Andromeda (A Space-Age Tale) вк-1

by Ivan Yefremov

  The doors of the protective walls built round the operation theatre opened noisily and Ahf Noot, squinting and stretching himself like a beast of prey awakened from its slumber, appeared in the company of his blood-smeared assistants. Evda Nahl, tired and pale, met him. and handed him Renn Bose’s heredity record. Ahf Noot snatched at it eagerly, glanced through it and heaved a sigh of relief.

  “I think everything will be all right. Come on and get some sleep.”

  “But… suppose he wakes up?”

  “Come along. He can’t wake up. Do you think we are so foolish that we did not take care of that?” “How long must we wait?”

  “Four or five days. If the biological investigation is accurate and the calculations are correct we shall then be able to make another operation, putting all the organs back. After that, consciousness….” “How long can you stay here?”

  “About ten days. The catastrophe fortunately coincided with a break in my teaching work. I’ll take advantage of the opportunity to have a look at Tibet, I’ve never been here before. It is my fate to live where there are most people, in the inhabited zone!”

  Evda Nahl gazed at the surgeon in admiration. Ahf Noot smiled gloomily.

  “You’re looking at me in the same way as people used to look at an image of a god. That does not befit the cleverest of my pupils!”

  “I really am seeing you in a different way. This is the first time in my life that a person dear to me has been in the hands of a surgeon and I can well understand the emotions of those who have come in contact with your art — knowledge combined with unexcelled skill!”

  “All right! Admire us, if you must. I shall have time to perform not only a second but even a third operation on your physicist.”

  “What third operation?” asked Evda Nahl, immediately on the alert. Ahf Noot, however, squinted cunningly and pointed to the pathway leading to the observatory. Mven Mass, his head bowed, was hobbling down.

  “Here’s another unwilling admirer of my art. Have a talk with him, if you can’t sleep, that is. I must sleep.”

  The surgeon disappeared round an irregularity in the hill in the direction of the temporary home of the doctors. From afar Evda Nahl could see how haggard the Director of the Outer Stations had grown and how much he had aged: but then, Mven Mass was no longer Director. She told him everything she had learned from Ahf Noot and the African heaved a sigh of relief.

  “Then I’ll go away in ten days’ time.”

  “Are you doing the right thing, Mven? I’m still suffering too much from shock to be able to think over what has happened, but it doesn’t seem to me that your guilt is so great as to require such condemnation.”

  Mven Mass frowned painfully.

  “I was carried away by Renn Bose’s brilliant theories. I had no right to apply all Earth’s power to the first attempt.”

  "Renn Bose showed you that an attempt would be useless with less power,” she objected.

  “That’s true, but we should have made indirect experiments first. I was insanely impatient and did not want to wait years. Don’t waste words — the Council will confirm my decision and the Control of Honour and Justice will not annul it.”

  “I’m a member of the Control of Honour and Justice myself!”

  “And apart from you there are ten other people. Since my case concerns the whole planet there will be a decision by the Joint Controls of North and South — twenty-one people besides you.”

  Evda Nahl laid a hand on the African’s shoulder.

  “Let’s sit down, Mven, you’re weak on your legs. Did you know that when the first doctors looked at Renn they decided to call a death concilium?”

  “I know, they were two short. All doctors are conservative, and according to an old rule that they haven’t got down to changing, there must be twenty-two people to decide to give a patient an easy death.”

  “Until recently the death concilium consisted of sixty doctors!”

  “That is a relic of the days when there was a fear of the right to put a patient out of his suffering being misused; in those days doctors used to condemn the sick to long and useless suffering and their relatives to senseless moral torment, even when there was not the slightest hope and death would have been a quick and easy release. But still, you see how useful tradition has been in this case, they were two short and I was able to get Ahf Noot, thanks to Grom Orme.”

  “That’s what I wanted to remind you of. Your own concilium of social death so far consists of only one man!”

  Mven Mass took Evda’s hand and raised it to his lips and she permitted him this gesture of great and intimate friendship. She was, at the moment, the only friend of a strong man oppressed by moral responsibility. The only one? And if Chara had been in her place? No… to receive Chara now the African would need great spiritual uplift and he still had not found strength enough for that. Let everything go its own way until Renn Bose recovered and the Astronautical Council held its meeting.

  “Do you know what the third operation is that Renn has to undergo?” asked Evda, to change the subject. Mven Mass thought for a moment and then recalled a conversation he had had with Ahf Noot.

  “Noot wants to take advantage of Renn’s being opened up to cleanse his organs of accumulations of entropy. It is usually done by physiochemotherapy and takes a long time, but it can be done in conjunction with such extensive surgery much more quickly and thoroughly.”

  Evda Nahl thought over everything she knew of the basis of longevity, the cleansing of the organism of entropy. Man’s fish, saurian and arboreal ancestors have left contradictory vestiges of ancient physiological structures in his organism each of which has its own specific way of forming entropic remnants of their activity. Thousands of years of study of these ancient centres of entropy accumulation, formerly the cause of senility and sickness, have resulted in the elaboration of cleansing by chemical and ray treatment and of methods of stimulating the aging organism with wave baths.

