CONTENTS

Introduction, by Mariano Villarreal

Translator’s note, by Sue Burke

The Star, by Elia Barceló

The Flock, by César Mallorquí

The Forest of Ice, by Juan Miguel Aguilera

My Wife, My Daughter, by Domingo Santos

God’s Messenger, by Rodolfo Martínez

In the Martian Forges, by León Arsenal

A Marble in the Palm, by Rafael Marín

The Albatross Ship, by Félix J. Palma

The Secret Hunting, by Javier Negrete

Victim and Executioner, by Eduardo Vaquerizo

The Cover, by Manuel Calderón

Acknowledgements

Also in English in Sportula

Our deepest thanks to D.L. Young, Dorothy K. Dean, Dean Jannone, Lou Burke, and Robin Hobb. You made it possible to build this castle much faster and easier.

Don’t forget to visit the Alhambra.

INTRODUCTION

1. Brief Historical Sketch

Science fiction, fantasy and horror from Spain is entirely unknown beyond its borders. This may be a slight exaggeration, as some Spanish works have been published in various Latin American countries (and many Latin American works have been published in Spain) thanks to the fact that those countries share a common language and a common set of cultural references. Some Spanish works have also been published in Europe. However, in the global market—in English—it’s pretty difficult to find stories and books by Spanish authors, a situation which may change in the near future thanks to the increasing interest in Spanish culture at the world level as it flows into the grand social network that is the Internet.

I can state, categorically and with plenty of examples (I’ll go into more depth when I introduce the authors included in this volume), that Spanish science fiction, fantasy and horror is rich and interesting not only for Spanish readers but for foreign ones as well. It counts among its ranks titles of extreme literary and speculative interest, it shows great variety, it has internationally respected authors and its own canon of classics. Over time, it has developed in a constant search for excellence, professionalism and social acceptance, and today it is possible to state, in spite of the economic crisis, that these genres occupy a small but significant portion of the Spanish literary market.

However, it is true that these genres, in particular science fiction, have not won the same popularity and relevance in Spain which they enjoy in other countries. It would take a detailed study to analyse the reasons for this, but most experts would concede that the factors include the overwhelming importance granted to literary realism, the traditional lack of respect shown by critics towards genre writing—dismissed as being mere ‘popular literature’—and the repressive influence of Franco’s dictatorship. With the opening up of democracy that began in 1975, literary science fiction, fantasy and horror experienced a noticeable upswing, which led to greater social, critical and academic interest. At this point there was an explosive growth in the number of publications, authors and works, many now created with references to local traditions after long years of copying Anglo-American models. Finally, the mid-’90s saw what we could call the ‘Golden Age’ of Spanish fantastic literature.

Yet, to a large extent, this bubble of creativity burst at the beginning of the 21st century thanks to the intrinsic limitations of the Spanish market: small print runs, low sales, a small capacity for export, and a low level of professionalisation throughout the industry. Many authors gave up on the genre or branched out into more commercial works such as thrillers, young adult books or historical fiction, a situation which has remained the case up to the present day.

2. The Market: Present and Future Perspectives

Today in the market for Spanish science fiction, fantasy and horror, new editions of successful titles stand alongside books by young writers who want to reclaim social or postmodern, playful contexts for their writing, and new works by established authors. These books are more or less present in bookshops, cultural supplements, forums and book signings, while the space devoted to genre writing is still fairly small, even though most of the absurd complexes of the past have apparently been overcome.

According to a recent study, the genre sector in Spain is atomised, consisting of thirty or so specialised publishing houses and another thirty or so general literary publishers who make regular incursions into genre writing, as well as amateur publishing which accounts for around 15% of the total. Approximately 1,000 titles are published each year—of which 200 are science fiction—and half of these are originally written in Spanish; the rest are translations, mainly from English. There is no still-active print magazine in spite of the historical role of such magazines in promoting the genre: the space that would be taken up by such a magazine is instead occupied by fanzines, websites and blogs of irregular publication and varying quality.

As far as authors are concerned, the vast majority combine writing with some other, more lucrative, economic activity: some of them are journalists, others are teachers or translators, in particular translators of genre works. (The translation of genre fiction has attained an extremely high level of skill thanks to the increasing discernment of its readers.)

The level of internationalisation of Spanish literature is far below what it could be. Very few works have been translated, and of those, very few have managed to make a significant impact. These are some of the most recent works that have been translated into English: ‘The Day We Went Through The Transition’ by Ricard de la Casa and Pedro Jorge Romero, published in the anthology Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain, which was a finalist for the Sidewise Prize in 2004; the scientific thriller Zigzag by the Spanish-Cuban writer José Carlos Somoza, which was shortlisted for the John W. Campbell Award in 2008; in 2012 one of the Spanish classics par excellence was translated, Enrique Gaspar’s El anacronópete (1887), which described a time machine a full eight years before Wells did; Tears in the Rain, a homage to Blade Runner by Rosa Montero; and, beyond any doubt the most high-profile example, Félix J. Palma’s Victorian Trilogy, whose first volume, The Map of Time, was a New York Times bestseller in its first week of publication.

