Vignette: A Lack of Even Nothing

By Alex Wallace.

On the Sea Lion Press Forums, we run a monthly Vignette Challenge. Contributors are invited to write short stories on a specific theme (changed monthly).

The theme for the 87th contest was Pride.

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Arkady Pavlovich Semyonov did not envy the poor page who had to tell Joseph Stalin that the world was coming to an end.

Perhaps, speculated Arkady, that that page had to tell the Vozhd that the end of the world was in some sense his fault. At least, he hoped the cell in the gulag he had been assigned to was warm, so that he could fade away in peace.

All of Arkady’s scientist friends had read the original papers, translated hastily from English after its findings had made the front page of the New York Times, and agreed that the logic was sound, and that the particle physicists had verified its findings.

Something about all the atomic bombs that had exploded in the past few years – including Soviet ones – had ruptured the fabric of space-time. The building blocks of matter were breaking apart.

Within a few months, as calculated by the American scientists who had demonstrated it, the universe was facing the specter of inevitable universal proton decay.

The world over, nations reeling from the Second World War were now seeing everything come to nought. There could be no prosperous return to peace if there was no ground on which to stand, to glory, to revel, to live!

Cults of all sorts sprang up. The NKVD was working around the clock to crush all of them in all the corners of the Warsaw Pact, but it was failing; half of its number had just stopped showing up for work. There were masses in parks and orgies in stadiums (and, somehow, Arkady was able to participate in a few without the Vozhd finding out).

The one man who offered an answer to the world, or perhaps more accurately, offered an answer to Joseph Stalin, was a man who Arkady had come to know well. This was a man, a physicist, so bullish and so brash, he was able to worm his way into the highest echelons of the Communist Party because he had a solution, so he claimed, to keep the Soviet Union alive.

Yevgeny Ivanovich Abelev said he had concocted physics that could allow a small craft to remain coherent even as the universe was falling apart around it. It would have great engines, the finest specimens of Soviet youth, and high ranking members of the Party.

And, in the most important and most lavishly decorated cabin onboard, was Stalin himself.

Arkady could not tell which was more intimidating: that he’d be aboard the same ship as the Vozhd, or that he’d be piloting it.

He had been a fighter ace during the war, shooting down more German planes than he could remember. He was completely and utterly loyal to the Party, and so his credentials were impeccable.

Of course, the problem of building a socialist society seemed rather pale in the light of the end of the world.

In his own mind, in his quietest moments, in dark rooms when sleep eluded him, he asked himself whether the man he had pledged his life to had grown so arrogant that he could defy the laws of physics.

But, out of the most morbid curiosity, he wanted to see the end himself, without a lead intermediary supported by saltpeter and conveyed through a barrel. It would be sublime, he would tell himself, like the walls of the Kremlin or the art in the Hermitage or the view of Lake Baikal, seeing it all fade away.

Seeing himself fade away.

There it stood like the Tower of Babel, sticking into the sky as if gravity didn’t matter. It looked like several tins of food stacked up on top of each other.

It was never made clear to him whether this ship was ultimately expected to land. It had landing gear, sure, but was he to use them?

The men and the women and the boxes of food and seeds and water all ascended the ramp and assumed their positions. At the end of the whole train was the man himself, no wife and no children with him, surrounded by guards.

Arkady was in the cockpit, back to the ground, staring at the sky. There were navigators and technicians and all of that. It was practically a submarine put on its back, in terms of crew, but carrying a far more precious cargo.

Then the world began to quake.

There was some message blared out by ground control to the sojourners on the first and last voyage from Earth to the stars. It must have been in a stentorian Russian, but Arkady was too preoccupied with making sure everything was right, everything calibrated, everything in perfect shape.

Then came the crash of pressure, driving him into his seat like being hit by a thousand trucks at once.

Arkady was somehow both totally in the moment, and lost in trepidation, wondering about what could come next, what new world they would find, what this scientist had told Stalin.

Hours passed. Maybe a day. He couldn’t tell. He couldn’t bring himself to care.

He could see Earth out of a window, the Moon obscuring the blue orb somewhat.

Space was pitch black, punctuated with little diamonds that looked like a necklace worn by a boyar, later ripped from him as a revolutionary put a hole through his head.

All the talk of class struggle, all the talk of revolution, now was ephemeral. How can Earth’s petty dramas mean anything, he thought, when the stars lasted for billions of years? The light he saw was generated when his entire species was living in hovels! In huts! On bare ground!

And one by one, with the inevitability of a tidal wave or an earthquake, the stars were going out.

