We
Looking from this summit down to the bottom, where something is
still left swarming like worms, from this summit all that is left
over in us from the ancients seems alike. Alike are the unlawful
coming motherhood of O-90, a murder, and the insanity of that
Number who dared to throw verses into the face of the United State;
and alike is the judgment for them--premature death. This is that
divine justice of which those stone-housed ancients dreamed, lit by
the naive pink rays of the dawn of history. Their "God" punished
sacrilege as a capital crime.
You Uranians, morose and as black as the ancient Spaniards, who
were wise in knowing so well how to burn at the stake, you are
silent; I think you agree with me. But I hear you, pink Venerians,
saying something about "tortures, executions, return to barbarism."
My dear Venerians, I pity you! You are incapable of philosophical,
mathematical thinking. Human history moves upward in circles,
like an aero. The circles are at times golden, sometimes they are
bloody, but all have 360 degrees. They go from 0° to 10°, 20°, 200°,
360°,--and then again 0°. Yes, we have returned to zero. But for a
mathematically working mind it is clear that this zero is different;
it is a perfectly new zero. We started from zero to the right and
came to zero on the left. Hence instead of plus zero, we are at
minus zero. Do you understand?
This zero appears to me now as a silent, immense, narrow rock,
sharp as a blade. In cruel darkness, holding our breath, we set
sail from the black night-side of the zero rock. For centuries we,
Columbuses, floated and floated; we made the circuit of the whole
world and at last! Hurrah! Salute! We climbed up the masts; before
us now was a new side of the zero rock, hitherto unknown, bathed
in the Polar light of the United State; a blue mass covered with
rainbow sparkles! Suns!--a hundred suns! A million rainbows! What
does it matter if we are separated from the other, black side of
the zero rock only by the thickness of a blade? A knife is the most
solid, the most immortal, the most inspired invention of man. The
knife served on the guillotine. The knife is the universal tool for
cutting knots. The way of paradoxes follows its sharp edge, the only
way becoming to a fearless mind....
RECORD TWENTY-ONE
The Duty of an Author
The Ice-swells
The Most Difficult Love
Yesterday was her day and again she did not come. Again there
came her incoherent note, explaining nothing. But I am tranquil,
perfectly tranquil. If I do act as I am told to in the note, if I
do go to the controller on duty, produce the pink check and then,
having lowered the curtains if I do sit alone in my room, I do all
this of course not because I have no power to act contrary to her
desire. It seems funny? Decidedly not! It is quite simple: separated
from all curative, plaster-like smiles I am enabled quietly to
write these very lines. This first. And second: I am afraid to lose
in her, in I-330, perhaps the only clue I shall ever have to the
understanding of all the unknowns, like the story of the cupboard,
or my temporary death, for instance. To understand, to discover
these unknowns as the author of these records, I feel it simply my
duty. Moreover, the unknown is naturally the enemy of man. And _Homo
Sapiens_ only then becomes Man in the complete sense of the word,
when his punctuation includes no question marks, only exclamation
points, commas and periods.
Thus, guided by what seems to me simply my duty as an author, I
took an aero today at sixteen o'clock and went to the Ancient
House. A strong wind was blowing against me. The aero advanced with
difficulty through the thicket of air, its transparent branches
whistling and whipping. The city below seemed a heap of blue blocks
of ice. Suddenly--a cloud, a swift, oblique shadow. The ice became
leaden; it swelled. As in springtime when you happen to stand at the
shore and wait; in one more minute everything will move and pull
and crack! But the minute passes and the ice remains motionless;
you feel as though you yourself are swelling, your heart beats
more restlessly, more frequently.... But why do I write about all
this? And whence all these strange sensations? For is there such an
iceberg as could ever break the most lucid, solid crystal of our
life?
At the entrance of the Ancient House I found no one. I went around
it and found the old janitress near the Green Wall. She held her
hand above her eyes, looking upward. Beyond the Wall, sharp black
triangles of some birds; they would rush, cawing, in onslaught
on the invisible fence of electric waves, and as they felt the
electricity against their breasts, they would recoil and soar once
more beyond the Wall.
I noticed oblique, swift shadows on the dark, wrinkled face, a quick
glance at me.
"Nobody here, nobody, nobody! No! And no use coming here...."
In what respect is it "no use" and what a strange idea, to consider
me somebody's shadow. Perhaps all of you are only my shadows. Did I
not populate these pages which only recently were white quadrangular
deserts, with you? Without me would they whom I shall guide over the
narrow paths of my lines, could they ever see you?
Of course I did not say all this to the old woman. From experience
I know that the most torturing thing is to inoculate someone with a
doubt as to the fact that he or she is a three-dimensional reality
and not some other reality. I remarked only, quite drily, that her
business was to open the gate, and she let me into the courtyard.
It was empty. Quiet. The wind remained beyond the walls, distant
as on that day, when shoulder to shoulder, two like one, we came
out from beneath, from the corridors,--if it ever really happened.
