The Star Diaries (15 page)

“Listen here, hydrant, among us such things are not said with impunity. Just let Aquatica hear about these questions of yours, and you’ll receive a nice addition to your sentence.”

Disheartened, I gave in to the gloomiest reflections, from which however I was roused by the conversation of my fellow sufferers. They were discussing their offenses, each pondering the gravity of his own. One was in the desiccator because he had, after dozing off on a waterlogged sofa, choked and jumped sputtering to his feet with the cry: “A man could drown.” The second had carried his child piggyback instead of teaching it, from the very first, to live underwater. And the third, the oldest one, had had the misfortune to gurgle in a manner characterized by competent observers as ambiguous and disrespectful during a lecture on the three hundred hydrant heroes who gave up their lives to set a record for breathing underwater.

Shortly thereafter I was summoned before the Head Flounder, who informed me that this new despicable crime of mine forced him now to sentence me to a total of three years of voluntary sculpture. The next day, in the company of thirty-seven Pintanese, I sailed off in a boat, no longer surprised at having to sit chin-deep in water, off to the sculpting areas. They were located far outside the city. Our work consisted in carving statues of fish of the carp family. To the best of my recollection we chiseled out approximately 140,000 of these. In the morning we would swim to work, singing songs; there is one particularly that sticks in my mind, it began with the words, “No slaves are we, that drag their feet, Freedom makes the labor sweet.” After work we would return to our cells; but before supper—which had to be eaten underwater—a lecturer came each day and gave a talk on our watery rights; those interested could sign up as members of the club of Contemplators of Befinnitude. At the end of his talk our lecturer would invariably ask if perchance any of us had lost the inclination to sculpt. Somehow or other no one ever spoke up, so neither did I. And anyway, the softspeakers placed around the hall assured us that we wished to sculpt as long as possible, and the more underwater, the better.

One day our supervisors began to show signs of unusual excitement, and at lunch we learned that the Big Fish Himself, the Mighty Hydrant Hermezinius, would be sailing past our workshops that very day, issuing forth to further the cause of gwatish barbelment. All that afternoon we swam at attention, awaiting the exalted arrival. The rain fell, and it was so beastly cold, we all started shivering. The softspeakers—attached to buoys—told us we were trembling with enthusiasm. It was nearly twilight when the retinue of the Mighty Fish-face, seven hundred boats in all, floated by. I happened to be close enough to get a good look at His Fishiness, who to my great surprise did not in the least resemble a fish. This was, to all appearances, a perfectly ordinary Pintan, except that he was very old and his limbs were terribly twisted. Eight magnates dressed in gold and crimson scales supported the ruler’s noble shoulders as he came up for air; in the process he sputtered dreadfully, till I began to feel sorry for him. In honor of this event we hewed eight hundred statues of carp over the quota.

About a week later I got awful stabbing pains in my arms for the first time; my comrades explained that this was simply the beginnings of rheumatism, the greatest plague on Pinta. Of course one was not allowed to call it an illness, but only the symptoms of the organism’s ideological resistance to fishification. Now I understood the contorted appearance of the Pintanese.

Every week we were taken to see pageants that presented glorious perspectives of underwater life. I kept my eyes shut, for the very mention of water made me queasy.

And so it went, for five months. Towards the end of this period I became friends with a certain elderly Pintan, a university professor, who was sculpting voluntarily because in one of his classes he had maintained that water was indeed indispensable for life, but in a different sense than was generally practiced. In our conversations, conducted mostly at night, the professor told me the ancient history of Pinta. The planet had once been beset by burning winds, which—the scientists said—threatened to turn it into one enormous desert. Therefore a great irrigational plan was adopted. To implement which, appropriate institutions and top-priority bureaus were set up; but then, after the network of canals and reservoirs had been completed, the bureaus refused to disband themselves and continued to operate, irrigating Pinta more and more. The upshot was—as the professor put it—that what was to have been controlled, controlled us. No one, however, would admit this, and of course the next, logical step was the declaration that things were exactly the way they ought to be.

