The End of the Line

by Tom Lichtenberg & John Lichtenberg

to tell us what the right thing to do is."

  "Useless!" Red Cliff fretted. He got up and started pacing up and down the platform, hands behind his back, shaking his hairy head restlessly.

  "You know what we have to do?" he declared. "We have to find this coalition. We have to find them and ask them straight out, no more mumbo jumbo, no more random clues, no more riddles, no more nonsense."

  "Sure," Soma agreed. "Why not? Except that we have no idea, no idea at all, where in the world they might be, or even if they really exist."

  "I know where they are!" came a small, high voice from inside the station. Its body presently appeared at the door. It was Zed, bucket in one hand, mop in the other.

  "You do?"

  "You what?"

  "Sure," he said, "I know just where they are. Well, almost just. They're under the ground!"

  "Almost just?" Red Cliff asked. "What does 'almost just' mean? Do you know where under the ground, or just anywhere under the ground?"

  It had only been a few days, but he was already accustomed to Zed's way of talking. Like the books, the boy spoke in absolute terms that on closer inspection were absolutely vague and uncertain. He would proudly say he knew everything there was to know about rabbits, and then proceed to describe a cloud in great detail. He would declare that a tree was exactly one centimeter tall, if you looked at it from a certain angle. He insisted that dreams were real, and reality was a dream, except for the times when they weren't and it wasn't. He drove Red Cliff crazy, but he had to remind himself that you couldn't expect too much from a child that had only been in the world for a handful of days, even if it had grown more than four feet in that limited span.

  "I know exactly where," Zed announced, "and I'll know it when I see it. We just have to go there is all. They're waiting for us, you know. Didn't they tell you?"

  "No, they didn't," Red Cliff sighed.

  "Maybe you should look at the book," Zed laughed, and dashed back inside to scrub down the tile wainscoting.

  Red Cliff pulled the almanac out of his back pocket and placed it flat on the palm of his hand. Sure enough, it opened right away to a page that was blank except for one line, which said "follow the path."

  Red Cliff gritted his teeth and had to control his urge to rip the thing into shreds.

  "What path?" he shouted. "Why can't you ever just come out and say what you mean?"

  "Maybe that path?" Soma asked. Red Cliff looked and saw she was pointing at the train tracks that were suddenly materializing on the beach as a warm wind kicked up and blew away the sand that had been covering them up. The tracks began right there at the station, and led off to the right, curving inland away from the shore.

  Five

  "I don't like it," said Ember, early the next morning when Soma showed her the tracks. "It was never here and then it was? A book that writes itself and tells you what to do? And we're supposed to follow a boy who was almost literally born yesterday? I don't like it, not one bit, and I say no."

  "You can't just say no," Soma pleaded with her. "What else are you going to do? Listen to me, Ember. I didn't have to tell you all of this. I could have kept a lot of it to myself and you never would have known. Instead, I'm being completely honest with you, because I respect you, and because I know you, and because I have no idea what's in store for you or any of us if we don't get to the bottom of this."

  "All this time," Ember countered, "It's been The Coalition this and The Coalition that, and now it comes out that you don't even have a clue what this so-called Coalition is, or where it is, or anything about it! And now you talk about being honest. You've been tricking us the whole time, haven't you? You're still hiding something. I can tell."

  Soma sighed. This was not the conversation she'd planned to have. After a restless night trying to decide whether or not to even wake the pair, it turned out that Edeline and Ember woke themselves as soon as the sun attempted to rise in the morning. It took a few tries, but finally the rubbery, bouncing orange ball latched on to a trajectory and held steady, and the sky brightened as the day promised to be another scorcher on the beach. Zed had been eagerly awaiting the two with platters of pancakes, fruit and rolls he'd produced seemingly out of nowhere. Edeline and Ember could not refuse and wolfed down their breakfast as if they hadn't eaten such a meal in centuries.

  Edeline was in a joyful mood. She'd slept well, her mind filled with happy dreams of swimming pools and sunsets and circling sea birds making chirpy noises. Ember was her customary sour self, glancing suspiciously at the walls and floor as if expecting them to betray her at any moment, but she did save a smile or two for Zed, who stood by patiently waiting for his turn to clear the plates and glasses.

  "Where did you come from?" Ember had asked him, and Zed silently pointed at his feet.

  "Did you not understand me?" she asked and he grinned.

  "They made me underground!" he declared.

  "Who made you?"

  "The people who make people," he said cheerfully.

  "I don't know what you're talking about," Ember told him. "People don't just make people, do they?"

  Edeline laughed and Ember turned pink.

  "That's not what I meant," she said.

  "You mean your mommy and your daddy, right?" Edeline asked Zed but he shook his head furiously and said,

  "I don't have exactly any of those. Except for maybe Red Cliff. He's like my daddy but he was only following instructions. The people use the book to tell him what to do."

  Ember and Edeline had nothing to say to this, but as they had finished swallowing the last morsels, Zed rushed over, snatched up the dishes, and ran out of the room with them. They looked at each other and with a nod agreed to get up and follow him. They had only just stepped into the station when Soma came up and greeted them. They immediately bombarded her with questions about Zed, Red Cliff, the people and the book. It took some time for her to explain, and when she was done she led them out back and showed them the rail line.

