We: New Edition Read online

  I head home at dusk along the green street, already big-eyed with streetlamps. I could hear myself ticking all over, like a clock. And any minute now my hour hand is going to pass a certain figure on the dial and I’ll do something that I’ll never be able to take back. She needs someone or other to think that she’s with me. But I need her, and what do I care about her “needs”? I don’t want to be someone else’s blinds. I don’t want it, and that’s that.

  Behind me I hear the familiar squelching footsteps, like someone walking through puddles. I don’t even look around any longer—I know it’s S. He’ll follow me right up to the entrance, and then probably he’ll stand there below on the sidewalk and drill upward with his gimlet eyes to my room, until the blinds go down to cover up someone’s crime.

  He, the Guardian Angel, had brought things to a point. I made up my mind: I’d had enough. I decided.

  When I went up to my room and turned on the light, I couldn’t believe my eyes: O was standing beside my table. Or rather, she was hanging there, the way an empty dress hangs when it’s been taken off. Inside that dress there was no spring left in her, no spring in her arms, her legs, her sagging voice.

  “I ... I’m here about my letter. You got it? Yes? I have to know the answer, I have to know it today, now.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. I took pleasure, as though it were all her fault, in staring into her blue eyes, brimming with tears. I took my time answering. I enjoyed inserting each separate word into her as I said: “Answer? What do you expect? You’re right. Absolutely. In everything.”

  “That means ...” She tries to cover a slight tremble with a smile, but I see it. “Well, very good! I’ll ... I’ll go now.”

  And she went on hanging over the table, her eyes, feet, and hands sagging. Her crumpled pink ticket is still lying on the table. I hurry to unfold this manuscript of mine—We—and hide the ticket with its pages (more from myself, maybe, than from O).

  “Look—I’m writing it all down. Already 170 pages.... It’s turning out to be sort of surprising....”

  Her voice ... or the shadow of it: “You remember how ... on page 7 ... I let a tear fall ... and you ...”

  The little blue saucers had silent, hurried tears running over the brim and down along her cheeks, and hurried words brimmed: “I can’t, I’m leaving right now.... I’ll never come again, that’s best. Only I’d like ... I must have a child from you. Give me a child and I’ll leave, I’ll leave!”

  I saw that under her yuny she was trembling all over, and I felt now I, too ... I clasped my hands behind my back and smiled. “What? You suddenly feel like going on the Benefactor’s Machine?”

  Then her words flooded onto me as over a dike: “So what! At least I’ll get to feel it—I’ll feel it inside me. And maybe for only a few days ... see it. Just once to see its little fold, here, like that one, there on the table. Just one day!”

  Three points: her, me, and there on the table the little fist with the puffy fold....

  Once when I was a child, I remember, they took us to the Accumulator Tower. On the very top flight I leaned over the glass parapet. Down below the people were dots, and a sweet excitement ticked in my heart: “What if ...” Then I gripped the railing all the tighter; now—I leapt over.

  “It’s what you want? And you’re perfectly aware that ...” Her eyes were closed as if she were looking right into the sun. A moist, radiant smile. “Yes, yes! It’s what I want!”

  I reached under the manuscript and grabbed her ticket and ran down the stairs to the duty desk. 0 had grabbed at my hand and shouted something, but what it was I understood only when I got back.

  She was sitting on the edge of the bed with her hands tightly clasped between her knees.

  “That ... that was her ticket?”

  “What difference does it make? Yes ... hers.”

  There was a cracking noise. Probably 0 had just shifted on the bed. She was sitting with her hands in her lap, not saying anything.

  “Well? We’re wasting time ...” I said, and I grabbed her arm hard and red spots (bruises tomorrow) showed on her wrist, at the place she’s got that puffy babyish fold.

  That was the last of it. Then the lights were turned off, thoughts sputtered out, darkness, sparks—and me, over the side of the parapet and down....

