The government drew to Polyn 66 the brightest people of the time, doctors, professors, scientists, and put them to work in factories and institutes of higher learning. You needed special passes to be allowed to enter the precincts of Polyn 66. The ordinary citizens of Polyn, for instance, were forbidden to travel there, and there were severe penalties if they were found there without the correct permission.
Aside from its being much colder than most of the scientists were used to, the life the city offered was a very comfortable one, with big apartments, high salaries, and good food, some of it brought in by air out of season.
There was no train to the city, and no road out of it. The only practical way to reach it in those days was by air. The taiga surrounded it on three sides like a moat of trees, and on the fou earth.de, Polyn stood between it and the Lena.
The story is that in its heyday, Polyn 66 was a real Sodom. Unless you have a real love of hunting and ice-fishing, the Far North doesn’t offer much for your leisure hours. They had theatres and an opera house and such like, but a great many people chose to spend their free time drinking, and going to bed with each other’s spouses.
But it’s what they got up to in their working hours that made them special. They were like the brain of the human race, puzzling out solutions to problems that had taxed us since we learned to make sparks from flint. No one alive can begin to guess at the sum of what they achieved, but it’s fair to say there’s not a branch of human knowledge that they didn’t add something to. They made better kinds of fuels, more deadly weapons, more fruitful crops. They looked through telescopes at the stars and made plans for carrying us into space. The scope of their work gave them an outlook different to what an ordinary man has. Every day they wrestled with the births and deaths of stars and civilizations. They thought in terms of Genesis and Apocalypse. How to scorch the life out of the planet, and how to bring it back in the aftermath.
Perhaps they tackled things that we don’t have the right to understand: how to breathe life back into a corpse, how to double the lifespan of a person, how to engender a child without the act of kind.
Because of the city’s great importance, Tolya said, the government had never abandoned it. Its food supply had been more or less constant. And when war and shortages were threatening it with chaos, its inhabitants were moved to safety. They were put in planes and flown out west and the city was left to crumble.
Left in the city was the fruit of all those years’ work.
‘You remember in Genesis,’ said Tolya, ‘that god puts an angel with a flaming sword to guard Eden after Adam and Eve have been expelled?’
‘There are two forbidden trees in the garden: the Tree of Life, and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. God doesn’t want Adam and Eve to eat from both, otherwise they’ll become gods, so he bars their way and sends them into exile.
‘The government decided the same thing. Knowledge and power can make you a god. There are things in Polyn that used rightly will make you almost a god. So over the city, they put a flaming sword.’
When he said its name, some of the prisoners crossed themselves. You would never have known there was such a deep seam of belief in these men from the way they carried themselves in the camp. They’d squirrelled god away inside them, like men who bury food in a famine and hold up empty hands to their starving neighbours.
The word stuck in my mind for being so strange and pretty. Anthrax. I had never heard it before, and it sounded to me like an ancient god, one the Tungus might worship, or maybe a famous old asiatic city with minarets and a mosaic arch.
But there was nothing pretty about what it did to you. Tolya told us how the spores of it slept in the rubble, stubborn and long-lived. It killed people, but it also killed what they lived on. It opened sores across your body and ate into your lungs. It was a living thing too, just a lot simpler than we are, and with its own implacable appetite for life. You wonder on what day a loving god created that.
Tolya said it was thanks to Apofagato that we knew these things. Apofagato was a scientist himself and he came from a family who had lived in Polyn. He understood the layout of the city, and that’s why Boathwaite had brought him to the base. With the instructions they’d been given, the prisoners were right now unearthing what we needed to restore more comfort and safety to our lives.
The men wanted to drink to that, but this is when Tolya grew grave and came to the point of his sermon. Though we needed what he hoped the prisoners had found, we couldn’t afford to let them out of the Zone alive. He didn’t like it any more than they did, but that’s how it was. The place was poisoned and the poison had to stay locked up.
The guards had listened intently as he talked, and when he stopped they broke out with questions. They wanted to know about the poison in the Zone, and the objects we were taking out, and how you could be sure that what came out of the Zone could be made clean.
Tolya answered their questions and he puffed up those men with the notion they were doing good, embroidering their task with a lot of long words like dedication and sacrifice that reminded me of those odd telegrams from the Almighty that would burst into our silent worship at home.
I don’t trust those words or the people that use them. Maybe I’m simple, but they ring in my ears with the same dull thud you get when a stone bangs against an empty coffee can.
The world has shrunk to simple facts, and the simpler the people the better they cope. My father spoke six languages but he couldn’t hammer a nail straight. He could speak with presidents and governments, when there were such things, on matters of law. He was one of those who negotiated the grant of land that became our home. He had yards and yards of words to dress up his vision of what our life should be, but he couldn’t so much as make a fist when the time came to defend it. He spoke constantly of bringing good to the world, but I don’t think the good he brought would cover a penny piece. It takes no words to do good.
What Tolya said reminded me a lot of how my father talked. Where my father saw the handiwork of god, all I ever saw was sunlight on ice, or two blue eggs in a nest. And where Tolya said he saw holy men preserving the lost jewels of human knowledge, all I saw was a team of burglars getting ready to shoot their accomplices.
*
The drink I’d had gave me a thirst that shook me out of my sleep some time after midnight. The moon was as big and pale as a duck egg and it dazzled me as I stumbled after my water bottle. The water was frozen hard in it, so I had to slake my thirst with a handful of snow. I looked at the sleeping forms in the darkness and decided that this was where we would part company. You can build your new world without me, I thought. I would try to get back to my lake cabin before August. I would get myself a hunting dog. I would pick cloudberries and plant broad beans. There’s so many things worse than a solitary life.
I shook the Tungus boy awake. He woke silently, like a good backwoodsman does, and I gave him the jagged lid of one of the meat cans to saw through his bonds with.
Osip’s carbine was next to him. I took it and changed it for mine. My gun was a rusty old thing that I didn’t want to trustlife to. He murmured a little at the noise, but he was pretty far gone in drink.
By the time I made the swap, the boy had sliced the lariat into pieces. I handed him the reins of my horse and pointed him the way we’d come. If he was smart, he’d keep to the trodden path and his trail would be invisible.
He swung up into the saddle and left without giving me a backward glance.