Otherwise (39 page)

SECOND FACET

T
he gossip Mbaba took me to was an old woman named Painted Red, who was a friend of Mbaba’s from youth. Painted Red was, Mbaba remembered, of Water cord when she was young, and her name had been Wind, before she learned to read the System and gossip.

“She hasn’t always known our cord,” Mbaba said as she got me ready to go. Her breath was faintly visible in the cold. “Only in the last few years has she studied it.”

“Not since I was born’”

“Well, yes, since before that,” Mbaba said. “But that’s not really so many years, you know.” We were ready. “She’s very wise, though, they all say, and knows Palm well, and all its quirks.”

“What are its quirks?”

“You!” she said, and tugged my ears. “You should know, of anyone.”

“She lives near Path,” Mbaba said as we went along, “because she likes to feel the feet of those going by.”

St. Roy—I mean Little St. Roy, of course, not Great St. Roy—said that Path is drawn on your feet. Little Belaire is built outward from a center in the old warren where it began, built outward in interlocking rooms great and small, like a honeycomb, but not regular like a honeycomb. It goes over hills and a stream, and there are stairs and narrow places, and every room is different in size and shape and how you go in and out of it, from big rooms with pillars of log to tiny rooms all glittering with mirrors, and a thousand other kinds, old and changeless at the center and new and constantly changing farther out. Path begins at the center and runs in a long spiral through the old warren and the big middle rooms and so on to the outside and out into the aspen grove near Buckle cord’s door on the Afternoon side. There is no other way through Little Belaire to the outside except Path, and no one who wasn’t born in Little Belaire, probably, could ever find his way to the center. Path looks no different from what is not Path: it’s drawn on your feet. It’s just a name for the only way there is all through the rooms which open into each other everywhere, which you could wander through forever if you didn’t know where Path ran.

Painted Red’s room was deep in toward the center. There in the ancient small stone rooms, cool in summer and warm and snug in winter, the gossips sit and feel their cords run out linking and tying like a web all through Little Belaire. It was dim; there was no skylight as Mbaba had, but a pale green lens full of bubbles set into the roof. Mbaba spoke from outside, her hand on my shoulder. “Painted Red,” she said. Someone within laughed, or coughed, and Mbaba drew me in.

This was the oldest place I had ever been in. The walls were of the gray blocks we call angelstone. Here and there a block was turned on edge, and the oval piercings that (they say) go through every such block’s insides made four small windows in the wall. Through these I could glimpse the little falls of the stream, lit by the slabs of glass that are set in the roof above it.

Mbaba sat me down, and I tried not to fidget, aware and expectant. When she came forth from a farther room, Painted Red looked first to Mbaba and laughed low, her hands making welcoming movements that set her bracelets clicking. She was older than Mbaba, and wore a huge pair of spectacles that glittered as she nodded to Mbaba’s greeting. She sat opposite me, drew up her naked feet, and rested her arms on her knees. She didn’t speak to me, but her eyes behind the quick glasses studied me as she listened to Mbaba talk. When she spoke herself, her voice was rich and slow as running oils, thick with inflection I only partly understood.

While they talked, Painted Red drew from a small pouch some flakes of St. Bea’s-bread, which she rolled into a blue paper to make a fat cigar. She took a long match from her pocket and motioned for me to come sit by her. I went slowly, Mbaba’s hands encouraging me. Painted Red gave me the match, and watched me as I struck it on the rough wall and held it with both hands to light her cigar. Her cheeks hollowed and a rosy cloud ascended as she inhaled noisily. The frank and friendly curiosity of her look made me smile and blush at the same time. When she had smoked, she said, “Hello, you’re a graceful fellow, I’m in a mood to talk to you. Don’t expect me to reveal too much of myself, though I’m sympathetic and can be helpful. Be at ease with me; I know it’s strange here, but soon we’ll be easy together, and then friends….”

No, of course she said nothing like that, but it was all in what she did say, in her greeting, for she spoke truthfully, and was very, very good at it; so good that, speaking, she couldn’t hide from my knowledge of what she meant. Of course my knowledge then was very slight; when she talked with Mbaba, they both said things I couldn’t hear.

“You are not,” Painted Red said, “a truthful speaker.”

“No,” I said.

“Well, you will be soon.” She put her hand on my shoulder and raised her curling brows at me. “I will call you Rush, as your Mbaba does, if I may; your name Rush that Speaks is too much a mouthful for me.” I laughed at that, too much a mouthful! She said a word to Mbaba that meant she and I must be alone, and when Mbaba was gone, she stubbed out the flat end of her crackling cigar and motioned me to come with her into the small farther room.

There she took from a chest a small narrow box that just fit in her lined palm. “Your Mbaba tells me good things about you, Rush,” she said. She opened the box. Inside were four small round pots with snug lids, each a different color: a black one, a silver one, a bone-white one, and one the pure blue of a sunset winter sky. “She says you like stories.”

“Yes.”

“I know a huge number.” Her face was gently grave but her eyes were sly behind the glittering glasses. “All true.” We both laughed at that; her laugh made me shiver with the weight and fullness of it, light and low though it was. I knew then that Painted Red was very holy; possibly she was a saint.

Why do you say holy?

Holy. Blink told me once that in ancient times they said a thing was holy if it made you hold your tongue. We said a thing was holy if it made you laugh. That’s all.

Painted Red now chose the little black pot, opened it, and rubbed her thumb in the rose-colored stuff that it contained; then she rubbed her thumb on my lips. I licked it off. It had no taste at all. She took from another place in her chests a set of nesting black boxes and tubes with tiny lenses, and these she assembled in her larger room beneath the big lens, setting the tubes to point at a white space on the wall. She drew a string that closed the pupil of the green lens in the ceiling until its light fell in a tiny bright spot onto a minor which she placed at the back of the boxes. The light from the lens was reflected through the tube; a circle of pale green shone on the wall.

