"When we wandered," she said, and began the story about St. Gary and the fly that I had heard Mbaba tell. She brought us a basket of apples, and as we ate them she told the story in her Water way, full of false beginnings and little ironies which if you stopped to think about you lost the thread; and the story was not quite the story I knew. When, at the end of the story, St. Gary let the fly go, nobody laughed. It seemed to have become, in Painted Red's telling, a riddle or something meant to be solved; and yet at the same time you felt that the answer lay within the story - that it wasn't a riddle but an answer, an answer to a question you didn't know you'd asked.
Big Bee, the Leaf cord boy, his mouth full of apple, asked Painted Red why she had told us that story. Leaf cord doesn't like mysteries.
"Because a saint told it," Painted Red said. "And why are the saints saints?" She looked around at us, smiling and waiting for an answer.
"Because," someone said, "we remember the stories of their lives."
"How do we remember the stories of their lives?"
"Because - because they told them in a way that couldn't be forgotten."
"In what way?"
"They spoke truthfully," a Water cord girl named Rain Day said.
"And what is it to speak truthfully?" Painted Red asked her.
She began to answer like Water cord, saying, "There was the Coop Great Belaire," and, "But there was a beginning almost before that," and how in ancient times most people had no homes they lived in all their lives. Except for the people in the Co-op Great Belaire. There, in its thousand rooms, people lived a little as they do now in Little Belaire. "But they were angels, too," she said. "Their co-op was high, they rode in elevators, they talked on phones…"
"Yes," Painted Red said. "Phones. It seemed, in those days, that the more the angels had to ride on, and talk over distances with, and get together by, the more separate they became. The more they made the world smaller, the greater the distance between them. I don't know how the people of the Co-op Great Belaire escaped this fate, but the children who grew up there, if they left, would find nowhere else to be as happy as they had been there, and they would bring their own children back with them to live there. And so it went on over many lifetimes.
"Now," she said, raising one finger as gossips do, "now in those days everyone talked to everyone else by the phones. Every room in the Co-op had a phone, every person had his own to call and be called on. A phone is only your voice, carried by cords over distance, just as a tremor is carried over the whole length of a taut string if you pluck one end. The people of the Co-op, as they grew closer together, began to learn about this engine: that to talk to someone with a phone is not like talking to him face to face. You can say things to a phone you wouldn't say to a person, say things you don't mean; you can lie, you can exaggerate, you can be misunderstood, because you're talking to an engine and not a man. They saw that if they didn't learn to use the phones right, the Co-op couldn't exist, except as a million others did, just places to put people. So they learned."
We weren't silent as she told us this; each of us knew a piece of this story and wanted to put it in, and some were contradicted by others. Only Once a Day said nothing: but no one expected her to. Rain Day told how there were gossips then too, old women who knew everyone and everything, and who had advice on all matters; but not listened to as carefully as now. Somebody else said that there were locks to every door at first, and every set of rooms was the same in size and shape, but by the time St. Roy led them all away, there were no locked doors, and all the inside of the Co-op had been changed to great and tiny rooms, like Belaire today. Painted Red listened to each of us, and nodded, and folded in what we said with little motions of her head and hands to what she was explaining, seeming not to care how long it took.
"What they learned," she went on, "was to speak on the phones in such a way that your hearer couldn't help but understand what you meant, and in such a way that you, speaking, had no choice but to express what you meant. They learned to make speech - transparent, like glass, so that through the words the face is seen truly.
"They said about themselves that they were truthful speakers. In those days people who thought alike were a church. And so they were the Truthful Speakers' Church.
"The truthful speakers said: We really mean what we say and we say what we really mean. That was a motto. They were also against a lot of things, as churches were; but nobody now can remember what they were.
"The Co-op Great Belaire survived for a long time, raised its children and learned speaking. But of course the day came when first the lights and finally, at last, the phones went off. And Great St. Roy led them out onto Road. And we wandered. That's when the saints were, who took the speech begun in the Co-op and finished it, when we wandered and while the warren was building, in the stories they told of their lives, which we remember and tell.
"And I have to tell you now: before there was truthful speaking, and you talked on the phones with others, and a confusion resulted, and someone was hurt or two people set against each other, the gossips would say, 'There must have been a knot in the cord.' A knot in the cord! That makes me laugh." And she did laugh, her big liquid laugh, and we laughed with her.
Once a Day wasn't laughing. She was looking at me, steadily, not curiously; just looking.
Fifth Facet
There were times during those winters that I sat with Painted Red when I thought that to be a gossip must be the most wonderful and strangest way to live. In those ancient rooms near the center of Belaire all our wisdom originates, born in the gossip's mind as she sits to watch the Filing System or think on the saints. Things come together, and the saint or the System reveals a new thing not thought before to be there, but which once born spirals out like Path along the cords, being changed by them as it goes. As I got older, the stories of the saints which Painted Red told absorbed me more and more; when one day I stayed after everyone else had gone, hoping to hear more, Painted Red said to me: "Remember, Rush, there's no one who would not rather be happy than be a saint." I nodded, but I didn't know what she meant. It seemed to me that anyone who was a saint would have to be happy. I wanted to be a saint, though I told no one, and the thought gave me nothing but joy.
But perhaps to others I might not have looked happy, a shy, slight kid, a Palm cord kid too much in love with knowledge, with a secret desire that made me inattentive and silent; maybe it was that desire that left me with what seems an odd set of memories of those years. Leaf cord remembers expeditions, achievements, summers they went naked and winters they built snow warrens. Buckle cord remembers skills and Thread cord remembers puzzles and Water cord remembers people: everyone's memories are of things, it seems, but mine aren't, not really; they are memories of things unspeakable, that I only remember because there are no words to put them in that could be forgotten. And remembering Painted Red, I know now I don't want to be a saint - I'd rather be happy. Do you know what I mean at all?