Enigmatic Pilot

garments and stepped out through the door into the ghostly morning, taking a longer, more circumspect route back to the Clutters’. After his earlier performance with the vigilantes, it was deemed that he needed no escort. He thought Hattie would have been proud of the Li’l Skunk.

He glimpsed many shapes and shadows along the way, and smelled the smoke of early cooking fires, the salivatory tang of bacon, and the glug of grits but garnered not a hint of any particular malice or intent toward himself or anything relating to either the vigilantes or the Quists. By the time he reached the undertaker and coffinmaker’s establishment and had scraped the mud from his boots, the sky was streaked with bloody color. Softly, he cracked the door, relatched, and bolted it-and had just snuggled back down into his coffin to think of Hattie when his father rose, stretched and farted simultaneously, which almost set him giggling. Hattie could change pitch! Moments later, Rapture squirmed awake.

“Yeh all fine?” she cooed to her husband.

“Lord, I feel like the risen dead!” Hephaestus exclaimed. “I have a crook in my back that will need a poultice. Or, better still, a knee and a yank. But we need to be shoving on. I’m hankering to be gone now. On our way.”

“I be there,” his wife promised, swallowing a yawn. “How’s Lloyd?”

“Ah, just look!” Hephaestus gestured. “A-peace like a suckling. You’d think there were no troubles a’tall in the world. He probably hasn’t changed position the whole night. Leave the rousting to me. We have tracks to make.”

CHAPTER 4. I Show You Plenty Ghosts

WE HAVE ALL HAD THE EXPERIENCE OF FALLING ASLEEP FOR A minute and then having what seems like an entire night of dreams. Often, these dreams act as a solvent to our day-to-day consciousness-a disbursing, confronting carnival of images and incidents that take us out of our familiar being and into fantastic new (or suddenly remembered) realms. Other times, we find ourselves not swept away from what we had been focused on before falling asleep but drawn closer, so that we seem to pass straight through the matter that was on our mind, merging with it. Such was the experience Lloyd had in the few short minutes of refuge and release that overcame him when he slipped back into his coffin as his parents were rising.

His mind was so aroused by what had transpired with the Quists and the vigilantes, the secret writing of the Ambassadors, and the lethal force of the Spirosian Eye (all of which, of course, had come close on the heels of the time-distorting effect of the Vardogers’ music box and the questions raised by the accelerated decomposition of the cannibal dog), that even though he was drained of physical energy, his thoughts ran back over his night episode. The conundrum of the Eye seemed momentarily impenetrable, so he ended up sifting through the things he had said to the Quists-the idea that the twins’ symbol system may have been treated by some process to create the illuminated effect. This, at first, had seemed to be the most logical explanation. He had even offered suppositions about what type of materials might be involved. Then he heard again in his sleep the remark made by the equine- countenanced girl: “The markings change!”

At the time, he had been aware of some taut string of conjecture her words had stroked in him, but there had been too much happening to address it. Now, in the serial stream of hypnologic clarity, this assertion began to resonate more explicitly. He realized that her remark was like the instruction on the Vardogers’ music box. Initially, he had thought it said one obvious thing-referring to the glowing effect of the writings. But it may have meant something both more literal and miraculous. Since he had first come into possession of the box, a vague thought had passed back and forth in his mind-that the symbols and characters seemed to move or shift with different examinations. Without the technology to duplicate the markings, it was impossible to decide the matter objectively. All he had was a foggy but needling impression that he had so far not had the energy, leisure, or privacy to explore.

The Quist girl had called his attention to it again, and now, in the twilight morning of half-sleep, he was able to at least contemplate the notion without prejudice. The idea of markings carved on a box, which were able to be altered-or to somehow alter themselves-was on the surface absurd. But suppose one had the suspicion that they did. What if this idea lingered and no matter how many times the writing was consulted one could not with absolute certainty feel as if the suspicion had been dispelled? This alone said something important about the symbol system, Lloyd felt. This was, in fact, a fundamental part of its uniqueness-that every time you confronted it, it seemed new and all the more indecipherable.

Yet if it were just a matter of impressions one could argue that the sense of change and movement was due to the foreignness of the markings. The whole world was like this. Birds arrange themselves like musical notes on the rope between trees where you hang washing. Are they the same birds you saw yesterday? Are they all the same? Do all humans appear as un-differentiated and interchangeable to other undomesticated species? This question sent him down a long corridor of speculation, and at the end of the corridor was a painting.

The impression one had that the Ambassadors’ writing underwent some kind of alteration (perhaps continuously, perhaps not) struck him as no more extraordinary than a painting that seems to change color and mood depending on the light, which brought to mind again the story that St. Ives had told about the paintings in Junius Rutherford’s possession. These apparently innocuous works of art, when observed over time, possessed very odd properties. It was not the effects their surface created that changed but the deeper structure, the very subject matter-or so his friend with the mechanical prosthesis had insisted.

As outrageous as the things the gambler had told him were, Lloyd acknowledged that there was a kind of consistency to them-and consistency, whatever form it takes, is always the hallmark of something one should pay attention to.

To Lloyd, the “painting phenomenon” was a transformation analogous to what he imagined occurring with the twins’ secret writing-and what the horse-faced girl may have been alluding to. The amount of space, the frame for each, did not change, but what happened within the frame did, over time. Time was the crucial element. Time and the observer, of course. Without someone to observe the changes, would they occur?

His mind had often spun around this perennial question of philosophy and perception. But now he saw that there was another aspect. There was the much more subtle yet still intensely practical issue of how the presence of a perceiver changed the event or object viewed. If, for instance, one was willing to grant some occult instability to the twins’ writing, what was it that triggered the changing? People, when they know they are being watched, behave differently from when they think they are alone and unseen. They perform. Could it be that in some way the markings were performing, and that the increase in their luminosity was influenced by the number of people and the intensity of attention paid? This would suggest that there was something important about his own particular participation, for the markings had shone brighter when he made physical contact.

This chain of thought brought to mind a comment his mother had made years before, when the husband of one of her herbal-remedy patients had asked with mock seriousness if she honestly believed ghosts were “truly real” or if she was just being colorful and folksy and thought that they were “creatures in the mind.” To Lloyd’s surprise, Rapture dropped the usual white accent she used in public and replied, “Show me now where yer mine true ends and de worl’ begins, I show you plenny ghosts.”

Something about ghosts. And time.

Ghosts and time were intimately related, and yet profoundly disconnected. For what were ghosts but people who had stepped out of time-who were now immune to time-watching from outside, interacting with the world but no longer of it?

What would the world look like outside time? Lloyd wondered in his sleep. What would human culture look like-or sound like-outside language?

Time was change. The glyphs of the Ambassadors seemed to be constantly changing, except for the spiral symbol that looked like a tornado. So their language had something to do with time.

But was not a written language always about time? A fixing and freezing of a spoken language? In his dream state it occurred to him that he had assumed that the markings and carvings were transcriptions of the alien tongue the twins seemed to share. Their behavior had suggested that they understood each other’s sounds. Because the one was so bizarre, he had made the link to their markings; it was not surprising that a method of transcription