Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034 English fan translation (v1.0) (docx) (23 page)

In half a century that
had become
a luxury that only few could afford
who had
died before
judgment
day. But who cares about a single body
when the whole planet is dying.

None
of the
inhabitants
of the metro had had the honor of a
funeral;
nobody could hope that the rats would spare their body.

Earlier the
remains
of humanity
had only had the
right to be there as
long
as
the living remembered
them
. A
human
being
remembers their
relatives,
their friends and
colleagues
. But his
conscience
reached
only
back three generations. Just more then
fifty
years.

With the same
ease
you
let
the picture of our grandfather or
your
friend
from
school out of our
conscience
into absolute nothingness. The memories of a human
can
last longer
than
the bones, but as soon
as
the last one
who
remembers
us had passed we
dissolve
with time.

Photographs,
who
makes them anymore? And how many of them were kept when everybody still made them?

Back then there was almost no
more
space in the thick family album for old
and
brown turned pictures, but almost nobody
who
looked
through
it
could
say for sure
who
was on the photos. The
photographs
of the
past
can be interpreted as some kind of death masks, but not as a print of
their
soul
when they were living.

And the
photographs
only decay
slower
as
the
body
that was on them.

What remains?

Our children?

Homer touched the flame of the candle with his fingers. The answer wasn’t easy to find for him, Achmed’s words still hurt him. He himself had been damned to be
without children, unable for this kind of immortality, so he couldn’t do anything but choose this path to immortality.

Again he reached for his pen.

They can look like us. In their
reflection
we mirror
ourselves
in a mysterious way
.
United
with
those
we had loved. In their gestures, their
memes
we
happily
find
ourselves
or with sorrow.

Friends confirm that our sons and daughter
s
are just like us.
Maybe
that gives us a certain extension of ourselves when we are no more.

We
ourselves
weren’t
the first
.
We have been made
out of
countless copies that have been before us,
just another chimera, always half from
our fathers and mothers
who
were
again the
half
s
of their parents.
So is there nothing unique in us but
are we
just an endless mixture of small mosaic parts that
never ending
ly
exist in u
s? Have we been
form
ed
out of
milliards
of small parts to a complete picture
that has no
own
worth and has to fall into its parts again?

Does it even matter to be happy if we found
ourselves
in our children, a certain line that has been traveling through our bodies for millions of years?

What remains of me?

Homer had it harder than the rest. He had always envied those who had put faith in life after death. Whenever he had come to this conversation about the end of life his thoughts had always turned to the
Nachimovski prospect
immediately, with its disgusting and corpse eating creatures.

But maybe he was made of something more than flesh and blood, which sooner or later would be eaten by corpse eaters and digested.

Only: If there existed something in him it existed as a part of his body.

What had remained of the Egyptian
pharaohs
? What of
Greece’s
heroes? From the artist
s
of the
renaissance
?
Did
something r
emain of them
and did it exist
inside of
their bodies
or in
what
they had left
behind
?

What kind of immortality was left for mankind?

Homer again read what he had written, thought about it for a short time, ripped the pages out of the notebook carefully, crumpled them up and put them on an iron plate and lit them. After a minute, from the work he had done in the last three hours there was only a handful of ash left.

She had died.

Sasha had always imagined death like that: The last ray of light had been extinguished, all sounds silenced, her body without any feelings and nothing but darkness.

Humanity had emerged out of darkness and silence.

It was inevitable that they would return to it. Sasha knew all the fables of paradise and hell, but the underworld had sounded harmless to her. Eternity in absolute blindness, deafness and absolutly not being able to do nothing at all was a hundredth times more terrible than some cauldrons with cooking oil in them.

But then a small shivering ray of light appeared.

Sasha reached for it but couldn’t touch it: The dancing ray of light ran away from her, came back, lured her, and ran away from her again immediately. Playing and luring her. She knew immediately: A tunnel light.

When a human died in the metro, her father had said, his or her soul was lost and had to wander the dark labyrinth of tunnels that lead nowhere. It didn’t realize that it wasn’t bound to a body anymore, its earthly life had ended and so it had to wander around long before someday in the distant future it would see the shine of the ghostly fire. So it would
guide her there, because this little fire had been sent to lead the soul to find its cold rest. But it can also happen that the fire had pity of on the soul and brought it back to his or her lost body. For these people you could say that they had returned from the beyond. It was more truthful to say that darkness had let them go again.

The tunnel light lured Sasha, again and again; in the end she didn’t resist and accepted her fate. She didn’t feel her legs anymore, but she wouldn’t need them: To follow the spot of light she just had to keep it in her eyes. She had to fix her eyes on it as if she wanted to talk it over and tame it.

