Hitherby Dragons

“Do you think that vampire Alice would be able to go through the looking glass?” asks Jane.

“Why would she want to?”

“Let’s say she’s afraid of getting a migraine,” Jane says, “and her medicine was accidentally made out of left-handed molecules.”

Martin thinks. “I don’t know,” he admits.

“It’d be really important,” Jane says, “because you need medicine when you might get a migraine. There aren’t many choices!”

“You can remove every tenth star,” Martin says. “If you remove every tenth star from a starlit sky, you won’t get a migraine.”

The stars twinkle in the sky above.

“That’s true,” Jane says. She nibbles on the end of a long lock of hair. “But what about stars with inhabited solar systems?”

“You prune first,” Martin says. “Delete a few extra stars, to smooth the transition later. You’re fine, as long as you don’t wind up with ten inhabited stars in a row.”

Jane sighs, looking up at the sky.

“Why is the universe so empty?” she asks.

“It’s not,” Martin says. He waves his hand at the sky. “After picking up old Star Trek and Dr. Who broadcasts, aliens are understandably wary of us. But they’re out there. They have special antennae that can turn things to gold.”

“I think you’re thinking of Midas,” Jane says.

Martin shrugs.

Jane plucks a flower. She begins counting its petals. She does not pull them off. She does not chant. After a moment, she says, “You could find the thousand secret names of Santa Claus, and recite them while standing on the tallest mountain in the world.”

“Won’t that summon him?”

“Well, yes,” she says, “but you won’t get a migraine, and summoning Santa isn’t that bad. It’s not like Mr. Hotep or Tsathoggua. He brings presents!”

“Bah,” Martin says.

Jane raises an eyebrow at him.

“I don’t like saints.”

Jane looks scandalized. “You have to like Santa.”

Martin sits behind the fortress of his cynicism goggles. For a long moment, Jane sulks. Then she beams.

“If you can count every hair in a saint’s beard,” she says, “you won’t get a migraine. He has to actually have a beard. It doesn’t count if it’s zero. But it still proves they’re useful!”

“I didn’t say they weren’t useful,” Martin says. “I just don’t like them. But I have to admit that St. Dunstan’s useful in a pinch. And St. Lucia can see around corners!”

“Ew.”

Jane wrinkles her nose.

“On account,” Martin belabors, “of keeping her eyes on a plate.”

“Yes, thank you, Martin,” Jane says. She pokes him.

Martin grins.

“You can avoid a migraine by riding an owl’s back,” Martin says, “thrice around the world.”

“Ooh.”

“You need a special owl,” Martin says.

“Every owl is special!”

Martin sighs. He pulls up two strands of grass and begins to braid them together. “I don’t think you need to worry about it,” he says.

“True,” Jane says.

Martin adds a third strand to the weave.

“It’s just,” Jane says, “that if a vampire Alice could get into the looking glass, then at any moment, couldn’t some strange mirror vampire Alice come out?”

Martin adds a fourth strand to the weave. His dexterity fails. Four pieces of grass flutter down to the ground. He sighs and begins trying again.

After a moment, Martin says, “Would the sudden appearance of looking glass world vampire Alice really be so bad?”

“She’d be all ‘eyes into my look’,” Jane says. “It’d be creepy!”

“Bah,” Martin says. “She’d just grab her left-handed migraine medicine and pop back into the mirror. The real world’s scary, you know, if you’re used to the looking glass.”

The chorus of definition provides a fixed point in the chaos.

There is an endless sea between the Gibbelins’ Tower and the land, and crossing it there is a bridge. It creaks under Sebastien’s feet, and under the monster’s, as they walk. It is made of wood, and the railing is rope.

The silence between them is palpable but not eternal.

“I think that if you were not a monster, that you would be a physics teacher,” Sebastien says.

“Pardon?”

“It seems like you want people to be objects,” Sebastien says. “Inanimate and insensate processes of life. So I think that somewhere, you must love how objects work. If you were sane, then you would want to show others how cool objects are, and make that passion serve people rather than destroy them.”

“Ah.” The monster snorts.

Sebastien shrugs. “One knows certain things,” he says, “regarding one’s gods.”

As they walk, a star falls past. It strikes the water near them. There is a flare of light. Hot spray burns them both. They can hear a mewling. Sebastien stands at the edge of the bridge and looks down into the water.

“It’s a cynosure,” Sebastien says.

The monster follows. He looks down. There’s a thin and pale thing, covered in a sheen of ichor, splashing weakly in the water below.

“How useless,” answers the monster.

“Once upon a time,” Sebastien says. “Liars were honored. Did you know that? People wanted lies that would give them power and happiness at the minimum cost to the integrity of their lives.”

The monster frowns. His right hand brushes against his left-hand ring. Sebastien wavers, and his knuckles, gripping the rail, go white.

“Hm?” Sebastien asks, after a moment.

“Your description prioritizes an objective truth,” the monster says. “But we live, ultimately, in subjective worlds.”

“It’s just historical narrative,” Sebastien says.

“Ah.”

“See, cynosures like that one—they’re the children of those liars. They can’t tell the kinds of lies that make everything better. They just . . . give you a fixed point. Something to look at. A lie to hold up when everything else is chaos.”

“We call them the chorus of definition,” the monster says. “When we make them. They seem most valuable in bulk. And when they are not drowning.”

“Drowning is generally a bad trait in gods.”

The cynosure looks up at them. She whispers, “Help me.”

“I can’t,” Sebastien says. “The best I can do is ask you your name, and regret your passing.”

“I shone down on a girl,” the cynosure says, “and said that everything would be okay. But then it wasn’t. And I fell.”

“That’s a good name,” Sebastien agrees. “I’m sorry you’re drowning.”

“Come on,” the monster says. “We’re wasting time.”

It is the April of 2004.

“What did Martin say to you?” Sebastien asks.

“A handful of dust fell from his hand,” the monster answers. “‘This is a season of metal,’ he said.”

“Ah.”

The monster looks hollow and his eyes are tired.

“He suggested that I join the winning side.”

