Tella inhabited the Neme, where the sun rose purple and yellow and stayed. If Fotine wished, the clouds would reform exactly as they had a week ago but Tella was glad they were different now.
“I must talk to Fotine,” she said. “He doesn’t know everything.”
“He seems to,” said Clotho who was a friend. They had been in school together and in those years made countless drawings of trees and the yellow and white clouds that hung above them. Always they had been attentive to the various forms of clouds; the women minded the sky, watching it, seeking out the strange shapes, and marking how every shape mutated to new shapes with some new meaning it was hard to guess.
“To make the clouds form exactly as they were a week ago, or last year, that must be hard,” said Clotho. “It must be like making time repeat, but in a local sort of way.”
“That’s just why we don’t need it,” said Tella.
Clotho languished and her arms hung down from the tree snake-like, for she was always in repose.
That night Tella went to join the others in the temenos of the Neme. Most of the citizenry could not make it, tired from work and interested in their own preoccupations, but those who did come knew each other quite well. They each saw their own path but were always just as much interested in the paths of others. Tella brought up the matter when she could.
“I don’t want the clouds to repeat,” she told them. “I want them to be different every day.”
“Oh, but it’s simply amazing,” Alice said. “How he can make the clouds change.”
“He doesn’t make them change. He makes them change back. Changing they can do by themselves.”
“But they are different most days,” said Dan. “I don’t know how you notice. I suspect clouds to you seem the same when they’re not. Remember how much work this is for Fotine: he has to make sure each molecule of air and water vapor goes into exactly the same place at the right time and then has exactly the same velocity and acceleration as it had at precisely some time, but all at the same time, last month. Or whenever. He has to have it all planned. I mean, how can he ever keep track?”
“He has nothing else to do,” Tella said. “And how are you going to feel if he starts doing this with other things, not just clouds? Just the other day, I saw you put a spoon on the counter, take it up to eat, and then half an hour later it was in exactly the same place–when you thought you’d washed it and put it away. Now how does that make you feel? Even things when you put them someplace, they don’t stay, they go back to where they were before. And you don’t even know when before is. It’s all Fotine’s doing. He’s playing with time.”
“Well, don’t be resentful,” said Alice. “He doesn’t do it always.”
“Maybe not,” said Tella, “but what is always anyway? And if things repeat in the kitchen, then what will happen next?”
“What is next?” the other asked.
“I know what is not next,” Tella rejoined. “I know when things don’t repeat. And I like that. And you should too. What’s going to happen to the Neme, which is where we are, if where we are is mixed up with where we’ve been? Don’t you think about that?”
“We’ll always have where we’ve been,” Alice said in her languid way. Her eyes took on a starry haze and her voice a melodic way of making any remark into a lyrical refrain.
“You’re living in a dream,” Tella said.
“If you can remember a thing, you don’t need to dream. Why, then you always have it with you. Or you can have. Think of prehistoric times, of all the ancient creatures that have lived under this sky before us and looked at it the way we do but never guessed that the clouds they saw are exactly the ones we see now. It’s such a blessing. So rare. Statistically of course, but in so many other ways. To think that what they had was never lost. When it comes back you can enjoy it all over again.”
Tella felt a backward wish to undermine her friend.
“If you missed it the first time you can catch up.”
“Exactly,” Alice replied with a lilt of assurance. “If I live through something twice it’s the same as getting that much more time.”
“Twice as much. Huh.”
“Uh-huh. And if I do it three or four times I get that much more.”
“A real savings.”
“And if you do enough of it you forget that time is passing altogether.”
“Yeah,” said Tella. “That’s the part that I don’t get. Time passing is what I want to keep in mind.”
Alice looked sadly at her friend.
“You fuss an awful lot,” she said sympathetically. “You know, Tella, I’ll tell you: you act like a disruptive force. You make things so complicated. You could be missing out on something important. I mean if a thing repeats…”
“If you weren’t paying attention the first time, then you get to make up for that.”
“Well, exactly. And it means that what we have has always been here, always. Like a promise we didn’t know about, waiting for us.”
