Against the Day

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Against the Day Page 102

by Thomas Pynchon


  These days there was little but nervousness among the cringers and climbers at all levels of Razvedka. Since the naval defeat at Tsushima and the massive demonstrations in the cities, the pogroms and terror and blood, the unthinkable possibility had been dawning that God had abandoned Russia. What had been certain and mandated by Heaven was now as loaded with uncertainty as any peasant’s struggle with the day, and all, regardless of wealth or position, must stumble blindly.

  “I AM A WARRIOR, not a scientist,” protested Ofitser Nauchny Gerasimoff. “You should be sending in professors.”

  “That can wait,” Padzhitnoff said. “Okhrana believe this Event could have been man-made, and they want to know weapons implications.”

  Gennady, the umnik of the crew, gestured casually at the dead ranks of bark-less virgin timber passing below. “Man-made? This? God didn’t do this?”

  “General Sukhomlinoff is more inclined to suspect the Chinese, though he does not rule out the Germans.”

  “He probably has another real-estate scheme in mind, seeing the land’s already been cleared free of charge.” Gennady pretended to look down in amazement. “In fact, who’re all those people in suits, riding on camels down there? Zi! wait! It’s real-estate agents, out on caravan!”

  “The General is eager to know how this was done,” Padzhitnoff said. “He keeps saying, ‘Remember who invented gunpowder.’”

  Pavel Sergeievitch, the intelligence officer, gazed at the horizonless disaster. “No sign of fire there. No crater, not even a shallow one. It wasn’t munitions—none we know of.”

  “What do the people who live down there say?”

  “That it was Agdy, their God of Thunder.”

  “That’s what they heard? thunder?”

  “Sound-pressure of some kind. . . . Even so, it appears the energy only moved laterally.”

  “But not quite radially,” Padzhitnoff said. “Helm, take us up three hundred meters. I want all of you to see something curious.”

  They ascended into a sky from which color had drained absolutely, as if in the same terrible moment that these millions of trunks had gone white, and, having reached the desired altitude, still in the air, looking down like icons of saints painted on the inside of a church dome.

  “It looks like a butterfly,” remarked Gerasimoff.

  “An angel,” said Pavel.

  “It is symmetrical, but not the ellipse of destruction one would expect.”

  PADZHITNOFF CONVENED A MEETING of the officers, which, as it turned out, would not be adjourned for weeks. They gathered in the wardroom and worried together, in shifts. The crew welcomed the slack and fell into a sort of holiday routine. Some played chess, others drank. Everybody smoked, some failed to sleep. Those who did sleep dreamed about playing chess and woke worrying about what kind of mental trouble they might be in.

  Meanwhile the zastolye in the wardroom had grown philosophical.

  “Were it not for the electromagnetic readings, I should say it was a meteorite that exploded about five miles up. But why should the area remain actively radiant like this?”

  “Because what exploded was brought by a conveyance, from somewhere else, out in Cosmic Exterior.”

  “Because there is an important time term hidden somewhere in the expression. With such an enormous discharge of sound, light, and heat—why no crater?”

  “If the object exploded too high above the ground to do more than blow trees over—”

  “—or the local distortion of other variables was so intense that the crater somehow actually got displaced along the time axis.”

  “Perhaps moved elsewhere in space as well.”

  “Khuy,” summarized Bezumyoff, the know-it-all or vseznaĭka of the crew, “in that case we’re fucked, aren’t we—there is now potentially a hole in the Earth no one can see, waiting to materialize with no warning at all, in fact it may appear at any moment, directly beneath St. Petersburg, for example—”

  This may just do the trick, thought Captain Padzhitnoff, the nervous collapse which no feat of Japanese naval ordnance, no Russian winter, no mystical intrigue at Tsarskoe Selo had been able to provoke, might only have been waiting for this spectacle of a crew he believed he had come to understand attempting to deal with the Event of 30 June. It had not escaped his notice that eyewitnesses living below had unanimously reported stones falling from the sky, at least suggesting the Bol’shaia Igra’s own traditional specialty. The possibility had to be entertained—had they field-tested some new munitions device, for example, over an “uninhabited” piece of Siberia, and had the result proven so terrible that now they’d all developed a collective amnesia about it, perhaps as a way of protecting their mental apparati?

