The Days of Tansy Capstone

Part 3: Seedle

DEVLIN

"...all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next."

-J.D. Salinger, Seymour, an Introduction

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've 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 we were not crazy. As this was certainly more interesting than my own experiment, we followed the girl out into the hallway.

With every turn, the halls grew rattier. What part of the building was she leading us into? Past peeling drywall, under sagging ceilings, we turned up a stairwell, and I saw a beam of sunlight. Then I saw a beam of the building, exposed and askew. I stood there stunned while Evelyn ran ahead.

The roof was open and before us girders lay moss-encrusted. The air was so redolent that I wondered at its oxygen content. What is your name, I said, and how has this happened?

Me Tansy, she said. Tame belazy.

Where the parking lot had been, there was a patchy glade, and I walked out expecting to find cars, half-rusted and crushed by centuries of snowfall, the ground still sparkly with window bits. That was exactly what I found. The old asphalt was lumped up and mossy. A lightpole leaned under ivy.

Evelyn screamed, A meganeura! I dashed over, and there was an impossible dragonfly, just sunning on a log like it was nothing. She shrieked with joy as it took flight. They've been extinct, she said, for 300 million years.

Shhh, said the girl. 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 in 1981? Did they say, one of our scientists vanished into thin air? Fell with his lab assistant into an anomalous sinkhole? Is another of me still back there?

Not that, 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 one to two 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.

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. 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. Maybe your scopes got too pokey. I joke. Stars got stretched over too many eyes.

I still don't know which explanation 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 grew crystalline.

The moon, she said. Have you seen it?

Seen it? I 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 rump down a muddy run, and there it was, all rushing and doubling the stars. I said to the river, nice move.

I scouted for a while longer, and in the morning I showed Tansy the prize I'd found upstream. Fortuitously, a spring flood had thrown a pond up a box canyon, and on it floated a wooden boat, tall at both ends like a Viking ship, and tight in joinery. She glared at it.

There was room in the boat for more than the three of us, so we went back down into the building to save what we could of antiquity. The deeper we went, the cleaner it got, and for a minute I thought we were really going back in time, and if I took a left at the drinking fountain I could still make Friday night poker.

I suppose the here-and-now had pulled up the past on a curve, reaching farther back as we went deeper. The epicenter seemed to be the hall outside my lab, and from the ceiling in one spot, I thought 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 that much, and those newspapers fetched a hefty sum from a museum.

While we were still packing, Tansy ran up to move the boat. When we got there, she claimed to have paddled it to the canyon mouth, rammed the muck that was damming it, and surfed it down to the river. But I saw deep footprints and no hull marks at all.

It was a fine day for boating, overcast and dry. I sat on the left of the two-seat midship, Evelyn on the right, and Tansy up front. Two strokes and we were in the flow.

When I say we experimented on the girl, she could make the same claim about us. She would look one way for a bit, then the other, and whoever's side she wasn't watching would try to paint the world.

I stole a glance and caught Evelyn greening the shore, great willows and rank lagoons. If Tansy looked too far upstream, it was yellow pine and scruff.

I dreamed up constructions. First I dotted the hills with the platforms of ancient powerlines, then I managed a fallen-in aircraft hangar, and I was working on a tall stone chapel, when Tansy looked over and turned it into a pillar of basalt.

Around the next bend came a nest of piers bristling with rafts and dingies. Here Trice, she said. You get off.

You're not coming with us?

First big street, go a mile north. Devlin, don't say your first name. You're Devlin and you're Evelyn. 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.

THE WIN-ALL

That's not quite how I remember it, but Devlin wanted to write a chapter and there it is. I would have just said, these two dweebs didn't even think it was possible and they were still manifesting like champs. I wasn't even trying to zonk them, I just wanted to see it.

The rest of my trip down the Itchywanna was pretty boring. The only strange thing was when I stopped at Stonehenge. I guess there was an older Stonehenge somewhere in ancient Texas. This one was wonky from frost heave and yellow with lichens, but still had square corners and clean lines. I beached the raft upriver and walked over land, and when I got close, I could hear some kind of flute or pipe music. Hippies, there's no getting away from them.

