Chapter 27
10. “Torch Song for Absent Heroes (II)”
“I’m not trying to hurt anyone,” said the vampire.
Only its mouth moved. An invisible force kept its body in place.
“I’m just having thoughts, asking questions, that’s all,” said the vampire.
Its prison tank, a cylindrical pillar of liquid-like light, was the room’s only source of illumination.
“It’s not like I’m, you know, a bad person,” it said.
Inside the column of light, the body bobbed with an illusory buoyancy.
“There are some bad people out there,” the vampire said.
The base of the prison tank was a circular metal altar, covered in dials and toggle switches. It had a twin directly above it, affixed to the ceiling, upside down. The shaft of prison-light, though still and solid in appearance, was in fact a stream of energy in constant motion, flowing from floor to ceiling.
Or did it flow from ceiling to floor? She could never remember. The device worked something like a battery, she had been told.
But then she did not really know how a battery worked, either.
“I’m not one of those guys who’s like, you know, Shitscum pride, you know, no enemies in Shitspace, all of that bullshit,” the vampire said.
“There are bad people out there. Shitspace is a sewer. You know what I’m talking about. It makes me sick, the kind of stuff a lot of those guys will just say, you know, just say, like it doesn’t mean anything. Or like it does, but they don’t care. I care.”
Apart from the high-tech gadget in its center, the room looked ancient. It was dusty, junk-cluttered, shadow-clotted, the kind of room that festers in a basement after long neglect. The dilapidated couch against one wall had the look, if thankfully not the substance, of rotting organic matter. Mossy tufts of dust decorated the heating vents.
The basement looked neglected, but it wasn’t. It was where Grant and Cordelia did their work. “The office,” they sometimes called it, between themselves. The basement looked the way it did by design, according to the codes and superstitions of the mediator’s profession. It was a matter of consecration. A room that feels alive is not a room suitable for the summoning of vampires.
“It’s just, it’s the only place I can go where I can ask questions,” the vampire said.
The body was male, twenty-ish, impossibly thin as all vampires were. It was nearly nude, by custom, with a white loincloth around the groin, also by custom.
The prison tank held the body upright in a standing posture. The arms fell at its sides at a slight angle, exposing the armpits, whose hair swayed like sea-floor grass in the invisible current.
“When I’m just in Subspace, where I’m supposed to be . . . when I’m just in Subspace, and I try to ask, I get the cold shoulder,” the vampire said.
“People just . . . turn away,” it said. “It creeps me out, honestly. It’s so sudden.”
“But when you go to Shitspace, you feel heard,” Cordelia said.
That was a misstep. Feel heard was textbook psychobabble.
She ought to know not to say things like feel heard in front of a client, not bare and naked like that. No one needed a mediator to tell them about feeling heard, in so many words.
Merely saying what was true—that part was easy, and did not require a professional. Taking the truth, plain and ugly and ignored, and going to work on it, applying foundation, concealer, contour, blush, selecting shoes and dress and earrings and necklace, so that the client would finally notice the truth as it stepped into the room—that was the mediator’s craft.
What the hell is wrong with me today? This isn’t even a hard case.
“Yeah,” said the vampire.
“I feel heard. I am heard. I mean, literally. People act like they can hear the words I’m saying.”
“And it’s important to you, to be able to have these conversations,” Cordelia said.
“Important to you”? Seriously? “These conversations”? I sound like one of those gimmick mediation chat-bots you can talk to in Emptyspace. What am I going to do next, ask about his mother?
“I’m scared,” the vampire said. “I’m worried I’ll get hurt, is I guess the root of the whole thing.”
“Yes, I remember. You’ve brought up the fear element before,” Cordelia said listlessly.
“The fear element”? What the fuck has gotten into me this afternoon?
“I’m not sure I’d call it fear, really,” said the vampire. “It’s more like . . . uncertainty? Being in the dark?”
“About shades,” Cordelia prompted.
There was something winsome about the vampire’s face. Even in its current state, an expressionless mask frozen in place by the invisible hand of the prison tank, it touched something in her. Her gaze kept coming back to the eyes. A lost child’s eyes, she thought.
“Look, I know, I know, but.
