ANNOTATION

HDive – this is not a name, not a last name, not a nickname. HDive – this is the guildhall, where hdivers gather and which can be found on the map in the neighbourhood of Moscow. Outwardly this building is the most ordinary and every hundred years it is demolished and rebuilt in order not to draw attention. Hdivers do not need popularity; in fact the bulk of HDive is not even above ground.

Hdivers are not magicians, although their abilities far exceed any human understanding. If something significant or inexplicable happens somewhere in the world, it means the matter is not managed without hdivers. It is impossible for an outsider to enter the grounds of HDive. Anyone who has betrayed the Charter of HDive just once also can never return.

Hdivers are not by birth. No supernatural talent or affinity with magicians is necessary. The golden bees choose hdivers and the only beehive is in HDive. No one, not even the hdivers themselves, knows whom a bee will choose next and, most importantly, why.

CHARTER OF HDIVE

When you hurt, do not pose as a suffering hero. You need to either cry out or put up with it. You can give everything to others, but nothing to yourself. Because you are a hdiver!

You will rip a pillow with your teeth, hit your fist against a wall, but you will smile at people. Because you are a hdiver!

Any dive is paid by the victim.

The smaller the victim and the less aptitude for sacrifice, the less chance a diver can extract a marker. The sacrifice cannot be more than a person can bear.

A repeat dive is impossible for one who has used a marker for himself.

A non-diving hdiver or one who gives up diving can remain in HDive, but not one who uses a marker for oneself.

The hardest dive is always the first. A hdiver is always tested by maximum pain with the first marker.

Not a single person, definitively firmly convinced of evil and its values, or perceiving himself as clearly good, can penetrate the grounds of HDive. We did not decide this. It is simply so, it was, and it will be.

New hdivers are not chosen by people but by golden bees, whose only beehive is in HDive. We do not know why the bees chose precisely you, because once in exactly the same manner they chose us. Although in some cases we can surmise. But surmising does not mean knowing.

It is impossible to crush a golden bee accidentally, but one can betray it. In this case it dies.

Chapter 1
Work – the Best Pill for the Love Virus

The principle of any advance: reach its absolute ceiling and make one sm-a-all step forward.

From the diary of a non-returning hdiver

On the fifth of December, snow began to fall heavily in Moscow. Earlier it was falling with selective timidity: on the roofs of cars, park benches, garages, and transformers. Now the snow got seriously down to work and fell so densely, as if somewhere in the sky hyeons – winged half-hyena-half-lions – simultaneously emptied out ten thousand pillows. Large snowflakes did not flutter, but solid like middle-aged hens, each sitting in its own place.

Movements stopped. Traffic lights winked independently, conducting a white symphony. There was nowhere to go. Roads had disappeared. Automobiles, waving the windshield wipers, turned into snowdrifts in the blink of an eye. As it often happens, in the herd of cars there turned out to be a hysteric, repeatedly pressing on the horn and honking long and angrily: it was incomprehensible what he was demanding and from whom.

On the construction site searchlights from below hit the crane, and three pillars of light, piercing snowfall and closing in, showed its absolute infinity.

When the snowfall began, two young men and a girl were standing in an area near the subway flooded by electric light and laughing at the mysterious inscription “Chickn meat in pita.” These were Ul, his girl Yara, wide-mouthed and smiling, and his best friend Athanasius.

Ul was standing, thumbs in his pockets. His favourite pose. Medium build, not muscular, but as if hewn from an oak stump. Nearly twenty years old, short scar on the upper lip (the result of an attack by a bicycle chain let go in Max Gorky Park), Russian blood with a touch of Kalmyk, two hundred and forty-two roubles in the pocket, wide shoulders, and size forty-three boots. Here is everything about our hero. Get acquainted, reader!

Athanasius is half a head taller and half a year younger. They often call those like him good-looking. Lean, with narrow shoulders, and long legs like a foal. His hair is flaxen as a German prince’s, whose kingdom is so small that now and then he has to dart off his throne and catch the chickens so that they do not cross the border.

