Part 6 (1/2)

'Well, from orbit one can clearly discern the spherical shape of the planet. The sight is quite unique. Between the sunlit surface of the planet and the deep black sky of stars the dividing line is thin, a narrow belt of delicate blue. While crossing the Vlast we see big squares belowour great collective farms! Ploughed land and grazing may be clearly distinguished. During the state of weightlessness we eat and drink. It is curious that handwriting does not change though the hand is weightless.'

And do you have a message for your loved ones left behind?

'Tell them,' says Vera Mornova, 'tell them we love them and remember them in our hearts.'

Part II.

Chapter Four.

We have raised the sky-blue sky-flag the flag of dawn winds and sunrises, slashed by red lightning. Over this planet our banners fly! We present...

ourselves! The Presidents of the Terrestrial Globe!

Velemir Khlebnikov (18851922).

1.

The sky above Mirgorod was a bowl of luminous powdery eggsh.e.l.l blue, cloudless and heroic. Enamel-bright coloured aircraft buzzed and twisted high in the air, leaving trails of brilliant vapour-white. The loudspeakers were broadcasting speeches and news and orchestral music at full distorted volume. The production of steel across the New Vlast exceeded pre-war output by 39 per cent. The cosmonaut-heroes continued to orbit through s.p.a.ce.

Citizens! Today is Victory Day! Congratulate yourselves!

From all across the city hundreds of thousands of people were making their way towards Victory Square on buses and trams and trains for the celebration parade. Hundreds of thousands more were coming on foot. Already an inexhaustible river of people was moving up the wide avenue of Noviy Prospect (newly paved and freshly washed before dawn that morning). Half the population of Mirgorod must have been there, going in a slow tide between the towering raw new buildings of the city centre. Vissarion Lom, less than twenty-four hours back in Mirgorod, sat at a cafe table under a canopy on a terrace raised above the sidewalk, nursing a cooling birch-bark tea, and watched them pa.s.s: more people in one place than all the people he'd seen in the last six years put together. Sunlight glared off steel and gla.s.s and concrete fresh out of scaffolding; glared off the flags and banners that lined Noviy Prospect; glared off the huge portraits of Papa Rizhin and the lesser portraits of other faces Lom could not name.

Lom disliked crowds. Even sitting somewhat apart and watching them made him uneasy. Edgy. Even anxious. The noise. The faces. He couldn't understand how it was that most people could merge into a throng so readily, so gladly even. To him it felt like submersion. Surrender. Drowning. He couldn't have done it even if he'd wanted to. But he saw the woman with the heavy canvas bag on her shoulder.

He almost missed her. She was moving with the crowd, one small figure in the uncountable ma.s.s, going in the same direction as everyone else. Someone else might not have noticed her or, if they had seen her, wouldn't have understood what it meant. It would have been a coincidence, nothing more. But because he was Lom, not someone else, he saw her, and recognised her, and knew what she was doing.

She was just another slight ageing woman in shabby sombre clothes: there were dozens like her, hundreds, shuffling along among the uniformed service personnel, the families, the cla.s.ses shepherded by hara.s.sed teachers, the young women workers in blue overalls and sneakers, the salaried fellows in s.h.i.+rtsleeves and fedoras, the limping veterans, the veterans in wheelchairs and the tight little groups of short-haired and pony-tailed Young Explorers in their blue shorts, grey s.h.i.+rts, red neckerchiefs, knee-length woollen socks and canvas shoes. The women in dark clothes walked alone or in twos and threes. They had their special place that day: they were the widows, the childless mothers, come to watch and remember on bittersweet Victory Day. Lom's gaze pa.s.sed across the one with the canvas bag on her shoulder and moved on. But something about her caught his attention and he looked again.

People in a large slow crowd surrender themselves to it. They all have the same purpose, all heading for the same destination. Simply being part of the crowd is itself the occasion and the only reason for being there. There's no rush. They have no need to do anything except move along at the crowd's speed and take their cues from the crowd. So they look around and take in the sights and talk, or absorb themselves in their own thoughts. Some bring drink and food and eat as they go. They won't miss anything. They're already where they need to be.

