The Castaways of Eros by Theo Varlet

Author:Theo Varlet [Varlet, Theo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Coat Press
Published: 2013-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

XVI. “Berlitz Lessons”

Our sojourn on Eros having lasted nineteen months, there is probably no point in reporting every detail of our existence in chronological order. It would even be tedious to reproduce the contents of three notebooks that I brought back, so I shall limit myself to reporting the principal facts.

They are divisible into two major periods, during the first and shorter of which we remained prisoners—at first all four of us, for ten days, and then Aurore alone, for four and a half months—and during the second of which we all recovered a relative liberty.

In order not to have to come back to it, I shall note here that a difficulty presents itself in the notation of events. We had to make a new calendar. In addition to the fact that a year on Eros is equivalent in length to slightly more than 21 terrestrial months—278½ days—it requires four Eros days to make up one Earthly day of 24 hours. For the sake of clarity, therefore, I shall employ a notation by means of terrestrial dates, which will situate the facts within a few hours; that is an approximation sufficient for a narrative that does not claim the exactitude of a chronometric report.

The pivot of these essential events having been the linguistic communication sketched out during our introduction to Zilgor and the assembly of the Twenty, it is appropriate for me to say something about its consequences.

As mentioned above, the apparatus I call the psychic lens permitted the lacertian examiner to read the meaning of words pronounced by a human “subject.” The functioning of the apparatus was not reversible, however, and it only provided unilateral communication. By virtue of the absence in us of a third eye, it remained impossible for us to decipher the lacertian language.

Now, the first explanations given by my wife in public session about human knowledge had excited Zilgor’s curiosity tremendously. It was not sufficient for him to understand what we were saying spontaneously; he wanted to be able to question us and converse with us. He therefore began by learning French—or rather, according to material appearances, he had his linguist, the Academician Styal, learn it.

From the twenty-third to the twenty-fifth of April, for forty Erotian days, almost from dawn to dusk—which is to say, two and a half hours a day—we were placed in his hands.

These “Berlitz lessons,”30 as my nephew called them—he also called our pedagogue-cum-pupil Polycarpe, for some reason unknown to me31—took place regularly in a small overheated from situated two floors above our prison, in the same wing of the Palace but on the façade opposite the one overlooking the grand plaza. From the window, which we were forbidden to approach too closely, the view over looked an immense landscape of disaster, a chaos of burned and decapitated buildings and broken walls looming over the ruins of an entire metropolis lying there, deserted and abandoned, in the sunlight, beneath the black sky of the atmospheric void, at the foot of the armored steel walls that had protected the Palace in which we were resident.

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