"A life," she said, folding her hands and regarding the first slide of the System which shone on her wall, "is circ.u.mstances. Circ.u.mstances are encirclings, they're circles. The circle of a saint's life, all its circ.u.mstances, is contained in the story of his life as he tells it; and the story of his life is contained in our remembering it. The story of his life is a circ.u.mstance in ours. So the circle of his life is contained in the circle of our lives, like circles of ripples rising in water."

She rose, leaving the marks of her skirts on the hard dirt floor. From the long box that was Palm cord, she drew out a second square of gla.s.s and put it in place with the other. The board changed; colors mixed and became other colors; ma.s.ses changed shape, became newly related to other ma.s.ses.

"Do you see?" she said. "The saints are like the slides of the System. Their interpenetration is what reveals, not the slides themselves."

"It's like the saints," I said, "because they made their lives transparent, like the slides; and their lives can be placed before our own, in our remembering their stories, and reveal things to us about ourselves. Not the stories or the lives themselves, but their -"

"Interpenetration, yes," Painted Red said. "They're saints not because of what they did, especially, but because in the telling of it, what they did became transparent, and your own life could be seen through it, illuminated.

"Without the Co-op Great Belaire there would be no truthful speaking. Without truthful speaking there could be no transparent life. And in transparent life, the saints hoped that one day we might be free from death: not immortal, as the angels tried to become, but free from death, our lives transparent even as we live them: not through a means, you see, like the Filing System or even truthful speaking, but transparent in their circ.u.mstances: so that instead of telling a story that makes a life transparent, we will ourselves be transparent, and not hear or remember a saint's life, but live it: live many lives in the moment between birth and dying."

"How could that come about?" I said, unable to grasp it, or even imagine it.

"Well," she said, "If I knew, perhaps I would be a great saint. Perhaps if you discover it... But tell me this, Rush that Speaks: how anyway is truthful speaking itself done?"

I must know that; I was a truthful speaker, the craft could never be taken from me; and yet... How: Painted Red's question reverberated within me, as a thing held up between two mirrors multiplies itself endlessly; as though my mind were crossing as my eyes can cross. I laughed, helpless. "I don't know," I said. "I don't know how it's done."

She laughed with me. She leaned forward, as though to impart a secret, and almost whispered to me: "Well, well, you know, Rush, I don't know either!"

Still chuckling, she picked up the long box which contained Palm cord's slides, to continue her preparations. A thought struck her as her fingers moved over the tabs. "You asked me once, Rush," she said, "what the names of these slides are, and how they go together."

"Yes."

"Do you still want to know?"

"I do."

"It's the day for it," she said, regarding me for a long time with a tenderness that was like a farewell. "The one you see," she said, "the first slide, is Fourth Finder, Palm cord's slide: you see, in the center, where the lines meet, a figure like the palm of a hand? And the other placed over it is called Little First Slot. Together, they make Little Knot." She took a third slide from the box and placed it behind the others. "Little Knot and Hands make Little, Knot Unraveled." She put two more with them. "Little Knot Unraveled and the two Stair slides make Great Knot." Carefully she drew out and inserted the thin, thin pieces of gla.s.s. "Great Knot and First Trap make Little Trap. Little Trap and the Expedition make Little Second Gate, or Great Trap Unlocked in Leaf cord. Little Second Gate and the Ball Court make Gate."

The figures on the wall had grown tangled and dark, infinitely intertwining. When one slide seemed to make a pattern of the previous ones, the next distorted the pattern. And now I could see nothing in it. Painted Red's hands lingered over the rest of the slides in her box. "It's thought," she said, "that Gate and the second and great Slot slides, together with the Broken Heart and the Shaken Fragments slides, all make Great Knot Unraveled. But no one can read that much; no one who can begin to understand Gate can even begin to read that much." She touched the lens tube to sharpen the figures; sharpness came and went amid the overlayed figures as she moved the tube. She came and sat by me again. "The gossips know, now, after many years of searching, that it can't be read past Gate, not packed all together; and if Great Knot Unraveled is the whole set, then Great Knot Unraveled can never be read."

"Does that mean," I asked, "that it's no longer any use? Since you know that? It doesn't, does it?"

