Yellow Blue Tibia

CODA

I started with Frenkel, and will end with him. This is the part where the red-haired man shoots me through the heart; the inevitable coda. Death can be postponed, perhaps, but not evaded.

I took Dora for a ride on the famous Moscow Metro. We got off and ascended outside the American embassy, and I waited with her in the antechamber. The embassy officials were very agitated to meet her — excited, they assured her, and delighted. They’d reported her as missing; and the death of James Coyne, quite apart from creating an enormous stir in certain circles, had made everybody fearful for her safety. Her family and friends would be delighted to discover she was all right. Her whole country would.

She was taken away. She said she was happy staying with me in my flat, but the authorities lodged her in embassy accommodation and — I believe — flew her out of Moscow the following day. The exact nature of Coyne’s nuclear business, presumably rendered more acutely sensitive by the events at Chernobyl, facilitated the rapidity and secrecy of her exit.

The last thing she said to me was a promise that she would be in touch as soon as she could. I did not know whether I would ever see her again.

But I could hope.

Rather than go straight home I took a walk through the centre of the enormous, populous city in which I had been born and in which I had spent most of my life. I wandered like a tourist. Wasn’t the city full of beauty, and youth, though, that morning? Wasn’t it though? The sunlight, perhaps, had scared away the crones and the wrinkled old retainers; the rising sap had driven out the natural Russian reticence of the courting couples. There was a superfluity of youth: infatuated young girls in headscarfs lolling on the arms of solid-limbed, blunt-faced young men; athletic females, witchy, pale-faced males, walking serious-faced together; the glibness of youth, the cleanness of youth, the innocent ferocity of youth. I had been young in the first half of the 1940s, when youth had existed as expensive filler for ditches and shell-holes, as the cement between two nations coming together like bricks squashed in the wall. It was wonderful, and peculiar, to see such unreaped harvests of youth. And always amongst them, moving, as the red-spiny stickleback headbutts the clear flowing waters and worms his way upstream, is death.

The front of my skull throbbed. I was wholly without anxiety, because, after all, I had lost the capacity for anxiety.

‘Come along,’ said the red-haired man, burlying up against me. He was wearing a jacket, into which his right arm was tucked, Napoleon-style — he had a gun in there, of course.

‘You have followed me from the American embassy.’

‘I think you mean to say,’ the red-haired man hissed, ‘you again? Isn’t that what you mean to say?’

‘I can say that if you prefer.’

‘You didn’t think,’ he said, coming closer still, to impress upon me that he did indeed have a pistol, ‘that you’d seen the last of me? Did you?’ He smelt, a little, of soap. Since my sense of smell is very poor, I suppose that means that, in fact, he smelt strongly of soap. But of course he was clean! Death is the cleanest thing of all.

‘You were lucky in Kiev,’ he said. ‘But your luck runs out here. Here is where it all ends for you, comrade.’

‘I’ve had so much good luck recently,’ I told him, ‘I was getting sated with it. It’s like sugar, good luck. At first its very sweet, but after a while you start to think: any more of this and I shall be sick.’

We were standing on a main thoroughfare, and people were coming and going. But of course none of them stopped to interfere with two men having so intimate a conversation. I wondered if there might be Militia officers somewhere who might want to intervene, but there was nobody. ‘At least,’ I said, ‘Dora is safe. I’m content to die, given that.’

‘Come on,’ he said, directing me down the street. ‘Down here,’ he said, down a side road on the left. ‘Along there.’ This was much less busy, and a much better arena for an assassin to shoot an old man and leave his body on the side. ‘Here?’ I asked, in a disinterested voice.

‘Further on.’

‘Trofim tried to kill me, and he didn’t manage it,’ I said, conversationally. I was walking alongside a huge pane of glass, in which my shuffling reflection seemed to step ghostly through the dust-covered and empty display spaces. ‘Then you tried to kill me, in that hospital in Kiev, and you didn’t manage it. Then Frenkel himself — your boss — tried to kill me in a hotel room, and he didn’t manage it either.’

‘Fourth time lucky,’ said the red-haired man.

‘But where are you taking me, though?’ I complained. We were passing, now, a pockmarked stone fa¸ade arrayed with closed shutters. ‘My legs get tired easily. Why not just do it right here?’

We walked into an open space with a dry fountain in the middle, and there was Frenkel, waiting for me. I understood then that Frenkel wanted to rant at me before I was dispatched. He had always been a choleric individual. I hoped it wouldn’t take too long. I really was very tired of all that.

