Return from the Stars

THREE

Spent the afternoon in a bookstore. There were no books in it. None had been printed for nearly half a century. And how I had looked forward to them, after the microfilms that made up the library of the Prometheus! No such luck. No longer was it possible to browse among shelves, to weigh volumes in the hand, to feel their heft, the promise of ponderous reading. The bookstore resembled, instead, an electronic laboratory. The books were crystals with recorded contents. They could be read with the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it. But optons were little used, the sales-robot told me. The public preferred lectons — lectons read out loud, they could be set to any voice, tempo, and modulation. Only scientific publications having a very limited distribution were still printed, on a plastic imitation paper. Thus all my purchases fitted into one pocket, though there must have been almost three hundred titles. A handful of crystal corn — my books. I selected a number of works on history and sociology, a few on statistics and demography, and what the girl from Adapt had recommended on psychology. A couple of the larger mathematical textbooks — larger, of course, in the sense of their content, not of their physical size. The robot that served me was itself an encyclopedia, in that — as it told me — it was linked directly, through electronic catalogues, to templates of every book on Earth. As a rule, a bookstore had only single “copies” of books, and when someone needed a particular book, the content of the work was recorded in a crystal.

The originals — crystomatrices — were not to be seen; they were kept behind pale blue enameled steel plates. So a book was printed, as it were, every time someone needed it. The question of printings, of their quantity, of their running out, had ceased to exist. Actually, a great achievement, and yet I regretted the passing of books. On learning that there were secondhand bookshops that had paper books, I went and found one. I was disappointed; there were practically no scientific works. Light reading, a few children’s books, some sets of old periodicals.

I bought (one had to pay only for the old books) a few fairy tales from forty years earlier, to find out what were considered fairy tales now, and I went to a sporting-goods store. Here my disappointment had no limit. Athletics existed in a stunted form. Running, throwing, jumping, swimming, but hardly any combat sports. There was no boxing now, and what they called wrestling was downright ridiculous, an exchange of shoves instead of a respectable fight. I watched one world-championship match in the projection room of the store and thought I would burst with anger. At times I began laughing like a lunatic. I asked about American free-style, judo, ju-jitsu, but no one knew what I was talking about. Understandable, given that soccer had died without heirs, as an activity in which sharp encounters and bodily injuries came about. There was hockey, but it wasn’t hockey! They played in outfits so inflated that they looked like enormous balls. It was entertaining to see the two teams bounce off each other, but it was a farce, not a match. Diving, yes, but from a height of only four meters. I thought immediately of my own (my own!) pool and bought a folding springboard, to add on to the one that would be at Clavestra. This disintegration was the work of betrization. That bullfights, cockfights, and other bloody spectacles had disappeared did not bother me, nor had I ever been an enthusiast of professional boxing. But the tepid pap that remained did not appeal to me in the least. The invasion of technology in sports I had tolerated only in the tourist business. It had grown, especially, in underwater sports.

I had a look at various equipment for diving: small electric torpedoes one could use to travel along the bottom of a lake; speedboats, hydrofoils that moved on a cushion of compressed air; water microgleeders, everything fitted with special safety devices to guard against accidents.

The racing, which enjoyed a considerable popularity, I could not consider a sport; no horses, of course, and no cars — remote-control machines raced one another, and bets could be placed on them. Competition had lost its importance. It was explained to me that the limits of man’s physical capability had been reached and the existing records could be broken only by an abnormal person, some freak of strength or speed. Rationally, I had to agree with this, and the universal popularity of those athletic disciplines that had survived the decimation, deserved praise; nevertheless, after three hours of inspecting, I left depressed.

I asked that the gymnastic equipment I had selected be sent on to Clavestra. After some thought, I decided against a speedboat; I wanted to buy myself a yacht, but there were no decent ones, that is, with real sails, with centerboards, only some miserable boats that guaranteed such stability that I could not understand how sailing them could gratify anyone.

It was evening when I headed back to the hotel. From the west marched fluffy reddish clouds, the sun had set already, the moon was rising in its first quarter, and at the zenith shone another — some huge satellite. High above the buildings swarmed flying machines. There were fewer pedestrians but more gleeders, and there appeared, streaking the roadways, those lights in apertures, whose purpose I still did not know. I took a different route back and came upon a large garden. At first I thought it was the Terminal park, but that glass mountain of a station loomed in the distance, in the northern, higher part of the city.

