“I’ve come to understand magic more deeply, since we talked about it last.” She let go of the balloon’s gas valve and began to get her gloves ready, patiently separating each finger to check for leaks. “The first suits were mostly mechanical. Their magic features were stuck in them willy-nilly, and honestly, they were — mostly adapted from other people’s ideas, which I didn’t fully understand. The feature that regulated the pace of the breathing was taken straight out of an automaton someone made, one that could run but not walk. It’s easier to make something that can run. The balance is easier. And the one that condensed the material of the air was a farm thresher. Honest to God. Just miniaturized, and with a few little improvements in sensitivity. I just sort of cut them up and stuck them together, and when they worked at altitude, I thought I was a genius. Because I needed to believe it. But that’s just the key to it, that’s what I didn’t understand. The heart of magic lies in need.”
“I’ve rarely got what I needed,” I said. “And when I have, I don’t think there was magic in it.”
“Well, the heart of a person isn’t very good on its own, either,” she said. “But we don’t work without them. The trick is knowing how to put your need into something else. That’s how I made the second generation of the suits. I breathed into their faceplates, and they needed to breathe. I pressed my hands against them and they needed warmth. Here — let me show you.”
She wrapped her cool hand, still ungloved, around my throat. We were standing in a wicker basket at twenty thousand feet, and I lost breath, stumbled back, felt Disaine catch me by the arm.
“Be careful,” she said, and resumed her grip. With her other hand she touched my open lip and drew out something — it felt like a long hair in my throat, like trying to swallow a hair in your food — and when she pulled it out and showed it to me, it was red and slick, and it tried to coil around her finger.
“Oh,” I said to the air. “What is that?”
“Well, if I’ve done it right, it’s something to do with Daila.” The thing was wrapped around her wrist now, and she let her grip on it go. “What remains of your love for him.”
“And now it’s just gone?” In that moment, I felt that it was, and the feeling was like new firelight.
“No,” she said. “They don’t go away.”
“Oh. But that doesn’t seem fair. It seems that you should — pay.”
“No, it doesn’t work like that,” she said. “It doesn’t work like fire, which needs fuel. It works like thought, which only multiplies. Here — let me do this.” And she took off the band of muscle from her wrist and did something to it, something I couldn’t see, within the wrist of my suit. “See? It shores up the pressure system. Now the suit will hold you a little more like Daila.”
“I’m not sure I like that idea.”
“Too bad,” she said, and turned to the maneuvering of the balloon. I sat down on one of its ledges, ready for a little while just to look at the wicker floor, at the cracks of blue light and green earth beneath it. “It’s made of what we need, not what we want.”
“So — you’re saying the other suits worked — despite being made of threshers and things — because you needed to believe they would?”
“Yes, and I had imbued them with that need. Magic is very strange, Lamat. Like a person. But, like a person, you can come to predict it.”
“Is that also why they stopped working? Because — you stopped needing to believe they would work?”
“Maybe,” she said. “I mean, they stopped working mostly because I made them badly, and didn’t account for the stress and the cold. You don’t understand the stress and the cold of the mountain until you’ve been there.”
“I know.”
“But, yes, I made that magic from my need to believe in it, and that is an awful foundation for anything. These are made from things we’ll need until we die.”
“I hope that isn’t true of Daila.”
“Daila, no. But you’ll always need the memory of him.” She smiled down at me, and I looked at her shadowed face with its worn and kindly skin, its brushed-down wads of gray hair.
She took us all the way to fifty thousand feet, then attached the cord between our helmets that was designed to allow us to talk.
“Say something,” it said into my ear.
“This is going to be a pain in our ass. You need to come up with a better system.” It felt good to contradict her; it felt great to contradict anybody. I felt my heart swelling with blood.
“We’ll only really need to do it at mealtimes, to plan.”
“No way, Disaine, seriously. I have to advise you all the time. Remember the descent?”
