The Living

by Anna Starobinets

  ‘The Wise Prophet will not help us.’ This was the response to the situation of Goldenhorse, a former member of the Council of Eight, who died today in Isoptera as a prince. ‘Because he doesn’t understand us. He cannot share our pain. The Wise One does not want to connect himself to socio as a matter of principle – he has all sorts of fine-sounding explanations for this behaviour of his, but I have my own opinion on the matter. He just doesn’t want to be our friend on socio, and that is all.’

  ‘It’s provocation.’ The General has already almost calmed down, but his voice is still trembling a bit. ‘To start a panic. I think Goldenhorse is behind the attack. Permission to terminate him?’

  ‘Leave him.’

  He looks confused, but still trusting, like a dog.

  ‘Permission to capture him alive to take part in Who Else Deceived Us?’

  I repeat: ‘Leave him. We’ve taken enough lives.’

  ‘So what are your orders?’

  I say nothing for a long time. Then I say, ‘You and your father were right.’

  He rubs his blood-drenched eyes with his hands, like a Darling who has not had enough sleep. And he looks at me again – this time in entreaty:

  ‘I don’t remember my father. I don’t understand you, Wise One…’

  …The old man was right. And the Servant. And Fourth too. No one needs my truth. The whole world was held together by their lie.

  Just a bit longer – and we will have been reduced completely, to nothing, to nought. Haha. To me. But I hope that the mistake can still be corrected.

  Today I will bring the Living back to life…

  My son will not be my heir. It will be you, my inc-successor.

  But please don’t have any illusions. In no way are you my continuation. This is just the only solution.

  I am going to shut down the System.

  How many of us are there now – a billion four hundred and something? – I’m going to take a slightly smaller figure. A billion. A nice, round number. So then: ‘The Living equals a billion livings…’ Sounds fantastic.

  There, it is decided. The Living has risen again, and His number equals one billion. The rest will be reduced while we are establishing stability. Those that aren’t reduced we will finish off. For their own good. For the good of the Living.

  There is no other solution. I will force them to calm down. I will force them to multiply. If there are too many, I will terminate them. Then the System will sort itself out and start to work on its own.

  At least, that’s what happened last time. If you can believe Fourth. And the things she said on Who Else Deceived Us, before she was torn apart.

  ‘Confess, Fourth, moderator of assistance to nature: when did you first lie?’

  ‘My inc-predecessor first lied in the time of the first Great Reduction.’

  At that time they moulded the Living from three billion, with three hundred thousand in reserve.

  But it helped.

  I sentenced her to a Public Pause of Shame – though she would have ceased within days anyway. She was like a skeleton. It was as if Death had stepped down from the ancient paintings to take part in the show…

  …I say to the General, ‘Don’t worry. You don’t have to understand anything. Now go and bring a good sysadmin to the Residence.’

  ‘Why, Wise One?’

  ‘When I resurrect the Living, I should become a part of him.’

  The General smiles:

  ‘Understood, Wise One.’

  The Butcher’s Son

  …Father takes me over to the Crystal and says, ‘Look, son. Look at the System for the last time. Soon I am going to shut off access.’

  And I look, since he is asking, although I don’t understand: why ‘for the last time’ all of a sudden?

  Even if, for instance, he stops sharing the System with everyone, I will still be able to see it. It has always let me in, for as long as I can remember. Cracker promised me that the System would never turn me away.

  Then he looks at the screen for a long time and says thoughtfully, ‘My lucky number is eight. Incode no. 8 has been free for a long time, I’ll take cell eight…’

  And then I suddenly start having this attack, as if I’m saying someone else’s words. I get it from time to time: it’s as if someone has crawled into my head and is making all my decisions for me. I say to him, ‘Well done, your intuition is good. That was your number after all.’

  He asks what I mean by that, but I don’t really even know myself. I don’t know, but I say, ‘In theory you should have been a double of incode 0 000 000 008. But Cracker managed to correct the last eight to a nought.’

  And he shouts at me:

  ‘Don’t lie! Cracker was a child then! He’s only two years older than me!’

  I shrug my shoulders: ‘Cracker is the founder. He will always be four and a bit centuries older than you.’

  My father starts looking so stupid that I really want to laugh. But I mustn’t. I bite my tongue painfully and squeeze my lips shut.

  I mustn’t laugh while the Monster is alive…

  Then the sysadmin comes and gives him that capsule – they gave me one like that too, a long time ago, in the House… And he says to father, ‘Connection is a great sacrament. I must read the Book of Life over you – or is your wisdom so great that you remember the text off by heart?’

  ‘I remember it,’ father replies. ‘But I don’t know what we should do with the opening. “The Living is three billion livings…” – because it doesn’t tally with the truth.’

  ‘What’s truth got to do with anything?’ The sysadmin gets scared. ‘The text must be read out in accordance with the canon! Otherwise the program won’t unpack and the socio slot won’t go in right.’

  ‘Fine,’ says father. ‘It might as well be in accordance with the canon for now. But remember – we are going to be changing the canon soon. “The Living is equal to one billion livings” – that’s how it’s always going to start…’

  When the sysadmin leaves, my father takes the capsule and begins the rite. And I say to him: ‘Dad, don’t. The Monster must die!’

  But he carries on reading. He gestures for me to go. And I leave.

  my monster must die

  I know where he keeps his black larvae.

  The Troll

  …And there in the Garden I meet the mistress, and her hair is all black, and there are bits of dye on her forehead and neck. She’s dragging the dog along on a lead. The dog is wheezing, and shaking all over, and there is foam coming out of her mouth – she’s ever so scared of all of us except the Wise One.

