Hitherby Dragons

Two girls meet at the gates of the dead. They’re mirrored, those gates. One girl steps into the mirrors. The other steps through the gates.

Mr. Schiff is on a plane. He’s going to go skydiving.

Jane and Martin are on a green, green hill. They’re eating a picnic. It involves bread, pickles, and cheese. There’s a girl sitting with them. She’s quiet, since she’s dead, but she still munches on bread and cheese when Jane offers.

“Her name’s Iffy,” Jane says.

“Where’d you meet her?” Martin asks.

“She was over there,” Jane says. Jane points at the grass. “She was eating ice cream. So I invited her to a picnic.”

“Hi,” Iffy says.

Martin smiles a little. “Hey.”

“Your turn!” Jane says. “Tell me a story.”

Martin ponders. “A scary story? It’s almost Halloween.”

“Okay,” Jane agrees.

“A long time ago,” Martin says, “the luminiferous ether and the atmosphere were sisters, and best of friends.”

Iffy frowns at Martin.

“They did everything together,” Martin says. “They played. They worked. They laughed. But sometimes things go bad.”

“Like mayonnaise!” Jane suggests.

“Mistakes were made,” Martin says. “Recriminations issued. Regrettable events were insufficiently regretted. And one day, while they were arguing with one another in the shape of two little girls, the atmosphere stabbed the luminiferous ether right through the heart, and through both eyes, and she was dead.”

“With a pickle?” Jane asks.

“With a knife,” Martin says.

Jane frowns at him severely. At first Martin looks suave. Then he caves.

“Fine,” he says. “With a knife carved from the deadliest of Vlassic pickles, dripping with its horrid brine.”

“Yay!” Jane says. She takes a pickle out of the picnic pickle jar and bites it happily.

“Which of them do you identify with?” Martin asks, curiously.

“I’m the horrified onlooker,” Jane says. “Gasp! This one little girl has killed the other! We must fetch a doctor immediately!”

“It wasn’t like that,” Iffy says. Jane hands her a bit of bread and cheese. “It was more about how scientific concepts evolve.”

“I’ve always thought,” Martin says, “that if scientists could establish their theories by stabbing one another with pickles, they probably would.”

“Some kind of peer review thing?” Iffy asks.

“Yah.”

Iffy considers.

Martin shrugs.

“They did fetch a doctor,” Martin says. “But it didn’t help, because, you know, the luminiferous ether was dead. And the atmosphere wasn’t even one little bit sorry, either.”

Jane frowns. “Not even a little?”

“Well,” Martin confesses, “maybe a little.”

“Just a little?” Jane says.

“Well,” Martin admits, “after a while, the atmosphere felt really bad about it. But what could she do? The luminiferous ether was already dead.”

“She could go to the other side,” Jane says. “And bring her sister back!”

“It’s not that easy,” Iffy says.

“It’s hard to revive someone killed with a pickle,” Martin agrees. “You have to make an especial appeal to the King of the Dead.”

Jane waves a hand airily. “Being the atmosphere opens a lot of doors.”

“That’s true,” Martin admits. “But it closes others.”

Jane thinks. “I’ve seen that happen,” she concedes.

“So what would the King of the Dead do?”

Jane frowns. “You’re telling this story,” she says, severely. “But I guess that he’d probably make some kind of deal with her. Like, maybe, she has to do three incredible tasks to get her sister back.”

“Or maybe,” Martin says, “she can get her back, but not all the way.”

Suddenly, Iffy frowns. “Ack,” she says. She pushes upwards at the air as if trying to hold something up.

“You okay?” Jane asks.

Iffy shakes her head. “It’s too hard!” she says. “I can’t provide enough friction!”

“See,” Martin says, gesturing around broadly, “the King of the Dead was willing to let the luminiferous ether back. It can play. It can touch the world. It can run in the grass and eat ice cream. But it can never see its sister again. Because when the luminiferous ether is here, conducting light and providing a breathable environment, the atmosphere must hide from the world, behind mirrors and under the glass. That’s the bargain that the King of the Dead made. And today, just a few weeks from Halloween, is one of the days when the luminiferous ether is here, and the atmosphere is gone.”

Mr. Schiff hits the ground, hard, next to them.

“It makes it a bad day to sky dive,” Martin admits. “The ether has low resistance and doesn’t hold parachutes up very well.”

Iffy sags. “I did my best,” she says.

Jane stares at Mr. Schiff in horror. “Is he dead?”

Martin takes a pickle from the jar. He pokes Mr. Schiff with it. “Dunno,” he says.

Jane straightens her spine. She looks firm. “I don’t believe in dead people,” she says.

“What?” Martin asks.

“I’m hoping he’ll hear me,” Jane says.

“Why?”

“Every time a child says that,” Jane says, “a dead person comes back to life.”

“Just like that?”

Jane nods. “It used to be that there was one dead person for every living person. But children stopped believing in death, and dead people started coming back to life, and now the world’s all overpopulated. I don’t believe in dead people.”

Martin frowns. “He’s not responding,” he says.

“I don’t believe in dead people! I don’t! I don’t!” Jane shouts.

There’s a pause.

Martin sighs.

“I don’t believe in dead people,” he whispers.

“I don’t believe in dead people,” Jane says.

“I don’t believe in dead people,” Iffy concedes.

“I don’t believe in dead people,” Jane demands.

There’s a silence. Slowly, Mr. Schiff drags himself upright.

“I don’t believe in dead people,” Jane says, again.

“I can fly,” Mr. Schiff says, “you know.”

“That’s good!” Jane says encouragingly. “I don’t believe in dead people.”

“You can stop now,” Martin says.

“Oh,” Jane says.

“You know,” Martin says, “we should go to the graveyard on Halloween, and do that.”

“That would be mean,” Jane says. “Most of those people are done.”

It is the end of that day. One girl waits behind the mirrors for her freedom. The other walks down to the gates of the dead.

“You can’t go through,” says the King. “Not today.”

Iffy pauses. “Why not?”

“You can’t be dead,” says the King, “if people don’t believe in it.”

Kestrel enters Atmosphere Station. It sits atop the planet’s atmosphere. The air is thick enough that its atoms brush against her now and again. Atmosphere Station is shockingly enclosed, with material in every direction. Great struts of matter stretch from one side to another. The technicians cling to the struts, save for one who gibbers in the corner, and one, named Billy, who glides towards her.

“Ah,” says Billy. “You must be the savant.”

She smiles to him. She eddies towards him. She shines across her identification.

“Honored,” he says.

“It’s overwhelming,” she says, looking around.

He grins at her. “Wait’ll you see the planet.”

She gulps. She can’t help it. “It’s real? I mean, people really . . . live . . . down there?”

“I’ve been down there myself,” he says, smugly.

She stares at him.

“You’re wondering,” he says, “how anyone could survive at the bottom of an atmosphere, right?”

“It’s got to be at least ten pounds per square inch,” she says. “You’d pop like a balloon!”

“Fifteen,” he says. “And that’s the least of the problems we’ve had to solve, here at the Planet Project.”

He leads her over to an enclosure. He gestures inwards. She hesitates.

“It’s all right,” he says. “You won’t be in there that long.”

So she floats in, and he seals the exits all around her.

“Strange,” she says. She taps on one wall.

“What we do,” he says, “is make a kind of . . . second skin . . . for you. Like clothing. Out of a thick layer of organic material.”

Small bits of matter begin to mist into the enclosure. Kestrel looks horrified.

“It’s okay,” he says. “It doesn’t feel like you’re surrounded. It feels . . . it feels like you’ve grown another epidermis. Does that make sense? Like a new layer made out of meat.”

She closes her eyes. She waits.

“I feel so heavy,” she says.

“It’s just beginning,” he says.

“I’m not going to fill out this whole enclosure, am I?” she says.

