Chapter 46

  Elizabeth and Jimothy

  Ink was still in Elizabeth’s hair.

  “Well, I think it looks good,” said Jimothy.

  “Ugh. Really?”

  He nodded. “It adds texture. I mean, I like your hair normally too. But the ink, um, makes it visually interesting.”

  Elizabeth made a noise of skepticism as she summoned another hairbrush and ran it through her long, silky, ink-stained hair.

  “Out of the two of us,” Jimothy continued, “I am the painter. Um. So I know about ink. Not much about hair, though, actually. But I think that your hair looks good like that. Um. It would probably look good in most circumstances. But. You have to trust me.”

  She smiled, then laughed. “Oh, Jimothy. I do.” Black smudges lurked all over her body: under her fingernails, in her ears, between her toes. She didn’t want to explain to Jimothy that while to him it was harmless ink, to her it was the blood of a giant wolf that had tried to kill her.

  Elizabeth picked up the book she’d been reading, The Ten, author uncredited. Then she set it back down.

  “Jimothy,” she asked slowly, carefully. “You said…you made a grave?”

  “For Niri?” He nodded. “Yeah. It’s just outside. You couldn’t really see it last night because, you know. It was dark.”

  ‘Dark,’ Elizabeth thought, was a mild way of putting it.

  Jimothy led her down to the bottom floor. He descended by creating slides of light. Elizabeth joined him on the slides.

  At the ground floor, he showed her the pool of water. He recreated for her the incomprehensible message that it had written. Outside, the only remaining trace of the nightmare of shadows were strange dark marks on the outer walls of his lighthouse, like graffiti. Jimothy gazed at these thoughtfully for a moment before he took her around the bend of the lighthouse to a large boulder set upright on the grass. Unlike the colorless foliage on most of Hyperion, the grass here displayed many shades of green. The stone itself was blue and silver and gold in a tasteful pattern. It had a word written on it: Niri, and a mound of white earth at its feet.

  “Did you put that stone here?” she asked. It was taller than she, and had to weigh several tons.

  “Yeah,” said Jimothy. “I grabbed it from the canyons over there.” Bands of light appeared around the stone. It rose easily into the air, then settled back down to the earth with a soft thump that shook the ground beneath her feet. Elizabeth wondered how much weight Jimothy could lift, but now did not seem like the time for that.

  “Are you…okay?” she asked, watching him. “About her?”

  “Niri?” Jimothy was always easy to read. He was not okay. “When it happened, I…I didn’t know what to do. I still don’t. I guess I cried a lot.” He looked embarrassed. Elizabeth wanted to tell him it was fine to cry, but she held her tongue and let him continue. “But I know it wasn’t my fault. Not really. None of this is any of our faults. But still. She was beautiful. And I wanted to be her friend. And then…” He waved his hands vaguely, helplessly. “And then her mother.” He chewed on his lip for a moment, thinking. Elizabeth waited.

  “And I couldn’t stop either of them from dying,” he said at last. “But I stopped him last night. The wolf. And…that makes me happy. Maybe it doesn’t balance anything out, but I think I have to do what I can to stop anyone else from dying. I mean, if he had killed you, I…” Now he was close to tears. Elizabeth stepped up beside him and put an arm around his thin shoulders.

  “I’m fine, Jim,” she said. “Thanks to you.” She looked again at the beautiful gravestone Jimothy had made. “I wish I could have met her.”

  “I still have her light,” Jimothy said. “I don’t know what to do with it.”

  He had told them about the light, but hadn’t shown it to anyone. Elizabeth wondered whether Jimothy had experienced some kind of brief infatuation with this Niri. If he did, would he even have realized it? And how long would it have taken the rest of them to notice? Jim treated every person as special.

  “Well,” she said, “I should be getting back.” From what she understood, it was a long journey home: back to Jim’s door, which he had to let her through, then through Skywater to her own door, then through that back to the Garden Moon.

  “You haven’t seen the top yet,” said Jimothy. “You should look at the top before you go.”

  Elizabeth shaded her eyes out of instinct as she gazed up at the top of the dark tower, though there was no need for shade. No sun. “All the way up there?” she asked.

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  “I can just…” Jimothy concentrated for a moment. A blue disc appeared on the ground beside them, easily large enough for both of them. Jimothy stepped on, leading with his cane, and beckoned Elizabeth to join him. She cautiously put her weight on the disc. It felt like stepping onto thick metal. Solid, hard, firm.

  It rose into the air without warning. Hazel barked excitedly as they left him below. Up they went, up faster than any elevator Elizabeth had ever taken. The colorless landscape dropped away, and suddenly the dark mass of stone on one side gave way to empty air. They were at the top.

  Jimothy put the brakes on too quickly; he and Elizabeth continued up into the air for several feet before gravity reasserted control.

  My turn, thought Elizabeth. She halted them both in midair by channeling their momentum away into the wind. She let herself down lightly to the stones below, walked over to Jimothy, and allowed him to slide down through the air to the top of the lighthouse. Easing him down like that was difficult, no different than moving smoothly, steadily, gracefully, while performing a challenging ballet pose.

