The Inhabited Island, Page 2

  Maxim crouched down and ran toward it without making a sound, sticking close to the side of the road, and abruptly stopped when he almost went darting out into an intersection. The road was intersected at right angles by another highway, a very muddy one, with deep, ugly ruts, and fragments of concrete slabs jutting up out of it. It was foul smelling and very, very radioactive. Maxim squatted down on his haunches and looked to his left, the direction from which the roaring of an engine and metallic rasping sounds were advancing. The ground under his feet began shuddering. It was getting even closer.

  A minute later it appeared—nonsensically huge, hot, and stinking, made completely out of riveted metal, smashing down the road with its monstrous caterpillar tracks caked in mud. It didn’t hurtle or trundle along, it barged its way forward, slovenly and hunchbacked, jangling sheets of iron that had come loose, stuffed full of raw plutonium and lanthanides. Moronic and menacing, with no human presence in it, mindless and dangerous, it lumbered across the intersection and went barging on, smashing the concrete, setting it crunching and squealing, and leaving behind a trail of incandescent, sweltering air as it disappeared into the forest, still lumbering and growling, until it moved away into the distance and gradually grew quieter.

  Maxim caught his breath and brushed off the midges. He was astounded. He had never seen anything so absurd and preposterous in his entire life. Yes, he thought. I won’t get hold of any positron emitters here. As he watched the receding monster, he suddenly noticed that the intersecting road was not simply a road but also a kind of firebreak, a narrow gap cut through the forest: the trees didn’t cover the sky above it as they did above the first road. Maybe he ought to chase after the monster, he thought. Overtake it, stop it, and extinguish the reactor . . .

  He listened closely; the forest was full of clamor, and the monster was wallowing about in the thickets, like a hippopotamus in a quagmire. Then the roaring of the engine started moving closer again. It was coming back. The same wheezing and growling, a surging wave of stench, clanging and rattling, and then it lumbered across the intersection again and barged back toward where it had just come from . . . No, said Maxim. I don’t want to get involved with it. I don’t like malicious animals and barbaric automatons. He waited for the monster to disappear from sight, walked out of the bushes, got a running start, and flew across the ripped-up, polluted intersection in a single leap.

  For a while he walked very quickly, taking deep breaths in order to clear the iron behemoth’s fumes out of his lungs, and then switched back to his hiking stride. He thought about what he had seen during the first two hours of life on his inhabited island and tried to assemble all these incongruous, chance events into a whole that was logically consistent. However, it was too difficult. The picture that emerged was fantastical, not real. This forest, stuffed full of old iron, was fantastical, and in it fantastical creatures called to each other in voices that were almost human. Just like in a fairy tale, an old, abandoned road led to an enchanted castle, and invisible, wicked sorcerers tried their damnedest to make life difficult for anyone who had ended up in this country. On the distant approaches, they had pelted him with meteorites, but that didn’t work, so then they had burned his ship, thereby trapping their victim, and then sent out an iron dragon to get him. However, the dragon had proved to be too old and stupid, and by now they had probably realized their blunder and were preparing something a bit more modern.

  Listen, Maxim told them. After all, I’m not planning to disenchant any enchanted castles and awaken your lethargic beauties. All I want is to meet one of you who is pretty bright and will help me with finding some positron emitters.

  But the wicked sorcerers dug in their heels. First they set a huge, rotten tree across the roadway, then they demolished the concrete surface, dug a large pit in the ground, and filled it with rank-smelling radioactive slurry, and when even that didn’t help, when the gnats grew disillusioned with biting him and abandoned him, as morning approached the sorcerers released a cold, wicked mist from out of the forest. The mist gave Maxim chilly shivers, and he set off at a run in order to warm himself up. The mist was viscous and oily, with a smell of wet metal and putrefaction, but soon it started smelling of smoke, and Maxim realized that a fire was burning somewhere nearby.

  Dawn was breaking, and the sky was already almost bright with the grayness of morning, when Maxim saw the campfire at the side of the road, by a low, moss-covered stone structure with a collapsed roof and empty, black windows. Maxim couldn’t see any people, but he could sense that they were somewhere nearby, that they had been here just recently and perhaps they would soon come back. He turned off the road, jumped across the roadside ditch, and set off, sinking up to his ankles in rotting leaves, toward the fire.