Peter Cottontail hides eggs.

“This one,” he says to himself, “I painted like the world. It tells the story of how Attaris Bunny broke the sky and stole the stars.”

He looks around. He scampers over to a bush. He plans to hide it under the bush. He looks up nervously, as he does each time, towards Eden Above.

“That story, Peter?”

Peter startles. He almost drops the egg. He spins around. Then he hides the egg behind his back. “Why, Betty!” he says.

Betty Bunny has her hands on her hips. She’s pink, except for her tail and waistcoat, which are yellow.

“It’s important,” says Peter.

“It’s not important. Nothing’s important. Not this close to Eden.”

Peter pouts. After a long moment, Betty relents. She looks down. She sighs. “But why that?” she says. “Why would you ever want anyone to know that?”

Peter brightens. He turns his back on her and finishes hiding the egg under the bush. Then he hops off towards the forest.

“Peter?”

“Come on!” he says.

Reluctantly, she hops after him. She follows him into the forest. He hops to the left. He hops to the right. Finally, he finds just the right tree. He pulls out an egg. It’s painted a dull cold red.

“This one,” Peter says, reverently, “is going to have the story of the serpent. And I’m going to hide it here, right under the tree of life.”

Betty flushes.

“You have to tell it,” Peter says. “You’re the best at it. I always get choked up.”

Betty frowns at him.

Peter puts the egg back in the basket. “It’s okay,” he says. “You don’t have to do it yet.”

He finds a different tree. He takes out an egg. “This one’s about the genocide in Asia,” he says. “When we killed all the lucky rabbits.”

It’s painted brilliantly. It’s a den and a backdrop of blue and there are white rabbits sitting in it, drinking tea and looking out their window at the night. The rough blue-black paint of the sky catches just the slightest spark of light.

“That was exaggerated,” Betty says.

“They weren’t all that lucky,” Peter agrees. His voice is sad. He looks up at Eden Above. He looks down. Then, quickly, he hides the egg. He scampers to an abandoned mouse hole, looks down, and then glances back at Betty. “Do you have any eggs?”

“Peter!”

“You knew I’d be out here,” he says. “You knew I’d be doing this. You didn’t bring any eggs? Even if it’d break my heart?”

Betty sighs. “Fine,” she says. She rummages around in her waistcoat pocket. She pulls out an egg. It has stick figures on it. They are the stick figures of rabbits. They look a lot like human stick figures except for the quintessential quality of bunnyness.

“It’s about peace,” she says. “It’s about every bunny who muddled through, even—”

She looks up. “Even knowing—”

Peter takes it gently from her paws. He hides it in the mousehole.

“See?” he says. “It’s important that they know.”

He thinks, and then he takes out an egg of his own, painted with a thin and wasting rabbit carrying a lantern and staring down a deep dark hall.

“Starvation,” he says.

After a nervous look upwards, he hides it with hers.

“I’ll tell you the story,” Betty says. “If you want.”

Peter takes out the dull red egg. He cradles it in his clever paws. He holds it up to her. It listens.

“We were young,” Betty says. “In the dawn of the world. In the garden. And the serpent tempted us, as it did Man.”

“Yes,” Peter says.

“We took down the apple,” Betty says. “A bunny and a cottontail. And ate it, so that we would know good from evil. We learned to make waistcoats to hide our shame.”

Peter nods. For a long time, Betty is silent.

“But we were very small!” Betty cried.

“You have to finish,” Peter prompts. “The egg won’t be done until you finish.”

“We weren’t hungry enough,” says Betty. “We couldn’t finish the whole apple, not even between the two of us. So we only learnt enough to last a thousand years.”

Peter nods.

“That’s how it was,” he says.

“Soon we’ll forget,” the bunny says, looking very small against the wind, “and go back to Eden, and we won’t have choices to make any more.”

The garden hangs above them. The strange devices that hold it out of human reach thrum low.

“It is a little closer,” Betty says, “every day.”

She thinks.

She adds, “The end.”

The egg clicks. The egg whirrs. “Data stored,” it says.

Peter takes the egg back to the tree of life. He leaves it at its root. He hops away. When he is at the edge of Betty’s sight, he stops, and turns back.

“Come on,” he says. “Come on!”

“There’s no one who’ll ever find them,” Betty says. “No one who’ll know—”

“We have to hide the egg about my birthday,” Peter says. “Otherwise no one will know which day to celebrate!”

“Oh,” Betty says.

She begins to hop after him.

“And the one about the War?” she asks.

“And the one about the War.”

In the forest there is a glen. In the glen there is grass and trees and dirt and earthworms and flowers.

Iris is a flower.

One day, she discovers that the ground is hurting her. Her roots are burning. So she pulls them up. The dirt is hurting her. The grass is hurting her.

She pulls her roots up. She pulls up her stalk. She spreads her petals and jumps and she catches the wind, and off she floats away.

The stars say to her at night, “We have lost one of our own.”

“I lost the ground,” she says.

“We have lost one of our own,” say the stars.

She drifts on.

It is hungry, being a flower in the sky. There is no soil to draw nutrients from. She must feed on clouds and the dirt in the wind. It is a lean time. But one day she finds a bag of plant fertilizer that drifts in the wind like she does.

“Did the fertilizer store burn you?” she asks, but bags of plant fertilizer can’t talk.

So she drifts to it, and buries her roots in it, and drifts on.

The wind says to her, one day, “There is a prince who is my son, and he has lost his love. She was stolen away. The chariot is taking her east of the sun and west of the moon, to the palace of a witch.”

“I miss my family,” Iris says.

“Then go back,” the wind suggests.

“The ground hurts,” Iris says.

She drifts on.

After a while, she finds a bathtub in the sky. She’s not very strong, but she’s determined. She empties the fertilizer into the bathtub. She adds dirt collected from the wind and opens the drain just enough that the soil doesn’t get waterlogged in the rain. She catches a picture of a forest that blows past, and in this carriage and with this comfort she rides high above the world.

An angel sits on the edge of the bathtub for a while. He’s wearing a jacket. It’s got holes for his wings. Hair flops in his eyes.

