Self-discovery

by Vladimir Savchenko

  “I knew, son. It’s all right. It was the times. I didn’t always believe myself. What are you planning to do?”

  “An experiment in controlling information in my own organism. Eventually I should develop a method of analyzing and synthesizing one’s own body, soul, and memory. Understand?”

  “You always spoke like a book, Val. I don’t know all this science stuff. Once I was able to take apart and reassemble a machine gun blindfolded. But this I don’t follow… what will it give you?”

  “Well, you fought for equality, right? The first stage of this idea is coming true: the inequality between the rich and the poor, between the strong and the weak, is disappearing. Society offers equal opportunity for everyone. But besides the inequality built into society, there is the inequality built into people. A stupid person is no equal to a smart one, an ugly one to a handsome one, a sick or crippled one to a healthy one. But this method will let everyone make himself just the way he wants to be: smart, handsome, young, honest — “

  “Young, smart and handsome — that’s for sure. Everyone will want that. But as for honest — I don’t know. That’s harder than anything else, being honest.”

  “But if a man definitely knows that this information will make him viler and sneakier and this will make him honest and direct, he wouldn’t vacillate over which to pick, would he?”

  “What can I say? There are people for whom it is important to appear honest in front of others, but they would steal or do anything else as long as they’re not caught. And those would pick cleverness and sneakiness.”

  “I know. Don’t talk about them now. The experiment is tomorrow, father.”

  “And you must go? Watch out for yourself, son.”

  “Who else, if not for me? Listen, you could have jumped down from the parapet into the trench?”

  “There were two officers guarding me. They would have shot me.”

  “Couldn’t you have gotten out of it?”

  “Sure! I could have told them that I wouldn’t agitate any more, that I was leaving the Bolsheviks — and they would have let me go at once.”

  “Why didn’t you tell them that?”

  “I should tell them that? I never even thought about it. I was thinking that if I was killed, it would be the end of fraternization in our unit.”

  “Why were you thinking that? You loved people so much, is that it? But you had killed people before — both before and after that.”

  “I killed and they tried to kill me — it was the times.”

  “Then why?”

  “I was proud, I guess that’s why. I was very proud in those days. I thought I was fighting the whole war.”

  “And father, that’s how proud I am now.”

  “Of course, if you go on the parapet you have to stand proud. That’s true. But don’t you equate your work with the parapet, son. I didn’t stand the whole two hours. The soldiers’ committee raised the battalion; they bumped off the officers, and that was it. Do you have anyone to raise an alarm over you?”

  I had no answer for that question — and the imagined conversation ended.

  Well, enough of this — bedtime! Cuckoo, cuckoo, how long will I live?

  Chapter 24

  “People from Earth, your excellency.”

  “From Earth? Earth, Earth… hmm…”

  “That’s the planet where Fledermaus was composed, Excellency.”

  “Ah! Tum — tiri — tiri, tum — tiri — tiri, tum — pam — pam — pam! Mar — velous piece. Well, give them a third — level reception.”

  A conversation in the Universe

  Graduate student Krivoshein went up to the fifth floor and entered the apartment. Victor Kravets and Adam were smoking out on the balcony; when they saw him, they came inside. Krivoshein gave them a glum look.

  “Three from one pea pod. And there used to be four….” He looked at the clock. There was still time. He sat down. “Tell me, Victor Kravets, what happened there?”

  Kravets lit up another cigarette and began the story in a hollow voice.

  The plan of the experiment was for Krivoshein the Original to immerse himself up to the neck in the liquid — control the sensations — put on Monomakh’s Crown — control the sensations once more — give the command of dissatisfaction (“Not it!”) — come into mutual contact with the liquid circuit — reach the stage of controllable transparency — fix his broken ribs — use the “impulse of satisfaction” for the command “That’s it” — return to nontransparency — break contact with the liquid circuit — and leave the tank.

  They had gone over the methodology of the experiment dozens of times by immersing their extremities. The mutual permeation of the liquid and the body could be controlled and regulated easily.

