The Caterpillar's Question by Piers Anthony and Philip José Farmer (2 page)

Next day they toured the great Green Mountains, the car's little engine laboring in a lower gear to manage the steep ascents. That was all right; he was no longer in a hurry, and they could proceed as slowly as they wanted. He continued to call out the view, and though Tappy did not turn her face to him again, he could tell by her alertness that she was interested.

He spoke of the old elms and maples, the mossy rocks, the near and distant mountain slopes covered with green foliage like thickly woven rugs. They passed a ski run-- a long bare swath running up the side of one of the higher peaks, resembling a scar.

And she was crying again, in her silent way. The scar-- why hadn't he kept his brain connected enough to stifle that analogy before it was spoken! His description lapsed; he couldn't think of any apology that would not hurt her more.

He understood now that her passive attitude concealed an extremely sensitive nature. Yet perhaps there was a positive aspect, for at least she was now showing her emotion. He had spoken to her, and gained her interest, thereby making her vulnerable. If he could hurt her, could he not also help her, if he found the right words?

They should have passed on through the Green Mountains and headed for New Hampshire, but Tappy seemed to be coming alive. Her head turned to the north, and her blind eyes became round. What was she trying to see? Jack remembered her words of the night, and decided to learn more of this if he could. He brought the car about, returned to the last intersection, and turned north.

Tappy's head now faced straight ahead; there was no doubt she was orienting on something, and it was independent of the motion of the car. What could it be?

He followed the direction of her gaze until it turned to the side. There was now no road where she looked, but her excitement suggested that the thing was fairly close.

At noon he pulled into a motel consisting of a row of ramshackle cabins. He thought it was deserted, and he only intended to search for some fresh water for lunch, and perhaps to see exactly where Tappy's fascination lay. But presently a man ambled out. He was dressed in high-fronted jeans, a style Jack had thought only picture-book farmers affected. They were in the hinterlands now!

"Don't get much business hereabout, this time o' year," the man remarked amiably. He spoke with a rich backwoods accent that also caught Jack off guard. "I'm the caretaker, but I can fix you up with a cab'n if you like."

"Two, if you please," Jack said. After all, he couldn't drive forever. Tomorrow was time enough to deliver Tappy. "There's a girl with me."

"Ay-uh," the man said affirmatively. "Saw her. Two'll cost you double, you know. Don't have to spend it."

Jack smiled at his candor. "It isn't my money," he said, as though that made everything all right. He accepted the keys to the two cabins. Then a thought gave him pause. "Do you have any books? I mean simple ones, to be read aloud? Like a children's book, or--?"

The man scratched his hairy head. "Well, now. There's some things the tourists forgot." Evidently the two of them didn't rank as tourists, which was probably for the best. Jack no longer detected much accent in the caretaker. The man wandered into a back room while Jack waited at the door, and sounds of rummaging drifted out. At length he emerged with a slim volume. "Don't know about this one," he admitted. "First I come to. If it don't suit, there's others."

Jack read the title: The Little Prince, by one Antoine de Saint-Exupery. He had never heard of the man. "I'll give it a try. What do I owe you?" The man declined money for the book, to his surprise, and he went to escort Tappy to her cabin.

They had sandwiches on a wooden table outside the cabin. Tappy made them up with a certain finesse, and he was reminded again that she was used to doing for herself. It was a mistake to think of her as clumsy; of course the other senses had been stimulated to make up for her blindness. Touch and memory, sound and smell: these she possessed. And feeling.

The day clouded over. It wasn't really cold, but he wrapped Tappy in a voluminous quilt, set her on the cabin's sagging bunk, and read to her from The Little Prince. It was a curious story, a mixture of childish fantasy and adult perception, with appropriate illustrations. There were hats and boa constrictors and elephants, and confusions between them; there were gigantic bottle trees growing on pea-sized planetoids. Jack didn't know what to make of it, but Tappy seemed interested, and he continued to read all that afternoon. He took time to describe all the illustrations as they appeared.

