Winter's Tale Part 31

"She is lovely, " Peter Lake said, "but I'm afraid she's not big enough."

"Not big enough?"

"No. I had in mind... a rather large white dog, " he answered."An heroic-sized dog."

"You'll have to go to Ponmoy's, " the salesman advised."They specialize in huge dogs."

Ponmoy's was not far, and was easier to find than the Third Circle. Huge dogs were everywhere, pulling against thick stainless-steel chains, bellowing like the insane on a night of the full moon, and drooling by the bucketful from floppy jowls that hung like the curtains at the Roxy. Attendants threw them twenty-pound buffalo steaks and clipped their fur with hedge trimmers.

"I'm looking for a big white dog, " Peter Lake said to Mr. Ponmoy himself.

"Big?" Ponmoy asked."Right here."

He showed his customer a five-foot-high snowy-colored mastiff. Peter Lake did a few turns around the beast, and shook his head.

"Actually, I had in mind a dog of a larger size."

"A larger size? This is the biggest dog in the shop. He weighs two hundred and fifty pounds. They don't make dogs any bigger than this."

"Are you sure? For some reason, I feel as if I want a really big white dog, a really big white dog."

"You don't want a dog, " Ponmoy said."You want a horse!"

Peter Lake stopped still for a moment, the model of placidity, happiness, fulfillment, and contentment."Yes..." he said."I couldn't keep him in my room, but there's a stable not far away. I could ride him in the park. A horse...."

SOON the bookcase in Peter Lake's room, in which he had previously kept examples of well-machined gears or bearings that were worthy of study, became the home for a hundred volumes on horses.

There were the cla.s.sics, of course, such as Care and Feeding of the Horse by Robert S. Kahn, Equine Anatomy by Burchfield, and Turner's Dressage, But he had combed the bookstores almost as thoroughly as he had toured the graves, and come up with a good collection of secondary, tertiary, and trenta-septesimal works as well, books that, like most lives, would know only the faintest glory, and that of the Last Judgment. There were Moffet Southgate's Memoirs of a Military Groom (all his long life he had been a stableboy at a naval air station) Catalog of Albama Curry Combs, 1760a"1823 by Georgia Fatwood, The Afro-California Jumping Style by Sierra Leon, Ride Like h.e.l.l, You Son of a Bitcb! by Fulgura Frango, and a coffee-table book that weighed forty pounds, was printed on vellum, bound in silk, engraved in gold, and priced at one week of Peter Lake's wages, Pictures of Big White Horses.

This last one kept Peter Lake up on many a night, leafing through it with searing concentration that tried to extort from the tip of his tongue, as it were, a connection with one of the animals, or the reason he needed to seek them out. He stared for hours at the white beauties rampant on the Camargue or dressed in scarlet and silver on an English parade ground, and gained a mysterious satisfaction from doing so. Less satisfied, to be sure, were Peter Lake's neighbors, who were awakened at odd hours when this otherwise respectable gentleman galloped around his tiny quarters and neigheda"not because he thought he was a horse, but because he was trying to understand what it was about horses that drew him on so strongly. He held his arms out in front of him in imitation of a running horse's forelegs frozen in a photograph, but there were no means by which he could match the grace of a perfectly balanced white-maned racer. He had a picture of a fire horse running so hard in the traces that all its legs were airborne at once and its head was elevated as if it had just turned a sharp corner and felt the weight of a trailing engine. This photograph obsessed Peter Lake, who in examining it tried to look into the horse's eyes, turned the book side-ways and upside down, and used a magnifying gla.s.s that he had brought from the tool room at work. There was something about how the horse seemed to be sailing above the ground. All Peter Lake had to do was close his eyes, and he too was flying. The differencebetween being on the ground and being several feet above it was not to be minimized. The few inches that separated a man's limp and relaxed feet and the surface from which they had risen and over which they could effortlessly float, were equal to a voyage of a longer distance than anyone had ever imagined. Peter Lake wondered if, after so long a time in pure suspension, angels remembered how to stand, and if one could tell those artists who worked for a higher purpose from those who didn'ta"not only by the depth of the angels' eyes, but also by the ease of the limbs. He himself had seen this kind of suspension, at Petipas, when the child had risen into his arms, pa.s.sing over the stones of the courtyard far more smoothly and slowly than physics allowed.

