Otherwise: Three Novels by John Crowley

by John Crowley

  It was close to the line of woods when the falcon exploded above it, transforming himself, with a wing noise they could hear, from bullet into ax. His foot struck the woodcock with the certainty of a million generations, killing it instantly. He bore it to the ground, leaving a cloud of fine feathers floating in the path they had taken.

  Sten came close carefully, his heart hard and elated, his throat raw from panting in the cold air. Hawk tore at the woodcock, a bleeding bolus of brown plumage, needle beak open. Sten stood over them and his mouth was suddenly full of water. He fumbled in his pocket for the lure. “Should I lure him off?”

  “Yes,” Loren said.

  Hawk turned from breaking the cock’s pinion to look up at Sten. He mantled, not wanting to rise to the fist, but greeting Sten; rejoicing, Sten tried not to think, in his master. Then he cocked his liquid eye at the woodcock, and with foot and beak returned to it. His bells made sounds as he worked. Unwillingly, not wanting to spoil Hawk’s enjoyment, but knowing he must, Sten took out the lure. He looked to Mika where she held the horses, and to Loren, who watched the dogs. “Hawk,” he said, all he could think to say. “Hawk.”

  On the ride home, he let Loren carry the falcon, because his arm had begun to tremble with the weight, but he walked nearby, leading his horse, letting Mika chase on ahead. When they came near the farmhouse, they saw Mika looking out to the weedy road that went past the house and farther on joined the gravel drive up to the mansion. A slim black three-wheeler had come off the road and was approaching. It slowed as it came near them, seemed to consider stopping, but then didn’t. It picked up speed silently and turned onto the elm-shaded drive toward the mansion.

  “Was that that counselor?” Mika asked.

  “I guess,” Sten said.

  “What did he want here? Anyway, he’s not allowed.”

  “Why not? Maybe he is. Isn’t it only other people who can’t come in? If he’s not exactly people…”

  “He’s not allowed.” For some reason, not cold, though her legs were bare beneath leather shorts, Mika shivered.

  The counselor wore an inverness cape because ordinary coats, even if they could be made to fit him, only emphasized his strangeness. His chauffeur opened the door of the three-wheeler’s tiny passenger compartment and helped him out; he spoke quietly to the chauffeur for a moment and on tiny feet started up the broad stairs of the house, helping himself with a stick. The guards at the door neither stopped him nor saluted him, though they did stare. They had been instructed that it wasn’t protocol to salute him; he wasn’t, officially, a member of the Autonomy’s government. They didn’t stop him because he was unmistakable, there were no two of him in this world, and that also was why they stared.

  Inside the mansion it was dim, which suited his eyes. He indicated to the servant who met him that he would retain cape and stick, and he was led down several halls to the center of the house.

  Halls fascinated him. He enjoyed their odors of passage, their furniture no one ever used, their pictures not meant to be looked at—in this case, fox hunting in long-past centuries in all its aspects, at least from the hunter’s point of view. He didn’t mind when he was asked, with reserved apology, to wait for a moment in another hall. He sat on a hard chair and contemplated a black, sealed jar that stood on a—what? sideboard? commode?—and wondered what if anything it was pretending to be for.

  The Director’s appointments secretary, a woman of a certain lean nervosity common in powerful subordinates, greeted him without discernible emotion and led him through old, glossy double doors that had new metal eyes in them; past her own high-piled desk; across another metal thing set in the threshold of an arch; and into the Director’s presence.

  Hello, Isengrim, Reynard thought. He didn’t say it. He made some conventional compliment, his voice thin and rasping like fine sandpaper drawn across steel.

  “Thank you,” the Director said, standing. “I thought it would be better to meet here. I hope I haven’t inconvenienced you.”

