Endless Things Read Free Page A

and you fled or you followed: whether borne along as Winnie had been, trailing one hand, or poling as fast as you could down the same thousand-branching streams and through its bogs and backwaters, as Pierce felt he must. He could weary of Axel, but he never despised him, because he was never taught that what Axel possessed wasn't worth possessing, and also because he was afraid to: afraid that if he hurt his father he would hurt him mortally, and so lose the last of something that he had already lost nearly all of, without which he would cease to exist.
    Anyway he liked knowing things. From his earliest years he gathered things to know like grain, and never forget them afterward. He learned what Axel knew, and then later he learned where Axel had learned those things; he came to know many things Axel would never learn. When Axel was on TV—an unbelievable overturning of the natural course of things, that he should be there, looking like himself but smaller and smoother: a doll of himself, answering questions on a famous quiz show for big money—Pierce knew the answer to the question that finally stopped him. You could only miss one, and then you left, shaking the hand of the host and the other guy, who looked like Arnold Stang and sounded like somebody else entirely. The question that stopped Axel was What is the Samian letter, and after whom is it named?
    Pierce Moffett was a junior at St. Guinefort's Academy then, watching TV in the crowded student lounge—you may not remember that, but maybe you remember the tick-tock music that played while Axel stared like a damned soul, everybody who heard it played week after week remembers it. And Pierce knew: he knew what the Samian letter was, and after whom it was named, and his father didn't.

 
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    Y.
    It stood at the head of the tall double-columned page, above and precedent to all things that only begin with Y, Yaasriel and Yalkut and Yggdrasil and Yoga and Yoruba: both a signum and its initial, which is what had attracted Pierce's attention to it. Only A and O and X were accorded the same status in this book, which was called A Dictionary of the Devils, Dæmons, and Deities of Mankind , by Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle.
    The twenty-fifth letter of the English alphabet , the book told him, it is also the tenth of the Hebrew—the Yod. Its numerical equivalent is Ten, the perfect number. In the Hebrew Cabala it is the membrum virile and is expressed by the hand with bent forefinger. The Y, or upsilon, is the litera Pythagoræ , and was long believed to have been first constructed by the Samian philosopher himself (it was often called the “Samian letter") and its mystic significance is Choice: the two branches signify the paths of Virtue and Vice respectively, the narrow right way leading to virtue, the wider left to vice.
    Pierce didn't know then why ten was the perfect number, but he guessed what a membrum virile might be (bent his forefinger to resemble his own). After some searching he found the Samian philosopher too: avoider of beans, reincarnationist, man-god.
    A sign for human life, its form taken from crossroads and tree forks and the springing of arches. Lydgate will have it that the stem stands for the years of youth, before the hard choices of maturity are made. In Christian thought its branches separate Salvation and Damnation, the horns of the tree of life, the Cross. Nor does this exhaust its significations: a more secret dogma is supposed to be expressed in it, one that certain Rosicrucians pretended to be on the point of disclosing, before that sect spoke no more.
    At the age he was when he first read this—ten or eleven—Pierce had no sense of how much time or space separated these characters, Samians and Hebrews and Rosicrucians; somehow they all existed together in the root of time, back before the choice of a way was made. Gathered together in this book they seemed gathered in a world of their own, openable and closable, discrete, though containing many