by Robert Reed
“How much longer?” Nissim asked.
“To the station? Oh, I’ll say three hundred recitations, but you might expect four.” The pilot kneeled beside Diamond and lifted his face shield, one boy winking at the other. “We’ll get you to your father. But without engine power, we don’t want to bleed too much hydrogen, and even free of the forest, we’ll have to limp our way to the hard country.”
The mask came down again. Diamond saw his own dark reflection on the shield.
When the pilot left, Diamond asked, “What is a recitation?”
With a shared voice, Elata and Seldom spoke the same words. Humanity and the beauty of the world was praised, and good citizens served the creation of the gods, and they were promising to be the best citizens they could be today, and should they live until tomorrow, they would again make this solemn pledge.
Their voices were flat and fast. When she was finished, Elata said, “Every school day starts that way.”
“Sometimes faster,” Seldom admitted.
“It’s a rough unit of time,” Nissim explained, placing a hand against Diamond’s back. “Come. The two of us need to talk more.”
They moved to the back of the cabin. Master Nissim sat and smiled, waiting for the boy to look at him. But Diamond felt shy and wary. His hands wrestled each other as he settled on the neighboring chair, watching the unbroken wall of leaves, the rich green turned almost black by the goggles. He smelled the rubber straps and his own perspiration. He looked at his nervous hands. As he leaned back in his seat, Nissim said, “You must miss your room very much.”
Diamond nodded.
“And you miss your parents.”
His hands went still.
“Describe them to me.”
“Describe what?”
“The room and your family.”
Picking one parent before another might betray a favorite. So Diamond began with the room—a space that now seemed tiny and simple next to this great bright busy world. Yet even the simplest chamber requires many words to make it real. He talked and talked, and sometimes it felt as if he was another person listening to a stranger. The room was a real place inside a tree left far behind, but it was also real inside his mind. He saw the walls and floor as he spoke. He saw the woven bed and old furniture and the shelves and toys, and that made him miss everything. He didn’t cry, but tears were gathering. He was sick and sorry for so much, and to feel better again, he focused on the old wooden soldiers, each name followed by descriptions of their faces and uniforms armaments, halfway through his army when Nissim touched him lightly on the shoulder, saying, “I know what your father looks like.”
“You’ve talked to him. I remember.”
“You remember quite a lot.”
Diamond felt the praise, but it didn’t mean much. He nodded, waiting for whatever came next.
“So that I know her when we find her,” said the man, “would you please describe your mother to me?”
Diamond tried. He opened his mouth, waiting for smart words, but he discovered that someone so important couldn’t be rendered easily. His mother was too large, and every detail felt important. Finally, almost in despair, the boy spoke about her hair, conveying how she wore it long but tied it back quite a lot, and it was white and it was black but when the light was poor it was mostly silver and very pretty. He loved his mother’s hair and her worn fine face and how she smelled when she had been cooking and how those cool hands felt when she touch his forehead and face. It was one of her many habits, measuring his endless, unimportant fever.
“My parents used to worry about everything,” he said. “I was going to get sicker and die. Every day would be my last.”
“Why did they think that?”
“The doctor told them.”
“What doctor?”
“The man who came to check on me,” Diamond said.
“Because you were too hot,” Nissim said. “And you were small and looked wrong. So they found a physician. Of course they did.”
Diamond waited.
“Your father,” Nissim said. “Describe him now.”
“But you know him.”
“I want to see what you know, Diamond.”
His father’s hair wasn’t as gray and old as his mother’s hair, but his face had more wrinkles and lines, and there were many important scars. Diamond described the big scar on the face that he was going to see again, hopefully in a little while. He imagined hugging his father and being hugged by him, and he smiled as he cataloged the smaller scars and other marks on his hands and forearms.
Nissim listened. Goggled eyes looked out the window, but he only saw his next question.
“And he has another scar on his left hand, here,” Diamond said, turning his own hand to map the location. “It curves and it’s very small and new. And then farther up on the wrist, up here . . . ”
“Diamond,” Nissim interrupted, turning toward him.
The boy fell silent.
“I’m not the smartest person in the world,” the Master allowed. “But I have never met any person with a better memory than mine. And to save my life, I can’t remember every scar on my own hands.”
The boy watched the big hands open and then close.
“You don’t have scars,” Nissim said. “Your friends tell me you heal that fast and that well. But I think your mind is much more impressive. Just naming and knowing each of your little soldiers . . . well, I don’t care how isolated you’ve been. Nobody should be able to recall so much.”
Diamond head dipped. “Last night,” he began. But he felt shy again, and he couldn’t talk.
“What about last night?”
“My mother asked where my mind was. Was it in my head, or was it somewhere else?”
“She said that?”
He nodded.
“That’s interesting,” the Master said. “Tell me about life with your parents. Whatever you think of, no matter how unimportant it sounds.”
But nothing was unimportant. He described meals long digested and conversations about very little and the dead usher bird and then that one time when he left his room and Mother found him. But he didn’t mention hitting her, even if he was supposed to tell everything. Even if it was an accident, he felt ashamed again, and that’s why he looked out the window and changed topics, falling back to some the oldest memories of his parents—masked faces smiling down at him while he lay in the little second-hand crib that he slept inside before he had a real bed.
