by Angels
At a great esplanade, he had sat down on a public bench, whose dark green paint was flaking off in long splinters, had hung his head forward, as if feeling ill; after a while, the one who shadowed him had approached, and he had suddenly risen to confront her.
“What do you want from me?”
“You should not ask too many questions.” The woman’s words were like necklaces, each syllable a bead strung on the dry reed of her voice. Her hair was a dirty blonde, her skin almost white; her forehead bore a faint scar.
“I order you to desist from following me. I have already had to accept this defence module; it is quite enough.”
The woman had pointed with her chin toward a gathering on the margin of the square: “What do you see there, Highness?”
He had turned to look. A score of people, the men bare-chested, the women in shapeless frocks, walked in cadence. One of the men held aloft a metal cross, tall as himself, without apparent effort. To the cross was affixed a large green doll, scarcely of human shape.
“They are Purificators,” the orbital agent had announced. “A sect that is hardly considered radical, nor is it particularly marginal. Right now, they are expressing how they feel about what is strange to them.”
The procession had reached a pink stone cube set at the centre of the esplanade. The cross-bearer had laid down his burden there, and the rest of the group busied itself around it, though the Prince could not see what they were doing.
My Prince?
The voice had startled him for an instant. Then he had felt the astrochele’s comforting presence fill his mind.
Are you well?
I’m all right, Amarille. Hurt is not as I had imagined it, that’s all. But I’m learning how to live here. How is the train doing?
All’s well for us. We have regained our strength. Hurt’s people do not like our presence in orbit: their thoughts are full of venom. But they dare not do anything against us.
I’m not worried. But your voice seems suddenly fainter. . . .
Our orbit carries us away; we go around Hurt in very little time. When the whole mass of the planet is between us, I cannot hear you. If you wish, I can hold my position above you by making short hops through overspace.
That would tire you out, wouldn’t it?
A little, yes. But if you want. . . .
No, it isn’t necessary. You come in range often enough as it is.
I can feel you even before you come above the horizon.
Well, then. When I need you, I will call you.
The agent gestured to draw his attention to the scene: flames were blooming around the stone. The puppet on the cross was burning with bluish flames and hardly any smoke. One of the women stood slightly apart from the others. She was laughing; she was laughing, the Prince had told himself, the way a child laughs when it sees its mother return.
Goodbye, my Prince.
The puppet was almost consumed; still it remained on the cross: its arms had been nailed to it. The laughing woman had turned, her gaze had met that of the Prince. Her eyes held the same fire as those of the port official looking at the gold piece from Verte.
HURT (TROY)
Three days in Port-Clèves, a city spread along the coast like a puddle of blood. Three days of impromptu celebrations that turned to riots, of garbage feasts on the periphery of the public dumps, of games played with hands and knives, of sexual overtures to which he did not even dare reply. Seventy-two hours spent contemplating streets overflowing with misery through the scratched windows of a mildewed room. Seventy-two hours spent listening to the city’s dissonances make up an atonal hymn to futility.
He had touched the soil from which his race had issued, but it was nothing more than a layer of filth and excrement.
The Prince turned on his finger the ring that contained the defence module. The false gem was a dull red, cabochon-cut. A unicorn’s bezoar stone. If he took off the ring, Planetary Security would lose their fix on him—he did not doubt that the module was equipped with a localization transponder. But the module would become aware it was no longer on the Prince’s finger, and would ring the alarm. Gerard Chun would find this enough of an excuse to repatriate him against his will.
He did not want to be taken back to orbit, not now, regardless of his disgust toward Hurt’s true visage. He still felt, even more painfully now, this need to regain the species’ native ground, as if his thirst had been staunched with vinegar.
He had gone down to the hotel’s lobby, a room whose wallpaper bore leprous water stains. Nowhere could he see the woman with the colourless hair and the desiccated voice. After much arguing with a clerk, he had obtained a map of the region. A greenish stain followed the coastline; inland, it paled and soon vanished, to be replaced by a featureless gray expanse. In the desert, perhaps he would at last find the communion that had eluded him.
At the frontier of the gray zone, perhaps fifty kilometres from Port-Clèves, the Prince had noticed a dot bearing the name of Troy. A red thread linked it to the stain that was Port-Clèves.
“Would it be easy to get there?” he had asked.
“There’s a bus every morning and every evening—when it runs.”
It was running that evening. The Prince had jumped aboard at the last moment, feigning up to that point to watch the departure with a tourist’s curiosity. He had seen the agent run across the street, too late according to the driver, who blindly obeyed the rusted clock bolted to the dashboard. The Prince had turned around to see the too-well-dressed woman’s form shrink in the rear window. She had made a parting gesture he had not been able to interpret.
The bus had bumped for an hour along the narrow, poorly marked road. Monkeys the colour of cinnamon and blood, the first animals the Prince had seen since the slinking rats and gaunt dogs of Port-Clèves, jumped from treetop to treetop, back and forth across the road. From the disturbed branches, tumorlike fruits plummeted to the ground and burst in a delirium of glairy pulp and barbed seeds.
