Yellow Blue Tibia Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Epigraph

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  PART THREE

  PART FOUR

  CODA

  KONSTANTIN SKVORECKY

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Also by Adam Roberts from Gollancz:

  Salt

  Stone

  On

  The Snow

  Polystom

  Gradisil

  Land of the Headless

  Swiftly

  Yellow Blue Tibia

  ADAM ROBERTS

  Orion

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  Copyright © Adam Roberts 2009

  All rights reserved

  The right of Adam Roberts to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by

  Gollancz

  An imprint of the Orion Publishing Group

  Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin’s Lane,

  London WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette Livre UK Company

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  eISBN : 978 0 5750 8780 4

  ISBN 978 0 575 08357 8 (Trade Paperback)

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Typeset by Input Data Services Ltd,

  Bridgwater, Somerset

  Printed and bound in the UK

  by CPI Mackays, Chatham, Kent

  The Orion Publishing Group’s policy is to use papers that

  are natural, renewable and recyclable products and made

  from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and

  manufacturing processes are expected to conform to

  the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  ‘You are right. I understood this myself when I read your novel The Time Machine. All Human conceptions are on the scale of our planet. They are based on the pretension that the technical potential, though it will develop, will never exceed the terrestrial limit. 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.’

  Vladimir Ilych Lenin, in conversation with H. G. Wells

  PART ONE

  ‘We have internal enemies. We have external enemies. This,

  comrades, must not be forgotten for a single moment.’

  Stalin in 1928

  ‘The war will soon be over. We shall recover in fifteen or twenty

  years. Then we’ll have another go at it.’

  Stalin in 1945

  CHAPTER 1

  1

  At dawn we boarded a special train. The track had recently been repaired. We all commented on the extraordinary and heroic efficiency with which war damage was being repaired all the way across the city. Sergei declared that the sunrise resembled a frozen explosion: clouds strewn about the sky like shreds of raw meat, and a vivid orange-yellow billowing-up of colour behind the eastern horizon. Our military escort didn’t know what to make of this. It’s possible they suspected bourgeois decadence in such talk. It’s possible they were right to be suspicious. Certainly the sky contrasted very sharply with the iron and stone of the city: grey and silver and rust. The eye was inevitably drawn to the frozen rage of sunrise. Such colours. We were on our way to meet Comrade Stalin himself, in person, and all of us feeling almost as honoured and excited as we did terrified. Then Sergei, as perverse as ever, tried to get the whole carriage singing patriotic songs, but the soldiers didn’t join in.

  A smashed motorcycle was lodged in the fork of one bare tree.

  An indication that this trip was something special came when one of the soldiers distributed American cigarettes. American cigarettes! We all smoked. The air inside the carriage, which had had the night chill still in it, began to warm and blur. The soldiers loosened their manner, became chatty.

  ‘They weren’t so badly touched here,’ said one of them, waving his hand at the window. ‘They complain, but compare this with the rest of the Motherland! Compare this with the west.’ He made a pssshh noise with his lips. ‘Hardly any damage, here.’

  ‘They should see the Volga,’ said another. ‘I’m not only talking about Stalingrad, but the whole countryside round there.’

  ‘I fought at Stalingrad,’ said Sergei Pavlovich Rapoport.

  That killed the conversation.

  We arrived at a small station in the middle of farmland. As we disembarked, Sergei said, ‘And where will our next train take us?’ He said no more, but his meaning - that he was expecting us all to be shipped off to the Gulag - was clear enough. The soldiers escorting us decided to find this hilarious - fortunately for us.

  Our further transport took the form of three mule carts. Adam Kaganovich, giddy (I suppose) with the fear and the excitement, pretended to take offence at this. ‘Carts! Donkeys! You cannot expect us to put up with such rusticity, comrades! Comrades, remember that we are science fiction writers!’ ‘That you are science fiction writers,’ said the Lieutenant, in charge of us, ‘is precisely why Comrade Stalin wishes to see you.’

  2

  When we arrived at the dacha everything happened very quickly. We were taken through into a large room, with tall windows of uncracked glass and excellent views across the low hills. The ungrazed grasses, high and feathery, fuzzed the distant fields. One flank of the landscape was a blue-green, almost the colour of sky.

  The room was under-furnished: a few chairs, nothing more. Over the mantelpiece was a large photographic reproduction of a group of revolutionary heroes. I recognised Molotov, Mikoyan, Kalinin and Comrade Stalin himself. In the middle was Lenin, with that expression on his face you often see in photographs of him - that sly narrowing of the eyes, his tight little beard bunched up around his upturned mouth, as if he is richly enjoying a joke that he has not chosen to share with anybody else.

