Father Cabani went quiet and began to slump, as if someone had grabbed his neck and was pushing him forward. Rumata picked up the stein, looked inside, then poured a few drops onto the back of his hand. The drops were purple and smelled of fusel oil. Rumata carefully wiped his hand with a lace handkerchief. Oil stains appeared on it. Father Cabani’s shaggy head touched the table and immediately jerked up.
“The man who put it in the box—he knew what it was all for. Barbed wire for the wolves? How silly of me—for the wolves. The mines, the mines should be ringed with this wire … so state criminals can’t escape! But I don’t want that! I’m a state criminal myself! Did they ask me? Sure they did! Barbed wire, they said? Barbed wire. For the wolves, they said? For the wolves. Well done, they said, good job! We’ll use it to ring the mines … Don Reba did it himself. And he took my meat grinder. Good job, he said! What a mind you’ve got, he said! So now the Merry Tower makes tender minced meat … very effective, they say.”
I know, thought Rumata. I know about all this. And how you yelled in Don Reba’s office, how you begged and groveled at his feet: “Give it back, don’t do it!” It was too late. Your meat grinder had started turning.
Father Cabani grabbed the stein and put it to his hairy maw. Gulping down the poisonous brew, he roared like the boar Y, then he shoved the stein onto the table and started to chew on a piece of turnip. Tears crept down his cheeks.
“Flammable water!” he finally announced in a strangled voice. “For kindling fires and merry magic tricks. What does it matter that it’s flammable if you can drink it? Mix it with beer—what a beer you get! I won’t allow it! I’ll drink it myself … and I drink it. All day long I drink it. All night long. I’m all swollen. I fall down all the time. The other day, Don Rumata, you won’t believe it, I was near a mirror— and I got scared. I look—Lord help me!—where’s Father Cabani? A sea creature like an octopus—with colored spots all over. First red spots. Then blue spots. That’s what comes of inventing water for magic tricks.”
Father Cabani tried to spit on the floor but hit the table instead, then shuffled his feet beneath the bench out of habit, as if rubbing it into the dirt. He suddenly asked, “What day is it today?”
“The eve of Cata the Pious,” said Rumata.
“And why is there no sun?”
“Because it’s night.”
“Night again,” Father Cabani said dejectedly, and fell face-first into the table scraps.
Rumata looked at him for a while, whistling through his teeth. Then he stood up from the table and went into the pantry. There, between the heap of turnips and the heap of sawdust, gleamed the glass tubes of Father Cabani’s massive brewing apparatus—an amazing creation of a born engineer, natural chemist, and master glassblower. Rumata circled the “infernal machine” twice, then felt for a crowbar in the dark and swung hard at it, aiming nowhere in particular. Clanking, jingling, gurgling sounds filled the pantry. The nauseating smell of sour home brew assaulted his nostrils.
Broken glass crunching beneath his heels, Rumata made his way into a far corner and turned on an electric lamp. There, underneath a pile of trash, was the compact field synthesizer Midas in its strong silicate safe. Rumata cleared away the trash, entered in the code, and lifted the lid of the safe. Even in the white electric light, the synthesizer looked peculiar in the midst of the scattered junk. Rumata dumped a few shovels of sawdust into the receiving funnel, and the synthesizer began to hum quietly, its display panel turning on automatically. Rumata shoved a rusty bucket underneath the output chute with the toe of his boot. And immediately— clink, clink, clink!—gold disks with the aristocratic profile of Pitz the Sixth, King of Arkanar, started pouring onto its battered tin bottom.
Rumata carried Father Cabani to a squeaky bunk, pulled his shoes off, and covered him with the hairless hide of some long-extinct animal. During this process, Father Cabani woke up for a minute. He could neither move nor think. He merely sang a couple of verses from the forbidden love song “I’m Like a Scarlet Flower in Your Little Hand,” after which he started snoring loudly.
