And there too, in that strange world, there was rain. Warm and caressing.
Where had this vision appeared to him from? Was it memory? No, this world had never existed. What then? Artyom felt a pang of anguish in his chest he wiped the raindrops off his face.
It was as if he had dreamed it. As if a fragment of a dream had surfaced into the open, inflaming his tissues at the point where it emerged. Who was it? Whose was it? Artyom froze, afraid of frightening it off.
These weren’t his dreams. What would he want with dreams like this? And who could possibly dream of something like that? His mother? No. No. This was something else.
He slung his automatic behind his shoulder and held his palms out like a little dipper, and the clouds wept a little water for him. He washed his eyes with the poison—to go blind on the outside and acquire sight on the inside.
No. The memory wouldn’t come. Strange.
Artyom walked on—past the Hotel National; past the dumb, silent university faculties; past the monuments that would scarcely be remembered for even half a generation longer; past senseless towers that no longer had any meaning; past walls that no one would ever storm again—forward, that way, towards the Great Library. To what lay under it.
To Polis.
That word could have brought his past flooding back. But he still saw that impossible nonsense before his eyes, that beautiful absurdity—dragonfly airplanes and giants in funny little railway carriages.
He simply couldn’t escape from this vision that wasn’t his, get rid of it.
But what was it?
* * *
Artyom used a special, secret signal to ring at the gates. It was the way stalkers who were hired to plunder the Great Library rang when they came back from their forays. Sometimes they stood at these gates and rang with their left hand because their right hand was holding up the intestines tumbling out of them. Sometimes only one out of a group could ring, after dragging the others here—the wounded and the ones who had already died along the way. Sometimes there was only enough strength and blood left in the viscera for a single tricky ring. So the men at Borovitskaya Station whose who knew that ring opened up immediately.
And they opened up for Artyom too.
Even the men who moved aside the sliding door in the hermetic gate, intending to expose themselves in the vestibule of Borovitskaya for no more than a minute, were swaddled in tarpaulin and rubber. They knew the risk they were taking.
And through their gas mask portholes they looked at Artyom—soaking wet from the rain, in nothing but dark-soaked trousers and a jacket that clung to his body—as if he were a prodigy, a savage, a suicide. They pointed their guns at him and frisked him. They took his automatic. They brought over a radiation monitor and let it take a sniff at Artyom. The monitor flew into hysterics.
Artyom stood there with his hands up, smiling.
“Can you talk?” they asked him
He caught in shot the one who had asked: a little green elephant with its round lenses steamed up in amazement.
“Can. You. Talk?” the little elephant repeated slowly.
“Call Miller. At Arbat. Tell him it’s Artyom.”
“Have you got any documents?”
“Tell Miller. Say it’s Artyom. He knows.”
And they knew Miller—like everybody here.
They led Artyom inside, keeping well away from him, as if he was a plague carrier. They zapped him with the jet from a fire-hose nozzle and washed off all the garbage. They took off their own suits, then led him to the guardroom naked and gave him someone else’s uniform. They started calling Arbat Station, keeping their eyes fixed on Artyom.
“A fine old whiff you have in here,” he told them.
“You go to hell,” muttered one of the men who had met him.” It smells fine. No smell.”
“You can say that again.” Artyom smiled at him.
“Are you drunk or what?”
The one who was waiting with the phone to his ear glanced round dubiously at Artyom: Was it worth trusting him, should they disturb Miller, wouldn’t it be best to stick this suspicious character in the slammer for the time being? But someone had already answered the call at the end of the line.
“Yes, Colonel Miller. The Borovitskaya-surface frontier post. I know it’s late. No, this is urgent.”
Like that other time, thought Artyom. When he came to Polis to warn them about the Dark Ones. About the appalling threat to Exhibition Station, the whole Metro and the entire human race. Fool. That was Miller and Borovitskaya too. It seemed like only yesterday and like a century ago. In less than three years since then he had gone through more than in the previous twenty-four.
