The Inhabited Island Page 9

  “Guardsmen!” he croaked in the voice that sent shivers running up and down Gai’s spine. “We have an assignment to carry out. And we shall perform it in worthy fashion. Company, attention! To the trucks! Corporal Gaal to me!”

  When Gai ran up and snapped to attention in front of him, the cornet said in a low voice, “Your section has a special assignment. On arriving at the destination, stay in the truck. I shall take command myself.”

  6

  The truck had terrible shock absorbers, which was very noticeable on the terrible cobbled roadway. Candidate Maxim, clutching his automatic rifle between his knees, considerately held Gai by his belt, thinking that it would be inappropriate for the corporal, who was so concerned about his authority, to bounce and hover above the benches like some Candidate Zoiza. Gai didn’t object, or perhaps he didn’t notice his subordinate’s attentiveness. Since his conversation with the cornet, Gai had been seriously preoccupied with something, and Maxim was glad the schedule meant they would be close beside each other and he would be able to help if necessary.

  The trucks drove past the Central Theater, trundled along beside the foul-smelling New Life Canal for a long time, turned onto long Factory Street, which was empty at this time of day, and started winding their way through the crooked little side streets of a workers’ district where Maxim had never been before, although recently he had been in many places and given the city very thorough and thoughtful study. In general, he had learned a great deal during these last forty-something days and finally figured out the situation, which proved far less reassuring and far more bizarre than he had expected.

  Maxim was still at the stage of poring over his spelling primer when Gai accosted him with the question of where he came from. Drawings didn’t help; Gai responded to them with a strange kind of smile and carried on repeating the same question: “Where are you from?”

  Then Maxim had tetchily jabbed his finger at the ceiling and said, “From the sky.”

  To his surprise, Gai had found this perfectly natural and started peppering him with a barrage of words spoken with an interrogative intonation; at first Maxim took them for the names of planets in the local system. But Gai spread out a map of the world in the Mercator projection, and it turned out that they weren’t the names of planets at all but the names of countries on the far side of this world. Maxim shrugged, uttered all the expressions of negation and denial that he knew, and started studying the map, and that was where the conversation temporarily ended.

  About two days later, Maxim and Rada were watching television in the evening. The program being shown was a very strange one, something like a movie without any beginning or any end, without any definite storyline, and with an interminable cast of characters—rather sinister characters who acted rather barbarically from the viewpoint of any humanoid. Rada watched, enthralled, sometimes crying out or grabbing hold of Maxim’s sleeve, and twice breaking into tears, but Maxim quickly got bored and was about to doze off to the dismal, menacing music when he suddenly caught a glimpse of something familiar on the screen. He actually rubbed his eyes in surprise. There on the screen was Pandora, with a morose tahorg trudging through the jungle, trampling down the trees, and then suddenly Oleg appeared, holding a decoy whistle in his hand, very intent and serious, walking backward; suddenly he stumbled over an exposed root and went flying, landing on his back in a swamp. Maxim was absolutely flabbergasted to recognize his own mentogram, and then another, and another, but there was no commentary, the same music just kept on playing, and Pandora disappeared, to be replaced by a blind, haggard man who was crawling across a ceiling, tightly wrapped in a dusty cobweb.

  “What is this?” Maxim asked, jabbing his finger at the screen. “A program,” Rada impatiently replied. “It’s interesting. Watch.” He didn’t manage to get a sensible answer, and suddenly the strange idea occurred to him of dozens and dozens of different aliens, all diligently recalling their own worlds. However, he quickly rejected this idea; the worlds were too terrible and too uniform—small, poky, airless rooms; endless corridors crammed with furniture that suddenly sprouted gigantic thorns; spiral staircases winding their way down into the impenetrable gloom of narrow well shafts; barred-off basements packed with writhing bodies, motionless faces peering out between them through ghastly, motionless eyes, like in the pictures of Hieronymus Bosch. It was all more like delirious fantasy than real worlds. Against the backdrop of these visions Maxim’s mentograms shone with a bright realism that, owing to his unique temperament, verged on Romantic Naturalism. Programs of this kind were shown every day, under the title Magical Voyage, but Maxim never did completely understand what the point of it all was. Gai and Rada responded to his questions with baffled shrugs and said, “A program. To keep things interesting. Magical Voyage. A story. Just watch it, watch! Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s frightening.” And extremely serious doubts arose in Maxim’s mind about the goal of Professor Hippopotamus’s research being first contact, and about his research really being research at all.

  This intuitive conclusion was indirectly confirmed about ten days later, when Gai passed the exam to join the correspondence school for guardsmen wishing to apply for the initial officer’s rank and began cramming math and mechanics. The diagrams and formulas of the elementary course in ballistics perplexed Maxim. He started pestering Gai, who didn’t understand at first, but then, with a condescending smirk, he explained the cosmography of his world to Maxim. And then it turned out that the inhabited island was not a globe and not a geoid—in fact, it was not a planet at all.