  RECORD 20

  Discharge Idea Material Zero Cliff

  Discharge is the most suitable definition. That’s what that was, I now see: like an electrical discharge. These last few days my pulse has been getting drier and drier, quicker and quicker, more and more tense—the poles closer and closer, making this dry crackling sound. One millimeter more, and there’ll be an explosion. After which: silence.

  Inside me right now it’s very quiet and empty, the same as in the building when everyone’s left and you’re lying all alone, sick, and you can hear this clear, precise, metallic beating of your thoughts.

  Maybe this “discharge” cured me, finally, of that torment called my “soul,” and I’m just like all the rest of us again. Now at least I don’t feel any pain when I see O in my thoughts standing on the steps of the Cube, when I see her under the Gas Bell. And if she gives them my name there in Operations—so be it. My last act will be to put a pious and grateful kiss on the Benefactor’s punishing hand. In my relationship with OneState I have that right, to undergo punishment, and this right I will not give up. None of us Numbers ought, none dares, to refuse that one right that we have, which means it is the most valuable.

  ... There’s a quiet, clear metallic sound to my thoughts’ clicking; an unknown aero is carrying me away into the blue heights of my favorite abstractions. And here in this purest, most rarefied air, I see my reflection “on operative right” pop with a slight bang like a tire blowing out. And I see clearly that it was nothing more than a throwback to the ancients’ idiotic superstition, their idea about one’s “right.”

  There are ideas made of clay, and there are ideas sculpted for the ages out of gold or out of our precious glass. And to determine what material an idea is made of, all you have to do is let a drop of powerful acid fall on it. Even the ancients knew one such acid: reductio ad finem. That’s what they seem to have called it. But they were afraid of this poison. They preferred to see at least some kind of heaven—however clay, however toylike—to this blue nothing. But we are grown-ups, thanks be to the Benefactor, and don’t need toys.

  Look here—suppose you let a drop fall on the idea of “rights. ” Even among the ancients the more grown-up knew that the source of right is power, that right is a function of power. So, take some scales and put on one side a gram, on the other a ton; on one side “I” and on the other “We,” OneState. It’s clear, isn’t it?—to assert that “I” has certain “rights” with respect to the State is exactly the same as asserting that a gram weighs the same as a ton. That explains the way things are divided up: To the ton go the rights, to the gram the duties. And the natural path from nullity to greatness is this: Forget that you’re a gram and feel yourself a millionth part of a ton.

  You, plump, rosy-cheeked Venusians, and you Uranites, sooty as blacksmiths—in my blue silence I can hear your grumbling. But understand this: All greatness is simple. Understand this: Only the four rules of arithmetic are unalterable and everlasting. And only that moral system built on the four rules will prevail as great, unalterable, and everlasting. That is the ultimate wisdom. That is the summit of the pyramid up which people, red and sweating, kicking and panting, have scrambled for centuries. And looking down from this summit to the bottom, we see what remains in us of our savage ancestors seething like wretched worms. Looking down from this summit, there’s no difference between a woman who gave birth illegally—O—and a murderer, and that madman who dared aim his poem at OneState. And the verdict is the same for them all: premature death. This is the very same divine justice dreamt of by the people of the stone-house age, illuminated by the rosy naive rays of the dawn of history: Their “God” punished abuse of Holy Chu
rch exactly the same as murder.

  You Uranites, stern and black as early Spaniards, you who were wise enough to do some burning at the stake, you are silent; I think you’re with me. But you rosy Venusians ... among you I hear something about torture, executions, a return to the age of barbarism. I’m sorry for you, old dears. You aren’t up to philosophical-mathematical thinking.

  Human history ascends in spirals, like an aero. The circles vary, some are gold, some are bloody, but all are divided into the same 360 degrees. It starts at zero and goes forward: 10, 20, 200, 360 degrees—then back to zero. Yes, we’ve come back to zero—yes. But for my mind, thinking in mathematics as it does, one thing is clear: This zero is completely different, new. Leaving zero, we headed to the right. We returned to zero from the left. So instead of plus zero, we have minus zero. Do you understand?