  “You see, friends, it turns out that inside our bodies there are always less healthy spots, tiny flaws, well, like your skin, no matter how healthy, always had a pimple or a scratch or chafing or a local irritation. I don’t know what kind of inner ‘scratches’ there are, but after working in the liquid your arm or leg always feels better than it did before. The liquid circuit corrects these minor flaws. And you can recognize these corrections as they are going on: there is a tingling sensation that increases and then decreases. And if after the decrease you give the command ‘That’s it’ the computer breaks contact and the arm or leg stops being transparent. I’m only telling you this to show you that we had no questions on the methodology of entering and breaking contact with the liquid circuit.”

  “While you were immersing no more than ten or fifteen percent of the body,” Krivoshein added.

  “Yes. We were also sure that the human body maintains muscle tone in the transparent stage in liquid. We used to ‘struggle’ in the liquid: his hand [transparent] and mine [not], or right against left when both were transparent. In other words, the liquid circuit fully supports the viability of the body.”

  “Of parts of the body,” Krivoshein interrupted again. “Yes. Perhaps that was the whole problem,” Kravets sighed. Of course, it was frightening. It was one thing to dip your hand or foot into the liquid — you can pull it out if you sense danger. At worst, you’ll lose an arm. But it’s completely different to immerse yourself in the tank, giving yourself up to the whim of a complex and mysterious medium that you can’t fight off or run away from.

  They hid the fear from each other. Krivoshein, because he feared for himself. Kravets, because he didn’t want to scare him unnecessarily.

  But everything had been prepared assiduously, conscientiously. They regulated the level of liquid in the tank so that it would come up to Krivoshein’s neck when he got in and stood in it. They placed a large mirror opposite the tank. (They had to shell out for it; there wasn’t one at the warehouse.) Krivoshein could observe and control the changes he saw in the mirror.

  In order to lessen the possibility of any fluctuations in current and electromagnetic field, they decided to run the experiment at night, after 2:00 A.M., when all the other labs were turned off and the buses and trolleys were in the depot.

  Krivoshein stripped, climbed up the steps, and holding on to the edge with his left hand (his right was weak after the motorcycle accident), sank into the tank. The liquid gurgled. He stood up to his neck in it — his head looked separate from his body. Kravets was ready with Monomakh’s Crown.

  Krivoshein licked his lips.

  “Salty.” His voice was hoarse.

  “What?”

  “The liquid. Like sea water.”

  They waited a minute.

  “It seems in order. No sensations, as to be expected. Give me the crown.”

  Kravets put Monomakh’s Crown firmly on his head, clicked the dials, and climbed back down. Now his job was to observe Krivoshein, give advice, if needed, and help him out of the tank in case of some unexpected emergency.

  Krivoshein spent another minute getting used to his new position.

  “The sensations are familiar: tingling, prickling,” he said. “Nothing new.
Well, that’s it. Wish me luck. I’m starting to plug in.”

  “Break a leg, Val.”

  “The hell with it. We’re off!”

  They didn’t talk after that.

  Krivoshein’s body developed in the liquid like a color negative. The white contours of the bones and tendons showed through the purple muscles with their layers of yellowish fat. His ribs rose and fell rhythmically, like a bellows. Kravets saw white swellings in two ribs on the right side. The purplish red fist of the heart contracted and relaxed, pushing along crimson streams of blood (it was no longer clear into where).

  Krivoshein didn’t take his eyes off his reflection. His face was pale and concentrated.

  Soon the muscles turned golden yellow and you could distinguish them from the liquid only by light refraction.

  “And then….” Kravets rubbed his temples with the palms of his hands, took a deep drag on his cigarette, “and then the automatic vacillations began. Like it had in the very beginning with the rabbits: everything in Val began changing size and shape synchronously. I ran up to the tank: ‘Val, what are you doing? He looked at me, but said nothing in reply. ‘The vacillations! Unplug! He tried to say something, opened his lips, and suddenly went under into the liquid. He began jerking, twisting, a dancing skeleton with a nickel — plated helmet!”

