Chekhov’s Journey

by Ian Watson

  “Just a mouthful, no more. I need tobacco to chew. You give it—it has to be your tobacco.”

  “But what for?”

  “To let me dream.”

  Reluctantly Anton searched his bag in the candlelight for his precious stock of decent Ukrainian weed, mailed by Masha. Tolya—who else would it be?—trotted over. Depositing staff and drum briefly, he scooped up a handful of tobacco. Raising the metal bird-mask a little, he crammed the spoils between his lips and began noisily masticating them. Then he beat a hasty retreat back to the tent flap, and held it wide. “Come!”

  Non-plussed, Anton donned his boots, hugged his clothes about him, and followed.

  Tolya skipped away smartly into the centre of the clearing and began dancing slowly round and round—but with the light step of a ballet dancer, not like someone encumbered with such a weight of metal. The iron stars clashed and sparkled in the moonlight, but in spite of the clanking of all these medallions nobody peeped out of any of the tents. Even the hobbled horses stood like statues. A trance had fallen upon the world, beyond the trance of sleep.

  The great pines and larches that hemmed the clearing were frost-giants crowding together to watch. Anton could just see the river beyond, in one direction. Little ice floes raced along it, spinning and colliding.

  ‘Dream people will slip out of the trees soon,’ he thought to himself. ‘And out of the past they’ll slip, too—grinning and sneering, their hearts full of intrigue. Then I’ll look around, and Masha will be there and everybody else I love, all of them suffering stupid cruelties at the hands of my bogies …’

  However, nobody came from the world of memory; and Tolya spun himself to a standstill. Flopping cross-legged on to the snow, his metalled ribbons spreading round him in a tiny tent, he began to rap his drum with a stick pulled from inside his caftan.

  Rut-tut-tut! Rut-tut-tut! Rit-tit-tit!

  Then he tossed his drumstick into the air. It turned over and over, and fell at Anton’s feet, where it jerked about for a moment like a compass needle before coming to rest, pointing north by south.

  “Heat!” moaned the strange figure. “Unbearable heat! The heat of Ogdy burning all the trees which are the roadway from Earth to Sky. But Shaman don’t feel no heat!”

  Tolya jumped up again suddenly, as if his tail was on fire. Racing towards the closest of the towering, snow-draped firs, he ducked underneath the bottom branches, then heedless of all the pounds of metal he was wearing, he leaped, caught hold, and scrambled up the trunk from branch to branch—showering snow down—till he sat perched on a high limb.

  Staring up at the brittle, ice-flake stars in the sky, he cried, “Lord Buga! Here I am, back where I was before my birth! Before the time my soul got hauled down from the branches of the World Tree—oh, Tree of all the World! D’you hear me?”

  Amazed, Anton walked forward a few paces.

  “Lord Buga, all your trees lie flat! What does it mean? Has Ogdy won out over you? Has He thrown down the sky-ladder? Must we all decay into beasts of no wisdom?”

  The iron bird cocked its head, listening. Then it shinned down the tree trunk again, and ducked out into the clearing to stand rocking and jingling before Anton. Somewhere inside the dark holes of its mask, glassy eyes stared into his own eyes. Tolya tipped the mask up momentarily, just a little, and spat a brown spent wad into the snow.

  Confronted by this tribal gibberer—who was undeniably impressive in an eerie, primitive way in the haunted moonlight—Anton felt as if time had been dislocated, and he had been suddenly plunged a thousand years into the past. Here was the real World Soul that Lydia had invoked so lyrically and fatuously as they floated down the Yenisey!

  Superstition … and absurd ecstasies … and weary despair—and sheer terror of some malicious spiritual foe lurking in the vastness of the land: these were all the common currency of average Christian souls, at the best of times! Was Tolya really any different from them—or they from him? There was a suspicious similarity between Tolya’s ‘Lord Buga’ and the Russian word for God …

  “I hear you!” the figure cried. It performed antic capers. “He shall see! And only he! Then he will turn his steps away from the accursed place!”

  Tolya whipped out an oval mirror from inside his caftan. It was the size of his palm, and framed in bronze. Puffing, he polished with his cuff before his breath could freeze.

