But Mikhail left, and then died on a far-off voyage, seeking the precious jewel of his secret idea. Maria Alexandrovna knew, of course, what her husband was looking for. She understood the idea of the matter-multiplying invention. And in that field she had wanted to help her husband. She had bought him ten copies of a large opus—the translation of symbols of a book just found in the tundra, under the title “The Ultimate Discourse.” Reading had probably been highly developed in Aiuna: this had been fostered by the darkness of the eight-month night and the isolation of the Aiunites’ life.
During the construction of the second thermal tunnel, when Kirpichnikov had already disappeared, the builders discovered four granite slabs containing symbols carved in deep relief. The symbols were of the same pattern as those in the previously discovered book, “The Songs of Aiuna.” For that reason they yielded themselves readily to translation into a modern language.
The slab-writings were probably the monument and testament of an Aiunite philosopher, but they contained ideas about the concealed substance of nature. Maria Alexandrovna, reading the entire book, found clear hints of what her husband had been seeking throughout the vacant world. A far-off dead man was helping her husband, scholar and wanderer, was aiding the happiness of the woman and mother.
And that was when Maria Alexandrovna placed the announcements in five American newspapers.
Fearful of losing the books somehow, and of not rejoining Mikhail with what would be the greatest happiness for him, she memorized the needed portions of “The Ultimate Discourse.”
“Only what is living is comprehended by the living,” wrote the Aiunite, “that which is dead is incomprehensible. The incredible cannot be measured by the indubitable. For that reason precisely we clearly comprehend such a remote thing as aens (corresponds to electrons. Translators’ and explicators’ note.) and such a nearby thing as mamarva (corresponds to matter. Translators’ and explicators’ note.) remains so little known to us. For that reason the former lives, as you live, while the latter is dead, like Muiia (unknown image. Trans. and explic. note.). When the aens stirred in the proiia (corresponds to atom. Trans. and explic. note.), we saw in this at first a mechanical force, and then with joy life was discovered in the aens. But the center of the proiia, full of mamarva, was a riddle for ages, until my son reliably demonstrated that the center of the proiia consists of those same aens, only dead ones. And the dead ones serve as food for the living. It was for my son to extract the core from the proiia, as all living aens had died of hunger. Thus it turned out that the center of the proiia is the fodder barn for living aens grazing around this repository of the corpses of their ancestors, to devour them. Thus simply and lambently veritably was discovered the nature of all mamarva. To the eternal memory of my son. May his name be eternally mourned! Eternal honor to his weary visage!”
Maria Alexandrovna knew this by heart, just as her son could recite some of his nursery rhymes.
The rest of the “The Ultimate Discourse” contained the teaching on the history of the Aiunites—about its beginning and its imminent end, when the Aiunites would find their zenith, and when all three forces—the Aiunite people, Time, and Nature—would come into harmonious consonance, and their three-fold being would begin to resound as a symphony.
This interested Maria Alexandrovna little. She was seeking the equipoise of her personal happiness and did not fully master the discoveries of the unknown Aiunite,
And only the last pages of the book made her shudder and forget herself in amazed attention.
The same thing has become possible today as existed in the infancy of my native land. At that time the abyss of the Maternal Ocean (the Arctic Ocean. ed.) was perturbed, and the ocean began to spill severe, freezing water mixed with clumps of ice on our land. The water departed and the ice remained. For a long time it crept over the hills of our capacious land until it wore them away, and our land became a barren plain. The best fertile soils on the hills were cut away by the ice, and the people were left on a bare field. But calamity is the best mentor, and the people’s catastrophe—its organizer, if its blood is not yet made barren by long life on the Earth. So it was then: the ice destroyed the fruit-bearing land, deprived our ancestors of food and procreation, and destruction came down over the people’s head. The hot ocean current which had inundated the country, began to move off to the north, and intense cold began to howl over the land where dusky argan trees had bloomed. In the north the chaos of dead ice guarded us, in the south, the forest, crammed with a dark swarm of powerful beasts, filled with the hiss of dark serpents and crossed by whole rivers of the poison, zundra (excrements of gigantic serpents. ed.). The Aiuna people, a people of bravery and respect for their fate, began to kill itself off, burying their books—the highest gift of the Aiuna—in the Earth, binding them with gold, impregnating the pages with a compound of veniia, that they might survive eternity and not rot away.
When half the people were subdued by death and lay as corpses, Eiia—the custodian of the books—appeared and went off to wander among the emptied roads and silent dwellings. He said: “The fertility of the soil has been taken from us, the warmth of the air is dying out, the ice is grinding down our native land and sorrow stifles the wisdom of the mind and bravery. All we have left is the sunlight. I have made an apparatus—behold it! Suffering has taught me patience, and I have known how to make fruitful use of the savage years of the people’s despair. Light is the force of mamarva torn to pieces (mutating matter. ed.), light is the element of the aens; the power of the aens is crushing. My apparatus converts streams of solar aens into heat. And I can convert the light, not merely of the Sun, but of the Moon and the Stars into heat as well. I can obtain an enormous quantity of heat, by which it is possible to melt mountains. Now we do not need the warm ocean current to heat our land!”
