Little, Big Part 42

Lilac said something that made no sense, about clouds and houses, and then no more, for she was asleep. Asleep, never having noticed the moment when she began, dreaming of it already as she would go on dreaming of it from now on; dreaming of all that she had seen, and all that would come of it; dreaming of the spring when she would dream of the autumn when she fell asleep, and dreaming of the winter when she would wake; in the involution of her dream, turning and altering those things she dreamed even as she dreamed them and as elsewhere they came to pa.s.s. She drew up, though unaware she did so, her knees; she drew her hands close to her chin, which drew down, till she took the same S-shape she had taken when she had lived within Sophie. Lilac was asleep.

Mrs. Underhill tucked the cloak once more carefully around her, and then straightened up. With both hands she pressed the small of her back and bent backwards, as weary as she had ever been. She pointed to the owl, whose soft-blooming eyes were looking out from its house, and said, "You. Take care, watch well," which those eyes could do as well as anypair she knew. She looked upward. Twilight, even the endless twilight of this November day, had nearly ended, and she with all her tasks left undone: the last of the year still unburied, and the rains that were to bury it (and a million insect larvae, a million bulbs and seeds) yet unpoured; the floor of heaven unswept of dirty cloud and its winter lamps still to be lit. Brother North-wind, she was sure, champed at his bit to be unleashed. It was a wonder, she thought, that day followed night, that the very earth turned at all, she had given it so little thought of late. She sighed, turned away, and (growing huger and older and more puissant than Lilac had ever supposed, or could imagine or even dream her to be) she expanded upward and outward toward these tasks without a backward look at her adopted grand-daughter asleep among the leaves.

High on the hilltop The old King sits; He is now so old and gray He's nigh lost his wits.

a"Allingham, The Fairies The first years after what Russell Eigenblick thought of as his accession were the hardest anyone then alive would live to seea"so it would seem to them, looking back. Sudden snowstorms raged on the November day when against token opposition he was elected President, and seemed scarcely to abate thereafter. It could not have been always winter in those years, summer must have come around duly as ever, yet universally people remembered winters: the longest, coldest, deepest winters ever known; one continuous winter. Every hardship the Tyrant regretfully imposed or his opponents wilfully inflicted in their uprisings against him was made worse by winter, by months of frozen mud and sleety rain that continually mired every enterprise. Winter made ghastly and hopeless the movements of trucks, traffic, brown-clad troops; everywhere, deeply marking the memory, were the huddled clots and queues of refugees, rag-bound against the cold; the stalled trains, grounded planes; the new frontiers at which lines of slush-bound cars, tailpipes breathing cold clouds, waited to be examined by m.u.f.fled guards; the shortages of everything, the awful struggle, the difficulties and uncertainties made more awful by the isolating endless cold. And the blood of martyrs and reactionaries frozen on the dirty snow of city squares.

At Edgewood, the old house submitted to indignities: antique plumbing froze; a whole floor was closed up, cold dust collecting in its disused rooms; glum black stoves were set to squat in front of marble fireplaces; and, worst, sheets of plastic for the first time were stapled up over dozens of windows, making every day a foggy day. One night, Smoky, hearing noises in the wilderness of the kitchen-garden, went out and surprised with his flashlight a starveling, an animal long, gray, red-eyed and slavering, mad with cold and hunger. A stray dog, the others said, or something; but only Smoky had seen it, and Smoky wondered.

Winters There was a pan of water on the stove which sat in the old music room, to help keep the plaster of the ceiling from cracking further from the dryness. A big wooden box roughly carpentered by Smoky held logs to feed the stove, and the two together, stove and woodbox, gave a Klondike air to the pretty room. Rudy Flood had cut the logs, and been felled himself doing so; had pitched face forward, chain saw still gripped in his hands, dead before he struck the ground, which (so Robin said, who was much changed by witnessing it) shook when he met it. Sophie, whenever she rose from her place at the drum-table to feed the insatiable Moloch, had an unpleasant or at least odd sensation that it was pieces of Rudy and not of his woodlot that she thrust into its maw.

