Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034 English fan translation (v1.0) (docx)

by Dmitry Glukhovsky

  Now the city is a giant smoking crater. They wanted to make an expedition to the south, into the direction of Moscow but I talked them out of it. Why risk it? As soon as the radiation goes back they can conquer other pieces of land. But at the moment there is nothing to gained by comming here. It’s a graveyard and nothing else.” Homer sighed

  “It is really strange.” Said Leonid. “When humanity after it had been destroyed by the atom now also has been saved by it”

  “It’s like with Prometheus who stole fire. The gods had forbidden to bring fire to mankind. But he wanted to bring humanity out of the dirt, out of darkness and coldness …”

  “I’ve read it.” Homer cut him of angrily. “>The myths and legends of old Greece<”

  “A prophetic myth. The gods were against it because of nothing. They knew how it would end”

  “But it was fire that made mankind, mankind”

  “Do you want to say that without electricity humans turn back into animals?”

  “I want to say that without power we are thrown back two hundredth years. And if you think about it that only one for every thousand has survived and everything has to be built again, connected and explored, probably it will take more then five hundredth years. Maybe we’ll never get back to how things were. Or do you think something else?”

  “No, No.” Answered Leonid. “But is it really just about electricity?”’

  “About what else?” Homer raised his arms over his head. The musician gave him a long and strange look and then he shrugged his shoulders.

  The silence got longer. Homer had felt that the end of the conversation had been his victory: Finally the girl had stopped eating that boy with her eyes and was sunken in thoughts. It wasn’t far to the station when Leonid said: ”Well, then I think then it’s my time for a story now”

  Homer made a tired face but nodded merciful.

  “At the other side of the Sportivnaya, there where the destroyed Sokolnitscheski Bridge is, there a line that departs from the main line and ends in a dead end. There is a grid and a security door. Many times people have tried to open it but they’ve succeeded. Practically every adventurer who had gone there never returned. Their bodies were later found at other parts of the metro”

  Homer made a grimace. “The emerald city?”

  “It’s well known.” Continued Leonid unflustered.

  “That the Sokolnitscheski metro bridge went down on the first day. That means that all stations behind it were separated from the metro. Most people think that nobody survived there even though there is no evidence for that”

  Homer made gesture with his hand. “The emerald city”

  “Also it is known that the Moscow University was built on soft ground. That giant building was only stable because giant cold machines cooled the cellar and kept the swampy ground in its frozen condition. If not it would’ve slid down into the river long ago”

  “That’s a farfetched argument.” Said the old man.

  He knew what Leonid wanted to say.

  “It has been over twenty years but the abandoned building is still standing at the same place”

  “Because it’s a fable, that’s why!”

  “Rumors say that under the university there isn’t just a normal cellar but a big gigantic bunker that is ten stories deep.

  There are the cold machines and even more important, a nuclear reactor, living quarters and connections to the nearest metro stations and even to the metro 2.” Leonid was looking at Sasha with big, scary looking eyes so that she had to laugh.”

  “That’s old coffee.” Commented Homer.

  “It’s said that there is an entire city underground”

  Continued the musician in his dreamy voice. “The inhabitants of this city didn’t die but have made it to their job to gather all knowledge and bring it back to the same level as before when all was beautiful. They don’t give up going on expeditions to still standing galleries, museums and libraries on the surface. They raise their children with a sense for beauty. There is peace and harmony there, their ideology is knowledge and their religion is art. There the walls aren’t just covered in ugly oil colors but with colorful frescos. From the loudspeakers no orders and alarm signals could be heard but Berlioz, Haydn and Tschaikovsky on that day. Just imagine every inhabitant can quote Dante out of their heads.

  That’s the reason why the people have remained like back then. Well not like in the 21st century but more like in antique times. Well, you’ve read >Myths and legends<”

  Leonid smiled at the old man as if he thought that he was a bit slow. “Free, courage’s, beautiful and wise.

  Righteous and noble”

  “I’ve never heard of it!” Now he just hoped that that smart devil hadn’t caught the girl with his net already.

  “In the metro the place is called >The emerald city<. Its inhabitants like to use another name”

  “And that would be?” Said Homer angrily.

  “The ark”

  “Nonsense! Complete nonsense!” Yelled the old man and turned away.

  “Of course.” Said the musician. “After all it is just a story”

  At the Dobryninskaya chaos reigned. Homer looked from one side to the other, surprised and fearful at the same time: Was this an illusion? Could something like that happen at the ring line? It looked like somebody had declared war on Hanza. Out of the tunnel towered the transport railcar, a few bodies on it that were laying on top of.

  Paramedics carried them down and put them on a piece of cloth, one was missing the head, another one had a mutilated face, intestines were quelling out of some …

  Homer held his hand in front of Sasha’s eyes.

  Leonid was breathing heavily and turned away.

  “What happened?” He asked one of the men who were guarding the paramedics.

