The Inhabited Island Read online

  Gai didn’t really regret that very greatly. To hell with the fossils, he had other things to think about, and in general he didn’t understand what anybody could ever need this science for. But Rada loved her uncle very much and always supported his expressions of horror at the stupidity of his colleague Shapshu and his grief that the university authorities wouldn’t approve the funding required for expeditions.

  Today, however, the conversation took a different turn. Rada, who had heard everything, massaraksh, behind her screen, asked her uncle in what way degenerates were different from ordinary people. Gai gave Mak a menacing look and suggested that instead of spoiling her near and dear ones’ appetites, she should read the literature. However, Uncle Kaan declared that the literature was written only for the absolute stupidest of fools, and the people in the Department of Public Education imagined everybody else to be the same kind of ignoramuses as they were. But the question of the degenerates was by no means as simple and by no means as trivial as they tried to make it appear in order to mold public opinion in a specific manner, and he said they could discuss this here either like civilized individuals or like their courageous but—unfortunately!—poorly educated officers in the barracks. Mak suggested discussing like civilized individuals for a change.

  Uncle Kaan downed another shot and started expounding the theory that was current in scientific circles about the degenerates being nothing less than a new biological species that had appeared on the face of the World as a result of exposure to radiation. The degenerates were undoubtedly dangerous, but not as a social and political phenomenon; the degenerates were biologically dangerous, for they were not waging their struggle against any single nationality, they were simultaneously waging it against all peoples, nationalities, and races. They were fighting for their place in this world, for the survival of their species, and that struggle was not dependent on any social conditions, and it would only end when either the last human being or the last degenerate mutant departed from the arena of biological history.

  “Hontian gold—gibberish!” yelled the raging professor. “Sabotage of the ADT system—nonsense! Look to the South, dear gentlemen! To the South! Beyond the Blue Serpent! That’s where the real danger is coming from! That’s where the monsters in human form will multiply, that’s the place from which their columns will advance to trample us underfoot and wipe us off the face of the World. You’re a blind man, Gai. And your commanders are blind men. You don’t understand the truly great destiny of our country and the historically heroic task of the Unknown Fathers! To save humankind! Not just one nation or other, not just our mothers and children, but the whole of humankind!”

  Gai got angry and said he wasn’t much concerned about the fate of humankind. He didn’t believe in all these armchair ravings. And if he was told there was a chance of setting the wild degenerates on Hontia, bypassing his own country, he would dedicate his entire life to that. The professor flew into a rage and called him a blind fool again. He said that the Unknown Fathers were the most heroic of heroes—that the battle they had to wage was truly against the odds if the only foot soldiers they had at their disposal were as pathetic and blind as Gai. Gai decided not to argue with him. His uncle didn’t have a clue about politics, and in some ways he was an animal fossil himself.

  Mak tried to intervene and started telling them about the degenerate who had fought against the authorities before the war, but Gai forestalled this feeble impulse to disclose official service secrets by telling Rada to serve the main course. And he told Mak to turn on the television. “Too many conversations today,” he said. “Let the soldier home on leave get a bit of rest.”

  But Gai’s imagination had been stimulated, and they were showing some kind of nonsense on the television, so he gave in and started telling stories about the wild degenerates. He knew a thing or two about them—God be praised, hadn’t he fought against them for three years rather than sitting it out in the rear like certain philosophers? Rada felt offended for the old man and called Gai a boaster, but for some reason her uncle and Mak took Gai’s side and asked him to continue. Only Gai declared that he wouldn’t say another word. In the first place, he was actually feeling rather offended himself, and in the second place, after rummaging around in his memory, he couldn’t find anything in there that would have refuted the old drunkard’s fabrications. The southern degenerates really were hellish beings, and absolutely merciless. Maybe their kind could exterminate the whole of humankind without a second thought, and perhaps even take pleasure in it. But then he suddenly recalled what Zef, the master sergeant of the 134th Unit, had once told him. Ginger-haired Zef had said that the degenerates were constantly getting more active because the radioactive desert was advancing on them from the south, and the poor wretches had nowhere to go—they had no choice but to try fighting their way north into regions where there was no radiation.