Thus Eiia became the leader of Life and the source of the new history of the Aiuna. His device, which consists of complex mirrors transforming the heavens’ light into heat and into the vital force of metal (probably electricity, ed.), even now provides the source for our life and prosperity.
The plains of our homeland burst into bloom, and new children were born. An en (a long period of time, ed.) had passed.
The vitality of the human organism was exhausted. Even a young man could not bring forth seed; even the most forceful intellect ceased to generate thought. The valleys of the homeland were covered by the twilight of ultimate despair—Man had come to his limit within himself—Aiuna, the Sun of our heart, was vanishing forever. The crushing power of ice was nothing in comparison—nor of the cold, or the death. Man was nourished only by self-contempt. He could neither love, nor think, nor even suffer. The sources of life had run dry in the depths of the body, because they had been drunk dry. We had mountains of food, courts of comfort, and crystalline book depositories. But there was no longer life, vitality and heat within the body, and hopes had darkened. Man was a mine, but all the ore had been worked out; only empty shafts remained.
It is fine to die on a strong boat in the wild ocean, but not to choke to death on one’s food.
It was thus for a long time. A whole generation did not experience youth.
Then my son Riigo found a way out. What nature could not give, art had provided. He had kept remnants of a vital brain within himself, and told us that our destiny was ending, but one could still open a door to it—toward a new, bright tomorrow. The solution was simple: an electromagnetic channel. (verbatim: a tube for the vital force of metal. ed.). Riigo had laid a gullet to the aens of our dark body from space and passed streams of dead aens (corresponds to ether. ed.) along this gullet, and our body’s aens, having received an excess of food, revived. That is how our brain, our heart, our love for woman, and our Aiuna were resurrected. But more than that: our children grew twice as fast and life pulsed in them, like a very powerful machine. All the rest—consciousness, feeling, and love—grew into fearsome poetry and frightened the fathers. History ceased to walk and began t
o race. And the wind of destiny beat against our unprotected face with great news of thoughts and deeds.
My son’s invention, like every remarkable thing, has a prosaic face. Riigo took two proiia centers filled with the corpses of aens and placed them into one proiia. The living aens of the proiia then began to multiply rapidly, and the entire proiia grew five-fold in ten days. The reason was evident and unimpressive: the aens began to eat more because their store of food had doubled.
Thus my son Riigo developed whole colonies of satiated, fast-growing aens, multiplying unbelievably. Then he took an ordinary body—a piece of iron—and past it, just touching the iron, begin to emit a stream of satiated aens, reared in colonies, in the direction of the stars. The satiated aens did not tap the corpses of their ancestors (that is, ether.—ed.) for food, and they freely flowed toward the piece of iron, where the hungry aens awaited them. And the iron began to grow under peoples’ eyes, like plants from the Earth.
Thus my son Riigo’s art revived man and began to cultivate matter.
But triumph always prepares defeat.
The artificially fattened aens, having a stronger body, began to attack living, but natural aens and devour them. And since in any transformation of matter there are inevitable losses, the devoured small aen did not enlarge the body of the larger to the size it had itself when it was living. Such matter, here, there, and everywhere the artificially fattened aens (electrons—the current term will be used hereafter. ed.) penetrated, began to diminish. Riigo’s art could not make a gullet for the entire Earth, and the matter melted. Only where the channel for the stream of electron corpses was laid (ether tract. ed.) did matter grow. People, the soil, and the substances of greatest importance for our life were fitted with ether tracts. The dimensions of everything else diminished; matter burnt up; we were living at the cost of the destruction of the planet.
Riigo disappeared from home. The water began to vanish from the Continental Ocean. Riigo knew the cause of the disappearance of the moisture and went out to meet the antagonist. One day a tribe of electrons, fattened and reared by him had, by the working of time and natural selection, reached the point where each electron, in terms of body volume, was the size of a cloud.
In raging fury swarms of electrons came out of the depths of the Continental Ocean, heaving like mountains in an earthquake, breathing like powerful winds. They will drink Aiuna dry, as if it were water! Riigo fell. It was impossible to bear the glance of an electron. Death from terror will be hideous, but Aiuna is beyond rescue. Riigo fell into obscurity long ago, like a stone into a well. These cosmic beasts move too slowly. But their path from proiia particle to living mountain advanced too quickly. I believe that they will sink into the Earth like curds, because their body is heavier than lead. Certainly Riigo did not fall to no purpose, but having resolved to conquer the unknown elementary bodies, and with the means to do so. The power of the electron is in rapid growth and the furious action of natural selection. And this is their weakness, because it clearly points to the extreme simplicity of their psyche and physiological organization, and perhaps reveals an unprotected point of vulnerability. Riigo understood this clearly, but was slain by the electron’s paw, heavy as a slab of platinum …
Maria Alexandrovna drooped over the book. Little Egor slept, the clock struck midnight—the most fearful hour of loneliness, when all happy people are asleep.
“Is the nurturing of man really so difficult?” Maria Alexandrovna said loudly. “Is triumph really always the harbinger of defeat?”
Moscow was quiet. The last trams hurried to the depot, their contacts shooting sparks.
