Otherwise (41 page)

“Little Belaire.”

“She said: ‘It’s spring now. And this part of the country is very nice, and fertile, and very scenic too.’ And she wondered if maybe they hadn’t wandered far enough, far enough from the angel’s death and ruin, who had never hurt this land around here much; and mightn’t it be time to stop? There would be no danger of St. Andy getting lost for good with the precious wagon. It had been a long time since the Storm had passed, the going-off of the world the angels made; perhaps all those sins had been forgiven, perhaps long ago. They had learned a lot, St. Bea thought, and maybe it was time to stop learning and start living a little.

“But St. Andy didn’t know. He knew how to keep moving. He said: ‘We fly the angels. The League is no friend of ours. There are a lot of people who don’t love us at all.’ And St. Bea said: ‘The angels are dead and gone. For the others,’ she said, ‘we can plan against them.’

“And she drew in the ashes by the fire the circle that is Little Belaire today, with its secret door and its Path no one knows but the speakers, and she said: ‘We’ll build it all of angelstone, and it will have no windows, and will all be joined, just like Big Belaire was.’

“Well, she convinced St. Andy. ‘She’s a very persuasive woman,’ he used to say. And so they called the gossips together around their fire, and toward morning it had been decided to rebuild the Co-op as well as they could, here, in this country the angels had left alone except for Road, which ran through it almost without stopping.

“And so that day the truthful speakers left Road and never took it again.”

Now the sun was low, and the wind had died away almost as suddenly as it had risen. It was colder than it had been. I pulled my hooded cloak more tightly around me. “You’ll take it, though,” I said. “One day.”

“Yes, big man,” he said softly. “One day.”

And when he said it—I don’t know how, whether because we had shared this adventure, or because of the story he had told, or because now for the first time he knew it to be true himself—I saw that Seven Hands wouldn’t leave Little Belaire and follow Road where it led. That had been the knot between us, that I had believed him when he said it. and resented and admired him for having decided to do it; and he, who knew in his heart of hearts that he never would, had disliked me for believing him capable of it when he wasn’t. He had spoken truthfully of all this to me even as he told me of his plans to go and his dreams of what he would see; but till now I hadn’t been able to hear it. With something like an audible whisper, the knot came untied in me, and left me sad. “One day,” I said. Beneath his hood his face was grave, and sad too; for I had in those two words just told him what I had learned.

Around us, and stretching away and behind, Road seemed to glow faintly in the quick-fading light, as though it spent an old radiance of its own. The sky was huge over me valley. I wondered then if there were truly cities in the sky; and if there were, could they see us here—two little men and their fire, whose thread of smoke rose straight up on the spot where St. Bea stopped, white smoke mixed now with the rose smoke of her Bread that we lit and passed; two men in the middle of the vast road where millions had raced. It was evening, it was November. There were two, there had been millions. Did the angels in their city in the sky weep to think of it?

No.

No. The angels don’t weep.

The
angels weep, but for
themselves.
And never saw you there.

FOURTH FACET

I
t was another day till I went along Path alone to Painted Red’s room. I left Mbaba still asleep, and ate an apple as I hurried along the still-dim way. If you could have hung in the air above like an angel and looked in, you would have seen me run around Little Belaire in a long, slow spiral, save for one short cut that had me stepping over sleeping bodies.

When I came within sound of the stream, people were awake and dressing; I passed a room where six sat smoking, laughing and talking. Little Belaire was waking up. On ladders men opened skylights and smelled the sharp morning air, climbed down again. I was walking against many who were going to the outside. It was warmer than it had been the day Seven Hands and I went to see Road, and people would stay in the sunny outer rooms today, and at evening bring back with them something they would need for the winter, like a set of Rings or tools or a big pipe that had been hung up in the outer rooms for summer. Some would make expeditions to gather the last of the year’s nuts in the woods; or they would meet each other in the outside rooms to weave and talk, if they were Leaf cord. Or climb to the top of Belaire and do sealing-work for the winter, if they were Buckle cord. Or discuss the affairs of their cord, if they were Whisper, or the affairs of others’ cords, if they were Water, or the affairs of the world if they were Palm; and gossip about all the things they remembered and knew about and had heard of from the saints back when we wandered and before that back to Big Belaire and before to ancient times, so none of it would be forgotten.

There are always a thousand things to see and stop for along Path, snake’s-hands to explore and people to listen to. In a snake’s-hand near Painted Red’s room I found some friends playing whose-knee, and I waited for a turn to play….

Stop a moment. When you said it before, a snake’s-hand was something in talk. Now it’s a place. And tell me about whose-knee, too, since you’re stopped.

