Andromeda (A Space-Age Tale) вк-1

by Ivan Yefremov

  A cold stream barred his way and Erg Noor turned on to a foot-path. The ripples caused by the wind on the sunlit surface of the transparent water gave it the appearance of an undulating network of wavy golden lines thrown on the pebbles of the river-bed. Unnoticeable strands of moss and water-weeds floated on the water casting shadows that ran like blue patches along the bottom. On the far bank big pale-blue harebells swayed in the wind. The aroma of damp meadows and red autumn leaves promised the joy of labour to man, for tucked away in a far corner of his heart everyone had hidden something of the experience of the first ploughman.

  A bright yellow oriole alighted on a branch and emitted its mocking self-confident whistle.

  The clear sky over the cedar forest was turned to silver by the far-spreading wing of a cirrus cloud. Erg Noor dived into the gloom of the forest with its odours of cedar needles and resin, came out on the other side, climbed a hill and wiped his bare head that the dew had wetted. The forest reservation that surrounded the Nerve Clinic was not a big one and Erg Noor soon came to a road. The stream had been diverted into a series of basins of milk-coloured glass, keeping them filled with water. Several men and women in bathing costumes ran round a bend in the road and raced on between rows of brightly coloured flowers. The autumn water could hardly have been warm but the runners, encouraging one another with laughter and jokes, sprang into the basins and in a jolly crowd swam down the cascade from basin to basin. Erg Noor smiled in spite of himself. It was rest time at some local factory or farm.

  Never before had our planet seemed so beautiful to him who had spent the greater part of his life in the close quarters of a spaceship. He was filled with profound gratitude to all people, to Earth’s nature, to everything that had helped to save Nisa, his astronavigator with the auburn curls. Today she had come to meet him in the clinic gardens. After a consultation with the doctors they had arranged to go away together to a polar sanatorium for nervous disorders. As soon as the scientists had managed to break the chain of paralysis and put an end to the persistent inhibition of the cerebral cortex caused by the discharge of the “cross” beast’s charge through its tentacles, Nisa had become quite healthy. She had only to regain her former energy after such a long cataleptic sleep. Nisa was alive and well! It seemed to Erg Noor that he would never be able to think of that without an impulse of joy somewhere inside him.

  He saw the solitary figure of a woman coming rapidly towards him from a side path. He would have recognized her among thousands — Veda Kong, the Veda who had been so much in his thoughts before it had become clear that their paths in life were different. Erg Noor was accustomed to the diagrams of the computing machines and his thinking followed the same lines — he saw a steep arc sweeping upwards into the heavens — his own urge — while Veda’s path of life and work left her hovering over the planet to delve into the depths of centuries passed and gone. The lines diverged until they were far apart.

  Erg Noor knew every tiny detail of Veda’s face but he was suddenly surprised to notice the resemblance she bore to Nisa Greet. The same narrow face with eyes placed wide apart, the same high forehead with the long upward sweep of the eyebrows, the same expression of gentle irony in her big mouth. Even their noses were both slightly snub, softly rounded and a bit long, just as though they were sisters. The only difference was that Veda always had a direct and pensive look while Nisa Greet would throw her head back in youthful exuberance or would lower her forehead and knitted brows to meet an obstacle.

  "Are you examining me?” asked Veda, surprised.

  She held out both hands to Erg Noor who took them and pressed them to his cheeks. Veda shivered and pulled herself away. The astronaut gave a weak smile.

  “I wanted to thank those hands for having nursed Nisa. She… I know about everything! Somebody had to be in constant attendance and you gave up an interesting expedition. Two months….”

  “I didn’t give it up, I was late for it, waiting for Tantra. The expedition had left by then, and well… she’s charming, your Nisa! We look alike but she’s the real companion for the conqueror of the Cosmos and the iron stars, with her urge to get back into space and her loyalty.”

  “Veda!”

  “I’m not joking, Erg, I mean it. Don’t you feel that this is no time for jokes? We must make everything clear!”

