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  We

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  In the One State of the great Benefactor, there are no individuals, only numbers. Life is an ongoing process of mathematical precision, a perfectly balanced equation. Primitive passions and instincts have been subdued. Even nature has been defeated, banished behind the Green Wall. But one frontier remains: outer space. Now, with the creation of the spaceship Integral, that frontier—and whatever alien species are to be found there—will be subjugated to the beneficent yoke of reason.

  One number, D-503, chief architect of the Integral, decides to record his thoughts in the final days before the launch for the benefit of less advanced societies. But a chance meeting with the beautiful I-330 results in an unexpected discovery that threatens everything D-503 believes about himself and the One State. The discovery—or rediscovery—of inner space… and that disease the ancients called the soul.

  A page-turning SF adventure, a masterpiece of wit and black humor that accurately predicted the horrors of Stalinism, “We” is the classic dystopian novel. Its message of hope and warning is as timely at the end of the twentieth century as it was at the beginning.

  We

  by Yevgeny Zamyatin

  First Entry

  TOPICS :

  A Proclamation

  The Wisest of Lines

  A Poem

  I shall simply copy, word for word, the proclamation that appeared today in the One State Gazette:

  The building of the Integral will be completed in one hundred and twenty days. The great historic hour when the first Integral will soar into cosmic space is drawing near. One thousand years ago your heroic ancestors subdued the entire terrestrial globe to the power of the One State. Yours will be a still more glorious feat: you will integrate the infinite equation of the universe with the aid of the fire-breathing, electric, glass Integral. You will subjugate the unknown beings on other planets, who may still be living in the primitive condition of freedom, to the beneficent yoke of reason. If they fail to understand that we bring them mathematically infallible happiness, it will be our duty to compel them to be happy. But before resorting to arms, we shall try the power of words.

  In the name of the Benefactor, therefore, we proclaim to all the numbers of the One State :

  Everyone who feels capable of doing so must compose tracts, odes, manifestoes, poems, or other works extolling the beauty and the grandeur of the One State.

  This will be the first cargo to be carried by the Integral.

  Long live the One State, long live the numbers, long live the Benefactor!

  I write this, and I feel: my cheeks are burning. Yes, to integrate the grandiose cosmic equation. Yes, to unbend the wild, primitive curve and straighten it to a tangent—an asymptote—a straight line. For the line of the One State is the straight line. The great, divine, exact, wise straight line— the wisest of all lines.

  I, D-503, Builder of the Integral, am only one of the mathematicians of the One State. My pen, accustomed to figures, does not know how to create the music of assonances and rhymes. I shall merely attempt to record what I see and think, or, to be more exact, what we think (precisely so—we, and let this We be the title of my record). But since this record will be a derivative of our life, of the mathematically perfect life of the One State, will it not be, of itself, and regardless of my will or skill, a poem? It will. I believe, I know it.

  I write this, and my cheeks are burning. This must be similar to what a woman feels when she first senses within herself the pulse of a new, still tiny, still blind little human being. It is I, and at the same time, not I. And for many long months it will be necessary to nourish it with my own life, my own blood, then tear it painfully from myself and lay it at the feet of the One State.

  But I am ready, like every one, or almost every one, of us. I am ready.

  Second Entry

  TOPICS:

  Ballet

  Square Harmony

  X

  Spring. From beyond the Green Wall, from the wild, invisible plains, the wind brings yellow honey pollen of some unknown flowers. The sweet pollen dries your lips, and every minute you pass your tongue over them. The lips of all the women you see must be sweet (of the men, too, of course). This interferes to some extent with the flow of logical thought.

  But the sky! Blue, unblemished by a single cloud. (How wild the tastes of the ancients, whose poets could be inspired by those absurd, disorderly, stupidly tumbling piles of vapor!) I love—I am certain I can safely say, we love—only such a sterile, immaculate sky. On days like this the whole world is cast of the same impregnable, eternal glass as the Green Wall, as all our buildings. On days like this you see the bluest depth of things, their hitherto unknown, astonishing equations—you see them even in the most familiar everyday objects.

  Take, for instance, this. In the morning I was at the dock where the Integral is being built, and suddenly I saw: the lathes; the regulator sphere rotating with closed eyes, utterly oblivious of all; the cranks flashing, swinging left and right; the balance beam proudly swaying its shoulders; the bit of the slotting machine dancing up and down in time to unheard music Suddenly I saw the whole beauty of this grandiose mechanical ballet, flooded with pale blue sunlight.

  And then, to myself: Why is this beautiful? Why is dance beautiful? Answer: because it is unfree motion, because the whole profound meaning of dance lies precisely in absolute, esthetic subordination, in ideal unfreedom. And if it is true that our forebears abandoned themselves to dance at the most exalted moments of their lives (religious mysteries, military parades), it means only one thing: the instinct of unfreedom is organically inherent in man from time immemorial, and we, in our present life, are only consciously…

  I will have to finish later: the annunciator clicked. I looked up: O-90, of course. In half a minute she’ll be here, for our daily walk.

