Читать книгу The Journey - Miguel Collazo - Страница 13

Catal was the leader of those men. Looking at his face, Teles felt his fears vanish. They were Ammes, and they called themselves “the lords of the Ellipse.” But these were strange ideas that entered and swirled about in Teles’s mind, leaving behind a confused rumbling in his head that stayed with him even in his dreams.

Spaces, other spaces, “other worlds,” another race.… The race of the Ammes. Yes, they came from elsewhere; from some distant part of the desert, or the sea … or perhaps the sky? Well, the fact was that they had come in those ships.

To Catal, Teles had to be—to give him some sort of title—an “envoy.” He therefore believed it his duty to explain a few things to Teles, and especially to justify their presence there. But he soon realized that Teles did not exactly want, or need, the explanations he was giving; his mind was struggling to delve into some obscure matter that the Ammes found incomprehensible. It was hard for Catal to follow Teles’s conversation; his language was rather confused, though basic and direct. Paradox—that is, paradox as a tool for understanding—was beyond the ine’s simple logic. Moreover, Catal quickly comprehended that there was no social order of any sort on this planet, not even the most rudimentary, nor did the ines have the slightest idea what “social order” meant. Teles’s history went back as far as his father: that was all the history he knew or remembered, apart from a few details that had reached him by word of mouth, which he kept stored chaotically in his memory. So the leader of the Ammes collected a few scattered pieces of information, but enough to surmise that these beings must be the descendants of a race from some other space that had colonized this planet. Probably some great catastrophe had left these beings completely cut off from their forebears—some phenomenon of an unknown nature and with extraordinary consequences, something not only physical but psychological as well.

What else could Teles clear up for him? He had mentioned the giant desert flowers as if the mere fact that such flowers existed would explain everything. To a certain extent Catal hadn’t missed that detail.

From above, the flowers had stood out as the center, the eye, of ’s symbol; and the conventional representation of that symbol was the Sphere. So Catal had decided to land as far as possible from those flowers. He had feared the flowers, that much was clear; what was unclear was why. The plants certainly didn’t belong to this world.

Teles was looking at his friendly face, and looking behind him, in the distance, at the two huge white ships. They seemed to really be there, but his mind kept telling him they were unapproachable, that any attempt to get near them or touch them would be pointless. He averted his gaze and went back to watching Catal’s face—something solid he could cling to in the void, something he could somehow identify with. In any case, he couldn’t stand to spend much time around the Ammes and their flying machines, all these things whizzing silently about him in various forms and colors. Catal had grown fond of him; he wasn’t exactly a “savage”; he came from a race with very ancient origins and a civilization too developed to be called primitive. The break between him and his forebears was too abrupt and too recent, and his current state, the leader of the Ammes decided, shouldn’t be considered a “regression” but rather something like a change of direction, with unpredictable consequences.

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Teles always went back to the house where Bímer and Borles had locked themselves inside, and as he walked there he would dream of meeting Orna, even if he had to put up with her brothers, even if he had to put up with her own cruelty in exchange for her pleasures.

His father and Borles refused to come out, so he had to tell them everything to satisfy their frightened curiosity, without omitting the slightest detail and occasionally having to repeat his story several times.

But nothing calmed them.

Teles was getting them more worried and frightened than ever.

Catal had ordered his men not to wander far from the base, so as not to scare the ines. Their work, after all, was on the base; and it was pretty simple work, or at least basic enough that “lords of the Ellipse” found it simple. It was a good site for a way station between the great blue stars, especially if his plans did become deeds, so that three generations from now they might realize the Seventh Constellation—the great Dream of the Ellipse.

The other part, getting along together on this planet and drawing up the agreements necessary for that sort of getting along, would come with time. It wasn’t complicated; besides, he had enough experience in such matters from dealing with other races to be confident it would be merely routine. In any case, “the universe has no owners.” If the ines didn’t understand that today, no cause for worry, they’d understand it tomorrow. The borders and boundaries really lay elsewhere, in the great mystery of the symbols and in the laws that governed the cosmos. They, the “lords of the Ellipse,” may not have managed to get to the bottom of those mysteries and laws just yet, but that was no reason to suppose that the laws were inescapably undecipherable.

On this last point, Catal had received an odd revelation, a sort of waking dream. Before drawing up his plans, then, he ought to go check out something about those three giant desert flowers; that is, about the nature of the symbol of the Sphere. He ought to go alone, unarmed, and on foot. He hadn’t given his men a convincing reason for carrying out this “whim” of his. The crew of the Ellipse seemed worried, but they didn’t dare to contradict him. Nevertheless, no sooner had he left than they met and agreed to send an armed group to protect him in case of danger; after all, Catal’s authority derived not from his rank but precisely from his extraordinary powers of comprehension and analysis. So his head was far too precious to place at the slightest risk.

The group that was to follow him was made up of four men, not one of whom made it back to base hale and hearty. Twelve hours later they were picked up, scattered and raving, by another quickly assembled rescue team.

So what had happened to Catal?

Faced with the inevitable, the Ammes were astonishingly serene; but until the moment arrived, the lengths they would go to in overcoming difficulties and obstacles were also astonishing. The tools that allowed them to navigate among the stars, in the immensity of the cosmos, within the limits of the Sixth Constellation, suddenly seemed to be of no use to them here in locating a simple man on a sandy plain. Yet that must have been the secret behind Catal’s odd decision: to go alone and on foot.

The next day, the men set off in two groups along the desert road; but this time they took a long detour to avoid the flowers, as they imagined their leader must have done. They walked in silence all that morning and through part of the night. If each and every one of them felt the urge, the ever more pressing need, to return to base, they each and every one also felt the urge to save Catal—if he were still alive, that is. Their trek wasn’t easy; days afterward they would find it impossible to remember the strange psychological phenomena that had intervened between their wills and their instincts, much as it is sometimes impossible to relive in your mind the torture and distress of a nightmare. Catal was unconscious, asleep, or oblivious. He’d been there the whole time, at the foot of the hill where his men found him. From the other side you could just make out the fluttering corollas of the flowers, colored an intense red, shrouded in the thin, electric mist of the abyss, like a tense animal emitting the scent of its power, or of its fear.

Despite all his efforts of will, Catal had been unable to climb the hill and face the flowers; he had felt the ravenous energy of the plants looming over him. He hadn’t even noticed his men arrive.

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Nobody dared make any comments. The experience made Catal think that there was more to the flowers than an antagonism between symbols, because they had the same symbol as the planet, which hadn’t had such a violent effect on the Ellipse. The men who had been attacked by the flowers were recovering quickly under the protection of the ships and their own symbol.

In reality, the leader of the Ammes hadn’t trusted himself enough, that part of himself that, from the moment they’d arrived, down in the deepest part of his mind, had been warning him of danger, telling him, “Get out!”