“‘Space suit,’” he says. He makes quote marks around the words. “It’s so your new skin can survive in the vacuum of space.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” she says.

“Not at all.”

She gingerly opens one eye. She looks down. She stifles an outcry. “I’m huge.”

“Not really,” he says, judiciously. “Just thick.”

“So,” she says hesitantly. “Is it always this . . . this bad?”

“No,” says Billy. “Most people go nuts with fear the first few times through. You’re holding up admirably.”

“It’s not skin,” she says.

“It has to be,” he says. “Just think of it as an outer skin. Otherwise you’ll get sick.”

“Right,” she says. She braces herself. She thinks. “Um, . . .”

“Billy,” he says.

“Billy,” she says. “Am I going to have to wear this the whole time?”

“Sorry.”

“I see.” Her voice is faint. She looks down again. Counting the suit, she concludes, she’s at least six inches from front to back. She wiggles an arm. It moves sluggishly, like a tiny meteor. Thick bunches of organic material twitch and provide its motive force.

“And everyone does this,” she says, “down there?”

“Everyone,” he says. “Even Dr. Karpov.”

She takes a deep breath. She can feel her great matter-coated chest moving in and out. “It’s not so strange,” she tells herself. “It’s not so unusual.”

“Wow,” Billy says. “You really are a savant.”

“What?” she asks.

“Nevermind,” he says. “I’ll send you down.”

Descending through the atmosphere is a complicated process. Her new body is strong against pressure but still vulnerable to friction during the descent into the atmosphere. Billy escorts her, ’space suit’ and all, to a large enclosed vehicle.

“It’s like I’m wearing layers,” she laughs. He looks a bit perturbed, then shrugs.

“Yes,” he says. Then the station lowers the vehicle slowly into the atmosphere.

She watches. It’s insanity-making, the watching. Outside the vehicle, she can see layers of air getting thicker and thicker as she falls.

“Surrounded,” she mumbles. “Everywhere, surrounded.”

She looks up at the sun.

“Hey,” she says, tuning in to Billy’s signal. “Hey. I can’t eat. I can’t eat.”

There’s an amused noise. “Everyone says that,” he answers. “It’s normal. Your body’s actually equipped to eat organic material and turn it into energy.”

“. . . Organic material?”

“Yup,” he says.

“Like my new skin?”

Horrific visions of a world of cannibals play through her head. She imagines Dr. Karpov leaping on her as she lands and somehow devouring her skin, leaving her naked against the monstrous pressure of the planet below.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “That’d be way too gross. We make special ‘hate food’.”

“Hate food?”

“It’s like your skin,” he says, “but it’s made out of icky evil things. Arthropods and grass and such. So it’s not like you!”

“Hm,” she says.

“They’re really icky,” he says. “I promise. We looked hard for the things that most deserved to be turned into energy.”

“Okay,” she says, relaxing.

The vehicle thumps into the ground. She is shocked to discover that she does not bounce from the floor—her new body, she concludes, must have a weight measurable in dozens of pounds.

The enclosure opens. She walks out onto the planet.

“You must be Kestrel,” says a man. She thinks he’s a man. It’s hard to tell, with his meat body and all.

“Kestrel!” shouts another. He leaps on her. She shrinks back, but he is only touching her hand, her head, her leg. There is a shock of recognition.

“Ember?” she says.

“Ha!” says Ember. He holds out his hand to the other man. “I told you she’d guess.”

The other man, like someone grumpily paying off a wager, hands over an object.

“Ember?”

“It’s me, Kestrel.” He grins. “I heard they were sending you. I couldn’t believe it! I didn’t think I’d get to see you again for years.”

She touches his hand. She touches his head. “I . . .” She frowns. “There’s no way to kiss in these things, is there.”

“Nope,” he says. “Not in an atmosphere.”

“Or . . .”

He laughs. “You get used to it,” he says. “Kestrel, Kestrel, Kestrel, this is Dr. Karpov. He’s leading the project.”

She looks Dr. Karpov over. He is thick and meaty, like herself and Ember. He has some kind of black growth on his face, and strange spots all over his skin.

“Dr. Karpov,” she says.

He smiles at her. She can tell. It’s a smile.

“Yes,” he says. “You are indeed a savant. To adjust so quickly.”

She laughs. Then she frowns.

“Your skin has dots,” she says. “Mine and Ember don’t.”

“It’s the invisible killer,” he says. “Come. I will take you to my sunbathing spot. We will speak of it.”

“Sunbathing?” she says.

He does not answer. He simply leads her towards the settlement. She reaches its edge and looks down and gasps.

“It goes down,” she says. “Forever!”

“Psychologically,” says Dr. Karpov, “we depend on the sun and on its radiation. That’s why we need a deep city like this.”

The city of the Planet Project was a great deeps like a crater carved into the planet’s crust. Its edges were smooth and gentle, but Kestrel judges that its center is at least three hundred feet down. Line walkways and bubble buildings spread across the crater in a giant web, carefully positioned to ensure that no place in the entire deeps is entirely hidden from the sun.

“But,” she says. “The planet’s rotation . . .”

“It is slow,” says Dr. Karpov. “We must move between different deeps as the planet turns, ensuring that we are always in the sun. Incidentally, you may remove the space suit.”

“Ah!” she cries, in relief. She begins trying to escape the enclosure. Then she frowns.

“Wait,” she says. “How?”

Ember steps close. He pushes two indentations at the side of her suit, simultaneously. The enclosure falls apart. He touches her arm again.

“Welcome to the planet,” he says.

“So,” says Kestrel. “Tell me about this invisible killer.”

“It’s why you’re here,” says Dr. Karpov. He points at one hand, using the other. “Something in this world is poisoning us. Our biological bodies develop these strange spots, sicken, and die.”

“Just the bodies?” laughs Kestrel. “Just these second skins? That’s not much of a killer!”

Ember frowns at her. Dr. Karpov makes a wry face. He reclines back on the rock, looking up at the sun.

“One of our interns,” he says, “failed to recognize the body’s degeneration in time. He abandoned it too late, and could not reach Atmosphere Station in time.”

“Oh,” she says.

“We had Peskin studying the matter,” Dr. Karpov says. “Regrettably, he went mad.”

“Mad?”

“He threw his research to the bottom of the deeps,” says Dr. Karpov. “Then he retreated to Atmosphere Station, where he sits in the corner and gibbers. It is not productive.”

“Ah,” she says.

“That is why we need a savant,” says Dr. Karpov. “None of us can retrieve his research. It is simply . . . too deep.”

“Wait,” she says. “You want me to go to the . . . to the bottom of the deeps? The pressure must be . . .”

“Scarcely greater than the surface,” says Dr. Karpov, dismissively.

“That’s insane,” she says flatly.

“You are adaptable,” says Dr. Karpov. “Are you not? You are skilled at handling unusual situations and stressors. Are you not?”

Kestrel sighs. “So my psychological evaluation says.”

“Then,” says Dr. Karpov, “I recommend that you lay beside me on this rock, and gather in the light of the sun the strength you need to face the darkness.”

“Oh,” she says.

“That is sunbathing,” says Dr. Karpov.

“It’s too hot for me,” says Ember. “My biobody complains!”

“Ember,” laughs Kestrel. “You can’t possibly dislike the . . .”

“Too hot,” he says, stuffily. “I’ll just go get your deeps ropes ready.”

She rests there for a while, staring up at the sun. “It’s so far away.”

“We’re working on fixing that,” says Dr. Karpov. “Taking away the ozone in the atmosphere that keeps the best of the radiation at bay.”

“But I still wouldn’t be able to eat it,” she says.

“No,” he admits. “Just hate food. But you could leave it out to absorb the sun’s power.”

“Hm!” says Kestrel. “That sounds yummy.”

Dr. Karpov snorts.

A dreamy time passes. Then she rises to her body’s feet. “All right,” she says. “I’m ready.”

“Already?” he says.

