Red Star Tales

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Red Star Tales Page 41

by Yvonne Howell


  It’s quiet outside the window, which means that it’s dark. The Institute has emptied out. To “light” the room I put a record on the player, and perceived not only the dim outlines of objects (give me time, Patrick Yanovich, and I will lay those matches cross-wise!), but also Čiurlionis-esque images, this time fairly concrete. A sea in a storm heaves with huge waves, reeling, all the way to the grey-blue horizon, great white-maned waves fly onto the shore, ring cannon blows against the cliffs, fling up to the sky exulting fireworks of sea-spray.

  Ta-dim, ta-dam-ta-dam-da-dum!

  There it is: I pulled out Beethoven’s Ninth symphony, the very beginning. I have not been to the places where he lived, but that is it.

  I don’t take long getting packed: inflatable gardbrace and breast plate, wig, glasses, briefcase with the bare necessities. Yes, I cannot forget the plastic bag and shoelace! Now a note: “Patrick Yanovich, Boris, Yulia, everyone! I earnestly ask you not to look for me. If it becomes necessary, I’ll find my own way back. So long, my love to you all!”

  I take the elevator down in light blue silence. The lobby. To the right the night watchman, covered by a newspaper, drowses in a leather armchair. Here they only look at who is coming in, and even then not all the time… That’s the help for you!

  And now I am free. For everyone it’s an autumn evening, like in “dark is the little night,”13 but for me it is light: the wind whistles14 in the naked branches, stripping the last leaves from the trees, and to the right splashes the Volga. I am walking along the embankment to the grove. The streetlights drench me in a shower of noise. Approaching passersby are perceptible from below, from their hasty steps. They’re probably thinking: what a weirdo, it’s not enough for him that it’s the middle of the night, he’s also put on dark glasses!

  The streetlights and asphalt have ended. My feet hew a gleaming path through the rustling leaves. And if I lean my head back, the stars above sing out something of their own, something cosmic, with the voices of violins. There, where they ring out as an entire orchestra, is the Milky Way.

  I am using words that describe what I perceive through “sound” and “light” – so far I have no others. But in reality everything is both this way and not this way. It is already different, my perception, and in it memories of my former days, my knowledge, and my recollections of radio-flights have been superimposed over my “mixed up” senses. Now I perceive the world with a fullness of which I previously had no notion.

  I came out of the woods at the spring. Ringing, it illuminates (this will have to do!) the clay bluff, the waves that obliquely rebound onto the sand. I get undressed, pack my clothes together with the briefcase in the plastic bag. I tie it up with one end of the shoelace, the other end, with a big loop, goes over my shoulder. Well?

  Whew, the water is cold in October, it burns my skin! It’s no big deal, psychonaut, you’ve overcome worse. I swim. On this side they could catch me quickly. But about thirty kilometers down along the other bank there is a wharf. I’ll get there by morning, get on one of the last steamships, and then on a barge, and on down through the Motherland.

  I’ll start somewhere with the simplest activity I can find: I will roll something round, drag something flat. It will probably look a little strange at first. “Listen, are you kin to Maxim Kolotilin, the famous psychonaut? You look like him.” “That’s me, I’m him.” And the guys will go ha-ha-ha! like Boris. It’s the most reliable way of disappearing… And I will return to the Institute “normal” in my ability to communicate and orient myself, no worse than anyone else (I will try to be even better), but having kept everything in me.

  Because, with this effect that we have unfortunately named being “mixed up,” we are opening a new chapter in the history of human knowledge, of our perception of the world. In it the former “sight/hearing/smelling/feeling/tasting” will be just one of many.

  And this will not be just a human sense. They, too, the ones from Barnard’s Star and the trinary system of Proxima Centauri, will rush to adopt this experiment for themselves.

  A shining wind rambles above the water, above the bright banks. The waves illuminate my hands as they thrust forward fathom by fathom. The stars sing with delicate voices. The Volga flows, the Earth flies in space… Come on, pull harder, so you can warm up!