  “Believe if you like in some extraterrestrial origin for this thing—but suppose instead it were extratemporal—a four-, perhaps five-dimensional surface intersecting with ‘our’ continuum.”

  “Ouspenskian!”

  “Bolshevik!”

  “It certainly resembles a capacitance effect, though on a planetary scale—a slow, incremental investment of energy, followed by a sudden catastrophic payback.”

  “Exactly what I’m saying. Time-travel isn’t free, it takes energy. This was an artifact of repeated visits from the future.”

  “Nichevo. Something that wasn’t supposed to be where it was. Maybe deliberate, but maybe not. It’s all we can say.”

  MEANTIME, in another part of the taiga, Kit and Prance were going round and round as usual, on the interesting topic of which one was less constitutionally able to clean up after himself, when with no announcement, everything, faces, sky, trees, the distant turn of river, went red. Sound itself, the wind, what wind there was, all gone red as a living heart. Before they could regain their voices, as the color faded to a blood orange, the explosion arrived, the voice of a world announcing that it would never go back to what it had been. Both Kit and Prance remembered the great roaring as they passed through the Prophet’s Gate.

  “It’s up by Vanavara,” Kit said when the day had resumed. “We ought to go up there and see if there’s anything we can do.”

  “You go if you want. I was not sent here for this.” Prance was hugging himself as if for warmth, though it was summer.

  “Because . . . ?”

  “My remit was political. This is not political.”

  “Maybe it is. Maybe it’s war.”

  “Out here? Over what, Traverse? Logging rights?”

  TWO SMALL BLACK BIRDS who had not been there now emerged out of the light as it faded to everyday green and blue again. Kit understood for a moment that forms of life were a connected set—critters he was destined never to see existing so that those he did see would be just where they were, when he saw them. Somewhere on the other side of the world, an exotic beetle stood at a precise distance and compass bearing from an unclassified shrub so that here, in this clearing, these two black birds might appear to Kit, precisely as they were. He had entered a state of total attention to no object he could see or sense, or eventually even imagine in any interior way, while Prance was all but hysterical.

  “Our mortal curse to be out here in the way of whatever force decides to come in out of that unlimited darkness and wipe us from the Creation,” Prance delivered into religious mania. “As if something in the Transfinitum had chosen to reenter the finite world, to reaffirm allegiance to its limits, including mortality . . . to become recognizably numerical again . . . a presence come to Earth. . . .”

  AND SOON THE DRUMS BEGAN. The dungur, rising to them out of the taiga inscrutable and vast. Through the long twilight into the pale evening. One drum would have been soul-rattling enough, but there were at least a dozen. Deep and far-reaching. Kit stood nearly paralyzed. It went on for days. After a while he thought he heard something familiar in it. He had begun to mistake it for thunder. Not ordinary thunder but whatever it was Agdy had brought down on the day of the Event. Were they trying to commemorate it? summon it back? Or provide homeopathic echoes to
protect them from its return?

  “I WAS SHOT AT TODAY,” Prance announced. “Again.”

  “Was it as much fun as last time, what’d you call it, ‘exhilarating’?”

  It had become disagreeably evident that young Prance was widely taken now for a Japanese spy, allowing Kit only so much slack to try and convince the Englishman’s many ill-wishers otherwise.

  “If only you didn’t ask so many questions all the time. Scholarly curiosity’s one thing, but you just don’t know when to quit. And you don’t look too local either.”

  “Well I certainly don’t look Japanese.” Then into Kit’s silence, “Do I?”

  “How many Japanese does anybody out here ever get to see? Prance ol’ buddy, let’s face it, out in these parts—you’re Japanese.”