But Tella was unconvinced. She wondered what could be in Alice’s head. What did the woman mean anyway, waiting for us? It was something that already happened, so what was waiting to her? Tella felt the nagging sense of misappropriation that came to her often when she looked up at the sky and wondered what Fotine might have done.
Tella’s friends gathered around her, for there was a great deal of love among them and none of them hated Fotine. Each wanted an invisible thread running from his own heart to the heart of another. This would be established now and at this moment all believed it would remain unbroken. Tella rejoiced to feel their closeness and how they all cared for her and for what she said even though they could not give importance to her concerns the way she did. She felt their warmth and their bowering enclosure like the petals of a lily, moist and promising and unwilling to let her be alone with her disquiet. She wished that that could go on forever.
But later that evening when she was alone she did not want to look up at the night sky. By making the clouds repeat, Fotine was betraying her and she knew that he was really betraying everyone else too, though they did not see it. Or did not care.
Tella waited several days before approaching Fotine. She was hesitant and thoughtful, especially since she felt no certainty that she could have any effect and might come away looking like a fool. She would of course tell everyone how it went whether good or bad. Then one night she put on her best ivory dress, the one that had pleats and no special markings. She wanted to cast an aura that could not be picked apart.
Fotine lived under ground, beneath the bole of a giant tree. It was a primitive dwelling, carved out by either his ancestors or his mentors, since what he did, not just with the clouds, was, like the tree, arcana that had to be handed down or at least studied more than anyone else had the patience for. The ambiance of the tree, living right under it where the roots ran, that surely affected the man and some said it made him a little strange. Tella had heard that he could live nowhere else; that if he left the tree for too long he would fall ill and might even die.
“I want you to stop changing the clouds,” she said.
“I don’t change them. They change themselves. I only sometimes change them back.”
“Rechanging them. Back to what they were at some other time. I don’t like it.”
“I’m surprised you even noticed. You must have a photographic memory for clouds.”
“I can tell.”
Fotine was not a young man. Tella remembered him from when she was small and her friends would point out where he lived and how rarely they saw him, but they all said he was very old.
“He must get lonely,” Tella said.
“He has his tree,” said another. “That’s enough for him.”
Now as they spoke and broke the ground of strangeness between them, the lines in his face deepened with puzzled sorrow. He had the strange air of being concerned by what she said but at the same time hearing her over a great distance farther than she could see. His gaze drifted over the glass and screens of his apparatus. Its pointy vanes extended up to the ceiling grazed now with the smoke of candles and gritty votive fires. Up there she knew the penciled vanes like needles poked through the soil at night. She had seen them by moonlight. They went like fingers reaching up between the gnarly roots. In the day other vanes, black and branching, came up in places not far away and sometimes stayed all day. Seeing one of these in the grass by the slanted light she could mistake it for a darkling hyacinth.
“Anyway,” Tella said standing, “I want you to do better. I want this reversion to cease.”
“I’ll try,” he said and his tone was almost pleading. “But you see it isn’t only me.”
“Who else is it?”
He gestured towards the apparatus piled like crates of produce and old stones.
“Some others. And other things. I don’t know. I don’t know everything.”
“I’m sure of that,” she said and promptly left.
Yet in a few days it became obvious that things were not better. Alice, now, repeated. She actually spoke in response to nothing, to no one’s voice, saying things she had said days, even weeks before. Exactly the same words.
“…If you can remember a thing, you don’t need to dream. Why, then you always have it with you. Or you can have. Think of prehistoric times,…”
“Stop it,” Tella snapped.
“… of all the ancient creatures that have lived under this sky…”
“Will you stop? Or I’ll yank out this table cloth.”
“…Statistically of course, but in so many other ways….” Alice’s voice radiated confident sweetness luxuriantly prolonged.
Tella yanked the table cloth and Alice’s coffee spilled on the floor. The woman stood up suavely and looked kindly at Tella.
“I know you can’t help the way you feel,” she said. Her voice again had a melodic lilt.
“At least you said something intelligent.”
