Nine Layers of Sky

by Liz Williams

  It took him two attempts before he found one that was working. Looking up, he saw the broken-tooth vent of the unfinished metro, rising above him. He glanced across at the apartments, wondering whether Elena might glimpse him if she looked out of the window, but the place was half-hidden behind a tracery of branches. Fumbling in his pocket, Ilya extracted a few coins and pushed them into the machine. It took several minutes to accomplish this. A good thing these old machines still took rubles. The brief battle with the rusalka and the pursuit through the market had left him breathless. His palm throbbed with the cut of his vow, and his hands were trembling. The cut across his palm burned and stung. Withdrawal. It would not be long till it really started to get its claws into him, the sweats and shakes and fever, but he had no choice now. He had made his promise and there was no going back on it. For the first time in centuries, God was watching him.

  The phone at the other end was ringing. At least Kovalin hadn’t palmed him off with a forged number. But it was a long time before anyone answered.

  “Who’s that?” said a voice. It sounded very old and querulous, as if woken from sleep. Ilya wondered whether he might not have a wrong number after all.

  “You don’t know me,” he said quickly. “My name is Ilya Muromyets. Kovalin gave me this number to call, if I had anything.”

  “Kovalin? Ah, yes, the boy,” the voice said. Ilya’s eyebrows rose. If the dead-eyed, corpse-faced Kovalin was a boy, how old was this person? “So, do you?” the voice went on.

  “Do I what?” Ilya said, stupidly.

  “Have anything.” The voice was patient, as though reasoning with an idiot. Not far wrong, Ilya thought.

  “Yes. I think so. I think I’ve found what you’re looking for.”

  “Do you? How long have you been in Kazakhstan?”

  “I got off the train this morning.”

  “And already you have found the thing for which we have been searching? Kovalin told me that you are a desperate man, Ilya Muromyets.”

  “Nevertheless,” Ilya said, as firmly as he could, “I may have what you’re looking for.” He did not want to say: I think I drew it to me. The wordless voice still echoed in his head: I am here. I have found you. What the hell was this thing?

  “Then come to us now. Show us. I will send a car.”

  “I don’t have the object myself,” Ilya was forced to admit. “Someone else has it. She wants to meet someone from your organization, to sell it. Tomorrow, at eleven. In the lobby of the Hotel Kazakhstan.”

  There was a long pause. Then the voice said, “Very well. I will give you a chance. We will be there. But do not be late.”

  “I won’t—” Ilya started to say, but the voice had hung up. There was only the humming of the phone in his ear. Slowly, he replaced the receiver and focused once more on Elena’s apartment. He could hear snatches of conversation, tuning in and out as though molded by static.

  “—nothing very much. I went to the market. I thought we’d have the rest of that plov tonight, how does that sound?”

  He thought that was Elena. An older, female voice answered briskly. Still listening in on this desultory conversation, Ilya sat down at a nearby table and ordered a shashlik and tea. Bottles of beer stood in the freezer and Ilya was tempted, but thought better of it. It was foreign, imported, and it would cost too much. Perhaps it was unfortunate that Kazakhstan, though Islamic, was not a dry country.

  “How long does this place stay open?” he asked the waitress.

  “All night.”

  “Any chance of a cheap place to stay round here?”

  “You could sleep out back with the refugees.” Ilya, studying her, saw blue eyes in a dark Persian face. It was likely that she was one of those refugees. She looked no more than sixteen.

  “Two hundred tenge will get you a bed. And there’s a toilet—we built it ourselves.” She sounded proud. He’d slept in worse conditions in Siberia, and he could keep an ear out for Elena, at least.

  “All right.”

  “Do you want to see it?” the girl asked, in the manner of a receptionist showing a guest the best bedroom. Ilya stifled a smile and followed her through to the back of the cafe, to a collection of rusty old vehicles and corrugated iron huts.

  “We sleep here.” She pointed to an ancient bus.

  “It’ll do.”

