The Inhabited Island Read online

  “All right,” the cornet said eventually. “Write a cover letter, Corporal Varibobu!”

  The corporal lifted his backside off his seat a little.

  “Is the travel order for Guards private Gaal ready?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Add prisoner under escort Mah-sim to the travel order. He is to be escorted without handcuffs and is permitted to travel in a public car . . . Private Gaal!”

  Gai clicked his heels and drew himself erect. “At your command, Mr. Cornet!”

  “Before presenting yourself at your new duty station in our capital city, deliver the detainee to the address indicated on this sheet of paper. After discharging these instructions, hand the note to the duty officer at your new station. Forget the address. This is your final assignment, Gaal, and you will of course carry it out as befits a fine young guardsman.”

  “Your word is my command!” Gai shouted in a rush of indescribable rapture. A surge of joy, pride, and happiness, a hot wave of ravishing devotion, swept over him, lifting him up and bearing him onward toward the heavens. Oh, these sweet moments of ecstasy, these unforgettable moments, these moments that shook him to the core of his being, these moments when he sprouted wings, these moments of sweet contempt for everything coarse, material, and corporeal . . . These moments when he thirsted for the fire and the command, when he yearned for the command that would unite him with the fire, hurl him into the fire, against a thousand enemies, against gaping gun muzzles, against millions of bullets . . . and that was still not all, it would be even sweeter still, the ecstasy would blind and consume . . . Oh, the fire! Oh, the glory! The command, the command! And there it is, there it is! . . . He gets to his feet, this fine, strapping, handsome fellow, the pride of the brigade, our Corporal Varibobu, like a flaming torch, like a statue of glory and loyalty, and he starts singing, and we all take up the refrain, every one of us:

  The Battle Guards advance with fearsome cries,

  Battle medals gleaming, faithful to their pledge,

  Sweeping all hostile fortresses aside, their blazing eyes

  Glinting as bright as blood-drops on a sharp sword’s edge.

  And they all sang. The brilliant Cornet To’ot sang, that very model of a Guards officer, for whom Gai wanted so badly, at this very instant, to lay down his life, his soul, and everything, to the strains of this very march. And the HQ medical officer Zogu sang, the very model of a brother of mercy, as coarse as a genuine soldier and as gentle as a mother’s hands. And our Corporal Varibobu, ours to the very marrow of his bones, an old war dog, a veteran turned gray haired in battle. Oh, how the battle medals glitter on his distinguished threadbare tunic; for him there is nothing else but service, nothing apart from devotion.

  Do you know us, our Unknown Fathers? Raise your weary heads and look on us, for after all you see everything, and then surely you must see that we are here, on the distant, barbarous outskirts of our country. We will die in rapture and in torment for the happiness of our motherland!

  Our iron fists all barriers obliterate

  The Unknown Fathers are well satisfied!

  Our foes bemoan their dire, inexorable fate!

  Forward, oh gallant Guards, advance with pride!

  Indomitable guardsmen, the law’s incisive blade,

  When Guards appear upon the battle scene,

  Swift into combat, and valiant in the fray,

  The Unknown Fathers’ hearts are tranquil and serene!

  But what is this? He isn’t singing, he’s just standing there, with his legs sprawling, leaning against the barrier, and turning his idiotic brown head to and fro, with his eyes darting around, and he keeps grinning, he keeps baring his teeth . . . Who is that blackguard grinning at? Oh, how I’d love to walk up to him, uttering a fearsome cry, and take a swing with my guardsman’s fist at that abominable white grin . . . But I mustn’t, I mustn’t, that’s not the Guards’ way. He is only a poor freak, a pitiful invalid, true happiness is unachievable to him, he is a blind nonentity, a pitiful fragment of humanity . . .

  But this ginger-haired bastard, doubled over in the corner in agonizing pain . . . Ah no, that’s a different matter: You always get headaches when we labor for breath in our rapture, when we sing our battle march and are prepared to rupture our lungs in order to sing it through to the end! You lousy educatee, you hideous criminal, you ginger bandit, I’ll grab you by your chest and by your foul beard! Get up, you bastard! Stand to attention when guardsmen are singing their march! And I’ll smash you across your head, across your head, across your filthy mug, across your insolent, goggling eyes . . . Take that, and that . . .

