Nine Layers of Sky

by Liz Williams

  Immersed in coolness, she closed her eyes and listened to the murmur of the bees in the persimmons and the liquid notes of the little fountain. A discreet cough announced the imam’s presence. Anikova looked up.

  “You look very comfortable,” the old man said. “I hardly like to disturb you.”

  “I was waiting for you,” Anikova told him.

  “Would you like some chai?”

  It would have been rude to refuse. Anikova followed him to the table beneath the portico and watched as he poured a careful stream of tea into two glasses. Anikova had one spoonful of sugar; the imam took three.

  The gilded ribbing of the dome momentarily caught the light and blazed against the sky. Anikova blinked.

  “What did you want to see me about?” the imam asked.

  Normally, Anikova would simply have issued a warrant and a request that the suspect present himself for questioning. But these circumstances were a little different. She heard herself say, “Did you know that there are rumors about you?”

  From the corner of her eye she saw the imam become very still, but when he spoke, his voice sounded as mild and pleasant as ever.

  “What kind of rumors, Colonel?”

  “Not fortunate ones. You see, the story of your pilgrimage in your youth is known, and there are those among my colleagues who claim that the few who are still alive, who have lived on Earth, want to keep the dream-gates open. The suspicion is that they cannot be entirely trusted.”

  “The climate has changed,” the imam said, still mild. “A decade ago, that would not have been such a problem.”

  “As you say, the climate has changed.”

  “What do you intend to do about it?”

  Anikova should have handed him the warrant at that point, but she thought instead of Kitai’s blank dark gaze and she leaned forward to put a hand on the old imam’s arm.

  “Leave. Get out of Pergama, go back to Earth while you still can.”

  “I don’t think that’s an option any longer. I know nothing of these new republics, and from what I hear, their brand of Islam isn’t what I was brought up to believe in. Fanaticism grows, fundamentalism grows, or so I hear—” He gave her a sidelong look. “Too many of my coreligionists have turned murderers. It is not the true faith. I will not be branded a terrorist when all I wish to do is to encourage minds to turn toward God. This is our colony, our sanctuary, just as much as it is of your people.”

  “Then at least go into hiding,” Anikova said, recklessly.

  “Why are you warning me, Colonel? We all know who you work for. Is it because of your sister and my grandson?”

  “No,” Anikova said. “It is because—” She did not know what to say. “Because of a crisis in faith.”

  They looked at each other in silence. The dome of the mosque seemed as fragile as a shell now that the light had gone. An evening breeze lifted the glossy leaves of the persimmon.

  “I should go,” Anikova told the imam.

  “I will think about what you say,” he murmured. He walked with her to the garden gate, through the gathering shadows.

  Part Eight

  One

  KYRGYZSTAN, 21ST CENTURY

  Are you planning to finish that?” Elena asked warily.

  Ilya tapped the half-empty vodka bottle. “What, this?” It was now close to midnight. It had only been over the last hour that his hearing had properly returned. His ears still rang.

  “Yes.”

  That look, he thought, must be one that mothers passed down to their daughters: a practiced, repressed resentment. And he resented it in turn, with its connotations of control and disappointment, but he knew that all it really evoked was his own guilt. When it had come down to it, he had not been able to protect either Elena or the old akyn, and that was why he was drinking.

  At least his impulse had been to reach for the bottle rather than trawling the unlit streets of Karakol in search of the nearest dealer. The weight of it fell on them both: generations of broken promises to women and to God. He knew he was reminding her of her father. The realization made him push the bottle away and go to sit beside her.

  “No, I’m not going to drink it all,” he said. “I want to make love to you. And I’m so sorry.”

  “Your hearing is abnormally sensitive, isn’t it? No wonder you couldn’t do anything.” Her face was creased in sympathy and, with astonishment, he realized that she did not blame him.

  “It hurt enough,” he said. “Elena—what happened back there? I could not see.”

  “I struck Manas with the sword, across his legs. I must have hurt him badly.” Her face crumpled and he held her tightly, murmuring reassurances. But there was nothing he could say that would make it any better, because it was hard to kill, and should never be an easy thing, and the consequences had to be faced. He bitterly wished that he had been able to save her, not from the violence, but from the horror of having to commit it.

  “I’m all right,” she muttered, and reached for a tissue. After a moment she added, “Do you think he’s dead?”

  “I don’t know. His kind—my kind—seem to be hard to kill.”

  “I think we should assume that he is not dead, then.” This time, it was Elena who reached for the vodka and poured herself a measured shot. “That thing in the chamber, beneath the polygon. You told the akyn you knew what it was.”

  “I’ve seen such a thing only once before, years ago. I was working for the Cheka. They sent me to kill a man.”

  He gave a brief version of the events of eighty years past, glancing at Elena to see how she was taking it. There was interest in her face, not judgment. “They told me that he was trying to develop a time machine.”

  Elena’s eyebrows rose. “And you believed this?”

  “You have no idea—or perhaps you do—what the security services have experimented with over the past fifty years. Telepathy, clairvoyance, farseeing techniques, hallucinogenics … The KGB has always been professionally credulous.”

