She dragged the body up the steps and laid it on its back. Water seeped out and puddled on the stone. The eyes were open and glassy, the pupils darkly dilated. In the dim grey dawn the face and hands were tinged an ominous blue. She made a desperate, rushed examination. There was no pulse at the wrist or neck, and no breath from the stiffened, cyanotic mouth.
‘He’s not gone,’ she said to herself. ‘He’s not gone.’ She was surprised how much it mattered.
With a desperate energy Maroussia pumped the lifeless chest with the heel of her hand and forced her own breath into the waterlogged lungs. Every time she paused to rest, she saw the ragged-edged hole in Lom’s forehead. It oozed a dark rivery fluid.
She worked and worked, pounding the inert chest, forcing breath into the cold mouth. At last she collapsed across him, her chest heaving.
It was no good.
But at that moment Lom gave a powerful jerk and twisted out from under her weight. He rolled over onto his side, retching and vomiting black river water.
Emptied of the river, Lom sank back into unconsciousness, but he was breathing now, and the blue of his face began to flush faintly in the rising light of morning.
Somehow she managed to heave him back into the boat. There was nothing else to do. She could not carry him, and she would not leave him.
She unshipped the oars and pushed the boat free of the landing place and out into the current. Pulling out into midstream she felt the force of the current seize her. The subsiding flood waters were pouring out of the city, down towards the marshes and the sea. The boat took its place among the detritus, the floating wreckage and the crewless vessels drifting, bumping and turning on the dark foam-flecked current. There was no need to row. It would be better — less conspicuous — if she did not. But Lom’s body was icy to the touch. He needed warmth, and quickly, or he would die.
Maroussia pulled Lom’s cloak over his head, stuffed it away at the stern, and got his shirt, boots and trousers off. His body, naked but for his underclothes, was white as chalk. She took off her own coat and dress and lay down next to him, pulling the clothes over them both and taking him in her arms like a lover. His body was cold, clammy, inert, like something dead, and the cold seeped from him into her. She shivered uncontrollably, but she pushed herself closer against him and closed her eyes.
The Mir surged forward in the cold of the morning, taking their small vessel in its grasp, carrying them onward, downstream on turbid waters under a dark pewter sky, past the waterfronts of the waking city.
Archangel probes a sudden strangeness, and realisation almost shatters him.
He is appalled.
He is brittle.
A new fact bursts open, flowering into his awareness, staining it with a rigid poison.
Blinded by the profusion of the millions — he has not noticed — not until this moment — the faint, brushing touches — the trails — the spraints — of those he cannot see. There are time streams, and people in them — story threads, small voices — that are not part of his future.
He begins to sense them now. He detects — faintly, peripherally — the tremor of their passing and knows what it means for him. Suddenly, disaster is near. At the very moment of his triumph, failure is becoming possible.
In the forest he heaves and struggles, desperate to release the embedded hill of himself from his rock prison. He pulls and shudders, straining at the crust of the earth. Stronger now, he feels the give of it, just a little, a fraction, and the snow roars and slides off his shoulders. For a moment he believes he might succeed. But it is not enough. He cannot move, he cannot rise, he cannot fly.
He sends his mind instead, the whole of it, the entire focused armoury of his attention forced down one narrow beam, ignoring everything except the hint of one small boat and its impossible cargo of change.
He cannot see them, he cannot find them, not himself: they are somehow hidden. But they are there, and there are — he reasons — others who will be able to see them with their jelly-and-electromagnetism oculars.
He bursts his way into first one human mind, then another, and another, a roaring angel voice.
WHERE ARE THEY? WHERE ARE THEY?
A sailor falls, bleeding from the eyes. Archangel jumps to another.
WHERE ARE THEY?
A typist collapses to the floor, fitting, speaking in tongues. Archangel jumps to another.
WHERE ARE THEY?
An engineer splatters vomit across the floor and tears at his ears until they hang in tatters and bleed. Archangel jumps to another.
Archangel leaps from mind to mind, faster and faster, finding nothing. Yet they must be found. Now. Before it is too late.
Part Two
64
The giant Aino-Suvantamoinen lay on his back on the soft estuarial river-mud of the White Marshes. It was almost like floating. It was more like being a water-spider, resting on the meniscus of a pool, feeling the tremor of breezes brushing across the surface. He kept his eyes closed and his hands spread flat and palm-downward on the drum-tight, quivering skin of the mud. He was listening with his hands to the mood of the waters, feeling the way they were flowing and what they meant. He drew in long slow lungfuls of river air, tasting it with his tongue and nose and the back of his throat. There was ice and fog and rain on the air, and the exhalations of trees. He knew the savour of every tree — he could tell birch from alder, blackthorn from willow, aspen from spruce — and he could taste the distinctive breath of each of the great rivers as they mingled in the delta’s throat: the Smaller Chel, the Mecklen, the Vod, and above all the rich complexity of the Mir, with traces of the city caught like burrs in her hair. Everything that he could taste and hear and feel spoke to him. It was the voice of the world.
He was floating on the cusp — the infinitesimal point of balance — between past and future. The past was one, but futures were many, an endlessly bifurcating flowering abundance of possibilities all trying to become, all struggling to grow out of the precarious restless racing-forwards of now.
Aino-Suvantamoinen sat up in the near-darkness — his heart pounding, his head spinning — and scooped up handfuls of cold mud. Cupping his palms together, he buried his face in the slather for coolness and rest. There was something on the Mir that morning such as he had never known before. The river was excited, it was strung out and buzzing with promise. In three centuries of listening, no other morning like this one. A boat was coming, the river told him: a boat freighted with significance, freighted with change. New futures were adrift on the Mir, and also — astonishingly — he’d never felt, never even conceived of anything like this — a new past.
The giant picked himself up from the mud. He had to hurry. He had to reach the great locks and set his shoulder to the enormous ancient beams. He had to open the sluices and close the weir gates before the rushing of the flood carried everything past. Before it was too late.