Red Star Tales

by Yvonne Howell

  We’d have to save ourselves from the cold by running.

  As if on purpose, we didn’t come across a single suitable crevice where we could shelter from the cold.

  Again we ran after the Sun. Running like slaves, chained to a chariot! Running forever!

  Oh, far from forever. We had only enough food left for one meal.

  What then?

  The meal was eaten, the last meal!

  Sleep closed our eyes. The cold forced us to huddle together like brothers embracing.

  And where were all those crevices that kept showing up when we didn’t need them?

  We didn’t sleep for long: the cold, still more powerful, woke us. Unceremonious and merciless! It hadn’t let us sleep for even three hours. Hadn’t let us get a good rest.

  Powerless, weakened by longing, hunger and the advancing cold, we couldn’t run with our previous speed.

  We were freezing!

  Sleep started to overcome me first – and the physicist supported his friend, and then sleep started in on him – and I supported him against sleep, deadly sleep. The physicist had taught me to understand the meaning of this terrible, final drowsiness.

  We held each other up and gave each other strength. As I recall now, we didn’t even think of abandoning each other and thus postponing the hour of our own deaths.

  The physicist was falling asleep and raving about the Earth; I hugged him, trying to warm his body with my own.

  I was overcome by tempting daydreams: about a warm bed, about the fire in a hearth, food and wine… I was surrounded by my own family… They were taking care of me, feeling sorry for me… They were taking me…

  Daydreams, daydreams! The blue sky, snow on the neighbors’ roofs… A bird flew by… Faces, familiar faces… A doctor… What was he saying?

  “Lethargy, extended sleep, a dangerous situation… Significant weight loss... He’s gotten much thinner… But he’ll be all right! His breathing has improved… His responsiveness is returning… The crisis is passed.”

  Everyone around was happy, despite their tear-stained faces…

  To make this brief, I had slept a diseased sleep and now I was awake: I lay down on the Earth and woke up on the Earth; my body remained here, while my thoughts flew off to the Moon.

  Nevertheless I raved for a long time: I asked about the physicist, spoke about the Moon, was surprised that my friends had come to be near me. I confused the earthly with the heavenly: first I imagined myself on Earth, then I was back on the Moon.

  The doctor ordered them not to argue with me and irritate me… They were afraid I’d go crazy.

  Very slowly I returned to consciousness and even more slowly regained my health.

  It goes without saying that the physicist was very surprised when, after I got better, I told him this whole story. He advised me to write it down and supplement it with some explanations.

  First published in Russian: 1893

  Translation by Sibelan Forrester

  * * *

  1. pood – a pre-Revolutionary Russian measure, approximately 16.4 kilograms to one pood.

  2. arshin – a pre-Revolutionary Russian measure, approximately 71 centimeters.

  3. sazhen – a pre-Revolutionary Russian measure, approximately 2.13 meters.

  4. Augustin Mouchot (1825-1911), French inventor of a boiler that used solar power to heat water to produce energy.

  VALERY BRYUSOV

  1908

  REBELLION OF THE MACHINES

  FROM THE CHRONICLES OF THE THIRTIETH CENTURY

  I

  My dear friend,

  Giving in to your repeated requests, I am embarking on a description of the monstrous events that befell me and sent my happiness to an early grave. You are right: those who witnessed the horrible catastrophe, unprecedented in recorded history, and still retained their sanity are now obliged to chronicle its details for historians of the future. Contemporary testimonies would be priceless for scholars who will study us one day, and perhaps help future generations defend themselves against the horrors that were unleashed upon us. This is why, despite how heavily the remembrance of those days that resembled delirious nightmares – days that took away everyone I loved and crippled me – weighs on my heart, I will put into writing, as dispassionately as possible, all that I observed myself and heard from other eyewitnesses.