  “Something hit our guards at the big distributor. All dead, to the last man. No survivors. And nobody knows who did it.” The paramedic cleaned his hands on his coat. “You got a smoke? My hands are shaking”

  The big distributor, so Hanza’s shuttle, it was the spider web like system of tracks, that departed from the radial station at the Pavelezkaya and connected four lines with each other: The ring, the grey, the orange and the green line.

  Homer had guessed that Hunter would take that way. It was the shortest. But it was always guarded by Hanza.

  Why all this bloodshed? Had they opened fire first?

  Or hadn’t they seen him coming out of the darkness? Where was he now? Oh god, there was another head … Why had he done this?

  Homer thought about the broken mirror and Sasha’s words. Should she have been right? Maybe the brigadier was fighting against himself, maybe he had wanted to avoid unnecessary deaths, maybe he wasn’t in control of himself … And that was the reason he had broken the mirror, to destroy the ugly man into which he had transformed?

  No. Hunter hadn’t seen a man in his reflection but a monster. He had tried to eliminate it but only broken the glass and one reflection had become a dozen.

  But what if … Homer looked after the paramedics who had just loaded the last of the eight bodies from the railcar onto the platform … What if he had seen a desperate man starring back out of the mirror? The old hunter?

  What if the other one, the monstrous one had already arrived and taken the lead?

  What else? (Chapter 14)

  What made a human to a human? More than a million years he journeys though the world. The magical transformation, which let this intelligent animal become something totally new, had only happened in the last ten thousand years. You just had to think: 99 percent of his history he spent cowering in caves and chewing on raw meat, unable to warmth himself, develop tools or even weapons and he couldn’t even really talk. Even his feelings weren’t that far from apes or wolves: Hunger, fear, companionship, pleasure …

  How had humanity learned to build in just a few centuries? To change its surrounding matter and to create new?

  Why had the
y started to paint all of a sudden and how had they discovered music all of a sudden? How could they bent the earth to their will and change it according to their needs? What was it that had made this animal to something special in the last ten thousand years? Fire? It gave humans the ability to tame light and warmth and carry it into uninhabitable cold regions. But what changed that? Good, it made it possible for humans to extend their reach. But rats had colonized the entire planet without fire. No it wasn’t fire, well not just fire, there the musician had been right. There had to be something else … But what?

  Language? That was a difference to any other animals without a doubt. When rough thoughts were polished to brilliants of words they had finally turned into the common, currency. At the same time it wasn’t just so much about expressing yourself, not really about what was happening in your head but more about the ability to order the instable, like molten iron flowing pictures into a solid form. To retain a clear and sober mind and to pass on orders and knowledge accurately. So also about the ability to organize, to conquer, to raise armies and form states.

  But ants didn’t need any words. On a for a human unnoticeable level they lived in complex hierarchies, shared information and orders with high accuracy, agitated thousands of fearless legions with iron discipline to merciless wars.

  Or was it letters? Without them would we have been able to safe our knowledge? Those bricks that made up the to the sky rushing tower of Babylon of human civilization?

  Without them all wisdom that Humanity had gathered, would flow apart like unbaked clay and the tower would fall down under its own weight. Turning into dust.

  Without letters every generation had to build the tower again, would work all their life in the ruins of their clay huts and finally die, without even having constructed a single floor. First letters and then writing made it possible for humanity to transport the gathered knowledge out of their small heads and store it just like it was for their decedents. So it was no longer their fate to discover the discovered over and over again and they were able to built something of their own on the stable fundament that had been built by their ancestors.

  Was that all?

  If wolves could write, would their civilization be similar to the one of humanity? Would they even have a civilization? A full wolf that was no longer hungry got tired, snuggled with its kind until it’s growling stomach drove it further. A full human gets a strange feeling on the other hand:

  He gets melancholic. The unbelievable, unexplained tend that gets him to look at the stars for hours, paint on the wall of his cave with ochre, to decorate the front of his warship with a carved statue, building stone colossuses over centuries of hard labor instead of strengthening the wall of his fortress and work his whole life on the perfection of his poetic masterpiece instead of learning how to wield a sword.

  It was the tendency which brought a former train operator helper to devote the few years he still had to lecture and search and to try and write something down …

  Something special …. To free him of the longing the common and poor people listen to the skilled violist, kings had kept own troubadours and painters and an underground born girl looked at the package of a painted teabag. It is an obscure and powerful calling, that is even able to overshadow the voice of hunger. And only humans can hear.

  It is not just the calling that goes past the spectrum of animals and gives a human the ability to dream and hope for courage. Love and mercy, two emotion which humans think to be such a special ability. They weren’t the first to find it. Even a dog is able to love and feel mercy: Is its master sick, it doesn’t stray from his side and whimpers. Even it can long for the day and is able to see the reason of life of another creature: Some dogs have been ready to die as well after the death of their master. Only so that they could stay with them.

