Case and the Dreamer (17 page)

“Ecologically—” I began to say.

“Damn it, I’m not giving you more of that popular and fashionable drone about ecology and conservation. There is no conservation that will do any good; we’re on the slide. The death of the oceans and the loss of a breathable atmosphere are not the end of the world—the world, per se, is not going to end, not for billions of years more.

“Earth has always, in its numb passive way, fought us back. The struggle for existence, for life, has always been a struggle because by its nature earth didn’t want us. Like us with the lice, we can live with them until we itch. Well, we’ve itched the earth and when we didn’t respond to a scratch or two, to a plague or a quake, then time came for the blue butter.

“We’re going back now, all the way to methane and ammonia,
hydrogen sulfide, water vapor and hydrogen for an atmosphere, back to the fifty-year rains and a land unprotected by an ozone layer. It won’t be exactly the primordial atmosphere, but something very like it, at least as far as terrestrial life is concerned. It won’t be a triviality like another Ice Age. It’ll be clear back to before-the-beginning.

“
It will be
. I am not fantasizing, I am not guessing. It will be so.

“So learning that, I looked at myself—fifty-one years old, faithful, reliable, a good credit risk. Never drank, fought, gambled, picked up a woman at a bar, never skated, skied, never ate haggis or kous-kous. So now I am going to live till I die, I am going to feel, I am going to be. I have money and so far, my health, and I am by God going to use them!”

For some time I couldn’t speak. When I could, I nodded at the computers and asked, “Then there’s really no hope?”

He laughed out loud. “Hope? Of course there’s hope! By its very nature, Earth is doomed to have parasites!” He freed one hand and patted his crotch. “During that deluge of mercurial ointment—an old-fashioned remedy but a good one—among the death-cries of the crab civilization I heard the voice of one old louse-philosopher, who said, ‘Have hope, my friends, have hope, he is but preparing the ground for another dose of crabs.’ I’m quite certain that he was right, and I do hope for the future of lousedom that the new clean environment produces a crab that does not itch.”

I got up then and left, and went to find Mrs. Stromberg and, if I could, tell her why.

“Mesmer-Eyes” he called her in the moonlight; in the meantime he was walking with her westerly to her inner wailing wall. A gross, uncaring bastard was this Bulbul Byo, blessed with silver speech and graceful gait and the manners of a tutor to the tutors of a household royal. His score so far was 66 successful satisfactory seductions, 37 shattered lives, six suicides, and fourteen thousand nights of bitter tears. His road ahead was paved with promises; behind him he left loneliness and puzzlement and greying disappointment—seldom anger, never vengeance. “Mesmer-Eyes,” he whispered, “you can drain me with a glance, I am weakened by your touch, I have no defense if you command me.” Watchfully, he spoke to her, proclaiming weakness as she weakened, acting melted as he touched her, humbled as he humbled her—his special trick, this artful knack of taking on himself the outward signs of this or that effect that he evoked in her. To make a woman want him he would want her with his words and hands; to make her cry, he cried; to make her yield, he said, “I yield.”

It worked. It always worked.

The target tonight was young Cecily—sunny and svelte and a cynosure, making the marketplace more than a mall for mere merchandise. Moonmarket Village (not really its name, but known so because of the region’s tradition of holding its market day, sun-up to midnight each full-of-the-moon) lay in the lake country east of the Wamberly Waters. Who is to say that the Moonmarket merriment, the sweet, mellow madness of Moonmarket Day, was caused by the magic of full-of-the-moon, or simply to celebrate its high soaring silver? Nobody questioned it, nobody wondered why rain never fell on the laughter and lanterns of Moonmarket, nor why the wind
whispered then, sweeping sweet smoke from the barbecue stalls and fanning the flower carts, caring for colorful kites and delaying the dancing of dust till the following day. Likewise the matter of Cecily, golden and swift, her laughter a spatter of birdsong, her adroitness in helping with tent pegs or tea baskets, her instant and total attention to troubles and children; why no one wondered where Cecily went when the market was over, nor how many markets, for how many moons, was Cecily central to Moonmarket time. She was, that is all, that is it; and a far greater mystery, greater than moons or a biddable wind, was that nobody wondered, nobody questioned, nobody traced the incredible Cecily Snow.

