In her rest periods she has ventured out into the Vitigorsk complex. She’s seen the glow on the skyline at night from the forging zone, and she knows convict labour works there. The children sleeping on concrete. She’s seen the people trucks come in. Yet that’s not the trouble either: the labourers reforge their consciousness as they work; they welcome it and leave gladdened and improved. An efficient system that brings benefit to all.
No, it’s the double mission parameter that corrodes her confidence. She doesn’t understand it. It has not been explained.
She has not one model to work with, but two. Vessel Design One must hold propellant bombs sufficient to take it out of planetary orbit and speed it on its way across the cosmos into the sidereal age, and it will carry a store of empty casings to be fuelled on the moons of the outer planets. Staging posts. But Vessel Design Two, even more massive and with a payload provision twice that of Design One, needs no more power than to lift it into near orbit. A fleet of several hundred platforms, each dwarfing any ocean-going ship, lifted into orbit two hundred miles above the ground and settled stable there? What is the reason for this? It has not been explained. The variable is unaccounted for, and that’s a lacuna of trust, a withholding of confidence that tugs at the edge of her and begins to unravel conviction.
She isn’t fully conscious of what’s happening. She doesn’t have the right words, and if she ever did she’s forgotten them now, the vocabulary of doubt eroded by the attrition of continually reset clocks, the accelerating repetition of year zero. What she feels is the uneasy itch of curiosity and upset at a distressing flaw in the machine. She takes it as a shortcoming in her own comprehension and sets about rectifying the fault, but her superiors frown and brush her off with critical remarks and the repetition of familiar platitudes. It never occurs to her that they don’t know either.
Unhappy and alone, Mikkala Avril lingers in the refectory over the evening meal. Having no circle of companions (the theoretical mathematicians exclude her, so do the engineers of the von Altmann machines), she attaches herself to other groups and listens. She gets to know the bio-engineers–the humanity-synthesisers, the warriors against death–and picks up fragments of their talk. There are rumours of strange zones where clocks run slow and the dead climb from their graves. Quietly she joins the groups that gather around people returned from expeditions to find such places, which they say are shrinking fast and will soon be gone. She listens to the news of specimens collected. Samples of earth and air. But nobody knows or cares about the parameters of vessel design.
A chemist called Sergei Ivanich Varin, eager to seduce her, invites her to see the resurrectionists’ laboratory after hours.
‘Come on,’ he says. ‘I’ll show you the freak shop.’
Strip lights flicker blue. The sickly stench of formaldehyde. Shelf after shelf of human babies in jars: misshapen foetuses and dead-born homunculi with bulging eyes, flesh softened and white like they’ve been too long under the sea. A boneless head, creased, flattened and flopped sideways. A torso collapsed in flaps of slumped waxy skin, diminutive supplicating arms raised like chicken wings. A lump with two heads and no internal organs, its shoulders ending in a ragged chewed-up mess.
Mikkala Avril coughs on choked-back sickness. Varin comes up close behind and nuzzles his face into her neck.
‘No need to be frightened of the fishes. Big Sergei’s here.’
She feels his hand sliding inside her jacket and blouse to cup her breast.
3
The lurid sleepless glare of the arc lamps and foundries and waste gas burn-off plumes of the Vitigorsk Closed Enclave was visible from two hours’ drive away. A billboard on the approach road celebrated the shattering of the Vlast record for speed pouring concrete. TAKE SATISFACTION, LEADING WORKERS OF VITIGORSK! THE ENGINEERING CADRES SALUTE YOU! YOU HAVE RAISED A NEW CITY AT A PACE HITHERTO THOUGHT POSSIBLE ONLY FOR DEMOLITION! The entire ten-mile sprawl was enclosed by barbed wire and observation towers.
Lom brought the truck to a halt at the checkpoint, turned off the engine and swung down from the cab into a wall of noxious chemical fumes, plant noise, the smell of hot metal and the brilliance of floodlights bright as day. A guard in the black uniform of the Parallel Sector came over to check his papers. Two more hung back and covered him with automatic weapons.
The guard frowned.
‘You’re three hours late.’
Lom shrugged.
‘Brake trouble,’ he said. ‘Fixed now.’
He shoved the sheaf of documents towards the guard. They were creased and marked with oily finger marks. Lom was wearing the truck driver’s scuffed boots and shapeless coat. His hands were filthy.
‘I could do with a wash,’ he said. ‘And I haven’t eaten since breakfast.’
The guard glared at him.
‘The transport workers’ kitchen’s closed. You’re late.’ He went through the papers slowly and carefully and took a slow walk around the truck, checking the seals. Comparing serial numbers with his own list. Kicking the tyres for no reason. Making a meal of it. Bastard.
Lom’s heart was pounding. He smeared a greasy hand across his face, rubbing his eyes and stifling a yawn. There was a tiny sleeping compartment at the back of the cabin. The truck driver was in there, hidden under a blanket, trussed up with a rope, his own sock stuffed into his mouth.
The guard came back and handed Lom the signed-off papers. He looked disappointed.
Lom had wanted to come in late to avoid other drivers and catch the night-shift security: less chance they’d know the regular drivers by sight, that was the calculation. He hadn’t reckoned on a guard who was bored and looking for trouble.
‘What was the trouble with the brakes?’ the guard said, still reluctant to let him go.
‘Hydraulics leak,’ said Lom. ‘I patched it up. It should hold till I get back.’
He knew nothing about trucks and hoped the guard didn’t either.
Please don’t look in the cab.
The guard signalled to the kiosk and the first barrier lifted.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Bay Five. Follow the signs. Check-in won’t open till six but you can park there, and if you walk over towards the liquid oxygen generators there’s a twenty-four-hour rest room for the duty maintenance. You might be able to get something to eat there. Maybe someone’ll look at those hydraulics for you.’
Lom nodded. ‘Thanks. Appreciate that.’
The gates of Bay Five were closed. No one was about. Beyond the chain-link fence was a row of dark containerless cabs. Lom checked on the driver. The man glared back at him with hot, frightened angry eyes. He pulled against the ropes and grunted through the sock in his mouth.
Lom hauled him up and propped him in a sitting position.
‘Someone will find you,’ he said, ‘but not before morning. Don’t try to call out; you’ll make yourself throw up and that’ll be very bad for you. You’ll choke on it. Sit tight and wait.’
The man grunted again. It sounded like a curse.
Lom left the truck on the unlit apron in front of Bay Five, locked it and dropped the keys through a drainage grating. He reckoned he had seven hours before anyone would investigate. Maybe another half-hour before the alarm was raised.
So what the fuck do I do now?