‘What you’re going to see,’ Dukhonin began, ‘needs no introduction. It speaks for itself. The culmination of years of work. Years of patient—’
‘Get on with it.’
He switched off the room light and set the projector running. It clattered and whirred, casting flickering monochrome images on the screen. White letters, jittering almost imperceptibly on a dark background under a faint snow of dust and scratch-tracks:
WINTER SKIES
FIELD TEST #5
NORTH ZIMA EXPANSE
VAYARMALOND OBLAST
A series of serial numbers and acronyms. A date about two months before.
The only sounds in the room were the clattering of the projector and Dukhonin’s heavy breathing. From time to time he gave a quiet moan. He probably didn’t know he was doing it.
Chazia watched the screen.
Men in heavy winter clothing were working outside in the snow. They were making adjustments to a large and heavy-looking metal object, a squat, solid, rounded capsule about ten feet high and twenty feet long. It resembled a swollen samovar turned on its side. Tubes and rivets and plates. One of the men turned to the camera and grinned. Thumbs up. Then the men had gone and the screen showed the thing alone. The camera dwelled on it for a moment or two and a caption came up. UNCLE VANYA. Then the scene cut to a wide expanse of windswept ice. A tall metal gantry, a framework of girders rising into a bleak sky. Tiny figures moving at the foot of it gave a sense of scale.
Another scene change: the heavy, swollen capsule being winched up the gantry and set in place at the top. More snow-bearded technicians gurning excitedly at the lens. And then nothing. Only the flat emptiness of the winter tundra: mile upon mile of grey icefields under a grey sky. Chazia waited. Nothing happened. Thirty seconds. A minute. Nothing.
Chazia shifted in her seat.
‘Steopan—’
‘Wait,’ he hissed. Tension in his voice. Excitement. ‘Wait.’
The entire screen lit up, a brilliant, dazzling white. A blinding flash erasing the tundra and the sky.
Dukhonin let out a small ecstatic sigh.
‘You see?’ he said. ‘You see what I can give you?’
Chazia was sitting forward in her chair, gripping the armrests. There was a knot in her stomach of joy and excitement and desire. As the blinding light faded, the screen showed a huge burning column roaring into the sky. There was no sound but she could hear it roaring. A thick pillar of destruction surging thousands of feet upwards. The air itself on fire. Boiling. The base of the column must have been five hundred yards across, and thickening steadily. It looked like an immense tree in full summer leaf, half a mile high. A mile. At the top it flattened and spilled outwards, its leafhead a canopy of roiling power and destruction. Cataclysm. The force of it left her breathless.
At the base of the mile-high tree a wind began: an expanding circular shout of power, racing outwards from the centre, scouring the snow off the ice, scouring the ice itself, whipping it into a tidal wall hundreds of feet high, hurtling at tremendous speed towards the watching camera. When it struck the lens the picture stopped. The screen went blank. The film clattered to a halt.
Dukhonin switched on the room light and extinguished the projector lamp.
‘Did you see? Did you see? One of these–just one of them!–can obliterate an entire city. And at Novaya Zima they are building hundreds. And that’s just the beginning. We have plans… Imagine, Lavrentina… There is no limit. No limit at all.’
Chazia felt a constriction in her throat. Power on this scale… Her legs and arms felt weak. She did not trust herself to stand.
‘Who knows, Steopan?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Who knows? Does Khazar know? Does Fohn? Was it only me that did not know about this?’
‘No, no,’ said Dukhonin. ‘Of course not. This is all mine. My doing. They brought this idea to me alone. And I have made it real! But you can join me, Lavrentina, and—’
‘Who brought it Steopan? Who brought you this knowledge?’
‘Technicians. Professors. Scientists. They’re at Novaya Zima, all of them.
‘But where is this from? Where did they get this knowledge from?’
‘What kind of question…? They are very brilliant men.’
‘And they came to you?’
‘Of course they came to me. An undertaking like this needs resources. Materials. Workers. Organisation of the highest order. They had gone as far as they could on their own. They needed help. Who else would they come to?’
