Wolfhound Century: Radiant State Part 5

The human woman dark-eyed Maroussia Shaumian opened her mouth to answer Fraiethe. She felt again the dark earth roots and the watchful sentience of rain. A wind stirred the leaves and moved across her face.

'Nothing,' she said. 'I would have you do nothing. There is another way. '

3.

Mailboat Number 437 chugged down the mighty mile-broad River Yannis. Vissarion Lom sat in the stern and watched the low wooded hills roll by. The river was slow and quiet here, taking a wide turn to the south, its green waters a highway for tugs, ferries, excursion boats and barges riding low under the weight of ore and grain and oil. Mailboat Number 437 was a dogged striver. The vibration of her engine defined Lom's world: the gentle rhythmic shocks, the slap of small waves against her iron skin. It was a world that smelled of diesel engine and pine planking and rust. Wet rope and mailbags.

Sora Shenkov, master and sole crew of Mailboat Number 437, was a big man with hard brown hands and eyes the colour of ice and sky. He wasn't a talker. Every day Lom sat in the stern and watched him work, unless it rained: then he would go below and watch the river through the specks and smears of his little cabin window. And every day Shenkov's boat made slow headway: her engine churned the screw, and her forward speed through the water exceeded the south-west slide of the Yannis by a certain number of miles, and the marginal gain acc.u.mulated. Not that Lom was keeping count. He'd earned some money and taken pa.s.sage with Shenkov. He'd paid his way. This boat-world time belonged to him. Lom had never owned a time before, but he owned this one and did not wish for it to hurry to an end.

The last six years had changed him. He had travelled far, keeping himself to himself, taking rough work where he could find it, never staying in one place long. His wanderings had taken him into the forest margins, and he had found the endless forest simply that: an endlessness of trees. There were sounds in the night and pathways that went nowhere. Above all, he had not found Maroussia. Of her no trace at all. When he came out of the forest again, months had pa.s.sed by, seasons come and gone, and he had imagined much but found nothing. He was heavily bearded now, muscular, wiry and weather-darkened, with s.h.a.ggy wheat-coloured hair. The hole in the front of his skull was nothing but a faint thumbprint visible in certain slanting lights, sun-browned and almost healed. And slowly, slowly, day by day, he was being carried down the river in Shenkov's boat. He enjoyed these days, which required no decisions, required nothing from him at all. He wasn't going anywhere in particular. His adventure was over and time had moved on. Once giants rode the timber rafts west on the Yannis, but now it was women without husbands or sons, and it seemed on the wide quiet river that it had always been so.

Swinging round a headland, the boat came up on two huge timber rafts sliding side by side downstream on the current. Rather than waste time and fuel going out into the middle pa.s.sage, Shenkov, in the little wheelhouse, gunned the engine and nosed skilfully though the channel between them. Lom reached instinctively for the boathook, not that it would help if the rafts chose to drift together and crush the boat between them. Each raft was as big as an island and carried a cl.u.s.ter of plank huts with smoking chimneys and fenced paddocks for goats and chickens. The logs were red pine, and though they were boughs and branches only, never the trunks, they were thicker and heavier by far than whole trunks of beech or oak. As the boat eased through the gap, a woman was milking a cow and speaking in a soft easy voice to her neighbour on the next raft, who was hanging out clothes to dry. Shenkov gave the women a courteous nod. The air was thick with the resinous red pine scent.

It was early evening when Mailboat Number 437 came to the timber station at Loess. Shenkov grunted in surprise. The wharves were crowded with military vessels: cruisers in brown river camouflage, crane-mounted barges loaded with stacked pontoons, a requisitioned paddle-wheel ferry painted stem to stern and smokestack in dull sky grey.

