“Sure as hell looks like it.”

  On the top porch Mabel said, “Let’s go back down to the Gila Monster.”

  “You figure out where you’re going to put in your outlets?”

  “Everyone seems to have decided the place is too hot and split.” She looked at her bright toe. “So if there’s nobody living up here, there’s no reason to run power up here—by law. Maybe Roger’s won after all.”

  “Now wait a minute—”

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking this morning, Blacky.”

  “So have I.”

  “Then give a lady the benefit of your ponderings.”

  “We’ve just killed somebody. And with the world statistics being what they are . . .”

  Mabel brushed back white hair. “Self-defense and all that. I still wonder whether I like myself as much this morning as I did yesterday.”

  “You’re not putting lines up?”

  “I am not.”

  “Now wait a minute. Just because—”

  “Not because of that. Because of nothing to do with angels. Because of what angels have taught me about me. There’s nobody up here any more. I go by the books.”

  “All right. Let’s go back then.”

  I didn’t feel particularly good. But I understood: you have to respect somebody who forces you to accept his values. And in that situation, the less you agree, the more you have to respect.

  We flew back down the mountain.

  I landed a little clumsily fifty yards up the stream.

  “You liked that?”

  Mabel just sighed deeply, and grinned at me a little. “I guess I’m just not made for that sort of thing. Coming back?”

  I squinted. “You go on. I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

  She cocked her silver brows high as though she understood something I didn’t, but grinned again. Then she started back.

  What I really wanted to do was take another ride. I also wanted to get the whole thing out of my mind: well, there were a lot more forms to be filled. Big choice, but it fixed me squarely at the brink of indecision. I stood there toeing stones into the water.

  Sound behind me in the leaves made me turn.

  Fidessa, tugging at the pteracycle, one leg over the seat, cringed when she saw me. “It’s mine!” she insisted with all the hostility of the first time we’d met.

  I’d already jerked my hand back, when I realized she meant the broomstick. “Oh,” I said. “Yeah, sure. You go on and take it. I’ve done my high-flying for the week.”

  But she was looking at me strangely. She opened her mouth, closed it. Suddenly she hissed, “You’re a monster! You’re a monster, Blacky, and the terrible thing is you’ll never understand why!”

  My reflex was to put my hand behind me again. But that was silly, so I didn’t. “You think I’m some sort of ghoul? I’m not trying steal anything that isn’t mine. I tried to give it back to Danny, but he wouldn’t take—” I reached down to pull it off my finger.

  Then I saw Fidessa’s eyes drop and realized with guilt and astonishment that she hadn’t even seen the ring—till now.

  I opened my mouth. Excuses and apologies and expressions of chagrin blundered together on my tongue. Nothing came out.

  “Monster!” she whispered once more. And the smile of triumph with the whisper made the backs of my thighs and shoulders erupt in gooseflesh.

  Fidessa laughed and threw about her black-red hair. Laughing, she twisted at the rings. The laugh became a growl. The growl became a roar. She jerked back on the rod, and the broomstick leaped, like a raging thing. Bits of the forest swirled up thirty feet. She leaned (I thought) dangerously to the side, spun around, and lifted off. Her high wing sliced branch ends and showered me with twigs and more tom green.

  I brushed at my face and stepped back as, beyond the leaves, she rose and rose and rose, like Old Meg, like ageless Mab, like an airborne witch of Endor.

  Some history here:

  I was transferred at the end of the week to Iguana. Six months later word came over the line that Mabel had retired. So Global Power lost another good devil. Iguana lumbers and clanks mainly about Drake’s Passage, sniffing around in Antarctica and Cape Horn. Often I sit late in the office, remembering, while the cold south winds scour the skylight—

  So I forgot something:

  When I went to look at Roger’s body.

  He had fallen by the line. We were going to let the Gila Monster bury him when it covered up the cable.

  I’d thought the ring might have melted. But his hand had hardly blistered.

  I took it off him and climbed out of the trough. As I came over the mound, between the brush and the tree trunks, something moved. “Pitt?”

  She darted forward, changed her mind, and ducked back.

  “Do you . . . want to take this back to Danny?” I held it out.

  She started forward again, saw what I held. A gasp, she turned, fled into the woods.

  I put it on.

  Just then Sue, all sleepy-eyed and smiling, stepped onto the balcony and yawned. “Hello, Blacky.”

  “Hi. How do you feel?”

  “Fine. Isn’t it a perfectly—?” She flexed her arm. “Sore shoulder.” (I frowned.) “Nothing so bad I can’t [sigh] work.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Blacky, what was the commotion last night? I woke up a couple of times, saw lights on. Did Mabel send everybody back to work?”

