Truth and Fear

by Peter Higgins

  Lom and Florian took the wide shallow apron of concrete steps two at a time and pushed open the wooden double door. Inside was a spacious entrance hall panelled with rich dark wood and thickly carpeted in plush brick red. A woman of about fifty in a crisp dark blue uniform tunic was watching them from behind a reception counter. She had short iron-grey hair and her face was powdered. She sat in a cloud of lavender eau de toilette and watched them suspiciously. Behind her on the wall was a noticeboard, a painting of the mountain in sunshine, the tubes of a pneumatic mail system and a large plate-glass mirror without a frame.

  ‘No visitors without an appointment,’ the woman said. ‘Do you have an appointment?

  Florian went up to the counter, confident, purposeful. He was Captain Vorush Iliodor. He held out his warrant card for inspection.

  ‘We are here for Professor Khyrbysk,’ he said. ‘Commander Chazia requires his presence urgently. You will call him down for us.’

  The woman frowned.

  ‘It is late,’ she said. ‘The professor does not receive visitors at home. He starts early in the morning. You may leave a message with me.’

  ‘We are not visitors,’ said Florian. ‘He is required. Now.’

  The woman glared at him, pale grey eyes blazing, points of pink flushing her cheekbones. In the mirror behind her Lom could see the electric switch under the counter.

  ‘The professor is unavailable,’ she said, reaching for the telephone. ‘Someone else will assist you. I will call Dr Ferenc. He will—’

  Lom pushed past Florian, lifted the counter lid and stepped quickly through. Put his left hand down to cover the emergency call switch before she could get to it.

  ‘We have no time for this,’ he said. ‘I am an investigator of the Political Police. My colleague is Captain Iliodor of Commander Chazia’s personal staff. You will take us to Professor Khyrbysk’s apartment. You will do this yourself. You will do this now. You will call nobody. You will trigger no alarms.’

  ‘You cannot order me! Where are your uniforms? Where is your police warrant? There are procedures. You have no authority here. The professor—’

  ‘The authority of the Vlast is everywhere,’ said Lom. ‘The Vlast is authority. There is no other. What is your name, citizen?’

  The woman hesitated.

  ‘Tyrkhovna,’ she said. ‘Zsara Tyrkhovna.’

  ‘You will take us to the professor immediately, Zsara Tyrkhovna. Instantly.’

  Still she hesitated.

  ‘You would prefer to join one of the long trains, perhaps?’ said Lom. ‘Would you like to take a journey into the mountain, Zsara Tyrkhovna? That can be arranged. We could give you that choice perhaps. Choose now.’

  Tears were coming to Zsara Tyrkhovna’s eyes, though they weren’t there yet. She didn’t know what to do.

  ‘Loyalty is creditable,’ said Lom. ‘Defiance and stupidity is not.’

  Her shoulders slumped. She looked ten years older.

  ‘Come with me,’ she breathed.

  They took the mirrored and chrome-plated lift to the top floor. The twentieth. More thick carpet in the hall, recessed lighting, pot plants and paintings on the walls: abstract constructions of circles and cones in primary colours, slashed across by thin black straight lines. This is the future! they said. The total universal truth of form and speed! No people and no skies!

  There was only one door. It opened almost instantly at Zsara Tyrkhovna’s tentative knock. The man who appeared in the doorway was wide and bulky. He had a broad creased face with a heavy stub of a nose, an imposing brow and a mat of wiry black curly hair cut short. Small pale blue eyes appraised Lom and Florian with sharp, watchful intelligence. He was wearing a dark blue dressing gown over a white shirt open at the collar. The gown looked like it was made of silk: real silk, not some petroleum-derivative substitute.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Yakov Arkadyevich,’ said Zsara Tyrkhovna. ‘These men… they say they are the police. They insisted. They threatened me… I didn’t know what to do. I shouldn’t have—’

  Florian produced his identification.

  ‘Commander Chazia requires Professor Khyrbysk to come with us now,’ he said. ‘It is a matter of urgency. She cannot wait.’

  Khyrbysk took Florian’s card and studied it carefully for a moment. Considered it and came to a conclusion. He nodded almost imperceptibly, as if to himself, as if some hypothesis of his own had been confirmed.

