The Snail on the Slope

by Arkady Strugatsky

  The earthlings have turned Pandora into something like a game reserve for hunters. Back then, in the middle of the 1960s, we didn’t yet know anything about the environment, and we had never heard of an endangered species list. Therefore, we made hunting a popular pastime for our people of the future. Hunters come to Pandora in order to kill tahorgs, wondrous and fearsome animals . . . Meanwhile, Leonid Gorbovsky from Noon: 22nd Century and Far Rainbow has been living on this planet for months and no one can figure out what he’s doing there, and why a great spaceman and member of the World Council is wasting his precious time here . . .

  Gorbovsky is our old hero—to a certain extent, he’s the personification of the man of the future, the embodiment of kindness and intelligence, the embodiment of culture in the highest sense of the word. He’s sitting by the edge of an enormous precipice, dangling his feet, watching the strange forest that extends all the way to the horizon, and he’s waiting for something.

  In the Noon Universe, all fundamental social problems and many scientific problems have long since been solved. The problem of a humanlike android has been solved, the problem of contacting alien civilizations has been solved, and so has, of course, the problem of education. People have become carefree and reckless. They seem to have lost the instinct of self-preservation. The Playing Man, Homo ludens, has emerged. (This was when we first became interested in the concept of the Playing Man.) All basic needs are automatically taken care of by billions of intelligent machines, while billions of humans only do what they want. They do scientific research, fly into space, and dive into the depths of the ocean in the same way that we currently play chess, tic-tac-toe, or volleyball . . . And that’s also how they study Pandora—casually, playfully, lightly, without a care in the world. Homo ludens . . .

  Gorbovsky is afraid. Gorbovsky suspects that this can’t end well, that sooner or later humanity will encounter some currently unimaginable hidden danger in space, and that humanity will then experience shock, humanity will experience shame, defeat, death—you name it . . . And so Gorbovsky, with his extraordinary nose for the unusual, roams from one planet to the next and looks for strange things. He doesn’t know exactly what he’s looking for himself. This wild and dangerous Pandora, a planet that earthlings have been cheerfully and eagerly exploring for a number of decades, seems to him to be the focal point of some hidden menace—he doesn’t know precisely what. And he’s sitting there so that he’s on the spot when something happens. He’s sitting there so he can prevent people from acting rashly or hastily, so that he can be the proverbial catcher in the rye.

  (Curiously enough, an entry in our work journal reads, “Gorbovsky, having made sense of the situation on Pandora, realizes that humanity has nothing to fear here. And he immediately loses interest in the planet. ‘I’m going to take off, there are a number of other planets worth checking out. For example, Rainbow.’” Apparently at the time we were still worried about the problem of “Gorbovsky’s untimely death” in Far Rainbow—a problem we never did get around to resolving.)

  Gorbovsky, hunters, preparations for the Pandorian safari—this is all happening on top of the Mountain. Meanwhile, other things are happening inside the Forest. If I remember correctly, we had read a samizdat article by the famous Soviet geneticist Vladimir Pavlovich Efroimson (then in disfavor), which boldly claimed that humankind could have existed and developed perfectly well entirely through parthenogenesis. If you run a weak current through a human ovum, it begins to divide—and in due course, you get a girl, always a girl, and moreover, an exact copy of the mother. Men are unnecessary. Completely unnecessary. And we populated our Forest with at least three different types of creatures: first of all, the colonizers, an intelligent race at war with the nonhumanoids; second of all, the women, who had splintered away from the colonizers, who multiply parthenogenetically and who’ve created their own, extremely complicated biological civilization; and, finally, the miserable peasants—men and women—whom everyone has simply forgotten about in the midst of all their fighting. They live there in their villages . . . When others had needed bread, they’d been necessary. And when others had learned how to grow bread without them, they’d been forgotten. And now they live on their own, with their outdated technology, with their outdated traditions, completely isolated from the violent tumult of real life. And then an earthling turns up in the midst of this quivering green hell. In our original version, this was our old friend Athos Sidorov from Noon: 22nd Century. He’s living in there, deeply depressed, studying this world, unable to get out, lacking the strength to get home . . .

