Ivan Yefremov - Andromeda (A Space-Age Tale)

The building of the “White Dawn” Sanatorium stretched down to the sea in terraces, the rounded form of its glass walls resembling the huge ocean liners of ancient days. The pale vermilion tones of the walls, staircases and vertical columns were in sharp contrast to the domed masses of the chocolate and violet andesite cliffs, cut by blue and grey porcelain-like paths of cast syenite. The polar night in late spring, however, made all colours alike in its specially white light that seemed to come from the depths of the sky and the sea. The sun had hidden for an hour behind the plateau to the south. A majestic arc of light covered the southern half of the sky, reflected from the giant ice-cap of the southern continent that still remained on the high plateau of the eastern part to where it had been moved back by the will of man who had reduced it to one-quarter of its former mass. The icy white dawn, whose name the sanatorium bore, turned the whole countryside into a phantom world of light without shadows or reflections.

Four people were coming down the silvery porcelain path to the ocean. The faces of the two men who walked behind seemed carved out of grey granite and the big eyes of the two women were bottomless and mysterious.

Nisa Greet, pressing her face against the fur collar of Veda Kong’s jacket, was arguing with the historian. Veda, making no effort to conceal her faint amazement was looking into that gentle face that outwardly resembled hers.

“I believe that the best gift a woman can make to the man she loves is to re-create him and in this way prolong the existence of her hero. Then another loving woman will create a new copy — why, it’s almost like immortality!”

“Men feel differently about us,” answered Veda. “Darr Veter once told me that he would not like to have a daughter that was too much like the woman he loved because it would be hard to go out of the world and leave her behind without him, without the cloak of his love and tenderness, leave her to a fate of which he would know nothing. That’s just a relic of the jealousy and protection of the old days.”

“I cannot bear the thought of parting with a tiny being that is mine to his last drop of blood,” continued Nisa, full of her own thoughts, “of giving him up to the school as soon as I have finished nursing him.”

“I can understand you although I do not agree,” said Veda, frowning, as though the girl had touched a painful string in her heart. “One of mankind’s greatest victories is the conquest of the blind instinct of maternity, the realization that only the collective upbringing of children by people trained and selected for the job can produce a man of our society. That insane maternal love of the past has almost died out. Every mother knows that the whole world is kind to her child and that he runs none of the dangers he formerly did. And so the instinctive love of the she-wolf that arose out of fear for her progeny has disappeared.”

“I understand all that but only with my mind,” said Nisa.

“I not only know it but feel it, I know that the greatest happiness is to bring joy to another and that is now possible for anybody, irrespective of age. That which was possible in former ages for parents and grandparents, and most of all for mothers…. Why must one always be together with the little one? That’s also a relic of ancient days, when the woman was compelled to live a narrow life and could not always be together with the man she loved. You’ll always be together, as long as you love each other….”

“I don’t know, but sometimes I feel an overpowering desire to have beside me a little one that is like him, it is so strong that I clench my hands in despair… no, I don’t know anything.”

“There’s Java, the Mothers’ Island. Those who want to bring up their own children live there, those who’ve lost their dear ones, for example….”

“Oh no! And I couldn’t be a teacher, either, like those who have some special love for children. I feel that I have great strength and I’ve been into the Cosmos once already.”

“You’re the personification of youth, Nisa, and not only physically. Like all people who are very young you don’t realize when you come up against contradictions that they are what go to make up life. You don’t realize that the joy of love will most certainly bring anxiety, cares and sorrows that will be the greater, the stronger the love. And you think that you’ll lose everything at the first blow struck by life.”

As she uttered those last words Veda herself became aware that Nisa’s restiveness and anxiety were not to be explained by youthfulness alone.

Veda had made a mistake common to many people, that of believing that spiritual traumas heal together with physical wounds. That, however, is not the case, for wounds to the psyche remain for a long, long time, hidden deep down in a physically healthy body, and they may open up at any moment from the most insignificant of causes. Such was Nisa’s case — she had been paralysed for five years and it had left its impress in every cell of her body; even if the memory was subconscious it still remained — the horror of her meeting with the terrible cross that almost been the death of Erg Noor!

Nisa guessed what Veda was thinking about and answered her in a dull voice.

“Ever since the iron star there is a strange feeling that has never left me. Somewhere there is an empty place in my heart. It continues to exist together with confident joy and strength and does not exclude them and at the same time does not disappear. I can struggle against it only by means of something that will employ me entirely and will not leave me alone with… Oh, now I know what the Cosmos is for a lonely man and have even greater respect for the first space travellers!”

“I think I can understand,” said Veda. “I was once on the tiny Polynesian islands that are lost in the ocean. There, standing by the sea in a moment of loneliness, you are overcome by a profound sorrow that is like a nostalgic song merging with the deadly monotony of great distances. Perhaps that is a memory of the distant past, n memory of the primordial isolation of his consciousness telling man how weak and helpless he formerly was, shut up in his own little cage of a soul. The only cure was common work and common thoughts — a boat came, smaller, even, than the island, but it was enough to change the ocean. A handful of companions and a ship is a world of its own striving towards distant objectives that they can reach and subordinate to their will. The same is true of the Cosmic vessel, the spaceship. In that ship you are together with strong and brave companions! But alone in the Cosmos,” Veda shuddered, “I don’t suppose a man could stand it!”

Nisa clung still more closely to Veda.

“How well you said that, Veda! That’s why I want everything at once….”

“Nisa, I’m getting very fond of you. Now I can sense the meaning of your decision but at first I thought it was sheer madness. For a ship to be able to return from such a long flight your children will have to take your places on the return journey — two Ergs, or maybe, more.”

Nisa squeezed Veda’s hand and pressed her nose against her cheek, cold from the wind.

“Do you think you can stand it, Nisa? It’s impossibly difficult!”

“What difficulties are you talking about, Veda?” asked Erg Noor, turning round on hearing her last exclamation. “Have you come to an agreement with Darr Veter? For the last half-hour he’s been trying to persuade me to give the youth the benefit of my experience as an astronaut and not to set out on a flight from which I shall never return.”

“Has he persuaded you?”

"No. My experience as an astronaut is still more necessary to pilot Lebed to her destination, up there,” said Erg pointing to the bright starless sky, to the place where Achernar should be seen, lower than the Lesser Magellanic Cloud and just below Tucana and the Hydra, “to pilot her where no ship from Earth had ever been before!”