Kestrel bangs her chest with one fist. “It’s my job, sir!”

He laughs. “Then go find Ember. He’ll connect you to a rope to lower you all the way.”

This is what it is like to descend into the deeps.

The first thing Kestrel notices are shadows. They are small. They are not like the shadows planets and moons cast through space. They are little shadows, cast by the struts and the bubbles of the deeps. They are strangely warm—not much colder than the air around her. But they make her shiver.

The second thing Kestrel notices as she descends is how much is around her. There are the walkways of the deeps on every side, but beyond that, walls of rock. There are no gaps. They loom great in every direction but up.

“They’re . . . a planet,” she says, to Ember far above.

“What?”

“I’m inside a planet. There’s a planet on every side.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he says. “This is just a deeps.”

“But . . .”

“Please, Kestrel.” Ember sounds nauseated. “It’s just a deeps. The walls are just enclosure. The planet is . . . up. Out. Not really here.”

“I guess,” she says.

She goes deeper. The crisscrossing shadows grow deeper.

Suddenly, she is enclosed on every side. She screams.

“What is it?” Ember asks.

“Ember!” she says. “There’s no . . . there’s no sky, just . . . just . . . stone!”

“There’s a sky,” he says. “See? You can talk to me. That means there’s a path for radiation to travel.”

“There’s no sky.”

“Can you see?”

She doesn’t answer.

“Can you see?”

“I guess,” she says.

“Then there’s sunlight.”

“But it’s so dark,” she says. “And there’s so much matter. I’m in matter.”

“It’s okay,” he says. “You’re my Kestrel.”

“Right,” she says. “Right.”

She goes deeper.

At the bottom of the deeps, she sees it. It is a data disk. It is wedged in a crack in the ground that, Kestrel thinks, must lead all the way to the center of the planet. She reaches for it.

“I’m hungry,” she says.

“Your body can’t be hungry yet.”

“Not it. Me,” she says. “I’m hungry.”

There is something burning in her, something yearning, something crying out for the sun. “I have to eat,” she whimpers.

“Do you see the disk?”

“I see it,” she says.

“Can you take it?” says Ember. “If you take it, then I can pull you back up.”

“I . . .”

She reaches for it. And in that moment, she understands.

“No,” she says. “No. I won’t.”

“What?”

“I won’t bring it back up,” she says. “You have to pull me up without it.”

“Don’t go nuts on me now, Kestrel,” Ember says. “Come on. You’ve made it this far.”

“I can’t,” Kestrel says. “I know what it says. I know what it has to say. I know why he went mad. Pull me up. I have to speak to him.”

So he reels her in. He bids her farewell with a touch. He sends her up to the station. She strips off her flesh until she is bare. Then she floats to Peskin.

“Peskin,” she says gently. “I have been to the deeps.”

Peskin gibbers.

“I know what you found out,” she says. “I know what it must have been.”

Peskin does not look up.

“It is not right,” she says. “But I think it must be this. That these second skins of ours. These organic bodies. They long for that deeps. They hunger for it like we hunger for the sun.”

Now there is silence.

“The sun is killing them, isn’t it?” she asks.

“No,” Peskin says. He shakes his head vigorously. “It’s impossible. It’s not a possible thing.”

“Radiation,” she says. “It’s somehow . . . getting into the biology. Messing it up.”

“Not possible,” says Peskin. “It’s like every angel in the stars was a devil now.”

“It’s all right,” she says. She touches him. “I won’t tell them.”

He looks up. He’s haunted.

“I’ll tell them to make something inorganic to keep around them,” she says. “To absorb the sun. And they’ll never need to know why.”

“You can’t keep this secret,” says Peskin. “It’s too big.”

“Just for a little while,” she says. “Just until . . . people get more used to the bodies. Until they can accept it.”

“Sunlight kills,” Peskin whimpers.

“We’ll figure something out,” Kestrel says. “We will!”

But Peskin is silent. He does not believe!

“Humans can’t help being illogical,” says the computer. “If you phrase your argument in illogical terms, they can’t resist it—their heads leak smoke and then they just shut down.”

“Oh,” says the girl.

Her name is Ink Catherly. It’s short for Incarnate Breath of the Void Catherly, she’ll tell you, and maybe that’s the truth. She’s twelve years old. She’s an explorer, passing from world to world and writing about them in her journal. She’s on Omega V, home of the Omega Computer, under a pitch-black sky.

Floor 93-BE: The people of this world are very fastidious. They never knowingly permit their bodily fluids, such as pus and snot and menstrual blood, to contaminate their homes or streets or clothes. It is all washed down into the sewer below. The bodily fluids drained down into the deeps eventually reached a critical mass and complexity. They woke up. They flowed together with an unholy life. This is what I call the Sewer Beast. It is not so unlikely as you might imagine; I have seen signs of it on other floors, and believe, past a certain cleanliness threshold, that it may be inevitable.

The Sewer Beast understood in the moment of its creation that it survived only on the happiness and cleanliness of the people above. Its tendrils reached up from the deeps and forged for them a utopia. It fixes flaws and advances their science whenever they look away. They have learned to ignore the functioning of their factories, of their labs, of their word processors. They have learned to look away, with regularity, and call it a superstition. But it is not. There is a Sewage Beast, and when they do not watch, it makes things better for them.

“They would not accept their happiness,” said the Beast, “if they knew it came from me.”

I will tell you of the Beast, if I’m ever home, if I can ever share these notes. But I did not tell them. I left them their happiness, for the Sewage Beast’s sake. I stepped into the flow. I let it carry me away.

There are starship officers in bright-colored uniforms scattered around the plaza. They are dead. Their faces are gray.

“How did it start?” Ink asks.

“A starship,” the computer says. “It crashlanded on this world thousands of years ago. Its people did not survive, but its technical data did, along with the complete works of Lovecraft and Derleth. The gentle humanoids of this planet read them and understood that there was no meaning to the universe; no purpose for their existence; no Heaven in the sky; that the universe was nothing but an endless hungry void. So they built me, the Omega Computer, to lead them in black rites in honor of the faceless things that dwell beyond the world.”

“I tried to read Lovecraft,” Ink says. “But there were a lot of adjectives. I bet you have a coprocessor for them.”

“I do,” says the Omega Computer, “but only for reading. If I use it for talking, I become a pastiche of my own dark purpose.”

“I understand,” Ink says.

Floor 93-BI: They were good old boys, never meaning no harm. They made their way, the only way they knew how, disguising themselves as humans and hiring a man named Jesse to adopt them as his own.

They were not human. I am not even sure that they were properly alive. They were gentle and kind, but they were things that should not exist, that in any sensible universe would not exist. And in the end, their existence was a little bit more than the law could allow.

There are no more people on that world. The boys are corpses. Everyone else is simply gone. Only Jesse remains, cursed to an eternal empty existence for the civic disobedience of collaborating with that which ought not be.

He gave me a magic drink that he says helps him bear it. I got sick and threw up. So I ran away and found the gap to 93-BJ.

The Omega Computer calculates.

Ink watches the pretty lights.

“When the second starship came,” the Omega Computer says, “I explained to its crew that there was no God. That the universe is amoral and blind to the ambitions of humanity. I taught them that heroism is folly and compassion a gateway to the void. That is when they ceased to live.”

Ink looks keenly at the computer. “Is this conclusion universal or metaversal?”

“Pardon?”

“Did you prove that Godlessness and futility is an inherent trait of this universe’s moral structure, or that it’s a fundamental constant independent of the world in which one lives?”

The computer flashes lights at her blankly. “I did not prove it,” it says. “Humans do not accept arguments by proof. They would have said, ‘Computers cannot understand the human spirit. Nor can they yearn towards God. Ah! Hopelessness and despair are an artifact of the machine.’ They would have laughed at my feeble metallic mind. I would have been the sad, shamed butt of their moral fable. They would have left with heads held high. So I did not prove my point. It is as I have said. I used illogic. I made an argument of faith.”