But this one woman was different. There was a tension and separateness about her. Something about the way she held her head and looked around: an obsessive, exclusive watchfulness that snagged his attention, raw and jangled as his nerves were by the numbers of people everywhere. She was making her way through the crowd, not moving with it, and she was alert to her surroundings as those around her were not. She knew where the security cordons and the crowd watchers were, and kept away from them. She tracked her way forward, intent on some private purpose.

And then there was the bag. A drab and scruffy canvas bag, nothing remarkable except Lom could tell by the way she carried it that it was heavy, and the object inside was long and protruded from the top. The thing in the bag was wrapped in a bright childish fabric, which was clever because it attracted attention but also disarmed suspicion. It looked like something that belonged to a child, or used to. The kind of thing an older woman might carry for her grandchild. Or keep with her for ever and never lay down, to remember the dead by. Only this woman seemed a little too young and a little too strong, and it wasn't easy to guess what sort of childish thing this long heavy object was. It scratched at Lom's crowd-raw nerves.

As she pa.s.sed near where Lom was sitting, the woman with the bag glanced sideways at something, and as she turned Lom glimpsed her face in profile. And recognised her. Six years had changed her. She was leaner, harsher, a stripped-back and sanded-down version of the woman who'd once given Maroussia and him shelter in the Raion Lezaryet, but still he knew instantly that this was Elena Cornelius: Elena, who used to have two girls and live in an apartment in Count Palffy's house and make furniture to sell in the Apraksin Bazaar.

He watched her move on through the crowd. She was good but not that good. Intent on her work, she was just a little too interesting. Too noticeable. Too vivid. She made use of sightlines and available cover for protection. She made small changes of pace. She was moving instinctively as a hunter did. Or a sniper. But snipers move through empty streets, not crowds. In a crowd she was conspicuous. If he could spot her, so could others. Like for instance the security operatives, who were no doubt even now scanning Noviy Prospect from upper windows, though he could not see them.

Lom got up from the cafe table and followed. He moved up through the crowd to get closer to her, working slowly, cautiously, so as not to be noticed himself and above all not draw the attention of other watchers to her. He felt her vulnerability and her determination. He wanted to protect her, and he owed her his help, but he couldn't let her do what she was going to do. She had to be stopped.

She made a sudden move to the right, picking up speed and making for the ragged edge of the moving crowd. Lom tried to follow, but his way was suddenly blocked by a knot of loud-voiced broad-backed men. They had just spilled out from a bar and stood swaying unsteadily and squinting in the glare of the sun. They smelled of aquavit. By the time Lom got past them, Elena Cornelius had disappeared from view.

2.

The meeting room of the Central Committee of the New Vlast Presidium was painted green. The conference table was simple varnished ash wood. There were no insignia in the room, no banners, no portraits: only the smell of furniture polish and new carpet. There is no past; there is only the future. Each place at the table had a fresh notepad, a water jug, an ashtray and an inexpensive fountain pen. A single heavy lamp hung low above the table, a flat box of muted grey metal shedding from its under-surface a muted opalescent glow. The margins of the room where officials and stenographers sat were left in shadow.

On the morning of the Victory Day Parade the Committee gathered informally, no officials present, to congratulate their leader and President-Commander General Osip Rizhin, whose birthday by happy chance it also was that day. At least, according to the official biography it was his birthday, though of course the official biography was a tissue of fabrication from beginning to end.

All twenty-one committee members were present: twelve men and eight women, plus Rizhin. Sixteen were makeweights: bootlickers, honest toilers, useful idiots, take your pickplaceholders just pa.s.sing through. Apart from Rizhin there were only four who really mattered, and they were Gribov, Secretary for War; Yas.h.i.+na, Finance; Ekel, Security and Justice; and Lukasz Kistler. Above all, Lukasz Kistler.

