The Days of Tansy Capstone

Part 6: The High Planes

45

Saddle

"One starts out, but at some point there is a break-down of the geographical coordinates found on our maps. Only the 'traveller' is not aware of it at that moment. He realizes it -- either with dismay or amazement -- only after the event. If he did notice it, he would be able to retrace his steps at will or indicate the way to others. However, he can only describe where he has been; he cannot show the road to anyone."

-Henry Corbin, Mundus Imaginalis

Back at Threeforks stables, there was one horse that nobody could ride. Of everyone in town, the person it feared the most was me of course. One night I snuck in to stroke it, and it stamped and bucked and snorted, then finally it settled down. After that it got depressed. All day it just wandered in figure 8s in the paddock. Then one morning it was gone, jumped the high fence and never came back.

No one knows where the wild horses go in winter, probably off to the Horse Planes. This could have been that horse's son, a bay spotted with plushy. He probably freaked out when Vance picked me up, that's why he ran so fast. Now he couldn't keep away.

I have that effect on people, it's annoying but sometimes I need their help. Like, I couldn't have got to the Long Now Clock without Vance, or him without me, and now all three of us were the worse off for it. I ran my tongue tip over the stubs of my front teeth. It turned out they were mostly still there, only a bit shorter than my side incisors. The one thing I couldn't do any more was bite splinters out. I'd have to get tweezers in Vegas.

I left Threeforks a season short of thirteen. To the ancients, that was childhood. Devlin said the brain doesn't finish developing until 25. I said, maybe your brain. Cedric said they went through time differently. I think probably their world was so wicked, that it took that long to know how to fend off creeps.

At thirteen I could be a a ranchhand in Caxiletas, a catamite in Moab, or an able seaman to Shanghai. At fifteen I could be ranger, master, captain. I'd be fifteen this summer. What couldn't I do?

All I ever wanted to be was a High Planes drifter, blowing into Lodi on a sirocco, exchanging artifacts at the saloon and disappearing around a corner at sundown, slipping off and catching a star to Dodge City. I thought I was landbending in the desert, when the peaks zoomed up so fast after not moving at all. But when I looked at Vance's map, I saw there were two lines of peaks, and the first one I'd passed in the night without noticing. And nothing I manifested after that was even unlikely. I probably had no powers whatsoever, by myself.

When Lily and I land-bent, it was her riding me. Now, with me riding the horse, I could only give it free rein into the sun, and look off to the side through the latitudes of grass. I put my map away and told stories of my destination.

The name Caxiletas comes from two ancient states, Cexis and Lottie I think. It started off as a water monopoly, which was ended by blacklattice condensers, but the name stuck. Now it's a confederation of cities and towns, with the rangelands mostly lawless, all the way from San Gellis to Amarillo, the last town before the bottleneck between the High Planes to the north, and the janky mechanics of Tenochtitlan to the south. You might have to choose between a footman going mad and a crankcase cracking.

I was riding down from Catscratch, a straight shot to Vegas on the map. But I rode and rode, and even if we weren't skipping miles, by now we should have seen the slabs of the northern suburbs. Instead that grassy carpet just kept rolling. Well, I wasn't in a hurry. I patted the horse's neck and said "Good job." He pounded his hooves and the next time I looked, the soil was red. This was definitely the wrong way. I got so excited.

I didn't dare look ahead, but on both sides the red soil crumpled and mounded. We were climbing. The horse was breathing hard and I dug in. Under its hooves I saw dirt, gravel, stones, were those tiles? The horse wheeled and reared. I hopped off and barely grabbed my saddlebags before he skittered.

Down below, all sepia in the late afternoon sun, stood a ruined city. Or was it? Those great cliffs were so angular, so patterned in their weathering, that they looked like buildings. Or those buildings were so worn and saggy that they looked like cliffs.

I just stood there reveling in the ambiguity. I had already wondered what a gate would look like if I ever found one. There would have to be a point of perfect balance, like a saddle for your eyes, where you could roll off to either side. I turned around and set camp right there.

Jack told me, if you find a gate, there's a superstition that you can fix it in place with your own blood. I thought, What's a superstition but a ladder to magic? I cut another nick in my thumb knuckle and dripped a circle.

In the night, a breeze brought the faint scent of either tar or petrichor. My side-eye caught the flash of either a meteor or a pyrotechnic. At first light I heard the whump-whump of an engine or a ruffed grouse.

Before sunrise I was up and ready, packed and facing the gate. I stood there flipping my perception, buildings, cliffs, buildings, cliffs. I caught myself hoping for cliffs, which would throw the balance, so I practiced flipping my hopes, from dreaming every bend of a spooky canyon to... what? Why was I even going to Vegas? It was because there was no place like it, and I needed outfitting for my main goal of walking the High Planes.

But this plane right here. Who will go if I don't?

"Are you ready?" I said. We walked into it.

46

Vegas

"Nay, I will say that he who has stood in the ways of a suburb, and has seen them stretch before him all shining, void, and desolate at noonday, has not lived in vain."

-Arthur Machen, The Decorative Imagination

The ancients believed that every choice splits the whole physical universe into two. Like creation would ever go to that much trouble. How many times does God want to be me? Well, at least once. Those cliffs turned out to be cob conapts like the one I was born in, but colossal and long abandoned, leaning and scrub-encrusted. Next was a flat-slab suburb that went on for miles, so blasted by time that nothing remained but fireplugs standing like sentinels.

The soil grew red with chips of adobe. I saw the far stub of a steel beam, and found a rubbly neighborhood dropping down a hill to an effluent canal. I could have followed it but it stank, so I climbed through toppled breeze blocks to a last-age extrusion, a whole neighborhood in one piece like the arch of Seedle, now all pecked into birdsnests.

Not far ahead I could hear its clank and buzz, the city of Sim. The ancients called it that because it was the peak of their artifice. They had half scale replicas of all the world's sacred sites, and a giant sphere where they could show anything they could dream up. Nobody knows how they did it, but Cedric had a book called Revolt of the Pixels, where the angels of the manifestations got sick of being jerked around.

I hurried toward the sounds, rounded a corner and almost bumped into a hobo, reeking of suss and gnawing a ration bar.

"Whoa there dream girl!" You think I'm a ghost?

Since Vegas is so gamified, I had considered running it with no dialogue. But now I thought, why make it harder? I took one look at that biscuit and joined the game.

"Where did you get that?"

"This biscuit is exclusive to the guild of the trashpickers. Want a bite?"

I took a nibble, and it must have had a humour missing from Vance's rations. I couldn't hide it, and he pounced.

"I've got a whole brick of these, back at my place."

Hope springs eternal, that I would fuck him for a brick of scrip biscuits. I said, what do you want for it?

I could see his little eyes casting about for something to ask for, short of the fucking, and he thought of something. "There's a new drug on the Strip."

"Lucy?"

"Yes! What I wouldn't do for a dose."

"Why can't you get it yourself?"

"Well, it's not cheap, and anyway I'm banned from the Strip for overpicking. You wouldn't believe what they think is not trash up there."

I pulled out the flask and said, "It's your lucky day."

We went back to his squat, an apartment stuffed with all the best towels and blankets abandoned by other hobos. He had the perfect bottle, an ancient milk jug he'd been using as a vase. He dumped out some roses and muckwater, gave it one slim rinse, then drained the condenser to fill it. In all his junk drawers he couldn't find an eyedropper, so I did a quick tip of the flask, it was too full anyway, a gurgle into the jug. It fell in the water like nothing, and he gaped like he saw rainbows. Then he almost took a whole gulp and I said, "One drop."

He didn't believe me, but I convinced him to start with a sip, and within an hour he was tripping ninepins. In tears, he insisted on fair payment, and since the only value he had was sentimental, he gave me the trashpicker badge passed down by his ancestors, a brass curlicue that matched my outfit.

47

Devlin

"Jesus Christ," said Devlin, "what happened to your face?"

I said, "The shovel was harder than my teeth."

