by Adam Roberts
But this, I realised at once, was the wrong tack to take. The worry lines disappeared from Trofim’s brow, and a rather vulgarly calculating expression passed across his eyes. ‘But, comrade,’ he said, ‘Didn’t you yourself fight in the Great Patriotic War? How many millions died then, defending Russia? How many is too many? Some thousands may perish in Ukraine, but they will be sacrificing their lives for a greater purpose.’
I felt my temper begin to stretch. Clearly the thing to do at that time, in that place, was to try and talk Trofim round; get him to holster his gun and put the grenade down. To persuade him to leave. Who better to do this than a man who has spent years as a writer honing his powers of expression? But I had had a long day. ‘Oh, don’t be idiotic,’ I snapped. ‘Purpose? What plan could possibly justify such sacrifice of life?’
He looked almost gloating. ‘It’s secret.’
‘So? You’re going to kill me anyway!’
‘Yes,’ he agreed, slowly, as if the reality of the situation were only then dawning on him. ‘I suppose I am going to kill you.’ My stomach swirled.
‘So, why not tell me?’
‘Oh no,’ he said, ingenuously. ‘I was ordered to tell nobody.’
‘Comrade, permit me to say, I believe you will tell me. What harm can there be in talking to a dead man? Dead men keep secrets better than anybody.’
‘Orders.’
‘You’d send me to my grave without knowing?’
This clearly troubled him. ‘I do apologise, comrade. But there’s really nothing I can say.’
I had to keep him talking. Perhaps, I thought to myself, Saltykov will come back in, creep up behind him and disarm him. I didn’t want to dwell on the details of how he would do this: Saltykov’s weakling-buffoonishness tangling with this slab of honed military flesh. If I had tried to picture the details to myself its impossibility would have impressed itself upon my mind and scorched my hope. But I wanted to hang on to the possibility. ‘I shall try and reason with you, comrade,’ I said, ‘as one old soldier to another. Things have very clearly not gone according to plan for you, here in Chernobyl. You will have to explain to your superiors why you failed to complete your mission. Take me back to Moscow, and I will support your story. Any story you care to concoct. I am a writer after all, and good at concocting stories.’
‘Stories of monstrous octocats from space,’ he said, in an enormously mournful voice.
‘Science fiction is the literature of the future,’ I said, scratching through my brain to recall some of the vatic emptinesses of Frenkel’s pronouncements on the genre. ‘Science fiction imagines the future. It seeks not to reproduce the world, as have all hitherto existing literatures, but to change it. It is the Communism of literary forms. It is the literature of proletarian possibilities.’
‘I am truly sorry, comrade,’ he said. ‘But I cannot report failure of the mission to Moscow. I must detonate the grenade.’
‘Even though it will kill you.’
‘It will kill you also.’
‘That,’ I said, ‘is also an important consideration.’
‘My father,’ said Trofim, standing straighter as he gave vent to this small confession, ‘was a soldier. He died of cancer. He said, in hospital, that he wished he’d died on the battlefield. He said that dying on the battlefield was better than dying in hospital. If I have to choose, I know which one I prefer.’
‘You omit the third option, which is not to die at all.’
‘To complete the mission,’ he said, holding out the grenade.
‘Think, Trofim! You want to turn this premier nuclear facility into a radioactive crater? Think of the hundreds of thousands you will slaughter! Children - women—’
Then Trofim said the most extraordinary thing I ever heard him utter. In a clear voice, as if reciting sacred text, he said, ‘We are not alone in the universe, comrade.’
It took me a moment to gather enough of my wits even to reply. ‘What?’
‘There are higher intelligences guiding what we do here.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Comrade, they are radiation aliens. If I detonate this grenade, and explode this nuclear pile, I will transform my grossly material consciousness into pure radiation.’
‘No you won’t,’ I said.
‘Yes, I will.’
‘Seriously, Trofim, you won’t.’
‘Yes,’ he repeated, articulating a credo too grounded in faith to be challenged, ‘I will. My consciousness will move to a higher dimension.’
‘Trofim, you don’t sound like yourself.’