Shenkov managed to find a berth in front of the excise house, tucked in under the looming steel hull of a cruiser, and began to unload mailbags onto the steps. Lom left him to his work and wandered off to have a look at what the troops were doing. Sitting on a bollard at the railhead, he watched a captain of engineers supervising the unloading of vehicles from an armoured train. The engine noise was deafening. The stink of diesel fumes. Heavy grinding tracks churned the mud, splintered the boardwalks and cracked the paving. There were half-tracks and troop carriers, but also tractors and cherry pickers and things Lom hadn't seen before that looked like immense hooks and chainsaws mounted on caterpillar tracks. The sapper platoon was marshalling them off the train and onto waiting barges whose decks were already stacked high with oil drums. The sappers struggled with three Dankov D-9 battle tanks, each towing what looked like a hefty spare fuel tank. Instead of a gun, the tank turrets were equipped with a short and vicious-looking nozzle. Lom knew what they were. He'd seen flame-thrower tanks in newsreels. Seen spouts of burning kerosene ignite buildings and flush trenches. Seen the enemy run. Screaming. Burning.

The captain of engineers saw him watching and came across. Took in Lom's weathered face and thick untidy crop of beard, his mud-coloured clothes and boots.

'You came down the river with the mailboat,' he said. 'Were you ever in the forest?' He was a decent-looking man, efficient and practical, more engineer than soldier. It was a question not a challenge.

Lom nodded. 'Off and on,' he said. 'A little.'

'What's it like there?' said the captain of engineers.

Lom gave a slight shrug. 'Trees,' he said. 'Trees and rivers and lakes. Valleys and hills. Miles and miles of nothing much.' He gestured towards the fleet of machinery, the barges and the armed boats. 'You going in there? With that?'

'That's right. No secret about that.'

'It's been done before. Always got nowhere.'

Once a generation the Vlast mounted incursions against the forest. It was one of the futile repeating rhythmic spasms of the Vlast's history. Patrols wandered, ineffectual and lost, doing a bit of damage till they got bogged down in mud and thorn and disease. Lom's own parents had lived in the forest edge. Soldiers came and killed them and razed their village to the ground. The soldiers had carried him out, an orphaned infant, and left him at the Inst.i.tute in Podchornok. Lom remembered nothing of that forest time and nothing of his parents: presumably they were buried in there somewhere. Bones under the leaf mulch.

So it was to happen again.

'It'll be different this time,' the captain said. 'This time we're going to do it right. We're going in in numbers, whole divisions on a broad front, with heavy machinery and air support. Three salients along the three big rivers. What you see here is just the tip of the iceberg. We're going to cut and burn all the way through to the other side. We're going to break the myth of the forest once and for all.'

'Guess you people need something to do,' said Lom, 'now the war's over.'

'I was hoping you might give me some advice. The benefit of experience? On-the-ground knowledge? Let me buy you dinner and pick your brains.'

'Not a chance,' said Lom. 'Not a chance in a million f.u.c.king years.'

4.

Lom went back to the mailboat moored at the jetty but Shenkov wasn't there; he'd gone into Loess for supplies. Lom settled himself on the bench in the stern to wait. There was twilight and silence on the air, and a faint smell of woodsmoke. The lapping of the river's edge against the side of the boat. Tiny white moths coming to the newly lit lamp. Not many, not yet, just a few: there was still some life in the western sky. Time was quiet and hardly moving: like the broad deserted river in gathering darkness, all islands and further sh.o.r.es hidden, it seemed to rest and breathe. Huge. Secretive. Watchful.

Maroussia came to him then in the cool of the evening.

Lom knew she was there before she spoke. Before he turned to see her, he felt her as a presence emerging. Resolving out of the periphery of things. She was watching him from out of the silence and the twilight and the shoals of time.

He turned his head to look at her full on, thinking as he did so that she might not be there if he did that. But she was still there, except it was impossible to say exactly where she was. She was on the jetty and on the deck of the boat and on the river sh.o.r.e and on the water. She was very precisely somewhere, but the frame of reference that located her was not the same as his. She was solid and real but she was made from air and shadow, woven out of the river twilight. Not flimsy, but he could not have reached out and touched her; the s.p.a.ce between them wasn't crossable. He didn't try. For a long time he looked at her. Studying. She was different: older, wiser, changed and strange. She saw things now that he didn't see.

Lom found he was waiting for her to speak first, but she didn't. He wasn't sure if it was possible to speak, anyway, if sounds and words could cross the s.p.a.ce that separated them. If language itself could survive that crossing.

