Return From the Stars Read online

  Twenty seconds, perhaps, had gone by since my leap. I looked for the woman. She was watching me. I grew confused. I did not know whether I should go over to her. But the crowd began to leave, and the next moment we found ourselves next to each other.

  “It’s always the same,” she said then. “I always fall!”

  The night in the park, the fireworks, and the music were, somehow, not entirely real. We left with the crowd, which was agitated after the terrors it had just experienced. I saw the woman’s companion pushing his way toward her. Again he was lethargic. He did not appear to notice me at all.

  “Let’s go to Merlin’s,” the woman said, so loudly that I heard. I had not intended to eavesdrop. But a new wave of exiting people pushed us together even closer. For this reason, I continued to stand near them.

  “You look like you are trying to escape,” she said, smiling. “What, are you afraid of witchcraft… ?”

  She spoke to him but looked at me. I could have elbowed my way out, of course, but, as always in such situations, I was most afraid of appearing ridiculous. They moved on, leaving a gap in the crowd. Others, next to me, suddenly decided to visit Merlin’s Palace, and when I headed in that direction, with a few people separating us, I knew that I had not been mistaken a moment before.

  We moved a step at a time. On the lawn stood pots of tar fluttering with flame; their light revealed steep bricked bastions. We crossed a drawbridge over a moat and stepped under the bared teeth of a portcullis, the dimness and chill of a stone entrance hall embraced us, a spiral staircase ascended, full of the echoes of thumping feet. But the arched corridor of the upper level contained fewer people. It led to a gallery with a view of a yard, where a noisy mob mounted on caparisoned horses pursued some black monstrosity; I went on, hesitant, not knowing where to go, among several people whom I was beginning to recognize; the woman and her companion passed by me between columns; empty suits of armor stood in recesses in the walls. Farther on, a door with copper fittings, a door for giants, opened up, and we entered a chamber upholstered in red damask, lit by torches whose resinous smoke irritated the nose. At tables a boisterous company was feasting, either pirates or knights-errant, huge sides of meat turned on spits, licked by flames, a reddish light played on sweating faces, bones crunched between the teeth of the armored revelers, who from time to time got up from their tables and mingled with us. In the next room several giants were playing skittles, using skulls for balls; the whole thing struck me as awfully naïve, mediocre; I had stopped beside the players, who were as tall as I, when someone bumped into me from behind and cried out in surprise. I turned and met the eyes of some youth. He stammered an apology and left quickly with a foolish expression on his face; only the look of the dark-haired woman who was the reason for my being in this palace of cheap wonders made me realize what had happened: the youth had tried to walk right through me, taking me for one of Merlin’s unreal banqueters.

  Merlin himself received us in a distant wing of the palace, surrounded by a retinue of masked men who assisted him passively in his feats of magic. But I had had enough of this and watched indifferently the demonstrations of the black art. The show was soon over, and the audience had begun to leave when Merlin, gray, magnificent, barred our way and silently pointed to the door opposite, covered with a shroud.

  He invited only the three of us inside. He himself did not go in. We found ourselves in a fairly small room, very high, with one of the walls a mirror from the ceiling to the black-and-white stone floor. The impression was of a room twice the size that contained six people standing on a stone chessboard.

  There was no furniture — nothing but a tall alabaster urn with a bouquet of flowers, which were like orchids but had unusually large calyxes. Each was a different color. We stood facing the mirror.

  Then my image looked at me. The movement was not a reflection of my own. I froze, but the other, large, broad-shouldered, slowly looked first at the dark-haired woman, then at her companion. None of us moved, and only our images, grown independent of us in some mysterious way, came to life, played out a silent scene among themselves.

  The young man in the minor went up to the woman and looked into her eyes; she shook her head in refusal. She took the flowers from the white vase, sorted through them with her fingers, selected three — a white, a yellow, and a black. The white she gave to him, and with the other two she came to me. To me — in the mirror. She offered both flowers. I took the black. Then she returned to her place and all three of us — there, in the mirror room — assumed exactly the positions that we really occupied. When that happened, the flowers disappeared from the hands of our doubles, and they were once more ordinary reflections, faithfully repeating every moment

  A door in the far wall opened up; we went down spiral stairs. Columns, alcoves, vaults changed imperceptibly into the silver and white of plastic corridors. We walked on in silence, not separately, not together; the situation was becoming intolerable, but what was I to do? Step forward and introduce myself in the time-honored fashion, with an antiquated savoir-vivre?

  The muffled sound of an orchestra. It was as if we were in the wings, behind an unseen stage; there were a few empty tables with the chairs pushed back. The woman stopped and asked her companion:

  “You won’t dance?”

  “I don’t want to,” he said. I heard his voice for the first time.

  He was handsome, but filled with an inertia, an unaccountable passivity, as if he cared about nothing in the world. He had beautiful lips, almost the lips of a girl. He looked at me. Then at her. He stood there, saying nothing.

