Radiant State

1

Engineer-Technician 2nd Class Mikkala Avril receives the letter that will change her life. It is waiting for her in the morning. Breakfast at the Kurchatovgrad Barracks.

Today is her twenty-fourth birthday, but she isn’t counting years; what matters is the accumulation of knowledge, the contribution she can make, not the piling-up of finished days you don’t get back again. Only achievement is notable. Next week she takes examinations that will lead to her promotion, and she has a report to finish: her paper on the dynamics of volatile angel plasma under intense shearing pressures. There are efficiencies to be gained by scoring microscopic fresnel grooves in the face of the pusher plate. So she believes. The equations are beautiful: they click into place inevitably, like good engineering.

Mikkala Avril dreams of making universal vessels that are less crude and primitive and brutal. More evolved. She has had her hair cut short to save time in the mornings.

Citizen women! Race ahead of the lumbering carthorse years! Consecrate yourselves to speed!

Every day she devotes forty-five minutes to the gymnasium. A good worker is healthy and strong.

The envelope waiting for Mikkala Avril on the morning of her twenty-fourth birthday is flimsy and brown and bears no official crest. A crinkly cellophane window shows the typed address within. She has smoothed it and read the address three times. It is for her. On the gummed back flap there is a purple ink-stamp, slightly off centre–PERSONAL & CONFIDENTIAL–and a manuscript addendum neatly capitalised: RECIPIENT ONLY. POST ROOM DO NOT OPEN. She notices that the flap has not been slit. The envelope is unopened, its peremptory instruction to the surveillance office (remarkably) obeyed. They must have known where it was from. But who communicates confidentially with an engineer-technician 2nd class at the Kurchatovgrad Barracks and has the weight to give the censors pause?

Mikkala’s heart runs faster: wild momentary anxieties show themselves, and crazy hopes she didn’t know she had. It’s probably nothing. Some error over her pay. A rebuke for some omission in the weekly returns. She leaves the envelope unopened on the tray and finishes her coffee.

Mikkala Avril is eking out the last empty moments of her old life. She is hesitating. She is wasting time. The letter stares back at her from the brink.

She rips it open and hooks out the single sheet.

2

Lom sat at the desk in the guardhouse at the entrance to the drive that led to Lukasz Kistler’s house. The guard was slumped in the corner, unconscious. He’d have a headache but he would recover: nothing a few days’ rest wouldn’t put right. Lom was wearing the guard’s cap. The interior light was dim: his profile would pass muster. Casual inspection from a distance, anyway. There was always risk.

There were two telephones on the desk: one an outside line, the other connected to the house’s own internal system. A typed list of extension numbers was pinned next to it. lobby. garage. housekeeper. switchboard. security. study. bedroom. Lom took a guess and chose the bedroom. It was almost midnight. He dialled the three-digit number.

And seven miles away in a windowless basement in the headquarters of the Parallel Sector a lamp on a switchboard console winks into life. The night duty operator stubs out her cigarette, puts on her headphones, flicks a switch and begins to type.

Kistler Residential–Internal

23.47 Transcription begins

Kistler: Yes?

Unknown caller: I wish to speak with Lukasz Kistler.

Kistler: This is Kistler. Who the fuck are you?

Caller: You don’t know me.

Kistler: Where are you calling from? How the hell did you get this number?

Caller: I have information for you and I am told you are someone who might make use of it. I am told you are a person of courage and independence. Was I told right?

Kistler: Who is this? What are you talking about? What kind of information?

Caller: Information of consequence. Documentary proofs.

Kistler: Proofs? Proofs of what?

Caller: Proofs that a certain person is not who he says. Proofs of conspiracy. Deception. Assassination. The seizure of power by a revolutionary terrorist operating under a false name with the collusion of certain very senior elements within the official security services.

Kistler: When would this happen?

Caller: It has happened. It has already happened. I am talking about the greatest power there is, and I am talking about incontrovertible documentary proofs.

Kistler: [Pause] Why are you telling me this?

Caller: I want to give these proofs to you. I want you to use them. I am told you are a person who could do this. You have strength of will. You have influence and you are independent of mind. You are also perhaps a decent man. I offer you these proofs, which in the right hands are dangerous–I would say deadly–to the utmost power.

Kistler: Who are you working for?

Caller: Nobody.

Kistler: This is a trap. A loyalty test. Or you are a crank. Either way, I cannot speak to you. Fuck off and leave me alone.

Call disconnected

23.50 Transcription begins

Kistler: Hello?

Unknown caller: I am not a liar. I am not a crank. This is not a trap.

Kistler: Then you are a most dangerous kind of man. You should not have this number.

Caller: I’m offering you a chance to act. To make a change. Perhaps to take power yourself if that’s what you want. The utmost power in the land is a deception. A plot. A man who is not what he seems. See my proofs, Kistler. Let me bring them to you. I will come to your house. See what I have, Kistler. Listen to me, then decide.

Kistler: [Pause] When?

Caller: Now. I am at your gate. All you need do is tell your door security to let me in. [Pause] I’m coming now, Kistler. Five minutes. Tell them to let me in.

Kistler: They will search you.

Caller: That is reasonable. I expected that. I am unarmed. I’m coming now.

Kistler: Wait. Who are you? What is your name?

Call disconnected

23:51–Transcription ends

The transcription operative pulls the sheet from the platen, slides it into an envelope, adds it to the pile in her tray and lights another cigarette. She gives no thought to what she has heard. No reaction at all. Nothing she ever hears leaves any trace: she listens and types and then she forgets. She is a component in a transmission mechanism only, an instrument with no more capacity for retention than the headphones and the typewriter she uses. That’s the safe way, the survivor’s way, and she has been in her job for many years. If she happens to see the consequences of her transcripts later in the rise and fall of magnates and the newspaper reports of arrests and trials, she takes no notice and never says anything. Even to herself she makes no remark.

It’s for others to read the transcripts in the morning and make of them what they will.

3

Lom walked the length of Kistler’s gravel drive in darkness, waiting for the sudden flood of light, the harsh call of a challenge, a bullet in the back. But there was nothing, only the restless animal calls from Kistler’s menagerie in the summer night: the grunting of monkeys, the growl of a big cat. The air was heavy with the scent of orchids and roses. A peacock, startled, disgruntled, stalked away across the starlit lawn.

What am I doing here? Blundering on. Butting my head in the dark against trees to see what fruit falls, and every moment could be my last.

Kistler received him in his study, a dressing gown over his pyjamas. He sat on the couch, chain-smoking, and listened in silence as Lom outlined the facts against Rizhin. Told him the story of the rise of Josef Kantor, the list of his terrorist acts, Lavrentina Chazia’s connection with him, their involvement in the assassination of the Novozhd by Lakoba Petrov. Lom made no mention of the living angel in the forest, Maroussia or the Pollandore.

‘But you haven’t brought me these papers from Chazia’s archive?’ said Kistler when Lom had finished. ‘They’re not with you now?’

‘No.’

‘Then you misled me.’

‘I have them,’ said Lom. ‘They’re nearby but safe, where you will not find them. If I don’t emerge from here in another hour, they will be destroyed.’

‘Perhaps that would be for the best.’

‘They are as I have said.’

‘But who are you? You ask me to take your word on trust, yet I don’t even have a name. You attack my guard and force yourself into my house, and tell me this wild story, which if it’s true—’

‘It is true,’ said Lom. ‘I told you: I have authentic documentary proofs.’

‘If it’s true, for me to even hear it is lethal. Even if it’s not true, look at the position you put me in by coming here. How am I to react? I should make a report immediately, but if I do that Rizhin will feed me to Hunder Rond anyway. You tell me others have died to keep this rumour silent, and I don’t doubt that, even if all the rest of this is horse shit. The only thing I can safely do is have you shot myself, here and now. Get rid of your carcass quietly and forget you ever came. There are a half a dozen VKBD men in the house. It would be straightforward enough to arrange.’

‘You’d have done it long before now, if you were going to,’ said Lom. ‘You wouldn’t have let me reach the door. Though I’m not so easily killed.’

‘Maybe I was curious,’ said Kistler. ‘Maybe I’m not afraid of a little risk. You’re an impressive fellow. You intrigue me. But I need to know who I’m dealing with.’

‘My name is Lom. I used to be a senior investigator in the Political Police. Six years ago I was commissioned by Under-Secretary Krogh to pursue the terrorist Josef Kantor. This is what I have found out.’

‘Used to be?’ said Kistler. ‘And what are you now?’

‘My official career came to an end. I’m freelance now.’

‘You work for no one? Really?’

‘I work alone,’ said Lom

‘You’re one of Savinkov’s experiments, I think?’ said Kistler. ‘That I can see for myself.’

Lom’s hand went to his forehead, reaching for the indentation in his skull where the angel piece had been before Chazia gouged it out. It was an involuntary movement. He caught himself and pulled his hand away. Too late. It was a weakness shown, but there was nothing to be done.

‘That’s gone now too,’ he said.

‘I see,’ said Kistler. ‘OK. Let’s say I accept all this. Let’s say I take you for what you say you are. Let’s say you’re a good fellow and your heart’s in the right place. My advice to you is to destroy these proofs of yours. Burn them. Forget it. Get on with your life and find something else to do.’

‘You’re not interested then. You will do nothing. You will not take my proofs.’

‘Nobody will take them, man! What you have is useless. Worthless. Rubbish. It is no good, no good at all. Oh it’s good police work, surely, but police work will not bring Rizhin down.’

‘But—’

‘Listen. I’ll tell you something about Rizhin—’

‘Kantor. Josef Kantor.’

Kistler shrugged.

‘Rizhin or Kantor,’ he said. ‘It makes no difference. It’s just a name.’

‘No!’

‘Listen to me. I sympathise with you, Lom. I should not say so, but I do. Osip Rizhin is a terrible man. He bullies, he intimidates, he kills. He diverts resources to the military and to idiotic pet projects like the fucking space programme. He sells our grain to our enemies while our people starve by the million. The ordinary economy is collapsing and he has no idea at all. Industrially the Archipelago walks all over us. We have no chance. You can’t run a modern nation on the labour of convicts and slaves, for fuck’s sake. It’s not sustainable. In ten years this Vlast of Rizhin’s will be history’s forgotten dust. I see this and it pains me. I do what I can—’

‘You do nothing,’ said Lom.

‘I do what I can. Here’s the truth about Rizhin. Not the story, the truth. The public fiction is maintained that Papa Rizhin runs his New Vlast alone. He sits in his plain office and smiles, bluff and avuncular, and through the haze of his pipe smoke he sees everything that happens. He intervenes everywhere. Nothing is done without Rizhin’s permission and every decision is his. He is the authority on all subjects. Politics. Culture. History. Philosophy. Science. Works in his name are published in their millions and studied by millions. That is the fiction for the people. Recognise it?’

Lom said nothing.

‘It’s shit,’ Kistler continued. ‘Of course it’s shit. The New Vlast is huge, complex and technical. One man couldn’t possibly direct the government, the armed forces, the security services and the economy. Rizhin needs support. He needs lieutenants. People with the expertise and competence to make decisions of their own. Yes?’

‘Go on,’ said Lom.

‘Have you never wondered,’ said Kistler, ‘what kind of person works for Rizhin? Does it not astonish you that people will do this, knowing what they do? They tolerate the bullying and the humiliation and worse; they accept terror and purges; they know the fate of their predecessors and still they step forward, still they accept appointment to the Central Committee, still they do Rizhin’s work, assiduously and as well as they can. Don’t you wonder why?’

‘You should know. You’re one of them.’

‘Not really. You do not know me yet. Rizhin’s lieutenants are a special sort of person. Iron discipline and faithful adherence to the norms of thought. They continuously adapt their morality, their very consciousness, to the requirements of the New Vlast. Without reservation, Lom. Absolutely without reservation. But above all–you must understand this, it is the key–they are ambitious. For themselves. They don’t support Rizhin because they believe in him, but because they believe in themselves. They want the power and prestige he gives them, and the gratification of their nasty little needs. Half of them will be imprisoned or dead within the year, but everyone thinks it won’t happen to them. They all believe, in the face of all the evidence, that they’re different from the rest, that they can hang on and survive the purges and arrests. Blind ambition. They support Rizhin because he is their security, their leader and the feeder of their desires. It’s a very distinctive cast of mind.

‘And Rizhin understands this. Perfectly. He is the greatest ever player of the game. In the early days, when he was still fighting the civil war against Fohn and Khazar, he used to shoot his commanders at a rate of one a week, but he learned he couldn’t shoot everyone. The people around the President-Commander must be effective, not paralysed. Terror is still the most powerful tool but he’s more subtle now. He purges sparingly. He lets others do the intimidation for him. I’ve watched him learn. It’s been a masterclass.’

Kistler paused to light another cigarette.

‘So you see why your plan won’t work?’ he continued. ‘To bring down Rizhin, you must win the Central Committee. There’s no other way. But if you tell the Central Committee he’s not Rizhin but Josef Kantor, they’ll say–like I do–what’s in a name? Tell them he killed the Novozhd and owes his position to Lavrentina Chazia, and they’ll say–like I do–where are the Novozhd and Chazia now?

‘You see, Lom? You can’t shake the Central Committee’s faith in Rizhin’s integrity of purpose, because they’ve no thought of it anyway. They simply couldn’t give a flying fuck. Everyone has skeletons in the cupboard, and personal ambition is everything. Nobody in Rizhin’s New Vlast wants to rake up memories. What’s past is nothing here.’

‘You’re saying, do nothing, then,’ said Lom, ‘because nothing can be done. This is the counsel of despair. Like I said, you’re one of them. You are ambitious too.’

‘Perhaps. But my ambitions are of a different quality. I see further. I want more. I want better.’

‘It makes no difference.’

‘You know,’ said Kistler carefully. ‘A man like you might dispose of Rizhin if he wanted to. Nothing could be more straightforward. A bomb under his car. Seven grams of lead in the head. No Rizhin, no problem.’

‘No good,’ said Lom. ‘Someone else would take his place. It’s not the man that must be destroyed, it’s the idea of him. The very possibility has to be erased.’

Kistler’s eyes widened. He studied Lom carefully.

‘This isn’t just squeamishness?’ he said. ‘It’s not that you’re afraid.’

‘I’ve killed,’ said Lom, ‘and I don’t want to kill again, not unless I have to. But it’s not squeamishness. Call it historical necessity if you like. It doesn’t matter what you think.’

‘I see. You really are more than a disgruntled policeman with a grudge.’

Lom stood to go. ‘I made a mistake,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have come. You’re not the man I was told you might be. I’ll find another way.’

‘Wait,’ said Kistler. ‘Please. Sit down. I have a proposition for you. Perhaps I could use a fellow like you.’

‘I’m not interested in being used.’

‘Sorry,’ said Kistler. ‘Bad choice of word. But please hear me out.’

Lom said nothing.

‘I share your analysis,’ said Kistler. ‘To put it crudely, Rizhin’s way of running the show is a bad idea. It’s effective but not efficient. History is against it. Frankly, I believe I could do better myself, and I want to try, but for this I need a weapon to bring him down. You have the right idea, Lom, but the wrong weapon. To make my colleagues on the Central Committee abandon Rizhin and come across to me, I need something that convinces them that his continued existence is against their personal interests now. If you can make them believe it’ll go worse for them with him than without him, then he’ll fall. But they all have to believe it, all of them at once, and they have to strike together; if not, Rizhin will just purge the traitors and his position will be stronger than ever. I need to convince them he’s a present danger. A terrible weakness. A desperate threat. That’s what I need evidence of, not your tale of forgotten misdemeanours and peccadilloes in the distant past.’

‘But—’ Lom began.

Kistler held up a hand to silence him.

‘There is a way, perhaps,’ he said. ‘Let me finish. There’s something going on that my colleagues and I have sensed but cannot see. It makes us uneasy and afraid. Rizhin has created a state within a state. The Parallel Sector. We are blind to Hunder Rond and his service, but it is vast, its influence everywhere. And Rizhin has secrets. A plan within a plan. Resources are still being diverted, just like in Dukhonin’s day. Funds. Materials. Workers. The output of the atomic plants at Novaya Zima is far greater than we see the results of. Whole areas on the map are blank, even to us.

‘A man in my position can’t ask too many questions. I have my resources but I can’t use them: the Parallel Sector’s reach is too deep and the penalty for being caught is, well, immediate and total. But for you, Lom, it’s different. I think you might just be the man for the job. I’ll tell you where to look. I’ll give you money. Whatever you need. If you fail, if you’re caught, I’ll deny all knowledge of you. No, I’ll have you killed before you can implicate me at all. But if you find me something I can really use, then we’ll be in business. You bring me back the weapon I need, Lom. This will be our common task.’

‘I don’t work for anyone but myself,’ said Lom. ‘I’m not a policeman. Not any more.’

‘Ego talk,’ said Kistler. ‘I’m offering you an alliance, not fucking employment. Call it cooperation in the mutual interest. Call it a beautiful friendship. A meeting of minds. Call it whatever soothes your vanity–I don’t care. I don’t need you. I was going along just fine before you came, but now I see an opportunity that’s worth an investment and a risk. That’s what you came here for, isn’t it? What the fuck else are you going to do?’

4

Lieutenant Arkady Rett of the 28th Division (Engineers) left his division behind and led his men deeper into the forest. The division had become hopelessly bogged down. They were going in circles.

‘Take a small party, Rett, and scout ahead,’ the colonel had said. ‘Three or four can travel more quickly. Find us an eastward path. Find us solid ground and somewhere to go.’