‘You’re saying these scientists and professors did this?’ She waved her hand towards the blank projection screen. ‘This? On their own? They worked on it, knowing what they had, and never told anyone. Never sought official sanction? Never came to the Novozhd in Council for recognition and protection and support. And then, when they had gone as far as they could on their own they came to you? To you alone? Who approached you? Some professor? Some engineer?’
‘Not at all. Of course not. They were frightened men. Out of their depth. They knew the importance of what they had, and the risks… the risks that it would get into the wrong hands. You couldn’t trust an idiot like Khazar with a thing like this. There was a middle man. An intermediary.’
‘Who?’
‘His name was Lura.’
‘Lura?’ Chazia stared at Dukhonin. She wanted to hurt him. Gouge out his other eye. Tear out his throat. ‘Shall I describe to you this Lura?’ she said. ‘Tall and thin? A pockmarked complexion? Thick shiny hair and big brown eyes like a fucking cow? A red silk shirt?’
‘Yes. That’s right. That’s Lura.’
‘It is Kantor,’ said Chazia. ‘Josef Kantor.’
Chazia turned to Bez, waiting like a shadow behind Dukhonin.
‘Kill this useless idiot,’ she said.
Bez moved so fast that Chazia barely saw what he did.
‘Find Iliodor, wherever he is,’ she said when he had finished. ‘I want these offices closed. The whole thing completely gone. Everyone who works here is to be dealt with. No trace. He is to do nothing about Novaya Zima, not yet, but I want a list of all the personnel there. Tomorrow. I want this tomorrow. In the morning. Tell Iliodor this.’
Bez nodded.
‘And when you have done that, there is a woman. Maroussia Shaumian. Iliodor has the file. The SV were to pick her up this evening, but they did not succeed. There have been previous failures. Find her and bring her to me.’
‘Of course,’ said Bez. Something lopsided happened to his face. Chazia realised it was a smile.
‘I want her alive,’ she said. ‘And in a condition to speak to me.’
33
In cloud-thickened moonless snow-glimmered darkness, in the hard bitter coldest part of the night, three miles east of the Lodka, crooked in a sharp elbow-bend of the River Mir, pressing hard against the south embankment, lay the eight flat, tangled, overgrown, neglected, lampless and benighted square miles of the Field Marshal Khorsh-Brutskus Park of Culture and Rest.
Three centuries earlier, the Park had begun life as the gardens of the Shurupinsky Palace, landscaped by Can Guarini himself, and the shell of the palace–its grounds long since appropriated to the greater needs of the citizens of Mirgorod–still stood, encircled (girt is the only word that will actually do) by an elegant, attenuated, over-civilised gesture of a moat, slowly succumbing to decay and sporadic, unenthusiastic vandalism. Long before the expropriation, the successive princes Shurupin in their financial prime had provided for themselves handsomely. In the high summer of the palace’s splendour, the Ladies’ New Magazine had produced a special supplement devoted to describing in detail, with tipped-in lithographs by Fromm, the thirty-two bedrooms, the eleven bathrooms, the glorious ballroom, the galleried library, the palm court, the orangery, the velodrome, the stabling for fifty horses, the private hospital, the theatre, the extensive Cabinet (in truth, a Hall) of Curiosities, the observatory with its copper revolving roof and huge
telescope, and the artificial island in the lake where, on summer afternoons, tea might be taken under a lacy canopy of ironwork.
And when the grounds of the Shurupinsky Palace were expropriated and became the Park of Culture and Rest it happened that, by some oversight or unresolved quirk of administrative demarcation, no provision whatsoever of any kind was made for the great house and its contents. No possessor or use for it was found. It was never emptied of its furnishings and equipment. Its library was never catalogued and relocated, its paintings never removed and rehung or stored away, and surprisingly little from the house was even stolen; at the time of the expropriation, and ever since, not only was there was no market for the cumbersome extravagances of the former aristocracy, they were dangerous to own, dangerous to be discovered with, and hideously inconvenient to export to the Archipelago, where buyers might still have been found though at a price that would scarcely have covered the illicit transportation cost. So the palace was simply abandoned, more or less in the condition the last prince left it, to moulder and slowly collapse.
