Radiant State

1

She sees with eyes too wide, her ears are deafened with too much hearing, she feels with her skin. She is the first bold pioneer of a new generation: Engineer-Technician 2nd Class Mikkala Avril.

Age twenty-three? Age zero! Fresh-born raw today, in the zero day of the unencompassable zero season of the world, she descends the gangway of the small plane sent personally for her, the only passenger, under conditions of supreme urgency. Priority Override. (The plane is still in its shabby olive livery of war: no time is wasted on primping and beautifying in the New Vlast of Papa Rizhin.) Reaching the foot of the wobbling steel stair, she steps out onto the tarmac of the Chaiganur cosmodrome, Semei-Pavlodar Province, and into the heat of the epochal threshold hour.

To be part of it. To do her task.

The almost-bursting heart in her ribs is the heart of her generation, the heart of the New Vlast, a clever strong young heart pounding at the farthest limit of endurability, equal parts dizzying excitement and appalling terrible fear.

Today will be a day like no other.

It is not yet quite six years since the armies of the enemy surrounding Mirgorod were swept from the face of the planet in a cleansing, burning wind by Rizhin’s new weapon, a barrage of atomic artillery shells. Not quite six years–the vertebrae of six long winters articulated by the connective tissue of five roaring summers–but for the New Vlast the time elapsed has delivered far more and felt far longer. General Osip Rizhin, President-Commander of the New Vlast and Hero of the Peace of a Thousand Years, has taken time by the scruff of the neck. He has stretched the weeks tight like wire and made each day work–work!–like days never worked before.

Some may express doubt that all this can been achieved so quickly, Rizhin said on First Peace Day, outlining his Five Year Plan, his Great Step into the Future. But the doubters have not grasped the true nature of time. Time is not a dimension, it is a means of production. Time is too important to be trusted to calendars and clocks. Time is at our disposal and will march at our speed, if we are determined. It is a matter of the imposition of human will.

Rizhin had seen the Goal and envisaged the completion of Task Number One. It would be delivered at the speed that he set.

And so it was. In two thousand hammer-blow days, each day a detonation like an atomic bomb, he made the whole planet beat with a crashing unstoppable rhythm perceptible from a hundred million miles away. The New Vlast was a pounding anvil the sun itself could feel: it shook the drum-taut solar photosphere, the 6,000-degree plasma skin.

But no day will ever beat more strongly or echo more enduringly down the corridors of the coming millennia than this one day, and Engineer-Technician Mikkala Avril will play her vital part.

She pauses on the airfield apron, savouring the moment, fixing it in memory. The furnace weight of the sun’s heat beats on her face and shoulders and back. Hydrogen fusing into helium at a steady burn. She feels the remnants of the solar wind scouring her cheeks and screws her eyes against the bleach and glare. The air tastes of bitter herb and dusty cinder, of hot steel and of the sticky dust-streaked asphalt that peels noisily away from the soles of her shoes at every step. Breathing is hard labour.

Chaiganur is a scrub of desert steppe, baked dry under the rainless shimmering sky, parched to the far horizon. Flatness is its only feature. The dome of the sky is of no colour, the sun swollen and smeared across it, and the steppe is a whitened consuming lake bed of silent fierce unwatchable brightness. Nothing rises more than a few inches above the crumbling orange-yellow earth and the low clumps of coarse grey grass, nothing except pylons and gantries and hangars and scattered blockhouses: only they cast hot blue shadows. Miles to the south lies the shore of an ancient sea, and when the hot breeze blows it brings to Chaiganur a new covering of salty corrosive grit: ochre dust, clogging nozzles and caking surfaces.

The workers at Chaiganur put scorpions in bottles and watch them fight.

Throughout the two-hour flight from the Kurchatovgrad Barracks, Mikkala Avril had studied the technical manual, memorising layouts and procedures she already knows by heart. The night-duty clerk woke her in the early hours of the morning, agog with news, his part in her drama. A telephone call had come: instructions to go instantly to Chaiganur, transport already waiting. Her principal, Leading Engineer-Technician Filipov, had been taken suddenly and seriously ill and she–she, Mikkala Avril, there was no mistake, there was no one else, none qualified–was required immediately to take Filipov’s place. Not an exercise. The thing itself.

As she put on her uniform she spared a thought for Filipov. He and his family would not be heard from again. Their names would no longer be spoken. It was a pity. Filipov had trained her well. Her success this day would be his final and most lasting contribution.

The plane bringing her to Chaiganur flew low. She watched through the window as they crossed the testing grounds and saw scars: the wide grey splash-craters of five years’ worth of atomic detonations, the fallen pieces of failed and exploded engineering, the twisted wreckage of spent platforms cannibalised from war-surplus bridges and pontoons. Half-buried chunks of stained concrete resembled the dry bones and broken tusks of dead giants.

Didn’t mammoths once walk this land? She might have heard that somewhere. Hadn’t someone–but who?–taken her once, a girl, to rock outcrops polished smooth by long-dead beasts (by the scraping of scurf and ticks from their rufous hairy sides). That might have happened to her, she wasn’t sure. Whatever. Nothing thrives now in all that flatness of stony rubbish but scorpions and rats and foxes and the sparse nomadic tribes with their ripe-smelling beards and scrawny horses.

The plane that brought her leaves again immediately, engines dwindling into sun-bleached silence. She heads for the control block, picking her way across pipes and thick cables that snake along the ground. She might be only one small component in the machine, one switch in the circuit, but she will execute her task smoothly, and that will matter. That will make a binary difference; that will allow the perfection of the most profound accomplishment of humankind. She will make no mistake. She will do it right.

2

Exactly one hour after the arrival of Mikkala Avril, a convoy sweeps at speed past the security perimeter of the Chaiganur cosmodrome trailing a half-mile cloud of dust. Three-and-a-half-ton armoured sedans–chrome fenders, white-walled tyres–doing a steady sixty. Motorcycle outriders and chase cars. They are heading straight for Test Site 61.

The sun-baked sedans carry the entire membership of the Central Committee of the New Vlast Presidium, and in one of the cars–no one is sure which, the bullet-proof windows are tinted–rides the President-Commander himself, General Osip Rizhin. Papa Rizhin, the great dictator, first servant of the New Vlast, coming to witness this greatest of triumphs and certify its momentousness with his presence.

Two jolting trucks bring up the rear. A sweating corps of journalists is tucked in among their movie cameras and their tape recorders. The men in the open backs of the trucks crook their arms in permanent angular shirt-sleeved salute, cramming homburgs, pork-pies, fedoras down tight on their heads against the hot wind of their passage. None but Rizhin knows what they are coming to see.

The party might have flown in to the cosmodrome in comfort but Rizhin refused to allow it, citing the presence among them of ambassadors from the new buffer states. We must never permit a foreigner to fly across the Vlast, he said. All foreigners are spies. That was the reason he gave, but his purpose was showmanship. He didn’t want his audience seeing the testing zones or getting any other clues. None among them, not even the most senior Presidium member, had any idea how far and how fast the project had progressed. And so they all rode for three days in a sweltering sealed train with perforated zinc shutters on the outside of the windows, and then in cars from the railhead, five hours across baking scrubland, to arrive red-faced and dishevelled at Test Site 61, where a cluster of temporary tin huts has been erected for the purpose of receiving them.

The temporary huts crouch in the shade of a two-hundred-foot tall, eighty-foot diameter, snub-nosed upright bullet of thick steel. The bullet is painted crimson with small fins near the base. The fins serve no functional purpose but Rizhin demands them for the look of the thing, to make it more like a rocket, which it is not.

The Vlast Universal Vessel Proof of Concept stands against its gantry, an ugly truncated stub, a blood-coloured thumb cocked at the sky, a splash of hot red glimmering in the glare of the sun.

3

Three time zones west of Chaiganur and eight hundred miles to the north, in the eastern outskirts of Mirgorod, a short train ride from the shore of Lake Dorogha, a woman in a shabby grey dress picks her way across a war-damaged wasteland.

Five years of reconstruction across the city have passed this place by, and the expanse of bomb craters and ruined buildings is much as she last saw it: tumbled brick-heaps, charred beams, twisted girders, tattered strips of wallpaper exposed to the sun. There are brambles now, nettles and fireweed and glossy grass clumps on slopes of mud, but otherwise nothing has changed. It is still recognisable.

The place she is looking for isn’t hard to find. She chose it well back then. It is a warehouse of solid blue brick, a bullet-scarred construction of blind walled arches and small glassless windows: roofless, but so it had been back then. During the siege this place had been contested territory: again and again the tanks of the Archipelago passed through and were driven back, and each time the warehouse survived. An artillery shell had taken a gouge from one corner, but the walls had stood. She’d used the upper windows herself for a week. It made a good place to shoot from when she was waging her private war, alongside the defenders of Mirgorod but not of them.

She crosses the open ground to the warehouse carefully, taking her time, moving expertly from cover to cover, using the protection of shell holes and bits of broken wall. There are no shooters to worry about now, only wasps and rats, nettles and thorns. Almost certainly there is no one here to see her at all, no faces in the overlooking windows, but it’s as well to take precautions. She mustn’t be noticed. Mustn’t be seen. The sound of the city is a distant hum. She is getting her dress dusty and mud-stained, but she has anticipated that. She carries a change of clothes in the canvas bag slung on her back. She is nearly forty years old, but she remembers how to do this. She was good at it then and she is good at it still.

Inside the warehouse the stairs to the cellars are as she remembers them. She has brought matches and a taper, but she doesn’t need them. She finds her way through the darkness, familiar as yesterday, by feel. Nothing has changed. It is possible that no one has been here at all since she left it for the last time on the day the war’s tide turned and the enemy withdrew.

She crouches at the far wall and runs clenched, ruined fingers along the low niche, touching brick dust and stone fragments and what feels like a couple of iron nails. For a moment she cannot find what she is looking for and her heart sinks. Then she touches it, further back than she remembered but still there. Her fingertips brush against an edge of dusty oilcloth.

Carefully she hooks the bundle out from the niche. It’s narrow and four feet long, bound with three buckled straps cut from an Archipelago officer’s backpack. The touch and heft of it–about twelve pounds weight in total, she estimates without thinking–brings memories. Erases the years between. She notices that her hands are trembling, and she pauses, takes a breath, centres herself and clears her mind. The trembling stops. She hasn’t forgotten the trick of that, then. Good.

In the blackness of the warehouse cellar, working by feel, she brushes the grit and dust from the oilcloth bundle and wraps it in the towel she stole before dawn that morning from a communal washroom. (The towel is a child’s, faded pink with a pattern of lemon-yellow tractors, the most innocuous and suspicion-disarming thing she could find. If she’s stopped and searched on the way back, it might just work. Camouflage and misdirection. Though she doesn’t expect to be searched: she’ll be just one more thin drab widow lugging a heavy bag. Such women are almost invisible in Mirgorod.)

She stows the towel-wrapped bundle in the canvas bag, hooks the bag on her shoulder and climbs back up towards the narrow slant of dust-filled sunlight and the morning city.

4

In a temporary hut at Chaiganur Test Site 61 the ministers of the Central Committee of the Presidium and the other dignitaries assemble to hear a briefing from Programme Director Professor Yakov Khyrbysk. The room is unbearably hot. Dry steppe air drifts in through propped-open windows. Khyrbysk’s team has mustered tinned peach juice and some rank perspiring slices of cheese.

President-Commander of the New Vlast General Osip Rizhin fidgets restlessly in the front row while Khyrbysk talks. He has heard before all that Khyrbysk has to say, so he is working through a pile of papers in his lap, scrawling comments across submissions with a fountain pen. Time moves on, time must be used. Big fat ticks and emphatic double side-linings. Approved. Not approved. Yes, but faster! Why so long? Do it now! Rizhin likes to draw wolves in the margins. I am watching you.

He listens with only half an ear as the Director runs through his spiel: how the experimental craft will drop atomic bombs behind itself at the rate of one a second and ride the shock waves upwards and out of the planetary gravity well. How the ship is not small, as space capsules are imagined to be, but built large and heavy to withstand the explosive forces and suppress acceleration to survivable levels.

‘Vlast Universal Vessel Proof of Concept weighs four thousand tons,’ he tells them, ‘and carries a fifteen-hundred-ton payload. She was designed and built by the engineers of the Bagadahn Submarine Yard.’

He tells them how the explosions generate temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun, but of such brief duration they do not harm the pusher plate. How Proof of Concept is equipped with two thousand bombs of varying power, and the mechanism for selecting the required unit and delivering it to the ejector is based on machinery from an aquavit-bottling factory. That gets a chuckle from the back of the room.

