by Adam Roberts
‘I think that Konstantin Skvorecky is correct,’ said Kaganovich. ‘We have the chance to perform a massive public good. And what have we ever actually achieved, as writers? What are we ever likely to achieve? As science fiction writers? Escapist junk, mostly. Missions to other worlds? Sentient comets? Clouds of black spores that soak into the atmosphere and make the trees come to life and walk around on sap-filled tentacles? Junk, all of it. This, however, this could be something worthwhile.’
‘I have a problem,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov, getting to his feet. ‘I have a problem, that I wish to share with this, our science fiction writers’ collective. We are to concoct a race of aliens against which humanity can unite. Spacefaring aliens, no?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Then this is my problem. We know the party line. The philosophy of the party has always been that capitalistic Western fantasies of launching rockets to other planets will always be doomed by the internal contradictions of the competitive inefficiency of capitalism itself. Only the combined and unified effort of a whole people would be able to achieve so monumental an achievement as interstellar flight. No capitalist race could ever achieve something as sophisticated as interstellar flight; only communists could do this. Now, how can it be that these evil aliens are able to build spaceships and fly across the void? Surely they are not communists?’
‘Sit down,’ said Sergei. ‘You’re making a fool of yourself.’
‘In Three Who Made a Star,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch, still standing, the - what were they called?’
Three Who Made a Star was one of my novels: an alternate history in which World Communist Revolution had taken place in first-century Judea. I spoke up. ‘What do you mean?’
‘The aliens they meet, in that novel. The ones with the three legs, and the spaceships made of spittle?’
‘The Goriniks.’
‘They. They were a socialist race, were they not? And you, Frenkel, in your Arctic story, the beings who live under the ice . . .’
‘Stop this,’ said Sergei, loudly. ‘Sit down, Nikolai Nikolaivitch. You’re making a fool of us, before our distinguished comrades.’
Asterinov looked around him, settled his gaze on Malenkov, and settled back into his chair. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Too much wine. Too much wine.’
One other thing I particularly remember from that first evening together, as the alcohol was drunk, was how clearly the grandiose nature of our ambitions manifested. Were we despised writers of pulp science fiction? By no means: rather, we were the inheritors of Pushkin and Tolstoy, of Homer and Shakespeare. ‘We shall write a new Iliad,’ announced Nikolai Nikolaivitch. ‘We shall write mankind’s greatest epic of war!’
‘We have just finished a war,’ I pointed out, in a glum voice.
War never finishes,’ said Frenkel. ‘How could war finish? What is there apart from war?’
The unspoken answer to his question rubbed a silence into the conversation like salt in a cut. Eventually, after a long pause, Frenkel went on. ‘Life is war, life is struggle, we all know that. And hard as the last war was, can we honestly say it was harder than the thirties?’ He was so drunk that, despite the fact that Malenkov was still sitting in the corner of the room eyeing us thoughtfully, Frenkel essayed an impression of Stalin himself, purring his rs like a Georgian. ‘Surely, comrades, you remember the thirties?’
Kaganovich laughed. Nobody else did.
‘It is in the nature of Marxism itself,’ said Frenkel, in a heavy, yokel voice, ‘in the very fabric of dialectical materialism, that life consists of conflict, of enemies all about us who cannot be appeased and who must be destroyed. After war comes - not peace, but more war. And we are gifted here! Gifted by historical necessity! Gifted by the news that we shall be the ones to shape this new war. This next war! It will be ours! War and war!’
‘I had thought,’ I said, ‘that the next war was to be against the Americans? To correct you, comrade, on one small point: we are planning the war after next.’
War and war and war,’ said somebody. With an alcohol-delayed jolt, I realised it was Commissar Malenkov. He was getting, slowly, to his feet, an unreadable smile on his face. Bluster as we might, we were all intensely aware that it would require only one phone call from this man to turn us all into corpses before the sun rose. All of us stared at him. All conversation stopped dead. ‘Goodnight, gentlemen,’ he said, with a curiously old-world courtesy. That I didn’t like. That none of us liked. And he left the room.
