Watson, Ian - Novel 11 (15 page)

 
          
With
extraordinary dispatch, Osip fairly bustled in only a few moments later bearing
a tray of glasses, with two half-litre bottles of Stolichnaya hooked between
his fingers. Crashing the tray on to the table, he tore the caps off both
bottles and poured shakily. Sergey hauled himself up, sniffing and snorting
like a camel approaching an oasis. Perhaps this was just to clear the white fog
from his nostrils. Or it might have been to stop
himself
from bursting into tears . . .

 
          
“Presumably
I’d
better
tell the crew,” said Commander Astrov.

 
          
“Why
tell them we’re all doomed? What can
they
do about it? You’ll only spread panic.”

 
          
“Yuri’s
right,” said Sasha.

 
          
“But
I told them the time-jump would be quasi-instantaneous— so why haven’t I announced
that we’ve emerged? They’re probably worried sick already. Do you think they
didn’t notice the ship bucking like a horse when Anna fired the jets?”

 
          
“So
we’ve been
busy\
We’re
trying to avoid space junk at the other end. T minus 43 years,” Yuri added more
calmly with a glance at his retardograph. “Look, there’s no time to launch our
shuttles—even if they could break out of the flux-field, which I doubt.”

 
          
“I’m
sure everyone ought to be told. It’s an awful thing to go to your death
ignorantly.”

 
          
“Thanks,
but I’d rather be taken by surprise—right out of the blue.”

 
          
“Oh,
it’s out of the blue
we'll
be coming
in a few more minutes, and no mistake! I wonder if anyone in Siberia looked up
in the sky and saw a Hammer and Sickle flying down from
space?
A sort of vision of future time. . . Maybe some of the reindeer people saw it.
The Evenki. . . Then all the trees were knocked flat—just the way Czarist
society was knocked flat a few years later . . . Shit, this is absurd talk. I’m
going to tell them. How’s the reprogramming coming on?”

 
          
“Slowly,”
said Anna Aksakova.

           
Yuri spoke up, more to delay Anton
than for any other reason. “You do realize, don’t you
Commander,
that
the flux-field is going to have to hold steady till almost the very
end? Otherwise, given our shape, we’d be torn to pieces by the atmosphere and
scattered across half of Asia. But we weren’t. I mean: we won’t be.’’

 
          
“Yes,
that figures. We have to return to the Earth, our home. . . I wonder if it’s
actually impossible to get away from our world by using the time-
flux?
Have you thought of that, Yuri?’’

 
          
“How do you mean?’’

 
          
“Oh,
we can send as much dead matter to the stars as we like—or as far back in time
as we want. But as soon as we try to send conscious, living beings, it doesn’t
work . . . What
is
time? Nobody
really knows.’’

 
          
Yuri
pretended interest. “Surely the main point is that all equations for physical
processes work just as well in reverse as forwards?
So
processes can occur in either time-direction— theoretically.
Well, we’ve
proved that in practice, haven’t we?’’ He indicated his console. “T minus 47,
see?’’ Immediately he regretted his gesture; he ought to be keeping the
Commander’s mind
off
their impending
doom.

 
          
“Ah,
but your equations don’t tell us what time w.”

 
          
“Surely
it has to do with the entropy total,’’ Yuri said cautiously.

 
          
“But
what if it doesn’t? What if the ‘passage’ of time is a construct of
consciousness—of
evolving
consciousness? Maybe that’s why time seems to flow from past to future. Maybe
it’s because of the dynamics of our evolution. And where, pray, did we
evolve?’’ Anton stabbed a finger towards the main viewscreen, filled with the
wild, solid fog which was part of the Earth. “Right down there, where else?
Maybe ‘time’ as we know it doesn’t exist elsewhere in the universe.
Because time hasn’t been constructed— out there.
So we can’t
get away from Earth by travelling through time.’’

 
          
“Surely not!
What happened to the test probes we sent
through the Flux? They certainly didn’t turn up on an earlier Earth, or people
would have found them years ago. They were rigged to transmit for a hundred
years.”

 
          
“Maybe
they just . . . stopped existing?”

 
          
“Things
don’t just cease to exist,” said Sasha sharply. “The Law of Conservation
forbids it.”

 
          
“
We'll
soon cease
to exist, Astrogator.”

 
          
“Oh no we won’t!
We will turn into heat and light and
particles and droplets of germanium and copper and everything else. But the sum
total of mass and energy won’t stop existing!”

 
          
“Have
you ever looked at a table of geological eras, Sorina?”

           
“Of course.
Hasn’t everybody?”

 
          
“Yes,
they look. But they don’t notice . . . one little detail. Each successive era
is
shorter
than the one before—a
child could plot the shrinking on a graph.”

 
          
“Shrinking?”