Fifty-Two Work consumed men. It hadn't been so in Sophie's youth. Not only Robin, but Sonny Noon and many others who in the old expansive days might have given up the farms their parents had worked, now drew in, thinking that if they had not these acres, and this labor, they'd have nothing. Rudy had after all been an exception; the older generation's experience had mostly been with endless possibility, sudden change for the better, vistas of freedom and ease. The younger saw things differently. Their motto was, perforce had to be, the old one about Use it up, wear it out and so on. That applied all around: doing his part, Smoky had decided that rents would be reduced or in abeyance indefinitely. And the house showed it: it was, or seemed to be, wearing out. Sophie, pulling her thick shawl more closely around her, looked up at the skeleton's hand and arm drawn in cracks across the ceiling, and then returned to her cards.

Being used up, worn out, and not replaced. Could that be it? She looked at the fall she had made.

Nora Cloud had left Sophie not only her cards, but her sense that every fall made with them was Somehow contiguous with every other, that they made only one geography, or told only one story, though it could be read or viewed differently to different purposes, which made it seem discontinuous. Sophie, taking up Cloud's view at the point where she had left it, had taken it further: if it were all one thing, then one question continually proposed to it should come eventually to have a whole answer, however lengthy and encyclopaedic; should come to have the whole thing for an answer. If only she could concentrate hard enough, continue to formulate the question properly and with the right variations and qualifications, and not be distracted by the shadow answers to unasked small questions which lurked within the fallsa"yes, Smoky's angina will worsen, Lily's baby will be a boya"then perhaps she could reach it.

The question she had was not exactly the one that Ariel Hawksquill had come to have answered, though that lady's sudden appearance and importunity had jolted Sophie into beginning to try and ask it. Hawksquill had had no trouble locating in the cards the huge events that had lately been taking place in the world, and the reasons for them, and her own part in them too, cutting them from the trivia and puzzlements like a surgeon finding and excising a tumor. Sophie's difficulty in doing such a thing had been that, ever since her search for Lilac, question and answer with these cards had seemed to her to be one; all answers seemed to her to be only questions about the question, every question only a form of the answer it sought. Hawksquill's long training had allowed her to overcome this difficulty, and any Gypsy fortune-teller could have explained to Sophie how to ignore it or evade it: but perhaps if one had, Sophie wouldn't have struggled so with the question, through years, through long winters, and would not now be as close as she felt herself to be to a sort of great dictionary or guidebook or almanac of answers to her (strictly speaking unaskable) single question.

Being used up, one by one, and not being replaced; dying, in fact, though they couldn't die, or anyway Sophie had always supposed they couldn't, she didn't know whya . Could it be so? Or was it just a winter thought in a time of hardship and shortage?

Cloud had said: it only seems as though the world is getting old and worn out, just as you are yourself. Its life is far too long for you to feel it age during your own. What you learn as you get older is that the world is old, and has been old for a long time.

Well: all right. But what Sophie felt to be aging wasn't a world, but only its inhabitants: if there were such a thing as a world which they inhabited, distinct from them, which Sophie couldn't imagine reallya"but anyway, suppose there was such a world, old or young didn't matter, what Sophie knew for sure was that however densely populated those lands may have' been in Dr. Bramble's time or in Paracelsus's, they weren't populated at all any longer in any large sense, Sophie thought it would be possible eventuallya" soon!a"if not to name at least to number all of them, and that the total number wouldn't be a large one; two digits only, possibly, probably. Which (since everyone without exception quoted in the Architecture, and everyone else for that matter who had considered the question at all, supposed there to be uncounted milliards of them, one for every harebell and thorn-bush at least) might mean that Somehow lately they were being one by one consumed, like the split muscled logs Sophie fed into the fire, or worn down to ravelings by grief and care and age, and blown away.

Or reduced by war. War was what Ariel Hawksquill had determined to be the relation at work, the thing that had made the world or this Tale (if there was a difference) turn so sad and puzzling and uncertain. Like all wars, an unchosen thing, however inevitable, with awful losses on their side at least, Sophie couldn't imagine what losses they might themselves have inflicted, or how a War: could it be then that all that remained of them was one last forlorn hope, a brave band caught in a desperate rearguard action and going down to the last man?