After a space of time Kaganovich said, ‘Jan Frenkel, your mouth will be the death of us. Jan. Jan.’ And Frenkel blushed the colour of spilt blood, and looked furious, though he said nothing.
4
So our new phase as writers of science fiction began. We were in that dacha, like a high-class barracks, for months. We fell into a rhythm; working as one group or separating into smaller groups during the morning; then a long lunch, and perhaps a sleep. Then late afternoon and evening, working further. The soldiers guarding us brought us some of what we asked for: paper; pens; cigarettes (Russian cigarettes, alas).
Our mornings began with a gathering in the dacha’s largest room to discuss, and make notes. Lunch would be our larger meal, brought to us by a surly battalion chef called Spiridinov. We worked and worked; mostly I made notes in a succession of notepads, and Nikolai Nikolaivitch typed them up on an enormous nineteenth-century typewriter that clattered like a rusty machine-gun.
In the evening, soup was brought in, straight from the oven and still in its copper pan. This was settled on the windowsill, where the sunset polished red gleams from the metal.
Sometimes we were supplied with vodka, sometimes not. In that respect it was like being back in the army.
We discussed and planned the nature of the alien foe that would threaten the whole of humanity. We decided that their weaponry would be atomic - very up-to-the-minute, this, for the mid-1940s. You must remember that there had been no official notification of the American atom bomb attack on Japan; our version of atomics was that of science fiction from the 1930s. But Comrade Malenkov personally approved this part of our design. We could imagine why; that such a threat would justify the Soviet Union in the accelerated development of its own atomic weaponry. We wrote pages and pages of human interest material, heroic exploits by soldiers of the Global Soviet; wicked traitors to the cause of humanity (Jews and homosexuals and the like); scene setting. We spent nearly a week on a set of stories about children encountering aliens. ‘And yet we have not decided on the nature of these aliens!’ Nikolai Nikolaivitch declared.
Grey rain fell all day. The sound of an endless flurry of wings behind the glass.
5
The weather cleared. The view from the glass doors was of hills, rising, sinking, and in places were hollows or sockets, grassed over but pooling the shadow until noon.
We wrote detailed accounts of alien atrocities. We had them villainously blowing up a city - New York, as a first choice. This was Rapoport’s idea; that the main island upon which New York stands (what was its name? we wondered. Nobody had the courage to ask Malenkov to supply us with an encyclopaedia that might answer such a question - Brooklyn Island said Kaganovich, Manhattan Island said Asterinov, Long Island said I) would be exploded by a diabolic alien death ray. Then we had second thoughts, for such a stunt, we reasoned, would be hard to fake; and if the Red Army were actually to bombard New York into dust and shards then we would have been the authors of mass death. So then we toyed with the idea of aliens attacking Siberia; some remote and inaccessible place where the story could not easily be falsified. But Asterinov voiced the obvious objection. ‘Our brief is to unite humanity against this monstrous alien foe!’ he said. ‘Why should humanity care if these aliens blow up a few trees in Siberia?’
‘We need a compromise,’ I suggested. ‘Somewhere close enough to civilisation to be threatening, but not so close as to be easily falsified. Eastern Europe?’
‘Germany,’
said Rapoport. ‘Let us have them erase Germany entirely. Turn that portion of central Europe into a blasted desert of polished and scorched glass.’
‘A little impracticable, in terms of faking the scenario,’ said Rapoport.
Nikolai Nikolaivitch only scowled.
‘Somewhere else,’ I suggested. ‘Ukraine, maybe. Latvia, perhaps. Let’s decide that later.’
‘The Ukraine has been almost depopulated,’ agreed Frenkel. ‘What with the famine, and then the war. Let us have the aliens blow up some portion of the Ukraine. That would be the best option.’
