“Your shoes need cleaning,” said the younger one, moving away to avoid Sasha’s swaying legs, and the girls giggled. Sasha squinted down at them and saw they were standing on the lower edge of a pyramid of small multicolored cubes. That must be Crazy Bird, a pleasant enough game with amusing music, but with an unexpectedly stupid and cruel ending. He could hang there like this for as long as he wanted, there was even something pleasant about the monotonous swaying to and fro, but Sasha thought it must look stupid. He pulled up his legs and clambered onto an unfamiliar stone landing that broke off abruptly above an abyss, while its opposite edge was concealed behind the left edge of the screen—he could just make out a buzzing sound from that direction. The other edge of the landing was flanked by a high wall built of coarse blocks of stone. Sasha sat down on the cold, rough surface of the floor, leaned back against the wall, and closed his eyes. Somewhere in the distance he could hear a flute playing quietly. Sasha didn’t know who was playing it, or where they were, but he heard that music almost every day. At the beginning, when he was still finding his bearings on the first level, he had been irritated by the monotony of the distant quavering sound, its seeming pointlessness, but in time he had gotten used to it and even began to discover a certain beauty in it—it was as though the single long, drawn out note contained an entire complex melody, and he could listen to the melody for hours at a time. Just recently he had even begun stopping in order to listen to the flute and would go on standing motionless for some time—just as he was now—after its sound had faded away.
He looked around. There was only one way out—a leap into the unknown beyond the left edge of the screen. He could take a run and jump, or just push off as hard as possible from the edge of the platform with both legs. All of the abysses in the labyrinth were the right width for either a running jump or a standing jump, and naturally the first seemed the most reliable, but for some reason intuition prompted him to try the second. Sasha walked over to the abyss and stood on its very edge, then launched himself as hard as he could into buzzing obscurity. After landing on his haunches he straightened up, and beads of cold sweat sprang out on his forehead at the thought that he had almost taken a running jump. Right there in front of him a dead body hung, twisted in torment on a sharp steel spike. It was already crimson and swollen, covered with hordes of fat, slow moving flies. When some of them flew up into the air to take a break they made the buzzing sound that was audible in the picture to the right. In life the corpse had been a middle-aged man; he was wearing a respectable suit and still clutching a briefcase in his hand. He must have been a novice in this game who decided it would be safer to take a running jump. But then, Sasha could easily have ended up on the bottom of a deep stone shaft, while the man in the suit might have continued on his journey toward the princess. There was no way of guessing for sure—at least Sasha didn’t know of any.
Carefully stepping around the corpse, he ran on along the corridor. At one point he reached up, clambered onto a platform supported by two coarse pillars and ran on along another corridor—at three points of which he had to leap across deep stone shafts. What he found surprising was that all of this was happening on the second level, which he thought he knew like the back of his own hand, and it was only when a control slab clicked under his feet and he heard the clanking of a portcullis rising in the corner that he realized what had happened.
Not far from the exit to the third level there was a portcullis which he had never found out how to open, and once he had managed to get onto the next level, he had decided it must be purely decorative. Now it turned out there was an entire section of the labyrinth behind it, only it was a dead end. Sasha ran under the raised portcullis and dashed on—he was in familiar territory now and the surroundings didn’t threaten any more surprises. He stepped on one more control slab, then jumped over another—otherwise the portcullis ahead, which had begun to rise, would drop back down—and then set off along the corridor as fast as he could. He had to hurry because once it was fully raised, the portcullis immediately began to descend. He just managed to squeeze through under the spikes when they were less than a yard from the ground and found himself beside the staircase on the third floor, very close to the spot where only a few minutes before a section of the stairs had collapsed underneath him. The door to the next level was close now. “Damn,” thought Sasha, shaking himself and finally realizing just how fast his heart was beating, “the staircase here never used to collapse before! It collapsed on the fourth floor, but not here. It must do that every now and then.”
“Sasha!”
He turned around. Emma Nikolaievna was peeping out of the door of the second section of the timber department. Her face was thickly coated with powder, reminding Sasha of a large pink patch of ringworm sprinkled with streptocide.
“Sasha, give me a light, will you?”
“What’s the matter, can’t you manage it yourself?” Sasha asked rather coldly.
“I’m not in The Prince, am I?” answered Emma Nikolaievna. “I haven’t got any flaming torches on the walls.”
“What, did you play it before then?” Sasha asked a little more kindly.
“There was a time, but those guardians, you know. They could do anything they liked with me. Anyway, I never got further than the second stage.”
“You have to use the
“It’s too late for me now,” sighed Emma Nikolaievna, taking the lighted cigarette and gazing at Sasha with moist eyes. He was on the point of opening his mouth to express polite protest when he spotted a seminaked monster, complete with a chest covered in red hair and a thoughtful expression on its large snout of a face, peeping out from behind her shoulder—monsters like that are only encountered in small foreign trade organizations or on the bottom of the well of death in the game Targkhan. He blenched, nodded awkwardly, and went back to his own section.
“The dame’s done for,” he thought, “she’ll end up in DOS soon. Or maybe she’ll pull through somehow, who can tell?”
