by John Crowley
“Everything?” I asked.
“That’s Relativity,” he said.
Well, Relativity, then, whatever that is; we’ll try a confusion. I opened the silver and the black pots; from the one I took a granule of black, like a cinder, and swallowed it. I wet my thumb and pressed it across the rose surface of the other, and then wiped the thumb inside my lip. And then went on smoking, building a pile of ash in the window, which the wind, grown harder, blew off into the wet.
There was just enough room inside my head for the game, though people standing in back to watch filled up the window-eyes and made it dark. The players sat cheek to cheek in a circle with knees drawn up. They played with only one ball, and though there was a lot of chatter, there was no argument about how to begin: the ball began on my mother’s knee.
“Whose knee?” they said, and the gossip Laugh Aloud moved the ball to Mbaba’s knee. “As for the silver ball and glove,” Mbaba said, “they’re gone; but for the rest, see here”: and she opened her mouth to show a perfect set of teeth, as green as grass.
“Whose knee?” they said, and the ball moved to Painted Red’s knee, and from hers to Seven Hands’s, who said, “One day, big man, one day,” and back to Painted Red, who was saying, “A knot in the cord—that makes me laugh.” The ball in her long, sure tweezers paused in air. “Whose knee?” they said, and the ball went to Once a Day’s knee. She raised her impossible blue eyes and said, “Ever after.”
“Ask women,” said Seven Hands, and moved the ball to In a Corner, who said, smoking softly, “Lighter than air, lighter than air.”
“An old joke of Roy’s,” said Once a Day, and moved me to Painted Red. “Many lives,” she said, “many lives in the moment between birth and dying.”
“This is spring,” said Once a Day, and with an unsure hand she moved tweezers toward the ball on Painted Red’s knee. Zhinsinura shook her head slowly as the tweezers came close.
“How many lives does a cat have?” she asked.
“Nine,” said Painted Red.
“Miss,” said Houd, who wore a bracelet of blue stones; and with his yellow-nailed hand he put the dropped ball on his own knee.
“Whose knee?” they all said, and tweezers came for the ball. “Great Knot and First Trap make Little Trap, Little Trap and the Expedition make Little Second Gate, or Great Trap Unlocked in Leaf cord,” said Painted Red, and the ball began to fly again from knee to knee.
“The fly sees out all around,” said Budding, and moved me to Blooming’s knee.
“And sees nothing that holds him back,” said Budding; “and still he can’t move.”
“And let that be a lesson,” said Blooming, and moved me to Blink’s knee. “We’re all legless men,” Blink said, yawning. “It doesn’t get better, a lost leg, like a cold.”
“Are you a saint yet?” said Budding, and Blooming moved me back to Once a Day’s, sharp knee, and Blink said, “Bits and pieces,” and moved me to the knee of another girl, a girl in a starred black robe with a great cat beside her, watching. “How can you think about me,” she said, “when I’m not there?”
“Miss! Two misses,” said the cat. The ball was retrieved and went to Zher’s knee. Once a Day said softly: “Beautiful.”
“After all,” said Painted Red as they paused, “It’s only a game.”
“Whose knee?”
The ball started fast around. “The object,” said Houd, “is to never discover you’re playing it.”
“To someday,” said Painted Red, “become transparent; and in transparent life to be free from death.”
“To learn to live with it,” said Blink. “We learn to live with it; we try. We have our systems and our wisdom…”
“How is truthful speaking done?” asked Zhinsinura. “Let’s both tell a secret.”
“I don’t remember riddles,” said Once a Day.
“The Salutation, the Body, and the Complimentary Close. You can find a path through that.”
“A path,” said Painted Red.
“Is only a name,” said Zhinsinura.
“Is drawn on your feet,” said Mbaba.
“For the place where you are,” said Zhinsinura.
“When-we-wandered,” said Mbaba.
“Where you’ve been on it,” said Zhinsinura, “is only a story.”
