“Do we have to wet the people from Taganskaya Station into the bunker?” Lyokha asked. “Aw of them, weawy?”
“The more, the better. Let them take a look for themselves at the cushy life these greasy bastards have and always have had. When they see that, maybe they’ll believe all the rest. Eh? Right, Lyokha! Can we do it, granddad?”
“Theoretically … “ said Homer. “If the paper survived. They stored it in plastic, actually … So it wouldn’t get damp. It could have survived.”
“Okay, Letyaga? What are our boys saying? Have they already forgotten everyone the Reds trampled in the dirt?”
“What do you … ?” Letyaga sighed. “How could they forget?”
“So we have a plan. I realize it’s risky. But it could work. Eh?”
“It could,” Lyokha admitted.
“Do you think they’ll just allow us to hand out those leaflets?” Homer asked doubtfully. “If things here are as you say … If the state hasn’t disappeared … Do you even have any idea what our state is like?”
“No, and bollocks to it anyway, granddad! We have to try. We just have to try! We have to tell people everything! We have to let them out!”
Homer nodded.
“And you … What are you going to do up on the surface? When we go out?” he asked Artyom. “Where at least? Have you decided?”
“Live! Like before all this! We’ll figure that out up there! Like people! Isn’t that clear?”
“Not very,” Homer sighed. “Take me now. I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“What difference does it make? Plant mushrooms if you like, even grain. I’m willing. If it’s up there. But first of all … There’s a huge world up there. You can walk right round it. Find yourself a place … One after your own heart. A city … Or the shore of an ocean. Why, aren’t you offended by the fact that a bunch of ghouls has decided for us that we’ll never see all of this?”
“And they sit there guzzwing sawads wound the cwock!” Lyokha added.
“There has to be a reason,” Letyaga reeled out again.
“There is a reason! Open spaces make them feel sick and dizzy. And they keep you with them like a domesticated animal.”
“We’ll knock them to hell out of that fucking bunker,” the apostle decided. “You’re pwan’s okay. Just as wong as they don’t stwing us up.”
“Do you understand, brother?” Artyom took hold of Letyaga’s massive shoulder. “Up there you’ll do more for people! What was that oath you swore about? Helping some red-bellied rats shoot at their own people? You swore to protect people! All of them! The Metro! If we lead them out onto the surface—then that’s the place where they’ll really need us! The people! Because we, the Order, have experience. We know how to do things. up there. We understand the risks. We know the wild animals … All about the radiation level. Our place is up there! Not here! Not slitting peoples’ throats if they come here from somewhere else. But helping our people reach land that’s alive! Well! Agreed?”
“Sure, okay. Agreed,” Letyaga mumbled.
“Granddad?”
“I don’t know.”
“I realize it’s frightening for you to go up on the surface. After being stuck underground all these years. You understand everything down here. It’s kind of dark and cramped, but it’s your own place already, right? And going up on top is somehow … And you’re not the only one. At Komsomol I called for people to follow me … Not a single soul believed; no one went. You’re not to blame. And they’re not to blame either. Those bastards in the bunker are to blame, that’s who. They lied to you; they lied to all of us. They taught us to be moles. They persuaded us that we’re worms. But it’s all lies, and it’s built on lies. If we don’t tell them the truth, if you—you’ve got the skill! Right, Ilya Stepanich? He’s got real talent? If you don’t tell the truth about the dead bodies in the barrows, about the metal bars, about my tunnel, about the dogs’ feeding pits, about the machine guns at Komsomol Station—who’s going to tell them? No one! I know they won’t believe it. Not immediately they won’t. No one believed me! You still don’t completely believe me! It’s hard to believe something like that … But it has to be done. Let them point their fingers at us. Let them say we’re fucking psychos. Let them think we’re the enemy. Someone must tell them. Let them have their doubts … But what if someone does believe it? And someone follows us? Eh? We have to do it for the people. Even if they’ll be against it right now. They’ll understand later. Or what will you do? Publish another fascist pamphlet?”
