On my way down to the subterranean rail, there was another white piece of paper on the immaculate glass of the steps: “MEPHI.” And down inside, it was on the wall, on the bench, and on the mirror of the train car (glued, apparently, in haste)—that same white, terrifying rash was everywhere.
In the silence: the distinct humming of the wheels, like the noise of feverish blood. Someone was touched on the shoulder—he winced and dropped his bundle of papers. And to the left of me was another cipher reading one and the same, one and the same, one and the same line, over and over again, in his newspaper, and the newspaper is trembling just noticeably. And I feel as though everywhere—in wheels, hands, newspapers, and eyelashes—there is a pulse, it’s getting faster and faster, and maybe today, when I go down to that place with I-330, the black line on the thermometer will reach 102, 104, 106 degrees …
In the hangar was the same silence, like the buzzing of a distant, invisible propeller. The machines say nothing, frowning, standing still. And only the cranes glide, vaguely audible, as if on their tiptoes, stooping, grabbing light blue blocks of frozen air with their pincers and loading them into the flank cisterns of the Integral: we are preparing for its test flight.
“Well, then, will we finish loading within the week?”
This was me to the Second Builder. His face was porcelain, painted with sweet blue and tender pink little flowers (eyes, lips), but today they were somehow off-color, washed out. We consider this question aloud, but I suddenly cut off in mid-word and stand, mouth agape: high up, under the cupola, on the light blue block raised by the crane, was a barely noticeable, little white square— a glued scrap of paper. And I was shaking all over—maybe, from laughter—yes, I could hear myself laughing (have you ever done that, heard yourself laughing?).
“No, okay, listen …” I say. “Imagine that you are in an ancient airplane, the altimeter shows five thousand meters and the wing breaks off, you’re like a tumbler pigeon falling, and on your way down you are calculating: ‘Tomorrow … from twelve to two I will … from two to six … six o’clock is dinnertime …’ Well, isn’t that funny? And, can you see, that’s exactly what we’re doing?!”
The little light blue flowers stir, goggling. What if I am made of glass and he can see that in three or four hours’ time …
RECORD TWENTY-SEVEN
KEYWORDS: No Keywords of Any Kind Are Possible.
I am alone in infinite corridors—those very corridors. A mute, concrete sky. Somewhere water is dripping on stone. A familiar, heavy, opaque door and, from behind it, a dull drone.
She said that she would come out and get me at exactly 16:00. But 16:00 passed five, ten, fifteen minutes ago: no one is here.
For a second, I am the former me, who is frightened that the door might open. Still, five more minutes and if she doesn’t come out …
Water is dripping somewhere nearby. Nobody here. With miserable delight, I feel: saved. I slowly walk back along the corridor. The flickering dotted line of little lamps on the ceiling grows dimmer and dimmer …
All of a sudden, behind me, the door hastily clatters, a rapid tramp softly ricochets off the ceiling, off the walls, and she, gliding toward me, lightly panting from running, breathes through her mouth: “I knew that you would be here, that you would come! I knew you—you …”
The javelins of her eyelashes move apart, letting me inside and … How can I explain what this ancient, ridiculous, miraculous rite does to me, when her lips touch mine? What formula could express this whirlwind that clears my soul of everything except her? Yes, my soul, yes … laugh if you want to.
She slowly lifts her eyelids with some effort and slowly manages words: “No, enough … afterward. Now we should go.”
The door opens. There are steps, worn and old. An intolerably colorful uproar, a whistle, daylight …
Almost twenty-four hours have passed since then; everything has partly settled inside me but nevertheless it is extraordinarily hard for me to give even the most approximately exact description. It is as if a bomb had exploded in my head and I am surrounded by: piles after piles of open mouths, wings, cries, leaves, words, stones …
I remember, my first thought was: quick, go back, fast as you can. It was clear that while I had been waiting in the corridor, they had somehow blown up and destroyed the Green Wall and everything had darted over and swamped our city, which until now had been unsoiled with that lower world.
