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"But why me?" I asked again. "Why am I here wit' you?
Why not a real hero like Champ Noland or somebody at least knows his numbers like Mud Albert?"

Tall John stopped walking and put his hand on my
shoulder. When he did this I realized that I had still been
growing. I was now taller than he.

"On my homeworld," he said, "we had a machine made
of glass. There were a trillion trillion prisms in this machine and they made up an infinite number of tiny reflec
tions . . ."

I understood the meaning of his words as they filtered
through the light in my mind. I could even see the ma
chine he spoke of. It was a great crystal ball throwing off an
uncountable number of rainbow-colored beams of light.

".. . this machine was one-of-a-kind," John continued,
"built by our ancestors who were very wise and very pa
tient. It is believed among my people that the ancients
placed all of their knowledge into the crystal globe so that in times of great stress we could come to them and ask for
advice."

"An' so that big glass ball got the answer to anything you
wanna know?" I asked.
"In a way," John said.

We were standing in an open field of grass surrounded
by a dozen or more live oaks. The sun was high but the air
was almost cool. And even though I was scared of going

into battle against Wall I was also deeply happy to be learn
ing things that no other human being had ever known.

"You see," John said, "it is the custom among my
people that every citizen gets to ask only one question of
the Queziastril
"
"The what?"

"Queziastril was the name of our glass machine."
"Was?"

"The Calash attacked us and destroyed Queziastril so
as to keep it from revealing their plan to rip the fabric of existence."

"But you knew anyway," I said.

"Yes. But knowledge is a strange thing," John replied. "A thousand people might ask Queziastril the same ques
tion and for each person the machine would give a differ
ent answer."

"Maybe yo machine was broken," I speculated. John grinned.

"No," he said. "What would the answer be if I asked you
how long it would take you to run around this field of grass?"
"I dunno," I said. "With the speed you give me I expect
it would be pretty quick."

"Now what if I asked Flore the same question?"
"Big Mama don't run," I said. "She on'y walk, an' not
too fast neither."

"So the answers would be different."
"I see what you mean," I said. "For everyone ask yo
machine how to do sumpin' there would be a different way."

"And so," John said, "when I went to Queziastril and
asked how could I stop the Calash from destroying every
thing . . ."

I don't know if John finished his explanation in words
because suddenly it was as if I were standing in front of the
great glass ball. My mind was sucked into image after im
age upon the reflective faces of the prisms. It was as if I
were traveling down halls of pure light, one after the other.

I saw strange and alien images at the end of each hall but there was no time to ponder them because no sooner
than I came to the end of one hall I was hurtled off into
another. Then, finally, after seeing ten thousand fleeting
scenes, I stopped before a square prism that was shiny and
reflective like a silver mirror.

The image I beheld there was my own. I realized that I
was seeing my own image through John's eyes many years
before I was ever born. And even though I was sure that
the boy I was seeing was me I seemed somehow different,
not older but with much more experience. I was wondering how that could be when John started speaking again.

"You," John said, and I came out of the vision to find
myself again in the grassy lea. "You were the answer
Queziastril gave me. For the next five years I was granted
special access and so I came back again and again to learn
about you and what role you were destined to play in our
war against Wall."

"And so you know everything that's going to happen?"
I asked.

"No," he said. "One day the Calash came and de
stroyed the machine of the ancients. And also Queziastril
will not allow certain information to pass through time.
The machine is sentient
"

"What does that mean?" I asked.
"It is like a living thing and knows to keep certain information about the future from those living in the past.
Because if you knew mistakes that you were going to make
and you tried to change them the world would suffer from
things that never came to pass."

"How long ago did you ask that question?" I asked John.
"Thousands of years ago."
"I wasn't even born."

"No. But time, like all other things, moves in a circle.
Every moment comes back on itself. It was said that Quezi
astril could remember tomorrow."

That was way beyond anything I could understand at
the time. Even though I contained part of Tall John's light
I was still limited by the things I had known and experi
enced as a child and a slave on the Corinthian Plantation.
"We bettah git down to yo machine," I said then. "Let us run," Tall John from beyond the stars said with
a grin.

I ran as fast as I could through the thick forest. I tried my
best to keep up with John, but now he moved like the wind.
Every now and then when I would lose sight of him completely I'd hear his voice in my head saying, "This way, slowpoke." And I'd follow in the direction of the thought.