Kistler was a shaven-headed barrel of a man, boulder-shouldered, hard not fat, his torso straining at the seams of his s.h.i.+ny jacket. Kistler liked money, drank with workers and didn't care about spilling his gravy. His s.h.i.+rt cuffs jutted six inches beyond his jacket sleeves. But the intelligence in his small creased eyes was sharp and dangerous as spikes. Kistler was never, ever tired and never, ever got sick and never, ever stopped working. His energy burned like a furnace. He had made huge amounts of money before he was thirty out of iron and oil and coal, anything big and dirty that came out of rock and was hard to get. He was a digger and a burrower and a hammerer. When Rizhin found Kistler he was turning out battle tanks from a factory that had no roof. It had been bombed so often Kistler had stopped rebuilding and left it a ruin in the hope the enemy would p.i.s.s off and bomb something else. Within half an hour of their first meeting Rizhin put him in charge of producing battle tanks for the whole of the Vlast. Since the war ended, Kistler had expanded into oilfields, gasfields, hydro turbines, petroleum refineries, atomic power. Energy. Energy. Energy. Lukasz 'Dynamo' Kistler made Papa Rizhin's Vlast burn brighter and run louder and faster every day.

And Lukasz Kistler was a clever, subtle, observant and far-sighted man. He saw that Rizhin knew how to spend money and people but had no idea where such resources actually came from. Rizhin didn't know how to turn dirt into cash or people into workers. Rizhin grabbed and stole to spend, and spent what he could not make, and in the end he would spend the whole of the world until he had nothing left. Kistler suspected that one day he and Papa Rizhin would come to blows.

Kistler was watching Rizhin now. Rizhin was on his feet and prowling behind the seated committee members in his soft leather shoes. He liked to walk behind them. It made them uncomfortable. And today Rizhin was wielding a sword. He gripped it in his swollen fist and made experimental swipes at the air as he prowled. (Rizhin's hands fascinated Kistler: hard, thickened, stub-fingered hands, butcher's hands, raw-pink hands that looked like they'd been stung by bees. Long rough work on stone in ice and cold could make such hands. Many years in labour camps. That was something not in Papa Rizhin's official biography.) The sword was ridiculous. The Severe Sword. The Southern Congress of Regions had presented it to him that morning as a birthday gift. Its blade was inscribed on one side SLASH THE RIGHT DEVIATION! and on the other SLASH THE LEFT DEVIATION! and on the hilt it said PUMMEL THE CONCILIATOR!

'They give me a sword?' Rizhin was saying. 'And what are we to make of that? I give them jet engines and atomic s.p.a.ce vessels and they give me a sword. What am I to do with a sword? What does a sword say? You see how riddled we are with aristocrats and peasants still? Fantasists. Nostalgists. Am I to ride out on a f.u.c.king horse like a khan? Do they mean me to butcher my own people? Well, if there is butchery to be done, let us start with the Southern Congress of Regions.'

'The sword is an emblem, Osip,' said Yas.h.i.+na. 'That's all.'

'Everything is an emblem,' said Rizhin. 'A generator is an emblem. A sky rise is an emblem. Those f.u.c.kers need to get better emblems.'

Rizhin laid the sword on the table and sat down, slumping back in his chair. He picked up a pen and began to scrawl doodles on his notepad.

'The people call me Papa and sing hymns about me,' he said. '”Thank you Papa Rizhin. Glory to our great commander.” It's laughable. I'm not Papa Rizhin; I'm a simple man. I am Osip, a worker and a soldier just like them.'

He paused and looked around the table, fixing them one by one with his smiling burning eyes.

'Even you, my friends,' he said, 'even you do this to me. You want me to walk out there today on that platform and let you make me Generalissimus. Do I need this? No. Does Osip the simple industrious man need such empty t.i.tles? No, he does not. I do not. I will not accept it. I give it back to you. Take it back, I beg you, and make someone else your Generalissimus, not me.'

There was silence in the room. Everyone froze. Everyone looked down. Secretary for Agriculture Vladi Broch stared gla.s.sy-eyed at the sword on the table in front of him as if it would leap up and stab him in the neck. Rizhin doodled on his pad and waited.

For one horrifying moment Lukasz Kistler thought the idiots were going to accept. It's a test! he screamed inwardly. A loyalty test! If someone didn't speak soon he would have to do it himself, and that would be no good. He wasn't on trialeveryone knew he was Rizhin's dynamobut if he had to step in and repair the situation it would be the end for some of them.

It was Yas.h.i.+na who rescued them in the end. Smooth, calm, cultured Yulia Yas.h.i.+na.