You, Uranians, as austere and dark as the ancient Spaniards who had the wisdom to burn offenders in blazing pyres, you are silent; I think you are on my side. But I hear the pink Venusians muttering something about torture, executions, a return to barbarian times. My dear friends, I pity you: you are incapable of philosophic-mathematical thought.
Human history ascends in circles, like an aero. The circles differ—some are golden, some bloody. But all are equally divided into three hundred and sixty degrees. And the movement is from zero-onward, to ten, twenty, two hundred, three hundred and sixty degrees—back to zero. Yes, we have returned to zero—yes. But to my mathematical mind it is clear that this zero is altogether different, altogether new. We started from zero to the right, we have returned to it from the left. Hence, instead of plus zero, we have minus zero. Do you understand?
I envisage this Zero as an enormous, silent, narrow, knife-sharp crag. In fierce, shaggy darkness, holding our breath, we set out from the black night side of Zero Crag. For ages we, the Colum-buses, have sailed and sailed; we have circled the entire earth. And, at long last, hurrah! The burst of a salute, and everyone aloft the masts: before us is a different, hitherto unknown side of Zero Crag, illumined by the northern lights of the One State— a pale blue mass, sparks, rainbows, suns, hundreds of suns, billions of rainbows…
What if we are but a knife’s breadth away from the other, the black side of the crag? The knife is the strongest, the most immortal, the most brilliant of man’s creations. The knife has been a guillotine; the knife is the universal means of solving all knots; along the knife’s edge is the road of paradoxes—the only road worthy of a fearless mind.
Twenty-first Entry
Yesterday was her day, and once again she did not come, and once again she sent an inarticulate note, explaining nothing. But I am calm, I am completely calm. If nevertheless I follow the note’s dictates, if I take down her coupon to the controller on duty and then, lowering the shades, sit in my room alone, it is not because I am unable to act against her wishes. Ridiculous! Of course not It is simply because, protected by the shades from all the plaster-healing smiles, I can quietly write these pages.
That is one. Second, I am afraid that if I lose I-330, I will also lose what is perhaps the only key to the disclosure of all the unknown quantities (the incident of the closet, my temporary death, and so on). And, even simply as the author of these notes, I feel that I am duty-bound to find the answers. Not to mention the fact that all unknowns are organically inimical to man, and homo sapiens is human in the full sense of the word only when his grammar is entirely free of question marks, when it has nothing but exclamation points, periods, and commas.
And so, guided, it seems to me, precisely by an author’s obligation, I took an aero today at sixteen and proceeded once more to the Ancient House. I flew against a strong wind. The aero plowed with difficulty through the airy thickets, their invisible branches swishing and whipping at it The city beneath me seemed built entirely of blue blocks of ice. Suddenly—a cloud, a swift slanting shadow, and the ice turned leaden, swelled as the ice on a river in springtime, when you are standing on the bank and waiting: a moment, and everything will burst, spill over, whirl, and rush downstream. But minutes pass, and the ice still holds; and you feel as though you yourself were swelling, and your heart beats faster, faster, with mounting disquiet (But why am I writing all this, and whence these strange sensations? For there is surely no icebreaker capable of crushing the most transparent, most enduring crystal of our life…).
There was no one at the entrance to the Ancient House. I walked around it and found the old gatekeeper near the Green Wall. Her hand shielding her eyes, she was looking up. There, above the Wall—the sharp black triangles of some birds. Screaming, they dashed themselves against the firm, invisible barrier of electric waves, recoiled, and—back again over the Wall.
I saw their slanting shadows glide swiftly over her dark, wrinkled face, her swift glance at me.
“There’s no one, no one here! No one! And no need to go in. No…”
What does she mean, no need? And what a strange notion—regarding me only as someone’s shadow!
What if all of them are only my shadows? Was it not I who populated with them all these pages—just recently no more than white rectangular deserts? Without me, would they ever be seen by those whom I shall lead behind me along the narrow paths of lines?
Naturally, I said nothing of all this to her. From my own experience I know that the crudest thing is to make a person doubt his own reality, his three-dimensional—not any other—reality. I merely told her dryly that her job was to open the door, and she let me into the courtyard.
Empty. Quiet. Wind outside, behind the walls, distant as the day when, shoulder to shoulder, two as one, we came out from below, from the corridors —if, indeed, this ever really happened. I walked beneath stone archways where my steps, resounding from the damp vaults, seemed to fall behind me, as if someone followed on my heels. Yellow walls with scars of red brick watched me through the dark glass squares of their windows, watched me open the singing doors of barns, peer into corners, dead ends, nooks, and crannies. A gate in the fence, and a desolate vacant lot—memorial of the great Two Hundred Years’ War. Rising from the earth-bare stony ribs, the yellow grinning jaws of walls, an ancient stove with a vertical chimney—a ship forever petrified among the stony splashes of red and yellow brick.
It seemed to me that I had seen those yellow teeth before, dimly, as through water, at the bottom of a deep lake. And I began to search. I stumbled into pits, tripped over rocks; rusty claws caught at my unif; sharp, salty drops of sweat crept down my forehead into my eyes…
It was not there! I could not find it anywhere— that exit from below, from the corridors. It was not there. But then, it might be better this way: more likelihood that all of it had been one of my senseless “dreams.”
Exhausted, covered with dust and cobwebs, I had already opened the gate to return to the main yard. Suddenly—a rustle behind me, splashing steps, and there, as I turned—the pink wing-ears, the double-curved smile of S.
Squinting, he bored through me with his gimlets, then asked, “Taking a stroll?”
I was silent. My hands were alien.
“Well, then, are you feeling better now?”
“Yes, thank you. I think I am returning to normal.”
He released me—raised his eyes, threw back his head, and for the first time I noticed his Adam’s apple.
Above us, at the height of no more than fifty meters, buzzed several aeros. By their low altitude, slow flight, and lowered black trunks of observation tubes, I recognized them: they were the aeros of the Guardians—not the usual group of two or three, but ten or twelve of them (unfortunately, I must confine myself to an approximate figure).
“Why are there so many today?” I ventured to ask.
“Why? Hm… A true physician begins his cure with a healthy man, one who will get sick only tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, or in a week. Prophylaxis, you seel”
He nodded, and plashed away across the stone slabs of the yard. Then he turned, and over his shoulder, “Be careful!”