Angels and Exiles

by Angels

  A hole in time, the space between one instant and the next, filled with a vortex of light, then Amarille’s mental voice, filled with anguish: My Prince?

  He had not been able to say anything to her, only to gibber his terror, the gag, the nails, the warmth flowing from his furrowed side, Thaïs and her face woven with metal . . .

  Again this instant of vertigo: Amarille was coming to him through overspace. The astrochele’s alarm welded their minds together. The Prince felt the force of gravity take him ever more cruelly, oxygen searing his carapace, the beat of his flippers resisted by the thickness of the atmosphere.

  Then a terrible voice had sounded in his head: FREE HIM.

  “Plane-seek! We gotta leave!” the boy had shouted.

  “No!” the Purificator had answered. “Satan is tricking us! Finish the ceremony!”

  The Prince now heard voices echoing in Amarille’s mind: a chaos of thoughts that he could not sort out. He has to die/it’s my fault, I should never have/no, no, God is great, no more pain afterwards/I do NOT know where he is, he was separated from the module/no right to live when my sister never once ate her fill/burn the whole damned town, I’m telling you. . . .

  And above all else, Amarille’s voice, Where are you, my Prince? Where are you?

  But the Prince did not know.

  Then he had taken his decision. It was like jumping deliberately into the Cyclades’ bonfire. He had dived toward Hurt, into the depths of the atmosphere that burned him, in the full grip of crushing gravitation, seeking the voice of his Prince.

  A moment of delirium in overspace, the horrified voices of his sisters who tried to hold him back . . . seeing the village on the surface of the planet through a haze of pain. . . . His flippers had been nailed to the beam, the corrosive gases flayed him, his shell was splitting under the gravity. . . .

  Lower still, time to see, to be guided by the strength of his mental voice, raise his head as the celebrants shout in stupefaction, the burning shape of a turtle etched in the sky, the pain, he is there, I see him, I see her!

  Time to send a message to the Planetary Security men in their craft, to tell them exactly where the Prince was, right below his burning form, time to make sure they would find him, an attempt to free himself from the planet’s pull, but he knew full well it was useless, he was caught in gravity’s nets, his body was breaking apart, his flesh was on fire, he did not have enough energy left, one last jump through overspace, the ultimate effort, hardly enough to move a few metres, Goodbye my Prince, crash on the sands of an alien desert and end it at last—

  Silence in his head. A machine like a shark shooting above the walls, two human forms in pangolin suits ejecting from its flanks, a voice distorted by amplification ordering everyone to stay where they were, the celebrants dispersing anyway, short bursts of energy bringing two of them down, but not Thaïs, not Thaïs.

  “Lord God Almighty,” one of the men in armor had said. The Prince, lowering his gaze, had grown aware of the cleaver that had been buried in his chest up to the hilt. He had felt himself at last slide toward sleep.

  Amarille?

  HURT (IN ORBIT)

  The Man from Hurt bent over him. Gerard Chun had the ruddy, lumpy skin of a diabole of the high plains; his words were angular effulgences, sparking blue and mauve.

  The Prince had opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was a string of frog’s eggs, in whose depths wiggled the dark shapes of tadpoles.

  “Be silent,” had said Gerard Chun. Tears rolled on his cheeks and changed into a rain of diamonds.

  A metallic voice had come out of nowhere: “ . . . I cannot . . . delirious . . . non-standard physiology . . .”

  “No,” Gerard Chun had said. “Two needles of Astree’s Wind. I want him awake for a while yet.” A brief burst of pain in the Prince’s inner elbow. His body was being invaded, but he could not resist.

  “Do you understand now? Or has all this adventure been nothing more for you than a meaningless piece of entertainment?” Gerard Chun stared at him, but the Prince felt that the Man from Hurt did not see him.

  “You’re pathetic. It’s not enough that everyone here believes you’ve come out of a fairy tale, you have to believe it yourself.

  “Do you even know where the name of your system comes from? The explorer who found it left it in terror. She was convinced that the sun and its planets were a kind of gigantic trap; a carnivorous beast taking a brief nap. She wrote ‘too good to be true’ a dozen times in her preliminary report.

  “But your ancestors did not believe her. They emigrated without the least hesitation; just a little four hundred and sixty light-year trip, far beyond the frontiers of the Human Expansion.”

