"Interpenetration, yes," Painted Red said. "They're saints not because of what they did, especially, but because in the telling of it, what they did became transparent, and your own life could be seen through it, illuminated.
"Without the Co-op Great Belaire there would be no truthful speaking. Without truthful speaking there could be no transparent life. And in transparent life, the saints hoped that one day we might be free from death: not immortal, as the angels tried to become, but free from death, our lives transparent even as we live them: not through a means, you see, like the Filing System or even truthful speaking, but transparent in their circumstances: so that instead of telling a story that makes a life transparent, we will ourselves be transparent, and not hear or remember a saint's life, but live it: live many lives in the moment between birth and dying."
"How could that come about?" I said, unable to grasp it, or even imagine it.
"Well," she said, "If I knew, perhaps I would be a great saint. Perhaps if you discover it… But tell me this, Rush that Speaks: how anyway is truthful speaking itself done?"
I must know that; I was a truthful speaker, the craft could never be taken from me; and yet… How: Painted Red's question reverberated within me, as a thing held up between two mirrors multiplies itself endlessly; as though my mind were crossing as my eyes can cross. I laughed, helpless. "I don't know," I said. "I don't know how it's done."
She laughed with me. She leaned forward, as though to impart a secret, and almost whispered to me: "Well, well, you know, Rush, I don't know either!"
Still chuckling, she picked up the long box which contained Palm cord's slides, to continue her preparations. A thought struck her as her fingers moved over the tabs. "You asked me once, Rush," she said, "what the names of these slides are, and how they go together."
"Yes."
"Do you still want to know?"
"I do."
"It's the day for it," she said, regarding me for a long time with a tenderness that was like a farewell. "The one you see," she said, "the first slide, is Fourth Finder, Palm cord's slide: you see, in the center, where the lines meet, a figure like the palm of a hand? And the other placed over it is called Little First Slot. Together, they make Little Knot." She took a third slide from the box and placed it behind the others. "Little Knot and Hands make Little, Knot Unraveled." She put two more with them. "Little Knot Unraveled and the two Stair slides make Great Knot." Carefully she drew out and inserted the thin, thin pieces of glass. "Great Knot and First Trap make Little Trap. Little Trap and the Expedition make Little Second Gate, or Great Trap Unlocked in Leaf cord. Little Second Gate and the Ball Court make Gate."
The figures on the wall had grown tangled and dark, infinitely intertwining. When one slide seemed to make a pattern of the previous ones, the next distorted the pattern. And now I could see nothing in it. Painted Red's hands lingered over the rest of the slides in her box. "It's thought," she said, "that Gate and the second and great Slot slides, together with the Broken Heart and the Shaken Fragments slides, all make Great Knot Unraveled. But no one can read that much; no one who can begin to understand Gate can even begin to read that much." She touched the lens tube to sharpen the figures; sharpness came and went amid the overlayed figures as she moved the tube. She came and sat by me again. "The gossips know, now, after many years of searching, that it can't be read past Gate, not packed all together; and if Great Knot Unraveled is the whole set, then Great Knot Unraveled can never be read."
"Does that mean," I asked, "that it's no longer any use? Since you know that? It doesn't, does it?"
"Oh no," she said. "No, no. It will be a long time before we have learned everything there is to learn even from Little Knot. But… well. It seemed, when the System was first being truly searched, in St. Olive's time, it seemed that… it seemed there was a promise, that one day it would be seen all together, and answer all questions. Now we know it won't, not ever. When that was first understood, there were gossips who broke up their Systems, and some who left Belaire; that was a sad time."
She pushed her spectacles back along her nose. "For me: well, I know there are enough byways, and snake's-hands, and things to be learned from the System to last many lifetimes. And work enough to do with its wisdom among the cords, in their knots and troubles." She looked at Gate, and its lights were reflected from her spectacles. "And the whole answer is there, you know, Rush, though I can't read it; it knows everything, about people, though I never will. That's enough to keep me in its presence."
She was silent a long time, and seemed to grow older. Then: "When will you leave?" she asked me.
"In the spring," I said. "I think I'll be ready then."
"A saint," she said. "You know, Rush, the first time you came to see me, seven years ago, you had a different thought. You were going to go out and find all our things that were lost, and bring them back to us."
"Yes."
"Is your Whisper cord girl one of those things that was lost?"
I said nothing. Painted Red had not looked at me, only at Gate. "Well, perhaps after all it's not a different thought, not really…" She struck her knees with her palms. "No," she said. "No, I won't read for you this year. I think, if you mean to do this, it could hurt as much as help. Do you mind?"
"If you think it's right."
"I do," she said. She had me help her up. "I do." Could it be that I had - almost instantly - grown taller than she, or had she somehow just as quickly shrunk? She took my shoulders in her strong hands. "When you go," she said, "never forget us and our needs. Whatever you find, if it's useful to us, save it; make the knowledge you got here into a box to carry it, it can be used for that. And however far away you go, come back with what you find to us."
And so she embraced me, and I left her, and ran away down the puzzle of Path that I knew by heart, through rooms and passages that seemed also to have grown smaller suddenly. I wondered about the reading of the System, and what it might have shown for me and my endeavor, what possibilities, what failures; and I felt a cord cut that had tied my childhood to Little Belaire, and a little lost, and a little free. She must have known best, though: if she knew nothing else (and she did, much else) she knew when and when not to tell what the System revealed.
But forget Little Belaire! She could not have thought I could forget it. The longer I'm away, the more it grows in my mind, the stream that runs through it speaking, its bugs and birds and berry bushes, the mystery at the heart of it hidden perhaps in the Filing System or the saved things of the Carved Chests; and now, now after I have lived in a tree and gotten a letter from Dr. Boots and been dark and light and lived as an Avvenger and been taken apart and put back together any number of ways, though now I think sometimes that that place in the woods is imaginary and I am not a truthful speaker at all, do not really mean what I say or say what I really mean, and have invented all of it: still, even if it's a dream, it's a dream dictated by a voice that speaks truthfully: a voice that cannot lie.
Second Facet
You did, though, really set out to find Once a Day again. Didn't you?
I don't know. Perhaps I did. I didn't know it.
When I was a kid, I wanted to find our things that were lost; as I grew up, and heard the stories of the saints, and listened to Seven Hands talk, I had another ambition: I wanted to be a saint. I wanted to have strange adventures, which I could tell of; and learn forgotten secrets, secrets stronger than the ones Once a Day kept from me; and make sense of the world in the stories I told.