The motor home rumbled clear of the cloud, evil trailing behind like a clinging black contrail. Swinging around, Frank saw between coughs that they’d slowed but not stopped its advance. Mouse and the others continued with their song as though oblivious to the danger crawling across the plateau toward them.
“Hang on!” Frank yelled.
For a second time they smashed into the storm front that was the Anarchis. This time it was ready for them. Penetration came faster, the tendrils reached for them without hesitation. Frank thought the smoke laughed, a hideous, unpleasant chuckle. Coils of it encircled his arms, then his wrists. Another that had slipped up through the heating elements contracted around the foot he kept resolutely jammed to the accelerator.
He tried to bring the heavy vehicle around for a third attack, but he could feel himself losing control. Hands were firmly disengaged from the wheel as his foot was lifted from the gas pedal. Flucca made a dive for it, only to run headlong into a wall of dark, pulsing smoke.
A thin tendril wrapped itself round his forehead and dipped down to arc up his left nostril. Frank coughed, tried to choke it out, knew instinctively that if it crept down inside it would fill his lungs and throat with unbreathable horror. He cut through it with the edge of one hand only to see it re-form instantly.
The light inside the motor home was going out, together with the light that was his life. He hoped only that he and Flucca had bought the others enough time to complete the work.
Drifting through the darkness came a dinner plate. It had eyes and stripes, though whether it was black with white stripes or black on white he couldn’t tell. Lack of oxygen was impairing his vision. As it drew near he added fins and tail to his final catalogue of proximate observations.
“Impolite,” it ventured coolly.
“Quite,” said a similar voice.
The three angelfish floated in the center of the motor home. The Anarchis tried to swallow them as it had swallowed the motor home and all its contents. Each time a smoky tendril made contact with shining scales it recoiled as if in pain.
Frank waited for the third fish to speak and complete the tripartite hallucination. It might have done so had it not been superseded by yet a fourth voice.
“Hi, Dad.”
19
AN UNFELT WIND swept the strands of the Anarchis from the motor home’s interior, though blackness still enclosed them on all sides. Frank hastily grabbed the wheel and hit the brake. Not even an impossible rescue could save them if he drove over the edge of the plateau. Claws and rasping tongues scratched at the windshield in frustrated fury. Only a few isolated puffs of darkness remained inside the motor home, and the angelfish were methodically herding them outside. Frank gaped at the tall young man standing behind him.
“Steven?”
The unanticipated visitor smiled. Only then did Frank recognize his son.
“Sorry I took so long to get here, Dad, but it was a long way and I wanted to be sure I could do something when I got back.”
Instead of the overweight, slightly porcine ten-year-old raised on a steady diet of junk food and junk television, the Steven leaning against the back of Flucca’s chair stood six-three and weighed a compact two twenty. He’d aged along with his inexplicable growth. Frank would have guessed him to be twenty-seven or twenty-eight.
He was clad in a sheepskin vest with the fleece facing outward, over a red and blue pearl-buttoned Western shirt. Below were jeans, snakeskin belt, and leather chaps beneath which boots flashed. Boots and shirt tabs were capped with gold. His Western hat was dusty brown encircled by a second reptilian band. Ivory-handled Colts rested in holsters slung from his belt, along with a shining lariat fashioned of something other than hemp. Always the would-be cowboy, Frank mused.
“I’ve heard about kids who grew up too fast,” Flucca commented, “but this is ridiculous.”
Steven smiled at him. Gone along with the fat was any suggestion of hesitation or uncertainty. He’d been transformed emotionally as well as physically.
“Nothing’s ridiculous about obulating.”
“What the hell is that, anyway?” his father demanded to know.
Steven pushed his hat back on his forehead. “It’s kinda hard to describe. You might think of it as experience attained through travel. It’s like reading a book only you’re in it for real. Helps you mature in a hurry.”
“No kiddin’.”
