by Angels
Outside the church, he leans against a wall (an old wall, with dry rough mortar and rotting bricks) and lets out spasmodic cries, he no longer knows if he is laughing or sobbing.
The history of Hurt is a play whose tempo speeds up at every new scene. The scenery changes faster and faster, but it would be too expensive to modify everything, so some fragments will remain the same for several acts. And since the actors do not have enough time to memorize their lines, they reuse early speeches and ad lib what they have forgotten.
He wipes the tears from his eyes, walks away. A little boy crosses the street, dragging a rag doll in the dust. The Sovereign sees the little girl of the arctic cities, who had made him understand he was no more real in their world than an eidolon escaped from a dream. Did she die in the attack launched by the Antarctics? She would have been an adult on Rosamund, free to choose the paths of her own life. She would have been entitled to her very own merych, to ride along Maude Lake and the floral fields. Pretty as she was, there would have been two or three sylphids to follow her everywhere, babbling for hours in their children’s voices. . . .
The BAR is still there.
He enters; he does not remember the old decor—only Thaïs had been real in this place—but he would be ready to believe that nothing has changed in the least.
He asks, aware of the feebleness of this ruse: “I was supposed to meet someone here, a woman with black hair, rather tall, she—”
“You’re late, fella,” says the barkeep, and the Sovereign shudders, recognizing in the pasty features of this thirty-year-old man the face of the boy who watched for the plane-seek while the sacrifice was prepared. “It’s been a long while since Thaïs turned tricks.”
“That isn’t why I’m meeting her. I have . . . I have something to give her.”
“None of my business. If you want to see her that bad, go on the square next to the church; she plays prophet now. The Trinitaries say she’s been touched by God. Me. . .”
The Sovereign is no longer listening. He exits, retraces his way back. On the square, he sees no one save for a woman in a black dress, seated on a stone bench. He avoids looking at her, so much does she recall to him the Purificator who guided him along his torture. It could not have been Thaïs who officiated at the ceremony; the man did not say that. The Sovereign’s gaze, as if he had just been pointed to the woman in black, goes slowly back to her. She turns her head in his direction, not seeing him.
It is only then that he recognizes her. Her face is free of implants; all that remains is a fine scar along her cheek. She has aged—how could she not have aged? But she has kept something intact through all these years, something which strikes the Sovereign anew, something that makes him recall the Cyclades, the culminating moment when all the masks are taken off; as if this matured face was only a semblance, ready to vanish to reveal the true face beneath, Thaïs’s face as it always was.
She moves, and so shatters the illusion.
Something else is shattered in him. The way a fever suddenly breaks. There had been first the calendar of Hurt and its brass wheels, the calendar that pretended you could go back against the flow of time by turning a disk the other way. Then there had been the shell full of images, as if it had really been possible to capture pieces of time and never lose them. And finally, there had been the Sleeping Worlds themselves, where time was like a snake biting its own tail, where the end of a Cyclade could not be told from the beginning of the next. . . .
Hurt has destroyed all this. He is freed from his illusions. He can no longer deny the flow of time, and its sole direction.
In an instant, he will have to decide whether he shall go to Thaïs or not. If he speaks to her, perhaps she will flee screaming from him, who brought miracles and death among her people. Perhaps she will not remember him, perhaps she will simply refuse to believe him.
If she speaks with him, if she manages to overcome her disbelief, her fright, what will she say to him? He has never heard her own words. Now that the implant is no longer there to make her into another . . .
He does not hold the calendar in his hand, he can no longer make time go backward and recover yesterday’s Thaïs. The world has changed; this is a new act.
The child of the Sleeping Worlds has woken.
He takes a deep breath and steps out of the land of dreams.
IGNIS CŒLESTIS
“What is it like,” she asked,
“to ride the wave to shore?”
I could not have explained,
and speech had been burned out of us;
so I remained silent.
“What is it like,” she asked,
“to touch the face of Death?”