Ilya Stepanovich didn’t even show his face from behind the shell of his knees, as if he had died. When the world shattered, a piece of shrapnel had hit him in the heart.
“Oh, no. “Homer shook his head. “That’s all over with.”
“That’s all, then? If we get a chance—we’ll do it? Are you all with me?”
“Yes!” Lyokha responded. “We’ll fuck the bourgeoisie!”
* * *
The time until the trial started coiling up into a spiral spring—the tighter it got, the slower it contracted. Artyom spoke to the jailers, demanding to see Miller—but they had black knitted-wool faces; they didn’t recognize Artyom, and Miller didn’t want to remember Artyom either.
Why was Svyatoslav Konstantinovich dragging his feet, what was he doing? Was he erecting the gallows in advance, because he already knew how the Order would vote, because he had already discussed and pondered every soldier’s vote with him?
But Artyom prepared anyway.
He strode round the cell, stepping on the others’ feet, repeating to himself everything that he had to say. He would only have one chance. To save himself, to rescue Letyaga and Lyokha. To burn out the rats’ nest and liberate the people from the rats.
It’s good that it’s a comrades’ court, he kept telling himself. That’s the right thing. They’re not stone idols. They’re not made of clay or granite. Artyom might only have served one year with them, but that year was worth seven others. They were all sewn tight to each other with a single red thread. Timur, Prince, Sam. Let Miller put up his gallows. It wasn’t that easy to condemn your own brother to death.
They arrived suddenly.
And called the prisoners out one by one.
“Letyaga!”
The big man hunched his bearish shoulders: He let them put the handcuffs on.
How was he?
While Artyom was talking to him, Letyaga seemed to be picking up his furious infection and started nodding along in time. But once Artyom fell silent, Letyaga’s fever subsided and passed off, unable to maintain itself. Letyaga was one of those who decide once and for all, for the rest of their lives, what they’ll think in this life and the view they’ll take of every single subject in it. And he had decided firmly a long time ago. To his thick skin the new truth wasn’t even like shotgun pellets; it was like salt.
“Zvonarev!”
That turned out to be Lyokha. There you go: Miller had managed to find out more about him than Artyom had. He wondered if the others had been questioned. They cuffed Lyokha’s hands too. As they led him away, he looked back at Artyom.
“Tyomich! You mustn’t fouw things up.”
A sacred precept.
“Dark!”
Artyom’s heart started racing. He’d thought he could breeze through it, but his heart was flustered and agitated anyway. That was plain stupid. A week ago you weren’t counting on lasting any longer than this week, were you? So now the time’s up. Right?
No. Wrong. That wasn’t going to happen.
He couldn’t croak now. Now was too soon.
“What was that you told me, granddad? Everyone has his own end of the line?”
Homer raised his head. He gave a faint smile, weary and surprised.
“You remembered?”
“I couldn’t forget it.”
“Let’s have your hands!” they barked.
He held out his wrists: They ringed them.
“There can be lots of end
s of the line,” Homer corrected him. “But each person has only one final destination. That’s what you have to find. The destination.”
“You don’t think this is it?” Artyom asked him, examining the handcuffs again.
“I don’t think it’s the end of the line yet,” said Homer.
Steely fingers squeezed Artyom’s neck and bent him down closer to the floor. And they jerked his hands behind his back to make him peck better.
“Be seeing you,” Artyom said to the old man.
He ran through the corridors with his armed escorts, his eyes thrust down into the worn granite, with the escorts doing Artyom’s looking and Artyom doing their thinking. There’s never a bad moment for a sermon.
“Guys … I don’t know if you’re ours or from Hansa … You’re being tricked. All of you. All of us. Do you know about the jammers? They’re only there to keep us stuck in the Metro …”
They stopped.
A solid bone slid across his temple, and sticky tape cracked as it unrolled. They sealed off his mouth with a wide, black strip. Then stuck another one over it, crisscross style.
And they dragged him on.
Just like that.
Now he broke into a sweat. What if they didn’t take it off? If they didn’t let him say anything?
They carried him out into a hall. Into Arbat Station.
