Otherwise (58 page)

She waved, and waved again. Each time, her face would be dark and apprehensive, then lighten to a smile; each time as she smiled the cat would close its eyes. And each time another petal would drift in rocking lightness to the ground.

“If we watch long enough,” I said, “there will be no more petals. The tree will fruit.”

“No,” said Once a Day. “No, it won’t.”

There was a puzzle that St. Gene made: he took a strip of paper, and half-twisted it, and sealed it in a loop. Now, he said, trace the outside of the loop with your finger. But don’t trace the inside. But the beginning of the inside always came before the end of the outside; the loop always began again before it came to an end.

“That’s a riddle,” I said. “You promised me, last month, you wouldn’t set me riddles any more.”

“I don’t remember riddles,” she said.

Mother Tom waved. The cat slept. The petal fell. With a sudden suffocating sense of having discovered myself to be in a small, closed place for ever and ever, I understood: all the petals that fell were one petal. Mother Tom’s wave was one wave. Winter never comes.

FIFTH FACET

“W
hen do you go?” I asked her.

May had rebuilt our shade house on the hill; the grass we had beaten down there had sprung up golden-green again.

“Soon,” she said. “They’ll come to tell me.”

They had been going away, one by one, down toward the river, and returning, naked many of them, from Dr. Boots, the old looking like children and the young ancient. The letter was got by each, and their secrets grew strong and sure, and intersected me everywhere. I turned to them, one by one, to the friends I had made, and found they had disappeared, though they looked at me still; and the greeting died on my lips. Even the youngest children, though left out as I was, seemed more still, and played games I didn’t know with cats who seemed restless and watchful. And though it was the List that had become—become disembodied, in a way, yet it seemed that it was I who was not there, who was only a flicker of memory and misunderstanding amid the solid weight of their magic.

“What if,” I said to her, “what if you didn’t go, this year?”

“What do you mean?” she said, not as though she truly wanted to know, but as though I had said something without any meaning at all, which hardly interested her. A thick wave of despair came over me. She could never, even Whisper cord as she was, have asked me that question in Little Belaire: what do you mean?

“I mean what I say,” I said softly. “I really mean what I say.”

She looked at me, the blue of her eyes as blank and opaque as the sky behind us. She looked away, at the hoppers that hopped in the damp grass; at Brom, who chased them, daintily for one so huge. She couldn’t hear. I would have to say it all in words.

“I don’t want you to go and get this letter,” I said.

Through the year I had lived with her, she had come slowly to be someone I knew; not the girl I had once known, but, month by month, someone I knew. I hadn’t asked for what wasn’t given me; yet she had given me herself. And I knew that when she got her letter she would be abstracted from me again as surely as if she fled from here to Little Moon. “Listen to me now,” I said, and took her thin wrist. “We could go away. You said they wouldn’t care, and surely now of any time they would care least. We could go tonight.”

“Go where?” She smiled at me as though I were telling some fantastic tale, one of their jokes.

“We could go back to Little Belaire.” I meant: to Belaire, where we were born, Belaire and the saints and the Filing System and the gossips who untie knots instead of tying them tighter as the old ones here do, Belaire where every story has a proof and all the secrets have names at least; I meant
We could go home.

“It wasn’t my home,” she said, and my heart leaped, for I heard she had heard me. “It wasn’t my home, only a place I found myself in.”

“But, then, anywhere, anywhere you like, only…”

“Don’t,” she said gently, looking at the grass, at the glitter of the hoppers. She meant: don’t darken me now, not now of any time.

Far off, we saw someone coming toward us, in a sleeveless black coat and a wide hat. Houd. He stopped some way off and watched us for a moment. Then he raised the stick he walked with, summoning her, and turned and walked away.

“I’m to go now,” she said, and rose.

“Do you know I lose you by it?” I said, but she didn’t answer, only started after Houd toward Service City.

I put my head on my knees and looked at the grass between my feet. Each blade of grass, tiny bud, tinier bug, was clear, clearer than I had ever seen them before. I wondered at that.

