Truth and Fear

by Peter Higgins

  The plane had landed on some kind of raised plateau, uplifted some yards above the surrounding grassland. Last night’s rain had already evaporated in the thin wind. Lom found he could scuff away the sparse dry gravelly soil with his shoe, scraping down to virgin rock. The herby scrub had virtually no roots at all. When he had been walking for fifteen minutes or so, he began to notice that the ground was scattered at wide intervals with curious slivers, shards and fist-sized stones, ranging in colour from pale pink and rusted blood to bruise-dark purple, some rough and sharp, some rounded and polished to a glassy shine. He picked up a couple at random and cupped them in the palm of his hand, hefting their surprising weight. He knew exactly what they were. Raw fragments of the flesh of a fallen angel. They tingled in his hand, their almost-aliveness calling to him, and the stain of the old angel implant still lingering in his own blood stirred in response. It was like fine wires in his veins tightening and humming faintly. Follow, they urged, whispering. Follow.

  It took Lom more than an hour to find the carcase of the angel itself: a small one, a minor malakh, nothing compared to the red grandeur of, say, the Ouspenskaya Torso. Keeping fifty yards distance, he walked all round it in five or ten minutes: a surprising, impossible crag of deep reds and purples. The angel had not been quite dead when it fell: three starfish pseudo-limbs extruded from one flank and flowed across the shallow crater floor, spreading fringes that trickled away and dissolved into the surface rock. Angels often survived their fall by hours, sometimes days, seeping liquefaction, scrabbling in sad confusion at the ground as the last intelligence drained out of them. But this one was certainly dead now, and had been dead for centuries: long enough for dusty wind-blown soil to gather deeply in the folds and depressions of its body. Even from such a mass as this, Lom sensed nothing but the vague, vestigial after-trace of dissipated sentience.

  He was surely the first human to see this thing since it had fallen. The Vlast Observatories paid wealthy bounties for such a find, and failure to report one was a serious crime, but if it had been reported, the angel-miners of the Vlast would have come, hacked and sliced away its substance and hauled it away in slabs. They would have swept up every scattered pebble and strand and web for miles around. But this one had lain unseen and undisturbed since it had fallen, untouched by anything except the abrading weather. It called to him. He wanted to go closer. To touch it. Sheer curiosity. Never before had he been close to more than a mudjhik-sized lump of angel substance, though he had carried a sliver of it embedded in his skull for most of his life.

  As Lom slipped down into the shallow crater and walked towards it, the small dead angel loomed over him like the hull of a battleship. The atmosphere sang and prickled against his skin. An ozone reek. He went right up against the flank. Close to, the angel’s flesh was dull and pitted, but marbled with streaks of dark translucence, seamed within by dim threads and striations of blood and midnight blue. Lom pulled off his glove and pressed his hand to it. Probing. Deeper and deeper into the dizzying mass. The answering wires in his veins snapped taut, leaving him dizzy, breathless, heart pounding.

  An echo of proud intellectual hunger reached out and gripped him, tugging him further down and deeper in. The angel wasn’t a solid bulk, it was an open mouth. A fathomless well. He was standing on the fragile edge of terrifying, vertiginous, depths and staring, rapt and self-surrendered, into infinite emptiness: the space between galaxies and stars, not dark and cold and filled with death, but alive, a beautiful shining limitless windfall home. He wanted to fall into it. Fall and fly. The way up and the way down the same. It was his birthright, his just entitlement, his more than human destiny: the everlasting, ever-expanding future to which his history, all human history, was prologue. Just one step more. The flesh of the dead angel opened, a warm inviting gate, parting comfortably to fold around him and take him in.

  No! Not this! Not ever this again!

  Lom fought it.

  Repel! Repel!

  But he could not pull away. He screamed and yelled. Choking. Desperate. He hit out and pushed and kicked and bit and screamed. He coughed and vomited. Sour spittle spilled down his chin in gluey strands. Pulling away was appalling and impossible, like drowning himself, like holding his own breath till he died. He was murdering the thing he loved completely, loved more than himself: he was wilfully choosing his own bereavement. The dead angel suffused him and clung to his mind with needle-hooked claws. It was pulling the brain and spinal cord out of his body through the top of his skull. For Lom to withdraw was sickening death and extinction.

