Summerland

by Michael Chabon

  "Good-bye, children," Uncle Mo said.

  Then Jennifer T. switched on the radio and took them up.

  SECOND BASE

  CHAPTER 6

  Thor's Crossing

  "OKAY," THOR WIGNUTT SAID, as they left behind the lights of Butler Beach, at the eastern tip of Clam Island, and headed out over the shining black waters of the Sound. "I'm ready."

  "Great," Ethan said.

  "I just have one question."

  "What's that?"

  "Where are we going?"

  Ethan turned from Thor to Cinquefoil, still standing in the front passenger seat with his ruddy hands on the dash.

  "That's hard ta say," said the little chief. "Ya can't never predict what old Coyote will do. Just about everything that could turn out two ways or more was invented by him, back when he Changed the world the first time. Before that, as ya may or may not know, everything could only turn out one way. There weren't no crossroads, fer instance. Only straight paths that didn't bend. Toss a coin, it always came up heads. And nobody died. That's one o' the things Coyote changed. He brought the wobble inta the world. Everything that turns out one way but could just as easy turn out the other. Good or bad. Dead or alive. Hungry or with yer belly nice and full."

  "So you're saying…what are you saying?" Ethan was having a hard time getting a handle on this Changer person, this Coyote who had taken his father. Was he only evil? Did he really want to destroy the Worlds? Why, in spite of the dreadful creatures and terrible machines, the Padfoots and skrikers and graylings in his army, the horror that his human agents had wrought at Hotel Beach, why was there always the tiniest glint of appreciation in Cinquefoil's eyes whenever he talked about Coyote?

  "I'm saying, I don't like ta try ta outguess Coyote, fer it can't be done but badly, and what's more it gives me a pain in the head. But I'm thinking we ought ta head inta the Summerlands after all. If Coyote changes his mind, which he loves ta do, or if he ain't really headed ta Murmury Well at all, then we sure as moose scat don't want ta be hanging around the Winterlands fer no good reason. And if he is headed ta Murmury Well, then we don't need ta go by the Winterlands at all. There are other ways o' getting ta the Greenmelt that surrounds Murmury. With luck and a talented shadowtail, we might be able ta make it by way o' the Summerlands. In the meantime we might find answers there. Help. Weapons. A grammer book or two. A map. P'raps some tricks ta trick the trickster. Even a few stout arms."

  "Sounds like a plan," said Jennifer T. "I'm not sure I'm ready for the Winterlands yet. The Summerlands were weird enough for me."

  Cinquefoil looked back at Ethan. "Well, hero?"

  Ethan nodded.

  "Okay," Thor said. "The Summerlands it is."

  "Take us forward, then," Cinquefoil said to Jennifer T. "If I remember my Tree lore there's a spot up ahead where a branch o' the Summerlands hangs close enough ta leap it. It's a old Thunderbird Trail."

  Jennifer T. sent them careening ahead for about half a mile, and then Cinquefoil said, simply, "Here."

  Thor closed his eyes, and settled against the backseat of the Saab. Jennifer T. let go of the wheel with one hand and twisted around to see what he was doing. Thor's face relaxed. The furrow of bafflement, like a letter V, that was always there, over his nose, went smooth. His hands lay open and palm up on the seat beside him. Ethan hugged himself, awaiting the inevitable cold breath of a leap between branches. Thor opened his eyes.

  "I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing," he said. Ethan had never heard him say anything of the sort before. But he said it in the same unflappable humanoid voice as ever. "I hope the crew all realize that."

  "Just feel yer way along the branch," Cinquefoil said. "Until ya sense the shadow falling over ya. The shadow of a leaf, like. Then ya know yer right under the spot."

  "But I don't know what the Summerlands look like," Thor said. "There's nothing." He tapped the side of his head. He meant, Ethan knew, that there was nothing about the Summerlands in his database.

  "That's not true," Ethan said. "You've gone there a thousand times."

  "Wull, yeah, that Summerland. But not the real one."

  "But our Summerland is part of the real Summerlands, somehow. Or was. Stuck in the middle of the Middling."

  "Yer Summerland wasn't no part of the Birchwood," Cinquefoil said. "They was two sides o' the same place. Like twin brothers on either end of a great endless bear hug."

  "Then shouldn't we have scampered over from there?" Thor said.