“I didn’t actually hear you during the descent,” she said, but cautiously. “—Oh, hell, Lamat, I spent so much time engineering this.”
“Sunk costs. You’ll find a way to use what you learned.”
“That’s true.”
She was working so well, that winter. She took my suggestions readily, letting her mind skim over any offense she might have taken — ordinarily she was always a little upset when people suggested things to her, because it meant she hadn’t thought of everything. Though I think I was too mean, when we first met; I could have handled her better. It came from excess of self-faith. I knew my place in the world, lodged like a seam of diamond, not like the loose jewel I am now. I might be taken up and polished, and used to stud a crown, but I will always look incongruous. Jewels always do, when you hack off bits of them and run a sander over their face, and hammer them into a spot and tell them to look pretty.
(Otile, do I seem snide or proud? It’s the worst thing in the Holoh world, to become a jewel; it means separation, it means coldness, jangling, death. That is why we use that image to talk about being cast off by God. I have become a byproduct of Their great force, valuable to southerners but meaningless in itself.
I know about the stones you hold dear, the diamond earrings from your grandmother, the opal from overseas that you bought yourself when you began to teach medicine. Those stones are precious to me, too, because they touch your ears, your hands, everything that perfume might touch. But without you, all they are is bright spots of color without context, traps for catching light. Lost bits of earth. That’s what I would see, if my younger self could see me now.)14
* * *
14 I just hope that when you look at me, you see something more than someone who finds you valuable.
* * *
We were sitting on the floor of the basket, looking out through the little handholds cut into the wicker. Mine pointed toward the mountain, miniaturized in a hand’s width of air, deep in black and gray clouds with its brilliant peak bursting out above. Moving my head up, I could see it over the rim of the basket, vanishing into the silence of the atmosphere.
The day was bright at fifty thousand, but below the clouds had gathered, and we could see nothing of Catchknot — or whatever was below; the wind had freshened, and we were leaving the mountain at a rapid clip. Disaine creaked back in the basket and took us five thousand feet higher. The noise of the wicker was in a curiously human register. I said, “That’s enough.”
“It is.”
“Must be about as high as this thing can take us.”
“Oh, there’s higher.” She laughed into the tube. “But I’d need a better balloon.”
“Must be hard for you to come back up here.”
“Why?”
“Well — after the fire.”
“Oh, don’t think about the fire up here.” She cut down the flame impatiently and joined me on the balloon floor. I really believe she was capable, herself, of not thinking about something. “It wasn’t hard, not really. That scares me a little, like how they say if you find it easy to quit things, drinking or smoking, it means you’ll go early into second childhood.”
“Is that true?”
“It’s doctors’ superstition.”15
* * *
15 It’s true. Oh my God, I’m so sick of
telling people this, IT’S TRUE and I’ve seen it again and again. If you can quit smoking just like that and you’re over 60, you should start making out a will.
* * *
“What’s it based on?”
“It’s superstition. It doesn’t need to be based on anything. That’s how doctors are. They see once, maybe twice, that people who’ve done such-and-such a thing get such-and-such a tumor, and then it’s gospel and they tell each other that. It’s not science. And to do science on the human body would be so cruel — imagine that — if you gave some people the cure and not others, just to have a control group.” She fell silent. “I’m sorry. There are many people in the Arit Brotherhood who say I’m either a liar or a lunatic, I’ve got no right to judge. But I guess I’ve retained one Arit prejudice, and it’s that. Let’s talk about something else.”
We both looked at the mountain, gridded by the slats of the wicker basket. As if we were plotting it out. Start at 1B, advance to 2B, then 2C. I felt the pressure of Disaine’s hand against my back, and startled — “The new suits make you stronger.”
“Well, yes,” she said. Drawling: “They don’t kill me, after all.”
“Does mine?”
“It can if you want. I don’t think you need to be stronger.”
“I don’t trust it.”
“After a certain point, you must trust the suits to keep you alive. Why not push that a little further?”