  In nature living beings are freed of accumulated entropy through being born of different individuals coming from different places and possessing different lines of heredity. This juggling with heredity in the struggle against entropy and the absorption of fresh strength from the surrounding world is one of the most difficult riddles of science that biologists, physicists, palaeontologists and mathematicians have been battling with for thousands of years. But the struggle has been worth it, expectation of life is now almost two hundred years and, more important still, that exhausting period of decay in old age has been eliminated.

  Mven Mass guessed the psychiatrist’s thoughts.

  “I have been thinking of the new and great contradiction of our lives,” said the African. “I mean the power of biological medicine that fills the body with new strength and the constantly increasing creative labour of the brain that burns a man up so quickly. How complicated everything is in the laws of our world.”

  “That’s true and explains why we are lagging behind with the development of man’s third system of signals[26],” agreed Evda Nahl. “Thought-reading greatly facilitates communication between individuals but requires a great expenditure of energy and weakens the inhibitory nerve centres. This latter effect is the most dangerous.”

  “And still the majority of the people, the real workers, live only half the possible number of years owing to their tremendous nervous tension. As far as I can understand, medicine cannot combat this except by forbidding people to work. But, then, who will give up his work for the sake of a few extra years of life?”

  “Nobody, naturally, because people only fear death and try to hang on to life when their lives have been passed in isolation and in sorrowful expectation of joys never experienced,” said Evda Nahl pensively; despite herself she could not help remembering that people live longer on the Island of Oblivion than anywhere else.

  Mven Mass once again understood her unspoken thoughts and grimly suggested that they return to the observatory to rest. Evda consented.

  T
wo months later Evda Nahl found Chara Nandi in the upper hall of the Palace of Information, whose tall columns gave it the appearance of a Gothic cathedral. The rays of the sun, slanting down from high windows, crossed at half the height of the hall creating a warm glow above and soft twilight below.

  The girl stood leaning against a column, her hands folded behind and her legs crossed. Evda Nahl, as usual, could not help admiring her simple attire — a short grey dress trimmed with blue and with a very low-cut bodice.

  Chara glanced over her shoulder as Evda approached and her sorrowful eyes lit up.

  “What are you doing here, Chara? I thought you were practising a new dance to surprise us with.”

  “Dances are a thing of the past,” said Chara, seriously. “I’m choosing a job in a field I’m acquainted with. There is a vacancy at a factory growing artificial leather somewhere in the South Seas near Celebes and another at the station developing perennial plants in the old Atakama Desert. I was happy working in the Atlantic Ocean, everything was so clear and bright and joyful there from the power of the sea and an unthinking contact with it… I enjoyed skilful play in competition with the waves, the big waves that are always there waiting for you and, as soon as you’ve finished work….”

  “I, too, have only to give way to melancholy to recall my first work in the psychological sanatorium in New Zealand where I was just an ordinary nurse. And Renn Bose, today even, after his terrible accident, says that he was happiest when he was working on helicopter traffic control. But, Chara, surely you know that’s just weakness! It’s only fatigue from the tremendous strain that was necessary for you to keep at the high artistic level you have achieved. It is going to be worse later on when your body ceases to be so splendidly charged with vital energy. But as long as it remains what it is, please give us the pleasure of admiring your skill and your beauty.”

  “You don’t know how it is with me, Evda. Every new dance I prepare is a matter of joyful search. I realize that I shall once more be giving people something good, something that brings them joy and reaches to the very depths of their emotions and that is what I live by. The moment comes when my plan is put into effect and I give myself up entirely to one burst of passion, to furious, flaming voluptuousness. I suppose this is transmitted to the audience and accounts for the enthusiasm with which the dance is received. I give all of myself to you all!”

  “And then what next? A sudden anticlimax?”

  “Yes! I’m just like a song that has flown away and vanished into thin air, I’m an exile from a vanished world that nobody wants and to whom nothing is left but the admiration of naive youth. I do not create anything that is registered by the intellect!”

  “You do more than that, you leave something in the hearts of people!”

  “That’s all very immaterial and transient — I was thinking of myself!”

  “Have you ever been in love, Chara?”

  The girl lowered her eyelashes and her chin stuck out.

  “Would that be like me?” she answered with another question.

  Evda Nahl shook her head.

  “I mean that tremendous big emotion that you, but not everybody, are capable of.”

  “I know what you mean, the poverty of my intellectual life leaves me a richness of emotion….”

  “That’s the right idea in essence but I would explain it differently; you are so gifted emotionally that the other side docs not necessarily have to be poor, although, of course, it will naturally be weaker by the law of contradictions. We’re talking too much in the abstract and I have an urgent matter to talk to you about, something that directly concerns our conversation. Mven Mass….”

  The girl flinched and Evda Nahl felt that she was inwardly putting up barriers against her. She took Chara under the arm and led her to a side gallery of the hall where the dark wooden panelling harmonized beautifully with the blue-gold of the stained glass in the arched windows.

