The Snail on the Slope Page 25

  The idea of an impending catastrophe simply didn’t fit into their heads. This catastrophe was approaching too slowly and had been approaching for too long. It was probably because they thought of a catastrophe as something immediate, as something instantaneous, as related to some kind of disaster. And they weren’t able and didn’t want to generalize, weren’t able and didn’t want to think about the world outside their village. There was the village and there was the forest. The forest was stronger—but then, the forest always had been and always would be stronger. Catastrophe, what catastrophe? How could this be a catastrophe? It was just life. Now, getting crushed by a tree—that was a kind of catastrophe, of course, but if you just had a bit of sense and kept a head on your shoulders . . .

  They’ll figure it out one day. When there are no women left; when the swamp is at their doorsteps; when underground springs erupt in the middle of their streets and lilac fog hangs over their roofs . . . Or maybe they won’t realize it even then: they’ll simply say, we can’t live here anymore—it’s the Surpassment. And they’ll go build another village . . .

  Crookleg was sitting by his door, pouring ferment on a crop of mushrooms that had sprung up overnight, and he was getting ready to have breakfast. “Have a seat, have a seat,” he welcomed Candide. “Will you have something to eat? These are good mushrooms.”

  “I’ll eat a bit,” said Candide, and sat down next to him.

  “Eat, eat,” said Crookleg. “Your Nava is gone, when will you ever get used to it? . . . I hear you’re leaving again. Who told me that? Oh, yes, you told me so yourself: I’m leaving, you said. Why don’t you want to stay home? You’d be better off staying home, you would . . . Are you going to the Reeds or to the Anthills? If it’s the Reeds, I’d go with you myself. We’d go immediately, we’d turn right and walk along this street, we’d pass through the open wood and pick some mushrooms while we’re at it—we’d bring ferment and eat along the way. The mushrooms that grow in the open wood are good, they don’t grow in the village, or anywhere else, either, but in the open wood you can eat and eat, and you can’t get enough . . . And after we ate, we’d leave the open wood, then we’d go past the Bread Swamp, and there we’d eat again—the Bread Swamp produces good, sweet grain, it always surprises me that the mud and the bog can produce grain like that . . . And then we’d follow the sun, of course, we’d walk for three days, and there we’d be at the Reeds . . .”

  “We’re going to the Devil’s Cliffs,” Candide reminded him patiently. “We’re leaving the day after tomorrow. Big Fist is coming, too.”

  Crookleg shook his head in doubt. “The Devil’s Cliffs . . .” he repeated. “No, Silent Man, we won’t make it to the Devil’s Cliffs. Do you know how far away they are, the Devil’s Cliffs? Maybe they aren’t actually anywhere at all, it’s just something people say, the Devil’s Cliffs . . . So I’m not going to the Devil’s Cliffs, I don’t believe in them. Now, if we went to the City, or even better, the Anthills—they aren’t far, just a hop and a jump away . . . Listen, Silent Man, how about we go to the Anthills? And Big Fist can come . . . You know, I haven’t been to the Anthills once since I hurt my leg. Nava always used to ask me to go there, let’s go to the Anthills, Crookleg, she’s say . . . Had a mind to see the hole where I hurt my leg, she did . . . And I’d tell her I don’t remember where that hole is, and maybe the Anthills, they aren’t there anymore, I haven’t been there in ages . . .”

  Candide chewed the mushroom and looked at Crookleg. And Crookleg kept talking and talking—he talked about the Reeds, and he talked about the Anthills, looking down and only occasionally glancing up at Candide. You’re a good man, Crookleg—you’re kind, and you’ve got a way with words, and the village head minds you, as does Big Fist, and the old man is just plain afraid of you, and there’s a reason you were the best friend and companion of the notorious Tortured Questioner, a restless seeker, a man who had never found what he was looking for and perished somewhere in the forest . . . There’s just one problem: you don’t want to let me go into the forest, Crookleg; you feel sorry for this wretch. The forest is a dangerous, deadly place, many enter it but few return from it, and the ones who do return are usually frightened out of their wits or even crippled . . . You might come back with a broken leg, or God knows what else . . . So you try to trick me, Crookleg—either you pretend to be a half-wit, or you pretend you think Silent Man is a half-wit, whereas in actual fact, the only thing you’re sure about is this: Silent Man has already somehow managed to come back once, having lost a girl, and lightning doesn’t strike twice . . .

