The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

CHAPTER XV
THE TYGUERROTYPE

In Which September and Her Friends Enter the City of Orrery, Meet a Gentleman Tiger, and Perform a Spectacular Optical Trick

The Moon owns many mountains. Some are so tiny you and I would step over them without a thought-yet on their infinitesimal slopes, wee invisible sheep chew lumps of microscopic snow. Some line the rim of the Moon like a spectacular fence, and there you will find frog-footed rams stripping painted bark from twisted tapestry trees. The highest and most fearsome of these mountains is the Splendid Dress, which opens up from its snowy bright peak like a skirt, flowing in stripes and swirls and patterns and tiers all the way down to the plains. I will share a secret with you: once, a girl really did wear this mountain like a dress. She was a very serious young strega and stregas are not to be meddled with, for they can hex as easy as they can tie their shoes. She wore glasses and her hair hung very straight. She had a highly developed sense of humor, which in some lights looked a bit like a sense of justice. She would not like it much if I told you how she got so big, so I will hold my peace and keep my hat.

At the foot of the Splendid Dress many brass rings and tracks circle the stony frills and ruffles of the Underskirt, the crags and cliffs that announce: A mountain is about to put on its heights, so hitch up your pride and get climbing. Here and there on the tracks, bright glassy bulbs as big as battleships open up like lotus-flowers whose petals have only just begun to yawn and open up to the day. Inside the many-colored flowers you can find anything a town might like to have for its very own. The tracks click and move every so often, but it’s done smoothly, and only a few people fall down, the way you and I will when riding a tram in a new city where we do not know the stops and starts. This is the place the Ellipsis leads to, the very last, small black pools and ponds no bigger than rabbit-holes.

“Are you sure this is the easiest way to the inner edge?” asked September. Everyone had walked softly after the Ellipsis and the moonquake, each in their thoughts. Great cracks in the Moon showed now, where the quake had cut them. But even so, September felt strangely light and eased since leaving the night and the Lightning Jungle behind. Once you have done a thing like that, she supposed, the only thing for it was to pick up your feet and get moving. She chose, and she chose now to be pleased with herself. Candlestick had not come with them after all, turning up her peacock tail and refusing to speak further with any of the lot of them. Vandals and sophists, she called them, and that was all she would say.

A-Through-L furrowed his orange brow. “Easiest, no, no, September, it surely isn’t. It is the shortest, though, and the two are rarely the same. When you’ve scared off all the patrons you can get so much reading done, and I read over all the maps of the Moon I could find. We could go the long way and walk up the whole lunar curve with hardly a bump in our way, a few very nice rivers with party manners, meadows full of teatime roses that bloom at exactly three fifteen every afternoon, full of iced cakes and sandwiches and cups and tablecloths. And it would take us a year and by that time Ciderskin will have cracked the crescent in half and used the horns to pick his teeth. But this is Orrery, and the way to it is done.”

September fell quiet. Dawn broke over the Splendid Dress, a black and white sort of dawn, stark and sudden and crisp. The craggy colors showed only as shades of darkness on the slopes. Saturday held out his hand across Aroostook’s cabin to take hers-a desperate sort of taking, as though if their hands touched, the Marid could believe that everything was all right. September let him, but she did not lace her fingers in his or press her thumb against his knuckles. She did not want to be cold. But she did not know another way to be just now. She had missed him so much. She could feel the hurt coming off him like heat. Who knew what he had done, who he had been, without her? A circus performer, and a boy who smiled the way she’d seen him smile on that platform. September had never made him smile like that. But she had seen more than that smile. She had seen him, grown-up and stern and unyielding and how could she bear knowing he could be like that? That he could be the man who stood beside the Yeti and did his work? No, no, that wasn’t it, and she knew it. Everyone can be stern. She had done it herself, though she felt very tired afterward. But she could not look her worry in the eye just yet. She folded it up and put it somewhere else, to be peered at later.

“It’s awfully quiet,” Saturday said, hiding his hurt like a wound. The brass rings stood cool and silent in the early light. Nearest to them, a pale yellow cup with swoops of quartz in it rose up against the peaks. A space between its petals showed the tips of gables and garrets inside.

“It’s a wind-up city, September,” Saturday said shyly. “An orrery is like a map of the sky, only it moves like the sky and spins like the sky and you wind it every day to keep it on the same schedule as the sky. Each of those stone cups is a neighborhood. They click around, and when they line up, the neighborhoods talk to one another, hold markets and barn dances, say hello to old friends, and then circle apart again. There’s planets up in the sky for every cup, and every cup fashions itself as a miniature of its planet. This one is called Azimuth.” He flushed with pleasure, to be the one who knew something. “It’s in the constellation called Wolf’s Egg. Do you remember?”

