Read We Page 3


  For instance, this morning I was at the hangar, where the Integral is being built, and suddenly: I noticed the machines. Eyes shut, oblivious, the spheres of the regulators were spinning; the cranks were twinkling, dipping to the right and to the left; the shoulders of the balance wheel were rocking proudly; and the cutting head of the perforating machine curtsied, keeping time with some inaudible music. Instantly I saw the greater beauty of this grand mechanized ballet, suffused with nimble pale-blue sunbeams.

  And then I thought to myself: why? Is this beautiful? Why is this dance beautiful? The answer: because it is non-free movement, because the whole profound point of this dance lies precisely in its absolute, aesthetic subordination, its perfect non-freedom. If indeed our ancestors were prone to dancing at the most inspired moments of their lives (religious mysteries, military parades), then all this can only mean one thing: the instinct for non-freedom, from the earliest of times, is inherently characteristic of humankind, and we, in our very contemporary life, are simply more conscious …

  To be continued: the intercom is clicking. I lift my eyes: it reads “O-90,” of course. And, in half a minute, she herself will be here to collect me: we are scheduled for a walk.

  Sweet O! It has always seemed to me that she looks like her name: she is about ten centimeters below the Maternal Norm, which makes her lines all rounded, and a pink O—her mouth—is open to receive my every word. Also: there are round, chubby creases around her wrists—such as you see on the wrists of children.

  When she entered, I was still buzzing inside out with the flywheel of logic and, through inertia, I started to utter some words about this formula I had only just resolved (which justified all of us, the machines and the dance): “Stunning, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Yes, the spring, it is stunning …” O-90 smiled pinkly.

  Wouldn’t you know it: spring … I say “stunning” and she thinks of spring. Women … I fell silent.

  Downstairs. The avenue is crowded: we normally use the Personal Hour after lunch for extra walking when the weather is like this. As usual, the Music Factory was singing the March of the One State with all its pipes. All ciphers walked in measured rows, by fours, rapturously keeping step. Hundreds and thousands of ciphers, in pale bluish unifs,1 with gold badges on their chests, indicating the state-given digits of each male and female. And I—we, our foursome—was one of the countless waves of this mighty torrent. On my left was O-90 (a thousand years ago, our hairy forebears most probably would have written that funny word “my” when referring to her just now); on my right were two rather unfamiliar ciphers, a female and a male.

  The blessed-blue sky, the tiny baby suns in each badge, faces unclouded by the folly of thought … All these were rays, you see— all made of some sort of unified, radiant, smiling matter. And a brass beat: Tra-ta-ta-tam, Tra-ta-ta-tam—like sun-sparkling brass stairs—and with each step up, you climb higher and higher into the head-spinning blueness …

  And here, like this morning in the hangar, I saw it all as though for the very first time: the immutably straight streets, the ray-spraying glass of the sidewalks, the divine parallelepipeds of the transparent buildings, and the quadratic harmony of the gray-blue ranks. And then: it was as if I—not whole generations past—had personally, myself, conquered the old God and the old life. As if I personally had created all this. And I was like a tower, not daring to move even an elbow, for fear of scattering walls, cupolas, machines …

  And then, in an instant: a hop across centuries from + to -. I was reminded—obviously, it was association by contrast—I was suddenly reminded of a picture in the museum depicting their olden day, twentieth-century avenue in deafening multicolor: a jumbled crush of people, wheels, animals, posters, trees, paint, birds … And do you know, they say that it was actually like that—that it’s actually possible. I found that so improbable, so ludicrous, that I couldn’t contain myself and laughed out loud.

  And then there was an echo—a laugh—coming from the right. I spun around: the white—unusually white—and sharp teeth of an unfamiliar female face were before my eyes.

  “Forgive me,” she said, “but you were observing your surroundings with such an inspired look—like some mythical god on the seventh day of creation. It looked as though you actually believed that you, yourself, had created everything—even me! I’m very flattered …”

  All this was said without smiling, and I’d even go as far as to say that there was a certain reverence (maybe she was aware that I am the Builder of the Integral). And I don’t know—perhaps it was somewhere in her eyes or eyebrows—there was a kind of strange and irritating X to her, and I couldn’t pin it down, couldn’t give it any numerical expression.

