Hard to Be a God (Rediscovered Classics) Read online

  Copyright © 1964 by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

  Foreword copyright © 2014 by Hari Kunzru

  Afterword copyright © 2014 by Boris Strugatsky

  English language translation copyright © 2014 by Chicago Review Press Incorporated

  All rights reserved

  Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, IL 60610

  ISBN 978-1-61374-828-2

  The publication was effected under the auspices of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation TRANSCRIPT Programme to Support Translations of Russian Literature.

  Published with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation (Russia).

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Strugatskii, Arkadii, 1925–1991, author.

  [Trudno byt’ bogom. English. 2014]

  Hard to be a god / Arkady and Boris Strugatsky ; translated by Olena Bormashenko.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-1-61374-828-2

  I. Strugatskii, Boris, 1933–2012, author. II. Bormashenko, Olena, translator.

  III. Title.

  PG3476.S78835T7813 2014

  891.73’44—dc23

  2014007355

  Interior design: PerfecType, Nashville, TN

  Printed in the United States of America

  5 4 3 2 1

  Foreword

  by Hari Kunzru

  There are always schisms, even in medieval fantasy. Weird tales are weird in more than one way. One the one hand we have a rural tradition, sentimental, conservative, and wedded to absolute notions of good and evil. This is the English school of Tolkien and Lewis, in which Christ-lions and schoolchildren fight cosmopolitan witches and wizards with suspiciously foreign names. The nasty working classes of industrial Mordor threaten the exurban tranquility of the Shire, a place full of morally centered artisans and small tradesmen, destined, once the dwarves build the railway and the elves finally get out of their hot tubs and invent the Internet, to end up as commuters. Elsewhere Anglo-Saxon Potters and Weasleys, first cousins of the hobbits, take on effete Norman-French Malfoys and Voldemorts. Fantasy of this kind is intended as comfort and consolation, which is why it’s often written for and marketed to children. One can retreat from the ambiguities of the real world into the greenwood, where the demarcation between right and wrong is clear. In the final pages, the reign of King John will come to an end and good King Richard will return, heralding a time of merriment and feasting.

  In the English tradition, the city is conspicuous by its absence. But there’s a countertradition, sexy and cynical, devoted to the romance of urban life, with its giddying complexity, its taverns and towers, its markets and locked doors and alleyways. In Viriconium or Lankhmar or King’s Landing, there are thieves and rogues and sorcerers and beautiful women at high windows. In such fantastical cities, shadows abound and good doesn’t always prevail. It’s a type of romance that owes more to Paris (the city of Dumas’s musketeers and the Baudelairean flaneur) than medieval chivalry or Icelandic sagas. So when Hard to Be a God deposits us in Arkanar, we may feel we know where we are. Don Rumata, swashbuckling swordsman, bon viveur, and wit, is no Bilbo Baggins, blushing when required to talk to a lady. And Arkanar is a far cry from Camelot or Gondor. Its citizens delight in hanging “suspicious bookworms” and the noble lord is clearly accustomed to using his blade against boors, footpads, and impertinent members of the lower orders.

  However, this is no reactionary celebration of aristocratic derring-do. Rumata is really Anton, an emissary from a future Earth where Communism has triumphed, creating a rational, benevolent society that can only look on the filth and cruelty of this backward world with disgust. Rumata/ Anton is an operative working on behalf of Earth historians, studying the feudal mores of the planet with a view to assisting them to “progress” along the straight and narrow path of history. Unlike their Yankee contemporaries (who always seem to be planting moonbases and generally making themselves at home on alien planets), the enlightened peoples of the Noon Universe don’t intervene as imperialists. Anton isn’t the probe-head of some future project of settlement or colonization. Instead he’s a kind of human webcam, feeding video back to his home planet, even as he’s embroiled in Arkanar’s vicious court politics. Like his fellow operatives, he rails against the strict injunction not to intervene overtly in the planet’s affairs. Faced with the brutality and excesses of the worthless, decadent aristocracy, he is sorely tempted to right some wrongs—and break some skulls. He is a god who must hide his divinity.

