people of the planet serve their history as photons serve light, as agglomerations of massiveness serve gravity. The voice of history is a dark force.
And Archangel comes to understand that the voice of this planet’s history is broken. In the future that is coming and has already been, the future that re-imagines its own antecedence, a catastrophic mistake is made.
And he learns something else, which is a danger to him. Cruel and immediate danger. Somewhere nearby there still exists a well of old possibility. The vestige of an older voice. The lost story that can no longer speak is tucked away somewhere in silent obscurity. It does not exist in the world but it is there. Beside it. In potential. A seed dormant. A storage cell untapped.
And this encapsulation of failed futurity is ripening, and breaking, and beginning to leak. It is beginning to wonder: maybe what is done will yet be undone?
Archangel roars.
‘THAT CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN!’
Archangel must return to the space between the stars, which is his birthright and his stolen domain. Not merely return to it, but seize it, consume it, become it. Become the stars. Become the galaxies. Better than before. He sees how it can be done. This planet can do it for him.
‘Let the voice of the planet be my voice. Let the voice of its history be mine. A fear voice. A power voice. Make the voice of history be my larynx. Retell the broken story in a new way. Make the expression of the world unfolding be the planning, cunning, conscious, necessary, unequivocal expression of me, Archangel, voice of the future, voice of the world, speaking through all people always everywhere.
‘Let the people take flight from this one planet to all the stars, all the galaxies, all the intergalactic immensities everywhere always – and let them speak me! A billion billion billion people always everywhere in glittering crimson ships across the black-red-gold recurving energy-mass-time seething scattered shouting me. The perpetual unfolding flowering of the voice of me. All filled with the angelness of me.
‘So it will be.
‘But first, for this to happen, that fatal other source – the fracturing egg of other possibilities that impossibly continues – must be destroyed.’
This then is the first syllable of the first word of the first phrase of the first sentence of the voice of Archangel.
‘DESTROY THE POLLANDORE!’
14
Lom woke early the next morning. As the first greying of the dawn filtered through the gaps in the curtains in Vishnik’s study, he lay on his back on the couch, turning the question of Kantor over in his mind. How to find him. How to even begin. Krogh had told him he would have no help, no resources, no official support from the immense intelligence machine of the Vlast. Krogh’s private secretary would fix him an access pass for the Lodka, and an office there, under cover of some suitably bland pretext to account for his presence, but that was all.
He had read Krogh’s file of clippings on Kantor late into the night. It was an accumulation of robberies, bombings, assassinations. There was no pattern that he could find. The targets were indiscriminate, the victims seemingly random: for every senior official of the Vlast or prominent soldier or policeman killed, there were dozens of innocent passers-by caught in appalling eruptions of destructive violence. There was no clear purpose: responsibility for each attack was claimed by a different obscure and transient dissident grouping, or by none, and none of the perpetrators had ever been taken alive.
He had spent a long time staring at the photograph of the young Josef Kantor that Krogh had given him. He tried to find in that face the lineaments of calculating cruelty that could drive such a murderous campaign. But it was just a face: long and narrow, scarred by the pockmarks of some childhood illness, but handsome. Kantor looked into the camera with dark, interested eyes from under a thick mop of dark hair, uncombed. Although the picture must have been taken in an interrogation cell, there was the hint of a smile in the turn of his wide mouth. This was a confident, intelligent young man, a man you could like, even admire. A man you would want to like you.
Of course, the photograph had been taken two decades ago. Twenty years at Vig would change anyone. Because of this man, an atmosphere of anxiety and distrust and lurking incipient panic had settled on Mirgorod. Lom felt it in the newspaper