Half a Life

by Kir Bulychev

translated by Bill Bowler

Chapter 4

part 2 of 4

I’m getting all mixed up with my story because what happened today is more important than anything that has happened in the years I’ve been trapped here. But I just can’t describe my adventure in order.

I came to in a dimly lit cell. This was not the room where I live now. In this cell, the dummies piled up all the stuff they had dug up and dragged on board during the past year. In the last four years or so, we have stopped sixteen times. Each time there was a great commotion, and they dragged all sorts of things here, including living creatures.

In this cell, aside from myself, were the dishes I had been washing, pine branches, grass, stones, and various insects. It wasn’t until later that I understood they were trying to figure out what to feed me. At first, I thought this whole collection was random. I didn’t eat anything. I wasn’t up for it. I sat and knocked on the wall. The wall was hard, and the whole time I heard some buzzing all around me, as if a great engine were running.

Aside from that, I felt a great lightness. Here in general everything is lighter than on Earth. I read once that on the Moon the force of gravity is also less, and if people someday fly to the stars, as Tsiolkovsky predicts, they won’t weigh anything at all.

This lesser strength of gravity had helped me to understand quickly that we were no longer on Earth, that they had kidnapped me, carried me off like a captive, but were not able to reach their destination. I hope very much that people, our people, from Earth, will someday learn to fly into space. But I’m afraid this won’t happen soon enough.

Pavlysh read these lines aloud.

Dag said, “And yet she lived only one year before the first sputnik.”

And Sato corrected him. “She was alive when Gagarin flew.”

“Maybe. But it didn’t make things any easier for her.”

“If she had known, it would have been easier,” said Pavlysh.

“I’m not so sure,” said Dag. “Then she would have begun to wait to be rescued. And she wouldn’t have lived long enough.”

“That’s not the point,” said Pavlysh. “It would have been important for her to know that we had also achieved space travel.”

He read aloud farther, until he grew tired.

They brought me something to eat, and stood in the door, watching, to see whether I would eat it or not. I tasted it. It was a strange porridge, a bit salty and boring. But at that time I was hungry and kind of deaf.

I kept looking at the dummies, who stood in the doorway, like turtles, and asked them to bring their master. I didn’t know then that their master was a machine that took up the whole wall of a huge chamber. And as for the real masters, I still don’t know how they launched this ship with only metal robots.

And then I started to wonder how they figured out what kind of food would not harm me. I wracked my brain until I saw their laboratory and guessed that they had taken blood from me while I was unconscious, and had done a complete analysis of my organism. They understood what was necessary, and in what proportions, so that I would not die of hunger. But they did not know what taste meant.

I have long since stopped being angry with the dummies. They are like soldiers obeying orders. But soldiers can still think. The dummies cannot. Throughout the first days, I cried and asked them to free me. I just could not understand that to reach freedom, I would have to fly a great distance and that I would never get there.

I have suddenly begun to feel uneasy. This is surely because I am no longer alone. I have the growing impression that a change is coming. I don’t know if it will be for the better, but things could not get any worse.

I dreamed of Olyenka today, and in my dream, I wondered why she was not growing, why she was running around so small? It was time for her to grow up. But she only laughed. When I woke up, I was alarmed. Did my dream mean that Olyenka was no longer in this world? Earlier, I had never believed in premonitions. Even at the front. I had seen plenty of false premonitions. But now, all day, I couldn’t calm myself.

And then I started to think, how do I know that I have counted the days correctly? All I do is make a scratch when I get up in the morning. But what if it’s not morning? Maybe I am sleeping more frequently? Or less frequently? How would I know? It’s always the same here. And then I thought, maybe four years have not passed, but only two? Or one? Or maybe the opposite — five, six, seven years? How old is Olya now? And how old am I? Maybe I’m already an old woman?

I got so upset that I ran to the mirrors. Of course, they’re not mirrors. They are slightly bulging, rounded, and look like television screens. Sometimes, green and blue zigzags run across them. I have no other mirror. I looked for a long time into the screens. Even the dummies who were on guard there started to signal me: what do you need? I just waved them off. The time has passed when I called them hangmen, torturers, fascists. Now I don’t fear them. I fear only the machine. The boss.

I kept looking in the screens, going from one to the next, searching for one that might be brighter. And I could not make up my mind. It seemed to be me — the same nose, the eyes a bit sunken, the face seemed a bit blue. But probably this was from the screen itself, though there were truly bags under my eyes. And I went back to my room.

“That is extremely interesting,” said Dag. “What do you think, Pavlysh?”

“What?”

“About this problem. Isolate a person for a number of years, so that he is not aware of the passing of time outside of his location. Would the biological clock change?”

“That’s not what I’m thinking about now,” said Pavlysh.