  "We could've, yesterday, maybe," Cinquefoil said. "But not today. Barely made it over myself, the parting was so wide. An' I could feel it getting wider by the minute. It's a gap that no shadowtail will ever leap across again."

  "That's terrible," Ethan said. Summerland, that enchanted island of blue sky in the gray sea of a Clam Island summer, was gone forever. "Picture it," he told Thor. "Just try to see Summerland in your mind."

  "Picture the ball field," Jennifer T. suggested. "On a sunny afternoon."

  "Green," Thor said.

  "And the water at Hotel Beach, and the leaves of the birch trees."

  "Green, with some gray in it. Flashing green."

  "The blackberry brambles," Ethan suggested.

  "Green, with all these dark green shadows. Okay. Huh."

  On the island, they had crossed from birch wood to Birchwood, with no apparent gap in the fabric of the worlds. What would it look like as they glided across the sky from one world to the next? Would they go from night to day? From seacoast to forest? Ethan peered out the rear windows of the station wagon. At first the darkness around them seemed no different from before. Below, the straggling lights of some coastal town. Above them, the stars, pale and distant. Then the temperature plunged, and abruptly the stars went out. The lights of Coos Bay or whatever town lay beneath them winked and were gone.

  "Hey," said Jennifer T. She started twisting knobs on the dashboard. "Is there any heat in this hunk of junk?"

  "Fascinating," said Thor. "My climate sensors indicate a temperature drop of over ten degrees in the last nine seconds."

  "He's doing it," Ethan said. "Chief, he's doing it, isn't he?"

  "He seems to be. But whether he's crossing us to the Summerlands or no…"

  A great shudder racked Ethan, and he zipped his fleece to the collar. He had never felt anything so cold before.

  "We're losing altitude," Jennifer T. said. "The gas in the envelope is shrinking or what's it called. Contracting."

  "Ice," Thor muttered. He reached up to wipe at the lenses of his heavy-rimmed eyeglasses.

  Jennifer turned up the radio dial while Ethan looked out the window again.

  "Losing altitude over what?" he said. "It looks like there's nothing down there. No fog. No clouds."

  "Yer right," Cinquefoil said. "It's Nothing. The Nothing that lies among the leaves and branches o' the Tree. The mightiest Nothing there is."

  Thor rubbed some more at the lenses of his glasses with his sleeve.

  "Ice," he said again. He was snuffling a lot, and his nose was running, and he looked pretty miserable.

  Cinquefoil gave him a poke with the tip of his boot.

  "Take care," he said. "It sounds ta me yer thinking overmuch about—"

  "Ice!" cried Jennifer T. There was a sudden opening of light, like a great blazing flower bursting into bloom, so bright that Ethan had to shut his eyes against it. It was like popping up out of a cardboard box into a brilliant afternoon; the nerves of his eyes were so baffled that even with his eyelids clamped shut they were busy turning everything red and blue and the luminous green of a beetle. When Ethan dared to open his eyes again, what he saw made so little sense that they might as well have remained closed.

  Outside the windows of the car, all below them, there stretched a limitless expanse of ice, a hundred or a thousand or ten-thousand miles of jagged ice teeth and shining ice prairies, under a sky that was the blue-black color of a scorched steel pot. Though the sky over the ice was dark, it also sho
ne, frothing with stars, great swirling jets and eddies of blazing snowdust. And then there was the radiance of the ice itself. The ice mountains, the ice pillars, the jagged broken staircases of tumbling glacier flow, all seemed to blaze from within, as if they were made not from mere water but from some compound of the radiance shed by the stars overhead: frozen starlight. The ice lit the sky; the sky lit the ice.

  Ethan turned around and looked out the rear window of the hatch; it was filled with the starless empty darkness they had just come sailing through.

  "Brother!" cried Cinquefoil to Thor Wignutt. "Oh, little brother! Where have ya brought us? This ain't the Summerlands, not at all."

  "I'm sorry!" Thor said miserably. "There was—it was—I had ice—on my glasses."

  "We're still going down!" Jennifer T. said. She grabbed at the volume dial, so calmly labeled LJUDVOLYM, and twisted it all the way up. Their course was angled toward the ice only slightly, but enough so that if they continued to drop they would eventually come down.

