by Неизвестный
Basalt is a hard stone. Mandy ran her hand along the ice-crusted edge. The thing must be very old. What tremendous effort it must have been to bring it here, for it was certainly an import.
Just as she had been told to do, Mandy went to the center of the stone and sat down. She folded her cloak under her and sat cross-legged, so that she made a sort of a tent and was at the same time insulated from the icy rock. She faced southeast, away from the wind. This cloak had been exactly the right garment for what she was expected to do, which was sit and wait. . . and wonder how crazy she was to have come here.
Some adventure to get this cold. Not to mention thirsty and hungry. An image of those delicious unfinished pancakes came to mind. She saw the dark-flecked surface of them, the slightly crumbly interior, the amber glow of the syrup oozing along the plate. The memory confirmed the fact that she had very quickly ceased to enjoy this. She was up here alone and this was a damned cold place and she was freezing.
No sooner had the thought of leaving crossed her mind than a bird, of all things, fluttered out of the rowan and flapped about her head. It wasn't in the least afraid. This place must be very little visited. The dusty little sparrow was what city people called a trash bird. First with one bright, blank eye and then the other it looked at her. She had the distinct impression not only that it was a girl bird but that it felt kind of friendly toward her.
If she had brought crumbs she could have fed it, the little thing was so unafraid. She had never fed a wild bird before. “Sweet, sweet,” she said. It flew away.
The next moment a squirrel, its fur rich and gray-black, came ambling along. It stopped at the rowan and ate berries for a time. Then it, too, came over to the rock and looked at the strange creature there.
“Hi,” Mandy said.
The squirrel raised itself up on its haunches and wiggled its nose at her. Then, as abruptly as if it had been called, it jumped and raced away over the edge of the mountain. It had not been gone ten seconds before Mandy felt the pressure of paws on her back. She turned around and startled a raccoon, which tumbled about in the snow, righted itself, mewed at her, and went on with its casual sniffing of her cloak. Then it poked its frigid nose at her hands, smelling them carefully. “Well, I like you, too.”
The sound of her voice made the coon look up at her. It mewed back, the cry so full of question that she ached to answer. But she could only smile, as she did not speak coon.
She began to understand Constance's sending her here. There might not be any fairies, but it was nevertheless a magical spot and a fine place to let the images flow in her mind. Despite the cold, the ice, despite everything, she could create extraordinary fairies here. There are places of life and places of death. Here on this inhospitable mountain between the sky and the rowan Amanda knew a feeling so strong it shocked her. Especially because it was not an aggressive feeling at all, but one of the peace and rightness of this world. No matter the fate of man, the loss or regaining of the old cup of kindness, peace abides.
A quick, hairy movement beyond the rowan brought her back to the present. She almost screamed when she saw what was there. Surely it couldn't be. But it was, and it had just noticed her. It moved like a great black furry rock, humping quickly along. There was nothing cute about the bear's black little eyes or the fog coming from its muzzle. She sat dead still, her attention fixed on the approaching beast.
The closer it got the faster it came. She could hear it breathing now, hear the clatter of its claws on the ice. A terrible, buzzing fear froze her.
When it bellowed she knew it, too, was a female, as the other animals had also been. If each animal could be said to represent an attribute of woman, this bear was the power of her protective instinct. Her greatest and most dangerous power. A she-bear protecting her cubs is the most fearsome of creatures.
Slowly, carefully, Mandy spread her arms, palms open. Why the gesture? She did not know. Now she could smell the bear, a thick odor of rancid fur. Its coat was shiny with secretions. Mandy found herself looking into the animal's eyes. She saw there a femininity so savage, so full of implacable power, that it drew a choked little sound from her throat. The bear grumbled reply, stared a moment, then became indifferent to her.
It walked on past, crashing off into the fastness of the mountain. Perhaps this bear was without cubs, or they were not nearby.