  "This is the way to the people Zed was talking about."

  Ember didn't like it.

  Edeline took her aside. She was of the opinion that they might as well do whatever Soma told them to do because the alternative was, what? Was there an alternative?

  "We could stay here," Ember suggested. She was thinking of the comfortable beds and the fine food. She was even thinking about going for a dip in the sea.

  "I've never played in the ocean," she said, "it looks nice."

  "Soma seems to think it's important that we hurry," Edeline said.

  "I want to play in the waves," Ember insisted, crossing her arms and pouting. Edeline took a deep breath. On the one hand, she knew that Ember had been around for more than seven hundred years. On the other hand, she also knew that the girl was only eight, and had been eight for almost all of those years. Smart as she was, agile and brave as she was, her brain had only developed to that one certain point, and you couldn't expect an egg to be a chicken. She left Ember on the platform and went to consult with Soma.

  "Maybe for an hour," Soma relented after some initial resistance, and so Edeline and Ember together stripped off their new outfits and ran screaming and yelling into the cold blue sea. It was magnificent. Ember leaped over the waves as Edeline dove in and took to swimming in circles around her. The sun had rushed overhead to a heated position and stayed there, stuck in one place for a while as they played. The salty sea felt so fine that Ember finally plunked down and sat with her bottom on the bottom as the waves lapped around her neck and face. Edeline came and sat by her and together they stared off at the distant horizon, seeing nothing but blue water before them, and blue sky up above.

  Then something else appeared, a shaggy blond head, then another, and a third, and the three heads drew closer, swimming directly toward them at an amazingly rapid pace. They all had the same face, or so it seemed to Edeline and Ember, a pale white face with pink eyes and white lips, flat noses that seemed to be missing their nostrils. The heads were attached t
o shoulders, that they could see, but nothing else of their bodies emerged from the sea as they came nearer and nearer until they were only a few feet away. Edeline opened her mouth and said "hello" but as soon as she said it, all three heads disappeared, diving beneath the waves, and then they were gone. Ember and Edeline sat there for several more minutes, certain that the swimmers would have to re-emerge, but they never did. Finally, they felt so unsettled by this experience that they got up and returned to the station, where Zed was waiting with towels and freshly folded up clothing.

  Also waiting was Red Cliff, who introduced himself before Soma got the chance.

  "Now we can go," Soma said. Edeline and Ember nodded and they all made their way to the tracks. Soma took the lead, with Red Cliff accompanying Edeline, and Zed sticking close to Ember, chatting merrily about the underground world they were heading for.

  "There are lots and lots of rooms," he told her, "and they're all filled with stuff. All kinds of stuff, like brooms and mops and sponges and these little metal scrubber things that do a great job getting off the most clingy dirt."

  "That's nice," Ember said.

  "And they have closets," he exclaimed, "that you can even walk into and stand there." He jumped up and down as if to demonstrate the size of these astonishing places, and then skipped along. Ember found herself wanting to skip too, and she scolded herself for these childlike feelings. She was already becoming not the self she was used to. She wondered if it showed.

  They hadn't walked far before the landscape began to radically change. They entered a scrubby marsh, the tracks forming a narrow trail between knee-high bushes and shrubs, and the land began to feature low slopes and hills, with occasional dwarf trees no taller than Ember appearing on either side. A few shallow streams crossed right through the rails, and Edeline could see a hint of pale blue mountains in the distance. She noticed that she hadn't seen any wildlife at all, not a bird or a lizard or even an insect, and was about to comment on this fact when she heard a low buzzing sound above her head. She looked up, expecting to see some sort of creature, but instead it was a machine, a flat, rectangular black one, and it was hovering just above her.

  "What is that?" she started to say, but before she could finish the sentence she found herself splattered with spaghetti-like noodles, cooked to al dente perfection and quite warm, raining down on her from that very machine. Edeline jumped out of the way, pasta clinging to her hair and shoulders, as the machine zoomed way up into the sky and vanished from sight.

  "Oh my," Red Cliff muttered. Zed was laughing behind them.

  "Bad code," he shouted. "Really bad code! Somebody messed up big time this time!"

  Edeline pulled the moist sticky morsels from her hair.

  "That was uncalled for," she complained.

  "Are you hungry?" Red Cliff asked, as they continued on their way.

  "Not now," she said.

  "But you were thinking it," Red Cliff said, "before. They can sense your thoughts, you know."

  "No, I don't know," Edeline said. "I'm beginning to think I don't know anything at all. What kind of place is this? In the forest we had nothing like those whatever-they-ares. We had nothing, nothing at all. No beds, no regular food, no clothing, no gadgets or tools, nothing even remotely mechanical. And here? It's all so different."

  "They mean well," Red Cliff said apologetically. "It's that they don't understand either. We don't know them, and they don't know us. They're programmed to serve, but the subtleties escape them. You have to watch your thoughts. And then again, lately they've been a little off."

  "A little?" Edeline exclaimed. "Dumping a pot of spaghetti on someone's head is more than a little off, if you ask me. It's rude, plain and simple."

  "Uh-oh," Zed said. Edeline turned to look at him and followed his gaze to