We: New Edition Read online

  RECORD 28

  Both Women Entropy and Energy Opaque Part of the Body

  Consider this. If your world resembles the world of our distant ancestors, then imagine that once upon a time you were sailing on the ocean and you bumped into a sixth or a seventh part of the world, some kind of Atlantis, and there you found unheard-of labyrinth-cities, people soaring about in the air without the help of wings or aeros, stones that you could lift just by looking at them—in other words, something that you’d never be able to imagine even if you had the dream sickness. That’s just how I felt yesterday. Because, you see, ever since the 200-Years War none of us had ever been on the other side of the Wall—that I’ve already told you.

  I know, my unknown friends, what my duty is before you. It is to tell you in greater detail about this strange and unexpected world that was revealed to me yesterday. But for the moment I’m in no condition to go back to that. New things keep happening so fast, there’s such a downpour of events, that I’d have to be two people to catch it: I pull out my yuny like an apron, I cup my hands—and bucketfuls pour by me, splashing nothing but drops on these pages....

  The first thing that happened was that I heard loud voices outside my door. I recognized her voice, supple and metallic, and another, almost rigid, like a wooden ruler: the voice of U. Next, the door swung open with a bang and the two of them shot into my room. And I mean shot.

  I-330 laid her hand on the back of my armchair and, looking over her right shoulder, smiled at the other woman with nothing but her teeth. I would not like to have that smile aimed at me.

  “Listen,” I-330 said to me, “this woman seems to have made it her aim in life to protect you from me, as though you were a child. She have your permission on this?”

  Then the other one, her gills quivering: “That’s right. He is a child. Yes! That’s the only reason he can’t see what you’re getting him into with all this ... just to ... that it’s all ... a farce. Yes! And it’s my duty ...”

  In the mirror I get a glimpse of the broken, bouncing line of my eyebrows. I jumped up and (barely managing to stifle that other self in me with the shaggy fists) squeezed out between my teeth words that I shouted point-blank right into her face, into her very gills: “Get out of here! Right now! Out!”

  The gills puffed out, brick red, and then collapsed and turned gray. She opened her mouth to say something, said nothing, clamped it shut, and left.

  I rushed over to I-330: “I’ll never forgive ... I’ll never forgive myself for that! She would dare to ... to you? But surely you don’t think that I think that ... that she ... It’s all because she wants to be registered to me, and I ...”

  “Fortunately, she’s too late for registering. And it wouldn’t bother me if there were thousands more like her. I know you’ll believe me, and only me, not those thousands. Because after what happened yesterday, so far as you’re concerned, you have me exactly where you wanted me. I’m in your hands. At any moment, you can ...”

  “At any moment ... what?” And then I immediately understood “what.” Blood gushed into my ears, my cheeks, and I shouted, “Don’t talk to me about that! Never mention that to me! You do understand, don’t you—that was ... that other me, the one before, but now ...”

  “Who knows who you really are? A person is like a novel: Up to the very last page you don’t know how it’s going to end. Otherwise, there’d be no point in reading....”

  1-330 strokes my head. I can’t see her face, but something in her voice tells me that she’s looking very far away, that her eyes are fixed on a cloud floating by silently, slowly, headed no one knows where....

  Suddenly, pushing me away with her hand, she said in a firm, tender voice: “Listen, I came to tell you that it may be that these are already our final days.... You know all the auditoriums are closed, starting tonight?”

  “Closed?”

  “Yes. And I looked in as I was going past. They’re getting something ready in the buildings where the auditoriums are, some kind of tables, with medics in white coats.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody knows yet. Which is worst of all. I just have this feeling that they’ve thrown the switch, the power’s on ... so if not right away, then tomorrow.... But maybe they’ll be too late.”

  I’d long ago lost track of who was they and who was we. I didn’t know which I wanted: for them to be late or not. One thing only was clear to me, and that is that 1-330 was walking right along the very edge, and at any moment ...