That night at the temenos, Tella met the others and they talked about their day. But there was a strange hesitancy when there came a moment of silence and they looked at Tella as if they had to say something but couldn’t think what. They knew she had an idea they might not want to hear.
“You see?” Tella turned on them. “It’s not getting better. It’s only getting worse.”
“Well, you made him promise,” said Dan.
“Yes, and he hasn’t kept his word.”
“Yes, he has. You made him promise to change and so this is the change you coerced him into. If you hadn’t entreated him, it would be just clouds. Now it’s the clouds and Alice too.”
“It isn’t the clouds,” Clotho said, speaking again from her tree. “I’ve watched. They’re definitely different now. I don’t think he repeats a single one.”
“No matter,” said Tella. “Alice is what he’s making repeat now. Used to be just a cloud and now it’s a person. She’s caught in a time circle and she can’t get out.”
“Never?”
“Well, pretty much never. Or at least when I saw her this afternoon. And if she’s different for a while, who’s to say it won’t happen again? Fotine doesn’t control everything. He’s sometimes very careless. He started her repeating and he has no idea when she’ll do it again.”
“Again?” said Dan. “Hm. Again is a funny word.”
That night sitting in the dark by her window Tella watched up at the streaks of clouds. Their long fingers extended out in threads near the horizon and its gloom promised encroachment of a waiting presence she could not name. She started to feel certain of a strange idea: that the deciding factor would be to get Fotine out from under his tree. If he were somewhere else he might think differently. He might consider something in his own thinking that would not repeat.
“Being under that tree all this time, for years really, that could affect a man’s mind.”
No one had any argument with that.
So off Tella went again, this time in a green dress, just as tasteful as before, with no accoutering pins. She sat in the middle of his home and admired all the work he had put into it. She was more confident now, despite the fact that there seemed to be no reason to be assured. With deliberate motions up over his head, Fotine showed how he trimmed the roots like hoary beards of old men, where the fine fur of them hung down.
“See, they are like hair. They are looking for ground,” he said, “but you see there is only air. And us.”
“And all your stuff. But this is a chance to get away from it, Fotine. Come with me. You’ll meet people you should have known a long time ago. But they’ll be new. It will be an adventure for you.”
She saw he was leery. He might even be afraid.
“It’s a sizeable group,” she went on. “But it isn’t everyone. You won’t be embarrassed or put on the spot.”
That seemed to enlighten him. With his soft voice as if she were hearing him from a great distance, he agreed to follow her.
When they got there the place was illumined by lights high up, which was the way Tella wanted it, so there were no shadows inside the disk. All stood back and Tella placed herself on the opposite side from Fotine so there was a lighted space between them and they could speak out across it. Calmly Tella described what she had seen, how even though the clouds seemed not to repeat anymore, Alice repeated and in a way that was worse. Tella complained that it altered the social ambiance for everyone and it made Alice a less enjoyable person than she had been before. Fotine said he understood. But was that all? Had she brought him here just to discuss this one person?
“One person is important,” said Tella. “One person turned back on herself is an aberration that must be addressed. Alice can’t speak to any of us anymore without we have doubts she’s responding to us as we are.”
“Perhaps she’s responding to you as you were.”
“Then we aren’t relating at all. That’s not good enough.”
Fotine hesitated. He had the shyness of a man who was not used to speaking to a crowd but wanted to be brave enough to endure it.
“Well,” he said, “if you all feel that way, I suppose, well…. Do you?”
He looked around at those assembled and got only murmured replies.
“You really think what Tella describes is not the way it should be? Do you?”
He asked them openly but again there were only vague murmurs. Tella felt she had better speak or the whole matter would fall apart from indifference in the crowd.
“It isn’t right, Fotine. It isn’t human.”
With that he assented and the discussion became dispersed. Others offering their own opinions and countering the opinions of those who spoke first. Tella saw that nothing substantial was going to develop after that. She sought a way to taper off.
“You may as well go on,” she called to Fotine. “I know you’ll do the best you can.”
