Kitman Versus The Squirrels

A novel. With some squirrels in.

<< Chapter 26 >>

In Which We Do What Needs To Be Done.

"So," said Kitman. "How are we going to handle this?"

"Let's just go do it," I said. "No point in dawdling."

"Gotcha." He raised his vaxillator, worked the bookmark thumbwheel, and pressed the Go button.

 

•

 

"What are you doing back already?" demanded a Kathleen, after muting the television.

"Erm," said Kitman, squinting at his screen, "apparently I hit the wrong bookmark. Thumbwheel's got some dirt in it. And never mind us, why haven't you left yet?"

"We did," said I₂. "But there was no sign of Kuan Kuo, and even his Harley was gone, so we came back. Except for Robin. He's baking a cake."

"Good man," said Kitman, adjusting his bookmark.

"So, have you built the reifier yet?" said Kitman₂.

"No, it's impossible," said Kitman. "We're about to try something so crazy it just might work."

"Can we watch the debacle?" said I₂.

"I beg your pardon?" said Kitman.

"Why not?" said Kitman₂. "I've got no solutions you don't. Kuan Kuo's missing. We have nothing better to do."

"Actually," said Kathleen, "Pinky and the Brain is about to come on."

"Tape it!" said I₂. "I want to see the endgame, anyway."

"Well, all right," said Kathleen. "Let me get my water bottle first. Don't worry," she added to me, "I paid for it myself."

 

So the living room of Kitman's house was fairly crowded, as it turned out.

The broad windows provided an excellent view of the scene in the Chaos Gap as the Id-squirrel put his plan in motion.

"Is that a maple tree?" said Kathleen, as the maple in question rose smoothly out of the ground without leaving a visible hole behind.

"Yes, but not a normal one," said Kitman.

"I sort of guessed...dear me."

Embraced in the roots of the maple was something that could be described as having the same relationship to a Tesla globe as a Tesla globe has to a light bulb, which is to say it could be described only by analogy. It was making a sound like an orchestra tuning up, run through a flanger and a phaser and a ring modulator and a few other things.

"That's a negative entropy nexus," said Kitman.

"Fascinating," said Kitman₂, touching his hair. "I could swear I just felt some dandruff reattach itself to my scalp. A pleasant yet strangely disgusting sensation. I must get one when all this is over."

"Those fellows there," continued Kitman, pointing at the green squirrel and blue squirrels running around beneath it all in a frenzy, "were going to try to reconstitute the World Tree out of the houses it was built from, but thanks to us the red squirrel has hijacked their plans."

"Thanks to you?" said Kathleen.

"Well, yes, all water under the bridge now," said Kitman.

"What's he doing instead?"

As if in answer, the glowing plasma effect in the roots of the maple tree expanded, twisting into a vortex that abruptly streamed up and over the cliff face that Kitman and I had stood on — heading, I surmised, straight for the squirrel-hole that we had been brought through.

Granted, it was an answer that only I and Kitman understood — or only I, because Kitman had suddenly gone running off into the kitchen, leaving me to carry on.

"Basically," said I, "the red squirrel is projecting that negative entropy field into a squirrel-wormhole you can't see. It leads into the tree lab, which happens to be built in a rather stunted World Tree that grew from the Goddess Nut which he stole, buried and temporarily lost. He's hoping to revert it into the Goddess Nut, which he intends to eat. I suppose it'll give him godlike powers."

"Oh," said Kathleen.

"So," I said, after a decent interval, "is this stranger than what happened at that music camp?"

"No," said Kathleen.

"Rats," I said. "Hey, Kitman, you're missing the end of the universe!"

"Coming!" he yelled. I could hear clanking noises coming from the kitchen.

"So," said Kathleen, "what's the solution to this problem?"

And there was nothing to do but tell her.

I reached into my pocket, and pulled out the necklace.

I showed it to her.

"Yes...?" she said, examining the necklace dubiously. A few more grains of silver glitter fell off the pendant.

"I made this for you."

"Did you?"

"Arts-and-crafts program, summer after third grade."

"...Oh," she said.

"I never had the courage to give it to you, and it's been in a drawer in my bedroom ever since."

"Well, this is your last chance, I suppose," she said.

"I'm not going to," I said.

"What?"

Kitman came running back even faster than he had left. "Here," he said. "You'll need this. Fresh from the kitchen junk drawer." He held out a large grubby silvery gray object consisting of a shallow oval bowl connected to a flattened rod.

"It is thematically appropriate, isn't it?" I said. "Tell everyone what's going on, will you?"

 

•

 

I jumped off the porch, since the stairs had been left behind, and ran. Without a metasquirrel to guide me, it wasn't an easy trip.

Not quite equidistant from all three houses was a stable patch of ground; this is what I was aiming for, and I ran through...waves of momentary imposed amnesia, bits of competing histories where I had never been and never would be where I was.

Only momentum carried me through them.

If I had stopped, who knows who I would have ended up being?