  He took another deep drag.

  “The only thing to do, to save him was to use Monomakh’s Crown and the ‘it — not it’ commands to get into rhythm with the vacillations of his body and stop them gradually, using them to return the body to the nontransparent stage. You know, external control, the way he made you,” Kravets nodded at Adam, and me.

  He stopped talking, working his jaw muscles.

  “That damn Harry! We could really have used an extra SES — 2 then. But of course there was no hope of getting a second crown after his dissertation flopped! Putting him in jail wouldn’t be enough.”

  “He probably wouldn’t even get a reprimand for not completing an order in time. It’s not like insulting a professor,” Krivoshein laughed drily. “And you can’t accuse him of anything more than that.”

  “The only way was to remove the crown from Val’s head,” Victor continued. “I jumped up on the steps, put my hands in the liquid — and I got an electric shock through both arms. Judging by the effect, I’d say four hundred or five hundred volts. There had never been potentials like that in the liquid before. Well, you know, the hands jerk away involuntarily in cases like that. I ran to the shelves, got rubber gloves, and tried again, but Val was deep inside, and the gloves weren’t long enough. The shock was so strong that this time I fell to the floor. I had to turn over the tank. I couldn’t let him dissolve into the liquid before my very eyes like… like you had.” Kravets looked over at Adam. “I was him, Krivoshein, when he was dissolving you. [Adam’s face tensed.] And he was still alive. His face had dissolved, too. There was only the crown on his skull, but he was jumping about, so that meant his muscles were working. I grabbed the edge of the tank and started shaking it. The edges are flexible and slippery but finally I pulled it down, almost on me. I just got out in time — but the liquid splashed on my face and neck and I got a third shock from that. I don’t remember the rest. I came to on the stretcher.”

  He was silent. The others said nothing. Krivoshein stood up and paced the room in thought.

  “There was nothing wrong with the way you set up the experiment. It was thought through. No evildoing, no fatal accident, not even a gross miscalculation… killed a man according to all the rules, as they say! If you hadn’t turned over the tank he would have dissolved, since the liquid that had permeated him was no longer the organizing liquid circuit. It’s too bad he kept the crown on, though. Once he was plugged into the liquid he could control it without the crown.”

  “So that’s how it is.” Kravets looked up.

  “Yes. That stupid cap was only necessary to plug into the computer — womb — and nothing else. From there the brain commands the nerves directly, and not through wires and circuits. And when the uncontrolled autovacillations began, it was the crown that destroyed him. A foreign body in the living liquid — it’s as irritating as a slingshot to a bear!”

  “Yes, but why did the vacillations start?” Adam interrupted. He turned to Kravets. “Tell me, did you investigate any further the process after the rabbits and… me?”

  “No. In the last experiments we didn’t touch on it. All the transformations were going smoothly directed only by sensations. I told you that. I can’t imagine how he lost control of himself! Did he panic? That process is sort of like confusion… but why was he confused?”

  “The switch from quantity to quality,” Adam said. “As long as you were immersing only an arm or a leg into the liquid, there were only a few ‘hotbeds of uncorrection’ which you used to control and direct the penetration of the body with the liquid. It was like talking to one or two people at the same time. But once he put in his whole body, there were naturally many more places like that in his whole body than in just parts of it, and — “

  “And instead of a decent conversation there was the incomprehensible babble of a crowd,” Krivoshein added. “And he grew confused. That’s quite possible.”

  “Listen, you self — taught experts!” Kravets glared at them. “There are always a lot of people ready to explain why something went wrong, to make themselves look bigger. ‘I warned you. I told you so! If there’s nuclear war, I’m sure there will be people who, before turning into cinders, will have time to exclaim joyously: ‘I told you so! Are you so sure that the experiment failed precisely for those reasons, that you would get into the tank if the corrections were made?”