  This was how we came up with the first outline of the novel, its skeleton. We planned the chapters. We had already figured out that the novel had to be structured as follows: a chapter of “the view from above, from the Mountain,” then a chapter of “the view from within, from the Forest.” We came up with the idea that the peasants have to talk in a slow, roundabout, viscous manner, and that they all have to constantly lie. And they don’t lie because they are bad people, or because they are so immoral, but simply because that’s how their world works—nobody knows anything, everyone is merely repeating rumors, and rumors are almost always lies. These sluggish creatures, whom nobody needs, whom everyone has abandoned, became for us a kind of symbol for a humanity that has fallen victim to cold-blooded progress. It turned out that we were very interested in writing about these people, that we began to feel a certain sympathy toward them, we were ready to empathize with them, pity them, feel resentment on their behalf.

  We began to write, writing chapter after chapter, a Gorbovsky chapter, then an Athos Sidorov chapter, and gradually, a new paradigm began to crystallize from the scenario itself, a paradigm that turned out to be very fundamental and significant for us. This is the paradigm of the relationship between humans and the laws of nature and society. We know that all of our actions, both moral and physical, are constrained by certain laws. We know that anyone who attempts to resist these laws will sooner or later be broken, defeated, destroyed, just like Alexander Pushkin’s mad Evgenii in “The Bronze Horseman,” who dared to yell “Just wait!” at an Architect of History. We know that history can only be harnessed by those who act in full accordance with its laws . . . But then what about a man who does not like these laws?!

  When it comes to the laws of physics, well, that’s simpler—we seem to have gotten used to them and made our peace with their immutability. Or we’ve learned to circumvent these laws. We even occasionally exploit them for our own benefit. People ought to fall—but they fly. Including into space. People ought to drown—but they live right at the bottom of the ocean. And if a rigid law of nature doesn’t, say, allow one to travel back in time—well, of course, that’s sad. But at the end of the day, that’s a fact we can resign ourselves to, and without any intense emotion. For some reason, this fact offends neither our pride nor our dignity.

  It is much more difficult to reconcile yourself to the overpowering force of the laws of history and society. For example, try to put yourself in the shoes of the men and women who before the revolution had been everything, and after the revolution became nothing—the men and women who had belonged to the privileged class. They had known since childhood that the world would be their oyster, that they were the ones for whom Russia had been created, and that their lives would be absolutely wonderful. Then, suddenly, their world collapsed. Suddenly, the social environment they had grown up with disappeared without a trace and was replaced by a pitiless new environment that was extraordinarily cruel toward them. And yet the smartest of these people understood perfectly well that this was a consequence of the laws governing the development of society, that it wasn’t some evil person throwing them into the mud, onto the very bottom of the ocean of life, but the blind, immutable laws of history. How should people feel about a law of society that seems bad to them? Is this even a valid question? A good law of society, a bad law of society—what does that even mean? Is the fact that productive forces are continuously
increasing good or bad? We know that these forces will sooner or later collide with the relations of production—this is a law of human society. Is it good or bad?

  I remember spending a lot of time discussing these topics. We were interested in them. And very soon we realized that we’d been writing about this all along. If the fate of our earthling, who had found himself among the peasants—the doomed, oppressed peasants—didn’t actually contain the answer to this question, then at the very least it contained the question. Because in this place, there exists a dominant progressive civilization—this biological civilization of women. And it also contains the vestiges of a previous subspecies of Homo sapiens, who are destined for inevitable, certain extinction under pressure from “progressive modernity.” So then our earthling, our brother in kind, who has found himself in this world—how should he feel about the things he’s seeing? Here, historical truth is on the side of the extremely unpleasant, very alien women, these self-satisfied and self-confident Amazons. Meanwhile, the hero’s sympathies lie entirely with these simpleminded, ignorant, helpless, and ridiculous men and women, who did, after all, save him, nurse him back to health, find him a wife, get him a dwelling, take him for one of their own . . . What should a civilized person do, how should he behave, when he realizes the direction of progress, and he finds it abhorrent? How should he feel about progress, when this progress sticks in his craw?!

