The Days of Tansy Capstone

Part 5: The Long Now

ROMANCE IN THE NEAR EVILS

Being an excerpt from the memoir My Adventures in the Evil Longitudes by Jackaroo Deva

"It is never any definite experience which gives me pleasure, but always the quality of mystic adventurous expectancy itself... being poised on the edge of the infinite amidst a vast cosmic unfolding which might reveal almost anything."

-H.P. Lovecraft, letter to James F. Morton

They say all of creation is bits of the sun dilly-dallying on their way back to the void. I saw her face and thought, already?

I'd only stopped at her spin because my airship had broken down. In my eagerness to get to the Evil Longitudes, I'd flown too close to the pole again, and picked up an asynchrony that my engines couldn't shake. They shuddered and seized from part spec drift, and I puffed the bag and let the wind take me.

My luck would always put me in the vicinity of the most important local, and I wondered what rich town might arise, unexpectedly, out of this lonely wasteland, or better yet, whose castle? But yellow pines straggled up north slopes out to the horizon, and at last I had to set down in the lee of an ancient roadcut.

The airbag supposedly folded to a bundle. I left it in a lumpy wad and unfolded my bike from the landing gear. The old road was trackless and grassy in both directions. Usually one way would be obvious, and I'd trust fate and take it. But sometimes fate wants you to get lost. These two directions looked equally forlorn.

This was the perfect time to try out my cards. I just had a new deck, major and minor arcana in a limited printing. I stood in the middle of the road and pulled them out. I didn't even ask a question. One cut, one draw.

Did I say I'm lucky? The near Ancients were ashamed of luck. They thought success came from the moral fortitude to do unpleasant tasks. But the far Ancients loved it: hoodoo, mojo, charisma. I've got a lot of it, and I like to think I please the Pancreator by not using it too selfishly.

The card might have been the seven of staffs. But there behind whatever the staffs were doing, under an electric blue sky, were taupe hills that exactly matched, bulge for bulge, my view in one of the directions. These cards were great. I'd have to remember to use them again.

That dead road was so lumpy that my bike was more a cart than a ride. The roadcuts helped with the hills, otherwise it was no better than cross country, and pretty soon I hit a gully. In Magnus Newby's Guide to the Ruined World, this would be a category four road, bridges fallen and thorny paths through every defile. One canyon had a full stream at the bottom, and I got to try out my simsilk waders.

Soon after that, I came to a category three road, good enough for wheels, and now I could make time. But first I had to check my bearings. I'd walked a lot of miles and they'd been rattling, and sure enough, I opened the runners and a lot of them were now the wrong sizes. It was subtle, but enough to crack the runners at full weight. I decided to do a full retune, and while I was doing it, three pilgrims passed.

The first was a monk, short and moon-faced, hunched forward and walking with quick short steps. Fair sir, I said, Where are you off to?

Amused by my upscroll vernacular, he sat on a rock to chat. Fair youth, he said, I am a Druid of the Pull. Gravity, you call it. The love of the Earth to which all things return. Our sect can't wait to turn to dust, we want to feel it now. We trace her swells and crevices. We find the hilltops where you can jump to the stars, and there we build stone circles. In the weightiest glades we crawl on our bellies and build shrines. We feel the pull of the ley lines like a spider on a web, and lately we feel a force moving through them. Excuse me while I commune.

He lay flat, arms out, head twisted and left ear to the ground. I swapped three bearings while his breathing deepened.

Aha! he said. She's just this side of Meridian.

She?

All manifestations of the Earth are feminine.

But human?

I, too, would like to know. Perhaps I will see you there.

He waved his cowl and set out, and as he rounded the far bend, I saw the second pilgrim round the near bend. Green and bushy, kangarooing and caterpillaring, it came up the road and I thought, What is that thing? The mythical Ent, or a hunchback dwarf with a skin disease? The closer it got, the more it looked like the latter.

It startled to see me and said, Have you seen a girl come this way?

Well, the last guy hugged the Earth and went off chasing a girl who floozed the ley lines.

If you see her, warn her that the Nativists are coming.

Upscroll we called them the geoConservatives. Whatever the land was like for their grandparents, they want it that way forever. And sometimes land means people. I said, Am I in danger?

They don't take kindly to upscrollers, but you'll never be killed, raped at worst, probably just hassled. Tell her they have guns.

Thinking I was lucky to have come down only in the near evils, I worked faster on the bearings, and just as I finished, the third pilgrim came along. He was shoeless and hobbling, feet wrapped in the ripped-off cape of his coat. His big head was barely balanced on his thin neck, and his eyes flittered around without ever fixing on anything.

He stopped to ask me, Did you see the stars?

I only landed this morning.

That took him aback, as if I were an angel, and theologians do say that angels are just very far upscrollers. Nay, he said. I am Prelate Aloysius of the splinter Fixiters, following the stars to the Rectifier.

From the first two pilgrims, I was expecting something more disruptive than a Rectifier. I said, What does she do?

He held his hands as if praying, and said, The Rectifier can stop the stars just by looking at them. No deception is safe in her presence. We sheltered her once at Trice, and she drew wondrous pancakes from our foodfab, and led us to the Hanford Anomaly.

What happened to your shoes?

Oh, I had to toss them, they were blistering. He sat on a rock and unwrapped his feet, and seeing their sorry condition, at last he felt the pain.

Kind stranger, he said, I feel I can trust you.

I didn't tell him, so many people say that, that I could totally be evil if I ever wanted to. He said, I am the bearer of an item of great importance, from Tansy's own family. Oops, I wasn't supposed to say her name. But as you seem more likely than myself to intercept her, I ask if you will take on my quest.

As quests go, it's hard to beat bringing an artifact to a princess. I said, I'm in. What is it?

The thing he pulled out looked like a wooden jar lid, stained purple, with a tiny light in the center and a dial on the edge.

Is that a radio?

It's better, but you have to know how to use it. His finger jabbed the light, which doubled as a button. It strobed dimly, and he held it at the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes, and cupped his hands around it. He said, It works better in the dark.

What do you see?

So far just a sunburst. I'm not very good.

How this toy was better than a radio, I could not imagine, and for not the last time on my journeys, I thought, these people are nuts but I'll play along. He gave me the device, I gave him a tube of antibiotic ointment, and I rode off into the long shadows. I was so zazzed to chase the princess, I didn't even think of popping a zing until total dark, and just then I ran into the first two pilgrims, both staring at the sky.

