Seven days passed.
Later when Los recalled that period it seemed to him to be a blue twilight, an astonishing time of rest when a file of marvelous dreams passed before him in his waking hours.
Los and Gusev awoke early in the morning. After a bath and a light breakfast they went to the library. Aelita’s attentive and affectionate eyes met them on its threshold. Now she spoke in the words most of which they understood. In the quiet and semi-darkness of the room and in Aelita’s soft words was a mood of ineffable calm—and her eyes shone and flashed in their way and in them lurked visions. Shadows moved across the screen. Words, without effort, penetrated into their consciousness. A miracle was taking place: words which at first were only sound became penetrating ideas which emerged seemingly out of a fog and then took on the juices of life. Now when Los pronounced Aelita’s name it stirred him doubly: the sadness of the first syllable “Ae-” which meant “To be seen for the last time,” and the color of silver felt in the syllable “-lita” which meant “The color of the stars.” And so the language of the new world like a delicate substance became part of their consciousness, firm and fast.
For seven days this process of enrichment went on. There were lessons in the morning and after sunset until midnight. Finally Aelita became obviously weary. On the eighth day no one came to wake her guests and they slept until evening.
When Los rose from his bed he could see long shadows extended from the trees. A bird called in a crystalline monotonous whistle. His head was light. He experienced a feeling of overflowing joy. Without waking Gusev, Los dressed quickly and went to the library, but no one responded to his knock. Then Los went outside for the first time in seven days.
The sloping meadow fell away towards the grove and to the low reddish buildings. In that direction, mournfully lowing, walked a herd of the clumsy, shaggy animals—khashi—which half resembled bears and half resembled cows. The low sun gilded the curling grasses—the whole meadow glowed with liquid gold. Over the lake emerald cranes passed. In the distance emerged the snowy cone of a mountain peak tinted by the sunset. Here it was also calm, the magic sadness of a day departing in peace and gold.
Los walked to the lake along the familiar path. Along both its sides stood the same weeping azure trees; he saw the same ruins through the maculated trunks of the trees, and the air was the same—fine and chilling. But it seemed to Los that now for the first time he saw that wonderful world—his eyes and ears were open and he knew the names of things.
Through the branches the lake sent its flaming reflections. But when Los came to the water the sun had already set and the fiery feathers and the tongues of easy flame of the sunset were in flight, capturing half the sky with such a golden frenzy that for a moment his heart stood still. Then quickly, quickly the fire was cloaked with ashes, the sky cleared, darkened and then the stars were ignited. Strange constellations were reflected in the water. At the lake’s curving shore near the stairway rose the black silhouettes of the two stone giants, the guardians of the ages who sat with their faces lifted to the constellations. < … > Los watched and stood so long that his hand on the stone became numb. Then he left the statue and immediately saw Aelita on the staircase below him. She sat with her elbows on her knees, her chin on her hand. < … > He sat next to her on the step.
Aelita said with a trembling voice: “Why did you leave the earth?
“The woman I loved died,” said Los. < … >
Aelita freed her hand from her cape and laid it on Los’s large hand—touched it and then returned it to her cape. < … > Los felt pain: Aelita was so marvelously beautiful and such a dangerous pungent and sweet odor came from the water, from her cape with its hood, from her hands, her face, her breath …
(1922)
Translated by Leland Fetzer
Andrei Platonovich Platonov
[Klimentov]
(1899-1951)
____________________________
The Sun, The Moon, and The Ether Channel
[A TRILOGY OF ABRIDGED VISIONS FROM THE FUTURE]
I. DESCENDANTS OF THE SUN
A Fantasy
He had been a tender, doleful child who loved his mother, the hand-made withy fences, the open field, and the sky above all these things. < … > No one could foresee what the boy would become. And he—he grew, and always more irrepressibly and alarmingly seethed within him stifled, repressed, shackled forces. He dreamed pure, blue, joyful dreams, and could not recall a single one in the morning—the early serene sunlight would greet him and everything inside him would grow quiet, fade from memory and subside. But he grew as he dreamed; the day held only flaming sunlight, wind, and the melancholy dust of the road.