  “Russians are obsessed with the parapsychological.” Elena frowned. “If they do their experiments in a proper scientific way—well, that’s all right. But often they don’t.”

  “Any rumor—that the Americans were using farseeing to spy on documents in Moscow, that they had developed over-the-horizon radar—anything was enough to send the Lubyanka into a flurry like a bunch of chickens. During the Great Patriotic War, the very notion of putting a man into space would have gotten you a one-way ticket to Siberia. Rumors work like dreams; they feed off need, and the security forces are obliged to investigate these claims just in case one of them happens to be true.”

  “And some of them are, aren’t they? Other dimensions, eight-hundred-year-old heroes … What must they have made of you?”

  “They just thought I was good at my job. I never told them what I was; I falsified my records over and over again. I think I always secretly hoped that someone would find out, just to see what might happen. I have a self-destructive streak, Elena. You may have noticed. And the device that I saw underneath the polygon—it was the same thing. There’s been a long-term project to open the wall between the worlds. That thing you’re carrying is a part of Tsilibayev’s machine, or something very similar.” He paused. “Tsilibayev had copied older technology. Perhaps this is an original component.”

  “It had some kind of shell around itself when I found it. I don’t think it’s something that a twentieth-century scientist could have made. It seems too— alien.” She paused. “So what part do you think Kovalin plays in all this?”

  “I know what I’ve been told, but I don’t know what to believe. Manas said one thing; Kovalin said another. It’s likely they both lied. But I think the key to all this is control of the dream-gates. Different forces, vying for power. What else is new?”

  “I don’t understand why Manas didn’t try to kill us in Bishkek. I’m assuming he was after the coil.”

  “He wasn’t sure that we had it. Perhaps he wanted to kill several b
irds with one stone: destroy the machine and the coil. Or perhaps he had another plan.”

  “I’m not sure that he intended to destroy the installation. It sounded to me as though that device he had went out of control.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What happened after you dynamited the lab?” Elena whispered. He was very conscious of her nearness, her warmth.

  “Siberia. Originally it was a ten-year sentence, but I knew they never expected me to come back. Not many people did in those days. But I survived, as you see.”

  “God, Ilya, you must have been through hell.”

  “I am a Siberian peasant. I’m used to it. It was hard, but at least it was quiet. Chechnya was worse.”

  “You fought in Chechnya?”

  “Chechnya, Ingushetia, Afghanistan. I’ve fought everywhere. It’s the only thing I really know how to do.” He knew that she was staring at him and he did not want to see what might be present in her face, so he said, “The akyn spoke to you before he died. I could not hear. What did he say? Write it down for me.”

  When she had done so, he read the scribbled note carefully before touching it to the little flame of the cigarette lighter.

  Samarkand. The place of the battle with Manas that had passed into such improbable legend. He had not been there for many years, but the knowledge that it contained a gateway to Byelovodye did not surprise him. Of all the cities in this region of Asia, surely Samarkand—domed with gold and azure, ruined and rebuilt again and again over the centuries—was the true home of dreams. And the tomb of the marauder must be that of Timur the Lame, nightmare son of the steppe, whom the West knew as Tamerlane, and who was rumored to have been one of the first of the bogatyri. Tamerlane, whose army reached St. Petersburg and who, if history had been a little different, might have conquered Russia itself. Ilya considered: Was this the key to Manas’ involvement? Was Manas, out of Central Asian nationalism, working with the Byelovodyeans with the aim of bringing Tamerlane’s ancient dream to life and causing the downfall of Russia? But how?

  “I still don’t have proper papers,” Elena said aloud.

  “But we can pay. We got into Kyrgyzstan, didn’t we?” He spoke with a confidence that he did not feel. She accepted it, but he could tell it was just that she wanted to believe him.

  Two

  KYRGYZSTAN, 21ST CENTURY

  They had decided to leave Karakol that morning, but found that the bus was not due to leave until ten. So Ilya and Elena walked down to the lakeshore road to wait. Elena could not dispel the prickling at the back of her neck; she jumped every time a bird began to sing. The memory of the sword striking flesh was as fresh within her as a new wound. She had not told Ilya this, but she had awoken in the night with it still sharp in her mind: of the sword hitting the bone and the shock running electric up her arm, the sudden stink of blood. The memory had sent her running to the sink, to stand trembling and retching over the basin. Now, in the early morning sunlight, she shivered again. Surely Manas must have been killed when the complex came down … but she did not really believe it.

  She kept a sharp eye on the hillside, but the land soared up toward the passes in a series of ghostly steps, too shadowed to see properly. The lake itself was very still. Its edges were as pale as glass; she could glimpse the lakebed. A few meters from the shore lay a ridge of rock like the beginning of a wall, vanishing into the deeper water.

  “They say it’s a city,” Ilya said. “There’s an old story that it drowned.”

  “Did you ever see it?”

  He shook his head, watching as a line of ducks veered over the water, hiding the wall beneath a veil of ripples and fractured light. Ilya sat down on a nearby stone and lit a cigarette.