Rumata cleared the table, swept the floor, and cleaned the glass in the only window, which had turned black from dirt and the chemical experiments Father Cabani was performing on the windowsill. He found a full barrel of alcohol behind the rusty stove and emptied it into a rat hole. Then he watered the Hamaharian stallion, poured him some oats from his saddlebag, washed up, and sat down to wait, gazing at the oil lamp’s smoking flame. He had lived this strange double life for five years and thought he was completely used to it, but from time to time, like right now, for example, it would suddenly occur to him that there was no organized brutality and approaching gray threat, only a performance of a bizarre theatrical production with him, Rumata, in the lead. That at any moment now, after a particularly felicitous line, there would be a burst of applause, and fans from the Institute of Experimental History would shout admiringly from their boxes, “Not bad, Anton! Not bad! Good job, Toshka!” He even looked around to check—but there was no crowded hall, only blackened mossy walls made from bare logs and caked in layers of soot.
In the yard, the Hamaharian stallion neighed quietly and beat his hooves against the ground. Rumata heard a steady low hum, achingly familiar but here utterly improbable. He listened hard, his mouth half-open. The hum stopped, and the flame above the lamp flickered then shone brighter. Rumata started to get up, and at that moment a man stepped into the room out of the darkness of the night: Don Condor, Chief Justice and Keeper of the Great Seals of the Mercantile Republic of Soan, Vice President of the Conference of the Twelve Merchants, and Knight of the Imperial Order of the Hand of Mercy.
Rumata jumped up, nearly knocking over the bench. He was ready to rush toward him, hug him, kiss him on both cheeks—but his legs observed the proper etiquette in spite of himself and bent at the knees. His spurs jingled solemnly, his right hand swept out an arc starting at his heart and ending at his side, and his head bent down so that his chin sank into the foamy lace ruff. Don Condor ripped off his plumed velvet beret, hastily waved it in Rumata’s direction, as if he were chasing off mosquitoes, flung it on the table, and undid the clasps of his cloak at his neck with both hands. His cloak was still slowly falling behind his back and he was already sitting on the bench with legs apart, his left hand on his hip and his right hand grasping the hilt of a gilded sword that he had stuck into the rotten floorboards. He was small and skinny, with large protuberant eyes in a pale, narrow face. He wore his black hair the same way as Rumata—gathered by a massive gold circlet with a large green stone above the bridge of his nose.
“Are you alone, Don Rumata?” he asked curtly.
“Yes, noble don,” Rumata answered sadly.
Father Cabani suddenly said loudly and soberly, “Noble Don Reba! You’re a hyena, that’s all.”
Don Condor didn’t turn around. “I flew here,” he said.
“Let us hope,” said Rumata, “that nobody saw you.”
“One legend more, one legend less,” Don Condor said irritably. “I don’t have time to travel on horseback. Whatever happened to Budach? Where did he go? Do sit down, Don Rumata, I beg you! My neck hurts.”
Rumata obediently sat on the bench. “Budach has disappeared,” he said. “I waited for him in the Territory of Heavy Swords. But only a one-eyed ragamuffin showed up, who gave the password and handed me a bag of books. I waited for another two days, then got in touch with Don Gug, who informed me that he had accompanied Budach all the way to the border, and that from then on Budach was escorted by a certain noble don who can be trusted because he gambled away body and soul to Don Gug at cards. Therefore Budach must have disappeared somewhere in Arkanar. That’s all that I know.”
“It’s not a whole lot,” said Don Condor.
“Budach is not the point,” Rumata objected. “If he’s alive, I’ll find him and save him. I know how to do that. That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. I want to once again draw your attention
to the fact that the situation in Arkanar is not within the scope of basis theory.”
A sour expression appeared on Don Condor’s face. “No, you have to hear me out,” Rumata said firmly. “I have the feeling that I’ll never explain myself over the radio. Everything in Arkanar has changed! Some new, systematic factor has appeared. And it looks like Don Reba is intentionally inciting all the grayness in the kingdom against learned people. Everything that’s even slightly above the average gray level is now in danger. Hear me out, Don Condor—these aren’t emotions, these are facts! If you’re smart, educated, a skeptic, if you say anything unusual—even if you simply don’t drink wine!—you’re in danger. Any shopkeeper has the right to hound you, even until death. Hundreds and thousands of people are declared outside the law. They are caught by troopers and strung up along the roads. Naked, upside down. Yesterday, they beat an old man with their boots after learning that he was literate. I hear they trampled him for two hours, the morons, with their sweaty animal mugs …” Rumata regained control of himself and ended calmly: “In short, there will soon be no literate people left in Arkanar. Like in the Region of the Holy Order after the Barkan slaughter.”