‘It will not be death. I will be translated into a realm of pure energy. This blast will propel me, and I will face our sponsors face to face.’
I considered this, and tried to formulate the most trenchant criticism. There had to be a way I could make Trofim see its lunacy; some form of words that would persuade him. In the end I opted for, ‘No you won’t.’
‘Yes I will.’
‘Translated into pure radiation? Meeting radiation aliens? This won’t happen.’
‘Yes it will.’
‘No it won’t.’
‘Yes it will.’
‘No it won’t.’
‘Yes it will.’
‘It will not.’
‘Yes it will.’
This argumentative strategy was not having the desired result. I tried a different tack. ‘If you explode the grenade, all that will happen is that you will exterminate your consciousness, and mine.’
‘No I won’t,’ he said.
‘You’ll die.’
‘No I won’t.’
‘Yes you will.’
‘No I won’t.’
‘Yes you will!’
‘I shall meet the radiation aliens,’ he said, firmly.
‘Comrade,’ I said. ‘Listen to me carefully. The radiation aliens - I made them up. Me! You’re talking to their creator. Comrade Frenkel and I, and a gaggle of other science fiction writers, back in the 1940s. We wrote them.’
He was looking at, but not seeing, me. ‘Comrade Frenkel . . .’
‘Comrade Frenkel has his own reasons for wanting to pretend this absurd narrative is real. But it is not real. Please do not believe in my ridiculous science fiction! I do not write science fiction for you to believe in it! For God’s sake! For the sake of the Mekon himself - don’t! None of us really understood what radiation even was, back then! It was all rumour, and conjecture, and wild stories about the American attack on Hiroshima. We didn’t know! If you pull that pin, you won’t be translating yourself into a higher consciousness; you’ll be blasting yourself into sand and ash and scattering yourself in fine grained, radioactive form across the whole east of Europe.’
‘Comrade Frenkel told me,’ said Trofim, with a stubbornness that was not aggressive, since it inhered simply, we might even say purely, in the very limitations of his own mind, ‘told me that you were a slippery fish. A slippery fish, he called you.’
‘You can’t believe all this UFO mumbo-jumbo?’
‘Of course!’ he said.
‘You’ve been brainwashed,’ I told him. ‘You’ve joined a cult.’
‘Religion,’ he said, as if considering the concept.
‘Marx called religion the opium of the people,’ I said, angrily. ‘But at least opium is a high-class drug. UFO religion? That’s the methylated spirits of the people. It’s the home-still beetroot-alcohol of the people.’ I was furious, of course, because I knew I had failed. This had been my chance to talk Trofim round - poor, dumbheaded Trofim. This had been my moment to overpower him with my superior wits, just as he would (given the chance) have overpowered me with his superior muscles. But if my supposed skill with words was not sufficient even to persuade an individual like Trofim, then what good was I? In retrospect I wonder if I wasn’t being unfair to myself. It is of course easier to fool an intelligent man than a stupid one, for the intelligent man is in the habit of shifting his thoughts around and around, wh
ere the stupid one more often than not has fastened onto a single notion like a swimmer clinging to the raft that will keep him afloat. In retrospect, I suppose I could never have persuaded Trofim of the idiocy of believing that the middle of an atomic blast was the gateway to a higher mode of existence.
I fumbled in my jacket pocket and located a cigarette. It was, I knew, the last cigarette I would ever smoke - and so it proved.
‘What are you doing?’ said Trofim.
‘I’m smoking my last cigarette,’ I said, snapping back the metal lid of lighter and manoeuvring its knob of flame onto the end of the white tube. ‘The last cigarette,’ I added, ‘that I shall ever smoke.’ Sucking the smoke into my chest added a tincture of calm to the rattled choler of my body. My stress unnotched itself one belthole. I breathed out, lengthily.
‘I believe that smoking is not permitted in here, comrade.’
‘By all means,’ I said, ‘fetch a supervisor and report me.’
He stared at me. ‘Smoking is very bad for your health,’ he said.
‘So is being caught at the exact heart of a nuclear conflagration.’