  There had been a flight of girlows under the sky of Rosamund, a child’s smile, the smell of the cinberry orchards south of Marble Lake: a portrait of the Sleeping Worlds that painted itself. But Gerard Chun had torn the canvas, had grasped the Prince’s shoulders. There had been a metallic ringing, and an intolerably lucid thought had crossed the Prince’s mind: They have put me in a healer. I am secured in the life-suit like a corpse in a coffin. And all the machine’s knives and all its needles will pierce me under the pretence of repairing my body.

  Gerard Chun had tightened his hands on the healer’s shoulder restraints.

  “A sun with three planets in the inhabitable zone, all three with perfectly compatible biologies. In orbit around a gas giant, a colony of telepathic animals able to naturally transect overspace. Not a single asteroid in the entire system, a cometary cloud reduced to its barest minimum. Probability of a planetary impact: less than one percent in sixty million years. On each of the three planets: continental drift nil, volcanic activity nil, background radiation level insignificant.

  “There was only one possible explanation: that all this had been arranged, put into place by an alien race. A race that would one day return. But you forgot that. For the last five generations, you’ve been very careful to forget it.

  “And the worlds helped you. The behaviour of higher animals has altered itself to better harmonize with human norms, even the fragmentary data we have proves it conclusively. While the insectoids you call sylphids have literally transformed themselves. They have almost human faces now, four limbs and five fingers, don’t they? Do you think this could have been the case originally? They imitate the currently dominant race as best they can. They didn’t always look like they do now. Do you know, Highness, what they looked like at the beginning of colonization? They were not called sylphids, then!

  “Do you want to know, Highness? Do you want to?”

  Gerard Chun’s voice was breaking, intercut with strange laments, like a diatryma’s nocturnal calls. His face was dissolving in a cloud of luminous filaments.

  “See! See what those who built your planets looked like!”

  The Man from Hurt held an image in one hand and violently shook the Prince with the other. There was a sound of bells coming from somewhere, and hot, sugary waves flowed through the air. For an instant, the Prince had seen something unspeakable float before his eyes, but then it had folded back its carapace, spread its four wings, and flown into the sun.

  VERTE

  He came back. Bereft of the Navigating Astrochele, the train could no longer guide itself efficiently through overspace: at the end of the few subjective weeks of travel, fourteen Hurt years had passed on the Sleeping Worlds.

  The ship was welcomed by two corvettes of the space fleet, antique craft which had served for the Exile, and which now were only used for the highest-ranking protocolar functions. The Prince immediately guessed what had occurred. He remained impassive when he was given the news of the death of Verte’s Sovereign and his own consequent elevation.

  He climbed aboard the aerostat-shuttle. He addressed a parting thought to the astrochele train.

  I thank you all.

  Do not thank us, Majesty. The mental voic
es formed a scratchy, tenuous chorus. We have failed you. We could not find the primary currents. Too much time has passed here. We are not worthy.

  You have served me well. But tell me only . . . he hesitated. Tell me who you served before us, before humans.

  There was silence. Then a single mental voice rose, the voice of Aradyane, the Second Astrochele of the train. We have forgotten, Majesty. It has been so long. We have forgotten.

  The shuttle disengaged itself from the ship and began its descent. Verte’s emerald oceans, speckled with islands the shade of new grass, spread under the shuttle’s transparent floor.

  His father had died. During his son’s fourteen-year absence. Had he despaired of ever seeing him again? Was he, the Prince of Verte, to blame, he who had crossed the heavens at the price of five sylphids’ lives; had his father’s life as well been exacted as payment for a trip that had only taken him to the shores of despair?

  The Prince did not want to think about Gerard Chun, about the man’s revelations, distorted by delirium, delivered with a triumphant rage. But the words Chun had spoken spun round his head, and the final vision he had been granted . . .

  His world, his own world, the planet over which he would reign, had grown to occupy all of the horizon. Escorting the aerostat-shuttle, the antique corvettes descended at the same speed, their repulsors spewing out long streamers of amethystine light. The low moan of a birthing Oceanid. The face of a blonde girl that only sees you as a talking beast. Implants woven into the flesh of a young woman, the burn of rusted nails in the palms . . .

  In counterpoint to his whirling thoughts, a chilling question returned to him again and again: was it possible to lie in mindspeech?

  HURT (IN ORBIT)

  There had been a brief war between the polar factions. Two arctic cities had been sunk: the gray ocean had filled the metal corridors, the cell-like rooms, the tomb-like chapels of the Church of Stellar Transmigration. But five others had survived intact, diving to abyssal depths and drifting over hundreds of kilometres, the entire ocean their shield against antarctic missiles.

  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.

  HURT (TROY)

  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.