Antoninu Florian had visited the Shurupinsky Palace once, before the expropriation, as a guest of the last prince. Prince Alexander Yurich Shurupin, landowner, moral philosopher, social reformer and author of prodigiously enormous, compendious, subtle novels, had shown Florian over the house and walked with him in the grounds, not in pride but in some bemusement and shame, because the Palace troubled him. An old man by then, his privilege troubled him. His own brilliant writings troubled him.
‘You have no idea how restful it is for me, talking to you, my friend,’ the Prince had said to Florian, striding along the avenue of yellow earth, hands in the pockets of his brown linen overalls, work boots flapping unlaced against his shins, beard and long grey hair flickering on the lilac-scented summer breeze. ‘It gives me a wonderful freedom to speak fully and truly, your not being tainted with humanness. In my experience, one can never talk to another human person with complete honesty, not really. It is impossible. Even the best of them, they take the truth so personally. But you, you have a fine intelligence but you stand completely apart. You are not engagé, you are not parti pris. You hear my words simply as words. My thoughts are simply thoughts, not the thoughts of wealth and fame and a name. Not the thoughts of one who could be of help to you, or could wound and insult you with a careless dismissive phrase that is intended to be of general application, not personal at all. You bring the disinterested clarity of perspective that comes from standing elsewhere. I value that, my friend. I value it tremendously.’
The last prince had died soon after Florian’s visit in obscure circumstances, but Florian, who had barely listened to Prince Shurupin’s words at all but paid close attention to the man, returned to the abandoned palace from time to time, to prowl its fading rooms and read in the library, until large parts of the roof had collapsed, the floors became unsafe and the stench of damp and mildew and fungal growth too depressing to bear. Even when he’d stopped going into the palace, he still made visits to the park. Too large by far for the two men employed by the city to maintain them, the greater part of the former gardens had reverted to thicketed, brambled wilderness, the marble temples and mythographical statuary imported from the Archipelago by the early princes soot-blackened and mossy green, submerged under a tide of thorn and glossy mounds of rhododendron. For Florian it was a cool, earthy, leafy, sap-rich, owl-hunted refuge from the city.
And he had come there now, in the dark and snow-muffled night, to nurse the gunshot wound in his belly.
Relieving himself of the discomfort of human clothes and human form, Florian nosed his way into the shelter of a stand of pine trees in the centre of the park and curled himself up on a patch of bare earth. The wound was a dull ache. It was almost healed, only a tender puckered crust remained, but the effort of driving the bullet out had cost him energy and he needed rest. He rasped at the place with his tongue until the last taste of dried blood had gone, then stretched out and closed his eyes.
The watchfulness of the world was all around him, the living awareness of earth and trees reaching out in all directions to the edge of streets and the river and beyond. The connective tissue of the park and the city was earth and water and air and roots, and Florian merged himself into the flow and tangle of it, surrendering, letting the constant work of holding together a pseudo-human consciousness relax and blur away. No words, no structured thoughts. No names for things. He was what he was, and only that. The hurt in the belly was not his hurt, it was simply hurt, a thing that was there, that existed, but without implication. No before-time and nothing to come: and without that, no fear.
34
Lom woke in the morning to find the curtain pulled back and the attic filled with brilliant early light. The sky in the window was a bright powdery eggshell blue. Maroussia was already gone. He got up and dressed. There was broken ice in the washbowl. He splashed his face and looked out of the window. Snow mounded the rooftops of the raion and filled the silent streets. Nothing moved but wisps of smoke from chimneys. The broken moons, faint and filmy, silver-blue against blue, rested at anchor, day-visible watermarks in the liquid paper sky.
