Angels and Exiles

by Angels

  Why a watchtower? Why the projectors at night? How had we come to this place? Why had we lost hope to the point of wanting never to remember?

  We’ll need less than forty centuries to disappear, I thought. Far less. We were half-mad a thousand years ago; what have we become since? How many years—days—before Mashak is erased from our memories?

  We had judged Mashak was no longer human; but it was we who had left that state. I passed Mazlir and Mevianis who were reclining on their respective doorsteps; they vaguely waved in my direction. We will cross the centuries like a ship the ocean of night. And be dead on arrival at the end of the voyage.

  I went back home. I locked my door, I sat in the kitchen, facing the cooking system. Mospedeo. Function: watcher. Never mind what I watched for. But before? Before arrival? What was I before?

  Mashak’s cry woke me up, I thought. But I will fall back asleep, I will return to the same debilitating dream we are all dreaming, the dream in which every day is like the last, in which centuries follow centuries, leaving no more imprint on the memory than a footstep leaves on the sand. . . .

  It must not be. What had awoken in myself wanted to live, wanted to at least know before resigning itself to die.

  I opened the cooking system’s assembly. The heat source was a jet of burning gas. A ring regulated its intensity; I snapped the safety wire that prevented turning the ring to its extreme setting.

  I ignited the jet, set the flame at its fullest intensity. The hissing of the gas was almost a peaceful sound. The flame was pink fringed with blue. I placed my left hand in the middle of it.

  Pain was long in coming. For long minutes, my hand remained intact. I felt only a vague itching. Then it became more and more intense. Suddenly, I was shaken by an adaptation spasm: the room’s air now seemed icy cold.

  I noticed my breathing had become terribly fast. Trains of nerve impulses ascended from my hand up to my elbow. I could feel them. The flame still had no visible effect; but the itching had become an acute lancing in the joints.

  I was shaken by three successive spasms, and my defences began to yield. Pain was born at the end of my arm like a flower blooming.

  I saw my skin blister, then scorch. My arm wanted to pull back; I steeled my muscles. My hand stayed in the heart of the flame.

  “Remember,” I said out loud. “Remember, Mospedeo. Watcher. Watcher for what? Why erase the memories of the origin? What are we waiting for?”

  My skin blackened, briefly began to burn. My flesh crackled in the flame. Waves of pain came up my arm to my heart. My sight grew veiled. I probed my memory as a weapon probes a wound.

  What was there before?

  The ship.

  There had been the ship. The voyage. Then nothing. Then Manoâr. Manoâr. The waiting. The waiting . . . crossing the centuries. A burning flower at the end of my arm. Manoâr. The ship . . . Mospedeo. Watcher. Scantech. Aboard the ship. Scantech. Screens sweeping the void. Then nothing. Then Manoâr. Twelve hundred years of emptiness. The sand, the wind, the sand . . .

  I felt my bones splitting from the heat and it was then that the pain became too strong. I fell back screaming, my charred hand pushed against my belly, my whole body bent around it.

  I did not faint. Simply, I remained with my eyes closed, rolled up into a ball, for perhaps an hour. Then I unfolded myself; I looked at my left hand. Flesh was beginning to flow back upon the bones, the fine network of capillaries was already redrawing itself. Soon the skin would reappear.

  And only then did I remember my own words. Perhaps that is what he’s trying to tell us. He returned from the desert screaming: perhaps he found something there. . . .

  Oasis. Flower.

  One more night; time for my hand to heal. Then I would do what I should have done from the start, what I would have done if I had had the merest particle of the rationality I should have possessed. I would go to the desert, and I would find what had inflicted upon Mashak the revelation which he had not been able to withstand.

  I was ready long before sunrise. I’d put on garments adapted for a long trip: a jumpsuit tight at wrists and ankles, a loose hood. I carried a flask of water and a bag containing some food.

