The Fixed Stars: Thirty-Seven Emblems for the Perilous Season

3. The Green Door

THE FIXED STARS 83 3.1 Mercury The man who bore crates was thinking of the meal in the spidersilk pouch that hung from the hook beside his head and swung with the sway of the wagon—thinking of it only obliquely and with strict casualness, so as not to exhaust it, it being the only thought available to him on this stretch of road—and meanwhile watching the moonshadow at play on the mountainside, and listening with one ear to the carbonrubber groan of the harness; when suddenly he became aware of a very small man sitting beside him. He startled, like an ox, and moved to beat the man away, as during the day he beat away flies. But the small man laughed, and the man who bore crates withheld his blow. The stranger was foxlike in appearance, with tiny sunken eyes and a muzzle of olive complexion, and very small pores, or none. “Practitioner of medicine,” he said, by way of introduction —and then, with a wink, “fertility doctor.” The man who bore crates returned his attention to the CHAPTER 3 THE gREEn DooR 84 BRIAN CONN road. The oxen trod with unvarying tread. He looked out over the river for a time, and when he looked again at the seat beside him, the small man winked twice, one eye and then the other. The man who bore crates seized him in both hands, stood on the step, and raised him over his head in order to dash him to the ground. The laughter of the small man accelerated, and he squirmed as though his bones were made of shivering-rubber . “Ticklish!” he cried. “Oh! Oh! Oh!” The man who bore crates set him down. “Apologies. I had thought you a spirit of darkness,” he said, “possibly contagious .” “No,” said the small man. “Practitioner of medicine.” With good humor he tossed away two tomatoes that had fallen from the spidersilk pouch and been crushed beneath him when the man who bore crates set him down. “But you neither bit nor stung me.” “Well noted: it is for all people to know what harmeth and what harmeth not.” “You failed also to transform yourself into a noxious animal , to vanish in a stroke of lightning, and to shroud yourself in toxic vapor. Therefore I set you down again.” “Practitioner of medicine,” the small man repeated. “Were there two tomatoes?” “Two,” the doctor affirmed. “Then both are gone. The soil on this mountain is the best soil for tomatoes,” the man who bore crates brooded, “and I had but two. How came you onto my wagon?” “Clambered up the wooden rungs.” As he thought it over, the expression of the man who bore crates grew stern. “And how came you onto this dark THE FIXED STARS 85 road, far from any community, with no company but the night?” The doctor wore an innocent expression; the man who bore crates glared down at him, and the doctor watched him from the corner of his eye. All at once he burst out laughing. “Harmed, my friend!” he laughed. “I did harm!” They had come to a crossroads beside a fork in the river. The oxen stopped; four roads, a ford, and a narrow bridge led in six different directions. The man who bore crates peered down one road and then the next, this one black under cover of trees, that one white under the moon; the river murmured audibly over the stones of the ford. “An obscure road,” he said. “It puzzles even the oxen, wisest of animals.” He took down a second pouch of spidersilk, which hung beside the first—then, thinking of it and being in no hurry, took down the first pouch too and peered within. “No tomatoes.” With a solemn expression, he replaced the food pouch and took from the other a scroll of translucent film one handspan square. As he unrolled it, the angelophytes within, scenting the musk of others of their kind on and about the road, luminesced in the shape of a sickle in melon green. The man who bore crates pored over this; after a moment he turned it upside-down and pored further. “Rarely have I come this way, and never at night. The spores suggest the bridge.” He let the film snap back into a roll and stowed it in the pouch. “But the spores are often mistaken: more...