlon.” Tallulah said, a note of pride in her voice, “She’s a great shot with a rifle!”, before saying “That would be a lot more fun than what we’re doing now.”
Sasha shook his head, his waist-length blonde ringlets getting all sweaty (which was a lot of sweat…), “This whole thing was your idea in the first place, Tallulah!” Tallulah waved her hand dismissively, saying “Blech, that’s Middle Tennessee for you. When you’re inside you want to be outside and when you’re inside you want to be outside.”
Sasha grinned wryly, saying “Oh, don’t worry, Tallulah, you’ll be on greener grass on other side of fence soon.” Draža blurted out “What does that mean?”, not getting an answer as Sasha navigated around the deserted grid of streets, stalling by looking out at the address numbers that peeked out, saying to his brother and sister “You know, I always liked these meter-delimited neighborhoods. Most of them used feet. My favorites, though, have to be the nautical-mile neighborhoods. You know, all of the kudzu-house subdivisions built by Ewen McEwen himself, the original creator of this style, used nautical miles? He subdivided them into sexagesimal units, one-sixtieth of a nautical mile, which made…uh, I think it’s 30 meters? Way too long for each address number to represent one house. So he divided each sixtieth of a nautical mile into sixtieths, just like minutes are divided into seconds. Which makes, uh, half a meter or so. So all the numbers count up to fifty-nine then they roll over to zero-zero again. On original address plaques they put in such places they put little colons or apostrophes or something between those groups of two digits. McEwen…he saw that minute of longitude was exactly equal to a nautical mile, and he was so impressed by beauty of the sexagesimal system he wanted to expand its usage.”
Tallulah asked “Sasha, what do you find so interesting about these address numbers?” Draža said “I don’t know, they’re just interesting.” Tallulah, a bit cranky from all the exercise, said “I wasn’t talking to you!” Sasha, scoping out address numbers, said “We’re here!” as he directed his brother and sister to turn into one of the driveways, through the ten-foot kudzu hedges.
Coming to a stop on the brick pavement, Tallulah asked “Here? Where’s here?” Sasha said “If you did find address numbers interesting, you might know!” Tallulah caught her bearings and beheld an open garage door, leading into a home built in the classic McEwenesque kudzu style, after a while of walking into the garage saying “I know all these houses look alike to me, but this one looks familiar.”
Sasha said “We came here a long while ago.” Climbing up the flight of stairs from the garage, which spanned, in classic kudzu-house style, the entirety of the first floor, Sasha slid the door open into its pocket in the adjoining wall, turning to his brother and sister and commenting “It still works!”, beckoning them to come on in to the rather dark interior of the second floor, lit only by the natural light coming in from the windows, prompting Draža to comment “Is it just me, or is it darker in here than it should be?” Sasha said “Hills, woods…thunderheads…hazy day. Trees could have grown some since we were here last.”
Sasha flipped the light switch, brightening up the open-plan expanse of the second floor with an orange-red color; he smiled and said “Such unique kind of light, neon.” Tallulah marveled “It still works…after all these years.” Draža “Yeah, much longer than we’ve been coming here even. It was super old even when we were little. No voice command here, just push buttons…”, trailing off as he made his way to where he knew the old-style thermostat was, turning on the air conditioner. Within seconds, the machinery gave its tell-tale whirr, and cold air duly poured out from all the vents in the house.
Tallulah went “Ah…” as she plunked herself down onto the dust-covered cushion that surrounded a low table. Draža followed her down onto his own musty cushion and laughed, saying “Isn’t it funny, whoever used to own this place went all-out for Japanese-style furniture – everything on floor – but the house itself is rather…I don’t know, Americanized?” Sasha said “Yeah…the sliding doors, the open flexible plan, and the screens were all from Japan originally, but McEwen took it and made it America’s own. Those accordion doors? Those were a later touch. That didn’t come from Japan.”
Sasha got onto the mats that covered the floor, and bounced up and down, marveling “Still so cushy…you’d think they’d have decayed some by now. I bet this was just as good when it was new. Practically like a real tatami mat. Amazing all this stuff lasts for so long, especially in this climate”. Inhaling as he was rejuvenated by the cool air coursing in, he remarked “Still got that woody tatami smell too.” Draža said “It’s a bit musty”, as he tossed his red ringlets around, trying to expose their sweated locks to the cool dry air from the vent. Sasha countered “Still, material of lesser construction…it would be destroyed by now. So much in here still works.”
Tallulah darted her eyes back and forth to the thermostat as she realized “I think it’s creepy…all the lights and air conditioning still works? Good as new? Wouldn’t it have decayed by now and…uh, no longer work?” Sasha said “Ah, Tallulah, not necessarily. A lot of these houses…some trust owns them, it’s all on the blockchain, and everything’s automated. Why wouldn’t it all still work?”
Draža asked, mischievously, “Bankruptcy?” Sasha said “Ha! If trust had even small brokerage account…it indexed the stocks…let’s say futures contract that it just kept rolling automatically, it would be more than enough to autopay. Just put it on margin; there’d be more than enough credit to cover interest as it accrued. Stocks go up. Power plans don’t. Easy.”
Draža said “I wonder how many of these houses have garage mummies in them…” Sasha and Tallulah mocked him by making ghost noises: “Ooooooo!”, before they all laughed. Sasha said, only a bit jokingly, “That’s one reason I like this house; garage door is open so you can see everything from driveway. No nasty surprise.”
Tallulah wondered “Seriously, though, how do you think this house became deserted?” Draža shrugged, saying “It beats me. Nothing ever changes here, not since we were little kids”, him gesturing to how tall they were back then. Sasha smiled, saying “There’s clues!”, getting up off the floor and sliding the door open into the kitchen, musty, stale, and a bit more dust-covered than they remembered, but otherwise exactly the same.
Opening the cabinets, Sasha beamed back to his brother and sister as he pointed out, taking one jar out of the cabinet, “Honey?” Draža commented “Honey will keep forever. Just shake it up and you can still eat it, no matter how old it is.” Tallulah smirked and said “Okay, then, Draža, you eat it!” Sasha got out another jar, shaking it up and pointing out “Salt?”
Draža looked at that, rather than take teasing from his sister, flipping it around and reading the ingredient list, eyes widening as he pointed out “Hey, Sasha, look at this ingredient list?” Sasha took it as Draža pointed out “I don’t think that’s salt.” Sasha read it, and his eyes widened too, before Tallulah took it and read it, Sasha pointing out “You know when I read up recently on all the essential nutrients to sustain life?” Tallulah said “I’d forgotten about that project of yours”, in a slightly sarcastic tone. Sasha went on “Well, these read like some kind of mineral salts. Like, all minerals human body needs are in these salts. It’s not just table salt.” Tallulah read it and said “How interesting”, before handing it back to Sasha and asking “What does that tell us about the owner?”
Sasha shrugged, before reaching in and getting a bottle from the largest collection in the kitchen, pointing out “I think this might tell us more.” Reading the label, Draža remarked “Moonshine?” Sasha commented “Hard liquor. Never opened. They say unopened these bottles will keep forever. Whoever owned this place sure had a lot of them.”
Tallulah wondered “So, whoever owned this place just ate honey and mineral salts and washed it all down with moonshine?” Draža said “It’s so disgusting it would be pneumatic if it wasn’t so disgusting.” Sasha said “I think it was bootlegger’s house. Tax-free if it’s bootleg. Back in old days you had to go to more effort to get tax-free than just tell computer to order from Web and a drone drops bottle off at your porch.”
Draža thought “Abandoned suburb would make good hiding places. You have kids working and playing, but nobody really ever bothers you out here. Lots of people who might see you here don’t want to attract attention themselves, you know. Especially, a lot of the little traffic they do have around here are robots who do their storage-house runs, and they don’t notice anything or anybody…and even when they do, they don’t report it.” Sasha added “Robots tell no tales…”
After a moment’s silence, when, unnoticed by the children, it got even darker outside, Tallulah said “I know it’s more practical this way, but…I think that makes places like this even creepier. It’s all abandoned, deserted, overgrown by kudzu, but it’s all managed by computers, and these computers run robots for what they have to do physically. It’s like…it was built for people but it doesn’t need people anymore.”
Sasha asked “What do you mean?” Draža clarified “Like, there are god-knows-how-many houses in this country that are just kept up automatically, and you can just go in them, do whatever you want, and nobody ever minds. It’s like it used to be house but now…it’s something else, but it still looks like house. Is that the creepy part?”
Tallulah answered “Well, yes, but what I mean is it’s like if humans all suddenly disappeared tomorrow, the world would keep on going just fine without us. Not just nature, but the economy, the infrastructure, the…everything. It all would take an awfully long time to degrade, but in the meantime, the lights would still stay on, the trains would run on time…even the markets would still be traded. With…but with no one to think anything, feel anything, experience anything…just…programming. That’s all that would be left. Like a zombie world.”
Their conversation flowed as their manes, their bodies, their faces were cooled off by the climate-control slice of Tallulah’s incipient zombie world, but eventually, Draža noticed “Is it just me, or is it way too dark?” The triplets’ eyes moved side to side, glancing at each other as the realization dawned on them…
They got up and walked apprehensively to the nearest window; peering out of it, Sasha’s mouth opened, prompting Draža and Tallulah to also look out and toward the left to where Sasha was looking, then…then they saw it: a towering dark billowing mass of cloud, stretching from horizon to horizon, draped along a northeast-to-southwest axis, white cirrus cloud to the right of them, rainshaft clearly visible to the left of them coming up over the obscured hills (the closest reaches of what past Whites Creek became the Highland Rim), and directly above them, approaching rapidly? A shelf cloud, dark and billowing in a wedge shape, ragged and mean-looking, as if it was a maw determined to reach down with its breath and attack.
Sasha and Tallulah gasped, but Draža was fascinated, cranking open the big French casement window, letting in outside air – still so hot and humid it turned the orphans’ faces red as it drifted into the house, but charged with the ambient electricity of an approaching thunderstorm, the breeze having eerily died down, as the orphans stuck their heads, Draža enthusiastically but Sasha and Tallulah only mincingly, and watched the shelf cloud flow in its southeastward course until they viewed more and more of the bottom, less and less of the forward side, its axis moving higher and higher in the sky, until it was at the zenith directly above them, the orphans at that point gazing directly upward, craning their necks out of the window so as to watch its approach.
First imperceptibly, and then suddenly, the wind picked up, carrying the childrens’ manes up and to the side as if they were sails, Tallulah’s brunette ringlets even impacting on the window, prompting her to shrink back inside as the trees’ upper branches started to sway in what had become an approaching roar, even the kudzu hedges beginning to rustle.
Each gust was stronger and louder than the last. It wasn’t long before the house started to creak under the strain, the very floor under them giving them a side-to-side movement as if on a ship at sea or in an earthquake on land, as trees bent toward the direction the wind was blowing, as if huddling for dear life, leaves flying sideways before the children as the windows still wide open, holding up well under the pressure.
Then a series of the very strongest gusts roared in, shaking the house around and audibly cracking a large branch outside, which tumbled down to earth right in front of the children in their window, all of them thinking it was among the scarier moments they’ve ever experienced. After that series of gusts, which lasted perhaps a minute, the winds started to die down, though the roars and strong gusts that continued after that kept them on edge.
Draža moved then to close the windows, though not before he stuck his head out and smelled the air: so humid it almost stank, but what for weeks had been their constant companion was missing; as he put it, “Come check out this air; it’s not hot anymore!”. Cautiously, his brother and sister stuck their heads out; no more heat. Indeed, if anything it felt outright cool.
But it was not the sort of wholesome chilly air that cooled them off in their penthouse; no, this was laden with moisture, charged with electricity, so much so that Tallulah motioned to close the casement windows through the crank, which Draža, budding gentleman he was, helped her with. As the cool humid air was replaced with the air-conditioned air from the inside, the triplets got their bearings, Tallulah staring down to the backyard, the whole lot (front yard and house included) measuring only a quarter of an acre, and the large branch that had been sheared off by the windstorm, along with a variety of other twigs and leaves that had been blown off…or, more to the point, blown in from elsewhere, likely further up in the hills where the much larger rural population beyond the built-up area of Whites Creek made their home.
It wasn’t long before they saw bolts of lightning striking the hills, and the rainshaft approach much like the shelf cloud had earlier; still breezy, the house was soon lashed with sheets of cooling rains, brick and concrete alike giving off steam, it had been so hot, cracking the triple digits on the Fahrenheit scale for a solid week by that point.
Sighing as they got over it all, Tallulah gave giggles of relief before she said “I think that’s what the natives here call ‘hurly-burly’.” Sasha said “Meteorologists call it ‘derecho’.” Draža asked “Is that like a tornado? It felt a bit like a tornado.” Sasha said “No, it’s not a vortex, it’s straight-line wind.” Tallulah said, still distraught, “Well, whatever it was, it was horrible.”
Sasha said “Seems we’ve been getting an awful lot of them lately.” He paused before he went on “It hasn’t even been all that long in climatological terms since that severe storm that killed mother…and Dymphna too. Among others. I wonder…” Draža asked, after Sasha trailed off, “Wonder what?” Sasha answered “I wonder if these storms might be getting more severe, like pattern, a trend. You know, an awful lot of carbon dioxide is being sucked out of the atmosphere…they suck it right out with these huge towers, not just philanthropy to ‘stop global warming’, but to make carbon dioxide for fertilizer too. To make more crops on less land…which means forests grow back rapidly, and forestation sucks even more carbon out. Very short time period too. Could make our climate…stranger. Less stable. More severe weather. Could even be another ice age coming in soon; they say the Sun might be giving us new grand minimum, and last time that happened was the ‘little ice age’. Maybe this time, with everything going on…it won’t be so little.”
Tallulah asked “What happens if we enter an ice age?” Draža said “Snow falls down to the Ohio. And it doesn’t melt. Ever. Not even in summer.” Sasha added “Our climate here was like Interior Alaska’s is now. You know those trees we saw when we visited Attakulla?” Tallulah said “Oh yes, I remember; you said they used to cover the entire South. That’s hard to imagine…”
Sasha nodded yes, before Tallulah reminisced, sighing “Attakulla, Kuwahi, all those mountains sound like great places to be now. But I don’t feel like going to any of them again…” Draža said “I know what you mean. It seems like just yesterday we were last there.” After a pause, filled only by the pitter-patter of the rain, now a bit less driving than it was but punctuated by even louder rolling thunder, Draža went on “Hmm…just thinking about Alaska. Even Alaska sounds nice about now.”
Sasha suggested, after a wild thought popped into his head, “You know…we could…go to Alaska.” His brother and sister turned their gaze more attentively to him, as he explained “Why not? We have the time. Nothing going on next few days.” Draža played with his hair as he pondered “Well, I am sick of this place…”
Sasha turned his gaze toward his sister, asking “What about you, Tallulah?” Tallulah shrugged, saying “Last time I made a decision I ended up bringing us here, and look how that worked out. I’ll let you boys take me for a ride this time. Besides, Sasha, I know you’ve always wanted to go see the Bering Strait Tunnel.”
Draža asked “Where exactly would we going on this trip?” Sasha asked back “Our destination?” before answering “Might as well go ‘whole-hog’ and make it Kamchatka. Once you’re out there it’s close enough. And besides, anywhere Katenka came from has to be dreamy, right?” Draža said “I’d like to see you follow our donor’s wayfinder clear out there to Katenka’s old country, all the way!” Sasha sighed, saying “I was thinking we could go to a spa I had picked out, but…when you put it like that?”
Tallulah said “You could always go to spa and then hunt down your long-lost father.” Draža said “Half of all our blood comes from him, not just Sasha’s!” Tallulah crossed her arms and said “Well, for a boy it is different, you know.” Draža turned to Sasha and said, “Well, as boy, I say we go for it!” Sasha smiled as he said “That spa I have in mind is right on the way, directly on the Pacific. We could go right there! Train could have us there and back…really, before anyone would even miss us!”
Tallulah pondered all those feelings swimming through her head, before saying “The more I think about it the more excited I get for it. Let’s go!” They all nodded in agreement on that thought, waiting for some time, until the rain had fully cleared, to exit the house, making sure to turn everything off before their departure, and mounting their bicycle built for three, the sun soon coming out from behind the departing storm clouds, the long shadows of the trees rippling across their eyes as they drove down the bridge back to Downtown, sun low in the sky, illuminating the buildings in an ever-deeper yellowish tinge.
It took a bit of time, yet it felt like no time at all, it was such a smooth ride back to the Grand Ole Opry Tower, where they took the elevator down to the subway station underneath, and then much further down still on the elevator to their mother’s tomb. Sauntering through the cave-like outer dome, they swiveled their heads to the left and to the right, before reaching the altar, and gazing for a moment at the marble statue of Zara being raptured up to heaven by Terpsichore, closing their eyes as if praying to her for guidance in their new mission they’d taken on, pressing the stone behind them in the right order and singing the notes, all the triplets together, in the right order as they were written, until the secret door opened, revealing the passage behind.
Passing through the dank – and cool – corridor, surrounded on both sides by nude reliefs of Zara as she reached the full bloom of motherhood, when she gave the triplets life, they reached the inner sanctum, just as they had left it yesterday, just as their mother had left it all those years ago.
