Chapter 20

  Elizabeth

  Elizabeth chose to spend the night in town with the Yvethians rather than returning to her greenhouse. In the morning she awoke in one of their homes, for the village had no inn or guest house. The cozy log cabin housed a large family of scarlet bird-like humanoids resembling cardinals. A reptilian clan had also offered her refuge, but she didn’t quite feel comfortable with that. She would have preferred cats, but she had yet to see any. Did that make her racist? Possibly, but last night she had been too tired to care. She had drunk tea and listened as a variety of animalian characters explained the basics of her moon.

  Their village was named Kotho, one of many settlements scattered all over Sisyphus, except on “the Mountain,” where no one lived. Five political factions reigned under the guidance of the King in a faraway city, and they battled incessantly with words, treaties, and edicts rather than martial force. Martial force was reserved for the sinister agents of “the Dark World,” which had been landing in greater numbers on the moon recently. Why were they invading? Everyone had a different theory, but it was generally agreed to be odd that the Dark World cared so much about Sisyphus. Winter oppressed the moon, as it had for many years, and its ravages only increased. The ice and cold smothered Sisyphus, crushing it, killing it slowly. The Yvethians were dying, piece by piece, town by town, year by year. Many departed as refugees for Ardia, the planet which Sisyphus orbited around, a world not freezing to death. But many remained.

  Elizabeth awoke to a warm room, curled up in a pile of blankets. She knew already that fuel could hardly be spared. But she was some “hero,” they said, so they made sure she was comfortable. This made her uncomfortable in a different way. Funny.

  Her cardinal-like hosts had prepared what perhaps to them amounted to a feast: nuts, berries, dried fruit, juice. They chattered over each other in their excitement and did their best to explain everything. They remarked with approval upon how much she was eating, to her embarrassment. She tried to listen, but their peculiar whistling voices blended together into a continual warbling more musical than intelligible. They had names, but she could neither remember nor pronounce most of them.

  Her hosts had canvassed the village in the night to find creatures whose bodies resembled hers in size and shape, and they had borrowed warm clothes for her. A storm was moving in, they told her. She thanked them profusely. She felt sure that she had warm clothes aplenty pre-stocked in her greenhouse, and she resolved to return these loaned clothes when she had located her own.

  Elizabeth bundled up in her new scarf, gloves, boots, and coat of thick, soft fur, and she left the home of the cardinals. Outside, the bright morning proved much colder and windier than the still dark night of her arrival. With Callie almost invisible at her side, she explored the village.

  It was a frigid, white, barren place. Trees shot up here and there, birch and maple encrusted with hoarfrost. Greenery crawled on many of the cozy cabins, often sprinkled with holly, but always frozen in ice. Almost every creature she encountered spoke to her with evident pleasure, as well as with a peculiar deference. They treated her as a person of import. The slightest expression of desire on her part–for a drink, for a place to sit, for information–produced immediate efforts to gratify said desire.

  She learned:

  That this moon waited for a hero, and it was her. “The Hero of Movement.” What did that mean? No one knew. Then how did they know it was her? She had come through the door, hadn’t she? At the Greenhouse? And she had the pendant.

  That advanced technology co-existed alongside wood fires and log houses. They possessed computers, specialized in purpose and used only on occasion. This technology assisted with, but did not obviate, the ever-present problem of heat.

  That they had a greenhouse of their own, one of the few means of acquiring non-imported food. They kept sturdy herd animals outside of town. A firm distinction, self-evident to the residents of Kotho, existed between the sentient animalian citizens of Sisyphus and the herd beasts kept for food, fur, and milk.

  That they had work, families, hopes, fears, dreams, and a sense of humor. They had children, marriages, and old crippled veterans wounded in battle against the forces of the Dark World.

  That a great variety of races existed, though only a half dozen were represented here in Kotho, and that each had unique social conventions, familial structures, and racial stereotypes.