  A boy was cooking plov in a wok over an open fire. He had no face, only a mass of blackened scar tissue. Blue eyes like the girl’s were scowling in concentration as he stirred the rice and mutton.

  “My brother,” the girl said, following Ilya’s stare.

  “Dear God. What happened?”

  “A shell. It fell on the house. We lived near Par-char, in Tajikistan. Everything in the village was destroyed.”

  “Who did it?”

  “I don’t know. Rebels, maybe, or mujahideen, or the Americans.”

  “Why would Americans destroy your village?”

  The girl shrugged. “I don’t know. Why not?”

  Ilya’s heart reached out to her, but she did not seem unduly concerned. Perhaps she had been too young to remember properly, or perhaps such events were like bad weather, striking without reason. The girl leaned over her brother, teasing, threatening to snatch the spoon, and the boy gave a happy, lipless grin.

  Watching them, the craving for heroin receded until it was no more than a distant tide. Ilya knew that it would come back, but faced with these two, who had so little, he could not bring himself to care about his own troubles. He went into the bus and sat down on one of the stained mattresses, listening as the rain once more began.

  Interlude

  BYELOVODYE, N.E. 80

  Early that morning, Anikova drove the staff car back from the dacha to Central Command. It was not long past dawn and she was still half-asleep, so when she reached the curve of the road that led past the lake, she stopped the car and got out. The lake was dim with mist in the early morning light; if Anikova narrowed her eyes, the landscape seemed to blur and swim, as though she was looking through a water-filled glass. Nothing moved in the pines, or among the white-striped birch branches. If she looked at the coils of mist in a certain way, she might imagine that the lost city of Baikal was rising from the water: the oldest place in Russia.

  But this was no longer Russia. This was her home of Pergama Province, not far from First City. Strange, Anikova thought, to be homesick for a place one had never known, but Russia must still run in her blood. This is Byelovodye, she reminded herself, the heart of all the Russias, the place where they meet, the hidden Republic. This is the best place of all. She looked down at her smart dark uniform, its buttons in the shape of snarling bear heads, at the red stars at her cuffs. Yet when she thought of what she and the Mechvor had to do that day, of what they had already done, she felt hollow and unconvinced, as though the uniform was the only thing holding her together.

  Anikova rested her forehead on the cool side of the staff car and took a breath of morning air. That kind of thinking was forbidden these days, and had never been entirely wise. She remembered her mother cautioning her against dangerous thoughts. Be careful what you dream. Look what happened to your father. And then her mother’s face would grow pinched and pale as she screwed her hands together in the shelter of her apron. Anikova had taken good heed of the lesson; an easy thing for a child to learn, but harder for an adult, forced into disquieting compromises. She should forget about hidden cities, forbidden dreams: just get in the car and drive. But it was a long time before she could bring herself to leave the lake.

  An hour and a half later, Anikova sat with her hands on her knees, watching as the Mechvor went through the procedure. Kitai’s whiteless eyes were closed; her face wore a faint smile. Anikova thought that this was what irritated her most about the Mechvor: The woman never seemed to lose her temper. She remained good-natured, good-humored, even under the most trying circumstances. Anikova could not help feeling, however, that Kitai felt a genuine concern for all her subjects, even w
hen she was so ruthlessly stripping their dreams from their heads.

  The old man lay on an operating table, surrounded by equipment. What made it worse was that this was the second case that morning; Kitai had already seen to a girl brought in by Anikova’s people on the previous day. She had been found outside the People’s Palace, distributing samizdat literature, perhaps the very leaflets that had been printed in the old man’s bathroom. Anikova had watched sourly as the Mechvor questioned her, treating it all as a huge secret, as though they were all girls together, gossiping about boys and love. The girl had at first been terrified, but had gradually relaxed, confiding in the Mechvor, forgetting about the silvery bands that crisscrossed her shaved scalp and led downward to feed into the skin of Kitai’s hands. And in due course, Kitai had plucked her thoughts neatly from her skull, leaving the girl a passive, empty shell.

