We: New Edition Read online

  The pink crescent trembled. I understand now that I was wrong, but at the time I thought she was about to laugh. So I shouted even louder: “Yes! Lily-of-the-valley! And there’s nothing funny. Nothing funny.”

  Smooth round globes of heads were floating past us—and turning to look. O gently took me by the arm: “What’s got into you today? Are you sick?”

  Dream—yellow—Buddha ... It suddenly became clear to me that I ought to go to the Medical Bureau.

  “You know you’re right? I am sick. ” I said this very happily (which is an inexplicable contradiction—there was nothing to be happy about).

  “So you should go to the doctor at once. You know very well it’s your duty to be healthy—it’s ridiculous even talking about it.”

  “O, darling, of course you’re right. Absolutely right!”

  I did not go to the Bureau of Guardians. I couldn’t help it. I had to go to the Medical Bureau, where they kept me until 17:00.

  And that evening (it doesn’t matter, anyway, they’re closed in the evening), that evening O came to my place. We didn’t let the blinds down. We worked on some problems from an old book of problems—that calms you down and cleans out your thoughts. 0-90 sat over the notebook, her head leaning toward her left shoulder, and making such an effort that her tongue was pushing her left cheek out. She looked like such a child, so charming. And so I felt good all over, clear, simple...

  She left and I was alone. I took two deep breaths (which is very good for you before going to sleep). And then all of a sudden I caught a whiff of something I didn’t expect... something that reminded me of something unpleasant. I soon found it. A stem of lily-of-the-valley had been hidden in my bed. Immediately something rose up from the bottom, some whirlwind. No, really, that was simply tactless of her ... hiding that flower on me. All right, then, I didn’t go. But I’m not to blame that I’m sick.

  RECORD 8

  The Irrational Root R-13 Triangle

  How long ago was it? In my school years. That’s when V -1 1 first happened to me. It’s so clear it seems chiseled. I remember the bright globular auditorium, the hundreds of round boyish heads—and Pliapa, our math teacher. We nicknamed him Pliapa. He was already pretty much used up and falling apart by that time, and whenever the person on duty would connect the plug to him, the loudspeaker would always start with what sounded like “Plia-plia-plia-tshshsh” and only then we’d get the lesson. Once Pliapa told us about irrational numbers—and ! I remember how I cried, I beat my fists on the table and bawled: “I don’t want √—1! Take it out of me, this V—1!” That irrational root grew in me like some alien thing, strange and terrifying, and it was eating me, and you couldn’t make any sense of it or neutralize it because it was completely beyond ratio.

  And now here’s that V -1 again. I’ve looked over these records of mine, and it’s clear to me that I’ve been fooling myself, I’ve been lying to myself, and all because I did not want to see that V—1 . That’s all nonsense about me being sick and so on. I could have gone there. A week ago I know I would have gone without a second thought. So why do I now... ? Why?

  Same today. At 16:10 on the dot I was standing in front of the gleaming glass wall. Above me was the golden, sunny, pure shining of the letters on the Bureau’s sign. Inside, through the glass, I could see a lot of light-blue yunies waiting in line. I could see faces glimmering like icon-lamps in an old church. These were people who had come to perform a heroic duty: They had come to lay on the altar of OneState their loved ones, their friends, even themselves. And as for me, I was dying to go to them, to be with them. And I couldn’t. My feet were sunk deep in the glass pavement. I stood there looking stupid, unable to budge from the spot.

  “Hey, mathematician! You’re dreaming!”

  I shuddered. The face looking at me had dark eyes, shiny from laughing, and thick African lips. It was the poet R-13, an old friend, and my rosy 0 was with him.

  I turned around angrily (I think that if they hadn’t interfered I’d have managed to tear that V -1 1 out of me with the meat still on it—I’d have gone into the Bureau). “I wasn’t dreaming,” I said, rather sharply. “I was admiring.”

  “Of course, of course! Listen, my friend, you’ve got no business being a mathematician. You’re a poet... a poet! No, really, come over and join us poets. How about it? I’ll fix it up for you in a minute.”

