Toivo looked at the whole thing, line by line, neatly folded it on the perforations, and stuck it in the storage memory slot.
“Anything interesting?” Grisha asked with sympathy.
“What can I say …” Toivo muttered. He really was thinking hard about something else. “It’s the spring of 81 all over again.”
“What do you mean, all over again?”
Toivo ran his fingers over the terminal’s sensor, starting the next top of instructions.
“In March 81,” he said, “after two hundred years, was the first recorded incident of mass suicide of gray whales.”
“So,” Grisha said impatiently. “But why all over again?”
Toivo got up.
“It’s a long story,” he said. “You’ll read the report later. Let’s go home.”
TOIVO GLUMOV AT HOME.
8 May 99. Late Evening
They ate dinner in a room crimson with sunset. Asya was in a bad mood. Pashkovsky’s yeast, brought to the delicatessen combine straight from Pandora (in living biocontainers, covered with terra-cotta hoarfrost and bristling with homed respirator crooks, six kilos of the precious yeast in each sack), had rioted again. The taste-smell had crossed over into Sygma class, and the bitterness had risen to the last allowable degree. The experts were divided. The Master demanded that they cease making their alapaichiks, famous all over the planet, until they cleared things up, while Bruno, an insolent chatterbox, a boy, declared: “Why bother?” He had never dared raise his voice against the Master, and today suddenly he was giving speeches. The regular fans would simply not notice such a subtle change in flavor, and as for the gourmets, well, he bet his head that at least every fifth gourmet would be ecstatic over a taste change like that… Who needed his head? But they supported him! And now it wasn’t clear what would happen…
Asya flung open the window, sat on the windowsill, and looked down into the two kilometers of blue-green expanse.
‘Tm afraid I’ll have to By to Pandora,” she said.
“For long?” Toivo asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe for long”
“Why it that?” Toivo asked carefully.
“You see… Master feels that we’ve checked everything possible here on Earth. That means that there’s something wrong on the plantations. Maybe there’s a new strain… or maybe something’s happening in transit … We don’t know.”
You’ve gone to Pandora once already,” Toivo said, growing grin. “You went for a week and stayed three months.”
“What can I do?”
Toivo scratched his cheek and groaned.
“I don’t know what you can do, but I do know that three months without you is horrible.”
“And two years without me? When you were on that… whatsitsname…”
“Really! Bringing that up! I was young, I was a fool…I was a Progressor then! Iron man — muscles, mask, jaw! Listen, why doesn’t your Sonya go? She’s young and pretty; she can get married there. How about it?”
“Of course Sonya’s going with me. Any other ideas?”
“Yes. Let Master go. He started this whole thing, now let him go fix it.”
Asya merely looked at him.
“I take it back,” Toivo said quickly. “A mistake. An error.”
“He’s not even allowed to leave Sverdlovsk! He has taste buds! He hasn’t left his block in a quarter of a century!”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Toivo began berating himself. “Forever. Never again. I blurted it out. Made a gaffe. Let Bruno go.”
Asya spent several seconds burning him with an angry stare and then turned back to the window.
“Bruno won’t go,” she said angrily. “Bruno is going to work on the new bouquet. He wants to capture and standardize it… We’ll see about that…” She gave Toivo a sidelong glance and laughed. “Aha! Got you down! ‘Three months… without you.’ “
Toivo immediately got up, crossed the room, and sat on the floor at Asya’s feet, resting his head on her lap.
“You’re due for a vacation,” Asya said. “You could hunt there … It’s Pandora, after all! You could go to the Dunes… Look at our plantations … You can’t imagine what the Pashkovsky plantations are like!”
Toivo was silent, and pressed his cheek harder against her knees. Then she stopped talking, and they were silent for a while, until Asya asked:
“Is something going with you?”
“What makes you think that?”
“I don’t know. I can see.”
Toivo sighed deeply, got up from the floor, and went to the windowsill.
“You are right,” he said. “Something’s happening.”
“What?”