  No! Not after all that’s happened, not this! Was it his own voice or the angel’s that screamed this horrified determination, this defiance of despair? It was both. There was only one voice.

  And then Lom was out of the dead angel’s grasp and stumbling back across the ground, sobbing and vomiting, his lungs heaving desperately for clean cold breath.

  Florian found Lom wandering, exhausted and confused, miles from the Kotik. Florian wiped the dried vomit and spittle from his face and made him sit on a rock and gave him water and meat. Lom ate a little but he could not speak. He leaned forward, hands on his knees, and swung his head from side to side, trying to shake it clear.

  ‘Take your time,’ said Florian. ‘No rush. None at all. Gretskaya is waiting. The aircraft is repaired. She is anxious to make Terrimarkh before dark.’

  ‘Before dark?’ said Lom. ‘What… what time is it, then?’

  ‘It is almost three in the afternoon. You were gone for eight hours.’

  ‘An angel…’ Lom groaned and turned aside and vomited again. ‘It was dead… It…’

  ‘I have seen it,’ said Florian. ‘When you didn’t come back I followed your trail. I found what you found but I didn’t go close, not like you did. I could not have. What made you…?’

  He paused but Lom said nothing. He could not.

  ‘I picked up your path again,’ said Florian, ‘on the other side of it. You were wandering.’

  There was a hammering pain behind Lom’s eyes. He tried to focus on Florian but flashes of coloured brightness sparked and drifted across his vision.

  ‘How close?’ said Florian. ‘How close did you go?’ His voice reached Lom from far away. Lom jammed the heels of his hands into his eyes. It only made things worse.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Think I’m going to—’

  He jerked his head aside and vomited once more. He felt himself toppling slowly, endlessly forward. The world slid sideways into easy and comfortable darkness.

  71

  Maroussia Shaumian sat alone in a compartment on Chazia’s train. Her own private travelling cell. The door was locked, the windows barred. The bars were painted dark purple to match the Edelfeld-Sparre coachwork: slender steel uprights, but solid. Immovable. She had tried them, as she had tried the door, a dozen times.

  Her clothes had been taken from her on the first night while she slept, when they moved her from the freight car. She had woken to find herself in a simple dress of heavy grey linen. Her hair had been washed and she was barefoot, her left ankle chained to a strut beneath the seat. The cuff was padded leather, and gave her no discomfort. A silent woman came three times a day to bring her food–always a wrapped packet of heavy bread, with sausage or cheese, never both–and to take her to the washroom at the end of the corridor. On washroom trips Maroussia saw no one. The other compartments in the carriage had their blinds drawn or were empty. The linoleum was cool under her feet, the water in the bathroom hot, the towel fresh and rough. The bathroom window was barred. All the windows of the carriage were barred. It seemed she had the entire carriage to herself. The woman who came, the provodnitsa, would answer no questions.

  The first time, after the washroom, Maroussia had refused to let her leg be shackled again. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. Not that.’ She kicked viciously at the provodnitsa’s hand.

  The woman shrugged and left her. Later, Maroussia slept, and when she woke she was chained again. Next time
the provodnitsa came, she brought with her an enamel pot and put it on the floor in the corner behind the door.

  ‘You are to let me put the chain back on afterwards,’ she said, ‘or stay in here always.’

  Maroussia stared at her for a long time, considering the hot water, the towels, the feel of the linoleum cool underfoot, then nodded and held out her leg for the chain to be removed. Apart from that one time, the provodnitsa was neither unkind nor kind, and never spoke at all.

  Maroussia slept long and often, during the days as well as at night, and woke feeling sluggish and dull. She wondered if her food was drugged, or more likely the tin cups of sickly fruit juice out of a can, which had a metallic taint. But probably she was simply exhausted. A floor vent fed engine-warmed air into the compartment and she could not open the window. There was a large mirror above the opposite bench. Whenever she looked at it her own face gazed back at her, dark-eyed and alone. As much as she could, she avoided it. Avoided catching her own eye.