Athanasius was laughing, but he was feeling sick at heart. He regretted coming into the city at all today. As a rule, Athanasius avoids Yara; but today everything was going against his will. Together they reached the city, together they sat in the subway. The station was the terminus and it is impossible to pretend that you have to go in the other direction. While they were travelling, Athanasius looked at his double in the window of the train. On the face of the double crawled infinite wires braided in black, and written on the chest: “Places for women with children and for the handicapped.”

Athanasius tried not to listen to what Ul and Yara were talking about, but the more he tried, the sharper his hearing became. They were arguing complete nonsense, nevertheless Athanasius felt like scum, eavesdropping by a crack. To him, each of their words seemed significant, containing secret tenderness concealed from everybody.

Once in a while one of them remembered Athanasius, turned to him and asked him a question. Athanasius answered with unnecessary attention, although he also knew that the question was posed in order not to exclude him from contact. You know, if the three of us are together, then we three should talk together and not otherwise. Athanasius did everything that a self-respecting third wheel should: he smiled, joked in return, but felt that it was tearing him apart. He wanted to yell and yank the emergency brake. Let everyone fall on one another, then he would feel better for a moment.

The consciousness of Athanasius hastily searched for a loophole. Suddenly he recalled that he should buy a cover for the lens. For two years the camera – a reliable thirty-year-old Zenith, which he placed above any digital camera – had lived excellently without a cover, but now Athanasius suddenly realized that this was fundamentally wrong. One must take care of technology. He jumped out at Pushkin Station and the other two jumped out after him. Probably, they reacted to the closing doors. “We didn’t want to lose you!” Ul declared.

Athanasius almost growled. Ul was so radiant with camaraderie that Athanasius knew if he would stumble now and fly in front of the train, then Ul, not missing a beat, would rush after him and try to drag him away. And Athanasius felt wretched because of this. True, he had not yet become a traitor, but it seemed to him that falling in love with Yara, he had stabbed their friendship in the back. One must never be unfaithful or betray even in jest. This is more dangerous than getting up on a stool, putting a noose around one’s neck, and then asking someone to kick out the stool and run to the kitchen for a chair because it is more comfortable to stand on a chair.

Before Ul and Yara got together, Athanasius treated her casually. If he liked her, then no more than three or four other girls. In his internal list, Yara was not even on top. Then Ul, with a determination normal for him, not wavering and not comparing, chose Yara for himself, to love “till death do us part.” And Yara somehow immediately felt this and reciprocated, although Ul never uttered ardent speeches. And then for the first time the inexpressible inner truth, which needs no words, breathed on Athanasius – smart, sensible, respecting himself, his own eloquence, and his own mind. If it, this truth, exists, then every girl will feel it.

At first, Athanasius, in the capacity of the best friend, was critical of Yara. He was not pleased that Ul dragged her everywhere with him, but she would go and keep quiet as a timid mouse, which would transform into a cat at any minute. This was still that period, when she was the third wheel. Then, although nothing had changed outwardly, and Ul still rushed to him every time so joyfully, Athanasius began to feel that he was gradually becoming a part of the scenery.

Then everything picked up and Athanasius got stuck like a wasp in jam. At the same time, as an attentive man and not missing a chance to introspect, he vaguely sensed that his love was not real, i.e., born independently, but viral – emerged from a feeling of competition. It is very complicated for love to grow. It is like creating a new influenza virus from nothing, when all around everyone is healthy. Yet, it is possible to catch the love of others after a sneeze.

But while love was in many respects viral, he was unlucky for real. Moreover, he was doubly unlucky because together with a girl who loved not him, he could lose a friend. “If Ul only knew…” thought Athanasius gloomily. “And what would he do if he knew? Would he throw Yara in a bag into the sea for the sake of our friendship?”

