Part 11 (1/2)

Rizhin himself is there at the Dreksler-Kino, seated in a raised box. The wound on his face is agony but his chair is gilt, the walls of his box padded and b.u.t.toned velvet. Like a brooch in a jeweller's box, he says to Ziabin. It is not a remark intended to put the great artist at his ease. Haven't we shot you yet?

11.

The Vlast Universal Vessel Proof of Concept tumbles slowly, describing twenty-thousand-mile-per-hour corkscrew ellipses of orbiting perpetual fall. The cosmonauts ride in silence, having nothing to do. Sweeps of shadow and light. Cabin windows crossing the sun. Nightside pa.s.sages of broken moon. The internal lighting has failed.

The frost of their breath furs the ceiling thickly.

Hourly they flick the radio switch.

'Chaiganur? h.e.l.lo, Chaiganur? Here is Proof of Concept calling.'

Universes of silence stare back from the loudspeaker grille.

In Mirgorod the twenty-foot likenesses of cosmonauts in bronze relief carry their s.p.a.ce helms at the hip. In bright mosaic above the Wieland Station concourse they look skyward with chiselled confidence, grinning into star-swept purple. Our Starfaring Heroes. Mankind Advances Towards the Radiant Sun.

On the giant screen in the Dreksler-Kino wobbling smoky rockets descend among rocks and oceans out of strange skies. Bubble-cabin tractors till the extraplanetary soil, building barracks for pioneers. The audience roars and stamps its forty thousand feet. All children know their names from the ill.u.s.trated magazines.

Our Future Among the Galaxies.

The Vlast Universal Vessel Proof of Concept, two-thousand-ton extraplanetary submarine, makes a s.h.i.+ning white mote against the nightly backdrop of the stars. It slides on smooth invisible rails across the sky. You can set your clock by it. It is clean and beautiful and very sad.

Silent the cosmonauts, eyes wide and dark-adapted, having nothing to do.

The turning of the cabin windows pans slowly across vectors of the lost planet, blue-rimmed, beclouded, oceanic. Shadow-side campfire towns and cities glitter. Ant jewels. The shrouded green-river-veined darkness of forest. Lakes are yellow. Lakes are brown. The continent is a midriff between ice and ice. Glimpses of the offsh.o.r.e archipelago.

Complex geometries of turn bring the snub nose of the Proof of Concept round to face the world. It's a matter of timing. Her fingers stiff with cold and lack of use, Cosmonaut-Commodore Vera Mornova engages console mechanisms. The distant tinny echo of whirr and clunk. The magazine selects a charge.

Her companions observe unspeaking with heavy-lidded eyes and do not move.

'I'm going home now,' she says and pushes her thumb into the rubber of the detonation b.u.t.ton.

The response is a distant bolt sliding home.

A half-second delay.

The tiny silent star-explosion of angel plasma smashes them in the small of the back. They do not blink.

Vera Mornova jabs her finger into the rubber b.u.t.ton again and again.

Her aim is true. Proof of Concept surges forward into burning fall. The world in the window judders and bellies and swells.

The melting frost of their breath on the ceiling begins to fall on them like rain.

12.

After leaving Pavel's apartment, Lom took a night walk on the Mir Embankment. The Mir still rolled on through the city, carrying silt and air and the remembering of lakes and trees, but it was silent now and just a river. Everything was hot and open under the Rizhin-stained sky. He didn't want to go home, not if home was a room in the Pension Forbat.

He was looking for something. Shadows and trails of what used to be. Old wild places where the forest still was. Giants and rusalkas and the dry ghosts of rain beasts in a wide cobbled square. There must be something left, something he could work with. But he was the only haunter of the new ruined city, caught between memory and forgetting, listening to the silence of dried waters. The city had turned its back on the Mir, and he was on the wrong side of the river.

In the very shadow of the Rizhin Tower, almost under the walls of the Lodka, he crossed into a small field of rubble. Mirgorod was aftermath city yet, and the heal-less residuum of war still came through. Stains under fresh plaster.

Lom stepped in among roofless blackened walls propped with baulks of timber. Night scents of wild herb and bramble. The smell of ash and rust and old wood slowly rotting. A grating in the gutter and running water down belowmoss and mushroom and soft mudthe Yekaterina Ca.n.a.l paved over and gone underground.

Follow. Follow.

Gaps and small openings into blackness everywhere. Subterranea.

He kicks aside a fallen shop sign. CLOVER. BOOKS AND PERIODICALS.

Down he goes into old quiet tunnels and long-abandoned burrowings. There is no light down there, no lurid Rizhin glow, but he is Lom and needs no light to find his way.

Chapter Six.

The sisters all had silent eyes and all of them were beautiful.

Velimir Khlebnikov (18851922)

1.

The Lodka, sealed up and abandoned by Papa RizhinNew Vlast, new offices! Sky rise and modern! Concrete and steel and gla.s.s!stands, a black stranded hulk on Victory Square, doors locked, lower windows barred and boarded, the silent and disregarded River Mir at its back. Papa Rizhin refuses to use it at all. It is a mausoleum, he says. A stale reliquary. It stinks of typewriter ribbons and old secrets and the accrual of pensions. Four hundred years of conferences and paper shuffling and the dust of yesterday's police. Will you make me breathe the second-hand breath of unremembered under-secretaries? t.i.tular counsellors who died long ago and took their polished trouser seats with them to the grave? f.u.c.k you. I will not do it.

And so the panels of angel flesh were removed from the Lodka's outer walls to be ground up for Khyrbysk Propellant, and the vast building itselfits innumerable rooms and unmappable corridors, its unaccountable geometry of lost staircases and entranceless atria open to the sky, its bas.e.m.e.nt cells and killing roomswas hastily cleared out and simply closed up and left.

Inside the Lodka now an autumnal atmosphere pervades, whatever the external season. Time is disrupted here, unforgetting and pa.s.sing slow. Many windows are brokenshattered bomb-blast gla.s.s scattered on floors and desksand weather comes in through opened oriels and domes. Paint is flaking off leadlights. In the reading room the great wheel of the Gaukh Engine stands motionless, canted two degrees off centre in its cradle by an Archipelago bomb that fell outside. Animals have taken up residenceacrid streaks and acc.u.mulations of bird s.h.i.+tbats and cats and ratsbut they do not penetrate more than the outermost layers, leaving undisturbed the interior depths of this hollowed-out measureless mountain. Only shadows and paper dust settle there, little moved by slow deep tides of scarcely s.h.i.+fting air.