  She wondered what Vissarion was doing, what had become of him, if he was even alive. She remembered lying next to him, freezing cold and wet in the bottom of the skiff, folding his unconscious and desperately injured body in her arms as they were carried down the swollen surging Mir. Trying with her own warmth to not let him die when he had been tortured for her sake. She remembered the smooth cold feel of his skin. The smell of the river water and blood in his hair. He was a good man. He met the world with an open face, not closed up hard like a fist as so many did. She felt obscurely guilty, as if she had abandoned him. And in a way she had.

  When the track made long sweeping curves Maroussia could see the rest of the train. There were two armoured engines at the front and two huge guns, each on its own heavy truck, one behind the engines and one at the very back. Long barrels canted to the sky. Four more wagons with thick steel plating lined with firing slits carried gun turrets. The bulk of the train was unmarked freight wagons and a dozen passenger cars, looking tiny and incongruous in the Edelfeld-Sparre purple. Between the turreted fighting cars and the freight wagons was a specially widened truck which carried a shapeless bulk, high and wide as a house, shrouded in pale grey camouflage sheeting.

  She knew what it was. She could feel its presence. The Pollandore. She tried to reach out towards it with her mind. There was nothing. No response. On a ledge at the front of the Pollandore’s truck a mudjhik stood, motionless and sentinel.

  The train seemed to be going east, as far as Maroussia could tell, and perhaps a little north. Sometimes they roared along at speed, sometimes they slowed to a crawl, little more than walking pace. Occasionally the train would halt, never in a station but always in a deserted siding or marshalling yard, some with a surrounding cape of township. Maroussia drank in the names when she could see them, and pinned them to her memory, though they meant nothing to her. Ortelsvod. Thabiau. Sarmlovsk. Novimark. Bolland. Malovatisk. Ansk. She tried to see who came and went from the train. Figures passed in and out of view in early mist or evening darkness. People must have seen her face at the lit carriage window but nobody came near.

  On the second day out of Mirgorod, shortly after dawn, the train came to a long shuddering stop with a screaming of brakes and the guns began to fire. The turret muzzles rattled viciously and the big ordnance boomed salvoes. The whole train shifted in the tracks with the recoils. Her face pressed tight against the window bars, Maroussia could see muzzle flashes and drifts of black smoke, but what they were firing at she had no idea. After fifteen minutes or so the firing ceased, but it was several hours before the train moved on.

  Time divided itself between periods of trees and periods of lakes. The trees were needle-leaved spars of spruce and pine rising from a carpet of moss. The lakes were leaden grey interludes in a featureless plain of sandy scrub and grass. Flat horizons deadened all sense of forward motion. Days and nights merged one into another.

  And then one morning Chazia came to Maroussia’s compartment. She looked drained. Exhausted. She filled the compartment with sour staleness and sweat. She sat on the opposite bench under the mirror, swung her legs up onto the seat, and stared at Maroussia. Her pale reddened eyes were unnaturally wide and bright, the skin of her face pallid, grey and dry. She curled up her legs on the seat, cosy and intimate.

  ‘Are you comfortable, darling?’ she said. ‘Are you sleeping? It must be tedious for you to be so much alone. I will send you books.’

  Chazia shifted restlessly in the seat, scratching at the dark patches on her arms and hands, tugging at the skin of her cheek. She was holding the solm of twigs and wax and stuff gently, like something delicate and precious, but in her hand it looked drab and stupid. A bunch of litter. Dead.

  ‘This little thing,’ said Chazia. ‘It’s so fragile. See? You could stick in your thumb and break it apart. It’s ephemeral. We need to be quick.’

  She winced and scratched vigorously at the skin on the inside of her elbow. There were scabs and wound tracks there. A little fresh blood was oozing. She saw Maroussia looking and smeared the blood away.

