“Four thousand two hundred and twelve.”
Alicia laughed: a short, sharp giggle that brought her hand quickly to her lips. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
“Laughing is good for you. Now especially.”
Alicia didn’t dispute that. It had been awhile since she’d laughed aloud. You had to appreciate the joke. Given the talents Mouse had already demonstrated, a figure of fifty or sixty might have been acceptable. After all, Lena Horne was in her sixties and didn’t she look wonderful? Four thousand, though, made the gag work.
“You don’t look a day over three thousand. What’s your secret? I’m having cellulite trouble already.”
“The secret,” Mouse told her somberly, “is to see time coming and to step around it. Laughing at it helps a great deal. Time is very sensitive, you know. It can cope with almost anything except laughter.” Vast violet eyes turned back to Wendy. “Remember that always, girl. When you see time coming at you, laugh at it and it will retreat. You see, it knows how absurd it really is.”
Wendy considered this, though it was impossible to tell if any of it stayed with her. “What happens if you don’t make it to this Spinner? Will the fabric of existence keep unraveling?”
Mouse nodded. “Completely. As you have seen, it has already begun, like a rope fraying at the edges. Right now we are on an intact thread, though it’s impossible to tell whether it is running true or twisting about another line entirely.”
“What happens if it all unravels?” Alicia asked her.
“Then the Anarchis will have final victory and order will dissolve into Chaos. Confusion will reign supreme forever, nothing will be certain or stable, and logic and reason will become naught but memories, themselves unsecured.”
“You mean the world will come to an end,” Wendy said.
“Not to an end: rather to a confusion. All the threads will break and intertwine and twist and contort about themselves.”
“I think I understand. Everything would stay the same only it would be different. You wouldn’t be able to be sure of anything. Like driving to Baker and ending up in Hades Junction instead.”
Mouse nodded. “Only it will be worse than that. Much worse. The little things will be as severely disrupted as the big things.”
Wendy nodded solemnly.
Burnfingers Begay had lumbered forward, ducking to clear the ceiling of the motor home. He gazed at the dash. The instruments were partly obscured by Frank’s body.
“How are we doing on gas, my friend?”
“If the stuff that old guy sold us is burnable at all, we’ll be okay. This dinosaur has double tanks. Should be able to steam right through to Vegas without stopping. The fridge is full. Poke around near the back, you might even find a beer.”
“I would appreciate that,” said Burnfingers gravely.
Alicia was staring past him. Her son sat on the convertible sofa. He was bending forward concentrating on his hands. “What were you telling Steven?”
Burnfingers glanced back at the boy, then forward again. “Nothing, really. Little tricks to keep him amused. Desert survival techniques. One or two amusements I have acquired in my traveling.”
“So you’ve been around?”
“Yes. He is a traveler.” Mouse was eyeing the big man appraisingly. “An experienced traveler.”
“I have spent my life trying not to be bored, Ballad-Eyes.”
“How old are you, Burnfingers?” Alicia asked.
“About forty-five. Why?”
“Nothing.” Alicia sounded disappointed. Perhaps she’d been hoping he would respond with another outrageous claim the way Mouse had. “That’s what I’d guessed.”
“Drat. I was hoping you would think I was thirty-five.” He touched a rough hand to his cheek. “Genetic wrinkles. White people think every Indian they see looks ‘dignified.’ We do not understand that.”
Wendy settled her legs under her. “If you’ve traveled, where have you been?”
“Everyplace, just about. I’ve fought alongside African rebels, worked rice paddies in a Communist commune in China, dived with great white sharks off Dangerous Reef in Australia. I’ve circumnavigated Greenland and found remnants of a civilization the archaeologists don’t know existed, buried deep beneath the ice, where their instruments haven’t reached. One of these days they are going to be surprised, boy. I’ve lived with the Inuit and their Siberian relations, gone swimming off the Ross Ice Shelf, and crossed the Rub’ al Khali in the dead of summer, when the Bedu insisted it couldn’t be done without frying your brains. Of course, being crazy, that did not worry me much.”
Wendy laughed and Alicia, though she disapproved of such facile prevarication, couldn’t keep from grinning herself.
“Your home, now, I have yet to visit,” he concluded, looking down at Mouse.
“If you can get there you will not soon forget it.”
“Bet you’ve met some interesting people,” Wendy said.
“Soon-woman, I have been with sturgeon fishermen in the Black Sea and Lake Superior both. I’ve talked with representatives of every Indian tribe on both the north and south continents, including some the anthropologists don’t know about. In Patagonia a tribe keeps young ground-sloths for pets and hides them from visitors. I’ve gathered giant pearls with divers from a lost linguistic group on an uncharted island in the South Pacific, dug out sapphires the size of hen’s eggs from river gravel in the mountains of Sri Lanka, and spent time with a lama in Bhutan who insisted he could teach me how to levitate.”
Wendy’s eyes widened. “Could he really do that?”
“Oh, that he could, but only upside-down.” Burnfingers shook his head sadly. “It’s not a very useful thing to know. After a while all the blood rushes to your head and all you want to do is throw up.”
Alicia smiled easily this time. Another joke, clearly one of many, cleverly designed to amuse them and relieve the tension in the motor home. Burnfingers knew what he was doing.
“What will you do now? I mean, once we drop you off in Nevada,” she asked him.
“Find another job.”