Very soon, the trees had thinned out, shrunk. Presently all that remained was a gloomy savannah punctuated by grayish mounds of uncertain origin. At the end of the road, the lights of Troy marked the limits of the desert as a lighthouse marks the coast; but what vessel of the sands had they been charged to keep away from the shores of humanity?
The bus’s passengers had dispersed; the Prince of Verte had remained alone on the cracked-asphalt plaza, in the declining day. He had neglected to ask the driver where he could find lodgings, and from where he stood, no such establishment could be seen.
He had crossed the village, which was larger than he’d first thought. He had reached the last houses as night fell completely. In front of him spread the desert. Far from relief, he had felt, in front of the limitless gray-ochre expanse, the same anxiety as when he’d looked at space through his ship’s scleras.
He had turned on his heels, recrossed the streets of Troy. At some moment or other, he had lost his way, and rather than return to the plaza he had started out from, he had found himself in a neighbourhood of narrow twisting streets. He had walked along a small park holding more sand than grass, guided by a faraway sign in flickering neon, which simply announced BAR, as if it were the only one in town.
Conversations had stopped when he’d entered. A young boy, barely fourteen, had pointed him to a table after a long stare. The babble of conversation had slowly returned once the Prince had sat. Someone at a nearby table had snickered: “What do you think he’s looking for here, except her?”
As if the speaker had risen to show the Prince of whom he spoke, a young woman had suddenly become visible where she stood, leaning against the counter, adorned with all the splendours of dream.
HURT (THAÏS)
She wore purple. It had been that simple. She wore purple and resembled the young woman in the image held by the conch. The same black hair, the same way of posing her arm.
He had sto
od, had taken the three steps that separated him from her. As if it had been inevitable, like a prophecy known since childhood or a still-remembered dream. She had turned to face him. The right half of her face was woven with a cortical implant.
The expression of the young woman was perfectly flat; but in an instant, it had become smiling, vivacious. “Evening. And who’re you?” Her voice was warm, caressing, made a hundred promises with every inflexion.
The Prince had answered evasively, “I’ve come from Port-Clèves.”
“And you want a nice evening, my Prince?”
He had believed for a long moment that she knew, before grasping the trivial sense of the appellation. The young woman had seemed to interpret his stunned silence as shyness, had grabbed his arm familiarly and dragged him after her out of the bar. “Come with me, we’ll have fun.”
He had followed her without a word; he almost expected her to show him, out of an alleyway, a high building of white stone; to guide him to the summit of the tower, and there to ring a silvery bell.
“Name’s Thaïs,” she’d said, and the metal of her implant glimmered in the streetlights’ flickering glare.
She had pulled him after her in the streets of Troy. A warm breeze made little whirls of dust in the courtyards and streets.
No lights shone at the windows of the house she’d led him to. The stairwell was filled with cooking smells and the reek of burned wood.
As naive as he might still be—even after Port-Clèves—the Prince had understood, well before reaching the third landing and Thaïs’s exiguous apartment; he had not felt offended when she’d run some rust-coloured water in a pitcher and asked him to wash himself.
She had stripped off her dress and her plastic necklace. Kneeling on the bed, she’d taken one alluring pose after another, her too-thin body stained fawn by the candlelight, her implant winking when her face came out of shadow.
There had been people like her in Corianne, who’d chosen to let a machine control their emotions and dictate their behaviour. The Prince knew there was a metal sphere, nestled inside Thaïs’s jaw, which made her want to sell herself and held a repertoire of optimized seduction routines.
But he had not been able to resist, even though, overlaying the sight of Thaïs pinching her nipples and spreading her legs, he had heard a phantom voice telling him all of the wonders of Hurt. . . .
Afterwards, she’d told him, in a tone already colder, “If you wanna sleep here, it’s more expensive, and you have to pay in advance.” He had accepted, nodding, and a smile had come back on her face.
And because he remembered the women of Corianne, who insisted that he take them despite their nausea, remembered the apostles of Transmigration mummifying in their coffin-cities, the Prince had paid Thaïs not by touching the plastic card to the read-port grafted behind her ear, but with a coin of Bleue, the last that remained to him.
She’d remained dumbstruck a half minute, the left half of her face sagging; then the implant had regained command, but imperfectly. “What’s that, love?” she’d asked, but her voice swung between conspiratorial tenderness and frightened anger. “Looks like gold with a jewel in the middle.”
“Yes, that’s what it is. A sapphire.” Thaïs had frowned; the Prince had gone on: “It’s a coin from my home. I come from . . . another world. I . . . listen . . .”
He had emptied himself of all his memories; it was like lancing a wound. Because he dared not blame Thaïs for what she was not guilty of. I have found nothing here of what I sought. Hurt is not the land of marvels I have dreamed of all my life. My long-gone ancestors were born of this soil, but it is more alien to me than the Moon’s.