  For some reason, I became embarrassed and, fumbling, began to justify my laughter to her with logic. It was perfectly clear, I was saying, that the contrast, the impassable chasm, that lies between today and yesterday …

  “But why on earth impassable?” What white teeth! “Across the chasm—throw up a bridge! Just imagine it for yourself: the drums, the battalions, the ranks—these were all things that existed back then too. And consequently …”

  “Well, yes, it’s clear!” I cried (it was an astonishing intersection of thoughts: she was using almost exactly my words—the ones I had been writing just before this walk). “You see, even in our thoughts. No one is ever ‘one,’ but always ‘one of.’ We are so identical …”

  Her words: “Are you sure?”

  I saw those jerked-up eyebrows forming sharp angles toward her temples—like the sharp horns of an X—and again, somehow, got confused. I glanced right, then left and …

  She was on my right: thin, sharp, stubbornly supple, like a whip (I can now see her digits are I-330). On my left was O-90, totally different, made of circumferences, with that childlike little crease on her arm; and at the far right of our foursome was an unfamiliar male cipher, sort of twice-bent, a bit like the letter “S.” We were all different …

  This I-330 woman, on my right, had apparently intercepted my confused glance and with an exhale: “Yes … Alas!”

  In essence, her “alas” was absolutely fitting. But again, there was something about her face, or her voice …

  I—with uncharacteristic abruptness—said: “Nothing alas about it. Science progresses, and it’s clear that given another fifty, a hundred years …”

  “Even everyone’s noses will be …”

  “Yes, noses,” I was now almost screaming. “If, after all, there is any good reason for enviousness … like the fact that I might have a nose like a button and some other cipher might have …”

  “Well, actually, your nose, if you don’t mind me saying, is quite ‘classical,’ as they would say in the olden days. And look, your hands … show, come on, show me your hands!”

  I cannot stand it when people look at my hands, all hairy and shaggy—such stupid atavistic appendages. I extended my arms and with as steady a voice as I could, I said: “Monkey hands.”

  She looked at my hands and then at my face: “Yes, they strike a very curious chord.” She sized me up with eyes like a set of scales, the horns at the corners of her eyebrows glinting again.

  “He is registered to me today,” O-90 rosily-joyfully opened her mouth.

  It would have been better to have stayed quiet—this was absolutely irrelevant. Altogether, this sweet O person … how can I express this … She has an incorrectly calculated speed of tongue. The microspeed of the tongue ought to be always slightly less than the microspeed of the thoughts and certainly not ever the reverse.

  At the end of the avenue, the bell at the top of the Accumulator Tower resoundingly struck 17:00. The Personal Hour was over. I-330 was stepping away with that S-like male cipher. He commanded a certain respect and, now I see, he had a possibly familiar face. I must have met him somewhere—but right now I can’t think where.

  As I-330 departed, I-330 smiled with that same X-ishness. “Come by Auditorium 112 the day after tomorrow.??
?

  I shrugged my shoulders: “If I am given instructions to go to the particular auditorium you mention, then …”

  With inexplicable conviction, she said: “You will.”

  The effect of that woman on me was as unpleasant as a displaced irrational number that has accidentally crept into an equation. And I was glad that, even if only for a short while, I was alone again with sweet O.

  Arm in arm, we walked across four avenue blocks. On the corner, she would go to the right and I to the left.

  “I would so like to come to you today and lower the blinds. Today, right now …” O shyly lifted her blue-crystal eyes to me.

  You funny thing. Well, what could I say to her? She came over only yesterday and knows as well as I do that our next Sex Day is the day after tomorrow. This was simply that same “pre-ignition of thought” as happens (sometimes harmfully) when a spark is issued prematurely in an engine.

