Return from the Stars Read Online Free Page B

smiling, exhausted face, then, suddenly, as if something had got in the way, her outline trembled and disappeared.
    "A raft for you, sir?" came a courteous voice behind me. I turned around; no one, only a streamlined table strutting on comically bowed legs; it moved forward, glasses of sparkling liquid, arranged in rows on side trays, shook, one arm politely offering me this drink, the other reaching for a plate with a fingerhole, something like a small, concave palette—it was a robot. I could see, behind a small glass pane in the center, the glow of its transistorized heart.
    I avoided those insect arms stretched out to serve me, loaded with delicacies, which I refused, and I quickly left the artificial cave, gritting my teeth, as if I had somehow been insulted. I crossed the full width of the terrace, among S-shaped tables, under avenues of lanterns, showered with a fine powder of disintegrating, dying fireflies, black, gold. At the very edge, a border of stone, old, covered with a yellowish lichen, and there I felt, at last, a real wind, clean, cool. Nearby stood a vacant table. I sat awkwardly, my back to the people, looking out into the night. Below lay the darkness, vast, formless, and unexpected; only far, very far away, at its perimeter, glowed thin, flickering lights, curiously uncertain, as though not electric, and even farther off, swords of light rose up cold and thin into the sky, whether homes or pillars, I did not know; I would have taken them for the beams of floodlights had they not been traced by a delicate network—a glass cylinder might have looked thus, its base in the earth, its tip in the clouds, filled with alternating concave and convex lenses. They must have been incredibly high; around them, a few lights glimmering, pulsing, so that they were encircled now by an orange haze, now by a nearly white one. That was all, that was how the city looked; I tried to find streets, to guess where they would be, but the dark and seemingly lifeless space below spread out in all directions, not illuminated by a single spark.
    "Col…?" I heard; the word had probably been said more than once, but I did not immediately realize that it was addressed to me. I started to turn around, but the chair, quicker than I, did this for me. Standing in front of me was a girl, perhaps twenty years old, in something blue that clung to her like a liquid congealed; her arms and breasts were hidden in a navy-blue fluff that became more and more transparent as it descended. Her slim, lovely belly was like a sculpture in breathing metal. At her ears she had something shining, so large that it covered them completely. A small mouth in an uncertain smile, the lips painted, the nostrils also red inside—I had noticed that this was how most of the women were made up. She held the back of the chair opposite me with both hands and said:
    "How goes it, col?"
    She sat down.
    She was a little drunk, I thought.
    "It's boring here," she continued after a moment. "Don't you think so? Shall we take off somewhere, col?"
    "I'm not a col…" I began. She leaned on the table with her elbows and moved her hand across her half-filled glass, until the end of the golden chain around her fingers dipped into the liquid. She leaned still closer. I could smell her breath. If she was drunk, it was not on alcohol.
    "How's that?" she said. "You are. You have to be. Everybody is. What do you say? Shall we?"
    If only I knew what all that meant.
    "All right," I said.
    She stood up. And I got up from my horribly low chair.
    "How do you do that?" she asked.
    "Do what?"
    She stared at my legs.
    "I thought you were on your toes…"
    I smiled but said nothing. She came up to me, took me by the arm, and was again surprised.
    "What have you got there?"
    "Where, here? Nothing."
    "You're singing," she said and lightly tugged at me. We walked among the tables and I wondered what "singing" meant—perhaps "you're kidding me"?
    She led me toward a dark gold wall, to a mark on