  “But I say look here, I’m not Japanese. I mean am I walking about in sandals? gesturing with fans, speaking in unsolvable riddles, any of that?”

  Kit raised his eyebrows and angled his head. “Deny it all you like, but what about me, I go on coverin your back long enough, folks here start thinkin I’m Japanese, too, where are we then?”

  Among Siberians one school of thought placed the origins of the mysterious visitation in Japan. Not good news for Prance, actually.

  “But it was sighted coming in from quite the other direction—from the southwest,” he protested. “China.”

  “Maybe they’re what you’d call a little ‘dis-Oriented’? If it was a projectile, or perhaps a ray of some kind, it might not even have been dispatched through what we think of as ordinary space.”

  “And . . . what do we ‘think of as ordinary space’ again, one does keep forgetting.”

  “Up and down,” Kit patiently, “left and right, to and fro, the three axes we know from our everyday lives. But someone may have command of Quaternion space—three imaginary axes plus a fourth scalar term containing energies few of us can imagine.”

  He had been thinking, with deep anxiety, about the Quaternion weapon he’d turned over to Umeki Tsurigane in Ostend. For the likes of Piet Woevre, the instrument had promised an advanced level of destructiveness, a chance to introduce large populations to the embrace of death and death’s companion, Time, which the w term might easily be taken to mean. Might the Tunguska Event have been caused by the discharge, planned or inadvertent, of a Q-weapon? It wouldn’t have been Umeki-san, but perhaps someone she had trusted. Who had perhaps betrayed her. And if someone had betrayed her, how fatally? And what did that make Kit?

  FOR A WHILE after the Event, crazed Raskol’niki ran around in the woods, flagellating themselves and occasional onlookers who got too close, raving about Tchernobyl, the destroying star known as Wormwood in the book of Revelation. Reindeer discovered again their ancient powers of flight, which had lapsed over the centuries since humans began invading the North. Some were stimulated by the accompanying radiation into an epidermal luminescence at the red end of the spectrum, particularly around the nasal area. Mosquitoes lost their taste for blood, acquiring one instead for vodka, and were observed congregating in large swarms at local taverns. Clocks and watches ran backward. Although it was summer, there were brief snowfalls in the devastated taiga, and heat in general tended to flow unpredictably for a while. Siberian wolves walked into churches in the middle of services, quoted passages from the Scriptures in fluent Old Slavonic, and walked peaceably out again. They were reported to be especially fond of Matthew 7:15, “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” Aspects of the landscape of Tierra del Fuego, directly opposite the Stony Tunguska on the globe, began to show up in Siberia—sea ernes, gulls, terns, and petrels landing in the branches of fir trees, swooping to grab fish out of the streams, taking a bite, screaming with distaste, and throwing them back. Granite cliffs rose sheer and unexpected out of the forest. Oceangoing ships unmanned by visible crews, attempting to navigate the shallow rivers and creeks, ran aground. Entire villages came to the conclusion that they were not where they ought to be, and without much advance planning simply packed up what they had, left behind what they couldn’t carry, and headed off together into the brush, where presently they set up villages no one else could see. Or not very clearly.

  And from everywhere in the taiga, all up and down the basins of the Yenisei, came reports of a figure walking through the aftermath, not exactly an angel but moving like one, deliberately, unhurried, a consoler. Accounts differed as to whether the outsize figure was man or woman, but all reported having to look steeply upward when trying to make out its face, and a deep feeling of fearless calm once it had passed.

  Some thought it might be some transfigured version of the shaman Magyakan, whose whereabouts had been puzzling folks along the Stony T. No one had seen him since the Event, his izba was empty, and the magical force that had kept it from sinking, like everyone else’s dwelling in Siberia, into the summer-thawed earth, had abated, so that the cabin now tilted at a thirty-degree angle, like a ship at sea about to slide beneath the waves.