  Ethan clung so tightly to the strap of his shoulder belt that the thick edge of it dug into his fingers. "What—what's—"

  "You're lying on your back, on that little hill behind the picnic tables," Jennifer T. suggested urgently to Thor.

  "Yeah?" Thor said. He didn't sound too convinced.

  "Looking up at the dark green shade of that tree, the big one that gets those little helicoptery things. Do it!"

  "Okay, okay!" Thor shouted. "I know the tree you mean—yeah.

  Okay."

  All at once the windows began to stream with water, bright droplets chasing one another across the glass. The ice was melting; the sky all around them was blue. Ethan shielded his eyes against the sudden brilliance of the sun. They rolled down their windows, and the car filled with a delicious sharp smell of evergreens. The color returned to Cinquefoil's face. His eyelids fluttered, opened, and then he smiled, and rolled down his own window. He stood up on the seat and hung his head out the window.

  "The Summerlands," he said. "Ya did it, boy."

  Jennifer T. stuck her head out her window and into the blindingly blue sky. She peered down. Beneath Skidbladnir's useless wheels stretched an immense forest, shadowy and cool. The spiky carpet of evergreens below was ripe with the vibrant green of a summer afternoon. At its farthest limits rose a range of smoky blue mountains. They didn't look like the Cascades; they looked older, lower, as if far more worn away by the passage of time.

  "Where are we?" Ethan said, looking down. "Is it any place you know?"

  "I might be mistook in this," Cinquefoil said. He was looking very hard at Thor. "But I believe ya just crossed us ta the heart o' the Far Territories."

  "Was that wrong?" Thor said.

  "Nah, nah, it was very well done." Still he stared, tugging at the curly tip of his playing-card-king beard. "Also impossible."

  "Compared to what?" Jennifer T. said. "This whole thing is impossible."

  "See here," Cinquefoil said. "It just ain't right, leaping from a branch o' the Middling ta one in the Winterlands and then over ta a branch in the Summerlands lickety-split like a sharp-turned double-play. Nobody can do that. It's like…that's like passing from one room in yer house ta another, then going back through the door again an' finding yerself in a third room on a whole nuther floor."

  "But I just did what you all said to do," Thor protested. "I thought of sunshine, and blue sky, and some kind of green that was almost like black, it was so green."

  "It's all right," Cinquefoil broke in. "No harm done, ta the contrary, ya done brought us ta a part o' this world where even Coyote don't much like ta set his foot. The Far Territories. Hard by the Raucous Mountains, by the look of it. It's still a wild place, the wildest in all the Worlds, not excepting the most shaggurt-infested corner a the Winterlands. An' what's more, if we can just get ourselfs over those mountains, we ought ta be able ta find our way ta the Greenmelt."

  "I thought the Greenmelt was in the Winterlands," said Jennifer T.

  "So it is. But beyond the Far Territories, see, over the Raucous Mountains, down through the Lost Camps, and way across the Big River, there's a spot called Applelawn. Beyond it lies Diamond Green, where the four limbs of the Tree rise from the trunk."

  "The axil point," Ethan said.

  "So I've heard it styled. It's where Old Mr. Wood was standin' when he tossed the first fireball o' creation. The same and very spot where Coyote laid down the lines fer the first inning a baseball ever ta be played. Now, the part of the Winterlands called the Greenmelt, well, it lies just across Diamond Green from Applelawn in the Summerlands. We need only step across Diamond Green to reach it. Come at Murmury Well from the back door, so ta speak, and if we can, beat Coyote to it. Yeah, this was well done, indeed, Thor Wignutt." His eyes narrowed and his normally placid gaze turned sharp. "Almost like you knew where you were leaping."

  Ethan's attention was diverted by a creaking rumble like some heavy old piece of furniture being slid across a wooden floor. He turned to see a massive shaggy thing, part polar bear, part enormous starfish, appear from beneath the car, right there in the middle of the sky. It wiggled its pink-skinned, white-furred tendrils in front of them, its bones cracking audibly.

  "Chief? Hey, Chief? Oh, my gosh!" Ethan shouted, pointing.

  A moment later the thing was joined by its twin. Each longhaired pale creature was at least twice the size of Skid herself.

