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  There’s the bell. We stood and sang the Hymn of the One State, and on the stage, the phonolector sparkled with its golden loudspeaker and keen wit: “Esteemed ciphers! Not long ago, archaeologists uncovered a book from the twentieth century. In it, an ironical author tells the story of a barbarian and a barometer. The barbarian noticed: every time the barometer pointed to ‘rain,’ it actually rained. And then, one day, when the barbarian wanted it to rain, he tapped out just enough mercury so that the level would indicate ‘rain’ ” (on the screen, a barbarian in feathers, tapping out the mercury; the sound of laughter). “You laugh: but does it not seem to you more appropriate to laugh at the Europeans of that epoch? Like the barbarian, the European wanted ‘rain’—rain with a capital R, algebraic rain. But he stood before the barometer like a big wet chicken. At least the barbarian had more gumption and verve and—though barbarous—logic: he was able to establish that there is a connection between effect and cause. Having tapped out the mercury, he achieved that first step along the great path, toward …”

  At this point (I repeat: I am writing all this, without hiding a thing)—at this point, I temporarily became sort of waterproof to the invigorating torrent pouring from the loudspeakers. It suddenly occurred to me that I had come here in vain (why “in vain”? And how could I have not come, seeing as I had instructions to do so?); it seemed to me that everything was empty, just a shell. And, straining, I returned my attention to the phonolector when it started to address its main subject: our music, our mathematical composition (the mathematician is the cause, the music is the effect), and the description of the recently invented musicometer.

  “… By simply turning this handle, any of you could produce up to three sonatas an hour. What a struggle this was for our ancestors. They could create only if they drove themselves to fits of ‘inspiration,’ a strange form of epilepsy. And here is an amusing illustration of their results: the music of Scriabin, twentieth century. This black box” (at this point the curtains moved apart on the stage and there stood their ancient instrument) “they called this box ‘grand’ or ‘forte,’ which again proves how much all of their music …”

  And so it went on—again, I hardly recall any of it, very possibly because … well, yes, I’ll tell you straight: because it was I-330 who went up to the “grand” instrument. It is likely that I was astonished by her unexpected appearance on the stage.

  She was in the fantastical attire of an ancient epoch: a tightly fitting black dress, the sharply emphasized white of her bare shoulders and neck, and a warm, heaving, breathing shadow between her … and those blinding, almost evil teeth …

  A smile—a sting, aimed here—down below. She sat and played. It was wild, convulsive, colorful—like everything back then: lacking even a shadow of rational mechanics. And, of course, all those around me were right: they were all laughing. Except a few … including me—but why wasn’t I?

  Yes, epilepsy is a psychic sickness—a pain … a slow, sweet pain—a sting—and you wish it would go deeper, hurt more … Then, slowly—sunshine emerges. Not our kind of sunshine, the pale-bluish-crystalline kind, which disperses evenly through our glass bricks—no: it was a wild, rushing, burning sun, expelling itself, shedding itself in little tufts.

  The person sitting next to me glanced to the left—at me—and giggled. For some reason, I distinctly recall seeing on his lips: a microscopic spit bubble jump out and burst. This bubble brought me to my senses. I was myself again.

  Just like everyone else, I was just hearing a silly, fussy clatter of strings. I laughed. Things became easy and simple. The talented phonolector had portrayed this wild epoch too realistically—that was all.

  With particular pleasure, I then listened to our contemporary music. (It was demonstrated at the end for the sake of contrast.) Crystal chromatic degrees converging and diverging in infinite sequences and the summarizing chords of Taylor and Maclaurin formulae with a gait like Pythagorean pant-legs, so whole-toned and quadrilateral-heavy; the melancholy melodies of diminishing oscillations; pauses producing bright rhythms according to Frauenhofer lines, the spectral analysis of planets … What magnificence! What unwavering predictability! And how pitiful that whimsical music of the Ancients, delimited by nothing except wild fantasy …

  As usual, in orderly rows, by fours, we all walked out through the wide doors of the auditorium. Nearby a familiar twice-bent figure flashed past; I bowed respectfully.