Time passes.

“The ground burns me,” says Iris.

The angel brushes her petals with a gentle hand. “I know what that’s like,” he says.

“That’s why I fly around in a bathtub.”

The angel nods.

“I liked the ground,” Iris says. “I mean, I liked it.”

“If you wish hard enough,” the angel says, “then you can go home.”

“How do you know?”

“I know,” the angel says.

Iris sighs. “I can’t,” she says. “I can’t wish that hard. I’m not that strong.”

The angel nods again. His wings beat, gently. He takes flight.

Iris floats on for a while. Below her, there’s a glinting in the ocean. That night, she calls to the stars, “I think it’s there.”

“We’ve lost one of our own,” say the stars.

“I think he’s there. I think she’s there. I think it’s there,” cries Iris.

There’s a tumult in the heavens. Then a silence. Then a stirring and a rising in the sea.

“We are whole,” say the stars.

Sometimes it rains very hard and lightning strikes the showerpole of the bathtub. Iris does not mind. It is invigorating.

Below her, one day, she sees a princess, in a chariot driven hard, east of the sun and west of the moon.

“Is that her?” she asks the wind.

“Who?”

“Your son’s true love?”

The wind fades out. The bathtub stops with a jarring halt, and falls nearly fifty yards before the wind is back.

“Thank you,” says the wind.

One day the angel comes to sit on the tub again.

“You could go home,” he says.

“I wish I could.”

“I know what it takes,” the angel says. “To help you. To help me. I’m just not very good at doing it. But you could go home. Just because the ground burned you once doesn’t mean it’ll burn you forever. Can’t you believe me?”

“One day I will,” says Iris. “One day I’ll believe you. One day something will happen, something will change, and then I can wish hard enough to find my way home.”

“Promise?” asks the angel.

“I don’t have any pinkies,” says Iris.

The angel smiles. Then he’s aloft again.

He says:

“I wish for you that ‘one day’ is soon.”

Jeremiah Clean lines up the rational numbers. He looks at the grimy irrational numbers between them. He sighs, takes out his Swiffer, and begins to Swiff them away.

This kind of thing upsets most mathematicians. It has Cantor practically spinning in his grave. But that’s not what this story is about.

A terrible ray, a terrible horrible ray, a monstrous needle-thin ray certain to destroy the Earth, pours at the speed of light through the boundless reaches of space. It has traveled for nearly seven hundred years and soon it will strike. It will end life as we understand it. There will be no world. There will be no humanity. There will be nothing that we know. There will only be the Decohesion Engine, Principle of Omnipotence, power born in death and a terrible light.

But this story is not about that either.

This story is about Mr. Enemy. Mr. Enemy is flopped back on his jail bunk. His hands are folded behind his head. He’s laughing.

“Mr. Evans,” says Special Agent Melanie Cook.

The laugh cuts short. Mr. Enemy sits up. His motion is smooth and even and he doesn’t hit his head on the bunk above him.

“I’m not Mr. Evans,” says Mr. Enemy. “Though I used to be.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not important what your enemy’s name is,” says Mr. Enemy. “It’s not important what he does for a living. It’s not important who he is, really. What’s important is that he’s your enemy. Jeremiah Clean scrubbed me clean. He scrubbed everything unimportant away. So now I’m just Mr. Enemy. His enemy. If you know what I mean.”

Melanie looks at her notes. “You’re in jail for 1,427 counts of aggravated littering,” she says.

“90% of all crimes go unsolved,” says Mr. Enemy. “It should be 14,270 counts. But an adversarial legal system refuses me my due.”

Melanie frowns at her notes. “How do you aggravate littering, anyway?”

“It’s my special talent,” says Mr. Enemy. “Observe.”

He takes a cigarette butt out from under his pillow. He flicks it onto the ground in front of Melanie. The burnt end flares and begins to emit seventh-hand smoke—sixty-four times deadlier than second-hand smoke! Melanie quickly stomps it out.

“I’m not afraid of getting lung cancer,” she says, boldly.

“I’m afraid of you getting lung cancer,” says Mr. Enemy sincerely. “I’m not your enemy. But I have to be as messy as possible or I can’t count it as a blow against Jeremiah Clean.”

Mr. Enemy pulls half a sandwich out from under his pillow. It’s covered in greasy saran wrap. It’s a peanut butter sandwich, so it’s not clear where the grease came from. He bites deep.

“What do you need me for?”

“What does it mean to you,” Melanie asks, “that you’re Jeremiah Clean’s enemy?”

Mr. Enemy gestures with the sandwich. Now there’s peanut butter on the cell wall. It’s a horribly artistic Rorschach smear. “There’s an obstacle in everyone’s path,” Mr. Enemy says. “There’s a stumbling block. Someone or something who gets in the way. Someone who is the antithesis of what you believe in. Someone who means, just ’cause they exist, that you can’t have what you want. That’s what it means to be an enemy. That’s what it means to be bad, you know, in someone else’s world.”

“Not everything has an enemy,” Melanie says.

“If we didn’t have enemies,” says Mr. Enemy, “we’d be as gods. Look.”

He holds up the saran-wrapped sandwich.

“Thon-Gul X is the warlord of a distant star. He would rule the world. He would rule everything. He would be the warlord. Except for saran wrap. It clings between him and his plans. If he could destroy it, then he would be unlimited. But he cannot, because saran wrap is part of him.”

“It was invented on Earth.”

“‘If only it did not thus cling!’” Mr. Enemy quotes in satisfaction. “That’s the lament of Warlord Thon-Gul X.”

“I find your evidence uncompelling.”

“Name something, then,” says Mr. Enemy. “I’ll tell you its enemy.”

“Pickles.”

“Cucumbers.”

“Pardon?”

“Pickles cannot triumph while cucumbers exist. Yet without cucumbers, there would be no pickles.”

Mr. Enemy finishes his sandwich. He tucks the saran wrap in his pocket.

“Reason.”

“The insufficiency of reason.”

“My imaginary friend Betty.”

