‘What if I can’t do this?’ said Pavel. ‘The archive could have been lost or destroyed by now. And even if it still exists, who will know where it is? I can hardly ask.’
Lom shrugged.
‘I don’t care how you do it. These are your problems, not mine. They’re administrative problems, the kind you’re good at solving. If you bring me the Kantor file, you won’t hear from me again. If not, well… I don’t like you, Pavel. I don’t like the kind of person you are, and I remember how you pissed me about when I was working for Krogh. I’m not your friend.’
‘Look,’ said Pavel, ‘OK. I’ll try to find it, but it may not—’
‘I’m not interested in intentions,’ said Lom. ‘Only outcomes. I’ll come back for it this time tomorrow. Have it ready.’
‘No,’ said Pavel. ‘One day isn’t enough. And you are not to come to my home again. Not ever again.’
‘Two days then,’ said Lom. ‘But no more.’
Pavel nodded. He looked sick.
‘There’s a konditorei on the lake in Kerensky Gardens,’ he said. ‘If I can get what you want, I’ll be there. I will arrive at 10 p.m. and I will wait till eleven.’
10
Night in the city, and Mirgorod celebrates the survival of Papa Rizhin the unkillable man. Lamps project the immense face of Rizhin all ruby-red against the underbelly of broken scudding cloud. Moon-gapped, star-gapped, streaming, he fills a quarter of the sky and floods the city with dim reflected redness.
In the rebuilt Dreksler-Kino, Ziabin’s greatest work, The Glorification of Time Racing, makes its triumphant premiere before an audience of twenty thousand. Oh, the ambition of Ziabin! Two thousand performers fusing music, dance and oratory! He will unify the arts! He will raise humankind to the radiant level! New instruments constructed for the occasion emit perfumes and effusions of vaporous colour in accordance with Ziabin’s score, and the auditorium reverberates to wonderful sounds previously unheard. Towers and mountains rise from the floor and cosmonauts descend thunderous from the sky, waving and smiling as they join the chorus in polyphonic harmony. Across the enormous cinema screen roll images of Rizhin country against a backdrop of galaxies. And all in glorious colour! The roars of wonder of twenty thousand watchers echo across the city, new gasps of rapture in perfect time with the long under-rhythms of Ziabin’s scheme. A synchronised crescendo every seventh wave.
Rizhin himself is there at the Dreksler-Kino, seated in a raised box. The wound on his face is agony but his chair is gilt, the walls of his box padded and buttoned velvet. Like a brooch in a jeweller’s box, he says to Ziabin. It is not a remark intended to put the great artist at his ease. Haven’t we shot you yet?
11
The Vlast Universal Vessel Proof of Concept tumbles slowly, describing twenty-thousand-mile-per-hour corkscrew ellipses of orbiting perpetual fall. The cosmonauts ride in silence, having nothing to do. Sweeps of shadow and light. Cabin windows crossing the sun. Nightside passages of broken moon. The internal lighting has failed.
The frost of their breath furs the ceiling thickly.
Hourly they flick the radio switch.
‘Chaiganur? Hello, Chaiganur? Here is Proof of Concept calling.’
Universes of silence stare back from the loudspeaker grille.
In Mirgorod the twenty-foot likenesses of cosmonauts in bronze relief carry their space helms at the hip. In bright mosaic above the Wieland Station concourse they look skyward with chiselled confidence, grinning into star-swept purple. Our Starfaring Heroes. Mankind Advances Towards the Radiant Sun.
On the giant screen in the Dreksler-Kino wobbling smoky rockets descend among rocks and oceans out of strange skies. Bubble-cabin tractors till the extraplanetary soil, building barracks for pioneers. The audience roars and stamps its forty thousand feet. All children know their names from the illustrated magazines.
Our Future Among the Galaxies.
The Vlast Universal Vessel Proof of Concept, two-thousand-ton extraplanetary submarine, makes a shining white mote against the nightly backdrop of the stars. It slides on smooth invisible rails across the sky. You can set your clock by it. It is clean and beautiful and very sad.