  “Chara, my dear, you are an earthly, light-loving flower transplanted on to the planet of a double star. There are two suns in the sky, one blue and the other red, and the flower does not know which one to turn to. You are a daughter of the red sun, why do you turn to the blue?”

  Strongly but gently Evda drew the girl to her shoulder and Chara suddenly snuggled up to her. The famous psychiatrist stroked the girl’s thick, somewhat harsh hair, thinking all the time how thousands of years of training had changed man’s petty private joys for something greater and common to all. But how far they still were from victory over the loneliness of the soul, especially in a soul complicated by a gamut of feelings and impressions, nurtured by a body rich in life. Aloud she said:

  “Mven Mass — do you know what’s happened to him?”

  “Of course, the whole planet is talking about his unsuccessful experiment!’’

  “And what do you think?”

  “I think he was right!”

  “So do I. That’s why we have to get him off the Island of Oblivion. A month from now there will be the annual meeting of the Astronautical Council. His misdeeds will be discussed and the Council’s decision will be handed over to the Control of Honour and Justice that constitutes the guardian of every person on the planet. I have every reason to hope for a lenient verdict, but Mven Mass must be here. A man whose emotions are quite as strong as yours must not remain long on the island, especially as he is alone!”

  “Am I really so much of an ancient woman that I build up plans for my life to depend on what a man is doing, even if it is the man I’ve chosen myself?”

  “Chara, my child, don’t! I’ve seen you together and I know what you mean to him and he to you. Don’t blame him for not having seen you, for having hidden from you. Think what it would mean to a man, one of the same type as yourself, to come to you whom he loves — yes, it’s true, Chara — badly defeated and liable to judgement and exile. Could he have come to you, one of the world’s beauties?”

  “That’s not what I was thinking of, Evda. Does he need me now that he is weary and broken? I’m afraid he may not have the strength necessary for a great flight of the spirit, not intellectual, but emotional this time, for such love as I believe we are both capable of. If he doesn’t possess strength enough he might lose faith in himself a second time and that would be too much for him. That’s why I thought that it would be better for me to be… in the Atakama Desert!”

  “You’re right, Chara, but only from one side. You have forgotten his loneliness and the unnecessary self-condemnation of a great and passionate man who has nothing to support him once he has left our world. I would go there myself but I have Renn Rose on my hands, he’s just pulling through, and, as he’s badly wounded, he comes first. Darr Veter’s been appointed to build the new satellite and that’s his share in helping Mven Mass. I’m making no mistake when I tell you quite seriously to go to him, ask nothing of him, not even a tender glance, no plans for the future, no love… only give him your support, dispel his doubts in his own right and then bring him back to our world. You have strength enough to do that, Chara. Will you go?”

  The girl was breathing fast, she raised her childishly trusting eyes to the older woman and there were tears in them.

  “I’ll go today!”

  Evda Nahl kissed Chara heartily.

  “You’re right, you must hurry. We’ll go to Asia Minor together on the Spiral Way. Renn Bose is in a surgical sanatorium on the Island of Rhodes and I’ll send you on to Deir-es-Sohr where there is a helicopter base belonging to the technical and medical first-aid service on the Australia and New Zealand route. I can imagine the pleasure it will give the pilot to take the famous dancer Chara — alas, not the biologist Chara! — to any place she wants to visit.”

  The chief conductor of train 116/78 invited Evda Nahl and her companion to pay a visit to the central control room. A corridor, covered with a silicolloid hood, ran along the whole length of the huge cars. Mechanics walked up and down this corridor, from one end of the train to the other, watching instrum
ents indicating the temperature of the axles, the strain on the springs and frame of each of the cars. Geiger counters kept a check on lubrication and brakes. The two women went up a spiral staircase and walked along the corridor until they came to a big cabin high up over the streamlined nose of the first car. In a crystal ellipsoid twenty-two feet above the railway line sat two mechanics one on either side of the pyramidal hood of the electronic robot driver. Parabolic screens showed them everything that was going on on both sides and behind the train. The whiskers of the antenna that trembled on the roof belonged to an apparatus that should give warning of anything appearing on the line of the Spiral Way for the next 50 kilometres although the circumstances under which anything could appear would be very extraordinary.

  Evda and Chara sat down on a sofa against the bade wall of the cabin placed half a metre higher than the seats of the mechanics and allowed themselves to be hypnotized by the railway lines racing swiftly towards them. The gigantic railway crossed mountain ranges, was carried over the plains along huge embankments and crossed narrow waters and bays by viaducts built deep in the water. The forest planted on the sides of the colossal cuttings and embankments formed a continuous carpet owing to the train’s uniform speed of 200 kilometres an hour, a carpet that was reddish, light or dark green depending on the trees of the district — pines, eucalypti, or olives. The calm waters of the Archipelago were set in motion on both sides of the bridge by the movement of the air as it was cut by the ten-metre-wide train. The big ripples ran out fanwise, darkening the transparent blue water.