Sister Emily's Lightship (14 page)

I thought of the silty boxes where we would soon lie down and mate, starting the next generation wiggling through our bodies and out our mouths. “Yes,” I said at last, “you are right this time. But still you will have to work the extra period to make up for it.”

He quivered sectionally and scurried back to the alien. At his touch, the alien fainted, though I suspected that he would revive again soon.

Necros 29 kept his word. He worked the extra load, and so much salvage quickened him. He entered maturity early yet lost none of the enthusiasm of a youngling. It was dreadful to see.

Once he came to me wriggling with joy. “I have come to something new,” he said. “Something not-found which is now found. It is called
haiku.”
He savored the word and gave it directly into my mouth.

I let the word slide down slowly, section by section, to my sack and the slow grinding began. Then it stopped. “I do not comprehend this word,
haiku,”
I said. “It means no more than his fe-fi's.”

Necros shivered deliciously. “It is a poem that is worked in sections,” he said.

“A poem in sections?” It
was
a new idea—and quite fine.

“There are seventeen sections broken into bodies of five-seven-five. And there are rules.”

“That is the first your poet has shown that he understands order,” I said thoughtfully. “Perhaps I was right to let you salvage him.”

Necros nodded, showing his neck section for good measure. “These are the rules. First the poem must rouse emotion.”

“Well, of course. Any youngling knows that.” I turned partly away from him, to show my displeasure.

“Wait, there is more. Second, the poem must show spiritual insight.” He nodded his head and his sections moved like a wave, enticing.

“Still, that is not new.”

Necros drew out the last. “And finally there must be some use of the seasons.”

“Fe-fi's again.”

“I am comprehending that piece of alienness slowly. Digestion is difficult. The grinding continues.”

“Perhaps,” I replied coolly, “it should not continue.”

“But I am working triple,” Necros said, twisting his head back in such alarm that the lumps of heart were pounding madly in front of my mouth. “And we have salvaged all but the ship's shell and the room where the poet lies.” His voice was strained by his effort to show me his chin.

“It is true that the boxes grow full and my desires descend,” I admitted. “How long will this salvage take?”

He shrugged. “The poet's voice weakens. He speaks again and again of
the night.”
He dared to lower his chin.
“Night
is, I am beginning to think, the ultimate alien season. Perhaps I will comprehend it soon.”

“Perhaps you will,” I said, turning without giving him any promises.

The next work section I was sleeping, with my body pressed along the sleek gray ship's side, dreaming of mating. I had grown so much with the salvage that I was now nearly half the length of the alien vessel, and my movements were slow.

Necros found me there and quivered in all his sections. I heard a deep grinding in his sack which he coyly kept from my sight.

“The poet is dead,” he said, “and I have salvaged him. But before he died, I made up one of his own strange poems and sang it into the translator. He liked it. Listen, I too think it quite fine.”

We all stopped our work to listen, raising our chins slightly. To listen well is of the highest priority. It is how one acknowledges order.

Necros recited:

The old poet fades, Transfigured into the night, Not-true becomes true.

What do you think? Does it capture the alien? Is it true salvage?

A small one-year shook his head. “I still do not know what
night
is.”

“Look out beyond the ship,” said Necros. “What is it you see?”

“I see our great Oneness.”

Necros nodded, letting ripples of pleasure run the entire length of his body. “Yes, that is what I thought, too. But I comprehend it is what he, the alien, would call
night.”

I smiled. “Then your poem should have said:
Transfigured into Oneness.”

Necros shivered deliriously and his sack began its melodious grinding again. “But they are the same, Oneness/Night. So Not-true becomes True. Surely you see that. Truly it is written that:
With salvage all becomes One.”

And indeed, finally, we all comprehend. It was fine salvage. The best. The hollow ship rang with our grinding.

“You shall share my box this section,” I said.

But so full of his triumph, Necros did not at first realize the great honor I had bestowed upon him. He chattered away. “Next time I must try to use all the alien seasons in a poem.
Seasons.
I must think more about the word and digest it again, for I am not at all sure what it means. It has sections, though, like a beautiful body.” And he blushed and looked at me. “They are called Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall.”

I ran them into my mouth and agreed. “They are indeed meaty,” I said. “Next time we meet such aliens we will all salvage their poems.” Then I spoke the haiku back to him, once quickly before it was forgotten:

The old poet fades,

Transfigured into the night.

Not-true becomes true.

Smiling, I led the way back across the platform to the boxes, leaving the one-years who were not yet ready to mate to finish salvaging the ship's hull.

“I
T ISN'T FAIR!” DARLA
complained to her mom for the third time during their bedtime reading. She meant it wasn't fair that Wendy only did the housework in Neverland and that Peter Pan and the boys got to fight Captain Hook.

“Well, I can't change it,” Mom said in her even, lawyer voice. “That's just the way it is in the book. Your argument is with Mr. Barrie, the author, and he's long dead. Should I go on?”

“Yes. No. I don't know,” Darla said, coming down on both sides of the question, as she often did.

Mom shrugged and closed the book, and
that
was the end of the night's reading.

Darla watched impassively as her mom got up and left the room, snapping off the bedside lamp as she went. When she closed the door there was just a rim of light from the hall showing around three sides of the door, making it look like something out of a science fiction movie. Darla pulled the covers up over her nose. Her breath made the space feel like a little oven.

“Not fair at all,” Darla said to the dark, and she didn't just mean the book. She wasn't the least bit sleepy.

But the house made its comfortable night-settling noises around her: the breathy whispers of the hot air through the vents, the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall, the sound of the maple branch scritch-scratching against the clapboard siding. They were a familiar lullaby, comforting and soothing. Darla didn't mean to go to sleep, but she did.

Either that or she stepped out of her bed and walked through the closed door into Neverland.