  A samovar was brought in and we all drank tea, smoking nervously the whole time. And then, without preliminary or preparation, in came Stalin himself, in the flesh, flanked by two aides. We all stood, of course, straight as iron railings, all in a line; and he came over and greeted us one by one, shaking our hands, and looking each of us in the eye. It was immediately evident that he knew our writings, that - indeed! - he was an enthusiast for science fiction. When he got to him, Frenkel dipped his head and said, ‘Ivan Frenkel, comrade.’

  ‘Ivan,’ said Stalin. ‘Ivan Frenkel. Not - Jan?’ And he laughed. Frenkel, a Slav, had been born Jan, of course, but had been publishing under the name Ivan since the thirties. ‘It’s more patriotic,’ he had once explained to me. ‘It’s a more patriotic name.’ But what did Comrade Stalin mean by drawing attention to Jan? The expression on Frenkel’s face was ghastly - smiling, but ghastly. Was Stalin saying: Do not pretend to be Russian when we all know you to be a Slav? He did not explain. He moved along the line with a jovial expression.

  You will want me to say what my impression of him was. I can do little better than say to you that what most struck me, mee
ting him in the flesh, was how very like himself he looked. It is a foolish observation, I daresay, but that’s what most struck me. You must remember that his image was ubiquitous in the Soviet Union at that time: and the strong features, the thick black hair and moustache, the sheer physical heft and presence of the man, were exactly as you would think they were. It is true that he looked old: but, after all, he was in his late sixties. There was a degree of pallor and slackness to his complexion. Little red broken veins embroidered the corners of his nose. His eyes were each surrounded by an oval of puffy flesh. But his gaze was unwavering. I had heard it said that when encountering Stalin the crucial thing was to meet his gaze. Any shiftiness about the eyes, any apparent avoidance of looking directly back at his gaze, could provoke mistrust, rage or worse. Only a few things about the physical proximity of Stalin surprised me. One was his height - for he was considerably shorter than I had expected. The other was his smell. A tart odour combined of tobacco and sweat. Also (this, I do not think, has been reported) his feet were very large in proportion to the rest of his body. I could see this as he moved along the line.

  He shook hands with Sergei Rapoport, Adam Kaganovich, Nikolai Asterinov and myself, one after the other. When he met Asterinov he chortled. Visibly plucking up his courage, Asterinov said, ‘Funny, comrade?’

  ‘Oh, Nikolai Nikolaivitch,’ Stalin said. ‘I am only thinking that they were making a film of your Starsearch, and I ordered the production stopped! And yet I admire the novel very much!’

  ‘Thank you, comrade,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch, his voice pitched rather higher than was normal for it.

  ‘Isn’t that funny, though?’ said Stalin.

  ‘Very, comrade.’

  Finally Stalin settled his tun-shaped body in a chair by the windows, and lit a cigarette. Adam Mikhailovitch sat. The rest of us remained standing. Adam glanced around anxiously and leapt back to his feet. ‘No, no,’ said Stalin, ‘sit down, all of you.’

  We all sat.

  There was a single bird somewhere outside in the garden, chirruping over and over, like a squeaky wheel.

  Stalin was quiet for a long time, staring into the smoke produced by his cigarette as if answers to many mysteries were written there. Then he coughed heartily and said, ‘Comrades, I imagine you are curious why I have sent for you.’

  We, of course, said nothing. Each of us vied with the other in adopting the most solicitous posture; sitting forward in our chairs, leaning a little, putting our heads to one side.

  ‘I have learnt many things in my time,’ said Stalin. ‘And there is one thing I have learned above all. Nothing is so efficacious in advancing the cause of universal Communism as struggle. When the people have an enemy against which to unite, they are capable of superb heroics. When they lack such an enemy they become slack, they fall prey to counterrevolutionary elements, and generally backslide. The Great Patriotic War has surely taught us this above all! We all here remember the thirties - do we not?’

  We murmured in agreement. Each of us, I am sure, trying hard to make our murmurs as non-specific as a murmur might be. Remember the thirties? The difficulty was not remembering the thirties. The difficulty was ever being able to forget the thirties.

  ‘It took the most strenuous efforts by the politburo to hold the country together during those years,’ Comrade Stalin said, smilingly. ‘Enemies without and traitors within, and the people loose, loose like a - like—’ He gazed out the window, as if searching for a suitable simile. Eventually, he went on. ‘Loose. I had to be stern, then. I’m a naturally loving man. It’s my nature to be loving. But sometimes love must be hard, or the loved ones become themselves weakened. Severity was the only way to preserve the revolution. But the war - the war gave us a proper enemy. Gave us something to unite against. Hitler’s declaration of war saved Communism. And now we have won the war.’

  ‘Hurrah,’ said Sergei, but not in a loud voice.

