Six moons before mating, p.11
Six Moons Before Mating, page 11
Another aisle over, past some brass tool Stan didn’t recognize and a stone base for an oil lamp that would never again produce light, the shoppers stopped at another box, flatter, scientific, the illustrations test tubes and Bunsen burners and a boy with no eye protection creating havoc in a jar.
Stan sounded like a kid when he explained to Abby:
“An old chemistry set with real chemicals and you can blow things up and make smoke to stink for days and stain your fingers and you will never get them clean.”
She looked up to him as though their roles were reversed. Abigail had never been that puerile. Of course, she wasn’t a boy.
Stan had no difficulty getting the box and the girl out the door, because the proprietor delivered, all the way to the plastic wheelbarrow, right beside the darling; and, no, he did not accept plastic money. Only plastic transportation.
Settled in her sled, Abigail held the box so carefully on her lap, gently running her hand across the pictures, not picking at that torn corner. That’s what a boy would do.
They went straight home; time to do some heavy playing. But the aware child looked seriously up to her father before they got inside.
“Mother will let us play with smoke?”
“She’s going to be napping, so I’m in charge.”
That made her snicker. Daddy in charge meant smoke and stink and stains.
Sneaking inside, they found no Vanessa, though her rhythmic breathing could be heard through her open bedroom door.
The scientists settled on the kitchen floor. Since Abigail had difficulty sitting upright, she leaned against the nearest cabinet. Stan at her side, they opened the treasure chest. Made to stand upright, the box opened from the middle like its own little cardboard cabinet with cardboard shelves.
Stan immediately grabbed the instruction book and handed it to his cohort. She held it in a real serious manner, scarcely looking to it as her father described the contents of their chemistry cabinet:
“The first thing we notice is that this was created in the early ages of cardboard and plastic.”
Stan then variously pointed at, touched, poked, turned, and/or lifted the items:
“Here we have a plastic balance scale. Over here we have several rows of small plastic jars with twist-off lids containing…let me see…sodium bisulphate, elixir of iron dust, refined neutralizing powder, and calcium chloride (CaCl2). This slender glass bottle with eye dropper is older but still looks familiar.”
“It smells like your cabin,” sniffing Abigail observed.
“I cannot argue. To proceed…this thing like a rounded triangle bottle is an Erlenmeyer flask, and here are test tubes and a test tube holder and test tube rack and corks and rubber stoppers.“
“Whew,” Abigail suggested.
“I agree.”
The girl pointed to a squat, clear bottle.
“Beautiful blue, Daddy! What is it?”
“Uh, let me read the label: ‘Tincture of woad. Used as a dye for costly fabrics or for encouraging timely growth.’”
“I could like blue,” Abigail told her father, “except for yellow, and red. More chem-ski set?”
“Indeed. This large, serious black tube is a genuine diffraction-grating spectroscope. Here is a sort of grey plastic hydrometer with separate scale. Beside it is a white mechanical centrifuge: it twirls. There is a box of flame test wire. Let me examine this…this cardboard container with a blue plastic sack of copper sulphate.”
“Oh,” Abigail said, her little face all studious and fascinated.
“Here we have degreased iron filings,” Stan continued. “In this corked jar, uh, litmus paper.”
“Hmm,” Abigail said, appearing scientific. “I am very interested in little mouse paper.”
“You have my understanding. What else do you have? A formerly yellow cardboard tube of heavy gauge containing…powdered alum. And in this, which resembles a skinny sardine tin, we have…flake graphite.”
He then turned to her with a happy ta-dum expression. She shared his enthusiasm. Abigail’s eyes weren’t especially big, but when she looked up to him, her imagination in high gear, they seemed huge, the size of the sky.
Extending her arm way way out, Abigail pointed at the box.
“Daddy, you missed something.”
Following her point, Stan reached into the box, removing a sealed cylinder that seemed to be made of, uh, not plastic, not cardboard, not stone, but a striking combination of gold and glass.