  Gai flung the educatee away, clicked his heels, and turned toward the cornet. As always after a fit of rapturous exhilaration, he felt a ringing in his ears, and the world was sweetly drifting and swaying in front of his eyes.

  Corporal Varibobu, blue from the strain, was feebly clearing his throat. The HQ medical officer, sweaty and crimson, was voraciously drinking water straight from the carafe and tugging a handkerchief out of his pocket. The cornet was scowling with a vacant expression, as if he was trying to remember something. By the door, ginger-haired Zef was squirming about in a dirty heap of check rags. His face was smashed and bloody, and he was feebly groaning through his teeth. And Mah-sim wasn’t smiling any longer. His face had frozen, becoming entirely like an ordinary human face, and he was gazing round-eyed at Gai, with his mouth hanging open.

  “Private Gaal,” the cornet said in a cracked voice. “Uhhh . . . I wanted to say something to you . . . or have I already said it? . . . Wait, Zogu, leave me at least a sip of water, will you . . .”

  3

  Maxim woke up feeling sluggish and heavy headed. The room was stifling; the window had been closed at night again. But then, opening the window didn’t make much difference. The city was too close; during the day he could see its motionless, reddish-brown cap of repulsive fumes, which the wind carried this way, and neither the distance nor the height of his room on the fifth floor nor the park down below were any help. What I could do with right now is an ion shower, thought Maxim, and then dart out naked into the garden—not this lousy, half-rotted garden, all gray from the fumes, but our garden, somewhere outside Leningrad, on the Karelian Isthmus—and then run about nine miles around the lake at full speed, and swim across the lake, and then walk along the bottom of it for about twenty minutes to exercise my lungs a bit, clambering over the slippery underwater boulders.

  He jumped up, swung the window open, stuck his head out under the fine drizzle, took a deep breath of the damp air, and started coughing—the air was full of all sorts of stuff that shouldn’t be there, and the raindrops left a metallic aftertaste on his tongue. Cars hissed and whistled as they hurtled along the express highway. Down below the window, wet foliage glistened and broken glass glimmered on top of a high stone wall. A man in a wet cape was walking around in the park, scraping fallen leaves together into a heap. Through the pall of rain Maxim could vaguely make out the brick building of some kind of factory on the outskirts of the city. As always, thick streams of poisonous smoke were slowly creeping out of its two tall chimneys and drooping back down toward the ground.

  A stifling world. A troubled, sickly world. It’s absolutely dreary and unappealing, like that official building where the men with the bright buttons and bad teeth suddenly, completely out of the blue, started howling, straining their voices until they went hoarse, Gai, that likable, handsome young fellow, started beating that red-bearded Zef’s face to a bloody pulp, and Zef didn’t even try to resist. A troubled world . . . A radioactive river, an absurd iron dragon, polluted air, and disheveled passengers in a lumbering, three-story metal box on wheels that pours out bluish-gray carbon monoxide fumes. And another savage scene—in that very same passenger car—when those coarse men, who smelled of poorly refined alcohol for some reason, reduced an elderly woman to tears with their crude laughter and gestures, and no one stuck up for her; the car was absolutely jam-packed,
but everyone looked the other way. Only Gai jumped to his feet, pale-faced with fury, or perhaps fear, and shouted something at them, and they cleared off . . . An awful lot of fury, an awful lot of fear, an awful lot of resentment.

  Everyone here is resentful and repressed—either resentful or repressed. Gai is obviously a good-natured, likable kind of person, but sometimes he would suddenly fly into an inexplicable rage and start frenziedly quarreling with the people beside him in the car, and giving me surly looks, and then just as suddenly he would relapse into a profound stupor. And nobody else in the car behaved any better. They sat or lay there perfectly peacefully for hours, talking quietly, even smiling and quietly laughing, and then suddenly someone would start cantankerously griping at the person next to him, and the other person would nervously snap back, and instead of trying to calm them down, the people around them got sucked into the quarrel, and the fracas expanded until it engulfed the entire car, and then everybody was yelling at everybody else, threatening and jostling, and somebody was reaching over somebody else’s head, waving his fists about, and somebody was grabbed by the collar, children were wailing at the tops of their voices, and somebody angrily tweaked their ears, and then everybody gradually quieted down, and they were all surly with each other, reluctant to talk, turning their faces away . . .

