The Days of Tansy Capstone

Part 2: Itchywanna

QUATHEADS

"Irving had taken a steamboat up the Mississippi from New Orleans, had stopped at one of the serene and dilapidated villages that border the rivers of ancient Louisiana, and had been there beguiled by the strangely joyous life of the tatterdemalion Creoles."

-Jonathan M. Smith, The Orthosphere blog

The bike had been loaded for days. No one else used it so they didn't notice. I waited for Dad to leave for the Institute, and went to sneak past Mom on the couch with her flasher.

The strobe fritzed. Tansy, she said, is that you?

I had to make her think of anything but where I was going. I just want to say, I said, and thought fast. Have you tried doing it with body parts? Like, holding your arm up?

My eyes are closed, hon, I can't see it.

But you could make like a phantom arm in the same place as the real arm, and train them to move together. Then you'd have another way to bend the vision.

While she played with that, I slipped out of the house, and pedaled the east road up to Hog Heaven. Green grass was fully poking through last year's brown, and the willows along the stream were yellow with leafbuds. They wouldn't miss me until supper, and they'd shrug and say, she's off.

In ancient times the road was a bike trail. Now its smooth grade made it the main road, while the old road lay cracked up on the hill. Three wide lanes were heavily painted with three icons: feet, wheels, and hooves, with wheels in the middle, and the best surface. I tried to look normal, like I was hauling turnips to market.

Hog Heaven was crustier than Threeforks. The roofs had straw sticking out, and off the main road, the zigzag brickwork was so bumpy I had to get off and walk. At the Co-op I claimed my prize. I'd ordered it in December with my last creds, and it took them this long to get it. The proprietor looked puzzled. A pound of dahlia seeds, he said, what are you planning to do?

I said, I'm bringing Verve to the Quats.


There's nothing worse to aspire to be than a Quathead. I learned that from my dad, testing him at dinner. How old do you have to be, I said, to deal sex in Vegas? He didn't bat an eye, and Mom said it's even younger in Moab. But when I mentioned running off to join the Quatheads, he got steamed. The Quatheads are such losers, he said, that they think utopia is still too hard, and they take to the hills and live off an invasive fruit.

Later I learned that modquats are only invasive because there are no Quathead lawyers. If there were, they would have been reclassified as native a long time ago. They're an Oracle quartet, mostly persimmon and goumi, even more pawpaw than kumquat. The skin is orange and wrinkly, the texture anywhere from crisp to custard, the flavor anywhere from custard to axle grease. They grow where they please and pump out enough low-grade fruit and bitter seeds that a tribe with bad taste can live on them.

At school, if you wanted to say something was big, you'd say it's the size of a Quathead dong. Everybody knew they were dumb and lazy, and spent all day boning and being filthy. Snoots called it the Quathead problem, those poor people, if only we didn't have to look at them, shambling into town for their Scrip and spending it on skunkweed.

One time my dad mentioned an academic study: Modquats Contain Verve Inhibitors. Verve is a humour that bestows verve, that's why they call it that. The study said a diet more than two thirds modquats will lead to sloth and lethargy, and also sterility.

I said, why doesn't someone just give them Verve supplements? He laughed at what a terrible idea that was, because imagine trying to pry Quatbabies from their debauched families.

I had to go to the Institute library to find it, and I made up a story in case someone noticed me, that I was inspired by my name to do an art project on the humours of flowers. That made me start in the flower section, otherwise I wouldn't have found it. The Verviest edible thing, by far, is dahlia flower. Luckily the guy at the co-op didn't read the academic journals. He thought I was talking nonsense.

I followed the river trail out of town. They say it's drinkable above Hog Heaven, and no wonder -- it's much smaller. You're cheating, I told the river, and glared at it, first at the rush of foam downstream, then I walked up the trail, making the river keep its promise of being actually big. After a minute my thoughts drifted off and it turned out to have been small all along. I went down to fill my bottles.

Mom had given me directions to the Quathead colony. It's halfway into the Hoodoo Mountains, she said. You'll have to--

Oh no, I said, I'm not actually going, I'm just wondering where they are.

Of course you're not, that would be big trouble for the Quats. This side of Deery, take the rough road. You'll see the campfires.

That Quatheads could make fire was something that hadn't occurred to me. I went up the rough road, standard half-patched pavement, with boards laid across the biggest cracks. The path to their colony wasn't a muddy ditch like I expected, but sort of graveled, with more than one wheeltrack. Maybe the just-arrived Quatheads weren't so lazy.

