by John Crowley
It tried, with great lassitude, to rise again on the breeze, but the man was on his feet, being walked away by it, struggling to untie himself from it, fighting with a fierce single-mindedness to stop it; got himself free, and began to haul his thing in with violent tugs as it rippled and rose across the ground like a compact fog. I came with a stone and threw it on top to pin it. It was easy then; he piled it up anyhow and turned to face me.
“Mongolfier,” he said, and I didn’t know what to say to that.
He was a pale, unsmiling man, with lank black hair that fell always over his eyes. Top to toe he was dressed in tight brown, a snug many-pocketed coat and pants, and strange glossy boots that reached to his knees, tightly thonged with yards of lacing. I smiled, and nodded, and made to come closer—at which he drew back, never looking away from me with eyes dark and wide, eyes such as I have seen only in wild things that have suffered some terrible hurt.
Just then Brom came warily out of the bushes behind me; and seeing him, the man cried out. He backed up, seemed about to fall over—there was a pack on his back as large as himself—and fumbled desperately for something in a holder at his side. He whipped it out: it was a hand-sized engine of some sort, with a grip and a black metal finger which he pointed at Brom. He stood stock still with the thing, staring. Only when Brom, sensing his fear, crept behind me and sat warily peeking out did he pocket his thing, and then without taking his eyes from Brom, he squatted, so that the bottom of his huge pack touched the ground. He pressed a black spot on his belt, and stood up. The pack remained standing in the meadow.
“Mongolfier,” he said again. There were no straps at all attached to the pack, which was an irregular shape covered up in what looked like my own black and silver cloth, which clung closely around it as though wet, or as though wind pressed on it from all sides at once.
“How did you do that,” I said, “with the pack?”
He held his hand up to silence me. With the other hand he reached into one of his many pockets and pulled out another small black machine. This one he fitted over one of his ears, fiddling with it to-make it stay; it looked like a great black false ear. Which is just what it was. He made a “come here” motion with his hand, eyes cocked to the false ear, but when I stepped up to him he jumped away.
“You’re jumpier than a cow I used to have,” I said; at that he ducked his head and listened at his ear. He screwed up his eyes and bit his lip.
“More jumping,” he said slowly, like a sleeptalker, and we stared at each other in confusion. He waved at me to come on again, and I was about to step toward him again when I understood what he was about. We didn’t speak the same. He understood nothing of what I said, nor would I understand anything he said. But the false ear apparently could; it whispered to him what I said, and then he spoke back to me in my way, as well as he could. If that were so, it would be a long time before I could ask him what he had been doing up in the sky, so I sat down slowly, and started to talk.
He sat down too, after a while, and listened—to his ear, not to me, nodding sometimes, sometimes throwing up his hands in confusion; he clenched his fist in front of his mouth till the knuckles went white. He understood pretty quickly some hard things I said, but when I said, “Nice weather,” he looked baffled. Late in the day, we were talking back and forth pretty well; he chose his words carefully and made sense as often as not. His eyes were never still, but darted always to the source of small noises, birds and bugs; a butterfly made him jump to his feet when it came near. Here he sat with me, not surprised at all by me, making me speak to him as though we had a long-standing agreement to meet here and do that, but every ordinary thing scared him. The only thing that distracted him from his fear was listening and speaking, which he struggled with fiercely.
Finally he waved me silent. He drew up his shod knees and closed his hands around them. “Yes,” he said. “Now I must tell you why I am here.”
“Good,” I said. “You might tell me how, too.”
He gritted his teeth with impatience, and I waved him calm. “I’ve come,” he said, “to get back property of ours, which I think you have.”
The strange, thing was that “property” wasn’t a word I had used to him. I don’t think I’ve said it twice in my life. “What property?”
From another of his pockets he drew out a fine silver glove, dull in the sunlight. “A glove,” he said, “like this one; and more important, another thing, a small thing, like a, like a…”
“Ball,” I said. It was my turn to be afraid. “Could you,” I said, and swallowed the fear, “could you answer a question for me?”
“Three,” he said, holding up three fingers. “Three questions.”
“Why three?”
“Traditional.”
“All right. Three,” I said. I counted them off in the List’s way: “Ay: what is this ball and glove, and what does it have to do with the dead men, like Uncle Plunkett? and bee: how did you know I had it? and see: where did you come from?”
When he heard my questions, eyes toward his false ear, he began to nod; he looked at me, and for the first time since he had fallen, began to smile, a strange, dark smile that was more remote than his tightly closed face had been. “Very well,” he said. “I answer them starting with the last—also traditional. I have come”—he pointed skyward—“from there. From a City there, some call it Laputa. I knew you had our property because of the sound it makes—not the sound you hear, but another, far subtler sound, which an engine in the City detected. And it has everything to do with the man Daniel Plunkett whom you call dead, and whom I have brought on my back from the City. That’s that.” And he pointed to the black shape which squatted amid the grasses of the meadow.
