by Angels
The hunt began at daybreak. We had formed small teams and scattered throughout the city; there was no attack plan, no need for concerted action: a single shot would be enough.
I hunted with Mervelld and Melfidian. I held my crossbow loosely, pointed toward the ground: I could not make myself believe in what we were planning to do. My friends made no comments; they kept their weapons at the ready, aiming them at imaginary targets. They looked ridiculous.
If only the weapons had been as ridiculous as their wielders. When Mantheor had exhumed them from Paradise’s cellars, we had all remained dumbstruck. Mactaledry and the others had probably thought we would capture Mashak by force and then destroy him somehow, laboriously; but the resources of Paradise went much further in terms of death than what we could imagine.
The crossbows were of black foam-metal, light and easy to use. The bolts were fletched in leather, but bore no point. Mactaledry had asked: “What’s this—are we supposed to stun him with those?” Mantheor had shaken his head; his sky-blue eyes blinked rapidly. Then he had brought out the sackful of death.
A teardrop-shaped glass bulb in a fragile metal cage, to be screwed onto the end of each bolt. On impact, the bulb shattered and released its contents: a substance so virulent we had trouble understanding it. As Mantheor explained, we found ourselves retreating farther and farther from him, forming a wide circle around the Patriarch. When he became aware of our fear, he had stopped suddenly and mocked us with a ferocious laugh.
There were echoes of Mashak in his laughter.
We hunted on Amaranth Boulevard, the eastern section. The desert lay to our right; sand sent pale tongues across the street, to taste the stone of the houses.
Reverberated a hundred times by the city’s walls, Mashak’s scream seemed to come from everywhere at once; impossible to tell where he was hiding. In the distance, half-obscured by a cluster of the red hemispheres that ringed Manoâr’s periphery, Mevianis, Montondara and Mazlir patrolled, taking long strides over the asphalt.
A nebulous thought came to me: An enemy is loose inside the city. . . . The first defenses have failed. . . . Operations must be coordinated. . . .
Extracts from the Codex? I could not have said, but something felt truly wrong in the way we were proceeding. I was following my two companions, paying no attention to what was happening. Then the answer came to me: the watchtower. From high atop its pole, it would be easier to spot Mashak and to direct the hunters to him.
I was about to communicate my idea to Mervelld, but I stayed silent. I had gathered the population, I had condemned Mashak to die like an insect; would I now lead the hunt? And why had no one else thought of the tower?
Mactaledry’s group was the first to encounter Mashak. We heard a frustrated exclamation; Mervelld set off in the direction of the call, Melfidian and I following.
“He was going too fast,” repeated Mactaledry, dejected. “He was going so fast . . . as if he knew we were going to shoot at him. I didn’t have time to centre him in the aimer.”
His bolt had impacted against one of the alley’s walls: a stain glimmered on the whitish stone. I went to observe it closely. I felt an insane urge to stroke the tip of my finger on it, as if I wanted to lose a limb permanently. The thing in myself, which Mashak had awoken, stirred.
At that moment, the scream decreased perceptibly. It wavered, almost went out, began again, but could not manage to return to its original intensity.
“He’s tiring,” Montondara exulted. “We’ll wear him down! When you shot at him, Mactaledry, he was scared, he stumbled, I saw it. He won’t last much longer.”
I thought: If he was truly scared, Montondara, it means that he hasn’t lost his mind and that it’s one of our own you are preparing to kill. But I said nothing. I too wanted him dead. So that I wouldn’t have to think anymore.
The echo thrown back by the city’s walls had also weakened, so that it had become possible to guess where the scream emanated from. Without needing to coordinate ourselves, we were closing in upon one another, and upon Mashak.
Two other groups faced him, but each time they failed to hit him. Their yells guided the others. Soon, we were forming a ragged circle, three or four blocks in diameter, around the central plaza; Mashak hid somewhere within the circle. We were certain of it.