The view was unusual, for although the darkness, cut by street lights, had enveloped the whole area, the upper levels of the Terminal still gleamed like snow-covered Alpine peaks.

It was crowded in the park. Many new species of trees, especially palms, blossoming cacti without spines; in a corner far from the main promenades I was able to find a chestnut tree that must have been two hundred years old. Three men of my size could not have encircled its trunk. I sat on a small bench and looked at the sky for some time. How harmless, how friendly the stars seemed, twinkling, shimmering in the invisible currents of the atmosphere that shielded Earth from them. I thought of them as “little stars” for the first time in years. Up there, no one would have spoken in such a way — we would have thought him crazy. Little stars, yes, hungry little stars. Above the trees, which were now completely dark, fireworks exploded in the distance, and suddenly, with astounding reality, I saw Arcturus, the mountains of fire over which I had flown, teeth chattering from the cold, while the frost of the cooling equipment, melting, ran red with rust down my suit. I was collecting samples with a corona siphon, one ear cocked for the whistle of the compressors, in case of any loss of rotation, because a breakdown of a single second, their jamming, would have turned my armor, my equipment, and myself into an invisible puff of steam. A drop of water falling on a red-hot plate does not vanish so quickly as a man evaporates then.

The chestnut tree was nearly out of bloom. I had never cared for the smell of its flowers, but now it reminded me of long ago. Above the hedges the glare of fireworks came and went in waves, a noise swelled, orchestras mingling, and every few seconds, carried by the wind, returned the choral cry of participants in some show, perhaps of passengers in a cable car. My little corner, however, remained undisturbed.

Then a tall, dark figure emerged from a side path. The greenery was not completely gray, and I saw the face of this person only when, walking extremely slowly, a step at a time, barely lifting his feet off the ground, he stopped a few meters away. His hands were thrust into funnellike swellings from which extended two slender rods that ended in black bulbs. He leaned on these, not like a paralytic, but like someone in an extremely weakened state. He did not look at me, or at anything else — the laughter, the shouting, the music, the fireworks seemed not to exist for him. He stood for perhaps a minute, breathing with great effort, and I saw his face off and on in the flashes of light from the fireworks, a face so old that the years had wiped all expression from it, it was only skin on bone. When he was about to resume his walk, putting forward those peculiar crutches or artificial limbs, one of them slipped; I jumped up from the bench to support him, but he had already regained his balance. He was a head shorter than I, though still tall for a man of the time; he looked at me with shining eyes.

“Excuse me,” I muttered. I wanted to leave, but stayed: in his eyes was something commanding.

“I’ve seen you somewhere. But where?” he said in a surprisingly strong voice.

“I doubt it,” I replied, shaking my head. “I returned only yesterday… from a very long voyage.”

“From… ?”

“From Fomalhaut.”

His eyes lit up.

“Arder! Tom Arder!”

“No,” I said. “But I was with him.”

“And he?”

“He died.”

He was breathing hard.

“Help me… sit down.”

I took his arm. Under the slippery black material were only bones. I eased him down gently onto the bench. I stood over him.

“Have… a seat.”

I sat. He was still wheezing, his eyes half closed.

“It’s nothing… the excitement,” he whispered. After a while he lifted his lids. “I am Roemer,” he said simply.

This took my breath away.

“What? Is it possible… you… you… ? How old… ?”

“A hundred and thirty-four,” he said dryly. “Then, I was… seven.”

I remembered him. He had visited us with his father, the brilliant mathematician who worked under Geonides — the creator of the theory behind our flight. Arder had shown the boy the huge testing room, the centrifuges. That was how he remained in my memory, as lively as a flame, seven years old, with his father’s dark eyes; Arder had held him up in the air so the little one could see from close up the inside of the gravitation chamber, where I was sitting.

We were both silent. There was something uncanny about this meeting. I looked through the darkness with a kind of eager, painful greed at his terribly old face, and felt a tightness in my throat. I wanted to take a cigarette from my pocket but could not get to it, my fingers fumbled so much.

“What happened to Arder?” he asked.

I told him.

“You recovered — nothing?”

“Nothing there is ever recovered… you know.”

“I mistook you for him…”

“I understand. My height and so forth,” I said.

