Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 (9 page)

 
          
 
Old Lady nodded at a tree. "That's
likely."

 
          
 
"Well," he decided slowly,
"I'll stay invisible for tonight, and tomorrow you can &i me back all
whole again. Old Lady."

 
          
 
"Now if that ain't just like a critter,
always wanting to be what he can't be," remarked Old Lady to a beetle on a
log.

 
          
 
"What you mean?" said Charlie.

 
          
 
"Why," she explained, "it was
real hard work, fixing you up. It'll take a little time for it to wear off.
Like a coat of paint wears off, boy."

 
          
 
"You!" he cried. "You did this
to me! Now you make me back, you make me seeable!"

 
          
 
"Hush," she said. "It'll wear
off, a hand or a foot at a time."

 
          
 
“How'll it look, me around the hills with just
one hand showing!"

 
          
 
"Like a five-winged bird hopping on the
stones and bramble."

 
          
 
"Or a foot showing!"

 
          
 
"Like a small pink rabbit jumping
thicket."

 
          
 
"Or my head floating!"

 
          
 
"Like a hairy balloon at the
carnival!"

 
          
 
"How long before I'm whole?" he
asked.

 
          
 
She deliberated that it might pretty well be
an entire year.

 
          
 
He groaned. He began to sob and bite his lips
and make fists. "You magicked me, you did this, you did this thing to me.
Now I won't be able to run home!"

 
          
 
She winked. "But you can stay here,
child, stay on with me real comfort-like, and I'll keep you fat and
saucy."

 
          
 
He flung it out: "You did this on
purpose! You mean old hag, you want to keep me here!"

 
          
 
He ran off through the shrubs on the instant.

 
          
 
"Charlie, come back!"

 
          
 
No answer but the pattern of his feet on the
soft dark turf, and his wet choking cry which passed swiftly off and away.

 
          
 
She waited and then kindled herself a fire.
"He'll be back," she whispered. And thinking inward on herself, she
said, "And now I'll have me my company through spring and into late
summer. Then, when I'm tired of him and want a silence, I'll send him
home."

 
          
 
Charlie returned noiselessly with the first
gray of dawn, gliding over the rimed turf to where Old Lady sprawled like a
bleached stick before the scattered ashes.

 
          
 
He sat on some creek pebbles and stared at
her.

 
          
 
She didn't dare look at him or beyond. He had
made no sound, so how could she know he was anywhere about? She couldn't.

 
          
 
He sat there, tear marks on his cheeks.

 
          
 
Pretending to be just waking—but she had found
no sleep from one end of the night to the other—Old Lady stood up, grunting and
yawning, and turned in a circle to the dawn.

 
          
 
"Charlie?"

 
          
 
Her eyes passed from pines to soil, to sky, to
the far hills. She called out his name, over and over again, and she felt like
staring plumb straight at him, but she stopped herself. "Charlie? Oh,
Charles!" she called, and heard the echoes say the very same.

 
          
 
He sat, beginning to grin a bit, suddenly,
knowing he was close to her, yet she must feel alone. Perhaps he felt the
growing of a secret power, perhaps he felt secure from the world, certainly he
was pleased with his invisibility.

 
          
 
She said aloud, "Now where can that boy
be? If he only made a noise so I could tell just where he is, maybe I'd fry him
a breakfast."

 
          
 
She prepared the morning victuals, irritated
at his continuous quiet. She sizzled bacon on a hickory stick. "The smell
of it will draw his nose," she muttered.

 
          
 
While her back was turned he swiped all the
frying bacon and devoured it tastily.

 
          
 
She whirled, crying out, "Lord!"

 
          
 
She eyed the clearing suspiciously.
"Charlie, that you?"

 
          
 
Charlie wiped his mouth clean on his wrists.

 
          
 
She trotted about the clearing, making like
she was trying to locate him. Finally, with a clever thought, acting blind, she
headed straight for him, groping. "Charlie, where are you?"

 
          
 
A lightning streak, he evaded her, bobbing,
ducking.

 
          
 
It took all her will power not to give chase;
but you can't chase invisible boys, so she sat down, scowling, sputtering, and
tried to fry more bacon. But every fresh strip she cut he would steal bubbling
off the fire and run away far. Finally, cheeks burning, she cried, "I know
where you are! Right there! I hear you run!" She pointed to one side of
him, not too accurate. He ran again. "Now you're there!" she shouted.
"There, and there!" pointing to all the places he was in the next
five minutes. "I hear you press a grass blade, knock a flower, snap a
twig. I got fine shell ears, delicate as roses. They can hear the stars
moving!"