And suddenly he erupted from behind Mactaledry’s workshop. He was coming straight toward my group, mouth grotesquely open, lips pulled back, revealing his teeth. I could feel his scream like the pressure of an impalpable wind.
I understood then why everyone had missed him: Mervelld and Melfidian stood right in front of him, raised their weapons—hesitated. Mashak ran toward them, straight toward them, was about to collide with them. They staggered out of his way, shot clumsily. Their bolts were lost.
I stood solidly in the middle of the street. I raised my crossbow. If I was the cause, however indirect, of his being put to death, it was only just that I take the responsibility upon myself.
Mashak ran toward me, straight toward me. I felt my whole self tremble, my body apprehended the shock, the contact. . . . I placed the cross of the aimer on the centre of his chest. I pressed the trigger.
His scream died before he did. The echoes lasted long seconds still, then were extinguished. We all shuddered at that moment, as if in the grip of an interminable adaptation; some fell to their knees. Melfidian was sobbing.
Mashak rose up. The force of the impact had thrown him to the ground, but he managed to struggle to his knees. His mouth was still wide open, the facial muscles frozen in a grimace of pain. He put his right hand to his chest, closed it upon the shaft, pulled out the bolt.
From the wound oozed a pinkish, bubbling liquid. It looked like a crater between his breasts. The cellular dissolution catalysts were already spreading throughout his body. Mashak was burning from the inside.
His gaze fixed on my eyes, and suddenly I could no longer move. The madness that burned in Mashak had transformed, had become a kind of sanity. I knew that he recognized me, that he understood what I had just done. And that it did not matter to him.
With a hand that did not shake, he threw away the crossbow bolt. Mashak began to make a gesture, again and again: thumb and index finger joined, hand rising in a straight line.
He was miming. A game of ours, such an ancient game, from the time of our youth, before the transformation. That sign . . . stick, shaft, stem, tower.
I murmured the series of words. Mashak held his closed hand palm upward, then slowly opened his fingers. Birth, dawn, growth, knowledge . . .
Flower. I said: “Flower, Mashak, I understand.”
His flesh poured out of the wound that dug itself like a pit opens in the sand. His heart was already half-eaten, his lungs burst like waterskins. He continued to fight, all his organism concentrated on his ultimate task. An absurd fable invented itself in my head. Once upon a time, there lived a man woven of steel. He claimed to be invulnerable: even the sharpest blades could do him no harm. One day, a child grasped a bit of metallic string that stuck out from the steel man’s heel. He pulled on the string; the invincible man unravelled completely and soon was nothing more than a ball of tangled wire.
Fingers undulating, hand turned palm down: water, dunes. The entire left side of his body was now swept by clonic spasms: his nervous system was disintegrating. Fingers letting flow a pinch of imaginary substance: sand. Cupped hand, thumb touching the index finger: symbol for the rainbow.
Oasis.
He repeated, again and again: flower. Flower. A particular kind? A last time: flower. Then he began another sign, but at that instant, death took him completely. He fell back upon the sand. A pink glow spread to his cheeks, cutting against the chalk-white skin. But it was the antithesis of health: the protoplasmic fire was consuming the last of him.
In a few minutes, he was nothing more than a shapeless gelatinous mass on the asphalt.
I was alon
e with what remained of Mashak; all the others had fled. Only the breath of the wind broke the silence.
Flower. Oasis.
What flower can be worth dying for, Mashak? What flower can make you forever end your crossing of the centuries?
I walked away from the corpse. The sound of my steps on the ground seemed an attenuated echo of Mashak’s cry.
2. CROSSING THE CENTURIES
There came a time of utter calm, of universal torpor. Freed from the cry, we felt the need to doze, to lie down in the sunlight, staring at the empty sky; the more energetic of us went up to the margins of the city and sat to contemplate the desert.