'I went into the forest,' he said at last. 'I was looking for you.'

There was a moment when he thought she hadn't heard. He wasn't even sure he'd actually said anything aloud. And then she spoke. It was her voice, the shock of her real voice speaking. He thought he'd kept the memory of it but he had not. The appalling uselessness of memory, how drab and inadequate it was. The sudden raw and open pain of six lost silent years 'I know,' she said.

Lom felt an overwhelming sudden surge of anger and despair. It ambushed him from within. He thought he'd moved beyond all that, he thought he'd acclimatised to loss and living on, but it was all there, unchanged since the day he'd lost her. Since she'd gone where he couldn't follow.

'You knew?' he said. 'But you didn't...'

'I couldn't,' she said. 'I'm sorry.'

He pushed the anger aside. That hurting was old business, to be dealt with another time, not now.

'Still,' he said, 'you're here. You came back.'

'No,' she said. 'I can't stay here. I can't come back. It isn't possible. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.'

'But-'

'Listen to me,' she said. 'I need you to listen. I need you to understand. What I'm doing now, somewhere else, not here, is I'm holding the forest closed. The angel is shut in and the intermixing of the worlds is separating out. Time runs at different speeds. My time will become, in your world, small fragments of stillness, areas where there is no time at all. I can't come back; I can't come home.' She stared at him, dark eyes wide and urgent in the twilight. They were made of the twilight and the air of the river breathing. 'Can you understand that? Can you?'

'How long?' he said. 'How long have we got?'

'I don't know,' she said. 'There's no measure. How can I say-'

'I mean today. Now. How much time have we got now?'

'Oh,' she said. 'Today? I don't know. I shouldn't have come here at all. Even being here makes a hollowing, a gap for the angel to come through. If that starts to happen, I must go.'

'I could come to where you are,' said Lom. 'You could show me how.'

'No.'

'I would come gladly. I would want that. There's nothing here for me now.'

She looked away sadly in the gathering river darkness.

'It's not possible. The barrier mustn't be broken.' She paused. 'I don't have a choice. I didn't choose this. But if I had a choice, I would choose it. You have to understand that. If I could choose this, I would.'

'Then why come at all?' he said. 'Why are you here?'

'You did something for me once, and I've come to ask you again. I'm sorry. You should be left in peace, but I'm not doing that.'

'What do you need?' said Lom. 'I will do it if I can. Of course I will.'

'This world is going too fast and too hard. The future here is... I see it, I see glimpses sometimes, and it's too... The fracture is deeper and wider and harder... It was unexpected... It could bring everything down-'

Sealed inside endless forest, Archangel grinds slowly on. Look away from him now; he is nothing. He feels the desolation of despair and self-disgust. Cut off from history, his futures slow and fade. Time is failing him. He cannot breathe. He is weak. He is dying. Once he was Archangel, strongest of the strong, quickest of the quick, most powerful of soldiers, quintessence of generalissimos, Archangel nonpareil, but those memories burn and torture him. So does the encroaching of the slow gra.s.s.

Archangel probes the boundaries of his enclosure, but they are blank to him, utterly without information and closing in. Archangel hurls himself against the borders ceaselessly, searching for a c.h.i.n.k, a crevice, the faintest possible thinning in the imperceptible wall, but all the time the roots of forest trees dig deeper, the gra.s.s grows back, and every tiny root-hair is a burning agony to him. He is succ.u.mbing to frost and the erosion of rain and wind. They will wear him away to insensate dust.

But then something happens.

It is only a beat of quietness in the roar of the storm, only the fall of a twig on the river. None but an archangel could hear it. None but an archangel could sense the flicker of a shadow in the face of the sun. The quick thinning of ice. The opening of a moment's gap in the wall of his cage.

With a scream of desperate hope Archangel launches his mind towards the hollowing.

Maroussia flinched and looked over her shoulder as if she had heard a loud noise.

'Not yet!' she groaned. 'Not so soon!' She looked at Lom in alarm. 'There's no more time. I have to go now.'

'Wait! Tell me what you need me to do.'

