of a sad story. It happened a long time before I was horn. Momdy sort of remembers. His name was Harvey Cloud. His father was Henry Cloud, the inventor and astronomer. Henry used to spend his summers up here, he had that pretty little cottage where the Junipers later lived. I think he had a lot of patents he lived on. Old John had put some money into his inventions—engines, I think, or astronomical things, I guess; I don't know what. One of his things though was the old orrery at the top of the house—you know. That was an invention of Henry's—I mean not orreries in general, they were invented by a Lord Orrery believe it or not (Smoky told me that). But Henry died before it was finished (it cost a lot of money I think) and about that time Nora, Great-aunt Cloud, married Harvey. Harvey was working on it too. His father's son. I saw a picture of him once that Auberon took, in his shirtsleeves and a stiff collar and tie (I guess he wore them even when he was working), looking very fierce and thoughtful, standing next to the engine of the orrery before they installed it. It was HUGE and complicated and took up most of the picture. And then when they were done installing it (John was long dead by then) there was an accident, and poor Harvey fell off the very tip-top of the house and was killed. I guess then everybody forgot about the orrery, or didn't want to think about it. I know Cloud never talked about it. You used to hide out up there, I remember. Now, you know, Smoky's up there all the time, trying to see if it will ever run, and studying books on machinery and clockwork—I don't know how he's doing.
"So he used to just live here, Harvey I mean, with Nora, in her room; and go up and work on the orrery; and then he fell off. So there you are.
"Sophie says to tell you to be careful of your throat because of bronchitis, in March.
"Lucy's baby's going to be a boy.
"Isn't the winter dragging on!
"Your loving mother."
Well. Still further dark or at least odd corners in his family's life he hadn't known about. He remembered saying once to Sylvie that nothing terrible had ever happened in his family. That was before he had learned much about the true and false Lilacs, of course; and here now was poor Harvey Cloud, a young husband, tumbling off the roof at the moment of his greatest triumph.
He could work that in. There was nothing, he had begun to think, that he couldn't work in. He had a gift for such work: a real gift. Everybody said so.
But meanwhile, his scene switched back to the City. This was the easy part, a rest from the other, more complex scenes; it was all simple in the City—predation, chase, escape, triumph and defeat; the weak to the wall, and only the strong survive. He chose, from a long row of them which had replaced George's anonymous paperbacks on the shelf, one of Doc's old books. He had sent to Edgewood for them when he had become a writer, and they had proved very useful, as he had thought they might. The one he had was one of the Gray Wolf's adventures; and, sipping his whiskey, he began to thumb through it, looking for some material he could steal.
Escapements
The moon was silver. The sun was gold, or at least goldplated. Mercury was a mirrored globe—mirrored with mercury, of course. Saturn was heavy enough to be lead. Smoky remembered something from the Architecture that associated various metals with various planets; but those weren't these planets, they were the dream-planets of magic and astrology. The orrery, brass-bound and oak-cased, was one of those turn-of-the-century scientific instruments that couldn't have been more solidly rational, material, engineered: a patented universe, made of rods and balls, meshing gears and electroplated springs.
Then why couldn't Smoky understand it?
He stared hard again at the mechanism, a sort of detached escapement, which he was about to disassemble. If he disassembled it before he understood its function, though, he doubted whether he could put it back together. On the floor, on tables in the hall below, there were several such, all cleaned and wrapped in oily rags, and wrapped too in mystery; this escapement was the last. He supposed (not for the first time) that he should never have begun