Stan had some difficulty reading the label, which seemed a thousand years old:
“‘Phlogiston’ is that essence within all combustible materials that allows flames. Upon burning, phlogiston is released. If it could be returned, the burnt material would regain its original constitution. Experiment and see what you can recreate!”
The new scientists looked to each other.
“Do we have anything burned that we could spearmint on?” Stan asked.
Only a profound innocent could have spoken Abigail’s next sentence:
“Grandmum was cremated.”
He had to look away. Not a word, but he hoped he wasn’t breathing funny.
“Daddy, you’re all red.”
He was closer to this girl than any other person in his life, any person to have lived, including the memory of his mother. They shared a spiritual intimacy he had never encountered before, not even with her mother, not even with his wife. Yet he could not meet her gaze. No, he wasn’t ashamed of his emotion, but he would not share his sorrow.
“Let’s read the instruction book and find something nice to do,” Stan recommended, nodding to the tome in Abby’s hands.
She didn’t mention that his voice sounded funny. She just scooched a little closer. Side by side, they read together.
Moments before, Stan didn’t understand how this experience could get any better. Now there was only one way to go.
“What do we see in the table of contents?” he began.
“The green one, Daddy.”
“Very well, green it is. The little green square says, ‘Making a non-erotic philter.’”
He looked his daughter in the eye.
“We’re not going there,” he told her.
After shrugging, Abigail looked down to the page again.
“We could try red.”
“Hmm, red is the color of warning.”
“It’s the color of blood,” Abigail pointed out.
“Sweetheart, if you see that color coming out of you, consider that a warning.”
“I know that one, Daddy. I don’t know this one,” and there went her tiny finger pointing to the middle of the page. Number 6: How To Make Gold From Lead, page 6.
Turning there, Stan read the instructions aloud:
“Ha Ha. No chemistry known to modern science will allow the transformation of gold (Au) from lead (Pb). In past ages, however, the precursor of real scientists (known as ‘alchemists’) mistakenly thought it possible. In their attempts, they often created dangerous compounds, even injuring themselves. Our motto: ‘Make plants from seeds, not gold from lead!’”
Father and daughter turned to each other.
“One man’s gold is another man’s goldfish,” Stan said.
“Ha,” Abby said, just a word, not a laugh. “That wasn’t funny but you said it funny.”
“But we learned something with the chemistry set, didn’t we?”
“We didn’t learn any fun,” she mentioned.
“Hmm. So, we could try a different number on this page, or go to free blowing.”
“What is ‘free blowing,’ Father?”
“I like when you call me ‘Father.’”
“That’s nice, Daddy. Answer question, please.”
“‘Free blowing’ is when you create something without being shackled by formal constraints.”
“You talk hard sometimes,” she said mildly in way of complaint.
“Oh. In our case, it means to freely make stuff without blowing up too much.”
“Now we’re learning fun!” she exclaimed.
From far away came the sound of a resting mother, another type of free blowing.
To keep the floor clean, Stan set down some newspaper. Without that, the flames wouldn’t have had any food.
Despite grasping the essential tenet of chemistry that one does not need a match for a fire to start, Stan was nevertheless surprised at the smoke rising from their single test tube heated at an angle over their Bunsen burner.
“Oh, smoke,” Abby whined as her father tried to smother their chemical reaction with a kitchen towel, which caught fire next, then the newspaper on the floor, and likely the floor itself.
Standing while sliding Abigail away from the billowing stench, Stan considering trying to douse it with water from the kitchen sink those few feet away. Unable to see that far, he grabbed his daughter and headed for the door.
Becoming expert at turning a handle with one hand while holding his daughter with the other, Stan was out the door, followed by an acrid stench, as though a dog slipping outside, its escape a type of free blowing.
“Stan!”
