Peter Higgins - Radiant State

She bit him, she swallowed him up and he was not killed.

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 god. 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 Kantor–Papa Rizhin–fraternal angel champion–mudjhik–came 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.

The prototype Universal Vessel Vlast of Stars stood on the concrete apron 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 Class Mikkala Avril was in it too. Yakov Khyrbysk was as good as his word.

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.

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.’

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 smashing flagstones and levering up cobbles. Bonfires had been lit.

‘It’s a stand-off,’ said Yulia Yashina.

‘Negotiations?’ said Kistler.

‘No,’ said Yashina. ‘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?’

‘Not for the moment,’ said Yashina. She paused. ‘We could end it now,’ she said. ‘The militia is standing by in the Armoury. There are tanks within two hundred yards.’

‘The commanders are loyal to us?’ said Kistler. ‘They would fire on their own people?’

‘Of course they would, if you give the word. Government rests on civil order. It’s the prerequisite.’

Kistler looked around the table, each face one by one. They all avoided his eye. The decision was to be left to him, then, and they would follow where he led.

‘We must not do it,’ he said. ‘And we will not. Give the order to withdraw the tanks and the militia to their barracks, and make sure the people of the city see them go.’

Wolfhound Century

Truth and Fear

Radiant State

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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Copyright © 2015 by Peter Higgins

Cover design by Lauren Panepinto

Cover images © Arcangel Images

Cover © 2015 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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