 
          
 
Silently he galloped off among the pines, his
voice trailing back, "Can't hear me when I'm set on a rock. I'll just
set!"

 
          
 
All day he sat on an observatory rock in the
clear wind, motionless and sucking his tongue.

 
          
 
Old Lady gathered wood in the deep forest,
feeling his eyes weaseling on her spine. She wanted to babble: "Oh, I see
you, I see you! I was only fooling about invisible boys! You're right
there!" But she swallowed her gall and gummed it tight.

 
          
 
The following morning he did the spiteful
things. He began leaping from behind trees. He made toad-faces, frog-faces,
spider-faces at her, clenching down his lips with his fingers, popping his raw
eyes, pushing up his nostrils so you could peer in and see his brain thinking.

 
          
 
Once she dropped her kindling. She pretended
it was a blue jay startled her.

 
          
 
He made a motion as if to strangle her.

 
          
 
She trembled a little.

 
          
 
He made another move as if to bang her shins
and spit on her cheek.

 
          
 
These motions she bore without a lid-flicker
or a mouth-twitch.

 
          
 
He stuck out his tongue, making strange bad
noises. He wiggled his loose ears so she wanted to laugh, and finally she did
laugh and explained it away quickly by saying, "Sat on a salamander! Whew,
how it poked!"

 
          
 
By high noon the whole madness boiled to a
terrible peak.

 
          
 
For it was at that exact hour that Charlie
came racing down the valley stark boy-naked!

 
          
 
Old Lady nearly fell flat with shock!

 
          
 
"Charlie!" she almost cried.

 
          
 
Charlie raced naked up one side of a hill and
naked down the other—naked as day, naked as the moon, raw as the sun and a
newborn chick, his feet shimmering and rushing like the wings of a low-skimming
hummingbird.

 
          
 
Old Lady's tongue locked in her mouth. What
could she say? Charlie, go dress? For shame? Stop that? Could she? Oh, Charlie,
Charlie, God! Could she say that now? Well?

 
          
 
Upon the big rock, she witnessed him dancing up
and down, naked as the day of his birth, stomping bare feet, smacking his hands
on his knees and sucking in and out his white stomach Hke blowing and deflating
a circus balloon.

 
          
 
She shut her eyes tight and prayed.

 
          
 
After three hours of this she pleaded,
"Charlie, Charlie, come here! I got something to tell you!"

 
          
 
Like a fallen leaf he came, dressed again,
praise the Lord.

 
          
 
"Charlie," she said, looking at the
pine trees, "I see your right toe. There it is."

 
          
 
"You do?" he said.

 
          
 
''Yes," she said very sadly. "There
it is like a horny toad on the grass. And there, up there's your left ear
hanging on the air like a pink butterfly."

 
          
 
Charlie danced. "I'm forming in, I'm
forming in!"

 
          
 
Old Lady nodded. "Here comes your
ankle!"

 
          
 
"Gimme both my feet!" ordered
Charlie.

 
          
 
"You got 'em."

 
          
 
"How about my hands?"

 
          
 
"I see one crawling on your knee like a
daddy longlegs."

 
          
 
'TIow about the other one?"

 
          
 
"It's crawling too."

 
          
 
"I got a body?"

 
          
 
"Shaping up fine."

 
          
 
"I'll need my head to go home. Old
Lady."

 
          
 
To go home, she thought wearily.
"No!" she said, stubborn and angry. "No, you ain't got no head.
No head at all," she cried. She'd leave that to the very last. "No
head, no head," she insisted.

 
          
 
"No head?" he wailed.

 
          
 
'*Yes, oh my God, yes, yes, you got your
blamed head!" she snapped, giving up. "Now, fetch me back my bat with
the needle in his eye!"

 
          
 
He flung it at her. "Haaaa-yoooo!"
His yelling went all up the valley, and long after he had run toward home she
heard his echoes, racing.

 
          
 
Then she plucked up her kindling with a great
dry weariness and started back toward her shack, sighing, talking. And Charlie
followed her all the way, really invisible now, so she couldn't see him, just
hear him, like a pine cone dropping or a deep underground stream trickling, or
a squirrel clambering a bough; and over the fire at twilight she and Charlie
sat, him so invisible, and

 
          
 
her feeding him bacon he wouldn't take, so she
ate it herself, and then she fixed some magic and fell asleep with Charlie,
made out of sticks and rags and pebbles, but still warm and her very own son,
slumbering and nice in her shaking mother arms . . . and they talked about
golden things in drowsy voices until dawn made the fire slowly, slowly wither
out. . . .

