He swam to the left and the rocky shore, and worked his way along it. Clinging close (the water seemed bottomless here) he rounded the point and came face to face (literally; they touched) with a girl.
She was young—near his age—and his first impression was of eyes of too complex an architecture, blue-white teeth with pointed canines quite unlike the piano-key regularity considered beautiful in these times, and a wide cape of rich brown hair afloat around her shoulders. By then his gasp was completed, and in view of the fact that in gasping he had neglected to remove his mouth from the water, he was shut off from outside impressions for a strangling time, until he felt a firm grasp on his left biceps and found himself returned to the side of the rock.
“Th-thanks,” he said hoarsely as she swam back a yard and trod water. “I’m not supposed to be here,” he added inanely.
“I guess I’m not either. But I thought you lived here. I thought you were a faun.”
“Boy am I glad to hear that. I mean about you. All I am is a trespasser. Boy.”
“I’m not a boy.”
“It was just a finger of speech,” he said, using one of the silly expressions which come to a person as he grows, and blessedly pass. She seemed not to react to it at all, for she said gravely, “You have the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen. They are made of aluminum. And your hair is all wiggly.”
He could think of nothing to say to that, but tried; all that emerged was, “Well, it’s early yet,” and suddenly they were laughing together. She was so strange, so different. She spoke in a grave, unaccented, and utterly incautious idiom as if she thought strange thoughts and spoke them right out. “Also,” she said, “you have lovely lips. They’re pale blue. You ought to get out of the water.”
“I can’t!”
She considered that for a moment, treading away from him and then back to the yard’s distance. “Where are your things?”
He pointed across the narrow neck of the lake which he had circumnavigated.
“Wait for me over there,” she said, and suddenly swam close, so close she could dip her chin and look straight into his eyes. “You got to,” she said fiercely.
“Oh I will,” he promised, and struck out for the opposite shore. She hung to the rock, watching him.
Swimming, reaching hard, stretching for distance warmed him, and the chill and its accompanying vague ache diminished. Then he had a twinge of stomach-ache, and he drew up his knees to ease it. When he tried to extend himself again, he could, but it hurt too much. He drew up his knees again, and the pain followed inward so that to flex again was out of the question. He drew his knees up still tighter, and tighter still followed the pain. He needed air badly by then, threw up his head, tried to roll over on his back; but with his knees drawn up, everything came out all wrong. He inhaled at last because he had to, but the air was gone away somewhere; he floundered upward for it until the pressure in his ears told him he was swimming downward. Blackness came upon him and receded, and came again; he let it come for a tired instant, and was surrounded by light, and drew one lungful of air and one of water, and got the blackness again; this time it stayed with him …
Still beautiful in her bed, but morphine-clouded, fly-papered, and unstruggling in viscous sleep, he lay with monsters swarming in his veins …
Quietly, in a corner of the room, she spoke with Keogh:
“You don’t understand me. You didn’t understand me yesterday when I cried out at the idea of that—that operation. Keogh, I love him, but I’m me. Loving him doesn’t mean I’ve stopped thinking. Loving him means I’m more me than ever, not less. It means I can do anything I did before, only more, only better. That’s why I fell in love with him. That’s why I am in love with him. Weren’t you ever in love, Keogh?”
He looked at the way her hair fell, and the earnest placement of her thick soft brows, and he said, “I haven’t thought much about it.”
“There’s always a way. All you have to do is think of it,” she quoted. “Keogh, I’ve accepted what Dr. Rathburn said. After I left you I went to the library and tore the heart out of some books … they’re right. Rathburn and Weber. And I’ve thought and I’ve thought … trying the way Daddy would, to turn everything upside down and backwards, to look for a new way of thinking. He won’t die, Keogh; I’m not going to let him die.”