I crept quietly around their territory, and didn't even hear the squeals of wanton boning. All I heard was slow thuds of mortar and pestle, and cracks of splitting firewood, and of course they started singing, all low and droney. This was one verse:

We live between the lantern and the creed
Sight of the eyes and wandering of desire
So long as those two dance, does blind love lead
Til turn by turn, we find the world entire

Not wanting to live on modquats alone, I had raided my dad's doom cabinet for novelty MREs. They were something you were made to eat as a joke, in a game my parents' game group played one time. My dad was probably mad at himself, that he didn't leave me something better to steal.

I set camp and opened a coconut macaroni casserole that was so gross, I was going to go dump it for the bears, but I thought, what if the next one's worse, and it was. I choked down the macaroni and left the peppermint tuna for the bears, and they didn't eat it either.

Sneaking up on the Quatheads was easy, they were so out of it. Every morning I picked my way upwind through clouds of skunkweed, to my target: their poop holes. Their composting toilet must have been under repair, or maybe it was a festival, because for a whole week they came out in the woods with handspades and buried their poop just deep enough that I could see the steam coming up. I'd pick up a stick and poke in a pinch of seeds, and then go find the next steam.

All that week I got more miserable. I'd planned the Quatheads as a stopoff on the way to the High Planes, and it was obvious I wasn't ready. In a place where reprobates were singing, I was losing weight, I had about a hundred mosquito bites, and it hadn't even rained yet. On the High Planes I'd be buzzard lunch, and I decided to do what I hate doing, and go back the way I came.

I'd been so frugal with the seeds that I still had half a pound left, so I scattered them in the most fertile places, and saved some in case I needed Verve later. Then I picked up camp, found the bike, and coasted down to Hog Heaven.

Some kind of flood had come through, and the road to Threeforks was covered with mud and closed, so everyone was taking the old road. Halfway there, a bunch of people were gathered around a washout, which had uncovered a whole ancient building of storage lockers: the Garage Mahal. They were arguing about how fast they could open it, and not break the magic.

DOWN THE PLUSH

"Let not the dark thee cumber;
What though the moon does slumber?
The stars of the night
Will lend thee their light,
Like tapers clear without number."

-Robert Herrick, The Night Piece, to Julia

I snuck up on Threeforks like I had the Quatheads. It would be so awkward to say hi everyone, I'm back. I camped in a copse up the river, and at darkest night I shimmied a tree and tapped on Cedric's window.

He slid up the sash and I popped in. Are they looking for me?

They're not even surprised. I saw Miss Turnbow smiling.

Listen, I need your condenser.

Take me with you.

Don't be stupid.

He said, You know I'm older than you.

Sure, in numbers.

What else is there?

I looked him up and down. Like, everything. You'll get swatted to the void by the first bear we run into.

Like you could beat a bear. What's your plan, to steal a kayak and float the Plush? You'll bottom out on sandbars all the way to the Itchywanna, another week of camping in worse places than wherever you just were.

Look, he said, I'll show you my condenser. We went down to the river and there it was, packed away with two pump filters, a cookpot and a tent, in the back of a flat-bottomed skiff just big enough for two of us.

I said, How long were you planning this?

Since you left. You're so predictable.

It was cloudy enough that barely any starlight got through, and we bumped down the ghostly river, bottoming out probably more than I would have done alone. Sometimes I had to get out and haul the front of the boat while Cedric worried the stern.

As the sky got light, we could see the dull red haze of the next town. Speedtrap was the most timestretched place in Greater Cascadia. Even pigeons were smart enough to go around. You went for the small town charm and outside the world changed. Elders overwintered there and came back youthful and sunburned.

The clouds were clearing, and if we were out on the river at midday we'd be broiled, but the sun wasn't even up. What do you think, I said. Should we run it?

I thought he'd say we should moor, but he said yes, let's run it. Good job, Cedric.

We came in with the sunrise behind us, dropping into timestretch and over the little falls where the Plush spits out to feed a channel as wide as the Win-all. You could still see chunks of the ancient culverts in the roots of willows. The river turned north into the shade of the canyon and we drifted up it, the Speedtrap main drag.

I don't know when people sleep, in a place with such short days. But they were out already, setting up umbrellas and putting on shades in anticipation of the sun. We were paddling to beat it, and a guy from the shore saw us and called out, Dig!