  In fact, if not for your persuasiveness and your observation that after the tragic war only a few survivors remained, I would never have taken up this responsibility. I am scarcely suited for it. I represent probably the least qualified person to undertake this enterprise, as I can only describe the events in their external form; their meanings and causes are inaccessible to me. I can only promise to represent, in as lively and clear a manner as possible, the fantastic events that have now come to be known as “the rebellion of the machines,” and in the process remain as credible as possible for a person who has now crossed the boundary between waking and dreaming and is incapable of distinguishing between reality and fantasy. It is up to others, more informed and educated than I, to analyze and interpret the facts.

  You know that I am an ordinary man of my time, a simple philistine who did his duty in the civil services and looked forward to spending his leisure hours on relaxation and entertainment. After spending the requisite time at work, I was happy to return to the circle of my family: to my wife, poor Maria, my two children – Andrei, your favorite, and his little sister Anna – and their grandmother, the old woman whom everyone called “dear Yelizaveta.” Whatever I learned at school stayed with me in some sort of vague way, and later I never had the time or the desire to supplement my rather limited knowledge. Let those who chose the higher calling of science be concerned with it, I thought, while we ordinary citizens, having fulfilled our obligations, could happily partake of the results.

  Like all our contemporaries, I took advantage of the many benefits of modern gadgets, but never thought about how their parts functioned or how they were designed. It was enough that these machines served our everyday needs, and I was completely uninterested in how this was accomplished. We pressed the required button or turned the proper dial, and received everything necessary: fire, warm or cool air, hot water, steam, light, and so on. We spoke on the telephone; over the megaphone, we heard the newspaper read out in the morning and some light opera in the evening; we would switch on the telecinema while conversing with friends and gladly see their faces come to life, or enjoy some ballet on the same apparatus; we rode up to our apartments on automatic elevators summoned by the press of a button, and went up to the rooftops the same way to catch a breath of fresh air.... Out on the streets I confidently leapt on buses, subway trains, and compartments of the imperial railways, and rode on the platform of a dirigible; in emergencies I used motorcylettes and airplanes; I used the connecting escalators between stores while shopping, and in restaurants my order arrived automatically; at work, I used electric writing machines, electric adding machines, electric multipliers and dividers. Needless to say, we used the telegraph, suspended walkways, long-distance telephones and telescopes, attended both the electro-theater and the phono-theater, took ourselves to the automatic clinic for every little ailment, and so on and so forth. Literally at every step, if not every minute, we sought the cooperation of machines, yet at no point did we ask ourselves how exactly it all worked; we only got annoyed when the administrative telephone rang to inform us about this or that machine being temporarily out of service.

  As everyone knows, using machines became exceedingly simple for us. Even my little Andrei knew which buttons and knobs got heat or light, called up the newspaper or circus, stopped the elevator or hailed the passing bus, and he never made a mistake telling them apart. It seems to me that modern man has developed a special instinct for communicating with machines. As people of bygone years figured out, for example, how much force they needed to push open a door without thinking too much about it, we press a button and know that the door will swing shut noisel
essly. In exactly the same way we know how to manipulate the switches so that the strains of the opera can be heard in only one room, or step off the moving walkway onto the pavement – even though a person unused to this would immediately stumble and fall. And it seems entirely natural for us to know that a slight movement of the hand, an imperceptible turn of a dial, will bring about a particular consequence. We almost believe that all this happens “all by itself,” that this is in the nature of things, just as in the past, when people struck a match, they knew to expect a flame for lighting their bonfire.

  Now I am compelled to become much more aware: many things needed to be sorted out, inquiries were made, and much of the information I got from the newspapers, which for two months now have been continuously broadcasting the details of the catastrophe to the whole world. Now I know (of course I knew it before, had studied it in school, but had totally forgotten about it) that the Earth is divided into eighty-four “machine zones,” each with its own self-contained electric station. Each area is subdivided into districts; ours had sixteen. Each district also has a central electric station, which in turn connected with all the others. Finally, each district is split into counties, with substations in each of them that receive electricity from the central station. The district central station, serving 146 counties, was located in our Octopolis. And if the mishap affected a relatively small area, it was precisely because the majority of the communicating lines were disconnected in the nick of time. That is why the rebellion, which began at the central station, caused upheaval only in Octopolis and its neighboring thirty counties, instead of affecting all 150 of them.