He was sitting in a wheeled chair, with a red blanket tucked over his lap and a pair of sunglasses — for by now the hot Moscow spring had heated itself up, and the sky was bright and the sun bore down with an almost radioactive intensity. The concrete bowl of the fountain, and its central stone spire from which water had long since ceased to flow, looked rather like a satellite dish; except that all it had gathered from being pointed at the sky was a layer of dried and blackened human detritus: old paper and discarded rubbish cartons.

‘Hello Jan,’ I said.

‘Konsty,’ he slurred. His mouth was curled round in a left-heavy sneer. The red-headed KGB man looked into the middle distance with an expression of vague disgust.

‘How delightful to see you,’ I said.

The red-haired man took up position behind me. There was something ostentatious about the way he had his hand on his gun.

‘You pushed me out of a fucking window,’ Frenkel gobbled, and saliva cried from his mouth. With a claw-like hand he dabbed at his face with a handkerchief.

‘You were about to push me.’

‘I was trying to close off your timelines, you fucker, not kill you. But you were trying to kill me. Don’t you understand anything?’

‘Close off my what?’

‘You think your luck in evading death is down to… what? God just really likes you?’

My temper rose half a degree or so. ‘You stabbed Dora.’

He nodded. ‘I thought I’d killed her too,’ he said, shortly. ‘But she fucking came back to life, didn’t she?’

‘Dora Norman has left the country,’ I said. ‘You won’t be able to get to her now. But Comrade Red-hair here knows all about that. He has followed me here from the American embassy. Haven’t you, comrade?’

‘Don’t talk to him,’ slobbered Frenkel, padding at his face again with the cloth. His arm came up and went down like a mechanical spar, pivoting at the elbow. He was clutching a square of cloth in his birdclaw right hand, dabbing at his mouth with it after each little speech. ‘Fucking red-headed imbecile.’

‘The injury to his head has disinhibited him,’ murmured the red-headed man, in a disappointed tone of voice.

‘How unfortunate,’ I said.

Frenkel wriggled in his chair. ‘Can’t keep my fucking mouth shut, now, can I? It’s not just the swearing. It’s the secrets. I can’t stop babbling them. We almost had it in 1977. People — the world — people almost saw them in fucking 1977. Petrazavodsk. We were thwarted by — certain persons. And since then, haven’t things gone to shit? Haven’t they?’

‘Hard to think we could get any closer to shit than we were in the 1970s,’ I said.

‘Scientology,’ Frenkel growled. ‘Interference pattern. Mass belief systems. Communism is the creation of the people. Religion is the creation of the people. It gets in the way. We can’t — oh! ah! Fuck! You know what Lenin said-fuck?’

‘Said-fuck? What do you mean?’

‘Said. Fucking said. Do you know what Lenin fucking said. Fuck.’

‘I also suffered an injury to my head, to the frontal lobe,’ I observed. ‘I assume, from Colonel Frenkel’s propensity to profanity, that an injury to the back of the head is associated with a different set of symptoms?’

‘He’s lucky to be alive,’ said red-hair, grimly.

‘Lenin said,’ slobbered Frenkel, ‘that if we succeed in establishing interplanetary communications, all our philosophies, moral and social views, will have to be revised. Lenin said that! That was Lenin! Coyne was fond of quoting that.’

‘Coyne?’

‘Fucking American bastard.’

‘Coyne was yours?’

‘Of course! What did you think? Fuck. He was supposed to persuade you of the reality of the attack on Chernobyl. Fuckfuck.’

‘He was trying to warn me,’ I said, curiously unsettled by this information.

‘In a fucking manner of speaking,’ slurred Frenkel, dabbing at the corner of his mouth. ‘He was trying to warn everybody. That’s what we are fucking doing.’

‘You killed him!’

Frenkel twitched his face about. ‘Don’t be, don’t be,’ he snarled, and pressed his handkerchief against his mouth. ‘Don’t be fucking — stupid,’ he said, through the fabric. Why would we kill him? He was ours.’

‘Nonsense. Don’t swear and talk nonsense, Jan. Do one or the other. Coyne and Dora were…’

‘He’d called me when L-Ron,’ Frenkel interrupted. ‘When L-Ron. Fuck! He’d brought the woman over to me,’ said Frenkel, flapping his arm away, with its square of white cloth, as if surrendering. ‘She’s a special case. There aren’t many like her! That’s why he brought her. He usually came on his own. You think I was loitering outside the ministry that evening just by chance? And then! And then! Hubbard’s death was the perfect opportunity. The moment had come. We figured: a loosening of that whole system. We figured a defocusing. All we needed to do was give the collective blindness of people one fucking jolt. It was the perfect fucking opportunity to pull together the…’ He coughed, and then dropped his head.

‘Scientology? What has that to do with anything?’