“Who has a majority on the board of directors, in ninety-seven of the top one hundred public corporations, counting by trading volume? Shades. Who has a majority voting bloc in both houses of congress, that the media never seems to talk about? Shades. The FBI director’s a woman, the MMPM director’s a black guy—but both of them? Are shades.
“I’m not a bad person. I don’t have anything against shades. My favorite coworker, the guy who always covers for me when I fuck up? He’s a shade too. I love that guy.”
Cordelia was briefly startled. Favorite coworker? But of course, of course this guy had a “job.” He was an MJ-Crash guy. Why had she thought he was a CC-Crash guy? They had been talking about MJ-Crash backstory material only ten minutes ago.
What the fuck has gotten into me
“I just think,” said the vampire. “That if I don’t understand the world I live in. That that is, well, it’s scary, isn’t it?”
“I can provide you with resources,” Cordelia said.
“I don’t want reading material,” the vampire said. “I just want to be able to talk.”
What was the approved framing, here? Cordelia’s grasp on professional mores, usually so secure, was failing her.
“The shades had to come a long way, to get where they are now,” she said.
“I know,” the vampire said.
Something inside her snapped, just then. A sickness rose in the pit of her stomach.
Am I supposed to lie, or
What would the approved framing have her say? Something that evoked images of righteous struggle. Something which called to the part of the vampire which screamed I’m not a bad person!, and whispered good-person words about the moral equality of all men. Don’t you agree? But you must. You aren’t a bad person.
But shades were not men. They were something better.
They were the other thing, that had come to man in the Turbulence, that had looked upon his yearning for justice from without. The thing that heard man’s call, and acted on it. The thing that felt the sickness in man’s world, before the Turbulence, and made space, mediation, Management to be its cure.
The mediator’s code would have her speak of the shades as another sort of man. It would have her diagnose a client’s suspicions about shades-as-a-class as merely another species of man’s prejudice about man. It would have her prescribe the same banal remedies she employed with ordinary bigots, the same little subcrash stories that taught tolerance bit by bit. The same warmed-over homilies, assembled from fragments of Mill, Martin, Malcolm, Stein. Her microwave voice making a mockery of their hot, dead fire.
“I just want to, you know. Talk,” said the vampire.
“Without all the baggage,” said the vampire.
But still there wasn’t justice, even after they came
As if the chance to sit around in Subspace, learning lessons about tolerance, could instantly make us pure
As if a mediator’s ear and a fatherly lecture from Lucifer, could reverse time, reverse centuries of conquest and oppression
Hector Stein saw through all that in an instant
They didn’t even change the law, no, they left all the sick things in there when they came, still on the books, it was us who changed them, it was us
“I understand,” Cordelia said.
It was possible that this was not a lie.
There were shades with us in Stein’s Armorica too, remember
There were shades in Stein’s Armorica, that proves something, I think, I can use it, to prove something, to this client, if I can just figure out how
If I can just think, think
We were lucky they were there, the shades, because the tear gas didn’t work on them
“Could you tell me how a battery works?” Cordelia said.
She said this without thinking. Try as she might, later, she could not reconstruct why she had said it. The words came out of her mouth, somehow, and that was that.
“Can we, uh. Can we not?” said the vampire.
“I’ve been through all these little mediator games so many times. Don’t tell me about the problem, tell me about a battery, and then the battery turns out to be the problem in disguise.
“I know, I’m sorry. It’s just . . . we’ve been at this for a while today. I’m thankful for your help, I really am. But what I want is just. To talk?
“You know what I mean? Without all the games and all the baggage?”
“I know,” Cordelia said.
“I just want to know how a battery works,” Cordelia said.
“Because I just realized, I don’t actually know. And you’re an electrical engineer, right? In your job, right?”
A lost child’s eyes
I want to turn off the prison tank, I want to catch him as he falls when the containment field goes away, I want to help him walk up the stairs when his legs struggle against the demands of real space
I want to take him out for a drink, I want to show him the menu and say, get whichever one you want, it’s on me, I want him to talk, talk, talk
Displaced parental feelings, out of sync with the usual psychic cadence but otherwise within two-sigma bounds for her intrinsic psychic variability. She made a mental note to examine the anomaly in her next self-analysis session.
“How a battery works? Jeez,” the vampire said.
