Radiant State

by Peter Higgins

  Vasilisk took his place in the driver’s seat and settled down to wait.

  Lom eased open the door of the gatehouse. Maksim entered first, pistol in his hand. The guards swung round in surprise: one reached for his holster, the other made a grab for the telephone receiver.

  Maksim fired twice. Neat and precise.

  Lom ripped the phone cable from the wall.

  At 10.55 Rizhin himself came round the corner of the veranda into the courtyard. Vasilisk followed him in the rear-view mirror. Saw him glance across at the car and see his bodyguard in the driver’s seat. Puzzled, Rizhin started to come over.

  Vasilisk turned the key in the ignition and the engine purred into life. He slipped the car into gear and headed for the tunnel entrance. A cool dark mouth in the rock. In his mirror he saw Rizhin standing in the middle of the courtyard watching him go.

  Vasilisk increased the weight of his foot on the accelerator pedal.

  The car roared forward. The barrier was down but the car weighed nearly three tons.

  As the barrier splintered it occurred to Vasilisk in an abstract way that he was probably beginning the final two minutes of his life.

  Lom walked up to the massive gate across the tunnel and pressed the flat of his hand against it, feeling the dry solid wood. Its grain and fine flaws. The bars of iron within it. The blackened studs. The wide sunlit air. The scent of cypress and resinous southern pine. Feeling and remembering.

  In the dark time, after Maroussia went, Vissarion Lom moved fast across ice fields and raced through the snow-dark birch trees. Part man, part angel, part something else, body and brain saturated with starlight and burn, all the dark months of winter he ran the ridges of high mountains.

  He pushed his fists deep into solid rock just to feel it hurt.

  Ten days and more he had stood without moving on the thick frozen surface of a benighted lake. Cold dark fishes slid through darkness far below him and bitter black wind scoured his face with particles of ice.

  Lom-in-burning-angel counted the needles on pine trees and ignited them one by one with an idle thought. Little bright-flaring match flames.

  He had forgotten who he was and he didn’t care.

  But slowly he had been moving south, and slowly the star-fire faded from the angel skin casing Lavrentina Chazia had made. In the early sunlight of that first spring five years ago Vissarion Lom shed his angel carcass and pushed it off a rock into the river.

  He squirrelled the recollection of that dark inhuman time deep in the secret fastnesses of the heart where bitterness festers, and guilt. Kept it there, locked under many locks, along with the memory of all the winter slaughtering Lom-in-burning-angel did, or could have done and thought he might have. The iron smell of blood on ice.

  After that long inhuman winter in the north without the sun, Vissarion Lom wanted to be nothing more than simply human again, but secretly he knew he never could be quite that. Possibly he never entirely had been: the earliest roots of himself were buried in oblivion and inexhaustible forest. As everyone’s are.

  ‘Turn your back and cover your face,’ Lom said to Maksim. ‘Splinters.’

  Lom focused. Tried to drive all other thoughts and memories from his mind. Tried to calm the rising anxiousness and the beating of his heart.

  There was only him and the gate.

  He probed. Pushed. Nothing happened.

  Changing direction, he gathered all the urgency, the growing white panic inside him, squeezed it all into a tight ball and forced it out from him. Hurled it into the timbers, deep into the corpse limbs of forest trees.

  Burst open by the pressure of tiny air pockets–the desiccated fibrous capillaries suddenly and violently expanding–the heavy wooden planks of the gate exploded loudly from within, split open and shattered.

  The rock tunnel behind the broken gate was dark and silent. It smelled like the mouth of a well.

  ‘What the fuck?’ said Maksim. ‘What the fuck did you do?’

  ‘Later,’ said Lom.

  Where the hell was Kistler’s car?

  They stood side by side for thirty long slow seconds.

  ‘Where is he?’ said Lom. ‘He’s not coming.’

  Engine roar echoed, and the sound of gunfire.

  The long black limousine was racing towards them. Lom glimpsed a face behind the thick windscreen as he scrambled aside. A tanned impassive handsome face. Cropped yellow hair.

  The limousine slowed to a crawl. Maksim pulled open the front passenger seat.

  ‘Get in the back!’ he yelled at Lom.

