Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts Read Free Book Online Page A

reality, some different branching timeline, I never did see him again. You’ll permit me, I hope, the indulgence of pausing here to imagine that eventuality - my consciousness sliding, frictionlessly, from choice to choice, veering left and right at the branching nodes of a billion quantum choices and into a world in which Frenkel and I never met again, and I lived out my life in peaceful, blissful boredom. A world in which I did not endure the sufferings I endured in this timeline. A world in which I didn’t die in Chernobyl.

PART TWO

    ‘The party proceeds from the Marxist-Leninist proposition:
History is made by the People, and Communism is a creation of
the People.’
     
From The Programme of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, adopted by the 22nd Congress of the Party 1961

CHAPTER 3

    I shall stand before you now, as narrators used to do in old-fashioned fiction, to relate how the consequences of this story worked themselves out. We had written these aliens, and now they were coming true. You will want to know: But were they truly? And not wishing to deceive you I shall say: Yes, they were. (Of course they weren’t! At least, either these stories were literally coming true, or they weren’t. There’s no third option.) In order to explain how this could be, I need first of all to relate two episodes. The first is a meeting I had with two Americans. The other sees me sitting in a restaurant being stung on the neck by a mosquito. It may not be immediately clear to you why these two episodes are so important; but you must trust me that they are, and that if you read on you will understand how and why.
    Moscow.
    The very cold winter of 1985-6 was on the cusp of changing into a very cold spring, and I was still in the process of getting on with my solitary life. I was queuing for hours every day outside dusty understocked shops, because I had no wife or girlfriend who was prepared to queue on my behalf. I was picking up work where I could find it: jabbing an accusing forefinger over and again at my typewriter to generate, slowly, the Russian version of some foreign document for Izvestia ; sitting in an airless room with junior trade functionaries and a doleful-looking Cuban factory owner whose English, though execrable, was nevertheless better than his Russian, on a day when no Spanish translator could be obtained. Much of the time I had no work.
    One day I was called in to the Office of Liaison and Overseas Exchange; an annexe of government for whom I occasionally interpreted. It was a dusty, frozen day. I walked into town to save the price of a Metro ticket. An east wind pushed its icy palm against my face, and poured chill down my collar. The sun was shining very brightly. I might describe its light as sarcastic.
    The Office of Liaison and Overseas Exchange was housed in an enormous concrete carton of a building on Leningradsky Prospekt. The glass of all the windows on its ground floor was covered in speckles of grit and dirt, as if they had caught grey measles. Its main entrance was an off-the-street alcove that trapped and turned over the wind most effectively. A miniature flurry of airborne jetsam seemed endlessly to be circulating in that space. Antique cigarette ends buzzed at my ankles like cardboard midges.
    In I went.
    I signed in, and rode the lift to the top of the building where Comrade Polenski himself met me. ‘A real stab in the arse with a dagger, this pair,’ he said.
    ‘UK?’
    ‘American.’
    I was impressed. I said so. If I had known what was coming - I mean, what these Americans would mean for my life, and for the saving of my nation - I would have been more than impressed.
    ‘Since Gorbachev,’ Polenski was saying, ‘my desk is clogged with Americans eager to visit Moscow.’
    ‘What do these Americans want? Trade?’
    Polenski stopped. He was twenty years my junior, and exactly my height; but since I had been considerably shrunken by age, he appeared somehow more condensed and