“And then, and then, and then,” said Blink.
“Some of the stories are pleasant ones…”
“That’s Relativity,” said Houd.
“… and some are not. That’s dark and light.”
“He was dark,” said Stick, and picked up the ball with tweezers of wet black wood. The ball slipped and bobbled within the twiggy tweezers. He could get no grip. And they had been doing so well.
“How many lives does a cat have?” asked Puff. “Quick.”
“Many lives,” said Painted Red, “many lives in the moment between birth and dying.” Stick just managed to wiggle the ball to her knee, and everyone said aaaah.
“Whose knee?” they all said. “Dr. Boots’s knee,” said Once a Day softly; “this is spring.”
“And truthful speaking is…”
“Transparent,” said Painted Red.
“And dark and light is…”
“Opaque,” said Zhinsinura.
The ball they played with was a hazelnut. Zhinsinura’s tweezers that reached for it were like a nutcracker. “Opaque, transparent,” said the ball. “Like way-wall.”
“Miss,” said Once a Day, a little sadly, but as though she’d expected it.
Zhinsinura, smiling, picked up the ball in her fingers. “Way-wall?” she said. “There’s no such thing.” She inserted the nut in her cracker.
“Three misses,” Teeplee said. “Game’s over.” Zhinsinura calmly cracked the nut.
I looked up at that sound. Above me, a thin crack ran the width of the skull, making fingers.
The cigar in my hand had gone out. Brom lay asleep, but not in the bed where he usually lay. Through the door in the floor I could see the fire burning low and shadowy. Outside the sound of the evening was heavy, and I realized what it was—rain. The crack in the skull widened with a little noise, and I jumped up with a cry, which woke the doctor but not Brom.
What doctor?
“That’s not right, though,” I said. “It wasn’t really three misses.”
“Yes,” the doctor said. She wasn’t old, though her hair was white and the hands which held my black and silver cloth around her were lined. She moved, and the bed crackled beneath her. She looked at me with wide still eyes.
“Because,” I said, “I do know how truthful speaking’s done.”
“Yes,” the doctor said.
“It’s done the same as dark and light.”
“Yes,” the doctor said.
“Yes,” I said, “because when you speak truthfully, what you’re doing is telling whoever can hear you about the dark and light, just then. The better you tell an old story, the more you are talking about right now.”
“Yes,” the doctor said.
’So I have always been dark and light. I never had to learn it, because I didn’t know it.”
“Yes,” she said.
“And never stopped saying what I really meant or really meaning what I said, because how could I do otherwise?”
“Yes.”
“Then there’s no difference. They’re the same.”
“Yes.”
“And is that what it means, then, that there’s no such thing as way-wall?”
“Yes.”
“So. All right. Two misses, then.”
“Yes.”
“The game goes on.”
“Yes.”
“So. All right. But,” I said, sitting down, “if they’re the same, then what’s the difference?”
“Yes,” the doctor said.
A loud crack overhead made me duck. I looked up. The split in my head was widening horribly. Rain seeped in, staining the white gray. Brom looked upward, and then at me. I wen
t to my pack, tossed in the Four Pots, and found my specs. I put them on. “I think,” I said, “that it’s time to be going.”
The doctor watched me as I came close to where she lay in the bed. “This will cover us, it’s big enough,” I said, and drew off the black and silver which covered her.
In the gloom I thought there was a cat with her in the bed; but of course she was the cat. She turned herself with careful grace and went on fours out of the bed and across the floor. Her tabby legs and thighs were like those of Fa’afa of the List; her hands helped her across the floor to look out the window. There she sat with knees up and her hands on the window ledge. Her tail swept around to cover her clawed feet. Above us the skull crunched and split; a fine white powder fell.
“Anyway,” I said, my voice catching, “we have to go.”
She looked from me to the rain, and then to the door in the floor. Soundlessly she padded to it and disappeared through it. Brom followed her. I shouldered my pack, and gathered up the black and silver, put on my hat. I glanced up: the skull was crazed.