 
          
 
In the year a.d. 400, the Emperor Yuan held
his throne by the Great Wall of China, and the land was green with rain,
readying itself toward the harvest, at peace, the people in his dominion
neither too happy nor too sad.

 
          
 
Early on the morning of the first day of the
first week of the second month of the new year, the Emperor Yuan was sipping
tea and fanning himself against a warm breeze when a servant ran across the
scarlet and blue garden tiles, calling, "Oh, Emperor, Emperor, a
miracle!"

 
          
 
"Yes," said the Emperor, "the
air is sweet this morning."

 
          
 
"No, no, a miracle!" said the
servant, bowing quickly.

 
          
 
"And this tea is good in my mouth, surely
that is a miracle."

 
          
 
"No, no. Your Excellency."

 
          
 
"Let me guess then—the sun has risen and
a new day is upon us. Or the sea is blue. That now is the finest of all
miracles."

 
          
 
“Excellency, a man is flying!"

 
          
 
"What?" The Emperor stopped his fan.

 
          
 
"I saw him in the air, a man flying with
wings. I heard a voice call out of the sky, and when I looked up, there he was,
a dragon in the heavens with a man in its mouth, a dragon of paper and bamboo,
colored like the sun and the grass."

 
          
 
"It is early," said the Emperor,
"and you have just wakened from a dream."

 
          
 
"It is early, but I have seen what I have
seen! Come, and you will see it too."

 
          
 
"Sit down with me here," said the
Emperor. "Drink some tea. It must be a strange thing, if it is true, to
see a man fly. You must have time to think of it, even as I must have time to
prepare myself for the sight."

 
          
 
They drank tea.

 
          
 
"Please," said the servant at last,
"or he will be gone."

 
          
 
The Emperor rose thoughtfully. "Now you
may show me what you have seen."

 
          
 
They walked into a garden, across a meadow of
grass, over a small bridge, through a grove of trees, and up a tiny hill.

 
          
 
"There!" said the servant.

 
          
 
The Emperor looked into the sky.

 
          
 
And in the sky, laughing so high that you
could hardly hear him laugh, was a man; and the man was clothed in bright
papers and reeds to make wings and a beautiful yellow tail, and he was soaring
all about like the largest bird in a universe of birds, like a new dragon in a
land of ancient dragons.

 
          
 
The man called down to them from high in the
cool winds of morning, "I fly, I fly!"

 
          
 
The servant waved to him. "Yes,
yes!"

 
          
 
The Emperor Yuan did not move. Instead he
looked at the Great Wall of China now taking shape out of the farthest mist in
the green hills, that splendid snake of stones which writhed with majesty
across the entire land.
That wonderful wall which had
protected them for a timeless time from enemy hordes and preserved peace for
years without number.
He saw the town, nestled to itself by a river and
a road and a hill, beginning to waken.

 
          
 
"Tell me," he said to his servant,
"has anyone else seen this flying man?"

 
          
 
"I am the only one, Excellency,"
said the servant, smiling at the sky, waving.

 
          
 
The Emperor watched the heavens another minute
and then said, "Call him down to me."

 
          
 
"Ho, come down, come down! The Emperor
wishes to see you!" called the servant, hands cupped to his shouting
mouth.

 
          
 
The Emperor glanced in all directions while
the flying man soared down the morning wind. He saw a farmer, early in his
fields, watching the sky, and he noted where the farmer stood.

 
          
 
The flying man alit with a rustle of paper and
a creak of bamboo reeds. He came proudly to the Emperor, clumsy in his rig, at
last bowing before the old man.

 
          
 
"What have you done?" demanded the
Emperor.

 
          
 
"I have flown in the sky, Your
Excellency," replied the man.

 
          
 
"What have you done?" said the
Emperor again.

 
          
 
"I have just told you!" cried the
flier.

 
          
 
"You have told me nothing at all."
The Emperor reached out a thin hand to touch the pretty paper and the birdlike
keel of the apparatus. It smelled cool, of the wind.

 
          
 
"Is it not beautiful. Excellency?"

 
          
 
"Yes, too beautiful."

 
          
 
"It is the only one in the world!"
smiled the man. "And I am the inventor."

 
          
 
"The only one in the world?"

 
          
 
"I swear it!"

 
          
 
"Who else knows of this?"

 
          
 
"No one. Not even my wife, who would
think me mad with the sun. She thought I was making a kite. I rose in the night
and walked to the cliffs far away. And when the morning breezes blew and the
sun rose, I gathered my courage. Excellency, and leaped from the cliff. I flew!
But my wife does not know of it."

 
          
 
"Well for her, then," said the
Emperor. "Come along."

