THE BLACK COSMIC DOG
In the city on the inside of the Moon, the Black Cosmic Dog has found something.
It is a very large something.
In fact, the Black Cosmic Dog has occupied himself with nothing but digging it up for some time now. It is a big job. When the Dog furiously claws at the soft lunar soil, bits of glittering stardust show under his fur like burrs. He uses both his front and back legs. When he sleeps, he sleeps curled up against the steep curve of his prize.
A scarlet boil, hot and painful, has grown on the waxing slope of the Moon, in the place where a city used to bustle and thrive. The red of it glows against the night and the Black Cosmic Dog. He pants all the while he digs around it, exposing it to the air and the wind. The Moon is so white and the boil is so red it looks as though the whole world is bleeding. The Black Cosmic Dog grins his cosmic grin and goes about his work. He is happiest when he is digging.
The red boil grows day by day as he scrabbles at it, moving great heaps of Moon-dirt like drifts of snow.
In the end, even the Dog cannot say how big it will be before it bursts.
CHAPTER XV
THE TYGUERROTYPE
In Which September and Her Friends Enter the City of Orrery, Meet a Gentleman Tiger, and Perform a Spectacular Optical Trick
The Moon owns many mountains. Some are so tiny you and I would step over them without a thought-yet on their infinitesimal slopes, wee invisible sheep chew lumps of microscopic snow. Some line the rim of the Moon like a spectacular fence, and there you will find frog-footed rams stripping painted bark from twisted tapestry trees. The highest and most fearsome of these mountains is the Splendid Dress, which opens up from its snowy bright peak like a skirt, flowing in stripes and swirls and patterns and tiers all the way down to the plains. I will share a secret with you: once, a girl really did wear this mountain like a dress. She was a very serious young strega and stregas are not to be meddled with, for they can hex as easy as they can tie their shoes. She wore glasses and her hair hung very straight. She had a highly developed sense of humor, which in some lights looked a bit like a sense of justice. She would not like it much if I told you how she got so big, so I will hold my peace and keep my hat.
At the foot of the Splendid Dress many brass rings and tracks circle the stony frills and ruffles of the Underskirt, the crags and cliffs that announce: A mountain is about to put on its heights, so hitch up your pride and get climbing. Here and there on the tracks, bright glassy bulbs as big as battleships open up like lotus-flowers whose petals have only just begun to yawn and open up to the day. Inside the many-colored flowers you can find anything a town might like to have for its very own. The tracks click and move every so often, but it’s done smoothly, and only a few people fall down, the way you and I will when riding a tram in a new city where we do not know the stops and starts. This is the place the Ellipsis leads to, the very last, small black pools and ponds no bigger than rabbit-holes.
“Are you sure this is the easiest way to the inner edge?” asked September. Everyone had walked softly after the Ellipsis and the moonquake, each in their thoughts. Great cracks in the Moon showed now, where the quake had cut them. But even so, September felt strangely light and eased since leaving the night and the Lightning Jungle behind. Once you have done a thing like that, she supposed, the only thing for it was to pick up your feet and get moving. She chose, and she chose now to be pleased with herself. Candlestick had not come with them after all, turning up her peacock tail and refusing to speak further with any of the lot of them. Vandals and sophists, she called them, and that was all she would say.
A-Through-L furrowed his orange brow. “Easiest, no, no, September, it surely isn’t. It is the shortest, though, and the two are rarely the same. When you’ve scared off all the patrons you can get so much reading done, and I read over all the maps of the Moon I could find. We could go the long way and walk up the whole lunar curve with hardly a bump in our way, a few very nice rivers with party manners, meadows full of teatime roses that bloom at exactly three fifteen every afternoon, full of iced cakes and sandwiches and cups and tablecloths. And it would take us a year and by that time Ciderskin will have cracked the crescent in half and used the horns to pick his teeth. But this is Orrery, and the way to it is done.”
September fell quiet. Dawn broke over the Splendid Dress, a black and white sort of dawn, stark and sudden and crisp. The craggy colors showed only as shades of darkness on the slopes. Saturday held out his hand across Aroostook’s cabin to take hers-a desperate sort of taking, as though if their hands touched, the Marid could believe that everything was all right. September let him, but she did not lace her fingers in his or press her thumb against his knuckles. She did not want to be cold. But she did not know another way to be just now. She had missed him so much. She could feel the hurt coming off him like heat. Who knew what he had done, who he had been, without her? A circus performer, and a boy who smiled the way she’d seen him smile on that platform. September had never made him smile like that. But she had seen more than that smile. She had seen him, grown-up and stern and unyielding and how could she bear knowing he could be like that? That he could be the man who stood beside the Yeti and did his work? No, no, that wasn’t it, and she knew it. Everyone can be stern. She had done it herself, though she felt very tired afterward. But she could not look her worry in the eye just yet. She folded it up and put it somewhere else, to be peered at later.
“It’s awfully quiet,” Saturday said, hiding his hurt like a wound. The brass rings stood cool and silent in the early light. Nearest to them, a pale yellow cup with swoops of quartz in it rose up against the peaks. A space between its petals showed the tips of gables and garrets inside.
“It’s a wind-up city, September,” Saturday said shyly. “An orrery is like a map of the sky, only it moves like the sky and spins like the sky and you wind it every day to keep it on the same schedule as the sky. Each of those stone cups is a neighborhood. They click around, and when they line up, the neighborhoods talk to one another, hold markets and barn dances, say hello to old friends, and then circle apart again. There’s planets up in the sky for every cup, and every cup fashions itself as a miniature of its planet. This one is called Azimuth.” He flushed with pleasure, to be the one who knew something. “It’s in the constellation called Wolf’s Egg. Do you remember?”
September smiled. In remembering, the unpeerable thing in her softened and she held out her hand. “Yes. The night we slept by Calpurnia Farthing’s fire. Ain’t what’s strong, but what’s patient.” Calpurnia was a Fairy, no different than the Fairies that had cut off a Yeti’s Paw years ago. She hadn’t seemed like the kind who could do such a thing, with her changeling daughter and her quiet way of talking. Perhaps she couldn’t-she still lived and chewed tire-jerky and rode the plains, after all, when her folk did not.
A long pair of slatted tracks led up into the brass rings from the earth around the mountain. Uncertainly, slowly, painstakingly, September fitted Aroostook’s wheels to it like a roller-coaster car. Ell flew above them as the automobile rolled upward and slid gracefully around the rails. After a moment, a great rumbling broke the birdless morning-for an awful, sickening moment, September thought it was another moonquake, Ciderskin shaking them off like a dog with fleas once more. But it was Orrery, clicking forward on its track. The yellow cup moved closer, and they saw a lovely carved gate in its side decorated with apples and sunbeams.