They were waiting at the outside door, with the thoughtful reluctance of cats before rain. Brom would have to decide for himself; I moved hesitantly to the doctor and knelt before her. The wet wind from the door made her shiver, but when she saw I wore the silver glove—I don’t know how I came to have it on—she grew calm and raised her arms slowly to slip them around my neck. With a soft cry that I don’t remember, was it Yes or No, I put one arm beneath her and lifted her to carry. And we stepped out into the night and the rain.
The leaves oozed under my feet as I stumbled down the incline away from the head. Gusts of rainy wind blew across the way, and I nearly stumbled with my burden. Behind me, I thought I heard the head I had abandoned crumble to pieces; I tried to look back, but it was all darkness and woods, and the doctor’s hands held me. I could feel her breath on me, gentle and warm, as though she were asleep and though my grip on her tightened at every stumble and lurch, she was easy; she even seemed to nestle against me under the robe which covered us.
When I came to broad naked Road I stopped. I looked both ways, but it was all wind and rain and stone and dim black-boned trees. “I think,” I said, already panting, “I think I know a place where we might go.”
“Yes,” the doctor said, muffled by the black. She sighed; I sighed; and we started north:
That was a long walk. It had taken after all, some months to come this far south from home: the walk to Blink’s woods, and south to Service City, and a summer after that, always going south; and this burden was heavy. “And what with the rain,” I sobbed, my lungs aching, “what with spring not coming…” When at last drizzly dawn came, and I stood on a bare hill pied with snow and looked down into the wide valley of That River from whose hidden length white steam rose like winter breath, my arms and hands had been locked so long that I knew the hardest part would be letting go.
“Somewhere,” I said to her, “down in those hills across That River is a wood; and in that wood, if you know it, is a path. The path gets clearer as you walk it, until it widens under the trees, and you see a door. The door will grow clearer as you come closer to it, until you are standing before it; and then you can step in, and look: a girl with blue eyes as opaque as sky is playing Rings, and looks up when you enter. But I can’t go any further.”
I sagged to my knees and let down my weight. Slowly, trembling, I uncurled my hands as my muscles snapped back on themselves with vengeance. I drew back the cloth and looked at what I had brought, and wondered if it had been worth it to carry this stuff so far.
There was a nice plastic jug and a funnel, which I had caught rain water in—scarce, they are. There was a spade blade, not too rusted, and a length of white close-line. There was some Book, mostly moldered, which I had thought to give to Blink if I ever saw him again. Angel silver bits and pieces—one of them Teeplee had called a dog collar; I thought that might be useful. And—heaviest of all—a machine, rusted where it wasn’t plastic-coated, that looked something like a mechanical version of Blink’s crostic-words: it had rows of little tabs with letters on them, and other inexplicable parts. Teeplee called it a spelling machine, with some contempt. I had kept it to see if I might learn to spell from it.
“It’s all just too heavy to carry, though,” I said. “Just too heavy.”
“So your avvenging days are over?” Teeplee said. “I thought the speakers never threw away anything.”
My heart slowed. The hilltop and the valley patched with fog seemed to thin, as though I could press upon it only a little harder with my senses and see through it. I did press: what I saw was the road leading into Teeplee’s ruin, and the old avvenger himself in his stars and stripes. I had walked through the night and reached, not home, carrying the doctor, but this place, carrying a load of junk. Probably, behind me, my head was still whole. It didn’t matter: I wasn’t going back.
“No, not over,” I said. My voice sounded thin and uncertain in this reality. “But they have a lot of stuff there already.”
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Home,” I said, “now that spring’s coming.” And it was: the rain had foretold it and I hadn’t known: but now where I knelt before that quiet pile it was quite clear: in the wet bushes around me each drop of water on each twig had within it an eye of green, and the wind that combed the dull grass showed tender new shoots starting. Of course Boots would never have told such a secret, would never whisper that spring was for sure until I had forgotten it was possible at all. That’s dark and light, I thought; this is spring; it’s nice now. I let go then of the doctor: and letting go felt like falling, falling gently backward into a waiting pair of hands I would never see but could not doubt were there.