Respectfully approaching the sarcophagus of their dear departed, Sasha pushed on specific spots on the stone, and the drawer popped out, the drawer that contained the artifacts they knew they had to have for this voyage: the red-backlit glowing compass-like artifact that pointed them in the direction of Kamchatka, and the letter, written for them by their donor, containing the rather frustratingly short message.
Sasha held the letter closely, the letter that directed Zara’s children to someday go there, to the coordinates specified on that metal sheet, to follow that compass all the way. Draža was handed the wayfinder. Tallulah asked “Are you sure you want to do this?” one last time, Sasha answering “Let’s see what’s out there”, before they closed the drawer and gazed at their mother’s grave.
That was quite a moment for them, for this was the first time since Zara’s passing that their paternal inheritance had left the tomb. The responsibility they carried on this trip was not lost on any of the orphans – it was their duty to guard and protect their only link to the other half of their bloodline, and the last task their mother had set for them that remained undone, before she was so cruelly rent away from them by the mother of mothers: nature herself.
They spent a long while gazing at the image of their mother, as if praying to her spirit for guidance, for strength, on this biggest of excursions for the Kovačević triplets. Finally, they disembarked from their mother’s tomb, closing the door to the inner sanctum behind them, ascending to Grand Ole Opry Station and then, following Sasha, up the escalator to Broad Street, rather than to the tower.
On the way up they had already directed their robotic minions to bring their luggage down, everything they’d need or want for a few days’ travel, which soon met them out on the street, wheeled chassis containing their belongings following their little masters in their appointed course.
Which followed Broad Street and its now cool-and-humid breezes through the heart of Downtown, proceeding on foot the quarter mile or so to the entrance to Union Station. Historic churches peeked out from the more modern glass-and-concrete skyscrapers, the tallest evincing Futurist lines of architectural thought, but the spine undergirding the ground level of the urban fabric evincing Gothic motifs, even including space-age takes on gargoyles, which the orphans could swear had multiplied above them in the years they had spent walking down Broad Street since they were little.
Staring them down when they met the Gulch was Union Station: vintage L&N, the Romanesque façade remaining as unchanged as ever, appearing just as it was originally designed by Richard Montfort in 1898. A more recent addition, though, loomed before the triplets as they sauntered off the thoroughfare that was Broad Street.
“Well, well, it’s the Sentinel”, Draža said, referring to his name for the larger-than-life statue that greeted comers and goers. Tallulah said “Hello, Sentinel”, waving, as if to ward off any adverse influence from its spirit; the vision always gave her the creeps. And no wonder: hewn out of stone specifically chosen to match the exterior of Union Station, the statue was an embodiment of the seal of the City of Nashville: a Native American in traditional dress holding a skull in one hand before his head, and a flagpole in the other.
Sasha noticed “Southern Cross this week”, referring to how the enigmatic Native American figure was flying the Confederate Battle Flag from his pole, reminding his brother and sister “Got to love how they rotate the heritage flags. Just when you get tired of one, another comes. I wish they did that inside the station too. It’s always the same in there.”
Tallulah walked up closer to the statue, mincingly, waving “Hello, Sentinel”, as she stared at the skull for what had to be the thousandth time. Tallulah pondered “It still bugs me…what exactly is he doing with that skull?” Sasha added “For that matter, we don’t know who he was, or even his nationality. Yet he’s been on the city seal from the beginning, always holding that skull.”
Tallulah said, a bit creeped out by the thought, “I heard once that the skull belongs to a white settler, and they keep it as ‘memento mori’. You know, a reminder to all who come and go that they too shall die one day.” Sasha joked “As if we need reminding…”
Draža said “You know what theory I believe in?” Both his brother and sister turned their gaze toward him and asked “What?” Draža answered, tongue in cheek, “That it commemorates the first performance of ‘Hamlet’ west of Appalachian Range.” Holding his hand out as if grasping the skull, he made fun of the famous scene: “Alas, poor Yorick!”, before Tallulah pinched him, and grabbed ahold of him, the three of them walking past the mysterious Indian and toward one of the front entrances.
Passing through a magnesium revolving door that a purist would say was more Art Deco than Romanesque, yet still fit well with the overall aesthetic, providing a hint of the modern wonders to come, they entered the interior of Union Station, appearing just as originally designed – a big archway forming a cathedral ceiling above them letting in some natural light through topside windows, lush details evocative of the Baroque, walls softly lit and painted in a golden color – but with what were, so many generations before, ticket counters there now stood museum exhibits from the history of all the railroad companies that regularly checked in to this station during its more-than-a-century-and-counting history, foremost among them being Old Reliable, the Louisville and Nashville Railroad.
Where there were doors to board the trains in the old days now stood portals to escalators, carrying passenger traffic in from all over the city, all over the country, all over the continent, and even beyond. For right here was the supreme hub of Music City’s mass transit, the oldest and still perhaps most active origin point of the metropolitan subway lines, parking garages stretching deep underground linked to the freeway tunnels that coursed under Downtown, all linked directly, within a single station, to the intercity maglev Breitspurbahn, Nashville’s link to the crown jewel of the American railroad network.
The orphans took some time – luggage following behind them with docile automation, like calves following their mothers – to appreciate the scenery, before wandering onto one of the escalators down, which they knew led to the real railway hub further underground, the one in current active use.
Emerging down there, they beheld, as so many times before, a veritable cathedral in Romanesque splendor, light-colored stone materials and airy arches stretching high up forming rows of arches and columns stretching forward-to-backward from the orphans’ point of view, natural sunlight, fading and golden, channeled in with the elaborate use of mirrors, together with the ambient haze making it look as if the immaterial fingers of god were coursing through the station, illuminating each balcony, each level as far down as they could see from the railing, as the sun made its arc across the sky, no day more so than that day, for the station was designed to channel the sunlight on the longest day of the year – the summer solstice – for maximum brightness in the cavernous underground station, illuminating every bit of the tri-star tessellations that made up the white stone floor.
“Really airy today, isn’t it?” said Draža, Sasha going “Yeah, they designed the station to be aligned with sun, moon, and stars, just like the ancients like who built Stonehenge, and with Romanesque architecture of the original station. I’ve always liked it here.” Tallulah sighed, saying “I know you’d like it even better with the heritage flags instead of…well, all the current ones.”
Sasha shrugged as he looked at the assemblage of flagpoles sticking out above them where the archway met each column, saying “Oh, I don’t know. The city flag has the Sentinel on it, that’s pneumatic.” Draža said “I always liked our state’s flag.” Tallulah pondered “The three stars?”
Draža nodded yes, saying “One for each division: west, middle, east. And the three stars are also for how Tennessee was third state after the original thirteen colonies to become a United State. The flag even evokes the same iconography as Confederate Flag does. It’s perfect!” Sasha turned his head toward his brother and said “Well, you know that’s not a real story? Nobody’s proven the third state confederate thing was anything other than coincidental.” Tallulah rolled her eyes, saying “How could something like that be a coincidence?”
They all shrugged at that, sauntering along for a few moments more, watching all the people going about their travels, boarding flight of escalator after flight of escalator. Sasha said “I know I’m being unpatriotic, but I like Tennessee’s flag a lot better than Slovenia’s. I mean, a white, blue, red tricolor? Meh. Gets lost in the shuffle.”
Descending down a particularly long flight of escalators, they finally arrived at their destination, the floor devoted to the Breitspurbahn, platforms bordering tracks that were wide enough to fit one of Ewen McEwen’s kudzu houses on them. Going up to one of the innumerable ticket counters, Sasha turned back briefly to Draža, saying “Oh, be sure to have the money close by”, before Draža gestured for one of the luggage robots to approach closer to him than it was following earlier.
At the marble ticket counter, clad in rich light colors of course, was the agent, an android who could have passed as a high-quality mannequin, or perhaps a closer comparison would be one of the automata from the Rococo. The automaton had a porcelain outer shell that was so peaches and cream it was inhumanly radiant not too dissimilar to the stone that made up the station, no doubt a deliberate touch to make every piece of the station, even the ticket agents, complementary in aesthetic. The hair was snow-white, waves evocative of a tropical beach tumbling down to the android’s chin, eyes blue with life-like detail, though one inhuman touch was the eyes being a much lighter sky blue color than any found naturally, and suffused with an active glow.
“May I help you?” the android said, before Sasha turned to his brother and sister and asked “What do you think you’d like for this trip, as in accommodation?” Both of his cohorts shrugged, Tallulah saying “Up to you.” Sasha then went back up to the counter and said “We would like fastest train possible to Petropavlovsk, Kamchatka.”
Eyes flickering in their glow, no doubt to indicate he was thinking, the android replied “We have our fastest express train leaving soon on that route. Departing from here and arriving at Petropavlovsk; stopovers in Chicago and Yellowknife. Total transit time 12 hours.” Sasha asked, just to be sure, “Does it go through Bering Strait Tunnel?” The android replied “Yes, the route passes through the Bering Strait Tunnel.” Sasha was so eager; even his brother and sister were getting a bit excited: it was really happening! Their big trip to Siberia!
The android said “12 hours is a long trip by train. Would you like to select one of our deluxe cabins?” Sasha shrugged and said “We’re a party of three. Would regular three-bedroom suite be possible? Like, nice, but we don’t have to go to most deluxe you have.” The android then read them a description of what it interpreted as a nice but not ultra-luxury three-bedroom suite on board the train, Sasha told him that’s what they wanted, and then Draža handed him the gold coins he placed on the counter, which the android took as payment before handing them their ticket, all the information they need inscribed by laser on-site on a metal card. Sasha waved goodbye to the automaton, saying “Thank you!”, as the orphans made their way to the platform indicated on their card.
Tallulah marveled “Amazing how good these androids are getting.” Draža chuckled, saying “The one we talked to just now even had a slight Texan accent. What’s up with that, anyway?” Sasha answered “If I remember correctly, all the…androids and robots here at Union Station are manufactured by some company outside of El Paso.”
Draža turned his head to his brother, shaking it side-by-side and saying “I should have known you’d know. Say, El Paso, that’s in Texas, isn’t it?” Sasha nodded yes, explaining “Hence the accent.” After a pause, he went on “That’s not even the interesting part.” Tallulah interjected “Oh?” Sasha said “No, no.”
He elaborated “The factory they make them in outside of El Paso is designed to be immune to nuclear war, since it is sited well outside the city or any military targets, and it’s so deep underground with such a hardened structure it could probably survive a direct hit anyway, even by a city-killer warhead!”
Tallulah, puzzled, turned her head to her brother as they walked on toward their platform, asking “But aren’t city-killers banned for military use by Nuclear Weapons Convention? They’re used only for starship propulsion and to make superheavy elements, aren’t they?” Draža added “Well, that’s what it says on the paper; doesn’t mean they wouldn’t use one anyway. Especially if there’s a global war!” Tallulah said “Bah, that’s science fiction; there’s never been a world war.”
Draža countered “Well, even so, poison gas shells were used in the Noëlic War.” Sasha shook his head, sighed, and said “War of the Christmas Army, actually. That’s what it’s called!” Draža countered “Noëlic War is more pneuma. And besides, they call new world order after that war the Noëlic period. Why wouldn’t it be Noëlic War?” Sasha just gave up on persuading his brother on that point.
During that pause, as Tallulah looked around, the interior of the station suddenly reminding her a bit – for reasons unknown even to her – of mother Zara’s tomb, a thought popped into her mind, inspiring her to say “You know…what you said earlier about city-killing nuclear warheads and factories having to be underground, hardened to survive such a weapon?” Sasha replied “Oh?”
Tallulah went on “It strikes me that if someone were to use city-killers…you know, we live right in the middle of the city…” Draža’s eyes opened a bit, as he thought out loud “I had forgotten about that! You’re right. We live in tallest building in Downtown Nashville. And that’s one of the biggest cities in the eastern interior of United States.”
Sasha pointed out “Well…we do have missile defense systems for just that happenstance. Bomb-pumped X-ray lasers in orbit. They’ll zap them from the sky! Before they can even see our city, these rogue weapons. They won’t stand a chance!” That reassured them, before Draža started giggling, Sasha going “What is it, Draža?”
Draža explained “Just realized…we’ll probably be safer in Russia than right here at home. After all, you told me that Russian missile defense is the most advanced of any country’s.” Sasha pointed out “Always has been, really. Probably because the technology works best for big countries with far-flung population. Zap most of the missiles and even if a few make it through they still have a country.”
Draža pointed out, mischievously, “Well, even if they do intercept all the missiles…there’s the matter of those German super-heavy panzers.” Sasha remembered “Yes, the panzers…” Draža went on “Just waiting there in the woods in Finland and Estonia, all ready to shell Saint Petersburg with nuclear warheads…and they’re fired too low for X-ray lasers to reach…”
They were jolted as they suddenly heard the tell-tale rush of air from an approaching train, wheel-less and suspended magnetically above its track, but still large enough to kick up quite a breeze as it moved into Union Station, coasting to a stop as the orphans beheld the rounded and streamlined contours of the train’s body, its locomotive appearing not unlike a bullet, or the conical cross-section of a jetliner aircraft, its dimensions being as wide and as tall as a small house and longer than the station itself.
Wide doors, more resembling a two-car garage than the more domestic size found on the Nashville subway, slid open as soon as the vehicle came to a rest, the other passengers and their robotic luggage filing in along with the orphans, their tickets picked up and scanned as they crossed the threshold.
Richly appointed, evocative of the sort of interior design and architecture one might find in Saint Petersburg, as if some lost palace was rediscovered and a piece of it hewn into the Breitspurbahn, it impressed the triplets, with Draža saying “Hmph. With aesthetic like this I feel like I’m in Russia already.” Tallulah spent a moment like all triplets did, staring at the statue of the old-fashioned train conductor at the center of the chamber that made up much of their boarding car, cathedral ceiling showing off flights of staircases and old-timey-looking elevators that took them to the upper deck of the train, before she suggested “Let’s get to our suite.”
“Where even is our suite?” asked Draža, Sasha replying “It’s on the upper deck. They have the best views”, as he led them to the car where the entrance to their accommodations were. Tallulah pointed out “We should be seeing some good ones on this trip.” Draža teased her “You’re still upset about Denver, aren’t you?” Tallulah asked back “What makes you say that?” Draža clarified “Well, last time we went to Denver you said you were reminded of how much you hate the view in Kansas.”
Tallulah rolled her eyes, saying “It’s not about that at all!” Sasha said “Seriously, we should be seeing quite a bit. This train stops at Chicago, and we always like Chicago’s Union Station.” Tallulah nodded, saying “It’s so pretty! And so big. Everybody all bustling and happy.” All Draža could think of is “I never understood why in this country they name every train station in every city ‘Union Station’.” Sasha pointed out “Well, not every station; you know that. They just name them that when more than one railroad company uses them. It does seem really same-y, though.”
Mischievously, Tallulah suggested “Maybe they’re all named the same thing because they’re the same station. You know the old one-electron theory? That there’s only one electron in whole universe, it just looks like there’s googols of them because it’s moving backward and forward in time? Maybe there’s only one Union Station and it just looks different in each city because it’s moving through time?” Teasingly, Sasha said “It would explain why every train is always exactly on time…”
Making their way through the lower deck of the train, Sasha finally spotted the number designating where their suite was, and ascended the staircase to the upper deck along with the rest of the triplets, the door to their suite sliding open as it sensed their ticket, revealing a room that made the triplets go “Ooh” and “Ahh”, the place they’d be spending the night.
Thick lush carpet covered the whole expanse, which stretched from one side of the train car to the other, giving the common room a view of both sets of windows, on the right and on the left; bedrooms, each with a private bathroom, easily accessible adjacent to a hallway snaking back from the common room, two bedrooms looking out to the right, one bedroom looking out to the left.
Unpacking their luggage so everything would be easily accessible for the overnight trip, they made themselves at home, even hanging up some art on the walls that they had brought from their penthouse. “There”, said Sasha, as he hung some up; “It already looks like home!”, causing his brother and sister to giggle.
Eventually they tried out the furniture, including plunking themselves down into the bubble chairs, glass hemispheres with pillows and cushions fastened to the bottoms and backs, all dangling from chains attached to robotic stands, easily moveable with a command of their voice; as Draža tried out, “Bubble chair, move me a meter toward the left window!”, which was done in a few moments courtesy of the treads attached to the bottom of the stand.
Tallulah joked “Those Finnish panzers wish they could be this comfy!”, referring to how the tread design first truly came to prominence with military vehicles in the last century, before proliferating into civilian usage with the rise of robotics. Draža said, craning himself to project his voice more clearly to his brother and sister in their bubble chairs, “Almost lulling, being in here!”
He wasn’t only talking about the atmosphere of the bubble chair itself – as they all well knew, being familiar with this rather common sort of furniture, being deep inside one was akin to a lite (very lite) version of an isolation tank – but rather also the bells, looking like shiny bronze hewn in classic Baroque, including Rococo visions of angels festooned from the chimes, which rang out ever-so-gently any time there was any motion on the bubble chairs, which was very often, at least the way they were using it.
Sasha and Tallulah agreed with Draža’s assessment as they tried out rocking back and forth, listening to the bells and chimes, spending a bit more time in their bubbles’ embrace before perching themselves on the edge, directing their on-board computers to move them closer to the high glass table, legs carved out of what looked like bronze, ornate geometric motifs segueing into a bronze circular shape of metal where the glass was supported.