In short fiction, I should mention Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Science Fiction, which includes half a dozen science fiction stories by Spanish and Latin American authors, and The Best of Spanish Steampunk, which collects work by forty writers in this subgenre. Also, several stories have appeared in American magazines, such as ‘The First Day of Eternity’ by Domingo Santos, which came out in the January-February 2011 issue of Analog. Another useful source is the collective interview given by several Spanish writers—most of them included in this volume—which appeared in the April 2015 issue of Clarkesworld.

So I should end by saying that if Spanish science fiction, fantasy and horror occupies a limited space in today’s publishing panorama, the intrinsic quality of a large part of what is written bodes well for future growth and, above all, for export to foreign countries: stories and novels not just for an internal market in Spanish, nor even a wider European one, but for a global market, and preferably an English-language one. In this respect, anthologies such as this can help some of these authors to become more widely known.

3. Castles in Spain

Castles in Spain / Castillos en el aire is a bilingual anthology, in Spanish and English, which gathers together some of the most important short works of science fiction, fantasy and horror published in Spain in the last twenty-five years. It is an unbeatable opportunity to get to know the stories that map the recent history of these genres.

The idea of publishing a book like this came after the hosting of the European Convention of Science Fiction and Fantasy (EuroCon) was granted to Barcelona in 2016. This event will be an excellent opportunity to allow a world audience to get to know the science fiction, fantasy and horror that is being written in our country; unfortunately, there has been very little material available for anyone who wanted to get to know its richness and diversity. On the other hand, although a number of writers have already been published outside Spain—some of them with notable success—until this book was put into motion, no-one had tried to offer a general overview aimed not simply at fans or the general Spanish-language reader, but also at the English reader or the reader with English as a second language.

In order to support the translation of the selected texts into English, a crowdfunding campaign was set up under the coordination of Sue Burke—head of the team of translators—and Elías F. Combarro—head of international relations for the project. The campaign was a total success and garnered more than $4,000 from more than a hundred contributors, most of them American, although with a notable number of Spaniards and other nationalities. Of course, not all the aims of the campaign were economic; authors and translators participated in spreading the word, along with individuals of the standing of Ken Liu, Aliette de Bodard, Cheryl Morgan and Carrie Patel, and the campaign helped spread the objectives and contents of this book and raise a great deal of interest among a significant proportion of the world community of genre readers and fans.

The current anthology consists of ten short stories and novelettes by ten authors: writers with significant careers whose work has been recognised with a number of awards and prizes. Each of these authors is represented by a single text which displays their own particular style, and which is, moreover, a significant milestone in the history of genre writing in Spain. These are stories which, by and large, are well known and about which there exists a critical consensus as to their membership of the canon of science fiction, fantasy and horror in Spain, although of course there are some surprises included in the contents as well.

Most of these stories come from the 1990s, the age of maturity for Spanish fantastic literature, stories which I read and enjoyed in my youth and which first appeared in fanzines and fan-produced publications (works which are still in my bookcase and which would have charmed Forrest J. Ackerman) and which then, little by little, as genre writing began to be included in publications by mainstream publishing houses, were republished in volumes with larger print runs and greater prestige. An evolution can be seen in these stories, a progressive change from speculative fiction that mimicked classical forms and ideas into one that was more personal, literary and in certain senses ‘culturally Spanish’. I believe that this has been a change for the better.

As the anthologist, I must admit that at times it has been difficult to choose the most representative story, given the abundance of material. In some cases, I was tempted to choose more recent stories, which are more innovative and representative of the actual state of affairs in Spain, but whose cultural weight is probably not as great as earlier, better-known works. I also wanted to add more authors to the book. But in any event, the present volume serves as a representative sample of a literature that is rich, diverse and, unfortunately, still far too little known: fantastic and science fictional literature which is no worse or better than those of other countries, but which is different, and which some readers will like and some will not, but which can now be freely experienced, judged, and, it is to be hoped, enjoyed.

All that remains for me now is to thank the translators—those true ambassadors for our culture—and the authors for their participation in the project, and the publisher of Sportula for making this dream come true. Per aspera ad astra.

Mariano Villarreal

novaficcion@gmail.com

@literfan

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

Science fiction has fans worldwide, and some of them are translators. When I put out a call in the fall of 2014 for translators to join a team to tackle this project, I had no trouble finding people with outstanding skills – all of them talented authors as well as translators – who could not have been more excited. Here was a chance to take stories by Spanish writers whose work we enjoyed and respected, and bring them to new readers in English. We all helped with the Kickstarter crowdfunding, and once the project was funded (thank you!), we got down to work.

