We: New Edition Page 13

  “Give that to me! Give it to me! I’ll have it phonocopied and make the children learn it by heart. We’re the ones who need that much more than your Venusians—right now, tomorrow, and the day after.”

  She gave a look round and said, very quietly, “Did you hear? They say that on the Day of Unanimity ...”

  I jumped up. “What? What are they saying? What’s going to happen on the Day of Unanimity?”

  The cozy walls had vanished. I felt myself instantly thrown outside, out there, where the huge wind was tossing about above the rooftops and the slanting clouds of twilight were falling lower and lower....

  U threw her arms firmly and resolutely round my shoulders (though I noticed that her fingerbones were like tuning forks, vibrating to my alarm).

  “Sit down, dear, and don’t get excited. What won’t people say? Anyway, I’ll be right beside you that day—only if you need me, of course—I’ll get someone else to mind my schoolchildren, and I’ll be with you, because you’re also a child, dear, and you need ...”

  “No, no.” I waved my arms. “Not for anything. Then you’d really think I’m some kind of baby, that I can’t manage alone.... Not for anything!” (I admit, I had other plans for that day.)

  She smiled. The unwritten message of this smile appeared to be: “Oh, what a stubborn boy!” Then she sat down, her eyes lowered, her embarrassed hands once again smoothing out the fold of yuny that had fallen between her knees. Let’s change the subject.

  “I think I’ve got to make up my mind ... for your sake. ... No, I beg of you, don’t hurry me, I’ve got to think it over....

  I was in no hurry. Although I understood that I ought to be happy and that there was no greater honor than to crown someone’s waning years with the gift of oneself....

  That whole night I heard wings of some kind, and I walked about trying to protect my head with my arms from those wings. Then there was a chair, but not like one of our chairs now—this one was old-fashioned, made of wood. And I’m moving my legs like a horse (right foreleg and left hind leg, left foreleg and right hind leg). Then the chair runs right up to my bed and jumps in. And I make love to the wooden chair. It was uncomfortable. It hurt.

  Amazing. Is it really impossible to think up some means of curing this dream sickness, or at least to make it rational, maybe even useful?

  RECORD 22

  Frozen Waves Everything Tends to Perfection I Am a Microbe

  Imagine this: You’re standing on a bank, and the waves rise up right on time, then, when they’ve crested, suddenly they stop, they freeze solid. That’s just how terrifying and unnatural this was, too, when our walk, prescribed by the Tables, suddenly went haywire, this way and that, and stopped. According to our chronicles, the last time anything like this happened was 119 years ago when a meteorite came crashing out of the sky and landed, screaming and smoking, right in the midst of our walk.

  We were walking the same as always, that is to say, just like the warriors you see on Assyrian monuments: a thousand heads with two fused, integrated legs, with two integrated arms, swinging wide. Down at the end of the avenue, where the Accumulator Tower was making its grim hum, a rectangle was coming toward us: The front, back, and two sides consisted of guards, and in the middle were three people with the gold numbers already gone from their yunies, and the whole thing was clear to the point of pain.

  The huge clockface at the top of the tower—that was a face, leaning out of the clouds and spitting out the seconds and waiting. It couldn’t care less. And then, right on the dot at 13:06, something crazy happened in the rectangle. It was all very close to me, I could see every smallest detail, and I very clearly remember a long thin neck and a tangle of twisted little light blue veins at the temples, like rivers on the map of some unknown little world, and this unknown world, it seemed, was a young man. He probably noticed someone in our ranks, got up on his tiptoes, craned his neck out, and stopped. One of the guards snapped him with the bluish spark of an electric knout. He gave out a thin squeal, like a puppy. This brought another neat snap, about one every two seconds—squeal, snap, squeal....

  We walked on as before in our measured, Assyrian walk, and I looked at the elegant zigzag of the sparks and thought: “Everything in human society is endlessly perfecting itself ... and should perfect itself. What an ugly weapon the ancient knout was—and what beauty there is in ...”

