Karl

The following Wednesday the three of us drove to the Academy. It was the first family visit in six months: Lia had outgrown the preschool regime, Kira had signed up to lead Noma’s morning seminar, and I... I, honestly, just wanted to take Lia out of Moscow after Elsa Brenn’s visit. For a week and a half I, like a professional paranoiac, monitored whether some other polite woman would appear at the doorstep, and on the tenth day understood that no one else would — Elsa had completed her visit, her next visit by regulation was in six months. But the air in the apartment still felt surveyed, and I preferred to take the family out of surveyed air into unsurveyed, three hundred and forty kilometers north.

(Unsurveyed — in the language of a bridge-keeper — is territory that has not yet been registered in Gosuslugi as a place of extended states. The Academy, recall, has no website, no legal entity, no electric kettle in the dining hall, if you want to be exact: Olga keeps the kettle on a primus stove, gas, since 1988. She tried an electric one; in the Academy it broke regularly even when it worked just fine a hundred meters away on Ignatich’s farm. Olga stopped buying electric kettles after the third. With us it’s a primus stove. It always works. The primus doesn’t leak from the sixth floor. That’s its strong suit.)

Lia sat in the back seat reading. Today — a volume of Bradbury stories in English, her favorite The Illustrated Man. She’d already read it in Russian, now she was rereading the original. At her age I read Chemistry and Life, the magazine, and couldn’t tell a ketone from an aldehyde. This is to the question of how a child evolves in humanity after the door has been opened. He evolves, evidently, faster than his father, which in absolute biological terms ought to gladden me and which in the daily family regime, honestly, periodically frightens me.

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We arrived at the Academy by eleven. Forest. Clearing. Olga at the gate in her invariable dark-blue cardigan (a color familiar already to a third generation of curators and as stable as a state flag) with the same folder under her arm. Over eight years more pages had accumulated in the folder. It couldn’t have shrunk, even if Olga had wanted: pages enter the folder the way teeth enter a cat — they come in, they don’t go out.

— Kira, — said Olga. — Noma’s expecting you in fifteen minutes in the dining hall.

— I’ll make it.

— Daniil, — she looked at me, — Wei Lin is on a walk. Back by lunch.

— Good.

— Lia. — Olga looked at Lia gravely, as last time. — Triads in the yard today. You may watch, no noise, hat on.

— My hat’s in the backpack, — said Lia.

Olga nodded. Once. The same half-millimeter nod that with her and with Wei Lin serves as a universal currency of approval requiring no confirmation.

We went in.

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The Academy over eight years has changed inside more than outside. Outside — the same two-story house with whitewashed walls, the same verandas, the same larch in the yard. Inside — the infrastructure has grown to accommodate thirty new first-wave awakened who now live here permanently. On the ninety-fifth day after the door opened, when massive spontaneous awakening began across the world, the Academy made a simple decision: it doubled in size, without noticing. Two new cabins were built deeper on the property, beds were brought in, each bed wired to a heat exchanger (Olga and Seryozha, by the way, designed them together, but Seryozha doesn’t visit them; they exchanged blueprints by fax in 2029, and ever since, in Olga’s vestibule there’s a framed portrait of Seryozha that Seryozha has never seen, and whose existence he doesn’t know about). Outbuildings, children, old curators, new curators — everything has somehow mixed together, but doesn’t fuss. The Academy knows how to grow without fuss. That’s its most valuable trait, and that’s a trait Ordo will never have, because Ordo grows by tender, and tender presupposes noise as a built-in function.

(Speaking of tenders. The Academy has had since 2028 a separate procedure of moneyless acquisition of everything. Formally — donations. Informally — people who want to understand something bring the Academy what the Academy previously lacked: an old radio, an old lathe, a huge cabinet with a CRT. The Academy accepts, places it in a corner, and leaves it to work, as if the object had always been here. Olga in this scheme is the sole point of accounting. Her folder is literally an archive of gratitude. In it, if I’m not mistaken, there are now about six thousand entries. Olga remembers all of them. She has forgotten no one.)