Chekhov’s Journey

by Ian Watson

  “Right now I believe it is equally probable that the Tunguska event happens in 1908 and in 1888—it’s undecided. So what is going to decide it? Why, the observers of this event—namely us! Specifically, Mike. Just as soon as Mike witnesses the Tsiolkovsky exploding in 1908, then all this phoney business back in 1890 will collapse. Poof! The fog will roll away, and you’ll have your authentic Chekhov heading for Sakhalin, as originally occurred. This other trip will be a ghost event with no substance.”

  “That’s way beyond me, Professor. What causes a ghost, of an event?”

  “Aha, there we have it in a word—and that word is ‘cause’! If a ship travels back through time—mark you, I don’t say that any such thing really exists—then obviously this disrupts cause and effect. Perhaps the passage of the ship sets up a sort of wake, composed of ghost events? But consider: maybe such ghosts are swirling around us all the time—ghosts of unfulfilled possibilities? Our normal consciousness only lets us experience a single chain of cause and effect. But these are extraordinary circumstances we’re in, now. Mike is experiencing possibilities, as though they’re real events—and the K. E. Tsiolkovsky is a superb metaphor for what’s going on in his head. And maybe that’s all it is: a metaphor.”

  “How about the fog?” insisted Osip. “And none of us being able to leave?”

  “Mike’s mind must be very powerful,” said Sonya; she flushed.

  “Indeed, he must be some kind of medium, without realizing it. Obviously his case would repay—”

  “No thanks,” interrupted Mikhail with alacrity, “I’ve no desire to spend the next ten years locked in a lab.”

  “Nor I, dear boy—that’s why I said ‘would repay’.”

  “Nobody’s gonna lock you up, Professor.” Osip edged even closer, as a duckling to its dam. He refilled Kirilenko’s coffee cup, nudging and jostling him officiously.

  “Your duty, Mike, is to steer this ship of your mind to a safe… well, that’s to say, to its destruction—in the year 1908. You must observe that event, so that it really happens. And then we’ll all be free of this imprisoning mesmerism.”

  “Is he a mesmerist, too?”

  “You’ve heard of the Indian rope trick, Osip? Well, it’s said that the Indian yogi performs this so-called trick by means of mass suggestion. I think we may well have run across an even stranger case of mass suggestion, here!”

  “Do you mean it’s all clear out there?” asked Sergey. “What, we could walk off down the hill—if we could only see how?”

  “I’m starting to suspect it.” Kirilenko steepled his hands as if in prayer.

  “And Osip could phone out—?”

  “How about that voice I heard? I in’t making it up, Professor!”

  “Of course you aren’t. Isn’t it curious, though, that you only heard the voice after Mikhail Petrov had used the phone?”

  “Ah—”

  “Might I voice one small objection?” asked Mikhail sarcastically. “A minor point, but how come I’m suddenly a master of mass suggestion when I’m such a dud actor—I mean, let’s be frank!—that I need a hypnotist to make me any good?”

  Yet Kirilenko was unabashed. “That’s because of super-ability, don’t you see? Your own repressed talent is to persuade audiences. It’s an actor’s business to convince the audience utterly. The yogi and the method actor have a lot in common, Mike—but the yogi goes a stage further. The yogi weaves a perfect illusion. He does so by using a superconscious communication channel. Beyond voice. Beyond body language. Incidentally, the object of the exercise wasn’t to enhance your talent—but that’s what seems to have happened.”

  Sergey nodded ruefully. “Speaking as a member of the audience, I’m convinced. Though I’ll never know how the hell I got the Volga swung round in that space—!”

  “The trouble is,” said Mikhail, “I’m convinced too. Oughtn’t a yogi to be aware of what he’s up to? I sure ain’t.”

  “But are we really an audience in the strict sense?” asked Kirilenko. “Aren’t we all very much active participants? Fellow conspirators, almost?”

  Felix thrust his chair back noisily. “It’s a good thing we didn’t decide to make a film about the young Lenin! Or we’d really be in the soup.”

  “In that case, you wouldn’t have chosen Petrov for the part.”

  “Heaven knows what games a Lenin look-alike would have got up to in your hands!”

