The Days of Tansy Capstone

Part 4: Bend

LILY

She was probably nine years old, a demon child more scared than I was. I wasn't even scared, I was angry. You little shit, I croaked, I was almost home.

The way her mouth hung open, I'll never forget. She was past fear to what the fuck. I shook in my constraints and raved, Hook me back up! There must be some more Oubliet somewhere.

Timidly she said, But you were being tortured...

I got better.

She let that sink in and laughed. From under my gurney she pulled out a bedpan, and held its shiny bottom up to me like a mirror.

It's still the scariest thing I ever saw, me. Tansy Capstone, eldritch horror. Wan pocked flesh stretched over poky cheekbones, slit mouth and teeth sharp and hungry, eyesockets deep as space and pupils blacker.

The bedpan was blurring it. She found a real mirror and it was even worse. My hair, I said. How long have I been here?

She handed me a notebook.



Three days after awakening, I was sitting up and taking solid food. Lily had found a myocyte aligner, my old friend, and I was running it down my biceps and flexors when I saw the scar on the inside of my elbow.

Shouldn't this be a wound?

You weren't on IV anymore, she said, and where I stuck the needle is healed.

What was in the needle?

She hesitated. An awakener?

Where did you get it? And why are pages ripped out of the book?

She got an awful look.

Whatever, I said, you saved my life.

My brain was still foggy. This whole place had clearly been abandoned, and it took me a minute to form the right question. I said, How does anyone know I'm here?

She burst into tears. Some sailors, she said, they were quartered in this building, and...

I got the picture. Oh wow, I said.

I wish I could say I shrugged it off. I didn't, but whatever they did to me, my body was fine. What bothered me most was the creepiness, still living on inside the ones who did it, and connected to me. They had to die for me to be clean. And I wasn't going to do that. I could spend the next ten years hunting them down one by one. What a waste of time. Revenge is letting your enemies set your agenda.

One of them must have talked, or more than one. They probably bragged about it to other sailors.

I said, you're working for someone with a boat. Dug? She looked puzzled, and I said, Cedric!

RPEZ

Its official name was the Rogue Primate Exclusion Zone, the moderates having won a compromise with the Nativists, that the Leaflings were at least monkeys and not trees. But everyone called them grinches.

In ancient myth, the Grinch was a grumpy shaman who lived up in the hills, and who so resented the revelry of the townies that he gave them a bad dose of psychs for their winter festival, and they tripped so hard that he came down to dance.

His visage, preserved in celluloid and memes, is strangely a lot like the Leaflings, broad-lipped and greenly shaggy. It was the most obvious thing to call them, and it wasn't even necessarily bad, the Grinch was cool. But it was considered offensive, and the daily fiches had to call them Verditic Humanoids.

Lily told me all this when she brought plates of chicken tails and carrot heels and beanpot scrapings. I would be in some awkward position with the myocite aligner, trying to not move any muscle other than the one the aligner was on, so they'd all get their turn at the flexing. I ate bread heels and moldy cheese and wrinkly apples, and within a week I was balancing on one leg, holding the aligner to my thigh and doing wobbly squats.

Lily came in and sat down. I brought you a muffin, she said. I have something to tell you. We dug a tunnel, my people. They should have guessed we had deep roots. We found the old subways, all caved in and flooded, and we've been clearing a path all the way to the sea. It's very tight, too tight for you even. You'll have to meet us.

Meet you where?

At the sea! For passage. You see?

I rolled back my head as I finally got it. I was their ticket out.


I left a half day early, to look around. I'd already been up to the roof of the building and spied on the Leaflings. They were humble and industrious, gardening and raising chickens and tending market stalls. In the sunny part of the day they mostly laid around.

Now, in the darkest night, I felt for their gazes like they'd felt for mine. I peeked around every corner, kept to the shadows, and found the perimeter. Streets had been walled off, and windows boarded, but one building had a brick wall I could climb to a loosely covered window. I ripped it open and crawled into a dusty room, and when my eyes got used to the dark, down a hallway to a stairwell, and out the other side.

I must have tripped an alarm, because guards came running up, but I wasn't an escaping grinch, just a dumb teen hobo. They lectured me and let me go.

I napped in a hedge until dawn, and then I heard it, a fucking piper! I wasn't dreaming. I cleaned up at a fountain and tracked the sound to a street corner, and of course there was a slickskin blowing a tune and bending the minds of passersby, so they would drop him coins, though he played terribly.

I tried to catch his eye and he was oblivious. But now I could hear another and I followed the sounds all the way to the old panTabernacle. Before it had been almost dignified. Now it was absolute filth. I could barely not look at the depravities, and they weren't even cool depravities, just embarrassing. This is what happens, I thought, when humans get what they want.

Every instrument I saw had been broken, because it was evil, and then repaired, because it was useful. The music was all out of tune and nobody could tell, because of the magic. I hung out by one piper just to see if I could get the audience to hear how bad he was. They didn't, but he did, and he probably learned more in five minutes than he'd learned so far, but I got bored and went down to wait for the ship.

The plan was for the kids to have last dinner with their families, and then in their best moccasins, each bearing a pack of honey biscuits, they would squeeze through the ancient underground, and come up a storm drain by the water. It took me a while to find it. From the street it was hard to get to. I had to climb down some slabs and through some brambles, and then there was a little beach and a nice log for sitting. The sky was getting pink, and since I had nothing to do but look at it, what pink!

I must have slept for not even a year. Because when I got to Seedle, all the trees were leafed out, and now the bigleaf maples were bare, and what branches!

I had tried world-building in the void, and I thought I was doing a good job, sunsets through branches just like I remembered. It was terrible. I looked at this sunset and these trees, and saw what that infernal drug had cut me off from: the sharpness of the clouds, the weight of the colors, the fineness of details I wasn't even looking at. The way the twigs pointed, you could never get it just by looking at it -- you had to be a tree.

