The Days of Tansy Capstone

Part 3: Seedle

17

Devlin

"And I am asking myself as the Girl Leader goes by like a meteor: 'Am I coming up again through the earth as weed or flame or man?'"

-Vachel Lindsay, The Golden Book of Springfield

1981, and I had just returned from the can, and was about to run figures on positron decay, when the lab door burst open, and there stood the strangest girl I had ever seen.

Her eyes were wide-set and wild, her nose pointy enough to hang a hat, her lips thin as the edge of a seashell. The gust from the door smelled like the breath of the mountains, when you go camping and first open the car door.

She looked at us like were were ghosts. "He ARE ye?"

"I'm Doctor Roger Devlin. Who are you?"

She looked back the way she came, back at us. "Ye need a leg a sigh."

I looked at Evelyn, my lab tech, and she at me, to confirm that we were not crazy. As this was certainly more interesting than my own experiment, we followed the girl out into the hallway.

Scents assailed me. Pine resin, river water, mold and mildew. The air felt thicker and more conductive, the overhead fluorescents as warm as the sun. They flickered as she led us down obscure hallways, past nameplates of scientists I had never heard of. My lab was on the second floor but we came to a stairwell where the downstairs was full of water. The lights went out. A dim glow came from above, and the girl did not hesitate to chase it, around and around until we emerged in the ruins of the top of the building, in sunlight so alive I could only stand awestruck.

This was better than a dream. It had to be heaven, a place I had not until now believed in, and not for long, as a terrifying mosquito went for my arm. I pulled back and an impossible dragonfly snatched it. "A meganeura!" cried Evelyn, and went off chasing.

The girl acted like this was all normal. "Who are you," I said, "and how has this happened?"

"I Tansy," she said. "Tame belazy."

I wondered if I could find my car, and went out to where the parking lot had been, expecting to find rusty hulks half dissolved into soil, the ground still sparkly with window bits. That was exactly what I found. Trees were growing through the old asphalt, lumped up and mossy. A bent lightpole leaned under ivy.

The dragonfly landed on the last remains of a Chrysler and Evelyn came running up. "They've been extinct for 300 million years!"

"Shhh," said Tansy. "Don't tell hum-hawk, they don't know."

I wondered, how had our civilization become so advanced as to resurrect extinct species, and yet fallen to this girl's primitive state? I asked her, "What year is it?"

"Ye ken Kaskadie tab, nee Caxiletas nur Hod-n-Saunee, twix thighs and ears apart?"

Her dialect was easy enough to understand, and I shall half-normalize it from here on. I assumed the three tribes she mentioned simply had a different year zero, not that their counts from the same zero were off by a thousand years. Did they not all orbit the same sun?

I said, "What happened to me in 1981? Did they say, one of our scientists vanished into thin air? Fell with his lab assistant into an anomalous sinkhole? Is another me still back there?"

"Not two yous," she said. "Fate belazy."

"I should think a playful fate would enjoy the challenge of juggling five or six of me."

She deadpanned, "Ye should think to be interesting." Evelyn laughed.

"If we dig up old records," I persisted, "they have to say something."

She looked at me like I was totally daft and said, "Why poke fate? Fate behazy for a reason. You be here."

As I was soon to learn, these people's physics are like that old joke: "Doctor, my husband thinks he's a chicken." "How long has this been going on?" "Three years." "Why didn't you come to me sooner?" "Because we needed the eggs!"

For this game to still be going on after a thousand years, I wanted to see those eggs.

Night was coming, and I was happy to learn that humanity had not undiscovered fire. I watched Tansy pull puffs and nuggets from a pouch, willow catkins and pine resin, and build a lively tripod of dry sticks. She clicked a spark from some gadget and it flamed up.

"Get wooood," she said, mocking my accent. "Ee nay wandrin, land be tricksy."

She was right. I hit such a trove of dry wood that in gathering it I lost sight of the fire. I turned about, and then I saw the sky.

The stars were as bright as two full moons. But my eyes didn't know what to do with them. They sparkled in the periphery but at the center they kept squirming away. I managed to balance under Bellatrix, and for a minute I played whack-a-mole with Orion's belt.

Suddenly the sky settled, and it was such a glory that it didn't matter if they were in the wrong places. Never had I seen it so clearly. Tiny stars pinpricked places I'd thought blank. But where were the planets? I looked around for something untwinkling, and Tansy came up.

I said, "How did they get so bright?"

"They so bright everwhen."

"They were certainly not!"

"Maybe your scopes got too pokey. I joke. Stars got stretched over too many eyes." To this day I don't know which of those was the joke.

"Bae true?" she said, and held up a fist. "Irth," she said, and spun a finger around it. "Bae true? Be turn day irth, same place or no?"

"Surely," I said, "you people have not forgotten about the round Earth."

