Chunk 17

I carefully moved apart the branches with the rifle barrel.

"Irma..."

"I see," she responded.

On the yellow-hot sign in large black letters was written:

DANGER! PROHIBITED ZONE VIOLATORS WILL BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE

"Wow..." Stepping back, I craned my neck looking for surveillance cameras. One of them indeed rose above the fence, but the vine had long ago wrapped it in flexible branches and broke it off—it helplessly dangled on the wire.

"Now it's clear why the corporal erased the tracking data," Irma said. "Apparently there must be a hole somewhere through which he drove."

"And I think we don't need even bigger problems than we have. And entering a prohibited zone—that's asking for exactly those."

"Oh, don't be so proper!" she grimaced as if disgusted. "I'm going anyway. And you, if you want, go back and turn me in!"

"What's this about 'turn you in'!"

"Then make up your mind faster!"

I thought. Until this moment my plan regarding the cocoon and our investigation invariably ended with the words "...and we'll inform command." But the yellow-hot sign hinted quite transparently that command was in the know without us. So what—go back? And simply wait until whoever hatches from the next cocoon opens fire? And, for example, chooses not the parade ground, like Okamura, but the kindergarten where my Elza goes... I shuddered. No, I brought my family here and I'm obligated to do everything so that Elza and Vira aren't threatened.

"Are you asleep there or what?"

"Wait, Irma..." I didn't even turn around, afraid she'd knock me off my train of thought.

I need to tell myself the truth: to go further—means to put on the scales my career, insurance, and therefore my family's future... And not to go

—to put my Elza's safety here and today on the other scale. And at the same time bury the answer to the question whether people lose their minds from the pollen. After all, if it's not about the pollen, then maybe I'll have a chance... I mechanically rubbed my right hand.

"What's with you!" Irma couldn't stand it. "Got scared of some signs? Seriously? More than a human-sized cocoon?"

"Let me think!!!" It came out sharper than I wanted, but at least she shut up.

No, you've gone crazy. What is there to think about! I will absolutely not eat alien powder! And it's not about that at all! Though who am I fooling...

"Irma... Can pollen fix a genetic defect?"

"Pollen can fix any defect."

"I mean a problem at the cellular level. For example, there's an abnormal protein in cells that mutates. Can pollen cure sick cells?"

"Just like I cured cells affected by cancer."

I expected her to ask why I was interested, but Irma didn't ask.

If they kick me out of the Corps, then by the time I again step on the surface of Mother Earth, I'll have a wagon of debts, and soon—a set of reflexes instead of brains... And if I go back now... Go back and don't tell anyone anything...

You can just go to work and live like it was a week ago! But do you need that life, the finale of which will be the dance of a fool, if salvation is possibly right now in Irma's pocket? Do you need life when you'll see how Ix Chel will justify her name, turning into a woman with jaguar eyes? Do you want to stand among relatives at some nth funeral ceremony? Just imagine you see your daughter in a coffin...

"Let's go!" I hurried to exclaim, to shut up this voice in my head.

I don't want to imagine this. I'll never allow this. Won't even allow the very possibility. And, jumping into the hatch, I sat next to Irma. She silently pressed on the accelerator.

We found the hole in the fence in a few hundred meters. Along the way I saw at least three working cameras, but we kept far from the fence. And then—one more, completely wrapped in vine. And,

it seems, Okamura had also noticed it—a whole section of fence was rolled into mud by the rover's treads. The engines howled, increasing revs, and Irma skillfully drove the rover through the hole.

"Listen, Irma... If Okamura drove here alone, where did the cocoon that Alex found come from?"

She shrugged.

"We won't find out until we understand where the first one came from. Maybe the corporal brought some crap with him... It's not just that you found the second cocoon right at the warehouses..."

I fell into thought, habitually stroking my right hand. On the frontal viewing monitor you could see the nose of our machine cutting through dense undergrowth like a ship through waves. Irma was silent, focused on driving. I kept returning in thought now to Father who went out the window, now to Grandfather who left the race at the wheel of a car. Now, when I thought about them, new feelings were born in me, completely different from before. I still felt unbearably sorry for Father, but now I also felt anger. Burning anger. I was angry at him for the gifted genetic deficiency... And even more—for helplessness... These thoughts were exhausting. I tried to distract myself, focusing on contemplating the gloomy taiga landscapes on the viewing monitor, but it didn't help.

