by Arkady
“So we need a veterinarian,” I said.
“He’ll be all right. It’s not his first time.”
“No, we can’t leave it at that. Let’s go and see.”
We went into the depths of the vivarium, by the perch of the harpies, who looked at us with sleep-dulled eyes, by the Lernean hydra, who was dour and silent at this time of year… The hekatocheires—hundred-armed and fifty-headed twins, the firstborn of Heaven and Earth—were housed in a large concrete cave guarded with heavy iron rods. Gyes and Cottus slept curled up in knots, from which protruded bluish shaved heads with closed eyes arid hairy, flaccid arms. Briareus was rocking to and fro. He was sitting on his haunches with his hand, supported by seven others, stuck out into the passage. With his ninety-two other hands, he held on to the iron rods and propped up his heads. Some of the heads were asleep.
“How is it?” I said sympathetically. “Does it hurt?”
The waking heads set up a clamor in Hellenic Greek and woke up a head that knew Russian.
“It’s awful, how it hurts,” it said. The rest stopped talking and stared at me.
I looked the finger over. It was dirty and swollen and not broken. It was simply sprained. In our gymnasium we fixed such a trauma without benefit of a doctor. I grasped the finger and jerked it toward me with all my might. Briareus howled with all of his fifty throats and fell back.
“There, there,” I said, wiping my bands with a handkerchief. “it’s all over…”
Briareus, sniveling through all his noses, peered at his finger. The near heads eagerly stretched their necks, biting the ones in front on the ears in their impatience, so they would not obstruct their view. Alfred was grinning.
“It would do him good to have his blood let,” he said, with a long-forgotten expression, then sighed and added, “Problem is, what sort of blood does he have? Must be something just for show. Not a very viable specimen.”
Briareus got up. All fifty heads smiled blissfully. I waved at him and started on my way back. I slowed up by Koschei the Deathless. The great evildoer lived in a comfortable private cage, with rugs and bookshelves. The walls were hung with portraits of Genghis Khan, Himmler, Catherine de Médicis, one of the Borgias, and another—either that of McCarthy or Goldwater. Koschei himself, dressed in a colorful robe, stood with his legs crossed before a huge lectern, reading an offset copy of The Witches Court. By way of self-accompaniment, his long fingers wove a sinister pattern: he was either turning a screw or sticking something in or ripping something off. He was kept in indefinite preliminary confinement while an interminable investigation was being conducted into his innumerable crimes. He was highly prized in the Institute, as he was concurrently employed in certain unique experiments and also as interpreter for Gorynitch the Dragon. (The latter was locked up in the boiler room, whence issued his metallic snoring and sleepy roarings.) I stood and thought about the fact that if some time in the infinitely remote future Koschei should be sentenced, then the judges, whoever they might be, would find themselves in a very strange situation; the death sentence could not be applied to a deathless criminal, and external imprisonment, considering the preceding term, he had served already.
Suddenly I was grabbed by my pants leg, and a besotted voice cried out, “What say, buddy, who’ll go against us three?”
I succeeded in wrenching free. Three vampires in the adjoining roost regarded me greedily, pressing their purplish faces against the metallic screen, which was maintained at two hundred volts.
“Crushed my hand, tough guy!” said one.
“Don’t grab,” I said. “Looking for a drubbing?”
Alfred ran in, snapping his whip, and the vampires retreated into the darkness of their cage, where they immediately began cursing in the foulest of language and playing with homemade cards.
I said to Alfred, “Well enough. It seems everything is in order. I’ll go along.”
“Happy traveling,” Alfred replied readily.
Going up the stairs, I could hear him clinking his teapot as he poured his tea. I looked into the mechanical section and checked the operation of the energy generator. The Institute was not dependent on the city for its power. Instead, after refining the principle of determinism, it was decided to utilize the well-known Wheel of Fortune source of free energy. Only a small section of the brightly polished rim of the wheel could be seen above the cement floor. Its axis was located somewhere in infinity, so that the rim looked like a conveyor belt moving out of one wall and into the other. At one time it was fashionable to write dissertations on the wheel’s radius of curvature, hut inasmuch as all of these dissertations yielded results of extremely low accuracy, on the order of ten megaparsecs, the Learned Council of the Institute passed a resolution to stop reviewing the papers on that subject, at least until such time as the creation of transgalactic means of communication would permit the expectation of raising the accuracy substantially.
