Masseter, meanwhile, waited at the sideboard until Petra had returned to her seat on the sofa. Then he took another long sip and two steps toward the center of the room. “Here goes, then.”
SIXTEEN
THE GARDENER OF METEORITES
The Chapman’s Tale
IN ANOTHER PLACE, in another time, there was a boy who could see the patterns.
All of them. And he nearly went mad with it.
Humans, like many creatures, are built to recognize patterns. It’s a protection—a way to find what we need to survive, and also to see the dangers lurking in the shadows. It is how we recognize the things we sense, and how we understand the ways in which they fit into the world around us.
And patterns are everywhere. In the clouds. In the tides. In the red fruit, so like an apple, that hangs from the tree, just within reach, when you find yourself famished by the side of the road at high noon; in the creature whose face reminds you of a wolf’s, the one you will now edge slowly away from. In the seedpods of pinecones and the nesting of spirals. In music, in speech.
In all these damned stories. Sequences. Series. Systems. Loops. Echoes.
This boy . . . let’s call him—no, not Pantin; though I imagine you haven’t heard the last of his tales, Maisie. Anyhow, this boy wasn’t from Nagspeake at all. Let’s call him Foulk.
Foulk couldn’t turn the patterns off. He couldn’t stop seeing them, sensing them, anticipating them. The natural ones, the intentional ones, the accidental ones and coincidental ones; the meaningful ones and the ones that were there, unmissable, but simply didn’t mean anything. The almost-patterns—oh, those were often worse: the ones that never quite manifested, or came close enough to meaningfulness to make him want to scream with frustration. Panes of window glass that didn’t quite match. A sound repeated, its rhythm just out of phase with the order his brain expected. Torture on top of torture. And it was all constant. An assault, like voices screaming in his ears and pounding in his head all the time. Torchlight, directed straight into the eyes.
He dreamed of emptiness, and silence. A cloudless, birdless, colorless sky; a dark sea with no scent, no temperature, and no motion.
And then, one day when he was not quite fifteen, he had an idea. He decided the way to force all those patterns to fade into the background was to try to make himself look for one particular system among all the rest. Just one thread, one web in the forest of information. Because as he grew, as he became more and more accustomed to the constant barrage as one becomes accustomed to the needle-pain of freezing water or the sandpaper ache of smoggy air in the lungs . . . he had begun to become aware of something.
Not aware of the actual pattern, per se—not in the sense of being able to see it or smell it or touch it. But he thought he could perceive it. Perceive that it must exist, even if he couldn’t spot it yet or pick it out of everything else. But he could feel it like pressure in his brain. All those years of inundation had made him unable to miss the hints of it, the moments he thought must be part of something bigger. They could not all be coincidence, nor all accidental. They could not all be meaningless.
Roads that lie strangely on the landscape. Springs that wind their devices in ways that physics cannot explain. Preternatural lights, unaccountable fogs, ice that freezes where it shouldn’t, its crystals forming according to aberrant geometries with their own inexplicably deviative patterns. The uncanniness of some numbers, some fires, and the occasional lone blue stair.
Yes.
He began to search for more iterations of the data he thought might be part of the invisible pattern. And he began to find them, amid the noise of everything else. But these were like pieces of a puzzle that seemed they ought to fit, and simply . . . didn’t. Or at least, if there was a means to make them fit, he couldn’t find the right way to turn them.
There was one other pattern he looked for, and it centered around a girl. Her name was Jacinda, and in the rare moments when Foulk could stop the rushing of stimulus long enough to notice anything as more than a term in a sequence, he noticed her. He loved how she, almost alone among everything else in the world, could exist outside a pattern in his mind. Yes, she was part of a family, and also human, and also fit into any number of other taxonomies he could’ve named. But she seemed to shake them off as she walked. They trailed behind her, no more substantial than a shadow, or a cobweb. Outside the obscure, indiscernible pattern he sought, she was the only thing he actively tried to place. He loved her, and he ached to know where she fit into the set that also included himself.
Jacinda kept a garden in a field at the edge of town, a garden that was a miracle in its own way. It had not one but four meteorites in it that, according to local legend, had fallen from the sky on four separate occasions at some time in the unspecified past. One was smallish, pocked with golden and glittering crystals, and looked as if a pair of strong arms could lift it. The other three meteorites were iron, full of shallow pits and indentations that made them look as if hundreds of gigantic fingers had pressed into them all over, and varied from about the size of a large curled-up cat to that of a large curled-up sheep. And all around these, in the shallow remains of the craters they still sat in, Jacinda had planted tangles of flowers and vines and brambles.
But she
