FOURTH FACET

It was nearly summer when I stood for real on the hilltop that overlooks the valley Little Belaire lives in, for there really is such a place; it was more tricked out with details than in my confusion, and of course green, but I recognized it. It was just the time that I had left, three years before.

I had thought at first just to run down the hill as fast as I could and find the path to Buckle cord’s door; but something stopped me there. I laid out my camp, as I had for every night along the way, and sat. Night came, and a moon near full; day again. I thought: when I go down the hill I will be as Olive was, arriving suddenly from far away, a great cat beside me with frank yellow eyes, and a terrible secret to tell.

I didn’t tell you that at my first camp after I had left Teeplee’s, Brom found me. He frightened me by sneaking up to the fire, and then I laughed aloud to see him. But after he’d smelled my breath, just to make sure I was I, and looked over the camp, he only lay on his feet with a sigh and went to sleep. A cat.

It was Brom who first saw my visitor. Another day had passed; I was still unable to make up my mind to go down the hill and across That River, and lay on my back looking up at the gold-green new leaves thinking of nothing, when I heard Brom making that noise—ak-ak-ak-ak—that some cats make at birds or for no reason at the sky. I rolled over to see what made him snicker—a hawk, perhaps, hanging high up—and sat up with a cry.

Someone was letting himself down out of the clouded sky on a huge white umbrella.

It was a great half-globe of translucent white. Ropes ran from its edges, holding it taut over a ball of air; and in the ropes a man hung like a fly caught in a web, holding on, his feet moving idly as he descended. I leaped up and ran, following his long descent as it changed with the wind. As it came closer, it seemed to grow larger, an immense, undulating dome; I could see clearly the man in the ropes. He waved to me, and then gave all his attention to manipulating his thing by tugging on the ropes so that it would fall on the hillside meadow and not in the trees. I ran after him. He hurtled to the ground, moving fast and not gently at all, and it seemed certain he would strike the ground with tremendous force, despite his umbrella, which now looked like a very bad idea and not workable at all. I held my breath as his feet struck the meadow. He flung himself over just then, thinking, I suppose, to break his fall that way; and down after him came the dome, just cloth after all, collapsing and then billowing away outward in the breeze.

It tried, with great lassitude, to rise again on the breeze, but the man was on his feet, being walked away by it, struggling to untie himself from it, fighting with a fierce single-mindedness to stop it; got himself free, and began to haul his thing in with violent tugs as it rippled and rose across the ground like a compact fog. I came with a stone and threw it on top to pin it. It was easy then; he piled it up anyhow and turned to face me.

“Mongolfier,” he said, and I didn’t know what to say to that.

He was a pale, unsmiling man, with lank black hair that fell always over his eyes. Top to toe he was dressed in tight brown, a snug many-pocketed coat and pants, and strange glossy boots that reached to his knees, tightly thonged with yards of lacing. I smiled, and nodded, and made to come closer—at which he drew back, never looking away from me with eyes dark and wide, eyes such as I have seen only in wild things that have suffered some terrible hurt.

Just then Brom came warily out of the bushes behind me; and seeing him, the man cried out. He backed up, seemed about to fall over—there was a pack on his back as large as himself—and fumbled desperately for something in a holder at his side. He whipped it out: it was a hand-sized engine of some sort, with a grip and a black metal finger which he pointed at Brom. He stood stock still with the thing, staring. Only when Brom, sensing his fear, crept behind me and sat warily peeking out did he pocket his thing, and then without taking his eyes from Brom, he squatted, so that the bottom of his huge pack touched the ground. He pressed a black spot on his belt, and stood up. The pack remained standing in the meadow.

“Mongolfier,” he said again. There were no straps at all attached to the pack, which was an irregular shape covered up in what looked like my own black and silver cloth, which clung closely around it as though wet, or as though wind pressed on it from all sides at once.

“How did you do that,” I said, “with the pack?”

He held his hand up to silence me. With the other hand he reached into one of his many pockets and pulled out another small black machine. This one he fitted over one of his ears, fiddling with it to-make it stay; it looked like a great black false ear. Which is just what it was. He made a “come here” motion with his hand, eyes cocked to the false ear, but when I stepped up to him he jumped away.

“You’re jumpier than a cow I used to have,” I said; at that he ducked his head and listened at his ear. He screwed up his eyes and bit his lip.

“More jumping,” he said slowly, like a sleeptalker, and we stared at each other in confusion. He waved at me to come on again, and I was about to step toward him again when I understood what he was about. We didn’t speak the same. He understood nothing of what I said, nor would I understand anything he said. But the false ear apparently could; it whispered to him what I said, and then he spoke back to me in my way, as well as he could. If that were so, it would be a long time before I could ask him what he had been doing up in the sky, so I sat down slowly, and started to talk.

He sat down too, after a while, and listened—to his ear, not to me, nodding sometimes, sometimes throwing up his hands in confusion; he clenched his fist in front of his mouth till the knuckles went white. He understood pretty quickly some hard things I said, but when I said, “Nice weather,” he looked baffled. Late in the day, we were talking back and forth pretty well; he chose his words carefully and made sense as often as not. His eyes were never still, but darted always to the source of small noises, birds and bugs; a butterfly made him jump to his feet when it came near. Here he sat with me, not surprised at all by me, making me speak to him as though we had a long-standing agreement to meet here and do that, but every ordinary thing scared him. The only thing that distracted him from his fear was listening and speaking, which he struggled with fiercely.

Finally he waved me silent. He drew up his shod knees and closed his hands around them. “Yes,” he said. “Now I must tell you why I am here.”

“Good,” I said. “You might tell me how, too.”