Vegas is so gamified that you can't get anywhere without doing a quest. Before the Gilded Palace of Sin would tell me where Devlin was, I had to watch a poker game to stop cheaters. Ancient cheaters were masters of sleight of hand. Now they just blinked and the ace had been there all along. I don't know if the normal watchers were incompetent or on the take, but a couple guys got really mad at how things were going, and it wasn't even the ones I was watching. I could see them wondering who I was.

Anyway, Devlin was exactly where they told me, sipping a gin and tonic in the lounge of the Pocahontas. "Let me get this straight," he said. "You were struck by a headless subjectivist in the sight of the Long Now Clock, with the very tool used to unearth it." He shook his head. "I always wondered how much voodoo it would take to get through your defenses. Say, you should go upscroll and get titanium implants."

"I hear you brought enough Lucy to flip the city."

"Tansy," he said, "you have enough Lucy in that flask to flip the city. I have a gallon. I sold a few drams to shrinks and shamans and they set me up like a prince."

"What's your next move?"

"Well, I was hoping you would show up here. It's a clean line from your last two sightings."

"Devlin, are you creeping on me?"

"You're an important person."

"Under pansolipsism," I protested, "every perspective seems to be-"

"Oh come off it! You're lucky they're so loopy, or the Sky Dividers would be here already, lying in wait. I can't think of anything that's happened lately that you didn't do, except the rise of the Quatheads, and the seven Synchronators."

I didn't say anything.

He said, "I heard about the incident at the Oasis."

"That wasn't me! What did you hear?"

"That someone spun the sky like a pinwheel."

"Yes, it was that Sky Divider who kidnapped me."

He winked and said, "It'll be our secret. You took care of the witness. Anyway, I have a quest for you. It seems that Baltimore has become divided. Travelers over Transcanadia and Route 66 report an increasingly different city. The only way to settle it is to send someone through the middle."

"Cool."

"You'd be joining an expedition led by the Catscratch ranger Levi Ripp."

I must have scowled. He said, "You thought you'd be leading it? Leading is about who you know, not what you can do. As an unknown, you're a hotshot rectifier and the expedition would love to have you."

"He has to come see me and I'll think about it. Actually no. What if I don't want a quest? What if I just want to wander at random?"

"Then why did you come here? Why not split from the Fixiters in Salt City?"

"Hey," I said, "suppose we sent two expeditions through the middle. Could we get four Baltimores?"

"Tansy," Devlin laughed, "don't change."

I sipped my drink, a barely fizzy mead, and said, "What was that about synchronators?"

"You'd never believe it. Apparently if you flash a strobe light on your closed eyes, you can see spirals and things. Some lid-staring hobbyists commissioned a set of flashers, which turned out to be so finely tuned that they started seeing the same things. You can see where this is going. It can be used to send messages, which nobody can intercept unless they have one of the devices."

I said, "If I bring you one, can you pay for my outfitting, and fly me to Moab?"

"Tansy," he said, "for a Synchronator, I'll outfit you in spider silk camo and fly you to Durango."

"Then we have a deal." I reached in my pack and whipped it out. There were three of them in there and the one I hit first was the one from Vance, blood-red cherry wood. He told me all about what saps the Sky Dividers were, for trusting him with it.

Stars danced in Devlin's eyes as he took it. I couldn't help it, I wanted to see his face when I pulled out another one. I reached in my pack to grab it and he shot me a look.

48

Durango

"You should get off on the dirt on your feet."

-Automatic, Too Much Money

Durango is the pointiest outpost on the west shore of whimsy. One well-watched road over the pass is all that tethers it from drifting off and dancing with Denver and Waverly. Devlin waved his wings at the pass watchers as we came in out of the sunset, and we set down on a bumpy airstrip with no one to greet us but sheep.

Devlin had business with the Fixiters in the morning, so I didn't stick around. I shook his hand and tried to meet his eyes. I said, "Is there something you're not telling me?"

"Oh, yes!" he said with a twinkle, "I almost forgot. I have a message from your grandmother. She said, 'Fate will drag you over the fucking coals.'"

Durango is a straight frontier town, hotels and saloons down the main strip, outfitters and cafes on the sidestreets, and beyond that the land belongs to whoever's there now. I passed yurts and firepits, squatted temples and shuttered market stalls, and went straight across Main without stopping. I had everything I needed.

The east end petered out in stone cabins, anything more ephemeral would be swept away in faestorms. I found a thick one to crash in, and in the night I heard two expeditions pass. From their chatter, it sounded like they were hallucinating daylight.

At real day I followed, and what I could find of their footprints went off the wrong way. They would wander in circles and come back with wild tales of the shimmer, while I went actual east, and the land didn't like it. All day long I lined up landmarks along unwalkable ways and not a lick of water. Finally at sunset I came to the base of a ridge that could pull some cloud. I hung my condenser betwen two cedars, and in the morning I had three liters -- enough to sweat.

All day I tore clean east, leaping gullies and climbing crags, chewing pemmican and daring the scenery to shock me. At dusk I climbed in triumph to the nub of some wan peak, and viewed the same dumb ridges out to every horizon. Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled.

I got out the gun. Devlin had finally convinced me to take it, Vance's pretty four-shooter. I protested that it would turn me evil, and he winked and said, "A little evil never hurt anyone. But seriously, that's a masterwork weapon that can drive a nail at twenty paces, and won't blow up in your hand even with unattuned bullets. You can outduel a whole posse if all they have is pipe guns."

He bought me forty clay bullets and ten tungsten. "Damn," I said, "how many people do you want me to kill?" He said I'd have to practice a few times with the tungsten, to learn the kickback. Now I loaded four clay bullets, spun the cylinder, aimed at a dead tree, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. I pulled back the hammer and pulled the trigger, and nothing happened. I flipped the safety off and pulled the trigger and that thing exploded in my hand. I don't think I hit anything, but it was way too loud. Thanks, gun, for attracting hoodlums and scaring off the interesting animals.

Gran always said, "It takes two shots to find a sniper." It was supposed to be a metaphor about getting away with crimes, but now I figured out that it was also literal. So I didn't shoot a second time, and set camp in a hidden place. In the small hours I woke up and listened hard. No approaching hoodlums, just spacy crickets and mating wildcats. Good job night.

The next day I found a road. This far out, it had forgotten what it was supposed to be. Storms had sublimed the asphalt to a granite intrusion that happened to follow a roadgrade. Intrusions have to go somewhere, and by now I was like, fuck the compass. Surely I've gone far enough for fate to let me get lost. So I followed that road all day, and at nightfall it turned a bend and became pavement. Down below I saw the lights of a town. Of course, it was Durango.

49

Levi

It was a good thing I looped around. Devlin had taken me to a dodgy outfitter, I should have kept the old stuff. Already my new boots were coming unglued and my fake spider silk was splitting at the seams. His "bonus" was a roll of Caxiletan silver spurs with a rattlesnake imprint I'd never seen, fully depreciated and now only worth the metal. I wandered around the outfitter looking for patches and glue, and then I saw it.

Hanging in the case, next to an upscroll stillsuit that filtered piss to nectar, was a modest native-made safari suit, hand-stiched and skin tight to one person: me. It was one the Leaflings had made for me that was a size too big, and it had made its way by trade to right in my path. There was only one thing to do. I reached for the gun.

"Looks like it was made for you," came a voice from behind me. I turned and there stood a Caxiletan dudebro straight out of central casting.

"Tansy Capstone," he said. "I've seen your face on wanted posters from here to Winnemucca, and I have to say, they look nothing like you."

"Then how did you recognize me?"

"Your eyes can scare ticks off a rat's back. Hasn't anyone ever told you that?"

I blushed. "How did you know my name?"

"From Devlin," he said, and held out his hand. "I'm Levi Ripp."

I said, "I've heard of you." I'd heard he was the son of the upscroll witch Fortuna Ripp, and the craftiest outlaw in Catscratch. I'd heard he was seven generations Central Valley, salt of the earth and the squeakiest ranger. I'd even thought about which one of those guys I'd bang, if I had to, and it was obviously the first. And here he was, obviously the second, chipmunk-faced like a folk singer, pointy-chinned like the second hero, eyes so close together that if he were a cartoon they'd be on the same side of his nose.