The ministers of the Presidium play it cautiously. They keep their expressions carefully impassive, neutral and unimpressed, but inwardly they are making feverish calculations. Who does well out of this, and who not? How should I react? Whose eye should I catch? What does this mean for me?

Rizhin listens with bored derision to their sceptical questioning and Khyrbysk’s patient answers. So that thing outside is a bomb? No, it is a vessel. It carries a crew of six. How can explosions produce sustained momentum not destruction? It is no different in principle to the operation of the internal combustion engine of the car that brought you here. Is the craft not destroyed in the blast? Will the crew not be killed? I hear there is no air to breathe in space and it is very cold.

Fucking doubters, thinks Rizhin. Do they think I’d have wasted time on a thing that doesn’t fucking work?

But he listens more carefully as Khyrbysk explains how each bomb is like a fruit, the hard seed of atomic explosive packed in a soft enclosing pericarp of angel flesh. The angel flesh, instantly transformed to superheated plasma in the detonation, becomes the propellant that drives against the pusher plate.

‘We call the bombs apricots,’ says Khyrbysk, which gets another laugh and a flurry of scribbling.

Rizhin is deeply gratified by this exploitation of angel flesh. Since Chazia died at Novaya Zima and the cursed Pollandore was destroyed, he’s heard no more from the living angel in the forest. No falling fits. No disgusting invasions of his skull. All the angel flesh across the Vlast has fallen permanently inert, and the bodies of the dead angels are nothing now but gross carcasses, splats on his windshield, and he is moving fast. Even the mudjhiks have died. Nothing more than slumped and ill-formed statuary, Rizhin had them ground to a fine powder and shipped off to Khyrbysk’s secret factories. Yes, even the four that stood perpetual guard at the corners of the old Novozhd’s catafalque.

‘And now,’ Khyrbysk is saying, ‘we will retire to the cosmodrome and watch the launch from a safe distance.’

But there is a brief delay before they can leave. Rizhin must honour the cosmonauts. A string quartet has been rustled up from somewhere, and sits under the shade of a tarpaulin playing jaunty martial music: ‘The Lemon Grove March’.

The cosmonauts, three men and three women, march up onto the makeshift podium and stand in a row, fine and tall and straight in full-dress naval uniform in the roaring blare of the sun. Brisk apple-shining faces. Scrubbed, clear-eyed, military confidence. Rizhin says a few words, and shutters click and movie cameras whirr as he presents each cosmonaut in turn with a promotion and a decoration. Hero of the Vlast First Class with triple ash leaves. The highest military honour there is. The cosmonauts shake Rizhin’s hand firmly. Only one of them, he notices, looks uneasy and doesn’t meet his eye.

‘Nervous, my friend?’ he says.

‘No, my General. The sun is hot, that’s all. I don’t like formal occasions. They make me uncomfortable’

‘Call me brother,’ says Rizhin. ‘Call me friend. You are not afraid, then?’

‘Certainly not. This is our glory and our life’s purpose.’

‘Good fellow. Your names will be remembered. That is why the cameras and all these stuffed shirts have turned out for you.’

On the way back to their cars the dignitaries stare at the stubby red behemoth glowing in the sun: the Vlast Universal Vessel Proof of Concept with its magazine of two thousand apricots, rack upon rack of potent solar fruits.

Rizhin is walking fast, oblivious to the heat, eager to be on the move. Secretary for Agriculture Vladi Broch breaks into a waddling jog to catch up with him. Broch’s face is wet with perspiration. Rizhin flinches with distaste.

‘Triple ash leaves?’ says Broch. ‘If you give them that now, what will you do for them when they come back?’

‘When they come back?’ says Rizhin. ‘No, my friend, there is no provision for coming back. That is not part of the plan.’

‘Ah,’ says Broch. ‘ Oh. I see. Of course. But… so, how long will they last?’

Rizhin shrugs. ‘Who knows?’ He claps Broch on the shoulder. ‘We’ll find that out, won’t we, Vladi Denisovich? That is the method of science. You should get friend Khyrbysk to explain it to you some time.’

5

In the control room at Chaiganur the tannoy broadcasts radio exchanges with the cosmonauts. From the edges of the room the whirring movie cameras follow every move with long probing lenses, hunting for the action, searching for the telling expression.

‘T minus 2000, Proof of Concept. How are you doing?’

All is good, Launch. Very comfortable.

The cosmonaut’s voice grates, over-amplified and crackling.

‘I remind you that after the one-minute readiness is sounded, there will be six minutes before you actually begin to ascend.’

Understood, Launch. Thank you.

The cosmonauts have nothing to do. No function. No control over their vessel unless and until the launch controller flicks the transfer switches. Their windows are blind with heavy steel shutters, which they will take down once they reach orbit.

If they reach orbit.

The last of the ground crew is already three miles away, racing for the safety perimeter in trucks.

And so the cosmonauts wait, trussed on their benches, separated by the thickness of two heavy bulkheads and a storage cavity from a warehouse of atomic bombs. They are sealed for ever inside the nose of Proof of Concept, locked in by many heavy bolts that will never be withdrawn, and the ship beneath them is alive with rumble and vibration, the whine of pumps, the whisper of gas nozzles, the thunk and clank of unseen mechanisms whose operations the cosmonauts barely understand.

The technicians who actually control Proof of Concept are ten miles away inside a low concrete caisson, a half-buried blockhouse built with thick and shallow-sloping outer walls to deflect blast and heat up and over the top of the building. Not quite twenty in number, the technicians occupy a semicircle of steel desks facing inwards towards the launch controller at his lectern. They lean forward into the greenish screens of their cathode readout displays, flicking switches, twisting dials, turning the pages of their typescript manuals. They wear headphones and mutter into their desk microphones. Quiet purposeful conversations. For them this is no different from a hundred test firings: everything is the same except that nothing is the same.

Behind the controller a wide panoramic window of sloping glass gives a view across the flatness of the steppe. The assembled dignitaries and journalists sit in meek rows between the controller and this window on folding chairs, the sun on their backs, not wanting to cause a distraction. In something over thirty minutes they will turn to watch Proof of Concept climbing skyward to begin her journey. They have been issued with black-lensed spectacles for the purpose. For now they clutch them in their laps and observe the technicians, alert for any hint of anxiety in the muted voices. They watch for the flicker of red lamps on consoles, the blare of an alarm, a first indication of disaster. More than one of them wants to see failure today: a grievous humiliation for Director Khyrbysk and his protectors could mean great advantage for them. Others are cold-sweating terrified of the same outcome: if Khyrbysk’s star wanes, theirs will tumble and crash all the way to a hard exile camp or a basement execution cell.

Guests and technicians alike smoke relentlessly.

President-Commander Osip Rizhin has not yet arrived in the control room. An empty chair waits for him between Khyrbysk and the chief engineer, whose name is never mentioned for he is a most secret and protected national resource.

‘T minus eighteen hundred, Proof of Concept.’

Thank you, Launch.

‘You are all well?’

There is an implication in the question. The captain of cosmonauts carries a pistol in case of… arising human problems. The psychology of each cosmonaut has been thoroughly and expertly examined, but the effects on emotional stability of massive acceleration, prolonged weightlessness and extreme separation from the planetary home are unknown. Every member of the crew is equipped with a personal poison capsule. The foresighted bureaucratic kindness of the Vlast.

We’re all good, Launch. We could do with some music to pass the time.

‘We’ll look into that, Proof of Concept.’

The launch controller’s gaze sweeps across the technicians at their workstations and settles on Engineer-Technician 2nd Class Mikkala Avril. He raises an eyebrow and she stands up.

Five minutes later, hurrying back down the passageway from the recreation room with an armful of gramophone records, hot with anxiety to return to her console, Mikkala Avril runs slap into men in dark suits armed with sub-machine guns. Rizhin’s personal bodyguard, walking twenty-five steps ahead of the President-Commander himself. Papa Rizhin–Papa Rizhin! In person!–is bearing down on her.

Terrified, the young woman in whom beats the heart of the New Vlast presses herself flat against the wall and shows her empty hands, the stack of records tucked hastily under her left arm. She has been taught what to do in such an extremity. Always look him in the eye, but not too much. Stay calm at all times, be respectful, answer all enquires with humour and firmness, above all conceal nothing.

Mikkala Avril stands against the wall, back straight, eyes forward. The gramophone records are slipping slowly from the awkward sweaty grip of her elbow. Any moment now they will fall to the floor and there is nothing she can do about it. Desperately she squeezes them tighter between arm and ribs, but it only seems to make the situation worse.

Papa Rizhin glances at her as he passes and notices her confusion. Stops.

‘Are you working on the launch?’

His voice is recognisable from his broadcasts but it is not the same. It is surprisingly expressive, with the tenor richness of a good singer. Up close his cheeks are scattered with pockmarks like open pores, something which is not shown in portraits: the legacy of a childhood illness, perhaps.

‘Yes, General,’ she says.

‘What is your task?’

‘To monitor the telemetry of the in-atmosphere flight guidance systems, General. The vessel carries small rockets to correct random walk—’

‘Yes,’ says Rizhin, interrupting her. ‘Good. You are young for this responsibility. And is all in order? Is there any concern?’

‘No, General. None. All is in perfect order.’

Inevitably the sweat-slicked gramophone records choose this moment to fall slap in a heap at Rizhin’s feet.

Mikkala Avril stares blankly at the wreckage: the titles of the musical pieces in curling script on the glossy sleeves; the monochrome photographs of mountains and lakeside trees. She feels her face turning purple.

Rizhin shows no reaction and does not look down.

‘What is your name?’ he says.

‘Avril, General. Engineer-Technician 2nd Class.’

‘That is good then. Avril. I will remember the name. The New Vlast needs young engineers; it is the noblest of professions. You are the brightest and the best.’

He glances at last at the fallen records and smiles with this eyes.

‘Youth must not fear General Rizhin,’ he says. ‘He is its friend.’

When he’s out of sight she crouches down to scrabble for the records. Shit, she mutters under her breath over and over again. Shit. Shit. Shit.

‘T minus twelve hundred, Proof of Concept. We have some music for you.’

A syrupy dance tune begins to play over the tannoy: ‘The Garment Workers of Sevralo’.

Yakov Khyrbysk groans inwardly and glares at the launch controller. Must we? He glances at his watch and wonders where Rizhin has got to. Wandered off, sniffing out buried corpses. It makes Khyrbysk uneasy, and he is edgy enough already.

On the other side of Rizhin’s empty seat, the chief engineer is leaning forward, long dark-suited limbs gathered in tight about him. He steeples his long slender fingers. The fingernails are ruined: blackened sterile roots that will not grow again. The chief engineer (whose name on Rizhin’s order is never spoken now, not even by himself) survived five years in prison camps before Khyrbysk found him and managed to fish him out. He hunches now like a bird on a steep-gabled rooftop, watching in silence. He has the pallid complexion of a man who lives his life underground and takes no exercise, but he is hot with energy. It stares from his eyes. Fierce, stark intelligence. Such energy would have burned through a weaker person long ago, but the chief engineer’s constitution is a gift of nature. It is hard to tell how old he is, a young forty or a harrowed twenty-five. His hair is cut short at the back and the sides like a boy’s.

The convoy of sedans waits outside, lined up, engines running, ready to race Rizhin and the dignitaries to safety in case of disaster. Khyrbysk wonders if someone has thought to issue the drivers with dark glasses. He is considering checking on this when Rizhin arrives and takes his seat. Kicks back, legs stretched out, reclining.

‘Today we start the engine of history, Yakov,’ says Rizhin. ‘Today we blow open the door on our destiny.’ He fishes for a paper packet of cheap cardboard cigarettes and lights one, drawing the rough smoke deep into his lungs. ‘Those are good phrases. They have a smack to them. I’ll use them in my speech.’ He exhales twin streams through his nose. ‘No problems, eh, Yakov? No fuck-up?’

‘We’ve made test firings every week for the last three months.’

So many tests that the Chaiganur desert is scorched and glassed and pitted for hundreds of miles in every direction, the landscape pocked with scar-pits that show the corpse-grey rock beneath the orange earth. So many tests. Yellow plumes and dust streaks still linger in the upper atmosphere like nicotine stains.

The first test launches carried automatic radio transmitters. Later they sent up dogs and pigs and apes. One of the first monkeys to fly slipped free of its muzzle and screamed for three days until they had to cut the radio off. After that they equipped the beasts with remote-controlled execution collars. A bullet in the back of the neck. Nine grams of lead. Now there is a small menagerie of mummifying corpses orbiting overhead in thousand-ton steel tombs. The success rate was improving all the time, but nothing is certain. Khyrbysk knows that. Nothing is certain except his own fate if Proof of Concept pops its clogs and goes phutt! in front of the entire Presidium and the assembled press corps of the Vlast. Nine grams of lead for dear old Yakov Khyrbysk then.