"Kay! Bit looook," and she made her fist like a candle, and like the somatics of a spell, she picked a coal from below it and kindled it above. "Bump, she said, or betwixt?"

If I'd had any idea what she were talking about, I would have gone stark raving mad. But she lowered her fist and looked up, and the sky again grew crystalline.

"The moon," she said. "Have you seen it?"

"Seen it? I've watched astronauts land on it."

She gave a little hop. "Bae true!"


After she fell asleep, I was still awake on thousand year old coffee, so I kept one eye on the fire and went exploring. The building I had gone into that morning, from my Plymouth now rusting under ferns, was at least five miles from the Columbia River. But the girl seemed to think we were a stone's throw from the mighty Itchywanna.

If the landscape were truly undefined, it occured to me that I might prejudice it by looking too far forward. And as I had to watch the fire anyway, I simply walked backward, and smelled and listened for water.

It came up so fast that I nearly slid on my butt down a muddy run, and there it was, slow-flowing and so smooth it nearly doubled the light of the stars. It was even more painful now to look at them, and I kept my gaze to the ground as I scouted up and down the river. Only once did I dare to lose sight of the fire, and there I found a prize. A spring flood had beached a wooden boat, tall at both ends like a Viking ship, and tight in joinery.

Tansy glared at it when I showed her in the morning. There was room for more than the three of us, so we retraced our steps, down into the building to save what we could of antiquity. "Don't open that door," said Tansy, "or this might never have happened." As the halls got cleaner, I wondered if we really were going back in time, and that if I took a left at the drinking fountain, I could still make Friday night poker.

I didn't take any chances. I suppose now that the present pulled up the past on a curve, reaching farther back as we went deeper. The epicenter was the hall outside my lab, and from the ceiling in one spot, I could still hear the ghost of the air conditioning.

It was hard to know what to take, but Tansy insisted on dividing the ball point pens three ways. Evelyn grabbed a microscope, and I packed some graduated cylinders in newspapers, thinking that if the river moved, why not the milliliter? It does, but not by much, and those newspapers turned out to be the most valuable thing.

The three of us dragged the boat to the river. It was strangely easy, and as my shoes squished in mud and gnats swarmed my face, I still felt awed by the richness of this world. The oxygen had to be higher, but more than that, I felt like I was walking in someone's memory of a good day. I did psychedelics in the sixties and they were not this good.

In the night I thought it was just the stars that were hard to see. In the light of day I could see it was the whole distance. The farther we got from the epicenter, the harder it was to look at it. There was light and color but it made no sense. "Are you not seeing that?" I said to Evelyn, pointing at the misbehaving horizon. We found that when we looked together, we could bring it into focus, the deep view, the lines of perspective. But it took effort to hold it there. Evelyn bent to examine a mayfly husk and I lost it. Exasperated, I said, "How does it know we're looking?" Tansy laughed like I'd told the funniest joke.

On the boat it got worse. Tansy paddled us to the midstream while I looked around in increasing distress, until finally I gave up and let the colors take me. Not heaven, I thought. Greek mythology, for this is surely the river Styx. Then all at once I got it. In college I mocked an art major for suggesting that Medieval paintings were realistic, that that was how the world really looked to them. Now I saw it with my own eyes. It was like I floated through a tapestry. The colors were deep but the distance was shallow. Everything was just there.

Evelyn and I found we could see the deep distance when we looked together, even more so when Tansy looked with us. At first I was hungry for her gaze, but soon I began to resent it. The tapestry was give-and-take, raucous and comforting. I was learning to work with it, and then Tansy would look over and bump it to mere grid. When she looked away, I would give suggestions to the scenery, and Evelyn was doing the same thing, painting her side with great willows and rank lagoons, while I dreamed up constructions. I dotted the hills with the platforms of ancient powerlines. I managed a fallen-in aircraft hangar, and I was working on a tall stone chapel when Tansy looked and turned it into a pillar of basalt.

The sun was over the westward bluffs when we rounded a bend and the sage prairie bloomed to a scrubby wood. I thought Evelyn had done it, but we had reached the ruins of far Richland, where basements and ditches held water farther into the summer. Here and there a stubborn piece of infrastructure still stuck up. In another mile we began to see standing buildings made of earth, and Tansy steered us toward shore. Ahead was a nest of piers bristling with rafts and dingies, and she brought us in with a bump. "Here Trice," she said. "You get off."

"You're not coming with us?"

"First big street, go a mile north. Devlin, Evelyn, say those names. They'll love you. And if Aloysius says he found you, don't argue."

I expected her to unload our boxes and take off in that fine boat. Instead she moored it tightly and went looking for a boat to steal, and damned if she didn't pick the lowliest raft in the entire marina, a lashed-together mat of reeds that would sink under anyone heavier. Shadows were long, and she was off.