  The campfire greeted him with its benign, primeval warmth, pleasantly agitating his slumbering instincts. Everything here was simple. Without having to greet anyone, he could squat down, reach out his hands to the flames, and wait, without saying anything, until the equally taciturn owner of the campfire handed him a hot dollop of food and a hot mug. Of course, the owner wasn’t there, but a smoke-blackened cooking pot containing a pungent-smelling concoction was hanging above the campfire, and two loose coveralls of coarse material were lying a little distance away, beside a dirty, half-empty bag with shoulder straps that contained huge, dented tin mugs and some other metal objects with indeterminate functions.

  Maxim sat by the fire for a while, warming himself up and looking into the flames, then got to his feet and went into the building. In fact, all that remained of the building was a stone box. He could see the brightening sky through the broken beams above his head, and it was frightening to step on the rotten boards of the floor. Bunches of bright crimson mushrooms were growing in the corners—poisonous, of course, but perfectly edible if they were well roasted. However, the thought of food immediately evaporated when Maxim spotted someone’s bones, jumbled together with faded, tattered rags, lying in the semi-darkness by the wall. That gave him a bad feeling, and he turned around, walked down the ruined steps, folded his hands together into a megaphone, and yelled into the forest at the top of his voice, “Ohoho, you six-toed folks!” The echo almost immediately got stuck in the mist between the trees, and no one responded, except that some little birds or other started angrily and excitedly chattering above his head.

  Maxim went back to the campfire, flung a few branches into the flames, and glanced into the pot. The concoction was boiling. He looked around, found something that looked like a spoon, sniffed at it, wiped it on the grass, and sniffed at it again. Then he carefully skimmed the gray scum off the concoction and shook it off the spoon onto the charred wood. He stirred the concoction, scooped up some of it from the edge, blew on it, then puckered up his lips, and tried it. It wasn’t bad at all, something like tahorg liver broth. Then he looked around again and said in a loud voice, “Breakfast is ready!” He couldn’t shake the feeling that his hosts were somewhere close by, but all he could see were motionless bushes, wet from the mist, and the black, gnarled trunks of trees, and all he could hear was the crackling of the campfire and the fussy chattering of the birds.

  “Well, OK,” he said out loud. “Suit yourselves, but I’m initiating contact.”

  He very quickly started enjoying the taste of it. Maybe the spoon was too big, or maybe his primeval instincts simply got the better of him, but he had lapped up a third of the pot before he even knew it. He regretfully moved a little distance away and sat there for a while, focusing on his gustatory sensations and giving the spoon another thorough wiping, but he couldn’t resist it after all and took another scoop, from the very bottom, of those little, tasty, melt-in-your-mouth brown slices that were like sea cucumber. Then he moved well away, wiped the spoon yet again, and set it across the top of the pot. This was just the right time to appease his feeling of gratitude.

  He jumped to his feet, selected several slim sticks, and went into the building. Stepping cautiously across the rotten flo
orboards and trying not to look over at the human remains in the shade, he started picking mushrooms and threading them on a stick, choosing the very firmest caps. If I could just salt you a bit, he thought, and add a bit of pepper too—but never mind, for first contact this will do anyway. We’ll hang you over the fire, and all your active organic compounds will be dissipated as steam, and you’ll be a delicious treat. You’ll be my first contribution to the culture of this inhabited island, and the second one will be positron emitters. Suddenly it became a bit darker in the building, and he immediately sensed someone watching him. He managed to suppress his urge to abruptly swing around, counted to ten, slowly got up, and, smiling in advance, unhurriedly turned his head.

  Looking in at him through the window was a long, dark face with large, despondent eyes and a mouth with its corners despondently turned down. It was looking at him without the slightest interest, with neither malice nor joy, as if it were looking not at a man from a different world but at some tedious domesticated animal that had once again clambered in where it had been told not to go. They looked at each other for several seconds, and Maxim could feel the despondency radiating from that face flood the building, sweep across the forest, across the entire planet and the universe surrounding it, and everything on all sides turned gray, despondent, and dismal. Everything had already happened, it had all happened many times over, and it would happen many more times, and there was no foreseeable salvation from this gray, despondent, dismal tedium. And then it became even darker in the building, and Maxim turned toward the door.

