“Well?” said Jerry, suddenly at Martin’s side. “You digging this?”

Martin was so overwhelmed he could barely find his voice. “I can’t . . . I can’t fathom that one man’s mind came up with all . . . all this!”

“There was a thousand times this much before Gash came alive—a thousand-thousand times this. What you’re seeing here are the scraps, the broken bits, the damaged goods.”

“They’re . . . amazing.” Until this moment, Martin Tyler had never been in the physical presence of anyone or anything that he would have called miraculous; now, with his unblinking gaze locked on the sights before him, he thought without any cheap sentiment that he might be seeing a glimpse of Heaven as he’d imagined it to be as a child.

“You’re not that far off the mark,” said Jerry. “Thinking that.”

“How did you know what I was—?”

“I told you, Gash is sleeping for the moment. We’ve—Bob and I—we’ve got a little time and a little more power than we’d have otherwise.”

Everything seemed to be spinning, rising, expanding; the calliope music growing faster, happier, the singing more joyous: the sound of sweet summer laughter released from a jar.

“So it’s not going to last, is it?” asked Martin.

“Nothing much does, in the end—but that doesn’t mean it has no value, no consequence.”

The musicians and performers began to move into place; for what, Martin didn’t know and couldn’t possibly guess . . . but he sure as hell wasn’t going to miss it. “Earlier today, when you told me how you managed to escape, how Bob ‘. . . called on some superhuman reserve of will’ that you couldn’t comprehend . . . you lied to me, didn’t you?” “‘Lied’ is such an ugly term,” said Jerry. “Let’s just say that I rearranged the facts to form a more palatable truth.” “You lied.” Jerry shrugged. “I lied.”

Martin looked at him. “What are the Onlookers?”

Jerry took off his mask and smiled. “That is not the question I was expecting.”

“Happy to disappoint you. Well?”

“They are the watchers through whose eyes God witnesses what we create and what we destroy. I suppose a simpler way to put it is, they’re God’s art critics, and humankind is the work in progress. Doesn’t do to underwrite an artist who never keeps trying to expand his or her creative horizons. Os Anjos de Percepção; Die Engel der Wahrnehmung; Angely Vospriyatiya; Los Ángeles de Percepción—” “The Angels of Perception.” “Retained a little Spanish from high school, I see.” Martin looked back out at the circus. “Is Bob human?” “More or less.”

“Oh, that clears things right up, thanks.”

“I’m trying to explain this in the simplest terms possible, work with me, okay? And stop worrying that you’re living in your own private Idaho, all right?” “Okay.” Below, the bacchanal of performers swirled: One thing became many: a white rhino, grains of sand. Many things became one: an antelope herd, an emerald wheel.

“Have you ever read Atlas Shrugged?” asked Jerry.

“Yeah. It got a little wordy, but I liked it.”

“What if—and this may require a great leap of faith and imagination for someone of your endearing but nonetheless limited capabilities—what if it were possible to simply will the world to stop spinning on its axis? Only you would have the power to do it, and no one else could notice until you said so.”

“The planet would go hurtling into the sun and we’d all be vapor in a millisecond.”

“That is one cheery outlook you’re walking around with. No, it would not go hurtling into the sun, not if you didn’t want it to. Try getting into the spirit of this, it’ll go faster.”

“All right, fine—I can stop the world on its axis and prevent it from going into the sun and no one knows this but me. Then what?”

“The real world goes on, oblivious to this wonder you’ve performed, so . . . you perform another. You go into Fountainhead mode and do a Howard Roarke, build the most astonishing building, a fantastic piece of architecture that hasn’t been seen since the Tower of Babel, then you tear it down because it isn’t perfect and you build another one, a better one—only in this case, since no one can consciously register what you’re doing, you re-create the whole effing world, turning it into this fabulous, breathtaking, mind-blowing work of Art. Think about it! You could destroy and re-create the world a million times over and no one but you would know it until you decreed otherwise.”

“And by then it would be too late for anyone to stop you.”

“But why would they want to? When the real world gets too horrible, then the real world must be altered.”

Martin laughed but there was no humor in it. “And whose job is it to make these covert alterations that the rest of us don’t notice?”

Jerry said nothing, only stared at him in the same way a patient parent will stare at a child as they wait for it to realize something on its own.

“Oh, no,” said Martin. “Huh-uh, no way, not buying it, nope, sorry.”

Jerry pointed toward the Center Ring, where ballerinas pirouetted on the backs of marble manticores, starlight and meteor dust flowing from their fingertips; where dwarves with leopards’ heads leapt over one another, becoming the base equations of infinite mathematical theorems; where selachian angels, their luminous wings the pectoral fins of stingrays, arose from the bosoms of tigers; where scores of young lovers emerged from velvety chrysalides, bringing forth all their past and future generations in an unending procession; where a black hawk wearing a feathered headdress and calling himself Golgi tamed the Wild Machines; where a turtle named Kôbios, the Master of Notion Games, wore a large-brimmed fedora like some private eye from a Forties detective movie and made the sawdust sing; where the circus historian, Voices Carry, dressed in a clattering bone robe into which were carved the faces of all who had performed in the Center Ring, conducted the musicians with a wand made from second thoughts; and where a glass owl called Patience Worth flew around filling its belly with the stray bits of distraction that might interfere with anyone’s performance.

Martin jumped to his feet, flinging away the cotton candy and dropping the funnel cake. “So I was nice to him, so what? That doesn’t make me anything special.”

“It does to him. To us.”

“What is he? And don’t give me that ‘more or less’ human shit, I need to know.”

“Why?”

“Because I . . .” He felt the tears forming in his eyes and hated himself for being so weak yet again. “Because I need something to believe in. I need to believe that I’ll be at ease in my own skin one day, that something I’ve done matters, that I can still fall in love with . . . anything—a woman, a song, an idea! I need to believe that there’s more than just breathing and taking up space and collecting a paycheck every two weeks. I need to know if . . .” “If what?” “. . . nothing . . .” “Say it.” “Fuck you.”

“Ever the eloquent one—say it.”

Martin balled his hands into fists and pressed them against his legs, his body shaking. Oh, yeah—you’re living in your own private Idaho, all right.

“Fine,” said Jerry. “Then let’s see if we can’t jog a little something loose, shall we?”

He rose to his feet and lifted his right hand.

The performers in all three rings froze in place, and from the very center of the Center Ring a ripple appeared in the atmosphere and one of the Onlookers stepped through, the ripple closing behind it (for a flash Martin saw the wall of the gym, then it was the circus again). It leaned forward, opening only one of its brass half-sphere eyes, projecting a beam that solidified a few feet from where Martin stood.