September smiled. In remembering, the unpeerable thing in her softened and she held out her hand. “Yes. The night we slept by Calpurnia Farthing’s fire. Ain’t what’s strong, but what’s patient.” Calpurnia was a Fairy, no different than the Fairies that had cut off a Yeti’s Paw years ago. She hadn’t seemed like the kind who could do such a thing, with her changeling daughter and her quiet way of talking. Perhaps she couldn’t-she still lived and chewed tire-jerky and rode the plains, after all, when her folk did not.

A long pair of slatted tracks led up into the brass rings from the earth around the mountain. Uncertainly, slowly, painstakingly, September fitted Aroostook’s wheels to it like a roller-coaster car. Ell flew above them as the automobile rolled upward and slid gracefully around the rails. After a moment, a great rumbling broke the birdless morning-for an awful, sickening moment, September thought it was another moonquake, Ciderskin shaking them off like a dog with fleas once more. But it was Orrery, clicking forward on its track. The yellow cup moved closer, and they saw a lovely carved gate in its side decorated with apples and sunbeams.

But inside the yellow glass petals, Azimuth stood empty and quiet. The pleasant, narrow little streets held not so much as rubbish; rows and rows of silver houses all had open doors and windows and no one inside. Ell had told it true-Orrery was a city of lenses, and Azimuth boasted so many that the morning sun seemed to explode in all directions. The fountain in the central square was a great, mad, jumbled mass of a telescope, bristling with eyepieces and earpieces and mirrors and bulging glass globes. Every roof hoisted up crystal discs and tubes and plates pointed upward and upward, toward the spire of the Splendid Dress, toward the stars, and further still.

“Would you stay, if a Yeti gave you an eviction notice?” asked Saturday. “How nice it would have been if we all could have seen the Moon and all her millions, dancing so that the whole thing bounces and singing up the earth below! But then I suppose that’s a lot of noise, and I did so miss your talking.”

“There’s a light on up there!” cried Ell, circling down toward them, his great red wings banking. “On the hill! A whole house lit up like a cake!”

With a sigh of relief, September’s little band turned toward the steep, tottering hill that reared up on the north side of the bulb. Aroostook took the hill in stride. His carburetor knob slowly melted into a moondial, carved with figures all in tiny opals, and the gnomon shining like a blade. September did not see it change. She saw only the road ahead, thin and straight with no hope of turning off or away.

The light gleamed ruddy and very home-like out of a peculiar house. September knew instantly what it was made of-not bricks, not wood, but silver plates, photographic plates. The delicate black lines and shadings and angles of a picture of the outside of a house showed stark and detailed on the surfaces of the plates. Every few moments the lines flickered and a new sort of house appeared: now a sweet cottage with roses in the window, then a forbidding stone fortress, still again a fisherman’s shack. Near the door-plate, before a tall window, an etching of a very handsome gentleman tiger stretched on the silvered glass. He bent down to pull a few beans and strawberries out of a negative garden. He wore a rumpled tweed suit with patches on the elbows and papers sticking out of the pockets as well as a dark paisley cravat. His stripes and whiskers rippled on the silver surface of the house.

“Visitors!” he cried when he saw them, putting one furry black and silver paw to his forehead. “Welcome, welcome! How nice to see a full-color face! Or four! What can I do for you this fine morning, and if you don’t mind my asking, why haven’t you skipped off like the rest of them? Good for your health, you know. Such peril in being three-dimensional!”

“Excuse me, Sir Tiger,” began September. The houses around them were all the same, silver plates with black images flickering over them like shadows on water.

“Oh, no sirs between the object and the gaze!” he said, his teeth showing beneath that striped muzzle. “I’m the object for the record. You’re the gaze. But calling someone an object is rather rude, so you can use my name, which is Turing and not Tiger, for I am not a tiger at all but a Tyguerrotype. Accuracy is next to godliness.”

“How is it you haven’t skipped off?” asked Ell. “Where has everyone gone? They want very much to talk to a Glasshob about the use of that great heap of a scope back there. But there seems to be nobody left in Azimuth but yourself.”

Turing the Tyguerrotype scratched behind one round ear. “What a funny thing to say! Everyone I know is still here. Azimuth is as busy and bustling as ever! I can hardly walk down the streets most days!”