"Heard you went out," he said. "How far did you get?"

"I crossed some mountains, and--"

"Wait, you crossed mountains? Seriously? Girl, this is the last mountain. I was warned not to camp too close to the edge of town. This morning my porter went out to pee and saw the shimmer."

"The shimmer?" I said it sulkily, and he knew.

"You've never seen it!" He looked at me in awe. "Devlin undersold you. Have you ever thought of making a trading post? Because you could do it. Right in the center of the High Planes. Ping the longitude and the paths will come. You'd pull so much commerce from Transcanadia, you could build a city."

I was getting madder and madder. "Ranger Ripp," I said, "I am not that kind of person."

"Then what kind of person are you?"

In the silence you could cut a potato. I said, "I want to be a walker between worlds. I want to go in a cave and come out in Gondwanaland."

"Girl, he said, you're the last person in the world who could find Gondwanaland. You're what Gondwanaland hides from, and I mean that in a good way, the light of concord, the agreement on what is what."

"Fuck what is what. I'm going out again, alone."

"And the suit?"

I pulled out the gun.

The proprietor's eyes bugged so hard he had to call the archivist, to make sure it wasn't stolen. "One doesn't see this quality in the wild," he said, but when it passed the registers, I had to clean out his top shelf to make him feel like he wasn't ripping me off. I got a larger model of the axe I gave the Leaflings, a blacklattice condenser, a jumbo diffractor, a block of all-humour pemmican, and bespoke toe boots.

While they measured my feet, and I couldn't get away, Levi told me about his quest to unite Baltimore. "There might even be three Baltimores," he said. "The Northwest Passage hasn't come in yet. So a consortium of Caxiletan merchants has assembled a folder of documents, and I'm on a speed run to stop their business interests from disexisting. I've got the engine to do it, but storms out there can blow you to Saskatchewan."

I was afraid he was going to say I was his anchor, and I'd have to deck him. Instead he said, "You're a human save point."

I imagined going out again, fighting the land even harder to stay east. And if I ever got to the flat part, I probably still wouldn't be surfing the shimmer, just trudging all summer on regular plains.

Levi said, "I guess I'll see you on the road."

"Wait!" I said. "Fuck it, let's go."

50

Roadrunner

"To the carnival is what she said
A hundred dollars makes it dark inside"

-Tom Waits, Jockey Full of Bourbon

His ride was a chrome three wheeler from the cyclesmiths of Frisco, sunsinks so black I got lost in their furls, its front wheel rearing with grav-assist. My glance put a stop to that impossibility. "Oops," I said, "now you have to pedal the whole way."

"Maybe not," he said, and showed me my seat, all made up like a throne, squeezed in with the packs and backward facing.

All my life I dreamed of running off to join the landscape. I imagined just watching whimsy pour down from the mountains, an avalanche of shifty air, and walking into it. I heard bro-Nomads boast of its ineffability, and now I listened to Levi raving at the shimmer. "Wow, it's like actually getting to a mirage!" All I saw were his boring manifestations roll out behind us, one flat place after another.

He glanced back and said, "Is that the best you can do?"

I got so mad, I set his flat grasslands to ripply winds, and zoned out on the waves. Levi whooped. Into my periphery popped things geology would never do. We rode up convenient canyons on gravelly draws that gripped the wheels, past arches so presumptuous I could knock them over by looking. I wondered how long the land remembered after we were gone. Was it like, "This is cool, I'll stay like this for a while." Or was it, "At last they're gone, now it's back to the bliss of indeterminacy."

We came down from the mountains to the road, is not a view that anyone saw. Levi was pulling the land out of his ass a foot in front of his wheel, and I only watched it backwards. He whirled around a bend, the land grew scruffy, and he yanked us to a stop. He pulled that gravstick back so hard I free-floated. "Whoa," I said, "do that again."

"Turn around girl. We've hit the double-high."

One time at a festival, people were so tightly packed that I couldn't take a step without someone getting mad that I stepped on their foot. The whole ancient times must have been like that. Now even Seedle can't find a use for both highways. The road goes on whichever one is least washed out, and the other is turned into a park or left wild. Out here it was the same way, except instead of a wagon a minute, and bricklayers every summer, it was a traveler a day, tripping the miles until they get bumped by a gully and maybe stop to fill it.

We rolled to the top and he said, "This is either the 70 or the 80. Don't look too close, we don't know which one we need. If you see a roadsign don't tell me -- and don't look up! Don't want to make the sun decide too soon. Now which way?"

It was like two snakeskins out to to the horizon, scaly with the last slabs of pavement. "The easy way," I said, and pointed to the skin that was most scaly and least wrinkly. Levi dug the pedals and we tore off. Still looking backward, I saw the land pass faster than the wind, as fast as the chariots of the ancients, a mile a minute, far bluffs fully rendered and moving in parallax.

I saw a sign and didn't tell Levi, we were on the 25. It ran north-south, and I had to make sure we were going north, so I said a little prayer and looked up:

In these days while I abide
Fate be lazy, let me slide

I was half expecting the sputtery sun god of Speedtrap. But that was a timestretch, and we were scrunching. All I could see was a wan sundog, a tickle in the clouds that fled from my gaze. I pinned it to the horizon, a rainbow smear. I nudged it to a spot just off my right shoulder, and pushed it over the edge.

"There's the sun," I said. "It just went down."

Levi squinted over his left shoulder. "North on the 25, cool. Now hold that sun, we have to get off before dark."

"Why?"

He looked around nervously. "Roadrunners."

I'd heard of them. A rare double oracle octave, 64 times the mass of their forebears, headcrests seven feet high and fast enough to leave wild dogs in the dust.

"Are they real?"

"Are you kidding? Their heads are all around the walls of Durango Saloon. Four hundred cred bounty, and that's an insult to these fearsome beasts."

We camped in the lee of a stand of pines, in sight of the road. I turned to watch it and Levi said, "Don't."

"Why?"

He looked at me like I was a total idiot, which I was. "Because the gaze is what stops travelers. Especially yours. Unless you want a visit from every surly outlaw who just had his ride bumped."

This was my first night on the High Planes. Gathering sticks in the deepening dusk, I kept glancing up for the first twinkle. Having just bullied the sun, I liked my chances with Betelgeuse. I brought one load back and went out again, and there it was, peeking over the southern horizon: Antares.

"Tansy," said Levi. "Listen!"

"What?"

"How do you not hear that?"

"What does it sound like?"

He mimicked, "Hoop hoop, Hoop hoop," and now I heard it. I had been tuning it out against the grasshoppers, a distant susurrus of squawks, not unlike chickens, but staccato and monotone, a serious bird. Were they getting louder? Antares...

"Oh shit oh shit oh shit!" said Levi, and I heard their footfalls, great clawed fingers thrumming the Earth. He shrank against the fire.

I lowered my gaze from the stars to the head bird, his great purple crest and nail-like beak. Behind him the other birds jittered about, tapping polyrhythms while he regarded me. Maybe he was their shaman. I met his eyes.

I remember my wildcraft trainer showing me tracks in mud, the dog and the coyote. Claw by claw, they're exactly the same, but if you catch the vibe of the whole track, dogs are sloppy and coyotes are efficient. Catching a vibe is not something I'm good at, but I looked this bird in the eye and knew it. I was the dog.

I once asked Father Ripple to define love. "The inevitable question," he said, and then tried to triangulate it from admiration and anti-resentment. "Admiration," I said. "That's a pretty high bar for something as important as love. Don't the unadmirable need love too?" He sighed and said, "That's my job."

That bird was the first thing I ever admired that walked on two feet. Having met the gaze of the Void, I was not afraid of anything less, so I let him probe me. The eye of a human is like a squirmy baby. And then if you get them mad it's like a red hot poker. This bird was surgically indifferent, and so sharp he found a spot even the void missed, and gave me something to think about.

I wasn't going to lose. I held his gaze until he gave me something better: what it's like to be him. On a stark plane between earth and sky, chasing stars upwind to unwary lizards, pecking the kernels of quatseeds and tasting the oil. I felt the high stakes of his existence, the clarity of living in that space.