He had spoken for an hour, perhaps two, lying on the too-short bed and its sticky sheets, while Thaïs watched him silently, bent over him, her hair framing her face with shadow. He had spent himself in her a second time, then had fallen asleep, his face nestled in the hollow of her shoulder.
HURT (THE PURIFICATORS)
He had woken alone in the bed; alone in the room. He had called Thaïs, gotten no answer. The memory of the preceding night had come back to him; he had felt a mix of shame and fulfilment. Whether because of his confidences to Thaïs or not, he felt at last freed from his obsession with Hurt. It was over and done; all that remained was to leave, to return to Verte, his parents, Swyle of Faudace, the slow gyration of the Sleeping Worlds.
He had dressed rapidly, rinsing his face at the stained sink. As he was drying himself, the door had suddenly opened; but it was not Thaïs who had come in. There was a half-dozen of them, in dark clothes; two wrestled with a heavy wooden beam.
“What do you want?” the Prince had asked, uneasy but incapable of believing himself in danger.
“Purification,” answered an old man in a mournfully triumphant voice, while his companions surrounded the Prince.
They tore off his clothes; and then he was truly afraid.
There was a lone woman among the Purificators, a woman with tangled brown hair and watery blue eyes. Her forehead bore a deep gouge, the memory of a frightful blow. She had long dry fingers. She’d stroked his cheek, and he had felt like crying. When she spoke, she constantly moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue.
“We’re gonna help you,” she had said, tenderly cruel. “The town’ll be purified of your presence, and you’ll be purified of your alienness. I know it ain’t your fault you were born elsewhere. You’ve got to understand: you see, it’s God who made the Sun and its planets, but Satan made all the other worlds. Those who went to live there, they broke God’s law. It’s written in the Book. There was the Original Sin, then the Second Sin. God sent His son to redeem the first sin, but we’ve got to redeem the second one ourselves.”
The Prince had answered in a trembling voice, not really knowing what he said: “Where I come from, there was a Book also, the Book of Exile. My mother read it to me when . . .”
“The Book of Exile, yes. The Exile from God! Your people knew; there’s nobody can ignore God: we all know it when we leave Him. Even the worst of murderers, he who kills the unborn child . . .”
The other Purificators had completed the sentence: “ . . . calls to God in the midst of his crime.”
The Purificator had gone on, speaking the words in a singsong rhythm: “Even the most depraved of fornicators, he who couples with a machine . . .”
“ . . . cries to God in the midst of his silence.”
It had become a ritual chant. “Even the most corrupt of mothers, she who feeds her child from grain grown under the suns of Satan . . .”
“ . . . hungers for God in the midst of her gluttony.”
And during the recitation, they had tied his wrists to the beam.
It was only then he had realized the defence ring was no longer on his finger. The old man was rooting through the Prince’s clothes; he had cried in pleasure upon finding the plastic card, but now whined that he found no money.
“Never mind,” the woman had said, but he’d protested: “He paid the whore with gold! It’s unfair if there ain’t any for us.”
“You here for God or for money?” she’d replied, and the old man had fallen silent.
The Prince was dizzy, the way one feels when one has been breathing very hard for a full minute, or when one has been suddenly pulled out of sleep while dreams still have a claim on their dreamer. He wanted to close his eyes and rest.
The door had been opened again. A young voice—he had recognized the boy in the bar—had intruded: “Get on with it. The ring’s far away, but the plane-seek’s gonna come eventually.”
“Stand up.” They had prodded him forward; two men had to help him go down the stairs sideways because of the beam. Outside, the streetlights were unlit. A vague rosy smear heralded dawn.
They had crossed twisting alleys to finally come out in an inner courtyard. A dozen people stood in corners, silent, most of them with hidden faces. Almost
immediately, he had seen Thaïs. She wore a shawl that covered the right half of her face.
The Purificators had fixed the beam that held his arms to a cement pillar. Then one of them had come forward. He bore a mallet and a handful of rusted nails.
Someone had stuffed a stinking rag in the Prince’s mouth to stop him from crying out. And the hammer had come down upon his palms.
HURT (AMARILLE)
Pain had freed the Prince from his trance. But it was too late to scream, much too late to struggle. The nails had burst the flesh of his palms and buried themselves in the wood of the transverse beam.
Someone was reading a book out loud, next to him. The words, in an archaic tongue, no longer held meaning. The Prince thought, I am going to die. They will kill me; here, now.
People pressed around him, close enough to touch. Thaïs was among them, right in front of him, half her face hidden by the shawl. She watched him, the Prince had told himself, as a child watches its mother leave, without understanding. How far did the influence of the cortical implant extend? Because he did not have much time left to live, he had decided in that instant, before his reason left him completely, that he forgave her, that he was in love with her.
There had been a brief silence. Then, after what had to be a command, a Purificator, holding a metal point with both hands, had furrowed his left side; the Prince had felt the edge grate against his ribs.
And the next instant he had felt, or thought to feel, Amarille’s presence emerge from beyond the horizon.
Telepathy weakens with distance as voices are lost in the wind; the Prince had screamed, an inarticulate mental cry, an animal wail.
