Les Archipels du temps
La Suite du temps -2
La Suite du temps -2
Daniel Sernine
(Chapter 1, Flying over a nest of ashes, p. 3-13)
Erymede was the colour of a chunk of coal drifting in space.
The side turned toward the Sun was a dark grey, the other as black as the void, except for an incandescent ring. Its shape was only apparent through the minute, luminous dotted lines of its outside installations, the bluish circles of its crater cities and the green of its crater parks.
The poets may well have looked for more elegant analogies, but what Erymede looked like was an enormous charred potato, contaminated on one side by a phosphorescent mould. On the other side, invisible to the Terrans and to most of the Erymeans, the burning furnace of the reactor gushed a torrent of plasma into space, counteracting the centrifugal force to which the asteroid was subjected because of its speed.
Bril Ghyota again turned his attention to the theatrical choreography taking place in front of the Celestial Sphere. Sheathed in close-fitting spacesuits, the actors were wearing masks on the visors of their compact helmets, mobile masks whose features replicated the movements on their faces.
In the hemispherical amphitheatre of the Celestial Sphere, the audience could watch through a vast, clear dome, a spectacle whose significance escaped Ghyota.
She hadn't read the hypertext that introduced the choreography, had barely followed the show, hadn't even taken her seat. All she could have said about it, if asked afterwards, was that the music hadn't appealed to her, that the masks, whose image was projected on a large screen, owed something to Greek tragedy and that the null-gravity moves seemed choreographed well enough so one could forget the microjet technology that made them possible.
As for the actors' lines, they went in one ear and out the other without registering, even in her short term memory, no more than the laconic sentences that were exchanged backstage around her.
What was so urgent, what was worrying her so much? Karilian had been dead almost a year. What little information Barry Bruhn could provide about Karilian's last decades of life would do nothing to change that fact. If Bruhn even had something to tell.
Something must have happened recently, some thought must have occurred to Bril Ghyota this day or the day before, to plunge her back into the nervous state she had experienced after the tragedy. A mental affliction, to be precise an agitated affliction, a distant cousin of hysteria, rather than a case of overwhelming distress.
That something was her sudden awakening in the middle of the previous night with the image of Karilian lying on a wooden floor splattered with his own blood, a gun in his hand. And the certainty that Nicolas Dérec, although he didn't know what had happened, was somehow linked to the tragedy. The surveilance videos had only shown him ringing the bell at the door of the hallway, then leaving, crossing the garden without being aware of anything.
Ah, but there was nothing to support that certainty. Twenty hours after Ghyota had awakened with the last embers of this scarlet dream in her eyes, the certainty had become mere intuition, so arbitrary, so unfounded that she had told no one, except councillor Sing Ha. The ashes of the night had grown cold and Ghyota had not found sleep, moving restlessly on her narrow, solitary bed.
The woman looked again through the wide porthole that permitted her to follow the spectacle from backstage. The coloured silhouettes, vividly lit, were thrashing and pursuing one another in the void. From where she stood, she could see one suit ready to go after a drifting actor if the tanks of compressed gas for his microjets were to fail.
Among the stars, a big luminous dot caught Bril Ghyota's eyes: she recognized Jupiter from its pinkish, intense brightness. While she was staring at it, the giant planet briefly twinkled, eclipsed by the transit of a large asteroid.
An electronic ring and a suddenly activated small signal screen brought Ghyota's attention back to the piece, whose title was "Backstage." The lock pressure was being equalized: some actors were coming back, their part being over. When the hatchway opened, they were already unfastening their helmets.
The man was Barry Bruhn: Ghyota had met him two or three times when he was Karilian's lover. Twenty years old, a handsome boy with light skin and dark, curly hair.
Bruhn also recognized her, or he seemed to remember having already seen her, perhaps without remembering where.
"Could I see you after the performance?" she asked bluntly. "I am Bril Ghyota, from the Institute," she added, seeing his eyebrows arch even more quizzically.
She didn't have to explain which Institute she belonged to. Something immediately triggered the memory:
"You were a friend of Karel's."
Hearing a first name that she had rarely used herself, Bril Ghyota shivered.
"Precisely. I want you to tell me about him, she replied in a low voice."
The actor's face darkened; he stared at her with some reluctance, if not outright wariness. However he did not say no, and went to the dressing room to get rid of his space suit.* In the intercity train speeding toward Valinor, another long silence fell on the uneasy conversation between Barry Bruhn and Bril Ghyota. The woman, originally from Psyche, was not gifted when it came to small talk. And her initiative had plunged the young man back into the grief he had thought was over.