I plunged the oar and threw water like dirt. The flat boat skimmed on the lazy river, and the sun caught us. I glimpsed it for a moment, a god of fire spitting and raging up the sky. We threw our coats on, squinted and steered as the water carried us around another bend and into the shade.

A stream from the north shot in and scrunched us halfway back. It was like walking into glass. Behind us was warm and fleshy, before us sharp and thin. I can see how people have trouble walking out, but the water kept on carrying us until it was just the old Plush, the noon sun feeble.

Where a bridge had fallen, the river widened so we could hide in its shallows, all surrounded by cattails, and sleep.

I woke up at dusk to Cedric's butt in the air, his hands in the muck. These are fattails, he said, cattails retuned for tasty rootstocks. I didn't quite believe him, but I helped him pluck and clean a few, and start a fire. Cedric knew some stuff about making fire, so he wasn't completely useless. While he tended it, I gathered sticks and looked at the stars.

The stars move all the time, Dad said, if you're patient. Betelgeuse sways and Cassiopeia flip-flops between M and W. He beckoned me to the roof. Let's go and look!

Mom said, there's something I have to tell you. They had a big fight. Not seeing the stars move used to make me angry. I'd be like, come on stars, do your job. You can do it, stars. Just a wiggle.

Then Gran said, Girl, you can navigate. If you can keep your eye on a star, you can follow it straight-line across the most uncanny planes.

I said, What if I want to get lost. She said, Just close your eyes.

Later, when she measured my head for the drugs, the scale only went to fifty. That's at least how many regular people I count as, to make reality fall in line and be boring. But I hoped, this far out of town, if it was just me, maybe they would move a little. My feet tramped into a bramble, and I had to look down.

Whoa, called Cedric, these stars are crazy!

You're lying, I said, but looked up.

Now they stopped, he said. I stormed back to the fire.

There they go again, he said, and I looked up.

Wow, the stars are afraid of you.

Well, they should be.


We slept through the night, and took it easy the next day. The river was bigger so the boat bottomed out less. We stopped for late lunch in a willowy lagoon, and the upper bank was so lush that we set camp and made a fire, and roasted the rest of the fattails with a spice pack that should have gone in the first batch.

Finally it got dark enough to take another crack at the stars. I said to Cedric, I'll try to freeze them and you try to move them. He couldn't, but I fixed on Capella and practiced tightening and widening my focus until I fell asleep.

THE FALLS

"I have never tried that before, so I think I should definitely be able to do that."

-Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking

The next day we drifted deeper into the Itchywanna plateau. It all got scraped to bedrock by floods in the far past, and now it was a beautiful blasted landscape, shaggy heath and basalt columns sticking up like ancient ruins. I had to pull the boat over just to run around in it. Cedric made brunch with fish he caught while I climbed the tallest spire, and then the weirdest, and I ate cold fish while the current took us downstream.

We were almost at the big river. Dropping down to it, canyon walls rose on both sides, and the water grew rough. After three or four sets of rapids, we came around a sharp bend and heard a mighty roar. Stay right, said Cedric, there's a portage to the bottom.

That sounded like a lot of work. I said, can we just go over?

It's 200 feet. The boat will be tincanned and we'll both be killed.

We came around the last bend and there was a shout. At the boat ramp, three men were waving. I saw knives on their hips. I had a bad feeling, and although my intuition is no better than chance, I followed it. Run! I said. Over the falls!

Great stakes had been pounded into the riverbed to stop idiots like me from going over, but it wasn't hard to get between them. I plunged the oar, and Cedric looked in horror, first at the falls and then even more at me. He dove and snagged a stake, while I slid through.

It wasn't the most dangerous thing I ever did, only the stupidest. Even if those guys were the scum of the Itchywanna, I could have played along and eventually taken them. Instead I had to prove my derring-do in this dumbass stunt. Cedric watched in raw anguish as I drifted away. He was sure I was going to die, and two seconds later, so was I.

They say your life flashes before your eyes. It does, it's called your life. I saw all the ways people had been nice to me, and I knew what a wonder it was, even to live for these final few moments. I got so timescrunched that I could see, in the droplets of water around me, the sun go through its spectrum.

I had to live. And I wasn't even halfway down, so I stretched out my wings. It was my coat that saved me, and the days I'd spent on hilltops, puffing out the flaps to wrestle the wind. I knew just how to angle the zipper corners for the most resistance.

