Winterlong (41 page)

“At least it’s always warm in here,” said Miss Scarlet as we passed through the entrance.

I sighed gratefully as a blast of heated air rolled over me. It was dark inside, illuminated only by squares of greenish light coming from glass cages set into the walls. An overwhelmingly pungent smell pervaded the chambers, rotting flesh and rotting vegetation; but the floor was immaculately swept and the glass fronting the cages was so clean that more than once I paused to prod it with my finger, just to be certain there was something between myself and the cages’ sluggish inhabitants. The place was empty, although brooms and mops and nets stacked in corners seemed to caution that its Keepers would return soon.

“They’re busy getting ready for this evening,” said Miss Scarlet. She stopped in front of a large cage. She eyed its inhabitant with loathing—a serpent coiled about a dead stump. “Are you warmer yet, Wendy?”

I nodded, stooping to stare at a speckled viper. It regarded me balefully, black tongue flicking in and out, then without warning lunged toward us and struck the glass. I stumbled backward, tripping over Miss Scarlet, then laughing a little breathlessly helped her to her feet. A small bloody streak smeared the glass. On the floor of the cage the viper lashed back and forth, trying to find us in the darkness.

“Did you see that?” I exclaimed, pushing my hair from my eyes. “I’ve never seen a—”

I turned to see that my friend had collapsed against the wall, heedless of the brooms that had toppled beside her. “Miss Scarlet! Are you all right?”

As I knelt beside her she nodded. “The snake,” she said faintly. “I can’t bear them.”

I helped her to her feet and looked around for someplace to sit.

“Really, I’m fine, Wendy—Here, turn at this corner, I wanted to show you something in here.”

We hurried past a huge display area covered by a glass roof, where crocodiles like immense and idle machines floated in stagnant pools. Crested white herons stepped nimbly from one plated back to another, dipping their bills to spear fish from the dark water. Miss Scarlet looked away and held her breath until we were safely past, but I glanced back, marveling that they never moved.

“The Herp Lab,” Miss Scarlet muttered, almost to herself. “This way, if I remember it right. Or not?”

She stopped in front of a case which held a pair of bloated golden toads, each bigger than my head but with lovely round jeweled eyes wise and tender as an aging courtesan’s. “Yes. This way.”

We rounded a corner into darkness. No cages here. The only light trickled from chinks in the ceiling high above.

“They used to leave it open, we’d come in here, Jane and I and some of others—Jane was a clever child, she taught me how to run the old machines—” “’She halted, quite out of breath, and gestured toward a tall arched door, oak inlaid with stained glass. Very old figured metal letters spelled out
HERP LAB/AUDI
VIS
AL
FAC ITY. I was surprised when the knob turned freely in my hand, and Miss Scarlet laughed in relief.

“Oh! I was so afraid it might be locked—not that anyone would dream of stealing anything, but—
you
know,
policy
changes.”

I nodded as we stepped inside. The door creaked loudly as it shut behind us. As if in answer a chorus of bell-like voices chirped from a corner of the room.

“Peepers,” said Miss Scarlet. Cages filled this end of the laboratory, some of glass, some of metal or plastic, some crude shells of wood and wire mesh. The room had a dry sugary smell, no longer merely warm but hot. I wiped my brow and blew down the front of my shirt. Miss Scarlet looked comfortable, in spite of her heavy crinolines. Holding up her skirts, she crossed to the far side of the lab, fastidiously avoiding looking into any of the cages. Against a windowless wall a number of very old machines were arranged on metal shelves, most of them sheathed in silver or black metal, a few with their intricate inner anatomies exposed to show wheels and gears and shining levers.

“You’re in the Nursery,” she called, waving me to join her. I could scarcely see her head poking above the uneven rows of cages. “But they store projectors and videos and cinematographs here, too. Come see.”