Karel Karilian's face came back to his memory with a clarity it had not had for months. His café-au-lait complexion, his auburn hair and short beard, with touches of grey on both sides of his chin. The way he stared at Barry, intently, silently, as if only through his eyes, and not his mouth, he could quench a deep thirst for Barry's face, his self, his vitality.
During those last decades, the young actor had managed to convince himself that he no longer missed Karilian. There were even entire days when he didn't think of him. Rehearsals, performances, his part-time studies in an altogether different domain, the friends he acquired with such facility, the lovers he was not lacking in, all this didn't leave much space for solitude, idleness and their escort of dark thoughts.
And along came this lady, Ghyota, "I want you to tell me about him," she was shaking the branch where the ravens had been asleep and threw them into heavy, lugubrious flight over the fields of his memory.* Valinor was the only Erymean crater park laid out under an elliptical dome instead of a circular one. In a narrow valley with rather steep sides, a small stream was meandering through a mosaic of cultivated lots of land, each barely bigger than a vegetable plot or a small garden. You could feel you were looking down at rice paddies in Eastern Asia. Here and there, squares of poppies resembling pools of blood contributed to that impression.
A few rocky crags, crested with pines, rose from the level terrain. The only entertainments were walking, canoeing or flying: as their weight was half the weight they would have had on Earth, the stronger Erymeans fitted themselves with large, ultralight wings and flew other the park. The enthusiasts for this sport were called "flyers," and Barry had been one for a few years, until a serious accident, and several decades of convalescence had left him filled with apprehension.
Residency was restricted in Valinor and no one had the privilege of living there permanently. Scattered on the hillsides, the apartments only enjoyed narrow terraces or discreet windows. You could only live there for a limited time, and the candidates were chosen by lot.
"You won an apart!" Barry Bruhn enthused when he realized where Ghyota was taking him.
"Not me," the mature woman answered, stopping in front of a numbered door in the endless corridor along which they had been walking. "A friend, a member of Argus Council."
She introduced Sing Ha when the woman opened the door. Ghyota's body was lean and sinewy, with prominent bones but Sing Ha offered a round face and soft contours, a promise of gentleness.
He was perplexed and a bit intimidated by being in the presence of an Argus Councillor and a member of the Metapsychics and Bionics Institute's board of directors, and Barry's unease took some time to dissipate. Something serious was happening and the young man felt he was being dropped in the middle of it without being asked.
The apartment was laid out along its longer axis, an open concept plan, and only its living room opened on a terrace through French doors. It was more of a ledge over the park. Valinor's lighting was in daylight mode and the two visitors sat down at a small table on which Sing Ha soon placed refreshments: white wine in a frosted bottle, grenadine and cranberry juice. In a pool of light, Ghyota's scarlet tunic shimmered with carmine highlights.
"I feel you're tense, Barry," their hostess said. "I know, either of us could be your mother. And it must not be every day that you have a drink with a member of the Argus Council."
They could have been his grandmothers, in fact, and Bruhn was in the occasional habit of drinking (and sleeping) with a member of the Council, but of the Upper Erymean Council, one notch above that of Argus. Still, he refrained from mentioning that to Sing Ha, who was as far as possible from being self-important.
He guessed she was attempting to break the ice with light conversation. But Ghyota had made laudable efforts in that direction during their trip from the Celestial Sphere and had obviously tapped out all her resources for chitchat: she was eager to get to the point.
"What do you know about Master Karilian's last mission, Barry?"
The first name had not come easily to her and didn't feel very natural on her lips.
"Absolutely nothing."
He was not exactly surprised by this question. It had been asked during the first investigation. "The first," since what could Karilian's ex-colleague and ex-friend be up to if not a new investigation, and what would they want of his last lover, if not to interrogate him? Except that, this time, they were offering to provide information to him, Barry Bruhn, whose links with Intelligence and the brand new Security Service were still not very solid, and he was studying and training in order to go into those activities.
According to Sing Ha and Ghyota, Master Karilian's mission had begun with some precognitions he had experienced while in his psi trances. In the beginning, all he had known was that he was going to meet and neutralize some crucially important character, in a posh holiday resort patronized by diplomats and ministers, Clifton Lake, close to the Canadian capital. He knew the place from having intervened there sixteen years before, as an Ops agent, at the height of what they had called on Earth the Cold War.