“You’re an angel, then,” I said, “to tell me such things.” He stopped smiling to listen, and then made his gesture of not understanding. “I don’t think,” I said after a long time, “that three questions are enough.”
He set himself, nodding, as though to begin a great task. He made a start three different ways, and each time stopped, strangled up; it was as though each word were a piece of him, drawn up out of his insides with pain. He told me there were not cities in the sky, only this one called Laputa, which the angels had built when the last days were at hand; it was a great half sphere a mile wide at its base, and all transparent—a fine lacework of triangular panes, he had a word for them which meant they were joined in such a way as to bear their own weight, and the panes not glass at all but something—nothing, rather—a thing or a condition that allowed light through but was not itself anything, but through which nothing could escape—
“Like way-wall,” I said, and he looked at me, but didn’t say there was no such thing. He tried to explain how the air inside was heated, and the air outside colder, and got confused, and I said I know: just because of that, the whole was lighter than air.
“Yes,” he said. “Lighter than air.” And so it rose into the sky, the whole mile of it, and, supported by its perfect simplicity, had floated ever since, while generations of angels had been born and lived and died there. He talked of engines and machines, and I wondered at first why they would choose to fill up their City with such stuff, until I saw he meant their machines were still perfect: still did what they were made to do. I looked at his false ear, and then at the pack in the meadow; he saw my look. “Yes,” he said. “Even that still works.”
He told me how after the Storm the angels had returned to find the four dead men, the greatest of their works, and how they found three of them destroyed by the League, and one lost; and they had followed that lost one, Plunkett, as the League had, but they found it first, and carried it away to the City in the Sky. Only, He said, there was a part missing: a ball, and the glove made to work it, which… which… And he stopped, and had to begin again another way, to explain Plunkett to me. It took a long time, because he must stop to think, and chew his knuckles, and slap his boots with impatience; and his tension affected me, and I interrupted with q
uestions until he shouted at me to be quiet.
We began to understand each other when I told him I had seen a picture of Plunkett. He breathed deeply and told me: the sphere that was Plunkett was like that picture: but instead of being of his face, it was of his self. Instead of looking at his picture and seeing what his face looked like, you must take the sphere on your own head, and for as long as you wore that sphere, like a mask, for so long you would not be there and Plunkett would be: Plunkett would live again in you, you would look out Plunkett’s eyes, no, Plunkett would look out yours. The sphere was solid with Plunkett, and only waited for someone to Be in; like, like the meaning of a word waiting for a word to be the meaning of…
“Like a letter,” I said. He nodded slowly, not sure what I meant. “And the ball and glove?”
“To erase the sphere,” he said. The sphere was a container only; now it contained Plunkett, but with the ball and glove he could empty it, Plunkett would be no more, the sphere would be as empty as a mirror no one looks into, and then could mirror someone else instead. The dead man would be dead.
“Doubly and for good,” I said. “Is that what happened to the others?”
“I think so.”
“Except the fifth.”
“There were only four,” he said.
“There were five,” I said.
He stood and went to the pack. He had slipped on his silver glove, and with it drew away the black stuff that clung around his pack. There stood a clear box or pedestal, with rows of black and silver knobs suspended in it as though in water, and on top a clear sphere the size of a man’s head with, it seemed, nothing at all inside it. “There were four,” he said. “There was an experiment, with an animal. They did that because they didn’t know if taking such a, such a picture of a man would kill him, or injure him; if it killed the animal, well, that didn’t matter, but they would know not to do it with a man. But the experiment was a success. And they did it with four people.” He sat again, and drew up his knees. “So the fifth you talk about: it was the experiment. It was a cat, a cat named Boots.”
Evening had come. The valley below was dark, and trees’ shadows reached across the sloping meadow, but we were still in light: he in his brown, clutching his knees, and I, and the thing which was Plunkett though Plunkett was dead.
“I have been that cat,” I said.
His fear looked out his eyes; his pale face was drawn. “And I,” he said, “have been Daniel Plunkett.”
“And then returned.”
“And then returned,” he said.
“Angel,” I said, “why have you come here?”
“I’ve answered your questions,” he said. “Now you must answer one for me.” He set himself, adjusted his ear, and asked: “How would you like to live forever, or nearly?”
FIFTH FACET
All night till moonrise I tried to answer him. I tried to tell him how I had seen the four dead men made of stone, and shivered in the warmth; how it had been to solve that mystery that I had followed Once a Day to Service City and been Boots: how the four dead men had always been the crossing place in my life where I turned further into darkness. And all night he tried to explain, and talked of processes and pictures and how painless and harmless it had been proved to be. We both talked, and despite his angel’s ear, neither understood.
“You ask me,” I said, “to be your dead man in Plunkett’s stead. Even if I understood why you needed such a one, I couldn’t choose to be one. Don’t you see?”
“But I would take nothing from you,” he said, trembling with effort. “No more—no more than a frosted glass takes anything from you when you print it with your thumb!”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Boots was there, when I was not. Alive as ever. She didn’t mind, I don’t think; but I think a man would. I think of a fly, stuck in a cube of plastic, able to see all around, but not able to move. It frightens me.”
