«Jack who?»

«Jack Chili. Mama, you don't want to know him, _ever_. Look, lunch is over and we've got to figure this thing out now. I can't keep having these dreams, Cullen, no matter what's causing them. I don't even want to know especially how the hell they're happening. You touched me, hit me with that purple light and boom! I'm living in Rondua. Fine, I accept that; it's weird as hell, but I accept it. Now all I want to do is get out of there, that's all. Last night I dreamed about two guys blowing their heads off. Beautiful camera work; right up close with all the guts all over. Forget it; I can't have that anymore.» He put down the potato and squashed it flat on to his plate with his fork. «What should I do, Cullen? What can _you_ do?»

«I think I know how to fix it.»

«You do? Are you serious? What?»

I told him the story of the confrontation with the machines on the plains. I told him about the word I used to get us out of that fix, and how in the dreams I knew I could use that wrord one more time to work its magic somewhere. Whether that magic carried over to a restaurant in New York City was something else.

«You can try, right? Say the word and let's see what happens. Christ, I'm game for anything, Cullen! Anything to get them out of my head. Do it!»

I reached across the table and, with my flat hand against his forehead, said «Koukounaries.»

He closed his eyes and put his hand on top of mine. «Say it again.»

I did, but I was afraid to tell him that I felt no tingle or jive of magic go out of me, as it had on the day when the purple light had protected me.

Dear Mrs. James,

Happy Birthday! I wrote Mr. James a letter a while ago and asked him when your birthday was. Luckily I knew in time. I know this card is kind of dumb, but I had to ask one of the doctors to buy one for me, and this happened to be his taste. I should have known by the kind of neckties he wears that he wasn't the right man to ask! Ha, Ha! Anywray, happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, Mrs. James, happy birthday to you!

Very sincerely yours,

Alvin Williams

3

It was the first time we had seen the ocean since our arrival in Rondua. It was pink and the waves, when they broke, frothed yellow. They were uncomfortable colors – childhood dreams gone awry.

Pepsi stood by our «boat» – an upside-down laughing fedora hat the size of an old bathtub. It was cold by the water – even my shadow felt cold.

Weeks had passed since Kempinski, Ophir Zik and our battle against the dancing Warm. Felina, saved by Pepsi there, died quietly one night not long afterward. Mr. Tracy and Martio knew immediately and stood on either side of her body throughout the night. Only at dawn did the giant black dog wake us by baying so sadly and beautifully that it sounded like full notes played on an ancient cello.

We didn't have to bury her because the body vanished as soon as Pepsi placed the three Bones on her head, heart and left rear leg. In a few minutes only the Bones lay on the ground where she had slept for the last time.

Martio said the winds would carry the dog's song back to the wolf's family and they would know she was gone by the end of the day.

The four of us continued our walk to the sea and missed her gentle presence every day. A thought kept crossing my mind like an important bulletin from some deeper part of me: «There is no peace, only rest.» I had no idea what it meant.

Ophir Zik was apparently the City of the Dead for human beings here, but where did the other Ronduans go when they died? Intriguingly, that thought brought to mind another I had had as a little girl and completely forgotten. If there was life on other planets and it was completely different from life on earth, where did those things go when _they_ died? Or was heaven an Edward Hicks «Peaceable Kingdom» where Earthlings ate with gook-eyed Martians and Ronduans lay down with dangerous creatures from Alpha Centauri?

There was time to think about these things because we had such a long way to go, all of it on foot now. The lands and things we saw there were as strange as ever – Jackie Billows in the Conversation Bath, a circus where memories performed – but in many ways Felina's death had emptied all of us and made us inured to wonder. One twilight we saw a lone dark horse galloping straight down a railway track at an oncoming train. At the last possible instant, the horse leapt gracefully into the air and took flight. None of us said anything.

The Slung People led us through the Caves of Lem and the wooden mice I had sung about so many months before guided us carefully over the Bridge of Art. We walked through a forest festooned with unmoving lightning bugs which Pepsi insisted on calling fire bees. The next morning we woke at the bottom of a milewide crater that was black and phosphorescent green and steaming evilly everywhere.

Food was never a problem. We picked leos and sixhat wherever we found their blue groves, naletense by the side of rushing streams. It all tasted delicious, but I had forgotten long before to pay attention to what I put in my mouth. We ate when we had to, slept when exhaustion – like gravity – pulled us to the ground. We had to reach the Sea of Brynn before the moon's next eclipse, so _we_ moved with the speed of secret couriers carrying messages of war from a king to his important generals.

I tired easiest and was often the one to call a halt to our flight. And flight it was, because Pepsi had only one chance to gain the fourth Bone of the Moon, which was somewhere in the immeasurable pink waters of the Sea of Brynn. What further complicated matters was the fact that it could only be done at night in the midst of a full lunar eclipse, with the stars our only guide.

Several days from our destination, we came to a remote cross-roads. Lying in the center of it were eight dead rabbits, their bodies placed so as to form a macabre furred star. Without any prompting, Pepsi took the first Bone – the one he had carved into a walking stick – and carefully used it to rearrange their pattern into a rough circle. Mr. Tracy asked if it shouldn't be a square, but my boy only shook his head and continued the shaping.

Pepsi made most of the decisions for us now. At times I found it almost impossible to believe he was a child, much less my own. How shocked his father, Peter Graf, would have been to see all this! I wondered why _he_ had never appeared in Rondua, but then it struck me that I had made the ultimate decision to abort Pepsi. Peter was only a small-spirited, arrogant man who'd considered abortion another form of birth control. I had been the one to climb on to that hospital table and say, «Yes, I'm ready now.» I even remembered using those exact words.

Curiously, however, I still didn't believe abortion was wrong for other women. Our actions and responsibilities are our own: what later returns to either haunt or applaud us is neither possible to predict nor always completely understandable.

I approached the Laughing Hat boat at the same time as Pepsi climbed in. It was silent now; only the upside-down face was still smiling broadly. Inside it were several wooden boxes full of food and plastic bottles of what I took to be drinking water.

Pepsi was moving things around inside. There were two bench seats opposite each other. Although everything was in beautiful condition, with the wood polished to a shine, it looked like the inside of any rowboat you would take out for half an hour on Sunday on Central Park Lake. Only here the Sea of Brynn stretched to the horizon and I knew we would be out on it for at least one night, if not longer.

«There's the sail, Mom, but we can catch the current and use it for a while. It'll take us out even if we don't put the sail up.»