Toivo, squinting, examined the black streaks of clouds cutting across the coppery sunset. The bluish-black clusters of forest on the horizon. The thin black vertical of the thousand-story buildings, standing in blocks. The gigantic dome of the Forum on the left, shimmering copper, and the unrealistically smooth surface of the sea on the right. And the black, creeping swifts, darting from the hanging gardens a block higher and disappearing in the foliage of the hanging gardens a block lower.
“What’s happening?” Asya asked.
“You are amazingly beautiful,” Toivo said. “You have sable eyebrows. I don’t know exactly what those words mean, but they were used for someone very beautiful. You. You’re not even beautiful, you’re gorgeous. Sweet to look at. And your concerns are sweet. And your world is sweet. Even yew Bruno is sweet, if you think about it… And the world is fine, if your must know… ‘The world is fine, a pretty flower/Happiness for five hearts all in power/For nine kidneys/and four livers…’ I don’t know what that poem is. But it floated up in my memory, and I wanted to read it to you… Here’s what I have to tell you. Remember this! It’s quite possible that I’ll fly out to join you on Pandora soon. Because his patience will burst any minute, and he will send me off on vacation. Or just send me old for good. That’s what I read in his nut-brown eyes. As clear as on a monitor. And now let’s have some tea.”
Asya stared at him.
“It’s not working?” she asked.
Toivo avoided her eyes and shrugged his shoulders vaguely.
“Because from the very beginning, you were operating on the wrong theory,” Asya said hotly. “Because you set up the problem incorrectly. You can’t set up a problem so that no result satisfies you. Your hypothesis was flawed to begin with — remember, I told you that. If the Wanderers really were discovered, would that make you happy? And now you’re beginning to realize that they don’t exist, and you’re not happy either. You were wrong, you expressed the wrong hypothesis, feel as if you’re losing, when actually you haven’t lost anything.”
I’ve never argued with you.” Toivo said meekly. “It’s all my fault, that’s my fate.”
“You see, now he’s disillusioned in that idea of yours, too. Of course I know he won’t fire you; you’re just blabbering. He like you and appreciates you, and everyone knows that… But really, you can’t waste all these years — and for what, really? After all, you two don’t have anything but the naked idea. No one’s arguing. The idea is rather curious, it can tickle the nerves of anyone at all; but it’s nothing more! Basically, it’s simply the inversion of a longtime custom of humanity… it’s just Progressorism in reverse, and nothing more… If we intervene in someone’s history, then someone could intervene in ours… Wait, listen to me! First of all, you two forget that not every inversion is expressed in reality. Grammar is one thing, and reality is another. So at first it seemed interesting, and now it seems simply… well, indecent, I guess… Do you know what one big shot said to me yesterday? He said, “We’re not COMCONites, you know’, those COMCONites are enviable. When they come up against a truly serious mystery, they quickly attribute it to the work of the Wanderers, and they’re done!”
“Who said that, I wonder’!” Toivo asked grimly.
“What difference does it make! Now our fermenters are rebelling. Why should we seek the causes? It’s perfectly clear its the work of the Wanderers! The bloody hand of a supercivilization! Don’t get mad, please. Don’t get mad! You don’t like jokes like that, but you almost never hear them. But I hear them all the time. You don’t know how much trouble I get just from the Sikorski Syndrome alone… And it’s not even a joke. It’s a sentence, my dear people! It’s a diagnosis!”
Toivo had gotten himself under control.
“Well, actually, the yeast is a thought,” he said. “It’s an unexplained event! Why didn’t you report it?” he demanded severely. “Don’t you know the regulations? I’m calling Master on the carpet!”
“It’s all a joke to you,” Asya said angrily. “Everybody’s joking around here!”
“And that’s fine!” Toivo said. “You should be happy. When it really starts, you won’t feel like joking.”
Asya struck her fist on her knee.
“Oh, God! What are you pretending for? You don’t feel like joking, you don’t have time for joking, and that’s what irritates people about you COMCONites. You’ve built this grim, gloomy world around you, a world of threats, fear, and suspicion… Why? Where did you get it? Where did that cosmic misanthropy come from?”