Yara, not yet thrown into the sea, displayed enormous activity. She dragged poor Athanasius through tonnes of stores and found a lid after all that would fit the diameter of the lens. After forcing Athanasius to be glad of it to the max, the happy couple pulled him into a cafe, where he drank coffee and from melancholy chewed the rim of the paper cup.

Then they proposed to Athanasius to stroll along the boulevards, and he agreed, although the pleasure for a walk in winter along the boulevards is two percent from average. With his toe Athanasius kicked a cap from a plastic bottle and, his eyes following the jumping red point with a white belly, he berated himself. Where did he go wrong? Perhaps he and Ul paced their friendship too fast? When you reach white heat too soon, then it is difficult to maintain it. However, never sell a friendship short. It does not forgive. For two hours, Athanasius trailed along beside them, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind.

“So I told her parents, ‘She’s absolutely undeveloped, although a beauty! Nearly twenty, and still spends the evenings gluing her brain to garbage on TV!’ Her papa, the secret service colonel, said to me, ‘First you get married, and then re-educate!’ he said, waving his hands.”

“Let’s go to her right now! We’ll dash off somewhere as a foursome!” Ul cheerful proposed. Athanasius became silent for a second. “Easily!” He took out his phone, but the next moment with regret took it away from his ear. “Ah, forgot! Can’t today! She has classes,” he said. “She always has classes. Either the Institute, or the University, or some academies,” remarked Ul. “What do you want! Well, maybe, although these will be the last. Then we’ll meet,” Athanasius expressed hope.

Here he was being sly, because he knew that his girl’s classes would continue forever. Or at least until the girl herself appeared in nature. For the time being, there existed only a name (Victoria), a last name (prudently not revealed), an apartment on Bolshaya Nikitskaya, important parents, and a photograph of a stunning beauty. Victoria came to his head somehow accidentally, surfaced from parts cut from non-existence, and now the entire HDive knew that somewhere in the city Athanasius has a girl, who was ready to walk to Siberia for his sake and was only waiting for the moment when the well-known firm would release its new line of winter footwear. At times Athanasius felt that he was beginning to be inconsistent in the details, and, suddenly remembering, started to reason out the circumstances of the break-up with Victoria. A tragic death? Fatal treason? Departure to Honduras of the intelligence officer papa with the cryptographer daughter and sniper wife?

Meanwhile the happy beloved of the cryptographer from Honduras was strolling pensively behind his friend’s girl and trying to convince himself that he did not like her legs. And generally he was glad that she was almost always in camouflage pants, which automatically transform every girl into a combat comrade.

All through the fall, during any free hour, Ul and Yara wandered along the Moscow River and, looking at the water taxis with pop music thundering, called them music boxes. Somehow, Ul shot apple cores at them. As the third core in succession struck against the side, the water taxi discharged dark and smelly diesel exhaust at the same time. “Yay! I beaned it!” Ul began to shout, and for a long time they ran after it until, tired, they fell onto the grass.

It was cold. Wet leaves stuck to their backs. “Dragons” escaped from their mouths on forceful exhalations. They lay on the lawn and imagined the sea of those quiet off-season Crimean towns, where at eight in the evening life stops, already inconvenient to phone, and only timid bicycle thieves dart along the narrow stone courtyards, reeking of the long-standing presence of cats.

This imaginary sea was better than the real one, because it was born of their love. In their Moscow sea rusty teeth of old moorings jutted out of the foamy water. Waves ran along the jagged steps of the embankment. At night, the searchlight burnt on the old customs quarantine pier. Well-fed seagulls, like chickens, were sauntering along the parapet. Insolent sparrows somersaulted in the surf, where small flies swarmed above the rotting algae and a dolphin tail cut by a screw stuck out.

Then Yara became Yara. In all documents and registers, it goes without saying, it remained “Yaroslava” as before. “Yara” was like the mark of Ul’s property. Economizing the sounds of his own speech, Ul eternally shortened everything, beginning with himself. It would seem that the name “Oleg” was too long. Why not make himself Ul?