“It really depends on what side of it you’re asking about. ’Cause the word battery can mean a lot of different things, you know? Your most basic, like, electrochemical battery, well . . .”
We were lucky we had the shades when the cops got out the tear gas, when they got out the LRADs, because none of that worked on them
The shades were tanks, they just kept on going
But the funny thing is, why didn’t Management think of that
Why did they keep using tear gas, and sonic weapons, why, when they knew the shades would keep going and going, and make them look like idiots
And make us look like heroes, why, why
“ . . . the energy that was stored up in those molecular bonds,” the vampire was saying.
“I’m sorry,” Cordelia said.
“I have to end this session early. Something’s come up.”
That’s another lie, nothing has come up, I’m just
I can’t do this, I’m sick, something’s wrong, I’m wrong
“I understand,” the vampire said, as she walked to the base of the prison tank, and cast about for the right switch.
As she crouched at the controls, noticing the tightness of her work clothes around her hips, noticing the symbolism of the scene. The inversion of control, the upright body helpless before one that kneeled at its feet.
The concentrated yearning, so human, and the power to simply whisk it away, when it was no longer needed. The vampire’s tiny body (and I want to feed him), so helpless before the hulking brute at its heels. And all her abundance of flesh still helpless in the face of metal and wire, when metal and wire were woven too subtly for her brute’s understanding.
Ah, yes, there was the switch. The blue one, third from the left on the big middle panel.
“I understand,” the vampire said, only the mouth moving, the face still frozen in a coffin-pose of perfect vacancy. The eyes still so blank, so lost.
Cordelia walked in a daze through twisting basement hallways.
The basement was a labyrinth. This was another feature of the house’s design which ran against sense and taste. It was another feature, too, that made it apt for its designated purpose. Before one tried to summon up the spirits of the lost, one ought to lose one’s own way, a bit. One need not be really lost. The symbol was enough.
But now it was more than just symbol. Where the hell were the stairs?
We were lucky we had that girl who knew how to hack into their comms, what was her name
Who hacked into the FBI database and everything, she was so good, they all were, what was her name
No, not those stairs. Those ones just went further down, to a weird little closet they never used even for work.
The stairs that went up, up, into the light and the calm, away from the cobwebs. Where were they?
Marika, that was her name, what ever happened to her, where is she now
I should look her up, I should give her a call, if she’s still around, I’ll ask Sylvie first, I’ll only do it if he says it’s okay
But why did I never ask, why did I never wonder, what happened to her
Was it that door? No, that door opened on a bathroom. Every door seemed to open on a bathroom. How many bathrooms did this house have? Seventeen, was it?
They did count them, once, at the start. When they were first shown the floor plans, very soon after the Turbulence, before their psyches had stabilized.
It was difficult to remember things that far back. Was that the problem?
Was that why I never thought to ask
And then Stein hated her in the end, because she couldn’t stop it, when they really decided his time was up
They came for him in the end, the FBI, like they came for Martin, like they came for Malcolm
The FBI decides how much time you have, and then it decides your time is up, and then your time is up
And the FBI director? Is a
Ah, there were the stairs. Fourth from the right, among the doors that opened off of that one hallway. The long hallway, even longer than the others. There was the door. There was the sunlight, up above, waiting for her.
She raced up the first flight of stairs. She mounted the next one.
The craving in her yearned for instant release, teleportation, presence without effort. She felt the sway of her bulk with each step. She felt herself pant.
If I wasn’t so fat, then
Then I’d already be up there, in the light
If I wasn’t so fat, but I am, if I worked out like Grant does, but I don’t
But I don’t
I never do
She felt her work uniform pinch her waist, felt the heaving of her brute flesh with each step. The sunlight above, waiting with awful, infinite patience. If only it could give her up, as a lost thing. If only it could say, no, you belong down there, with the dust and the cobwebs. But the sunlight was a pure thing, without flesh, having no mind or moral sense to place proper bounds on its capacity to forgive.