  I see this zero as some kind of silent, huge, narrow, knife-sharp cliff. In ferocious, shaggy darkness, holding our breath, we pushed off from the black night side of the Zero Cliff. For centuries, like some new Columbus, we sailed and sailed and rounded the whole earth, and at last, Hurrah! A salute! All hands on deck and lookouts aloft! In front of us is the new, hitherto unknown side of the Zero Cliff, lit by the polar effulgence of OneState, a blue massif, the sparks of a rainbow, the sun, hundreds of suns, billions of rainbows....

  So what if nothing but the breadth of a knife blade separates us from the other dark side of the Zero Cliff? A knife is the most permanent, the most immortal, the most ingenious of all of man’s creations. The knife was a guillotine, the knife is a universal means of resolving all knots, and the path of paradox lies along the blade of a knife—the only path worthy of the mind without fear....

  RECORD 21

  An Author’s Duty Swollen Ice The Most Difficult Love

  Yesterday was her day, and again she didn’t come, and again she sent me an incoherent note, explaining nothing. But I am staying calm, absolutely calm. If I’m still doing just as the note told me to do, if I’m still taking her ticket down to the duty desk and then lowering the blinds and sitting alone in my room—it isn’t because I don’t have the strength to go against her wishes. That’s ridiculous! Of course not. It’s just that with the blinds down I’m protected against any sticking-plaster smiles and can write these pages in peace—that’s one. And two: I’m afraid that if I lose her, 1-330, I might lose the only key to explain all the unknowns (that story with the wardrobe, my temporary death, and so on). And explaining them—I now feel myself duty-bound to do it, if only because I am the author of these records, to say nothing of the fact that the unknown is in general the enemy of man, and Homo sapiens is not fully man until his grammar is absolutely rid of question marks, leaving nothing but exclamation points, commas, and periods.

  And so, in obedience to what strikes me as my authorial duty, I took an aero today at 16:00 and set off once again for the Ancient House. There was a strong headwind. The aero had a hard time butting its way through the dense thicket of air, the transparent branches whistling and whipping. The city below looked like light-blue blocks of ice. Suddenly there was a cloud, a quick slash of shadow, and the ice turned leaden and began to swell, the way it does in spring when you’re standing on the bank waiting for it to burst at any moment and rush whirling away, but minutes pass one after the other and the ice just lies there and you yourself start to swell, your heart starts beating wildly and faster (but ... why am I writing about this, and where do these strange feelings come from? Because, really, there isn’t any icebreaker that could break through this life of ours, this extremely transparent and permanent crystal).

  There was no one at the entrance to the Ancient House. I went round it and saw the old woman, the gatekeeper, standing beside the Green Wall. She was shielding her eyes with her hand and looking up. There above the Wall were the sharp black triangles of some sort of birds that were cawing and throwing themselves into the attack, striking their breasts against the strong fence of electric waves, being thrown back, and again flying over the Wall.

  I see quick slanting shadows on her face, overgrown with wrinkles, as she steals a quick glance at me. “There’s nobody here—nobody, nobody! That’s right! And no use you going in. Right....”

  What does she mean, no use? And what’s got into her, anyway—to consider me nothing more than someone’s shadow? And maybe you’re all nothing but my shadows. Wasn’t I the one that used you to populate these pages, which only a little while ago were white quadrangular deserts? Without me, would you ever have been seen by any of those that I am going to lead along behind me down the narrow paths of these lines?

  I didn’t say any of this to her, of course. I know from personal experience what a torment it can be if you plant a doubt in someone’s mind that he is reality—and three-dimensional reality, not some other kind. All I did was remark dryly that her only concern was to open the door, and she let me into the courtyard.