‘Comrade,’ he said mournfully, ‘please do not be sarcastic.’ There was a popping noise: Trofim was tutting. That would be like him - to tut me like a disappointed schoolmaster.
‘I’ll make you a deal,’ I replied. ‘I will abjure sarcasm for the remainder of my earthly existence, if you agree not to pull the pin on your grenade.’
‘It’s too late.’
I breathed in another long draw on my cigarette. Despite the absurd situation in which I found myself, relaxation was starting to spread through my muscles. ‘This alien realm to which you will be transported. Will I get there too? Or will I be blasted to material atoms, even as you translate into radiation consciousness?’
‘You don’t understand, comrade,’ he said.
‘I’m trying to understand.’
‘You don’t believe.’
‘Comrade Trofim,’ I said, turning away from him to face the pool, ‘if you pull that pin, then I shall lose all respect for you.’
‘I have already pulled the pin, comrade,’ he said, in a wavery voice.
That was what the popping sound had been. The fuse had been ticking down all those long seconds of chatter. I had, perhaps, a single second remaining of earthly life.
It seems very strange to me, looking back at that mortal portion of my existence, to think that I could, standing as I was on the very lip of eternity, give myself over to petty annoyance. But mortal humanity cannot ever prepare itself for death, for the very good reason that we can only prepare for events with which we are familiar, or which we can comprehend, and our own death is neither of these things. Until we are dead we will stubbornly believe, in some corner of our consciousness, that we will continue living; and once we are dead it is, naturally, too late to believe anything at all. As the mechanical fuse marked off the last remaining second of my life I was aware, of course, that I had failed. I found it was possible to bring all my consciousness into the focal point of the cigarette at my mouth. I drew a very last lungful of smoke. Of all the cigarettes I had smoked before, this may have been the most simply pleasurable. Previously I had either been aware that I was smoking, an awareness tinged necessarily with guilt at the harmful effects the foul stuff was having upon me, or else I had smoked from automatic, unconscious habit, as I concentrated upon something else, in which case I was hardly aware that I was smoking at all. But for that one perfect moment, on the edge of death, I could suck the tobacco into my lungs knowing that, since I was dying anyway, it could do me no harm. I began to breathe out a tentacle of smoke, and with the smoke blew away all my anger. It felt like a lifetime’s anger. And, in that perfect moment, two thoughts occurred to me. One was the purest optimism, and it was this: The grenade may be a dud. The other, which seemed to spool naturally from that first, was: I shall ask him simply to replace the pin, and he will do this. As to why I believed I would be able to persuade Trofim to do this, I’m not sure. It came into my head as clearly, and purely, as a revelation. It was all I needed to do. I started to turn my head, saying, ‘Com—’
I heard just the start of a roar; no more than a split second before it vanished entirely from my sensorium, or else before my sensorium vanished entirely. The material solidity of the space we were in was deconstructed and reconstructed as light, clear and bright and warm, alive and bright and warm. It was pure light. I did not have time to think, the grenade has detonated, Chernobyl has exploded - I did not, then, have time to think anything at all because there was no time at all. Time had evaporated. Instead of time there was the experience, filtered as if through memory, of white light and white heat, the rushing and beating upon me of great waves, monumental tides, of white light and white heat. A process of replacing every single one of the carbon atoms in my body with photons; and a reverberating pulse that swarmed upon the net of my nerves.
When I was a child, I had believed that death was a red-haired man.
Out of perfect whiteness and the perfection of the light a single point of sensual connection began to coalesce; one unsullied, soprano musical note, a musical note as pure as mathematics, like an angel singing, a spirit-entity heralding my arrival in a new place.
PART THREE
‘Жumъ cmaлo лyuwe, mobapuщu. Жumъ cmaлo beceлee.’
‘[Life has got better, comrades! Life has become more joyful!]’
Stalin, speech to the Stakhanovites’ conference, 17 November 1935
The clarity of this sustained, pure musical note was beautiful. Then it was insistent. Presently it became annoying.
I had been annoyed for much of my life. It occurred to me it made sense I would translate into the afterlife in the same state of mind.
