Dust of Eden (37 page)

He had wanted to hug Dana
Novicki
for a long time, he realized, but there was nothing romantic in it now. It felt paternal. If he could have somehow known that she was twenty-three years of age the day he was born, it still would have felt paternal. He held her buried against his chest, her arms crossed between them, and her remorseful shudders contradicting the ghastly act she had just committed. Things were very wrong throughout New Eden, but all he had to substantiate this was the eccentric and circumstantial evidence of a bizarre summer.

In a moment she regained her composure and, with her arms still hugged against her breasts and her eyes downcast, she stepped away.

"Tell me what it is, Dana. What's all this about pictures and red things?"

She looked dazed and weary, not even a distant relative of the woman who had swung a shovel three times against the defenseless thing at their feet.

He caught her wrist to stop her retreat.

"All right, I won't ask you anymore. But listen, I've decided to take my father out of New Eden. Things are too shaky around here. And since I don't know what's going on, I've got to take him out—even though I can't take care of him myself. In fact . . . in fact, I'm asking you to go on taking care of him. If you'll come with us back to where I live in Little Canada, I'll pay you everything I'm paying Ariel—"

She shook her head vigorously.

"You can live there the same as you do here, Dana—independent, no strings attached—except that I can help when I'm home from work. You can drive a car, go shopping, have a life. Don't tell me you don't want that. I know you do."

"You don't know what you're asking."

"The hell I don't."

"It would be over as soon as she knew."

"You mean Ariel? Why?"

Each flurry of head shaking gained celerity, as if she were trying to convince herself. He took her by the shoulders, but she wouldn't look at him.

"No strings, Dana. I swear."

"You can't take your father out of here."

"Watch me."

"Don't do it, Denny." And now she looked him dead in the eye, repeating: "You don't know what you're asking."

"I don't think you know what you're turning down."

"Yes, I do. Is that what you want to hear? I can give you that. I'd love to leave here. I'd love to go live with you and your father. But trust me, I can't leave. And neither can your father."

It was absurd. It roused what small capacity he preserved of the warrior man.
Do not tell me what I cannot do
. An old woman like Ariel
Leppa
couldn't hold anything over him the way she seemed to with everyone else in this odd household. More than that, he was uplifted by Dana's bold assertion that she would love to accept his offer. That alone was reason enough not to argue, not to risk poisoning the sentiment. It wasn't the thought of a relationship with him that was holding Dana in check. She had opened up to him that much in order to stress some other imperative. But what?

"Trust me," she said again. "Leave your father here. He'll be all right, if you leave him here."

P
ainters preferred the north light. Ariel had read that somewhere. Painters and surgeons from the days when operations were performed by candlelight favored the "cool, clear light of the north." Sixteenth-century studios and operating theaters had skylights oriented to the north. Ariel's studio window was pointed north, and she stood there in the weathered frame high up on the third story, where a year ago she had contemplated suicide, feeling cosmic and apocalyptic.

But there was no cool and clear light out there now. Out there in the darkness was the cistern, and in it her child—a copy of her child. If Amber lived till dawn, then that version of her could surrender the paint as her petition to go on living. And if she didn't make it—if, for instance, that ghastly spidery spawn of her own artistic endeavors caught her at the bottom of the hole—well, what was a mother to do?

A mother.

Not the right term. At risk of profaning the sacred, Ariel had to be honest about her role. She was Amber's creator in every sense of the term. The implication beyond biology was intriguing. Could a mortal act of genuine creation compare with a divine act? She would have to think that over, come to a conclusion once and forever. Up until this point she had been timid about using her powers, and that was natural because she was a good person, one who had no intention of usurping higher prerogative. But, in fact, what was the difference between the mortal and the divine? She painted, and it was her design, her rendering, her will that controlled the outcome. Of course, the paint was procreative in some organic and palpable way, but it was still just paint. An inert thing by itself. The way it was used, on the other hand, could be . . . well, godlike.

She had to be ruthlessly honest about this because it would be just as bad to be too humble as too vain. It wasn't a sin to maximize what you had, as in the parable of the talents. You could make the argument that something had created the red dust that went into the paint, and you could reason that the creator of the red dust was therefore the ultimate god, but Ariel had mixed the paint and shaped the images, and how could that not be the heart of it? Was it a universe of overt creative acts that included her in its pantheon of creators, or was the universe just a single creative act from which all else derived?

Downstairs in a bedroom a perfect facsimile of Amber slept. So far she had obeyed to the letter, following her predecessor twin to find where the stolen paint was and even taking the initiative of trapping the disobedient Amber before coming back to report to her mother-creator that the missing paint was in the cistern. A little better than Eve had done, wouldn't you say?

When dawn raked its fingernails through the canopy of night to the east Ariel got her cane, and it was only fear that she might encroach on the hours of the hunter spider that made her wait a little longer. Light spread like surf up a Plutonian shore, and when it touched the far horizon she glided through the house where her creations slept, dreaming dreams of the immortality that was hers to bestow. She was the cynosure of all hope, all morality, all judgment for those things she had made. Within that sphere, she need answer no one.

She opened the door to Amber's room without knocking and found her sitting upright in the middle of the big bed, rocking. In the diluted light of dawn, the dresser and the oak bedposts were black, the walls and the sheets white. And something of this contrast extended to Amber in a way that was faintly shocking to Ariel. Her daughter's face and cotton nightshirt were white, but her hands were black. Jet-black trailed up her wrists as though she were wearing ragged velvet gloves.