The station was completely full of no one but men in black. Outsiders had been asked to disperse while the Order lynched its own. The men who had gathered here weren’t wearing masks. Voting by roll-call, Artyom guessed. Afterwards every man would have to answer for his vote; they’d have to remember about it, if it was suddenly decided to pardon him.
They pushed him into an empty circle of space. Lyokha and Letyaga were already there. Both restrained; hands behind their backs and faces redecorated at the front. They must have wandered off course on the way here and been given directions.
Letyaga saw the black cross where Artyom’s mouth should be and started blinking his crossed eyes. Artyom jerked too: Take it off! He started looking round for Miller, to demand justice from him.
And Miller was soon rolled out by Anzor.
But Miller didn’t even see Artyom; for some reason he kept looking in different directions. Artyom wriggled and squirmed like a tapeworm on a hot skillet with his glued-up mouth, biting at his rusty-tasting lips, so that maybe he could at least say everything through a little hole in them. But the tape was wide, and the glue had a grip of iron.
They hadn’t started yet.
Finally Homer and Ilya Stepanovich were pushed through the crowd. They weren’t restrained: witnesses. What testimony would they give? Artyom fixed his gaze on the burnt-out teacher. He had heard everything, back there in the cell. What would he decide to tell? had he been bought? Artyom recalled Dietmar, with his simple and precise formula for winding people round his little finger. He recalled how he had slurped down swill to the repose of Dietmar’s soul, remembering his premonition about Ilya Stepanovich.
Again and again he tried to tear his lips apart, but everything was firmly stuck. His mouth had grown shut.
“We’re ready,” said Anzor.
“This is a hearing of a case of desertion and treason by three of our former comrades,” Svyatoslav Konstantinovich hissed from his throne. “Letyaga, Artyom, and a newly accepted member. Zvonarev. Acting by previous collusion. They sabotaged two highly important assignments. The goal of which was to halt a war between the Reds and the Reich. In our interest. And the interest of the entire Metro. They obstructed the delivery of a dispatch with an ultimatum for the Führer. And then the operation to coerce Moskvin into peace. At the center of the collusion stands Artyom Dark. In our opinion, Letyaga simply fell under his influence. Regardless of circumstances, we demand the death penalty for Artyom. We are prepared to discuss Letyaga’s case. The third accused is Artyom’s hanger-on. A spy, basically. He should be liquidated too.”
“Are you totawy off your wocker? What have I done? Or Artyom!”
“Right. Is this one mentally incompetent? Restrain him.”
Someone kicked Lyokha from behind and shut his chipped teeth.
“But what’s that on Artyom’s mouth?” someone muttered in the crowd. “How’s he going to speak for himself?”
“There are grounds for believing that he has lost his mind,” Miller replied reluctantly. “Don’t worry; his turn will come; we’ll hear him out. You’ll be convinced for yourselves. Everything is clear to me as it is. But we decide fair and square. With open and general voting. We’ll start with Letyaga. Then we have the witnesses. We’ll vote on Letyaga. Then on the subnormal one, then Artyom. I wish to say specifically that this is not some kind of slapstick show. You must give me your answer with all due severity. A former relative, that’s not important. The man betrayed us. The law applies to everyone. I especially brought him before a comrades’ court so that afterwards there wouldn’t be any doubts. Is that clear?”
The crowd started buzzing, but it only managed to buzz in chorus, only as a team, drawn up in ranks.
“Right, Letyaga. Tell us the facts. When Artyom Dark made his first attempt to recruit you and what he said. How he made you hand over the secret dispatch. And the details of how he disrupted the negotiations with Moskvin. The men can know. We have no secrets here. And in whose interest Dark was acting.”
Miller’s face was as calm as a paralytic’s. But with his one live arm he had clutched the rim of his chair’s wheel so hard that the fingers were white. He looked at Letyaga with eyes of bronze, and his pupils were holes hollowed out in the bronze.
Letyaga stepped forward like a bear on a chain. He moved his head about and squinted guiltily at Artyom. He breathed out noisily, expelling surplus air. Looked down at the granite. The crowd was silent. Artyom couldn’t part his lips; Lyokha was chewing on bloody jelly.
