"What's happening here?" Harry said.
"Anybody's guess," Testa replied. As she spoke he saw another piece of her in the vicinity of the shack. "It's all part of the Reef."
And now, as the child started to slip from its mother's arms, the scene slid away like the first, and on he flew, his mind starting to snatch hold of some of the dramas he was piercing. Never more than a piece-a flock of birds in ice, a coin bleeding on the ground, somebody laughing in a burning chair-but enough to know that every one of these innumerable images was part of some greater scheme.
"Amazing-" he breathed.
"Isn't it?" Testa said, and again her voice brought him to a halt. A city, this time. A lowery sky, and from it flecks of silvery light dropping lightly, like mirrored feathers. On the sidewalks below, people went about their business blind to the sight, except for one upturned face: an old man, pointing and hollering.
"What am I seeing?" Harry said.
"Stories... " Testa replied, and hearing her, Harry glimpsed another piece of her mosaic, in the crowd. "That's what Grillo gathered here. Hundreds of thousands of stories.
The street was slipping. "I'm losing you@' Harry warned.
"Just let go," Tesla replied. "I'll catch up with you somewhere else."
He did as she instructed. The street fled, and he moved on at breath-snatching speed while the stories continued to fly at him from all directions. Again, he caught only glimpses. But now he had some way to interpret the sights, however brief. There were epics and chamber pieces here; domestic dramas and quests to the end of the world; Old Testament splendors and nursery-tale terrors.
"I'm not sure I can take much more," Harry said. "I feel like I'm going to lose my mind."
"You'll find another," Tesla quipped, and again he stopped dead in the midst of a tale.
This time, however, there was something different about it. This was a story he knew. "Recognize it?" Tesla said.
Of course. It was Everville. The crossroads, Saturday afternoon, with the sun pouring down on a scene of farce and lunacy. The band on their butts; Buddenbaum digging for glory; the air laced with visions of whores. It was not the way Harry remembered it exactly, but what the hell? It held its own with anything he'd witnessed so far.
"Am I here?" he asked.
"You are now," Tesla replied.
"What?"
"Grillo was wrong, calling it a reef " Tesla went on. "A reefs dead This is still growing. Stories don't die, Harry-"
"they change?"
"Exactly. Your seeing all this enriches it,' evolves it. Nothing's ever lost. That's what I'm learning. "
"Are you going to stay?" Harry said, watching the drama at the crossroads continue to elaborate.
"For a while," she said. "There are answers here, if I can get down to the root. "
She reached out towards Harry as she spoke, and he saw that the fragments he'd glimpsed on the way here were before him still. Part of her was carved from a patch of ocher ground, and part from the hole dug there. Part resembled the shack in the field, and part the golden-eyed child. Part was made of mirror-flakes, part was the old man, pointing skyward.
And part, of course, was made from that sunlit afternoon, and from Owen Buddenbaum, who would be at the crossroads raging for as long as stories were told.
Finally, though he could not see this sliver, he knew she was also made from him, who was in this story somewhere.
I am you... the Nomad murmured in his head.
"Do you understand any of this?" Tesla asked him.
"I'm beginning to."
"It's like love, Harry. No; that's not right. I think maybe. it is love. "
She smiled at her own comprehension. And as she smiled the contact between them was broken. He flew from her, back through the blazing colors, and was returned in the bursting of a bubble to the stale room he'd departed. Raul was there, waiting for him, trembling.
"God, D'Amour," he said, "I thought I'd lost you."
Harry shook his head. "It was touch and go for a moment there," he said. "I was visiting with Tesla. She was showing me around."
He looked at the body sitting in the chair in front of the monitors. It seemed suddenly redundant: the flesh, the bone. The true Tesla-perhaps the true Harry, perhaps the true world-was back where he'd come from, telling itself in the infinite branches of the story tree. "Will she be coming back?" Raul wanted to know.
"When she's got where she wants to go," Harry replied.
"And where's that?"
"Back to the beginning," Harry said. "Where else?"
I in That first trip down to the harbor proved fruitless; Phoebe found nobody who knew anything about the misamee. But on the second day her relentless questioning bore fruit. Yes, one of the Dock Road bar owners told her, he knew what she was talking about. Some creature in an agonized and unfinished state had indeed been seen down here several weeks before. In fact, if his memory served, some attempt had been made to corral the abomination, for fear it had murderous appetites. to his knowledge the creature had never been caught.
aps, he suggested, it had been driven back into the sea, which everybody had assumed it emerged. In which the tide had carried its misbegotten body away.
There was both good news here and bad. She had confirmation that she was at least searching in the right quarter of the city; that was the good. But the fact that Joe had not been sighted of late suggested that perhaps the bar owner's theory was correct, and he had indeed been lost to the waters. She now went in search of somebody who had been a member of the pursuit party, but as the days went by it became more and more difficult to keep track of her progress. There were new ships docking daily, from single masted vessels to the plethora of fishing boats that plied in and out of the harbor, leaving light and returning heavy with their catch. Often she found herself neglecting her inquiries and listening, half enchanted, to the talk exchanged by the sailors and the stevedores: stories of what lay out beyond the tranquil waters of the harbor, out in the wilds and wastes of the dream-sea.
She had heard of the Ephemeris of course, and from Musnakaff of Plethoziac and Trophett6. But there were far more than these; countries and cities whose names conjured glories. Some were real places (their goods being unloaded at the dock), others in the category of fables.
Into the former group went the island of Berger's Mantle, where crews were apparently lost all the time, preyed upon by a species so exquisite the victims died of disbelief. Into the latter went the city of Nilpallium, which had been founded by a fool, and which was ruled over-justly and well, so legend went-by its founder's dogs, who had devoured him upon his decease.
The story that most engaged her, however' was that of Kicaranka Rojandi. It was reputedly a tower of burning rock, which rose straight-sided out of the sea, climbing to a height of half a mile. The species that crawled and climbed upon it were not consumed by its flames, but had to constantly fling themselves down into the steaming waves to cool their bodies, only to begin the ascent afresh when they could bear to, desperate to court and fertilize their queen, who lived encased in flame at the very summit.
The more preposterous of these stories were a healthy, indeed vital, distraction from her misery, and the true ones were curiously encouraging, evidence as they were of how many miraculous states of being were plausible here. If the citizens of b'Kether Sabbat had the courage to live in an inverted pyramid, and the fire climbers of Kicaranka Rojandi the devotion to climb their tower, believing they would one day reach their queen, should she not keep looking for her misamee?