Angels and Exiles (22 page)

He did not want to be taken back to orbit, not now, regardless of his disgust toward Hurt’s true visage. He still felt, even more painfully now, this need to regain the species’ native ground, as if his thirst had been staunched with vinegar.

He had gone down to the hotel’s lobby, a room whose wallpaper bore leprous water stains. Nowhere could he see the woman with the colourless hair and the desiccated voice. After much arguing with a clerk, he had obtained a map of the region. A greenish stain followed the coastline; inland, it paled and soon vanished, to be replaced by a featureless gray expanse. In the desert, perhaps he would at last find the communion that had eluded him.

At the frontier of the gray zone, perhaps fifty kilometres from Port-Clèves, the Prince had noticed a dot bearing the name of Troy. A red thread linked it to the stain that was Port-Clèves.

“Would it be easy to get there?” he had asked.

“There’s a bus every morning and every evening—when it runs.”

It was running that evening. The Prince had jumped aboard at the last moment, feigning up to that point to watch the departure with a tourist’s curiosity. He had seen the agent run across the street, too late according to the driver, who blindly obeyed the rusted clock bolted to the dashboard. The Prince had turned around to see the too-well-dressed woman’s form shrink in the rear window. She had made a parting gesture he had not been able to interpret.

The bus had bumped for an hour along the narrow, poorly marked road. Monkeys the colour of cinnamon and blood, the first animals the Prince had seen since the slinking rats and gaunt dogs of Port-Clèves, jumped from treetop to treetop, back and forth across the road. From the disturbed branches, tumorlike fruits plummeted to the ground and burst in a delirium of glairy pulp and barbed seeds.

Very soon, the trees had thinned out, shrunk. Presently all that remained was a gloomy savannah punctuated by grayish mounds of uncertain origin. At the end of the road, the lights of Troy marked the limits of the desert as a lighthouse marks the coast; but what vessel of the sands had they been charged to keep away from the shores of humanity?

The bus’s passengers had dispersed; the Prince of Verte had remained alone on the cracked-asphalt plaza, in the declining day. He had neglected to ask the driver where he could find lodgings, and from where he stood, no such establishment could be seen.

He had crossed the village, which was larger than he’d first thought. He had reached the last houses as night fell completely. In front of him spread the desert. Far from relief, he had felt, in front of the limitless gray-ochre expanse, the same anxiety as when he’d looked at space through his ship’s scleras.

He had turned on his heels, recrossed the streets of Troy. At some moment or other, he had lost his way, and rather than return to the plaza he had started out from, he had found himself in a neighbourhood of narrow twisting streets. He had walked along a small park holding more sand than grass, guided by a faraway sign in flickering neon, which simply announced
BAR
, as if it were the only one in town.

Conversations had stopped when he’d entered. A young boy, barely fourteen, had pointed him to a table after a long stare. The babble of conversation had slowly returned once the Prince had sat. Someone at a nearby table had snickered: “What do you think he’s looking for here, except her?”

As if the speaker had risen to show the Prince of whom he spoke, a young woman had suddenly become visible where she stood, leaning against the counter, adorned with all the splendours of dream.

She wore purple. It had been that simple. She wore purple and resembled the young woman in the image held by the conch. The same black hair, the same way of posing her arm.

He had stood, had taken the three steps that separated him from her. As if it had been inevitable, like a prophecy known since childhood or a still-remembered dream. She had turned to face him. The right half of her face was woven with a cortical implant.

The expression of the young woman was perfectly flat; but in an instant, it had become smiling, vivacious. “Evening. And who’re you?” Her voice was warm, caressing, made a hundred promises with every inflexion.

The Prince had answered evasively, “I’ve come from Port-Clèves.”

“And you want a nice evening, my Prince?”

He had believed for a long moment that she knew, before grasping the trivial sense of the appellation. The young woman had seemed to interpret his stunned silence as shyness, had grabbed his arm familiarly and dragged him after her out of the bar. “Come with me, we’ll have fun.”

He had followed her without a word; he almost expected her to show him, out of an alleyway, a high building of white stone; to guide him to the summit of the tower, and there to ring a silvery bell.

