by Angels
“I know quite well what a religion is, we have many records. And at any rate, I am human, am I not?”
“Unfortunately, yes. You are indeed human, despite two hundred years of genetic drift. But anyway, what is the point of venturing onto the continents? There is nothing there to see, especially for someone like yourself. . . .”
“Nonetheless, I wish to go. If you cannot prevent me, I do not see what more we have to say to each other.” The Prince spoke this ancient dialect easily, given its lack of declensions and stripped-down tenses; but he regretted not being able to use the didactive mode of the tongue of Bleue, which would have put Gerard Chun back in his place.
“Our government will send a formal protest to the higher authorities of the Sleeping Worlds.”
“I have already told you my father was not opposed to this trip.”
Gerard Chun had closed his eyes. Exasperation could be plainly read on his alien face.
“So be it. But I must warn you that we shall not be responsible for your security. Whatever your fate, we shall not be accountable to your fath—your government. Your refusal to cooperate frees us from all responsibility.” He spoke loudly and distinctly—the Prince had deduced that their conversation was being recorded for legal purposes.
“Will you let me leave, now?”
“Wait.” Gerard Chun had called for a biogineer. “At the very least, we’ll implant a protection module; remove your blouse, please.”
But the Prince had stepped back, aghast.
“I will not let you. . . . I cannot. . . . You may not ask this of me!”
The Man from Hurt had sighed: “I had forgotten your taboos on bodily integrity. In that case, we will put it inside a ring. Will this be agreeable?”
“If it will make you happy,” the Prince had replied.
They had both waited silently for the ring to be brought. While Chun knotted and unknotted his fingers, swaying from one leg to the other, the Prince had focused his thought on Amarille, the train’s Navigating Astrochele.
Amarille? Are you there?
Always there, my Prince.
They have allowed me to go down where I will. I shall soon touch the true soil of Hurt.
We are all happy to be able to serve you, my Prince.
Gerard Chun looked out the porthole. The Prince had joined him. The ochre crescent of Hurt blazed under the fires of the Sun, and a few cable’s lengths from the orbital station floated the six turtles who had brought the Prince from the Sleeping Worlds, four hundred and sixty light years distant from the planet that had borne humankind.
HURT (THE POLES)
There had been the frenzies of the polar cities, the capricious frenzy of pleasure of the Antarctics in their park-burgs, the puritanical frenzy of interdicts of the Arctics in their floating cities of metal and crystal.
Two weeks in Corianne-the-Capital, scattered among the valleys of Eternity Range. Two weeks of impromptu parties in his honour, of banquets, of games, of sexual overtures it would have been improper to refuse.
Five days in New-Thule [NT57] and Sankte-Brendan [SB80], one hundred twenty hours spent watching the ocean through the lensed windows of deserted observation galleries. One hundred twenty hours spent listening to the apostles of Stellar Transmigration preach to faithful who seemed to have already Transmigrated: empty husks, dead eyes.
Still, it had been in the floating cities of the North that he had felt the more readily accepted. The Antarctics’ fervour, he had realized as early as his second day among them, masked an almost absolute revulsion toward him. He could not have said why their laughter cracked when he came near, why their faces froze while they listened to him speak, why the women who made love to him kept their teeth clenched as if to hold back vomit.
It was only among the disciples of the Transmigration, in their cities that seemed always empty outside the mandatory recreation periods, during their communal meals eaten in absolute silence, that he had been able to breathe. These people should have held him in abhorrence, he who came from a world even more paradisiacal than the spheres promised to the Transmigrators, but who was only a man, a man with suspect mores, to boot. And yet they treated him with a courtesy icy but impeccable.
It had only been toward the end that he had understood. He was pacing along one of the observation galleries, the sound of his footsteps muffled by the thick gray and black, geometrically patterned carpet. He had been watching the ocean behind the salt-spattered windows, and had not seen the little girl. She seemed not to have noticed him either, had bumped hard against his knees.
“Careful!” had cried the Prince, worried that she might have hurt herself. He had grasped her shoulders to prevent her from falling, had leaned over her.
She had frowned, pinched her nostrils as if she was smelling something foul. She had murmured, tonelessly: “Let me go, animal.”
He had stepped aside to let her pass; had he not done so, he almost believed she would have walked through him.
BLEUE
He often dreamed of the fête that had been given to celebrate his departure. Always, certain details were changed: it was not Hurdi, the Fourth Infanta of Rosamund, who accompanied him, but Swyle of Faudace, whom he had never seen again after the Third Cyclades of 722; his mother wore yellow instead of blue, as if she had been in mourning; the guests refused, for no perceptible reason, to drink the syrille liqueur.
Bleue’s interpreters would have found many unfavourable portents in these alterations; but the Prince had never believed in oneiromancy.
At the time of departure, five sylphids had suddenly appeared. Two Jayls, a Cardallow, a Nightgalen, and last, a Silverine, whose race had been thought extinct for fifty years.
The sylphids had formed a half-circle around the Prince and spoken to him only, ignoring the higher-ranked nobles, even to his father, Verte’s Sovereign.
“Prince, let us leave with you. Let us. That you should not be alone to cross the heavens.”
