by Arkady
That was why the parrots one, two, and three were so similar: they were simply one and the same parrot. Poor old Photon. Perhaps he had been overcome by old age or maybe he had caught a cold in the draft and had flown to his favorite balance in Roman’s laboratory to die. He died and his aggrieved owner made him a fiery funeral and scattered his ashes to the wind, doing so because he didn’t realize how dead countermovers behave. Or perhaps precisely because he did know. Naturally, we viewed this as a movie with reversed sections.
On the ninth, Roman finds the remaining feather in the furnace. Photon’s corpse is already gone; it was burned tomorrow. On the morrow, the tenth, Roman finds it in the petri dish. Janus-U finds the corpse and burns it then and there in the furnace. The feather, which escaped cremation, remains in the furnace to the end of the day; and at midnight jumps into the ninth. On the morning of the eleventh, Photon is alive, although already sickly. The parrot expires before our eyes under the scales (on which it will be so happy to sit now) and the simple-souled Sanya Drozd puts it in the dish, where the deceased will lie till midnight, will jump into the morning of the tenth, will be found there by Janus-U, burned and scattered to the winds, but its feather will remain to be found by Roman. On the morning of the twelfth, Photon is alive and well and has an interview with Korneev, asking for sugar; but at midnight the bird wilt jump into the morning of the eleventh when it will sicken and die, and will be placed in the petri dish; but at midnight it will jump into the morning of the tenth, will be burned and scattered, but a feather will remain behind, which at midnight will jump into the morning of the ninth, will be found by Roman and thrown in the wastebasket. On the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth, and so on, much to our joy, Photon will be happy, talkative, and we’ll be spoiling it, feeding it sugar and pepper seeds, while Janus-U will be coming around to inquire whether he is interfering with our work. Employing the word-association technique, we should be able to learn a great many curious facts from him concerning the cosmic expansion of mankind and, doubtlessly, our own personal futures.
When we arrived at this point in our discussion, Eddie suddenly became gloomy and announced that he didn’t appreciate Photon’s insinuations about his, Amperian’s, untimely demise. Korneev, to whom any empathetic tact was foreign, remarked that any death was inevitably untimely and that nonetheless we’d all get to it sooner or later. Anyway, Roman said, it was possible the parrot loved him more than anyone else and remembered only his death. Eddie understood that he had a chance to die later than all of us and his mood improved.
However, the talk about death channeled our thoughts into a dismal direction. All of us—except, of course, Korneev—began to feel sorry for Janus-U. Truly, if one thought about it, his situation was horrible. First, he represented an example of tremendous scientific selflessness, because he was practically deprived of the possibility to exploit the fruits of his labor. Further, he had no bright future whatsoever. We were moving toward a world of reason and brotherhood, and he, with each passing day, went toward Bloody Nicholas, serfdom, the shooting on Sennaya Square, and—who knew?—maybe toward all kinds of repressive governments and torture. And somewhere in the depths of time, on the waxed parquet floor of the Saint Petersburg Academic de Science, he would be met on a fine day by a colleague in a powdered wig—a colleague who for a whole week had been scrutinizing him peculiarly—and who now would exclaim in surprise, throw up his hands, and mutter with horror in his eyes, “Herr Neffstroueff! How can it be? Fwhen yesterday they printed in ‘Notices’ that you hat passet away from a stroke?” And he would have to tell of a twin brother and false reporting, knowing full well and understanding only too correctly what that conversation meant.
“Cut it out,” said Korneev. “You are too maudlin. In return for all that he knows the future. He’s been there, where we still have a long way to go. And he may know exactly when we will all die.”
“That’s a completely different matter,” Eddie said sadly.
“It’s hard on the old man,” said Roman. “See to it that you treat him more gently and warmly in the future. Especially you, Victor. You are always the wise guy.”
“So why does he always pester me?” Victor hit back.
“‘What did we talk about and where did we see each other…?’”
“So now you know why he pesters you, and you can conduct yourself decently.”
Victor scowled and started to examine the list of questions with a great show of concentration.
“We have to explain everything in more detail to him,” I said. “Everything we know. We have to predict his near future to him constantly.”
“Yes, devil take it!” said Roman. “He broke his leg this winter, on the ice.”
“It has to be prevented,” I said decisively.
“What?” asked Roman. “Do you understand what you are saying? It has been healed for a long time…”
“But it has not been broken yet—for him,” contradicted Eddie.
For several minutes he tried to comprehend the whole thing.
Victor said suddenly, “Wait a minute! And how about this? One question, my dear chums, has not been crossed out.”
“Which?”
“Where did the feather go?”
“What do you mean, where?” said Roman. “It transited into the eighth. And on the eighth, I had coincidentally used the furnace to melt an alloy…”
“And so what does that mean?”
“But I did throw it into the wastebasket… I did not see it on the eighth, seventh, sixth…hmm… Where did it go?”
“The charwoman threw it out,” I offered.
“As a matter of fact it would be interesting to cogitate on that,” said Eddie. “Assume that no one incinerated it. How should it appear through the centuries?”