To not bellyflop, and still timescrunched enough to plan it, I did a three quarter forward turn and went toes-first into the water. It was as soft and warm as a glacier. It went into every opening and the pain kept me from passing out. The coat had some loft, and I held my breath as it bore me to the surface.

I couldn't feel my legs, but my arms were strong, and I clumsily backstroked to the shore.

I see everything the way it really is. That's why I saw three raiders after us, and it turned out to be three dweebs. Well, the first guy had the body of a raider, but luckily not the ethics, because I was helpless on the rocks when he found me.

Whoa! he said, It's a miracle. The second guy came huffing over, and they lifted me to the lower boat ramp. They took off my wet coat and gave me both of theirs. Finally the skinniest dweeb came wheezing down.

Was it you, he gasped, who stopped the stars?

The inevitable question. I shrugged like it was nothing, and they fell to their knees. Then came Cedric, who did basically the same thing, he was so glad I wasn't dead.

Aloysius, Balthasar, and Cable. I started out thinking of them as my blurry captors, but they took shape as three whole different people. Aloysius was a classic bobblehead, stumbling along and spitting out big words. Balthasar was a classic dude-bro, jovial and chill. Cable was quiet and competent.

I wasn't fit to climb the canyon, so Balthasar and Cable gathered sticks for a fire, while Aloysius told me the story of their cult. Growing up in Trice, they all heard about the fixity over Threeforks. Geologists said it was crystals grinding in the Earth. Cloud watchers said it was an inversion layer. But the first time he saw it he knew it was alive. He showed me a chart that tracked its cycles. Look, he said, at the spike on Sundays.

Sunday night was when I climbed up the Morphics building, my special alone time, just me and the stars, and it turned out even then I was being creeped on.

They'd seen the stillness grow the night before last, and last night I put on such a show that they took off in their chariot to find me. They guessed that I was on the river, and drove until the charge died to cut me off. They said I was the Rectifier, and they had my whole life already prophesied. First I would stop the stars, and then I would forge a path across the Great Planes, and finally I would unite all of humanity under a single beacon. Like I would ever do that.

Aloysius kept asking me metaphysical questions, like what happens when you die. I just made up some stuff. If I had multiple lives, I said, I'd make each one seem better than the last, but not really be better, so I could loop around.

He gasped. Did you just independently derive the barberpole heresy?

Am I in trouble?

Cable, laboring on the bow-drill, said, Every half-assed faith calls itself a heresy. The string snapped.

I said, do you not have lighters?

Cable likes to rough it, said Balthasar, and pulled out a sparker, but he looked at Cable to make sure it was OK. Then we all stick-roasted some trout they had caught while waiting for me. Aloysius, with his bobblehead fixation, was roasting his the best. I asked him, Which heresy is your favorite?

Bi-solipsism! Not one but two lonely gods, living out eternity as hider-seeker, as player-audience. The heresy is that you and the filler-in of details are full equals.

You're on fire.

He yanked that fish so fast it flew over his head smoking, and landed in the grass pretty well cooked.

TRICE

"I bought all my friends rocketships with money for the man
We didn't go anywhere, we just laid in the sand"

-Big Blood, In The Light Of The Moon

The next day I hobbled up the canyon while Cable ran ahead to get the chariot. Balthasar and Cedric stayed behind so I could ride, and it was just like riding the river, drifting through the bluffs of the scablands, but much bumpier. I cushioned myself on the pile of packs and slept, and when I woke up, we were all the way to the north edge of Trice. Their compound was in west Trice, and on the way we passed through the biggest ruined suburbs I'd ever seen. The old lots and slabs were so broken they rolled like the sea, and the flattest slabs boasted hovels of outlaws and hermits in papercrete and bubbledome.

I wondered how big the cult was. I don't know what I expected, an ancient steelframe hung with starry rags and crowds waving from the upper floors. It turned out they lived in a thrice-rebuilt ruin, and the rest of the tribe was one other person, a hippie chick named Fern. They were only a couple years older than us, and had just moved out from their parents.

Fern shook my hand squishily. Let me guess, she said. Daisy?

I said, did you divinate that?

Standard Earth deck, Eight of Flowers.

I knew the card, a field of daisies. It's what my dad wanted to name me, but my mom put her foot down for a less dumb flower. Almost, I said. Tansy.

Is that the same as Fernleaf Yarrow?

I said, It's suspicious, isn't it? You never see the two of them together.