He had nodded in agreement—how could he have refused?—and the sylphids had climbed with him aboard the car of the aerostat-shuttle. All through their ascent to orbit, they had chirped and laughed. Once in weightlessness, they had launched themselves from one end of the car to the other, whirling, dizzied.
When the ship emerged from its first overspace transect, all the sylphids were dead. Their tiny corpses still floated in the auricle where they had fashioned their nests, their shining wings slowly beating in the air currents. The Prince knew he would never be able to force himself to unseal the exterior vacuole and release their bodies to space.
HURT (ON THE OCEAN)
Hurt has shrunk. The thought echoed ceaselessly in the Prince’s mind. Hurt has shrunk. The waters have risen, the continents have desiccated. All that remain are deserts bordered with diseased jungles. I cannot make myself believe we were born of this world.
He had come down from orbit in a snub-nosed shuttle, all of metal and glass. Its repulsors spat out long pennons of amethystine light, moaning in a low tone like the song of a birthing Oceanid.
The same craft had conveyed him from Antarctica to the Arctic along a ghost-meridian, rising so high in mid-course that the planetary curvature changed the horizon to the rim of a plate, above which the purplish-blue sky dyed itself with the black of space. Under the shuttle spread the deserts of Hurt: grayish-ochre extents, punctuated by the dark blots of dead cities, bordered by a muddy green ribbon.
“I want to go down,” the Prince had murmured without noticing he was thinking aloud. “I want to touch the soil from which I came.”
“The last authorizations have not yet come, Highness. You will have to remain in the Arctic until—”
“Be silent.” The Prince had shivered. He could not bear hearing the metallic voice of the shuttle’s thinker. All the thinkers of Hurt had the same voice, a voice that could not be mistaken for a human voice, so that the people of Hurt could neve
r mistake the words of a mere machine for those of a human being.
Every time he heard the voice of a thinker of Hurt, the Prince would force himself to remember the old, half-senile thinkers of the First Ship, on Bleue; their voices, soft or harsh, sometimes amused, sometimes sad, but that could always be fancied to come from a human throat. So that he would not think about the voice of the sylphids, the singsong phrasings of the Silverine who had embarked with him to cross the heavens and who floated, empty-eyed, in an auricle of the orbiting ship . . .
Hurt has shrunk.
It had not been the shuttle that had taken him from the puritanical cities of the Arctic to the shores of a defaced continent; he had taken passage aboard a ship more than a century old, conveying sheets and beams of a porous metal, lighter than the Ivraine wood from which Rosamund’s lake-dwelling nomads built their rafts. They had travelled the surface of the waters for several days before seeing the shore appear on the horizon. Then they had veered to starboard, following the course of a sea-drowned river, heading deep inland.
The ship, half a kilometre long and a hundred metres wide, had only a handful of sailors: the onboard machines and thinkers sufficed for most manoeuvres. The Prince, freed from the suffocating atmosphere of New-Thule, had sought to converse with the sailors, but they seemed to pay him even less attention than the Arctics had. Irked, he had found the mess and there waited for evening, in hope that the crew would be more talkative at the end of a watch.
But when they had at last appeared, the crewmen had not even looked at the Prince. Almost angry, he had seized the hand of the nearest man, to force him to acknowledge his presence. It was cold and smooth, a mass of pseudoflesh on a rigid framework. The Prince had fallen back, mouth loosely open. He had run to the captain’s cabin, desperate to see the only other human aboard.
The door had opened by itself when he had knocked. The captain had risen from the metal chair where he had been sitting. “How may I be of help, Highness?” The captain’s voice was the voice of the shuttle’s thinker. His outstretched hand pointed to an armchair, a table bearing bottles of spirits, all full, all thickly furred with dust. “We do not often have the privilege of carrying passengers, Highness. If I can be of help in any way, please do not hesitate to ask.”
“No . . . no,” the Prince had stammered. He had exited the cabin backward, while the android’s inhuman voice announced: “We will arrive at Port-Clèves in two days and four hours if everything proceeds as projected. If you should need anything . . .”
In his cabin, the Prince had attempted to reach Amarille, but telepathy weakens with distance as voices are lost in the wind; the presence of the astrochele was a distant murmur. So he had called Gerard Chun, caring little what time it might be on the orbital station. The face of the Man from Hurt, the Grp III Xeno Admin, had appeared on the screen built into the desk.
“What is it, Highness?” His voice expressed no amity; and the Prince, all his memories of the Antarctic brought to mind, had suddenly realized that Gerard Chun hated him, despised him with all his might.
“I had not been told that . . . that the crew was not human. . . .”
“There is no reason to constrain citizens to accomplish a task a machine may perform more cheaply; though I suppose this idea also is foreign to you. If you cannot cope with the situation, I am sincerely sorry.”
Chun’s contempt, far from worsening his confusion, had abruptly calmed the Prince. After a beat, he had said: “I can deal with it. I should have guessed this omission was deliberate on your part. Your tactics to make me abandon my pilgrimage are unworthy of you. Leave me be!”
