by Adam Roberts
‘I wouldn’t think anything of the sort, comrade,’ I said, mildly.
‘The reason it doesn’t,’ he went on, ‘is that many of these branching alternatives cancel one another out. Over the broader fan of possibilities, spreading into a complex delta-basin of alternate realities, probability creates reality gradients. Realities below a certain threshold are liable to evaporate altogether. Realities above a certain threshold can solidify in an absolute sense. It’s chance, you see, but also observation. That’s the Copenhagen part.’
‘Fucking Copenhagen,’ growled Frenkel.
‘And some consciousnesses are more gifted with that solidifying effectiveness than others.’
‘Dora fucking Norman,’ snapped Frenkel. ‘Fuck! Fucking fuck!’
But there is still a broad range of alternative realities co-existing. Universes in which you were blown up and died in Chernobyl - lots of them. The universe in which you survived is a tenuous one, in terms of probability. If the Norman woman had not perceived you as strongly as she did - does - then you’d have died there. And his beard danced and waggled as he spoke: all the long black lines extruded from those little hair-pits on his chin and cheeks and upper lip, all grown out and matted and packed together.
‘You’re very well informed,’ I said. ‘About my life.’
‘We have a good perspective upon it.’ He twirled fingers in his beard again. ‘You can see, our technology gives us access to this realm of - superposition.’
‘That’s the ground on which they’re fucking invading us!’ screeched Frenkel, slobber scattering. ‘This one! This ground! That’s why it’s so hard to, fucking, pin them down.’
I looked over at Frenkel. ‘You ought to calm yourself, Jan.’
‘That’s what I was trying to fucking tell you in that park in Kiev! Look up!’
I looked up. The sky was full of flying saucers, from horizon to horizon. There were alien spacecraft everywhere, and descending directly above our heads was a craft bigger than all the rest: the pupil of a colossal eye, the radial iris spokes of grey and dark green against a dark blue background, a shield-boss kilometres in diameter framing it. The air was shuddered by the thrum of its impossible engines. It might descend inexorably and crush central Moscow - I didn’t know. It was possible I could see clouds through the main body of the thing. I wasn’t sure.
‘[Good gracious,]’ I said, lapsing, for some reason, into English.
‘Fuck!’ yelled Frenkel, spit coming from his mouth in pearls. ‘Fuck! This is the ground they’re invading us over!’
‘This.’ I looked around. ‘It’s more than one reality, it’s the whole sheaf of possible realities?’
‘A good spread of them. As many as we can coalesce. And the bullet that passed through your chest - that’s a very weak reality, when diluted by all the rest. Very weak.’
‘Weak because?’
‘Isn’t it obvious ! Because in most of the rest you died in Chernobyl ! And in the realities in which you died in Chernobyl, there’s no need for Nik here—’ but Nik was barely here: he was vaguer than the dream to the waker - ‘to follow you across Moscow and put a bullet in your chest.’
‘So - he didn’t shoot me?’
‘Of course he fucking shot you!’ slurred Frenkel.
‘He shot you in one thread. In forty thousand other threads he didn’t shoot you. So if you’re worrying whether you’ve been shot and killed by Nik . . . you need to know which thread you’re in.’
‘Fucking fuck,’ Frenkel interjected, with no very obvious pertinence.
‘I’m still alive,’ I said, running my hand across my chest. ‘So I suppose I wasn’t in that thread.’
‘You were in that thread,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov. ‘But you were in forty thousand other threads as well, at the same time, and in those forty thousand you weren’t shot. The ones in which you live diluted the one in which you die to the point where . . . Well, look I don’t want to strain the point. You see what I’m saying.’
I looked at my feet. They looked weirdly solid against the fluctuating, pulsing, darkly luminous pavement. Good Moscow stone. The ground interested me less as metaphysics, and more as - I don’t know. The grave, I supposed. The space opened by pressing the hidden latch-switch, visible only by moonlight, and lifting one of the great pavement slabs up and out, a horizontal door. Those steps lead down . . . where do they lead, exactly? ‘I don’t see,’ I said.