  “Listen, Crookleg,” said Candide. “Listen to me carefully. Say what you like, think what you like, but there’s just one thing I have to ask you: don’t abandon me, come to the forest with me. I really need you with me in the forest, Crookleg. We’re leaving the day after tomorrow, and I’d really like you to come with us. Do you understand?”

  Crookleg was looking at Candide, and his faded eyes were inscrutable. “Of course,” he said. “I understand everything. We’ll go together. We’ll come out, turn left, walk until the field, go past the two stones, and come out onto the trail. It’s not hard to find, this trail: it’s so full of rocks it’s easy to break a leg . . . Keep eating, Silent Man, keep eating those mushrooms, they’re tasty . . . And then this trail will take us all the way to the mushroomy village, I’ve told you about it, I think, it’s empty, it’s overgrown with mushrooms, but they aren’t like, say, these mushrooms, they are bad mushrooms, people have gotten sick and even died from them, so we won’t stop there, we’ll keep going. And before long, we’ll make it to the kook village, where they make pots out of soil—the things people think of! They started doing that after the blue grass went through them. And it wasn’t a big deal, they didn’t even get sick, they just started making pots out of soil . . . We won’t stop there either, there’s no point stopping there, we’ll just turn right—and there we’ll be, right at your Clay Meadow . . .”

  Or maybe I shouldn’t take you? thought Candide. You’ve already been there, the forest has already chewed you up and spit you out, and who knows, maybe you’ve already rolled around on the ground, screaming in pain and fear while a young woman, biting her adorable lip and splaying her childish fingers, hung over your body. I don’t know, I don’t know. But we do have to go. We have to capture at least two of them, at least one of them, so we can learn everything, so we can get to the bottom of it all . . .

  And then what? They are the damned, the miserable damned. Or rather, they are the happy damned, because they do not know that they’re damned; that the strong ones of their world only see them as a dirty tribe of rapists; that the strong ones have already targeted them with clouds of controlled viruses, armies of robots, and the walls of their forest; that everything has already been decided for them; and that—this is the most terrible thing of all—the historical truth here, in the forest, isn’t on their side. They are relics who have been condemned to death by objective laws, and helping them means holding up progress—it means putting an obstacle in the way of the front lines of progress, even if only a small one. Except I don’t care about that in the least, thought Candide. What’s their progress to me? It’s not my progress, and the only reason I’m calling it progress is because I can’t find a better word . . .

  I can’t choose this with my head. I have to choose this with my heart. Objective laws can’t be good or bad; they are outside the bounds of morality. But I’m not outside the bounds of morality! Maybe if those helpmates had found me, healed me, and showered me with affection, if they had taken me in and felt sorry for me—well, then I would have probably found it simple and natural to take the side of their progress, and then I, too, would have believed that Crookleg and all these villages are irritating anachronisms that we’ve already fussed with too long . . . Then again, maybe not, maybe I would have never found it simple or easy, I can’t stand to see people being treated like animals. But maybe the issue is merely one of terminology, and if I had
learned the women’s language, everything would sound different: enemies of progress, stupid, lazy gluttons . . . Lofty ideals . . . A higher purpose . . . Laws of nature . . . And this is why we’re annihilating half the population?

  No, it’s not for me. It wouldn’t be for me in any language. I don’t care that Crookleg is a spoke in the wheel of their progress. I’ll do everything to make sure that this spoke slows the wheel down. And if I never manage to get back to the biological research station—and I probably will never manage to get back—I’ll do everything to make the wheel stop. Then again, if I do find a way to get back . . . Hmmm. Strange, it never occurred to me to look at the Administration from the outside. And it doesn’t occur to Crookleg to look at the forest from the outside. And the same probably goes for those helpmates. Whereas it’s quite a curious spectacle—the Administration as seen from above. All right, I’ll have to think about it later.

