‘All right, all right. Let me think. Let’s agree’, said Kostya slowly, ‘that the world is finite. Whatever they say about limitless nature in dialectical materialism classes, the amount of something that you can actually lay your hands on, at any one moment, is always limited, yes? Organisms have a limited food supply, mines contain a limited amount of iron ore, factories have a limited supply of raw materials to work with. The fundamental economic situation is one of scarcity.’
‘Yes.’
‘Yet we mean to get from scarcity to plenty. So the economic task is to allocate our limited resources in the most efficient way possible. The socialist economy tries to do that by pushing factories to do more every year. But here’s the catch. We don’t want them to do more. We really want them to do the least they can possibly do that will still fulfil the plan. Yet the targets they’re given don’t make that possible. The target for a transport enterprise, for example, is given in ton-kilometres. They’re supposed to move the greatest weight they can over the greatest distance they can – which is hopeless, it should be exactly the other way around, so long as everyone who needs stuff moved is happy. We need new targets. And luckily, thanks to Valentin’s boss, Professor Kantorovich, who is standing just over there, the mathematical means exist to create them.’
‘Not ton-kilometres.’
‘No; and not kilowatt-hours of electricity either, or litres of refined gasoline, or square metres of spun nylon. Did you know that last year more than half of the hosiery delivered to shops was sub-standard?’
‘Let’s say that I had an anecdotal appreciation of that fact, from trying to put some of it on.’
‘Kostya really knows how to talk to girls, don’t you think?’ said Valentin. ‘No, no, go on: league after league of malformed stockings…’
‘The point being that it was incredibly hard for the stores to send the bad stuff back to the knitting mills, because it all counted towards their output targets. What we need is a planning system that counts the value of production rather the quantity. But that, in turn, requires prices which express the value of what’s produced.’
‘The value to whom?’
‘Good question,’ said Valentin.
‘Not just the value to the producer, or even to the consumer, because that only gives you capitalism again, surging to and fro, doing everything by trial and error. It’s got to be the value to the whole system; the amount it helps with what the whole economy is trying to do in the present plan period. And it turns out that a set of prices exist which will do that. But –’
‘But,’ agreed Valentin.
‘But – in order to work, they have to be active. They have to keep changing along with the changing possibilities of the economy; they can’t be fixed by an administrator in an office somewhere. So, in order to get them –’
‘– you have to automate the management f the economy,’ said Valentin, forgetting to be frivolous. ‘You have to take away the discretion of the bureaucrats, and treat the economy as –’
‘Ta-dah!’ said Kostya.
‘– one big connected cybernetic system. With software –’
‘Ta-dah!’
‘– written by us.’
‘Or at any rate, written by great minds whom we are, from time to time, honoured to be able to help out.’
‘In our obscure and menial way.’
‘Hang on,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t that mean that the economy has to be completely centralised? I mean, perfectly centralised?’
‘Ah,’ said Valentin, ‘no. It could mean that; and in fact Academician Glushkov of the Ukrainian Academy has proposed a rival system in which the computers really do track every single nut and bolt that come off the production line, and take every single decision. But –’
‘– but –’ said Kostya, smiling.
‘– this is where the game theory comes in. That stuff about the many-person non-coalition game? It turns out that the mathematics is indifferent to whether the optimal level of production is organised hierarchically or happens in many distributed, autonomous units. So long as the prices generated by the algorithms are correct, all of the decisions can be made locally. There’s no loss of efficiency.’
‘And this is good because …?’
‘Because it means you can have a society dedicated to maximising the total social benefits of production, without everyone having to obey orders all the time.’
‘Do you like obeying orders?’ said Kostya.
‘No.’
‘Well then.’
They were joking about; but still, in joke, they were talking as if the heaviest, most inevitable parts of the order of things had suddenly lost the awful mass that strained the earth beneath them, and risen up to be played with, soap-bubble-easy. It was as if gravity had failed. They were talking as if having the right idea stole away the weight of refineries and textile works, department stores and ministries, technologies and social systems, and set them floating where they stood, to be switched and swivelled about at the touch of a hand, to be tried out at will in experimental configurations, now like this, now like that. Usually she would have scoffed. Not overtly, of course: by asking them how the great work was going, and leading them with gentle malignity to the point where they had to confess complications, frustrations, disappointment. She did not quite think of herself as a bitch, but the last few years had not been fun, and she had developed a certain sour pleasure in easing awkward facts into view. But the boys were grinning at her, most charmingly, and it occured to her that they really might not, yet, have been disappointed. And she was finding, too, that gravity did not seem to have its whole grip on her. Tonight, without Max nearby, and her attention constantly extended into the entire zone around her where he orbited, there seemed to be less of her than she was used to, and what was left was, exactly, lighter. Lighter, less responsible, more prone to bob and shift if the breath of circumstance blew on her. She grinned back.
‘So which ones are your great minds, again?’ she asked.
‘All right,’ said Kostya. ‘Just there by the buffet is our Leonid Vitalevich. Resident genius.’
‘Candidate member of the Academy. King of mathematical economics. Prince of cybernetics. Rabbi of functional analysis. Master of algorithms. The White Crow himself,’ said Valentin.