Don Condor stared at him intently, pursing his lips. “I don’t like how you sound, Anton,” he said in Russian.
“I don’t like a lot of things, Alexander Vasilievich,” said Rumata. “I don’t like that we’ve tied our hands and feet with the very formulation of the problem. I don’t like that it’s called the Problem of Nonviolent Impact. Because under my conditions, that means a scientifically justified inaction. I’m aware of all your objections! And I’m aware of the theory. But here there are no theories, here there are typical fascist practices, here animals are murdering humans every minute! Here everything is pointless. Knowledge isn’t enough, and gold is worthless, because it comes too late.”
“Anton,” said Don Condor. “Don’t lose your head. I believe that the situation in Arkanar is absolutely exceptional, but I’m convinced that you don’t have a single constructive suggestion.”
“Yes,” Rumata agreed, “I don’t have any constructive suggestions. But it’s very hard for me to control myself.”
“Anton,” Don Condor said. “There are two hundred and fifty of us on this entire planet. Everybody controls themselves, and everybody finds it very hard. The most experienced of us have lived here for twenty-two years. They came here as nothing more than observers. They were completely forbidden to do anything whatsoever. Imagine that for a moment: forbidden to do anything. They wouldn’t even have had the right to save Budach. Even if Budach was being trampled before their eyes.”
“Don’t talk to me as if I were a child,” Rumata said.
“You’re impatient like a child,” Don Condor declared. “And we must be very patient.”
Rumata smiled bitterly. “And while we watch and wait,” he said, “calculating and planning, animals will be destroying humans every minute of every day.”
“Anton,” Don Condor said, “the universe has thousands of planets where we haven’t come yet, where history is taking its course.”
“But we’ve come here already!”
“Yes, we have. But we’ve come here to help these people, not to satisfy our righteous rage. If you’re weak, leave. Go home. After all, you really aren’t a child, and you knew what you’d encounter here.”
Rumata stayed silent. Don Condor, slumping and seeming instantly older, walked up and down the table, dragging his sword by the hilt behind him like a stick, sadly nodding his head. “I understand,” he said. “I’ve gone through it myself. There was a time when this feeling of helplessness and my own culpability seemed to be the worst thing. Some of us, the weakest ones, went crazy from it, were sent back to Earth, and are now being treated. It took me fifteen years, dear boy, to understand what the worst thing really is. The worst thing is to lose your humanity, Anton. To sully your soul, to become hardened. We’re gods here, Anton, and we need to be wiser than the gods from the legends the locals have created in their image and likeness as best they could. And yet we walk along the edge of a swamp. One wrong step—and down you go in the dirt, and you won’t be able to wash it off your whole life. Goran the Irukanian, in his History of the Coming, wrote, ‘When God, after descending from the heavens, appeared to the people from the Pitanian marshes, his feet were covered in mud.’”
“For which Goran was burned,” Rumata said grimly.
“Yes, he was burned,” Don Condor said, returning to his seat. “But that was said about us. I’ve been here for fifteen years. My dear boy, I’ve even stopped having dreams about Earth. One day, rummaging through my papers, I found a picture of a woman and for a long time couldn’t figure out who she was. I occasionally realize with terror that I’ve long stopped being an employee of the Institute, that I’m now an exhibit in the Institute’s museum, the chief justice of a feudal mercantile republic, and that there’s a room in the museum in which I belong. That’s the worst thing—to lose yourself in the role. Inside each one of us, the noble bastard struggles with the communard. And everything around us helps the bastard, while the communard is all alone—the Earth is thousands and thousands of parsecs away.” Don Condor paused, stroking his knees. “That’s how it is, Anton,” he said in a firmer voice. “We must remain communards.”