‘Aa. Oo. I don’t know why I keep talking,’ slurped Frenkel. ‘I can’t seem to stop babbling.’

‘No,’ agreed the red-haired man, snide. ‘You can’t.’

‘Fucking brain injury. Mass hypnosis. They’re techniques. Brainwashing. Fuck. That’s too strong a term for it, brainwashing, but — you know. Belief systems. Belief. Oh, garoo. You saw them fucking kill him, and then you magicked a fucking rope out of your brainpan to explain it away. Why would you do that?’

‘I know what I saw,’ I told him.

‘That’s the whole fucking point! Nobody sees anything — until they know what they are seeing! There’s no such fucking thing as pure seeing. It’s always being shaped by what we know. Except it’s not what we know, it’s what we fucking think and what we presuppose and what we have been told. She doesn’t even know what she’s capable of!’

‘You’re not making sense, Jan,’ I said.

‘Excuse me, Comrade fucking Ironist. Making sense? Don’t give me that. You wouldn’t know sense if it came up and bit off your balls.’

I looked around. Red-haired man was still behind me, with his hand tucked into his own jacket. A few people were coming and going. I contemplated calling to them, but it would have been fruitless. What would I have yelled? ‘Help help!’ perhaps? I would have been taken for a drunk, and Muscovites would have averted their eyes and shuffled on.

‘If they are here, these aliens of yours,’ I said, meaning perhaps to postpone the inevitable, ‘then where are they? What are they doing?’

‘They’re making war upon us,’ said Frenkel. ‘Of course.’

‘I don’t see—’

‘They’re invading us, of course. They’re fucking softening us up. A century or so of attrition. It’s the’- dab, dab, dab — ‘battleship anchored off the coast, bombarding our fucking entrenchments. Of course they’d prefer it if we didn’t see the battleship. If we saw it, we might start firing back.’

‘Bombarding us?’

‘You don’t think the entire twentieth century is fucking evidence of the shells landing amongst us? You don’t think it’s strange that this century, out of all the previous epochs of human existence, is the one where the world goes up in fucking flames all around us?’

‘Flames? You were the one who wanted to blow up Chernobyl!’

‘The thing that’s incredible about UFOs,’ Frenkel went on, ‘is not that millions of people believe in them, but that millions don’t. It takes a continual effort of will not to see them.’

I started to reply. But Frenkel was in spate now.

‘I’m not the bad guy,’ he slurred. ‘Two roads. One of them leads to glory — a human renaissance. One led to the stars, do you understand?’ Dab, dab. ‘Not a figure of speech. The other leads to the mundane. The mundane. The fucking mundane. The bourgeois mundane.’ He seemed to be getting increasingly worked up. ‘The shitting mundane. The Yankee mundane. The deadly mundane. The defeating mundane. The appalling, appalling, appalling mundane. Into the realm of that American woman’s perceiving consciousness. The interference pattern that… fucking fuck. That fucking. Fucking.’

‘You seem to be distilling your thought down to a single word,’ I observed.

‘If only we’d taken her out of the picture…’ Dab dab. ‘Everything was in place. She’ll go back to America,’ dabbing at his twisted mouth. ‘And good riddance. Fucking reality catalyst and she’s not even aware of it herself. Coyne was right about her.’

‘You’re talking about the woman I love,’ I said.

A rasp, the sound of somebody clearing his throat.

I looked behind me. Red-hair was still standing there, his hand still menacingly inside his jacket. But directly behind him was now standing a second man: a fellow enormously bearded and dressed in an old-style black coat. There was something vaguely familiar-looking about him, but perhaps it was simply that he looked as many Russians do. Coat, beard, patient manner. ‘Good morning, comrade,’ I said to this newcomer.

‘Good morning,’ he replied.

The red-haired man started and looked around. ‘Hey? What do you want? Go on — fuck off.’

‘I’m just waiting, comrade,’ said the big-bearded man, mildly. ‘I’ll wait my turn.’

‘This is none of your business,’ said Red-hair. ‘Go on, fuck off.’

I looked about the little square. Two women, plump and middle-aged, were standing in the corner watching us; deciding, evidently, whether or not to join the queue. Because, of course, two people standing together in a Moscow street is just two people; but three people standing together must be queuing for something.

‘Whatever it is the wheelchair-bound comrade is selling,’ said Big-beard, ‘I’m sure he’ll have enough to sell to a third customer, after he’s dealt with you two.’

‘Selling?’ barked Frenkel, from his chair. ‘Fuck off!’

The two women were now making their way over towards the dry fountain.

‘Look,’ said Red-hair, bringing his hand gunless from his jacket the better to gesticulate. ‘Go away. Fuck off. This is a private matter.’

