+++
He’d thought such stupid stuff!
The Ellipse had arrived to bring that delicious thing, had set it next to him so that he, stupid Teles, could enjoy it. Yes, he was an idiot; only an idiot could have thought that Orna was bad, that the Ellipse was bad.
Teles jumped up and shouted, “Borles, Bímer, come and enjoy the Ellipse!”
He heard a sinister guffaw. He saw Bumis’s face through the blue-green foliage, through the vines with their tiny, multicolored flowers. A stone hit him on the head. Orna stood up and walked quietly away; when she was far enough from him, she began to laugh. Who knows, maybe she was happy to become Orna again! But Teles had noticed her absence long before he heard her laugh. He was shaken and searched for her. She wasn’t there!
“Orna, Orna!”
While he heard, as if in answer, her laughter in the distance, Larte said behind him, “You’ll never get tired of being stupid. Orna won’t ever come back. Why should she? Listen up: the three of us are going to the desert, and you won’t dare to follow her.”
Teles tried to grab him, but his arms closed on air, and Larte’s head, hard as a rock, butted him in the stomach. From where he lay, his head spinning with pain, he could dimly make out Orna’s face, once more staring at him just as she used to do. Then her face grew closer; her mouth opened, and she spat at him; she made faces, stretching her lips with her fingers and sticking out her tongue. Teles clumsily reached over and touched her thighs. Orna stood exactly over his head, spreading her legs. Teles’s hand moved, searching upward between her white thighs; then she swatted his hand aside and ran off laughing.
Bumis leaned toward him and said, “Larte told the truth. You’ll never get tired of being stupid.”
Teles kicked blindly and managed to land a blow somewhere on Bumis. He tried to get up but he felt his eyesight going cloudy. He doubled over suddenly and spat up some vomit. He groped his way to the stream and plunged his head into the water.
Then he lay stretched out on the grass and let the wind clear his head.
+++
Teles marched across the valley with a head full of confused thoughts. The Ellipse could be bad one moment and good the next. Had Orna and her brothers really been attacked by the new symbol? That had to be it. Otherwise, where had all their wickedness come from? If Orna was bad, how had she made him feel so good? What was good and what was bad, anyway? Did anyone really know for sure? He no longer knew; he knew nothing at all. He looked ahead and, through his misty eyes and his misty confusion, saw the huge, unmoving ships, like another pair of eyes—vacant, inexpressive, but perhaps wicked; and he told himself that the answer had to be over there, though he was no longer sure whether any questions really had answers.
3. The Ammes
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.
+++
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