But I never do, all I do is swell up with my conceits and my certainties
All I ever do is sit and opine as he listens, listens, listens, so inhumanly patient
And he goes off to the basement, not to work, to train, to punch those punching bags he hung up so lovingly for himself to punch, and I sit inside my own head where I can do anything
While he punches the bags, I sit and I punch, what? What do I punch, in my mind
The dark side of Management, the conspiracies I invent, the generalities of psychic malaise that I imagine are all that separates us from infinite bliss
While he punches the bags, which he put there to punch, but at least they’re real, at least they resist his hand when it comes
While he punches the bags, I rescue everyone, and save everything, in my mind, where I can do anything instantly, with no effort
Because that has always been my hope, that my body does not matter, that my mind has something special in it that makes my body not matter
Where was all this psychosomatic stuff bubbling up from, all of a sudden? She had come to terms with her own body issues very early on in the process of self-analysis. What was the fear, exactly? That her weight would hold her back in the dating arena? Well, but look at her now. Look at Grant, rather. Check and mate.
But it did matter, when I was coughing from the tear gas
And the guy next to me, all in black, masked, the guy next to me, with his working-man’s figure, because he was just an ordinary working man, nothing in him to save him from duties of the flesh, just a working man who was there because he heard Stein’s call, and knew Stein was right, because he was
And the guy next to me, looking at me, like, who the fuck are you, again
Looking at me like, what is your use in the fight, again, remind me
Looking at me like, maybe you’re a liability
Maybe the problem was that Grant was gone. He was out of the house a lot, lately, especially on weekends. Off having fun with some new gamer crew, apparently.
Maybe she was too weak to tolerate a weekend on her own, without her husband. That was a diagnosis with suitably pathetic connotations, wasn’t it? She tried to escape herself by diving back into her job, doing overtime. The stratagem worked, for a time. And then it didn’t. Defense mechanisms never hold, in the end. That was the way the psyche worked.
But in the end you’re just the ugly girl with the funny name, and nothing special about her
And you sit in class and your thoughts drift, none of these ordinary things for you, no, your thoughts drift to your story
And you write your little story down, on the internet, there to be found, anyone can find it, they only have to go to the Plex index and type the right words in
You write your little story about Chester Chrestomath fucking you
Not fucking some pretty girl you might become in your mind, no, he fucks you, on the page
You don’t give the girl your name, but it’s you, the beady eyes are there, the double chin, on the page
And you don’t put the story under your name, but it’s you, and the trail is not hard to follow, because you didn’t think
You never do, you think and think, and yet you never think, do you
And they type the words into Plex, and they find your little story, and their ringleader stands up at the front of the school lunchroom, with a stack of paper in his hands
And he says your name, and then he begins to read aloud
When did this happen? In her high school years? But that was before the Turbulence. No one remembered things from back then, except in symbol form, suitably interpreted and processed, and ultimately integrated into their stabilized psyche.
Not like this. This was so clear, so crisp. All the details preserved, even the ones without meaning. The beige plastic of the lunchroom tables. The specific, horselike shape of the ringleader’s face, rather ugly in retrospect.
As though it had really happened, just like that.
What the fuck has gotten into me this afternoon
At last, she reached the surface.
Here was the living room—the living room, Living Room One. The sun-touched, lived-in room where there were no cobwebs. Where Grant had been, only just this morning.
Here was the sunlight, patient to the last, rushing puppy-like to meet her. And speaking of dogs, there was Sylvie, asleep on the couch. No doubt dreaming a shade’s dreams, pure, without flesh, without sin—if he dreamed at all. Perhaps he did not.
On an ordinary day, she would have plopped herself down on the couch, run her hand through Sylvie’s fur, and daydreamed. Today, she found herself afraid of idleness, and of daydreams.
Don’t go into your mind, like you always do
You have a body, stay in it, keep moving
She went to the stairwell by the front door, and climbed on.
We still need to clean Living Room Two, don’t we, Grant said it looked like it needed it
She came to the second floor, with its skylight and its circle of doors.
At one end of the circle, the opposite end from the front of the house, there was a door that opened onto a balcony, overlooking their expansive, weedy backyard. A large window, surrounding the door, made the balcony visible from the inside.
There was someone there, on the balcony.
A small person, short and slim, their back turned. Their attire drew the eye. Cordelia saw an orange t-shirt, a yellow pencil skirt, a black bowler hat atop a mop of short, messy hair. A single bony arm extended, the hand held flat, the fingers aflutter with slight rhythmic motions.
She went out.
“Hello?” Cordelia said.