“Yes. How old are you now, biologically?”

“Forty.”

“I could have…” he murmured.

I understood what he was thinking.

“Do not regret it,” I said firmly. “You should not regret it. You should not regret a thing, do you understand?”

For the first time he lifted his gaze to my face.

“Why?”

“Because there is nothing for me to do here,” I said. “No one needs me. And I… no one.”

He didn’t seem to hear me.

“What is your name?”

“Bregg. Hal Bregg.”

“Bregg,” he repeated. “Bregg… No, I don’t remember. Were you there?”

“Yes. At Apprenous, when your father came with the corrections Geonides made in the final month before takeoff… It turned out that the coefficients of refraction for the dark dusts had been too low… Does that mean anything to you?” I broke off uncertainly.

“It does. Of course,” he replied with special emphasis. “My father. Of course. At Apprenous? But what were you doing there? Where were you?”

“In the gravitation chamber, at Janssen’s. You were there then, Arder brought you in, you stood high up, on the platform, and watched while they gave me forty g’s. When I climbed out, my nose was bleeding. You gave me your handkerchief.”

“Ah! That was you?”

“Yes.”

“But that person in the chamber had dark hair, I thought.”

“Yes. My hair isn’t light. It’s gray. It’s just that you can’t see well now.”

There was a silence, longer than before.

“You are a professor, I suppose?” I said, to say something.

“I was. Now… nothing. For twenty-three years. Nothing.” And once more, very quietly, he repeated, “Nothing.”

“I bought some books today, and among them was Roemer’s topology. Is that you or your father?”

“I. You are a mathematician?”

He stared at me, as if with renewed interest.

“No,” I said, “but I had a great deal of time… there. Each of us did what he wanted. I found mathematics helpful.”

“How did you understand it?”

“We had an enormous number of microfilms: fiction, novels, whatever you like. Do you know that we had three hundred thousand titles? Your father helped Arder compile the mathematical part.”

“I know about that.”

“At first, we treated it as… a diversion. To kill time. But then, after a few months, when we had completely lost contact with Earth and were hanging there — seemingly motionless in relation to the stars — then, you see, to read that some Peter nervously puffed his cigarette and was worried about whether or not Lucy would come, and that she walked in and twisted her gloves, well, first you began to laugh at this like an idiot, and then you simply saw red. In other words, no one would touch it.”

“And mathematics?”

“No. Not right away. At first I took up languages, and I stuck with that until the end, even though I knew it might be futile, for when I returned, some might have become archaic dialects. But Gimma — and Thurber, especially — urged me to learn physics. Said it might be useful. I tackled it, along with Arder and Olaf Staave, but we three were not scientists…”

“You did have a degree.”

“Yes, a master’s degree in information theory and cosmodromia, and a diploma in nuclear engineering, but all that was professional, not theoretical. You know how engineers know mathematics. So, then, physics. But I wanted something more — of my own. And, finally, pure mathematics. I had no mathematical ability. None. I had nothing but persistence.”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “One would have to have that to fly…”

“Particularly to become a member of the expedition,” I corrected him. “And do you know why mathematics had this effect? I only came to understand this there. Because mathematics stands above everything. The works of Abel and Kronecker are as good today as they were four hundred years ago, and it will always be so. New roads arise, but the old ones lead on. They do not become overgrown. There… there you have eternity. Only mathematics does not fear it. Up there, I understood how final it is. And strong. There was nothing like it. And the fact that I had to struggle was also good. I slaved away at it, and when I couldn’t sleep I would go over, in my mind, the material I had studied that day.”

“Interesting,” he said. But there was no interest in his voice. I did not even know whether he was listening to me. Far back in the park flew columns of fire, red and green blazes, accompanied by roars of delight. Here, where we sat, beneath the trees, it was dark. I fell silent. But the silence was unbearable.

“For me it had the value of self-preservation,” I said. “The theory of plurality… what Mirea and Averin did with the legacy of Cantor, you know. Operations using infinite, transfinite quantities, the continua of discrete increments, strong… it was wonderful. The time I spent on this, I remember it as if it were yesterday.”

“It isn’t so useless as you think,” he muttered. He was listening, after all. “You haven’t heard of Igalli’s studies, I suppose?”

“No, what are they?”

“The theory of the discontinuous antipole.”

