Novelties & Souvenirs (11 page)

“If you say so,” said the Nightingale, and his heart was filled with gladness.

And Dame Kind went away, to pour rain, to plant seeds, to turn the world in its socket. “And as for you,” she said to the Moon when next she saw it, “from now on you will hold your tongue.” She pinched its nose and squeezed its cheeks and locked up its lips until its face was hardly a face at all. “And from now on forever,” she said, “when the Man and the Woman ask you questions, no matter how they insist, you will answer nothing, nothing, nothing at all.”

And so it has been, from that day to this.

It was another day when the Nightingale saw the Man again, but whether it was the next day, or the day after that, or many many days later, the Nightingale didn’t know, for he didn’t keep track of such things.

The Nightingale was singing in the forest when he saw the Man some way off.

The Man stood looking into the forest where the Sun fell in patterns of dark and light on the flowers and the ferns.

“Why don’t you come in?” said the Nightingale. “Come in and rest, and have a chat.”

“I can’t,” the Man said. “I can’t pass through this gate.”

“What gate is that?” the Nightingale asked.

“This one here,” the Man said, pointing ahead of him with the stick he carried.

But the Nightingale could see no gate there. “Well, I don’t know what you mean,” he said, “but if you say so.”

The Man went on staring into the forest, through the gate that he alone saw there. He seemed at once sad and angry and resolute. The Nightingale sang a few notes and said, “Tell me. How is it with you now? How did the place you made up turn out? Is it better than here?”

The Man sat down, holding his stick in his lap, and put his elbows on his knees and his cheeks in his hands.

“I wouldn’t say
better,
” he said a little sadly. “It’s interesting. Bigger. I think it’s bigger, but we haven’t gone very far yet. There’s a lot of work to do.”

“A lot of what?” asked the Nightingale.

“Work,” the Man said, looking up at the branch where the Nightingale sat and saying the word a little bitterly. “Work. You wouldn’t understand.”

“I think,” the Nightingale said cheerfully, “I think I understand you less and less. But don’t hold it against me.”

The Man laughed, and shook his head. “No, I won’t,” he said. He sighed. “It’ll be all right. It’s the nights that are the hardest time.”

“Why is that?” asked the Nightingale. He hardly knew what Night was, after all; he slept all through it, and when he awoke, it was gone.

“Well, there are
Things
in the dark. Or anyway I
think
there are Things. I can’t be sure.
She
says they’re Dreams.”

“Dreams?”

“Things that you think are there but aren’t.”

“If you say so,” said the Nightingale.

“But it doesn’t matter,” said the Man. He grasped the stick in the two clever hands the Nightingale had always marveled at. “See, I’ve got this stick now. If anything comes near—” He struck out with the stick, which made a swishing noise in the empty air.

“That’s a good idea,” said the Nightingale. “I never would have thought of it.”

The Man was turning the stick in his hands with a dissatisfied expression. “I could make it better,” he said. “Somehow better. Stronger. Like stone—that’s the strongest thing. So it would cut, like a sharp stone.” He made an imaginary jab with the stick, like a jay’s sharp beak breaking into an egg, except there was no egg there. Then he put down the stick and sat again with his cheeks in his hands.

“Anyway,” the Man said, “there’s nothing to be afraid of
now.
”

“No,” said the Nightingale.

“But
then,
” the Man said. “Soon. There might be something to be afraid of.”

“If you say so,” said the Nightingale.

The Man rose to go, shouldering the stick he had thought of. “It’ll be all right,” he said again. “It’s just the nights that are hard.”

He looked back once through the gate that he saw there, which kept him from the precincts of the forest, and which the Nightingale couldn’t see.

“Well, good-bye then,” he sang. “Good-bye.”

And the Man went away down the valley to the place he and the Woman had made up.

When darkness came that night, the Nightingale perched on his usual branch. He fluffed his feathers; he bent his legs so that his sharp, small feet locked themselves tightly around the branch (so that he wouldn’t fall from the tree in his sleep). He nestled his beak in the feathers of his shoulder and closed his eyes.

But sleep wouldn’t come.

