Otherwise (54 page)

It was a name. A boy, pale blond and with a pink tint of sunburn on his shoulders and nose, sat in a circle of people, mostly older, who seemed to keep a distance from him, though they smiled at him, and occasionally one reached out to stroke his arm or touch him. Once a Day went over to them. The boy Zher looked up at her, who was known to him, and at me, who was a stranger, and his look was the same. Once a Day went through the circle and knelt before the boy; he looked at her, his eyes searching her but seeming to look for nothing. She touched his face and hands, and kissed his cheek, and without a word came back and sat with me.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Zher,” she said. “Just this year come of age, and got his first letter from Dr. Boots today.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a letter. And it’s from Dr. Boots.”

“Why is he naked?”

“Because he wants to be.”

Zher smiled a little, and then more; a laugh seemed to be within him, and those around him smiled too, and looked at each other and at him, and he did laugh, and they laughed-with him. Somewhere someone dropped something with a clang, and the cats’ ears all rose, and Zher’s head snapped around with eyes wide.

“Have you had this letter from Dr. Boots?” I asked.

“Yes. Every May month since I was his age; the first, the summer after I came; and just before I went out to the camp, and met you, this year.”

“Was it like that for you when you got your letter?”

“Yes. Just the same. I felt that way.”

“Were you silent? Do you have to be?”

“You don’t have to be. You just are, especially after the first. You don’t have anything to say. It’s all done. It’s all like it will be. Talking, after that, is just—just for fun. Just something to do.”

“When you talk to me—is it like that?”

She brushed her black hair with her hand and said nothing, and I didn’t dare talk more about it. Evening was falling in the room; the blue daytime shimmer turning dusty gold.

“Doesn’t he look beautiful?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Beautiful.”

“Yes.”

As the sun set, the singing began, low and quiet, touched off by the purring of some cat, Brom or Zhinsinura’s tiger, and taken up by one group of them, and then by another, a low sweet chuckle and drone and growl, each voice finding room in the medley to purr; and, as night came on, left off, voice by voice, Once a Day’s high sad sound nearly the last, until they were all silent. And the Lights were let out.

Perhaps the angels knew a way to make the cool globes dark in the day; the List just keeps them in black bags, and lets them out at night. There were many there, but still in that great place there were pockets and vague places of darkness. No one around Zher moved to bring a Light near him, and in the gloom I could see his fair body glowing as though a lamp were lit within him.

THE THIRD CRYSTAL

A L
ETTER FROM
D
R
. B
OOTS

FIRST FACET

…A
nd wait till I’ve inserted it.

What? Shall I begin again?

No. It’s all right. Here is the second crystal; see how tiny: yet it’s all there. Blink and Budding and Blooming, all that part.

How many more? The sun is setting. Look: the clouds below us are all pink and yellow.

The third is the last, usually.

Angel… tell me this now…

No.
Not yet. Tell me: what happened next day, at Service City?

Well, that night we slept; she took me up the wide flight of stairs that led to the big platform which covered the back part of the place—the mezzanine, they called it (the List knew such words, words that rang like ancient coins flung down angelstone—mezzanine). There, rooms had been made with curtains and low walls, and it reminded me a little of home. Once a Day found us an empty nook piled with pillows, and we lay together there, she talking all the while as though to pull me into her List’s arms by strength of stories, until she was yawning too much to talk. She was so happy to be there, and so glad I was with her to see it, that it made me ache with some unnamable feeling—oh, Dr. Boots, you make them—no, you let them make themselves—so happy, so seldom!

Dr. Boots’s List can do a thing that I never could, that Once a Day had learned in her years with them: they sleep like cats. They cat nap. Once a Day would sleep for a time, and be up for as long, and sleep some more and be up again. All through that night I felt her get up and go and come back to watch me, impatient for me to get done my long sleep; but I was in the middle of thick dreams, the dreams a sleeper in a strange house has, and couldn’t wake. When I did, it was with a cry that woke me from some adventure; I lay staring, trying to remember where I was. I stumbled out through the curtains and found myself on the very edge of the mezzanine, looking out over the vast hall lit by a clear morning turned faintly blue by way-wall. Once a Day stood by it, bent over with her hands on her knees, by a little muscled brown man who sat holding up a ball of clear blue glass, turning it so the light shot through it; he bit on a tiny wooden pipe from which rose a fine white smoke.