When he came to the part about taming the fox by following the fox's own instructions, Tappy smiled. Jack could not honestly claim it was like a ray of sunshine. It was not poetic. It did not erase the terrible scar across her face. He was not about to use it as a model for a contemporary Mona Lisa portrait. It was simply a faint, frail, rather human smile. But it was the first, and his heart jumped that moment.

When he read the soliloquy to the field of roses, Tappy cried. But it was the tear of a woman at a wedding, incomprehensible but not miserable. The Little Prince had a cherished single rose, then was confronted by an entire field of roses, each as pretty as his own. But he had learned a lesson from his taming of the fox. "No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one," he said to those other roses, much to their embarrassment. "You are beautiful, but you are empty... because it is she that I have watered... she that I have listened to... because she is my rose."

Jack would not have thought that a girl of thirteen would comprehend the message there. He wasn't sure he grasped it himself. Apparently he had stumbled across a book that was meaningful to her.

When it finished, she took the volume from his hand and held it to her breast. He left her sitting there, swathed in the quilt, tightly hugging the story she could not read herself. She was there when he returned an hour later with a bag of groceries. He let her keep the book that night, and she slept.

This time he was alert, and was there to listen the moment she began talking. But the words made no more sense than before. "Alien menace... only chance is to use the radiator." He thought that was what it was. Evidently more of the television program.

Yet why should she be so intrigued with it that she repeated it in her sleep? This child suffered so terribly; how could a routine segment of a silly program affect her like this?

Then she said something different, with a peculiar intensity. "Larva... Chrysalis... Imago." Quite clearly. He knew what that was: the several stages of the growth of an insect. First it was a kind of worm, then a kind of bug, finally it metamorphosed into its moment of glory, the flying form. He had of course painted many butterflies. But she could have picked this up in any class on natural life. Why was she repeating it in her sleep with such intensity?

Unless she identified with it. Tappy's present form was about as miserable as it could be. Was she dreaming of metamorphosing into something far better? He could hardly blame her! Yet he had an eerie feeling that there was more to it than this.

She was up, bright and clean, the next morning, wearing a new dress. He hadn't realized she had a third one in her small suitcase. Her dark hair was freshly combed and seemed longer than before. He saw that she was taller, too, now that she stood up straight, and her figure was better developed than he had credited. Except for the scar, she was not an unattractive girl.

Something clicked, and he ran to the car. Sure enough, there were dark glasses in the glove compartment. They were men's glasses and were too big for her, but a little effort with the car's compact tool kit enabled him to bend the frames around to fit her face. It was awkward to adjust for the damaged ear; he had to use adhesive tape from the first-aid kit. But when it was done, both the scar and the vacant stare were inconspicuous. He did not explain what he was doing, but was sure she understood.

She raised her hand as he applied the finishing touches. He thought she meant to remove the glasses, but she brushed his face instead. The cobweb caress of her delicate fingertips passed over his cheeks and nose, and he realized that this was her way of seeing him. "My eyes are gray," he told her helpfully, then wondered if she had any conception of color. Yes, of course she did: she had been normal until the accident. "My hair is brown and I stand five-seven in thick socks."

Then, abruptly, she turned, as if hearing something. But there was nothing out of the ordinary. "What is it, Tappy?" he asked. She only stared, eyes round, as she had in the car. Whatever it was, it seemed closer now; she was trembling with excitement.

Her face oriented on something beyond, as it had before.

"Why don't we go somewhere where I can paint?" Jack suggested. She acceded gladly. She wanted to go somewhere, certainly.

The day outside was beautiful. The bright sun sent shafts through the mountains and made the morning mists rise in perpendicular tails. He hauled his portable easel from the car along with a couple of canvases, and took Tappy by the hand.

The caretaker came out as they passed the lead cabin. "Going to do some painting," Jack called to him. "We'll be here a few days."

A few days! What was he doing?

"Ay-uh," the man said knowledgeably, and went about his business. Jack had not told him that Tappy was blind.

