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Artyom thanked him with a nod, turned on his flashlight and walked into the tu
At first he grew calm, empty, then he began to think about something else. His journey was coming to an end. Even Artyom could not say how long he had been away. Maybe two weeks had passed, perhaps more than a month. How simple, how short the trip had seemed to him when, sitting on the handcar at Alekseevskaya, he had been looking at his old map in the light of the flashlight, trying to plan a route to Polis… An unknown world lay before him then, about which he knew nothing for certain. It had been possible to develop a route by considering only the length of the journey and not how it would change the traveller walking it. Life had turned out to be very different, confused and complex, mortally dangerous. Even casual companions, sharing small segments of his trip with him, had paid for it with their lives. Artyom remembered Oleg. Everyone has his own predestination, Sergei Andreyevich had told him at Polyanka. Could it have been that the terrible, nonsensical death spared other people and allowed them to continue their affairs? Artyom grew cold and uncomfortable. To accept such a proposition, to accept this sacrifice, meant that he had to believe that his journey could only be at the cost of somebody’s life… Could it be that in order to fulfil his predestined fate others had to be trampled, destroyed, crippled? Oleg, of course, had been too young to ask why he had been born. But if he had thought about it, he would hardly have agreed to a fate. The faces of Mikhail Porfirievich, Daniel and Tretyak passed before his eyes. Why did they die? Why did Artyom himself survive? What gave him this capacity, this right? Artyom was sorry that Ulman, who with one mocking remark could dispel his doubts, was not with him now. The difference between them was that the trip through the metro had forced Artyom to see the world as if through a multi-faceted prism, but Ulman’s Spartan life had taught him to view things simply: through the sight of a sniper’s rifle. He didn’t know which of the two of them was right, but Artyom no longer was able to believe that there can be only one, single true answer to every question. Generally in life, and especially in the metro, everything was unclear, changing and relative. Khan had explained this to him at first using the example of the station clock. If such a basis for perceiving the world, as time, turned out to be farfetched and relative, then just what could be said about other indisputable views of life? All of it: from the voice of the pipe in the tu
Too much already had happened, and it was impossible to get out of this rut just like that. If he had gone so far, then he had to go even further – such was the inexorable logic of the path chosen. Now it was already too late to hold any doubts. He must go forward, even if this meant bearing the responsibility not only for his own life, but also for the lives of others. All the sacrifices had not been in vain. He had to accept them, he was obligated to take his path to the end. That was his fate. Just how had he lacked this clarity earlier? He had doubted his own election, distracted by stupidity and hesitating all this time, but the answer always was right there. Ulman had been right: there’s no need to complicate life.