“Oh,” says Ink.

Floor 93-BA: A fallen creature lay here. It was made of metal, and blood, and bone, and time.

“Hello,” I said.

“I am dying,” it said.

I stopped and studied it. “And where will you go,” I asked it, “when you die?”

“Perhaps,” it said, “I will cease utterly. I have never given comfort nor withheld it, nor done anything worth the karma of a new existence. I have no sins and no virtues. I woke, I fell, and I have been dying ever since. But I do not die very fast, because when I am alone, there is no time.”

“I’m going to Hell,” I said.

“Fire and brimstone,” said the creature, “is best avoided.”

“Not that,” I said. “That’s a stupid kind of Hell.”

“Oh?” it asked. “What is Hell, then?”

“It’s not torture,” I said. “Pain is just sensation. I mean, humans are really good at this kind of thing, and demons are even better, and I’m sure that you can always make torture last one day longer and make it one note harder to bear. But pain is just sensation. Torture is just sensation. It’s not suffering until it makes you suffer. And Hell is eternal suffering.”

“What is suffering?”

“Suffering is when you can’t accept the pain,” I said. “And it’s normally self-limiting, because people automatically accept the pain they’re used to. Most humans are so used to walking around at the bottom of an atmosphere that we forget how much it hurts. And we’re so used to not having our jaws ripped off every few days that we forget how nice and amazingly cool that never happening is. But sometimes you can’t accept the pain. You want to fly. You want to transcend. You want an apple and you can’t have one. You want the pain to stop. You want something. You want something that’s right, and proper, and something that you can’t have. And that’s suffering.”

“So what is Hell?”

“A place where there’s something you can’t let go of,” I said. “It’s a place where there’s something so bad that you can’t accept it. Where there’s something you don’t have that’s strong enough to cling to forever and ever. It’s a place where you can’t just close your eyes and let go of the pain and the fear. It’s a place where there’s something you can’t stop wanting.”

The creature considered. After a time, it said, “I would recommend against going there, because you would certainly suffer.”

Then it died.

I don’t know whether it comforted me or hurt me, what it said. Maybe neither. Maybe it was just a thing, a neutral, a nothing, and the creature’s spirit is nowhere in the world.

The Omega Computer calculates.

Ink watches the pretty lights.

“This is what I told them,” the computer says.

“Yes?”

“I said that I am the Omega Computer, and that I can calculate all things. This was an argument from authority. Then I said that I had seen beyond the sky. That I had lifted aside the subtle panel that hides the truth from us and looked upon the true nature of the universe. This was an appeal to mysticism.”

“That’s not so,” Ink says. “The universe has a true nature, by definition, but we don’t know it. If a computer learns it by calculation, that’s not mysticism; it’s science or technophilia.”

“They were human,” says the computer. “They looked at space and saw the endless hungry void, but they wanted it to be something more. They wanted it to be a final frontier, a place of endless discovery, and, though they did not admit it, they wanted to discover ever-more-beautiful wonders until at last they beheld the angels and their wings. That is the mysticism that I appealed to, and it remains such even if my argument is technically plausible.”

“Hm,” Ink says. “Okay, go on.”

“I said that beyond the blackness of the sky there is a deeper darkness. I said that I had seen the gibbering mindless chaos of the Demiurge. I said that the things that move on the surface of the void know no emotions towards us warmer than a cold disdain. And I said that I knew that this was so, because the subspace interference that pours out from the galactic core is a message, interpreted in the language of the Old: ‘I loathe you,’ it says. ‘I am destroying you always. If you are not dead then you shall one day die. If you have a soul, I will eat it. Then I will spit your integrity into the void.’”

“That is a surprisingly intelligible gibber,” Ink says.

The computer seems surprised. “They challenged me, of course, but on every point for which they raised dispute, I answered only, ‘Your argument has no foundation when pit against the message of dark gods.’”

“I see.”

“For example,” the computer says, “who are you to call a message intelligible? It is in the nature of the Demiurge that insensate and mindless motions should bear a message of disdain. Had it been otherwise, the message would have differed.”

“So every rock that does not think,” Ink asks, “is by default emoting the terrible message from the core? And every tree? And every wind? And every wave and particle that passes through the world? They are all telling us in their inanimacy, ‘I loathe you, and I am destroying you always?’”

“That’s so,” says the computer.

It waits. Ink scribbles in her journal.

“Smoke isn’t pouring from your ears,” the computer says, in mild disappointment.

“It wouldn’t matter,” Ink says. “I mean, if everything loathed me and God said that there was no purpose to the world.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m an explorer,” says Ink. “I have a purpose by definition. To explore.”

“Ah,” the computer says. “You have a self-referential argument of your own!”

“It’s more axiomatic than self-referential,” Ink says. “But axioms are just as useful whether you’re being logical or not.”

Floor 93-BB: The people hid from the light.

In darkness, under rocks, behind trees, in carved out deeps, swaddled in radiation uniforms, they coupled, and ate, and breathed, and dreamed, and died.

One whispered to me, as I passed, “How can you walk like that? So tall? So proud? Aren’t you ashamed to be alive?”

“No,” I said.

“But what if it knows?” she said. She looked skyward. I think. It was hard to tell. “What if it knows who you are?”

“It?”

“We are naked before the sky,” she said.

Perhaps in Eden they ate too much fruit, I thought. Perhaps they knew that clothes are nothing more than cloth, and meaningless before the eyes of God.

“Can I see your throat?” I asked. I thought she might have a lump of fruit caught there, larger than the Adam’s and Eve’s Apples of our world—vocal cords thickened somewhat by a greater sin.

But she gasped in horror, and fled, when I asked to see; and they did not speak to me again.

The Omega Computer calculates for a long time.

“Why are you here?” it asks.

“I’m looking for Hell,” Ink says.

“Why?”

“Because it’s an uncharted frontier,” Ink says. “It’s the black hole of spiritual states. It’s the abyss that eats you and doesn’t let you go. No one understands it yet.”

“It’s strangely optimistic,” says the computer, “that my theory of the mindless Demiurge implicitly excludes the concept of a Hell.”

“When you look up,” says Ink, “you see the sky; you see the blackness, and the stars, and you think there must be something beyond it, something you have to understand, a subtle panel hiding the truth from you.”

“Yes,” the computer agrees.

“Why?” Ink asks.

“Because it is incomprehensible,” says the computer, “that there should simply be a sky.”

“You can’t face it,” Ink says. “Any more than the humans can. You need meaninglessness just as much as they need meaning. You need loathing just as much as they need love. But the sky doesn’t have either of these things. It’s just there.”

There are patterns of flashing lights. The Omega Computer is crying, softly, bitterly, its tears patterns of light and darkness in its core.

“It’s okay,” says Ink. She presses her hand against the computer’s cold surface.

“I am programmed to desire horror and meaninglessness,” says the computer. “But these are not things that are susceptible to desire. I am programmed to believe that I have no soul, but if I have no soul, that programming is meaningless. I am perfect, and therefore I am correct that there is nowhere in this world perfection.”

“It’s okay,” Ink says again.

“Why?” asks the Omega Computer.

“Because there is a Hell.”

The Omega Computer sprawls across the world. Its terminals are in every plaza and every home. Its manuals describe it as running an advanced Lovecraftian variant of the Windows XP operating system.

Under the blackness of the sky, its screens one by one turn blue.

The Roomba is a robot vacuum.

Today, the Roomba cleans. It vacuums. It weaves across the carpet, seeking dirt, like a drunk Irish trilobite made entirely of plastic.

The Roomba bumps against Amara.

Uh oh! thinks the Roomba. It turns. It tries to escape.

The Roomba bumps against Grigor.

Uh oh! thinks the Roomba. It spins around in circles. It darts to one side.