No! I leaped up, and Brom stopped playing to watch me. I caught up with her as she started across the wide, sun-heated stone plaza. Winter had cracked it, adding minute wrinkles to its face as years add them to a human face.

“Once a Day,” I said to her back, “I’m going away. I don’t know where, but I’m going. In a year, I’ll come back. But promise me: promise you’ll think about me. Think about me, always. Think about… flunk about Belaire, and the foxes, about the Money, think about how I came and found you, think about…”

“I don’t remember foxes,” she said, not turning to me.

“I’ll come back and ask you again. Will you think about me?”

“How can I think about you if you’re not here?”

I grasped her shoulder, suddenly furious. “You can! Stop it! Speak to me, speak to me, I can’t bear it if you don’t…. All right, all right,” for she was closing her face against me, turning away, taking my hand from her as though it were some accidental obstruction, a dead branch, an old coat, “only listen: no matter what you say, I know you can hear me: I’ll go away now, and we can both think, and I’ll come back. In the spring.”

“This is spring,” she said, and walked away across the plaza. I watched her, vivid, white, and living for a moment against the immense absent blackness of way-wall; and then gone. Blink: gone. As though she hadn’t been.

And what if, I thought, my heart a cold stone, what if she had spoken truthfully to me, what if she had heard in all I said that I could no more go away from here for a year—for a month, for a day—than Brom could speak or St. Blink tell a lie?

I don’t remember the rest of that day, what I did with myself. Perhaps I stayed where I had been left, on that stone. But at evening, before I could see her return, I went to Twenty-eight Flavors to find Zhinsinura.

She stood with other old ones at the long counter, pondering with them a great piece of smooth slate which had been carefully coated with beeswax, so that signs could be made on it. After some thought, she brought forward one woman and gave her a pointed stick; as the others smiled and nodded, she bent and made a sign on the wax. Zhinsinura hugged her then, and she departed with one or two others.

“I want to go too,” I said, and Zhinsinura turned her hooded eyes on me. “I’ve passed all your tests. I haven’t asked for what wasn’t given me: but I ask now for that.”

She held up her hand for the others to wait, and took me by the shoulder to the time table, where we could talk alone. “No tests were set you,” she said. “But I will ask you this: why did you come here?”

There were a lot of answers to that, though only one
that
mattered now. “There was a story,” I said, “about four dead men. A wise man I knew told me that you here might know the ending to it. I suppose he was wrong. It doesn’t matter now.”

“The four dead men are dead,” she said, chin in her hand. “The League destroyed them, the four clear spheres with nothing at all inside them; they destroyed all but one, which is lost for good, as good as destroyed…”

“There were five.”

She smiled. “Yes. So there were, five.” In her hooded eyes were answers to that mystery; the last test was not to ask for them.

“I don’t care now. I only want to stay, here, with her. I can’t, unless I know what you know, unless I understand.…”

“What if it doesn’t help? I think you truthful speakers put too much faith in knowing and understanding and such things.”

“No. Please. It’s not even understanding I want. She… I. want, I want to be,
her.
I want to be her. I don’t want to be me any more. It doesn’t help. Nothing I know helps a bit. I don’t know if being her is better than being me, but I don’t care any more. I give up. Help me. I have no more reservations.”

Zhinsinura listened. She chewed a finger and thought. We were alone now in the place, except for the cat Fa’afa, who wasn’t interested. I looked down at May’s tile between us: the children (who had not grown older in a year) stood in a wooden house with a wide door, a house filled with cut yellow grass in piles—the sun shone from it and lit their cheeks and placid downcast eyes. Hands on their knees, they looked down at a cat, a tiny tabby lying on her side, at whose nipples sucked three, four, five kittens, More than any cat mother and her children I had ever seen, it looked like the family of foxes I had found for Once a Day. Would I forget them too?

Zhinsinura leaned toward me and stroked my cheek; I felt her rings catch at my beard. “I love Boots,” she said quietly. “I’m as old as anyone I ever heard of, and I would not have had it any other way. I love Boots; so I will grant your request; and I hope you will be done by as I have been. But remember: there is no hoping for it to do anything. It will do as it does, and is not accountable: not Boots, not me or your young girl, not even, as you will see, you.

