Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

Before he came to Mirgorod, Lom had been only in towns which had a centre and a periphery, and that was all. But this place was neither middle nor edge, but some third thing that could exist only in the gaps and interstices of a great city. It was a part of the huge fabric of Mirgorod, yet Lom had the feeling that for the people they passed, these ordinary fractal streets were the core of their lives, the stage for their dramas, and they seldom left them. It was both somewhere and nowhere, a familiar alienness, the kind of place you saw–if at all–from the window of a tram or a train. The otherness of someone else’s ordinary places. Yet history found its way here, just as much as it came to the wide central prospects and the great buildings of the capital: you felt the presence of it, its strength and its anxiety, the possibility of dark murderous events and love and wonder. For the first time Lom realised the strangeness of what history was: a physical force that acted from a distance on the granular substance of life, like gravity, like inertia. Every where was obscure and elsewhere, non-existent until you found yourself in the middle of it, and then it was local and overwhelmingly specific. Everywhere history operated, everywhere there were things to be afraid of and choices to be made. Because history was gravity, but you could choose not to fall.

‘Where is this place?’ said Lom. ‘What’s it called?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Maroussia. ‘I don’t think I’ve been here before. We must have taken a wrong turning somewhere back there.’

They turned to retrace their steps, only what they’d passed before wasn’t there any more. Different traders, different names. Maroussia slowed and looked around, puzzled.

‘I thought there was an umbrella shop on this corner,’ she said. ‘We haven’t passed that stationer’s before. I would have remembered. Still. It doesn’t matter. We just need to keep going north and east and we’ll come into Big Side in the end.’

There was a burned-out building on the corner of a broad cobbled square. It stank of wet ash and charred wood. A girl of fifteen or sixteen was sitting in the middle of the square under a statue of Admiral Koril. She had a box eubandion on her knees but she wasn’t playing, just resting her arms on the instrument and staring up at the raw darkness of glassless windows, the mute gape of a broken doorway, the jagged roof beams against the sky. She wore long black skirts and a black scarf drawn up over her head. Pulled low, it shadowed her face. Maroussia went across to her.

‘Was that your place?’ she said, nodding to the burned ruin.

The girl looked at her narrowly. She had dark intelligent eyes. Watchful. A strand of dark hair fell across her face. Her hands were red and raw with the cold.

‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s the Internationals.’

‘The what?’

‘The Peace and Hope Meeting Rooms For All Nations. Or it was.’

‘What happened here?’

‘Who are you?’ said the girl. ‘Why’re you asking?’

‘We’re not anybody,’ said Maroussia. ‘We’re just walking through.’

The girl glanced at Lom.

‘He’s not nobody. He’s police.’

‘No,’ said Lom. ‘No. I’m not.’

The girl closed her face against them and looked away.

‘Leave me alone,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’

‘It’s OK,’ said Maroussia. ‘He’s OK. Really, he is. My name’s Maroussia Shaumian. I live by the Oyster Bridge. And this is Vissarion. He’s my friend.’

‘Oyster Bridge? Isn’t that in the raion?’

‘Just this side of the gate. We only want to know what happened here.’

‘The Boots burned it in the night,’ said the girl.

‘Boots?’ said Lom.

‘Thugs,’ said Maroussia. ‘Vlast Purity rabble rousers. Why?’ she said to the girl. ‘Why would they do that?’

‘They’re saying Lezarye killed the Novozhd,’ said the girl. ‘The government said that, so the Boots attacked the Lezarye shops and the hotheads came to fight the Boots, which is what the Boots wanted. Because the Novozhd is dead now, and they want to make trouble.’

‘Who did kill the Novozhd?’ said Lom. ‘Who is the government now?’

The girl stared at him.

‘It’s not a trap,’ said Lom. ‘It’s just a question.’

‘But everyone knows.’

‘We don’t,’ said Maroussia. ‘Honestly. We’ve been away. Travelling. We don’t know what’s happened here.’

‘Where could you travel where they don’t have the Novozhd?’ The girl stood up and hoisted the eubandion across her shoulder. ‘I’m going. Don’t follow me. I’ve got brothers. They’re just over there. I’ll call them.’

‘We won’t follow you,’ said Maroussia. ‘Please. We just want to know what everyone knows. It can’t do you any harm to tell us.’

The girl studied Maroussia for a moment. Lom hung back.

‘The Colloquium is the government now,’ she said. ‘There’s four of them. Fohn. Dukhonin. Chazia. I forget the other one. They say it was the Lezarye that killed the Novozhd, but some people say it was a spy from the Archipelago, and others say it was a loner. A madman. Who do you believe? Everyone says what they want to be true.’ The girl lowered her voice. ‘I even heard someone say the Colloquium did it themselves, to get him out of the way. I don’t know. Whoever did it, it was bad. Look at what happened here. Everything’s getting worse. The Boots—’

She stopped short as a heavy horse-drawn wagon trundled into the square, a gang of young men crowded in the back, bawling ‘Blood of Angels’.

‘They came back,’ the girl said bleakly.

Archangel sends a node of sentience out beyond the forest border and snatches a bird in the air.

HELLO, BIRD.

He flies in bird a while, becoming bird, savouring the alien taste of bird mind. When he withdraws, bird falls, heart-stopped, out of the sky.

GOODBYE, BIRD.

Archangel isolates a tiny piece of his own rock-hard substance and puts into it all that he has learned of bird. He replicates bird. When he has finished, he pulls the tiny chunk of angel flesh out of himself and throws it into the air.

It flies. For a while it is bird and he is bird in it. Archangel-bird. Almost.

Archangel-bird flies and flies, and then the shadow falls. Archangel-bird stutters, stumbles out of the air and collapses in on itself, reverting into nano-quantum-slime that slaps down onto the earth.

Never mind. First steps. He is learning as he goes.

He returns to original bird. Dead bird. He sniffs and prods the corpse and slips back into it. Repairs it and makes it fly again.

HELLO, BIRD.

It is almost as good.

It is almost better.

But it is not enough. One bird. Or one man. It does not even begin to be enough.

Archangel needs EVERYTHING. If he is to escape this dark constricting suffocating world–if he is to regain his birthright across the uncountable stars and the spaces between the stars–he must have it ALL. Every mind on the planet must speak with HIS voice and speak always and only HIM.

The unfolding future of the planet, its coming history, must be HIS. He must understand it all in every intricate detail and inhabit it all and transform it all.

Remake it all.

No secret private thought. No life outside HIS life.

Archangel. Always and only and everywhere Archangel.

Total Archangel.