While it had diverted her attention something else had happened, something which filled her soul with a coldness far greater than that of the wind.
About the rowan there stood six small men in snow-white coats and breeches. On their feet were white pointed shoes, and on their heads close-fitting caps just as Constance had described.
It wasn't possible. And yet, here they were.
Robin's warning rushed back into her mind.
She screamed, a single, sharp cry, quickly controlled.
These men had sharp faces with pointed noses and large eyes. Perhaps they looked so different precisely because they were so almost-human. But then one of them licked his lips, and Mandy got a glimpse of tiny teeth more like a rat's than a man's.
Together they raised bows, and mounted arrows on them made of twigs. There came then on the air the ringing of small bells and a whisper of tiny feet in the snow.
She appeared from behind the stone, all blond, her hair as soft as elder blow, her eyes startlingly dark brown, her body lightly dressed in the very lace Constance had promised. She was wee, not nearly as large as her six guards. On her head was a garland of rowan, berries and stems and leaves. Seeing such beauty, how ineffable, how frail, how strong, Mandy thought she would simply sink away. By comparison she herself was coarse. All delicacy seemed to have concentrated itself in this single small creature. Around her neck there was drawn a silver chain, and at her throat hung a gleaming sickle of moon.
Mandy instinctively lowered her eyes. It was more bearable this way, just looking at the woman's feet, no more than two inches long, naked in the snow. Then the feet rose out of her line of sight. She looked up, startled. The girl was floating in the air. Wings flapped and she was gone. A great gray owl hooted from the top of the rowan, its horns darkly silhouetted against the sky. It took flight, racing round and round the rowan. Next hoofs clattered on the stones, and a black mare reared into nothingness, its neighs echoing off to silence.
An ancient woman, drooling, her teeth yellow, one eye put out, her hands fantastic with arthritis, scraped up on a stick. “Oh, my God! Can I help you?”
She held out her hands then and was as suddenly gone, the maiden spinning forth from her flying gray hair. The girl took Mandy's large hands in her own tiny ones. She was grave now, her eyes limpid—and yet so very aware. They were scary. Her lips parted as if she would speak. Mandy remembered Robin's warning about the whisper. The girl's voice was as much the wind's as her own. “You're trembling,” she said.
“I'm cold.”
“Come a little way with me.”
Mandy started to stand up, but she was stopped by the astonishing sensation of being enclosed in enormous, invisible hands. Woman's hands, immense and strong and soft. They drew her close to an invisible breast, clutched her, enfolded her. It was a terrifyingly wrong sensation; there was nobody here, and nobody could ever be so huge. She struggled, she tried to scream, she felt her stomach unmooring with fright.
But she found herself being cuddled in warm perfumed folds that could be felt and smelled and even tasted, so rich they were. All of the tension, the discomfort, the fear in Mandy's body melted away. Then, just as she was beginning to enjoy herself, she was set down. She wobbled, she cried out, she flailed at the air.
Never had she felt so thoroughly explored, so—somehow—examined. She had the eerie feeling mat whatever had held her had also been in her mind. And was still there, looking and discovering, moving like a strange voice in her thoughts. But it wasn't ugly at all, it was young and so very, very happy and so glad to meet her. She couldn't help herself, she burst out laughing.
&nb
sp; The lady laughed, too.
“Who are you?” Mandy asked her.
But she was gone, they were all gone, as clouds upon the air.
BOOK TWO:
The Sleeping Beauty
Thai such have died enables us
The tranquilter to die:
That such have lived, certificate
For immortality.
—Emily Dickinson
Chapter 11
The torn moved quickly, nervously, through the silent animal room. The terranums were empty, the bloodstained monkey cage was empty. Even though the animals were gone, the room was still full of the ammonia stink of captured things. The torn hated this room, but he hated more the people next door, hated them enough to use them mercilessly. Because of their guilty dislike of themselves, he did not consider Bonnie and Dr. Walker capable of being true witches, and Clark understood enough to take care of himself.