If he were a weaker man, he would think it unfair. He would think Rizhin ungrateful. Was it not Yakov Khyrbysk who sent the shipment of atomic shells to Mirgorod so Rizhin single-handed could break the siege? It was. And was it not Khyrbysk who expanded the town of Novaya Zima into a huge, sprawling secret city where penal labourers built the armoury of manoeuvrable atomic field-weapons that tipped the balance of the war? It was. But Khyrbysk is a canny operator: he has never made the mistake of reminding Rizhin of all that he owes him.

Six months after the victory at Mirgorod, when the war against the Archipelago was still in the balance, Rizhin had ousted the feeble government of Fohn and Khazar and made himself President-Commander of the New Vlast. After that, the first thing he did was fly north to Novaya Zima to see Yakov Khyrbysk.

‘You must forget these bombs, Yakov,’ Rizhin had said. ‘I’ve got ten men who could run this show better than you. Talk to me about the other thing. Task Number One. Tell me about the ships that will carry us to the stars.’

Khyrbysk’s stomach lurched. It was sheer brutal astonishment. How did he know?

‘And bring me Farelov,’ Rizhin added.

‘Farelov?’

‘Are you the brain here, Khyrbysk? Does all this come from your head? I do not think so.’

Khyrbysk had blustered. He cringed to think of it now.

‘Well,’ he said,’ of course the theoretical foundations were laid by Sergei Farelov. Sergei is a brilliant mathematician and a visionary engineer, truly visionary, but he is not the sort of fellow to be the leader of an undertaking like this. I made Novaya Zima. I am the organiser, I am the efficient man. I am the will that drives it on.’

‘Bring me Farelov,’ said Rizhin. ‘And Yakov…’

Rizhin paused, and Khyrbysk, caught off guard, found himself looking unprepared into the gaze of a potentate. The neutral brown eyes of a man who knows for certain and unremarkable fact that he can do to you anything that he wants, anything at all–cause you any pain, destroy you and those around you in any way he chooses–and there is no protection for you, not anywhere, none at all. It was not a fully human gaze.

‘Do not keep secrets from me, Yakov,’ said Rizhin. ‘Never try that again. I don’t like it.’

Farelov arrived, tall and slender as a birch tree with wide nocturnal eyes.

‘You are the great engineer, then,’ said Rizhin, raking him with his gaze. ‘You are a vital national resource. You belong to the Vlast. Your very existence is a state secret now. Your name will not be spoken again.’

Farelov returned his gaze without speaking. He nodded slowly.

‘How long will it take?’ said Rizhin. ‘How long to build this thing so it works?’

‘I will answer,’ said Khyrbysk hastily. A promise not kept was a death warrant. He hesitated, mind racing. ‘Fifteen years,’ he said. ‘At the outside, twenty.’

‘Five,’ said Rizhin. ‘Make it five.’

‘Five! No. Five is impossible.’

‘Why impossible, Yakov?’ said Rizhin. ‘This, nothing else but this, is Task Number One. Tell me what you need and you shall have it. Without limit. The resources of the continent will be at your disposal. A hundred thousand workers. A million. Twenty million. You just tell me. Never hide your needs. How does a mother know her baby is hungry if the baby does not cry?’

Khyrbysk looked at Farelov.

‘It can be done,’ said the chief engineer quietly. ‘In theory it can be done.’

‘So,’ said Khyrbysk. ‘OK. Five years then.’

And in five years, though it was impossible, he had done it. He’d brought Task Number One this far, to this point of crisis: Proof of Concept baking quietly on her launch pad in the country of the hot panoptic undefeated sun.

6

In Mirgorod the new clocks are striking noon as the woman with the heavy canvas bag on her shoulder crosses towards her apartment building. The block where she lives is harsh and slabby: a cliff of blinding colourlessness under harsh blue sky in the middle of a blank square laid out with dimpled concrete sheets that are already cracked and slumped and prinked with grass tufts and dusty dandelions. Scraps of torn paper lift and turn in the warm breeze.

She climbs the wide shallow steps and pushes through the door into the dimness of the entrance hall. The sun never reaches in here and the lamps are off. There is no electricity supply during the day. No lift. She nods to the woman at the desk and crosses to the stairwell.

Her room is five flights up. The stairs smell of boiling potatoes and old rubber-backed carpet. On the landing of her floor an oversized picture of Papa Rizhin is taped to the wall. He is smiling.

She opens the door of her apartment into a blast of hot stale brilliance. The brassy early-afternoon sun is glaring in through a wide window. There is no one there. The women she shares with–young girls, sisters from Ostrakhovgrad–are out at work, but the room is heavy with their scent and full of things. The three beds, a table and chairs of orange wood, and shelf upon shelf of purposeless gewgaws and tat: make-up and toiletries, small china ornaments, magazines in faint typeface on thick brittle paper filled with advertisements and optimistic stories. The one big flimsy yellow cupboard stands open, overflowing with nylons and cheap summer clothes. Both girls are conducting affairs with high-ups in the Ministry of Supply. There is a can of raspberries tucked in the underwear drawer.

One of the sisters brought with her to Mirgorod a poster from the wall of the Ostrakhovgrad Public Library and tacked it inside the cupboard door: a photograph of strong women with the sun on their faces, shoulders back, heads up, the wind in their hair. DAUGHTERS OF THE VLAST, COME TO THE CITY! CITIZEN WOMEN! REBUILD OUR LAND! So many men were killed in the war, there was free accommodation on offer in Mirgorod to women of working age with no children.

The woman unwinds the pink towel with the lemon-yellow tractors and lays the long oilskin-covered bundle on her bed. Kneels on the floor to unbuckle the straps. Forcing clumsy hands to do what once went smooth as breathing.

She’d done a good job almost six years before. She’d left the rifle cleaned and wrapped in strips of cotton damp with lubricant, and it had kept well. No damp or grit had reached it. Awkwardly she strips it and cleans and oils each part. The touch and smell of the rifle is as familiar to her as her own body. The wood of the stock is still smooth and dark honey-brown. The magazine and firing mechanism, the telescopic sight rails, the pierced noise-suppressing muzzle and flash guard, all still blue-black steel, are a little scuffed and scratched–she remembers every mark–but there is no sign of corrosion. Only her own broken hands, finger bones snapped and carelessly re-fused, have to relearn their work. Figure it out all over again.

The Zhodarev STV-04–gas-operated, a short-stroke spring-loaded piston above the barrel, a tilting bolt–weighs eight and a half pounds unloaded and is exactly forty-eight inches long, of which the barrel is twenty-four. Muzzle velocity is two thousand seven hundred feet per second. Effective range with a telescopic sight, one thousand yards. The Zhodarev is not a perfect weapon: it is complex to maintain, a little too heavy, the muzzle flash too bright even with a flash guard; it tends to lift, and the magazine can come loose and fall out. The woman had always wished she had a Vagant. But she knows the Zhodarev intimately. She fitted the muzzle brake herself to counteract the lifting. It is her weapon.

She reassembles the rifle, lays it aside and checks the rest of the kit. Wrapped in a separate bundle of oiled cotton is the olive-green 4-12 x 40 VP Akilina telescopic sight, rarer and more precious by far than the weapon itself, its graticule adjustable both vertically for range and horizontally for windage. And there are paper packages, still sealed, containing five-round stripper clips of 7.62 x 54mm Vonn & Belloc rimmed cartridges. One hundred and twenty rounds. One combat load. Not really enough for what she needs but it will have to do.

7

‘T minus six hundred, Proof of Concept.’

Ten minutes to go.

Engineer-Technician 2nd Class Mikkala Avril settles herself at the familiar console and tries to calm the churning of her mind. She runs again through the routines. The launch controller is making his final tour of workstation checks before launch. Calling on each desk in turn for confirmation of go. Her turn soon. A matter of seconds. She scans the columns of figures again. All displays are showing within normal parameters. Dead on the line.

She has never actually done this task herself before, not at a real launch, not once, not even under supervision; except for practice exercises, she has always sat at Filipov’s left hand and watched while her principal made the necessary settings and corrections. Even so, she’s ready. She understands the procedures. It’s not that complex. Ever since she joined the Task Number One programme, fresh from graduating top of her year (the first graduating year of the New University of Mathematical Engineering at Berm), she has spent every spare moment in the technical libraries at Kurchatovgrad and Chaiganur studying the classified reports.

It was Khyrbysk’s policy to encourage technicians on the programme to learn as much and as widely as they could about the project as a whole and not limit themselves to their own area of work. His attitude to access to papers was liberal, and she took maximum advantage, beginning with the chief engineer’s own seminal paper, Feasibility of an Atomic Bomb-Propelled Space Vessel, and working her way along the shelves: A Survey of Shock Absorption Options; Trajectory Walk Caused By Occasional Bomb Misfire; The Capture of Radiation by Angelic Materials; Radiation Spill Around An Impervious Disc; Preliminary Sketch of Life Support For A Crewed Vessel. There weren’t many people at Chaiganur who knew more about the history, physics and engineering of Task Number One than Mikkala Avril.

She checks the central readout once more. The eight-inch-square display is connected to a von Altmann machine beneath the floor, which will, when called upon, analyse the telemetry from the vessel in flight and calculate any necessary corrective thrust from the banks of small rockets set in the midriff of Proof of Contact. It is her job to send the instructions for those corrections to the rockets themselves. It requires concentration, rapid reflexes, a steady hand. But all she has to do now is confirm readiness.

Launch is looking at her.

‘Guidance Telemetry?’ says Launch, relaxed and neutral.

And Mikkala Avril freezes.

Her screen has gone dark.

After half a second a short phrase blinks into life: Fail code 393.

Everything else, all the rows and columns of figures, have disappeared. She has no contact with the ship.

Fail code 393? It means nothing to her. Heart pumping, hands trembling, she riffles through the code handbook in mounting panic. 349… 382… 397… 402… What the hell is 393?

There is no 393. Not in the book.

Launch asks again, impatient now.

‘Guidance Telemetry, are we go?’

Think. Think.

Faces are turning towards Mikkala Avril. She feels the gaze of Director Khyrbysk on her back. The chief engineer is watching her. Papa Rizhin himself is watching her. She can feel it.

‘Guidance Telemetry?’ says the launch controller a third time. ‘What’s happening, Avril?’

‘I’ve got a 393, Launch.’

‘What is that?’

‘I’m working on it, Launch.’

Ignore them. Focus only on the immediate need.

She has no idea what Fail code 393 means. It isn’t in the book, which suggests it’s a core manufacturer’s code, not set up by Task Number One. It might be trivial, only a glitch in the machine. But it could equally be a fundamental system failure that would send Proof of Concept pitching and yawing, tumbling out of the sky to crash and burn.

It is either/or, and the only way to find out is to switch the machine off and start it up again. And that will take ten minutes.

‘Last call, Avril,’ says the launch controller. There is tension in his voice now. The beginning of fear.

She hesitates.

It is the epochal moment of the world, and it turns on her.

If she says go and the guidance systems misfire… No, she will not even think about the consequences of that… But if she calls an abort, Papa Rizhin’s flagship launch will collapse in ignominy in front of the entire Presidium, the ambassadors, the assembled press of the Vlast. It will be days–possibly weeks–before they can try again. And if the abort turns out to be unnecessary, only a twenty-three-year-old inexperienced woman’s cry of panic at an unfamiliar display code…

She hears her own voice speaking. It sounds too loud. Hoarse and unfamiliar.

‘Guidance Telemetry is go, Launch. Go.’

‘Thank you, Avril.’

Launch moves on to the next station.

With trembling hands, Mikkala Avril powers off her console, counts to ten, and switches it back on. The cathode tubes begin cycling through their ponderous loading routine.

‘T minus three hundred, Proof of Concept.’

Thank you Launch.

Five minutes. The sugary music cuts out at last. There is a swell of voices and a scraping of chairs as the dignitaries turn to the window and put on their dark glasses.

‘Can’t see a bloody thing from here,’ mutters Foreign Minister Sarsin. (The Vlast needs a foreign minister now. So the world turns.) ‘It’s below the fucking horizon.’

‘You will see, Minister,’ says Khyrbysk. ‘You will certainly see.’

An argument breaks out as camera operators try to set up in front of the dignitaries.

‘You don’t have to do this. There’s another team on the roof.’

‘Something could go wrong up there. We should have back-up footage.’

