Уолтер Мосли - Blue Light

“The written word is where we can all come together,” Nesta said before each class. “Words are thoughts, and thoughts are dreams, and dreams are the dawn of change.”

I asked Bones how two more Blues had gotten to hear his special call.

“Winch Fargo is more like you, Last Chance. A crooked light, a dim light. A creature between here and not. He heard my call and came running like a dog on Teacher’s leash.” Teacher is what he called Nesta Vine. “But now I have changed the call. Now all that the singing trees hide is the blue spoor of the puppy trees and the ones you call Blues.”

“So, no more will come?”

“No. Not so many, I think.”

“So now that we’re here, what do we do?”

“Eat and sleep,” the little brown man said. “Drink and dream, tell stories and kiss. Tend the gardens that we need.”

“What gardens?”

“The puppy trees are growing now. They dream of devouring the sun and tickling the tonsils of Earth. They’re not yet grown-up, but they’ll be loud enough to hear unless we can grow a whole chorus of singing firs to drown out the sounds of hunger.”

“How many trees do we need?”

“Hundreds and then thousands should do.”

“All that? We can’t do all that.”

“Then we’ll do what we can and hope for the rest. I can make you stronger, make you work longer. I have ways to make you a tree farmer.” Bones smiled at me but didn’t share his secret plans. And I didn’t mind waiting to see what he meant.

While I waited, a society had begun to form among the citizens of Treaty. Alacrity fell in love with Nesta Vine. She followed the black amazon around, hanging on her every word and gesture. They ran in the forest together, executing great and small projects, like building a raft or making exotic clothes from the wings of the killer butterflies. They’d often disappear for days at a time. Whether they were lovers in the physical sense I never knew. But next to the looks they had for each other, any passion I’d ever felt was pale and insignificant.

I was a little jealous of that love, but not in the way you might think. I was happy for Alacrity, happy that she had a close friend. But that meant I could rarely see Nesta alone. And being alone with Nesta was what I dreamed about every night.

A few days after she’d arrived in Treaty, Nesta and I took a long walk in the woods together. She was full of stories about places she’d been and times she’d read about. And she was accomplished in dozens of disciplines, arts, and sciences. One was the Chinese medicine called acupuncture. She said that the Chinese needle-and-flame doctors could cure many symptoms that the drug-and-knife doctors of the West couldn’t begin to treat.

“You mean these guys could treat with a pin one of the headaches I get listening to Bones?”

“Give me your left arm” was her answer.

She took me by the upper half of my left arm and applied pressure to two nerve points. It started off by tingling like flesh receiving blood after the circulation had been cut off for a while. I wasn’t even aware of my erection until I looked down and noticed the bulge in my pants.

Nesta smiled while keeping the tingly pressure constant.

“You like that?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, really trying to answer her question. “It’s like I don’t really feel it.”

Nesta then released the pressure from one point, touching me lightly with her free hand somewhere on the right side of my neck.

“Do you want to feel it?”

When I nodded she pinched a nerve on my neck, which caused a great deal of pain. I thought that I was going to scream when the ejaculation started. She didn’t keep the pressure on my neck constant. After a painful pinch she’d release for a second or so, then pinch again. And every time, I tensed and ejaculated more.

After the seventh or eighth time I stammered, half laughing, “S-stop. I can’t—”

She gave my neck one more hard nip and then released me with both hands. This left me quivering on the ground at her feet.

Nesta got down on her knees next to me and put her lips near my ear. “Those are pressure points doctors give to women who have not conceived or whose husbands are impotent. It drains the man. Do you feel drained, Chance?”

I nodded, grinning like a fool.

“Then come by and see me night after next and I’ll show you some points that you can pinch on me.”

I spent as many evenings as I could under the tutelage of Nesta Vine. There was never what I’d call love between us, not like the love between either of us and Alacrity. We were more symbiotic in an intellectual and physical way. To be blunt, I needed sex and I needed her knowledge to write my History .

Nesta wanted children and she loved to talk and tell stories. I wasn’t much help, but it wasn’t from a lack of trying. She was childless in the years we were acquainted, and I learned more about blue light from her than from any other source.

“In one sense,” she once told me, “the light is the motivation while blood is the machine. Like gasoline and a car engine. That’s one way to look at it. Bones says that light is more like the chemical reaction needed to motivate a seed, which is the blood. At this point you and I are the root jutting down from the seed.”

“But Bones also told me that blue light is like disease,” I said.

“Or maybe it’s just magic,” Nesta replied; then she kissed me.

I liked her kisses very much. The kisses and pinches. It was a sorrow to me that we never conceived a child. I also lamented the days on end that she and Alacrity would go off together. Sometimes I would catch glimpses of them running naked in the woods or sitting on opposite sides of a small stream from each other speaking in low tones and gazing into each other’s eyes across the distance.

I wasn’t the only one who was disturbed by the friendship between the two young women. Wanita had been Alacrity’s closest friend before Nesta showed up. They had been girls together. When Alacrity had been miraculously transformed into a woman, she still shared her deepest secrets with the Dreamer. But after Nesta showed up, Alacrity either ignored Wanita or treated her as an adult would a child.

Often when I’d be looking after Nesta and Alacrity, I’d see Wanita watching them too. I found myself searching her out sometimes just to say hi to someone who shared my bruised feelings.

This self-pitying concern for Wanita is what made me aware of the threat to Treaty’s only child.

Often when I’d find Wanita I’d also see Mackie Allitar somewhere in the vicinity. I began to worry about her safety and so made it my business to always be aware of the whereabouts of either Mackie or Wanita.

But whenever I stalked Mackie I found Bones there too. Once when I was watching Mackie watch Wanita playing down by the stream, I looked up and saw Bones high in the branches of a tree.

It comforted me to know that Bones was guarding her, but I was afraid that one day he’d be off with his bears or stone pots, that one day I’d wake up late and Mackie Allitar would have raped and murdered my last charge.

I was sure that Mackie wanted to kill Wanita. We all knew that he’d been a convict under ex-Warden Reed.

I followed him all day long. Reluctantly Addy promised to keep Wanita with them at night. She didn’t think there was any threat. I guess she figured that keeping Wanita with her would help my sleep.

Mackie looked old and withered, but I saw him as a threat as great as Gray Man.

No one would listen to me. Reggie and Trini couldn’t see past their own love for each other, and Addy trusted in Bones. Miles Barber was morose and sad most of the time, and when he wasn’t he was in terrible pain that was both physical and in his soul.