  The top of Jimothy’s lighthouse offered a spectacular view of a strange world. The blank-canvas skies with their wisps of black clouds, the pale lands, the hazy horizons, the dark delineations of the landscapes. Here and there were spots of color, especially along the footpaths that wound through the surrounding countryside. Some places had larger splotches, carefully crafted. The color was all bright, all beautiful, but so far only a drop in the bucket.

  Jim’s platform was a color wheel of stained glass, lit faintly from below by the lighthouse light. They stood on the red circle, a simple, stylized heart symbol in its center. Jimothy beamed with innocent delight at the colors that filtered up from the light below. Elizabeth crossed the glass to Jimothy’s door, remembering when she had first seen it in the Museum days ago.

  “Oh!” said Jimothy. “Elizabeth.”

  He was embarrassed when she turned to look at him. “Yes?”

  “Oh. Um…” He fidgeted.

  “Go ahead, Jimothy. You can ask me anything.”

  “Well…I was wondering. Could you…um, dance?”

  “Dance?”

  “Here. On the lights. I want to paint you.”

  “Paint me?”

  “Dancing. Yeah.” He was turning red. “But only if you want to.”

  “No, I…” Words, her reliable friends, deserted her. Had she ever been so flattered? Jimothy wanted to paint her! The best artist she knew wanted to use her as a model.

  “Of course!” she said, maybe too eagerly. She entirely forgot to be shy about dancing. “I’ll need music…”

  And so, several minutes later, with a sound system brought up for Elizabeth’s music, which she played from her phone, and with an easel and paints set up for Jim, a confluence of arts occurred.

  Elizabeth wondered what kind of dance to perform. (Any kind, said Jim–whatever she felt like.) Then she wondered how on Earth Jim intended to paint a moving image onto canvas. But he just told her, with single-minded focus on his own business, to begin.

  Jimothy, for his part, could easily have used his powers of coloration to skip the whole business with the paints, as he had in that room where the Lockbreaker had left him. But he did not want to. Elizabeth and her beauty, he thought, deserved better. And besides, he had all kinds of paints and supplies in storage here at his lighthouse. Why not use them? Most of all, he was deeply in love with the smell of paint, the feel and texture of it, the simple experience of dragging a loaded paintbrush across a blank canvas.

  So Elizabeth danced, and Jimothy painted. She danced a slow, graceful solo routine to a classical minuet. She had to make up parts of it, stitching the routine together from ballet moves that she knew, but that was fine. It came strangely easy. She flowed like a breath of wind over the lights–a step, a spin, a sweeping aside. She forgot that she was being watched, painted. She forgot where she was. She forgot that she was not normally borne aloft by brushstrokes of colored light. She forgot that it was unusual for her dance to stir the stars.

  Jimothy, for his part, forgot that the oil paints he slashed across the canvas were inert pigment. The colors were alive in his mind. They burned to be free, to sweep and glide across the canvas the way his subject did across the top of his lighthouse. Jimothy forgot that there was an outside world beyond Elizabeth and his paint. He forgot that the strokes of his brush were not supposed to carry her along through the air. He forgot that his moon didn’t have stars.

  They were there now, the stars: jeweled pinpricks of light glittering on the blank sheet of sky, stirring themselves according the flick of Elizabeth’s hand, the turn of her body.

  Was the performance perfect? No, nor the painting. Yet they turned, like a tiny key in the mechanism of a vast clockwork machine, and the machine was made of stars, and when it finally clicked into place, they both felt it, and they both knew it was done.

  Somewhere, far away, the Bright World flared with a wild light, spewing stars. The pinpricks of light faded from the sky above Hyperion. And something had changed.

  Elizabeth dropped, panting, to the stained glass. She had no idea how long she had been dancing, but it had been long enough for her to become glazed with a sheen of perspiration. Jimothy likewise set down a brush with a trembling hand, where it fell at once off the easel and onto the glass below. He didn’t dare attempt to stand.

  They both understood that something had happened, but they didn’t know what it was until they noticed the new door at the top of the Lighthouse. It was Elizabeth’s door. Callie and Hazel explained it to them in the way they had been communicating ever since their time with Arcadelt, not with words, but with ideas and impressions.

  Elizabeth’s door would always open onto her own platform, and Jimothy’s door would always open here, atop his lighthouse. But with both doors on both their homes, they could come and go as they pleased, greenhouse to lighthouse.

  There was more their angels told them–about how doors could be locked by their owners, about how doors could be calibrated to places like Skywater Citadel–but neither Elizabeth nor Jim cared just then.

  At length, Elizabeth summoned up her strength, stood, and went over to Jim at his easel to see the result of his work. However long she had been dancing, it had apparently been enough for Jim to create an impressionist masterpiece. It showed a dancer, lit from below by colored lights, her movement so evident and powerful that it seemed a continual surprise that she didn’t keep dancing right there on the canvas. She was surpassingly beautiful, even with the ink stains in her hair.

  They both fought uselessly against inexplicable tears as they experimentally opened the doors linking the Color Moon and the Garden Moon.