Arkady Strugatsky - Hard to Be a God

Don Condor stared at him intently, pursing his lips. “I don’t like how you sound, Anton,” he said in Russian.

“I don’t like a lot of things, Alexander Vasilievich,” said Rumata. “I don’t like that we’ve tied our hands and feet with the very formulation of the problem. I don’t like that it’s called the Problem of Nonviolent Impact. Because under my conditions, that means a scientifically justified inaction. I’m aware of all your objections! And I’m aware of the theory. But here there are no theories, here there are typical fascist practices, here animals are murdering humans every minute! Here everything is pointless. Knowledge isn’t enough, and gold is worthless, because it comes too late.”

“Anton,” said Don Condor. “Don’t lose your head. I believe that the situation in Arkanar is absolutely exceptional, but I’m convinced that you don’t have a single constructive suggestion.”

“Yes,” Rumata agreed, “I don’t have any constructive suggestions. But it’s very hard for me to control myself.”

“Anton,” Don Condor said. “There are two hundred and fifty of us on this entire planet. Everybody controls themselves, and everybody finds it very hard. The most experienced of us have lived here for twenty-two years. They came here as nothing more than observers. They were completely forbidden to do anything whatsoever. Imagine that for a moment: forbidden to do anything. They wouldn’t even have had the right to save Budach. Even if Budach was being trampled before their eyes.”

“Don’t talk to me as if I were a child,” Rumata said.

“You’re impatient like a child,” Don Condor declared. “And we must be very patient.”

Rumata smiled bitterly. “And while we watch and wait,” he said, “calculating and planning, animals will be destroying humans every minute of every day.”

“Anton,” Don Condor said, “the universe has thousands of planets where we haven’t come yet, where history is taking its course.”

“But we’ve come here already!”

“Yes, we have. But we’ve come here to help these people, not to satisfy our righteous rage. If you’re weak, leave. Go home. After all, you really aren’t a child, and you knew what you’d encounter here.”

Rumata stayed silent. Don Condor, slumping and seeming instantly older, walked up and down the table, dragging his sword by the hilt behind him like a stick, sadly nodding his head. “I understand,” he said. “I’ve gone through it myself. There was a time when this feeling of helplessness and my own culpability seemed to be the worst thing. Some of us, the weakest ones, went crazy from it, were sent back to Earth, and are now being treated. It took me fifteen years, dear boy, to understand what the worst thing really is. The worst thing is to lose your humanity, Anton. To sully your soul, to become hardened. We’re gods here, Anton, and we need to be wiser than the gods from the legends the locals have created in their image and likeness as best they could. And yet we walk along the edge of a swamp. One wrong step—and down you go in the dirt, and you won’t be able to wash it off your whole life. Goran the Irukanian, in his History of the Coming, wrote, ‘When God, after descending from the heavens, appeared to the people from the Pitanian marshes, his feet were covered in mud.’”

“For which Goran was burned,” Rumata said grimly.

“Yes, he was burned,” Don Condor said, returning to his seat. “But that was said about us. I’ve been here for fifteen years. My dear boy, I’ve even stopped having dreams about Earth. One day, rummaging through my papers, I found a picture of a woman and for a long time couldn’t figure out who she was. I occasionally realize with terror that I’ve long stopped being an employee of the Institute, that I’m now an exhibit in the Institute’s museum, the chief justice of a feudal mercantile republic, and that there’s a room in the museum in which I belong. That’s the worst thing—to lose yourself in the role. Inside each one of us, the noble bastard struggles with the communard. And everything around us helps the bastard, while the communard is all alone—the Earth is thousands and thousands of parsecs away.” Don Condor paused, stroking his knees. “That’s how it is, Anton,” he said in a firmer voice. “We must remain communards.”

He doesn’t understand. And how could he? He’s lucky, he doesn’t know what gray terror is, what Don Reba is. Everything he’s witnessed in his fifteen years of work on this planet has in one way or another fit into the framework of basis theory. And when I tell him about fascism, about the gray storm troopers, about the incitement of the petty bourgeoisie, he interprets it as emotional expressions. “Don’t abuse terminology, Anton! Terminological confusion brings about dangerous consequences.” He simply can’t grasp the fact that in Arkanar, typical medieval brutality belongs to a happy past. For him, Don Reba is something like the Duke of Richelieu, a shrewd and farsighted politician, defending absolutism from feudal excesses. I’m the only one on this whole planet who’s aware of the terrible shadow creeping over the country, but even I can’t figure out whose shadow it is or where it’s coming from. And how can I possibly convince him, when I can see in his eyes that he’s almost ready to send me back to Earth for treatment?

“How’s honorable Sinda?” Rumata asked.

Don Condor stopped eyeing him suspiciously and grumbled, “He’s doing well, thank you.” Then he said, “To conclude, we must be firmly aware of the fact that neither you nor I nor any of us will see the tangible fruits of our labors. We’re not physicists, we’re historians. For us, time isn’t measured in seconds but in centuries, and our work isn’t even sowing, it’s preparing the ground for sowing. Because occasionally we do get… enthusiasts, blast them—sprinters who can’t go the distance.”

Rumata gave a crooked smile and started pointlessly fiddling with his boots. Sprinters. Yes, there’ve been sprinters.

Ten years before, Stephan Orlovsky, also known as Don Capata, the commander of a company of His Imperial Majesty’s crossbowmen, ordered his soldiers to open fire on the executioners at a public torture of eighteen Estorian witches; he cut down the judge and two court bailiffs and was lanced by the Imperial Guard. Writhing in agonies of death, he shouted, “But you’re human! Get them, get them!”—but few heard him over the roar of the crowd: “Fire! More fire!”

Approximately at the same time, in another hemisphere, Carl Rosenblum, one of the leading experts on the peasant wars in France and Germany, also known as the wool-seller Pani-Pa, led a revolt of Murissian peasants, stormed two cities, and was killed by an arrow to the back of the head while trying to stop the looting. He was still alive when they came for him in the helicopter, but he couldn’t speak and only looked on in guilt and bewilderment with his big blue eyes, which constantly streamed tears…

And shortly before Rumata’s arrival, the magnificently placed confidant of the Caisan tyrant (Jeremy Tafnat, a specialist in the history of agrarian reforms) suddenly staged a palace coup, usurped power, and for two months attempted to start a golden age. He stubbornly refused to reply to furious queries from his neighbors and from Earth, earned the reputation of a lunatic, managed to avoid eight assassination attempts, and was finally kidnapped by an emergency team of Institute workers and transferred by submarine to an island base by the planet’s southern pole.

“Just think!” muttered Rumata. “And all of Earth still imagines that the hardest problems are in null-physics.”

Don Condor looked up. “Finally!” he said quietly.