“Oh, that’s the story of your life,” I said, and I shifted my legs on the basket’s floor; they had got stiff. “The only thing that really bothers me about Daila now —”
“Yes?” A hungry question.
“He’s moved on. He’s left the tent. And now I’m alone.”
“Oh, Lamat, do I really have to say it?”
“I don’t mean now. I mean in my own — in that fragment of time, in the past, I’m alone. Saon didn’t make it, Courer went out to die, and now Daila has gone off, to the blanket of snow, where he has no right to be. That’s all. And that’s all that bothers me. Look, aren’t they tested enough?”
“Not quite.” I felt her hand on my back again, more hesitantly. “I wanted to tell you — well, I can’t say why. I wanted to tell you about Nel.”
She said the name awkwardly, as if she were trying to preserve a precious shape in her mouth. I looked at her with greater interest and saw her face shadowed and self-contained in her helmet. She took a breath that I heard in my own ears.
“You know now that my career was kind of a disaster, and not even that long. It must have been — maybe — twenty years that I was a priest. I mean, you know I still consider myself to be one.”
“And I do, too.”
“Thank you for that. But about twenty years as a priest, and twenty since I left. My life divides up pretty evenly into thirds. My career broke up into thirds, too. There was the beginning, when it was all going well. And then the middle part, when the magic crept in, and the results I’d been getting — which seemed so solid — proved to be all vapor. People started to describe me as ‘brilliant but unfocused,’ and what drove me mad about it was that it was a physical description, you know? They thought it was insight, but they were just — well, look at my eyes.” She pointed to them with the middle finger of her tridactyl hand.
“I know what you mean.” Her eyes were brilliant, in their sheen and their quickness and liquidity of movement, and they did indeed lack focus. It took great effort for her to fix them on you. You recognized, on some level, the muscular strength it took her to drag those orbits to a single point, as if they were the orbits of planets — here I skip the garnishing “goddamn” that would have shrunk this metaphor to a reasonable size, for I really do mean to emphasize what Disaine’s gaze was, and what it cost her.
“But it was a new thought to everyone. There was a tic in their faces that they’d get just as they formulated it, and I’d grow to dread that tic, because it’s polite, of course, to pretend that you’ve just heard it for the first time. I was almost relieved when they stopped, and things fell apart entirely.”
Her eyes had held focus on me; now they loosened in the sockets.
“I went to a conference. It was very close to the end, and I think I was already working on balloon stuff then. Funny, but I don’t remember, even though that was an epiphany too and you’d think I’d remember which one came first. But this wasn’t the same sort of epiphany. It wasn’t something I knew I had to chase; it was something I realized had caught me. I didn’t understand what that meant, though, not yet.
“Anyway, I gave my talk. It was about the noctilucent clouds. Hardly anyone came. They were embarrassed — the Arit always did have a keen sense of embarrassment — they didn’t want to be seen reacting to me; any reaction would be a cruel one. Interest would be wrong, but so would schadenfreude, and so would flatness. So I gave this talk, very haltingly and painfully, to a few men who all sat at the back and who were probably the sort to see me as a sort of aggregating agent that would come up with good ideas for real scientists to use later. After it was done, I decided to pack up and move on. I had a place at a monastery for the next six months, though when I got there later I found that I wasn’t welcome.
“So in a mood of incredible weariness, I went to my little room and lay down before I could start to pack. I could hear the ripple of applause in the big hall, where a boy soprano of a junior priest was giving a talk about the moon. They were all in love with the moon that year, and I lay there thinking, I don’t see why. The moon was tacky, I thought — very defiant, very much grasping at my own little straw — the long thin shape, like a piece of food. I hated the moon. And then I fell asleep.
“When I woke up it was dark. Everyone was stealing around having cocktails in each other’s rooms; there was laughter next door, and that was what woke me. I thought I was too old to be so petty, so fretful about this, which is another thing the Holoh are probably right about, not acknowledging the idea of ‘too old.’”
