Yellow Blue Tibia (29 page)

‘The malign star shining down upon us,’ I said. ‘The star wormwood, the Chernobyl.’

‘I was in full view! All the time! In the
centre
of the brightly lit stage. And look at you, with your burnt face!’

I put my hands to my face: I was no longer in my twenties. The skin had been scorched by age, and vodka, and tobacco, and above all scorched by—

He could, of course, read my mind.

‘By light!’ he said. ‘Your face was scorched by
light
!’

‘Light altered my form,’ I said, running a finger over the thickened tab of scar tissue over the end of my nose.

‘So.’ Stalin gestured at himself, at his stocky, barrelled torso. ‘Human form? Look at me. Remember what I did. Was I ever
human
?’

‘You were inhuman,’ I said, with a sense of dawning comprehension.

‘Exactly so! I was
always
the alien. Always - it was always there. I fought the Nazis and killed a million of them, soldiers and civilians. Why did I fight the Nazis? To protect the Russian people?’ Every time he made his expressive gesture with his right hand, a comet-tail of smoke trailed from the blood-red gleam at the tip of his cigarette, weaving a back-and-forth folding of silver-blue in the air. ‘To protect the
Russian
people? But in 1933, and in 1934, when the people were starving, I confiscated their grain. How many millions died? Ten million? Try to
imagine
that number of people.’

‘I cannot.’

‘I can, because my mind does not work as yours does. I can imagine that number alive, and I can imagine that number dead, and the latter pleases me more. Do H. G. Wells’s Martians joy in the destruction they cause humanity? Of course they do.’

‘It’s not as if you descended in metallic craft . . .’ I began.

‘What form of life am I?’ Stalin demanded. ‘Did I hide it? Did I ever
pretend
humanity? My name is steel, not flesh. Steel-built Joe.’ And as I looked, I noticed, again belatedly, with a sense of my foolishness in not having noticed it before, that his flesh was harder and less yielding than ordinary flesh. ‘I, robot Josef.’ He chuckled. ‘Did I ever show the
weaknesses
of flesh?’

I remembered what I had read of Stalin’s youth. ‘Your father beat you.’

He acknowledged this with a dismissive tilt of his head. ‘He beat me because he was a drunk. He was angry with me, and with my mother, because I was not his natural child. My mother was promiscuous. My father knew me to be a bastard. People speculated as to who my actual father was: the merchant Yakov Egnatashvilli - a wrestling champion, no less! A strong and handsome man, that merchant. Or the priest, Father Christopher Charkviani. A policeman called Damian Davrichewy. All these names. Nobody realised who my actual father was because they were not looking in the correct place.’

‘Where should we have been looking?’

‘I ordered a million people to be shot during the Great Purge of the 1930s. Half a million died during forced resettlement. Two million died in the Gulags. I did all this. You need to ask yourself simply one thing. Is this what a
human being
would do?’

‘In an important sense,’ I agreed, ‘no.’

‘I did it all in plain sight. I did not hide. I came to the Soviet Union, an alien from a hostile world, and did as much damage as I could. Such was my mission. I was born December 1878. Do you know what was happening throughout 1878?’

‘I would assume many things.’

He laughed like a blunderbuss. ‘Of course many things! But I mean one thing in particular. X-rays. They called it cathode radiation, in those days. It had been discovered in 1876, and by 1877 and 1878 every scientist and physicist in Europe and Russia was building the equipment, firing out the rays, irradiating animals, people, objects, wild and promiscuous experiments - it was everywhere. There was a large laboratory at Gori, in Georgia. But there were such laboratories all over Europe. Think of that! Think of the
consequences
of that!’

I shook my head. There was a crudeness, a kind of pulp aesthetic, about this. ‘But you weren’t literally made of steel,’ I said, haltingly. ‘You were not actually . . .’ I imagined him replying:
And who got close enough to me to know?
But he wasn’t speaking. He wasn’t interested in my questions.

‘The thing,’ he said, ‘that puzzles our souls about radiation poisoning is the way the very word contradicts its message. We are habituated to think of poison as a product of
darkness
, of dirt and putrescence, of secrecy and shadows. But radiation is a form of
light
, and it is hard for us to think of light as poison. Light can blind, of course; and it can of course burn; we
know
that. We comprehend that. It correlates to our sense of its essence. But
poison us
? What is more alarming than the thought that poison can
radiate
?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Has there ever been a being like me? Before, in human history?’

‘Adolf Hitler?’

‘Oh,
him
?’ He looked away. ‘I’ll tell you.’ He leant forward. His cigarette was still threading the air with a silk-line of smoke. Either he had lit a new one, or he had somehow made the first one last a surprisingly long time. ‘I’ll tell you. Hitler was a human tyrant. He murdered millions, but he murdered those he considered
other
. He had his tribe, these Aryan humans, and he directed his destructiveness against other varieties of humanity. That’s what human beings have done for hundreds of thousands of years. Hitler’s particular distinction is to have effected destruction on a very large scale, and for that we have to thank the rapid advances of industrialisation. Me, however? I did not limit myself to a particular group, or scapegoat-crowd, or others. I waged war on the whole of humanity. I killed non-Russians. I killed Russians. I killed my opponents and my supporters. I killed Jews, Aryans, Slavs, black, white and yellow. I killed men, and I killed women. I killed my own army - in many of my battles I executed more of my troops than were killed by the enemy! I killed members of my own family. I killed my friends, my enemies, my political allies, my political opponents, my doctors, my generals, my party members. I used to send orders to Soviet cities that would read:
Draw up a list of a thousand names - exactly a thousand - and execute them all
.’ He beamed at me. I peered at him more closely, as if for the first time. His moustache looked lacquered. His hair had the appearance of a single solid shape, like something carved from liquorish. He was a metal frame, with a plastic outer skin. He was an android, and yet we had not noticed it. His eyes twinkled - that kindly-old-uncle twinkle of his eyes. He had the look of a skilful and detailed
copy
of a human. He did not look like a human. He was not even made out of flesh. He was, of course, made of metal: polished, shaped, expertly fitted: and the very fronds of his moustache were wires of ore, and his skin was burnished. Steel-fashioned. SF.

All I could think was: how had I not noticed it before?

He could read my thoughts: ‘You did not think of it. Nobody thought of it, I know, but you have less excuse than the others. You! A science fiction writer! Only consider: to invade a planet? A whole planet? To lay it waste - to devastate its population? H. G. Wells thought you needed armies of robot tripods and deathrays; that you needed to set your weaponry against the weaponry of the aborigines. But you don’t need that. You can set
your enemy
against your enemy. You can infiltrate your enemy and set them bickering amongst themselves. What else has this century been, but humans striving with humans to destroy the world? What could give greater comfort to
us
?’

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.