The Nail and the Oracle (16 page)

“Take one of those—those things like fertilized ova—make it grow …”

“You don’t
make
it grow. It wants desperately to grow. And not one of them, Keogh. You have thousands. You have hundreds more every hour.”

“Oh my God.”

“It came to me when Dr. Rathburn suggested the operation. It came to me all at once, a miracle. If you love someone that much,” she said, looking at the sleeper, “miracles happen. But you have to be willing to help them happen.” She looked at him directly, with an intensity that made him move back in his chair. “I can have anything I want—all it has to be is possible. We just have to make it possible. That’s why I went to Dr. Weber this morning. To ask him.”

“He said it wasn’t possible.”

“He said that at first. After a half hour or so he said the odds against it were in the billions or trillions … but you see, as soon as he said that, he was saying it was possible.”

“What did you do then?”

“I dared him to try.”

“And that’s why he left?”

“Yes.”

“You’re mad,” he said before he could stop himself. She seemed not to resent it. She sat calmly, waiting.

“Look,” said Keogh at last, “Weber said those distorted—uh—
things
were
like
fertilized ova. He never said they were. He could have said—well, I’ll say it for him—they’re
not
fertilized ova.”

“Bat he did say they were—some of them, anyway, and especially those that reached the lungs—were very much like ova. How close do you have to get before there’s no real difference at all?”

“It can’t be. It just can’t.”

“Weber said that. And I asked him if he had ever tried.”

“All right, all right! It can’t happen, but just to keep this silly argument
going, suppose you got something that would grow. You won’t, of course. But if you did, how would you keep it growing? It has to be fed, it has to be kept at a certain critical temperature, a certain amount of acid or alkali will kill it … you don’t just plant something like that in the yard.”

“Already they’ve taken ova from one cow, planted them in another, and gotten calves. There’s a man in Australia who plans to raise blooded cattle from scrub cows that way.”

“You
have
done your homework.”

“Oh, that isn’t all. There’s a Dr. Carrel in New Jersey who has been able to keep chicken tissue alive for months—he says indefinitely—in a nutrient solution, in a temperature-controlled jar in his lab. It grows, Keogh! It grows so much he has to cut it away every once in a while.”

“This is crazy. This is—it’s insane,” he growled. “And what do you think you’ll get if you bring one of these monsters to term?”

“We’ll bring thousands of them to term,” she said composedly. “And one of them will be
—him
.” She leaned forward abruptly, and her even tone of voice broke; a wildness grew through her face and voice, and though it was quiet, it shattered him: “It will be his flesh, the pattern of him, his own substance grown again. His hair, Keogh. His fingerprints. His—eyes. His—his
self
.”

“I can’t—” Keogh shook himself like a wet spaniel, but it changed nothing; he was still here, she, the bed, the sleeper, and this dreadful, this inconceivably horrible, wrong idea.

She smiled then, put out her hand and touched him; incredibly, it was a mother’s smile, warm and comforting, a mother’s loving, protective touch; her voice was full of affection. “Keogh, if it won’t work, it won’t work, no matter what we do. Then you’ll be right. I think it will work. It’s what I want. Don’t you want me to have what I want?”

He had to smile, and she smiled back. “You’re a young devil,” he said ardently. “Got me coming and going, haven’t you? Why did you want me to fight it?”

“I didn’t,” she said, “but if you fight me, you’ll come up with problems nobody else could possibly think of, and once we’ve thought
of them, we’ll be ready, don’t you see? I’ll fight with you, Keogh,” she said, shifting her strange bright spectrum from tenderness to a quiet, convinced, invincible certainty. “I’ll fight with you, I’ll lift and carry, I’ll buy and sell and kill if I have to, but I am going to bring him back. You know something, Keogh?”

She waved her hand in a gesture that included him, the room, the castle and grounds and all the other castle and grounds; the pseudonyms, the ships and trains, the factories and exchanges, the mountains and acres and mines and banks and the thousands of people which, taken together, were Wyke: “I always knew that all this
was
,” she said, “and I’ve come to understand that this is mine. But I used to wonder sometimes, what it was all
for
. Now I know. Now I know.”