  “Look,” said Sonya, “if we’re all supposed to be fellow conspirators, I suggest we avoid blaming any particular individual, hmm?”

  Sergey thumped on the table, jarring cups and cutlery. “I’m going to speak freely—as an intimate friend, seeing as we all toasted each other so sincerely last night. Audience, participants: I don’t care! All this talk, when we should be getting on with it! If Mike says it’s all carrying on regardless, I’ll believe him—he was telling the truth about outside. I want to know what’s going on with Anton and Anton Astrov. One thing I can tell you is that time’s moving much more slowly for Astrov than it is for Anton. With him it’s minutes, compared with days.”

  “No it isn’t,” said Felix. “Astrov is living through years of time, speeded up.”

  Kirilenko dropped his napkin, and arose. “Sergey’s quite right—about getting on with it.”

  “Can I come with you?” begged Osip.

  “If you clear up, first.”

  Osip fairly scurried.

  Twenty-five

  “I’M AFRAID I did it too quickly,” said Anna Aksakova. “Look, my over-ride programme won’t lock in.”

  “Never mind, forget it.” Anton gazed at that whisking bowl of a viewscreen, which by now was only showing a tiny portion of the Earth. “What’s going on down there, Yuri?”

  Valentin consulted his datalscope. “It’s 1917. The Revolution.” He laughed bitterly. “Now you see it, now you don’t—we’re back in Czarist times already.”

  “I suppose that makes us dangerous revolutionaries? Forerunners of the Great Explosion …”

  “Eh?”

  “The Revolution.”

  “Oh, that explosion.” Yuri tapped the isocalendar. “Well, that shouldn’t worry the Czar for long. I make it three minutes till Tunguska.”

  Anton switched on his chin-mike. “Commander Astrov to All Crew. We have failed. Our ship will be destroyed in approximately three minutes. This will happen too quickly for any of us to feel pain—or even to realize. There’s nothing to fear.” He felt his pet fly buzzing in the little box in his pocket as if trying to escape. “For your information, we will drop out of flux in the year 1908. We believe the ship may well explode over the Tunguska region of Central Siberia. If it’s any consolation, we’re all about to become part of a great mystery. Goodbye to you all.”

  He switched off. They sat and waited.

  *

  ‘Thirty seconds to go,” said Yuri.

  “The flux-field’s holding steady,” reported Anna.

  Sasha gestured at the screens, ablaze with light. “Massive ionisation effects—we must be visible for hundreds of kilometres.”

  “The field’s off!”

  Briefly, on some screens, they saw a brown and green landscape streaked with clouds far below. Then the ship lurched hugely, swinging askew as the thin air tore at its irregular contours, pitching it along a new course.

  Yuri cried out in agony as G-forces smashed him against his straps, snapping ribs. From somewhere else in the ship came distant screams. And Anna Aksakova’s head lolled sideways at an impossible angle …

  The gyrating Tsiolkovsky pitched in a new direction. The shafts of the sickle and the hammer, the blunt hammer head, all were raging with the abrasion of the atmosphere, trying to tear apart from each other. But the ship had no time to break up.

  Anton struggled for words. “Sasha! I—”

  He fell through time, dazed and sickened by a strobing mosaic of visions which overloaded any attempt to make sense of them all. Everything which had happened since 190
8 seemed to be flashing through his brain in images, burning it out cell by cell …

  Images of war, of burning cities under siege, mobs rioting, trials, of jets dropping sticks of bombs, of spacecraft blasting off, and of new cities rising. The faces of Lenin, Hitler, Gandhi, Mao, Gagarin, Einstein, Shostakovich, Berryman, Qiang-Xi raced towards him, and away. Images of past time and images of his own time whirlpooled around, dragging him down through the vortex.

  He screamed.

  Like chaff burning off from a heat-shield, fragmentary visions streamed out of the sun-bright depths of the vortex. Flashes of Hiroshima, Stalingrad, Freedom Moonbase, the Great Comet of 2070, the March on Mecca, the reconstruction of the Eiffel Tower, the deification of the paranormal infant Claudia Rapuchini and her assassination …

  He continued screaming.

