Andromeda (A Space-Age Tale) вк-1

by Ivan Yefremov

  Darr Veter and Evda walked down as far as the cape that protected the bay from the open sea. From there they would see the lights round the huge disc-shaped rafts of the maritime expedition.

  Darr Veter pushed a transparent plastic boat off the sand and stood by the water in front of Evda, even more massive and powerful than Mven Mass. Evda stretched up on tiptoes to give her friend a parting kiss.

  “Veter, I’ll be with Veda,” she said, as though answering his thoughts. “We’ll go back to our zone together and there we’ll await your arrival. Let me know where you fix yourself up, I’ll always be glad to help you.”

  For a long time Evda followed the boat with her eyes as it crossed the silvery sea.

  Darr Veter went as far as the second raft where the mechanics were still working in a hurry to set up the accumulators. In response to Veter’s request they lit three green lights in the form of a triangle. An hour and a half later, the first helicopter that came that way hung over the raft, the roar of its engines rumbling over the sleepy sea. Darr Veter entered the lift it lowered; for a second he could be seen against the illuminated bottom of the aircraft and then disappeared through the hatch. By morning he reached his permanent abode near the Council observatory which he had not had time to change for another. Darr Veter opened the air-taps in both his rooms and in a few minutes all dust had vanished. He pulled his bed out of the wall and, tuning his bedroom in to the smell and sounds of the sea that he had lately become accustomed to, was soon sound asleep.

  He awoke with a sensation that the beauty of the world had been lost. Veda was far away and would remain far away… now… until…. But he must help her and not complicate matters!

  In his bathroom a whirling column of cold electrified water burst upon him. Darr Veter stood under the column of water so long that he began to shiver. Feeling refreshed he went to the televisophone, opened its mirror doors and called up the nearest Registrar of Vacancies. The face of the registrar, a young man, appeared on the screen. He knew Darr Veter and greeted him with a scarcely perceptible shade of respect that was considered the hallmark of politeness.

  “I want to get some hard and lengthy job, with tough physical labour,” said Darr Veter, “something like the Antarctic mines!”

  “All the jobs there are taken!” answered the registrar, in tones of sincere regret. “All the miner’s jobs on Venus, Mars and even Mercury have been filled too. You know that the young people are always anxious to go where the work is hardest.”

  “That’s true but I can no longer place myself in that fine category. What is there now? I want a job immediately.”

  “There are the diamond workings in Central Siberia,” began the registrar slowly, glancing at a list that Darr Veter could not see, “that is, if you want mine work. Then there are some jobs on the rafts of the oceanic food-packing plants, at the solar pumping station in Tibet, but that’s easy work. There are some other places, but nothing particularly hard!”

  Darr Veter thanked him and asked for some time to think things over and asked him to keep the place open in the diamond workings.

  He switched off the Registrar of Vacancies and tuned in to Siberia House, the centre for geographical information concerning that country. His televisophone was switched on to a memory machine that showed him the latest records and he saw pictures of extensive forests go floating past him. The boggy, scanty, larch forests growing on permafrost that had once occupied the region were gone for ever, giving place to such giants as Siberian cedars and American sequoias, trees that had formerly been in danger of extinction. Their gigantic red trunks made a magnificent fence round hills covered with ferroconcrete caps. Steel tubes, thirty feet in diameter, crawled from under the caps and curved over ridges to the nearest rivers that they sucked entirely into their huge scoops. Monstrously huge pumps roared dully. Billions of gallons of water were driven into the volcanic chimneys where the diamonds were found; the water whirled and raged as it washed the clay away and then found its way out again leaving behind tons of diamonds on the grids of the washing chambers. In long, well-lit buildings people were watching the dials of the sorting machines. The brilliant stones were sifted like grain through the calibrated holes of a screen into boxes. The pumping station operators were keeping constant watch over the calculating machines that computed the ever-changing resistance of the rock, the pressure and expenditure — of water, the depth of the shaft and the expulsion of solid matter. Darr Veter thought that though the joyful picture of sun-bathed forests did not suit his mood at that moment, the concentrated activity of the work at the pumps might suit him and he switched off Siberia House. Immediately the call signal rang out and the Registrar of Vacancies appeared on the screen.