  On March 6, we wrote our first sentence: “From above, the forest looked like dappled foam . . .” On March 20, we finished the first draft. We wrote quickly. As soon as we’d develop a detailed plan, we’d always write very quickly. But there was a surprise awaiting us: before the ink on our last sentence had dried, we discovered that we’d written something unacceptable, something that wasn’t going to do. We suddenly realized that we didn’t care about Gorbovsky in the least. What did Gorbovsky have to do with it? What did our glorious utopian future, with its entirely invented problems, have to do with it? For God’s sake! All kinds of hell is breaking loose around us, and we’re wasting our time on inventing problems and solutions for future generations. Like they won’t figure out how to deal with their own problems when time comes! And by March 21, we had already decided that we couldn’t consider the novel complete, that we had to do something with it, something drastic. But we still had absolutely no idea what.

  It was obvious that the chapters about the Forest were fine. There, the “scenario fit the paradigm”; everything was finished and all the loose ends were tied off. This novel within a novel could even exist independently. But when it came to the parts about Gorbovsky—they were no good. And the issue wasn’t that they were, say, badly written. No, they were written in a perfectly estimable way, but they had nothing to do with the story we were then trying to tell. They did not interest us. The Gorbovsky chapters had to be excised from the text and put aside. Let them sit a bit.

  (And sit they did, all the way until the mid-1980s. At the beginning of perestroika, when it was possible to get anything published, when publishers were ready to wrest anything that hadn’t previously appeared in print from our grasp, we had taken our “Gorbovsky” out of the archives and discovered to our intense amazement that it wasn’t half bad. The text had stood the test of time, was easy to read, and seemed to us to be capable of engaging the interest of a reader. That was how the novel Disquiet came into being and took on a life of its own.)

  Excising the chapters was easy—the difficult thing was finding something appropriate to replace them with. How were we going to replace them? This gloomy question didn’t yet have an answer. The crisis had given rise to half a novel, but the crisis hadn’t dissipated—it was still hanging over us. We had never experienced a double crisis (“with multiple warheads”) like this before. But we no longer felt a real sense of despair—for some strange reason, we were sure that we were up to the challenge.

  The next time we met was at the end of April. Unfortunately, I can no longer remember how we came up with the key idea that determined the plot and the essence of the second half of the novel, nor who thought of it first. This is sadly not recorded in the journal. In fact, the journal doesn’t even contain a clear formulation of the idea. It’s just that on April 28, there’s suddenly the following entry: “Gorbovsky is Peretz, Athos is Zykov.” And a little farther down: “1. The runaway machine; 2. Getting ready to go into the forest; 3. Trying to convince everyone to take him with them into the forest.” The idea that the future in the novel should be replaced by the present had been born and had begun to operate.

  New names begin to appear in the journal. We started to develop the “Peretz” storyline, this time in its eventual final form. “Fails to have a meeting or rendezvous with the boss, who occasionally comes outside to do his exercises”; “Arranges with the driver for tomorrow”; “As he waits in the truck, the truck’s wheels are removed.” Something had happened to us here, something important. We had come up with the idea of the Administration for Forest Affairs—that surreal parody of every government agency in existence. Somehow, in some way, we had realized that one fantastic storyline, that of the Forest, should be complemented by another fantastic storyline, but that this one should be symbolic. It shouldn’t be science fiction, it should instead be symbolic. One person is desperately struggling to get out of the Forest, while another, very different from the first in both character and disposition, is desperately trying to get into the Forest, to figure out what is going on in there.