The Nightingale’s eyes opened. He shut them again, and again they opened.

The Nightingale was thinking.

For the first time in his life, and the first time in all the time there had been a Nightingale, the Nightingale was thinking about something that was not in front of his eyes.

He was thinking about the Man and the Woman, alone in the place they had made up, wherever it was.

He was thinking of what the Man had said to him: that it was all right, but that the nights were hard.

That there were Things in the night to be afraid of.

The Nightingale took his beak out from the feathers of his shoulder and looked around himself.

There were no Things in the night to be afraid of that he could see.

There was a sparkling dimness; there were the black shapes of the sleeping trees and the very, very dark pool of the forest floor. There was the secret Moon turning in the clouds and saying nothing. There were stars, and there were breezes. But no Things.

“It’s all right,” the Nightingale sang. And because there were no other songs being sung, the Nightingale’s song was stronger and sweeter than he had ever heard it.

“It’s all right,” he sang again, and again his song floated out into the night, and lingered, all alone.

That’s interesting,
thought the Nightingale,
very interesting: but the night is for sleep.
He tucked his beak again into the feathers of his shoulder and closed his eyes.

Without even knowing he had done so, he found after a few moments that he had opened his eyes again and was looking around himself and thinking.

He was thinking,
What if I fly to where the Man and the Woman are?

If they hear me sing,
he thought,
they might not be so afraid. If they heard me singing, they would remember that day will come. And anyway,
he thought,
what’s the use of sleeping all night, when you can be awake and singing?

He made up his mind to do this, even though it was something he had never done before. He looked around himself, wondering how he would find the Man and the Woman. He unlocked his feet from the branch where he sat, opened his brown wings, and sailed off carefully into the cool darkness.

He flew, not knowing exactly where he should fly; now and then he stopped to rest, and to eat a few of the bugs that were so plentiful, and to look at the new world of night he had discovered, and to test his song against it. And after a time that seemed to him more short than long, he came upon the place where the Man and the Woman were.

“Why, it isn’t very far away at all,” he said to himself. “In fact it seems just like the same old forest to me.”

There was one difference, though.

In the place where the Man and the Woman were, there was something bright, something yellow and orange and red, dancing and shifting and shining. It was as though a tiny piece of the Sun had been broken off and set before them.

The Man and the Woman had thought of fire.

They sat before their fire, with their arms around each other, looking into the fire and into the deep darkness around them. In one hand the Man held the stick he had thought of.

The Nightingale didn’t like to get too close to the new idea of fire, which was surely marvelous but a little scary; and so he hid himself in a thicket. And from there he sang.

“It’s all right,” he sang.

The Woman listened. “Did you hear that?” she asked.

“What?” said the Man, looking up in alarm.

“Listen,” the Woman said.

The Nightingale sang: “It’s all right.”

The Man and the Woman listened to the song. In the stillness of the night it was so clear that it seemed they heard it for the first time. They had never noticed that it was so beautiful, so strong and soft, so happy and sad all at once.

“Once,” said the Man, “he sang in the day.”

“Now he sings at night,” the Woman said.

“We’ll call him the Nightingale,” said the Man.

The Woman rested her head on the Man’s shoulder. Hearing the Nightingale’s song, she remembered the forest they had left. She remembered the happiness they had had there. She remembered the Sun falling in patterns of light and darkness on the flowers and the ferns. She remembered it all, and hot tears came to her eyes, because they had lost it all.

“It’s all right,” sang the Nightingale.

The Woman thought:
I can remember it all.
And then she thought:
If I can remember it all, then I haven’t lost it—not completely. If I can remember it, I will have it always, even if only a little bit of it. Always: no matter what.

She closed her eyes. “It’s all right,” she said. “It will be all right. You’ll see.”

The Man put his arm around her, glad of her warmth in the darkness. He listened to the Nightingale sing, and he thought:
Day will come. No matter what happened before, day will always come. Tomorrow the Sun will lift itself over the hills, and the world will be new. What will it be like?
He didn’t know, but he thought it might be good. He hoped it would be good.

“It’s all right,” sang the Nightingale.

