in a little triangular half-wild patch that had been left where two, roads forked. Nothing was permanent, of course, in a community like this one that might change its houses every five years or so, to follow the fashion, but this spot had been left to itself for a long time. It was the best I could do.
I had the paper ready; it was one of a batch I had printed up a year ago. The paper was treated, and I knew it would stay legible~a long time. I hid a little photo capsule in the back of the niche and ran the control wire to a staple in the base of the figurine.
I put the figurine down on top of the paper and anchored it lightly to the rock with two spots of all-cement. I had done it so often that it came naturally; I knew just how much cement would hold the figurine steady against a casual hand, but yield to one that really wanted to pull it down.
Then I stepped back to look, and the power and the pity of it made my breath come short, and tears start to my eyes.
Reflected light gleamed fitfully on the dark-stained blade that hung from his hand.
He was sitting alone in that niche that closed him in like a coffin. His eyes were shut and his head tilted back, as if he were turning his face up to the sun.
But only rock was over his head. There was no sun for him.
Hunched on the cool bare ground under a pepper tree, I was looking down across the road at the shadowed niche where my figurine sat.
I was all finished here. There was nothing more to keep me, and yet I couldn’t leave.
People walked past now and then—not often. The community seemed half deserted, as if most of the people had flocked off to a surf party somewhere, or a contribution meeting, or to watch a new house being dug to replace the one I had wrecked. . . . There was a little wind blowing toward me, cool and lonesome in the leaves.
Up the other side of the hollow there was a terrace, and on that terrace, half an hour ago, I had seen a brief flash of color—a boy’s head, with a red cap on it, moving past and out of sight.
That was why I had to stay. I was thinking how that boy might come down from his terrace and into my road, and passing the little wild triangle of land, see my figurine. I was thinking he might not pass by indifferently, but stop and go closer to look, and pick up the wooden man and read what was written on the paper underneath.
I believed that sometime it had to happen. I wanted it so hard that I ached.
My carvings were all over the world, wherever I had wandered. There was one in Congo City, carved of ebony, dusty-black; one on Cyprus, of bone; one in New Bombay, of shell; one in Changteh, of jade.
They were like signs printed in red and green in a colorblind world. Only the one I was looking for would ever pick one of them up and read the message I knew by heart.
TO YOU WHO CAN SEE, the first sentence said. I OFFER YOU A WORLD...
There was a flash of color up on the terrace. I stiffened. A minute later, here it came again, from a different direction: it was the boy, clambering down the slope, brilliant against the green, with his red sharp-billed cap like a woodpecker’s head.
I held my breath.
He came toward me through the fluttering leaves, ticked off by pencils of sunlight as he passed. He was a brown boy, I could see at this distance, with a serious thin face. His’ ears stuck. out, flickering pink with the sun behind them, and his elbow and knee pads made him look knobby.
He reached the fork in the road and chose the path on my side. I huddled into myself as he came nearer.
My fingers closed around a stone.
He was nearer, walking jerkily with his hands in his pockets, watching his feet mostly..
When he was almost opposite me, I threw the stone.
It rustled through the leaves below the niche in the rock. The boy’s head turned.
He stopped, staring. I think he saw the figurine then: I’m sure he saw it.
He took one step.
“Risha!” came floating down from the terrace.
And he looked up. “Here,” he piped.
I saw the woman’s head, tiny at the top of the terrace. She called something I didn’t hear; I was standing up, squeezed tight with anger.
Then the wind shifted. It blew from me to the boy. He whirled around, his eyes big, and clapped a hand to his nose.
“Oh, what a stench!”
.
He turned to shout, “Corning!” and then he was gone, hurrying back up the road, into the unstable blur of green.
My one chance, ruined. He would have seen the image, I knew, if it hadn’t been for that damned woman, and the wind shifting.. . . They were all against me, people, wind, and all.
And the figurine still sat, blind eyes turned up to the rocky sky.
There was something inside me that told me to take my disappointment and go away from there and not come back.
I knew I would be sorry. I did it, anyway: took the image out of the niche, and the paper with it, and climbed the slope. At the top I heard his clear voice laughing.
There was a thing that might have been an ornamental mound, or the camouflaged top of a buried’ house. I went around it, tripping over my own feet, and came upon the boy kneeling on the turf. He was playing with a brown-and-white puppy.
He looked up, with the laughter going out of his face. There was no wind, and he could smell me. I knew it was bad. No wind, and the puppy to distract him—
everything about it was wrong. But I went to him blindly, anyhow, and fell on one knee, and shoved the ‘figurine at his face.
“Look—” I said.
He went over backwards in his hurry; he couldn’t even have seen the image, except as a brown blur coming at him. He scrambled up, with the puppy whining and yapping around his heels, and ran for the mound.
I was up after him, clawing up moist earth and grass as I rose. In the other hand I still had the image clutched, and the paper with it.
A door popped open and swallowed him and popped shut again in my face. With the flat of my hand I beat the vines around it until I hit the doorplate by accident and the door opened. I dived in, shouting, “Wait,” and was in a spiral pas~ sage, lit pearl-gray, winding downward. Down I went, headlong, and came out at the wrong door—
an underground conservatory, humid and hot under the yellow lights, with dripping rank leaves in long rows. I went down the aisle raging, overturning the tanks, until I came to a vestibule and an elevator.
Down I went again to the third level and a labyrinth of guest rooms, all echoing, all empty. At last I found a ramp leading upward, p.ast the conservatory, and at the end of it voices.
The door was clear vitrin, and I paused on the near side of it, looking and listening. There was the boy, and a woman old enough to be his mother, just—sister or cousin, more likely— and an elderly woman in a hard chair holding the puppy. The room was comfortable and tasteless, like other rooms.
I saw the shock grow on their faces as I burst in; it was always the same; they knew I would like to kill them, but they never expected that I would come uninvited into a house. It was not done.
There was that boy, so close I could touch him, but the shock of all of them was quivering in the air, smothering, like a blanket that would deaden my voice. I felt I had to shout.
“Everything they tell you is lies!” I said. “See here—here, this is the truth!” I had the figurine in front of his eyes, but he didn’t see.
“Risha, go below,” said the young woman quietly. He turned to obey, quick as a ferret.
I got in front of him again. “Stay,” I said, breathing hard. “Look—”.
“Remember, Risha, don’t speak,” said the woman.
I couldn’t stand any more. Where the boy went I don’t know; I ceased to see him.
With the image in one hand and the paper with it, I leaped at the woman. I was almost quick enough; I almost reached her, but the buzzing took me in the middle of a step, louder, louder, like the end of the world.