  None of the strange effects lasted long, and as the Event receded in memory, arguments arose as to whether this or that had even happened at all. Soon the forest was back to normal, green underbrush beginning to appear among the dead-white trunks, the animals fallen speechless again, tree-shadows again pointing in their accustomed directions, and Kit and Prance continued to make their way through it with no idea what this meant for their mission out here.

  KIT HAD ALMOST gotten used to riding Kirghiz horses, or more often their shaggier pony-size cousins, his feet all but dragging along the ground, when one day he and Prance came across a band of reindeer herders, moving the herd to new pasture, and he immediately caught sight of one reindeer, pure white, who seemed to be looking back at him pretty intently, before disengaging himself from the herd and trotting over.

  “As if he knew me,” as Kit explained it later.

  “Of course, Traverse,” Prance blithely demented, “and what did he say to you?”

  “Told me his name. Ssagan.”

  Prance stared. “That’s a Buriat pronunciation of tsagan, which is Mongol for ‘white.’” He went over to the critter and began talking Buriat, now and then pausing as if to listen.

  It didn’t seem that odd to Kit, talking with reindeer. Folk out here were said to do it all the time. Since the visitation at the Stony Tunguska, he had noticed that the angle of his vision was wider and the narrow track of his life branching now and then into unsuspected side trails.

  The herders were reluctant at first, believing Ssagan to be the reincarnation of a great Buriat teacher. They consulted with him for days, shamans came and went, wives put in with useful advice. Finally, from what Prance could learn, Ssagan convinced them that Kit was a pilgrim who could not proceed farther without Ssagan to pilot him through confusions in the terrain.

  THEY HAD ENTERED a strangely tranquil part of Siberia, on the Mongolian border between the Sayan and Tannu-Ola ranges, which Prance had been briefly through and said was known as Tuva. Kit reckoned if a fellow was going to come riding in anywhere on a white reindeer, he could do a lot worse than here. After Kit dismounted and took his saddlebags, Ssagan, as if having discharged a duty, turned abruptly and went off the way they had come, to rejoin his herd, wherever they’d got to by now, without looking back.

  “He says he’s done all he can,” said Prance. “His job was to bring us here.”

  They slept that night in a bark hut with a pointed top, and woke into the dawn to an unearthly guttural singing. Some Tuvans were tending a herd of sheep. The man singing was standing alone, but after a while Kit heard a flute accompanying him. He looked around, but there was no flute-player, no other musicians of any kind, in fact. He looked at the singer more closely and could see lip movements that matched up with the sound of the flute. It was all coming from the one voice.

  “They call it borbanngadyr,” Prance explained. “Perhaps shamans are not the only ones who know how to be in two sta
tes at once. On the other hand, perhaps there really is a flute-player but he’s invisible, or a ghost. It all needs to be looked into more closely, which is why I think I’ll stay here for a while if you don’t mind.”

  There was something else. Prance seemed almost embarrassed. “This is the heart of Earth,” he whispered.

  “Funny,” said Kit, “all’s I see’s a bunch of sheep.”

  “Exactly. Traverse, I know we’ve had our differences—”

  “Still broodin about that time back in the woods there, I knew it—but I wasn’t really aiming at you, Dwight.”

  “Not that. I believe . . . all the signs are here, you must have seen them . . . these high peaks surrounding us, the Tuvan script that resembles Tibetan characters—and these are the only known Buddhists in the world who speak Old Uyghur or any sort of Turkic language, for that matter. Everywhere one sees images of the Wheel of Life. . . . A Tibetan Buddhist enclave in the middle of a prevailing Islamism. What does that suggest to you?”

  Kit nodded. “Ordinarily it would have been the reason for our trip out here, and somebody would write it up and report it back to Lieutenant—Colonel Halfcourt. But the problem for me these days is—”

  “I know. There may not be a ‘mission’ anymore. What happened up on the Stony Tunguska—we don’t know how they reacted back in Kashgar, Shambhala may have vanished in that instant from their list of priorities. We don’t even know what it’s done to us out here. Far too soon to say. As to our purpose now—no one has the wisdom or the authority to tell us anything.”

 

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