‘I see,’ I said.
‘I don’t see,’ I said, ‘how I’m suddenly living forty thousand and one realitylines simultaneously. Is it that - what? Is that normal?’
‘Fuck!’ gargled Frenkel. He sounded like he was choking on something. His own rage.
‘That’s not normal. It’s normal to live one realityline, of course. Our consciousnesses work that way; they slide effortlessly left, right, whichever, down all the frictionless cleavages and reunions of possibilities. We never even notice them.’
‘I don’t see,’ I said. Then I said, ‘No, I don’t see.’
‘You’re wondering,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov, his beard shuddering like a live thing, like a beard of black bees, ‘given that your natural habitat is a single realityline, how you can be presently living in the full spread of forty thousand?’
‘I’m wondering that,’ I agreed.
‘Fucking! Fuh-fuh-fuh!’ interjected Frenkel, and then he sneezed. It made his body writhe like an eel in its chair. He almost fell out.
‘You want to know how we are doing it?’ Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov asked. ‘So look up.’
I looked up again. Directly above us, now no more than a thousand yards up, was the main, vast alien spacecraft. It looked like a huge inverted cymbal made of pig-iron: so broad it stretched wider than the eye could take in. A mind accustomed to seeing large things in the sky thinks, automatically, cloud: and a shape this big put me in mind of rain clouds first of all - a perfectly circular rain cloud with a vast eye in its centre. But there was no doubting its prodigious solidity. There was all manner of intricate griddle and porthole detail in the underside. It was not rotating, but around its bulging black-blister middle - that central dome alone was more than a hundred metres across, I think - strips of radial illumination, not sharp-edged but not exactly fuzzy either, moved clockwise very slowly: yellow and red ones, blue and white ones. The exact middle of the central dome, like an inverted nipple, was a ridged cavity.
My feelings were of awe.
I tried to breathe in, but my lungs felt like polythene bags, and my mouth was dry. The thought kept running through my head: how could I not have noticed!
Frenkel was coughing furiously in his chair. Either that, or he was having a conniption fit.
‘It takes, I don’t mind telling you, enormous amounts of energy even to maintain the co-presence of a relatively small spread, like the forty thousand we’re in now. And even a ship as large as,’ he pointed up with his finger, ‘as that one can’t do it indefinitely. Do you remember being intercepted on the road to Moscow?’
I did remember. Of course I did. ‘That happened,’ I said, dumbly.
‘That craft, that intercepted you,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov. It was even bigger than the one up there. It had even more powerful . . . I suppose, engines is the best word. That craft put out a spread of about eighty-thousand threads, but even that, with all the power we could muster - even that we could only maintain for a short time. And that was because she was in the car. Do you start to understand?’
‘I did see a UFO on that road,’ I said, feeling foolish.
‘Yes.’
‘And, at the same time - I didn’t. At the same time, we dropped the soldier off at that brothel and drove on.’
‘Yes.’
I looked up at the staggering, enormous object sitting in mid-air directly above us. It was incredible. It was certainly there, though.
‘And now she’s not here . . .’
‘She’s being flown, dispatc
h, back to America. She’s in the plane now, waiting for take-off.’
Frenkel pulled himself up in his chair. ‘I fucking told you. Look around, Konsty! This is where they’re invading! Not Russia, or Ukraine, or America - here. This is why they’re simultaneously such a genuine threat and why they’re so hard to spot! Because their main battle front isn’t in one reality, but - here. In this fucking manyspace. This fucking manyspacetime.’
With a slightly sticky movement, as if wading through a resisting medium, Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov took a step towards me, and laid his hand on my arm.
‘Oh, garoo, garoo,’ cried Frenkel. ‘Don’t you fucking . . . don’t you fucking walk off with him . . .’
‘Come along Konstantin Andreiovich,’ said Asterinov. ‘Just a little walk round the corner. I’m not abducting you. We’ve intervened for a good reason. We’ve intervened at my insistence, actually.’
‘What’s round the corner?’
