No true forest grew in this land as far as the eye could see. The trees were evenly spaced and evenly distributed to please some controlling aesthetic eye. Not a squirrel or a bird scampered or chirped. As to insects, one could but guess, since this was winter, a deep winter with little snow. Many minor plants were absent. This was a forest planted by a mind that had not seen a true forest. The entire landscape reeked of the White Man’s idea of the living world as a ‘park’; a desolate penned-in-not-wild-place where curiously specialized dogs are escorted by over-dressed people for approved defecation.

This place is in essence a disastrous devolution of the Sunset World you have just escaped. No wonder they come to other earlier worlds seeking the living. This world is a corpse in winter!

They crossed the Shenandoah on a bridge too narrow to accommodate a vehicle, scaled the heights on the other side and then stopped for a lunch of circus peanuts and bread. The object of their quest could be seen even more clearly now from their vantage atop the last ridgeline of the great spine of mountains behind them. Spread out beneath them for as far as the eye could see was a patchwork of parks and open grasslands. In the center of each open space was a white dome-like structure from which radiated three or four white-paved trails. The land was encompassed by the Potomac on the winter side, beyond which rose ridges of ice. In the distance, where Washington D.C. had been, beckoned to each of them their own particular desire.

Yes unseen hunter of us, I feel your gaze and would spoil your aim. I am no ordinary prophet. I am Thunder-Boy and I am coming to wreck your snare!

Eddie was nervous when he looked to the ice fields. “I seen this kind’a thing before yo. Jay-Bone en me spent months livin’ near glacial fields. This is an ice age Three-Rivers; this is what it looks like, only with no animals.”

Do you feel the hand of The Ender in this son?

They spent three more days travelling through the grim parklands, avoiding the white-domed structures. These places filled Three-Rivers with an uneasiness—almost a panic. He did not wish to admit his fear to his companions, so he derided the structures in various ways, and his companions did likewise as they continued on by them towards their goal.

T.T. called the structures ‘igloos’ after a type of snow house made by a tribe of ice hunters. Eddie called the structures ‘crack-houses’. Gerald, not to be outdone, derisively referred to these places as drunk-tanks. Three-Rivers called them soul-weirs, having to explain what a fish-weir was to his companions by likening it to the laced moonstone enclosures called cages in which DeathSong had fought as a Sunset ‘MMA’ warrior before coming to Mother Earth to steal Three-Rivers and Lady Doe- Eye. They all had a good time at the expense of the feared buildings and this helped them on their path.

On the third day Three-Rivers no longer saw their destination in the form of a campfire. What he now saw was a radiant tree of repose; The One Tree of Wisdom that WhiteSkyCanoe had proposed as a possible Fount of Beginning. Eddie still saw a Christmas Tree. T.T. still saw a church steeple. Gerald, however, now saw the sacred place where the Medicine-men of the Hennessy River made their incomparable beverage. The squirrel was becoming impatient, and Three-Rivers was beginning to fear for his companions…

Finally, on the fourth day, at about noon, one of the structures opened a panel at its base and a person emerged. This person walked swiftly along the path, and they stopped to allow her passage. The person was a young woman with white skin and red hair but the features of a person from Africa. The woman was dressed in a form-fitting suit and wore a headband that reminded them all of the band about Three-Rivers waist, except for the fact that the woman’s headband was obviously an external device, apparently attached to her head, as opposed to Three-River’s thunder-hoop which appeared to be within and a part of him. The woman passed them by as if she did not even sense their presence.

They all made sure to keep pace with this woman as soon as it became obvious that she was headed in the same direction as they. Their trek had brought them into the broadest open space in the bend of the Wild-Goose-River—or what was left of it; being more a drainage trench than a living river now. The object of their quest was now obviously before them on a raised piece of ground where some rich White Person would have built a house after rubbing out the Mother Earth People.

It was just before dusk of their fourth day in Furthest Sunset when they came to the base of the large manicured hill with its short grass and switch-back foot path. At this point they were beginning to hear a wonderful type of music that sounded something like Hoost’s classical music that set the manufactured man of Further Sunset so at ease. They continued to follow the tireless woman up the path, and then, all-of-a-sudden, they came upon it!

It was the most wonderful tree The Beginner had ever created! Its branches reached into the clouds. The birds that nested within it sang the songs of man in his many divergent languages. The squirrels that nested there were all painted blue for visions and gathered ears of maize that grew from this great maize-oak rather than the bitter acorns of common oaks…

…WhiteSkyCanoe was staving-in the bottom of their canoe as the Pushing River dragged them toward a roaring torrent of white water and rock that should not have been there, that should have been on some other river. The canoe finally caught on a snag, which gave his giant elderly father an opportunity to reach out and place Three-Rivers on the riverbank before being dragged himself toward the churning doom…

He woke drenched in sweat on the foul-smelling grass that was no-longer grass but rather an expanse of blackened wind-blown dust. Towering before him was not the One Tree, but a massive moonstone device wrought by the hands of man. The thing was nearly twice as tall as T.T. Red Bone, who was now singing, “swing low sweet chariot”.