I pointed to my own;
her fingers stroked my branded flesh,
and I felt her shiver.
“What is it like,” she asked,
“to burn and burn, and still not die?”
At this I turned away,
picked up my weapons from the sand,
set forth toward the City.
My brothers had all come ashore,
had all struggled with temptation.
We raised flame-pitted blades up high,
turned our sight to the horizon,
set forth toward the City.
They tried to stop us then,
begging and pleading, like children.
Their dove-like wings fluttered in vain:
love had been burned out of us
along with compassion.
We raised a ragged cheer,
croakings from calcined throats;
clutched hafts in charred fingers;
having abandoned hope,
set forth toward the City.
ROSE OF THE DESERT
For Jean-Louis Trudel, with apologies for stealing the first sentence
1. VOICE OF THE SAND
Mashak was a burning cry. Nothing more was left of him. His body had remained the same—same coarse chalk-white skin, same long meticulously depilated skull, same powerfully muscled limbs and jutting tendons—but the very idea that some intelligence still resided within this physical envelope had become inadmissible.
Mashak was but a cry, a scream that never ceased. The walls of Manoâr echoed it to perfection; during the brief seconds when Mashak reinflated his lungs, the echoes of his cry filled the silence, and an instant later, Mashak’s voice rose again. For two days, the cry had gone on uninterrupted.
Mervelld and I had climbed the steps of the watchtower, using our status as Watchers to try to escape from the cry, even partially. In vain: at the summit of the tower, the sound, scarcely muffled by distance, became even more terrible through the sympathetic vibrations it awoke within the metal walls. It was as if, Mervelld had whispered nervously not long after Mashak’s return, the city itself were screaming, using Mashak as a mouth. I had gestured at Mervelld to be silent. My throat had grown tight; it took me a long time to dare admit to myself I had felt, fleetingly, the desire to strike him.
“How long before . . . ?” Mervelld asked, leaning on the railing, chin resting on his cupped hands.
“He can last for days and days,” I said. “You know that.”
“He was running when I saw him. Do you hear me? He was running. With all the strength in his legs, crossing the plaza in front of Paradise. He was running, and the dust rose in clouds where his feet touched the ground. He was running and screaming; his mouth was wide open, you could see only blackness inside; his chest swelled like a bellows between two expirations; he kept his mouth wide open all the time; and the echo of his cry was so perfect I had the impression his breath wasn’t at all involved in the making of it. . . .”
“Shut up,” I said.
“He’ll hurt us eventually,” Mervelld continued. “If he lasts too long. Some of us may flee to the desert.”
“Perhaps that’s what we should do. Perhaps that is wh
at he’s trying to tell us. He returned from the desert, screaming: perhaps he found something there. . . .”
“There is nothing in the desert, Mospedeo,” he said, with the quiet certainty of the man who states there is nothing between one and zero. Then he turned away and started to descend the stairs. I waited for a moment before following him. Under the noonday sun, the tower’s petals were fully open. Manoâr’s walls reverberated the echoes of the cry Mashak had become, and the metal blades thrummed in harmony.
Mervelld was right: it was as if the tower itself, as if Manoâr itself, were screaming.
Old Mantheor stared obstinately at the sun, wrapped as usual in his mangy fur coat. I was too troubled to have remembered to wear extra clothing before entering Paradise, and the cold that reigned there seeped into me to the bone, but Mantheor seemed not at all incommoded.
“Peace, Mospedeo,” he said. “What brings you here?”
The old man was playing with a pair of lenses that he placed one behind the other to enlarge the image of the sun. All Paradise’s lamps were extinguished; only the brilliance of the sun, filtered by the black rosette, drowned the room in sepia light. A bright disk painted itself on Mantheor’s face, around his right eye.
“Respect, Mantheor,” I answered. “You’re aware of what happened to Mashak?”
