Chapter 19

I woke up feeling light-headed and overly warm. The sun was close to the horizon; I hoped it was sunrise tomorrow and not sunset today. Sleeping was difficult enough without messing up the timing of it.

The hammock I lay in was a comfortable net of goat-leather strips. I wriggled slightly, getting the sling to swing and watching the way the red and orange dapple of sunlight rippled through the cracks and gaps in the cabin.

Moments of complete peace are rare, so I gave this one my complete attention. I could go back to sleep. Really get some rest. Sleep until it was all over, let someone else do the work and wake up to read about it in the papers. Like everyone else, I would be concerned about it for half an hour until the next news story took over the collective consciousness of the world.

Goat emerged, shuffling with the dim-witted semi-conscious­ness of the freshly woken. He paused in an errant beam of sunlight, scratching himself before stretching mightily and yawning. He turned, arms raised above his head, and we made eye contact.

A moment passed during which I kept my gaze locked on his face.

“Meep!” Goat yelped, and scrambled up the rigging towards the orchard.

“Morning, Pudding,” Drakeforth announced with unusual cheer.

“Good,” I replied and swung the pendulum of the hammock until I reached escape velocity and landed on my feet.

“A near perfect dismount,” Drakeforth said.

“It is morning isn’t it? I slept through the night?”

“Yes. Tea?” Drakeforth raised a chipped mug with a faded cartoon character on it.

“Not after last time,” I frowned.

“Regular tea. A blend of some rather stale Oolong and a sprinkle of Ashma.”

“Thank you.”

“There would have been more Ashma, but it was mouldy.”

“You had me at regular tea.”

Drakeforth handed me the cup; the tea was hot and refreshing. I drank it and tried not to think about watering persimmons. “Do you think Goat has a toilet?” I asked.

Goat’s bathroom had seen less water than most Pathian plumbing. He had emerged fully dressed by the time I returned and we let Drakeforth do the talking as we occupied ourselves with not looking at each other.

“I have been going through your charts and…notes,” Drake­forth said. He lifted a pile of screwed-up scraps of paper on to the table. “The good news is that you have been to many places that may have been the site of The Tree, but actually aren’t. At least, they weren’t when you went there.”

“Tree?” Goat asked, and gnawed on a strip of goat jerky.

Drakeforth peeled a crumpled egg of paper. “There is a theory that The Tree has quantum properties. This makes actually finding the drumming thing almost impossible.”

“What quantum properties?” I asked.

“Like any decent sub-atomic particle, we can either know where the Tree is or how fast it is travelling.”

“Oh, that quantum property,” I said. “Are you sure that is why no one has ever found it? Don’t things have to be, well, sub-atomic to have quantum properties?”

“Of course,” Drakeforth said. “What no one considers is that if you bring enough sub-atomic particles together they can make up quite a large piece of reality.”

“All of it, I should think,” I said.

“Precisely. The trick is bringing all that quantum potential with you. Living Oak manages that up to a scale of one tree.”

Drakeforth rarely spoke with such passion about anything he wasn’t angry about. I finished my tea and sniffed a piece of goat jerky before putting it back on the plate.

“How do we find The Tree, if we can only know where it has been?” I asked.

“Or how fast it is travelling,” Drakeforth replied.

“Either way, it makes finding it impossible.”

“There is a way.” Drakeforth collected Goat’s bark manuscript and unrolled it across the breakfast table. “You are tuned into the channels of interconnected empathic energy.”

“Okay.”

“So we use you to confirm The Tree’s current position and its momen­tum.”

“Have you considered that maybe The Tree doesn’t want to be found?”

“That will be the second question we can ask it,” Drakeforth said.

“The first being…?”

“The whereabouts of Professor Bombilate, of course.”

I almost asked who Professor Bombilate was, and then I remembered and felt guilty about the lapse.

“Of course. We should get started then.”

“Goat!” Drakeforth barked. Goat flailed wildly and fell back off his stool.