  But sometimes the ruckus turned into something absolutely outrageous, with people’s eyes goggling out of their heads, their faces breaking out in red blotches, and their voices raised to bloodcurdling shrieks, while some roared with laughter, some sang, and some prayed, raising their trembling hands above their heads. An insane asylum . . . And those cheerless, melancholy gray fields drifting by outside the windows, stations blackened with smoke, squalid villages, ruins of some kind that hadn’t been cleared away, and gaunt, ragged women watching the train go by with their hollow, dismal eyes . . .

  Maxim moved back from the window, limply stood in the middle of the cramped little room for a while with a feeling of apathy and mental exhaustion, then forced himself to gather his strength and limber up a bit, using the unwieldy wooden table as his apparatus. It won’t take long before I get completely out of shape like this, he anxiously thought. I can probably cope with another day or two, but then I’ll have to hit the road and roam around in the forest for a while . . . It would be good to head for the mountains—the mountains they have here look glorious, really wild. It’s a fairly long distance, of course; I couldn’t do it in one night . . . What was it that Gai called them? “Zartak.” I wonder if that’s their name or just mountains in general. But anyway, the mountains are out of the question. Not on my agenda. I’ve been here for ten days already, and nothing has been done yet . . .

  He squeezed into the shower stall and spent several minutes snorting and rubbing himself down under the heavy artificial rain, which was every bit as repulsive as the genuine kind. It was a little bit colder, but the water was hard and limy, and what was more, it had been chlorinated, and it had also been run through metal pipes.

  He wiped himself off with a disinfected towel, and then, feeling dissatisfied with everything—this murky morning, and this suffocating world, and his own idiotic situation, and the fatty breakfast that he would have to eat now—he went back into the room in order to make up the bed, an ugly contraption of iron bars with a greasy, striped pancake of a mattress under the clean sheet.

  His breakfast had already been brought in and it was steaming and stinking on the table. Fish was closing the window again.

  “Hello,” Maxim said to her in the local language. “Mustn’t. Window.”

  “Hello,” she replied, clicking the numerous bolts shut. “Must. Rain. Bad.”

  “Fish,” Maxim said in Russian. In fact her name was Nolu, but from the very beginning Maxim had dubbed her Fish—for the general expression of her face and her imperturbability.

  She turned around and looked at him with unblinking eyes for a moment. For the umpteenth time, she set her finger to the tip of her nose and said “Woman,” then she prodded Maxim with her finger and said “Man,” and then she jabbed her finger in the direction of the loose coverall that he was so sick of, hanging on the back of a chair. “Clothes. Must!” For some reason she couldn’t bear to see a man in just his shorts. For some reason she needed a man to swaddle himself all the way from his feet right up to his neck.

  He started getting dressed and she started making his bed, although Maxim always told her he would do that himself. She moved the table, which Maxim always set against the wall, back into the middle of the room, and resolutely turned the valve of the heating system, which Maxim always set as high as it would go, right back down low again, and Maxim’s monotonous repetitions of “Mustn’t” all shattered against her equally monotonous repetitions of “Must.”

  After fastening the coverall at the neck with its single broken button, Maxim went over to the table and prodded at his breakfast with a two-pronged fork. The usual dialogue ensued.

  “I don’t want. Mustn’t.”

  “Must. Food. Breakfast.”

  “I don’t want. Tastes bad.”

  “Must. Breakfast. Tastes good.”

  “Fish,” Maxim said to her with sincere feeling, “you’re a cruel person. If you ended up with me on Earth, I’d run myself ragged in order to find you food that you liked.”

  “I don’t understand,” she regretfully said. “What is ‘fish’?”