“There are items of more interest,” said Victor. “For instance, what happens to Janus’s shoes when he wears them to the day they were manufactured at the shoe factory? And what happens to the food he eats for supper? And again…”
But we were too tired to continue. We argued a little more, and then Sanya Drozd came along, evicted us from the sofa, switched on his radio, and got around to scrounging for two rubles.
“I need some bread,” he droned.
“We don’t have any,” we replied.
“So it’s the last you have; can’t you let me have some…?”
Further discussion became impossible and we decided to go and have dinner.
“After all is said and done,” said Eddie, “our hypothesis is not so fantastic. Perhaps the fate of Janus is even more astounding.”
That would be quite possible, we thought, and departed for the dining room.
I ran in to Electronics to let them know that I’d gone to have dinner. In the hall I bumped into Janus-U, who looked at me attentively, smiled for some reason, and asked if we had met yesterday.
“No, Janus Poluektovich,” I said. “We did not see each other yesterday. Yesterday you were not at the Institute. Yesterday, Janus Poluektovich, you flew to Moscow first thing in the morning.”
“Ah yes,” he said. “It had slipped my mind.”
He was smiling at me in such an affectionate way, that I made up my mind. It was a little presumptuous of me, of course, but I knew for sure that Janus Poluektovich was kindly disposed toward me lately, and this meant that no unpleasantness could occur between us now. And I asked softly, looking around cautiously, “Janus Poluektovich, may I be permitted to ask you one question?”
Raising his eyebrows, he regarded me thoughtfully for some time, and then, apparently remembering something, said, “Please do. One question only?”
I understood that he was right. It all wouldn’t fit into just one question. Would there be a war? Would I amount to something? Would the recipe for universal happiness be found? Would the last fool die someday?
I said, “Could I come to see you tomorrow morning?”
He shook his head, and replied, with what seemed to be a touch of
perverse enjoyment, “No. It is quite impossible, Tomorrow morning, Alexander Ivanovich, you will be called by the Kitezhgrad plant, and I will have to approve your trip.”
I felt stupid. There was something degrading about this determinism, delivering me, an independent person with free will, to totally defined steps and actions outside of my control. And it was not a question of whether I wanted to go to Kitezhgrad or not. It was a question of inevitability. Now I could not die or get sick, or act up (“up to getting fired”). I was fated, and for the first time, I grasped the terrible meaning of this word. I had always known that it was bad to he fated to execution or blindness, for example. But to be fated to the love of the most wonderful girl in the world, to a round-the-world voyage, and to the Kitezhgrad trip (where, incidentally, I had rared to go for the past three months) also proved to be most unsettling. The knowledge of the future now presented itself to me in an entirely new light…
“It’s bad to read a good book from its end, isn’t it?” said Janus Poluektovich, watching me frankly. “As to your questions, Alexander Ivanovich…try to understand, Alexander Ivanovich, that a single future does not exist for everyone. They are many, and each one of your actions creates one of them. You will come to understand that,” he said convincingly. “Very definitely, you will understand it.”
Later I did indeed understand it.
But that’s really an altogether different story.
Epilogue and Commentary
A short epilogue and commentary by the head of the SRITS computing laboratory, junior scientist A.I. Privalov.
The subject sketches about life in the Scientific Research Institute of Thaumaturgy and Spellcraft are not, in my view, realistic in the strict sense of the word. Nevertheless they possess certain virtues that favorably distinguish them from the analogous works of G. Perspicaciov and B. Pupilov and consequently permit their recommendation to a wide circle of readers.
First of all it should be noted that the authors were able to perceive the situation and to distinguish that which is progressive in the work of the Institute from the conservative. The sketches do not evoke the kind of irritation that one experiences when reading adulatory articles about the hack tricks of Vibegallo or the enraptured transliterations of the irresponsible prognostications from the Department of Absolute Knowledge. Further, it is a pleasure to note the correct attitude of the authors to the magus as a human being. For them, the magus is not an object of fearful admiration and adulation, but neither is he the irritating film fool, a person out of this world who is constantly losing his glasses, is incapable of punching a hooligan in the face, and reads excerpts from Differential and Integral Equations to the girl in love. All this means that the authors had assumed the proper attitude toward their subject. The authors should also be given credit for presenting the Institute environment from the viewpoint of a novice and for not missing the profound correlation between the laws of magic and the laws of administration. As to the shortcomings of the sketches, the preponderant majority of them are the result of the fundamental humanitarian orientation of the authors. Being professional writers, they time and again show a predilection for the so-called artistic verity to the so-called verity of facts. Also, being professional writers, and just as the majority of writers, they are insistently emotional and pitifully ignorant in matters of modern magic. While in no way protesting the publication of these sketches, I feel nevertheless impelled to point out certain concrete errors and inaccuracies.