‘Round the corner is a better place to be when the spread is collapsed back down to a single realityline again. Because once that happens, and Nik sees that he has not managed to shoot you dead with his first bullet, he’ll shoot again. Won’t he! So, better not to be directly in front of his gun.’
‘Round the corner,’ I said, taking an awkward step myself, and then another, with Asterinov’s still-young hand tucked into my elbow. ‘To stay alive.’
‘Yes.’
‘You intervened to save my life?’
‘Yes.’
‘Because we were friends, all those decades ago?’
Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov’s beard moved, and I wondered if perhaps he was smiling. ‘It would be nice to think that,’ he said.
‘Don’t! Oh, garoo! Garoo!’ shrieked Frenkel, his arms flailing. ‘Don’t fucking walk off with him. He’s the enemy, Konsty!’ But soon we had left him behind and were moving on. ‘Fucking Copenhagen !’ he yelled. ‘Fucking Copenhagen!’
The corner, when we came to it, shimmered and bulged, and we went round it, and walked in silence for a while, until, suddenly, everything snapped abruptly and rather bafflingly into familiarity again. The buildings acquired sharp-edged lucidity. People filled out their own spectral shapes.
I looked up, but the sky was empty. Instead of a huge alien spacecraft ceilinging the view there was nothing but a quantity of grey-blue sky.
‘I wish it were true,’ Asterinov was saying, ‘that I intervened to save your life, Konstantin Andreiovich, for old times’ sake. Indeed I remember that time in the dacha! Good memories. But, no, we intervened not for your sake. But because of Dora Norman. She is remarkable.’
‘I know.’
‘Her ability is . . . important. We need to understand it better. Her line is now tangled up with yours. It’s pretty much as simple as that.’
‘You’re the enemy,’ I said.
‘We’re the good guys, Konstantin Andreiovich,’ he replied, his beard splitting with a wide smile. ‘You’re the enemy.’
‘Now that I understand the particular . . . territories you are moving over, I comprehend the particular reasons why UFO sightings have been so problematic,’ I told him. I told it, I should say. ‘So widely reported and believed and simultaneously so widely unseen and disbelieved.’
‘The invasion is pretty much over, friend,’ it said to me. ‘It’s been four decades since we met in that dacha.’
‘You were one of them, even then?’
It laughed. ‘You were a human, even then?’ he retorted.
‘But what were we . . . what were we doing?’
‘We were crafting a realityline. We were preparing the ground for my people. We were . . . think of it as, clearing the undergrowth. Think of it as laying a path through possibilities. We were creating the spine of a realityline.’
‘We were just writers.’
‘Writers create.’
‘Not realities, though. Only fictions. Only science fictions.’
‘What you have to do,’ said the creature that I knew as Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov, ‘is consider the total spread of realitylines. That’s what you need to think of as reality is the whole spread. Reality is a matter of probabilities. Likelihoods, and possibilities. That’s the idiom of fiction. That’s what artists are good at doing. What were we doing? We were laying a line about which actual realities, coral-like, could grow. I was there to make sure we came up with the right sort of line.’
‘Radiation aliens?’
‘Radiation aliens.’
‘It seems so haphazard. We knew nothing, for instance - for an instance, we knew nothing of radiation! It was all guesswork. The atomic bomb had only just been dropped, and we hadn’t even heard of it!’
‘I see you think of radiation in that sense,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch. His beard jiggled.
We were still walking, briskly now, turning right onto a main street, and then left again. I pictured, somewhere behind me, a bewildered Nik blinking and waving his pistol. Because the aliens wanted me alive, of course they wanted me dead. It was war, after all.
‘It’s her, isn’t it?’ I said to the alien.
‘You mean Dora.’
‘Yes. You need her, in some sense. Because of her abilities.’
‘Yes.’
‘You need me alive only because she needs me alive.’
‘Love,’ said the alien, ‘has its redemptive possibilities. Don’t you think?’ And we had arrived at the marble gateway, and the steps down to the Metro.
‘Goodbye, now,’ he said. ‘Down there, get on a train. And stay away from Jan Frenkel.’ He turned to go, but I caught his sleeve.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Wait. It’s hard to believe that you’re not real!’