  Jarrell Gregorius’s voice was still faintly accented; he had learned English only as a schoolboy, when his father—whose portrait stood with the children’s on an otherwise impersonally naked desk—came here with the international commission that had tried to arbitrate the partition. The commission had of course failed, though the idea of Autonomies remained, unlike as they were to the commission’s complex suggestions. When the Malagasian member was kidnapped and executed, and it became obvious that the Autonomies were becoming, inevitably, disputing nations, the commission had disbanded, and Lauri Gregorius had gone home to ski, leaving them to their madness. Jarrell—Jarl as he had been christened-—stayed. The portrait on his desk was twenty years old.

  “Will you take something? Lunch? A drink?”

  “Early for both in my case.”

  “I’m sorry if we’ve called you too early.”

  Reynard sat, though the Director had not. It was among his privileges to be unbound by politenesses and protocol; people always assumed he couldn’t understand them, didn’t grasp the subtleties of human intercourse. They were wrong. “It’s difficult to believe that any nocturnalism would have survived in me. But there it is. You can’t have government solely at night.”

  “Coffee then.”

  “If convenient.” He rested his red-haired tiny hands on the head of the stick between his knees. “I passed your children on my way up from the gate.”

  “Yes?”

  “Someone, an adult, with them, with a bird on his wrist.”

  “A Mr. Casaubon. Their tutor.”

  “Beautiful children. The famous son resembles you as much as they say. Wasn’t there a film…”

  “A tape. I’m glad they’re here now; the boy, I think, was beginning to be affected by the publicity. Here he can live a normal life.”

  “Ah.”

  “The girl has a different mother. Puerto Rican. She’s only come to live here in the last—what?—eighteen months?” He had been pacing steadily in front of the tall windows seamed with metal that looked out toward raw concrete bunkers where men in Blue lounged. Gregorius would have looked well in Blue; its pure azure would have just set off his flawless, windburned skin and tawny hair. Instead, he wore black, noncommittal, well-tailored, somewhat abashing. “How,” he said, “are we to behave today? Can we begin that way? The USE people will be here shortly.”

  “Will they bring the safe-conduct?”

  “They say they will.”

  “And under what circumstances will they hand it over?”

  “On receipt of a signed affidavit of mine endorsing the general aims of the Reunification Conference.”

  “As interpreted by USE.”

  “Of course.”

  “And you’ll sign it?”

  “I have no choice. USE’s bargain with the Federal is that USE will accept the terms of reunification the conference arrives at, if USE can issue these safe-conducts.”

  “And since all the Autonomies must have representatives at the conference…”

  “Exactly. They will arrive having, publicly at least, endorsed a USE view of reunification.”

  Reynard rested his long rufous chin on his hands, which held the stick between his knees. “You could refuse. Attempt to go down there without a safe-conduct…”

  Gregorius stopped pacing. “Do you say that to test me, or what?” He picked up a small round steel box that lay on the desk and tapped its lid. “Without the safe-conduct I’d be detained at every border. With or without an armed guard. I certainly don’t intend to battle my way down there.” He opened the box, took a pinch of the glittering blue crystal it contained, and inhaled it. His eyes rested on his father’s portrait. “I’m a man of peace.”

  “Well.”

  “I know,” Gregorius said, “You’re no friend of the Union for Social Engineering.” He ran a hand through his proud hair. “You’ve kept me away from them. You were right. Those in the Directorate under their influence would have castrated me, with
USE’s help.”

  “But things have changed.” Reynard could say such things without irony, without implication. It was a skill of his.

  “This time,” the Director said, “this time, reunification could work. Because of—well, my strength here, which you have helped me gain—I’m the logical choice, if a plan is arrived at, to direct. To direct it all.” He sat; his look was inward. “I could heal.”

  Beyond the guardhouse the two children could be seen walking their horses; Gregorius looked out that way, but saw nothing, because, Reynard was astonished to see, his eyes glittered with tears.

  Sten and Mika had begged one last ride before afternoon lessons began, and Loren had allowed it; he always did, the “one last” of anything, so long as it was truly the one last and not a ruse. That was their bargain, and the children mostly kept it.

  “How can he be what you say?” Mika said.

  “Well, he is. Loren said so.”

  “How.” It was a command, a refusal, not a question.

