“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.
Gritting his teeth, adrenaline surging through his veins, he hung tight to the wheel as for the third time the motor home slammed into the body of the Anarchis. He thought he saw it contort violently as it tried to strike at the individual holding the end of the lariat.
The sunlight turned silver. At the same time, Mouse’s song, which had been overpowered by the bellowing of the Anarchis, swept over them in a great wave of sound. He flung up his arms to protect his eyes.
The rear wheels rose from the ground first. Then the entire machine was blown forward as if by a tremendous gust of wind. At the last instant Frank saw the true eyes of the Anarchis, yellow like contaminated water. They flew at the very face of Chaos.
A calmness filled him, the knowledge that he’d done the right thing. That Mouse had at last come to the end of her song. The cry of despair that rang in his head came not from the musicians or his strange companions or from his precariously positioned son but from the intensely evil thing wrapped around the front of the motor home.
The cry and the music still echoed through his brain as he regained consciousness. The seatbelt held him upright in the driver’s seat. A concerned face gazed into his own.
“Frank? Hey man, you all right?”
He blinked at Flucca and tried to straighten. At the Farmer’s Market in Los Angeles there was a big taffy machine that ran round the clock; pushing and pulling, pushing and stretching. He felt like it had been working on his body. Only when he was reasonably confident he wouldn’t fall over in a dead heap did he permit himself to unsnap the seatbelt.
“Pretty slick driving, Dad.”
It was Steven, looming larger than ever. The fancy cowboy outfit was gone, replaced by clean jeans and a short-sleeved shirt. Easy for an obulator to change clothes, Frank mused. Could be that everything would be easy for Steven from now on. Anyone who could learn how to swap youth for age and fat for muscle could surely manage a quick change of attire.
“Where are we, kiddo?”
“Back where we belong, Dad. On our own reality line. That’s what Mouse says, anyway, and I’m inclined to agree with her.”
“Me, too.” He looked up sharply. “The Spinner?”
“Spinning smoothly, soothed and rhythmic. All’s right with the Cosmos again.”
“Frank?”
He recognized his wife’s voice. Steven moved aside to let her through. She glanced in wonder at her mature son before moving to hug her husband.
“It worked, Frank. Thanks to you and Niccolo and Steven and Wendy and everybody else, it worked. Mouse finished her song.”
“Just in time, too.” He looked past her, reluctant to disengage from her arms. “Where is she?”
The motor home was a wreck. Food and linens, dishes and utensils were scattered everywhere. Not unnatural, since they were lying in the old streambed at a thirty-degree angle. He turned and peered out the window on his side. The glass was cracked but still in place.
A few hummingbirds flitted from flower to flower. Hard as he tried, he couldn’t see any little people riding them. However, one flew right up to the window and stared in at him for a very long time before it turned to dart back into the trees.
“Finished the song on a rising note,” Steven was saying.