We struggled at times to capture the style, the voice, and the tone of these stories. Sometimes we had to ask the authors for guidance, which they were delighted to give. And the struggle was in fact a luxury. The chance to use all our skills to turn a gem in one language into a gem in another language comes along only rarely.

This is an international team, as you will notice. Some stories take on a very British tone, others lean decidedly Stateside. English is an international language, after all, something that becomes very obvious living overseas. Despite our subcultural differences, we edited and proofed and polished each other’s work to help each other do our very best.

On behalf of the translation team, I hope you will love reading these stories as much as we savored them palabra por palabra, word by word. The best translators often go unnoticed, letting the original authors shine through. I hope we have achieved invisibility so that you can see Spain’s leading science fiction writers exactly as they are and understand what makes these works landmarks.

Sue Burke

THE STAR

Elia Barceló

(Translated by Nur-Huda El Masri)

Elia Barceló is a professor of Hispanic literature at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and, along with Angélica Gorodischer of Argentina and Daína Chaviano of Cuba, one of the most outstanding female Spanish-language authors of science fiction. Her anthologies Sagrada (Sacred) in 1989 and Futuros peligrosos (Dangerous Futures) in 2008 brought together the best of her science fiction short stories. Barceló’s anthropological novella El mundo de Yarek (Yarek’s World) won the 1995 UPC Prize and shook the foundations of the genre in Spain. After that, she leaned more toward the literary side of fantasy, with titles including El vuelo del hipografo (The Flight of the Hippogriff) in 2002, El secreto del Orfebre (The Goldsmith’s Secret) in 2003, and Corazón de tango (Heart of Tango) in 2007. She has also ventured into horror with El contrincante (The Opponent) in 2007; and into young adult fiction with Cordeluna (Cordeluna) in 2007 and her 2013 trilogy Anima Mundi, which won a Celsius Award at Semana Negra in Gijón. She has also published academic works about Julio Cortázar.

Born in Elda, Alicante, in 1957, Barceló has been translated into eighteen languages and has won a wide variety of awards. Two of her novels are available in English: The Goldsmith’s Secret and Heart of Tango, along with the short story ‘First Time’ in the 2003 anthology Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain. Her anthology Futuros Peligros was included in the List of Honor of IBBY (the International Board on Books for Young People) in 2010. Another of her stories, ‘Mil euros por tu vida’ (A Thousand Euros for Your Life) was adapted into a graphic novel and a 2011 German film entitled Transfer, directed by Damir Ludacevic.

‘La Estrella’ (The Star) won the first Ignotus Award for short fiction, equivalent to the Oscar for science fiction, fantasy, and horror in Spain, presented by the Asociación Española de Fantasía, Ciencia Ficción y Terror (Spanish Association for Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror).

We were all there. Lana, like a blonde doll hanging from puppet’s strings, with a ridiculous red skirt and a thread of saliva glistening on a pale face; Lon, with eyes huge and dark in a nearly non-existent face; Sadie, fluttering a pair of wings dizzily, hovering a few centimetres off the ground while chewing that beloved green stuff with robotic efficiency; Tras, reduced to a tiny, almost vanishing fragile frame and desire fixed on the sky; and I, the fifth, the brooch that binds the star, atremble like an icicle of light, there to illuminate yearning. All of us, waiting.

We had waited so long. There was no reason to be more worried than on other occasions, but the tension had turned different and we felt that what we were waiting for was approaching. We could have just disappeared, of course, especially myself, but we were the contact star and we did not want to become lost in the vigil as others had before us.

We still did not know what to offer them; it had been so long since we’d lost contact that we no longer knew anything of their desire nor their vigil. ‘We are wise and beautiful’, Sadie had said, but only I understood the concept of singular reality and I knew it could all turn out painful for them.

‘Slow’, muttered Lana, who, after me, was the most verbal of the group.

‘Yes’, I replied, knowing how Lana liked to put into words what we all already knew.

I felt Lon’s desire and began to illuminate an image for its eyes and ours: the endless blackness of what is outside and an artefact of singular reality, objectively white, slipping softly towards our vigil. Slow. Full of multiple realities without illumination.

‘Slow’, I repeated for Lana’s sake.

We dissolved. Our surroundings started to turn blue and orange, somewhat melancholic, just like Tras. Soft. Ancient. We shifted in its perception and silver towers arose to a music of glass and tinkling bells. Sadie danced and I floated above them, attenuating the vigil. We made our way to a white tower that rose from a few metres above the general subjective ground and went in, in my case through the roof, the others through doors, windows and walls.

