Алан Дин Фостер - To the Vanishing Point

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.

Suddenly Mouse seemed taller, stronger. She cleared her throat once, twice, while resting both hands against her lower abdomen. Without appearing to exert much more effort than she had on similar previous occasions, she began to sing.

It was a wordless song, a song of power, and it poured out of her like a torrent in an endless fortissimo. Frank had to put his hands over his ears, and Alicia, too. They listened in awe to the incredible volume of sound issuing from that seemingly frail body. The music was simultaneously calming and exhilarating, reassuring and ennobling, soothing and strength-bestowing.

As they looked over the edge of the plateau, they saw that the rippling movements of the Spinner’s body were becoming more pronounced, like waves traveling across a golden beach. It was starting to move, not in uncertain, hesitant jerks, but smoothly and in time to the rhythm of Mouse’s song.

She sang for a long time, longer than should have been possible, before her lips finally came together again. She wore the strain of the song like a scar on her face as she turned and smiled weakly at Wendy.

"I’ll have another sip, I think." Dumbstruck, the girl handed her the glass.

"Wow — if I only had my tape recorder."

Alicia was taking in the vastness that was the Spinner. "Is that all? I mean it’s over? You fixed it?"

"I do not know."

Frank frowned at her. "Whaddaya mean, you don’t know? After all we’ve been through you mean to say you can’t tell if it’s been worthwhile?"

"I believe I have stabilized it some, but not completely. Did you think this would be so easily done?" She passed the water back to Wendy. "I must continue. It is not finished."

Throwing back her head, she let loose an entirely new and different tsunami of sound. The irresistible musical avalanche swept out from the plateau to wash the place the Spinner lived. This time it seemed to have no effect. The expression Mouse wore when she concluded the song showed she was not pleased.

"Still not there. Something is wrong and I know not what."

"I do."

Surprised, they all turned. Burnfingers Begay regarded them, proud and exhausted. Sweat streaked his face and his black hair lay flat against his skin. In his right hand he held a two-foot-long golden cylinder that glowed with internal fire.

Alicia stared at it in amazement. "Where did you ever find that?"

"Did not find it. Made it. In your bedroom." He grinned at Frank. "With your hobby tools, my friend."

"What the hell is it?"

Burnfingers held it up so the clouds could have a good look at what he had wrought, like a father proffering his newborn son for approval.

"It is a flute. The flute."

"Doesn’t look like any kind of flute I ever saw," Frank replied uncertainly.

"It is not the kind of flute you would find in a symphony orchestra. This is a Native American flute. The best kind of flute. From it comes the music of prairie and grass, of butte and sandstone, of the wind and the waters. This flute will breathe Four Corners music." His eyes glittered; perhaps with his madness, perhaps with something else.

"I made it out of the gold I have saved and collected. Gold of Spanish doubloons and Colombia and the Yucatan. Gold from the Andes and the Sierra Nevada. Gold from the shallows of Brazil’s rivers and from great museums where I have worked and studied."

"You stole it?" Alicia asked him.

"Stole it?" He lowered the unique instrument to regard her intently. "I did not steal it. I liberated it. This is piece and fragment of all the gold the white men have ever stolen from the Amerindian, from the tundra to the plains of Patagonia. I did not know at the time why I liberated it except that it made me feel good to do so." His gaze rose, to settle on Mouse. "Then I met the little singer and learned of her journey, and I knew what I would do with the gold when the time came for it to be of use.

"When I told you that I was crazy you should have guessed I was a musician."

Mouse was nodding knowingly, like one who’d just found the missing piece of the puzzle under her chair. "And I thought you were only a Traveler."

"All musicians are travelers, but not all Travelers are musicians," he replied merrily. The glint in his eyes had become a twinkling. "It takes more than the right song to soothe the Spinner. It takes the proper accompaniment." And putting the gleaming flute to his lips, he began to play.

So Mouse, inspired, sang a third song, and they all knew it was the best yet, better than ever before. But when it was done she declared herself still unsatisfied, and the Spinner, though obviously much improved, still heaved and buckled alarmingly.

"Still something absents itself." She was thinking hard, staring at the ground. "Burnfingers Begay, your music has helped much, but I fear it is not enough." She glanced so sharply at Frank that he twitched, startled. "Frank Sonderberg, can you play an instrument?"