To the Vanishing Point

by Alan Dean Foster

  "All right. Sure."

  "Good. Put out your hand like this." Burnfingers extended his left hand, demonstrating how to place the thumb against the tip of the forefinger.

  Steven struggled to position his much smaller fingers. "Like this?"

  "No. Cross them a little more." Burnfingers gently adjusted the boy’s hand. "Now you do — this." He snapped his fingers. A tiny dancing flame burst from the tip of his thumb, burning merrily.

  Even for a ten-year-old, Steven’s eyes became very wide. "Wow, that’s neat! How’d you do that?"

  "Practice, and knowing how things are." He gestured with his burning thumb. "Blow it out. Go on, go ahead."

  Steven leaned forward, hesitated a moment, then exhaled sharply. The flame vanished. Where it had danced was no darkening of the skin, no scorch mark.

  "It’s a trick."

  Burnfingers smiled. "Didn’t I say so? Most of life is a trick, Steven. Physics is a trick, and chemistry a trick, and mathematics the neatest trick of them all. Now you try it."

  "Okay," the boy said dubiously. He concentrated hard on his thumb as he snapped his fingers together. They popped cleanly, but several attempts produced only sore fingers and no flame.

  "You do right with your fingers but not with your head. That’s where the trick part is." He leaned close and whispered in the boy’s ear. Steven listened intently, nodding as he did so. "Now try again."

  Steven did so, repeatedly. The fourth attempt brought forth a tiny but unmistakable puff of smoke. "Gee!" Steven started to smile, staring at his hand in wonder.

  "You see?" Burnfingers sat back, satisfied. "Like most tricks it is just a question of practice and getting your head straight. Concentrate now."

  Steven leaned forward eagerly, trying to set his mind the way the Navajo had instructed him. As he concentrated, he relaxed, and as he relaxed, the fear and terror of the past hours faded from his memory.

  Which was what Burnfingers had intended all along.

  8

  Frank drove easily. Alicia had swiveled her chair around in order to talk with Wendy, who kneeled on the floor next to her mother.

  "He was so good-looking I didn’t see his eyes," she was saying. "Or maybe I did and I just ignored what was there."

  Alicia stroked her daughter’s hair. "It’s all right. It doesn’t matter now."

  Mouse stood nearby, staring out the windshield. "Do not berate yourself, child. It is difficult much of the time to tell devils from men. Most devils have a little man in them, and most men a little devil in them. What one has to learn is how to judge proportions."

  Alicia smiled tolerantly. "A very clever metaphor."

  "Oh, no, not at all," said Mouse innocently. "It’s the literal truth."

  "I take it, then, you’ve had a lot of experience with men?" As soon as she said it Alicia was sorry. That wasn’t her style at all. It was one of the main reasons she hated attending the parties thrown by Frank’s business associates. The women who came had raised bitchiness to a high art, and she wanted no part of it.

  She needn’t have worried. It affected Mouse not in the slightest. "As a matter of fact I do know quite a bit about men. I’ve known men who were intelligent and handsome, men who were witty, men who were evil, a few who were everything. I’ve also known some devils, and I say again there are times when it is hard to tell them apart." She smiled warmly down at Wendy.

  "Don’t think you are the first woman who has had trouble making the distinction. The only difference in your case was that the differences were more clear-cut than usual."

  "I can tell you’ve had a lot of experience," Wendy replied, "but really, how old are you?"

  "Four thousand two hundred and twelve."

  Alicia laughed: a short, sharp giggle that brought her hand quickly to her lips. "Sorry. I didn’t mean that."

  "Laughing is good for you. Now especially."

  Alicia didn’t dispute that. It had been awhile since she’d laughed aloud. You had to appreciate the joke. Given the talents Mouse had already demonstrated, a figure of fifty or sixty might have been acceptable. After all, Lena Horne was in her sixties and didn’t she look wonderful? Four thousand, though, made the gag work.

  "You don’t look a day over three thousand. What’s your secret? I’m having cellulite trouble already."

