Chekhov’s Journey Read online

  “So it is. But nobody’s answering.”

  “Hardly surprising—we’re already here.” Mikhail laid the hand-set down without bothering to cradle it. “Come on.”

  Osip immediately scuttled to the abandoned hand-set and scooped it up. He listened too, then cradled it hastily and pursued Mikhail and Sonya to the door to see them off his premises.

  Mikhail sauntered a few paces down the corridor before stopping to fuss with his shoe. “Damned lace!”

  As soon as he heard the door close, he tiptoed back to eavesdrop. Straining, he heard the whirr of Osip dialling a new number—followed by a bewildered curse and the slam of the hand-set being banged down. Grinning, he caught up with Sonya.

  “That’s given him food for thought.”

  “Us too, Mike. Us too.” She pushed open the double doors.

  “Ah, Mr Petrov,” Kirilenko called out heartily. “Refreshed, and ready for another bout?”

  Seventeen

  LYDIA-POPOVA THREW the revolver down on the table. It was Anton’s own revolver, commandeered for the occasion. An embroidered linen tablecloth concealed a thick felt underlay, thus protecting Governor Vladimirov’s precious rosewood from any scars or dents.

  “My fingers are stiff from holding the horrid thing!” In a transport of fury she began twisting her lace handkerchief as though to massage life back into her hand. “Why are you standing there?” she shouted at Vershinin-Smirnov. “Get out!”

  Meanwhile Anton regarded the proceedings quizzically from the very back of the huge reception room. Crystal chandeliers blazed and the heavy tasselled curtains were closed, though there was still ample daylight outside. Twenty rows of chairs, upholstered in maroon velvet, seated the cream of local society. A number of the men—notably the Governor—wore military uniform; others were dressed in frock coats; but quite a few lounged in shabbier duds. One fellow was puffing a cigar; beside him an old buffer in dundreary whiskers was snoozing. Of the ladies, some wore old-fashioned crinolettes, and others had their skirts tied back tightly under their buttocks; there were also gowns with high collars and flounced shoulders. A few of the women were wagging Chinese fans.

  And every few moments the whole audience would burst into a cacophony of laughter, which drowned the dialogue—the men slapping their sides to stop them splitting; so presumably this performance of The Bear could be regarded as a huge success…

  The hoots and guffaws lanced through Anton’s head like migraine. ‘Dear God,’ he thought, ‘isn’t people’s taste appalling?’

  “I love you!” Vershinin bellowed. “This is the last thing in the world I need! I’ve got that interest to pay off tomorrow. The haymaking’s just started. And now there’s you!”

  When he seized Lydia round the waist, the watching women’s eyes popped with delighted scandal.

  He wailed, “I’ll never forgive myself!” And the audience convulsed.

  “You just keep away from me!” cried Lydia. “Take your hands off! I loathe you!” She reached towards the revolver … but she didn’t pick it up. “I … I challenge you!”

  “Bravo!” the cigar puffer cried.

  And suddenly Lydia and Vershinin fell into each other’s arms and kissed … and kissed … and carried on smooching passionately for an inordinately long time. Rodé seemed to have missed his cue. Or maybe he was delaying his entry out of mischief. The audience oooh-ed and aaah-ed.

  At long last Rodé did bustle in, waving an axe. He was followed by several extras recruited from among the Governor’s own servants. These men were a little uncertain as to what was actually going on, and visibly nervous to be hauling gardening tools into the best room in the house. But this was all part of the fun. The spectators cackled at the gardener with his rake and the coachman with a pitchfork in his hand and the other workmen wielding spades as cudgels.

  “Holy Saints!” shrieked Rodé as he caught sight of Lydia and Vershinin locked in an embrace.

  Lydia contrived to look demure. With eyes downcast, she delivered her punch line. “Looka, you can tell them that Toby isn’t to have any oats today!” So much for her recently deceased husband’s favourite horse …

  And that was that. Since there was no curtain—except for the curtains at the windows—Lydia, Vershinin and Rodé all stood stock still for a few moments, before stepping forward in unison, Lydia to curtsey, the two men to bow deeply from the waist.

