“Little warrior did not look to be in danger.” Burnfingers, too, was staring into the distance. “He said they were his friends. He was very certain. I think they are, and I think they will take care of him.”
“But he’ll be marooned here if we drive off! He’ll be stuck on this reality line with no way of finding his way home.”
“He seemed sure he would.” Burnfingers looked down at his distraught companion. “Always children have to trust their parents. I think maybe this time you are going to have to trust him.”
“Trust him? Trust him to what? A bunch of refugees from some airborne aquarium?”
“I think they are more than what they seem.”
“What,” asked Alicia numbly, “is ‘obulating’?”
No one knew. No one even had an idea. Not Burnfingers Begay, not even Mouse.
“It must be something really unique or special for him to leave his parents over it,” Flucca observed.
“He’s just a kid,” Frank snapped. “He doesn’t know what’s going on here. He doesn’t know what anything’s about. To him it’s all a big game.”
“No, Dad.” Wendy put an arm around her father’s shoulders. She was looking out past him, in the direction her brother and his friends had gone. “He knows it’s not a game. Steven’s, like, a pain sometimes. I guess all little brothers are. But he’s pretty smart. He didn’t think Hell was a game, and I know he didn’t think that place we just left was a game, when we were in that cage, and I don’t think he thinks it’s a game now.”
She was interrupted by a distant rumbling, the throaty purr of something darker than hunger on the prowl. Flucca scurried to the rear of the motor home to peer out the back window.
“It’s getting dark in back of us, folks, and it doesn’t look like nighttime that’s coming up on us.”
Mouse looked. “The Anarchis. It’s too close, much too close.” She turned bottomless eyes to Frank. “We must go now. If we’re trapped here it will be the end of everything, including hope. The end of my mission to help the Spinner, of your chance to see your son again, of all of us. Do you know anything about the Unified Field Theory?”
“Huh, what?” Frank shook himself, blinked, turned away from the far horizon that had swallowed his boy.
“The Anarchis is kind of a unified field. It’s Chaos and Evil personified. If we don’t get away from here fast we won’t do your son any good at all.”
“But if it’s coming this way,” Alicia said, “and Steven’s still here…”
“I think he’s gone.” Mouse nodded toward the horizon. “With his friends. And I don’t think he’s coming back to this spot whether you’re here or not.” It was a cold thing to say, but with the entire sky behind them blackening rapidly Mouse had no time to lavish on tact. “He’s gone away with his friends, obulated or whatever it is they do. The only way you can help him now is by helping yourselves. We must go on.”
“All right.” An uncaring numbness had taken hold of Frank. His son was gone. Having accepted that, he found he didn’t much care what happened anymore. Not on this reality line or anyone else’s. All he wanted was his boy back.
But he was intelligent enough to realize he was out of his depth, caught up in a maelstrom of implausibilities beyond his or anyone else’s experience. Without any knowledge or ideas of his own he had to rely on people like Mouse and Burnfingers Begay to tell him what to do. Mouse said they had to go on. So he would go on. He climbed inside and moved purposefully toward the driver’s seat.
Alicia followed closely. “Frank …?”
He shook off her hand, grimly inspecting the instruments. “Mouse says we can’t stay here. So we’ve got to go.”
“If we leave this reality he’ll never find us. We’ll never see him again, Frank.”
He looked up at his wife. He couldn’t smile. His mouth wasn’t working properly. But he tried to sound reassuring anyway. “We don’t know that. Just like we don’t know anything else here.” He started the engine. At least something responded to his wishes, he told himself.
“Frank, he’s only a ten-year-old boy. If he doesn’t know where he is now, how will he ever know where to find us?”
“Maybe the damn fish will show him. How the hell do I know?” Seeing the hurt on her face, he softened his tone. “Look, sweetheart. We don’t have any choice. We can’t stay here. Even if we could, I don’t think the kid’s coming back right away anyhow.”
“Dad’s right, Mom.” Wendy tried to comfort her mother, who was on the verge of tears. “I don’t like leaving the little brat here, either, but like Mouse says, we don’t even know if he’s here anymore. This is the craziest place we’ve been yet. Maybe—maybe he’s on his way home already. Maybe that’s where the fish took him. He might even be waiting for us.” She made herself sound cheerful. “What if that’s what obulating is? Finding the way home?”
Alicia tried to reply but choked and could only nod.
Frank put the motor home in gear, spoke without looking back over his shoulder. “Which way, chief?”
“Straight ahead. First turn to the right,” Burnfingers told him calmly.