Lana said, ‘Heat’, and we all laughed, breaking the tension of the vigil. The room made us hot and Lon brought down a light bubbly rain, which ended up hanging from our bodies and being transformed into the desires of the star. Flowers, nails, lights, and sticky salty substances came up on Lana’s body and Tras swept them up carefully with a vast blue tongue, translucent spheres containing images of expired realities. Lon, changing colour and shape, floated them over to me on the wings of wildly spinning Sadie.

‘Star asks’, Lana sang, ‘Channel, Vai.’

‘Star not verbal, Lana. Channel, Tras.’

Tras recovered the tongue and turned it halfway into a trail of colours, assembling a pyramid of scents and sending them, transformed into droplets of colour, out of a window:

Vigil. Slowness. Need for time. We have not forgotten. We are waiting. We are waiting.

A storm of speculation from another star enveloped us and we let it lead us on.

They want. What. We do not have. We cannot. For them. It is unacceptable. We are not acceptable. For them. Laughter. Laughter and changes and changes and transformations. Lana’s skirt swelling to fill our space with threads of woven softness. Construct a singular reality. When they arrive. More laughter. Which. We cannot. Yes we can. Tedium. Tedium. Tedium. Singular reality. Absurd and monstrous. Until when. Curiosity. Why not. Try. Common effort. Laughter. Laughter. A game. What for. For them. Too hard. Boring. They do not understand.

We let it go. The speculation rolled away among other stars. A question for Lon, from all of us. Lon knows more than any of us about the other times. No. Tras knows more but doesn’t like to show it. A flood of images falling upon us, and I am struggling to illuminate such a lot of things I do not understand.

A world of large, solid, strong beings that stay the same, sharing a singular reality, accepted in part out of convention, in part out of an incapacity to do without conceptual frameworks. A world of frightened beings made confident only by cerebral understanding of what they take to be reality. Beings who cannot or will not share their dreams, their changes and their whims, who cannot abandon the convention they have been developing down the ages of their existence, to whom the sweetness of channelling and focusing, and of the star, is unknown.

‘All of them like that’, asks Lana, flitting between green and mauve with a voice like metal scraping on stone.

‘Some not’, answers Lon, ‘but they suffer. They are not unified.’

‘And if they unify’: an empathy unusual for Sadie.

‘They suffer more. They are not understood. They are not accepted.’

‘We were all like this before.’ Tras is no more than a shred of bright fog in the room now dark.

‘Before’, Lana’s arched body sparkles upon the void.

‘Before us. Before the star. When this was the real world for them.’ The flow from Tras to Lon is so dense it almost hurts. We fall back a bit; they feel it and relax.

‘They will not understand us’, says Lon. ‘We will suffer, even disappear. They are strong.’

I feel the star’s pain and desperately channel outward, towards the objective reality. The mountains outside shake and slowly crumble with a roar that I wipe from our perception. The dust lands mote by mote upon our tower which shrinks and turns into a soft-walled cave where electronic music hums. Tras makes us bodies of firm muscle and smooth skin and has us gallop through the night on big, silky-coated creatures between our parted legs. The sense of power is heady but vanishes sharply. Sadie and I glide over them and watch them end their race in a great sea of silvery foam. We make a forest and observe the moon’s shine between its limbs, lulled by the murmur of the sea.

‘It was like this before.’ Lana sounds exquisite, a voice from the past, in a new white body, large and feminine (the word is Lon’s, I don’t know what it means but it is lovely): with long hair and eyes wide open.

‘Long, long ago’, answers Tras wordlessly. Time is difficult to express. ‘There were changes. Like these.’

I know the image hurts Tras and I move closer to those feelings, merging and sustaining while Sadie and the others come, and Tras is transformed into an ecstasy.

The sea has turned greasy, it smells of loss and destruction; there is no forest, no plants. The soil is grey and black, incinerated. The feeling of fear and desperation is like a greenish yellow light. We hug each other, not daring to believe, not wanting to believe, that such a convention could be accepted for someone to exist.

‘It was no convention’, whispers Lon. ‘They did it and then they could not change it. That is why they left.’

‘We can.’ Sadie leaves the star and turns the land into a weave of different coloured sheets that throw out sparks in cascades wherever they cross. Sadie is bathed in music and harmony. In happiness.

‘We are not them’, I say with a smile that strokes its essence with a fresh fleeting touch like a moist sea breeze.

‘Yes we are’, say Lon and Tras in unison. ‘And they know it. That is why they will not understand.’

‘Everything changes’, sings Lana.

‘Not them.’ Tras and Lon embrace, frightened.

‘We are beautiful and wise. We are happy. We are the star.’ Sadie takes us upward and beyond, flying, circling, gliding, while Lana sings.

‘Not them, not them.’