Khyrbysk makes angry signs to the press liaison officer to close the disturbance down. He hadn’t wanted the press there at all, or the ambassadors for that matter, but Rizhin insisted. Rizhin is a showman; he wants to astonish the world.

‘The risk,’ Khyrbysk had said to him on the telephone. ‘What if it flops?’

‘You make it not flop, Yakov. That’s your job.’

Rizhin needs risk, Khyrbysk realises. He burns risk for fuel. Everything races hot and fast, the engine too powerful for the machine. Parts that burn out are replaced on the move, without stopping. The whole of the New Vlast is Rizhin’s Proof of Concept, his bomb-powered vessel heading for unexplored territories and goals only Rizhin understands.

The cosmonauts feel the colossal engineering beneath them sliding into life, the coolant pumping round the shock-absorbing pillars, the bomb pickers rattling through the magazines in search of the first charge. Proof of Concept is a behemoth of industrial construction, but it is also very simple.

Mikkala Avril’s screens come back up with ten seconds to go. Everything is fine: readouts dead on the line. She is so relieved she wants to cry, but she does not allow herself; she is stronger than that and holds it in. She is the heart of the youth of the New Vlast and she is good at her job and she will not fail.

Two seconds to go, she remembers to put her dark glasses on. She turns up the brightness on her screen, closes her eyes, presses a black cloth against her face and begins her own interior count. For the first ten bombs it will be too bright to see, and Proof of Concept will be on her own: then Mikkala must open her eyes and be not too dazzled to work.

Before the chief engineer discovered the properties of angel flesh propellant, what Mikkala was about to do would have been impossible: the bombs’ electromagnetic pulses would have broken all contact between ship and ground. But now the ship’s instruments will sing and chatter as she rises, and be heard.

The cosmonauts’ cabin shivers with the clang of the first apricot locking into the expulsion chute.

Launch control is whited out in a flash of illumination that erases the sun.

Bomp–bomp–bomp. Bigger explosions each time. Brilliant blinding flashes. Slowly at first then faster and faster Proof of Concept rises, riding a crumb trail of detonations, climbing a tower of mushroom clouds.

The cosmonauts groan as each detonation slams their backs with a brute fist of acceleration. The whole ship judders and creaks and moans like a bathyscaphe under many thousand atmospheres of pressure.

For the observers in the launch control blockhouse at Chaiganur Test Site 61, the ship itself is lost, the explosion trail hard to watch. The repeated retinal burn forms blue-purple-green jumbling images. Brilliant drifting spectral bruises in the eye. President-Commander Rizhin stands at the window, the hot glare pulsing on his face, an atomic heartbeat.

I am the fist of history. I am the mile-high man.

A long time after the light the sound waves come.

1

In Papa Rizhin’s world the clocks race forward to the pounding iron-foundry beat, the brakes are off and the New Vlast tears into the wind, riding the rolling wave of continental cataclysm-shock, flung into the future on the impulse-rip of centrifugal snap, taking a piston-blur express ride–six years now and counting and there’s no slowing it yet. But pieces break off and get left behind. Because the past is sticky. Adhesive. Reluctant to let go. The continent is littered with broken shards. Arrested fragments of slower time. Unhealed unforgotten memories and the dead who do not die.

A house and a village and a lake.

On a day in the eleventh year of her dislocated life Yeva Cornelius comes gently awake in the first grey light of morning. There is some time yet to go before the rising of the cooler, circumspect, conciliatory sun. Yeva stays quite still on the couch, breathing slowly, watching the curtain stir. Lilac and vines crowd against the house. The room is leaf-scented, leaf-shaded, cool.

Her hair has been braided again in the night with loving gentleness: she feels the tightness of the intricate knotted plaits against her skull and smells the clean sweet fragrance the domovoi anoints her with while she sleeps. The prickle of tiny decorative twigs. Trinkets of seed and bird shell.

Take the domovoi’s attention as a mark of favour, Eligiya Kamilova had said. It’s glad there are people again in the house. Leave a little salt and bread by the stove and it won’t trouble us.

The domovoi laid trails of crumbling earth across the floorboards, long sweeps and spirals along corridors from room to room. Eligiya Kamilova was right: it didn’t want to hurt, not like those in the rye and oat fields–they were bad. Watchful and furtive, they came at you out of the white of noon and raised welts and sore rashes on your skin. Sly thorn scratches that stung and drew beads of blood. But the ones to be really afraid of were the ones that moved around outside in the night. Darkness magnifies. Darkness changes everything.

Daylight gathers and hardens in the room. Moment by moment the curtain is more visible, rising and collapsing. It’s as if Yeva is moving it with her breath. Experimentally, she holds back the air in her lungs and eyes the curtain to see if it pauses too. Half-convinces herself that it does.

The atmosphere of a complicated dream is ebbing slowly away. Her mother was in the dream. Her mother was looking for her.

Her mother looks for her always, every day. She will have come back to the apartment and found it not there because of the bomb. But somebody will have told her the soldiers took them away, her and her sister, and put them on the train, and she will look for them. Only she won’t know that Eligiya Kamilova took them off the train again, that Eligiya did something with her hands and broke the door of the train and took them into the night and the snow, and they ran away. Her mother won’t know that.

Everywhere they go, Eligiya Kamilova leaves behind messages and notes so her mother can know they have been there and where they are going next. But her mother might not get the messages. She might not know who to ask. Eligiya posted letters to their old address but her mother can’t go back to that house, not ever, because the soldiers sent everyone away. Some stranger will have read those letters. Or they’ll be in a pile in a big post office room in Mirgorod. Or burned.

They walked south through the winter, Yeva and her sister Galina and Eligiya Kamilova, keeping off the roads and out of the villages, staying in the trees and the snow. The cold was like a dark glittering blade, but Eligiya was a hunter in the woods: she didn’t talk much but she knew how to trap, how to make a warm place, how to build a fire in the night that didn’t show light and a barricade of thorns against the wolves. Sometimes she slipped away to a village and came back with something they needed. Sometimes she found a hut or a farm where the people would let them sleep, maybe in a barn.

Yeva remembered every night. Every single night.

Her sister Galina was sick for a long time but she didn’t die, and in the first days of spring the three of them came out of the trees, following a black stream flecked with brown foam, and found the house in the middle of a wide field of waist-high grass: a big square house of yellow weatherboards under a low grey roof, the glass in the many windows mostly broken. They waded over to it, leaving a trodden wake in the grass that buzzed and clattered with insects. Eligiya Kamilova went up under the porch and broke open the door, just like she had opened the door of the train. A wide staircase climbed up into shadow, and on the bare boards of the entrance hall was a pile of leaves and moss. Twigs laid out around it in patterns like the letters of a strange alphabet. Eligiya stepped round it carefully.

‘Don’t disturb it,’ she said. ‘Be careful not to touch that at all.’

There were pieces of furniture in some of the rooms. Mostly they’d had their upholstery ripped open, the stuffing pulled out and carried off for nests. There were chalky splashes of bird mess in the corners and streaks of it down the curtains. In the kitchen there were lamps, and oilcloth spread on the table.

‘Are we going to stay here?’ said Galina. ‘For a while?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Eligiya Kamilova.

Yeva knew that Galina needed to rest, to stop moving for a long while, to be strong again.

Eligiya Kamilova hadn’t give them any choice when she opened the door of the train and took them away into the trees and made them walk. It all happened too quickly to even think about until after it was done. But if they’d stayed on the train and gone where it was taking them, their mother would have known where they were and she could have come there to get them. Eligiya said the train was going to a bad place, a cruel terrible place, and no one ever came home from there, but she didn’t even know what the terrible place was called, and Yeva wasn’t scared of being in terrible places.

Every day she remembered the bomb. It always jumped her when she was thinking of something else. It wasn’t like a memory. Memories change until you don’t remember the actual thing any more; you remember the remembering. But of the time when the bomb fell nothing was forgotten and nothing was changed. When it jumped her it was like opening the same page of a book again and again, and the words were always all there, and always the same: Yeva’s life hammered open like a bomb-broken building, the insides scattered and left exposed to ruinous elemental fire and rain.

Part of her stopped moving forward when the bomb came. Part of her got stuck in that piece of time for ever, always back there, always smelling the dust and burning, always looking down at Aunt Lyudmila squashed flat, always going down the stairs that used to be inside but were outside now, with nothing to hold on to. Part of her stayed back there, and only part of her was left to carry on. Now was a shadow remnant life of numbed and lesser feeling. Now was only aftermath. Aftermath.

That day when they first found the yellow house in the grass they didn’t stay there but after looking it over they walked on down the stony dry track into the village. Long before they reached the village fields, Yeva could taste the tang of raw damp earth and animal dung in the air. Rooks chattered, squabbled and wheeled across the wide flatness of black soil just turned, thick and heavy and gleaming blue like metal. In the distance women were stooping and crouching at their work. They wore long red or green skirts, and their hair was wrapped in lengths of white cloth.

The village was a collection of ramshackle dwellings under heavy mounds of thatch, and beyond it was the lake and a line of tall pale trees on the shore, blue and dusty and far away. They walked in among skinny chickens and wary, resentful dogs, grey wood barns, grey corrugated-iron roofs. Scrawny cattle browsed in the dust behind a low fence of woven branches. A tractor leaned, abandoned, its axle propped on a rock.

‘What’s the name of this place?’ said Eligiya Kamilova to the knot of men who gathered to meet them.

‘Yamelei,’ they said. ‘This is Yamelei.’

Women from the nearest field came to join them, treading heavily over the upturned mud in rag-made shoes. Eligiya showed them the intricate brown patterns on her dark sinewed arms, and their eyes opened wider at that. A big old fellow with a ragged beard scoured the skyline behind them.

‘There are no men with you?’ he said.

‘No.’

‘A mother and daughters, then.’

‘I am not their mother.’

‘Grandmother?’

‘No,’ said Eligiya. ‘Who lives in the big yellow house?’

‘They left,’ a woman said.

‘How long ago?’

The woman pursed her lips. It was a question without an answer. Seasons rolled, and once in a while a new thing happened.

‘And no one lives there now?’ said Eligiya.

While Eligiya was talking to them Yeva watched the people of the village, their broad flattened faces, flattened noses, narrow dark curious eyes in crinkled skin. The men wore linen shirts and sleeveless jackets of animal hide, the pattern of the cows’ backs on them yet, and shoes of woven bark that looked like slippers. They had knotted hands and swollen knuckles and their teeth were bad. They were looking at her, and she was looking at them, but the space between her and them was like thousands of miles and hundreds of years. She couldn’t feel what they were thinking. They talked the same words but it was a different language.

Eligiya Kamilova told the people of Yamelei she would fix the tractor and make their boats stronger and steadier for the lake, and it was agreed that she and the two girls could stay at the yellow house for a while.

‘Whose house is it?’ said Galina as they walked back. ‘It must be somebody’s.’

‘Small house,’ said Eligiya Kamilova. ‘Small aristocracy, long gone now.’

‘Why doesn’t someone from the village go and live there?’

‘If someone did that,’ said Eligiya, ‘the others would have to resent them, and it would lead to trouble.’

They took water from the stream to drink and cook and wash in. Eligiya Kamilova trapped things in the woods. Pigeons and hares. Yeva didn’t mind the plucking and the skinning and pulling the inside parts out. Galina wouldn’t do it, but it gave Yeva no bad feelings at all.

There was a place behind the house closed in by a high wall of horizontal weathered planking between tall solid uprights. Inside the wall was a mass of ragged foliage, a general green flood: shoulder-high umbellifers and banks of trailing thorn. Week by week Eligiya and the girls cleared it away and found useful things still growing there: cabbage and onion and currant canes and lichenous old fruit trees. On a high shelf in a tool shed Eligiya found a rust-seized shotgun and a half-carton of shells. She fixed the gun up with tractor oil and it seemed like it would work, but she didn’t want to try it out because the noise would reach the village and the men would come.

When summer came the walled yard was gravid with acrid ripeness. Lizards sunned themselves on the planking and wasps crawled on sun-warmed fruit. Eligiya Kamilova and the girls went into the garden and ate berries hurriedly, greedily, three at a time, bursting the sharp sweet purple taste with their tongues against the roofs of their mouths, staining their fingers with the blue-black juice.

