Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary

by PAMELA DEAN

  Next would be “The Day the Devil.” Gentian decided to walk out on its first line. She might have to live here, but she could not think of anything to say, and she didn’t want to think of the time she had played those songs for Becky, when everything was all right.

  “Well,” said Laurie Anderson reflectively, “I could just go on and on and on, But tonight, I’ve got a headache.”

  So have I, thought Gentian. She put her mug on the bookcase, occluding several of the works of Dickens. From the speakers came, not “The Day the Devil,” but the next song, which Gentian always skipped; it was about how Hansel and Gretel were alive and well and living in Berlin, and it made her furious. Gretel had been the smart one when she and Hansel were kids, so why, when they were grown up, did she ask questions like “What is history” and let him hold forth interminably?

  Gentian’s mother handed her another brownie, which she took without thinking; so she had to stay and listen. The drama of her exit was ruined both by the absence of the Devil song and by the fact that it is hard to make a tragic exit with a large gooey brownie in your hand. She bit into it instead. Laurie Anderson sang:

  “And he said: History is an angel

  Being blown backwards into the future

  He said: History is a pile of debris

  And the angel wants to go back and fix things

  But there is a storm blowing from Paradise

  And the storm keeps blowing the angel

  Backwards into the future And this

  storm, this storm Is called Progress.”

  Gentian did not believe in Progress; she believed in evolution. She had used to believe in, at least, social progress, but Erin had shaken this faith badly by reading her bits of Susan Faludi’s Backlash. Steph’s contention that a lot of the figures in that book were wrong only made her gloomier. That journalists were always getting statistics wrong and Susan Faludi might have done so said nothing good about social progress either.

  The illusions of progress aside, she wondered if Laurie Anderson had met Dominic too. He knows the way to your house, he’s got the keys to your car. And when he sells you his time machine, you say, funny, that’s my size. Gentian finished her brownie, licked her fingers, and said, “What if I apologize to you and then you apologize to me?”

  “Fair enough,” said her father. “I apologize for using magic on you when I wasn’t good enough to pull it off.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t rescue you from yourself,” said her mother, dryly.

  “I’m sorry I tried to have it both ways, autonomy and rescue.” Gentian stood up. “Well,” she said, “I’ve got an awful lot to do. Good night.”

  She gave them each a hug, which they returned with considerable force. Then she ran up the stairs as fast as she could. It was not time to try coaxing Murr yet, but she left the door to the attic stairway ajar.

  In her dusty, crumpled room, she picked up the telephone, and then paused. It was Halloween; either Becky was not home, or everyone was there, having a Giant Ants party without her. She could not possibly face them all at once; this would have to be done one at a time. How much truth can I tell, she thought. To Becky, everything. But what on earth will I say to Steph and Alma—or to Erin, either? They’ll all be revolted, for different reasons. I guess I could say I had a mental breakdown. If Becky thinks that’s a poetic kind of truth rather than a lie, maybe I’ll try it. It’d be awful to have them think that. I guess I could tell them the truth. That might be more awful, but I wouldn’t have to act a part and remember my lies. I don’t think they’ve ever lied to me.

  She looked around her room, feeling helpless. It was in a mess very different from the sort she put it into when she was living in it. Her bed, which she always kept clear, was piled with a wild assortment of objects. She supposed she had better clear it off, just in case she actually felt like sleeping tonight. Where had she been sleeping, anyway? I don’t think I want to know, she thought. She walked over to the bed. It was more orderly than it had looked from a distance. About a third of it was covered with clean laundry, folded T-shirts and jeans, neatly rolled socks, underwear all sorted into a pile. The top item on each pile was perhaps a little grimy with dust, but she decided to ignore that, and put them all away, smoothing and laying them neatly in their places. Her father or Juniper had done all her laundry.

  The next third of the bed held paper: catalogs, junk mail, a scattering of hand-addressed letters on the orange stationery Becky was trying to use up, and a large stack of Sky and Telescope. The subscription would have run out in May, on her birthday. She sorted through. No, her mother must have renewed it. They were all here, January through April 1994 and then on without a break, May, June, July, August—Gentian stopped, the magazines under August sliding out of her hand and landing on the floor with a slithering thud that would have brought Maria Mitchell running, if she had been there. Tucked among the magazines were newspaper clippings, computer printouts, Xeroxes of other articles.

  Something had hit Jupiter. While she was toiling on an illusion, soldering nonexistent circuits, working for somebody who did not and never would love her, a comet called Shoemaker-Levy 9 had slammed into what was then the far side of Jupiter, with such violence that amateurs, watching through telescopes like hers, or smaller, had seen the bright flash of impact. She sorted feverishly through it all. Not something, some things.