  Confined by his rules of engagement, Anton sometimes seems less a god than a trickster—a semidivine Raven or Anansi or Coyote, mixed up in situations rather than standing transcendentally above them. He has special powers but a limited scope in which to use them. All the time he suffers the psychological torments of any operative who spends a long time in deep cover. What does his far distant home really mean to him? Will the mask of the aristocratic dandy begin to eat into his face?

  It’s a common observation that all science fiction novels say as much about the time of their composition as they do about the future. As they wrote Hard to Be a God, the Strugatsky brothers were working under considerable political pressure. Following Khrushchev’s infamous visit to an exhibition of abstract art in 1962 (“dog shit” was one of his more printable responses) a wave of panicked ideological house-cleaning swept through the Soviet Union’s artistic establishment. For SF writers, as Boris Strugatsky remembers, this resulted in a reminder that the only truly orthodox subject was “the collision of two worlds.” At the time the brothers still harbored hopes that Communism could produce the kind of enlightened civilization that forms the backdrop of their Noon novels. But perhaps inevitably, their initial plans for a Dumas-influenced swashbuckling tale about an earth-man’s adventures in a feudal world became a much darker story about the fate of the intelligentsia under totalitarianism. The spymaster villain Don Reba was originally called Rebia, a none-too-subtle anagram of Beria, the infamous head of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD. Reba’s systematic destruction of the values of science and intellectual inquiry are thus both a reminder of the purges of the 1930s and a coded plea to Khrushchev not to follow in his predecessor’s footsteps. The resulting novel, part Boy’s Own adventure and part dystopian political satire, is a sort of metafantasy, neither Dumas nor Tolkien but a wry commentary on the medievalism of the genre. In Russia, it has been wildly popular for almost half a century. It’s sure to find new fans in English.

  The sorrow that tortured me, the shame that overwhelmed me, the desperation that wracked my mind, all these I could then feel, but even now I can find no words to express them.

  —Pierre Abelard

  Now one thing I have to tell you. In this particular show you have to be armed to enforce your authority. But you’re not to use your weapon under any circumstances. Under any circumstances. Is that quite clear?

  —Ernest Hemingway

  Prologue

  The black stock of Anka’s crossbow was made of plastic, while the strings were chrome steel, operated by a single motion of a noiselessly sliding lever. Anton didn’t trust newfangled technology; he had an old-fashioned arbalest in the style of Marshal Totz (King Pitz the First), overlaid with black copper, with a cable of ox sinew wound around a little wheel. And Pashka had taken a pneumatic rifle. Since he was lazy and lacked the mechanical aptitude to work crossbows, he thought they were childish.

  They landed on the north shore, where the gnarled roots of the giant pines jutted out of the sandy yellow cliff. Anka let go of the rudder a
nd looked around. The sun was already over the forest, and everything was blue, green, and yellow— the blue fog above the lake, the dark green pine trees, and the yellow shore on the other side. And the sky above it all was a pale, clear blue.

  “There’s nothing there,” Pashka said.

  The kids sat leaning over the side of the boat, looking into the water. “A huge pike,” Anton said confidently.

  “With fins this big?” Pashka asked.

  Anton didn’t reply. Anka also took a look, but saw only her own reflection.

  “Be good to take a swim,” said Pashka, plunging his arm into the water up to his elbow. “It’s cold,” he reported.

  Anton clambered to the front and jumped onto the shore. The boat swayed. Anton grabbed its side and looked expectantly at Pashka. Then Pashka stood up, put the oar behind his neck like a yoke, and wriggling his lower body, sang:

  Grizzled seadog Tarkypark!

  Pal, you’d better stay awake.

  Careful, schools of deep-fried sharks

  Rush toward you through the lake.

  Anton silently jerked the boat.

  “Hey, hey!” Pashka shouted, grabbing at the sides.

  “Why deep-fried?” Anka asked.

  “Dunno,” answered Pashka. They climbed out of the boat. “Sounds good, huh? Schools of deep-fried sharks!”

