by Angels
What was the name she bore? She would have given herself a new one upon her arrival here, but what was it on their native world? It took him a moment to remember. Celadon. That was it. Sorry, Celadon, he thought. The chill of the air seemed to diminish, but it was his inner heat returning. He would soon complete his mission.
He ended his visit of the Fair that evening. He had seen no other place where his target might hide. He went out through the wrought-metal gates, a man lost in the crowd. He followed a series of streets that became more and more narrow and less and less lit, to return to his lodgings. There had been no question of renting a private house or even a suite at the hotel; he must in no case attract Celadon’s attention. He had thus found a room on the third floor of a rundown building, in a working class neighbourhood. Perhaps he had been too careful, after all. He wouldn’t have minded a hotel room for his last night on this world. Too bad. He was used to hardship. He asked the lodger for his key, and went up the wooden staircase that squeaked at every step. At home, doors opened by themselves at his approach. At home, there was no need to laboriously ignite a gas flame to get light. . . .
He forced himself to stop his recriminations. He checked carefully that his door was locked from the inside, then he pulled his old travelling bag out of the closet, opened the false bottom, and took out the metadagger he would use against his prey. He probably did not have enough time to give the impression of a suicide: Celadon had been active for far too long. He would have to settle for a clean termination. Andersen caressed the weapon: a handle thin enough to be hidden in a closed hand, ending in a rigid wire finer than a human hair. One could strike at the head or the heart: once the wire had penetrated the body, twisting it inside the flesh would inflict fatal damage. The entry wound was a minuscule hole, far less than a scratch.
The metadagger’s wire was dangerous; Andersen sheathed the weapon by putting a rigid cap over it. Shouldn’t he eat something? He wasn’t hungry. But the chill of the badly heated room was slowly working its way inside him. He opened the box of pellets, swallowed an adjustor dry. The chill left him. His eyelids became heavy soon afterwards; he slid into his bed and yielded to sleep.
He gave himself the next day off. He would show up at the Fair only two hours before closing time.
For half an hour, he walked along the belvedere that overlooked the sea. The ceaseless drizzle discouraged strollers. Andersen found himself thinking of his native world’s covered walkways, protected from the elements by nearly invisible glass roofs. Richly dressed men and women elegantly strolled there, holding exotic animals on leashes. When evening fell, the roof glowed a soft white, and heating apparatus cleverly integrated into the floor kept the chill away. He yearned to come back to that place, to dwell once more among his peers.
Out to sea, a flotilla of dredge-boats busied itself. An archaeological program: they were attempting to recover graven stone slabs that had been given to the waters a century ago. Andersen watched them for a while, but nothing happened, and suddenly he started to feel the cold. He left the belvedere, found a cartman selling soup and hot drinks; he dissolved a pellet in a cup of chamomile. With several hours still to lose, and feeling tension rising in him, he visited stores. He bought nothing—he had little local coin—but nothing would have appealed to him anyway. On his world, he had at his disposal all the products of an advanced civilization. To his eyes, the goods offered by the local merchants were no better than the clumsily carved fetishes he had seen at the Fair.
Time passed, too slowly for his taste. The afternoon waned; the Fair remained open until eight in the evening, and Andersen wanted to enter around six. At the thought of eating once more in one of the Fair’s eateries, his gorge rose. He found a pub not far from the Fair. The place was crowded, but he managed to find a free table in a corner. He ordered a mug of beer and a meat pie. The pie tasted of cardboard, but its warmth comforted him. He swallowed a draught of beer and put his hand in his left outer pocket. He fumbled for a while before realizing that the box of pellets had disappeared.
It was as if he’d just been slammed in the stomach. He began to paw his overcoat methodically. He still had the metadagger and the letter opener in the right outer pocket, and the sealed envelope was still in the inner pocket. But his adjustors were no longer on his person.