Arkady looked back. He could hear the fright among the passengers, who had been gazing out at portholes like fish in a bowl.

The moon was slowly phasing out of existence.

The sun was slowly phasing out of existence.

The Earth, with all its transcendent glory and all its petty dramas, was slowly phasing out of existence.

The planets slowly faded. All the comets, all the asteroids, all the magnificent pearls of the cosmos slowly came apart, every little bubble of an atom popping.

Space itself began to vanish, the void itself leaving not even an absence behind it. Soon, the entire universe was gone.

Except this ship, which was gliding through a lack of a lack, an absence of an absence, a vacuum of a vacuum, a void where a void should have been. A void would have had more substance.

It felt like days.

No, it felt like years.

No, it felt like decades.

Centuries.

Millennia.

Aeons, epochs, eras.

Chronicles, epics, testaments, legends, myths, tales, stories, novels, plays, films, radio shows, propaganda posters, Stalinist pageants

And yet the ship passed through it.

He could hear the commotion in the hold. Some of it was ecstatic, some of it positively orgiastic, some of it filled with deep pain and deep fear. He didn’t bother intervening. What good would it do?

He kept going, through the absence of nothing.

After what felt like an eternity in a time without a time in a space without space, he felt something very unfamiliar.

He saw something.

A thing.

A being.

An entity.

Matter.

In the void of a void stood a little white dot. He steered the ship, which seemed to keep going far longer than the fuel it had been bequeathed would guarantee, into the little white dot.

The little white dot became a bigger white dot, and from there a sort of hole in unreality, a doorway that was three dimensional, from all sides revealing only light.

The ship passed through, and emerged in a very big room. He landed the ship on what looked like a bed made for giants. He passed through chaos and misery, through joy and splendor and a total collapse of meaning. He couldn’t be bothered with their petty dramas, after seeing how small they were.

He walked down the walkway onto this massive bed. He looked around. He saw a dresser and a desk. Everything was covered in books. Books on the desk, on the shelves, on the floor even.

On the desk was what looked like a very flat typewriter with a bright screen on it, like a screen for a film projector but flatter, more durable, glossier even.

Calculating the trajectory, the ship must have emerged from the screen.

“So you made it all the way here?”

Arkady’s head jolted behind him.

There was a man there, skin slightly brown, hair dark, rather portly to the point his torso looked like a slug as he sat there on his bed, looking at the ship that must have been the size of a children’s toy from his perspective.

Arkady gestured toward this man. His hand was now the size of his hand, his head the size of his head.

The two men sat on the bed as equals.

“Who are you? What are you? Where are we?” The questions poured out like water cascading down a mountain.

“I made you,” said the man. “I wrote you.”

“What does that even mean? None of this makes any sense!”

“Doesn’t this whole setup feel a little contrived?” asked the writer.

It did, Arkady had to admit to himself. The dictator, the scientist, the ship, the coming end of all things. It all read like a romance in a novel, the sort of thing that wasn’t supposed to exist in the Soviet Union.

A pause. A pregnant pause. A pause whose water was about to break.

“So I am in a story?”

“Yes, yes you are,” replied the writer.

“You are the man who makes all of this make sense. Tell me, then, what sense does this make?”

“It’s about megalomania,” said the writer. “In my world, Stalin is remembered as a great tyrant and a mass murderer, and more than anything else a man who made others worship him. In my world’s 1956, a man named Nikita Khrushchev took power after he died and denounced him, and it was such a shock people in your country died over it.”

“So you are playing with history,” asked Arkady. “Why do you feel the need to do that?”

“I wanted to write about megalomania,” said the writer. “In the present of my world, as I see it, I am expected to work at a desk while my phone and my computer tell me about how megalomaniacs are wrecking it. My own President thinks America exists to serve him. The Russian President fights on in his slog in Ukraine, thinking he can win as his own armies are decimated. In Israel, a huckster slowly erases a people so he won’t be held responsible for his crimes. My time’s captains of industry lack even the pretense of dignity or respectability. They want to conquer time, conquer space, conquer the human spirit with machines that pretend to think.

“I just wanted to say something about it. Scream something about it, to be more precise. To say something about the arrogance of men who think they can rewrite the world at a whim.”

Arkady took this all in. He took a deep breath.

“So, to comment on how men try to remake the world, you have remade my world?”

The writer paused. “One could say.”

“Tell me, then, writer,” asked Arkady, “Do you think these men will listen to you?”

There was a silence, as the writer looked at him forlornly.

And then, there, where Arkady stood, there was a lack even of nothing.

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Alex Wallace is the editor of the 'Alloamericana' Anthology