18

The Win-All

"Unlike other altered states of consciousness, hypnosis is not associated with any unusual EEG patterns. Physiologically speaking, the mental state hypnosis most closely resembles is our normal waking consciousness. Does this mean that normal waking consciousness is itself a kind of hypnosis?"

-Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe

Don't believe everything that Devlin says. For one thing, they were the ones stretching my eyes. I was just seeing normal stuff, and then when I lined it up with a real live Ancient, the distance rolled out like a carpet. I was barely learning to do it without them, while they were manifesting like champs when they thought it was impossible.

After I dropped them off, I paddled back to the middle, went to sleep, and let the current take me. I was so tired that I slept right through being stuck on a snag all night. So it was the day after the next day when I got to Stonehenge.

Stonehenges were ancient observatories, the first places where humans could agree on where the stars were. The Ancients built them all over, Texas, Angland, somewhere on the High Planes there's one made of cars. As a sky-starer I had to stop there. I beached the raft upriver and walked over land until I saw the stones, wonky with frost heave and yellow with lichens. I was hoping it would just be me there, but I could hear some kind of flute or pipe music. Hippies, there's no getting away from them.

It's a good thing those Scientists taught me far seeing, because that piper would have had me dead to rights if he saw me first, and saw my reaction. Because it wasn't a hippie -- it was a demon. Bony as a corpse and green as mold, skin peeling like bark, jerking like a puppet on half-backwards elbows and knees. I watched from behind a rock as he blew a pan flute, through a freakishly wide gap-toothed mouth, for a human audience who saw nothing wrong.

I know people get weirder toward the coast, and also more tolerant, but this was something different. Children were dancing to this abomination. I snuck away so fast I had to quiet my feet, toe-tipping on the least noisy patches until I got halfway down the hill, and then I broke into a run and didn't stop until I was out on the water.

That's around where the Itchywanna changes its name to the Win-all. I don't know how many buttresses of old dams I passed. The Ancients had the whole river stairstepped, you could ride lock-raises all the way up to Nez. Now the river was free to surge and high on spring. I could see the bulge of the surface, and I rode the middle to keep from being sucked into floodplains.

The river passed through a gorge so windy that I had to lie flat to not be blown back, and sailboarders buzzed me. In late afternoon, I found a decrepit jetty and set camp. I wanted to have my head buried before the stars came out. If three rubes in Trice had tracked me, how many more were watching from Birdland?

Birdland was a whole big city that got sunk in the Apocalypse. It's up the Lammit from the Win-all, an easy row on a slow river, and as I got close I could see the tall buildings sticking up out of the water. Their skeletons were grey with bird poop, every bird from house finch to heron nesting on the girders. All around the shores were the piers of traders: fruit from upriver, arts and crafts from Shasta, Arcatan tonics and Friscan tech.

I slid the boat to the obscurest skeleton and moored to a column. The sun was setting and swallows were skimming the water. Bugs probably taste like candy to them. I sat and reveled in my options, the wide-open world. I could hitch a wagon south and buy Gran enough drugs to open a storefront. I could hop a ship to the High Seas, or climb the leaning tower of Seedle. Then I heard the piper.

I rowed carefully toward the sound, and picked it out on a boat docked at a shop called Dugworth's Doodads. I wished I had a spyglass, and thought that might come under doodads, so I paddled to the next pier over and snuck some looks.

The boat was a standard magjet shuttle bearing Seedle colors. There were two of the creatures, one piping from the boat, the other negotiating with a jovial black-bearded fellow, who didn't look weirded out at all. They made the deal and got out fast, and before the piping faded I was up on the pier. Inside the shop I heard him say, "I just got robbed."

19

Dug

"There were no ordinary human beings. Everybody was born with a surprise inside."

-Jincy Willett, The Writing Class

She burst in like a dust devil, an elf of the hills. Her face was sharp as a nail, her hair long and tangled, and her outfit so rustic that I could sell it as neo-indigenous.

"A spyglass!" she demanded, and I feared what those eyes would do through a lens. "The guys who just robbed you," she pointed. "Go and look!"

"I didn't mean it that way. I just should have looked closer at the merchandise."

"What did he look like?"

"I forget," I told her, "just normal." But she kept pressing me. "How tall was he? What color was his hair?" I ummed and errd and finally she blurted, "He was seven feet tall and green!"

She was pretty convincing. I said, "How do I know you're not crazy?"

"I bet you're pretty good at tuning into the vibe."

"Yes, I am."

"Well you just got vibed by that uncanny fluting."

I heard a chuckle from Bella, back sorting skeins, and I tried to remember if I really had heard fluting.

The girl popped out a coin, an ancient quarter. "This," she said, "for a spyglass."

