Transreal Cyberpunk by Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling Page B

choked weakly. “No more.”
    “It’s tea,” Vlad said. I could tell his mind was running a mile a minute. “Take it easy. It’s all over. We’re alive, and we’ve found the star-drive. That blast last night!” His face hardened a bit. “Why didn’t you let me try to save poor Nina?”
    I coughed and wiped my bloodshot, aching eyes. I tried to fit my last twelve hallucinated hours into some coherent pattern. “The yurt,” I croaked. “The star-drive shot it into the sky? That really happened?”
    “Nina shot the old man. She burst in with a kind of ghost-dog? She burst in and the old man rushed her with his knife. When the drive went off, it threw all of them into the sky. Nina, the two Evenks, even the two reindeer and the dog. We were lucky—we were right at the edge of the ellipse.”
    “I saved you, Vlad. There was no way to save Nina, too. Please don’t blame me.” I needed his forgiveness because I felt guilty. I had a strange feeling that it had been my wish of finding a rocket drive that had made the artifact send out the fatal blast.
    Vlad sighed and scratched his ribs. “Poor Ninotchka. Imagine how it must have looked. Us rolling around screaming in delirium and you having filthy sex with that Evenk girl ...” He frowned sadly. “Not what you expect from Soviet scientists.”
    I sat up to look at the elliptical blast area where the yurt had been. Nothing was left of it but a few sticks and thongs and bits of hide. The rest was a muddy crater. “My God, Vlad.”
    “It’s extremely powerful,” Vlad said moodily. “It wants to help us Earthlings, I know it does. It saved Laika, remember?”
    “It saved her twice. Did you see the blue dog last night?”
    Vlad frowned impatiently. “I saw lots of things last night, Nikita, but now those things are gone.”
    “The drive is gone?”
    “Oh no,” Vlad said. “I dug it out of the crater this morning.”
    He gestured at our booty. It was sitting in the mud behind him. It was caked with dirt and weird, powdery rust. It looked like an old tractor crankcase.
    “Is that it?” I said doubtfully.
    “It looked better this morning,” Vlad said. “It was made of something like jade and was shaped like a vacuum cleaner. With fins. But if you take your eyes off it, it changes.”
    “No. Really?”
    Vlad said, “It’s looked shabby ever since you woke up. It’s picking up on your shame. That was really pretty horrible last night, Nikita; I’d never thought that you ...”
    I poked him sharply to shut him up. We looked at each other for a minute, and then I took a deep breath. “The main thing is that we’ve got it, Vlad. This is a great day in history.”
    “Yeah,” agreed Vlad, finally smiling. The drive looked shinier now. “Help me rig up a sling for it.”
    With great care, as much for our pounding heads as for the Artifact itself, we bundled it up in Vlad’s coat and slung it from a long, crooked shoulder-pole.
    My head was still swimming. The mosquitoes were a nightmare. Vlad and I climbed up and over the splintery, denuded trunks of dead pines, stopping often to wheeze on the damp, metallic air. The sky was very clear and blue, the color of Lake Baikal. Sometimes, when Vlad’s head and shoulders were outlined against the sky, I seemed to see a faint Kirlian shimmer traveling up the shoulder-pole to dance on his skin.
    Panting with exhaustion, we stopped and gulped down more rations. Both of us had the trots. Small wonder. We built a good sooty fire to keep the bugs off for a while. We threw in some smoky green boughs from those nasty-looking young pines. Vlad could not resist the urge to look at it again.
    We unwrapped it. Vlad stared at it fondly. “After this, it will belong to all mankind,” he said. “But for now it’s ours!”
    It had changed again. Now it had handles. They looked good and solid, less rusty than the rest. We lugged it by the handles until we got within earshot of the base-camp.
    The soldiers heard our yells