  “Antosha, look!”

  And Anton looked. To begin with, it appeared that the silvering behind the glass was badly tarnished; he could only make out a snowstorm or white fog, in place of the clearing … But then the fog (or whatever) dispersed suddenly. To his surprise he saw what must be the bridge of a ship, in miniature within. At least so he assumed from all the glass dials, instruments and controls. As the mirror tipped slightly in Tolya’s hand, he could see a man strapped in a seat. The man wore a worried expression on his face—and that face, astonishingly, was Anton’s own.

  Who was the man?

  He could hardly be a naval officer. He was wearing such a peculiar uniform: silver-grey, and all of a piece, with strips of metal on the pockets. A red flag was sewn to his sleeve, near the shoulder, sporting a star and a hammer and sickle. What kind of flag was that? Turkish? No …

  As Anton watched, the other man who wore his face fumbled with the buckles holding him—and floated up above the seat. Weightlessly.

  Was this not a ship at sea at all—but one of Tsiolkovsky’s spaceships? But if there were people on Mars—where they must fly the red flag—why should they look exactly like people on Earth? Was a twin born on Mars, to every soul on Earth?

  This had to be a hallucination—a person could be mesmerised by a mirror! Anton shook his head, to regain clarity; and in response Tolya shook the mirror from side to side …

  Anton blinked. The scene had changed. His double was lying on a tatty old sofa in a wood-panelled room. A burly man with curly black hair and a thin nose, dressed in a suit of indefinably strange cut, was sitting astride a cane chair nearby—like a doctor by his patient’s couch. The ‘double’ must have hurt his eye; he was wearing a black patch over it … His head rested on a folded jacket; otherwise he was dressed in a woollen jersey and a pair of coarse blue trousers apparently cut from sailcloth or tent canvas.

  A peculiar box stood on the floor beside the sofa. It was the size of a small suitcase, and what appeared to be glass discs joined by a length of grey tape were turning round on top of it while the doctor listened intently to the words of the invalid … Since Anton couldn’t lipread, whatever was being related remained a mystery—or why the doctor should be glancing at the box from time to time, as though this was his tool of diagnosis.

  Suddenly Anton began to feel that he was falling forward weightlessly—and that in a very short while he would be that figure lying on the sofa! He cried out incoherently.

  A jerk upon his wrist broke the enchantment. He discovered that Tolya had cast a little noose of twine around his wrist, with his free hand. The Tungusi was playing him as an angler plays a fish … And the mirror was all snow or fog again; quickly Tolya tucked it back inside his caftan out of sight.

  “So you’re back?” said Tolya. “Make sure you go back, where you belong.”

  “What did I see? What was it? Where was it?”

  “You should rather ask: When was it?”

  “When? What do you mean by that?”

  The Tungusi chuckled softly, and led Anton unresistingly back towards the tent, pulling him along by that loop of string. And one of the horses neighed miserably: a statue restored to life …

  Weariness overcame Anton the moment the two men reached the tent flap. He was barely able to pull his boots off in the last guttering flickers from the candle, and creep back inside his bedding, before he fell deeply asleep.

  Thirty

  NEXT MORNING TOLYA gave no sign that anything odd had happened between Anton and him the night before; what’s more he talked in the same barbaric and halting Russian as ever. S
o Anton wasn’t at all convinced that his nocturnal experience had been anything other than a particularly vivid dream. Perhaps he had walked in his sleep, in the clearing …

  After a lot of grumbling on Tolya’s part, considerable browbeating by Vershinin and a mite of bribery from Mirek, the Tungusi even agreed to guide them further towards their destination; and within a couple of hours the party was making its way along the south bank of the Chambé in an easterly direction. The day was bitterly cold, though hardly a breeze was stirring; and under a cloudless sky that augured well—though not to Tolya—the snow was almost blue, not white. So low must the temperature have been that the snow ran off their boots and the horses’ hooves and the sledge-runners like dry dust; none of it could cling.