He could feel the faint rush of microwaves from the newly installed motion detector in the center of the room. Such things were not powerful in his world, and they neither surprised nor impressed him. When he wanted Dr. Walker to come in here, he would trip the alarm, but not until then.
Despite his disapproval of her, the torn could not help but feel a little compassion for Bonnie. She was about to suffer a most interesting death.
George preferred to think of himself and Bonnie as wanderers in a deadly jungle. Somehow dark was not with them, perhaps because he was so dedicated a technician, too realistic to have a commitment to the romance of the experiment, and no sense of the art of the work.
Unless at least one of them was awake and on guard, they had to assume their experiment would be ruined by Brother Pierce and his fanatics. There were various things George would like to do to Brother Pierce, chief among them being dismemberment. Slow, considered dismemberment, the lifting off of appendages. No. Burn him. Do it with a candle. Or tattoo his crimes on him. People did not understand the politics of pain, how it must settle in the victim and remain there for a time. An image from his dreams, of cat claws, hung a moment in his thoughts. He could light a fire in agony's tower on behalf of all destroyed things. He raged, and he hurt, and felt a fine rush of guilt: he could have delivered his body to Bonnie's will just then.
But he enjoyed too much the intricate mechanics of killing her, enjoyed her trembles and the faint scent of her sweat and the coolness of the skin to which he would soon attach electrodes.
He surveyed this tangled technical realm of his and saw that it was well sealed against the rages of Brother Pierce.
It had taken a trip all the way to Aitoona to find locks for the lab doors that were both secure and cheap. Somehow George had installed them, reading the sketchy instructions, going by trial and error. His fingers were thoroughly mutilated but the tumblers worked smoothly and the steel protective plates were tight against the doors. He had put bolts on the windows and had bought a fifty-dollar motion detector at Radio Shack. It sat in the middle of the now empty animal room, ready to give warning if anybody should come that way. He had tried to buy a closed-circuit TV camera for the hall outside the lab, but he couldn't afford the four hundred dollars.
“This is just wonderful,” Clark said. He was staring at a piece of interoffice correspondence. “Really very nice.”
Bonnie was eating boysenberry yogurt; George had been staring at the coils that surrounded the outline of her body that they had chalked on the lab table. “What?” she asked.
Her eyes, so green, so full of fire, regarded Clark calmly. George himself was shaking, not with excitement or desire, but with the thought of just how risky this was going to be for her.
“It's a very politely worded requisition for our lab space. 'In view of the impending completion of your grant-related activities there,' it says. You'll never guess what they're going to put in here.”
“A bar?”
“Fruit flies. They're going to use it as a fruit fly hatchery for Biology One.”
“I wish I had a Bio One assistantship. No offense, George, but it's a secure job.” Even Bonnie's voice was calm.
“I don't know,” Clark said, “the work's too predictable. Boring as hell, raising generation after generation of fruit flies.”
“Some people,” Bonnie said around a spoonful of yogurt, “are better than others at fruit flies.” She laughed, high and sharp, betraying a first sign of nervousness. “Your trouble is you're not committed to your work. I don't think you care. Take me, I'm the opposite. I'm dying to keep my job.”
George looked at her. There was panic in there behind the brittle humor. He did not relish the prospect of her getting balky. What would he do if she tried to back out?
“I think we'd be best off if you went in with as calm an attitude as possible. I'd like to see you in alpha before we put you under.”
“In alpha! You think I can lie there meditating while you kill me? Look, if you want to talk about it, let's be completely frank with one another. Shall we?”
“Of course.”
“Then I'll drop my act and tell you the truth. Yeah, you guessed it. I am scared to death! Absolutely.” She laughed again, this time without even the pretense of mirth. “ 'S funny, scared to death. But what if—” She stopped. The silence thickened rapidly. She stared down at her yogurt container. On the other side of the room dark muttered numbers and worked with calipers, positioning the coils so that the fields they created would touch without overlapping.