I reached the solid bare earth, and got down on my knees.

 

"That pendant," explained Kitman, "we are reasonably sure, is the new Goddess Nut."

 

I and started digging at the soft, warm earth with the Kitman family spoon. I had a pleasant feeling of deja vu.

 

"If it gets planted here, we are again reasonably sure, the original, pre-theft state of affairs will be restored, more or less."

 

I straightened up and pulled the necklace from my pants pocket; twisted the pendant off it. The last of the glitter fell away under the pressure from my hand, but the acorn pendant gleamed anyway, shining in the light of the negative entropy nexus.

 

"More or less?" said Kathleen.

"Quite possibly we'll go back to the way things were right up until June," said Kitman. "That's probably the World Tree's intent. Granted, you'd need to be a tree psychologist to know for sure."

 

I dropped the acorn in the hole, and scraped the small pile of dirt I had dug over it. I patted the dirt down loosely with my hands, stood up and backed away.

The plasmatic vortex continued to blast into the distance.

The small pile of dirt continued to sit where I had put it.

I waited. Nothing changed, except that the green and blue squirrels finally noticed that I was there.

They scampered toward me. I turned back to Kitman's house; everyone was now on the porch. I raised my arms in the universal gesture of what-now?

The squirrels skittered to a halt at the filled-in hole.

"Back off, you," I said, and kicked at them with my shoe...

...and there was a thunderous snap.

It came from beyond the cliff.

I looked over — just as a line of streaming vortex energy came flying from behind me and smacked straight into the nexus it had originally come from.

"The Chaos Gap is finite but unbounded," said Kitman, who had just come running up. "This should be interesting."

"Isn't it dangerous out here?" I said.

"Terribly," said Kathleen.

The stream of energy, if that was what it was, intensified. I didn't like it.

"What happened?" I said. "Did I do that?"

"My evil brother goofed," said a small voice.

I looked down. It was the blue squirrel speaking.

"I can't imagine why he didn't realize that a negative entropy field would cause the tunnel to collapse," he said, pulling a small pince-nez from somewhere, polishing it, and placing it on the spot where the bridge of his nose would be if he had one. "Tunneling being an entropic process."

"Because he's an idiot," said the green squirrel, adjusting his red bow tie.

"Oh, yes, of course."

Kitman and Kitman₂ said "And when the stream hit the its own point of origin—"

"Classic feedback loop," concluded the blue squirrel. The stream over our heads was expanding, a river of ever-intensifying silver. "That's the problem with negative entropy generators," he added. "They just don't know when enough is enough."

"What's the prognosis?" said Kitman.

"What do you think will happen?" said the squirrel.

"I think it'll ground itself in chaos."

"Spot on."

"And then what?"

There was a flash...

...total blackness...

...and then nothing much.

 

"Chaos and order have cancelled each other out," said someone. "Only the Void and you remain."

It was Kuan Kuo.

"Yeah," said Kitman, from somewhere in an oily grey blankness. "That's about what I'd expect. Nice that you could make it in time for the end, by the way."

"Time is of the essence," said Kuan Kuo. "But what is the Essence? Figure that out, smartypants, and get back to me."

There was a long pause while Kitman did not figure out what the Essence was.

"So," said I. "Are you going to fix this mess?"

"Me?" said Kuan Kuo. "I waive that honor."

There was another long pause, which ended when someone, presumably Kuan Kuo, poked me in the waist.

"Well?" said Kuan Kuo.

"What?" I said.

"Give it the old community college try, expediently chosen one. I think you know the precedented form of injunction."

"What?" I said.

"Lumos," said someone in a stage whisper.

"Close, but no," said Kuan Kuo. "—Go ahead, it won't hurt to try."

I coughed.

"Uh, let there," I said, "uh, let there be light."

I heard Kathleen murmur something about Bob Newhart not being her idea of God.

Nonetheless...

The oily greyness flickered like a indecisive fluorescent light.

What it revealed was: very little.

Everything was foggy, and only a small circle of bare ground was visible. I could see Kuan Kuo, myself and Kathleen, but everyone else had been reduced to scattered pillars of shadow.

"Not great," said Kuan Kuo. "In the beginning, God created the universe. It became quite popular and spawned a number of shoddy imitations. Case in point. But for a first try — not great. Still, you should finish what you started."

"Finish? Finish how?"

Kuan Kuo pointed down at the little pile of disturbed earth.

"Hah?"

"Oh, for goodness sake," said Kathleen. "Isn't it obvious?"

She extended her hand to me.

It was holding a bottle.

"Oh," I said.

"Well, feel free," I added.

"Nope, not me, pal," she said, and pushed the bottle into my hands. "You do the honors."

I unscrewed the cap, and gently poured the contents onto the pile of dirt, and waited...

 

•

 

And there was light, and we saw the light, and it was sunshine.