All right. I told you about Path: Path is like a snake, it curls around the whole of Little Belaire with its head in the middle and the tip of its tail by Buckle cord’s door, but only someone who knows Little Belaire can see where it runs. To someone else, it would seem to run off in all directions. So when you run along Path, and here is something that looks to be Path, but you find it is only rooms interlocking in a little maze that has no exits but back to Path—that’s a snake’s-hand. It runs off the snake of Path like a set of little fingers. It’s also called a snake’s-hand because a snake has no hands, and likewise there is only one Path. But a snake’s-hand is also more: my story is a Path, too, I hope; and so it must have its snake’s-hands. Sometimes the snake’s-hands in a story are the best part, if the story is a long one.

Whose-knee. I’ve never been that good at whose-knee, but like every kid in Belaire I carried my ball and tweezers everywhere; it’s part of every kid’s equipment. My ball was a cherry stone tightly wrapped in some string; the tweezers are a rush almost as long as your forearm that’s split almost all the way down and pegged just right so you can pick up a ball. You can play it a lot of different ways, with one ball or several, with two people or with as many sitting in a circle as you can reach with your tweezers. Whatever way you play, the ball is balanced on your knee—you draw up your knees like this—and another person picks the ball off your knee with his tweezers and places it on someone else’s knee. The different ways to play are different ways of calling whose knee will be played, and who will move.

It has to be played very fast—that’s the fun of it—and if you drop a ball or move out of turn three times, you have to ask to stay in, and the others can say Yes or No….

How
do you win?

Win?

How
do you beat the others?

Beat them? You’re not fighting, you’re playing a game. You just try to keep the ball in motion and stay out of the way of other people; and keep your ball on your knee, too. It takes a lot of concentration, and you can’t laugh too much, though it can get very funny. Buckle cord plays it very well; they all wear very intent, serious faces and the tweezers fly around, snicksnicksnick. Also Buckle cord people all seem to have flat, broad knees.

Anyway, a place in this circle became empty, and I sat down. The girl opposite me, whose knee I would play, looked up at me once with eyes startlingly blue; startling because her hair was deeply black and thick, and her eyebrows too; they curved down and almost met above her nose. She only glanced at me, to make certain it was I whose knee she was playing, and set her ball.

“Whose knee?” they said, and we began. Little yelps of anxiety or triumph: “Miss! He has two.” The girl opposite me played with a kind of abstracted intentness, as though utterly aware of a game, but a game she was playing in a dream. Her down-turned full mouth was partly open; her tiny teeth were white.

“Whose knee?” we said. “Big Bee moves Whisper cord,” the leader said, and a lanky, laughing Leaf cord boy, after only the quickest glance around the circle, moved the ball of the girl opposite me. Whisper cord: yes, I would have chosen her too. Not only for her abstraction, her appearance of not being wholly present; not only that she seemed—to me, anyway—the center of this circle without having to claim that. Something else: some whisper. When it came my turn to move her, she suddenly raised her impossible blue eyes to me. The ball dropped.

“Miss!”

She retrieved the ball, not looking again at me. I tried to play well, now, but I stumbled over myself, missed my cord when it was called. I was soon out.

And all that, about the game, was a snake’s-hand in my story; but just as there are snake’s-hands that look like parts of Path, so there are parts of Path that look like snake’s-hands. When I stood up, so did she; behind us others were calling out the words that meant they had claim on our places. When I came onto Path, she was ahead of me, going toward Painted Red’s room; I followed at a distance. At a turning, she stopped and waited for me.

“Why are you following me?” she said. Her down-turned eyebrows gave her a permanent angry sulk that was only occasionally the way she felt, but I knew nothing of that then.

“I wasn’t. I was going to a gossip named Painted Red….”

“So am I.” She gazed at me without much curiosity. “Aren’t you a little young?”

That was annoying. She was no older than I. “Painted Red doesn’t think so.”

She crossed her pale arms, thin and downed with dark hair. “Come on, then,” she said, as though I needed her protection, and she reluctantly had to give it. Her name, she said when I asked it, was Once a Day; she didn’t bother to ask mine.

Painted Red was still asleep when we came into the larger of her two rooms; we sat down amid the others gathered there, who looked at me and asked my name. We waited, trying to be quiet, but that was hard, and soon we heard her moving around in her other room. She looked out sleepily, blinking without her spectacles, and disappeared again. When she finally came out we had stopped trying to be quiet, and she sat down in the middle of the hubbub and calmly rolled herself a blue cigar. Someone lit it for her, and she inhaled deeply, looking around and feeling better. She smiled at us, and patted the cheek of the girl who lit her smoke. And my first morning with Painted Red began.