Maybe the day was half-done. Maybe this wasn’t the pure light of dawn anymore. But the hole in the canopy had grown wider, and the brilliance was astonishing. Leaves were a pale watery green, letting much of the sunlight push through them without being absorbed. Diamond talked about his life, but at the same time he marveled at how the trees looked like the sweet clear green-tinted gelatin that his mother fed him on special occasions. Somewhere inside his mysterious mind, he tasted the gelatin again, and he smiled and stopped talking, and then the Happenstance let out some ballast. Sprayed water made rainbows, and he stared at those endless, unexpected colors. Then they stopped descending, picking one direction and heading straight on.
“I’m hungry,” he said.
The Master called to Elata. “Ask the pilot, would you? Is there any food onboard?”
Elata left, and Seldom followed.
Nissim picked up one of the small perfect hands. “Who else came into your room? Besides your parents and your doctor, I mean.”
Diamond listed everybody, finishing with Seldom’s mother and Karlan.
“And your doctor,” Nissim repeated.
“Yes.”
“Who examined you from time to time.”
Diamond shifted his weight. “Yes.”
Nissim had a suspicious face. “Yesterday,” he said. “Tell me about yesterday. I want to hear every noise in the house, every word your mother said to you and everyone else. Tell me what you saw or might have seen in her face. That’s what I want to know about.
”
“Why?” Diamond asked.
Nissim nearly smiled, but an unwelcome thought stole that expression away. Leaning close, he placed his hand on the head that might or might hold the boy’s mind, and with the voice that people use when they share secrets, he said, “This probably is going to be a short day, and already quite a lot has happened. Either there has been one big collision of random, remarkable events, or there is a single simple explanation for everything.”
Diamond nodded, but he didn’t understand.
“And a lot more will happen to you soon,” Nissim warned. “Tell me about yesterday, Diamond. And don’t stop talking, not until we step off this gas bag.”
Diamond talked until Seldom arrived with a paper box of full of biscuits and dried meat. Elata followed with bottled water and an apology from the pilot for the food’s miserable charms. A quiet quick meal broke out, Diamond eating the most, and then the others retreated again and the boy went on describing yesterday. He expected his mouth to stop. The words would stop coming at any moment. But a steady flow of tiny details were waiting to be remembered, each event knowing exactly where it stood in what had been the most ordinary of days. He described meals eaten and games played and passing thoughts and morning conversations with his mother, all of it normal. But nothing had been normal. He realized that now. Like Nissim, he listened to the voice pouring out of him, trying to find the true clue, that soft signal that here was something important. But nothing appeared exceptional. Nobody visited the house, even for a quick, “Hello.” Bells sounded when a call arrived, which wasn’t all that remarkable. The call came before dinner, and he didn’t hear his mother talking to anybody, and she didn’t mention anyone after that. She brought his last dinner and left him to eat alone, which was a little peculiar. Then she returned to put him to bed, and everything had changed. She was angry with the mess in his room, but she wasn’t angry. Maybe she was sad, and she was definitely worried. Yet she was fine before that, which was baffling, and that was the moment when the Master dropped one finger on Diamond’s mouth and bent down, interrupting the words to say, “While you were enjoying dinner, she used the house line. She knew that you had good ears, and so she spoke quietly to somebody. And whatever was said left her terrified.”
“What was said?” he asked.
“I don’t know. We’ll ask her, as soon as we find her.”
The conversation paused. The Master fell into his own thoughts while the Happenstance continued threading its way through the lowest, thinnest reaches of the wilderness forest. Every leaf looked shriveled, spent. Skeletal branches wore silvery epiphytes that grew nowhere else. Birds were scarce and each bird had slits for eyes, and the insects wore mirrors on their shells. The sun was something to be endured. It scorched flesh and peeled bark, and the reflected glare made Diamond’s eyes ache even when covered with the goggles. Nobody else looked out the windows. But Diamond could stare into the distance, and the discomfort was bearable. He felt the fletch bleed gas and drop still lower. This big fine machine was nothing but a speck inside a great room filled with golden air, and all of the world’s trees were above them—a ceiling of burnt yellow and black-green that seemed small compared to this vastness of wind and light.
Far to his left, something moved.
Something fell.
A long slender shape was spinning, distance making it tiny. Diamond squinted and laid his hands under his eyes, fighting the glare. The object was a large branch or whole tree, something ripped free of the ceiling and plunging into places even brighter and hotter. The event was enormous and soundless, without any sense of violence. A tiny stick tumbled and grew tinier, and he watched the stick vanish, swallowed by the sun’s magnificent glare.
Then with a big jovial voice, the pilot shouted down from the cockpit. “Reef coming,” he said.
Diamond pressed his face into the window, looking ahead.
What was empty air just moments ago was changing. Emerging from brilliance was something dark, weightless and massive in the same glance. He couldn’t piece together details. He thought the object was just ahead, but distances confused him. Falling leaves and tumbling bugs and monkey poop and the endless drip of rainwater made for cluttered air, and rising sunlight made a mist from the falling debris, hiding what was too far or too small.