Every day Eligiya Kamilova went down to Yamelei to work. Yeva was glad when she was gone and the sisters were on their own together without her. Then there were long afternoons of slow lazy time when few words were said or remembered, only the smells and colours and the day-flying moths in the house and the feeling of the long grass against their skin. Yeva would lie on her back by the overgrown stream and shut her eyes and look through closed lids at the bright oranges and soft, swirling, pulsing reds and browns. There were rhythms there, like the rhythms of her breathing. A plenitude of time. Galina got stronger, and in the evenings the sisters swam together in the big deep pond where the stream was dammed, until the air streamed with night-borne scents and the first stars rained tiny flakes of light that brushed their faces and settled on their arms. Then the night fears started to come out of the trees and across the grass, and Galina said it was time to get dressed and go into the house. Galina was getting better, but she still went silent sometimes and far away as if she was looking up at Yeva from under water.

In the evenings, before she went to sleep, Yeva would empty her pockets onto the shelves in the bookless emptied library and pick through the collection of the day. Feathers, empty dappled eggshells, twigs and leaves and moss, stones and fragments of knotty root. The best of them she put out by the stove for the domovoi.

Morning is fully come now. Yeva can see every thread in the thin curtain, and the dust smears on the broken windowpanes. Soon she will get up and put some wood in the stove and get water and wash her hair and brush the tight braids out. Then she will go down by herself into the woods by the lake. But for now she lies without moving and watches the curtain, and her sister is warm and heavy beside her under the blanket, eyes still closed fiercely in sleep. Galina will stay like that for another hour or so yet. Although there are rooms enough in the house to sleep in a different bed every night for a week, the sisters share the couch in the library. Eligiya Kamilova sleeps out on the veranda with the loaded gun.

2

In the coolness under the trees down by the lake at Yamelei the dead artilleryman brushes aside his coverlet of damp memorious earth. Conscript Gunner K-1 Category Leonid Tarasenko. The grave mound is sweet and crumbly, layered with rotting leaves and matted fungal threads. Parts of his body are wrapped in warm, wet, skin-like, papery stuff.

The dead man’s mushroom face feels the gentle touch of the conciliatory morning sun in patterns of leaf shadow. The head turns from side to side, moving its dirt-stuffed mouth. Eyes large and dark as berries stare without blinking. As yet they see nothing.

There is a faint perfume on the air.

Soldier Tarasenko, throat unzipped and bled out long slow years ago–a whizz of hot shell casing, a shiv wouldn’t do it neater–rises slowly from the shallow accidental grave where he was planted like a seed.

Yeva Cornelius, night braids brushed out from her hair, leaves the house and her sister and Eligiya Kamilova still sleeping. The early fields are filled with air and light to overbrimming like a cup.

The path down to the lake passes between sea-green rye and scented hummocks of dried manure. In the bottom land the sorrel bloom is over, the crop coming on heavy and dark. Thick green heady vegetable blood. Yeva comes out onto the yellow grass of the lake margin. Old Benyamin Zoff is there already, on his hands and knees, crawling in his best grey suit along the edge of the water. He moves slowly, intently, with sacramental concentration, murmuring words that are quiet and musical but not a song. He will crawl like that all morning. There is a sunken city under the mirror-calm lake. An underwater world. In the village they keep water from the lake in their houses, in bottles and basins, and in the winter people go sliding face down on their bellies across the frozen surface, staring down, trying to see what is there.

The soul of the people is forever striving to behold the sunken city of Litvozh.

Eligiya Kamilova said that soon after they came to Yamelei. It was a quotation from a book. They long not for something that will be but for the return of something that was. They have not forgotten and they never will. The window frames of the village houses are carved with pictures of streets and towers under watery waves.

There are brown wooded islands in the lake and low hills on the horizon beyond the further shore. Yeva waves to Benyamin Zoff, who ignores her, and turns away from the water’s edge to climb up into the woods. There is a dead man standing among the trees. She passes quite close to him, but he is not watching her, and Yeva pays him no regard. Yeva isn’t bothered by the dead: they are preoccupied with their own thoughts and take no notice of her.

War, like storm and famine, has come around the shore of the lake and passed from time to time through Yamelei. The woods near the village are scarred by tank tracks, shallow shell holes and random trenches sinking under bramble, ivy and thorn. The trees are ripped and tattered by gunfire. Here, in these woods, colliding companies of the lost, rolling along on random surges of retreat and advance, attack and counter-attack, stumbled over one another, panicked and rattled bullets into each others’ bodies. Field guns set up among the oats and rye in the upper ground rained desultory shellfire on unofficered and bootless conscripts crawling for shelter under thorn bush and bramble mound. One time a whole truckful of people from somewhere else was driven in under the trees, shot and shovelled into three-foot ditches.

In the woods around the lake the killed have not died right. Uneasily half-sentient, not rotting well, they can be disturbed, upset, awakened. Their uncommitted bodies rise through the earth. They will not sink. They float. From time to time they get up from their beds and wander a while under the trees and lie down somewhere else. When the villagers come across a shallow-buried corpse in the woods they cut its head off, sever the tendons in its legs and drive a wooden peg through the ribcage to pin it firmly down. But they will never find them all.

You put new plaster on the walls but the old stains still seep through. That’s what they say in Yamelei.

Conscript Gunner K-1 Category Leonid Tarasenko, dead, stands with his forehead pressed against a tree trunk and traces the fissures in the bark with his hands. Pushes his fingers into the cracks and tries to pull pieces of the bark away, to see what is underneath. The pieces of bark won’t come free. They slip through the tips of fingers that are sticky from the gash in his throat. His second, silent mouth.

The dead man has probed the inside of the tear in his throat to feel what is in there. He has found soft things and hard things. The hard things are sometimes slippery smooth, and there are some pieces in there that are sharp. There is a hole deeper inside that he can slip fingers into, but the hole is deeper than his fingers are long.

The interiors of things interest him. The inspection of the tree absorbs his attention. He touches the tree with his tongue. Feels roughness, tastes taste.

It occurs to him that the tree is not part of him.

Where is the end of me? the dead man wonders, looking up into the top of the tree. Where is my limit? I am up there. I go past those branches and those branches and up into the bright place up there that looks wet but has no smell of wet. I go past those trees over there, and those trees, and those trees behind me, and that is not the end of it and that is not the end of me. But though I am over there and up there, I am here and not there. It is strange. Fingers and tongue don’t go up there to the top of the tree. They stop short.

The dead man apprehends that the tree doesn’t stand on the earth but continues down into it. The tree reaches into the ground and fastens there, but it isn’t the same with him. Unlike the tree, the dead man seems to be free to go to a different place.

That is interesting.

When he thinks about himself and what he knows and feels, the dead man finds pieces of knowing and pieces of feeling but the pieces are not connected. One of the pieces is angry and one of the pieces is sad because something important has been lost. One of the pieces feels sick, unfathomable horror and despair.

The pieces look at each other as if they have eyes, but they don’t have eyes, not really. Eyes are on the outside, in the sticky-soft raggedy face thing, here, where you can touch with hands. When fingers touch eyes, eyes cannot see trees any more and fingers come away sticky. If you press eyes with fingers you see flakes of light, strange muted flakes of different light, but you only see the light and not the other things, not the trees you could see before. The light you make with fingers in the eyes, that light is inside the head.

Yet inside the dead man mostly there is darkness. He can touch the darkness in his throat with fingers, but the darkness is always there and doesn’t come out. He cannot press that into light. That too is interesting. The dead have a lot to think about. But the piece in him that is sad and the piece in him that is angry want something. They are saying to go down the path.

What is path? says the piece of him that has all the questions. There isn’t any piece with an answer to that, but the feet are walking now, and that seems to be good. That seems to be the answer to the path question.

He notices that if the feet stopped walking then all the other things–all that is not him but other stuff, trees and not trees–stop moving also, and wait, and watch the dead man watching them, waiting.

I am the centre then.

I see that.

That I understand.

Yeva Cornelius passes the dead man by. As she moves away, he catches the sense of her crossing a splash of sunlight between trees, and his heart is surprised by a deep dim anguish, a recognition of kinship.

Leonid Tarasenko does what the dead don’t do. He starts to follow.

3

In Mirgorod the woman with the heavy canvas bag on her shoulder takes the tram all the way out to Cold Harbour Strand. She starts out along the spit and, when there is no one to see, leaves the path and disappears into the White Marsh. An hour and a half of hard walking brings her to the edge of a wide muddy expanse of marshland. She unpacks her bundle, spreads the oilskin out on the ground like a mat, sheltered from the breeze in the lee of a fallen tree trunk, and lays the Zhodarev on it. She crouches next to it to push the telescopic sight into the rails and set the graticule. Prises ten rounds from two stiff stripper clips into the toploader. Four hundred yards away across the mud another tree leans sideways in front of a mossy stone wall. She cuts a branch into three short lengths with a knife and binds them with twine to form a makeshift tripod barrel mount. Then she sets the graticule and settles herself into position, kneeling then lying alongside the fallen trunk. Remembers how it feels to be tucked away. Hidden from view. Safe.

She settles the stock of the rifle against her shoulder. Closes her left eye and fits her right eye against the back of the sight. Lets herself relax and sprawl on the ground. Becoming part of it. Settled. Rooted. She has to cock her wrist awkwardly to bring her clawed trigger finger to bear. It feels wrong but she will get used to it.

She fixes the tree in the cross wires. Centres on the place where a particular branch separates from the main bough. Squeezes the slack out of the trigger. The graticule is shivering and taking tiny random jumps. Her heart is busy in her chest. She breathes out, emptying her lungs–calm, calm–and pulls the trigger. The muzzle kicks and deafens her. A puff of dust rises from the wall five feet to the left of the target tree. Waterfowl lift from the mud and circle, puzzled.

Not good.

The woman resettles herself and takes another shot. Forcing her clawed finger to squeeze smoothly.

Two feet to the right of the target. Still not good. But better.

She has put ten rounds aside in a safe place ready for the task itself, which leaves her a hundred and ten to practise with. At ten shots a day that’s eleven practice days. Eleven days in which to remember. Eleven days in which to learn again how to put an entire magazine into a spread she could cover with one hand. She used to be able to do that, six years ago.

Eleven days to get it back. That will be enough.

She has eight cartridges left for this morning’s work. She adjusts the graticule again and prepares herself for another shot.

4

Galina Cornelius wakes to the empty house. Her sister Yeva is wandering in the woods by the lake and Eligiya Kamilova has gone down to the village to work. Galina is glad to be alone. She has a secret place to go.

She crosses the black stream by a wooden plank and pushes her way along the overgrown margin of the pond, following the rim of still, deep water. The grass, in shadow and still morning-damp, soaks the edge of her skirt. Thorns snag at her clothes and roots try to trip her, but she presses forward. Old statues watch her from the undergrowth with pebble-blank eyes: naked women holding amphorae to their breasts; burly, bearded naked men, long hair curling to their shoulders; a laughing boy riding a big fish. The dark green foliage has almost absorbed them, and some have already lost limbs and faces to winter frost and summer heat. There is a rowing boat beached among the reeds on the lake shore. The oars are still shipped in the bottom but the sky-blue paint on the hull is peeling away. Every time she sees it Galina pictures a mother and her girls, a lilac parasol, a shawl against the cool of the shade, in that boat on the water in the afternoons of summer. She tried to pull it onto the water once, but the wood was soft as cake and came away in pieces.

Galina pushes on towards her destination.

The little concrete building is still there, grey and weather-stained, half ivied-over under the shade of trees. Figurines look down at her from the corners: fat naked children smiling, crumbling, patched with moss. Galina pushes the door open. Inside, in the semi-darkness, there is a dark mouth in the ground, the start of a spiral stone staircase. The air in the stairwell smells cool and earth-scented with a taint of rust. She descends. At the bottom is a narrow tunnel with tiled walls that bow out and then lean in to meet low overhead. The tunnel leads away into gloom, heading out underwater across the floor of the lake, and at the far end is a dim green light. Galina feels her way in near-darkness towards her secret underwater room.

Who knows what kink of imagination caused the people who once lived in the house in the grass to build such a place, a hemispherical glazed dome of white steel ribwork, an upturned glass bowl twenty feet high on the bed of the lake? The water that presses against the glass walls is a deep moss colour at floor level, fading to the palest, faintest green at the top. The steel framework is streaked and patched with rust, and on the other side of the glass is the dim movement of water vegetation and shadowy water creatures. Obscure larvae and gastropods. Muffled fishes. Over the course of the years the lake has rained a gentle silt upon the outside of the chamber, staining the glass yellow and flecking it with patches of muck. The underwater room is filled with dim subaqueous forest light, but when Galina arches her neck to look up she can see light and the undersides of ripples lapping in the breeze, and sometimes the underneath of a waterfowl disturbing the circle of visible surface.