  “Well, then, go, if you like,” she said. He parted a curtain that formed one of the walls, and left. I started to follow him.

  “Please?” I heard her voice.

  I stopped. From behind the curtain came applause.

  “Won’t you have a seat?”

  Without a word I sat down. She had a magnificent profile. Her ears were covered by little shields of pearl.

  “I am Aen Aenis.”

  “Hal Bregg.”

  She seemed surprised. Not by my name — it meant nothing to her — but by the fact that I had received her name so indifferently. Now I could get a close look at her. Her beauty was perfect and merciless, as was the calm, controlled carelessness of her movements. She wore a pink-gray dress, more gray than pink; it set off the whiteness of her face and arms.

  “You don’t like me?” she asked quietly.

  “I don’t know you.”

  “I am Ammai — in The True Ones.”

  “What is that?”

  She regarded me with curiosity.

  “You haven’t seen The True Ones?”

  “I don’t even know what it is.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  “I came here from my hotel.”

  “Really. From your hotel…” There was open mockery in her tone. “And where, may I ask, were you before you got to your hotel?”

  “In Fomalhaul.”

  “What is that?”

  “A constellation.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A star system, twenty-three light years from here.”

  Her eyelids fluttered. Her lips parted. She was very pretty.

  “An astronaut?”

  “Yes.”

  “I understand. I am a realist — rather well known.”

  I said nothing. We were silent. The music played.

  “Do you dance?”

  I nearly laughed out loud.

  “What they dance now — no.”

  “A pity. But you can learn. Why did you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “There — on the footbridge.”

  I did not answer immediately.

  “It was… a reflex.”

  “You were familiar with it?”

  “That make-believe journey? No.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  A moment of silence. Her eyes, for a moment green, no
w became almost black.

  “Only in very old prints can one see that sort of thing,” she said, as if involuntarily. “No one would play… It isn’t possible. When I saw it, I thought that… that you…”

  I waited.

  “… might be able to. Because you took it seriously. Yes?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps.”

  “Never mind. I know. Would you be interested? I’m friends with French. But you don’t know who he is, do you? I must tell him… He is the chief producer of the real. If you are interested…”

  I burst out laughing. She gave a start.

  “I’m sorry. But — ye gods and little fishes, you thought of giving me a job as…”

  “Yes.”

  She did not seem to be offended. Quite the contrary.

  “Thank you, but no. I really don’t think so.”

  “But can you tell me how you did it? Is it a secret?”

  “What do you mean, how? Didn’t you see… ?”

  I broke off.

  “You want to know how I was able to do it.”

  “You are most perceptive.”

  She knew how to smile with the eyes alone like no one else. Wait, in a minute you won’t be wanting to seduce me, I thought.

  “It’s simple. And no secret. I’m not betrizated.”

  “Ooh…”

  For a moment I thought that she would get up, but she controlled herself. Her eyes became once more large and avid. She looked at me as at a beast that lay a step away, as though she found a perverse pleasure in the terror that I aroused in her. To me it was an insult worse than if she had been merely frightened. “You can… ?”

  “Kill?” I replied, smiling politely. “Yes. I can.”

  We were silent. The music played. Several times she raised her eyes to me. She did not speak. Nor did I. Applause. Music. Applause. We must have sat like that for a quarter of an hour. Suddenly she got up.

  “Will you come with me?”

  “Where?”

  “To my place.”

  “For some brit?”

  “No.”

  She turned and left. I sat without moving. I hated her. She walked without looking about, walked like no woman I had ever seen. She did not walk: she floated. Like a queen.

  I caught up with her among hedges, where it was almost dark. The last traces of light from the pavilions blended with the bluish glow of the city. She must have heard my footsteps, but on she went, not looking, as if she were alone, even when I took her by the arm. She walked on; it was like a slap. I grabbed her shoulders, turned her to me; she lifted her face, white in the darkness; she looked into my eyes. She did not try to break away. But she could not have done so. I kissed her roughly, full of hatred; I felt her tremble.

  “You…” she said in a low voice, when we separated.

  “Be quiet.”

  She tried to free herself.

  “Not yet,” I said and began to kiss her again. Suddenly my rage turned into self-disgust, and I released her. I thought that she would flee. She remained. She tried to look me in the face. I turned away.

  “What is the matter?” she asked quietly.

  “Nothing.”

  She took me by the arm.

  “Come.”

  A couple passed us and vanished in the shadows. I followed her. There, in the darkness, it had seemed that anything was possible, but when it grew lighter, my outburst of a moment before — which was supposed to have been in reprisal for an insult — became merely amusing. I felt that I was walking into something false, false as the danger had been, the wizardry, everything — and I walked on. No anger, no hatred, nothing. I did not care. I found myself among high-hanging lights and felt this huge, heavy presence of mine, which made my every step by her side grotesque. But she seemed unaware of this. She walked along a rampart, behind which stood rows of gleeders. I wanted to stay behind, but she slid her hand down my arm and grasped my hand. I would have had to tear it away, becoming even more comical — an image of astronautical virtue in the clutches of Potiphar’s wife. I climbed in after her, the machine trembled and took off. It was my first trip in a gleeder, and I understood now why they had no windows. From the inside they were entirely transparent, as if made of glass.