  ‘See what it’s doing to me?’ she said. ‘It’s making the ants worse. Tiny awful ants. You can’t see them, they’re too small, but they’re there under my skin and I can’t get them out. The forest put them there. I went too near the trees at Vig. They’re in my arms now, but the face is worse. I can’t sleep then. Not at all.’ She stopped scratching and looked at Maroussia. Her blue eyes were hot and sore. ‘You can’t destroy the angel, Maroussia. It isn’t destructible. It’s too strong. It’s beautiful. It spoke to me once, at Vig, and it will speak to me again.’

  ‘Where’s this train going?’ said Maroussia.

  ‘Novaya Zima,’ said Chazia. ‘I told you.’

  ‘I don’t know where that is.’

  Chazia gestured vaguely. ‘North.’

  ‘We’re not going north.’

  ‘Not yet. We’ll turn north when we can.’

  ‘There was shooting yesterday,’ said Maroussia. ‘Was that the Archipelago? Are you losing the war?’

  ‘Losing it?’ said Chazia. ‘Of course we can’t lose it. The war is good. It is history in action. The old Vlast was stale and tired. Silted up with careerists. They had no energy. No purpose. No imagination. The Archipelago will clear all that away for us. They want Mirgorod? So? Let them have it. Mirgorod is not the Vlast. Mirgorod is one city, yesterday’s city. Let them have it. The Archipelago will consume our corruption like maggots in a wound, and for now we let them do their work, and when they have finished we’ll brush them away.’

  ‘What if their armies follow you east?’ said Maroussia.

  ‘At the time of my choosing I will destroy them,’ said Chazia. ‘All their armies will count for nothing. They will burn, they will all burn, and the winds of their burning will blow the ashes of the Archipelago from the face of the planet.’

  As she talked she was turning the solm over and over in her hands, looking at it from every direction. Cupping it protectively. Holding it up to her face.

  ‘It doesn’t do anything,’ said Chazia. ‘Nothing at all.’

  Maroussia felt something moving inside her head. A surreptitious, intrusive touch, like careful fingers probing gently, cool and sly. A secretive violation. It made her feel dizzy and sick.

  ‘What are you doing to me?’ she said.

  Chazia looked up from the solm.

  ‘You were going to use this,’ said Chazia, ‘against the Vlast. Against the angel. Against me. You thought you were going to change the world. You thought you could free the planet of angels by the deed of your own hand. You thought you’d got some kind of hero’s task.’

  ‘No—’

  ‘It is an interesting form of individualistic delusion. One person does not change the world. History is huge, colossal, unturnable. Look at me. I am building a new, better, cleaner Vlast. By my own efforts I will do this. But I don’t think I’m a hero. I know I am not. I reject the concept. I am a conduit, a facilitator. I ride the wav
e of history but the wave has its own momentum and I go this way because it is inevitable. If I turn aside and try to find my own independent path I will certainly be destroyed. The world is as it is and will be as it will be.’

  ‘Everyone makes their own world,’ said Maroussia. ‘I will do what I have chosen to do. Because I have chosen. Even if what I do makes no difference to anyone but myself, I’ll still have done something that matters.’

  Again Maroussia felt faint sickening touches inside her mind. Needle probes and clumsy fingers grubbing around. She tried to focus on what was happening but could not.

  ‘But that is such rubbish, sweetness. Can’t you hear yourself? Absolute shit. Did you choose the Pollandore, or did it choose you? You don’t know anything about what you’re dealing with, except what the people in the forest have told you. You’re a move in a game, that’s all. Someone else’s game.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘So what is the Pollandore? What does it do? What is it for? Can you tell me?’

  ‘Take this chain off my leg,’ said Maroussia.

  Chazia laughed.

  ‘You’re stubborn,’ she said. ‘Determined. I understand what Lom sees in you.’

  ‘You opened his head with a knife.’

  ‘It was a chisel. A fine chisel.’

  ‘You hurt him. You tried to kill him, but it didn’t work: it made him better and stronger.’

  ‘He desires you, did you know that?’ Maroussia looked away. ‘Ah,’ said Chazia. ‘I see you do. And you desire him? You are lovers perhaps? Are you lovers? Tell me, darling, are you?’