  R-13 chokes with excitement when he talks and the words come bursting out of him, out of those thick lips, in sprays. Every p is a fountain. The word poets is a real fountain.

  “I have served and will continue to serve knowledge,” I said, frowning. I don’t like or understand jokes, and jokes are a bad habit with R-13.

  “Knowledge! What does that mean? Your knowledge is nothing but cowardice. No, really, that’s all it is. You just want to put a little wall around infinity. And you’re afraid to look on the other side of that wall. It’s the truth. You look and you screw up your eyes. You do!”

  “Walls,” I began, “walls are the basis of everything human....”

  R spluttered like a fountain. 0 gave her round pink little laugh. I waved my hand, meaning: Go on and laugh, who cares? I had no time for that. I had to get something to wash that damned V—1 down, to drown it out.

  “You know what?” I proposed, “let’s go to my place, let’s sit around and work on problems” (I was thinking of that quiet hour we’d spent yesterday, and hoped we might have one today, too).

  0 glanced at R, and then turned her round, clear gaze on me, her cheeks taking on the tender, exciting color of our Sex Day tickets.

  “But today ... today I have ... a ticket for him,” she said, nodding toward R. “And he’s busy this evening... so ...”

  He made a good-natured sound with his damp, shiny lips: “What’s the problem? Half an hour’s all we need, right, O? I don’t really feel like working on your problems... but why don’t we just go to my place and sit around?”

  I was terrified of being left in my own company, or rather in the company of that new unknown me, who got my D—503 only by some weird coincidence. And so I went to his place, to R’s. It’s true that he is not a precise person, not rhythmical, and his logic is ridiculous, inside out, but still ... we’re friends. It wasn’t by accident that he and I both chose that dear pink O three years ago. That somehow brought us even closer together than all our school years.

  We went to R’s room. To look at it, you’d think everything was just exactly like my place. Same Table on the wall, and the armchairs, table, chest, bed all made with the same glass. But R had hardly entered before he moved one of the easy chairs, then the other, and the planes were dislocated, everything slipped out of the prescribed correlation and became non-Euclidian. R will never change, never. In Taylor and in math he was always at the bottom of the class.

  We talked about old Pliapa, about how we boys used to stick little thank-you notes all over his glass legs (we really loved old Pliapa). We talked about the law professor.c The law professor had a deafeningly loud voice, a real blast of sound came out of his loudspeaker, and we boys would bellow the texts along with him. We recalled how that crazy R-13 once chewed up some paper in his mouth and then rammed it down the mouthpiece, and how with every text a spitball would shoot out. R was punished, of course. What he did was a dirty trick, of course. But now we laughed over it, our whole triangle laughed, all of us, including (I admit it) me.

  “And what if the law professor had been a live human being, like teachers in the old world? What a panic ...” And the p meant a shower from the thick lips.

  There was sun coming through the ceiling and walls—sunlight from above, from the sides, and reflected from below. 0 was sitting on R-13’s lap, and there were little drops of sunlight in her blue eyes. I felt warmer and somewhat better. The V—1 eased off and lay quiet.

  “Hey ... how’s your INTEGRAL doing? We flying off to enlighten the inhabitants of other planets anytime soon? You’d better get a move on if you don’t want us poets
to write more than your INTEGRAL can ever lift off with.” Every day from 8:00 to 11:00 ... R shook his head and scratched the back of it. From the rear his head looks like it has a little square suitcase attached to it. (It reminds me of an old painting called In the Carriage.)

  This woke me up. “Oh, are you also writing something for the INTEGRAL? What about? What would you write about today, for instance.”

  “Today—nothing,” he said. “Had other plans. ...” Another p, another shower in my face.

  “What plans?”

  R frowned. “What what? Nothing. Okay, if you must know. It was a verdict. I had to put a verdict into verse. Some idiot... and one of us poets, too. For two years we sit next to each other and he seems okay. And then suddenly something snaps. ‘I’m a genius!’ he says. ‘A genius... above the law!’ And the stuff he wrote... ah, the hell with it.”

