Finally he waved me silent. He drew up his shod knees and closed his hands around them. "Yes," he said. "Now I must tell you why I am here."
"Good," I said. "You might tell me how, too."
He gritted his teeth with impatience, and I waved him calm. "I've come," he said, "to get back property of ours, which I think you have."
The strange thing was that "property" wasn't a word I had used to him. I don't think I've said it twice in my life. "What property?"
From another of his pockets he drew out a fine silver glove, dull in the sunlight. "A glove," he said, "like this one; and more important, another thing, a small thing, like a, like a..
"Ball," I said. It was my turn to be afraid. "Could you," I said, and swallowed the fear, "could you answer a question for me?"
"Three," he said, holding up three fingers. "Three questions."
"Why three?"
"Traditional."
"All right. Three," I said. I counted them off in the List's way: "Ay: what is this ball and glove, and what does it have to do with the dead men, like Uncle Plunkett? and bee: how did you know I had it? and see: where did you come from?"
When he heard my questions, eyes toward his false ear, he began to nod; he looked at me, and for the first time since he had fallen, began to smile, a strange, dark smile that was more remote than his tightly closed face had been. "Very well," he said. "I answer them starting with the last - also traditional. I have come" - he pointed skyward - "from there. From a City there, some call it Laputa. I knew you had our property because of the sound it makes - not the sound you hear, but another, far subtler sound, which an engine in the City detected. And it has everything to do with the man Daniel Plunkett whom you call dead, and whom I have brought on my back from the City. That's that." And he pointed to the black shape which squatted amid the grasses of the meadow.
"You're an angel, then," I said, "to tell me such things." He stopped smiling to listen, and then made his gesture of not understanding. "I don't think," I said after a long time, "that three questions are enough."
He set himself, nodding, as though to begin a great task. He made a start three different ways, and each time stopped, strangled up; it was as though each word were a piece of him, drawn up out of his insides with pain. He told me there were not cities in the sky, only this one called Laputa, which the angels had built when the last days were at hand; it was a great half sphere a mile wide at its base, and all transparent - a fine lacework of triangular panes, he had a word for them which meant they were joined in such a way as to bear their own weight, and the panes not glass at all but something - nothing, rather - a thing or a condition that allowed light through but was not itself anything, but through which nothing could escape -.
"Like way-wall," I said, and he looked at me, but didn't say there was no such thing. He tried to explain how the air inside was heated, and the air outside colder, and got confused, and I said I know: just because of that, the whole was lighter than air.
"Yes," he said. "Lighter than air." And so it rose into the sky, the whole mile of it, and, supported by its perfect simplicity, had floated ever since, while generations of angels had been born and lived and died there. He talked of engines and machines, and I wondered at first why they would choose to fill up their City with such stuff, until I saw he meant their machines were still perfect: still did what they were made to do. I looked at his false ear, and then at the pack in the meadow; he saw my look. "Yes," he said. "Even that still works."
He told me how after the Storm the angels had returned to find the four dead men, the greatest of their works, and how they found three of them destroyed by the League, and one lost; and they had followed that lost one, Plunkett, as the League had, but they found it first, and carried it away to the City in the Sky. Only, he said, there was a part missing: a ball, and the glove made to work it, which… which… And he stopped, and had to begin again another way, to explain Plunkett to me. It took a long time, because he must stop to think, and chew his knuckles, and slap his boots with impatience; and his tension affected me, and I interrupted with questions until he shouted at me to be quiet.
We began to understand each other when I told him I had seen a picture of Plunkett. He breathed deeply and told me: the sphere that was Plunkett was like that picture: but instead of being of his face, it was of his self. Instead of looking at his picture and seeing what his face looked like, you must take the sphere on your own head, and for as long as you wore that sphere, like a mask, for so long you would not be there and Plunkett would be: Plunkett would live again in you, you would look out Plunkett's eyes, no, Plunkett would look out yours. The sphere was solid with Plunkett, and only waited for someone to Be in; like, like the meaning of a word waiting for a word to be the meaning of.
"Like a letter," I said. He nodded slowly, not sure what I meant. "And the ball and glove?"
"To erase the sphere," he said. The sphere was a container only; now it contained Plunkett, but with the ball and glove he could empty it, Plunkett would be no more, the sphere would be as empty as a mirror no one looks into, and then could mirror someone else instead. The dead man would be dead.
"Doubly and for good," I said. "Is that what happened to the others?"
"I think so."
"Except the fifth."
"There were only four," he said.
"There were five," I said.
He stood and went to the pack. He had slipped on his silver glove, and with it drew away the black stuff that clung around his pack. There stood a clear box or pedestal, with rows of black and silver knobs suspended in it as though in water, and on top a clear sphere the size of a man's head with, it seemed, nothing at all inside it. "There were four," he said. "There was an experiment, with an animal. They did that because they didn't know if taking such a, such a picture of a man would kill him, or injure him; if it killed the animal, well, that didn't matter, but they would know not to do it with a man. But the experiment was a success. And they did it with four people." He sat again, and drew up his knees. "So the fifth you talk about: it was the experiment. It was a cat, a cat named Boots."
Evening had come. The valley below was dark, and tree shadows reached across the sloping meadow, but we were still in light: he in his brown, clutching his knees, and I, and the thing which was Plunkett though Plunkett was dead.
"I have been that cat," I said.
His fear looked out his eyes; his pale face was drawn. "And I," he said, "have been Daniel Plunkett."
"And then returned."
"And then returned," he said.
"Angel," I said, "why have you come here?"
"I've answered your questions," he said. "Now you must answer one for me." He set himself, adjusted his ear, and asked: "How would you like to live forever, or nearly?"