Otherwise (44 page)

“‘Please,’ Roy said. ‘In a minute I could take you deep within, and I know everyone who should hear your message, who first, who last; but …’ Well, the woman waited. The great moon now lit the room and eclipsed her light. St. Roy spoke at last: ‘It’s been a long time since the League’s meeting, since we learned that someone, or some news would come. It was I who learned that, and told Little Belaire about it, and waited for this day. And what I ask now is just for all that. I would like to know first what the news is. Now, before the others.’

“The woman looked at him a long time, and then laughed gently. ‘It was always the story,’ she said, ’that the Long League was much feared here, and its news ignored. Has it changed?’

“St. Roy smiled too. “There are old things,’ he said, ‘and there are new things. I think the Long League must be changed now too.’

“‘No,’ she said. ‘No. There is no new thing with the League any longer. That’s what I’ve come to tell you, as others have gone to tell all the old enemies of the League—everywhere we made enemies in the old, old days—to all of them women had gone to tell them: the League is done. It’s all done now. For a long time our strength has withered, as any great strength must and should; and nothing has come up to challenge its strength and make it grow again. The world is different now. What it matters that we all came together to say this I don’t know; but perhaps that last acknowledgment is the greatest success. Anyway. That’s what I’ve come for. Just to tell you. The Long League of great memory is dead. My name is Olive, and I’ve come with this news, and if you’ll have me, to stay and help.’

“Then the only noise in the room was the cat’s and the moon’s.”

Painted Red took the claws of her spectacles from behind her ears and wiped them carefully. “What secrets she brought to Roy that Whisper cord inherits, I can’t say,” she said. “I know this though about Whisper cord: that for them a secret isn’t something they won’t tell. For them, a secret is something that can’t be told.”

SEVENTH FACET

T
here’s a time in some years, after the first frosts, when the sun gets hot again, and summer returns for a time. Winter is coming; you know that from the way the mornings smell, the way the leaves, half-turned to color, are dry and poised to drop. But summer goes on, a small false summer, all the more precious for being small and false. In Little Belaire, we called this time—for some reason nobody now knows—engine summer.

Maybe because summer seemed endless; but in that season of that year it seemed Once a Day and I could never be parted either, any more than Buckle cord could untangle sun from a crystal, no matter what unhappiness we might cause each other, no matter even if we wanted to be parted. When we weren’t together we were looking for each other. It isn’t strange that you think love, which is so much like a season, will never end; because sometimes you dunk a season will never end—no matter that you tell yourself you know it will.

In engine summer we went with an old breadman of Bones cord named In a Corner to gather in St. Bea’s-bread. He allowed us to come as a favor to Once a Day’s Mbaba, whom he had known long; a favor, because we were too young to be much help. We slept with him in his room near the outside, waking when dawn light came through his translucent walls of yellow. A misty engine summer morning, which would turn dry and hot and fine. Once a Day, shivering and yawning at once, stood pressed to me for warmth as we waited in the white dawn for everyone to gather, many carrying long poles with big hooks at their tips. After some head-counting and consultation, we moved away into the woods, following the stream up into the misty, sun-shot forest.

We would reach the stand of bread-trees at sundown, In a Corner thought, at the time when they were largest. “At night when it’s cool, they grow smaller,” he said. “Like morning glories; except that instead of closing up, they shrink. That’s only one of the funny things about them.”

“What are the other funny things?” Once a Day asked.

“You’ll see,” said In a Corner. “This afternoon, tonight. Tomorrow. You’ll see all the funny things.”

There was no path to follow to the stand; the other breadmen had spread out so that only occasionally did we see one or two moving beside us through the woods. Many besides the speakers smoke St. Bea’s-bread, but it remains our secret where it lives, and we were careful not to stamp a path to that place. When we had harvested it and prepared it, then others would come to Belaire to trade for it; which was fun and I guess to everyone’s advantage.

We came out of the forest late in the afternoon, came out from under big sighing pines into a wide field of silvery grass stirred by wind. The other breadmen were stretched out in a long line to our right and left, sometimes hidden up to their shoulders, making dark furrows in the grass. There was a high wave in the ground, and on top of it some of the breadmen already stood, waving and shouting to us. “From the top you can see them,” In a Corner said; “you hurry on.” And we did, racing to the top of the ridge where tall concrete posts stood at intervals like guardians.