  "I’d like to give you something more concrete to think about. We have received a request for somebody to fill a vacancy that has just occurred in the submarine titanium mines off the west coast of South America. This is the hardest work available today, but if you take it you’ll have to go there immediately.”

  That last piece of information rather upset Darr Veter. “But I shan’t have time to pass the tests at the nearest station of the Academy of the Psychophysiology of Labour,” he said.

  “The sum of the annual tests that were obligatory for your former work is sufficient to exempt you from them.”

  “Inform them that I’m coming and give me the coordinates!” answered Darr Veter immediately.

  “Western section of the Spiral Way, seventeenth southern branch. Station 6L, Point KM40. I’ll inform them.”

  The serious-looking face disappeared from the screen. Darr Veter gathered together all the little trifles that belonged to him personally and filled a box with films containing the photographs and voices of his nearest relatives and friends and the most important records of his own thoughts. He took a chromoreflex reproduction of an old Russian picture from the wall and from the table he took a bronze statuette of the actress Bello Galle, which he kept because it bore a resemblance to Veda Kong. All these things and his few clothes he packed into an aluminium box with some letters and figures embossed on the lid. Darr Veter dialled the coordinates he had been given, opened a hatch in the wall and pushed the box into it. The box disappeared, taken up by an endless belt. Then he checked up on his rooms. Long before the Great Circle Era special cleaners and charwomen had been abolished. The work was now done by every person in his own place, something he could do because of his sense of absolute orderliness and discipline and because domestic and public buildings were designed more conveniently and fitted with means to clean and air them automatically.

  When he had finished his examination he pulled down the lever at the door which immediately informed the Housing Bureau that his rooms had been vacated. Outside, on an external gallery glazed with sheets of milk-coloured plastic, the sun’s warmth made itself felt, but on the flat roof the sea breeze was as cool as ever. The light footbridges thrown from one high latticed building to another seemed to be soaring in the air and tempting the onlooker to a leisurely saunter along them. Darr Veter, however, no longer belonged to himself. Through the tubular tunnel of the automatic descent he made his way to the underground electromagnetic mail tunnel and a tiny truck took him with switchback-like movements to the Spiral Way station. Darr Veter did not travel north, to the Behring Straits, where he could get on the intercontinental arch of the Spiral Way. To reach South America by this route, especially as far south as the seventeenth branch, would take four days and nights. In the northern and southern inhabited zones there were helicopter lines that handled heavy cargo round the planet, crossing the oceans and short-circuiting the brandies of the Spiral Way. Darr Veter travelled by the Central Branch as far as the southern inhabited zone hoping there to be able to convince the Director of Transport that he was urgent cargo. Apart from saving thirty hours by going this way he would be able to see Diss Ken, the son of Grom Orme, President of the Astronautical Council, who had selected him as his mentor.

  Diss Ken had come
to the end of his school years and in the following year would begin his twelve Labours of Hercules; in the meantime he was working in the Watchers’ Service of the West African swamps.

  Every youth wanted to enter the Watchers’ Service — to keep a look-out for sharks in the ocean, for harmful insects, vampires and reptiles in the tropical swamps, for disease microbes in the living zones, for epizoons and forest fires in the savanna and forest zones — hunting down and destroying all harmful life left over from the old world that in some mysterious way kept reappearing in remote corners of the planet. The struggle against harmful forms of life never ceased for a moment. Microorganisms, insects and fungi reacted to new and most radical chemical destroyers by the development of new, impervious forms. People learned to make proper use of strong antibiotics without generating dangerous and stable bacteria only after the Era of Disunity.