  I say to her, ‘Three-Headed Lord, mistress, what have you done with your beautiful honey-coloured hair?’

  And she laughs, all strange like, and says, ‘I was set on fire and now I’m all black.’

  I say, ‘What have you got the dog for?’

  And she replies, ‘What do you mean what for? For science. And you should come with me too, Layla. You do want to take part in an experiment, don’t you, to contribute to science?’

  Well, so I go with her to the lab, because I’m ever so pleased that I can be of use to science. And the mistress squeezed us into these long metal things, me in one, the dog in another, and before that she gave us some sort of jab too. Well, I got a little bit scared in there because it was dark and there was no air, and the dog was howling away all sad, but everything pretty much went alright. The mistress let us out fairly soon.

  The dog puked right there on the floor and then ran off.

  ‘I’ll mop it all up right away, don’t you worry,’ I say to the mistress. ‘But tell me, did we contribute to science?’ And she says, ‘Of course! I’ll send the result to your inbox now.’

  And at that moment I got a mail from the mistress, but I couldn’t make any sense of it.

  This is what it said: ‘Dust – five seconds of darkness – life – five seconds of darkness. All the little volunteer doggies have given the same result.’

&n
bsp; And then she hugs me, just like that, without any contact gloves and says:

  ‘Farewell, Layla.’

  I ask her, ‘Where are you going?’

  And she says, ‘I’m off to the Festival.’

  ‘What are you on about?’ I say, ‘Mistress, stay here, there, outside, it’s dangerous. You won’t make it as far as the Festival, and anyway they’re banned!’

  But the mistress is stubborn.

  ‘I make it, I don’t make it,’ she says, ‘it makes no difference…’

  On the doorstep she turns around and says, ‘Do you hear that, Layla? The noise has stopped.’

  And she leaves. And I’m left to mop up the mess the dog has made. And, smin, I listen closely, and the noise really has disappeared.

  But it never really bothered me. It was just like the wind.

  0

  Dozens of fat, two-headed beetles fly about the room and crawl over my skin. I can no longer move. I can’t chase them off.

  My consciousness is still there, it never went away. It’s just cold. So cold that I can’t breathe, look or move. And it’s very quiet. Quiet in my chest.

  It seems to me like now I am made of ice. My eyes have rolled up into my head and frozen to my eyelids; my arms have gone stiff; my legs have gone stiff and stuck together.

  It seems to me now that I am hard and icy, I cannot be broken. But if you took my body out into the sun, it would melt and soak into the ground like watery lymph…

  But there is no sun.

  My son is sitting at the opposite end of the room and sniffing. I hope that he feels at least a little bit sorry for what he has done to me… Somewhere nearby there is the rumble of gunfire.

  The dog comes over. She pokes her face into my stiff body and yelps thinly.

  Quietly and imperceptibly I am temporarily ceasing to exist, and after five seconds I will appear in the System again. With the number nought.

  And then another nought will spring up. And another.

  Small round holes in the body of the little man made of numbers, more and more of them all the time…

  The dog howls over my corpse. Gunfire rattles the glass, but the dog stays by me. She licks my frozen hands.

  She is so consumed by her grief that she lets the Son come up very close.

  They both sit over the body. The dog’s breathing is heavy and fast, and a hot, rotten smell comes from her mouth. An explosion makes the glass burst and fly out; the dog trembles in fear. The Son carefully reaches his hand out to her and strokes her raised fur. She growls limply, but stays where she is.

  She lets him touch her.

  ‘No death,’ the Son says to her and smiles tentatively. The dog looks at him, cocking her head to one side.

  His smile is utterly childlike.

  Glossary

  1 . FOFS: ‘Frightened Of Five Seconds’; popular abbreviation from socio chats. Entered first-layer lexis in the early second century AV.

  2 . SMIN: ‘Swear on My INcode’. Popular abbreviation from socio chats. Entered first-layer lexis in the early third century AV.

  3 . GOPZ: Popular abbreviation from socio chats. ‘GO to the Pause Zone’; used as a term of abuse, can be used as a joke in friendly conversation. Entered first-layer lexis in the first century AV soon after the first Festival for Assisting Nature.

  4 . GLAP: ‘Glory to the Living and its Parts’; popular abbreviation from socio chats; entered first layer lexis in the early second century AV.

  5 . B2B: Brain2Brain

  6 . Sucs: Abbreviation: single-use contact suit

  Biographical note

  Anna Starobinets was born in Mosow in 1978 and graduated in philology from Moscow State University. She is a Russian journalist and internationally published author whose first book, An Awkward Age, is published by Hesperus Press.

  James Rann is a translator and scholar of Russian literature, which he studied at Oxford University and University College London. A former winner of the Rossica Young Translator Award, he is also the translator of It’s Time, by Pavel Kostin. He lives in London.

  HESPERUS PRESS

  Hesperus Press is committed to bringing near what is far – far both in space and time. Works written by the greatest authors, and unjustly neglected or simply little known in the English-speaking world, are made accessible through new translations and a completely fresh editorial approach. Through these classic works, the reader is introduced to the greatest writers from all times and all cultures.

  For more information on Hesperus Press, please visit our website: www.hesperuspress.com

  Copyright

  Published by Hesperus Press Limited

  28 Mortimer Street, London W1W 7RD

  www.hesperuspress.com

  First published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2012

  This ebook edition first published in 2012

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © Живущий / Анна Старобинец. – М: АСЕ 2011

  The right of Anna Starobinets to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  English language translation copyright © James Rann, 2012

  Designed and typeset by Fraser Muggeridge studio

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–1–84391–377–1