Truth and Fear

by Peter Higgins

  Lom was using the plate-glass window as a mirror. He caught a glimpse of something thirty yards back. Maybe. Too far for details. When he turned round to look there was nothing. But the edgy feeling was back, the pressure at the top of his spine, the certainty that he was being watched.

  13

  Josef Kantor, master terrorist, was alone in his room on the Ring Wharf, listening to the voice of Marfa-Anna Priugachina. She was singing the ‘Apple Harvest’ from Lefalla’s Five Evening Songs.

  The autumn orchard drowsing

  In the honey-warm windfall sun.

  The phonograph, a portable ODZ Pobedityel, was a new acquisition. When it was closed, the heavy, rexine-covered wooden cabinet looked like a briefcase, and when you unlatched and lifted the lid to reveal the turntable with its mat of red felt, it released a rich unnameable scent of components and dust. The neat iron crank handle was clipped inside the lid. All it needed was a disc on the felt, a few turns of the crank in the slot on the side of the box, and the machine was ready. A neat, precise lever dropped the meticulously balanced tone-arm into position and Lefalla’s melody, coming rich and full from the perforated grille on the sides of the casing, filled the room. The gramophone was modernity in a box. The contrast between the precision of its components and the nostalgic melancholy confection of Priugachina’s voice stimulated and soothed him.

  One sweet last fruit for Ninel

  Before the salt stars come.

  Kantor had treated himself to the phonograph the week before: one small gift to himself, one negligible handful of roubles skimmed from the thirty million before they went north to Yakov Khyrbysk. It was a rare departure from his iron principle that all money was for the cause and none for himself, except the most frugal of necessary living expenses. But the deviation from his own discipline didn’t trouble him. It was justified. Looked at clearly, it was no deviation at all. The spirit must be nourished, just as much as the body must, because Kantor was a poet: his greatest resource was the force of imagination, and imagination must be given space to stretch and breathe, or else it grew tired and constrained, and then he missed opportunities and made mistakes.

  So he sat in his chair and listened to music. It was a moment of pause, a widening of the spirit, a gathering of forces. The preparations for his new life were almost complete: his books were packed away in a wooden case and the ashes of his papers were smouldering in the grate. All his pamphlets and leaflets and speeches, all the incendiary paragraphs over which he had laboured in the long nights, they were all burned. Citizens! Sisters and brothers! New times are coming. The blood of the Vlast is thin and cold. A fragile skull under a paper face. Young Mirgorod will smash it with a fist! He had believed it in a way, and he believed it still, because it was true: in distant workshops far to the north, amid the pounding of steam hammers, the detonation of rivet guns, the blazing spark-showers of foundries spilling streams of glowing molten iron, new things were being built. Crimson seeds to scatter across the stars. Radiant humankind.

  But Kantor let the papers burn without regret, feeling the fading warmth of the fire on his face like the evening sun in Lefalla’s orchard. A new phase was beginning for him now: there was new work to do, and he was ready. More than ready. He had long outgrown the tedious conspiracies of factions and cells, movements and tendencies and futile terrorist acts. The assassination of the Novozhd had been the last and greatest of his triumphs.

  Kantor used explosives as an engineer did, with an engineer’s precision and strategic purpose, to loosen rock, to clear a blockage and blast a passage, as in a mine, a quarry, a tunnel, and the bomb that destroyed the Novozhd was the one that had broken through. It had released the landslide. Things were on the move. It was time for direct action now, and for that he needed different tools: he needed armies and police, he needed a city, he needed his own hands on the levers of power. And now he had that: the fox-bitch Chazia had given him Mirgorod in the end, as he knew she would. All he had to do was waft the scent of the living angel under her nose and she was avid for it, blind. She surrrendered the tool of her own destruction to him in her hunger for a sniff of the angel’s rancid piss.