  Dear O! It always seems to me that she looks exactly like her name: about ten centimeters shorter than the Maternal Norm, and therefore carved in the round, all of her, with that pink O, her mouth, open to meet every word I say. And also, that round, plump fold on her wrist, like a baby’s.

  When she came in, the flywheel of logic was still humming at full swing within me, and I began, by sheer force of inertia, to speak to her about the formula I had just established, which encompassed everything—dance, machines, and all of us.

  “Marvelous, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Yes, marvelous.” O-90 smiled rosily at me. “It’s spring.”

  Well, wouldn’t you know: spring… She talks about spring. Women… I fell silent.

  Downstairs, the avenue was full. In such weather, the afternoon personal hour is used for an additional walk. As always, the Music Plant played the “March of the One State ” with all its trumpets. The numbers walked in even ranks, four abreast, ecstatically stepping in time to the music-hundreds, thousands of numbers, in pale blue unifs[1], with golden badges on their breasts, bearing the State Number of each man and woman. And I—the four of us—but one of the innumerable waves in this mighty stream. On my left, O-90 (if this were being written by one of my hairy ancestors a thousand years ago, he probably would have described her by that funny word “mine”); on my right, two numbers I did not know, male and female.

  Blessedly blue sky, tiny baby suns in every badge, faces unshadowed by the insanity of thoughts… Rays. Do you understand that? Everything made of some single, radiant, smiling substance. And the brass rhythms: “Ta-ta-ta-tam! Ta-ta-ta-tam!” Like brass stairs gleaming in the sun, and every step taking you higher and higher, into the dizzying blue…

  And again, as this morning at the dock, I saw everything as though for the first time in my life: the straight, immutable streets, the glitterin
g glass of the pavements, the divine parallelepipeds of the transparent houses, the square harmony of the gray-blue ranks. And I felt: it was not the generations before me, but I—yes, I—who had conquered the old God and the old life. It was I who had created all this. And I was like a tower, I dared not move an elbow lest walls, cupolas, machines tumble in fragments about me.

  Then—a leap across the centuries, from + to -. I remembered (evidently an association by contrast) —I suddenly remembered a picture I had seen in a museum: one of their avenues, out of the twentieth century, dazzlingly motley, a teeming crush of people, wheels, animals, posters, trees, colors, birds… And they say this had really existed—could exist. It seemed so incredible, so preposterous that I could not contain myself and burst out laughing.

  And immediately, there was an echo—laughter— on my right. I turned: a flash of white—extraordinarily white and sharp teeth, an unfamiliar female face.

  “Forgive me,” she said, “but you looked at everything around you with such an inspired air, like some mythical god on the seventh day of creation. It seems to me you are sure that even I was created by you, and by no one else. I am very flattered…”

  All this—without a smile; I would even say, with a certain deference (perhaps she knew that I am the Builder of the Integral). But in the eyes, or in the eyebrows—I could not tell—there was a certain strange, irritating X, which I could not capture, could not define in figures.

  For some odd reason, I felt embarrassed and tried, in a rather stumbling manner, to explain my laughter to her logically. It was entirely clear, I said, that this contrast, this impassable abyss between the present and the past…

  “But why impassable?” (What white teeth!) “A bridge can be thrown across an abyss. Just think: drums, battalions, ranks—all this has also existed in the past; and, consequently…”

  “But of course!” I cried. (What an astonishing coincidence of ideas: she spoke almost my own words, the words I had written down before our walk.) “You understand, even ideas. And this is because nobody is ‘one,’ but ‘one of.’ We are so alike…”

  She: “Are you sure?”

  I saw her eyebrows raised to her temples at a sharp angle, like the pointed horns of an X, and again I was confused. I glanced right, left, and…

  On my right—she, slender, sharp, stubbornly pliant, like a whip, I-330 (I could see her number now); on my left—O, altogether different, all curves, with that childish fold on her wrist; and at the other end of our row, a male number I did not know—strange, doubly bent somehow, like the letter S. All of us so different…

  That one on the right, I-330, seemed to have intercepted my flustered glance, and with a sigh she said, “Yes… Alas!”

  Actually, this “alas” was entirely appropriate. But again there was that something in her face, or in her voice… And with a sharpness unusual for me, I said, “No reason for ‘Alas.’ Science progresses, and it is obvious that, if not now, then in fifty or a hundred years…”

  “Even everyone’s noses…”

  “Yes,” I almost shouted, “noses. If there is any ground for envy, no matter what it is… If I have a button-nose and another…”

  “Oh, your nose is ‘classical,’ as they used to say in olden times. But your hands… No, let us see, let us see your hands!”

  I detest to have anyone look at my hands: all hairy, shaggy—a stupid atavism. I held out my hand and said, as indifferently as I could, “An ape’s hands.”

  She glanced at my hands, then at my face. “A most interesting conjunction.” She weighed me with her eyes as on a scale, and the horns flicked again at the corners of her eyebrows.

  “He is registered with me.” O-90’s lips opened rosily, with eager joy.

  I wished she had kept silent—this was altogether out of place. Generally, this dear O… how shall I put it… her tongue is wrongly timed; the speed of the tongue should always be some seconds behind the speed of thought, but certainly not the other way around.