  Sweet O was supposed to be coming over in an hour. I felt pleasantly and usefully excited. Once home, I hurried to the building office, handed my pink ticket to the monitor, and received permission for blind-lowering. This permission is only given to us on Sex Days. Otherwise, we live in full view, perpetually awash with light, in among our transparent walls, woven from the sparkling air. We have nothing to hide from one another. This also eases the arduous and distinguished task of the Guardians. Otherwise, who knows what could happen? It’s possible that it was exactly those strange nontransparent habitations of the Ancients that gave rise to that sorry cellular mentality of theirs. “My (sic!) house is my castle”— they really should have thought that through!

  At 22:00, I lowered the blinds and at that same minute O walked in, a little out of breath. She offered me her pink little mouth and her pink ticket. I tore the pink ticket but couldn’t tear myself away from the pink mouth until the very last moment at 22:15.

  Afterward, I showed her my records and spoke—very well, I think—about the beauty of the square, the cube, the straight line. She listened so charming-pinkly, and suddenly from those blue eyes: a tear, another, and a third, right onto the open page (page 7). The ink ran. So now I’ll have to copy it out again.

  “Dear D, if only you—if only …”

  “If only”? “If only” what? Again with her old refrain: a baby. Or maybe this is a new thing, to do with … to do with that other woman? Could it be that … No, that would be too stupid.

  RECORD FIVE

  KEYWORDS: A Quadrilateral. The Masters of the World. A Pleasantly Useful Function.

  Again, something’s not right here. Again, I’ve been talking to you, my unknown reader, as though … well, let’s say, as though you were my old comrade R-13, the poet with African lips, a person everyone knows. Meanwhile, you—on the moon, on Venus, on Mars, on Mercury—who knows you? Where and who are you?

  Here’s the thing: imagine a quadrilateral—a living, beautiful square. And this quadrilateral is asked to describe itself, its existence. But you see, the last thing that would occur to the quadrilateral mind would be to mention its four equal angles: it just doesn’t see them—they’re just a given, every day. Well, that’s me, permanently in that same sort of quadrilateral predicament. Whether it’s the business of the pink ticket or something similar: to me, it’s all the equivalent of four angles, but for you, it may be more vividly evident than Newton’s binomial theorem.

  So here goes. Some ancient sage once said something clever (accidentally, of course): “Love and hunger are the masters of the world.” Ergo, to take control of the world, man must take control of the masters of the world. Our ancestors finally conquered Hunger with a heavy cost: I am talking about the Two-Hundred-Year War, the war between the city and the countryside. It is likely that savage Christians stubbornly clung to their “bread”2 out of religious prejudice. But in the thirty-fifth year before the founding of the One State, our modern petroleum-based food was invented. True, only 0.2 percent of the population of the earthly sphere survived. But in exchange for all that—the cleansing of thousand-year-old filth— how glistening the face of the earth has become! In exchange for all that, this zero-point-two percent has tasted bliss in the ramparts of the One State.

  Isn’t it clear that bliss and envy—they are the numerator and the denominator of the fraction known as happiness. And what would be the point of those countless sacrifices in the Two-Hundred-Year War if, in our life, there still remained good reason for enviousness? But it did remain, because noses were still ??
?button” noses and “classical” noses (our prior conversation on the walk), and because some achieved the love of many but many achieved the love of none.

  So it’s natural that having subjugated Hunger (algebraically = to the sum of material goods), the One State began an offensive against the other master of the world—against Love. Finally, even this natural force was also conquered, i.e., organized and mathematicized, and around three hundred years ago, our historical Lex Sexualis was proclaimed: “Each cipher has the right to any other cipher as sexual product.”