  “They made him. Scientists. They took cells from a fox. They took cells from a person…”

  “What person?”

  “What does it matter? Some person.”

  “It matters because that person would be his mother. Or his father.”

  “Anyway. They took these cells, and somehow they made a combination…”

  “Somehow.”

  “They can! Why do you want it not to be so?”

  “I don’t like him.”

  “Jesus. Some reason not to believe he’s what he is. Anyway, they took the combination, is all, and they grew it up. And he came out.”

  “How could they grow it up? Loren says the deer and horses can’t have children. Or dogs and foxes. How could a man and a fox?”

  “It’s not the same. It’s not eggs and sperms. It’s different—a mixture.”

  “Not eggs and sperms?” There was a sly, small laughter in her eyes.

  “No.” He had to keep this on a grown-up level. “A mixture—like the leos. You believe in them, don’t you?”

  “Leos. There are lots of them. They’ve got parents. And eggs and sperms.”

  “Now they do. But that’s how they were first made: lions and men. The counselor is the same, except he’s new. How do you think they first got leos?”

  “Eggs and sperms,” she said, abandoning reason, “eggsandsperms. Hey, Sperms. Let’s play Mongol. Look!” She pointed with her gloved hand. Down the hill, across another collapsing stone wall—the vast property was seamed with them—they could just see Loren, who had come out of the stone farmhouse and was sweeping the yard with a great broom. He wore his long coat of Blue, which he called his teacher shirt. “Look. A poor peasant.”

  “Just gathered in his crop.” He turned his horse. This was their favorite game. It was a dangerous game; that was the only kind Sten liked.

  “Poor bastard,” Mika said. “Poor eggsandsperms. He’ll be sorry.”

  “Burn the women and children. Rape the huts and outhouses.” He felt a lump in his throat, of laughter or ferocity he didn’t know. He banged his hard heels against the pony’s flanks. Mika was already ahead of him; she clutched her horse’s bay ribs with thighs muscled and brown (“trigueña,” she called the color: “Nutlike,” Loren translated; “Like a nut is right,” Sten said). She was streaking down on the wall; Sten would beat her to it. He gave his Mongol yell and bent low over his careening horse. The Mongol yell was a yell only, no words, sustained until his breath gave out; when it did, Mika took up the yell, a higher, clearer note with no male pubescent descant, and when she had to stop he had begun again, so that the sound was continuous, to keep Mongol spirits fierce and astound the cottagers. They ran as close together as they dared, to make an army, almost touching, the horses’ feet a sound as continuous as their yell.

  They took the wall together, Mika sitting neatly and confident, Sten losing his hold for a frightening moment, the yell knocked from him by impact. The farmer Loren looked up. He had been carrying wood back into the farmhouse to get a fire started for lessons, but he dropped it when he saw them and dashed across the yard, coat flying, for the broom. He had it in his hands when they rode down on him.

  This was the scariest part, to ride hard right into the yard, without pulling up, as fast as they dared, as fast as the horses dared, coming as near as they dared to being thrown by the horses’ excitement and as near as they dared to murdering the tutor they loved.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Loren shouted, “no you don’t, not this year….” He flailed with the broom at them, startling the horses, who wheeled around him, throwing up clots of farmyard, snorting.

  “Give up, give up!” Mika cried, hoarse from yelling, striking at him with her little crop.

  “Never, never, damn barbarians…” He was afraid, and afraid for the children, but not about to give in. He had to play as hard as they did. He gave Sten a swat on the shoulder with the broom, Sten’s horse reared and wheeled, Mika laughed, and Sten went end-over onto the ground with a noise that brought a lump to Loren’s throat.

  “Peasants one, Mongols nothing,” Loren said, rushing to Sten and holding him from getting up. “Wait a minute, let’s see if any Mongol bones got broken.”

  “I’m all right.” His voice was quavering. “Leamee alone.”

  “Shut up,” Loren said. “Bend your legs up, slowly. All right, stand up. Bend over.” He had to speak harshly, or Sten would cry, and hold it against him. “Oh, you’re all right.”

