Red Star Tales

by Yvonne Howell

  She is offended now as well. She rushed here as soon as she heard the statement about me, abandoned filming (no small sacrifice for a young actress), and I, you see, “am not taking visitors.” I really did not want to appear before her helpless, deaf and dumb, inferior. And now I am tightly wound, like a student before a test. This might seem ridiculous to a third party, but I even take care to recall and review her face: a twenty-three-year-old brunette, a wide face and forehead (or maybe it only seems this way to me because she is short and looks at me with a frown?), big, dark eyes, spectacularly pale skin with a purity and smoothness that highlights a birthmark on her right cheek; her dark chestnut hair usually gathered in a braid; a melodious soprano voice (how fine it will look in light!), an easy nonchalance in her pronunciation of difficult words… All this I’ve learned by rote over years of interaction. But how will I perceive her face now? her fine figure, her well-rounded arms, the shine of her eyes, her mood? It would be good if my memory of her would superimpose itself over my new perceptions in an enriched understanding of her feelings, of her soul. Because this is a test. And not just for me.

  There is a movement from the door, like a racing flame. Sounds from the lines of her body and clothing: something between noise and intimate music. And then there is something that requires not sight, not hearing, not even words: a head on my chest, warm hands around my neck, the smell of perfume and something intrinsic to her alone. I swoop her up in my arms, bury my face in her hair, her cheek, her hot lips. And my final sensible thought is: “Maybe we shouldn’t?”

  Why were they studying you for so long this time? Did something happen? They’re saying all kinds of strange things about you in town. But everything’s fine with you, isn’t it?

  We are lying on the couch, her head is on my arm. I perceive not so much the warm yellow flashes of her voice, but meaning of her questions.

  “Well, what do you think? How do you find me?”

  She raises herself up on an elbow, looks – movements, sounds, apprehension.

  Normal. Completely. It’s just your eyes are blank, floating around. Are you tired?

  “It’s because I’m blind. And besides that, I’m deaf…” I tell her everything.

  The silence-darkness of motionlessness… she has frozen up next to me. Confusion, fear, stupefaction, and – oh, God! – aversion, disgust towards me, a cripple. I have no interest in analyzing how I perceive this, but I do perceive it. Right away she checks herself, is angry at herself over these feelings:

  My poor little dear… and nothing can be done?

  “Nothing, of course. What can you do?”

  It’s horrible! (A line from many plays.) Listen… but could this be passed on to children?

  “It’s possible.”

  No, I don’t want to recall or retell her behavior, which, the further it went, the more it smelled of some well-practiced game. Her initial flash of alienation and aversion towards me was the sincere one. A famous psychonaut was one thing, a worthy match for an up-and-coming star of the screen, but an invalid with a unique deformity who could now only lick envelopes was another. And then children… well there’s no way to hide it, the future mother’s holy care. She doesn’t need me, no matter how you look at it.

  And I now don’t need her either. I was surprised myself at the feeling of relief and calm once Camilla had left. A woman I had been so afraid to lose…

  There are perceptions that enrich; there are also those that weaken, that strip away illusions. But in any case what you gain is clarity.

  10

  Listen, it’s still good that your eyes and ears got mixed up, and not your eyes with your tongue, say, your sight with your sense of taste. And wouldn’t it have been even worse if it had been your hearing with your sense of smell… oh! Imagine what sort of miasma you’d have to sniff up, what sort of filth you’d have cram yourself with, and still be hungry, ha! Listen, please get mixed up like that next time, in the interests of science, OK?

  I am finishing the dinner that was brought to me. Food in tubes, just pieces of bread and some milk in a glass. Now, it seems, I can switch over to normal food, but at first my perception of what I was eating in the new interpretation was so nauseating that it made me want to throw up. Sight and hearing are informator-senses, but taste is the Great Consumer. So Boryunia is right, I really am lucky.

