Thousands of miles east of Mirgorod, deep in the endless forest, the immense, mountainous body of Archangel rises against the skyline like a storm cloud approaching. His consciousness bleeds into the surrounding country, not life but anti-life, oozing out through the forest like lichen across rock. Like piss in snow. In the lower skirts of his body, dead-alive giants of ice and stone with eroded faces lumber waist-high through crumbling stone trees.
A wonderful thing is happening to Archangel. He is beginning to recover.
He has wormed and rooted tendrils of himself down through the planetary crust and deep into the hot seething places. He has spread vapours of himself thinly on the upper layers of the atmosphere, sifting solar radiation. And now, at last, slowly, slowly, the clouds of forgetfulness grow thin and dissipate in the growing heat of his renewed interior sun.
Far down inside the painful solid rock of himself, Archangel feels gobbets of mass spark into energy. Tiny bright cold shards of pure elation spark and shatter. Crushed clods of light stretch and breathe. Fragments of dead processes, imploded and squeezed to appalling density by his flight and fall, are unpacking themselves and restarting. Raw spontaneous networks unfurl and new possibilities trickle across them, glittering into self-awareness. Archangel, ancient as all the stars, old and hurt, wrapped in scraps of memory and stunted relics of ambition, is growing young again.
He makes an inventory of his inward terrain. Scraps of brightness in a dark country. He hadn’t realised how much of himself he had lost and forgotten. How far gone dead he’d been. Even now the greater part of him remains useless. Eclipsed. Obscure. Inert. And much that was lost will never return, not while he remains trapped here on this small dark planet.
He cannot escape. He hasn’t the strength for that, not yet. But he can, at last–at last!–begin to move.
With a roar of agony and joy, thunderous and tree-shattering, Archangel grinds and slides forward, forcing extrusions and pseudopodia of himself out across the landscape. He is a rock amoeba, a single-cell life-form mountain-high. It hurts. With painful slowness at first, millimetre by screaming millimetre, a metre by day, a metre by night, onward he goes. The ground for miles around him trembles. The flanks of his momentous body shed fresh avalanches. He is anti-life rock mountain slowly moving, leaving in his wake a slug-trail of seething, crippled waste. As he goes he screams out in his agony and joy and desperate purpose. It is a fear voice. A true power voice. The voice of history.
And in Mirgorod Josef Kantor hears him.