Part 18 (2/2)

All that day they walked in the direction of the red hill rising. The sky settled lower with thickening cloud banks and strange copper light. Trees spread around them in all directions, numberless, featureless and utterly bleak, a still, engulfing, unending tide of reddening blankness. Hour followed hour and always they pa.s.sed between trees, and always the trees were replaced by more trees, and always the trees were the same. They were moving but getting nowhere because the forest was without boundary or finish or variation. Its immenseness was beyond size and without horizon. Walking brought them no nearer and no further away. Motion without movement. Everything unchanging copper and grey except the red hill. That was coming closer. They walked on towards it until it was too dark to move, and then they camped without a fire. Rett felt small beyond insignificance and absolutely without purpose or hope.

In the morning the red hill was nearer. It had moved in the night. Its lower slopes were ash-grey. Rett started towards it. The air p.r.i.c.kled, metallic. The trees were looking ill. They had no leaves.

Fallun hung back. 'I don't want to,' he said. 'It's not right.'

The sky was low and copper again. The air tasted of iron, the fine hairs on their skin p.r.i.c.kled.

'We must,' said Rett. 'Orders. I think that's what we've come to find.'

Fallun stared at him. 'Orders?'

'”Find a hill that might be moving,” ' said Rett. 'It's the primary objective of this whole thing. Burning the forest is secondary. The icing on the cake. The colonel told me before we left.'

'A hill?' said Senkov? 'A moving hill? What the f.u.c.k's it meant to be?'

'An angel,' said Rett. 'But alive.'

Fallun took a step backwards. Hitched his pack off his shoulder and dropped it. 'No. No way. Not me.'

Rett stared at him. He didn't know what to say. He was an engineer.

'It's an order.'

'f.u.c.k orders.'

'An order, Fallun.'

Fallun looked at Senkov. Rett felt sick, like he was going to throw up again. Senkov blushed and looked at his shoes.

'f.u.c.k orders,' said Fallun again, 'and f.u.c.k you both. I'm going home.'

Rett hesitated. Then he shrugged. 'Wait here,' he said. 'We'll pick you up on the way back.'

Shreds of low bad-smelling mist drifted across the ground. A sour sickening smell under the copper sky, the light itself dim and smeary. The earth in places a crust over smouldering embersthe roots of trees burning under the groundbut there was no heat.

The wind brought the smell of burning earth and something else, something edgy, p.r.i.c.kling and dark. Like iron in the mouth.

'Something bad,' said Senkov. 'Careful.'

'We have to see,' said Rett. 'We have to go there.'

'OK,' said Senkov. 'But be careful.'

The red hill was hundreds of feet high. Rounded, fissured, extending shoulder-slopes towards them. Rett felt the pressure of its gaze.

A mile before they reached it, the earth was a brittle cinder crust that crunched and broke underfoot. Boots went through ankle-deep into smouldering cool blue flames. The ground was on fire without heat and the air sang with electricity. Ahead of them were pools of colourless s.h.i.+mmering. Small lakes but not water. The undergrowth and the trees were white as bone. Ash-white, they snapped at the touch.

A grey elk struggled to get to her feet and run from their approach but couldn't rise. She had no hind legs. She gave up and collapsed to her knees and watched them with dull frightened eyes. Milky blue-grey eyes. Like cataracts.

Rett felt dizzy and almost fell.

'I can't feel my feet,' said Senkov. 'Please. This is far enough.'

'Just a bit further,' said Rett. 'Then we'll turn back.'

Five more minutes and they came upon the bodies of the giants. The giants weren't simply dead; they were destroyed, their bodies eroded and crumbling like soft grey chalk. Parts of the bodies were there and parts were not. Broken pieces were embedded with fragments of hard s.h.i.+ning purple-black skin. Flinty bruises.

Objects crunched underfoot.

