After half a second a short phrase blinks into life: Fail code 393.
Everything else, all the rows and columns of figures, have disappeared. She has no contact with the s.h.i.+p.
Fail code 393? It means nothing to her. Heart pumping, hands trembling, she riffles through the code handbook in mounting panic. 349... 382... 397... 402... What the h.e.l.l is 393?
There is no 393. Not in the book.
Launch asks again, impatient now.
"Guidance Telemetry, are we go?"
Think. Think.
Faces are turning towards Mikkala Avril. She feels the gaze of Director Khyrbysk on her back. The chief engineer is watching her. Papa Rizhin himself is watching her. She can feel it.
"Guidance Telemetry?" says the launch controller a third time. "What"s happening, Avril?"
"I"ve got a 393, Launch."
"What is that?"
"I"m working on it, Launch."
Ignore them. Focus only on the immediate need.
She has no idea what Fail code 393 means. It isn"t in the book, which suggests it"s a core manufacturer"s code, not set up by Task Number One. It might be trivial, only a glitch in the machine. But it could equally be a fundamental system failure that would send Proof of Concept pitching and yawing, tumbling out of the sky to crash and burn.
It is either/or, and the only way to find out is to switch the machine off and start it up again. And that will take ten minutes.
"Last call, Avril," says the launch controller. There is tension in his voice now. The beginning of fear.
She hesitates.
It is the epochal moment of the world, and it turns on her.
If she says go and the guidance systems misfire... No, she will not even think about the consequences of that... But if she calls an abort, Papa Rizhin"s flags.h.i.+p launch will collapse in ignominy in front of the entire Presidium, the amba.s.sadors, the a.s.sembled press of the Vlast. It will be dayspossibly weeksbefore they can try again. And if the abort turns out to be unnecessary, only a twenty-three-year-old inexperienced woman"s cry of panic at an unfamiliar display code...
She hears her own voice speaking. It sounds too loud. Hoa.r.s.e and unfamiliar.
"Guidance Telemetry is go, Launch. Go."
"Thank you, Avril."
Launch moves on to the next station.
With trembling hands, Mikkala Avril powers off her console, counts to ten, and switches it back on. The cathode tubes begin cycling through their ponderous loading routine.
"T minus three hundred, Proof of Concept."
Thank you Launch.
Five minutes. The sugary music cuts out at last. There is a swell of voices and a sc.r.a.ping of chairs as the dignitaries turn to the window and put on their dark gla.s.ses.
"Can"t see a b.l.o.o.d.y thing from here," mutters Foreign Minister Sarsin. (The Vlast needs a foreign minister now. So the world turns.) "It"s below the f.u.c.king horizon."
"You will see, Minister," says Khyrbysk. "You will certainly see."
An argument breaks out as camera operators try to set up in front of the dignitaries.
"You don"t have to do this. There"s another team on the roof."
"Something could go wrong up there. We should have back-up footage."
Khyrbysk makes angry signs to the press liaison officer to close the disturbance down. He hadn"t wanted the press there at all, or the amba.s.sadors for that matter, but Rizhin insisted. Rizhin is a showman; he wants to astonish the world.
"The risk," Khyrbysk had said to him on the telephone. "What if it flops?"
"You make it not flop, Yakov. That"s your job."
Rizhin needs risk, Khyrbysk realises. He burns risk for fuel. Everything races hot and fast, the engine too powerful for the machine. Parts that burn out are replaced on the move, without stopping. The whole of the New Vlast is Rizhin"s Proof of Concept, his bomb-powered vessel heading for unexplored territories and goals only Rizhin understands.
The cosmonauts feel the colossal engineering beneath them sliding into life, the coolant pumping round the shock-absorbing pillars, the bomb pickers rattling through the magazines in search of the first charge. Proof of Concept is a behemoth of industrial construction, but it is also very simple.
Mikkala Avril"s screens come back up with ten seconds to go. Everything is fine: readouts dead on the line. She is so relieved she wants to cry, but she does not allow herself; she is stronger than that and holds it in. She is the heart of the youth of the New Vlast and she is good at her job and she will not fail.
Two seconds to go, she remembers to put her dark gla.s.ses on. She turns up the brightness on her screen, closes her eyes, presses a black cloth against her face and begins her own interior count. For the first ten bombs it will be too bright to see, and Proof of Concept will be on her own: then Mikkala must open her eyes and be not too dazzled to work.
Before the chief engineer discovered the properties of angel flesh propellant, what Mikkala was about to do would have been impossible: the bombs" electromagnetic pulses would have broken all contact between s.h.i.+p and ground. But now the s.h.i.+p"s instruments will sing and chatter as she rises, and be heard.
The cosmonauts" cabin s.h.i.+vers with the clang of the first apricot locking into the expulsion chute.