The leaf man's hunchback cracked straight as he leaned upward. The monk, it turned out, could lean back like a gymnast if he had a good reason. I'd been missing it all under the visor of my helmet, and now I took it off to behold a grand ball in the heavens. I'd heard stories of this kind of thing at far upscroll festivals, and here I was, watching Arcturus throw pinwheels at Vega.

I don't know how long it lasted, and then the first glow of the sun sent the stars scattering. I was never less happy to see morning, and to be reminded of the dreary land that we on Earth must traverse.

I finally popped that zing. It would have me revving until noon, and I blew down that road so fast that I would have missed it if I hadn't climbed just the right tree to reconnoiter. Down there in the ruined suburbs, not occupied since ancient times, was a hundred meters of strangely smooth street. I'd know it anywhere. That was an airstrip.


I saw her waver out of the heatmirror, and I couldn't tag her. Genie, witch, fairy, this was something different. Her nose and chin were prominent like the prow of a freighter, her lips tight as a bowstring. You could measure the width of her irises with a caliper, and it wouldn't do you any good. Falling into her pupils, you could ping an echolocator and it would never come back.

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

She said, Did I? I couldn't understand her expression, like she was craving for it to be true.

My name's Jack, I said. You're in danger. On the road I met three pilgrims--

The stars. What did they do?

You're just like Aloysius.

I am not! How do you know that name?

He was the third pilgrim, and he gave me this to give you. I held out the device, and she took one look and threw her head back.

Aw, she said, I've already got one!

The second pilgrim said to warn you that the Nativists are coming.

How close are they?

Three hours at least.

She turned to her friends and called, Nativists in three hours. It was an older man and a lady, both wearing strange white coats. They opened a door to a sheet metal building, and inside I glimpsed ancient glassware. I said, Are you Scientists?

That we are! said the man. And we could use your help.

Tansy was leaning over a barrel full of water, like she was figuring out how to move it, and I wondered if she needed my help more than they did, but I went inside. Those scientists were weird in a way that wasn't downscroll weird at all. The best I can say is that we were packing glassware, and when I picked up a beaker, the beaker and I were two aspects of the same action. When they picked up a beaker, it was an agent acting on an object. That's why they kept almost dropping them. The only other person I've met like that is my dad's wizard. I asked them, Are you gods?

Oh no, laughed the man. It's only science. The lady didn't say anything.

JACK

"In place of a human heart, you have a wild harp, and that's all I know about you."

-David Lindsay, A Voyage to Arcturus

Devlin and Evelyn had just enough time to stash the glassware, still dripping with enough Lucy to dose a town. They offered me a third of the drug, knowing that my one steel flask would only hold a pint. I filled it, and at local noon they lifted off. Devlin caught one of his air swirls and rose enough to risk the wave of a wingtip, saying goodbye as they bore south into Moab.

Jack probably wondered how I moved the barrel, all the way through a debris field to a half-basement far off the street. He probably came down and saw me leaning over it like a witch over a cauldron. Whoa! I said. There must be a million of them!

I didn't even know if it would work. I said those words and closed my eyes, and I heard Jack gasp. They're coming out!

I grabbed my pack while he folded up the sunfoil on his bike, and we tore out of there not a minute too soon. The moquitoes were tickling our ears and we broke away and down a cracked street to the main highway. Far to the west I saw one figure, maybe it was the Druid. To the east, closer and coming toward us, was a guy in the hippie garb of the Sky Dividers, shaggy and all the wrong colors.

We zipped by that clown without him ever guessing the kid on the bike was the Adversary. I kept my eyes down, and Jack kept pedaling through the whole outskirts of the Divider host.

You're cutting it close, I said.

He said, Do you feel lucky? Because I do.

One more pack of clowns and we hit an exit just as the hubbub came up behind us. By the time they got around to chasing us we'd taken two turns. If they catch us, said Jack, excited, what will they do?

Don't worry, the Sky Dividers are super-nice. They'll let you go, and I'll either get to be their trophy prisoner, or at worst get blinded.

He dodged down a sidestreet and then came out back out on the main road, behind the Dividers. The last stragglers hadn't got the message, and we rode right through them and full-speed east.

After a mile, Jack slowed. Keep going, I said.

I can't, he gasped. I'm coming down from a zing and the gravslant is spent.

Then let me drive.

We'd have to lower the seat. Hold on. He turned up a random sidestreet, then took a turn, another turn, and another, pretty fast for being winded. See, they'll never guess we're back here.

The street names, still readable on the ancient signs, were all stars. At Altair and Procyon we found a ruin sturdy enough to hide us from the road even with a fire. Keeping our ears peeled, we poked around for wood, and Jack found a barely fallen-in basement to scrounge around in.

He reached into an unlikely crevice and pulled out such an instrument as Dug would unearth a mall to find. I was almost mad. You manifested that with me watching!

I'm not a manifester, he said. It was already there, I'm just lucky.

I didn't even know how to argue with that. The instrument was a small six-string. Two strings broke right away, and two more during tuning. Jack was able to tie two together and thread another on a closer post. With four strings, he sat by the fire and played the songs of the Ancients.

Everybody knows We Will Rock You, he didn't even try it because you need a crowd. Instead he played a bunch of songs I'd never heard. He did one about the ancient lust for devices: "Keep on, to the phone store, don't stop til you get enough."

Is it true, I said, that a Phone could talk to anyone in the world? I told him how my dad said it would take genies so small they could juggle books on a pinhead, and so fast they could talk a million words a minute, all dancing abreast down a wire no thicker than a hair.

That's impossible, Jack shrugged, but we do impossible things all the time. The hardest part is the synchrony of perspectives, to achieve an out-there world so stable that it can serve as a substrate for a web so delicate. You can't just pull that much agreement out of thin air. They had to build it up over hundreds of years.

I said, what if they were all like me? He said, if they were like you, they would have left cooler ruins.

He played one about the resistance to the busy zeitgeist: "What in the world can they get done? Oh girls, they want to have fun." But the one that really blew my mind was "Here we are now, in containers." The Ancients, how did they know?

At the end he played one he wrote himself:

Girl, does it feel like heaven's at hand?
Do you feel like the queen of the world?
You're the Pancreator's one night stand
You're just another girl

Did you write that for me? I said.

Lord, no. You probably actually are the queen of the world.

I'd rather be the power behind the throne.

Like they'd let you.

You're not going back, I said, for your airship?