  “Who told you that?” his uncle asked scornfully. “What blockhead could ever get such a primitive idea into his head?” Gai looked at him with a gloating expression and gravely replied, “That is the opinion of a certain Allu Zef, an Imperial Prize winner and our foremost psychiatrist.”

  “And where did you meet him?” Gai’s uncle asked even more contemptuously. “Not in the company mess, was it?”

  In the heat of the moment, Gai was about to say where he had met Zef, but he bit his tongue, put on an important expression, and started demonstratively listening to the television announcer, who was reading out the weather forecast.

  And at that moment, massaraksh, Mak butted into the conversation again. “I am prepared to acknowledge,” he said, “that the monsters in the South are some new breed of humans, but what do they have in common with the property owner Renadu, for instance? Renadu is also considered a degenerate, only he clearly doesn’t belong to any new breed. In fact, to be quite frank, he belongs to a very old breed of people.”

  Gai had never thought about this point, so he was very glad when his uncle jumped in to answer the question. Calling Mak a clodhopping dolt, Kaan started explaining that the secret degenerates, otherwise known as urban degenerates, were nothing other than surviving remnants of the new breed that had been almost completely exterminated in our central region while they were still in the cradle. “I can still remember all the horrors: they were killed at birth, sometimes together with their mothers. The only ones who survived were those in whom their new species characteristics were not manifested in any external form.” Uncle Kaan downed a fifth shot, then went on a rampage, setting out in front of his audience a precise plan for the universal medical screening of the entire population, which would have to be carried out sooner or later, and preferably sooner rather than later. And no legal degenerates! No tolerance! The weeds had to be mercilessly pulled out by the roots!

  On that note lunch came to an end. Rada started washing the dishes, and her uncle, without waiting for any objections, put the stopper in his flask and carried it off to his room, muttering that he was going to write a reply to that fool Shapshu. But for some reason, he happened to take the shot glass with him too. Gai watched him go, looking at his shabby, threadbare jacket, at his old, patched trousers, at his darned socks and darned slippers, and he felt sorry for the old man. That cursed war! His uncle used to own this entire apartment, he had a wife and a son and a servant, and there was luxurious tableware, plenty of money, and even an estate somewhere, but now . . . Just a dusty study crammed with books, which was also his bedroom and all his other rooms as well; shabby clothes, loneliness, and obscurity. Yes.

  Gai moved the only armchair up to the television, stretched out his legs, and started drowsily gazing at the screen. Mak sat beside him for a while, then instantly and silently, as only he was capable of doing, disappeared and turned up in a different corner. He rummaged in Gai’s little library for a while, selected some kind of textbook, and started leafing through it, leaning his shoulder against the wardrobe. Rada cleared the table, sat down beside Gai, and started knitting, occasio
nally glancing at the screen. The home was filled with peace, quiet, and contentment. Gai dozed off.

  He dreamed about some kind of rubbish: he captured two degenerates in some kind of iron tunnel, started interrogating them, and suddenly discovered that one of the degenerates was Mak. The other degenerate, smiling gently and kindly, said to Gai, “You were mistaken all the time. Your place is with us, and the cornet is simply a professional killer, without any patriotism, without any real loyalty—he simply likes killing, the way you like shrimp soup.” Gai suddenly felt a suffocating doubt. He sensed that he was on the brink of completely understanding everything through and through; just one more second and not even a single question would be left. But this unfamiliar condition was so agonizing that his heart stopped beating and he woke up.