One day rumors began to circulate among us, tremendously exciting rumors. It was said that some extraordinary change was about to take place, a few even dared claim that the Mighty Hydrant Himself would very shortly decree private dryness, and possibly public. Our supervisors immediately proceeded to combat this defeatism, announcing new fish-statue projects. In spite of this, the rumor persisted, and in ever more fantastic versions; with my own two ears I heard someone say that the Mighty Fish-head Hermezinius had been seen holding a towel.

Then, one night, sounds of riotous laughter reached us from the supervisors’ building. Swimming outside, I saw the commandant and the lecturer tossing water out the windows in great bucketfuls, singing loudly all the while. At the break of day the lecturer came; he sat in a caulked-up boat and told us that everything till now had been a misunderstanding; that new, genuinely free ways of living—not like the previous ways—were being worked out, and in the meantime gurgling was repealed, as fatiguing, injurious to health and totally unnecessary. During this speech he put his foot in the water and pulled it out again, shuddering with disgust. In conclusion he added that he had always been against water and knew all along that nothing good would ever come of it. For the next two days we didn’t go to work. Then they sent us to the statues that had already been completed; we chipped off the fins and attached legs in their place. The lecturer began to teach us a new song, “Our spirits are high when it’s dry,” and everyone was saying that any day now pumps would be brought in and the water removed.

However after the second verse our lecturer was recalled to the capital and never came back. The following morning the commandant sailed over to us, barely showing his head above the waves, and handed out waterproof newspapers. These announced that gurgling, injurious to health and not furthering siluriation, was hereby once and for all rescinded, which however in no way signified a return to pernicious aridity. Quite on the contrary. To enacclimate the gwats and spurge on the sunkers, underwater breathing would be instituted throughout the planet, and
exclusively
underwater, as being fishlike in the highest degree; at the same time—out of consideration for the public welfare—this would be introduced in stages, that is, each day all citizens were required to remain beneath the water just a little longer than on the preceding day. In order to assist them in this, the general level of water would be raised to eleven bathyms (a unit of length).

That evening the water level was in fact raised, and to such a height that we had to sleep standing up. Since the softspeakers were now covered, they were fastened a trifle higher, and our new lecturer had us do underwater breathing exercises. A few days later Hermezinius, at the request of the entire population, generously consented to raise the water level half a bathym more. We all began to walk around on tiptoe. Persons who were shorter quickly dropped out of sight. Since no one quite got the hang of underwater breathing, the practice of inconspicuously jumping up for air developed. After about a month, considerable proficiency was achieved in this, while everyone pretended not to notice others doing it, nor indeed that they were doing it themselves. The press reported that great strides were being made throughout the land in underwater breathing, and meanwhile a sizable number of new sculpting volunteers arrived, persons who continued to gurgle in the old way.

All of this, taken together, gave me such a headache, that at last I decided to quit the voluntary sculpting grounds for good. After work I hid behind the underpinning of a new monument (I forgot to mention we had chipped off the attached legs of the fish and put back fins), and when everyone was gone, I swam to the city. In this respect I had a considerable advantage over the Pintanese, who, contrary to what one might have expected, were quite unable to swim.

I exhausted myself completely, but made it at last to the airport. Four Aquaticans were guarding my rocket. Fortunately someone nearby started gurgling and the Aquaticans hurled themselves in that direction. So I broke the seals, jumped inside and took off with the greatest possible speed. After a quarter of an hour the planet glimmered in the distance, now a tiny star, on which it had been my lot to endure so much. I stretched out on the bed, reveling in its dryness; but alas, this pleasant respite was short-lived. Suddenly I was wakened by an energetic knocking at the hatch. Still half-asleep, I shouted: “Long live Free Pinta!” This cry was to cost me dearly, for into the rocket burst a patrol of Angelicans from Panta. In vain did I attempt to explain that they had heard me wrong, that I had shouted not “Free Pinta,” but “Free Panta.” The rocket was sealed and taken in tow. And as if this wasn’t bad enough, there was a second can of sardines in the larder, and I had opened it before my nap. Spotting the open can, the Angelicans gasped, then with a cry of triumph proceeded to write out a summons. Before long we had landed on the planet. Placed inside a waiting vehicle, I sighed with relief, for the planet, as far as the eye could see, was free of water. When my escort removed their spacesuits I observed that these beings with whom I had to deal bore a remarkable likeness to people, except that their faces were identical, as if they had all been twins, and smiling besides.