When I reached them, stumbling past groups that fell silent when I smiled at them, I saw that on the brown man’s wrist was the bracelet of blue stones which Once a Day had given to him on the day of the trading at Little Belaire. His name was Houd, but when he said it it was as soft and long and unspeakable as a cat’s sigh. Others gathered around us, and I was made much of; they stared as frankly as cats at my pigtail and my spectacles and marveled at my ignorance of Dr. Boots and the List; and I couldn’t understand much of their talk, though I knew the words. Outside in the morning, Brom the black and white cat walked across the wide stone, and Once a Day and the others turned to watch me do what I had to do, being new to way-wall: I tried to walk out there. It doesn’t work that way; I could get close to it (always from it a hot breath blew, smelling of metal somehow) but—it doesn’t work that way. I looked around at them, and they were all smiling the same smile.

“It doesn’t work that way,” Houd said around his pipe, and Once a Day came and pulled me away. “It’s only one way,” she said laughing. “Don’t you see? Only one way.”

She took my hand and we went across the black and white squares of the floor and out the heavy glass doors ranged all along the back of the place, and around to the front through the real morning light, and then ran together headlong across the stone, with Brom beside us, and we must drown in its limitless blackness, but of course didn’t, and we were inside again, panting and hugging. “One way,” she said, “only one way! I learned that, I learned that; it’s all only one way, don’t you see?” And the brown man Houd seemed to watch me to see if I had heard in her words all that she said; and I knew I hadn’t.

There was one other thing that one new to way-wall has to do
:
I tried putting my arm through and then drawing it back out. I never tried it again.

In Little Belaire we said a month the same way we said a minute or a mile: to the angels they meant exact things, so that every month and minute and mile were the same length. To us, they just mean a lot or a little, depending. The List is the same, about minutes and miles, but they know how long a month is. They Count it off in a number of days, thirty or so to the month, twelve months to the year, and you are back at the beginning again; and for a reason they explained to me but which I can’t remember, to every fourth year they add one winter day that has no number.

To me, the name of a month is the name of a season. I’ve been in years with two Marches and no April, or where October came in the middle of September; but I loved the List’s calendar, because it didn’t only count the days for some reason you might want them counted, it told too about the twelve seasons of the year.

The building at Service City that had the orange roof and the little white steeple was called by them Twenty-eight Flavors, and it was there they made most of the medicines and doses for which they’re famous. Once a Day took me there, and we sat at two seats that enclosed a little table, private in the dimness (Twenty-eight Flavors had once had big windows of glass, but most had been broken and filled with sticks and plastic). There were many tables there like the one we sat at, angel-made with a false wood grain and not even marred in how-many-centuries. On the table was a beautiful box such as the List makes for precious things, and with a reverent care Once a Day took off its cover.

“The calendar,” she said.

Inside the box were shiny square tiles, a pile of them face up, and another face down, about this size: two hands would just have covered their faces. The one showing, the one on top of the pile that was face up, was a picture, and below the picture were ranks of squares, a little like Blink’s crostic-words. The picture showed two children, younger than Once a Day had been in our first June, in a meadow impossibly full of pale blue flowers, which they picked with faces quiet and absorbed. He wore short pants, she a tiny dress of the same blue as the flowers they picked.

Once a Day touched a black word below the picture. “June,” she said. There was a small stone, made sticky with pine gum, in a square below the picture; she plucked it off and moved it to the next square. Ten days in June. The bell which hung before the way-wall house sounded four times, clear in the dimness, and we went to the great room for evening.

When twenty days had passed, and the stone had made its way through all the squares, we sat again in Twenty-eight Flavors. There were others there that day to watch, and they stood in the heat as Zhinsinura’s big hands moved the June tile to the face-down pile and showed the next. When it was revealed, they all made a satisfied sound, like
aaaah.

That picture let me know, and laugh to know, that however strange and old the angels were, still they were men, and knew what men know, if they could make this. The same two children, she still in her blue dress, lay on green grass darker than June’s, older with length of hot days, and looked into a sky my great changeable clouds were piled up in, cities in the sky. But what made me laugh: the grass and they were at the top of the picture, and looked down into the clouds which floated below: and that’s how it feels, in summer, to watch clouds.

“July,” Once a Day said. The evening bell rang.

In July I went with her on expeditions to gather things, plants and rocks and soils and funguses the List uses for their medicines; and when we grew tired of searching, we lay to watch clouds.

“What are dark and light?” I asked. “Why do you say someone is dark, and another time that he’s light?”

She said nothing, only pillowed her head on her hands and closed her eyes.