It looked like blood, except for the fact that nothing transferred to the white sheets, and mud wouldn't have dried in such thin rivulets on her forearms. But as she opened her mouth to speak, Ariel grasped something else: the rocking, the lack of focus, the steady gaze at the wall opposite the bed—a few hours ago she had spoken to her anointed one, and there had been none of this obvious trauma. This was not the Amber she had recently created.

"Thank God you got out of that old cistern," she said smoothly. The fact that her clever little girl had escaped should have infuriated Ariel, but instead she smiled calmly. "Amber? I couldn't come for you in the dark—you know that. I can't imagine how you made it back here, but it would have been suicidal for me to go out there in the dark. Of course, I want the paint returned—that's a matter of survival for all of us—but I've been fretting over you all night."

No reaction, no expression, just a little girl in ebony gloves, rocking, staring. What was the black stain on her skin?

"Amber? Where is she?"

"In the cellar," came back abruptly.

"The cellar?"

Suddenly the child's face turned, and her eyes lit up with awareness, and she looked squarely at her mother and spoke with just a hint of tremor. "Here's the way it is. If you paint me again, then I'll paint too. I'll paint spiders and snakes, and I'll let them loose in the house. If you do anything else to me, you won't ever get your paint back. It will just be there where someone else will find it. And I wrote a note, so whoever finds it will know where it came from and what it can do."

As abruptly as she had turned, Amber faced back to the wall and resumed rocking.

Outrage sizzled like a lit fuse in the high-ceiling room, but it was a long fuse. Time was on her side, Ariel decided. She stood up, walked slowly to the door.

"How dangerous," she said. "How very, very dangerous."

But the rocking continued.

Ariel went straight to the cellars, where she found the blackened canvas, and that snuffed out her rage with cold fear. She scratched at the black coating, searching for confirmation that this was indeed one of her paintings. But of course it had to be. There were the familiar corrugated fasteners and copper staples she used on frames. This was the newer Amber . . . painted out of existence with – what, black ink, shoe polish?

She thundered up the steps, breathing hard but driven to assess the damage to her security. She reached the studio electrified, fumbling with her key. Wheezing, shaking, she unlocked and threw open the door.

Everything had looked in order a few minutes ago, and it still looked in order, but that must be a lie, because she had just held one of her sacred paintings in her own two hands down in the cellar, so someone had been in here. Someone had access. She rifled through the stacks of frames against the wall, one after another:
Ruta
. . .
Paavo
. . . Molly

. . . Dana . . . Helen . . . Marjorie . . . Beverly . . . Thomas . . . Kraft
—even the younger sketch of herself waiting to be painted in. But NOT
Amber
! Not Amber One. Not Amber Two.
Both
missing.

She sat down hard on the floor. It was over. The little menace had her, could expose her at will. She felt like an old hag again. White-faced, bloodless, suddenly facing the merciless fate of all fallen deities. But why hadn't Amber said something about possessing her own portrait? Why threaten with just the paint and not mention that her mother could no longer change the painting? And why was she worried about another Amber being created—why hadn't she just taken her portrait and the paint and run away?

Of course, this was a little girl reborn into a world she had not seen for more than thirty years. Running away would be daunting. But then again, this was tempestuous Amber, indomitable flesh of her indomitable flesh, climber of roofs, painter of monsters, who ventured out at night with stolen goods—very little truly daunted her. Then what could one conclude except that Amber didn't know her own portrait was missing?
 
Obviously she had come into possession of her rival's and used it to destroy her, but not her own.

My, my.

Another thief in the house. Who? They had gotten into the studio without breaking in. A key? Ariel didn't think this was possible. She must have left the door unlocked briefly. So it had to be someone relatively mobile (Molly? Dana?). Or someone opportunistically close at hand (Thomas?). Or with a reckless hate for her (Kraft?). She would search each room. Put the fear of God in them. Find the answers to all her questions. But first she would do another contingency portrait, like the one she had done of herself.

This one from a newer photo—Amber at eleven. Unfinished for the moment, because it was done only with pigments that were not mixed with the dust of creation. This one her warrior. This one her gladiator who would defeat the younger, smaller Amber anytime in order to live. Anytime Ariel wanted to go over it properly with the proper paint.

Behold, Amber Three.

A
warm, breathing twin of herself had lain on the bed a few hours before, and Amber had painted her out, made her disappear, sent her . . . where? What was death like? Everyone in the house knew except her and her mother. And Mr. Bryce.

So why did she feel like the other Amber was still here? It was incredibly real and spooky, almost like they were together on the mattress, touching knee to knee, face to face, eyeball to eyeball, her twin staring goggle-eyed into her brain and her soul. The only thing missing was breath in her face. But even that was sort of there, because she felt air moving against her skin, only it was ice-cold.

When her mother had come in, something had prickled at the base of Amber's neck and squeezed her throat slightly all the way up behind her ears, as if her insubstantial twin were suddenly trying to smother her. It had made her keep her eyes open, watchful that her mother wasn't orchestrating something she had created with her magic paints.

Amber was figuring things out. She had gotten rid of her competition, but it wasn't going to end there. Her mother was saying nice things, fake things about how she had wanted to save her from the cistern, and Amber had to let her know that she couldn't be fooled anymore. She hadn't planned to say those things about painting spiders and snakes if another Amber came along; they just came out. Then her mother went away.

And now she couldn't stop rocking.

Rocking kept the world in balance, like a swing, like a teeter-totter. Stop rocking and you fell or slid or tipped over. When the door opened again she stopped rocking.