  Mak and Rada were talking in quiet voices about some nonsense or other—about swimming in the sea, about sand and seashells . . . He didn’t listen to them. A thought had suddenly occurred to him: Could he really be capable of doubts of any kind, of hesitation or uncertainty? But he had doubted in his sleep, hadn’t he? Did that mean he would have doubts in the same situation when he was awake? He tried for a while to recall all the details of his dream, but the dream slipped away from him, like wet soap skidding out of wet hands, blurring until eventually it became completely implausible, and Gai decided in relief that it was all a load of drivel. And when Rada noticed that he wasn’t sleeping and asked what he thought was better, the sea or a river, he replied in soldierly fashion, in the style of good old Doga, “The best thing of all is a good bathhouse.”

  The program showing on television was Patterns. They were bored. Gai suggested having a beer. Rada went to the kitchen and brought two bottles from the refrigerator. Over the beers they talked about this and that, and somehow in passing it emerged that Mak had mastered the textbook on geopolitics in the last half hour. Rada was delighted. Gai didn’t believe it. He said half an hour was enough time to leaf through the textbook, perhaps even to read it, but only mechanically, without any understanding. Mak demanded an examination. Gai demanded the textbook. A wager was struck: the loser would have to go to Uncle Kaan and declare to him that his colleague Shapshu was an intelligent man and an excellent scientist.

  Gai opened the textbook at random, found the test questions at the end of a chapter, and asked, “What is it that makes our state’s expansion to the north a morally noble endeavor?” Mak replied in his own words, but very close to the text, and added that in his view moral nobility had nothing at all to do with it; as he understood things, it was all a matter of the aggressive stance of the Hontian and Pandeian regimes, and in general this section of the textbook contradicted the basic thesis of the first chapter on the sovereignty of each and every nation. Gai scratched the back of his head with both hands, turned over a few pages, and asked, “What is the average harvest of cereals in the northwestern regions?” Mak laughed and said there was no data on the northwestern regions. The attempt to trick him had failed, and Rada delightedly stuck her tongue out at Gai. “Then what is the population pressure per unit area in the estuary of the Blue Serpent River?” Mak gave the figure, also giving the margin of error, and took the opportunity to add that he thought the concept of population pressure was rather vague. In any case, he didn’t understand why it had been introduced. Gai started explaining to him that population pressure was a measure of aggressiveness, but at that point Rada intervened. She said that Gai was twisting things and trying to back out of the rest of the exam because he realized it was looking bad for him.

  Gai absolutely did not want to go and speak to Uncle Kaan, so he started bickering to drag things out. Mak listened to him for a while, then suddenly announced that under no circumstances should Rada go back to working as a waitress; she needed to study, he said. Gai, delighted by the change of subject, exclaimed that he had told her the same thing a thousand times, and had already suggested that she should apply to the Women’s Guards Corps, where they would make a really useful person out of her. Mak only shook his head, and Rada, as she had always done before, expressed her opinion of the Women’s Guards Corps in highly disrespectful terms

  Gai didn’t try to argue. He put down the textbook, reached into the wardrobe, took out a guitar, and started tuning it. Rada and Mak immediately moved the table aside and stood facing each other, ready to roar out “Yes-yes, no-no.” And Gai gave them “Yes-yes, no-no,” tapping out the rhythm and strumming so that the notes chimed out. He watched them dance and thought what a splendid couple they made, only they had nowhere to live, and if they got married, he would have to move out completely into the barracks. Well, what of it? Plenty of corporals lived in the barracks . . . Only, then again, Mak wasn’t giving any signs of planning to get married. He treated her more like a friend, only with more tenderness and respect, but all the signs were that Rada had really fallen for him. Oh, just look at the way her eyes flash. And how could she possibly not fall for a young guy like that? Even that old hag Madam Go acts the same way, and she’s well past sixty; when Mak walks along the corridor, she opens her door, sticks her skull out, and grins. But then, damn it all, the entire building loves Mak, even the guys in the section love him, only the cornet takes a strange sort of attitude toward him—but even the cornet doesn’t deny that the guy’s a real ball of fire.

  The couple danced until they were ready to drop. Then Mak took the guitar from Gai, retuned it in his own outlandish manner, and started singing his strange Highlander songs. Thousands of songs, and not a single one that Gai knew. Something new every time. And the strangest thing of all was that Gai didn’t understand a single word, but when he listened, he felt like crying, or he laughed until he almost split his sides.