Three-Rivers came to his feet as the woman discarded her mechanical headband and approached the metal tower, radiant with its many lights. The pointed tower intoned soullessly, “Welcome to the Mount Vernon Municipal Repository Relief Engine. Your request for uploading is being processed.”

The woman approached the machine in a trance. Even as she extended her pale delicate hand the machine bulged at the base, as if forming a lumpy hand of its own to greet her. The woman had a look of ecstasy in her eyes; the look of the insane that the Chief of Hawk-nosed Men had on his beady-eyed face when Mother seduced him in the space-trade.

The hand made contact with the machine and the woman was wreathed in beautiful radiant-blue light. She then turned black and crumbled to dust before them—and Mister Gerald Hicks was right behind her, “Sho brutha, I’ll ‘ave a double shot a dat, right out a da barrel…”

Three-Rivers rushed forward and grabbed his entranced totem with one hand and stuffed him inside of his pimp hat. The squirrel was vexed and struggled like a man trying to get out of a tangle of brush or a sack. But Three-Rivers no longer struggled with the physical world from within the confines of a bent child’s body. He was a spry youth, good at bagging squirrels, and he kept the squirrel contained in his hat with one nimble hand.

T.T. Redbone was now approaching the terrible machine with a deep swaying song belting from his lungs and hands outstretched as if to The Beginner. With one hand occupied bagging his squirrel Three-Rivers had no choice but to strike the giant between the eyes with the sparkling head of his pimp-cane, which, since their transit and his transformation, was made of the actual clear imperishable stone called a diamond, and not its cheap man-made likeness.

He struck with surprising force and the giant fell back like a creaking tree as blood spurted from his forehead. Eddie had stepped past him and was nearly touching the malevolent machine when Three-Rivers spun like a warrior with a tomahawk and slashed into the back of his friend’s knee, which caused Eddie to fall face-first into the fluttering flaky remains of the woman. Three-Rivers himself now found himself ankle-deep in the powdered remnants of countless people—the lightning flashed behind his mind’s eye and he was drawn forth from his body, spiraling outward as the nine digits of his number until he became a dove; not a white dove of morning, but the Perfect Black Dove of Night who nests within the eternal void of Space-Time…

…He flew about the Midnight Tree shooing away the three disoriented souls who sought its shade against the long night to come, as if shade was a thing that brought comfort to one stranded in a nighted world. He drove them with beating wings toward the fading rays of the sun, away from the faint trickle of a once mighty river. They staggered ahead reluctantly on weary legs, dragging their material things as if these possessions alone afforded them a sane grasp on the insanity of life. As he flogged them with his black wing-feathers he heard a caw above. When he looked above the stones in his stomach sank. He was being dived upon by a demon-eyed raven, descending from its perch atop the Midnight Tree. He knew he was lost; could never develop the speed necessary to out-fly this terror. He busied himself instead with the task of shooing away the imperiled souls in his charge—then it struck; not claws and beak in his back, but the shockwave of an unstoppable impact…

The buffet of massive wings had driven him nearly to ground. But he recovered, his friends clutching weakly to his plumed back. He risked a look above as he rose on a fresh breeze and saw him there; the Bald Eagle of Beginning, flying off with a dying Midnight Crow clutched in his talons…

…He woke to the beating of a huge heart. The taste of vomit was in his mouth. He rocked as if he floated on an ocean. He then heard a plaintive moan, and a familiar voice, “Shoot yo, I can’ breathe unda dis big corn-fed somebody! T.T. you killin’ a brutha son!”

He opened his eyes and realized that he was laying on the chest of T.T. Redbone, who was fast asleep on a grassy rise. The sun was falling weakly behind the distant mountains. Pinned underneath of T.T.’s large head and left arm was Eddie, struggling to free himself. Inside of Three-River’s tuxedo vest there was movement, the movement of a squirrel, then its voice, “’Ey boy, I didn’ appreciate dat bit a ass-whoopin’ dare. You gettin’ kine’a ‘ard on a brutha who jus’ wanna drink. Ad lease led me snort a line—jus’ a lille line…”

He heard a hum behind him as T.T. coughed and began to wake. Behind them intoned the soulless voice that seemed to be composed of pure energy, “Welcome to the Mount Vernon Municipal Repository Relief Engine. May we process your request?”

The irreverent Sunset terms burst from his lips unbidden, and perhaps regretted, but not inappropriately, “Hell no! T.T. get your big ass up and move downhill—nobody look back. Gerald I’ll beat yo hairy ass with my pimp-cane if you sass me boy! Eddie, just tuck and roll downhill —shit’s gettin’ critical up in here son…”

At some future place, in some past time, he might choose to tell this part of the story. However, Thunder-Boy’s dialogue would first undergo some polishing, merely a convention of the tale-teller’s art, so-to-speak.