The dark object gradually spread sideways. A distinct line divided the mystery into a top and bottom. Below was bright blackness, like the glass in his goggles, and above it was a different species of darkness. Then Diamond closed his eyes and opened them, and that’s when he realized that the reef was like a shelf hung on a wall. The shelf blocked the light from below, and he was seeing shadow on top. With too many questions wanting to be asked, he did nothing but stare, the one side of his face pressed against rubber that was hot to touch and growing hotter.
And the Happenstance let out a huge blaring roar. Everyone in the cabin jumped. The Master laughed without really laughing, and with a fond slow voice said, “The Bright River station. We’re almost there.”
The ship passed over the shelf’s lip, and the sun softened. One moment the full glare of it was everywhere, and then the fringes of shadow washed over them. Seldom took his hands off his eyes, looking at Diamond before clamping them shut again. “He can see outside,” he told Elata.
“Of course he can,” said Elata, not bothering to look.
Again, the horn gave out its warning. Diamond couldn’t make sense of what was under him. Turquoise shades predominated, but there were odd greens and radiant blues and cold blues and golden splotches that refused to come into focus. This was a place visited in dreams, not in life. Pushing deeper into shadow that was still well-lit, the terrain turned into a series of mounds and holes and faces of exposed coral cliffs and stands of odd upright plants, nothing in this place resembling any of the wonders he had already seen today.
His friends dropped their hands and joined him, gazing out and down.
“And this is the reef’s wasteland,” Seldom said. “This coral is old, drained of its nutrients.”
On the poor ground beneath them was a big animal, thick and strong with long jaws and a fleshy sail down its back. Rising up on its hind legs, it greeted the ship with a solid, high-pitched wailing.
“A burnish-hound,” Seldom said.
The children pushed their shoulders against Diamond.
“Do you see any papio?” Elata asked.
Seldom looked everywhere, admitting, “I wish I did, but no.”
Elata shoved her face against the flexible window, pushing to look ahead, pushing as if she wanted to split the rubber and fall free. “I see the station,” she said. Then after a pause and one abrupt deep breath, she said, “Oh my, my! I think that’s . . . it is has to be . . . I can’t believe it . . . !”
“The papio?” Seldom asked.
“A corona,” she said.
“Dead?” he said.
She laughed. “If it was alive, I’d be screaming. Wouldn’t I?”
Horns sounded from below, modulated, rich with meaning. The Happenstance turned away from the corona. Diamond caught a glimpse of something long and pale, but then it vanished behind a tall knob of blue-green coral. The station was a sprawling, thinly populated collection of industrial buildings and bunkhouses, and on the outskirts were circles of ground stripped of foliage and roughly smoothed out, pylons standing in the middle of each circle, waiting for ships to be tied against them. A small busy man waved red flags, and the Happenstance paused above him, bleeding just enough hydrogen to begin a slow, graceful fall. Then a troop of capable monkeys galloped out of a bunkhouse, grabbing the lines cast off from the ship, and they climbed the pylon, each weaving its own slipknot before falling into boisterous arguments about which knot was best.
The pilot was first down the gangway, cursing to the one human about his miserable luck and his extraordinary good fortune. “That engine flew to pieces, but did we catch fire? Did we puncture? Did we fall into the sun? I don’t know wh
ether to moan or cheer, so I’ll do both. How about that?”
The man with the flags nodded absently, watching three children and one older man approaching.
“Merit,” said Nissim. “We’re looking for him, sir. It’s very important.”
The man was short and strong and perhaps a little simple. But he liked being called, “Sir,” and talking about the famous corona hunter always brought a smile to his filthy, unshaven face.
“I don’t know where Merit is,” he said. “But steer for the carcass. The man brought us a half-giant this morning. A beauty. I’m sure he’s there now, kneeling in its shadow, begging for forgiveness.”
Everything was amazing, and Seldom laughed at everything. “Do you know who this fellow is? This is Merit’s son.”
The flag man was pleasant but not terribly impressed. “Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” he told Diamond. Then voicing some old, well-rehearsed joke, he added, “You certainly got lucky, my boy. You don’t look at all like your father.”
Seldom and the flag man laughed together, for different reasons.
Diamond’s head dipped and he walked on.
The Happenstance’s pilot remained behind, steering the conversation back to what mattered: the condition of his broken engine and how soon could he roundup the mechanics to help him and his crew make repairs.
The Master dropped his goggles down around his neck, and the others did what he did, following him along a broad trail covered with pulverized, closely packed coral. With a teacher’s voice, Nissim said, “The reef is rough and we don’t have adequate shoes. So walk the established paths. And please, whatever you do, stay close to me. This isn’t safe country for the prepared, and we aren’t even that.”
“I know,” Seldom said.
“We’ll be careful,” Elata said agreeably.
“And I have one command,” Nissim said. “From now on, nobody mentions fathers and sons. I think we need the habit of keeping certain kinds of knowledge private.”