Mr. Enemy laughs.

“What?”

“You’re expecting me to say ‘adulthood,’” he says. “But it’s not true. It could only have been the turtle-people.”

Melanie fights to keep sudden tears from her eyes. She can still remember Betty’s pleading eyes as the turtle-people tied her to the stake.

Mr. Enemy is staring at her. Then he looks down. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t know that even Michelangelo could be so cruel.”

Melanie shakes her head to clear it.

“So why are you his enemy?” Melanie asks.

“Because I understand what he does not,” says Mr. Enemy. “I realize that there is no finality in cleanliness save the empty void. I understand that clean and simple order is the enemy of the small things, that it has no room for small things, and that, in the end, we are all of us small. That is why I must oppose him.”

“By keeping half-eaten sandwiches under your pillow?”

Mr. Enemy shrugs. “The philosophy of disorder has its own philosophical flaws which we need not explore at this time.”

“It’s gross.”

“Agent Cook,” says Mr. Enemy, “Life is gross.”

Melanie sighs. Then she opens his cell. She walks with him through several layers of security, out of the prison, to her car.

“It’s nice to see the sky again,” says Mr. Enemy.

The sky is blue. There are no clouds. There is no sun. There is no moon. There are no stars. The sky is so shiny and clean Mr. Enemy can see his reflection in it.

“We tried to arrest him,” Melanie says, “but he just removed the unsightly federal agents with hot water and scrubbing bubbles.”

“He’ll do the same to you and me,” says Mr. Enemy.

“Then it’s hopeless,” she says.

She gets in the car. They begin to drive.

Mr. Enemy looks around for things to litter with. He finds a bagged and tagged corpse in the back seat, leftover from a deprioritized murder case, and heaves it out the window. It thumps and rolls down the road.

“If everybody did that,” Melanie says critically, “the roads would be trashheaps.”

“Enh,” says Mr. Enemy.

“So why are you willing to fight him,” Melanie says, “if he’s just going to mop us up?”

“I’m really more of the principle that he has an enemy than an actual enemy,” Mr. Enemy admits. He finds a Styrofoam cup and tosses it out the window. It hits the ground behind them and explodes into a steaming pile of goop. “So I figure, if he removes that principle, then he has no way to externalize conflict. Since the division between cleanliness and untidiness is itself an untidy thing, I think that might doom him—that he might become Mr. Enemy.”

“If he becomes Mr. Enemy, won’t that mean that you become him?”

Mr. Enemy spits his gum out the window. It gums together a spotted owl and a bald eagle, causing both to lose their aerodynamic qualities and plummet screaming to the ground.

“. . . don’t make me turn the car around,” says Melanie.

“Yeah,” Mr. Enemy says. “It means I become him.”

“You’re willing to become everything you loathe and oppose just to torment him?”

“I’m very good at being Mr. Enemy, Agent Cook.”

She sighs. “I hate working with martyrs.”

“I’m not a martyr,” Mr. Enemy says. He tosses his saran wrap out the window. It flutters in the wind and sticks to a tree. “I’m an aggravated litterer.”

“He mopped away the messy distinction between quantum mechanics and general relativity, you know.”

“I’m not surprised,” says Mr. Enemy.

They drive on.

Saran wrap clings to a tree. It is only scarcely conscious. It has only the vaguest notion that a ray sent seven hundred years’ distance by the Warlord Thon-Gul X is hitting it square-on from the depths of space. It does not know what it means that this terrible needle of decohesion energy threatens to overwhelm it. It only knows, as it has always known, that it must cling. It must hold to itself. It must endure.

“If only it did not thus cling!” laments the Warlord Thon-Gul X.

But enemies endure.

Susan’s leaning against a tree looking at the sky when the star falls down.

He’s got bright gray hair, like it’s lit up inside, and there’s a spike in his lower lip. He’s wearing enough leather to apoplecticize six PETA warriors and a pair of fuck-you shades. He lands hard, but he lands rolling, and when the dust settles, he cracks his neck and looks pretty much okay.

“I’m late,” he says.

He looks around.

There’s a freeway not too far. There’s Susan’s bike parked on a bed of gravel. There’s a tree and dead withered grass. There’s Susan. There’s the cigarette that Susan dropped.

“Hey,” he says. “Do I know you?”

Susan shakes her head.

“No,” he says. “I’m sure I know you. Names are hard. Sharon? Siffer?”

“Nobody’s named Siffer,” she says. “I mean, hardly anybody.”

“That’s fair,” he agrees.

He stares at her for a moment longer. Then he grins. “Susan,” he says. “That’s right. I flared in the sky over Corner Road to celebrate your birth.”

“What?”

“Like with Bethlehem,” he says. “Only, you know, for you, rather than for a messiah.”

“Oh.”

“Glad that’s settled,” he says. “It’d be nagging me all day.”

He walks over to her bike. He gets on it. He grips the handles. Somewhat to Susan’s surprise, the engine turns on.

“Um . . .”

He kicks up the kickstand.

“Um, that’s my bike,” Susan says. “And this is the middle of nowhere. And it’s getting cold.”

“There’s a sparrow that’s going to die of malnutrition thataways in about thirty-seven minutes,” the star says, “and I’m on watching-sparrow-die duty.”

She lurches forward, but she’s slow and clumsy compared to the movements of the star.

The bike roars out, and there’s a bit of gravel on her face, and blood slowly trickling down from it, and he’s gone.

a multi-part legend inspired by the works of Roald Dahl.

Mr. Lancaster builds the marvelous Origins Bomb.

It is a big squat bomb. It sits on a table. Mr. Lancaster is under the table on a rolling platform. He is covered in bomb oil and using a wrench.

“Do we have the strands of amoeba DNA?” Mr. Lancaster asks Mrs. Lancaster.

“Of course,” she says, calmly.

Mrs. Lancaster is combing Iphigenia’s hair. Iphigenia wriggles.

“Don’t struggle now,” says Mrs. Lancaster. “You want nice hair when you’re Raptured, don’t you?”

“But Lizard Cops is almost on,” Iphigenia pleads.