"Oh no," she said. "No, no. It will be a long time before we have learned everything there is to learn even from Little Knot. But... well. It seemed, when the System was first being truly searched, in St. Olive's time, it seemed that... it seemed there was a promise, that one day it would be seen all together, and answer all questions. Now we know it won't, not ever. When that was first understood, there were gossips who broke up their Systems, and some who left Belaire; that was a sad time."

She pushed her spectacles back along her nose. "For me: well, I know there are enough byways, and snake's-hands, and things to be learned from the System to last many lifetimes. And work enough to do with its wisdom among the cords, in their knots and troubles." She looked at Gate, and its lights were reflected from her spectacles. "And the whole answer is there, you know, Rush, though I can't read it; it knows everything, about people, though I never will. That's enough to keep me in its presence."

She was silent a long time, and seemed to grow older. Then: "When will you leave?" she asked me.

"In the spring," I said. "I think I'll be ready then."

"A saint," she said. "You know, Rush, the first time you came to see me, seven years ago, you had a different thought. You were going to go out and find all our things that were lost, and bring them back to us."

"Yes."

"Is your Whisper cord girl one of those things that was lost?"

I said nothing. Painted Red had not looked at me, only at Gate. "Well, perhaps after all it's not a different thought, not really..." She struck her knees with her palms. "No," she said. "No, I won't read for you this year. I think, if you mean to do this, it could hurt as much as help. Do you mind?"

"If you think it's right."

"I do," she said. She had me help her up. "I do." Could it be that I had - almost instantly - grown taller than she, or had she somehow just as quickly shrunk? She took my shoulders in her strong hands. "When you go," she said, "never forget us and our needs. Whatever you find, if it's useful to us, save it; make the knowledge you got here into a box to carry it, it can be used for that. And however far away you go, come back with what you find to us."

And so she embraced me, and I left her, and ran away down the puzzle of Path that I knew by heart, through rooms and pa.s.sages that seemed also to have grown smaller suddenly. I wondered about the reading of the System, and what it might have shown for me and my endeavor, what possibilities, what failures; and I felt a cord cut that had tied my childhood to Little Belaire, and a little lost, and a little free. She must have known best, though: if she knew nothing else (and she did, much else) she knew when and when not to tell what the System revealed.

But forget Little Belaire! She could not have thought I could forget it. The longer I'm away, the more it grows in my mind, the stream that runs through it speaking, its bugs and birds and berry bushes, the mystery at the heart of it hidden perhaps in the Filing System or the saved things of the Carved Chests; and now, now after I have lived in a tree and gotten a letter from Dr. Boots and been dark and light and lived as an Avvenger and been taken apart and put back together any number of ways, though now I think sometimes that that place in the woods is imaginary and I am not a truthful speaker at all, do not really mean what I say or say what I really mean, and have invented all of it: still, even if it's a dream, it's a dream dictated by a voice that speaks truthfully: a voice that cannot lie.

Second Facet

You did, though, really set out to find Once a Day again. Didn't you?

I don't know. Perhaps I did. I didn't know it.

When I was a kid, I wanted to find our things that were lost; as I grew up, and heard the stories of the saints, and listened to Seven Hands talk, I had another ambition: I wanted to be a saint. I wanted to have strange adventures, which I could tell of; and learn forgotten secrets, secrets stronger than the ones Once a Day kept from me; and make sense of the world in the stories I told.

Painted Red suspected that what I really wanted to do was follow Once a Day; that perhaps she was the lost thing I most wanted to find.

And she told me that what saints attempt to do is to become transparent.

How could I know, that spring, what it was I most wanted, or what would become of me? And how was I to know that all of those things were true, that they would all happen to me, every single one?

Well, I didn't. What I thought was this: that despite what Painted Red had said about saints nowadays, somewhere in the world there must be a saint, a saint like the saint I wanted to become; and that what I ought to do first was to find such a saint, and sit down before him, and study him, and learn from him how to go about being what I couldn't imagine being: transparent.

Seven Hands and I had made many expeditions together, sometimes spending a week outside Belaire, just seeing what we could see. I had learned to climb rocks, to make fires with wet wood, tell directions, and to walk all day without worrying that I didn't know just where I was walking to. Preparations, Seven Hands called these; and as my resolve to leave Little Belaire grew stronger, I made these preparations more eagerly, with greater attention. And Seven Hands came to know - though we never spoke of it - that the preparations we made were in the end mine, and not his.