Down here in the underwater room the temperature is constant and cool. The room is furnished. Rugs, a sofa, an empty bookcase, a cupboard, a chair, a desk. A pot of earth stands in the centre of the circular floor, the remains of some long-dead, long-dried plant slumped across it. As Galina moves around, circling, touching, she surprises traces of cigar smoke. The smell of brandy and laudanum lingers in pockets of air.

She has told no one about this place and brought no one here, not Eligiya Kamilova, not even Yeva. It is her own place, where she can come and be herself and think about what she should do. Eligiya Kamilova is not their mother. She has never been a mother to anyone at all. She stays with them and takes care of things, but she would travel further and faster without them; she would go even as far as the endless forest in the east. Eligiya has been in that forest, has travelled there, and it stains the air around her. Part of her is in the forest always and has never come away.

Their mother is in Mirgorod.

I have been too ill to do anything but follow where Eligiya Kamilova went, but that time is coming to an end. I must take Yeva back to Mirgorod. I am the older one, and it is my job to do that. Soon I will be as well and strong as I will ever be, and then I must do that.

But I am not ready, not quite yet.

The rusalka presses its chalky face, expressionless and pale, against the silt-flecked glass and stares in at Galina, watching her intently. It moves its hands through the water slowly as if it were waving. But it is not waving. It is only watching. The first time it came Galina mistook it for the reflection of her own face.

The dead soldier Leonid Tarasenko follows Yeva out from under the trees into the emptiness of tall light. There is a tiny anguished hook of memory somewhere inside him, a diamond-hard strange survivor in the heart, a piece of disconnected understanding no larger than a single word, and the word is child.

The dead man follows child. Child fills his heart with happiness and tears and need. In all the world of the dead man there is only child and follow and no other purpose at all, and the existence of even this one irreducible shard of purpose is a mystery more mysterious than the endless ever-faithful burning of the sun.

But child (all unaware of the following) moves faster than the dead man can. The separation between them stretches and stretches.

The dead man would call out after her if he could, but there is not enough wonder and mystery in the world to provide him with concepts like voice and call. He has been given only child and follow, and it is not enough.

Child is gone.

He moves on, following the line she took. Child is gone, but of following there is no end and nothing else to take its place.

The line of his following brings him again to an edge of trees, different trees, but trees. Trees are familiar to him and the smell of earth is familiar beneath them, and that is a soothing ointment for his heart, but also not soothing at all; nothing takes away the happiness and the tears and the need for following child.

Because trees are familiar to him the dead Leonid Taresenko follows his following in under the trees.

Galina Cornelius stays a long while in the underwater room, but eventually it is time to return to the house because Yeva will soon be home from the woods. As Galina is crossing the plank over the black stream, the dead soldier steps out from a tree and comes towards her.

She sees his open earth-filled mouth, the woodlice in the folds of his face and neck.

She screams. It is blank terror.

All the way to the house she runs, heart pounding, fear-blind, and at the veranda she stops and turns. The dead thing is following her, loping unsteadily through the waist-high grass.

Galina screams again.

‘Yeva! Yeva!’

The dead soldier is out of the high grass and coming up the path, coming towards her with fixed and needy dead black eyes, hand stretched out for companionship.

Eligiya Kamilova’s gun is lying on the couch on the veranda.

It could blow up in your eyes. Eligiya had said. Only use it if the other thing will be worse. But she had shown them how.

Galina seizes the gun and swings the barrel up into the face of the dead soldier. His foot is already on the first veranda step when she pulls both triggers together and takes his head apart. The stock kicks back into her shoulder and knocks her down. She can’t hear her own screams any more for the appalling ringing of the double gunshot in her own ears.

5

Eligiya Kamilova finds the two girls sitting side by side outside the house, on the couch on the veranda, staring at the corpse of twice-killed Conscript Gunner K-1 Category Leonid Tarasenko, a good and simple man but not a lucky one. When she heard the shot she was already on the track up to the house, work abandoned halfway done, weightless, spun out of orbit by the kick of the newspaper in her hand.

The girls look up at her in silence when she comes. Their faces are strained and pale, their eyes rimmed red and wide with shock. She knows that she should comfort them, but she doesn’t know how, she hasn’t got it in her; she searches but it isn’t there, the right thing to do to take that shock and pain away. She stands stiffly on the veranda, bitterly, emptily aware of the newspaper rolled and clutched by her side. The ineradicable, undeniable truth of it burns in her hand. She hasn’t anything to give them for comfort, not even news, not good news, only bad.

There’s no good time to tell them what she knows. She is tempted to wait, but waiting will only make things worse, compounding fact with deceiving, and she has never told them less than truth. She cannot give them loving comfort but she can give them that and always does.

She holds the newspaper out to Galina.

‘Look,’ she says. ‘Read it. Read the date.’

Eligiya was down in the village working on the boats when the musicians came out of the east, walking in with their rangy dog: the gusli player with the long straggled hair and thick coal beard resting on his chest, one leg lost in the war, swinging along on crutches, and the tall old man in the long coat, drum like a cartwheel slung on his back. The drummer carried a newspaper stuffed in his pocket that nobody in the village could read. Kamilova bought it from him for a couple of kopeks.

Galina stares at the newspaper blankly.

‘What?’ she says. ‘What about it? What?’

‘The date.’

Galina makes an effort to squint at the stained print.

‘It’s a couple of months old.’ She hands it back to Kamilova and wipes her fingers in the lap of her dress already splattered with the soldier’s drying mess. ‘It’s greasy. It smells bad.’

Galina’s eyes aren’t focused properly. They stray back to the half-rotten corpse on the veranda boards.

‘Not the month,’ says Kamilova. ‘The year.’ She holds the paper up again for the girl to see. Galina stares at it for a while. Furrows her brow in confusion.

‘It’s a mistake,’ she says. ‘A printing error.’

‘No,’ said Kamilova. ‘I talked to the men who brought it into the village. I asked them questions. It isn’t a mistake.’

‘What?’ said Yeva. ‘What are you talking about.’

Kamilova sat down beside them on the end of the couch. She felt suddenly exhausted. Not able to manage. Not able to lead the way, not at the moment, not any more. The strength in her legs, the straightness in her back, was gone. Yeva squeezed up to make room.

‘What is it?’ she said.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Eligiya Kamilova. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘What?’

‘We’ve been walking in the trees,’ said Kamilova, ‘and we’ve been living here in the village by the lake, and it’s been seven months, nearly eight–a long time but not quite eight months–that’s all.’ She takes the paper from where it lies in Galina’s lap. ‘Look at the date.’

Yeva reads the small print at the top of the page.

‘But that’s wrong.’

‘No.’

‘But it is wrong. It’s five years wrong.’

‘Five and a half. Five and half years gone.’

Kamilova has had longer than the girls to think it through.

The three of them roll the corpse of the twice-killed soldier onto a sheet, wrap it and drag it through the grass far away from the house. They dig a hole up near the woods. It takes all day and they are dumb with exhaustion and heat and stink, and the sun has gone and the fear is coming out of the woods. They go inside and light candles and put wood in the stove, and when the water is hot they wash in the kitchen in silence, the whole of their bodies from head to toe. It takes a long time to get the dirtiness off and they don’t quite manage it even then.

Rank warm cheese and a stump of hard bread on the shelf. Oilcloth on the table. Candles burning. The house and the village and the lake. Some people cannot look at their memories, and some people cannot ever look away.

‘Our mother thinks I’m sixteen,’ says Yeva. ‘Sixteen. Or dead. Either way she didn’t find us. She never came.’

‘I didn’t know,’ says Kamilova. ‘There wasn’t a way to know.’

‘She couldn’t have come,’ says Galina. She looks at Eligiya Kamilova. ‘But tomorrow we’ll go home,’

‘Home?’ says Kamilova. ‘What do you mean “home”?’

‘You don’t have to come with us, Eligiya. You’ve done enough; you’ve done more than you needed to for us. You can have your life back; you can go where you want; you can go into the forest again, or stay here and live for ever. ’

Galina’s words lacerate Eligiya like the blades of knives.

‘I…’ she begins. The pain she feels is shame and guilt and love, inextricable trinity, hands held open to receive the price you had to pay. ‘Everything will have changed,’ she says. ‘You have to think about that. She… Your mother might not even—’

‘You don’t have to come, Eligiya.’

‘I will come,’ says Eligiya Kamilova. ‘Of course I will come.’

1

The rain came in long pulses, hard, warm and grey, and the noise of it in the trees was loud like a river. The galloping of rain-horses. Rain-bison. Rain-elk. Maroussia Shaumian followed the trail through rain and trees, splashing through mud-thick rain-churned puddles, the bindings on her legs sodden and clagged to the knee, pushing herself, back straight and face held high, into the future. Her clothes smelled of wet wool and woodsmoke and the warmth of her own body. Rain numbed her face and trickled down her chin and neck. It tasted of earth and nettles. Rain slicked and beaded on the ferns: tall fern canopies trembling under the rain, unfurling ferns, red fern spore. A boar snuffled and crashed in the fern thickets. His hot breath. The smell of it in the rain. There were side paths leading in under the thorns; mud ways trodden clear that passed under low branches. The larger beasts were further off and elsewhere, under taller trees. Cave bear and wisent and the dagger-mouth smilodon.

The land rose and then fell away: not hills but a drifting swell that wasn’t flatness. Coming down, the trail took her among broad shallow pools. Maroussia cut a staff and kept her head down and walked against the rain, churning knee-high through water, mud-heavy feet slipping and awkward. Most of the ground here was water. Roots and stumps and carcasses of fallen trees reached up through the rain-disturbed surface, paused in arrested motion, waiting, balanced between worlds, and everything distant was lost in the rain.

Maroussia crouched to dip her hands in the water, letting the rain beat on her back. Rolling up her sleeves she reached right down to the bottom and ran her fingers through the grass there. It looked like hair and moved to her touch, dark green and beautiful. It was just grass. Her arms in the water looked pale and strange, not hers but arms in the shadow world as real as the one she was in. She cupped her hands and brought some water up into her world to drink, feeling the spill of it through her fingers and down her arms. The water tasted of cold earth and leaves and moss. She tasted the roots of all the trees that stood in it and the bark and wood of the fallen ones. She swallowed it, cool and sweet in her throat, and took more, still drinking long after she wasn’t thirsty any more.

The forest is larger than the world, though those who live outside it think the opposite.

She was Maroussia Shaumian still. Nothing of that time was forgotten, nothing was lost, though she was more now, more and less and different and changed and far from home. Like the water in the rain she was fresh and new, and as old as the planet, both at once.

You don’t know where home is until you’re not there any more.

She waded out deeper into a wide pool loud under the rain to where a beech tree lay on its side, its rain-darkened bark smooth and wet to the touch. The beech had fallen but it wasn’t dead; it was earth-rooted still, and its leaves under the water were green. She let her hands rest on it and felt the tree’s life. She wished she could speak to it but she didn’t have the words, and what would she say? Help me, perhaps. Help me to get home. But that wasn’t right. It wasn’t what you should ask, and no help would come.

Wolves plashed under tree-shadow, distant and silent and indistinct as moths. One turned his face towards her, wolf eyes in the rain, unhurried, considering. She returned his gaze and he looked away.

Some while later she came on the wolf kill. It was an aurochs, huge and bull-like, lying on his side in a shallow pool of bloodied water, his rough fox-coloured hair matted with mud and rain-sodden. From a distance he looked drowned, but when she got close half of him was gone, a rain-washed hole of raw meat. Rain-glistening flies sipped at his eyes and crawled on the grey flopped rain-wet slab of his tongue. The noise of the rain beat in her ears like the rhythm of her own blood, too close and too ceaseless to attend to.

Sudden and uncalled, the killing moment closed its grip on her and she was in it. It was still there, still happening, and she was the happening of it, not outside and watching, not remembering, but being there. She was aurochs not hearing the splashing charge of wolf above the rain, not seeing wolf behind him, not smelling wolf through rain and water and the rich scent of rain on leaf. She felt the appalling shock of the boulder-heavy collision and the clamp of the tearing mouth at her throat. Heard with the aurochs’ own strange clarity the small snap deep inside her neck. Felt the wordless sad dismay of ruminant beast, the surge of fear and panicked stumble, the attempted burly sweep of a neck that didn’t respond–delivered nothing, moved nothing, connected with nothing. The loneliness of that.

She saw with hopeless aurochs eye the wolf that made the first charge turn and come splashing back through mud-swirled blood-swirled water. Then other wolves were on her back and she fell. Pain and the acceptance of pain. Aurochs could not rise and could not stand. Her leg wouldn’t go where she wanted it to go, her beautiful leg was lost. Aurochs grieved for it. Maroussia lived the last long moments when wolves ripped aurochs belly open and pulled the stuff there out and tore and swallowed bits from her beautiful twitching leg and slowly and softly minute after minute aurochs grew tired and far away and died.