He had been jostled, when he came in. Andersen had not paid attention: the other man had had the opportunity of picking one of his pockets. Andersen almost rose to run outside, in pursuit of a man whose appearance he had not noticed and who had been gone for ten minutes. He forced himself to calm down. He took out his wallet from his pants pocket, left a big coin to pay for his meal, and rose. He scrutinized the floor of the common room, in case the box of pellets had simply fallen out of his pocket. His throat was tight, and he felt a childish urge to cry.
Nothing on the floor. He wasted two minutes asking the barmaid if someone had found the box; he had guessed that was not the case. He went out of the pub, his gaze glued to the ground, hoping against hope to catch sight of a glint of tin, the still smile of a young woman with a medieval hairstyle. He found nothing. He attempted to retrace his wanderings, asked three shopkeepers if a small tin box of candy had been found on the premises, but the business day was coming to an end, and Andersen soon met with closed doors.
He came back to the belvedere, tried to find the soup seller, but the man had left long before.
His hands had begun to shake, and his fingers were so cold they pained him acutely. He leaned against a wall, tried to compose himself. A clock rang half past six. The Fair would close in an hour and a half. Andersen didn’t have much time left. He would have to act without the help of the adjustors. It would only take up a few hours more, then he would have accomplished his mission and would return home. He was one of the best agents of the Organization. He was worth three of their best recruits; was he the kind of man to let himself be stopped by the loss of his medicine?
He went toward the Fair. Ten minutes’ walk, no more, then he would cross the wrought-metal gates that gave access. He would pay the reduced evening rate of six pence, he would visit the Pavilion of Optical Science, would pretend to be amazed by Brendan Napier’s muddy pictures. Not long before closing time, he would slip behind the hedge that bordered the unused alley on the side of the Kraken Pavilion. He had located a hiding place from which he could observe without risking being seen. A few more hours, and he could act. He would kill Celadon, and it would all be over.
An interminable hour went by. Andersen entered the Fair, went to the Pavilion of Optical Science under a thin icy rain. At half past seven, he left and passed in front of the Kraken Pavilion. He had stuffed his hands deep in his overcoat’s pockets to hide their trembling. He stopped by the hedge, looked around him. People were coming toward the Kraken Pavilion. If he crossed the hedge now, they would see him. He delayed, but staying motionless under the now-pouring rain would attract even more attention. . . .
Unable to wait any longer, Andersen crouched down and squeezed through the row of tall bushes, to find himself in the back of another pavilion, in a small disused courtyard. Close by the hedge was a pile of damaged building stones, covered by a waxed canvas tarp. He wedged himself in the space between two stones, half hidden by the tarp. Surely, someone had noticed him and warned the Fair’s constable. . . . Nothing happened. He had not been seen, or at least not reported. Andersen felt his frantic heartbeat slowing down. He put his frozen hands around his knees and bit his lips to avoid shuddering with the cold. From where he was, he could see part of the façade of the Kraken Pavilion, through the hedge. He waited.
Was there a pellet left at the bottom of his pocket? No. He should have stashed a few away, in case of emergency. He hadn’t thought of it. Was the metadagger still in his right pocket? Yes. If he’d thought of taking precautions. . . . If only there was a pellet, just one, somewhere in his pockets. . . . The metadagger, the wooden letter opener, yes. No pellets. A singl
e adjustor and he would recover fully. The letter opener, the metadagger at the bottom of the right pocket. The left pocket still just as empty.
A bell rang twelve times to signal that the Fair was closing. The last visitors hurried away. It took the employees a good hour to close down the pavilions and leave in their turn. It was the pimply young man who shut the door of the Kraken Pavilion. He went toward the entrance gates, wrapped up in a worn cloth coat. Some more time passed. From his hiding place, Andersen observed a maintenance crew perfunctorily clean up the Plaza of Sciences. They emptied the garbage cans into a large wheeled bin, then went on to other parts of the Fair. The clatter of the bin’s wheels died down in the distance.