1. The title of the sketches, it seems to me, does not correspond with their content. Using the title Monday Begins on Saturday, which is indeed a widespread saying among us, the authors apparently wished to state that the magi work without respite even when they are resting. In reality such is almost the case. But it is not evident in the sketches. The authors became excessively entranced by the exotic aspects of our activities and succumbed to the temptation to proffer the more adventurous and exciting episodes. The adventures of the spirit, which constitute the essence of life in any magus, were given almost no expression in the sketches. Of course, I don’t include here the last chapter of Part Three, where the authors did attempt to depict the labor of the mind, but based themselves on the ungrateful medium of a rather dilettantish and elementary problem in logic. (Incidentally, I had expounded my viewpoint on this question to the authors, but they shrugged their shoulders and said, in something of a pique, that I took the sketches too seriously.)
2. The aforementioned ignorance of the problems of magic as a science plays nasty jokes on the authors throughout the entire length of the book. As, for example, in formulating the M.F. Redkin dissertation theme, they admitted fourteen (!) errors. The weighty term “hyperfield,” which they obviously liked very much, is inserted improperly into the text over and over again. Apparently it’s beyond their ken that the sofa-translator radiates not an M-field, but a Mu-field; that the term “water-of-life” had gone out of usage two centuries ago; that the mysterious apparatus under the name of “aquavitometer” and a computer by the name of “Aldan” do not exist in nature; that the head of a computation laboratory very seldom checks programs—for which purpose there are programmer-mathematicians (of which we have two, whom the authors stubbornly persist in calling girls). The description of materialization exercises in the first chapter of Part Two is done in a repugnant manner: examples of wild terminology that must remain on the conscience of the authors include, “vector magistatum” and “Auers’ incantation.” The Stokes equation has no bearing whatsoever on materialization and Saturn could in no way be in the constellation of Libra at that time. (This last lapse, particularly, is all the more unforgivable since I was given to understand that one of the authors is a professional astronomer.)14 The list of these kinds of inaccuracies and incongruities could be extended with no great exertion, but I refrain from doing so, since the authors categorically refused to change a single item. They also refused to expunge the terminology that they did not understand: one said that it was necessary for the ambience, and the other—that it adds color. I was, by the way, forced to agree that the preponderant majority of the readers could not distinguish the correct from the erroneous terminology, and also that no matter what terminology was employed, no reasonable reader would believe it anyway.
3. The pursuit of the above-mentioned artistic verity (as expressed by one of the authors) and character development (as expressed by the other) has led to a considerable distortion of the images of the real people taking part in the story. As a matter of general fact, the authors are inclined toward a certain belittlement of heroes and, consequently, some sort of believability has been achieved by them, possibly only in the case of Vibegallo, and to some extent with Cristobal Junta (I am not counting the episodic projection of the vampire Alfred, who indeed has emerged more successfully than anyone else). For example, the authors assert that Korneev is rude and imagine that the reader can construct an adequate perception of this rudeness for himself. Yes, Korneev is indeed rude. But it is precisely for this reason that Korneev, as described, appears as a “semitransparent inventor” (in the terminology of the authors themselves) as compared with the real Korneev. The same applies to the legendary politeness of B, Amperian. R.P. Oira-Oira is completely fleshless in the sketches, although in the very period described, he was divorcing his second wife and expected to marry for the third time. The adduced examples are probably adequate to keep the reader from lending too much credence to my own portrayal in the stories.
The authors had requested that I explain certain incomprehensible terms and little-known names encountered in the book. In responding to this request I have encountered definite difficulties. Naturally I do not intend to explain the terminology thought up by the authors (“aquavitometer,” “temporal transmission,” and the like). But I don’t think it would be of much use to explain the real terminology when it demands extensive specialized knowledge. It is, for instance, impossible to explain the term “hyperfield” to a person who is poorly oriented
in the theory of physical vacuum. The term “transvection” is even more pregnant and, furthermore, different schools employ it in different senses. In brief, I have restricted myself to commentaries on those names, terms, and concepts that are, on the one hand, fairly widely known, and on the other, have wide application and specific meaning in our work. Further, I have commented on some words that don’t have a direct relationship to magic, but which, in my view, could confound the reader.
GLOSSARY
Afreet: A variation of the jinn. As a rule the afreets are well-preserved doubles of the most famous Arabian generals. At the Institute, they are used by M.M. Kamnoedov in the role of armed security guards, as they are distinguished from other jinns by being highly disciplined. The fire-throwing mechanism of the afreets has not been well investigated and it is hardly likely that anyone will ever study it thoroughly, because nobody needs it.
Anacephalon: A congenitally deformed individual without brain or cranium. Typically, anacephalons die at birth or a few hours later.
Augurs-K: Priests in ancient Rome who foretold the future by the flight of birds and their behavior. The great majority of them were conscious confidence men. This applies in considerable measure to the augers in the Institute, although they have now developed new methods.
Basilisk: Mythological monster with the body of a rooster and the tail of a snake, which kills with its gaze. In actuality, an almost extinct lizard covered with feathers and the precursor of the archaeopteryx. Capable of hypnosis. Two exemplars are maintained in the Institute’s vivarium.
Beczalel, Leo Ben: A well-known medieval magician, royal alchemist of Emperor Rudolph II.