After a short time I came to a ledge that looked down
into a basin. John was there scanning the valley. His chest
was heaving and sweat was dripping from his head and
neck. Over his shoulder down about five hundred feet or
so, I could see Mr. Stewart and Andrew Pike peering into a
hole that resembled a freshly dug grave. Mr. Stewart was
on his knees, holding up what looked like a long green stem.

"That's a part of the machine I used to come here,"
John said. "It once held enough power to ignite a thousand
stars. But that's nothing compared to what the green pow
der can do."

"What now?" I said.

"We have to destroy the machine that still lies in that
hole," John said.

"How big is the rest of it?" I asked.

"Like so," John said, holding his arms out as if he were
holding one of Mama Flore's prize watermelons.

"Really ain't all that big," I suggested. "I guess we can
fall on 'em and it'll prob'ly get broke in the jumble."

Tall John smiled. He opened his mouth as if he were
about to laugh.

"No, Forty-seven," he said. "You can't just fall on my
golden machine and hope it will break. That thing carried
me through ten thousand suns and just as many black
holes. It will take more than a clumsy boy to destroy it."

"So, what then?" I asked, a little piqued about him
laughing at my ignorance.

"I will climb down the left side," John said then. "You
go down to the right. When you get behind those pine trees
I want you to gather up as many throwing rocks as you can.
Then, when you see my signal, start throwing your rocks at
Stewart and Pike. Every time after you've thrown a stone
run a few steps before throwing again. You have to keep
moving because Stewart will be shooting at you."

"Shootin' what?" I asked. "He don't have no gun."

"You don't want to find out, brother."

Brother.
It was a word that I had heard most of my life.
There was Brother Bob who called us all his brothers, and there were the slaves that had the same mother, there were
the male puppies from the same litter, but never had the
word meant so much to me. John, after only a few days, had
become my brother. He was as close to me as my hands or
feet. His pain would be my pain and his people were my own. This kinship, this relation, was even more important to me than my newly found freedom. Because the love in
our hearts for each other, even though an expanse as large
as the Universe divided us, was the power that would save
both his race and mine.

I didn't have long to consider these thoughts though. I
ran down into the woods and gathered a dozen stones.

I squatted down behind an old pecan tree. Most of the
branches were dead, and only one still bore fruit. I stared
across the field to where Mr. Stewart and Andrew Pike
were working with a rope and pulley, trying to pull some
thing heavy out from the grave.

Up at the top of the gorge I saw John stand and hold up a hand. A flash appeared. Pike noticed the light somehow
and turned away from the winch.

"Keep digging!" Pike shouted at his ghoul. Then he
strode off up the hillside toward the place where the flash
had originated. I could see that my friend was hidden again.
As soon as he was a dozen steps from the excavation I
hurled my first stone at Stewart. My aim was true and the rock clocked the ex-slave-boss on the forehead.

He felt the blow but didn't go down like I expected him
to. Instead he gazed in my direction for three seconds,
maybe four. In that short span his metal eye-patch began
to glow, and then a crackling flash of light burst forward in

The tree I stood under exploded into flames, and then I
remembered that John told me to keep on moving. I ran twenty steps, stopped, and threw another stone. The rock
hit Stewart but at the same time his eye flared and the
earth blew up under my feet.

From the ground I could see that Pike had turned
around. When he laid eyes on me he began to run back

down the hill.

"Go back to the hole!" he yelled at Stewart.
But Stewart didn't hear because he was cursing my
number and running right at me.

At the same time John came out from hiding and was run
ning toward the hole. Pike turned to pursue but John was
moving faster. I hefted my largest rock and crouched down.
Then the most amazing thing happened. Pike's body
fell away like a shirt that someone had thrown off while
running. From the cloth of skin a full-grown, winged
Calash flapped its great blue wings, speeding toward the hole. Now he and Tall John were moving near the same speed at their destination.

I couldn't worry about them right then because Stewart
was only five steps from me. I hurled the stone with all my
might, hitting him on the metal eye-patch. There was a
great blue spark that jumped off the torturer's metal eye.
He flipped in the air and hit the ground with a loud
humph!
I threw another stone at the Calash named Wall but
missed.

He and John dove into the hole at the same time, it
seemed.

I ran toward them with a rock in each hand.

Just when I reached the hole, Wall flew out with a golden ball clutched within his tentacles. I threw both
rocks but they just bounced off of his pale hide.

The great black eye turned toward me. In the brief instant that Wall looked at me he seemed to know every
thing about me. He knew the history that my blood held.
He knew every thought and fear I'd ever known.