I closed my eyes and tuned in to the sounds of the city, clatters of carts and hums of chariots, seagulls and crows, the lap of the waves. What was that annoying birdcall? It almost sounded like my name.

CEDRIC

"She was transformed; words exist to describe what she became -- pure anima, Kali, Leucothea, something erotic but not human, something addressed to the species and not to the individual, glittering with the possibility of cannibalism, madness, space, and extinction. She seemed on the edge of devouring me."

-Terence McKenna, True Hallucinations

Of course it was Lily. I birdcalled back, badly, and looked along the shore for the drain. Following the calls, I found it, a rusty grating with a rock rolled over it. I said, is this supposed to be here?

No, she said angrily, someone's put it here.

It wasn't even that big, but rocks are heavy. I sat on it and got out the myocyte aligner and went over all my muscles while I stretched them. Then I wobbled it enough to get a sense of how to rock it, did another round of aligning, and pushed and tugged. Then I had to figure out tugging. It took me until dark to get it over the hump and crashing into the brambles.

Lily looked at me like I'd done something hard. The kids crawled out behind her, the tinest first so as not to get blocked by the fatties, I guess one kid had to go back. And they all looked at me the same way. At least it wasn't admiration. It was fear.

I ignored them and sat on the log. One of them flashed a code out to the water, and it didn't take the boat long, sliding in on a magjet. And what if it wasn't that same boat that I left at the docks of Trice. It wasn't half big enough for all of us. Cedric landed, and I stood up so he could see me. I must have been quite a sight for the look on his face.

She goes last, said the beacon kid. Cedric looked relieved to only have to wave at me, as he took two boatloads out, and on the third, me and a few stragglers. Even then he wouldn't meet my eyes. I tried putting my hand on his shoulder to comfort him. It was probably the most awkward thing I ever did. He acted like I was pouring ick on him. Cedric, I said, what's wrong? Don't lie.

From shadowed eyes he whispered: Who are you?

It's me, you dolt! I went to bonk him on the head, like I always did, and he got a look of absolute horror. I said, if it were possible for you to hurt my feelings, you just would have. But you saved my life, so whatever.

The ship came in sight, and it was shaped exactly like the boat, only larger. I thought it was some mirroring illusion, until we bumped and boarded.

Cedric's only crew was Balthasar. They kept us in the cabin, the kids to not be seen, and me to not zonk their seafaring. They squeezed together tight to not have to touch me, and I tried to not watch them, but I decided they had no leader, only specialists in this or that. The beacon kid, Nestor, was like their ambassador. A shrub named Bruno kept them in line. And Lily was the minister of me.

I sat staring at our wake, mist billowing while the scent shifted from brine to swamp, while she mimicked Balthasar telling her what happened.


We were all waiting for Tansy to come back from Hanford, and when Cedric heard that she floated away without even saying hi, he went chasing after her in that boat. A week later he came back covered in flower petals, raving of obscure streams of the Itchywanna, red rock cliff houses and salt marsh pole lodges.

We were like, dude, none of that stuff is around here. Where did you go? None of us knew, at first, how magic that boat was. With enough mist to hide our goings, we could float the impossible seven ways. There were places Cedric saw on his first trip that we never found again. But we found a port of hungry rockhounds, and a port of homely farmers, and went back and forth trading gems for lentils until all the rockhounds had the farts and the ladies shined.

We stocked enough creds to pay a master shipsmith for two uncanny doublings. That's when you replace the boat board by board with bigger boards, it barely floats but you keep the magic. We had to keep taking it out and getting half soaked to make sure it was still going where it wasn't supposed to. At the end we had so many unmatched parts that we made a bonfire. But the original boat got put back together as our shuttle.

Cedric was obsessed with finding Tansy, the more the closer we got. He saw the signal and dashed off to meet her, and then he came back totally freaked out. When I saw her I knew why. That's not Tansy. Wherever she dreamed off to, some dark thing must have jumped her and taken her skin, and she doesn't even know. Don't tell her I said that.


You're my new best friend, I told Lily, and she beamed.

BIRDLAND

The next day I woke from sleep to the mighty squawk of Birdland. We docked at Dugworth's Doodads, and his building was bigger by about as much as the boat was. Papercrete columns were still curing on the upper deck, and Dug himself was around one side at the road dock, inspecting a bounty. Lily had made me look in the mirror again, so I wouldn't be surprised at how he greeted me. He was wary, but curious, like peeking in the door of a tomb. Bella hustled the kids inside while Dug and I had a talk.

I ripped you off, he said, and I'm sorry. I gave you a bent optic for a book of ticket stubs to manifestations. You were right, it's the fucking Book of Treasure Maps. I sent a crew to Area 51, and they haven't come back yet, probably still in timestretch. Then I sent a crew to the time-pit of Roseburg, and they came out with a lump of the ancient balm, black tar heroine. The morphs of Eugene tuned the oracle, and I sold it for enough creds to get a right good warehouse. Fifteen chapters to go.

Your binoculars, I said, some kid stole them.

He laughed, then he saw I was serious and said, You don't know.

That's him, I said. Dug had cranked up the fiche cache and there was the issue from last summer, that pug-nosed brat, Saint Tony, they called him, the child who wandered into the grinch tabernacle and was given magic spectacles by a fairy. He didn't even admit to stealing them, even though it would be more heroic. Then, according to the story, he gradually awakened the whole city, and they showed admirable restraint. After that first guy at the night market they hardly killed anyone.

In the latest issue, Tony was up in the hills with the Nativists, I'm not surprised. If the lenses still show true, let them use them on each other.

