Lom and Florian watched from the cover of the trees. It was a town for thousands of people, tens of thousands, freighted in piece by piece across the continent, secretly, and assembled by dying slaves.
‘And the labour is still coming,’ said Lom. ‘There were half a dozen trains yesterday, at least. So where are they? The town’s not for them. That’s not housing for penal labour. I don’t see camps. I don’t see factories. I don’t see cranes and holes in the ground. So where do they go?’
The rail track crossed the valley floor on viaducts and embankments, bisected the township, cut though an expanse of marshalling yards to the north, and plunged on into a low dark mouth in the mountainside.
‘The mountain,’ said Florian. ‘They go into the mountain.’
There was a gate where the railway entered the township. An asphalt road came out and looped away into the trees to circle the town. The gate stood open, the guard post deserted. It was the middle of the afternoon.
‘No security,’ said Lom. ‘Lazy.’
‘Isolation,’ said Florian. ‘Who could find their way here? And who could leave? Where would they go?’
‘We got here,’ said Lom.
There was a sign at the gate. A huge billboard meant to be read from incoming trains.
They walked into the town unchallenged. It seemed colder in the streets than it had been under the trees. Colder than Mirgorod, but not the same cold. Mirgorod cold had an edge of ocean dampness, but the air in Novaya Zima was dry. Lom felt its bitterness desiccating his face, as if his lips would crack. His breath wisped drably away. The snow on the pavement crunched underfoot. Dusty snow, like crystallised ash.
For the first ten blocks or so the streets were given over to huge communal barracks for collective living. Kommunalki. Lom had read about such new-style buildings–embodiments of a new, less individualistic mode of life, the basis for modern developments in the industrial belt to the south–but he hadn’t seen any, not till now. The buildings were new but already stained and shabby: hastily thrown up to a uniform pattern, the concrete blistered and bled rust where the steel reinforcing rods were too near the surface. Street-level heating vents breathed steam clouds across the pavements. On the ground floors there were public dining halls, public laundries, public baths. They walked past a school with street-level windows. NOVAYA ZIMA JUNIOR LYCEUM FOR THE SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF WORKERS.
Workers? Lom studied the people in the streets. They had neat sombre clothes and smooth white hands. They were clerks, administrators, secretaries, teachers, junior white-collar engineers: more than half were young women. They looked efficient. Nobody was poor and nobody was old and everybody was moving along, eyes down, unspeaking, each in their own small sphere of inwardness and temporary privacy. The rail transit rumbled overhead on its single track.
Nearer the centre of town the buildings were taller and better built. Polygons of steel and glass, each set back in its own apron of concrete and paving. Benches. Kiosks. Cafés. Parks behind railings, leafless and wintry. A deserted outdoor skating rink. An open-air swimming pool with a green and white tiled façade under a low curved roof. Scarves of steam drifted across the surface of the water. Swimmers in bathing caps ploughed steadily up and down the lanes. RESTORE YOURSELVES, CITIZENS! LEISURE REBUILDS! HEALTH IS A PLEASURABLE DUTY!
Florian stopped outside a restaurant with a wide glossy vitrine. the magnetic bakery. Shining tables of polished yellow deal on legs of tubular chrome. It was almost empty.
‘We should split up,’ he said. ‘We need to know when Chazia is coming. It’ll be easier if I go alone.’
‘Why?’ said Lom.
‘Because one person is better,’ said Florian.
‘So why you not me?’
‘Because they will tell me what we need to know.’
‘You’re just going to walk into a VKBD station and ask them?’
‘No,’ said Florian. ‘Captain Vorush Iliodor will ask them. Captain Iliodor is Commander Chazia’s aide-de-camp. I carry his identification and warrant cards.’
‘Out of uniform and without Chazia? They’ll want to know what you’re doing here. They’ll want to know why you don’t already know her plans better than they do.’
‘They may wonder,’ said Florian. ‘In my experience they will not ask.’
‘Do you even look like this Iliodor? What if somebody there knows him?’
Florian raised an eyebrow quizzically.
‘Oh,’ said Lom. ‘Of course. Sorry.’
‘We’ll meet back here,’ said Florian. ‘Give me a couple of hours. Three at most.’ He gave Lom his knapsack. ‘You’d better keep this. It’s out of character for Iliodor. There’s money in the side pocket.’
81
Lom wandered the streets aimlessly, angry and frustrated. For days he had been a passenger, a tagger-along, abandoned now to his own devices. He saw the force of Florian’s logic but he didn’t like it. He’d left Mirgorod thousands of miles to the south and west, burning on the edge of war, and he felt Maroussia’s loss as an emptiness next to him. I’ve just been pissing about, he thought. And I’m still just pissing about.
He found himself in a shopping street. Modistes sold suits and gowns and patent shoes at impossible prices. Bright-lit displays offered cameras, radios, gramophones, perfumes, chocolate, southern sparkling wines, but it was all garish, ersatz and shoddy, and nobody was buying. He walked on up Dukhonin Prospect–six lanes wide, almost empty of traffic–and into the blustery immenseness of Dukhonin Square. The square was lined with gleaming new buildings. The Polytechnical College. The Institute of Metallurgy. The Faculty of Mathematical Design. The Engineers’ Euharmonia was giving a concert that night at the House of Culture: a poster next to the entrance promised Zoffany’s PSYCHO-INDUSTRIAL SYMPHONY FOR VOICE AND NEW-STYLE ORCHESTRA, WITH THEATRE OF PUPPETS.
Absences worried at Lom. Absences frayed his patience. They made him edgy. The absence of Maroussia. The absence of Chazia. The absence of trainload after trainload of conscript workers. Stolen persons. Thousands of them. They went on north, through the town and into the mountain and disappeared.
Lom wanted a closer look at the mountain.
There was a station on Dukhonin Square. The ticket hall was a brightly lit lofty palace. Stainless-steel arches. Walls of marble and malachite. Chrome fittings. Electric chandeliers. The size and solidity of the place dwarfed the few travellers passing through. Bronze bas reliefs on the walls represented the achievements of science and industry: dynamos and hydroelectric dams; Magnitograd; the Novozhd Factory; mining engineers drilling and excavating the torso of a huge fallen angel. Slogans carved in marble shouted: THOUGHT IS LABOUR! PRIVILEGE IS SACRIFICE! CONTRIBUTION IS FULFILMENT! CADRES DECIDE EVERYTHING! CITIZEN, YOU ARE THE CONDUIT TO THE FUTURE!