Otherwise (63 page)

“And then returned.”

“And then returned,” he said.

“Angel,” I said, “why have you come here?”

“I’ve answered your questions,” he said. “Now you must answer one for me.” He set himself, adjusted his ear, and asked: “How would you like to live forever, or nearly?”

FIFTH FACET

A
ll night till moonrise I tried to answer him. I tried to tell him how I had seen the four dead men made of stone, and shivered in the warmth; how it had been to solve that mystery that I had followed Once a Day to Service City and been Boots: how the four dead men had always been the crossing place in my life where I turned further into darkness. And all night he tried to explain, and talked of processes and pictures and how painless and harmless it had been proved to be. We both talked, and despite his angel’s ear, neither understood.

“You ask me,” I said, “to be your dead man in Plunkett’s stead. Even if I understood why you needed such a one, I couldn’t choose to be one. Don’t you see?”

“But I would take nothing from you,” he said, trembling with effort. “No more—no more than a frosted glass takes anything from you when you print it with your thumb!”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Boots was there, when I was not. Alive as ever. She didn’t mind, I don’t think; but I think a man would. I think of a fly, stuck in a cube of plastic, able to see all around, but not able to move. It frightens me.”

“Fly?” he said to his ear. “Fly?” He couldn’t make it make sense. I rolled smoke for myself, and saw that my hands trembled. “Fly,” he said’ desperately. I struck a match but the head flew off, sizzling, and struck Brom, who jumped up with a howl, and what with it all, the fly and the flame and Brom and me so stupid, he plucked the false ear from his head, flung it on the ground, and burst into tears.

What is it?

It’s just… well,
you make him sound comical. He wasn’t. He was brave and fine and the best man of his time. When he came down, you know, he didn’t know what he would find; he knew only the City
—
and the world
Plunkett
had lived in. For all Mongolfier knew, the land below him would
swallow him like
a mouth. Except for pictures, he’d never seen an animal. And yet he jumped from his home to change our lives. He wasn’t comical.

I only meant to show my wonderment. I have no words for his sufferings: before them I felt thin and old, as you do before an angry child. I couldn’t follow what he said, and it made him weep, is all I meant.…

If he could have spoken your way, he could have made it clear.

He would have told you that when the angels raised the City, it wasn’t out of despair, or to flee the ruin they had created: they were proud of it, it was
the
last hope and greatest engine of man, and in it would be preserved the knowledge that led to its creation, preserved from the mass of men who
wished
insanely to destroy Everything they Wanted, Plunkett was the most complex and precious of all their works, and when they first used it, it was as
they had
used all the other things
they
had saved: to remember, in its use, the learning and skill that had made it.

But in its use they learned something unexpected, something terrible and wonderful: they learned what it is to be a man. As you learned from Boots what it is to be alive, they learned from Plunkett
what
it is to be a man: and it wasn’t what they had thought, at all
.

You see, you think
all
men who lived in Plunkett’s time were angels, and could fly, and were consumed with fierce passions to alter the world and make it man’s, without remorse,
without
patience, without fear. It’s not so. The mass of men then were no more angels than you are. Unable to understand the angels’ world, ignorant of how to do any wonders at all, they only suffered from the angels’ hunger, suffered blindly in the wreckage of the angels’ world.
Plunkett was
such a one. Zhinsinura said that even the League’s
women were
angels: the angels learned from
Plunkett
that even they were men.

And the first of them to look out Plunkett’s eyes and learn it, when he returned, never spoke again.

You make me afraid for this one who I am. How hard, how hard… Harder than Boots, it must be, far harder…

Yes: because though Boots has no memory, you have. And Plunkett had: they came away from him remembering everything, his shame, his hurt, his confusion, Everything he Wanted. Boots’s letter was Forget: Plunkett’s letter was Remember.

They said it made for madness, then, that it had been a mistake, that it shouldn’t be used again. But it was used again. The bravest learned to bear Plunkett, and to speak of it. And while in the warren they told stories of the saints, and grew old in speaking; and as the list remembered the League, and grew old in Boots; so we grew old in Plunkett. All we knew was learning to live with his suffering: our suffering. We forgot our plans; the years came to the hundreds; our pride vanished, we studied Plunkett only, our hope became dread, our escape exile.

But why didn’t you stop? Come back again? The City could return, couldn’t it, if they’d seen they were mistaken?

No. The world they
left was Plunkett’s world: it was all they knew of earth. Plunkett taught them that the rule of men had not been sufficient; and if that were so, then the world beneath them must have died, and the men with it. It was the only possibility.

But it’s not so. It got different, is all. You could come back; there’s no hard feelings. You must come back. It’s home.

Home…. Do you know how
large the world
is? I
do. The winds blow always westerly around it, and the City is moved with them, and in a lifetime goes around to the place where it began.
I
was born over sea: when I was grown, still the sea was beneath us. When we pass through storms, they aren’t the storms that fall on earth; we know them at their birthplaces; we pass through them and are not shaken. Do you know, when it snows here, the snow flies upward;
lightning
comes close enough to touch, and comes not from the sky but upward from the earth. It has never made me afraid.

Far off, when
the
clouds part, we see earth; vague and lovely and
possible,
I suppose the way you look at distant mountains, and wonder, but never visit. No:
this is
my home. It was Mongolfier’s. For
its
sake, dark with Plunkett’s fear and suffering, he jumped down to earth, to find you, who would heal us; you, who had found the ball and glove that could free us from Plunkett; you who would dry our old tears.