  But a dog can’t dream.

  Then isn’t there the longing for something beautiful and the ability to value it? This surprising ability to enjoy a composition of colors, arrays of sound, broken lines and elegant constructed sentences? To get the sweet and at the same time hurting sound of their soul, which grips your heart, even if it is sick and scarred and make it pure again?

  Maybe. But not just that.

  To sound over shots and the desperate screams of imprisoned naked humans, some humans have played wonderful operas from Wagner on full volume. And that wasn’t a contradiction: One underlined the other.

  What else?

  Even when humanity survives this hell as a biological kind, is it going to keep that fragile and almost unnoticeable but without a doubt real part of its nature? Is it going to protect that special spark that had brought the hungry animal over ten thousands of years to a creature of order? To a creature who was tortured more by the hunger of the soul then the hunger of the body?. A stumbling creature, always torn from one side to the other, between spiritual greatness and lowness. Between for a predator forbidden mercy and unforgivable cruelty which seemed to have come out of the soulless world of insects?.

  A creature that built wonderful castles and made unimaginable paintings. Whose ability to create beautiful things could measure up with the creator itself and at the same time create gas chambers and nuclear weapons to destroy and annihilate the created and exterminate his own kind. A creature that built sand castles with much passion so that it could destroy them one day when it felt like it. A creature that knew no limits, that was fearful and cooking of hate, unable to satisfy its hunger but not trying to do anything but that in its entire life. A human …

  Is that spark going to stay in it?

  Or is it going to disappear in the past, like a short beat on the diagram of history? Is humanity going to be thrown back after this strange event? It had become timeless routine for countless of generation to have their eyes fixed onto the ground. Will the ten, hundredth, five hundredth years going to pass on them without extinguishing the spark?

  What else?

  “Is it true?”

  “What?” Leonid was smiling at her.

  “That with the emerald city? The ark? That there is such a place in the metro?” Sasha’s voice sounded like she was sunken in thoughts while she was looking at her feet.

  “There’re rumors”

  “I would like to see it … You know, when I was walking around up there it had pity on humanity. Only because of one mistake it won’t ever be like back then. But it is so beautiful … I think at least it is”

  “Because of one mistake? No that wasn’t just one. To destroy the entire world, to kill six milliards of people, can you even call that a mistake?”

  “Still. Don’t you and I have earned their forgiveness?

  Everybody deserves a second chance, to change and try again and again and even if it’s the last time.” Sasha turned silent for a while and then she said: ”I would like to see how it looks like in reality. Back then I didn’t care. Back then I was just afraid and everything was so ugly up there.

  But it seems that I had just gone up at the wrong place. How stupid … The city up there is like from another life before mine. It has no future. Only memories and even those are strange to me. Just ghosts.

  I’ve realized something important when I was up there you know …” She was searching for the right words.

  “Hope is like blood in your veins. As long as it flows you’re alive. I want to keep hoping”

  “What do you want in the emerald city?” Asked Leonid.

  “I want to see how life was back then. You’ve said it yourself. There the people are probably totally different. They haven’t forgotten yesterday and they will surely have a tomorrow. So they have to be totally different, totally …”

  They hastily walked along the Dobryninskaya. The guards still didn’t leave them out of their eyes. Homer had gathered all his courage and went to speak with the commander of the station. He had been gone for a while now and there was no trace of Hunter.

  Then at the marble passageway of the Dobryninskaya Sasha realized someth
ing strange: The big arcs through which you could get to the tracks changed into smaller ones.

  Always a big arc and a small arc, a bigger one and a smaller one. Like a man and a woman who were holding hands. A man and a woman, a man and a woman … Suddenly she felt the need for the broad and strong hand of a man. To put her hand into his.

  “Even here you can start a new life.” Said Leonid and winked with his eyes into her direction. “Sometimes you just have to go somewhere else and search … Sometimes it is enough to look around”

  “And what am I seeing?”

  “Me”

  “I’ve already seen you. Already heard you play too.” Finally Sasha smiled as well “I like your music very much. Like all. Don’t you need the bullets? You’ve given so many away to get us through …”

  “I only need enough for food. I always have enough.

  To play for money is stupid”

  “Then why are you playing?”

  “Because of the music.” He laughed. “Because of the people. But not to just for them. Because of what music does to the people.”

  “What are you doing to the people?”

  “Whatever I want.” Now he was serious again.

  “I got one for love and another for tears”

  Sasha gave him a distrusting look. “And the one that you’ve played the last time? The one that doesn’t have a name? What does it create?”

  “That one?” He whistled the song. “Nothing. That one just takes away the pain”

  “Hey old man!”

  Homer closed his book and slid from one side of the uncomfortable bench to the other. The officer on duty towered over a small desk that was almost completely covered with three old black telephoned that were missing the dials. On one of the apparatuses a small red lamp was flashing.