“Then what triumph does my husband’s dismal death repay? What soul will replace for me his gloomy lost love?”
And she burned with a fervent grief and wept tears that kill the body more quickly than lost blood. Her mind tossed about in a nightmare: the hum of living murky electrons had ripped apart the wise, defenseless Aiuna, rivers of the green poison, zundra, flowed over the flowering tundra, and in the green fluid, sinking and choking, swam Mikhail Kirpichnikov—her only friend—lost forever.
* * *
In the Silver Forest, near the crematorium, stood a building in a delicate architectural style. It had been done as a spheroid in the image of a cosmic body held up by five powerful columns, without touching the ground. A telescopic column rose into the sky from the topmost point of the spheroid, as a sign and a threat to the dark natural world that takes away those who are alive, those who are loved and those who love—in the hope that the dead will be borne away into the universe by the power of ascending science, resurrected, and returned to the living.
This was the House of Remembrance, containing the urns with the ashes of perished men.
A woman, gray and splendid with age, entered the House with a young man. They went quietly through to the far end of the enormous hall, illuminated by the dark-blue light of memory and longing. The urns stood in a row, like candles with light snuffed-out, lighting a formerly unknown path.
Memorial plaques were attached to the urns:
Andrey Volugov, Engineer.
Perished in the underwater expedition exploring Atlantis.
There are no ashes in the urn—there is a handkerchief, soaked with his blood when he was wounded while working at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The handkerchief was delivered by a woman traveling with him.
Peter Kreizkopf. Builder of the first Lunar craft.
He flew to the Moon in his probe and did not return. There are no ashes in the urn. His baby clothes have been preserved. Honor to the great engineer and his brave will!
The gray-haired woman, her face surprisingly aglow, went on further with the young man. They stopped at the furthest urn.
Mikhail Kirpichnikov.
Investigator of the method for multiplying matter.
Colleague of the physicist Doctor F. K. Popov, engineer. Died on the California after collision with a fallen meteor. There are no ashes in the urn. His work on the feeding and cultivation of electrons and a lock of hair are preserved.
A small second plaque hung below:
He lost his wife and the soul of his friend in his search for electrons’ nutrition. The son of the deceased will accomplish his father’s work and return to his mother the heartfelt love squandered by the father. In memory of, and love for, the great seeker.
Age is like youth: expecting salvation in a miraculous later life. Maria Alexandrovna Kirpichnikova had expended her youth in vain; her love for her husband had become transformed into a passionate maternal feeling for her elder son, Egor, who was already twenty-five years old. The younger son, Lev, a student, was sociable, very handsome, but did not arouse the sharp feeling of tenderness, protectiveness, and hope that Egor did. Egor’s face resembled his father’s—lackluster, ordinary, but unusually attractive in its hidden formidability and unconscious power.
Maria Alexandrovna took Egor by the hand, like a little boy, and went toward the exit. A square gold plaque with gray platinum letters hung in the vestibule of the House of Remembrance:
Death is present where sufficient knowledge is lacking of the physiological elements acting in the body, and destroying it.
There was an arch above the entrance to the House with the words:
Remember with tenderness, but without suffering: Science will resurrect the dead and comfort your heart.
The woman and the young man went out into the open air. The summer Sun rejoiced above the full-blooded Earth, and the new Moscow stood before the eyes of the two—a miraculous city of powerful culture, unrelenting labor, and sensible happiness. The Sun hastened to do its work, people grinned from the surplus of their energy—they were eager in work and vigorous in love.
The Sun above their heads supplied them with everything—the same Sun that once lit the path to Mikhail Kirpichnikov in the citrus district of Riverside—the old Sun, which shines with alarming passionate joy, like a world catastrophe and the engendering of the Universe.
* * *
[Egor Kirpichnikov]
The Intellectual Toiler published the following note on January 4:
THE CENTRAL ELECTRICAL POWER STATION OF LIFE.
A young engineer, Egor Kirpichnikov, has performed some interesting experiments over a number of months on artificial ether production in Prof. Marand’s ether laboratory. The idea behind engineer Kirpichnikov’s work is that a high-frequency electromagnetic field kills living electrons in matter; as we know, dead electrons constitute the substance of the ether. The height of engineer Kirpichnikov’s technical art can be understood from the fact that a field oscillating at no fewer than 1012 periods per second is required to kill electrons.
Kirpichnikov’s high-frequency machine is the sun itself, whose light is decomposed by a complex system of interfering surfaces into its constituent energy elements: the mechanical energy of pressure, chemical energy, electrical energy, etc.
Kirpichnikov only needs electrical energy, which he concentrates in a very confined space by means of special prisms and deflectors to achieve the necessary frequency.
In essence, an electromagnetic field is a colony of electrons. By forcing this field to pulsate rapidly, Kirpichnikov has succeeded in causing the electrons making up what is called the field to die; this causes the electromagnetic field to be converted to ether—the mechanical mass of the bodies of dead electrons.
Obtaining a number of ether spaces, Kirpichnikov lowered common objects (for example, a Waterman fountain pen) into them; the volume of these bodies increased two-fold in three days.
Worlds Apart Page 85