‘I have seen this future! Red rockets, curvaceous, climbing on parabolas of steam and fire. making the sky seem small and wintry-blue. Because the sky is small. We can take it in our fists! I have seen these rockets of the future rising into space, carrying a new human type to their chosen grounds. Individuals whose moral daring makes them vibrate at a speed that turns motion invisible. There are new forms in the future, my friends, and they need to be filled with blood. We are the first of a new humankind. Where death is temporary a million deaths mean nothing.’
After the dinner and the dancing, Rizhin led the way to his cinema. Blue armchairs in pairs, a table between each pair: mineral water, more grappa, chocolate and cigarettes. Rugs on the grey carpet. They watched an illicit gangster film, imported from the Archipelago: men in baggy suits with wide lapels fought over a stolen treasure and a dancing girl with silver hair. Then came a Mirgorod Studios production, Courageous Battleship! Torpedoed in the Yarmskoye Sea, a hundred shipwrecked sailors line an iceberg to sing a song of sadness, a requiem for their lost ship.
Halfway through the film, Rizhin leaned across and gripped the elbow of Selenacharsky, secretary for culture.
‘Why are the movies of the Archipelago better than ours?’
Selenacharsky turned pale in the semi-darkness and scribbled something in his notebook.
Dawn was coming up when they filed out of the cinema into the scented courtyard. Kistler was going to his car when Rizhin appeared at his elbow.
‘I shoot in the mornings at the pistol range. Join me, eh, Lukasz? We’ll have a chat, just you and me. Man to man.’
Kistler groaned inwardly. His head hurt.
‘Of course, Osip.’
‘Good. Nine thirty sharp.’
3
Kistler managed a couple of hours’ sleep and returned to Rizhin’s dacha stale and depressed, unbreakfasted, the dregs of the wine and the grappa still in his blood, a sour taste of coffee on his tongue. The dinner of the night before weighed heavy in his stomach. He felt queasy.
He followed the sound of gunfire to Rizhin’s shooting range, a crudely functional concrete block among almond trees. Vasilisk the bodyguard, six foot three, blond and beautiful, was lounging on a chair by the door, white cotton T-shirt tight across his chest. He was wearing white tennis shoes and regarded Kistler with sleepy expressionless sky-blue eyes.
Kistler nodded to him and entered the shooting range.
Vasilisk rose lazily to his feet and padded in behind him. Closed the door, leaned against the wall and folded his arms. Kistler watched the muscles of the bodyguard’s shoulders sliding smoothly. His thickened honey-gold forearms.
Rizhin was alone inside the building, bright and fresh in shirtsleeves, firing at twenty-five-yard targets with a pistol. Three rounds then a pause. You could cover the holes in the target with the palm of your hand.
He paused to reload. The gun was fat and heavy in his swollen fists but his fingers on the magazine were lightning-quick. Nimble. Practised.
‘Do you know firearms, Lukasz?’
‘Not really.’
‘You should. Our existence depends on them. The powerful should study and understand the foundations of their power. This, for instance, is a Sepora .44 magnum. Our VKBD officers carry these. Heavy in the hand, but they shoot very powerful shells. Very destructive. They tend to make a mess of the human body. The removal of limbs. The bursting of skulls. Large holes in the stomach or torso. Butchery at a distance. Not a pretty death.’ He turned and fired seven shots in rapid succession. The noise was deafening. An unmistakable acrid smell.
Rizhin offered the gun to Kistler.
‘Would you like to shoot, Lukasz? It’s important to keep one’s skills up to scratch’
‘No,’ said Kistler. ‘Later perhaps. I drank too much grappa last night.’
Rizhin shrugged.
‘Your hand’s trembling,’ he said.
Kistler couldn’t stop himself looking down at his hands. It was a sign of submission. He cursed himself inwardly.
Careful.
He held his hands out in front of him, palms down.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said.
Rizhin ejected the magazine from the pistol and reloaded, taking a fresh magazine from his pocket.
‘You enjoyed our evening then?’ he said. ‘I hope so.’
‘Of course! It’s good to know one’s colleagues better. The holiday season is valuable. Time well spent.’
‘I thought you were bored. You seemed bored. Gribov can be overpowering.’
‘Not at all. A little tired perhaps. I’d had a long journey.’
Rizhin raised his arm and squeezed off three rapid shots. ‘But you keep a distance–I see you doing it–and that’s sound. I admire it in you. Music and feasting are excellent things, Lukasz; they reduce the bestial element in us. Song and dance, food and wine, good company: they calm the soul and make one amiable towards humanity. But we aren’t ready for softness yet, you and I. Today is not the time to stroke people’s heads. Of course, opposition to all violence is the ultimate ideal for men like us, but you have to build the house before you hang the pictures. Your attitude last night was a criticism of me, which I accept.’
‘No. Not at all, Osip. I only—’
‘But yes, it was, and I accept it. I’ve sent the others home, you know. I’ve packed them all off back to Mirgorod, back to their desks. There is work to be done and they must get to it.’
‘What? All of them?’ said Kistler.
‘I thought you’d be pleased. Our colleagues bore you, Lukasz, isn’t that so? Be honest with me. I’ll tell you frankly, they bore me too. For now I must use people like them, but they’re narrow, they have limited minds. Not like you and me. We see the bigger picture.’
Where is this going?
Vasilisk the bodyguard moved across to a wooden chair. The neat brown leather holster nestled in the small of his back bobbed with the rhythm of his buttocks as he walked. Vasilisk settled into the chair, crossed legs stretched out in front of him, and absorbed himself in studying his fingernails.
Rizhin was turning his pistol over with thick clumsy-looking fingers.
‘What I was trying to say last night,’ he continued, ‘but I was drunk and over-poetical… what I was trying to say is that this–this, all around us, our work and our diplomacy and our cars and our dachas–this is not the point to which history is leading us. This is only the beginning: the first letter of the first word of the first sentence of the first book in the great library of futurity. You see this as well as I do.’
‘There’s a lot more to be done,’ said Kistler cautiously. ‘Of course. Certainly. Our industry…’
Rizhin fished out three more shells from his pocket, ejected the magazine and pressed them into place one by one. Replaced the magazine in the pistol.
‘I’m talking philosophically,’ he said. ‘The moral compass is not absolute, you see. It has changed and we have a new morality now. A new right. A new good. A new true. Our predecessors were scoundrels; the angels were an obfuscation, the things of the forest bedbugs. Leeches. A distortion of the moral gravity. Whatever serves the New Vlast is moral. That’s how it must be, for now. Where all death is temporary then death is nothing. Killing is conscienceless. A million deaths, a billion deaths, are nothing.’