Nicholas said, “I want to be a bomb; a bomb doesn’t need a safety valve.” To his mother, “Is that South America, Mama?”
“No, dear, India. The Malabar Coast on your left, the Coromandel coast on your right, and Ceylon below.” Words.
“A bomb destroys itself, Nicholas.”
“A bomb doesn’t care.”
He was climbing resolutely now, his toes grabbing at tree roots and the soft, mossy soil, his physician was no longer the wind but a small brown monkey that followed a stone’s throw behind him. “I hear someone coming,” Nicholas said.
“Yes.”
“Is it Ignacio?”
“No, it is Nicholas. You are close now.”
“Close to the Point?”
“Yes.”
He stopped and looked around him. The sounds he had heard, the naked feet padding on soft ground, stopped as well. Nothing seemed strange; the land still rose, and there were large trees, widely spaced, with moss growing in their deepest shade, grass where there was more light. “The three big trees,” Nicholas said, “they’re just alike. Is that how you know where we are?”
“Yes.”
In his mind he called the one before him Ceylon; the others were Coromandel and Malabar. He walked toward Ceylon, studying its massive, twisted limbs; a boy naked as himself walked out of the forest to his left, toward Malabar—this boy was not looking at Nicholas, who shouted and ran toward him.
The boy disappeared. Only Malabar, solid and real, stood before Nicholas; he ran to it, touched its rough bark with his hand, and then saw beyond it a fourth tree, similar too to the Ceylon tree, around which a boy peered with averted head. Nicholas watched him for a moment, then said, “I see.”
“Do you?” the monkey chattered.
“It’s like a mirror, only backward. The light from the front of me goes out and hits the edge, and comes in the other side, only I can’t see it because I’m not looking that way. What I see is the light from my back, sort of, because it comes back this way. When I ran, did I get turned around?”
“Yes, you ran out the left side of the segment, and of course returned immediately from the right.”
“I’m not scared. It’s kind of fun.” He picked up a stick and threw it as hard as he could toward the Malabar tree. The stick vanished, whizzed over his head, vanished again, slapped the back of his legs. “Did this scare Diane?”
There was no answer. He strode farther, palely naked boys walking to his left and right, but always looking away from him, gradually coming closer.
Don’t go farther,” Dr. Island said behind him. “It can be dangerous if you try to pass through the Point itself.”
“I see it,” Nicholas said. He saw three more trees, growing very close together, just ahead of him; their branches seemed strangely intertwined as they danced together in the wind, and beyond them there was nothing at all.
“You can’t actually go through the Point,” Dr. Island Monkey said. “The tree covers it.”
“Then why did you warn me about it?” Limping and scarred, the boys to his right and left were no more than two meters away now; he had discovered that if he looked straight ahead he could sometimes glimpse their bruised profiles.
“That’s far enough, Nicholas.”
“I want to touch the tree.”
He took another step, and another, then turned. The Malabar boy turned too, presenting his narrow back, on which the ribs and spine seemed welts. Nicholas reached out both arms and laid his hands on the thin shoulders and, as he did, felt other hands—the cool, unfeeling hands of a stranger, dry hands too small—touch his own shoulders and creep upward toward his neck.
“Nicholas!”
He jumped sidewise away from the tree and looked at his hands, his head swaying. “It wasn’t me.”
“Yes, it was, Nicholas,” the monkey said.
“It was one of them.”
“You are all of them.”
In one quick motion Nicholas snatched up an arm-long section of fallen limb and hurled it at the monkey. It struck the little creature, knocking it down, but the monkey sprang up and fled on three legs. Nicholas sprinted after it.
He had nearly caught it when it darted to one side; as quickly, he turned toward the other, springing for the monkey he saw running toward him there. In an instant it was in his grip, feebly trying to bite. He slammed its head against the ground, then catching it by the ankles swung it against the Ceylon tree until at the third impact he heard the skull crack, and stopped.
He had expected wires, but there were none. Blood oozed from the battered little face, and the furry body was warm and limp in his hands. Leaves above his head said, “You haven’t killed me, Nicholas. You never will.”
“How does it work?” He was still searching for wires, tiny circuit cards holding micro-logic. He looked about for a sharp stone with which to open the monkey’s body, but could find none.
“It is just a monkey,” the leaves said. “If you had asked, I would have told you.”
“How did you make him talk?” Nicholas dropped the monkey, stared at it for a moment, then kicked it. His fingers were bloody, and he wiped them on the leaves of the tree.
“Only my mind speaks to yours, Nicholas.”
“Oh,” he said. And then, “I’ve heard of that. I didn’t think it would be like this. I thought it would be in my head.”
“Your record shows no auditory hallucinations, but haven’t you ever known someone who had them?”
“I knew a girl once. . . .” He paused.
“Yes?”
“She twisted noises—you know?”
“Yes.”
“Like, it would just be a service cart out in the corridor, but she’d hear the fan, and think . . .”
“What?”
“Oh, different things. That it was somebody talking, calling her.”
“Hear them?”
“What?” He sat up in his bunk. “Maya?”
“They’re coming after me.”
“Maya?”
Dr. Island, through the leaves, said, “When I talk to you, Nicholas, your mind makes any sound you hear the vehicle for my thoughts’ content. You may hear me softly in the patter of rain, or joyfully in the singing of a bird—but if I wished I could amplify what I say until every idea and suggestion I wished to give would be driven like a nail into your consciousness. Then you would do whatever I wished you to.”
“I don’t believe it,” Nicholas said. “If you can do that, why don’t you tell Diane not to be catatonic?”
“First, because she might retreat more deeply into her disease in an effort to escape me; and second, because ending her catatonia in that way would not remove its cause.”
“And thirdly?”
“I did not say ‘thirdly,’ Nicholas.”
“I thought I heard it—when two leaves touched.”
“Thirdly, Nicholas, because both you and she have been chosen for your effect on someone else; if I were to change her—or you—so abruptly, that effect would be lost.” Dr. Island was a monkey again now, a new monkey that chattered from the protection of a tree twenty meters away. Nicholas threw a stick at him.
“The monkeys are only little animals, Nicholas; they like to follow people, and they chatter.”
“I bet Ignacio kills them.”
“No, he likes them; he only kills fish to eat.”
Nicholas was suddenly aware of his hunger. He began to walk.
He found Ignacio on the beach, praying. For an hour or more, Nicholas hid behind the trunk of a palm watching him, but for a long time he could not decide to whom Ignacio prayed. He was kneeling just where the lacy edges of the breakers died, looking out toward the water, and from time to time he bowed, touching his forehead to the damp sand; then Nicholas could hear his voice, faintly, over the crashing and hissing of the waves. In general, Nicholas approved of prayer, having observed that those who prayed were usually more interesting companions than those who did not; but he had also noticed that though it made no difference what name the devotee gave the object of his devotions, it was important to discover how the god was conceived. Ignacio did not seem to be praying to Dr. Island—he would, Nicholas thought, have been facing the other way for that—and for a time Nicholas wondered if he was not praying to the waves. From Nicholas’s position behind him he followed Ignacio’s line of vision out and out, wave upon wave into the bright, confused sky, up and up until at last it curved completely around and came to rest on Ignacio’s back again, and then it occurred to Nicholas that Ignacio might be praying to himself. Nicholas left the palm trunk then and walked about halfway to the place where Ignacio knelt, and sat down. Above the sounds of the sea and the murmuring of Ignacio’s voice hung a silence so immense and fragile that it seemed that at any moment the entire crystal satellite might ring like a gong.