"Irma... I've long wanted to ask... How did you find out you had cancer?"

A second ago I didn't know I'd ask exactly this. On the other hand, what could I ask, having just emerged from gloomy thoughts about genetic diseases! She smiled sadly without taking her eyes from the viewing monitor.

"Doctors told me."

"Still on Earth?"

"No, of course! Nobody takes sick people into the Corps. Especially on long missions."

I smiled glumly and looked at my palm. Well, of course. Nobody and never.

She was silent for some time, immersed in memories. I didn't rush her. After about two minutes Irma continued herself:

"I was afraid of this all my life. My mother died of cancer—diagnosed too late... I saw all her suffering..." she pressed her lips together tightly and blinked several times, holding back tears. Then

she sighed deeply and continued: "From twenty I got used to regularly checking for tumor markers... There was a period when I woke up almost every night from nightmares where they told me I had stage four... But finally I convinced myself that cancer couldn't sneak up on me unnoticed. That I was ready to meet it when I still had all the chances..."

She was silent again.

"I arrived here not even suspecting I was standing on the edge of the grave. For about three months everything was wonderful... Then everything was just being built. Not a single biologist, the bio-company was still forming, I was managing equipment installation at the station."

Irma casually touched her cheek, hoping I wouldn't understand the real purpose of this gesture. But a second tear rolled as a large pea after the first.

"And then it all started. Very rapidly. Headaches, dizziness, vision problems..."

"And you suspected cancer?"

"You'll laugh, but I suspected pregnancy. But I didn't even have time to buy a test when I suddenly had an attack. Right at the workplace. Unconsciousness, convulsions... They urgently hospitalized me. Did a CT scan. The same one I showed you... I was preparing to end my life here. I only hoped death would be quick."

I avidly listened to every word, hoping she'd now say about the pollen, but Irma was silent.

"And the pollen?" I couldn't stand it.

"What about the pollen?"

"How did you discover it? And about your bracelet—will you tell?"

Irma seemed not to hear the question: she looked ahead intently. And then shook her head:

"Not today."

Of course I wanted to hear answers, but what can you do. I stared at the monitor. There was only the green-black monotony of the taiga, and in half an hour I started nodding off.

In a shaky half-sleep it seemed to me I was again on Proxima, sitting inside a transporter that was making its way through a swamp. My commander for some reason was Vandlik, she loomed over me, giving off

the smell of some unbearable evening perfume and tobacco. "Cheer up, soldier!" Vandlik rehearsed, as if she's not a control officer but a sergeant overheated in the sun. "We'll kick those spiders' asses!" Here Vandlik insistently shoves a bottle of pollen under my nose, and I pull back in fright, hit the back of my head on the rack (already in reality, not in the dream) and wake up. But I don't have time to examine in detail what's happening around before sticky, exhausting sleep again wraps around my head, like that predatory ivy around the surveillance camera... Crash—and the head hangs helplessly on wire, fallen on my chest and dangling from merciless shaking. "The camera hangs," I correct myself, "not the head, but the camera." And I'm glad I managed to preserve crumbs of sound mind even in a dream. For now I managed. Haven't yet gone out a window or crashed into a bridge support. Haven't yet locked myself in the bathroom, pressing a thermobaric grenade to my chest... "You'll never have the courage for that!" I say (for some reason in Virka's voice) with reproach and realize I'm sitting astride a fence with yellow-hot signs "Danger! Prohibited Zone." I can't get down because my right arm has become completely plastic and no longer obeys me. "It's not scary to pull the pin—no! It's scary when you want to pull it, but you—have nothing to do it with!" flashed through my head, and this thought for some reason amuses me greatly. "Fear is cocaine," suddenly a phrase pronounced in Vandlik's voice surfaces in memory. "And you're hooked, buddy. Badly hooked."

"Fear is cocaine," Vandlik once told me in training.

"I understand," I nodded. "Adrenaline junkies and all that..."

"No," she interrupted. "Forget about adrenaline! You can't explain what fear is using fear as an example. It's like talking about heroin's harm using heroin as an example. Moreover to an addict. No, Gil. Want to understand what fear is, listen to me: it's cocaine. Of your own production. Have you ever tried cocaine?"

I had. In the first year of army. For an hour and a half you feel like a perfectly tuned mechanism. Crystal-clear thinking, instant genius decisions without the slightest doubt.