“We’ll by done by 11,” says Mrs. Lancaster.

So Iphigenia pouts and sits still.

“What about the frog tooth?” Mr. Lancaster asks. “Do we have the flying frog tooth?”

“Of course, dear,” says Mrs. Lancaster.

Mr. Lancaster rolls out from under the bomb. He’s holding a jar. It’s labeled ‘Flying Frog Tooth.’ It has a tooth in it. The tooth has little wings. It flutters about in the jar.

“Are you sure it’s from a real frog?” Mr. Lancaster asks, skeptically.

“It’s a new species,” says Mrs. Lancaster, who is an expert scientist with more than six doctorates in biology. “I bred it myself in the lab.”

“All right,” says Mr. Lancaster. He rolls back under. “What about these carbons? Are they good?”

“That’s what the salesman said.”

“Eh?”

“He said, ‘these are damn fine carbons, Mrs. Lancaster. Damn fine.’”

“Such language! He will receive a terrible reckoning on the Day of Judgment,” says Mr. Lancaster, sadly.

He works on something under the bomb with a wrench.

“That is,” Mr. Lancaster adds, “unless linguistic drift has rendered such terms essentially non-blasphemous.”

“That’s so, Mr. Lancaster,” Mrs. Lancaster agrees. “He will be cast into the pit of fire and brimstone, unless the secularization of the English language serves as a circumstantial shield against God’s judgment.”

Mr. Lancaster stops and thinks. “Hey, I can’t find a Snavering Lavelwod.”

Mrs. Lancaster sighs. “I wish you wouldn’t use Snavering Lavelwods, Mr. Lancaster. Such murderous mutant mini-squids were never meant to trouble God’s green earth.”

“But they’re so adorably fuzzy, Mrs. Lancaster,” he protests. “In any case, they’re necessary.”

“Check your pockets, then,” says Mrs. Lancaster.

“Oh,” says Mr. Lancaster after a moment. “How embarrassing.”

Mr. Lancaster slots a protesting Snavering Lavelwod into the Snavering Lavelwod slot.

Mrs. Lancaster works on Iphigenia’s hair. “You have such gorgeous hair, my child. I think it is your prettiest feature.”

Iphigenia smiles a little back over her shoulder at Mrs. Lancaster.

Mrs. Lancaster grins. “There,” she says, putting down the brush and patting Iphigenia’s head. “All done!”

“What about the chocolate?” Mr. Lancaster asks.

Mrs. Lancaster releases Iphigenia from her lap. Iphigenia starts to run to the door, but then she stops. Curiosity has gotten the better of her. She squats down and stares interestedly at Mr. Lancaster’s activities beneath the bomb.

“Here,” says Mrs. Lancaster. She takes out a bar of chocolate. It is labeled ‘Age-Measuring Chocolate.’ She breaks off a small piece, hands the small piece to Iphigenia, and passes the rest to Mr. Lancaster.

Iphigenia’s eyes get very round. She takes the piece of chocolate. Graciously, she says, “Thank you, Mommy!”

Iphigenia bites the chocolate. The chocolate says, “Thirteen years and seven months and four days and eight hours and two minutes and thirteen seconds.”

Iphigenia looks at the chocolate. She looks suspiciously at her mother.

“Go ahead, dear. It’s just measuring your age.”

Iphigenia takes another bite. “Thirteen years and seven—”

Iphigenia hastily finishes the chocolate off. She swallows it before it can speak. Then she opens her mouth.

“—months and four days and eight hours and two minutes and nineteen seconds!” Iphigenia says, surprising herself.

There’s a pause.

“But I’m twelve,” protests Iphigenia.

“It probably uses the Chinese schema,” Mrs. Lancaster says.

“There!” says Mr. Lancaster. He rolls back the platform. He dusts himself off. He rises. “It’s a perfect Origins Bomb, if I do say so myself.”

“Perfection is for God alone,” corrects Mrs. Lancaster.

“Oh, Mrs. Lancaster,” says Mr. Lancaster, beeping her nose. “You do keep me honest.”

“What’s it do?” Iphigenia asks.

“It’s a way to prove Creationism right for once and for all,” says Mr. Lancaster. “When I push this button—”

Here he indicates a large red button labeled “Emergency Proof of Creationism.”

“—everything in the universe that is older than ten thousand years old, and every human who evolved from lower life forms, blows up!”

Iphigenia frowns. “But that’s nobody. You said that people were made by God.”

Mr. Lancaster’s eyes dance.

Iphigenia will always remember this moment. When Mr. Lancaster is very happy his eyes get a marvelous crinkle at the edges. It makes Iphigenia want to laugh and hug him. And sometimes he will sweep her up and spin her around, or tell her a wonderful secret, like where the Apostle Paul is really buried, or race her through the house around and around and around.

His eyes are crinkly like that now.

“That’s the marvel of it,” he says, “The absolute marvel of it! It’s the world’s deadliest bomb—and it won’t hurt hardly anything!”

“We expect there are a few things that will qualify,” explains Mrs. Lancaster. “Sinister bloodlines descended from lizards, ancient gyroscopes from alternate timelines, the angels of nations, and so forth. Exceptions. Nothing the world can’t do without.”

Iphigenia is mildly unnerved.

“Would you like to press the button?” Mr. Lancaster offers. “There are a lot of threats to God’s word in America today. It’s not really an emergency—”

and here he winks, like there’s a star caught in his eye and he needs to blink it out—

“—but I think it’s fair to say that we’re in an orange alert for the faith.”

Iphigenia chews on her lip.

“I’m scared to push a button and blow up stuff,” Iphigenia says.

Mr. Lancaster nods. “It is a weighty moral responsibility,” he says.

He hangs his head. He looks grim. Then he looks up and he’s sparkly again.

“And we all know who bears the weighty moral responsibilities around here!”

Mrs. Lancaster blushes.

“Oh, Mr. Lancaster,” she says.

“You know you want to,” Mr. Lancaster teases.

