Untraceable

CHAPTER 16

Usually, if he could not sleep, Kalitin listed the formulas of the substances that failed testing. They were never again synthesized; they vanished from the world, remaining only in lab notes; their names led to emptiness, to nonexistence.

But the time for long portions of dreams had ended. The clever god Hypnos had left the house and his sleepless brother stood at the door, refusing gifts.

Kalitin felt alone facing death and memory. He remembered almost everything he liked to remember and much of what he hoped to forget. He was ready to stop and fall asleep. But memory—unwanted, rejected—had come to exact a penalty for its long incarceration.

Kalitin got out of bed, fanned the flames, added kindling. Yesterday the eastern sky would have been getting light over the ridge by now. But today brought heavy clouds and rain beyond the mountains, hiding the dawn.

He needed just a few hours of sleep. And then he would leave. Had he been invited to join the investigation? Yes. So he would go away. The decision about where came on its own. The shore of the Arabian Sea. To a country run by the army and intelligence service; they would have a real appreciation for Neophyte and its creator.

Kalitin didn’t bother to search for the embassy address online. He had walked past it once, he had a vague recollection of the building, recognizably faceless. He wondered if it was under surveillance. Probably. A permanent post in some nearby apartment. Cameras with face recognition. Well, the main thing was to hand over his letter. The embassy people would find him. He would buy a new SIM card at a street kiosk. He’d have to leave all his things behind. Like the last time. In his new life, everything would be new.

The only things from the past would be Neophyte and himself.

Neophyte. When Kalitin finally had a full-fledged laboratory again, it could be moved from its travel container into a stationary vessel. He would be able to see how it was affected by the passage of time. That was the main enemy of all preparations of its class, hyperactive but not very stable. So it was a question—was it Neophyte in the container? Or just Mr. Fizz, bubbly water, no more harmful than children’s shampoo? That thought caused Kalitin pain. He couldn’t even imagine the death of Neophyte. Substance. Being. A cherished being.

Vera had wanted a child. A son. She must have known that he could have only one child: one born in a test tube. He sensed that children would not be given to him. He saw it as a kind of scientist’s blessing. But Vera…

Kalitin had blamed himself so many times for the marriage, planned to get a divorce. But he knew too well why he had married. For the same reason he had joined the Party, had gone to rallies and subbotnik volunteer activities.

The Island protected you, but it demanded loyalty. Beyond its borders lay the terrarium of science, where predatory monsters of various eras lived, as if in a crazy garden of time.

Elders. Abettors of the bloody destruction of scientific schools that culminated in execution and exile. Collaborators in murders executed with the help of critical articles. Connoisseurs of fatal polemics in the scholarly argot poisoned by Marxism, rivals for the attention of Stalin, the Giant of All Sciences. Creators of false doctrines born of ideological dogmas that destroyed, like decay, entire branches of knowledge.

Kalitin had met them in the hallways of institutes and ministries—the influential gray undead, who extended their time thanks to former privileges, medicines, hospitals, mineral spas, massages, and transplants. They were still deadly and could still devour you—if not alive, as before—if a new theory disproved their work of forty years ago, for which they had received bonuses, orders, and the title academician.

Youngsters. Shrewd Party activists, who did not write their own dissertations, scions of prominent families set up in science. These sleek creatures were as bloodthirsty as the old men, even though they did not have fangs and claws: the breed had degenerated. But they knew how to spread rumors, start an intrigue, pilfer a topic, steal an idea, become a coauthor, cut off financing.

On the Island, close to Zakharyevsky, Kalitin was practically invulnerable. But on the Island, the substances were only born. They had to be promoted, brought out into the world, albeit a secret one, and there Kalitin was, and therefore the products were, in danger.

Kalitin knew the strong and weak points in his CV, his tested and retested biography. When Zakharyevsky gave him the friendly advice to start a family because it would help his candidacy advance through the Party bureaucracy, Kalitin already knew his choice.

Vera.

Forgotten name.

Once he and Vera watched an episode of Animal World. It was about iguana fry spawned on the beach: thousands are born, many hundreds die, dozens reach the water, three or four survive, one will live to sexual maturity.

