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.
+++
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!”
4. The Flower and the Ellipse
The days went by. There were things the men didn’t want to talk about with him. He thought this would pass, over time they would assimilate and destroy this hurdle. Yet over time, what was blocking them gradually became more distressing and harder to define. But Catal didn’t appear worried, or didn’t want to appear worried. Maybe whatever he was leaving in their hands was something beyond his powers of discernment, as if he were testing them, or letting them finish a business he had started. It would have been easy enough to give the marching orders if Catal had been absolutely convinced that his men, on their own, understood the situation. Man’s haste counted for nothing in comparison with the infinite patience of the cosmos. In part Catal knew that the men wanted to talk with him and that, if they didn’t, it was because the topic hadn’t ripened yet in their heads, and it wasn’t up to him to force events; on this point no one could say he had acted with insufficient tact.
+++
The man halted and saw Catal’s eyes fixed on him, but those eyes were filled with nothing but kindly attention.
“What is it?” Catal asked quietly.
The man was suddenly unable to explain himself.
Catal looked at the base, then turned back to look calmly at the man. The man saw nothing demanding about that look. He felt slightly annoyed with himself.
Catal smiled and took him by the arm. They walked in silence over the thick, sand-spattered grass, as if on a stroll. When they passed the borders of the base and reached the top of a hill, Catal stopped.
Far off, past quartz formations glinting in the sunlight, the flowers stood. For a moment the man was afraid the leader would keep moving forward, but Catal turned to face him, his whole head alert, as if he were trying to hear something inaudible through the silence. The desert spread out stark before them, not a bird or a reptile, under a stormy sky pierced by wide beams of blinding light. Perhaps Catal knew everything; perhaps he even had an explanation. Why wouldn’t he help him?
“Catal,” he nearly begged, “we tried to do things as well as could be done.”
He waited for Catal’s reply, but the leader didn’t speak; he didn’t even show signs of being willing to do so. His face had lost that attentive expression. It still looked friendly, but was completely impenetrable.
The man took a deep breath.
He glanced furtively at the quartz formations beyond which the flowers hid, way over there, far off in the distance, on the edge of the horizon, on the dead, burnt plain; to him it seemed an immense cemetery crowded with corpses, with irascible entombed mummies, the great cemetery of the universe where all the charred and twisted, wicked, intractable, ancient remains of the planets would come to rest.
He closed his eyes. Suddenly he heard, at last, his leader’s voice.
He felt as if a finger were tracing, with each word he spoke, the lines of his cerebral cortex and pressing down on specific spots. Catal’s eyes studied his face. In the bottomless and tempestuous emptiness of those eyes, cold but full of life, a small, trembling flame suddenly flared: a melody was drifting in from distant places, through the mists of time, becoming audible as it moved forward through Catal’s pupils. Suddenly the image of the flower arose in the man’s memory, full-blown, from the roots on up, connected to other brilliant, fleeting recollections.
The melody merged with a human voice crying out in anguish, almost like an endless lament. He didn’t know whether he wanted to run away or let himself be drawn in and chase after the recollection. The novel familiarity of the flower, of the symbol of the sphere, pierced the original tragedy of the Ellipse in the primordial world of the Ammes.
The man slowly began raising his arms, and his hands instinctively covered his ears.
Catal looked away; he observed the wind whipping the sand and a blue, fossilized leaf twisted into a spiral rolling past his feet. The silence at that moment was so deep, Catal thought he could hear the distant rustling of the giant petals as they fluttered in the breeze.… The other man managed to open his eyes and look around in astonishment.
“It’s exactly what we had thought,” said Catal.
Actually, the flashes of lightning when they had landed could not be taken as evidence; right now, however, they assumed great significance.
Catal remained silent for a moment.
A ray of light touched the hilltop, and the mist pooled around his feet quickly fled; perhaps that was the only ray that would break through the clouds, like a light beam deliberately aimed in their direction, purposefully pointing them out.
Catal turned to face the man; his gaze again grew friendly and attentive: something huge beyond measure was moving in the fathomless vastness of his mind. He began to speak, letting his words betray no hint of worry, as if he were discussing something that they had no say in.
The Ellipse had always been a true symbol for them, and its origins were very clear. A bemused smile passed over the leader’s lips: man’s pride would have to suffer many more setbacks still. The false image created by the Ammes ethos surrounding the origin of their symbol was now crumbling—because