Return from the Stars (15 page)

"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.

"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.

The real was more than just a film, because whenever I concentrated on some portion of the scene, it grew larger and expanded; in other words, the viewer himself, by his own choice, determined whether he would see a close-up or the whole picture. Meanwhile the proportions of what remained on the periphery of his field of vision underwent no distortion. It was a diabolically clever optical trick producing an illusion of an extraordinarily vivid, an almost magnified reality.

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.