Tappy led the way. There was definitely something she wanted to find. His curiosity thoroughly aroused, Jack cooperated. They climbed through field and forest, heading for the top of the mountain. That summit had looked very close from the cabins, almost overhanging them. Two hours later it still looked close. He had not meant to subject the lame girl to this much labor, or himself, burdened with his painting apparatus.

Jack put his free arm around Tappy's waist to help her climb, as she did not wish to turn back. He discovered a hardness there. In a moment he realized that she had The Little Prince with her, tucked inside her blouse. All this time... this was foolish of the girl, but it pleased him obscurely, and he gave her a friendly squeeze.

There was a dip in the thickening forest for a mountain stream whose bed comprised little more than a collection of massive round rocks. A driblet of water trickled between them, very cold. Jack dipped his hand in it and splashed a few droplets on Tappy. She shook them off prettily and tugged him on. Why was she so eager to make this climb?

The stream originated in a sandy patch beneath a huge old maple tree. Ancient sugaring spigots ringed the giant's gnarled trunk. Careless, he thought; these should have been removed. The water percolated up from some subterranean reservoir, as though this were the vanishing sap of the tree. Jack lay on his stomach and drank, feeling the moist coolness of the leaves and twigs against his chest. Then he guided Tappy to the same refreshment.

Life appeared. Little tubular shells decorated the bottom of the streamlet, and threadlike animalcules, and an agile salamander skittered magically away. A tiny gray and white bird watched them from its perch on a neighboring trunk-- upside down. It proceeded to spiral on down, around and around the tree headfirst, until it reached the ground. It took wing for the next tree's upper section, then started down again.

He described it to Tappy, who listened attentively. She raised her hand toward the bird and smiled. For a moment he thought the nuthatch was coming to her; then it was gone, and they resumed the climb.

The ascent became ferociously steep near the end. They had to scramble over jutting rocks and tangled roots, and his painting paraphernalia neutralized a hand he needed. Tappy had no trouble, now that touch was the most important guide, and soon she was leading the way and indicating the best route for him. He followed, trying to avoid staring up inside her skirt as her legs moved above him, feeling guilty for even being conscious of the impropriety. Her legs looked healthy; did she need that brace at all?

They made it at last. There was a brief clearing at the summit, a disk of grass and bare rock tike the balding head of a friar. Tappy hurried to a big rock at the top, seeming much taken with it, yet somehow disappointed, too. She opened her blouse and brought out the book, setting it on the rock.

He stood there and marveled at the ring of mountains, row on row, circle beyond circle, extending as far as he could see. The very world seemed to turn under his feet, giving him a strange exhilaration and a sense of power.

There had been a time when he thought little of such displays, when a pinnacle had been merely a distant high place. But in his youth his father took him for a climb, one unexpected day, and when they rested on the height, fatigued and perspiring from the hike, he showed Jack the land. Now Jack relived that experience.

Through the eons of prehistory the earth itself crumpled and cracked, wrinkling into the jaggedly fresh peaks of a stony range. Then came the rain, and the ice of a glacier, and the mightiest of mounts wore down with the burden of time. The green mold of verdure pried at its grandeur, the rivers spirited away its substance for deposit to the accounts of alluvial banks. Natural history lived in the decline of the mountains, and it was written here, all around him, in the remnants of a range once greater than the Rockies. It was as if he could see all the way into the past-- and into the future, too.

How was he to record any fragment of this language of eternity on his poor flat canvas? Yet it was a joy to try!

Tappy sensed his mood, and she stood on her toes beside him and kissed him lightly on the cheek. Without thinking he turned and took her in his arms and kissed her deeply on the lips.

She clung to him, her slight eager body pressing tightly against his. Nothing seemed to matter but the indefinable emotion of the moment.

Jack withdrew, confused. This was a thirteen-year-old child, with outsized glasses and a nebulous fate. He had traveled with her only three days. He had to deliver her to--

"Let's settle down awhile and... paint," he said, setting aside a situation too complex to be understood at once. He set up his easel and stood facing out onto the bowl of the world.