  “It wasn’t anything, honey. You just stay away from the trough until we cover it up. We had some trouble there last night.”

  “Why? Isn’t it a perfectly—?”

  “That’s an order.”

  “Oh. Yes, sir.”

  She looked surprised but didn’t question. I went inside to get Mabel to get things ready to leave.

  I kept it.

  I didn’t take it off.

  I wore it.

  For years.

  I still do.

  And often, almost as often as I think about winter in Tibet, I recall the October mountains near the Canadian border where the sun sings cantos of mutability and angels fear to tread now; where still, today, the wind unwinds, the trees re-leave themselves in spring, and the foaming gorge disgorges.

  —Rifton

  November 1967

  CAGE OF BRASS

  Describe the darkness inside Brass? It was too complete to fix with words. He shunted and shuttled through the dark until he stopped in one of the cells, was lowered by the mechanical hands into the glycerine coffin, and the lid fell like a feather falling on a mound of feathers. That darkness? Perhaps you could hint at it with a lack of words. Perhaps you could hint at it by saying that once the voices came, there was nothing else:

  “Hey!”

  “. . . aaaaaaah . . .”

  “Hey! What’s your monicker, buddy-boy?”

  “I don’t tink he wake up yet.”

  “Shut up! Hey, come on and give with something beside the grumbly-grunts!”

  “. . . aaah . . . wha . . .?”

  “He’s cornin’ roun’ now!”

  “. . . who are . . .?”

  “I’m Hawk, grunter. And that’s—”

  “I’m Pig. Hawk wants ’a know what they got ya for.”

  “Oh. I . . . my name . . .”

  “That’s it, baby. Give Hawk what he wants. Hawk always gets what he wants.”

  “ ’S’right. You tell ’im, Hawk.”

  “. . . Cage. Jason Cage.”

  “Who’d you cross, Cage, to get stored down here in the subbasement with the likes of us?”

  “I. . . look, leave me alone!”

  “No!”

  “I don’t . . . I just want to be left—”

  “I’ll make Pig do his hollering act. Baby, that’ll drive you battier than you feel now. Go on, Pig. Holler.”

  “Aloooah—glogalogologologa—Rheeeeeeeshiminyl Biminy! Whim-iny! Zapologologola—”

  “. . . all right!”

  “You don’t get left alone, Mister Jason Cage. I been here a year now with nothing but Pig to babble with. And they burned out half his brain before they dumped him down here. No, you ain’t going to be left alone. You talk to me!”

  “Hawk wants ’a know what they got you here in Brass for.”

  “And you’re going to tell Hawk why they got you here in Brass. You hear that, Mister half-asleep Cage?”

  “(breath) . . . (breath) . . . I guess you fellows don’t get too many newspapers down here.”

  “Never read no newspapers even when I weren’t here (chuckle).”

  “Shut up, Pig! Come on. Spill, Cage.”

  “I don’t want to talk about—”

  “Talk!”

  “I’ll tell ya all ’bout me if ya tell me ’bout you. Ya gotta talk, Mister Cage. I heard jus’ ’bout all there is to hear about Hawk. An’ there ain’t much left to hear ’bout me. Please, Mister Cage—”

  “Shut it, Pig. Cage: Talk, I said.”

  “All . . . right. All right. But it hurts.”

  “Hurt, Cage.”

  “They ain’t put us in Brass to make us happy—”

  “There’s a world out there. What world do you come from, Hawk?”

  “A place called Krags, from a city called Ruption, where the streets are cracks down to the hot core of the planet and lava broils up with sulfur and brim.”

  “Yeah, yeah, you told me all about Ruption, where the green and yellow smoke twists up between the balconies of the rich men’s palaces in the charred evening—”

  “Shut up, Pig. Go on, Cage.”

  “Don’t shut up, Pig. What about you?”

  “You wanna know where I’m from, Mister Cage?”

  “He’s from a world called Alba, Cage.”

  “Yeah, Alba, an’ a city called Dusk. Dusk is in the mountains,

  where we got caves cut way down in the ice, and sunset and dawn flame in the fog and make the ice dance like diamonds.”

  “I’ve heard it, Pig. Let Cage talk.”

  “Well I come from a world called . . . Earth.”

  “Earth?”

  “Be quiet, Pig!”