A mouth on his mouth, a weight on his stomach. He felt boneless and nauseated, limp as grease drooling. The light around him was green, and all shapes blurred.

The mouth on his mouth, the weight on his stomach, a breath of air, welcome but too warm, too moist. He needed it desperately but did not like it, and found a power-plant full of energy to gather it up in his lungs and fling it away; but his weakness so filtered all that effort that it emerged in a faint bubbling sigh.

The mouth on his mouth again, and the weight on his stomach and another breath. He tried to turn his head but someone held him by the nose. He blew out the needed, unsatisfactory air and replaced it by a little gust of his own inhalation. On this he coughed; it was too rich, pure, too good. He coughed as one does over a pickle-barrel; good air hurt his lungs.

He felt his head and shoulders lifted, shifted, by which he learned that he had been flat on his back on stone, or something flat and quite that hard, and was now on smooth, firm softness. The good sharp air came and went, his weak coughs fewer, until he fell into a dazed peace. The face that bent over his was too close to focus, or he had lost the power to focus; either way, he didn’t care. Drowsily he stared up into the blurred brightness of that face and listened uncritically to the voice—

—the voice crooning wordlessly and comfortingly, and somehow,
in its wordlessness, creating new expressions for joy and delight for which words would not do. Then after all there were words, half sung, half whispered; and he couldn’t catch them, and he couldn’t catch them and then … and then he was sure he heard: “How could it be, such a magic as this: all this and the eyes as well …” Then, demanding, “You are the shape of the not-you; tell me, are
you
in there?”

He opened his eyes wide and saw her face clearly at last and the dark hair, and the eyes were green—true deep sea-green. Her tangled hair, drying, crowned her like vines, and the leafy roof close above seemed part of her and the green eyes, and threw green light on the unaccountably blond transparency of her cheeks. He genuinely did not know, at the moment, what she was. She had said to him (was it years ago?) “I thought you were a faun …” He had not, at the moment, much consciousness, not to say whimsy, at his command; she was simply something unrelated to anything in his experience.

He was aware of gripping, twisting pain rising, filling, about to explode in his upper abdomen. Some thick wire within him had kinked, and knowing well that it should be unbent, he made a furious, rebellious effort and pulled it through. The explosion came, but in nausea, not in agony. Convulsively he turned his head, surged upward, and let it go.

He saw with too much misery to be horrified the bright vomit surging on and around her knee, and running into the crevice between thigh and calf where she had her leg bent and tucked under her, and the clots left there as the fluid ran away. And she—

She sat where she was, held his head, cradled him in her arms, soothed him and crooned to him and said that was good, good; he’d feel better now. The weakness floored him and receded; then shakily he pressed away from her, sat up, bowed his head and gasped for breath. “Whooo,” he said.

“Boy,” she said; and she said it in exact concert with him. He clung to his shins and wiped the nausea-tears from his left eye, then his right, on his knee-cap. “Boy oh boy,” he said, and she said it with him in concert.

So at last he looked at her.

He looked at her, and would never forget what he saw, and exactly the way it was. Late sunlight made into lace by the bower above clothed her; she leaned toward him, one small hand flat on the ground, one slim supporting arm straight and straight down; her weight turned up that shoulder and her head tilted toward it as if drawn down by the heavy darkness of her hair. It gave a sense of yielding, as if she were fragile, which he knew she was not. Her other hand lay open across one knee, the palm up and the fingers not quite relaxed, as if they held something; and indeed they did, for a spot of light, gold turned coral by her flesh, lay in her palm. She held it just so, just right, unconsciously, and her hand held that rare knowledge that closed, a hand may not give nor receive. For his lifetime he had it all, each tiniest part, even to the gleaming big toenail at the underside of her other calf. And she was smiling, and her complex eyes adored.

Guy Gibbon knew his life’s biggest moment during the moment itself, a rarity in itself, and of all times of life, it was time to say the unforgettable, for anything he said now would be.

He shuddered, and then smiled back at her. “Oh … 
boy
,” he breathed.

And again they were laughing together until, puzzled, he stopped and asked, “Where am I?”