And then I suddenly remembered the kitten. I had completely forgotten, but today I remembered. They had gotten a kitten from somewhere. From Earth, of course. It whined and meowed. That was in the first days. It was whining in the next cell, and the dummies all ran there, but could not figure out what it needed.

I was completely timid then, and they brought me to it, to the kitten, thinking that I could help. But I couldn’t explain to them what milk was. Apparently, there was something lacking in their artificial food. I fussed with the kitten three days, mixed water into the porridge, and in this care, forgot even my own grief. But the kitten died. It seems man is much more endurable than animal, though they say cats have nine lives. But I live, while the kitten, probably, is lying in their museum.

Now I would be able to find something to nourish it. I know the way to their laboratory. And the dummies treat me differently. They’ve gotten used to me. But the dragon is in really bad shape. It’s clear, he’ll die soon. Yesterday, I sat with him a long time, cleaning his wound again. But he is very weak.

I’ve discovered something about him. It turns out the dragon can influence my thoughts by some means. Not so I can understand him, but when he’s in pain, I can feel it, too. I know he is glad when I arrive. I am very sorry now that I did not pay more attention to him earlier. I was afraid. But very possibly, he is just the same as I am. He’s a prisoner like me, only more unfortunate. They have kept him all these years in a cage.

Maybe this dragon is a nurse in a hospital on some far-away planet? And this dragon had also gone to accompany his daughter, and ended up in our zoo here, and lived here so many years in a cage. And the whole time, wanted to make the dummies understand, that he was no dumber than they. And he will die without having made them understand. At first I smiled, but then I wept. And here I sit, howling. But it’s time for me to go. They’re waiting.

And still, if I think about the dragon, then I consider my fate to be better. At least I have some degree of freedom, and have had it from the very beginning, from the time the kitten died. I often wondered why it turned out that all the other prisoners sit locked up? How many of them are here? Behind the partitions on the other floors there is different air. I can’t go there, but I’m sure there are more prisoners there. But why is it only I who can wander more or less freely around the floors?

For some reason, they decided I was no danger to them. Maybe their masters resemble me. They entrusted the kitten to me. They allowed me into the garden and showed me where the seeds were. I am able to go to the laboratory. The dummies even do what I say.

Whoever reads these pages will probably wonder what’s all this about dummies? That’s what I call the iron turtles. When I learned that they were little machines, that they did not understand simple things, I began to call them dummies. To myself.

All the same, if you think about it, my life was only slightly better than those who were locked in cages and cells. My prison was simply more spacious than theirs. That’s all. I tried, through the dummies, to explain to the machine, the boss, that it was a crime to abduct a living person and hold him like this. I wanted to explain that it would be better to communicate with us, with Earth. But then I had to realize that, except for machines, there was no one else here. And the machines had been given instructions: fly through the universe, gather what you find along the way, and then report back.

But the return trip seems endless. I still hope to live long enough to meet them and explain this all to them. Maybe they don’t realize that somewhere, aside from their planet, there are intelligent beings?

When Pavlysh finished reading this page, Dag said, “In general, she was reasoning rather logically.”

“Of course, this was a robotic exploratory mission,” said Pavlysh. “But there’s one riddle here, and Nadezhda has caught it.”

“Riddle?”

“It seems odd to me,” said Pavlysh, “that such an enormous ship, sent on remote exploration, maintained no connection with its base, with its planet of origin. It’s clear it has flown for many years, and in that time the information it collects begins to age.”

“I don’t agree,” said Dag. “Take into consideration that there may have been several such ships, each one assigned a sector of the galaxy. And let’s say they have flown for many years and gathered information. A hundred years is nothing to a civilization that can send out such scouts. They can wait and examine their trophies at their leisure, and then decide where to dispatch the next expedition.”

“And they grab everything that comes into reach?” asked Sato, with unconcealed animosity towards the masters of the ship.

“But what criteria could robots use to determine whether they’d come upon a rational or non-rational creature?”

“Well, Nadezhda, for example, was clothed. They had seen our cities.”

“That’s not persuasive,” said Pavlysh. “Where’s the guarantee that on Planet X, the rational beings don’t walk around naked and don’t put garments on their pets?”

“And the chance that they would catch rational beings is low enough,” added Dag, “that they probably just ignored it. In any case, they were trying to keep all their trophies alive.”

“This is a meaningless discussion,” summed up Pavlyshev, picking up the next page. “We still know nothing of those who sent the ship. And we don’t know what their intentions were. In the part of the galaxy known to us, there is nothing like this. It means they dispatched this ship from a remote origin. We only know that they were with us, and for some reason did not return home.”

“Maybe that’s just as well,” said Dag.

The others remained silent.

To be continued...

to Challenge 409...