I could, perhaps, have asked: Who are you? Where are you from? Why are you so hostile? I could have asked: What is your civilization, your culture, your history? I could have asked: Are there others like you? Are all alien lifeforms manifestations of radiation, or are there corporeal beings out there too, like us? But I didn’t ask any of this. Instead I asked: ‘How were we able to write you?’
‘You?’
‘We science fiction writers. How did we know? Did we… channel you?’
For the first time a wrinkle appeared in the taut, plump skin of Comrade Stalin’s face; a wrinkle beside his left eye. ‘Channel?’
‘Did you infect our minds? Were you inside our heads? Is that what happened? Why did you inspire us to write you?’
‘I think you have it the wrong way round,’ said Stalin, yawning. ‘You wrote us? I think you have misunderstood. All human conceptions are on the scale of the planet. They are based on the pretension that the technical potential, though it will develop, will never exceed the terrestrial limit. But if we succeed in establishing interplanetary communications, all our philosophies, moral and social views, will have to be revised. In this case the technical potential, become limitless, will impose the end of the role of violence as a means and method of progress.’
These words sounded familiar to me, but I could not place them.
Like summer clouds drawing away from the sun, light intensified in the tall panes of glass. It washed clean and perfect and blinding into the room. Light is a form of radiation.
You have a duty to make me understand, I said. Or if I did not say these words then I thought them. One of the two.
‘It is a question of reality,’ Stalin was saying, out of the light. It was all light now; I couldn’t see anything else. ‘Let’s say we’re here, all around you, and yet you cannot see us. Why might that be?’ And then again: ‘Some of you see us. We have been processing you, in ones and twos, for many years: it is millions now. Yet you are not sure it is actually happening, and even they are not sure, oftentimes. How can that be? What kind of radiation are we talking about?’
This seemed to me, then, to be a profound question. What kind of radiation are we talking about?
‘Its not that we’re one thing, and then another. That’s why you find us so hard to see. It is as if you were to look at a frog and say: So, what are you? Are you a fish? Or a rabbit? It is as if you were to say: I can only see you if you are a rabbit, or a frog. I cannot see you otherwise.’
I couldn’t see anything because it was so bright. Or perhaps I couldn’t see anything because it was so dark. It was dark, and it was light, at the same time. Or, it was some third thing. What kind of radiation are we talking about?
I thought: If I am back in the dacha, and it is immediately after the war, then Frenkel must be here as well, somewhere. Where is he?
I could see Stalin again, surrounded by brightness.
‘What kind of radiation are we talking about?’ he beamed. The individual hairs of his moustache moved, as stems of grass move when the wind is on them.
And he stopped. A switch had been thrown, somewhere. A cord had been yanked from its socket. He stopped, like a manikin denied power.
He stopped.
A flashbulb moment, endlessly prolonged. Then it snapped off, and shrank away, as if I were rushing backwards away from a star and it was dwindling to a white globe, a circle, a dot, a point.
Don’t you know who I am?
A different question. This last in a woman’s voice.
The light had swallowed itself into a TV-dot, centred in blackness. Everything was black except for this dot. The dot held steady, bright. Then the dot moved, shining to the left, and to the right. It was shining in my left eye. ‘Do you know who I am?’ It was shining in my right eye.
‘Josef,’ I said. ‘Josef.’
‘Who is Josef?’ This voice was a child’s.
‘Joe, SF,’ I said. ‘Sf, sff, ssff.’
‘Hold still.’ A child’s voice, or a woman’s.
‘Joe-s-f Vissarionovich Stalin,’ I said, with a great effort, as if forcing something from my chest.
‘You are mistaken,’ said the voice.
Then came the god Hypnos. You know him as Sleep. He came with skin as grey as exhaustion, and huge black slumbrous eyes, almond-shaped and ink-black, and he was the size of a child, because children sleep much more than adults, sleep being the proper realm of children, and so of course Hypnos is child-like. The proper realm. He flew through the air, as Hypnos may, and clutched about my head and my neck with elongated fingers. I wanted to ask him: but am I dead? Am I truly dead, or am I only transformed into an existence of pure radiation? But all he whispered, insistently, like a heartbeat — exactly like a heartbeat, with the thrum of the muscle and the afterhiss of blood slipping silkily along the arteries — was: Joe SF. Joe SF. Joe SF.
PART FOUR
‘In many heads everything has become confused.’
‘The main thing needed now is work, work, work.’
‘Doctor Bello,’ she said, again.
I was lying on my back.
This was a new voice. I had not heard this voice before, or I had. Either I had heard this voice before or I had not, or there was a third option.
‘Doctor Bello,’ she said again.
I contemplated this name for a long time. It seemed to have some mystery attached to it.
‘Can you speak?’
‘Of course,’ I said. It was my voice. It was a little croaky, but it was perfectly functional. I was dead, or. I was either dead or I was alive or there was some third option.
I had no idea who I was. I could not think what my name might be, where I was lying, what had happened to me, or anything like that. The most I could remember was meeting Josef Stalin. But I had only the vaguest memories of what he had said to me. But — had I not actually met Stalin, once upon a time?
I was lying on my back, and I was lying in bed. Lying on and in at the same time. I was not at the dacha at all. Stalin was not there. I was in a hospital room. Dr Bello was a doctor, and she was standing beside the bed.
The quality of light was completely different in this place. It was subdued, filtered, and ordinary. Bearable, I thought. Light was coming through the window over in the far wall.
‘Have you ever heard of Egas Monis?’ the doctor asked me.
‘It is a place on Mars,’ I said, raspily, but with confidence.
‘No, no. It is the name of a human being.’
‘Is he a science fiction writer?’ I asked. ‘I believe I have heard of his name, and it is the name of a science fiction writer.’
‘He won the Nobel prize.’
‘Well then he cannot be a science fiction writer. No writer of science fiction would be awarded such a prize.’
‘His was a prize for medicine. He was awarded it in 1949 for his work with the surgical operation called pre-frontal lobotomy. Why would you think he wrote science fiction? Why would you think such a thing?’