‘Have you never wondered,’ somebody asked me, ‘why tinnitus manifests as a musical note in that manner?’
‘I have never wondered that,’ I said. ‘It has never occurred to me.’ I wasn’t speaking. The other voice wasn’t speaking. This was a new mode of existence, a new form of communication. Thought to thought. I had been translated into pure radiation.
‘It is, in effect, a malfunction of the inner ear,’ said my interlocutor.
I was in a new sort of space. An endlessly busy hurricane of light, with roaring, and then the roaring abruptly stopped. White, or bright whiteness speckled with a billion scuffs of bright grey. The musical note emerged from it, as pure as before. As pure as before. The violin sound had modulated, surfed a sinewave, intensifying and shrinking alternately. Like a squeaky wheel turning over and over.
It was a bird, singing in amongst the foliage.
Yes, there was foliage. It was like a poem by Fet. I walked through the light and it gradually coalesced into strands beneath my walking feet. The strands were bronze-coloured, not white, and then darker-coloured, and clearly it was grass. Strolling over grass, a slight upward incline, a long July hill leading up into brightness. ‘And now I shall meet the radiation aliens,’ I thought to myself. ‘I, who doubted their existence for so long!’
The upward slope of the hill invited me to keep walking. It was a peaceful rhythm, heatbeatlike; and it seemed to involve no physical effort. That was my first intimation that things were different. The sky above me was an intense yet milky blue, very bright, very right, and it did not hurt my eyes. The grass beneath my feet was the beer-coloured, though dry, central Russian summer pasture. The stems of the grass were soft as strands of hair. They reached to my ankles. It was an intensely pleasurable experience to walk through it.
I was coming up, in a leisurely way, to a dacha: exactly the same as the dacha in which I had spent those weeks, immediately after the war, with Sergei Rapoport, Adam Kaganovich, Nikolai Asterinov and the other person, whose name I could not then remember. But it was not exactly the same for, hovering above the low roof, very clearly visible against the bright sky, were two mighty letters:
SF
Science Fiction, of course! H
ow tremendously, how deeply exciting! At last I understood. I was approaching the mansion of science fiction itself. The radiation aliens, who had received my energetic engram (or whatever had happened to me inside the reactor) were now bringing me, in a profound sense, home. Naturally, I grasped the rightness of this. It had been in an earthly manifestation of this house that we, the writers of Soviet science fiction, had concocted the aliens in the first place. And the aliens had turned out to be real! We had channelled, without realising it, the true nature of the cosmos. We had articulated actuality and we had thought we had been writing fiction. We were hierophants of a hidden futurity, the pens that scribbled what they understood not. But in death - in my death - I had finally understood. The American, Coyne, had indeed been snatched up by aliens. There had been no rope. The rope had been a figment of my imagination, my way of rationalising the tractoring-beam of alien technology. My scepticism had corrupted my own experience, for the aliens were real. Trofim had not been babbling when he talked of them. And here they were! In this house! And I had invented them, or rather they had invented me. That last phrase made a trembly, hair-tickling, heart-thumping sense. They had written me, as I had written them. I had never stopped being a writer of science fiction, and the paradox of the phrase is that science fiction is living fact.
I quickened my pace. Naturally I was eager finally to meet the aliens, for I believed they would explain everything to me. The snake bites its own tail.
My excitement was such that it took me a moment to comprehend that there was something wrong with the floating signifier, the two holographic letters hovering over the roof of the dacha. I looked again, and saw that the S was twisted about. Something was wrong with it. It was proclaiming not SF, not exactly. I looked again.
ZF
It was no Z; the S was the wrong way about. This was a puzzle. Of course, I was looking at Cyrillic, not Latin, characters: which is to say, the ‘S’ was a C and it was the C that was mirror-written. The F (which is to say, the Φ) was not inverted. It was the correct way about. Why would one letter be reversed and the other not? My brain buzzed, and lurched. Then it occurred to me that one property of the character Φ is its mirror-symmetry, such that it looks the same from front as from back. From here, but slowly, as the most obvious things sometimes do occur, I reasoned that I was looking not at SF, but at FS from behind.