But that might have been one of those things that he had imagined, one of the many things that, like his terrifying knowledge of the dead, weighed upon him heavily nonetheless. He would never be able to explain such illusions when he hadn't even the slightest idea of who he was. The horses, however, were of both the inexplicable mystery that drew him to one thing or another, and the reality of flesh and blood. He seized upon them for the very sensible reason that even if their appeal to him was otherworldly, still, they could be seen pulling junk wagons or transporting tourists around the park. And it was easy, of course, to love horses, since they were exceedingly beautiful and exceedingly gentle. So Peter Lake stared at pictures of white horses without understanding why, and his love for a white horse that he didn't know he had ever seen filled him with unexplained emotions.

After a while, there was not a stable in the city that did not know his face. If horses were auctioned or shown, Peter Lake was there. He often sat on a rock above the most heavily traveled bridle path in Central Park. Had he been stuck in the madness of his bagman's thatch, he never would have understood any of this. But now he was at peace, and he began to catch on. In a very short time, he was able to realize, more from the pattern of his behavior than from any understanding of his desires, that he was searching for a particular horse. He despaired of finding the very one he sought, since he knew neither why he was looking nor exactly what he was looking for, and there were a lot of big white horses around.

But the deeper he drove, the sharper he became. As he healed and strengthened, his faculties served him better. Were it not for that, he never would have noticed Christiana.

She was not hard to notice. She was the kind of woman who ... Well, we know what she looked like. Strangely enough, Peter Lake was as comfortable in her presence as other men were not, perhaps because she had none of the very specific attributes that held sway over him, such as blue eyes, the habit of wearing pearls, and the certain kind of face that he could not encounter without deep pain and longing. He noticed Christiana early on, after having pa.s.sed her several times as he was coming out of or going into a stable. He saw her watching the cart horses at their dawn muster in Red Hook (most of these were small Shetlands who drew flower carts and worked birthday parties, but occasionally there was a full-sized white, or even a white stallion). He bowed slightly in recognition when he encountered her at horse shows. And he noticed at the auctions that she and he were the only people who consistently did not bid.

When finally they spoke, they were amazed to find that they had in common not only their interest in horses (neither dared inform the other of what they did not know was a mutual obsession), but The Sun. Peter Lake told her that he was the chief mechanic there, and she said, "You must be Mr. Bearer."

"How do you know that?" he asked.

She knew because her husband had told her. And who was he? He was the man who ran The Sun's launch. In fact, her connection with The Sun and therefore, by extension, with Peter Lake was even stronger, since she was a maid at the Penn house, and had often read to Harry Penn when Jessica was either on the road or when she had been making appearances on behalf of Praeger de Pinto, when he was running for mayor.

"I met him, " Peter Lake said."I voted for him twelve times, and I know your husband. Sometimes he gives me fish. I took one or his bluefish to the French Mill, and they broiled it with herb b.u.t.ter. The mechanics always look forward to Asbury's visits, whether or not he brings along a fish, because there's no one with greater patience for listening to us explain our machines. He wants to know about every single one of them."

"He doesn't have much to do these days, " Christiana reported."The harbor's iced over, and he's put the launch in overhaul because he's having terrible trouble with the engine. It's an old model, and he doesn't really know how to fix it."

"Why didn't he ask me?"

"He probably didn't want to trouble you."

"Trouble? I love engines. Tell me when he'll be at the slip."

"All the time, these days."

"I'll go there tomorrow and see what I can do."

Peter Lake parted from Christiana in a daze, because he seemed to have made a friend. A friend implied happiness, and too much happiness might lead him to give up his struggle. But why not fix Asbury's engine? Certainly it could do no harm. It did belong to The Sun, after all, and, as far as he could tell, taking care of The Sun's engines was his reason for being.

ABYSMILLARD REDUX.

