“Do you know what that is?” she asked, screwing up her face as if the liquid burned. She had enormous lashes, no doubt false. Actresses always have false lashes.
“No.”
“You won’t tell anyone?”
“No.”
“Perto.”
“Well,” I said noncommittally.
She opened her eyes.
“I saw you before. You were walking with a horrible old man, and then you came back alone.”
“That was the son of a young colleague of mine,” I replied. The odd thing was, it was pretty much the truth.
“You attract attention — do you know?”
“What can I do?”
“Not only because you’re so big. You walk differently — and you look around as though you…”
“What?”
“Were on your guard.”
“Against what?”
She did not answer. Her expression changed. Breathing more heavily, she examined her own hand. The fingers trembled.
“Now…” she said softly and smiled, though not at me. Her smile became inspired, the pupils dilated, engulfing the irises, she leaned back slowly until her head was on the gray pillow, the auburn hair fell loose, she gazed at me in a kind of jubilant stupor.
“Kiss me.”
I embraced her, and it was awful, because I wanted to and I didn’t want to. It seemed to me that she had ceased to be herself — as though at any moment she could change into something else. She sank her fingers into my hair; her breathing, when she tore herself away from me, was like a moan. One of us is false, contemptible, I thought, but who, she or I? I kissed her, her face was painfully beautiful, terribly alien, then there was only pleasure, unbearable, but even then the cold, silent observer remained in me; I did not lose myself. The back of the chair, obedient, became a rest for our heads, it was like the presence of a third person, degradingly attentive, and, as though aware of this, we did not exchange a single word during the entire time. Then I was dozing, my arms around her neck, and still it seemed to me that someone stood and watched, watched…
When I awoke, she was asleep. It was a different room. No, the same. But it had changed somehow — a part of the wall had moved aside to reveal the dawn. Above us, as if it had been forgotten, a narrow lamp burned. Straight ahead, above the tops of the trees, which were still almost black, day was breaking. Carefully I moved to the edge of the bed; she murmured something like “Alan,” and went on sleeping.
I walked through huge, empty rooms. In them were windows facing east. A red glow entered and filled the transparent furniture, which flickered with the fire of red wine. Through the suite of rooms I saw the silhouette of someone walking — a pearly-gray robot without a face, its torso giving off a weak light; inside it glowed a ruby flame, like a small lamp before an icon.
“I wish to leave,” I said.
“Yes, sir.”
Silver, green, sky-blue stairs. I bade farewell to all the faces of Aen in the hall as high as a cathedral. It was day now. The robot opened the gate. I told it to call a gleeder for me.
“Yes, sir. Would you like the house one?”
“It can be the house one. I want to get to the Alcaron Hotel.”
“Very good, sir. Acknowledged.”
Someone else had addressed me in this way. Who? I could not recall.
Down the steep steps — so that to the very end it would be remembered that this was a palace, not a home — we both went; in the light of the rising sun I got into the machine. When it began to move, I looked back. The robot was still standing in a subservient pose, a little like a mantis with its thin, articulated arms.
The streets were almost empty. In the gardens, like strange, abandoned ships, the villas rested, yes, rested, as if they had only alighted for a moment among the hedges and trees, folding their angular, colored wings. There were more people in the center of the city. Spires with their summits ablaze in the sun, palm-garden houses, leviathan houses on widely spread stilts — the street cut through them, flew off into the blue horizon; I did not look at anything more. At the hotel I took a bath and telephoned the travel office. I reserved an ulder for twelve. It amused me a little, that I could toss the name around so easily, having no idea what an ulder was.
I had four hours. I called the hotel infor and asked about the Breggs. I had no descendants, but my father’s brother had left two children, a boy and a girl. Even if they were not living, their children…
The infor listed eleven Breggs. I then asked for their genealogy. It turned out that only one of them, an Atal Bregg, belonged to my family. He was my uncle’s grandson, not young, either: he was now almost sixty. So I had found out what I wanted to know. I even picked up the receiver with the intention of phoning him, but put it down again. What, after all, did I have to say to him? Or he to me? How my father had died? My mother? I had died to them earlier and now had no right, as their surviving child, to ask. It would have been — or so I felt at that moment — an act of treachery, as if I had tricked them, evading fate in a cowardly escape, hiding myself within time, which had been less mortal for me than for them. It was they who had buried me, among the stars, not I them, on Earth.
However, I did lift the receiver. The phone rang a long time. At last the house robot answered and informed me that Atal Bregg was off Earth.
“Where?” I asked quickly.
“On Luna. He is away for four days. What shall I tell him?”
“What does he do? What is his profession?” I asked. “Because… I am not sure he is the one I want, perhaps there has been a mistake…”
It was easier, somehow, to lie to a robot.
“He is a psychopedist.”
“Thank you. I will call back in a few days.”
I put the receiver down. At least he was not an astronaut; good.
I got the hotel infor again and asked what it could recommend as entertainment for two or three hours.
’Try our realon,” it said.
“What’s there?”
“The Fiancée. It is the latest real of Aen Aenis.”
