Yellow Blue Tibia (44 page)

‘We were just writers.’

‘Writers create.’

‘Not
realities
, though. Only fictions. Only science fictions.’

‘What you have to do,’ said the creature that I knew as Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov, ‘is consider the total spread of realitylines. That’s what you need to think of
as
reality is the whole spread. Reality is a matter of probabilities. Likelihoods, and possibilities. That’s the idiom of fiction. That’s what artists are good at doing. What were we doing? We were laying a line about which
actual
realities, coral-like, could grow. I was there to make sure we came up with the right
sort
of line.’

‘Radiation aliens?’

‘Radiation aliens.’

‘It seems so haphazard. We knew nothing, for instance - for an instance, we knew nothing of radiation! It was all guesswork. The atomic bomb had only just been dropped, and we hadn’t even heard of it!’

‘I see you think of radiation in
that
sense,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch. His beard jiggled.

We were still walking, briskly now, turning right onto a main street, and then left again. I pictured, somewhere behind me, a bewildered Nik blinking and waving his pistol. Because the aliens wanted me alive, of course they wanted me dead. It was war, after all.

‘It’s her, isn’t it?’ I said to the alien.

‘You mean Dora.’

‘Yes. You need her, in some sense. Because of her abilities.’

‘Yes.’

‘You need me alive only because
she
needs me alive.’

‘Love,’ said the alien, ‘has its redemptive possibilities. Don’t you think?’ And we had arrived at the marble gateway, and the steps down to the Metro.

‘Goodbye, now,’ he said. ‘Down there, get on a train. And stay away from Jan Frenkel.’ He turned to go, but I caught his sleeve.

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Wait. It’s hard to believe that you’re not real!’

‘But I am indeed real,’ he retorted.

‘Not human, though.’

‘Not human, no.’ He made a second move, as if to walk off, and several people pushed past me to go down the steps into the station.

‘Do you remember,’ I said to him, ‘when you and I talked in that meadow? We were discussing your book about the man who could breathe under water. You confessed that you had not written that book; you had merely copied it from another language.’

‘I do remember.’

‘You stole all those stories . . . why? Because you lacked the capacity to invent?’

‘Exactly that,’ he said, his eyes creasing with pleasure. ‘Exactly! That is your talent, the ability to invent realities. It is one of the things that makes your otherwise unexceptional world so interesting to us.’

‘But,’ I said, ‘but. I asked if you had plagiarised
Starsearch. I
asked if you had simply copied
Starsearch
from somebody else.’

‘I remember.’

‘And you said you had not!’

He put his head a little to one side, doggishly.

‘I’m not expressing myself very well,’ I said. ‘What I mean is: you plagiarised all your novels, as you confessed, except
Starsearch
. Therefore you composed
Starsearch
as an original fiction, the product of your own creative imagination. So I think to myself: if this is the truth - if you
could
write that fiction - then why did you need five of the Soviet Union’s top SF writers to concoct a storyline? Why not . . . do it yourself?’

‘That’s beyond us,’ he said. He didn’t sound mournful, or regretful. He spoke in a purely explanatory mode.

‘Yet you managed it with
Starsearch
,’ I said.

‘No.’

‘Then how did you write
Starsearch
?’

‘It is mere documentary verisimilitude, is
Starsearch
. A factual account drawn from my life. A poor substitute for the splendours of fictional invention, I’m afraid. Goodbye, Konstantin Andreiovich.’ That was the last I ever saw of him.

 

Radiation in
that
sense. I see now, of course, in what sense they were radiation aliens: not in the sense I had understood, of (as it might be) nuclear radiation. It was realitylines that radiated; quantum alternatives that radiated; and the aliens’ technical advantage over us is a motor to manipulate this radiative spread of possible
nows
. As Frenkel said, this gives them a mighty advantage, but I tend to think - given how long they have been engaged in their assault upon us, and how slow their campaign has advanced - that they must be in some other sense feeble: few, perhaps; weak or uncertain. Or wouldn’t they, else, have essayed a sudden rush and a push? What they are doing, instead, is stealth; picking up individuals here and there, moving their heavy cannon into position. But they are almost ready. We shall know the assault is about to commence in earnest when accounts of alien abduction becomes less frequent, or perhaps stop being reported altogether. That is when we should be most afraid.