I must have said something of the sort to I-330. She burst out laughing: “No, not at all! It is simple—we have come out beyond the Green Wall …”
Then I opened my eyes wide and I was face-to-face, in actuality, with the very thing, which no living person today had seen until now—other than through the cloudy glass of the Wall, which weakened, obscured, and reduced it by a thousand times.
The sun … it wasn’t our sun, evenly distributed along the mirrored surfaces of the streets: it was live splinters and incessantly jumping dots, blinding your eyes and spinning your head. And the trees were like candles jutting right up into the sky; like spiders on gnarled paws squatting on the earth; like mute, green fountains … And everything is crawling, stirring, rustling and a sort of rough, little tangle rushes up underfoot and I am riveted, I can’t take one step because it is not level under my feet—do you understand? It was not level but sort of repulsively soft, yielding, living, green, bouncy.
I was deafened by it all and I choked—that’s perhaps the most appropriate word for it. I stood, seizing on to some sort of swinging bough with both hands.
“Don’t worry, don’t worry! This is only the beginning, it will pass. Be brave!”
Next to I-330, against the head-spinningly jumping green lattice, someone’s very fine, paper-thin profile … no, not just someone’s, I know this person. I recognize: the doctor. No, no, I understand everything very clearly now. And I also understand: the two of them are taking me under the arms and dragging me forward, laughing. My legs are wobbling, sliding. Cawing, moss, hummocks, knots, trunks, wings, leaves, a whistle …
And the trees dispersed—a bright clearing … people in the clearing … or, I don’t know what they were—maybe “beings” is more accurate.
This is the most difficult part. Because at this point we depart from the confines of the believable. And it is clear to me now why I-330 was always stubbornly silent about this: I wouldn’t have believed it anyway—even from her. It’s also possible that tomorrow I won’t believe myself—or these records of mine.
In the clearing, stirring around a naked, skull-shaped rock, was a crowd of three hundred, four hundred … persons—I suppose “person” is the word, it’s difficult to say anything else. And just like at the tribunals when, in the general mass of faces, you take in only those that are familiar to you, at first I could only see our gray-blue unifs. And then—a second later—among the unifs, completely distinct and simple: jet-black, chestnut, golden, dark-bay, roan, and white people—yes, by the looks of them, they were people. They were all without clothes, and they were all covered with short, shining fur like the kind that you can see on the stuffed horses at the Prehistoric Museum. But the females had faces just exactly like— yes, yes, exactly like—those of our own women: tenderly pink and not overgrown with hair, and their breasts, likewise, were free of hair—big, firm, beautiful geometrical forms. The males were only hairless on part of their faces—like our ancestors.
This was unbelievable to such an extent, unexpected to such an extent, that I stood calmly—I can positively assert that I stood calmly—and looked on. Like a set of scales: once you have completely filled up one cup, you can put as much of anything into it and the arrow won’t move anyway …
Suddenly I am alone: I-330 is not with me anymore. I don’t know how she disappeared or where she has gone. There are only those satiny furs, shining in the sun around me. I grab someone by the hot, firm, jet-black shoulder: “Listen, for the Benefactor’s sake— you haven’t seen—where did she go? She was here, just now—jus
t a second ago …”
Shaggy, stern eyebrows turned to me: “Sh, sh, sh! Quiet!” And it nodded shaggily over to the middle of the clearing, where the yellow, skull-like rock stood.