  The audience burst into applause—and the extras milled about in confusion, till Vershinin noticed and chased them gruffly off. Fleeing, the servants crushed through the doorway in a pack, and the rake got jammed across it…

  Some wit cried out, “Author!” Turning about in their seats, everyone took up the call. Anton rose reluctantly, and bowed.

  “Speech!”

  “No, please …” He spread his hands beseechingly. “All the credit belongs to our fine actors.”

  Rodé brandished the axe aloft. “Not a speech about this! A speech about the expedition!”

  “Absolutely so!” seconded the bewhiskered gentleman—who had recovered consciousness the moment the play was over. “To the front with you, man!”

  During Anton’s speech, Lydia passed blithely amongst the audience bearing a collecting bowl—which, a little later, she announced had netted a thousand roubles. Once again—what a farce, in both senses!—The Bear had bailed Anton out …

  Servants carried the chairs aside to clear the floor for dancing and drinking; and a buffet was wheeled in. Immediately half the men made a bee line for it.

  Gaily Lydia handed Anton’s gun back to him. “Come and chat with the Governor, Anton Pavlovich! Looka!” she called to Rode, “do get rid of that axe. You look like a madman.”

  ‘Looka,’ indeed? So Lydia was still carrying on the drama in her head? Either it was the sign of the great actress, or a monomaniac …

  Three musicians arrived, bearing fiddles and a guitar. ‘Surely I don’t have to dance!’ thought Anton. ‘I’ll be the bear, then. I’ll be the capering, baited bear …’

  The original bear, Vershinin, was deep in converse with Governor Vladimirov. Lydia tugged at Anton’s sleeve, and he pocketed the gun hastily as she drew him towards the Governor, to join in …

  How many fathers or grandfathers of people in this very room had once similarly skulked towards someone in authority, with a weapon or a petition or an incriminating letter concealed about their person? It occurred to him that Exiles might be a good title for a comedy … or perhaps not. Even if it was a knock-about farce, with a title like that it probably hadn’t a cat in Hell’s chance of passing the Censor … Still, it could make a publishable story—something to give the lie to all those smart brats at Russian Idea with their beady, liberal eyes trained remorselessly on Mr Chekhov … Was this any way for an honest writer to think?

  As he waited his turn to speak, nostalgia overwhelmed him. He yearned for a summerhouse overlooking a little orchard, rather than the infinite forests hereabouts. Yes, with a good fishing stream nearby instead of a raging Siberian torrent …

  But any summerhouse he bought would probably turn out to be riddled with woodworm; and the trees in the orchard would suffer from blight… Yet the stream, ah the stream! He could sit on its bank for hours on end with a rod in his hand, while the world and life degenerated all about him until the cold death of everything …

  Surely there must be an orchard somewhere! For that matter, the whole world could be an orchard one day … ‘What a hope,’ he thought. And yet he hoped.

  The Governor clapped a hand on him.

  “Anton Pavlovich, I haven’t laughed so much for ages! You must tell me the secret of your comic talent…”

  Eighteen

  ANTON ASTROV STOPPED whistling the Czarist anthem a few seconds before 3.00 p.m., Moscow time. “Now, Anna.”

  And Anna Aksakova pressed the button to begin their Flux-jump; they started to fall through time …

  Alarm bells rang out immediately; red lights stabbed on and off. Stars
frisked about on the viewscreens. The Moon raced from one screen to the next, trailing phosphorescence in its wake.

  On the central screen the image of Earth held steady, but all detail had disappeared: the world blurred and foamed like a whisking bowl.

  Sasha pointed a shaky finger at the frothing Earth. “Why are we still here? Why hasn’t it gone?”

  Anton quickly shut off all the bells and panic-lights. “Here? Where is here, anyway? Yuri?”

  Valentin consulted the retardograph and temporal symptomometer. “Time minus 5 years. T minus 5.3 … minus 5.7 … We’re diving backwards through time, all right! If you can call it diving. Drifting, more like.”

  “The Earth’s spinning backwards,” Sasha said. “We’re seeing it speeded up—that’s why it’s so blurred.”

  “And yet we’ve left the present,” said Yuri Valentin. “T minus 6.8 …”

  “But we should be light years away by now,” said Anton.

  “Well, we aren’t. We’re following the world-line exactly.”