  They hauled the boat onto the shore. Their feet sank into the damp sand, full of dried needles and pinecones. The boat was heavy and slippery, but they managed to drag it out all the way to the stern, then stopped, breathing hard.

  “I crushed my foot,” said Pashka, fixing his red bandanna. He always made sure that his bandanna was tied precisely over his right ear, in the fashion of the hook-nosed Irukanian pirates. “Life ain’t worth a dime,” he declared.

  Anka was intently sucking on her finger.

  “A splinter?” Anton asked.

  “No. A scratch. One of you two has real claws …”

  “Let me have a look.”

  She showed him.

  “Yes,” said Anton. “A wound. Well, what should we do?”

  “Hoist the boat onto our shoulders and walk along the shore,” Pashka suggested.

  “So why did we get out?” Anton asked.

  “Any idiot could manage in the boat,” Pashka explained. “But on the shore, there are reeds—that’s one. Cliffs—that’s two. And ponds—that’s three. And the ponds are full of carp, and catfish.”

  “Schools of deep-fried catfish,” said Anton.

  “You ever dive into a pond?”

  “Sure”.

  “Never seen you do it. Must have missed it somehow.”

  “Lots of things you haven’t seen.”

  Anka turned her back to them, raised her crossbow, and shot at a pine tree about twenty paces away. Bits of tree bark rained down.

  “Nice,” said Pashka, and immediately fired his rifle. He had aimed at Anka’s bolt, but he missed. “Didn’t hold my breath,” he explained.

  “And if you had?” asked Anton. He was looking at Anka.

  Anka pulled the bowstring lever. She had excellent muscles—Anton enjoyed watching the little hard ball of her biceps roll under her tanned skin. She took very careful aim and fired another bolt. It pierced the tree trunk right below the first with a crack. “We shouldn’t be doing that,” she said, lowering her crossbow.

  “Doing what?” Anton asked.

  “Hurting the tree, that’s what. Some kid was shooting at a tree with a bow yesterday, so I made him pull the arrows out with his teeth.”

  “Pashka,” said Anton. “Go on, you have good teeth.”

  “One of my teeth makes me whistle,” he retorted.

  “Forget it,” said Anka. “Let’s do something.”

  “I don’t feel like climbing cliffs,” Anton said.

  “Me neither. Let’s go straight.”

  “Go where?” Pashka asked.

  “Wherever.”

  “Well?” said Anton.

  “That means the saiva,” Pashka said. “Let’s go to the Forgotten Highway. Remember, Toshka?”

  “Of course!” Anton replied.

  “You see, Anechka—” Pashka began.

  “Don’t you call me Anechka,” Anka said sharply. She couldn’t stand it when people called her anything other than Anka.

  Anton took careful note of her preference. He quickly said, “The Forgotten Highway. No one drives on it. And it’s not on the map. And we have no idea where it goes.”

  “And you’ve been there?”

  “Once. But we didn’t have the time to explore.”

  “A road from nowhere to nowhither,” declared the recovered Pashka.

  “That’s amazing!” Anka said. Her eyes became like black slits. “Let’s go. Will we make it by night?”

  “Come on! We’ll make it by noon.”

  They climbed up the cliff. When he got to the top, Pashka turned around. He saw the blue lake with the yellowish bald patches of the sandbars, the boat lying on the sand, and large ripples spreading in the calm, oily water by the shore—probably a splash from that same pike. And Pashka was filled with the vague elation he always felt when he and Anton had run away from boarding school and a day of total independence lay ahead—full of undiscovered places, wild strawberries, hot deserted meadows, gray lizards, and ice-cold water from unexpected springs. And as always, he wanted to whoop and leap up high in the air, and he immediately did so, and Anton looked at him, laughing, and Pashka saw that Anton’s eyes expressed complete understanding. And Anka put two fingers in her mouth and gave a wild whistle, and they entered the forest.