To not be cringey, I lowered my gaze. The whole flock bugled and thundered away. Levi still half-cowered. "What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck" he said.

I said, "What? I just made peace with the natives while you pissed your pants."

51

Crossroads

I couldn't believe how big the land was. The next day it was hour after hour of the same shit, bland tan steppes and blocky ridges. I got bored and looked at the sky, and I must have timestretched because it wasn't long before Levi said it again.

"We have to get off before dark."

"Why?"

He narrowed his eyes. "The crossroads."

I didn't get it. "What happened to the crossroads at the 80?"

"Did you see the 80?"

"I wasn't looking."

"The 80 wasn't there, because there's nobody on the 80 who wants to meet us."

"And now there is?"

"Can't you feel it?"

"What do you think?"

Levi sighed. "If two parties are going to meet, there's a crossroads. The land is a lazy manifester. It doesn't want to have to remember twice how exactly the cloverleafs are falling off their columns, so it syncs the arrivals, everyone gets there at high noon. If we go now we'll just get timestretched into tomorrow. Best use the night to arrive well-rested."

I said. "Let's go around. Isn't that what you brought me for, to go overland?"

"Are you kidding? Are we not the biggest badasses on the High Planes? Let them go skulking around, to not run into us."

There was something about the way he said well-rested. I saw his hand fiddling at his hip, and I said, "Levi, is that a gun?"

Sheepishly he pulled it out, and it was the very same gun that I looted from Vance, who nicked it from who knows who, that I traded for the suit and Levi, when I wasn't looking, bought back.

I said, "Where did you get the creds to buy that?"

He said, "Where did you get the gun?"

I didn't want to have to tell the whole story of how I had to kill my last travel partner, so we left it at that. I set camp while he went off to bless the bullets. That why he wanted to wait, not to rest his fluffy head, but to give the slugs and casings time to get snug in their chambers, to acclimate to local physics so they could fly true tomorrow.

While falling asleep, I imagined myself sniping enemies from a hundred yards before Levi could even draw on them. I could do it too. That's why I don't carry a gun.

The crossroads was a rare three-leafed clover. Outside it's three double-highs to bumfuck, but inside it's six clean curves, all meeting in a mathematical asterisk. The ancients built the center on three levels, cut, flat, and bridge, but gradually the bridge had filled the cut, either through manifestation or dynamite. Now it was almost the same level, all around a dusty plaza.

In the center was an art sculpture the same style as the sunflowers off Bend. I couldn't tell what flower it was supposed to be, maybe a thistle, a mess of black bent pipes, a few of them actually squirting water into a goopy basin. Levi gasped, "The Fountain!"

"It's not supposed to be here?"

"The Fountain only appears for the most important meetings." He drew the gun, and up on the left, on the old bridge, our enemies emerged, a sullen runt with a stub-toe face, and three hulking heavies holding pipe rifles.

"Saint Tony," I said. "What are you doing here?" I was trying to get him talking, and it didn't work.

"Daysie Mayhem!" He said it like an angry magistrate. "For your many alliances with invasives, you are an affront to the landbase, and it finds you unfit to live." That's all he said, and shot me.

I heard the bullet zing by while Levi shot the first heavy. He lined up the second while Tony sent a barrage of bullets. At this range even a smoothbore pistol should have hit me by now. I looked in his eyes and burst out laughing.

He was crosseyed! I laughed and laughed and Tony got so mad that he finally aimed right. I took a bullet to the heart and watched his head explode.

The second heavy hit dirt, and I sat up. For some reason I wasn't dead, and I watched Levi wing the third heavy. His rifle clattered and Levi took aim with the final bullet.

"Let him live!" I cackled bloodily. "Give him the binoculars!"

Levi looked at me funny as the guy ran off. The bullet must have bounced off a rib or something, and somehow made it around my heart and out the other side. If I'd been wearing that badge the trashpicker gave me, that's right where I would have worn it. Why I went into battle without armor, I don't know, but I know that fate always takes each of us as our best self, and then it's up to us to fuck it up.

I didn't want to leave as long as the fountain was running. Levi squirted a whole tube of antiseptic sap in my bullethole, and I slumped under the spray while he went to loot the bodies. In the cities of Caxiletas they use mostly silver spurs, high value and fast depreciating. In the frontier they use copper spurs, non-depreciating but low-value, and if someone has over a hundred it's legal to steal them. Tony and his posse had mostly brass spurs, which are like the worst of both. They also had ten bullets, five bladders, three pipe guns, two condensers, and the orange Synchronator. It was really hard to convince Levi to take it without telling him that I already had two of those things.

As the day went on, he got nervous. "Chill," I said. "You're the biggest badass, remember? Your bullets are hard tuned, you have the jump on them."

"I'm not afraid of people, they'll have to wait until noon. It's just that I've never stayed at a crossroads past nightfall."

"So you're afraid of non-people?"

"You're not going to look at the stars, are you?"

"Levi," I said, "if there's one night in my whole life when I'm going to look at the stars, it's at a High Planes crossroads, half bled out from a shooting, with a gunslinger to protect me."

"You're totally right. I'm just spooked."

I was propped up facing north, and waited for darkness to reveal the pole star, which tonight was Pollux. Dizzy from my wounding, I stared into its redness and the whole sky spun.

"Whooooa," said Levi. His slowness clued me in, and I didn't stop him from covering my eyes. "Girl, you just timestretched a night like a whisper."

"I did what?"

"Tansy Capstone, you are the least dysmanifestational person I've ever met."

52

The Tower

"Heaven is for those who have already been there."

-Cynthia Ozick

I'd seen it in a daguerrotype at the Threeforks library, a stony rampart above the grasslands, the thumb of the Earth hitching a ride: Devil's Tower. Nobody knew quite where it was. Subjectivists had burned so many maps that the few that were left had to capture all the indeterminacy, and they put it everywhere from Bismarck to Cody.

I always wanted to climb it. That's why I had us going north on 25, and now that we were buzzing east on 90, right near where my map said it was, I imagined how it would happen. I'd spot it poking over the horizon and say "Hey Levi, is that Devil's Tower?"

He would drop me at the base and dash off to save Baltimore. I'd climb to the top, barely hanging on fingerholds above the abyss. There I would find a verdant garden, undiscovered all these centuries. Its palm trees summoned monsoons and its tulips gentle rains. In a well-preserved villa I would sit by a fountain, me and the stars forever.

That's pretty much what happened. Except the gunshot had depleted my glaze, and I had to keep my eyes closed against the daylight. I guess the sun got me back for the bumping. So I asked Levi what he saw, and he said, "Hey, there's Devil's Tower."

We camped at least three nights at its base. I tried to count the days by scratching a rock, and ended up with three marks, but maybe I forgot a few days, or thinking I forgot, scratched twice. That's the way time is there and Levi was in no hurry. "If I get there too soon," he said, "they'll say I cheated."

"Well did you?"

The myocite aligner was a pain to pack, and finally worth it. The sap could hardly dissolve fast enough for me to build muscle, and Levi got so grossed out that he used a second tube of sap to cover it up.

Neither one of us even said let's climb it. It was that obvious. It turns out rock climbing is actually hard. I thought with my strength I could swing like a monkey over the abyss. Then we spent an hour bouldering and my arms were noodles. It's not about how hard you can hold. It's about how soft you can hold, and not fall.

Also the gunshot had depleted my bravado. So we made our way up, well-roped, to the hard part, climbing a chimney. Levi started clockwise around the tower to look for a good one, and what if he didn't go two chimneys over and find a line of spikes and carabiners all the way to the top.

I glared at it. "Those are recent."

"I hate it," he said, "when you're not the first person to ever set foot in a place."

It's not like I could not go, and now it was easier. In the end I did swing like a monkey over the abyss, and I only needed the rope two or three times to not die.

From the lip of the summit, knotty pines poked out. We climbed and behind them rose fir and spruce. If any place is bigger on the inside, I thought, it's the top of Devil's Tower. I like to dream big, and I imagined the boundary bending back until it engulfed our whole world. Devil's Pit, they called it, and nobody had climbed out of it since the last age.