“I don’t know anything about an antipole. What is it?”

“Retronihilation. From this came parastatics.”

“I never even heard of these terms.”

“Of course, for it originated sixty years ago. But that was only the beginning of gravitology.”

“I can see that I will have to do some homework,” I said. “Gravitology — that’s the theory of gravitation?”

“Much more. It can only be explained using mathematics. Have you studied Appiano and Froom?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, you should have no difficulty. These are metagen expansions in an n-dimensional, configurational, degenerative series.”

“What are you saying? Didn’t Skriabin prove that there are no metagens other than the variational?”

“Yes. A very elegant proof. But this, you see, is transcontinuous.”

“Impossible! That would… but it must have opened up a whole new world!”

“Yes,” he said dryly.

“I remember one paper by Mianikowski…” I began.

“Oh, that is not related. At the most, a similar direction.”

“Would it take me long to catch up with everything that has been done in all this time?” I asked.

He was silent for a moment.

“What use is it to you?”

I did not know what to say.

“You are not going to fly any more?”

“No,” I said. “I’m too old. I couldn’t take the sort of accelerations that… and anyway… I would not fly now.”

After these words we were silent for good. The unexpected elation with which I had talked about mathematics had suddenly evaporated, and I sat beside him, feeling the weight of my own body, its unnecessary size. Outside of mathematics we had nothing to say to each other, and we both knew it. Then it occurred to me that the emotion with which I had spoken of the blessed role of mathematics on the voyage was a deception. I had been deceiving myself with the modesty, the serious heroism of the pilot who occupies himself, in the gaps of the nebulae, with theoretical studies of infinity. Hypocrisy. For what had it been, really? If a castaway, adrift for months at sea, has a thousand times counted the number of wood fibers that make up his raft, in order to keep sane, should he boast about it when he reaches land? That he had the tenacity to survive? And what of it? Who cared? Why should it matter to anyone how I had filled my poor brain those ten years, and why was that more important than how I had filled my stomach? I must stop playing the quiet hero, I thought. I will be able to allow myself that when I look the way he does. I must concentrate on the future.

“Help me get up,” he said in a whisper.

I led him to a gleeder that stood in the street. We went very slowly. Where there were lights, among the hedges, people followed us with their eyes. Before he got into the gleeder he turned to say good-bye to me. Neither he nor I could find anything to say. He made an unintelligible motion with his hand, from which one of the canes jutted like a sword, shook his head, and got inside; the dark vehicle floated off noiselessly. I stood with my arms hanging until the black gleeder had disappeared in a stream of others. I stuck my hands in my pockets and moved on, unable to answer the question of which of us had chosen better.

That nothing remained of the city that I had left behind me, not one stone upon another, was a good thing. As if I had been living, then, on a different Earth, among different men; that had begun and ended once and for all, and this was new. No relics, no ruins to cast doubt on my biological age; I could forget about its Earthly reckoning, so contrary to nature — until that incredible coincidence brought me together with a person whom I had last seen as a small child; the whole time, sitting next to him, looking at his hands, dry as a mummy’s, and at his face, I had felt guilt and knew he was aware of this. What an improbable accident, I repeated over and over again, inanely, until I realized that he could have been drawn to this place by the same thing that had drawn me: growing there, after all, was that chestnut tree, older than either of us. I had no idea yet how far they had gone in increasing the span of human life, but I could see that Roemer’s age was something exceptional: he must have been the last or one of the last of his generation. If I had not left Earth, I would no longer be alive, I thought, and for the first time I saw an unexpected reverse side to our expedition: the subterfuge, the cruel trick that I had played on others. I walked on blindly. Around me was the noise of a crowd, a stream of pedestrians bore me along and pushed me — then I stopped, suddenly awake.

