One tree’s as good as another in that regard.
The world’s turned upside down, and I’m the terrorist now and this is Kantor’s world. Everything is changed and gone and new, and I am become the surly lone destroyer, opening gaps into different futures by destruction, ripping away the surfaces to show what’s underneath.
One target’s as good as another when everything is connected to everything else.
Maybe I’m just a sore loser, and this is nothing but resentfulness and grudge.
I never saw Maroussia on the river. Trick of memory. Didn’t happen.
Six years. I’ve been alone too long.
A huge truck thundered up the road behind him. He had to step off into the grass to let it pass. Three coupled sixteen-wheeled containers in a cloud of diesel fumes and dust, the wheels high as a man. There were no markings on the raw corrugated-steel container walls, just fixings bleeding streaks of rust. The driver stared down at him from the elevation of his cab, a blurred face behind a grimy window. Lom nodded to him but the driver didn’t respond.
Time to get off the road.
The forty-eight-wheel truck dwindled into the horizon and silence, leaving him alone under the weight of the endless grey sky. Lom turned and left the asphalt behind him. The grass was coarse under his feet, tussocky and sparse.
For the first time in far too long he opened himself to the openness around him. There was a hole in his head. A faint flickering drum-pulse under fine silky skin. A tissue of permeable separation.
He let the wind off the hills pass through him. The soil under the grass was thin. A skimming of roots and dust. He ignored it and felt for the rock beneath, the bones of the living planet. Beneath his feet were the sinews of the world, the roots of ancient mountains, knotted in the slow tension of their viscid churn. The low surrounding hills were eroded solid thunderheads.
Lom’s heart slowed and his breathing became more quiet and easy. He kept on reaching out, down into the dark of the ground, till he touched the heart rock of the world: not the sedimentary rocks, silt of seashell and bone, but the true heart rock, extruded from the simmering star stuff at the planetary heart. Layered seams of granite and lava, dolerites, rhyolites, gabbros and tuffs, buckled, faulted, shattered and upheaved under the pressure of their own shifting. Rock that moved too slowly and endured too long to grieve. He felt the currents of awareness moving through it, eddying and swirling, drifting and dispersing: sometimes obscure and indifferent and sometimes watchful; sometimes withdrawing inwards to collect in pools of deep dark heat, and sometimes sharpening into intense, brilliant, crystallised moments of attention.
There was life in the air. The ground wore a faint penumbra of rippling light like an electrostatic charge, the latent consciousness of the stone fields. He let the currents play across his skin. Felt them as a stirring of the fine small hairs of his arms and the turbulence of his blood. He was alive to the invisible touch of the deep planetary rock. It reached into his body to touch the chambers of his heart.
This is who I am. I will not lose sight of this again.
The grasslands were not empty. Everywhere, invisible vivid small animal presences burrowed and hunted. Bright black eyes watched him from cover. The high-tension power lines were black and sheathed in sleeves of smoke. When he opened his mouth to breathe, their quivering tasted metallic on his tongue.
Rizhin’s new world was thin and brittle. Translucent. Lom reached up into the sky and made it rain simply because he was thirsty and he could.
Beyond the skyline was the place he was going to. He knew the way.
Walking in the endless forest, Maroussia Shaumian feels the stirring of the trees and the cool damp touch of moving air against her cheek. The faintest ragged edge of a distant storm.
Chapter Eight
1
Vacation season came early for the Central Committee that year. A motion was tabled in plenum in the name of Genrickh Gribov, Secretary for War: ‘To grant Osip Rizhin a holiday of twenty days.’ It was a formality, preserving the fiction that Papa Rizhin worked for them; naturally the motion was approved by acclamation.
The wound on Rizhin’s face was healing more slowly than he’d have liked: the assassin’s bullet had reawakened the old problem with his teeth. He wanted southern sunshine, a change of food and good dentistry, so it was with some relief that he settled into his personal train for Dacha Number Nine in the mountains overlooking Zusovo on the Karima coast. Lobster and citrus trees.
VKBD detachments secured the route, six men per kilometre. Sixteen companies guarded the telephone lines and eight armoured trains continually patrolled the track.
And where Rizhin went the Central Committee followed. Holidays were serious business in Rizhin’s New Vlast. Gribov and Kistler, Yashina, Ekel and the rest packed hastily and piled into their cars and trains. They all had dachas in the Zusovo heights. Hunder Rond flew on ahead to be there when they came.
2
Engineer-Technician 1st Class Mikkala Avril works fourteen hours a day in a windowless room in the basement of a nine-floor block in the centre of the Vitigorsk complex, pausing only to bolt food and sleep in her one-room apartment in the House of Residence: bed, bookshelf, desk and chair.
They’ve given her a bank of von Altmann machines, six of them wired in linear sequence. Each machine has six cathode tubes, and a tube is 12,024 bits of data in 32 x 32 array. Each phosphorescent face is read, written and refreshed a hundred thousand times a second by electron beam. The smell of ozone and burning dust thickens the air. At the end of every shift her skin and clothes and hair stink of it. The odour pervades her dreams.
Her task is calculating pressure, force and trajectory. The vessels under development at Vitigorsk are larger and heavier than Proof of Concept by orders of magnitude–crude sledgehammer monsters–and the question presented to her for consideration is, one pressure plate or two? It’s a matter of running the models again and again. Mikkala Avril is trusted to work alone, unsupervised, in silence, with her von Altmann array. She works through the models diligently. Progress is ahead of target.
But something is going wrong. Day by day Mikkala Avril’s wide-eyed joy at the greatness of her purpose, her privilege, the task she’s been selected for, is growing hollow. The sustenance it gives her is getting thin. The song of the New Vlast wearies her heart and jangles her nerves, even as her skin grows chalky-grey and her cropped hair loses its lustre.
The power of the detonations required to haul such behemoths crawling up the gravity well is terrifying: the ground destruction would gouge city-wide craters in the rock, obliteration perimeters measured in tens of miles. Mikkala Avril understands the numbers. She knows what they mean. But that’s not the trouble: the continent is wide, the atmosphere is deep and broad.