It turned out it was only like five times as big. Firs gave way to maples and young oaks. We passed through a hedge of filberts, through a ring of palm trees to a patio. In the center, half carved into an extrusion and half built out of mortared chunks, was a little stone villa. And in the doorway stood who else.


Lin Jiang Kong is how they anglicized my birth name. English can't say it anyway. There was already a Lynn on my dorm floor so I picked Evelyn. My parents sent me to college in America to escape the Cultural Revolution, and it's a good thing, because they both got killed. At the time I was studying entomology, and I changed to chemistry to make sure I got a job. But I still dreamed of finding an insect in amber, so well preserved that science could bring it back. Now I don't think science could ever do that. That's resurrection. You need magic.

Lucky for me, Tansy burst in on us, and I came to a land where magic is real. I thought the people would all be like her, hungry at the edge of their powers. But it was the opposite. I saw why she was the first to find us. I'd just come down the river painting the world, and they hadn't even painted their outhouse. "These people," I said to Devlin, "they could do more."

He grinned and said, "You noticed. How can they make more worlds, if they've only ever seen one?"

While Devlin tinkered on his flying machine, I caught up on science. Even in 1981 we knew it, but now they took it seriously. Everything is already quantum-entangled. That leads straight to synchronous physics, and then to resonant biology. I read the polemic, DNA Is An Oracle, that spawned an age of such manifestation that you could cross cats and dogs, and sport a tree with a tuning fork.

Upscrollers made elves and unicorns. Downscrollers made orcs and trolls. There were dragon-sized pterodactyls, dragon-brained vultures, and dragonflies almost as big as the one I saw at Hanford. I don't know how Tansy kept her cool. That humhawk definitely knew it wasn't supposed to be there.

Most of them died. What survived were the grittiest. Modquats can grow out of cliff cracks. Roadrunners can live a week on a lizard. The grittiest humanoids are the Leaflings, who were dumped in a desert to die and will probably outlive us.

Devlin talked about buying one for experiments, before he got the idea of doing Lucy. I couldn't have done it without him finagling the lab and the glassware, and he wasn't a bad chemist. We finished just in time. I gave a dram to Tansy and I could see her already dreaming of urban aquifers.

At Salt City we split. Devlin flew back to the lab to pick up my weight in glassware, and I spent a week with the Intensifiers, to prove to them how many doses were in that little vial I was selling. They didn't believe me until the Prelate spent a whole day ogling rocks. Then, as we agreed, they outfitted me for a safari to Devil's Tower. I got a guide and a mule, and normally three diverse perspectives would loop around or split, but I had an advantage. I had been there when the land was real.

The land had forgotten what it was, and when I reminded it, it fell down so hard before us that we crossed the Planes in a week. When the guide saw the tower, he freaked out and would go no further. The mule at least I could talk to. He hauled my stuff almost to the base before running off.

I set camp on a low hump of the tower, and took my time scouting. When I found the best route, I climbed just enough to pound the next stake, and rested. I could only go as fast as my fingers could toughen. On the third day I hit the chimney, and by then the sun was pulling me so hard I almost didn't set ropes. By afternoon I was over the top.

My grandmother fed rice cakes to the local spirits. Every little peak had one. But a peak like this would have a major fairy at the top, if not an angel. As I crested I kept my eyes down, and knelt to mamifest the land inch by inch. A patch of lichen, a tuft of grass, a bracken, a knapweed, a toadflax, a patch of kinnikinnik. In my face, the broad leaves of a thimbleberry. In the duff, long needles of yellow pine, then double-striped needles of grand fir, then pointy needles of spruce.

It went a long way in, but I never found any fairies. It was just me.

53

Gods

Evelyn wavered across new-minted space. Bigger on the inside has to start somewhere, and the scrunch unfolded from a tar pit in the center of the patio. I looked at the weeds to gauge its speed. A dandelion at five spans, a buttercup at ten, and out by me, knee length grass and sapling hazels.

Evelyn came around. The scrunch was so heavy that the house got smaller as she walked away. I didn't remember her being that young.

I said, "You're acting like a god."

"I am one, as are you."

"Shut up."

"Why not? It's what they call us. Would you rather be called normal?"

"I'll take the third option."

She laughed. "And so you will. But your face." She pointed to my still scabby lip. "Who did that to you? Was it a very lucky person? Did he have unusual powers?"

I didn't say anything.

"What did you do with his soul?"

"What?"

"What did you do with his soul?" She looked me full in the eyes and didn't seem at all bothered, so I gave her the full blast of the void. She shuddered, not in a bad way, and said, "Levi, are you ready to go?"

I looked between them. "You two know each other?"

"Ma'am," said Levi, and gave a little bow. "It's been a pleasure to serve as your escort."

I was so mad. Not because they helped me get where I wanted to go anyway, not even because they had to trick me into taking their help. It was because I always wanted to be a spark, a seed of fire wild and free, and here I was a gear again, spinning around with the rest.

"The deIncarnationists are right," said Evelyn. "Gods are the most basic beings. I get everything I want, as long as everything I want is on a certain path. But it's the best path, and so easy. My life is a kiddie trail. I'm not complaining. Levi, how many synchronators do you have?"

He pulled out two, the orange one we found on Tony, and Gran's yellow. How did he get that? Now I couldn't show less than two, so I pulled out the purple one Aloysius gave me, and the white one I had all along. I never did use it, except a few times in Threeforks, before I figured out that any dweeb with a flasher might be creeping on my manifestations.

"I have only one," said Evelyn, and it was the green one from Dad.

I looked at her. "How did you get that?"

"Well," she said, "Devlin and I met your parents. It was while you were in the pit of Seedle. Devlin was so curious about where a girl like you had come from, and we were not disappointed. We got to talking, and they told us all about the flashers. They worked too well, your dad told us. Any faction that had two of them would have too much of an advantage. So as soon as one fell to the Fixiters, one fell to the Sky Dividers, one to the Nativists, and the rest went dark. Your dad was glad to be out of the loop, and your grandmother saw us as agents of fortune. Your mom didn't trust us."

She looked them over. "Orange, yellow, green, blue, white, and the red with Devlin. That's six of seven, with blue still in play. We think the Fixiters have it."

"There were eight."

"What?" She looked actually surprised.

"My dad made eight. I watched him do it."

"What was the last color?"

"Black," I said. "Black walnut stain on black locust. The hardest wood and the smoothest dial. It was the one I wanted and I got the white. I don't know what they did with it."

"Well," said Evelyn, "this adds a twist, but it doesn't change our plans. Tansy, how would you like to be left alone on top of this tower?"

I had never wanted anything more. I didn't say anything.

"Good," she said, "I thought so. I'm going to Frisco to hire a fast cutter to China. I'll be gone all summer at least, probably longer. You can stretch the winter if you want."

I thought I might stay a hundred years, but I thanked her, and sat on the patio itching for them to go over the edge.

54

Sun-Blind

Fairy tales are always putting princesses on top of towers, and no wonder, it's the best place. They're probably annoyed to be rescued. I was afraid to look at the stars, in case someone was still watching, so for three days I went around naming trees and adjusting condensers. And when I was sure the location of the tower had been good and shuffled, I laid out on the patio and looked up.

Even then I was afraid some lucky ranger would be close enough to follow the stars and find me. I didn't have to worry. Within ten minutes, I thought I heard a storm. The patter of big drops, the rumble of far thunder. It was the roadrunners. They pounded up to the base of the tower and ran all around it stomping and hooting.

I had nothing to do but listen, and when I really zoomed in, not one of those birds was singing. Each one only knew one note, and together they were totally atonal, but it was definitely music. I hope they weren't worshipping me, that would be creepy. I imagine I was just the lightshow for their raves.

That was definitely the best summer ever. I did the stars every four nights, then every three, then every two, daring the rangers to get through my birds. On the off nights I lit fires, and by moving the condensers around, I drew enough water to take hot baths. I'd never been so clean, and I dumped the greywater to fatten the berries. How much better can this get, I thought, before it gets worse?