No! It was too awful to think of: dying. Dying out. Sophie knew (none better) that they had not ever thought of her with love, didn't in any human sense care about her at all, or any being like her. They had stolen Lilac from her, and though that had not been for any intention of hurting Sophie, it hadn't been for any love they bore Lilac either, presumably, but only for reasons of their own. No, Sophie had no reason to love them; but the thought of their pa.s.sing away utterly was unbearable: like thinking of a winter with no end.

And yet she thought she could soon count out the few remaining.

She a.s.sembled her deck, and spread it all in a fan before her; then she drew out court cards one by one to represent the ones she already knew of, laying them in groups with low cards for their courts or children or agents, insofar as she could guess at them.

One for sleep, and four for seasons; three to tell fates, two to be Prince and Princess; one to go messages, no, two to go messages, one to go and one to come back again a It was a matter of discriminating between functions, and learning which were whose, and how many were needed for it. One to bring gifts; three to bear gifts away. Queen of Swords and King of Swords and Knight of Swords; Queen of Coins and King of Coins and ten low cards for their children a Fifty-two?

Or was it only that at that number (with only the Least Trumps, the plot which they acted out, left uncounted) her deck ran out?

There was a sudden clanging noise above her head, and Sophie ducked; it sounded as though a full and heavy set of fire-irons had tumbled over in the attic. Smoky, at work in the orrery. She glanced up. The crack in the ceiling seemed to have lengthened, but she doubted that it really had.

Three for labor, two to make music, one to dream dreams a She thrust her hands into her sleeves. Few, anyway; not hosts. The taut plastic over the window was a drumskin, tapped on by wind. It seemeda"it was hard to tella"that it had begun to snow again. Sophie, abandoning the count (she still didn't know enough; it was wrong, and more than wrong on an afternoon like this, to speculate when you knew so little) gathered up the cards and put them away in their bag in their box.

She sat for a while, listening to the taps of Smoky's hammer, hesitant at first, then more insistent, then ringing as though he struck a gong. Then they fell silent, and the afternoon returned.

Carrying a Torch "Summer," Mrs. MacReynolds said, lifting her head slightly from the pillow, "is a myth."

The nieces and nephews and children around her looked at each other in thoughtful doubt or doubtful thought.

"In winter," the dying old woman went on, "summer is a myth; a report, a rumor, not to be believeda ."

The others drew closer to her, watching her fine face, her fluttering blue lids. Her head lay so lightly on its pillow that her blue-rinsed coiffure was unmussed, but this was for sure her last gasp; her contract had run out, and would not be renewed.

"Never," she said, and then paused a long time in limbo while Auberon thought further: never forget me? Never break faith, never say die, never never never? "Never long," she said. "Only wait; only have patience. Longing is fatal. It will come." They had begun to weep around her, though they hid it, for the old lady would have been impatient with tears. "Be happy," she said, even more faintly. "For the things a" Yes. There she goes. Bye, Mrs. MacR. "The things, childrena"the things that make us happya"make us wise,"

One last look around. Lock glances with Frankie MacR., the black sheep: he won't forget this, a new leaf turns for him. Music up. And dead. Auberon skipped two s.p.a.ces and made three memorial asterisks across the page, and drew it out.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay?" said Fred Savage. "Done?"

"Done," Auberon said. He shuffled the twenty or so pages together, his hands clumsy in gloves from which the ends of the fingers had been cut off, and jammed them in an envelope. "G'ahead."

Fred took the envelope, thrust it smartly beneath his arm, and with a mocking suggestion of salute, made to leave the Folding Bedroom. "*M I spose to wait?" he asked, hand on the door. "While they reads over this?"

"Ah, don't bother," Auberon said. "It's too late now. They'll have to just do it."

"Oookay," Fred said. "Later, m'man."

Auberon built up the fire, pleased with himself. Mrs. MacReynolds was among the last of the characters whom he had inherited from the creators of "A World Elsewhere." A young divorcee thirty years ago, she had tenaciously and cleverly held on to her part, through alcoholism, remarriage, religious conversion, grief, age and illness. Done now though. Contract terminated. Frankie was about to go off on a long trip, too; he would returna"his contract had years to run, and he was the producer's boyfriend as wella"but he would return a changed man.