Silent the cosmonauts, eyes wide and dark-adapted, having nothing to do.
The turning of the cabin windows pans slowly across vectors of the lost planet, blue-rimmed, beclouded, oceanic. Shadow-side campfire towns and cities glitter. Ant jewels. The shrouded green-river-veined darkness of forest. Lakes are yellow. Lakes are brown. The continent is a midriff between ice and ice. Glimpses of the offshore archipelago.
Complex geometries of turn bring the snub nose of the Proof of Concept round to face the world. It’s a matter of timing. Her fingers stiff with cold and lack of use, Cosmonaut-Commodore Vera Mornova engages console mechanisms. The distant tinny echo of whirr and clunk. The magazine selects a charge.
Her companions observe unspeaking with heavy-lidded eyes and do not move.
‘I’m going home now,’ she says and pushes her thumb into the rubber of the detonation button.
The response is a distant bolt sliding home.
A half-second delay.
The tiny silent star-explosion of angel plasma smashes them in the small of the back. They do not blink.
Vera Mornova jabs her finger into the rubber button again and again.
Her aim is true. Proof of Concept surges forward into burning fall. The world in the window judders and bellies and swells.
The melting frost of their breath on the ceiling begins to fall on them like rain.
12
After leaving Pavel’s apartment, Lom took a night walk on the Mir Embankment. The Mir still rolled on through the city, carrying silt and air and the remembering of lakes and trees, but it was silent now and just a river. Everything was hot and open under the Rizhin-stained sky. He didn’t want to go home, not if home was a room in the Pension Forbat.
He was looking for something. Shadows and trails of what used to be. Old wild places where the forest still was. Giants and rusalkas and the dry ghosts of rain beasts in a wide cobbled square. There must be something left, something he could work with. But he was the only haunter of the new ruined city, caught between memory and forgetting, listening to the silence of dried waters. The city had turned its back on the Mir, and he was on the wrong side of the river.
In the very shadow of the Rizhin Tower, almost under the walls of the Lodka, he crossed into a small field of rubble. Mirgorod was aftermath city yet, and the heal-less residuum of war still came through. Stains under fresh plaster.
Lom stepped in among roofless blackened walls propped with baulks of timber. Night scents of wild herb and bramble. The smell of ash and rust and old wood slowly rotting. A grating in the gutter and running water down below–moss and mushroom and soft mud–the Yekaterina Canal paved over and gone underground.
Follow. Follow.
Gaps and small openings into blackness everywhere. Subterranea.
He kicks aside a fallen shop sign. CLOVER. BOOKS AND PERIODICALS.
Down he goes into old quiet tunnels and long-abandoned burrowings. There is no light down there, no lurid Rizhin glow, but he is Lom and needs no light to find his way.
Chapter Six
The sisters all had silent eyes
and all of them were beautiful.
Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922)
1
The Lodka, sealed up and abandoned by Papa Rizhin–New Vlast, new offices! Sky rise and modern! Concrete and steel and glass!–stands, a black stranded hulk on Victory Square, doors locked, lower windows barred and boarded, the silent and disregarded River Mir at its back. Papa Rizhin refuses to use it at all. It is a mausoleum, he says. A stale reliquary. It stinks of typewriter ribbons and old secrets and the accrual of pensions. Four hundred years of conferences and paper shuffling and the dust of yesterday’s police. Will you make me breathe the second-hand breath of unremembered under-secretaries? Titular counsellors who died long ago and took the
ir polished trouser seats with them to the grave? Fuck you. I will not do it.
And so the panels of angel flesh were removed from the Lodka’s outer walls to be ground up for Khyrbysk Propellant, and the vast building itself–its innumerable rooms and unmappable corridors, its unaccountable geometry of lost staircases and entranceless atria open to the sky, its basement cells and killing rooms–was hastily cleared out and simply closed up and left.