“Miller,” a voice snapped in the speaker.
Artyom’s frivolous mood instantly evaporated. The tension swamped him, and his guts cramped up again. What if Miller didn’t acknowledge him?
“We’ve got a weirdo here. Came down from surface with nothing on. No suit, that is. Yes! Says he’s Artyom. Just Artyom. Yes, your Artyom, Comrade Colonel. That’s what he said.”
The voice stopped grating in the receiver, and there was a pause.
What if Miller really did reject Artyom? After all, he hadn’t asked him to come. He hadn’t sent for him even once in the last two years, he hadn’t even inquired how Anya was getting on. Just cut off contact. Artyom had just wasted his time waiting.
“I’m busy,” a spiky gearwheel rasped at the other end of the line.
“Can I have the phone?’ Artyom asked in desperation.
The sentry reluctantly let him approach.
“Svyatoslav Konstantinovich. This is Artyom. Anya’s husband.”
“Artyom,” the rusty, cracked voice repeated after him.” What have you come here for?”
“Tell them to let me in, Svyatoslav Konstantinovich. I haven’t got any rubber or any documents.”
“I’ve got an emergency here. I can’t talk. I have to go.”
“Do I go back up to the surface, then?”
Suddenly the receiver was empty. The sentries and Artyom listened together to the hissing of silence. The same silence as for the last two years. Miller didn’t want to answer him. The commander of the border post squeezed and released the handles of an invisible little spring-driven torch, demanding that Artyom give him back the phone. The guardroom went a little bit darker.
“The emergency’s at Teatralnaya, right?” Artyom asked.
The voice in the phone reluctantly reawoke.
“What’s Teatralnaya go to do with anything? It’s an explosion at Okhotny Ryad. Only one stop from Polis. I have to work out—”
“Okhotny Ryad is chicken feed. I’ve just come from there.”
“What the hell … ?”
“Don’t you … Don’t you know anything about Teatralnaya yet? About the invasion? Haven’t they told you?”
“What invasion? What are you babbling about?”
“Tell them to let me in. I won’t talk on the phone. But I’ll tell you.”
There was a thud. Miller had put the phone on the desk. Artyom caught what he said to someone else: “Anzor! What’s happening at Smolensk? Have they moved out? Yes, we’re going! Take Letyaga! Follow me in one minute.”
Artyom clutched the heated plastic tight in his hand.
“Svyato …”
“Okay. Give the phone to the watch officer. At the Library in ten minutes.”
* * *
Polis.
There were stations in the Moscow Metro that were well fed, even prosperous. Not many, but there were some. Compared with the destitute, wild, or abandoned stations, they seemed like heaven, but compared with Polis they were pigsties, even though they were well fed.
If the Metro had a heart, that heart was here, in these four stations—Borovitskaya, the Alexander Gardens, the Lenin Library, and Arbat—linked together by the blood vessels of their pedestrian passages.
This was the only place where people didn’t want to give up on who they used to
be. Pompous university professors, scholars of wild and woolly sciences, stupid bookish people and performers of all kinds, apart from street artists—at the other stations the same fate lay in store for all of them: to eat shit. Nobody needed these pampered drones. In the new world their sciences didn’t explain anything, and nobody had any patience for their art. Go and clean mushrooms or guard the tunnels. Or you can turn pedals, because in the Metro, light is simply light, and everybody here has enough knowledge already without you. And don’t talk too fancy; don’t put on airs if you don’t want to catch it hot.
That was how it was everywhere, except Polis.
But at Polis they were actually welcomed. And fed. They were allowed to feel like human beings: to take a wash and get their bumps and bruises treated. In the Metro many old words had lost their meanings and become mere shells holding decomposed nuts: “culture,” for instance. The word existed, but bite it open and there was nothing but putrid, bitter mold left on your tongue. It was like that at Exhibition, and on the Red Line, and in Hansa.
