Angels and Exiles (23 page)

The Prince had answered in a trembling voice, not really knowing what he said: “Where I come from, there was a Book also, the Book of Exile. My mother read it to me when . . .”

“The Book of Exile, yes. The Exile from God! Your people knew; there’s nobody can ignore God: we all know it when we leave Him. Even the worst of murderers, he who kills the unborn child . . .”

The other Purificators had completed the sentence: “ . . . calls to God in the midst of his crime.”

The Purificator had gone on, speaking the words in a singsong rhythm: “Even the most depraved of fornicators, he who couples with a machine . . .”

“ . . . cries to God in the midst of his silence.”

It had become a ritual chant. “Even the most corrupt of mothers, she who feeds her child from grain grown under the suns of Satan . . .”

“ . . . hungers for God in the midst of her gluttony.”

And during the recitation, they had tied his wrists to the beam.

It was only then he had realized the defence ring was no longer on his finger. The old man was rooting through the Prince’s clothes; he had cried in pleasure upon finding the plastic card, but now whined that he found no money.

“Never mind,” the woman had said, but he’d protested: “He paid the whore with gold! It’s unfair if there ain’t any for us.”

“You here for God or for money?” she’d replied, and the old man had fallen silent.

The Prince was dizzy, the way one feels when one has been breathing very hard for a full minute, or when one has been suddenly pulled out of sleep while dreams still have a claim on their dreamer. He wanted to close his eyes and rest.

The door had been opened again. A young voice—he had recognized the boy in the bar—had intruded: “Get on with it. The ring’s far away, but the plane-seek’s gonna come eventually.”

“Stand up.” They had prodded him forward; two men had to help him go down the stairs sideways because of the beam. Outside, the streetlights were unlit. A vague rosy smear heralded dawn.

They had crossed twisting alleys to finally come out in an inner courtyard. A dozen people stood in corners, silent, most of them with hidden faces. Almost immediately, he had seen Thaïs. She wore a shawl that covered the right half of her face.

The Purificators had fixed the beam that held his arms to a cement pillar. Then one of them had come forward. He bore a mallet and a handful of rusted nails.

Someone had stuffed a stinking rag in the Prince’s mouth to stop him from crying out. And the hammer had come down upon his palms.

Pain had freed the Prince from his trance. But it was too late to scream, much too late to struggle. The nails had burst the flesh of his palms and buried themselves in the wood of the transverse beam.

Someone was reading a book out loud, next to him. The words, in an archaic tongue, no longer held meaning. The Prince thought,
I am going to die. They will kill me; here, now
.

People pressed around him, close enough to touch. Thaïs was among them, right in front of him, half her face hidden by the shawl. She watched him, the Prince had told himself, as a child watches its mother leave, without understanding. How far did the influence of the cortical implant extend? Because he did not have much time left to live, he had decided in that instant, before his reason left him completely, that he forgave her, that he was in love with her.

There had been a brief silence. Then, after what had to be a command, a Purificator, holding a metal point with both hands, had furrowed his left side; the Prince had felt the edge grate against his ribs.

And the next instant he had felt, or thought to feel, Amarille’s presence emerge from beyond the horizon.

Telepathy weakens with distance as voices are lost in the wind; the Prince had screamed, an inarticulate mental cry, an animal wail.

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
?

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.

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 voices 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?

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.