“How about this, though?” Teeplee said, and from within his robe he took out something small, a piece of winter ice, no, something else. “I took a trip,” he said.
It wasn’t a ball at all; it looked like one of the knobs that hung suspended as though in water within Boots’s pedestal. I raised the silver glove on my hand. “Give it to me,” I said.
“It’ll cost you,” Teeplee said.
“Everything I have,” I said. He made as though to hand me the thing, but released it; perhaps he dropped it, but it didn’t drop: my glove began to sound, a strange whistle came from it yet not from it, and the ball came floating to it and landed in my palm as gently as a bird.
And joined, they made a double note, a note that some engine here, in the City, heard, isn’t that right? Yes, some angel ear that had been waiting for how many centuries to hear it: and when it was heard, Mongolfier began to prepare.
“This stuff isn’t much,” Teeplee said, nudging my treasures with a toe. “Not for a good thing like that ball. That’s a good thing, and in perfect condition.”
“All right,” I said; and I found and took from my sleeve a bright piece of ancient Money, the piece with which I had been bot. I held it for a moment, feeling under my thumb the upswept hair of the angel’s face cut on it, but it no longer mattered to me. I had found what was lost and could take it to the warren and put it in its place again, and tell the long, the strange story of how I had come by it: and anyway, giving it to Teeplee in exchange for St. Andy’s ball couldn’t free me, for it’s the same with Money as with anything, as with every other thing men do: it’s all only one way.
FOURTH FACET
It was nearly summer when I stood for real on the hilltop that overlooks the valley Little Belaire lives in, for there really is such a place; it was more tricked out with details than in my confusion, and of course green, but I recognized it. It was just the time that I had left, three years before.
I had thought at first just to run down the hill as fast as I could and find the path to Buckle cord’s door; but something stopped me there. I laid out my camp, as I had for every night along the way, and sat. Night came, and a moon near full; day again. I thought: when I go down the hill I will be as Olive was, arriving sudde
nly from far away, a great cat beside me with frank yellow eyes, and a terrible secret to tell.
I didn’t tell you that at my first camp after I had left Teeplee’s, Brom found me. He frightened me by sneaking up to the fire, and then I laughed aloud to see him. But after he’d smelled my breath, just to make sure I was I, and looked over the camp, he only lay on his feet with a sigh and went to sleep. A cat.
It was Brom who first saw my visitor. Another day had passed; I was still unable to make up my mind to go down the hill and across That River, and lay on my back looking up at the gold-green new leaves thinking of nothing, when I heard Brom making that noise—ak-ak-ak-ak—that some cats make at birds or for no reason at the sky. I rolled over to see what made him snicker—a hawk, perhaps, hanging high up—and sat up with a cry.
Someone was letting himself down out of the clouded sky on a huge white umbrella.
It was a great half-globe of translucent white. Ropes ran from its edges, holding it taut over a ball of air; and in the ropes a man hung like a fly caught in a web, holding on, his feet moving idly as he descended. I leaped up and ran, following his long descent as it changed with the wind. As it came closer, it seemed to grow larger, an immense, undulating dome; I could see clearly the man in the ropes. He waved to me, and then gave all his attention to manipulating his thing by tugging on the ropes so that it would fall on the hillside meadow and not in the trees. I ran after him. He hurtled to the ground, moving fast and not gently at all, and it seemed certain he would strike the ground with tremendous force, despite his umbrella, which now looked like a very bad idea and not workable at all. I held my breath as his feet struck the meadow. He flung himself over just then, thinking, I suppose, to break his fall that way; and down after him came the dome, just cloth after all, collapsing and then billowing away outward in the breeze.