'Stop Kantor,' she said. 'Stop him.'

'You mean kill him?'

'No! Not kill. Not that. If you only kill him, the idea of him will live, and others will come and it will be the same and worse. Don't kill him; bring him down, destroy the idea of him. Ruin him in this world, using the tricks of this world. Ruin this world he has created.'

'But... how? I'm just one person.'

'You have to find a way. Who else can I ask, if not you? Who will listen to me if you don't listen? There is no one else.'

'And if I can do this,' he said, 'then afterwards...'

'No,' she said, 'there's no then. No afterwards. No consequence. No reward. I can't see then. I can only see what will happen if this doesn't. Do you understand?'

'No,' said Lom. 'I don't understand. But it doesn't matter.'

She was looking at him across a widening distance, and he knew that she was leaving him.

'I have to go now,' she said. 'I've already stayed too long. I wanted... Oh no...'

There was a ripple, a shadow-glimmer, and Maroussia was gone.

In the forest it takes Archangel time to react and time to move, and time in the forest is recalcitrant. Slow. Even as he gets close to the gap, it is closing. By the time he reaches it, the tear in the wall has snapped shut. He is too late.

This time.

But now for him there is hope.

And on the quiet River Yannis it was moonless dark and long after midnight and the stars were uncountably many, scattered like salt across darkness, bitter and eternal. She was gone, and Lom felt they hadn't said anything at all, not reallynothing adequate, nothing enough. She'd come to him and spoken to him, but he didn't know anything, he didn't understand more; in fact he understood less than ever, and all the terrible loss and solitude of the last six years was open and fresh and raw once more: the bleak ruination, the need and the grief and the necessity of acting, of doing something, of finding her again. Perhaps that was the point of her coming. Perhaps that was what she had done.

Lom packed his bag and left the mailboat without waiting for Shenkov to return.

5.

The Vlast Universal Vessel Proof of Concept circles the planet at tremendous speed, outpacing the planetary spin, pa.s.sing by turn into clean sunlight and star-crisp shadow. The cabin's interior days and nights come faster and last for less time even than the rapacious advancing days of Papa Rizhin's New Vlast, but aboard the Proof of Concept there is no perceptible sense of forward motion.

Cosmonaut-Commodore Vera Mornova, tethered by long cables to her bench, drifting without weight and having nothing much to do, presses her face against the cabin window. The air she breathes smells of hot rubber, charcoal and sweat. The spectacle of the stars unsettles her: they burn clean and cold but seem no nearer now, and all she sees is the infinities of emptiness that lie between. It is her lost, unreachable home that captures her loving attention: the continent, striated yellow and grey by day, the glitter of rivers and lakes, the spa.r.s.e scattered lamps in inky blackness that are cities by night, the dazzling reflection of the sun in the ocean, the green chain of the Archipelago, the huge ice fields spilling from the poles towards the equator and the edgeless forest glimpsed under cloud.

Misha Fissich drifts up alongside her, accidentally nudging her so she has to grab the edge of the window to stop herself spinning slowly away. He offers her a piece of cold chicken.

'Hungry?' he says. 'The clock says lunchtime. You should eat.'

She shakes her head.

'No, not now, Misha. I'm not hungry. Thanks.'

'You should eat,' he says again. 'The others are watching you, Vera. If you don't bother, neither will they.'

'OK,' she says. 'Thanks.' She smiles at him and takes the chicken and chews it slowly.

When she's finished, it's time for the radio interview: a journalist from the Telegraph Agency of the New Vlast, her voice on the loudspeaker sounding indistinct and far away.

Commodore Mornova, she says, the thoughts of all our citizens are with you. You and your crew are the foremost heroes of our time. Parents are naming their newborns after you. Will you tell us please what it's like to leave the planet? What do you see? How does it feel? How do you and your comrades spend your time?

'We feel proud and humble, both at once,' says Vera Mornova. 'It is humankind's first step across the threshold: a small first step perhaps, but we are the pioneers of a great new beginning. History is watching us, and we are conscious of the honour. s.p.a.ce is very beautiful and welcoming. We test our equipment and make many observations.'

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