Hermit and Six Toes: Part IX, final.

In which the secret of flight is discovered.  Written by Victor Pelevin.  Translated from the Russian by A. Baylin.  (Beginning here.)
  May 18, 2004

“Just listed to him crow!” a voice thundered from above.  “Is this the one?”

“Nah,” another voice answered.  “The other one.”

Two gigantic faces hovered above the Wall of the World.  They belonged to the gods.

“Look at &#8217em;!” one of them said ruefully.  “What are we supposed to do with ’em?  They look like they're about to croak.”

A giant hand covered with a white, blood-stained sleeve with feathers still stuck to it dashed across the world and touched the feeder.

“Shit, Semyon!  Why haven't you checked the damn feeder?  Look, it's broken.”

“But it was fine before,” a bass protested.  “I checked it earlier this month.  So are we gonna slaughter them or what?”

“No, we're not gonna slaughter them.  Turn the conveyor back on and get another container in here.  I want this feeder fixed by tomorrow, you hear?  It's a damn miracle they managed to survive this far…”

“All right.”

“Now what about this one, the one with six toes—did you want both feet?”

“Sure, I'll take both.”

“’Cause I wanted one for myself.”

Hermit turned to Six Toes, who was listening intently but grasping very little.

“Six Toes,” he whispered, “I think they want to—”

At this moment the giant white hand dashed across the sky once again and grabbed Six Toes.

Six Toes could not make out what Hermit was trying to tell him.  The hand clasped him and lifted him above the ground.  Rocketing up, he noticed an immense chest with a pen stuffed into a pocket, a shirt collar, and finally, a pair of enormous bulging eyes that stared right back at him.

“Look at the wings on this guy!  Like an eagle's!” uttered an enormous mouth with protruding teeth that glistened yellow.

Six Toes was used to being handled by gods.  This time, however, the hands that held him emitted strange, frightening vibrations.  All he understood from the exchange that had just taken place was that it concerned either his arms or his legs.  Suddenly he could hear Hermit's panicked cry rise from below:

“Run, Six Toes!  Get away!  Peck him right in the snout!”

For the first time since they had met, Hermit sounded desperate.  Six Toes was gripped by overwhelming fear.  The fear imparted somnambulistic precision to his actions: he pecked at the bulging giant eye as hard as he could and used both his hands to beat with incredible speed at the god's sweaty muzzle.

The god roared with such force that Six Toes perceived the roar not as sound but rather as pressure exerted over his whole body.  The divine hands let him go and in a flash he found himself hovering below the ceiling without any support.  At first he could not understand what happened.  Then he noticed that he was still flapping his arms and that they were holding him aloft in the void.  From his vantage point, he could see the entire Section One; it was a section of the conveyor belt closed off with two partitions.  Next to the conveyor sat a long wooden table stained with red and brown splotches, covered in feathers and down, and stacked with clear plastic packages.  The world that still held Hermit looked like a simple rectangular container filled with a mass of tiny motionless bodies.  Six Toes could not tell which one of them was Hermit but he was sure that Hermit could see him.

“Hey,” he yelled, flying in circles under the ceiling.  “Hermit!  Get up here!  Just flap your arms as fast as you can!”

Something stirred down in the container, then Hermit started to rise, growing rapidly in size.  In a second he was hovering beside Six Toes.  They made several circles together and then Hermit shouted:  “Let's touch down over there.”

When Six Toes flew up to a faintly glowing whitish square spanned by a narrow cross, Hermit was already perched on the sill.

“It's a wall,” he said as Six Toes settled down.  “A glowing wall.”

Outwardly he appeared calm but Six Toes knew his friend well enough to tell that the events had riled him up.  Six Toes felt the same way.  Suddenly, he had an epiphany.

“I get it!  What we just did—that was flight!  We were flying, Hermit.”

Hermit looked at him for some time, then nodded.

“It makes sense,” he said.  “It is a bit primitive.”

Meanwhile the commotion below had quieted down enough to reveal two figures in white gowns holding back a third, who was covering his eye with one hand.

“Motherfucker!” screamed the third figure.  “He pecked my eye out!  Motherfucker!”

“What's 'motherfucker'?” asked Six Toes.

“It's a supplication to one of the elements,” explained Hermit.  “The word itself has no inherent meaning.  I think we're in big trouble, though.”

“What element is he supplicating?”

“We will find out.”

Just as Hermit was uttering those words, the god shook off the other two who restrained him.  He rushed to the wall, ripped out the red cylinder of a fire extinguisher and flung it at the sill.  He moved so quickly that the others could not stop him; Hermit and Six Toes barely had enough time to flutter out of the way.

Something shattered, something crashed.  The fire extinguisher went through the window and disappeared.  A wave of fresh air rushed into the breach and only then it became clear how foul the air was inside.  Brilliant glow spilled over everything.

“Let's go!” yelled Hermit, suddenly dropping any pretense of keeping cool.  “Let's fly!  Forward!”

And circling around to gain momentum, he folded his wings and disappeared into the stream of warm yellow light that flooded through the hole in painted-over glass along with the wind and the new, unfamiliar sounds.

Six Toes went into a loop to gather speed.  Below, he glimpsed for the last time the octagonal container, the table smeared with blood and the flailing, gesticulating gods.  Then his wings pressed tightly against his body and he hurtled like a comet through the hole.

The light on the other side was so bright that it blinded him for a second.  Then his vision adjusted and he beheld, up ahead and above him, a disk of yellowish white fire.  It burned with such incandescent intensity that one could not bear to look at it even out of the corner of one's eye.  Higher still danced a small dark spot; it was Hermit.  He was turning around to allow Six Toes to catch up.  Soon they were flying side by side.

Six Toes looked back and saw far below the huge, ugly grey building from which they had escaped.  It had only a few windows, each coated with a layer of oil paint.  One of the windows was broken.  Everything sparkled with such pure and brilliant colors that Six Toes had to look upward to keep his sanity.

Flying came surprisingly easy; it took them no more effort than walking.  They kept rising until the ground beneath looked like a patchwork of multicolored spots and squares.

Six Toes faced Hermit.

“Where to now?” he shouted.

“South,” came the laconic reply.

“What's that?” asked Six Toes.

“I don't know,” said Hermit, “but it's over there.”

And he waved his wing in the direction of the giant blazing disk whose color was the only thing in common with the objects that they had once called luminaries.

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