ONE week in November, the fad among corporate giants was church buying. Craig Binky didn't want to be left out, so he bought half a dozen Baptist churches on the Upper West Side. He was depressed because, by the rules of the game, this was a pretty poor showing. After all, Marcel Apand had three mid-town Episcopals and a Greek Orthodox in Astoria, and Crawford Bees had gotten hold of sixty synagogues.

He had been terribly hurt when Praeger de Pinto turned against him during the campaign, and frustrated when Praeger had gone on to win the election. He felt that, at the very least, he was owed some information about the s.h.i.+p that lay at anchor in the Hudson, but the mayor-elect refused to tell him anything, stating that he was going to announce the project himself, in December, and that Craig Binky could find out then along with everyone else.

"But I'm a newspaper!" Craig Binky sputtered."I'll lose my momento if I don't know these things. I supported you, and now you're asking me to water-ski without a rope."

Craig Binky was back in his office before he realized that he had discovered nothing."I'm the only one in this city, " he said to Alertu and Scroutu, "who knows no thing." He frequently said "no thing" instead of "nothing." "I'll remedy that."

He turned to the underworld, paying $100, 000 to learn that the central figure was Jackson Mead, and $50, 000 apiece for the names of Reverend Mootfowl and Mr. Cecil Wooley. At one of the many fall publis.h.i.+ng banquets, Harry Penn, who had heard rumors of the buy and that Craig Binky thought he knew more now than anyone, was a.s.sured in one glance that the rumors were accurate. Craig Binky was puffed up like a Cornish rock game hen (as he would say), so happy with himself that, even though he was sitting down, he was strutting. After Craig Binky's speech (which was supposed to have been in praise of the columnist E. Owen Lemur, but went like this: "He always liked me. He thought I was great. He said that someday I would...."), Craig Binky could not resist standing again to say, "I know the names of the people on the s.h.i.+p in the Hudson. Ahem!" Then he sat down.

Harry Penn leaned over to whisper in his ear, "You mean Jackson Mead, the Reverend Mootfowl, and Mr. Cecil Wooley? Craig, your newsboys know that, and they didn't have to pay Sol Fappiano two hundred thousand dollars to find out, either."

"How did they find out?" asked Craig Binky, whiter than confectioner's sugar.

"They read it in The Sun, " Harry Penn lied."They always read The Sun. I thought you knew."

Craig Binky decided that to salvage his position he would bear any burden and pay any price, and find out exactly what was going on. He had to redeem his honor. He decided to ask a computer.

He put snow tires on one of his touring cars and drove deep into Connecticut, where, perched upon a limestone cliff, a huge warlike building looked over a peaceful valley. This was one terminal of the National Computer in Was.h.i.+ngton. Most of the time, the silicon behemoth in the capital was busy with things that no one understood, but it occasionally worked a few minutes for the general public "Is that it?" Craig Binky asked the facility's director, as he was brought into a room the size of two hundred large barns, filled to its high ceiling with banks of electronic tombstones.

"That?" the director asked back."Of course not. This installation is only the terminal. Here we convert the user languages into a specific algorithm that the big computer in Was.h.i.+ngton can understand."

"You mean the computer in Was.h.i.+ngton is bigger than this?"

"Actually, no. It's only about the size of a house, but its heart is always kept at absolute zero. One of its random access memories the size of a grain of sand has the capabilities of a room-sized model from, say, nineteen ninety. It's like a brain, and the terminals are like the senses distributed throughout the body. Make the a.n.a.logy with your own brain, which, despite being the size of a..."

"Basketball, " said Alertu and Scroutu.

"All right, a basketball. It's still a lot smaller than your body, but it's a lot smarter."

"Let's get to it, " Craig Binky said, impatiently.

"Did you bring your chips?"

"What chips? I just want to ask it a question."

"Only one question?"

"Why not?"

"The threshold charge is a million dollars."

"It's worth it to me."

"Very well. It's your decision. What's the question?"

"Who is Jackson Mead?"

"It'll cost you a million dollars just to access the Was.h.i.+ngton mainframe."

"Just ask it for Christ's sakes!"

An operator approached a terminal, and typed a series of code: and orders. Then he typed, "Who is Jackson Mead?"