  “But this is crazy,” I say. “You ... and OneState. It’s like putting your hand over the muzzle and thinking you can stop the shot. It’s absolutely crazy!”

  With a smile: “Everyone has to go mad ... go mad as soon as possible. Someone said that yesterday. Remember? There ...”

  Yes, I have that written down. Which means it actually happened. I say nothing but merely look at her face: The dark cross on it is now especially vivid.

  “I-330, darling, before it’s too late ... If you want, I’ll throw it all away, I’ll forget about it ... and we’ll go together, over there, beyond the Wall, to those ... I don’t know who they are. ”

  She shook her head. Through the dark windows of her eyes, there, on the inside, I see the stove burning, sparks, tongues of flames leaping up, piles of dry resinous wood. And I see that it’s already too late. My words can no longer do any ...

  She got up. She’s about to leave. It may be that these are the final days ... or final minutes. I grabbed her by the hand.

  “No! Just a little while longer ... for the sake of ...”

  Slowly she lifted my hand up into the light, my shaggy hand, which I so detested. I tried to pull back, but she held on tight.

  “Your hand ... You don’t know, there are few who do know, that there are women from here, from the city, who have come to love those others over there. You, too, probably have a drop or two of that sunny forest blood. Maybe that’s whyI...”

  There was a pause, and strangely enough, the pause, the blank, the nothing, made my heart race. And I shout:

  “Oh good! You aren’t leaving yet! You won’t leave until you tell me about them, because you love ... them, and I don’t even know who they are, where they come from. Who are they? Are they the half we’ve lost—the H2 to our O, that have to be joined as H2O to make streams, seas, waterfalls, waves, storms?”

  I distinctly remember every movement she made. I remember her taking the glass triangle from my table and, all the while I was talking, pressing the sharp edge of it to her cheek, which raised a white welt that later was suffused with pink and then vanished. What is surprising is that I can’t remember what she said, especially at the beginning. All I recall are various images and colors.

  I do know that at first it had to do with the 200-Years War. There was something red against the green of the grasses, against dark clays, against the blue of the snow—pools of red that never dried up. Then yellow grasses, burnt by the sun, naked, yellow, ragged people, and ragged dogs beside them, next to bloated corpses—of dogs, or maybe of humans.... All this on the other side of the Wall, of course, because the city had already won, inside the city you could already find the kind of food we have now, made of petroleum.

  And stretching almost from heaven to earth were the heavy black folds of some material, waving folds: It was columns of slow smoke above the forests, above the villages. A hollow wailing sound hung over the black endless lines of those who were being driven into the city, to be saved by force and taught happiness.

  “You almost knew all this?”

  “Almost, yes.”

  “But you didn’t know, only very few knew, that a small part of them managed to survive and went on living there, on the other side of the Walls. They were naked and went off into the forest. There they learned from the trees, animals, birds, flowers, sun. They grew coats of fur over their bodies, but beneath the fur they kept their hot red blood. You had it worse. You grew numbers all over your b
ody, numbers crawled about on you like lice. You all have to be stripped naked and driven into the forest. You should learn to tremble with fear, with joy, insane rage, cold—you should learn to pray to the fire. And we Mephi, we want ...”

  “No, wait. Mephi? What is Mephi?”

  “Mephi? It’s an old name. Mephi is one who ... You remember, there on the stone, there was an image of a youth. ... Or, no, I’d better put it in your language so you’ll understand it sooner. Look—there are two forces in the world, entropy and energy. One of them leads to blissful tranquillity, to happy equilibrium. The other leads to the disruption of equilibrium, to the torment of perpetual movement. Our—or rather, your—ancestors, the Christians, worshipped entropy as they worshipped God. But we anti-Christians, we ...”

  At this moment there came a knock at the door that you could hardly hear, like a whisper, and into the room rushed that same Number with the flat face and the forehead pulled down over his eyes that had often brought me messages from 1-330.

  He ran up to us and stopped, panting like a pneumatic pump, unable to get a word out—he must have been running as fast as he could.

