by Adam Roberts
FS
So I was coming up towards the back of the dacha - and indeed I was, because I recognised the slope, and the broad windows of the back room in which we had sat and talked decades before. Yet this was a puzzlement, because I could not understand what FS abbreviated. But I was at the house now, very conscious of the fact that I had believed myself to be approaching from the front. This unnerved me. Nobody wants to sneak up the back route when they can march proudly up the front. I hurried along the side of the building, a huge beige rectangle with two blank windows like eyeholes in a robot skull, and I kept glancing upwards as I jogged so as not to lose sight of the gleaming letters. It was clearer now. The building was labelled not SF but the reverse:
Φ C
And then, with a second sense of foolishness at being so slow to realise, I saw that there were more than two letters. There were two strings of letters. Not individual signifiers, but strands like DNA encoding a more profound mystery. It was that I had not seen the other letters until I came round the front. But now I could see that the F was the end of one word, and the S the beginning of another. I was a little breathless now, and panting, an intimation that I had translated some of my earthly limitations into this new mode of existence - my shortness of breath, for example - and I stopped, gazing upwards, to get a good view of the legend. It was written in bold and unmistakable letters. I could not understand how I had not seen it fully before: shining script, each letter a metre high:
иocиΦ Cтaлин
And from looking up I looked down, and he was there, standing on the porch. He was beaming at me. He was the most distinctive-looking human being I think I have ever laid eyes upon. Of course he was here, in this place. ‘Josef Stalin,’ I gasped, hurrying forward. ‘Josef Stalin.’
‘Comrade Skvorecky,’ he boomed. ‘Come up here! Come up to the porch! Let us talk!’
I was in my twenties again, and as nervy and callow as ever I had been in that decade. ‘To find you here, comrade!’ I kept babbling. ‘To find you here!’
‘You are surprised?’
But, as he asked that question, I realised I was not surprised. Surprise did not describe my state of mind. I apprehended inevitability as, itself, an emotion. Of course I would meet Stalin. Had I ever believed that Death had red hair? Death was not a red-haired man. Here I was.
He led me through the main door. The hallway inside was exactly as I remembered it. We went through to the back room: there were the broad windows, and their view over the rain-washed green of Russian hills.
‘I am not surprised, comrade,’ I said, bravely. ‘I take it I am not alive any more?’
‘Consider,’ said Stalin, settling himself into a chair. I looked around: we two were in the familiar old room of the dacha. There was the same photo on the wall, although this time Stalin was surrounded not by Molotov, Mikoyan, Kalinin but by Rapoport, Kaganovich, Asterinov and myself. I was there in the photograph, scowling my twenty-eight-year-old scowl, and all the others were grinning. I thought: At least I am alive with my scowl. Much good their grins will do them now they’re all of them dead. But then I realised I was dead too, scowl and all. Everything had changed.
Stalin sat there, looking up at me.
‘Consider,’ he said, lighting a cigarette and puffing it contentedly. ‘You were inside the main reactor room of a nuclear reactor. You stood in that place at the precise moment it exploded. Do you think you could survive such a blast?’
‘No.’
‘Ah! But it was no ordinary blast! It is one thing to be blown up by high explosive, and quite another to be blown up by radiation. As the citizens of Hiroshima discovered! Radiation!’ He beamed, and the strands of his moustache spread minutely. I fancied I could almost hear them rustling.
There were seats on the far side of the room. I picked my way over the bare boards of the floor and sat down. But I had no cigarettes. I was aware that I had smoked my last cigarette. I had stood inside the reactor building and smoked my last ever cigarette. That was all over, now.
‘Radiation?’ I said.
‘Radiation,’ he confirmed.
‘Let me put it this way,’ I offered, trying to master my sense of over-awe. ‘For a long time I disbelieved the existence of alien beings, these creatures - you - from another star. I accepted that other people did believe. I simply did not share their belief. But is it the case that . . . I am now meeting the aliens?’