  I waited for the diurnal spasm before going out. I took a roundabout way up to Manoâr’s periphery: no one observed my passage. I paused, leaning on one of the red hemispheres, indifferent to the metal’s chill. It seemed to me I should have warned someone: Mervelld, or at the least Mantheor. But what would I have told them? I am off to seek for that which drove Mashak insane and caused his death; await my return?

  I arranged my bag more comfortably on my shoulder and set off. I knew that Mashak had come back to Manoâr from this direction; logically, he had also departed by that route. I doubted that he wouldn’t have followed one of the spokes; my way was therefore traced.

  I started walking at a good pace, and soon, warmed by the sun, I began to run. The sand of the spoke under my feet was deep blue, in striking contrast with the ochre dunes that surrounded me. From time to time, I sought to find traces of Mashak; but the sand of the spoke constituted a concrete-hard surface, whereas that of the neighbouring dunes was constantly swept by the wind.

  The day passed swiftly; I must have crossed approximately eighty kilometres without seeing anything more than dunes and sky. I drank a mouthful of water and decided to sleep rather than continue on. I burrowed into the inner face of a dune bordering the spoke and fell asleep, breathing gently through the sand.

  The next morning, I set off once more. It seemed to me Mashak had been gone three or four days; thus, now was the time to be most alert. And I thought I knew what I was looking for.

  Toward the middle of the afternoon, I smelled a trace of moisture on the air; there was water not far, to the southwest. My heart began to beat very hard; and I was afraid. Afraid that I also would not be able to resist. Afraid I would return to Manoâr screaming, to end up shot down like a beast. I left the spoke, found a way among the dunes. My feet sank into the loose sand, my strides were clumsy.

  There were boulders emerging from the sand, forming a natural barrier. An easily crossed breach opened in this miniature mountain range; I took it.

  The ground sank to form a wide bowl. At the bottom, the mirror gleam of water, surrounded by a ring of trees. I descended. At first sight, there was nothing unusual. Could it be the water of the oasis? It was rather muddy; small pisks and tiny cancers swam in it. I leaned down to drink; but the water’s taste awoke nothing in me. It was as I straightened up that I saw the tomb, fairly high up on the slope, half-sheltered by a rocky overhang.

  Mashak must have assaulted the ground with an insane energy. Clumps of sand were scattered for metres all around. The corpse was halfway exposed.

  At first I remained very calm. I noticed the curious clothes, the jewelry of a kind I had never seen. The colour of the skin, the oddness of the features. Had I brought a notebook, I would have written down my observations. The body seemed in pristine condition; even taking into account the extreme slowness of decomposition, death could not be more than a few months in the past. The dead man’s eyes were partly open. They had been blue. His black hair was very long, ornamented by painted wooden beads. At his throat glittered a pendant rose.

  He had never been one of us. So much had been obvious from my first glimpse of him. But there was something else. I spread apart the folds of the dead man’s clothes; and I saw.

  Something broke in me. My memory was returning. An image came to me: like a tidal wave. I had forgotten until that moment what a sea was.

  There had been the ship. The ocean of night. On approach to our destination, the head-on impact, utterly unpredictable, with an aggregate of dark matter. The screens going wild, intermodular energy links rupturing, the great ship scattered like a necklace whose string has snapped, the other impacts, again and again, for a moment we had believed it to be an attack, one module after another bei
ng destroyed, and all the while, coming over the audio channels, the screams of crewmen losing themselves among the stars . . .

  There had been the planet swelling on the screens, the two hundred survivors brought back in the command module and one of the biolabs taken in tow at the last moment, the captain giving orders to cut radio communications, to silence the mad pleadings of those who still believed themselves alive. The brief period of orbit, the inevitable descent, the command module like a drunken bird, the atmosphere burning, the antigravs’ shriek rising beyond the threshold of hearing, our final destruction miraculously avoided.