The genius was a short man, becoming tubby, with a nose that didn’t seem large enough to explain the nickname, though she could see that it was probably growing beakier in effect as the rest of his head got more convex.
‘And the person he’s talking to’ – slight, ascetic, horn-rimmed glasses – ‘is Professor Ershov of the computer centre.’
‘Who says –’
‘Who famously says –’
‘“A programmer”’, they chorused together, ‘“must combine the accuracy of a bank clerk with the acumen of an Indian tracker, and add in the imagination of a crime writer and the practicality of a businessman.”’
‘And then,’ Kostya went on, ‘if you look right a little bit, that’s my boss, the other chair of the seminar, Dr Shaidullin. Ah, he’s coming over.’
Yes, he was: slight but sleek, full of the assumption of power, with delicate features and a long narrow skull down whose sides the curly hair was retreating. Whatever else was different in Akademgorodok, this was not. Strangers get the once-over from someone in authority. It was a law of life, an almost biological law, for it was how institutions protected themselves, how they operated an immune system. When an interloper appeared, so must the human equivalent of a white blood cell, to see if what had arrived in the social bloodstream was a pathogen. Watch, children, she thought, if you don’t know how this is done. You’ll be doing it yourselves before very long.
‘A face I don’t know,’ Shaidullin remarked, giving her a look that mixed one part of carnal consideration with many parts of suspicion. He held out his hand, and she shook it, but as the opening formality of an examination. She told him her name, he asked her where she would be working in Ak
ademgorodok. She told him that, he asked her where she had come from. She told them that, and told him where she had been before, and who had taught her, and who had taught them, until in a few minutes he had an academic lineage for her. The mood perceptibly relaxed as it became clear that she came from the untainted part of the biological family tree, and became almost cordial when she mentioned the name of Nemchinov, her supervisor’s supervisor – who had, come to think of it, left genetics to go off and do something to do with economics.
Shaidullin, of course, wanted a milder, less urgent version of the assurance that the Director of her institute had been after, when she went through a similar interrogation with him earlier in the day. ‘And will you be a good comrade?’ the Director had ended. Meaning, we wanted you because you were a real geneticist, but will you be tactful about it? Will you lie when lying is necessary, will you be silent when silence is necessary, will you obfuscate when obfuscation is necessary? Will you back us up when we do these things? Meaning, above all: are you going to be trouble? It seemed to her that it would take an unlikely kind of honesty to give anything but the answer the question asked for, but perhaps the art here, tt of vigilance, lay in judging how people gave the inevitable answer, obligingly or otherwise, convincingly or otherwise. She couldn’t tell how convincing she had been, herself, for the truthful reply would have been that she didn’t know; that she was not sure, any more, how good a comrade she had it in her to be.
At last Shaidullin smiled – a provisional smile. She was in, or in enough for the purposes of the evening. Valentin and Kostya had said nothing, because there would have been no point in offering any endorsement of her till she had been judged worth endorsing. Now, with the signal given, they brought up the seminar, and to her surprise Shaidullin took the suggestion that she be booked to speak entirely seriously. They were talking about dates before she knew it. Shaidullin exhibited an easy, impressive, tactful familiarity with the current anguishes of her subject, as if it were only normal for an educated person to know a smattering of every science; and an easy familiarity, too, with its big names, as if that were his natural company and (he flatteringly implied) hers as well. He raised his eyebrows at her enquiringly, as Valentin launched into another breathless riff. What are you doing with these little boys? She gave him the eyebrow lift back, wide-eyed and uninformative. Mind your own business, sir. Playing, she thought. I’m playing. It’s a summer night and I’m playing. Shaidullin put on, for one split comical second, a long face that must have come from some ancestral store: it was a commercial expression, a bazaar merchant’s good-humoured dumbshow of disappointment, to be deployed when you turned down his very reasonable offer. She smiled at him properly, and turned to egg Valentin on as he climbed up his new mound of rhetoric.
And the invisible fissure which had separated her from the rest of the party closed. The crowd thickened around her. More drinks appeared. Shaidullin, as he moved smoothly away, snagged a passing physicist with a mossy, nineteenth-century beard and sent him back to make conversation with her about the theory of automata. It turned out that he had attended one of Timofeev-Ressovsky’s famous genetics summer schools in the Urals: it was, he said, quite true that the audience was encouraged to sit in the lake in their swimsuits, while the lecturer scribbled at a blackboard set up on the shore. Valentin and Kostya were joined by a gaggle of their friends, including, she was amused to see, a girl in a hairband who laughed enthusiastically at everything Valentin said, and shot poisonous glances in her own direction.
‘“Tahiti”,’ announced the boy leading the band, and Hairband Girl swiftly grabbed Valentin and pulled him onto the dancefloor. Kostya made a face.
‘You’re not dancing?’ she said.
‘All this old stuff gives me the shits,’ he said. ‘I don’t see the point.’
She wondered whether Historical Beard might be in the mood to dance, but before she could find out, another voice said, ‘Excuse me. May I?’ It was the genius.