  ‘Don’t upset yourself, Zsara,’ he said. His voice was deep and complex. ‘Everything is in order. You’ve done all that you should, and more. I am grateful. You can leave us now.’

  ‘Should I telephone someone?’ she said. ‘I should tell Shulmin what is happening. No, Shulmin is not here. Ferenc then. I will call Ferenc. He will come.’

  ‘There’s no need to trouble Leon, Zsara. Really no need. Everything is fine here. Go back to your work.’ He stood back from the door. ‘Please, gentlemen, come in.’

  They followed Khyrbysk into his apartment. It was over-warm and brightly lit, and the white walls were hung with certificates of academic distinction and more paintings. The floor was covered with a thick light blue carpet. There were a few pieces of expensive-looking furniture and rugs in the modern geometric style. The curtains were drawn shut across wide windows.

  Khyrbysk indicated a low sofa in the middle of the room. There was a polished oval coffee table in front of it, empty except for a bowl of dried fruits.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Please. You are my guests. Perhaps you would like some wine?’

  ‘There is no time,’ said Lom.

  Khyrbysk ignored him.

  ‘Captain Iliodor,’ he said to Florian. ‘We have corresponded, have we not? And spoken on the telephone, I think. A pleasure to meet you in person at last. Also something of a surprise. I was expecting to meet you yesterday with Lavrentina when she arrived, but you were not with her. Indeed, she mentioned that you had disappeared during a bombing raid on Mirgorod. She was concerned for you. There was some suggestion that you might have been injured. Or dead.’

  Florian gave him a quick untroubled smile.

  ‘As you see,’ he said, ‘I am not dead; I was merely delayed. I arrived in Novaya Zima some hours ago.’

  ‘We can talk as we go,’ said Lom. ‘Get your coat, Professor. Let’s be on our way.’

  Khyrbysk turned towards him, small eyes narrow in the slab of his face.

  ‘And who are you, please?’ he said. ‘I know who your associate says he is, but you have not yet accounted for your presence here.’

  ‘My colleague—’ Florian began.

  ‘I am an Investigator of the Vlast Political Police.’

  Khyrbysk sighed.

  ‘Oh, really, must we continue this charade?’ he said. ‘I know you are not what you say you are. Whatever you might have told poor Zsara, you are evidently nothing to do with Lavrentina, and you are certainly not from the police, so let us waste no more time on tedious diversions. Spare me that. I am not surprised you have come. I have been expecting you, or someone like you, for a long time.’

  ‘Who do you think we are?’ said Lom.

  Khyrbysk shrugged.

  ‘Precisely?’ he said. ‘Precisely, I have no idea at all. Spies? Agents of the Archipelago? The specifics hardly matter. You are outsiders. People from elsewhere, come to find out what is happening here in Novaya Zima. As I said, I have been expecting that someone like you would come eventually. Our achievements were bound to attract such attention, though frankly I thought there would be a more subtle approach. A less frontal assault, shall I say? Well, no matter. You are here, and I have nothing to hide, so let us be civilised. Share my wine and tell me what you want from me.’

  Khyrbysk’s manner was smooth and urbane but there was hard calculation in his eyes. He’s playing with us, thought Lom. Playing for time. But there is no time.

  ‘You met Chazia when she arrived?’ he said.

  ‘Of course,’ said Khyrbysk.

  ‘The
re was a woman with her. Early twenties. Five foot nine. Black hair cut short at the neck.’

  For the first time, Khyrbysk looked surprised. Genuinely surprised.

  ‘I couldn’t say. I don’t recall seeing such a woman. Lavrentina’s entourage was large. I did not meet them all. Of course not.’

  Lom’s patience had reached its limit. He pulled the Blok 15 from his pocket and pointed it at Khyrbysk’s belly.

  ‘Where is Chazia now?’ he said.

  Khyrbysk glanced briefly at the gun and looked away. Dismissed it from his attention.

  ‘When I left Lavrentina earlier this evening she was in the mountain. She had work to do. She is a woman of remarkable energy.’

  ‘You’re going to take us to her,’ said Lom. ‘You’re going to take us into the mountain and vouch for us with your security. Tell them we are your guests. Take us to where Chazia is.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Khyrbysk. ‘If that’s what you want.’ He glanced at the gun. ‘Your argument is persuasive.’

