The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering (16 page)

She looked at me like I ought to be giving her more evidence of my worth. Prove myself. The green-painted lids swelled with secret meaning. “That all you got?”

Of course not. I had plenty. But there was no point in saying I could operate an advanced Stirling radioisotope generator or pressure-clean a space suit. I told her I had driven a tour bus around the Miamy Ruins and could grow water spinach in a plastic tub.

Stiles informed me that the tour guide job had been filled. She tidied her patches.

I laid my crème fraîche on the counter, and Miss Stiles thought of something. There was day labor, she said, if I could hack it. Early mornings a crew was restoring one of the old domes. I smelled fried sweets. A radio came on in an adjoining room.

“Sure,” I said. “I guess I could lay bricks.”

Miss Stiles was kind enough to let me keep two jars of the crème. “You won't eat so well here,” she said.

That night I camped out under the junipers, my bed softened by fallen boughs. Though I had developed a hard back for gravel, it was a relief to sleep in such comfort. Miss Stiles assured me the woods would only be a stopgap till a berth opened up in the dormitory. The next morning, however, I decided to make the tent permanent. I had grown suspicious of group living, and woke up more refreshed that day than I had in years.

At five I reported to the work site. The air was thicker there than on Mount Evans, and it filled my tubes with power. Against instinct I expected something to happen. Something good. The foreman smiled, as if to say I would not be disappointed. You have known him all your life, your funny Uncle Chips, but I had never met an organism quite like Raoul.

When I extended my hand he jerked it vigorously, pinching his waistband with the other hand. (Trousers were always falling off him for he imagined himself a much stouter man than he was.) Raoul was what the fairy tales might call a spry old fellow. Liver-spotted and lean, he hopped about like a cricket. He talked like one, too, saying more than he should after dark, and asking too many questions. He stuttered so badly, you wanted to cry.

From the looks of them, the rest of the crew had been sweating away at the dome for some time before I arrived. Raoul said be an hour earlier tomorrow; they were under strict orders to vacate the site by ten, when the tour buses started rolling in. Though as far as I could tell, tourists were a rare sight on Mars Hill.

As it turned out, bricklaying was not required, which came as a relief. I had never touched a brick except in self-defense against Stairdwellers. Raoul displayed for me the finer points of a pneumatic rivet gun. “Have you ever manipulated a tool of this nature?” he asked. (Despite his stutter, Chips uses 20 percent more words than necessary.) I thought of the Heat Poke, of blue ice, and my poor lost Umma.

“No, sir,” I said. “I came here to be a tour guide.”

“Nothing to it.” He gripped my arm.

For the next five hours I paneled the interior of the dome till my knuckles went numb from the jolts. At ten Raoul blew a whistle and waved us over to share a thermos of tea. He'd laid a pretty table in the center of the dome, six paper cups with fold-out handles. Nearby, concealed under a blue drop cloth, lay a fixed object the dimensions of a cannon, with its barrel trained on a passing cloud. Back in peach country they fired birdshot at thunderheads to make holes for the rain to spill out. When I asked Raoul what lay under the cloth, he frowned and said, “Marked for demolition,” gently removing my hand from the barrel.

With a wink he pushed a milk jug in my face. A coppery smell stung my nose. Haven Dark. Considering all the poison I'd pumped through my tubes those many years since Cape Cannibal, it was remarkable no rum had passed my lips. The smell of that stuff was too reminiscent of departures, of leaving the Gables, of the launch, and of fleeing the Cape. Of Sylvia.

“A splash for bravery?” he asked. I did not offer my cup to be filled. I'd never had the stomach for bravery, you know. Raoul didn't force me to drink. Instead, he drew my neck under one crickety arm. It was okay, he said: “We all got here somehow.”

How strange it is to be understood. How odd to be known so easily by a man I had just met. Raoul Chips knew why I behaved as I did, why I had come to Mars Hill. I said I would take my tea to go, thanked him, and hurried down to the woods for a nap.

*   *   *

When I woke it was late afternoon, nearing dusk. The junipers cut the slanted sunlight into knife blades. Birds were getting busy for the bugs. Ever since I had left Floriday, the sun I'd loved so well felt like a target on my head. It throbbed over my scalp as a warning to keep quiet. I was one of the few men alive who knew what the sun really was: not a lamp or a blemish on a blue glass bowl, not the widening valve that lets in the ether to end it all. Our sun is a glittering star like any other. To some distant world it is the porch light at the end of a dark road that makes a traveling man feel less alone.

Raoul sat outside my tent, a knotted onion sack on his lap. He picked drywall mud from a hairy forearm like a sparrow browsing crumbs. When I pushed through the flap, he acted surprised to see me. How was I finding my accommodations, he wanted to know. Did the work suit me? Stiles told him that I came from Meyer-Womble Observatory; had I met a fellow there called Ghandy? What we were having, as it turned out, was not a conversation but a questionnaire. I popped a jar of crème fraîche for lunch and pushed it toward him.

“Thanks, no,” said Raoul. “I brought real food.”

From his onion sack he offered a past-date hoagie and a Fanta. I accepted. He fell silent, and it made me nervous to have him sitting so quiet while I ate. The spaces between my back teeth compel me to make certain modifications in chewing. I take baby bites that I soften with my tongue, jut out my chin to align the remaining molars, and grind cautiously until the paste is fine enough to swallow. It's a process and not a silent one.

Raoul listened intently, his head cocked to one side. He brushed mud from his trouser leg. He was learning my story by hearing me eat.

“Okay, then,” he asked. “Why Lowell?”

I said the scenery, which made him smile. The man's teeth were almost too pretty. I wondered had he suffered at all.

“Okay,” he said, folding his onion sack into a neat square. “Too soon for questions. I get it.”

When I had eaten my sandwich, Raoul suggested a walk to get the digestive tubes working. He led the way uphill at a clip, past the concession and work site. Down a path of stone pavers, a promontory showed the city below, lights now beginning to come on. Raoul pointed to a second openwork dome, too small for a person to fit inside, too ornate to be an observatory. The bronze plaque on its base had been mutilated by what looked like hammer blows, but this much of the epitaph remained:

Today what we already know is
omprehension of another
w
rl
. In a not so distant fu