  “Then that’s settled,” he said. “We’re leaving the day after tomorrow.”

  “Sure thing,” Crookleg immediately replied. “We’ll go out and turn left—”

  Suddenly, shouts came from the field. Women started screeching. Many voices rang out in unison: “Silent Man! Hey, Silent Man!”

  Crookleg started. “Sounds like deadlings!” he said, getting up in a hurry. “Come on, Silent Man, let’s go, I want to watch.”

  Candide stood up, pulled the scalpel out from under his shirt, and began to walk toward the outskirts.

  AFTERWORD

  BY BORIS STRUGATSKY

  In March 1965, the brothers Strugatsky finally got a permanent working journal. I can’t say that the entries in this journal conclusively solve the problem of having to reconstruct lost or forgotten facts, but these records are definitely of value. I had drawn on this journal when I spoke at a 1987 meeting of the Leningrad seminar of science fiction writers, delivering something resembling a lecture on “How The Snail on the Slope was created, a history and commentary.” And it was on the basis of this very lecture, which has been corrected, abridged, and supplemented as necessary, that I’ve written the remarks below.

  On March 4, 1965, two young, newly hatched writers—it hadn’t even been a year since they joined the Writers’ Union—arrived at the Artists’ Retreat in Gagra. Everything there was great: lovely weather, excellent service, delicious food, practically perfect health, stellar mental and physical states, and a whole stash of ideas and scenarios ready for development. Everything was wonderful! We had been assigned to the VIP quarters, a feat we could never replicate in the future. And this time we got lucky, because it was the off-season, and the only ones staying at the Gagra Artists’ Retreat other than the brothers Strugatsky were the soccer players from FC Zenit, who were holding a training camp in those parts.

  Everything would have been unbelievably wonderful, had it not suddenly transpired that the Strugatskys were apparently in a state of creative crisis! We didn’t know this yet. We had thought that everything was going well, that we had a clear and obvious path forward. It was clear what we should be doing, and it was obvious what we should be writing about. We did, after all, bring a fairly good sketch of a novel with us. Well, it would be more accurate to describe it as a decently conceived setup rather than a novel. Imagine an island. Somehow, people turn up on this island—maybe they are shipwrecked, or perhaps they come as members of a scientific expedition. And what they find are monkeys. There’s something off about these monkeys—they behave in a very strange way, not at all like normal monkeys. They are fat and slow, and they aren’t afraid of people at all; on the contrary, they try to stay close to them. And mysterious things begin to happen on this island—people suddenly go insane, they die strange, inexplicable deaths . . . And in the depths of this island they find a village where the monkeys live together with the natives—a pitiful tribe, clearly about to go extinct, seeming to consist of only feebleminded idiots . . . Well, then it turns out that the strange monkeys are to blame for everything. It turns out that these aren’t normal monkeys, they are paramonkeys, pseudomonkeys, and they apparently feed on human thoughts. They suck the intellect out of a person, they make use of his or her intellect, just like we make use of the energy of the sun. Except that this doesn’t hurt the sun, whereas people go crazy and die. The symbolism, as you can see, is rather transparent: fat, greedy creatures only interested in the pleasures of the flesh, thriving at the expense of the human intellect, actively turning the spiritual into the physical, and turning thoughts and ideas into shit. And on top of it all, killing the possessor of the intellect. Philistines. The bourgeoisie. Barbarians . . .

  That’s how things appeared to us at first. And we spent our whole first day in Gagra vigorously refining and adding to this scenario. On the second day, we gave up on the monkeys. What did we care about some island, some monkeys, some natives? We’re interested in society! Civilization! The monkeys were decisively scrapped. Why allow monkeys into our already complicated society? And besides, we’d never be able to get that published . . .

  (The only thing left over from the monkey scenario was an occasional and to us very amusing minor ritual. When we were mulling over a new plot and the work had ground to a halt, one of us would inevitably suggest, looking very sagacious, “They find themselves on an island . . .” and the other would readily chime in “. . . and they discover monkeys. Strange monkeys!”)