Take your pick.

It didn't feel at all like a dream to Darla. The details were too exact. And she could
smell things.
She'd never smelled anything in a dream before. So Darla had no reason to believe that what happened to her next was anything but real.

One minute she had gotten up out of bed, heading for the bathroom, and the very next she was sliding down the trunk of a very large, smooth tree. The trunk was unlike any of the maples in her yard, being a kind of yellowish color. It felt almost slippery under her hands and smelled like bananas gone slightly bad. Her nightgown made a sound like
whooosh
as she slid along.

When she landed on the ground, she tripped over a large root and stubbed her toe.

“Ow!” she said.

“Shhh!” cautioned someone near her.

She looked up and saw two boys in matching ragged cutoffs and T-shirts staring at her. “Shhh! yourselves,” she said, wondering at the same time who they were.

But it hadn't been those boys who spoke. A third boy, behind her, tapped her on the shoulder and whispered, “If you aren't quiet,
He
will find us.”

She turned, ready to ask who
He
was. But the boy, dressed in green tights and a green shirt and a rather silly green hat, and smelling like fresh lavender, held a finger up to his lips. They were perfect lips. Like a movie star's. Darla knew him at once.

“Peter,” she whispered. “Peter Pan.”

He swept the hat off and gave her a deep bow. “Wendy,” he countered.

“Well, Darla, actually,” she said.

“Wendy Darla,” he said. “Give us a thimble.”

She and her mom had read that part in the book already, where Peter got kiss and thimble mixed up, and she guessed what it was he really meant, but she wasn't about to kiss him. She was much too young to be kissing boys. Especially boys she'd just met. And he had to be more a man than a boy, anyway, no matter how young he looked. The copy
of Peter Pan
she and her mother had been reading had belonged to her grandmother originally. Besides, Darla wasn't sure she liked Peter. Of course, she wasn't sure she
didn't
like him. It was a bit confusing. Darla hated things being confusing, like her parents' divorce and her dad's new young wife and their twins who were—and who weren't exactly—her brothers.

“I don't have a thimble,” she said, pretending not to understand.

“I have,” he said, smiling with persuasive boyish charm. “Can I give it to you?”

But she looked down at her feet in order not to answer, which was how she mostly responded to her dad these days, and that was that. At least for the moment. She didn't want to think any further ahead, and neither, it seemed, did Peter.

He shrugged and took her hand, dragging her down a path that smelled of moldy old leaves. Darla was too surprised to protest. And besides, Peter was lots stronger than she was. The two boys followed. When they got to a large dark brown tree whose odor reminded Darla of her grandmother's wardrobe, musty and ancient, Peter stopped. He let go of her hand and jumped up on one of the twisted roots that were looped over and around one another like woody snakes. Darla was suddenly reminded of her school principal when he towered above the students at assembly. He was a tall man but the dais he stood on made him seem even taller. When you sat in the front row, you could look up his nose. She could look up Peter's nose now. Like her principal, he didn't look so grand that way. Or so threatening.

“Here's where we live,” Peter said, his hand in a large sweeping motion. Throwing his head back, he crowed like a rooster; he no longer seemed afraid of making noise. Then he said, “You'll like it.”

“Maybe I will. Maybe I won't,” Darla answered, talking to her feet again.

Peter's perfect mouth made a small pout as if that weren't the response he'd been expecting. Then he jumped down into a dark space between the roots. The other boys followed him. Not to be left behind, in case that rooster crow really had called something awful to them, Darla went after the boys into the dark place. She found what they had actually gone through was a door that was still slightly ajar.

The door opened on to a long, even darker passage that wound into the very center of the tree; the passage smelled damp, like bathing suits left still wet in a closet. Peter and the boys seemed to know the way without any need of light. But Darla was constantly afraid of stumbling and she was glad when someone reached out and held her hand.

Then one last turn and there was suddenly plenty of light from hundreds of little candles set in holders that were screwed right into the living heart of the wood. By the candlelight she saw it was Peter who had hold of her hand.

“Welcome to Neverland,” Peter said, as if this were supposed to be a big surprise.

Darla took her hand away from his. “It's smaller than I thought it would be,” she said. This time she looked right at him.

Peter's perfect mouth turned down again. “It's big enough for us,” he said. Then as if a sudden thought had struck him, he smiled. “But too small for
Him.”
He put his back to Darla and shouted, “Let's have a party. We've got us a new Wendy.”

Suddenly, from all corners of the room, boys came tumbling and stumbling and dancing, and pushing one another to get a look at her. They were shockingly noisy and all smelled like unwashed socks. One of them made fart noises with his mouth. She wondered if any of them had taken a bath recently. They were worse—Darla thought—than her Stemple cousins, who were so awful their parents never took them anywhere anymore, not out to a restaurant or the movies or anyplace at all.

“Stop it!” she said.

The boys stopped at once.

“I told you,” Peter said. “She's a regular Wendy, all right. She's even given me a thimble.”

Darla's jaw dropped at the lie.
How could he?

She started to say “I did not!” but the boys were already cheering so loudly her protestations went unheard.

“Tink,” Peter called, and one of the candles detached itself from the heartwood to flutter around his head, “tell the Wendys we want a Welcome Feast.”

The Wendys?
Darla bit her lip.
What did Peter mean by that?

The little light flickered on and off.
A kind of code,
Darla thought. She assumed it was the fairy Tinker Bell, but she couldn't really make out what this Tink looked like except for that flickering, fluttering presence. But as if understanding Peter's request, the flicker took off toward a black corner and, shedding but a little light, flew right into the dark.

“Good old Tink,” Peter said, and he smiled at Darla with such practice, dimples appeared simultaneously on both sides of his mouth.

“What kind of food…” Darla began.