He doesn’t understand. And how could he? He’s lucky, he doesn’t know what gray terror is, what Don Reba is. Everything he’s witnessed in his fifteen years of work on this planet has in one way or another fit into the framework of basis theory. And when I tell him about fascism, about the gray storm troopers, about the incitement of the petty bourgeoisie, he interprets it as emotional expressions. “Don’t abuse terminology, Anton! Terminological confusion brings about dangerous consequences.” He simply can’t grasp the fact that in Arkanar, typical medieval brutality belongs to a happy past. For him, Don Reba is something like the Duke of Richelieu, a shrewd and farsighted politician, defending absolutism from feudal excesses. I’m the only one on this whole planet who’s aware of the terrible shadow creeping over the country, but even I can’t figure out whose shadow it is or where it’s coming from. And how can I possibly convince him, when I can see in his eyes that he’s almost ready to send me back to Earth for treatment?
“How’s honorable Sinda?” Rumata asked.
Don Condor stopped eyeing him suspiciously and grumbled, “He’s doing well, thank you.” Then he said, “To conclude, we must be firmly aware of the fact that neither you nor I nor any of us will see the tangible fruits of our labors. We’re not physicists, we’re historians. For us, time isn’t measured in seconds but in centuries, and our work isn’t even sowing, it’s preparing the ground for sowing. Because occasionally we do get … enthusiasts, blast them—sprinters who can’t go the distance.”
Rumata gave a crooked smile and started pointlessly fiddling with his boots. Sprinters. Yes, there’ve been sprinters.
Ten years before, Stephan Orlovsky, also known as Don Capata, the commander of a company of His Imperial Majesty’s crossbowmen, ordered his soldiers to open fire on the executioners at a public torture of eighteen Estorian witches; he cut down the judge and two court bailiffs and was lanced by the Imperial Guard. Writhing in agonies of death, he shouted, “But you’re human! Get them, get them!”—but few heard him over the roar of the crowd: “Fire! More fire!”
Approximately at the same time, in another hemisphere, Carl Rosenblum, one of the leading experts on the peasant wars in France and Germany, also known as the wool-seller Pani-Pa, led a revolt of Murissian peasants, stormed two cities, and was killed by an arrow to the back of the head while trying to stop the looting. He was still alive when they came for him in the helicopter, but he couldn’t speak and only looked on in guilt and bewilderment with his big blue eyes, which constantly streamed tears …
And shortly before Rumata’s arrival, the magnificently placed confidant of the Caisan tyrant (Jeremy Tafnat, a specialist in the history of agrarian reform
s) suddenly staged a palace coup, usurped power, and for two months attempted to start a golden age. He stubbornly refused to reply to furious queries from his neighbors and from Earth, earned the reputation of a lunatic, managed to avoid eight assassination attempts, and was finally kidnapped by an emergency team of Institute workers and transferred by submarine to an island base by the planet’s southern pole.
“Just think!” muttered Rumata. “And all of Earth still imagines that the hardest problems are in null-physics.”
Don Condor looked up. “Finally!” he said quietly.
There was a clattering of hooves, the Hamaharian stallion let out an angry, shrill neigh, and they heard energetic swearing with a strong Irukanian accent. In the doorway appeared Don Gug, the Chamberlain of His Grace the Duke of Irukan, fat, ruddy, with a dashing upturned mustache, a smile from ear to ear, and merry little eyes underneath the chestnut curls of his wig. And once again, Rumata was about to jump up and hug him, because this was actually Pashka, but Don Gug suddenly assumed a formal posture, an expression of cloying sweetness appearing on his plump-cheeked face. He bent slightly at the waist, pressed his hat to his chest, and pursed his lips. Rumata briefly glanced at Alexander Vasilievich—but Alexander Vasilievich had disappeared. On the bench sat the Chief Justice and Keeper of the Great Seals, his legs apart, his left hand on his hip, and his right hand holding the hilt of his gilded sword.
“You’re very late, Don Gug,” he said in an unpleasant voice.
“A thousand apologies!” cried Don Gug, smoothly approaching the table. “I swear by the rickets of my duke, there were completely unforeseen circumstances! I was stopped four times by the patrols of His Majesty the King of Arkanar, and I got into two fights with various boors.” He gracefully lifted his left hand, wrapped in a bloody rag. “By the way, noble dons, whose helicopter is that behind the house?”