Mrs. Lancaster stands up. Just a tiny bit of her decorum is faded now. “Are you serious, honey? You’d really let me be the one to . . . to usher in this new age of scientifically-proven faith?”

“I love you,” says Mr. Lancaster.

So Mrs. Lancaster smiles. It’s a secret smile. It’s the kind of smile that waits in someone’s lips for years and years before it finally finds the perfect chance to come out.

“Mom!” says Iphigenia suddenly. “I’m scared!”

It is 10:52am, on Saturday, July 16. It is eight minutes before the premiere broadcast of Lizard Cops.

Mrs. Lancaster pushes the button.

The Origins Bomb goes off.

Tune in tomorrow for the exciting continuation of . . . Countdown to Annihilation!

Yesterday, in the first amazing installment of Countdown to Annihilation! . . .

. . . the 11am premiere of Lizard Cops drew nigh!
. . . Iphigenia’s parents built an Origins Bomb!
. . . everything older than 10,000 years old blew up!
. . . and so did every human who’d evolved from lower life forms!

But who will survive?

Will the Bible prove inerrant?

Will the world drown in endless void?

Or is the truth, as so often happens, . . . somewhere in between?

Song of the Apocalypse

Mary drank too much at tea
She jittered faster
Recursively!
The faster she drank
The faster she drank
The faster the pile of tea scones sank!
She could see each beat of a flying bird’s wings
She could see each drop of her tablemate’s sneeze
“More tea!” she cried, but the waiter looked stopped
So she zipped from her chair to the kitchen’s pot.
And her story would have gone on from there
But the bomb tore through
And the bomb didn’t care! Oh

George he cackled George he laughed
George’s machine brought a dead man back!
In defiance of God!
In hubris insane!
“Raar!” said the dead man
Then he died again.
The bomb tore through
The bomb didn’t care.
George had evolved, so he wasn’t spared.
And the dead man, he’d once been Darwin’s toy
He was one more thing for the bomb to destroy. Oh

The Earth was barely nine thousand years
Old. Mad props to Usher! Creationist cheers!
Nine thousand years old! Plus seven days!
So the Earth, it lived on, anyways
Its valleys! Its hills! Its endless seas!
Its glorious plains! Its mountains! Its trees!
It all lived on! And we’re very pleased . . .
But the sun was as old as the scientists said
So the Origins Bomb killed the sun clean dead.

The aliens on Alpha Ceti III
Descend from the cones of evergreen trees
They’re a warlike bunch!
They’d have killed us later
But the bomb took them down
Like Bush took down Nader. Oh!

And all through the Earth just a handful of men
Some women, some children (most under ten),
Lived to see the winter that came
When the fire of the world
Turned a fading flame.

Iphigenia staggers through a savage wasteland. She grows lean and scruffy and lonely.

Every clock in the world that is not broken is stopped, frozen at 10:57am. The computers that she finds do not work. The paper calendars are also stopped, with nobody to flip them.

Iphigenia does not know how long it has been since the Bomb went off. But it feels like many years.

Everyone is dead.

Everything is in ruins.

There are no groundskeepers. There is no electricity.

A flyer flutters down to her from the sky. It looks strangely new, though she knows it must predate the bomb. And on it is written:

What Would You Keep?

If you could keep just one thing—one thing to last you all the empty years, what would it be?

Think on it. Decide. And when you know, if you are still alive, come to London. Come to the place of lights.

Iphigenia laughs. “I don’t know how to get there from here!” she says.

The wolves have come out, since the bomb, to stalk through the streets. They mutter and wolf to one another, and they do not bother Iphigenia. One day Iphigenia finds a Lego Universal Translator set, suitable for ages 12 and up, in an abandoned toy store. She assembles the pieces including two AA batteries and she turns it on and she eavesdrops on some wolves.

“Humanity has become incapacitated!” says a Shaggy Wolf. “It can no longer rule the Earth! It is our honor and our privilege to become Earth’s new guardians. Now we are the city people. Observe as I perform the strange city ritual of ‘rushing nowhere in particular.’”

“Yeah! Yeah!” agrees a Lean Wolf.

Shaggy Wolf looks slyly at one of the stopped clocks. He asks Lean Wolf, “Is that clock right?”

“It’s not just ‘right,’” says Lean Wolf. “It’s actually slow!”

Shaggy Wolf pauses for dramatic effect. Then he gasps. He panics. First he skitters in a panicked circle. Then he begins to speed-walk very fast, just barely surrendering the edges of his dignity, in the direction of a distant office building.

“The end is nigh!” rails an Apocalyptic Street-Corner Wolf as he passes. “The Snavering Lavelwods will inherit the Earth!”

“What?” says Shaggy Wolf.

“He’s challenging your presumption of succession!” says the Lean Wolf, shocked.

Shaggy Wolf snarls. The Universal Translator says, “What?” Then it says, “Bleep! Bleep bleep! Bleepity bleep! Bleep!”

“Ow!” says Iphigenia. “My ears! Too much bleeping!”

So after that she does not eavesdrop on the wolves.

Two hundred meals and seventy-nine naps later, Iphigenia sees the flyer again. This time she holds it tightly. She pretends that it matters. She pretends that it is a thing from after the bomb, printed on crisp yellow and golden paper by someone surviving, somewhere, someone somehow not dead. So she finds an information kiosk and she digs through its maps and she heads towards London.

There is a bird in the air. It is a feral parrot. It circles down to land on her shoulder. It says, “Hello!”

“Hello,” says Iphigenia.

“Brawk,” says the bird. “Broderick. Good Broderick.”

“Would you like a cracker?” Iphigenia asks.

Broderick bobs up and down in excitement. Then he bites her ear and flutters away. From a tree nearby he says, “Snavering Lavelwods inherit the Earth. Inherit the Earth. Brawk!”

“Ow,” Iphigenia says.

Seven hundred meals and three hundred naps later, Iphigenia sees a light. She does not understand it at first. Her brain cannot parse it. It is an electric light. It is shining.

Iphigenia’s heart begins to race. It races faster and faster. She begins to hop. She begins to jump. She begins to dance around and glee.