  "The secret," Mouse told her somberly, "is to see time coming and to step around it. Laughing at it helps a great deal. Time is very sensitive, you know. It can cope with almost anything except laughter." Vast violet eyes turned back to Wendy. "Remember that always, girl. When you see time coming at you, laugh at it and it will retreat. You see, it knows how absurd it really is."

  Wendy considered this, though it was impossible to tell if any of it stayed with her. "What happens if you don’t make it to this Spinner? Will the fabric of existence keep unraveling?"

  Mouse nodded. "Completely. As you have seen, it has already begun, like a rope fraying at the edges. Right now we are on an intact thread, though it’s impossible to tell whether it is running true or twisting about another line entirely."

  "What happens if it all unravels?" Alicia asked her.

  "Then the Anarchis will have final victory and order will dissolve into Chaos. Confusion will reign supreme forever, nothing will be certain or stable, and logic and reason will become naught but memories, themselves unsecured."

  "You mean the world will come to an end," Wendy said.

  "Not to an end: rather to a confusion. All the threads will break and intertwine and twist and contort about themselves."

  "I think I understand. Everything would stay the same only it would be different. You wouldn’t be able to be sure of anything. Like driving to Baker and ending up in Hades Junction instead."

  Mouse nodded. "Only it will be worse than that. Much worse. The little things will be as severely disrupted as the big things."

  Wendy nodded solemnly.

  Burnfingers Begay had lumbered forward, ducking to clear the ceiling of the motor home. He gazed at the dash. The instruments were partly obscured by Frank’s body.

  "How are we doing on gas, my friend?"

  "If the stuff that old guy sold us is burnable at all, we’ll be okay. This dinosaur has double tanks. Should be able to steam right through to Vegas without stopping. The fridge is full. Poke around near the back, you might even find a beer."

  "I would appreciate that," said Burnfingers gravely.

  Alicia was staring past him. Her son sat on the convertible sofa. He was bending forward concentrating on his hands. "What were you telling Steven?"

  Burnfingers glanced back at the boy, then forward again. "Nothing, really. Little tricks to keep him amused. Desert survival techniques. One or two amusements I have acquired in my traveling."

  "So you’ve been around?"

  "Yes. He is a traveler." Mouse was eyeing the big man appraisingly. "An experienced traveler."

  "I have spent my life trying not to be bored, Ballad-Eyes."

  "How old are you, Burnfingers?" Alicia asked.

  "About forty-five. Why?"

  "Nothing." Alicia sounded disappointed. Perhaps she’d been hoping he would respond with another outrageous claim the way Mouse had. "That’s what I’d guessed."

  "Drat. I was hoping you would think I was thirty-five." He touched a rough hand to his cheek. "Genetic wrinkles. White people think every Indian they see looks dignified. We do not understand that."

  Wendy settled her legs under her. "If you’ve traveled, where have you been?"

  "Everyplace, just about. I’ve fought alongside African rebels, worked rice paddies in a Communist commune in China, dived with great white sharks off Dangerous Reef in Australia. I’ve circumnavigated Greenland and found remnants of a civilization the archaeologists don’t know existed, buried deep beneath the ice, where their instruments haven’t reached. One of these days they are going to be surprised, boy. I’ve lived with the Inuit and their Siberian relations, gone swimming off the Ross Ice She
lf, and crossed the Rub' al Khali in the dead of summer, when the Bedu insisted it couldn’t be done without frying your brains. Of course, being crazy, that did not worry me much."

  Wendy laughed and Alicia, though she disapproved of such facile prevarication, couldn’t keep from grinning herself.

  "Your home, now, I have yet to visit," he concluded, looking down at Mouse.

  "If you can get there you will not soon forget it."

  "Bet you’ve met some interesting people," Wendy said.

  "Soon-woman, I have been with sturgeon fishermen in the Black Sea and Lake Superior both. I’ve talked with representatives of every Indian tribe on both the north and south continents, including some the anthropologists don’t know about. In Patagonia a tribe keeps young ground-sloths for pets and hides them from visitors. I’ve gathered giant pearls with divers from a lost linguistic group on an uncharted island in the South Pacific, dug out sapphires the size of hen’s eggs from river gravel in the mountains of Sri Lanka, and spent time with a lama in Bhutan who insisted he could teach me how to levitate."