The women joined the queue. ‘What’s he got?’ asked the plumper of the two. ‘Oranges, is it?’

‘It’s not oranges!’ snapped Frenkel.

‘This is not a queue,’ insisted the red-haired man.

Big-beard looked at him. Then he turned his head to look at the two ladies queuing behind him. He looked back at us. ‘It certainly looks like a queue to me, comrade.’

‘Empirically,’ I put in, ‘I’d have to say he’s correct.’

‘What is he selling?’ asked the less plump of the two ladies.

‘Death,’ I told them, smiling.

‘Death? What is that — cigarettes, you mean? Vodka, you mean?’

‘I was hoping for oranges,’ said the plumper of the two ladies.

‘Nik, get rid of them,’ snarled Frenkel, slaver pooling in the sickle-curve of his twisted lower lip. ‘Just get rid of them! This is KGB business! Tell them!’

‘KGB business,’ said Nik, bringing out his pistol and flourishing it.

The three newcomers looked at him. ‘Since when do the KGB have to queue in the street to buy oranges?’ asked the plumper of the two women.

‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ said the less plump. ‘Shame on you, young man. You should be in Afghanistan, fighting for the Motherland, like my nephew.’

‘He wants all the oranges to himself,’ said the first woman.

More people, seeing the queue form, were starting to come across and line up. ‘What’s he selling? asked one

‘Rope,’ I said, in a loud voice. ‘Unless,’ I added, turning back to Frenkel. ‘Unless you’re saying, really, that there is no rope.’

‘There is no rope!’ barked Frenkel, spittle flying from his mouth in the sunshine like sparks. ‘There was no rope, there is no rope — you know all about that.’

‘Rope?’ said somebody, joining the queue at the back. ‘Or cord? I will buy cord. I need cord to mend the curtains in my apartment.’

‘I heard it was oranges,’ said the plumper of the two plump women behind me.

‘Nik!’ cried Frenkel. ‘Get rid of them. Shoot if you have to.’

There were now eight people queuing, and more looking on from the edge of the square. Red-haired man stepped a little to one side, so everybody could see him. ‘Listen everybody!’ he called. ‘Do you see? Do you see this gun?’

Everybody was looking at the gun. He held it in the air. Then he brought it down, and aimed it at my head. Its muzzle was no more than an inch from my temples. ‘Do you see?’ he called. ‘Do you understand?’

There was a murmur up and down the line. Three more people had joined the end of the queue.

Shortly the big-bearded man behind me spoke up. ‘How much for the gun, then, comrade?’

‘What?’

‘How much for the gun?’

‘The gun’s not for sale, you moron.’

Big-beard stiffened. ‘There’s no need to be impolite, comrade,’ he said.

‘It’s for fucking killing people,’ called Frenkel, from his chair. ‘Tell him it’s not for sale. Put the gun in his face, Nik!’

Nik did so. The big-bearded man examined it closely. ‘Looks to be in good order. What’s the price though?’

‘I’m not showing it to you, moron,’ said the red-haired man. ‘I’m threatening you with it. Can’t you tell the difference?’

There were now twelve people in the queue.

‘Twelve witnesses,’ I pointed out to Frenkel. ‘I suppose that makes killing me a more awkward business than it was before?’

‘Nothing of the sort. Twelve morons, you mean. Twelve witnesses I don’t think.’ A disapproving murmur ran up and down the line. ‘Nik will scare them all away. Nik!’

The red-haired man was glowering at Big-beard.

‘Shoot in the air! Shoot in the ground!’ called Frenkel. ‘Then put one in Skvorecky’s head and we can be on our way before the Militia show up.’

Frenkel smiled, to show his death’s-head teeth; the bleached white leather of his cheeks crumpled. Nik made a Г with his right arm, aiming the pistol at the central stock of the desiccated fountain, to his right and my left, and pulled the trigger. I must have heard ten thousand guns firing in my life — more than that number, I daresay. But it’s not a noise you ever get used to. It is always louder than you remember. I flinched. The crash of the gun going off and the clatter of various shards of concrete being blasted from the point of impact were almost simultaneous. The next sound was from further back in the queue, as a small chunk of spattering stone struck somebody — a woman I think — somewhere — on the cheek, I think. ‘Fuck off the lot of you,’ yelled Red-hair, over the brief echo of this report. Then he rotated his body like the turret of a tank to bring his arm, still sticking straight out at a right angle, to bear on me.

I was aware of the queue dispersing rapidly. The two women nearest me flinched away and scurried, head down, towards the edge of the square, squeaking. Some other people were helping the person hit by ricocheting masonry away. Others were simply slinking off. As quickly as it had assembled, the queue was disappearing.

