Radiant State

by Peter Higgins

  ‘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 awkwa
rdness 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.

  Thank you! Thank you! Papa Rizhin!

  All our peace is owed to you!

  All new truth and all fresh plenty!

  A million voices, a thousand years!

  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 dr
ank 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!’