Later, in the kitchen, Bella was the first person to look me in the eyes since Lily woke me up. Whatever she saw, she sure was surprised. You poor creature, she said. Let's get you fattened up.

So I ate lamb hocks and apple pies, greasy steelhead steaks and skewers of honey mushrooms. Dug didn't forget I helped him get rich. I had also stashed my pack with him, expecting that I wouldn't get clean out of Seedle, and he didn't even steal anything.

The kids were hidden in the loading dock, the door rolled down and the floor piled with pillows. He was surprised they ate regular food, and not sap or something. But he didn't want to tip off a hosting, so he bought black market bulk feed and Bella brought in great pots of boiled oats and white carrots.

They kept me in the back bedroom, where no one had to look at me, and at night I went up to the ridge and lifted rocks. I still had the myocyte aligner, and I got so strong that I had to ease off to not blow my tendons. I swung from trees like a monkey, and I don't know if one night I might have gone off and never come back, or should have, and I'd be there now.

Instead, Bella came in and said, Dug asked me to ask you, if you'd like to go up and look at his telescope.


The fucking stars, what are they? Everyone has an answer: transcended ancestors, adventurous will-o-wisps, lost ball lightning, the mitochondria of atmospheric amoebae. Devlin said in his time they were dimmer, but also brighter than the sun and so far away that it would take a bullet a thousand years to get there. I said, how do you know that, and he explained parallax, like the earth is two eyes around the sun, wink and the stars move. I don't know what the ancients were smoking, to see something so grand.

Dug's latest venture had cracked an ancient mall, and the prize was this scope. A six inch reflector, painted like sparkly wine, a toy in its time, but the pre-apopalypse optics would cut the sky.

He had it up on the roof. The stars were blazing and I had to tuck my chin hard to not be tempted. It's easier to control my neck than my eyes.

Dug pointed to the eyepiece. Take a look.

You want me to look at something that's not been looked at for a thousand years.

Right-o!

But you've looked at it.

I don't want to lead the witness.

You already have. By looking you've made the sky tell a story and now you want me to seal it.

He shrugged guiltily. I had half a mind to smash the thing. But everyone would have said I was jealous. So I got another idea. I said, Let's ask the Leaflings.

So I went down and said, Who wants to dream space? I should have gone through Lily. Instead of the best dreamers, I got the ones who were least afraid of me. They didn't understand how a telescope worked. They thought it was a magic window, and they saw impossible stuff, like the Earth is inside-out, or the sky is a forest, or stars are holes that you can fall into, or it's all a big gear contraption. Dug still wanted me to look, but luckily the clouds came in.

The next morning we got the news. Dug had been waiting to see how public opinion would turn, for or against the Leaflings. He would love to hire them out as scouts. Even if they didn't know the land, their plant oracle would give luck to any expedition. Instead he came in, somber, and cast the fiche on the wall. The escape was front page. They got a bunch of stuff wrong, and some people wondered why they were imprisoned in the first place, but most people were like, hide the babies!

We're beyond Seedle law, said Dug. But Birdland doesn't want you running around either.

Bend will take us, said Nestor.

How do you know?

Nestor pulled out a Notice of Asylum stamped by the Bend ambassador. He had been busy with the pigeons.

Well I'll be, said Dug. They'll never chase you into Bend. We just have to get you over the mountains.

Not the river? said Balthasar. Cedric hadn't come to the meeting.

Too risky, said Dug. You'd be fish in a barrel for inspectors. No, it's got to be the deepest canyons, the old logging roads. I can drive you as far as they go. We should leave now, before the Nativists hear the news.

In the awkward silence, Lily finally spoke. Well, are you coming?

EXODUS

"And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest."

-Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning

Before we left, Dug and I had a serious moment in the back room, where he unlocked a case of artifacts and relics.

This is my best shit, he said, but first I have to ask. Are you a god?

Don't be stupid.

He gave me a long look, but still wouldn't meet my eyes. Finally he said, I was wondering if you wanted a gun.

He pulled it out. We have guns in Threeforks, for when the deer get too annoying, so I knew about them. But I was the last person in town they'd ever let shoot one. I imagined myself on the High Planes, rifle and scope, staring down the baddies from so far away they didn't know I existed. I had no doubt, this gun would turn me evil. Also, it would be banging on doorways and shit. I wanted to travel light and quiet.

No gun, I said, but I like that hatchet. It was a tiny thing, but I could tell it was well made.

Ah, he said, you noticed! This is an ancient masterwork, sharp enough to shave with, and hard enough to split skulls. You can butcher a moose and flip a pancake. Good choice! He was so happy, there must have been something better I didn't take.

Dug packed the whole lot of Leaflings in his biggest cart, under a tarp, and they didn't even weigh as much as a load of potatoes. I sat with him up front, and Cedric finally came out to sort of wave goodbye. Ha, I thought, I fooled them all.

I mean not really. But yeah. None of us is ever the same person. My memories, if anything, were too fresh. If I were a new person, put together from parts of the old, how would I know? Who else would be me if not me? Everyone knows, if you stare into the void, it stares back, but I wonder if the void gets lonely when not enough people are staring.

So we set off through greater Birdland, up from the bay and into the hills. It was a clear late morning, and my coma-intensified senses still thrilled at the yellow of the sun and the smell of a million buds.

Dug talked my ears off as I watched the aspens give way to the pines. Bend is called that, he said, because it's more witchy than the Itchywanna, but nothing like the High Planes, where each line of sight is its own island.

We went along the old rail grade until it got overgrown. Bridge out ahead, said Dug, probably forever. I imagined future weirdos rebuilding it with cybervines or something, while Dug drove us up a cutoff to an old logging road, and then deeper into the hills. The cart almost got stuck a couple times and then it got actually stuck, and worse ahead, this was the end of the line.

