Return from the Stars (33 page)

The building was filled with an absolute silence. I did not even hear Olaf's retreating footsteps; in the glass of the window my own heavy shape was weakly reflected; from an unknown source flowed heated air; through the outline of my reflection I saw the edge of trees submerged now in complete darkness. Again I ran my eyes around the room, then went to the large chair by the window.

An autumn night. I couldn't even think of sleeping. I stood at the window. The darkness that lay beyond it had to be full of coolness and the whisper of leafless branches brushing against one another. Suddenly I wanted to be there, in it, wandering through the darkness, through its unpremeditated chaos. Without another thought I left the room. The corridor was deserted. I tiptoed to the stairs—an unnecessary caution, probably, for Olaf must have gone to bed some time ago, and Thurber, if he was working, was on a different floor, in a distant wing of the building. I ran downstairs, no longer muffling my footsteps, slipped outside, and began to walk quickly. I chose no particular direction, just walked, avoiding the glow of the city as much as possible. The paths of the park soon took me beyond its boundary, marked by a hedge; I found myself on the road, walked it for a while, then made a sudden stop. I didn't want to walk down a road; roads led to houses, people, and I wanted to be alone. I remembered: Olaf had told me, back in Clavestra, about Malleolan, the new city in the mountains, built after our departure; the few kilometers of road that I had walked certainly seemed full of bends, curves, no doubt skirting slopes, but in the darkness I couldn't see if this was the case. The road, typically, was not illuminated, the surface itself glowed with a weak phosphorescence, too weak to light up the vegetation on the sides. So I left the road, felt my way in the dark, found myself in low, dense shrubbery that led up to a hill without trees—without trees, because the wind gusted freely here. Several times, pale, winding fragments of the road I had abandoned came into view, far below, and then that last light vanished; I stopped a second time; not so much with my helpless eyes as with my whole body, my face to the wind, I tried to get to know the land, alien to me, like another planet; I wanted to reach one of the peaks surrounding the valley where the city lay, but how to find the right direction? Suddenly, when the whole enterprise seemed hopeless, I heard a drawn-out, distant roar, like that of waves, yet different, coming from high up and to the right—the noise of wind blowing through a forest, a forest much higher than where I stood. I headed in that direction. A slope overgrown with dry grass led me to the first trees. I picked my way through these phantoms, raising my arms to protect my face from the branches. Soon the slope became less steep, the trees thinned out, and again I had to choose a direction; listening intently in the darkness, I waited patiently for the next strong gust of wind. And the wind came, from the high ground in the distance I heard its long whistle; yes, the wind of that night was my ally; I went straight, disregarding the fact that I was now losing altitude, descending sharply into a black ravine. At the bottom of this was a steep incline; I began climbing gradually upward, a trickling rivulet showed me the way. At one point I stopped seeing it; anyway it probably was running beneath a layer of stones; the sound of the water diminished as I went higher, until it died away altogether, and once more the forest surrounded me, tall trees, pine, almost entirely devoid of undergrowth. The ground was covered by a pillow-soft layer of old pine needles, and in places it was slippery with moss. This blind wandering went on for more than three hours; the roots I tripped over were twisted more and more frequently around erratic boulders that jutted through the shallow soil. I was afraid that the summit would turn out to be covered by forest and that in that labyrinth would end my barely begun excursion into the mountains, but I was fortunate—through a small, bare pass I reached a field of rubble, which grew steeper and steeper. Finally, I could hardly stay on my feet, the stones began slipping from under me with a rattling sound; hopping from one foot to the other, not without repeated falls, I made it to the side of a narrow gully and now could climb more quickly. I stopped from time to time, to try to distinguish my surroundings, but the total darkness made that impossible. I saw neither the city nor its glow, nor any trace of the shining road that I had left. The gully led me to a bare area with patches of dry grass; that I was now high up I knew from the ever-widening starry sky, and the other mountain ridges began to draw level with the one I was climbing. A few hundred steps more and I came to the first clusters of dwarf pines.

Had someone in the darkness suddenly stopped me and asked where I was going and why, I would not have been able to answer; but there was no one, and the loneliness of that night march gave me a feeling, even if temporary, of relief. The angle of the slope increased, walking became more and more difficult, but I forged ahead, trying only to keep straight, as if I had a definite goal. My heart pounded, my lungs labored, and I fought upward in a frenzy, feeling instinctively that this exhausting effort was precisely what I needed. I pushed aside the twisted branches of the dwarf pines, sometimes became entangled, pulled free, and went on. Clusters of needles brushed my face, my chest, caught on my clothing; my fingers stuck together from the resin. In an open space a sudden wind hit me; rushing out of the dark, it rampaged, whistling high above, where I guessed was a pass. Then the next thicket of dwarf pines swallowed me up; in it were islands of warm, motionless air permeated with its strong fragrance. Indistinct obstacles rose in my path, erratic rocks, loose stones underfoot. I must have been walking for several hours now, and still I felt a reservoir of strength in me, sufficient to bring me to despair; the gully, leading to some pass, possibly to the summit, narrowed so that I could see both its edges high against the sky, blocking out the stars with their dark ridges.

