by John Crowley
But they couldn’t cease troubling the air. A building a half mile broad and nearly as high, set amid rolling hills of grass, will do that; and it was not only Meric who felt bad about that, and as it were begged Wind’s pardon.
“They’re there, though, aren’t they,” Bree said. She closed the terrace doors behind her, but a wind had gotten in and went racing around the level, lifting rugs and drapes of Blue and making the wall panels vibrate.
“They’re there somewhere.”
She turned up the tapers at the low table and nudged the pillows close to it with her gray-socked feet. Beyond their doorless space, far off perhaps—the drafts and airs made it hard to judge—men and women began an antique hymn as they returned from work; Meric and Bree could hear the tune but not the words.
“Your show begins again tonight, doesn’t it,” Bree said as Meric laid out their plain supper. “Does it mention them?”
“No. We didn’t have tape or film. It wouldn’t have done much good.”
“People don’t know what to think, though.” She tucked the robe between her brown thighs and knelt Japanese-fashion before the table. “Should they be here?”
“They’re not men.”
“You know what I mean.” The Preserve—the land that Candy’s Mountain owned—was strictly forbidden to hunters, hikers, trespassers—men.
“I don’t know. There was talk sometime of putting them on a reservation. They have to live.”
“You feel sorry for them?” Bree asked.
“Yes. They’re not men. They don’t have freedom of choice, I don’t think. They can’t decide, like we can, not to… not to be…”
“Carnivores.”
“Yes. Not to be what they are.”
“We thank Thee, O Lord,” Bree said, her long-lashed eyes lowered, “for these gifts Thou hast given us, which we are about to receive, in Jesus’s name, amen.”
She took bread, broke it, and gave it to him.
When Meric had first come to live here, twenty years before, he was six years old and the great structure had not been inhabited for much longer than that. Its growth had begun to slow; it would never reach its two hundredth level. It would never, then, match exactly the exquisite model of it that Isidore Candy had made long before it had been begun. Among Meric’s most deeply imprinted memories was his first sight of that model. In fact he remembered so little of his life before the Mountain—the fleeing, displaced life of refugees that burns an everlasting faint mark of insecurity on the soul but leaves few stationary objects in the mind—that it seemed as though his life began in front of that model.
“Look!” his mother said when their tiny, exhausted caravan was still miles away. “It’s Candy’s Mountain!” The enormous mass of it, blue with distance, rose like many great shoulders lifting themselves out of the earth; the skeleton shoulders of all the dead Titans coming forth together. Once it hove over the horizon, he saw it always no matter how the road they traveled twisted away from it; yet it was so big that it was a long time before they seemed to come any closer to it. It grew, and he must look always more sharply upward to see it, until they stood on the wide stairs of its threshold. The sea of grass they had crossed broke against those stairs in a foam of weed and flower, drowning the first tread, for no road or terrace led up to it. He stood on the stairs as though on a cliffy shore. When he tried to look up, though, the cliffs above were too huge to see. Around him, his people were mounting the stairs toward a hundred entrances that stood wide and waiting across the broken front; someone took his hand and he went up, but it was the Mountain itself that drew him in.
Their steps echoed in the vastest indoors Meric had ever seen or even dreamed of. The echoes had echoes, and those echoes fainter echoes. The whole arriving caravan was scattered across the chalky, naked stone of the floor, sitting on their bags or moving about, seeking friends, but they made no impression on the space, didn’t diminish it at all. Yet at the same time its height and breadth were full of noises, people, activity, comings and goings, because the central atrium was strung all around with galleries, terraces, and catwalks; its depths were peopled, densely. Now that he was inside, it didn’t seem to be a cliff on the seashore but the interior of the sea itself: life and movement, schools of busyness at every level.
He almost didn’t dare to take steps there. There were so many directions to go, none marked and all seemingly infinite, that no decision was possible. Then a focus was given him: a girl, almost his age, in a dress of Blue, whose dark skin was like silk in the watery depths of this sunshot sea. She moved among the strangers as one who lived there, one of those who had taken the strangers in, one of those whom the weary, sad, desperate people he had traveled with wanted to become; and at that moment Meric wanted even more than that: he wanted to be her.
He hadn’t ever quite stopped wanting that.
“Come see,” she said to him, or at least to him and to others standing around him, grownups too distracted to hear her. He went with her, though, straight across the floor and into depths, following her. Beyond the central atrium, walls divided the space, bisecting it, halving and quartering it again and again as though he proceeded down some narrowing throat; and yet the heights and breadths remained, because most of these bisecting walls were transparent, an openwork of slats and suspended walks and cable-flown platforms, wood, metal, glass.
