WE (A Dystopia). Yevgeny Zamyatin

Tower was playing the

      March of the United State with all its pipes. The Numbers, hundreds, thousands of Numbers in light blue unifs (probably a derivative of the ancient uniform) with golden badges on the chest—the State number of each one, male or female—the Numbers were walking slowly, four abreast, exaltedly keeping step. I, we four, were but one of the innumerable waves of a powerful torrent: to my left,

      O-90 (if one of my long-haired ancestors were writing this a thousand years ago he would probably call her by that funny word, mine); to my right, two unknown Numbers, a she-Number and a he-Number.

      Blue sky, tiny baby suns in each one of our badges; our faces are unclouded by the insanity of thoughts. Rays.... Do you picture it? Everything seems to be made of a kind of smiling, a ray-like matter. And the brass measures: Tra-ta-ta-tam ... Tra-ta-ta-tam ... Stamping on the brassy steps that sparkle in the sun, with every step you rise higher and higher into the dizzy blue heights. . . . Then, as this morning on the dock, again I saw, as if for the first time in my life, the impeccably straight streets, the glistening glass of the pavement, the divine parallelepipeds of the transparent dwellings, the square harmony of the grayish-blue rows of Numbers. And it seemed to me that not past generations, but I myself, had won a victory over the old god and the old life, that I myself had created all this. I felt like a tower: I was afraid to move my elbow, lest the walls, the cupola, and the machines should fall to pieces.

      Then without warning—a jump through centuries: I remembered (apparently through an association by contrast) a picture in the museum, a picture of an avenue of the twentieth century, a thundering, many-colored confusion of men, wheels, animals, billboards, trees, colors, and birds. ... They say all this once actually existed!

      It seemed to me so incredible, so absurd, that I lost control of myself and laughed aloud. A laugh, as if an echo of mine, reached my ear from the right. I turned. I saw white, very white, sharp teeth, and an unfamiliar female face.

      “I beg your pardon,” she said, “but you looked about you like an inspired mythological god on the seventh day of creation. You look as though you are sure that I, too, was created by you, by no one but you. It is very flattering.” All this without a smile, even with a certain degree of respect (she may know that I am the builder of the Integral). In her eyes, nevertheless, and on her brows, there was a strange irritating X, and I was unable to grasp it, to find an arithmetical expression for it. Somehow I was confused; with a somewhat hazy mind, I tried logically to explain my laughter.

      “It was absolutely clear that this contrast, this impassable abyss, between the things of today and of years ago—” “But why impassable?” (What bright, sharp teeth!) “One might throw a bridge over that abyss. Please imagine: a drum battalion, rows—all this existed before and consequently—”

      “Oh, yes, it is clear,” I exclaimed.

      It was a remarkable intersection of thoughts. She said almost in the same words the things I had written down before the walk! Do you understand? Even the thoughts! It is because nobody is one, but one of. We are all so much alike—

      “Are you sure?” I noticed her brows that rose to the temples in an acute angle—like the sharp comers of an X. Again I was confused, casting a glance to the right, then to the left. To my right—she, slender, abrupt, resistantly flexible like a whip, I-330 (I saw her number now). To my left, O—, totally different, all made of circles with a childlike dimple on her wrist; and at the very end of our row, an unknown he-Number, double-curved like the letter S. We were all so different from one another. . . .

      The one to my right, I-330, apparently caught the confusion in my eye, for she said with a sigh, “Yes, alas!”

      I don’t deny that this exclamation was quite in place, but again there was something in her face or in her voice ...

      With an abruptness unusual for me, I said, “Why, ‘alas? Science is developing and if not now, then within fifty or one hundred years—”

      “Even the noses will—”

      “Yes, noses!” This time I almost shouted, “Since there

      is still a reason, no matter what, for envy____Since my nose

      is button-like and someone else’s is—”

      “Well, your nose is rather classic, as they would have said in ancient days, although your hands— No, no, show me your hands!”

      I hate to have anyone look at my hands; they are covered with long hair—a stupid atavism. I stretched out my hand and said as indifferently as I could, “Apelike.”

      She glanced at my hand, then at my face.

      “No, a very curious harmony.”

      She weighed me with her eyes as though with scales. The little horns again appeared at the corners of her brows.

      “He is registered in my name,” exclaimed O-90 with a rosy smile.

      I made a grimace. Strictly speaking, she was out of order. This dear 0-, how shall I say it? The speed of her tongue is not correctly calculated; the speed per second of her tongue should be slightly less than the speed per second of her thoughts—at any rate not the reverse.

      At the end of the avenue the big bell of the Accumulating Tower resounded seventeen. The personal hour was at an end. I-330 was leaving us with that S-like he-Number. He has such a respectable, and I noticed then, such a familiar, face. I must have met him somewhere, but where I could not remember. Upon leaving me I-330 said with the same X-like smile:

      “Drop in day after tomorrow at auditorium 112.”

      I shrugged my shoulders: “If I am assigned to the auditorium you just named—”

      She, with a peculiar, incomprehensible certainty: “You will be.”

      The woman had a disagreeable effect upon me, like an irrational component of an equation which you cannot eliminate. I was glad to remain alone with dear 0-, at least for a short while. Hand in hand with her, I passed four lines of avenues; at the next corner she went to the right, I to the left. O- timidly raised her round blue crystalline eyes.

      ‘1 would like so much to come to you today and pull down the curtains, especially today, right now. . . .”

      How funny she is. But what could I say to her? She was with me only yesterday and she knows as well as I that our next sexual day is day after tomorrow. It is merely another case in which her thoughts are too far ahead. It sometimes happens that the spark comes too early to the motor.

      At parting I kissed her twice—no, I shall be exact, three times, on her wonderful blue eyes, such clear, unclouded eyes.

Record Three

       Table of Contents

      A Coat A Wall The Tables

      I looked over all that I wrote down yesterday and I find that my descriptions are not sufficiently clear. That is, everything would undoubtedly be clear to one of us, but who knows to whom my Integral will someday bring these records? Perhaps you, like our ancestors, have read the great book of civilization only up to the page of nine hundred years ago. Perhaps you don’t know even such elementary things as the Hour Tables, Personal Hours, Maternal Norm, Green Wall, Well-Doer. It seems droll to me, and at the same time it is very difficult to explain these things. It is as though, let us say, a writer of the twentieth century should start to explain in his novel such words as coat, apartment, wife. Yet if his novel had been translated for primitive races, how could he have avoided explaining what a coat meant? I am sure that the primitive man would look at a coat and think, "What is this for? It is only a burden, an unnecessary burden.” I am sure that you will feel the same, if I tell you that not one of us has ever stepped beyond the Green Wall since the Two Hundred Years’ War.

      But, dear readers, you must think, at least a little.