It took him a moment to realize that they weren’t talking. They were singing, and Mouse was singing with them. She’d opened a window and her face was against the screen. He could see her lips move but, strain as he might, could not overhear a single word.
Only when she straightened and rejoined them did Alicia ask the question. "Who are they? They’re precious!"
"They wouldn’t think so." Dozens of hummers and riders were darting back and forth in front of the glass. "This is their home. They live on the tip of the Vanishing Point. We’re related a little, because they, too, are musicians. For them a ballad lasts only seconds, a cantata a few minutes, an epic less than one of your hours. They’ve sung like that since the beginning of time. They cannot share with others because their music is as intense as their lives. Too much for people like us to handle." She turned and gestured back the way they’d come, back down the streambed.
"The other inhabitants of this land suspect their existence and have told tales about them for centuries. Most people do not believe in the tiny ones, which suits them well. They like their valley the way it is. Visitors, even friendly ones, would despoil it and interfere with the music."
"What land are you talking about? Where are we, anyway? Besides close to the Vanishing Point, I mean."
"What lies behind us no longer matters. All that matters is what lies ahead. Have a care from now on for what exists beyond reality." She lowered her voice. "The crucial time approaches. We must be careful lest this changes, too."
"This?" Alicia was all but nose-to-nose with a dozen hummers and their exquisite, perfectly formed riders. They hovered outside her window, easily keeping pace with the motor home. "This couldn’t change. This is too beautiful."
"It is exactly that, which is why so few people have seen it. But there are no absolutes in the cosmos, Alicia. Truth and Beauty exist because people invent them. When a tree falls in the forest it makes a sound whether anyone is present to hear it or not, but it is not beautiful unless someone is there to look upon it."
Frank tried to drive around a good-sized rock, failed and winced as a tire kicked it up under the chassis. "Just so long as you’re right about us being close. I’m tired of ending up on highways to nowhere."
Mouse nodded ahead. "We are almost there. Thanks to you, Frank Sonderberg, I think everything is going to be all right."
He glanced back toward the rear bedroom. "If Charlie doesn’t burn us down or blow us up first."
"He’s talking to his yeibichais."
"What?"
"His spirits, his gods. I’ve known for some time he’s not alone back there. They’re all working on something together. He doesn’t want you back there because he knows you couldn’t handle what you might see. I gather it’s a very sensitive business."
"So you don’t know what he’s up to, either?"
She shook her head. "I trust Burnfingers Begay. He’s an unusual man, besides being a Traveler."
It was harder than ever for Frank to keep his mind on his driving. "Hardly enough room back there for two people, let alone a bunch of gods."
"There are large gods and small gods, and the proportion of them has nothing at all to do with physical size. I think Burnfingers’s gods are very big indeed."
The canyon walls closed in around them until for the second time that day there was barely enough room for the motor home to pass between them. The narrow passage was suffused with an eerie, slightly orange sunlight. Vines and orchids, ferns and palms vanished, leaving only the cold stone. Frank edged the motor home forward, finding he missed the comforting hum of the birds and their riders. This was a place where a song was needed, even one he couldn’t hear.
There was a sharp spang as the sideview mirror on the passenger side was snapped off by protruding rock. Frank cursed, corrected imperceptibly to the left. Alicia rose to put a comforting arm around her daughter, who didn’t like enclosed places.
If they wedged themselves in here, Frank told himself as he sweated the drive, they’d never be able to back up.
Overhead, the walls of the canyon towered hundreds, maybe thousands of feet toward the sky. Then suddenly they opened up, parting, literally falling away on both sides. Frank breathed a sigh of relief as they rolled out onto a wide, flat plateau covered with bright green grass and inch-wide yellow flowers. He decided the latter were close cousins to dandelions.
"Stop," Mouse quietly instructed him. "Stop here."
Frank put the motor home in park, turned to look back at the cleft from which they’d emerged. Surely it was far too narrow to have passed the Winnebago. At the far end of the slit of a canyon the light was faint and hazy. It was like looking toward another world.
"This is it," Mouse was saying. "We’ve done it. We’re here." She strode past Wendy and her mother to open the door. Frank hastened to follow.
Now that the engine was off, they could hear it clearly: a vast sighing, the rush of immense bellows — Eternity breathing. Mouse was walking through the grass and yellow flowers toward the edge of the plateau. Beyond lay turquoise sky. With each step tiny black things jumped out of her path and the flowers inclined curious heads toward her ankles.
The Sonderbergs followed, along with Niccolo Flucca. Frank held his wife’s hand. As they neared the drop-off, Alicia sucked in her breath and Wendy gasped. Flucca murmured something inadequate in a foreign language.
The Spinner hung in the bright blue air, stretching to infinity. Clouds broke against the unending golden body. Some were tinged with red, others with yellow. Lightning flickered beneath the Spinner’s epidermis, which was not skin but something indefinable. As the body rippled like a long Chinese kite, thousands of legs busily twisted and worked against one another. From each pair of legs a silklike thread emerged, to drift off into immensity. The sky surrounding the Spinner was full of rippling silvery mats, and reflected in each could be seen entire worlds, whole universes. Each thread was a different reality, and there were thousands upon thousands of realities.
Anyone could see something was amiss. Holes showed in some of the mats, and in places there were no mats at all where proximate threads had been broken or become entangled. There the spinning legs jerked spasmodically, uncertainly. Realities became entwined, or roped together. There was great confusion, but not chaos. Not yet.
Though Mouse had referred to it as such, Frank hadn’t really expected the Spinner to be an actual creature. Somewhere in the archives of man there was doubtless a creation myth, which got it right. If so, it was one he’d never heard.
"Behold the Spinner," Mouse instructed them, one arm lifted gracefully in its direction.
Two eyes stared blankly from the near end of the immensity.
They were an impossible distance away. Distance had no meaning here. The gap might be measurable in miles — or in light-years. Each orb was a limpid blue sea the size of Lake Superior. The Spinner hung in cloud-stuff far away and below the rim of the plateau on which they stood. Frank cautiously looked over and down. If there was a bottom, it could not be seen.
"It’s clear that it’s ill." Mouse pointed out the rips in the fabric of existence, the broken threads with which legs toyed helplessly. "It suffers from an emotional instability that will only become worse — unless I can soothe it with song. Even something as great as the Spinner can suffer." She turned to Wendy. "If you wouldn’t mind, dear child, I will need a really big glass of water."
"Okay, sure!" Wendy turned and dashed back to the motor home. When she returned with the glass, Mouse took a long swallow of the contents before handing it back. Wendy stepped aside without having to be asked.