The place she brought him to, he knew now, years later, was in the very center of the Mountain. On a table there, standing nearly as high as himself, was the model of the Mountain. It was less like the model of a place than the idea of Place: space endlessly geometered by symmetries of lines, levels, limits. The sense grew only slowly in him that this was a model of the place he had come to live, that these dense accretions of closely set lines and serrated spaces modeled places large enough to live out lives in: were huge. The atrium he had stood stupefied in would not, in this model, have contained his fist; he could not have put a finger between the floors of any of the levels where multitudes lived and worked. Its tininess was the hugest thing he had ever seen. This, he thought, is how big it is. Its lines of wall and floor were made of materials whose fineness only made the idea of it grow bigger in his mind: gold wire and pins and grommets small as needles’ eyes, steps made from single thicknesses of paper. Those steps he had mounted.
The girl pointed to a photograph suspended behind the model. An old man in a battered hat and a creased white shirt, with many pens in his shirt pocket; eyes kindlier than Santa Claus’s and a beard like his too, which came almost to his waist.
“He built it,” she said, and he knew that she meant both the model and in some sense single-handedly the place it was in as well. “His name was Isidore Candy. My name is Bree.”
Around them as they ate, Bree and Meric heard the endless, wordless voice of their level and, though too faint to be distinguished, of others too. The panels of paper that were all that made this space theirs, panels that in every size, height, and extent were all that made any space a space on this level, vibrated like fine drumheads to the voices, the gatherings of people, and the noises of work and machinery, a noise so constant and so multiform in its variations that they really didn’t hear it at all; nor were they heard.
“How many are there?” Bree asked.
“Nobody’s sure.” He took more of the dense, crumbling bread. “Maybe ten or so.”
“What is it they call it?” Bree said. “I mean a family of lions. Do they use the same word?”
“Pride,” Meric said. He looked at Bree. There was in her brown, gold-flecked eyes an unease he couldn’t read but knew; knew well, though never how to make it pass. Was it fear? She didn’t look at him. “A pride of lions. They use the same word.”
She stood, and he suggested to himself that he not follow her with his eyes around the house (“house” they called it, as they called workspaces “offices” and meeting-spaces “halls”; they knew what they meant). Something had been growing in her all day, he could tell it by h
er continual small questions, whose answers she didn’t quite listen to.
Somewhere, clay bells rang, calling to meeting or prayer.
“Sodality tonight?” he asked. Why wasn’t his tenderness a stronger engine against her moods?
“No.”
“Will you come and see the show?”
“I guess.”
He wasn’t able not to look at her, so he tried to do so in a way that seemed other than pleading, though to plead was what he wanted to do; plead what, plead how? She came to him as though he had spoken, and stroked his cheek with the back of her hand.
Meric was so fair, his hair so pale a gold, that his sharp-boned face never grew a beard; his hair ran out along his ears like a woman’s, and if he never shaved, a light down grew above his lip, but that was all. Bree loved that; it seemed so clean: She loved things she thought were clean, though she couldn’t express just what “clean” meant to her. His face was clean. She had depilated herself because she felt herself to be cleaner that way. The softest, cleanest feeling she knew was when he gently, with a little sound like gratitude, or relief, laid his smooth cheek there.
She didn’t want that now, though. She had touched him because he seemed to require it. She felt faintly unclean: which was like but different from feeling apprehensive.
She returned to her testament again, not as though to read it, but as though she wished to question it idly too. He wondered if she listened to Jesus’s answers with any more attention than she did his.
“Why is it you want to know about them?” he asked. “What is it they make you feel? I mean when you think about them.”
“I wasn’t.”
She perhaps wasn’t. She might have meant nothing by her questions. Sometimes she asked aimless questions about his shows, or about technical matters he dealt with, tape, cameras. Sometimes about the weather. Maybe it was he who kept thinking about them; couldn’t get the thought away from him. Maybe she only reflected an unease that he alone felt.
“‘Beware, watch well,’” Bree read, “‘for thine enemy like a roaring lion walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.’”
The Birthday Show began this way:
Isidore Candy’s hugely enlarged, kindly face, or his eyes, rather, filled the screens. The face moved away, so that his hat and great beard came into view. There was a rising note of music, a single note only, that seemed to proceed outward as the face retreated into full view. Through some art, the whole image was charged and expectant. A woman’s voice, deep, solemn almost, said without hurry:
“There was an old man with a beard
Who said: ‘It is just as I feared.
Two owls and a wren
Three sparrows and a hen
Have all built their nests in my beard.’”
At that moment the single note of music opened fanwise into a breath-snatching harmony, and the image changed: The eagles who had aeries in the craggy, unfinished tops of the Mountain opened their ponderous wings in the dawn and ascended, one crying out its fierce note, their shaggy legs and great talons seeming to grasp air to climb.
It was a moment Meric loved, not only because he was almost certain of its effect, how it would poise the audience, at the show’s beginning, on some edge between wit, surprise, awe, glory, warmth; but also because he remembered the chill dawn when he had hung giddy in the half light amid the beams, clutching his camera with numb fingers, waiting for the great living hulks within the stinking white-stained nest to wake and rise; and the joy in which his heart soared with them when they soared, in full light, in full view. He wasn’t so proud of any image he had ever made.