The Master of Algorithms only came up to her chin,but when the foxtrot started he clasped her firmly round the shoulders with one pudgy arm, shot the other one straight out with his hand round hers and was off with pace and attack, leaning back slightly so she could see a little more of him than just the bald crown of his head. Ba-ba-ba, BA, ba, went the band. Oh, he had mastered the algorithm for this, all right; they whirled, the room whirled, and he put her through the turns with precise glee. As the faces of the onlookers and the other dancers went by, she saw the same look directed at the pair of them over and over: a sort of affectionate satisfaction. It was, she saw, part of the genius’s legend that he should do this, that he should like to do this. She wondered, for a moment, what she had let herself in for, but the touch of his hands was entirely correct, in the old-fashioned sense, and his expression was nothing but friendly. She had the impression, too, that if she had surrendered to her pressing urge to giggle, it would not have mattered to Leonid Vitalevich very much; perhaps he was not so far from giggling himself.
‘Thank you,’ he said afterwards. ‘I enjoyed that very much.’
‘So did I,’ she said, truthfully.
‘Emil tells me you’ll be coming to talk to us? Good. I find myself more and more interested by the robust homeostasis of biological systems.’
They talked for a little while about cellular self-regulation, and then he went. He had his eye, she could see, on another tall woman on the other side of the room.
‘Comrades, ladies and gentlemen, the White Crow!’ cried Valentin, crowing himself.
‘He likes to dance, doesn’t he.’
‘He loves to dance. And always with good-looking women. But there’s a moral here, you know. I’ve seen old photographs of him, and he was good-looking himself, not too long ago. A nice, brown-eyed boy.’
‘What’s your moral?’
‘Simple. Brown-eyed boys don’t last very long. That’s why you have to pluck us while we’re ripe. During our brief flowering.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Kostya.
‘“Blue Horizon”,’ declared the band leader. A clarinet began to hoist the sorrows of the world skyward, by patient stages.
‘Does this suit you any better?’ she asked Kostya.
‘Not really. I don’t like Dixieland any more than I like swing.’
‘Kostya’s a bebop man,’ said Valentin. ‘He’s strict in his loyalties.’
‘If you want to hear good jazz round here,’ Kostya said, ‘the only place is Under the Integral. Even these guys experiment a bit, there. It’s a club,’ he added, seeing her looking blank. ‘You know, like Aelita in Moscow.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know much about music.’ Or care much, she politely didn’t say. She could never hold patterns of sound in her memory for very long. Probably some specialised protein was missing. ‘You probably don’t want to dance to this, then?’
‘Kostya doesn’t, on the whole,’ said Valentin. ‘Generally he prefers to just stand around, inhaling the vapours of the cool.’ She looked at Kostya.
‘Thank you but no,’ he said.
‘I, on the other hand, am very much available,’ said Valentin. Hairband Girl vibrated with indignation at his shoulder.
*
She did dance with Valentin, but not for a slow number. She also danced with the bashful, newly-anointed Candidate of Science whose part was; and then again for a second time with Leonid Vitalevich, once a sufficiently venerable and sufficiently rule-defined dance step came up. She chatted with Kostya’s economist colleagues and Valentin’s mathematical ones, wandering away from the pair of them on long looping arcs, but always intercepting them again; or perhaps always being intercepted again. She even made an effort to talk to Hairband Girl, but got back only hostile monosyllables and a face of rabbitlike defiance. The food ran out but the drink did not.
‘A bunch of us are going on,’ said Valentin, as the party wound up. ‘Are you coming? Leonid Vitalevich is holding open house, and he said to invite you.’
‘Which way we do walk?’ she asked.
‘Walk? Pfah!’ said Valentin. ‘Our White Crow is famous for lots of things; and one them is for just how much he likes the car they gave him.’
Leonid Vitalevich had stepped to the kerb and raised his hand with a conjurer’s solemnity: a long green Volga slid obediently out of the shadows. He opened the passenger-side door and sat down next to the driver.
‘Now we fit the rest of us into the back,’ Valentin said. ‘It’s a topological exercise, tricky but not impossible. If you just sit on my knee –’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you should sit on mine –’
But the others ignored both of them and crowded straight in, carrying her to a position topologically quite separate from Valentin’s, halfway down a tangled wedge of arms and legs in the far corner of the big back seat. So far as anyone was on her knee, Hairband Girl was, angrily shifting about, and in the end sticking her feet out of the open window. The weight was quite something. But there it was again, even with gravity doing its worst: that lightness, that sense of pressing on the world with less than the whole of herself. Kostya looked in without envy through the other window.
‘See you there,’ he said. ‘I’m just going to go and get something.’
The car pulled away, full of laughter. Someone towards the bottom of the heap started to sing, and the rest joined in raggedly, with grunts of discomfort as the car jolted on the unfinished roadways. The glow of the lighted piece of street holding the hotel and the cinema dwindled behind them, and they entered a black zone with no lamp standards at all. Her eyes adjusted, and she began to make out the bulks of buildings going by, spiky with scaffolding, against a sky absurdly thick with stars.
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