  But at this point, like a nut flying off a machine at top speed, a lithe, slender female figure tore off out of our ranks screaming, “That’s enough! Don’t you dare ... !” and pitched right into the midst of the rectangle. This was like the meteor 119 years ago. The whole walk froze, and our ranks were like the gray crests of waves instantly immobilized by a flash frost.

  For one second I stared at her like all the others as something that had dropped out of nowhere: She was no longer a Number, she was simply a person; she existed as nothing more than the metaphysical substance of the insult committed against OneState. But then some one of her movements—turning, she twisted her hips to the left—and all at once I knew: I know her, I know that body resilient as a whip—my eyes, my lips, my hands know it—in one moment I was absolutely sure of it.

  Two of the guards moved to cut her off. A still-bright mirror-like patch of pavement showed me that now, any moment, their trajectories would cross, they would grab her. My heart swallowed hard and stopped, and, never stopping to think whether one could or not, whether it was stupid or not, I dashed for that point....

  I could feel a thousand eyes popping with horror on me, but that only added more desperate giddy strength to the hairy-handed savage that had leapt out of me, and he ran all the faster. Two steps more, and she turned around....

  What I saw was a trembling face with lots of freckles and reddish eyebrows. It wasn’t her. It wasn’t 1-330.

  Wild, bursting joy. I feel like shouting something like, “Go on! Grab her!” but all I can hear coming out of me is a whisper. Then I feel a heavy hand take me by the shoulder, they’re holding me, they’re taking me somewhere, I’m trying to explain to them ...

  “Wait a minute, listen, you’ve got to understand, I thought she was ...”

  But how was I going to explain my whole being, this whole disease that I’ve been jotting down in these pages? So I shut up and went along peacefully. A leaf torn off a tree by a sudden gust of wind falls peacefully downward, but on the way it twists and catches at every twig, offshoot, branch that it knows. That is just how I caught at each silent, spherical head, at the transparent ice of the walls, at the light blue needle of the Accumulator Tower as it thrust up into the clouds.

  At that moment, when a blank curtain was on the point of separating me forever from that whole splendid world, I see a little way off over the mirrored pavement a large familiar head and a pair of waving pink winglike arms. And I hear the familiar flat voice:

  “I consider it my duty to state that Number D-503 is ill and in no condition to control his emotions. And I am convinced that he was carried away by a perfectly natural outrage....”

  “Yes, yes!” I jumped in. “I even shouted: Grab her!”

  “You shouted nothing.” This from just behind me.

  “Yes, but I meant to ... I swear by the Benefactor, I meant to.”

  I was instantly pierced by the cold gray eye-drills. I don’t know whether he could see into me and tell that this was (almost) the truth, or whether he had some sort of secret aim to spare me once again for a while, but all he did was write out some note and hand it to one of the men holding me—and I was free once more, or rather, I was once more confined within the orderly, endless Assyrian ranks.

  The rectangle containing the freckled face and the temple with the geographical map of blue veins disappeared round the corner, forever. We march on, one million-headed body, and each one of us harbors that humble happiness that also, probably, sustains the life of molecules, atoms, and phagocytes. In the ancient world, this was understood by the Christians, our only (if very imperfect)
predecessors: Humility is a virtue, pride a vice; We comes from God, I from the Devil.

  So here am I, in step with everyone else, and yet separate from all of them. I’m still trembling all over from the recent excitement—like a bridge that one of the ancient iron trains has just rumbled over. I feel myself. But it’s only the eye with a lash in it, the swollen finger, the infected tooth that feels itself, is conscious of its own individual being. The healthy eye or finger or tooth doesn’t seem to exist. So it’s clear, isn’t it? Self-consciousness is just a disease.

  Maybe I’m no longer a phagocyte calmly going about the business of devouring microbes (with blue temples and freckles). Maybe I’m a microbe, and maybe there are thousands more of them among us, pretending like me to be phagocytes....

  This thing that happened today was really not so important, but just suppose it were only the beginning, only the first meteor of a whole shower of thundering hot rocks poured down by infinity onto our glass paradise?