  That the iguana-like reptilians who had offered to house her the previous night lived in a single large longhouse (all 73 of them), piled together at night for warmth, and possessed both great kindness and a keen sense of wry humor.

  That humans lived on Ardia, but not on the Garden Moon, and that the moon’s denizens viewed the human race with indifference. Nothing special.

  That King Basileus ruled the Garden Moon from Dyaz, the capital city. He was beloved but old, his grip on authority tenuous, the political situation volatile.

  And finally, that a great mountain rose on the far side of the moon, a mountain of incredible size, at the summit of which grew a single frozen flower, unique among all the many frozen flowers of Sisyphus.

  “If it blooms…” said the ancient hunched cat to which she spoke, beside a small fire in a ramshackle cottage, “spring will come at last to the Garden Moon.”

  She blew on the tea she held in a heavy ceramic mug and took a sip. Sweet. “And what will make it bloom?” she asked, clunking the mug down on the rough table at which she sat. The shutters of the tiny hovel rattled in the gusts, and fingers of icy wind crept in through the cracks.

  The wizened cat, who barely saw over the table when standing upright, climbed up into a rickety chair opposite Elizabeth. He wrapped his tattered gray cloak around himself, obscuring fur of the same color and quality. Though elderly, his gray eyes remained bright, and his tufted tail twitched behind him as he placed his cane on the table and then tapped it at her. “You will,” he said in a shaky voice. “Or rather, you are meant to.” He reached with quivering hands for his own bowl of tea, drew it toward himself, and leaned over to lap it up. Callie, at Elizabeth’s side, lapped milk in the same manner.

  Elizabeth had to repress a deeply ingrained impulse to pet cats. This ancient gray was adorable. She wanted to hug him, scritch him behind the ears. But that would definitely be improper. Probably.

  “Meant to by whom?” she asked.

  “Who knows? The Bright World, perhaps? The gods? Your Guardian?” He coughed.

  “My Guardian–is that Callie?” Callie, at her feet, perked up at her name. Elizabeth reached down and stroked her between her long, tufted ears.

  The old cat chuckled, and this became a rasping cough. “No, no. Every moon has a Guardian. A great, powerful, fearsome creature. Do not let their title fool you, however. They are not all benevolent.”

  “Hm…I’m sorry, what’s your name?” Elizabeth just then realized that she had not yet asked this elder his name. She hoped this wasn’t too rude.

  “Deuteronomy,” said the cat. “Old Deuteronomy, some call me.” He chuckled.

  “It is a pleasure to meet you.” He did not appear to have a family, unlike most in Kotho. Would he be all right here on his own? Maybe she should invite him back to her Greenhouse?

  “I appreciate it,” he said in his shaky voice, “but that will not be necessary.”

  Embarrassed, Elizabeth realized she must have spoken her thoughts out loud. “And this Bright World,” she continued, “what is that?”

  “Why, it is what lights the daytime. It orbits Ardia just as the moons do, and just as the Dark World does.”

  “Can you tell me more about the flower? How should I make it bloom?”

  He sighed; the breath rattled his frail frame. “You cannot.”

  She waited for him to continue.

  “If you wish to find the flower, you must venture to the peak of the Mountain. But the way to make it bloom…is impossible. This is common knowledge.”

  “Not common pessimism?”

  He shook his head gravely. “It is a law of this world.”

  “Yet it is my task?”

  He nodded.

  “Sisyphus.”

  He nodded again.

  “Well, we’ll see about that.”

  He nodded a third time, slowly. Maybe he was just dozing off.

  “Can you tell me more? About the angels. And those worlds you talked about: Bright, Dark. And the Guardians. And Ardia.”

  Old Deuteronomy yawned hugely. “I am an old and tired cat,” he said. “Too much talk for one day. Too much.”

  Elizabeth could tell he simply didn’t wish to speak anymore, so she let him be. She would soon know all about it. Perhaps all this information could be discovered somewhere in her Greenhouse. It had a library.