  All these fragments did form part of a mosaic. The shattered pieces flew together and became a face. It was his own face, each of the cells of his skin and flesh a separate bit of history… The same high forehead, the humorous wrinkles fanning from the sides of the eyes, the dark tousled hair. The face cast a shadow behind it, like a deathmask moulded from inside the head …

  “Oh, let me die!”

  He did not die. The mosaic face broke up, and he fell down the funnel of visions again. The whirlpool began to ripple nauseatingly, distorting everything he saw. Waves arose; they rushed up the funnel towards him, tearing images apart and reforming them upside-down or inside-out—warping faces, altering events. For a moment his own body seemed to knot itself into a Klein bottle shape, then it snapped back again …

  Abruptly he dropped through the bottom of the funnel. He was still sitting in his Commander’s seat, staring at the swirling fog on the screen. “What—?”

  “But I’m alive,” said Anna in wonder, nearby.

  “My chest,” mumbled Yuri—and he breathed in cautiously. “It’s okay, it isn’t smashed …”

  “We’re still alive!” Sasha cried. “But how can we be? Look: we’re still diving towards the Earth—we haven’t hit it yet. God, surely we don’t have to live through that again! And again and again and again!”

  “Flux-field’s back on,” said Anna. “According to this it’s never been off.”

  Yuri waved at the datalscope. “We’re back in 1905. We missed Tunguska.”

  “But we didn’t miss it—we exploded!”

  “And still we’re heading down the years.”

  “Towards what, another collision?”

  “Around 1890. No, a bit earlier.”

  “Do we have to hit and hit and hit again—like a stone bouncing over a lake, before we can sink? I can’t bear it, not again.”

  “This is your time-storm, Anna,” Anton said. “This is what it’s like.”

  Twenty-six

  … AND AS SOON as Baron Nikolai Vershinin awakes from sleep in the rude hut at Vanavara, he feels the warmth of the Countess’s naked body next to his, and rejoices that he has enjoyed such ecstasy as on the previous night. Surely he can enjoy this same ecstasy one more time before they get ready to be ferried over the Stony Tunguska River into a savage landscape, where they will have to sleep fully kitted out in fur coats and boots.

  He pulls the bedding down a little way to contemplate the faint, blurred outline of Lydia’s face and shoulders in the grey of dawn—in their haste they had left the window only partly curtained.

  The snow on the ledge and the leaves of frost on the panes focus, as in a lens, the faint light coldly upon the bed; the rest of the room is as black as inside a cupboard.

  The night before, Lydia made love to Nikolai in a way that he thinks of as sincere. There was no inane chatter, no babble of meaningless vows, no ‘poetry’. Instead, in each other’s arms they had both released a tension which had been pent up in their souls and bodies for many weeks—the product of a void in both their lives, which he for his part had filled up with bearish growls, and she for hers with eccentric behaviour.

  As is the case with essentially frigid people, who need to rub their bodies together in abandon as the only way of setting them on fire, their love-making was sensuous and lustful. They had snatched at their joys almost desperately, he and she.

  To awaken her, Nikolai kisses her shoulders.

  He whispers, “Darling Lydia”, yet there is little love or passion in his voice, for they both owe a desperate, selfish duty to themselves …

  Her lips move underneath his lips. “Kolya,” she murmurs. There’s a harshness in the way she says his name; it resembles the stubborn grating of a pair of adjacent boulders in a river which is rushing ever onward past them in flood, towards some mysterious and distant destiny. And thus she opens her embrace to him …

  She’s still half asleep, and she remains so, as though what takes place now is only the continuation of a haunted dream—and this relieves her of any sense of connexion with the rest of the day.

  Later, she sits up. Candlelight vies with the ice-light. Having pulled on her lace-decorated chemise, she brushes out her chestnut hair. Vershinin lights a cigar; it’s the last one he has left.

  “What encounters there are in our lives!” he exclaims. But then he paces about the room monotonously like a caged tiger, wearied suddenly by the length of time it takes her to get ready. ‘Just imagine this, every morning!’ he thinks to himself, feeling a strange blend of lust and boredom.