  Chazia was a hunter after power in her own way, but her way was weak. She wanted to be near power, to wash herself in it, to smell it on her fingers, but she had no idea what power really was. Chazia had the heart of a bureaucrat. She was insane–there was no doubt of that–but hers was the insanity of the mad administrator. She would give herself to power, when power was to be taken. Power was to be used. And to use power, you needed a poet’s purpose, not an administrator’s.

  Kantor despised Chazia as he despised the rest of the authors of this pathetic Colloquium that sought to ride the rockfall of history let loose by the Novozhd’s death; he despised her as he despised the politicking conspirators and secret coterists he had been obliged to deal with for so long: the factionalisms of anarchists, nationalists, nihilists, social democrats, Birzelists. He despised them all. Weak-minded, they considered their goal to be the administrative implementation of ideas, principles, policies. They pleasured themselves in perpetual debate about ends and means and slogans, contending the disposition of property and labour, the organisation of schemes for the provision of sewerage and justice. They built and broke alliances, they disbursed compromise and patronage and money. Kantor understood their world–he had exploited it when he needed to–but he hated it. It absorbed energy and purpose and hope. Policies! The word itself was small-minded. Pusillanimous. It made him feel tired, nauseous, sleepy and bored. There was only one thing that mattered. Energetic force of personality. That was all there was to it, everything else was illusory, bones thrown to dogs. There was nothing of greatness in policies, and Josef Kantor was nothing if not great. He was a visionary. A poet. He saw the shape and sweep of things.

  Chazia had given him Mirgorod, and Mirgorod would be his beginning. He would weld the city into one single weapon with a simple, efficient, basic, robust system of control. Fear. Terror. The Vlast had wandered in the foothills of terror but Josef Kantor would climb terror mountain. The city would be a Kantor-machine, and then the continent, the entire planet, would be a Kantor-machine. And still that would only be the beginning. Beyond the world were other worlds, other stars, the angels themselves. The Kantor-machine would force itself ever outwards with one simple beautiful poetic purpose, with an abstract beauty of its own. Perpetuation. Propagation. Expansion. Total universal integration.

  And yet there was a problem, an obstacle: the living angel that came from time to time and screamed at him inside his head. For the moment, the angel’s direction and Kantor’s direction were the same, and it was useful to him. The angel was the leash that hauled Chazia to him again and again. But a machine could not have two engines. Kantor feared the angel, and the thing you feared must be confronted. It must be killed. In the end that time must come, and he would find a way.

  The recording of Marfa-Anna Priugachina reached its end in a hiss of crackle. The metronome-click of the needle rebounded and rebounded at the limit of its groove.

  14

  The further north into the city Lom and Maroussia went, the smaller and poorer the houses became. Narrow streets smelled of rendering fat, cabbage and potatoes. There were shops selling black bread and dried fish, packets of dusty tea, sour kvass, second-hand linen. Pawn shops and moneylenders. In small yards groups of men smoked rank tobacco and tossed quarter-kopek coins against walls. Fat snowflakes flocked thicker in the air. They stopped at a second-hand clothes stall in the street. Bought a grey scarf and a pair of woollen gloves for Maroussia. A knitted cap for Lom. He pulled it low over his forehead to cover the wound there. They got the lot for a single rouble. Apart from a few kopeks, it was the last of their money.

  Ten minutes later they came to the first smashed windows. Pieces of broken glass and shattered roof tiles littered the pavement. Lom felt the tension of violence and fear in the air. It was a tangible thing. A taste. Outside a ransacked clothi
ng shop a white-haired woman was gathering up the ruins of her stock. She’d made a neat little heap of dislocated, broken-backed umbrellas at the roadside, and in her arms she held a pile of white undergarments, torn and trodden with mud. Her face was closed up tight. Nobody helped. Further down the street, other shops were the same. Words were daubed on walls and windows in red paint.

  FUCK OFF LEZARYE!

  A thin young man in a peaked felt hat was handing out printed fliers. Lom took one. It was badly printed on a cheap portable press.