That was when Kalitin was seriously thinking about the idea for Neophyte. It was like seeing a reflection of his own thoughts: thousands of neophytes, nameless numbered substances born in test tubes; most will be useless, dozens will show some capability but will have flaws that override it; only two or three will get indexed and early names; they will fight the real battle for life, for realization, for a place in the registers and production plans.

There will be only one Neophyte with a capital N.

He felt his loneliness acutely, the useless burden of their marriage: Was Vera capable of sharing that? Understanding that he was also a neophyte, one of the few who thirsted for fulfillment more than anything?

Vera, whose name meant faith. He could say the word without meaning her.

It turned out that there was meaning in their marriage. She had saved him. And given him a discovery.

He was required to run the test with Neophyte’s first, experimental version. Predecessors of the substance. He was unhappy with it, he imagined that a mistake had crept into the calculations and the mixture was not strong enough.

Vera volunteered. She was qualified to do it.

A crack in the valve they’d overlooked. The valve exploded, a metal shard broke the plastic box and the super reliable protective gear. The exhaust ventilation worked well, only a minuscule amount got inside the clothing. Just a few molecules, you could say. But it was Neophyte, the real Neophyte. Kalitin had correctly guessed the base composition.

Neophyte had killed Vera instantly.

It was the first thing it did.

It took payment for its birth.

Neophyte was exactly what Kalitin had dreamed.

Not just a substance.

It was that, and not his wife’s death, that stunned Kalitin. He could not admit that he was afraid.

Frightened not as a chemist whose substance turned out to be devilishly effective. But as a creator, whose creation, intended to be a faithful servant or loyal soldier, came to life beyond measure, escaping obedience, insubordinate to its creator.

Neophyte was too fierce. It should have been forgotten, written off as a failure, the way they put down mad dogs of fighting breeds that cannot be trained.

But Kalitin could not give it up.

He had put everything into it; he knew he would not have a second enlightenment.

Neophyte was so secret that Vera’s body could not be sent to the hospital morgue. Neophyte had touched her and she became a vessel for the secret.

The autopsy showed there were no traces of the substance. Kalitin’s hypothesis was confirmed. Neophyte was untraceable.

They expressed condolences, gave him leave, wanted to send him to a sanatorium in the south. He said he wanted to return to work. It would be easier for him there. For Vera’s sake.

They allowed it.

He began his attempts to tame his creation, solve the problems of preservation, stability—without that he could not hope for certification, for its production.

But Neophyte turned out to be excessively sensitive and high-spirited. If he changed the original composition just an iota, the whole became unbalanced. Neophyte was born to be just as it was; limited in use because of its wildness, its instant passion to kill.

For years, Kalitin struggled for minute improvement; he was close to the success he begged from fate. But the country fell apart, the Island collapsed, and Neophyte was not born officially, remaining nonexistent, unrecorded, as if its name doomed it to perpetual beginner status.

Neophyte.

Kalitin had proposed the name long ago. He hated ciphers that meant nothing. They seemed to steal something from the substance, something that appears when a thing has the right name, a pet with the perfect diminutive, a secret of the soul, a drawing of fate.

He went through dozens of names, checked dictionaries—none of them worked.

One day Kalitin took a walk on the edge of the testing ground. There was a ravine overgrown with angelica, a stream pouring from the slimy stone wall. Beyond the ravine were broken, tumbledown tombstones of an abandoned cemetery; the wooden village houses had rotted long ago, but the limestone slabs stuck out through last year’s flattened grass. There, at the ravine, Kalitin came up with clever, elegant, lively name: Neophyte, as if someone had placed it on his tongue.

There was no substance yet, no formula, no path to it—only his brazen idea.

He had joined Zakharyevsky’s laboratory not knowing that he would be working on chemical weapons. He had signed a nondisclosure agreement before he had anything to disclose.

Of course, the institute had other areas of work. He learned about them only later, after receiving his first independent assignment from Zakharyevsky.

Kalitin did not regret a thing. The ontology of death that he encountered as a researcher set before him scientific questions of incredible scope and depth.