A missionary? well, yes, in a sense; perhaps a missionary a More ought to happen, Sylvie had said once on a certain day to Fred Savage; and in the long interpenetration of Auberon's vision of "A World Elsewhere" and the show as he had found it, a lot had. He couldn't believe it at first to be so, but it seemed that the turgid, long-drawn-out pointlessness of its plot had been due simply to a lack of inventiveness on the writers' parts. Auberon, in the beginning anyway, suffered from no such lack, and besides, there were all those tedious and unlikable people who had to be disposed of, whose pa.s.sions and jealousies Auberon had a hard time understanding. The death rate had therefore been high for a while; the shriek of tires on rainy roads, the horrid crunch of steel on steel, the shout of sirens had been nearly continuous. One young woman, a drug-addicted Lesbian with an idiot child, he could not contractually eliminate; so he magicked her away in favor of her identical twin sister, long-lost and a very different character. That had taken a few weeks to accomplish.

The producers blanched at the speed with which crises came and pa.s.sed in those days; the audience, they said, couldn't bear such storms, they were used to tedium. But the audience seemed to disagree, and while eventually it came to he a somewhat different audience, it was no smaller, or not measurably so, and more fiercely devoted than ever. Besides, there were few enough writers who could produce the amounts of work Auberon could, at the new and sharply reduced salaries being offered, and so the producers, struggling for the first time in their profession with tight budgets, flirting with bankruptcy, counting a.s.sets and debits late into the night, gave Auberon his head.

So the actors spoke the lines which Fred Savage carried to them from Old Law Farm every day, meekly trying to infuse some reality and humanity into the strange hopes, intimations of high events, and secret expectancy (calm, sad, impatient, or resolved) which had come to infect characters they had played for years. There were not the many secure berths for actors that there had been in the days of the old affluence, and for every character released from the box of Auberon's foreknowledge there were scores of applicants, even at fees that would have been scoffed at in the now-lost Golden Age. They were grateful to be embodying these peculiar lives, working toward or away from whatever huge thing it was which seemed always in preparation, yet never revealed, and which had kept their audience on gentle tenterhooks now for years.

Auberon laughed, staring into the fire and already fcrmulating new gins and defeats, embroglios and breakthroughs. What a form! Why hadn't anyone before caught the secret of it? A simple plot was required, a single enterprise which concerned all the characters deeply, and which had a grand sweet simple single resolution: a resolution, however, that would never be reached. Always approached, keeping hopes high, making disappointments bitter, shaping lives and loves by its inexorable slow progress toward the present: but never, never reached.

In the good old days, when polls were as common as house-to-house searches were now, pollsters asked viewers why they liked the bizarre torments of the soap operas, what kept them watching. The commonest answer was that they liked soap operas because soap operas were like life.

Like life. Auberon thought "A World Elsewhere," under his hands, was coming to be like a lot of things: like truth, like dreams; like childhood, his own anyway; like a deck of cards or an old alb.u.m of pictures. He didn't think it was like lifea"not anyway like his own. On "A World Elsewhere," when a character's greatest hopes were dashed, or his task all accomplished, or his children or friends saved by his sacrifice, he was free to die or at least to pa.s.s away; or he changed utterly, and reappeared with a new task, new troubles, new children. Except for those whose embodying actors were on vacation or ill, none simply came to a stop, all their important actions over, haunting the edges of the plot with their final scripts (so to speak) still in their hands.

That was like life, though: like Auberon's.

Not like a plot, but like a fable, a story with a point, which had already been made. The fable was Sylvie; Sylvie was the sharply-pointed, unenigmatic yet brimful and undepletable allegory or tale that underlay his life. Sometimes he was conscious that this view robbed Sylvie of the intense and irreducible reality which she had had, and no doubt somewhere went on having, and when he saw that he felt a sudden shame and horror, as though he had been told or had told a shocking and defaming lie about her; but those times grew less frequent as the story, the fable, grew more perfect, took on other and more intricately refracting facets even as it grew shorter and more tellable; underlying, explaining, criticizing and defining his life even as it grew less something that had actually happened to him.