September and Saturday looked around at the deserted cobblestones, stretching away into more and more empty blocks.

“Subjects are cowards, is what I think,” the Tyguerrotype went on. “It’s what comes of having to pose and look one’s best all the time. Me, I am what I am. Fixed and finished. A little shaking doesn’t worry me.”

A soft, velvet-shoed boom blossomed out of the mountain. Rain began to fall in thin, gauzy ribbons.

“Might we come in, please?” asked Saturday politely. “If you and yours have stayed behind, we must find someone to let us use the telescope-and tell us how! We mean to stop the shaking, you see. And for that…well, we need to see. Far and deep.”

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” answered the Tyguerrotype, moving like a filmstrip over the plates of the house into the door-plate. “If you came in you’d be photographed and that’s a dodgy business.”

“I’ve had my picture taken.” September shrugged. “It’s not so bad, only you never come out looking quite like yourself.”

Turing ate a silver strawberry in one bite, and looked a bit guilty eating in front of them. “You don’t come out looking like yourself,” he said with his mouth full, “because by the time you come out, you’re not yourself. You’ve gone through a whole country, in through the lens, out through the chemical bath. Everything that’s ever photographed does. But it happens so fast you don’t remember it. It only shows in the photograph-the lines of your face, the set of your eyes, just a little different than you see in the mirror. Life outraces memory. It’s on account of how memory dawdles and smells the perfume of a long-lost love or sings the same song over and over again instead of getting right to the important bits, whereas life just steams right through, one thing to another, episode to episode. That’s why photography got invented in the first place. To help memory catch up. I was a tiger, though probably not a Sir Tiger, once upon a time. A professorial tiger with a big, predatory brain! But some fellow took a picture of me at the presentation of an academic medal and sent me into the Country of Photography.”

“I thought you said you come out the other side on the quick,” interrupted Ell, searching for a hole in the logic of the tale.

“Oh, most all of you does. You’d never notice the difference. But some of you stays and lives in the Country of Photography forever and ever. That’s why you never look quite like your picture-when you’re done being pictured you’re a new person. Part of you is living in the Country of Photography and not in you anymore. It’s lovely here-all kinds of people and houses and trains and horses and apple orchards and smiling people and frowning people and old people and young people all together, everything that’s ever been filmed or photographed. If you sat for a great lot of pictures, there’ll be heaps of you running around, if not, maybe only an out-of-focus background shot. And Azimuth, photographed Azimuth, is a metropolis. Packed full-the biggest city in all of Fairyland, except that no one counts us in the census. The Glasshobs had a lens for everything, and lenses are for capturing, and they took more pictures like blinking before they bolted off at the first sign of worry. As I said, subjects are cowards.”

“But your house isn’t a camera; it’s only plates,” said September, her hair beginning to drip.

“The inside of this house is a darkroom, and that’s the same as saying a tunnel from one Country to another. I come to look at the scenery in the mornings. Though it’s been ever so lonely lately. I don’t know what the fuss is about. We’ve got eleven Ciderskins in Country. They’re harmless! Still, if you came in I couldn’t vouch for your safety. A photograph doesn’t die; it only fades a little-we don’t fear much. But you are very fragile.”

“Do you mean to say you’re not…well, not quite alive?” asked September, who thought better of the question as soon as she had said it.

“That’s very interesting, you know!” The Tyguerrotype scratched under his cravat with one claw. “I suppose it depends on what you mean by alive. Do I seem alive?”

“Oh, yes!”

“If I were not alive, do you suppose I would sound or seem or behave very differently than I am doing?”

“I don’t think so…”

“If you shut your eyes and only listened to my voice and didn’t know that I was a Tyguerrotype and not a Tiger, if you couldn’t see that I am an image on a silvered plate and not a fat, roly, orange and black gentleman with an advanced degree, would you assume that before you stood a real and living Great Feline? With a noble constitution and an eye for composition?”

“Yes, I expect so…”

“Then I am as alive as makes no difference. I do all the things an alive thing does,” said Turing. “Do you know another test for living?”

September could not help looking at Aroostook. She changed by herself, into sunflowers and golden hands and phonograph bells. Only living things could change without someone changing them. She drove himself when he saw fit and she had said no to the Blue Winds (though that might have been a jammed lever) and she had to eat or else she would stop, just like her. She Had Rights, if the King was to be believed. But September could believe a photograph of a tiger was alive more readily than that her car was.