Launch control is whited out in a flash of illumination that erases the sun.
Bompbompbomp. Bigger explosions each time. Brilliant blinding flashes. Slowly at first then faster and faster Proof of Concept rises, riding a crumb trail of detonations, climbing a tower of mushroom clouds.
The cosmonauts groan as each detonation slams their backs with a brute fist of acceleration. The whole s.h.i.+p judders and creaks and moans like a bathyscaphe under many thousand atmospheres of pressure.
For the observers in the launch control blockhouse at Chaiganur Test Site 61, the s.h.i.+p itself is lost, the explosion trail hard to watch. The repeated retinal burn forms blue-purple-green jumbling images. Brilliant drifting spectral bruises in the eye. President-Commander Rizhin stands at the window, the hot glare pulsing on his face, an atomic heartbeat.
I am the fist of history. I am the mile-high man.
A long time after the light the sound waves come.
Chapter Two.
... in the deep country Where an endless silence reigns.
Nikolai Nekrasov (182178)
1.
In Papa Rizhin"s world the clocks race forward to the pounding iron-foundry beat, the brakes are off and the New Vlast tears into the wind, riding the rolling wave of continental cataclysm-shock, flung into the future on the impulse-rip of centrifugal snap, taking a piston-blur express ridesix years now and counting and there"s no slowing it yet. But pieces break off and get left behind. Because the past is sticky. Adhesive. Reluctant to let go. The continent is littered with broken shards. Arrested fragments of slower time. Unhealed unforgotten memories and the dead who do not die.
A house and a village and a lake.
On a day in the eleventh year of her dislocated life Yeva Cornelius comes gently awake in the first grey light of morning. There is some time yet to go before the rising of the cooler, circ.u.mspect, conciliatory sun. Yeva stays quite still on the couch, breathing slowly, watching the curtain stir. Lilac and vines crowd against the house. The room is leaf-scented, leaf-shaded, cool.
Her hair has been braided again in the night with loving gentleness: she feels the tightness of the intricate knotted plaits against her skull and smells the clean sweet fragrance the domovoi anoints her with while she sleeps. The p.r.i.c.kle of tiny decorative twigs. Trinkets of seed and bird sh.e.l.l.
Take the domovoi"s attention as a mark of favour, Eligiya Kamilova had said. It"s glad there are people again in the house. Leave a little salt and bread by the stove and it won"t trouble us.
The domovoi laid trails of crumbling earth across the floorboards, long sweeps and spirals along corridors from room to room. Eligiya Kamilova was right: it didn"t want to hurt, not like those in the rye and oat fieldsthey were bad. Watchful and furtive, they came at you out of the white of noon and raised welts and sore rashes on your skin. Sly thorn scratches that stung and drew beads of blood. But the ones to be really afraid of were the ones that moved around outside in the night. Darkness magnifies. Darkness changes everything.
Daylight gathers and hardens in the room. Moment by moment the curtain is more visible, rising and collapsing. It"s as if Yeva is moving it with her breath. Experimentally, she holds back the air in her lungs and eyes the curtain to see if it pauses too. Half-convinces herself that it does.
The atmosphere of a complicated dream is ebbing slowly away. Her mother was in the dream. Her mother was looking for her.
Her mother looks for her always, every day. She will have come back to the apartment and found it not there because of the bomb. But somebody will have told her the soldiers took them away, her and her sister, and put them on the train, and she will look for them. Only she won"t know that Eligiya Kamilova took them off the train again, that Eligiya did something with her hands and broke the door of the train and took them into the night and the snow, and they ran away. Her mother won"t know that.
Everywhere they go, Eligiya Kamilova leaves behind messages and notes so her mother can know they have been there and where they are going next. But her mother might not get the messages. She might not know who to ask. Eligiya posted letters to their old address but her mother can"t go back to that house, not ever, because the soldiers sent everyone away. Some stranger will have read those letters. Or they"ll be in a pile in a big post office room in Mirgorod. Or burned.
They walked south through the winter, Yeva and her sister Galina and Eligiya Kamilova, keeping off the roads and out of the villages, staying in the trees and the snow. The cold was like a dark glittering blade, but Eligiya was a hunter in the woods: she didn"t talk much but she knew how to trap, how to make a warm place, how to build a fire in the night that didn"t show light and a barricade of thorns against the wolves. Sometimes she slipped away to a village and came back with something they needed. Sometimes she found a hut or a farm where the people would let them sleep, maybe in a barn.
Yeva remembered every night. Every single night.