“Raise the mainsail, weigh the anchor, bilge the pumps! We have places to go and trees to see!”

“Tree!” Goat yelled from the floor, a fist pumping the air in triumph before he rolled to his feet. Goat leapt into the rigging and then slid down a rope to the cabin deck. We watched as he threw himself around the flying ship. Tugging on goat-hide straps, turning wooden pegs and pulling on levers. The ship continued to meander through the air at the same sedate pace.

“Well…” I said after a few minutes of watching a distant sand dune keeping its distance. “This is exciting.”

“Do you feel anything?” Drakeforth asked.

“Too much, too often,” I replied. “It’s exhausting.”

“Specifically, are you feeling any empathic energy flows in a particular direction, either converging on or coming from the tree that Goat is obsessed with finding?”

I took a deep breath. On the exhale, my breath misted as if I was somewhere cold. It also sparkled as if I was in a blizzard of glitter.

“Pudding?” Drakeforth’s voice came from a great distance. I blinked, my eyelids crashing down with the weight and gravity of neutron stars.

“Yes…” I whispered down a tunnel of swirling light. The warm glow of empathic energy sparked in a living network that pulsed with an infinity of synchronised heartbeats.

“It’s kinda cool,” I murmured. My words sparkled, sending glowing snowflakes of energy spinning into each other, where they burst into shards.

“Follow the energy to its source,” Drakeforth said.

Empathic energy funnelled into a whirlpool that stretched to infinity. I let my consciousness tip forward and I plunged into the vortex. As everything accelerated, the blur of my velocity knitted the sparks together with faint lines that I told myself were light.

A constellation took shape as I plummeted down the seemingly endless tunnel. Like people who see the face of Arthur in their burnt toast, I comprehended the shapes by making them familiar. “I wondered where you got to.”

The woman with dark hair smiled at me in that mysterious way that no one really can.

“You’re everywhere,” I said. “You show up and interfere, or stop me doing something, and then you disappear again. I have no idea if you are trying to ruin my life or save it. Your only redeeming quality is that you don’t have Drakeforth’s sarcasm.”

The woman raised a pale, glowing finger to her cold, sparkling lips and silently shushed me as I crashed through her face. Her image shattered into stars, and the stars broke.

In a place of moving light, refracted, reflected, imprismed, and scattered, I found The Tree.

“No wonder no one has ever found you,” I said to The Tree. “You probably don’t exist.”

Energy coursed in lines from all directions. It flowed up the trunk to spread among the endless branches and leaves, spilling out into everything in countless streams.

“Not the source, a conduit,” I said. “Energy is neither created nor destroyed, just endlessly cycling.”

I could have stayed there forever. I may have already. Rising from the stream of consciousness only required me to open my eyes.

“What did you find?” Drakeforth asked.

“You don’t know?”

“Pudding, I’m not Pathian-trading with you. There is too much at stake.”

“Arthur doesn’t know something?” I was amused but unsurpr­ised.

“Arthur knows all. So humour us by telling me what you found.”

“The Tree. It’s not what you think. There is no plant growing in some hidden desert oasis. The Tree is everywhere. Connected to everything.”

“Now you understand,” Drakeforth said.

“Yes, though I don’t think you do.”

“I find it better not to,” Drakeforth replied.

I cleared my mind with a sigh. “You could have told me that before!” I punched Drakeforth in the arm.

“I find it is better to learn things at your own pace,” Drakeforth said. “That way, you can make your own mistakes.”

“And learn from them,” I replied.

“Mostly it stops you blaming anyone else.”

“How does this help Goat? Or us, for that matter?”

“You found the answer when you went, wherever it was you disappeared to.”

I frowned, “Uhm, no I’m quite sure I said I didn’t find The Tree.”

“You found it. You just don’t know where it is going,” Drake­forth said.

“Because we can either know where it is, or where it is going?”

“We know where it is going,” Drakeforth replied.

I thought for a moment. “Everywhere…?”