We - Yevgeny Zamyatin (whitelam books txt) 📗

only a part of their faces were free from hair, like our ancestors’, and the organs of reproduction, similar to ours.

All this was so unbelievable, so unexpected, that I stood there quietly (I assert positively that I stood quietly), and looked around. Like a scale: overload one side sufficiently and then you may gently put on the other as much as you will; the arrow will not move.

Suddenly I felt alone. I-330 was no longer with me. I don’t know how nor where she disappeared. Around me were only those, with their hair glistening like silk in the sunlight. I caught someone’s warm, strong, dark shoulder.

“Listen, please, in the name of the Well-Doer, could you tell me where she went? A while, a minute ago she.⁠ ⁠…”

Long-haired, austere eyebrows turned to me.

“Sh⁠ ⁠… sh⁠ ⁠… silence!” He made a sign with his head towards the centre where there stood the yellow, skull-like stone.

There above the heads of all I saw her. The sun beat straight into my eyes, and because of that she seemed coal-black, standing out on the blue cloth of the sky⁠—a coal-black silhouette on a blue background. A little higher the clouds were floating. And it seemed that not the clouds but the rock itself, and she herself upon that rock, and the crowd and the clearing⁠—all were silently floating like a ship, and the earth was light and glided away from under the feet.⁠ ⁠…

“Brothers!” (It was she.) “Brothers, you all know that there inside the Wall, in the City, they are building the Integral. And you know also that the day has come for us to destroy that Wall and all other walls, so that the green wind may blow all over the earth, from end to end. But the Integral is going to take these walls up into the heights to the thousands of other worlds which every evening whisper to us with their lights through the black leaves of night.⁠ ⁠…”

Waves and foam and wind were beating the rock:

“Down with the Integral! Down!”

“No, brothers, not ‘down.’ The Integral must be ours. And it shall be ours. On the day when it first sets sail into the sky, we shall be on board. For the Builder of the Integral is with us. He left the walls, he came with me here in order to be with us. Long live the Builder!”

A second⁠—and I was somewhere above everything. Under me: heads, heads, heads, wide open yelling mouths, arms rising and falling.⁠ ⁠… There was something strange and intoxicating in it all. I felt myself above everybody; I was⁠—I⁠—a separate world; I ceased to be the usual item; I became unity.⁠ ⁠…

Again I was below, near the rock, my body happy, shaken and rumpled, as after an embrace of love. Sunlight, voices, and from above⁠—the smile of I-330. A golden-haired woman, her whole body silky-golden and diffusing an odor of different herbs, was near by. She held a cup, apparently made of wood. She drank a little from it with her red lips and then offered the cup to me. I closed my eyes and with avidity I drank the sweet cold prickly sparks, pouring them down on the fire which burned within me.

Soon afterward my blood and the whole world began to circulate a thousand times faster; the earth seemed to be flying, light as down. And within me everything was simple, light and clear. Only then I noticed on the rock the familiar, enormous letters: M E P H I, and for some reason the inscription seemed to me necessary. It seemed to be a simple thread binding everything together. A rather rough picture hewn in the rock; this too, seemed comprehensible; it represented a youth with wings and with a transparent body, and in the place ordinarily occupied by the heart⁠—a blinding, red, blazing coal. Again, I understood that coal, or no, I felt it as I felt without hearing every word of I-330 (she continued to speak from above, from the rock), and I felt that all of them breathed one breath and that they were all ready to fly somewhere like the birds over the Wall.

From behind, from the confusion of breathing bodies⁠—a loud voice:

“But this is folly!”

It seems to me it was I, yes, I am certain it was I, who then jumped on the rock; from there I saw the sun, heads, a green sea on a blue background, and I cried:

“Yes, yes, precisely. All must become insane; we must become insane as soon as possible! We must; I know it.”

I-330 was at my side. Her smile⁠—two dark lines from the angles of her mouth directed upward.⁠ ⁠… And within me a blazing coal. It was momentary, light, a little painful, beautiful.⁠ ⁠… And later⁠—only stray fragments that remained sticking in me.⁠ ⁠…

… Very low and slowly a bird was moving. I saw it was living, like me. It was turning its head now to the right and then to the left like a human being, and its round black eyes screwed themselves into me.⁠ ⁠…

… Then: a human back glistening with fur the color of ancient ivory;⁠—a mosquito crawling on that back, a mosquito with tiny transparent wings. The back twitched to chase the mosquito away; it twitched again.⁠ ⁠…

… And yet another thing: a shadow from the leaves, a woven, net-like shadow. Some lay in that shadow, chewing something, something similar to the legendary food of the ancients, a long yellow fruit and a piece of something dark. They put some of it in my hand, and it seemed droll to me for I did not know whether I might eat it or not.⁠ ⁠…

… And again: a crowd, heads, legs, arms, mouths, faces appearing for a second and disappearing like bursting bubbles. For a second appeared (or perhaps it was only an hallucination?) the transparent, flying wing-ears.⁠ ⁠…

With all my might I pressed the hand of I-330. She turned to me.

“What is the matter?”

“He is