Definitely Maybe Page 14

  “Why do I have to understand that?” I asked grimly.

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’ll make it easier for you. And then I would like you to know that this isn’t for a day or for a year. I think that it may be for more than a century. There’s no hurry,” he snorted. “There’s a billion years to go. But we can and must start now. And you … well, you’ll have to wait. Until Bobchik grows up. Until you get used to the idea. Ten years, twenty—it doesn’t matter.”

  “It does, and how!” I said, feeling a disgusting crooked smirk on my face. “In ten years I won’t be good for anything. And in twenty I won’t give a damn about anything.”

  He didn’t say anything; he shrugged and filled his pipe. We sat in silence. He was trying to help me. Paint some prospects for me, prove that I wasn’t such a coward and that he wasn’t such a hero. That we were just two scientists; we were offered a project, and due to circumstances, he could work on it now and I couldn’t. But it didn’t make it any easier for me. Because he was going to the Pamirs to struggle with Weingarten’s revertase, Zakhar’s fadings, with his own brilliant math, and all the rest. They would be aiming balls of fire at him, sending ghosts, frozen mountain climbers, especially female ones, dropping avalanches on him, tossing him in space and time, and they would finally get to him there. Or maybe not. Maybe he would determine the laws of the manifestations of fire and the invasions of frozen mountain climbers. And maybe none of this would happen. Maybe he’d just sit and pore over the work and try to discover the point of intersection of the theory of M cavities and the qualitative analysis of American cultural influence on Japan, and probably that will be a very strange point of intersection, and it’s also probable that he will find the key to the whole vicious mechanism in that point, and maybe even the key to controlling the mechanism. And I will stay home, meet my mother-in-law and Bobchik at the plane tomorrow, and we’ll all go out and buy the bookshelves together.

  “They’ll kill you there,” I said hopelessly.

  “Not necessarily,” he said. “And after all, I won’t be there alone … and not only there … and not only me.”

  We looked into each other’s eyes. Behind the thick lenses there was no tension, no false fearlessness, no flaming martyrdom—only the reddish calmness and reddish confidence that everything should be just the way it was and no other way.

  And he said nothing else, but I felt that he was still speaking. There’s no hurry, he was saying. There’s still a billion years to the end of the world, he was saying. There’s a lot, an awful lot, that can be done in a billion years if we don’t give up and we understand, understand and don’t give up. And I also thought that he said: “He knew how to scribble on paper under the candle’s crackle! He had something to die for by the Black River.” And his satisfied guffaws, like Wells’s Martian laughter, rang in my ears.

  I lowered my eyes. I sat hunched up, clutching the white envelope to my stomach with both hands and repeated for the tenth time, the twentieth time: “Since then crooked, roundabout, godforsaken paths stretch out before me …”

  A NOTE FROM THE TRANSLATOR

  Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are Russia’s best-known science fiction writers. Intellectually invigorating, full of adventure, and set in fantasy worlds, their work was powerful social criticism that could be expressed only indirectly under Soviet censorship. Even so, they had to deal with censors for every publication. The brothers lived in different cities, Arkady in Moscow, Boris in Leningrad, and in those pre-Internet days, they met in person to work on their books, see publishers, and try to persuade editors to leave in concepts, phrases, even individual “suspect” words.

  The collapse of the USSR brought an end to state censorship, and many new editions of the Strugatskys’ previously expurgated works appeared. The canonic texts, edited and annotated by Boris Strugatsky, were published in 2000–2001. This edition of Definitely Maybe is based on those publications, and it is the first time the complete text has been available in English.

  In this afterword, Strugatsky tells the backstory to Definitely Maybe (which was called A Billion Years Before the End of the World in Russian), and discusses the writing process from proposal to text, the delay caused by a political-literary case in which Boris was a witness, and the book’s eventual publication. Boris refers to Arkady as AN and himself as BN; the “N” stands for Natanovich, their patronymic.

  The case that delayed the writing of the book was that of Mikhail Kheifets, who was arrested for “spreading anti-Soviet propaganda” in 1974. Kheifets was charged with writing the introduction to a collection of poems by Joseph Brodsky and editing a collection of essays by Andrei Amalrik, both of which were samizdat editions. Samizdat, which literally means “self-published,” was the method by which banned works were circulated in the Soviet Union: people typed manuscripts with as many carbon copies as possible and passed them around, and the recipients retyped more copies. Boris was called as a witness, and denied ever having seen the books. Kheifets was given four years in the labor camps.