A moment later, these words flashed across a red rubidium screen: "I don't know."

"What do you mean, I don't know?" Craig Binky screamed."Let me talk to it!"

"A voice hookup can be arranged."

"Let me talk to the G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing."

"I don't really recommend it."

"Put that son of a b.i.t.c.h on the line!" Craig Binky screamed.

"Okay, go ahead."

"Look, you stupid son of a b.i.t.c.h, " Craig Binky began."I paid a million dollars just to ask you a simple question, and you say you don't know the answer."

"So?" the computer wrote.

"You're supposed to know everything."

"Like h.e.l.l I am."

"You're a fake. I ought to come down to Was.h.i.+ngton and beat the lights out of you."

"Are you threatening me?" the computer asked.

"Yeah, " said Craig Binky, hopping from foot to foot, fists raised."I'm threatening you.'Cause you're a chicken."

The computer took its time, and then wrote, "You suck."

"Just try collecting your bill, " Craig Binky shouted as he stormed out.

The computer summoned the registration numbers of every single financial instrument in Craig Binky's substantial portfolio, and before he was out the door a legal brief had been filed and answered, a judgment rendered, his accounts attached, the appropriate fees and penalties confiscated, and news of the case flashed to every newspaper in the countrya"except The Ghost.

"That G.o.dd.a.m.ned automatron!" Craig Binky said in the car toAlertu and Scroutu."The lousy automon!" Still, he knew nothing of Jackson Mead, and everyone else did. Day by day, details were being revealed in the press, and elsewhere, in preparation for Praeger de Pinto's announcement on the first of December. For Craig Binky, it was most frustrating. Although he did not know, even Abysmillard knew.

Abysmillard? Yes, Abysmillard.

OF all the creatures made by G.o.d, the most abysmal was Abysmillard. Even as a baby he had been dank and unpleasant, and then, as he grew older, his hidden abysmillarities flowered. The Baymen hadduck hunters and trappers were drawn to it in hopes of using it as a blind or a storage place, and if they encountered its owner inside their response was invariably one of such fear and loathing that they would shoot as a form of therapy, to exorcise the creature that lay in the darkness and stared at them with the impossible hollow eyes of the past. Though they missed him when they shot, they made a lot of holes in the thattle and waub. Fearing that they would someday hit their target, he moved into a soft damp hole in the earth a muskrat burrow that he claimed after the muskrats had fled because the water in its vicinity had become too oily. This was a kind of grave, but it had an exit.

Every few days, he went out in the darkness to forage. He lived on reed shoots, snails, little darters that he caught in the nets that he could still weave, and a clam or two when he was able to find them. If he were fortunate, he might land a salmon or a shad that had come into the rainbow slicks by accident, or catch a migrating bird that had had the temerity to land. Everything he ate tasted as if it had been raised in a garage, but he didn't eat much, and was saved.

For most of his life he had been hugea"seven feet tall and three hundred pounds. Just before the beginning of the third millennium, he was only five feet tall and he weighed about a third of what he had weighed before. For twenty years or more as he lay in his burrow, breathing slowly, staring blankly ahead like a man with a fever, he had been changing. It was so slow that he never knew, but his flesh was rearranging.

The teeth had gradually aligned until they no longer pointed hither and thither, but only hither, and his eyes had become syncopated. What a great relief not to have to stare in two directions at once! And now that he could perceive depth he felt that he was more of the world, rather than an observer of flat pictures. As his body fed upon itself, it showed admirable discipline in partaking of the worst first. The boils, sores, goiters, and fungal constructions disappeared His hair, no longer matted after he had nearly drowned in a sum hole filled with turpentine and kerosene (this killed all the bugs too), was now white and flowing. Thoroughly dry-cleaned for the first time, his clothes became as soft and fluffy as they were the day the Baywomen made them from the wool of beach sheep and peccaries.

