Summerland (28 page)

The red-haired man sat across from him, in an even larger chair, in a pair of Chinese pajamas decorated with capering embroidered monkeys. He cupped his slender hands around a steaming mug, looking every bit as snug and comfortable as Mr. Feld was feeling. But Mr. Feld was not fooled. He knew that he was about to be asked to do something that he was not going to want to do.

"You are a man of sense," the man said, with a sigh of impatience. He smiled. "It's always so much harder to bargain with a creature of sense. Fortunately such creatures are blessedly scarce. Another of Old Woodenhead's many oversights. Hello. How are you? Comfortable, I hope? Coffee all right? It's Peruvian Organic, that's what you like, isn't it? And the salt in that sandwich was harvested from French salt marshes. One really can taste the difference, can't one, between sea salt and the ordinary kind? Isn't that what you always say?"

"Are you the boss? Are you the Coyote?"

"Some people call me that. Also the Changer. Monkey. Raven. Weasel. Snake. Loki, Herm, Legba, Glooscap, Eshu, Shaitan. Prometheus."

"Shaitan," Mr. Feld said. "Isn't that another name for—?"

"Yes, yes, but that Satan business is a bunch of bologna," Coyote said, looking bored with the subject. "It gives me a pain. All right, I've pulled a few fast ones over the years on you people. Ha-ha, oh, my goodness, yes, okay, I grant you, there have been times when I've been just awful. But that's only part of the story. Name one thing you enjoy in that woebegone world of yours. Go ahead. I guarantee you, I'm responsible for it. Go ahead. Name it."

"Pizza," said Mr. Feld.

"Fire," Coyote said at once. "Try running a wood-burning oven without
that
.'

"You invented fire." Mr. Feld sounded doubtful.

"Middling fare was a nasty, tough, bloody, stringy business before I tricked Old Woodenhead out of his precious flickering stuff." As he recalled the incident of the theft of fire, Coyote's entire body itself seemed to flicker, like a flame, with pleasure. "Name another."

"Physics," said Mr. Feld.

"Let me ask you this," Coyote said. "According to physics, can a box possibly contain a cat that is both dead and alive at the same time?"

"Schrödinger's Cat," Mr. Feld said. "Nothing is ever one way or the other until you observe it. Theoretically, yes. The cat is both a dead cat
and
a live cat until you open the lid of the box and see which it is."

"Well, you can thank me for that, too. So much for physics. Now, one more. Come on. Something that you really, honestly love about life in the Middling."

And, as if to give Mr. Feld a hint, he began to whistle.
Take me out to the ball game. Take me out with the crowd
.

"Baseball?" Mr. Feld obediently guessed.

"They don't tell you
that
about old Shaitan, do they now?"

"You invented baseball."

"Oh, a while back now. On a fine summer day on Diamond Green."

"What about death?" Mr. Feld said. He set down his coffee on a little table next to his chair. "My son has a book of Indian folk tales. I recall reading to him about Coyote in that book. It said there that Coyote brought death into the world. I remember that we talked about that, Ethan and I."

"Ah, yes, Ethan," Coyote said. "Such a
spunky
little youngster. They all start out so
spunky
, these heroes of the Middling. Always come to such
regrettable
finales. Poisoned by the blood of centaurs. Crushed in the toils of a dragon. Crashing their rescue planes into the Caribbean Sea on the way to Nicaragua."

Mr. Feld stood up. Real or not, he was tired of this business now. He had not slept in over a day, his belly felt bloated and overfull, his head spun from the warmth of the fire.

"I won't keep you against your will, Mr. Feld," Coyote said. "You may go at any time."

Mr. Feld looked around for a door out. The room did not seem to contain any. He went to a large drapery dangling in one corner and brushed it aside. There was nothing there. He peeked into the corners. He even searched the floors and ceiling for a trapdoor.

"Does this room have a way out?"

Coyote sighed.

"No."

"I thought you said I could go."

"I lied."

Mr. Feld started to protest, but then he remembered. "Oh, that's right," he said. "You're a big liar, aren't you? The Prince of Lies."

"Suppose I say no to that?" Coyote said with a grin. "Where are you then? On the other hand, suppose I say yes?"

Sadly Mr. Feld circled back around and sat down in his chair. All the feeling of comfort and warmth had dissipated. He needed to go home. He needed to see Ethan again.

"What do you want from me?" he said.

"I'm going to be requiring your brain," Coyote explained. "Your brain, your hands, your way of seeing things. For this little project I have underway."

"Right. Look, I see the kind of operation you have here. You already have my Zeppelina. I'm sure it would be no problem for some of those smart little gray guys you have working for you to figure out how I array my picofibers."

"Actually, I have them at work on it even as we speak. Oh, one thing." He winced. "I'm afraid my boys have made a
terrible
mess of your lovely little Zeppelina. Cut it to bits, the little monsters."

Mr. Feld let out a groan. He had poured all of his sorrow and passion into the building of
Victoria Jean
.