  A couple of versts beyond the Tungusi encampment they reached the Avarkita and waded across it amidst little rafts of ice; after which they had to light a bonfire of branches and stamp around to dry their legs. Five versts further on Tolya pointed out the best place to cross the Chambé itself, then he took them to where a single raft was cached, hidden by snow amidst tall spruces.

  He pointed north by north-west. “Before noon, see trees what fell down. I go now.”

  “Oh no you don’t!” barked Vershinin. He caught hold of Tolya’s arm. “You’re coming along too! How are we supposed to find the trail on our own? We’re paying you good roubles—a lot more than you deserve!”

  “Is cursed.”

  “Drivel! What’s wrong with our money? Your eyes lit up before.”

  “Money clean. Place cursed.”

  “Balderdash and poppycock!”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Tsiolkovsky thoughtfully. “It occurs to me that if billions of atoms get broken, and if these fragments impregnate the ground, then conceivably the earth continues to release active particles—”

  “Shut up.” Vershinin pulled out his service revolver and waved it about.

  “Let’s try to be rational?” suggested Mirek.

  “What’s rational about a curse? I ask you! Tell me, my northern savage, how can any part of God’s good Earth be cursed? This might be a wretched, desolate hole, and the conditions of life might be shit, but cursed—isn’t that going a bit far?” He rounded on Mirek for a moment. “Are you going to let us all be stymied by a curse? I’ll tell you what kind of curses I believe in! Curses that get things done!”

  “Quite so,” said Lydia. “But do put the gun away.”

  “You not see,” Tolya said. “Is curse.”

  As Vershinin was holstering his revolver, obedient to her word, Tsiolkovsky began mumbling. “Such particles … they might well involve, um, a form of burning energy … like the sun’s energy …”

  “Be quiet, drudge! Come along, wild man, tell us all about this precious curse! What does it do? Make people’s balls fall off?”

  “It belong Tungusi people.”

  “Aha!” There was a glint in Mirek’s eye. “Do I hear someone invoking mineral rights? One has to realise that even if mining is possible, this will require tens of thousands of roubles in investment capital before utilisation—”

  “He means,” interrupted Anton, “that Ogdy—their god of fire, or of heat and cold or something—has dethroned their sky god, Buga, by knocking down all the trees.”

  “How on Earth do you know that?” Sidorov’s expression was a study in doting wonder. On Tolya’s face, however, was a different expression: one of complete surprise at this revelation—as though he hadn’t said it all in Anton’s hearing just a few hours earlier…

  ‘And maybe he never did,’ thought Anton. ‘Not if I was dreaming … But what if Tolya was in some sort of trance last night? A trance in which he spoke much better Russian than he normally does? His brain soaks up the Russian language like a sponge, but only the top of the sponge is ever in touch with the surface—last night he spoke from the depths.’

  Sensing that somehow he had gained the upper hand, Anton fixed Tolya with what he hoped was a look of penetrating command. “You will guide us—all the way.”

  The Tungusi glanced aside, like a village dog, outstared. Presently he nodded.

  ‘Maybe,’ Anton reflected, ‘all that nonsense last night was supposed to send me scuttling with my tail between my legs… on the principle that it would have sent a Tungusi scuttling!’

  He turned to Vershinin, and spoke angrily. “They may be wild men! And what this place needs are mines and railways and dispensaries and schools! But how can we even think of this when Russia herself is so uncivilised? When pig ignorance rules the roost everywhere? I tell you, Baron, it’s the ordinary Russian people who are devils of ignorance—not just these tribesmen!”

  He found himself remembering the red flag stitched to the clothes of his double in the mirror … A hammer and sickle—all the way from the Red Planet. Symbols of hard work which had successfully built a ship of space? Yes, that’s what they might have been: emblems of honest, clear-sighted labour.

  “And what’s more,” he said to Mirek, “our local socialists aren’t likely to change things much! What do they call themselves: Marxists, eh? Lackeys of a German Jew’s dogmas… All they can produce are tiny explosions of mayhem which only make matters worse. If society’s ever going to change, maybe the impetus will have to come from the planet Mars!”

  The immediate effect of Anton’s outburst, in the dry chill air, was to rack him with a bronchial spasm. He coughed into his glove eight or ten times. Exhausted, he continued staring at his gloved fist. On the fabric he saw a tiny red star, of bloody sputum.