How could we plan such monstrosity so very casually? This is not an easy question to answer, although in the light of what came later it is, of course, an important one. Conceivably it is that we did not believe, even in the midst of our work, that it would come to anything - that we felt removed from the possible consequences of our planning. But I suspect a more malign motivation. Writers, you see, daily inflict the most dreadful suffering upon the characters they create, and science fiction writers are worse than any other sort in this respect. A realist writer might break his protagonist’s leg, or kill his fianc’e; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be more concerned with the placement of commas than with the screams of the dying. He will do this every working day all through his life. How can this not produce calluses on those tenderer portions of the mind that ordinary human beings use to focus their empathy?
6
The house had electricity, but the supply was intermittent. We worked in the afternoon in groups of two or three, or off by ourselves; and then we worked as a whole group in the evening by the light of oil lamps, tulip-shaped bulbs of brightness, orange as summer blooms. There would be three or four lamps placed upon the table, hissing quietly as if in disapproval of our work.
In the mornings there was a spring quality to the sunlight; a freshness. On one such day I walked in the garden with Nikolai, the two of us smoking earnestly. The brightness coming through the trees freckled the lawn with paler greens. Nikolai found a wooden soldier, a foot tall, in amongst the unmown grass, over by the shrubbery. It had once been bright with blue and yellow paint, but its time out in the open had blistered and stripped most of its colour off, and the wood beneath was damp and dark and crumby. ‘I wonder who left this here,’ I said. ‘I wonder for how long they wept for their lost toy! I wonder if it was quickly replaced.’
‘I wonder if they’re still alive,’ said Nikolai.
He tossed the thing into the foliage.
‘Konstantin,’ Nikolai said. ‘I have something to tell you.’
‘Yes?’
‘I have not written anything in a decade. Longer.’
‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘Dark Penguin. The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. The Vulture is Moulting. Superb books. And what about that series about the man who could breathe under water?’
‘A French book, little known, and, I think, illegal here. L’Homme qui peut vivre dans L’eau. I simply translated it into Russian, purging it of bourgeois details and adding a few standard Russian touches. The same with the others. Though those were American, rather than French. I changed the titles, of course; and I was secretive. Who would want to be discovered in possession of an American novel?’ He shrugged. ‘I am a fraud. I can’t pull my weight.’
This was strange news. ‘Don’t worry’, I said, a little uncertainly.
‘I am very afraid of disappointing the Comrade General Secretary. I was in the army. I understand how . . . unmerciful authority . . . needs to be.’ His hand, I saw, was shaking as he lit a new cigarette.
‘I was in the army too,’ I said. ‘We were all in the army, Nikolai.’
‘Where were you posted?’
‘Moscow. Then Latvia, Estonia, the west.’
‘Moscow?’
‘I,’ I said, with a little tremor of remorse in my heart, ‘know.’
‘I suppose,’ he said, in a slow voice, ‘somebody had to be stationed in Moscow. Were you on the general staff?’
‘God, no. I was a regular soldier. Like you. And I saw plenty of fighting too, later on. In Latvia. The Nazis fought like hounds. Their lives at stake, of course. All my friends died; and then I made new friends, and they all died, and . . .’ I stopped. The wind moved between us and around us. The sun glared at us out of a petrol-blue sky. The shadows of the trees shuddered. ‘Well, you know all about that,’ I said.
‘Yes.’
We sat in silence, smoking.
‘When I was a young boy,’ I told Asterinov (I was telling him something I had shared with nobody since), ‘I saw a red-haired man selling chestnuts in a market square.’ Asterinov looked at me. ‘I thought that red-haired man was Death,’ I said. ‘I still do. I still think that Death is a red-haired man.’
‘Isn’t he supposed to come in a black cloak and have a skull for a face?’ This, of course, was how Asterinov’s imagination worked; and it was how most people’s imaginations work. They tap into the general well, which sometimes we call clich’. It is a weakness, but in another way it is a greater strength than any to which I have ever had access. It was what he had summoned his courage to tell me, I suppose, that day: my imagination is the common imagination, comrade, he was saying; and I have drawn on the imaginations of others to write my books.
‘You’re quite right,’ I said. ‘A skull. Not a redhead. I was a foolish child, I’m afraid, and I have carried this foolishness into adult life. Death - a red-haired man?’
We sat in silence for a further minute, or so.