He took his gaze away from the sun to look at me, eyes pale blue as the noonday sky.
“I don’t know what happened to him. I know only the result of those events; do you think I’m deaf?”
Even through the thick walls of Paradise, Mashak’s scream made itself heard. I had not been aware of it immediately: the scream had become a constant, a thing that exists yet is no longer noticed.
“Don’t you have some advice to give me, Patriarch?”
“I’m only a stupid old man,” said Mantheor. “What do you want me to tell you? We are all affected by Mashak, but what solution can we adopt? No one can reason with him, he doesn’t even see us. We simply have to wait.”
“Wait until . . .”
His mouth pursed: “Say it. Wait until he dies. Mashak will die. Like others before him. Like Miriannis, like Mercono, like Methush, like all the others. There will be one fewer of us. Here!”
He was holding out the two lenses.
“Look at the sun, Mospedeo. Dappled like a moldy orange. The ancestors stated that such an amount of maculæ announced a period of dangerous instability. Do you know for how long the sun has been ‘dangerously unstable’?”
“I don’t know anymore, Mantheor. A long time, at any rate.”
“And yet nothing happens. Nothing changes. I think there is a deep underlying truth there, although I couldn’t say exactly what it is . . . I lack information. Perhaps more observations will serve. . . .”
Mantheor’s eyes were once more fixed on the solar disk; he seemed not to be paying me any attention anymore. Half-mad old mystic, I thought, but without rancour; almost affectionately.
Since I had become once more aware of the cry, the cold had become ever more intolerable: I laid the lenses on a table and turned away to leave. “Eternity, Mospedeo,” came Mantheor’s peaceful voice from behind me.
“Eternity, Mantheor,” I answered.
Paradise’s door shut with a thud. I was back in the day’s glare, its beneficial heat. Still, I shivered. Mashak’s scream had regained all its strength. I felt a dull anger rising in me, with no specific object—an emotion I had not felt in an eternity.
I saw Mayter walking along Windy Alley, his hands clenched like talons, his teeth digging into his lower lip. Montondara, who was coming out of a side street, hailed him. Mayter shuddered violently, shouted: “Don’t come near me!” And then he threw a rock at him. It shattered when it hit the edge of a wall; Montondara, who had been barely missed, remained dumbstruck. Mayter squawked the sound of someone making an aberrant discovery, and took flight.
I watched Montondara, clenching my teeth. After a moment of silence, he laughed shortly and said, as if he was the one at fault: “We’re all on edge, with that. . . . Well, I must be going home. . . . Eternity, Mospedeo.”
I watched him leave. I was even more chilled now. Because I felt no sympathy for him; nothing but a violent irritation. And the scream, Mashak’s scream, filling the air. . . . Another moment and I would have flung a stone at Montondara myself.
In the hours that followed, Manoâr’s streets grew deserted. Each man cowered at home, behind the illusory protection of his walls; but Mashak’s scream hunted for us, found us, entered us, gnawed us from within. . . .
I had gone home, wrapped myself in my bed sheets, stopped my ears with fibre torn from my pillows; in vain. I had made the mistake of going to my dining room, where one of Mactaledry’s musical sculptures sighed and clicked softly: seized by a fury as sudden as it was blind, I had smashed the planks, severed the ropes, shattered the ceramic beads. Then I’d cried, huddled among the debris, watching the cuts on my skin fade, and my right palm eject the splinter that had buried itself deep inside my flesh.
I would keep no trace of the accident, but the sculpture was irremediably destroyed. I was terribly ashamed. I strove to fight, to return to normal, to forget the scream. I kept repeating the same words to myself. The future like the past. We will cross the centuries like a ship the ocean of night. The old phrases written on the first pages of the Codex.
The sun was declining now. I had regained my calm, but it was a fragile shell trying to contain something burning and savage that Mashak had awoken. His scream flayed me, forced something monstrous to emerge from me, like a killer-vespid emerges from its pseudo-vegetal chrysalis.