I examined it. I had a jar of these in back, but none this fine. "May I ask," I said, "where did you get it?"

"I nicked it from a time-traveling Scientist. What's it worth?"

"Five pounds of flour, a kilojolt of juice, or a dull knife. But nowhere near an optic."

She pulled out a pen, an ancient ballpoint in the most mint condition I'd ever seen. Its sides were as smooth as glass, bright tangerine and bearing the ancient runes: BiC

"Try it," she said, and handed me the pen. I took off its rocketship cap and opened the ledger to a clean page.

First stroke, I drew a line smooth as tallow and blue as the sea. I would have swapped it for a monocular right there, but I hesitated, because I wanted to see what else she had. And damned if she didn't pull out a lighter, in equally impossible condition.

"Do you have a joint?" she said, and with one thumbstroke popped a tall flame sparkling with ancient steelflakes.

I said, "Let's go talk about that time traveler."

20

The Changing Lands

"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

Dugworth's Doodads was a junk and stuff store that Threeforks could only dream of. There were bins of ancient thumbdrives, racks of capacitors, cabinets of refurbished magjets, jars of ball bearings down to their last cracking. There were shovels and mattocks, paddleboards and snowshoes, parachutes and flares.

Dug led me past a rack of baubles, ancient chips that once held a thousand books, now encased in candy-colored plastic. We went into a fabric section with thirteen shades of flax, and he introduced me to his wife Bella. She was so rotund and friendly that I wondered if Dug only got that way from being in her orbit. While he closed up, she bustled me up to their house.

It was timber and cob, just like home. Full tree cornerposts, cross-braced and filled in with a mix of coarse sand and clay. The inside was all adorned with the finest junk that had come through. On one wall was an ancient four-color tapestry of deer in a moonlit forest. On the table stood a hand-carved Salish bobblehead icon, and our chairs were high-end beanbags, castoffs from some Shastan queen. The stove's gas came from a tank that could be in a museum, and Bella cooked us a fine meal of sockeye and potatoes.

Later Dug asked me why I trusted him. I said, "You two aren't bad for fate's first try." The truth was they could tie me up and I could still take them. And since they didn't seem wicked, I told them more of my story than I had to, working backward from Stonehenge to Devlin, and how I found him.

"Wait," Dug said. "Was it you who stopped the stars?"

I rolled my eyes and said, "Who else knows?"

He pulled up last week's newsfiche and found it on page seven: Itchywanna Skywatchers Report Anomaly. The article was like, look at these quaint dweebs, and it didn't say anything about it being caused by a person. I decided I was still going.

"Tomorrow," I said, "I'm going to Seedle."

I thought he'd try to talk me out of it. Instead he said, "Well, if you're up there anyway..."

If he had a job for me, I wondered why he hadn't mentioned it. Bella looked askance at his silliness. He said, "I've heard rumors of a book, deep in the Seedle Stacks..."

"It's his holy grail," said Bella. "The Book of Treasure Maps."

"An ancient gamebook!" said Dug. "A set of quests that synchronistically correlate with places in this world where shifting geography conceals wonders out of place and time."

"Oh," I said, "I have that!"

I pulled out the book I'd found in the death pit with Aloysius. Dug was about to have a heart attack until he saw the title: The Changing Lands by Joachim Keen.

"That's not it."

"Well, of course it's not exactly it. How good a manifester do you think you are?"

His fingertips felt the spine, and around the page edges, sticky and brittle. "Bella," he said, "get my kit." I remember the words of Brother Yellowfeather: "Anoint! Disfixate!" I swear Dug said the same stuff, and it made sense, watching him do it. His thick fingers worked goop into page faces, around to the spine and back, creasing the cover to work the goop inward. We went to bed and in the morning it had opened like a flower.

Dug's fingers spread the stickiest pages apart, tissue-thin and glistening. "Fixator!" he said, I thought he meant me, but Bella passed him a can and he sprayed a fragrant mist of ancient VOCs, around and around until those pages were thoroughly shellacked. "Supplicator."

"We're out of supplicator, I told you."

Now I got to watch Dug himself disfixate. "That you did! Well, I wasn't waiting anyway. Just be careful, a strong breath will crack it."

We leaned in as close as we dared and read what pages were showing. I don't know what I expected, a catalog of latitudes and longitudes, a running narrative of roadside wonders and horrors. It was just this goofball adventurer, slumming from the Upscroll, who went right up to the edge of all the cool places and then chickened out or got distracted. It was fun to read and completely useless.

Dug said, "If you let me borrow this, I will give you my best optic."

21

The Roads Round Seedle

"Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road."

-Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

In the morning Dug brought out all his lenses: binoculars, monoculars, inverted and non-inverted scopes, one so far-eyed that I couldn't even hold it still enough to see upside down. There was a spectrum bender that could see in the dark but all blurry. I've never had any trouble with lenses. Most people do. Since the Apocalypse, looking through an optic is more mind than matter, and you have to get a lens that fits your mind, or you can't make sense of it. Ancient optics will still work for everyone, and Dug probably thought he wouldn't have to give it up his oldest binoculars, since I could see through all of them, but they were clean as a whip, I could see the woodgrain on the next pier. The only trouble was that the sights were crooked. Dug said he'd have to break it to fix it, so I had to cross my eyes to make them line up.

"Careful," Dug said as I cast off, "you don't want them to get stuck that way."

Pretty soon I learned to just look through one eye. The current pulled me super-slow toward the bird towers, and I traded left and right eyes and figured out what they were good for, the right for reconnoitering and the left for closeup, it had to be all in my head since the zoom was the same. I looked at those birds until I could catch them chirping and compare their accents to the birds back home.

Past the towers the current picked up and pulled me to the Win-all. Fully rested, I paddled hard over the midstream flow and into the slow waters on the other side, just drifting a few stones throws from the north shore, looking for a place to land. Around a bend came a marina with piers and a ramp. I went to paddle and then saw a lick of green on the hillside behind it. There, swaying like a tree as she piped, stood another one of those creatures.

I pulled the raft to the skeleton of a steamboat and kept low. Poking over the wreckage, my right eye found her. Could she see me looking? I rolled over and switched to my left, caught her green on the periphery, and edged in. I defocused, went wide, and swept clean across the middle. No reaction. Then I looked right at her, her hideous skinflakes green in the sun, and she had no idea.

I had to try it. I imagine that's what humanity will say, when brought before the God of the Ancients, to justify all our mistakes. I had to see what would happen. I opened up my other eye, saw two pipers, and crossed them into one. That girl was looking right at me. Then she looked all around, and up at the hills behind her, but I knew she was faking, pretending she hadn't marked me.

The spell must have had some staying power, because nobody noticed she didn't belong. Then she started playing again, this time not a lilting melody but a simple riff, repeating. I untied fast and pushed off.

I've been told, don't worry about what other people think, because they're thinking about their own stuff and not about you. I wish. I'm always hearing about people who were thinking about something I did that I forgot about. But this time I hadn't been paranoid enough, because how could the greenies possibly know about me? At the next boat ramp there was another one, playing the same notes, which in his harsh instrument sounded like what it was, a bird-call warning.

I considered rowing hard upstream and crossing the mountains behind them while they waited for me at the ports. And I could have done it, but I was lazy. I just floated downstream until dark, and looked for the nastiest place on the north shore to land. Dug had convinced me to trade all my gear for his, even my clothing. It looks like it was made by elves, he kept saying, it was just my mom's friend Nona, and it was inferior in every practical way to his workshop premium, from extrusion toeboots up long-stem linen dungarees to a set of moisture-wicking mycelia t-shirts and a seven pocket hemp vest.

The shoes gripped true as I waded through cattails to shore, and the pants didn't rip as I scampered up a brambly cliff and under trees that barely passed enough starlight to find a place to camp. I rolled out Dug's premium puffpad and hung up a condenser so new it still smelled of beeswax.

In the morning I found the road that went along the river, and it was much better than the roads around Threeforks. All the ancient pavement was heaped to the sides and covered with ivy, and the surface had been graded and graveled so recently that bits of granite gleamed in the sun. Right there on the side of the road, I sharpened my knife and cut off my hair. The greenies might not even know I was a girl, but I couldn't take any chances. It must have looked magnificent, billowing out around me when I went over the falls. I left it in a ditch.

Why didn't I just go back? Leave the greenies alone and do a run for Dug into Shasta? Because I was obsessed. That's a bad thing about me that I like. I gave up my hair to spy on some skittish pan-flutists, who maybe hadn't done anything wrong.

Then I walked up the center of the road with a heavy boy stride, like I was walking through water. In ancient times you could stick out your thumb and get a ride, a mile a minute on the double-highs, you just had to watch out for serial killers. I walked an hour and waved down a cart, and the driver wasn't even creepy, just a guileless farmer named Stu, who wanted me to work the dzos while he took a nap.

My dad was a Morphicist so I knew all about mules and dzos. The ancients could only go fifty fifty. We could hit the whole spectrum from ass to horse, from yak to cow. Dad would bless breedings in the fall to get creds for Solstice. I went with him once and saw him strike unhearable tuning forks and tell people exactly what traits to pray for. It didn't always work, but it tilted the odds enough that he was in demand. I said Dad, you're a sorcerer. It was the best compliment I could give him and he got offended.