  Shoemaker-Levy 9 was in pieces; it had looked like a string of pearls to the first few astronomers who discovered it in March of 1993; they called it a comet train, not just a comet. It had hit Jupiter over and over, with fragments lettered from A to W. The Hubble Space Telescope had sent images that were uploaded to the Internet; the Galileo space probe had sent images; astronomers all over the world had watched the impacts and then tracked the spots left on Jupiter. It did not in fact look as though Gentian, or much of anybody else in North America, would have been able to witness any of the impacts. But she could have looked at the spots. She could have seen Heidi Hammel and other astronomers being paid respectful attention by television reporters. She had missed the most spectacular astronomical event of the century.

  She looked over at the telescope, and turned out her reading lamp. If she remembered correctly, Jupiter would be hard to see this month, too close to the sun, and would have set by now anyway. She did not check her memory. She would not look at the new Jupiter just yet.

  She sat, waiting for her eyes to adapt a little to the dark. The fixed, eternal stars were neither. Comets hit planets; stars blew up. The entire universe was expanding, at a rate astronomers had not yet calculated precisely, but that they thought was somewhere between fifty and a hundred kilometers per second for each megaparsec of distance between the distant galaxies and the sun. Stars and clusters and galaxies had their own local motions as well, as names like the Ursa Major Moving Cluster demonstrated. Thuban, not Polaris, had once been the Pole Star; the Big Dipper had once had a longer handle and a much less dipper-shaped cup, and in another hundred thousand years would look more like a shoe tree or a Dustbuster than a dipper.

  But compared to events here, earthward where the trouble lay, industrious man tossing his ribald stones all over, the stars were indeed, as they had once been called, the firmament. Gentian took her red-hooded flashlight from its drawer, and examining matters with it, saw with relief that she had taken care of the telescope; she had not left the dome open to weather, or forgotten to put the lens caps back, or done any of the other terrible things she might have, in her idiot state, to damage it. Her room was still colder than the night outside, the best condition for stargazing.

  It was October 31, at eight o’clock in the evening. Overhead were Pegasus, the Great Square, Andromeda, Casseiopeia, Cepheus, Cygnus. Orion was not there; it would not rise until between three and four in the morning. The last thing she had looked at was Serpens Caput, the head of the serpent constellation split by Ophiuchus, once Aescalepius, the Healer, now called Serpent-Charmer and Serpent-Bearer. Serpens was the
only constellation that came in two parts. The second part was called Serpens Cauda, the tail of the serpent.

  That wily old serpent the devil, Gentian thought. He’s turned tail and run—in fact, he’s kaput. She smiled grimly at her joke. What shall I look at, then, in the tail of the serpent? Oh, yes, of course. She would find M5, an extremely fine globular cluster in the same constellation. It was finer in photographs, or in a larger telescope, but even in Gentian’s it was very bright, and seemed to grow larger while she contemplated it, as slowly its fainter outlying stars showed themselves. It looked like a luminous pile of spilled sugar, a concentrated heap of bright white in the center thinning out to granular edges, with smaller fainter grains the further out you looked. She used averted vision on it, automatically, letting the edges of her eyes gather light, as was their function. The sugary dusting grew denser.

  I should have tried this on Dominic. I looked at him with the wrong part of my eye. I wonder what his faint companions, his mother, that woman with the mirror, that house, would have looked like then.

  I wonder if my yellow flag iris will come up in the spring.

  “The serpent, subtlest beast of all the field,” she said, repeating what Dominic had said to her when she came back from viewing M16. “Then I am a beast of the house, and I am subtler yet. What else shall I look at?”

  Ophiuchus was the reason Serpens was split into two parts; Ophiuchus, the Serpent-Charmer. She had not charmed Dominic; it was the other way around. But Ophiuchus had the Serpent in his grip, and she would look at him. He was right above the western horizon, not the best place, but she would look at him anyway. She would look at that portion of the Milky Way that lay in Ophiuchus, with its dark rifts and lanes, the equatorial dust band beyond which was the nucleus of the galaxy. She looked for a long time, because when she stopped, she would have to read Becky’s letters.

  She could not quite bear, especially with no cat on her lap, to read all of them. She sat on her bed under the electric blanket with the rest of the mail weighing her feet down, and skimmed the letters in orange envelopes, putting each aside as it became unbearable. She had a hard time opening the very last one. It was much thinner than the others, and probably said something like, “Go to hell, then.” She opened it at last, ripping the envelope in half, and pulled out one folded sheet of paper. It was a poem.

  Some say we picture lovers face to face

  Entwined, intent each on the other alone,

  While friends are side by side intent, and gaze

  Upon some truth each thought himself to own

  Sole, strange, and lonely: Friendship is that wood

  In which run rank all flowers we thought rare,

  In which at first aghast we stared and stood

  To see two phoenix dazzle the dim air.

  But when I think of you in terms of these

  Symbolical fine patterns, full of grace,

  We are not side by side but back to back,

  Intent upon two mirrors where we gaze:

  But I see your face multiplied in glass,

  And you see mine, through those infinities.

  Gentian turned the lamp off again and sat in the dark for a little, clutching the paper. She went back to the telescope, and found Albireo.

  She gathered the telephone into her lap, and still looking steadfastly at the double star, she dialed Becky’s number.