  The inhabited island was the World, the only world in the universe. What lay beneath the feet of the indigenous population here was the firm surface of the Sphere of the World. What hung above the heads of the indigenous population was a gaseous sphere of absolutely gigantic but finite volume; its composition was not yet known and it possessed physical properties that were not yet entirely clear. A theory existed that the density of the gas rapidly increased toward the center of the gaseous bubble, where certain mysterious processes occurred that gave rise to regular changes in the brightness of the so-called World Light, and this gave rise to the regular succession of day and night. In addition to short-term, diurnal changes in the state of the World Light, there were also long-term changes, which gave rise to seasonal fluctuations in temperature and the succession of the seasons of the year. The force of gravity was directed out from the center of the Sphere of the World, perpendicular to its surface. In short, the inhabited island existed on the inner surface of an immense bubble in an infinite firmament of solid matter that filled the rest of the Universe.

  Totally dumbfounded by this surprise, Maxim tried to launch into a debate, but it very soon became clear that he and Gai were speaking different languages, and it was far more difficult for the two of them to understand each other than it would have been for a convinced Copernican and a follower of Ptolemy. The whole problem lay in the amazing properties of the atmosphere of this planet. First, its exceptionally powerful refraction hoisted up the horizon, and from time immemorial this had implanted in the heads of the indigenous population the idea that their land was not flat and quite definitely, absolutely not convex—it was concave. “Stand on the seashore,” the school textbooks recommended, “and follow the movement of a ship that has pulled away from the quayside. At first it will appear to move across a flat surface, and the farther away it moves, the higher it will rise, until it is concealed in the atmospheric haze that screens off the remainder of the World.” Second, this atmosphere was extremely dense, and it phosphoresced by day and by night, so that nobody here had ever seen the starry sky, and the incidences of observation of the planet’s sun that were recorded in chronicles had only served as a basis for attempts to create a theory of the World Light.

  Maxim realized that he was caught inside a gigantic trap, that first contact would only become possible when he managed to turn natural conceptions that had been formed over the course of millennia inside o
ut. Apparently some attempts had already been made to do this here, judging from the common expression “massaraksh,” which literally meant “the world inside out.” And in addition, Gai had told him about a purely abstract mathematical theory that took a different view of the world. This theory, which arose in ancient times, had been persecuted by what was once the official religion, and it had its own martyrs. It had been given mathematical consistency by the works of brilliant mathematicians of the past but had remained purely abstract, although, like most abstract theories, it had finally found practical application very recently, when super-long-distance ballistic shells had been created.

  After thinking over and collocating everything that he had learned, Maxim realized, first, that all this time he must have seemed like a madman here, and it was no accident that his mentograms had been included in the schizoid TV program Magical Voyage. Second, he realized that for the time being he would have to keep quiet about his alien origins if he didn’t want to go back to Hippopotamus. This meant that the inhabited island was not going to come to his rescue and he had only himself to rely on, that the construction of a null-transmitter was indefinitely postponed, and he was obviously stuck here for a long time, or perhaps, massaraksh, forever. The hopelessness of the situation had almost floored him, but he had gritted his teeth and forced himself to think in a purely logical fashion. His mother would have to survive a very difficult time. She would be immensely wretched, and that thought was enough in itself to dispel any wish to think logically.

  Curse this second-rate, self-contained world. But I have only two options: either carry on pining for the impossible and wallowing in bitter regret, or pull myself together and live. Live a genuine life, the way I have always wanted to live—loving my friends, achieving my goals, fighting, winning and losing, taking it on the chin and giving as good as I get—anything at all except wringing my hands in despair . . . He had stopped talking about the structure of the universe and started asking Gai about the history and social order of his inhabited island.

  As far as history was concerned, things were not that easy. Gai had only a fragmentary knowledge of it, and he didn’t have any serious books. And there weren’t any serious books in the city library either. But it was clear that right up until the latest ruinous war, the country that had given Maxim refuge had been considerably more extensive and was governed by a bunch of bungling financial economists and depraved aristocrats who had driven the people into poverty, established a corrupt state apparatus, and eventually become involved in a large colonial war unleashed by their neighbors. This war had engulfed the entire world, millions and millions of people had been killed, and thousands of cities had been reduced to ruins. Dozens of small states had been annihilated, and chaos had engulfed the world and the country. A period of appalling famine and epidemics had set in. The bunch of bloodsucking exploiters had suppressed attempts at a popular uprising by using nuclear warheads. Both the country and the world were on course for total destruction.

  The situation had been saved by the “Unknown Fathers.” As far as Maxim could tell, these were an anonymous group of young officers from the General HQ who, one fine day, when they had at their disposal only two divisions, highly incensed at being dispatched into the nuclear meat grinder, had organized a putsch and seized power. That had happened twenty-four years earlier, and since then the situation had stabilized to a significant extent and the war had died down of its own accord, although nobody had concluded peace with anybody else. The energetic, anonymous rulers had restored relative order and straightened out the economy with harsh measures—at least in the central regions—making the country into what it was now. The standard of living had increased quite substantially, life had settled into a peaceful groove, civic behavior had improved to a level never previously seen in history, and in general everything had become rather good.