Bulbul Byo in a dusty cloak, with a hunting set to his wide-spaced eyes and plumes to sweep from his glossy head and a twist of glands where his heart should be and a tidal voice which could drown girls’ doubts, swung down from the hills to the marketplace when the moon was full and the late sun paused on the wooded crests. The village, framed by its yielding fields with its outer border of wilderness and the distant lake with its green and blue and its scarf of orange from the setting sun, and the call of hucksters and the fiddles’ cry were enough to halt any normal soul for a draught of joy. Bulbul’s care was for none of this, for he saw the sun on long black hair and the swirl of skirts and slender arms, and the fit of bodices that curved his hands; and his glands beat strong and his pointed tongue flicked the pointed tip of his upper lip and he took a step and he froze.

For then he saw Cecily, Cecily Snow, flickering down and across the invisible lines that the dance-caller wove on the Moonmarket green, tilting to this man and whirling with that, and allemande left, and now-swing-your-own. Bulbul, a moment ago, had the choice of a hundred and looked to the pleasure of choosing; but one glimpse of Cecily settled the matter. One deep breath through wide flared nostrils, legs come alive again, eyes blurring slightly through a mist of lust, Bulbul strode to the village street and along to the green and around to the place with the music played. And he waited.

And the music bleated and bubbled and came to a halt, and Cecily spun gasping and smiling away from the dancers as the sets turned
turmoil, and found herself caught by the elbow and speared by the gaze of the man in the cloak, who swept down his plumes and announced that he found her at last.

“I do not know you, sir,” she said, “and I am not lost.”

“I am Bulbul Byo.” His throaty voice seemed aimed at the pores rather than the ears; it soaked the skin entire, to its most intimate reaches. “I came over the mountains and across the moors, seeing the loom of a light like that of the unrisen moon, and thirsting to know its source; and it led me to you. Now you know me and how I came to be here.”

“But not why,” she responded.

“To give you gifts,” he answered immediately, and gave her a little gold locket he acquired two towns ago by saying to a woman that he did not want it. He had given it away one town ago, and had gotten it back by saying how he admired any lady who could treasure memory more than a material thing. She took it and cupped it in one hand while the fingers of the other drifted over its small bright surface looking not at it, but at him. He felt a twinge of alarm, but kept it out of his voice. “What are you doing?” he asked, surprising himself.

“Looking at you,” she replied.

“I mean, with the locket.”

“Looking at you,” she said; and at that, he should have known, but he did not. She asked him then what other gifts he had in mind, which was what he wanted to hear. He bowed slightly and offered his arm, which she took, and they toured the market, where he bought her a sausage and a cider.

“And now I have a thing unique and precious for you,” he said, and he said it leaning forward, taking her shoulders, placing his mouth by her neck, warming it, putting his words up under the fall of her hair. “But I have it hidden yonder, and we shall have to walk.”

“Yonder? To the west? But there is nothing there but the wood, and Wamberly Waters.”

“But there is. Come. We have the moon to help us.”

“Yes,” she said. “Indeed the moon will help us.” Arm in arm they walked away westerly, whether or not to her wailing wall he could
not care, and she simply did not. “Tell me: what are you?” And he answered her easily: traveler, trader, tutor, teller of tales; cavalier, courtier, captain of calvary, artist and artisan, poet-philosopher. “My,” she said. “My!”

And into the fringes, moon-flecked and bright, of Wamberly Wood, and into the thickening growth with more shadows than light, and into the heart of the dark of the woodland they walked, when he sighed and they stopped.

“What is it?”

“Forgive me; you’ve worked at the market all day, you were dancing for half of the night, you are weary. I know by my own weariness, pressing toward you day after day, and you must forgive me.” He opened the clasp of his cloak and spread it on the moss and sank down on it, holding out his hands. “I must rest, and so must you.”

“Perhaps I must,” said Cecily. “You’ve a weary-making way of saying
weary
,” and she took his hands and nestled them beside him.

“The dark has not brought cool,” he said weakly. “I find it hard to breathe,” and he unhooked the loops of his silken shirt.

“I, too, find it difficult.…” she whispered.