They gave me the best room, upwind of the composting toilet, a cube of well-padded puffcrete with a feather bed. They fed me thimbleberry tarts, made of cakey starch from their foodfab and half-rancid fat from the wingnut orchard up the road. I didn't complain, but the next day I sorted out their fab.

Food fabricators are simple. You take a barrel full of stuff that only goats can eat, moisten it, and throw in some last age magic, a cup of goop from the previous batch. No one knows how it works, but pretty soon you've got a barrel full of the nastiest stuff that you can still eat.

From there it's all refinements. Pre-treatment, post-treatment, protein coagulators and starch powderers, options for automation all the way to pumping out bread. These Trice squatters had a basic unit, but I found enough mis-set settings that when I fixed them, the next morning they mixed batter for pancakes that were so average they couldn't stop raving. Who needs to rectify the world when you can rectify breakfast?

Then Balthasar and Cedric came in, scratched up and tanned but in good spirits. They'd gone downstream and found both our packs, unbent the boat and rode the river all the way.

While they got clean, Aloysius wanted to test me on luck zonking. He was going to flip a coin ten thousand times with me watching, while he slid an abacus to calculate the odds of it being that random. I said, it's one hundred percent, you dolt. He complained that he always favored heads.

If they kept asking me to do stuff, I was going to blow. Luckily Cedric picked up the slack. He talked with Fern about foraging, with Cable about boating, and after supper at the firepit Aloysius was picking his brain on the ancient world.

The Earth used to be once-around, Cedric said.

Like, you run into a wall?

No, it's exactly the same place. Like an ant walking around an apple.

But it's not an apple now.

I don't know, Cedric said, maybe God came by with a big peeler.

I drifted off to sleep, thinking that Pansolipsism would never think of that, because they see the world more like a dream, and less like a fruit.

When I got up to watch the darkest night, they were still talking.

You and Tansy, are you amorous?

I'm not her type. She was the only interesting person in my town, so when she blew, I came along.

What's her type?

He didn't even have to think about it. The space between the stars.

I was on my back on the patio, already looking. I held as still as I could, until it almost seemed like they shivered, and by then Cedric and Aloysius were talking about some book.

Proofs of my Return, said Aloysius. It's a guide to places where you can walk among worlds. I queried every library, and finally got a note from a bookshop, they'd send me a copy for a hundred creds. The courier never made it, and then the shop said they never heard of it.

It was obvious he got scammed, but Cedric said, Wow, you almost manifested it.

HANFORD

"A scant candy sphere
Is cracked on the ground
Over the mountains
And beyond the clouds"

-Big Blood, Thumbnail Moon

These yokels could see the stars move and complained that they moved the wrong amount. None at all was better, and best of all was too much. That's why they moved to these far suburbs, to be close to their first love, the particle plant at Hanford.

The Ancients were so into Things, that they manifested things you can't even see, called particles, and then, because they were quite mad, they demanded smaller and smaller things that you can't see. Fate got so annoyed that it threw a bomb: a particle that would incinerate a city. Cedric said the particles got so small that the rounding errors added up to more than they could hold. The Ancients didn't care, they burned cities and kept demanding smaller particles, until Fate said fuck it, there never were any particles.

Aloysius said that's how the Apopalpyse happened, they cracked one particle too deep and let uncertainty loose. Fern said, those scientists got the Earth so excited the stars are still dancing. Balthasar said it must be like that feeling you get at a show, but a place that feels like that all the time.

Cable wondered at the shape of the Anomaly. Is it a radiant field? Does it seep out like a gas? Can you pop it like a balloon? Does it hunt like a shark?

No expedition had ever reached the site. Cable had an ancient map where you could just waltz up a flat plain to buildings spread all over. Now it's guarded by ridges that chew up and spit out hikers. Balloonists can't spot a single building. Boaters go downriver and come out at the bottom having forgotten the whole trip, and also random earlier things. Boaters go upriver until their magjets fizzle, then paddle all day and end up at last night's camp.

I was their ticket, their tool to jimmy the zone. Fair enough, they were my ride. We waited a few days because it was rainy, and also the chariot needed to settle its bearings. To go west so soon after going east, they would surely crack. The last pancakes were actually good, and we puttered out on a clear morning, Aloysius driving and me and Fern stuffed in back with the packs, while the other three followed on bikes.

Pretty soon we got to where nobody went except other expeditions. The old highway got more and more hummocky, until it was easier to drive beside it where the hummocks were less rubbly.