An idea popped into Sasha’s head, so he got one of their robots – he didn’t feel like leaving his seat – to fetch them a really big piece of digital paper, which they often used on trips like this, and throw it onto the table, the triplets then spreading it out so as to overcome any folds, creases, or crumples. Although it might look like the stuff made from trees, “paper” made out of liquid crystals hewn into the most advanced glasses had properties that would have struck an end user of only a century earlier as bordering on sorcery; it could be folded into a tiny cube and then unfurled flat looking none the worse for wear.
A bit of further adjustment was needed after the train started moving, accelerating so imperceptibly it threw the kids’ efforts to unfold their digital paper off a bit. It wasn’t too long before the accelerating broad-gauge maglev train emerged from under Downtown Nashville and onto surface-level track through the countryside, natural low sunlight flooding their cabin.
With his fingers Sasha manipulated the now-sunlit digital paper so as to turn the whole sheet into one big map, within a few taps calling up an azimuthal equidistant projection of the world centered on Nashville, Tennessee, light brown parchment color denoting the oceans, dark brown denoting the landmasses, the shading corresponding to altitudes (bringing the mountains into sharp relief), white lines on the map denoting Breitspurbahn lines. “Map, plot out the route of the next train leaving from Nashville to Petropavlovsk.” The paper then faded out the black lines and turned their route a vivid yellow color.
Sasha smiled, and said “That’s it, that’s our route!”, as he manipulated his fingers on the sheet to zoom them in so as to put Nashville on one end of the table and Petropavlovsk on the other end, instead of the outer edges being taken up by the likes of East Africa, Australia, and Antarctica.
Tallulah asked “How long is our route?” Draža tried to answer “12 hours?” Tallulah said “No, I mean distance.” Sasha shrugged as he looked at the graphic, saying “6000 miles I think.” Tallulah asked “Looks like we’ll be passing by…” as she looked at the map, before Draža interjected, tracing out the path with his finger “Chicago, Duluth, Winnipeg, Fort McMurray, Yellowknife, Fairbanks, Nome, Uelen, Petropavlovsk.” Tallulah said “Well, I meant more natural landmarks. If I wanted to see a city I could have just stayed at home.” Sasha giggled at that, before tracing out with his finger “Lake Michigan, Lake Superior…uh, lots and loooots of plains as we cross Canada, ooh…Caribou Mountains.”
Draža blurted out “Bah, who cares about caribous?” Sasha said “Well, it is national park of Canada. The mountains should be pretty. I’d be surprised if we saw any caribou. They like to avoid rail track.” Tallulah said “Wildlife overpasses should be full of them!” Sasha countered “Yes, but you approach them so fast you can’t see much, except from distance.”
Draža said “These trains are about as fast as flying wing.” Tallulah said “I know, boys, you’ve told me that before: just below the speed of sound.” After a pause, she continued “Well, a flight to Petropavlovsk by airplane would be supersonic. And we’d have less layovers.” Sasha said “Still, you can see whole world by train!” Tallulah retorted “Yet whenever we go to Europe with Decca we fly. We’ve never even been to Bering Strait Tunnel before and then taken the trans-Siberian to Europe.”
Sasha remembered what he was supposed to be doing, as he traced out their course some more, “Oh! Yes, after Caribou we should see Tu Nedhé.” Tallulah gushed “It’s a beautiful sea. Especially in summer.” Sasha went on “Then after Yellowknife stopover we go through some more woods before we tangle with Great Divide at the Yukon Ranges.” Grinning and turning to his brother and sister, he added “That’ll be amazing. So many tunnels…” Tallulah said with a dreamy note “So many mountains.”
Sasha added “Anyway, we’ll be making a straight shot to Kamchatka, so it won’t be long crossing Alaska. That’ll be the last of woods for a while, when we get into tundra, and…the Bering Strait.” “Ooh…” Draža said. Sasha traced his finger over the last sections of the route, going on “We come out of the tunnel and cross into Russia. Train route parallels Arctic Coast for a while before we go southward into woods again and we go right through this big valley to Petropavlovsk station.”
“Wow” Tallulah said at all that. Draža wondered “It’s practically Midsummer’s Day now. Will we see midnight sun when we go up there?” Darting his eyes side to side, Sasha manipulated his map to show the latitude and longitude grid, before saying “We actually don’t cross Arctic Circle until we pass Uelen. So…I think? I’m not sure.”
Tallulah got a few moments to think, and then she asked “Sasha, we’ll be heading westward, so we’ll be gaining time, right?” Sasha thought about that for a bit, before nodding and saying “Yes…I think. We head back an hour every fifteen degrees of longitude.” Tallulah wondered “Will we see the sun set, or will it stay up as we chase it westward?”
Sasha’s mouth opened, before he said “I had not considered that! We might not see sunset…” He trailed off as he squinted out the window, seeing the sun low in the sky and right in his field of vision above the rolling hills of the Upland South – or was it the Lower Midwest by that point? He shrugged and said “I don’t know. It seems awfully low in the sky to not set on our trip, but I guess there’s only one way to find out.” Draža teased his brother, saying “You always say that…”
After a while conversing, Tallulah confessed “Ugh…this sun in my eyes. I know we could shade it all, but I want to see everything.” Emerging from her bubble chair, she unpacked some suitcases and fetched a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses; turning her gaze toward the sun, she sighed and said “Much better.” After a moment she realized she might be being inconsiderate, so she offered “Oh, um…Sasha, Draža, would you like some?”
They both nodded yes, and their sister fastened some identical heart-shaped sunglasses to their heads. Tallulah said as she giggled “Boy, you two look too girly”, referring to how her brothers had ringlets down to their waists and heart-shaped glasses on now. Draža shrugged, saying teasingly “Remember, Tallulah, it’s all in the pants!” They all giggled at that.
Eventually making their way to a much bigger bubble chair in the other part of the room, looking out rightward, eastward, so they could catch a view of the Chicago skyline – or, rather, one of the skylines – before the train slipped underground, once again plunging them into darkness, lit only by the ribbon of light that was a troglodyte’s only inkling that sources of illumination even existed.
The train had been decelerating for a while, but the pressure on the orphans was noticeable as they adjusted to the motion, until, train practically at crawling speed, emerged into one of the deeper netherchambers of Chicago’s Union Station.
Not quite in the Loop, though contrary to its positions on official maps some passengers who took the escalators down could swear they had traversed enough lateral distance underground to be in that most central of Downtown sectors – the station, like Nashville, was designed to be aesthetically whole, the newer deeper portions serving the Breitspurbahn, the subway, and other modes of transportation matching the original station on the surface, which still functioned as the portal of access to and from the surface.
The Chicagoans might have done an even better job than the Nashvillians in being matchy-matchy: the Corinthian columns, the marble floors, the great hall, even the brass lamps gave a vision of the new deep station being identical to the original surface station except in its size, much larger in the newer station’s case. Too good a job for their own good?
Draža said sarcastically “Watch the gap! Welcome to the Belt!” before waving his hands dismissively at the view before him. Tallulah acted a bit puzzled, saying “You know, Draža, every time we come to this whole region it seems to make you mad”, even though she had a pretty good inkling of what it was her brother found objectionable.
Sasha explained, rather gratuitously, “They call it Factory Belt, Manufacturing Belt, Steel Belt… Draža’s probably in the mood to call it ‘Rust Belt’.” “I’m not!” Draža objected, as he watched the passengers come on and off the platform and their train through their windows, which he was of a mind to open; with a voice command from Draža to the computer, the windows opened, hinging in French door fashion toward the inside, letting in fresh air from the station.
Breathing it in, they took in some air deep into their lungs, feeling invigorated enough to get out of their bubble chairs and stand on the lushly carpeted floor, sticking their heads out so they could see down to the platform and further out into the station. They all smiled, as Tallulah said “I think it’s cooler already now that we’re in Chicago; hard to tell, though. They have big towers on surface that bring in fresh air, they’re like as tall as Chrysler Building.”
Draža interjected “Hmph. No wonder it’s so breezy.” Tallulah went on “But it’s air conditioned. I hear they use liquid nitrogen as their refrigerant. Was very advanced at the time they installed it.” Sasha said “To show how superior the Belt was technologically. They built it so good, I read once, that if someone wanted to…if it were ever turned on to maximum…everyone in here would turn to human popsicles, it would get so cold. Makes for good security measure…” Draža said “That’s just conspiracy theory or something. They built it so big so as station expands in future they won’t have to rebuild cooling system again, they can just turn the old one up to a higher setting so more air can be cooled.”
Sighing, Draža thought back to how he didn’t like the vista before him, explaining once again to his brother and sister “Maybe if they do make yet another station they can actually make it industrial-looking. Like, we’re in the Steel Belt, the Factory Belt, workshop of the world, Vulcan’s forge brought to life. There should be black anvils, hammers, steel ingots, rivers of molten metal being poured out by muscle men, and what do we see? Something that wouldn’t look out of place in Caesar’s Rome.”
A silent moment followed, broken only by Sasha saying “You know what someone once said about America? ‘We are the greatest experiment in Hellenism’. Not Greece, not the Diadochi, not Rome – America.” Sasha sighed, before saying “I’m not sure what that means, but it comes to mind.”
They gazed at that vista and people-watched, Draža in between conversation with his brother and sister envisioning in his mind’s eye what he would do with Chicago Union Station were he given carte-blanche, until the time came for the train to depart from Chicago, on a much longer leg toward one of the taiga’s great railway hub: Yellowknife.
Sasha told the computer to close all the windows before they even left the station; they could have kept them open during the whole trip, but experience in Breitspurbahn tunnel and high-subsonic surface travel had long ago shown them the wisdom of keeping them closed up when not stopped at the stations; if nothing else, the noise of the windstream was very disruptive to the whole idea of a relaxing railway trip. Their mother Zara had once vividly demonstrated that to them by acceding to Draža’s request to keep the windows open one time, both in the tunnels and at peak velocity, which got the lust for that particular bit of thrill-seeking out of his system.
Setting their big sheet of digital paper to show them the schedule of everything that was being offered to passengers on the train – dining, entertainment, and all the rest of it. Tallulah gasped a bit when she became cognizant of an offering that she knew she had to take up: “Brothers, they’ll be showing ‘Blood Empire’ in here!” Draža went “What!? On the train?”
Tallulah nodded as she pointed to the line of text where that was listed, “See right here, in movie-house car! It’ll be starting soon!” Darting his eyes back and forth, Sasha realized “Oh my…I forgot. The season finale was supposed to be released tonight.” Looking toward Draža, Sasha said “It won’t take long. We’ll still get to see all of the Yellowknife to Kamchatka leg of the trip. And I so, so want to see the finale!”
Tallulah opined “It’ll be even more special if we do it on a trip like this. We’ll have to start getting ready now!” Draža wondered “What should I wear?” Tallulah did her eye-roll before saying “Let’s make it all black. And hope those robots of yours packed your capes.” Sasha panicked, saying “I don’t think they did…that’s some special costume I got for ‘Blood Empire’, and we didn’t tell them to pack the costumes, did we? Just regular traveling…”
He trailed off, before starting to talk with the computer in his room, asking if they had any black capes in the on-board wardrobe that were available in their sizes, and when the computer voice answered in the affirmative, Sasha directed it to send some robots up with the three capes.
Going into their bedrooms along with their luggage, the children changed, the two brothers coming out in rather identical-looking outfits, all black dress pants and dress shirts with black belts, black vests, black neckties, and black jackets, even black shoes; Tallulah came out in all black as well, only all she had on was a lacey high-hemmed dress with stockings on her legs made out in black vampire-bat patterns, heeled shoes in glamorous shiny black on her feet.
Sasha stared at her, Tallulah saying teasingly “What are you looking at?” before Sasha answered “You brought your costumes?” Tallulah shrugged, saying “I got the vampire-bat stockings for the ‘Blood Empire’ showings, but I liked it so much I added it to my regular wardrobe. And as you should know, Master Know-It-All, if you add an item to your regular wardrobe it’s automatically packed in when you tell computer to fetch your things for you.”
Sasha grinned, saying “Alright, Mistress Vamp, time for you to go out and fetch your cape!” They emerged from their cabin and found their robotic valet stand waiting for them, three black capes of just the right size, which they all put on. Tallulah twirled for her brothers in the hallway, asking “How do I look?” Draža said “Good enough to bite. Let’s go.”
They scrambled down fast – well, as fast as Tallulah’s heels would allow – to the car containing the movie palace, where they checked themselves in for the big finale of “Blood Empire”. The man at the counter, clad in a very traditional and elaborate movie usher’s uniform, asked them “I’m sure you already have plenty of company”, referring to the fact they were a party of three, “but would you like a companion for the show? I’ve got a party of one who’s unmatched as yet. About the same age as you three, actually. They’ve indicated they want to eat dinner while watching the movie. What do you say?”
They whispered among themselves, then Sasha said “Yes, we’d like to see movie with him! And we would all like to eat a dinner too. We’re kind of hungry!” The man then directed one of his robotic ushers, a humanoid robot but clad in metallic copper rather than the realistic appearance favored at Union Station in Nashville, to show them to where their table was.
Row after row of stadium seating in deep burgundy color stretched before them, before they were led down the aisle, past leather divider after divider between the different parties, creating different compartments to maintain privacy and quiet while permitting a full view of the big screen at the front of the movie-house car.
After sauntering down for a bit, the robot gestured toward the booth they were to be seated in and said to its current occupant “Your companions for the film, sir.” The triplets all saw a child about the same age as them, raven curls tumbling down to almost chin length, eyes a rich dark brown color, skin tone white but with just enough of a tan to not be so fair as Fintan’s and Fia’s.
He said “Oh! I had no idea I was going to be getting three companions! This is awesome!” The orphans were well-traveled enough to recognize the accent: West Shore, but considerably less upper-crust than the stereotypical version; this child’s speech largely lacked the quasi-British “transatlantic” features.
Sure enough, after the triplets introduced themselves – one by one, “Sasha Kovačević”, “Draža Kovačević”, “Tallulah Kovačević” – the boy introduced himself: “Raphael Chicago”. As they slid into the booth side-by-side, the triplets giggled, but only Draža had the courage to ask “I know probably everyone you meet asks you that, but uh…did you get that name because you were from Chicago?”
Raphael replied “Ya, ya, that’s where I live. That’s where I came from. My family too, actually.” After a pause, he said “Tell me, Draža, where did you and yours come from?” Draža said “Nashville, Tennessee.” Raphael’s eyes widened a bit when he heard that, saying “I would not have guessed.”
Tallulah asked back “What would you have guessed?” Thinking for a moment, Raphael answered nervously “Slovenia?” Sasha marveled “Good guess. You really know your accents”, before going on “Actually, we kind of are Slovenians too. Our mother came from there; she raised us in Nashville, but we spent a lot of time in the old country too.”
Knowing better than to ask them what happened to the mother – he noticed the use of the past tense – he queried “Are you three – you’re siblings, right?” They all nodded yes, Draža saying “Triplets, actually! We were all born at same time!” Raphael marveled “Wow”, before going on “Are you three traveling with your family or on your own?”
Tallulah answered “On our own. We do it a lot, actually, but this will be our first time going by train west of the Bering Strait. Sasha, here, has a fixation on the Bering Strait Tunnel.” “I don’t!” Sasha protested, before Tallulah pinched him, and asked Raphael “What about you?” The raven-haired boy replied with a giggle “Well, you would think I’m all alone too, but I’m traveling with my mother and father. They’re just not interested in seeing ‘Blood Empire’ with me; really, it’s always my grandmother I like to see the vampire movies with, but she’s off to the beach in Ceylon now and me and my parents had this jazz dance thing, so I was left with no one. Until you three came along!”.
Tallulah asked “What’s this jazz dance thing you speak of? That sounds interesting.” Raphael nodded his head, saying “It is! Both my mother and father are full-time jazz dancers, actually; it’s always been their passion. And, uh, we’re all going to spend a week on the shores of the Great Bear Lake in a jazz dance intensive.”
Sasha asked “Are you following in your father’s footsteps? Are you…on track to be a jazz dancer yourself?” Raphael shrugged and said “I don’t know.” Draža queried “Do you like jazz dancing?” Raphael paused and thought for a moment before saying “Eh…I guess I do, but I’m not sure if I like it that much, if you know what I mean?” Tallulah nodded, saying “Not enough to devote your life to it?”
Raphael said “Exactly, Tallulah, exactly. I’ve spent my whole childhood sampling the performing arts, and I really like it, I love the creativity, I love the performance, when the lights come on at a stage, oh, it’s dreamy. But picking any particular, specific style or path…I guess I just haven’t found my thing yet.”
Tallulah sighed, saying “I know what you mean. Our mother was a country music star, but us? We like rock a lot better. Even so, it’s not quite so all-consuming, like the passion we’re sure we’ll devote all our lives to. It’s like ‘oh, this is fun, let’s just keep doing it’.” Sasha said mischievously “That’s how passion creeps up on you, though. Well, that’s what mother always said.”
Raphael wondered “Mother…country star…Nashville…Kovačević…why does all that ring a bell?” Draža suggested “Because our mother was Zara Kovačević?” Raphael’s mouth dropped open as he realized who they were. Eventually he said “Oooh…like, she goes ‘Watch the gap!’, and then she gets whacked down by that guitar and gets run over, and reappears as a ghost or something?” The triplets nodded yes, Raphael going on “That was the most iconic train music video ever! I did a whole routine to it once! The venue we had, we had to get a bit creative about the getting-run-over-with-a-train part.”
