One day he arrived as usual early in the morning and saw a large golden dragonfly on the flower.
“Who are you?” asked the beautiful dragonfly.
“Who am I? I don’t know,” the grey and shaggy one bitterly answered.
“But everybody is somebody,” said the dragonfly. “Look, you run to this place every morning at dawn to find the key to happiness. Do you want me to call you a dawn-key?”
“Yes,” said the runner, “I like that name.”
“Hmmm, well…” commented Saton, after a long pause.
“Not a word about cybers,” said Telesik. “Although I’ll grant you that a golden dragonfly is nevertheless a cyber-dragonfly.”
“Not exactly a fount of creativity, is he…” commented one of the sociologists, scratching his stomach.
“What do you mean?” said the other one. “A fairytale is beyond even our limits. Just try and make one up. I, for one, could not even start…”
“I like it!” Alyoshka asserted decisively, and the sociologists respectfully stopped talking. “In general, I like Nuri Metti as a person. Justification: he is active, kind, and brave. These are qualities we need. He has many good qualities…”
“For instance… humor,” hinted the raven.
“Yes, that too.”
“He beat up the leopard. He subdued that primordial animal’s powerful instinct to bite. Here’s proof,” said the cyber, adjusting the bandage around the leopard’s meowsers. The leopard purred in bass tones.
“The IRN dispatcher affirms that Nuri didn’t want to do it, he was forced…” Alyoshka hastened to add.
“I thought,” Nuri interrupted the wunderkind, “that we were talking about my knowledge.”
“Knowledge! Who is impressed by knowledge nowadays?” shiny pants asked. “Character is the most important thing. Individuality, preserved even under the most extreme conditions. Uniqueness – along with the ability to bow to the collective interest. Personally, I’d give you an A, because you impressed me with the way you bargained with me over that bracelet. None of that wimpy “ahh, come little boy, let the puppy go,” stuff, which I can’t stand.”
“We have been analyzing the actions of Nuri Metti since the day he got his summons,” said one of the sociologists. “We compared them to the recordings in his coded bracelet. He always stayed true to himself. He is who he is. He is genuine.”
Rakhmatulla came out of his state of nirvana.
“People,” he said, casting his glance over all of them. “I have returned to reality, and it is beautiful. I will read aloud what Nuri has deserved; indeed what all of us deserve. Listen.”
He took from Nuri’s hands a wooden tablet and read:
“In the name of the future. Diploma. The examination commission of the Maritime Branch of the Institute for the Restoration of Nature, acknowledging its responsibility towards humanity, hereby certifies Nuri Metti to perform the duties of preschool teacher on the planet Earth.”
First published in Russian: 1979
Translation by Yvonne Howell
* * *
1. Institute for the Restoration of Nature. Most of the earth’s originally existing plants and animals were destroyed or became extinct during humanity’s earlier period of wanton disregard for Nature. Bio-genetic engineering allowed us to create a secondary nature and interesting new animals, who now roam the grounds of the Institute.
2. The proper Russian response to the expression for “good luck” is “go to the devil,” the traditional “rude” response which precludes the Devil coming to spoil the “good” luck.
VLADIMIR SAVCHENKO
1980
MIXED UP1
1
Entering into the antenna is both a shock and a delight. The joy of a traveler returning home multiplied by the speed of the return, by the speed of light. And I am not just coming home, but into my body!
Until now I had tuned myself to thinking that in radio-wave form I am the same as I am in corporeal form: a rational being with consciousness, memory, and purposeful behavior, the same Maxim Kolotilin, thirty-two earth-years old. This was really just a self-deception to help me do my job. In reality, it was like I was riding a rubber band: the further I flew, the more strongly I felt myself pulled back.
And now, after four months of radio-flight, I am returning into myself. It’s no big deal that I will once again become tiny: one meter, ninety centimeters tall (one seven millionth of the diameter of the Earth), weighing ninety-two kilograms, subject to gravity and all the vagaries of the elements. On the other hand, I will hear, smell, and feel my world. I will breathe! I will walk on the Earth. I will eat all different kinds of food… Stop, Max, don’t be in a hurry to indulge your cravings. Help the machine.