In his section the phone was ringing loudly and Sasha jumped impatiently onto the slab that opened the entrance, in order to make the door to the next level rise as quickly as possible.
Level 3
“Lapin! You’re wanted on the phone!”
Sasha hopped across to the desk and picked up the receiver.
“Sasha? Hi!”
It was Petya Itakin from Gosplan.
“Are you coming over today?”
“I wasn’t really planning to.”
“The boss said that someone from state supplies was coming by with some new programs, so I just thought it must be you.”
“I don’t know,” said Sasha, “nobody’s said anything to me about it yet.”
“But you’re the one who’s got the three extra files for Abrams, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“That means they’re bound to send you. Be sure to wait for me if I’m out, okay?”
“Okay.”
Sasha hung up and went to his desk. Beside him at the reserve computer a temporary consultant from Penza was absorbed in firing his laser gun at an Ergon rocket ship that had almost turned into position to fire back; on every side the joyless sands of Starglider extended as far as the eye could see.
“How’re you getting on there?” Sasha inquired politely.
“Not good,” answered the visitor, frowning as he hammered at the keyboard. “Not good at all. If that thing just...”
Suddenly a blinding whirlwind of fire hid everything from sight. Sasha pulled back and covered his face with his hands, quite instinctively; when he realized that nothing could happen to him and opened his eyes, the visitor was no longer there beside him—nothing was left but the flaps of his jacket, which were smoldering on the floor.
Boris Grigorievich bounded out from behind the cupboard and flung his sword on
the floor, then held up the sides of the long padded cloak he had draped over his body armor before combat and began stamping on the lump of cloth that was giving off vile-smelling smoke. His horned helmet represented a sullen Japanese deity and in combination with the fussy, rather womanish movements of his large, flabby body, the scowl stamped into the metal was actually rather frightening. When he had liquidated the remains of the fire, Boris Grigorievich removed his helmet, wiped his wet bald patch and glanced inquiringly at Sasha.
“Done for,” said Sasha, and he nodded at the DOS prompt blinking in isolation on the screen.
“I can see that. Just load him up again, we’ve got a document here that still needs to be signed.”
Boris Grigorievich’s telephone began ringing, and he dashed back behind the cupboard without finishing what he was saying. Sasha moved over to the next computer, went into drive A, where the visitor’s rotten Bulgarian diskette was sitting, and called up the game. The disk drive buzzed quietly and a few seconds later the man from Penza reappeared in his chair.
“When you’re targeted by rocket fire, you should gain as much height as you can,” said Sasha. “You can’t get more than one of them with the laser, and that thing fires in salvoes.”
“Don’t try to teach me,” growled his neighbor, attacking the keyboard. “It’s not my first year out in deep space.”
“Then at least you should set up auto-exec for yourself,” said Sasha, “nobody’s got the time to keep on reloading you.”
The visitor didn’t answer—he was under attack simultaneously from two walking tanks, and had no time for idle chatter. Suddenly there was a loud rumble followed by shouting in the boss’ office.
“Lapin!” Boris Grigorievich roared from his cupboard. “Come here immediately!”
When Sasha came running in Boris Grigorievich was standing on the desk and using his sword to keep at bay a tiny Chinaman with a childish face who kept thrusting a pike at him with the speed of a sewing machine. Realizing at once what had happened, Sasha dashed over to the keyboard and jabbed his finger at the
“Phew!” said Boris Grigorievich, “that was a close one. Loaded the fifth dan by mistake—just pressed the key without thinking about it, thought it was asking me for the type of monitor. Never mind, we can sort him out now. But then, we’d better deal with him later. You’ve got a job to do. Go save that extension to Abrams onto a diskette and get over to Gosplan. You know Boris Emelianovich?”
“I installed Abrams for him,” Sasha answered, “deputy manager on the sixth floor.”
“Good. You can get a contract signed at the same time—take it over with the file. And he’ll give you a diskette...”
From the other side of the cupboards there came a blinding flash of flame, a series of bumps and a sudden smell of scorched flesh.
“What’s that?”
“The guy from Penza again. Looks like he hit a pyramid mine.”
“Okay, we’ll reload him tomorrow morning. We’ve suffered his noise and stench for more than an hour already. On your way. He’ll give you a diskette with Arkanoid. Take a look around to see what they have that’s new, okay?”
Sasha was about to turn toward the door, but Boris Grigorievich pulled him back by the sleeve.
“Wait,” he said, putting on his helmet. “I need you for a moment. When I shout ‘kiyai,’ press a key.”
“Which one?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He went around behind the Chinaman, who was still frozen in his furious attack, assumed a low stance and measured his sword against the Chinaman’s neck.
“Ready?”
“Ready,” said Sasha, turning away.
“Kiyai!”
Sasha poked at the keyboard; there was a sharp whistle and a crunching sound and something struck the floor.
“Now you can go,” said Boris Grigorievich in a hoarse voice. “And be quick about it, there’s a lot of work to do.”
“I wanted to go to the cafeteria,” said Sasha, trying to look away.
“Better get across to Gosplan right away. You can get lunch there.”