Hoping Alicia wasn’t watching, Frank leaned slightly forward and looked to his right as he pulled out onto the road. There was no sign of Steven or his patrimonial pisceans. Tricky little bastards, he thought furiously. They swim aboard, act curious and friendly, then make off with his kid.
No, that wasn’t right, he told himself forcefully. Steven had left with them voluntarily. His friends, he’d called them, and seemed to mean it. He’d always enjoyed flying. Frank prayed fervently that wherever his son was and whatever he was doing at that moment, he was enjoying himself.
It was very quiet inside the motor home. As they accelerated, the ominous thunderheads and querulous lightning shrank behind them. Mouse stood in back watching the clumsy, deadly Anarchis recede. It was tenacious but undisciplined. They could not go around it, but as long as the motor home functioned, they could outrun it. It only suspected their presence here, smelled their intentions. Like a blind killer, it would follow remorselessly, intent on stamping out the hope they represented. They had to continue to stay two steps ahead of it. One wrong step and they would all perish.
Along with everything else, she knew.
The Sonderbergs sat side by side, speaking little. They kept their attention on the road ahead, no longer interested in their constantly changing, surreal surroundings. They thought solely of their vanished son.
He’d sounded so relaxed, so confident, Frank mused. Much more sure of himself than any ten-year-old had a right to be. In spite of Mouse’s and Burnfingers’s reassurances he still had to wonder if he’d ever see his boy again. He found himself regretting all the times he’d yelled at him, usually over little things, inconsequentialities. Now he’d lost him to a world of permanent inconsequentiality.
The highway climbed a grassy knoll before splitting on the other side into a second tangle of curls and twists. Burnfingers Begay confidently pointed the way, remembering the view from his earlier near-cosmic vantage point. Frank drove on, through holes in mountains that weren’t solid, avoiding solid holes that drifted in the midst of insubstantial mountains. Climbing vertical lanes that passed between clouds and dived down into dark earth.
They drove a corkscrew of a road, around and around, making half a dozen loops without falling from the summit of each before the highway straightened out. Mist began to close in around them. Frank switched on the motor home’s fog lights. They helped some, but the poor visibility forced him to slow. There’d been no sign of the Anarchis for several hours, but he had no intention of stopping and waiting for the soup to lift. Besides, there was no place to pull over. There was only the road and the fog.
Long, thin shapes with multiple wings were dimly glimpsed rafting through the grayness. They had bright yellow bodies stiff as rulers and tiny, unmoving black eyes. They didn’t so much fly as paddle through the sky. Later they passed a pair of cow-sized creatures that resembled the deep-sea nightmares Frank had once seen in a National Geographic documentary: all mouths and guts. But they had no teeth. They were consuming the fog, taking huge gulps of the stuff. Wherever they bit, a perfect sphere of clarity appeared. They paralleled the motor home for ten minutes, eating lazily, before falling behind.
The road commenced a gradual descent. It also narrowed, which forced Frank to shift into low and kiss the brakes repeatedly as they negotiated one tight turn after another. After a while he could smell the burning brake shoes, a sharp acrid odor which drifted up through the center console.
“Better get to the bottom of this soon, or find a place to pull off,” he grumbled. “We have to let the brakes cool down.”
“Maybe there?”
Alicia pointed. The fog was rising. Trees materialized out of the mist surrounding them. They looked like normal evergreens. Their roots were planted firmly in the ground, not an inch or so above it. As the mist thinned further they could make out a sweeping panorama of high snow-covered peaks and deep tree-lined canyons. A noisy river rushed down the gorge that paralleled the road. The pavement beneath the motor home’s wheels had given way to dirt somewhere back in the fog, Frank didn’t recall when or where. Now it straightened and turned to two-lane blacktop.
As he accelerated tentatively, another car whizzed past in the opposite lane. It held another family. Buick, Chevy, he couldn’t tell. They were all so interchangeable these days, and it went by fast. Not too fast for him to make out a mother, father, and a couple of kids in the back seat. It might have been the Sonderbergs, except all four were five years younger.
It was followed in a couple of minutes by a battered pickup. Each bruise and paint scrape was a wound of reality. The fog had almost dissipated completely.
“Which way?”
Burnfingers’s eyes narrowed as he surveyed the intersection ahead. “I don’t know. I did not see this place. My concern was to find the right road, but I did not have time or vision to follow it to its end.”
“Turn right,” Alicia said suddenly.
Frank eyed her in surprise. “Don’t tell me you’ve developed some kind of special sensing ability.”
“N-no.” She hesitated. “It’s just that right feels, well—right.”
When Burnfingers said nothing, Frank shrugged. “What the hell. I’ve taken everybody else’s advice.”