Inside the Lodka now an autumnal atmosphere pervades, whatever the external season. Time is disrupted here, unforgetting and passing slow. Many windows are broken–shattered bomb-blast glass scattered on floors and desks–and weather comes in through opened oriels and domes. Paint is flaking off leadlights. In the reading room the great wheel of the Gaukh Engine stands motionless, canted two degrees off centre in its cradle by an Archipelago bomb that fell outside. Animals have taken up residence–acrid streaks and accumulations of bird shit–bats and cats and rats–but they do not penetrate more than the outermost layers, leaving undisturbed the interior depths of this hollowed-out measureless mountain. Only shadows and paper dust settle there, little moved by slow deep tides of scarcely shifting air.
In the inner core of the Lodka, unreached by traffic noise and the coming and going of days, the silence of disconnected telephones drifts along corridors and through open doorways, across linoleum, tile and carpet. Nowhere here is ever completely dark: bone moonlight sifts and trickles eventually through the smallest gaps. Dim noiselessness brushes against walls painted ivory and green and the panels of frosted glass in doors. Quietness drifts along empty shelving and settles like ocean sediment inside deed boxes, cubbyholes, lockers and filing cabinets, the drawers of desks. Chairs still stand where they were left, pushed back. Abandoned pens rest on half-finished notes and memoranda. Jackets hang on coat stands in corners. Spare shoes are stowed under cupboards. Muteness insinuates itself into the inner mechanisms of typewriters, decryption machines, opaline desk lamps and heating boilers. Tiny fragments of angel flesh, inert now, lie where they fell on workroom floors. Obscurity preserves in grey amber the strangely intimate and homely office world of government. The Lodka is an ungraspable archaeology of administration. Surveillance. Bureaucracy. Interrogation. Death. Suspended and timeless. An unfathomable edifice. A sanctuary. An abysm.
Vissarion Lom found his way into the abandoned Lodka by subterranean ways. Following passages till recently used by only the most secretive of confidential agents of the secret surveillance police, he crossed the barely tangible time-slow frontier into memorious residuum, and long hours he wandered there, a warm attentive ghost. There was endless freedom in the Lodka now. It was the one free place in Rizhin’s new city. Free of everything but memories and a strange nostalgia for faded old oppression. It suited Lom better than the Pension Forbat.
But about one thing he was wrong.
The abandoned Lodka is not empty.
The vyrdalak sisters are light and fragile, almost weightless. They dress in brittle patchwork fabrics of subtle colour unlike anything in Rizhin world, and they have wide nocturnal lovely eyes. Inside them is very little body left at all. They are not of the forest but older and stranger than that.
Lom, entering the Lodka, spilling bright perfumed pheromone clouds of forestness all unawares, drew the hungry vyrdalak sisters to him like a warm candle flame.
‘He’s beautiful,’ said Moth. ‘I’d almost forgotten the good smell of trees.’
‘But he stinks of angel also,’ said Paper. ‘Violence is coming back.’
‘We should go to him,’ said Pigeon. ‘One of us must go.’
‘Let it be me then,’ said Moth. ‘Let me. I will go.’
2
Under-Secretary Pavel Ilich Antimos had a natural talent for dealing with complex administration, matured by years of experience. He was subtle, clever, far-sighted, cautious and patient, and he grasped the elegant beauty inherent in meticulous precision and detail. He had been around a long time in large institutions and knew instinctively how to make his way.
Lom’s appearance in his apartment had put Pavel in an uncomfortable place, caught between risk and risk. Through a long evening and sleepless night he weighed up options, measured the balance of danger and reward, and by the time he rose in the morning he had decided to do as Lom suggested. He would find the private Chazia archive. It was a dangerous project, but who could tackle it better than he could, and do it without attracting notice? He knew the ways of government offices: the harmless word in the corridor, the enquiry hidden inside the request, the flicker of reaction, the silent tell. The oblique and traceless passage through a filing list.
By the first afternoon Pavel was beginning to feel he was getting somewhere. There was a book of cancelled requisition slips in a box under a counter at the former address of the Ministry of Railways, a building located out towards the old Oxen Quarter and now occupied by an outpost of the Catering Procurement Branch. If certain papers were not there, if a certain circuit of communication had not been closed, he would be several steps nearer the missing archive, which he was increasingly certain did actually exist.