And that wasn’t all.

She was the death of aurochs but she was also the hunting of the wolves. She was salt on the wolf’s tongue and the dark hot taste of blood. She was the sour breath of the aurochs’ dying and the glad teeth in the neck of it. She was the crunch of the killing bite and the thirsty suck and tearing swallow of warm sweet flesh.

And that wasn’t all.

She was the life and growth and connected watchfulness of every tree and every leaf and every small creature and every water drop in the pool and the rain, its history and the possibilities of what was to come.

And that wasn’t all.

Nothing was all, because there was no end to the fullness of what she could perceive. Because this was what she had become, this overwhelming surprise of plenitude.

She was Maroussia Shaumian still–Maroussia Shaumian, who had made her choice in Mirgorod and followed her path to its end in Novaya Zima–but she had been inside the Pollandore when the temporary star ignited around it. The Pollandore had imploded and exploded and changed and brought her here, and now it was gone. It was inside her now, if it was anywhere: inside her, new and strong, volatile and unaccommodated. The Pollandore and what she could be ran ahead of her and overwhelmed her until she hardly knew what was her and what was not, because sometimes she was everything.

Time wasn’t a river; time was the sea, layered and fluid and malleable, what was past and what was possibly to come all intricately infolded and vividly present inside the rippling horizons of now. Nothing of Maroussia was lost, but she was more. She was changed and become this. All this.

The seeing faded. (She called it seeing though it wasn’t that, but there was no word.) Seeing always came uncalled and surprised her. She suspected she could learn to call it up at will, but she was afraid of learning that. Once she went through that door, there would be no coming back, and she hadn’t chosen that and did not want it. She hadn’t chosen anything of this, not this, but here it was.

She was as lonely in the rain as the dying aurochs and as far from home.

Time to move on.

The meeting place was not far, and they would be waiting.

2

There were three of them at the place on the White Slope, Fraiethe and the father and the Seer Witch of Bones, and Maroussia Shaumian was the fourth.

The father spoke, as he always did, the phrases of beginning.

‘And so we are met again under wind and rain and trees and the rise and set of sun. We are the forest; the forest is everywhere and everything, and the forest is us.’

‘No,’ said Maroussia. ‘We are something but not everything.’

The father made a barely perceptible movement of his head, acknowledging the justice of that, but frowned and said nothing. An antagonist then, Maroussia thought. Well, there it is then. So it is.

The father was not actually present at the meeting on the White Slope. After the first time he had not come in bones and blood and flesh but as a fetch, a spirit skin, while he kept himself apart and somewhere else. The fetch had come as a man with woodcutter’s hands and forearms, hair falling glossy-thick across his brow and shoulders. A rank aroma, and burning green eyes that watched her openly. Maroussia thought the fetch crude and suspected a deliberate slight aimed at her. This is the form, it said, that seduced your mother and made her sweat and cry in a timberman’s hut in the woods. This the form that fathered you. Like some too?

But Maroussia didn’t believe it. Whatever artifice seduced her mother at Vig would have been more subtle than that, more complex and thoughtful and elegant and patient and kind, to console her for the wasteland of her marriage to Josef Kantor and draw her out of it into the shadow under the trees. It was imagination that seduced her mother, not this unwashed goat. The goat was provocation only.

Then she realised that the father knew this, and knew that she knew it, and in fact the burly woodcutter was not a provocation but a complicitous tease. A wink. A father–daughter joke to be shared.

She didn’t resent the father for fathering her. Not any more. When she was growing up in Mirgorod she’d lived with the pain of the consequences of that, but now and here she understood. For the father there was a pattern to be woven, things to be done, opportunities to be taken and prices paid. What he had done to her mother and her wasn’t personal. It wasn’t even human.

She turned away from him to the other two.

Fraiethe had come in the body. She was really there. Though Fraiethe had guided the paluba that reached Maroussia in Mirgorod, that spoke to her and half-lied and half-bewitched and set her on the course that brought her here; though Fraiethe was part of the deception–if deception was what it had been (which it was not, not a deception but an opening-up)–Fraiethe did not like spirit skins. She stood now under the trees, shadow-dappled like a deer, rain-wet and naked except for the reddish-brown fur, water-sleek and water-beaded, that covered her head and neck and shoulders and the place between her breasts. Fur traced the muscular valley of her spine, and a perfume of musk and warmth was in the air around her. Her skin was flushed because of the rain and cold, and her eyes were wide and brown and there were no whites in them.

The third, the Seer Witch of Bones, was neither body nor fetch, but something else, a shadow presence, a sour darkness, the eater of death, the mouth that opened with a smile of dark leaves and thorns, rooted in neither animal nor tree but of the crossing places, muddy and terrible.

And Maroussia Shaumian, who had sewn uniforms at Vanko’s factory and pulled Vissarion Lom out of the River Mir and lain beside him in the bottom of a boat to bring him back with the warmth of her body; Maroussia Shaumian, who had sliced a man’s head off with a flensing blade and crossed the snow of Novaya Zima to the Pollandore; Maroussia Shaumian, who forgot none of that but remembered everything: Maroussia Shaumian was the fourth at the White Slope, and she claimed an equal place.

The three of them had drawn her to the Pollandore in the moment of its destruction. Because of them she had been there at that moment and absorbed it–been absorbed into it–and become what she was. Because of them the Pollandore was gone from the world beyond the forest and she was here. It was their stratagem against the living angel in the forest. The forest borders were sealed and she, Maroussia, by her presence here, was what held them so. But the three had no sense of the consequences of what they’d done, none at all; only Maroussia had that, and even to her it came only in broken glimpses, fragments that were dark and bleak and hopeless.

She didn’t know if there was a better thing they could have done than what they did, but if there was, they hadn’t done it.

The fetch of the father spoke again, the man with green eyes: ‘The forest is safe. The living angel is contained and we will deal with him. Already he is growing weak and slow. He subsides and grows mute. His ways out of the forest are closed and he no longer draws strength from the places beyond us. The trees are growing back. He has no influence beyond the forest, and here we are stronger than he is.’

The human woman, dark-eyed Maroussia, answered him, and the voice she spoke with was her voice but not only hers but the Pollandore’s also, and sounded strange to her ears.

‘Yet the angel lives!’ she said. ‘Whatever you say, it is not yet destroyed, and it is not clear that we alone have the strength to do it. And we must look to the world beyond the forest. The years there are moving hard and fast, the Vlast is resurgent, the last slow places are closing, the giants and rusalkas are driven out.’

‘What happens beyond the edge of the trees doesn’t concern us,’ the fetch of the father said. ‘It is outside. That’s what outside means.’

‘The world beyond the forest is growing steel fists,’ said Maroussia. ‘There’s no balance there, no breathing of other air. They will not rest content with what they have; they want it all. They will come here, they’ll cut and burn. There are winds the forest cannot stand against. I’ve seen—’

‘They’ve come here before,’ said the fetch of the father, the green-eyed man of muscle, the rich deep voice. ‘And always we have always driven them out. It’s not even hard.’

‘But nothing is the same now, because of what you did. The Pollandore is gone from that world. There is no balance there, and the Vlast will come in numbers, they will drive and burn and burn and drive. There is a man that leads them. Josef Kantor, called Rizhin now. I know something of him and so do you. You know how far he’s gone already and how fast he moves.’ The human woman, dark-eyed Maroussia, paused and looked at all of them, not just the father. ‘And we all know what he is throwing into the sky. We have all heard the hot dry thundercrash and smelled the burning stink of dead angel flesh cutting open the sky. We know the force and speed of what is passing overhead and looking down on us. It makes the forest small. And that’s just the beginning of his ambition. How can you say this doesn’t concern us?’

The fetch of the father moved to speak, but Maroussia dark-eyed paradigm shifter, the unexpected outcome and maker of change, held up her hand to stop him.

‘You must listen to me,’ she said, ‘or why did you do this? Why make me as I am and bring me here–which I did not ask for, which I did not choose–why do this and not listen now to what I say?’

The fetch fell into silence. Maroussia realised that the father, wherever he was, had finished his testing of her.

The Seer Witch of Bones said nothing. It didn’t matter to her. Whatever came there would be a fullness of death at the house of bleached skulls.

But Maroussia felt the pressure of Fraiethe’s attentive examination. Fraiethe knew everything: the heaviness and smell of her wet muddy clothes, the hot sweat of her palms and the beating of her heart, her anger at the trickiness of the father, that she was lonely and didn’t like the forest and wanted to go home. It was Maroussia not Fraiethe who was naked on the White Slope.

‘What would you have us do?’ said Fraiethe.

The human woman dark-eyed Maroussia Shaumian opened her mouth to answer Fraiethe. She felt again the dark earth roots and the watchful sentience of rain. A wind stirred the leaves and moved across her face.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I would have you do nothing. There is another way. ‘

3

Mailboat Number 437 chugged down the mighty mile-broad River Yannis. Vissarion Lom sat in the stern and watched the low wooded hills roll by. The river was slow and quiet here, taking a wide turn to the south, its green waters a highway for tugs, ferries, excursion boats and barges riding low under the weight of ore and grain and oil. Mailboat Number 437 was a dogged striver. The vibration of her engine defined Lom’s world: the gentle rhythmic shocks, the slap of small waves against her iron skin. It was a world that smelled of diesel engine and pine planking and rust. Wet rope and mailbags.

Sora Shenkov, master and sole crew of Mailboat Number 437, was a big man with hard brown hands and eyes the colour of ice and sky. He wasn’t a talker. Every day Lom sat in the stern and watched him work, unless it rained: then he would go below and watch the river through the specks and smears of his little cabin window. And every day Shenkov’s boat made slow headway: her engine churned the screw, and her forward speed through the water exceeded the south-west slide of the Yannis by a certain number of miles, and the marginal gain accumulated. Not that Lom was keeping count. He’d earned some money and taken passage with Shenkov. He’d paid his way. This boat-world time belonged to him. Lom had never owned a time before, but he owned this one and did not wish for it to hurry to an end.

The last six years had changed him. He had travelled far, keeping himself to himself, taking rough work where he could find it, never staying in one place long. His wanderings had taken him into the forest margins, and he had found the endless forest simply that: an endlessness of trees. There were sounds in the night and pathways that went nowhere. Above all, he had not found Maroussia. Of her no trace at all. When he came out of the forest again, months had passed by, seasons come and gone, and he had imagined much but found nothing. He was heavily bearded now, muscular, wiry and weather-darkened, with shaggy wheat-coloured hair. The hole in the front of his skull was nothing but a faint thumbprint visible in certain slanting lights, sun-browned and almost healed. And slowly, slowly, day by day, he was being carried down the river in Shenkov’s boat. He enjoyed these days, which required no decisions, required nothing from him at all. He wasn’t going anywhere in particular. His adventure was over and time had moved on. Once giants rode the timber rafts west on the Yannis, but now it was women without husbands or sons, and it seemed on the wide quiet river that it had always been so.

Swinging round a headland, the boat came up on two huge timber rafts sliding side by side downstream on the current. Rather than waste time and fuel going out into the middle passage, Shenkov, in the little wheelhouse, gunned the engine and nosed skilfully though the channel between them. Lom reached instinctively for the boathook, not that it would help if the rafts chose to drift together and crush the boat between them. Each raft was as big as an island and carried a cluster of plank huts with smoking chimneys and fenced paddocks for goats and chickens. The logs were red pine, and though they were boughs and branches only, never the trunks, they were thicker and heavier by far than whole trunks of beech or oak. As the boat eased through the gap, a woman was milking a cow and speaking in a soft easy voice to her neighbour on the next raft, who was hanging out clothes to dry. Shenkov gave the women a courteous nod. The air was thick with the resinous red pine scent.

It was early evening when Mailboat Number 437 came to the timber station at Loess. Shenkov grunted in surprise. The wharves were crowded with military vessels: cruisers in brown river camouflage, crane-mounted barges loaded with stacked pontoons, a requisitioned paddle-wheel ferry painted stem to stern and smokestack in dull sky grey.

