'As I said, Jake, this is your show,' Susan said. 'If you don't like the metaphor, change it.'
'This is a metaphor?'
'A common one. Scaling the heights, that sort of thing. Change it. Find a new way of getting to where you want to go.
'Where-' I began, then stopped and looked around. Everywhere the earth seemed to run up to a ceiling of cloud., What to do? Go back down?
So I pushed on, leading Susan by the hand. Sean took up the rear. We trudged up the slope and entered a bank of fog. Wet mist enveloped us, and rocks glistened underfoot. I was fine, except for feeling a little chilled. Susan didn't seem to mind the cold at all. We broke through the fog and the ground leveled off abruptly. We had come up to a broad level plateau populated with dark monoliths. I looked up and saw a brightening sky painted in swirls of gray and silver, shot through with luminescent streaks. A fine icy rain fell, cold and bracing on my face. The clouds roiled and billowed like milk poured in water.
'What now?' I asked, stopping.
'I think you want to make it warmer,' Susan suggested.
'Yeah.'
The clouds parted and a golden sun broke through with shafts of cathedral light.
'Religious symbolism?' I commented.
'Maybe.'
'Pretty,' Sean said.
It did warm up a bit, and very quickly, but up here lay a high windswept plateau, and I turned my collar up against a breeze blowing sand from the direction of a ruined city far out in the flats-Broken towers, tumbled walls, sand drifting against a shattered dome. To our right, nearer, another ruin was wedged into a box canyon, stone dwellings pressed together under the eaves of a sheer cliff.
'This gotta be someplace,' I said.
'It is,' Susan said. 'Everyplace is someplace.'
'Penetrating philosophical insight.'
'Thank you.'
Hills in the distance, and somehow we reached them in a very short time. The wastelands dropped behind us as we followed a twisted trail upward through scrub brush and browned grass.
'California,' I said. 'Hm?'
'Reminds me of southern California.'
'I've never been there. I'll have to go sometime.'
'It was a good place circa 1960. Except for the smog. I've heard it was very nice between 1919 and 1940.'
'I'll have to go, then,' Susan said.
We reach a ridge. The path snakes down a hill and into changing terrain. The sky changes, and it becomes a star(lusted night, low half-moon hanging to our left, another moonlike body-a tiny disk-speeding along the ecliptic. At zenith a river of stars… strange shapes in the darkness at either hand, moving things, hulking things. No trace of fear in rne, just resolution. I'm searching for a particular place. I don't know what it — looks like, or where it is. A meteor shower, brilliant points of green fire falling out of the night, vanishing almost as soon as they appear. Glowing filaments radiating from an area of sky to our left, galaxies pinwheeling overhead-to the right, an aura of zodiacal light at the horizon. A night wind rises, and the star-rivers flow.
'Beautiful,' Susan comments.
'Thanks,' I say, understanding that she means it as a compliment, not comprehending why I'm accepting it.
A violet sun comes up and chases the glory away. Another city to our right, a grouping of crystal bubbles sitting on a vast empty plain. This world stays with us for a short minute, then dissolves into a seascape at twilight, breakers pounding a porcelain-white beach. Shells crack under our feet as we walk the strand. The sky churns with grays and blacks. There is no color in this place-if it indeed is a place, and not a phantasm conjured by Prime or some hidden deceiver. No life here. The sky is dishwater gray fading to charcoal, and the bits of shell underfoot are chalk white, gray, and black. Sand dunes to the right bristling with stalks of dried beach grass. In the distance a line of low hills.
'Great place for a beach house,' I say.
Susan nods. 'Sure.' Ironic agreement.
Sean says, 'Don't much care for the look of this place, Jake.'
I say, 'Neither do I.'
What to do? We step out of that place and into another. It didn't occur to me to ask how we had done that.
Night again here. A moonlit necropolis, a ruined temple, a mound of debris, truncated columns, a half-buried plaza. We walk in alien moonlight. Stars again, a gaseous nebula glowing above. Where are we? The question goes unspoken.
I stop and gaze at the time-swept city around us. 'The ruined cityscape motif again,' I comment.
'Time,' Susan says.
'Yeah. Great big gobs of it.'
Whispers from the darkness: ghosts. A shadow falls across our path, thrown by a communion-wafer moon backlighting a blasted tree. The shadow looks like a wild dancer. A temple sits on a hill up ahead, its riven dome no longer sheltering the statue of a tall alien deity. In a crypt somewhere a mote of dust falls and the heavens are disturbed.
'I'm spooked,' I said. 'Let's get out of here.'
Over here, Susan says, so I follow her over there, wherever it is. It's not in any particular direction, really, just a slightly different frame of mind. It's a soothing emotional shade, a combination of restful contemplation and wistful nostalgia. It's more than a state of mind; it's almost a smell. I fell Susan that I'd rather see/feel something, and if she could du that for me, would she? Yes, I can, she says…
. and we're in another world, this one swampy and wet, so I can it and get into another, then another, then a fourth and fifth. We linger in this one, for it's a little like the place I'm
looking for, a little, not much, because it's much too warm, so I take the temperature down five degrees and change the color of the sky to blue-I like blue skies-and shade the grass so it isn't so blindingly, feverishly green, and I make the trees taller and give them fuller foliage, and perhaps touch up that bark to look a little less like cancerous leather, and what I'm looking at now is a planet under a kind sun, a very nice place indeed for good old- fashioned dirt farming, which is the sort I like best. The terrain rolls gently, not too flat like some places I'd seen- the tornados wouldn't be totally implacable here. There are some mountains in the distance; good, if you want a change of weather, you don't have to go very far. And there's o cute little farmhouse under some poplar trees, and a barn, and sheds, and a chicken coop, a corn crib, a granary, a cattle pen, and other outbuildings and accessories, all you'd need.
'Like this place?' Susan asks.
'Yes,' I say. 'Yes, I do. Very much.'
And I do, because, although it's not a lot like our place on Vishnu (which is a much less benevolent planet than this one), it comprises all the elements that I require for a sense of wellbeing and peace: space, quiet, green things, more space. The clouds are white and puffy, and whoever had painted them had first laid down washes of pure Earth-sky blue underneath. It did look a lot like Earth. Maybe that's where all we humans belong, after all.
'Nice little farm,' Sean said approvingly, grabbing up a fistful of black sod and smelling it. 'Fertile.'
'Great, I've found it,' I said. 'What have I found? What am I supposed to do?'
But I knew the answer. Susan told me, anyway.
'Your body can stay here while other parts of you roam wherever you want. No matter where you are or what you do, you'll always have a sense of being home. Just like now-I'm still back at the cottage by the pond, even though I'm here at your place, too.'
'Makes sense.'
'No, it doesn't.' Susan laughed. 'That's why it's so neat. It doesn't make any sense at all. But it's