  Wendy’s eyes widened. "Could he really do that?"

  "Oh, that he could, but only upside-down." Burnfingers shook his head sadly. "It’s not a very useful thing to know. After a while all the blood rushes to your head and all you want to do is throw up."

  Alicia smiled easily this time. Another joke, clearly one of many, cleverly designed to amuse them and relieve the tension in the motor home. Burnfingers knew what he was doing.

  "What will you do now? I mean, once we drop you off in Nevada," she asked him.

  "Find another job."

  "In Las Vegas?" Wendy wondered.

  "Why not? It is a very interesting place, good for studying people. That always interests me. A good place to find people like myself."

  "You mean other Indians?" said Wendy.

  "No. I mean other crazy people. Vegas is like the Mad Hatter’s tea party, only with neon."

  Wendy giggled. This charming older man was helping her to forget the unhappy ordeal she’d suffered at the hands of their hellish captors. It all seemed like a bad dream now. Maybe she would wake up and find out that that was just what it had been. Only if that turned out to be the case, Burnfingers Begay would vanish like part of a dream, too, and she didn’t want that.

  "Know anybody in Vegas?" Frank inquired casually.

  "Don’t worry about me. I can get a job anyplace."

  Frank didn’t doubt Begay’s word. He checked his watch. Hades Junction lay far behind them. Probably below them as well, if half of what Mouse said about reality lines twisting and bending was accurate. The cars that passed them in the fast lane were filled with people. Anxious certainly, but not yet damned. Maybe they weren’t going to go mad, after all.

  "What time do you think we’ll hit Las Vegas, dear?" Alicia appeared to have completely recovered from their recent otherworldly encounter. A resilient gal, his spouse, Frank mused. He checked the clock on the dash.

  "If we don’t run into any more detours, we’ll be at the hotel before midnight."

  "Want me to drive for a while?"

  "Naw, not yet. Lemme take it for another hour. Then we’ll switch."

  "If you folks get tired, I’m a pretty good driver."

  Frank glanced back at their oversized companion. "Thanks. I think we can manage." Despite everything he’d done for them, Frank had no intention of letting Burnfingers Begay behind the wheel of the motor home. Wasn’t he a self-confessed crazy?

  As for Mouse, she anticipated his next thought. "I am not very good with mechanical things. I’m far more comfortable with what you might call the citizenry of the natural world."

  "Everyone to their taste," Frank jibed. "Give me a four-forty any day." Of them all, only the motor home itself had emerged untouched by their experience. He found himself wondering what happened to old machines when they passed on. Was there a mechanical hell, a place where devilish mechanics ran sugar through engines and deliberately overtightened nuts and screws?

  There he was, doing as Alicia did, ascribing human characteristics to inanimate objects. She had a word for it. Anthro — anthrosomething. The habit infuriated him. "Oh, that poor chair!" she’d wail when it was time to discard a crippled piece of furniture. "It’s been in the family for years!" At such times he would have to try to explain patiently that the chair was not dear, old Uncle Ned but simply a collage formed of wood and plastic. A soulless assemblage.

  Like Burnfingers Begay? But if Begay was right and soulless, could not a machine have one in his place?

  He wasn’t aware when he did it that he’d given the Winnebago a comforting pat on the steering wheel.

  Steven was hungry, a sure sign everything was back to normal. Wendy had slithered back into her headphones and was twitching to some unheard electronic rhythm. And Alicia, sweet Alicia, was humming to herself.

  But when the hour had come and gone and it was time for her to drive he did something he hadn’t done previously. Instead of stopping he made certain the road ahead was clear, then rose and stepped behind her, holding on to the wheel until she was able to take his seat, letting the cruise control handle the accelerator for them. When he’d said earlier that they weren’t stopping until they reached Vegas he’d meant exactly that. And when they got there he was going to drop his family off right on the main steps before parking the motor home. Though Hell had been painfully bright he planned on avoiding dark places for some time to come.

  "As it seems all is well again, would you like for me to sing you a song? One of delight and relaxation this time, not of rejection and defense."