  "What are those things?" Jennifer T. said. It was a natural question and Ethan would have asked it himself, but he suddenly found that he could not open his mouth to speak. "They look like giant hands."

  "Those are giant's hands," said Cinquefoil, just before they were snatched from the sky.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Eighteenth Giant Brother

  THE GIANT HAD TO GO UP on tiptoe to get hold of them, reaching for them like a right fielder robbing a batter of a home run at the wall. Though of course there was no altimeter in Skid's dashboard control panel, Ethan had been up in Victoria Jean enough times to be able to estimate their altitude as somewhere around thirty meters. As high, that is, as fifteen extremely tall men standing one atop the shoulders of the next. The envelope of the airship was capable of lifting two tons but offered no resistance to the giant's great creaking arms. It plucked them down from the sky carefully, even tenderly, like someone with a lightbulb that has to be changed. The wind whistled through the open windows of the car as they made their captive fall toward the trees. About a third of the way down their progress abruptly stopped. An enormous eye, the iris blood-red, the white pink-veined, blinked in at them through the windows on Ethan's side. The lashes were palest yellow, like the fur on the great pink hands. It was an albino giant, then. Somehow that made it even more frightening.

  "It's looking at me," Ethan said finally, his voice emerging in a faint, strangled whisper.

  The giant's red eye was veiled in a heavy mist, which each flapping of its pale blond eyelashes sent whirling and eddying away. Then a moment later the mist would return, dense and stinking something terrible of fish and rancid meat. It was, Ethan realized, the giant's breath.

  "It's his job to look at ya," Cinquefoil said. "That is Mooseknuckle John."

  "You—you know him?" Jennifer T. said, peering out through the screen of her fingers.

  "He and his seventeen brothers, Johns all, done wandered inta our parts from time ta time over the years," Cinquefoil said, returning the giant's bloody gaze with an expression of polite uninterest. "Raising a considerable portion o' hell. For which we done paid 'em back handsomely, often enough as not."

  "Is he going to eat us?" said Thor. That positronic brain had a way of cutting right to the core of any complicated problem.

  "If he has the taste fer little reubens," Cinquefoil said, "and it's likely he does. Most o' them boys do. In the old days they used ta eat human children by the fistful."

  "Okay, I would like to be somewhere else right now," Jennifer T. said. "I—"

  "PRETTY T
OY!"

  The voice of the giant, when he finally spoke, was not something they heard as much as felt, in every joint and soft part of their bodies. It shook the bolts of Skid's chassis and made the glass in her windows hum. The car was suddenly drenched in a stink of dead fish and sweet rotten flesh. Ethan felt as if he might have to vomit. It would certainly not have been the first time he had vomited in Skid. The memory of a summer night after the Colorado State Fair at Pueblo came to him, when his stomach, scrambled by the Tilt-A-Whirl and tilted by the Scrambler, had brought up the corn dog, fried dough, cotton candy, snow cone, and caramel apple that he had consumed, all over Skid's backseat. His mother had so calmly, so patiently, so dutifully comforted him, wiped him with paper napkins dampened with ice, changed him into some clean sweatpants that were in the back of the car, given him a piece of Juicy Fruit to take the bad taste away.

  The eye narrowed and seemed to focus in on Ethan alone for a moment.

  "ONE IS LOST," said Mooseknuckle John. "ONE IS ANGRY. ONE DREADS. AND ONE IS BROKENHEARTED."

  The four passengers of Skidbladnir looked at one another. It was not immediately apparent to any of them which was which.

  "Giants have sharp eyes," Cinquefoil said dryly.

  "And bad breath," whispered Jennifer T.

  The ferisher chief clambered across from his seat and climbed right up onto Jennifer T.'s lap, without a word of excuse or pardon. Awake and active, there was yet something catlike about him. He perched on Jennifer T.'s knees, but as when a cat comes to visit your lap, he did not quite settle there. He stuck his fierce head out her window.

  "Now, Mooseknuckle John," he said in his soft, clear voice. "We're bound ta urgent bidness, and awful far from home. Do us the kindness ta let us alone, just this once, won't ya, now?"

  "WANT THE TOY, MORSEL," said Mooseknuckle John. He let go of Skid with one hand and with an enormous index finger flicked the taut gas envelope, as you might thump a melon to hear if it is ripe. It throbbed like a drum. "LIKE IT."