  “If Diss Ken has been appointed to the Swamp Watchers’ Service,”‘ thought Darr Veter, "he must be a serious young man.”

  Diss Ken, Grom Orme’s son, like all children in the Great Circle Era, had been brought up away from his parents in a school on the sea-shore in the northern zone. There, too, he had passed the first tests made by a local station of the Academy of the Psychophysiology of Labour. When young people were allotted work the psychological specifics of youth — the urge to go farther, an exaggerated sense of responsibility and egocentrism — were taken into consideration.

  The huge coach ran on smoothly and silently. Darr Veter went up to the top deck where there was a transparent roof. Far below, on either side of the Spiral Way, buildings, canals, forests and mountain tops swept past. The brightly gleaming, transparent domes of buildings marked the narrow belt of automatic factories at the junction of the agricultural and forestry belts. The rugged shapes of the huge servicing machines could be clearly seen through the glass walls of the buildings.

  The monument erected to Zhinn Cahd, the inventor of a cheap method of manufacturing artificial sugar, flashed past and then the arches of the Spiral Way cut across the forests of the tropical agricultural zone. Plantations of trees stretching away into infinite distance showed every conceivable shade of leaf and bark and great variety in the shape and height. Harvesting, pollination and calculating machines crawled along the smooth narrow roads that separated the plantations: countless cables formed a giant cobweb. There was a time when a field of ripe, golden corn had been the symbol of abundance. In the Era of World Unity, however, the economic inefficiency of annual crops was realized and, after all farming had been transferred to the tropical belt, the hard labour involved in the annual cultivation of herbage and bush plants became unnecessary. In the Great Circle Era perennial trees that did not take too much out of the soil and were impervious to climatic changes, became the chief crop.

  Bread, berry and nut trees, yielding thousands of different kinds of fruit rich in proteins, produced up to a hundred kilograms of food each. Forests of these trees ran round the planet in two belts covering thousands of millions of acres — true belts of Ceres, the ancient Goddess of Agriculture. Between these two belts lay the equatorial forestry zone, an ocean of humid tropical forests that supplied the whole world with its timber — white, black, violet, pink, golden and grey wood with a silky grain, wood as hard as Lone or as soft as an apple, wood that sank like a stone and wood that floated like cork. The forests also yielded dozens of kinds of resin cheaper than the synthetic varieties, possessing valuable technical or medicinal properties.

  The tops of the forest giants were level with the permanent way and waved and surged on both sides like a green ocean. In the dark depths of these forests, in cosy-looking glades, stood houses on metal piles and beside them mechanical spider-like monsters capable of turning these stands of 80-metre trees into stacks of logs and planks.

  To the left appeared the rounded summits of the famous equatorial mountains. On one of them, Kenya, was the installation for the maintenance of communications with the Great Circle. The ocean of trees moved away to the left, making way for a stony plateau. Blue cube-shaped buildings appeared on both sides.

  The train stopped and Darr Veter stepped out on to the extensive, glass-paved square of the Equator Station. Near the foot-bridge that stretched over the grey tops of the Atlas cedars, stood a white truncated pyramid of porcelain-like aplite from the River Lualaba, surmounted by the statue of a worker of an age long past. The luxuriant silver foliage of trees brought from South Africa surrounded the pedestal whose sides gleamed dazzlingly bright in the sunshine. In his right hand he held a gleaming sphere with four transmitting antennae jutting out from it, his left was stretched out towards the pale equatorial sky. The man’s body, straining backwards as though to launch the sphere into the sky, was the expression of inspired effort. The figures of people in strange clothing arranged around the pedestal at the feet of the central figure increased the impression of effort. This was a monument to the builders of the first man-made Earth satellites, people who had performed miracles of inventiveness, labour and courage.

  Darr Veter could never look at these sculptured faces without a feeling of excitement. He knew that the first people to build artificial Earth satellites and reach the threshold of the Cosmos had been Russians, that amazing nation from whom Darr Veter was descended, the people who had taken the first steps towards building the new social order and towards the conquest of the Cosmos….