For them, for the earthly ones, with their slow ion processes, the entrance is an instantaneous process. But this is a fragment of time saturated with complex work for both me and the automatic receiver, programmed to redistribute my biocurrents and biopotentials through electrodes implanted in my body, each to its proper place, in a well-defined sequence.
But now for me everything has become slow, weighty: ordinary. I am lying facedown on the platform in the chamber, I feel the beats of my heart... Oh, how it is now pounding hurriedly! I feel the pulses in my temples and in my wrists that lie alongside my body. Here I am: I have a muscular body with a somewhat slouching spine (this is inherited from my ancestors: peasants and slaves who leaned over plows, over lathes), dark red hair, an elongated bony face, sharp nose, thin lips, a prominent forehead set off by a receding hairline; for someone of my height the shoulders could be a little wider. And in general, for a star-pilot, my appearance could be a bit more classical; but this one suits me, I’m used to it. The way you get used to worn-out shoes that feel good on your feet.
Someone is lightly touching my spine near the small of my back, my neck, my shoulders: they are taking out the now useless electrodes. Who is it, Patrick Yanovich or Yulia? It’s probably her. Patrick works more slowly.
With fingers light as a dream
He touched my eyes.
My prophetic eyes opened
Like a frightened mother eagle’s.
He touched my ears:
And noise and ringing filled them…2
And that’s what will happen now. After the “all clear” tap I will sit up, see everyone in the semi-darkness of the chamber, get situated, stand up. There will be embraces, handshakes, many exclamations of “well, how was it?” My body obeys me: arms, fingers, legs… I do a few test contractions of my muscles. My face as well: lips, cheeks, tongue, eyelids… they work.
But further up things are worse. In my head, in my brain something is off. Especially in the frontal and the temporal lobes. Something feels heavy, empty, like I have a bad hangover. Did something did not turn out right?
I raise my head slightly from the breathing-channel hollow in the platform. And right away… some sort of semi-darkness, a calm silence… an incomprehensible roaring with wavering flashes of light comes crashing down on me. Where am I? What’s happening, a fire or something? It doesn’t look that way, I feel no warmth. Unless it’s in the figurative sense: they won’t leave me alone, they’re slapping me on the back, someone hugs me. Wait, I can’t deal with this right now! I have to get my bearings.
I sit down, propping my head in my hands: it’s like someone else is controlling me. I get to my feet, but I can’t stand, I lose my balance. They don’t let me fall, they catch me… does this mean that they are here? I recognize the arm muscles: Boryunia, my partner and stand-in: Boris Geraklovich, son of Hercules, descendant of Ossetian princes and my best friend. He’s a full-blooded type, an overly informal lover of life.
What the hell is this: they’re here, but I don’t see anyone, don’t hear anyone! I perceive a fiery extravaganza, a grating sound, a roaring, voices of the jungle. Have I not reentered my body completely? That’s nonsense, the machine wouldn’t have switched off… and this isn’t my first tim
e out.
Something in my head is off… but what? If the assignment of biopotentials had seriously failed, I’d be dead already. This means the failure is not serious, but a trivial omission in allocating my sight and hearing. All right, I will try to fix it myself. Once again I lie facedown in the hollow, I cover my ears. Silence, darkness: zero start. Concentration: all of me is under my skull, with thought-volition I shine light from within on my brain, on the bones of my face, on my eyes, on my ears, from my cerebellum, from my hypothalamus. Well?! See, hear, see, hear… the world is right there, on the other side of a thin partition, close by! See, hear… good job, guys, they understand, they aren’t disturbing me… see, hear, see, hear!
The pain and emptiness in my head abate. A light clarity emerges. This means that everything in my head has fallen into place (but what on earth just happened?). I get up, open my eyes: once again the optical pandemonium, roaring, and a blizzard of howls. So what is this?!