  “I find everything clear enough as it is! And I’m thanking you for Nisa, not for myself.”

  “Don’t thank me. It would have been difficult for me if you’d lost Nisa, that’s why….”

  “I understand but still I don’t believe you because I know that Veda Kong could never be so calculating. And so my gratitude remains.”

  Erg Noor patted the young woman’s shoulder and placed his fingers in the crook of her arm. They walked side by side along the deserted road in silence until Erg Noor spoke again.

  “Who is he, the real one?”

  “Darr Veter.”

  “The former Director of the Outer Stations? So that’s it!”

  “Erg, you are saying words that mean nothing. I don’t recognize you.”

  “I suppose I must have changed. I can’t imagine Darr Veter apart from his work and I thought that he was a Cosmic dreamer.”

  “He is. He dreams of the world of stars but he has proved able to combine the stars with an ancient farmer’s love of Earth. He is a man of knowledge with the big hands of the simple mechanic.”

  Erg Noor involuntarily looked at his narrow hand with the long fingers of a mathematician and musician.

  ‘“If you only knew, Veda, how much I love our Earth at this moment!”

  “After the world of darkness and a long journey with paralysed Nisa? Of course, you do!”

  “You don’t believe that love for Earth can provide the basis of my life?”

  “I don’t. You’re a real hero and will always be thirsting for deeds. You will carry that love like a full bowl from which you are afraid to spill a drop, carry it on Earth in order to give it to the Cosmos for the sake of that same Earth!”

  “Veda, you’d have been burnt at the stake in the Dark Ages!”

  “I’ve been told that before. Here’s the fork…. Where are your shoes, Erg?”

  “I left them in the garden when I came to meet you. I’ll have to go back.”

  “Well, good-bye, Erg. My job here’s finished and yours is just about to begin. Where shall we meet again? Perhaps it will be only before you leave on the new ship?”

  “Oh, no, Veda. Nisa and I are going to a polar sanatorium for three months. Come and see us and bring Darr Veter with you.”

  “Which sanatorium? The ‘Stone Heart’ on the north coast of Siberia or ‘Autumn Leaves’ in Iceland?”

  “It’s too late for the northern polar regions. We’re being sent to the southern hemisphere where the summer will soon begin. The ‘White Dawn’ in Grahamland.”

  “All right. Erg, we’ll come if Darr Veter does not start out immediately to rebuild Satellite 57. There’ll probably be a long time spent on getting materials together.”

  “That’s a fine terrestrial man for you — almost a year in the sky!”

  “Don’t try to be smart. That’s quite near compared with your tremendous spaces, the spaces that divided us.”

  “Do you regret it, Veda?”

  “Why do you ask, Erg? There are two halves in each of us, one half is anxious to get at the new, the other half cherishes the old and would be glad to return to it. You know that and you also know that return never achieves its aim.”

  “But regret remains like a wreath on a beloved grave. Give me a kiss, Veda, my dear!”

  The young woman obediently complied with the request, pushed the astronaut lightly aside and strode swiftly away to the main road where there was an electrobus service. Erg Noor watched her until the robot driver of the first bus to arrive stopped the vehicle and her red dress disappeared inside.

  Veda also looked through the glass at Erg Noor as he stood there immobile. Her head was filled with
the refrain of a song dating back to the Era of Disunity that had recently been reset to music by Arck Geer. Darr Veter had once repeated it to her in response to a gentle reproach from her.

  And neither the angels in heaven above,

  Nor the demons down under the sea,

  Can ever dissever my soul from the soul

  Of the beautiful Annabel Lee!

  This was the challenge of a man of ancient days to the menacing forces of nature that had taken his beloved from him… the challenge of a man who was not reconciled to his loss and did not want to make any concessions to fate!

  The electrobus drew near the branch of the Spiral Way but Veda Kong was still standing by the window holding on to the polished hand-rails and humming the beautiful romance filled with such sweet sorrow.