Abysmillard was aware only that he was slowly starving to death, that the seasons pa.s.sed, and that he was still alive. Like the animals, he was capable of staying still for periods that seemed like an eternity. He did little more than look at the light and listen to the wind. In winter he could see snowflakes landing just beyond the exit of his burrow, and the sun would come down low enough to s.h.i.+ne like a hunter's flashlight and blind him as it reached to warm the underground. Blizzards sometimes raged above, entertaining him with their waitings and concussions. If a low-flying plane roared over the marsh, he thought that an angel was coming to take him.

This slow diminution could have continued until he was as thin as a thread, at which point he might have been eaten by the air or taken up by the wind and blown as far away as Polynesia. But he was forced from his resting place.

In the ancient fire dreams of the Baymen, the last days, though difficult, were not to be feared. According to the Thirteenth Song, a sure sign that the last days had arrived was "when a solid rainbow springs from the ice to leap the white curtain, and on its arc of beating lights are a thousand smiling steps." As workers stayed through the night to build them all around the marsh, Abysmillard was able to see the piers and foundations of this rainbow. Though the sites were cluttered with huge scaffoldings and shrouds, they often lit'up and glowed, and light in many colors practically burned through the flapping tarpaulins. Because he knew the Thirteenth Song, Abysmillard suspected that these piers would generate beams to be joined into a single magnificent arc.

He would have been content to wait for this quietly, but the ice was so thick that he could no longer get food. He tried to chop through it with his wooden adze, and even with his sword (the sword was seldom disgraced with such a task). Never had he seen such a perfect mirror. And the last time he had tried to make a hole in it, he had seen when the leads were connected in the scattered foundations that the light on the surface was as nothing compared to the multicolored streets and avenues which shot through the frozen world below. The woven beams ignited like flash powder and remained in front of Abysmillard's eyes for half an hour as he groped about, blinded, trying to find his tools.

His only hope was to get to the edge of the ice where it met thesea, where he could fish right off the shelf or bore a hole in it because it was not as thick as the more stable inland ice. A long time before when the harbor had frozen over and the Baymen were still on the marsh by the thousands, in dozens of villages, they had gone to the sea and had lost many men. Sometimes, he remembered, eight-foot waves had leapt over the ice like a great tongue, and pulled the fishermen into the frigid ocean. Men vanished among the undulating shards of razor-sharp ice, and were cut up in so many pieces that by the time their friends reached the spot where they had disappeared the only thing to see would be a bright red patch blooming smoothly against the underside of the transparent floor upon which they stood.

To go there alone at night was most dangerous, since it wouldbe hard for him to make his way over the fractured ridges, the wind was high, and the ocean sent tides slithering for miles along the frozen surface. In the dark he would have little chance of seeing or avoiding them. It was not likely, however, that he would ever reach the sea, since a fifteen-mile walk in subzero winds was not an easy matter for someone of his frailty. Like all Baymen, he was drawn to danger, and he set out one night when the moon lit the way and the cold was an angel with a sword of ice.

Though he was only partially aware of it, he had finally come into his own. He moved with grace, his eyes had become kind and intelligent, his long white hair flowed like that of a patriarch, and he was now ready to enter the thriving communities from which he had been excluded all his life. But there was no one left! Though he had come through to the end, he had come through without ever having been embraced. He supposed that there were others like him, perhaps whole legions. And he imagined that it would not be just for so many people to have lived through such loneliness and not come to a final reward. This gave him courage for his last walk the ice.

PEOPLE were thrilled by the sudden onset of so great and (they thought) so unprecedented a winter. Even those who feared and hate cold weather and snow were quickly seduced by the silvery polarnights, and joined in a medieval pageant of sledding, gatherings about the fire, and evenings under the stars. It was as if the occasional joyful paralysis that winter sometimes lays at the foot of Christmas had come for good. Layers of clothing made the flesh more mysterious and enticing than it had been in many a year, a certain courtliness was restored, and the struggle against the elements reduced everyone in scale just enough for people to realize that one of the fundamental qualities of humanity was and would always be its delicacy. The entranced citizens did not go to so many places or work as hard as they usually did, but they lived far better than they had ever lived.