  “That,” Sten said with breathless dignity, “is what I said.”

  “Yes, all right.” He turned to Mika. “Now the horses are good and lathered, are you happy?” She grinned down at him. “Go settle them down. And then let’s go learn something.” He pushed Sten toward the ramshackle stable. “Maybe next year, Genghis Khan.”

  “Loren,” Mika said, “is that counselor what Sten says he is?”

  “Tell her,” Sten said, wanting this victory at least. “Once and for all.”

  “According to the journals of genetics, yes. If you mean is he half a fox, vulpes fulva, and half a man, homo sort of sapiens, whatever ‘half’ could mean in this context,” he took a long breath, “yes.”

  “It’s eerie.” She slid from the saddle. “Why is he a counselor? Why does Daddy listen to him?”

  “Because he’s smart,” Sten said.

  Loren looked up to where the blank, bulletproof windows of the study could just be seen in the L of the house. “Yes, I suppose,” he said, “or, as they used to say years ago, dumb like a fox.”

  Reynard pushed his coffee cup away with a delicate, long-wristed hand. “Supposing,” he said carefully, “that the conference is a success. That reunification* is somehow arrived at, or its beginnings anyway. I think you’re right that you would be the choice to direct it. But if you went down under the auspices of the Union for Social Engineering, it would be their plan that you would direct, wouldn’t it? I mean ‘make the world work’ and the rest of their ideas.”

  “I don’t expect you to agree.”

  “What do you expect?”

  “I don’t want to be bullied by them. Of course I have to sign this statement. But I want to preserve some independence.”

  Reynard pretended to consider this. “Do this,” he said at last. “Tell them today that you are preparing a statement of your own, a statement of goals for the conference. You want it included with theirs.”

  “They will refuse.”

  “Assure them it won’t contradict theirs. That you will sign theirs if they will accept yours. If they refuse still, throw a rage. Announce their intransigence. Threaten to break off negotiations.”

  “None of that will do any good. They’ll want capitulation.”

  “Of course. And in the end you’ll capitulate,”

  “What have I gained? They’ll say I’m hesitating, malingering.”

  “If they say that, admit it. It’s true.”

  “But…”

  “Lis
ten. They know you are the only possible representative at the conference from this Autonomy. Let them know you require this measure of independence—a separate statement. If they won’t go that far, they will at least allow you to appear to negotiate for one.”

  “It seems like very little.”

  “You intend to sign. They know that.”

  Gregorius considered this, and his hand, which shook. “And where is this statement? They won’t wait long.”

  “I’ll prepare it. Tomorrow you’ll have it.”

  “I’d like to discuss it.”

  “No time. Believe me, it will be mild enough.” He rose. The appointments secretary, whose name was Nashe, approached. “Did you know, by the way,” Reynard said, “that USE has recently developed a military arm?”

  “Hearsay.”

  “Of course they are pacifist.”

  “I’ve heard the rumors.”

  “The USE people are here, Director,” Nashe said.

  “Five minutes,” Gregorius said without looking at her. “They’ve denied everything. Assassinations, terror bombings—they’ve completely condemned all that, whenever they’ve been linked with it.”

  “Yes. But the rumors persist.” He took up his stick. “As effective, it seems to me, as if they were true. Now, is there another exit here? I’d rather not pass the time with USE.”

  Gregorius laughed. “You amaze me. You hate them, but you show me how to surrender to them.”

  “Hate,” Reynard said, smiling his long, yellow-toothed smile, “isn’t the right word, exactly.”

  When his counselor had sticked away without farewell, Gregorius sat again in the deep chair behind the blank field of his desk. He should compose himself for the USE people. They would speak in that impenetrable jargon, dense as the priestly Latinate of ancient Jesuits, though half of it was invented yesterday; would speak of social erg-quotients and a holocompetent act-field and the rest of it, though what they wanted was clear enough Power. He felt, involuntarily, an apprehensive reflex: his scrotum tightened.