Now he could admit that he had never been an atheist in the strict sense of the word. But he was not a believer, either. He knew that there was a higher power in the world. He knew it as a practitioner who had experienced epiphanies that could not be explained rationally. A prospector, a miner, depending on these insights, knowing how to find the intuitive path.

He did not ascribe them to God or the devil, to human nature or the qualities of knowledge.

Probably, deep inside, he thought himself an archaic creature, a shaman traveling through other worlds in the search of sources, artifacts of power. It was no accident that he was a collector; they did a lot of digging in the test field, and those were areas of ancient nomads, ancient stops along the river, and the land always yielded up gifts—ancient, original symbols of sacred, clumsy Paleolithic figures, and also flint axes and arrowheads.

Kalitin believed that he was a creator alongside other creators, since he did not draw water from some black well, did not find inspiration in blood and suffering. Huge eagles often circled above the Island; Kalitin liked the birds, liked the winds, the unrestrained sunsets, the wild expanses. It was from them that he drew vision, inspiration, the sense of the significance of his own life. This fact was proof to him that he was like all the other talents; divisions were hypocritical. Anyone who condemned him simply did not know that the same wind and sunsets ran in his blood as in that of any other gifted person; Neophyte was as much a product of inspiration, risk, and art as was the Winged Victory of Samothrace, as Mendeleev’s table of elements.

Kalitin remembered and could relive the first flash of understanding, the guiding meteor.

He was working on Zakharyevsky’s orders with vegetable substances, stable, acting instantly, but leaving traces just as stable. He tried to lower their visibility, blurring, dissolving, turning them into a transparent veil.

But the stubborn substance would not yield, and Kalitin, furious, threw his pencil on the floor and stared at the lab ceiling, a cupola of the former church, with exhaust vents hanging down. Only one angel in the corner, cut off at the chest, remained of the original painting. Anywhere else it would have been painted over, but the Party committee was not allowed inside the lab. Kalitin liked looking at the thoughtful face in a gold wreath, at the narrow golden tube pressed to the angelic lips. The angel was in Kalitin’s power, a ghost of another era, herald of a trial that did not take place, having outlived the prerevolutionary world in which his image had sense, the direct power of significance.

While gazing at that angel with the special stubbornness of the last shard that does not wish to vanish, steadfastly witnessing the existence of the whole, Kalitin realized that death by its very nature is a dirty thing, and that was not a metaphor. Death always left clues, the multifaceted natural traces that the wise investigator will understand; that is how the world is made, those are its laws.

To bypass, trick those laws, to make death come unseen, penetrating every cover and leaving no trace is the highest power, the ability to directly rule existence.

At that moment Kalitin—who was still young—vacillated.

He understood that the appearance of death, its eternal fate to leave traces, be known, is a natural good, the red signal thread sewn and woven into the fabric of the world. The original law of retribution is encoded and realized in matter. That means the possibility of executing it. The possibility of the existence of the concepts of crime, guilt, revenge, retribution, repentance. Morality per se.

Kalitin hesitated but he was not frightened. He had touched a certain border—the sensation was clear, real. He wanted to step beyond it.

When Kalitin created Neophyte, he saw that it was impossible to bypass the protective mechanism. The law was more complicated than he thought.

Neophyte was weak because of its strength. It left no trace and was lethal, but too unstable as a chemical; the absolute of two qualities to the detriment of all others. Too lethal and therefore not viable.

Neophyte could not be directed, untraceable but dependent on the container. The experts had immediate questions on the tactics of use: How to deploy a substance that kills the killer as well as the victim? They came up with the lame scheme of leaving the target alone with the Neophyte and then removing the vessel, the container; that’s how they killed the banker. The scheme worked, but it removed Neophyte’s main advantage: secrecy.

Back then, at the start of the journey, before Neophyte was formulated as a clear concept, Kalitin was filled with hope.

He became a fan of death. He studied how people died, how that took place chemically and physiologically. He listened to talks by invited specialists, doctors who thought they were entrusting their knowledge to a chemist working on a secret medicine for the Central Committee. At the City morgue he learned from the forensic experts. He read histories of epidemics and researched the death of all living things: plants, mushrooms, insects, plankton, ecosystems.

