attendants, but it is the fear that intrigues him. So this is what fear is like. It could be useful. If he is to live.
His attentive gaze, vast and cool and inhuman, moves restlessly across the surface of the planet, sifting through the teeming profusion of minds that populates it. So many minds. He opens them up, first one and then another, looking for what he needs. And he draws his plans.
6
Lom took the overnight steamer down the Yannis and reached the rail terminus at Yislovsk just after dawn the next day. There was an hour to wait for the Mirgorod train. The waiting room was crammed with fresh conscripts for the southern front, crop-haired and boisterous, so he bought a bag of pirogi and settled on a bench outside, sheltered from the blustering sleet. He shivered inside his heavy black woollen cloak, his feet numb, the pirogi warm in his hands. Stevedores, sacking tied round their shoulders against the rain, were unloading barges. Passengers wandered across the wet quay, picking their way across the rails, squeezing between trucks and wagons. A crane arm swept the sky, the grind of its winch engine competing against the sound of the rain and the wash of the river against the quayside. The first warning bell rang. Fifteen minutes to departure. On a whim, Lom went across to the telegraph office and wired ahead to Raku Vishnik, hoping to save himself the cost of a room in Mirgorod.
The train was a twelve-foot-gauge monster, the locomotive as high as a house. The Admiral Grebencho, in the purple livery of the Edelfeld Sparre line. Three cylinders, double Chapkyl blastpipe, sleek, rounded, backswept prow, pulling thirty carriages. The Admiral could make a hundred and fifty versts an hour on the straight, but they travelled with meticulous slowness, stopping at every halt and crossing place, sliding across vast flat country.
Lom had spent an entire week’s salary on a first-class compartment. He travelled in solitude, in a slow blur of daylight and darkness. His only company was a framed photograph of the Novozhd and two posters: CITIZEN! WHOM ARE YOU WITH? and COME TO LAKE TSYRKHAL! THE WATER IS WARM!
The unchanging landscape of birch forest made all movement seem an illusion. Time grew thickened and lazy, measured out in the glasses of tea the provodnik brought from the samovar at the end of the corridor. Lom watched the trees and slept, stretched out on the green leather upholstery. Five days of enforced inactivity… the trundling of iron wheels and the slow passage of trees and earth and sky… rest in motion…
The birches bored him. They were unimpressive: widely-spaced chalk marks. Nothing like the forest east of Podchornok. That was proper forest. Dark. Mossy. Thick. He’d lived all his life in its shadow. Podchornok was the last town before the forest began: from Durnovo-Burliuk Street you could see the low hills of the tree edge. The measureless forest. No one knew how big it was, or what – if anything – lay beyond it. Normally, Lom tried not to think about the forest too much – it was addictive, it consumed the hours – but now, with nothing else to do, he imagined what it would be like to walk there, smelling the damp earth, digging his fingers into layers of mouldering leaves and rotting, mushroomy fallen wood. Swimming in the white lakes. Great wolves and giant elk moving through splashes of sunlight.
The Vlast mounted periodic incursions into the trees. Artel followed artel into the woods, only to find themselves caught in impenetrable thickets of thorn, their horses floundering up to their bellies in mud. River expeditions drifted through tangled shadow, feeling themselves shrinking, diminishing, losing significance as the world grew silent and strange. Aircraft flew over an illimitable carpet of trees flecked with the glint of rivers and lakes. The silence of the forest remained undisturbed.
Karka. Lapotev. Narymsk. Kaunats. Vorkutagorsk.
Having no money for the restaurant car, Lom carried with him a supply of bread and white crumbly cheese. Bored of this eventually, he got off the train at Chelyagorsk, where they had a two-hour stop, and spent a few kopeks on some mushrooms and dried fish and a newspaper. There was a wooden hut at the end of the platform. A sign said EXHIBITION OF PRESERVED ZOOMORPHS – 5 KOPEKS. A pale girl in a knitted headscarf was sitting on a flimsy chair by the door. She was shivering. Her eyes watery with the