They went out of the Foundation Hall and across the floodlit square. The sky-aspiring sculpture cast three long black gnomon-shadows. Lom walked on one side of Khyrbysk, Florian on the other. The square was deserted. It was almost nine.
‘No transport?’ said Khyrbysk, looking around.
‘No,’ said Lom.
‘You don’t have much of a plan then.’
‘The plan’s simple,’ said Lom. ‘If there’s any trouble from you we kill you and think of something else.’
‘I see. You have no transport. Well, I’m afraid my driver has gone home for the night, but if we go back inside I could get Zsara to telephone for a car.’
‘We’ll walk,’ said Lom.
‘Five miles in the night?’ said Khyrbysk. ‘Partly across open country? Better to take the train.’
There was a transit station at the corner of the square. The system was still running. They didn’t have to wait long for a northbound service. There were a couple of solitary passengers–night workers going on shift–but Khyrbysk led them to seats at the other end of the car.
‘The city is beautiful at night,’ he said, looking out of the window, ‘but you should see it in the long summer days. It is the northern jewel of the Vlast.’
‘You call this place a city?’ said Lom.
‘Yes, certainly Novaya Zima is a city. A city is defined by importance rather than size. By centrality to the culture of the coming times. Novaya Zima is not an agglomeration of buildings, it is a machine for living. A machine for making the future. And it is a metaphor. A work of art.’
He sat back in his seat and unbuttoned the fawn camel-hair coat he had put on over his shirt. It was hot in the carriage. He seemed inclined to talk. Perhaps it was nerves, but Lom didn’t think so. Khyrbysk didn’t seem too bothered about his predicament at all.
‘Take the building where I live, for instance,’ Khyrbysk was saying. ‘The Foundation Hall. It is made from steel and glass. Above all, glass. What better metaphor than glass for the future we are building? Millions of separate grains of sand, weak and uncohesive when separate, fused together under a fierce transmuting heat to form a new substance. And the new substance is perfect. Unblemished, transparent and strong. This is how we shall reforge humanity. The progress of history is inevitable. It is happening already. The individual is losing his significance–his private destiny no longer interests us–many particles must become one consistent force…’
Khyrbysk paused.
‘You smile,’ he said. ‘But I assure you, what I am saying is a clear-sighted expression of fact. Novaya Zima signifies. Everything you see in Novaya Zima, the fine architecture, this mass transit system of which we are so proud, it all signifies.’
Florian grunted. ‘You have a fine apartment,’ he said.
‘You sound censorious,’ said Khyrbysk, ‘You want to make me ashamed of my privileges while others labour hungry and the Vlast is at war?’
‘The thought occurred to me,’ said Florian.
‘But I am not ashamed,’ said Khyrbysk. ‘The fact that others forgo essentials so we can live like this, that is what drives us on. It shows our strength of purpose. The Vlast may suffer hardships, Novaya Zima says to the world, but we can still do this.’
‘This place tells the world nothing,’ said Florian, ‘because the world doesn’t know it exists.’
‘Not yet perhaps,’ said Khyrbysk, ‘but when we are ready it will.’
Lom remembered the smell of the empty trains at the Wieland marshalling yard. The ranks of empty trains. He was surprised by the heat of his own anger
‘You’ve built a comfortable utopia for you and your friends on the bones of slaves.’
‘You’re trying to provoke me,’ said Khyrbysk blandly, ‘but I will not rise to it. I am merely a worker in my own field, as are we all. There is no egotism here, only I becoming We: the clear and perfect simplicity of glass.’
‘And the workers under the mountain? Do they see it like that? I’ve seen the trains.’
‘Certainly they do. Most of them. Physical labour is redemptive. Many request to stay on when their terms are complete. They ask for their families to join them. ‘
Lom turned away in disgust. He caught his own reflection in the window looking back at him. And through his own face he saw the lighted windows of kommunalki buildings moving past. For a moment it was as if he was stationary and the buildings were sliding away, leaving him behind.
‘The quality of our city,’ said Khyrbysk, oblivious to Lom’s reaction, or ignoring it, ‘expresses the supreme importance of the work we do.’
Florian leaned forward intently.
‘What work?’ he said. ‘What is happening here? What is all this for?’
‘The Foundation for Physico-Technical Machines,’ said Khyrbysk, ‘is the greatest concentration of human intelligence the world has ever seen. The whole city exists to support our work. There is more brilliance lodged in Foundation Hall, in that one single building, than… There is no comparator. No precedent. It is our academy. We have sacrificed our careers to be here, all of us. We do not publish, at least not under our own names. We get no fame for what we do, none of the mundane rewards. But the future will know us by our work.’
They stopped at a station and the last passengers left them alone. Shortly after the train restarted, the buildings outside the window disappeared, leaving nothing but blank darkness. Lom realised they had crossed the northern boundary of the township and were heading across open country towards the mountain.
‘What work?’ said Florian again. ‘What is the work?’
‘Our work?’ said Khyrbysk. ‘We look up at night and see a universe of stars and planets teeming with life, and angels swimming the cosmic emptiness like fish. Only the emptiness between the stars is not empty; it teems with life and vigour just as the planets do. It merely does not shine so brightly.’ There was a light in Khyrbysk’s eye that was not entirely sane. For all his craggy bulk, his thick grizzled curls and cliff-like face, he was a prophet burning with the incandescence of a vision. ‘That is where history is leading us,’ he continued. ‘Humankind spreading out across the galaxies in the endless pursuit of radiant light. Only there will we find space enough to live as we are meant to live. It is inevitable. It is the will of the universe.’
Lom could see nothing but blackness outside the carriage window. The reflection of the bright interior obliterated everything. He could see himself, and opposite him a mirror-Khyrbysk and a mirror-Florian. There was less of Iliodor in Florian’s face, he thought: more angularity, more darkness. An effect of mirror and harsh shadow, perhaps.
‘There are practical problems to be solved, of course, if humankind is to escape from this one cramped planet,’ Khyrbysk was saying. ‘That’s what we are doing here. New means of propulsion, new techniques for navigation, new technologies for sustaining life outside the atmosphere and beyond the light of the sun. And new designs for humankind itself. Crossing the immensities of space will take immensities of time. Our present bodies are too short-lived. They decay and fail. But even this problem will be solved. We know that angel flesh can absorb and carry human consciousness: all that’s needed is refinement of technique.’
‘There are thousands of workers here,’ said Lom. ‘They aren’t engaged in cosmological hypothesising.’
‘Not hypothesising!’ said Khyrbysk. ‘Practicalities! There are a hundred real and specific problems to be solved. Problems of science, engineering and design.’
‘That is not enough,’ Florian’s voice was a snarl. ‘There is something more. Something else is happening here.’
‘Not enough! I’ve shared more truth and vision with you in the last ten minutes than you can possibly have heard in the whole of your life up to this moment.’
Khyrbysk’s pale blue eyes were narrow and predatory.
‘You think I’m afraid of you?’ he said. ‘You think I’m your prisoner? I am no such thing. You will not kill me, but I will take you to Lavrentina, and she will surely kill you.’