  “I wonder how Masha and Nastya are getting on?” Lydia asks idly. “Nastya’s the sly one, you know! She stares at a closed door as though she can see right through the wood—as if a sixth sense tells her everything. It’s quite disconcerting! But she’s too young to understand any of it…”

  ‘So if I became your husband,’ thinks Vershinin, ‘then Nastya would watch my door all the time—to make sure I wasn’t slipping out to your boudoir, or even smoking in bed! Why should a child exercise such a damnable tyranny, unless that’s the way you want it to be? Unless it’s your excuse …

  ‘You’re glad to be free of a dull fool of a husband… so now you frustrate yourself, to keep your freedom! Oh, you cut a fine figure, Lydia, you really do—with your German camera and your cigarettes and your dashing ways. And really, all the time, you’re a slave—to liberty! That’s it.’

  At first Nikolai is delighted by his perspicacity; but then the suspicion dawns on him that Lydia and the wayward governess Olga Franzovna are in reality secret lovers … Thinking back, it seems to him that when he kissed Lydia awake, it was not his own diminutive, Kolya, which she murmured so demandingly in reply—but rather ‘Olya’, diminutive of Olga, the name of her dream.

  Such a thing isn’t totally beyond his comprehension. It isn’t even beyond his sympathy, swear as he might at such perversions in the Mess; prescribe, as he might, a swift phallic cure for them …

  Had Lydia and Olga sworn blood brotherhood (or sisterhood), nicking their wrists with sharp knives, blending their bloodstreams? What impulsive, impetuous creatures they both had seemed to him—surely they both nursed strong desires!

  ‘What’s got into me?’ he wonders. ‘Such slander, against a woman I’ve just slept with!’

  He puzzles on and on, convinced that he has never thought so deeply as this morning. It’s as though Lydia has lit a taper of speculation deep in him, which is flickering its light into dark corners …

  On impulse he catches and raises her wrist, to stare at the white skin closely, seeking for the faint crack of a long-healed scar.

  “What on Earth?”

  “You ought to wear a fine golden wristwatch, Lydia. I’ll buy you one, some day.”

  “Who needs to know the time? It’s always either too late, or too early.”

  Nikolai guffaws. “Not for us, it wasn’t.”

  “You embarrass me, Baron. Have you lost your respect for me so soon?”

  “Not a bit of it! I’m crazy about you—that’s the trouble. Ach, love! I think love’s a pretty dodgy proposition. A fellow can fall in love with a sheep, if he’s lonely enough.
”

  “But a sheep can’t fall in love with him.”

  “Or a woman could fall in love with a governess.”

  “Really?” Lydia purses her lips. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “God fell in love with the world, Lydia. And He composed flowers and rivers, and birds and trees and clouds, to woo us. But in our responses we’re just like sheep. Munch, munch—not ’alf bad, this patch of grass! Munch, munch—this clover’s a bit of all right! That’s what everyone’s really like inside. Yet Cupid’s blind, and love’s an enchantment which stops us from seeing the truth. But the enchantment wears off after a while: two years, or three at the most. So where’s the use? Before you even get going, you’re condemned!”

  “Lust,” she answers, “is sometimes far more honest.”

  “That’s a true word you’ve spoken. It’s because of confusing lust with love that we all get into trouble. Only God knows love.”

  “Because He doesn’t know lust…”

  “I think love is something you feel for people in anguish. It’s a form of sympathy—it hasn’t anything to do with beauty.” And suddenly Nikolai kneels by Lydia’s side, and to his surprise he bursts into tears. “Forgive me, lady! Forgive me for not feeling love for you—because you’re beautiful! I’ll tell you what anguish is. Anguish is an ‘impossible love’, not one you can fulfil—if you follow my drift?”

  “I believe you’re reading my heart, mon chéri. If I’d known you could read hearts, I don’t think I should have made love to you! Imagine a world where everyone can read everyone’s heart at a glance—how awful.” She speaks lightly, though really this is the levity of deep pain. “Voyez: no hidden secrets, no enchantments, no impossibilities … Consequently, no love—ever again. Bien, le fin d’amour”

  However, by now her hair is fully brushed. And somebody walks past the frosted window, down the snowy Vanavara street, banging two pieces of metal together noisily; alarmed, a pack-horse whinnies …

  Twenty-seven

  The Middle of Nowhere (alias