“You said you accepted—”
“Oh, part of him. Most of him, if you like. We all die, bit by bit, all the time, and it doesn’t bother us because most of the dead parts are replaced. He’ll … he’ll lose more parts, sooner, but—after it’s over, he’ll be himself again.” She said it with superb confidence—perhaps it was childlike. If so, it was definitely not childish.
“You have an idea,” said Keogh positively. As he had pointed out to the doctors, he knew her.
“All those—those things in his blood,” she said quietly. “The struggle they go through … they’re trying to survive; did you ever think of it that way, Keogh? They want to live. They want most terribly to go on living.”
“I hadn’t thought about it.”
“His body wants them to live too. It welcomes them wherever they lodge. Dr. Weber said so.”
“You’ve got hold of something,” said Keogh flatly, “and whatever it is I don’t think I like it.”
“I don’t want you to like it,” she said in the same strange quiet voice. He looked swiftly at her and saw again the burning deep in her eyes. He had to look away. She said, “I want you to hate it. I want you to fight it. You have one of the most wonderful minds I have ever known, Keogh, and I want you to think up every argument you can think of against it. For every argument I’ll find an answer, and then we’ll know what to do.”
“You’d better go ahead,” he said reluctantly.
“I had a pretty bad quarrel with Dr. Weber this morning,” she said suddenly.
“This m—when?” He looked at his watch; it was still early.
“About three, maybe four. In his room. I went there and woke him up.”
“Look, you don’t do things like that to Weber!”
“I do. Anyway, he’s gone.”
He rose to his feet, the rare bright patches of anger showing in his cheeks. He took a breath, let it out, and sat down again. “You’d better tell me about it.”
“In the library,” she said, “there’s a book on genetics and it mentions some experiments on Belgian hares. The does were impregnated without sperm, with some sort of saline or alkaline solution.”
“I remember something about it.” He was well used to her circuitous way of approaching something important. She built conversational points, not like a hired contractor, but like an architect. Sometimes she brought in portions of her lumber and stacked them beside the structure. If she ever did that, it was material she needed and would use. He waited.
“The does gave birth to baby rabbits, all female. The interesting thing was that they were identical to each other and to the mother. Even the blood-vessel patterns in the eyeball were so similar that an expert might be fooled by photographs of them. ‘Impossibly similar’ is what one of the experimenters called it. They had to be identical because everything they inherited was from the mother. I woke Dr. Weber up to tell him about that.
“And he told you he’d read the book.”
“He wrote it,” she said gently. “And then I told him that if he could do that with a Belgian hare, he could do it with—” she nodded toward her big bed—“him.”
Then she was quiet, while Keogh rejected the idea, found it stuck to his mind’s hand, not to be shaken off; brought it to his mind’s eye and shuddered away from it, shook again and failed, slowly brought it close and turned it over, and turned it again.
“Take one of those—those things like fertilized ova—make it grow …”
“You don’t make it grow. It wants desperately to grow. And not one of them, Keogh. You have thousands. You have hundreds more every hour.”
“Oh my God.”
&nb
sp; “It came to me when Dr. Rathburn suggested the operation. It came to me all at once, a miracle. If you love someone that much,” she said, looking at the sleeper, “miracles happen. But you have to be willing to help them happen.” She looked at him directly, with an intensity that made him move back in his chair. “I can have anything I want—all it has to be is possible. We just have to make it possible. That’s why I went to Dr. Weber this morning. To ask him.”
“He said it wasn’t possible.”
“He said that at first. After a half hour or so he said the odds against it were in the billions or trillions … but you see, as soon as he said that, he was saying it was possible.”
“What did you do then?”
“I dared him to try.”
“And that’s why he left?”
“Yes.”
“You’re mad,” he said before he could stop himself. She seemed not to resent it. She sat calmly, waiting.
“Look,” said Keogh at last, “Weber said those distorted—uh—things were like fertilized ova. He never said they were. He could have said—well, I’ll say it for him—they’re not fertilized ova.”
“Bat he did say they were—some of them, anyway, and especially those that reached the lungs—were very much like ova. How close do you have to get before there’s no real difference at all?”