Stalin’s face was capable of great sternness, but also of great benevolence. Such a warm and wide smile!
‘Might it be,’ I said, ‘that I am not encountering you as you really are? Perhaps you are assuming a human shape, to facilitate interaction between us? You have been into my mind and pulled out this memory.’ I cast my arms around. ‘This memory of me being in this dacha. Of me meeting the original Stalin. Using that memory you have built this imagined space, in which you and I can talk. But you are not truly Stalin.’
‘I am truly Stalin,’ he said, his smile broadening further.
‘But as a radiation alien,’ I suggested, ‘surely you do not naturally possess corporeal form? Surely not.’
‘And what do you know about the radiation aliens?’ Stalin asked me.
‘I thought I knew,’ I said. ‘I thought I’d written you. I thought I had created you.’
‘A common human mistake. You think yourselves Frankensteins, to have made monsters. But the monsters were always there. It was never needful for you to create them.’
‘I did not think I had done it alone,’ I said, nodding at the photograph.
‘You could not have done it alone.’
‘So it’s not that we wrote you - is it that you somehow shaped us?’
Stalin puffed his cigarette. Light from the uncurtained windows made beauty in the unfolding curves and curls, shells and eels of smoke.
‘Consider,’ he said again. ‘What is radiation? It is light. Does light not hurt us? Have you never been sunburnt, comrade?’
‘Sunburn,’ I repeated.
‘Many people believe that aliens lurk in the shadows, hide away. That they only emerge at night, like vampires.’ He chuckled. ‘No! No! Aliens come from the stars, not from the darkness between the stars. We come precisely out of the light. It is simply our brilliance that is harmful to you. That’s all. And who has been more harmful than I?’
‘The malign star shining down upon us,’ I said. ‘The star wormwood, the Chernobyl.’
‘I was in full view! All the time! In the centre of the brightly lit stage. And look at you, with your burnt face!’
I put my hands to my face: I was no longer in my twenties. The skin had been scorched by age, and vodka, and tobacco, and above all scorched by—
He could, of course, read my mind.
‘By light!’ he said. ‘Your face was scorched by light!’
‘Light altered my form,’ I said, running a finger over the thickened tab of scar tissue over the end of my nose.
‘So.’ Stalin gestured at himself, at his stocky, barrelled torso. ‘Human form? Look at me. Remember what I did. Was I ever human?’
‘You were inhuman,’ I said, with a sense of dawning comprehension.
‘Exactly so! I was always the alien. Always - it was always there. I fought the Nazis and killed a million of them, soldiers and civilians. Why did I fight the Nazis? To protect the Russian people?’ Every time he made his expressive gesture with his right hand, a comet-tail of smoke trailed from the blood-red gleam at the tip of his cigarette, weaving a back-and-forth folding of silver-blue in the air. ‘To protect the Russian people? But in 1933, and in 1934, when the people were starving, I confiscated their grain. How many millions died? Ten million? Try to imagine that number of people.’
‘I cannot.’
‘I can, because my mind does not work as yours does. I can imagine that number alive, and I can imagine that number dead, and the latter pleases me more. Do H. G. Wells’s Martians joy in the destruction they cause humanity? Of course they do.�
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‘It’s not as if you descended in metallic craft . . .’ I began.
‘What form of life am I?’ Stalin demanded. ‘Did I hide it? Did I ever pretend humanity? My name is steel, not flesh. Steel-built Joe.’ And as I looked, I noticed, again belatedly, with a sense of my foolishness in not having noticed it before, that his flesh was harder and less yielding than ordinary flesh. ‘I, robot Josef.’ He chuckled. ‘Did I ever show the weaknesses of flesh?’
I remembered what I had read of Stalin’s youth. ‘Your father beat you.’