Dug unloaded the kids and I lifted the wheels out of the ruts and got it turned around, while they unpacked their condensers and stuck their feet in the mud, tuning their bodies to the soil.

As Dug was driving out, he waved to the littlest girl and said, See you later, alligator!

She smiled back and said, Bye, pig!


I imagined us being confronted by roughnecks, and me splitting their heads, but lucky for them they didn't see us. This land was empty even when the world had a billion people. It was now so long unlogged that there were fallen trees you could live in, and trails were kept by deer and dwarf aurochs that came up to forage in the summer. Their hoofs had cut the cliffs around washouts, where the kids and I went single file, Bruno up front, then back to Lily and me.

It took us a long time to work out the system. With me in front, we'd have to walk the whole way. I walked backwards but kept stumbling. I looked at my feet and we kept hitting brambles. I looked wide angle and by then it was getting dark, but the next day we figured it out. The trees were beautiful. I got lost in their leaftips, and followed them up canyons, the V of their crowns against the sky, while the kids pulled dreams.

The sun was setting behind us when we came around a mountain and Bruno called Stop! Looking up, I saw a lot of blue below. We were on the other side of the mountain, and the kids had to decide what it was, before they looked at it.

I just looked at the sky and told them stuff I'd read in books about how to manifest. The land doesn't like to be pushed. It likes to be given options. Spit out ideas of what it could be, like releasing birds, and some bird of your desire will get through.

They did a good job. From under our ridge a spring fed a little lake surrounded by an idyllic wooded grassland. Deertrails made a clean switchback and they ran down to explore the place. That night we camped in a rock cleft, and it rained just to tease us, the sentries throwing up the tarp and giggling.

In the morning, I waited for one of them to say it. We should stay here, said Bruno. He started to make an argument about how none of them had seen the Ranch, and this was such a nice place. Nestor said I think so too, and then two others and that was it. They started picking cabin spots.

Wildcraft is hard, even in a land carved out of dreams. They had some biscuits left, a modquat grove down the hill, they could drink the sun, and they still lost weight while they gave up on cabins and stuffed leaves under lean-tos.

It got better after they deadfalled a deer. I lent them my hatchet to strip it and they acted like it was a holy artifact.

I stayed all that summer, clubbing pigeons until they got the stomach for it, hauling wood and digging holes. Those were good times. Lily mostly left me alone, and I walked the canyons, as far as the kids had manifested, and then beyond where the raw land was more realistic.

It's hard to believe I didn't look at the stars. My time in the void still felt awkward, and on top of that, I got a stab in my gut when I started looking skyward. That's the kind of signal my body has to give me, before I notice. It really didn't want to get killed.

In the fall I had to leave, the trees were too beautiful. Why is it that humans look better with their clothes on, and trees look better naked? By then the kids had built one sturdy cabin, two rooms and a kitchen, mainly with my axe. So I left it.

Lily begged me to take her along. These aren't my people, she insisted, and the way I looked at her made her sad. They picked me to wake you up, she said, because I was the weird one.

So be their shaman or something.

She got really sulky, and blurted: Are you going to walk the whole way?

That's what I was going to ask you. Will I carry you when you get tired?

You're so stupid! She glared. I'll be carrying you.

Of course she was right. I rigged her up a basket, looking over the top of my head, and ran her for a test. We drove clear through the mountains to greater Birdland and back in an hour.

We came up on the ridge where we had first seen the place, and Lily said, Do you remember what you said? That if this were all swept away, it should please God, for the next wave shall leave foam just as fine.

I said, I don't remember saying that. I was mad that I didn't remember.

She grinned. Maybe I just made it up.

BEND

"Buckle up, we're wayward bound"

-Beat Happening, Indian Summer

There was still the matter of where we were. As long as none of us had come down from the mountains, we might be anywhere from the Win-all to Catscratch. The Leaflings had a meeting, without me, and told each other stories of the journey that Lily and I would make. Nestor and Bruno would follow half a day back, so their eyes didn't dull the manifestations.

It worked. I kept my eyes on the ground, and every moss-encrusted pebble looked like it had been there forever, when Lily was just pulling them out of the Plenum. I rubber-stamped her creations all the way to her first instruction. We decided, she said, to have a winding maze, where we have the drop on our enemies. Ok, you can look up now.

I edged my periphery to an ancient roadcut, not exactly a maze but the cliffs were tall on both sides and we had to zigzag among fallen basalt columns. Now, said Lily, a path hard to find across a dazzling plain.

We burst out onto it, a million spotted knapweeds hot pink in the sun. They blitzed my periphery and made the sky electric blue. At my feet the pebbles sharpened. Lily took a strange turn and the weeds thickened.

A bee, I said, did you hear it? I didn't hear anything, but it worked.

Yes! she said, and hopped off me to chase it. A purple flower drooped with the weight of a bumblebee, and I knelt to witness. I said, do you think there are more?

We followed the bees to the edge of the plain, right at a gentle entrance to a sharp canyon. At the bottom ran a cool trickle, and we knelt to drink and rinse. The middle ancients, who believed in fairies, said once you've eaten the food of fairyland, you can never leave. Lily was thinking the same thing. She said, The land knows where we are now. I glanced at the sun.

The day was getting on. We followed the canyon to its opening and camped. This was it. If not now, when? I waited hungrily for the night. Sirius sparkled like a holiday bulb in the low south. Capella poked through the roof. I closed my eyes to tease the Pleiades, and opened them to the only sky I ever saw. Lily gasped.

I said, Everyone does that. What's so great about it?

She thought for a minute and said, It's like a water drop turning to a snowflake.