“It can’t be. It just can’t.”
“Weber said that. And I asked him if he had ever tried.”
“All right, all right! It can’t happen, but just to keep this silly argument going, suppose you got something that would grow. You won’t, of course. But if you did, how would you keep it growing? It has to be fed, it has to be kept at a certain critical temperature, a certain amount of acid or alkali will kill it … you don’t just plant something like that in the yard.”
“Already they’ve taken ova from one cow, planted them in another, and gotten calves. There’s a man in Australia who plans to raise blooded cattle from scrub cows that way.”
“You have done your homework.”
“Oh, that isn’t all. There’s a Dr. Carrel in New Jersey who has been able to keep chicken tissue alive for months—he says indefinitely—in a nutrient solution, in a temperature-controlled jar in his lab. It grows, Keogh! It grows so much he has to cut it away every once in a while.”
“This is crazy. This is—it’s insane,” he growled. “And what do you think you’ll get if you bring one of these monsters to term?”
“We’ll bring thousands of them to term,” she said composedly. “And one of them will be—him.” She leaned forward abruptly, and her even tone of voice broke; a wildness grew through her face and voice, and though it was quiet, it shattered him: “It will be his flesh, the pattern of him, his own substance grown again. His hair, Keogh. His fingerprints. His—eyes. His—his self.”
“I can’t—” Keogh shook himself like a wet spaniel, but it changed nothing; he was still here, she, the bed, the sleeper, and this dreadful, this inconceivably horrible, wrong idea.
She smiled then, put out her hand and touched him; incredibly, it was a mother’s smile, warm and comforting, a mother’s loving, protective touch; her voice was full of affection. “Keogh, if it won’t work, it won’t work, no matter what we do. Then you’ll be right. I think it will work. It’s what I want. Don’t you want me to have what I want?”
He had to smile, and she smiled back. “You’re a young devil,” he said ardently. “Got me coming and going, haven’t you? Why did you want me to fight it?”
“I didn’t,” she said, “but if you fight me, you’ll come up with problems nobody else could possibly think of, and once we’ve thought of them, we’ll be ready, don’t you see? I’ll fight with you, Keogh,” she said, shifting her strange bright spectrum from tenderness to a quiet, convinced, invincible certainty. “I’ll fight with you, I’ll lift and carry, I’ll buy and sell and kill if I have to, but I am going to bring him back. You know something, Keogh?”
She waved her hand in a gesture that included him, the room, the castle and grounds and all the other castle and grounds; the pseudonyms, the ships and trains, the factories and exchanges, the mountains and acres and mines and banks and the thousands of people which, taken together, were Wyke: “I always knew that all this was,” she said, “and I’ve come to understand that this is mine. But I used to wonder sometimes, what it was all for. Now I know. Now I know.”
A mouth on his mouth, a weight on his stomach. He felt boneless and nauseated, limp as grease drooling. The light around him was green, and all shapes blurred.
The mouth on his mouth, the weight on his stomach, a breath of air, welcome but too warm, too moist. He needed it desperately but did not like it, and found a power-plant full of energy to gather it up in his lungs and fling it away; but his weakness so filtered all that effort that it emerged in a faint bubbling sigh.
The mouth on his mouth again, and the weight on his stomach and another breath. He tried to turn his head but someone held him by the nose. He blew out the needed, unsatisfactory air and replaced it by a little gust of his own inhalation. On this he coughed; it was too rich, pure, too good. He coughed as one does over a pickle-barrel; good air hurt his lungs.