  They all stared at the Earth spinning widdershins on the screen.

  Presently Yuri tapped a jagged graph displayed on the cathode screen of the chronodyne resonometer.

  “Resonance, that’s it! Look, here’s the evidence. The instant our own flux-field went into action, so did a second flux-field. The two fields resonated momentarily. This had the effect of subtracting most of our spatial momentum. We got glued to the Earth’s world-line, kilometre for kilometre, year for year.”

  “A second flux-field?”

  “It must have been Captain America’s Shield switching on, Commander.”

  “Was it deliberate? Did they try to sabotage us?”

  “Spontaneous, I’d say. There must be an acausal trigger effect, independent of distance …” Yuri pointed at the isocalendar. “Look, our temporal momentum got slowed as well. This’ll affect our point of emergence in past time—it could shake it plus or minus fifty years.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t malicious?”

  “No, the other flux-field switched on the very instant ours did—without even a nanosecond’s delay! No human skill could have arranged it. And I can tell you, if it was intentional it was a bloody stupid thing to do. Time-energy must have been transferred.”

  “To the Earth?”

  “Presumably.”

  “Well, what effect would that have?”

  Yuri shook his head. “I’m not a time-theorist—nobody on board is. Those types all stayed behind at their cushy research jobs in Academgorodok and Krasnoyarsk. We’re star-colonists; so what do we need to know about time-theory?”

  “We were star-colonists. Right now it looks as though we’ll end up colonising the Earth—a century or two ago.”

  Sasha unbuckled herself. “You forget Cosmic Censorship. Paradox isn’t allowed. I’m going to take a naked eyeball look.” She drifted up towards the observation pod.

  “Be careful! It could be damned disorienting, seeing all this in the raw.”

  “It’s my job, Commander.” Sasha disappeared through the hatch.

  Anton turned to Anna. “What’s your opinion of the consequences, Earth-wise?”

  “How do I know? Time-storms, maybe?”

  “What are time-storms, Aksakova? Come on, tell me. Are they like snow-storms?”

  “How do I know what they’re like? Or even if such things can happen? It’s just a word—to cover our ignorance.”

  “T minus 15.5 years,” said Yuri.

  At T minus 25 years Sasha bobbed back through the hatch; catching hold of Anton’s seat, she righted herself.

  “Rough, up there?”

  “Of course it’s bad… That isn’t the worst thing!” Scrambling to her own seat, she fiddled with the radar. “I thought so—we’re diving towards the Earth. We’re on collision course.”

  “Oh shit. How long have we got left?”

  “How many years till it happens, that’s the important thing,” said Yuri. “Not how many minutes ahead, but how many years ago. Sasha, patch yourself into my console and we’ll try to compute it.”

  “But this ship can’t possibly enter the Earth’s atmosphere,” said Anna. “We aren’t aerodynamic.”

  “Oh, we can enter the atmosphere all right,” snapped Anton. “What happens then is another matter.”

  Anna hesitated. “The flux-field might protect us … as though we’re in an envelope. I mean, we aren’t in direct contact with our own space-time environment, are we? We’re only in virtual contact.”

  “Oh yes. But can we navigate, while we’re in virtual contact? Well, maybe we can, at that! Anna, I want you to fire the starboard and upper attitude jets—then light the plasma torch.”

  She swallowed. “Acknowledged. Five seconds, and counting …”

  Five seconds later the ship jerked and shuddered; but the central screen remained full of the Earth, swirling amorphously.

  “This isn’t normal motion that’s taking us in,” said Anna hopelessly. “It’s the Flux.”

  “Any chance of killing the field?”

  “Before the pre-set time? I’d have to reprogramme.”

  “How long would that take?”

  “By the looks of it: too long.”

  “Start doing it, anyway—conditions may alter. Yuri, any idea what year we’ll hit the Earth?”

  Valentin had been trying to average the fluctuating readings of his datalscope. “I think it’ll be some time between 1910 and 1908.”

  “Where, geographically, Sorina?”

  “Possibly it’ll be … where we were looking at before Anna pushed the button.”

  “The Indian Ocean? Himalayas? Suppose we re-enter there … we end up over … Siberia’’

  “I’d say the best estimate is 1908.”