“It’s all right,” said the Man, and he held the Woman in his arms. “I think it will be all right.” He closed his eyes, too. “Anyway,” he said, “I don’t think the story’s over yet.”

And so, from that day to this, the Nightingale has sung his song at night.

In the spring and summer, when his heart is full and the nights are soft and warm, he sings his song of hope and remembrance, his song that no one can imitate and no one can describe.

In the day, too, he can sometimes be heard singing, but so can the blackbird and the thrush and many other singers, and the Nightingale is hard to hear. But in the night he is alone: he is the one who sings at night.

It was the only new idea the Nightingale had ever had, and he never had another one.

I. T
HE
S
INGLE
E
XCURSION OF
C
ASPAR
L
AST

I
F WHAT
I
AM TO SET DOWN
is a chronicle, then it must differ from any other chronicle whatever, for it begins, not in one time or place, but everywhere at once—or perhaps
everywhen
is the better word. It might be begun at any point along the infinite, infinitely broken coastline of time.

It might even begin within the forest in the sea: huge trees like American redwoods, with their roots in the black benthos, and their leaves moving slowly in the blue currents overhead. There it might end as well.

It might begin in 1893—or in 1983. Yes: it might be as well to begin with Last, in an American sort of voice (for we are all Americans now, aren’t we?). Yes, Last shall be first: pale, fattish Caspar Last, on excursion in the springtime of 1983 to a far, far part of the Empire.

The tropical heat clothed Caspar Last like a suit as he disembarked from the plane. It was nearly as claustrophobic as the hours he had
spent in the middle seat of a three-across, economy-class pew between two other cut-rate, one-week-excursion, plane-fare-and-hotel-room holidaymakers in monstrous good spirits. Like them, Caspar had taken the excursion because it was the cheapest possible way to get to and from this equatorial backwater. Unlike them, he hadn’t come to soak up sun and molasses-dark rum. He didn’t intend to spend all his time at the beach, or even within the twentieth century.

It had come down, in the end, to a matter of money. Caspar Last last had never had money, though he certainly hadn’t lacked the means to make it; with any application he could have made good money as a consultant to any of a dozen research firms, but that would have required a certain subjection of his time and thought to others, and Caspar was incapable of that. It’s often said that genius can live in happy disregard of material circumstances, dress in rags, not notice its nourishment, and serve only its own abstract imperatives. This was Caspar’s case, except that he wasn’t happy about it: he was bothered, bitter, and rageful at his poverty. Fame he cared nothing for, success was meaningless except when defined as the solution to abstract problems. A great fortune would have been burdensome and useless. All he wanted was a nice bit of change.

He had decided, therefore, to use his “time machine” once only, before it and the principles that animated it were destroyed, for good he hoped. (Caspar always thought of his “time machine” thus, with scare-quotes around it, since it was not really a machine, and Caspar did not believe in time.) He would use it, he decided, to make money. Somehow.

The one brief annihilation of “time” that Caspar intended to allow himself was in no sense a test run. He knew that his
“machine” would function as predicted. If he hadn’t needed the money, he wouldn’t use it at all. As far as he was concerned, the principles once discovered, the task was completed; like a completed jigsaw puzzle, it had no further interest; there was really nothing to do with it except gloat over it briefly and then sweep all the pieces randomly back into the box.

It was a mark of Caspar’s odd genius that figuring out a scheme with which to make money out of the past (which was the only “direction” his “machine” would take him) proved almost as hard, given the limitations of his process, as arriving at the process itself.

He had gone through all the standard wish fulfillments and rejected them. He couldn’t, armed with today’s race results, return to yesterday and hit the daily double. For one thing it would take a couple of thousand in betting money to make it worth it, and Caspar didn’t have a couple of thousand. More importantly, Caspar had calculated the results of his present self appearing at any point within the compass of his own biological existence, and those results made him shudder.