And a fantastic inexhaustible supply of energy. For an hour and a half.

"No," I answered. "Haven't tried."

"On cocaine—impossible doesn't exist! Approximately the same effect is produced by fear when you're saving your skin. Even better—someone else's. You've definitely been through that. But it happens differently too. Overdose! Bam, and instead of an energy surge—complete stupor! Shortness of breath like you ran a marathon. Sweat floods your eyes. And in your brain—as if something burned out. This happens if you snorted too much, and exactly the same—if you got more scared than you can handle. Everyone's been through this too. And you, I'm sure, if you dig around, you'll remember."

I didn't even have to dig.

I remember that incident very well, because the stupor Vandlik talked about almost cost me my life. Long ago. But in my mind I'd returned many times to that moment when an unfamiliar until then irrational feeling of animal horror, contrary to all instincts, nailed me to the ground, not letting me save myself...

I was seven years old. It happened in the village where my mother's father lived. Large, green, with farms, beautiful houses, cozy streets. On ours gathered a whole company of such "children of asphalt" who'd come to grandmas and grandfathers. The main entertainment that summer—"night knocking," when over someone's window we'd tie a branch, and to the branch—a thread we'd pull, hiding far enough away. The branch knocked on the window, the owner looked out with a worried "Who's there?", we choked with laughter until finally he understood what was what and tore down our device... And then one of the local boys suggested doing this with the house of a granny nicknamed Gorbosia.

Gorbosia lived on the outskirts. She was a sturdy stocky old woman with remarkably wide shoulders, a huge hump above her left shoulder blade and a neck eternally tilted to the right side, as if she was constantly listening attentively to something. Due to her twisted torso the woman's right arm seemed much longer than the left. Or maybe it really was. This arm was sinewy and looked so strong, as if it belonged not to a granny but to a lumberjack used to hard work. They said Gorbosia used to be a professional athlete. A track and field star or something like that. But she was kicked out of sports either for doping or for prohibited implants. Whatever it was, that's exactly what later twisted the woman, bending her into an arc and prematurely aging her.

Adults forbade us even to approach her house, because Gorbosia, as they said about her, "wasn't right in the head." I'd seen her only once—in a supermarket in the district center. She rolled her cart, bent over so she was lower than it. She bent her left arm bird-like near her chest, with her right—it really did seem huge—Gorbosia deftly threw goods into the cart. Everyone looked around at her, and when Gorbosia glanced up from below with her little eyes, they immediately turned away and hurried to hide between the aisles. Now I'm almost certain I saw that day how she took from the shelf a huge axe with a carbon handle, the kind they advertise on TV, and put it in her cart.

"Let's go to Gorbosia's house!" someone said, and we went, since it had only just started getting dark, the sky was still lilac-gray and this prank didn't seem so scary.

There were six or seven of us. We caught the granny in the yard. Pressing against the fence palings, we watched with delight and fear how this mighty woman chopped wood, skillfully wielding a large axe—smartly and with pleasure, not at all as you might imagine given her age. Between blows she played with the tool, spinning it around her wrist, though in size the axe was almost as big as the granny herself. Having adjusted the next log on the woodpile, Gorbosia immediately swung with her muscular right arm. Without aiming, with a high "e-e-ekh" she split the log always on the first try.

When we attached an old pear tree's dry branch above Gorbosia's window, it had already gotten dark and the moon shone in the sky. We hid on the street, by the fence, so the escape route would be clear. Holding back slightly nervous giggles, we started pulling the thread. Any moment now should sound a surprised "Who?" or a plaintive "Stop!" But nothing happened. We increased the pressure—the thread could break from our jerks, the branch drummed on the glass as hard as possible. Nothing. We got bolder and even straightened up, no longer hiding behind the fence. Gorbosia seemed to have decided to ignore us. Someone suggested climbing into the yard again and throwing a clump of earth or a stone at the window... And here the door opened—silently and suddenly. The granny didn't even come out—she rushed at us like a snake disturbed in its lair—with a strange lopsided gait, limping, and therefore as if hopping. When a bench appeared in her path, she didn't go around it

but, like a gorilla, leaned on her huge right hand and with a jerk flipped her short torso over it, not slowing down one iota.

We froze in stupefaction. And only when the silence of the summer night was torn by the high metallic sound of an axe pulled from the woodpile did we come to our senses and rushed to run. Looking back every moment, we expected the granny to stop at the fence, exploding with helpless curses. But Gorbosia jumped the meter-and-a-half fence just as easily as the bench. And then we in unison let out a frightened, filled with despair scream.