That caused them all to laugh, conversation eventually, after they took the time to think of what they wanted off the menu for their dinner and place their order, turning to the “Blood Empire” installment about to play, Draža asking “So what do you think’s going to happen with the Black Paladin?” Raphael gave them such a knowing smile and looked like he was about to burst into laughter, before he regained his senses and said “Oh, don’t even talk about that. I don’t want to be tempted!”
Tallulah asked “You’ve seen it already?” Raphael said “Well, yes and no. You know the simulator version, like virtual reality?” They all nodded yes. Raphael went on “I’m a huge fan of that, and uh…I played it before now. It contains the whole second season, so I already know what’s going to happen. True, it’s more interactive than the actual serial, which is the most canonical version, blah blah blah, but I already know. And I don’t want to spoil it for you.”
Sasha said “Bah, we don’t mind being spoiled. Tell us!” Raphael shook his head from side to side, saying “No, no, no, this is something you don’t want to be spoiled about. You’ll understand when you see it.” The triplets all looked at each other, intrigued by the suggestion, letting the topic go.
Soon, their dinner was there; in the table in front of them, the robotic waiter, clad in the same copper metal as the ushers, delivering to them a plate with a whole smoked ham on it, knives enough for all of them to slice it up to their heart’s content, and more plates with a chocolate vampire for each of them to eat, dark chocolate of course. To wash it down with, they were each served a big mug of steaming-hot black coffee. “I wouldn’t want to give out before we reach the tunnel!” said Sasha, prompting Tallulah to point out “See what I mean?”, as they dug in and the film began: the season finale of “Blood Empire”.
It was tense from the first to the last moment, gripping the attention of the orphans and their companion in the booth so much they could barely remember at times to eat and drink, though over the two hours or so of the episode’s length they did manage to eat it all. The kids loved how every episode of the series, including this one, was primarily carried by their visuals, their music, and the caption cards, cinematography that wouldn’t have been at all out of place in the “silent era” of the last century; a certain school of filmmaking had kept the flame alive in the interim, holding that the dream-like style had more of an impact on the viewer, and that telling the story not in dialogue had a certain inclusiveness and cosmopolitanism to it, which they found appealing.
Particularly common the style was in mythological, legendary, science-fictional, or fantastic settings, and the creators of the “Blood Empire” serial had taken full advantage of the possibilities offered by it. Although the captions, the titles, the credits, and so forth were in German – a language widely understood among the sort of people coming to and going from Chicago – all of the dialogue was in French, but not modern French; rather, the classical French of Louis XIV, lending the characters, particularly the vampires, a certain antique and aristocratic vibe.
Throughout the last installment of the second season, it was down to the wire, as the sinister agents of the arch-villain, greatest of all vampires, the Prince Volodymyr, newly elected as Emperor after two seasons of scheming by a dizzying array of vampire covens throughout the galaxy, successfully lure the hero, named only the Black Paladin, to his throne world, the seat of the Empire: the Noctis Draconis, a world lit only by its supernatural bolts of lightning and the omnipresent glow of the galaxy’s supermassive black hole’s accretion disk, shrouded from the rest of the galaxy, and its deleterious starlight, by a vast dark nebula at the galactic core.
The Black Paladin, the most powerful of vampire hunters, came face to face with the Emperor, sitting on sitting on the Dragon Throne, hewn from the scales of dragons, who once, in the age before vampires, ruled the galaxy. Viewers appreciated the touch of how Volodymyr with complete affable confidence held the Sang Real in his hand the whole time; the ancient artifact, of draconic origin, had the power to darken all suns in the galaxy, and hence the power to unleash vampires, whose powers and reach are weakened by sunlight and even starlight, to roam freely and prey upon the masses without limit.
There was only one problem: the Sang Real required dragon blood to work, and dragons were extinct…or so the mainstream of vampire society thought. Volodymyr, at the beginning of his rise to power in the first season, had discovered that before the last full-blooded dragon went extinct, it interbred with a vampire from one of the minor covens, who bore a child: half-dragon, half-vampire, a dhampir.
As already seen by the viewers during the prologue to the first episode in the first season of the serial, the dhampir was spirited away by a wizard, who put her under a spell of amnesia, keeping her in the dark as to her true heritage and nature as a dhampir, raising her to be the foremost of all vampire hunters in the galactic resistance.
Walking straight into the Emperor’s trap, in an impressive visual on the screen, Volodymyr revealed to the Black Paladin her true nature as a dhampir, and, in a twist that caused viewers to gasp, the Black Paladin surrendered to him, was bitten by the Emperor on her neck, accepting her place as a vampire by his side, her blood dripping out from her neck into the chalice that was the Sang Real, to cheers from the assembled cultists, lightning flashing all around them as Prince Volodymyr drank from the cup, calling his children to his throne world.
The camera showed the call being sent, a ritual guttural chant of the vampires, as the Black Paladin sat at his feet next to the Dragon Throne, the camera zooming out so the viewer saw the galaxy, with all the stars winking out as a shockwave of darkness spread out from the center of the galaxy. To dramatic music, the text “Wird fortgesetzt”, “to be continued”, was shown, and that was the end of the second season.
Tense and dramatic exit music played after the end of the serial, Tallulah eventually working up enough gumption to say “That’s it!? That’s the end of the season!?” Smiling, Raphael nodded yes, Tallulah motioning as if she was going to pull her ringlets out, saying “Oh my god, I’m not sure if I can stand to wait until the third season? What could possibly happen to them?”
Raphael said “I can only hope our auteur has an even more ingenious twist for the third season than he had in the second season.” Sasha asked “Well, what do you think will happen to them? You’ve had more time to think about this than we have!” Raphael paused for a bit, before saying “I think in the third season the galaxy will be brought to its knees and the vampires will be defeated by a spontaneous mass uprising. You just watch: that’s where he’s going with all this.”
After some more thought, Tallulah said “Yes, consider that at this point the supernatural heroes have failed, so all we have now are the supernatural villains on one hand and everyone else they’re victimizing on the other hand.” Draža suggested “Yes, imagine if you were in a galaxy like that: you’re being preyed upon, victimized, but it’s bearable, it’s tolerable, but what happens when it becomes not so bearable, not so tolerable? That sounds a little bit too familiar if you ask me.”
They discussed the ins and outs of “Blood Empire”, now that they had all seen all two completed seasons of the movie serial, and eventually they figured out that it was almost time for Raphael to go. Walking out of the theater, Raphael’s eyes opened as he realized “Oh…I just noticed this. The Black Paladin, you know? She became like pale ghost white when she was bitten by Volodymyr and accepted she was a vampire. Wasn’t that a great touch?”
Tallulah went “Oh my…you’re right! She did turn pale!” Sasha said “Really interesting too that her actress is part-white and part-Khoisan. Lends her an appearance you don’t see every day.” Draža interjected “Except in movies. Anyone with an unusual nationality, they always typecast them as space opera.” Tallulah gushed “She’s really good, though, that girl! She’s not just another unusual face to say least.”
Draža said “Yeah, but I can’t help but wonder: do they hunt down any indigenous person they see and put them to work as actors? Something like half the population has to be in the business by now!” Raphael laughed, saying “Not in the places I go to. And not anywhere near Yellowknife.” Tallulah was reminded, going “Oh. I guess this is goodbye. It’s been great meeting with you.”
Raphael said “Well, you three have my onion address. Goodbye!” as he waved his arm, the triplets waving back as he receded from view in the hallway, along with everyone else, including those getting off the train at Yellowknife. The orphans chose to mingle in and out of the arriving and departing crowd, people-watching as they whispered into each other’s ears and pointed out examples of a trend they noticed: more domestic-looking people getting off, and more rugged-looking or, dare they say it, exotic-looking types coming on.
They spent most of their stopover like that, eventually coming across a sight that really caught Draža’s eye in particular: a child about their own age, all alone, walking a whole team’s worth of huskies on board on leashes. Draža said “Ooh…look at her.” They beheld her form: a girl, with a soft baby face and a toned body, clad in a modest ice-blue-colored dress and a matching wide-brimmed hat (complete with a girlishly big blue feather), looking strong and wholesome with her peaches-and-cream complexion, and, most strikingly, icy blue eyes even more piercing than the color on her dress, and a long straight mane all the way down her back, colored snow-white and looking like it was freshly blown out at the salon.
The triplets minced toward her and, making their way next to the pack of huskies she had on her leash, Tallulah said “Hi!” The new girl turned her head and cautiously said “Hello?” Tallulah asked “Heading to Petropavlovsk?” The girl replied “That is where this train goes…” Sasha added “Yeah, we’ve been on since Nashville.” The girl’s eyebrows raised, her saying “Nashville? Isn’t that a ways from here, especially by train?”
Draža added “It’s going to be our first time seeing the Bering Strait Tunnel. How about you?” She laughed quietly, waving her hand dismissively, saying “Many, many times have I gone through it.” Sasha asked eagerly “Ooh…what’s it like?” She just shrugged her shoulders, saying “I don’t know…it’s just, you know, a tunnel? If you ask me Arctic Coast is the best part of this track. This time of year you might even catch some midnight sun.” She added “Well, we’re going to Petropavlovsk…the volcanoes in Kamchatka are very pretty. If only we got midnight sun there, but if you want to see the really pretty part north of the Circle you need to go to, like, Norway.”
Draža contemplated “Norway?” Tallulah added “We’ve been to Norway, but not by train; we took zeppelin.” The new girl made a thoughtful gesture, then told them “Hmm…I think you might have been missing out. The trans-Siberian route is a very scenic way to get there. And to be honest from Nashville once you hit Russia you’re basically halfway to Norway anyway by train.”
As the huskies rustled and made some noise, they were distracted, which prompted Tallulah to go “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t introduce myself. I’m Tallulah Kovačević.” Her brothers followed, introducing themselves as “Draža Kovačević” and “Sasha Kovačević”. The white-haired kid introduced herself “Osine Tremblay. Pleasure to meet you.”
Tallulah asked her “If I may ask, what are you doing with these…uh, are they huskies?” Osine nodded yes, saying “My Siberian Huskies, yes.” Draža asked “Are they all your pets?” Osine shrugged, saying “Oh…I guess they are, but they’re really working dogs too. I love, love, love dog-sledding; all winter I go clear across Siberia with my family, there’s nothing else like it, the cold, the snow, the atmosphere, going across the woods and the frozen rivers to somebody’s hunting lodge for a good time, or even to a city, or something…” She trailed off as she exited her reverie, going on “But, uh, you know, that’s not something you can do in the summer.”
Sasha replied, curiously, “Not even on a glacier? I know they do skiing and snowboarding on glacier in summer.” Osine answered “Eh…it’s just not the same as going through the woods and the rivers. That’s why I don’t like Antarctica; I went there once to sled, but…not again. No. Besides, I like having an off season in the summer.”
Draža speculated “Good for checking into spa and relaxing, huh?” Osine said “We’re actually going to a spa, in the mountains, after we reach Petropavlovsk. I was wanting to do some hang-gliding, but we might be in for a spot of bad weather during our stay. We can just get more treatments indoors until that blows over, though. We don’t really have anything else to do. Well, other than keep going on our trip, but we don’t have a schedule to meet for that.”
“Trip?” asked Tallulah, Osine answering “Our idea is after Kamchatka we head to Vladivostok and then on the old trans-Siberian route to Europe, stopping along the way for the scenery, the amenities, and all that good stuff.” Sasha asked “And after that?” Osine looked quizzical, saying “In all honesty, we don’t know. We’ve been through Siberia backward and forward so much, we were…toying with the idea of taking a more southern track, see more of the Old World, it’s such a huge continent. But we like to do our vacationing in the summer, and much south of Russia it starts to get really hot in the summer…”
Draža interjected “Not in the mountains it doesn’t!” Osine raised up her finger with a smile, saying “I like… Draža, was it?” He nodded yes, before she went on “I love the way you think, Draža! We were scoping out what you might call a crest route, sticking as high as possible through Persia on the south shore of the Caspian and then through the Himalayas.”
They went “Ooh…” as they hit it off well in conversation, eventually, as the train accelerated out of Yellowknife, leading to the suggestion by Tallulah “Maybe we could go somewhere more comfortable…perhaps our cabin? We have a three-bedroom suite. With bubble chairs.” Osine said “That sounds nice.” Draža asked, eagerly, “Would you like to?” Osine answered “Sure”, as they ambled away from the lobby in the big train car, and Osine called her parents on her hearables to tell them – and her little cousin they were taking with them – that she picked up some new friends and was going to be with them for a while.
Eventually, they reached the triplets’ cabin, Osine and the huskies making themselves at home in there, the white-haired girl settling in, practically gushing over the biggest bubble chair they had in there, a combined chair and bed in a glass bubble, big enough to easily hold three grown men…and, perhaps, big enough for four kids to squeeze in?
Osine also noticed “Hmm…you have some art on the wall?”, Tallulah replying “It’s from our penthouse. We bring this stuff to make our train cabins seem more homey.” Osine gushed “That’s nice”, before she squinted at it, eventually going “Is that hair?” Draža nodded yes, saying “From our mother. That’s the black hair that was arranged to form the core of the tree motif, and you see those other three locks of hair?” Osine gasped as she realized as she beheld the hair locks arranged under the glass case, all framed decoratively, “Yours is the copper hair, Sasha’s is the blonde hair, and Tallulah’s is the brown hair.” The triplets all nodded yes.
Osine went on “Is your mother with you here, somewhere, because it doesn’t seem…”, cut off by Tallulah holding up her watchband, pointing to it, saying “She’s always with us.” Osine just darted her eyes from side to side, intrigued yet creeped out enough to not want to inquire any further; she guessed, though, that the mother in question had died at some point in the past.
Osine just said “I see…” before changing the subject by darting her eyes to Tallulah’s legs, saying “Say, those are some interesting stockings. Bats?” Tallulah smiled and nodded, saying “Vampire bats.” Osine gasped in recognition, going with a grin “And the capes…”, pausing before asking “They have a movie house on this train. Tell me…did you see ‘Blood Empire’? The season finale?”
The triplets all nodded yes, Osine saying “Oh, that is so good, that serial. I don’t even like these vampire movies, usually, but this one has a special quality to it. I think it might be the backstory…so few feature such a creative take on the topic, complete with dragons. I’ve always loved dragons in fantasy, and maybe that’s what draws me in to this particular vampire show. You see remnants of this draconic precursor culture all over the galaxy, but it’s all such a mystery what happened to them. It’s all so ambiguous and left up to the imagination, and that always gets my mind on fire, cinema like that.” Sasha agreed “Mine too. It’s even better when you can go through the ‘Blood Empire’ encyclopedia, especially right after you’ve seen the latest episode. I know you haven’t, but it’s not like the backstory spoils anything.”
Sasha got his copy of the reference book out of his luggage, a physical bound book but made up of digital paper that could be interactive, and plunked himself down on the big bubble chair (or, arguably, bubble bed, especially considering he just laid himself out deep within the thing), followed by Draža, Tallulah, and Osine, and they went through the encyclopedia together, richly illustrated in painterly fashion, presented as if it’s a textbook from inside the fictional universe itself, consisting of fragments of knowledge gleaned about the deep history of the galaxy, the age when dragons were prevalent and ruled the stars.
Osine thoroughly enjoyed reading it with them all from cover to cover, discussing everything to do with it, and their fan theories, Osine’s favorite being the idea that in a later season, or perhaps a sequel, the dragons will turn out to not be extinct at all – particularly likely, since the viewers had known from the beginning that at least hybrids with draconic ancestry, namely the Black Paladin, still existed – but rather will return in force to take back what’s rightfully theirs.
Sasha hadn’t thought of that one before, and he became convinced over the course of that train ride that that’s how it would end: not by some statement of populist power, but rather by the whole conflict being rendered irrelevant and superceded, which made sense to him, as in his view the premise of the serial had gotten a bit stale over the course of two seasons, and there was little else they could do that would be dramatically satisfying after the stunning conclusion of the second season. Perhaps, he thought, the Sang Real, a draconic artifact after all, being used in such dramatic fashion would attract the ancient dragons out of hiding.
Passing through the Yukon Ranges and then the valleys of the Canadian, then Alaskan taiga, it struck the triplets that the sun had seemingly not even moved since they left Tennessee, lending the whole scene a creepy quality as the thick forests and even the smaller closer mountains seemed to speed past them.
Once they had crossed what had to have been the Yukon River a few times, Sasha knew that Nome, and the Bering Strait Tunnel, were near. The sun still shined on the orphans, who had long ago put on their heart-shaped sunglasses; poor Osine didn’t have any sunglasses, but she didn’t seem to mind as she just shaded her eyes with her hat, adjusting it every so often as the angle of the train relative to the sun changed with each gentle curve – given the high-subsonic speed it was designed for, the geometry of the track was rather straight.
Sasha ordered them up a midnight snack for the approaching midnight sun – at least on Nashville time, it was well past that hour anyway – consisting of a big bowl of popcorn, with a very generous dose of butter, for them all to share. Osine and the triplets smiled as they regularly grabbed the delicious treat, talked among themselves, and admired the view.