  It was a forest of sparse pines; their feet kept slipping on the fallen needles. The slanting rays of the sun fell between the straight trunks, and the ground was dappled with golden spots. It smelled of tar, the lake, and wild strawberries; unseen birds screeched somewhere in the sky.

  Anka was walking in front, holding the crossbow underneath her arm, occasionally bending down to pick the blood-red wild strawberries, so shiny they looked varnished. Anton followed with the good old-fashioned arbalest of Marshal Totz on his shoulder. The quiver with the good old-fashioned bolts slapped heavily against his behind. He walked and glanced at Anka’s neck—tanned, almost black, with protruding vertebrae. Once in a while he’d look around, searching for Pashka, but Pashka was nowhere to be found—except that from time to time, first to his right, then to his left, a red bandanna would flash in the sun. Anton pictured Pashka silently gliding between the pine trees, his rifle at the ready, his thin, predatory face with the peeling nose stretched out in front of him. Pashka was stealing through the saiva, and the saiva meant business. The saiva will call, my friend—and you have to respond in time, thought Anton. He was about to duck down, but Anka was in front of him and she might turn around. It’d be ridiculous.

  Anka turned around and asked, “You left quietly?”

  Anton shrugged. “Who leaves loudly?”

  “Actually, I might have been noisy,” Anka said anxiously. “I dropped a basin—then, suddenly, there were footsteps in the hall. Must have been old maid Katya—she’s on duty today. I had to jump into the flower bed. What do you think, Toshka, what kind of flowers grow in there?”

  Anton furrowed his brow. “Underneath your window? No idea. Why?”

  “Very hardy flowers. ‘No wind can bend them, no storm can fell them.’ People have jumped in there for years, but they couldn’t care less.”

  “That’s interesting,” Anton said with an air of deep thought. He remembered that underneath his window there was also a flower bed with flowers “no wind can bend, no storm can fell.” But he had never paid any attention.

  Anka stopped, waited for him, and offered him a handful of wild strawberries. Anton carefully took three berries. “Have some more,” said Anka.

  “Thanks,” said Anton. “I like taking them one by one. Old maid Katya isn’t too bad, right?”

  “Depends on your point of view,” said Anka. “Whe
n someone tells you every night that your feet are either dirty or dusty …” She stopped talking. It was wonderful walking alone in the forest with her like this, shoulder to shoulder, bare elbows touching, glancing over occasionally to take in how pretty she was, how agile, and how amazingly friendly. How her eyes were big and gray, with black eyelashes.

  “Yeah,” said Anton, stretching out his hand to brush aside a cobweb that gleamed in the sun. “I bet her feet are never dusty. If you’re carried over puddles, you sure won’t get covered in dust …”

  “Who’s been carrying her?”

  “Henry from the weather station. You know, the big blond one.”

  “Really?”

  “What’s the big deal? Everyone knows that they’re in love.”

  They stopped talking again. Anton took a look at Anka. Her eyes were like black slits. “Since when?” she asked.

  “Oh, one moonlit night,” Anton answered cautiously. “Just don’t tell anyone.”

  Anka chuckled. “No one made you talk, Toshka,” she said. “Want some wild strawberries?”

  Anton mechanically scooped berries from her stained little palm and stuffed them into his mouth. I don’t like gossips, he thought. I can’t stand blabbermouths. He suddenly found an argument. “You’ll be carried in someone’s arms yourself someday,” he said. “How would you like if it people started gossiping about it?”

  “What makes you think I’m going to gossip?” Anka said, sounding distracted. “I don’t like gossips myself.”

  “Listen, what are you up to?”

  “Nothing in particular.” Anka shrugged. A minute later she confided, “You know, I’m awfully sick of having to wash my feet twice every single night.”

  Poor old maid Katya, thought Anton. A fate worse than the saiva.

  They came out onto the trail. It sloped down, and the forest kept getting darker and darker. It was overgrown with ferns and tall, damp grass. The pine trunks were covered in moss and the foam of white lichen. But the saiva meant business. A hoarse, utterly inhuman voice suddenly roared, “Stop! Drop your weapons—you, noble don, and you, doña!”