Andersen waited some minutes more, then he came out. As he stood up, he was briefly gripped by vertigo and he shivered so strongly his teeth chattered. He leaned briefly against one of the stone blocks, struck his numb hands against one another until he got back his sense of touch. He was an agent of the Organization, and he would fulfil the mission he had been assigned.
He crossed the hedge, went to the hidden door in the side of the Kraken Pavilion. He pushed the blade of the letter opener into the slit and managed to raise the latch. He pushed gently at the door with his other hand. The door opened with a muffled creak. Behind was darkness. Andersen slipped inside, grasped the door handle and closed it behind him. The latch fell back into the catch with a clinking of metal. Andersen started and held back a curse. Why hadn’t he kept the latch raised and then lowered it noiselessly? The loss of his adjustors had unnerved him. No need to panic. The sound had been feeble, and there had been no reaction. Useless to berate himself for a past mistake. He simply had to be more careful now.
He waited for his eyes to accustom themselves to the darkness. A little light filtered from underneath the door that led to the pavilion’s main room. After a while, Andersen could make out a desk at one end of this room, and two of the glassed oak cubes common to all the Fair’s pavilions in a corner. He could hear nothing.
He stepped toward the middle of the room; suddenly the sound of his footsteps altered: he was walking on a trapdoor. He took two steps backward, found the ring by touch, and gently raised the trapdoor.
A yellowish glow issued from beneath, revealing the beginning of a staircase. A briny smell came to him. Andersen raised the trapdoor fully, went down the staircase. It seemed quite old; no doubt it led to the basement of one of the decrepit houses that had been torn down to make room for the Fair.
The staircase corkscrewed down six feet and gave onto an underground room thirty feet deep by fifteen wide. A candle in a saucer set on a wooden table cast a yellowish light on the scene. Apart from the table, the room was empty of all furnishings. A pool ten feet wide had been dug at the end of the room; it was from there that the marine smell came. The pool’s water was black in the dim light.
There came a splashing noise; a woman’s head emerged, water streaming down her carmine hair. “Carl?” she said. Seeing Andersen, she frowned. “Who are you? How did you get in?”
Andersen swayed on his feet. It was Celadon; he recognized her. She must be killed, right now. He seized the metadagger, unsheathed it feverishly. And stopped dead, staring slack-mouthed at the metal pen nib that sprouted from the handle.
Celadon sighed, and her bare shoulders emerged. “You were at the show tonight, weren’t you? Every time, there are one or two people in the audience who are more strongly affected than the others. I’m warning you, Carl will soon be back; he’s gone to get my evening meal. You’d better leave before he returns. And put that pen away, they didn’t lie to you: I can neither write nor draw.”
Andersen wanted to thunder, “Celadon, in the name of the Organization, I have come to terminate you!” but his throat had tightened almost shut. The words suddenly seemed ridiculous, those of a child playing pretend. Where were the machines she had stolen from their native world? The plans, the diagrams, the compendia of secret knowledge? There was nothing in the room but the wooden table, the saucer, and the candle.
Celadon’s tone of voice betrayed a certain nervousness. “Listen, if you want to talk to me, talk. Why did you come back to see me?”
Andersen managed to utter “Celadon . . .”
“That isn’t my name,” she said. She came closer to the pool’s edge. Her hands emerged in turn. The skin of her face was pale, but her palms had a reddish tinge. “It’s been explained to you: those of your race can’t pronounce my true name, but I can’t change it.”
“Your name doesn’t matter,” said Andersen in a strangled voice.
She pinched her lips, frowned. “I should have understood from the start,” she said. “Listen well: I am not a woman. To lust for me is like lusting after . . . one of those beasts you call dogs. Would you couple with a she-dog?”
Andersen answered nothing. She who denied that she was Celadon rested her weight on her arms, came halfway out of the water. She was naked. Her small cone-shaped breasts were tipped by blood-red nipples.
“Is that what you wished to see? Go ahead, look all you want.” She hesitated. “If you promise to be nice, I’ll let you touch my chest. Will that make you happy?”