  “How are you feeling?” Elena asked. She had told herself to stop badgering him about his health, but it was hard. Women were supposed to be solicitous, caring, concerned, but men seemed to get tired of it after a while. It had always irritated Yuri, as though she was questioning his competence, but she knew that he would have been offended if she’d failed to show an interest. You couldn’t win.

  But Ilya smiled up at her.

  “Not so bad, thanks. I still want it, you know?” From the shadow that crossed his face, she knew he was referring to the heroin. “But it isn’t so strong.” He looked down at his hands. “I thought it would never let me go.”

  “That’s the trouble with we Russians,” Elena said. “We’re a nation of addicts. Not just drugs, but vodka, too. And ideas.”

  “I sometimes think we just want our dreams to come true, but we want it too much and we drive them away so that there’s a gap between us and our dreaming, and we need something to fill it. But nothing ever can. I don’t think it’s just Russians, though. I think it’s all of us.”

  “The Kyrgyz say Manas is only a little lower than God,” Elena said.

  “I wonder if he’s found it as hard as I have, to live up to being a hero. It would seem that he has.”

  She wanted to say: I think you are a hero, but it would have sounded false, so she said nothing.

  “And you, Elena. What are your dreams?”

  “Science. Space. The future. At least, those were my dreams. I don’t know anymore.” Now, she realized that her dreams had become more nebulous: a glimpsed, unreal land and a damaged man. But in the next moment, she thought that perhaps this wasn’t entirely true. The hope for the space program had merely gone underground, running through her unconscious like water seeping through rubble. They sat in silence, staring at the vanished world beneath the lake, until the bus rumbled along the road.

  The journey was slow and uneventful as far as Kyzyl-Suu, where Elena got off the bus and bought more water and a newspaper, as well as a Russian translation of the Manaschi epic that was prominently displayed on the bus-station counter. Evidently the Kyrgyz were losing no time in promoting their national bogatyr. It was an odd thought, that the down-at-the-heels man in the battered leather coat, now dozing by her side, fell into the same legendary category.

  She read the newspaper, a day-old copy of Kazakhstanskaya Pravda, from cover to cover. There was no mention of the murders at the hotel. The front page was filled with news of the earth tremor and subsequent fire that had swept through woodland beneath the slopes of Koktubye Hill. Meteorologists were mystified by the fire, but Elena again remembered that great rift in the air and could not help but wonder.

  She finished the newspaper and turned to the epic, reading with care as the bus trundled along the mountain passes, through scattered settlements and the pointed columns of the roadside graveyards.

  “Not a space there was between flag and standard; the range of the Altai could not be seen… . Black plains, grey hills, the face of the earth was beaten down …”

  Very Kyrgyz, thought Elena, all earth and struggle and death, very far from her dreams of space and a shining tomorrow. But that was the tension in Russian dreams, too: the love of land and the need to escape from it. That was all prostor was, the word held to best express the Russian soul: vastness, expanse, space itself. Who, then, were the heroes? It seemed that they were everyone—a return to the proletarian ideal, in the end.

  She looked up. They were passing yet another military installation, part of the buildup of recent years. A man in uniform sat at a guardhouse, dozing over a gun in the spring sunlight. Then a street of low white houses, electrical repair shops, a garage. They had reached Barskoon. She nudged Ilya awake.

  “We’ll have to change buses here.”

  At the bus station, she tried to call her family, but there was no reply. She called her sister’s mobile, only to find that it had been switched off. She left a message anyway, not knowing what to say.

  The day wore on. The bus came, taking them down to Naryn. They kept passing unfamiliar traffic on the road: military trucks bearing the American flag, probably en route for the Afghan border.

  Elena became bored with the Manaschi tales. There was something relentless about the epic, which m
ade her feel short of breath. She wished she had something Russian to read—Dostoevsky or Turgenev—something classical, with its reassuring darkness and familiarity. She missed reading, as she would have craved a drug. That thought made her glance at Ilya, but he was still sleeping. He seemed to have an infinite capacity for sleep; she wondered if it was a legacy of the heroin or whether he was simply exhausted. She wondered, too, if they had any kind of future together. A moment later, however, Ilya was pulling her down between the seats.

  “What—?”

  “Someone’s shooting at us.”

  The bus was a sea of confusion; people bundling down into the central aisle, a woman’s voice frantically trying to calm a wailing child.

  “Bandits?” Elena mouthed. It was still a problem in Kyrgyzstan, but not usually on these main roads.

  “I don’t know.” Ilya’s voice was ragged. “Keep your head down.”

  They waited. Gradually, by degrees, the bus fell into a kind of anticipatory hush. There was no more gunfire. Elena fought the urge to look up and see what was happening. She imagined Kyrgyz gunmen, raiders from the Tajik side of the border, about to storm the bus and kill everyone. It had happened before, but it was difficult to imagine it befalling her. She felt as though she had stepped from one nightmare into another. She swallowed hard and stared toward the front of the bus, but nothing happened. The driver got back in his seat and started the engine.

  “It’s all right, get up. We’ll be in Naryn in fifteen minutes.”