Similar difficulties attended any scheme that involved using money to make money. If he returned to 1940 and bought, say, two hundred shares of IBM for next to nothing: in the first place there would be the difficulty of leaving those shares somehow in escrow for his unborn self; there would be the problem of the alteration this growing fortune would have on the linear life he had actually lived; and where was he to acquire the five hundred dollars or whatever was needed in the currency of 1940? The same problem obtained if he wanted to return to 1623 and pick up a First Folio of Shakespeare, or to 1460 and a Gutenberg Bible: the cost of the currency he would need rose in relation to the antiquity, thus the rarity and value, of the object to be bought with it. There was
also the problem of walking into a bookseller’s and plunking down a First Folio he had just happened to stumble on while cleaning out the attic. In any case, Caspar doubted that anything as large as a book could be successfully transported “through time.” He’d be lucky if he could go and return in his clothes.

Outside the airport, Caspar boarded a bus with his fellow excursionists, already hard at work with their cameras and index fingers as they rode through a sweltering lowland out of which concrete-block light industry was struggling to be born. The hotel in the capital was as he expected, shoddy-American and intermittently refrigerated. He ceased to notice it, forwent the complimentary rum concoction promised with his tour, and after asking that his case be put in the hotel safe—extra charge for that, he noted bitterly—he went immediately to the Hall of Records in the government complex. The collection of old survey maps of the city and environs were more extensive than he had hoped. He spent most of that day among them searching for a blank place on the 1856 map, a place as naked as possible of buildings, brush, water, and that remained thus through the years. He discovered one, visited it by unmuffled taxi, found it suitable. It would save him from the awful inconvenience of “arriving” in the “past” and finding himself inserted into some local’s wattle-and-daub wall. Next morning, then, he would be “on his way.” If he had believed in time, he would have said that the whole process would take less than a day’s time.

Before settling on this present plan, Caspar had toyed with the idea of bringing back from the past something immaterial: some knowledge, some secret that would allow him to make himself rich in his own present. Ships have gone down with millions in bullion: he could learn exactly where. Captain Kidd’s treasure. Inca
gold. Archaeological rarities buried in China. Leaving aside the obvious physical difficulties of these schemes, he couldn’t be sure that their location wouldn’t shift in the centuries between his glimpse of them and his “real” life span; and even if he could be certain, no one else would have much reason to believe him, and he didn’t have the wherewithal to raise expeditions himself. So all that was out.

He had a more general, theoretical problem to deal with. Of course the very presence of his eidolon in the past would alter, in however inconsequential a way, the succeeding history of the world. The comical paradoxes of shooting one’s own grandfather and the like neither amused nor intrigued him, and the chance he took of altering the world he lived in out of all recognition was constantly present to him. Statistically, of course, the chance of this present plan of his altering anything significantly, except his own personal fortunes, was remote to a high power. But his scruples had caused him to reject anything such as, say, discovering the Koh-i-noor diamond before its historical discoverers. No: what he needed to abstract from the past was something immensely trivial, something common, something the past wouldn’t miss but that the present held in the highest regard; something that would take the briefest possible time and the least irruption of himself into the past to acquire; something he could reasonably be believed to possess through simple historical chance; and something tiny enough to survive the cross-time “journey” on his person.

It had come to him quite suddenly—all his ideas did, as though handed to him—when he learned that his great-great-grandfather had been a commercial traveler in the tropics, and that in the attic of his mother’s house (which Caspar had never had the wherewithal to move out of ) some old journals and papers of his still
moldered. They were, when he inspected them, completely without interest. But the dates were right.

Caspar had left a wake-up call at the desk for before dawn the next morning. There was some difficulty about getting his case out of the safe, and more difficulty about getting a substantial breakfast served at that hour (Caspar expected not to eat during his excursion), but he did arrive at his chosen site before the horrendous tropical dawn broke, and after paying the taxi, he had darkness enough left in which to make his preparations and change into his costume. The costume—a linen suit, a shirt, hat, boots—had cost him twenty dollars in rental from a theatrical costumer, and he could only hope it was accurate enough not to cause alarm in 1856. The last item he took from his case was the copper coin, which had cost him quite a bit, as he needed one unworn and of the proper date. He turned it in his fingers for a moment, thinking that if, unthinkably, his calculations were wrong and he didn’t survive this journey, it would make an interesting obol for Charon.

