Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

He was surely the first human to see this thing since it had fallen. The Vlast Observatories paid wealthy bounties for such a find, and failure to report one was a serious crime, but if it had been reported, the angel-miners of the Vlast would have come, hacked and sliced away its substance and hauled it away in slabs. They would have swept up every scattered pebble and strand and web for miles around. But this one had lain unseen and undisturbed since it had fallen, untouched by anything except the abrading weather. It called to him. He wanted to go closer. To touch it. Sheer curiosity. Never before had he been close to more than a mudjhik-sized lump of angel substance, though he had carried a sliver of it embedded in his skull for most of his life.

As Lom slipped down into the shallow crater and walked towards it, the small dead angel loomed over him like the hull of a battleship. The atmosphere sang and prickled against his skin. An ozone reek. He went right up against the flank. Close to, the angel’s flesh was dull and pitted, but marbled with streaks of dark translucence, seamed within by dim threads and striations of blood and midnight blue. Lom pulled off his glove and pressed his hand to it. Probing. Deeper and deeper into the dizzying mass. The answering wires in his veins snapped taut, leaving him dizzy, breathless, heart pounding.

An echo of proud intellectual hunger reached out and gripped him, tugging him further down and deeper in. The angel wasn’t a solid bulk, it was an open mouth. A fathomless well. He was standing on the fragile edge of terrifying, vertiginous, depths and staring, rapt and self-surrendered, into infinite emptiness: the space between galaxies and stars, not dark and cold and filled with death, but alive, a beautiful shining limitless windfall home. He wanted to fall into it. Fall and fly. The way up and the way down the same. It was his birthright, his just entitlement, his more than human destiny: the everlasting, ever-expanding future to which his history, all human history, was prologue. Just one step more. The flesh of the dead angel opened, a warm inviting gate, parting comfortably to fold around him and take him in.

No! Not this! Not ever this again!

Lom fought it.

Repel! Repel!

But he could not pull away. He screamed and yelled. Choking. Desperate. He hit out and pushed and kicked and bit and screamed. He coughed and vomited. Sour spittle spilled down his chin in gluey strands. Pulling away was appalling and impossible, like drowning himself, like holding his own breath till he died. He was murdering the thing he loved completely, loved more than himself: he was wilfully choosing his own bereavement. The dead angel suffused him and clung to his mind with needle-hooked claws. It was pulling the brain and spinal cord out of his body through the top of his skull. For Lom to withdraw was sickening death and extinction.

No! Not after all that’s happened, not this! Was it his own voice or the angel’s that screamed this horrified determination, this defiance of despair? It was both. There was only one voice.

And then Lom was out of the dead angel’s grasp and stumbling back across the ground, sobbing and vomiting, his lungs heaving desperately for clean cold breath.

Florian found Lom wandering, exhausted and confused, miles from the Kotik. Florian wiped the dried vomit and spittle from his face and made him sit on a rock and gave him water and meat. Lom ate a little but he could not speak. He leaned forward, hands on his knees, and swung his head from side to side, trying to shake it clear.

‘Take your time,’ said Florian. ‘No rush. None at all. Gretskaya is waiting. The aircraft is repaired. She is anxious to make Terrimarkh before dark.’

‘Before dark ?’ said Lom. ‘What… what time is it, then?’

‘It is almost three in the afternoon. You were gone for eight hours.’

‘An angel…’ Lom groaned and turned aside and vomited again. ‘It was dead… It…’

‘I have seen it,’ said Florian. ‘When you didn’t come back I followed your trail. I found what you found but I didn’t go close, not like you did. I could not have. What made you…?’

He paused but Lom said nothing. He could not.

‘I picked up your path again,’ said Florian, ‘on the other side of it. You were wandering.’

There was a hammering pain behind Lom’s eyes. He tried to focus on Florian but flashes of coloured brightness sparked and drifted across his vision.

‘How close?’ said Florian. ‘How close did you go?’ His voice reached Lom from far away. Lom jammed the heels of his hands into his eyes. It only made things worse.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Think I’m going to—’

He jerked his head aside and vomited once more. He felt himself toppling slowly, endlessly forward. The world slid sideways into easy and comfortable darkness.

Maroussia Shaumian sat alone in a compartment on Chazia’s train. Her own private travelling cell. The door was locked, the windows barred. The bars were painted dark purple to match the Edelfeld-Sparre coachwork: slender steel uprights, but solid. Immovable. She had tried them, as she had tried the door, a dozen times.

Her clothes had been taken from her on the first night while she slept, when they moved her from the freight car. She had woken to find herself in a simple dress of heavy grey linen. Her hair had been washed and she was barefoot, her left ankle chained to a strut beneath the seat. The cuff was padded leather, and gave her no discomfort. A silent woman came three times a day to bring her food–always a wrapped packet of heavy bread, with sausage or cheese, never both–and to take her to the washroom at the end of the corridor. On washroom trips Maroussia saw no one. The other compartments in the carriage had their blinds drawn or were empty. The linoleum was cool under her feet, the water in the bathroom hot, the towel fresh and rough. The bathroom window was barred. All the windows of the carriage were barred. It seemed she had the entire carriage to herself. The woman who came, the provodnitsa, would answer no questions.

The first time, after the washroom, Maroussia had refused to let her leg be shackled again. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. Not that.’ She kicked viciously at the provodnitsa’s hand.

The woman shrugged and left her. Later, Maroussia slept, and when she woke she was chained again. Next time the provodnitsa came, she brought with her an enamel pot and put it on the floor in the corner behind the door.

‘You are to let me put the chain back on afterwards,’ she said, ‘or stay in here always.’

Maroussia stared at her for a long time, considering the hot water, the towels, the feel of the linoleum cool underfoot, then nodded and held out her leg for the chain to be removed. Apart from that one time, the provodnitsa was neither unkind nor kind, and never spoke at all.

Maroussia slept long and often, during the days as well as at night, and woke feeling sluggish and dull. She wondered if her food was drugged, or more likely the tin cups of sickly fruit juice out of a can, which had a metallic taint. But probably she was simply exhausted. A floor vent fed engine-warmed air into the compartment and she could not open the window. There was a large mirror above the opposite bench. Whenever she looked at it her own face gazed back at her, dark-eyed and alone. As much as she could, she avoided it. Avoided catching her own eye.

She wondered what Vissarion was doing, what had become of him, if he was even alive. She remembered lying next to him, freezing cold and wet in the bottom of the skiff, folding his unconscious and desperately injured body in her arms as they were carried down the swollen surging Mir. Trying with her own warmth to not let him die when he had been tortured for her sake. She remembered the smooth cold feel of his skin. The smell of the river water and blood in his hair. He was a good man. He met the world with an open face, not closed up hard like a fist as so many did. She felt obscurely guilty, as if she had abandoned him. And in a way she had.