  “No, Victor Kravets,” Krivoshein said, “not that sure. And not one of us will get into the tank just to prove that he’s right or that someone else is wrong — that’s not our work. We will have to get in, and more than once — the idea was sound. But we will do it with minimal risk and maximum benefit. And there’s no point in your getting so excited. You two made the experiment. An experiment like that! And you almost ruined the lab and the whole project. You had everything — great ideas, heroics, discoveries, meditations, high — level effort — except one thing: reasonable caution! Of course, maybe it’s not for me to reproach you. I did pretty much the same thing in one very serious experiment and almost killed myself. But tell me, why couldn’t you have called me back from Moscow to participate in this one?”

  Kravets looked at him ironically.

  “How would you have helped? You were way behind in this work.”

  The graduate student sighed: to hear that after all his labors!

  “You’re a louse, Vitya,” he said with unbelievable meekness. “It’s terrible to have to say this to someone so close to you, but you are simply a son of a bitch. I’m good enough to be used as a decoy with the police while you get off scot — free from criminal culpability? But not good enough to be a researcher on this project?” He turned away from the window.

  “What does culpability have to do with this?” Kravets muttered in confusion. “Someone had to save the project….”

  Suddenly he jumped up in terror: Onisimov was coming toward him from the window! Adam shuddered, too, and looked around in panic.

  “You wouldn’t have saved anything, suspect Kravets,” Onisimov said in an unpleasant voice, “if the head of your department hadn’t learned a thing or two in Moscow. You’d be in the defendant’s chair right now, comrade pseudo — Kravets. I’ve managed to put people behind bars with less evidence than this. Do you see?”

  This time Krivoshein got his own face back in ten seconds; the practice was paying off.

  “You mean, that was you? You let me out? Wait… how do you do that?”

  “Using biology?” Adam asked.

  “Biology and systemology.” Krivoshein massaged his cheeks calmly. “You see, unlike you two, I remember what it was like being part of the computer — womb.”

  “Tell us how you do
it,” Kravets nagged.

  “I’ll tell you, don’t worry, all in good time. We’ll set up a seminar. Now we’re going to use this knowledge in conjunction with our work on the computer — womb. But applying it to life will have to be done very carefully.” He looked at his watch and turned to Kravets and Adam. “It’s time. Let’s go to the lab. We’ll reconstruct your experiment.”

  “Hah.. those crazy scientists!” the chief of police laughed and shook his head when Matvei Apollonovich reported the final clearing up of the events at the Institute of Systemology. “You mean, while you were gathering evidence and talking to the academician, the ‘corpse’ crawled out from under the oilcloth and went to the shower?”

  “Yes, exactly. He wasn’t himself after the blow to his head, comrade colonel.”

  “Naturally! It can take less than that. And the skeleton right next to him. Hah! That’s what comes of not studying the scene of the incident carefully enough, comrade Onisimov,” and Aleksei Ignatyevich raised his forefinger didactically. “You didn’t take the specifics of the place into account. This isn’t going out to see a highway accident or a drowning — it’s a scientific laboratory! They’ve always got a hellish amount of stuff going on. That’s science. You were careless, Matvei Apollonovich!”

  “Should I tell him how it really was?” Onisimov thought glumly. “No, he wouldn’t believe it.”

  “But how did that first — aid doctor make such a mistake, declaring a live person dead?” thought the colonel aloud. “Oh, I have a feeling their rate of success isn’t very high. She looked at him, saw that the man was poorly, figured he’d die in the clinic anyway, and this way their statistics would look better if he was DO A.”

  “Maybe she just made a mistake, Aleksei Ignatyevich,” Onisimov defended her generously. “He was in shock, deep faint, and wounded. And so she — “

  “Perhaps. Too bad that Zubato wasn’t there. He always goes on the pattern of spots and marks on the body. He’s never wrong. Hm… of course, it would have been nice to have called this a solved case — the end of the quarter is coming up, and it would have looked good — but to hell with the statistics. The important thing is that everyone is alive and well. Yet,” he looked at Onisimov, “there’s still the discrepancy with Kravets’s papers. What about that?”