“Name’s Thaïs,” she’d said, and the metal of her implant glimmered in the streetlights’ flickering glare.

She had pulled him after her in the streets of Troy. A warm breeze made little whirls of dust in the courtyards and streets.

No lights shone at the windows of the house she’d led him to. The stairwell was filled with cooking smells and the reek of burned wood.

As naive as he might still be—even after Port-Clèves—the Prince had understood, well before reaching the third landing and Thaïs’s exiguous apartment; he had not felt offended when she’d run some rust-coloured water in a pitcher and asked him to wash himself.

She had stripped off her dress and her plastic necklace. Kneeling on the bed, she’d taken one alluring pose after another, her too-thin body stained fawn by the candlelight, her implant winking when her face came out of shadow.

There had been people like her in Corianne, who’d chosen to let a machine control their emotions and dictate their behaviour. The Prince knew there was a metal sphere, nestled inside Thaïs’s jaw, which made her want to sell herself and held a repertoire of optimized seduction routines.

But he had not been able to resist, even though, overlaying the sight of Thaïs pinching her nipples and spreading her legs, he had heard a phantom voice telling him all of the wonders of Hurt. . . .

Afterwards, she’d told him, in a tone already colder, “If you wanna sleep here, it’s more expensive, and you have to pay in advance.” He had accepted, nodding, and a smile had come back on her face.

And because he remembered the women of Corianne, who insisted that he take them despite their nausea, remembered the apostles of Transmigration mummifying in their coffin-cities, the Prince had paid Thaïs not by touching the plastic card to the read-port grafted behind her ear, but with a coin of Bleue, the last that remained to him.

She’d remained dumbstruck a half minute, the left half of her face sagging; then the implant had regained command, but imperfectly. “What’s that, love?” she’d asked, but her voice swung between conspiratorial tenderness and frightened anger. “Looks like gold with a jewel in the middle.”

“Yes, that’s what it is. A sapphire.” Thaïs had frowned; the Prince had gone on: “It’s a coin from my home. I come from . . . another world. I . . . listen . . .”

He had emptied himself of all his memories; it was like lancing a wound. Because he dared not blame Thaïs for what she was not guilty of.
I have found nothing here of what I sought. Hurt is not the land of marvels I have dreamed of all my life. My long-gone ancestors were born of this soil, but it is more alien to me than the Moon’s.

He had spoken for an hour, perhaps two, lying on the too-short bed and its sticky sheets, while Thaïs watched him silently, bent over him, her hair framing her face with shadow. He had spent himself in her a second time, then had fallen asleep, his face nestled in the hollow of her shoulder.

He had woken alone in the bed; alone in the room. He had called Thaïs, gotten no answer. The memory of the preceding night had come back to him; he had felt a mix of shame and fulfilment. Whether because of his confidences to Thaïs or not, he felt at last freed from his obsession with Hurt. It was over and done; all that remained was to leave, to return to Verte, his parents, Swyle of Faudace, the slow gyration of the Sleeping Worlds.

He had dressed rapidly, rinsing his face at the stained sink. As he was drying himself, the door had suddenly opened; but it was not Thaïs who had come in. There was a half-dozen of them, in dark clothes; two wrestled with a heavy wooden beam.

“What do you want?” the Prince had asked, uneasy but incapable of believing himself in danger.

“Purification,” answered an old man in a mournfully triumphant voice, while his companions surrounded the Prince.

They tore off his clothes; and then he was truly afraid.

There was a lone woman among the Purificators, a woman with tangled brown hair and watery blue eyes. Her forehead bore a deep gouge, the memory of a frightful blow. She had long dry fingers. She’d stroked his cheek, and he had felt like crying. When she spoke, she constantly moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue.

“We’re gonna help you,” she had said, tenderly cruel. “The town’ll be purified of your presence, and you’ll be purified of your alienness. I know it ain’t your fault you were born elsewhere. You’ve got to understand: you see, it’s God who made the Sun and its planets, but Satan made all the other worlds. Those who went to live there, they broke God’s law. It’s written in the Book. There was the Original Sin, then the Second Sin. God sent His son to redeem the first sin, but we’ve got to redeem the second one ourselves.”