  I am eating, and he is strolling unhurriedly and somehow very weightily from the window to the closet and back. I perceive him in the form of multiple roundish sounds, building in proportion as he approaches the window: something like a wave rolling onto a pebbly beach. Geraklych is in an excellent mood; I generally have never seen him in a bad mood, but today he simply strutting out of satisfaction and friendly feelings towards me. He has appeared in order to do me some great good, only so far it is unclear just what kind. Boris’s voice flames in rainbow modulations.

  A complicated relationship connects us. They choose people with great excessiveness to be psychonauts, people with an excellent charge of life energy, and Boris Geraklovich has this. As for the rest… I am a scientist, an author of papers and inventions, and he is an all-around athlete, of the highest class, to be fair. But when we switched bodies, even though it was only for twenty-four hours, an intimate, sensitive, preverbal mutual understanding arose between us; such an understanding probably occurs only between monozygotic twins or between a mother and child, flesh of her flesh. And such an understanding – of words, and movements, and silence, all the way up to one’s physical state – is of no use between strangers. This is bad, indecent. Leonid Leonov has a phrase about two old friends who “knew one another closely to the point of hatred.”11 That is something like what we have: we are estranged from one another by our independence of actions and judgments, even by how we egg each other on, but just the same we are connected.

  It’s all because of your impatience, Boris switches to a homiletic tone. I understand very well how it all happened: quickly, quickly, home quickly into my body! If you could’ve, you’d’ve been in an even bigger rush, and you basically would have jumped into your body like you were pulling on your flight suit while half asleep. Picture it: your arms are legs, you have to walk on them, your shoulders are your pelvis… But it’s best not to say anything about what, heh, what sort of remarkable place your intelligent head would end up at. Ha-ha-ha-ha!

  He lowers himself to the couch and snorts in pleasure, tearing up. The room fills with a yellowish-raspberry bonfire and a rhythmic quaking. That’s what he is like, Boryunia, the simple soul. He can never hold himself back, he is the first to laugh at his own jokes; and when other people start to laugh as well, then it’s not clear what they are laughing at. But it is noteworthy that here, too, he is right: everything happened precisely because of my impatience.

  Tell me, please, how do I look in your new perception? Still interesting and handsome?

  “Even better: intelligent. So hurry up and get mixed up yourself.

  Oh, well said, dear man! and he sidles over to hug me.

  “Go away! I’d rather you cleaned up in here. What did you come here for?”

  To turn you back into a person. To reduce you to the common denominator. For a start I will... you.

  “What will you do?” I put my fingers on the pins of the automatic reader.

  Calibrate you!

  He draws the thick curtains: the sunny noon beyond the window falls silent, the murmur from the objects in the room dwindles; he places a hefty device on the table, turns it on.

  What do you see?

  “Red. Is that the ZG you have there?”

  That’s the one. You just figure everything out, don’t you! Now I will slowly increase the frequency, and you tell me when it changes to orange.

  It would be hard not to figure it out: it’s the ZG-10, an audio-frequency generator. Boryunia is using it to find the border frequencies of the sounds that I perceive in a given color. All very proper.

  “You’re already there.”

&
nbsp; One thousand one hundred hertz. Let’s go on.

  The transition from yellow to green was marked at two-and-a-half kilohertz, from green to blue at four. And beyond ten kilohertz there was an impression of violet and a gradual transition into darkness.

  Let’s go on to the next step. What do you hear?

  “A-flat in the first octave.”

  Whoa, now that’s some musical literacy for you! I suddenly feel like calling you “sir.” This one?

  “C-natural second, minor…” He is showing me plates of specific colors; I’m starting to feel playful. “Listen, Borya, stop this nonsense.”

  What do you mean, stop? I’ve organized a volunteer laboratory. First we will create an “auditory inverter” that transforms sounds into flashes according to our calibration. You will see them, and hear sounds. You will hear my voice! Then we will figure out the visual inverter. The idea is still not clear, but we will think of something. Seeing with your ears, heh, it’s more complicated than with your eyes, but you will be able to do it on the same level as a cheap television.