At midnight I woke to the wild yips of coyotes, more raucous than the ones around Threeforks. From town, coyotes are the sound of the outer dark. Now we were so far out that they told us the way in, and I listened carefully for the direction.

In the morning we finally came across something human. It was an art sculpture, giant sunflowers made of piping and wire, by the looks of the crud and bronzing at least two hundred years old. Over the next rise we came to the rusted wreck of a powerline pylon. The cables had decayed to lines of discoloration in the grass, and we followed them to a road.

We stood in the middle and looked both ways. The grade was straight and still as death, the pavement rippled by a thousand winters. Lily narrowed her eyes and said, I say we go left. It was bumpy and too sticky to stretch, so it took us most of the rest of the day before we came in sight of a settlement.

It was just lurkers around a crossroads, only enough perspectives to stabilize a horizon. A hand-painted sign said Bumpus Junction. Three cob huts, and tents and lean-tos straggling out into the sagebrush. They had seen us coming, and must have had a spyglass, because I felt one eye on me after another, then none when they spotted Lily.

They were so nice, they didn't even attack us, but just gawked as we came in. Lily nudged me and I said, I'm Daisy and this is Lily. She and her people, the Leaflings, have a colony upcanyon, and would like to trade. Two more of us arrive in the morning.

Later I would get in trouble for that "us". I didn't want to insult Lily, but a Nativist was listening, and word would get out.

I picked a spot to camp, and the people drifted awkwardly away, sneaking glances. I heard a pigeon flutter. We were marked.

The next morning, when we hadn't been killed yet, Nestor and Bruno came in with wares. This being still the boonies, they traded a deerskin for a spool of wire, a hand-carved charm for a storybook, and a jar of hard deer tallow for a name to say to get a spot at the equinox market in Bend City.

I rode with them the whole way. I tried pulling the cart, but we made better time with them pulling it and me sitting backwards. I don't even know if we were skipping time or skipping space, but pretty soon we hit the outskirts of Bend City. Ruins closed in on the road and licks of smoke rose from squatter camps.

Another mile and every intersection was fixed up into storefronts. I got out to walk in front, but we weren't even the weirdest people there. I saw feral teens with foraging baskets, albino eunuchs, and a bagpiper so bad I had to make sure he wasn't casting a spell. We passed a pack of Hairshirts, their faces frazzled from the thrill of not scratching that itch.

One of the hardest things about utopia is cops. Upscroll they have fewer rights than ordinary citizens, but that doesn't work in the wild frontier. Bend City being too small for an anti-corruption office, and too big for everyone to know everyone, the custom was for the cops to always be sussed. We followed the skunky smell to the station, and Nestor showed the sheriff the document of asylum. He couldn't read two words without forgetting the first, but he traced the wax seal with his fingertip and said you're good.

At the market I got a hooded coat of waxed cotton, wool socks, a quarter bushel bag of instant wheat and a kilo of dried cherries. Lily got a good deal on last year's outfit, and as soon as Nestor didn't need us, we were off, diving into the dreamlands of autumn.

We had upgraded her rig and she was weightless on my shoulders. All I had to do was look at the land halfway between this can't be happening and where was I anyway. If the woods weren't too dense or too sparse, I could look up and get lost in the cracks between crown-shy treetops, while she skipped the miles.

The civilized part of Bend is crescent shaped, with two points to the east. From Bendleton it curves west and south through Billy and Bend City, then south and east to Burnt. In the center of it all are the Bad Day mountains, and I have to say, those were the best days.

We coasted off reefs of willow, we strobed the sun with yellow pines, we steered into red leaves and bottomed out in mallow ninebark. Let's do that valley again, I said, and we did. It wasn't like we were going anywhere.

We would go up a draw and come down so far around the crescent that colors yellowed and rocks fell slower. It was just too good. Before we knew it, we had fallen into timestretch and winter came on.

THE RANCH

Through the snowfall, Lily sniffed woodsmoke to a town. We shook out our boots on a bench and she smelled fatsmoke, and we tracked it to a grill where we traded an opal for a sausage. The people gathered around and when they saw her eating that greasy meat, they were like, hey, she's one of us.

Luckily meat has the exact stuff that she doesn't get from photosynthesis. So we made sure she ate a sausage in every town. It's the fastest way for a green-skinned girl to fit in. We had all kinds of treasures from up in the hills, fossils from rockfaces, fire-dried shrooms, golden rings whose fingers had gone to soil, almost. She traded the heaviest thing right away, a rock that looked like a dick and balls, for a night's lodging plus breakfast. It's probably still there on the mantel.

In bigger towns we sold fossils for scrip and went shopping. I got my shoes resoled, and a kilo of high-fat pemmican. Lily was getting bigger and got some flax pants that didn't clash with her skin.

Of course she had to go visit her ancestral home. In the far southeast corner of Bend, in the heart of no-you-take-it territory, is a place so godforsaken that no one who couldn't drink the sun would try to live there. That's the place they picked to dump the failed experiment that were her people.

They were actually doing great, the last she heard. As a class-C race, they got so many charitable airlifts that they could feed sky biscuit to cattle and eat steak. Maybe not now though.

We messaged ahead, and when we got to Burnt, we asked at the pigeon tower, a great teetery fang on the edge of town, and there was no message waiting. They must be in trouble, said Lily, and we spent our last scrip on a driverless cart, two mules who knew their way home, up the near side of the pass.

Lily called it stitching, like a thread going in and out of cloth, pull it tight and skip the folds. On the other side, where no one could see us, we hopped off to the high steppe and stitched one rabbitbrush to the next across the miles. I had to keep my head down, and we must have looked, to anyone we accidentally passed, like a demon riding a nag.

I see it! she said, and I looked up from an arbitrary rabbitbrush to see the great antennae of archaic condensers, waving over the next rise.