Sasha emerged from behind the cupboards, went over to his seat, shoved the visitor’s fused spectacle frames under the radiator with his foot, then sat at his computer and dumped everything he needed onto a diskette. He put the diskette in his bag, stood up, and slowly made his way across the debris-scattered stone slabs of the corridor, jumping in his usual fashion over the trap, swung on his hands, jumped down to the lower stage, raised a slim, decorated jar from the floor and pressed it to his lips, thinking that he still didn’t know who set out these jars in the quiet corners of the underground terrain—or where each jar disappeared to after he had drunk its contents. Sasha knew every detail of the path to the fourth level and he walked, leapt, clambered, and stretched quite mechanically, thinking about all kinds of nonsense.
First he recalled Kudasov, deputy manager of the second section, who had reached the eighth level in the game Throatcutter ages ago, but still hadn’t managed to jump over some kind of green locker—he always said that was why he was the permanent deputy manager for several high-flying bosses who shot past him to promotion like rockets, all of them managing the locker, if not immediately, then at least without any great struggle.
Then Sasha began thinking about the strange things Itakin had said one evening recently—that some young guys had cracked his game a long time ago; it wasn’t quite clear just what Itakin had been thinking of, since the game had already been cracked when Sasha installed it on his hard drive. Then the door to the fourth level slowly rose and Sasha stepped into the subway car that happened to be behind it.
Level 4
“Just where is it I’m trying to get to?” he thought, staring into the black mirror of the subway door and adjusting the turban on his head. “I’ve already reached the seventh level—well, maybe not quite reached it, but I’ve seen what’s in there. It’s all the same stuff, only the guards are fatter. So I’ll reach the eighth level—but it’s going to take so long—and what comes after that? Of course, there’s the princess...” Sasha had last seen the princess two days before, somewhere between the third and fourth levels. The corridor on the screen had disappeared and been replaced by a room with a high vaulted ceiling, its floor spread with carpets. Immediately the music started playing, plaintive and wailing, but only at the beginning, and then only so that one note at the very end would sound particularly beautiful.
On the carpet stood an immense hourglass. From the stone floor a spoiled palace cat gazed at Sasha as though through the lens of a monocle, and on the scattered cushions in the very center of the carpet sat the princess. From that distance he could not make out her face—she seemed to have long hair, unless it was a dark scarf falling across her shoulders. She could hardly be aware that he was watching her, or even that Sasha existed as such, but he knew that if he could just reach that room, the princess would run to throw her arms around his neck. The princess stood up, crossed her arms on her chest, took a few steps across the carpet, and went back to sit down on the scattered cushions. Instantly it all disappeared, a heavy door clanged shut behind him and Sasha found himself beside the tall rocky projection with which the fourth level began.
“I wonder what she’s thinking about now? Maybe she’s thinking about the one who’s making his way to her through the labyrinth? That is, about me—without even knowing that she’s thinking about me?”
The columns of a station flickered past beyond the glass of the door. The train stopped. Sasha allowed himself to be caught up in the crowd and drifted slowly toward the escalators. Two of them were working. Sasha branched into the section of the crowd that was making for the one on the left. His head gradually filled with the slow, gloomy thoughts about life that usually came in the afternoon. “It’s strange,” he thought, “how I’ve changed over the last three levels. It used to seem as though I just had to leap over the next gap and that was
all. My God, how little I needed in order to be happy! And now I do it every morning almost without looking, so what? What have I got to hope for now? That at the next level everything will change and I’ll start wanting something the way I knew how to want before? Well, just suppose I do get there. I almost know how to do it already: after the fifth portcullis I have to jump—there must be a way through in the ceiling, the stone slabs there are odd. But when I do get through, where shall I find the me who wanted to get through?”
Hearing a familiar clanking sound, Sasha suddenly turned cold. He looked up and saw that a body-scissors had been switched on ahead of him on the escalator—two sheets of steel with sharp-toothed edges that clashed together every few seconds with such force that the sound was like a blow on a small church bell. The other passengers passed straight through it quite calmly—it existed only for Sasha, but for him it was absolutely real: he had a long ugly scar running the full length of his back, and on that occasion the body-scissors had barely touched him, ripping a patch of cloth out of his expensive denim jacket. It wasn’t very difficult to get through a body-scissors—you just had to stand close and then step through the moment it opened. But this time Sasha was riding on an escalator and there was no way he could guess at just which moment he would reach the scissors.
Without pausing to think, he turned and dashed back downward. It was hard to run—the escalator was packed with drunkards who only let Sasha past with great reluctance. A woman in a red shawl clutching two big bundles in her arms held Sasha up for so long that he found himself closer to the scissors than when he started, but eventually he managed to get through the crowd. Then a portcullis dropped down in front of him and Sasha realized that he was lost. Me turned limp and screwed up his face, but instead of seeing his entire life flash before his eyes in a single second, for some reason he recalled in great detail a singing lesson in the fourth grade when he had pushed the young music master so far that he had stopped playing Kabalevsky on the piano, got up, walked over to Sasha, and smacked him on the face. The clanking of the body-scissors was very close now, and Sasha instinctively stepped backwards, thinking that perhaps he might just...
A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories Page 18