“People!” she shouts.

Then she runs. She runs until she sees a factory. It is surrounded by a ruined fence and a ruined gate and a ruined sign hanging from that gate, reading, “NKA” and “CTOR”. Its lights are on!

She runs to the door. She cannot stop. There is a glee bubbling in her. It is practically leaking out her nose and ears. She hammers on the door. “Let me in! Let me in! I’m people too! You’re alive! Open up!”

And Charles does.

Who is this mysterious Charles? Why did his factory survive? The Countdown will continue . . . on MONDAY!

Previously, in the first two installments of Countdown to Annihilation! . . .

. . . the Origins Bomb destroyed most of humanity!
. . . also, the sun!
. . . and some random aliens.
. . . the Snaveling Lavelwods poised themselves to inherit the Earth!
. . . Iphigenia wandered an empty post-apocalyptic world
. . . finding another human at last!

But why hasn’t the world gone dark yet?

Why hasn’t it frozen?

How can anyone live on, when the sun is dead?

Fimbulwinter

The sands dripped through the hourglass
And the minute of the end closed in at last.
People dance in the hour of the sun
But we’re born to freeze when that hour’s done.

Iphigenia runs to the door. She cannot stop. There is a glee bubbling in her. It is practically leaking out her nose and ears. She hammers on the door. “Let me in! Let me in! I’m people too! You’re alive! Open up!”

Charles opens the factory door.

Charles is a man. He looks about thirty years old. He is the first person Iphigenia has seen in quite some time.

Charles blinks at her congenially. “Well,” he says. “Hello!”

“You’re alive!” Iphigenia says. “You’re human!”

“I am!” says Charles. He pats himself, confirming it. “I have bones and skin and meat and hair and over ten thousand individual intellectual potencies! That’s my humanity at work!”

Iphigenia hugs him. Charles squeaks.

“Thank you,” Iphigenia says. “Thank you for being real.”

“It is my honor,” says Charles, who is quite humble about being real, “and my privilege.”

“But how did you survive?” Iphigenia asks. She lets him go. She pushes him back to arm’s length so she can stare at his face. “Everybody blew up but me!”

Charles blushes. He takes a funny little step back and spins around.

“It’s only the people who evolved from lower animals that the Origins Bomb blew up,” he says. “A few rare humans were made directly by God. Like me! That’s why I don’t have any introns or junk DNA. And that’s why I’m alive!”

“Oh,” says Iphigenia. She blinks. “That must be why I didn’t blow up either.”

Iphigenia sighs.

“What a weird way to find out you’re adopted,” Iphigenia says.

“Oh, dear,” says Charles. Then he beams at her. He rubs his hands together. “Did you get my flyer?”

This is the flyer that Charles means:

What Would You Keep?

If you could keep just one thing—one thing to last you all the empty years, what would it be?

Think on it. Decide. And when you know, if you are still alive, come to London. Come to the place of lights.

And Iphigenia has in fact seen the flyer, but she isn’t expecting questions about flyers right now.

So she just blinks at Charles blankly. “Pardon?”

“Oh.” Charles looks disappointed. “No, never mind. Never mind. It’s not important now. You’re people! I’m people! We’ll talk about it later.”

He cranes his neck to look past Iphigenia out the door.

“I take it that your parents were descended from lower life forms? You’re alone? That’s terribly tragic. Or were they older than ten thousand years? All the really old things blew up too. It’s possible, you know. Suppose you postulate reincarnation. Then their souls could come from previous bursts of Creation! That’s how that would work. So they wouldn’t have to have been descended from animals—not if their ancient souls blew up inside them and disintegrated their bodies! Not that that’s much help to them or you, I suppose. No, no, it’s not.”

Then his eyes twinkle.

“But I could invent you new parents, you know. I have all the ingredients. Come in, come in. Close the door. Must keep the Lavelwods out. That’s absolutely critical. So come in, close the door, and we can get right to work.”

Iphigenia just stares at him blankly.

“Invent . . . new parents?”

Charles pulls a set of blueprints in scroll form out of his pocket. He unrolls them dramatically. There are at least twenty feet of blueprints sprawling now across the floor, labeled, “Parent Replacements—DO NOT CONSTRUCT!” Charles then flicks his hand and the blueprints roll themselves back up. He tucks them back into his pocket.

“I,” Charles says, “am an inventor. A most marvelous inventor, if I do say so myself. Most likely the marvelousest inventor left in all the world. Possibly the only inventor left in all the world. I made the marvelous See-Through-Things Prism and the Eden Room and even the Eight-Minute Hourglass.”

Iphigenia frowns.

“That’s not very useful,” she says. “I mean, if it only has eight minutes on it.”

Charles looks shocked. “What? What? What?”

Charles shakes his fist. He hops up and down. He gestures expansively.

“My dear,” Charles says. “You offend me! Well, you would, if I were not drinking up the sight of another living human. In other circumstances, you would offend me! It is the most useful device.”

“But why would you want it to run out in eight minutes?”

“Run out?”

Charles blinks. “Why, that’s brilliant! An hourglass that runs out in eight minutes. You could cook a Thanksgiving turkey in thirty-two minutes. Or fail to build Rome in three hours and a fifth! Come on! Come on! We’ll go to the Inventing Bench!”

Charles seizes Iphigenia’s hand. Before she can so much as startle or shift her balance, he drags her off at a run through the hallways of the factory. Most of them are dark and scorched with the marks of people descended from animals blowing up. Some have flickering lights. Occasionally Iphigenia will see an open door that leads into an invention room containing some incredible wonder. There is the flower made entirely of lambs. There is the Snaverer-Killing Bomb. There is the perfect replica of Eden. There is a hopping Tesla Coil with a most amusing face, singing along to karaoke in the Tesla Karaoke Lounge. She wants to gasp and stare but he’s running too fast!

“But no, no, no, no,” says Charles, as they run. “The hourglass I meant wasn’t that kind of hourglass at all. This is an hourglass that delays time, not an hourglass that speeds it up. That’s not something I’d have thought of on my own, what with Fimbulwinter coming!”