There was an indescribable racket; in the midst of mingled shouts and music, volleys of fireworks burst into the sky, hanging high above in colorful bouquets; burning spheres rained on the tops of the nearby trees; at regular intervals came the piercing sound of many voices, a howl of terror mixed with laughter, exactly as if somewhere close by there was a roller coaster, but I looked in vain for the trestles. In the middle of the park stood a large building with towers and battlements, like a fortified castle transported from the Middle Ages; the cold flames of neon lights, licking its roof, arranged themselves every few seconds into the words MERLIN’S PALACE. The crowd that had led me here made for the side, toward the crimson wall of a pavilion, unusual in that it resembled a human face, with smoldering eyes for windows, and a huge, distorted mouth, full of teeth, opened to swallow the next helping of jostling people, to the accompaniment of general merriment; each time, the mouth consumed the same number — six. At first my intention was to get out of the crowd and leave; but that would not have been easy, and besides, I had nowhere to go, and the thought came to me that out of all the possible ways of spending the rest of the evening, this one, unknown, might not be the worst. I appeared to be the only one by myself — there were mostly couples, boys and girls, men and women, lined up two by two — and when my turn came, heralded by the white flash of the huge teeth and the gaping crimson darkness of the mysterious throat, I found myself in a predicament, because I did not know whether I could join an already completed six. At the last moment the decision was made for me by a woman who stood with a young dark-haired man dressed more extravagantly than all the others: she grabbed me by the hand and without ceremony pulled me after her.

It grew almost completely dark; I felt the warm, strong hand of the unknown woman, the floor moved, the light returned, and we found ourselves in a spacious grotto. The last dozen or so steps led uphill, over loose gravel, between piles of crushed stone. The unknown woman let go of my hand — and, one by one, we stooped through the narrow exit from the cave.

Although I had been prepared for a surprise, my jaw dropped. We were standing on the broad, sandy bank of a big river, under the burning rays of a tropical sun. The far bank of the river was overgrown with jungle. In the still backwaters were moored boats, or, rather, dugouts; against the background of the brownish-green river that flowed lazily behind them, immensely tall blacks stood frozen in hieratic poses, naked, gleaming with oil, covered with chalk-white tattoos; each leaned with his spatulate oar against the side of the boat.

One of the boats was just leaving, full; its black crew, with blows from the paddles and terrifying yells, was dispersing crocodiles that lay in the mud, half immersed, like logs; these turned over and weakly snapped their tooth-lined jaws as they slid into deeper water. The seven of us descended along the steep bank; the first four took places in the next boat. With visible effort the blacks set the oars against the shore and pushed the unsteady boat away, so that it turned around; I remained in the rear, in front of me there was now only the couple to whom I owed my presence and the journey that was about to take place, for now appeared the next boat in line, about ten meters long; the black oarsmen called to us and, fighting the current, docked skillfully. We jumped into the rotting interior of the boat, kicking up a dust that smelled of charred wood. The young man in the fanciful outfit — a tiger skin, actually a costume, for the upper half of the predator’s skull, slung over his shoulder, could serve as a hood — helped his companion to a seat. I took a seat opposite them. We had already been moving a good while, and although a few minutes earlier I had been in the park, in the middle of the night, now I was not so sure of that. The tall black standing at the sharp prow of the boat gave a wild cry every few seconds, two rows of backs bent, gleaming, oars hit the water with brief, violent strokes, the boat scraped over the sand, drifted, then suddenly entered the main current of the river.

There was the heavy, heated smell of the water, of the mud, of the rotting vegetation that floated past us around the sides of the boat, which were hardly a hand’s breadth above the surface of the water. The banks receded; we passed bush, characteristically gray-green, as though burned; from sun-baked sandy shoals crocodiles slid from time to time like animated logs, with a splash; one of them remained for quite a while at our stern, its elongated head on the surface; slowly water began to encroach upon the bulging eyes, and then there was only its snout, dark as a river stone, gliding swiftly, cleaving the brown water. Between the rhythmically swaying backs of the black rowers one could see humps in the river, where it flowed over submerged obstacles — the man at the bow would then let out a harsh cry, the oars on one side began to strike the water more vigorously, and the boat turned. It is difficult to say when the hollow grunts made by the blacks as they leaned on their oars began to merge in an inexpressibly gloomy, endlessly repeating song, a kind of angry cry that changed to grievance, whose chorus was the lapping of the water broken by the oars. Thus we proceeded, as if actually transported into the heart of Africa, on an enormous river in the middle of a gray-green wild. The solid wall of jungle receded finally and disappeared in a shimmering mass of sweltering air; the black helmsman quickened the tempo; on the distant savannah antelopes grazed; and at one point a herd of giraffes passed in a cloud of dust, at a languorous trot; then I felt the gaze of the woman seated opposite me, and I looked at her.