Lom went out into the corridor and tried to retrace his steps back to Elena’s kitchen but found himself in parts of the house he hadn’t seen before. A wide staircase took him down to an entrance hall: red tiles and threadbare rugs, a stand for coats and hats, umbrellas and galoshes. Fishing rods. The scent of polish and leather. Morning sun streamed in through the coloured-glass skylight over the door, kindling dust motes and splashing faint lozenges of colour across the floor. He unbolted the door and opened it onto foot-thick snow. Crisp bitter air spilled inwards, caught at his nose and throat and made his breath steam. He stepped out into crisp blue illumination. Every colour was saturated. The snow glistened, translucent, refracting tiny diamond brilliances. He stomped his way round the side of the house, looking for the entrance they’d used last night. Nothing moved in the streets. The snow muffled all sound, except for the morning bells, the calling of the rooks and the rhythmic crunch of his own feet.
He made his way round to the gate into the garden and pushed it open. As he was passing the wide low loggia, a figure stepped out to confront him.
‘Yes? Who are you?’
It was a man of about sixty, leaning on a malacca cane. Wisps of un-combed grey hair, a heavily embroidered morning coat, gold-rimmed spectacles. An ugly intelligent face. He was standing on the step under the canopy. Worn, turned carpet slippers on his feet.
‘Sorry,’ said Lom. ‘I’m staying in the house. We’re with Elena Cornelius. I got myself lost. I was trying to find my way back to her apartment.’
‘Ah,’ said the man. He lit a black cigarette with a match. Wraiths of cheap rough tobacco smoke drifted in the cold air. ‘That’s it then. You are one of our guests in the attic. I fear it will have been cold for you up there among the rafters.’ He came down the step and held out his hand. ‘I am Sandu Evgenich ter-Orenbergh Shirin-Vilichov Palffy and this is my house. You are welcome. Of course.’
Lom took the offered hand.
‘Lom,’ he said. ‘Vissarion Yppolitovich Lom.’
Palffy made a slight, formal bow.
‘You were taking a walk in the snow before breakfast, perhaps?’ he said.
‘I guess,’ said Lom. ‘You don’t see snow much, where I come from. Just rain. Always rain.’
‘Where is that? Where you are from?’
‘East,’ said Lom, gesturing vaguely. ‘East. Way east. On the forest border. I doubt you’ve heard of it. A small town called Podchornok.’
‘I believe I do know Podchornok, as it happens. Some cousins of mine had an estate in that country once.’
Lom grunted.
‘Small world.’
‘Not such a coincidence,’ said the Count. ‘I had cousins in every oblast of the Dominions once, but that was a lifetime ago. A different world. The people I’m talking about were at Vyra. They had a fine house. A
good lake for pike. The place is gone, now, of course, alas.’ He coughed and looked sourly at the cigarette in his hand. ‘In those days, when I was a child and went to Vyra, the Vlast was more… what? Moderate? Sensible? Willing to overlook small independences, let us say, so long as they were far from their own front door and paid their taxes and didn’t draw attention to themselves.’
‘Vyra was the Vishniks’ place,’ said Lom.
‘It was! Exactly so!’ Palffy looked at him with a new interest. ‘You knew them then?’
‘I knew Raku. We were at school.’
‘Raku?’ Count Palffy frowned. Then he remembered. ‘Of course! There was a Prince Raku. The Vishniks had a son, an only child. But that was long after my visit. We could not have met, Raku and I. So where is this Prince Raku now? What does he do with himself ? Perhaps I might write to him. Families should keep up their connections, don’t you think?’
‘Raku died.’
‘No!’ said the Count. ‘He couldn’t have been more than thirty. Was he ill? What happened?’
‘The militia happened.’
‘Ah. How shit. How very shit.’ Palffy dropped his cigarette on the step and crushed it out with the brass ferrule of his cane. Not an easy trick, but he speared it first shot. ‘This is a heavy blow. But we should not be making ourselves sad on such a splendid morning, my friend. Come inside with me, Vissarion Lom, and have breakfast. The snow makes one hungry, don’t you find?’
‘Thanks,’ said Lom. ‘But I should be getting back—’
‘Some coffee then. I have good coffee. Red beans from the Cloud Forest, roasted to my personal specification by Mandelbrot’s in Klepsydra Lane. How does that sound to you?’
‘I’d appreciate that,’ said Lom. ‘But not now. Maybe later.’
Truth and Fear Page 13