I illume, I illuminate joy, beauty, while we soar, we soar, we drown fear, we lose ourselves in the star, singing, soaring, forgetting, existing, transforming, waiting.

‘It’s in sight, Captain.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘You don’t seem very pleased, Ken.’

The Captain runs a clammy hand through her tousled hair and smiles at her second-in-command.

‘It shows?’

Alda smiles back and takes a seat opposite Ken in silence, waiting for the explanation she knows will come. In any case there’s no hurry; there’s still plenty of time for initiating the approach manoeuvre. Ken sighs, gets up, serves coffee in two transparent mugs and returns to her seat. Alda knows from her breathing that she’s about to speak, so she sits still and starts drinking coffee without sugar rather than getting up to get some.

‘I just….’ She stops, takes a sip of coffee. ‘For the life of me, I can’t understand the thrill you all feel over getting to this planet. What the hell do you expect to find there? Living proof, or rather, dead proof of the greatest mistake in our history, the greatest atrocity ever committed by our species. What does everybody expect to find on that planet after so many centuries? There can’t be anything. Nothing can be left of what once was there and it’s too soon for anything new to have arisen. This expedition is a fantastically expensive exercise in gratuitous self-indulgence.’

‘And why did you accept command?’

The reply is instant, the answer to a question already posed many times. ‘Because if I hadn’t taken it, they would have given it to Captain Morales.’

Alda nods in silence. Everyone knows that Captain Morales is a fanatical restorationist.

‘If I can convince them that there is nothing there, that it’s not worth the trouble, maybe we’ll finally start looking to the future and stop insisting on the dream of a return to the homeworld. What sort of return? What kind of home? What are we going to do nearly a thousand years afterwards, on a planet destroyed by our own folly – okay, our ancestors’ folly,’ she said, forestalling Alda’s objection, ‘where nothing can be left that has anything to do with us?’

‘You know as well as me that there are plenty of projects, some of which aren’t bad.’

‘For example?’

‘For example, making the planet ready for life. Letting the restorationists settle there and giving us all the chance to visit the origin of our civilisation at least once in our lives.’

‘What origin? What nonsense! Dust, radioactive dust, the ashes of what once was living and beautiful, a vast plain eroded by time and man-made destruction, degraded oceans without a trace of life, air we can’t breathe.… Do you really think we’re going to find survivors, kinsmen who’ve survived eight hundred years of radioactive hell, or even some ruins, the originals for all the photos and films in our museums? I doubt we’ll even be able to trace the edges of the old continents. If I’d known you thought like this, I wouldn’t have sanctioned your appointment.’

Alda bit her lip. She’d been friends with Ken for as long as she could remember and it hurt to hear her speak that way when she knew perfectly well that her loyalty was infallible. She could rely on her absolutely. Yet her friend’s stance gave her a pretext for asking something she had wanted to know since the outset of the voyage: ‘Why did you choose Boris?’

Ken looked up from her cup and began to laugh a bit, a dry bitter laugh. ‘I can only choose my First Officer, Alda. Boris is the second officer, and I can assure you I would have given ten years of my life to have avoided bringing him along, but the restorationists are stronger than you think and they needed someone on board. And in a position of responsibility. I had to accept it. So whatever you do, look after yourself and look after me, because if anything happens to us, Boris will be left in command.’

‘And if it came to that, what do you think would happen?’

Ken opened her hands vaguely. ‘I don’t know. Anything could happen. He’s capable of ordering a landing, destroying the ship and founding a colony. It’s not as if there aren’t enough women on board and frozen embryos aplenty.’

Ken’s jocular tone gradually gave way to a growing bewilderment.

‘You think him capable of that?’

‘Haven’t you read the Restorationist Manifesto?’

Alda shook her head.

‘It’s well worth reading. The finest heroic qualities of our fighting species summed up in twenty-five pages.’

‘So it’s true, they really are saying that if the planet were colonised in the interim by another galactic species, we’d have to fight to get it back.’

Ken nodded with a wry smile. ‘Total war. To the finish’, she added. ‘It’s…’ she stopped. ‘What do they call it? A question of honour. Do you know what I mean?’

Their eyes met briefly.

‘But you don’t think the planet is inhabited, do you?’

Ken looked down and said nothing.

‘There’s only one species other than ourselves capable of readying a planet for habitation’, Alda continued, ‘and we have a non-aggression treaty with them, which has never been broken.’

‘Exactly.’ Ken returned the gaze of her friend and they held hands over the table.

We were there. The star. Waiting. They were very close. We could hear their breath and fear. They did not feel us. ‘We are not part of their reality’, Lon had said and must have been correct. What was their reality? What did they want to see in our world? The things that Lon and Tras fashioned? Or images of the way it had been before? How long ago? My speculative mind began to spin, detached from the star, until they called me back to channel, to direct what was coming in from outside.