I'd never seen dzos, and they were even bigger and hairier than I expected. Stu said they could gallop if they had to, but they tromped steadily, and Stu had plenty of time to nod off before we hit the double-high. It's hard to imagine that the Ancients needed two whole highways. Like how many of them were there? One time I was at a festival where 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 we passed among columns of the ancient cloverleaf, through a gap in a highway gone to seed, up a rubbly ramp to pavement of slabs and patching, just wide enough for two wagons to pass. To the south I could see a four-dzo wagon, and to the north, a fast horse going out of sight, otherwise we were the only vehicle.

Those animals must have used their eastern breeding to skip the miles. Every time Stu woke up, he was surprised how far we'd gone. Finally he chugged a bottle of cider and got chatty. This load of alfalfa was his cousin's payoff to the feedlots, and Stu was driving it so he could go to Seedle and see the Pan-Tabernacle.

"The Pan-Tabernacle," I said. "What's that?"

"At the north edge of the city," he said, "there's a canyon that the Ancients missed. All the old gods slept there at one time or another, and now it's a place of loose manifestation, where you can do stuff that would be wrong if it didn't probably not happen. You and I could meet and make each other's avatars be anything we want, as long as it fits both our stories."

That's kind of how it already is, I thought, but Stu was all excited about how different it might be, and still seem to be the same. "This wagon could be a sailing ship to one of us, and the other wouldn't know it. Sailing ship, you would say, and I would hear wagon. Is God not big enough that I can be a cowboy and you can be a pirate?"

In late afternoon we passed by a wide shallow lake. I could see the shapes of the ancient malls where Dug told me about treasures just waiting for divers. At dusk we hit the east-west double-high and Stu dropped me off. He was bound east for the feedlots, and I thought I'd hitch the rest of the way into the city, but instead I walked through a suburb where the streets were all twisty and got lost.

It was so cool. This whole neighborhood must have been redone, postapocalypse, by eco-architects who thought the city should be a tribute to the forest, and went too far. The street pattern was modeled on leaf veins, which was cool, but the houses were all made to look like actual trees, and they had leaked so hard that they had all been abandoned and I couldn't find a non-mildewed one to sleep in.

In the end I shimmied up a mushroom-shaped shed, and it was perfect. The roof was single panel and the windows were downward facing. I slept hard and the next day I found an old orchard of wingnuts and shriveled modquats, and decided to stay an extra night, and then an extra two. There was nowhere I had to be except closer to the mystery, and it will always keep waiting.

In two days and three nights, I heard strange birds, I heard howls of cats in heat, I heard the squeak of carriage suspensions on the highway. And not once did I hear any fluting. That made me think they weren't all over the city, but probably in one neighborhood.

22

The Pan-Tabernacle

"Indeed, there is no other way to form an illusion except by using what is real, there is no other material around."

-Thaddeus Golas, The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment

I came into the city on the public bus. It was pay a dinari or pedal, and I sat in the pedal section and gave the driver a ride.

Over the hills of Seedle, the first thing you see are the tops of the ancient towers, all turned into flowers by local artists. They're so real that you can squint your eyes and everything looks like it's actually tiny, which it is.

I hit the last hill so hard the other pedalers were coasting, and at the top I hopped off and saw it: the Needle. It was the first thing we drew in art class, a three line icon, blue water along the bottom, black staff leaning, and white cross of the deck.

"Now," said the teacher, "make it your own." I made the lean just now happening from a giant wave crashing into it, tiny stickfigures being thrown into the sky. I had so much fun drawing their splayed limbs, they sent me to the therapist who diagnosed me with empathic lethargy.

When I got over the hill, it turned out the tallest buildings had the boringest flowers. The best ones were on decrepit skeletons out past the waterline. It reminded me of something Father Ripple said: "Heaven on Earth is like a handful of wildflower seeds. Throw them not on the broad lawn, where they will be mowed by senseless blades, nor in the tended garden, where sharp eyes will pluck them, but cast them in the waste places, to grow unheeded."

The Needle is in forty feet of water, a half mile out. I could swim it, and then it would just be me out there. Instead they had to build a footbridge for tourists, propped on ancient rooftops and lined with gift shops. I listened to some chatter and found out that it cost five dinari to climb, a padded ladder packed so tight that you're breathing the farts of the person above you.

I went the way the crowd wasn't going. I admired the view and had shit to do.

The Pan-Tabernacle, Stu told me, lies north over the Uni-arch, a great bridge extruded in one piece in the Bubble Age, some uncanny polymer that we can only patch. Seeing it, I felt like I was in somebody's sandbox, which I am. My dad once said that life is like walking over an arched bridge. You see yourself striving for the top, then all at once you see your whole life stretched out to its end. Maybe that's because he was an academic.

Me, at the top of the arch I heard the pipers. I couldn't hesitate, or they would sound the alarm. This was what I cut my hair for. I held my head up and walked like a boy, straight into trash fairyland.