Rett chose two men, Private Soldier Senkov and Corporal Fallun, and walked out of the camp with them. Behind them the sky was black with the smoke of burning trees, and ahead lay woods within woods, always further in and further back, deeper and deeper for ever. There was no end to going on.

Rett had thought that entering the deeper woods would mean disappearing into darkness. He’d imagined a densely packed wall of trees. Impenetrable thorn-thicket walls. Endless columns of tall trunks disappearing up into gloom, and beneath the canopy nothing but silence. But the reality was different: open spaces filled with grass and fern and briars and pools of water; occasional oak and ash and beech, singly or in small groups; hazel poles so slender he could push them with one hand and they would bend and sway like banner staffs. Ivy and moss and sticky mud and fallen branches underfoot. The forest was the opposite of pathless; there were too many paths, and none led somewhere.

‘Paths don’t make themselves,’ said Senkov.

The compass was useless. After the first day he didn’t get it out of his pack.

On the second day Rett woke feeling small. The world was inexhaustible and he was one tiny thing alone. There was no human scale: hostile, featureless, relentless, the forest defeated interpretation. Rett was a constructor of bridges, a worker with tools, a rational man: he looked for pattern and structure and edge, and found none here. His mind filled the gaps, the spacious lacuna of unresolvable chaotic plenitude, with monsters. There were faces in the trees. Movement in the corner of the eye. Presences. Watchfulness. The nervous child he no longer was returned and walked alongside him.

Senkov and Fallun fell silent, sour, but the invisible child talked. The child saw the shadow-flanks of predatory beasts between the trees: witches and giants and forgotten terrors returning; the fear of being forever lost and never finding home again; men that were bears, stinking eaters of flesh. Trolls crowded at the edge of consciousness, importuning attention at the marginal twilit times. Dusk and dawn.

The 28th had crossed the edge into the trees at the start of summer, but it was chill and autumnal here. Mushrooms and mist and the damp smell of coming winter. There was always a cold wind blowing in their faces. The wind unsettled them: they didn’t sleep well, tempers were short, always there was a feeling something bad was about to happen.

As they penetrated deeper into the trees Rett saw signs of ancient construction: overgrown earthworks; lengths of wall and ditch built of huge boulders, shaped by hand and smooth with moss and age, collapsing unrepaired; broken spans of bridge; tunnel entrances; empty lake villages rotting back into shallow green waters. Shaggy-haired grazing beasts, wisent and rufous bison, faded into further trees at their approach.

On the fourth day they came to the edge of an enormous hole in the earth’s crust: not a canyon or a rift but a gouge, dizzyingly immense, approximately circular, about half a mile across. It was like a great throat, a punched hole, a core removed from the skin of the world. It was terrifying to stand at the brink and lean over, staring down into bottomless darkening depths. It seemed to Rett that there were faint distant points of light down there. It was as if they were stars, and he was seeing through to the night on the other side of the world. More than anything else he wanted to jump off and fall for ever. It cost him tremendously to tear himself away.

Rett and his men skirted the edge of the great gouge and pressed on. Deeper into the inexhaustible forest. They hacked white strips in the bark of trees to mark their way back out. On the eighth day Rett woke early, before the others. He woke in confusion out of stupefying dreams, a thick heavy pain in his head, his mouth dry and fouled.

Hard frost had come in the night. Mist–damp, chilling, faint, insidious, still–brushed against his face, filled his nose and lungs, reduced the endlessness of the surrounding trees to a quiet clearing edged by indeterminacy. His boots crunched on brittle, whitened grass and iron earth. The sound was intrusive. Loud and echoless. The trees seemed suddenly bare of leaves, sifting a dull and diminished light through the monochrome canopy of branches.

The intense cold made his fingers clumsy. Breath pluming in small clouds, he fumbled the tinder, dropped it, couldn’t make his stiffened blue-pale hands work to get a fire started. The water was frozen in the bottle and the pan felt clumsy, and fell, spilling chunks of ice across the hearth. It took an age to coax a meagre, heatless flame into burning. There were a few dusty grains, the last of the coffee. He scattered them across sullen water. It didn’t boil. He built up the fire with thick stumps of log and put a neat pile of others ready. The heat chewed at the wood, smouldering, strengthless, with occasional watery yellow licks of flame the size and colour of fallen hazel leaves. Smoke hung over it, drifting low, thickening the mist. Clinging to his hair.

Rett left Senkov and Fallun to sleep and climbed the shallow rise they’d chosen last night for shelter. The trees were awake. The many trees, watching. The weight of their attention pressed in on him, sucking away the air. It was so cold. His ankle was hurting. His limbs were stiff from too much walking.

Ten minutes later he was on a scrubby hilltop among hazel and thorn, looking across a wide shallow valley. Without trees above him he could see the sky, the grey-brown canopy of leaf-falling woodland spread out at his feet. A range of low hills on the further side climbing into distance and mist.

There was a new hill above the treeline. It hadn’t been there the day before. A fingernail clot of dark purple-red, the rim of a second sun rising.

Rett hurried back down the slope to rouse the others.

All that day they walked in the direction of the red hill rising. The sky settled lower with thickening cloud banks and strange copper light. Trees spread around them in all directions, numberless, featureless and utterly bleak, a still, engulfing, unending tide of reddening blankness. Hour followed hour and always they passed between trees, and always the trees were replaced by more trees, and always the trees were the same. They were moving but getting nowhere because the forest was without boundary or finish or variation. Its immenseness was beyond size and without horizon. Walking brought them no nearer and no further away. Motion without movement. Everything unchanging copper and grey except the red hill. That was coming closer. They walked on towards it until it was too dark to move, and then they camped without a fire. Rett felt small beyond insignificance and absolutely without purpose or hope.

In the morning the red hill was nearer. It had moved in the night. Its lower slopes were ash-grey. Rett started towards it. The air prickled, metallic. The trees were looking ill. They had no leaves.

Fallun hung back. ‘I don’t want to,’ he said. ‘It’s not right.’

The sky was low and copper again. The air tasted of iron, the fine hairs on their skin prickled.

‘We must,’ said Rett. ‘Orders. I think that’s what we’ve come to find.’

Fallun stared at him. ‘Orders?’

‘“Find a hill that might be moving,” ’ said Rett. ‘It’s the primary objective of this whole thing. Burning the forest is secondary. The icing on the cake. The colonel told me before we left.’

‘A hill?’ said Senkov? ‘A moving hill? What the fuck’s it meant to be?’

‘An angel,’ said Rett. ‘But alive.’

Fallun took a step backwards. Hitched his pack off his shoulder and dropped it. ‘No. No way. Not me.’

Rett stared at him. He didn’t know what to say. He was an engineer.

‘It’s an order.’

‘Fuck orders.’

‘An order, Fallun.’

Fallun looked at Senkov. Rett felt sick, like he was going to throw up again. Senkov blushed and looked at his shoes.

‘Fuck orders,’ said Fallun again, ‘and fuck you both. I’m going home.’

Rett hesitated. Then he shrugged. ‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘We’ll pick you up on the way back.’

Shreds of low bad-smelling mist drifted across the ground. A sour sickening smell under the copper sky, the light itself dim and smeary. The earth in places a crust over smouldering embers–the roots of trees burning under the ground–but there was no heat.

The wind brought the smell of burning earth and something else, something edgy, prickling and dark. Like iron in the mouth.

‘Something bad,’ said Senkov. ‘Careful.’

‘We have to see,’ said Rett. ‘We have to go there.’

‘OK,’ said Senkov. ‘But be careful.’

The red hill was hundreds of feet high. Rounded, fissured, extending shoulder-slopes towards them. Rett felt the pressure of its gaze.

A mile before they reached it, the earth was a brittle cinder crust that crunched and broke underfoot. Boots went through ankle-deep into smouldering cool blue flames. The ground was on fire without heat and the air sang with electricity. Ahead of them were pools of colourless shimmering. Small lakes but not water. The undergrowth and the trees were white as bone. Ash-white, they snapped at the touch.

A grey elk struggled to get to her feet and run from their approach but couldn’t rise. She had no hind legs. She gave up and collapsed to her knees and watched them with dull frightened eyes. Milky blue-grey eyes. Like cataracts.

Rett felt dizzy and almost fell.

‘I can’t feel my feet,’ said Senkov. ‘Please. This is far enough.’

‘Just a bit further,’ said Rett. ‘Then we’ll turn back.’

Five more minutes and they came upon the bodies of the giants. The giants weren’t simply dead; they were destroyed, their bodies eroded and crumbling like soft grey chalk. Parts of the bodies were there and parts were not. Broken pieces were embedded with fragments of hard shining purple-black skin. Flinty bruises.

Objects crunched underfoot.

Senkov picked up an axe from the ground. The iron was covered with a sanding of fine grainy substance, a faintly bluish white, as if the metal had sweated out a crust of mineral salt. When he tried it against a tree the axe head broke, useless.

‘What did this?’ he said quietly

The copper was draining from the sky, leaving it the colour of hessian. Darker stains seeping up from the east. A hand of fear covered Rett’s face so it was hard to breathe. Everything inside him was tight. Tight like wires.

‘They’re moving,’ he said. ‘Oh god, they’re moving. They’re not dead.’

The ruined giants were shifting arms and legs slowly. Scratching torn fingers at the air. Eyes opened. Mouths mouthing. Wordless. The eyes were blank and sightless and the words had no breath: they were parodic jaw motions only. One body was twisting. Jerking. A hand seemed to grasp at Rett’s leg. He recoiled and kicked out at it, and the whole arm broke off in a puff of shards and dust. Gobbets of bitter stinking sticky substance splashed onto his face. Into his mouth. Rett made a noise somewhere between a groan and a yell, leaned forward and puked where he stood.

‘They’re dead,’ said Senkov. ‘The poor fuckers are dead, they just don’t know it.’

‘We need to get out of here,’ said Rett. ‘We need to move. Now.’

Senkov stumbled and fell, twitching, shuddering, struggling to breathe. White saliva bubbles at the corner of his mouth. Thick veins spreading across his temples, the muscles in his neck standing out like ropes. His back arched and spasmed. He fell quiet then but his chest was heaving. His eyes stared at the sky. They were dark and intent, unfocused inward-looking whiteless bright shining black. Senkov’s mouth began to speak words but the voice was strange.

‘Tell him,’ he said monotonously and forceful and very fast, over and over again. ‘Tell. Tell. Tell I am here. Tell I am found. Come for me. Come for me. Nearer now. Nearer. Tell him to come.’

5

Engineer-Technician 1st Class Mikkala Avril, secret Hero of the New Vlast, personally selected for a glittering new purpose and destiny by Papa Rizhin himself, freshly uniformed, all medicals passed A1, tip-top perfect condition in body and mind, ready and willing to hurl herself into the shining future, takes a seat across the desk from Director Khyrbysk himself. In his own office. A welcome and induction from the very top. She is conscious of the honour, flushed and more than a little nervous. She must work hard to concentrate on what he is saying, and the effort makes her frown. It gives her an air of seriousness that belies the trembling excitement in her belly. She holds her hands together in her lap to stop them fidgeting.

Here she is, twenty-four years and two days old, a thousand miles north-east of Kurchatovgrad and Chaiganur, in a place not shown on any map, on the very brink of what it’s really all about. This is Project Perpetual Sunrise. This is Task Number One.

Khyrbysk is a cliff of a man, a slab, all hands and shoulders and clipped black curly hair, but his voice is fluent and beautiful and his pale eyes glitter with cold and visionary intelligence. They burn right into Mikkala Avril and she likes the feeling of that. Director Khyrbysk sees deep and far, and Mikkala Avril is important to him. He wants her to hear and understand.

‘All known problems–’ Khyrbysk is saying in that voice, that fine beguiling voice ‘–all known problems have a single root in the problem of death. The human lifetime is too brief for true achievement: personality falls away into particulate disintegration before the task at hand is finished. But this will not always be so. Humanity is not the end point of evolution, but only the beginning.

‘Now is the telluric age, and our human lives are brief and planetary. Next comes the solar age, when we will expand to occupy our neighbour planets within the limits of our present sun. But that is merely an intermediate step on the way to the sidereal age, when the whole of the cosmos, the endless galactic immensities, will be ours. This is inevitable. The course of the future is fixed.’

Director Khyrbysk pauses. Mikkala Avril, brows knotted in concentration, wordless in the zero hour and year, burning with purpose and energy, nods for him to continue.

I understand. I am your woman. Papa Rizhin was not wrong to pick me out.

‘You see immediately of course,’ says Khyrbysk, ‘that the contemporary human body isn’t fit for such a destiny. Active evolution, that is the key: the extension of human longevity to an unlimited degree; the creation of synthetic human bodies; the physical resurrection of the dead. These are the prerequisites for the exploration and colonization of distant galaxies. The living are too few to fill the space, but that is nothing. The whole of our past surrounds us. Everybody who ever lived–their residual atomic dust still exists all around us and holds their patterns, remembers them–and one day we’ll resurrect our dead on distant planets. We will return our ancestors to life there! The whole history of our species, archived, preserved, will be recalled to live again in bodies that have been re-engineered to survive whatever conditions prevail among the stars. And when that time comes the whole cosmos will burn with the light of radiant humankind.’

Mikkala Avril, astonished, excited, confused and strangely disturbed, feels it incumbent upon her to speak. She opens her mouth but no words come.

‘You doubt the practicality of this?’ says Khyrbysk. ‘Of course you do. These ideas are new to you. But there is no doubt. We have already seen the proof of it. What do you think the angels were, but ourselves returning to greet ourselves. It is a matter of cycles. The endless waves of history. The great wheel of the universe turns and turns again.’

Mikkala Avril is puzzled by this reference to angels. It stirs vague troubled memories. Uncertain images of large dead forms. Dangerous giants walking. She thinks she might have heard talk of such things long ago, but nothing is certain now. She can’t remember clearly. Rizhin’s New Vlast burns with such brightness, the blinding glare of it whites out the forgotten past.

‘Of course,’ says Khyrbysk, ‘our science is far from being able to do this yet. The success of Proof of Concept was a great step forward, but there are technical problems that may take hundreds, even thousands of years to overcome. Yet surely if all humanity is devoted to this one single common purpose then it will be done. And that, Mikkala Avril, is what the New Vlast is for. Rizhin himself appointed me to this task, as he appointed you to yours. “Yakov,” he said to me then, “devote all your energies to this. Abandon all other duties. This, my friend, this is Task Number One.” ’

6

When Mikkala Avril had left him, Yakov Khyrbysk reached for pen and paper. A man of many cares and burdens, he had a letter to write.

Three days later he received a scribbled reply.

7

Kistler had given Lom an envelope with a thousand roubles in it and a place name.

I hear whispers, Lom. Phrases. Vitigorsk, in the Pyalo-Orlanovin oblast. Post Office Box 932. That’s all I can give you. Make of it what you can

A thousand roubles was more than Lom had ever held at one time in his life. He bought an overnight bag, some shirts and a 35-millimetre camera (a Kono like Vishnik had, but the newer model with integral rangefinder and a second lens, a medium telephoto). He also bought ten rolls of fast monochrome film and an airline ticket to Orlanograd. From there he took buses. Four days and several wasted detours found him set down at a crossroads in a blank space on the map. He shouldered his bag and began to walk west into the rhythmic glaring of the late-afternoon sun.

Grasslands and low, bald, rolling hills.

Lom measured his progress by the heavy pylons and the rows of upright poles that stretched ahead of him: high-tension power cables and telephone wires. If the wires and cables were heading somewhere, then so was he.

The road was straight and black and new, a single asphalt strip edged with gravel. Wind hummed in the wires, slapped his coat at his knees, scoured his face with fine dry sandy dust. He’d never felt so alone or so exposed. He was the only moving thing for miles. Whether he was going forwards or backwards he had no idea. There was no plan. He put no trust in Kistler, except that Kistler’s demolition of his proofs had the compulsion of truth, and Kistler had shown him a different tree to shake.

One tree’s as good as another in that regard.

The world’s turned upside down, and I’m the terrorist now and this is Kantor’s world. Everything is changed and gone and new, and I am become the surly lone destroyer, opening gaps into different futures by destruction, ripping away the surfaces to show what’s underneath.

One target’s as good as another when everything is connected to everything else.

Maybe I’m just a sore loser, and this is nothing but resentfulness and grudge.

I never saw Maroussia on the river. Trick of memory. Didn’t happen.

Six years. I’ve been alone too long.

A huge truck thundered up the road behind him. He had to step off into the grass to let it pass. Three coupled sixteen-wheeled containers in a cloud of diesel fumes and dust, the wheels high as a man. There were no markings on the raw corrugated-steel container walls, just fixings bleeding streaks of rust. The driver stared down at him from the elevation of his cab, a blurred face behind a grimy window. Lom nodded to him but the driver didn’t respond.

Time to get off the road.

The forty-eight-wheel truck dwindled into the horizon and silence, leaving him alone under the weight of the endless grey sky. Lom turned and left the asphalt behind him. The grass was coarse under his feet, tussocky and sparse.

For the first time in far too long he opened himself to the openness around him. There was a hole in his head. A faint flickering drum-pulse under fine silky skin. A tissue of permeable separation.

He let the wind off the hills pass through him. The soil under the grass was thin. A skimming of roots and dust. He ignored it and felt for the rock beneath, the bones of the living planet. Beneath his feet were the sinews of the world, the roots of ancient mountains, knotted in the slow tension of their viscid churn. The low surrounding hills were eroded solid thunderheads.

