Kazimirov (3 July 888–1 January 919), gardener of the Flower Machine
‘Kazimirov has a head on his shoulders,’ people would say with profound respect. In his native Guernica, at the Koryazhna Institute and the Vasilissian Academy of Forces and Properties, in the laboratories of Bezdez, among the clinic’s doctors and patients, among the oratayas and oratai, among ordinary townspeople, at church, on the town council, in the bakery, at the Jelly Shores café and the Lavender hairdresser’s—everywhere, Kazimirov was respected in the most respectful manner imaginable. Lyutovik was considered the eccentric son of a mad father. Kazimirov, though: now there was a clever fellow.
Kazimirov was entirely at home on Yavros. His father, Doctor Kazimirov, and Professor Yavorov had founded the clinic and revived Bezdez together, and their boys had grown up almost as brothers. Yavorov died in 905 and Doctor Kazimirov in 909, but by then their sons were already under the spell of the mysterious, immense Flower Machine. They followed their fathers’ path, caring for nothing beyond the science of enigmatic properties and beckoning forces.
Forces and properties, forces and properties, forces and properties—and at the centre of it all, the Flower Machine: a capricious being of thrilling secrets and intoxicating possibilities. Its danger, too, drew them. Young men love the sense of danger.
In 902, the fourteen-year-old prodigy Vanya Kazimirov left to study at the Vasilissian Imperial Academy—only to return home two years later with a doctorate, three patents and twenty-one articles in the Academic Herald. The problems over which they were racking their brains at the Academy, Lyutovik had solved at eleven; Kazimirov had checked his work, agreed with it and made a correction here and there.