  RECORD 23

  Flowers Dissolution of a Crystal If Only

  They say there are flowers that bloom only once every hundred years. Why shouldn’t there be some that bloom only once every thousand, every ten thousand years? Maybe we just haven’t heard about them up to now because this very day is that once-in-a-thousand-years.

  So here I am, drunk with joy, going down the stairs to the duty desk, and before my very eyes, quickly, silently, thousand-year buds are popping open all around me, everywhere, and armchairs are blossoming, and shoes, golden badges, lightbulbs, someone’s dark long-lashed eyes, the faceted columns of the banisters, a handkerchief lost on the stairs, the table of the one on duty, and above the table the gentle cheeks of U, brown with spots. It’s all unusual, new, tender, pink, moist.

  I hand U the pink ticket, and above her head, through the glass wall, the moon hangs blue and fragrant from some invisible branch. I point to it triumphantly and say: “The moon ... you understand?”

  U glances at me, then at the number on the ticket, and I see that familiar movement of hers, so charmingly modest, when she adjusts the folds of her yuny between the angles of her knees.

  “You don’t look normal, dear. You look sick. Because sick and not normal are the same thing. You’re destroying yourself, and no one is going to tell you that—no one.”

  That “no one” was of course equal to the number on the ticket, 1-330. Dear, wonderful U! You’re right, of course. I’m not sensible, I’m sick, I have a soul, I’m a microbe. But isn’t blooming a sickness? Doesn’t it hurt when the bud bursts open? And don’t you agree that the spermatozoan is the most terrifying of all microbes?

  I’m upstairs in my room. 1-330 is sitting in the sprawling cup of the armchair. I’m on the floor, my arms around her legs, my head in her lap, and we’re both quiet. Silence. My pulse. I’m a crystal, dissolving in her, in 1-330. I feel with absolute clarity the way the polished facets that define me in space are melting, melting. I’m vanishing, dissolving in her lap, in her. I’m getting smaller and smaller, and at the same time wider, larger, off every scale.... Because she ... she’s no longer herself, she’s the whole universe. And for one second I and this chair shot through with joy beside the bed—we are one; and the old woman with the marvelous smile at the gates of the Ancient House, and the wild wastes beyond the Green Wall, and the silver-on-black ruins that drowse like the old woman, and that door that just slammed somewhere, probably far away: All that is in me, with me, listening to the beating of my pulse and flying across the blessed second.

  I try to tell her—in stupid, confused, drowned words—that I am a crystal, and that that is why the door is in me, and why I can feel how happy the chair is. But such balled-up nonsense comes out that I stop, I’m ashamed, I ... and suddenly I say, “1-330, darling, forgive me ... I don’t understand, I’m talking such nonsense....”

  “What makes you think nonsense is bad? If they’d nurtured and cared for human nonsense over the ages the way they did intelligence, it might have turned into something of special value.”

  “Yes....” (I think she’s right. How, right now, could she not be right?)

  “And for your nonsense alone, for what you did yesterday on the walk, I love you still more ... still more.”

  “But then why did you torture me, why didn’t you come, why did you send your tickets, why did you make me ... ?”

  “But maybe I had to test you? Maybe I had to find out whether you’d do everything I wanted? That you were completely mine?”

  “Yes, completely!”

  She took my face, all of me, between her palms and lifted up my head: “Well, but what about your ‘duties of every honest Number’? What of that?”

  Sweet, sharp, white teeth. Then, a smile. In the opened cup of the chair she was like a bee—she had both honey and a sting.

  Yes, duties.... In my mind I quickly went through the most recent entries in these pages. The fact is that there wasn’t anywhere the least thought of any duty that I should ...

  I keep quiet. There’s an ecstatic (and probably stupid) smile on my face. I look into her eyes, now one, now the other, seeing myself in each. I am tiny, minuscule, jailed in these little rainbow prisons. And then more bees, lips, the sweet pain of blooming....

  Inside each of us Numbers there is an invisible metronome ticking away quietly, and we never have to glance at a clock to know the exact time to within five minutes. But now my metronome had stopped and I did not know how much time had passed. Frightened, I grabbed my badge with its clock out from under the pillow....