I imagined finding the whole place mysteriously abandoned. I would find the Leaflings rooted to the soil and molting into actual trees, or frozen in an electrical field maintained by a wicked imp, who ran to the hills when he saw me. I imagined them timestretching so hard that we came out in spring.

None of that happened. We passed through a well-kept forest garden, not just modquats and wingnuts, but apple and hazelnut and cherry. I nibbled a few shriveled fruits and we came out into a cow pasture. A Leafling was out there filling a trough with a hose. He waved to us, and went back to his work.

It turned out we were expected. They hadn't sent a pigeon because too many got poached by the Nativists. We found the whole tribe, minus a few loners, sitting around the kiln in the great hall, knitting, studding leather, chipping flints, and playing board games.

I hope it's not offensive to compare them to trees, anyway trees are better, but their leader was a classic oak type, his wife a quaking aspen. They greeted us and we got interrogated. Lily was weirded out a little but glad to be among her kind. I let her tell a few lies about our adventures.

These are fraught times, said Bathsheba, and Brutus gave me a piercing look. I was so tempted to show him the void, but I didn't want to play my hand so soon, and I lowered my head.

Did Lily tell you, he said, that it was her grandfather who invented the Aural Befuddler?

I said to Lily, you never told me you were a genius.

You should have known.

That's what Engleton called it, Brutus continued. Moss called it the Peace Pipes. I told him he was going too far. All it takes is one true-seer to pop your bubble, and here we are with the Nativists raging. Luckily the Quatheads are taking some pressure off us. They're surging and no one knows why.

Oh, I said.

Brutus went off to his buddies while Bathsheba explained their whole system. In theory, she said, we're a rhizomatic commune. The connections arise from whatever each one of us feels like doing. In practice we have to grease the wheels a bit, and Brutus has to do some browbeating.

They must not have been browbeaten into cooking, or it wouldn't have been so good. We feasted on ribeye and winter squash, and I drank a five year mead so fine that I could hear the hum of the bees in the bubbles. Then they showed me my bed, right in the deepest part of the biggest building. I got the message. One look at the stars and they were in danger. The next day I decided to make myself useful, and do something they didn't feel like doing.

Equanimity, said my meditation teacher, is when you understand that the value of this moment, in being a moment, is greater than any content this moment might have. I tried to remember that while I was fixing the toilets. The steps were all rickety and the pits too green. I wanted to scythe some dry grass and they insisted on not giving me that weapon. So I watched them do it and mix it into the pits, it was a regular party.

There must have been some timestretch after all, because that winter passed way too fast. I was helping with this and that, and eating so much that I had to ease off to fit the pants they were making me.

There was one thing they felt like doing even less than fixing toilets: going into town. The Burnt market was coming at the spring equinox, and they needed too much stuff to skip it. I said, I'm not your ambassador, and they said don't worry, we'll do the talking, you can just stand around.

As soon as I agreed, all the crafters started making me stuff, conveniently timed to be finished around the equinox. Like I wouldn't have stayed anyway. I got an axe half as magical and twice as big as the one I gave up, a plasma sparker charged by my footsteps, a fresnel that could melt copper, four pounds of succulent jerky, soft leather boots and a nettle fiber safari suit that fit like a second skin.

Meanwhile Lily was falling in love. He was sweet and scruffy, and they were so swoony I couldn't even get mad. I told her, I'll never find a better driver. I don't know, she said, you're pretty lucky.

Their divinator was very clear that I wouldn't be coming back. I wonder if they just wanted to get rid of me. I waved goodbye from the back of the wagon, and we made good time up to Burnt. As we came in past the old airport, an actual plane came in right as I was watching. Even the mules turned their heads. It was a janky biplane, wheezing in on some weird engine, and when it passed behind the trees I was surprised to not see an explosion.

I hate taking center stage, but me being both the native race and the scariest person, there was no other way. At the market, I tried to act halfway between a queen and a bodyguard, while they made the rounds. They had a whole crate full of these dried sausages that the Burnts couldn't get enough of, and a great heap of leather, and two crates of crafts, mainly stuff they made for me that I didn't want. They got sawblades and wire, spices and chocolate, books and windowpanes and plant cuttings.

I hadn't decided what I was going to do next, and I wonder which card the divinator saw, because guess who was in that plane.

FLYING

"The protagonist, well, she split town
in a 265 Hemi Valiant Pacer.
Outlaws and the cops they tried to chase her down
with insufficient power."

-Dom & The Wizards, Outlaws and the Cops

Tansy was exactly the girl I remembered, minus something, and it was something important, but what? Could you build a machine to spot the difference? Could I look at her crosseyed and see it pop? How does one measure the ineffable? Her eyes had been hungry before, and now I wondered what they'd eaten.

Devlin, she said, I should have known. Who else in that contraption.

I'm so glad to find you. You're in danger.

No way! I haven't looked at the stars all winter.

I pulled out the poster I'd found stapled to a pole in Dusty. "WANTED" it said, "For Crymes Against The Land-base: DAYSIE MAYHEM"

That's not my name, she said, or my face.

Dead or Alive, said the poster, Preferred Dead. I said, Do you think they won't know you when they see you? Everyone is just waiting for you to appear.

Everyone who?

I counted them off. The Fixiters think you're the emissary of Polaris. You could probably be their queen.

Except they're dweebs.

The Sky Dividers think you're the Adversary, bringing back the shackles of single vision.

They don't know me.

The Oculants think true seeing is teachable, and that you might teach them?

That would be the worst job in the world.

And the Pre-apopals think the real end of the world is still to come, and you might be the one to bring it.

She rolled her eyes. Look around, it's so obvious we're playing in the scraps. But you tell them I'll do my best.