“I can barely move, but I shall help you,” and he unlaced her bodice. She made no move to stop him. But as each lace was loosed, she murmured a thing he had told her about himself: traveler, trader, tutor, teller of tales; cavalier, courtier, captain of cavalry, artist and artisan, poet-philosopher; and as the last lace fell away, she asked him, “Are you also a liar?”

“Certainly not!” he cried, startled. “I speak only the truth!”

“Then sobeit,” she said; and, reaching into a stray thread of moonlight, she filled her cupped hands with it like a fluid, and poured it over his head.

For the second time he demanded, “What are you doing?” and she answered, “Making of you a teller of truth.”

“I have told you the truth!” he protested. “I have sought you, I have found you, I have become your servant and your slave!”

“Precisely,” said Cecily. “Know then that I am the Moon Witch of the market village, and that the likes of what you were are not
tolerated, and what you now are can be useful; for now, anything you say will then become the truth, since getting you to tell the truth in any other way is beyond your ability or mine.”

“I will never leave you!” he cried.

“Oh damn,” said Cecily, “I do wish you hadn’t said that. Let me think a minute.”

He waited slavishly for a moment and then she rose and held out her hand. “Come with me.” And she led him through the wood to the shore of the Wamberly Waters.

Moored there was a little boat. She ordered him into it and, opening the little gold locket, she handed it to him, saying, “Your first condition is that of my servant and my slave, and as such you must finish the task I set you before you begin to be my constant companion. Therefore, I order you to take this locket as your spoon and with it lift all of the water from one side of the boat and put it all on the other side.” So saying she bent and took the prow of the boat and mightily launched it far out into the Wamberly Waters; then turned and walked into the wood, lacing up her bodice and thinking good thoughts.

And so it is, if you ever cross the mountains and the rich fields of the lake country, and at the full of the moon, come upon a village with a Moonmarket, and go on through the forest to the lake shore, you will see an old, old man in a boat, dipping and spilling, dipping and spilling, while back in the village the dancers dance and the hawkers cry their wares, and central to it all is the beautiful Cecily Snow. None of which is a mystery, not when compared to the mystery that nobody ever questions, nobody ever wonders, about Cecily, Cecily, Cecily Snow.

The most exciting thing that ever happened to Harry (aside from rheumatic fever and Susan) was the evening he spent with Timothy Leary. After that—well, you’ll judge for yourself, but before, things had been pretty quiet for Harry.

Dr. Leary came swinging into Woodstock, New York, bringing with him two younger men, Metzner and Alpert, with shiny shoes, pants with creases, and sharing a professorial, rather humorless air. They reminded Harry of divinity students, senior grade: earnest, intense, illuminated. But Leary, the leonine head just grizzling, straight-spined, quick-minded, with his charisma and his resonant voice; Leary was something else again.

He used words like “psychotomimetic” and a brand-new one, “psychedelic,” and fielded questions like “If I knocked and the door was opened by a man who had taken LSD, what would you look like?” and “Is it addictive?” openly and immediately, all of which interested Harry quite a lot, but it wasn’t until afterward, at the Café Espresso across the street, that Harry achieved that highest-yet peak of excitement.

Over cappuccino, Dr. Leary held forth about mutations. “There are three kinds of mutations,” said Leary. “Lethal ones, and you can mostly forget about them. They cause stillbirths, and when they don’t, the young seldom survive, and when they do, they seldom reproduce—they’re mules, they just don’t live long enough to mate. Then there is the beneficial mutation—say in a herd animal, when one is born with longer and stronger hind legs. This one gets away from the predators better than any of the others, and passes the strain on. The descendants thrive, and in a few, or a few dozen generations, you’ll find a whole herd with the new legs.

“But there’s a third kind of mutation. It’s the one that just means
nothing—nothing at all. Suppose, in our herd animal, one is born with mottled skin—black and pink, when all-pink has been the rule. This coloration is under the hair, invisible unless you bring a razor and shaving cream on your safari, and it doesn’t make any difference. It doesn’t affect speed or strength or diet or anything else; there’s no selective breeding for it because there just isn’t anything to select. Well, in three generations, or three hundred, or three thousand—a very short time, as such things go—the mottled characteristic will dilute and die out, and, in all probability, never appear again. Why should it?