At the end of the most glorious night, it must have been October, I finally invited the moon. The moon is not something you can just manifest, like you would a thimbleberry. I remembered the words of my meditation teacher.

"Stop seeking," he said. "For just five fucking seconds can you stop seeking?"

"It depends. How many seconds does it take to reach enlightenment?"

"There you go again, seeking! But if you must know, most adherents report one to two thousand hours."

"You've got to be kidding. Then I'm too lazy for enlightenment. I'll just accept that I'm one of the rabble, and seek and seek until I burn out on seeking."

He clapped his hands with joy. "I have no more to teach you."

To summon the Moon, I tried so hard to stop seeking, that when I started seeking again, there it was. I wasn't hallucinating, there was a white glow over the treetops. I ran through the trees to the edge of the tower, and it was right there in front of me, a great glowing bulge.

Under it, impossibly, hung a black gondola. I heard a funny sound, klikklikklikklik, it was almost like the dial on a synchronator, and then I felt four stings across my flesh, hip to shoulder, and thought, "Oh no, not again."


I once wrote a bad poem:

Sun-blind I wish to be
Bathed in blowing leaves
Warmed by glow of Earth
Blank of face and bright of eye

Fate, that bitch. You can't make one dumb wish without her holding onto it and using it against you. I woke up strapped to a table, what else, this time plus a headache. Cedric used to complain of migraines and I thought, how bad could it be? Now I knew. Except if Cedric's had been this bad, he would have cried like a baby. Even I had to groan. I heard a page turn. "Ah," said a voice, "you're awake."

"Nix you snake! Get me some laudanum. I swear I'll suck your dick for it."

"I don't believe you. You'll bite it off."

How did he know? I was in total darkness, and the pain was right behind my eyes. It wasn't hard to guess what he had done. "You disgusting geek, you blinded me!"

"Indeed I did," said the prig. "It was just a matter of holding your eyes open to the sun. Don't worry, your shiny lenses are intact, but I'm afraid your retinas are barbecue."

"Why?"

"You know, I've forigiven you for abandoning me in the desert, and exposing me as a charmer before my own people. I decided you did me a favor. You said it yourself that first night: You're a wizard, Nix."

Then he told me about his glorious defection to the Sky Dividers, and how fast he made it to Grand Divizier, and all the while I tested my constraints. I had to pretend I was stuggling futilely to escape. Left wrist, right wrist, left ankle, right ankle, feeling for the breaking point and stopping just short.

"And now," he said, "the iconic story point: the Sun-blinding of the Rectifier atop Devil's Tower, by -- oh shit!"

I had broken loose, almost. The left ankle held a moment too long for me to wring his neck like a dishtowel. He slipped away and I heard his feet skittering out the door. Chasing him, I bumped the doorframe and heard him laugh.

I could hear his feet scampering across the patio. I knew he'd be tricking me, not running straight to the balloon but in a curve to throw me off. If I guessed exactly right, I'd beat him there, but I wasn't feeling lucky, and I came into the sunlight at the sound of his feet clanging up the ramp. I ran toward the sound and heard the clickety clack of a crank. I went to jump.

"No!" Nix cried. There was so much fear in his voice even I could hear it. Someone definitely would have died, him or me I'll never know. But I stopped at the edge and listened as the clicking drifted off. "Don't worry," he called, "it's all been predetermined."

55

Sublimating

"The maze of her hair could hardly be told from the photosphere."

-Maurice Hewlett, Lore of Proserpine

"Your soul," said Father Ripple, "can be found in the weakest part of you." Well, at least I hadn't lost any soul, because my eyes were definitely the strongest part of me. Second strongest would be my actual muscles, then either stubbornness or imagination. If fate ever comes for that she'll have to kill me.

Every morning I ate two modquats and did the rounds. Nix had left his pack when I chased him off, and I used his packstraps as kneepads as I crawled around re-learning the place by feel, mumbling a misremembered hymn:

Walk like Bigfoot
Wear that pig suit
Bend your back and
Make it happen

First I touched everything that I already knew about. Then when I was guessing where it was correctly, I moved out to badly touching the partly known, and then I hurried on to the prize. If the strongest emotion is love, then the strongest kind of love is love of the unknown. I'd move my hands in arcs through the needles, like a snow angel until I bumped a treeroot. Then I felt up it, the sap bubbles of grand fir, the smooth bark of aspen. I wasn't even thinking in names anymore, only feels and smells. Out of my eyes was out of my head.

Within a week I could sniff out ripe berries and dry wood, and one morning I smelled the snow coming. That's when I knew I was on my own. Evelyn must have been captivated by upscroll Asia. Right now she was probably cloudbusting in Tibet, while I was holed up against the storms of winter. I had Nix's socks stuffed in the doorframe, I was double-wrapped in his bivy sack and eating his jerky, it's a good thing I tried to kill him.

Snow drifted high, and in the total quiet, I listened to the pitter-patter of snowflakes on the powder outside, and wondered if I were a weatherwitch. That's an uncanny traveler who can make it stormy, and then ride the storms to other stormy places. It could be a snowstorm, or a sirocco, it depends on the kind of weatherwitch, and there might not even be any weatherwitches, only regular landbenders who got lucky. But if I was one, how would I know if I didn't try? So I tried to coax up a warm monsoon and nothing happened at all, unless it got more cold to spite me.

I woke from deep sleep to a sparkly smell. This was what heaven should smell like, but what WAS it? I pulled on Nix's mittens and tried the door. It was snowed shut, I had to push pretty hard to get it open. Outside, I kneeled and took a deep sniff. It was the snow, going straight from ice to vapor in the bitter cold, and sublimating unvaporizable humours. I felt it on my face and thought, So that's what the sun smells like.

The other thing in Nix's bag was the blue synchronator, it couldn't be the black because it didn't smell like walnut. Now I had five of those things and no retina. There is no unfairness, just fate fucking with us. Anyway I didn't need a retina. The action happens in the back brain, which I still had, the sun hadn't burned that far.

Because of my condition, when I close my eyes I see total black. So did my mom, that's why she needed the flashers. Most people see a dim glow of purple brown, it's like the clay of eye space and with enough time you can turn it into anything. One spark, I prayed, and I'll stoke it to a fire.

I got squat, flat black to infinity. This was almost like the Oubliet, but at least this time I had a body. I felt the whole thing, out to my toetips and back to my heart, and just then just then the pressure drop blew my head. This was a whole other thing from the burning, and if it was a migraine, Cedric was pretty tough. My head was a glass mug that broke on every heartbeat, and I squirmed until I remembered the song of the Intensifiers:

How much pain would you pay for protection from trauma?
What hope would you lose for the chance to win dream?
When we get to the end of this infernal drama
We'll "All of it! All of it! All of it!" scream

If that's the game, I thought, I'll pay some pain. I said to the headache, harder, and it worked. Now my head was a whole bowling alley of breaking glass. I unfolded myself in the face of the pain, and when it didn't kill me I folded around it, and there it was, it probably would have happened anyway. A spot of purple, a bolt of green. I watched the fireworks and rode the pain like a bull until it got tired. Then I went to work.

The last thing I said to my mom was, try sticking your arm out, even though you can't see it, and if you can manifest an arm on your eyelid, you can try to sync them. She must have actually done it, and tuned the oracle for me, because it was too easy. In between the pain being too bad to do anything, I was sliding my forearm like a curtain, side to side, up and down, and seeing a dim shadow moving.

I could have stretched the winter but I wanted the time. I had never had nothing to do while still having my body. If my arms could be eye-puppets, so could my legs, and then I was doing upside down bicycles and weird stretches. Pretty soon I was pacing around the room, seeing the walls, the bed, the door. It wasn't magic, I knew where they were, and it was just dim blobs anyway.

The next time I smelled the sun, I went straight out and took my shirt off. I wanted to get sublimated too, and when that didn't work, I tried to make the sun into an eye puppet. It had to be easier than the doorknob, and it was.


"Are you sure," I asked Evelyn, "that she has enough food?"

