Half a Life

by Kir Bulychev

translated by Bill Bowler

Nadezhda Sidorova has survived WWII, endured the death of her husband in a car crash, and is struggling to raise her little girl Olya while working as a nurse. Nadezhda has paid her dues, more than her share, and seems now finally on the verge of finding a better life with the kind and loving Timofei. Events suddenly jolt Nadezhda onto a new and unexpected course. She faces a greater struggle than any she has yet endured or could even have imagined.

Chapter 3

Until that moment, for Pavlysh, the ship had remained a phantom, the reality of which was conventional, as if governed by the rules of a game. Even when marking the network of corridors and hatches on his map, on the plastic disc strapped to his left wrist, he did not go outside of the framework of this conventionality. He was like a rational mouse in a laboratory maze, though unlike a real mouse, Pavlysh knew that the maze was closed and that, in a defined manner, it was traveling through space, approaching the solar system.

The disintegrating note had broken the rules, since there was no way, by any stretch of the imagination, that it could turn up here; and therefore it led to only one rational conclusion: it had not existed. This was Dag’s conclusion. It would have been Pavlysh’s, had he been in Dag’s place. But Pavlysh could not change places with Dag.

“’Nadezhda?’” asked Dag.

“Yes,” answered Pavlysh.

“Think about it,” said Dag. “You yourself are a philologist. You know. Maybe it would be best if we sent someone else over to relieve you? Or postponed inspecting the ship?”

“Everything’s fine,” said Pavlysh. “Don’t worry. I’m going for the preservative.”

“Why?”

“If I find another note, I’ll save it for you.”

Pavlysh made the short trip back to his cabin, where he removed the preservative from the case of supplies that Sato had packed so carefully. All the while he tried to keep in his mind’s eye the image of the rag or sheet of paper and its inscription. But the sheet did not submit. Like the face of the woman you love — you try to remember it, but memory provides only separate, petty, totally unsatisfactory details: a braid of hair behind the ear, a little crease on the forehead.

By the time Pavlysh returned to the chamber where the little pile of white dust awaited him (he already had begun to fear that it, too, had disappeared), his confidence in the reality of the note was shaken.

Reason sought to shield him from miracles.

“What are you doing?” asked Dag.

“I’m searching for the hatch,” said Pavlysh, “in order to look further.”

“And how was it written?” asked Dag.

“In Russian.”

“What kind of writing? What kind of letters?”

“The letters? Large, hand-written.”

Pavlysh found the hatch, and it opened easily. This was a strange length of corridor, flanked by compartments of various shapes and sizes, divided by partitions. Some of the compartments had glass fronts, some were separated from the corridor by netting.

In the middle of the hallway stood a half-sphere, resembling a big turtle, sixty centimeters in diameter. Pavlysh touched it, and the half-sphere rolled with unexpected lightness down the corridor, as if on well-oiled, hidden wheels. It hit the wall and stopped.

The light of the helmet lamp pulled corners and niches from the darkness, but they were all empty. In one compartment, a pile of stones lay; in another, pieces of wood. And when he looked closely, the pieces seemed to resemble the remains of some kind of large insect. Pavlysh moved forward slowly, reporting his progress back to the ship minute to minute.

“You know what?” Dag’s voice came over the line. “I’d say this ship was abandoned around forty years ago.”

“Or maybe thirty?”

“Or maybe fifty. It’s just a guess.”

“Don’t bother,” said Pavlysh. “Even thirty years ago, we still had not gone beyond the edge of the solar system.”

“I know,” answered Dag. “But I will still check it. So long as you don’t have any more hallucinations.”

There was nothing to check. Moreover, they knew the ship they had found was not from their solar system. At the very least, it had been approaching the sun over the course of many years. And before that, it must have been traveling away from the sun.

But forty or fifty years ago, mankind had only just settled Mars and landed on Pluto. And beyond Pluto lay the unknown cosmos, like the lands beyond the sea to the ancients. And no one in that cosmos knew how to speak and write in Russian...

Pavlysh made his way to the next level, trying to disentangle himself from the labyrinth of corridors, niches, and chambers. After half an hour, he said, “They were packrats.”

“What about Nadezhda?”

“Nothing else so far.”

It was possible that he simply was not noticing the traces of Nadezhda, was passing them by. Even on Earth, you had only to leave the standard world of spaceports and big cities, and you lost the ability to judge the true significance of things and phenomena you saw.