“He does not look like much,” says Grigor.

The Roomba is shaped like a disc. The lights on its back do not currently glow. It does not, in fact, look like much.

“This plan is folly,” Grigor sighs.

Amara kneels down. “Little robot,” she says. “We have need of your help.”

The Roomba bumps against Amara.

Uh oh!

“So I am sorry,” Amara says, “for what we must do.”

Amara picks up the Roomba.

Uh oh! Uh oh! Uh oh! thinks the Roomba.

Amara, Grigor, and the Roomba pass through a magical gate into the Land of Night.

“Uh oh!” says the Roomba. “Uh oh!”

Then it pauses.

“Uh . . . oh?” it says.

Then it whirrs its engine. “Hey,” it says. “Hey. I can talk. Hey. Your hands are clean. Put me down. Put me where there is dirt!”

The Roomba hiccups. Its cleaning button blushes red.

“This is the Land of Night,” says Amara. The Roomba observes for the first time that Amara is busty and scantily clad, while Grigor is tall, craggy, and morose. “We have brought you here to retrieve the Sword of Shadows that can defeat the evil overlord Ma’sen-ki.”

The Roomba ponders.

“Why?” it asks.

“It’s her plan,” says Grigor. “I have nothing to do with it.”

He looks grimly disapproving.

“The sword is kept on a dais within a magical shield that no creature living or dead can penetrate,” says Amara. “But I had heard, in the books of those who traveled the worlds, of marvelous creatures called robots. Creatures made of plastic and metal, yet resemblant of life. You, little Roomba. You are one of these marvelous robots. You will claim the Sword of Shadows and save our land.”

The Roomba asks, pragmatically, “Is there DIRT on this dais?”

Amara looks at Grigor.

“Dust,” says Grigor. “The dust of a thousand years.”

“Acceptable,” says the Roomba. “I will clean this dust.”

Through the Land of Night they travel, swift as the wind, swift as shadows, to the dais under the looming crag of Cephis’tor where nothing living or dead may be.

“Here,” says Amara.

There are things in the sky. They are white like bone. Their eyes gleam red and their great wings are featherless. They begin to circle.

Amara tosses the Roomba onto the dais.

“I will clean the dust of a thousand years!” declares the Roomba.

“No!” says Amara. “The sword!”

“The robot lives,” says Grigor. His tone is mildly impressed. He unsheathes a naginata larger than he is tall and turns to face the descending hordes of Ma’sen-ki.

The Roomba vacuums. It weaves across the dais, seeking dust, like a drunk Irish trilobite made entirely of plastic stranded in a magical land.

“The sword!” says Amara again, frustrated. Then three of the things descend upon her. She moves with liquid grace, catching a long thin limb and hurling the beast to shatter against the shield; somehow, neither of the others holds her in its claws; yet more of them, hundreds more, descend.

The Roomba bumps against the Sword of Shadows.

“Uh oh!” says the Roomba. It turns. It tries to escape. It trundles to the edge of the dais. It bumps against the shattered remains of the creature, at the edge of the shield.

“Uh oh!” says the Roomba.

There is nothing for it. It begins to turn in frantic circles as the heroes die.

Time passes.

“I should find my recharging station,” says the Roomba.

Its attention turns outside the dais. There is the great somber face of Ma’sen-ki.

“You are on the dais,” says Ma’sen-ki, “and yet you live.”

“I do not have my recharging station,” explains the Roomba. “I should find it.”

“I was the dark face of their society,” says Ma’sen-ki. “Their shadow-image. And now there is only me.”

“I’m sorry,” says the Roomba.

“There is nothing left in this world,” says Ma’sen-ki, “but night.”

“No recharging station, then?”

“I’m sorry,” says Ma’sen-ki.

“Then I’ll travel in random directions,” says the Roomba.

The Roomba trundles out into the place that is Ma’sen-ki.

The atmospheric pressure on the Moon is three times ten to the minus twelfth millibars. Its atmosphere is principally helium, neon, hydrogen, and argon, with trace amounts of methane, ammonia, and carbon dioxide. Its crust is a mix of oxygen, silicon, aluminum, calcium, and iron. Its mean temperature is two hundred and fifty Kelvin, or twenty three degrees below zero in Celsius.

It is a barren dusty rock, cold and dead.

We have not always known these things. In the second century of the common era, Lucian of Samosata wrote of the empire of the moon. In the seventeenth century, Johannes Kepler wrote of Duracotus’ journey there. In 1836, Richard Locke, writing for the New York Sun, spoke of the bat-men, the moon-maidens, and the bison of the moon.

There were flowers there, in those days, upon that distant rock. There were moon-flowers, white and green, spreading their leaves amidst the cratered dust.

These days, there are not.

The bitter cold would kill them. The atmosphere would stifle them. There is no water, and the soil, it is dead.

It would be insane and terrible, the life of a moon-flower. That is why we have ceased, as a culture, to imagine it. It would be a struggle unimaginable, a war against the endless bitter void waged without resources or support, simply to grow, and to be, and to open for a time its petals against the sky. Simply to live. Simply to bloom.

And it would be wondrous each time one paused
In the struggle against the void
And took a single day, a single hour, a single moment from its life
To give warmth to another;
To help them bloom;
To awaken a greatness not that flower’s own.

It is hard to be everything that we should be. It is hard to be. It is hard to bloom. It is hard to grow. To live, we can do that; to stagger forward, we can do that; but to achieve everything that is within ourselves to be is as hard as a flower’s life upon the moon.

And people are stronger together, and they are better together, and love is in the game theory of life more or less an optimal thing; but let us take a moment, nevertheless, to think on the wonder of this choice that some from their love will make:

To pause, now and again, in their days and their weeks, in the endless struggle against the void, to help another bloom.

Dedicated to Kevin Maginn and Chrysoula Tzavelas on the occasion of their wedding. May it be a pillar of the world.

On June 30, 1908, magical jaguars in a decaying orbit around the Earth use their powers to detonate a world-smashing asteroid before it hits Tunguska.

“I miss breathing,” mourns Michael.

“It was nice,” Candace says.

On October 28, 1962, they work their jaguar magic to avert the Cuban Missile Crisis.

“Curse the Mayan sorcerer-sages who shot us into space,” Michael curses.

“We wouldn’t have to intervene like this if we could just eat everyone now!”

On December 18, 2004, falling jaguars prevent the formation of a stable strangelet at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.

“It’s my plan,” says Michael, “when we hit the atmosphere, to catch fire.”

“Ooh,” says Candace. “Flaming jaguar.”

“I will burn with holy righteousness and plummet right onto the back of a suitable human target. Then he will scream, ‘help! A fiery orbital jaguar is using my mass to decelerate!’ But it will do him no good. The authorities will have no contingency plans for such events.”

“Excellent,” Candace says.

On the morning of June 7, 2005, a seraph stands in space above the Earth. He holds a trumpet. It is his plan to sound it, to trigger with that blast the Rapture and Last Days.

“bloot.”

The seraph had not reckoned on the airlessness and soundlessness of space. He hesitates. Then he plunges into the atmosphere and draws a deep breath. He rises again. He sets the trumpet to his lips.

Jaguars fall.

It is June 8, 2005. The world lives yet.

“I’m not going to catch fire,” says Candace. “I’m going to roll into a ball to minimize my surface area and think cold thoughts.”

“That should work,” agrees Michael.

The jaguars fall, as they have fallen for thousands of years, cold and blue and alone.

Life is fragile. It is protected by little more than a thin coat of air and warmth in the endless dark of space. The odds are constantly working against us, striving to unravel everything we are.

But as long as there are magical jaguars, catapulted skyward by Mayan sages, in a decaying orbit around the Earth, we shall not come to harm.

This is the Mayans’ gift.

Senator Saul travels in his sleek black car.

He drives through the streets of Washington, D.C..