But not in Polis. Here that word still had a sweet aroma to it. Here they sucked on it and gnawed on it and laid it in store by the barnful. Verily, not by mushrooms alone …
The Lenin Library Metro Station had upper exits leading directly into the actual building of the Great Library that was once the Russian State Library, and so that no one could break through from there into the Metro; these exits had been securely sealed off long ago. The only way to get in here now was through the vestibule of Borovitskaya. That was only a stone’s throw, so Artyom and his escorts arrived at Lenin Library before Miller’s ten minutes were up.
The station was really old, as if the Metro builders hadn’t built it themselves, but chanced upon someone’s ancient sepulcher as they drove their tunnels through the clay of Moscow and then excavated it, adapting it to their own Metro-building needs. The hall here was unsuitable for the Metro, with immensely high ceilings and wide archways; there was too much air for Metro passengers. When it was built, no one worried about the thick strata of clay crushing these vaults and tearing them down. Almost all the new stations were hidden in low, narrow tunnels, inside a shell of tunnel liners, so that when the ground settled onto them, it wouldn’t break their backs. So that bombs couldn’t reach them from the surface. But when they built here they had also thought about beauty; as if it could save the world.
The lighting here was glaring; every last one of the lamps, those white spheres hanging from the ceiling two stories high, was ablaze. It was a waste, a feast in time of plague: People had no need for so much light. But here they let it blaze unsparingly—the magic of Polis was simply its ability to give outsiders the feeling, if only for one brief hour, that they were in the old world that had disappeared.
And like everyone else, Artyom squeezed his eyes shut for a second, and for that brief second he bought the illusion.
And then that picture from someone else’s dream flashed before his eyes—the city that never was, up on the surface. Something somehow reminded him of it. He brushed it aside and swatted away the planes with dragonfly wings. Enough of that.
The station was in turmoil.
Unkempt little old men and old women with spectacles as thick as magnifying glasses, forty-year-old students of long-perished educational institutions, effeminate performing artists of all stripes, Brahmins in robes with books under their arms, the entire endearing mass of moribund, recondite sophistry—they were all swarming in alarm along the edge of the tracks, craning their necks to get a better look at the black square of the tunnel that led to Okhotny Ryad. But they should have been sleeping, shouldn’t they? The clock showed midnight.
The black square was smoking.
Standing there on the border were Red Line sentries: All the tunnels leading up to the Library and immediately beyond it were Red Line territory. After the war with Hansa, the Reds had exchanged Lenin Library for Revolution Square.
“What is all this? What’s happened down there?” The gawpers pestered the sentries.” Has something been blown up, then? A terrorist attack?”
“Nothing’s been blown up. The situation’s routine. You’re imagining things,” the sentries lied, although the smoke from the black square was irritating their lungs so badly they had to lie through their coughing.
“So it’s started, then. At last their people will be free,” one bespectacled individual confidently assured another, leaving the Red Army tin soldiers in peace.
“We have to support them. It’s our duty!” exclaimed an agitated lady with a gypsy skirt draped casually over her broad backside.” I’ll go and paint a poster for solidarity. Would you like to join me, Zakhar?”
“I knew it; I knew it would happen. But so soon! The Russian man’s patience is exhausted!” said an old-timer with a long beard, wagging his index finger.
“There’s equality for you. There’s brotherhood.”
“You see! And it’s no accident that Okhotny Ryad is the first place it happens! It’s all because we’re next along the line. Polis! Soft power in action, so to speak. It’s simply our presence here, our cultural influence! Our concrete example! You can’t hoist democratic values up on a bayonet. And our … spirit of freedom, pardon my grandiloquence …”
“I think we have to reach out to them. Open the border to refugees. Organize the distribution of food!’ proclaimed a woman with a bouffant hairstyle and a dramatic neckline. “They’re being starved to death there, so I’ve heard. How appalling! I’ll bring some biscuits from home just in case. I just seemed to feel something when I was baking them yesterday.”