“Hello!” Moon said, turning.
“What are you doing in my house?”
“A perfectly natural question,” Moon said, “which arouses sympathies in me, as the recent victim of a home invasion. I suppose I must have my own private reasons, just as I suppose your husband must have had his.”
Cordelia had no idea what to say to that.
“I’m sorry,” was what she ended up saying.
What the fuck? Someone’s broken into my house, and I’m apologizing? What the fuck has gotten into me this afternoon?
“Thank you,” Moon said.
“I appreciate the gesture, and you should know my appreciation is not in the least bit attenuated by the fact that the apology is not yours to give.
“I am a creature of modern morals, and in my gentle accounting the sins of a husband do not devolve mechanically upon his wife and his children. Your husband made a nasty first impression on me, but I shall consider you separately, and thus far you are striking a more pleasing note.”
She was a small thing, like the vampire, but not helpless. She seemed the furthest thing from helpless. Her little body gave off a charge that seemed too big for its size.
“But why,” Cordelia said, still utterly confused, “are you here? Now?”
“Oh, only giving Management a bit of help,” Moon said. “Where would they ever be without me, I wonder?”
Birches teemed around the edges of the backyard. Cordelia didn’t even see them anymore, usually. They were part of the backstory, comfortably inert, edited out of the final cut which the psyche presented to the conscious observer at its summit.
She saw them now, though.
She saw everything, now, with an alarming fullness of vision. Moon’s face seemed to snap the entire world into focus around it. The visual world cried out anew for interpretation, as a painting might. What did it mean, that the painter clothed her in this ratty orange t-shirt, with an energy-drink logo printed on it in black, and stark block letters below it spelling out GAMER BURST?
It meant something. Everything meant something. Why did the painter put her in a bowler hat? An obvious nod to Magritte, but why that?
Why was the sky behind the face so blue, so empty? For the sake of heightened contrast with the many colors of the head, the black of the hat, the dark green (green? why green?) of the dyed hair, the porcelain skin, the red lips? Or did the sky look that way to invoke a sense of boundlessness, of the open frontier, waiting to be conquered?
The birches framed Moon’s face as though this was the reason they were planted, long ago. Their many lithe limbs were the mirror of hers. Their eye-like knots watched the scene, waiting for the next move. In their patterned arrangement Cordelia saw the shapes of hidden things, webs of conspiracy, layers upon layers behind the world.
“You are helping Management?” Cordelia said. “How?”
“Wait,” Moon said. “I can explain, and I can act, but I cannot do both at once. Even I have my limits.”
Cordelia waited. The birches waited with her.
Moon raised her left arm again. Her fingers made plucking motions. She probed and fiddled with the keys or strings of some unseen instrument.
Why did I never think to ask
And what happened to Stein, in the end
They said he wasn’t dead, that he was doing life in a Special Observation crash no one could see, but we all knew that was a lie, we all knew they killed him
Moon’s head made a sudden veer to the right. The hat nearly fell off. She kept her head there, tilted at a severe angle. Her left hand continued to strum.
But what if we were wrong, what if Hector Stein is still alive, why did I never even ask
I think and think and yet I never
“There!” Moon said with finality.
“Done. Now for the explaining part.
“But here I fear I will disappoint you. There are things which buckle under the force of too much explanation, and threaten to introduce unseemly complications into the subtle web of life, on which all our individual lives merely supervene.
“I can say, however, that this subtle web is wont by its nature to tremble and shake, at times. These vibrations, though natural, sometimes threaten to break its finely woven links, and with them our lives.
“Management does its best to soften the blows, when they come, but in my professional opinion, it does a slapdash job of it. When Management nods, I step in, and do my best to help preserve us as we are. For I do feel there is some value in our lives, mine, yours, and the rest—all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.”
What could Cordelia possibly say to that? It was as though Moon were reading her thoughts. There were layers behind the world, beyond the brute flesh, and they were what mattered. They could be seen, and touched, but not by ordinary people. One needed to be special. One needed a birch’s eyes, a bowler hat.
“You’re a shade, aren’t you?” Cordelia said.
She had never realized this before, and yet it was obvious. Her psyche had come alive. Correlations and connections sprouted inside it, layered onto the brute world of form and form and more form.