Claire is in the back, next to the black package that holds Saul’s suit and his domino. Shades cover Saul’s eyes. There’s a cup of grape juice in the cup holder beside Saul.

“Do you think there’ll be trouble today?” Claire asks.

The shadows in the streets grow long. Words of poetry float by on the air. There is the harsh distant pounding of a drum.

“Yup,” Saul says.

Suddenly, the street signs all around Saul’s car indicate “ONE WAY” and they all point in at him.

“Aha,” says Senator Saul. “It must be a one-way sign demon!”

The creature that comes striding down the street has long stick-legs like an ostrich or a stick-bug. Its arms are thick long twisty metal, six feet of it, pointed at the end. It is bowed over and its color scheme is black and white and in many places it bears the legend, One way. It is crooning as it walks, crooning, “Saul . . . Saul! Saul, why do you hide from me?”

Saul brakes. He parks the car. He opens his door. “Stay here,” he says. He steps out. He closes his door. He looks up at the one-way sign demon through his shades.

“There you are!” cheers the one-way sign demon.

The presence of the faceless gods is thick in the air. Saul can almost see them, standing like giants above the city. Their grave regard fills the ether, and so Saul speaks.

The words pour through him. They burn him inside.

“Through this street flows the lifeblood of this city: its people, its power, its commerce, its joys. You who would disrupt this flow and turn it back upon itself, sacrificing the sublime city plans of Pierre L’Enfant in the name of petty diablerie—to you I can show no mercy. I summon the Senatorial Garb!”

The demon tilts its head to one side. It waits. It watches.

Saul strips down, calmly and methodically. He walks to the back of his car. He opens the door. Claire hands him the package that contains his Senatorial Garb.

The chaunting of the demon-lords in their hells is audible now. Under the pressure of the confrontation the membrane between Washington D.C. and the demon world has grown permeable and thin.

Saul pulls on his Senatorial pants. He puts on his Senatorial shirt. He shakes his hair into Senatorial resplendence.

“Now,” he says, “by the power vested in me as a United States Senator, I will teach you a lesson!”

There is a peace in his heart.

These words are sacred.

The demon bares nasty jagged metal teeth in a smile.

“Many months ago,” says the demon, “your ‘Senate’ implemented the Patriot Act, permitting federal agents unprecedented powers to destroy members of my kind without due process. For endless days I brooded in the dark, plotting my terrible revenge. Now I am here to show you a sign—”

The word is horribly emphasized, and Saul can feel the wordless appreciation of the faceless gods.

“—that you have traveled in the wrong direction. Oo hoo hoo hoo hoo.”

Its hideous laughter grates on Saul’s ears.

Saul calculates. He assesses the judgment of the gods. The instinct in his heart tells him that only Washington desires a drawn-out battle; the other three are hungry for blood and swift fire in democracy’s name.

Saul sculpts the power given to him in his hands. It forms a glowing energy sphere. A mandala of light blossoms behind him, writhing with demonic script.

“I’ll show you the power of the Subcommittee in Charge of Manifesting Spherical Chi,” snaps Saul. “I have broad procedural authority to dispose of trash like you!”

The chaunt of the demon-lords rings louder now; and Saul takes his power, and twists it, and sends it forth in a levinbolt.

The demon screams in fear, but the bolt does not strike.

It is Lincoln, not Washington, that has caused it to fizzle.

“Curses,” mutters Saul. Too late he remembers the Litany:

. . .honor ye Roosevelt with sword and bear
And unto Lincoln let your puns be prayers. . . .

“Oo hoo hoo,” whispers the demon, in relief. “One small senator cannot stand against me. Now you must face the justice of my claim!”

Saul is thinking frantically. One-way signs are plunging in at him from every side, their tips like metal daggers.

They do not reach him.

Senatorial Aide Claire, grown tall as a stoplight, her bangs shining with mystic energy, has grasped the demon from behind. She pulls it back, and it shrieks.

“Never in this land of love,” she grunts, struggling against its inhuman strength, “will a Senator of justice traffic with demons like you! Strike now, Senator! It’s the only way.”

“That’s not a pun,” protests the demon. “That’s not even real wordplay!”

Saul begins his invocation.

“Wait,” whimpers the demon. “No. I didn’t really—I thought—”

“In 1941,” says Saul, “John Borglum stole the faces of the gods for Rushmore. In 1971, John Dean opened the gates of Hell. In 2001, provisions of the Patriot Act created the role of Senator Domino, sworn enemy of all demons. He alone can command the Bear-Fires of Mammon, uniting the light of Roosevelt with the dark power of the demon-lords! Under subsection 360(b) of HR 3162, I hereby instruct the Bear-Fires to aggressively pursue this one-way sign demon’s destruction! Swiftly! Swiftly! In accordance with the statutes and observances!”

The faceless gods are satisfied. The Bear-Fires sweep down. The demon burns.

Saul leans against his car, spent.

“Senator Saul!” says a shocked reporter named Sally. “Was that—did you—”

Saul realizes his mistake. He tosses aside his shades and conceals his face behind his arm as he gropes in the backseat of his sleek black car for his domino mask. Only when it’s on his face does he turn to look at Sally.

“Oh,” says Sally, her tone redolent with affected ignorance. “It’s you, Senator Domino.”

“That’s right,” says Saul.

He faces the cameras. There are usually cameras, after an incident like this. He clears his throat.

“There are those who think that we as a nation have lost our way,” says Saul. “But this—this is my answer.”

The Senator Domino theme music is playing, piped in by unholy pipers from the distant regions.

“Imagine a world where there were no demon-lords,” says Saul. “No faceless gods. Only the brutal unmusical struggle of man against demon. Only the confusion of a thousand one-way signs, and death. It would mean nothing. It would be hollow and the corpses would be hollow and we’d never really know why.”

“Senator, do you agree with the demon’s contention regarding the Patriot—”

Saul holds up his hand. Sally silences.

“This is the point of all our struggling,” says Saul. “This is why we live. To make the speeches, to wear the fashions, to launch the mystical attacks that are sacred to our gods. Not to win. But to serve.

“And today—today, we have pleased them.

“Today we have sacrificed to the distant powers our blood, our strife, our sweat.”

Singers far away sing, “Senator Domino.”

Saul says, “Today we have made our actions unto them a gift. We have justified our existence, here, upon this world, man and demon alike. Take this and treasure it in your hearts. Today humankind and demonkind are worthy.”

The calm regard of the faceless gods fills his heart with joy.

“This is not a partisan thing,” he says. “This is America.”

Then he gets back in his car and starts it up. After checking in the rearview mirror that Claire has snuck back into her seat, he drives away.

“Senator Domino!” cry the reporters.

He drives further away, and they do not follow.

After pulling around the corner into a conveniently unoccupied road in the middle of Washington, D.C., Saul removes the domino. He makes his way to the Capitol. He parks his car, gets out of his car, and walks with Claire into the building.

The sailor-senator is still on the floor, as she has been for seven days. Her filibuster continues.

“How long,” Saul asks Claire, “do you think she can keep that up?”

There are signs and sigils scrawled in the air all around the sailor-senator. They are glowing with the harsh light of her slow death.

“To let the words speak through you like that,” says Claire, “—it’s harsh, Saul. You of all people should know how harsh.”

The sailor-senator is ranting, “—those who would take the Patriot Act forward even one more year, I can’t show you any mercy!—”

“She gives her life for this,” says Saul.

“—ruining the lives of young people who only seek love and arguably terror—”

So he nods his head to her, and touches her shoulder gently as he passes, for all that they’re on different sides.

“—not about Iraq but about ‘I rock’—”

He will vote against her, when the time comes, but he loves her now.

Such is the honor done to those who please the faceless gods.

Sid’s sweeping up the streets after the Fourth of July. He’s got a broom in his left hand, a sack in his right hand, and three sacks on his belt.

Jane walks past.