In a few minutes we, panting to nausea, were exchanging impressions. The concrete road no one had driven on for a long time led past an old cemetery. In the moonlight the concrete surface was almost white. We still cast anxious glances over our shoulders, but no one was chasing us. And here we saw something ahead.

It looked like a jacket or something thrown in the middle of the road, and we weren't scared at all. Someone even tried to joke. And then this something moved. We tensed. For a second you could still think it was a play of shadows in the moonlight. But this something moved again, and now it was completely clear—it was moving. Coming toward us, awkwardly waddling.

"A dog!" someone said, and everyone stared at the moving shadow, thinking how dangerous it was. It happened that I was the first to make out in the shadow's strange movements the granny's lopsided gait.

"Gorbosia..." I exhaled, and a moment later it became obvious: the granny had managed to come out ahead of us. She was walking briskly in our direction, gripping the huge axe with her larger arm.

Letting out a frightened cry, our little company scattered like a flock of sparrows. Many weren't afraid to hide in the cemetery, which an hour ago they would have called the scariest place in the area. Only I alone stood there, unable to tear my gaze from the asymmetric and strange granny's movements. As if they'd made me drink three liters of dissolved gelatin and it had frozen in my esophagus—and here I'd barely found a position that allowed me to somehow breathe, and I didn't dare move...

From somewhere far away the wind brought my name, shouted scattered by several children's voices, and also, it seems, the word "run," but I heard almost none of this. I carefully breathed, trying not to choke on that jelly-like fear. And watched. Watched with widely

opened eyes as the moon traced on the limping shadow the features of the granny's face. Her large uneven nose, and sunken cheeks, and some strange inappropriate smile on thin lips. Last the moonlight marked her eyes, and I shuddered when I made out that gaze. "Not right in the head," my mother's voice said in my brain, and I understood very clearly: yes, it's true! She'll kill me without thinking for a moment about either the essence of this act or the consequences.

A few steps remained. A few awkward but remarkably light and quick steps. A few uneven movements of her wide shoulders. And now the axe had already flown up in a wide arc and smoothly floated toward my head. I followed it only with my eyes. And the granny, unbearably slowly stepping, drew out her battle cry "e-e-ekh!". I can't be killed, I'm still a child...

I often remember that moment. Exactly that second. And how a moment later the shell of a bubble with slowed time burst over me. And immediately as if someone invisible jerked me by the collar and shouted in my ear: "Back!" I sharply leaned back (barely) and felt something smooth pass over my head. "Doesn't hurt!" flashed an unexpected and even joyful thought. "Turns out it doesn't hurt!"

I don't remember how I rushed to run. How I turned my body, a second ago so clumsy and heavy. I remember already running with all my might, barely touching the concrete. Something warm and wet flows down my neck, and I for some reason think it's sweat, though at that same moment in my head the joyful thought still pounds: "Doesn't hurt! Turns out it doesn't hurt!"

I was fantastically lucky. The upper edge of the well-sharpened blade left a deep scratch above my ear, that's all. Adults (both parents and doctors, and everyone who heard this story) would worry and say for many more years that half a centimeter would have been enough—and the thin temporal bone would have been split like an eggshell. And I'd think each time about how I almost let myself be killed. How I froze as if my death was something foreseen. How at the very last moment (the last of all possible) I suddenly decided to live. And realized this decision—is easy and beautiful. Simply to live.

After this incident Gorbosia was declared dangerous and isolated for forced treatment...

"In such a state you could stick a knife in up to the hilt—you wouldn't even feel it!" I heard Vandlik's voice.

"Doesn't hurt!" my own childish voice responded in my head. "Turns out it doesn't hurt!"

"Are you listening or not?"

I hastily nodded:

"Yes. Knife to the hilt, you wouldn't even feel it," and absentmindedly added: "Or an axe..."

"And that, lieutenant, is crap!" Vandlik summed up. "If an adult man reacts like that—it's incurable. Because it means this man is a useless soldier! But that's easy to check in the neurodesigner. Much worse—when you're hooked. You can't check that, and the harm from such a fighter can be even greater."

"Hooked on fear?" I'd completely lost the thread of her reasoning. "Are you talking about cocaine?"

"Doesn't matter! Remember, Gilel, fear or coke—the effect is the same."