  As he queasily chewed on a fatty morsel, Maxim took a piece of paper and drew a bream, viewed head-on. She carefully studied the drawing and put it in the pocket of her robe. She collected all the drawings that Maxim made and carried them off somewhere. Maxim drew a lot, and quite voluntarily. He enjoyed it; during his free time and at night when he couldn’t sleep, there was absolutely nothing to do here. He drew animals and people, traced out tables and diagrams, and reproduced anatomical cross sections. He drew Professor Megu, looking like a hippopotamus, and a hippopotamus looking like Professor Megu. He set out the universal tables of Lincos, Freudenthal’s invented language, and plans of machines, and diagrams of historical sequences; he used up masses of paper, and it all disappeared into Fish’s pocket, but without any apparent consequences for the process of contact. Professor Megu, a.k.a. Hippopotamus, had his own method, and he had no intention of departing from it.

  Hippopotamus had taken absolutely no interest in the Lincos universal table, the study of which was supposed to be the starting point for any first contact. Fish was the only one who taught the new arrival the local language, and she only did that in order to make it easier to deal with him, so that he would close the window and not walk around without his coverall. No experts in first contact were involved at all. Maxim was handled by Hippopotamus and only Hippopotamus.

  However, Hippopotamus did have at his disposal a rather powerful research tool—mentoscopic technology—and Maxim spent from fourteen to sixteen hours a day in the scanning chair. Moreover, Hippopotamus’s mentoscope was a good one; it allowed him to penetrate rather deeply into a subject’s memories, and it had extremely high-resolution capability. Possessing a machine like this, it might perhaps have been possible to manage without any knowledge of language. But Hippopotamus used his mentoscope in a rather strange manner. He quite categorically, even rather indignantly, refused to display Maxim’s mentograms, and dealt with those mentograms in a quite extraordinary manner. Maxim had deliberately developed an entire program of memories that should have given the indigenous population here a fairly adequate impression of the social, economic, and cultural life of Earth. But mentograms of that kind entirely failed to rouse Hippopotamus’s enthusiasm. He contorted his features into a morose grimace, mumbled, walked away and started making telephone calls, or sat down at the desk and started tediously nagging his assistant, in the process frequently repeating the succulent little word “massaraksh.” But when the screen showed Maxim blowing up an immense ice boulder that had pinned down his ship, or blasting an armored wolf to shreds with his scorcher, or r
ecapturing an express laboratory from a gigantic, stupid pseudo-octopus, it was literally quite impossible to drag Hippopotamus away from the mentoscope, even by the ears. He quietly squealed, gleefully slapped his hands on his bald patch, and menacingly yelled at his exhausted assistant, who was keeping an eye on the recording of the images. The spectacle of a chromospheric prominence threw the professor into raptures as intense as if he had never seen anything of the kind in his life, and he really enjoyed the love scenes, which Maxim had mostly borrowed from movies, in order to give the indigenous population here some impression of the emotional life of humankind.

  This absurd attitude to the material reduced Maxim to cheerless speculation; it gave him the impression that Hippopotamus was not a professor at all but merely a mentoscope operator, preparing material for the genuine contact commission, whom Maxim still had to meet, and when that would happen remained unknown. Which meant Hippopotamus was a rather primitive individual, like the little kid in War and Peace who was only interested in battle scenes. And that was galling. Maxim represented Earth, and—honestly and truly!—he really had every right to expect a more serious contact partner.

  Of course, he could suppose that this world was situated on an intersection of certain unidentified interstellar highways, and that aliens were a common occurrence here. Such a common occurrence, in fact, that they no longer bothered to set up special, authoritative commissions for every new arrival but simply pumped the most impressive information out of him and left it at that. One argument in favor of such an assumption was the efficiency that had been demonstrated by the men with bright buttons, who were clearly not specialists, in coming to grips with the situation and dispatching the new arrival to the appropriate destination. Or perhaps some nonhumanoids who had been here earlier had left such bad memories behind them that now the local population regarded any alien visitor with categorical distrust, and in that case all the ballyhoo being kicked up over Professor Hippopotamus’s mentoscope was no more than a facade, a pretense at contact, a way of dragging things out until Maxim’s fate was decided by certain higher authorities.