Lom’s heart slowed and his breathing became more quiet and easy. He kept on reaching out, down into the dark of the ground, till he touched the heart rock of the world: not the sedimentary rocks, silt of seashell and bone, but the true heart rock, extruded from the simmering star stuff at the planetary heart. Layered seams of granite and lava, dolerites, rhyolites, gabbros and tuffs, buckled, faulted, shattered and upheaved under the pressure of their own shifting. Rock that moved too slowly and endured too long to grieve. He felt the currents of awareness moving through it, eddying and swirling, drifting and dispersing: sometimes obscure and indifferent and sometimes watchful; sometimes withdrawing inwards to collect in pools of deep dark heat, and sometimes sharpening into intense, brilliant, crystallised moments of attention.

There was life in the air. The ground wore a faint penumbra of rippling light like an electrostatic charge, the latent consciousness of the stone fields. He let the currents play across his skin. Felt them as a stirring of the fine small hairs of his arms and the turbulence of his blood. He was alive to the invisible touch of the deep planetary rock. It reached into his body to touch the chambers of his heart.

This is who I am. I will not lose sight of this again.

The grasslands were not empty. Everywhere, invisible vivid small animal presences burrowed and hunted. Bright black eyes watched him from cover. The high-tension power lines were black and sheathed in sleeves of smoke. When he opened his mouth to breathe, their quivering tasted metallic on his tongue.

Rizhin’s new world was thin and brittle. Translucent. Lom reached up into the sky and made it rain simply because he was thirsty and he could.

Beyond the skyline was the place he was going to. He knew the way.

Walking in the endless forest, Maroussia Shaumian feels the stirring of the trees and the cool damp touch of moving air against her cheek. The faintest ragged edge of a distant storm.

1

Vacation season came early for the Central Committee that year. A motion was tabled in plenum in the name of Genrickh Gribov, Secretary for War: ‘To grant Osip Rizhin a holiday of twenty days.’ It was a formality, preserving the fiction that Papa Rizhin worked for them; naturally the motion was approved by acclamation.

The wound on Rizhin’s face was healing more slowly than he’d have liked: the assassin’s bullet had reawakened the old problem with his teeth. He wanted southern sunshine, a change of food and good dentistry, so it was with some relief that he settled into his personal train for Dacha Number Nine in the mountains overlooking Zusovo on the Karima coast. Lobster and citrus trees.

VKBD detachments secured the route, six men per kilometre. Sixteen companies guarded the telephone lines and eight armoured trains continually patrolled the track.

And where Rizhin went the Central Committee followed. Holidays were serious business in Rizhin’s New Vlast. Gribov and Kistler, Yashina, Ekel and the rest packed hastily and piled into their cars and trains. They all had dachas in the Zusovo heights. Hunder Rond flew on ahead to be there when they came.

2

Engineer-Technician 1st Class Mikkala Avril works fourteen hours a day in a windowless room in the basement of a nine-floor block in the centre of the Vitigorsk complex, pausing only to bolt food and sleep in her one-room apartment in the House of Residence: bed, bookshelf, desk and chair.

They’ve given her a bank of von Altmann machines, six of them wired in linear sequence. Each machine has six cathode tubes, and a tube is 12,024 bits of data in 32 x 32 array. Each phosphorescent face is read, written and refreshed a hundred thousand times a second by electron beam. The smell of ozone and burning dust thickens the air. At the end of every shift her skin and clothes and hair stink of it. The odour pervades her dreams.

Her task is calculating pressure, force and trajectory. The vessels under development at Vitigorsk are larger and heavier than Proof of Concept by orders of magnitude–crude sledgehammer monsters–and the question presented to her for consideration is, one pressure plate or two? It’s a matter of running the models again and again. Mikkala Avril is trusted to work alone, unsupervised, in silence, with her von Altmann array. She works through the models diligently. Progress is ahead of target.

But something is going wrong. Day by day Mikkala Avril’s wide-eyed joy at the greatness of her purpose, her privilege, the task she’s been selected for, is growing hollow. The sustenance it gives her is getting thin. The song of the New Vlast wearies her heart and jangles her nerves, even as her skin grows chalky-grey and her cropped hair loses its lustre.

The power of the detonations required to haul such behemoths crawling up the gravity well is terrifying: the ground destruction would gouge city-wide craters in the rock, obliteration perimeters measured in tens of miles. Mikkala Avril understands the numbers. She knows what they mean. But that’s not the trouble: the continent is wide, the atmosphere is deep and broad.

In her rest periods she has ventured out into the Vitigorsk complex. She’s seen the glow on the skyline at night from the forging zone, and she knows convict labour works there. The children sleeping on concrete. She’s seen the people trucks come in. Yet that’s not the trouble either: the labourers reforge their consciousness as they work; they welcome it and leave gladdened and improved. An efficient system that brings benefit to all.

No, it’s the double mission parameter that corrodes her confidence. She doesn’t understand it. It has not been explained.

She has not one model to work with, but two. Vessel Design One must hold propellant bombs sufficient to take it out of planetary orbit and speed it on its way across the cosmos into the sidereal age, and it will carry a store of empty casings to be fuelled on the moons of the outer planets. Staging posts. But Vessel Design Two, even more massive and with a payload provision twice that of Design One, needs no more power than to lift it into near orbit. A fleet of several hundred platforms, each dwarfing any ocean-going ship, lifted into orbit two hundred miles above the ground and settled stable there? What is the reason for this? It has not been explained. The variable is unaccounted for, and that’s a lacuna of trust, a withholding of confidence that tugs at the edge of her and begins to unravel conviction.

She isn’t fully conscious of what’s happening. She doesn’t have the right words, and if she ever did she’s forgotten them now, the vocabulary of doubt eroded by the attrition of continually reset clocks, the accelerating repetition of year zero. What she feels is the uneasy itch of curiosity and upset at a distressing flaw in the machine. She takes it as a shortcoming in her own comprehension and sets about rectifying the fault, but her superiors frown and brush her off with critical remarks and the repetition of familiar platitudes. It never occurs to her that they don’t know either.

Unhappy and alone, Mikkala Avril lingers in the refectory over the evening meal. Having no circle of companions (the theoretical mathematicians exclude her, so do the engineers of the von Altmann machines), she attaches herself to other groups and listens. She gets to know the bio-engineers–the humanity-synthesisers, the warriors against death–and picks up fragments of their talk. There are rumours of strange zones where clocks run slow and the dead climb from their graves. Quietly she joins the groups that gather around people returned from expeditions to find such places, which they say are shrinking fast and will soon be gone. She listens to the news of specimens collected. Samples of earth and air. But nobody knows or cares about the parameters of vessel design.

A chemist called Sergei Ivanich Varin, eager to seduce her, invites her to see the resurrectionists’ laboratory after hours.

‘Come on,’ he says. ‘I’ll show you the freak shop.’

Strip lights flicker blue. The sickly stench of formaldehyde. Shelf after shelf of human babies in jars: misshapen foetuses and dead-born homunculi with bulging eyes, flesh softened and white like they’ve been too long under the sea. A boneless head, creased, flattened and flopped sideways. A torso collapsed in flaps of slumped waxy skin, diminutive supplicating arms raised like chicken wings. A lump with two heads and no internal organs, its shoulders ending in a ragged chewed-up mess.

Mikkala Avril coughs on choked-back sickness. Varin comes up close behind and nuzzles his face into her neck.

‘No need to be frightened of the fishes. Big Sergei’s here.’

She feels his hand sliding inside her jacket and blouse to cup her breast.

3

The lurid sleepless glare of the arc lamps and foundries and waste gas burn-off plumes of the Vitigorsk Closed Enclave was visible from two hours’ drive away. A billboard on the approach road celebrated the shattering of the Vlast record for speed pouring concrete. TAKE SATISFACTION, LEADING WORKERS OF VITIGORSK! THE ENGINEERING CADRES SALUTE YOU! YOU HAVE RAISED A NEW CITY AT A PACE HITHERTO THOUGHT POSSIBLE ONLY FOR DEMOLITION! The entire ten-mile sprawl was enclosed by barbed wire and observation towers.

Lom brought the truck to a halt at the checkpoint, turned off the engine and swung down from the cab into a wall of noxious chemical fumes, plant noise, the smell of hot metal and the brilliance of floodlights bright as day. A guard in the black uniform of the Parallel Sector came over to check his papers. Two more hung back and covered him with automatic weapons.

The guard frowned.

‘You’re three hours late.’

Lom shrugged.

‘Brake trouble,’ he said. ‘Fixed now.’

He shoved the sheaf of documents towards the guard. They were creased and marked with oily finger marks. Lom was wearing the truck driver’s scuffed boots and shapeless coat. His hands were filthy.

‘I could do with a wash,’ he said. ‘And I haven’t eaten since breakfast.’

The guard glared at him.

‘The transport workers’ kitchen’s closed. You’re late.’ He went through the papers slowly and carefully and took a slow walk around the truck, checking the seals. Comparing serial numbers with his own list. Kicking the tyres for no reason. Making a meal of it. Bastard.

Lom’s heart was pounding. He smeared a greasy hand across his face, rubbing his eyes and stifling a yawn. There was a tiny sleeping compartment at the back of the cabin. The truck driver was in there, hidden under a blanket, trussed up with a rope, his own sock stuffed into his mouth.

The guard came back and handed Lom the signed-off papers. He looked disappointed.

Lom had wanted to come in late to avoid other drivers and catch the night-shift security: less chance they’d know the regular drivers by sight, that was the calculation. He hadn’t reckoned on a guard who was bored and looking for trouble.

‘What was the trouble with the brakes?’ the guard said, still reluctant to let him go.

‘Hydraulics leak,’ said Lom. ‘I patched it up. It should hold till I get back.’

He knew nothing about trucks and hoped the guard didn’t either.

Please don’t look in the cab.

The guard signalled to the kiosk and the first barrier lifted.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Bay Five. Follow the signs. Check-in won’t open till six but you can park there, and if you walk over towards the liquid oxygen generators there’s a twenty-four-hour rest room for the duty maintenance. You might be able to get something to eat there. Maybe someone’ll look at those hydraulics for you.’

Lom nodded. ‘Thanks. Appreciate that.’

The gates of Bay Five were closed. No one was about. Beyond the chain-link fence was a row of dark containerless cabs. Lom checked on the driver. The man glared back at him with hot, frightened angry eyes. He pulled against the ropes and grunted through the sock in his mouth.

Lom hauled him up and propped him in a sitting position.

‘Someone will find you,’ he said, ‘but not before morning. Don’t try to call out; you’ll make yourself throw up and that’ll be very bad for you. You’ll choke on it. Sit tight and wait.’

The man grunted again. It sounded like a curse.

Lom left the truck on the unlit apron in front of Bay Five, locked it and dropped the keys through a drainage grating. He reckoned he had seven hours before anyone would investigate. Maybe another half-hour before the alarm was raised.

So what the fuck do I do now?

He shouldered his bag and walked. The gun he’d taken from the VKBD man in Pir-Anghelsky Park was a comforting weight in his pocket.

He wandered among vast hangars and metal sheds. Chemical processing plants. Yards stacked with enormous pieces of shaped steel: curved components for even larger constructions. There was a river running thick and green under lamplight and a poisonous-looking artificial lake: scarfs of mist trailed across the surface and the acrid rising air warmed his face. Klaxons blared and gangs of workers in overalls changed shift. Parallel Sector patrols cruised the main roads in unmarked black saloons. It was easy to see them coming: he stepped into the shadows to let them pass.

For an hour he walked steadily, keeping to one direction as far as he could: east, he thought, though there was no way of telling. Vaporous effluent columns from a thousand vents and chimneys merged overhead in a low dense lid of cloud that shut out the night sky and reflected Vitigorsk’s baleful orange glow.

A cluster of signs at an intersection pointed to meaningless numbered sectors but one caught his attention: prototype–assembly. Cresting a low hill, he found himself looking out across a floodlit concrete plain. From the centre rose a huge citadel of steel capped with a rounded dome. It resembled a massively engorged grain silo with stubby fins at the base. The trucks parked at the foot of it gave some sense of scale: if it had been a building, it would have been twenty or thirty floors high. Lom had seen pictures of the Proof of Concept–everyone had–and this thing was the same but much larger: a parent to a child.

From the cover of a low wall he took a couple of photographs just for the sake of it–he couldn’t see what use Kistler could make of them, even if the facility was being kept secret from the Central Committee–and slipped away.

He glanced at his watch.

Almost 1 a.m.

He felt like he was playing at espionage.

What he needed was someone to talk to. Human intelligence.

PROJECT CONTROL. INSTITUTE OF RESEARCH. RESIDENTIAL CAMPUS.

It was a labyrinth of office blocks and apartment buildings, all crammed in and pressing against one another cheek by jowl: ramps and bollards and courtyards, walkways and flights of shallow concrete steps. Scrappy shrubs in concrete containers. Unlit ground-floor windows, service roads and areas of broken paving. A yard for refuse bins. Lom could see into uncurtained corridors. A few lights still burned in upper rooms.

Steps led up from a square with benches and flower beds to a revolving door. He heard voices, hushed but urgent. A couple standing in the splash of yellow light at the foot of the steps, arguing.

‘No, Sergei. Please. I have to go now. I must go in.’

The woman was young. Slight and not tall, with cropped hair. Neat, sober office clothes. The man was bigger, older. Aggressive. Standing too close.

‘Why not, Mikkala? What’s wrong with me?’

‘Nothing’s wrong with you, Sergei. It’s just… It’s late. I have to go.’

He grabbed her arm. ‘Come on, Mikkala,’ he said. ‘You’ll like it. I’m good. I’m the best.’

She pulled her arm away and stepped back. ‘I said no.’

‘You fucking bitch. All evening you’ve been… What’s a man supposed to think? You can’t just turn round and say no, you cold fucking…’ He reached out and pulled her towards him. Moved his head to hers. She turned her face away.

‘Please, Sergei.’

Lom stepped out of the shadows.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘What’s happening? Is this man bothering you?’

Sergei turned. ‘Who the fuck are you?’ He was swaying on his feet. Squinting. Lom smelled the aquavit thick on his breath.

‘You should leave her alone,’ said Lom.

‘It’s nothing to do with you, arsehole. Piss off. I’ll break your fucking neck.’

Lom ignored him. ‘Is this where you live?’ he said to the woman. ‘Come with me. I’ll take you inside.’

‘I said piss off, fuck-pig,’ Sergei growled. ‘You can’t push me around.’

‘Sergei,’ said the woman. ‘Don’t.’

Sergei made a shambling lunge and swung a fist at Lom. He was big but soft and clumsy, and there wasn’t much speed or power in the punch. Lom could have stepped out of the way. But he didn’t. He raised his arm awkwardly as if to ward off the blow but he let it through. Turned his head slightly to take it on the side of the nose.

It hurt. A lot. He rocked back and put his hands to his face. Felt the warm blood flooding from his nostrils.

‘You hit me!’ he said to Sergei. ‘I’m bleeding.’

‘You were lucky, pig. Next time I’ll break your fucking spine. And yours, bitch. I’ll see you again. I’ll ruin your fucking career. I’ll ruin your life. People will listen to me.’

He turned and walked away, swaggering, unsteady. Lom tried to staunch the bleeding with the sleeve of the driver’s coat. Smeared it around. It made quite a mess. His whole face felt stiff and sore.

‘Are you all right?’ said the young woman. She was thin and pale. Narrow shoulders. Her eyes glistened blurrily. She had been drinking too. ‘Did Sergei hurt you? ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Not much,’ said Lom. ‘Not really. I’ll be fine in a moment.’ He pressed the back of his hand to his nose and brought it away covered in blood. Red and gleaming in the light from the doorway. ‘I could do with a little cold water. And perhaps a towel. Is there somewhere…?’

The young woman hesitated. Made up her mind.

‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘I’ll find you something.’

4

Lom sat on the bed in Mikkala Avril’s room. She brought a bowl of cold water and a couple of rough grey towels. He dipped the end of one in the bowl and dabbed at his face.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I haven’t got a mirror. There’s one across the way, in the bathroom, but it’s women only. Actually we’re not meant to have men in this building at all.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Lom. ‘I’ll manage. You tell me how I’m doing. Is there much blood?’

She sat down next to him on the bed and studied his face. Her face was very thin, her eyes unnaturally wide.

She hasn’t been eating. Pushing herself too hard.

‘There’s still blood coming from your nose,’ she said. ‘There’s some in your hair, and it’s all over your coat.’

He wet the towel again and pressed it against the side of his nose.

‘I don’t even know your name,’ he said. His voice was muffled by the cloth. ‘I’m Vissarion.’

‘Mikkala. And… thank you. For what you did just now.’

Lom waved it away. ‘It was nothing.’

‘But I feel awful,’ said Mikkala. ‘I was so stupid; I should never have gone with Sergei and got drunk like that, it’s not the kind of thing I do. Ever. I’m not… I wasn’t good at it. I didn’t handle it. It all went wrong. Everything’s gone wrong here. I was so proud when I came, but nothing’s going right…’

She was really quite drunk. Words tumbled out.

‘Is Sergei your boyfriend?’ said Lom.

‘No!’ She shook her head fiercely. ‘No, no, not at all–nothing like that. I’ve met him two or three times, that’s all. It’s just… I don’t know many people here. I work on my own; there’s no one I can talk to, and the resurrectionists are more friendly than the others. They drink and talk and they’re not so cold and stuck-up. I started spending evenings with them. It was… a mistake.’

‘How long have you been here?’ said Lom. ‘At Vitigorsk?’

‘Not long.’

‘Same here,’ said Lom. ‘It’s an odd sort of place. It’s hard to know what it’s all here for. It’s not easy to fit in.’

Mikkala nodded. Her cheeks flushed.

‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Yes! That’s it exactly. That’s how I feel too. I thought I could be friends with the resurrectionists. I thought they liked me, and it made me feel part of something, not just on my own.’