All except for the large-bearded man, who had been the first to join. He stood his ground, seemingly unfazed. Soon everybody had gone except for Frenkel, Red-hair, myself and this stranger. Although what was strangest about him was how familiar he looked.

But whatever it was, and whatever he was saying, red-haired Nik wasn’t about to wait for it. His job now was to shoot me, and to wheel his boss away before the authorities turned up. He was an experienced KGB assassin, aiming his gun at the heart of his victim.

He pulled the trigger.

The trigger released a firing-hammer, a component inside the body of the weapon, which in turn impacted upon the base-pan of the bullet. The bullet was ready in the chamber. It had been slotted into position by a spring that was pushing up with its coil, and continued its upward push.

Gunpowder ignited, and gases expanded very rapidly, forcing the projectile portion of the bullet along the inwardly-grooved barrel.

‘Konstantin Andreiovich Skvorecky!’ boomed the bearded man, his mouth barely visible beneath the black carpeting of his beard. The thing that seemed familiar to me about this man clicked in my brain (click, as the Pistol Makarova clicked and detonated).

‘Why,’ I said, ‘you could be the son of Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov! You must be Nikolai Nikolaivitch’s son! The resemblance is… uncanny.’

‘It’s not the resemblance which is uncanny,’ he said, smiling broadly, and shaking his head so that his heavy beard wobbled like a bough of black blossom in a spring breeze.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean what I say! That’s not the uncanny thing.’

I turned my head back to watch the bullet coming out of the gun. Its point emerged first, as if the pouting mouth of the barrel were sticking its tongue out at me. Then the whole thing slipped free and began moving through the air towards me,

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘I don’t understand why it’s coming so slowly.’

‘It’s easy enough to explain.’

‘Asterinov?’ I said, looking back at him. ‘Are you really Asterinov?’

‘The very same! Don’t you remember, Konstantin Andreiovich, working together in that dacha? Do you remember you and I walking in the meadows outside. I confessed to you that I had stolen most of what I wrote from other writers. I remember that conversation very well, my friend. It was very heartening to me, that conversation.’

‘You’ve aged well,’ I observed. I meant: You haven’t aged at all.

The bullet was in the air, now, between the gun and myself. It was moving through the air, as a torpedo through water: which is to say, it cleaved the air, or punched a hole in it, sweating DNA-STRANDS of curling turbulence behind it. The strange thing, oddly enough, was not that it was moving so slowly. The strange thing was that it was swelling, like a plump-black kernel of popcorn in the fire. As it expanded it lost its density. In moments it was the size of a grape, and had become semi-transparent. I drew a breath into my lungs. I breathed out again.

‘I don’t, so, I don’t understand,’ I said.

The red-haired man was a ghost now, as transparent as tracing paper. As transparent as mist. As transparent as an image projected upon glass, and he had one arm out firing his gun, or he had both arms out throttlingly, or he had his arms by his side, it wasn’t clear.

Frenkel was scowling. His face was perfectly opaque. I could not see through his face, and I could see the movement of his face. But everybody else in that square was growing wispy, glasslike. The air had assumed a certain quality; the sort of impression you get in a heavy downpour: not that water and air are superimposed, because, clearly, in a rainstorm it is a question of either water or air. Either water or air or some third thing. The interleaving of water and air is temporal, not spatial, although the effect for the viewer is almost like superposition. I’m afraid this isn’t a very good way of putting it.

Frenkel was unaffected; but everybody else in the square was fading. The buildings themselves were flickering on a frequency as rapid as a television image on its cathode screen, too rapidly for my eye to distinguish the what and what they were flickering between. The sky had a cloudy feel, even though there were no clouds. Or there were clouds.

‘Why have things slowed?’ I asked.

‘I suppose,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov, twining a finger into his beard. ‘I think it has something to do with processing density. Something like: if you force water through a narrow pipe it moves quickly, and if you put the same volume of water through a much wider pipe it moves slowly.’

‘The water?’

‘Time. And the pipe — well you can see.’ He looked around. ‘But I’m not really expert in that sort of thing.’

The bullet was a foot from my chest, and the size of a tennis ball: dark grey now. I could not see it spinning, as perhaps I expected to do; but that was because I could not see its edges at all. It was fuzzed, weirdly unfocused. ‘Should I move out of the way?’

‘I don’t think you can.’

‘No?’

‘I don’t think you have time. Between, I mean, the bullet leaving the gun and reaching you?’

‘But it’s taking a long time.’

‘Ah! Well it seems that way.’

‘It’s not really taking a long time?’

‘How long does a bullet take to travel a few feet? In one realityline, I mean if we isolate just one — the one you were in a moment ago — it would take less than a second. A single realityline is a very narrow pipe you see: time gushes rapidly along it.’