I tried to comprehend this. Then smiled.

"Are you serious?"

"Absolutely. Long-term cocaine use causes deafness and visual hallucinations. And fear... Constant fear... It makes you deaf to the voice of reason, and you see in everything only what you want to see. Not even that. You see what you're afraid to see. Therefore, you're no longer capable of either analyzing or making decisions. You're no longer from our reality."

Now Vandlik smiled, satisfied with such an apt comparison.

"Why are you telling me this, ma'am?" I suddenly became wary, realizing Vandlik wouldn't just chat with me for no reason.

"Because I sense it in you, Gilel. I don't know what exact fear, but you're hooked. And it seems, badly..."

At that second I saw before me Father's face when he took a step into the open window. One of his legs still stood on the windowsill, and his hands reflexively tried to grab at least something, but his body had already tilted too strongly over the abyss... On his lips still played the remnants of a foolish smile... But in his eyes were already pleading and horror. This imaginary picture surfaced in my consciousness often. More often than many real memories. But then, reasoning with Vandlik about the similarity of fear and cocaine, I first understood that actually Father's face I imagined had always been my own...

*

"Hey!"

Irma's voice immediately woke me, but to realize where I was took time.

"I'm not sleeping," I finally answered and mechanically touched the scar under my hair. "Hooked and, it seems, badly," Vandlik's words sounded in my head.

"Did we arrive?" I tried to make out something through the viewing slits, but saw only a wall of taiga.

"Exactly so..." Irma answered somehow gloomily.

"Where?"

"We've arrived in general," she said quietly. "Shit... The battery died."

"How's that?" I looked at the clock and rubbed my temples, trying to calculate how long we'd been driving. Not even noon yet. So not that much...

"Probably mechanical damage," Irma answered, checking with the onboard computer. "Electric motor consumption increased six hundred percent."

"By how much?!"

"And I was wondering why it was humming so much..."

"Your matrix... " I opened the hatch to look at the sky. It was cloudy. "With such sun we'll be charging till tomorrow..."

"I didn't bring solar batteries," Irma said.

"You didn't bring them?"

"Officially, we're on a raid checking video traps, remember? How would I explain why I need batteries?"

I groaned:

"And what will we do, huh? Leave the rover here?!"

Irma leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes.

"Really?! You won't even say 'sorry'?" I think I'd been angry at her this whole time, since the moment I found pollen at Vira's. "Or, say, 'we're in deep shit because of my passion for adventures'!"

"Sorry, we're in deep shit because of my passion for adventures," Irma repeated emotionlessly without opening her eyes.

"Go crazy..." I muttered and climbed out of the rover.

We stood in the center of some valley or... Maybe once it was the bed of a wide river: trees grew on both sides of a passage overgrown with low shrubs that resembled a clearing. Just in case I closed my helmet visor and jumped off the rover.

I landed unexpectedly hard. The impact echoed with a boom throughout the exosuit. Instead of soil under my feet, despite the grass, was something hard and even. I bent down in surprise to examine it, and here the upper part of the exosuit impossibly outweighed, and I crashed head first. "Good thing I closed the helmet," I managed to think before I stuck into the ground like an ostrich.

"Everything okay?" Irma's voice sounded in the headphones.

I tried to get up but couldn't. The situation was so absurd I burst out laughing, already guessing what the matter was.

"What?" Irma's voice sounded again. "Did you fall?"

I tried to straighten up but nothing worked—I stood on all fours with my head stuck in the ground, and helplessly laughed.

"What's there?! What are you doing?"

In this position I couldn't see the rover, only the treads, so I didn't manage to stop Irma. Only when her boots clanged on the armor did I guess she was about to jump off.

"Irma, don't! It's a magnet!"

But it was too late. Obviously alarmed, she jumped harder and farther than me. And sprawled face down with such a crash as if a metal bucket had rolled. I laughed again, we both had a foolish-funny appearance.

"What the fucked penis... Why are you neighing! " Irma swore every other word. "I can't get up, fucked matrix... Can you help, fucking mama? The emergency fastener is under me, can't reach..."

In this position her chances of freeing herself were minimal. If I were lying the same way, our situation would be not funny at all. I rolled onto my side, and the magnetic field helpfully pulled me right onto the strange surface. Barely tearing off one arm, I reached the emergency release lever and in a second got out of the exosuit like from a shell.