Sasha had caught the light with her gaze and it pulled her through the darkness, through the labyrinth of the tunnels which she wouldn’t have been able to leave if she had been on her own. Until they reached the last station of the lifeline.

And then she saw it in front of her: Her guide seemed to sketch the contours of a far room where they waited for her.

“Sasha!” yelled a voice after her. Surprised she registered that she knew the voice, but she didn’t know to whom she belonged anymore. In it a full, know, caring tone swung with it.

“Father?” she said unbelieving.

They had come. The ghostly tunnel fire stood still, turned into a common fire, jumped onto a wick of a molten candle and made its home comfortable like a cat that had returned from an expedition …

A cold, wrinkled hand was on her hand. Slowly Sasha loosened her look from the flame because she feared that she could sink into the ground at any time. As soon as she awoke she felt the stinging pain in her lower arm and in her forehead. Out of the darkness simple furniture appeared tumbling: A few chairs, a dresser … Sasha herself was lying on a stretcher that was so soft that she couldn’t feel her back.

She felt as if her body only came back to her gradually.

“Sasha?” Repeated the voice.

She looked at the person that was speaking and hastily retracted her hand. At the bed the old man who had been with her on the railcar was sitting. His touch had been without any claim, neither harsh nor indecent. Shame and disappointment had made her retract her hand: How could she have mistaken the voice of a stranger with the one of her father’s? Why had the tunnel light led her back here from all places?

The old man smiled softly. He seemed to be pleased that she had awoken again. Only now she recognized the
same warm shine in his eyes which she had only seen in wit one other human. No she knew that she had been mistaken …

She was ashamed of herself.

“Forgive me.” She said. In the next moment she remembered the last minutes at the
Pavelezkaya
. With a strong movement she rose up. “How’s your friend?”

She didn’t know if she should cry or laugh. Maybe she just didn’t have the strength for it.

Luckily the razor sharp claws of the chimera had missed the girl; only the paws had hit her. But she had been unconscious for the whole day. The doctor had reassured Homer that her life was in no longer in danger. He hadn’t told his own problems to the doctor.

While Sasha had been unconscious Homer had gotten used to calling her that way, sank back into his chair and she leaned against her pillow. The old man returned to the table, where an opened notebook with ninety-six pages waited for him. He turned around the pen in his hand and continued at the place where had had been interrupted by the fevering girl.

“… But this time the return of the
caravan
had been
delayed
and
so
long that there was only one reason for it:

Something
unknown
must have
happened
, something
terrible
, something
that
not even the heavy
armed
and
experienced soldiers
who
accompanied them nor their
long and good
relationship with hanza could have prevented.

The
whole thing would have been a lot less unsettling if they could at least
communicate
with each other.

But there was
something wrong
with the telephone t
o
the
ring line
, the
connection
had
been gone since Monday
and the
troop
who
had been sent to the breaking point had returned without
any
success
.”

Homer raised his eyes and winched, the girl was standing directly behind him and looking over his shoulder at what he had scribbled down. Her curiosity seemed to be the only thing that kept her on her feet.

Embarrassed the old man turned the notebook on the other side.

“Are you waiting for inspiration?” She asked him.

“I am only at the very beginning.” Mumbled Homer.

“And what happened to the caravan?”

“I don’t know”. He carefully framed the title with his pen. “The story isn’t over for a long time yet. Lay down, you need to rest”

“But you decide how your book ends”

“In this book nothing is decided by me. I just write down everything that happened”

“Then it is even more decided by you.” Said the girl sunken in thoughts. “Am I in it as well?”

Homer smiled. “I just wanted to ask for your permission”

“I’ll think about it” she answered serious.

“Why are you writing this book?”

Homer stood up to talk to her from eye to eye.

Already after his last conversation with Sasha he had realized that her youth and missing experience created a wrong picture in her mind. At the strange station where they had taken her from, a year must have seemed as two. So she didn’t answer the questions which he spoke out loud, but the ones that he left unspoken. And she only asked questions to which he himself had no answer.

He was counting on her honesty and how else could she ever be the heroine (
not the drug, it is the female form of hero in English
) of his book if not? He had to be honest as
well, to not treat her like a child and to not cover her in silence. But he mustn’t say any less then what he had already admitted to himself.

He said: “I want that people remember me.
ME
and those who were close to me. They don’t know how the world was. The one that I have loved. That they hear the most important stuff that I have witnessed and realized. That my life wasn’t in vain. That something remains of me”