  Lom slid in alongside the collapsed form of Kistler, who was crouched on the floor. Dirty shirt and soiled trousers. Unshaven face grey. He looked up at Lom with glassy eyes. No recognition. There was a smell of urine and vomit in the car.

  The driver didn’t look round but gunned the engine and raced off down the mountain.

  The heat of the sun, now high in the sky, beat against the side of Elena Cornelius’ face. She could feel her skin burning. Insects buzzed and clattered in the grass, crawled across the back of her neck, sunk tiny probes into her arms and her ankles. She fought back the urge to scratch. All movement was dangerous.

  She was still. She was nothing but eyes watching. She was part of the rock.

  From five hundred yards she saw the gate shatter and the limousine emerge, slow to pick up Maksim and Lom, and hurtle away down the hill, jumping culverts, taking the hairpin too fast, scraping its side along the crash barrier.

  The racing of the engine and the squeal of tortured metal echoed off cliffs and scree.

  Elena Cornelius waited. Less than a minute later two vehicles came charging out of the tunnel mouth: a black Parallel Sector saloon and an open VKBD jeep with three men cradling sub-machine guns on their knees.

  Elena moved the rifle slowly, sliding the graticule smoothly along the road, catching up with the windscreen of the leading pursuit car. The driver’s head was a shadow. She moved the scope with the saloon for a moment, matching speed for speed, then shifted her aim three car lengths ahead and lifted it half an inch.

  Squeezed the trigger gently.

  Half a second after she fired, the glass in the windscreen shattered. From where she was it seemed to collapse and dissolve. The Parallel Sector saloon swung wildly to the left, crashed against the rock face and spun twice.

  The jeep, following close behind, had nowhere to go and no time to stop. It crunched sickeningly into the side of the saloon. The men in the back of the jeep were thrown out. They landed badly.

  Elena shifted the scope back to the driver. He was folded into the jeep’s steering wheel, his head pushed through broken glass in a mess of blood.

  She watched a man stagger from the back of the saloon. Limping. He pulled at the driver’s door. It wouldn’t open. None of the men from the jeep was moving at all. The two crashed vehicles together completely blocked the road.

  She shouldered her gun and slid backwards away from the ridge, stood up and began to move, half running, half sliding down through the trees. This route would cut off a mile of road. In seven minutes she would be back at the track where Konnie would be waiting with the boxy grey Narodni.

  10

  Archangel hurls himself across the continent, Rizhin world. He is a fisted pocket of certainty crashing from mind to mind–land and pause and look and leap again–leaving a crumb trail of sickness and fall. Hunting the only angel trace still left in Rizhin’s New Vlast.

  Brother, I am racing to you! Brother, call again and I will come!

  He has scarcely the strength for it. Mile by mile the connecting cord back to his rock-lump-grinding-carcass in the forest lengthens and thins. The thread grows weak and spider-fine.

  In the deep concrete cistern under the Mirgorod Sea Gate, Safran-in-mudjhik pummels the imprisoning wall with shapeless fists. His mind is dark with anger at his fall.

  Lom pushed him in there.

  He cannot get out.

  Six years.

  Th
e endless surging weight of water, the whole force of the River Mir, pins him on his back. The noise of it fills his head and deafens him. The lost mind of Safran huddles in a silent corner, curled and foetal, wanting only the sound and the shouting and the hopelessness to cease.

  Hairline fractures are opening in the concrete.

  Two thousand days ago an aircraft of the Archipelago returning from a raid emptied its bomb bay, dumping its unspent load across the White Marshes. Two bombs fell against the dam. No visible damage done, but in the secret places, in the dark interior of immense solid walls, weakened bonds began to shear and slip.

  Predator-Archangel plummets from height, daggering into the mind of Safran-in-mudjhik and taking possession with a shriek of triumph. Instantly he expands to fill the space. Scoops the remnants of the weaker mudjhik mind from their runnels and crannies with a spoon and eats them all.

  Sorry, brother.

  Archangel glows with satisfaction and joy. He has a worthy body now in Rizhin world. He flexes. He samples. He trials his goods.

  In a dark corner he finds Safran cowering and hauls him out wriggling and retching by the ear.

  What use are you? he wonders briefly, rummaging with clumsy fingers through the maddened Safran mind before crushing it for ever out of existence.