"Don't worry," Evelyn said, "she'll stretch it. You wait and see, she'll still have the bloom of summer." Boy was she wrong. What nobody suspected was that not only wouldn't Tansy stretch the winter, she would scrunch it.

I anchored the balloon and it's a good thing I didn't have my gun handy. Out of the trees popped an unholy horror, porcelain white and so thin I could almost see between her tibia and fibula. Still half timescrunched, she zipped spider-fast to the precipice and sniffed. Nose in the air, eyes blank and sparkly, tangled hair touching her bare heels, she stood there like zombie Rapunzel. "Devlin," she said, "is that you?"

I disembarked and she wouldn't stop chattering. "Spring!" she said. "The bitterness of the moss, the sweetness of the grass, can you smell it? This is Bartholomew, look at the green on those buds, and here's Phyllis extending catkins."

I was going to ask her how she saw the green, but I couldn't get a word in edgewise. It was nice to know there were limits to her introversion. She might have introduced me to every tree on the tower, but every time she walked into a sunbeam she couldn't help but soak in it. How it made her more pale, and never tan, was some kind of wizardry, and I wondered how long she had gone witout human food, and how much longer she could. I lit my camp stove and she teased her fingertips at the edge of flame, like she was remembering what fire was. I offered her a pemmican bar and she took one sniff and gagged. I convinced her to taste a seed cracker and she spat it out.

By now you will have guessed. I had some inkling when Evelyn insisted on a high loft balloon. I went to bed, and in the morning she was gone.

56

Up

"There are data for thinking that aviators, who have gone up from the surface of this earth, as far as they supposed they could go, have missed entering conditions that, instead of being cold, may be even warmish, and may exist all the way to a not so very remote shell of stars."

-Charles Fort, Lo!

As soon as Devlin nodded off, I dashed to the balloon. I had my wits about me, you wouldn't think it from his telling, and I unloaded all his stuff before I untethered. With just me in it, that basket was feather light and the bag was straining to rise. I cut the rope and dropped the ballast.

How did I see? Well, I knew where the Earth was. It was just like pacing my bedroom, and more details. Instead of the dim smear of the doorframe, I saw I saw the clear lines of ridges that might actually be there, and watched the horizon unfold.

Devlin said it stopped unfolding for his dumb astronauts. That's probably why they ended up in such a bad part of the sky. I tried to pull the colors around me like a blanket, then over the top of me like gift wrap, but the best I could do was a bulge on the horizon. I tried spinning and got dizzy. I took a gulp of air and it turned to ether. In a fit, I coughed up the last of my earth air and gripped the rim of the basket.

Not all balloonists even report ether, so I knew I was going the right way. They carry pressure suits for vacuum, gyroscopes for slant, oars for the sky-sea, and because ether brings delusions and madness, they bring gas masks. What a waste of a good balloon trip.

I thought it would smell like the humours of the snow, but that was a mountain spring and this was the great river. It smelled like barbecued metal, like a knight had gone up against too hot a dragon. And I didn't get any madness at all. I just kept playing with the horizon, and I found that by tugging up on a bulge, I could build a bridge, and then roll out a carpet of continents curving up the sky. I pushed them until they fell apart like oilslicks and tried again.

Ether must be time-arbitrary, because I don't know how long it took, but when I finally pulled a carpet to the apex, it was like going all the way around on a swingset.

Metaphysicians identify six levels of incommensurability: insignificant, anomalous, impossible, nonsensical, inconceivable, and imperceptible. This was a solid level four. From here it made perfect sense how one person can go once around the earth, and another person twice around, and they end up in the same place. Where does the sun hide in a concave universe? Easy. Day is when you're facing the sun, and night is when you're facing away from it.

The balloon was level one, and also level six. I jumped, did a tumble-turn, and faced the sun.

It's a good thing Nix blinded me, or I couldn't have done any of this. I would have just passed out from the ether and come down at the Mississip, then off to play capture the flag with the Hod'n'Saunee.

Here I was looking full at the Sun, in fraud eye, and what people don't realize about he Sun is, he's a person. At the swimming hole, he's the huge fat guy who cannonballs. At a party, he's drinking the punchbowl. He pats you on the back and you go flying. You would never, ever want to fight him. I'd glimpsed his face in Speedtrap, and now I met his eyes.

He winked.

Once I asked Father Ripple, "Wouldn't God be a cyclops? Because if God has two eyes, then they'd see a little different, and which one is true?"

"We're all the eyes of God," he said. I said, "How does God not get a headache?"

That one wink was all I needed. I took another tumble-turn and faced the stars.

The fucking stars, what are they? I saw it from Earth on Lucy, and wrote it down, but it made no sense when I was sober, and now it did. The stars are bubbles. Stand up and turn around where you are. That's your bubble. It's made of everything that you're not. It follows that stars are bubbles of the night.

I left Antares waiting and went right past him to the full host of the south. I'd glimpsed them in bitterest winter, and here I was moving among them: Rigel, Spica, Acheron, and oh my god Canopus. Not one of them was white. Whatever I was seeing with, saw them as green, and what if it wasn't just like a forest. The green stars were trees, the red stars were drizzly hot springs, the blue stars were ponds in the sun. Canopus, I didn't even ask. I turned my back as far as I could on the sun, and dove right in.

What I went through is what metaphysicians call a counter-containing membrane, or an innie-outie. All I needed was a ball of black to burst out of, and that was some telescope, those kids got it exactly right. I popped up from the tin ball of the Earth, in a gear-and-rod model of the solar system.

I stood with one foot on the brown scar of the Rockies, one foot in the Pacific, and I wondered about the rules here. The physics were definitely unreal but the details were super-real. I hopped to Jupiter and marveled at the moons, perfect spheres of lapus lazuli and quartzite. Every satellite was balanced on a brass toothpick, bending below to meet the gears.

Everything was moving except the Earth. It was also the one crappy model, dented and dully painted with not even the right continents. I hope they didn't want me to fix that, jump to Neptune for turquoise or some shit. But the gears were easy. Just one was missing, about the size of my hand, and it must have been in my pocket when I jumped on the balloon, because there it was, the trashpicker badge. It fit the gearworks perfectly, it's a good thing I took that bullet or it would have got bent. I watched the motion kick through the gearcase, the torque of the sun, until I looked up to see the Earth turn.

Now I had to see about the Moon. The stick was there but the ball was missing. I looked all around for it, trying to conjure a coffee table out of the ether for the orrery to be sitting on. There was nothing there but my old friend the void. I hopped to the tip of the stick and wow, what a view. The Earth from that angle was like the actual Earth. There's your blue marble Devlin, you win.

The High Planes were storming under me, sparks of lightning in black stacks of clouds. I turned to look west and instead slid east, over the Mississip still awaiting the storm, over Old America catching the dawn, and halfway to Eire before I figured out the interface. It was like in Devlin's airplane, where you pull the stick down to go up. Whichever way I turned, my view went the opposite direction, and in a very predictable way.

I could tell the Earth hadn't been looked at like this in a long time. She's a person too, more complicated than the Sun. The Earth is who all the hippie chicks are trying to be, and one thing they're getting wrong, is how a cat might scratch you at any moment. The Earth is your friend but she's not a saint. She's funny and doesn't give a fuck. I saw her cheekbones in the edges of continents, her eyes in the spirals of storms. I looked for her browline in archapelagoes, followed her east and thought of Jack's song. "Turn, turn, turn, and a time to every purpose in development."

57

Turn

"The creation of the universe," Black finished. "Yes. We are going all the way around."

-Roger Zelazny, The Changing Land

I always thought the evil longitudes would be more cartoonish. Downscrollers are simple people. Shouldn't their land be mythic? I imagined pointy peaks curving like eye teeth, red tribes slashing green plains, and running down the blue rivers, snaky black oilslicks.

It turns out Downscrollers are smart. They had whole continents denuded in grids, nothing wild but the twisted forests around zero point leaks and particle meltdowns. I saw dams that had drowned whole ecologies, squeezing juice to cities of jagged spires and sprawling tenements. I saw the smokestack of the Anaconda forge, ten Devil's Towers tall and pumping lead to the stratosphere, its slag heaps the size of cathedrals.