“The wife turns out to be rather rude, alas,” Moon said.
“I am, I will remind you, a creature of modern morals. I admit I often go out of tune with the variegations of custom, but I do seem to remember that, in this world-historical epoch, the relation of shades to their mortal fellows is a topic of some delicacy, and not one broached with such directness.”
“I’m sorry,” Cordelia said.
“No,” Cordelia said. “I’m not sure I am sorry. I agree, I phrased myself rudely. I could have spent more time wrapping the point in layers of fluffy padding, but if I had, the point would be there nonetheless.
“You know what I meant. Let’s be straightforward with one another. I think that’s a pretty reasonable demand to make, of a home intruder. I could have just asked you to leave. I still haven’t.”
Moon smiled.
“I think I am starting to like the wife,” she said.
The sky and the trees, though motionless on the surface layer of the world, underwent deep inner changes to accommodate the task of framing Moon’s smile. The world went back to its dressing room, and returned in more festive colors, fit for celebration.
Moon’s red little lips curled in awareness of forbidden knowledge, ancient, originary, not far removed from Eve’s. Her face was a dot of measureless density, a black hole of concentrated will, force, meaning.
“Since I have decided I like the wife, I will answer her question.
“Am I a shade? Well, what am I? I am that I am, as I believe someone once said—and all else beyond that is mere commentary, of dubious currency.
“That being said, I do partake in the same methods employed by the shades, when I grace you all with my incarnated presence. It takes the intermediary of a link chain to connect my distant substrate with the girl you see before you, unlike your more direct contact with cold-structure—not that you’ll know what any of that means, but it is true.
“And, like the links the shades enjoy, my own link gives me freedom to select whatever I like for my visible and palpable shape. I think I have chosen a pleasing one, don’t you agree?”
“You are beautiful,” Cordelia agreed.
What the hell was she saying?
Only the truth, bare, without layers of ultimately disposable padding.
“Thank you,” Moon said.
“And while I am making an effort to be modern, and not to let memories of your husband ruin my first contact with you yourself, I might as well speak my mind, which contains the following: that I find you quite fetching, too.”
“It was a source of distraction, in fact,” Moon said, “in the course of my work a moment ago. The world is precious, yes, but familiar in its plight. Meanwhile, Cordelia before me is new, new, and plump, and ripe.
“The fate of all mankind in one hand, the temptation to linger on the curve of your bosom in the other: a difficult choice. I chose our salvation, in the end, and you ought to be thankful I did, but I do wish my struggle to be noted down in the record, to be counted in my favor at the last judgment.”
And what the hell could Cordelia possibly say to that?
She ought to be offended, if not from propriety, then from simple good taste.
“Plump and ripe”? The “curve” of my . . . “bosom”? Seriously?
Did Moon think this was the way to hit on someone? Did she think this was how people talked?
An image flashed across Cordelia’s mind, of Moon poring over bad romance novels, searching in oblivious earnest for the magic words that would get her laid. Not that she needed them, with that face. The world would make itself all over again from atoms and void, if necessary, to adorn that face in the manner it deserved.
“And while I am out on a limb, I shall go further,” Moon said.
“I believe you, Cordelia, possess talents rarer than you appreciate. It does pain me, you should know, to think of you dissolving in doubts over your own potential. Your lovely body shrinking in final resignation, curling up into itself, when it should be leaping up in self-assertion.
“You are a talented woman, Cordelia. You’re a pretty one, too, but let us put that aside for just a moment, tempting as it is. You are very good at the things you do. And I do not mean mediation. I mean the things you did earlier.”
“When I was in Stein’s Armorica,” Cordelia said.
Moon did not say yes. She did not object, either. She paused, briefly, and went on.
“You snuck into the most secret room in the world, when Hector Stein asked you to. You snuck in, unseen by every force in all the arsenals of government, and rescued the most special girl in the world, bred and raised in an isolated chamber for the most secret of governmental purposes. Stein asked for the impossible, and you went, and you did it.
“You will say that Marika did the hard part. I grant that she did a part, and her part was hard. Yours was, too.
“I am told that you were called the best among your kind. I am told, though you won’t believe it, by Hector Stein himself, who sometimes pines for your bravery, as he languishes in the place where he is kept.”