Intelligence had immediately assumed that Master Karilian's precognition was related to the meeting of ministers from the space powers, which was to take place at the Clifton Lodge that summer. It was during that meeting that the great powers had for the first time openly entertained the hypothesis that a clandestine organization, more advanced than their own space agencies, was "interfering" with their space satellites.
At first, Karilian had known nothing about the target he was to eliminate, except that it was a woman who suffered from a split personality disorder. During their very brief mental contact, Karilian had perceived that person's involvement, potentially, in a planetary war and the near-annihilation of the human race.
Feeling increasingly hemmed in, Bruhn stared at Sing Ha. The councillor had really said "eliminate," meaning murder. No wonder Karel had seemed so sombre, the last night they had made love in his apartment in Troy. The following day he had left for Argus and Earth, taking with him in the astrobus the terrible weight of his worries, like excess baggage.
The secret summit of the space powers had taken place, and had been highly interesting for Intelligence, but the target expected by Karilian had not appeared at the Clifton Lodge. The field of possibilities had been widened to include the summer camp of a private college attended by sons and daughters of diplomats, ministers and military officers. To his utter dismay, Karilian had realized that the person with whom he'd had his brief empathic contact could well be a teenage girl.
Barry Bruhn realized his mouth was dry. Karilian must have become aware of this ultimate information only after their last conversation on the visiophone, for he had seemed serene, almost in a good mood.
Barry knew what had happened next: Master Karilian had killed himself, in the end of the afternoon, shooting himself in the mouth in the hallway of the Villa of the Moons, the pied-à-terre of Argus on Clifton Lake. He had left no notes and no report the day of his suicide, or the day before. It was therefore impossible to know whether a new fact had motivated his action or if it was more the end of a long road of depression, the idea of murdering a young girl having become unbearable to him. A few errors in judgement regarding security during the last decades had led to suspicions of some deterioration in his mental processes, perhaps due to the toxic effects of the propsychin with which he was injecting himself repeatedly for his mission. The drug was harmless if taken at appropriately spaced intervals. But Karilian had been the first one to use it that intensively. During the last decades, he was suffering from an almost constant migraine. He had not let Barry suspect any of this.
Moreover, during his two last visits on Earth - but Ghyota and Sing Ha didn't know how it was linked, or even if there was a link - Karilian was destined to cross paths with a young Terran. The first time, when the boy's psi potential had suddenly revealed itself during a car accident near the Argus regional base in north-eastern America, and the second time seven years later, during Karilian's last mission. The teenager was a participant in psylogics research in a laboratory on Clifton Lake. The Recruiting Service had been interested in him for several months and was going to facilitate his "disappearance" and his transit to Erymede. That summer, Karilian had established a friendship with the boy, even endangering the secrecy of his mission.
Nicolas Dérec - that was the boy's name - was even a few meters away from Karilian when Karilian had killed himself: he'd come to visit him at the Villa, but had rung the doorbell in vain.
Barry Bruhn stood up when the two women finished their summary, delivered in a duet. Not completely turning his back to them, out of courtesy, he leaned on the guard rail of the narrow terrace and looked away, toward the other end of the park. Five winged silhouettes were flying there, you could see them by the movement of their coloured sails. At this moment, Barry would have liked to get rid of the osmium-weighted ankle boots worn by all Erymeans and jump from this terrace perch. But his jump wouldn't have carried him very far, with the icy water that had just been poured into him, freezing like a serac in his chest.
"A question..."
"Yes?"
He hesitated.
"Go ahead, ask, Barry," urged Sing Ha softly.
"That kind of mission... eliminate someone. Did he have to do it often?"
"Never," Bril Ghyota answered immediately; she had worked with Karilian for ages at the Metapsychics and Bionics Institute.
"Not directly, I don't think so," Sing Ha rectified. "He had not been in Ops for fifteen years when he asked to be sent to Clifton Lake. And even when he was an agent, I don't think he had to..."
Barry, turning back, looked intently at the councillor; in her left earlobe a small ruby was sparkling each time she tilted her head; it was her only ornament.
"One time only," she added. "He felt responsible for the death of a Terran. A high-ranking official or a minister who killed himself when the secret summit he was overseeing ended in a diplomatic fiasco. Karel's and his team's mission was to derail a nuclear initiative by NATO that would have used the Berlin Wall as a pretext. That man took the blame for it."
Barry Bruhn let out a sigh of relief: there was no blood on the hand that had so often caressed him.
© 2005 Éditions Alire & Daniel Sernine
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