I climbed the watchtower shortly before the dawn of the third day. The petals were still closed, but the thermosensitive metal was starting to unfold itself. Through the portholes in the centre of each of the petals, I could observe the surroundings—but there was nothing to see, there had never been anything to see. For so long a time, nothing, always nothing. I was about to turn and leave, disgusted, when a reflection of the exterior lights on a flaw of one of the portholes made me stop. This reflection reminded me of something. An ancient memory, so terribly ancient . . .
I was on watch in the tower, waiting for someone to relieve me (who? It did not seem to me that it was Mervelld), and the torrent of light pouring from the projectors had created an image, caught by the flaw in the imperfect window. . . . This had to be several decades ago, at least. . . . It was . . . yes, it was toward the beginning. Much longer back, then . . .
I leaned against the wall to prevent myself from falling. This dive among my memories induced vertigo. How much time? In the absence of any seasons, all days were alike, we marked the passage of years only through Paradise’s chronometers, but we had soon ceased to celebrate anniversaries. . . . Why?
I heard Mashak screaming.
“It is only the whistling of the wind in the interstices of the petals,” I said out loud. “And you feel vertigo because the dawn spasm is late in coming.”
Mashak screamed, somewhere. The cross of the aimer in the middle of his chest; the crater dug between his breasts, flesh flowing from it like an avalanche on a dune’s external face. Oasis. Flower. We have to kill him, Mospedeo.
Something awoke in me. Something that had been banished, exiled forever beyond the walls of Manoâr the city. We could not feel this. It was impossible.
I felt pins and needles in my arms; my hands vibrated as if under the influence of an electrical current. My throat tightened, my eyes grew moist. I let myself slide gently along the wall. Mashak’s face burning on the sand. Then no longer his face, but mine.
“I’m afraid,” I whispered. “I’m afraid to die.”
We will cross the centuries like a ship the ocean of night. How much time?
I tried to remember the days, the weeks, the years that had gone past since the beginning . . . since the transformation. I was not able to remember the transformation. Afterwards—afterwards, there had been . . . the building of Manoâr? I didn’t remember. Still, it did not exist when we arrived here; we must have built it!
Nothing. I tried to run through the years in my memory: a mass of confused, fragmentary remembrances. One evening at Mercono’s house, Melfidian had said something that had alienated him from everybody. . . . Watches in the tower . . . visits in Paradise, old Mantheor officiating before his machines . . . the silver sun in the sky . . . the sand sweeping the streets, the sun, the sand, the wind . . .
How much time?
The days’ monotony had destroyed my memories. But Mantheor knew; he couldn’t not know.
I came down from the tower. The answer would be found in Paradise. Paradise, whence had come the weapons that had killed Mashak. Paradise, I suddenly remembered, where we had lived in the beginning . . . before being able to survive the desert, before the construction of Manoâr . . . before the transformation. Paradise, which faithfully reproduced the conditions of the planet of origin; Paradise, which kept its chronometers set to the base time—I remembered the display that showed in red digits how much time had passed since . . . since . . .
The flow of memory had abruptly gone dry. I continued to walk. The sun rose behind me, behind the watchtower, whose petals slowly unfurled with the rising heat. The projectors shut off. The adaptation spasm shook me, and the late-night warmth became early morning’s cool.
When I pushed open the door to Paradise, it was with the sentiment that I was committing a crime. Mantheor was not awake at this hour; I took a thousand precautions to make no noise, but it wasn’t through solicitude for his slumber.
Only a few lamps were lit in the main room. In the centre of the floor, a spiral stair descended to the lower levels. A trapdoor sealed the opening. It would have been easy for me to open it, but I did not, telling myself I would be heard. The truth was that I remembered the crossbows, and that it was from the cellars of Paradise that Mantheor had taken them.
The clocks were set high in a section of the wall that more or less faced the doors. It took me a long moment to understand they had been extinguished. I should have, of course, remembered that I hadn’t seen them when I came to visit; but for a long time now I hadn’t been seeing any part of Manoâr. I fumbled at length before reactivating them. For an instant, I feared that they had been completely stopped—a whiff of memory came to me, a vision of Mercono demanding their destruction, pure and simple—but only the luminous display had been shut off.
