“You haven’t yet said you think me beautiful.”
“You’re an Easter egg.”
“What do you mean by that, Nicholas?”
“Never mind.” He saw the egg as it had hung in the air before him, shining with gold and covered with flowers.
“Eggs are dyed with pretty colors for Easter, and my colors are beautiful—is that what you mean, Nicholas?”
His mother had brought the egg on visiting day, but she could never have made it. Nicholas knew who must have made it. The gold was that very pure gold used for shielding delicate instruments; the clear flakes of crystallized carbon that dotted the egg’s surface with tiny stars could only have come from a laboratory high- pressure furnace. How angry he must have been when she told him she was going to give it to him.
“It’s pretty, isn’t it, Nicky?”
It hung in the weightlessness between them, turning very slowly with the memory of her scented gloves.
“The flowers are meadowsweet, fraxinella, lily of the valley, and moss rose—though I wouldn’t expect you to recognize them, darling.” His mother had never been below the orbit of Mars, but she pretended to have spent her girlhood on Earth; each reference to the lie filled Nicholas with inexpressible fury and shame. The egg was about twenty centimeters long and it revolved, end over end, in some small fraction more than eight of the pulse beats he felt in his cheeks. Visiting time had twenty-three minutes to go.
“Aren’t you going to look at it?”
“I can see it from here.” He tried to make her understand. “I can see every part of it. The little red things are aluminum oxide crystals, right?”
“I mean, look
He saw then that there was a lens at one end, disguised as a dewdrop in the throat of an asphodel. Gently he took the egg in his hands, closed one eye, and looked. The light of the interior was not, as he had half-expected, gold tinted, but brilliantly white, deriving from some concealed source. A world surely meant for Earth shone within, as though seen from below the orbit of the moon—indigo sea and emerald land. Rivers brown and clear as tea ran down long plains.
His mother said, “Isn’t it pretty?”
Night hung at the corners in funereal purple, and sent long shadows like cold and lovely arms to caress the day; and while he watched and it fell, long-necked birds of so dark a pink that they were nearly red trailed stilt legs across the sky, their wings making crosses.
“They are called flamingos,” Dr. Island said, following the direction of Nicholas’s eyes. “Isn’t it a pretty word? For a pretty bird, but I don’t think we’d like them as much if we called them sparrows, would we?”
Nicholas’s mother said, “I’m going to take it home and keep it for you. It’s too nice to leave with a little boy, but if you ever come home again it will be waiting for you. On your dresser, beside your hairbrushes.”
Nicholas said, “Words just mix you up.”
“You shouldn’t despise them, Nicholas. Besides having great beauty of their own, they are useful in reducing tension. You might benefit from that.”
“You mean you talk yourself out of it.”
“I mean that a person’s ability to verbalize his feelings, if only to himself, may prevent them from destroying him. Evolution teaches us, Nicholas, that the original purpose of language was to ritualize men’s threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later. Words can be a safety valve.”
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.