I had a s.h.a.ggy blue shirt, and bread and a pipe and some dried fruit and nuts; I had a string hammock, light and strong, that Seven Hands had made for me, and a sheet of plastic to hang above it to make a tent. I had Four Pots and some other doses; I had my new spectacles that My Eyes had made for me. They were yellow, and turned the white May morning into deepest summer; I took them off and put them on again for entertainment, looking now and then up into the trees for saints.

In the trees?

Because the saints always lived apart from us, and often in houses built into trees. I don't know why. I thought, one day, I would live in a tree as those old saints had; I would choose a great low-branching oak or maple, like some I pa.s.sed. I loved already the saint I knew I would be, saw with strange clarity that old man, could almost, though not quite, hear the compelling stories he would tell... When the sun was high, I crept into a little woods that bordered a marshy stream where wild cows sometimes could be seen drinking, and smoked. Then there was nothing to do but keep on. With only a morning of my adventure pa.s.sed so far, it began to seem impossibly long; and I decided I would lighten that load.

Of the Four Pots, it is the silver one that lightens a load. It contains many small black granules like cinders, of different sizes; I knew this because I had seen Mbaba open it and swallow one. I knew also that to lighten the load of a journey, you must know clearly before you lighten your load just where you are going, how you will get there, and when you intend to arrive. I knew the way to That River, and that it would take me till nearly sunset to find it and the bridge of iron that Seven Hands and I had crossed; so I cracked open the pot and - a little uncertain and a little afraid of what was about to happen to me (for I had never done this before) - I selected a small one of the black granules and swallowed it.

A little bit later my footsteps slowed as I approached an enormous maple that shaded the way. The sound of the wind in its branches grew slow also, and low, like a moan, and then slower, till it was too low to be heard. The sound of the birds slowed, and the movement of the leaves; the sunlight dimmed to a blue darkness that was still daylight, like the light of an eclipse; one branch of leaves absorbed my attention, and then one leaf; I had leisure between one footstep and the next to study it quite intensely, while the sunlight on it didn't change and the low call of a bird extended note by note infinitely. I was waiting with enormous patience for my raised right foot to fall, which it seemed it would never do, when the leaf and the birdcall and the soundless moan of the wind went away, the footfall struck and I found myself standing before That River, downstream from the iron bridge, watching the sun go down. I laughed, amazed. Lighten my load! I had traveled the whole of an afternoon, miles, and hadn't noticed it. I suddenly understood the chuckle of old men when they look, a little startled, at some day-long task they have completed after taking one of these black cinders to lighten the load.

I looked back the way I had come, the trees turning their leaves in the evening breeze, and regretted missing the journey. You lighten a load, I saw then, which you have carried a hundred times before; or to go a journey you must make but would rather not. It wasn't for new journeys or new saints. There's a lesson, I thought, and spun the little pot so that it skipped across the brown swollen river and sank.

Across That River the sun still lit the tops of the hills, but down amid the weeds and roots at the water's edge it was growing dark and a little cold. A frog plunked. I put my hands in my armpits and watched the current go by; I was tired - I really had come a long way - and I wondered if I had put match to more than I could smoke. There was a gurgle and splash of water then, and out on the river a man strode by. Strode: the water came up to his chest, and his shoulders made the vigorous motions of a man striding; a wake flowed out behind him. He shot on past me without seeing me in the shadows; he was moving quickly on the current.

Amazing! Without exactly knowing why, I ran along the riverbank following him, stumbling on roots and plunging my feet in mud. I lost sight of him, then glimpsed him through the trees floating away serenely, a fair pigtail and his wet white shirt flapping. I was some time crashing through the willows and vines at the river's edge, the mud sucking at my boots, till I saw him again, standing up as ordinary as any man, on a wooden wharf built out over the water, laughing with a woman who was toweling him vigorously as he squeezed water from his pigtail. Just as they turned to see what was clambering through the bushes, I lost my footing and slithered like an otter into the muddy river.

They helped me out, laughing and wondering how I came to be there, and it was a moment - a spluttering moment - till I realized they were truthful speakers. They took me up onto their wharf, which connected by a set of stairs to a house built into the bank of the river. And tied up to the wharf, riding high out of the water without his weight on it, was what had allowed him to walk the river: two big cylinders of light metal, with a seat attached between them, and handholds, and broad foot pedals to make it go. He was Buckle cord, I knew then. I was going to tell him about my amazement at seeing him on the river, but just then a boy burst through the door that led out of the house, stopping when he saw me. He was a couple of years younger than me, tanned already, and his hair sun-streaked. He carried a stick and was naked except for a blue band around his neck.

