“I, too, have only to give way to melancholy to recall my first work in the psychological sanatorium in New Zealand where I was just an ordinary nurse. And Renn Bose, today even, after his terrible accident, says that he was happiest when he was working on helicopter traffic control. But, Chara, surely you know that’s just weakness! It’s only fatigue from the tremendous strain that was necessary for you to keep at the high artistic level you have achieved. It is going to be worse later on when your body ceases to be so splendidly charged with vital energy. But as long as it remains what it is, please give us the pleasure of admiring your skill and your beauty.”
“You don’t know how it is with me, Evda. Every new dance I prepare is a matter of joyful search. I realize that I shall once more be giving people something good, something that brings them joy and reaches to the very depths of their emotions and that is what I live by. The moment comes when my plan is put into effect and I give myself up entirely to one burst of passion, to furious, flaming voluptuousness. I suppose this is transmitted to the audience and accounts for the enthusiasm with which the dance is received. I give all of myself to you all!”
“And then what next? A sudden anticlimax?”
“Yes! I’m just like a song that has flown away and vanished into thin air, I’m an exile from a vanished world that nobody wants and to whom nothing is left but the admiration of naive youth. I do not create anything that is registered by the intellect!”
“You do more than that, you leave something in the hearts of people!”
“That’s all very immaterial and transient — I was thinking of myself!”
“Have you ever been in love, Chara?”
The girl lowered her eyelashes and her chin stuck out.
“Would that be like me?” she answered with another question.
Evda Nahl shook her head.
“I mean that tremendous big emotion that you, but not everybody, are capable of.”
“I know what you mean, the poverty of my intellectual life leaves me a richness of emotion….”
“That’s the right idea in essence but I would explain it differently; you are so gifted emotionally that the other side docs not necessarily have to be poor, although, of course, it will naturally be weaker by the law of contradictions. We’re talking too much in the abstract and I have an urgent matter to talk to you about, something that directly concerns our conversation. Mven Mass….”
The girl flinched and Evda Nahl felt that she was inwardly putting up barriers against her. She took Chara under the arm and led her to a side gallery of the hall where the dark wooden panelling harmonized beautifully with the blue-gold of the stained glass in the arched windows.
“Chara, my dear, you are an earthly, light-loving flower transplanted on to the planet of a double star. There are two suns in the sky, one blue and the other red, and the flower does not know which one to turn to. You are a daughter of the red sun, why do you turn to the blue?”
Strongly but gently Evda drew the girl to her shoulder and Chara suddenly snuggled up to her. The famous psychiatrist stroked the girl’s thick, somewhat harsh hair, thinking all the time how thousands of years of training had changed man’s petty private joys for something greater and common to all. But how far they still were from victory over the loneliness of the soul, especially in a soul complicated by a gamut of feelings and impressions, nurtured by a body rich in life. Aloud she said:
“Mven Mass — do you know what’s happened to him?”
“Of course, the whole planet is talking about his unsuccessful experiment!’’
“And what do you think?”
“I think he was right!”
“So do I. That’s why we have to get him off the Island of Oblivion. A month from now there will be the annual meeting of the Astronautical Council. His misdeeds will be discussed and the Council’s decision will be handed over to the Control of Honour and Justice that constitutes the guardian of every person on the planet. I have every reason to hope for a lenient verdict, but Mven Mass must be here. A man whose emotions are quite as strong as yours must not remain long on the island, especially as he is alone!”
“Am I really so much of an ancient woman that I build up plans for my life to depend on what a man is doing, even if it is the man I’ve chosen myself?”
“Chara, my child, don’t! I’ve seen you together and I know what you mean to him and he to you. Don’t blame him for not having seen you, for having hidden from you. Think what it would mean to a man, one of the same type as yourself, to come to you whom he loves — yes, it’s true, Chara — badly defeated and liable to judgement and exile. Could he have come to you, one of the world’s beauties?”
“That’s not what I was thinking of, Evda. Does he need me now that he is weary and broken? I’m afraid he may not have the strength necessary for a great flight of the spirit, not intellectual, but emotional this time, for such love as I believe we are both capable of. If he doesn’t possess strength enough he might lose faith in himself a second time and that would be too much for him. That’s why I thought that it would be better for me to be… in the Atakama Desert!”
“You’re right, Chara, but only from one side. You have forgotten his loneliness and the unnecessary self-condemnation of a great and passionate man who has nothing to support him once he has left our world. I would go there myself but I have Renn Rose on my hands, he’s just pulling through, and, as he’s badly wounded, he comes first. Darr Veter’s been appointed to build the new satellite and that’s his share in helping Mven Mass. I’m making no mistake when I tell you quite seriously to go to him, ask nothing of him, not even a tender glance, no plans for the future, no love… only give him your support, dispel his doubts in his own right and then bring him back to our world. You have strength enough to do that, Chara. Will you go?”
The girl was breathing fast, she raised her childishly trusting eyes to the older woman and there were tears in them.
“I’ll go today!”
Evda Nahl kissed Chara heartily.
“You’re right, you must hurry. We’ll go to Asia Minor together on the Spiral Way. Renn Bose is in a surgical sanatorium on the Island of Rhodes and I’ll send you on to Deir-es-Sohr where there is a helicopter base belonging to the technical and medical first-aid service on the Australia and New Zealand route. I can imagine the pleasure it will give the pilot to take the famous dancer Chara — alas, not the biologist Chara! — to any place she wants to visit.”
The chief conductor of train 116/78 invited Evda Nahl and her companion to pay a visit to the central control room. A corridor, covered with a silicolloid hood, ran along the whole length of the huge cars. Mechanics walked up and down this corridor, from one end of the train to the other, watching instruments indicating the temperature of the axles, the strain on the springs and frame of each of the cars. Geiger counters kept a check on lubrication and brakes. The two women went up a spiral staircase and walked along the corridor until they came to a big cabin high up over the streamlined nose of the first car. In a crystal ellipsoid twenty-two feet above the railway line sat two mechanics one on either side of the pyramidal hood of the electronic robot driver. Parabolic screens showed them everything that was going on on both sides and behind the train. The whiskers of the antenna that trembled on the roof belonged to an apparatus that should give warning of anything appearing on the line of the Spiral Way for the next 50 kilometres although the circumstances under which anything could appear would be very extraordinary.
Evda and Chara sat down on a sofa against the bade wall of the cabin placed half a metre higher than the seats of the mechanics and allowed themselves to be hypnotized by the railway lines racing swiftly towards them. The gigantic railway crossed mountain ranges, was carried over the plains along huge embankments and crossed narrow waters and bays by viaducts built deep in the water. The forest planted on the sides of the colossal cuttings and embankments formed a continuous carpet owing to the train’s uniform speed of 200 kilometres an hour, a carpet that was reddish, light or dark green depending on the trees of the district — pines, eucalypti, or olives. The calm waters of the Archipelago were set in motion on both sides of the bridge by the movement of the air as it was cut by the ten-metre-wide train. The big ripples ran out fanwise, darkening the transparent blue water.