He grew up in the great epoch of electricity and the restructuring of the globe. The thunder of labor shook the Earth, and no one had looked at the sky for a long time—every gaze was directed at the Earth, all hands were occupied. The radio’s electromagnetic waves were whispering through the atmosphere and the interstellar ether, the challenging words of Man—the builder. Ever more insistently, unbearably, thoughts and machines were penetrating unknown, unconquered, rebellious matter and molding it into Mankind’s slave.
The Principal Director of the projects reshaping the globe was the engineer Vogulov, a gray, hunched individual with flashing hate-filled eyes—it was that very same tender boy. He directed a million armies of workers who dug deep into the Earth with machines and were transforming its aspect, making it into a home for Mankind. Vogulov worked without respite, without sleep, with a burning hatred in his heart, with fury, with madness, and with a restless, unflagging genius. < … > His charge was to regulate the intensity and direction of the winds through changing the topology of the Earth’s surface, and by digging new canals in the mountains to promote air circulation and wind flow so as to divert warm or cold ocean currents into the interior of continents by means of canals.
At first one had to invent an explosive compound of such power that an army of workers twenty or thirty thousand strong might send the Himalayas into the stratosphere. < … > And Vogulov found a means of super-charging light’s electromagnetic waves—ultra-light—an energy that would explode back into the world, to its “normal” state with a strange, annihilating, incredible force that numbers alone could not express. Vogulov was content with this discovery, as there was enough of ultra-light energy to fashion the Earth into a home for Man.
They tested ultra-light in the Carpathians. Into a small tunnel they rolled a cart with a charge of ultra-light, then released the inhibitor which maintained the ultra-light in its abnormal state—and a flame howled over Europe, a hurricane swept through the nations, lightning began to rage in the atmosphere, and the Atlantic ocean began to heave sighs from its very depths, blanketing islands with millions of tons of water. Abysses of granite, spiraling, were borne up to the clouds. Heated to an incalculable temperature they were transmuted into the lightest of gases, and the gases were borne into the highest layers of the atmosphere, where whey somehow bonded with the ether and broke away from the Earth forever. Of the Carpathians there remained not a grain of sand as a souvenir. The Carpathians had resettled themselves in closer proximity to the stars. Vogulov’s idea had transformed matter into very nearly nothing.
A month later they did the same thing in Asia with several portions of the Hingan and the Sayan ranges. And a month after that, in the Siberian tundra timid flowers were already blooming and warm caressing rains were falling; airplanes flew, trains moved in, and deep into the Earth were sunk as foundations the ponderous frames of factories.
Vogulov had at his command millions of machines and hundreds of thousands of technicians. Mankind was struggling with Nature in rage and fury. Teeth of consciousness and iron had seized upon matter and were masticating it. Working frenzy overcame Mankind. Labor intensity was raised to the limit—to go further led to the destruction of the body, the rupture of muscles, and insanity. The papers hailed the projects as if transmitting sermons. Composers
with their orchestras played The Symphony of the Will and Elemental Consciousness in the recreation halls at mountain and canal sites; Man was rebelling against the Universe, armed not with a dream but with Consciousness and the Machine. < … >
Yet in rare moments of forgetfulness or ecstasy Vogulov’s expanding mind would register flashes of a thought which did not belong to the present day. Only the mind and a flame of consciousness, which with time and work was growing more and more powerful, remained in Vogulov. To this point men had been dreamers, fainthearted poets in the likeness of women and sobbing children. They were incapable and unworthy of understanding the world. The horrifying clashes of matter, the whole of the monstrous, self-devouring universe, was unknown to them. What man needed was fierce intelligence, flintier and more real than matter itself, in order to comprehend the world, to descend into its very depths, fearing nothing, to traverse an entire hell of learning and labor to its end and to re-author the Universe. For this one must have hands that were more merciless and hard than the fists of that savage creator who once upon a time, in jest, had placed the stars within the vastness of space.