They are approaching. They will soon be here.

We mingled with the other stars, embracing, consulting, feeling the union. And fear. The fear that was almost unknown to our existence.

Only one star. The contact star. Anything else is not real to them. Dissolve. Dilute. Disappear. Vanish.

‘Well, Boris, here we are.’

Ken’s voice rang loud and clear in the second officer’s earphones, but the comment was so casual, he didn’t feel obliged to respond. His gaze was lost in the immensity of the blackened, carbonised desert, closed off at the horizon by a chain of hills that might have been huge mountains, long since eroded by the wind. According to the best estimates, using old maps, they were in Europe, which had been the cradle of modern civilisation. All over that continent, there had been great cities surrounded by forests on the banks of brimming rivers. One of the planet’s temperate zones and among the most heavily populated, it had the highest standards of living, and was one of the most varied in landscape, customs and language. He looked despairingly at the ground, looking for some vestige of the past, a piece of carved stone, a coin, anything, anything to wipe away his disappointment if only for a moment.

Even he had never known what to expect there, but never in his worst moments had he ever imagined that this was what he was going to find: dust, desolation, emptiness.

He got back onto his vehicle and started it wildly. He was not going to give up so easily. The ship was taking measurements and soundings of the whole planet, going kilometres deep into the formerly inhabited areas, into the most traversed oceans, and in fact everywhere where a trace might remain… But of what? Not even he could be bothering to look for life. That would be absurd. But what then was he looking for? Proof that another species had settled on Earth after it had had to be abandoned by the few survivors? An indication perhaps of a handful of human beings, who had survived the catastrophe, if only for a few years?

He recalled his childhood dreams of Old Earth, as his grandfather still called it, the love of the old ways passed down from generation to generation, the Sunday visits to all the museums where the remains of that other world were safeguarded. The world his imagination had painted with the most beautiful colours, knowing it was impossible and yet convincing himself that it could be, but only if he truly desired it.

He compared the land that slid by beneath his vehicle with ancient history films and felt a lump in his throat. There had once been vast dark green forests here that turned a bluish colour at sunset, rivers lazy in autumn and overflowing with snowmelt in spring, white high mountain peaks set against the blue sky, thousands and thousands of different animals he could never name filling the air with their cries, flowers that opened with the sun’s heat and perfumed the humid air, the air that could be breathed without a mask....

He also remembered the way the others thought, the progressives, people like the captain: ‘This is our world’. ‘What have we got to do with Old Earth?’ ‘It wasn’t all glorious clean nature; well before the final catastrophe, Earth was already a sick degenerate planet, where one animal species became extinct every day, whose oceans were covered with a film of petroleum that impeded evaporation, whose forests were dying bit by bit, its poisoned air ever more difficult to breathe, its climate changing year by year under an irreversible greenhouse effect, bound to render it deadly in the end even without the eventual nuclear holocaust.’ ‘Earth was already a corpse before humans abandoned it.’

He’d never wanted to believe that. For him, Earth was still alive somewhere in the vast universe, an abandoned garden, waiting for someone to claim it as his own and make it bloom again.

He was in that garden now.

It was a desert.

Ken flew silently behind Boris, hardly watching the land that slid by beneath her. It wasn’t her first landing on a shrivelled planet, but this was different because life had once existed here, her own species, life like hers. Men and women like her, smaller perhaps, less developed, but humans just the same, had lived, grown up and loved here before having to find another home amid the thousands of stars of Outer Space. She had studied very little ancient history, something she now regretted because she found herself unable to imagine the daily lives of these people, of whom, amid such devastation, not the slightest trace remained, something which actually cheered her up. She was right after all. The future of her species was not on Earth but at its new home, in its future, on the other planets in New Earth’s Nearer Space which had been readied to take in the surplus population. It had been a sad if interesting voyage, but a satisfactory one. In a few hours, once Boris got tired of flying over the desert, they would return to the ship and in a few days, be home with a report of what they’d found.

The engine of her vehicle let out a laboured roar as it climbed up a mountain range higher than the previous ones, and for a moment she had to fight the hot air turbulence that the mountainside created rather than keep Boris in sight. When she managed to steady the vehicle and cross the ridge, she was astonished by what she saw.

In what once must have been a valley and was now just a wrinkled wound in the mountains, there stood a silver tower. A tower about twenty metres tall but which looked much taller because it floated above the ground, as strong and stable as the very rock it should have been built upon. It was slender and graceful, with no outside decoration, but polished and fine like a luxury toy. The afternoon sun gave it a pink glow and it looked totally out of place in that wasteland because it was not a ruin from the past but something brilliant and real, newly-built. Boris’s vehicle lay at his feet and the second officer’s tiny figure stood out against the lower rim of the structure. Ken landed her vehicle and walked slowly up to him.