Several demons from the plant department were playing at the wheel—jumping on the rim, riding to the other wall, jumping off and running back at top speed. I called them to order decisively. “You will cut that out,” I said. “This is not a sideshow, you know.” They hid behind the transformer and set to bombarding me with spitballs. I decided not to get involved with the whelps, walked along the control panels, and, verifying that all was well, ascended to the second floor.
Here everything was quiet, dark, and dusty. At the low half-open door, a feeble old soldier, dressed in a Preobrazhensk regimental uniform and tricornered hat, dozed, leaning on a long-barreled flintlock. Here was the home of the Defensive Magic Department, among whose personnel there hasn’t been a living soul for quite some time. All our old men, with the possible exception of Feodor Simeonovich, had at one time or another given it their due of infatuation. Ben Beczalel had successfully employed Golem in palace revolutions; the clay monster, impervious to poisons and bribery, guarded the laboratory and the imperial treasury as well. Giuseppe Balsamo had founded the first airborne squadron on brooms, which gave a good account of itself in the Hundred Year War engagements. However, the squadron soon fell apart when some of the witches were married and the rest took off after the regiments as canteen-keepers. King Solomon caught and spellbound a gross of afreets and hammered them into an excellent anti-elephant destroyer fire-throwing brigade. Young Cristobal Junta brought a Chinese dragon conditioned against the Moors into Charles the Great’s company, then upon learning that the Emperor was not campaigning against the Moors but the tribes of the Basques, he was enraged, and deserted.
Throughout the many-centuried history of wars, various magicians suggested the use of vampires (for night reconnaissance), basilisks (for striking the enemy with such terror that they would turn into stones), flying carpets (for dropping offal on enemy cities), living swords (for compensating inferiority in numbers), and much else. But, after World War I and after Big Bertha, poison gas, and tanks, defensive magic began to fade. Resignations spread like wildfire through the Department. The last survivor was a certain Pitirim Schwartz, an erstwhile monk and inventor of the forked musket rest, who was selflessly laboring on the jinn bomber project. The essence of the project was to drop on the enemy cities bottles with jinns who had been held imprisoned no less than three thousand years. It is well known that jinns in their free state are capable only of destroying cities or constructing palaces. A thoroughly aged jinn, reasoned Schwartz, was not about to start building palaces, and therefore things would go badly for the enemy. A definite obstacle to the realization of this concept was an insufficient supply of bottled jinns, but Schwartz counted on overcoming this through the deep dragging of the Red and Mediterranean Seas. It was said that having heard about fusion bombs and bacteriological warfare, the old man lost his psychic equilibrium, gave away the jinns be had collected to various departments, and left to study the Meaning of Life with Cristobal Junta. No one ever saw him again.
When I stopped at the doorway, the soldier looked at me out of one eye and croaked,
“It’s not allowed to go in any farther,” and dozed off again. I looked over the bare junk-laden room with shards of strange models and fragments of unprofessional drawings, paused by the door to poke my shoe at the folder bearing the smudged legend Absolutely Secret. Burn Before Reading, and went on. There was no power here to switch off, and as to auto-combustion, everything that could auto-combust had already done so years ago.
The same floor contained the book archives. This was a depressing area, not unlike the vestibule but considerably larger. As to its real size, the story went that a fairly good paved highway started about half a kilometer from the entrance and ran along the bookshelves with kilometer marks on posts. Oira-Oira had walked as far as the number 19, and the enterprising Victor Korneev, searching for technical documentation on the sofa-translator, had obtained a pair of seven-league boots, and had run as far as the number 124. He would have gone farther, but his way was blocked by a squad of Danaides in stuffed vests, and armed with paving hammers. Under the supervision of fat-faced Cain, they were breaking up the asphalt and laying some sort of pipes. Over and over, the Learned Council had raised the question about constructing a high-voltage line along the highway, for transmitting the data on wire, but every positive suggestion had been turned down for lack of funds.
The repository was stuffed with the most fascinating books in all the languages of the world, past and present, from Atlantian up to and including pidgin English. But I was most intrigued by the multi-volume edition of the Book of Fates. The Book of Fates was printed in three-and-a-half-point excelsior on the finest of rice paper and contained, in chronological order, data on 73,619,024,511 intelligent individuals.