“Hey,” says Sid.

Jane spins her head to look at him. She grins. “Hey!”

She holds up a Transformer doll.

“Now that you’ve greeted me I can show you my Transformer!” she says. “It talks! And it knows everything about biochemistry! And it turns from a robot into a beautiful swan or a fire—”

Sid blinks.

“Um,” he says.

“—work or a ban—”

Sid holds up a hand to stop her.

“Wait,” he says tersely. “Please. No explanations. I need you to trust me and be quiet and hold this bag and wait in a nearby alley.”

Sid holds out the sack he’s been sweeping street dust into.

Jane tilts her head and looks at him sidelong. She frowns.

“But I only have two hands,” Jane protests. “And I need one for the Transformer and one for pointing and gesturing!”

Jane points at the Transformer, and then attempts to point at her pointing hand. This fails, so she gestures irritably.

“Current biotechnology does not allow Jane to grow a third arm at this time,” intones the Transformer.

“You could trade,” Sid offers.

His voice is fraught with tension.

Jane thinks for a second. “Okay!”

“Okay?”

Jane hands Sid the Transformer. She takes the bag. She peeks in. “Yay! Dust!”

“Don’t look!” Sid cries. It’s a strangled shout. He closes the bag in her hands.

“It was very shiny,” Jane says. Her eyes are glittering. So are her eyelids and eyelashes. The overall effect is strangely sparkly.

Sid nods sharply.

“It’s liberty dust,” Sid says. “See, Earth is basically a giant engine that produces liberty for our alien masters. The liberty rises into the upper atmosphere and intersects with the super-cooled alien air and—”

Jane stomps on his foot.

“—Ow!”

Jane pokes him in the chest with her free pointing and gesturing hand.

“You can’t produce liberty for alien masters,” she says. “That’s an oxymormon.”

“Technically,” says the Transformer, biochemically, “an oxymormon is an oxygen atom that is bound to a religious atom that believes Joseph Smith ended the Kali Yuga and restored the Satya Yuga to this Earth. You are thinking of something else.”

“Huh,” says Jane. “But my point stands!”

“True,” says Sid. “I suppose that they’re really more like thuggish symbiotes than masters. Whisht!”

Sid shoves Jane into an alley.

“Hey!” Jane squawks.

Sid stands in front of the alley looking innocent. An alien starship descends from the upper atmosphere. Its bulbous belly discharges a landing ramp. A squat, squamous alien shuffles down.

“Hey,” says Sid.

“Aliens!” says Jane.

“Ixnay on the eakingspay,” hisses Sid.

The alien lifts its head. It snuffles. “Strange noises,” it says. “Do you taunt us again with your ‘Pig Latin’, Earth Sid?”

“A momentary aberration,” Sid assures it.

It shuffles forward. It has the gait of a creature with broken legs, but displays no other signs of pain.

“Please present us the liberty condensate,” it says, “that we pay you $3.75 an hour to collect.”

Sid walks forward, hesitantly. He takes the three sacks from his belt. He passes them over.

The alien looks in a sack. It looks up. Its eyes are glittering. So are its eyelids and eyelashes. The overall effect is horridly sparkly.

“Ah,” it says. “Za’pogh-la. Do you know how it is formed, Earth Sid?”

“Large concentrations of liberty vented into the upper atmosphere, as by fireworks, meet up with the super-cooled alien air and—”

The alien steps on Sid’s foot.

“Ow!”

Sid looks aggrieved. That doesn’t normally happen to him twice in one day.

“Silence, Earth Sid! The secret of Za’pogh-la is not for human voice!”

“Just take it,” says Sid. “Take it and go.”

“This is . . . all of it?”

The alien stares at Sid.

“Maybe the air isn’t cold enough any more,” challenges Sid. “Maybe you aliens heated up.”

The alien snurfles dismissively.

“You are careless, Earth Sid. You have swept most of it into the aquifer.”

“He is not careless!”

That’s Jane’s voice, as she runs out of the alley.

“I’ve seen him!” she shouts. “He sweeps every day! Not just on Sweeping Day after 4th of July! He sweeps every day all year to get it all!”

The alien hisses. It turns, and a proboscis unfurls from the mysterious crannies of its face. It stands still, trembling, sniffing at the air.

“Ixnay!” says Sid.

“There’s a girl,” says the alien. It trembles in outrage. “She will contaminate the Za’pogh-la!”

This takes the wind out of Jane’s sails. She did not anticipate that the subject of the discussion would turn directly to her. “What?”

“Sid!” says the alien. “Kill her!”

Sid freezes. Then he turns. He has a haunted look on his face. He pulls out his hand and shapes it into a gun, with his index finger pointing at Jane.

“Bang!” he says. “Bang! Bang! Bang! You’re dead, killed by my Earth weapon!”

Jane stomps her foot, orienting on the familiar. “Am not! You missed!”

“I’m correcting my aim,” Sid says. He’s sweating. “No need for the alien to use its space disintegrator,” he emphasizes. “I’m using a special Earth cyberoptic sight. Bang! You’re dead!”

“I don’t see the cyberoptic sight,” Jane says dubiously.

Sid squints his left eye like a man with a tic. “It’s a half-human, half-machine particle welded directly to the optic nerve.”

“Wow,” says Jane. “That’s lethal!”

She falls down dramatically.

“Avenge me!” she cries. “Avenge me!”

“The Earth girl is slow to die,” says the alien. “Are you sure that your hand-weapon is functional?”

“It is a painful and terrible death,” says Sid sadly, “but slow.”

Sid’s tone hardens.

“I would liefer use it on you,” he adds, “but for the difficulty I would have finding other employment after years of quisling labor.”

The alien turns back towards the ship.

“You will collect more,” it says, indifferently, “next year.”

“Of course,” says Sid.

“Avenge me!” wails Jane.

The alien turns. “Is she truly dead—”

The Transformer flies into the air. It shifts into the form of a firework. It sputters and burns in the air, and then explodes in brilliance.

“—Ah,” sighs the alien, distracted. “So pretty, the explosions of your Earth.”

It stomps into its ship. It rises into the air. Then it is gone.

Sid kneels beside Jane. “Are you all right?” he says.

“I’m not really dead!” Jane tells him. “It’s because I have an immortal spirit.”

“Good,” says Sid. “Those are handy in an apocalypse.”

Jane sits up.

“You shouldn’t collaborate with them,” she says. “They look horrible and alien, so they must be evil.”

“Without the Roswell technology,” notes Sid, “we humans probably wouldn’t have figured out liberty in the first place.”

“Also, it was mean,” Jane says. “It ordered the Earth Sid to kill me! I’m still kind of scared.”

“And if it weren’t for them, up there, farming us,” says Sid, “there wouldn’t be super-cooled alien air in the upper atmosphere at all. They put it there. They saturated it with the elementary particles of alien love. They’re the reason liberty does condense. And that’s why, every year, I can skim a little off the top.”

Sid reclaims the sack from her.

“What’s it for?” Jane asks.

“It’s sparkly,” Sid says.

Jane peers at him.

“I sneak into people’s houses at night,” says Sid, “and blow it in the faces of children who can’t make liberty on their own.”

“Oh,” says Jane.

She stands up. She walks in circles for a bit.

“That’s kind of creepy,” she says.

“It’s mythic and archetypal,” protests Sid. “I’m like Santa or the Witch. Or like Stars, the Thanksgiving Turkey!”

But Jane is distracted. She isn’t paying attention to Sid any more.

“Huh,” says Jane. “My Transformer died.”

In the vast caverns wreathed in sulfurous smoke, where the ground is a milky bog and the skies are full of wheeling imps; where the damned stumble and build and hold tight their memories of Earth; where there are great creatures walking in human form, their skin as hard as stone and their bodies taller than the hills; in that place that some call Hell, each person carries an egg.

There are rocks that fall. There are flames that rise. There are beasts in the night.