She opened carefully a long box and, after some thought, drew out one of the many thin squares of glass it contained. I could see as she held it to the light that it was inscribed with a pattern, and when she slipped it into place, there was suddenly the same pattern projected onto the wall, greatly enlarged and as clear as though drawn there.

“Is it the Filing System?” I asked in a whisper.

“It is.”

Years later, Blink told me the full name of the Filing System, and I made him say it over and over till I could say it too, and then I went on saying it, like a nonsense rhyme. Sometimes at night I say it over to myself till I fall asleep: Condensed Filing System for Wasser-Dozier Multiparametric Parasocietal Personality Inventories, Ninth Edition. Blink tried to explain what all that meant, but I forget now what he said; and even the gossips who sit and look at it all day call it only the Filing System. It’s from the Filing System that the cords are derived, though the angels who created the System knew nothing of cords, and the System is hundreds of years older than the cords which the gossips found there. “In ancient times,” Blink told me, “it wasn’t supposed to yield knowledge, only to keep facts straight; but the angels who thought it up had created more than that, and although whatever facts the System was to have kept straight are lost now, this new knowledge of the cords was found in it, which its makers didn’t know how to see there. It’s often so.”

I looked at the wall where the figures glowed that meant my cord, and a great cord it is, with two great saints in it. “My cord has two saints in it,” I said.

“You’re very clever,” said Painted Red. “Perhaps you can tell me more.” She spoke kindly, but I was abashed then, having spoken up before this thing I knew so little about. She waited politely a moment for me to speak again, and laughed gently at my silence; and then, turning to the System, after a long moment she began to talk, partly to me, partly to herself, about our cord and its ways and how Palm cord goes on with the business of life; and as she talked she put her hand over mine where I sat beside her on her couch. There was nothing in the room to see except the bright pattern on the wall, nothing to hear but Painted Red’s soft voice. When my lips began to grow oddly numb and loose, I hardly noticed. What I did notice was that Painted Red’s questions, and then my answers, began to take on bodies somehow. When she talked about something, it wasn’t only being talked about but called into being. When she asked me about my mother, my mother was there, or I was with her, on the roofs where the beehives are, and she was telling me to put my ear against the hive and hear the low constant murmur of the wintering bees inside. When Painted Red asked me about my dreams, I seemed to dream them all over again, to fly again and cry out in terror and vertigo when I fell. I never stopped knowing that Painted Red was beside me talking, or that I was answering; but—it was the rose-colored stuff that did it, of course, but I wasn’t aware even of that—though I knew that I hadn’t left her side and that her hand was still on mine, still I went journeying up and down my life.

It seemed to take as long as my life had, too; but gradually the solid-seeming incidents of my life became thinner and more tenuous, less real than the face of Painted Red beside me; and I returned, a little surprised, yawning a huge yawn and feeling I had slept a whole night’s refreshing sleep, to the little room where the pattern still burned on the wall.

“Rush that Speaks,” Painted Red said to me gently. “You are Palm for sure, and doubly Palm.”

I said nothing to that, because in my growing up I had learned it was regarded as something secret, not to be spoken of, and possibly shameful, that my father Seven Hands was Palm cord as my mother was. It doesn’t happen often that both your parents are of the same cord; it’s almost as rare as when they are sister and brother. The gossips warn against it; it makes, they say, for knots.

“When will Seven Hands leave?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said, not surprised that she knew Seven Hands’s secret; she seemed to know everything. I wasn’t surprised either that she knew it was my greatest sorrow. “Soon, he says, is all.”

“And you want him not to go.”

Again I said nothing, afraid of what would show in my speech. Seven Hands was my best friend, though I saw little enough of him; and when in the middle of some game or story he would fall silent, and sigh, and talk about how big the world is, a fear would take hold of me. The fear was that the world—outside Little Belaire—
was
big; it was vast, and unknown; and I wanted not to lose Seven Hands in it.

“Why does he want to go?” I asked.

“Perhaps for the untying of a knot.” She rose up, her joints cracking, and took from the long box another thin square of glass. She put this before the mirror in the box with the first and drew out the tube a little to make the picture clear. And suddenly it was all changed. The fine-lined pattern was altered, colored, darkened, obscured.

She looked at it in her dreamy, attentive way. “Rush,” she said, “lives come in many shapes, did you know that? There are lives that are like stairs, and lives that are like circles. There are lives that start Here and end There, and lives that start Here and end the same. There are lives full of stuff, and lives that will hold nothing.”

“What shape is mine?”

“Don’t know,” she said simply. “But not the same as the man Seven Hands’s. That’s certain. Tell me: when you are grown up, and a truthful speaker, what will you do?”

I lowered my head, because it seemed presumptuous; as it wouldn’t if I were to say that I wanted to make glass, or keep bees, or even gossip. “I’d like to find things,” I said. “I’d like to find all our things that are lost, and bring them back.”

“Well,” she said. “Well. There are some things that are lost, you know, that may be better unfound.” But I heard her say too: don’t lose your thought, Rush, it’s a good one. “Did you tell Seven Hands about it?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“He said that things that get lost—get lost for good—all end up in the City in the Sky.”

She laughed at that; or perhaps not at that but at something she saw in the tangled figure on the wall. “Palm cord,” she said, and was absorbed for a long time. “Do this, Rush that Speaks,” she said then. “Ask Seven Hands if he will take you with him when he leaves.”

My heart leaped. “Will he?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think so. But we’ll see what happens. Yes. It’s best.” And she pointed to the figure on the board. “There’s a path out of that. Its name is Little Knot, and the path isn’t so long …”