“Look,” Once a Day said, standing by a concrete post, “oh, look.”

Down in a little river valley, sun struck the water, bright as silver. And struck, too, the stand of St. Bea’s-bread, which lived there and (I think) nowhere else in this world.

Did you ever blow soap bubbles? When you blow softly, and the soap is sticky, you can grow a great pile of bubbles, large and small, from the cup of the pipe. Well: imagine a pile of bubbles as large as a tree, the big bubbles on the bottom as large as yourself, the small ones at the top smaller than your head, than your hand, trailing off in an undulating tip; a great irregular pile of spheres, seeming as insubstantial as bubbles, but the weight of them great enough to press down the bottom bubbles into elliptical sacks. And imagine them not clear and glassy like soap bubbles, but translucent, the upper sunside, of them a pale rose color, the undersides shading into blue-green at the bottom. And then imagine as many of these piles of bubbles as fir trees in a grove, all leaning gently, bulging and bouncing as in a solemn dance, the ground around them stained colors by the afternoon sun striking through their translucence. That’s what Little Belaire lives on.

We ran down to where they stood, across great fractured plazas of concrete, past ruined roofless buildings laid out angelwise in neat squares with the neat lines of weed-split roads between them, and into the stand itself. “They really
are
bubbles,” Once a Day said, laughing, amazed. “Nothing. Nothing at all.” They were membranes, dry and scored into cells like a snake’s skin, and inside, nothing but air. The odor as we stood among them was spicy and dusty and sweet.

The breadmen were all gathering in the rosy light the bubble-trees made. They smiled to each other, slapped each other’s backs, pulled and pinched at the skin of the bottom bubbles, coarse and thick, and shaded their eyes to look up at the pale, fine tops. It had been a good summer, humid and hot, and there would be no skimping next winter. The hooked sticks they carried were laid in a heap for the next day, and coils of thin rope were handed out from a big sack. Then we all dispersed—Once a Day and I following In a Corner—to circle the whole stand, and work inward till we met in the center.

In a Corner would choose a short length of rope and tie it very tightly around the feathery neck of a stem beneath the bottom bubbles. The stems were chest-high to Once a Day and me, and there were many of them supporting each tree.

“Except they’re not supporting them, not really,” said In a Comer. “That’s another funny thing about them. The stems don’t support the bubbles as much as they keep them from flying away. See, when the sun heats up the air inside, the whole tree grows huge, like now; and gets lighter. Hot air is lighter than cold air. And if they weren’t tied down by the stems?”

“They’d float away,” said Once a Day.

“Float right away,” In a Corner said. His tough old hands drew the cord tight, tying off the stem. We were deep in now, moving slowly toward the center; all around us the blue-green undersides bulged and swayed in the slightest breezes. It was exhilarating; it made you want to jump and shout. “Lighter than air,” Once a Day said laughing. “Lighter than air!”

In the center of the stand was a clearing, and in the center of the clearing were the ruins of low buildings and tall metal towers bent and rusted, some fallen to their knees; all faced a great pit in their midst, and in this pit, as though designed to fit there, there sat a squat, complex mass of black metal, high and riveted, from which struts shot out to grip the broad concrete lip of the pit—a great spider climbing from a hole. Machinery of unfathomable design protruded everywhere from its hump. The buildings and towers seemed to have fallen asleep in attendance on it.

“Is it the planter?” I asked.

“It is,” In a Corner said. He coiled the last of his rope over his shoulder and motioned us to follow; Once a Day held back till I took her hand, and she pressed close behind me as we walked up to it.

“It went to the stars,” I said.

“It did. And came back again.” It and a hundred more like it, gone to the stars; and when they returned, after how many centuries, full of knowledge of the most outlandish kind—nobody was left to receive them. Of any left on earth, they were the only ones who still knew their purposes; and without men to receive it, their knowledge was locked within them. And they sat, with endless patience, but no one came, because they were all on the road or dead or gone. And at last the planters died where they sat, rusted, decayed; their memories disintegrated, their angel-made minds became dust.

“And how odd to think,” In a Corner said, “that they were called planters because they were to have been the first of a system of machines that planted men on other stars. Instead, here it sits, having become a planter in truth: it planted the little balloon-tree from elsewhere here, on this earth, and is its planter, like an old black pot an mbaba plants marigolds in.”

