Radiant State

by Peter Higgins

  ‘You see, Lom? You can’t shake the Central Committee’s faith in Rizhin’s integrity of purpose, because they’ve no thought of it anyway. They simply couldn’t give a flying fuck. Everyone has skeletons in the cupboard, and personal ambition is everything. Nobody in Rizhin’s New Vlast wants to rake up memories. What’s past is nothing here.’

  ‘You’re saying, do nothing, then,’ said Lom, ‘because nothing can be done. This is the counsel of despair. Like I said, you’re one of them. You are ambitious too.’

  ‘Perhaps. But my ambitions are of a different quality. I see further. I want more. I want better.’

  ‘It makes no difference.’

  ‘You know,’ said Kistler carefully. ‘A man like you might dispose of Rizhin if he wanted to. Nothing could be more straightforward. A bomb under his car. Seven grams of lead in the head. No Rizhin, no problem.’

  ‘No good,’ said Lom. ‘Someone else would take his place. It’s not the man that must be destroyed, it’s the idea of him. The very possibility has to be erased.’

  Kistler’s eyes widened. He studied Lom carefully.

  ‘This isn’t just squeamishness?’ he said. ‘It’s not that you’re afraid.’

  ‘I’ve killed,’ said Lom, ‘and I don’t want to kill again, not unless I have to. But it’s not squeamishness. Call it historical necessity if you like. It doesn’t matter what you think.’

  ‘I see. You really are more than a disgruntled policeman with a grudge.’

  Lom stood to go. ‘I made a mistake,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have come. You’re not the man I was told you might be. I’ll find another way.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Kistler. ‘Please. Sit down. I have a proposition for you. Perhaps I could use a fellow like you.’

  ‘I’m not interested in being used.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Kistler. ‘Bad choice of word. But please hear me out.’

  Lom said nothing.

  ‘I share your analysis,’ said Kistler. ‘To put it crudely, Rizhin’s way of running the show is a bad idea. It’s effective but not efficient. History is against it. Frankly, I believe I could do better myself, and I want to try, but for this I need a weapon to bring him down. You have the right idea, Lom, but the wrong weapon. To make my colleagues on the Central Committee abandon Rizhin and come across to me, I need something that convinces them that his continued existence is against their personal interests now. If you can make them believe it’ll go worse for them with him than without him, then he’ll fall. But they all have to believe it, all of them at once, and they have to strike together; if not, Rizhin will just purge the traitors and his position will be stronger than ever. I need to convince them he’s a present danger. A terrible weakness. A desperate threat. That’s what I need evidence of, not your tale of forgotten misdemeanours and peccadilloes in the distant past.’

  ‘But—’ Lom began.

  Kistler held up a hand to silence him.

  ‘There is a way, perhaps,’ he said. ‘Let me finish. There’s something going on that my colleagues and I have sensed but cannot see. It makes us uneasy and afraid. Rizhin has created a state within a state. The Parallel Sector. We are blind to Hunder Rond and his service, but it is vast, its influence everywhere. And Rizhin has secrets. A plan within a plan. Resources are still being diverted, just like in Dukhonin’s day. Funds. Materials. Workers. The output of the atomic plants at Novaya Zima is far greater than we see the results of. Whole areas on the map are blank, even to us.

  ‘A man in my position can’t ask too many questions. I have my resources but I can’t use them: the Parallel Sector’s reach is too deep and the penalty for being caught is, well, immediate and total. But for you, Lom, it’s different. I think you might just be the man for the job. I’ll tell you where to look. I’ll give you money. Whatever you need. If you fail, if you’re caught, I’ll deny all knowledge of you. No, I’ll have you killed before you can implicate me at all. But if you find me something I can really use, then we’ll be in business. You bring me back the weapon I need, Lom. This will be our common task.’

  ‘I don’t work for anyone but myself,’ said Lom. ‘I’m not a policeman. Not any more.’

  ‘Ego talk,’ said Kistler. ‘I’m offering you an alliance, not fucking employment. Call it cooperation in the mutual interest. Call it a beautiful friendship. A meeting of minds. Call it whatever soothes your vanity–I don’t care. I don’t need you. I was going along just fine before you came, but now I see an opportunity that’s worth an investment and a risk. That’s what you came here for, isn’t it? What the fuck else are you going to do?’

  4

  Lieutenant Arkady Rett of the 28th Division (Engineers) left his division behind and led his men deeper into the forest. The division had become hopelessly bogged down. They were going in circles.

  ‘Take a small party, Rett, and scout ahead,’ the colonel had said. ‘Three or four can travel more quickly. Find us an eastward path. Find us solid ground and somewhere to go.’

  Rett chose two men, Private Soldier Senkov and Corporal Fallun, and walked out of the camp with them. Behind them the sky was black with the smoke of burning trees, and ahead lay woods within woods, always further in and further back, deeper and deeper for ever. There was no end to going on.

  Rett had thought that entering the deeper woods would mean disappearing into darkness. He’d imagined a densely packed wall of trees. Impenetrable thorn-thicket walls. Endless columns of tall trunks disappearing up into gloom, and beneath the canopy nothing but silence. But the reality was different: open spaces filled with grass and fern and briars and pools of water; occasional oak and ash and beech, singly or in small groups; hazel poles so slender he could push them with one hand and they would bend and sway like banner staffs. Ivy and moss and sticky mud and fallen branches underfoot. The forest was the opposite of pathless; there were too many paths, and none led somewhere.