The shout from inside was not hot, but chilling. Quickly setting his daughter down on the grass, Stan turned to the increasing smoke, his only thought saving Abigail’s mother. With his final step before entering the kitchen door, Stan caught his foot on the stoop, falling face first against the concrete, everything grey in his sight.
He picked himself up.
Chapter 15
A Lullaby For Lucifer
Rising, he saw that the smoke was dissipating. He had created worse fires in his laboratory, though none intentional.
“Father, are you injured?”
Turning, he saw his daughter standing behind with both hands on her dress, lifting her hem from the ground. Even when aiding her father in his Gnostic tasks, she remained a young lady.
“No, I just tripped running in two directions at once.”
His attempt at levity brought only a strained smile to Abigail. Though removed from the smoke, she coughed, but only once.
“I think I can enter the kitchen again,” he told her.
“The kitchen?” she asked.
He looked at her quizzically a moment, as though she had failed to understand his simple phrase. Then he turned, clearly seeing the building’s entry as a light wind blew away the smoke.
“I must have breathed too much smoke,” he smiled. “Let me go inside the laboratory first. If it’s clear, you can follow, Abigail.”
Of course, the thick plank door was yet open—that’s how he had escaped. Hearing a cough from within, Stan saw Malbad trying to dissipate the smoke by waving a linen bench cover toward the windows. No fire present. Not truly a stench, that interesting scent diminished with every wave of the overseer’s fabric.
Again Stan retreated. The strange feeling came to him that he needed to pull himself together—literally. He seemed to be in two places at once—but of course he was: his thoughts were inside the laboratory though his body was outside. Perhaps he did not feel a discrepancy of place, but of time. Yes, he was yet in his laboratory working and simultaneously fleeing the danger. But the danger of the Hermetic Art he plied was outside, not in: the danger came from those outside his Gnostic beliefs who would consider him heretical upon learning of his science. Their condemnation had come to his family before, and their victim had not survived.
Stan had to hold back tears to look at the girl and see her grandmother in her hair and eyes.
“Father?” she asked, one frightened word.
“Smoke in the eyes,” he smiled, rubbing his face with his fingertips.
For a moment, he had to stare at the little girl, as though he had never seen his daughter before. She wore a velvet gown with sleeves ruffled below the elbow, of the darkest brown, one slender golden chain, scarcely visible beyond touching distance, with links of infinity signs, appropriate for the boundless love she effortlessly accepted as a gift from her father.
Viewing in return, did she notice his woolen robe, deeply pleated along its length, ending above the ankle, the sleeves narrow? His separate collar, of yellow satin, was not tied but connected with a silver clasp. He wore no jewelry. What did this matter to a child her age, and how did it matter to him?
“Your robe got burnt a little, Daddy,” she said, pointing. “It’s not so pretty anymore.”
“Let’s visit the growth-house while the smoke clears,” he suggested.
Stan held out his hand, which Abigail readily grasped.
Stepping past the stone laboratory, they proceeded to the adjacent building, its low timber walls and expanse of light-controlling nets suitable for that green and growing interior.
Looking across the great open land of his manor, Stan had to consider this house of growing things silly. There, the nearest holding of a tenant, Doane’s half-virgate of land all in barley this spring, the fresh shoots visible to a man with vision. And the adjacent fief: the Miles’ quarter-virgate of sheep. A fence of entwined and tied limbs separated sheep from barley sprout. And what did the lord of this estate grow? Strange plants whose task was not to fill a man’s belly, but fulfill his destiny.
“Father, I would like to dig.”
Stan followed his daughter’s view. At an imaginary border surrounding his manor house and outbuildings, dozens of vassals bent to their shared task. Following the decree of the king, each estate must be protected by a moat suitable to repel hordes of invaders, none of which had threatened for a century. Stan viewed the different styles of digging: some spade loads of soil fell right behind the digger; others went flying vigorously. These men had worked all day. The sun would soon set; only then would these workers return to their simple byres for meal and sleep.