  ‘Friends, remember Birzel!’ it read. ‘The government of the Colloquium is not legitimate. The Archipelago is not our enemy. All angels are dead. Let us unite with our brothers the giants and all free peoples everywhere. Wear the White Freedom Rose of Peace! Support Young Mirgorod and bring an end to this pointless war!’

  The young man looked cold and scared and vulnerable. Lom wanted to stop and say something to him, but what could he say? Not all the angels are dead?

  The part of the city they were walking through was like nothing Lom had experienced in daylight before. It felt both small and immensely extensive. Streets led into other streets, turned into alleyways, went blind and died, or opened suddenly into expansive paved squares. It was like the place he’d wandered into when he was lost on his way to Vishnik’s in the rain, the evening he first arrived in Mirgorod. Through open windows he could see the shadowy profiles of people at work in kitchens. In workshops open to the street men in overalls bent over dismantled engines, and from somewhere out of sight came the sound of a lathe. Every so often there was a street name, but the names were strangely anonymous, interchangeable, perfunctory. Meat Street. Polner Square. Black Pony Yard. A woman flapped a rug from an upstairs window: she caught his eye and looked away. Lom felt he had intruded on something private.

  Before he came to Mirgorod, Lom had been only in towns which had a centre and a periphery, and that was all. But this place was neither middle nor edge, but some third thing that could exist only in the gaps and interstices of a great city. It was a part of the huge fabric of Mirgorod, yet Lom had the feeling that for the people they passed, these ordinary fractal streets were the core of their lives, the stage for their dramas, and they seldom left them. It was both somewhere and nowhere, a familiar alienness, the kind of place you saw–if at all–from the window of a tram or a train. The otherness of someone else’s ordinary places. Yet history found its way here, just as much as it came to the wide central prospects and the great buildings of the capital: you felt the presence of it, its strength and its anxiety, the possibility of dark murderous events and love and wonder. For the first time Lom realised the strangeness of what history was: a physical force that acted from a distance on the granular substance of life, like gravity, like inertia. Every where was obscure and elsewhere, non-existent until you found yourself in the middle of it, and then it was local and overwhelmingly specific. Everywhere history operated, everywhere there were things to be afraid of and choices to be made. Because history was gravity, but you could choose not to fall.

  ‘Where is this place?’ said Lom. ‘What’s it called?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Maroussia. ‘I don’t think I’ve been here before. We must have taken a wrong turning somewhere back there.’

  They turned to retrace their steps, only what they’d passed before wasn’t there any more. Different traders, different names. Maroussia slowed and looked around, puzzled.

  ‘I thought there was an umbrella shop on this corner,’ she said. ‘We haven’t passed that stationer’s before. I would have remembered. Still. It doesn’t matter. We just need to keep going north and east and we’ll come into Big Side in the end.’

  There was a burned-out building on the corner of a broad cobbled square. It stank of wet ash and charred wood. A girl of fifteen or sixteen was sitting in the middle of the square under a statue of Admiral Koril. She had a box eubandion on her knees but she wasn’t playing, just resting her arms on the instrument and staring up at the raw darkness of glassless windows, the mute gape of a broken doorway, the jagged roof beams against the sky. She wore long black skirts and a black scarf drawn up over her head. Pulled low, it shadowed her face. Maroussia went across to her.

  ‘Was that your place?’ she said, nodding to the burned ruin.

  The girl looked at her narrowly. She had dark intelligent eyes. Watchful. A strand of dark hair fell across her face. Her hands were red and raw with the cold.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s the Internationals.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The Peace and Hope Meeting Rooms For All Nations. Or it was.’

  ‘What happened here?’

  ‘Who are you?’ said the girl. ‘Why’re you asking?’

  ‘We’re not anybody,’ said Maroussia. ‘We’re just walking through.’

  The girl glanced at Lom.

  ‘He’s not nobody. He’s police.’

  ‘No,’ said Lom. ‘No. I’m not.’