I circled to the uphill side and came down under tree cover, and it's a good thing. That piper would have had me dead to rights, or me him, if he'd seen 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. His mouth was double-wide and gap-toothed, and through the middle gap he was blowing a pan flute for a human audience who saw nothing wrong.

I know people get freakier and more tolerant toward the coast, but this was something different. Children were dancing to this abomination. I got out of there 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 saw. The ancients had the whole river stairstepped, so 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?

Where the Win-all turns north toward the ocean, Birdland is off to the south up a slow river. It's a whole big city that got sunk, so only the tall buildings are out of the water, old skeletons grey with bird poop and nests on every girder, everything from house finch to heron. All around the shores are the piers of traders: fruit from the Lammit, arts and crafts from Shasta, Arcatan tonics and Friscan tech.

I slid the boat to the obscurest skeleton and moored to a piling. 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 sim-psilocin 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 and snuck some looks.

The boat was a standard magjet shuttle bearing Seedle colors. There were two of them, 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.

DUG

She burst in like a dust devil, an elf of the hills. Her face was sharp as tacks, her hair long and tangled, and her outfit so rustic that I could sell it as 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 said. 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 so convincing, I didn't assume she was crazy, but asked her, How do I know you're not crazy?

She said, I bet you're pretty good at tuning into the vibe.

Yes, I said, 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.

THE CHANGING LANDS

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 seven 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 Fixity. 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.

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 to the pageface, sticky and brittle. Bella, he said, get the defixer. She found a canister, and he puffed vapor around and around the page edges until the can was empty and the book opened like a flower. Now, he said, the fixer. Bella was ready and passed him another can that he sprayed until the spread pages sparkled like diamonds. Touch them now and they would shatter. A third can would make them supple, the emulsifier, and Dug was fresh out.

We leaned in as close as we dared and peeked at the pages. 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, 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 binoculars.

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 end we could only find one pair of binoculars that went as wide as my eyes. The next day, after I cast off, I got them out and watched the birds on the towers. The lenses were clean but misaligned, so I had to cross my eyes, and then uncross them to see where I was going.

I practiced that system all the way to the Win-all, and then I caught the current and watched the north shore. There was a marina with piers and a ramp, and up behind it, I saw another greenie, swaying like a tree as she fluted.

I pulled the raft to a half-collapsed scaffolding and kept low. Only my right lens poked over a girder. Could she see me looking? I kept the center of my eye in the black of the scope, and worked in until I was tickling my periphery with her hideous skinflakes, green in the sun.

I fine-tuned my eyes and made a fleeting sweep, a zoned-out centering, and then I looked right at her. She didn't seem to notice. I looked her up and down and wondered, can she read my mind? I toyed with hostile intentions, but it felt creepy.

Just then I remembered the other eye. I brought it up, crossed them together, and 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 some staying power, because nobody noticed her. 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 thinking about me when I wasn't even thinking about myself. I hadn't been paranoid enough, because how could they know about me? But at the next boat ramp there was another one, playing the same riff.

I thought about 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.

It wasn't even that bad. An old wreck, some cattails, and a low cliff that I easily scrambled up. The trees let enough starlight through that I could see my way up another slope to the road along the river.

It was much better than the roads around Threeforks. All the old pavement was heaped to the sides, and since winter it had been graded and graveled. Bits of granite gleamed in the starlight, and it was all I could do to not look up. I hurried back under the trees and camped.

In the morning, I sharpened my knife in the sun, and cut off my hair. They might not even know I was a girl, but I couldn't take any chances. It must have looked magnificent, billowing out 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 flutists, who maybe had done nothing 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 your thumb out and get a ride, a mile a minute on the double highs, you just had to watch for serial killers. I walked an hour and waved down a cart, and the driver wasn't even creepy, just a guileless farmer who wanted me to work the mules while he took a nap.

Those mules were so afraid of me, Stu barely had time to nod off before we got to the junction. Where the river road hits the double highs, the Ancients had a cloverleaf, and we just had to wait for a southbound wagon to pass, before we turned north.

I heard fluting, and tried as hard as I could to ignore it. Up ahead, a spelt cart had spilled and all the beasts were feeding. The piper was off to the side somewhere, I could never look. The mules took their time and I sweated. If they could see me looking, could they hear me listening?