The first thing you notice about Devlin is his long thin lizardy lips, always with some kind of mirth. That feeling that life is wonderful for not even any reason, the feeling I have to flirt with death to get, he has all the time.

Nobody was ever happier to be in the postapopalypse. First he cobbled together a plane from panels and struts at the Trice airport, and when it crashed, he consulted at the Moe's Lake radio club, to get into the old airbase, and there he found an ancient cropduster that he used as a template for a new plane of bamboo and simsilk. Then he went up to Children of the Sun and connived two experimental engines.

Tansy, he said, looking utterly horrified, I'm so glad to run into you. He was glad because he wanted me to look at his airplane. All the way to the hangar he listed the cults that were after me, and then he unveiled it. What a piece of junk.

All I had to do was raise my eyebrows and he saw struts out of place and misangled panels. The engines were basically exhaust fans in paper mache housing. The turbine condenser was impossible but I didn't tell him, I just pointed out the misaligned blades. He cranked the power and the bearings played a tune.

It took us until dark, and then all the next day, to make his plane fit to fly me, and on the second morning we took off into the west wind.

Wheeling toward Meridian the world turned like I was nothing. I thought of what Buddah said, Be the still center, around which all things move.

Devlin pointed south, over Catscratch. Now I saw why they called it that, because that's what it looks like from the air, long thin ridges in the earth like a moon-sized cat had scratched it. I wondered how the people who named it got so high. From down on the ground, you can see ridges from anywhere, so the land's more set than the High Planes, but valleys are known to swap places.

He pointed as far as he could and shouted over the engines: Vegas. He pointed to the battery needle and motioned too small. He pointed to me, did another too small, and motioned to out there. I finally figured out that he wanted me to shrink the distance, like that was ever something I could do. I shook my head, and we stayed on course. The land unfurled in a lumpy path toward Meridian.

It must have had to work pretty hard to fill itself in for us, but I didn't stop looking. It was late winter, and wherever there were humans, the gray canopies of broadleaves blotched the conifers. My eye traced out sigils of neighborhoods and followed roadlines to the mountains.

Devlin was looking at the sky. Suddenly he cried, Starry night! Starry night!

It was daytime. He'd gone off his rocker.

My God, he said, Van Gog was a draftsman! He yanked the stick for no apparent reason and the plane swayed and dived. He kept trying more crazy moves and going lower, and I was looking for a pond I could jump into and not die, then just as we were about to snag a steeple, he caught an updraft. I figured he got lucky, but then he rode one updraft after another until the earth got dizzy under under us, shimmering to manifest at such an altitude. Blood trickled out of his nose and he whooped.

I tapped my finger on the voltmeter, almost at zero. Devlin killed the engines and we drifted. It was dead quiet, and the Earth lay under us like a giant bowl.

It was curving up, just how the Leaflings had seen it. Hey, I said, we live on the inside!

He assured me that it was an illusion, and he tried to explain it with vectors, which I guess are lines of distance that no one is actually looking along. I said it doesn't work like that anymore.

Trust me, he said, we sent up astronauts and it eventually curves down.

Sure, I said, you probably picked the most boring people to be astronauts. He laughed and didn't answer, so I won the argument.

From that high up, with the wind behind us, we could have drifted halfway to Salt City. Meridian was a cinch, and Devlin leaned back in his seat and told the story he'd been saving.


Having missed the Apocalypse, I read all I could find about the lost years, and for God's sake, could they at least have used acid-free paper? The small publishers that used it mainly did fiction, and I learned more about vampires than about how we managed to do it with nothing but digital logic, what the myths all say we did: Billions of magic mirrors, pulling the gaze of humanity into lands of wonder and madness.

In some myths the Earth was a spurned wife who stopped keeping up appearances. In some, she was a faithful servant giving each one of us what we wanted. But why then and not before? The linearists say we transcended. The circularists say we came home. The retro-mechanists think it was a gamma ray burst from Fomalhaut.

So there we were, Evelyn and I, squatting with the splinter Fixiters of Trice. We should have held back some artifacts, to not saturate the market, but I was keen to get flying and Evelyn wanted books. By winter we were down to rubber corks and notepads, and our scrip was about to depreciate, so I cast about for another source of income.

What's something we can make that they want? My first thought was alcohol, but I learned the most curious thing about the future. You know you've landed in heaven when there are no drunks. They sip whiskey and twirl wine, they brew bitter herb ales, get a little tipsy and go to bed. It doesn't occur to anyone to get four sheets to the wind. Evelyn says they don't have enough pain.

Of course they have pot, which they call suss, and a special hashish for priests. Their coffee is a dreadful plant called yaupon, they have opium for surgery, and a variety of unreliable pharmaceuticals and fancy placebos. Their main hallucinogen is a yeast-made analog of magic mushrooms. I once almost met Terence McKenna but instead I picked up a lady. And someone had just brewed a batch of sim-psilocin so potent that it was fetching enormous prices.

I asked Cable about other hallucinogens, and he told me of a mythical drug, more celestial than sim-psilocin, called Lucy. I said, I did that myth at a cocktail party in 1966. We were all waiting for Feynman to show up, and I went in the back yard and looked at a flower until I invented fractals. Later I found out they'd already been invented. Life is good.

Not only is Lucy real, I told him, I can make it. The truth is, I'm not that good a chemist. But Evelyn is, and she knew better than I did how to work this world. Just by looking through through some books with the right attitude, she found enough formulae to patch together a protocol for synthesis.

LUCY

"Numbers which at first seemed random are sequential
They come together like the pieces of a puzzle
Synapse after synapse until the growth is exponential"

-Orphans and Vandals, Metropes

In his time, Devlin said, they called it Ellis Dee, after the wife of the wizard John Dee. I still don't know if he was joking. But he got me so excited about spreading it through the lands, that I didn't notice he never said he had it.