I went down; it was in the basement. The show had already begun, but the robot at the entrance told me that I had missed practically nothing — only a few minutes. It led me into the darkness, drew out an egg-shaped chair, and, after seating me in it, disappeared.
My first impression was of sitting near the stage of a theater, or no — on the stage itself, so close were the actors. As though one could reach out and touch them. I was in luck, because it was a story from my time, in other words, a historical drama; the years during which the action took place were not specified exactly, but, judging from certain details, it was a decade or two after my departure.
Right away I was delighted by the costumes; the scenario was naturalistic, but for that very reason I enjoyed myself, because I caught a great number of mistakes and anachronisms. The hero, a handsome swarthy man with brown hair, came out of his house in a dress suit (it was early morning) and went by car to meet his beloved; he even had on a top hat, but a gray one, as if he were an Englishman riding at the Derby. Later, a romantic roadhouse came into view, with an innkeeper like none that I had ever seen — he looked like a pirate; the hero seated himself on the tails of his jacket and drank beer through a straw; and so on.
Suddenly I stopped smiling; Aen had entered. She was dressed absurdly, but that became irrelevant. The viewer knew that she loved another and was deceiving the young man; the typical, melodramatic role of the treacherous woman, sentimentality, cliché. But Aen did it differently. She was a girl devoid of thought, affectionate, heedless, and, because of the limitless naïveté of her cruelty, an innocent creature, one who brought unhappiness to everyone because she did not want to make anyone unhappy. Falling into the arms of one man, she forgot about the other, and did this in such a way that one believed in her sincerity — for the moment.
But this nonsense did not hold together, and there remained only Aen the great actress.
Afterward I went up to my room to pack my things, for in a few minutes I would be setting off. It turned out that I had more things than I thought. I was not ready when the telephone sang out: my ulder was waiting.
“I’ll be down in a minute,” I said. The robot porter took my bags, and I was on my way out when the telephone sounded again. I hesitated. The soft signal repeated itself untiringly. Just so it doesn’t look like I’m running away, I thought, and lifted the receiver, not altogether sure, however, why I was doing it.
“Is that you?”
“Yes. You’re up?”
“A long time ago. What are you doing?”
“I saw you. In the real.”
“Yes?” was all she said, but I sensed the satisfaction in her voice. It meant: he is mine.
“No,” I said.
“No what?”
“Girl, you are a great actress. But I am not at all the person you imagine me to be.”
“Did I imagine last night, too?” she interrupted. In her voice, a quiver of amusement — and suddenly the ridiculousness returned. I was unable to avoid it: the Quaker from the stars who has fallen once, stem, desperate, and modest.
“No,” I said, controlling myself, “you didn’t imagine it. But I am going away.”
“Forever?”
She was enjoying the conversation.
“Girl,” I began, and did not know what to say. For a moment I heard only her breathing.
“And what next?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” I quickly corrected myself: “Nothing. I’m going away. There is no sense to this.”
“None whatever,” she agreed, “and that is why it can be splendid. What did you see? The True Ones?”
“No, The Fiancée. Listen…”
“That’s a complete bomb. I can’t look at it. My worst thing. See The True Ones, or no, come this evening. I’ll show it to you. No, no, today I can’t Tomorrow.”
“Aen, I’m not coming. I really am leaving in a minute…”
“Don’t say ‘Aen’ to me, say ‘girl,’ ” she begged.
“Girl, go to hell!” I put down the receiver, felt terribly ashamed of myself, picked it up, put it down once more, and ran out of the room as if someone were after me. Downstairs, I learned that the ulder was on the roof. And so up again.
On the roof there was a garden restaurant and an airport. Actually, a restaurant-airport, a mixture of levels, flying platforms, invisible windows — I would not have found my ulder in a year. But I was led to it, practically by the hand. It was smaller than I expected. I asked how long the flight would last, for I planned to do some reading.
“About twelve minutes.”
It was not worth starting anything. The interior of the ulder reminded me a little of the experimental Thermo-Fax rocket that I had piloted once, except that it was more comfortable, but when the door closed on the robot that wished me a pleasant trip, the walls instantly became transparent, and because I had taken the first of the four seats (the others were unoccupied), the impression was of flying in an armchair mounted inside a large glass.
It’s funny, but the ulder had nothing in common with a rocket or an airplane; it was more like a magic carpet. The peculiar vehicle first moved vertically, without the least vibration, giving off a long whistle, then it sped horizontally, like a bullet. Again the thing that I had observed once before: acceleration was not accompanied by an increase in inertia. The first time, at the station, I had thought that I might be the victim of an illusion; now, however, I was sure of myself. It is difficult to put into words the feeling that came over me — because if they had truly succeeded in making acceleration independent of inertia, then all the hibernations, tests, selections, hardships, and frustrations of our voyage turned out to be completely needless; so that, at that moment, I was like the conqueror of some Himalayan peak who, after the indescribable difficulty of the climb, discovers that there is a hotel full of tourists at the top, because during his lonely labor a cable car and amusement arcades had been installed on the opposite side. The fact that had I remained on Earth I would probably not have lived to see this amazing discovery was small consolation to me: a consolation would be, rather, the thought that perhaps this contrivance did not lend itself to cosmic navigation. That was, of course, pure egoism on my part, I admitted it, but the shock was too great for me to be able to show the proper enthusiasm.