‘But, then, I am going to die?’

‘You’re still talking to me,’ said Asterinov. ‘So, I doubt it. It’ll pass through your heart, yes. But it will slip between heartbeats, I’d say.’

‘Fuck!’ contributed Frenkel. He was wriggling with fury in his chair, although sluggishly.

I looked around once more. ‘It’s everybody except you, and me, and Frenkel.’ I observed. The bullet, now a ball of soot the size of a football, had intersected my chest. I could almost feel it. It was almost wholly spectral. It was both palpable and impalpable at the same time. It with either palpable, or impalpable, or else some third thing.

‘It is everybody save for us three,’ Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov agreed.

‘Why us three.’

‘Use your fucking noddle,’ barked Frenkel. ‘Use you fucking head.’

‘Asterinov — I must say I’m surprised to see you. Delighted, obviously, but surprised. I’d heard you were dead.’

‘Reports of my death,’ he beamed. ‘I forget how that one ends.’

‘But you haven’t aged. Perhaps you’re a ghost?’

‘No such thing. No such thing.’

‘I’m trying to get my head around this,’ I informed them.

The air around me was less atmosphere and more immersion, or preparation was of a multiple spectral shift, a shift of spectres, or spectra, an uncanny gloom. It was somewhat like the quality light takes on during an eclipse. The ghosts were now pale, and only some were loitering. Others were on the move, making their way towards the streets that led off the square. Or they weren’t moving. Either they were moving, or they weren’t moving, or it was some third thing.

‘You’re unaged because of them,’ I said to Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov. By them I meant — well, you know whom I meant.

‘I am them, Konstantin Andreiovich.’

‘When you say the pipe is wider…’

‘One reality is a narrow pipe: but a bundle of forty thousand, give or take… that’s a broader pipe. Accumulate them altogether and the flow is… Ah, but, look! The bullet went through you, and no ill effects.’

I looked round. The bullet was now a beachball of smoke, or the ghost of one of those knots of tumbleweed that rolls along the street in a Western movie. Or, as I watched, a mere sphere of mist, expanding and disappearing.

‘I wasn’t shot?’

‘You were shot, in that realityline. But when you consolidate all forty thousand, given that you weren’t shot in the vast majority, then the average is…’ He seemed to lose interest in his explanation. His finger was in his beard.

‘You’re saying I was shot in the particular, but that on average I wasn’t shot?’

‘That’s a good way of putting it.’

‘I’m immune?’

‘The probability of you being killed, in this lamination, is very low.’

‘Lamination?’

He winced. ‘Not a very good way of putting it, I know. Do you know what quantum physics is?’ Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov asked me.

‘He knows shit,’ splurged Frenkel, from his wheelchair.

‘I know a little,’ I corrected.

‘Copenhagen fuck!’ Frenkel slurmed. ‘I wish we’d written that the aliens blew up Copenhagen, all those years ago. Fucking Copenhagen.’

‘A blameless town,’ I objected.

‘Blameless? Fucking quantum physics.’

‘Destroying Copenhagen would hardly alter the facts of the quantum universe,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov.

There was something disorienting happening in my inner ear. There was a faint dazzle, like solar glare over a camera’s convex glass eye, in my sense of the city. It was all happening at once. It wasn’t happening at all. It wasn’t happening at all, or it was all happening at once, or there was some other, third thing.

‘Every event that can happen more than one way,’ Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov was saying, ‘happens more than one way. You might think that would lead to a multiverse of near infinite complexity.’

‘I wouldn’t think anything of the sort, comrade,’ I said, mildly.

‘The reason it doesn’t,’ he went on, ‘is that many of these branching alternatives cancel one another out. Over the broader fan of possibilities, spreading into a complex delta-basin of alternate realities, probability creates reality gradients. Realities below a certain threshold are liable to evaporate altogether. Realities above a certain threshold can solidify in an absolute sense. It’s chance, you see, but also observation. That’s the Copenhagen part.’

‘Fucking Copenhagen,’ growled Frenkel.

‘And some consciousnesses are more gifted with that solidifying effectiveness than others.’

‘Dora fucking Norman,’ snapped Frenkel. ‘Fuck! Fucking fuck!’

But there is still a broad range of alternative realities co-existing. Universes in which you were blown up and died in Chernobyl — lots of them. The universe in which you survived is a tenuous one, in terms of probability. If the Norman woman had not perceived you as strongly as she did — does — then you’d have died there. And his beard danced and waggled as he spoke: all the long black lines extruded from those little hair-pits on his chin and cheeks and upper lip, all grown out and matted and packed together.

‘You’re very well informed,’ I said. ‘About my life.’