It's not like we came over a rise, or a haze parted. It just happened to be there the next time we looked: a dark ridge, a fingerwidth tall between sky and plain. Even the chariot noticed before Aloysius and jittered to a stop. Lo! said Aloysius, The ridge over which reports become unreliable!

With me looking, it wasn't going to vanish, nor could we sneak up on it. We walked the whole way and it got bigger just like a normal ridge would. Before the sun passed behind it, we were camped at its base. Cedric and Balthasar went up a canyon looking for water, and I had to go up and confirm that a trickle from a rockface actually existed.

By the time we got back, the first stars were out. I humored the gang with my one trick, looking up and down, and they were giddy like three year olds, popping out and saying here I am to the sky.

I went to sleep. At darkest night I woke up, rolled on my back and heard a gasp. OK, I said, which one of you is still looking?

It was Cable. He came over and sat down. After a minute he said, I used to follow moon sightings. I would catalog the times of all the reports, looking for patterns. You'd think the moon, of all things, would have periodicity. It didn't, but you did, every Sunday.

It was you, I said, who made that chart.

He said, I tried to imagine what you'd be like. Golden hair and golden smile, some insipid goddess. I could never have imagined. There's no one like you.

Well, I said, Good job no one.


In the morning I took the lead up the canyon, imagining that I really was manifesting it before the others could mess it up. It was dry and bristly, and it kept looking like we were getting somewhere but the climb kept tricking us with more height. Cable said that's normal, but I was thinking, if the mountain can keep dreaming height, what if it doesn't stop? Could we walk to the stars?

Instead, we found a deer trail to a ridgeline that ran zig-zagging up to the main ridge. It was pretty straightforward, and immediately they started wandering off.

Aloysius, where you going?

Up this path, he said, and pointed down a bumpy slope.

Wait, said Cable, Petroglyphs. It was barely even lichens.

Look, I said, If I'm your fixity princess, you all have to do what I say.

Finally I got them to line up behind me, everyone grabbing the beltloop of the person in front of them. As we climbed, the straight and narrow path grew twisty and thorny in illusion. Cable stepped over not-there logs and Fern got psychosomatic bramble scratches.

I tugged them past every false temptation from huckleberries to fossils. At last the path broadened and flattened out into a saddle, and there it was before us, the panorama of desire.

THE SADDLE

"Everything around me became a voice, an articulation, an incantation, a tumescence. I could see the swaying of the tree-tops: the foliage of the park opened and closed, borrowing the gestures of voluptuous forms; the sky was tense and arched like a rump."

-Blaise Cendrars, Moravagine

Cedric, I said, what do you see?

I see a pond, deep and blue in a box canyon. And a boat, a fat canoe with tight joinery and tall stems.

Aloysius couldn't shut up. He said, the whole plain is earthworked to a great dish, and in the center is the spire of a particle refiner, pipes all radiant around it.

After a thousand years?

Yes! The whole place must have been timestretched, just waiting for us to see it.

Fern fell to her knees before some kind of forager cornucopia, while I looked as far as I could into the distance. And I couldn't do it. I had to look away. That never happened before. This place was serious.

A road, cried Aloysius, and though he was hallucinating, he happened to run on a flat path in a good direction.

Cable was seeing God on a slab of granite, my dad would have been so proud.

I found Cedric going for a swim on a bed of rabbitbrush. I went to bonk him for making a fool of himself, but I saw water rolling off his chin. Was it drool?

Just then Fern came up munching fruit. Blueberries, she said, holding out a giant handful of misshapen ghost-white berries.

Those are cloudberries, I said, you'll get sick.

Oh dear! She leaned over and hacked up her last mouthful. It was blue.

She looked up at me. Did you just zonk my berries?

That's impossible, I said. I'm dysmanifestational.

She looked at me in weird way.

In the distance, Aloysius screamed.


By the time I got there, they were screams of ecstasy. He'd fallen off a cliff, not even a big one. I was able to drop down, and see that one of his feet, not knowing where it was, had snapped its own shinbone. I could see it poking out of the skin.

I found it, cried Aloysius. The secret library of the Ancients.

What does it look like?

Silver shelves, shining spines of sacred books. YAAAIGH!

While he was raving, I had straightened out his leg.

There it is! He raised a finger, which was also broken. Proofs of my Return!

I grabbed the thing he was pointing at, and put it in my pack.

And there, the Particle Codex.