  Before parting, I twice … no, I’ll be exact: I kissed her marvelous, blue, untainted-by-a-single-cloud eyes three times.

  RECORD THREE

  KEYWORDS: A Jacket. The Wall. The Table of Hours.

  I looked through all that I wrote yesterday and I see: I was not writing clearly enough. I mean, all this is of course completely clear to any one of us. But how do I know: it may be that you, unknown reader, to whom the Integral will be carrying these records, have only read the great Book of Civilization up to the page that describes the life of our ancestors nine hundred years ago? It may be that you don’t know terms like the Table of Hours, the Personal Hour, the Maternal Norm, the Green Wall, the Benefactor. It is amusing to me—and at the same time very laborious to explain all this. It is exactly as if a writer of, let’s say, the twentieth century, were made to explain in his novel the meaning of the words “jacket,” “apartment,” or “wife.” But then again, if his novel is to be translated for barbarians, would it make any sense to carry on without notes about the likes of “jackets”?

  I am certain that the barbarian, looking at a “jacket” would think: “What’s this for? Just more to carry on my back.” I have a feeling that you will think exactly the same thing when I tell you that none of us, since the Two-Hundred-Year War, has been beyond the Green Wall.

  But, my dear friends, you must try to think a little now—it will help matters. It is clear that the whole of human history, as far as we know, is the story of transition from a nomadic mode of life toward an increasingly settled one. Surely it follows then that the most settled mode of life (ours) is also the most perfected life (ours)? It was in previous eras that people rushed about the Earth from end to end, when there were nations, wars, trade, the discoveries of different Americas. But why—and for whom—is this necessary anymore?

  I will allow: becoming accustomed to this kind of settledness was not effortless or immediate. During the Two-Hundred-Year War, all roads were destroyed and grasses grew over everything and, initially, it must have been very uncomfortable to live in cities, which were cut off from one another by green thickets. But what of it? I imagine that after man’s tail fell off, he, likewise, didn’t immediately know how to fend off flies without the help of his tail. He, at the beginning, undoubtedly mourned his tail. But can you imagine yourself now with a tail? Or can you imagine yourself on the street, naked, without a “jacket”(perhaps you still walk around wearing “jackets”)? Well, that is how it is here: I cannot picture a city without the dressing of the Green Wall, I cannot picture a life not expressed in the numerical overlay of the Table.

  The Table … Right now, from the wall of my room, from the panel of gold underlay, the burgundy numbers are looking me in the eye, sternly but tenderly. I am involuntarily reminded of that which the Ancients called “icons,” and I feel like making up poems or prayers (the same thing). Ah, if only I were a poet, I would rightly exalt you, O Table, O heart and pulse of the One State.

  All of us (perhaps you, too), as children, read at school that greatest of all ancient literary legacies: The Railroad Schedule. But even if you put that next to the Table, you will see it is graphite next to diamond: in each is the same C, carbon, but how eternal, how transparent, how dazzling is the diamond. Who is not made breathless when racing and rumbling through the pages of the Schedule ? But the Table of Hours—it transforms each of us into the real-life, six-wheeled, steel heroes of a great epic. Each morning, with six-wheeled precision, at the exact same hour, at the exact same minute, we, the millions, rise as one. At the exact same hour, we uni-millionly start work and uni-millionly stop work. And, merged into a single, million-handed body, at the exact same Table-appointed second, we bring spoons to our lips, we go out for our walk and go to the auditorium, to the Taylor Exercise Hall, go off to sleep …

  I will be totally frank: the absolutely exact solution to the mystery of happiness has not yet fully materialized even here. Twice a day—from 16:00 to 17:00 and from 21:00 to 22:00—the united powerful organism scatters to its separate cages. These are written into the Table of Hours: the Personal Hours. In these hours you will see chastely lowered blinds in the rooms of some; others are walking along avenues, deliberately, to the brass beat of the March; and others still, like me now, are at their desks. But I firmly believe—call me an idealist or fantasist—I believe that sooner or later, one day, we’ll find a place in the general formula for these hours too, one day all of these 86,400 seconds will be accounted for in the Table of Hours.