Eh, it's pretty far, and mostly uphill. I'll just bluff into whimsy and come out somewhere cool.

How does that even work?

Don't ask too many questions, is how it works. I try not to look at anything that makes the place have to decide where it is.

Are there gates?

Like from one specific place to another? There are, but why would I ever be back exactly here, and want to go back exactly there, when I could just surf the slipstream, and end up somewhere just as good?

You could make a trade route.

You couldn't, because the whole thing is impossible. I mean, one person alone could make some creds on untracked commodities.

I said, What about two people?

Sure, if they act as one.

What's the best untracked commodity?

He thought about it. Artifacts, he said. Unique items with powers that no one knows about.

We roasted puffs and bangers as the fire burned low, and ended up both on the upwind side, half under a blanket.

Jack leaned in for a kiss. I didn't know what to do, so I took a taste and shook him off. You're cool, I said, but I'm asexual.

That's what I tell everyone. The truth is, I'd be first in line to bang an angel, or to have it out with someone's animating spirit, if I didn't have to go through meat.

He said, we can keep our clothes on, but how about if we kiss asexually?

I tried it for a minute, but then pulled away again. It was all the wrong kind of whatever.

Over on the highway, cartwheels rattled. Someone's in a hurry, said Jack.

A mosquito buzzed my ear. I went to slap it and changed my mind. Instead I held out my arm and said, Come to mother. It lighted, danced, and plunged. Jack gawked. Up on the road wheels thudded. From the west came a great yipping. I thought, the coyotes around here sure are lame, but it was people.

I was letting the mosquitoes bite me, so Jack had to do it too. A little lick, I said, cuts the itch in half. I tongued my hand and he followed. They must have bit us a hundred times. I said, Tell me a number for how high you are.

Hardly at all. Ten milliwigs, maybe twenty. Wait, can you do that again?

What?

What you just did.

This? I glanced at the sky.

Yes but for longer.

I looked at the stars for a full five seconds, and closed my eyes.

A hundred milliwigs, he said. What are you doing?

My eyes are closed, I teased. I'm not doing anything.

Fuck it I'm full quarter wigged. Whatever you're not doing, don't not stop.

The far yips intensified. Those humans were really getting raw. This must have been how it sounded when fancy monkeys first burst out of Gondwanaland.

Gondwanaland? said Jack.

Did you just read my mind?

I never found out if he did, or if I was just mumbling, because just then bright lights caught us, and a sharp voice rang out.

Nobody move, Fixity!

NIX

Jack reached for his pistol. I think it was some kind of repeater dart gun, and as much as I wanted to see it work, I could see the crackling of three zap guns aimed right at us. I stopped his hand and called: It's me you want. Leave the boy out of this.

A blue bolt zapped Jack and he fell convulsing. Two Fixiters ran up and tied him.

The leader stepped forward. He looked just like you'd expect the Arch Fixiter to look, square and stocky like a mechanic, but with a spark, I could see why the other dweebs followed him. My name, he said, is Pinkerton Nix.

On what authority are you arresting me?

He held up a piece of vellum and announced: A Writ of Capture from a Magistrate of Greater Moab. Daysie Mayhem wanted as an accessory of landbase degradation.

That's not my name.

He sidled up to me and said, Then what is your name?

I grabbed his gun, but he was ready. He held on hard, and I was deciding whether to go full strength and rip it out, when another Fixiter shot me.


Polaris, Nix was explaining, was at the very north pole of the Ancients, just twirling alone up there, and when he flew into space, that let the plug out of the balloon, as it were, and the objective Earth collapsed to unlikely probabilities and a billion lost souls.

A billion dreamers, I said. And how many are left? I was tied hand and foot in his chariot, riding up to the Fixity steading. He was making me watch all the miles, so he could boast about never having seen them before, he was so good at skipping.

I wanted to punch him, and I probably should have. The ropes weren't that strong. Half the posse had business in Meridian, so besides the chariot it was just a few footmen, a pack mule, and a bike scout. I worked out how I could probably break loose and disarm the footmen, probably not either getting shot or killing them, and then either outrun them or lose them in the trees. I'd find Jack, and we'd be off to slip an artifact through a gate.

But I'd probably have to leave my stuff. And I hate to go backwards. Jack had been sloppily tied and was probably gone. And Nix, while obviously a worse person, was sort of more interesting.

Whether you know it or not, he said, you are the Liminix, the daughter of Polaris and the sky serpent, sent here to spread the word of his return to the crux of the heavens.

Maybe I'm Polaris.

Nix laughed. Polaris is a man.

Could he not manifest as a girl, to trick you?

He scoffed. Polaris is the least tricky star.

You want to bring back the least tricky star?

Yes, to restore Objectivity! The Ancients built towers to the sky while we wallow in muleshit.

I said, How did that work out for them?

They were different from us, the Ancients. They drank the blood of the Earth, and it made them wicked. He waved his hands. Look at how benign we are. I don't even know anyone who has been shot, and they fear the universal bullet. What about the universal ball bearing? What about railroads?

I said, I was only planning on staying a week.

He laughed an actual laugh, he really thought that was funny. You're my prisoner, he said. I'm just being nice to you.

Then why should I stop the stars for you?

You can't not stop them, can you? With your eyes to the heavens, the stars must fall into place.

I thought, what's he going to do, strap me down with my eyelids taped open? I didn't want to give him any ideas. Meanwhile he was ranting about timekeeping.

The Moabite and Cascadian calendars, he said, are off by two hundred years. Every town has its own noon bell, and they don't even ring in sequence. Even the sun can't decide. That will all change when we unearth the ancient artifact, the Long Now Clock.

I didn't tell him that I knew all about the Long Now Clock. There was a whole chapter about it in Joachim Keen's book, and I listened as Nix got both things wrong, which mountain it was under, and what it was for.

The Long Now Clock, he said, was constructed by ancient proto-Fixiters, anticipating the Apopalypse, to preserve temporal objectivity through the dark ages. If we find it, all the indeterminacy never happened.

It won't work, I said. You think Moab will toss the handwritten records of their ancestors, for something found in a cave, by someone who probably just filled in the date by their own manifestation?

That's why it has to be you. The true-seer!

I vowed right then, whatever I did, I wouldn't be the first person to look at that thing. If you build a railroad, I said, who will be your workers?

