‘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.
Secretary, President-Commander and Generalissimus Osip Rizhin!
When you entrusted me with the responsibilities of Task Number One, you invited me to come to you if ever I needed your help. ‘I am a mother to you,’ you said (your generous kindness is unforgettable), ‘but how may a mother know her child is hungry, if the child does not cry?’ Well now, alas, your child is crying.
Our work progresses better than even I might have hoped. We have had technical successes on many fronts, and our theoretical understanding of the matters under consideration advances in leaps and bounds. I claim no credit for this: our scientists and academicians work with a will. Your trust and vision inspire us all daily. Building on the success of the Proof of Concept (which came to an unfortunate end, but the fault there lay with the human component not the ship herself, and we have stronger human components in preparation now), we are well ahead in production of the greater fleet. Both kinds of vessels required are in assembly. The supply of labour continues to exceed attrition and our mass manufacturing plants outperform expectations (see output data enclosed).
But we have struck an obstacle we cannot ourselves remove. Our reserves of angel matter are exhausted. We simply do not have a supply sufficient to power the launch of the numerous ships envisaged. All known angel carcasses have been salvaged and there is no more.
Helpless, I throw myself at your feet. Find us more angel matter and we will deliver you ten thousand worlds!
Yakov Khyrbysk, Director
Three days later he received a scribbled reply.
Don’t worry about the angel stuff, that’s in hand. Forget it, Yakov–soon you’ll have all you can imagine and ten thousand times more. Drive them on, Yakov, drive your people on. Make the clocks tick faster.
O. Rizhin.
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 u
nder 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.
Chapter Eight
See him–rescuer, lord of the planet,
Wielder of gigantic energies–
In the screaming of steel machines,
In the radiance of electric suns.
He brings the planet a new sun,
He destroys palaces and prisons
He calls all people to everlasting brotherhood
And erases the boundaries between us.
Vladimir Kirillov (1880–1943)
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 hersel
f 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.
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