  On April 30, the word “Administration” first appears in the journal, followed by an “organizational chart”: the Eradication Team, the Research Team, the Armed Guard Team, the Scientific Guard team . . . There’s a detailed outline of the first chapter, fragments of our hero’s thoughts, and then, a pivotal line: “The Forest is the future.”

  This was the moment that everything clicked into place. The novel stopped being science fiction (assuming it ever had been) and became simply fantastic, grotesque, symbolic—whatever you want to call it. Everything turned out to have a hidden meaning; every scene became full of new ideas. What is the Forest? The Forest is the Future. A Future we know nothing about. A Future we can only speculate about, usually baselessly, which we only have fragmentary insights about, insights that crumble if subjected to any kind of closer scrutiny. When it comes to the future—if I’m being frank, if I’m speaking with my hand on my heart—when it comes to the future, the only thing that we know with any degree of certainty is that it will completely fail to correspond to any of our ideas about it. We don’t even know whether the world of the Future will be good or bad; we are fundamentally incapable of answering this question, because chances are that the world of the Future will be so immeasurably alien to us, that it will be so far from corresponding to our ideas about it, that we won’t know how the concepts good, bad, mediocre, and subpar even apply to it. It will simply be alien and unlike anything we have known, in the same way that the world of a modern-day metropolis would feel absurd and unlike anything he has known to a modern-day cannibal from Malaita Island.

  The Forest that we had already depicted fit perfectly into this paradigm. Why shouldn’t we imagine that in the distant future, humanity will merge with nature, in large part becoming a part of nature? Humans would stop being human in the modern sense of the word. It wouldn’t be all that hard. You would only need to deform one human instinct: the reproductive instinct. This instinct rests, like on a foundation, on the heterosexuality of our species, on its two genders. If you took away one of the genders, you would get completely new creatures, who resembled people but were people no longer. They would have completely different, alien moral principles, they would have very different ideas about what should be and what could be, they would have different goals, they’d even have a different perspective on the meaning of life . . . It turned out that we hadn’t spent a month writing for nothing! It turned out that we had created a completely new model of the Future! And moreover, it wasn’t merely a hypothetical framework, not an inert,
stable world in the manner of Huxley or, say, Orwell, but a world in flux, a world that hadn’t yet finished forming itself, a world still under construction. And at the same time, it contained remnants of people from the past, living lives of their own, who were psychologically akin to us and therefore gave us something like a moral frame of reference . . .

  And from this perspective, the as of yet unwritten world of the Administration looked completely different. What is the Administration in our new, symbolic conception of the universe? That’s easy—it’s the Present! It’s the Present, with all of its chaos, with all of its stupidity, improbably combined with shrewdness. The Present, where human errors and delusions meet an ossified system of habitual inhumanity. The very same Present in which people are constantly thinking about the Future, living for the Future, shouting slogans in praise of the Future, and yet at the same time, they are fouling up this Future, eradicating this Future, doing their best to stamp out every single one of its tender shoots, trying to turn the Future into a parking lot, striving to turn the Forest, their Future, into an English garden with carefully manicured lawns, so that the Future doesn’t become what it is capable of becoming, but rather what we’d like it to be today . . .

  It’s curious that this happy idea, which helped us come up with the storyline of the Administration, and which illuminated the entire novel for us in a completely new way, has on the whole remained entirely inaccessible to the general reader. I can count on one hand the number of people who fully grasped the entirety of the authorial intent. And we did scatter hints decoding our symbolism throughout the story. You’d think that the epigraphs would suffice. The future is a pine wood; the future is the Forest. The pine wood awaits you, and there’s no turning back, the Future is already here . . . And the snail stubbornly climbing Mount Fuji is another symbol of man’s progress toward the future—the slow, grueling, but inexorable progress toward unfathomable heights . . .