The Quatheads! What do they do all day? I asked one and he said, Time passes the same whether you're doing anything or not. We'll see how that attitude holds up now that they have babies to feed. They're one spring frost from famine, and then any organization with a good store of staples could have their pick of new members. Nix filled his lungs and loudly sang, "I've been working on the railroad!"

STEADING

The Fixity steading, like most things, was less impressive than I imagined. It was a last-age ski lodge up against a hundred miles of trackless forest, but the Fixiters never went up there. One of them lived on the roof, staring at the sky. Another one sat in his room drawing fanciful blueprints of utopia. And those were the two best ones. The others hung out in the great hall playing cutthroat boardgames and arguing metaphysics. There were no girls. The way they looked at me, if two or three would have started, the rest would have joined in.

Nix had already made me look at his engine. I didn't want to tell him that the chariot we rode in on was impossible, to climb that far without recharging. Back in the garage, he ripped off the cowling and said, Behold!

Devlin's engines were at least plausible. The turbine drives the condenser, the condenser drives the turbine, and you get the thrust for free. This was an art sculpture of how an idiot thinks an engine works. The Arch Fixiter didn't know torque from a hole in the ground. I almost told him, this thing has no more business driving a chariot than a toaster does. But I remembered Devlin's joke, we need the eggs. I also didn't tell him the bigger secret, that he was no mech but a pure charmer.

Wow, I said. You're a wizard.


After a supper of foodfab slop and mythical vitamins, they brought me up to the roof to do my thing. Brother Armond, the sky-starer, had set up his best wicker armchair for me to sit in, all covered with cushions. The last sunglow was fading and Sirius already flickered.

The stars, I said, do they move for you?

They move so much!

For me, I said, not at all.

That's what I've heard. Can I put on the blindfold?

I leaned my head back, and listened to them all filing up. The sky must have got more and more boring, with Nix topping it off. I could hear them all breathing around me, but strangely it wasn't scary. This was like a church service, and probably not even a sacrifice.

Armond tore off the blindfold and they all gasped. It was the same fucking sky I see all the time.

What's it like? I said.

He said, It's like candy turned to cotton candy.

Nix cried, Get out your sextants!

I closed my eyes. Nope!

They all groaned, but Nix backed me up. He wasn't stupid. I was their drug and he had to parcel me out. Use the bright light, he quoted, but return to the dim light. We'll try again tomorrow.

Later that night I heard them scheming. I could hear better than they thought I could, not enough to make out words, but the vibe was absolutely them cackling about how they were going to use me. I could have blown right there, slipped out and vanished in the forest. But then what? I'd rather get a ride to Salt City and pay my fare with sky-staring. I just had to take the chance that I would get away in the end.

Now that Nix had my blessing for his wizardry, he put his art sculptures in the engine cavities of a carriage, a zap cycle, and a tractor, each more improbable than the last, and better art too. It took him almost a week. Meanwhile I helped Brother Lucius fix the foodfabs and condensers, and I had to fix the toilets on the sneak, they'd never let the Liminix do it and I didn't want to keep smelling them.

Then we made a convoy down from the mountains to Meridian. Nix thought it would be a big deal, the Arch Fixiter parading the Liminix down Main Street, but when we got there, we weren't even the most interesting people. There was a band of bro-Nomads in from the High Planes, long-haired and haggard and all aglow from their journey. Nix himself stopped to watch a pack of scruffs doing cycle stunts down a sidestreet. On the next corner, a saint of the Sky Dividers was raving about the mosquito apopalypse.

Nix didn't like it when I called him Pink, so I called him Nix when I had a real question. Nix, I said, on the night you captured me, you never told me how you escaped the mosquitoes.

I have a repellant, he declared, and pulled it out, a thick cylinder so ancient that the runes were barely readable: DEET. I was pretty sure it used to have something in it and you couldn't just hold it up, but it was too late to give him retroactive bites.

MOAB

The Great Moab Roadway was wide enough for two wagons to pass, and more than half paved, all the way from Meridian to Moab City. We rode east, and when we got to Bliss, the pavement was all yellow bricks and I thought we had wandered into ancient myth. But all the towns took pride in their special pavements. We rode over red cobbles and retro asphalt, and one town had blue tiles so exquisite that I made Nix stop so I could marvel, all this to be ground up under wheels.

We were headed for Salt City, the source of all the salt this side of the coast ranges. We had it in our kitchen back home, the green label for minimum nastiness. My mom still said she could taste the chemicals, and once I found a toenail.

Salt City was also a hotbed for temples, ever since the breakup of the neo-Moabites for sexing the Absolute. Either God's all genders or God's not the All, pick one or the other, and when they wouldn't, the Congress of Faiths declared a schism. A schism legalizes talkback in all their services, and the faiths that survive it get stronger, but the neo-Moabites cracked fast. We had one splinter in Threeforks, the Concorsians, who took the idea that the best people get their own planet after death, and said hey, why not everyone?

Nix had pigeoned ahead to every two-bit faith, meet the Liminix, and we went on a tour of all the ones that offered us food. Nix feasted on deersteak while I wowed the sages. They didn't know that I knew their theologies already, so I would lay traps, ask innocent questions to lead them to a quandary, and then offer the most delicious heresies. I taught the Transcendentalists a song of the Immanentists, and they didn't hate it, even though I forgot the third verse.

I am no one going nowhere
Got no future, got no past
I am no one going nowhere
Going nowhere, here at last

I am no one going nowhere
Dump my bones and turn the sod
I am no one going nowhere
Going nowhere, good job God

South from Salt City we had so many hangers-on that the land wouldn't stretch an inch. For two days I watched every dusty mile, and got so bored that I dated the ruined suburbs. Porticoes poked out of alders and gothic arches leaned under oaks, that's two hundred years to those lazy builders.

At Spanish Fork, instead of going east, over the great pass to Moab City, Nix kept south, down the long rutted road to Vegas.

You surprise me, I said. I thought you'd want to harvest more followers.

Where we're going, he said, we already have too many. I don't want to get in trouble for failure to render aid to the dying.

We stopped at the next campground. Three hippies on mules were first to the composting toilets, four scruffs on cycles went to drain the condensers, and an upscroll couple on a sunscooter set up a diffractor.

One of the scruffs had a saber I fancied, a bent machete hanging useless, and he looked dumb, so I said, hey, do you want to cut some grass for the toilets, I can smell them from here. My plan was to notice him swinging badly, and while I was showing him how to do it right, I would get a sense of the weapon.