“It’s a handsome machine,” said Turing, following her gaze.

“Do you think-” September cleared her throat. She had said nothing to her friends about Aroostook and his changes. “Do you think it might be alive as well? You seem to know something about the business, is why I ask.”

The Tyguerrotype roared laughter.

“Do I know about living? Do I know about Alive? I know about seeming, little primate. I know about how a thing looks. It looks like a handsome machine. But then, so do you. And I wouldn’t, I really wouldn’t come into the house. I’m sorry you’re wet and hungry but if you stood where I stand and ate my strawberries you’d come down with a fantastic case of mercury poisoning at the very least. If you came into the house you’d end up in my Country, backwards and upside down and black and white.”

“You said when a picture’s taken a body goes all the way through the Country of Photography,” said September slowly, trying to figure out where her mind was tugging her. “As fast as a shutterclick. But that country has to be as big as anything that’s ever stood in front of a camera. How long have folk been taking pictures in Fairyland? They’ve been at it for quite a while in my world. Have you seen a Fairy city in there? With a great giant paw on display in the middle of it?”

The Tyguerrotype stroked his striped cheeks. “It’s possible. I can’t be sure. There are ever so many cities in Country. But I think I saw a place like that when I was first developed.”

“Don’t you see?” cried September to her friends. “We can do better than the Glasshobs’ lenses! It all has to be in there-the Paw, Patience, even the Fairies! If we are lucky, we can see what happened to it. When you live as fast as the Fairies did when they could Yeti away anything they didn’t like you’d just have to take pictures! Their lives outraced memory, kicked it, and jumped on its head.”

“But we couldn’t really,” protested Ell. “You go through in a blink. The tiger said so. There’d be no time to look around.”

The Tyguerrotype shoved his paws in his pockets. “I suppose you know about Physicks, little one. They don’t work the same way in Country. Seeing is magic. A lion I once knew called Werner, photographed in a zoo for chessmasters and scavengers, well, he told anyone who would listen-but no one would. Seeing is magic. When you look at something you change it, just by looking. It’s not an apple anymore, it’s an apple your friend Turing saw and thought about and finally ate. And it’s worse than that-anything you look at changes you, too. A camera takes a picture-but the photographer can’t escape the picture. She’s there, even if you can’t see her. She’s the one holding the box.”

“It’s like what Candlestick said about Pluto. People see my clothes and they say I’m a Criminal,” September said, chewing over the Physicks of it. “And I know I’ve acted like one-but only when I had to!” Or when I desperately wanted to, she thought, a flash of guilt bursting in her stomach over what she’d done.

The Tyguerrotype nodded. “They see you and they change you and you change because you’ve been seen and you change them because they’ve changed you. I hope that sounds very confusing because it’s much worse in Country. There’s nothing but seeing and being seen in the Country of Photography.”

“That’s all very well. But you haven’t said there’s no point in it because we’d flit through in an instant. So there must be a way not to,” said Saturday shrewdly, tugging on his topknot.

Turing the Tyguerrotype furrowed his furry brow. “I should have to catch you as the flash goes off,” he said, “to stop you silvering right through. But I am very vivid. A strong image, clear and dynamic!”

Saturday looked longingly at the silver-plate house. “It sounds like home in there. Everyone all together, all of themselves round the supper table, baby pictures and holiday portraits and wedding albums.”

“And perhaps I will be safe in there-you can’t photograph a curse, after all,” added Ell softly. “But I do not like it. I do not want to be flat and colorless as well as small. I like my own country. I like being red in it, and warm, and round.”

“But photographic processes are caustic!” whispered Saturday. “We shall certainly be scorched, and what if we should come out a mile into space or back in the Jungle? Let’s not be reckless!”

Turing had already pulled an old studio camera out onto his silver plate. He positioned the tripod and peered through the lens, pulling a curtain over his striped ears.

“I am reckless,” said September to her friend. “You have to be, in my line of work.” She paused. “Our line of work.”

“Scoot together now,” called the Tyguerrotype. “Around our handsome machine. I’ve got to get you all in frame at once!”

Turing spread his great, wide arms as wide as he could. His fierce mouth opened, showing silver teeth and a silver tongue lined in black. In one paw he squashed the squeezebulb.

“Everybody say ‘Observer Effect’!” he roared.

At the last moment, Ell could bear it no longer. His flame burst out in fear and doubt and great lizardy distress. The violet jet arced over the silver-plate houses, sizzling and hissing through the raindrops.

The flash exploded like a star.