He gritted his teeth with impatience, and I waved him calm. “I’ve come,” he said, “to get back property of ours, which I think you have.”

The strange, thing was that “property” wasn’t a word I had used to him. I don’t think I’ve said it twice in my life. “What property?”

From another of his pockets he drew out a fine silver glove, dull in the sunlight. “A glove,” he said, “like this one; and more important, another thing, a small thing, like a, like a…”

“Ball,” I said. It was my turn to be afraid. “Could you,” I said, and swallowed the fear, “could you answer a question for me?”

“Three,” he said, holding up three fingers. “Three questions.”

“Why three?”

“Traditional.”

“All right. Three,” I said. I counted them off in the List’s way: “Ay: what is this ball and glove, and what does it have to do with the dead men, like Uncle Plunkett? and bee: how did you know I had it? and see: where did you come from?”

When he heard my questions, eyes toward his false ear, he began to nod; he looked at me, and for the first time since he had fallen, began to smile, a strange, dark smile that was more remote than his tightly closed face had been. “Very well,” he said. “I answer them starting with the last—also traditional. I have come”—he pointed skyward—“from there. From a City there, some call it Laputa. I knew you had our property because of the sound it makes—not the sound you hear, but another, far subtler sound, which an engine in the City detected. And it has everything to do with the man Daniel Plunkett whom you call dead, and whom I have brought on my back from the City. That’s that.” And he pointed to the black shape which squatted amid the grasses of the meadow.

“You’re an angel, then,” I said, “to tell me such things.” He stopped smiling to listen, and then made his gesture of not understanding. “I don’t think,” I said after a long time, “that three questions are enough.”

He set himself, nodding, as though to begin a great task. He made a start three different ways, and each time stopped, strangled up; it was as though each word were a piece of him, drawn up out of his insides with pain. He told me there were not cities in the sky, only this one called Laputa, which the angels had built when the last days were at hand; it was a great half sphere a mile wide at its base, and all transparent—a fine lacework of triangular panes, he had a word for them which meant they were joined in such a way as to bear their own weight, and the panes not glass at all but something—nothing, rather—a thing or a condition that allowed light through but was not itself anything, but through which nothing could escape—

“Like way-wall,” I said, and he looked at me, but didn’t say there was no such thing. He tried to explain how the air inside was heated, and the air outside colder, and got confused, and I said I know: just because of that, the whole was lighter than air.

“Yes,” he said. “Lighter than air.” And so it rose into the sky, the whole mile of it, and, supported by its perfect simplicity, had floated ever since, while generations of angels had been born and lived and died there. He talked of engines and machines, and I wondered at first why they would choose to fill up their City with such stuff, until I saw he meant their machines were still perfect: still did what they were made to do. I looked at his false ear, and then at the pack in the meadow; he saw my look. “Yes,” he said. “Even that still works.”

He told me how after the Storm the angels had returned to find the four dead men, the greatest of their works, and how they found three of them destroyed by the League, and one lost; and they had followed that lost one, Plunkett, as the League had, but they found it first, and carried it away to the City in the Sky. Only, He said, there was a part missing: a ball, and the glove made to work it, which… which… And he stopped, and had to begin again another way, to explain Plunkett to me. It took a long time, because he must stop to think, and chew his knuckles, and slap his boots with impatience; and his tension affected me, and I interrupted with questions until he shouted at me to be quiet.

We began to understand each other when I told him I had seen a picture of Plunkett. He breathed deeply and told me: the sphere that was Plunkett was like that picture: but instead of being of his face, it was of his self. Instead of looking at his picture and seeing what his face looked like, you must take the sphere on your own head, and for as long as you wore that sphere, like a mask, for so long you would not be there and Plunkett would be: Plunkett would live again in you, you would look out Plunkett’s eyes, no, Plunkett would look out yours. The sphere was solid with Plunkett, and only waited for someone to Be in; like, like the meaning of a word waiting for a word to be the meaning of…

“Like a letter,” I said. He nodded slowly, not sure what I meant. “And the ball and glove?”

“To erase the sphere,” he said. The sphere was a container only; now it contained Plunkett, but with the ball and glove he could empty it, Plunkett would be no more, the sphere would be as empty as a mirror no one looks into, and then could mirror someone else instead. The dead man would be dead.

“Doubly and for good,” I said. “Is that what happened to the others?”

“I think so.”

“Except the fifth.”

“There were only four,” he said.

“There were five,” I said.

He stood and went to the pack. He had slipped on his silver glove, and with it drew away the black stuff that clung around his pack. There stood a clear box or pedestal, with rows of black and silver knobs suspended in it as though in water, and on top a clear sphere the size of a man’s head with, it seemed, nothing at all inside it. “There were four,” he said. “There was an experiment, with an animal. They did that because they didn’t know if taking such a, such a picture of a man would kill him, or injure him; if it killed the animal, well, that didn’t matter, but they would know not to do it with a man. But the experiment was a success. And they did it with four people.” He sat again, and drew up his knees. “So the fifth you talk about: it was the experiment. It was a cat, a cat named Boots.”

Evening had come. The valley below was dark, and trees’ shadows reached across the sloping meadow, but we were still in light: he in his brown, clutching his knees, and I, and the thing which was Plunkett though Plunkett was dead.

“I have been that cat,” I said.

His fear looked out his eyes; his pale face was drawn. “And I,” he said, “have been Daniel Plunkett.”

“And then returned.”

“And then returned,” he said.

“Angel,” I said, “why have you come here?”

“I’ve answered your questions,” he said. “Now you must answer one for me.” He set himself, adjusted his ear, and asked: “How would you like to live forever, or nearly?”