  “From a city called Venice. At least that’s where I was arrested, where I was tried, and where I was sentenced to spend the rest of my life in Brass. Venice? There the ocean comes and makes streets between the great palazzos and crowded slums strung with clothes lines, where the motorboats stop on the market street, decks spread with cabbages and tomatoes and persimmons and mussels and artichokes and clams and lobsters. Where the visitors and the architectural students and the bankers and the artists stroll down the tiled trapezoid of the Piazza, move among the pink columns of the Doge’s Palace, come and walk down the waterfront and gaze into the canaletti where the Bridge of Sighs arches between the Doge’s palace and the old dungeon. Where the students will see you wandering by yourself with the park on one side and the sea on the other, and run up to you and slap your back and tell you to come with them, and drag you back to the vaporetto that hums down the Grand Canal, singing and joking with the girls, while I try to point out to Bruno the historic bits of architecture that have fascinated men of Earth since Ruskin. They storm down the alley to the Mensa, rollick over the Ponte Academia, its boards brown and hung with moss underneath, pass the little wine shops, then upstairs, where you pound on the doors to make the cooks let you in and then everybody is eating and singing, and Bruno is telling you that it is all right, not to worry, and you cannot be sad any more because it is Venice . . .

  “Hey, wa’ ’sa matter, Mister Cage?”

  “Go on, Cage.”

  “Have either of you ever seen Brass from the outside?”

  “Sure as hell can’t see it from the inside.”

  “Shut up, Pig. No.”

  “It’s on a plane of rock and snow. Even the clouds are scrawny. They shroud the nights and let the stars peak down on Brass itself. And it just sits there and doesn’t look back.”

  “Nobody’s ever supposed to have seen Brass, Mister Cage.”

  “Yeah, how’da ya know what it looks like?”

  “I’ve seen a picture. I’ve seen many things I’m not supposed to have seen, Pig. I was an architectural student, you see.”

  “On Earth?”

  “In Venice?”

  “That’s right. I was once allowed access to the plans. I got a chance to see where all the corridors go and where they come from.”

  “You did?”

  “I could tell you where every brick and block on Hagia Sofia is placed and mortared. I could tell you how they put together the optical-illusory temple of Ancqor on the world of Keplar down to the last mirror. And I know every blind corridor and twist and turn and gate and time lock and drainage conduit in Brass.”

  “You do?”

  “Hey, you mean you know how you could get out of here?”

  “Venice . . .”

  “Hey, Hawk. Maybe Cage knows how to get us out of here!”

  “Shut up, Pig. Keep talking, Cage.”

  “Venice, that’s so far away now; no more nights in the wine shop while Giamba throws his knife to cut the sausages hanging from the rafters; those nights where we drank the wine from the south and the wine from the north to see which was sweeter. They are gone. Bruno is gone. And so is the beautiful lazy-eyed girl who destroyed it all: Bruno, me and the beautiful girl called—”

  “Cage!”

  “-Sapphire!”

  “Cage, listen to me!”

  “Yeah, you better listen to Hawk!”

  “Sapphire is gone . . .”

  “Can you tell us how come these three coffins can talk to one another? I been in one coffin before this one. I cried and screamed and whimpered like a dog there. But this is the first one where I ever heard anyone answer. All the answer I got was Pig. But it was more than before. What is it, some kind of whispering chamber effect?”

  “Why we three can . . . hear?”

  “Yeah, can you tell Hawk an’ me that? I been in two before this one an’ I ain’t never heard no voices.”

  “The tri-nexus . . . yes, that must be it. The prisoners in Brass are stored in glycerine coffins that feed and wash them and minister to any medical needs and keep them from hurting themselves . . . too badly. You can hurt yourself just to the point of death, then the coffin knocks you out with drugs and makes you get better. You can get out of it to exercise once a day, in the dark, in a little stone cubicle—”

  “Yeah, yeah. We know all that, Cage. But why the parly-parly in these three coffins?”

  “At the tri-nexus—that s at the very bottom of the prison, three chambers come together around the old drainage pipes. Hollow metal pipes instead of stone between these three chambers. A new drainage system was put in a hundred and fifty years ago. If the pipes were filled up with waste and things, then you couldn’t hear. But the new system goes somewhere else. Now that the pipes are empty, these three coffins in the lowest level have . . . well, you can hear. . . through the drains.”

  “What about getting out, Mister Cage? Hawk and me sure would like to get out of this.”

  “Quiet, Pig.”

  “. . . the drains . . . of the city, emptying along the canal, into the water, the bits of paper, the leaves, the filth of animals and humans floating in the water along the back canals of the city . . .”