  By late afternoon they had been struggling through devastation for many versts. Uncountable pines and birches had been blasted to the ground. Under the snow cover the taiga seemed to be an infinite battlefield where massed armies of giants had been laid low, doomed to lie here for several hundred years till very slowly they rotted away, summer by summer. All the tumbled trunks pointed south.

  Yet branches and wrenched-up roots twisted every which way, too, like bare broken bones—the force of the blast had instantly stripped away all trace of former greenery from the branches. So the only way though very often was to hack a path with axe or sickle.

  But they made progress.

  To the east the land sloped downward, and there they could see the River Makirta approaching them and twisting away again a dozen times over; at least the map was right in that respect. Low knolls pimpled the terrain. Lydia had scrambled up several of these with Mirek, she to gain a little elevation for photography, he to take sightings through his theodolite.

  In worsening weather late in the day, they camped. A bitter wind was blowing steadily from the west by now, raking their cheeks; it seemed to be scudding grits of ice into their skin instead of snowflakes. If the wind had been coming from the north, it would hardly have been possible to breathe.

  A couple of hours earlier they had all rubbed their faces with goose grease. It had been Mirek’s inspiration to bring along jars of this thick sticky fat: a piece of forethought for which Lydia thanked him profusely while she rescued her complexion from ruin. Anton, who had been trudging in a daze, thought for a while that they were all donning theatrical grease paint, a commodity from another world—to which he doubted if he would ever again belong … He feared he was going to lose the sight of his weaker eye. He had wept tears from it, and these tears froze on his cheek, notwithstanding the grease. These tears of ice only melted after quite a while inside the chilly tent which they erected finally in the lee of a knoll.

  He and Sidorov, Mirek, Tolya and Tsiolkovsky all crammed into a single tent, huddling for warmth which seemed to elude them. Lydia and Vershinin shared a second, smaller tent pitched close by; though there was no doubt in Anton’s mind as to their … frigidity, in the circumstances. It was enough agony to expose yourself momentarily outside for a piss, with your back to the wind; and the yellow stain on the snow froze instantly. As for having a crap the following morning, he certainly intended to hold that back for as long as pos
sible, till it was all ready to burst out in one five-second rush. No, Lydia and Kolya weren’t making love …

  Anton drifted slowly off to sleep, fully dressed, as though succumbing to exposure.

  He was lost in a great house made all of ice … Desperately he tried to find the room where sister Masha and mother Evgenia were praying for him—the room with the icon. He wanted so much to light a candle in memory of his father.

  But these ice walls were as reflective as mirrors; so that he kept on turning corners and bumping into himself. These sudden contacts with his own image chilled him to the marrow.

  Eventually his image spoke to him.

  “Hullo there,” it said in a chirpy way. “My name’s Mike. I’m an actor—star of provincial stage and screen!” (What sort of screen could he possibly mean?) “I’m acting you, old Antosha. And you’re acting me …”

  The image faded. The ice wall ran with moisture as though weeping. Through the halls of ice Anton heard Tolya’s mocking laughter echo. At once he awoke, sweating and shivering—the sweat seeming to freeze as soon as it oozed out of him. His arm had thrashed about and fallen across Tolya’s body. Bitterly Anton turned over to face the other way.

  Thirty-one

  “TIME-STORM? IT’S JUST a word I made up

  “Even so, Anna.”

  “Well, supposing this is a time-storm—whatever such a thing might be. What does that tell us? Nothing at all! We’re none the wiser.”

  “Yuri, did we pick up any temporal momentum there?”

  “Uh … Yes, you’re right! We picked up almost 20 chronodynes. That isn’t as much as we lost to the American Shield.”

  “No, it wouldn’t be. Listen,” said Anton, “the temporal momentum we lost to the Shield must have been discharging itself back through history from our starting point. Try to imagine it as a tidal wave running the wrong way up a river—and gradually losing power. I think the wave caught up with us just now—in 1908. It discharged its remaining momentum, and boosted our flux-field. Result: it tossed us back beyond 1908.”