And Vogulov made the decision to re-create the Universe with ultra-light. < … > To accomplish this he invented a photo-electro-magnetic resonating transformer; a device which transformed light’s electro-magnetic waves into eveready electric current, good for powering motors. Vogulov simply “cooled” light rays received from space, impeded the infra-spectrum, and derived waves of the necessary length and frequency. Unconsciously and to his own surprise he had solved what historically had been the greatest energy question of mankind: how to derive the greatest quantity of power with the smallest expenditure of force. The expenditure in this case was negligible—the fabrication of the resonating transformers needed to turn light into current—while the quantity of energy derived was, strictly speaking, infinite, since the universe is made up of light. The world’s energy status, and therefore the economic status, were turned upside down: for mankind there dawned a truly Golden Age—the Universe was working for Man, nourishing him and making him happy.
Vogulov was compelling the Universe to work in his laboratories, fabricating ultra-light, in order to destroy that universe. But this was the least of it: Man was working too slowly and lazily to produce the required number of resonators—millions of them—in a short time. The tempo of work had to be increased to extremes, and Vogulov inoculated the working masses with energy microbes. He took for this purpose an element of the infra-spectrum with its horrific impulse towards maximal status—towards light—he grew cultures and colonies, trillions of these elements, and sowed them throughout the atmosphere. And man began to die in the heat of his labors, to write books celebrating pure courage, to love as Dante had loved, and to live not years but rather days. And man did not regret this.
The first year produced one hundred cubic kilometers of ultra-light. Vogulov had thought to double the production each year, so that in a little over three years the one thousand cubic kilometers of ultra-light would be ready. Humanity lived within a hurricane. A day equaled a millennium in the production of goods. The swift, whirlwind rise of generations created an completely new type of human being—possessed of furious energy and radiant genius.
The energy microbe had made eternity unnecessary—a brief instant was enough to drain the cup of Life dry and to perceive Death as the fulfillment of a joyful instinct.
* * *
And no one knew the heart or the suffering of Vogulov—the Engineer. Such a heart and such a soul should not live in a human being. At twenty-two he had fallen in love with a girl who had died a week after they met. For three years Vogulov had wandered the Earth in madness and grief, he sobbed along desert roads, prayed, cursed and howled. He was so frightening that the courts ordered his destruction. He suffered and grieved so intensely that he could not die. His whole body became one wound, and began to decay. The soul within him had destroyed itself.
And then he experienced an organic catastrophe: the power of love and the energy of his heart rushed to his brain, burst his skull and engendered a brain of heretofore unseen, incredible power.
But nothing had really changed—it was only that love had been transformed into thought and thought—full of hatred and despair—was destroying the world which made it impossible to have the one thing a human being needs—the soul of another …
Vogulov was going to shatter the universe without fear or pity, yet aching for what was irretrievably lost, what gives Man life and what he needs—not bye and bye, but now. And Vogulov wished to create this impossible thing—now.
Only one who loves understands the Impossible, and only he desires it in deadly earnest and will make it possible, no matter the path that leads him there.
1922
II. From THE LUNAR PROBE
Kreizkopf’s Plan
The Engineer Peter Kreizkopf, a miner’s son, was in his nation’s capitol for the first time. The whirlwind of automobiles and the roar of underground railways cast him into rapture. The city, it seemed, must be populated entirely by mechanics! But no factories were to be seen—Kreizkopf was sitting on a bench in the central park, while the factories stood on the marshes of the city’s outskirts, where the canal water was piped, beyond the global aerodromes. < … >
The train had arrived early, but that strange city was already awake, as it never slept. Its life consisted of steadily accelerated motion. The city had no connection with nature: it was a concrete and metal oasis, closed in on itself, completely isolated and alone in the abyss of the world.
