Lom hit a wall.
The wall of Kantor"s will. Impregnable will. A hardened vision that could not be changed but only broken, and it would not break. Lom could not break it.
The force of his attack skittered sideways, ineffectual, like cat"s claws against marble slab. It wasn"t a defeat. The fight didn"t even begin.
He felt the gross stubby fingers of Josef Kantor picking over his fallen, winded body. Ripping him open and rummaging among the intimate recesses of memory and desire. Kantor"s voice was a continual whisper in his dissolving mind.
I am Josef Kantor, and what I will to happen will happen. I am Josef Kantor, and I am the strongest and the hardest thing. I am the incoming tide of history. I am the thing you hate and fear and I am stronger than you. You fear me. I am Josef Kantor and I am inevitable. I am the smooth and uninterruptible voice. I always return. I am total. I am the force of one single purpose, the voice of the one idea that drives out all others. The uncertain dissolve before and forgive me as they die. I am the taker and I have killed you now.
Vissarion Lom wasn"t strong enough. He wasn"t strong at all. He was dying. He could not breathe. He was dead.
And then Maroussia was in the mudjhik with him. Her quiet voice. A mist of evening rain.
The Pollandore was with her, inside her and outside her. Clean light and green air. Spilling all the possibilities of everything that could happen if Josef Kantor did not happen and there were no angels at all. The endless openness and extensibility of life without angels.
She followed him into death.
Come back with me. Come back.
8.
Lom was in a beautiful simple place among northern trees. Pine and birch and spruce. The air was clear and fresh as ice and rain. Resinous dark green needles carpeting the earth. Time fell there in sudden windfall showers, pulses of night and day, evening and morning, always rising, always young, always new. There were broadleaf trees, and laughter was hidden in the leaves, out of sight, being the leaves.
Everything alive with wildness.
He could see trees growing: unfurling their leaves and spreading overhead, reaching towards each other with their branches until they met, a green ceiling of leaves, and all the light was a liquid fall, green as fire, that spilled through the leaves, enriching the widening silence.
Josef Kantor slammed together the walls of his will to crush Maroussia between them and extinguish her utterly, and it made no difference to her at all.
Lom saw Maroussia walking towards him, and a figure was walking beside her through the trees. It seemed at first to be walking on four legs like a deer, but it must have been a trick of the shadows, because the dappled figure appeared to rise on its hind legs as it came and he saw that it was like a woman. A perfume of musk and warmth was in the air. Her eyes were wide and brown and there were no whites in them. She was naked except that a nap of short smooth reddish-brown fur covered her head and neck and shoulders and the place between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and spread down across her brown rounded belly.
"Who are you?" said Lom. Engage in dialogue with your visions.
She smiled, and a long warm pink tongue flickered between thin white pointed teeth.
"You mean, what am I?"
"Yes."
"Do you want to know?"
"Yes."
"You know what I am."
"Tell me."
She opened her mouth and spilled a flow of words, green foliage tumbling, heaped up, all at once. A chord of words.
I am the vixen in the rain and the hungry sow-badger suckling in the dark earth. I am salt on your tongue and the dark sweet taste of blood.
I am scent on the air at dusk, sweet as colostrum. I am the belly-warm womb of the she-otter in the river. I am the cub-warm sleep of the she-bear under the snow. I am the noctule, stooping upon moths with the weight of cubs in my belly.
I am the she-elk, ice-bearded, nudging my calf against the wind, and I am the mouse in the barn, suckling the blind pink buds of life. I am the sour breath of the stoat in the tunnel"s darkness and I am the vixen"s teeth in the neck of the hen.
I am the crunch of carrion and I am the thirsty suck and the flow of warm sweet milk. I am tired and cold and wet and full of cub. I am s.h.i.+t and blood and milk and salty tears. I am plastered fur and soaking hair.
I am the abdomen swollen taut as a drum and full as an egg. I am the ceaseless desperate hunger of the starveling shrew. I am the sow"s l.u.s.t for the boar, the hart"s delight in the pride of the hind.
I am the f.u.c.ker"s laughing and the smell of droppings in the wet gra.s.s. I am the sweetness of milk on the baby"s breath and the cold smell of a dead thing. I am the hot gates opening into light.
I am all of us and I am you. I am the mirror of your coming here to meet yourself.
"I don"t understand."
You understand, said Fraiethe. Though understanding doesn"t matter. You are green forest and dark angel and human world, compendious and strong. Forget what you cannot do and do what you can do.
Fraiethe opened her mouth to kiss him, as she had kissed Maroussia once, though that he did not yet know.
She bit him, she swallowed him up and he was not killed.
9.