  “No, well… go ahead and do that for the glory of science; I’m not against it. But what you will do is hook those invertors up to yourself, so that you can see and hear as I do. Why is it, I’d like to know, that you want to force on me your way of perceiving reality only because there are many of you and one of me?”

  A second’s worth of stupefaction with a hint of violet.

  Now would you look at that! Nope, I will not in my life meet another person like you. So you want everyone to get mixed up so they’ll be able to communicate normally with you? Listen, maybe you’re not Maxim Kolotilin, but Napoleon Bonaparte? Tell the truth, I won’t give you away.

  “It would be useful for you! As far as communicating with me, you and I are communicating without invertors, and even without the teletype.”

  But that’s just you and I! Listen, old boy, don’t jerk me around. Let’s continue. What do you hear now?

  “I’m not going to get calibrated. Keep playing without me.”

  Well, then… sorry, but I have to do this… Boris dials a number, and (I almost hear it) speaks into the receiver in a schoolboy’s voice: Patrick Yanovich, he doesn’t wish to be calibrated! It would probably be better if you talked with him yourself. I don’t have the strength or the words.

  11

  The next scene: the same characters as before and Patrick. Now I also feel a little like a schoolboy. We have pulled the boss away from his work, he is impatient and angry.

  I already mentioned that I don’t like televisions, that I don’t watch them. But during trips, when I am put in a hotel room with the obligatory TV, I sometimes amuse myself by turning it on its side or even upside-down. It’s pleasant to watch someone bash out some jazz while sitting on the ceiling, or actors, standing on the wall, explaining complicated dramatic relationships: “Die, you miserable wretch!” and the “miserable wretch” does not fall, but just the opposite, she seems to stand up… But here’s the remarkable thing: in those instances when they show real drama, or when realness manifests itself in the actors’ performances, in inspired production, then you stop noticing the television’s incorrect positioning. Apparently, the nature of true art, like the nature of physical laws, is such that it operates independent of any coordinate system.

  Something similar happened this time as well: I ceased to noticed the chromatic peculiarities of Patrick Yanovich’s speech, of Boris’s replies, the shades of noise of their gestures, and saw just the meaning. Thought clashed with thought.

  Why do you not want to calibrate your perceptions for the invertors? People are burning with impatience to help you!

  “Because it is silly, Patrick. I am grateful, of course, for the burning and for the impatience, but this is just wrong. I see, I hear, I have the same sense organs, at least in their exterior parts, as all of you. And the impressions that result from them inside me… that is my personal business!

  Your personal business, right! (Hand movement.) Well, then please be so kind as to lay these two matches cross-wise.

  I couldn’t even see them, the matches: they were too small.

  There you have it: “The other one fell silent and walked back and forth in front of him. He could raise no better objection!”12 That’s Boryunia, who was a good student in grade school and remembers his Pushkin.

  “Well… I can’t yet do that. But I will learn in time.”

  In time… Listen, my dear man, let’s be frank. You know what complex work we are doing, how grueling everyone’s work is, how much is still unstudied and how many hidden dangers still remain. And if your comrades – at Boris’s initiative and with my consent – want to spend their time and energy on this work, then it is because, in the first place, we want to help you, and, in the second place, we do not want to lose you. We will find you some sort of radio-flight consulting position, and you, your experience and knowledge, your exceptional abilities will remain in our field. But for this to happen, it goes without saying that we will need a satisfactory means of communicating and getting oriented. For a start, they will whip you up visual and auditory invertors… well, in the form of some sort of complex earphones and glasses, an inversion unit in your side pocket, batteries in your breast pocket. It will be cumbersome, of course, but the good thing is that everything will be normal. And then the neurologists and psychocyberneticians will get started on you, and maybe they’ll come up with something better before you know it. And you will be a person. But otherwise, where are we going to put you?