  And the rest are technicalities. You are thoroughly examined in the laboratories of the Bureau of Sex, the exact sexual hormone content of your blood is determined, and then they generate a corresponding Table of Sex Days for you. Then you make a statement that on your given day you would like to make use of this (or that) cipher, and you receive the appropriate ticket book (pink). And that’s it.

  It’s clear: if there is no good reason for enviousness, the denominator of the fraction of happiness is brought to zero and the fraction is transformed into a glorious infinity. And that very thing, which was to the Ancients the source of innumerable silly tragedies, has been converted to a harmonic, pleasantly useful function of the organism, exactly like sleep, physical labor, ingestion, defecation, and the rest. From this you will see how the great strength of logic purifies everything, no matter what it touches. Oh, if only you, unknown people, could also know this divine strength, if only you could learn to follow it through.

  … Strange: I was writing today about the highest of heights in human history and all the while breathing the cleanest mountain air of thought, but, meanwhile, there were clouds and cobwebs and a cross, some kind of four-pawed X, inside me. Maybe it was my own paws, since they were in front of me on the table all this time—my shaggy paws. I don’t like talking about them and I don’t like them: they are evidence of the savage epoch. Could there actually be, within me—

  I wanted to cross out that last part because it goes beyond the bounds of my preselected keywords for this record. But then I decided: I won’t cross anything out. Let my records—like the most sensitive seismograph—produce the crooked line of even the most insignificant brain oscillations. Sometimes it is exactly these oscillations that serve as forewarning of …

  Okay, this is really absurd, this really actually should be crossed out: we have channeled all the forces of nature—there cannot be any future catastrophes.

  And now everything is clear to me: that strange feeling inside is all due to that very quadratic predicament of mine, about which I spoke at the beginning of this record. And there is no X in me (it’s not possible). It is simply that I am afraid that some kind of X exists in you, unknown readers of mine. But I believe you won’t judge me too harshly. I believe you will understand that it is more difficult for me to write than for any author in the course of all human history: some wrote for their contemporaries, others for their descendants, but no one ever wrote for their ancestors or beings who resemble their own distant, savage ancestors …

  RECORD SIX

  KEYWORDS: An Incident. That Damned “Clear.” Twenty-Four Hours.

  I repeat: I have charged myself to write this without hiding a thing. Therefore, however sad it is, I ought to record here that, obviously, even today, the process of hardening, the crystallization of life has not yet been completed, it hasn’t reached the ideal—there are still a few stages to go. The ideal (clearly) is a state where nothing actually happens anymore, but meanwhile, there are still things that … Well, take something like this, if you like: I read today in the State Gazette that a Celebration of Justice will take place on Cube Plaza in two days’ time. So, you see, once again some cipher has disrupted the progress of the great State machine. Once again, something unforeseen, something that couldn’t be calculated in advance, has occurred.

  And, besides that, something happened to me. True, it was during the Personal Hour, i.e., the hour specially reserved for unforeseeable circumstances, but all the same …

  At around 16:00 (more exactly, ten minutes to 16:00), I was at home. Suddenly, the telephone:

  “D-503?” (A female voice).

  “Yes.”

  “You free?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s me, I-330. I’m flying by for you now and we’ll set our course for the Ancient House. Agreed?”

  I-330 … That I-330 annoys me, repels me—almost spooks me. And that’s exactly why I said: “Yes.”

  Five minutes later and we were already in the aero. A May sky of blue majolica and the light sun in its own golden aero, buzzing along behind us, not rushing ahead, not falling behind. But there, up ahead, was a cloud whitening our view like a cataract, stupid and puffy, like the cheeks of the ancient “Cupid”—and it was somewhat irking me. The wind dries your lips when the front window is open—you lick your lips incessantly without meaning to and incessantly think about your lips.

  Dull green dots were already visible, though still far off—there, behind the Wall. Then a slight, involuntary sinking of the heart— down, down, down, like descending a steep hill—and we were at the Ancient House.