Her sister Galina was sick for a long time but she didn"t die, and in the first days of spring the three of them came out of the trees, following a black stream flecked with brown foam, and found the house in the middle of a wide field of waist-high gra.s.s: a big square house of yellow weatherboards under a low grey roof, the gla.s.s in the many windows mostly broken. They waded over to it, leaving a trodden wake in the gra.s.s that buzzed and clattered with insects. Eligiya Kamilova went up under the porch and broke open the door, just like she had opened the door of the train. A wide staircase climbed up into shadow, and on the bare boards of the entrance hall was a pile of leaves and moss. Twigs laid out around it in patterns like the letters of a strange alphabet. Eligiya stepped round it carefully.
"Don"t disturb it," she said. "Be careful not to touch that at all."
There were pieces of furniture in some of the rooms. Mostly they"d had their upholstery ripped open, the stuffing pulled out and carried off for nests. There were chalky splashes of bird mess in the corners and streaks of it down the curtains. In the kitchen there were lamps, and oilcloth spread on the table.
"Are we going to stay here?" said Galina. "For a while?"
"Perhaps," said Eligiya Kamilova.
Yeva knew that Galina needed to rest, to stop moving for a long while, to be strong again.
Eligiya Kamilova hadn"t give them any choice when she opened the door of the train and took them away into the trees and made them walk. It all happened too quickly to even think about until after it was done. But if they"d stayed on the train and gone where it was taking them, their mother would have known where they were and she could have come there to get them. Eligiya said the train was going to a bad place, a cruel terrible place, and no one ever came home from there, but she didn"t even know what the terrible place was called, and Yeva wasn"t scared of being in terrible places.
Every day she remembered the bomb. It always jumped her when she was thinking of something else. It wasn"t like a memory. Memories change until you don"t remember the actual thing any more; you remember the remembering. But of the time when the bomb fell nothing was forgotten and nothing was changed. When it jumped her it was like opening the same page of a book again and again, and the words were always all there, and always the same: Yeva"s life hammered open like a bomb-broken building, the insides scattered and left exposed to ruinous elemental fire and rain.
Part of her stopped moving forward when the bomb came. Part of her got stuck in that piece of time for ever, always back there, always smelling the dust and burning, always looking down at Aunt Lyudmila squashed flat, always going down the stairs that used to be inside but were outside now, with nothing to hold on to. Part of her stayed back there, and only part of her was left to carry on. Now was a shadow remnant life of numbed and lesser feeling. Now was only aftermath. Aftermath.
That day when they first found the yellow house in the gra.s.s they didn"t stay there but after looking it over they walked on down the stony dry track into the village. Long before they reached the village fields, Yeva could taste the tang of raw damp earth and animal dung in the air. Rooks chattered, squabbled and wheeled across the wide flatness of black soil just turned, thick and heavy and gleaming blue like metal. In the distance women were stooping and crouching at their work. They wore long red or green skirts, and their hair was wrapped in lengths of white cloth.
The village was a collection of ramshackle dwellings under heavy mounds of thatch, and beyond it was the lake and a line of tall pale trees on the sh.o.r.e, blue and dusty and far away. They walked in among skinny chickens and wary, resentful dogs, grey wood barns, grey corrugated-iron roofs. Scrawny cattle browsed in the dust behind a low fence of woven branches. A tractor leaned, abandoned, its axle propped on a rock.
"What"s the name of this place?" said Eligiya Kamilova to the knot of men who gathered to meet them.
"Yamelei," they said. "This is Yamelei."
Women from the nearest field came to join them, treading heavily over the upturned mud in rag-made shoes. Eligiya showed them the intricate brown patterns on her dark sinewed arms, and their eyes opened wider at that. A big old fellow with a ragged beard scoured the skyline behind them.
"There are no men with you?" he said.
"No."
"A mother and daughters, then."
"I am not their mother."
"Grandmother?"
"No," said Eligiya. "Who lives in the big yellow house?"
"They left," a woman said.
"How long ago?"
The woman pursed her lips. It was a question without an answer. Seasons rolled, and once in a while a new thing happened.
"And no one lives there now?" said Eligiya.
While Eligiya was talking to them Yeva watched the people of the village, their broad flattened faces, flattened noses, narrow dark curious eyes in crinkled skin. The men wore linen s.h.i.+rts and sleeveless jackets of animal hide, the pattern of the cows" backs on them yet, and shoes of woven bark that looked like slippers. They had knotted hands and swollen knuckles and their teeth were bad. They were looking at her, and she was looking at them, but the s.p.a.ce between her and them was like thousands of miles and hundreds of years. She couldn"t feel what they were thinking. They talked the same words but it was a different language.
Eligiya Kamilova told the people of Yamelei she would fix the tractor and make their boats stronger and steadier for the lake, and it was agreed that she and the two girls could stay at the yellow house for a while.
"Whose house is it?" said Galina as they walked back. "It must be somebody"s."
"Small house," said Eligiya Kamilova. "Small aristocracy, long gone now."
"Why doesn"t someone from the village go and live there?"