  ‘Don’t over-focus on the gun,’ said Lom. ‘You should worry more about my friend there. I certainly would.’

  84

  They went out of the Foundation Hall and across the floodlit square. The sky-aspiring sculpture cast three long black gnomon-shadows. Lom walked on one side of Khyrbysk, Florian on the other. The square was deserted. It was almost nine.

  ‘No transport?’ said Khyrbysk, looking around.

  ‘No,’ said Lom.

  ‘You don’t have much of a plan then.’

  ‘The plan’s simple,’ said Lom. ‘If there’s any trouble from you we kill you and think of something else.’

  ‘I see. You have no transport. Well, I’m afraid my driver has gone home for the night, but if we go back inside I could get Zsara to telephone for a car.’

  ‘We’ll walk,’ said Lom.

  ‘Five miles in the night?’ said Khyrbysk. ‘Partly across open country? Better to take the train.’

  There was a transit station at the corner of the square. The system was still running. They didn’t have to wait long for a northbound service. There were a couple of solitary passengers–night workers going on shift–but Khyrbysk led them to seats at the other end of the car.

  ‘The city is beautiful at night,’ he said, looking out of the window, ‘but you should see it in the long summer days. It is the northern jewel of the Vlast.’

  ‘You call this place a city?’ said Lom.

  ‘Yes, certainly Novaya Zima is a city. A city is defined by importance rather than size. By centrality to the culture of the coming times. Novaya Zima is not an agglomeration of buildings, it is a machine for living. A machine for making the future. And it is a metaphor. A work of art.’

  He sat back in his seat and unbuttoned the fawn camel-hair coat he had put on over his shirt. It was hot in the carriage. He seemed inclined to talk. Perhaps it was nerves, but Lom didn’t think so. Khyrbysk didn’t seem too bothered about his predicament at all.

  ‘Take the building where I live, for instance,’ Khyrbysk was saying. ‘The Foundation Hall. It is made from steel and glass. Above all, glass. What better metaphor than glass for the future we are building? Millions of separate grains of sand, weak and uncohesive when separate, fused together under a fierce transmuting heat to form a new substance. And the new substance is perfect. Unblemished, transparent and strong. This is how we shall reforge humanity. The progress of history is inevitable. It is happening already. The individual is losing his significance–his private destiny no longer interests us–many particles must become one consistent force…’

  Khyrbysk paused.

  ‘You smile,’ he said. ‘But I assure you, what I am saying is a clear-sighted expression of fact. Novaya Zima signifies. Everything you see in Novaya Zima, the fine architecture, this mass transit system of which we are so proud, it all signifies.’

  Florian grunted. ‘You have a fine apartment,’ he said.

  ‘You sound censorious,’ said Khyrbysk, ‘You want to make me ashamed of my privileges while others labour hungry and the Vlast is at war?’

  ‘The thought occurred to me,’ said Florian.

  ‘But I am not ashamed,’ said Khyrbysk. ‘The fact that others forgo essentials so we can live like this, that is what drives us on. It shows our strength of purpose. The Vlast may suffer hardships, Novaya Zima says to the world, but we can still do this.’

  ‘This place tells the world nothing,’ said Florian, ‘because the world doesn’t know it exists.’

  ‘Not yet perhaps,’ said Khyrbysk, ‘but when we are ready it will.’

  Lom remembered the smell of the empty trains at the Wieland marshalling yard. The ranks of empty trains. He was surprised by the heat of his own anger

  ‘You’ve built a comfortable utopia for you and your friends on the bones of slaves.’

  ‘You’re trying to provoke me,’ said Khyrbysk blandly, ‘but I will not rise to it. I am merely a worker in my own field, as are we all. There is no egotism here, only I becoming We: the clear and perfect simplicity of glass.’

  ‘And the workers under the mountain? Do they see it like that? I’ve seen the trains.’

  ‘Certainly they do. Most of them. Physical labour is redemptive. Many request to stay on when their terms are complete. They ask for their families to join them. ‘

  Lom turned away in disgust. He caught his own reflection in the window looking back at him. And through his own face he saw the lighted windows of kommunalki buildings moving past. For a moment it was as if he was stationary and the buildings were sliding away, leaving him behind.

  ‘The quality of our city,’ said Khyrbysk, oblivious to Lom’s reaction, or ignoring it, ‘expresses the supreme importance of the work we do.’