“I’ve been through a lot of realities, Dad. It was a help to have guides.” He indicated the three hovering angelfish. “On the other hand, I’m afraid I’m overqualified for Little League now.” He gazed out the front window. “Looks like the crisis has come. All reality’s at stake. I’ve learned a lot about reality and unreality. I figure I’ve acquired enough experience to be of some help.”
“Someone sings,” said one of the angelfish, “and sings beautifully.”
“It will restore the Spinner’s rhythm,” said one of the orange fish, “but only if she is given time to finish. We must restrain the Anarchis a little longer.”
“That’s what we’ve been trying to do.” Frank kept a wary eye on the angry darkness beyond the glass as he spoke. “It’s like trying to fight smoke.”
“You have done well,” the other orange fish told him. “Steel is good for weakening Chaos. Aluminum is better still. Now we can help, too.” It was drifting less than a foot from Frank’s face now, regarding him from the bottom of flat black eyes. Disconcerted, Frank looked past it toward his son.
“What can I do?”
“Drive on,” said one of the other fish.
Despite his fears Frank was more than happy to follow instructions for a change. For a second time the motor home burst clear of the Anarchis. As soon as they emerged he saw they were more than halfway across the plateau. Dark tendrils the size of trees were reaching for the three musicians performing perilously near the edge. Alicia’s self-confidence might hold it back for a moment or two, but no longer. Then they would find themselves enveloped, together with reality’s last hope.
Frank drove a little nearer oblivion than he would have preferred, but they needed the additional room. Already the Anarchis reached skyward, obscuring the cliffs from view and expanding to cover the entire plateau. As it advanced, the little yellow flowers closed up and grass wilted. The cloud of desperate hummingbirds and riders were forced into a steadily shrinking portion of plateau.
The door slammed. A moment later Steven appeared in front of the motor home. He climbed up on the front bumper and unlimbered the shining lariat.
Frank stared as his son whirled the rope over his head. It grew and grew until a sound like that of an approaching freight train filled the Winnebago. With a quite credible yee-haw! Steven let the immense loop fly at the oncoming wall of darkness. It settled neatly around the entire gigantic bulk.
As he began pulling it tight, the Anarchis let loose with a roar powerful enough to make worlds tremble. Steven began whistling, drawing in the loop like a deep-sea fisherman fighting a record marlin. He didn’t stop until the Anarchis had been compacted by the lariat, reduced to a cylinder of pure Chaos barely a couple of yards in diameter. It was as black and shiny as polished obsidian and it fought with a relentless, wild strength.
Steven used one hand to grip the radio aerial, wrapped the lariat twice around his wrist. “Let’s go, Dad!”
“Yes. Time to go,” the angelfish chorused.
“Go? Go where?”
“Back the way you came.” Another fish gestured with a fin. “Back to reality, which the Anarchis cannot stand. Back through the Vanishing Point.”
Frank eased down the accelerator. “It’ll break free. He can’t hold it.” His son stood on the bumper, clinging to rope and aerial as the motor home started forward. “It’s just one little rope.”
“Little rope?” said an orange angelfish. “Don’t underestimate your son or his tools. His rope is a superstring.”
“What the hell’s a superstring?”
“I forget how primitive is your reality line,” said one of the other fish. “A superstring is little more than an atom wide, but it’s billions of light-years long. The gravitational strength it exerts is beyond your comprehension. All superstrings were formed during and are left over from the creation of the Cosmos. They’re very useful for tying things together. Some are even stronger than the Spinner’s reality lines. It takes someone very special to make use of them.”
“Like you?” Flucca wondered.
“We have neither hands nor inclination. Your son has always had both.”
“Cowboy,” Frank murmured.
“Expert obulator,” the third fish corrected him. “He’s been a fine pupil.”
The Anarchis bellowed and thundered. It slammed into the canyon walls, sending rocks the size of skyscrapers flying. But it could not break the superstring. By this time Frank saw that the string itself was invisible. What they could see was the energy it radiated in the immediate visible spectrum. The silvery fluorescence he’d thought was the lariat itself was only its ghost.