  ‘Paths don’t make themselves,’ said Senkov.

  The compass was useless. After the first day he didn’t get it out of his pack.

  On the second day Rett woke feeling small. The world was inexhaustible and he was one tiny thing alone. There was no human scale: hostile, featureless, relentless, the forest defeated interpretation. Rett was a constructor of bridges, a worker with tools, a rational man: he looked for pattern and structure and edge, and found none here. His mind filled the gaps, the spacious lacuna of unresolvable chaotic plenitude, with monsters. There were faces in the trees. Movement in the corner of the eye. Presences. Watchfulness. The nervous child he no longer was returned and walked alongside him.

  Senkov and Fallun fell silent, sour, but the invisible child talked. The child saw the shadow-flanks of predatory beasts between the trees: witches and giants and forgotten terrors returning; the fear of being forever lost and never finding home again; men that were bears, stinking eaters of flesh. Trolls crowded at the edge of consciousness, importuning attention at the marginal twilit times. Dusk and dawn.

  The 28th had crossed the edge into the trees at the start of summer, but it was chill and autumnal here. Mushrooms and mist and the damp smell of coming winter. There was always a cold wind blowing in their faces. The wind unsettled them: they didn’t sleep well, tempers were short, always there was a feeling something bad was about to happen.

  As they penetrated deeper into the trees Rett saw signs of ancient construction: overgrown earthworks; lengths of wall and ditch built of huge boulders, shaped by hand and smooth with moss and age, collapsing unrepaired; broken spans of bridge; tunnel entrances; empty lake villages rotting back into shallow green waters. Shaggy-haired grazing beasts, wisent and rufous bison, faded into further trees at their approach.

  On the fourth day they came to the edge of an enormous hole in the earth’s crust: not a canyon or a rift but a gouge, dizzyingly immense, approximately circular, about half a mile across. It was like a great throat, a punched hole, a core removed from the skin of the world. It was terrifying to stand at the brink a
nd lean over, staring down into bottomless darkening depths. It seemed to Rett that there were faint distant points of light down there. It was as if they were stars, and he was seeing through to the night on the other side of the world. More than anything else he wanted to jump off and fall for ever. It cost him tremendously to tear himself away.

  Rett and his men skirted the edge of the great gouge and pressed on. Deeper into the inexhaustible forest. They hacked white strips in the bark of trees to mark their way back out. On the eighth day Rett woke early, before the others. He woke in confusion out of stupefying dreams, a thick heavy pain in his head, his mouth dry and fouled.

  Hard frost had come in the night. Mist–damp, chilling, faint, insidious, still–brushed against his face, filled his nose and lungs, reduced the endlessness of the surrounding trees to a quiet clearing edged by indeterminacy. His boots crunched on brittle, whitened grass and iron earth. The sound was intrusive. Loud and echoless. The trees seemed suddenly bare of leaves, sifting a dull and diminished light through the monochrome canopy of branches.

  The intense cold made his fingers clumsy. Breath pluming in small clouds, he fumbled the tinder, dropped it, couldn’t make his stiffened blue-pale hands work to get a fire started. The water was frozen in the bottle and the pan felt clumsy, and fell, spilling chunks of ice across the hearth. It took an age to coax a meagre, heatless flame into burning. There were a few dusty grains, the last of the coffee. He scattered them across sullen water. It didn’t boil. He built up the fire with thick stumps of log and put a neat pile of others ready. The heat chewed at the wood, smouldering, strengthless, with occasional watery yellow licks of flame the size and colour of fallen hazel leaves. Smoke hung over it, drifting low, thickening the mist. Clinging to his hair.

  Rett left Senkov and Fallun to sleep and climbed the shallow rise they’d chosen last night for shelter. The trees were awake. The many trees, watching. The weight of their attention pressed in on him, sucking away the air. It was so cold. His ankle was hurting. His limbs were stiff from too much walking.

  Ten minutes later he was on a scrubby hilltop among hazel and thorn, looking across a wide shallow valley. Without trees above him he could see the sky, the grey-brown canopy of leaf-falling woodland spread out at his feet. A range of low hills on the further side climbing into distance and mist.

  There was a new hill above the treeline. It hadn’t been there the day before. A fingernail clot of dark purple-red, the rim of a second sun rising.

  Rett hurried back down the slope to rouse the others.

  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 passed 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 prickled, 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 prickled.

  ‘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 fuck’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.’

  ‘Fuck 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.

  ‘Fuck orders,’ said Fallun again, ‘and fuck 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 embers–the roots of trees burning under the ground–but there was no heat.

  The wind brought the smell of burning earth and something else, something edgy, prickling 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 shimmering. 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 shining 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 god, they’re moving. They’re not dead.’

  The ruined giants were shifting 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 fuckers are dead, they just don’t know it.’

  ‘We need to get out of here,’ said Rett. ‘We n
eed 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 shining 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 Class 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 passed A1, tip-top perfect condition in body and mind, ready and willing to hurl herself into the shining 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.