But was it really so very much more radical than sticking one’s foot over the edge of the world, or driving blind on a highway that ran through ultimate void past a veil of stars? If there could be roads through nothing, why couldn’t there be roads through something? Water, for instance? Slowly his foot came off the brake.
"Frank …?"
He turned to his wife and smiled, surprised at his own indifference to what might happen next. "There’s nowhere else to go, sweetheart. Not here, not on this line. So we might as well go on."
She looked at Mouse, who smiled reassuringly. Then she sat up straight in her seat, her hands gripping the armrests tightly. "Okay. I don’t know why, but okay."
"There is only one other problem." Burnfingers was staring straight ahead as Frank started down the slope, the motor home picking up speed as it headed for the water.
"What’s that?" Frank heard himself shout.
"I cannot swim."
The motor home did not leak. Not even a little bit. Nor did it show signs of leaking as they plunged deeper and deeper into the resurgent sea. By law they should have come to a halt. At the very least, water should have seeped into the engine compartment and shut them down, or the air they continued to breathe should have made them too buoyant to cling to the increasingly rough seabed. Laws, however, no longer seemed to apply to them, natural ones least of all.
Mouse continued to give directions and Frank obeyed, too far beyond astonishment to object. He tried to pretend they were out for an afternoon drive on the San Diego Freeway, but it was hard to ignore the fish and other denizens of the deep who swam curiously up to the windshield and windows. Something was keeping the water out, and it wasn’t a pressure differential or airtight seals. It defied reason — which meant that in the context of the past several days it was perfectly logical.
"Just don’t open any windows." Mouse’s eyes alternated between open and shut. Frank wasn’t inclined to ask why. "We are safe within a fragment of your reality, which you have carried about with you the way a diving spider carries its air supply. Now is the time for you to make use of it."
"How long will it last?" Alicia asked softly, marveling at the increasingly dark landscape.
"Long enough."
"It’d better, little singer." For the first time since they’d made his acquaintance, the big Navajo was showing symptoms of fear.
They had a hard time driving through the kelp forest that clung to the narrow continental shelf. A pair of mutated things that looked like sharks with hands inspected them closely before swimming away. Frank wondered how their protective bubble of reality would respond to a direct attack. Would any assailants bounce off, or would they be able to penetrate?
As time passed and the air inside the motor home remained breathable, he found he was able to relax a little. They were so deep now that if their protection did collapse it would all be over in a few seconds. They rolled down an increasingly flat and featureless bottom until he came to a steep drop-off. He wasn’t even surprised to discover that the brakes still functioned.
"Keep going," Mouse instructed him.
"What, over that?"
"It’s the way." Her eyes were only half open, giving her a slightly sinister look.
Frank turned to his wife. They exchanged one more kiss. No need for words anymore. Not in a here and now that wasn’t.
He switched from brake to accelerator. As they went over the cliff he instinctively shifted into low. The slope was almost seventy degrees, but they didn’t fall. Somehow he kept control.
"Reality is sticky stuff," Mouse told him with a sly smile.
Feeling almost jaunty, he switched on the headlights. The twin beams pierced the blackness for forty feet. Schools of small silvery fish swam into the lights, hung as if paralyzed for an instant before dashing away in fright.
Their descent seemed to continue forever. When the cliff did terminate, the end was abrupt and unexpected. The ground leveled off. A broad, flat plain stretched endlessly before them. It looked like mud and sand, but the motor home progressed across the uncertain surface without any trouble at all. Except for the small area lit by the headlights, it was pitch-black around them.
"Wow, did you guys see that?" Wendy was sitting by a big side window, staring out into the darkness.
"See what, dear?" her mother asked.
"Something big. It had teeth and fins and it looked like a neon sign!"
"Didn’t know we were that deep." Frank spoke without turning. "You sure we’re goin' the right way?"
"We are going the only way," Mouse assured him.
"Pressure down here must be hundreds of pounds a square inch, or however the hell they measure that stuff."
Whatever the pressure was, the motor home cruised along unaffected. The roof did not crack, the joints did not groan. It wouldn’t take that long, Frank knew. If their protection went, the motor home and everything within would be flattened like a tin can beneath a tank.
Other phosphorescent monstrosities gradually became visible. Things with stomachs bigger than their bodies, with heads bigger than their stomachs, all needle-sharp teeth and bright electric eyes. The motor home’s lights froze them briefly before they jerked or darted back into the eternal night that was their home.
Other creatures, infrequent but active, scuttled out of the motor home’s path, stirring up mud and silt as they fled. Once something like a fifty-foot flounder exploded out of their way, stirring up so much muck they never got a decent look at it.
Frank glanced down at the speedometer. With the accelerator pushed to the floor and no obstacles to slow their progress, they were doing slightly over a hundred miles an hour, right up near the motor home’s limit. He saw no reason for caution. There was nothing down here to run into and in Mouse they had a guide more efficient than any sonar.
Only once did she direct him to deviate momentarily from their course. As they did so he saw the plutonic glow of subsurface vents off to their left. Five-foot-long worms clustered close around whirling plumes of Earth’s breath. Bacteria clouded the water, feeding on hydrogen sulfides. It was all real, and more alien than anything they’d yet encountered.
After several days of this Frank found himself wondering if it was Mouse’s intention to circumnavigate the globe underwater. They were making excellent progress and the fuel level fell with inexplicable slowness, but their range was still finite. She assured him repeatedly that they were not driving aimlessly, but toward a definite destination.
There was no propane to cook with, but the motor home’s microwave worked fine. Assisted by the imaginative Flucca, Alicia managed to conjure up remarkably nutritious meals from their declining food stock. Only Burnfingers was unable to relax and enjoy the impossible ride. Knowing that tons of water pressed tight all around them, held back only by a thin strip of transient reality, he kept to himself and said little.
"We’re getting close," Mouse finally said one day.
Frank was doing his stint at the wheel. Now he took a deep breath. He’d begun to despair of ever hearing those words despite her repeated reassurances.
She was crowding close, her perfume distracting him from his driving. "Turn here. No, more to the right. That’s it."
He complied, marveling once more at how the motor home responded under what should have been not only impossible but deadly conditions.
"Now straight."
A loud bump came from beneath and Frank’s blood went cold for an instant. Then he realized they hadn’t lost their seal of reality. It was only the sound of the front shocks adjusting as they began to ascend. He shifted back into low.