First the tree line was crossed, for the first time so far that trip – thickets of black spruce and white birch gave way to the blooming meadows of the tundra, stretching out from horizon to horizon, telling the orphans they were getting close. A flat white sheet of ice extending out toward what looked like broken seawater told them they were now on the north shore of the Bering Sea, the line paralleling the coast, giving them views of the blooming meadows to the right and the iceberg-strewn seascape to the left, characteristic of the arctic spring, all lit up by the looming sun right over the horizon, bathing it all in a golden glow, every blade of grass, every iceberg casting a long shadow.
Several tunnels gave them an appetizer on this home stretch, but then – it hit. After paralleling the coast of the Bering Sea for a long stretch, the triplets and Osine all making for the windows and looking out as surely as a sentry on a sailing ship of old, they approached a tube much larger than any they had seen so far, seeming to stretch an infinity downward into the darkness, before the soft solar-spectrum glow suffused into the boretube itself lit them up in the train as if in a magical embrace once they entered; “The Bering Strait Tunnel” Sasha said, a wondrous note to his voice.
They all, especially Sasha drank it in for all it was worth, all 60 miles of that tunnel, making sure the train’s announcement system was turned on for their suite, so they could hear the words they had been anxious to hear. Emerging out into the midnight sun a mere six minutes later, the announcer’s voice said, in that unique pilot’s tone, “Добро пожаловать в Россию” – Welcome to Russia. A few minutes later, another announcement: “We are now crossing the Arctic Circle. At this latitude the sun never sets this time of year; to your left you now may gaze upon the legendary midnight sun.”
The orphans did so, in between sighting glimpses of the Chukchi Sea, part of the Arctic Ocean, as they paralleled the coast of these arcticmost parts of Russia’s Far East. Ever so gently, after several minutes they curved leftward, heading south again toward Kamchatka, soon leaving the Arctic. “It was amazing, the Arctic” Tallulah said. Sasha said “You were right, Osine; it was amazing, the midnight sun. But I still like Bering Strait Tunnel best!” Osine just shrugged at that, saying “I’m glad you’re enjoying it. That’s what matters: to have a good time.”
After a little while they existed the verdant meadows of the tundra and were once again ensconced by the woods of the taiga, low mountains that Tallulah thought were eerily reminiscent of some western badland, only with the exotic touch of some alien planet suffused with a much colder climate, glacial heritage concealing wonders both subtle and gross, beckoning the fearless to take up a walking stick and explore its limitless expanse under that unique domed sky that was omnipresent at these high latitudes.
Draža wondered “Is it just me, or has the sun not even moved since Tennessee?” Tallulah agreed “It’s creepy, how that sun doesn’t even move. What time is it anyway?” Sasha looked at his watch, but just said “No idea. I mean, I could tell you Nashville time, but that’s rather useless out here”, as he gazed at the utterly foreign and vast landscape before them.
Osine grinned, saying “You’re not even in the same day anymore; in the Bering Strait Tunnel you crossed the International Date Line. You gained 24 hours.” Sasha shook his head, tossing his blonde ringlets back and forth, saying “I’ve never quite been able to understand that.” Draža said “It’s pneuma, though! In ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ Phileas Fogg gained a day, unbeknownst to him! Just like we did.”
Osine pointed out “Well, in ‘Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours’ Phileas Fogg went the opposite direction you did; east to west, not west to east. So no, not just like him. You will be just like him on the return trip, though.” The triplets turned their gaze toward her, Sasha trying to recount “Le tour du monde en…what?” Osine laughed, “Sorry, couldn’t resist. I’m Canadien, so I always had the pleasure of reading Jules Verne in the original française.” Draža pondered “I wish I could speak French.” Tallulah countered “You speak enough.”
Despite seeming like it would never leave them, as they moved southwestward from Chukotka into Kamchatka, the sun drew lower and lower in the sky, finally setting near the narrowest point of the northern Kamchatka Peninsula, prompting them to take off their heart-shaped sunglasses at long last.
Twilight was rather persistent, though, bathing the mountains growing before them as they sped southward into the virgin forest in a diffuse glow, cirrus clouds high up still lit by brilliant sunlight. By that time Sasha had finally figured out what time it was – maybe. He announced, as they were passing by Kozyrevsk, right down the middle of what some described as Kamchatka’s great valley, that it was eleven o’clock in the evening local time, five in the morning Nashville Time. Tallulah said “It should be bedtime…yet I’m not sleepy”, adding to the almost magical quality of that evening they spent together on that train ride across the Strait.
Speeding by more twilit-mountains than they could count or even remember, it got darker and darker, the woods looking more and more like some landscape out of a fantasy movie – as Sasha reminded them, though, places like Kamchatka were popular locations to base fantasy landscapes on, for its pristine beauty, as if it’s where the Old World met overland with something greater than itself yet not quite in the New World. Well, Sasha thought, that wasn’t too far off from the reality of it – for was not Siberia part of the New World, Russia’s Wild East, clasped hand-in-hand with the Wild West of its dearest friend and oldest ally, the United States of America?
For what seemed like hours of travel time and thousands of miles, there was seemingly nothing there, yet everyone in that cabin knew that appearances could be deceptive; hidden in those gradually darkening woods was a whole society, ranging from inhabitants whose heritage in the region stretched clear back to the last glacial period to new arrivals from the other side of the world, all dispersed throughout the scenic landscape, civilization having only truly flourished here in the last century, built up as if part of the landscape itself, rusticated in harmony with nature, like America’s own Pacific Crest staring back at itself from the other side of the northern sea.
When they reached Petropavlovsk, the end of the line, it was still nautical twilight; very much evening, yes, but even there, at a mere 53 degrees north in latitude, not quite totally dark yet. Hugging Osine goodbye, and taking their luggage out with them from the cabin that had been their home that night, they looked at the ornate architecture and interior design of the Petropavlovsk Station, evocative, much like the train itself was, of a palace built during that singular time when the Tsar held absolute power, answering to no Duma, no master, no God.
Emerging onto the platform, Sasha navigated them onto one of the spiral escalators, Tallulah’s mind coursing with thoughts of the atmosphere before her, feeling as if she had slipped into some other universe, so much of it feeling familiar, yet also unfamiliar, for her a whole new part of the New World.
Passing directly up onto the tree-lined brick boulevards in the heart of downtown Petropavlovsk, low-rise buildings all lit up for nighttime, stretching before them evocative of Haussmann’s Paris if it adopted the Nordic design with Russian flourishes pioneered in the capital half a world away on the Baltic, Tallulah gazed at the statue of a navigator, she presumed the founder of the city, the discoverer of this new land, feeling as if it knew her apprehension of the foreign people, the alien landscape, stone-cold expression in his face and eyes as if telling her “You went to California, you went to Tacoma, you saw the Cyrillic alphabet, you heard the Russian spoken in these enclaves from across the great taiga, and you thought you knew. Now, young fool, you will experience the full power of the Russian Federation.”
The sense was heightened by the reflection of the dim twilight off the metallic statue, not to mention the city lights. As the robotic luggage came out, a vehicle on the street honked lightly, causing Sasha to mince toward it and go “Oh…that’s our ride!” Tallulah asked “To the spa?” apprehensively as she took in the sight of the driver: she thought he looked Mongolian, dressed in the colorful traditional cloths of Siberia, gazing at them with a quality that reminded her of a ghost.
Draža, meanwhile, was more interested in the vehicle; a convertible automobile, top-down, open to the air and the moonlight of that shortest night of the year they were in, body clad in traditional indigenous Siberian motifs. The driver sat up front, the front row consisting of only one chair, his, with three bench seats harboring enough room to seat nine people total, all vacant – obviously, the orphans were the only customers the driver was picking up on this run.
Although Tallulah was creeped out, she and the other orphans scanned their smartwatches against the vehicle and the driver, who remained silent and all but motionless throughout, confirming with their transponders that they were indeed who they were supposed to be: dispatched by the coastal spa to pick them up.
So the triplets boarded the seats through the rear-hinged doors, and once their luggage was secure in the trunk the door to it closed and the driver started on their way, gradually accelerating, neither he nor the car betraying any sound, bar a low sound of a motor that Sasha readily recognized. Whispering to his brother, he said “Electric car. Pneuma.”
Draža retorted “Not as pneuma as Decca’s car. Hot pink convertible; a lot bigger than this one. Takes it all the way to Abingdon and back every night down that Long Hunter Freeway.” Tallulah, meanwhile, mostly gazed at the driver behind the glass barrier that separated passengers and driver, in between diverting her gaze to the city and to the surrounding mountains and ocean, viewable primarily as silhouettes by then.
She whispered to her brothers, “You brought the guns, right?” Sasha darted his eyes side-to-side before answering “Yes?” Draža said “You never know when you might need one.” Tallulah then realized “But…they would be in the trunk, wouldn’t they?” Sasha asked “What are you so scared of?” Tallulah confessed in a whisper “That driver gives me the creeps. To think we’re going on a long car ride with him…in those woods out there, who knows what might happen to us?”
Draža assured her “Oh, nothing’s going to happen to you.” Tallulah asked “What makes you so sure? I mean, with the guns locked in the trunk…” Draža cut her off, saying “Not this one”, as he opened up his jacket and plied a pistol out of a concealed pocket. Tallulah breathed a sigh of relief, as Draža went on “Black on black and in concealed pocket, so you can’t see easily, but it’s in there. Winchester semi-automatic.”
Sasha giggled, saying “Namesake of Winchester the African Grey.” Tallulah, lightening up, asked “Decca’s bird?” Draža added “And mascot of Old Dominion Dance Studio.” Sasha whispered, “Just between us, I packed ourselves fully-automatic rifle too. With plenty of ammunition.” Draža stared at his brother, going “In one of those boxes?”
Tallulah shook her head, saying “Why, that’s ridiculous. What would you use that for?” Sasha shrugged, saying “I don’t know. Bear attack?” Draža and Tallulah looked at each other, Draža confessing “Good point. Pistol might not work too good for that.” Sasha said “Best to be careful. I thought something might attack out of those dark deep woods or something…”
Much later, as they sped down the gentle curves of the road south of Petropavlovsk, their side of the road alternating having a passing lane with the other side every few miles, each direction of the road separated from the other by cable barrier, Draža pondered “Is it just me, or are these woods here not as dark as the ones at home?”
Sasha agreed “Yeah…you know, every time we go somewhere new and remote I keep expecting to finally see something darker, but I’ve yet to see anything darker than those roads in Crab Orchard Range back home.” Tallulah said, feeling a creepy atmosphere come on once again for some reason, “Maybe it’s…because there’s tall woods and high mountains?” Draža pointed out “Doesn’t explain why California wasn’t as dark.” Tallulah speculated “Maybe full moonlight makes it look brigher?” Draža retorted “I don’t remember there being any moon that night in California…”
Any time the driver looked back with those slanted brown eyes of his, face lit only dimly by moonlight and by the backlit red displays in the vehicle, the kids were startled, the last time outright gasping when they saw him. He never said a word for that whole hour; finally, some 150 miles later, they stopped, electric motor as silent as the driver, at their destination: a log-made gate, cold sea breeze caressing their faces and hair calming them down slightly from the hair-on-the-back-of-their-head mood they were in for most of the trip.
Looking closely, they saw the tell-tale glows of fire emanating from certain spots in the woods, noise whispering out from the rustle of the trees in the sea breeze indicating a locus of human activity, though well-hidden visually. Exiting from their vehicle, the orphans’ robots emerged from the trunk as the driver opened it from his seat, following the triplets into the spa’s woodlands, studded with wooden boardwalks through the lush northern forest, moonlight and starlight casting shadows that danced under the canopy formed by the old-growth trees.
The wind, along with the tactile knowledge that she was once again in an outpost of human civilization, had a reassuring effect on Tallulah – try as she might to get out into wild nature, she had always been a city girl at heart. Sasha and Draža were more enthusiastic about how the whole outpost seemed to be in tune with nature, seeking to add to and complement the landscape rather than, as would be the case with a traditional city, supplant it with some much more obvious sort of artificiality.
Very much an engineered environment, Sasha thought, yet it didn’t look like it – a design style that was much more pervasive out in the space habitats than it was on Earth, but yet another bounty of humanity’s forays into space brought back to the ancestral homeworld. As he walked that night toward their hotel suite the boy couldn’t help but wonder if constructions like this spa, like those space colonies that inspired it, were harbingers of what the future was going to be like – a topic he had a vested interest in.
After all, there was a chance he’d see the year 2100, and that assuming no advancements in rejuvenation – it had long been an on-and-off interest of Sasha’s, the little master among the triplets of researching the depths of the Web: the prospects for rejuvenation, life extension, even the conquest of senility itself. In his more sanguine moments, he dared to dream, maybe he and his brother and sister could live forever.
Finally, they came to where Sasha’s smartwatch directed them to: the spiral wooden staircase into their treehouse, suspended amid the branches of an old evergreen, dominated by rich dark woods, the finest that Kamchatkan hospitality had to offer a visitor. When they emerged into their bedroom, which they were all to share, they beheld a lodge-style fireplace – decorated by a larger-than-life wooden relief of a black beat standing up on its hind legs – at one end, and at the other end a large open window, framed by tasseled sheer white curtains, providing a gorgeous view of the open Pacific Ocean, waves looking fierce as they crashed ashore, lit aglow in silver by the moonlight.
The chilly air blowing in was invigorating, especially as it caressed the billowing sheer white curtains of their four-post bed – right by the window, and, in a touch showing the proximity to Japan, flush to the floor, layer upon layer of white silk bedsheets and pillows inviting them into the realm of dreams, so, so tempting – but even with that and all that coffee they drank on the train, they just couldn’t resist.
It was all they could do to get into their nightgowns, coincidentally – or perhaps not, considering Sasha’s usual “luck” with making everything matchy-matchy – the same white silk as their bedsheets were made out of, before plunking themselves down onto the bed, three meters wide and three meters long, more than big enough for all three of them.
Before the shadow of slumber took them, Sasha took a look at his watch: seven o’clock in the morning Nashville Time, but only one o’clock in the morning Kamchatka Time. He sleepily giggled to himself, as he realized that, per jet lag – or in their case train lag – in Nashville they were night owls, but here, playing against type, they were larks. Yes, Siberia was going to be fun, he thought, before drifting off into a long sleep, lulled by that sea breeze and the sounds of the distant waves rushing ashore.
Slept they all did, little dreamy heads plunked so deep down into those silk sheets it looked like they didn’t ever want to come out. Slept they all did, through the rest of the night…then through the sunrise…then through the morning. Despite having a full view of the sun, those rays only aroused them into wakefulness past noon, when most of the other lodgers scattered in the treehouses throughout that seaside forest had woken up and gone about enjoying all the spa had to offer a vacationer.
Not that that was much of a problem: all the pleasures still awaited them in afternoon just as surely as they would have had they woken up in the morning. Waking up, they luxuriated in that bed until they felt up to getting up and getting their clothes on. Picked out by Sasha, their outfits for the day were matchy-matchy: sailor-style outfits, pantsuits for the boys, and a dress for the girl.
“So, Sasha, what have you got picked out for us for our spa day?” asked Tallulah, Sasha answering “I got us a good package this afternoon!” He then went over everything he had planned for them there, and his brother and sister nodded in eagerness, eventually practically skipping on the boardwalk once they made their way down out of their treehouse, over to the big log treehouse – built into the forest like the lodging, but much more interconnected between the trees with enclosed hallways, forming a much larger structure all told – with a good view of the beach, still shaded and shrouded in woods, skylights and wide-open windows – clad with sheer curtains for privacy while still letting in light and fresh air – pervading the interior.
Gone was the creepout of last night, as an elegant, full-figured, and – in Draža’s mind, very beautiful – woman who looked Japanese and wore a traditional kimono greeted them and escorted them to the room where their first treatment was to take place, in a fashion that was downright bubbly by Eastern standards. Shuffling off their sailor outfits, they climbed onto the spa tables and covered themselves with the provided sheets, the tables smelling of fresh northern wood, fireplace emanating a relaxing glow as the smell of white birch wood filled the room.
Throughout the hallways and the rooms, a pervasive motif – flowers contained in glass spheres filled with water, their middle portions evacuated of water and filled with candles, providing more illumination beyond what the outside light and the fireplaces throughout the spa proper part of the resort provided, not to mention aromas that at once awakened and relaxed the body, evocative of a taiga people’s conception of what heaven must be like.
The impression was only heightened by the number of people the triplets saw who looked like native Siberians – all in traditional indigenous dress – even if most of the people there looked more Russian. Between them, people who looked like they were from East Asia, and even the Middle East and India, they were impressed by the diversity of the crowd the place drew; in a globalized world one might have expected all these tourist destinations to attract much the same clientele, but the vibe here was quite different from anywhere else they’d been before. Locality, and the realities of distance, still worked their will to shape human geography in subtle yet decisive ways, even in the new millennium.
In that treatment room of theirs Sasha, Draža, and Tallulah just stared at that fireplace and the flickering candles, not to mention the soft billowing of the sheer white curtains, making them quite relaxed by the time another woman, this one a native Siberian, in full traditional-style dress, came in and started giving them their first procedure: an exfoliating scrub thoroughly covering all their bodies, mineral salts specially selected by their therapists to be gentle on that smooth supple skin of youth, still vibrant and growing; after all, though they liked to maintain their beauty and luxuriate in wholesome attention as much as anyone, the children had no need of the sort of harsher treatments used to combat the ravages of old age.