  Praise be to the Benefactor! I still had twenty minutes. But minutes ... such stumpy little short things it’s not even funny ... were running, and I had so much to tell her—everything, all of myself: about O’s letter, about the horrible evening when I gave her a child; about my own childhood, for some reason; about the mathematics teacher Pliapa; about √—1; about my first time at the Day of Unanimity and how hard I cried because on that day of all days I got a spot of ink on my yuny.

  1-330 raised her head and propped herself on her elbow. At the corners of her lips were two long sharp lines, and the angle of her eyebrows made a cross.

  “Maybe, that day ...” She stopped, and her brows darkened even more. She took my hand and pressed it hard. “Tell me, you won’t forget me? You’ll always remember me?”

  “Why do you say that? What are you talking about? Darling?”

  1-330 said nothing, and her eyes were already looking past me, through me, far away. Suddenly I heard the wind whipping its huge wings against the glass (this had been happening all along, of course, but I only heard it now), and for some reason I recalled the shrill birds flying over the top of the Green Wall.

  1-330 gave her head a shake as though to get rid of something. Once more, for one second, the whole length of her body touched me, the way an aero gives the earth one springy little touch before it lands.

  “Right, then. Hand me my stockings. Hurry!”

  The stockings had been thrown on my table, on page 193 of these notes, which were lying open there. In my hurry I knocked against the manuscript and the pages scattered and I couldn’t put them back in order, but the main thing is that it wouldn’t matter even if I did put them back in order, because there’s no real order, anyway, there’ll always be dangerous rapids and pits and unknowns.

  “I can’t go on like this,” I said. “Here you are, here, next to me, and you still seem to be on the other side of some ancient wall that I can’t see through. I hear rustling sounds through the wall, voices, but I can’t make out the words, I don’t know what’s back there. I can’t go on like this. You’re forever stopping just short of telling me something. You’ve never told me where I was that time in the Ancient House, and where those corridors went, and how come there was a doctor ... or, maybe that never happened?”

  1-330 put her hands on my shoulder and looked slowly and deeply into my eyes.

  “You want to know everything?”

  “Yes I do.
I have to.”

  “And you won’t be afraid to follow me anywhere, to the very end, no matter where I lead you?”

  “Anywhere!”

  “All right. I promise you—when this holiday is over, if only ... Oh, yes: How’s your INTEGRAL? I keep forgetting to ask you. Is it soon?”

  “No. What do you mean if only? You’re doing it again. If only what?”

  She was already at the door when she said, “You’ll see....”

  I’m alone. All that’s left of her is a slight hint of something that reminds me of the sweet, dry, yellow pollen of certain flowers on the other side of the Wall. That and the questions that stick in me like fishhooks, like those things the ancients used to catch fish (Museum of Prehistory).

  ... Why’d she suddenly ask me about the INTEGRAL?

  RECORD 24

  Limit of Function Easter Cross It All Out

  I’m like a machine being run over its RPM limit: The bearings are overheating—a minute longer, and the metal is going to melt and start dripping and that’ll be the end of everything. I need a quick splash of cold water, logic. I pour it on in buckets, but the logic hisses on the hot bearings and dissipates in the air as a fleeting white mist.

  Well, of course, it’s clear that you can’t establish a function without taking into account what its limit is. And it’s also clear that what I felt yesterday, that stupid “dissolving in the universe,” if you take it to its limit, is death. Because that’s exactly what death is—the fullest possible dissolving of myself into the universe. Hence, if we let L stand for love and D for death, then L = f (D), i.e., love and death....

  Yes, that’s it, that’s it. That’s why I’m afraid of I-330, why I fight against her, why I don’t want ... But why do those two exist side by side in me: I don’t want and I want? That’s just what’s so horrible: What I want again is that blissful death of yesterday. What’s so horrible is that even now, when the logical function has been integrated, when it’s obvious that it contains, as a hidden component, death itself, I still want her, my lips, my arms, my chest, every millimeter of me wants her....