Fotine assented, bowed and walked back out of the light. Tella turned to talking with the others, about how their day had gone and what plans they had for the next. There was hardly a word about Alice who wandered among them, dipping into one conversation and then another. She seemed oblivious to being the subject of any talk at all. All chatted among themselves for several minutes. Then without warning Tella turned around and saw Fotine. He was exactly where he had been before. He took the same pose. He made the same gestures and his mouth was open as it had been when he was about to speak as he did now:
“…what Tella describes is not the way it should be?” he was saying and he looked around with the same spread of his hands as before.
Tella stood aghast and watched the man repeat several of the things he had said minutes before with no prompting from anyone.
“Fotine, you’ve got to stop.”
“What?” He looked around at her, apparently surprised he was not alone. She walked across the open disk and took his hand.
“Let me help you out,” she said. “Out of this little circle.”
She led him away from where the light was brightest and along a path among sleeping trees and fronds that reached for their arms as they passed. Voices that had been present and urgent a moment before receded and gave way to the whisper of a light breeze in the leaves. Tella walked him all the way to his earthen home. She waited and saw him disappear into the light underneath. Then she departed into the dark, glad that the matter was in some way settled.
The next day was like any other. As evening came on everyone saw that the clouds were different. Several complimented Tella, saying that now they saw how her insistence was warranted and it was really better if the clouds were different every day. A new form, a new shape, it was like new life, some said. There would be a new texture to the clouds and their mutations in the wind. They felt encouraged. They engaged Tella and there was no air of anyone treating her as an out-of-step person. But as night grew near they looked around and saw something that many thought very strange: they saw that the stars now were in different places. It was not just that they moved in one solemn curve as they would by the sidereal rotation everyone knew. It was something else. Now they arranged in new patterns, or not into patterns at all, some said. Everyone remarked that it seemed strange.
For a while they worried about it, some not even accepting that it was so. Others countered them and pointed out particular stars to support their arguments. Dan in particular strolled among them, carefully pointing out stars that were not where they had been only a few nights before.
“They’re moved.” He nodded to himself in a speculative way.
“But not very far,” said a small man who knew stars by their color and luminosity. “They’re not where they were, but where they were at some other time, if you get my meaning.”
“I thought,” said someone else, “the stars were supposed to stay where they were. I mean from one night to the next.”
“They know their place,” said another.
“Well, you see the trouble Fotine can cause,” one said.
“Can he do that? They’re certainly not where they’re supposed to be.”
“No. They’re where they were.”
“You mean in some ancient time,” said Alice. She strode as if she might swoon and her body had a willowy leaning in tune with a faraway thought.
“Probably,” said Clotho. “I’ve known Fotine a long time. He goes way back.”
Over the next nights the crowd at the temenos formed into allied groups and argued about how to deal with the new arrangements of the stars. Soon they set about the task at hand and some scurried to form a system of new constellations, writing down each one and giving it a name. They compared the lists they had made and tried to find agreement without dispute. But many of them blamed Tella for the disruption.
“Well,” said Clotho, “Alice doesn’t repeat as much. I’ve listened to her. Not at all, as far as I can tell.”
“That’s good,” said Tella.
“She likes the Neme. I don’t think she will ever leave.”
Clotho leaned into the bark of the tree and let her leg dangle down. She felt relaxed when matters like that were settled and the tree especially gave her native comfort. But not everyone agreed. Some looked sideways at Tella and she could tell they were avoiding saying anything unkind.
“She can’t fix one thing without making something else worse,” one said under his breath.
“First it was just clouds,” said another. “Then it was Alice. And now it’s the stars.”
“Well,” said Clotho, “we only see them at night.”
“Bad enough.”
“But it’s all for the better,” Dan said, “because with our new arrangements, with our lines and designs connecting the stars, anyone can see we are making good headway.”
Indeed they showed a remarkable level of resolve and creative imagination. Several drew up sheets and charts and spread them out on tables to argue and show others who were eager to see and compare. The talk went on for hours. Even so, they resolved that, once they had collated their work, they would approach Fotine themselves. They would form a delegation and make sure that some of their asterisms and constellations would not go to waste but would find permanence, or at the very least, recurrence.
Tella opined that she could not think why.
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