BY NOW LEVIATHAN HAD SUFFICIENTLY calmed that the beast’s boredom entered Foom like an inner packing of wet sand.
How big are you underneath all this encrustation really? Probably the size of a carp. Growing up in Michigan then moving to Ohio, Foom had caught his share of carp. Most people hated carp as being bottom-feeding garbage fish, and they were right. Foom couldn’t stand the taste of the things. But they also put up a helluva fight, and Foom hoped the similiarity between them and the aquatic land mass he sat on ended before that.
The comm beeped softly. “Bubba.” (He’d always loved Desiree’s voice.) “Milo and Ramses are on their way back. Just crossed the Blank. You want to wait for ‘em?”
Foom roused immediately. “No. Gimme a few to sharpen my knives. I’m going in.”
It was like stepping off an escalator into a hurricane with winds strong enough to reduce reality to atoms. He hoped he didn’t scream. He hoped out there Desiree wasn’t listening to him going out of his mind. Everything regarding thought was an illusion, he knew that for a fact. No matter how long this thing had lived, no matter how much it had seen or caused, it was not the universe. It was not god. It was a fish, an impossibly, ridiculously big fish. Constrained by the same world as Foom. Subject to hungers and boredom and dreams.
You could alter its transmissions, Milo had told Foom, but that wasn’t the same as controlling the message.
Foom drew his consciousness into as tight a ball as he could manage. He needed time, time to find something that he and Leviathan could share before Leviathan’s memories obliterated this tiny pea in its mindstream, a direction in which Foom’s consciousness could ride with a current as opposed to against it.
He found it in blue. Leviathan, after billions of years of asexual reproduction and genetic memories where it lived as a continuum beneath the deepest blankets of the earth, feeding between hibernations now and then on singularities but most often through the osmosis of nutrients from the ecosystem living on its body, after stretches in darkness long enough to see the fanciful dreams that were civilizations rise and fall—Leviathan enjoyed the sky. The blue forever of it, the quietude. Clouds didn’t unconsciously ask to share Leviathan’s dreams, and the sun in the sky was like the creature’s twin cast off from it. Blue tasted like polar ice, breath, and thoughts at the same time.
Blue was Foom’s favorite color. Sky blue. He rode the pull of blue on their minds like scattered ball bearings toward an inescapable magnet.
Blue was sanity. Blue was control. It was memories of spring and apple orchards along lonely roads; memories of the scarf Asme had around her dreads the first time he ever saw her, its fabric the precise light shade of blue he’d gravitated to ever since his third birthday; it was the icy shock of his own eyes in a mirror the first time he’d ever read another mind, his father’s, an unsettling experience in the extreme.
It was seeing the sky suddenly burst full across the world as though it hoped to hug the sea, the beautiful forever of it reminiscent of the way Foom’s heart constricted thinking of his love for Asme; in this Foom found voice to communicate in a voice Leviathan hadn’t heard in eons: its own.
*may i speak?* he broadcast.
*you may.*
*there is nothing they have that you need.*
*this world is mine?*
*yes.*
*then i need this world.*
This was not a matter of finesse or gentle actions. Foom’s tiny Pequod grew pincers as reins, lodged itself, and forceably pulled, knowing how laughable the vision of a mite trying to direct a rhino was but ignoring that for now. Leviathan’s mind was a land of dreams, for what else did it have to do? He pulled hard in the direction of Atlantis, trying to feel the bulk of the rhino turn under him, but the beast was stone.
*go home, Leviathan. you’re drunk, drunk off the thoughts of others, off their false directives.*
*i am the alpha and the omega…*
*we haven’t been that for a long time.* He pulled again, digging into tough flanks. If he could forge bridges of intent with its other brains, Leviathan would believe it had come to its own decision; its bulk would move and, by the Deities Three, Bubba Foom would be like unto a god.
That last part troubled him just a nibble. Gods, however, easily ignored nibbles.
*their world is intrusive and incessant* Leviathan pointed out.
*we’re the source of their aspirations. we are the creators.* But we’re behind the curtain, Foom realized. *behind the curtain!*
Leviathan’s mind slowed, its brains aligning toward solidarity. *i once dreamt lizards into dragons. the dragons went away. i dreamt monkeys into people. they need to go away.*
*we never should have awakened you.*
*no.*
*we never should have manipulated you.*
*agreed.*
*we are unfit to be graced by you.*
*you are.*
*go home.* Foom tugged again, every erg of conscious energy strained and bulging.
*i know your mind.* said the beast. *i gave you the purest color blue.*
Foom’s grip on the reins slipped. *you?*
*i gave him visions of god* meaning Fruehoff; *her, realities.* Fiona. *you, the limitless blue.*
*i am the alpha and omega.*
*there is nothing you cannot do.*
*except be you.*
*i am the alpha and the omega* Leviathan communicated.
Foom felt an ever so tiny nudge of movement.
*then you can afford to wait till we move out of the neighborhood before stretching out again* Foom sent. *for now, however, let this dream be over. we will wake you no more.*
Foom felt a definite tug on his body and ignored it, although there was the feeling of suddenly sailing through air. His mind, however, splintered outward to Leviathan’s other brains, the mite giving orders, the mite taking charge. There was a huge cave under a mountain in a land through a dimensional drift, deep, deep, where the earth was still primitive and thus still new. It was home. Safe, necessary home. A place where dreaming created the world.
Leviathan stirred and very slowly swam toward the Blank, ignoring the whales and humans darting about it retrieving bombs.
Milo and Ramses saw it coming and gave it a wide berth. It felt strange seeing Leviathan swimming near the surface where the sun was just beginning to turn the ocean orange but the sky held to its lovely blue.
They continued at due speed for Kichi.
The Atlantic was getting larger and larger to them the more they traveled it, but that was neither here nor there. Their father and compatriots were on the water and that was destination enough. Even Death-mael had a destination; Kichi had not forgotten the adventure-sick animal.
Milo rendezvoused and assessed injuries, damage, and victories. “There’s a dragoon out there thinking it’s going to Florida,” said Kichi. “He’s likely tired and surface bound.” Physically, outside of aches from being yanked off Leviathan, Bubba Foom seemed fine. Mentally wouldn’t show till he was reunited with his family. Psychically, not till Foom relented to show. The tall man was alone, below deck, at his request. “Maseef and the whales will fan out,” Kichi continued. “Y’all find the dragoon. Thank it. Send it home. The clones stay with me.”
“Sir?” said Milo.
Eight Jetstreams, tired, bedraggled, water-logged, mourning, spread across the deck like random dolls. They needed to be talked to. “Hurry up, Milo. We’ll meet you at Shig’s.”
Kichi Malat’s boat went one way, Milo’s the other.
Death-mael, feeling the presence of the whales and seeing the ship bearing for him, simply stopped swimming and thought Damn.