Up close, it was huge; it rose up, flat black, and glowered down at us. The couplings and devices that held it in place were of a strength that was hard to really believe in: metal that thick, that rustless, a hold that perfectly crafted, that tenacious. In its center what might have been a door had broken open; and from that door there foamed like a mouthful of great grapes the misshapen bubbles of the first of the trees, mother of them all. From this mother-plant, blue-green shoots had been sent out, and had found a way down through the struts and plates of the planter and then gone underground, like roots; and then had surfaced again, In a Corner said, as the other stems in the stand. “It’s all one plant,” he said, “if it is a plant at all.”

Our work for that day was finished, and while the sun set we gathered wood and built fires on the concrete plazas beyond the bread.

“I don’t know where it comes from,” In a Corner said, laying the logs Once a Day and I brought in a circle that would keep us warm all night. “But I think things, about that place. It’s a cold place, I think, and much larger than this one; these trees never grow so large there, and living things move slowly or not at all.”

We looked out over the bread, which had already diminished as the chill of evening came on. “Why do you think that?” I said.

“Because from boyhood I have been smoking it. Because it has grown me up to be a man, and my eyes and my blood and my brain are partly made of its stuff, now. And I think I know: I think it has told me.”

They say that the planters were far wiser than any human. I wonder: if this planter returned from who knows where and found that no one would ever learn what it knew, could it have let out its load on purpose, hoping (could it hope?) that someday men would learn a little, as In a Corner had? I suppose not…. In a Corner from his pouch drew a handful of last year’s bread with knobby fingers.

It was all blue-green, without the rose color of the spheres; it shone with a strange interior light as he sifted it into the bowl of the big gourd pipe he carried hung around his neck. “It used to be thought, you know, not good to smoke it all the time. And later that if you did smoke it all the time, it must be piped through water, as in the great pipes. But you young ones pay no attention. And I think you know best. It won’t harm you: hasn’t harmed anyone. But it changes you. If you spend your life a man, and eat not only men’s food, but this.”

The reason it was thought, in the old days, to be bad, was because of St. Bea, of course. It was after the first hard winter at Little Belaire that she found the stand of bubbles, which smelted so nice when the sun warmed them; and St. Bea was hungry. And it wasn’t even that eating the bread made her die, or even sicken; but when St. Andy found her, weeks later, still beneath the trees, her clothes had all gone to rags, she ate of the bread when she was hungry, and had forgotten him and the speakers and the new Co-op that was her own idea. And though she lived for some time after that, she never said another three words together that made sense to St. Andy.

That pipe you smoked from, in your Mbaba’s room …

Yes. For a long time after it was learned to smoke it, hundreds of years ago, the pipes’ mouths were made in the shape of St. Bea’s head, her mouth open to receive it.

Her bread hissed and bubbled as In a Corner put match to it, hollowing his cheeks around the old chewed stem. The first rosy cloud billowed up. He gave the pipe to Once a Day, and she inhaled, and a thin rosy mist came out from her lungs, through her nose and mouth, and I shuddered with a sudden wonder at this odd consumption—odd though I’d seen it and done it almost all my life.

The first stars were winking on in the near blue sky. A breeze made the bowl of the pipe glow, and snatched away the smoke. One star, perhaps one we could see from here, was its home. But no matter how high the wind took it, it would never go there again.

Next morning was heavy with clouds, and the rafts came up the river from the south. All day the breadmen worked, pulling away the vast clusters from the strangled stems with their hooked sticks, and lifting them (on this cloudy day they weren’t lighter than air, but almost as light) and maneuvering them to the rafts with shouts and directions, and tying them to the rafts with hooks and ropes through their skins. Once a Day and I weren’t much help, but we ran and pushed and pulled with the rest as hard as we could, for they had all to be taken today, or they would collapse like tents and be unmovable.

When the last of them had been floated away to where Buckle cord burned maple for charcoal to dry it, and where it would be shattered then and sifted and packed to haul, and the whole glade stood naked, only the blue-green stems left, and the men from the rafts were left to cover those stems with sacks for the winter, and others were winding plastic and cloths around the planter to keep the mother-tree safe from snow, well, then the harvest was over; and Once a Day and I had helped; and we rode back on the next-to-last raft.

Exhausted, she laid her head in my lap, and we wrapped ourselves in a shaggy cloak someone gave us, for the wind was cold; blown leaves floated on the river’s gray surface.