She would not answer, so he closed his eyes and puzzled it out. Pine bower … undress somewhere … swimming. Oh, swimming. And then across the lake, and he had met—He opened his eyes and looked at her and said, “You.” Then swimming back, cold, his gut full of too much food and warm juice and moldy cake to boot, and, “… you must have saved my life.”

“Well somebody had to. You were dead.”

“I should’ve been.”

“No!” she cried. “Don’t you ever say that again!” And he could see she was absolutely serious.

“I only meant, for stupidity. I ate a lot of junk, and some cake I think was moldy. Too much, when I was hot and tired, and then like a bonehead I went right into the water, so anybody who does that deserves to—”

“I meant it,” she said levelly, “never again. Didn’t you ever hear of the old tradition of the field of battle, when one man saved another’s life, that life became his to do what he wanted with?”

“What do you want to do with mine?”

“That depends,” she said thoughtfully. “You have to give it. I can’t just take it.” She knelt then and sat back on her heels, her hands trailing pine-needles across the bower’s paved stone floor. She bowed her head and her hair swung forward. He thought she was watching him through it; he could not be sure.

He said, and the thought grew so large that it quelled his voice and made him whisper. “Do you want it?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, whispering too. When he moved to her and put her hair back to see if she was watching him, he found her eyes closed, and tears pressed through. He reached for her gently, but before he could touch her she sprang up and straight at the leafy wall. Her long golden body passed through it without a sound, and seemed to hang suspended outside; then it was gone. He put his head through and saw her flashing along under green water. He hesitated, then got an acrid whiff of his own vomit. The water looked clean and the golden sand just what he ached to scrub himself with. He climbed out of the bower and floundered clumsily down the bank and into the water.

After his first plunge he came up and spun about, looking for her, but she was gone.

Numbly he swam to the tiny beach and, kneeling, scoured himself with the fine sand. He dove and rinsed, and then (hoping) scrubbed himself all over again. And rinsed. But he did not see her.

He stood in the late rays of the sun to dry, and looked off across the lake. His heart leapt when he saw white movement, and sank again as he saw it was just the wheel of boats bobbing and sliding there.

He plodded up to the bower—now at last he saw it was the one behind which he had undressed—and he sank down on the bench.

This was a place where tropical fish swam in ocean water where there was no ocean, and where fleets of tiny perfect boats sailed with no one sailing them and no one watching, and where priceless statues
stood hidden in clipped and barbered glades deep in the woods and—and he hadn’t seen it all; what other impossibilities were possible in this impossible place?

And besides, he’d been sick. (He wrinkled his nostrils.) Damn near … drowned. Out of his head for sure, for a while anyway. She couldn’t be real. Hadn’t he noticed a greenish cast to her flesh, or was that just the light?… anybody who could make a place like this, run a place like this, could jimmy up some kind of machine to hypnotize you like in the science fiction stories.

He stirred uneasily. Maybe someone was watching him, even now.

Hurriedly, he began to dress.

So she wasn’t real. Or maybe all of it wasn’t real. He’d bumped into that other trespasser across the lake there, and that was real, but then when he’d almost drowned, he’d dreamed up the rest.

Only—he touched his mouth. He’d dreamed up someone blowing the breath back into him. He’d heard about that somewhere, but it sure wasn’t what they were teaching this year at the Y.

You are the shape of the not-you. Are you in there?

What did that mean?

He finished dressing dazedly. He muttered, “What’d I hafta go an’ eat that goddamn cake for?” He wondered what he would tell Sammy. If she wasn’t real, Sammy wouldn’t know what he was talking about. If she was real there’s only one thing he would talk about, yes, and from then on. You mean you had her in that place and all you did was throw up on her? No—he wouldn’t tell Sammy. Or anybody.

And he’d be a bachelor all his life.

Boy oh boy. What an introduction. First she has to save your life and then you don’t know what to say and then oh, look what you had to go and do. But anyway—she wasn’t real.

He wondered what her name was. Even if she wasn’t real. Lots of people don’t use their real names.

He climbed out of the bower and crossed the silent pine carpet behind it, and he shouted. It was not a word at all, and had nothing about it that tried to make it one.