It turned out he was better at it than I was. You have to put the wrist into it at just the right moment, he said, and when I did, that blade was flat and clean as a dead calm sea. Its edge was brittle and chipped but still drew blood. Its handgrip was gritty and fit my fingers. I said, how much do you want for this?

Taint mine, he said. I carry it for Rufous.

I'd noticed him tailing behind the others, younger even than me, his hair fire-red and spiked with fir pitch. I wondered why they waited for him, and it turned out he was their leader. Up close his face was tack-sharp on the right side, but the left side drooped under a crusty swollen eyelid. I told him, I think we can make a deal.

Deep in my pack I found it, triple-wrapped and no bigger than a fingerbone: an obsidian scalpel. I'd got it in trade for an ancient luck charm, a doll with hair just like this kid. I pulled a hair off my own head, and just touching the edge was enough to cut it. You need surgery on that eye, I said. This will do it. I held it up next to the filthy machete and said, Blade for blade.

I thought it was a generous offer. The scalpel had three times the cred value. No, he said.

Why not?

I also want a favor. He looked around and said, if you were to get surgery, who here would you pick to cut you?

There was still an hour of daylight left. While I washed up, Rufous huffed a lump of poppy resin and had the other scruffs tie him to a chair.

I went to work, first slitting the lid to pop his eyeball, and it was just what I expected, a dodgy raccoon eye implant. Scruffs got them to see in the dark, and this one had lost its mooring, and probably spiraled in his sleep until the nerves were all twisted. He was tough, he barely even screamed as I unwound it and popped it back in.

Attracted by the screaming, the upscrollers gave us a tiny tube of flesh glue from their first aid kit. I sprinkled enough drops to hold the eye while it healed, blew a breath to dry it, and glued Rufous up. It was all done in time for Nix's big speech.

RIFFINHEIM

We all went down to Riffinheim
To trade a pail of turpentine
For one clean dram of dream elixir
Said the master, see my sister

Up in Eifelheim we found her
Days like leaves all blowing round her
We gave her all our bliss and pain
She sent us home with urethane

-Children's song, circa ¤ ¥

At sunset, Nix cranked down the roof of his chariot and addressed the crowd. People of the postapopalypse, he intoned, we are not going to Vegas! At Nephi we turn west over the desert, and for you, our most faithful followers, it's time to reveal the Secret.

In ancient times, the whole great globe was spanned by tubes of light, thin as a hair and flashing a million times a minute with the spells of the Ancients. They brought time to heel, with not a second lapse from Frisco to Adelaide. They brought space to heel, with eyes in the sky to triangulate every streetcorner.

The fools, Nix said sappily. They thought it was real. With Scientists to impossiblify every manifestation, they thought their house of cards was the rock of ages. Objectivity just happens. They actually believed that, until the seeds of divergence, fully debunked, grew through the cracks and blossomed in the rolling blackouts. Now all we see are the skeletons of their towers. People of the post-apopalypse, Objectivity must be earned! What year is it?

They shouted four or five answers, and I have to hand it to Nix, he didn't lie. Follow me, he said, and you'll all be wrong! Because one true count survives, on the face of a holy artifact. In the easternmost range of Catscratch, under a mountain, deep in a cave, lies a device built by the wisest Ancients, to strike Objectivity into the heart of the future.

It's called the Long Now Clock. And we know where it is. When we unearth it, we shall cast a great bell to ring its holy count at every hour. We shall clean up the clocks and calendars, until the very stars settle and Lord Polaris returns. We shall build a zone of fixity so pure as to bring back Science. We shall recast the universal ball bearing, and our devices shall roll to the ends of the earth. We know where it is, because we have a true-seer.

He nudged me and whispered, do your thing. We'd talked about this, and I hadn't agreed to it. He wanted to show off my power, and I thought it was mean. But I did it. I looked them in the eye one by one, and nobody lasted more than three seconds, except one guy who was following us on foot. He lasted five and immediately left.


In the morning some other people had gone too, including the upscrollers who took off for Vegas. The pilgrimage was small enough now that we could shrink the journey. All down to Nephi I sat looking backward, and sometimes I thought I saw a follower, a glint or a shadow around the farthest bend. I imagined Jack coming to rescue me, like I needed it, and we would catch a whim and loop the world.

Whoa, said Nix, Nephi already, and I turned around. Looming on our left were polyhedral hills dusted with pinyon-juniper. To our right was a great white haze, far peaks floating. And straight ahead was a crappy town. Nix was in no hurry. We stayed the rest of the day while he bargained for hardtack and bladders, and the next morning we drove into the desert.

I expected the road to be smooth and it was, our tire tracks just missing the ruts. The town dwindled to a dot while the hills stayed the same size. I closed my eyes for a minute, and Nix said, Will you look at that!

I turned around and it looked like two giant butterflies over the horizon, their great wings iridescent and lazily waving. It's called the Oasis, said Nix, and he explained how monks and nuns had gone hundreds of years passing down the paradigm for impossible condensers, apparently still without thinking of a good name, and now they pulled enough water to take sponge baths and feed five acres of food forest, with enough wildflowers for their own mead label. We passed by some top bar hives, bees fluffing the air, and some gardens that looked droopy. In the great yard, a monk was scything and another monk was pounding stakes. It was barely noon, but Nix called, We'll stop here, and nobody was surprised.

This was obviously the night to sneak away, and at supper I thought about logistics. We ate sweet cicely salad and roasted camas root, the monks were all chattering about some new distillation equipment, and I was counting the miles to Catscratch and how much water I'd have to steal. Sister Theodora gave me a mug of plum mead and I chugged it.

The next thing I knew, I was flat on my back. I was outside, it was dark, and my eyes were wide open. I tried to close them and caught the whiff of glue. I tried to touch them and felt the shackles on my wrists, then my ankles. At least they'd left my legs together. Sister Theodora was leaning over me, dutifully dripping eyedrops.

There you are, said Nix. It was lucky you had that glue in your pocket, or I would have had to use pitch. He leaned over me and said, you understand that I had no choice. Everything that happens has been already been written since the first particles of the Big Bang.

It was just like that dweeb to hide behind determinism. I said, what did the Big Space Fuck tell you to do next?

What do you think? he said. You're going to show us where the stars are, forever, and every sky starer in greater Moab has come to watch. She's awake! he called to the crowd. Get out your sextants!

I tested the shackles and thought I could probably break loose, but if even one held, they would be onto me and I wouldn't get another chance. Sister Theodora leaned over and whispered, Wait.

