A Wind in the Door: Chapters 8–10

I don’t know why I thought I might be of help. This is all over my head. I will only be a hindrance to the children.

“The full implications of this are not yet clear to me.”

All anger vanished when Meg caught, from Louise’s song, another projection of Charles, huddled under the blankets.

His mother lifted him to prop him up on pillows to ease his labored breathing, then pulled down the blankets so that Dr. Louise could listen to his heart with her stethoscope.

Mr. Jenkins looked at her and spoke in his most stilted, academic voice.

“Man. The mean point in the universe. And Charles Wallace—is that it? At this moment in time Charles Wallace is the point of equilibrium?”

Ahead of her was a tremendous rhythmic swirl of wind and flame, but it was wind and flame quite different from the cherubim’s; this was a dance, a dance ordered and graceful, and yet giving an impression of complete and utter freedom, of ineffable joy.

And then wind, flame, dance, song, cohered in a great swirling, leaping, dancing, single sphere.

“You must stop thinking about size, you know. It is both relative and irrelevant.”

Her heart beat in frightened counterpoint to the rhythm of the mitochondrion.

She could not pay proper attention as Proginoskes said, “It’s what might be called a circadian rhythm. All life needs rhythm to—”

The surface of the sea, and any light which might penetrate the surface, was hundreds of fathoms away.

The movement assumed shape and form, and images were kythed to her mind’s eye, visual projections superimposed swiftly one over the other; she tried to send them to Mr. Jenkins...

a primordial fern forest;
a giant bed of kelp swaying to submarine currents;
a primeval forest of ancient trees with rough, silver bark...

...underwater trees with silver-gold-green foliage which undulated regularly, rhythmically, not as though the long fronds were being blown by wind or current but of their own volition, like the undulation of those strange sea creatures halfway between plant life and animal life.

...underwater trees with silver-gold-green foliage which undulated regularly, rhythmically, not as though the long fronds were being blown by wind or current but of their own volition, like the undulation of those strange sea creatures halfway between plant life and animal life.

Tendrils were drawn back, pulled away from her, isolating themselves, isolating Meg, Proginoskes, each other.

“If Blajeny wanted him along, there must be a reason for it. But it seems to me he’s an awful liability.”

“Charles Wallace said she isn’t in school. He said that Meg is in him. I heard him.”
“Charles Wallace is delirious.”

This minuscule undersea world was totally beyond his comprehension.

Yes, but for an unimaginative man to come with them into the unimaginably infinitesimal unknown isn’t the kind of thing a failure does.

Another flash of Charles Wallace’s face, ashen, eyes closed, breathing labored; of her mother’s face, tight with pain; of Dr. Louise, watchful, waiting.

A cold wind seemed to blow through the interstices of her ribs.

“I am a cherubim. All I need to know is that all the galaxies, all the stars, all creatures, cherubic, human, farandolan, all, all, are known by Name.” He seemed almost to be crooning to himself.

She felt his mind balking at the idea of communication where distance was no barrier.

“Mice talk by squeaking, and shrimp by—I don’t know much marine biology but they must make some sound. But trees!” he expostulated. “Mice who put down roots and turn into trees—you did say trees?”

Meg was impatient, not so much at Mr. Jenkins as at her own ineptitude in communicating with him.

“The farae—well, they aren’t unlike trees, sort of primordial ones, and they aren’t unlike coral and underwater things like that.”

Mr. Jenkins had never had that kind of communion with another human being, a communion so rich and full that silence speaks more powerfully than words.

Some of the pepper plants had large, firm, healthy fruit. On others the peppers were wizened and wrinkled and pale.

The plant heard the automatic ugly invective of daily speech in Calvin’s home.

The third bean he talked to, encouraging it, urging it to grow. When the first green shoot appeared he lavished on it all the love which had so little outlet in his home.

“My name is Proginoskes, if you please, mouse-creature.”
The farandola was not amused. “My name is Sporos.” A reproving twingle.

He was not kything in words now, but in great waves of courage, of strength, flowing over and through her. She accepted it, absorbed it. Fortitude.

“It is the pattern throughout Creation. One child, one man, can swing the balance of the universe. In your own Earth history what would have happened if Charlemagne had fallen at Roncesvalles? One minor skirmish?”