Angels and Exiles (27 page)

The flow of memory had abruptly gone dry. I continued to walk. The sun rose behind me, behind the watchtower, whose petals slowly unfurled with the rising heat. The projectors shut off. The adaptation spasm shook me, and the late-night warmth became early morning’s cool.

When I pushed open the door to Paradise, it was with the sentiment that I was committing a crime. Mantheor was not awake at this hour; I took a thousand precautions to make no noise, but it wasn’t through solicitude for his slumber.

Only a few lamps were lit in the main room. In the centre of the floor, a spiral stair descended to the lower levels. A trapdoor sealed the opening. It would have been easy for me to open it, but I did not, telling myself I would be heard. The truth was that I remembered the crossbows, and that it was from the cellars of Paradise that Mantheor had taken them.

The clocks were set high in a section of the wall that more or less faced the doors. It took me a long moment to understand they had been extinguished. I should have, of course, remembered that I hadn’t seen them when I came to visit; but for a long time now I hadn’t been
seeing
any part of Manoâr. I fumbled at length before reactivating them. For an instant, I feared that they had been completely stopped—a whiff of memory came to me, a vision of Mercono demanding their destruction, pure and simple—but only the luminous display had been shut off.

I stayed immobile, head lifted toward the clocks. Trying to understand what they were displaying. One of them indicated the date on Origin, according to a system of numeration I no longer recognized. The other, the time elapsed since our arrival. The method to differentiate them was obvious: the clock displaying the lesser number necessarily indicated the elapsed time.

But this number was so huge I could not believe it.

I went to the table where Mantheor kept his registers. In one of the volumes, he had accumulated drawings of the sun as seen through the polarized windows, carefully noting down the position of the maculæ, coronal intensity, variations in the magnetic field. I opened the book, turned the pages yellowed by time, going back to the very first. There was a date written in red next to the drawing. I made the subtraction: the date of the first clock minus the book’s date. The result was indeed displayed by the second clock.

Mantheor shut off the display. I should have known no one could enter Paradise without his knowledge.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “I could have believed two centuries, or three. . . . Mantheor,
twelve hundred years.
 . . . No. No!”

I opened the other registers: they contained only astronomical data, records of temperature, columns of meaningless digits. . . . 

I was shaking, but it was not the cold of Paradise that affected me so. Twelve centuries. Only a handful of days remained to me from all this time. . . . A mass of fragmentary knowledge, useless . . .

“Why? Why are we here?”

Then for an instant, I thought I had found the solution. I asked: “Where is the Codex?” The Codex, of course. The Codex which held all the information. To alleviate our memories’ deficiency, to remind us of who we were . . . my relief was short-lived, replaced by a growing horror. Mantheor didn’t really need to remind me of what had happened, but I could not prevent myself from listening to his soft voice:

“Two hundred years after arrival, the Codex and all other documents were destroyed; I managed to preserve only my astronomical registers, because you’d forgotten they existed. You don’t remember, of course?”

I shook my head no, but I lied.

“You were among the leaders, Mospedeo. You had decided to destroy anything that reminded us of Origin—even its true name. The waiting had become intolerable to you. We were all already half-mad by that time, but at least we still had enough energy to act. I managed to seal off the lower levels, but I could not preserve the data: it had remained accessible to all, along with the backup systems. You destroyed everything. You don’t remember?”

I had begun to weep, silently.

“I couldn’t stop you. Oh, strictly speaking, I was able to. Paradise’s defences would have incinerated all of you—but the idea wasn’t to destroy you. . . . We had to survive, even at the cost of our memory. So I let you do as you wanted. If only I hadn’t been taken by surprise. . . .”

I shouted: “But
you
know, then, who we are, why we’re here, what we’re waiting for!”

“I
knew
. But not anymore. Our memories have been erased by the centuries, mine as well as yours. I no longer know how we came here. I vaguely remember that we built Manoâr; why . . . ? If only I
could
remember what we’re waiting for! I think it had something to do with the sun, so I observe it, I keep notes, I write in the registers. . . . But that’s all. We are
dead
, Mospedeo, we’ve been dead for centuries. It took twelve hundred years for eighteen of us to perish—yes, I can see this shocks you; but those figures I was able to preserve. There are indeed eighteen of us who died, even if you’ve forgotten almost all of them, even if to me, their names no longer mean anything, save for the last few. . . . In one or two hundred years, we’ll have forgotten them all, even Mashak. And in forty centuries, mathematically, nothing will be left of us. We’ll have found rest. I know—I remember—that somewhere in the basements there is an emergency control post; and that there is a way to push the reactors beyond their limits, to enlarge hugely, for a brief moment, the fusion field. If I am the last one alive, I will go down to the basements, I will unlock the controls, I will push down the levers, and for a fraction of a second, there will be a new star on the surface of this world . . . then nothing. That is what I think about every day, Mospedeo. The only will left in me. The sun in the sky, the sun I will cause to be born here when you are all gone . . . in four thousand years; tomorrow.”

I left without saying anything. Mospedeo. Watcher. And
watching for what
?

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.