There she was, on top, above all the heads, above everyone. The sun was coming from that same direction right into my eyes and the whole of her—against the blue linen of the sky—was a sharp, coal-black silhouette on blue. Clouds were flying a little higher up, but it was as if the rock, not the clouds, but she herself on the rock with the crowd behind her in the clearing, were all inaudibly gliding, like a ship, and the light earth underfoot was floating away …
“Brothers …” It was her. “Brothers! You all know that there, in the city behind the Wall, they are building the Integral. And you know that the day has arrived when we will destroy this Wall— every wall—so that the green wind can blow from pole to pole— the whole Earth over. But the Integral is taking these walls up there, to the thousands of new Earths, to those that will whisper to you tonight with their fires through the black night leaves …”
Around the rock: waves, foam, wind … “Down with the Integral! Down!”
“No, brothers: not that. The Integral should be ours. On the day when it first casts off into the sky—we will be on it. Because the Builder of the Integral is here with us. He forsook the Wall and he came here with me, to be among us. All hail the Builder!”
In a blink, I am somewhere up high and underneath me are heads and heads, and gaping, screaming mouths, and arms pouring upward and then falling. This was exceptionally strange, intoxicating: I felt myself above everyone, I was myself, a separate thing, a world; I stopped being a component, as I had been, and I became the number one.
And then I was put down next to the rock itself: a creased body, happy and crumpled, as though released from a lover’s clutches. The sun, a voice from above, and a smile from I-330. A goldenhaired, herb-smelling woman, all satiny-gold, appears. In her hands is a cup, seemingly made of wood. She drinks from it with her red lips and gives it to me, and I drink greedily, with closed eyes, in order to quench the fire: I am drinking sweet, prickly, cold sparks.
And then the blood inside me, and the whole world, is going a thousand times faster; the light Earth is flying like a bit of fluff. And everything is lighter, simpler, clearer to me.
And now I see the familiar, enormous letters—MEPHI—on the rock, and for some reason this is just as it should be, this is the simple, sound thread, connecting everyone. I see the crude sketch of a winged youth with a transparent body (it was also on the rock, I think), and there is a blinding, red-hot coal in place of his heart … And again, I understand this coal … or rather, I feel it—just as I was feeling but not hearing each word (she is talking from above, on the rock). And I feel that everything is breathing together and everyone has somewhere to fly to, like those birds above the Wall that time …
From behind, from the densely breathing thicket of bodies came a loud voice: “But all this is pure madness!”
And, it seems, I leapt onto the rock (yes, I think it was me). From there I could see the sun, the heads, and a green, toothed saw against the blue and I cried out: “Yes, yes, exactly! And we must all go crazy, it is essential that we all go crazy—as soon as possible! It is essential—I tell you!”
I-330 is next to me; her smile is two black lines from the edges of her mouth upward at an angle; and there is a piece of coal inside me, and it is, for an instant, light, almost painless, beautiful …
After that, I’m left with only stray, embedded fragments:
A bird, slowly, lowly passing by. I see it is alive, like me. It turns its head to the right, to the left, like a person, and then screws its black round eyes into me.
Another fragment:
A spine of shining fur, the color of old elephant bones. A dark, transparent insect with tiny wings climbing along the spine and the spine quivers to drive the insect away, then quivers again …
And another:
The shadow of leaves is a weave, a lattice. In this shadow, people are lying around and munching on something that looks like the legendary food of the Ancients: long, yellow fruit and a piece of something dark. A woman puts one of these in my hand and I find it funny: I don’t know if I can eat it.
One more:
A crowd, heads, feet, hands, mouths. Faces spring out for a second—and disappear, like popping bubbles. One second, transparent wing-ears flash past (but perhaps it just seemed that way to me).
I squeeze I-330’s hand as hard as I can. She looks around: “What’s wrong?”
“He is here … I thought I saw …”
“Who is he?”
“S … Here, just now—in the crowd …”
Coal-black, thin eyebrows, hitched up to the temples, a sharp triangle, a smile. And it isn’t clear to me why she is smiling: how can she smile?
“You don’t understand, I-330, you don’t understand what it would mean if he or any of his people were here.”
“How funny! As if it would occur to someone there, behind the Wall, that we are here. Remember, you yourself—did you ever think that this was possible? They’re looking for us there—and let them! You are delirious.”