“But that’s too many words already. They won’t help.” She rose, and led me to the counter where the slate slab covered with wax lay. “Be alone tonight,” she said. “Come early tomorrow and find me. I’ll take you. You’ll have your letter from Dr. Boots.” She gave me the pointed stick. “Now sign the List.”

All their marks were there; Once a Day’s was there. I had no mark, so carefully and clumsily I scratched on the List the palm sign of my cord.

I was alone that night, though I didn’t sleep. I lay thinking that however much it had been Once a Day that had brought me to this, it must anyway have lain on the path I had walked from the beginning. I had seen the four dead men, and Once a Day had whispered Olive’s inaudible secrets in my ear; I had gone out to be a saint to solve those mysteries, and teamed that winter is half of life, though I could come no closer to Once a Day’s heart than that—could come no closer ever, unless I took this last step. I thought of Zher, as I had seen him the first day I had come to Service City, and thought that now Once a Day sat among the old ones as he had, as though a lamp were lit within her. Tomorrow I would be as she was. And my only regret, now, is that I didn’t pack my old pack that night and leave Service City forever.

I came early to Zhinsinura, shivering and yawning with morning chill and expectation, and followed her through the forest to the river’s edge. There was a log raft there lashed with plastic closeline; a man and a woman my parents’ age sat within it waiting. He and I, when Zhinsinura was seated, untied the boat and poled it with poles worn and smooth out onto the May-quick river.

Silent but for the spank of the river on the raft’s sides and the chuckle of the forest, we followed the current. Zhinsinura smoked tobacco, and continually changed the pipe from place to place between her teeth. “About the letter,” she said once, “we have only an old joke. The angels said every letter has three parts: the Salutation, the Body, and the Complimentary Close.” I listened to the roll of the ancient words and said nothing. The gullied banks were tumbled with ruined places, mostly become forest now, revealed only by an angel-made angle or straight line in the moss. We glided past them, passing through drooping willows as through thin draperies, and after a time came up against a wharf in the river, swung the raft around and tied it up.

A path from the wharf led up to a—what was their word—
glade:
a kept place of young willows and soft grass, which the sun reached into. Some of the List were there and watched us approach, but gave no sign; some were naked. In the center of the glade stood a small house of angelstone, which over time had sunk and was now partly buried in the soft earth; a narrow path led down to its low door. Zhinsinura took aside the two we had come with; they nodded together, looked at me smiling, and sat to wait. As she had before way-wall, Zhinsinura took my shoulder in a firm grip and led me down into the darkness within the little house.

There was but one small window. For a moment the dimness was spangled with the sunlight still in my eyes. I saw that the small square place was empty; then I saw that it was not. There stood there a box, or pedestal, as clear as glass or clearer; inside it, silver and black balls or knobs were suspended in rows as though in water. And on top of the box was a clear sphere, the size of a man’s head, with nothing at all inside it.

“The fifth,” I whispered.

“Boots,” she said. She was drawing on her hand a silver glove, a silver glove that glowed like ice. “Sit,” she said. I sat; I didn’t think my knees would hold me, anyway; Zhinsinura with her gloved hand pretended to turn one of the knobs within the box. The knob turned. The clear sphere, with a small noise like a shocked, indrawn breath, changed instantly to black: black so black it appeared no longer a sphere, a black circle cut out of the world.

“Now close your eyes,” Zhinsinura said; “It’s best to close your eyes.” I did; but not before I saw that with her silver glove she was pretending to turn another of the knobs within the box; and that the black circle was rising from the pedestal, moving like a Light; and that it came toward me.

And then there came the time that I must tell you of, but can’t; the time when Boots was there, and I was not. When I was not in Rush that Speaks, and Boots was; when Boots lived; when she was Rush and I was not; when I was not at all. I remember nothing of it—I wasn’t there—and though Rush was stained with Boots’s being, stained and colored with it forever, he remembers nothing, forgot all even as I returned to him: because though Boots has many lives she has no memory. I know only the last thing Boots did: and that was to close her eyes. And then she left him. It was in that moment, when Boots left, that I got my letter: my letter was myself.