  We didn’t need monkeys, and we didn’t need an island. After all, we could use a country with an unspecified social order. And it won’t have monkeys. Instead, it’ll have parallel evolution! The shadow of protein-based life on Earth. It turns out that from time immemorial, planet Earth has hosted a parallel class of beings without an independent form. They are, as was recorded in our journal, a kind of protoplasm-mimicroid. Protoplasm-mimicroids colonize living beings and feed on their juices. Once upon a time, they destroyed the trilobites. Then they destroyed the dinosaurs. Then these awful protoplasm-mimicroids attacked the Neanderthals. This was more difficult—the Neanderthals already had the rudiments of intelligence, they were harder to master—but as everybody knows, the Neanderthals also took a wrong turn in their evolutionary journey. They, naturally, were also destroyed by the protoplasm . . . And in the present day, the protoplasm feeds on people, on you and me. The remarkable thing is that human beings who’ve been colonized by the protoplasm don’t change much in outward manifestation. To all appearances, they are still the same people—simply no longer interested in any spiritual or intellectual matters. Their only remaining concerns are of the material variety: eating, drinking, getting laid, finding something to gawk at . . . So what is it that prevents the protoplasm from taking over the word? Well, the thing is that when a human being engages in intense thought, the protoplasm can’t stand it and starts to disintegrate, then it’s destroyed and flows out as a pool of disgusting, quickly evaporating ooze . . .

  These were the rather unappetizing images that were then hovering in front of our eyes. It was easy to picture; it had the social symbolism, and the conceptual framework, and a plot that in those days felt original—it had everything . . . But nothing came of it. I don’t know (or maybe no longer remember) why. It just wouldn’t go. We stalled. We stalled again, just like we had four years earlier when we were working on Escape Attempt. We again hit a dead end, and we again experienced the sort of panic that Don Juan might have experienced if a doctor had suddenly informed him, “That’s all over and done with, sir. Alas, you must put that out of your mind. Forever.”

  Filled with panic, we began frantically flipping through our notes, where we, like any decent young writers, had an enormous list of potential plots, ideas, and scenarios. And out of these scenarios, we selected one, which had attracted and excited us a long time ago. Imagine a certain planet that contains two different intelligent species. And these species are locked in a struggle for survival, a war. And this isn’t a technological war, the kind that earthlings know about and are used to, but a biological war, which to an outside observer f
rom Earth doesn’t look like war at all. A military action on this planet is interpreted by earthlings as, for example, a kind of atmospheric condensation that hasn’t yet been adequately explained by scientists, or maybe even as the creative activity of some alien mind. But certainly not as war. Our journal lists a number of methods of warfare: “Waterlogging, jungling, limecovering (a defensive maneuver), direct exposure to viral and bacterial diseases, the weakening of genetic material by mutagenic viruses, destroying old instincts and instilling new ones, viruses that sterilize the men . . .” The earthlings land there and—oof!—find themselves in the middle of this ridiculous pandemonium, in which it’s completely impossible to tell someone’s deliberate actions from random paroxysms of nature . . .

  Once, a number of years earlier, this plot had seemed to us to be promising and appealing, and now, feeling panicked and even desperate, we decided to give it a try. I can remember it as if it were yesterday: we sat down on the beach, chilled by the March wind and caressed by the already pleasant March sun, and we began to carefully and thoughtfully develop the scenario . . .

  Pandora. Of course, the planet had to be Pandora, a strange, wild planet we had invented a long time ago for our Noon Universe stories. It was a wonderful setting for our adventures—a jungle planet completely covered by impassable forest and inhabited by strange and dangerous creatures. Here and there, white cliffs jut out of the forest, resembling the Amazonian plateaus described by Arthur Conan Doyle in The Lost World, and it is on these practically uninhabited tablelands that the earthlings set up their bases. They observe the planet, almost without interfering with its ways, and in fact they don’t even try to interfere, because the earthlings can’t make heads or tails of what’s going on here. The jungle here lives a mysterious life of its own. Occasionally, people disappear in there; sometimes they are rescued, sometimes not.