“The river!” she said, gasping. “We gotta go for the river!”
“You’re outa your mind!” I tried to shake her off, but she clung to me.
“It’s a test!” she said. “Like back in Yonder…the mountains looked like the worst option. But we got through ’em. Now the river looks like the worst. That’s the way out. I know it!”
The nearest of the sloths was a couple hundred feet away, and about a dozen more were edging up behind him, all grunting as they came, sounding like stalled engines trying to turn over. I started to run again, but Annie kept a hold on me and dragged me down to my knees beside her.
“Godammit, Billy!” She shook me. “They can follow us into the forest! But the river…maybe they won’t go there!”
The logic of that penetrated my panic. I dragged her up and we went lurching, half-falling, ploughing toward the bank. But on reaching it, I hesitated. The way it ran straight, like a long black sword laid flat across the land, its point invisible beyond the horizon, dividing everything from nothing. The Styx. Charon. Mythic images of death crowded into my brain. The water was flowing up fast from wherever it came. Snow crusts fallen from the bank floated on it. Cold as it looked, I doubted we’d last more than a minute or so. Beneath the surface were glittering points that reminded me of the beardsleys’ eyes. The slothlike creatures lumbered near. Their mouths were partially obscured behind fringes of hair, but they were wide enough to swallow us both without stretching. The shine of their violet eyes stained the snow in front of them, as if they were nothing but energy inside, no guts, no bones, just a furnace of violet glare. Their footfalls made no sound. Freeze or get chewed. It was not an easy choice.
“Billy!” Poised on the brink, Annie pleaded with me, but I couldn’t take the step. Then her face seemed to shut down, all her caring switched off, as if it, too, had been a light inside her, and she jumped, disappearing from sight with a sodden splash. She did not resurface, and I knew she must be dead, killed by the shock. When I understood that, I didn’t much care which way I went to hell.
Behind me, the grunting evolved into a piggish squealing. Two of the animals had begun to fight, batting with their enormous paws, mauling each other, trying to bite with mouths that opened into pink maws the size of loading bays. I watched their incompetent white battle for a second, unconcerned, empty of awe, of fear, of all feeling. I saw the mountains beyond, the sky whirling with sparks, and it seemed I could see all the way back to Yonder, the tree full of hobos, the green river, the jungle, the gorge where Euliss had died. But I could no longer see the world. It was like smoke in my memory, its images dissolving, or already dissolved. Alone and cut off from all I had known, I had little use for life. For no better reason than it was where she had vanished, I jumped into the river after Annie.
What is it we think when we are born? After the shock, the stunning light, the sudden absence of comfort and warmth, the alarming sense of strange hands, the pain of the umbilical knife…what apprehension comes to stir the first wordless concern, the first recognition? I think it must somehow resemble the thought I had when I woke in a ferny hollow with Annie and three others: I yearned for the vague particulars of the creature inside whom I had been carried to that place, whose knowledge of the place was in me, albeit cloudily realized as yet. A creature whose skin might be a river or the interior of a black boxcar, and whose geography incorporated Yonder and places of even deeper strangeness. A vast, fabulous being whose nature was a mystery to me, but for the fact that it engulfed the world like a cloud, a heretofore unobserved atmosphere, nourishing the earth as an oyster nourishes a pearl, and extracting whomever it might need for its purposes. A great identity whose presence had been unknown to everyone; though certain saints and madmen may have mistaken it—or recognized it—for God, and those who dwelled long years in the solitudes might on occasion have sensed its sly, ineffable movements beyond the sky (old Euliss Brooks might have been one such). A cosmic monstrosity who had strained the stuff of my mind through its own substance, purifying and educating me toward an end I could not yet perceive. Before I opened my eyes and learned that Annie was there, I realized I was as different from the Billy Long Gone who had jumped into the river as he had been from the man who had climbed drunkenly aboard a black train in Klamath Falls. Smarter, calmer, more aware. I had no clear memory of where I’d been, but I understood that Annie had been right—this was a test, a winnowing, a process designed to recruit a force of considerable measure from among those who lived on the edges of things, from loners and outcasts, and develop them into…what? That I was not sure of. Pioneers, explorers, soldiers? Something on that order, I believed. But I did know for certain that those who failed the test became part of it, transformed into beardsleys and worse, and those who survived went on to take part in some enterprise, and I knew this because the creature who brought me to the hollow had imprinted that knowledge and more on my brain.
The hollow was spanned by the crown of a tree with a thick grayish white trunk and milky green leaves. The sky was overcast, and the air cool like summer air at altitude, carrying an undertone of warmth. I felt no weakness, no fatigue—in fact, I felt strong in all my flesh, as if newly created. I looked at the others. Apart from Annie, who was just beginning to stir, there were two men and a woman. One man, lying on his back, eyes closed, was dark, lean, bearded. Dressed in a fatigue jacket, blue pin-striped trousers that must have belonged to an old suit and were tucked into boots. Next to his outflung left hand were a small backpack and an automatic rifle. The other two were asleep in an embrace. Brown-skinned; tiny; wearing rags. Mexican, I thought, judging by the man’s Aztec features. I picked myself up, went over to the bearded man, and examined his rifle. Words in the Cyrillic alphabet were incised on the housing. To be on the safe side, I pocketed the clip.
I checked on Annie—she was still asleep—and then scrambled up the slope of the hollow. When I reached the top I saw a city sprawling across the hills below, surrounded by forest on every side. On the edges of the city were new shacks and cabins carpentered from raw unpainted boards and logs. The buildings farther away were older, weathered, but not many were larger than the buildings on the outskirts, and they were only two- and three-stories tall. It was like a frontier town with dirt streets, but much bigger than any I’d ever heard of. A shanty metropolis. People were moving along the streets, and I made out animals pulling carts…whether oxen or horses or something else, I could not say. But the city was not the dominant feature of the view. Rising from its center, vanishing into the depths of an overcast sky, was an opaque tube that must have been a hundred yards in diameter, and along it were passing charges of violet light. It was half-obscured in mist—perhaps the mist was some sort of exhaust or discharge—and this caused it to appear not quite real, only partially materialized from its actual setting. I knew, in the same way I had known all else, that the violet lights were men and women going off on journeys even more unimaginable than the one I had taken, traveling through the branching structure I had glimpsed back in the valley (the tube was merely a small visible section of the structure); and that the city was the place to which they returned once they accomplished their tasks. Knowing this did not alarm or perturb me, but the implication it bred—that we were still inside the thing that had snatched us from our old lives—was depressing. Understanding had become important to me, and I had believed I would eventually come to an understanding that would satisfy my need for it. Now it was clear that I would always be in the midst of something too big to understand, be it God or cosmic animal or a circumstance that my mind rendered into a comprehensible simplicity…like God or a cosmic animal. I would never be able to climb up top of any situation and say, “Oh, yeah! I got it!” For all I knew, we could be dead.