  Stalin’s smile widened. ‘Victory was a necessary result of the advanced Soviet science of war, and of the fact that the high command,’ and he dipped his head, and we all understood he was referring to himself, ‘the fact that the high command more thoroughly understood and was able better to apply the iron laws of warfare, the dialectic of counter-offensive and offensive, the cooperation of all services and arms, that modern warmaking requires. But most of all. Most of all . . . with the Nazis we had a threat against which the entire country could unite. Now, I ask you, is there a similar enemy now against which we may continue to preserve that unity? I ask you.’

  And it seemed he was genuinely asking us, for he paused. My throat dried at this. Did he expect us to answer? Eventually Ivan Frenkel spoke up. ‘America?’ he hazarded.

  ‘Of course,’ boomed Stalin. ‘Of course America! Only yesterday Zvezda reported that the American government machine-gunned workers in New York. Killed hundreds. Of course America. But I do not find that America unites the people in hostility, the way the German threat did.’

  We said nothing. Nikolai Nikolaivitch fumbled a new cigarette from its box, and by doing so made it clear how trembly his fingers were.

  ‘Besides,’ said Stalin, with force, ‘I give America five years. Do you think that defeating America will be harder than defeating the Germans? The Nazi army was the most modern and best equipped in the world, and we made short work of them. And now our weapons are even stronger; our troops battle-hardened and our morale high. I can tell you, comrades, that America will fall within five years.’

  ‘Tremendous news,’ said Sergei, in a loud, brittle voice.

  ‘Indeed,’ we all said. ‘Excellent. Superb.’

  ‘But it is my duty,’ said Stalin, ‘to consider longer-term futures than a mere five years. It is my duty to ensure that the revolutionary vigour is preserved long into the future. And this is where you can help me. Yes, you, science fiction authors. Once the west falls, as it inevitably will, and the whole world embraces Communism, where then will we find the enemies against which we can unite, against which we can test our collective heroism? Eh?’

  This was a tricky question - tricky in the sense that it was not immediately obvious which answers were liable to provoke official displeasure. We pretended to ponder it. Fortunately Comrade Stalin did not leave us to stew.

  ‘Outer space,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘Space will provide the enemies. You, comrades, will work together - here, in this dacha. All amenities will be provided. I myself will visit from time to time. Together we will work upon the story of an extraterrestrial menace. It will be the greatest science fiction story ever told! And we will write it collectively! It will inspire the whole of the Soviet Union - inspire the whole world! It is, after all, the true Communist arena. Space, I mean. Outer space is ours! That is your task, comrades!’

  He got to his feet. He moved slowly, but with force. ‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘But I shall return shortly, and I look forward to hearing what you have come up with! Soon, my friends, I shall return to you!’

  3

  That, naturally, was the last we saw of Stalin. We were left to our own devices, more or less, except for Malenkov, a senior party figure who stayed for a week or so to ensure that we did nothing foolish. By foolish, he told us, he meant ‘anything liable to disappoint Josef Vissarionovich’. We were as eager as was he to avoid this possibility.

  At that evening’s first evening meal we chattered excitedly, and drank too much. It was the drink that meant we talked more freely than otherwise we might have done. Several military personnel, and of course Malenkov, were there the whole time, watching us, listening to what we said.

  ‘Do I understand?’ said Sergei. ‘Do I understand what exactly we are to do? Presumably this work we are to compose is to be more than just a story.’ He was appealing to Malenkov, but that man only smiled and said, ‘General Secretary Josef Vissarionovich explained this to you himself, did he not?’

  ‘Well, yes—’

  ‘Then surely you have all the information you need
.’

  ‘More than just a story,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch. ‘A story, yes, but obviously not just a story. Comrade Stalin made it plain that what we decide will act as a social glue - that people, in short, will believe it, and organise on a mass scale to make it real.’

  ‘There is one great merit in the idea,’ I said.

  ‘Come, Konstantin Andreiovich,’ said Sergei, wagging his head, ‘only the one?’

  ‘The plan has very many merits, of course,’ I said, hurriedly. ‘But I am struck by one in particular. To unify the people against a human enemy - against Germans, Americans, Jews - necessarily involves us in a form of inhumanity. For these enemies are human beings, after all.’

  ‘Germans?’ said Rapoport, disbelievingly.

  ‘All human beings are surely capable of being brought within the healthy body politic of a Communist collective,’ I said.

  ‘The perfectibility of humanity,’ said Frenkel, sourly.

  ‘Not Germans,’ insisted Rapoport.

  ‘But against this threat - a perfectly unhuman enemy - the whole of humanity could unite. We would have that,’ I paused, for I had been about to say paradox, but instead I said, ‘that dialectical synthesis: a fully peaceful world that is simultaneously united in a great patriotic war!’

  ‘Peace,’ said Sergei. And then, in a high-pitched voice, ‘Comrade, will there be a war?’ And then, rapidly, in a lower voice, ‘No, comrade! But there will be such a struggle for peace that not a stone will be left standing.’ He laughed at his own joke. It was an old joke.