Summerland

by Michael Chabon

  "Of course I do," said the raven. "All ravens know where Coyote is, at all times. It's just a little gift we have. Got it from Coyote himself, as a matter of fact, back when he Changed the world."

  "Is he here? It's very important that I speak to him."

  "Relax," said the raven. "He wants to talk to you, too. He's heard about you."

  Screeching graylings, grinning like boys, came sledding down the ramps.

  "I've gathered that," Mr. Feld said. "I think he wants my—he sent Padfoot to—he wants my airship envelope design."

  The low chuckle of the raven took on a suave quality, less raspy and harsh. Mr. Feld looked back at the bird. What he saw made him jump so quickly and carelessly that he nearly tumbled over the side of the observation platform. Where the raven had sat, perched on a length of cold brass pipe, there now stood a man. He was a slender person, slight of build, an inch or two shorter than Mr. Feld. He wore a short, hooded tunic, of scarlet shot through with gold, trimmed at the collar, cuffs, hood, and hem with thick black fur. The hood was thrown back to reveal a flaming shock of red hair. The face under the fiery hair is, and has always been, difficult to describe. It was handsome, but the bones of the nose, cheeks, and chin were drawn too sharply; youthful, but the skin was lined and weathered; merry, but the eyes were cold and unkindly; wise, but the thick red lips were drawn into a cruel and stupid smirk. It was the face of someone who could see no difference between looking for trouble and looking for fun and who, though since the beginning of time he had succeeded in stirring up no end of trouble, had seen nothing of fun in a very long, in much too long, a time.

  "It's not your precious envelope I want, Mr. Feld," said the person. "It's the truly marvelous stuff you spin it from."

  Mr. Feld was about to guess (correctly) at the identity of his mysterious companion, when his attention was distracted by the sound of a high, thin voice, uttering the worst string of curses that he had ever heard. Mr. Feld looked toward the wild mass jig now taking place in the crossroads, all around the bonepit, to the icy skirling of the pipes. Some of the graylings, he saw, had formed a ragged line, leading back from the edge of the pit to the place where the lead steam sledge had come to a halt. Down this line they were tossing along a small, furry bundle, over their heads, from one pair of wicked hands to the next. The bundle was of a fiery orange color that stood out boldly against the colorless expanse of the Iceburns, and it was from the center of this bundle that the truly scabrous cursing seemed to be coming.

  The language spoken by the bundle was unknown to Mr. Feld. (In fact it was a dialect of West Reynardine.) But so deeply outraged was the bundle's tone, and so fiery its rhetoric, that the meaning of unknown words was nevertheless as plain to Mr. Feld as if he were speaking them himself. The ancestors of the graylings were first compared to a variety of loathsome animals, fungi, and bacteria, and then were accused of having perpetrated on themselves and one another a number of vile and probably physically impossible acts. All this seemed to amuse the graylings considerably. Next the bundle—it had a tail, Mr. Feld saw now, a great red brush of a tail—began to describe to the graylings, who were sending it, inexorably, toward the giant pit of bones, all the horrible illnesses and afflictions that would befall them, and their offspring, and the offspring of their offspring, if they did not, this minute, set the bundle down. Skin lesions, boils, sores, deformities of limb, failures of crucial organs. None of this appeared to make any impression on the graylings. The thing with the tail arrived at the grasping hands of the last grayling before the pit, and then with a heave, and a group shout of "Ho!" was sent sailing. It arced high out into the frost-blue air, kicking and shaking its tiny black fists. Then it landed, with a nasty crunch, on the pile of bones. Its head struck with a thud against something hard. After that it lay there, unmoving, a poor, tiny little creature, familiar somehow to Mr. Feld—a fox, or a monkey, or—

  "A bushbaby!" said Mr. Feld.

  "It's a werefox, actually," said the young-old man with a polite cough. "Bushbabies, I believe, are rather smaller."

  Mr. Feld turned, filled with a pity for the werefox and also, belatedly, for Ethan, stuck with a father who shunned the unlikely and refused—foolishly, as it turned out—to believe in the impossible. He started to reproach the young-old man, to protest the treatment of the innocent werefox whose life had been spared, on the Clam Island Highway, by the sharp gaze of his lost little son. But as soon as he looked at the man, Mr. Feld found that his thoughts grew fuzzy and confused. It was as if Coyote shone with some kind of invisible light that you could see with the deepest animal layer of your brain.

  "What's going to happen to it?" he managed to get out.

  "Nothing you'd care to see. He served his purpose, old Cutbelly. I told him, he really ought to feel honored. Shadowtail for the last great leap between the Worlds." His gaze flickered like a leaping spark in the direction of the madness in the crossroads, then back at Mr. Feld. "Idiots," he said, affectionately, with a grin so large and cheery that it warmed Mr. Feld from the depths of his fur-wrapped belly to the frozen tips of his ears. "Let them have their fun. In the meantime, Mr. Bruce Feld, you and I can get acquainted."

  Nothing changed. There was no sound, no hint of motion. And yet from one heartbeat to the next the endless white world around them vanished completely, and with it the sound of the pipes and drums, the growling of the werewolves, the rumble of engines, the strange half-light of the sky. Instead Mr. Feld found himself seated in a large, soft chair. A fire flickered gaily in a stone fireplace. The walls were dark and handsome. The lamps cast a warm, buttery light. Mr. Feld was holding a cup of coffee, black with sugar, exactly as he preferred to drink it. In his other hand there was a chicken sandwich, with mayonnaise and tomato, on egg bread, the chicken warm from the soup-pot and well salted. His favorite kind. He took a bite of the excellent sandwich and then washed it down with a slug of good hot coffee.

  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 physic
s, 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 ch
ins 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?"

  CHAPTER 11