  “What’s ’a matter with ’im, Hawk?”

  “Just listen, Pig.”

  “. . . alone, wandering alone in the back alleys of the city, the sky running like purple waters between the narrow rooftops, the water beside me like dirty blood, arteries laid open between crumbling stones. Oh, it’s a terrible city, beautiful with its wells and its rusted railings, and its rickety porches hanging over the water, its shop windows alive with the glass of Murano, its children darkeyed and dark-haired with skin like dirty soap, a city of beauty, a city of loneliness . . .”

  “Cage, we’re alone. Here in Brass, you hear about it all the time, the prison without guards. It’s all automatic. All the coffin changing, the feeding, it all goes on without guards. Now you say you know how Brass is laid out. How can we believe all that?”

  “I know. I knew the stones of the city better than Ruskin, better than Persey. I knew the crack in the rock where Napoleon laid his pick to the Ponte San Marco, and I know the workings of the locks in the dungeon by which the Doge could flood the lower chambers of the prison when he had to be rid of vast numbers of political prisoners without question; I knew the passage by which Titian’s Ascension of the Virgin was smuggled from St. Mary’s to the cellar of Di Trevi the wool merchant, or the foundations for the gate by which Marion visited Angiolina before their betrothal. I have walked down the staircase of the palace as did Byron and Shelley, and like them I found the secret entrance into the Palazzo Scarlotti where the nightly debauches are still being carried on by the decadent sons of the sons of Fottia, in the mirrored halls, in the tapestried pavilions. All of the city was open to me, and I was profoundly alone.”

  “What’s he talkin’, Hawk?”

  “Shhh—”

  “And into my aloneness, into the Venetian evening, came Sapphire. Hawk, Pig, have you ever seen a woman?”

  “Pig, who was the most beautiful woman you ever saw?”

  “Huh? Well, there was Jody-b, and when I us’ta bring in my haul back in the caves of Dusk, she’d laugh and wallop me and wrestle me for the best piece, and the others would stand around the fire, hoopin’ and hollering, and bettin’ on which of us, she or me, would win—”

  “I knew a woman in Ruption. She walked in the burning streets of the city, and the flames fell back into the earth around her. Her name was Lanza, and when she dropped her fire-colored hair across my face, her fire-colored mouth on mine—”

  “Neither of you have known Sapphire. Neither of you have known a woman. She was the daughter of an Ambassador to Earth from the thirteenth planet of Sirius. You come from Krags and Alba? She had summered on one and wintered on the other and found them dull, tawdry, productive of incomparable ennui. And she had come to Venice. I saw her three times in one afternoon. Venice is a small city, and if you are wandering the streets, you will pass other wanderers many times; first on the steps of the bridge at Ferovia, while women with their husbands carried their baby carriages across the steps, and lottery vendors hurried by, their sticks streaming with tickets. Again, at the Rialto, I saw her as they were closing the stalls along the bridge, and she stopped to examine a flask, then replaced it and looked over the balustrade into the water; the third time, when I dared speak to her, was on a little back canal, where she had stopped on the tiny Ponte Diavolo, leaning on the rail, while the sunset gilded the swell of water that flapped at the rotten, rusty stones. I came upon her just as she was offering a piece of something to one of the cats. I ran to her, struck her hand away, and when she drew back, frightened and surprised, I explained that the wild cats that roamed the city were vicious, many of them diseased, and that with so much fishing in the city they could fend for themselves. First she looked offended, then just annoyed, but at last she laughed and agreed to go with me when I invited her back to the university, begged her to come, explained how much fun the students were, how delightful the city could be with good companionship, till at last she smiled and exclaimed, “Why, you poor, lonely man. Of course I’ll come with you,” and she came, while I told her all about the prizes I’d won, and the buildings I’d planned, and the papers I’d written; and when we reached the Grand Canal, I helped her onto the vaporetto; and as we plowed the water between the gorgeous facades, I pointed out to her Ca’ d’Oro, the Scholas and the great merchant palazzos that towered into the evening behind the colored landing poles, their reflections shimmering until the public-boat’s ripples shattered them. And when we went up to the students’ dining room, oh, they were so friendly with us, and Bruno came all the way over to invite us to the party he was giving that night. ‘I couldn’t find you earlier or I would have invited you before,’ he explained. And that night we drank wine and danced on the balcony, and the breeze lifted Sapphire’s scarf and hung it over the moon for a moment so that her face was in shadow, and I held her hand, and she smiled in shadow, and below the water carried flecks of silver down toward a bridge. And then the scarf dropped again . . .”