  Maxim realized that the political order in the country was very far from ideal and represented a species of military dictatorship. But it was clear that the Unknown Fathers enjoyed an extremely high level of popularity, and moreover in all strata of society. The economic basis for this popularity remained a mystery to Maxim; after all, half the country was still lying in ruins, military spending was huge, and the overwhelming majority of the population lived in conditions that were modest, to say the least . . . But the important point was clearly that the military elite had managed to rein in the appetites of the industrialists, which had made them popular with the workers, and also to subjugate the workers, which had made them popular with the industrialists. However, all of this was only guesswork. This way of posing the question seemed outlandish to Gai, for instance; for him, society was a unitary organism, and he couldn’t conceive of any contradictions between social groups.

  The external situation of the country still remained extremely tense. Two large states lay to the north of it—Hontia and Pandeia, both of them former provinces or colonies. Nobody really knew much about these countries, but it was known that both of them harbored extremely aggressive intentions; they continually sent in spies and saboteurs, contrived incidents on the borders, and were making preparations for war. The goal of this war was unclear to Gai, and in fact he had never even wondered about that question. There were enemies to the north, he was fighting their secret agents to the death, and that was quite enough for him.

  To the south, beyond the border forests, lay a scorched desert produced by nuclear explosions; it had been formed on the territory of a whole group of countries that were most actively involved in the hostilities. Nothing was known about what had happened and what was happening now on those millions of square miles, and nobody was interested. The southern borders of the country were subject to continuous attacks by colossal hordes of half-savage degenerates—the territory on the far side of the Blue Serpent River was teeming with them. The problem of the southern borders was regarded as just about the most important one of all. Things were very difficult there, and that was where the elite units of the Battle Guards were concentrated. Gai had served in the South for three years, and he told Maxim some quite incredible things.

  To the south of the desert, at the other end of the only continent on the planet, some states might possibly have survived, but they gave no indications of their presence. However, the so-called Island Empire, established on the two immense archipelagoes of the other hemisphere, constantly provided disagreeable evidence of its existence. The World Ocean belonged to the Empire; the radioactive waters were furrowed by an immense fleet of submarines, provocatively painted snow white and equipped with the latest word in combat technology, with gangs of specially trained cutthroats on board. As sinister as ghosts, these white submarines held the coastal regions in a state of ghastly agitation and anticipation, carrying out unprovoked bombardments and landing piratical assault forces on the shore. The Guards confronted this white threat too.

  Maxim was stunned by this picture of universal chaos and destruction. He was dealing with a graveyard planet, on which the flame of rational life was just barely flickering, and that life was on the point of finally extinguishing itself at any moment.

  Maxim listened to Rada’s calm and terrible stories about her mother receiving the news that Rada’s father had been killed (an epidemiologist, he had refused to leave a region stricken by plague, and at that moment the state had neither the time nor the capability to fight the plague by regular means, so a bomb had simply been dropped on the region); and about the time, ten years ago, when insurgents had approached close to the city, an evacuation had begun, and Rada’s grandmother, her father’s mother, had been trampled to death in a crowd that was storming a train; and about how, ten days after that, her youngest brother had died of dysentery; and about how, after her mother died, in order to feed little Gai and the completely helpless Uncle Kaan, she had worked for eighteen hours a day as a dishwasher at a military reconsignment point, then as a cleaner in a luxurious hangout for speculators, then competed in “women’s sweepstake races,”
and then spent some time in jail, although not very much, but after jail she had been left without a job, and for several months she had lived by begging . . .

  Maxim listened as Uncle Kaan, who was once a prominent scientist, told him how the Academy of Sciences was dissolved in the first year of the war and His Imperial Majesty’s Academy Battalion was formed; how the originator of the theory of evolution went insane during the famine and hanged himself; how they had boiled up watery soup out of glue scraped off wallpaper; how a starving crowd had ransacked the zoological museum and seized the specimens preserved in alcohol for food . . .

  Maxim listened to Gai’s artless stories about the building of ADTs, or antiballistic defense towers, on the southern border, and about cannibals creeping up to the construction sites and abducting the educatee workers and the guardsmen on watch; about merciless ghouls, half men and half bears, or half dogs, attacking without a sound in the night. Maxim also listened to Gai’s ecstatic praise of the system of ADTs, which had been constructed at the cost of incredible deprivations in the final years of the war, had essentially put an end to the military action by protecting the country against attack from the air, and even now was the only guarantee of safety from aggression by the country’s northern neighbors . . . But, said Gai, those bastards organized attacks on the defense towers—those sell-out rats, murderers of women and children, who had been bought with Hontia’s and Pandeia’s dirty money, those degenerates, that scum worse than any Rat Catcher . . . Gai’s high-strung face contorted in hatred. “The most important business is here,” he said, hammering his fist on the table, “and that’s why I went into the Guards and not into a factory, not into the fields or into a business but into the Battle Guards, who bear the responsibility for everything now . . .”