On and on the scrub went, the initial feeling on the kids being rather harsh, but the sort of harshness that soon gives way to a rejuvenating sensation of cleanliness. When their scrubs were completed, it was time to paint their bodies down with a paste, harvested from Pacific algae, that was supposed to nourish and detoxify the skin, stretching from their necks to their toes, encasing them as if they were in cocoons, feeling especially relaxing as they could hear the crash of the waves, growing fiercer than they were yesterday as the sun kicked up some afternoon winds: where they were, wind and surf could emanate across fetches stretching clear to Hawaii, or even beyond.
After all, Sasha thought during his relaxing time that day, they weren’t too far from one of the termini of the longest straight line it was possible to traverse on the face of the Earth without hitting land: 20,000 miles, extending from Kamchatka through the Drake Passage and the Mozambique Channel over to Balochistan.
As that settled in, their first trio of women departed and was soon replaced by another set of therapists, the ones who were to carry out their next treatment. Wipe after wipe, scrub after scrub, caress after caress, they each gave a gentle treatment to the faces of the children, making sure to nourish, moisturize, and above all relax them, eventually painting them all up with white paste of not too different construction as that which encased their bodies, capped off by slices of kiwi fruit being placed over their eyes.
Tallulah giggled as she felt them being put on: it was such a classic spa treatment, and she only imagined how she must look now: much like her mother did when she was little, she looked like a monster from outer space, but such was the price, the delightful and delicious price, of feeling good and looking pretty at the end of it all.
Another trio of women came in, robotic wheels proceeding in behind them in quiet but still easily perceptible fashion, for their next treatment. Fixing little cloth barriers around their scalp so as to not interfere with the facial paste, they drew each of the children’s manes back, and dangled their ringlets over the small tubs that the robotic chassis transported: ‘twas time to get their hair treated.
Nothing strenuous, nor anything that would change their look much: no, what Sasha had in mind was just a shampooing, though he had before coming into the spa surreptitiously ordered the hairstylists to put a special something in all their hair that would make it look shinier, not too unlike the shine of the classic platinum blonde look, though without the blonding part.
Their hair was pampered as their faces and bodies luxuriated under the wraps – first their manes were shampooed, then they had the solution for the extra shine put onto them. Finally, they were left there, to luxuriate under the ocean breezes and dancing lights of the sun, the fires, and the candles, white birch wood mixing in with the aromas from the wicks, not to mention all the stuff they had on their bodies, from head to toe.
After a long while, the time came for it all to be washed off. Maneuvering copper frames each containing multiple showerheads to where they were directly above them and to the side, the women – the orphans knew not their identities nor even their appearance, save for the rustle characteristic of long dresses, and soft hands characteristic of youth – removed the kiwi slices from the children’s eyes and turned the shower on.
Jets of water streamed forth, blasting the algae wrap, the salts, the facial products, all of it, off their little bodies, the therapists moving the jets and the frames around subtly so as to ensure all the material was washed off. Then, the time came for a less intensive showering – the showering that was due to their hair, which took off the shampoo and the product that was to make their ringlets shine.
The therapists dried off everyone with soft and luscious towels, making sure to pay attention to every lock of hair, every part of the body, so as to make sure the orphans were totally dried off. Tallulah gasped silently as she saw one of her brunette ringlets tumble in front of her: she knew that Sasha had given a little something extra in that shampoo, but she just giggled; after all, it had been a while since she got her hair pampered in a big way, and she did adore that fresh-out-of-the-salon shine.
Their next treatment: a bubble bath, all drawn up for them in another room, which they were escorted to by their aestheticians, fully visible in a diverse array of regional traditional dresses, the sailor outfits the orphans came in following behind on a robotic clothes frame as they donned spa robes, complete with the spa logo and their names in Cyrillic letters written on the fabric.
Draža giggled, joking “You know, Sasha, I’m really feeling what you told me once: that Cyrillic is a better way to write. I don’t even need an accent mark!” Referring, of course, to how his name in Cyrillic was written “Дража”. Sasha rolled his eyes, saying “Come on, Draža, we’re abroad! We’re supposed to be proud Slovenians!” Tallulah asked, only half-teasingly, “I thought we were supposed to be Americans?” Sasha waved his hand dismissively, saying “Meh, that too.”
Their bubble bath, which they climbed into, was already nice and hot on their pampered skin, steaming up from the suds as they luxuriated in it and the staff made sure they were comfortable, before turning on the jets in the bathtub ever-so-gently, and leaving them to their treatment for a while.
Their bathroom, accessed through a fusuma with an Eastern-style depiction of whales frolicking in a warm whirlpool, was wood-clad much like the room they were in earlier, complete with the flowers in the glass spheres, the candles, and the crackling fireplace, only it had a clear view out to the woods and the ocean, including the beach itself, the occasional passer-by or surfer visible in the distance; it had really seemed, at least to the children, that the waves were getting bigger, the skies cloudier, though with white puffy cumulus scattered every so often like an Impressionist painting rather than anything that looked threatening – “no derechos here”, thought Tallulah, as she luxuriated in the very stereotype of girlish heaven.
Sasha and Draža, meanwhile, just closed their eyes and almost fell asleep, though the odd crash of a wave – or was it a whale? – and stiff gust of the sea breeze woke them up, where they played with their suds and the window, sliding the inner window back and forth, making it cover the outer window and uncover it.
While the outer window was a regular transparent window, the inner window was much more artsy, consisting of a stained glass depiction of, once again, the North Pacific’s marine life, in Japanese drawing style yet brought to life with a method right from western Europe, so reminiscent of the aesthetic gift that had kept on giving through three different centuries by that point: Art Nouveau, the first, and some, including the brothers in that moment, thought still the greatest, of many “fusions” between Western and indigenous artistic traditions, an echo, Sasha and Draža had read some historians say, of the long-ago Hellenistic period, the culmination of the first great Western expansion.
Sasha couldn’t help but wander his mind over to all that he had read about the ancient precursors of the West as we know it, the civilization that had left an indelible mark on his ancestral homeland of Slovenia, and his not-so-ancestral homeland of America, a country that so dearly imitated ancient Greece and Rome that its public buildings were routinely used as on-location sets for depictions of worlds where the Empire never fell.
Squint one’s eyes at those sites and one could almost convince oneself that that classical world was forever, but fall it did; despite achievements that its successors wouldn’t hold a candle to until the Age of Discovery, even the Age of Industry, the flame of the Hellenistic world burned out before it could reach to the Moon, to Mars, to all those πλάνητες ἀστέρες, new discoveries making the rise of darkness in its wake ever more puzzling with each passing year, it seemed: they were so close, yet, it seemed, not close enough. Would the West’s modern incarnation suffer the same fate?
A distant crack interrupted Sasha from his reverie – it must have been a whale, he thought. After a while, the orphans tired of their bubble bath, and the water was turning cooler; as if on cue, their therapists returned, helping to extricate them from the bathtub, and giving them another thorough towel-cleaning, their bodies feeling cleaner and more pampered than they had in…was it weeks? Months? Certainly a long time.
But that wasn’t the end; in yet another room, behind yet another set of fusuma – this one depicting in Japanese style European men and women in the nude, frolicking in a heavenly cloudscape, intimate and sensual, as if capturing on the paper the feeling of being massaged – they encountered the site of their next treatment: three massage tables, in a room much like the first one they were in, only looking out on a different angle, an amphitheater visible in between the sheer white curtains, parted so as to give the orphans a view of the site, home to a crowd gathered for…something.
As the orphans climbed under the sheets, the uniquely comforting heat of a radioisotope blanket and bedsheet suffusing their bodies from neck to toe, their masseuses rotated in and got to work, kneading, mashing, and stroking their whole bodies as if they were rolling pins flattening out dough, flattening out the least bit of tension, the least bit of toxin, the least bit of imperfection from their relaxing day.
Soon it became clear what the event the crowd were gathered for outside in the amphitheater was: on stage soon emerged some performers in elaborate traditional costumes, starting to sing with a sound that was deep, guttural, and striking, quite unlike anything on the Ryman’s roster.
All three of them perked up at the hearing of that sound that the masseuses had to do a bit of extra work just to keep them relaxed. Their attention was rapt, though, as the singers finished their piece. Draža couldn’t help but ask, relaxed to the point of dreaminess but still lucid, “What was that? That style of singing?”
One of the masseuses answered “Rekuhkara.” Tallulah asked “What’s Rekuhkara?” The masseuse clarified “Traditional Ainu throat singing. You’re from America, so you might be more familiar with the Inuit style. I had the privilege once of seeing an Inuit throat singing concert in Kalaallit Nunaat. Any style of throat singing, once you hear it live, you never forget it. It always stays with you.” Sasha mused “Isn’t that the truth?”
Soon the Ainu throat singers were succeeded by another act, which closed out the evening concert, one the orphans might have liked even better than the Ainu style, and kept them mesmerized the whole time as they got their treatment – the masseuse, upon being asked by Tallulah “What’s that style?” answered “Itelmen.” Tallulah mused dreamily “Itelmen…”, before her therapist elaborated “They’re the nationality native to this area”, kneading Tallulah’s back some more and sending her on a cloud as the throat singing resonated all over the beach, the triplets all determined, no words exchanged between them even needed for understanding, that they just had to learn how to sing like that for their own performances; like their massage, it was just too good.
Once their hours of massage were over, totally relaxed, they were helped up off their beds, and they once again put on their spa robes, not only for modesty but also for comfort – after all, away from the warmth of plutonium beds and essential oils, it could get cold on the Pacific seacoast of Kamchatka, especially now that the sun had set again, and its radiant heat was but a pale ember of its daytime splendor.
There was still enough twilight to provide illumination amid the chilling evening breezes of their next treatment, in yet another room attached to another tree much like the first room they were treated in, looking out over the darkening waters through open French doors draped with sheer curtains drawn back for visibility’s sake, the full moon rising in red, then orange, then yellow splendor as it climbed into the sky, opposite the descending sun.
Still clad in their spa robes and all warm from their massage, plunked down on plush recliner chairs, their hands and then their feet were all put in tubs to soak in by their therapists, a new trio who had come out to service them, luxuriating in the Pacific wind as the trees rustled gently around them, as if succumbing to the magic of the moon and the night, stars ever-so-gradually coming out, giving the orphans a view of the night sky far better than what they ever could see above the Grand Ole Opry.
As the triplets actually started to shiver a bit in the evening chill, Draža turned to Tallulah, saying “Well, we wanted to get out of the heat…”, causing them all to giggle. To the sound of wind chimes and the sips of herbal tea fed to them by their therapists, the children relaxed in the final part of their big spa day that night.
After the nails were soaked, time came to file them down to what each of the triplets wanted, shaping them to the desired geometry, buffing them for the polish that would come later. Cuticles were cared for: pushed back, trimmed, oiled, and moisturized. After hand and foot massage time, a fine art that made them even more blissed-out than they were to begin with, their biggest decision of the treatment came: as one of the therapists asked, “What sort of nail polish do you want? Plain, solid color, a design? There are lots of fun possibilities.”
Tallulah smiled “There sure are.” With a relaxed sigh, she said “But I’ve already made up my mind: give us dark blue, like dark night sky blue with spacey nebula, with stars in the shape of constellation Virgo. All three of us, both fingernails and toenails.” Sasha and Draža were a bit surprised with how bold Tallulah was, and by how it seemed like exactly the right idea to both of them, perhaps because they could swear they could see Virgo peeking out from under the dim haze of the slowly receding twilight.
Tallulah explained to the therapists, so relaxed it came out all dreamy-eyed as she reminisced, “Our mother was called Zara: an old Arabian name meaning bright, shining, brilliant…and beautiful. Just like mother was. Virgo was the sign she was born under, the sign of the Virgin, and she was a virgin when she gave life to all three of us…under that same constellation…”
Amid the rush of waves in the distance, the gusts of chilling breezes, the therapists painted all their nails in the same pattern: Sasha’s, Draža’s, and Tallulah’s. They all smiled and practically gushed over the end result once it was finished; holding it up under the moonlight, they felt like true star children.
The very last treatment came soon afterward: Sasha had ordered a bit of makeup application. So on them was put some concealer, some powder, a bit of mascara, some lip balm (clear for Sasha and Draža, colored slightly red for Tallulah), and after a while they were all done with their treatment, the therapists eventually leaving them, and the orphans spending some time on the wooden balcony, gazing down at the beach and taking in the view of the Kamchatkan wilderness as it got dark and the stars – yes, even those of Virgo – came out to twinkle, as if reaching out through the orphans’ eyes and saying “Come dance with me”.
As the night went on, the triplets stayed on their balcony, for some reason not feeling like going out onto the beach that night, or back into the treehouses, or anywhere at all, as if moving away from the balcony they saw the stars come out on would spoil the moment of what was already turning into a magical night.
Eventually even the few night surfers and the distant bonfire partyers tired, and an almost eerie quietude settled in over the spa, rushing water acquiring an almost ominous quality in the silvery moonlight, the white noise punctuated by the odd woodland creature or two further inland.
And the triplets tired too; having had their fill of that magical evening, they donned their sailor-style outfits – not wanting to carry them all the way back to their treehouse – and sauntered their way through the wood-clad corridors connecting the treehouses of the spa proper. Emerging onto the boardwalk and on the way to their cabin, they suddenly encountered a flash of white shuffling in the silvery moonlight.
Although startled at first, they soon realized it was a boy – a very little boy, too little to have even been breeched yet, skipping through the boardwalk all alone in his white dress, right toward the triplets. “Throat singers!” he said, as he beheld the triplets.
Draža asked him “Excuse me, throat singers?”, the boy nodding and saying “Throat singers, down there!”, gesturing back toward where he was coming from and pointing downward. Intrigued, Tallulah turned to her brothers, saying “You want to meet one just as bad as I do. Admit it.” She turned to the boy, saying “Could you take us to them?”
The boy obliged them, going back the way he came down the boardwalk, into a rather remote and dark section of woods, Sasha eventually saying “I doubt there’s any throat singers over here. I mean, if you were a throat singer would you be in a dark woods…”, trailing off as they reached their destination: a wood-clad tube right there amid the old-growth trees, a subtle warm light emanating from it.
Turning toward his brother and sister, Draža said “Just like he said…down there.” Kneeling down to his level – well, as close to his level as he could reach – Draža said “Thank you. They’re down in there?” The little boy nodded yes, pointing down there into that entrance to what was clearly some sort of underground installation, saying “I saw them myself!”
Darting his eyes to his two siblings, Draža said to the little boy “I think we can take it from here. My name’s Draža, what’s yours?” He replied “Alexei.” Draža said “Pleased to meet you. Now run along!”, the boy obliging as he skipped back toward the woods. Tallulah asked, nervously as much as curiously, “What do you see down there?”
Sasha decided to stick his head down, and his eyebrows raised when he thought out loud “Library.” Tallulah interjected, incredulously, “Library!?”, before she stuck her head down too, beholding a rolling librarian’s ladder perched next to a shelf, the flat top of the shelf located so conveniently close to the entrance to the topside it must have been a deliberate part of the design.
Draža stuck his head in too, saying “Alexei must have explored this place. Let’s go in.” The children made their way, jumping down the hole and onto the top of the library shelf, not being able to quite stand up tall and not hit the ceiling, excepting when they were directly under the access port, but they were able to crouch down and crawl along the top, the library stretching as far as they could see in all directions, a sight that caused Tallulah’s and Draža’s eyes to widen as they felt an ominous dankness come over them with each mincing movement.
As they crawled along the expanse of the shelf, much longer than it was wide, Tallulah said “I feel like Alice when she went down rabbit hole.” Draža asked “Do you see anything?” to no one in particular, Sasha answering “Just a library.” Tallulah asked “Is this spa supposed to have a subterranean library attached to it?” Sasha went “Not that I know of.” Tallulah then thought out loud “Then what is this place?”
Sasha then led them down some more, before pausing, Draža asking “What’s wrong?”, Sasha answering “Oh, it’s just my jacket. The wayfinder is crunching against my skin. It would be more comfortable if I extricate it.” Tallulah asked him rhetorically “You brought our artifact in here? In your jacket?” Sasha answered as he maneuvered with his arms and fingers “Our paternal inheritance. I can’t very well leave it in a tree…”, trailing off as he realized “That’s odd. It’s not pointing where it should.”
Tallulah retorted “How would you know?” Sasha replied “I know direction coast points and I know where we are and where we’re oriented in relation to that, and I know where coordinates are I mapped at our mother’s tomb. This is now pointing the opposite way!” Draža asked “Which way would that be?” Sasha replied, in a whisper indicating he was creeped out, “Same way we’re crawling.” Draža replied in a whisper “Holy pneuma.”
Following the compass-like artifact down the top of the library bookshelf, the Gothic expanse – a striking contrast to the rest of the spa that should perhaps have alerted the children that that area was not truly part of the same installation – they gasped as they saw where their compass pointed them toward, once it started pointing toward their right instead of diagonally.
For before them was a large open chamber, much like a reading hall or a study room, resembling the stone Gothic architecture seen in western European cathedrals, or – and this similarity struck Tallulah – a mausoleum. And before them there were also readers: for paging through books and going through motions were figures in black cloaks faces so hidden behind the hoods they couldn’t make them out.