‘But I am indeed real,’ he retorted.
‘Not human, though.’
‘Not human, no.’ He made a second move, as if to walk off, and several people pushed past me to go down the steps into the station.
‘Do you remember,’ I said to him, ‘when you and I talked in that meadow? We were discussing your book about the man who could breathe under water. You confessed that you had not written that book; you had merely copied it from another language.’
‘I do remember.’
‘You stole all those stories . . . why? Because you lacked the capacity to invent?’
‘Exactly that,’ he said, his eyes creasing with pleasure. ‘Exactly! That is your talent, the ability to invent realities. It is one of the things that makes your otherwise unexceptional world so interesting to us.’
‘But,’ I said, ‘but. I asked if you had plagiarised Starsearch. I asked if you had simply copied Starsearch from somebody else.’
‘I remember.’
‘And you said you had not!’
He put his head a little to one side, doggishly.
‘I’m not expressing myself very well,’ I said. ‘What I mean is: you plagiarised all your novels, as you confessed, except Starsearch. Therefore you composed Starsearch as an original fiction, the product of your own creative imagination. So I think to myself: if this is the truth - if you could write that fiction - then why did you need five of the Soviet Union’s top SF writers to concoct a storyline? Why not . . . do it yourself?’
‘That’s beyond us,’ he said. He didn’t sound mournful, or regretful. He spoke in a purely explanatory mode.
‘Yet you managed it with Starsearch,’ I said.
‘No.’
‘Then how did you write Starsearch?’
‘It is mere documentary verisimilitude, is Starsearch. A factual account drawn from my life. A poor substitute for the splendours of fictional invention, I’m afraid. Goodbye, Konstantin Andreiovich.’ That was the last I ever saw of him.
Radiation in that sense. I see now, of course, in what sense they were radiation aliens: not in the sense I had understood, of (as it might be) nuclear radiation. It was realitylines that radiated; quantum alternatives that radiated; and the aliens’ technical advantage over us is a motor to manipul
ate this radiative spread of possible nows. As Frenkel said, this gives them a mighty advantage, but I tend to think - given how long they have been engaged in their assault upon us, and how slow their campaign has advanced - that they must be in some other sense feeble: few, perhaps; weak or uncertain. Or wouldn’t they, else, have essayed a sudden rush and a push? What they are doing, instead, is stealth; picking up individuals here and there, moving their heavy cannon into position. But they are almost ready. We shall know the assault is about to commence in earnest when accounts of alien abduction becomes less frequent, or perhaps stop being reported altogether. That is when we should be most afraid.
That they saved my life, I suppose, means that in some way they consider that I shall be of use to them. But before they saved my life Dora did, without even knowing that she had done it: her mind, somehow attuned, aware of the spread of realities branching from that moment in Chernobyl and thinning them automatically down into the few lines in which I was still alive. Love shining from her eyes. Radiation in that sense.
KONSTANTIN SKVORECKY
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Konstantin Andreiovich Skvorecky (1917-) is a Russian-born writer of science fiction. Most of Skvorecky’s fiction was produced in the 1930s, including such minor classics as Tamara (1935), Plenilune (1936), Sirius na Rusi (1936) [translated as Three Who Made a Star, 1938], Mortidnik (1937), Vsyo eto (1938) [translated as And All This, 2003], Nadezhda (1939), Zoya (1939) and various others. He served in the Red Army in the Second World War, but disappeared shortly after the war. His reappearance coincided with the Chernobyl disaster. It is believed by some that Skvorecky, having been abducted by aliens, spent the years 1945-1986 on another planet. His memoir Yellow Blue Tibia (1999) provides an account of these missing years that explicitly asserts (or attempts to) the existence of aliens, an assertion which has been widely disbelieved. The memoir also asserts that he died inside Chernobyl in 1986. His more recent pamphlet When I Met the Aliens (And What They Told Me) (2000) is a satirical reimagining of the events of that novel, warning people of an alien invasion he claims is on-going.