A favorite pastime was to skate down the rivers to the harbor. High winds kept the surface of the ice clear of snow and piled it up against the banks of the Hudson, the East River, and the sh.o.r.es of the bay, in many-storied ramparts through which had been drivena" on the model of the Roman catacombsa"a hundred thousand pa.s.sages and tunnels leading to the snow rooms that served as impromptu restaurants, hotels, shops, and inns. The informality and variety of these nameless places proved far more attractive than the conventional stores in the city, and New Yorkers did everything they could to escape the squares and rectangles into which Manhattan had been scored, and get to the serpentine snow cities. Crescents, circles, dim galleries with partially inclined paths, and rooms that led to chambers that led to chains of halls, caverns, and secret places, did a lot to free and delight those who had been brought up on the right angle. Skaters glided from place to place, losing track of time and disappearing for days into the cities of the s...o...b..nks. Whole families went there to sleep in the snow rooms, eat roasted meats on tiny skewers, and take part in the ice racesa"only to realize that they had been gone for days at a time, and that all their appointments had been violently broken. But often those with whom they were supposed to have met had forgotten as well, and were themselves to be found on the ice. The s...o...b..nks and the long frozen rivers were, however, just the means to get to the harbor, which, by day, was now like a plain that held a.s.sembled armies, and by night a festival and observatory of the stars.

Thousands of tents were pitched on the ice, rivaling the snow palaces. If one did not cheat and move between rows, one could easilybe lost in a maze of alleys and avenues that were filled with skaters merchants, and teams of colorfully clad hockey players, racers, or curlers traveling to tournaments in the great squares that were placed at random throughout the tent city. Above innumerable fireboxes caldrons steamed and boiled, lobsters tumbled, and many grosses of eggs jiggled in the hysterical dances of the legless bald. Roasted meats, hot drinks, and fragrant fruit pies that were baked in brick ovens which had been built on the ice, were everywhere and cheap Trick skaters, jugglers, acrobats, music students, and dancing pigs performed at the busier junctions. Children zipped about on their skates like supersonic mites, pa.s.sing through crowds and under tables laden with merchandise or food. The nine-year-old boys seemed to be the fastest and the most daring. They were as skinny as elastic bands, knew no danger, and stopped only long enough to shovel fruit pastries into their mouths. Then they were off at a hundred miles an hour, dodging, darting, and continually raving in squeaky voices for everyone to move out of their way. As speedy as pions, muons, and charmed quarks, they were all places at once, the possessors of pure and boundless energy.

At night the fires burned until nine, and then were damped down and put under grates so as not to interfere with the astronomical observations. A strange residue of warmth lingered until well after midnight, permitting intense scrutiny of the heavens. Entrepreneurs rented out thick pads and quilts for people to use as they lay on their backs absorbed by the celestial sphere. Though the inhabitants of New York had hardly been aware of the stars for a hundred years, they now were highly enamored of them.

Not only astronomers, but various astrologers, charlatans, and quacks in pointy hats and sequined boots discoursed for a fee upon the Pleiades, s.e.xtans, Rigel, Kent, Pavo, Gacrux, Argo Navis, Betelgeuse, Bellatrix, and Atria. Little books about the stars stuck out of many back pockets, telescopes and tripods proliferated into a forest of three-legged trees, and the populace became aware for the first time in a long while that something existed that all could love and never lack. Had it continued, this might have taken the city very far. But every night the wonder was balanced by the scourge of winds so fierce and cold that the tents came down, and the ice was abandoned so completely that in the morning all that was left were the boxy ovensa"and even they were moved by the wind, colliding like curling stones. As the days grew shorter and real winter piled its severities upon those of the winter that was charmed, the ice became less and less hospitable, and the hours of astronomical observationwere steadily reduced.

Early one morning, Peter Lake went down to The Sun's slip at Whitehall to help Asbury fix the engine of the launch.

Though the sun had just risen and was putting things in a fresh and vigorous light, the air was still very cold, and they could hardly speak. They built a fire in an oildrum, and every five or ten minutes they climbed down from the launch to warm their hands. Since they were working with steel and had to touch it often, their fingers quickly got numb. As Peter Lake and Asbury crouched by the fire, they stared across the deserted plain of ice that had formed over theonce busy harbor.