I walked slowly, pausing often to peer into cages where ruby-throated anoles stalked each other up and down pale bamboo shoots, and agamas blinked beneath the heat lamps as they guarded leathery eggs, and where in a cool dim corner the deceptively big-voiced peepers proved to be only three tiny frogs now silent at my approach: translucent throats deflated, their mottled brown backs crossed with red as though someone had X’ed them with a fingernail. I passed them and stopped in front of a narrow cage labeled
HOGNOSED
SNAKE
. Half a dozen eggs lay in a depression in the sand, eggs the color of spoiled milk, the approximate shape and length of my thumb. As I watched one shifted very slightly. I thought of Jane, recalled her joy at witnessing the birthing vipers. And suddenly I wanted to stay to watch them, to lose myself among all these new small lives. I felt a violent pang as I recalled Jane’s accusing eyes, and remembered sadly the lizard I had killed the morning I escaped with Justice from
HEL
.

“Wendy!”

I started. Miss Scarlet stood atop a wire chair and beckoned me, brow furrowed. “Ugh! You can’t be mooning over those things! You’re worse than Jane.”

I shrugged and crossed the lab. Several yards of empty space divided the Herp Lab from where the machines were stored. A single diatom lantern was suspended from the ceiling, its silvery filaments casting bluish light over the silent machines. The air smelled pleasantly of cedar.

“Hog-nosed snakes,” I said. “Hog-nosed snake eggs, actually.”

Miss Scarlet rolled her eyes. “How revolting! I despise serpents—I don’t suppose you can smell them, else you would too.”

“I never saw one before,” I said. “Except in pictures. So many things …”

My friend nodded, patting my arm. “Well, we haven’t an awful lot of time left before the others arrive.” She coughed discreetly. I turned to see that she had drawn her chair in front of a cinematograph. Pinpoints of red and green light shone at its edges. After a moment pearly sparks began to glimmer across the dull black screen.

“Wendy?”

She dipped her head to indicate a chair beside hers. From their corner of the room the peepers began to chime once more. We settled into our chairs and stared at the screen brightening before us.

I glanced at Miss Scarlet and saw that she was sitting bolt upright, her face rapt with an expectation so intent it might have been dread. The little screen cast greenish highlights across her smooth black face. She began to rock back and forth with excitement.

“What is it, Miss Scarlet?”

A louder, sweeter music drowned out the peepers’ song. Words flowed across the black screen in an elegant script, yellow and green and white, names it seemed; but they meant nothing to me.

“It is one of their histories,” she whispered. She clasped her hands together. “A very old story, I first saw it oh so many years ago and that was when I realized I was not the first, just as when I saw you I knew that you were another, Wendy—”

Colors swirled about the screen, formed vague lines, then took shape. A midnight sky speared by stars, tiny buildings clustered in a valley between dark and snowcapped mountains. A high voice singing to itself, so achingly sweet that I shivered and knotted my hands together. It was like one of the Small Voices, piercing me with a yearning that could never be fulfilled. I leaned forward to stare at the screen. A square of yellow light swelled into a window looking in upon a solitary old man and a room filled with toys and clocks, and unnoticed among these automatons a tiny figure, singing.

“What are they?” I said. Not real actors, surely? I had seen holos and videos and even films before, but never anything like this, never such colors and faces, no more alive than the Paphians’ scholiasts but strange and lovely all the same: and moving and speaking like human beings.

“It is an ancient history of those who were here before the First Ascension,” whispered Miss Scarlet. “It is one of their lost Arts. It has survived to show us the world as it truly was then.”

When I started to ask another question she put a finger to her lips and shook her head. “Watch, Wendy,” she said; “and you will understand why I dream that one day we may become Truly Human, you and I.”

So I watched and listened to a story like nothing I had ever seen before. Oh, histories I knew; but even as Dr. Harrow taught us of these she had cautioned us:

“There are too many histories now. Once there was only one, and the world was a simpler place. But now every Ascension has its Historian, its Poet, its Savior, its Traitor.” Memory of her bitter voice rang in my ears as she said, “Choose carefully the history you want, Wendy: it will determine the world you live in.”

The world on the cinematograph was not the one I had chosen. But as I watched the strange images race across the screen I knew it was Miss Scarlet’s world: one where the animals spoke, and the cruelty and kindness of humans was punished or rewarded; where audiences showered gold upon a marvelous fantoccio that danced and sang, and a man could love a creature made of wood. And as I untangled the threads that strung the tale together—selfishness and lies, laziness and arrogance and too late the bittersweet knowledge of love—I realized why she had wanted me to see this.

“She thinks it’s like me,”
I thought, mortified.