"Carrying a torch," George Mouse called it, and Auberon, who had never heard the old phrase, thought it just, because he thought of the torch he carried not as a penitential or devotional one, but as Sylvie. He carried a torch: her. She flared brightly sometimes, sank low other times; he saw by her, though he had no path in particular he wanted to see. He lived in the Folding Bedroom, he helped out on the Farm; one year was not different from the next. Like a long-time cripple, he put aside the better part of the world, not always aware he did so, as not being for the use of such as he: he was not any longer someone to whom things happened.

He suffered from some odd disorders, living as he did in his most vigorous years. He couldn't sleep much beyond dawn on any but the deepest of winter mornings. He grew able to see faces in the chance arrangements of his room's fixtures and furnishings, or rather unable not to see them: faces wicked, wise or foolish, figures gesturing to him, weirdly distorted or wounded, able to express emotions that affected him without themselves having them, animated without being alive, which he found faintly disgusting. He pitied, against his will, the ceiling light fixture, two blank Phillips-head screws the eyes, and a light bulb stuck in its stupid, gaping ceramic mouth. The flowered curtains were a crowd a congress, or rather two: the flower people, and the people made of background, outlined by flowers, peering through flowers. When the whole room had become unrelievably populated, he actually visited a psychiatrist, though he told no one about it. The man said he suffered from man-in-the-moon syndrome, not uncommon, and suggested that he get out more; a cure, though, he said, would take years.

Years.

Get out more: George, a constant and a choosy philanderer, not much less successful now than he had been in youth, introduced him to many women, and the Seventh Saint provided others. But talk about ghosts. Now and then two of these real women rolled into one (when on occasion he could persuade them to be so rolled) gave him a rude bliss, if he concentrated, that was intense. But his imaginings, working on the st.u.r.dy though desperately fine stuff of memory, were of a different order of intensity altogether.

He would not have had it so; he honestly believed that. He even knew, in moments of great clarity, that it would not have been so had he not been who he was, that his disability didn't lie in what had happened to him at all, but in his flawed nature, that not everyone, perhaps no one but he, would have ended up thus becalmed after being touched only by Sylvie as though in pa.s.singa" what a stupid and antique disease that was, and one that had been all but eliminated from the modern world, he resented deeply at times that he should be, apparently, the last victim of it and thus excluded, as though by some rule of common hygiene, from the broad banquet that the City, even in decline, could still show. He wished, he wished he could do as Sylvie had done: say f.u.c.k destiny, and escape. And so he could, too, he just wasn't trying very hard; he knew that, too, but there it was: flawed. And it was no comfort to think that perhaps to have such a flaw, to be thus inadequate to the world, was just what it was to be in the Tale he could no longer deny that he was in: that perhaps the Tale was the flaw, that the flaw and the Tale were the same thing; that being in the Tale meant nothing more than being suited to your role in it and good for nothing else, like having a cast in your eye, by which you saw always something elsewhere, but which to everyone else (even most of the time to yourself) seemed only a disfigurement.

He rose, annoyed with his thoughts for having fallen into that old bag. There was work to do; that should be enough; most of the time it was, and he was grateful. The amount he accomplished, and the pittance he was paid, would have astonished the mild and affable man (dead now of an accidental overdose) to whom Auberon had first shown scripts. Life had been easy thena . He poured himself a small whiskey (gin was verboten, but his adventure had left him with a persistent small habit, more like a sweet tooth than an addiction) and addressed himself to the mail which Fred had brought from uptown. Fred, his old guide, was his a.s.sociate now, and so described to Auberon's employers. He was farmhand as well, and memento mori or at least an object-lesson of some kind for Auberon; he could not now any longer get along without him, or so it seemed to him. He tore open an envelope.

"Tell Frankie he's going to break his mother's HEART carrying on like that. Doesn't he see that, how can he be so BLIND. Why doesn't he get a good woman and settle down." Auberon never got used to the suspension of disbelief his viewers were capable of, it always gave him a guilty thrill. Sometimes he felt the MacReynolds's were real, and it was the viewers, like this lady, who were imaginary; pale fictions hungering after the flesh-and-blood life Auberon created. He tossed the letter into the woodbox. Settle down, huh; a good woman. Not a chance. Lot of blood under the bridge before Frankie settles down.