‘We have a good perspective upon it.’ He twirled fingers in his beard again. ‘You can see, our technology gives us access to this realm of — superposition.’

‘That’s the ground on which they’re fucking invading us!’ screeched Frenkel, slobber scattering. ‘This one! This ground! That’s why it’s so hard to, fucking, pin them down.’

I looked over at Frenkel. ‘You ought to calm yourself, Jan.’

‘That’s what I was trying to fucking tell you in that park in Kiev! Look up!’

I looked up. The sky was full of flying saucers, from horizon to horizon. There were alien spacecraft everywhere, and descending directly above our heads was a craft bigger than all the rest: the pupil of a colossal eye, the radial iris spokes of grey and dark green against a dark blue background, a shield-boss kilometres in diameter framing it. The air was shuddered by the thrum of its impossible engines. It might descend inexorably and crush central Moscow — I didn’t know. It was possible I could see clouds through the main body of the thing. I wasn’t sure.

‘[Good gracious,]’ I said, lapsing, for some reason, into English.

‘Fuck!’ yelled Frenkel, spit coming from his mouth in pearls. ‘Fuck! This is the ground they’re invading us over!’

‘This.’ I looked around. ‘It’s more than one reality, it’s the whole sheaf of possible realities?’

‘A good spread of them. As many as we can coalesce. And the bullet that passed through your chest — that’s a very weak reality, when diluted by all the rest. Very weak.’

‘Weak because?’

‘Isn’t it obvious ! Because in most of the rest you died in Chernobyl ! And in the realities in which you died in Chernobyl, there’s no need for Nik here—’ but Nik was barely here: he was vaguer than the dream to the waker — ‘to follow you across Moscow and put a bullet in your chest.’

‘So — he didn’t shoot me?’

‘Of course he fucking shot you!’ slurred Frenkel.

‘He shot you in one thread. In forty thousand other threads he didn’t shoot you. So if you’re worrying whether you’ve been shot and killed by Nik… you need to know which thread you’re in.’

‘Fucking fuck,’ Frenkel interjected, with no very obvious pertinence.

‘I’m still alive,’ I said, running my hand across my chest. ‘So I suppose I wasn’t in that thread.’

‘You were in that thread,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov. ‘But you were in forty thousand other threads as well, at the same time, and in those forty thousand you weren’t shot. The ones in which you live diluted the one in which you die to the point where… Well, look I don’t want to strain the point. You see what I’m saying.’

I looked at my feet. They looked weirdly solid against the fluctuating, pulsing, darkly luminous pavement. Good Moscow stone. The ground interested me less as metaphysics, and more as — I don’t know. The grave, I supposed. The space opened by pressing the hidden latch-switch, visible only by moonlight, and lifting one of the great pavement slabs up and out, a horizontal door. Those steps lead down… where do they lead, exactly? ‘I don’t see,’ I said.

‘I see,’ I said.

‘I don’t see,’ I said, ‘how I’m suddenly living forty thousand and one realitylines simultaneously. Is it that — what? Is that normal?’

‘Fuck!’ gargled Frenkel. He sounded like he was choking on something. His own rage.

‘That’s not normal. It’s normal to live one realityline, of course. Our consciousnesses work that way; they slide effortlessly left, right, whichever, down all the frictionless cleavages and reunions of possibilities. We never even notice them.’

‘I don’t see,’ I said. Then I said, ‘No, I don’t see.’

‘You’re wondering,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov, his beard shuddering like a live thing, like a beard of black bees, ‘given that your natural habitat is a single realityline, how you can be presently living in the full spread of forty thousand?’

‘I’m wondering that,’ I agreed.

‘Fucking! Fuh-fuh-fuh!’ interjected Frenkel, and then he sneezed. It made his body writhe like an eel in its chair. He almost fell out.

‘You want to know how we are doing it?’ Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov asked. ‘So look up.’

I looked up again. Directly above us, now no more than a thousand yards up, was the main, vast alien spacecraft. It looked like a huge inverted cymbal made of pig-iron: so broad it stretched wider than the eye could take in. A mind accustomed to seeing large things in the sky thinks, automatically, cloud: and a shape this big put me in mind of rain clouds first of all — a perfectly circular rain cloud with a vast eye in its centre. But there was no doubting its prodigious solidity. There was all manner of intricate griddle and porthole detail in the underside. It was not rotating, but around its bulging black-blister middle — that central dome alone was more than a hundred metres across, I think — strips of radial illumination, not sharp-edged but not exactly fuzzy either, moved clockwise very slowly: yellow and red ones, blue and white ones. The exact middle of the central dome, like an inverted nipple, was a ridged cavity.