  “Hold on, Patrick Yanovich… hold on with these works of mercy and the practical side of the matter. (I was annoyed at being treated like an invalid who had to be stuck someplace.) First let’s consider this wonderful idea of inversion as a method of combating this ‘mixed-up’ condition. Like scientists. So, let’s say we create a device that transforms sounds into visual images (you will not manage with just flashes for conveying complex information, quasi-representations on some sort of mosaic screens will be required; you’ve made it too simple there) and directs them into the eyes. The eyes, after all, are our most informative organ…” The thought was just forming in my mind, I was talking in fragments. “We will test this on a person whose sight is fine, but whose other senses are a disaster – no hearing, smell, or sense of touch. So, his auditory perceptions are directed to his eyes. We make another inverter that transforms smells into visual signals and images. Then another one for touch. We could make another one as well, for taste impressions, we will also translate them into the visual. Everything goes into the eyes! And what’s more, the world around is full of infrareds and ultraviolets, radio-signals and other sorts of infra- and supersonic signals that communicate something just their own about reality; we will transform these as well and feed them into the eyes. What would a person with such a fully visual perception of the objective world see?

  He wouldn’t see a thing!

  “Worse, Boryunchik: he would see ‘white noise.’ A polychromatic fog. Now mentally play out an inversion like this based on hearing or touch, and you will get the same thing: ‘white noise.’ You have to understand that the world is not like this. We do not perceive it as such, because our sense organs… well, they’re like radio receivers or something, each tuned to a different bandwidth. Change the tuning, and you receive the wrong thing. Why would I fool myself with reverse inverting? If you were to give me back normal vision and hearing, I would have a great deal of mistrust in what I would see and hear!”

  Well, what do you know! I could not tell who that reply belonged to – they were both shocked.

  “Patrick Yanovich, you yourself said that what has happened to me is possible only for protein-based bodies, that this kind of thing could not happen with the silicon-based beings and the crystalloids, and could not…”

  It’s not going to happen to us, either, we are going to be cooling the bodies.

  “There you have it. It emerges that, your intentions to invert me and sti
ck me in a pensioner’s consulting role will ruin a one-of-a-kind potential, something unique across three worlds, something that, just the same, needs to be studied in full. They also have the same arrangement: they see with their eyes, hear with their ears, and are content…”

  Ha-ha-ha-ha! Boryunia has gone up in flames like a gas tank. So you wish everyone would get mixed up. Both here, and on Proxima, and on Barnard’s Star! That’s what it is, Patrick Yanovich, he proposed that I put the invertors on myself.

  Patrick did not laugh, but I could sense that he also did not understand me. He even doubted whether the changes in my mind were limited to my analyzers. Does one really have to become “mixed up” in order to understand what I am trying to explain?

  So we did not agree on anything. The boss suddenly realized that he had to attend an experiment, said that we would talk about it further, that there was no rush, and left, a talented, narrow-minded man. Boryunia stole out after him. I’ll leave the equipment here, my dear man, heh-hm!

  I found no words… Oh, words are not what is important, but rather what I decide and what I will do. And I already know what this will be. But first I have to get a good night’s sleep.

  12

  In my sleep I was looking at myself in the mirror, running an electric razor along my cheeks. I saw my hands with slender, strong fingers, well-defined veins, sparse, light hair. Then I saw Camilla, Vitka Strizhevich, a friend from my university days; I saw leaves on the asphalt, fire-red and yellow maple leaves, rusty-yellow elm leaves, a newspaper kiosk that’s not far from the Institute, a section of brick wall with a drain pipe, a street with pedestrians and shining cars, and something else, and something else. When I woke up, my pillow was wet; I had been crying while I slept. People are weak in their sleep.

  Oh, well, let this, too, inform my new perception of the world; my sense of sight that I lamented in my sleep is something we inherited from the animals, something that seemed like the only possible way of seeing.