Alongside him Florian ran, easily keeping pace. He was a grey wolf running, and he was Florian, who could have run the other way and might have saved himself, but did not.
Wolf-Florian ran in heart-bursting despair, his still-tender ribs sending bright jabs of pain shooting through his chest. The Shaumian woman was too near the Pollandore. He would not reach her now. He would not prevent her. She would get there.
He might have stopped her when he had the chance. But he had not decided, and that had become in the end his decision.
He would live with the consequences.
If only for a short while.
The Pollandore is in front of Maroussia. Neither close nor far away. It hangs in no time and no space. Waiting for her. Inviting her to go on. The gap that separates her from the Pollandore is not a gap in this world. It is the gap between worlds. Unbridgeable. Unmeasurable by any planetary metrication. Worlds apart and not apart at all. Uncrossable.
Maroussia crossed.
Miles away a technician flicked a switch on a control panel. A jolt of electrical current surged along the long rubber-sheathed cables that snaked for miles across the snow. The current reached Uncle Vanya’s big fat cousin and gave him a nudge.
Detonation.
A star ignited and the world broke open into light.
The angel suit that carried Vissarion Lom knew what this was. This was home. The angel flesh surged. It flowered. It was itself a skin of woven light. Against the storm of starlight it stood, made itself of light, not moving but moving, pace against pace, light into light, going nowhere. For one moment of eternity time itself slowed and paused. Lom, held safe within the cohesive web of light, was everywhere and nowhere, now and for ever.
The snow was gone and the whole country was lit with an intensity brighter than any midday sun. Gold and purple and blue. Sheets of rock lit with more than planetary clarity. There were mountain ranges in the distance, low on the horizon, he had not seen before. Every fold and gully and snow-covered peak was clear and vivid and scarcely beyond the reach of his hand.
Then the light passed.
Lom was running again, running against the burning wind towards an enormous ball of fire that churned and rolled towards him, and churned and rolled up into the burning sky. Climbing for miles. Lemon. Crimson. Green. The cloud of fire rolled over him like a wave and gathered Lom in.
The wind of light from the new star brushed grey-wolf-Florian-running out of the world in a stream of particles too small for soot.
Archangel screams in the consummation of his joy.
Lom ran. The ground itself was boiling. A roaring column of heat and dust and burning earth lifted the huge flower of fire from his shoulders and carried it up. High overhead the explosion cloud boiled and swelled and spread, blocking out the sky, shedding its own darkening light: a hard rain falling.
The Pollandore was ahead of him, turning gently on its own orbit, following its own parabolas of fall, there but not there, a sphere of greenish milky brightness the size of a small house. It was a survivor. He ran towards it.
Lom stopped in front of the Pollandore and stood there, braced against the howling winds of desolation. He reached out to touch it. It moved with gentle resistance at the pressure of the Lom-in-angel hand and swung back into position.
He was trembling.
Maroussia was not there.
Maroussia had gone into the dark.
Lom felt a hand on his shoulder.
‘Vissarion?’
Her voice. He didn’t want to turn and look. It wouldn’t be her.
He turned.
‘Yes?’ he said.
Maroussia was standing there, hesitant, smiling. Her eyes were different. She wasn’t the same. Standing in sunlight under a different sky.
‘It isn’t you,’ he said.
‘Yes. It is.’
She was in sunshine and he was under dry burning rain, encased in angel light. But none of it was there. He put his arms around her and smelled woodsmoke and summer warmth in her hair. He kissed her mouth and felt her hand pressing against his back.
Then she drew away from him. The distance between them was widening rapidly though neither of them had moved. The Pollandore was changing now, the interior pulsing with milky light to the rhythm of a slow inaudible heart. It was shrinking, condensing, diminishing, falling into itself, and the fall was a very long way and no distance at all.
Maroussia’s expression changed. Darkened. Her gaze turned inward.
‘Oh,’ she said quietly. ‘Oh… I see… I see what I have done… I didn’t know.’
‘What is it? Tell me.’
She shook her head. Her eyes were wide and dark.
‘I have to go now,’ she said.
‘Wherever you go,’ said Lom ‘whatever comes next, I will find you.’
‘No… I’m sorry, no… you can’t follow, not where I’m going, nobody can, not any more. The way is shut now and must be held shut. I didn’t think it would be like this… but there’s no choice… I’m so sorry…’
Smaller and smaller and further away the Pollandore went. It had not moved, but it was separated from Lom by a great and growing distance. It was a mark of misty brightness on a far horizon, small as a fruit. He could have reached out and held it in his hand.
And Maroussia was not there at all.
The Pollandore folded in upon itself until it was nowhere, until it occupied no space and no time, until it was a concentrated singular point of unsustainable possibility balanced on the imperceptible edge between now and not.
And then it exploded, and the explosion passed through him like it was nothing at all.
The shockwave flashed outwards from the unsustainable zero point–not light, not heat, not sound, not energy of any kind, but a cataclysm-detonation of consequence and change–and nothing was like it had been before, and everything was the same, except that Lom was there, in the star-burned wastes of Novaya Zima at the foot of Uncle Vanya’s twisted gantry, a frozen cooling torsion-structure under the desultory falling-to-earth of radioactive rain, and Maroussia was not there at all.
Archangel screams again. He sees the implication of what has been done. This time his scream is not for joy.
Lom stood in the cooling ground zero of the exploded Pollandore and the future spread out round him, a carpet unrolled in all directions at the speed of light. Whether Maroussia had done it, or whether it had been done to Maroussia, for good or for ill, it was done, and what came afterwards would all be consequence of that.
‘I will come looking for you,’ he said aloud to the echoless aftermath world.
93
The world was changed, changed utterly, and the world still felt the same, because it was the same, except that time was all clockwork and inevitable now. History roared on like a building wave across the open ocean, like an express on a straight and single track roaring ahead into an obvious future. Like the train rolling at full speed from Novaya Zima towards Mirgorod, hauling its cargo of a hundred yellow 180mm calibre atomic artillery shells and Hektor Shulmin in the solitary passenger car.
There was a second telephone on the desk in Rizhin’s office in the Armoury. He’d had it installed the day he arrived, with instructions that it should be given a certain number, which he provided. The number was of the utmost importance. Nobody was to know that number and nobody was to call it, not ever: Rizhin was quite clear on that point. He left precise instructions with his staff on what to do if it rang when he was not there.