  We traveled a long time, in silence. The buildings of the city center gave way to bizarre forms of suburban architecture — under small artificial suns, immersed in vegetation, lay structures with flowing lines, or inflated into odd pillows, or winged, so that the division between the interior of a home and its surroundings was lost; these were products of a phantasmagoria, of tireless attempts to create without repeating old forms. The gleeder left the wide runway, shot through a darkened park, and came to rest by stairs folded like a cascade of glass; walking up them, I saw an orangery spread out beneath my feet.

  The heavy gate opened soundlessly. A huge hall enclosed by a high gallery, pale pink shields of lamps neither supported nor suspended; in the sloping walls, windows that seemed to look out into a different space, niches containing not photographs, not dolls, but Aen herself, enormous, directly ahead — Aen in the arms of a dark man who kissed her, above the undulating staircase; Aen in the white, endless shimmer of a dress; and, to the side, Aen bent over flowers, lilies as large as her face. Walking behind her, I saw her again in another window, smiling girlishly, alone, the light trembling on her auburn hair.

  Green steps. A suite of white rooms. Silver steps. Corridors from end to end, and in them, slow, incessant movement, as if the space were breathing; the walls slid back silently, making way wherever the woman before me directed her steps. One might think that an imperceptible wind were rounding off the intersections of the galleries, sculpturing them, and that everything I had seen so far were only a threshold, an introduction, a vestibule. Through a room, illuminated from without by the most delicate veining of ice, so white that even the shadows in it seemed milky, we entered a smaller room — after the pure radiance of the other, its bronze was like a shout. There was nothing here but a mysterious light from a source that seemed to be inverted, so that it shone on us and our faces from below; she made a motion of the hand, it dimmed; she stepped to the wall and with a few gestures conjured from it a swelling that immediately began to open out to make a kind of wide double bed — I knew enough about topology to appreciate the research that must have gone into the line of the headrest alone.

  “We have a guest,” she said, pausing. From the open paneling a low table emerged, all set, and ran to her like a dog. The large lights went out when, over a niche with armchairs — I cannot describe what sort of armchairs they were — she gestured for a small lamp to appear, and the wall obeyed. She seemed to have had enough of these budding, blooming pieces of furniture; she leaned across the table and asked, not looking in my direction:

  “Blar?”

  “All right,” I said. I asked no questions; I could not help being a savage, but at least I could be a silent savage.

  She handed me a tall cone with a tube in it; it glittered like a ruby but was soft, as though I had touched the fuzzy skin of a fruit. She took one herself. We sat down. Uncomfortably soft, like sitting on a cloud. The liquid had a taste of unknown fresh fruits, with tiny lumps that unexpectedly and amusingly burst on the tongue.

  “Is it good?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  Perhaps this was a ritual drink. For example, for the chosen ones; or, on the contrary, to pacify the especially dangerous. But I had decided to ask no questions.

  “It’s better when you sit.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re awfully large.”

  “That I know.”

  “You work at being rude.”

  “No. It comes to me naturally.”

  She began to laugh, quietly.

  “I am also witty,” I said. “All sorts of talents.”

  “You’re different,” she said. “No one talks like that. Tell me, how is it? What do you feel?”

  “I don’t understand.” />
  “You’re pretending. Or perhaps you lied — no, that isn’t possible. You wouldn’t have been able to…”

  “Jump?”

  “I wasn’t thinking of that.”

  “Of what, then?”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “You don’t know?”

  “Ah, that!” I said. “And isn’t that done any more?”

  “It is, but not like that.”

  “I do it so well?”

  “No, certainly not… but it was as if you had wanted to…” She did not finish.

  “To what?”

  “You know. I felt it.”

  “I was angry,” I confessed.

  “Angry!” she said contemptuously. “I thought that… I don’t know what I thought. No one would dare to, you know.”

  I began to smile a little.

  “And you liked it.”

  “You don’t understand a thing. This is a world without fear, but you, one can be afraid of you.”

  “You want more?” I asked.

  Her lips parted, again she looked at me as at an imaginary beast.

  “I do.”

  She moved toward me. I took her hand, placed it against my own, flat — her fingers barely reached beyond my palm.

  “What a hard hand you have,” she said.

  “It’s from the stars. They’re sharp-edged. And now say: What large teeth you have.”

  She smiled.

  “Your teeth are quite ordinary.”

  Then she lifted my hand, and was so careful doing it that I remembered the encounter with the lion, but instead of feeling offended I smiled, because it was awfully stupid.

  She got up, stood over me, poured herself a drink from a small dark bottle, and drank it down.