Senkov picked up an axe from the ground. The iron was covered with a sanding of fine grainy substance, a faintly bluish white, as if the metal had sweated out a crust of mineral salt. When he tried it against a tree the axe head broke, useless.

'What did this?' he said quietly The copper was draining from the sky, leaving it the colour of hessian. Darker stains seeping up from the east. A hand of fear covered Rett's face so it was hard to breathe. Everything inside him was tight. Tight like wires.

'They're moving,' he said. 'Oh G.o.d, they're moving. They're not dead.'

The ruined giants were s.h.i.+fting arms and legs slowly. Scratching torn fingers at the air. Eyes opened. Mouths mouthing. Wordless. The eyes were blank and sightless and the words had no breath: they were parodic jaw motions only. One body was twisting. Jerking. A hand seemed to grasp at Rett's leg. He recoiled and kicked out at it, and the whole arm broke off in a puff of shards and dust. Gobbets of bitter stinking sticky substance splashed onto his face. Into his mouth. Rett made a noise somewhere between a groan and a yell, leaned forward and puked where he stood.

'They're dead,' said Senkov. 'The poor f.u.c.kers are dead, they just don't know it.'

'We need to get out of here,' said Rett. 'We need to move. Now.'

Senkov stumbled and fell, twitching, shuddering, struggling to breathe. White saliva bubbles at the corner of his mouth. Thick veins spreading across his temples, the muscles in his neck standing out like ropes. His back arched and spasmed. He fell quiet then but his chest was heaving. His eyes stared at the sky. They were dark and intent, unfocused inward-looking whiteless bright s.h.i.+ning black. Senkov's mouth began to speak words but the voice was strange.

'Tell him,' he said monotonously and forceful and very fast, over and over again. 'Tell. Tell. Tell I am here. Tell I am found. Come for me. Come for me. Nearer now. Nearer. Tell him to come.'

5.

Engineer-Technician 1st Cla.s.s Mikkala Avril, secret Hero of the New Vlast, personally selected for a glittering new purpose and destiny by Papa Rizhin himself, freshly uniformed, all medicals pa.s.sed A1, tip-top perfect condition in body and mind, ready and willing to hurl herself into the s.h.i.+ning future, takes a seat across the desk from Director Khyrbysk himself. In his own office. A welcome and induction from the very top. She is conscious of the honour, flushed and more than a little nervous. She must work hard to concentrate on what he is saying, and the effort makes her frown. It gives her an air of seriousness that belies the trembling excitement in her belly. She holds her hands together in her lap to stop them fidgeting.

Here she is, twenty-four years and two days old, a thousand miles north-east of Kurchatovgrad and Chaiganur, in a place not shown on any map, on the very brink of what it's really all about. This is Project Perpetual Sunrise. This is Task Number One.

Khyrbysk is a cliff of a man, a slab, all hands and shoulders and clipped black curly hair, but his voice is fluent and beautiful and his pale eyes glitter with cold and visionary intelligence. They burn right into Mikkala Avril and she likes the feeling of that. Director Khyrbysk sees deep and far, and Mikkala Avril is important to him. He wants her to hear and understand.

'All known problems' Khyrbysk is saying in that voice, that fine beguiling voice 'all known problems have a single root in the problem of death. The human lifetime is too brief for true achievement: personality falls away into particulate disintegration before the task at hand is finished. But this will not always be so. Humanity is not the end point of evolution, but only the beginning.

'Now is the telluric age, and our human lives are brief and planetary. Next comes the solar age, when we will expand to occupy our neighbour planets within the limits of our present sun. But that is merely an intermediate step on the way to the sidereal age, when the whole of the cosmos, the endless galactic immensities, will be ours. This is inevitable. The course of the future is fixed.'

Director Khyrbysk pauses. Mikkala Avril, brows knotted in concentration, wordless in the zero hour and year, burning with purpose and energy, nods for him to continue.

I understand. I am your woman. Papa Rizhin was not wrong to pick me out.