Страница 101 из 265
Renie moved forward, squinting as though studying a dusty mirror. The lights in the water were not points like the wood-candles, but something more like active waveforms, shimmers of faint purple and silver that were either moving swiftly or turning on and off in sequence. She lowered herself to a crouch and stared at the hypnotic movement of light in the blackness, then stretched out a hand to the dark water.
"Don't!" the Stone Girl said. "We don't go in it. We have to go around it."
"Why? What are those lights?"
Her companion wrapped small cool fingers around Renie's arm. "They're just . . . they just belong there. Don't you want to go to the tree?"
Renie allowed herself to be drawn upright. "I thought you said it was here."
"No, silly. It's over there. Can't you see it?"
Renie followed the girl's gesture. Halfway around the lake,, something a good bit larger than the surrounding vegetation loomed over the riverbank, half-sunk in the water like a giant cooling its feet. It was hard to see it clearly: the other trees wore their crowns of sparkling fairy-lights, and the water itself was alive with glimmers of faint color, but the thing the Stone Girl pointed at was dark.
As they waded along the spongy lakeshore, Renie could not shake the idea that the lights in the water were following them like curious fish, but she could not be sure it wasn't merely her own changing vantage point. She leaned over and violently waved a hand over the water, half-expecting the lights to startle back, but if the dull gleams were some kind of creatures, they were not much impressed.
Of all the unlikely shapes of living things Renie had encountered since entering this simworld, the Witching Tree seemed the poorest copy of a real-world object. It was scarcely a tree at all: only its roughly vertical middle section, which might have been a trunk, and the way it flared at the bottom and the top, seemed to fit the bill. Its hide was shiny and smooth but for the places it wrinkled at the bends of branch and root, resembling the skin of some black dolphin more than it did bark. At the end of their forking subdivisions the limbs disappeared among the branches of other, more normal looking trees; the rubbery black roots dangled in the murky water like the tentacles of an octopus dragged halfway onto land. The thing gave an impression of not quite belonging, a piece of alien life dropped into the environment.
Considering how weird everything else is around here, that's saying a lot, she decided, "Are you sure that's . . . a tree?"
The Stone Girl frowned. "It's the Witching Tree. Do they look different where you come from?"
Renie could think of no useful reply to that. "What do we do?"
"We make a witch and ask a question." She looked at Renie expectantly. "Do you want to go first?"
"I have no idea what to do." Something about this strange, lonely spot suddenly made her aware of how tired and used-up she felt. "I'll just watch you, for now."
The Stone Girl nodded. She rucked up her shapeless dress and sat on the ground, composing herself. Then, in a dry and touchingly off-key voice, she began to sing unfamiliar words to a familiar melody.
"Hush-a-bye, baby,
Your cradle is green,
Daddy's a king,
And Mommy's a queen;
Sister's a lady
Who wears a gold ring;
Brother's a drummer
Who plays for the king."
In the moment's silence that followed, Renie thought she saw a slowing and dimming of the flashes in the dark water, but the tree itself, as if it were somehow absorbing the light, began softly to glow, the merest hint of a rich grape-skin purple beneath the Witching Tree's smooth black rind. It creaked and shuddered. For a frightened instant Renie thought the tree was going to stand up on its roots like some nightmare vision, but it was the branches that were slowly bending. Something came rustling down from the heights where it had been hidden in the foliage of the surrounding trees—a fruit that glowed like a lantern with a deep, fleshy red shine, dangling at the end of a long black branch.
The Stone Girl reached up her small hands and let the fruit nestle in her palms. She gave a small sharp twist; when the twig snapped free, the black branch sprang back into the heights. The Stone Girl looked up at Renie, her smiling face bathed in strawberry-colored light, her dimple-eyes round. Although she had been expecting it, the little girl's expression clearly said, it was nevertheless a thing of wonder.
The sparkle in the surrounding trees grew dimmer, so that the fruit, an ovoid about the size and shape of an eggplant, seemed now to be the brightest light. Renie found herself leaning forward as the Stone Girl clutched the glowing object firmly and split it in half.
A tiny shape lay at the center of the fruit—a baby, or something shaped like a baby, its shrunken body markedly female, the eyes closed as if in sleep. Its hands were laid across its stomach, the little fingers translucent as threads of glass.
"I made a Witch!" the Stone Girl whispered, thrilled and a little scared. The infant thing wriggled in its glowing bed at the sound of her voice.
"A . . . witch. . . ." Renie fought against the dreamy illogic of the scene. She had thought it a simple mispronunciation, but clearly it was more, somehow.
The Stone Girl held up the homunculus, cradling it close to her chest so that she nearly touched it with her lips as she asked her questions. "Will the Ending come any closer?"
The little thing stirred again. When it spoke, eyes still firmly shut, the voice was eerily out of keeping with the infant form, a lost moan that seemed to echo across great distances.
". . . Ending . . . is only begi
"But what will happen to us when all the world is gone into the Ending? Where will we live?"
The tiny mouth curled in a half-smile, then the Witch began to sing. "Boys and girls come out to play, the moon is shining as bright as day. . . ."
Renie fought down a superstitious shudder. Despite the small, ghostly voice, the entire fantastic setting, this was something that existed for a reason—or at least its creator had once operated under direction and intention. It might be weirdly unsettling to listen to the murmuring pronouncements of what was essentially a machine, but she had too much at stake to be tricked into forgetting. Underneath all this hoodoo ran the binary blood of a comprehensible system: she was not going to be sidetracked by what was little more than game design gone badly astray.
The Witch in the Stone Girl's hand had begun to wither, shriveling into a wrinkled mass like the stone of a peach. Grotesquely, it continued to talk and sing, but the voice had grown so faint now that although the Stone Girl was still listening intently, Renie could no longer make out any of the words. After a while it became clear that even the Stone Girl could not hear it anymore; she stared at it sadly for a moment, then dropped it unceremoniously into the dark, unreflecting water.
"Will the tree work for me, too?" Renie asked.
The Stone Girl seemed disturbed, but not by the question. "Suppose so."
Renie seated herself on the ground beside the girl. She couldn't remember the words the Stone Girl had sung. "Can you help me sing?"
Her small companion prompted her with the unfamiliar words about kings and queens, and Renie followed along, trying to make up for her hesitation between lines with clarity and volume. When she had finished, the air around the lake fell silent. A wind, perhaps, moved the branches of the trees so that the lights wavered. After a moment the branches of the dark tree began to move again: one of the shining, globular fruits was gliding down to her out of the hidden spaces overhead.
As she cradled the warm, smooth thing in her hands and tugged at it, watched it split open like a biology illustration to reveal the little creature within, Renie had a brief but powerful flash of memory. The childish solemnity of the experience, the crude images of death and birth, brought back to her the games she used to play with her friend Nomsa—elaborate, mock-Egyptian funerals of dolls, somber ceremonies out behind the flatblock where the weeds would hide them from mothers they somehow knew would disapprove. This was much the same, another flirtation with the forbidden that seemed not quite adult.