SHE DREAMS OF a lake. It’s very blue and deep. It’s fed by springs. The mother kept the child tethered to her by a silk strand of the most remarkable resiliency. The silk was durable and flexible, and it stretched to accommodate the farthest places the child would ever want to go. The mother reeled out the tether now, and the child swam far.
The mother thinks she would like gently, gently to suggest to the child that it might be possible to sever the thread.
You have all your teeth now, she says.
SHE REMEMBERS THE way the South Tower seemed to buckle and bend, then blur and be gone. Perhaps it was true that where she stood on the 110th floor mesmerized, looking out onto the world, she stayed, when she might have descended the stairs. The nightmare involved the right atrium, a corridor, rising heat, a kind of inferno, a baby motionless inside her capsule. Smoke.
At the pond, they had harnessed the fog. In the night they had placed an almond inside a cake and waited. They had visited the Boy in the Glen and the child had danced. Had it all been a dream? Anything was possible, she supposed. But for the smoke — so dense, so dark — they might have jumped into that blue lake of sky and survived. It’s very deep. And no bats skim the surface. She looked to the child for a sign.
MAYBE THERE IS time to separate in advance, the mother to her fiery, already transacted fate, and the child to her own blue lake of sky, free to live out an entire life, unburned. Every child, the mother murmurs, deserves to grow up.
Perhaps it would be possible for the child to chew the tether now and jettison herself away—
Don’t be absurd! the Vortex Man bellows. And he is back, just like that, in full, lavish form.
But I thought you were dead, the mother says.
Don’t be absurd!
ON THE NORTH Pole of Mars, liquid water is being searched for tonight. Beneath the polar ice, well into the permafrost underground, deposits of water are believed to lie. From this distance, it certainly does seem as if those smooth, bluish areas on the crater floor could be ponds.
I can’t wait to get there, the Grandmother from the North Pole says. She thinks about the planet’s obliquity — the angle at which its Poles tilt toward the sun. Liquid water, she smiles, and she opens her mouth like a baby bird awaiting a droplet. I can almost taste it.
Still the crust is thicker and colder than previously thought, says the child. And the liquid water, if it exists at all, is a lot deeper below the surface than once thought.
You might as well stay here, the child says, a while longer.
IN A TRANCE she makes her way to the Flagship. She skittles across the frozen tundra to the vault where the world’s seeds are being laid to store. There, beneath the shining ice, seeds and sprouts from every plant on earth will slumber, protected until the end of time. No earthquake or nuclear catastrophe or funnel or any other heartache or sorrow, including the heartaches and sorrows yet to be invented, will harm this bank of seeds and nascent growing things. After the end of the world, there is another world.
I know, the Grandmother whispers, that we are losing biodiversity every day. . She is talking in a sweet and swaddling voice to the little dreaming seedlings.
The Grandmother from the North Pole has been consumed by a lifelong mission that is only now revealed to the child. All her life she has scoured the earth collecting seeds from every plant in the world to be stored in the great vault beneath the snow, singing to them as she goes. One by one, she cradles and then drops them into liquid nitrogen where they are preserved in frozen, suspended animation. The seed crib strapped to her back.
Legions of grandmothers carrying sacks of seeds from every position on the globe can now be seen. They nod and wave to one another as they pass.
Having traversed once more the entire world, the Grandmother from the North Pole arrives again at the Global Seed Vault, only six hundred miles from her home at the North Pole. She waits for admittance. No one person knows all the codes. At last the door opens, and she unstraps the seed crib from her back. With this the Grandmother’s head grows pointy, and she bores through the hard, smooth ice and deposits the seeds inside the earth. Over and over she does this in silence, until she is finished. The crib is light now, and she will stop home for a moment before resuming her toil.
Once the Egyptians saw her pass on a papyrus raft. Once the people in GinGin asked her what she was looking for. Once when her children wandered down for breakfast, she was not there. Things begin to make more sense to the child. Open your eyes, she says, tugging at her grandmother’s sleeve, and she puts her hand to the Grandmother’s glassy forehead.
The seeds will sleep in the climate control far beneath the permafreeze for something like an eternity. With each deposit now, the Grandmother lingers longer and longer under the earth. She is more and more exhausted now. Luckily, the child has finally gotten a picture phone. Luckily, the picture phone has been vastly improved so it can still reach the Grandmother who is now surrounded by a fog of dry ice, five hundred feet beneath the surface.
She smiles for the child and waves, even though she is so tired. Luckily the child can recognize her even when she has assumed the shape of a barge, or a lozenge, or a seedpod, or a toboggan. Luckily, the child can picture her even when the picture phone clouds and the reception is bad and the fog of ice does not lift. When the Grandmother, surrounded by seeds, falls asleep, no one can blame her. Eventually an automated voice will say to please hold. The child doesn’t mind. The child can hold on for a long time.
SUDDENLY THE ATRIUM is flooded with sea light and we are helpless before it — at the mercy of it — its perfection, its splendor.
Come out. It’s safe now, she whispers to the Girl with the Matted Hair, you don’t have to hide any longer.
THE GIRL WITH the Matted Hair stands naked before the gilded mirror. This is the evening she has been waiting a lifetime for — the night of the Hamster Ball.
She tiptoes over to the ancient pine tree armoire where she begins to select her adornments. Never has any choice seemed so grave before. Never has so much been at stake. She selects her undergarments first, made of silk from the most precious silkworms in Persia. She steps into them and already she has begun to transform. Next she takes out the sea otter skirt, heavy with salt, then a corset of crane, and the wolverine bodice.
In the drawing room, her white-maned father in elegant foxtails waits, checking his golden pocket watch every few minutes. At last, he walks down the dark hall and knocks on the Girl’s door. She reaches for the swan wing cape, puts on her cloven-footed shoes, grabs her pony purse, and opens the door.
Father!
She has never seen her father look like this — so elegant, so handsome, so at ease. He offers his arm, and she takes it, and he escorts her to the next station of the evening. One more minute, the Girl whispers, and she puts on, at last, the final crucial garment — her gleaming ermine head. How resplendent the Girl with the Matted Hair is now! She takes her father’s arm.
The mother understood that after having a mother, the next best thing to have is a Sacred Animal Totem, and she has to admit that the Girl with the Matted Hair has chosen beautifully. Slowly, she walks in her ceremonial garb down the palace path and into the ballroom. She feels a little topply; thank goodness her father is there.
The band begins to play. Dall Sheep take the floor along with Snow Geese. In the rafters there are owls. It is a charmed night. A night of extravagance and consequence, and she knows not what to expect, but for once, among the beautiful creatures of the night, the world seems entirely open to her.