  Burnfingers answered her before his host and hostess had a chance to reply. "I would like that very much. A cappella."

  She looked at him in surprise, but only a little surprise. "Yes, of course. I’ll sing you a song," she murmured, her expression turning dreamy, "of the far places you’ve never been. Wispy landscapes visible in dreams alone, seascapes beyond any blue paint, the worlds writers fight for words to describe. I’ll sing of the shadow folk who live on the fringe of reality, and of my own people, my own land. My home."

  And, as she sang, she soon had all the adults humming softly along with her. Wendy’s music remained hers alone and Steven went unnaturally silent, munching like a chipmunk in the woodwork on a sack of chocolate-covered raisins. Within the solid, middle-class rectangular world on wheels all was peace and contentment.

  It relaxed Frank’s spirit if not his determination. One of the reasons he was rushing Vegasward was to be rid of their strange little passenger. Be it club, garbage can, manhole, or bus stop on the way to somewhere else, they would find her Vanishing Point and deposit her there. Let the fabric of existence unravel around her. He was convinced that if they could separate themselves from her, despite her warnings, they could distance themselves from her problem. Hadn’t she confessed to being some kind of focal point on which Evil and Chaos concentrated their efforts? If she needed to travel beyond Vegas, let her find another ride. She’d as much as promised to do that and he intended to hold her to her promise. So while he absorbed her wonderful music and smiled frequently and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel in time to the subtle melodies that poured effortlessly from her throat, the true joy he felt sprang from the vision of finally being rid of her.

  No one suggested stopping in Needles for dinner, despite the tempting beacons of the billboards and road signs that announced the town’s presence like so many frozen TV screens. They roared past both off ramps, the gas gauge holding steady and the engine running cool. As they accelerated into Nevada, the desert night descended on them, clothing everything except the starry sky in black velvet.

  Frank was driving again and the onset of night troubled him, though he didn’t show it. It was impossible to tell now if anything was crawling or flying or hopping toward them out in that vast dark emptiness. He was glad he wasn’t a particularly imaginative man. Better to be persistent and hardworking. This way he was a
ble to drive steadily onward without glancing too often out the window in search of improbable manifestations. The road led northeastward, comfortingly eggshell-white in the glare of the headlights.

  He decided he preferred the near total darkness to the shadows a full moon would have thrown up. The motor home droned on, trailing the scent of its own high beams.

  Steven was sound asleep in back and Wendy drowsed in her own bed. Their original intention had been to use the motor home as a mobile hotel room, moving from trailer park to trailer park. The hotels maintained elaborate facilities for visitors who preferred to spend their time on wheels. Now he couldn’t wait to turn it in to the local representative of the rental company. Even though it was paid for, they were going to check into a hotel tonight. He’d ask for a noisy room, in the middle of the hotel, surrounded by hundreds of other rooms and thousands of people. He wanted to bathe in light and conversation and mumbled banalities. In his present state of mind, turgid reality was far preferable to the least excitement.

  They’d had enough of that to last a lifetime. For the next ten days he planned to bury himself in activities utterly devoid of social value. Alicia could buy all the junk she desired and he wouldn’t say a word. His daughter could display herself in her less-than-there swimsuit and he wasn’t going to complain. Steven might personally send the price of sugar futures soaring without a single objection from his father. Let them all indulge themselves. He would derive his pleasure from watching them. It was an attitude that made him a good husband and father.

  As for himself, he’d lounge around the pool squinting through his sunshades at showgirls and rich men’s mistresses and beauty-contest runners-up from Iowa and Tennessee, trying to keep his gut sucked in while not perishing from self-induced asphyxiation. Alicia would smile tolerantly on such behavior, knowing that all her husband would ever do was look.

  They would be safe in Las Vegas, that mildly risque middle-class Disneyland. Even the temptations of the casino posed no threat. Frank could gamble sensibly. He was too good a businessman to lose severely. Hard work was the best vaccination against gambling fever. So he would usually break even at craps, Alicia would lose on roulette, and he would make a little of it back at blackjack, where years of manipulating figures gave him a slight edge over his fellow gamblers.