"The four dead men are dead," she said, chin in her hand. "The League destroyed them, the four clear spheres with nothing at all inside them; they destroyed all but one, which is lost for good, as good as destroyed…"
"There were five."
She smiled. "Yes. So there were, five." In her hooded eyes were answers to that mystery; the last test was not to ask for them.
"I don't care now. I only want to stay, here, with her. I can't, unless I know what you know, unless I understand…"
"What if it doesn't help? I think you truthful speakers put too much faith in knowing and understanding and such things."
"No. Please. It's not even understanding I want. She… I want, I want to be, her. I want to be her. I don't want to be me any more. It doesn't help. Nothing I know helps a bit. I don't know if being her is better than being me, but I don't care anymore. I give up. Help me. I have no more reservations."
Zhinsinura listened. She chewed a finger and thought. We were alone now in the place, except for the cat Fa'afa, who wasn't interested. I looked down at May's tile between us: the children (who had not grown older in a year) stood in a wooden house with a wide door, a house filled with cut yellow grass in piles - the sun shone from it and lit their cheeks and placid downcast eyes. Hands on their knees, they looked down at a cat. A tiny tabby lying on her side, at whose nipples sucked three, four, five kittens. More than any cat mother and her children I had ever seen, it looked like the family of foxes I had found for Once a Day. Would I forget them too?
Zhinsinura leaned toward me and stroked my cheek; I felt her rings catch at my beard. "I love Boots," she said quietly. "I'm as old as anyone I ever heard of, and I would not have had it any other way. I love Boots; so I will grant your request; and I hope you will be done by as I have been. But remember: there is no hoping for it to do anything. It will do as it does, and is not accountable: not Boots, not me or your young girl, not even, as you will see, you.
"But that's too many words already. They won't help." She rose, and led me to the counter where the slate slab covered with wax lay. "Be alone tonight," she said. "Come early tomorrow and find me. I'll take you. You'll have your letter from Dr. Boots." She gave me the pointed stick. "Now sign the List."
All their marks were there; Once a Day's was there. I had no mark, so carefully and clumsily I scratched on the List the palm sign of my cord.
I was alone that night, though I didn't sleep. I lay thinking that however much it had been Once a Day that had brought me to this, it must anyway have lain on the path I had walked from the beginning. I had seen the four dead men, and Once a Day had whispered Olive's inaudible secrets in my ear; I had gone out to be a saint to solve those mysteries, and learned that winter is half of life, though I could come no closer to Once a Day's heart than that - could come no closer ever, unless I took this last step. I thought of Zher, as I had seen him the first day I had come to Service City, and thought that now Once a Day sat among the old ones as he had, as though a lamp were lit within her. Tomorrow I would be as she was. And my only regret, now, is that I didn't pack my old pack that night and leave Service City forever.
I came early to Zhinsinura, shivering and yawning with morning chill and expectation, and followed her through the forest to the river's edge. There was a log raft there lashed with plastic closeline; a man and a woman my parents' age sat within it waiting. He and I, when Zhinsinura was seated, untied the boat and poled it with poles worn and smooth out onto the May-quick river.
Silent but for the spank of the river on the raft's sides and the chuckle of the forest, we followed the current. Zhinsinura smoked tobacco, and continually changed the pipe from place to place between her teeth. "About the letter," she said once, "we have only an old joke. The angels said every letter has three parts: the Salutation, the Body, and the Complimentary Close." I listened to the roll of the ancient words and said nothing. The gullied banks were tumbled with ruined places, mostly become forest now, revealed only by an angelmade angle or straight line in the moss. We glided past them, passing through drooping willows as through thin draperies, and after a time came up against a wharf in the river, swung the raft around and tied it up.
A path from the wharf led up to a - what was their word - glade: a kept place of young willows and soft grass, which the sun reached into. Some of the List were there and watched us approach, but gave no sign; some were naked. In the center of the glade stood a small house of angelstone, which over time had sunk and was now partly buried in the soft earth; a narrow path led down to its low door. Zhinsinura took aside the two we had come with; they nodded together, looked at me smiling, and sat to wait. As she had before waywall, Zhinsinura took my shoulder in a firm grip and led me down into the darkness within the little house.
There was but one small window. For a moment the dimness was spangled with the sunlight still in my eyes. I saw that the small square place was empty; then I saw that it was not. There stood there a box, or pedestal, as clear as glass or clearer; inside it, silver and black balls or knobs were suspended in rows as though in water. And on top of the box was a clear sphere, the size of a man's head, with nothing at all inside it.
"The fifth," I whispered.
"Boots," she said. She was drawing on her hand a silver glove, a silver glove that glowed like ice. "Sit," she said. I sat; I didn't think my knees would hold me anyway; Zhinsinura with her gloved hand pretended to turn one of the knobs within the box. The knob turned. The clear sphere, with a small noise like a shocked, indrawn breath, changed instantly to black: black so black it appeared no longer a sphere, a black circle cut out of the world.
"Now close your eyes," Zhinsinura said; "It's best to close your eyes." I did; but not before I saw that with her silver glove she was pretending to turn another of the knobs within the box; and that the black circle was rising from the pedestal, moving like a Light; and that it came toward me.
And then there came the time that I must tell you of, but can't; the time when Boots was there, and I was not. When I was not in Rush that Speaks, and Boots was; when Boots lived; when she was Rush and I was not; when I was not at all. I remember nothing of it - I wasn't there - and though Rush was stained with Boots's being, stained and colored with it forever, he remembers nothing, forgot all even as I returned to him: because though Boots has many lives she has no memory. I know only the last thing Boots did: and that was to close her eyes. And then she left him. It was in that moment, when Boots left, that I got my letter: my letter was myself.
"Open your eyes," said Zhinsinura.
That - "open your eyes" - entered in at the doors of Rush. I was not, and that entered nothing; but still as quick as ever it found and ran along the old path which such things had taken countless times before. Only this time, as though it were a Light, it was able to see the path, infinitely long, which it took. The path was Rush: the walls and snake's-hands were his stuff, the countless steps and twists and false ways and rooms were him, chest full of Rush, it was all Rush: all along, Rush was handholds, ways, stairs, a path for that to get deep in. And I - I was nothing; but when Zhinsinura said that, "open your eyes," I uncurled outward from some tiny center of not-being and built Rush to receive it: the path those words took and the place the path led through spun out both together. The words watched me watch myself make a place that held a path which the words took through the place to where I built it. A place like spheres, like the trees of bread, but all within each other, spheres of bright complexity made only of making, each sphere fitting within a larger just in time to let "open your eyes" escape into the smaller, until the words and I had made up Rush to hold us both; and we all three, in a silent swift coupling, laced all our ways together. And I opened my eyes.