  “Ta-dim… ta-dam-ta-dim! We’ll win the next round!”

  First published in Russian: 1980

  Translation by Kevin Reese

  * * *

  1. The first published version of this story appeared in Ukrainian in the magazine Nauka i suspil’stvo [Science and Society] 9, 10 1980, under the title “Zelenyi kolir holosu” [The Voice’s Green Color]. The second installment of the story ends with the note “Translated from the Russian by Oleksandr Teslenko.” It is possible, given Savchenko’s penchant for playing with language, that this translator is some sort of “literary mystification,” particularly since the same Teslenko is evocative of Tesla, a name connected closely to engineering and electricity.

  2. Lines from Pushkin’s famous poem “Prorok” [The Prophet, 1826], in which a six-winged seraph violently transforms the poetic speaker into a being with “all-wise” eyes, all-hearing ears, a serpent’s tongue, and glowing coal for a heart. This prophet is then given the task of “burning men’s hearts” with God’s word.

  3. Kolotilin is referencing the fact that Barnard’s star (about 6 light years from Earth, in the constellation Ophiuchus, near 66 Ophiuchi) has the largest known proper motion (the apparent motion of a star among other seemingly fixed stars) of any star that can be observed from Earth.

  4. Alpha Centauri is a binary star system with components A and B. A third star, Proxima Centauri or Alpha Centauri C may or may not be gravitationally associated with Alpha Centauri AB.

  5. Designed and constructed by the English psychiatrist and cybernetics pioneer William Ross Ashby, the homeostat was built to maintain homeostasis when subjected to various environmental changes. Its construction is described in Ashby’s 1952 monograph Design for a Brain. Ashby is a favorite thinker of Savchenko’s, and his work is referenced frequently throughout Self-Discovery.

  6. An 1826 poem by Pushkin.

  7. An 1857 poem by Fedor Tiutchev.

  8. Either Savchenko or Kolotilin has made a slight mistake: Chopin’s 69/2 is in B-minor. 64/2 is in C#-minor

  9. The Russian folk song “In the field there stood a little birch…” is incorporated into Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony.

  10. A 1947 song (music by B. Mokrousov, lyrics by A. Fatyanov) celebrating Soviet aviation.

  11. A slightly inexact quotation from Leonov’s 1932 novel Skutarevsky.

  12. From Pushkin’s “Dvizhenie” [Movement] [1825], a poem that uses Zeno’s first Argument and Galileo’s heliocentrism to consider the problem of physical motion.

  13. The opening words of a 1911 poem by Esenin.

  14. A half-line from Lermontov’s “Parus” [The Sail, 1832]

  KIR BULYCHEV

  1985

  JUBILEE-200

  I sat down in the shade of the sycamore, which according to legend was planted by Academician Sosnora himself, and began to watch the kids.

  The kids squealed and frolicked along the shore of the pond, while their teachers trotted after them, convinced that any minute one of the little ones might fall into the cold water and catch pneumonia.

  I could easily guess the genetic lines of every youngster just by looking at them.

  More than a century ago, a male named Stark with a light-colored, shorthair coat, homozygous for that allele, left his mark on several generations to come. The dominant phenotype still appears in the kids, who have no idea who their great-grandfather was. Just think of the receding chins and drooping mustaches of the Habsburgs – these traits continued for six hundred years or more, as is obvious in their portraits, no matter how hard the artists tried to ameliorate them.

  We subdue nature, and nature finds ways around us, in order not to be subdued.


  The Experiment seemed modest on the face of it, but beneath the surface, it was pompous and full of human vanity: let’s put ourselves in God’s place, figure out how to humanize chimps, and call upon radiation genetics to flip every switch towards biological advancement.

  We the omnipotent will take a herd of chimpanzees, mobilize the mechanism that directs mutations, drive out of the blind-alley of evolutionary progress, pick up tremendous speed and then take a look – will nature allow us to create our own brothers in Reason?