And, shrilling like the peepers, the Small Voices whirred inside my head,
It’s you, it’s you, it’s you.

Something moved behind me. I turned to see Jane Alopex shutting the lab door, shaking her head so that I would remain quiet as she crossed the room to join us.

“Look,” Miss Scarlet said as the girl pulled another chair beside hers and sat. The long black hairs on her neck stood up out of her high collar. I smelled the ripe odor she gave off before a performance, fear and arousal and anticipation all at once.

“I see,” said Jane, letting the chimpanzee crawl into her lap. I looked back at the screen. A woman in long blue robes floated there. She reminded me of the images of the Magdalene I had seen at the House Miramar, except that she had wings. I wondered if the Magdalene was that old; if before the First Ascension Her followers had worshipped at the Cathedral as others did now.

The blue lady on the screen said, “If you learn to be brave, honest, and unselfish, then you will become a real boy.” Miss Scarlet stared raptly. I knew that if she had been capable of weeping—one of the many things she dreamed of—she would have cried. I stared down at my knees. I could never have chosen such a world for myself.

A little longer and the story ended. We sat in silence, Jane and Miss Scarlet and I. After a minute or two Jane leaned forward and clicked something so that the screen went black and the machine’s hum was stilled. Miss Scarlet slid from her lap to the floor and walked a few steps away from us.

“Well,” said Jane as she stood and stretched. “I figured I’d find you here. I see that Scarlet has shown you her favorite story.”

I nodded, continuing to stare at the empty screen.

“She loves that one. When she was only a few years old;—
after
the operation …”

She lowered her voice. “One of the Keepers set up a cinematograph in her room. That was the first one she ever saw, that one you just watched.” She pointed at the machine, then glanced over at Miss Scarlet standing by herself at the edge of the room, her back to us.

“She thinks it’s true,” Jane whispered. Her dark eyes glazed with pity as they met mine. “You could never tell her otherwise—not that I’d want to, it would break her heart. And really, look at her! She’s famous, the entire City knows her and loves her, you would think that would be enough.

“But
she
never thought it was enough. She’s like the Paphians. Dreams that someday the Magdalene will come to save them all: overthrow the Ascendants, teach the Curators a lesson in humility, turn a chimpanzee into a woman.” She shrugged, sighing. “Turn me into a fox, if I had
my
wish! Then I wouldn’t have to worry about all this nonsense tonight. Ha!”

She laughed, shaking the hair from where it flopped into her eyes. “They found the lynx,” she called to Miss Scarlet. The chimpanzee turned, face rumpling into a smile. “But not before it killed Anatole Equestris’s favorite bird-of-paradise.”

“Oh dear,” said Miss Scarlet. “Poor Anatole! I meant to ask him for another of those feathered flywhisks he made for me last year.”

She rejoined us, tsk-tsking over the state of Jane’s breeches and a fresh bloody cut upon the girl’s arm. “I don’t know how you can stand it, Jane. Those—”

She hesitated, searching for the right word. “Those animals, those
barbarians!
You with your carnivores and now you’ve got Wendy looking at snakes… .”

She shook her head. “But what time is it? Wendy and I should be thinking about meeting the others and setting up for
The Tempest.”

Miss Scarlet gasped when Jane told her the hour. “And I meant to visit Koko and Effie!”

“Oh, there’s still time for that,” insisted Jane. “They’re right on the way to the amphitheatre.”

Miss Scarlet looked discomfited, but after a moment sighed. “I suppose I should: it’s been almost a year. It’s just so hard …”

I followed them, looking back regretfully at the terrarium where the peepers clung to the glass until we had passed out of the Herp Lab, when I heard their ringing song once more.

Outside it had grown cooler. Dark clouds sailed across a blue sky rapidly turning gray. But there was a buoyancy to the air as we crossed the wide avenue where the Zoologists strolled, wearing clean tunics of green and russet and yellow, laughing and calling to Jane and Miss Scarlet, and even acknowledging me with bright smiles.

“They know you are one of Toby’s troupe, Wendy,” Jane proudly announced as we passed a group of laughing women carrying hooded gerfalcons, like small gloomily cowled monks perched upon their wrists. The women giggled. One who was hawkless pressed three fingers to her lips and winked, then rubbed her fingers across her palm to show her interest in me. I looked away.