It was as much as I could do to follow him. Listening to Malevin, my Russian, perfectly adequate for a host of day-to-day uses, was like an old locomotive being driven far beyond its tolerance: rivets bursting off the boiler, everything overheating, and yet pounding forward with an exhilarating sensation of speed.

26

I woke up the next day in my hotel room in Arkhangelsk. Out on the chilly water, a man was fishing in a tiny boat. I longed to be home. At breakfast, a table of Swedish engineers next to me were eating plates of buckwheat porridge and cold meat. I caught the train back to Moscow at lunchtime and arrived the following day.

With hours to kill before my next meeting with Vera, I went to Tolstoy’s old house on Prechistenka. I saw the shoes the writer had made himself, his bicycle. I thought of all the people and experiences that made Tolstoy Tolstoy. How would you code all that? And if you did, who would you get? The priapic soldier and nobleman, exercising his droit de seigneur upon the serfs on his estate? The writer and paterfamilias of the middle years? The bearded guru of the late ones, who had sublimated his vast ego to the quest for Christ-like perfection? How could you fashion those layers from his words alone, and yet have each one riven with all his authentically human inconsistencies – that old man writing in his final year and experiencing a flash of recollection as he remembers his adored peasant lover: ‘to think that Aksinia is still alive!’ Could you really inscribe all that in a fresh carcass?

Malevin had seemed to be suggesting that there was a spiritual dimension to the work. One phrase in particular stayed with me. Struggling to understand him, I had tried to paraphrase what he was saying and he shook his head impatiently. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘It’s much simpler. We are the masks God made to know itself!’

I remembered how his eyes had glittered in the half-dark as he nodded with pleasure at the exactness of his words. ‘Vot tak.’ That’s how it is.

*

Vera was waiting for me outside the brand new Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. We walked across the footbridge over the Moscow River past girls in summer dresses.

‘You spoke to Yurii Olegovich? He told you about the 1951 experiment?’

I said he had.

‘Yurii Olegovich and I do not agree about the significance of that experiment,’ she said. ‘Malevin provided only the theoretical basis for the procedure that bears his name. My personal belief is that whatever they made in 1951, it wasn’t a true proxy complex. Tell me this: a natural philosopher attaches swan’s wings to his arms and plunges to his death from a belfry. This shows what? That flight is impossible? Absolutely not. You understand me? In the Soviet Union of the 1940s and ’50s, developments in the west, advances in computing, the Turing Test: these things were still unknown to them. Who knows what shortcuts those terrified men took?’

On the other side of the river, the huge brick structure that I remembered as the Red October chocolate factory had been redeveloped into an urban playground for rich young Russians. It was full of bars and restaurants. We found a gallery cafe that was big and airy enough for us to be isolated from the other customers. Vera chose a table near the entrance, where a giant sculpture of a melted iPod was showing images from Soviet propaganda films. I helped her off with her coat and we both ordered herbal tea.

‘Tell me something,’ I said. ‘How did you get mixed up in this?’

She said nothing until the waitress was out of sight, then she leaned forward and began speaking in a low voice. She explained that she had held an academic position in the Soviet equivalent of artificial intelligence, but had left it in the early 1990s when it became impossible to live on the official salary.

‘It was a very chaotic time for my country,’ she said. ‘Many top scientists were leaving Russia. They were experts in very sensitive areas of study. For example, Ken Alibek, the chief of the Soviet biological weapons programme, went to the US. There were many, many such instances. Can you imagine? If there is no future for him here, what hope is there for a simple academic?

‘I was approached in 1998 to do work for Sinan Malevin. During that time, he began dealing with Hunter. In the very early 1990s, maybe 1990, before the break-up, Hunter had invested in a radio station in Moscow.

‘From 2001, my work changed. I was present at a meeting with Sinan and his father, Hunter, and both US and Russian officials. Following that meeting, I worked closely with Yurii Olegovich, studying his classified work from the 1940s.’

‘But who was paying for all this?’

‘What we understood at the time was that Hunter had raised funding from private US sources to see if this work of Malevin’s had commercial potential. Now I think it’s not the case. Above Hunter, there are others.’ She looked meaningfully at me.

The scenario she was describing would have seemed beyond absurd if it had been suggested to me a month earlier. But after my experience with Jack, after talking to Malevin, I wasn’t so sure.

‘Why isn’t Sinan’s father involved any more?’

‘Yurii Olegovich resigned when the source of our funding became clear. He is an old Soviet idealist. He couldn’t bear the thought of his work helping our former enemies. The research is being conducted by a clandestine US and Russian joint venture. You understand that the next technological frontier is the human body itself? I’m speaking of human enhancement. The possibilities are enormous, but so are the costs. Each enhancement is tied to a human subject. Every operation is a risk. There is the danger of accident and injury, and the certainty of ageing. Using the Malevin Procedure, each enhanced subject can be in principle duplicated at relatively low cost. It’s the military application of Fedorov’s old dream, using science to transcend the limits of the human. In this case, to create the transhuman – the post-human.’

‘The Übermensch,’ I said.

‘Of course,’ she agreed. ‘The fascist overtones are unmistakable. Another of my objections. I have no sympathy with those who idealise human perfection. What place would I have in a world like that?’

There was something very touching about the question, and about Vera’s open consciousness of her strangeness and asymmetry. It made me feel protective towards her. And as I stopped fighting the possibility that she might be telling the truth, I began to glimpse her courage. Perhaps she saw some of this in my face, because she reached across the table and took my hand.

‘We must not allow it, Nikolasha. We must not allow it.’

The waitress chose that moment to refill our tea-cups and we both fell silent until she was out of earshot.

‘There is another thing. I know for a fact that Hunter has an additional personal interest. He was diagnosed with a recurrence of prostate cancer last year. He wants us to speed up the testing of prototypes in the hope of prolonging his own life.’

On the giant iPod screen, an old black-and-white newsreel showed a sturdy Russian woman changing a tractor tyre. The lights in the cafe seemed strangely bright. I closed my eyes for a second and the floor gave a lurch under my feet.

‘You don’t look very well at all, Nikolasha,’ Vera said. She touched my forehead. Her hand felt as cold as marble. ‘You have a temperature.’

‘I couldn’t sleep on the train,’ I said.

*

We walked back to the river bank together and found Vera a taxi. She offered me a lift, but I felt like I could use the fresh air. It was a clear, balmy evening. The absurd, Disneyland sculpture of Peter the Great in a Pirates of the Caribbean galleon was framed by yellow and black clouds. Under this lonely, unfamiliar sky, I was struggling against a life-changing realisation and its consequences.