  His thick lips drooped and his eyes grew dull. R-13 jumped up, turned away, and fixed his gaze somewhere beyond the wall. I looked at that tightly locked little suitcase of his and wondered, “What thoughts are turning over now in that little case?”

  There was a minute of awkward, asymmetrical silence. It wasn’t clear to me what was going on, but something was.

  “Thank goodness,” I said, deliberately raising my voice, “the antediluvian times of all those Shakespeares and Dostoevskys, or whatever you call them, are over.”

  R turned his head. The words spurted out of him like a fountain, as always, but I thought the twinkle in his eye was gone.

  “Yes, my dear mathematician... thank goodness, thank goodness, thank goodness! We are the happiest of arithmetical means.... As you people put it: integrated from zero to infinity, from the cretin to Shakespeare. Right!”

  I don’t know why—it just seemed to come out of nowhere—but I thought of that woman, of her tone of voice. A very thin thread of some kind stretched between her and R. What kind of thread? I could feel the V -1 begin to stir in me again. I opened my badge: 16:25. They had 45 minutes left on their pink ticket.

  “Well, time I was going,” I said, and I gave O a kiss, shook hands with R, and went to the elevator.

  I was already crossing to the other side of the avenue when I looked back: In the bright, sun-drenched mass of the glass building you could see here and there the gray-blue opaque cages where the blinds were down, the cages of rhythmic, Taylorized happiness. My eyes searched out R-13’s cage on the seventh floor: He’d already lowered the blinds.

  Dear O ... dear R. There’s something in him, too (why “too” I don’t know, but let it stand as written), something in him, too, that isn’t quite clear to me. Still, he, 0, and I ... we’re a triangle, maybe not isosceles but still a triangle. If you want to put it in the language of our ancestors (a language that might be more understandable to you, my planetary readers), we’re a family. And sometimes it is so good to rest, even if not for long, to lock yourself up in a strong simple triangle away from all that...

  RECORD 9

  Liturgy Iambs and Trochees Cast-Iron Hand

  A bright, triumphant day. On a day like today you forget about your weaknesses, your uncertainties, your illnesses, and everything is crystalline, steadfast, everlasting... like our new glass.

  Cube Square. Sixty-six powerful concentric rings: the stands. And sixty-six rows: quiet faces like lamps, with eyes reflecting the shining heavens, or maybe the shining of OneState. Blood-red flowers: women’s lips. Tender garlands of children’s faces—down front to be near the action. A profound, strict, Gothic silence.

  Judging by the descriptions that have come down to us, this is something like what the ancients felt during their “divine service. ” But they served their irrational, unknown God, whereas we serve something rational and very precisely known. Their God gave them nothing but eternal tormented searching. Their God couldn’t come up with any smarter idea than sacrificing yourself, never mind why. But we, when we sacrifice to our God, OneState, we make a calm, rational, carefully considered sacrifice. Yes, this was the triumphant liturgy in celebration of OneState, a remembrance of the days and years that went into the crusade of the 200- Years War, the magnificent victory of all over one, of the whole over the part....

  There was one... standing on the steps of the Cube, the sunlight pouring down on him. His face was white, or no, not white, it was no color at all, his glass face, his glass lips. Just his eyes, dark, sucking, swallowing holes... and that terrifying world that he was only minutes away from. The gold badge with his number had already been taken. His hands were tied with a purple ribbon (ancient custom; the explanation seems to be that in old times, before this was done in the name of OneState, the condemned naturally thought he had a right to put up a fight, so his hands were usually chained).

  And up above on the Cube, beside the Machine, was the figure of the one we call the Benefactor, dead still, like something made out of metal. From down here the face is hard to make out. All you can see is that the features are limited to strict, solemn, square lines. But as for the hands... It happens this way sometimes in photographs when the hands are too close, too much in the foreground, and they come out huge, they’re all you can see, they cover up everything. These heavy hands, resting on the knees for the moment—it’s clear that they’re made of stone, and the knees can hardly bear up under their weight.