  At the end of the avenue, the bell on the Accumulator Tower was loudly striking seventeen. The personal hour was over. I-330 was leaving with the S-shaped male number. His face somehow inspired respect, and now it seemed familiar. I must have met him somewhere, but where?

  In parting, I-330 said with another of her X-smiles, “Come to auditorium 112 the day after tomorrow.”

  I shrugged. “If I am assigned to that auditorium…”

  And she, with an odd certainty, “You will be.”

  The woman affected me as unpleasantly as an irresolvable irrational member that has somehow slipped into an equation. And I was glad to remain for at least a few moments alone with dear O.

  Hand in hand, we crossed four lines of avenues. At the corner she had to turn right, and I, left.

  “I’d like so much to come to you today and let down the blinds. Today, right now…” O timidly raised her round, blue-crystal eyes to me.

  How funny she is. What could I say to her? She had come to me only the day before, and she knew as well as I did that our next sexual day was the day after tomorrow. It was simply a case of her usual “words ahead of thought”—like the occasional (and sometimes damaging) premature supply of a spark to a motor.

  Before we parted, I kissed her lovely blue eyes, unshadowed by a single cloud, two — no, let me be precise — three times.

  Third Entry

  TOPICS:

  Coat

  Wall

  Tables

  I have just looked over what I had written yesterday, and I see that I did not express myself clearly enough. Of course, it is all entirely clear to any of us. But perhaps you, the unknown readers to whom the Integral will bring my notes, have reached only that page in the great book of civilization that our ancestors read some nine hundred years ago. Perhaps you do not know even about such elementary things as the Table of Hours, the Personal Hour, the Maternity Norm, the Green Wall, and the Benefactor. It seems to me ridiculous yet very difficult to speak about all this. It is as if a writer of, say, the twentieth century had to explain in his novel the meaning of “coat,” or “apartment,” or “wife.” Yet, if his novel were to be translated for savages, how could he avoid explaining what a “coat” meant?

  I am certain that a savage would look at the “coat” and wonder, “What is it for? It’s only a hindrance.” It seems to me that your response may be exactly the same when I tell you that none of us has been beyond the Green Wall since the Two Hundred Years’ War.

  But, my dear readers, a man must think, at least a little. It helps. After all, it is clear that the entire history of mankind, insofar as we know it, is the history of transition from nomadic to increasingly settled forms of existence. And does it not follow that the most settled form (ours) is at the same time the most perfect (ours) ? People rushed about from one end of the earth to the other only in prehistoric times, when there were nations, wars, commerce, discoveries of all sorts of Americas. But who needs that now? What for?

  I admit, the habit of such settled existence was not achieved easily, or all at once. During the Two Hundred Years’ War, when all the roads fell into ruin and were overgrown with grass, it must at first have seemed extremely inconvenient to live in cities cut off from one another by green jungles. But what of it? After man’s tail dropped off, it must have been quite difficult for him at first to learn to drive off flies without its aid. In the beginning he undoubtedly missed his tail. But now—can you imagine yourself with a tail? Or can you imagine yourself in the street naked, without a coat? (For you may still be trotting about in “coats.”) And so it is with me: I cannot imagine a city that is not dad in a Green Wall; I cannot imagine a life that is not regulated by the figures of our Table.

  The Table… At this very moment, from the wall in my room, its purple figures on a field of gold stare tenderly and sternly into my eyes. Involuntarily, my mind turns to what the ancients called an “icon,” and I long to compose poems or prayers (which are the same thing). Oh, why am I not
a poet, to render fitting praise to the Table, the heart and pulse of the One State !

  As schoolchildren we all read (perhaps you have, too) that greatest literary monument to have come down to us from ancient days—“The Railway Guide.” But set it side by side with our Table, and it will be as graphite next to a diamond: both consist of the same element—carbon—yet how eternal, how transparent is the diamond, how it gleams! Whose breath will fail to quicken as he rushes clattering along the pages of “The Railway Guide”? But our Table of Hours! Why, it transforms each one of us into a figure of steel, a six-wheeled hero of a mighty epic poem. Every morning, with six-wheeled precision, at the same hour and the same moment, we—millions of us—get up as one. At the same hour, in million-headed unison, we start work; and in million-headed unison we end it And, fused into a single million-handed body, at the same second, designated by the Table, we lift our spoons to our mouths. At the same second, we come out for our walk, go to the auditorium, go to the hall for Taylor exercises, fall asleep…

  I shall be entirely frank: even we have not yet found an absolute, precise solution to the problem of happiness. Twice a day, from sixteen to seventeen, and from twenty-one to twenty-two, the single mighty organism breaks up into separate cells; these are the Personal Hours designated by the Table. In these hours you will see modestly lowered shades in the rooms of some; others will walk with measured tread along the avenue, as though climbing the brass stairs of the March; still others, like myself now, are at their desks. But I am confident—and you may call me an idealist and dreamer—I am confident that sooner or later we shall fit these Personal Hours as well into the general formula. Some day these 86,400 seconds will also be entered in the Table of Hours.