 
          
 
They walked back to the great house. The sun
was full in the sky now, and the smell of the grass was refreshing. The
Emperor, the servant, and the flier paused within the huge garden.

 
          
 
The Emperor clapped his hands. "Ho,
guards!"

 
          
 
The guards came running.

 
          
 
"Hold this man."

 
          
 
The guards seized the flier.

 
          
 
"Call the executioner," said the
Emperor.

 
          
 
"What's this!" cried the flier,
bewildered. "What have I done?" He began to weep, so that the
beautiful paper apparatus rustled.

 
          
 
"Here is the man who has made a certain
machine," said the Emperor, "and yet asks us what he has created. He
does not know himself. It is only necessary that he create, without knowing why
he has done so, or what this thing will do."

 
          
 
The executioner came running with a sharp
silver ax. He stood with his naked, large-muscled arms ready, his face covered
with a serene white mask.

 
          
 
"One moment," said the Emperor. He
turned to a nearby table upon which sat a machine that he himself had created.
The Emperor took a tiny golden key from his own neck. He fitted this key to the
tiny, delicate machine and wound it up. Then he set the machine going.

 
          
 
The machine was a garden of metal and jewels.
Set in motion, birds sang in tiny metal trees, wolves walked through miniature
forests, and tiny people ran in and out of sun and shadow, fanning themselves
with miniature fans, listening to the tiny emerald birds, and standing by
impossibly small but tinkling fountains.

 
          
 
"Is it not beautiful?" said the
Emperor. "If you asked me what I have done here, I could answer you well.
I have made birds sing, I have made forests murmur, I have set people to
walking in this woodland, enjoying the leaves and shadows and songs. That is
what I have done."

 
          
 
"But, oh. Emperor!" pleaded the
flier, on his knees, the tears pouring down his face. "I have done a
similar thing! I have found beauty. I have flown on the morning wind. I have looked
down on all the sleeping houses and gardens. I have smelled the sea and even
seen it, beyond the hills, from my high place. And I have soared like a bird;
oh, I cannot say how beautiful it is up there, in the sky, with the wind about
me, the wind blowing me here like a feather, there like a fan, the way the sky
smells in the morning! And how free one feels! That is beautiful, Emperor, that
is beautiful too!"

 
          
 
"Yes," said the Emperor sadly,
"I know it must be true. For I felt my heart move with you in the air and
I wondered: What is it like? How does it feel? How do the distant pools look
from so high? And how my houses and servants? Like ants? And how the distant
towns not yet awake?"

 
          
 
"Then spare me!"

 
          
 
"But there are times," said the
Emperor, more sadly still, "when one must lose a little beauty if one is
to keep what little beauty one already has, I do not fear you, yourself, but I
fear another man."

 
          
 
"What man?"

 
          
 
"Some other man who, seeing you, will
build a thing of bright papers and bamboo like this. But the other man will
have an evil face and an evil heart, and the beauty will be gone. It is this
man I fear."

 
          
 
"Why? Why?"

 
          
 
"Who is to say that someday just such a
man, in just such an apparatus of paper and reed, might not fly in the sky and
drop huge stones upon the Great Wall of China?" said the Emperor.

 
          
 
No one moved or said a word.

 
          
 
"Off with his head," said the
Emperor.

 
          
 
The executioner whirled his silver ax.

 
          
 
"Burn the kite and the inventor's body
and bury their ashes together," said the Emperor.

 
          
 
The servants retreated to obey.

 
          
 
The Emperor turned to his hand-servant, who
had seen the man flying. "Hold your tongue. It was all a dream, a most
sorrowful and beautiful dream. And that farmer in the distant field who also saw,
tell him it would pay him to consider it only a vision. If ever the word passes
around, you and the farmer die within the hour."

 
          
 
"You are merciful. Emperor."

 
          
 
"No, not merciful," said the old
man. Beyond the garden wall he saw the guards burning the beautiful machine of
paper and reeds that smelled of the morning wind. He saw the dark smoke climb
into the sky. "No, only very much bewildered and afraid." He saw the
guards digging a tiny pit wherein to bury the ashes. "What is the life of
one man against those of a million others? I must take solace from that
thought."

 
          
 
He took the key from its chain about his neck
and once more wound up the beautiful miniature garden. He stood looking out
across the land at the Great Wall, the peaceful town, the green fields, the
rivers and streams. He sighed. The tiny garden whirred its hidden and delicate
machinery and set itself in motion; tiny people walked in forests, tiny foxes
loped through sun-speckled glades in beautiful shining pelts, and among the
tiny trees flew little bits of high song and bright blue and yellow color,
flying, flying, flying in that small sky.