The solution to our problem suddenly became obvious. We must all be together to fight. All together, close enough almost—despite the obscenity of the thing—to touch. Only then could we oppose our wills to Mashak, and silence the thing in us that answered his scream.
I went out of my house. The sun had vanished below the horizon. The evening wind had risen, and dust devils spun in the streets. I felt the spasm of the twilight adaptation. Paradise would feel too hot to us now, but it was still the best place to assemble.
I ran to Mervelld’s house; at first he refused to open his door to me, then he yielded to my insistence. There was an unhealthy gleam deep in his eyes.
“What do you want, Mospedeo? Leave me in peace. The city is screaming, can’t you hear it?”
“It’s not Manoâr that’s screaming; it’s you. It’s me. It’s all of us. Don’t you understand? Mashak screams and wakes up something in ourselves that should be sleeping. We have to gather; now, in Paradise. The thing wants to be alone, to emerge more easily. We must all be together to fight it!”
“What are you saying? This is absurd. I’m perfectly calm.”
“Then why are you clenching your fists? Why are you breathing so fast?”
He looked at his hands with surprise. I continued to argue. “A while ago, I lost control of myself. I . . . hurt myself. I would never have acted like that if I’d been with other people. Coming here, I didn’t really feel like seeing you. But now that I’m speaking with you, I feel better. There should be many of us, the whole population of Manoâr should assemble. Then, we would be strong. I know you feel calmer now that I’m talking to you, I can see it.”
Slowly, Mervelld’s face regained its usual expression; the flame in the depths of his eyes guttered out.
“Yes . . . yes, you’re right,” he said. “We have to fight it, otherwise. . . . Can you believe it, I’d been thinking about. . . . No, I’d rather not talk about it.”
“I’ll go find Mantheor, I’ll make him open the doors wide and light the lamps. You, go see Mevianis, and then all the others. Everyone must be convinced to come, even those who won’t accompany you. Talk to them the way I just talked to you, explain the danger they’re facing if they stay alone. Tell them to gather in Paradise.
“Yes . . . it’s
a good idea. I . . . I’ll go.”
He left without further delay. Before turning the corner of the alley, he looked back, his eyes full of shame, and I wondered what he could have dreamed, for an instant, of doing to me.
They began to arrive not long after. More or less against their will. Some had burning eyes; their gestures were angular, spasmodic. Yet they managed to keep themselves under control; and, as our numbers grew, I could see them slowly regaining mastery of their tempers. I had faced them with the truth. Danger seen up close is never as terrible as when it is merely imagined.
Paradise was too warm; sweat ran on my forehead, and even the newly arrived were already fanning themselves. Mantheor still kept his fur coat without betraying any discomfort. Standing on a rostrum, he addressed the crowd:
“We are gathered here at the request of Mospedeo. He claims we must unite our efforts to face . . . what is troubling us all at present. That if we remain together, we will be less subject to it. I know certain . . . abnormal incidents took place recently.”
There was a long moment of silence. Although a certain nervousness still floated among the assembly, it was clear that the random flare-ups of rage had stopped. I noted Mayter looking, ashamedly but rationally, at Montondara. Then Martegen exclaimed:
“Mospedeo is right! We must be united to fight this! We haven’t made any group effort to end this madness, but now we’ll act together!”
I opened my mouth to ask him to explain, but Mactaledry cut me off:
“Yes. It has to end. What’s the use of a few more days for a man whose mind is gone?”
I shouted: “What?”
Mactaledry turned to me:
“We have to kill him, Mospedeo. I know you weren’t thinking of it that way when you summoned us, but it’s the obvious solution—isn’t it?”
No one contradicted him. And I, facing the man whose most beautiful work I had just destroyed, did not dare protest. I sold Mashak’s life to pay for the loss of an assemblage of wood and porcelain. I could no longer tell if that was an act of cowardice or courage.