That they saved my life, I suppose, means that in some way they consider that I shall be of use to them. But before they saved my life Dora did, without even knowing that she had done it: her mind, somehow attuned, aware of the spread of realities branching from that moment in Chernobyl and thinning them automatically down into the few lines in which I was still alive. Love shining from her eyes. Radiation in
that
sense.

KONSTANTIN SKVORECKY

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Konstantin Andreiovich Skvorecky
(1917-) is a Russian-born writer of
science fiction
. Most of Skvorecky’s fiction was produced in the 1930s, including such minor classics as
Tamara
(1935),
Plenilune
(1936),
Sirius na Rusi
(1936) [translated as
Three Who Made a Star
, 1938],
Mortidnik
(1937),
Vsyo eto
(1938) [translated as
And All This
, 2003],
Nadezhda
(1939),
Zoya
(1939) and various others. He served in the
Red Army
in the
Second World War
, but disappeared shortly after the war. His reappearance coincided with the
Chernobyl disaster.
It is believed by some that Skvorecky, having been abducted by aliens, spent the years 1945-1986 on another planet. His memoir
Yellow Blue Tibia
(1999) provides an account of these missing years that explicitly asserts (or attempts to) the existence of
aliens,
an assertion which has been widely disbelieved. The memoir also asserts that he
died
inside Chernobyl in 1986. His more recent pamphlet
When I Met the Aliens (And What They Told Me)
(2000) is a satirical reimagining of the events of that novel, warning people of an alien invasion he claims is on-going.

 

 

Skvorecky presently lives in
New York
with his American wife and their young child. He has applied for
US citizenship
.

 

 

Wikiquote
has a selection of material relating to the work of Konstantin Andreiovich Skvorecky.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

There is a great deal of evidence of Stalin’s interest in UFOs, as indeed there is for his interest in a wide range of cranky and peculiar things. On 19 November 2002,
Pravda
published an article (an English translation is available at a number of online sites) detailing Stalin’s abiding interest in extraterrestrials and the possibilities of alien contact, as well as the many military and scientific bodies set up by the Soviets to secretly investigate the phenomenon. The figure Frenkel gives in the novel (‘
Seven research institutes and eleven departments. All of them are attached to a secret wing of the KGB created specifically for this purpose by Andropov
’) is taken from
Pravda
, and is evidence of, at the very least, an enduring Soviet interest in the phenomenon. The alleged 1947 retrieval of an alien artefact during archeological digs in Kiev (at a site very near the present day location of the internationally renowned Kiev Tchaikovsky Conservatory) is attested from several sources, and is a hardy perennial of UFO literature. The strange events at Petrazavodsk on 20 September 1977 have likewise been debated widely in the UFO community. Many thousands of eyewitnesses saw radiation aliens (‘
radiating pulsating beams of light
’, ‘
huge jellyfish of light
’) and tens of thousands of military personnel were mobilised.

The kernel of this novel is an attempt to suggest a way of reconciling the two seemingly contradictory facts about UFOs: that, on the one hand, they have touched the lives of many millions of people, often directly; and that, on the other, that they clearly don’t exist. I have sought to suggest one possible explanation for this odd paradox of contemporary culture. Those interested in the UFO phenomenon who would like an uncranky and balanced account are advised to read Bryan Appleyard’s
Aliens: Why They Are Here
(Scribner 2005). I would like thank Jane Brocket for sharing her reminiscences of youthful visits to both Kiev and Moscow in the mid-1980s. Thanks also to Rachel Roberts for reading the whole MS and making many helpful suggestions, and to my editor Simon Spanton, whose input on this novel has been unusually important.