THE THIRD CRYSTAL: A Letter
from Dr. Boots
First Facet
… and wait till I've inserted it.
What? Shall I begin again?
No. It's all right. Here is the second crystaclass="underline" see how tiny: yet it's all there. Blink and Budding and Blooming, all that part.
How many more? The sun is setting. Look: the clouds below us are all pink and yellow.
The third is the last, usually.
Angel… tell me this now…
No. Not yet. Tell me: what happened next day, at Service City?
Well, that night we slept; she took me up the wide flight of stairs that led to the big platform which covered the back part of the place - the mezzanine, they called it (the List knew such words, words that rang like ancient coins flung down angelstone - mezzanine). There, rooms had been made with curtains and low walls, and it reminded me a little of home. Once a Day found us an empty nook piled with pillows, and we lay together there, she talking all the while as though to pull me into her List's arms by strength of stories, until she was yawning too much to talk. She was so happy to be there, and so glad I was with her to see it, that it made me ache with some unnamable feeling - oh, Dr. Boots, you make them - no, you let them make themselves - so happy, so seldom!
Dr. Boots's List can do a thing that I never could, that Once a Day had learned in her years with them: they sleep like cats. They cat nap. Once a Day would sleep for a time, and be up for as long, and sleep some more and be up again. All through that night I felt her get up and go and come back to watch me, impatient for me to get done my long sleep; but I was in the middle of thick dreams, the dreams a sleeper in a strange house has, and couldn't wake. When I did, it was with a cry that woke me from some adventure; I lay staring, trying to remember where I was. I stumbled out through the curtains and found myself on the very edge of the mezzanine, looking out over the vast hall lit by a clear morning turned faintly blue by way-wall. Once a Day stood by it, bent over with her hands on her knees, by a little muscled brown man who sat holding up a ball of clear blue glass, turning it so the light shot through it; he bit on a tiny wooden pipe from which rose a fine white smoke.
When I reached them, stumbling past groups that fell silent when I smiled at them, I saw that on the brown man's wrist was the bracelet of blue stones which Once a Day had given to him on the day of the trading at Little Belaire. His name was Houd, but when he said it it was as soft and long and unspeakable as a cat's sigh. Others gathered around us, and I was made much of; they stared as frankly as cats at my pigtail and my spectacles and marveled at my ignorance of Dr. Boots and the List; and I couldn't understand much of their talk, though I knew the words. Outside in the morning, Brom the black and white cat walked across the wide stone, and Once a Day and the others turned to watch me do what I had to do, being new to waywalclass="underline" I tried to walk out there. It doesn't work that way; I could get close to it (always from it a hot breath blew, smelling of metal somehow) but - it doesn't work that way. I looked around at them, and they were all smiling the same smile.
"It doesn't work that way," Houd said around his pipe, and Once a Day came and pulled me away. "It's only one way," she said laughing. "Don't you see? Only one way."
She took my hand and we went across the black and white squares of the floor and out the heavy glass doors ranged all along the back of the place, and around to the front through the real morning light, and then ran together headlong across the stone, with Brom beside us, and we must drown in its limitless blackness, but of course didn't, and we were inside again, panting and hugging. "One way," she said, "only one way! I learned that, I learned that; it's all only one way, don't you see?" And the brown man Houd seemed to watch me to see if I had heard in her words all that she said; and I knew I hadn't.
There was one other thing that one new to way-wall has to do: I tried putting my arm through and then drawing it back out. I never tried it again.
In Little Belaire we said a month the same way we said a minute or a mile: to the angels they meant exact things, so that every month and minute and mile were the same length. To us, they just mean a lot or a little, depending. The List is the same, about minutes and miles, but they know how long a month is. They count it off in a number of days, thirty or so to the month, twelve months to the year, and you are back at the beginning again; and for a reason they explained to me but which I can't remember, to every fourth year they add one winter day that has no number.
To me, the name of a month is the name of a season. I've been in years with two Marches and no April, or where October came in the middle of September; but I loved the List's calendar, because it didn't only count the days for some reason you might want them counted, it told too about the twelve seasons of the year.
The building at Service City that had the orange roof and the little white steeple was called by them Twenty-eight Flavors, and it was there they made most of the medicines and doses for which they're famous. Once a Day took me there, and we sat at two seats that enclosed a little table, private in the dimness (Twenty-eight Flavors had once had big windows of glass, but most had been broken and filled with sticks and plastic). There were many tables there like the one we sat at, angel-made with a false wood grain and not even marred in how-many-centuries. On the table was a beautiful box such as the List makes for precious things, and with a reverent care Once a Day took off its cover.
"The calendar," she said.
Inside the box were shiny square tiles, a pile of them face up, and another face down, about this size: two hands would just have covered their faces. The one showing, the one on top of the pile that was face up, was a picture, and below the picture were ranks of squares, a little like Blink's crostic-words. The picture showed two children, younger than Once a Day had been in our first June, in a meadow impossibly full of pale blue flowers, which they picked with faces quiet and absorbed. He wore short pants, she a tiny dress of the same blue as the flowers they picked.
Once a Day touched a black word below the picture. "June," she said. There was a small stone, made sticky with pine gum, in a square below the picture; she plucked it off and moved it to the next square. Ten days in June. The bell which hung before the way-wall house sounded four times, clear in the dimness, and we went to the great room for evening.
When twenty days had passed, and the stone had made its way through all the squares, we sat again in Twenty-eight Flavors. There were others there that day to watch, and they stood in the heat as Zhinsinura's big hands moved the June tile to the face-down pile and showed the next. When it was revealed, they all made a satisfied sound, like aaaah.
That picture let me know, and laugh to know, that however strange and old the angels were, still they were men, and knew what men know, if they could make this. The same two children, she still in her blue dress, lay on green grass darker than June's, older with length of hot days, and looked into a sky my great changeable clouds were piled up in, cities in the sky. But what made me laugh: the grass and they were at the top of the picture, and looked down into the clouds which floated below: and that's how it feels, in summer, to watch clouds.