  Rada had already memorized some of the songs, and now she tried to sing along. She was especially fond of a funny song (Mak had translated it) about a girl who is sitting on a mountain and waiting for her boyfriend, but her boyfriend just can’t get to her—first one thing stops him, and then another . . . Through the sounds of the guitar and the singing, they didn’t hear the front doorbell ring. There was just a loud knock, and Cornet Chachu’s orderly lumbered into the room.

  “Mr. Corporal, sir, permission to speak!” he barked out, squinting sideways at Rada.

  Mak stopped playing. Gai said, “Permission granted.”

  “The cornet has ordered you and Candidate Sim to report immediately to the company office. The car is waiting downstairs.”

  Gai jumped to his feet. “Off you go,” he said. “Wait in the car, we’ll be down immediately. “Quick, get dressed,” he said to Maxim.

  Rada took the guitar in her arms, as if it were a child, and stood at the window, turned away from them.

  Gai and Mak hastily got dressed. “What do you think this is about?” asked Mak.

  “How should I know?” Gai growled. “Maybe it’ll be an alarm drill.”

  “I don’t like this,” said Mak.

  Gai looked at him and switched on the radio, just to make sure. They were broadcasting Businesswomen’s Small Talk.

  After they had gotten dressed and tightened their belts, Gai said, “Rada, we’re off, then.”

  “Go,” said Rada, without turning around.

  “Let’s go, Mak,” said Gai, tugging his beret down on his head.

  “Give me a call,” said Rada. “If you’re delayed, be sure to call.” But she still didn’t turn around.

  The orderly obligingly opened the car door for Gai. They got in and drove off. The business was obviously urgent; the driver drove hard and fast, with the siren on, in the reserve lane. Gai rather regretfully thought that now their little party, and a fine, cozy, carefree evening at home, had been ruined. But such was the life of a guardsman. Now they would tell him, You’re going to get into this tank and you’re going to fire, straight after the bottle of beer, after his cozy pajamas, after the jolly songs to the strains of the guitar. Such was the glorious life of a guardsman, the best of all possible lives. And we don’t need
any girlfriends or wives. And Mak’s right for not looking to marry Rada, although I feel sorry for my sweet sister, of course . . . Never mind, she’ll wait. If she loves him, she’ll wait.

  They turned onto the parade ground and braked to a halt at the entrance to the barracks building. Gai jumped out and ran up the steps. He stopped outside the door of the office, checked the position of his beret and his buckles, cast a quick glance over Mak, fastened Mak’s collar button—massaraksh, that thing was always unfastened!—and knocked.

  “Come in!” the familiar voice croaked. Gai walked inside and reported in. Cornet Chachu was sitting at his desk, wearing a wool cape and peaked cap. He was smoking and drinking coffee, and the shell casing in front of him was full of cigarette butts. Lying next to it on the desk were two automatic rifles.

  The cornet slowly got to his feet, leaned heavily on the desk with both hands, and started to speak, staring fixedly at Mak. “Candidate Sim. You have shown yourself to be an outstanding soldier and a loyal comrade in arms. I have petitioned the brigade commander for your early promotion to the status of an active private in the Battle Guards. You have passed the test of fire quite satisfactorily. There remains only the final test—the test of blood.”

  Gai’s heart leaped in joy. He hadn’t expected it to happen so soon. Good for you, Cornet! That’s an old war dog for you! What a fool I was to think he was scheming against Mak . . . Gai looked at Mak, and his joy dwindled. Mak’s face was completely wooden and his eyes were goggling—which was all correct according to the rules, but just at this moment he didn’t need to adhere so strictly to all the rules and regulations.

  “I am handing you an order, Candidate Sim,” the cornet continued, holding a sheet of paper out to Mak. “This is the first written order addressed to you in person. I hope it will not be the last. Read it and sign it.”