I walked under stone arches, my steps resounded against the
damp vaults and fell behind me, sounding as though someone were
continually following me. The yellow walls with patches of red brick
were watching me through their square spectacles, windows,--watching
me open the squeaky doors of a barn, look into corners, nooks
and hidden places.... A gate in the fence and a lonely spot. The
monument of the Two Hundred Years' War. From the ground naked, stone
ribs were sticking out. The yellow jaws of the wall. An ancient oven
with a chimney like a ship petrified forever among red-brick waves.
It seemed to me that I had seen those yellow teeth once before.
I saw them still dimly in my mind, as at the bottom of a
barrel, through water. And I began to search. I fell into caves
occasionally; I stumbled over stones; rusty jaws caught my unif a
few times; salt drops of sweat ran from my forehead into my eyes.
Nowhere! I could find that exit from below, from the corridors,
nowhere! There was none. Well, perhaps it was better that it
happened so. Probably that _all_ was only one of my absurd "dreams."
Tired out, covered with cobweb and dust, I opened the gate to return
to the main yard, when suddenly ... a rustle behind me, splashing
steps, and there before me were the pink wing-like ears and the
double-curved smile of S-. Half closing his eyes, he bored his
little drills into me and asked:
"Taking a walk?"
I was silent. My arms were heavy.
"Well, do you feel better now?"
"Yes, thank you. I think I am getting normal again."
He let me go. He lifted his eyes, looked upward, and I noticed his
Adam's apple for the first time; it resembles a broken spring,
sticking out from beneath the upholstery of a divan.
Above us, not very high (about 50 meters) aeros were buzzing. By
their low, slow flight and by the observation tubes which hung down,
I recognized them. They were the aeros of the Guardians. But there
were not two or three, as usual, there were about ten or twelve (I
regret to have to confine myself to an approximate figure).
"Why are there so many today?" I dared to ask S-.
"Why? Hm.... A real physician begins to treat a patient when
he is still well but on the way to becoming sick tomorrow,
day-after-tomorrow or within a week. Prophylaxis! Yes!"
He nodded and went splashing over the stones of the yard. Then he
turned his head and said over his shoulder, "Be careful!"
Again I was alone. Silence. Emptiness. Far beyond the Green Wall the
birds and the wind. What did he mean? My aero ran very fast with the
wind. Light and heavy shadows from the clouds. Below blue cupolas,
cubes of glass-ice were becoming leaden and swelling....
_The Same Evening_
I took up my pen just now in order to write upon these pages a
few thoughts which, it seems to me, will prove useful for you,
my readers. These thoughts are concerned with the great Day of
Unanimity which is now not far away. But as I sat down, I discovered
that I cannot write at present; instead I sit and listen to the wind
beating the glass with its dark wings; all the while I am busy
looking about and I am waiting, expecting.... What? I do not know.
So I was very glad when I saw the brownish-pink gills enter my room,
heartily glad I may say. She sat down and innocently smoothed a fold
of her unif that fell between her knees, and very soon she pasted
upon me, all over me, a host of smiles,--a bit of a smile on each
crack of my face and this gave me pleasant sensations, as if I were
tightly bound like an infant of the ancients in a swaddling-cloth.
"Imagine! Today, when I entered the classroom" (she works in the
Child-Educational Refinery), "I suddenly noticed a caricature upon
the blackboard. Indeed! I assure you! They had pictured me in the
form of a fish! Perhaps I really--"
"No, no! Why do you say that?" I hastily exclaimed. When one was
near her, it was clear indeed that she had nothing resembling
gills. No. When I referred to gills in these pages I was certainly
irreverent.
"Oh, after all it does not matter. But the act as such, think of
it! Of course I called the Guardians at once. I love children very
much and I think that the most difficult and the most exalted love
is--cruelty. You understand me, of course."
"Certainly!" Her sentence so closely resembled my thoughts! I could
not refrain from reading to her a passage from my Record No. 20,
beginning "Quietly, metallically, distinctly, do the thoughts" ...
etc. I felt her brownish-pink cheeks twitching and coming closer
and closer to me. Suddenly I felt in my hands her firm, dry, even
slightly prickling fingers.
"Give, give this to me please. I shall have it phonographed and make
the children learn it by heart. Not only your Venerians need all
this, but we ourselves right now, tomorrow, day-after-tomorrow."
She glanced around and said in a very low voice:
"Have you heard, they say that on the Day of Unanimity--"
I sprang to my feet.
"What? What do they say? What--on the Day of Unanimity?"
The coziness of my room, its very walls, seemed to have vanished. I
felt myself thrown outside, where the tremendous, shaggy wind was
tossing about and where the slanting clouds of dusk were descending
lower and lower....
U- boldly and firmly grasped me by the shoulders. I even noticed how
her fingers, responding to my emotion, trembled slightly.
"Sit down, dear, and don't be upset. They say many things; must we
believe them all? Moreover, if only you need me, I shall be near you
on that day. I shall leave the school-children with someone else and
I shall stay with you, for you, dear, you too are a child and you
need...."
"No, no!" (I raised my hands in protest). "Not for anything! You
really think then that I am a child and that I cannot do without
a.... Oh, no! Not for anything in the world." (I must confess I had
other plans for that day!)
She smiled. The wording of that smile apparently was: "Oh, what a
stubborn, what a stubborn boy!" She sat down, eyelids lowered. Her