  “Well, come on! What’s happened?” 1-330 grabbed him by the arm.

  The pump finally managed to pant out: “They’re headed this way ... the guards ... and he’s with them, that one with the sort of hunch!”

  “S?”

  “Yes! They’re right here, inside. They’ll be here any minute! Hurry!”

  “Relax ... we’ve got time!” She laughed. There were sparks in her eyes, gay little tongues of flame.

  Either this was stupid, irrational courage, or there was something else going on here that I didn’t understand.

  “1-330! For the Benefactor’s sake! You’ve got to understand ... this is ...”

  A sharp triangular smile: “For the Benefactor’s sake ...”

  “Well, for my sake, then ... Please!”

  “Oh, by the way, I still have to talk with you about a certain matter.... But, never mind—it can wait till tomorrow....

  She nodded to me gaily (that’s right: gaily), and the other one came out from underneath his brow just long enough to give me another nod, and I was left alone.

  Quick, sit at the table. Unrolled my notes, took out my pen—I meant for them to find me at work for the benefit of OneState. And all of a sudden it felt as if every hair on my head had come alive and stood up: “And what if they take and read a page, even one page, especially one of these last ones?”

  I sat motionless at the table and saw the walls trembling, the pen in my hand trembling, the letters swaying and blending together....

  Stash them? But where? Everything’s made of glass. Burn them? But they could see from the hall and from the rooms next door. Besides, I can’t, I no longer have the strength to destroy this painful piece of myself, which might turn out to be the piece I value most.

  Far down the corridor I could already hear voices and footsteps. All I had time for was to grab a bunch of pages and stick them under me and there I was, welded to a chair every atom of which was shaking under me, with the floor under my feet like a deck pitching and rolling....

  Hunching down into a ball and somehow looking out from the overhang of my brow, I watched stealthily and saw them going from room to room, starting at the right end of the corridor and getting closer all the time. Some, like me, sat frozen in their positions; others were jumping up to greet them and throw their doors open wide—lucky them! If only I...

  “The Benefactor is that most perfect disinfectant, necessary for humanity, as a consequence of which no peristalsis in the organism of OneState ...”—this absolute nonsense I was squeezing out with a pen leaping all over the paper as I bent lower and lower over the table while some insane blacksmith was pounding an anvil in my head and behind me I heard the door handle turn and felt a gust of wind and the chair beneath me began to tap-dance....

  Only then did I manage to tear myself away from the page and turn to face those who had come in (it isn’t easy playing a farce—oh, who was it talking to me today about a farce?). S was in the lead—his gloomy, silent, quick eyes started drilling wells in me, in my chair, in the pages shaking under my hand. Then, for a moment, I saw some familiar, everyday faces on the threshold, and one in particular stood out: It had puffed out, brownish pink gills....

  I recalled everything that had been going on in this room half an hour ago, and it was clear to me that she now ... My whole being was beating and pulsing in that part of my body (opaque, fortunately) with which I was hiding the manuscript.

  U came up to S from behind, cautiously touched his sleeve, and said very quietly: “This is D-503, the Builder of the INTEGRAL. You’ve heard of him, no doubt. He’s always at his desk this way. Absolutely no mercy on himself!”

  And as for me? I was thinking: What a marvelous, astonishing woman!

  S slunk up to me and peered over my shoulder at the desk. I tried hiding my paper with my elbow, but he shouted sternly: “You will show me that at once!”

  Mortified, I handed him the paper. He read it, and I saw a smile slip out of his eyes, slide down his face, and, with a flick of its tail, take a seat on the right side of his mouth.

  “Rather ambiguous, but still ... Okay, go on; we won’t bother you further.” He paddled off to the door, and with his every step I got back more of my feet, hands, fingers—my soul spread evenly once more through my body, and I breathed again....

  The last thing was that U hung around long enough, to come whisper in my ear: “Lucky for you that I ...”