  Deep in the endless forest the Seer Witch of Bones is the first to discern the gap in the wall. She shrieks in dismay, ‘Close it! Close it! The angel is through!’

  Maroussia Shaumian walking under the trees, preoccupied with the child in her belly and Vissarion Lom, reluctantly turns her attention to the call. She traces the fine connecting threadway. It is weak and she is strong, invested with the Pollandore. It costs her no more than a tussle with the weakened and attenuated angel mind. She pinches her fingers and the cord is cut.

  The forest is secure.

  But the archangel fragment in the mudjhik, isolated from the depleted mother hill, clings on to life and purpose. In the mudjhik carcass he is strength and fire and brilliance like nothing has been in a donkey workhorse mudjhik ever before.

  Slowly Archangel-mudjhik rises to his feet against the power of the crushing river and puts his shoulder to the wall. Shoves and batters and kicks against the weakening concrete.

  Brute force does it. Boulders come tumbling down, the river is unleashed and Archangel-mudjhik is swept out, twisting and floundering in a torrent of broken concrete and white water, out into the deeper colder darkness of the bay.

  Chapter Ten

  They all believed their happiness had come,

  That every ship had reached harbour,

  And the exhausted exiles and wanderers

  Had come home to bright shining lives.

  Aleksander Blok (1880–1921)

  1

  They changed cars at a small fishing port ten miles east along the coast from Anaklion, ditching the Narodni for a spacious pre-war Tsvetayev with cloth-covered seats, more tractor than automobile, and drove back to Mirgorod. By the direct north-east route it was only nine hundred miles, but it took them five days of doubling back and taking less-used circuitous routes. They assumed they were being searched for. Trains and flights were out of the question, even if they’d had the money for that.

  There were five of them in the car: Lom and Elena, Maksim and Konnie and Kistler. They left Vasilisk at the fishing port, where Maksim had arranged a place for him on a boat. He would work his passage south and disappear. As they were leaving, Vasilisk shook hands with Maksim and snapped a military salute.

  ‘He was in my unit,’ was all Maksim would say afterwards. ‘In the war.’

  They drove long hours on ill-made roads, sharing the driving and sleeping in the car, picking up food where they could and stopping as little as possible. North of the Karima mountains they skirted the hungerland. What they saw was bad and the rumours were worse. Ruined and abandoned farmland, the people of the towns gaunt, grey-faced, weak, watching them pass through with sullen hopeless eyes. Villages where there was nobody at all, only crows and pigeons and packs of dogs that circled, heads down, ribcages, dirty lustreless coats.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ said Konnie. ‘None of us knew about this.’

  They ran into a roadblock in a birch wood: a tree across the road and five men in rags with staves and a shotgun rising from a ditch. An attempt to steal the car: fuel and food and a way out. Maksim had to shoot two of them. The rear window of the Tsvetayev was broken.

  Maksim had been wary of Lom since the incident of the gate. Lom felt himself watched. By Konnie too. Maksim tried to ask him about it once, but Lom didn’t answer. Where to begin and what to say? The atmosphere was strained.

  Elena Cornelius just wanted to get back to the city. She’d been away too long, She was terrified that her girls had come home and she had missed them.

  Kistler recovered slowly. They cleaned him up and fed him, found him fresh clothes and let him sleep most of the day. He had lost weight in Rizhin’s interrogation cell. His eyes were dark, blank and anxious, and for long hours he sat in the back of the car next to Elena, pressed up against the door, leaning forward, hands on his knees, staring at nothing. Every few minutes he would open his mouth to speak but say nothing. On the second day tears came, silent tears soaking his face. He didn’t wipe them away.

  Lom feared he was permanently gone, that they’d lost him for ever in Rizhin’s interrogation cell, but slowly with the passing of the days some of Kistler’s fire and energy returned, though not like before. When Lom had first seen Kistler he was a master of the world, filled to the brim with confident assurance. The smooth sheen of real power. It had been there in his voice, in his gaze, in the way he moved. Now he was coming back, but darker, more determined, altogether more dangerous. His hurt and his fall, the shock of his humiliation and psychic destruction at the hands of Rizhin and Hunder Rond were raw and near the surface and he was vengeful. His face was thinner and he glared at the world through dark-hooded eyes.