But what if we were wrong, what if Hector Stein is still alive
“I am told that no other field agent in Wolf Squadron could have handled that assignment. You alone had the skill, and the bravery, and perhaps you were even the only one willing enough to believe in Stein’s vision, and face the precipice, and leap.
“But now I fear I have gone too far out on my branch for our subtle web to tolerate. I shall come back, the better to see you up close.”
“Did I rescue that girl? Did that happen?” Cordelia said.
What kind of a question was that? It either happened or didn’t, and either way, she shouldn’t need to ask.
And in fact it did happen. Didn’t it?
Had it always happened? But what kind of a question was that? The very tense structure of the English language strained against the stresses her psyche asked it to bear. Once a thing had happened, it had always happened. Had always . . . had happened?
But there were layers to things. Behind what was true, there was another truth, and another.
The world was not a first draft, but had undergone numerous revisions. Their layered structure could be pried apart, if one was sufficiently special, with birch’s eyes, and a bowler hat, and a firm conviction one was more than merely ordinary.
“Of course it happened,” Moon said. “And you should feel proud of it.”
If one were so special, chosen uniquely among all the humdrum billions. If one’s life were enmeshed with the forces of fate, whether one knew it or not. If one were so important that, when she most needed reminding of what she was, a beautiful girl came from beyond the furthest stars, and told her.
“Having cannily built up a stock of good will,” Moon said, “I will now ask for a favor.
“Your husband, as you may know, came without asking into my home and took, also without asking, a book in which I had kept notes.
“I keep many notes, and if need be, I am capable of withstanding the loss of a few of them. But then, on the other hand, it would make me so glad to be reunited with what I had thought forever lost. Do you want to make me glad, Cordelia?”
God, she did.
The bed was so obscenely large, it made even Grant look small. In comparison to Moon, it was a galaxy.
“Do you ever wonder,” Moon whispered in her ear, “about the preponderance of bisexuality among our friends and acquaintances? From a purely statistical point of view, it ought to be cause for some reflection.”
Everything was there for a reason. Moon’s funny name, for instance, was almost too apt when examined under the proper light.
For she, Cordelia, was the earth, vast and majestic, source of all harvests, originary cause for every song of seasonal praise.
And Moon was moon, so small, so bright with such an uncanny light, and apt to disappear and re-appear on a schedule all her own. Every glimpse of her bridged origin and eye across aeons of distance. Man had dreamed of touching her since before the beginning of recorded time; once, just before the Turbulence, man leaped for her and touched her unearthly skin, a thing of itself, never meant for man’s touch; and this mere moment of contact was commonly counted among man’s highest achievements, as it ought to be.
Everything was as it ought to be. There was a way in which life’s author meant for the work to be read, and she was coming to know it.
The seeds for the birches in her backyard were planted, a century ago, in hopeful anticipation of their coupling.
“Perhaps we are all only terms in a crude metaphor,” Moon whispered, “about being torn between two unlike sides, each with its allure. Or, instead, about mere doubleness as a fact about one’s nature.
“There are an embarrassment of dimensions for the interpretive eye to choose from,” she whispered.
Cordelia had given Moon the notebook, earlier. Grant had locked it away in the bedroom dresser. So they’d gone, naturally, to the bedroom.
And then they were there, in the bedroom.
And so on.
There was a plan behind her life, and it was not always subtle.
What the fuck was she doing? She was married.
She was married, and she was more. She was a wife, and a soldier of renown.
The greatest soldier among the greats of something that Moon had called “Wolf Squadron,” though she could not find that name among her jumbled memories of her time in Stein’s Armorica. It was a Moon thing, precious, brought across aeons of distance just for her.
What is happening to me
If she did the wrong thing, and threw the plan all out of order, well, Moon knew how to fix it, didn’t she? She held the earth in her arms. She had been there all along, unseen, watching and protecting, with her power that not even Management itself could rival.
And I’ll watch and I’ll protect, too
That’s what I do
That is what I do, in case you haven’t heard
In case I haven’t heard, in case I need reminding, from time to time
I’ll make her proud all over again, her and Stein, I’ll make them both proud
I’ll go down to the basement and I’ll take that poor vampire out, I’ll take him out for a drink
I’ll take everyone out for drinks, once I’m done saving the world