The region of mist was far below me, but the cool night had no moon, and the stars gave little light. I was surprised, then, at the appearance, around me and above me, of elongated whitish shapes. They lay in the darkness without illuminating it, as though they had absorbed radiance during the day; the first loose crunch beneath my feet told me that I was on snow.

A thin layer of it covered the rest of the steep slope. I would have been frozen to the bone, lightly dressed as I was, but the wind fell unexpectedly, and now I could hear distinctly the sound of crunching snow with every step.

At the pass itself there was hardly any snow. Huge windswept rocks stood silhouetted above the scree. I stopped, my heart hammering, and looked in the direction of the city. It was hidden behind the slope; only a patch of reddish gray, from the lights, betrayed its position in the valley. Above me quivered the stars, sharply visible. I went on a few steps more and sat down on a saddle-shaped boulder. Now the glow was gone. Ahead of me, in the darkness, were the mountains, ghostlike, their peaks whitened by snow. Looking hard at the eastern edge of the horizon, I could make out the first streaks of daybreak. Against it, the outline of a ridge broken in two. And all at once, in my immobility, something began to happen; formless shadows around me—or within me?—shifted, receded, altered in proportions. I was so preoccupied with this that for a moment it was as if I had lost my vision, and when I regained it, everything was different. The skies of the east, barely gray above the invisible valley, deepened even more the blackness of the rock, yet I could have pointed out every irregularity, every indentation; I knew intimately the scene that the day would unfold to me, because it had been inscribed in me for all time, and not in vain. Here was the immutability that I had desired, that had remained untouched while my world crumbled and perished in a century-and-a-half gulf of time. It was in this valley that I had spent my boyhood years—in the old wooden hostel on the grassy slope, opposite, of the Cloud Catcher. Of that house not even the foundation stones would be left, the last boards must long since have rotted away, but the rocky ridge stood unchanged, as if it had been waiting for this meeting—could a vague unconscious memory have guided me through the night to this very spot?

The shock of recognition instantly freed me of all my weakness, so desperately concealed, concealed first with a pretense of calm, then by the intentional frenzy of my mountaineering. I reached down and, not embarrassed by the trembling of my fingers, took some snow and put it into my mouth. The cold melting on my tongue did not quench my thirst but made me more awake. I sat and ate snow, still not believing, now waiting to have my surmise confirmed by the first rays of the sun. Long before the sun appeared, from above the slowly fading stars, came a bird, which folded its wings, made itself smaller, and, alighting on a slanted sheet of rock, began to walk toward me. I froze, afraid of scaring it away. The bird went around me and moved away, and just when I thought that it hadn't noticed me, it returned from the other side and circled the boulder where I was sitting. We regarded each other for a while, until I said quietly:

"And where did you come from?"

Seeing that it didn't fear me, I resumed eating snow. It cocked its head, peered at me with its black beads of eyes, then suddenly, as if it had had enough of me, spread its wings and flew away. And I, resting against the rough rock, hunched over, my hands numb from the snow, waited for the dawn, and the whole night came back to me in a violent, incomplete synopsis—Thurber and his words, the silence between Olaf and me, the view of the city, the red mist and the breaks in the mist made by funnels of light, gusts of hot air, the inhaling and exhaling of a million, the hanging squares, malls, avenues, skyscrapers with wings of fire, the different levels with different colors, the uninspired conversation with the bird at the pass, and how I ate snow—and all these pictures were and were not themselves, as in dreams sometimes, they were both a reminder and an avoidance of the thing I dared not touch. Because, throughout, I had tried to find in myself an acceptance of what I could not accept. But that had been before, like a dream. Now, clearheaded and alert, awaiting the day, in air almost silver, in the presence of the slowly revealed mountain slopes, the gullies, the scree, which emerged from the night in silent confirmation of the reality of my return, for the first time I—alone but not a stranger to the Earth—now subject to her and her laws—for the first time I could, without protest, without regret, think of those setting out for the golden fleece of the stars…

The snow of the summit caught fire in gold and white, it stood above the purple shadows of the valley, stood powerful and eternal, and I, not closing my tear-filled eyes, got up slowly and began to walk across the stones, to the south, to my home.

Zakopane—Cracow, 1960

S
TANISLAW
L
EM
is "a major figure who just happens to be a science fiction writer—Very likely, he is also the best-selling SF writer in the world" (Fantasy and Science Fiction]. For the past four decades he has been one of Europe's most prolific and esteemed writers, considered the single most important influence in putting science fiction into the mainstream of literature. Born in 1921 in Poland, where he lives now with his family, Lem was originally trained in medicine. He cofounded the Polish Astronautical Society and is a member of the Polish Cybernetic Association. His nearly thirty books, translated into as many languages, range from novels and thrillers to SF short stories, screenplays (
SOLARIS
is best known), parodies, philosophy and literary criticism. Of his SF novels translated into English, Avon has published
THE CYBERIAD
,
THE FUTUROLOGICAL CONGRESS
,
THE INVESTIGATION
,
MEMOIRS FOUND IN A BATHTUB
,
MORTAL ENGINES
,
THE STAR DIARIES
, and
TALES OF PIRX THE PILOT
.