For a moment that was all there was, but then, as though through the process of logical deduction, there was a sun to provide it, large and yellow; and finally and a landcape for it to illuminate: green, grassy, verdant, almost like a golf course except for the presence of three houses, one maple tree lying on its side — and a seedling, poking up out of the grass.

"Huzzah!" said the squirrels, who linked arms and began dancing.

Kuan Kuo examined the new Chaos Gap with mild approval. "Very nice," he said. "Could use a water feature."

A fountain did not spring up out of the ground, but a hatch opened on the maple tree, and a small, dejected and coincidentally sopping wet red squirrel crawled out of it.

"Suddenly I was ruined and homeless," said Noel.

"How very nearly ironic," said Kuan Kuo cheerfully, and pointed his fly-whisk at the small and dejected, who was trying to sneak off unnoticed.

"Accio vermin!"

 

•

 

"Now, really," said Kitman, peeling a banana in his kitchen, "how much of that whole business was just you messing with our heads?"

"Beg pardon?" said Kuan Kuo, taking up a lotus position in midair. "I have little interest in messing with heads, yours or otherwise."

"You didn't say no interest..."

"Kuan Kuo assures you: whole business was a ghastly reality. Had not implantation and watering of acorn occurred at propitious time, disaster would have ensued."

"You wouldn't have done anything?" said Kitman.

"Kuan Kuo lacks the luxury of holding out for perfect outcomes," said the saffron-robed duck, pulling a cup of tea out of his sleeve. "Were this not teatime, which discovers all things, he wouldn't be filling you in on things you strictly need not know."

"Please," said Kathleen. "Explain to my brother."

"Okay," said Kuan Kuo. "Regardez!" He waved his free hand at a glowing tree that was, I noticed, floating innocently in the air next to him. "World Tree. Rooted in Chaos Gap (not shown) — grows best in slightly unstable ground. My side too mushy, your side too hard. Oops, hold on, forgot to provide scale."

A blue fleck, too small to be a dot, appeared next to the tree.

"Planet Earth," said Kuan Kuo. "To continue —

"Everything you have worked out for yourself is substantially correct. Goddess Nut stolen, planted in what became your back yard; Kuan Kuo is asked to look into matter..."

We all gave him the eyebrow raised and fixed.

"Not perfect, you know," he said. "Stunted new World Tree strives to penetrate into Chaos Gap, as is its nature. Pursues course comparable to...getting someone out of a tree with a fishing rod. Sends through a thread, in the form of Nash Mider's mind; pulls back a string, in the form of Nash Mider's dream-self, which pulls through —" he held up a familiar keychain with a round cagelike fob — "this stable, captured ontological infarct; pushes through a rope, in form of you and your vaxillator — and finally you pull it back where it belongs."

"But what about the houses?" demanded Kitman. "Who built them? Who processed the World Tree into lumber? How did they end up installed where they were?"

Kuan Kuo blinked at him mildly. "Interesting unresolved question. Perhaps nice young people will make effort and discover answer themselves before school starts?"

"Oh, I hope not," said Kitman.

"Um," said Kathleen₂.

"What?" said Kitman.

"Well," she said, "I spent a certain amount of time in the bathroom of the third house, the one that was always in the Chaos Gap..."

"Yes?"

"Someone had left a magazine in there for me to read."

We all stared at her.

"It was an issue of Physical Review Letters," she said. "Section D. It had an address label on it."

Kitman, with eyes wide, pointed at himself.

She nodded slowly.

"Good grief," said Kitman. "I'm going to have to invent time travel. I'd better get started right away. Or is that strictly necessary?"

"What about the negative entropy nexus?" said I.

"Eh," said Kuan Kuo. "Things are weird on my side of the Borderline. Squirrels probably it found in government warehouse or something. Ask them when they finish pushing your house back into place. Which shouldn't be long now," he added, looking out the kitchen window at the blackness outside.

Kitman finished his banana. "So will our world be...back to the way it was?"

"Substantially. Tree in you back yard is now World Tree branch office rather than World Tree proper, but sufficient to the needs are the days thereof."

"What about our duplicates?" said I.

"Where are our duplicates?" said Kitman, suddenly looking around.

"Oh, you finally noticed," said Kathleen₂. "Have you ever noticed that despite your brilliance you can be a bit dim?"

I hadn't noticed either, which disturbed me. Had one of those passing history ripples stuck? But if one had, why would I remember them?

"Where are they?" said Kitman again. "Did they cease to exist?"

"Silly boy," said Kuan Kuo. "Nothing ever ceases to exist."

"You can have a pretty good life even though you're only imaginary," said Kathleen₂. "Trust me."

"Indeed!" said Kuan Kuo, waving his fly-whisk.

The room suddenly had one fewer person in it.

Strangely, it did not feel any less full of life.

"Where did she go?" said I. "Where did they go?"

Kuan Kuo tapped me on the forehead.

"Home, silly," said Kuan Kuo.

 

•

 

And the rest, as they say, is epilogue.