We landed short of Meridian, in some old suburb, on a length of street with its bumps smoothed and its cracks patched, so we set down with hardly a bump. The building was rusty sheet metal, less ramshackle than I expected, and bigger. Inside was a whole room full of crazy glassware, and Evelyn.

They say real courage isn't being fearless, it's being afraid and doing it anyway. Whatever, I don't have real courage. But one thing I do, that I don't feel like doing, is helping other people. They sure need it! Supposedly we are all one. I can't see it, but I have to trust the experts, just like with germs.

So of course I said I'd help them. Devlin tried to walk me through the process and immediately started noticing mistakes. Even Evelyn had mislabeled reagents. On the first day they nearly blew us up by leaving a gas burner on. I couldn't watch both of them at the same time, so I made whichever one I wasn't watching take a break from chemistry, and clean or prep, or if it was Devlin, tell stories. I went to Vegas in a Vega, a chevy in the seventies, he said cryptically. Back then the Strip was a sidestreet and it was house against all.

On the third day I succumbed to temptation. Everything had gone swimmingly, and they almost had the real stuff already, still cloudy with unfiltered precipitate. A pinhead sized dose, said Devlin, will take you to the moon. He wasn't noticing where his fingers were, and I decided to also not notice, until it was too late. Then I said, did you just get a drop on your hand?

Oh dear, he said, and he went to tell Evelyn. She insisted on knowing exactly what sized drop he got, and when he showed her, she put the same drop on her own hand. She wasn't going to let him be the first, and I had to babysit those two monkeys.

After an hour, they said the walls were breathing, because that was the cliche from the old days. I decided someone would have to take an actually interesting trip. I meant to put just one drop on my tongue, but I squeezed the dropper too hard and got a squirt. It tasted exactly like Devlin looked, like a thousand year old lemon.

At that moment, I had a vision of myself going over the falls. Good job, subconcious. Otherwise I might have swallowed it, but instead I ran outside and swished my mouth in the rain barrel.

This is it, I thought. I finally flew too close to the sun. But nothing happened.

I always get Buddah confused with Newton, they both sat under trees and figured stuff out. Newton got hit with an apple, and quantified the love of the Earth. Buddah became a holy man by balancing his mind on this very moment. A tree would definitely help with that.

So I sat down under a sycamore and waited for enlightenment, or really anything. Birds flew across the sunset and I thought, did we make a placebo?

I was about to go inside and check Devlin's notes, except he was just as likely to do it right and report doing it wrong. So I decided to give Lucy one more chance, and jumpstart my visions with a daydream.

And I couldn't. I went to open my mind's eye and instead I got a pain in my gut, what's up with that? Maybe this wasn't Lucy, but it was definitely a real thing. Not only couldn't I daydream, I couldn't look away. I was so locked into my senses that edges were sharper and sounds were all tinkly. I went for a walk and everything was what it was. I can't explain it. I was like, of course.

Only then did I think to look at the stars. I'd been avoiding it so hard I forgot I could, but this was what I promised the Leaflings, that I would get a good distance away and take a good long stare at the sky. This was the moment.

As crystalline as the earth was, the stars I can't explain. I scribbled a message to my sober self: The stars are bubbles. I still don't know what it means. And they still wouldn't move. I told Arcturus to throw a pinwheel at Canopus and they both just hung there trembling.

I sighed, covered my eyes, and counted to thirty. And what if I didn't just quantify timestretch, it was morning.

When I told him I tripped, Devlin asked me lots of annoying questions. Did you go outside time and space? No, time went outside of me. Did you get euphoria, or panic? No, I was totally calm. Did you come face to face with the void? Been there, done that. Did you see all existence as meaningless, but in a good way? Like it wasn't already. Did this locality feel squeezed in a gem, a billion year old memory entertaining God at the end of time? I said, stop bragging.

My symptoms gave Devlin a number, and he whipped out his pad and started writing. A number for how much harder he tripped than I did, a number for how much more I took than he did, another number when I told him I swished and spat. He lined them all up, crossed some out, and wrangled the rest into one. There, he said, I've measured the thickness of your head, plus uncertainty.

It was one to two thousand normal heads. No one had quantified me since Gran, and her scale only went to fifty. Devlin, I said, you're a wizard. Nope, he said, it's just math.

Evelyn called from outside, Come look at this! It was the rainbarrel, and I could tell she had already been looking at it for a while. Her pupils were as deep as the water. I leaned over and looked in, and the algae were all glowing pink and swirling in a lotus mandala.

My God, said Devlin, what have we brewed? He was so excited.

Up through the center of the mandala, green as trees in spring, came a fountain of squirming mosquito larvae.

Evelyn met my eyes and said, they need your blood. She wasn't even in a hurry to look away. Like she knew something I didn't, and how could I not do it? With the edge of my axe, I nicked my left thumb knuckle and dribbled in six or eight drops. Then on a whim I swished the wound, and licked it clean.

Say, said Devlin, is that someone coming up the road?

He appeared out of the heat ripples, a head poking, left and right, a spindly cyclist leaning forward with each stroke, nimbly dodging potholes.

Later he said I appeared the same way, out of the mirror, and he thought he'd met a fairy. I thought I'd met a spaceman, his bike all gleamy with upscroll alloys, hopping off in some avant garde outfit.

He took off his visored helmet and looked like someone from a magazine, the guy puppies would run up to, sandy haired and fresh as spring, face daintily rugged and only slightly smug.

Decadent and dissipated, flighty and clueless, all the things we say about upscrollers and when you meet one they're just really likeable. It's not even annoying.

He said, Are you the one who spun the stars?