Her loveliness took me by surprise. I had noticed earlier that she was attractive, but that had been just in passing and had not arrested my attention. Now I was too close to her to make the same mistake: she was not attractive, she was beautiful. She had dark hair with a coppery sheen, a white, indescribably tranquil face, and dark, motionless lips. She captivated me. Not as a woman — rather, in the same way as this vast expanse mute beneath the sun. Her beauty had that perfection that had always frightened me a little. Possibly because I had, on Earth, experienced too little and thought too much about it; in any case, here before me was one of those women who seem cast of a different clay from that of ordinary mortals, although this magnificent life is produced only by a certain configuration of features and is entirely on the surface — but who, looking, thinks of that? She smiled, with only her eyes; her lips preserved an expression of scornful indifference. Not to me — to her own thoughts, perhaps. Her companion sat on a recessed ledge in the dugout; he let his left hand hang limply over the side, so that his fingers trailed in the water, but he did not look in that direction, or at the panorama of wild Africa unfolding all around; he simply sat, as in a dentist’s waiting room, completely bored.

Ahead of us gray rocks came into view, strewn across the entire river. The helmsman began to shout, as if cursing, with a penetrating, powerful voice; the blacks struck furiously with their oars, and when the rocks turned out to be diving hippopotamuses, the boat picked up speed; the herd of thick-skinned animals was left behind, and through the rhythmic splash of the oars, through the hoarse, heavy song of the rowers, one could hear a hollow roar that came from an unknown source. Far off, where the river disappeared between increasingly steeper banks, I saw two rainbows, immense, flickering, bending toward each other.

"Age! Annai! Annai! Agee!” bellowed the helmsman frantically. The blacks redoubled their strokes, the boat flew as if it had acquired wings; the woman reached out her hand, without looking, for the hand of her companion.

The helmsman howled. The dugout moved at an amazing speed. The bow lifted, we descended from the crest of a huge, seemingly motionless wave, and between the rows of black backs that labored at a furious pace I saw a great bend in the river: the suddenly darkened waters pounded at a gate of rock. The current split in two; we kept to the right, where the water rose in whiter and whiter crests of foam, while the left arm of the river disappeared as if chopped off, and only a monstrous thunder and columns of whirling mist indicated that those rocks concealed a waterfall. We avoided it and reached the other arm of the river, but here it was not peaceful, either. The dugout now bucked like a horse among black boulders, each of which held in check a high wall of roaring water; the banks drew near, the blacks on the right side of the boat stopped rowing and held the blunted handles of their oars to their chests; then, with a shock whose force could be judged by the hollow thud it sent through them, the boat rebounded from the rock and gained the center of the current. The bow flew upward, the helmsman standing on it kept his balance by some miracle; I felt the cold from the spray that streamed off the edges of the rocks as the dugout, quivering like a spring, sped downward. Our shooting of the rapids was extraordinary. On either side flashed black rocks with flowing manes of water; time and time again the dugout, with an echoing jolt, was kept off the rocks by the oars, bounced off, and went into the throat of the fastest water, an arrow released across white foam. I looked up and saw, high among the branching crowns of sycamores, tiny monkeys scampering. I had to grab the sides of the boat, so powerful was the next jolt, a heave, and in the thunder of water that rushed in on us from either side, so that in an instant we were soaked to the skin, we went down at an even steeper angle — we were falling, the boulders of the bank flew past like statues of monstrous birds in a welter of sharp wings, thunder, thunder. Against the sky, the taut silhouettes of the oarsmen, like guardians at a cataclysm — we were headed straight for a pillar of stone dividing the narrows in half, and in front of it swirled a black vortex of water. We flew toward the barrier, I heard a woman’s scream.

The blacks struggled with the frenzy of desperation, and the helmsman lifted his arms; I saw his lips open wide in a shout, but I heard no voice. He danced on the bow, the dugout went sideways, a rebounding wave held us, for a second we stood in place, then, as if the work of the oars counted for nothing, the boat turned right around and went backward, faster and faster.

In an instant the two rows of blacks, throwing down their oars, disappeared; without hesitation they jumped overboard on both sides of the boat. The last to make the deadly leap was the helmsman.