Though night had fallen, the city lamps made it bright as day. I noticed that whenever a pedestrian looked at me he would shake his head, either with pity or dismay, and one female Pantan actually fainted, which was curious, considering that even then she continued to smile.

After a time I got the impression that all the inhabitants of the planet were wearing some sort of mask, but couldn’t tell for sure. The trip ended in front of a building that carried the inscription: FREE ANGELICA OF PANTA. I spent the night alone in a small cell, listening to the sounds of the metropolis that reached my window. The next day, around noon, I was read the charges against me in the office of the examiner. I was accused of committing angelophagy at the instigation of the Pintanese, and also of the crime of personal differentiation. The material evidence of my guilt consisted of two items: one was the open can of sardines, the other—a mirror, held up to my face by the examiner.

This was an Angelican 4th Class in a uniform as white as snow, with diamond thunderbolts across his chest; he explained that for the above offenses I could face life identification, then added that the court was giving me four days in which to prepare my defense. I might consult with an officially appointed counselor-at-law at any time.

Having already had some experience with legal procedures in this part of the Galaxy, I wished above all to learn the nature of the punishment involved. In answer to my request I was led to a modest room of amber color, where my lawyer, an Angelican 2nd Class, was already waiting. He turned out to be most obliging and was only too happy to explain.

“Know, O uninvited alien,” he said, “that ours is the knowledge of the ultimate source of all the cares, sufferings and misfortunes to which beings, gathered together in societies, are prone. This source lies in the individual, in his private identity. Society, the collective, is eternal, obeying steadfast and immutable laws, as do the mighty suns and stars. The individual, on the other hand, is characterized by uncertainty, indecision, inconsistency of action, and above all—by impermanence. Therefore we have completely eliminated individuality on behalf of the society. On our planet there are no entities—only the collective.”

“But really,” I said, astonished, “what you’re saying must be merely a figure of speech, for after all, you yourself are an individual, an entity…”

“Not at all,” he replied with an imperturbable smile, “You have noticed, surely, that there is no difference among us in our faces. In the same way we have achieved the highest degree of social interchangeability.”

“I don’t understand. What does that mean?”

“At any given moment there exists in a society a certain number of functions or, as we say, roles. One has the occupational roles, namely those of rulers, gardeners, mechanics, physicians; there are also family roles—fathers, brothers, sisters, and so on. Now in each such role a Pantan serves for twenty-four hours only. At midnight there occurs throughout our land a single movement, it is as if—speaking metaphorically—everyone takes a single step, and in this fashion a person who yesterday was a gardener, today becomes an engineer, yesterday’s mason is now a judge, a ruler—a teacher, and so on. The same holds with families. Each is composed of relatives—there’s a father, mother, children. Only the functions remain constant; the ones who perform them are changed every day. And so you see it is the collective, and only the collective, which remains intact. There are still the same number of parents and children, doctors and nurses, and similarly in all walks of life. The powerful organism of our state endures through the centuries, unmoved and unchanging, more durable than rock, and it owes its durability to the fact that we have done away, once and for all, with the ephemeral nature of individual existence. That is why I say we have achieved the ultimate in interchangeability. You will see this for yourself when, after midnight, you call for me, and I appear in a new form…”

“But what is the purpose of all this?” I asked. “And how do each of you possibly manage to practice all professions? Can you really be not only a gardener, judge or lawyer, but also a father or mother at will?”