“Abigail, we’ll leave the work to the workers,” Stan said.
“I am not a worker, though I do needlework,” she replied thoughtfully.
“Yes, Abigail, because your position in this estate is growing as my daughter, not working as a farmer.”
“Father, since you are lord of this manor and I am your daughter, am I not almost a princess?”
“You are more important than a princess,” he told her. “You are my treasure.”
Being mature and modest, she averted her eyes while blushing.
Returning his attention to immediate work, Stan stepped through the growth-house’s entry, a half door with no lock, arriving at an expanse of lush growth. Timber frames and tables supported Stan’s efforts. Oriental grasses and European tubers grew directly in the ground. Requiring special soil mixtures, newly bred crosses of foodstuffs and decorative flowers reached for the skies or crawled across the foot paths. The smell was a complexity of astringent and sweet and annoying. Dead leaves fell like desiccated feathers. Resin dripped from a broken limb like spittle from a rabid dog.
“I could see your secret plants,” Abigail smiled sneakily.
In Abigail’s syntax, her words were a request.
He had to consider the danger, the danger in knowledge. But such danger was his life’s work, and Abigail was an unparalleled part of his life. If danger came to him, danger came to her.
Stan scarcely considered the correlate: If he created danger, he created it for them both.
They stood looking at the strange circular echo bush, which grew like a common plant except at a vastly increased rate, dropping seeds that sprouted with equal rapidity, maturing before the original plant wilted, the effect being of a single plant expanding and receding simultaneously.
Leaning against her father, one hand on his arm, Abigail reached out to the plant while looking up to the lord’s face.
“You can touch it,” he told her. “It won’t hurt you.”
So she did. One dainty fingertip against the nearest leaf, which trembled so slightly, only a princess would notice.
“It feels…green!” she smiled.
“If anyone, even the clergy, ever asks you what grows in here, Abigail, just shrug and say you never noticed.”
“Mother says lying is a sin, and lying to the priests is worthy of condemnation.”
“Never argue with your mother.”
“You do.”
“She’s not my mother. To protect yourself in these ignorant times, you must learn to lie. My own mother never learned that.”
“I miss my grandmum.”
“With these plants, Abigail, I hope to bring us all together again.”
“Do you mean they will kill us and we’ll meet in Heaven?”
“Heaven on Earth is my goal,” he told her. “By harnessing the power of life’s elixir, which is known as Philosopher’s Stone, people will become angels and live without end.”
“How will this bush help you with your harnessing, Father?”
“Instead of dying, this plant begins its life cycle again. I endeavor to transmute this achievement to people and how we live. Instead of our lives ending or beginning again, they might continue indefinitely.”
“Oh,” Abigail replied.
She was just a child.
Before their lesson continued, an alien stopped them. A flying object of excruciating color—yellow and deep red and bright green feathers, its head and beak rounded—entered the growth-house. Though unique in appearance, it flew the same as any bird, showing no special intelligence in soaring against the outer netting, its claws becoming entangled. Wings flapping, going nowhere, it squawked in the universal sound of frightened birds.
Abigail ran directly to it.
“Daddy, we have to help before it gets hurt!” she exclaimed.
Stan didn’t stop her. Though he recognized the bird, he couldn’t explain it. According to Malbad, the bird was either imported from a distant land, or his own modification, via alchemy, of an eagle. It wasn’t gold. But it was a bird with claws and a beak that could crack nuts.
“Be careful, Abby,” Stan warned. “This bird’s duty is guardian. Its purpose is to warn of approaching wolves or other covert dangers.”
She moved the stool herself, standing up where she could reach. Now quiet, its wings scarcely moving, the bird breathed deeply, red tongue visible between parted beak. As though practiced in rescuing exotic creatures, Abigail carefully pulled those claws loose with one hand while holding the bird’s torso in the other. As she pulled it away, the bird reached down to press her hand with its beak while flexing its sharp claws.