The artifacts of an alien ship were even more incomprehensible. The half-sphere, lightly rolling off his foot, the niches, the abandoned objects and equipment, the use of which was unknown, the interlacing wires and tubes, the bright stains on the walls and the grating on the ceiling, the sections of smooth floor and of burst, semi-transparent membrane.

Pavlysh could not understand what the owners of the ship were like. He would suddenly find himself in a space where it seemed giants had lived; then just as suddenly, he found himself in front of a small cell designed for a gnome. Then he emerged onto a frozen basin, and seemed to see long bodies encased in murky ice.

Then he found himself in a vast hall, the far wall of which looked like a machine, covered with screens, with rows of buttons running down to the floor and up to the ceiling, five meters overhead.

This illogic, this inconsistency in the surrounding world, annoyed Pavlysh, because it would not permit construction of even an approximate working hypothesis on which to string the facts. And some form of hypothesis was precisely what Pavlysh’s mind, weary from wandering the labyrinth, demanded.

Behind a wide lattice (just right for squeezing between the strands) lay a dark mass, desiccated in the vacuum. Most likely, this had once been a living creature the size of an elephant. Possibly, one of the ship’s crew? But this lattice formed a cell cut off from the corridor. It would hardly have been necessary to hide behind a screen.

For a second, a version, not devoid of color, presented itself: this cosmonaut was being punished. He had been put behind bars. Yes, there was a prison on the ship. And when emergency evacuation of the ship became necessary, they forgot him. Or they didn’t want to take him.

Pavlysh told Dag his theory, but Dag objected,

“The escape launch was intended for much smaller creatures. You saw the berth.”

Dag was right.

On the floor next to the dark mass lay an empty vessel, fifteen centimeters in diameter.

And a half hour later, in the next corridor, behind a closed but unlocked hatch, Pavlysh discovered the cabin in which Nadezhda had lived.

He didn’t enter the room. He stopped at the threshold, looking at the neatly made cot, covered with some gray fabric; at the scarf thrown on the floor, worn, old, with tiny red polka-dots; at the shelf, where a cup with a broken handle stood.

Later, each time he returned to this room, he noticed more and more things that had belonged to Nadezhda. And he found traces of her in other locations on the ship. But then, the first time, he remembered only the red polka-dots on the scarf and the cup with the broken handle because these were so much more unbelievable than any of the alien machines and devices.

“Everything’s in order,” said Pavlysh. He opened the nozzle and sprayed everything in the cabin with preservative.

“What are you doing?” asked Dag.

“I found Nadezhda.”

“What?”

“No, not Nadezhda. I found where she lived.”

“You serious?”

“Perfectly serious. Her teacup is here. And she forgot her scarf.”

“You know,” said Dag, “I’m sure that you have not gone out of your mind. But all the same, I can’t believe it.”

“I don’t believe it either.”

“Imagine,” said Dag, “that we had landed on the Moon and seen a girl sitting there, sitting and sewing, for example.”

“That’s about what it’s like,” agreed Pavlysh. “But I’ve found her cup. The handle is broken.”

“But where is Nadezhda?” asked Sato.

“I don’t know,” said Pavlysh. “She’s long gone.”

“What else?” asked Dag. “Say something. What was she like?”

“She was beautiful,” said Sato.

“Of course,” agreed Pavlysh, “very beautiful.”

Behind the cot, Pavlysh noticed a small suitcase full of things, as if Nadezhda had been packing, but something had forced her to abandon her belongings and just leave empty-handed.

Pavlysh sprayed the contents with preservative and laid them out on the cot. There was a skirt sewn from plastic with thick nylon thread, a sack with holes for the head and arms, a shawl woven from wires of different colors.

“She spent a long time here,” said Pavlysh.

At the very bottom of the case lay a stack of white pages covered with evenly spaced handwriting that strongly inclined to the right. Pavlysh forced himself not to read what was written on the sheets of paper until he had treated them and could be sure they would not disintegrate in his hands. He looked at them only after he had returned to his own cabin, where he could take off his spacesuit, lie down on the inflated mattress, and turn the lights on to full power.

“Read out loud,” asked Dag, but Pavlysh refused. He was very tired. He promised that he would definitely read the most interesting parts to them. But first he would take a look himself. Silently. And Dag did not argue.

To be continued...