  “You should go to Skywater,” Deuteronomy said after he had lapped up some more tea.

  “Where is that?”

  “On Ardia. The City of Doors, it’s called.”

  “And how shall I reach this city?”

  “A door, of course.” The old cat yawned again, though it seemed more genuine this time. He dropped from his chair and shuffled to a small bed in the corner, heaped with blankets. It didn’t seem very warm, and she again considered inviting him to her greenhouse, which had exhibited no dearth of heat.

  “Unnecessary,” said the cat. “I will be fine. A door to Skywater is somewhere near your greenhouse, I believe.” He curled up in the blankets, apparently unconcerned that she still sat at the table. But it didn’t feel right to stay and drink tea while he went to sleep, so she stood, drained her tea, thanked Deuteronomy, and left.

  Callie appeared at her side when she closed the door. Callie stretched, clawed at the ice with huge milky-white paws, unbothered by the bitter wind which ruffled her flawless fur. She was a lynx, of course. This was lynx weather. Callie loved it here.

  It was time to go home. The lift station at the edge of town also served as the train station and hub of communication with the rest of Sisyphus. A cardinal charting routes on a wall-map with colored pins greeted her when she entered the station. This bird wore a blue jacket against the cold, for the interior of the station was little warmer than outside. The blue of his thick woolen jacket partly concealed his brilliant crimson plumage.

  The bird introduced himself as Kyko. She offered him a handshake, which took some awkward explaining, and she marveled at his rough claw-like bird hand when she shook it. He began starting up the lift mechanism. This required her key. Kyko knew what to do, but it had never been done before. The lift had never been used until the night before, for the hero had never been around to use it. He hopped from foot to foot on his thin legs as the sleek white machinery hummed to life, apparently overcome with excitement. For him, this seemed like a dream come true.

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  “It will take a moment for it to warm up,” he told her in a quick, raspy voice. “Would you like to see the station?”

  She nodded and followed on a brief tour of the Kotho station. A single rail line passed through the town. The track had three parallel rails. Elizabeth wanted to see a train, but none were present at the moment.

  Kyko supplied her with a map of Sisyphus. He also told her that the various political factions already knew of her arrival, and would soon arrive via train to “deal with” her. Kyko, it seemed, knew all there was to know about the complex train network that covered the surface of Sisyphus. He chattered on about routes and trains and trams and engines and rails and maintenance and various inefficiencies which had been unfortunately introduced into the system. Elizabeth was not so interested in all this and directed his conversation toward the people and parties that dwelt upon the moon.

  Only when listening to Kyko monologue did Elizabeth begin to understand the complexity of her role in Sisyphus and the responsibilities this might entail. Contrasting opinions on this matter warred within her: offense at having such a role foisted upon her non-consensually weighed against pleasure at the prospect of such importance and influence that she now apparently possessed, even if she had done absolutely nothing to earn it.

  She thanked Kyko, told him to give her regards to the town, promised to return soon, and stepped into the lift. The push of a button sent her sliding out of the station and through the frigid whiteness of the day outside.

  Thick cables lifted the carriage on a slow upward ascent through part of the town and then up to the mountains beyond. The carriage swayed in the wind. She steadied herself on conveniently placed poles overhead as the landscape slid past outside. She enjoyed the aerial view of Kotho through the tinted windows. Beyond Kotho, away from the dark mountains, she saw the triple-rail of the train tracks cutting a straight line through vast empty fields. A forest of strange trees, frozen and dusted with frost, sprawled in another direction. They looked a bit like flowers. Tree-sized lilies. The thought made her smile. How marvelous might that be if they were thawed and growing?

  As she neared the mountains, she grew tired of viewing the monochromatic landscape and turned her attention to the map of her moon. The mountain she had heard tell of occupied the center of the map. It was apparently just named “the Mountain,” and a small floral symbol marked its summit. The Mountain covered roughly a third of the area of the entire map. That did not make sense, assuming this was a map of the whole moon. She looked for elevation markers but found none, as this appeared to be a political map. Kotho had been marked out on the far left edge. About as far away as one could get from the Mountain, it looked like. Kotho stood next to a small range, and another flower symbol marked her greenhouse nearby.