  ‘I should thank you,’ Kistler said on the third day. ‘All of you. I know what I owe, and I will not forget.’

  ‘We came because we need you,’ said Lom. ‘I went to Vitigorsk as you suggested. I’ve got information you can use. If you want it. If you feel you still can.’ Lom paused. ‘Or my friends can help you get far away, if that’s what you want. To the Archipelago, even. That is possible. It can be done.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Konnie from the front seat. ‘We can arrange that. We’ve done it before, for others. It’s what we do.’

  Kistler said nothing. He looked for a long time out of the window: there was dry grass out there, dull grey lakes and low wooded hills in the distance.

  ‘We would understand,’ said Lom, ‘if you decided to go. No shame in that.’

  Kistler didn’t look round.

  ‘Liars,’ he said. ‘You people didn’t risk yourselves just to let some sick old fucker go free. Certainly not a bastard and a criminal like me.’

  Kistler’s eyes followed a young girl leading a horse across a hill, until they left her far behind. Lom thought he wasn’t going to say any more. Long minutes passed before Kistler spoke again.

  ‘I’m going to bring the fucker Rizhin to his knees,’ he said. ‘And I will do whatever it takes, whatever it takes, to make that happen. I want to see him broken. I want to see him hurt. I want to see him crawling on the floor in his own shit and piss and puke and blood. I would die to make that happen and be glad. I would suffer and howl till the end of fucking time, as long as it was him and me there together. So tell me. What have you got?’

  ‘Pull over,’ said Lom to Maksim, who was driving. ‘I’ll get my bag from the back.’

  As they drove on, Lom told Kistler about the vast construction plants at Vitigorsk. The plans for a fleet of atomic-powered vessels to go to the planets. The experiments in resurrection and synthetic human bodies. The aspiration to abolish death.

  ‘Insane,’ said Kistler, ‘insane, but—’

  “That isn’t all,’ said
Lom. ‘It’s just the beginning.’

  He opened his bag and brought out the papers from Khyrbysk’s office.

  ‘They are building vessels of two kinds,’ he said. ‘There was a conference a couple of years ago. A hotel on a lake. Rizhin was there, and Khyrbysk, and the chief engineer. Others too. Some names you know. Papers were circulated and minutes taken. All most efficient, and Khyrbysk kept a copy.’

  He spread a folder open on his knee.

  ‘They are constructing two kinds of vessel,’ he said again. ‘One, a fleet to go to the planets and the stars. Five years, they think, ten at the most before they are ready. Resources are no obstacle. Rizhin promised them whatever they need. They will be arks. Transport ships to carry pioneers and the equipment they will require. It’s all planned. They’ll select the people carefully. Even two years ago they’d begun to draw up criteria and candidate lists. They are gathering scientists, artists, writers, athletes. The best of the armed forces and the finest workers.’

  ‘Let me see,’ said Kistler. ‘Show me the names.’

  ‘They need huge amounts of angel matter to power the craft,’ said Lom. ‘More than all the carcasses can supply. But there is a living angel in the forest and Rizhin says it’s huge. Immense. An angel mountain. He’s going to find it and excavate its living flesh. Army divisions are already in the forest searching.’

  Kistler was still looking at the lists. The people at the conference.

  ‘I don’t recognise these names,’ he said. ‘None of the Central Committee is here. No one from the Presidium or the ministries. Only Rond.’

  ‘They don’t know,’ said Lom. ‘None of them know about it because they’re not going. They’re not invited to the stars. But the arks are just part of it. There’s another kind of vessel design. These are for low planetary orbit only, and there are to be thirty of them. They’re also building bombs. Huge atomic bombs. Emperor Bombs. The power of these weapons can’t be understated, it can’t even be imagined: a single one would have the power of sixty million tons of high explosive, big enough to flatten entire cities and destroy half a province on its own. They expect them to set the air itself on fire. The orbital craft, the second design, will be artillery platforms. Flying gunships, each one equipped with twenty Emperor Bombs. That’s six hundred of them. The dust will blacken the skies for years. Five years of darkness and winter. Clouds of poisonous elements will cover the continent, raining disease and death. The atmosphere of the world will burn away.’