“Are you afraid we can't bring you back? I just want you to think of the principles involved. You know you'll be returning. The physics is basic, so is the biology. Nothing's going to go wrong.”
“Oh, George, you really don't understand, do you? Not at all'”
“Understand what? Tell me what you're driving at, then I'll see if I understand.”
“George, what if something is out there?”
He restrained himself from laughing with relief. He had been afraid that he was going to have to cope with real death panic. But this sort of fear wasn't that bad. “Come on, now, you're a scientist and a witch. You know what's out there.”
“Oh, no. I don't think you understand. I've enjoyed the witch rituals and all, but I was baptized a Catholic. They brand your soul at birth.”
“Oh, Bonnie, come on. That's absurd. Belief is relative. Death will be exactly what you expect it to be.”
“I just keep thinking, what if there really is a hell? And then I think, what if I fall in and I can't get out? I know it's stupid, it's highly unsophisticated, but there it is.”
“That's what's scaring you?”
“That's it. I don't think I can help expecting some kind of Catholic hell. Or worse, a Catholic heaven, which is a form of hell where the good are brainwashed into wanting to sing at all times.”
“You know what it's going to be like? Shall I tell you?”
“I wish you could.”
“My dear, beautiful Bonnie.” He caressed her cheek. It was so warm, so soft—he kissed it. “I would never do anything I thought might hurt you in any way.”
He imagined her hanging from the ceiling, himself at her feet, and she comes down from her garrote transformed into a virgin of retribution and takes him at last to the black chamber.
The chamber in his basement.
No! Don't think of that. Not now.
“You're going to kill me, and I'm going to find out I'm still a Catholic after it's too late. The Devil—”
“You know where that legend came from! The Homed God isn't a devil any more than the Mother Goddess is a virgin. The King of the Netherworld and the Queen of Heaven are the oldest of seasonal deities.”
“I'm being sacrificed for a lark. So you can find out what it's like.”
When he spoke, it was as if the words were formed by an outer mechanism, a device that had been made to seem human: “Oh, that's low,” said the outer George Walker. “That's a low blow. Let's get our priorities in order here. I think that's what we haven't done. First, we ar
e performing this experiment for a reason, and it's an important one. The craft needs it. Constance needs it, and we all love her, don't we? Second, we will be giving mankind a new tooi. A person killed in this way and cryogenicaily frozen could last indefinitely. What's more we'll revolutionize surgery, make ultra-long space voyages more practical.”
“Don't patronize me! I'm scared, that's all. I don't know what I'm facing.”
Clark came over. “I hate to interrupt this charming conversation, but our electronics are ready.”
Bonnie stood up as if she had been sitting on a tack. Then she slumped, Clark caught her from behind.
“I know it's stupid but I'm so scared I can't move!”
George saw the tears brimming in her eyes. He had to act quickly. That was the merciful thing to do—and also, she might be on the point of changing her mind. “Hey, now, take it easy.” He sat her back down on her stool, “dark, do you think you could bring in that swivel chair from the other room?”
When dark opened the door to the animal room, the motion detector started warbling. After a moment he cut it off and came back with the chair.
“Better restart the detector. Don't give them any chances at all.”
“Okay.”
As dark went back, George moved Bonnie to the more comfortable chair. He stroked her hair.
“Because I'm a woman you think you can cuddle away all my fears.” Her voice was ugly and low. “Get me my cigarettes.” She drew herself away from him.
“The no-smoking rule—”
“Get me my cigarettes!”
He got them from her purse, held them out to her. When she took one, he lit it for her. She smoked in silence for a time, dark came back and stood over them with his arms folded, his expression dark and analytical. The only sound in the lab was the intimate noise of Bonnie's smoking, the crinkle of the burning tobacco, the blowing sound when she expelled the smoke.