  “1908? My God. That was the year of the Tunguska explosion! Are we the Tunguska event?”

  Anna sat back. “If so, then we’ve had it. Because Tunguska already happened—we can’t alter that, can we?”

  “Tunguska might have been something else: a giant meteor, anything. Carry on trying!”

  “Or it might have been the first and last flux-ship from the future …”

  “T minus 37 years.”

  Nineteen

  AT LONG LAST—and none too soon for Anton’s liking, since he was heartily fed up with Krasnoyarsk by now—on a crisp blue Thursday the expedition was ready to set off, from a jetty on the Yenisey. (The weather was also ready for them: mornings were sharp with frost again, and flurries of snow had blown by during the past few days.)

  Scores of well-wishers and spectators gathered on the riverbank; foremost among them Governor Vladimirov and his lady, accompanied by the editor of Krasnoyarets who had written an extolling leader the day before. Rodé and Fedotik were there, of course, though they too would quit Krasnoyarsk within hours; they had received further travel expenses and testy orders to proceed post-haste to the Amur before the full onset of winter could entrap them into months of gambling, balls and other festivities.

  Old Polena and Olga Franzovna were shepherding Lydia’s daughters …

  Masha waved and wept and capered, and at one point was in danger of falling into the river. But Nastya squinted tightly at her Mother, as though Countess Lydia was a criminal who ought to be reported for abandoning her family, were it not for the amazing fact that the authorities connived corruptly in whatever was going on. The little girl stared daggers at Vershinin—to get rid of him; though this was useless, since he seemed to be eloping with her Mother. And Mr Chekhov she continued to regard with beady suspicion. He was supposed to be famous, but he didn’t behave as if he believed it; so Nastya suspected a confidence trick—particularly when Mama had given the man so much money. Mr Chekhov hadn’t even shown a scrap of interest in his ‘own’ play! Maybe he hadn’t actually written it … As for that scruffy fellow Tsiolkovsky, whom the said ‘Chekhov’ had invited once he’d tested the bath-water with his toe, obviously he was a shady accomplice! None of his
hamstrung, hectic talk of people on other planets and ships sailing through the sky had fooled little Nastya. It was simply amazing how gullible grown-ups could be.

  In one respect the girl was looking forward to her Mama’s absence with some relish. For this would allow her ample leeway to practise deceptions of her own—upon silly Masha, and daft old Polena. Maybe even upon dear Olga Franzovna, too—though Nastya respected that effervescent lady’s ability to make cards vanish and pop up in unexpected places. Still, a governess was only a jumped-up servant!

  Finally, Nastya brought herself to wave. And a moment later, to her great surprise, she also cried.

  The six members of the expedition had embarked upon two specially constructed rafts, piloted by a small gang of hired rivermen. Stout rails penned the pack horses with their stock of hay, two sledges, and assorted panniers, saddlebags and boxes. On the first raft Rodé Sidorov, Mirek and Tsiolkovsky; on the second, Vershinin, Lydia Zelenina and Anton.

  As the rivermen poled them away from the jetty into the rushing current, Lydia snapped a photograph of all the people waving farewell then restored her camera to the safety of its waterproof box.

  “Well, the die is cast,” said Vershinin. “Or as Vasily Romanych would put it: the Rubicon is crossed!”

  “But we aren’t crossing the Yenisey,” Lydia said, puzzled. “Not till we get to the Angara …”

  “Exactly!” Vershinin roared with laughter. “But that’s what old Fedotik would say, bless his heart.”

  She smiled at him. “Yes, he would, wouldn’t he?”

  Meanwhile Fedotik and everyone else on the shore diminished swiftly in size till they were indistinguishable. Anton turned away, and began to roll a cigarette. Had Krasnoyarsk been Moscow itself, he would still have been bored with it long ago …

  This first stage of the route was by far the easiest: swiftly downstream along the river for a couple of hundred versts as far as the confluence with the Angara. Soon they left the lumber mills and tanneries and workers’ hovels behind; and then, behind them too, some chilly marshes where the honk of geese sounded more like the sad croaking of frogs soon to be interred by ice. Presently, forest pressed gloomily about both banks.