A luxurious theater built in dark matte stone attracted Kreizkopf’s gaze. The theater was so large it could have been a hangar for airships. Grief pierced Peter Kreizkopf’s heart: his young wife Erna, once in love with him, had remained in Karbomort, the coal town Peter had left behind. He had cautioned her: “It’s not worth it to divorce, Erna. You and I have lived together for seven years. Things will get easier. I’ll go to city and work on my “lunar probe”—they’ll pay me well, for sure they will.”
But Erna had grown tired of promises, tired of the coal mine’s black fog, of Karbomort’s narrow life and the monotonously identical faces of its unchanging technical personnel. She was especially tired of Peter’s friends—narrow specialists who consciously considered themselves to be atoms of human knowledge. The witticism most frequently heard by Erna were the words of one of these co-workers, Mertz, “We live in order to know.”
—But what you don’t know—replied Erna—is that people don’t live in order to know …
Peter understood both Erna and his friends, but they did not really understand him. Erna, an aristocrat, the daughter of an important coal-producer, Sorbonne educated, hated Peter’s friends—the craftsmen, electricians and inventors who would sit in her living room and argue pointlessly with Peter until midnight. Kreizkopf knew that he had little in common with Erna: he, an autodidact and engineer by calling—and she, mistress of the latest “flowers of culture” which he understood not at all.
So Erna had left him and returned to her own circle.
Kreizkopf missed her, he had no idea what to do with himself, alone in a crowd of people.
* * *
The general bustle, the advertisements, the smell of exhaust and the roar of raging machinery magnified Kreizkof’s grief tenfold. He recalled past years of his life, full of labor, faith in humanity, technical creativity and devotion to his beloved wife. Now it had all been destroyed by inexplicable factors: people had deceived and betrayed him, his work seemed worthless to them, his wife had fallen in love with someone else and begun to hate him, his creativity had brought him loneliness and poverty. [He nonetheless continues with his project, procuring the necessary government funds, ed.] < … >
His “lunar probe” project envisioned a transport device capable of movement in any gaseous medium within or beyond the atmosphere. A metallic sphere, loaded with the necessary weight, was to be fixed on the disk’s periphery: the disk
itself would have a horizontal, vertical or tangential orientation to the Earth’s surface—depending on where the probe was to be sent. The disk was given a rotational speed appropriate to its destination. Upon achieving the RPM necessary for its path the sphere would obediently detach itself and head off on a path tangential to the disk by centrifugal force. The disk’s safe landing was secured by the automaton in the probe itself; on approach to a hard surface current was switched off to the automaton, and a certain amount of fuel was ignited, its force directed in the same direction as the flight. The recoil resulted in a slowdown, and free fall was transformed into a smooth, safe descent. < … >
The flight of the Lunar Probe
Everyone who was anyone came to the launch site. < … > There was magnificent lighting, music, drinks, kvass and ice cream were served, hovering taxis gathered—the usual accompaniments of an unusual event. Three minutes before the stroke of midnight the disk began to rotate. The motor roared, five gigantic fans blew clouds of cold air through the rumbling, heating engine—and the air that escaped was dry, hard and white-hot, like a desert whirlwind. The oil in the machinery was cooled by icy streams from the centrifugal pumps, and even so a corrosive smoke hung about the disk and the entire installation; the housings were heating up excessively, the oil was burning on the ice. In spite of its precise mounting, the disk rumbled like a cannonade or an erupting volcano: so high was its rate of rotation. Its circumference was smoking due to air friction < … > [The craft’s lift-off was successful, ed.]
Here are Kreizkopf’s bulletins from space, in the order in which they were received:
1. Nothing to report. The dials show a coal-black sky. Stars of an incredible brightness. < … >
2. Numerous blue flames have passed over the probe. I have discovered no cause for this. The temperature has not risen.
3. The flight continues. I sense no motion, of course. All controls are in good order.
Worlds Apart Page 82