“You talk to yourself a lot, don’t you?” said Luna.
Williams looked at her and finally smiled
in spite of himself. “Or it just may be that he’s really talking to me, and you
just can’t hear it.” He tweaked her nose. “Yet. Either way, you need to eat
something and get some sleep. We all do. We’ve got a big day ahead of us
tomorrow.”
“Why a big day?”
“Ank, camping gear,” he said, and the dinosaur
folded his front legs with a groan. “Because we’re going to head out for Barley’s
in the morning.” He loosed his bedroll from the supplies strapped to Ank’s back
and tossed it to her. “The place where the sounds on your radio come from. We’ve—we’re searching for something. A place we call
Tanelorn. And we think that might be it.”
“Tanelorn,” she repeated. “What’s that?”
Williams rested his arms on the bundles of
supplies, thinking about it. “I don’t know, exactly. I reckon it’s just a place
someone feels drawn to … even if they don’t know why. A place where the homeless can find a home, maybe.” He looked at the lights in the sky, the Alien
Borealis, as Ank called it, and wondered. “But it may be that it’s something
else—a kind of Omega Point. A place where all the colors of the spectrum meet,
like a prism. And become focused into a single, burning light. Maybe that’s
what people mean when they talk about the power and the glory.” He tugged on a
rope, releasing a waterfall of pots and pans. “Meh. It’s just something to keep
us going.”
“Like a magnifying glass,” she said, ignoring his last statement.
He paused, thinking
about it. “Like a magnifying glass,” he agreed. Then he added, “Now, what’ll it be? Beans or beans?”