“Oh,” says Iphigenia.

“It was just a few minutes ago,” Charles says. “10:52am. That’s when the sun blew up! Pfft! Just like that. Some people are entirely too careless with their inventions. Everything older than ten thousand years blew up! Everyone descended from a lower life form, too.”

“The Origins Bomb,” Iphigenia says. Somewhat lamely, she adds, “It was meant to prove Creationism right.”

“Half-right! Half-right! After all, the Earth survived, didn’t it? And we did? But it blew the sun right up. And most of the people. Blew them right up! That’s when I leapt into action.”

Here Charles stops in his frantic rush. He stands still and beams at her. He takes her other hand in his other hand. He squeezes both her hands in joy. “And it’s a good thing, too! Otherwise, we wouldn’t have met until we were dead! That wouldn’t have made anyone very happy.”

Iphigenia stares at him. Then, reluctantly, she grins.

“Also,” Charles says, “please remember to think about what you’d keep. I mean, if you could only keep one thing. It could be very important.”

Charles lets go of one hand so he can resume dragging her towards the Inventing Bench.

“The bomb went off. Everybody died. The Oomps blew up around me like so much kindling. Even the old dog himself! But I knew what I had to do. I rushed to the Inventing Bench, just like we’re doing now. I speculated on what might have caused the explosions. I tasted a bit of the boom. I recognized the sinister work of an Origins Bomb.

“So I made the Eight-Minute Hourglass! It’s an hourglass that never runs down its first eight minutes! It hasn’t even run down its first minute yet. That’s why the world hasn’t gotten dark. That’s why it hasn’t gone cold and dead. It’s the same principle as waiting in lines—it might just be a few minutes until the world actually ends, but it’s guaranteed to feel like forever. It’s the Hourglass that gives us all the time we could possibly want, even though the dread minute is just around the corner. We can live and breathe and get things done before the dark comes in, before the cold comes in, before humanity dies and the Snavering Lavelwods inherit the Earth. It’s all thanks to my marvelous Eight-Minute Hourglass!”

That’s about when the realization hits Iphigenia.

“The sun … blew up?”

Her voice is plaintive and sick. Iphigenia likes the sun. It’s her favorite celestial body.

“It was the final pyrrhic victory of heliocentrism,” Charles sighs.

The door to the factory is open, gaping, like a wound. The first of the Lavelwods has found it now, drawn to the smell of captured time.

Tune in tomorrow when the COUNTDOWN TO ANNIHILATION . . . continues!

Jane is sick.

“Darn it,” Jane says, when she hears the doctor’s report. “Tuberculosis!”

There’s a little picture of tuberculosis on the wall. It shows the various systems that the TB bacteria infests. It says, in bold, “There’s no magic answer to tuberculosis!”

“You shouldn’t be playing in infested pits of tuberculosis bacteria,” explains the doctor. “That’s not good hygiene!”

Jane makes a woeful face. Her lip trembles.

“But it’s the only good place to play in,” she says.

“There’s a half-finished slide at the park!” the doctor says. “You could use that!”

“I could have,” says Jane. Her eyes widen. “But now I’ll be quarantined!”

The doctor shakes her head.

Jane slowly relaxes.

The doctor says, “In nihilistic 19th century Russia we would have idolized you. In barbaric 20th century America we would have quarantined you. But today—”

The doctor taps the “treatment” section of the tuberculosis picture.

“—today, we can treat this malaise with advanced medical techniques. Do you have good health insurance?”

“I have moderate health insurance,” Jane stresses. “It’s okay for ordinary treatment, but don’t try any of your funny medical tricks!”

The doctor nods. She prints out a series of instructions. Jane watches nervously as the doctor measures out doses of several different medications into the plastic mold of a wand. The doctor then hands the wand to Jane.

“Wave the wand and recite,” says the doctor.

“Okay!” says Jane, giving a thumbs-up. Then she coughs, racking consumptive coughs. Then she blinks it off and beams at the doctor.

“Star sparkle power,” says the doctor. “Production!”

Jane waves the wand, reciting, “Star sparkle power—production!”

Jane leaps into the air. She can’t help it. It’s the magic of the words. She spins around. Her clothes attenuate into great sky-pythons of fabric that swirl in the air around her.

“Ack!” says Jane. “My dignity!”

Jane’s skin turns translucent. She doesn’t have organs! Instead, inside her, she has the sparkling grandeur of a starlit sky.

“You can tie the sky-pythons together in back,” says the doctor, “so that they’re more concealing.”

“Oh!” says Jane.

But the transformation sequence does not last long enough for Jane to apply this advice. She lands on the ground in a heap, now wearing the marvelous rainbow outfit of a Star Sparkle Girl.

“Huh,” says Jane, dizzily. Her skin is still shimmering, and little stars whirl around her head.

“Say ‘ah’,” says the doctor.

The doctor puts a tongue depressor in Jane’s mouth.

“Ah!” says Jane.

“Good,” says the doctor. “I don’t see any tuberculosis bacteria in your throat.”

Jane’s stomach twitches a bit. It’s from the minor gag reflex triggered by having the tongue depressor on her tongue.

Then, even though the doctor takes the tongue depressor out, Jane’s stomach heaves! She hiccups stardust all over the doctor’s floor. Now it’s very sparkly.

Jane gulps a little bit.

“Um,” says Jane.

“It’ll happen for a bit,” says the doctor. “I mean, the stars-in-the-stomach.”

“But all the kids will tease me!” says Jane. Her eyes are wide. “I can’t be ‘throws up stars girl!’”

The doctor looks in Jane’s left eye, then her right eye. Then the doctor takes down a few notes, shrugs, and tucks her medical clipboard under her arm.

“There’s no magic answer to tuberculosis,” the doctor points out. “It says so on the sign.”

Jane hiccups. There’s the bitter taste of a white dwarf in the back of her throat, its cold electrons mashed one against another to fill up all the available energy levels.

“But everyone will tease me,” Jane says, miserably.

Playing in the tuberculosis pits doesn’t seem that good an idea now.