“Fly?” he said to his ear. “Fly?” He couldn’t make it make sense. I rolled smoke for myself, and saw that my hands trembled. “Fly,” he said’ desperately. I struck a match but the head flew off, sizzling, and struck Brom, who jumped up with a howl, and what with it all, the fly and the flame and Brom and me so stupid, he plucked the false ear from his head, flung it on the ground, and burst into tears.
What is it?
It’s just… well, you make him sound comical. He wasn’t. He was brave and fine and the best man of his time. When he came down, you know, he didn’t know what he would find; he knew only the City—and the world Plunkett had lived in. For all Mongolfier knew, the land below him would swallow him like a mouth. Except for pictures, he’d never seen an animal. And yet he jumped from his home to change our lives. He wasn’t comical.
I only meant to show my wonderment. I have no words for his sufferings: before them I felt thin and old, as you do before an angry child. I couldn’t follow what he said, and it made him weep, is all I meant.…
If he could have spoken your way, he could have made it clear.
He would have told you that when the angels raised the City, it wasn’t out of despair, or to flee the ruin they had created: they were proud of it, it was the last hope and greatest engine of man, and in it would be preserved the knowledge that led to its creation, preserved from the mass of men who wished insanely to destroy Everything they Wanted, Plunkett was the most complex and precious of all their works, and when they first used it, it was as they had used all the other things they had saved: to remember, in its use, the learning and skill that had made it.
But in its use they learned something unexpected, something terrible and wonderful: they learned what it is to be a man. As you learned from Boots what it is to be alive, they learned from Plunkett what it is to be a man: and it wasn’t what they had thought, at all.
You see, you think all men who lived in Plunkett’s time were angels, and could fly, and were consumed with fierce passions to alter the world and make it man’s, without remorse, without patience, without fear. It’s not so. The mass of men then were no more angels than you are. Unable to understand the angels’ world, ignorant of how to do any wonders at all, they only suffered from the angels’ hunger, suffered blindly in the wreckage of the angels’ world. Plunkett was such a one. Zhinsinura said that even the League’s women were angels: the angels learned from Plunkett that even they were men.
And the first of them to look out Plunkett’s eyes and learn it, when he returned, never spoke again.
You make me afraid for this one who I am. How hard, how hard… Harder than Boots, it must be, far harder…
Yes: because though Boots has no memory, you have. And Plunkett had: they came away from him remembering everything, his shame, his hurt, his confusion, Everything he Wanted. Boots’s letter was Forget: Plunkett’s letter was Remember.
They said it made for madness, then, that it had been a mistake, that it shouldn’t be used again. But it was used again. The bravest learned to bear Plunkett, and to speak of it. And while in the warren they told stories of the saints, and grew old in speaking; and as the list remembered the League, and grew old in Boots; so we grew old in Plunkett. All we knew was learning to live with his suffering: our suffering. We forgot our plans; the years came to the hundreds; our pride vanished, we studied Plunkett only, our hope became dread, our escape exile.
But why didn’t you stop? Come back again? The City could return, couldn’t it, if they’d seen they were mistaken?
No. The world they left was Plunkett’s world: it was all they knew of earth. Plunkett taught them that the rule of men had not been sufficient; and if that were so, then the world beneath them must have died, and the men with it. It was the only possibility.
But it’s not so. It got different, is all. You could come back; there’s no hard feelings. You must come back. It’s home.
Home…. Do you know how large the world is? I do. The winds blow always westerly around it, and the City is moved with them, and in a lifetime goes around to the place where
it began. I was born over sea: when I was grown, still the sea was beneath us. When we pass through storms, they aren’t the storms that fall on earth; we know them at their birthplaces; we pass through them and are not shaken. Do you know, when it snows here, the snow flies upward; lightning comes close enough to touch, and comes not from the sky but upward from the earth. It has never made me afraid.
Far off, when the clouds part, we see earth; vague and lovely and possible, I suppose the way you look at distant mountains, and wonder, but never visit. No: this is my home. It was Mongolfier’s. For its sake, dark with Plunkett’s fear and suffering, he jumped down to earth, to find you, who would heal us; you, who had found the ball and glove that could free us from Plunkett; you who would dry our old tears.
If he could have spoken your way, he would have said this to you.…
How is it you can speak my way, and he couldn’t?
You’ve taught us. We are truthful speakers too now, Rush.
And you? Are you, angel? Do you know what it is to be… another, to return from not being, to tumble back through all your ways, as though you fell from a height, and see, and see…. Do you?
No. I only know what they’ve said: that the cruelest was to have been Plunkett; that heavy as you are, to put you down is joyful in the end, that after the days of silence, it’s easy; that I could learn to live with you, as none ever could with Plunkett. Plunkett made us brave, they say, and you have made us happy. But I haven’t, yet; I’m afraid to bear your weight.
And Mongolfier could? Did I make him easier?
No. He never dared, after Plunkett. He brought you here. They told him: he saw it work but never dared.