He acknowledged this with a dismissive tilt of his head. ‘He beat me because he was a drunk. He was angry with me, and with my mother, because I was not his natural child. My mother was promiscuous. My father knew me to be a bastard. People speculated as to who my actual father was: the merchant Yakov Egnatashvilli - a wrestling champion, no less! A strong and handsome man, that merchant. Or the priest, Father Christopher Charkviani. A policeman called Damian Davrichewy. All these names. Nobody realised who my actual father was because they were not looking in the correct place.’
‘Where should we have been looking?’
‘I ordered a million people to be shot during the Great Purge of the 1930s. Half a million died during forced resettlement. Two million died in the Gulags. I did all this. You need to ask yourself simply one thing. Is this what a human being would do?’
‘In an important sense,’ I agreed, ‘no.’
‘I did it all in plain sight. I did not hide. I came to the Soviet Union, an alien from a hostile world, and did as much damage as I could. Such was my mission. I was born December 1878. Do you know what was happening throughout 1878?’
‘I would assume many things.’
He laughed like a blunderbuss. ‘Of course many things! But I mean one thing in particular. X-rays. They called it cathode radiation, in those days. It had been discovered in 1876, and by 1877 and 1878 every scientist and physicist in Europe and Russia was building the equipment, firing out the rays, irradiating animals, people, objects, wild and promiscuous experiments - it was everywhere. There was a large laboratory at Gori, in Georgia. But there were such laboratories all over Europe. Think of that! Think of the consequences of that!’
I shook my head. There was a crudeness, a kind of pulp aesthetic, about this. ‘But you weren’t literally made of steel,’ I said, haltingly. ‘You were not actually . . .’ I imagined him replying: And who got close enough to me to know? But he wasn’t speaking. He wasn’t interested in my questions.
‘The thing,’ he said, ‘that puzzles our souls about radiation poisoning is the way the very word contradicts its message. We are habituated to think of poison as a product of darkness, of dirt and putrescence, of secrecy and shadows. But radiation is a form of light, and it is hard for us to think of light as poison. Light can blind, of course; and it can of course burn; we know that. We comprehend that. It correlates to our sense of its essence. But poison us? What is more alarming than the thought that poison can radiate?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Has there ever been a being like me? Before, in human history?’
‘Adolf Hitler?’
‘Oh, him?’ He looked away. ‘I’ll tell you.’ He leant forward. His cigarette was still threading the air with a silk-line of smoke. Either he had lit a new one, or he had somehow made the first one last a surprisingly long time. ‘I’ll tell you. Hitler was a human tyrant. He murdered millions, but he murdered those he considered other. He had his tribe, these Aryan humans, and he directed his destructiveness against other varieties of humanity. That’s what human beings have done for hundreds of thousands of years. Hitler’s particular distinction is to have effected destruction on a very large scale, and for that we have to thank the rapid advances of industrialisation. Me, however? I did not limit myself to a particular group, or scapegoat-crowd, or others. I waged war on the whole of humanity. I killed non-Russians. I killed Russians. I killed my opponents and my supporters. I killed Jews, Aryans, Slavs, black, white and yellow. I killed men, and I killed women. I killed my own army - in many of my battles I executed more of my troops than were killed by the enemy! I killed members of my own family. I killed my friends, my enemies, my political allies, my political opponents, my doctors, my generals, my party members. I used to send orders to Soviet cities that would read: Draw up a list of a thousand names - exactly a thousand - and execute them all.’ He beamed at me. I peered at him more closely, as if for the first time. His moustache looked lacquered. His hair had the appearance of a single solid shape, like something carved from liquorish. He was a metal frame, with a plastic outer skin. He was an android, and yet we had not noticed it. His eyes twinkled - that kindly-old-uncle twinkle of his eyes. He had the look of a skilful and detailed copy of a human. He did not look like a human. He was not even made out of flesh. He was, of course, made of metal: polished, shaped, expertly fitted: and the very fronds of his moustache were wires of ore, and his skin was burnished. Steel-fashioned. SF.