Shenkov managed to find a berth in front of the excise house, tucked in under the looming steel hull of a cruiser, and began to unload mailbags onto the steps. Lom left him to his work and wandered off to have a look at what the troops were doing. Sitting on a bollard at the railhead, he watched a captain of engineers supervising the unloading of vehicles from an armoured train. The engine noise was deafening. The stink of diesel fumes. Heavy grinding tracks churned the mud, splintered the boardwalks and cracked the paving. There were half-tracks and troop carriers, but also tractors and cherry pickers and things Lom hadn’t seen before that looked like immense hooks and chainsaws mounted on caterpillar tracks. The sapper platoon was marshalling them off the train and onto waiting barges whose decks were already stacked high with oil drums. The sappers struggled with three Dankov D-9 battle tanks, each towing what looked like a hefty spare fuel tank. Instead of a gun, the tank turrets were equipped with a short and vicious-looking nozzle. Lom knew what they were. He’d seen flame-thrower tanks in newsreels. Seen spouts of burning kerosene ignite buildings and flush trenches. Seen the enemy run. Screaming. Burning.

The captain of engineers saw him watching and came across. Took in Lom’s weathered face and thick untidy crop of beard, his mud-coloured clothes and boots.

‘You came down the river with the mailboat,’ he said. ‘Were you ever in the forest?’ He was a decent-looking man, efficient and practical, more engineer than soldier. It was a question not a challenge.

Lom nodded. ‘Off and on,’ he said. ‘A little.’

‘What’s it like there?’ said the captain of engineers.

Lom gave a slight shrug. ‘Trees,’ he said. ‘Trees and rivers and lakes. Valleys and hills. Miles and miles of nothing much.’ He gestured towards the fleet of machinery, the barges and the armed boats. ‘You going in there? With that?’

‘That’s right. No secret about that.’

‘It’s been done before. Always got nowhere.’

Once a generation the Vlast mounted incursions against the forest. It was one of the futile repeating rhythmic spasms of the Vlast’s history. Patrols wandered, ineffectual and lost, doing a bit of damage till they got bogged down in mud and thorn and disease. Lom’s own parents had lived in the forest edge. Soldiers came and killed them and razed their village to the ground. The soldiers had carried him out, an orphaned infant, and left him at the Institute in Podchornok. Lom remembered nothing of that forest time and nothing of his parents: presumably they were buried in there somewhere. Bones under the leaf mulch.

So it was to happen again.

‘It’ll be different this time,’ the captain said. ‘This time we’re going to do it right. We’re going in in numbers, whole divisions on a broad front, with heavy machinery and air support. Three salients along the three big rivers. What you see here is just the tip of the iceberg. We’re going to cut and burn all the way through to the other side. We’re going to break the myth of the forest once and for all.’

‘Guess you people need something to do,’ said Lom, ‘now the war’s over.’

‘I was hoping you might give me some advice. The benefit of experience? On-the-ground knowledge? Let me buy you dinner and pick your brains.’

‘Not a chance,’ said Lom. ‘Not a chance in a million fucking years.’

4

Lom went back to the mailboat moored at the jetty but Shenkov wasn’t there; he’d gone into Loess for supplies. Lom settled himself on the bench in the stern to wait. There was twilight and silence on the air, and a faint smell of woodsmoke. The lapping of the river’s edge against the side of the boat. Tiny white moths coming to the newly lit lamp. Not many, not yet, just a few: there was still some life in the western sky. Time was quiet and hardly moving: like the broad deserted river in gathering darkness, all islands and further shores hidden, it seemed to rest and breathe. Huge. Secretive. Watchful.

Maroussia came to him then in the cool of the evening.

Lom knew she was there before she spoke. Before he turned to see her, he felt her as a presence emerging. Resolving out of the periphery of things. She was watching him from out of the silence and the twilight and the shoals of time.

He turned his head to look at her full on, thinking as he did so that she might not be there if he did that. But she was still there, except it was impossible to say exactly where she was. She was on the jetty and on the deck of the boat and on the river shore and on the water. She was very precisely somewhere, but the frame of reference that located her was not the same as his. She was solid and real but she was made from air and shadow, woven out of the river twilight. Not flimsy, but he could not have reached out and touched her; the space between them wasn’t crossable. He didn’t try. For a long time he looked at her. Studying. She was different: older, wiser, changed and strange. She saw things now that he didn’t see.

Lom found he was waiting for her to speak first, but she didn’t. He wasn’t sure if it was possible to speak, anyway, if sounds and words could cross the space that separated them. If language itself could survive that crossing.

‘I went into the forest,’ he said at last. ‘I was looking for you.’

There was a moment when he thought she hadn’t heard. He wasn’t even sure he’d actually said anything aloud. And then she spoke. It was her voice, the shock of her real voice speaking. He thought he’d kept the memory of it but he had not. The appalling uselessness of memory, how drab and inadequate it was. The sudden raw and open pain of six lost silent years

‘I know,’ she said.

Lom felt an overwhelming sudden surge of anger and despair. It ambushed him from within. He thought he’d moved beyond all that, he thought he’d acclimatised to loss and living on, but it was all there, unchanged since the day he’d lost her. Since she’d gone where he couldn’t follow.

‘You knew?’ he said. ‘But you didn’t…’

‘I couldn’t,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

He pushed the anger aside. That hurting was old business, to be dealt with another time, not now.

‘Still,’ he said, ‘you’re here. You came back.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t stay here. I can’t come back. It isn’t possible. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.’

‘But—’

‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘I need you to listen. I need you to understand. What I’m doing now, somewhere else, not here, is I’m holding the forest closed. The angel is shut in and the intermixing of the worlds is separating out. Time runs at different speeds. My time will become, in your world, small fragments of stillness, areas where there is no time at all. I can’t come back; I can’t come home.’ She stared at him, dark eyes wide and urgent in the twilight. They were made of the twilight and the air of the river breathing. ‘Can you understand that? Can you?’

‘How long?’ he said. ‘How long have we got?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘There’s no measure. How can I say—’

‘I mean today. Now. How much time have we got now?’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Today? I don’t know. I shouldn’t have come here at all. Even being here makes a hollowing, a gap for the angel to come through. If that starts to happen, I must go.’

‘I could come to where you are,’ said Lom. ‘You could show me how.’

‘No.’

‘I would come gladly. I would want that. There’s nothing here for me now.’

She looked away sadly in the gathering river darkness.

‘It’s not possible. The barrier mustn’t be broken.’ She paused. ‘I don’t have a choice. I didn’t choose this. But if I had a choice, I would choose it. You have to understand that. If I could choose this, I would.’

‘Then why come at all?’ he said. ‘Why are you here?’

‘You did something for me once, and I’ve come to ask you again. I’m sorry. You should be left in peace, but I’m not doing that.’

‘What do you need?’ said Lom. ‘I will do it if I can. Of course I will.’

‘This world is going too fast and too hard. The future here is… I see it, I see glimpses sometimes, and it’s too… The fracture is deeper and wider and harder… It was unexpected… It could bring everything down—’

Sealed inside endless forest, Archangel grinds slowly on. Look away from him now; he is nothing. He feels the desolation of despair and self-disgust. Cut off from history, his futures slow and fade. Time is failing him. He cannot breathe. He is weak. He is dying. Once he was Archangel, strongest of the strong, quickest of the quick, most powerful of soldiers, quintessence of generalissimos, Archangel nonpareil, but those memories burn and torture him. So does the encroaching of the slow grass.

Archangel probes the boundaries of his enclosure, but they are blank to him, utterly without information and closing in. Archangel hurls himself against the borders ceaselessly, searching for a chink, a crevice, the faintest possible thinning in the imperceptible wall, but all the time the roots of forest trees dig deeper, the grass grows back, and every tiny root-hair is a burning agony to him. He is succumbing to frost and the erosion of rain and wind. They will wear him away to insensate dust.

But then something happens.

It is only a beat of quietness in the roar of the storm, only the fall of a twig on the river. None but an archangel could hear it. None but an archangel could sense the flicker of a shadow in the face of the sun. The quick thinning of ice. The opening of a moment’s gap in the wall of his cage.

With a scream of desperate hope Archangel launches his mind towards the hollowing.

Maroussia flinched and looked over her shoulder as if she had heard a loud noise.

‘Not yet!’ she groaned. ‘Not so soon!’ She looked at Lom in alarm. ‘There’s no more time. I have to go now.’

‘Wait! Tell me what you need me to do.’

‘Stop Kantor,’ she said. ‘Stop him.’

‘You mean kill him?’

‘No! Not kill. Not that. If you only kill him, the idea of him will live, and others will come and it will be the same and worse. Don’t kill him; bring him down, destroy the idea of him. Ruin him in this world, using the tricks of this world. Ruin this world he has created.’

‘But… how? I’m just one person.’

‘You have to find a way. Who else can I ask, if not you? Who will listen to me if you don’t listen? There is no one else.’

‘And if I can do this,’ he said, ‘then afterwards…’

‘No,’ she said, ‘there’s no then. No afterwards. No consequence. No reward. I can’t see then. I can only see what will happen if this doesn’t. Do you understand?’

‘No,’ said Lom. ‘I don’t understand. But it doesn’t matter.’

She was looking at him across a widening distance, and he knew that she was leaving him.

‘I have to go now,’ she said. ‘I’ve already stayed too long. I wanted… Oh no…’

There was a ripple, a shadow-glimmer, and Maroussia was gone.

In the forest it takes Archangel time to react and time to move, and time in the forest is recalcitrant. Slow. Even as he gets close to the gap, it is closing. By the time he reaches it, the tear in the wall has snapped shut. He is too late.

This time.

But now for him there is hope.

And on the quiet River Yannis it was moonless dark and long after midnight and the stars were uncountably many, scattered like salt across darkness, bitter and eternal. She was gone, and Lom felt they hadn’t said anything at all, not really–nothing adequate, nothing enough. She’d come to him and spoken to him, but he didn’t know anything, he didn’t understand more; in fact he understood less than ever, and all the terrible loss and solitude of the last six years was open and fresh and raw once more: the bleak ruination, the need and the grief and the necessity of acting, of doing something, of finding her again. Perhaps that was the point of her coming. Perhaps that was what she had done.

Lom packed his bag and left the mailboat without waiting for Shenkov to return.

5

The Vlast Universal Vessel Proof of Concept circles the planet at tremendous speed, outpacing the planetary spin, passing by turn into clean sunlight and star-crisp shadow. The cabin’s interior days and nights come faster and last for less time even than the rapacious advancing days of Papa Rizhin’s New Vlast, but aboard the Proof of Concept there is no perceptible sense of forward motion.

Cosmonaut-Commodore Vera Mornova, tethered by long cables to her bench, drifting without weight and having nothing much to do, presses her face against the cabin window. The air she breathes smells of hot rubber, charcoal and sweat. The spectacle of the stars unsettles her: they burn clean and cold but seem no nearer now, and all she sees is the infinities of emptiness that lie between. It is her lost, unreachable home that captures her loving attention: the continent, striated yellow and grey by day, the glitter of rivers and lakes, the sparse scattered lamps in inky blackness that are cities by night, the dazzling reflection of the sun in the ocean, the green chain of the Archipelago, the huge ice fields spilling from the poles towards the equator and the edgeless forest glimpsed under cloud.

Misha Fissich drifts up alongside her, accidentally nudging her so she has to grab the edge of the window to stop herself spinning slowly away. He offers her a piece of cold chicken.

‘Hungry?’ he says. ‘The clock says lunchtime. You should eat.’

She shakes her head.

‘No, not now, Misha. I’m not hungry. Thanks.’

‘You should eat,’ he says again. ‘The others are watching you, Vera. If you don’t bother, neither will they.’

‘OK,’ she says. ‘Thanks.’ She smiles at him and takes the chicken and chews it slowly.

When she’s finished, it’s time for the radio interview: a journalist from the Telegraph Agency of the New Vlast, her voice on the loudspeaker sounding indistinct and far away.

Commodore Mornova, she says, the thoughts of all our citizens are with you. You and your crew are the foremost heroes of our time. Parents are naming their newborns after you. Will you tell us please what it’s like to leave the planet? What do you see? How does it feel? How do you and your comrades spend your time?

‘We feel proud and humble, both at once,’ says Vera Mornova. ‘It is humankind’s first step across the threshold: a small first step perhaps, but we are the pioneers of a great new beginning. History is watching us, and we are conscious of the honour. Space is very beautiful and welcoming. We test our equipment and make many observations.’

Such as? Please share your thoughts with us.

‘Well, from orbit one can clearly discern the spherical shape of the planet. The sight is quite unique. Between the sunlit surface of the planet and the deep black sky of stars the dividing line is thin, a narrow belt of delicate blue. While crossing the Vlast we see big squares below–our great collective farms! Ploughed land and grazing may be clearly distinguished. During the state of weightlessness we eat and drink. It is curious that handwriting does not change though the hand is weightless.’

And do you have a message for your loved ones left behind?

‘Tell them,’ says Vera Mornova, ‘tell them we love them and remember them in our hearts.’