  I’ve come to read and hear many unlikely things about the times when people lived in freedom, i.e., the unorganized savage state. But the most unlikely thing, it seems to me, is this: how could the olden day governmental power—primitive though it was—have allowed people to live without anything like our Table, without the scheduled walks, without the precise regulation of mealtimes, getting up and going to bed whenever it occurred to them? Various historians even say that, apparently, in those times, lights burned in the streets all night long, and all night long, people rode and walked the streets.

  This I just cannot comprehend in any way. Their faculties of reason may not have been developed, but they must have understood more broadly that living like that amounted to mass murder— literally—only it was committed slowly, day after day. The State (humaneness) forbade killing to death any one person but didn’t forbid the half-killing of millions. To kill a man, that is, to decrease the sum of a human life span by fifty years—this was criminal. But decreasing the sum of many humans’ lives by fifty million years— this was not criminal. Isn’t that funny? This mathematical-moral mystery could be solved in half a minute by any ten-year-old cipher here among us; but they couldn’t do it—not with all their Kants put together (because not one of their Kants ever figured out how to build a system of scientific ethics based on subtraction, addition, division, and multiplication).

  And then, isn’t it absurd that the government (it dared call itself a government!) could fail to impose any control on sexual lives? It was whoever, whenever, and however much you wanted … Absolutely unscientifically, like wild animals. And, like wild animals, obliviously giving birth to children. Isn’t it funny to know crop breeding, poultry breeding, fish breeding (we have specific information that they knew how to do these things), and not to be able to get to the top rung of that logical ladder: child breeding? Not to pursue those ideas all the way to our Maternal and Paternal Norms?

  It is so funny, and so unbelievable, and yet I’m nervous of what I’ve just written: perhaps, you, unknown reader, think I’m a malicious joker? Suddenly you’re thinking that I simply want to make a little fun of you and in mock seriousness I am telling you the most absolute junk.

  Well, first, I am not capable of joking—every joke, by function of its omissions, contains a lie; and, second, One-State Science confirms that the life of the Ancients was exactly so, and One-State Science cannot be mistaken. Yes, after all, how could there have been any logic to their government if all their people lived in that state of freedom, i.e., like wild animals, monkeys, herds? Wh
at could you possibly expect of them, when even today, on rare occasions, from some distant undersurface, from the shaggy depths of things, you can hear the wild echoes of monkeys?

  Fortunately, it rarely happens. Fortunately, these are only minor incidentals: they are easily repaired, without having to stop the perpetual, great progress of the whole machine. And to expel the offending cog, we have the skillful, severe hand of the Benefactor and we have the experienced eye of the Guardians …

  Yes, by the way, I have just remembered: that twice-bent, S-shaped man—it seems I once had the occasion to see him emerging from the Bureau of Guardians. Now I understand why I instinctively felt a certain respect for him and a sort of awkwardness, when in his presence that strange I-330 was … I should confess that that I-330 …

  The sleep bell is ringing: 22:30. Until tomorrow.

  RECORD FOUR

  KEYWORDS: The Barbarian and the Barometer. Epilepsy. If Only …

  Until now, everything in life had been clear (it is not in vain that I have, it seems, a certain predilection for this particular word “clear”). But today … I don’t understand it.

  First: I actually received instructions to be at Auditorium 112, like she said I would. Even though the probability of that was

  (where 1,500 is the number of auditoriums and 10,000,000 is the number of ciphers). And secondly … but then again, I’d better tell you everything in the right order.

  The auditorium. An enormous, sun-saturated hemisphere of glass expanses. Circular rows of noble, spherical, smoothly sheared heads. My heart sank slightly as I looked around. I suppose I was searching for something: would that pink half-moon glimmer on the pale blue waves of unifs—where were those sweet lips of O? I spotted someone’s unusually white and sharp teeth, just like … no, no, I’m mistaken, it isn’t … This evening, O is coming over—at 21:00—so my desire to see her here was completely natural.