‘Please,’ I said. ‘Draw me a turtle.’
The Pilot looked at me strange, like I did something wrong. ‘Don’t you mean a sheep?’
We stood by the ruins of his Lockheed Lightning P-38. It shimmered in the intense sunlight of the desert, a thing broken and made insubstantial, like snow-blindness or a fata morgana.
‘Just draw me a damn turtle,’ I said.
‘Look, kid,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you draw your own bloody turtle, alright? I need to figure out a way of getting help, or I’m going to die here.’
‘There are worse places to die,’ I said. I handed him a piece of printing paper I picked up on planetoid where I met the poacher. I gave him a beautiful quill pen I found in the place of lost pens. He looked at me and sighed.
And I said, ‘Draw me a turtle.’
The turtle lay on its back in the sand. It looked like a jar of pickles. Small eyes blinked myopically upwards.
‘Well?’ the Pilot said. ‘Was it worth it? You know the rattle-snakes are only going to get him when night comes. That’s why there are no more elephants.’
‘There are,’ I said. He stared at me for a long moment, then rubbed his face, hard, and sighed again. ‘I think I’m starting to hallucinate,’ he said. ‘I thought that as soon as you showed up.’
‘No,’ I said patiently. Adults were such complicated machines. ‘You’re still not making an effort. You’re looking at things from the wrong angle.’
‘Show me then,’ he said.
And I did.
It was getting colder as the sun approached the distant horizon and tumbled over its edge. We lay on our stomachs in the sand and watched the turtle.
‘Look,’ I said, pointing. I reached forward with my finger and flipped the turtle over. ‘Can you see them?’
The Pilot stared for a long moment. His face was sunburnt and the stubble was becoming a full beard. ‘Elephants?’
I said, ‘yes.’
There were four, tiny elephants standing on the back of the turtle. We watched them together, not speaking. The elephants were perfect form and silent as statues, but when I reached a finger again and touched one the skin was warm and dry, and a felt a distant, steady beat.
‘Look,’ the Pilot whispered. He pointed too, and I watched as the faint outline of a new turtle began to form on the elephants’ backs, as insubstantial as mist, as rare as water in the desert.
It seemed to us then that the elephants were growing, and in a moment we were no longer lying in the sand but on a cool green square, in shadow. Standing, we looked up, and saw one of the elephants high above us like a rocky mountaintop, its shadow on us.
The Pilot looked into the distance. I followed his gaze, could see, in a great distance, lands and clouds and seas, a blank map, a universe of Here Be Dragon; and tall, graceful Baobabs that reached up to an impossibly-distant sky.
The Pilot touched his forefinger to his tongue and held it aloof. ‘There’s a good wind building. Do you think...’ Wild hope turned his eyes into dark pools, speckled with sunlight. ‘Do you think we could go there?
I looked at him, looked at the Lockheed Lightning, and I smiled.
‘I think we could try,’ I said.
The End
