After thinking over and collocating everything that he had learned, Maxim realized, first, that all this time he must have seemed like a madman here, and it was no accident that his mentograms had been included in the schizoid TV program Magical Voyage. Second, he realized that for the time being he would have to keep quiet about his alien origins if he didn’t want to go back to Hippopotamus. This meant that the inhabited island was not going to come to his rescue and he had only himself to rely on, that the construction of a null-transmitter was indefinitely postponed, and he was obviously stuck here for a long time, or perhaps, massaraksh, forever. The hopelessness of the situation had almost floored him, but he had gritted his teeth and forced himself to think in a purely logical fashion. His mother would have to survive a very difficult time. She would be immensely wretched, and that thought was enough in itself to dispel any wish to think logically.
Curse this second-rate, self-contained world. But I have only two options: either carry on pining for the impossible and wallowing in bitter regret, or pull myself together and live. Live a genuine life, the way I have always wanted to live—loving my friends, achieving my goals, fighting, winning and losing, taking it on the chin and giving as good as I get—anything at all except wringing my hands in despair… He had stopped talking about the structure of the universe and started asking Gai about the history and social order of his inhabited island.
As far as history was concerned, things were not that easy. Gai had only a fragmentary knowledge of it, and he didn’t have any serious books. And there weren’t any serious books in the city library either. But it was clear that right up until the latest ruinous war, the country that had given Maxim refuge had been considerably more extensive and was governed by a bunch of bungling financial economists and depraved aristocrats who had driven the people into poverty, established a corrupt state apparatus, and eventually become involved in a large colonial war unleashed by their neighbors. This war had engulfed the entire world, millions and millions of people had been killed, and thousands of cities had been reduced to ruins. Dozens of small states had been annihilated, and chaos had engulfed the world and the country. A period of appalling famine and epidemics had set in. The bunch of bloodsucking exploiters had suppressed attempts at a popular uprising by using nuclear warheads. Both the country and the world were on course for total destruction.
The situation had been saved by the “Unknown Fathers.” As far as Maxim could tell, these were an anonymous group of young officers from the General HQ who, one fine day, when they had at their disposal only two divisions, highly incensed at being dispatched into the nuclear meat grinder, had organized a putsch and seized power. That had happened twenty-four years earlier, and since then the situation had stabilized to a significant extent and the war had died down of its own accord, although nobody had concluded peace with anybody else. The energetic, anonymous rulers had restored relative order and straightened out the economy with harsh measures—at least in the central regions—making the country into what it was now. The standard of living had increased quite substantially, life had settled into a peaceful groove, civic behavior had improved to a level never previously seen in history, and in general everything had become rather good.
Maxim realized that the political order in the country was very far from ideal and represented a species of military dictatorship. But it was clear that the Unknown Fathers enjoyed an extremely high level of popularity, and moreover in all strata of society. The economic basis for this popularity remained a mystery to Maxim; after all, half the country was still lying in ruins, military spending was huge, and the overwhelming majority of the population lived in conditions that were modest, to say the least… But the important point was clearly that the military elite had managed to rein in the appetites of the industrialists, which had made them popular with the workers, and also to subjugate the workers, which had made them popular with the industrialists. However, all of this was only guesswork. This way of posing the question seemed outlandish to Gai, for instance; for him, society was a unitary organism, and he couldn’t conceive of any contradictions between social groups.
The external situation of the country still remained extremely tense. Two large states lay to the north of it—Hontia and Pandeia, both of them former provinces or colonies. Nobody really knew much about these countries, but it was known that both of them harbored extremely aggressive intentions; they continually sent in spies and saboteurs, contrived incidents on the borders, and were making preparations for war. The goal of this war was unclear to Gai, and in fact he had never even wondered about that question. There were enemies to the north, he was fighting their secret agents to the death, and that was quite enough for him.
To the south, beyond the border forests, lay a scorched desert produced by nuclear explosions; it had been formed on the territory of a whole group of countries that were most actively involved in the hostilities. Nothing was known about what had happened and what was happening now on those millions of square miles, and nobody was interested. The southern borders of the country were subject to continuous attacks by colossal hordes of half-savage degenerates—the territory on the far side of the Blue Serpent River was teeming with them. The problem of the southern borders was regarded as just about the most important one of all. Things were very difficult there, and that was where the elite units of the Battle Guards were concentrated. Gai had served in the South for three years, and he told Maxim some quite incredible things.
To the south of the desert, at the other end of the only continent on the planet, some states might possibly have survived, but they gave no indications of their presence. However, the so-called Island Empire, established on the two immense archipelagoes of the other hemisphere, constantly provided disagreeable evidence of its existence. The World Ocean belonged to the Empire; the radioactive waters were furrowed by an immense fleet of submarines, provocatively painted snow white and equipped with the latest word in combat technology, with gangs of specially trained cutthroats on board. As sinister as ghosts, these white submarines held the coastal regions in a state of ghastly agitation and anticipation, carrying out unprovoked bombardments and landing piratical assault forces on the shore. The Guards confronted this white threat too.
Maxim was stunned by this picture of universal chaos and destruction. He was dealing with a graveyard planet, on which the flame of rational life was just barely flickering, and that life was on the point of finally extinguishing itself at any moment.
Maxim listened to Rada’s calm and terrible stories about her mother receiving the news that Rada’s father had been killed (an epidemiologist, he had refused to leave a region stricken by plague, and at that moment the state had neither the time nor the capability to fight the plague by regular means, so a bomb had simply been dropped on the region); and about the time, ten years ago, when insurgents had approached close to the city, an evacuation had begun, and Rada’s grandmother, her father’s mother, had been trampled to death in a crowd that was storming a train; and about how, ten days after that, her youngest brother had died of dysentery; and about how, after her mother died, in order to feed little Gai and the completely helpless Uncle Kaan, she had worked for eighteen hours a day as a dishwasher at a military reconsignment point, then as a cleaner in a luxurious hangout for speculators, then competed in “women’s sweepstake races,” and then spent some time in jail, although not very much, but after jail she had been left without a job, and for several months she had lived by begging…