Out of the unimaginable chaos of its interminable stochastic fiction, Time thrust only one unforeseen oddity on Caspar Last as he, or something like him, appeared beneath a plantain tree in 1856: he had grown a beard almost down to his waist. It was abominably hot.

The suburbs of the city had of course vanished. The road he stood by was a muddy track down which a cart was being driven by a tiny and close-faced Indian in calico. He followed the cart, and his costume boots were caked with mud when at last he came into the center of town, trying to appear nonchalant and to remember the layout of the city as he had studied it in the maps. He wanted to speak to no one if possible, and he did manage to find the post office without affecting, however minutely, the heterogeneous
crowd of blacks, Indians, and Europeans in the filthy streets. Having absolutely no sense of humor and very little imagination other than the most rigidly abstract helped to keep him strictly about his business and not to faint, as another might have, with wonder and astonishment at his translation, the first, last, and only of its kind a man would ever make.

“I would like,” he said to the mulatto inside the brass and mahogany cage, “an envelope, please.”

“Of course, sir.”

“How long will it take for a letter mailed now to arrive locally?”

“Within the city? It would arrive in the afternoon post.”

“Very good.”

Caspar went to a long, ink-stained table, and with one of the steel pens provided, he addressed the envelope to Georg von Humboldt Last, Esq., Grand Hotel, City, in the approximation of an antique round hand that he had been practicing for weeks. There was a moment’s doubt as he tried to figure how to fold up and seal the cumbersome envelope, but he did it, and gave this empty missive to the incurious mulatto. He slipped his precious coin across the marble to him. For the only moment of his adventure, Caspar’s heart beat fast as he watched the long, slow brown fingers affix a stamp, cancel and date it with a pen-stroke, and drop it into a brass slot like a hungry mouth behind him.

It only remained to check into the Grand Hotel, explain about his luggage’s being on its way up from the port, and sit silent on the hotel terrace, growing faint with heat and hunger and expectation, until the afternoon post.

The one aspect of the process Caspar had never been able to decide about was whether his eidolon’s residence in the fiction of the past would consume any “time” in the fiction of the present. It
did. When, at evening, with the letter held tight in his hand and pressed to his bosom, Caspar reappeared beardless beneath the plantain tree in the traffic-tormented and smoky suburb, the gaseous red sun was squatting on the horizon in the west, just as it had been in the same place in 1856.

He would have his rum drink after all, he decided.

“Mother,” he said, “do you think there might be anything valuable in those papers of your great-grandfather’s?”

“What papers, dear? Oh—I remember. I couldn’t say. I thought once of donating them to a historical society. How do you mean, valuable?”

“Well, old stamps, for one thing.”

“You’re free to look, Caspar dear.”

Caspar was not surprised (though he supposed the rest of the world was soon to be) that he found among the faded, water-spotted diaries and papers an envelope that bore a faint brown address—it had aged nicely in the next-to-no-time it had traveled “forward” with Caspar—and that had in its upper-right-hand corner a one-penny magenta stamp, quite undistinguished, issued for a brief time in 1856 by the Crown Colony of British Guiana.

The asking price of the sole known example of this stamp, a “unique” owned by a consortium of wealthy men who preferred to remain anonymous, was a million dollars. Caspar Last had not decided whether it would be more profitable for him to sell the stamp itself, or to approach the owners of the unique, who would certainly pay a large amount to have it destroyed, and thus preserve their unique’s uniqueness. It did seem a shame that the only artifact man had ever succeeded in extracting from the nonexistent past should go into the fire, but Caspar didn’t really care. His own
bonfire—the notes and printouts, the conclusions about the nature and transversability of time and the orthogonal logic by which it was accomplished—would be only a little more painful.

The excursion was over; the only one that remained to him was the brief but, to him, all-important one of his own mortal span. He was looking forward to doing it first class.

II. A
N
A
PPOINTMENT IN
K
HARTOUM

I
T MIGHT BE BEGUN VERY DIFFERENTLY
, though; and it might now be begun again, in a different time and place, like one of those romances by Stevenson, where different stories only gradually reveal themselves to be parts of a whole…