 
          
“That’s
what I said. Look, the Carboniferous era lasts for about 350 million years. The
Permian lasts for 280. Next
comes
the Triassic, at
230. Then there’s the Jurassic, at 190. And so on.
Getting
shorter all the time.”

 
          
“But
that’s just a convenient way of dividing prehistory.”

 
          
“Is
it indeed? I’ll telj you what it is. As life and brain structures evolve, so
does time
speed up.
First of all,
it’s all very slow and stately—but lately it’s been zipping along.”

 
          
“That’s
. . . preposterous.”

 
          
“I
thought you’d say so. And meanwhile,
tempusfugit
for us too . . .” Anton switched on his chin-mike. “Commander Astrov to All
Crew: hear this . . . !”

 
          
“No!”
Yuri whispered urgently. “Maybe you’re right about the geological eras. Maybe
nobody else ever put two and two together—”

 
          
“Shut
up, Yuri . . .

 
          
“.
. . We have met unexpected difficulties, Comrades. We have failed to leave
Earthspace. We are currently proceeding backwards through time at a rate of
approximately three years per ship minute. However, we are also closing in on
the planet Earth at considerable speed. You will have noticed our evasive
manoeuvres. These proved unsuccessful. Chief Engineer Aksakova is
reprogramming our flight pattern to bring us out of flux prematurely, before
we impact with the atmosphere. I shall keep you informed. Be brave, Comrades.”

 
          
The
K. E. Tsiolkovsky
continued
plummeting through time, back towards its world of origin . . .

 
          
Trading
Post of Kezhma
 
September 24th

 
          
My wonderful Masha, beloved Mama, and
everyone else at home,

           
Goodness only knows when (or from
where) this letter will ever be posted! Perhaps it isn’t really a letter at
all, but a journal? Destined for your own sweet eyes, dear Sister, when I
return home again. . .

 
          
If
so, I haven’t the foggiest how to proceed! For whom does one address in this
kind of ‘diary of the heart’? One’s own heart, perhaps?

 
          
All
I know about my own heart is that it keeps on beating steadily—
thump
, thump—despite the awful struggles of the last week
and more.

 
          
I
suppose you really address the future in such a piece of scribbling as a
‘private journal’. You’re full of egotistical hopes that this vague entity,
Futurity, will disinter all your carefully orchestrated secrets from the desk
drawer where you’ve hidden them—leaving the key in the lock, of course!
Whereupon eager Futurity will at once declare what a fascinating chap this
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was. And it’ll all be a big bluff.

 
          
How
can I sum up the sequence of days since we quit the Yenisey for our long tramp,
350 versts eastwards, along the banks of the
Angara
?

 
          
Well,
there was already enough light snow cover this far north for us to use the
sledges, as we’d counted on doing. And that meant fighting our way through
branches quite a lot of the time. (I have scratches and cuts all over my mug,
as if I’ve been whipped by invisible forest spirits wielding tiny lashes.) And
sometimes we were forced to take to the shallows
of
the river to haul the sledges upstream some way, which involved
a lot of skidding and stumbling and getting dunked in icy water. We have
shivered around camp fires—about which I can assure you there’s nothing
romantic. Wild ducks and geese have avoided our guns with great dexterity, save
for a couple of scraggy specimens potted by Countess Lydia. Sidorov managed to
net one salmon-trout, but otherwise I’d hardly describe the
Angara
as an angler’s paradise— the fish didn’t
seem to know what the game was about. So all in all this has amounted to a
disturbing lack of victuals from the land. No hares, no bears or giant rats.
Not even any tigers.

 
          
Just trees.
Trees, trees, was
the
long and the short of it: an infinity of snow-dusted spruce, frosted larch and
silver fir. And every day more snow fell, gently and persistently, muffling the
world—till it seemed as though our colour vision was failing through disuse,
and the whole planet had turned white. Often even the air was white with
freezing fog.

 
          
We
passed through a few little human settlements, but on the whole there wasn’t a
living thing to be seen. Apart from the motion of the river—flowing in the
wrong direction—it appeared that life had shut up shop for ever. Oh the
silence—it haunts you! The taiga steals away every sound, till you fear you’ve
gone deaf as well as blind. And so you mumble to yourself. . .

 
          
Bah,
the idiotic joy we felt when we sighted the scurvy huts of Zaimskove a few days
back. You’d think we’d arrived outside the walls of
Babylon
, or seen Monsieur Eiffel’s modern wonder
looming on the horizon. Oh to renew acquaintance with a bedbug! Oh to meet a
cockroach on a wall! The experience was positively metropolitan.

 
          
And
now at last we’re in Kezhma, where the Tungusi from the north trade their furs
in the spring. Almost all the roofs of this fine city are made of sods. Of
streets there are exactly two and a half, and these peter out very quickly.