  “We’ll give her something new, later today,” Kitai had said that morning. “Something much more appropriate.” She had put a hand on Anikova’s arm and peered anxiously into her face as they made their way up the marble steps of Central Command. “She’ll be a lot happier, really. And it won’t hurt a bit.”

  The wind that blew across the central square was cold and tinged with rain. The classical portal of the Command building towered above them, its façade dull in the absence of sunlight. Anikova, dressed only in her uniform darks, shivered.

  “Tell me,” Anikova said. “How many people’s memories have you altered like this? How many dream-neurons have you bled dry?”

  Kitai looked momentarily blank. “Why, I can’t remember.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Colonel. I do keep excellent records—I’m sure I could get the numbers for you.”

  “Don’t bother,” Anikova said. She wondered how old the Mechvor really was. She had the appearance of a girl in her twenties, but Anikova had first met her when she herself was a raw recruit, and that had been three decades ago. In that time, the Mechvor had barely altered.

  “I started my work among the horse clans.” Kitai seemed eager to make up for her inadvertent lapse in knowledge. “It was very different then, naturally. We had not developed the technology; we used drugs and drums. I suppose you might say I was a kind of shaman. But now, with all this new equipment, there’s no need for any of that primitive sort of thing.” She smiled. “I’m a very modern girl, really.”

  You are what the State wants you to be, Anikova thought, but she did not say so aloud. The last thing she wanted was Kitai poking about inside her head. The Mechvor was looking at her sharply, nonetheless.

  “You do understand how necessary this is, Colonel?” she said. “That dreams and ideas should be controlled? Because otherwise, reality itself is in danger of collapse. Ever since the coil was stolen, the breaches along our borders have been growing, increasing in number and in size. These are no longer just the little natural rifts, Colonel. If we don’t find a solution, it’s only a matter of time before a major breach occurs. If this coil remains in the wrong hands, and matters reach a point where the tribes and our enemies can freely cross between here and Russia, our national security will be threatened. We have to redouble our efforts if we’re to maintain our wonderful society.”

  “Of course I understand,” Anikova said. “I lost my father through a breach. Do you think I’m not aware of the risks?” How many coils did Central Command possess, anyway? She knew that most of the gates on the Byelovodyean side were powered by Tsilibayev’s engineered copies and had now been closed, but she could not help wondering as to the number of ancient originals. That information, however, was strictly classified: The only certainty was that there was now one less. With an effort, she forced her thoughts from her mind.

  “Colonel, I’m so sorry,” the Mechvor said, but she must have known about Gregori Anikov’s death. Anikova’s background was a secret to no one; Kitai’s sympathy felt merely superfluous.

  “Well, I should get busy,” Kitai went on. “It would be nice to go for lunch later, wouldn’t it?”

  Anikova muttered something in reply. The Mechvor, feeding the links back into her hands, connected herself to the machine and started work.

  Part Three

  One

  ALMATY, KAZAKHSTAN, 21ST CENTURY

  That morning, Elena found herself applying her makeup with more than her usual care, using the American lipstick that had been a birthday present from her sister, and coaxing the last grains of Clarins powder from its case. Then she stared at herself in the bathroom mirror and frowned. Was she so desperate for a boyfriend that she would dress up for a madman with a sword? She had not had a date in over a year, and there had been no one serious since Yuri had chosen space in preference to her. But she knew that the smart suit and the lipstick weren’t for the mysterious Ilya Muromyets. They were for herself, for her future, in a way that she did not fully understand.

  The weather was still cold. Elena hesitated between her raincoat and the full-length rabbit fur, eventually deciding on the latter. She did not want to risk it in the rain, but she felt the need to persuade these unknown people that she was someone to be reckoned with, a professional woman with money. The fur coat was over seven years old, but still had its silver sheen. Now that the winter was passing, she would sell it before they left Moscow. She could not stop thinking about Anna and the German. Where was her sister today? In the restaurant or, God forbid, flat on her back in someone else’s hotel room? Elena was determined to wring a decent price out of Muromyets’ contacts, if it was the last thing she did.