If he could have spoken your way, he would have said this to you.…

How is it you can speak my way, and he couldn’t?

You’ve
taught
us. We are truthful speakers too now,
Rush.

And you? Are you, angel? Do you know what it is to be… another, to return from not being, to tumble back through all your ways, as though you fell from a height, and see, and see…. Do you?

No. I only know what they’ve said: that the cruelest was to have been Plunkett; that heavy as you are, to put you down is joyful in the end, that after the days of
silence,
it’s easy; that I could learn to live with you, as none ever could
with Plunkett.
Plunkett made us brave, they say, and you have made us happy. But
I haven’t,
yet; I’m afraid to bear your weight.

And Mongolfier could? Did I make him easier?

No. He
never dared, after
Plunkett. He
brought you here. They told him: he saw it work but never dared.

You make me ashamed. Ashamed, with all that, of why in the end I did agree to let him take me, or whatever it was he wanted to take, with him.

Why?

It was just, well: ever since I was a kid I’ve somewhere in me believed in a City in the Sky. Not as Blink did, as a perhaps, or as the List did, as a story, or as Little St. Roy did, as a pretty thought, but that it was real. As real as clouds. And an angel had dropped from there, and said he’d take me. And however much he said that I, mortal I, would feel no change, that I would be left sitting in the meadow just as I was while he went off with—with something like a slide of the Filing System, if he could have thought to say that: still, I thought maybe I would get to see it, what it was like; that dome, those clouds. That’s all.

But I slept, first. I was exhausted by our struggle. I wrapped up in my black and silver and watched the moon for a while; Brom lay next to me roaring. Mongolfier wouldn’t sleep; he sat straight up, with his back against a tree, and watched.

I dreamed that night of the warren, of running on Path toward the inside, through great and little rooms where chests were kept and gossips studied cords, circling in a spiral nearer to the center past people smoking and kids playing, into narrow passages of angelstone in the dim small deep insides. I awoke without reaching the center, and thinking that after all I had never known where exactly the center of Belaire was, to see Mongolfier still sitting, paler with his vigil and with his, his Gun, as he called it, in his lap, waiting.

“All right,” I said. “All right.” I rubbed my eyes and sat up. He got up, stiff with tension, and held out his hand for the silver ball and glove. I searched in my pack for them; they called to me softly from beneath the raggedies piled on top of them. “Now,” he said, when he had them, his voice hoarse with no sleep, but calm for the first time since I’d met him. He led me down through the pasture to where Plunkett stood amid the meadow flowers. “Sit, sit,” he said, “and close your eyes.”

I sat, but wouldn’t close my eyes. I watched silver fog rising out of the valley of That River. I watched Mongolfier at the engine: he drew on my glove, and with it brought the ball close to the pedestal on which Plunkett sat, and then released it: as though thrown, it buried itself within the glassy box, lining up with the others there. Its whistle ceased as it entered. He pretended, with his gloved hand, to turn that ball, that knob, and it turned. The sphere on top of the pedestal, clearer than glass, grew clouded, as though filling with smoke; Mongolfier turned the knob until the sphere was black: as black as way-wall: a black no-place in the morning.

“Plunkett is dead,” he said. “Close your eyes.” With the other glove, the glove he had brought, he pretended to turn a black knob, and the sphere rose off its pedestal. “Close your eyes,” he said again, worried, glancing from me to his machine.

“All right,” I said, but didn’t. I put my hat on. I took it off again. The black sphere came slowly before my face. I had a moment to feel the limitless fear I had felt before way-wall as it filled up my sight: and then I closed my eyes.

And opened them here.

Yes. And you must close them now again, the story’s told.…

Wait. Put down the glove. I’m afraid.

Afraid?

Afraid for him, for me. What do I do, angel, alone, stuck like the fly, when I’m not here telling this?

Nothing. If you dream, they are the dreams you wake from having already forgotten. But I don’t think you dream: no, nothing, probably.

It seems I’m still in that meadow, and that I, I mean my story, just got here to be told. But that can’t be so. I’ve told all this before.

Yes.

Why don’t I remember?

You aren’t here, Rush. There isn’t anything here of you but
—
but something like a slide of the Filing System, that can only reveal you by
—

Interpenetration.

Interpenetration, yes. With another. Who is gone now, while you’re here, who will return when you are gone. But nothing spoken to you while you are here can affect you, any more than the picture of Plunkett could smile back at you if you smiled at it; when you are in yet another, you will be surprised again to find yourself here, surprised that a moment ago you sat in the meadow with Mongolfier; and you’ll marvel at the dome, the clouds; and tell your story again. What it is to be you when you aren’t here but on your pedestal, we don’t know; we only know that sometimes you come from that sleep asleep, sometimes awake…

How many times? How many?

…
and each time ask that. When our son … when my son is grown, Rush, and takes you on himself, if he dares, you will have been awakened here three hundred times, in twice as many years.

No. No, angel…

Many lives, Rush. Painted Red said.

But she’s gone. They’re all gone. And I… what did I do, then, angel, in my life? Did I grow old? Did I ever go down the hill? And Once a Day… oh, angel, what became of me?

I
don’t know. There are those who, having been you, have guessed; have dreamed or imagined how you returned to Belaire, the saint you became. Mongolfier said he
watched
you, after the old copter had come for him, watched you marvel at it, watched you watch it fly off with him: that’s all we know. We know
nothing else, Rush,
but what you tell us. It’s all you here now,
Rush.