All I could think was: how had I not noticed it before?
He could read my thoughts: ‘You did not think of it. Nobody thought of it, I know, but you have less excuse than the others. You! A science fiction writer! Only consider: to invade a planet? A whole planet? To lay it waste - to devastate its population? H. G. Wells thought you needed armies of robot tripods and deathrays; that you needed to set your weaponry against the weaponry of the aborigines. But you don’t need that. You can set your enemy against your enemy. You can infiltrate your enemy and set them bickering amongst themselves. What else has this century been, but humans striving with humans to destroy the world? What could give greater comfort to us?’
I could, perhaps, have asked: Who are you? Where are you from? Why are you so hostile? I could have asked: What is your civilization, your culture, your history? I could have asked: Are there others like you? Are all alien lifeforms manifestations of radiation, or are there corporeal beings out there too, like us? But I didn’t ask any of this. Instead I asked: ‘How were we able to write you?’
‘You?’
‘We science fiction writers. How did we know? Did we . . . channel you?’
For the first time a wrinkle appeared in the taut, plump skin of Comrade Stalin’s face; a wrinkle beside his left eye. ‘Channel?’
‘Did you infect our minds? Were you inside our heads? Is that what happened? Why did you inspire us to write you?’
‘I think you have it the wrong way round,’ said Stalin, yawning. ‘You wrote us? I think you have misunderstood. All human conceptions are on the scale of the planet. They are based on the pretension that the technical potential, though it will develop, will never exceed the terrestrial limit. But if we succeed in establishing interplanetary communications, all our philosophies, moral and social views, will have to be revised. In this case the technical potential, become limitless, will impose the end of the role of violence as a means and method of progress.’
These words sounded familiar to me, but I could not place them.
Like summer clouds drawing away from the sun, light intensified in the tall panes of glass. It washed clean and perfect and blinding into the room. Light is a form of radiation.
You have a duty to make me understand, I said. Or if I did not say these words then I thought them. One of the two.
‘It is a question of reality,’ Stalin was saying, out of the light. It was all light now; I couldn’t see anything else. ‘Let’s say we’re here, all around you, and yet you cannot see us. Why might that be?’ And then again: ‘Some of you see us. We have been processing you, in ones and twos, for many years: it is millions now. Yet you are not sure it is actually happening, and even they are not sure, oftentimes. How can that be? What kind of radiation are we talking about?’
This seemed to me, then, to be a profound question. What kind of radiation are we talking about?
‘Its not that we’re one thing, and then another. That’s why you find us so hard to see. It is as if
you were to look at a frog and say: So, what are you? Are you a fish? Or a rabbit? It is as if you were to say: I can only see you if you are a rabbit, or a frog. I cannot see you otherwise.’
I couldn’t see anything because it was so bright. Or perhaps I couldn’t see anything because it was so dark. It was dark, and it was light, at the same time. Or, it was some third thing. What kind of radiation are we talking about?
I thought: If I am back in the dacha, and it is immediately after the war, then Frenkel must be here as well, somewhere. Where is he?
I could see Stalin again, surrounded by brightness.
‘What kind of radiation are we talking about?’ he beamed. The individual hairs of his moustache moved, as stems of grass move when the wind is on them.
And he stopped. A switch had been thrown, somewhere. A cord had been yanked from its socket. He stopped, like a manikin denied power.
He stopped.
A flashbulb moment, endlessly prolonged. Then it snapped off, and shrank away, as if I were rushing backwards away from a star and it was dwindling to a white globe, a circle, a dot, a point.
Don’t you know who I am?
A different question. This last in a woman’s voice.
The light had swallowed itself into a TV-dot, centred in blackness. Everything was black except for this dot. The dot held steady, bright. Then the dot moved, shining to the left, and to the right. It was shining in my left eye. ‘Do you know who I am?’ It was shining in my right eye.
‘Josef,’ I said. ‘Josef.’