  “Angels — that’s what religious Europeans in the old days called the imaginary spirits of heaven, the heralds who made known the will of the gods. Angelas meant ‘herald’ or ‘messenger’ in the ancient Greek language. It’s a word that has been forgotten for centuries….” Veda shook off these thoughts while she was at the station but they returned to her in the coach of the Spiral Way train.

  “The Heralds of Heaven, of the Cosmos — why, that’s what we might call Erg Noor and Mven Mass and Darr Veter. Especially Darr Veter when he will be in the nearby, terrestrial heaven, building a satellite….” Veda smiled mischievously. “Then the demons down under the sea that’s us, the historians,” she said aloud, listening to the sound of her own voice, and laughed merrily. “Yes, that’s right, the angels of heaven and the spirits of the under world! Only Darr Veter may not like it.”

  Low cedars with black needles, a variety impervious to frosts that had been developed for the subantarctic regions, sang solemnly and monotonously in the never-slackening wind. The cold, dense air flowed like a swift river, carrying that extraordinary purity and freshness with it that one associates with the open ocean and high mountain ranges. When the wind comes in contact with the eternal snows of the mountains, however, it is dry, it tends to burn, like sparkling wine. Here the breath of the ocean made its heavy touch felt as the wind wrapped the body in a humid mantle.

  The building of the “White Dawn” Sanatorium stretched down to the sea in terraces, the rounded form of its glass walls resembling the huge ocean liners of ancient days. The pale vermilion tones of the walls, staircases and vertical columns were in sharp contrast to the domed masses of the chocolate and violet andesite cliffs, cut by blue and grey porcelain-like paths of cast syenite. The polar night in late spring, however, made all colours alike in its specially white light that seemed to come from the depths of the sky and the sea. The sun had hidden for an hour behind the plateau to the south. A majestic arc of light covered the southern half of the sky, reflected from the giant ice-cap of the southern continent that still remained on the high plateau of the eastern part to where it had been moved back by the will of man who had reduced it to one-quarter of its former mass. The icy white dawn, whose name the sanatorium bore, turned the whole countryside into a phantom world of light without shadows or reflections.

  Four people were coming down the silvery porcelain path to the ocean. The faces of the two men who walked behind seemed carved out of grey granite and the big eyes of the two women were bottomless and mysterious.

  Nisa Greet, pressing her face against the fur collar of Veda Kong’s jacket, was arguing with the historian. Veda, making no effort to conceal her faint amazement was looking into that gentle face that outwardly resembled hers.

  “I believe that the best gift a woman can make to the man she loves is to re-create him and in this way prolong the existence of her hero. Then another loving woman will create a new copy — why, it’s almost like immortality!”

  “Men feel differently about us,” answered Veda. “Darr Veter once told me that he would not like to have a daughter that was too much like the woman he loved because it would be hard to go out of the world and leave her behind without him, without the cloak of his love and tenderness, leave her to a fate of which he would know nothing. That’s just a relic of the jealousy and protection of the old days.”

  “I cannot bear the thought of parting with a tiny being that is mine to his last drop of blood,” continued Nisa, full of her own thoughts, “of giving him up to the school as soon as I have finished nursing him.”

  “I can understand you although I do not agree,” said Veda, frowning, as though the girl had touched a painful string in her heart. “One of mankind’s greatest victories is the conquest of the blind instinct of maternity, the realization that only the collective upbringing of children by people trained and selected for the job can produce a man of our society. That insane maternal love of the past has almost died out. Every mother knows that the whole world is kind to her child and that he runs none of the dangers he formerly did. And so the instinctive love of the she-wolf that arose out of fear for her progeny has disappeared.”

  “I understand all that but only with my mind,” said Nisa.

  “I not only know it but feel it, I know that the greatest happiness is to bring joy to another and that is now possible for anybody, irrespective of age. That which was possible in former ages for parents and grandparents, and most of all for mothers…. Why must one always be together with the little one? That’s also a relic of ancient days, when the woman was compelled to live a narrow life and could not always be together with the man she loved. You’ll always be together, as long as you love each other….”