  It was empty. Quiet. The wind was far away, over there beyond the walls, the way it was that day when the two of us, walking like one, shoulder to shoulder, emerged from the corridors below—if in fact that ever really happened. I was walking under some kind of stone arches where the sound of my footsteps bounced off the damp vaults and fell behind me, like someone that kept walking right on my heels. The yellow walls with their red brick lesions watched me through the dark square spectacles of the windows, watched me opening the squealing doors of the barns, peering into corners, dead ends, nooks and crannies. There was a gate in the fence, and beyond it a wasteland, a relic of the Great 200-Years War, where bare stone ribs came up out of the ground, the yellow grimacing jaws of walls, an ancient stove beneath a vertical stovepipe, a ship turned to everlasting stone among stone and brick waves of yellow and red.

  It seemed to me I’d already seen these very same yellow teeth once before, but dimly, as though on the bottom, through fathoms of water. And I began to search. I kept falling into holes, I stumbled on rocks, rusty paws kept grabbing the sleeves of my yuny, salty drops of sweat slid across my forehead into my eyes.

  Not there! That lower exit from the corridors I could not locate anywhere—it didn’t exist. But maybe it was better that way. It made it even more likely that all this was one of my stupid “dreams.”

  I was tired, covered with dust and some kind of spiderweb, and was already opening the gate to return to the main courtyard, when suddenly, from behind me, there was a rustling noise, the sound of squelching footsteps, and I found myself facing the pink ear-wings and double-twist smile of S.

  With a squint he drilled into me with his eyes and said: “Out for a stroll, are you?”

  I said nothing. My hands were bothering me.

  “Well, how are you? Feeling any better now?”

  “Yes, thank you. I seem to be getting back to normal.”

  He released me by raising his eyes. His head tilted back, and for the first time I noticed his Adam’s apple.

  Not very far above, about 50 meters, aeros were humming. From the slow, low-level flight, and the black elephant trunks of spy-tubes that they’d let down, I recognized them as belonging to the Guardians. Except there weren’t the usual two or three of them, but about ten or twelve (sorry, but I have to make do with these approximations).

  I got up the courage to ask: “How come there’re so many today?”

  “How come? Hm ... a real doctor starts treating a man while he’s still well, the one who’s not going to be sick until tomorrow, the day after, a week later. Prophylactic, it’s called. ”

  He nodded and slouched off across the stone flags of the courtyard. Then he turned and said to me, over his shoulder: “Be careful!”

  I was alone. It was quiet. Empty. High up above the Green Wall the birds were dashing about. The wind was blowing. What did he mean by that?

  The aero took me quickly along the current of air. Cloud shadows, light and heavy. Below, light blue cupolas, cubes of frozen glass, turning the color of lead, swelling ...

  Even
ing.

  I opened my manuscript in order to write down in these pages a few thoughts that seem to me useful (for you, readers) about the great Day of Unanimity, which is already close. And what I saw was that I can’t write just now. I keep on listening all the time to how the wind is beating against the glass walls with its dark wings, I’m looking around all the time, waiting. For what? I don’t know. And when the familiar brownish-pink gills turned up in my room, I was very glad, I’ll be honest about it. She sat down, modestly arranged the fold of her yuny that had fallen between her knees, quickly plastered her smiles all over me, one for each hurt place, and I felt wonderful, held tight.

  “I came into the classroom today, you see [she works at the Childrearing Plant], and there was a caricature on the wall. Oh, yes, I assure you! They drew me as some kind of fish. Maybe I really do ...”

  “Oh, no, of course not,” I hastened to say (up close, as a matter of fact, she has nothing remotely like gills, and my crack about gills—that was completely uncalled for).

  “Oh, well, it’s not important in the long run. But it was just the act itself, you know. Of course I called the Guardians. I love the children very much, and I think that cruelty is the highest, the most difficult kind of love, if you see what I mean.”

  Did I ever! It could not have chimed in better with the thoughts just running through my head. I couldn’t resist and read her a section from my Record 20, beginning with the words: “There’s a quiet, clear metallic sound to my thoughts’ clicking....”

  Even without looking I could see the brownish-pink cheeks trembling. Then they moved closer and closer to me, and I felt in my hands her dry, hard, even somewhat bristly fingers.