Part 5 (2/2)

'I would come gladly. I would want that. There's nothing here for me now.'

She looked away sadly in the gathering river darkness.

'It's not possible. The barrier mustn't be broken.' She paused. 'I don't have a choice. I didn't choose this. But if I had a choice, I would choose it. You have to understand that. If I could choose this, I would.'

'Then why come at all?' he said. 'Why are you here?'

'You did something for me once, and I've come to ask you again. I'm sorry. You should be left in peace, but I'm not doing that.'

'What do you need?' said Lom. 'I will do it if I can. Of course I will.'

'This world is going too fast and too hard. The future here is... I see it, I see glimpses sometimes, and it's too... The fracture is deeper and wider and harder... It was unexpected... It could bring everything down-'

Sealed inside endless forest, Archangel grinds slowly on. Look away from him now; he is nothing. He feels the desolation of despair and self-disgust. Cut off from history, his futures slow and fade. Time is failing him. He cannot breathe. He is weak. He is dying. Once he was Archangel, strongest of the strong, quickest of the quick, most powerful of soldiers, quintessence of generalissimos, Archangel nonpareil, but those memories burn and torture him. So does the encroaching of the slow gra.s.s.

Archangel probes the boundaries of his enclosure, but they are blank to him, utterly without information and closing in. Archangel hurls himself against the borders ceaselessly, searching for a c.h.i.n.k, a crevice, the faintest possible thinning in the imperceptible wall, but all the time the roots of forest trees dig deeper, the gra.s.s grows back, and every tiny root-hair is a burning agony to him. He is succ.u.mbing to frost and the erosion of rain and wind. They will wear him away to insensate dust.

But then something happens.

It is only a beat of quietness in the roar of the storm, only the fall of a twig on the river. None but an archangel could hear it. None but an archangel could sense the flicker of a shadow in the face of the sun. The quick thinning of ice. The opening of a moment's gap in the wall of his cage.

With a scream of desperate hope Archangel launches his mind towards the hollowing.

Maroussia flinched and looked over her shoulder as if she had heard a loud noise.

'Not yet!' she groaned. 'Not so soon!' She looked at Lom in alarm. 'There's no more time. I have to go now.'

'Wait! Tell me what you need me to do.'

'Stop Kantor,' she said. 'Stop him.'

'You mean kill him?'

'No! Not kill. Not that. If you only kill him, the idea of him will live, and others will come and it will be the same and worse. Don't kill him; bring him down, destroy the idea of him. Ruin him in this world, using the tricks of this world. Ruin this world he has created.'

'But... how? I'm just one person.'

'You have to find a way. Who else can I ask, if not you? Who will listen to me if you don't listen? There is no one else.'

'And if I can do this,' he said, 'then afterwards...'

'No,' she said, 'there's no then. No afterwards. No consequence. No reward. I can't see then. I can only see what will happen if this doesn't. Do you understand?'

'No,' said Lom. 'I don't understand. But it doesn't matter.'

She was looking at him across a widening distance, and he knew that she was leaving him.

'I have to go now,' she said. 'I've already stayed too long. I wanted... Oh no...'

There was a ripple, a shadow-glimmer, and Maroussia was gone.

In the forest it takes Archangel time to react and time to move, and time in the forest is recalcitrant. Slow. Even as he gets close to the gap, it is closing. By the time he reaches it, the tear in the wall has snapped shut. He is too late.

This time.

But now for him there is hope.

And on the quiet River Yannis it was moonless dark and long after midnight and the stars were uncountably many, scattered like salt across darkness, bitter and eternal. She was gone, and Lom felt they hadn't said anything at all, not reallynothing adequate, nothing enough. She'd come to him and spoken to him, but he didn't know anything, he didn't understand more; in fact he understood less than ever, and all the terrible loss and solitude of the last six years was open and fresh and raw once more: the bleak ruination, the need and the grief and the necessity of acting, of doing something, of finding her again. Perhaps that was the point of her coming. Perhaps that was what she had done.

Lom packed his bag and left the mailboat without waiting for Shenkov to return.

5.

The Vlast Universal Vessel Proof of Concept circles the planet at tremendous speed, outpacing the planetary spin, pa.s.sing by turn into clean sunlight and star-crisp shadow. The cabin's interior days and nights come faster and last for less time even than the rapacious advancing days of Papa Rizhin's New Vlast, but aboard the Proof of Concept there is no perceptible sense of forward motion.

Cosmonaut-Commodore Vera Mornova, tethered by long cables to her bench, drifting without weight and having nothing much to do, presses her face against the cabin window. The air she breathes smells of hot rubber, charcoal and sweat. The spectacle of the stars unsettles her: they burn clean and cold but seem no nearer now, and all she sees is the infinities of emptiness that lie between. It is her lost, unreachable home that captures her loving attention: the continent, striated yellow and grey by day, the glitter of rivers and lakes, the spa.r.s.e scattered lamps in inky blackness that are cities by night, the dazzling reflection of the sun in the ocean, the green chain of the Archipelago, the huge ice fields spilling from the poles towards the equator and the edgeless forest glimpsed under cloud.

Misha Fissich drifts up alongside her, accidentally nudging her so she has to grab the edge of the window to stop herself spinning slowly away. He offers her a piece of cold chicken.

'Hungry?' he says. 'The clock says lunchtime. You should eat.'

She shakes her head.

'No, not now, Misha. I'm not hungry. Thanks.'

'You should eat,' he says again. 'The others are watching you, Vera. If you don't bother, neither will they.'

'OK,' she says. 'Thanks.' She smiles at him and takes the chicken and chews it slowly.

When she's finished, it's time for the radio interview: a journalist from the Telegraph Agency of the New Vlast, her voice on the loudspeaker sounding indistinct and far away.

Commodore Mornova, she says, the thoughts of all our citizens are with you. You and your crew are the foremost heroes of our time. Parents are naming their newborns after you. Will you tell us please what it's like to leave the planet? What do you see? How does it feel? How do you and your comrades spend your time?

'We feel proud and humble, both at once,' says Vera Mornova. 'It is humankind's first step across the threshold: a small first step perhaps, but we are the pioneers of a great new beginning. History is watching us, and we are conscious of the honour. s.p.a.ce is very beautiful and welcoming. We test our equipment and make many observations.'

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