She smiles lightly, joyfully, and I smile; the Earth, drunk, joyful and light, is floating …
RECORD TWENTY-EIGHT
KEYWORDS: Both of Them. Entropy and Energy. The Opaque Part of the Body.
Okay: if your world looks like the world of our distant ancestors, then imagine for yourself that one day you stumble upon a sixth or seventh part of the world—some sort of Atlantis in the ocean— and there you find far-fetched labyrinth-cities, people swooping through the air without the help of wings or aeros, and rocks you can lift up with a mere glance … Basically, the sorts of things that wouldn’t even enter your head, even if you were suffering from the dream-sickness. Well, that’s how it was for me yesterday. Because, you must understand, not one of us has ever, since the end of the Two-Hundred-Year War, been behind the Wall—but I already told you that.
I know: my duty to you, unknown friends, is to recount the finest details of the strange and unknown world that was revealed to me yesterday. But at the moment I am in no state to return to this. Everything is new, new, new—a sort of downpour of events—and one of me is not enough to collect it all. I am stretching out the flaps of my unif and cupping my hands and yet whole bucketfuls still flow past me, and only drops end up on these pages …
At first, I overheard loud voices behind my door and I recognized I-330’s flexible, metallic voice. But there was another, almost as rigid as a wooden ruler—it was the voice of U. Then the door swung open with a crack and they both shot into my room. Just like that: they shot in.
I-330 put her hand on the back of my chair and smiled over her right shoulder at U, with all her teeth. I wouldn’t like to stand in the way of that smile.
“Listen,” I-330 said to me, “this woman seems to have made it her goal to protect you from me, as if you were a small child. Is this—with your permission?”
And then, the quivering gills: “Yes, he is a child. Yes! And that’s why he doesn’t see that you, with him, that all this is only so that … that all this is a farce. Yes! And it is my duty …”
For an instant, the broken, jagged line of my eyebrows was in the mirror. I leapt up and, straining to contain my other self with his trembling hairy fists, straining to shove each word out through my teeth, I screamed at her point-blank, right into her gills: “Th-thissss very second—get out! Get out!”
The gills swelled brick-redly, then sank, and grayed. She opened her mouth to say something and then, saying nothing—slammed it and left.
I threw myself at I-330: “I cannot forgive—I will never forgive myself for this. She dared to … to you? … You don’t think that I think that … that she … This is all because she wants me to be registered to her, but I …”
“Fortunately she won’t manage to be registered to you now. And if there are thousands lik
e her, it doesn’t matter. I know that you will believe me and not those thousands. Because, well, after yesterday’s … I am beholden to you, just like you wanted. I am in your hands. At any moment, you could …”
“What, at any moment I could … what?” And then I understood. Blood was gushing into my ears and cheeks and I cried: “What are you talking about?! Never talk like that! You of all people should understand that that was the former me but now I’m …”
“Who knows who you are … A person is a novel: you don’t know how it will end until the very last page. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be worth reading to the very end …”
I-330 was stroking my head. Her face was not visible to me, but I could hear in her voice that she was looking far into the distance and her eyes had caught onto a cloud, floating inaudibly, slowly, who knows where to …
Suddenly she pushed me aside with her hand, firmly and tenderly.
“Listen: I came to tell you that these might be the last days before … Did you know? All auditoriums were shut down today.”
“Shut down?”
“Yes. And I walked past and saw them in the auditorium buildings preparing something. There are tables and medics in white.”
“But what does this mean?!”
“I don’t know. For the meantime no one knows. And that’s the worst of it. I just feel—they’ve turned on the current, the sparks are running, and if not today, then tomorrow … But perhaps they won’t succeed.”
A long time ago I had ceased understanding who “they” were and who “we” were. I’m not sure if I want “them” to succeed or not. Only one thing is clear to me: I-330 is now walking along a fine line, and any second now …