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.
‘You see immediately of course,’ says Khyrbysk, ‘that the contemporary human body isn’t fit for such a destiny. Active evolution, that is the key: the extension of human longevity to an unlimited degree; the creation of synthetic human bodies; the physical resurrection of the dead. These are the prerequisites for the exploration and colonization of distant galaxies. The living are too few to fill the space, but that is nothing. The whole of our past surrounds us. Everybody who ever lived–their residual atomic dust still exists all around us and holds their patterns, remembers them–and one day we’ll resurrect our dead on distant planets. We will return our ancestors to life there! The whole history of our species, archived, preserved, will be recalled to live again in bodies that have been re-engineered to survive whatever conditions prevail among the stars. And when that time comes the whole cosmos will burn with the light of radiant humankind.’
Mikkala Avril, astonished, excited, confused and strangely disturbed, feels it incumbent upon her to speak. She opens her mouth but no words come.
‘You doubt the practicality of this?’ says Khyrbysk. ‘Of course you do. These ideas are new to you. But there is no doubt. We have already seen the proof of it. What do you think the angels were, but ourselves returning to greet ourselves. It is a matter of cycles. The endless waves of history. The great wheel of the universe turns and turns again.’
Mikkala Avril is puzzled by this reference to angels. It stirs vague troubled memories. Uncertain images of large dead forms. Dangerous giants walking. She thinks she might have heard talk of such things long ago, but nothing is certain now. She can’t remember clearly. Rizhin’s New Vlast burns with such brightness, the blinding glare of it whites out the forgotten past.
‘Of course,’ says Khyrbysk, ‘our science is far from being able to do this yet. The success of Proof of Concept was a great step forward, but there are technical problems that may take hundreds, even thousands of years to overcome. Yet surely if all humanity is devoted to this one single common purpose then it will be done. And that, Mikkala Avril, is what the New Vlast is for. Rizhin himself appointed me to this task, as he appointed you to yours. “Yakov,” he said to me then, “devote all your energies to this. Abandon all other duties. This, my friend, this is Task Number One.” ’
6
When Mikkala Avril had left him, Yakov Khyrbysk reached for pen and paper. A man of many cares and burdens, he had a letter to write.
Secretary, President-Commander and Generalissimus Osip Rizhin!
When you entrusted me with the responsibilities of Task Number One, you invited me to come to you if ever I needed your help. ‘I am a mother to you,’ you said (your generous kindness is unforgettable), ‘but how may a mother know her child is hungry, if the child does not cry?’ Well now, alas, your child is crying.
Our work progresses better than even I might have hoped. We have had technical successes on many fronts, and our theoretical understanding of the matters under consideration advances in leaps and bounds. I claim no credit for this: our scientists and academicians work with a will. Your trust and vision inspire us all daily. Building on the success of the Proof of Concept (which came to an unfortunate end, but the fault there lay with the human component not the ship herself, and we have stronger human components in preparation now), we are well ahead in production of the greater fleet. Both kinds of vessels required are in assembly. The supply of labour continues to exceed attrition and our mass manufacturing plants outperform expectations (see output data enclosed).
But we have struck an obstacle we cannot ourselves remove. Our reserves of angel matter are exhausted. We simply do not have a supply sufficient to power the launch of the numerous ships envisaged. All known angel carcasses have been salvaged and there is no more.
Helpless, I throw myself at your feet. Find us more angel matter and we will deliver you ten thousand worlds!
Three days later he received a scribbled reply.
Don’t worry about the angel stuff, that’s in hand. Forget it, Yakov–soon you’ll have all you can imagine and ten thousand times more. Drive them on, Yakov, drive your people on. Make the clocks tick faster.
7
Kistler had given Lom an envelope with a thousand roubles in it and a place name.
I hear whispers, Lom. Phrases. Vitigorsk, in the Pyalo-Orlanovin oblast. Post Office Box 932. That’s all I can give you. Make of it what you can
A thousand roubles was more than Lom had ever held at one time in his life. He bought an overnight bag, some shirts and a 35-millimetre camera (a Kono like Vishnik had, but the newer model with integral rangefinder and a second lens, a medium telephoto). He also bought ten rolls of fast monochrome film and an airline ticket to Orlanograd. From there he took buses. Four days and several wasted detours found him set down at a crossroads in a blank space on the map. He shouldered his bag and began to walk west into the rhythmic glaring of the late-afternoon sun.
Grasslands and low, bald, rolling hills.
Lom measured his progress by the heavy pylons and the rows of upright poles that stretched ahead of him: high-tension power cables and telephone wires. If the wires and cables were heading somewhere, then so was he.
The road was straight and black and new, a single asphalt strip edged with gravel. Wind hummed in the wires, slapped his coat at his knees, scoured his face with fine dry sandy dust. He’d never felt so alone or so exposed. He was the only moving thing for miles. Whether he was going forwards or backwards he had no idea. There was no plan. He put no trust in Kistler, except that Kistler’s demolition of his proofs had the compulsion of truth, and Kistler had shown him a different tree to shake.