  The girl closed her face against them and looked away.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Maroussia. ‘He’s OK. Really, he is. My name’s Maroussia Shaumian. I live by the Oyster Bridge. And this is Vissarion. He’s my friend.’

  ‘Oyster Bridge? Isn’t that in the raion?’

  ‘Just this side of the gate. We only want to know what happened here.’

  ‘The Boots burned it in the night,’ said the girl.

  ‘Boots?’ said Lom.

  ‘Thugs,’ said Maroussia. ‘Vlast Purity rabble rousers. Why?’ she said to the girl. ‘Why would they do that?’

  ‘They’re saying Lezarye killed the Novozhd,’ said the girl. ‘The government said that, so the Boots attacked the Lezarye shops and the hotheads came to fight the Boots, which is what the Boots wanted. Because the Novozhd is dead now, and they want to make trouble.’

  ‘Who did kill the Novozhd?’ said Lom. ‘Who is the government now?’

  The girl stared at him.

  ‘It’s not a trap,’ said Lom. ‘It’s just a question.’

  ‘But everyone knows.’

  ‘We don’t,’ said Maroussia. ‘Honestly. We’ve been away. Travelling. We don’t know what’s happened here.’

  ‘Where could you travel where they don’t have the Novozhd?’ The girl stood up and hoisted the eubandion across her shoulder. ‘I’m going. Don’t follow me. I’ve got brothers. They’re just over there. I’ll call them.’

  ‘We won’t follow you,’ said Maroussia. ‘Please. We just want to know what everyone knows. It can’t do you any harm to tell us.’

  The girl studied Maroussia for a moment. Lom hung back.

  ‘The Colloquium is the government now,’ she said. ‘There’s four of them. Fohn. Dukhonin. Chazia. I forget the other one. They say it was the Lezarye that killed the Novozhd, but some people say it was a spy from the Archipelago, and others say it was a loner. A madman. Who do you believe? Everyone says what they want to be true.’ The girl lowered her voice. ‘I even heard someone say the Colloquium did it themselves, to get him out of the way. I don’t know. Whoever did it, it was bad. Look at what happened here. Everything’s getting worse. The Boots—’

  She stopped short as a heavy horse-drawn wagon trundled into the square, a gang of young men crowded in the back, bawling ‘Blood of Angels’.

  Vlast! Vlast! Freedom land!

  My heart a flag in winter–

  The drum of my blood

  In storms of rain.

  ‘They came back,’ the girl said bleakly.

  15

  Archangel sends a node of sentience out beyond the forest border and snatches a bird in the air.

  HELLO, BIRD.

  He flies in bird a while, becoming bird, savouring the alien taste of bird mind. When he withdraws, bird falls, heart-stopped, out of the sky.

  GOODBYE, BIRD.

  Archangel isolates a tiny piece of his own rock-hard substance and pu
ts into it all that he has learned of bird. He replicates bird. When he has finished, he pulls the tiny chunk of angel flesh out of himself and throws it into the air.

  It flies. For a while it is bird and he is bird in it. Archangel-bird. Almost.

  Archangel-bird flies and flies, and then the shadow falls. Archangel-bird stutters, stumbles out of the air and collapses in on itself, reverting into nano-quantum-slime that slaps down onto the earth.

  Never mind. First steps. He is learning as he goes.

  He returns to original bird. Dead bird. He sniffs and prods the corpse and slips back into it. Repairs it and makes it fly again.

  HELLO, BIRD.

  It is almost as good.

  It is almost better.

  But it is not enough. One bird. Or one man. It does not even begin to be enough.

  Archangel needs EVERYTHING. If he is to escape this dark constricting suffocating world–if he is to regain his birthright across the uncountable stars and the spaces between the stars–he must have it ALL. Every mind on the planet must speak with HIS voice and speak always and only HIM.

  The unfolding future of the planet, its coming history, must be HIS. He must understand it all in every intricate detail and inhabit it all and transform it all.

  Remake it all.

  No secret private thought. No life outside HIS life.

  Archangel. Always and only and everywhere Archangel.