Draža whispered “Throat singers?” Tallulah said “I don’t think these are throat singers.” Sasha whispered, puzzled more than ever, “Why is our compass pointing toward them?” Tallulah said “I don’t know”, before adding as she watched them thumb through books in black gloves, “Maybe we should get out of here.” Sasha said back “Where’s your adventurous spirit? Our donor left us this and said for us to follow. Well, let’s follow.” Tallulah said sarcastically “After you…”
The triplets remained in place, staring at the figures who seemed more and more to go about their tasks with smooth automation, before they all simultaneously got up and started walking off, the triplets looking at each other, Sasha tracking the changes in the needle as the mysterious figures moved away and changed direction. He said “Beyond shadow of doubt; they are what compass points towards. We must follow!”, as he climbed the library shelves all the way down to the floor, followed by his brother and sister.
Keeping abreast of where the compass was pointing, and making sure to not get so close to the figures – Sasha started thinking they had to be monks – as to attract their attention, they all followed where the compass pointed, through labyrinthine Gothic corridors hewn from light-colored stone, until they emerged out of a portal, an inlet where fresh sea air blew in from, right on the beach, large waves crashing ashore as clouds passed rapidly in front of the full moon, its silvery glow illuminating the sailboat close to shore, a form resembling a racing yacht, the “monks” having already boarded it by the time the children emerged.
Sasha’s face lit up when he realized “Hey, our compass points towards that boat…and towards the coordinates I figured originally. They must be a conveyance…”, taking off through the beach and into the tidewater, braving each wave by wading out toward the sailboat. Draža asked “What are you doing?” as he instinctively followed his brother, as much out of intrigue at his idea as a desire to protect him. Tallulah, recognizing Sasha’s intent, said “If you’re going, I’m going!”.
They waded out into the shallower part of the ocean, their outfits and their bodies becoming drenched with the saltwater, but they were nevertheless able to make it all the way out to where the sailboat was, grabbing onto the boarding ladder, climbing it in mincing fashion, making sure there were no “monks” watching them on deck. Oddly enough, there weren’t, so the children rushed in stealthy fashion onto the deck, taking a split second to behold the sailboat before nerves got the best of Draža, scoping out several large old-style chests on deck that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Golden Age of Piracy, were it not for the obviously more modern materials they were using, before trying to open one of them.
Surprisingly enough, the first one he tried was empty, and, beckoning his brother and sister, they climbed into it, shutting the lid on them but not locking it, all the better to get airflow and be able to surreptitiously monitor the crew of the ship they had stowed away on. It wasn’t too long until, untold rock and rolls later, they beheld through the crack the mysterious cloaked figures start to roam above deck, lifting anchor and setting full sail, lurching the orphans in their trunk as they set off for…somewhere. Wherever it was, it was where their donor’s compass was pointing, according to Sasha, so they were on the right track.
Right track or wrong track, though, they were now committed – with a crew of unknown quantities, their black cloaks and black gloves lending them a look that couldn’t be readily described as friendly. Nevertheless, Sasha was convinced that this crew, this ship, this voyage, held the key to the long-time mystery of where exactly their paternal inheritance pointed to, why their donor wished them to go there. They must be related, Sasha reassured himself, as his brother and sister couldn’t help but wonder if Sasha had stowed them onto the sort of ship from whence they were unlikely to ever come back.
Hours passed, with the cloaked figures going on and off the deck of the ship in the silvery slow, light and shadow moving as the ship rocked and rolled with the waves of the sea, growing larger and…fiercer? The triplets started to become nervous when they caught sight of a massive dark cloudbank toward wherever it was they were headed, distant cracks of thunder echoing amid the white noise of the sea spray that was starting to moisten the deck.
Not knowing their intent, the triplets opened the trunk only haltingly and infrequently, so as to get some glimpse as to what was going on. They suspected more and more about a certain uncanny quality they observed in the cloaked figures, the “monks” – they didn’t seem altogether human.
Finally, the orphans sighted a conical-shaped island ahead, more and more enshrouded by fogbanks, steep rocky slopes exposed on all sides. As they drew closer, Sasha peeked out as much as he dared, during a time when there were no “monks” on deck, and checked the direction of the island: the donor’s wayfinder pointed straight to it. Sasha thought, and Draža and Tallulah agreed In silence: this had to be the coordinates off the coast of Kamchatka the compass-like artifact was pointing to all along.
They made a close approach of the coast, heavy surf by the beach rocking the orphans so hard they tumbled toward the back of the chest as one particularly big wave hit. That didn’t scare them nearly as much as what happened a few minutes later; as they made their closest approach to the shore, dropped anchor, and lowered the sails, the children gasped as the trunk was opened fully by one of the “monks”: beholding the face in the moonlight, under the black cloak, they discovered the truth they had started to suspect. The “monks” weren’t human at all: they were skeletal forms, clearly mechanical in operation; humanoid robots, built and programmed for some unknown purpose.
For a split second the triplets were sure they were going to join the silent majority…or worse. But no: after a few seconds that felt like an eternity, the cloaked robot turned his head away and sauntered away in the fashion of an automaton, leaving the orphans to take deep breaths as they got over the shock.
It took them a few minutes to come to their senses, and realize they were now right on top of the island. By then a mist had started falling, and the wind had kicked up enough to blow the children’s ringlets behind their head, all billowing as dark clouds rose higher in the sky, clearly approaching the island.
Draža said, relieved, “That was close!” Sasha pondered “They either don’t see us, or they don’t see us as a threat.” Tallulah, meanwhile, could only think out loud “What do you think they are?” Cautiously, hanging onto whatever they could grab ahold of – the rim of the trunk, then the railings on deck – they emerged from their hiding place, standing right out in the open as the black-cloaked robots went about their routine as if they weren’t even there.
Tallulah pondered “They definitely don’t see us. They don’t mind us!” After several minutes pondering that almost surreal sight, of animated skeletons in black cloaks going about…whatever it was they were doing, Sasha checked his wayfinder and said “This has to be the place! The place our donor wanted us to go! It’s this island.”
Draža wondered “Where are we, anyway?” Sasha said “Obviously one of the Kuril Islands. I would say Oyakoba, but it doesn’t look it. I think…it might be Shirinki.” Tallulah asked “Where’s Shirinki?” Sasha smiled in the driving mist, saying “Southwest of the spa. And over the line. Congratulations, Tallulah! Welcome to Japan!”
They silently watched as the black-cloaked robots busted out a shore boat, to carry themselves the remaining distance to the steep coast. Sasha turned to his brother and sister, saying “We must follow them!” Draža asked rhetorically “Onto the island?” Tallulah shook her head side to side, saying “We’ve come too far to turn back now!”, as the orphans boarded the small boat together with the skeletal cloaked robots, side-by-side as one of the automations rowed amid the heavy surf, approaching the coast as close as they dared before making anchor and tethering themselves to the rocky steep shoreline with a grappling hook, deployed out of a device resembling a harpoon.
In the driving mist, the rock and roll of the waves, the receding moonlight under the ominous storm clouds approaching, and the sheer proximity to the nightmarish visage of those automatons, the children became very nervous, to the point that if their ringlets weren’t being buffeted by the strong winds cycling around the island the hair would have stood up.
Following the automatons onto the coast, being sure to watch the gap between the boat and the shore, they stepped onto terra firma for the first time in what felt like forever. Sasha checked his wayfinder as he made his way in behind the skeletal robots, down a cleverly hidden entrance, camouflaged to look like the prevailing tundra, rapidly receding into complete darkness as the portal led to an underground tunnel.
Turning on their smartwatch’s light feature, their screens at maximum illumination, they pressed on into the dank corridor, winds from the approaching storm outside streaming in as if it was an entrance to fairy land from the old British tales, those myths where in some enchanted dank wood a man slips through a hollow and only emerges a thousand years later, feeling like no time had passed at all.
The Gothic mausoleum-like décor gave them the creeps, especially since, as Tallulah put it, “Is it just me, or does this place remind you of Mother’s tomb?” Almost right after that, Draža gasped as he caught sight of something: a body, mummified remnants clinging onto what was little more than a skeleton, humped over to the edge of the hallway.
Swallowing their fear, they pressed on, following their donor’s wayfinder clear through a veritable labyrinth of corridors under the volcanic mountain, seeing decayed remnants of people’s belongings, covered in cobwebs, along with yet more skeletons and mummies, their numbers increasing as they got deeper in.
Draža asked, whispering, “Why do you think they’re all dead? All these people?” Sasha said “I can only surmise that it’s a tomb.” Tallulah whispered back “This place is a hundred times creepier than mother’s tomb.” Draža wondered “If it’s a tomb, how come the bodies are just strewn about?” Tallulah pondered “Maybe something happened to them…”
After a while, they came to the end of the main corridor, the wayfinder still pointing straight ahead, through a partially opened stone door; squeezing through and finding a Gothic-style dome, reminiscent of the inner sanctum in their mother’s tomb under far-distant Opry Tower.
“There’s light in here”, noted Draža, who walked mincingly along with the other triplets to an elevated well-like structure, surrounded by desks, glowing red from a backlight below, eerily reminiscent of the wayfinder, with the arrow pointing straight towards it. Sasha tested it by moving around this most central piece of the underground dome, and sure enough, it pointed right toward the shallow pit.
Craning themselves so they could look at the central pit surrounding the desks, they saw it: a book, backlit in red just like the compass, angular motifs all over the cover, resting on a tray that itself glowed red, along with a metal sheet like the one their message from their father was in, only this one having cut-outs instead of any text.
The triplets looked at each other, with Tallulah saying “Well, this has to be it.” Sasha, not knowing what would happen to him if he disturbed anything in the underground facility, swallowed his fear and reached out his arm, finally taking in one swift motion the glowing-red book and the metal sheet, clutching them with his hands, and placing the sheet in the pocket of his jacket.
Sasha said, nervously, “Our paternal inheritance?” Tallulah wondered “A book? And a metal sheet?” Draža pondered “Yeah…what is this?” They inspected with their watch-powered flashlights the rest of the circular table and the ornate chairs that surrounded it, gasping when they turned one around, a mummified body staring at them.
At the arm on his chair, the corpse held a note: reading, in Slovenian, “Forgive me, my heirs.” Tallulah pondered in horror “My heirs…? Are you thinking…” Draža said “This has to be him. Who else would have an inheritance our wayfinder would lead to?” Sasha said “Slovenian too…it has to be him.” Her voice almost cracking, Tallulah said “We truly are orphans. Our father’s dead too.”
Draža was merely wondering “What could have happened to him?” They searched and searched that inner sanctum for clues, and they indeed did find belongings scattered about, covered with the dusts and cobwebs of decay, even inscriptions, many of which alluded to immortality, to something called “Tachlit”.
Sasha pondered “Tachlit…that sounds familiar.” Draža tried his best to remember “It sounds like something that would possibly in mother’s library? Think, Sasha!” Sasha racked his brain out, before his eyes went open, going “It was! That’s…a word some mystics use to describe the end of the universe. The final point of unification. God.”
Tallulah wondered, a creeped-out tone to her voice “What are we in the middle of, some kind of a cult?” Draža darted his eyes back and forth, saying “We have what we came for…let’s go before the weather gets any worse.” Sasha said, shining his light all over the tomb-like interior, “I would say I wish I could stay longer, but…” Trailing off, he added, looking at his brother and sister “I do have a bad feeling about the idea of sticking around longer too. Let’s go.”
They moved with a fast walk to exit the inner sanctum, but not before Sasha turned around and whispered, in the direction of the corpse keeping watch over his inheritance all those years, “Rest in peace, father.”
They walked out considerably faster than they walked in, not wanting to attract any unwanted attention, and intent on beating the storm they knew was approaching. However, when they emerged at the front entrance, they beheld raw driving rain, winds easily at gale force ripping across the landscape, waves so high crashing onto the steep coast that their white spray was reaching the orphans’ heads, leaving the taste of saltwater on their mouths and in their eyes.
“I think…”, Draža said, “It’s too late to beat the storm.” Tallulah said, in shock, “One so bad at this time of year?” Sasha said “I was tracking a typhoon, but it wasn’t supposed to be this bad here.” Draža could only surmise “It must have veered north!” Sasha wondered “There’s no shelter on this island…it’s just steep tundra and rock. Maybe we should go back in there until the weather clears?” He said that with a scared tone to his voice, as he saw the shore boat bob up and down in truly tremendous action that he hadn’t seen since that time they sailed the Drake Passage together.
They minced back toward the tunnel, gaining shelter from the wind, but then…they stopped in their tracks, as Tallulah gasped almost silently. They beheld points of light, glowing eyes approaching them at high speed, soon resolving to luminescent insect-like forms, millipede-like mechanical legs speeding at them through the tunnel.
Screams erupted as they realized the robots were coming after them, and they were skeletal in form – these skeletons, unlike those on the ship, did see them as a threat. Wasting no time, they almost instinctually plunked themselves down into the shore boat, cutting their anchors and rowing as hard as they could on the crashing waves toward the racing yacht, which was still out there, bobbing and rolling but still sailable even in the harsh weather.
Going nearly vertically up and then down on each wave, it seemed at first they were making no progress at all, but then their saltwater-drenched eyes beheld glimpses of the coast, receding with each glimpse, at first with only a camouflaged windswept tundra slope for them to see, but later on with the insectoid robots gazing at them in full view, scaring the wits out of the children and prompting them to row ever-harder, until they approached the yacht.
They dared not approach too closely, because there was a risk in the rough seas of crashing their heads against the rather hard hull in the tumbling surf, so, they chanced jumping right onto the boarding ladder from the shore boat, first Sasha, then Tallulah, then Draža, all of them making it, though it was perhaps the scariest leap they’d ever done in their lives.
Ladder slippery because of the driving rain pouring onto and off of it, not to mention the swells of saltwater nearly knocking them off their perches, they minced upward onto the deck, finding the ship abandoned. Sasha led them down below decks – they knew from their experience sailing around the world that the first thing they needed were harnesses and ropes for themselves, to ensure they aren’t tumbled overboard.
Fastening themselves onto the ship on deck, they brought the anchor up and unfurled the sails, catching the storm-force winds, lurching them as the ship took off, heading into the storm and the surf but away from the robots on the island, eventually receding into the distance, obscured by rain, fog, and spray. Tallulah shouted in the driving raw rain “Are you sure this is safe?”
Sasha shouted back “Safer than those robots, I’m sure!” Draža added “Yes, Tallulah! They were coming after us! You saw them!” The orphans were thrown up above deck and slammed below, from side to side, but the harnesses and the railing kept them right up as they operated the ship’s wheel, and tended the sails in the building typhoon.
Draža had ahold of the wheel, Sasha oversaw the sails, and Tallulah helped out however she could, Draža shouting “How do you like that, huh? Just like the Drake Passage!”, laughing in the face of the rain, the wind, the thunder. And the lightning that flashed before them, giving them ever-so-brief glimpses of the world beyond what could be illuminated by the ship’s own floodlights.
Tallulah, looking outward most of the time as she was not busy with helping the boys, could swear she saw the water forming a spiral motion in the distance, almost like the outer edge of a great whirlpool, though she figured she must be seeing things: the great storm they faced down in the Drake Passage was at night, and they all thought they saw many things that weren’t really out there. The sheer strain of the heavy weather did things to a man.
Nevertheless, she worried, asking Sasha, “Are we getting anywhere?” Sasha looked at his display at the helm, presumably containing an inertial navigation system, shouting “Yes! We have to beat against the wind in a typhoon, so it’s slow going, but yes, we are downrange of the island! We’re heading away from it!”
She could only surmise the instruments were telling them the truth – it’s not like she could see any land, but that in itself was a good sign…maybe. A not-so-good sign was when a particularly long bolt of lightning illuminated the sea before them, and she gasped as she noticed something. “There’s another boat out there!” she shouted, Sasha retorting “What are you talking about?” Tallulah clarified as she pointed, best she could given the extreme rock of the boat, “Thataway! I saw a sail against the lightning!”
Draža countered “The lightning makes many…”, before another bolt happened to illuminate it in the distance: the silhouette of a billowing sail was unmistakable. Draža told Sasha “There is another ship out there!” Sasha couldn’t doubt them – even the phantasms in the Drake Passage had not seemed as real as what his brother and sister were describing – but nevertheless, who would be out on a sailboat on a night like this unless they had to be?
In the fullness of time it became clear that it was not someone – but rather something. Far from a hallucination of Tallulah’s, Sasha noticed “We’re being deflected!” Draža asked “What did you say?” Sasha clarified “It’s like we’re being drug by some spiral motion.” Tallulah shouted, scared, “Like a maelstrom?”, before another bolt of lightning flashed in the driving raindrops, the first in a long while, revealing their counterpart as being much closer, now almost perpendicular of where it was.
Even Sasha caught that, his eyes widening despite the raindrops feeling like hailstones on his poor beleaguered head, so tired he could swear he was hallucinating by that point, but no hallucination ever felt or looked so real as this did. He was wide awake, despite being bone-tired.
As he caught glimpses as they were tossed on top of the waves, the triplets all started to get concerned, Draža asking “Why is that boat coming so close to us?”, as Sasha said “We’re being pulled in a spiral motion!” Tallulah went, horrified, “It is a maelstrom! Just like in Jules Verne!”
Draža suggested “Maybe we should send a distress call!” Tallulah added “Or at least contact Decca! Or June Bug! Or somebody! So they know where we are!” Sasha’s mouth opened, filling his throat with saltwater spray, as he pondered that nobody would know what happened to them – the thought hadn’t even crossed his mind when they set out on this adventure; it was just one thing after another.