He felt his head and shoulders lifted, shifted, by which he learned that he had been flat on his back on stone, or something flat and quite that hard, and was now on smooth, firm softness. The good sharp air came and went, his weak coughs fewer, until he fell into a dazed peace. The face that bent over his was too close to focus, or he had lost the power to focus; either way, he didn’t care. Drowsily he stared up into the blurred brightness of that face and listened uncritically to the voice—
—the voice crooning wordlessly and comfortingly, and somehow, in its wordlessness, creating new expressions for joy and delight for which words would not do. Then after all there were words, half sung, half whispered; and he couldn’t catch them, and he couldn’t catch them and then … and then he was sure he heard: “How could it be, such a magic as this: all this and the eyes as well …” Then, demanding, “You are the shape of the not-you; tell me, are you in there?”
He opened his eyes wide and saw her face clearly at last and the dark hair, and the eyes were green—true deep sea-green. Her tangled hair, drying, crowned her like vines, and the leafy roof close above seemed part of her and the green eyes, and threw green light on the unaccountably blond transparency of her cheeks. He genuinely did not know, at the moment, what she was. She had said to him (was it years ago?) “I thought you were a faun …” He had not, at the moment, much consciousness, not to say whimsy, at his command; she was simply something unrelated to anything in his experience.
He was aware of gripping, twisting pain rising, filling, about to explode in his upper abdomen. Some thick wire within him had kinked, and knowing well that it should be unbent, he made a furious, rebellious effort and pulled it through. The explosion came, but in nausea, not in agony. Convulsively he turned his head, surged upward, and let it go.
He saw with too much misery to be horrified the bright vomit surging on and around her knee, and running into the crevice between thigh and calf where she had her leg bent and tucked under her, and the clots left there as the fluid ran away. And she—
She sat where she was, held his head, cradled him in her arms, soothed him and crooned to him and said that was good, good; he’d feel better now. The weakness floored him and receded; then shakily he pressed away from her, sat up, bowed his head and gasped for breath. “Whooo,” he said.
“Boy,” she said; and she said it in exact concert with him. He clung to his shins and wiped the nausea-tears from his left eye, then his right, on his knee-cap. “Boy oh boy,” he said, and she said it with him in concert.
So at last he looked at her.
He looked at her, and would never forget what he saw, and exactly the way it was. Late sunlight made into lace by the bower above clothed her; she leaned toward him, one small hand flat on the ground, one slim supporting arm straig
ht and straight down; her weight turned up that shoulder and her head tilted toward it as if drawn down by the heavy darkness of her hair. It gave a sense of yielding, as if she were fragile, which he knew she was not. Her other hand lay open across one knee, the palm up and the fingers not quite relaxed, as if they held something; and indeed they did, for a spot of light, gold turned coral by her flesh, lay in her palm. She held it just so, just right, unconsciously, and her hand held that rare knowledge that closed, a hand may not give nor receive. For his lifetime he had it all, each tiniest part, even to the gleaming big toenail at the underside of her other calf. And she was smiling, and her complex eyes adored.
Guy Gibbon knew his life’s biggest moment during the moment itself, a rarity in itself, and of all times of life, it was time to say the unforgettable, for anything he said now would be.
He shuddered, and then smiled back at her. “Oh … boy,” he breathed.
And again they were laughing together until, puzzled, he stopped and asked, “Where am I?”
She would not answer, so he closed his eyes and puzzled it out. Pine bower … undress somewhere … swimming. Oh, swimming. And then across the lake, and he had met—He opened his eyes and looked at her and said, “You.” Then swimming back, cold, his gut full of too much food and warm juice and moldy cake to boot, and, “… you must have saved my life.”
“Well somebody had to. You were dead.”
“I should’ve been.”
“No!” she cried. “Don’t you ever say that again!” And he could see she was absolutely serious.
“I only meant, for stupidity. I ate a lot of junk, and some cake I think was moldy. Too much, when I was hot and tired, and then like a bonehead I went right into the water, so anybody who does that deserves to—”
“I meant it,” she said levelly, “never again. Didn’t you ever hear of the old tradition of the field of battle, when one man saved another’s life, that life became his to do what he wanted with?”
“What do you want to do with mine?”
The Nail and the Oracle Page 11