Lom put down the towel and showed her his face.

‘How is it now?’ he said.

Mikkala frowned and squinted.

‘Your nose has stopped bleeding,’ she said. ‘It looks a bit sore though, and I think you’re going to have a black eye. Oh, there’s still blood in your hair. You poor man, I’m so sorry.’

Lom dipped his hands in the water and pushed them through his hair.

‘So what went wrong tonight?’ he said. ‘I mean, if you don’t want to talk about it…’

‘Oh it was awful,’ said Mikkala. ‘Sergei took me to see the resurrectionists’ building, where they work. He showed me the freak shop and it was horrible. It made me really upset. I was sick on the floor, and afterwards… Sergei had a bottle of aquavit and we went somewhere and drank it. He said it would make me feel better but it didn’t. I drank too much–we both did. I don’t normally drink at all. But after what I saw…’

‘At the freak shop?’

‘Yes.’

‘How’s my hair, Mikkala? Do you mind just checking?’

‘What? Oh, yes, it’s fine now–I think so–but your coat…’

‘That’s nothing.’ Lom took it off and began to dab at the sleeve. ‘What did Sergei show you at the freak shop?’

She shuddered. ‘Dead babies. In jars. Ruined babies. Deformed foetuses.’

She went quiet.

Keep going, thought Lom. Don’t stop now.

‘Dead babies?’ he said gently.

‘It’s not right,’ said Mikkala. ‘What they’re doing. I don’t think it’s right. Of course they have their duty. It’s their part of Task Number One, they’re working to solve the common problem and that’s a good thing, but… they’re experimenting with the effects of exposure to different isotopes, and it goes wrong all the time. It feels wrong. They have old bodies too. From graves.’

‘Why are they doing that?’

‘It’s the resurrection programme, learning to grow artificial bodies and bring people back from death, making it so people can live for ever and not die any more. So we can make the long journey to planets around other stars. The Director told me himself, one day we’ll be able to bring someone back to life if you have even just a few atoms left from their bodies, because atoms have memories and they’re alive. Sergei said they’re thinking now that you don’t need living people on the ships at all, only a few crew: you could maybe just send out small pieces of the dead and bring them back to life when you get there.’

Lom remembered Josef Kantor’s strange invitation to him, six years before, alone in Chazia’s interrogation cell in the Lodka. Looking into Kantor’s dark brown eyes was like looking into street fires burning.

Humankind spreading out across the sky, advancing from star to star!

Impossible, Lom had said, and Kantor slammed his hand on the table.

Of course it’s possible! It’s not even a matter of doubt, only of paying the price! Imagine a Vlast of a thousand suns. Can you see that, Lom? Can you imagine it? Can you share that great ambition?

It had seemed like an invitation. Lom had turned him down without a thought.

‘But you must know this already,’ said Mikkala. ‘Everyone here knows about the resurrectionists.’

‘Not me. I’m just a grease monkey. Rivets and bolts. I do what I’m told. I haven’t been here long. Still learning the ropes.’

Mikkala got up from the bed and moved to the chair at the desk.

‘I shouldn’t talk so much,’ she said. ‘I feel giddy. I’ve had a lot to drink.’

‘It’s fine, Mikkala,’ said Lom. ‘You’re fine. That thing with Sergei was a shock, but you’ll be OK.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I can’t remember your name. I don’t know what you do. I’ve never seen you before.’

‘Vissarion. I’m a construction engineer.’

‘What are you working on?’

Lom thought fast. ‘Prototype assembly.’

‘Yes? Really? Then maybe you can tell me about the—’

She stopped.

‘I don’t think I’m supposed to ask,’ she said. ‘I ought to know, for my work, but nobody will say. They don’t trust me; they keep me in the dark and they expect me to work alone. I don’t like it. I don’t feel comfortable here; it doesn’t feel right.’

‘I’ll tell you what I can, Mikkala. We’re all in this together. Working for the common purpose. That’s what Vitigorsk is all about. What do you want to know?’

‘Oh, nothing.’

‘What?’

‘It’s just… the vessels, the planetary ships… I’m supposed to be working on launch calculations, only there are two kinds, and one kind is meant to leave this planet and make the long voyages, but the other only needs to reach a low orbit, and I think there are going to be more of those. But that makes no sense, does it? It doesn’t fit in and I don’t know why. Which kind is it you’re building? I’ve never even seen it.’

She was looking at him, hot and staring eyes. He could see the wildness there. She was on the edge.

‘I don’t know,’ said Lom.

‘Oh.’

‘Like I said, I just build what I’m told.’

‘You mean you wouldn’t tell me,’ she said fiercely, ‘even if you knew.’

‘Of course I would.’

Her shoulders slumped.

‘I don’t feel well,’ she said. ‘I’d like to sleep now.’

‘I would tell you if I knew, Mikkala. I tell you what: I’ll help you to find out.’

She got up unsteadily from the bed.

‘I think you should go,’ she said. ‘You’re not meant to be here, you know.’

‘Of course.’ Lom stood and started putting on the truck driver’s coat. There was blood soaked into the sleeve.

‘Who would know?’ he said.

‘Know what?’

‘Who knows about the plans for the different ships? Where could we find out about that?’

‘Some people know, but they won’t say.’

‘So who knows? Who could we ask, if we wanted to?’

‘I… Oh, lots of them know. The von Altmann programmers, the supervisor of mathematics, the chief designer. And the Director of course. Khyrbysk knows everything.’

‘Khyrbysk? Yakov Khyrbysk?’

‘Of course.’

‘Khyrbysk is here? Where?’

‘What do you mean, where?’

‘I mean where’s his office?’ said Lom.

‘Why?’

‘We’re old acquaintances. I’d like to go and see him. Where’s his office?’

Mikkala slumped down again on the bed.

‘In the Administration Block,’ she said. ‘But…’ She stared up at him. Her face was drawn and chalky. Dark tears behind her eyes. ‘Oh god. I’ve made another mistake. I thought you were my friend.’

‘I am your friend. Of course I am.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You’re a good person, Mikkala. I don’t mean you any harm. I’m glad we met.’

‘Please go now.’

‘Get some sleep,’ said Lom. ‘Everything’ll be fine.’

5

It was almost 2.30 a.m. when Lom found the Administration Block. Parallel Sector security patrols had slowed him up.

The building was dark and locked. He took a small torch and the roll of lock-picking tools from his bag, let himself in and locked the door behind him. Made his way up the stairs and started from the top. Fifteen minutes later he was in Khyrbysk’s office. He extinguished the torch, drew the curtains and switched the desk lamp on.

He should have at least three hours before someone found the driver in the cab of his truck. Unless Mikkala raised the alarm, but he didn’t think she would.

He felt bad about Mikkala.

There was a row of steel cabinets along the wall of Khyrbysk’s office. Locked, but the locks were flimsy. No obstacle at all. He went through them methodically one by one, taking the most promising files across to the desk to read.

Piece by piece the story came together. Some of it he knew, but the rest… There were plans within plans. The ambition. Some of it was flat-out insane. He thought about trying to take photographs of the documents, but the light was poor and he had the wrong kind of lenses. He’d seen too many blurred and badly exposed copies of documents. He started pulling out pages and stuffing them into his bag. Whole files if need be. It wasn’t ideal–Khyrbysk would know he’d been burgled–but it couldn’t be helped.

By 4.30 a.m. he had the whole picture. It was lethal. All that Kistler needed to work with, and more. Except that nothing tied it for certain to Rizhin, and he was running out of time.

There was a green steel safe behind the door. He hadn’t touched it yet because of the combination lock. He didn’t know how to open those. But everyone wrote their combination somewhere.

Lom went through the drawers of Khyrbysk’s desk. Nothing. Checked the blotter but it was no help. Looked inside the covers of the books on his shelves. There was nothing that looked remotely like a combination to a safe.

Think. Think.

He went out into the corridor. There was a card on the door of the next office, tucked into a holder by the handle: ASSISTANT TO THE DIRECTOR.

Secretaries always knew the combinations to their boss’s safe. Lom went into the room. There was an appointments diary next to the telephone. He flicked through the pages rapidly. On the inside back cover was a sequence of numbers. Four groups of four. In pencil.

Why would pencil be more secure than pen?

So you could erase it later.

He took the diary back into Khyrbysk’s office and tried the numbers, but they didn’t work. The safe didn’t open.

Shit.

Then he tried them backwards.

The tumblers fell into place and he heard the lock click open.

On the bottom shelf of the safe was a small stack of brown folders. Not official files. Titles printed carefully in manuscript. Black ink.

Private Correspondence.

Conference–Byelaya Posnya.

There was no time to look inside: grey light was beginning to show behind the curtains in the window. Lom pushed the folders into his overloaded bag and switched off the desk lamp.

When he came out of the Administration Block there was a dull band of light across the eastern sky. Dawn came late and dark to Vitigorsk under the livid permanent cloud. In the plush quiet of Khyrbysk’s office Lom had forgotten how the air stank. His bag was bulging. The sleeve and lapels of his coat were stained with his own dried blood. He looked a mess.

There was another truck loading bay a few blocks away. He’d noticed it in the night. He hustled, half-walking, half-running. The alert could come any moment now. He had to get clear of the checkpoints and on the road.

The gate of Bay Nineteen was open. An early driver unlocking his containerless cab. Lom circled round behind it.

The driver was lean, compact, energetic; long nose, flashing white teeth, thick black moustache; glossy black curls under a shiny leather cap. The kind of fellow that carried a knife. Bright black eyes narrowed viciously when he saw Lom’s gun.

‘Keep your hands out of your pockets,’ said Lom. ‘I’ll be in the back of the cab. All I want is a ride out, no trouble for you at all. But I’ll be watching you. I’ll have the gun at your head. You say anything at the checkpoint, you make any move, any sign at all, and there’ll be shooting. Lots of it. And you’ll be caught in the crossfire, I’ll make sure of that. You’ll be first. I’ll splatter your brains on the windscreen.’

The driver spat and stared at him. Said nothing. Didn’t move.

‘And I’ve got five hundred roubles in my pocket,’ said Lom. ‘It’s yours when we’re fifty miles from here.’

‘Show me.’

Lom reached into his inside pocket with his left hand. Showed him the thick sheaf of Kistler’s money.

‘Pay now,’ the driver said.

‘Fuck you,’ said Lom. ‘We’re not negotiating. It’ll be like I say. Nothing different. Move. Quickly.’

The driver spat again and nodded. Stood back to let Lom climb aboard.

‘You first,’ said Lom

The driver swung up and slid across behind the wheel. Lom followed and squeezed into the sleeping compartment. Crouched down behind the driver’s seat.

The engine roared into life.

6

Investigator Gennadi Bezuhov of the Parallel Sector, Vitigorsk Division, arrested Engineer-Technician 1st Class Mikkala Avril at three the next afternoon, less than ten hours after the discovery of the intrusion into Director Khyrbysk’s office. Bezuhov presented her with his evidence: the statement of assaulted truck driver Zem Hakkashvili; the accusation of assaulted chemist Sergei Varin; the reports of communications operatives Zoya Markova and Yenna Khalvosiana, who overheard a male voice in Avril’s room in the small hours of the night; the damp towel under her desk, stained with blood and engine oil. Suspect descriptions provided by witnesses Hakkashvili and Vrenn were undoubtedly of the same person.

The interrogation was brief. Suspect Avril, in a condition of marked emotional distress, immediately made a full confession and provided a detailed account of her encounter with the terrorist spy, whom she knew as ‘Vissarion’. She admitted discussing with him restricted information concerning the work of Project Continual Sunrise. She had provided guidance and assistance in breaking into the Director’s office and stealing Most Secret papers.

Engineer-Technician Avril’s attitude under interrogation demonstrated poor social adjustment, psychological disturbance and instability, personality disorder, pathologically exaggerated feelings of personal importance, severe criticism of senior personnel and opposition to the purposes of her work and deep-seated internal deviation from the norms, aims and principles of the Vlast. Investigator Bezuhov permitted himself to observe that the subject had been promoted to her current rank without passing though normal processes of assessment, and had been allowed to work unsupervised on tasks for which she lacked the necessary intellectual capacities and technical credentials.

Bezuhov’s superiors–Major Fritjhov Gholl, commander, Parallel Sector, Vitigorsk, and Director Yakov Khyrbysk himself–saw the broader perspective. They were acutely aware that Mikkala Avril was a Hero of the New Vlast, recruited and promoted on the instruction of Osip Rizhin himself, and she was in possession of information which must not be permitted to escape the confines of the project. Also they were not blind to the fact that the supervision of Mikkala Avril at Vitigorsk was not above criticism.

In the light of these additional considerations it was clear to Bezuhov’s superiors that the Avril case required sensitive and flexible treatment. Embarrassment must be avoided. Their own careers were at stake, and surely Rizhin himself would prefer to know nothing of this. A judicial trial followed by a period in a labour camp was out of the question.

‘Special handling, Gholl,’ said Khyrbysk. ‘In the circumstances? Don’t you think?’

Gholl accepted the Director’s judgement was sound, as ever.

Special handling. Seven grams of lead in the back of the head and the body dumped in the Cleansing Lake to dissolve.

‘But retain a sample of body tissue, Gholl,’ said Khyrbysk. ‘Mikkala Avril had promising qualities. Death is temporary and she will be recalled, not once but millions of times, to walk for ever in perfected forms under countless distant suns.’

It was a comforting thought. The Director was not a harsh man. He looked to the radiance of humankind to come, and in dark days he lived by that.

‘You understand, Director, I will have to report back to Colonel Rond?’ said Gholl. ‘I must do that.’

‘Naturally.’

‘You need not be concerned; the colonel is always discreet.’

7

The 28th Division (Engineers), guided by Lieutenant Arkady Rett, arrives at the edge of the living angel’s cold-burning anti-life skirt where the trees are dying. They build walkways across the cold smouldering embers, the flimsy crusts of ground. The red hill advances and they retreat before it. Observations suggest it is picking up speed.

The commanding officer wrestles with many practical problems. Prolonged contact with the hill’s margin is troublesome. The metal of his machines grows weak and brittle, and his people fall sick. Their limbs and faces and bodies acquire strange patches of smooth darkness. Their extremities grow numb, whiten and begin to crumble. An hour a day is the safe limit, all they can stand. But the commanding officer makes progress. Now he has lines of supply, he puts the sappers on rotation. The excavation gear arrives. They reach the lower slopes and begin to dig.

Corporal Fallun, who refused an order and abandoned his comrades, was never seen again. Rett didn’t find him on his way back, and Fallun is assumed to be lost in the woods. The commanding officer classifies him a deserter and thinks of him no more. Fallun’s comrade, Private Soldier Senkov, who returned with Rett but never regained his senses and babbles relentlessly, never sleeping, is sent back out of the forest on a returning barge. He did his duty and the commanding officer recommends a sanatorium cure.

A piece of Archangel rides Senkov’s mind down the river and out of the trees. Quiet and surreptitious, all hugger-mugger, he slips the green wall and squeezes a tenuous blurt of himself through the gap into Rizhin world.

It is the merest thread of Archangel. A wisp of sentience. But he is through. He inhales deeply and shouts defiance at the sky.

This–this!–this is what he needs!

The impossible slow forest behind the green wall was killing him. There was no time there. There was no history.

But he finds Rizhin world different now. Hard. Quick. Lonely. There is no place for living angels here: the whole world stinks of barrenness and death.

Desperately he scrabbles for purchase and purpose.

Archangel! Archangel! I am beautiful and I am here!

And a tiny distant voice answers from the west. A shred of shining darkness from the space between the stars.

1

Vasilisk the bodyguard, six foot three and deeply tanned and sleek with sun oil, naked but for sky-blue trunks, runs five springing steps on his toes, takes to the air and executes a long perfect dive. Enters the pool with barely a splash, swims twelve easy lengths, hauls out in a single smooth movement and lies stretched out on a towel–blue towel laid on perfect white poolside tiles–in the warmth of the morning sun.

He lies on his back with eyes half closed, arms spread wide to embrace the sun, the beautiful killer at rest, empty of thought, breathing the scent of almonds. His slicked yellow hair glistens, his firm honey-brown stomach is beaded with water jewels. Through damp eyelashes he watches blue shimmer.

The pool is filled with water and sunlight. The surface glitters.

A warm breeze stirs the fine pale hairs on his chest.

A dragonfly, lapis lazuli, fat as his little finger, flashes out of the rose bushes, disturbed by a quiet footfall in the garden. The chink of glass against glass.

A housemaid with a tray of iced tea.

Vasilisk the bodyguard, blond and beautiful, half asleep, listens without intent to the bees among the mulberries, the shriek and laughter from the tennis court, the pock pock pock of the ball, the sway of trees on the hillside that sounds like the sea.

The sky overhead is a bowl of blue. Brushstroke cloud-wisps. Vasilisk closes his eyes and watches the drift of warm orange light across translucent skin.

Far away down the mountain a car drops a gear, engine racing to attack a steep climb. The sound is tiny with distance.

2

Lukasz Kistler’s sleek ZorKi Zavod limousine took the corniche along the Karima coast, purring effortlessly, a steady sixty-five, glinting under the southern sun. Two and a half tons of engine power, bulging wheel arches, running boards, mirrors and fins.

The road was a dynamited ledge, hairpins and sudden precarious fallings-away. The mountains of the Silion Massif plunged to the edge of the sea: bare cliffs and steep slopes of black cypress; sun-sharpened jagged ridges and crisp high peaks, snow-capped even in summer. And always to the right and hundreds of feet below, the white strip of sand and the sea itself, discovered by glittering light, a tranquil and brilliant horizonless blue.