Sasha tried to access a satellite network, but whenever he tried any form of communication, he got no signal. Sasha shouted “No signal! Everything’s dead!” Draža countered “That’s impossible!” Since before the first man had even flown to space, satellite communications coverage had been truly global – even in a typhoon, even off the Kuril Islands, even in the fiercest of storms, even in the Drake Passage, it all still worked. But not that night – and not there. The orphans looked at each other knowingly; they were all well aware that there was only one possibility: someone – or something – was jamming their communications.
The beating in their course northeastward, not to mention the curious spiral motion of the surrounding water, necessitated that they follow a circumferential course in the next leg, and that is where the mysterious other sailboat drew closer. In odd flashes of lightning, Tallulah and her siblings were horrified as they gradually could behold that the other vessel was of a design identical to their own.
As if that wasn’t enough confirmation that the vessel had come from the mysterious island, they soon were able to make out, in a rare burst of lighter rain that made everything around them more clearly visible, the luminescent forms of skeletons – not human skeletons, not insectoid skeletons, but rather cephalopod skeletons, evocative of squid and octopus; but still similar enough to leave no doubt that their battle with the island’s security system was not over: the robots were coming after them. If not by land, they were going to retrieve them by sea. And now, thanks to the motion of the maelstrom, the hindrance of the storm, they were going to have them.
Drawing ever-closer despite Sasha’s best efforts, the orphans became ever-more terrified: what were these robots going to do to them? Kidnap them? Kill them? Forcibly retrieve the artifacts? And then, for the first time, it hit Draža: he shouted, “Sasha, they must want the artifacts!”
Sasha couldn’t help but have a brainstorm, an inspiration about what to do, but he couldn’t do what he knew he had to do on the deck: he said, simply, “Tallulah, take the helm!”, shoving her over so she held the wheel while he made his way to below decks. Tallulah did the best she could to hold off the approach of the sinister robot-crewed ship, by this time the waves clearly tilting them across a spiral current toward each other, giving them a view where they could stare right across to each other amid the roiling waves of the sea, lit only by the occasional bolt of lightning and the floodlights of each ship.
Over the radio, the incessant jamming was replaced by a message, clearly from the enemy ship: “Give us the book.” Tallulah, shouting back but knowing that they couldn’t hear her amid the din of the storm, said, saltwater and rainwater in her mouth, “Not on your lives!Sasha will take care of you!” Though she knew not what Sasha was trying to do.
Unfortunately, neither did Sasha; or, rather, he was taking a leap of faith. He knew from handling it previously that the book was locked, but he figured that it must be unlockable by his father’s heirs in some simple way. Sasha thought: he would have wanted to make it simple! How could he prove he was the heir? The child of this man?
A pit formed in Sasha’s stomach as he pretty much knew the answer, but dared to dream that it might be a lock of his hair – that was a common place to test for DNA. However, despite examining the book, he found no place where a lock of hair, nor even a follicle, could be designed to fit; he did, however, find something that upon close inspection looked like a tray, a square strip, disguised as part of some esoteric motif so it wouldn’t be noticed by the casual observer, but to someone who was looking for it the resemblance to a certain medical technology was unmistakable.
So, swallowing his fear and trepidation, he detached a hook that was fastened on the wall, and pricked his finger ever-so-gently; out of it soon trickled in a drop of the stuff of life, a viscous red liquid: blood. Dripping that one drop he pulled forth from his finger onto the tray, Sasha prayed that that was the answer, that the book would be unlocked.
He perked up, shouting “It’s working!”, as he hung on for dear life against the incessant rock of the boat, the book coming undone enough for him to open its cover. He found the text inside was in some sort of code, but it was unlocked. Overjoyed, he made his way out to the rainswept deck, shouting to his siblings “I unlocked it! It’s blood! I unlocked it by proving I’m the heir!”
Tallulah shouted back “What are you talking about!? They’re still coming!” Sasha looked to the side and, in horror, saw the robotic craft approaching very closely, so closely they could actually see the “crew” in great detail, their skeletal forms resembling sea creatures, glowing eyes still intent on taking back what was theirs. Too much closer and the ship’s sails would have been in serious danger of touching.
In a low gravely voice that sounded like it came out of a nightmare, they said audibly as their tentacles pointed at Sasha in unison “Give us the book!” Sasha, mortified, shouted, as if he lost his voice at first but then ringing out loudly against the thunder, “I don’t understand!” Draža shouted at the robots, saying “We are the heirs! This is our book!” The robots then said to them “You are not authorized. Decryption missing. Give us the book!”
Sasha just stood there, as he was barely tethered onto the deck via his harness – were it not for that, the children would have been tossed overboard long beforehand – and Tallulah steadied the helm best she could. Soon, however, the currents’ pull proved to be inescapable, as they drew closer and closer to the enemy.
The children all racked their brains out: decrypt…decrypt…before a particularly large wave sent their masts clashing – the two ships had made contact with each other. The children then screamed in terror as the octopus- and squid-like robots began to climb their ship’s mast and leap over to their own vessel’s – they had now been boarded.
Abandoning their posts to take shelter behind the locked doors below decks, they knew it was down to the wire: that they had to give, someway, somehow, the robots what they wanted. Buying themselves some time by locking themselves below decks, robots searching whatever parts of the ship they could get their mechanical tentacles onto, Tallulah said “Sasha, you know that metal sheet you got from the island? Give me that!
Sasha handed it to her, and at her urging “The book!”, she placed the metal sheet with the cutouts above the book’s cover, above the title page in the thin metal sheets that made up its substance, only to get nonsense, as she went urgently, panting, “There has to be some trick to this…”, muttering “Remember mother’s tomb…”, before Draža thought out loud, “Remember, it said in the letter we were to take the wayfinder and the letter with us.”
Tallulah then had an inspiration: “The letter!”, she said, ordering Sasha to give her the letter. Holding it up against the wall as the waves rocked them nearly vertically, the hull of the boat starting to grind – had they made contact with more than just the mast of the other ship? – Tallulah’s eyes opened as she beheld glyphs, every last one of them corresponding to well-known musical notes, the resulting combination of the cut-out from the island and the letter from the tomb forming sheet music.
Tallulah turned to Draža and Sasha and told them, “Sing this!”, as she sang each note, their relative durations matching what was shown on the decrypted sheet music from the letter, soon the orphans all singing in unison to the book as Sasha held it close. Multiple times they sang to it, round after round, as if an incantation to protect themselves against the mechanical monsters out in the sea and besieging their vessel.
After a while, they panted as they ran out of steam, Tallulah, breathing heavy, saying “I hope that was it”, before Draža noticed “I don’t hear anything…not like before. No crawling…no grinding against another ship.” Sasha darted his eyes back and forth, saying “Do we dare…”, as they cautiously made their way above decks.
The weather was as severe as ever, raw rain pounding their ringlets, their faces, their bodies, their soaking-wet sailor outfits, but outside in that seascape there was only their own ship. The robots? Gone. Nowhere on their ship did they remain. Lightning flashed. Nowhere from horizon to horizon was there even the enemy ship: it had disappeared.
Even the spiral, though still there, seemed considerably less fearsome, as Sasha took the helm, Draža and Tallulah managing the sails so they could catch the wind just right to emerge out of it, piloting their ship in their harnesses for the rest of what had become a night of terror. Had they escaped the jaws of death, or was it all just a dream?
Their minds knew not the difference, as their fatigued selves struggled to hold fast their course against the wind, beating a course toward the Kamchatkan mainland all night long until the rain became lighter, the thunder less rolling, the waves less sublime, the wind less raw, not even daring to pass their little selves out until the skies shined bright through the clouds, the typhoon passed, and the air and sea became once more fresh and lulling.
On that ship they slept deeply, right out on the deck under the moonlight, until the moment came, feeling like a long time after to the orphans, when the brightness of midsummer’s sun finally aroused them to wakefulness again, still feeling strung out yet rejuvenated enough to feel like facing the world and winning again. Their outfits, soaking wet last they remembered, had been dried off, though their clothes did look like they had been through hell and back.
Sasha thumbed through the book that was their inheritance, finding that the text had been altered – now it was readable, not in code. It must be some sort of digital paper, he thought, despite the metallic construction; the ever-glowing red backlight belied a power source that was likely radiogenic, perhaps tritium.
Tallulah woke up from her slumber soon after Sasha’s, looking around and wondering “Was it all a nightmare?” Sasha held up the book, and, grinning, asked rhetorically “Is this a nightmare?” Tallulah touched it, just to be sure it was tangible, and admitted with a sigh “Yeah…it was real.”
Draža, sleepily observing the conversation, added “What’s in that book, anyway? Why would our father have stationed a whole legion of robots, just to kill us if we took it?” Tallulah countered “Well, not us. He wanted to keep anybody else from taking it. Apparently successfully. We have it now. We have what he told mother was so important for us: us orphans’ only link to our late father.” Draža said “For that matter, why is he late father? Why are there so many dead people on that island? Why–?” He was then cut off by Sasha, who held out that book in front of them, saying “All the answers are in here. But in the meantime…let’s get back to the spa.”
His brother and sister nodded in agreement, and under the whitecapped surf, stiff breezes, and bright sunny skies characteristic of the wake of a typhoon, they made sail toward the mainland, making anchor right where they started, right outside the woods next to their spa, looking upon it with fresh eyes: the launching pad of adventure, where Tallulah, just as she suspected when she stared down that tunnel a seeming eternity ago, had entered wonderland.
Wading through the surf with their belongings and their bounty, they made their way back to the hotel, the passers-by staring at them as if they couldn’t figure out why they looked how they looked: Tallulah in particular didn’t even want to know what had happened to her hair during the storm, though feeling it it all seemed to still be there.
In any event it was all moot, as they turned that June day into another spa day, needing one far more desperately than they did before, getting the same full suite of treatments they did the first time, only adding hairstyling to get their ringlets back into shape. When shown the results in the mirror of the spa’s on-site salon, the triplets all smiled: the stylists in Kamchatka might just have been even better than the ones in California, let alone Tennessee.
Their second day of pampering, their biggest yet, left Sasha, Draža, and Tallulah with little time for any in-depth look into their prize, before they went back to their treehouse and slumbered for another night. Only then did they finally decide to call it a trip and be shuttled to Petropavlovsk, where they caught the next Breitspurbahn to Nashville, the reverse course of the same route they had traversed originally: Petropavlovsk to Yellowknife through the Bering Strait Tunnel, then Yellowknife to Chicago, and finally Chicago to Nashville.
The overday trip left the triplets plenty of time to seclude themselves in their three-bedroom suite – this time they had little interest in mingling with their fellow passengers, having had their fill of travel for a good long while – and read the text their father had left them.
They spent so much time reading, trying to understand it, and gazing out their bedroom windows, as arctic, taiga, woodlands, then woodlands that graded more southern passed them by. On the final approach back to Nashville, Sasha, looking out at the landscape speeding before them, confessed some of his thoughts for the first time.
“Touching…our father. We still don’t even know his real name.” Tallulah grinned, as she noted “Throughout the text he only identifies himself as Netzach ben Tachlit, and that name means victory or eternity, plus son of finality or ending. Obviously that’s a pseudonym, not his original name.” Draža countered “In his case, the new name might have been more real than old name. Tachlit was foundational to his philosophy.”
Tallulah sighed as she pondered “Tachlit…the point where the universe’s expansion stops, reverses, and finally collapses in on itself, all existence forming a singularity: God. He thought it was our responsibility in the timeline of existence to bring that about…and a crucial step was the conquest of aging. Only men who could live forever could birth a god at the end of the universe. Mind-bending stuff.”
Sasha pointed out “He does go into detail about how the Cosmist program was essential, but was incomplete without the Omega Point being the ultimate goal. He gathered all those followers, in secret, so that they could develop this…theology, and do experiments, without outside scrutiny.”
Tallulah said “Some of these experiments this cult of his did on their subjects were…disturbing. So many of them were maimed, or died, or got diseases that nobody had ever even heard of before people started experimenting with genetic engineering. These symptoms he describes, right here…why would he even include this information for us to read?”
Sasha clarified “Oh…I understand. It’s to make sure his heirs knew what it would take to unlock the secrets of the universe.” Tallulah looked perturbed by Sasha’s ambivalently positive stance toward the whole idea of such experiments, but Draža pointed out “They were all willing volunteers. Informed consent…not to mention tremendous pay. It’s a good thing this organization of his could accumulate so much money…” Tallulah shrugged, saying “Not so good for the volunteers. It’s still horrible any way you slice it.”
Draža went on “Not as horrible as what happened to the cult. They…they reached a gene therapy to conquer aging that they were so sure worked. He describes it in this book, the parts with diary entries: they based it on the immortal jellyfish’s genes. Every volunteer they experimented on halted all signs of aging, over such a long period; it seemed so promising, they were so desperate for a wonder therapy…so they all took it, so sure it would work. And then…long-term effects they didn’t anticipate killed them all at a stroke. At least they all died quickly…”
Sasha ruminated “If only our father hadn’t taken it. We would not be orphans now. Not really. Yet we are…we are truly alone in the world.” Tallulah pointed out “For what it’s worth, he clearly intended for us to come there with him alive. He was right there, waiting for us…right up to the end…past the end, even. He wanted us to be his successors, his replacement at the helm of the cult, to continue his work, in case anything should happen to him I suppose. It’s just…something happened to him so much earlier than he thought. Now there’s not even a cult anymore…”
Sasha said “Tragic…truly. He detailed this in the book; why we’re here, with our blood coming from him…it was all part of the plan. He scattered his genetic heritage to the world, because he wished his secrets…the cult itself, to be under the control of people similar to him, yet in a way random. We knew nothing of the cult; we’re an outside view, a fresh pair of eyes. And he did prize randomness; he…I guess you could say he worshipped it. He says in book that luck, that fortune, is one and the same with Tachlit, with God. Leaving his legacy to chance…that was his way of leaving it to God.” Tallulah pondered “And God cut him down…”
They emerged at Union Station in Nashville once more, breathing sighs of relief at being home. Strolling on the street, they gazed at the cityscape, the people, finding it familiar yet also unfamiliar, grinning at the thought that that’s exactly how they always felt after a vacation. The harrowing experience, perhaps, had left them unscathed after all; childhood, they dared to dream, was not yet over.
The weather was not quite a heat wave, but was still hot and humid, shade offering little relief from the summer sun, so much stronger than what they had grown accustomed to during their time at the higher latitudes, but unlike when they left Nashville, they almost luxuriated in it, feeling it, if not pleasant, at least a welcome change from what had to go down as the most important voyage of their young lives.
The triplets all smiled and walked with a pride she’d never quite felt before, the glow that comes after a deed of heroism, Tallulah in particular beaming with it all the more as she realized that not even the sailor cosmonauts she idled, names like Polina Valentinova, and, perhaps much more to the point, Carlotta von Frey.
Though she couldn’t help but blush at her presumptuousness, as she thought back to her harrowing voyage she genuinely doubted if Carlotta herself could have done much better. What was her path now? Would Tallulah Kovačević keep her maritime laurel on her pretty little head as she grew into womanhood, and into being the greatest music star this side of the Mississippi? Or would she follow in the footsteps of fellow child performing artist Polina Valentinova, and turn in womanhood to being the greatest space explorer? Mankind’s first interstellar expedition was in the works, after all. Dare she join them into the void?
Thoughts like that swirled in each of the orphans’ minds as they made their way through the lobby of the Grand Ole Opry and toward the elevator, the sight of two – well, really three – familiar faces interrupting their reverie: none other than Fintan and Fia, with Fintan lovingly embracing his Katenka like always nowadays.
The orphans weren’t of a mind to greet them with enthusiasm, but as they were recognized by three of their grown-up friends, they gave them a wave. Fia told them “So glad I caught you when you were coming back. We were going to leave soon.” Draža asked “Oh? Where are you going?” Fintan said “South Coast…er, that is, the South Coast of California. Katenka says it’s the perfect place for my Fia to get her makeover.”
Katerina asked the orphans with beaming eagerness “How was Kamchatka?” The orphans turned their gaze toward each other as they tried to make sense of all the thoughts and feelings of their trip, filled with both pleasure and peril. Finally, Draža spoke for them when he said “It was much…muchier. Than we expected.”
They all left it at that, as the orphans wished Fia a good trip, Tallulah thinking back to her mother Zara, sighing in the elevator, saying “Just thinking of Fia…if I turn out like mother, someday that will be me. Tallulah Kovačević, a pneumatic girl.” Draža countered “We’re not grown up yet.” Tallulah mused “In the grand scheme of things, though, it will be very soon. Our childhoods are so short. Our youths are so short…Our lives are so short.”
As the elevator opened up to their penthouse, they sauntered in, gazing out to the sunlit and hazy landscape below, the faraway yet close-at-hand city pulsing with activity like the greatest of all of man’s machines, towers rising into the sky, toward heaven, to meet God…to reach Tachlit.
Taking off his watch band, hewn from his mother’s hair, and playing with it, Sasha contemplated that scene before him, and his sister’s words, brooding “Too short. Our donor – our father – thought the enemy, the true enemy, the only enemy, was mortality. And he was right”, declaring, as he turned back toward his brother and sister – feeling a whisper from the island, from the book, from his father’s unfinished task, speaking into his very soul – “You know, if I were not so musically talented, I should want to cheat death.”