He saved for the last a letter from Edgewood, some weeks in transit, a good long one from his mother, and settled to it like a squirrel to a large nut, hoping to find something within he could use for next month's episodes.

Something He Could Steal "You asked what happened to the Mr. Cloud that Great-aunt Cloud was married to," she wrote. "Well, that's really sort of a sad story. It happened a long time before I was horn. Momdy sort of remembers. His name was Harvey Cloud. His father was Henry Cloud, the inventor and astronomer. Henry used to spend his summers up here, he had that pretty little cottage where the Junipers later lived. I think he had a lot of patents he lived on. Old John had put some money into his inventionsa"engines, I think, or astronomical things, I guess; I don't know what. One of his things though was the old orrery at the top of the housea"you know. That was an invention of Henry'sa"I mean not orreries in general, they were invented by a Lord Orrery believe it or not (Smoky told me that). But Henry died before it was finished (it cost a lot of money I think) and about that time Nora, Great-aunt Cloud, married Harvey. Harvey was working on it too. His father's son. I saw a picture of him once that Auberon took, in his shirtsleeves and a stiff collar and tie (I guess he wore them even when he was working), looking very fierce and thoughtful, standing next to the engine of the orrery before they installed it. It was HUGE and complicated and took up most of the picture. And then when they were done installing it (John was long dead by then) there was an accident, and poor Harvey fell off the very tip-top of the house and was killed. I guess then everybody forgot about the orrery, or didn't want to think about it. I know Cloud never talked about it. You used to hide out up there, I remember. Now, you know, Smoky's up there all the time, trying to see if it will ever run, and studying books on machinery and clockworka"I don't know how he's doing.

"So he used to just live here, Harvey I mean, with Nora, in her room; and go up and work on the orrery; and then he fell off. So there you are.

"Sophie says to tell you to be careful of your throat because of bronchitis, in March.

"Lucy's baby's going to be a boy.

"Isn't the winter dragging on!

"Your loving mother."

Well. Still further dark or at least odd corners in his family's life he hadn't known about. He remembered saying once to Sylvie that nothing terrible had ever happened in his family. That was before he had learned much about the true and false Lilacs, of course; and here now was poor Harvey Cloud, a young husband, tumbling off the roof at the moment of his greatest triumph.

He could work that in. There was nothing, he had begun to think, that he couldn't work in. He had a gift for such work: a real gift. Everybody said so.

But meanwhile, his scene switched back to the City. This was the easy part, a rest from the other, more complex scenes; it was all simple in the Citya"predation, chase, escape, triumph and defeat; the weak to the wall, and only the strong survive. He chose, from a long row of them which had replaced George's anonymous paperbacks on the shelf, one of Doc's old books. He had sent to Edgewood for them when he had become a writer, and they had proved very useful, as he had thought they might. The one he had was one of the Gray Wolf's adventures; and, sipping his whiskey, he began to thumb through it, looking for some material he could steal.

Escapements The moon was silver. The sun was gold, or at least goldplated. Mercury was a mirrored globea"mirrored with mercury, of course. Saturn was heavy enough to be lead. Smoky remembered something from the Architecture that a.s.sociated various metals with various planets; but those weren't these planets, they were the dream-planets of magic and astrology. The orrery, bra.s.s-bound and oak-cased, was one of those turn-of-the-century scientific instruments that couldn't have been more solidly rational, material, engineered: a patented universe, made of rods and b.a.l.l.s, meshing gears and electroplated springs.

Then why couldn't Smoky understand it?

He stared hard again at the mechanism, a sort of detached escapement, which he was about to disa.s.semble. If he disa.s.sembled it before he understood its function, though, he doubted whether he could put it back together. On the floor, on tables in the hall below, there were several such, all cleaned and wrapped in oily rags, and wrapped too in mystery; this escapement was the last. He supposed (not for the first time) that he should never have begun this. He looked again at the diagram in the Cyclopedia of Mechanics which most resembled the dusty, rusted thing before him.