‘Captain, can you hear it?’ asked Boris in a whisper.

She was about to reply, ‘Can I hear… what?’ but stopped suddenly because she had also heard it. It was an utterance, vague, like a chorus of half-real, half-invented voices, like the whispers of children who are unable to suppress their giggles, hiding in the dark for a grown-up to find them. She nodded.

‘Inform the ship of what we have found, Lieutenant. Report that we’re about to enter and explore and that we’ll be back in contact within two hours. They should do the analysis and take the photographs without abandoning their position, and under no circumstances should they get further involved without a specific order to do so.’

She let Boris carry out his instructions and began to examine the tower in search of a way in. It was clearly only worth trying the windows because the two doors were both closed and too high up. In any case, they’d have to use the vehicle, so one of them would be obliged to stay down on the ground. She had just decided that she’d be the one to go in, however much Boris might protest, when he said, ‘Captain, the ship has just reported that they cannot detect the tower. They can see us but according to our equipment, the tower doesn’t exist.’

Before Ken could react, something luminous slid out from underneath the tower, a sort of giant translucent tear that sank to the ground.

‘What is that?’ Boris uttered hoarsely.

‘Perhaps it’s a lift’, Ken said.

‘Instructions for the ship?’

‘Stay put for two hours. If we don’t come back, they should come down and investigate.’

They walked side by side up to the giant tear and a second before they could summon the courage to pass through that gelatinous, glassy substance, it extended towards them, enveloping and sucking them up into the tower.

We were vibrating. We were vibrating. The whole star vibrated, transforming, transforming ourselves, deciding without words, without images, trying to adapt to them, in order to not cause harm or be harmed in return. Lon fashioned the tower and lured them in. Tras gave Lana a body to wear for them and I transformed myself after Tras’s design into something suited for contact. They were large. And strong. They were dressed in hard metal objects, with protectors for their eyes, ears and respiration. Lon was right. They did not know how to transform themselves. They remained in the lounge Sadie had created for them, looking at everything with eyes wide open, trying to keep their breathing under control. All the stars fell silent, intent on Lana and me, on Sadie, on Lon, on Tras.

Boris felt a chill when the tear-transporter dissolved all over him, leaving behind a shower of multicoloured sparks. He looked at Ken and his eyes followed the captain’s to a figure waiting for them at the back of the room. It was a man between twenty and forty years old, tall and slim, wearing dull gold clothes that covered him from his waist to his feet. His face and body were like the tower, delicate and graceful more like a work of art than a real being, but nonetheless obviously human. It was not some other species that had settled on Earth.

A second later, another figure emerged from behind the man, this time a woman as beautiful and perfect as her companion, also dressed in black and silver from the waist down, revealing rounded, erect breasts veiled by her long, smooth, black hair.

The pair remained completely still, while Boris and Ken looked at them. Finally the captain said, ‘We are friends.’

‘Friends, Friends.’ A voice reverberated in her brain as if repeated by an invisible choir.

With absolute precision, the man and woman smiled at the same time. ‘We are friends’, they repeated in a distant, plural voice, laughter in the background, as if it were a game.

‘Who are you?’ asked the captain.

‘We are. We are’, they replied.

‘We are you’, said Lon by way of our smiles.

‘Are you human? Survivors of the catastrophe?’

‘We are the star’, answered Sadie.

‘We do not understand’, said Ken.

We fall back. We join up as we search again. Searching for a way. Show. The star. Transformation. Sadie delves into one of them and finds images, a landscape, a light, sounds, odours. We change. We spin.

Boris and Ken suddenly find themselves in a typically Alpine landscape: a deep blue sky, crystalline, in which the first stars are already appearing, scented woods, the first signs of spring, a cool breeze and the sound of a nearby river, a clear brook of fast and foamy water. Boris crouches to the ground, passes his gloved hands through the damp grass, through real grass that does not disappear when he touches it, puts his hand in the brook and feels its coldness through his gloves. He begins to undo the seal of his helmet, when the captain’s voice brings him up short.

‘Freeze! That’s an order. Can’t you see it’s a trap, you fool? They’re only hallucinations….’ She stutters out of anger and fear.

Boris gets up slowly, furious and embarrassed at having fallen for something so childish, frustrated at being deprived of his dream. Then suddenly, looking up at Ken, he sees that she is naked, that they both are, their skin exposed to all the radiation, breathing in the poisonous air that smells of flowers and grass, feeling the splashes of that water that must be foul and in fact doesn’t exist, just as the night sky does not exist nor the breeze that blows through his hair and caresses all his skin. He bursts out laughing, hugs Ken and shouts, ‘I knew it, I knew it. We can begin again on Earth. We can live here. It’s much better than I expected. It’s a miracle.’