The first volume began with Pithecanthropus Ayyoukh (Born 2 Aug. 965543 B.C.; died 13 Jan. 96522 B.C. Parents Ramapithecus; wife Ramapithecus. Children: male Add-Am; female Eihoua. Wandered as a nomad with a Ramapithecus tribe on the planes of Ararat. Ate, drank, and slept to his content. Drilled the first hole in a stone; devoured by a cave bear on one of the hunts). The last name—in the last tome of the regular edition, which came out last year was Francisco-Gaetano-Augustine-Lucia-y-Manuel-y-José-Miguel-y-Augustine-Gaetano-Francisco-Trinidad and Maria Trinidad. (See): Portuguese. Anacephalon. Cavalier of the Order of the Holy Ghost; colonel of the guard.
From the editorial data it was evident that the Book of Fates was published in 1 (one) exemplar, and this last one was printed in the time of the Montgolfier Brothers. Apparently, in order to satisfy somehow the needs of contemporaries, the editorial board undertook the publication of extra irregular editions in which only the dates of birth and death were given. In one of these I found my own name. But due to the rush, errors had crept into these editions by the thousand, so that I saw to my amazement that I would die in 1611. In the eighth volume errata, they had not as yet reached my name. A special group in Prophecies and Forecasts served as consultants for the editing of the Book of Fates. The department was anemic, neglected, and unable to rid itself of the effects of the short-lived directorship of Sir Merlin. The Institute repeatedly ran a competition for the vacant post, and each time there was but one applicant—Merlin himself.
The Learned Council conscientiously reviewed the application and safely voted it down—by forty-three votes “against” and one “for.” (In accordance with tradition, Merlin was a member of the Learned Council.)
The Department of Forecasts and Prophecies occupied the whole third floor. I strolled past doors with the signs Coffee Grounds Group, Augurers Group, Pythian Group, Synoptic Group, Solitaire Group, Solovetz Oracle. There was nothing to switch off, inasmuch as the department labored by candlelight. The notation Dark is the Water in Ye Clouds had already appeared in chalk on the Synoptic Group door. Every morning, Merlin, cursing the intrigues of detractors, erased this message with a wet rag, and every night it renewed itself. In general, it was entirely unclear to me as to what it was that maintained the credibility of the Department. From time to time its workers issued reports on rather strange themes such as: “On the Eye Expression of the Augur,” or “Prediction Properties of Mocha Coffee Grounds, Vintage 1926.” Once in a while the Pythian Group succeeded in predicting something correctly, but each time they appeared so startled and intimidated by their success that the effect was entirely dissipated. Janus-U, a most sensitive individual, could not, as was often noted, control a wan smile each time he was present at the seminar sessions of the Pythians and Augurs.
On the fourth floor, I finally found something to do: I turned off the lights in the cells of the Department of Eternal Youth. There were no youths there, and its thousand-year oldsters, suffering from sclerosis, constantly forgot to switch off their lights when they left However, I suspected that the matter involved something more than just sclerosis. Many of them, to this day, feared a shock. They insisted on calling electricity “the pounder.” In the sublimation laboratory, the listless model of a perpetual youth wandered yawning, hands in its pockets, among the long tables. Its gray two-meter-long beard dragged on the floor and kept catching in the chair legs. Just in case, I put away, in the cabinet, a bottle of aqua regia that was placed on top of a stool, and started toward my own place, the electronic section.
Here was my “Aldan.” I admired it a bit for its compactness, beauty, mysteriousness, and soft highlights. The Institute had rather diverse reactions toward us. Accounting, for example, met me with open arms, and the chief accountant, smiling avidly, loaded me at once with tedious computations of pay scales and productivity. Gian Giacomo, director of the Universal Transformations Department, was also overjoyed at first, but having become convinced that Aldan was incapable of calculating even the elementary transformation of a lead cube into a gold cube, cooled off toward my electronics and granted us only rare and sporadic assignments. In contrast, there was no respite from his subordinate, and favorite pupil, Victor Korneev. Oira-Oira, too, was constantly on my back with his skull-breaking problems in irrational mathematics. Cristobal Junta, who loved to be first in everything, regularly connected his central nervous system to the machine at night, so that the next day something in his head audibly hummed and clicked, while the derailed Aldan, in some manner incomprehensible to me, switched from the binary to the ancient hexadecimal system, and, on top of that, changed its logic, totally disregarding the principle of the excluded third. Feodor Simeonovich, on the other hand, amused himself with the machine like a child with a toy. He played tick-tack-toe with it for hours, taught it Japanese chess, and in order to make it more interesting, infused it with someone’s immortal soul—which was, incidentally, quite jolly and hard working. Janus Poluektovich (I don’t remember anymore whether -A or -U) used the machine only once. He brought with him a small semitransparent box, which he connected to the Aldan. In approximately ten seconds of operation with this device, all the circuit breakers blew, and Janus Poluektovich apologized, took his box, and departed.