The Birthday Show was all Meric’s work. In a sense it was his only work: shown each year on Candy’s birthday, it was changed each year, sometimes subtly, sometimes in major ways, to reinforce the effects Meric saw—felt, more nearly—come and go in the massed audiences that each year witnessed it. He had a lot of opportunity to check these reactions: even in the huge multiscreen amphitheater it took nearly a month of showings for everyone who lived in the Mountain to see it each year, and nearly everyone wanted to see it.
Bree thought of it as his only work, though she knew well enough that most of his year was taken up with training tapes, and a regular news digest, and propaganda for the outside. Those things were “shows.” This was “your show.” He asked her every year if she thought it was better now, and laughed, pleased, when she told him it was wonderful but she didn’t notice that it was any different. She was his perfect audience.
Meric had acquired, or perhaps had by instinct, a grasp of the power a progress of images had on an audience, of the rhythms of an audience’s perceptions, of what reinforcement—music, voice, optical distortion—would cause a series of random images to combine within an audience’s mind to make complex or stunningly simple metaphors. And he made it all out of the commonest materials: though it was all his work, in another sense very little of it was, because he composed it out of scraps of old footage, discarded tapes, ancient documentaries, photographs, objects—a vocabulary he had slowly and patiently, with all the squirrelly ingenuity that had built Candy’s Mountain itself, hoarded up and tinkered with over the years. The very voice that spoke to the audience, not as though from some pillar of invisibility but as though it were a sudden, powerful motion of the viewer’s own mind, was the voice of Emma Roth, the woman he worked with in Genesis Section: a voice he had first heard speaking wildlife-management statistics into a recorder, a voice that made numbers compelling. A wizard’s voice. And she completely unaware of it.
“Use it up,” Emma’s voice said in every ear, as they watched old tapes of the Mountain being built out of the most heterogeneous materials, “use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without”: said no differently from the way she had said it one day to Meric when he asked about getting fresh optical tape. Yet she said it as though it were a faith to live by: as they did live by it.
Bree surrendered altogether to the mosaic of word and image, as she could surrender, at times, in prayer: in fact the Birthday Show was most like prayer. Some of it frightened her, as when over flaming and degraded industrial landscapes a black manna seemed endlessly to fall, and dogs and pale children seemed to seek, amid blackened streets, exits that were not there, and the sky itself seemed to have turned to stone, stained and eternally filthy, and Emma said in a voice without reproach or hope:
“The streams of Edom will be turned into pitch, and her soil into brimstone; her land shall become burning pitch. Night and day it shall not be quenched; its smoke shall go up forever. From generation to generation it shall lie waste; none shall pass through it for ever and ever. They shall name it No Kingdom There; and its princes shall be nothing.”
For ever and ever! No, it could not be borne; Bree covered her mouth with her hands, hands ready to cover her eyes if she couldn’t bear the scenes of war that followed: blackened, despairing faces, refugees, detention centers, the hopeless round of despair for ever and ever…. Only by stages was it redeemed; amaryllis in flower, cocoon opening, a butterfly’s panting wings taking shape. Genesis Preserve: a thousand square miles stolen from Edom. Day rose over it, passed from it. She saw its fastnesses. Rapt, she let her hands slowly come to rest again. Emma spoke the words of an ancient treaty the Federal had made with the Indians, giving them the forests and plains and rivers in perpetuity, fine rolling promises; governments had made the same promises to the people of Candy’s Mountain, and so there was warning as well as security in Emma’s words. Then far off, seen from the unpeopled fastnesses of the Preserve, blue and shadowy as a mountain, remote, as though watched by deer and foxes, their home. Emma said again: “None shall pass through it for ever and ever; they shall name it No Kingdom There, and its princes shall be nothing,” and Bree didn’t know whether the change of meaning, which she understood in ways she couldn’t express, made her want to laugh or cry.
Withdraw: that was what Candy had preached (only not preached, he was incapable of preaching,
but he made himself understood, even as Meric’s show did). You have done enough damage to the earth and to yourselves. Your immense, battling ingenuity: turn it inward, make yourselves scarce, you can do that. Leave the earth alone: all its miracles happen when you’re not looking. Build a mountain and you can all be troll-kings. The earth will blossom in thanks for it.
A half century and more had passed since Candy’s death, but there was as yet only one of the thousand mountains, or badger setts, or coral reefs that Candy had imagined men withdrawing into for the earth’s sake and for their own salvation. The building of that one had been the greatest labor since the cathedrals; was a cathedral; was its own god, though every year Jesus grew stronger there.
All the world’s miracles: Meric had combed the patronizing nature-vaudevilles of the last century and culled from them images of undiluted wonder. There was never a time that Bree didn’t weep when from the laboring womb of an antelope, standing with legs apart, trembling, there appeared the struggling, fragile foreleg of its child, then its defenseless head, eyes huge and wide with exhaustion and sentience, and the voice, as though carried on a steady wind of compassion and wisdom, whispered only: “Pity, like a naked newborn babe,” and Bree renewed her vows, as they all silently did, that she would never, never consciously hurt any living thing the earth had made.