The woman cried out a second time; her companion held fast with his feet against the opposite side of the boat and she clung to him; I watched, entranced, the spectacle of tumbling water, roaring rainbows; the boat struck something, a scream, a piercing scream…

Across the path of the downward-rushing torrent that carried us lay, just above the surface, a tree, a giant of the forest, which had fallen to form a kind of bridge. The other two dropped to the bottom of the boat. In the fraction of a second left to me, I debated whether I should do the same. I knew that everything — the blacks, this shooting of the rapids, the African waterfall — was only an amazing illusion, but to sit still while the bow of the boat slid under the dripping, resinous trunk of the huge tree was beyond me. I threw myself down but at the same time lifted a hand, which passed through the trunk without touching it; I felt nothing, as I had expected, but in spite of this, the illusion that we had miraculously escaped catastrophe remained intact.

Yet this was not all; with the next wave the boat stood on end, an enormous roller caught us and turned us around, and for the next few heartbeats the dugout went in a hellish circle, heading for the center of the whirlpool. If the woman screamed, I did not hear it, I would not have heard a thing; I felt the crash, the splitting of the boat, with my whole body, my ears were as if stopped by the bellow of the waterfall; the dugout, hurled upward with enormous force, got wedged between the boulders. The other two jumped out onto a foam-covered rock; they scrambled up, with me behind them.

We found ourselves on a crag between two arms of trembling whiteness. The right bank was quite distant; to the left led a footbridge anchored in crevices in the rock, a kind of elevated passage above the waves that went plunging into the depths of that hellish cauldron. The air was chilly from the mist, the spray; the narrow bridge hung — without handrails, slippery from the dampness — above the wall of sound; one had to set one’s feet on the rotting planks, loosely joined by knotted ropes, and walk a few steps to reach the bank. The others were on their knees in front of me and apparently arguing about who should go first. I heard nothing, of course. It was as if the air itself had hardened from the constant thunder. At last the young man got up and said something to me, pointing downward. I saw the dugout; its stern, broken off, danced on a wave and disappeared, spinning faster and faster, pulled in by the whirlpool. The young man in the tiger suit was less indifferent or sleepy than at the beginning of the journey, but seemed annoyed, as if there against his will. He grasped the woman by the arm, and I thought that he had gone insane, for unmistakably he was pushing her straight into the roaring gorge. She said something to him, I saw indignation flash in her eyes. I put my hands on their shoulders, gestured for them to let me pass, and stepped onto the bridge. It swung and danced; I walked, not too quickly, keeping my balance by moving my shoulders; in the middle I reeled once or twice, and suddenly the bridge began to shake, so that I almost fell. Without waiting for me to get across, the woman walked out on the bridge. Afraid that I would fall, I leapt forward; I landed on the very edge of the rock and immediately turned around.

The woman did not cross: she had gone back. The young man went first, holding her by the hand; the strange shapes created by the waterfall, black and white phantoms, provided the background for their unsteady passage. He was near; I gave him my hand; at the same time the woman stumbled, the footbridge began to sway, I pulled as if I would have sooner torn off his arm than let him fall; the impetus carried him two meters, and he landed behind me, on his knees — but he let go of her.

She was still in the air when I jumped, feet first, having aimed so that I would enter the water at an angle, between the bank and the vertical face of the closest rock. I thought about all this later, when I had time. Essentially I knew that the waterfall and the crossing of the bridge were an illusion, the proof of which was the tree trunk that my hand had gone straight through. Nevertheless, I jumped as if she had been in real peril of her life, and I even recall that, quite by instinct, I braced myself for the icy impact with the water, whose spray had been continually dousing our faces and clothes.

I felt nothing, however, but a strong gust of air, and I landed in a spacious room, my legs slightly bent, as though I had jumped from a height of one meter at the most. I heard a chorus of laughter.

I stood on a soft, plasticlike floor, surrounded by other people, some still in soaked clothes; with their heads turned up, they were roaring with laughter. I followed their gaze — it was extraordinary. No trace of waterfalls, cliffs, the African sky. I saw an illuminated ceiling and, beneath it, a dugout just arriving; actually it was a kind of decoration, since it resembled a boat only from above and from the sides; the base was some sort of metal construction. Four people lay flat inside it, but there was nothing around them — no black oarsmen, no rocks, no river, only thin jets of water spurted now and then from concealed nozzles… Somewhat farther away stood the obelisk of rock at which our journey had come to an end; it rose like a tethered balloon, for it was not supported by anything. From it the footbridge led to a stone exit that jutted out from the metal wall. A little higher, small steps with a handrail, and a door. That was all. The dugout with the people tossed, rose, fell sharply, without the slightest sound; I heard only the bursts of hilarity that accompanied each successive stage of the adventure of the waterfall that did not exist. After a while the dugout collided with the rock, the people jumped out, they had to cross the footbridge…

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, now 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.