  Standing there with his short, sturdy legs planted wide apart, and completely blocking the doorway with his broad shoulders, was a stocky man entirely covered with ginger hair and wearing a dreadful check coverall. Gazing at Maxim out of the riotous ginger thickets of his face were two gimlet-sharp blue eyes, very intent and very hostile, and yet somehow seeming equally jolly—perhaps by contrast with the universal despondency emanating from the window. This hairy roughneck had obviously also seen visitors from other worlds before, but he was used to dealing with these tiresome visitors abruptly, drastically, and decisively—without any contact-making or other such unnecessary complications. Hanging from a leather strap around his neck he had an extremely ominous-looking thick metal pipe, and with his firm, filthy hand he was pointing the outlet of this instrument for lynching alien visitors directly at Maxim’s belly. It was immediately obvious that he had never even heard of the supreme value of human life. Or of the Declaration of Human Rights, or any other such magnificent achievements of progressive humanism, and if you told him about any of these things, he simply wouldn’t believe you.

  However, Maxim didn’t have to make that choice. He held the stick with mushroom caps threaded on it out in front of him, smiled even more broadly, and enunciated with exaggerated clarity, “Peace! Friendship!” The despondent individual outside the window responded to this slogan with a long, unintelligible phrase, after which he withdrew from the zone of contact and, to judge from the sounds outside, set about heaping dry branches onto the campfire. The blue-eyed man’s tousled ginger beard started moving, and growling, roaring, clanging sounds came darting out of that dense copper growth, instantly reminding Maxim of the iron dragon at the intersection. “Yes!” said Maxim, energetically nodding. “Earth! The cosmos!” He jabbed his thin stick up toward the zenith, and the ginger-bearded man obediently glanced at the smashed-in ceiling. “Maxim!” continued Maxim, prodding himself in the chest, “Mak-sim! My name is Maxim.” For additional cogency, he struck himself on the chest, like an enraged gorilla: “Maxim!”

  “Mahh-ssim!” the ginger-bearded man barked with a strange accent. Keeping his eyes fixed on Maxim, he launched over his shoulder a series of rumbling and clanging sounds, in which the word “Mah-sim” was repeated several times, and to which the invisible, despondent individual responded by uttering a sequence of sinister, dismal phonemes. The ginger-bearded man’s blue eyes started rolling about, his yellow-toothed mouth opened wide, and he howled with laughter. When he was done laughing, the ginger-bearded man wiped his eyes with his free hand, lowered his death-dealing weapon, and unambiguously gestured to Maxim: All right, come on out!

  Maxim gladly obeyed. He walked out onto the steps and proffered the stick with the mushrooms on it to the ginger-bearded man once again. The ginger-bearded man took the stick, turned it this way and that way, sniffed at it, and flung it aside.

  “Hey, no!” Maxim protested. “Those will have you begging for more . . .”

  He bent down and picked up the stick. The ginger-bearded man didn’t object. He slapped Maxim on the back and pushed him toward the fire. Beside the fire he heaved down on Maxim’s shoulder, making him sit, and started trying to din something into his head. But Maxim didn’t listen. He was watching the despondent individual, who sat facing Maxim, drying some kind of broad, dirty rag in front of the fire. One of his feet was bare, and he kept wiggling the toes. And there were five of those toes—five, not six.

  2

  Gai was sitting on the edge of the bench by the window, polishing the badge on his beret with his cuff and watching Corporal Varibobu write out his travel order. The corporal’s head was inclined to one side and his eyes were goggling out of it; his left hand was resting on the desk, holding down a form with a red border, and his right hand was unhurriedly tracing out calligraphic letters. It’s great the way he does that, thought Gai, not without a certain envy. The inky-fingered old buzzard, twenty years in the Guards and still a pen pusher. Just look at him glaring, the pride of the brigade—any moment now he’ll stick his tongue out . . . There, he’s done it. Even his tongue is all inky. Bless you, Varibobu, you cracked old inkwell. We’ll never meet again. And in general it’s a sad business, this leaving—we got a fine set of men together, and real gentlemen officers too, and it’s useful service, meaningful . . . Gai sniffed and looked out the window.