He had shut off the communication with a cold, precise gesture. Verte’s Lithiarchs learned to live immersed in the caustic ichors secreted by the Leviathes; their Prince ought to be able to adjust to Hurt’s psychic atmosphere.
HURT (ALMARICA)
Port-Clèves. Shores clawed by twisted mangroves; canals choked with black nenuphars; waves stitched with ribbons of ochre fluids; the ship welcomed by flights of shrieking birds, while a bouquet of stenches rose from the sun-hammered city: greasy mud, camphor, urine, offal.
The ship had docked at a shaky quay, more than a kilometre from the shore: Port-Clèves was surrounded by shallows. While the machines performed the unloading, a port agent had climbed aboard. Dressed in a black cloth striped in dazzling colours, he was too worn, too dirty, too ugly to be anything but a true human being.
The captain had welcomed the little man on the deck, had suggested that they go into his cabin; but the man had shuddered at the suggestion and declared his intention to stay where he was. Under the gaze of the Prince, who held himself somewhat to the side—as usual, ignored by everyone— papers had been exchanged, signatures put down. The little man had been on the verge of leaving, relief plain on his face, when the Prince came to him.
Startled, the man had defiantly spoken several words in a language that the Prince had eventually recognized as Anglade, straightjacketed by a murderous accent.
“I wish to go to the city,” the Prince had said. In response to which the little man had mimed something, several times, with growing impatience. The Prince had finally understood he was supposed to pay. He had extended the plastic rectangle he had been given before his descent from orbit, and which—though it had taken him a long while to believe it—contained money in the same way a word contains an idea; but the little man had flatly refused.
“Baksheesh should be paid in cash, Highness,” the captain had murmured. Then the Prince had taken from his pocket a small coin of Verte—he had no coinage of Hurt—and given it to the port agent.
Who had examined it at length, weighed it, bitten it. Then, “Golt? Golt?” he had asked.
“Ah . . . yes, it’s gold.” The Prince had nodded. The little man’s eyes had glinted like those of a tetracere at the kill. The defence module, reacting to the Prince’s sudden burst of fear, had enveloped him in the blue haze of a kinetic protection field. The little man had spun around, snorting, and gestured for the Prince to follow him.
“You should not have given him money from your world, Highness,” the captain had said. “The gold in this coin is easily worth a hundred times its nominal value.”
“But . . . it is only a symbol, a metal like any other. What could gold be good for, that would make it so precious?” As the Prince’s fear evaporated, so did the protective field.
The android captain had shrugged its shoulders of metal and pseudoflesh: “We have forgotten, Highness. It has been so long. We have forgotten.”
VERTE
Then had come what was far more important, the shell full of pictures. Something much older than the calendar. His mother had given it to him as a birthday gift. A fist-sized seashell, the off-white of those very old things whose colours have been washed away by time, whose lip formed a perfect circle.
Faint gray stripes followed the conch’s spiral, which seemed to extend into ever-fainter infinity. They were sensitive to a fingernail’s touch, and depending upon the pressure point, a different image appeared at the mouth of the shell, a brilliantly coloured miniature.
Three women in dark jupons holding each other’s hands, on a flower-spangled meadow. A piece of raw meat on a wooden trencher. A machine with multiple insect arms rocking a naked infant.
The Prince stroked his finger along the spiral, and thousands of images of Hurt blossomed in the conch’s mouth.
The one he always tried to retrieve showed a white stone building with an elongated architecture; a tower in the centre of the façade held a silvery bell. A young woman stood before the entrance in a purple dress, holding a book in her right hand. One could see, through the building’s doorway, behind the young woman, a statue of a man with open arms, fixed against a wall.
The Prince would have wanted to find this place, to enter the building, to admire the mysterious statue, to speak with the young woman in the purple dress. Sometime
s, when he knew no one was watching him, he would converse with the image, inventing the young woman’s replies. She would tell him the secrets of Hurt, describe the fabulous animals that dwelled on it, the many races of humanity and their baroque customs.
And he would feel the pull of the planet from which his species originated, feel it in his bones. Like a subtle, draining disease. With the years, the illness would become real, to the point where he could no longer resist it, where he would have to leave, to touch the soil of the world from which he came.
For now, he was still a dreaming child, holding an antique marvel in his hands.
HURT (PORT-CLÈVES)
He had realized as soon as he’d arrived in the town that he was being followed. As soon as he’d stepped on dry ground, he had felt spied upon. No need for telepathic faculties to confirm this impression, so clearly did the one who watched over him contrast with the inhabitants of Port-Clèves.
A woman too tall, wearing clothes far too new. With too much jewelry that was too intricate not to be electronic equipment.
The Prince’s irritation had surprised himself. It was, he reasoned, because of the contempt implied by this way of doing things, the attitude of a Gerard Chun who warned him of the dangers he courted, disengaged himself from all responsibility, then put agents on his heels—to watch over him, or maybe even to frighten him.
Keeping one eye always on the agent, he had begun his tour, had found a room at a hotel (an angular and ugly building, with windows like murder holes), had taken a tasteless meal at a restaurant, had paced the main streets of the town. Always, his companion followed, evidently aware that he had spotted her, but in no way seeking to hide.