Between me and the sky was a great sheet of rough hemp. I could see starlight poking through it, but if it seemed to move it might just be the holes moving. With this big a crowd, the stars wouldn't be moving anyway. I wondered what they needed me for. Nix flung the sheet off and even Theodora gasped.

What? I said.

She whispered, It's real!

I got so mad that for the first time ever, while looking at the stars, I tried not to see them. If you stare at something long enough your eyes will cancel it, and I fought those astronomers from the center to the periphery.

Inclination of Arcturus! called Nix. Thirty degrees! called the quickest dweeb. Thirty four! called the cleverest.

Sister Theodora put a drop in each eye and the astronomers groaned and then cheered as the sky got even cleaner.

Inclination of Bellatrix!

I did it. I couldn't see the stars. I switched to my mind's eye and imagined them fighting, swirling in angry pinwheels, Canopus tearing over the horizon and bonking Rigel to the pole.

Twenty degrees! Eighteen!

Shhhh, said Theodora, and covered my eyes with a blindfold. She tied it behind my head, and then slid her hand to the buckle on my right wrist. The astronomers bellowed and she flipped it.

Three gunshots split the air, and a voice barked, "Sky Dividers! Divide!"

VANCE

"I'm the luckiest guy alive
I got a facial tattoo saying please revive
The luckiest guy alive
Just waiting for the trouble to arrive"

-John Cooper Clarke

Of course everyone started running. Not just because of the shout but because apparently the sky had gone totally nuts. I heard the crackle of Nix's zap gun. Theodora put her hand over the blindfold and said, Don't look up.

I knew the drill. I got loose and rolled to the stage, and then to the dirt. Crawling on my hands and knees, with gunshots and zaps all around, I peeked out the bottom of the blindfold and made my way around some posts and wheels. I scurried under a chariot where the stars couldn't see me, took off the blindfold and worked my eyelids loose from the glue.

Why was the smell of glue so strong? Because it wasn't glue, and then I recognized it. It was the acrylic paint on Nix's engine, that would burn off of any real engine. It was right above me, and I got an idea. Rolling out from under, I lifted the cowling off the engine and stomped it.

My pack was right where I'd left it in the back seat. Not expecting me to escape, Nix had no reason to move it. The whole time I kept my head down hard. Starlight on the ground looked normal, but later I heard that the old constellations came to life, and Orion up and killed Ursula.

The Sky Dividers took full credit of course, but their agent wasn't even looking at the stars. I know because he was looking at me. I crossed a lane toward the garden and heard sudden hoofbeats. I felt a firm tug on the scruff of my vest, and got lifted by my armpits to the neck of a horse. A strong arm encircled me and we rode into the night.

I still hadn't worked out how big a creep I'd take a ride from. I could throw an elbow and be off, but if it was that easy, why not stay longer? Behind I heard more gunshots, and started to wonder if I'd heard any in the first place. Guns are rare, bullets are expensive, and murder is too serious for that much shooting in the dark. Those are firecrackers, I said. Where are you taking me?

He tried to slow the horse and it kept running. My name, he said, is Vander Happenstance, Knight of the Sky Dividers, arch-Subjectivist. You can call me Vance. I knew you'd be on my side because of how bored you looked with Nix.

You were watching me, I said. Where?

Salt City, we all were. And we knew where you were going. It's been up and down the pigeon post, the great star-fixing at the Oasis. How would they think we wouldn't show up?

Where are we going?

To the Long Now Clock, where else?

And then what?

Destroy it! Don't you want to save the world?

From what?

From the shackles of single vision! Isn't that something you believe in?

If he'd only played me a little better, I would have told him right where it was. But he was already being pompous, and his hands, to keep me on the horse, were more squeezy than they needed to be, and in softer spots. I decided right then not to trust him. But he was dashing, and I needed a ride. I thought he'd at least be a good land bender, but the horse slowed to a trot, and I closed my eyes for a mile that felt like a mile. I tried looking back but that only made him start talking again.

Did you ever wonder, he said, if what you see as red, I see as green?

Here we go again. Yes, I said.

What if it's like that with everything? Like I see us on a horse, and you see us on a sailing ship.

But I see us on a horse.

But you don't! That's just how it translates into my reality.

I said, Then you should say, What you see as a horse, I see as a sailing ship.

But I see a horse.

Where did you get it?

A subjectivist is never alone. My universe populates with whoever I need.

You stole it.

Maybe, from the other person's perspective, they stole it from me.

ALONE

"What I had not counted on was discovering how closely a man could come to dying and still not die, or want to die."

-Richard Byrd, Alone

I didn't even have to think about it. We camped after midnight, in a rough spot the horse wouldn't go through. When Vance was good and snoring, I snuck out, let the horse go, and took off in the other direction, dragging a tumbleweed to cover my tracks. He was dumb enough that it might work. I went down an arroyo, up a rocky bank, and skipped across sagebrush while the stars turned. I didn't dare look at them, but I got a sense of which way they were going, and followed them west.

Nix had taken my condenser, to stop me from doing just this, and I didn't want to take Vance's condenser and give him another reason to chase me. So I only had my one bladder, and I was so thirsty from the drugging that I drank most of it. I held myself to one gulp a minute, just to give it a chance to soak in, and barely had any left when the far peaks lit orange.

I curled up in the lowest place I could find, and rolled with the shade all day. At nightfall I drank the last drop, took a last glance at the peaks, and put all my will into the land. What my meditation teacher never told me, because it came so easily to him, is that you can't just sit back and be mindful. Attention is something you have to pump out, moment by moment, into the however boring outside world. With every step I re-pushed my attention to the point of my vision and the balls of my feet. With every breath I pretended I just got here. I even tried to sync my breath to my steps, but neither one liked it. Half the night I walked, and when I looked up, those mountains hadn't moved an inch.

I remembered sitting by the fire with Jack, and he said, Manifesting is easy. First, you have to love where you are. Right there is my problem. Even by the fire with Jack I couldn't do it. How was I to do it in this forsaken land? But I did have one more source of liquid. I felt for it in my breast pocket, the steel flask, and I knew right then that I was going to do it. On only my second night in the desert, I succumbed to temptation. Just to feel some wetness on my tongue, I took the tinest sip.