This was the favoured country: sun-warmed Karima rich in climate and soil, with its own little private ocean. Karima of the islands and the hidden valleys. Karima of the flowering trees, hibiscus, tea plantations, vineyards and orange groves. Karima of the white-columned sanatoriums in the wooded hills and on the curving quiet of the bays. Rest-cure Karima. Union-funded convalescent homes for the paragons of sacrificial labour in olive and lemon and watermelon country: the bed-ridden propped under rugs in their windows to watch the sea, the ambulatory at backgammon and skat under striped awnings. Secluded private hotels with balcony restaurants (LIST ROUBLES ONLY ACCEPTED). Resort Karima. Twenty-mile coastal ribbons of pastel-blue concrete dormitories for the ten-day family vacations of seven-day-week leading workers. War never touched Karima. The Archipelago never got there, neither bombers nor troops nor cruisers nor submarines. Civil war was fought elsewhere. Karima was never hurt at all.

The municipal authorities of Karima made the most of the annual Dacha Summer of the Central Committee. The road to Rizhin’s Krasnaya Polyana, Dacha Number Nine at Zusovo, was remade fresh each year: the velvet shimmer of asphalt, the gleam of undented steel crash barriers.

The limousine tyres hissed quietly. The driver dropped a gear and slowed into a hairpin switchback, and the turn brought Kistler suddenly face to face with the biggest portrait of Papa Rizhin he’d ever seen: two hundred feet high, surely, and the benevolent smiling countenance outlined with scarlet neon tubes, burning bright against the cliff face even in the noonday light.

Lukasz Kistler had his own dacha, a white-gabled lodge in the Koromantine style tucked in among black cypresses a mile or so from Krasnaya Polyana. They all did–Gribov, Yashina and the rest–all except Rond, who travelled with his staff and had rooms in Rizhin’s place. No vacation for the assiduous Colonel Hunder Rond.

Studded timber gates opened at Kistler’s approach. The car entered a rough-walled unlit tunnel cut through solid mountain and ten minutes later emerged into sunlight and the courtyard of Krasnaya Polyana, a sprawling low green mansion on the brink of a sheer cliff.

The sun-roofed verandas of Dacha Number Nine looked out across the sea. Some previous occupant had planted the gardens with mulberry, cherry, almonds and acacia. Tame flightless cranes and ornamental ducks for the boating lake. Rizhin had added tennis courts, skittles, a shooting range. Papa Rizhin holidayed seriously.

Kistler found Rizhin himself in expansive mood, rigged out in gleaming white belted tunic and knee-length soft boots, Karima-fashion, paunch neat and round, hair brushed back thick and lustrous in the sunshine. He seemed taller. Mountain air suited him. The bullet scar on his cheek, still puckered and raw, gave his long pockmarked face a permanent lopsided grin. A show of white ivory teeth.

‘Lukasz! You came!’ Rizhin clapped him on the shoulder. ‘So we haven’t arrested you yet? Still not shot? Good. Come and see Gribov playing tennis in his jacket and boots, it’s the most comical thing–everyone is laughing. But he wins, Lukasz! He plays like a firebrand. What a man this Gribov is.’

They linked arms like brothers and walked around the edge of the lake.

‘Zorgenfrey came up yesterday from Anaklion,’ said Rizhin, ‘and completely fixed my teeth. No pain at all. Why can’t we have such dentists in Mirgorod? The Karima sanatoriums get the best of everything. Yet he tells me he can’t get his daughter into Rudnev-Possochin. He wants her to study medicine but the university puts up no end of obstructions. We must do something there. Talk to them for me, Lukasz. Iron the wrinkles out.’

‘Leave it with me, Osip,’ said Kistler. ‘I’ll take care of it.’

There were twenty-four at dinner: the Central Committee, Rizhin’s bodyguards Bauker and Vasilisk, uncomfortable and self-conscious (‘Come,’ said Rizhin. ‘We’re all family here.’) and silent, watchful Hunder Rond. They ate roasted lamb in a thick citrus sauce. Sliced tomatoes, cherries and pears. Red wine and grappa. Rizhin kept the glasses filled, and after dinner there was singing and dancing.

Bauker and Vasilisk pushed the table to the side of the room and rolled back the carpet. Rizhin presided over the gramophone, playing arias from light operas and ribald comic songs. He led the singing with his fine tenor voice. The bodyguards circulated, refilling glasses.

‘Dance!’ said Rizhin. ‘Dance!’ He put on ‘Waltz of the Southern Lakes’ three times in a row, loud as the machine would go. The men danced with other men or jigged on the spot alone. Yashina, tall and gaunt, twirled on her spiky heels, arms upraised, face a mask of serious concentration. Gribov went to take her in his arms, and when she ignored him he pulled out a handkerchief and danced with it the country way, stamping and shouting like the peasant he used to be. He lunged at Kistler, breathing grappa fumes. Kistler ducked out of his way.

‘Osip!’ shouted Gribov. ‘Osip! Put on the one with dogs!’

‘What’s this about dogs?’ said Marina Trakl, the new Secretary for Agriculture, red-faced. She was very drunk. ‘Are there dogs? I adore dogs!’

‘These are dogs that sing,’ said Gribov. He started to dance with her.

‘Then let us have singing dogs!’ Marina Trakl grinned, snatching Gribov’s handkerchief and waving it in the air.

‘Of course,’ said Rizhin. ‘Whatever you say.’ He changed the record to Bertil Hofgarten’s ‘Ball of the Six Merry Dogs’. When the dogs came in on the second chorus Rizhin started hopping and yelping himself, face twisted in a lopsided beatific smile. Kistler hadn’t seen Rizhin so full of drink. Normally he left the aquavit and the grappa to the others and watched.

‘Come on, you fellows!’ called Rizhin, dancing. ‘Bark with me! Bark!’

One by one, led by Gribov, the members of the Central Committee pumped their elbows and put back their heads and howled like hounds and bitches at the broken moons.

‘Yip! Yip! Yip! A-ruff ruff ruff! Wah-hoo!’

‘Come on, Rond!’ yelled Rizhin. ‘You too!’

Peller, the Secretary for Nationalities, slipped on spilled food and fell flat on his back, legs stuck out, laughing. He wriggled on his back in the mess.

‘Yap! Yap! Yap!’

When the music stopped Gribov slumped exhausted and sweaty on a couch next to Kistler, undid his jacket, put back his head and began to snore. Kistler jabbed him when Rizhin, face flushed, eyes suddenly on fire, drained his glass and banged the table. It was time for Rizhin’s speech.

‘Look at ourselves, my friends,’ he began. ‘What are we?’

He paused for an answer. Somebody made a muffled joke. A few people laughed.

‘What was that? I didn’t hear,’ said Rizhin, but no one spoke. The atmosphere was suddenly tense.

‘I’ll tell you what we are,’ Rizhin continued. ‘Nothing. We are nothing. Look at this planet of ours: a transitory little speck in a universe filled with millions upon millions of far greater bodies.’ He gestured towards the ceiling. ‘Out there, above us, there are countless suns in countless galaxies, and each sun has its own planets. What is any one of us? What is a man or a woman? We are, in actual and literal truth, nothing. Our bodies are collections of vibrating particles separated by emptiness. The very stuff and substance of our world is nothing but light and energy held in precarious patterns of balance, and mostly it is nothing at all. We are accidental temporary assemblages in the middle of a wider emptiness that is passing through us even now, at this very moment, even as we pass through it. Emptiness passing through emptiness, each utterly unaffected by the other. The energies of the universe pass through us like Kharulin rays, as if we are not here at all. We are our own graves walking. We are handfuls of dust.’

Several faces were staring at Rizhin with open dismay. Gribov leaned over in a fug of grappa to whisper in Kistler’s ear, ‘What the fuck’s the man talking about? What’s all this crazy shit?’

Kistler winced. ‘You’re too loud,’ he hissed. ‘For fuck’s sake, keep it down.’

Every time Kistler glanced at Hunder Rond the man was watching him. Their eyes locked for a second, then Rond turned away.

One day, little prince, thought Kistler. One day I’ll snap your fucking thumbs.

‘But what a gift this nothingness is, my friends!’ Rizhin was saying. ‘It is the gift of immensity! Once we see that this world, this planet, is nothing, we realise what our future truly holds. Not one world, but all the worlds. The universe. The stars like sand on the beach. The stars like water, the oceans we sail. Our present world is trivial: it is merely the first intake of breath at the commencement of the endless sentence of futurity.’

Rizhin poured himself another glass, the clink of bottle against tumbler the only sound in the room. He fixed them with burning eyes. It was Rizhin the poet, Rizhin the artist of history, speaking now.

‘I have seen this future! Red rockets, curvaceous, climbing on parabolas of steam and fire. making the sky seem small and wintry-blue. Because the sky is small. We can take it in our fists! I have seen these rockets of the future rising into space, carrying a new human type to their chosen grounds. Individuals whose moral daring makes them vibrate at a speed that turns motion invisible. There are new forms in the future, my friends, and they need to be filled with blood. We are the first of a new humankind. Where death is temporary a million deaths mean nothing.’

After the dinner and the dancing, Rizhin led the way to his cinema. Blue armchairs in pairs, a table between each pair: mineral water, more grappa, chocolate and cigarettes. Rugs on the grey carpet. They watched an illicit gangster film, imported from the Archipelago: men in baggy suits with wide lapels fought over a stolen treasure and a dancing girl with silver hair. Then came a Mirgorod Studios production, Courageous Battleship! Torpedoed in the Yarmskoye Sea, a hundred shipwrecked sailors line an iceberg to sing a song of sadness, a requiem for their lost ship.

Halfway through the film, Rizhin leaned across and gripped the elbow of Selenacharsky, secretary for culture.

‘Why are the movies of the Archipelago better than ours?’

Selenacharsky turned pale in the semi-darkness and scribbled something in his notebook.

Dawn was coming up when they filed out of the cinema into the scented courtyard. Kistler was going to his car when Rizhin appeared at his elbow.

‘I shoot in the mornings at the pistol range. Join me, eh, Lukasz? We’ll have a chat, just you and me. Man to man.’

Kistler groaned inwardly. His head hurt.

‘Of course, Osip.’

‘Good. Nine thirty sharp.’

3

Kistler managed a couple of hours’ sleep and returned to Rizhin’s dacha stale and depressed, unbreakfasted, the dregs of the wine and the grappa still in his blood, a sour taste of coffee on his tongue. The dinner of the night before weighed heavy in his stomach. He felt queasy.

He followed the sound of gunfire to Rizhin’s shooting range, a crudely functional concrete block among almond trees. Vasilisk the bodyguard, six foot three, blond and beautiful, was lounging on a chair by the door, white cotton T-shirt tight across his chest. He was wearing white tennis shoes and regarded Kistler with sleepy expressionless sky-blue eyes.

Kistler nodded to him and entered the shooting range.

Vasilisk rose lazily to his feet and padded in behind him. Closed the door, leaned against the wall and folded his arms. Kistler watched the muscles of the bodyguard’s shoulders sliding smoothly. His thickened honey-gold forearms.

Rizhin was alone inside the building, bright and fresh in shirtsleeves, firing at twenty-five-yard targets with a pistol. Three rounds then a pause. You could cover the holes in the target with the palm of your hand.

He paused to reload. The gun was fat and heavy in his swollen fists but his fingers on the magazine were lightning-quick. Nimble. Practised.

‘Do you know firearms, Lukasz?’

‘Not really.’

‘You should. Our existence depends on them. The powerful should study and understand the foundations of their power. This, for instance, is a Sepora .44 magnum. Our VKBD officers carry these. Heavy in the hand, but they shoot very powerful shells. Very destructive. They tend to make a mess of the human body. The removal of limbs. The bursting of skulls. Large holes in the stomach or torso. Butchery at a distance. Not a pretty death.’ He turned and fired seven shots in rapid succession. The noise was deafening. An unmistakable acrid smell.

Rizhin offered the gun to Kistler.

‘Would you like to shoot, Lukasz? It’s important to keep one’s skills up to scratch’

‘No,’ said Kistler. ‘Later perhaps. I drank too much grappa last night.’

Rizhin shrugged.

‘Your hand’s trembling,’ he said.

Kistler couldn’t stop himself looking down at his hands. It was a sign of submission. He cursed himself inwardly.

Careful.

He held his hands out in front of him, palms down.

‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

Rizhin ejected the magazine from the pistol and reloaded, taking a fresh magazine from his pocket.

‘You enjoyed our evening then?’ he said. ‘I hope so.’

‘Of course! It’s good to know one’s colleagues better. The holiday season is valuable. Time well spent.’

‘I thought you were bored. You seemed bored. Gribov can be overpowering.’

‘Not at all. A little tired perhaps. I’d had a long journey.’

Rizhin raised his arm and squeezed off three rapid shots. ‘But you keep a distance–I see you doing it–and that’s sound. I admire it in you. Music and feasting are excellent things, Lukasz; they reduce the bestial element in us. Song and dance, food and wine, good company: they calm the soul and make one amiable towards humanity. But we aren’t ready for softness yet, you and I. Today is not the time to stroke people’s heads. Of course, opposition to all violence is the ultimate ideal for men like us, but you have to build the house before you hang the pictures. Your attitude last night was a criticism of me, which I accept.’

‘No. Not at all, Osip. I only—’

‘But yes, it was, and I accept it. I’ve sent the others home, you know. I’ve packed them all off back to Mirgorod, back to their desks. There is work to be done and they must get to it.’

‘What? All of them?’ said Kistler.

‘I thought you’d be pleased. Our colleagues bore you, Lukasz, isn’t that so? Be honest with me. I’ll tell you frankly, they bore me too. For now I must use people like them, but they’re narrow, they have limited minds. Not like you and me. We see the bigger picture.’

Where is this going?

Vasilisk the bodyguard moved across to a wooden chair. The neat brown leather holster nestled in the small of his back bobbed with the rhythm of his buttocks as he walked. Vasilisk settled into the chair, crossed legs stretched out in front of him, and absorbed himself in studying his fingernails.

Rizhin was turning his pistol over with thick clumsy-looking fingers.

‘What I was trying to say last night,’ he continued, ‘but I was drunk and over-poetical… what I was trying to say is that this–this, all around us, our work and our diplomacy and our cars and our dachas–this is not the point to which history is leading us. This is only the beginning: the first letter of the first word of the first sentence of the first book in the great library of futurity. You see this as well as I do.’

‘There’s a lot more to be done,’ said Kistler cautiously. ‘Of course. Certainly. Our industry…’

Rizhin fished out three more shells from his pocket, ejected the magazine and pressed them into place one by one. Replaced the magazine in the pistol.

‘I’m talking philosophically,’ he said. ‘The moral compass is not absolute, you see. It has changed and we have a new morality now. A new right. A new good. A new true. Our predecessors were scoundrels; the angels were an obfuscation, the things of the forest bedbugs. Leeches. A distortion of the moral gravity. Whatever serves the New Vlast is moral. That’s how it must be, for now. Where all death is temporary then death is nothing. Killing is conscienceless. A million deaths, a billion deaths, are nothing.’

‘But we need people,’ said Kistler. ‘Strong healthy people, educated, burning with energy. We need them to work. And we need steel. We need oil. We need power. We need mathematics and engineering. We need to be clever, Osip, or the Archipelago will—’

Rizhin brushed him off with a gesture. ‘The Archipelago will be ground to powder under the wheels of history, Lukasz,’ he said. ‘You underestimate inevitability.’

He raised the pistol and levelled it at Kistler’s head, the ugly blackness of the barrel mouth pointing directly between his eyes.

‘History is as inevitable and unstoppable as the path of the bullet from this gun if I pull the trigger. Effects follow causes.’

Kistler made an effort to take his eyes from the pistol. His gaze met Rizhin’s soft-brown gentle look.

‘Osip…’ he began.

Rizhin turned away and fired a shot at the target. The raw explosion echoed off the concrete walls. Kistler realised his hands were damp. The back of his shirt was cold and sticky against his skin.

‘I had hopes for you, Lukasz,’ said Rizhin. ‘I was going to involve you. You’re a man of fine qualities. An outstandingly useful fellow. I was going to take you with us. But I find you are also a sentimentalist. Your belly is soft and white and you aren’t to be trusted. You’ve let me down. Badly.’

‘I don’t understand this,’ said Kistler. ‘What’s happening here, Osip? Where is this going to?’

‘Tell me about Investigator Vissarion Lom.’

‘Who?’

‘Feeble. Feeble. Where is the famous Kistler fire in the guts? Where is the energy?’ Rizhin pulled a crumpled typescript from the back pocket of his trousers and pushed it towards him. Kistler read the first few lines.

Kistler Residential–Internal

23.47 Transcription begins

Kistler: Yes?

Unknown caller: I wish to speak with Lukasz Kistler.

Kistler: This is Kistler. Who the fuck are you?

‘I know this is Lom,’ said Rizhin. ‘He’s a man I know. He circles me, Lukasz. He buzzes in my ear. I can’t shake him off.’

‘So shoot me.’

Rizhin shook his head.

‘I want you to extend your vacation, Lukasz. Another week or two maybe. I’ve had enough of this bastard Lom. I want to trace him. I want to tie him down and finish him. And he’s not doing this alone; there are conspiracies here, Lukasz, and you’re deep in the whole nest of shit, and I’m going to know the extent of it. The whole fucking thing. Names. Dates. Connections. Circles of contact. You’ll stay here and spend some time with Rond and his people. We’re going to be seeing a lot more of each other. We’ll have more talks.’

4

Back in Mirgorod again after the long journey from Vitigorsk, Lom wasted no time. He dialled from a call box at the Wieland Station. The contact number Kistler had given him rang and rang. He hung up and tried again.