I was thinking how I might explain myself to him, but at that moment a boy came out the door behind him, stopping when he saw me. He was tanned, and his hair sun-streaked; he carried a stick and was naked except for a red band around his neck.

They were the only twins I have ever seen. It was hard not to stare at them as I wrung out my wet clothes. They stared at me too, not that there was anything remarkable about me; they stared with a look I didn't understand then, but know now is the look of people who don't see strangers often.

"This is Budding," said the man, "and that is Blooming." I couldn't help laughing, and he laughed too. "My name is Sewn Up, and she is No Moon. Come in and get dry." Buckle cord, as I supposed; and the woman must be Leaf; the two boys were harder to tell, maybe because there were two of them.

Inside the house, the sunset over the water glinted and glittered on the ceiling and across the dark, rug-hung walls so that it felt as though we were under water too. The gurgle of the river made me sleepy, and sitting with the water-walker and his family made me feel like a fish visiting fish friends. Sewn Up talked as he lowered and filled a gla.s.s pipe; his voice was a good one, with odd insides that made me laugh, and made No Moon laugh even more. I asked him why he didn't live in Little Belaire.

"Well," he said, motioning to the two boys with a spoonful of bread, "they liked the water, and the stream that runs through Little Belaire wasn't enough water for them. Their Mbaba said they moped a lot, so I said if they liked water, they should come back and stay here; and if they liked people - other people besides us, anyway - they should stay at Little Belaire. Well, they get along best with each other, so here they stay."

"We were born here," Blooming said, and Budding said, "This is our spot."

"I took them back, you see, for a while," No Moon said; "it's their home, in a way, as it was mine and still is. But they like it here."

"Aren't they going to be truthful speakers?"

"Well, if we're truthful speakers, so will they be, won't they? There are two truthful speakers in the river house and no river in Little Belaire, so it all works out fine."

And it was better for them, too, Sewn Up said; people would always make much of them, there were people who came a great distance just to see them, and he didn't want it to go to their heads; he had pointed out to them that there was nothing really so remarkable about them. They said nothing to this, only smiled the same smile; they knew there was something very remarkable about them, and so did we.

There was a thick, dry smell of smoke in the cool room, easier to breathe almost than air. When Sewn Up talked, puffs of smoke mimicked his words from his nose and mouth. "Odd you should find it odd to leave Little Belaire," he said, sprinkling new bread onto the blue ashes. "It seems you've made the same choice yourself, and younger than we were by quite a bit."

"Oh no," I started to say, but thought that, yes, I had, and had no intention of returning, not for years and years; yet I had been feeling sorry for Budding and Blooming, who couldn't stay there in the best place in the world all the time. "I'm just, well, ranging; I'll go back, one day. It'd be terrible if I couldn't ever go back." And terrible it did seem to me for the first time.

"Well," No Moon said rising, "stay here anyway as long as you want. We have room."

So when I could think of no more news of the warren to give them, and the lights No Moon lit were growing low, I followed the two boys up a winding flight of stairs to a room with gla.s.s windows all around, open to the clear night which Little Moon sped across. But sleepy as I was, it was a long time before we were quiet under our s.h.a.ggy blankets. I lay amazed and listened to Budding finish Blooming's words and then Blooming Budding's, as though they were one person. Giggling and laughing at things I didn't understand, they rolled over each other like otters; they had looked tan in the sun, but in the pale night light they were white against the dark covers.

They had treasures to show me, tucked away at the bottom of the bed and in boxes, an empty turtle sh.e.l.l, a twitch-nose mouse in a nest of gra.s.s. And, taken carefully from its hiding place in the wall, their best thing. It was a little cube of clear plastic; inside the plastic, poised for flight, a fly. A real fly. A cube of plastic with, who could tell how, a fly right in the middle of it! We turned it in the moonlight, our faces close together. "Where did it come from?" I asked. "Is there a story? Where did you get it?"

"The saint gave it to us," said one, and the other was drawing out something else for me to see, but I stopped him at hearing that.

"A saint gave you that? What saint?"

"The one we know," said Budding.

"You know a saint?"