  She could tell by judging the distance from her greenhouse to Kotho that the moon was quite small. Much smaller than Earth. Maybe only a few thousand miles in circumference. Was that too small for a moon? And what about gravity? She was no scientist; she didn’t know.

  Local cosmology was a puzzle that seemed increasingly important to work out. Just as she had said earlier in the group chat, they needed answers. Isaac had an orbital satellite instead of a moon, full of telescopes? Of course he did. She trusted him to figure out the arrangement and size of their respective celestial bodies.

  As for her, for now, she wanted to learn about this flower on top of the mountain. The Garden Moon would thaw when the flower bloomed. It sounded like a fairy tale. Why would it not bloom? She had only the word of an old cat on that, though she felt she should trust him. A mystery. It intrigued her. She should go and find this flower.

  The lift carriage ascended up into the snowy peaks and docked smoothly at her conservatory complex, which looked quite impressive when viewed from the outside in the pale light of day. That crystalline flower platform glittered at the highest point, with its single white door standing alone at one edge.

  One door. One out of six.

  She danced later. To think; to relax. She played the music she found already loaded onto the sound system. It was strange, exotic, cool and flowing like a river under the ice. She did not recognize it. She danced and felt more keenly than ever the pang of loneliness. No one to dance with, and not even the possibility of one nearby. To be fair, she hadn’t asked anyone in Kotho. The thought of those animal-like creatures put a smile on her face. How strange their dances must be!

  She felt strangely light when she danced. She also felt strangely heavy. No–neither light nor heavy, but…inexorable. Profound. Nothing could stop her movement, her dance. Were a mountain to oppose her, she would dance right through it, leaving a cartoon-style outline of her figure in the rock. Were she not careful, she would close her eyes and dance right out of the studio, through the wall and out into the snowy brightness, resulting in a variety of heating problems.

  The music pulsed. She was light-headed, dazed. Confused? Not at all. Certain, rather. Every movement was intentional. She leaped high, as high as she could go. She meant to stay up, so up she stayed. For one second, two, three, she hung in the air like a cloud.

  She drifted back to the polished wooden floor, tripped, tumbled lightly onto her back. She panted, confused, a dull ache in the back of her head. Callie purred like a motorcycle nearby. “That was strange,” Elizabeth said. What had happened? She could hardly remember. There was only the music there in her memory. Not exactly beautiful, but oh so clear.

  Callie watched on full alert, thrumming with a cat’s barely contained motion. Her tail twitched back-and-forth, sweeping the floor. She stood and strolled from the room, pausing at the door to glance at Elizabeth. Elizabeth had been with Callie long enough to know when the lynx wanted her to follow.

  Callie took her to an unknown part of the greenhouse, to a door that opened onto the bright snowy field outside. Callie strolled up to the door and was gone. Elizabeth put her face to a window of thick three-layered glass and tried to spot Callie out there. Of course, the effort was futile. The daylight, diffused through the cold clouds above, leaked from everywhere. Everything out there was Callie-colored.

  Elizabeth expected to find a coat closet near the exit, and in this she was not disappointed. She remembered, as she bundled up in a coat, scarf, hat, gloves, and snow boots, that she had to return the clothing she had borrowed from the people of Kotho.

  The door had a keypad that unlocked as soon as she brought her hexagonal pendant within an inch of its surface. She opened the door outward and stepped into the snow, taking the yellow umbrella propped against the wall on the inside.

  Callie appeared only intermittently as she stomped through snowy fields and skirted clumps of frozen trees. Still cold up here, but not as windy as it had been down in Kotho. A solid slate of pale sky hung overhead. She hiked through knee-deep or sometimes hip-deep snow in a washed-out world, cold and featureless. Only the gray trunks of nearby trees and the darker black of the cold rocks on the surrounding cliffs gave her any reference for location. A blank slate. Tabula rasa.