Eventually someone answered. A woman’s voice. Cautious.

Yes? Who is this?

‘I want to speak with Lukasz Kistler.’

Name, please. Your name.

‘I will speak to Kistler. Only Kistler. He is expecting me.’

Secretary Kistler is unavailable.

‘I’ll call back. Give me a time.’

The Secretary will be unavailable for some considerable time, perhaps days, perhaps longer. You may discuss your business with me. What is your name?

Lom cut the connection.

He took a cab across the city and walked the last few blocks to the war-levelled quarter of the rubble dwellers, to the cellar Elena Cornelius had led him to. His link to the Underground Road. Konnie and Maksim were there. So was Elena, looking strained. Hunted.

‘I can’t reach Kistler,’ said Lom. ‘I’ve got something he can use. Devastating material. Dynamite. In Kistler’s hands it will bring Rizhin down. Definitely. But Kistler is out of contact. His number’s no good. I thought you could—’

‘Kistler has been arrested,’ said Maksim.

Lom felt the warmth drain from his face.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No. When?’

‘He went to Rizhin’s dacha. He’s being held there under interrogation. Rizhin is there with him, and so is Rond. Nobody else.’

‘How do you know this? How can you be sure.’

‘We have somebody there,’ said Konnie. ‘On the dacha staff. There is no doubt.’

‘But Kistler is alive?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Maksim. ‘For now he is alive, though what state he’s in…’

‘Is there anybody else?’ said Lom. ‘Anyone else who could use the material I have, like Kistler could?’

‘In the Presidium? No. Not a chance.’

‘Then I have to get Kistler out of there and back to Mirgorod,’ said Lom.

‘That’s impossible,’ said Maksim. ‘He’s being held by the Parallel Sector in Rizhin’s own fucking dacha.’

‘Nothing’s impossible,’ said Lom. ‘I need Kistler. Tell me about this dacha. Tell me about your contact there.’

‘No,’ said Maksim. ‘It’s out of the question.’

‘This material,’ said Konnie. ‘It’s as big as you say? It’s that dangerous for Rizhin?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Lom. ‘Poisonous. Lethal. In Kistler’s hands it will bring him down.’

‘What is it?’ said Maksim.

‘No,’ said Lom. ‘First you tell me about Rizhin’s dacha.’

‘But what you’ve got is really that good?’

‘Yes. If we can get Kistler back to Mirgorod, free, and arm him with what I have, he can turn the Central Committee against Rizhin and he will fall.’

Konnie glanced at Maksim.

‘We won’t tell you where Rizhin’s dacha is,’ she said. ‘You’ll need help. We’ll take you there. We’ll go with you.’

‘Konnie…’ said Maksim.

Konnie ignored him.

‘You can’t get Kistler out of there all by yourself,’ she said. ‘We have some resources, not much maybe, but better than one man on his own.’

Lom considered. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Yes. That would be good.’

Konnie turned to Elena.

‘You’re welcome to stay here,’ she said. ‘You’ll be safe. You won’t be found. Someone will bring you food. It won’t be more than a week.’

Elena Cornelius bridled. ‘I’m coming. I’m tired of hiding. I’ve got a job to finish and none of you can do what I can do. Get me a rifle and I will come.’

5

Every day in the first pale pink and violet flush of another new morning Vasilisk the bodyguard runs in the hills above Dacha Number Nine. Ten easy miles on yellow earth tracks before breakfast, taking the slopes through fragrant thorny shrub with cardiovascular efficiency, the early warmth of the sun on his shoulders. He sees the soft mist in the valleys. Sees the black beetles crossing the paths and the boar pushing through thickets. Watches the big hunting birds, high on stiff wings against the pale dusty blue, circling up on the thermals. Miles of rise and fall unrolling smoothly and effortlessly.

No words. No thoughts.

He knows the routes of the security patrols and the places they watch from and he does not go there; he prefers to drink the mountain solitude in, like cool sweet water. The watcher doesn’t like to be watched. Doesn’t like the feel of a long lens on his back. Ten miles of nobody in the morning sets him up for the day.

Two hundred push-ups, breathing steady and slow, two sets of fifty per arm, and a downhill sprint between pine trees–jumping tussocks and stony glittering streams–and Vasilisk the bodyguard steps out onto the road, corn-yellow hair slick with sweat. Sweat patches darkening his singlet.

The guards at the gatehouse phone him in through the gate, as they do every morning. He glances at them lazily, indifferent small blue eyes blank and pale behind pale-straw eyelashes. He goes to his room, picks up a towel and heads for the pool.

6

The streets of Anaklion on the Karima coast were wide and shaded by trees. Many of the houses were modern, every fifth building a guest house or hotel. Women at the roadside and in the squares sold figs and watermelons and clouded-purple grapes. Warm air off the sea disturbed the palms and casuarina trees.

Konnie, Lom and Elena took the funicular up to the Park of Culture and Rest. Gravel paths between long plots of enamel-bright flowers. Statues of dogs and soldiers. Wrought-iron benches for the weary and the convalescent. At the Tea-Garden-Restaurant Palmovye Derevya they took a table some way from the other customers, at the edge of the cliff, shaded by waxy dark green leaves against the low morning sun. A hundred feet sheer below them youths swam in the river, and across the gorge balconied houses recuperated: quiet lawns, striped awnings.

A waiter materialised at their table. Tight high-waisted trousers, a pouch at his hip for coin.

‘Tea,’ said Konnie. ‘With lemon. For four. And some pastries.’ Her long fine hair was burnished copper in the flickering splashes of sunlight between leaves. Her eyes flashed green at the waiter. A hint of a conspiratorial smile. ‘You decide which ones.’ A beautiful young woman with friends, on vacation. A husband or boyfriend would join them soon.

They’d arrived the night before. Lom used the last of Kistler’s roubles for rooms at the guest house Black Cypress. Maksim hadn’t appeared at breakfast.

‘He went up the mountain before dawn,’ said Konnie. ‘He wanted to have a look for himself.’

Lom said nothing. Since they had left Mirgorod, Maksim had changed subtly. His face cleared. No longer pent-up and clouded with frustration, he was self-contained, competent and direct. Back in the military again, he was a man at his best with a mission. A simple purpose. Lom liked him. He’d started to trust him too.

‘We can do this,’ said Maksim when he arrived. ‘It is possible. There is a way. But it’s all about timing. Everything has to work precisely right. Absolute discipline.’

‘OK,’ said Lom. ‘Go on.’

Maksim glanced at him. The two men had never quite resolved the unspoken question of who was in charge.

‘The dacha is a fortress,’ Maksim began. ‘A compound surrounded by steep hills. The only way in is a tunnel through the mountain. There’s a gate at the entrance from the road: wooden but three inches thick and reinforced with iron. There’s a gatehouse–always two guards, with binoculars and a view for miles down the mountain. They’d see any vehicle coming ten minutes before it reached them. The gate is kept closed and barred from within. It’s opened at a signal from the gatehouse, when they’re expecting company. But nobody comes and nobody goes, except the domestics make a shopping trip once a week. A couple of guards go with them.’

‘And inside?’ said Lom.

‘VKBD security. Plus Rond is there, and he’s got Parallel Sector personnel with him. And Rizhin has his own personal security. Two bodyguards. Part of the family. Very dangerous. Say, twenty in all.’

‘Not so much,’ said Lom.

‘There’s a militia company in the town, an armoured train five miles away, a cruiser in the bay. They think they’re safe enough.’

‘Patrols in the hills?’

‘No information,’ said Maksim. ‘But assume so. Yes.’

‘So what’s the plan?’ said Lom.

‘We must have the gate open at eleven tomorrow morning. Eleven o’clock exactly, to the second. No sooner and no later. Kistler will be coming out in a car.’

‘A car?’ said Konnie.

‘Rizhin’s personal limousine. It’s the most powerful and heavily armoured they have. Bullet-proof glass in the windows. Thick steel panels underneath too. Hell, even the tyres are bullet-proof.’

‘And all we have to do,’ said Lom, ‘is open the gate tomorrow?’

‘Yes.’

‘How?’ said Konnie.

Maksim’s face clouded. ‘It can’t be unbarred from outside, so we’ll need explosives.’

Konnie looked around at the Park of Culture and Rest, at the teenage boys and girls in the river and stretched out on flat slabs of rock, lazy under the sun.

‘Where do you get explosives in a place like this?’ she said.

‘Every construction project here has to start with blasting rock,’ said Maksim. ‘There’s got to be a supply somewhere. A builder’s merchant. An engineering yard.’

‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Lom. ‘You can leave the gate to me. I’ll take care of it. And the guards in the gatehouse too.’

Maksim looked at him doubtfully.

‘How?’ he said.

Lom hesitated. Maksim’s expression was soldierly. Sceptical. He couldn’t begin to explain. Explaining would make it worse.

‘It’ll be fine,’ said Lom. ‘Please. I know what I’m doing. Leave it to me. If you can get Kistler to the gate at eleven, it’ll be open.’

Maksim bridled.

‘I must know what you intend,’ he said. ‘I will not lead my people blind. Lives depend on me.’

Lom shrugged. ‘Stay here then. I’m grateful for what you’ve done, and from here I will go on alone.’

‘Maksim,’ said Elena Cornelius quietly, ‘I think we should trust Vissarion. He has brought us this far. Without him we would be nowhere. We owe the chance we have to him.’

‘Chance!’ Maksim began, but thought better of it. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘But I’ll be at the gatehouse with you.’

‘Good,’ said Lom. ‘Thank you.’

He took a long draught of hot sweet tea and considered the plan. It was terrible. A really shit plan. But it would be fine.

Just keep blundering on. Plough through the obstacles as they come. Way too late to back off now.

7

Weary after weeks of frustrating travel–delays over paperwork, failed and diverted trains, fuel shortages, their carriage attacked by a hungry mob–the Philosophy League arrived at the Wieland Station. Penniless–all their money spent on unexpected expenses along the way–but back in Mirgorod at last.

They’d hoped for more of a reception. Forshin had wired ahead to Pinocharsky to warn him of their arrival. They’d expected journalists and prepared the lines they would take: Forshin had the text of a speech in his pocket, and Brutskoi had written an article for the Lamp, a manifesto of sorts, a call to intellectual arms. But there was no one to meet them. The League stood together in a disgruntled huddle on the platform, surrounded by their suitcases and chests of books, their luggage much battered and repaired. They all looked to Forshin for answers.

‘Well?’ said Yudifa Yudifovna. ‘So what are we to do?’

Eligiya Kamilova stood somewhat apart from the rest with Yeva and Galina Cornelius. The girls were restless and unhappy.

‘Do we have to stay with these people any more?’ said Yeva. ‘Can’t we go home now?’

Home? thought Kamilova. What is home?

‘Ha!’ said Forshin, visibly relieved. ‘Here’s Pinocharsky at last.’ He waved. ‘Pinocharsky! I say, Pinocharsky! Here!’

Pinocharsky came towards them, arms open in a mime of embrace. He was wreathed in smiles but looked harassed, his wiry red hair wisping.

‘Well then!’ he said. ‘Here you are; you have come at last! But you’re late. I was expecting you two hours ago. You have to hurry. Your train is waiting on the next platform.’ He gestured for porters. ‘What a lot of luggage you have. But no matter, there’s no doubt plenty of room.’

The members of the League were looking at one another in dismay. Forshin took Pinocharsky by the arm.

‘Train?’ he said. ‘What train? We’ve only just arrived, man. We need a hotel. We need a meeting. Editors. Publishers. We need a plan. We have much to say to the people.’

‘Ah,’ said Pinocharsky. ‘Well, no, not exactly. Not yet. There’s been a change of plan. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to contact you.’ He was looking shifty.

‘A change of plan?’

Yes. The House of Enlightened Arts… Rizhin decided Mirgorod wasn’t the place for it after all. He has a new plan, a better plan. You’ll see the advantages when you understand.’

‘What?’ said Forshin. ‘No. This is unacceptable.’

‘I’m to take you there directly,’ said Pinocharsky. ‘The train’s waiting—’

‘This is outrageous,’ said Forshin. ‘I protest. On behalf of the League. There must be consultation.’

‘These are the instructions of Rizhin himself,’ said Pinocharsky stonily.

‘At least let us have some time to rest and recover from the journey. The ladies—’

‘I’m sorry, that won’t be possible.’

‘Then tell us where we are going, man,’ said Olga-Marya Rapp. ‘At least tell us that.’

‘A new town in the east,’ said Pinocharsky. ‘A pioneering place. Leading edge. A city of the future. A place called Vitigorsk. There’s a great project under way there. I don’t know much about it yet myself.’

The League muttered and grumbled and cursed under their breath but there was no rebellion. They were too weary, too inured to disappointment; they knew in their hearts the limits of their true worth. Porters picked up their baggage and moved along the platform, and they followed in a subdued huddle.

Eligiya Kamilova caught up with Forshin.

‘Nikolai…’

Forshin looked at her, puzzled. She and the girls had slipped his mind in all the fuss.

‘Oh, Eligiya, of course…’

‘I wanted to thank you, Nikolai. You’ve been very kind to the girls and me. You’ve done more than we had any right to hope for.’

‘Oh. You’re not coming with us? No, of course not. But do. Come with us to this Vitigorsk place, Eligiya. See where all this excitement leads. The future is opening for us, I feel sure of it.’

‘I can’t, Nikolai. I must take Galina and Yeva to look for their mother.’

‘Of course you must do that.’ He held out his hand and she took it. ‘Well, goodbye then.’

‘Thank you, Nikolai. And good luck.’

Eligiya Kamilova watched Forshin walk away purposefully, hurrying to catch up with Pinocharsky. She never saw or heard of him, nor any other member of the Philosophy League, ever again.

‘Eligiya,’ said Yeva, ‘can we go now, please? We have to go and find our mother.’

Two hours later they were standing in the street where their aunt’s apartment building had stood, the place where the Archipelago bomb had fallen: six years before in Mirgorod time, but for them it was a matter of months.

Everything was different. Everything was changed.

Of their mother Elena Cornelius there was of course no sign at all. They waited a while, pointlessly. It was futile. They were simply causing themselves pain.

Eligiya Kamilova wondered what to do. It was only now she was here that she realised she had no plan for what came next, no plan at all.

‘We’ll come back again tomorrow,’ said Galina to Yeva. ‘We’ll come every day.’

8

The next morning, early, Lom went up into the mountains with Maksim, Konnie and Elena. Konnie had rented a boxy grey Narodni with a dented near-side wheel arch. The interior smelled strongly of tobacco smoke. There was a heaped ashtray in the driver’s door. The streets climbed steeply out of Anaklion into scrub and scree and dark dense trees. No sun yet reached the lower slopes.

They drove in silence. Lom, squeezed onto the scuffed leather bench-seat in the back next to Elena, watched out of the window. The Narodni struggled on the steep inclines and Konnie swore, fishing for the second gear that wasn’t there. The back of Maksim’s head sank lower and lower between his shoulders.

After forty-five minutes Konnie pulled off the road onto a rough stony track. Out of sight among boulders and black cypress she killed the engine.

‘This is it,’ she said. ‘You walk from here.’

Maksim, Lom and Elena left her with the car and started up a steep narrow hunting trail. Elena carried a rifle slung across her back. When they crested a ridge and clear stony ground fell away to their right, she broke away on her own. Two minutes later Lom couldn’t see her at all.

It took him and Maksim another hour to work their way around to the thick woodland above and behind the gatehouse of Dacha Number Nine. Maksim picked his route carefully, stopping to look at his watch. He seemed to know what he was doing. Once he had them crawl on their bellies in under thick green spiky vegetation.

‘Patrol,’ he hissed.

The sun was higher now, kindling scent from crushed leaves and crumbling earth. Slow pulses of purple and blue rippled across the cloudless sky. A liminal solar breathing.

Lom’s every move and step was a startling noise in the thin motionless air.

They crouched in the shadow of a pine trunk. The roof of the gatehouse was fifty feet below them, and beyond it the closed gate itself. Maksim checked his watch again and put his face close to Lom’s ear.

‘Now we wait,’ he whispered. ‘I will tell you when.’

9

Lukasz Kistler was lying on a low cot bed in his cell. Every part of him was in pain. He followed the passing of days and nights by the rectangle of sky in the high window, but he didn’t count them. Not any more. He divided time between when he was alone and safe and when he was not, that was all.

When the key turned in the lock and the door opened he wanted to open his mouth and scream but he did not. He knotted his fingers tight in his grey blanket and pulled the fabric taut: a little wall of wool, a shield across his chest. A protection that protected nothing at all.

Vasilisk the bodyguard stepped inside and padded across to the bed. Looked down on Kistler impassively with sleepy half-closed eyes.

‘Please,’ said Kistler. His mouth was dry. ‘Not any more. There is no more. It’s finished now.’

‘You’ve got friends outside the dacha,’ said Vasilisk. ‘They’re coming to take you away.’

Kistler tried to focus on what he was hearing. He couldn’t get past the fact it was the first time he had heard Vasilisk speak. His voice was pitched oddly high.

‘They’re going to try to blow up the gate,’ he said. ‘Stand up. You have to come with me.’

‘I refuse,’ said Kistler. He pressed himself deeper into the thin mattress. The springs dug into his back.

‘You refuse?’ Vasilisk looked at him with faint surprise, like there was something unexpected on his plate at dinner.

‘I refuse,’ said Kistler again. ‘Absolutely I refuse. No more. I will not come again. Not any more. I’m finishing it. Now.’

Vasilisk bent in and hooked a hand under Kistler’s shoulder, iron fingers digging deep into his armpit, hauling him up. Kistler resisted. Pulled away and tried to fall back onto the mattress.