“When we wandered,” she said, and began the story about St. Gary and the fly that I had heard Mbaba tell. She brought us a basket of apples, and as we ate them she told the story in her Water way, full of false beginnings and little ironies which if you stopped to think about you lost the thread; and the story was not quite the story I knew. When, at the end of the story, St. Gary let the fly go, nobody laughed. It seemed to have become, in Painted Red’s telling, a riddle or something meant to be solved; and yet at the same time you felt that the answer lay within the story—that it wasn’t a riddle but an answer, an answer to a question you didn’t know you’d asked.

Big Bee, the Leaf cord boy, his mouth full of apple, asked Painted Red why she had told us that story. Leaf cord doesn’t like mysteries.

“Because a saint told it,” Painted Red said. “And why are the saints saints?” She looked around at us, smiling and waiting for an answer.

“Because,” someone said, “we remember the stories of their lives.”

“How do we remember the stories of their lives?”

“Because—because they told them in a way that couldn’t be forgotten.”

“In what way?”

“They spoke truthfully,” a Water cord girl named Rain Day said.

“And what is it to speak truthfully?” Painted Red asked her.

She began to answer like Water cord, saying, “There was the Co-op Great Belaire,” and, “But there was a beginning almost before that,” and how in ancient times most people had no homes they lived in all their lives. Except for the people in the Co-op Great Belaire. There, in its thousand rooms, people lived a little as they do now in Little Belaire. “But they were angels, too,” she said. “Their co-op was high, they rode in elevators, they talked on phones….”

“Yes,” Painted Red said. “Phones. It seemed, in those days, that the more the angels had to ride on, and talk over distances with, and get together by, the more separate they became. The more they made the world smaller, the greater the distance between them. I don’t know how the people of the Co-op Great Belaire escaped this fate, but the children who grew up there, if they left, would find nowhere else to be as happy as they had been there, and they would bring their own children back with them to live there. And so it went on over many lifetimes.

“Now,” she said, raising one finger as gossips do, “now in those days everyone talked to everyone else by the phones. Every room in the Co-op had a phone, every person had his own to call and be called on. A phone is only your voice, carried by cords over distance, just as a tremor is carried over the whole length of a taut string if you pluck one end. The people of the Co-op, as they grew closer together, began to learn about this engine: that to talk to someone with a phone is not like talking to him face to face. You can say things to a phone you wouldn’t say to a person, say things you don’t mean; you can lie, you can exaggerate, you can be misunderstood, because you’re talking to an engine and not a man. They saw that if they didn’t learn to use the phones right, the Co-op couldn’t exist, except as a million others did, just places to put people. So they learned.”

We weren’t silent as she told us this; each of us knew a piece of this story and wanted to put it in, and some were contradicted by others. Only Once a Day said nothing: but no one expected her to. Rain Day told how there were gossips then too, old women who knew everyone and everything, and who had advice on all matters; but not listened to as carefully as now. Somebody else said that there were locks to every door at first, and every set of rooms was the same in size and shape, but by the time St. Roy led them all away, there were no locked doors, and all the inside of the Co-op had been changed to great and tiny rooms, like Belaire today. Painted Red listened to each of us, and nodded, and folded in what we said with little motions of her head and hands to what she was explaining, seeming not to care how long it took.

“What they learned,” she went on, “was to speak on the phones in such a way that your hearer couldn’t help but understand what you meant, and in such a way that you, speaking, had no choice but to express what you meant. They learned to make speech—transparent, like glass, so that through the words the face is seen truly.

“They said about themselves that they were truthful speakers. In those days people who thought alike were a church. And so they were the Truthful Speakers’ Church.

“The truthful speakers said: We really mean what we say and we say what we really mean. That was a motto. They were also against a lot of things, as churches were; but nobody now can remember what they were.

“The Co-op Great Belaire survived for a long time, raised its children and learned speaking. But of course the day came when first the lights and finally, at last, the phones went off. And Great St. Roy led them out onto Road. And we wandered. That’s when the saints were, who took the speech begun in the Co-op and finished it, when we wandered and while the warren was building, in the stories they told of their lives, which we remember and tell.

“And I have to tell you now: before there was truthful speaking, and you talked on the phones with others, and a confusion resulted, and someone was hurt or two people set against each other, the gossips would say, ‘There must have been a knot in the cord.’ A knot in the cord! That makes me laugh.” And she did laugh, her big liquid laugh, and we laughed with her.

Once a Day wasn’t laughing. She was looking at me, steadily, not curiously; just looking.