  The whole, strange, fragile, blind structure is wrapped in a glass shell: otherwise, of course, it would have collapsed long ago. At the glass door was an old lady, wrinkled all over, especially her mouth: all pleats and gathers, the lips already tucked inside. Her mouth was overgrown somehow—it was totally unbelievable that she could speak at all. But then she did speak: “Well, now, my dears, you’ve come to look at this little house of mine?” And the wrinkles beamed (that is, it is likely that they formed an optical image that created the impression that they were “beaming”).

  “Yes, grandma, I felt like seeing it again,” I-330 told her.

  The wrinkles beamed: “What a sun, eh? … Well, what’s up, what? Ooh, mischief-maker, ooh, mischief-maker! I kno-o-ow, I know! Oh, all right: go in alone; I think I’m better off here, in the sunshine …”

  Hmm … It would seem that my companion is a frequent visitor here. I want to shake something from myself, something is bothering me: it’s still that same untethered visual image, that cloud on the smooth blue majolica.

  As we climbed up the wide, dark staircase, I-330 said: “… Love her—that old woman.”

  “What for?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe—for her mouth. Or maybe for no reason at all. Just because.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. She continued, smiling a little bit, or maybe even not smiling at all: “I feel very guilty about it. It’s clear that one should not ‘love for the sake of it’ but ‘love for something’s sake.’ All natural forces should be …”

  “It’s clear …” I began. I caught myself immediately on that word and secretly glanced over at I-330: had she noticed?

  She was looking down somewhere: her eyes lowered, like blinds.

  It reminded me of walking along the avenues in the evening, at around 22:00, and among the brightly lighted, transparent cages there are darkened ones with lowered blinds, and behind those blinds—what is happening, what is behind her blinds? Why did she call me today and what is all this?

  I opened the heavy, creaky, opaque door and we were in a dark, disorderly space (they called this an “apartment”). There stood that strange, “grand” musical instrument, amid the wild, disorganized, crazy multicolor of tones and shapes—like that ancient music. White smoothness overhead; dark-blue walls; the red, green, orange bindings of ancient books; the yellow bronze of a candelabra and a statue of Buddha; and the lines created by the furniture all mangled by that epilepsy, not adhering to any sort of equation.

  I bore this chaos with great strain. But my companion had, seemingly, a stronger constitution.

  “This is my most favorite …” Suddenly she caught herself and that sting-smile of white, sharp teeth appeared. “To be more precise: this is the most ridiculous of all of their ‘apartments.’ ”

  “Or, even more precisely: of their nation-states,” I corr
ected her. “Thousands of microscopic, perpetually quarreling nation-states, relentless, like …”

  “Well, yes, that’s clear,” said I-330, apparently very serious.

  We crossed the room where two little children’s beds stood (in that epoch, children were private possessions). And more rooms, the glimmering of mirrors, gloomy closets, intolerably multicolored sofas, a vast “fireplace,” and a mahogany bed. The only evidence of our contemporary, excellent, transparent, and eternal glass was in their pathetic, fragile, mini-quadrilateral windows.

  “And to think: these people ‘loved for the sake of it,’ burning, suffering …” Again her eyelids lowered like blinds. “What a ridiculous, spendthrift waste of human energy—don’t you think?”

  She spoke somehow from within me, she spoke my thoughts. But there was still that annoying X in her smile. There, behind those blinds, inside her, something was going on—I don’t know what— and it exasperated me. I wanted to quarrel with her, to scream at her (to be exact), but I had to agree anyway—not agreeing is not allowed.

  Then we stopped in front of a mirror. At that moment, I only saw her eyes. An idea came to me: aren’t human beings constructed as haphazardly as these ridiculous “apartments”? Human heads aren’t transparent, and their only tiny windows: the eyes. It was as if she had guessed what I was thinking and she turned. “Well—here are my eyes. So?” (This, of course, was said without words.)

  Before me were two terrifyingly dark windows, and within them a very unknown, strange life. I could only see fire—some kind of inner wood-fire was blazing there—and there were figures, who looked just like …