  What she meant to say I don’t know. Later that evening I learned they’d taken away three Numbers. Not that anyone talks about this, or anything that’s going on (the edifying influence of the Guardians hiding everywhere among us). The talk is mostly about how fast the barometer is falling and the weather changing.

  RECORD 29

  Threads on the Face Shoots Unnatural Compression

  Strange—the barometer is falling, but there’s no wind yet, just silence. Up there above, where we can’t hear it, it’s already begun, the storm. The rainclouds are racing along at full speed. There aren’t many of them yet—scattered serrated fragments. It’s as though some city had fallen up there and now the pieces of the walls and towers are flying down, the heaps of them grow with horrible rapidity before your eyes, and they come closer and closer, but still have days to fly through blue emptiness before they crash down here to the bottom, with us.

  Down below it’s quiet. There are thin, mysterious, almost invisible threads in the air. Every fall they blow in here from over there, beyond the Wall. They float slowly. Suddenly you feel you’ve got something strange, that you can’t see, on your face, and you try to brush it off, but no, you can’t, there’s no way to get rid of it.

  These threads are unusually numerous if you go near the Green Wall, where I was walking this morning. 1-330 had asked me to meet her at the Ancient House, in our “apartment” there. [I was not far from the rust-red, opaque] mass of the Ancient House, when I heard behind me someone’s hurried little steps and rapid breathing. I turned round and saw O trying to catch up with me.

  There was something special about her person, how rounded and softly full it seemed. Her arms and the cups of her breasts and her whole body, which I knew so well, rounded out her yuny and stretched it, as though the thin material was going to give at any minute and everything would be ... outside, in the sun, in the light. It occurred to me that over there in the green thickets, in the springtime, shoots break their way up through the earth just as stubbornly, in order to put out branches and leaves as quickly as possible, to bloom as soon as they can.

  She was silent for a few seconds while the blue of her eyes shone in my face.

  “I saw you that time, on the Day of Unanimity.”

  “I saw you too.” And I had a sudden recollection of her standing down below in the narrow passageway, her back pressed to the wall and her hands shielding her belly. I couldn’t he
lp glancing at her belly, round beneath her yuny.

  She must have noticed this; she became all round and pink, and gave me a pink smile: “I’m so happy, so happy.... I’m full, you see. Full up to the brim. I walk about and I hear nothing going on around me—I’m forever listening on the inside, inside myself. ...”

  I said nothing. There was something on my face, it bothered me, I couldn’t manage to brush it away. Then suddenly, her blue eyes still shining, she surprised me by grabbing my hand—and I felt the touch of her lips on my hand.... This was the first time in my life this ever happened. This was some kind of ancient caress that I’d never even heard of. ... I felt such hurt and shame that I jerked my hand back (probably a little too roughly).

  “Listen, you’ve lost your mind! And not only this ... in general, you ... what are you so happy about? Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten about what’s going to happen to you? Not right now, maybe, but in a month or two for sure. ...”

  She was like a candle that just went out. All the circles that made her up suddenly got lopsided and warped. And as for me, there was an unpleasant, even painful compression in my heart, the kind associated with the sensation of pity (that’s all the heart is—an ideal pump; a pump sucking up a liquid—to call that compression, contraction, is a technical absurdity; from which it follows how absurd, unnatural, diseased are all these “loves” and “pities” and anything else that’s supposed to cause this compression).

  Silence. The cloudy green glass of the Wall was on our left. The dark red mass ahead. And these two colors, blending together, combined in me to produce a resultant: what I considered a brilliant idea.

  “Wait! I know how to save you. I can save you—you won’t have to take one look at your baby and then die. You’ll be able to feed it, you understand, you’ll watch it grow in your arms, grow round and ripe like a fruit.”

  A shudder went through her whole body and she clung to me.

  “You remember that woman, you know, a long time ago, on the walk? Okay, listen. She’s here now, in the Ancient House. Let’s go to her, and I promise—I’ll settle everything right away.”