Fear shakes us as it has done since we began to wait for them. All the stars are spinning madly. We cannot. We do not want to. Them. Different. No. No. Share. With them. Impossible. I illuminate and we transform, we transform.

They are on a beach at sunrise. The cold is so intense that it hurts their nostrils when they breathe and their eyelashes are covered in frost. The rest of their bodies are wrapped in bulky insulated suits. There is a vehicle ticking over nearby. The engine sounds hoarse and thick black smoke comes out of the exhaust pipe. The sea is grey, covered with a greasy film that counterfeits colours in the still water. The beach is covered with the dead bodies of fish and birds and animals they cannot name. ‘This can’t be real’, mutters Boris.

‘Nor was the other’, Ken replies.

‘What’s going on, Captain? Are we dead?’

‘I wish I knew.’

‘This can’t be happening. This isn’t real.’

Everything is real, we say, everything is real. They don’t understand. They suffer. Beings of singular reality.

Ken and Boris find themselves back in the lounge. There are thousands of white lit candles and a sweet exhilarating scent floats through the air. The couple have disappeared. ‘We want to know’, Boris says to the void. ‘We want to understand.’

Ken purses her lips and says nothing. Her mind progressively closes out the reality around her, which cannot be real. She sees how her second officer’s features are being deformed and stares at his solid form turning fluid, and then nebulous, until it is no longer there and she is alone in the room. For a moment, in panic, she tries to flee and realises that the windows have disappeared, that everything before her hands, before her body, is solid; with a gasp, she falls back on the cushions covering the floor and passes out.

Boris floats in the middle of nowhere, spinning and forgetting ever more rapidly everything he ever knew or was familiar with. He can’t feel his body and he hardly cares. He hears imperceptible voices, laughter, footsteps. He gets lost, gives in and soon finds himself floating with nearly immaterial beings who tell him in images, words, smells and touch, everything he wants to know and everything that has troubled him. He lets himself be carried away and, for a moment, understands that his concept of reality was absurd, that the new humans have liberated themselves from the constraints of what is possible and what is not, that he has entered another phase, the level where humans finally dominate their planet by no longer being subjected to it. They are finally independent of everything external, and now nothing can affect them ever again. They are beautiful, they are superior, they are perfect.

‘Wake up, Ken, wake up.’

Ken’s eyes open sluggishly, afraid of encountering the reality of that non-existent room. But the first thing she sees is Boris’s dilated pupils, his crazed look, his taut body, his hands that grab her by the shoulders and shake her violently in what appears to be a fit of triumph.

‘I found them, Ken. I’ve understood them. They are human, like us, only much better than us, much better. They are the survivors of our own species who have been refined over the centuries, who have perfected themselves. They have abandoned everything we think is basic, to make the great leap. They are the next phase in evolution.’

Ken holds her breath as she takes in the gush of emotion that springs from Boris. When he pauses, expecting some kind of confirmation on her part, be it a look or a smile, she utters the accursed word, the word the restorationists most fear: ‘They’re mutants, then.’

Boris strikes her violently with the back of his hand and warm blood flows from her mouth. When he raises his hand to strike again, he stops and looks at her in pity.

‘Didn’t you see the couple? Would you call them mutants?’

‘That couple was a hallucination, like everything else here, like the forest, like the sea, like this very room. You’ve seen the state of this planet. Do you think a human being could survive here without protection, without technology?’

‘I know they’re hallucinations. Well, more like projections of their minds. I told you there is more to them. I’ve seen them. I’ve felt them. They are incorporeal, they’re like spirits that can adopt the form they wish and can transform their surroundings. What would they want technology for? They’ve got something else. It’s… it’s like magic.’

‘And you think they are human beings? All of this you’re telling me, does that sound human to you?’

Boris looks down, his feelings hurt. He sits on the cushions that cover the floor and is still for a while, staring into the void, his eyes reflecting the flames of the noiselessly burning candles.

Finally, Ken speaks, very slowly. ‘Boris, if these beings were ever once human, they clearly are not anymore. They are not like us. We have nothing in common.’

‘We may not have anything in common but we have everything to learn from them’, he shouts.

‘It is not something I want to learn’, she says softly.

‘I thought you progressives were in favour of anything that takes us into the future.’ His sarcasm is almost childish. ‘And this, Captain, is the future. The future of our species. The one and only. The best.’

‘So the ideal of restoring Earth isn’t your ideal any longer? Now it’s a question of these beings’, she pointed toward them, ‘teaching us how to free ourselves from our bodies and how to destroy our planet, and how to fake a reality made up of hallucinations so as to be able to go on enduring empirical reality, is that it?’

‘They didn’t destroy their planet. All of you did.’