  That day, as usual, Darr Veter made his way to the monument to look once more at the carvings of the heroes of ancient times and to seek in them similarities and differences in comparison with the people of his own day and with himself….

  Two tall, youthful figures appeared through the trees, stopped and then one of them rushed to Darr Veter. He placed his arms round Veter’s shoulders and took a stealthy look at the familiar features of that well-known face: the big nose, wide chin, the unexpectedly mirthful turn of the lips that did not seem to fit in with the rather grim expression of the steel-grey eyes under their joined brows.

  Darr Veter cast a glance of approval over the son of a famous man who had built bases on the planets of the Centaurus system and had been elected President of the Astronautical Council for five three-year periods in succession. Grom Orme must have been at least 130 years old — three times the age of Darr Veter — but his son was very young.

  Diss Ken called over his friend, a dark-haired boy.

  “This is Thor Ahn, my best friend, the son of Zieg Zohr, the composer,” he said. “We’re working together in the swamps and we want to do our Labours of Hercules together and after that we want to continue working together.”

  “Are you still interested in the cybernetics of heredity?” asked Darr Veter.

  “Oh, yes! Thor has got me even more interested — he’s a musician, like his father. He and his girl-friend dream of working in a field where music helps us understand the development of living organisms, that is, they want to study the symphony of their structure….”

  “It’s all very indefinite, the way you put it,” said Veter, frowning.

  “I don’t know enough yet,” answered Diss in confusion, “perhaps Thor can tell you better than I.”

  The other lad blushed but stood up to the test of the penetrating glance.

  “Diss wanted to tell you about the rhythms of the mechanism of heredity. As the living organism develops from the original cell it attunes itself by chords of molecules. The primordial paired spiral develops along lines analogous to the development of a musical symphony, or, to put it another way, to the logical development in an electronic computing machine.”

  “Really!” exclaimed Darr Veter in exaggerated astonishment. “Then you will reduce the entire evolution of all living and non-living matter to some sort of a gigantic symphony?”

  “The plan and internal rhythm of which are determined by basic physical laws. We have only to understand how the programme is built up and where the information of the musico-cybernetic mechanism comes from,” insisted Thor Ahn with the
unconquerable confidence of youth.

  “Whose idea is it?”

  “My father’s, Zieg Zohr’s. He recently published his 13th Cosmic Symphony in F-minor, Colour Tone 4.75 m

  “I’ll most certainly hear it! I love blue tones…. Now about your immediate plans, your Labours of Hercules. Do you know what has been allotted you?”

  “Only the first six.”

  “Of course, the other six will be allotted when the first half has been done,” Darr Veter recalled.

  “Clean out the lower tier of the Kon-I-Gut caves in Central Asia so that visitors can go there.” began Thor Ahn.

  “Build a road to Lake Mental across the steep mountain ridge,” continued Diss Ken, “renew a grove of old bread trees in the Argentine, explain the causes for the appearance of big octopuses in the region of the recent lift near Trinidad….”

  “And destroy them!”

  “That’s five, what’s the sixth?”

  The two lads turned somewhat bashful.

  “We are both proficient at music,” began Diss Ken, blushing, “and… we have been asked to collect material on the ancient dances of the Island of Bali and resuscitate them musically and choreographically.”

  “By that do you mean select girls to dance them and form a troupe?” laughed Darr Veter.

  “Yes,” admitted Thor Ahn, unwillingly.

  “An interesting job. But that’s a group job, like the road to the lake, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, we’ve got a good group. Only… they want you to be their mentor, too. It would be fine if you only agreed!”

  Darr Veter doubted his abilities with regard to the last of the six tasks. The lads, however, their faces beaming, danced for joy and assured him that “Zieg Zohr himself” had promised to guide the sixth task.