I stayed immobile, head lifted toward the clocks. Trying to understand what they were displaying. One of them indicated the date on Origin, according to a system of numeration I no longer recognized. The other, the time elapsed since our arrival. The method to differentiate them was obvious: the clock displaying the lesser number necessarily indicated the elapsed time.
But this number was so huge I could not believe it.
I went to the table where Mantheor kept his registers. In one of the volumes, he had accumulated drawings of the sun as seen through the polarized windows, carefully noting down the position of the maculæ, coronal intensity, variations in the magnetic field. I opened the book, turned the pages yellowed by time, going back to the very first. There was a date written in red next to the drawing. I made the subtraction: the date of the first clock minus the book’s date. The result was indeed displayed by the second clock.
Mantheor shut off the display. I should have known no one could enter Paradise without his knowledge.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I could have believed two centuries, or three. . . . Mantheor, twelve hundred years. . . . No. No!”
I opened the other registers: they contained only astronomical data, records of temperature, columns of meaningless digits. . . .
I was shaking, but it was not the cold of Paradise that affected me so. Twelve centuries. Only a handful of days remained to me from all this time. . . . A mass of fragmentary knowledge, useless . . .
“Why? Why are we here?”
Then for an instant, I thought I had found the solution. I asked: “Where is the Codex?” The Codex, of course. The Codex which held all the information. To alleviate our memories’ deficiency, to remind us of who we were . . . my relief was short-lived, replaced by a growing horror. Mantheor didn’t really need to remind me of what had happened, but I could not prevent myself from listening to his soft voice:
“Two hundred years after arrival, the Codex and all other documents were destroyed; I managed to preserve only my astronomical registers, because you’d forgotten they existed. You don’t remember, of course?”
I shook my head no, but I lied.
“You were among the leaders, Mospedeo. You had decided to destroy anything that reminded us of Origin—even its true name. The waiting had become intolerable to you. We were all already half-mad by that time, but at least we still had enough energy to act. I managed to seal off the lower levels, but I could not preserve the data: it had remained accessibl
e to all, along with the backup systems. You destroyed everything. You don’t remember?”
I had begun to weep, silently.
“I couldn’t stop you. Oh, strictly speaking, I was able to. Paradise’s defences would have incinerated all of you—but the idea wasn’t to destroy you. . . . We had to survive, even at the cost of our memory. So I let you do as you wanted. If only I hadn’t been taken by surprise. . . .”
I shouted: “But you know, then, who we are, why we’re here, what we’re waiting for!”
“I knew. But not anymore. Our memories have been erased by the centuries, mine as well as yours. I no longer know how we came here. I vaguely remember that we built Manoâr; why . . . ? If only I could remember what we’re waiting for! I think it had something to do with the sun, so I observe it, I keep notes, I write in the registers. . . . But that’s all. We are dead, Mospedeo, we’ve been dead for centuries. It took twelve hundred years for eighteen of us to perish—yes, I can see this shocks you; but those figures I was able to preserve. There are indeed eighteen of us who died, even if you’ve forgotten almost all of them, even if to me, their names no longer mean anything, save for the last few. . . . In one or two hundred years, we’ll have forgotten them all, even Mashak. And in forty centuries, mathematically, nothing will be left of us. We’ll have found rest. I know—I remember—that somewhere in the basements there is an emergency control post; and that there is a way to push the reactors beyond their limits, to enlarge hugely, for a brief moment, the fusion field. If I am the last one alive, I will go down to the basements, I will unlock the controls, I will push down the levers, and for a fraction of a second, there will be a new star on the surface of this world . . . then nothing. That is what I think about every day, Mospedeo. The only will left in me. The sun in the sky, the sun I will cause to be born here when you are all gone . . . in four thousand years; tomorrow.”
I left without saying anything. Mospedeo. Watcher. And watching for what?