This time I easily remain standing. At least I have my feeling of balance back, that’s something. But in every other sense I am incommunicado.
“Let me get dressed.”
Even my voice is not mine. I have a pleasant baritone, but this is some sort of deep-seated voice, like from a barrel. And these flashes in my eyes. Someone thrusts a cellophane-wrapped package into my hands. My pajamas are in it. No, I’m not in the jungle… I sit down, I get dressed.
(They are probably interrupting each other, asking me questions. They can’t help asking: “What’s wrong? How do you feel? Can you walk?” and the like. But why, why can’t I perceive anything?! Where are you, world that I was in such a hurry to get back to?)
“I can walk. Take me to my room.” (That voice!)
They lead me there. Boryunia, son of Hercules, leads me, I can tell by his arms: the left one holds me by my shoulders, the right supports my elbow. And these flashes, these flares, these roars… what are they? It would be better to see nothing than to see like this. Hercules’ son’s pulse is also in a hurry: boy-oh-boy, my poor psychonaut!
My room, which serves as both a pre-launch room and an office, is on this floor.
We make it there, whew! I feel for the armchair, I sit down.
“And now leave me alone.” (The flashes, the noise: their reactions?) “Please! I have to get my bearings. Then I’ll call you myself.”
They seem to have done what I asked, they’re gone. Silence, darkness… zero perception. At least that part lines up.
So much for being “back home.”
2
Here I’m like a little animal in its burrow. I don’t need eyes or ears. I know without them where everything is. To the left of the armchair, at the distance of an outstretched hand, is a wide windowsill (I stretch out my hand: there it is. What is it like outside? If I completed the flight precisely on schedule, it should be the middle of the night, two in the morning; but was my timing really that accurate?). In front of me is the desk (there it is!), to the right, along the wall, are bookshelves, microfilms, magnetic cassettes, record cases; above them (I have a habit of piling everything on top) a stereo, a tape recorder, an Epsilon electric typewriter, a portable computer: all I need for work, thought, and relaxation. On the opposite wall are watercolors that I did myself: nothing special, done for my own enjoyment. The left one is Camilla, the middle one is a pine forest by the Volga, and the right one is the sunrise as seen from my room. Under the watercolors there is a wide sofa, with bed sheets in a drawer under the headboard. To the right is the door into the entranceway (the one they brought me in through), along with the bathroom and all that stuff. (Should I take a bath, splash around, lounge? Wait, now is not the time to hurry with joys of the flesh; get your bearings first.)
The one thing that I do not have in my room and never will is a television. The first attempts to read “radio-essences” for subsequent transmission used television raster scanning: it seemed a tried and true way of doing things, and, more importantly, it was ours, earthly. I drew the lot to be the third one to undergo reading. But the first two, Patersen and Gumenyuk, were killed, and the experiment was terminated. Ever since then, I can’t stand televisions.
My room is on the twelfth floor. During the day it has a wonderful view of the wide curve of the upper Volga with its banks of yellow sand and orange-burgundy clay, of its barges and white liners, as well as of the meadows and pine forests beyond it, the concrete bridge with eight arches, the Institute campus; you can also see the blue sky with dipping swallows, with processions of clouds marching off to the horizon… all that I missed and all that I was in a hurry to get back to.
I am a psychonaut, a star-pilot without a starship. We participate in a program of exchange flights (more accurately: exchange psy-transportation of intelligent life-forms) with the crystalloids of Proxima Centauri and the silicon-based humanoids of Barnard’s fast-flying3 Star. We are still in the beginning stages. Humankind is participating in the program at kind of the lowest trainee level.