“We watched Artyom for a long time,” Letyaga began. “All last year. We knew that he went up onto the surface several times a week. He walked out of the Exhibition of Economic Achievements Station and went to the Tricolor high-rises out along the Yaroslavl Highway. We had a position fitted out opposite them. We watched. Several times a week he tried to make contact by radio.”
Letyaga was selling him out. As Artyom listened, he jabbed his tongue against the bitter glue and bleated through his nostrils. The helplessness pressed down on him heavily—like cold, sharp-edged crushed stone, like damp, freshly chopped soil—weighing down on his legs, on his arms, on his chest.
Artyom’s comrades were here: Sam, Styopa, Timur, Prince. He thought he glimpsed Anya, squeezed in behind the men’s shoulders. He looked closer—was it really her? He lost her.
“You know …” Letyaga said. “That the war with the West isn’t over. That they’re just waiting for us to give ourselves away. Of course, we immediately suspected that Artyom was trying to get in contact with someone there. To unmask us. Perhaps even to direct attacks against us … He was a new man. And the colonel said: watch him. Regardless of … Well, in a nutshell. And this other business … With the radio center. You’ve already heard about it, probably.”
The men started rustling.
Anya!
Anya appeared. She tore herself out of someone’s clawed hand and squeezed through into the front row. She fixed her eyes on Artyom and held him in their grip.
“You’re wandering,” Miller said severely. “First tell about the dispatch.”
“Yes. Well. It’s like this. Basically, everything was more or less clear about Artyom. That he was probably working for the enemy. With the goal of destabilizing the situation. Exposing Moscow. Directing their fire. And with the dispatch …”
Artyom jerked and squirmed, but he was held firmly. And there wasn’t even a tiny little hole in his mouth for him to say something to Letyaga about A minus—and anyway, Letyaga had already repaid that debt, And Artyom had borrowed a load of blood from Bessolov. But what for? So he could hobble to the noose on his own?
; Letyaga didn’t want to see him anymore.
He was already speaking clearly and concisely, as if he was playing on a disk.
In the crowd occasional men whom Artyom knew were already squinting at him as if he was a stranger, some kind of poisonous creature that should be crushed.
“And what happened with Moskvin?” Miller asked.
“With Moskvin,” Letyaga repeated after him. “The story with Moskvin was this: Artyom dragged me out of the bunker when we were stuck in there, fighting Korbut and his specials. When we buried Number Ten, Android, Ullman, Red, Antonchik …”
“I remember all of them,” Miller interrupted. “Don’t go on.”
“Yes, you remember all of them. You’ve got that list. We’ve all seen it. And I almost croaked there. And Artyom said to me: Do you realize that we just brought cartridges, twenty thousand cartridges—to the Reds? To Moskvin. That we brought them to the bastards who killed our boys? On Miller’s orders. I realized. That we’d sold their memory. I realized what they died for. For nothing. That it was politics.”
“Letyaga!”
“That politics is more important. That’s it’s war yesterday, peace today. It’s too bad the boys all croaked for nothing yesterday, when there was war, because today there’s peace. Today we’ll load those scumbags’ guns with twenty thousand cartridges so tomorrow they can mow down the rest of our boys with them when there’s a war again.”
“That’s enough!”
“And then Artyom said there aren’t any Reds or fascists at all. And there isn’t any Order. There’s only this sort of structure. The Invisible Observers. Or fuck knows who; it makes no difference. And we’re one section of this structure, and the Reds are another. And it wasn’t a genuine war, and the defense of the bunker was a load of crap. It’s all a show. And what I wonder is—maybe drinking vodka with our dead boys is all a show too?”
“Letyaga!”
“Let him speak!” someone shouted from the crowd. “Let him have the floor! Letyaga’s our man! One of us! Don’t shut his mouth!”
METRO 2035. English language edition.: The finale of the Metro 2033 trilogy. (METRO by Dmitry Glukhovsky) Page 50