  “I don’t know, but sometimes I feel an overpowering desire to have beside me a little one that is like him, it is so strong that I clench my hands in despair… no, I don’t know anything.”

  “There’s Java, the Mothers’ Island. Those who want to bring up their own children live there, those who’ve lost their dear ones, for example….”

  “Oh no! And I couldn’t be a teacher, either, like those who have some special love for children. I feel that I have great strength and I’ve been into the Cosmos once already.”

  “You’re the personification of youth, Nisa, and not only physically. Like all people who are very young you don’t realize when you come up against contradictions that they are what go to make up life. You don’t realize that the joy of love will most certainly bring anxiety, cares and sorrows that will be the greater, the stronger the love. And you think that you’ll lose everything at the first blow struck by life.”

  As she uttered those last words Veda herself became aware that Nisa’s restiveness and anxiety were not to be explained by youthfulness alone.

  Veda had made a mistake common to many people, that of believing that spiritual traumas heal together with physical wounds. That, however, is not the case, for wounds to the psyche remain for a long, long time, hidden deep down in a physically healthy body, and they may open up at any moment from the most insignificant of causes. Such was Nisa’s case — she had been paralysed for five years and it had left its impress in every cell of her body; even if the memory was subconscious it still remained — the horror of her meeting with the terrible cross that almost been the death of Erg Noor!

  Nisa guessed what Veda was thinking about and answered her in a dull voice.

  “Ever since the iron star there is a strange feeling that has never left me. Somewhere there is an empty place in my heart. It continues to exist together with confident joy and strength and does not exclude them and at the same time does not disappear. I can struggle against it only by means of something that will employ me entirely and will not leave me alone with… Oh, now I know what the Cosmos is for a lonely man and have even greater respect for the first space travellers!”

  “I think I can understand,” said Veda. “I was once on the tiny Polynesian islands that are lost in the ocean. There, standing by the sea in a moment of loneliness, you are overcome by a profound sorrow that is like a nostalgic song merging with the deadly monotony of great distances. Perhaps that is a memory of the distant past, n memory of the primo
rdial isolation of his consciousness telling man how weak and helpless he formerly was, shut up in his own little cage of a soul. The only cure was common work and common thoughts — a boat came, smaller, even, than the island, but it was enough to change the ocean. A handful of companions and a ship is a world of its own striving towards distant objectives that they can reach and subordinate to their will. The same is true of the Cosmic vessel, the spaceship. In that ship you are together with strong and brave companions! But alone in the Cosmos,” Veda shuddered, “I don’t suppose a man could stand it!”

  Nisa clung still more closely to Veda.

  “How well you said that, Veda! That’s why I want everything at once….”

  “Nisa, I’m getting very fond of you. Now I can sense the meaning of your decision but at first I thought it was sheer madness. For a ship to be able to return from such a long flight your children will have to take your places on the return journey — two Ergs, or maybe, more.”

  Nisa squeezed Veda’s hand and pressed her nose against her cheek, cold from the wind.

  “Do you think you can stand it, Nisa? It’s impossibly difficult!”

  “What difficulties are you talking about, Veda?” asked Erg Noor, turning round on hearing her last exclamation. “Have you come to an agreement with Darr Veter? For the last half-hour he’s been trying to persuade me to give the youth the benefit of my experience as an astronaut and not to set out on a flight from which I shall never return.”

  “Has he persuaded you?”

  "No. My experience as an astronaut is still more necessary to pilot Lebed to her destination, up there,” said Erg pointing to the bright starless sky, to the place where Achernar should be seen, lower than the Lesser Magellanic Cloud and just below Tucana and the Hydra, “to pilot her where no ship from Earth had ever been before!”

  As Erg Noor spoke those last words the edge of the rising sun came in a burst of fire over the horizon, its rays driving away all the mystery of the white dawn.