  The command module partially buried in the sand, results from the environmental probes, the presence of relatively complex life, but the impossibility of surviving outside, the riot, the forty-three dead, the emergency measures, the elaboration of the desperate plan, the preliminary modifications, nights spent packed in haphazard bunks, conversations in mime to obey the directive of absolute silence meant to keep the peace, Mashak lying above me, a vision more terrible than all the others, Mashak before the ultimate transformation, his skin already faded like a photograph exposed too long to the sun . . .

  The others. Those who had refused the last step. The brief mutiny that had brought them to power, only long enough to leave us forever. The others. Those whose bodies were like the body of the corpse Mashak had discovered.

  Those who would have had to disappear at any rate, to eliminate all idea of reproduction, any risk of change in the community that would form once adaptation to this world had been realized. The females. Those who had extracted the shuttle from the hold of the command module, taken a handful of us with them, vanished below the horizon . . .

  The slow years at the beginning; our emergence from the command module, the establishment of the city, our use of the least available resource, decades spent consolidating existing structures . . . already we had forgotten who we had been; all that was left for us to lose was who we were.

  We knew it would take a long time, perhaps a very long time, before we were found. Given the confusion that reigned in wartime, we thought we might have to last up to several decades. Then we told ourselves: a century or two, at most. And then we forgot. Why the projectors are turned skyward, why we built spokes of coloured cemented sand, electrostatically cleaned, two hundred kilometres long, in the middle of the desert: to be visible from space. So that the ships come to rescue us would be able to spot us. But they never came.

  I thought: Perhaps we are the last. All that’s left of humanity. But I corrected myself instantly. No, there were others left. The others. Those whose descendants had survived for twelve hundred years had been changed. I understood once more, for the second time only in more than a thousand years, why the decision had been taken. The first sentences of the Codex only repeated it, and those sentences none of us had been able to forget; I was sure of it. The future like the past. We will cross the centuries like a ship the ocean of night.

  Remember who you are, where you came from. Remember that you must not change. You must preserve what you are, you must preserve what is human in you. Fight against entropy in every possible way. You were made immortal when you were adapted to this world: you shall never perish. You must keep intact what you are, never deviate by an iota from the human norm. Sleep if you will, dream a dream of sand, forget for a thousand-year night what you are, but when the day comes, you will remember who you are, who you have always been.

  And Mashak had lost his mind, unable to face his memories, even without the knowledge of how much time had really passed. I told myself that if he had known, he would never have returned to Manoâr screaming his distress; he would have gone deeper into the desert, navigating at random for weeks, until his water reserves ran out, until the day’s searing heat and the night’s arctic cold had destroyed him.

  I could feel my mind about to shatter in the face of all my memories; I stumbled to the water, splashed my face with it, buried my head under the surface. I breathed the muddy water for a few minutes; my lungs burned; my head came up; I vomited litres of liquid before readapting to air-breathing. For the space of an instant, I tasted death, and my sanity held.

  I remembered telling myself, a thousand years ago, that if I had adapted so well, it was because I was youngest. I had been training as a scantech in the command module. I had been nineteen years old. I began to cry. A terrible scream rose in my throat, but it died before reaching my lips. When I stood up, I was, as much as was possible for a man twelve centuries dead, who I had always been.

  3. ROSE OF THE DESERT

  I could not leave. I remained with the body through the night, knowing full well I would have to reinter it, unable to bring myself to do that, unable to leave it. I kept imagining the alien visage would animate, the lips part, the voice rise. I wanted to hear the dead man—the dead woman—speak. What had our tongue become after all these centuries? In the starshine, her face seemed to have been delicately sculpted in stone. Shortly before dawn, yielding to a fatigue that existed perhaps only in my memories of a more fragile body, I fell asleep.

  I don’t know if it was the arrow or the shout that woke me. There came, simultaneously, a dull pain at my right side and a screamed word: “Hommort!”

  I bounded to my feet, whirled around: before me stood the cadaver’s replica, bow still vibrating in her hands. I could not help but look at the grave, as if I could have believed the dead woman merely sleeping. She was still there, and the next second, I saw that she who had shot the arrow looked nothing like her.