Things can change. Borders are not fixed. Permeability. Mutability. Trees can speak. A man may become an animal. A woman may become time like a G.o.d. Everything is alive and humans are not separate from that.
There is power which is the exercise of will and there is power which is openness and letting go. It has to do with air and breath and consciousness. A freeing not a binding. A removal of bonds.
Josef KantorPapa Rizhinfraternal angel championmudjhikcame lumbering at them out of the trees to silence and kill. Maroussia Shaumian and Vissarion Lom, side by side, the child inside a possibility between them, watched him come.
They saw right round him and through him and he wasn"t there.
The mudjhik was an empty column of stuff like stone.
10.
The prototype Universal Vessel Vlast of Stars stood on the concrete ap.r.o.n at Vitigorsk, a swollen citadel of steel, a snub and gross atomic bullet thirty storeys high. Hunder Rond had personally overseen the stowage on board of the embalmed corpse, the earthly remains of Papa Rizhin. A chosen crew had taken their places, eager and proud, the brightest and the best, prepared to live or die, but in their hearts they knew that they would live. They would reach their destination. There were other, better suns awaiting them.
Rond stood now on the asphalt, uniformed in crisp new black. The hot wind that disturbed his hair was heavy with the industrial chemical stench of Vitigorsk "There have been no tests," said Yakov Khyrbysk. "It is the prototype. You know what that means."
"You can come or you can stay," said Rond. "Your choice."
Khyrbysk shook his head.
"I"m staying here," he said.
Rond looked around.
"The backwash will destroy all this," he said.
"We have evacuated. We will be far away. We will rebuild better somewhere else."
"Perhaps," said Rond. "Perhaps. But we will get there first. You will not find us."
Khyrbysk shrugged. "I have to go now."
Half an hour later and twenty miles away in Tula-Vitisk Launch Control, Yakov Khyrbysk gave the word. He was curious. It was a prototype. Whatever happened he would learn from it and move on.
The horizon disappeared in a flash of blinding light.
When the light cleared, a column of expanding mushroom clouds was climbing into the pale blue sky, puffs of distant smoke and wind illuminated by inward burn. Higher and higher they climbed, a rising stairway of evanescent stellar ignitions, a trajectory curving towards the west and the sinking of the sun.
At the sweet spot of the rising curve, several hundred miles high, the entire magazine of the Vlast of Stars exploded at once. The brightness of the detonation spread across the whole of the western sky. It overwhelmed the sun. The vaporised residue drifted for months through the upper atmosphere, borne on high fierce winds. Intermixed with the shattered molecular dust of the earthly remains of the corpse of Papa Rizhin it slowly slowly fell to earth, becoming rain.
The dust of Engineer-Technician 1st Cla.s.s Mikkala Avril was in it too. Yakov Khyrbysk was as good as his word.
11.
The great hill of the living angel, blinded, muted and unchampioned, abraded by wind and rain, crawled slowly on, lost among limitless trees. No fliers crowded the air above its sad peak. Already, scrubby vegetation was beginning to claim the crumbling lower slopes. The rain washed from it in slurries of tilth and rolling scree.
Directionless, inch by inch, withdrawing from the borderland, not knowing where it was, the ever-living angel turned inward from the forest margin into inexhaustible trees. There it would crawl on for ever and get nowhere at all. Of the heartwood, the inward forest, there is no end, and so there can be no ending of it.
12.
Lom and Maroussia were together on the bank of the river. Fraiethe was there, and the Seer Witch of Bones, and the father also, though his presence was indistinct and Lom felt he had not really come there at all.
Eligiya Kamilova was standing apart. Alone again. A secondary role.
Fraiethe spoke to her.
"You can remain here, Eligiya Kamilova, in the forest with us. Go further in and deeper. If that"s what you wish? You"ve done your part."
"Yes," said Kamilova. "That would be good. I would like that."
"In that case," said Lom, "perhaps we could borrow your boat?"
"You"re not staying?" said Kamilova.
"No," said Maroussia. "No. We"re going home."
13.
The Political Bureau of the interim collective government met in the former Central Committee cabinet room. Lukasz Kistler took the chair. Unrest was continuing. Rizhinites had barricaded themselves in the administrative block of the university and a large crowd had gathered in Victory Square. Already it had been there three days, penned in by a cordon of gendarmes. The crowd was smas.h.i.+ng flagstones and levering up cobbles. Bonfires had been lit.
"It"s a stand-off," said Yulia Yas.h.i.+na.
"Negotiations?" said Kistler.
"No," said Yas.h.i.+na. "At least not yet. They have no leader; they have no clear demands to make. They want to turn back the clock, that"s all."
"Give them time," said Kistler. "We can do that. Are more people joining them?"