  Florian leaned forward intently.

  ‘What work?’ he said. ‘What is happening here? What is all this for?’

  ‘The Foundation for Physico-Technical Machines,’ said Khyrbysk, ‘is the greatest concentration of human intelligence the world has ever seen. The whole city exists to support our work. There is more brilliance lodged in Foundation Hall, in that one single building, than… There is no comparator. No precedent. It is our academy. We have sacrificed our careers to be here, all of us. We do not publish, at least not under our own names. We get no fame for what we do, none of the mundane rewards. But the future will know us by our work.’

  They stopped at a station and the last passengers left them alone. Shortly after the train restarted, the buildings outside the window disappeared, leaving nothing but blank darkness. Lom realised they had crossed the northern boundary of the township and were heading across open country towards the mountain.

  ‘What work?’ said Florian again. ‘What is the work?’

  ‘Our work?’ said Khyrbysk. ‘We look up at night and see a universe of stars and planets teeming with life, and angels swimming the cosmic emptiness like fish. Only the emptiness between the stars is not empty; it teems with life and vigour just as the planets do. It merely does not shine so brightly.’ There was a light in Khyrbysk’s eye that was not entirely sane. For all his craggy bulk, his thick grizzled curls and cliff-like face, he was a prophet burning with the incandescence of a vision. ‘That is where history is leading us,’ he continued. ‘Humankind spreading out across the galaxies in the endless pursuit of radiant light. Only there will we find space enough to live as we are meant to live. It is inevitable. It is the will of the universe.’

  Lom could see nothing but blackness outside the carriage window. The reflection of the bright interior obliterated everything. He could see himself, and opposite him a mirror-Khyrbysk and a mirror-Florian. There was less of Iliodor in Florian’s face, he thought: more angularity, more darkness. An effect of mirror and harsh shadow, perhaps.

  ‘There are practical problems to be solved, of course, if humankind is to escape from this one cramped planet,’ Khyrbysk was saying. ‘That’s what we are doing here. New means of propulsion, new techniques for n
avigation, new technologies for sustaining life outside the atmosphere and beyond the light of the sun. And new designs for humankind itself. Crossing the immensities of space will take immensities of time. Our present bodies are too short-lived. They decay and fail. But even this problem will be solved. We know that angel flesh can absorb and carry human consciousness: all that’s needed is refinement of technique.’

  ‘There are thousands of workers here,’ said Lom. ‘They aren’t engaged in cosmological hypothesising.’

  ‘Not hypothesising!’ said Khyrbysk. ‘Practicalities! There are a hundred real and specific problems to be solved. Problems of science, engineering and design.’

  ‘That is not enough,’ Florian’s voice was a snarl. ‘There is something more. Something else is happening here.’

  ‘Not enough! I’ve shared more truth and vision with you in the last ten minutes than you can possibly have heard in the whole of your life up to this moment.’

  Khyrbysk’s pale blue eyes were narrow and predatory.

  ‘You think I’m afraid of you?’ he said. ‘You think I’m your prisoner? I am no such thing. You will not kill me, but I will take you to Lavrentina, and she will surely kill you.’

  85

  There was a burst of noise as the transit car hurtled straight into the side of the Foundation Mountain and entered an unlit concrete tube barely wide enough to accommodate it. The light from the car’s lamps flickered along the uneven wall, illuminating snaking power cables and gaping black side shafts. Ten minutes later they emerged into dazzling fluorescent brilliance and came to a sudden stop. Khyrbysk opened the door and they stepped out onto an iron platform.

  They were in the middle of an immense cloister carved out of solid rock, hundreds of feet long and fifty feet high, supported by a field of wide columns: trunks of raw rough stone, left in place when the solidity of the mountain was cut away, sleeved in squared-off concrete for the first twenty feet of their height. Thousands of lighting tubes threw daylight-blue shadowless brightness across gleaming asphalt. The air was body-warm, dry to the point of desiccation and smelled faintly of naphtha. Not air at all but breathable suffocation, it moved in a steady current across Lom’s face. Glancing up, he saw rows of ventilation shafts in the rock ceiling and wide rotor fans behind grilles, turning slowly. He felt the terrible weight of the dark mountain overhead, inert, world-heavy, impending.