Vasilisk leaned forward and jabbed him in the solar plexus.

Kistler screamed and retched and tried to bring his knees up, curling himself into a protective ball, but the last of his strength had gone. Rizhin’s bodyguard yanked him to his feet and held him upright, though his legs failed him and he could not stand.

Kistler heard a strange sound and realised it was himself sobbing.

‘Shut up,’ said Vasilisk and jabbed him again.

On the slope above the guardhouse Maksim nudged Lom in the ribs and gestured with his chin.

Go! Go!

Vasilisk the bodyguard half-carried, half-dragged the unresisting semi-conscious Kistler through the rose garden and past the swimming pool. There was no one there. From half past ten to half past twelve there was tennis.

Iced tea at half past eleven.

Rizhin’s car was parked in the courtyard and Vasilisk had the keys in his pocket. He checked the time on his watch: 10.51.

He opened the rear door and bundled Kistler inside. Pushed him down into the footwell. Kistler groaned and retched again, spilling sour vomit down the front of his shirt.

Vasilisk took his place in the driver’s seat and settled down to wait.

Lom eased open the door of the gatehouse. Maksim entered first, pistol in his hand. The guards swung round in surprise: one reached for his holster, the other made a grab for the telephone receiver.

Maksim fired twice. Neat and precise.

Lom ripped the phone cable from the wall.

At 10.55 Rizhin himself came round the corner of the veranda into the courtyard. Vasilisk followed him in the rear-view mirror. Saw him glance across at the car and see his bodyguard in the driver’s seat. Puzzled, Rizhin started to come over.

Vasilisk turned the key in the ignition and the engine purred into life. He slipped the car into gear and headed for the tunnel entrance. A cool dark mouth in the rock. In his mirror he saw Rizhin standing in the middle of the courtyard watching him go.

Vasilisk increased the weight of his foot on the accelerator pedal.

The car roared forward. The barrier was down but the car weighed nearly three tons.

As the barrier splintered it occurred to Vasilisk in an abstract way that he was probably beginning the final two minutes of his life.

Lom walked up to the massive gate across the tunnel and pressed the flat of his hand against it, feeling the dry solid wood. Its grain and fine flaws. The bars of iron within it. The blackened studs. The wide sunlit air. The scent of cypress and resinous southern pine. Feeling and remembering.

In the dark time, after Maroussia went, Vissarion Lom moved fast across ice fields and raced through the snow-dark birch trees. Part man, part angel, part something else, body and brain saturated with starlight and burn, all the dark months of winter he ran the ridges of high mountains.

He pushed his fists deep into solid rock just to feel it hurt.

Ten days and more he had stood without moving on the thick frozen surface of a benighted lake. Cold dark fishes slid through darkness far below him and bitter black wind scoured his face with particles of ice.

Lom-in-burning-angel counted the needles on pine trees and ignited them one by one with an idle thought. Little bright-flaring match flames.

He had forgotten who he was and he didn’t care.

But slowly he had been moving south, and slowly the star-fire faded from the angel skin casing Lavrentina Chazia had made. In the early sunlight of that first spring five years ago Vissarion Lom shed his angel carcass and pushed it off a rock into the river.

He squirrelled the recollection of that dark inhuman time deep in the secret fastnesses of the heart where bitterness festers, and guilt. Kept it there, locked under many locks, along with the memory of all the winter slaughtering Lom-in-burning-angel did, or could have done and thought he might have. The iron smell of blood on ice.

After that long inhuman winter in the north without the sun, Vissarion Lom wanted to be nothing more than simply human again, but secretly he knew he never could be quite that. Possibly he never entirely had been: the earliest roots of himself were buried in oblivion and inexhaustible forest. As everyone’s are.

‘Turn your back and cover your face,’ Lom said to Maksim. ‘Splinters.’

Lom focused. Tried to drive all other thoughts and memories from his mind. Tried to calm the rising anxiousness and the beating of his heart.

There was only him and the gate.

He probed. Pushed. Nothing happened.

Changing direction, he gathered all the urgency, the growing white panic inside him, squeezed it all into a tight ball and forced it out from him. Hurled it into the timbers, deep into the corpse limbs of forest trees.

Burst open by the pressure of tiny air pockets–the desiccated fibrous capillaries suddenly and violently expanding–the heavy wooden planks of the gate exploded loudly from within, split open and shattered.

The rock tunnel behind the broken gate was dark and silent. It smelled like the mouth of a well.

‘What the fuck?’ said Maksim. ‘What the fuck did you do?’

‘Later,’ said Lom.

Where the hell was Kistler’s car?

They stood side by side for thirty long slow seconds.

‘Where is he?’ said Lom. ‘He’s not coming.’

Engine roar echoed, and the sound of gunfire.

The long black limousine was racing towards them. Lom glimpsed a face behind the thick windscreen as he scrambled aside. A tanned impassive handsome face. Cropped yellow hair.

The limousine slowed to a crawl. Maksim pulled open the front passenger seat.

‘Get in the back!’ he yelled at Lom.

Lom slid in alongside the collapsed form of Kistler, who was crouched on the floor. Dirty shirt and soiled trousers. Unshaven face grey. He looked up at Lom with glassy eyes. No recognition. There was a smell of urine and vomit in the car.

The driver didn’t look round but gunned the engine and raced off down the mountain.

The heat of the sun, now high in the sky, beat against the side of Elena Cornelius’ face. She could feel her skin burning. Insects buzzed and clattered in the grass, crawled across the back of her neck, sunk tiny probes into her arms and her ankles. She fought back the urge to scratch. All movement was dangerous.

She was still. She was nothing but eyes watching. She was part of the rock.

From five hundred yards she saw the gate shatter and the limousine emerge, slow to pick up Maksim and Lom, and hurtle away down the hill, jumping culverts, taking the hairpin too fast, scraping its side along the crash barrier.

The racing of the engine and the squeal of tortured metal echoed off cliffs and scree.

Elena Cornelius waited. Less than a minute later two vehicles came charging out of the tunnel mouth: a black Parallel Sector saloon and an open VKBD jeep with three men cradling sub-machine guns on their knees.

Elena moved the rifle slowly, sliding the graticule smoothly along the road, catching up with the windscreen of the leading pursuit car. The driver’s head was a shadow. She moved the scope with the saloon for a moment, matching speed for speed, then shifted her aim three car lengths ahead and lifted it half an inch.

Squeezed the trigger gently.

Half a second after she fired, the glass in the windscreen shattered. From where she was it seemed to collapse and dissolve. The Parallel Sector saloon swung wildly to the left, crashed against the rock face and spun twice.

The jeep, following close behind, had nowhere to go and no time to stop. It crunched sickeningly into the side of the saloon. The men in the back of the jeep were thrown out. They landed badly.

Elena shifted the scope back to the driver. He was folded into the jeep’s steering wheel, his head pushed through broken glass in a mess of blood.

She watched a man stagger from the back of the saloon. Limping. He pulled at the driver’s door. It wouldn’t open. None of the men from the jeep was moving at all. The two crashed vehicles together completely blocked the road.

She shouldered her gun and slid backwards away from the ridge, stood up and began to move, half running, half sliding down through the trees. This route would cut off a mile of road. In seven minutes she would be back at the track where Konnie would be waiting with the boxy grey Narodni.

10

Archangel hurls himself across the continent, Rizhin world. He is a fisted pocket of certainty crashing from mind to mind–land and pause and look and leap again–leaving a crumb trail of sickness and fall. Hunting the only angel trace still left in Rizhin’s New Vlast.

Brother, I am racing to you! Brother, call again and I will come!

He has scarcely the strength for it. Mile by mile the connecting cord back to his rock-lump-grinding-carcass in the forest lengthens and thins. The thread grows weak and spider-fine.

In the deep concrete cistern under the Mirgorod Sea Gate, Safran-in-mudjhik pummels the imprisoning wall with shapeless fists. His mind is dark with anger at his fall.

Lom pushed him in there.

He cannot get out.

Six years.

The endless surging weight of water, the whole force of the River Mir, pins him on his back. The noise of it fills his head and deafens him. The lost mind of Safran huddles in a silent corner, curled and foetal, wanting only the sound and the shouting and the hopelessness to cease.

Hairline fractures are opening in the concrete.

Two thousand days ago an aircraft of the Archipelago returning from a raid emptied its bomb bay, dumping its unspent load across the White Marshes. Two bombs fell against the dam. No visible damage done, but in the secret places, in the dark interior of immense solid walls, weakened bonds began to shear and slip.

Predator-Archangel plummets from height, daggering into the mind of Safran-in-mudjhik and taking possession with a shriek of triumph. Instantly he expands to fill the space. Scoops the remnants of the weaker mudjhik mind from their runnels and crannies with a spoon and eats them all.

Sorry, brother.

Archangel glows with satisfaction and joy. He has a worthy body now in Rizhin world. He flexes. He samples. He trials his goods.

In a dark corner he finds Safran cowering and hauls him out wriggling and retching by the ear.

What use are you? he wonders briefly, rummaging with clumsy fingers through the maddened Safran mind before crushing it for ever out of existence.

Deep in the endless forest the Seer Witch of Bones is the first to discern the gap in the wall. She shrieks in dismay, ‘Close it! Close it! The angel is through!’

Maroussia Shaumian walking under the trees, preoccupied with the child in her belly and Vissarion Lom, reluctantly turns her attention to the call. She traces the fine connecting threadway. It is weak and she is strong, invested with the Pollandore. It costs her no more than a tussle with the weakened and attenuated angel mind. She pinches her fingers and the cord is cut.

The forest is secure.

But the archangel fragment in the mudjhik, isolated from the depleted mother hill, clings on to life and purpose. In the mudjhik carcass he is strength and fire and brilliance like nothing has been in a donkey workhorse mudjhik ever before.

Slowly Archangel-mudjhik rises to his feet against the power of the crushing river and puts his shoulder to the wall. Shoves and batters and kicks against the weakening concrete.

Brute force does it. Boulders come tumbling down, the river is unleashed and Archangel-mudjhik is swept out, twisting and floundering in a torrent of broken concrete and white water, out into the deeper colder darkness of the bay.

1

They changed cars at a small fishing port ten miles east along the coast from Anaklion, ditching the Narodni for a spacious pre-war Tsvetayev with cloth-covered seats, more tractor than automobile, and drove back to Mirgorod. By the direct north-east route it was only nine hundred miles, but it took them five days of doubling back and taking less-used circuitous routes. They assumed they were being searched for. Trains and flights were out of the question, even if they’d had the money for that.

There were five of them in the car: Lom and Elena, Maksim and Konnie and Kistler. They left Vasilisk at the fishing port, where Maksim had arranged a place for him on a boat. He would work his passage south and disappear. As they were leaving, Vasilisk shook hands with Maksim and snapped a military salute.

‘He was in my unit,’ was all Maksim would say afterwards. ‘In the war.’

They drove long hours on ill-made roads, sharing the driving and sleeping in the car, picking up food where they could and stopping as little as possible. North of the Karima mountains they skirted the hungerland. What they saw was bad and the rumours were worse. Ruined and abandoned farmland, the people of the towns gaunt, grey-faced, weak, watching them pass through with sullen hopeless eyes. Villages where there was nobody at all, only crows and pigeons and packs of dogs that circled, heads down, ribcages, dirty lustreless coats.

‘I didn’t know,’ said Konnie. ‘None of us knew about this.’

They ran into a roadblock in a birch wood: a tree across the road and five men in rags with staves and a shotgun rising from a ditch. An attempt to steal the car: fuel and food and a way out. Maksim had to shoot two of them. The rear window of the Tsvetayev was broken.

Maksim had been wary of Lom since the incident of the gate. Lom felt himself watched. By Konnie too. Maksim tried to ask him about it once, but Lom didn’t answer. Where to begin and what to say? The atmosphere was strained.

Elena Cornelius just wanted to get back to the city. She’d been away too long, She was terrified that her girls had come home and she had missed them.

Kistler recovered slowly. They cleaned him up and fed him, found him fresh clothes and let him sleep most of the day. He had lost weight in Rizhin’s interrogation cell. His eyes were dark, blank and anxious, and for long hours he sat in the back of the car next to Elena, pressed up against the door, leaning forward, hands on his knees, staring at nothing. Every few minutes he would open his mouth to speak but say nothing. On the second day tears came, silent tears soaking his face. He didn’t wipe them away.

Lom feared he was permanently gone, that they’d lost him for ever in Rizhin’s interrogation cell, but slowly with the passing of the days some of Kistler’s fire and energy returned, though not like before. When Lom had first seen Kistler he was a master of the world, filled to the brim with confident assurance. The smooth sheen of real power. It had been there in his voice, in his gaze, in the way he moved. Now he was coming back, but darker, more determined, altogether more dangerous. His hurt and his fall, the shock of his humiliation and psychic destruction at the hands of Rizhin and Hunder Rond were raw and near the surface and he was vengeful. His face was thinner and he glared at the world through dark-hooded eyes.

‘I should thank you,’ Kistler said on the third day. ‘All of you. I know what I owe, and I will not forget.’

‘We came because we need you,’ said Lom. ‘I went to Vitigorsk as you suggested. I’ve got information you can use. If you want it. If you feel you still can.’ Lom paused. ‘Or my friends can help you get far away, if that’s what you want. To the Archipelago, even. That is possible. It can be done.’

‘Yes,’ said Konnie from the front seat. ‘We can arrange that. We’ve done it before, for others. It’s what we do.’

Kistler said nothing. He looked for a long time out of the window: there was dry grass out there, dull grey lakes and low wooded hills in the distance.

‘We would understand,’ said Lom, ‘if you decided to go. No shame in that.’

Kistler didn’t look round.

‘Liars,’ he said. ‘You people didn’t risk yourselves just to let some sick old fucker go free. Certainly not a bastard and a criminal like me.’

Kistler’s eyes followed a young girl leading a horse across a hill, until they left her far behind. Lom thought he wasn’t going to say any more. Long minutes passed before Kistler spoke again.

‘I’m going to bring the fucker Rizhin to his knees,’ he said. ‘And I will do whatever it takes, whatever it takes, to make that happen. I want to see him broken. I want to see him hurt. I want to see him crawling on the floor in his own shit and piss and puke and blood. I would die to make that happen and be glad. I would suffer and howl till the end of fucking time, as long as it was him and me there together. So tell me. What have you got?’

‘Pull over,’ said Lom to Maksim, who was driving. ‘I’ll get my bag from the back.’

As they drove on, Lom told Kistler about the vast construction plants at Vitigorsk. The plans for a fleet of atomic-powered vessels to go to the planets. The experiments in resurrection and synthetic human bodies. The aspiration to abolish death.

‘Insane,’ said Kistler, ‘insane, but—’

“That isn’t all,’ said Lom. ‘It’s just the beginning.’

He opened his bag and brought out the papers from Khyrbysk’s office.

‘They are building vessels of two kinds,’ he said. ‘There was a conference a couple of years ago. A hotel on a lake. Rizhin was there, and Khyrbysk, and the chief engineer. Others too. Some names you know. Papers were circulated and minutes taken. All most efficient, and Khyrbysk kept a copy.’

He spread a folder open on his knee.

‘They are constructing two kinds of vessel,’ he said again. ‘One, a fleet to go to the planets and the stars. Five years, they think, ten at the most before they are ready. Resources are no obstacle. Rizhin promised them whatever they need. They will be arks. Transport ships to carry pioneers and the equipment they will require. It’s all planned. They’ll select the people carefully. Even two years ago they’d begun to draw up criteria and candidate lists. They are gathering scientists, artists, writers, athletes. The best of the armed forces and the finest workers.’

‘Let me see,’ said Kistler. ‘Show me the names.’

‘They need huge amounts of angel matter to power the craft,’ said Lom. ‘More than all the carcasses can supply. But there is a living angel in the forest and Rizhin says it’s huge. Immense. An angel mountain. He’s going to find it and excavate its living flesh. Army divisions are already in the forest searching.’

Kistler was still looking at the lists. The people at the conference.

‘I don’t recognise these names,’ he said. ‘None of the Central Committee is here. No one from the Presidium or the ministries. Only Rond.’

‘They don’t know,’ said Lom. ‘None of them know about it because they’re not going. They’re not invited to the stars. But the arks are just part of it. There’s another kind of vessel design. These are for low planetary orbit only, and there are to be thirty of them. They’re also building bombs. Huge atomic bombs. Emperor Bombs. The power of these weapons can’t be understated, it can’t even be imagined: a single one would have the power of sixty million tons of high explosive, big enough to flatten entire cities and destroy half a province on its own. They expect them to set the air itself on fire. The orbital craft, the second design, will be artillery platforms. Flying gunships, each one equipped with twenty Emperor Bombs. That’s six hundred of them. The dust will blacken the skies for years. Five years of darkness and winter. Clouds of poisonous elements will cover the continent, raining disease and death. The atmosphere of the world will burn away.’

‘Even if they could build such weapons,’ said Kistler, ‘they could never use them. We know the Archipelago has its own atomic weapons now. We would destroy each other.’

‘No need for the Archipelago to do that,’ said Lom. ‘Rizhin’s orbiting gunships are intended to do it all. Burn the Archipelago, burn the Vlast, burn the endless forest too. Burn it all. Scorched earth. Leave the planet a smoking cinder.’

Kistler stared at him. Lom saw growing understanding in his eyes.

‘I see,’ said Kistler. ‘Rizhin and his arks will leave the planet and destroy it behind them so no one can follow, so no such ships are ever built again.’