“I’m not Holoh anymore,” I said.
“You’re a Holoh now the same way that I’m a priest,” she said gently. “You just have to believe it for yourself.”
“Maybe. You haven’t gotten to Nel.”
“Who do you imagine Nel is?”
“A lover, I would have thought. From anyone else.”
“No, no. He died before I even met him. It went like this. I decided I couldn’t stay in the place an hour longer, and I put my pack on my back and went right out the front door. The road was dark but pretty clear, and you didn’t have to hack through it. I made good time and eventually came to a village where there was a circus playing.” Now she took in another deep breath, and adjusted the tube between us. “They were a weirdo sect that messed about with magic. Hooks in their chests, pulling trees from the ground, eating fire. But really eating it, you know, their bellies glowed for a moment. Nothing to interest me, but they had food and I was hungry, so I bought something fluffy and fried and I hung about for a bit feeling sorry for myself.
“Finally, though, Nel did his act. And you could smell all of a sudden that a greater magic was going on than before, a spicy heat on the hands and in the nose. I stress that Nel himself was nothing special. These people always took on the name of their leader; he was the leader that month, but they had a high failure rate, because they did shit like this.
“They built a skeleton of wood for him, right there in front of everyone, a tower. It must have been fifty feet high. They obviously had had some practice with it, but it took a while, and in the meantime I could see Nel pacing about. It could only be him. He was doing something, crying out aloud to the air, and I could see that he was walking more and more stiffly and speaking with greater struggle. When he went to the top of the tower I saw why. He had hardened his body in some way, imbued himself with magic, made his flesh something more like wood, like metal. He walked awkwardly, like a jointed doll. Dragged his feet.
“They stoked up the fire, and the heat enriched the air
. I could feel everything speeding up. The Nelites were chanting his name, which was admirably suited to chanting. Then the chant became a howl, and it was less suited to that — try it. For real.”
“Nelnelnel...”
“Well, I would have howled it a little more than that, but — I don’t know why, but this is important — do you feel how your tongue catches on the N and especially the L? It tries to drag the name back into your mouth, like to protect it. I didn’t know what I was doing, who these people were. It was horrible. The sound of it was knowing. They knew he would die. And he did. I can’t help but feel — now — if he had only made himself loose instead of hard...”
She fell silent for a long time, and once again I watched the slot of the basket handle, and the mountain through it.
“Anyway, that was the magic. I knew then — well, I knew nothing then. I went on, in tears, back along the road to my next post, which turned out to be nothing of the sort. But much later I realized that that night showed me the magic again. It had always been waiting, like a cruel lover, for me to get desperate enough to come back. But no, that’s not fair, because there’s no cruelty in the magic. It’s as neutral as the stars. And God finds us in these desperate places too.”
She shuddered and sat back against the basket, and said wearily, “I think they are tested enough.”
“Disaine,” I said. “I love you.”
“And I love you,” she said, and closed her eyes for a long moment.
It was a dramatic descent, the fire growing redder and fuller as we got closer to the earth, and the clouds deep around us — we plunged into their surface and then we were wet with vapor and chilled by gray darkness, and the clean fire penetrated only a little distance through it. We saw lightning far away, a bright heat that ripped through the clouds, and Disaine worked the ropes grimly, cutting the power as fast as she could without cooling the balloon too much to fly. As she stood there, the fire as low as a candle, holding up the sphere of metal that she used for ballast — a crude but powerful attractor that strained the water from the air and weighted the balloon down with it — she looked like a sorcerer, like something old and dangerous, standing there in the deadly wind with no hair stirring, nor detail of her robe. I let the idea that she owned the elements soak into me like hot water. Then with a final jerk of wind we were under the clouds, only a few hundred feet over the suburbs of Catchknot, and she was only a woman silvered by the cold and wet, holding a bronze ball near a campfire. We set down gently, and I sagged onto the floor of the basket, feeling the wind once again.
The Breath of the Sun Page 13