It was just a regular boring urban neighborhood. There was a zap cart, its capacitor crackling as a it bore a load of soggy modquats going to fatten cattle for the feast of Saint Bonaventure. There was an oxcart of puffcrete powder going to get slurried and poured into fir-plank wallframes. There was a swerving cyclist with a satchel of fiches, and a foodcart of rotisserie pigeons, and a whole band of pipes and drums playing a drone I could barely see through.

More than half the people were greenies. I saw shrubs and saplings, ivy piles and coppice heads. The ones I'd seen out on the road must have been ideal human types. Here they shambled and limped, or scurried like tumbleweeds about their business.

The pigeon vendor looked like four mossy sticks with a goblin mouth. But what I had to consider, was that I might be crazy. The only way to be sure was to test my vision against a second observer. I waited for a kid to buy a pigeon and caught up with him. He was around nine, pug-nosed and brash, and not happy to be turned around.

"What color is that guy? His skin."

He looked at me queerly. "He's not a yap if that's what you mean. Nor a skizzy."

"Is he green? Wait!"

I caught up and pulled out the binoculars. He looked greedily at the sleek casing and barely scratched lenses, and when I handed them to him, he looked everywhere before finally turning to the vendor. "Nope, normal guy."

I said, "Cross your eyes."

The kid gasped. The vendor might have jerked, I couldn't tell.

"Chill," I said. "They don't know who you are."

"They??"

"They might not even be bad. Just walk away. Stay out of trouble."

I walked the other way, and saw him turn a corner and break into a run. That little shit stole my binoculars.

After that I kept my head low and went the way the crowd was going, and no surprise, it got trashier. Pipes played crazily, and a footpath curved under buttresses of an ancient bridge and down to a greasy brook. Eventually there have to be consequences for seeing reality wrong, but these people were still getting away with it. They threw litter like they were scattering flower petals, and must have thought they pissed rainbows, from the smell. Uglies groped in the bushes and naked men with open sores strutted in hallucinatory tuxedos.

It was just like I imagined the Quatheads, and it was nice to know that the Greenies also had a derelict class. Here the least useful body types could take root and live on scraps, tourists throwing coins that were actually potato chips to false gurus who gobbled them up.

This had to be it. The Pan-Tabernacle.

In a place this degraded, no one would notice me, and I started looking for a spot to camp. Tonight under darkness I would climb the prettiest tower and look at the stars. With this many eyes they'd never find me. Tomorrow I would change my look, and track down their headquarters...

I felt a sting on my shoulder, and another sting on my thigh. The last thing I remember thinking is, I must have stepped on a hornets nest.

23

The Minister of Defense

"If you are a woman and you want to avoid causing offense there needs to be a legibility to your actions. You cannot be an unquantifiable presence on the periphery."

-Claire-Louise Bennett, afterword to The Wall

I woke up strapped to a chair, in the office of some guy who had nothing better to do than wait for me to wake up. He said he was the minister of defense of the Leaflings, that's what they call themselves, so I'll call them that even though they were the baddies. I could have broken loose but I didn't know how many of them I'd have to fight. The best thing you can do with baddies is get them to explain themselves.

I said, "What did I do?"

"You stopped the stars over Hanford, for God's sake. Every skygazer in Cascadia has been waiting for the other shoe to drop."

"It could have been a cloud inversion."

"We're not stupid. Only an aberrant human has that kind of power. I knew any sky-starer would stop at Stonehenge, so I sent an assassin, whom you eluded. Our scout marked you at the Win-all marina, so we knew you were coming north. Then it was just a matter of setting a trap. Like a rat to nutbutter, the Rectifier came straight to the Pan-Tabernacle. Why shouldn't we kill you?"

"Do your people drink the sun?" It was a shot in the dark, and he smiled.

"You've guessed our secret. The photosynthetic human. At the tail end of the Ambiguity, a con man oracle wrangler raised a fortune for his crazy scheme, and lit away with half the creds, but with the other half they actually did it. Us. In summer torpor, with a supplement, we can almost break even. That wasn't good enough for progress, and we're not pretty. They put us on a homestead in Bend and hoped we'd inbreed to extinction. But we grew stronger."

"The flute," I said. "How does it work?"

He wagged his finger. "That's a secret. Even I don't know the oracle codex, only the result, that it allows my people to live without persecution."

"You're a religion? My dad loves trees. He would probably join you."

"What's your dad's name?"

That was the wrong thing to say. I mean, he had to try, but now, first, I wondered if they would kill my dad, and second, I knew they didn't know my name. I had no papers, and I'd left all my stuff with Dug, even clothing, and taken stuff you could get at any shop in Birdland.

I said, "But are you? A religion?"

He didn't want to answer that. He pulled out three daguerrotypes, they could have been any three hobos, and said, "You're not the first. All three of these slickskins tried to thwart us, and they all work for us now. As you will."

