Angels and Exiles (21 page)

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.

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.”

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. Sometimes, 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.

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.

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.

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.