Meanwhile the ulder flew, now without a sound; I looked down. We were passing the Terminal. It moved slowly to the rear, a fortress of ice; on the upper levels, not visible from the city, huge rocket pads showed black. Then we flew fairly close to the needle tower, the one with black and silver stripes; it loomed above the ulder. From the Earth, its height could not be appreciated. It was a bridge of pipe joining the city and the sky, and the “shelves” that protruded from it were crowded with ulders and other, bigger, machines. The people on these landing strips looked like poppy seeds spilled on a silver plate. We flew over white and blue colonies of houses, over gardens; the streets got wider and wider, their surfaces were also colored — pale pink and ocher predominated. A sea of buildings extended to the horizon, broken occasionally by belts of green, and I feared that this would continue all the way to Clavestra. But the machine picked up speed, the houses became scattered, dispersed among the gardens, there appeared instead enormous loops and straight stretches of roads; these ran at numerous levels, merged, crisscrossed, plunged beneath the ground, converged in star-shaped arrangements, and shot away in strips along a flat gray-green plane beneath the high sun, swarming with gleeders. Then, amid quadrangles of trees, emerged huge structures with roofs in the shape of concave mirrors; in their centers burned something red. Farther along, the roads separated and green prevailed, now and then interrupted by squares of a different vegetation — red, blue — they could not have been flowers, the colors were too intense.
Dr. Juffon would be proud of me, I thought. The third day, and already… And what a beginning. Not just anyone. A brilliant actress, famous. She had not been afraid, and if afraid, then she had got pleasure from the fear, too. Just keep it up. But why had he spoken of intimacy? Was that what their intimacy looked like? How heroically I jumped into the waterfall.
The noble gorilla. And then a beauty, worshiped by the masses, lavishly rewarded him; how generous of her! My face burned all over. All right, cretin, I said to myself mildly, what exactly do you want? A woman? You’ve had a woman. You’ve had everything it’s possible to have here, including an offer to appear in the real. Now you will have a house, you will take walks in a garden, read books, look at the stars, and tell yourself, quietly, in your modesty: I was there. I was there and I came back. And even the laws of physics worked in your favor, lucky man, you have half a lifetime ahead of you, and do you remember how Roemer looked, a hundred years older than yourself?
The ulder began its descent, the whistling started up, the ground, crossed by white and blue roads whose surfaces gleamed like enamel, grew larger. Great ponds and small square pools threw up sparks of sun. Houses scattered on the slopes of gentle hills became progressively more real. On the blue horizon stood a chain of mountains with whitened peaks. I saw gravel paths, lawns, flower beds, the cool green of water in cement-rimmed pools, lanes, bushes, a white roof; all this turned slowly, surrounded me, and became motionless, as if it had taken possession.
FOUR
The door opened. A white-and-orange robot was waiting on the lawn. I stepped out.
“Welcome to Clavestra,” it said, and its white belly unexpectedl
y began to sing: tinkling notes, as though it had a music box inside.
Still laughing, I helped it unload my things. Then the rear hatch of the ulder, which lay on the grass like a small silver zeppelin, opened, and two orange robots rolled out my car. The heavy blue body sparkled in the sun. I had completely forgotten about it. And then all the robots, carrying my suitcases, boxes, and packages, moved in single file toward the house.
The house was a large cube with glass walls. One entered through a panoramic solarium, and farther on were a hall, a dining room, and a wooden staircase going up; the robot, the one with the music box, did not fail to point out to me this rarity.
Upstairs there were five rooms. I did not pick one with the best — an eastern — exposure because in them, particularly in the room with the view of the mountains, there was too much gold and silver, whereas mine had only streaks of green, like crushed leaves on a cream background.
Efficiently and quietly, the robots put all my belongings away in closets while I stood at the window. A port, I thought. A haven. Leaning forward, I could see the blue mist of the mountains. Below lay a flower garden with a dozen or so old fruit trees farther back; they had twisted, tired boughs and probably no longer yielded anything.
Off to the side, toward the road (I had seen it earlier from the ulder, it was obscured by hedges), the tower of a diving board rose above the brush. The pool. When I turned around, the robots had already left. I moved the desk, light as if inflated, over to the window; on it I set my packs of scientific journals, the bags of crystal books, and the reading machine; I arranged the still-unused notebooks and the pen separately. It was my old pen — under the increased gravity it had started leaking and blotted everything, but Olaf had fixed it. I put covers on the notebooks, labeled them “History,” “Mathematics,” and “Physics” — all in a rush, because I was anxious to get into the water. I didn’t know if I could go outside in my trunks, I had forgotten a bathrobe. So I went to the bathroom in the corridor, and there, maneuvering a bottle of foam, I produced a horrible monstrosity that bore no resemblance to anything. I tore it off and tried again. The second bathrobe turned out a little better, but even so it was a fright; I cut away the larger irregularities of the sleeves and hem with a knife, and then it was more or less presentable.
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