I grabbed the other thing, and luckily he passed out. Now I could use all my strength without anyone seeing. I threw him over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes and hopped out of the gully.

When I heard their voices, I went a little closer and set Aloysius down. I've got him, I said, and those rubes surprised me. With their friend in trouble, not one of them wandered into fairyland. They came running up, and whitened at the carnage, while Aloysius, awake and in shock, was rambling about the library.

Proofs of my Return, he said. Where is it?

This is what you were pointing at, I said, and pulled out a skull. I moved it like a puppet and said in a heroic voice, Proof of my non-return! Nobody thought it was funny. Then I pulled out a femur and said, Here's your Particle Codex. Actually it was the other way around, but I didn't tell him, or about the other thing I also found.

Fern was already crushing leaves for the wound. She said, We can use the bone as a splint.

Then I'd better go, I said. I don't want to zonk your healing.

I meant it, and they didn't argue. Cable wanted to come with me, but I said they needed his help to find the way back. They probably didn't, they just had to follow their own footprints.

THE DEEP

"That which is not penetrates that which has no crevice"

-Tao Te Ching 43, Ellen Chen translation

The bear went over the mountain, my mom used to sing, to see what he could see. And all that he could see was the other side of the mountain, the other side of the mountain was all that he could see.

What a lame mountain. I wanted nothing more than to veer off into fairyland, to wander the many universes of the Ancients, to write my own ticket in the rocks. Instead I found an ordinary high steppe north slope, bushier than the south, but at least it was downhill.

So I danced down slopes, along deer trails, across gullies, the sun at my back. Time slipped away, until there in the distance, I saw the gleam of the river.

Over the shoulder of a ridge the sunset was beautiful. But it was on my right, and it was supposed to be on my left. Whimsy had swallowed me and spat me out.

I'd figure it out tomorrow. I hung the condenser from a knobby pine, rolled out a puff pad, and lay back to look at the stars.

Damned if those suckers still wouldn't dance. I stared so hard at one I swear it stopped twinkling. My periphery a-sparkle, I fell asleep.

In the morning I chugged the piney stillwater, sucked the puffer and set out into my own shadow. I had fallen on the wrong side of a sub-ridge, which I just had to get around now, or over. My shadow was good enough for my compass, and before the sun had moved enough to make it the wrong way, I looked up and didn't see it: the distance.

That point of no-look now became my compass. Or that was the idea. It's hard to go in a direction you can't look at, so instead I kept following my shadow, in not quite the right direction, or sighting distant landmarks just a little off.

After an hour, I found my own fooprints, and knew I'd have to go in through the front door.

Luckily, back in Threeforks, a monk had failed to teach me meditation. I did all the practices without ever getting a non-boring mental state. He was almost so mad. But now, at least I knew how to hold focus.

You know how you start doing something that feels bad, but after a while it feels good? Yeah, that doesn't happen to me anyway. Walking into the Anomaly was just normal life, but harder.

I don't know how many nights I camped. I'd walk a minute and curl up for a while, and walk a minute again. I remember two more nights of stargazing before the sky was part of it too and I just rolled over and rested my eyes. One day I couldn't see the sun. The no-go zone had me so enfolded that all I could feel was the way back, a green thread of comfort.

I strained against it, that needle of reminder of what I was missing out on, to keep going. At last my prayers were answered. When the world figured out I was only using it to go the opposite direction, it snapped.

Anchored in the undefined, equally ill-at-ease everywhere, I stepped out and even my toes were in the zone. I stumbled and held onto my knees, and crawled in what seemed like the cleanest direction. I don't know how long. My fingers tingled and numbed and I fell to my elbows. I remember a bed of leaves, a bower of moss. Fearing suffocation, I rolled onto my back.

What shape is the Anomaly? Am I shimmying down a pole? Am I walking into the ocean? That's what I was thinking, when I lost track of my breathing. I thought my thoughts would be the last thing left, but I lost them too. The last thing about me was actually the ringing in my ears. Because I didn't know what it was, it was the most beautiful sound. It could have gone on forever.

Instead, my sense of time returned. Fuck you time, you ruin everything.

I opened my eyes to a perfect ceiling. I thought the hallways of the Institute were clean, but this was T-square sharp on every corner. Every surface was flat and satiny as a pool of cream. Vaportubes glowed without the slightest flicker. Lines of perspective were as straight as the rays of the sun.

There was a door. I opened it.