  She repeated, her face twisted by what I took to be anger: “Hommort!” I became aware of the arrowhead protruding from below my right nipple; absent-mindedly, I grasped the shaft and pushed the arrow out completely. Two or three drops of blood fell on the sand.

  Other men crossed the natural wall, not far from us. They no longer speak our tongue, I thought. We will never understand one another. The next instant, they had drawn their scimitars and were charging toward me. The words they shouted seemed strangely familiar, yet I could not assign them any meaning.

  When they were less than ten metres away, I managed to get moving. I felt no fear, indeed I had the impression I was performing an obscure ritual whose signification had been lost.

  I climbed the wall, jumped over the crest. I remained stunned for a second when I saw the caravan: a score of people, riding almost fabulous beings, gigantic versions of the cobbs that haunted the nooks of Manoâr, accompanied by what I could only see as dogs. Twelve hundred years, I thought, dizzied by the passage of centuries. Then my pursuers crossed the ridge, and I fled once more.

  Since I was easily distancing them, they changed tactics. A hail of arrows fell down around me. One of them scratched my jumpsuit on the left shin, causing me no damage. Another, however, came down full on the nape of my neck and severed my spinal cord. I collapsed upon the sand, unable to control my movements. A shout of triumph rose behind me. My limbs shook in spasms, digging into the sand as if I sought to bury myself. A few seconds later, a burning whip lashed my body: nervous connections had been reestablished. I got back to my feet a second before they reached me.

  They stood back, aghast, from a being who should have been dead, and so I was able to escape, to regain the hard-packed surface of the spoke. I began to run, swiftly reaching my peak speed, leaving them far behind, their useless bows limply hanging from their arms.

  My body was warning me that my energy reserves were falling rapidly, but I knew I had enough resources to reach Manoâr without having to slow down. As I ran, I tried to reason. The descendants of the Others knew of the oasis: they had therefore necessarily seen the spoke, which continued anyway a good hundred kilometres beyond that point. No doubt they had never dared follow it to its destination—what memories of us could remain to them, knowing their long-ago ancestors had fled what amounted to an execution?

  But now? Now they had seen a stranger, a Hommort, whatever that word mea
nt. A stranger who had desecrated a grave, a stranger whom their weapons could not even wound. Would they try to avenge the profanation, or would they fear what they could not understand?

  It was, I knew, only a question of time. Very little time. The desert covered two thirds of the planet; if they had the resources to go this deep into it . . .

  I arrived at Manoâr shortly before sunset; my legs shook slightly—I told myself it was from having run for so long, but I wasn’t so sure. I paused a long while at the frontier of the city before resolving to cross it. The evening wind lazily sent trails of sand across Amaranth Boulevard. The houses of stone and metal rose all about me. All these cubes, nine tenths of them empty . . . we had created, without realizing it, a scale model of the cities from our world of origin; we had “played city” as children would.

  I met Martegen, who saluted me indifferently: “Peace, Mospedeo.”

  I turned away without returning his salute. The temptation was so terrible, to take up the dream of sand; I was like a sleeper who wishes to close his eyes again even as he knows he must wake immediately. What if I forgot . . . ? What if I returned peacefully to my house . . . ? Mervelld would ask me what I had seen in the desert, and I would answer, “There is nothing in the desert, Mervelld,” with the quiet certainty of a man who has just gouged out his own eyes.

  I saw again the corpse Mashak had exhumed; the giant cobbs who served as riding beasts to the Others’ children; the gleam of the sun on the blades of the scimitars; the pendant rose at the neck of the dead woman. I shook myself, and I went to see Captain Mantheor.

  The temperature in Paradise seemed more bearable this time, as if my body remembered its old reactions. Mantheor welcomed me with an abstracted hospitality. I accepted his invitation to share his meal. The pale green vegetables grown in our greenhouses tasted of sand.