  Outside the wind was blowing white dust along the wide, smooth street without sidewalks, paved with old hexagonal slabs. The walls of the identical long administrative and engineering staff buildings were glowing white, and Madam Idoya, a portly and imposing lady, was walking along, shielding her face against the dust and holding up her skirt—a brave woman, she hadn’t been afraid to bring her children and follow the brigadier to these dangerous parts. The sentry outside garrison HQ, one of the rookies, wearing a new duster that was still rigid and a beret pulled right down over his ears, gave her the “present arms” salute. Then two trucks carrying educatees drove past, no doubt taking them for vaccination . . . That’s right, give it to him, get him in the neck. He shouldn’t go sticking his head over the side, he’s got no business doing that here, this isn’t some kind of public thoroughfare.

  “Exactly how is your name written?” Varibobu asked. “‘G-a-a-l’? Or can I simply write ‘G-a-l’?”

  “No way,” said Gai. “My surname is Gaal. G-a-a-l.”

  “That’s a shame,” said Varibobu, pensively sucking on his pen. “If I could write ‘G-a-l,’ it would just fit on the line.”

  Write it, write it, inkpot, thought Gai. Forget the nonsense about saving lines. And they call you a corporal . . . Buttons all covered with green tarnish. Some corporal you are. Two medals, but you never even learned to shoot straight, everybody knows that . . .

  The door abruptly swung open and Cornet To’ot briskly strode in, wearing the duty officer’s gold armband. Gai jumped to his feet and clicked his heels. The corporal lifted his backside slightly but didn’t stop writing, the old fogy. Call him a corporal . . .

  “Aha,” said the cornet, tearing off his dust mask in disgust. “Private Gaal. I know, I know, you’re leaving us. A shame. But I’m glad for you. I hope you’ll continue to serve with equal fervor in the capital.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Cornet, sir!” Gai said with true feeling. The exaltation even set his nose itching on the inside. He was very fond of Mr. Cornet To’ot, a cultured officer and a former high school teacher. And apparentl
y the cornet appreciated his qualities too.

  “You may be seated,” said the cornet, walking in past the barrier to his own desk. Without bothering to sit down, he took a cursory glance at his documents and picked up the phone. Gai tactfully turned away toward the window.

  Outside in the street nothing had changed. His own beloved squad tramped past in formation on the way to lunch. Gai watched them go with a sad air. Now they would reach the canteen, and Corporal Serembesh would give the command to remove their berets for the Word of Thanksgiving, the guys would roar out the Word of Thanksgiving with all their thirty throats—and meanwhile the steam is already rising above the cooking pots, and the bowls are gleaming, and good old Doga is all set to deliver that hoary old gag of his about the private and the cook . . . Really and truly, it was a shame to leave. Serving here was dangerous, and the climate was unhealthy, and the rations were really monotonous—nothing but canned stuff—but even so. Here, at least, you knew for certain that you were needed, that they couldn’t manage without you. Here you faced that pernicious pressure from the South full on, taking it on the chest, and you really felt that pressure. Gai had buried so many of his friends here—over on the other side of the settlement there was an entire grove of poles with rusty helmets on them . . .

  On the other hand, he was going to the capital. They wouldn’t send just anyone there, and if they were sending him, it wasn’t for a vacation . . . They said that from the Palace of the Fathers you could see all the Guards’ parade grounds, so there was certain to be one of the Fathers observing every formation. Well, it wasn’t an absolute certainty, but he might take a look every once in a while. Gai felt a sudden, feverish flush; completely out of the blue, he imagined himself being been called out of formation, and on his second stride he slipped and crashed down, flat on his face, at the commanding officer’s feet, his automatic rifle clattering on the cobblestones, gaping open, and his beret wildly flying off into the air . . . He took a deep breath and stealthily looked around. God forbid . . . Yes. The capital. Nothing escaped their eyes. Well, never mind—after all, there were other men serving. And Rada, his dear sister . . . and his funny uncle with his ancient bones and primeval skulls. Oh, I miss you so badly, all my dearest ones!