Angels and Exiles (24 page)

Corianne-the-Capital was a necropolis. Eighty thousand people exterminated by an alien plague, fetched from the neighbourhood of Epsilon Indi, which left the faces of its victims covered by silvery stigmata.

Yet it was the Antarctics who had won the war. Everywhere in the corridors of the orbital station shone the wheat-sheaf-in-lemniscate insignia.

Gerard Chun was still Grp III Xeno Admin. His back had hunched, his hair had fallen in patches. Grayish shiny lines crisscrossed on his face. The Sovereign felt a diffuse fear looking at him.

“They sent the virus inside the stations as well,” said Gerard Chun. “But here, for reasons unknown, almost half the victims survived.”

He stopped, made a manual adjustment to the optical compensators that sealed up his eyesockets.

“You haven’t changed. Virtually identical to the last visual recordings.” His voice expressed neither envy nor surprise. Only a serene lassitude.

“An under-optimal overspace return trajectory,” said the Sovereign, seeking refuge in technical vocabulary; but he could not continue thus. “I crossed fourteen years in two weeks. From my point of view, less than two of your years have passed since we last spoke. When I returned home, my father was dead. I became Sovereign of Verte while I slept, somewhere between two stars I could not have put a name to.”

“And to what do we owe the honour of you visit, High . . . Majesty?”

The Sovereign pursed his mouth, wryly amused by the situation. “As you told me yourself, long ago—perhaps you do not remember—all that happened has been for me nothing but a meaningless piece of entertainment. I wish to go down again. I have to end a story. You told me I came from a fairy tale, and in all tales, it is paramount to know what happens to the Princess. One wishes she will marry the Prince, of course, but that isn’t really what is important. It is that the letters T-H-E E-N-D be put after the last words of the story.”

Chun sighed: “None of this is of any importance, Majesty. You do not have to justify yourself; we are no longer under the same High Administration. The new policies allow you to touch down wherever you like. As a member of a type III society, you are free to do as you please. However—and this time I speak the strictest truth—no protection will be given to you, unless you are ready to pay for it.”

“The last time I was here, a small coin of Bleue was worth a man’s life.”

Gerard Chun answered by an imperceptible gesture; it was only then that the Sovereign understood what it was that scared him about the Man from Hurt: he no longer fidgeted. He remained sitting deep within his chair, and moved his head only when absolutely necessary. This, more than all his physical ruin, terrified the Sovereign.

“Gerard . . .” he said softly, like a marquiset confiding in his page. “When I had the astrocheles harnessed, they . . . they protested. I would almost say that they fought it. For a moment.

“When I read the reports of the Diagonal Huntresses, or those of the Free Explorers, when I am relayed the telepathic songs of Bleue’s Navigants . . . the behaviour of the animals on all three planets seems to be changing. Nature is no longer the same. It is so minor that few notice it, and none worry; but I think that, maybe, the Sleeping Worlds are awakening. That perhaps those who made them are about to return.

“Sometimes I tell myself it is only a shudder in the long dream, like a sleeper who opens her eyes for a moment, then returns to her slumber, but . . . I am not sure. I think not.”

Gerard Chun stared at him. The lenses of his optical compensators were black under the light.
I care nothing for this
, proclaimed his destroyed face, his charred body.

It was too late: more than fifteen years separated him from the Gerard Chun he had first met, the real Man from Hurt, the one who had sought out the truth with a cold rage, the one who had hated the Prince of the Sleeping Worlds, not for his place of birth or his wealth, but for his ignorance and stupidity. A clean, nourishing hatred. Of all the hatreds the Prince of Verte had battled on Hurt, that was the only one he had deserved. And it had brought him back to Hurt, had made him cross the heavens again, along four hundred and sixty light years. Yes, he had to admit it: it was Gerard Chun’s hatred, far more than anything he might have felt for Thaïs, that had brought him back. But this hatred had withered, like a love too long neglected.

The Sovereign rose painfully, as if it was his body, not Chun’s, that had been devoured by an alien plague; and after all, maybe that was the deeper truth.

As if random fragments of the Troy from fifteen years ago had been taken away and replaced by different varieties of misery, while others had been kept scrupulously intact. So strong, this impression that one is moving through a labyrinth, though every street yields at last to another one, though the goal can be felt to come slowly closer.

Verte’s Sovereign is dressed in threadbare clothing, his hair is tangled and his face caked with dirt. Almost all whose path he crosses turn around, stare briefly, then hurry away: they know he is not one of them, though they cannot prove it. For now, he does not care. He needs only a few minutes, an hour or two at most, to accomplish his task. He wears no defence module, and this time, no Planetary Security craft watches over him. No one will come to his help if things go wrong. The astrocheles will not repeat the suicide of Amarille, the only one of her race to whom he ever bore true affection.

Never has he felt so secure. Hurt is the land beyond the mirror, where hedonists are the fiercest fighters, and the masters of the sky mere puppets whose strings are pulled from the surface.

Recent constructions are of blackish-brown bricks, whose surfaces are already pitted. The mortar, strangely, has remained soft: children tear off little pieces with their fingers and stuff their cheeks with them, or else make them into sticky balls that rapidly lose their cream colouring to take on a blackish-gray shade from fragments of asphalt and ashy sand.

The Sovereign crosses a neighbourhood identical to what it was two/fifteen years ago. (Is this a temporal maze, then? If he rounds the wrong corner, will he find himself in an even more remote past? Before the birth of Thaïs, before the rise of the waters, before the planetary migrations, a time when all of Hurt’s children dwelled still within her breast?)

He remembers this pitiful park: its grass is as sparse and yellowed as fifteen years ago. Beyond the park, a new building, done in an unusual architecture: leaning towers, asymmetrical vaultings . . . a sudden, irresistible curiosity drives him inside.

There are signs on the walls of the vestibule, but he cannot decrypt the characters. Behind a double door painted pale yellow, a single large room fills the rest of the building. A dozen people have assembled toward the rear, facing a dais on which stands a woman in a tricoloured dress: green, pink, and blue. She is reading aloud from a large, poorly bound book.

The Sovereign comes closer (an absurd twinge in his heart: these hues—a strange coincidence) and the words of the woman become clear.

“He came to this place, the most humble of the villages of our world, to bring us the most precious of all messages. He was the Prince of Heaven, and through his death he redeemed our sins. When we die, we shall leave our bodies and Transmigrate to the Triple Paradise. . . .”

The Sovereign hurries out of the church. His steps echo on the floor, tiled in blood-red linoleum. He feels the gazes of the faithful at his back. If he should turn and show them his face, they would not recognize him, even though many of them doubtless witnessed his martyrdom. The scars on his palms and at his side, that even the healer could not fully repair; the secret words of the Purificators’ chant; nothing would convince them. Who is he to claim they are wrong? It cannot be he who died for their sins. He is here, alive; not even resurrected, just . . . aged. Changed.

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.

“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.