A Hat Full Of Sky

make a shamble, which could more or less be made of anything that seemed a good idea at the time provided it also contained something alive, like a beetle or a fresh egg.
    Tiffany couldn’t get the hang of it. That was…annoying. Didn’t she have the virtual hat? Didn’t she have First Sight and Second Thoughts? Miss Tick and Miss Level could throw a shamble together in seconds, but Tiffany just got a tangle, dripping with egg. Over and over again.
    “I know I’m doing it right, but it just twists up!” Tiffany complained. “What can I do?”
    “We could make an omelette?” said Miss Level cheerfully.
    “Oh, please, Miss Level!” Tiffany wailed.
    Miss Level patted her on the back. “It’ll happen. Perhaps you’re trying too hard. One day it’ll come. The power does come, you know. You just have to put yourself in its path.”
    “Couldn’t you make one that I could use for a while, to get the hang of it?”
    “I’m afraid I can’t,” said Miss Level. “A shamble is a very tricky thing. You can’t even carry one around, except as an ornament. You have to make it for yourself, there and then, right where and when you want to use it.”
    “Why?” said Tiffany.
    “To catch the moment,” said the other part of Miss Level, coming in. “The way you tie the knots, the way the string runs—”
    “—the freshness of the egg, perhaps, and the moisture in the air—” said the first Miss Level.
    “—the tension of the twigs and the kinds of things that you just happen to have in your pocket at that moment—”
    “—even the way the wind is blowing,” the first Miss Level concluded. “All these things make a kind of…of picture of the here and now when you move them right. And I can’t tell you how to move them, because I don’t know.”
    “But you do move them,” said Tiffany, getting lost. “I saw you—”
    “I do it but I don’t know how I do,” said Miss Level, picking up a couple of twigs and taking a length of thread. Miss Level sat down at the table opposite Miss Level, and all four hands started to put a shamble together.
    “This reminds me of when I was in the circus,” she said. “I was—”
    “—walking out for a while with Marco and Falco, the Flying Pastrami Brothers,” the other part of Miss Level went on. “They would do—”
    “—triple somersaults fifty feet up with no safety net. What lads they were! As alike as two—”
    “—peas, and Marco could catch Falco blindfolded. Why, for a moment I wondered if they were just like me—”
    She stopped, went a bit red on both faces, and coughed. “Anyway,” she went on, “one day I asked them how they managed to stay on the high wire, and Falco said, ‘Never ask the tightrope walker how he keeps his balance. If he stops to think about it, he falls off.’ Although actually—”
    “—he said it like this, ‘Nev-ah aska tightaropa walkera…’ because the lads pretended they were from Brindisi, you see, because that sounds foreign and impressive and they thought no one would want to watch acrobats called the Flying Sidney and Frank Cartwright. Good advice, though, wherever it came from.”
    The hands worked. This was not a lone Miss Level, a bit flustered, but the full Miss Level, all twenty fingers working together.
    “Of course,” she said, “it can be helpful to have the right sort of things in your pocket. I always carry a few sequins—”
    “—for the happy memories they bring back,” said Miss Level from the other side of the table, blushing again.
    She held up the shamble. There were sequins, and a fresh egg in a little bag made of thread, and a chicken bone and many other things hanging or spinning in the threads.
    Each part of Miss Level put both its hands into the threads and pulled….
    The threads took up a pattern. Did the sequins jump from one thread to another? It looked like it. Did the chicken bone pass through the egg? So it seemed.
    Miss Level peered into it.
    She said: “Something’s coming….”

    The stagecoach left Twoshirts half full and was well out over the plains when one of the passengers sitting on the rooftop tapped the driver on the shoulder.
    “Excuse me, did you know there’s something trying to catch up to us?” he said.
    “Bless you, sir,” said the driver, because he hoped for a good tip at the end of the run, “there’s nothing that can catch up to us .”
    Then he heard the screaming in the distance, getting louder.
    “Er, I think he means to,”