‘I wish it were true,’ Asterinov was saying, ‘that I intervened to save your life, Konstantin Andreiovich, for old times’ sake. Indeed I remember that time in the dacha! Good memories. But, no, we intervened not for your sake. But because of Dora Norman. She is remarkable.’
‘I know.’
‘Her ability is… important. We need to understand it better. Her line is now tangled up with yours. It’s pretty much as simple as that.’
‘You’re the enemy,’ I said.
‘We’re the good guys, Konstantin Andreiovich,’ he replied, his beard splitting with a wide smile. ‘You’re the enemy.’
‘Now that I understand the particular… territories you are moving over, I comprehend the particular reasons why UFO sightings have been so problematic,’ I told him. I told it, I should say. ‘So widely reported and believed and simultaneously so widely unseen and disbelieved.’
‘The invasion is pretty much over, friend,’ it said to me. ‘It’s been four decades since we met in that dacha.’
‘You were one of them, even then?’
It laughed. ‘You were a human, even then?’ he retorted.
‘But what were we… what were we doing?’
‘We were crafting a realityline. We were preparing the ground for my people. We were… think of it as, clearing the undergrowth. Think of it as laying a path through possibilities. We were creating the spine of a realityline.’
‘We were just writers.’
‘Writers create.’
‘Not realities, though. Only fictions. Only science fictions.’
‘What you have to do,’ said the creature that I knew as Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov, ‘is consider the total spread of realitylines. That’s what you need to think of as reality is the whole spread. Reality is a matter of probabilities. Likelihoods, and possibilities. That’s the idiom of fiction. That’s what artists are good at doing. What were we doing? We were laying a line about which actual realities, coral-like, could grow. I was there to make sure we came up with the right sort of line.’
‘Radiation aliens?’
‘Radiation aliens.’
‘It seems so haphazard. We knew nothing, for instance — for an instance, we knew nothing of radiation! It was all guesswork. The atomic bomb had only just been dropped, and we hadn’t even heard of it!’
‘I see you think of radiation in that sense,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch. His beard jiggled.
We were still walking, briskly now, turning right onto a main street, and then left again. I pictured, somewhere behind me, a bewildered Nik blinking and waving his pistol. Because the aliens wanted me alive, of course they wanted me dead. It was war, after all.
‘It’s her, isn’t it?’ I said to the alien.
‘You mean Dora.’
‘Yes. You need her, in some sense. Because of her abilities.’
‘Yes.’
‘You need me alive only because she needs me alive.’
‘Love,’ said the alien, ‘has its redemptive possibilities. Don’t you think?’ And we had arrived at the marble gateway, and the steps down to the Metro.
‘Goodbye, now,’ he said. ‘Down there, get on a train. And stay away from Jan Frenkel.’ He turned to go, but I caught his sleeve.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Wait. It’s hard to believe that you’re not real!’
‘But I am indeed real,’ he retorted.
‘Not human, though.’
‘Not human, no.’ He made a second move, as if to walk off, and several people pushed past me to go down the steps into the station.
‘Do you remember,’ I said to him, ‘when you and I talked in that meadow? We were discussing your book about the man who could breathe under water. You confessed that you had not written that book; you had merely copied it from another language.’
‘I do remember.’
‘You stole all those stories… why? Because you lacked the capacity to invent?’
‘Exactly that,’ he said, his eyes creasing with pleasure. ‘Exactly! That is your talent, the ability to invent realities. It is one of the things that makes your otherwise unexceptional world so interesting to us.’
‘But,’ I said, ‘but. I asked if you had plagiarised Starsearch. I asked if you had simply copied Starsearch from somebody else.’
‘I remember.’
‘And you said you had not!’
He put his head a little to one side, doggishly.
‘I’m not expressing myself very well,’ I said. ‘What I mean is: you plagiarised all your novels, as you confessed, except Starsearch. Therefore you composed Starsearch as an original fiction, the product of your own creative imagination. So I think to myself: if this is the truth — if you could write that fiction — then why did you need five of the Soviet Union’s top SF writers to concoct a storyline? Why not… do it yourself?’
‘That’s beyond us,’ he said. He didn’t sound mournful, or regretful. He spoke in a purely explanatory mode.
‘Yet you managed it with Starsearch,’ I said.
‘No.’
‘Then how did you write Starsearch?’
‘It is mere documentary verisimilitude, is Starsearch. A factual account drawn from my life. A poor substitute for the splendours of fictional invention, I’m afraid. Goodbye, Konstantin Andreiovich.’ That was the last I ever saw of him.
Radiation in that sense. I see now, of course, in what sense they were radiation aliens: not in the sense I had understood, of (as it might be) nuclear radiation. It was realitylines that radiated; quantum alternatives that radiated; and the aliens’ technical advantage over us is a motor to manipulate this radiative spread of possible nows. As Frenkel said, this gives them a mighty advantage, but I tend to think — given how long they have been engaged in their assault upon us, and how slow their campaign has advanced — that they must be in some other sense feeble: few, perhaps; weak or uncertain. Or wouldn’t they, else, have essayed a sudden rush and a push? What they are doing, instead, is stealth; picking up individuals here and there, moving their heavy cannon into position. But they are almost ready. We shall know the assault is about to commence in earnest when accounts of alien abduction becomes less frequent, or perhaps stop being reported altogether. That is when we should be most afraid.
That they saved my life, I suppose, means that in some way they consider that I shall be of use to them. But before they saved my life Dora did, without even knowing that she had done it: her mind, somehow attuned, aware of the spread of realities branching from that moment in Chernobyl and thinning them automatically down into the few lines in which I was still alive. Love shining from her eyes. Radiation in that sense.
KONSTANTIN SKVORECKY
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Konstantin Andreiovich Skvorecky (1917-) is a Russian-born writer of science fiction. Most of Skvorecky’s fiction was produced in the 1930s, including such minor classics as Tamara (1935), Plenilune (1936), Sirius na Rusi (1936) [translated as Three Who Made a Star, 1938], Mortidnik (1937), Vsyo eto (1938) [translated as And All This, 2003], Nadezhda (1939), Zoya (1939) and various others. He served in the Red Army in the Second World War, but disappeared shortly after the war. His reappearance coincided with the Chernobyl disaster. It is believed by some that Skvorecky, having been abducted by aliens, spent the years 1945-1986 on another planet. His memoir Yellow Blue Tibia (1999) provides an account of these missing years that explicitly asserts (or attempts to) the existence of aliens, an assertion which has been widely disbelieved. The memoir also asserts that he died inside Chernobyl in 1986. His more recent pamphlet When I Met the Aliens (And What They Told Me) (2000) is a satirical reimagining of the events of that novel, warning people of an alien invasion he claims is on-going.