  Those who planned the Experiment, who secured the financing and housing, convinced academic and funding organizations that this experiment was vital for the human race – they themselves understood that they would not live to see the results. That is, they understood in the abstract, but in fact nobody believes in their own mortality, and every one of them felt that perhaps a miracle would happen, and within just thirty years there would be a mutant who could communicate in words and learn the multiplication tables.

  Naturally, everything turned out as they’d planned, but nothing turned out as they’d hoped.

  Once, I searched the library for a journal from two hundred years ago, and there I found a lively article about how they combed the zoos and sanctuaries for the brightest, most advanced chimpanzees and brought them together to breed in places that had been specially set up for them – kind of a cross between a zoo, a genetics research institute, and a dormitory for idiots.

  At first, enthusiasm made up for the lack of financing and equipment. Not everyone in the world was convinced that this experiment should take precedence over other issues occupying humanity. But at the helm of the institute stood Sosnora, who used part of the premises for an ancillary project: treating cows to exponentially increase their milk production. Therefore, with the help of those witless creatures who still graze near the pond today, he proved the profitability of the enterprise. He himself died ten years later.

  The next director gradually expanded the operation. He added exceptionally gifted new chimps to the herd so that the existing genetic pool would not become so isolated as to give rise to a new species, incapable of interbreeding with wild stock.

  Throughout various crises and conflicts, the institute never closed. There was something unreal about the entire principle of the institute’s activity. It was science with pretensions to godhood.

  Directors came and went, researchers received salaries, made discoveries, defended dissertations, retired; in general, their activities resembled those of their colleagues in related scientific institutes.

  In the course of things, genetic concepts and methods changed, new theories arose, or obsolete theories were resurrected. Neo-Lamarckism was suddenly in vogue, followed by the triumph of post-Darwinism, only to be finally replaced by super-Mendelianism.1

  Every one of these theoretical turns reflected in some way on the politics of dealing with the herd of chimpanzees. The most promising specimens fell into disfavor and were sent off to zoos or medical institutes, and the greatest accomplishments were suddenly viewed as setbacks, only to be viewed again as grand discoveries a few years later.

  The ascents, falls, defeats, and changes in theory hit the chimpanzees the hardest. Having created a new race of rational beings out of monkeys, human beings then denied humanity to the creatures they were in the process of humanizing.

  Not all that long ago there was a case in which a female named Sienna-4 was written off to a zoo to perish there, despite the fact that she possessed remarkable mathematical abilities. The reason was simple: her boss – a very nice, talented, but wayward man – got into an irrevocable dispute with his department chair and left the Experiment. And this man was the only one who Sienna-4 had trusted or liked.

  Therefore, as a participant in the Experiment and one of many who contributed to it, I harbor a deep personal objection to what is going on here. In the course of two hundred years of directed mutations, continuous tests and operations, experimental medications, and changes in habitat, no stable outcomes have been reached. Moreover, as the results accumulate, the gap between homo-chimps and experimenters grows ever wider. Oddly enough, Man – who thought up the Experiment, expended two hundred years and a heap of resources on it, employing hundreds of minds that might have been far better used to advance other fields of knowledge – Man is mentally unprepared to accept a repudiation of his own exceptionalism. For people, homo-chimps are still nothing more than chimps. They may be objects of research, but not partners in Reason…

  My rather depressing thoughts were interrupted by shouts from one of our behaviorists, whom we’d nicknamed Formula.

  “John!” she yelled, running through the corridor, “where are you?”

  When she saw me, she asked, “Have you seen John?” But she didn’t wait for my answer and kept running. She couldn’t stand me.

  John is an old homo-chimp, and a real creep from an anatomical point of view: nearly bald, with a bulging forehead and a conniving mind. For some reason, he’s the one all the Experiment people trust. The meager vocabulary by which he communicates strikes them as the epitome of their accomplishments. Whenever some kind of delegation or important guests visit, they always bring out John, and John presents himself as a parody of man, even putting on boxer shorts and a red shirt. He pretends to engage in elementary conversation, but he comes off as a parrot in the company of monkeys.