He made a good job of it, a brilliant job actually–Pavel Antimos was a genius at that kind of thing. But Hunder Rond was better, and Rond had had years to prepare, so Pavel had no way of knowing that, when he put in a chit for a particular registry number, a tag on the file triggered a clerk to marry a pink perforated slip with its other half and slide them both into a manila envelope addressed only to a box number. The arrival of the same envelope some hours later in a post room halfway across the city led to a telephone call, which led to another call, to the Parallel Sector, to the office of Hunder Rond.
‘It could be nothing,’ the caller said. ‘A random coincidence.’
‘We have anything on this Antimos?’ said Rond.
‘No. Nothing at all. He has an exemplary record.’
Rond took a decision.
‘Let’s pick him up,’ he said. ‘Collect him now.’
‘Shall I talk to him?’
Rond looked at his watch.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Leave him to me.’
And so, at the end of the day, when Pavel called in at the Catering Procurement Branch on his way home from work, two women in the black uniform of the Parallel Sector emerged from a side room and took him into custody with little fuss. Pavel showed no rage. He was not distraught. It was a moment he had prepared himself for, many years before, and when it happened he went along with them, numb and automatic. The only thing that really surprised him was how little his arrest actually mattered to him, now that it had finally come. He hated his life. He hated his apartment. He wouldn’t miss anything at all.
‘You don’t need to hurt me,’ Pavel said to Rond in the interrogation room. ‘I will tell you anything you want. I will say whatever you ask me to say. Let me be useful to you. I help you, and you keep me alive. Yes?’
He was half right anyway. One out of two.
3
Lom encountered the vyrdalak Moth in the reading room of the Central Registry. She came down silently, weightlessly, out of the moon-dim lattice, the glass-broken rust-scabbed ceiling dome, the strut and gondola shadows of the Gaukh Engine. (The Gaukh Wheel! Stationary and permanently benighted sun wheel, ministering idol of information now burned, ash-flake-scattered, released to rain.) Out of the wheel Moth came to him, face first, noiseless and beautiful. Her presence brushed across his face like settling night-pollen. Quiet vortices of neck-prickling wakefulness. She was young with the freshness of ageless moonlight. Youngness is the oldest thing there is.
Close she came and tipped at the air near his face with a quick dry tongue.
‘You smell sweet,’ she said, wide dark eyes shining. ‘Foresty. Earth and trees.’ Her sunless skin was warm, her wide mouth purple-dark. ‘I’m Moth,’ she said. ‘Who are you?’
‘My name’s Vissarion.’
She sniffed.
‘No, it isn’t,’ she said. ‘What do
you want?’
‘I thought no one was here,’ said Lom. ‘The giants and rusalkas have left, the river’s gone silent, but you’re still here?’
‘The forest is closed, but we’re not of the forest. We’ve always been here.’
‘We?’
‘Three sisters, all nice girls. I’m the one that wanted to come. My sister Paper thinks you’re dangerous, name’s-not-Vissarion. She says you stink of angel like Lavrentina. I say you stink of angel like nothing else does now, but not like Lavrentina; you’re also sweet. I say you’re liminal compendious duplicitous. I say you’re beautiful but violent and you’ve hurt and killed much in your time but you’re not dangerous. Which is right, name’s-not-Vissarion? Say whether Moth or Paper.’
‘Lavrentina?’ said Lom when finally she took a breath.
‘Changing the subject?’ said Moth. ‘That’s an answer of a kind. Do you know Lavrentina? She said she was coming back but she hasn’t come back yet. Do you know where she is?’
‘What do you have to do with her?’
‘Oh, she knew us! There were more of us then and some of us she used for purposes and missions and death. Some liked it. It was purpose. Bez liked it a lot but he hasn’t come back either. The word that Lavrentina liked was coterie but we didn’t like all that my sisters and me. We kept from Lavrentina far away. Keep to the rafters when Lavrentina’s about! Come down when she’s gone! The rest of us have gone away but not the three sisters we like it here. Is Lavrentina ever coming back?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Lom.
‘So answer the question then name’s-not-Vissarion are you a danger thing?’
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