  And suddenly one of these huge hands slowly rose... a slow, cast-iron gesture... and in answer to this raised hand a Number came from the stands and approached the Cube. This was one of the State Poets. It had fallen to his happy lot to crown the festivities with a poem. And there thundered out over the stands the divine bronze iambics, which were about him, the idiot with the glass eyes who was standing there on the steps waiting for the logical consequences of his stupidities.

  ... A conflagration. Houses swayed in the iambics, they burst upward in a liquid golden shower, then crashed. Green trees writhed in it, spewed drops of sap, left nothing but black skeletons like crosses. But Prometheus appeared (that’s us, of course):And in machines, in steel, he harnessed fire,

  And chaos fettered he with hoops of Law.

  All was new, made of steel: a steel sun, steel trees, steel people. Suddenly some madman “loosed the fire from its chains”—and everything was about to perish again....

  I have a poor memory for poetry, unfortunately, but one thing I do remember: You couldn’t have picked more edifying and resplendent images.

  Again the slow, heavy gesture, and a second poet stood on the steps of the Cube. I nearly rose from my seat: Could it be? No ... those thick, African lips... it was him. Why didn’t he mention that he was going to have the high... ? His lips trembled, they were gray. I can see that when you’re face to face with the Benefactor, standing before the whole corpus of the Guardians, you’d be ... but still, to be that nervous ...

  Trochees... cutting, rapid... sharp as an ax. About an unheard-of crime, about a blasphemous poem, one in which the Benefactor is called... but no, I can’t make my hand write it.

  Pale, not looking at anyone (this shyness was not like him), R-13 went down and took his seat. For one tiniest fraction of a second I thought I saw next to him someone’s face... sharp, a dark triangle ... and then it vanished at once. My eyes lifted up, and so did thousands of other eyes, up to the Machine. The inhuman hand made a third cast-iron gesture. And, shaken by some invisible wind, the criminal moves ... a step ... another... and takes the last step that he will make in life. He is face up to the sky, his head thrown back, on his final resting place.

  Heavy, stone, like fate itself, the Benefactor made one full circle around the Machine and laid his huge hand on the lever. Not a rustle anywhere, not a breath. All eyes were on that hand. What a whirlwind of fire that must feel like—to be a weapon, to have the force of hundreds of thousands of volts. What a stupendous fate!

  An instant. The hand fell, loosing the current. A sharp blade of unbearable light. A shudder in the pipes of the Machine, a crackling that you could hardly hear. The spr
ead-eagled body was covered by a light, sparkling little puff of smoke, and then before our eyes it began to melt, and melt, and it dissolved so fast it was horrible. And then—nothing. A puddle of chemically pure water, which just a moment ago had been in a heart, red, beating up a storm.

  This was all simple, we all knew about it. Dissociation of matter—check. Disengagement of the atoms of the human body—check. Still, every time it happened, it seemed like a miracle. It was a sign of the superhuman might of the Benefactor.

  Up above, lined up in front of Him, were ten female Numbers with Hushed faces, their lips partly open with excitement, their bouquets of flowers blowing in the wind.d

  According to the old custom, the ten women decorated with flowers the Benefactor’s yuny, which was still damp from the spray. With the lordly stride of a high priest, He slowly descended, slowly passed through the stands—and in His wake were gentle white female hands raised aloft like branches and a million hosannas in unison. And then the same hosannas in honor of the corpus of Guardians, invisibly present somewhere in our midst, in our ranks. Who knows—maybe it was the Guardians that ancient man foresaw in his fantasy about the “archangels,”e both stern and tender, that were assigned at birth to every human.

  Yes, there was something of the old religions, something cleansing, like storm and thunder, in this whole ceremony. You who are going to be reading this... have you ever known such moments? I’m sorry for you if you haven’t.

  RECORD 10

  Letter Membrane Hairy Me

  For me, yesterday was like the paper that chemists filter their solutions through: All the particles that were in suspension, all the unwanted stuff, stays on this paper. And when I went down this morning I felt I’d been freshly distilled, perfectly clear.