‘That’s part of the reason,’ said Lom, ‘but also so that no one who goes with Rizhin to the stars can ever dream of coming home again.’ He took the note of the conference and found the page he needed. ‘Rizhin’s own words were recorded verbatim.’

He handed the paper to Kistler.

‘We must leave nothing behind us. No before-time. No happy memory. No nostalgia for golden age and home. And above all, no one to come after us. We will be the first and the last. There is no past, there is only the future.’

Kistler read it over several times. Shaking his head.

‘A single man might think this,’ he said, ‘but that others should follow, and help him, and do his work…?’

‘Khyrbysk for one didn’t care,’ said Lom. ‘Nor did the chief engineer. There are letters between them that Khyrbysk kept.’

Lom quoted a passage. He had it by heart.

‘“Where death is temporary, a million deaths, a billion, ten billion, do not matter. When we have mastered the science of retrieving memory from atoms we can come back here for the dust, if we have need of the ancestral dead to fill the planets we find.”

‘I’m not sure if Rizhin believes the resurrection stuff himself,’ he added. ‘You can’t tell that from these papers.’

‘But,’ said Kistler, ‘can they really do this? Could they actually build these things? Could they truly hope to travel to the stars?’

‘For our present purposes,’ said Lom, ‘that doesn’t really matter, does it? It hardly makes any difference at all. Rizhin intends it. He has corresponded with Khyrbysk–I’ve got letters in his own hand here. The project has begun.’

Kistler stared at him.

‘Fuck,’ he said. His face flushed. ‘Fuck. You’re right. Hah!’ He reached across and put his hand on Lom’s knee. Squeezed it affectionately. ‘Of course you’re right, you marvellous fucking marvellous man. It doesn’t matter at all.’

‘So did I get you what you need?’ said Lom.

‘You did,’ said Kistler. ‘You bloody well did. Get me back to Mirgorod and I’ll tear the bastard down. I’ll bury him.’

2

As soon as he was back in Mirgorod, Lukasz Kistler went to work. It took time. There were no phone calls. No letters. No traces. Kistler travelled across the city only by night, with the assistance of Maksim and the Underground Road, and by day he lay up in hiding and slept and prepared himself for the next night. He visited every single member of the Central Committee. In secret he came to them, unannounced and unexpected, when they were alone and at home. Each one was shocked by the thinness of his body, the new lines in his face, the black energy burning in his eye.

But you were dead, Lukasz. We all thought you were dead.

He sat with them, whispering into the early hours of the morning in studies and bedrooms while the households slept, and told them his story. He showed them the documentary proofs that Lom had brought back from Vitigorsk. The notes of meetings. The lists. The letters to Khyrbysk in Rizhin’s own scrawl.

And as he spoke, they saw the intact intelligence in his face. They understood the clarity of vision, the urgent determination: this was not Kistler broken and made mad by fear and detention and loss of power; this was Kistler commanding. Kistler on fire. Kistler the leader they had been waiting for.

And one by one in the watches of the night each man and woman of the Central Committee made the same response to what he told them, as Kistler knew they would. He knew his colleagues. He knew the stuff of their hearts.

What shocked and horrified them most was not the plan Rizhin had put into effect; it was that they were not in it. They were not included.

I am not on the list! He was going to leave me behind. I was to burn. My husband, my wife, my children, all were to burn.

One after another Kistler reeled them in. Stroked their vanity, fed their fear, bolstered their courage and swore them to secrecy. And when he had them, he convened a secret meeting at two in the morning at Yulia Yashina’s house, and presented them with his proposal.

‘We must all be signed up to this,’ he said. ‘Absolute and irreversible commitment. Every single one without exception. You must understand–you already know this well, of course you do–that if one of us falters we are all, all of us, doomed. The man or woman who loses courage now, who believes that he or she can gain advantage by moving against the rest of us: that betrayer is the one Rizhin will kill first. You all know this as I do. Concerted collective decisive action, this is the only way. One swift and irresistible blow!’

3

Yeva Cornelius stares up at a tall cliff of concrete and windows. The concrete is grey but the building is somehow brown, and the windows reflect brown and yellow although the sky is blue. The paving of the street is brown and everything is strange.

Eligiya Kamilova has told them that this is Big Side, and this is the street where Aunt Lyudmila’s apartment was, before the bomb; she’s told them they can’t go back to the raion where their proper house was, with the Count and Ilinca and the dog and all the other people who lived there too, because the raion isn’t there any more. Yeva is beginning to doubt whether Eligiya is right about that or anything else. This doesn’t look like Big Side at all. Maybe there was another city, the one they lived in, and this is a different place, another city with the same name but somewhere else, and everything is a bad mistake.

Eligiya doesn’t say much any more, and Galina is thin and tall and her eyes are big and dark and she never says anything at all. They sleep in a dirty room with only one bed and come here very morning, but Yeva’s more sure every day that it’s the wrong place. The women who live here wear pale blue dresses and coats, and their hair is wavy and doesn’t move in the breeze, and they wear small hats, though it’s not cold or raining, and the hats are the same colour as the dresses and coats. Always the same colour. That’s what you have to do here. The men wear hats too, and thin shoes.

Yeva Cornelius thinks she’s eleven years old still, but she hasn’t counted the days and the dates here are wrong. She knows what date it is here–the newspaper has that–but when the date of her birthday comes, it won’t be her birthday. No one asks how old she is anyway. Birthdays are for children, and this is the wrong place; her mother is somewhere else.

‘This is the wrong place,’ she says again to Eligiya Kamilova, who’s standing next to her with Galina. They come here every day at ten o’clock and wait for half an hour. That’s their plan.

‘You say that every day, Yeva,’ said Eligiya, ‘but it’s not.’

A woman in black is watching them from the other side of the road. She looks like their mother but she’s smaller and she has browner skin and shorter hair and the hair’s grey and she’s very thin. Even from so far away, Yeva can see her eyes are black and sad.

The woman in black is watching Yeva just like the dead soldiers used to watch her at Yamelei: patient and with nothing to say and watching for ever and never getting bored or wanting to look at something else instead. But the eyes are black and sad and that shows the woman is alive.

It is their mother.

Galina has seen her too but she doesn’t move and she doesn’t make a sound.

Yeva wants to run across the road but she doesn’t because… because her mother is not the same and Yeva is not the same and nothing is the same. The awkwardness of strangers meeting. Yeva watches her mother back, from the opposite side of the road, and says nothing and doesn’t move.

Eligiya doesn’t know yet. She hasn’t seen.

The woman in black makes a small movement, almost a stumble. Yeva thinks she’s going to turn round and walk away. But she doesn’t.

4

The Sixth Plenum of the New Vlast convened in Victory Hall in central Mirgorod under low ceiling mosaics of aviators and cherry blossom, harvesters and blazing naval guns, all depicted against the same brilliant lucid eggshell-blue cloudless sky. Victory Hall was not large: despite the brutal columns of mottled pink granite and the banners of gold and red, the atmosphere was surprisingly intimate.

The Central Committee took their seats on the platform in a pool of golden light. The floor of the hall before them–the sixty non-voting delegates from the oblasts, the observers from the armed forces in their uniforms, the leading workers in crisp new overalls of blue–murmured anticipation. Order papers were shuffled. An official in a dark suit tested the microphone at the lectern.

This was the day of accounting. Annual reports were to be delivered, production targets exceeded, measures of increasing wealth and prosperity noted, improvements celebrated without complacency. Your committee can and must do better, colleagues, and in your name we will. Revisions to the rolling Five Year Plan would be proposed, and adopted by acclamation.

Watching from the tiered side-galleries, the fifteen chosen representatives of the press, snappy in new dresses and suits, were relaxed and slightly bored, their copy already written and filed according to tables of information and officially approved quotations previously supplied. The seven ambassadors and their assistants from the independent border states measured their shifting relative importance and influence by the seating plan. In the rows behind them, squinting at the platform, trying to identify the members of the committee by name and thinking of what they would tell their families and friends later, sat several dozen selected members of the public–outstanding citizens all, decorated heroes of the Vlast. And among them, perched at the end of a row, inconspicuous in shadow, Vissarion Lom waited alongside Lukasz Kistler.

Every person in the Victory Hall was waiting for Rizhin to appear.

At two o’clock precisely he did. The small crowd gave a soft wordless visceral rising moan of delight.

Rizhin, simple white uniform blazing under the lights, paused a moment to acknowledge the reception–a modest deprecatory smile–and took his place with the rest of the committee. His chair was no grander, his place no higher than the rest.

I am the servant of our people. I do what I can.

As soon as Rizhin had settled, the Victory Hall was flooded with warm pink illumination. The chamber orchestra in their cramped pit below the platform began to play. At the sound of the first familiar bars every person except Rizhin rose to their feet, and they all began to sing, falling naturally into the fourfold harmonies of which everyone always knew their part.

Kistler leaned across to whisper in Lom’s ear. ‘When the time comes they will not do it, Lom. All this, it’s too strong. It’s too much to go against. They’ll lose their nerve.’

‘It’ll be fine. You’ve done what you can.’

The members of the Central Committee came to the lectern one by one to deliver their reports and were received with warm applause. The afternoon wore on. Rizhin was to speak last, and as the time approached he began to flick through his script. Shifting in his chair, preparing to stand.

Gribov was in the chair. He cleared his throat nervously and stood. ‘Colleagues…’

Rizhin was already coming to take his place. Gribov held up his hand to stop him. Rizhin paused and looked at him, puzzled.

Gribov motioned him back to his seat.

Rizhin hesitated, shrugged and sat down again.

‘Colleagues,’ said Gribov again, ‘at this point the planned business of the Plenum is suspended. I require the public galleries to be cleared.’

There was a collective murmur of surprise. A burst of muttered protest.

Lom kept his eye fixed on Rizhin, who frowned and looked at Gribov, but Gribov was ignoring him. Then Rizhin glanced at Hunder Rond, but Rond was avoiding his gaze.

‘Clear the room!’ called Gribov. Plenum officials and officers of the VKBD began to usher the protesting ambassadors and the press corps towards the door. Lom and Kistler moved to one side, half-hidden from the platform. The officials ignored them as Gribov had arranged.

The non-voting delegates were permitted to remain. Gribov called the room to order.

‘The Central Committee by collective agreement in accordance with Standing Order Seven has resolved to bring before you an urgent and extraordinary resolution.’ Gribov’s voice was gravelly. He struggled to make himself heard. Took a sip of water. ‘The resolution, in the name of Secretary Yashina is, “To remove Osip Rizhin from all official positions, responsibilities and powers with immediate effect.” ’

Silence fell in Victory Hall. No delegate moved. None spoke. None made a sound.

Rizhin sat back in his chair. He looked relaxed. Almost amused. A wry scornful smile on his scarred face.

‘So it comes to this,’ he said, scanning the line of faces, fixing the committee one after another. ‘Well done then. Bravo. Of course it’s all shit, it’s nothing, but let’s see what you make of it.’

You mustn’t let him react, Kistler had said to Gribov when they made the plan in secret conclave at Yashina’s house. Once you start, the momentum is yours, but you have to keep it. If he speaks, if he fights back, it’ll be a battle between competing authorities and you could lose control. It’ll turn into a shouting match. Don’t get into a battle with him.

Gribov turned to Rizhin.

‘You may leave us now, Osip,’ he said, ‘or you may remain and hear what is said. But you may not speak. The resolution will be proposed and a vote will be taken. There is to be no right of reply. If you speak you will be ejected from the hall.’

There was a commotion on the floor of the hall.

‘Shame!’ someone shouted. ‘Criminals! Betrayers!’

The cry wasn’t taken up. It fell on silence. The shock and bemusement in the chamber was palpable. And fear, above all there was fear. The observer delegates collectively maintained a tense, terrified silence.

Lom guessed some of them were beginning to wonder if they would make it out of the room alive. If they would ever go home again.

He saw Rizhin look towards Hunder Rond again. The two men’s eyes locked. Rond kept his face studiously, stonily impassive. Rizhin raised his eyebrows and gave an almost imperceptible nod: And you, Rond? That’s how it is then? Well it’s your loss. It means nothing to me.

Lom wondered what kind of deal Kistler and his cronies had made with Rond. He watched Rizhin’s eyes slide from Rond to Yashina and from her to Gribov. Rizhin was obviously wondering the same thing.

Rizhin sat back in his chair and slipped his hands into his tunic pockets carelessly.

‘Thank you, Gribov,’ he said. ‘I will not leave. This is my chamber and I am President-Commander of the New Vlast. I’ll go when and where I choose. But this could be interesting. So come on, let’s hear what you arseholes have to say.’

Gribov ignored him. He yielded the floor to Yulia Yashina.

‘They’re doing it,’ hissed Kistler in Lom’s ear. ‘They’re fucking doing it. I have to go now.’ He squeezed Lom’s arm as he left. ‘Oh I could kiss you, you beautiful man. Look at that fucker wriggle.’

‘It’s not finished yet,’ said Lom as Kistler disappeared.

5

Tall and slender, elegant, Yulia Yashina moved to the microphone and began to speak. Like Gribov, for the first few sentences her voice was dry and weak. She then drank some water and proceeded, more loudly and with growing purpose and confidence, speaking the words that Kistler had drafted for her.

‘When we analyze the practice of Osip Rizhin in regard to the direction of the Vlast,’ she said, ‘when we pause to consider everything which this man has perpetrated, we see that his achievements in leading our country during war have transformed themselves during the years of peace into a grave abuse of power.’

A single gasp broke the silence in the hall. Yashina pressed on. She spoke slowly, with absolute clarity and determination, looking occasionally towards Rizhin as she went. By this moment she would live or she would die.

‘As President-Commander, Osip Rizhin has originated a form of rule founded on the most cruel repression. Whoever opposes his viewpoint is doomed to removal from their position and subsequent moral and physical annihilation. He has violated all norms of legality and trampled on the principles of collective leadership.

‘Friends, of the original ninety-four members and candidates of this plenum after the war, sixty-seven persons have been arrested and shot. Yet when we examine the accusations against these so-called spies and saboteurs we find that all their cases–all of them, every single one–were fabricated. Confessions of guilt were gained with the help of cruel and inhuman tortures—’

‘No!’ called a voice.

‘Yes!’ called another. ‘Yes! It’s all true!’

‘Here we see it, friends,’ said Yashina, looking out across pained faces. Shock and disbelief and fear. ‘This is the fate that will come to us all if the man Rizhin remains in his position.

‘He has elevated himself so high above the Vlast he purports to serve that he thinks he can decide all things alone, and all he needs to implement his decisions are engineers, statisticians, soldiers and police. All others must only listen to him and praise him and obey. He has created about himself a cult of personality of truly monstrous proportions, devoted solely to the glorification of his own person. This is supported by numerous facts.

‘His official biography is nothing but an expression of the most dissolute flattery, an example of making a man into a god, an infallible sage, the sublimest strategist of all times and nations. It is a confection of lies from beginning to end, and all edited and approved by Rizhin himself, the most egregious examples added to the text in his own handwriting. I need not give other examples. We all know them.’

Lom noticed that Kistler had slipped onto the platform and taken a seat at the back. Rizhin had seen him too.

‘Friends and colleagues,’ said Yashina, ‘we must draw the proper conclusions. The negative influence of the cult of the individual has to be completely corrected. I urge the Central Committee to declare itself resolutely against such exaltation of a single person. We must abolish it decisively, once and for all, and fight inexorably all attempts to bring back this practice. We must in future adhere in all matters to the principle of collective leadership, characterised by the observation of legal norms and the wide practice of criticism and self-criticism.’

She paused.

‘I present the motion stated by Secretary Gribov to the Central Committee for the vote,’ she said. ‘Long live the victorious banner of our Vlast.’

Yashina returned to her seat, visibly shaken. The observer-delegates sat absolutely still. A woman was sobbing. A naval officer had his head between his knees, being quietly sick.

Rizhin sat looking at his fingernails with the same faint smile.

‘I ask my colleagues,’ said Gribov at the microphone, ‘to indicate assent or dissent.’

For long moments nobody moved. Rizhin looked along the row of them, and none would meet his gaze. He began to smile. Then Kistler raised his hand.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Assent. Assent.’

Another hand went up.

‘Yes.’

And another, and another, and the dam broke, and all hands went up, every one, and the Victory Hall exploded into tumultuous shouting. In the body of the auditorium the observer-delegates–knowing now which way the wind blew–were on their feet, applauding, roaring, weeping their relief and joy.

Alone, Lom watched from the balcony corner. Rizhin was still sitting in the same attitude, still with the same supercilious smile. He seemed frozen in time. Gribov and Yashina embraced, and Kistler’s face was alight with the clear happy grin of a child. The face of a man to whom the future belonged.

Lom listened to the ecstatic cheering and asked himself why he wasn’t cheering too. He had won. He had done what he set out to do–Rizhin was fallen, the beast was down, the very idea of him in tatters–but his own first emotion was a flood of tired cynicism. Here he was, watching the rulers applaud themselves. All was decided now: Rizhin was a criminal; no one else was to blame, and the banners of the Vlast still flew. The roaring in the hall was the sound of survival, and of ranks closing.

He pushed that weariness aside: it wasn’t right, it did no justice to the courage of Kistler, Yashina and the rest, and it did no justice to himself. The fall of Rizhin might not be an end, but it was a beginning. Things which only that morning could not have happened were once again possible now. Doors were opening. Possible futures multiplying second by second. He had done a good thing, and it had been hard, and he had a right to a moment’s satisfaction. And more than that. Maroussia. He had a right now to go home.

He looked across at Rizhin once again, but his chair was empty. The man was not there.

Lom took the steps up to the exit from the gallery three at a time, crashed open the door into the deserted corridor and began to run.