"Are you going to torture me?"

"You're going to torture yourself, and it's not even illegal, being that it's nothing."

"Nothing?" I said, hiding my anticipation.

"The Sufis call it Nafssafar. We source it from the neo-Benedictines, who call it Oubliet. None but a master meditator dares to take it: a concoction of head-chems so potent as to block out all senses and leave the client fully conscious, just you alone with your thoughts."

I said, "I like my thoughts."

He grinned obscenely widely. "How long do you think you'll last?"

"Probably a million years."

He bellowed with laughter, and went on a long rant about how fast the other subjects cracked up, and how painfully, accidentally giving me tips on how to beat it. I pretended to be angry when he faked the consent form, and I pretended to be afraid as they wheeled me off to the hospital.

I couldn't believe it was actually happening. It was all I ever wanted: nothing.

24

Oubliet

"The vanishing cream victims
Are drip-fed amnesia neat"

-John Cooper Clarke, Valley of the Lost Women

There I was, there I was, there I was, in the Void. It was emptier than I expected. I thought I'd just take a daydream vacation, but that infernal cocktail had even blanked my mind's eye.

The Minister boasted of how the Furies drove men mad by reflecting their selves back at them. He fancied himself a fury, that dweeb, and all I had to do to prove him wrong was be unreflective.

It turns out that's really hard. Back in school they they let us play with a vacuum tube amplifier, and I could make the screechiest feedback without hardly trying. The mind is a devious amp, because I now was damping and zoning as hard as I could, and my thoughts were screaming. Everything I'd ever done bubbled up, the ghosts of my errors needling my desire for competence. I wanted to get out so bad that I remembered what Brother Yellowfeather said. "Still the chatter and God will forget you're here. Feel your breath, feel the glow of your body, listen to your tinnitus, anything but thinking. Cogito ergo retardo."

Now retardation was all I had, thoughts stumbling over thoughts forever. I had a dream when I was five years old, where I was at the park, and I found a stairway going down into the earth. The peat-cut steps were alluring, and I stepped down a few, but found out that stepping back up was a hundred times harder. I thought, I'll go down one or two more to get leverage, and then I was stuck deeper, slipping down into the dark while Mom and Dad walked away.

My heart must have jumped on the table, and I probably would have cracked, if I didn't have to go through self-pity. Because as soon as I thought, "I can't take another minute of this," I heard a voice: "Not with that attitude." It was my voice. What the fuck? So I thought, what if it's not another minute? What if it's another hundred years?

Pain is a muscle. You build it by feeling pain and saying fuck it. I climbed up one of those steps, and then it wasn't just keep climbing. It was a bouldering problem, where the next step had a whole different thing you had to do. I toyed with pain like a cat until it was almost fun. I built up anxiety and popped it like a capacitor, and my body must have jerked on the table.

I was so obstinate, it took me three or four steps to get it, the cosmic joke. I'm not straining against the furies. I've been a fury the whole time. Destruction of the self: it's not what you think it is, but you'll like it.

Time is an invention, everyone knows that, but now I got it. At first I was thinking in words, and my clock was how long it took to speak them. When I got past words, there were still the habitual timings, five seconds to snuff a fear, ten seconds to pull out of a cringe. When I stopped even doing that, I knew why Buddhists paid big creds to get what I had for the price of a crime: neither heartbeat nor breath to hang time on, and no reason to have time in the first place. A million years, why not?

A flash.

It's the oldest story in religion. God said, "Let there be light." I said to Father Ripple, "Like God can't see in the dark?" But now I got it. Light is not a thing where you had nothing. Nothing was a thing and now you have two things. Light on one side and dark on the other, spin it like a Yin-Yang and whirls in whirls make worlds.

This wasn't regular seeing, or back of the eyelid visuals, or daydream either. The flash had shown me a whole new substrate. I went to work.


Dad loved to show me the stained glass windows in the treetops. He didn't take pictures, you had to be there, down along the Plushy at sunset, after the leaves had fallen from the great willows, and their limbs and twigs etched black on the fruity sky. I got bored of saints in the branches and looked for goblins in the gnarled bark of the trunks, and we came out of the trees to a big field of last year's long brown grass. I said, hey Dad, show me the people in the grass. He looked like he had never thought of that before, to go just one plant over. He pondered it as we walked up the cobbled path, past the plots of the hobby farmers, over the footbridge and across the tracks, and through the little park with its weathered plaque:

There is no world but mental
No be but once was seem
The sun is but a rental
We owe the night a dream

On my arm I felt a wicked sting, and looked down to see a murder hornet the size of my thumb, jabbing the pit of my elbow. I tried to scream and my mouth wouldn't open. My arm was on fire. Dad was walking away. A leering face leaned over me.

Part 4