“Is it a game?” I asked. “I remember Little St. Roy said, about Olive, that when she was dark she was very, very dark, and when she was light she was lighter than air.”

She laughed at that, her flat stomach shaking. “I heard that,” she said.

“What did he mean?”

She lay silent for a time, and then rose on one elbow to look at me. “When will you go back to Little Belaire?” she said.

The name in her mouth sounded odd; it was the first time I had heard her say it here, and it sounded like a place impossibly remote. “I won’t,” I said. “I promised I wouldn’t.”

“Oh, they’ve forgotten that. If you left, no one would mind; no one would ask you where you went.”

“Would you mind?” I said, for I hadn’t heard in her speech that she would, or that she wouldn’t; had seemed to hear only that there was no minding in her, which couldn’t be so. For a moment my heart felt cold, or hot, and I quickly said: “Anyway I don’t want my tongue cut out.”

“Tongue?” she said, and then laughed. “Oh, they were dark. Now…” And she looked away from me, closing her mouth, as though she had told a riddle wrongly, so that its answer was revealed. But nothing had been revealed to me.

“It was a joke of Roy’s,” Once a Day said. “A joke is all; an old joke. Look, look, we’re falling!”

Below us—yes, below—the sky was tumbled full of clouds. By some magic we stuck to the grass, we were even cross-legged and calm, but we were falling endlessly into cities, faces, monstrous white animals, holding hands to hold onto the roof of the world: strange, when the clouds roll close below you and the sky is grass.

And July’s tile turned at the time table made seven in one pile, five in the other.

The calendar’s two children lay in deep shade; the boy was asleep, a straw hat over his face and a long yellow straw in his mouth, his small bare feet wide apart. She in her blue dress sat beside him looking over a field of the same yellow straw to a red angel’s tower with a conical top; and the gray clouds of a summer storm grew far off. August.

We had a shade house we shared for summer, under two maples that grew together on a hill, and we could see far off too, though all the angels’ works were gone, and Once a Day wore no blue dress; no dress at all. The edges of our house changed as day went on, and the brown bodies of our guests moved with the shade.

“Four doors along the spine,” Houd said. One of his skinny legs he dangled over his knee, and a wide hat shadowed his face, from which his wooden pipe protruded. “And press with all your might against them, you wouldn’t be able to open them. That’s my opinion.”

“That’s because they
are
open,” Once a Day said, yawning. “The heat makes me sleepy.”

“Just as hard to shut them,” Houd said.

“No,” she said. “They blow open; as doors are blown open one by one down a corridor by wind; and that’s the end of that; they’re open.”

“You’re light to think so,” Houd said, and Once a Day yawned again and stretched out her little tawny body on the matted grass so her breasts were nearly flat; she smiled me a sleepy smile.

“Sun’s come around,” someone said. “Everybody move one place.”

Shade.

At evening one let out a light he had brought, but the air drew it away toward Service City, and one by one they followed it there. We lay together as the moon rose and remade our shade house all different.

“Do you think,” she said then, moving away from me by a series of slow changes of posture, “that there are four doors along your spine? And how do you think they open?”

“I don’t know,” I said, following her.

“Neither do I.”

There was a faint rumble of thunder, like someone huge, over the horizon, grumbling in his sleep; and as we lay together our moon house too gradually moved away from under us, leaving us splashed with still, cold light.

And September’s tile shown at the time table made eight in one pile, four in the other.

“I know her,” I said when I saw it, “and now I know those two as well.”

“How could you know them?” she asked.

“Because you showed them to me. Look: there’s the old one, who comes out when it’s dark; and see? she waits now, inside, in this month, and the two children are out…”

“No, you’re wrong.”

“And in the next months she’ll be out, and they’ll be hid.”

“They won’t,” she said. “They’re just two, like any two…”

“Dark and light,” I said, “just as you said, don’t you remember…”

“No!” she shouted, to silence me.

The tile we looked at showed a golden engine-summer day. The two children walked together with shining faces; slung over his shoulder by a strap was some Book, and she carried proudly a bright September apple. In all this it was like every other tile, he and she, she in her dress of blue, in a day just the color of the month it pictured, as though squeezed from the month as from a fruit. But in this month only, there was somebody else: the children walked smiling toward a tiny red house with a peaked roof, in whose door could just be seen a small and aged woman.

And yes, it would grow dark, though it was nice now; the old woman would come out, and the two children must retire to wherever they could, to wait out the dark months, isn’t that right? The angels, even in their covered cities without weather, would not have forgotten that, that in warm perfect engine summer the old woman waited…