Then I thought, wait, they're afraid of me. I'm not the hunted I'm the hunter. Then I knew just how to play it. I blended in with my camouflage, ordinary humans, and swayed lightly to the music. The fluting never quavered.

Every time Stu dozed off, he was surprised how far we'd gone. Maybe the mules were skipping miles when I wasn't looking. 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 panTabernacle.

The panTabernacle, I said. What's that?

At the north edge of the city, he said, there's a canyon that the Ancients overlooked. All the elder gods slept there at one time or another, and now it's a place of loose manifestation. You and I could meet and make each other's avatars be anything we want, as long as it fits both our stories.

I saw where this was going: the fringe of Pansolipsism, that each of us lives in a world incomprehensible to everyone else, and our points of apparent agreement are clever misunderstandings. I called it the you see red, I see Faltramador fallacy. But the way Stu explained it, it was like, how could it be anything else? Is God not big enough that you can be a cowboy and I can be a pirate?

In late afternoon we passed by a wide and shallow lake. You could see the shapes of the ancient malls where Dug had sent divers for treasure. We hit an 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 I cut through a suburb whose streets were all twisty and got lost.

It was so cool. This whole neighborhood must have been redone, postapopalypse, by the Anarchitects, who believed the city is a tribute to the forest, and took it too far. The street pattern was modeled on leaf veins, and the houses were all made to look like actual trees. 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 tight and the windows were downward facing. I slept hard and the next day I found a vacant lot full of wingnuts and shriveled modquats, and decided to stay an extra night. It was hard to remember I wasn't in a hurry.

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

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 cred or pedal, and I sat in the pedal section and gave the driver a ride.

Seeing Seedle over the hills, the first thing you see are the tops of 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 leaning half a fingerspread, and the 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 palsy.

When I got over the hill, I found 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 costs a cred 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 panTabernacle, said Stu, lies north over the Uni-arch, a great bridge extruded in one piece in the last age, some uncanny polymer that we can only patch. Seeing it, I felt tiny again, 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 a feast. There was an oxcart of puffcrete powder going to get slurried and poured into 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 insane. 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. No, he said, 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 wandered randomly, just keeping my head low and following the crowd. I went the way everyone else was going, and no surprise, it got trashier. The footpath curved under buttresses of an ancient bridge, now crossed by ropes and planks. Pipes played crazily, and the path dodged a great chunk of rubble and followed a mossy stream that got more and more filthy.

There have to be consequences for seeing reality wrong, but these people were still getting away with it. Romantics shuffled their feet through litter like it was autumn leaves, and breathed the piss-laden air like a sea breeze. 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 panTabernacle.

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.

THE MINISTER

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 defense minister 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 a human or a demigod 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 panTabernacle. Why shouldn't we kill you?

Do your people drink the sun? I said. It was a shot in the dark, and he beamed.

You've guessed our secret. The photosynthetic human. At the end of the last age, a con man Oracle wrangler raised a fortune for his crazy scheme, and stole half of it, but with the other half they actually did it. 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 national 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.

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 was damping and zoning as hard as I could, and my thoughts were screaming. My need for competence jostled with ghosts of my errors in a dreadful cacophony, and I wanted to get out so bad that I remembered what my meditation teacher said.

Be the Kandinsky of yourself. The brushstroke of your breath, the triangle of your hips, the fuzzy bubble of your tinnitus. From the tickle of your toes to the whiff of your nose, ride the self like a surfer and don't fall into the stultifying checkerboard of cognition. 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 a construct, 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 invent 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 closed eye visuals, or daydream either. The flash had shown me a whole new substrate. I went to work.


I thank the panImaginer for this feast, said my dad. It wasn't even food. He was looking at the sunset through the trees, all bony with winter. Look, he said, that one's waving its arms. As we walked, he showed me stained glass windows in branches and faces in trunks.

We walked the cobbled path up the Plush past the plots of the hobby farmers, over the footbridge 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. Mom and Dad were walking away. A leering face leaned over me.


[*This line is from "A Watery Down II" by Big Blood]

Part 4

coming in 2025