Andersen swallowed. The inside of his cheeks was dry as parchment. He took a few steps to the table. A wave of chill shook him. He had to fight to recover control of his thoughts.
“You want to see the rest of me? Then look.” Celadon pulled herself even farther out of the water with a grunt of effort. She bent her body, and her lower half came to rest on the rim of the pool. Her torso melted into a crimson abdomen that ended in a wide tail with triangular fins.
“Are you happy now?” she asked. She was panting, the lower half of her body quivered. “Get a good look, I can’t—stay long out of water.” After a few seconds, she let herself fall back into the pool with a splash. Her human half immediately rose back to the surface.
Andersen began to laugh. His momentary weakness had faded.
“Bravo,” he said. “Bravo, Celadon! I almost let myself be convinced. I don’t know how you knew I would come tonight, but my congratulations for the performance.”
Celadon withdrew to the farthest end of the pool. Andersen could see she was afraid of him now.
“Of course, it all makes sense: it was you who arranged that I should lose my adjustors. You thought I would have to return to the Organization, that it would leave you enough time to finish your work and leave. A plan full of subtleties, I admit. But the time for subtleties is past.”
“If you try to touch me,” warned Celadon, “I will drown you. I am stronger than you are.”
“Not stronger, oh no. I am Andersen, an agent of the Organization. Your adventure is over, Celadon.” To have spoken the words filled him with well-being.
He started to brandish his metadagger, but then he remembered that the weapon had been altered. He completed the motion by crossing his arms. “I’m tired of this game, Celadon. Come out of there.”
After a pause, she said: “You don’t believe me. You never believed what you were told, did you? You think I am a woman wearing a rubber suit.” She made a series of curious sounds: whistles and throaty hisses. Her lips drew back and Andersen thought to see that she possessed several rows of teeth.
A sudden, icy doubt crossed his mind. Was she truly who he thought she was? He tried to remember Celadon’s face, but the image on the photographs had fled his recollection. He could no longer be sure. . . . Weakness flooded back into him. His thoughts began to stutter. The pen fell from his hand onto the stone floor.
“If you’re not Celadon,” he heard himself saying, “who are you?”
“I am what you were told I am. Professor de Weir netted me in the ocean, right after he had killed his Kraken. He taught me your language and brought me back here with him.”
“No. That’s impossible. For centuries, sailors have sold ‘sirens’ they make by sewing a monkey’s torso to a fish�
�s tail. I’m not that gullible.” Andersen had to lean on the table with both hands. His arms shook.
“No? You’re not gullible? Then tell me: who do you think you are?”
“I told you. I am an agent of the Organization. An envoy from our native world.”
“Which world?” Celadon’s voice had lost its nervous undertone; it now seemed assured, almost mocking.
“The real world. My world. A world of progress, of cleanliness. This place is no better than a savages’ encampment by comparison.”
“There is a red seaweed that grows on the shallows,” said Celadon. “When my people chew it, they feel a kind of happiness, and visions like fever dreams come to them. On Professor de Weir’s ship, I saw that your people also use dream plants. Now I understand what’s happening. Wake up, Andersen.”
Andersen stood straight, keeping the fingers of one hand on the tabletop. “I’m not dreaming. I remember quite well. On the world I come from, we make light without burning gas or wood. There are horseless carriages that move by themselves. Men have learned to fly, using machines. . . . People have even been to the moon!”
“Delirium, Andersen; fever dreams. You’re describing impossible accomplishments, things no one has ever seen, but you refuse to believe in my existence, when I’m here in front of you.”
“No. I have proof. I still have the ultimate proof.” Andersen leaned his hip against the table to free both of his hands. He took the envelope from his overcoat’s inner pocket, unsealed it. The flap tore in two; one of the pieces remained glued. He had to tear the rest of the envelope open.
He pulled out the photographs and let them fall onto the table. Four squares of white cardboard, on each of which a woman’s face had been clumsily drawn with coloured pencils.