I was so thirsty, my body must have mainlined that substance to every nerve from my toe tips to my cortex. I fell on my knees before the nearest sagebrush and thought, What's a boy with a guitar compared to this? What good are the stars? This gnarled being is closer to God than I'll ever get. I stood up and wheeled around and there were a million more just like it. The precious is common, I muttered, and the common is precious.

They paraded me to the mountains, a ragged file passing by on each side, sometimes brushing my calves as my lizard brain plotted every footfall. I vowed to come back with a condenser and do this forever. But first I had to not die, and what if those peaks didn't zoom. I tried to count my steps, to know if I was land-stitching or time-stretching, but I just kept saying one, one, one.

When the first orange hit the peaks, they were right above me. In front of me was the bottom of a deep canyon, and I went straight up it for water. I tried to sniff it out. I thought back on going over the falls, and told the land what it was like. In answer, the sun came up, hot on my back.

They say you can survive three days without water, but I probably would have curled up right there and napped forever if I wasn't tripping. Instead, I kept placing the next foot like it was the nest of heaven, and taking every breath like it was my one and only. I finally smelled water, and stumbled to a patch of damp dirt, a rock with a rim of mud. I dug it out and rolled it, and then dug and rolled a bigger one. In its pit, an ooze gathered, and I drank that dirt until I wasn't dying, and got up and walked again.

The leaves got fatter, the stems got bendier, and I found water so wet that there was an actual drip from the lip of a rock. I cleaned my face and tried to manifest a drizzle, but that drip kept me waiting until I just set up a bladder and went to sleep.

I woke to the cool air coming down from the heights. The bladder was full and murky, and now the water tasted less like the nectar of life and more like whatever died upstream. I took a swallow, splashed my face, and went straight up the mountain.

One way the other side of the mountain can be better, is if it's against the wind. The clouds have to drop their loads to pass, and before midnight I was on the dry ridgeline, and smelled it, not just a bit of dampness but a whole damp landscape. Under the starlight there was no color. The trees were black, and I aimed for the blackest canyon, and came down into it, down slopes of monochrome lupins, past stubby pines, switchbacking through firs and yews and then a great cedar, and under it, a spring-fed pool with a single star reflecting. It was the best water I ever tasted.

I drank my fill and slept until morning. I drank again, filled the bladder and the pot, and went into the pool for a full bath. Just from me and my clothes that water got so nasty that I wondered if bears downstream could smell it.

Then I set up the diffractor and moved the pot with the sun, and all day I ate hot porridge and pemmican, and took naps. It was probably the best day ever.

I still had them, the last of the dahlia seeds, plus some modquat seeds I'd saved from the tastiest fruits. The next day I walked around planting them, and also looking for a good rock to sharpen my blade. The best one was right by the spring. When the whole edge held the light, I went back up the hill to forage saskatoons, which were just ripening.

Right out of the most promising thicket, fate sent me a turkey. I must have got too close to her eggs, because she was charging fast. They say birds are actual dragons, and right then I knew why. I waited for the last moment and swung the saber, badly, but it did the job, and I got her eggs too. When I ate her liver, it was the sludge of all filth, the worst of every herb and grub in these hills. I nibbled it greedily and felt the weight of the land.


Everyone assumed the Clock was under Pyramid Peak, because what other name of a mountain would have an ancient chamber? People take names way too seriously. I knew from Joachim Keen that it was under the unnamed mountain just south of Pyramid Peak. He had found an old road, and followed it to a flat place that looked like a parking lot, with a rockslide just where you'd expect the entrance to be. He went off to hire rock movers, and then went chasing Egyptian artifacts in the Grand Canyon, and never made it back.

I was up before dawn, climbing the ridge and working around the highlands to no-name peak. I was tempted to take the low road, cut through a canyon and maybe come out in the next one. But since almost dying in the desert, I took the sure path and stumbled over scree, until I saw the flank of the peak, and went down into the forest to look for the road.

The Ancients were good at surveying. They usually put their roads in obvious places, but it was still hard to spot it, the flatness that didn't quite fit. I wasn't even sure it was real, until I came around a turn and there it was, the parking lot and the rock pile just as Keen described it.

On the lowest rock sat Vance, ankle up on his knee and gnawing jerky. He said, Why did you do it the hard way?

THE LONG NOW

"Or may be there aint no such thing as a Big 1 or a Little 1 its jus only all 1 and you see what diffrent things you see in the chaynjing lites of the diffrent times of the girt dants of the every thing. Sum tyms bytin sum tyms bit."

-Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

I glared, then wondered, how did he know?

He said, you told me.

I did not!

You said you read it in Proofs of My Return.

Having definitely not told him that, I tried to puzzle it out. I thought, are you a mind reader?

No, you said it with your mouth.

For the first time since the Oubliet, I had to call on that power, to settle my chatter. He didn't know!

You don't like me, do you? He said it like he couldn't think of a reason. He held up a stubby shovel and said, but you need me.

I found a leaning yew and cut a staff as stout as his shovel. Then he would wedge the steel under a rock and pry it up, enough for me to stick the staff in, and bit by bit we moved boulders. I had to show some of my strength, or we would never have got in. But I held back more than half when he was looking, and even some when he wasn't. At the same time, I was testing his mind reading.

It was pretty shallow. I mostly had to be thinking actual words for him to hear. I tried thinking hints of words, and then pictures. I imagined a burning sun. Did he squint? I started visualizing where I was going to put the staff, and we got more in sync, until I didn't know if I was telling him where to put it or knowing.

It was getting dark, and I visualized a campfire. Go find wood, he said. Later, sitting at the fire, I didn't want to have to blank my inner chatter, so I got him talking about how great he was. As he went through his exploits, the antihero leaving a wake of ruin, I couldn't help thinking, this guy has no self-awareness.

The self, he said, is the one thing I'm aware of. I guess he meant that he made an icon of his own villainy, instead of noticing himself doing stupid things. As wordlessly as I could, I imagined him as my puppet, my finger all the way up to his brain, making him make good decisions for once, my muscle and my front man for crusading. We could trail the Sky Dividers behind us like tinsel and walk the High Planes to Gondwanaland.

Yeah, I wasn't going to do that. He boasted of havoc until the fire went down, and I went off to sleep in the woods. I don't trust you, I thought, and he surprised himself and said, You shouldn't.

In the morning we broke through. We were mostly there already, and only had to roll a few boulders to reveal the door, the top half anyway. Vance took his shovel to the rusted hinges and tried to kick it in. Wait, I said, we can lift it, but it was too late. His first kick had bent it too much for lifting and he had to kick it a bunch more times. I felt bad for the door.