"The one who gave us this," said Blooming.

"Why did he give it to you? What is it?"

"I don't know," said one. "It's a lesson, he said. The fly thinks he's in the air, because he can see out all around, and can't see anything that holds him back. But still he can't move. And let that be a lesson, he said."

"It was just a present," said the other one.

"Can I see him?" I asked, and they must have been surprised at the urgency in my voice. "Is he far away?"

"Yes," said one.

"No," said the other. "He's not too far. Walk all morning. We can take you. He might not like you."

"He likes you."

The two of them looked at each other and laughed. "Maybe that's because," said Budding, and "there are two of us," said Blooming, and they stood with their arms around each other, grinning at me.

With true Leaf cord politeness, they let me choose where I would sleep, but I lay awake a long time, listening to the gurgle of the brown river, with a saint to see tomorrow, already, so soon!

Third Facet

In the morning, Sewn Up ferried us across That River on his contraption, laughing and making jokes: I've never seen anyone as happy to be up in the morning as he, except maybe myself on this morning, off to meet a real saint. Budding and Blooming wore thick shirts against the morning chill and the mist that lay thickly over the river and its fragrant tributaries, and I shivered. No Moon had given me more bread, and a nice plastic bottle full of grape soda she'd put up in the winter, and a kiss.

"I'll go to the warren in the fall," she said. "I'll tell them I saw you, and that you were well."

I thought of a thousand messages she might bring for me - gone only a day! - but I kept quiet and only nodded, an adventurer's uncaring nod, and climbed behind Sewn Up.

The twins and I followed a rushing tributary of the river for some time till it ran quietly between its wooded banks; when the sun was high and hot and the mist gone, we came to an inlet where a little dish of a boat was tied up among the saplings at the water's edge. It was something angel-made of white plastic, and (like so many things in the world) put to a use the angels surely never intended; certainly, with its odd ridges and projections and strange shape, it had not been made for a boat. So hot and still it had become that Budding and Blooming threw their warm shirts into the bottom of the dish, and I sat on them and watched the twins pole along. Some white water-flowers came away with the boat from the inlet, and the twins pulled them out of the water to wear for hats; naked, they poled upstream, the leaf shadows flowing over them, wearing flowers in their hair.

When the stream became shallow and poured fast over shadowed rocks, we tied up the boat and followed the stream up its narrowing rocky bed. The breath of it was cold in the warming woods, still fed by snow melting in far-off mountains. When we had tramped through the new ferns at its side for a long way, Budding and Blooming signaled me to be quiet, and we climbed the bank. Past the trees that bordered the stream was a small sunny pasture full of small white flowers; and on a slope amid them lay the saint.

He was fast asleep. His hands were crossed over his bosom, and he snored; his feet, clad in big boots, stuck up. His white hair lay all around him on the ground, and his beard spread out around his small brown face so that he looked like a milkweed seed. We crept up on him, and Budding whispered something in Blooming's ear that made him laugh. That woke up the saint, who sat up suddenly, looking around confused. Seeing us, he sneezed loudly, got up grumbling, and stumbled off toward the woods across the pasture. Budding cried out and started chasing him as though he were a bird we'd raised; Blooming followed after, and I hung behind, embarra.s.sed at how they approached him.

When they had been some time crashing around in the woods into which the saint had gone, they came back to me panting.

"He's in a tree," said Blooming.

"We'll never find him now," said Budding, licking his finger and wiping a long scratch on his thigh.

"Why didn't you just leave him alone?" I asked. "He would have waked up, we could have waited."

"Blooming laughed," said Budding, "and he woke up..

"Budding made me laugh," said Blooming, "and he ran off."

"He saw you, is why," said Budding. "He's not scared of us."

I wished I could have approached him alone; now I could never get into his good graces. The twins didn't really care about saints; they chased a gra.s.shopper now with the same enthusiasm they had chased the little old man. They sat for a while poking each other and whispering together, and then came to the log I was sitting on.

"We're sorry about the saint running off," said Blooming. "But you saw him anyway, and now you know what one looks like. Let's go home."

He spoke kindly, because he could see I was disappointed; but he said too that even if we left now it would be long after dark when we got back, day was going.

"I'm going to stay," I said.

They looked at me blankly.

"Maybe he'll come down from his tree in the morning," I said, "and I can talk to him, and apologize for waking him and all. I'll do that."