  I started to wonder why Formula needed John so badly on such a crazy day. I went to the window and saw her standing next to an old flower bed calling, “John, where are you? I need you!”

  Naturally, John, who was snoozing somewhere nearby, climbed out of the bushes lazily, scratching his enormous belly, which had grown fat on handouts.

  “Johnny!” Formula was overjoyed. “Come welcome the new girl. You know how to do it best. Please!”

  “Whaddaya give me for it?”

  “Johnny, you know I have never let you down…”

  “Okey-dokey,” said Johnny, and started to walk behind Formula, stooping more than necessary, so that his fingers touched the ground in front of him. This time he was wearing blue trousers and a white cap worn backwards, so that everyone could admire his frontal lobes.

  I decided to follow them.

  They walked out to the landing platform. A huge guy from park services hung around the transport helicopter, holding a young female chimpanzee on a leash. She was frightened to death by the flight and the unfamiliar circumstances.

  As soon as he saw the pretty female, the pride of genetic science turned into a rutting chimp. He liked the girl a lot. Hopes that he might bed this young thing stirred in Johnny’s brain. He started to ape around, pursing his lips and hooting, hopping and beating his chest with his fists, as if he were a gorilla. Naturally, the young female became even more terrified.

  She really was very pretty. Her mind still slept; then again, nobody had any intention of inspiring her with Reason. She was only here to prolong the species, to bring a new stream of genes into the pool.

  “Johnny, don’t scare her,” Formula begged. “Explain to her that she will live in very nice conditions. Tell her to calm down.”

  It’s amazing how naïve some of our researchers are. Having created a race of humanoid chimps, they somehow imagine that an ordinary chimpanzee also has primitive speech and can converse with someone like John. On the other hand, John, who never knew the language of his wild forbears – a primitive but all-encompassing language of gestures and breaths – needed to uphold his reputation. Nothing worked. The girl bared her teeth and tried to hide behind the huge guy with the leash, figuring that an ordinary person was still better than an animal of unknown species in a white cap.

  I could see that the situation was reaching a crisis point, so I started to approach the girl, convinced that I would be able to calm down this poor creature. And everything would have worked out, if not for that damned Formula.

  “Stop!” she screamed. “John, restrain that hooligan! Where is the fire hose?” Jo
hn frowned and tried to look like a defender of humanity, although inside he was terrified of me and knew what I would do to him if he even dared touch me.

  I met the trusting glance of the female chimpanzee and returned it with a smile. I knew that from that moment on, she would be my loyal servant. That’s all I needed. I snorted quietly to calm her down, and let her know with a grimace that she had nothing to be afraid of. Then, over Formula’s shrieks and the alarmed movements of the confused park services guy, I jumped into the nearest tree and swung up from a lower branch onto a higher one, all the while feeling the ecstatic gaze of the girl on my back. I swung on a well-worn path through the trees all the way back to sleeping quarters.

  Several homo-chimps were relaxing on their cots; some were reading, some were watching video clips. Barry, a natural-born carpenter, was fixing a stool. We’d hammered the chairs together in the work training shop.

  “What happened?” asked Gitta, an elderly, wise homo-chimp blessed with remarkable intuition.

  “Damn that Formula,” I said. “They brought in a lovely young creature. Formula called Johnny, and that old goat…”

  “Don’t even go on, I get it,” Barry interrupted. He put aside his hammer. “You know, today they dragged me in for testing again.”

  “Let me guess, you thought about bananas.”

  “Yeah, and oranges, too,” laughed Barry. “They were disappointed.”

  “Oh, this is hard,” said Gitta. “I’m especially afraid for our youth. Sooner or later they’re going to catch us.”

  “What alternatives do we have, though?” I asked. “Admit everything? Become the objects of a media sensation, while remaining third-class beings, talking macaques?

  “If only everything would go off without a hitch today,” said Barry.

 

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