When it was out of the way, he pulled out an artifact he had nabbed from the bro-Nomads, an ancient shake flashlight. A flip of his wrist and a lode bounced between two magnets, through a coil that drove a tiny lamp, cold and blue and barely bright enough. In a place this heavy with myth, there should have been ghosts. I imagined them going Boo out of the shadows, but Vance was oblivious, and when they saw me they hid.

The walls were all carved with glyphs, the same ancient script that Devlin used to make the Lucy. They were probably explaining how the clock worked, and Vance just blundered through, his eyes fixed on the farthest point of light. He shook and shined, shook and shined, through three halls of ever more intricate illustrations.

We came out in a big empty space. I could hear it swallow our footsteps, and Vance waved the flashlight until it caught a glint of gold. He threw a flare. It sizzled white, and in that light I saw the Clock complete. It was like all the divinity of the Ancients had gone into this one thing. The glass was the cleanest I ever saw, the brassworks still gleaming like new. I heard a THUNK of its clicking, and imagined if you listened to that sound hard enough, you could unfold its whole mechanics.

By now the flare had settled into a deep volcanic red. Vance, looking totally evil, stepped to the Clock and raised the shovel to smash it. It wasn't possible for me to get there in time, but there I was, flat in front of him, my hand on the shaft.

I don't know what he was so mad about. Maybe because I looked at the machine the way I'd never looked at him. What a thing to care about! And now when I shoved him back, his rage doubled that he couldn't just do what he wanted.

He raised the shovel to smash me. I drew my blade and caught his eyes. There was no guilt. He expected to kill me and felt good about it. I probably looked afraid. He was as strong as me, and twice as big, with more reach in both arm and weapon. A cut from me might bleed him out in five minutes. A blow from him and I was paste on the floor.

But his footwork was terrible, and I knew exactly what he was going to do. I even delayed my reactions to the last moment, to not give up the game. We're all the fingerpuppets of the panImaginer, and for a little while I was his puppet and he was mine. But he was mine a little more.

Three times he left himself wide open. The first time I thought it was a trick. The second time I thought, if it's this easy, I might as well keep dancing. I wondered if this is how wild animals feel all the time, and I wonder about myself, that I only ever felt that way with a baddie.

The third time, I didn't want to push my luck. The dragon had given me practice, and now I knew just how to angle the blade, with twice as much power as he had any right to expect. Reader, I cut off his head.

I always thought decapitation would be a good way to die. The head is like, at last, no more body to drag around, I can melt into the void. And the body is like, at last, no more head lording over me, I can melt into the Earth. But his head, in its last few moments, did not look at all happy. And while I was watching it, the shovel hit me in the teeth.

I was on the ground spitting blood. I heard glass break and thought, this can't be real. Vance's headless body slipped in its own blood and fell squirming. I bent the stubs of my buck teeth back in place. My head was spinning but I got up, and made sure he was really dead this time, then went to check on the machine.

THUNNNNNG

That was not a regular tick. The sound came from deep in the earth and my senses, jazzed up from battle, felt the mountain tremble. A shivering came up the machinery. Smashed glass lay all around it now, a thousand rubies in the flare, but not a scratch on the brass, and nothing but air separated it from my eyes. The shiver smoothly turned a gear, and the great outer circle turned one notch.

I went to the creek and got clean. My upper lip was split and those teeth weren't coming back. They say not to sleep after a head injury, and I was still jacked on near-death blowback, so I went down for Vance's body. It would be disrespectful to leave it on cold concrete, and I didn't want it stinking up the Clock, so I hauled it on my shoulder out of the maze, and up the mountainside to a flat rock where the buzzards could return it to the Earth.

I even slit his clothes to help them. And when I did, out clattered a gun: a mini-revolver, four shots and flat black, the signature of Anaconda forge. I was afraid of what I might do with it, and I almost smashed it, but it was too beautiful. If I ever found out who Vance stole it from, I would definitely return it.

My face being bashed in, I was in no shape for traipsing across the desert, and with Vance's provisions, and the horse off foraging, I could rest here into summer. And I had a problem to solve. I didn't want to hurt the clock, but I also couldn't just let it objectify history, and close all the doors to everwhen. People would get so mad that they would smash it anyway.

To save it, I had to make it useless, but still beautiful. On the second night I foraged some wild suss, green but there was enough that just by throwing it on the fire, and sitting downwind, I got blitzed enough to see the answer.

The next day I lined up both diffractors and got the shovel blade so hot that it glowed, then I carried it as fast as I could to the clock. Luckily Vance had smashed the glass, because I would never do that on purpose, and now I could get to the face. It was two great golden rings turning around a center, each with a hundred numbers, years on the outside, centuries on the inside, and more room inside that, if the people of the future decided to count to a million.

So what year was it? That's what everyone wants to know, and the answer will die with me. If the Objectivists torture me, I'll just lie, because I made it up anyway. It was a nice number, and it had to go.

The shovel blade had lost its glow, and when I pressed it to the metal, it barely softened it. That was enough to know that it was possible. I put the diffractors closer to the entrance, and practiced the route, until I could get there with enough heat to melt an inch-long line. Then I tested heating times and found the sweet spot around eight minutes. It got dark and I got tired. I slept hard and dreamed about being branded, and in the morning I got to work.

I started with simple crossthroughs, but there was nothing else to think about, so I worked up to curves and strokes, and then I started making up runes. Vance's head was finally smelling bad enough that I had to take it out. Luckily I could just grab his hair, and it was such a pretty skull that I didn't want it to get crunched by coyotes, so I stuck it in a little crevice where it could only be pecked at.

I had forgotten the shovel in the diffractor, and when I got back, it had cracked in two. It would never dig another hole, but the broken off part had a sharp tip that was way better for scribing. I made a stick and twine handle, and when that burned, I made a better one, all the while getting more artistic in my defacements.

In a week I did all 200 numbers. Do the math, I was obsessed. I even had time to clean up all the traces of the originals, and redo some bad ones. I was planning to spend the next day making the runes more obscene, but I woke up getting nuzzled by the horse. He was fat and healthy on spring grass. Why did he come back?

I didn't make him wait. I chewed a prune for breakfast and packed up, and we rode out while the grass was still dewy. And I finally remembered that third verse. Break the peace and find the hole.

I am no one going nowhere
Break the piece and find the whole
I am no one going nowhere
Going nowhere
Take one, roll