  After the death of his brother in 1991, Boris wrote under the pen name S. Vititsky, and Search for Predestination, or the Twenty-Seventh Theorem of Ethics (1995) deals with the KGB and the Kheifets case. Boris died in 2012.

  Antonina W. Bouis

  AN AFTERWORD TO DEFINITELY MAYBE

  On April 23, 1973, this notation appeared in our work diary:

  Ark[ady] arrived to write a proposal for Aurora [publishing house].

  1. “Faust, 20th century.” Hell and Heaven try to stop the development of science.

  2. A Billion Years Before the End of the World (“before the Final Judgment”).

  Saboteurs

  The Devil

  Aliens

  Spiridon Octopi

  Union of the Nine

  The Universe

  This was followed by a proposal that gave the essence and plot of the future novella in much detail and with great similarity to the final version. The rare case where we managed to build the “skeleton” of a novella in a single workday.

  The further elaboration of the book was continued during a May meeting—we even began writing a rough draft and a dozen pages—but then we had to interrupt the work: first to work on the screenplay for Fighting Cats and then on the novella The Kid from Hell. It was only in June 1974, having rewritten the ten pages, that we took up Billion seriously and completed it in December.

  Today I am certain that the delay of almost a year was only beneficial. In the spring of 1974, BN was dragged into the so-called Kheifets affair: this was his first face-to-face confrontation with our valiant “competent organs”; fortunately, he was only called as a witness. This confrontation (described in a fair amount of detail by S. Vititsky in Search for Predestination) left an ineradicable mark on BN and colored (at least for him) the entire atmosphere of Billion in a completely specific way and with a completely specific tone. Billion became for BN (and naturally, according to the law of communicating vessels, for AN as well) a novella about the tormenting and essentially hopeless struggle of mankind to preserve the “right of primogeniture” against the dull, blind, persistent force that knows neither honor, nor nobility, nor charity, that knows only one thing—how to achieve its goals, by any means, without any setbacks. When we wrote this novella, we could clearly see the real and cruel proto-image of the Homeostatic Universe that we had invented, and we saw ourselves in the subtext, and we tried to be realistic and ruthless—toward ourselves and the entire invented situation from which there was only one exit, as in the real world—through the loss, total or partial, of self-respect. “If you have the guts to be yourself,” as John Updike wrote, “other people’ll pay your price.”

  Amazingly, even though the subtext of the novella seemed carefully hidden, it kept poking through uncontrollably and making the authorities wary. Thus, Aurora, which was waiting impatiently for our novella, and which had in fact commissioned it and even given us an advance, despite the good reviews, despite the absolute
impossibility of picking on any specific thing as unacceptable, despite their original goodwill toward the authors—despite all this, they immediately demanded that the action be moved to some capitalist country (“the USA, for example”), and when the authors refused, they immediately rejected the novella, with regret but decisively.

  We managed to get it published in the magazine Znaniesila, and at the cost of relatively small changes. The first victim of the censors was naturally Lidochka’s bra, which was declared a toxic bomb placed by the authors under the people’s morality.… But most of all, I remember, we were surprised by the determined and totally uncompromising insistence that the warning telegram (“BOBCHIK SILENT VIOLATING HOMEOPATHIC UNIVERSE”) be removed. It remains an editorial secret as to which higher-up had what “uncontrolled associations” with that telegram. They had at first demanded that we cut the Homeostatic Universe en grand, but we and our editor friends managed to fight them off with a relatively minor concession: getting rid of the concept of “homeostasis” (which for some reason the authorities imbued with a socio-mystical significance) and introducing the concept of “Preservation of the Structure” (apparently, this was devoid of all social-mystical spirit). We also had to change “criminal investigator” to “procuratorial investigator.” Or the other way around. I don’t remember. One of these investigators did not suit the overseers—which one? Why? God only knows. Or perhaps the devil; it’s more in his line, I think.

  I just had a thought: all the characters have a prototype. A rare case! No one is totally made up, except for Investigator Zykov, and even he is an average of Porfiry Petrovich (see Crime and Punishment) and the KGB investigator who was in charge of the Kheifets case. Perhaps that’s why we always considered Billion one of our favorite novellas—it was a piece of our life, a very concrete, very personal life, filled with absolutely concrete people and real events. And as we all know, there is nothing more pleasurable than recalling unpleasantness that has bypassed us successfully.

  Boris Strugatsky

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