  She moved slowly, steadily, quietly. Soon she was out of breath; plowing through snow was hard work. But she enjoyed that. A simple physical challenge to be overcome was a welcome break from the seemingly irresolvable mysteries of the past few days. It took her about half an hour to catch up with Callie, something she only realized she had done when she felt Callie rub against her leg. The cat was nearly invisible in the snow. Not even any eyes to give her away, nor any stain or discoloration of her fur. If anything, she was even a bit whiter than the snow around her. Elizabeth collapsed into a nearby snowbank to catch her breath. She stroked the purring lynx and gazed about her. Why here? She had been sure Callie was leading her somewhere. Callie knew she liked flowers, so back in Pennsylvania she would often take Elizabeth on treks through the woods to show her patches of wildflowers. Callie seemed either unable or unwilling to differentiate between types of flowers, so sometimes the place she took Elizabeth had nothing more interesting than blooming dandelions.

  There were indeed flowers here, and Elizabeth saw them after exploring behind the nearest copse of pines. They were colorful but frozen, encased entirely in a thin sheath of ice. They clustered around the base of a freestanding door. The door, she saw when she came closer, had the word “Skywater” written on the frame. Hadn’t Kate said something about this? That they should all meet up in Skywater?

  In the quiet white, she sent Kate a message.

  EE: Kate, are you there?

  KC: yeah!

  KC: just woke up ;)

  EE: Slept in? That is not like you.

  KC: no it’s still dark here :p

  EE: Oh. Right.

  KC: heheh!

  EE: I am looking at a door that says “Skywater.”

  KC: !!

  KC: cool!

  KC: I still haven’t found mine <:\

  KC: I haven’t really looked yet though

  EE: Where does it go?

  KC: a city I think?

  EE: Is it safe?

  KC: eeehhhhhh

  KC: (shrug)

  KC: maybe?

  EE: How reassuring.

  KC: he he

  KC: we should go together!

  EE: How?

  KC: once I find my door, we’ll go together and then find each other once we’re there!

  EE: We should all do that.

  KC: yeah!

  KC: Jim too!

  EE: Apparently I am supposed to find a flower, and make it bloom.

  KC: ?

  EE: And to do this, I must thaw out my moon.

  KC: woah, cool!

  KC: I think mine has something to do with storms?

  EE: Your what?

  KC: my IMPORTANT MISSION

  KC: hehe

  KC: I’ll let you know when I find my door!

  Elizabeth pocketed the phone and warmed her hands inside her coat. She sat on the snow and observed the door. It had a hexagonal pad just like her greenhouse. She could walk through that door to another place, right now. She wasn’t afraid. She had an umbrella. But…

  But she had always wanted to take things one at a time. She wanted to work out one thing before moving on to the next. In this situation, she wanted to know about her moon before moving on to some city elsewhere. She wanted to know about that flower she was supposed to make bloom. She wanted to see it.

  IMPORTANT MISSION, Kate had said. Sisyphus.

  Elizabeth sat in the snow for maybe half an hour, luxuriating in the calm, the quiet, the cold. Beautiful here. She turned her gaze to the cloudy sky above. Strangely pale, as though the sun beyond lacked depth of color. Her own hand, when she held it up, curiously white.

  Snow began to fall in big fat flakes. She remembered the place of columns, the flower petals, the bleeding sky. It came, a flower bright, amid the cold of winter when half gone was the night.

  And here was another one: “always winter, never Christmas.”

  Elizabeth uprooted a frozen flower from the base of the “Skywater” door and took it back to her greenhouse. She planted it there in a subtropical environment, watered it, watched it thaw. Its petals drooped when they unfroze. Surely they would wither and fall. Time would tell whether the flower would survive.

  Surely the special flower on the mountaintop would not be so easy.