  I do not know if one can talk about a plan for the rebellion, about its “preparations” or “conscious deliberations.” No matter how awkward it sounds, after all I have gone through, I can no longer tell the difference between the unthinkable and the possible. The machines behaved so systematically, with such diabolic logic, during the events that I am ready to acknowledge – never mind the sarcasm most people direct towards crazy “fantasists” and the way in which scientists try, through harsh criticism, to beat some reason into them – that the rebellion was definitely thought out in advance, if not consciously conceived. That would make the rebels’ plan crystal clear: they began the uprising not in one of the small substations, where its impact would have been relatively insignificant, but rather at the central station, from which it would potentially spread chaos into the whole district, and then, maybe, through the communicating lines across the whole zone – a vast space approximately the size of what used to be called a country. Naturally, I have no idea whether the rebels intended to spread their revolutionary actions all over the planet.

  One might add – to my embarrassment, I only learned about this recently from newspapers and lectures after suffering through my experiences – that some scientists have been predicting such a rebellion for a considerable time. It turns out that many centuries ago the similarities between organic and inorganic life had been noted. For instance, the growth of crystals is analogous to the growth of plants and animals; the fragments of a crystal are regenerated by the same “forces of nature” as those that heal a wounded living organism; pearls can suffer from disease, as can minerals; metals have breaking points of elasticity and tension; power cables “wear out” and refuse to comply if they are forced to work too hard; some elements (or substances, I am not sure exactly what they are called) magnetize spontaneously; electric currents at certain levels of condensation (I apologize again for a possible terminological error) spontaneously go live; all chauffeurs and pilots have noticed that engines “act up” without any observable cause, and so on. Incidentally, my knowledge of all this is so vague that I am the least suitable person to describe such phenomena; even in these few short lines, I must have committed many errors. I repeat: let those with more knowledge untangle the facts, and I will merely describe what I saw.

  I will get to the story now and try to keep all explanations out of it. I will leave aside the “why” and “wherefore,” and attempt to answer only the question of “what.” Even then my responses would be limited to a small range of events: as I never left the city of Octopolis through the whole course of the catastrophe, my observations are of necessity bounded by the city limits. I am an insignificant man, a speck of dust in a gigantic tornado, yet the tornado is made up of billions of dust specks; and so my limited awareness nevertheless registered the full extent of the horror that would soon engulf the entire Earth and, as they say, the whole universe.

  II

  I can’t say anything about how the catastrophe began. Now it has come to light that the first terrifying events – signals of the larger rebellion, so to speak – occurred at the Central Station. But what happened there, what monstrous apparition was witnessed by those working there, will remain forever unknown, since not one worker survived to tell the story. Now, following diverse speculations, they are trying to reconstruct the hellish, fantastic scenario that played out in the massive hallways of the Station: hurricanes of unexpected lightning sparks, floods of electrical discharge, noise like a million simultaneous thunderclaps, hundreds and thousands of people – engineers, assistants, ordinary workers – falling charred beyond recognition, destroyed, blasted to pieces or contorted in unbelievably tortuous dances... But all this is mere supposition, and maybe it did not happen at all this way. In any case, I cannot attest to it and certainly did not know in those minutes, or rather moments, when it all transpired.