My feelings were of awe.

I tried to breathe in, but my lungs felt like polythene bags, and my mouth was dry. The thought kept running through my head: how could I not have noticed!

Frenkel was coughing furiously in his chair. Either that, or he was having a conniption fit.

‘It takes, I don’t mind telling you, enormous amounts of energy even to maintain the co-presence of a relatively small spread, like the forty thousand we’re in now. And even a ship as large as,’ he pointed up with his finger, ‘as that one can’t do it indefinitely. Do you remember being intercepted on the road to Moscow?’

I did remember. Of course I did. ‘That happened,’ I said, dumbly.

‘That craft, that intercepted you,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov. It was even bigger than the one up there. It had even more powerful… I suppose, engines is the best word. That craft put out a spread of about eighty-thousand threads, but even that, with all the power we could muster — even that we could only maintain for a short time. And that was because she was in the car. Do you start to understand?’

‘I did see a UFO on that road,’ I said, feeling foolish.

‘Yes.’

‘And, at the same time — I didn’t. At the same time, we dropped the soldier off at that brothel and drove on.’

‘Yes.’

I looked up at the staggering, enormous object sitting in mid-air directly above us. It was incredible. It was certainly there, though.

‘And now she’s not here…’

‘She’s being flown, dispatch, back to America. She’s in the plane now, waiting for take-off.’

Frenkel pulled himself up in his chair. ‘I fucking told you. Look around, Konsty! This is where they’re invading! Not Russia, or Ukraine, or America — here. This is why they’re simultaneously such a genuine threat and why they’re so hard to spot! Because their main battle front isn’t in one reality, but — here. In this fucking manyspace. This fucking manyspacetime.’

With a slightly sticky movement, as if wading through a resisting medium, Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov took a step towards me, and laid his hand on my arm.

‘Oh, garoo, garoo,’ cried Frenkel. ‘Don’t you fucking… don’t you fucking walk off with him…’

‘Come along Konstantin Andreiovich,’ said Asterinov. ‘Just a little walk round the corner. I’m not abducting you. We’ve intervened for a good reason. We’ve intervened at my insistence, actually.’

‘What’s round the corner?’

‘Round the corner is a better place to be when the spread is collapsed back down to a single realityline again. Because once that happens, and Nik sees that he has not managed to shoot you dead with his first bullet, he’ll shoot again. Won’t he! So, better not to be directly in front of his gun.’

‘Round the corner,’ I said, taking an awkward step myself, and then another, with Asterinov’s still-young hand tucked into my elbow. ‘To stay alive.’

‘Yes.’

‘You intervened to save my life?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because we were friends, all those decades ago?’

Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov’s beard moved, and I wondered if perhaps he was smiling. ‘It would be nice to think that,’ he said.

‘Don’t! Oh, garoo! Garoo!’ shrieked Frenkel, his arms flailing. ‘Don’t fucking walk off with him. He’s the enemy, Konsty!’ But soon we had left him behind and were moving on. ‘Fucking Copenhagen !’ he yelled. ‘Fucking Copenhagen!’

The corner, when we came to it, shimmered and bulged, and we went round it, and walked in silence for a while, until, suddenly, everything snapped abruptly and rather bafflingly into familiarity again. The buildings acquired sharp-edged lucidity. People filled out their own spectral shapes.

I looked up, but the sky was empty. Instead of a huge alien spacecraft ceilinging the view there was nothing but a quantity of grey-blue sky.

‘I wish it were true,’ Asterinov was saying, ‘that I intervened to save your life, Konstantin Andreiovich, for old times’ sake. Indeed I remember that time in the dacha! Good memories. But, no, we intervened not for your sake. But because of Dora Norman. She is remarkable.’

‘I know.’

‘Her ability is… important. We need to understand it better. Her line is now tangled up with yours. It’s pretty much as simple as that.’

‘You’re the enemy,’ I said.

‘We’re the good guys, Konstantin Andreiovich,’ he replied, his beard splitting with a wide smile. ‘You’re the enemy.’

‘Now that I understand the particular… territories you are moving over, I comprehend the particular reasons why UFO sightings have been so problematic,’ I told him. I told it, I should say. ‘So widely reported and believed and simultaneously so widely unseen and disbelieved.’

‘The invasion is pretty much over, friend,’ it said to me. ‘It’s been four decades since we met in that dacha.’

‘You were one of them, even then?’

It laughed. ‘You were a human, even then?’ he retorted.

‘But what were we… what were we doing?’

‘We were crafting a realityline. We were preparing the ground for my people. We were… think of it as, clearing the undergrowth. Think of it as laying a path through possibilities. We were creating the spine of a realityline.’

‘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.