Fifth Facet
All night till moonrise I tried to answer him. I tried to tell him how I had seen the four dead men made of stone, and shivered in the warmth; how it had been to solve that mystery that I had followed Once a Day to Service City and been Boots: how the four dead men had always been the crossing place in my life where I turned further into darkness. And all night he tried to explain, and talked of processes and pictures and how painless and harmless it had been proved to be. We both talked, and despite his angel's ear, neither understood.
"You ask me," I said, "to be your dead man in Plunkett's stead. Even if I understood why you needed such a one, I couldn't choose to be one. Don't you see?"
"But I would take nothing from you," he said, trembling with effort. "No more - no more than a frosted glass takes anything from you when you print it with your thumb!"
"I don't know," I said. "Boots was there, when I was not. Alive as ever. She didn't mind, I don't think; but I think a man would. I think of a fly, stuck in a cube of plastic, able to see all around, but not able to move. It frightens me."
"Fly?" he said to his ear. "Fly?" He couldn't make it make sense. I rolled smoke for myself, and saw that my hands trembled. "Fly," he said desperately. I struck a match but the head flew off, sizzling, and struck Brom, who jumped up with a howl, and what with it all, the fly and the flame and Brom and me so stupid, he plucked the false ear from his head, flung it on the ground, and burst into tears.
What is it?
It's just… well, you make him sound comical. He wasn't. He was brave and fine and the best man of his time. When he came down, you know, he didn't know what he would find; he knew only the City - and the world Plunkett had lived in. For all Mongolfier knew, the land below him would swallow him like a mouth. Except for pictures, he'd never seen an animal. And yet he jumped from his home to change our lives. He wasn’t comical.
I only meant to show my wonderment. I have no words for his sufferings; before them I felt thin and old, as you do before an angry child. I couldn't follow what he said, and it made him weep, is all I meant.
If he could have spoken your way, he could have made it clear.
He would have told you that when the angels raised the City, it wasn't out of despair, or to flee the ruin they had created.' they were proud of it, it was the last hope and greatest engine of man, and in it would be preserved the knowledge that led to its creation, preserved from the mass of men who wished insanely to destroy Everything they Wanted. Plunkett was the most complex and precious of all their works, and when they first used it, it was as they had used all the other things they had saved: to remember, in its use, the learning and skill that had made it.
But in its use they learned something unexpected, something terrible and wonderfuclass="underline" they learned what it is to be a man. As you learned from Boots what it is to be alive, they learned from Plunkett what it is to be a man: and it wasn't what they had thought, at all.
You see, you think all men who lived in Plunkett's time were angels, and could fly, and were consumed with fierce passions to alter the world and make it man's, without remorse, without patience, without fear. It's not so. The mass of men then were no more angels than you are. Unable to understand the angels' world, ignorant of how to do any wonders at all, they only suffered from the angels' hunger, suffered blindly in the wreckage of the angels' world. Plunkett was such a one. Zhinsinura said that even the League's women were angels: the angels learned from Plunkett that even they were men.
And the first of them to look out Plunkett's eyes and learn it, when he returned, never spoke again.
You make me afraid for this one who I am. How hard, how hard… Harder than Boots, it must be, far harder.
Yes: because though Boots has no memory, you have. And Plunkett had: they came away from him remembering everything, his shame, his hurt, his confusion, Everything he Wanted. Boots's letter was Forget: Plunkett's letter was Remember.
They said it made for madness, then, that it had been a mistake, that it shouldn't be used again. But it was used again. The bravest learned to bear Plunkett, and to speak of it. And while in the warren they told stories of the saints, and grew old in speaking; and as the List remembered the League, and grew old in Boots; so we grew old in Plunkett. All we knew was learning to live with his suffering: our suffering. We forgot our plans; the years came to the hundreds; our pride vanished, we studied Plunkett only, our hope became dread, our escape exile.
But why didn't you stop? Come back again? The City could return, couldn't it, if they'd seen they were mistaken?
No. The world they left was Plunkett's world: it was all they knew of earth. Plunkett taught them that the rule of men had not been sufficient; and if that were so, then the world beneath them must have died, and the men with it. It was the only possibility.
But it's not so. It got different, is all. You could come back; there's no hard feelings. You must come back. It's home.
Home… Do you know how large the world is? I do. The winds blow always westerly around it, and the City is moved with them, and in a lifetime goes around to the place where it began. I was born over sea: when I was grown, still the sea was beneath us. When we pass through storms, they aren't the storms that fall on earth; we know them at their birthplaces; we pass through them and are not shaken. Do you know, when it snows here, the snow flies upward; lightning comes close enough to touch, and comes not from the sky but upward from the earth. It has never made me afraid.
Far off, when the clouds part, we see earth; vague and lovely and possible, I suppose the way you look at distant mountains, and wonder, but never visit. No: this is my home. It was Mongolfier's. For its sake, dark with Plunkett's fear and suffering, he jumped down to earth, to find you, who would heal us; you, who had found the ball and glove that could free us from Plunkett; you who would dry our old tears.
If he could have spoken your way, he would have said this to you…
How is it you can speak my way, and he couldn't?
You've taught us. We are truthful speakers too now, Rush.
And you? Are you, angel? Do you know what it is to be… another, to return from not being, to tumble back through all your ways, as though you fell from a height, and see, and see… Do you?
No. I only know what they've said: that the cruelest was to have been Plunkett; that heavy as you are, to put you down is joyful in the end, that after the days of silence, it's easy; that I could learn to live with you, as none ever could with Plunkett. Plunkett made us brave, they say, and you have made us happy. But I haven't, yet; I'm afraid to bear your weight.
And Mongolfier could? Did I make him easier?
No. He never dared, after Plunkett. He brought you here. They told him: he saw it work: but never dared.
You make me ashamed. Ashamed, with all that, of why in the end I did agree to let him take me, or whatever it was he wanted to take, with him.
Why?
It was just, welclass="underline" ever since I was a kid I've somewhere in me believed in a City in the Sky. Not as Blink did, as a perhaps, or as the List did, as a story, or as Little St. Roy did, as a pretty thought, but that it was real. As real as clouds. And an angel had dropped from there, and said he'd take me. And however much he said that I, mortal I, would feel no change, that I would be left sitting in the meadow just as I was while he went off with - with something like a slide of the Filing System, if he could have thought to say that: still, I thought maybe I would get to see it, what it was like; that dome, those clouds. That's all.