  It is remarkable that the morning alarm woke us, the entire family, as usual at 7:15. Thus, at a quarter after seven the gadgets were all working normally – assuming, of course, that they were suppressing any signs of the coming rebellion according to the conspirators’ plans that we were not to be alerted ahead of time. We switched on the lights, my wife placed the automatic coffeemaker on the stove, Andrei turned on the heat in the rooms, and all our activities proceeded normally. A few minutes must have passed before the catastrophe unfolded, or else the power supply in our home may have come from a local generator rather than directly from the station; or, as I mentioned above, the rebels may have been hiding the true state of things from the city residents… The usual cacophony of motors and propellers could be heard beyond the walls.

  I was in a hurry because I planned to call on my friend Stefan, who was ailing, on the way to work. Not wanting to waste time, I asked Grandma (as everyone in the family called my mother) to inform Stefan on the telephone that I was on my way. She picked up the receiver of the city telephone, brought it up to her ear, pressed the right buttons on its panel and finally the last one... And suddenly something happened that we could not immediately understand. Grandma shuddered pitifully, dropping the receiver, and then went rigid, collapsed on the couch, and fell to the floor. We rushed to her prone figure. She was dead; this was apparent from her distorted face and the absence of breathing, and the ear to which she had held the telephone was as charred as if a lightning bolt had struck it with unimaginable force.

  We looked at each other with surprise as much as despair. Naturally we attempted to revive her, but I saw immediately that it was futile. “We need to call the doctor!” I exclaimed, and reached for the telephone. But my wife sprang forward, grabbed my arm, and cried, “No! No! Do not touch the telephone! Don’t you see there is something wrong with it? It will kill you just like Grandma!” Grasping the truth by some instinct, Maria overcame my resistance and did not let me approach the telephone, and thus saved my life – but to no avail, alas! I would have preferred to be killed then, at the beginning of the horrors, like my poor mother.

  After some argument we decided that I would go up to find the young physician who lived on the fourteenth floor of our building. I had already turned towards the door when all the lights went out. It was light enough outside, but nevertheless this event surprised us. And again Maria, with startling perspicacity, pinpointed the source. “Something is malfunctioning at the Central Station,” she warned. “Be careful.”
Then she sternly forbade Andrei to touch any buttons or knobs; this miraculous insight, however, did not save the woman herself. I was out on the landing by then. To my astonishment, there were about twenty people gathered there, all in a state of nervous excitement. Apparently some mishap had taken place in almost every apartment: some were killed, like Grandma, while trying to talk on the telephone, others received a terrible shock switching on the telecinema, still others were boiled alive by steam bursting out of the furnace or had their hands frozen by the refrigerator, and so forth. It was clear that the machines had deviated from their normal functions and that every wire and cable concealed danger.

  After exchanging a few incoherent explanations, we decided to summon the elevator. For a long time no one was willing to transmit the necessary signal. At last, an elderly man resolved to press the button. We looked on with fear, yet he remained unharmed. But the elevator car did not appear, because there was no current. After some hesitation, I ran up the stairs because I only had to climb five floors. On every landing fearful faces kept asking me what had happened. Silently I ran up to the doctor’s apartment and, not daring to press the doorbell, knocked with my fist. Startled by my wild knocking, the doctor himself opened the door, as I had almost broken it down like a madman. He did not yet know anything, and listened to my rambling account with a skeptical smile; nevertheless he agreed immediately to accompany me and help Grandma, all the while assuring me that she had probably only lost consciousness.

  Before my arrival the doctor had been busy with some work in his small laboratory, into which I followed him from the entrance. Now, preparing to leave with me, he seemed to want to hermetically seal something, or perhaps start something up. I am not sure what he intended, but momentarily forgetting about my concerns – or not having paid any attention to them – he carelessly extended his hand and started to manipulate some kind of switch. Obviously, the doctor’s table was equipped with special wires and circuits, and suddenly, before my very eyes, a bluish spark, thick as a good-sized rope, shot out of the switch and struck a fatal blow like a small clap of thunder. And the doctor collapsed on the carpet before me, brought to his death by this domestic lightning.... I froze in [Editor’s note: the text ends here].