The first, the simplest, path of experiments he chose led to the creation of a twin substance.

He had long thought that all substances with their various fighting temperaments, duration of action, vulnerabilities, and strong points had twins in the human world. Among people you can call yourself something else, random, unassociated—and so Kalitin created dark twins for substances for civilian use, achieved identical traces that no one could interpret as evidence of murder.

But that was still only a partial, imperfect solution. The trace remained, and in unfortunate circumstances could raise suspicions.

Once Kalitin went night fishing with the chief of security, Zakharyevsky’s old friend. Called back into the acting reserves, the general respected and nurtured Kalitin in his rough way. But his peasant habits had to be indulged from time to time, for instance, carp fishing. The security chief was of interest to Kalitin, too. Uneducated, hopelessly behind the times, he was a fossil from a bygone era, from the sins, filth, and blood that Kalitin wanted to avoid. The simple and meaningless death by bullet reigned there, indiscriminately taking millions of souls. Kalitin was creating a different death—rational, focused; its morality and justification lay in its singularity. But that was why the general interested Kalitin, he reeked of wild blood; against his background, Kalitin’s inner principles stood in stark relief. Besides which, there was a profound and unobvious similarity to their work, which preordained and blessed their alliance, the scientist and the KGB officer. The security chief was a professional whose ethics were expediency; he knew how to open people up and take the shortest path to truth. That’s how Kalitin acted in science.

They fished by the light of a kerosene lantern that cast long shadows on the sand. Nothing was biting. The security chief sucked on his stinking Belomor cigarette, stared at length, thoughtless, at the fishing pole’s bell, sipped at his flask of alcohol infusion of birch fungus, real turpentine—Kalitin tried it once and almost burned his throat. They had brought three newbies to the Island, recent graduates of the special school, as he had once been. Kalitin was looking for an opportunity to ask informally about one he was planning to take on as a lab assistant.

“I wouldn’t,” the old man said in a friendly tone, instantly understanding why Kalitin was interested. “He’s a fool. Talks too much. If he keeps blabbing we’ll take away his access.”

“What does he blab about?” Kalitin asked neutrally.

“Ghosts,” the old man answered slowly. “Those, damn it, specters. Seen them in the cellar.”

“That’s nonsense,” Kalitin exclaimed sincerely.

“Nonsense, but not nonsense,” he said in a lecturing tone. “We’re in a special place. With history. Events took place here in the olden days. Shouldn’t gab in that direction.”

Kalitin felt the old man was talking about something personal, long past. He knew some details of his biography. Zakharyevsky had enlightened him, explaining how to deal with the general.

Kalitin wondered more than once as he thought about the old man: Why didn’t they just round people up, shoot and bury them? Why did they have investigations, write documents, observe the formalities, if they knew it was all a lie? Why all those procedures? He understood now, looking at the old man: for the sake of the executioners. The procedures served as guardrails, to keep them from going mad and becoming insubordinate.

The old man had fallen silent. Kalitin felt that the topic of ghosts had upset him, the idea that death was reversible, that witnesses could arise out of nowhere. He did not believe in ghosts. But it was pleasant observing the superstitious, childish fears of the all-powerful chief of security.

The bell jingled. Deep in the water the carp had taken the bait and pulled it. The old man tugged, then cursed in disappointment. “Gone, the bastard.”

Suddenly in the cupola of light from the lantern white flakes swirled like a snow shower. The wind had carried August mayflies from the expanses of the river, wandering creatures of the night that would not live till dawn.

The mayflies threw themselves at the heated glass, striving for the flame, turning to charcoal. The lamp was like a magical vessel calling them out of the darkness.

The mayflies covered the sand, the tideline, like fallen constellations. Kalitin felt piercing delight. He now knew what his Neophyte should be: short-lived, vanishing in the shadows of the world, capable before disintegrating of performing just one wish: death.

Mayflies. Glorious mayflies. The rusty light of the kerosene flame. The living white blizzard at the end of summer, the dance of departure. A foretaste of blizzards to come. The swoon of winter’s white sleep.

Kalitin fell asleep, feeling the tremor of light-winged shadows under his shut eyelids.