It’s just what it sounds like: there are star-pilots, but no starships. Starships did not work out. Human extrapolations are very linear. The first sources of light were powered by chemical batteries: aha, this means that the power plants illuminating the cities of the future will be enormous galvanic batteries! And so it goes in all things, scorning the well-known law of transition from quantity to quality. Even apart from the technical difficulties that simply could not be overcome (we didn’t find materials suitable for the nuclear energies and temperatures, the super-penetrative emissions of Deep Space), would it really be worth it? Dragging your protoplasm, your microclimate, food, and bodily wastes across the parsecs into what you know to be an alien world?
An alternate way was always there, humankind from the very beginning had penetrated along it a great deal further into the Universe than by means of mechanical transposition: radio signals, radio technology. But for broadcasting information very far away, this method does have a flaw compared to sending physical bodies: dissipation. A cobblestone billions of kilometers from where it was launched will remain the same, while a radio or light beam, no matter how narrowly it is focused, will dilate and blur. If only we could come up with some kind of non-dissipation or auto-compression technique for the beam!
It’s probable that if we had really looked, if we had poured as many resources and as much effort into it as we had put into the insoluble problem of starships, we would have found the method ourselves. But everyone was stuck on the idea of an interstellar taxi (with a tip jar above the meter) and galactic trading posts, where our guys would get cheated by beetle-eyed creatures from other worlds offering fish fur, yet they would still maintain that human conceptions of morality, justice, good, and evil are universally valid throughout the Cosmos.
In a word, to be blunt, we had our noses rubbed in it. The rub was information-laden millimeter-band “radio-packets.” When the “radio-packets” began to broadcast video-information about the aliens, with a thoroughness and a level of detail that ruled out any thought of a hoax, there was plenty to watch on television screens and plenty to listen to on VHF receivers. At first they sent video-information about themselves, which was the most accessible, but then moved on to codified information in general. This was work on a grand scale! In those five days all other matters on Earth fell to the wayside; hundreds of millions of television viewers and, more importantly, hundreds of thousands of scientists observed, correlated, decoded, and compared results. The richest day was the third, when a multi-channel dialogue began between Earthlings and the “radio-packets.”
Five beings from the trinary star system of Alpha Centauri4 had flown here as “radio-essences” to verify the intelligent origin of electromagnetic emissions from the Solar System. As later became apparent, there was no sense in trying to determine from which of the three stars – from which planets – they’d originated: all the planets there had long ago been assimilated, transformed into hives of crystal beings, who flow around those three heavenly bodie
s – the sources of their lush electromagnetic life – as meteor showers, rings, discs, and spheres. Those five beings were unable to become incarnate in our material forms for the simple reason that we lacked the appropriate technology. Even so, once they’d verified that Earth’s radio emissions did contain a component of intelligence, they made themselves right at home, retransmitting themselves along the ring of communications satellites, reflecting themselves from the antennae of lunar and Martian radio telescopes, and gallivanting around the Solar system, so as to enlighten us and answer all our questions (questions that in fact were precisely formulated only after they arrived).
Solving the problem of just what information you need to broadcast so that the carrying radio signal doesn’t dissipate turned out to be simple: you have to broadcast yourself. You have to broadcast the whole of your make-up, as expressed in biocurrents and psy-potentials, your individual distinctiveness, your motivation, your life activity, the depths of your understanding of the world – all that makes man an intelligent being. On Earth, as the result of an elevated psy-charge (and not of a hearty diet, since cows and tigers eat a great deal more) people walk on two extremities, have hands free for complex work, and a head elevated for wide-ranging observations and reasoned understanding of the world. In space this quality (in conjunction with an electromagnetic boost, of course) allows them to remain intact over a much greater distance than radio-packets, which carry “dead” information.
The “crystalloids-in-essence” expressed their unbiased opinion that humans had matured to only the most minimal degree required to apply the method of psy-transmission, and would submit to the process only with difficulty. Some would manage it, some would not. There are still other means of interstellar, even intergalactic, communication exchange between intelligent beings, but they’d require such a reconstruction of our psyche, our conceptions of the world, even of our way of life, that… in a word, it was still too early to talk with us about them.
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