"Let E be a four-leaved scape-wheel, the teeth of which as they come around rest against the bent pall GFL at G. The pall is prevented from flying too far back by a pin H and kept up to position by a very delicate spring K." G.o.d it was cold in here. Very delicate spring: this thing? Why did it seem to be in here backwards? "The pall B engages the arm FL, liberating the scape-wheel, a tooth of which, M a ." Oh dear. As soon as the letters got past the middle of the alphabet, Smoky began to feel helpless and bound, as though tangled in a net. He picked up a pliers, and put it down again.

The ingenuity of engineers was appalling. Smoky had come to understand the basic principle of clockwork, upon which all those ingenuities were based: that a motive forcea"a falling weight, a wound springa"was prevented by an escapement from expending all its energy at once, and made to pay it out in ticks and tocks, which moved hands or planets around evenly until the force was all expended. Then you wound it up. All the foliots, verges, pallets, stackfreeds and going-barrels were only ingenuities, to keep the motion regular. The difficulty, the maddening difficulty, about Edgewood's orrery was that Smoky couldn't discover a motive force that made it go arounda"or rather he had discovered where it was, in that huge circular case, as black and thick as an old-time safe, and he had examined it, but still couldn't conceive how it was supposed to drive anything; it looked like something meant itself to be driven.

There was just no end to it. He sat back on his heels and clutched his knees. He was eye-level now to the plane of the solar system, looking at the sun from the position of a man on Saturn. No end to it: the thought stirred in him a mixture of itchy resentment and pure deep pleasure he had never felt before, except faintly, when as a boy he had been presented with the Latin language. The task of that language, when he had begun to grasp its immensity, had seemed likely to fill up his life and all the blank interstices of his anonymity; he had felt at once invaded and comforted. Well, he had abandoned it somewhere along in the middle of it, after having mostly licked off its magic, like icing; but now his old age would have this task: and it was a language too, The screws, the b.a.l.l.s, the rods, the springs were a syntax, not a picture. The orrery didn't model the Solar System in any visual or spatial way, if it had the pretty green-and-blue enameled Earth would have been a crumb and the whole machine would have needed to be ten times the size it was at least. No, what was expressed here, as by the inflections and predicates of a tongue, was a set of relations: and while the dimensions were fictional, the relations obtained all through, very neatly: for the language was number, and it meshed here as it did in the heavens: exactly as.

It had taken him a long time to figure that out, being unmathematical as well as unmechanical, but he had its vocabulary now, and its grammar was coming clear to him. And he thought that, not soon perhaps but eventually, he would be able to read its huge bra.s.s and gla.s.s sentences with some comprehension, and that they would not he as Caesar's and Cicero's had turned out to be, mostly dull, hollow and without mystery, but that something would be revealed equal to the terrific encoding it had received, something he very much needed to know.

There were quick footsteps on the stairs outside the orrery door, and his grandson Bud put his red head in. "Grampa," he said, looking over the mystery there, "Gramma sent you a sandwich."

"Oh, great," Smoky said. "Come on in."

He entered slowly, with the sandwich and a mug of tea, his eyes on the machine, better and more splendid than any Christmas-window train set. "Is it done?" he asked.

"No," Smoky said, eating.

"When will it be?" He touched one sphere, and then quickly drew his hand away when, with the smooth ease of heavy counterweighting, it moved.

"Oh," Smoky said, "about the time the world ends."

Bud looked at him in awe, and then laughed. "Aw come on."

"Well, I don't know," Smoky said. "Because I don't know yet what makes it go around."

"That thing," Bud said, pointing to the black case like a safe.

"Okay," Smoky said, and went to it, cup in hand, "but then the question is what makes this go around?"

He pushed up the lever that opened the gasketed door (dust-proof, but why?) and swung the case open. Inside, cleaned and oiled and ready to go if it could, which it couldn't, was the impossible heart of Harvey Cloud's machine: the impossible heart, so Smoky sometimes thought, of Edgewood itself.

"A wheel," Bud said. "A bent wheel. Wow."

"I think," Smoky said, "it's supposed to go by electricity. Down under the floor, if you lift up that door, there's a big old electric motor. Onlya""

"What?"

"Well, it's backwards. It's in there backwards, and not by mistake."