‘Comrade,’ I said. ‘There is no need for the General Secretary to be bothered with any irrelevant details.’
‘He singled me out, that first day, to tell me how much he liked Starsearch.’
‘He said he’d blocked the motion picture.’
‘But he liked the novel! What if he pays close attention to me - to my contribution? What if he finds out?’
‘Comrade,’ I said. ‘Calm yourself, please. Find out what? This is a collective project. Literature,’ I went on, ‘has always been a collective activity. Writers adapting plots from other writers, sharing ideas and characters and images, all the way back to Homer. Shakespeare didn’t invent a single one of his plots. You have nothing to be ashamed of. Your works have been an inspiration to the Soviet people in the great war. And, and,’ I stopped. ‘Starsearch too?’ I asked, in a sorrowful voice.
Asterinov took a deep breath. ‘No, that was one of mine.’
I could not explain the strange feeling of relief that passed through me when he said this.
A bifurcated cloud the shape and colour of a walrus moustache muffled the sun, with others following. Soon it began to rain, a drizzle drifting like spindrift, and we hurried indoors.
7
The next day we spent writing. The story we were assembling was growing; the particulars of the aliens - a very horrible, insectoid race, implacably individualist and implacably hostile to social animals such as human beings. To begin with, our aliens were something like giant ants, but the objection was made that the idea of a ruthlessly individualist ant was a contradiction in terms. ‘That’s the horror,’ Sergei Rapoport insisted. ‘Horror depends upon some substantive contradiction, some paradox that outrages our sense of nature! A live man, or corpse, neither is horrific: but a living corpse - that scares us!’
‘You’re talking nonsense, Sergei,’ said Ivan Frenkel. ‘Ants live in big collective groups. Ants are communists. We need a solitary insect - a spider.’
‘Spiders are not insects,’ retorted Sergei.
‘Corpses can be scary,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch. ‘Not - living corpses,’ he added, and I realised he was not making a suggestion, but was instead wrapped in the coils of memory. ‘Dead ones.’
‘I propose we do not call our aliens insectoid,’ said Ivan, calmly. ‘We call them arachnoid.’
‘Yes, Jan,’ said Sergei. ‘Let us do that, Jan.’ Frenkel coloured.
‘I h
ave a better idea,’ I said. ‘Let us disembody them.’
‘Ghosts?’
‘Radiation aliens. Sentient emanations of poisonous radiation.’
The others contemplated this. ‘A little insubstantial, perhaps?’ offered Nikolai Nikolaivitch. ‘To be really scary, I mean?’
‘But they would have machines. As we have tanks and planes, they would have robots and killing machines; but inside - they would be only waveforms of poisonous radiation.’
This met with a general agreement.
We sketched their culture, the reasons for their assault, the nature of it. One sticking point was whether we confined the battles to space - announce to the world that Soviet rocket ships had been launched into orbit and were fighting off the foe up there; or whether we should report that aliens had landed.
‘We have agreed to blow up the Ukraine,’ Frenkel reminded us.
‘I assumed that would be a blast from space down to earth,’ said Asterinov.
‘No, no,’ insisted Frenkel. ‘People will not unite if the enemy is too far away. They won’t believe the threat. They must land.’
‘Like H. G. Wells’ Martians,’ said Kaganovich. ‘That would be better.’
‘Gherbert George,’ said Sergei, pouring himself some vodka. ‘Gh-hh-herberr Gyorgi.’1 But nobody laughed.
‘Comrades, remember,’ said Kaganovich, holding up his hand. ‘Everything we do must ring true! The whole world must believe it!’
‘We will need props,’ said Frenkel. ‘Artefacts. Perhaps theatre professionals, or film makers, can construct devices that would pass inspection as alien technology. We must have film of the fighting.’
‘In the future,’ I put in, ‘who knows what advances there may be in the creation of specialised filmic effects.’
‘And, uniting all the evidence, our narrative of the ongoing struggle.’ Frenkel was heady with the possibility.
‘Cut up and sear together portions of flesh from various animals,’ suggested Kaganovich, eagerly, ‘and present them as slain alien bodies.’