A few more turns and the people are too ornery for police states, so it's all warlords. You can tell who has the best warlords from who has the best roads. That clean white crosshatch belongs to Gallius the Great or some shit, when he's gone they won't even tear down his statues, but in a hundred years his pavement will be rubble before the next empire.

Finally the people get too ornery for even warlords, and what if it isn't red tribes slashing green plains, mountains in crazy shapes hollowed out by mining, peasants building wooden palisades against mounted knights. This is the High Evils, a place of loose manifestation with real death wargames and actual dragons. Upscrollers risk their lives to come here, a turn of the world from the nearest hospital and even the healers are pervs.

The High Evils fizzle out in everybody having killed each other, or nobody wanting to go that far, until there aren't enough people left for evil. But the ruins! Cubic mile cities of honeycombed extrusion, mountains carved with faces of forgotten dweebs, titanium castles, from some fleeting alchemy, that will outlast the sun. Eventually there's nobody left but geo-tourists and trashpickers, the land itself loses track and million year old cliffs are striped with urban landfill.

The wind blows ever east, and she never takes out the trash. With only the most curious and degraded left to manifest it, the land narrows to a black lumpy ribbon of refuse. I can see the void off both sides and its barely darker. In the last lick of the ocean, cesspools bloom with algae in holiday colors, and on land not even thorns grow, only the grotesque fruits of fungi who cracked the code of some rich toxin.

And yet there is a path. Spare my lex be skew, I lost my mind. Mythic it be at last. Gloom be glowin and every scrapyard a stonehenge. Earth be squirmin like a dog's back, and still be a path. At long last I find him, the last man, trashpicker zero. Oh hey, it's you.

That balloon was level one, and also level six. It's all a loop of what-even-is-that. I was outside time like a fish leaping, with time for one wiggle, and below me the manifestations spun like a Rorschach slot machine. Deserts red-striped with rock strata for my my eye only, peacock green lakes, plains a-sparkle with glass or diamonds, and that was just one image. I say "Earth, you resplendent!"

Already I was falling into cognition. What-even-is-that resolved to nothing more than a continent knee-deep in gemstones. This was the last land of legend, the Chromatic Plains, glimpsed only by astral travelers and shaman-possessed birds.

Diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, it had all the colors to make all the colors, so I asked the Earth for a wink, and got one. The plains turned sandy and then all at once blue, too blue even for the sea, and it was her eye of course. That's how close she got to the screen. She pulled back and I saw her pupil, straight under me and black in broad daylight, how did she do that?

The land rose to a roiling rainbow oilslick, the second-to-last land of legend: the Mountains of Candy Madness. No traveler had ever passed them, or maybe not even gone a mile without being sucked into some personal heaven.

To get there, you have to cross the highest High Planes, Elysium, an ancestral savanna where wild unicorns run in herds, half-reverted to their goat oracle and wise enough for riddling. The thylacine lies down with the dodo, there's so little death that even the fungi get bored, and any patch of trees might hold the Fairy Woods.

The Fairy Woods are their own geography. Metaphysicians model them as a thousand separate forests, deeply entangled, or as one forest with way too many portals. Some of them are copses in Elysium, some of them are glades in the Last Woods, and those two places don't meet in any other way. I wondered if I could jump it, but I took the tunnel, zoomed into a copse and wow! It was what-even-is-that all over again, but narrowed to woodsy. I thought about the sagebrushes and walked down a path until I could almost feel my body.

Ahead the green blossomed with impossible colors. How did she do that? But it was only the paradigms of the far saints. The Fairy Woods are perfectly capable of trapping you in a dream if you're too lazy to cross Elysium, and these were the pilgrims whose personal heavens hadn't killed them yet. Thinking I was sniffing a flower, I bottomed out on a nonsensical homestead, and passed over a common haunted forest to the sea.

Pelagia, the first sea of legend, is so blue that it was her eye after all, and so big that I couldn't see the edge, which meant that any lucky sailor might forget the horizon and pop out here. But all I saw were lazy fishermen. It's hard to get this far while having any needs.

On the other side lay the farthest verifiable place, the Eyrie of the Oculants. I could tell the whole area had been manifested by humans, it was so blocky and obvious. But the Eyrie itself was spectacular, a nest of candy cane towers that will surely inspire the Earth, in a million years, to carve the mountain beneath into the same shapes.

They say far Upscrollers are indistinguishable from nature, so I probably missed some, but the tree cities of Far Faltramador are way too big to be real trees. Alloy frames shellacked with bark extruded from some oracle engine, all up and down the mountain-sized trunk and out street-sized limbs, where a thousand sim-leaves waved like towels, their veins feeding chestnut domiciles whose lithe occupants walked like aphids to congregate on extruded plazas.

Beyond were forests so well tended that fruits and nuts piled up and fed flocks of bright birds that swirled around the farthest temples, which worshipped them, and then on to the less far temples that ate them. The land was already starting to discriminate.

The towns got better when they stopped trying to look like trees, and instead tried to do things in a tree-like way. I saw a spiral-themed town where steeples twisted to flowery peaks and even the outhouses swirled like seashells. I saw a town of modblocks, man-sized cubes stacked into mansions, matte black with photosynthesis and who knows what they're doing in there. I saw towns where all the buildings were spiny like hedgehogs, or crinkly like crumpled paper. The sun finally got away from me. In the night I crossed the last verifiable ocean, and the lights of the boats were like stars, tankers of sap and spices eastbound, and westbound the dreamers. I could see them looking up at me. Who's creeping on who now?

Everyone agrees that Yon is the best Faltramador. Far is too hidebound and Hin is too kitschy. Yon is like if trees could paint, with sewer grates like leaf veins straining the greywater of colossal pinecone pagodas, every prickle a lantern dimming in predawn. The sun rose, that scamp, on accordion conapts bending in the morning wind, the top floors swaying and sighing a tune. One neighborhood was nothing but onion towers and very steep pyramids in chartreuse and aquamarine. I tried to slow down and the Earth wouldn't have it, so I was still thinking of the transit tubes when I saw the hedgehog echo as a porcupine.

The Ancients got the Earth so puffed, Devlin said the middle was 25,000 miles around, if it was an inch. So that's how she fit so many people. Now her middle is unmeasurable, though dweebs have tried, but there's no way it's that big. It was only one or two thousand miles of twee towns to the ocean.

The sun gave me the night again, he was probably jealous of the blue, and again I saw the lights of the seafarers, this time more varied, like bugs as you get closer to trash. There were red warning lights of humour trawlers, blue flashers of grav-assist catamarans, yellow glows of airship landing platforms.

Hin Faltramador is what Vegas wishes it was, and secretly wishes it was Far Morlock. There are double size replicas of all the world's sacred sites, the Great Pyramid hollowed out for conapts, the Colossus of Rhodes showing his bum. It's the farthest you can get on money alone, so all the money comes there and trickles down to a continent of shiny towns, and an ocean so full of lights I could do pareidolia and see myself walking down a path again.

That's enough, says the Earth, no more Faltramadors. This time there's nothing there but a crossroads on a bucolic continent, a patchwork of the spiffiest dude ranches and most reknowned farms. Even the Earth is racist, next down are the highest neo-Indigenes, just as nice as the snoots and their patches move around. But by now the Earth is so big that there are two or three continents per turn. These are the mid-Goods, and Upscrollers are smart. It was turn after turn of every flavor of Utopia, and some of the least good were the best.

Then it's half-assed garden planets and tame hedonistic cities, around and around to my home longitude. I don't know how Jack got off calling us the near evils, probably our murder rate, but we only neglect the Earth, we don't abuse her.

The second time through the evils was twice as good. I saw demonic factories and buzzing slums, rivers bursting cut-rate dams, trebuchets battering castles, the unspeakable green of the zones between warring tribes, and the ribbon of filth where every lump told a story. I had never been less bored, and I had not even begun to get in their hearts.

How do you like it? said the trashpicker.

Oh, I said, I could do this forever.

Part 7