"I'm truly sorry," Coyote said. "I know how much she meant to you. But it couldn't be helped." And he really did look very beautifully sorry. "Now, listen. For reasons that are hard to explain to reubens—believe me, I've tried—I would like to put an end to existence as we know it. But the way I've been going about it is so
very
slow and inefficient. Along about, oh, three or four thousand years ago, I realized that I would never be able to undo
everything
, take everything back to zero, as long as magic and its by-product, story, were constantly flowing back and forth among the Worlds through the pleached branches of the Tree. So I've been trying ever since to cut apart those irritating galls. But it's a
very
time-consuming business, and what's more, new galls are popping up all the time. For quite some time, therefore, I've been looking for a
faster
way. Then, one day, I happen to get word of a modest little gall tucked way in a spot corresponding to the place you know as Summerland. I had some of my people look it over, and sure enough, not only is there a mob of highly irritating ferishers living there, but it turns out they've been
warned
of my arrival. They've sent for a champion, to defend against me. Hopeless, of course, but that lot never seem to learn. And then, of all things, this so-called "champion" turns out to be a very small, forgive me, not very impressive
boy
.

"The boy's
father
, though. There's an interesting fellow. Turns out he's somehow managed to stumble onto a substance with some very interesting properties. Inert. Nonreactive. Yet infinitely malleable. Just the sort of thing that might be used to contain and deliver a, let's call it volatile, substance. More poisonous than a death's-head mushroom. Nastier than vomit. More corrosive than acid. Hot stuff. Hard to handle. The sort of substance you might use, say, to
dissolve the entire underlying structure of the universe
.''

"I'm in aviation," Mr. Feld said, doubting Coyote's tale without being able completely to disbelieve it. "Sounds to me like you need a materials engineer."

"You understand picofibers as well as any chemist," Coyote said. "With one difference—you taught yourself. You have a fine, independent, uncluttered mind. All I need to do is touch it. Just once. With my little pinky finger. As I did for, oh, Tesla, Goddard, Tycho Brahe." These were three of the scientific thinkers whom Mr. Feld had always most admired. Coyote might have mentioned Daedalus, Werner von Braun, or Robert Oppenheimer, but he did not. "As I did for the men and women who brought pizza and physics and baseball into the Middling."

"What if I say no?" Mr. Feld said.

"Oh, I'll manage without you, in time. Everything will just take me longer. But I have been waiting for a very long time already. I can wait a bit more." He smiled another of his bright, cheery, cruel smiles. "You will never see your son again, however. I promise you that. The universe as you know it will come to an end before
that
happens."

"I see," Mr. Feld said. "Well, all right then. I suppose I have no choice."

"Oh, you
always
have a choice," Coyote said. "That's another little fun feature of life you can put down to me, if you like."

"But I can't do it myself," Mr. Feld said. "I'll need an assistant."

"Fine. I'll send over a half dozen of my brightest—"

"No," Mr. Feld said. "Not the graylings."

WHEN THE SUN ROSE OVER THE CROSSROADS AT BETTY'S BONEPIT
the next morning, there was a horrible gnashing, an outburst of cracking and snapping like ten thousand nutshells being ground to paste under an enormous bootheel. It was the creaking of the ice, stirring and rippling like the hide of an enormous frozen beast. In the next moment there arose a terrible tinkling and chiming, as if a gigantic bell were being pelted with thousands upon thousands of wineglasses, each of which shattered on impact with a sharp
ping!
That was the sound of the Rade, thawing out. They had danced through the night, gorging themselves on ice mice until their bellies squirmed, slaking their thirst with sweet, evil liquors, waiting for the Boss to appear in the crossroads. After a while they grew so wild and intoxicated and stupid with mouse that they failed to notice that Coyote never showed. Then as the deep, heavy, eldest cold, the cold of the Winterlands, settled upon them like the effects of a strong drug, their movements slowed, grew less frantic, and their singing and banging faded to a few ragged shouts. Finally, about an hour before daybreak they had all, at the same moment, frozen solid as statues, and toppled over. Those who had congealed while standing on an incline or slope went skittering down and across the endless ice, some of them for miles and miles. When the sun at last defrosted them, those scattered graylings who were not immediately set upon by packs of dire wolves made their way back toward the crossroads as quickly as they could, found their sledges or steam-sledges, and rejoined their companions. The mushgoblins blew their special whistles (hollowed-out shards of moonstone), and, grudgingly, the furry creatures came limping in from the country all around, their chins gory and greased with the fat of seals and caribou. The thunder buffalo were stampeded, and took off at once across the cloudless Iceburns sky. If anyone noticed that the body of the werefox was no longer lying in the bonepit, its absence was marked down to the stealthy ravenings of a dire wolf.

When the demon known as Padfoot finally awoke, his head still pounding with weird drums, his throat parched from the copious horns of fermented haint's milk he had drunk the night before, the Rade had long since rambled on. He had to run across the ice for seventeen miles, without stopping to feed, before he caught and went aboard the steam sledge known as the
Panic
, his flagship as commander-in-chief of the graylings. Hung over, out of breath, and very, very relieved not to have been left behind by his troops, he was only mildly surprised and not at all put out to discover that the large private quarters on the middle deck of the
Panic
, formerly his own, had been reassigned to Mr. Bruce Feld, of Clam Island, Washington, and was now a laboratory for his researches into new applications of picofibers, those curious molecules that when properly arrayed were as flexible as rubber and impermeable as diamond.

"So," he said, sucking greedily on an icicle, "you going to make us a nozzle to spray poison on the roots of that great old Weed?"

"That's right! And then we're going to turn the hose on you, you nag-shouldered, pigment-free mop with no handle!"

"Allow me to present my laboratory assistant," Mr. Feld said with a small smile. "I believe you already know Mr. Cutbelly?"