           
But on the subject of Tungusi, we
have been lucky enough to hire a guide . . .

 
          
This
fellow, Tolya by name, has apparently been hanging around Kezhma for the past
five or six months, doing odd jobs on what pass for farms in the vicinity
instead of tramping off smartly back to his family tents deep in the
wilderness. Perhaps he has been trying to become an example of Urban Man? But
he looks like an Eskimo, and speaks Russian accordingly.

 
          
Ach,
I suppose it’s all a question of degree! If this Tungusi specimen is
Russianized, just so are we Russians . . . Europeanized! We all remain
slovenly Asiatics at heart . . .

 
          
We’ll
certainly be glad of his local knowledge on the next stretch of the journey. For
here at Kezhma is where we strike off overland through the virgin taiga,
heading for the trading post of Vanavara a hundred versts away on the southerly
branch of the
Stony
Tunguska
.

 
          
Tonight
the snow flakes are drifting down again. And I think I must be crazy to be
stuck out in this back of beyond when I could already be home, near to you,
dear Masha, with all my research on
Sakhalin
over and done with!

 
          
Am
I crazy? It’s easy to take leave of
one’s senses in these parts. I’ve mentioned how people mumble to themselves:
often it’s the same word or phrase repeated over and over a thousand times, as
if this is the key to the meaning of life. You get a bee in your bonnet, and it
buzzes round all day till its humming is the only sound you can hear in the whole
world.

 
          
My
own particular foible, as I found out after five or six days of sledging and
tramping, was to perceive every tree I passed—as a book, bound in bark! For
what else are books, but trees in another form? I became quite obsessed with
the idea. Here was I, travelling through all my past and future works, set out
in a uniform edition. And as regards originality, no book differed by a jot
from any other! This one might be called
The
Spruce
and the one after,
The Stone
Pine
—and the one after that,
The
Larch.
But they would all amount to the same thing: another damn tree!
Instead of, say, a skylark—or an elephant.
Or a dragon.
Oh, the ennui of it!

 
          
Old
Grigorovich told me to write a novel. . . But, dear me, the characters I
dreamed up are all moribund. The fine women I envisaged are wrinkled and senile
by now: their skins as coarse and rutted as the bark of these wretched trees .
. .

 
          
But
here’s the real nightmare: supposing this trek into the wilderness was a novel
in its own right? What persons do I have in it? Why, exactly the sort of people
whom I faithfully promised myself never to write about! There’s Countess
Lydia—a ‘new’ type of woman. There’s a ‘superfluous man’—old Sidorov
(reinvigorated but still, I fear, condemned). And there’s a het-up, pedantic
visionary: Konstantin Eduardovich, no less . . .

 
          
Of
course, I do Tsiolkovsky an injustice! But really, when I hear him going on
about the ecstasy of escaping the bondage of gravity and flitting about in free
space, my ears detect such a strident metaphor for our own social conditions in
Russia
. I can already hear all the intellectual
lackeys taking up this refrain in a chorus—and completely ignoring what life is
really like. They’ll get up a subscription to build Tsiolkovsky a rocket, which
might blow him to pieces, and meanwhile they’ll ignore an outbreak of cholera
in their own back yard . . .

 
          
Oh,
these pilgrimages that we Russians devote our lives to! Is this one any
different? Off we march to the holy scientific icon of
Tunguska
, to unswaddle our souls, and prostrate
ourselves before a mystery!

 
          
Masha,
I must pull myself together. I’m sure we haven’t any real hope of solving the
mystery awaiting us. We’d be hotheads to try to! The evidence is what matters.
We must gather a portfolio of evidence—then I can escape from all this, and get
on boring the public with
The Stone Pine
or whatever. (I don’t think I’ll write a comedy about ‘The Exiled Baron and the
World Soul’! But that’s another story . . .)

 
          
Of
course, if I did put my literary scruples aside and wrote a novel of adventure,
well, I could have a gruff but romantic Baron, a dashing Countess conducting an
adulterous liaison in her tent—we’ll overlook the fact that she’s already a
widow, shall we? And then there’s our home-bred Russian Hamlet, Sidorov,
equipped with a bold quest to take his mind off suicide. . . We mustn’t forget
our noble savage, Tolya, either—how does he fit in? Will he give his life for
us, fighting off a hungry bear? (And I don’t mean Baron Vershinin!)

 
          
Ah, if it were a novel, what trash it would
be! And what a popular success! I can see the reviews already. ‘A real change
of pace for Mr Chekhov: Bravo!' ‘On the other hand, fellow connoisseurs, isn't
it just a shade vulgar?'

 
          
I
coughed a fleck of blood from my left lung yesterday. But it was only one
fleck; and that isn’t serious. There’s nothing basically wrong with my bellows.
I blame the cold more than anything: it sticks daggers in a fellow’s chest . .
.