“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.

It’s funny, but the ulder had nothing in common with a rocket or an airplane; it was more like a magic carpet. The peculiar vehicle first moved vertically, without the least vibration, giving off a long whistle, then it sped horizontally, like a bullet. Again the thing that I had observed once before: acceleration was not accompanied by an increase in inertia. The first time, at the station, I had thought that I might be the victim of an illusion; now, however, I was sure of myself. It is difficult to put into words the feeling that came over me — because if they had truly succeeded in making acceleration independent of inertia, then all the hibernations, tests, selections, hardships, and frustrations of our voyage turned out to be completely needless; so that, at that moment, I was like the conqueror of some Himalayan peak who, after the indescribable difficulty of the climb, discovers that there is a hotel full of tourists at the top, because during his lonely labor a cable car and amusement arcades had been installed on the opposite side. The fact that had I remained on Earth I would probably not have lived to see this amazing discovery was small consolation to me: a consolation would be, rather, the thought that perhaps this contrivance did not lend itself to cosmic navigation. That was, of course, pure egoism on my part, I admitted it, but the shock was too great for me to be able to show the proper enthusiasm.

Meanwhile the ulder flew, now without a sound; I looked down. We were passing the Terminal. It moved slowly to the rear, a fortress of ice; on the upper levels, not visible from the city, huge rocket pads showed black. Then we flew fairly close to the needle tower, the one with black and silver stripes; it loomed above the ulder. From the Earth, its height could not be appreciated. It was a bridge of pipe joining the city and the sky, and the “shelves” that protruded from it were crowded with ulders and other, bigger, machines. The people on these landing strips looked like poppy seeds spilled on a silver plate. We flew over white and blue colonies of houses, over gardens; the streets got wider and wider, their surfaces were also colored — pale pink and ocher predominated. A sea of buildings extended to the horizon, broken occasionally by belts of green, and I feared that this would continue all the way to Clavestra. But the machine picked up speed, the houses became scattered, dispersed among the gardens, there appeared instead enormous loops and straight stretches of roads; these ran at numerous levels, merged, crisscrossed, plunged beneath the ground, converged in star-shaped arrangements, and shot away in strips along a flat gray-green plane beneath the high sun, swarming with gleeders. Then, amid quadrangles of trees, emerged huge structures with roofs in the shape of concave mirrors; in their centers burned something red. Farther along, the roads separated and green prevailed, now and then interrupted by squares of a different vegetation — red, blue — they could not have been flowers, the colors were too intense.

Dr. Juffon would be proud of me, I thought. The third day, and already… And what a beginning. Not just anyone. A brilliant actress, famous. She had not been afraid, and if afraid, then she had got pleasure from the fear, too. Just keep it up. But why had he spoken of intimacy? Was that what their intimacy looked like? How heroically I jumped into the waterfall.

The noble gorilla. And then a beauty, worshiped by the masses, lavishly rewarded him; how generous of her! My face burned all over. All right, cretin, I said to myself mildly, what exactly do you want? A woman? You’ve had a woman. You’ve had everything it’s possible to have here, including an offer to appear in the real. Now you will have a house, you will take walks in a garden, read books, look at the stars, and tell yourself, quietly, in your modesty: I was there. I was there and I came back. And even the laws of physics worked in your favor, lucky man, you have half a lifetime ahead of you, and do you remember how Roemer looked, a hundred years older than yourself?

The ulder began its descent, the whistling started up, the ground, crossed by white and blue roads whose surfaces gleamed like enamel, grew larger. Great ponds and small square pools threw up sparks of sun. Houses scattered on the slopes of gentle hills became progressively more real. On the blue horizon stood a chain of mountains with whitened peaks. I saw gravel paths, lawns, flower beds, the cool green of water in cement-rimmed pools, lanes, bushes, a white roof; all this turned slowly, surrounded me, and became motionless, as if it had taken possession.