  She collected the ball from its place on the dressing table. It lay heavy and innocent in the palm of her hand. There had not been the rustle of something inhuman, bolting beneath the dresser in the night. What had Ilya Muromyets meant, with his talk of rusalki? A lunatic, she thought again, or perhaps merely a poet. She remembered, uneasily, the addict in the park and the girl’s head flying toward the wall of the marketplace corridor. She could not have seen such a thing; she must have imagined it.

  She took a last look into the mirror. Then, making sure that the ball was safely zipped into the inner pocket of her handbag, she checked the gas stove and the locks on the door, slipped into her best pair of heels, and walked down into daylight.

  The Hotel Kazakhstan was on the other side of town. Elena found herself looking warily about her as she walked, but the day was dreary and overcast. As she turned the corner onto Abai Street, a plume of cloud lifted up from the mountains, briefly revealing their snowy summits. The wind changed, veering round to the north. The first heavy drops began to fall and Elena decided to take the chance and hitch. She put out a hand, waiting until a car with a single occupant appeared, and flagged it down.

  “Kyda?”

  “Hotel Kazakhstan,” Elena said. If she was lucky, and the man wanted the fare, he might take her all the way. But he shrugged.

  “Sorry. I’m not going down Lenina. I can drop you at the bottom of the park, if you like.”

  “Thanks,” Elena said, though the thought of the park brought back some unpleasant memories. She studied the man covertly as they drove. Charms dangled in the windows of the car; the seats were cracked and cheap. A cheerful Kazakh face, nothing sinister about it. She had a brief, broken memory of the thing in the pine tree, the snap of teeth. She ought to be glad of the prospect of getting rid of the ball, but her lethal curiosity had also been aroused.

  That was the trouble, Elena thought. If there was the promise of anything interesting, she always wanted to get involved. Then the doors would slam shut, just as they had during her time in the space program. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was just the way things went, and at least in this case there might be a chance of getting some money out of it. Then Anna wouldn’t have to do what she had done. Thinking of her sister, Elena felt a dull, dim bemusement, as though she had been living with a stranger all these years.

  The car pulled toward the curb and stopped. Elena handed the driver a hundred tenge note and got out into the chilly air. Lenina str
etched before her. She could see the lattice of the Hotel Kazakhstan reaching up to the heavens like a crown. The tiny square of the cable car appeared behind it, hauling itself up Koktubye Hill where the radio mast stood. It was perhaps a twenty-minute walk and there was enough time; she was reluctant to spend any more money on car fares. Elena set off toward the hotel.

  Despite the chill, she could already taste spring on the wind. There were buds on the oaks along Lenina and the gutters were still running with snowmelt. In the distance, she could see the statue of the Golden Warrior coming into view, high on its immense pedestal, riding on a griffin. Another of Lenin’s replacements, overlooking the government square. Elena had seen the original armor half a dozen times; it had been dug up in an archaeological find in the 1920’s, high in the mountains. She dimly remembered her father snorting with drunken derision and remarking that an empty suit of armor was as good a representation of the new state as any. But everyone agreed that it was a useful landmark. It meant that she was no more than a few minutes’ walk from her destination.

  When she reached the concrete forecourt of the hotel, she paused. Ilya Muromyets was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he was already inside. She made her way to the double doors of the building, stepping aside as a group of businessmen came through. Americans, or perhaps European; she could not tell. They wore expensive coats and their faces appeared freshly scrubbed, as though their mothers had polished them with handkerchiefs. One of the younger men gave Elena a frank, appraising glance as he went by. Elena smiled back. It was good to know that she wasn’t entirely unremarkable, sliding into the invisibility of middle age. But then she thought of Anna’s German engineer, of international dating agencies, and felt her smile fade.

  Then she was through the door and into the gloom of the hotel foyer. It took her eyes a moment to adjust and realize that the shadowy figure standing before her was Ilya Muromyets. His sharp-boned face was haggard. She wondered where he had spent the night.