The Yeti looked meaningfully at her. “You are dressed as a villain also. Does that make you one?”
September looked down at her black silks. “That’s not the same thing!”
“You are a baby,” sighed Ciderskin. “And you only see what’s small enough for you to crawl toward. The Moon hurts, but I am not hurting her.”
CHAPTER XIX
TIME IS THE ONLY MAGIC
In Which One Becomes Two, Two Become One, a Half Truth Becomes a Whole, Everything Is Transitive, and Everyone Was Mistaken
The red dome in the great pavilion of Patience began to move.
It twisted, slowly, straining. It swelled, and shrunk, and swelled again. It made strange, soft noises as it stretched toward the empty sky. Under the skin of it, shadows blossomed.
“It’s nearly time,” growled the black dog. And as soon as he did, they were no longer five but six. A tall man with blue skin and black tattoos clouded into being—clouded, because he came in a thundercloud as gray and dark as summer storms, and when the cloud had cleared he stood there, wet and bright and strong. And holding a pair of shears made all of bone, long and white and sharp. He looked at September for a long moment, and not less long at Saturday, his younger self, whose eyes were filling with gray and cloudy tears.
“Why?” the younger Saturday whispered. But the older did not answer.
September watched the tall Marid as though from somewhere very far away. She knew she ought to holler at him—he would listen to her, probably. Her own Saturday did, usually. But once again she felt a terrible paralyzing stillness flow over her. This Saturday was the future. Didn’t that mean it had all already happened? Didn’t that mean there was nothing to be done? How could she argue with all the Saturdays ahead? She had smashed her fate with a hammer—didn’t that mean something?
The elder Saturday moved swift and sure. Ciderskin moved his fingers in the pearly soil, and once again the stars wheeled as though on a racetrack, dashing after some poor, hopeless rabbit. The sun rose and set in flashes like photographs, faster and faster. Time spasmed and dragged them with it. And in the flashbulb dawns, September saw Saturday open the shears and slice into the Moon itself. He cut in long lines away from the horrible red boil, using all his weight to lever the handles up and down. The black dog capered behind him, biting the edges of his cuts and peeling them back.
The red blister began to rise.
A final, profound, spine-severing quake shivered up under them. It seemed to begin in the back of their minds—and bloom forward, crumbling and convulsing. September fell to the ground, catching herself at the last moment so as not to crush Ell beneath her. Saturday caught her up, put her on her feet. But then he dashed off, trying to catch his future self, vanishing into his own stormclouds and out again after him.
Out of the wounds made by the Bone Shears, the black blood of the Moon seeped up like deep oil. It shimmered, hot gold and crimson and violet patterns over the dark of it. And still the red dome rose up out of the wreckage of the Moon.
September screamed, clutching Ell’s basket. She tried to crawl to Aroostook—but she no longer recognized the Model A at all. She seemed to have turned wholly to stained glass and striped, wild pelts, no longer a car but a creature, her sunflower wheel glinting within, her ebony and mushroom lever, her scrimshaw dash. Only the Aroostook Potato Company burlap sack still flapped over her spare wheel—no longer a wheel but a long feline tail coiled around itself. The Model A’s horn sounded, and it was no longer a squwonk or an ah-ooga but a voice, a thin and thready voice like a trumpeter blowing with his mouth only half fixed to his instrument. A voice saying that other word an alive thing must learn, that other word as necessary to living as taking in fuel and making of it movement, music, leaves, roots, dimetrodon spikes, dancing, libraries, children:
Yes! Yes! Yes!
The curving, swirling, swollen red dome burst free of the Moon. It tore away with a sound like a thousand bones shattering—and floated up into the dark, the dark flashing into day and out again as the sped-up world stuttered forward. The red dome drifted free like a great balloon.
But it was not a dome, nor an orb, nor a blister, nor a boil.
It was a crescent.
A tiny version of the great pale Moon, dark red and new, wafting up and up and up. A long, pulsing rope of stone, shimmering quartz and opal, connected it to the bubbling sea of Moon-blood below. The scarlet crescent seemed to twist and tug but could not get free of the rope, the thick braid connecting the little Moon to its mother.
September had seen dogs get born, and sheep
and cows as well. She could not mistake what was happening for any other thing.
The Moon was having a baby.
The Black Cosmic Dog gave a great leap, arching in the air like a perfectly fired arrow. He caught the marbled rope as he passed it and caught it with one savage snap of his powerful jaw. The little Moon rocked onto its side, the points of its ruby horns tilting upward, making the shape of a smile, or a cradle. But the cord did not break. The dog fell back with a yelp.
“I am not a villain,” said Ciderskin when the quaking had stilled. He watched the red Moon kick and gambol at the night, learning to turn and phase as fast as a just-born deer. Already it had grown bigger. Perhaps two people together could fit on its surface now and make a house there. “I am a midwife,” he finished. “I told you, the Moon is alive. No different than your mother. It takes a long time for a Moon to come to term. Longer than many quick lives down below. And who will help a planet in her birthing bed but a nurse who can hold time in the palm of his hand? All I have done has been for this little one, to bring her out of her mother safely. The Moon quaked—but I did not shake her. She was in her labor.”
“But Abecedaria said—”
“I should have paused in my duties to explain to a wig that I needed the Sapphire Stethoscope to listen to the heart of the new Moon? It was good that they left! She needed her privacy. The Moon couldn’t worry that her contractions would hurt her folk, terrify them, even shake them off into the black! I couldn’t do my work with the Moon crowded full. I’d be no better than a Fairy, kicking time forward so that the little one can get big fast enough so that the first comet by doesn’t kill her. So I let them look at me and say what they pleased. Call me a monster, call me a menace. Call me a villain. It doesn’t pain me. I’ve been to Pluto. I learned my lesson.”
“What others call you, you become,” said September worriedly. “So you are a monster. A villain.”
The Yeti stared at her. “That’s just the first part. What others call you, you become. It’s a terrible magic that everyone can do—so do it. Call yourself what you wish to become. I’ll have to have a word with the Undercamel, he’s clearly gotten lazy.”