But, in spite of all these petty interruptions, in spite of the fact that the animated Alden sometimes printed out, “I am thinking, please don’t interrupt,” in spite of the insufficiency of spare subassemblies, and the feeling of helplessness that took hold of me when it was required to conduct a logical analysis of the “incongruent transgression in the psi-field of incubal transformation,” in spite of all that, it was devilishly interesting to work here, and I was proud of being so obviously needed. I carried out all the calculation in Oira-Oira’s work on the heredity mechanisms of hi-polar homunculi. I constructed tables of the M-field potential around the sofa-translator in the ninth dimension. I carried the routine accounting for the local fish-products factory. I computed the conceptual design for the most economic transport of the Elixir of Children’s Laughter. I even calculated the probabilities of solving the “Great Elephant,” “Government House,” and “Napoleon’s Tomb” solitaires for the players in that group, and also did all the quadratures for Cristobal Joseevich’s numerical solution method, for which accomplishment he taught me how to achieve nirvana. I was satisfied; t
here were not enough hours in the day, and my life was full of meaning.
It was still early—just after six. I switched on Aldan and worked a while. At nine o’clock I caught myself, turned off the power with regret, and set off to the fifth floor. The blizzard was not about to quit. It was a true New Year’s Eve storm. It howled and moaned in the old abandoned chimneys, it piled drifts in front of the windows, madly shook the infrequent street lamps.
I passed through the territory of the Plant and Administration Department. The entrance to Modest Matveevich’s reception room was interdicted with crossed six-inch girders, flanked by two huge afreets in turbans, full battle dress, and with naked sabers. Each had his nose, red and swollen from a head cold, pierced with a massive gold ring on which hung a tin inventory tag. It stank of sulphur, burned fur, and antibiotics. I stayed for some time, examining them because afreets were a rare phenomenon in our latitudes. But the one on the right, unshaved and with a black patch over his eye, began to bore into me with the other eye. He had a bad reputation, allegedly with a cannibal past, so I hurried along. I could hear him slurping his nose and smacking behind me.
All the window ventilators were open in the Department of Absolute Knowledge, because the stench from Vibegallo’s herring heads was seeping in. Snow had drifted on the sills, and puddles stood under the radiators. I closed the ventilators and strolled past the virginally clean tables of the departmental staff. New writing sets, which had not seen any ink and were stuffed with cigarette stubs, graced the desks. Strange department, this. Their motto was, “The comprehension of Infinity requires infinite time.” I didn’t argue with that, but then they derived an unexpected conclusion from it: “Therefore work or not, it’s all the same.” In the interests of not increasing the entropy of the universe, they did not work. At least the majority of them. “En masse,” as Vibegallo would say. In essence, their problem boiled down to the analysis of the curve of relative knowledge in the region of its asymptotic approach to absolute truth. For this reason, some of the colleagues were constantly busying themselves by dividing zero by zero on their desk calculators, while others were requesting assignments in infinity. From there they returned looking energetic and well fed and immediately took a leave of absence for reasons of health. In the intervals between travels, they sauntered from department to department with smoking cigarettes, taking chairs by the desks of those who were working, and recounting anecdotes about the discovery of indeterminacy by L’hôpital. They were easily recognized by their empty look, and their unique ears, which were perpetually nicked from constant shaving. During my half-year tenure in the Institute, they submitted just one problem for Aldan, and it reduced to the same old division of zero by zero without any content of absolute truth. It is possible that some of them did do something useful, but I had no information to that effect. At ten-thirty I arrived at Ambrosi Ambruosovitch Vibegallo’s floor. Covering my face with a handkerchief and trying not to breathe through my nose, I went directly to the laboratory generally known among the colleagues as the “Maternity Ward.” Here, in retorts, as Professor Vibegallo said, were born models of the ideal man. Hatched out, that is; comprenez vous?