“There won’t be any refugees here,” Artyom told them all. “And there won’t be any uprising. Nothing’s going to happen. It’ll smoke for a while and then stop.”
“How can you be so sure?” they asked him resentfully.
Artyom shrugged. How could he explain?
But they had already forgotten about him; they all turned away from the smoking square towards a little bridge that rose almost right up to the ceiling as it crossed one of the tracks.
Men clad in black were pouring off that bridge in a silent avalanche. Masks on their faces, Kevlar on their chests, and burnished helmets with raised visors on their heads. And in their hands—AK-74s with silencers.
“The Order!” The words buzzed in the air above the people’s heads. And inside their heads.
“The Order,” Artyom repeated in a whisper.
His heart started pounding. And the cigarette burns that had taken the place of every letter of “If not us, then who?” started itching.
As always, there was no one else.
The column of men flowed over to the tunnel entrance and formed up. Artyom pushed his way closer to them, drawing his escorts along with him. He counted: fifty men. That was a lot. So Miller had managed to make up for what had been lost.
Artyom peered into the slits of the masks, into the eyes and tops of noses framed in black. Were any of his comrades here? He had heard Letyaga’s name. What about Sam? Styopa? Timur? Prince? But no one noticed him; they were all staring fixedly, motionless, at a point in the tunnel.
Miller couldn’t have replaced all of them! There was no one who could take the place of men like that.
Miller himself wasn’t with them. This was probably the brigade from Smolensk, the Order’s base, that had just arrived. Now they were waiting for their commander. He was based separately, at Arbat.
The ten minutes that Miller himself had set ran out. Then it was fifteen minutes. And then twenty. A slow wave crept along the column: Men shifted from one foot to the other and straightened their backs. They were men after all, not stone idols.
He finally appeared.
One man carried the wheelchair down the steps. Another two brawny characters brought down Miller himself. They sat him in the chair, adjusted his balance, and started trundling him along.
He had a dappled pea jacket thrown over his shoulders—almost naturally, almost as if he was s
imply feeling cold. But there was only one hand, the left one, lying on his bony knees. His right arm was missing from the shoulder down; that was what the pea jacket was for. Two years had gone by, but he still covered up the stump. He hid it. He didn’t want to get used to it. As if his arm could grow back again, if only he was patient for a while.
The entire formation turned on its heels in unison to face its commander. A universal spasm drew them all up to attention. Artyom realized that he was straining too, but he only realized it when the unaccustomed effort made the muscles cramp in his back.
“At ease,” Miller croaked to them.
He had become withered and yellow. The ruddy, glowing flesh had dwindled away. The color had washed out of the hair that used to be black, streaked with white, and now it was completely gray. But when he was moved closer, it was clear that he hadn’t lost any of his toughness as a result; the wrinkles and folds only delineated his features even more starkly; and his eyes hadn’t faded. On the contrary, they blazed brighter than ever.
Artyom moved through the crowd towards him.
“Let me through! I must see the colonel!”
They immediately cut him off, blocking his way with their black arms. One of the hulks in his path exclaimed in surprise, “Artyom? You?”
“Letyaga!”
They were too embarrassed to embrace, but they winked slyly at each other. Artyom tapped his finger on a badge on his shoulder: “A Rh-”—blood group A, rhesus negative. The same as Artyom.
Miller half turned to look over his shoulder and recognized Artyom too.
“Bring him here.”
“Comrade Colonel.” Artyom addressed his father-in-law formally in public. His hand flew up to his temple of its own accord.
“Don’t salute with no hat,” Miller told him.
“Yes, sir.” Artyom smiled at him, but Miller didn’t smile back.
“Report. What’s happening down there? A terrorist attack? Sabotage?”
“That’s not the most important thing. It’s at Teatralnaya.”
“I’m asking you about Okhotny Ryad.”
Metro 2035 Page 23