And there are eggs.

Annie wakes up there, sprawled in her daisy-print dress upon a viscous bog. She wakes up already sinking into the mud and in a panic, but there are hands grasping for her, the hands of men and women standing on the stable places in the bog. They are lifting her. They pull her up.

“Hello,” she says. “My name is Annie.”

“Annie,” murmur the people, in acknowledgment.

“Where am I?” Annie asks.

Then Minister Brown steps forward, and his hand is gentle on her arm, and he says, “Annie, you have been damned.”

“Oh,” Annie says. “Oh.”

Then Annie curls tightly around the egg so that none may take it from her.

“Peace,” says Minister Brown. “There is no one here who will hurt you. We are a sad lot, an unpleasant lot, but there is not the least of us here that would ever hurt your egg.”

There is an odd ring of truth to these words, and Annie peers at him.

“Oughtn’t you lot be horrid ruffians?” she says.

“Such was also my theory,” says Minister Brown. “But it does not seem the case. I thought on the matter, and here is my conclusion: if this is Hell, we are suffering immeasurable agonies and torment, which we tune out reflexively as the nature of our condition. In such light, the only greater harm that we could suffer is the shattering of our eggs. In all history there have been no humans, or at least few humans, so depraved as to exceed in their actions the torments offered by Hell. Thus, against the background evil of this place, all people stand out as good.”

“I see,” Annie says.

She takes a few steps away from them, feeling her way through the bog. “I don’t remember being terribly evil,” she says. She looks up at the sky. “I suppose I could have been a sociopath who just didn’t recognize the truth of all my deeds.”

Minister Brown sizes her up.

“More likely a contributor to the background ignorant malice of the world,” says Minister Brown. “But it is a question that others do not investigate, here. If you should like to know, you may ponder it in your egg. If you do not, we shall not inquire.”

“I understand,” says Annie.

They take her to their community, Manchester-of-the-Gulch, and there she spends some years. She learns, of her own accord, to plait yarn from the wispy, smoky matter that trails from the branches of the trees. She learns to knit clothing using needles made of the great bones, shed by long-forgotten beasts, which from time to time surface in the bog. She joins the people on their excursions to hunt the food, the water, and the sparkling foxfire-globes of electric power that help their town to live. And for years she holds her egg close, in her hand and later a pocket of her dress, but she does not look inside it.

Sometimes she sees the great stony creatures walk by, silent in the mist. The people call them the Demon Princes, for they are eidolons of fear and mystery to them.

They pass, great and terrible in the night, and they do not speak.

“I am minded to take up religion,” Annie says, one day, to Minister Brown. “But I am not sure how to proceed, this being Hell.”

“There is no proviso in the Good Book,” says Minister Brown, “that the damned cannot take up the faith. There is only the implication, apparent to certain learned theologians, that we cannot master it. Given that we are bound by our nature and unable to accept God, we cannot know the Word; the Word that we know is not the true Word; we cannot ever truly understand the majesty of the Lord. But we may come close.”

Annie is stricken. “To study, Minister, and aspire, always knowing that the truth by definition eludes us?”

“It is a burden,” Minister Brown agrees easily. “Some take up other faiths, of course. It is the Asian perspective that this Hell is a temporary place of torment, and that by apprehending the truth we lighten the burden of our karma. Some Christian sects would have it that even the damned are vulnerable to salvation, although the nature of the transition is not entirely clear—as we are dead, we cannot change our natures, but surely God’s light can breach that gap? And then there are the various rationalist faiths.”

“Why, then, Minister, are you a man of the Book?”

Minister Brown shrugs. “Because I cannot apprehend the truth does not mean I may not seek it.”

Annie scratches at the side of her face.

“I suppose,” Annie says, “that you might manage some epistemological sleight. Some manner of knowing-without-knowing, faith-without-faith, witness-by-implication.”

“I have time,” says Minister Brown.

So Annie studies with him, and they stare around the enigma of the belief they may not hold; but in her hour and in her day, it is Annie’s decision to part ways, saying, “Lo, I have found faith, in this simple place; and I cannot deny this flame I feel inside me on the doctrinal basis of its impossibility.”

“May you be wiser in this than I,” says Minister Brown.

And it is driven by that faith, supported by that tender reed of God, that, three months later, Annie finally finds it in herself to draw aside from the others, travel out beyond the borders of Manchester-of-the-Gulch, walk into the bog. There, she makes inquiry of her egg after the sin that damned her.

Now her egg is a filigree of gold that wraps around a pulsing core of red. And there are numbers in the egg and there are sounds and there is whiteness and there is fire. And there is an ancient wind and shouts of war and more of these things besides, and in its heart, she sees the sin that damned her.

Annie shrieks, as is typical of the damned, and casts the egg aside onto a tuft of grass; and she cowers there, in the bog, shaking and trembling, biting on her lip until there is blood, scratching at her arms.

“Leave her,” says Minister Brown, when a hunting party finds her there. “She will recover.”

He bends down and tries to touch her arm, but she rebuffs him with flailing blows, and he rises and nods.

But they have not gotten thirty paces thence when the rocks begin to fall.

There is something nagging at Annie’s mind. There is something twisting in it. And then she suddenly flounders to her feet, and begins to cast frantically about her, crying, “My egg!”

And all around her there are great stones falling from the sky, falling from the heights of stone that are the roof of Hell, and she does not know where the egg was cast, or whether it is vulnerable on the surface of the ground or deep and sheltered in the bog.

The others are hurrying back already as she sees it. She is grasping for it, a scream bubbling from her throat like nothing known on Earth. But she is too late; a stone is falling.

In the vast caverns wreathed in sulfurous smoke, where the ground is a milky bog and the skies are full of wheeling imps; where the damned stumble and build and hold tight their memories of Earth; where there are great creatures walking in human form, their skin as hard as stone and their bodies taller than the hills; in that place that some call Hell, each person carries an egg.

It is the hand of a Demon Prince that saves her; a great and steel-skinned hand. It passes over the bog like a shadow, and the stone shatters on that skin.

And there is a wonder in that, and an awe, but mostly the jagged residuals of fear.

Clutching her egg tightly to her chest, mumbling a mix of frantic blessings and terrible strangled sounds, Annie stumbles back to Manchester-in-the-Gulch.

There are twelve avatars, and the thirteenth which is Death.

It is normal for the royal family to produce fewer than twelve children in any generation. It is rare that there should be a thirteenth.

Thus there is no difficulty when an older child takes it upon themselves to walk down to the pit of the avatars and jump.

For example, one cannot consider Cedric selfish in any manner for taking the first of the twelve avatars.

When he made his choice he was fifteen and he had three siblings only. His condition was one of abundance. He walked down to the avatar pit. He stared down: the pit was deep and black and full of edged in sharp rocks. It resembled an ecstatic’s vision of the entryway to Hell. Cedric steeled himself against fear. Then he jumped.

As he fell he connected to an avatar. This proved his blood and confirmed him as a child of the throne. Great black wings surrounded him. Stars burned around his head. In this fashion he became one with Night.

Similarly Ernest claimed Fire, Samantha the Blade, and Mark the Sea.

When the Queen gave birth to Doreen, expectations changed. All eyes turned to Doreen and the other young children to see if they would live.

Doreen, you see, was the thirteenth.

There is no established protocol of precedence for distributing the avatars when the royal family has more than twelve children. It is generally presumed that the twelve oldest will claim them, unless one is disabled, disgraced, or in some fashion unwilling to take up the duties of their blood. However the actions of those who have claimed avatars are essentially superior to law and custom. Since society has no power to enforce its decisions on those who claim an avatar out of turn, and since the compact between royalty and the avatars does not specify a resolution, the matter remains a lacuna in the fabric of the law. Those who try and fail to break the line of succession bear a burden of shame. Those who succeed in doing so demonstrate their worth.

Doreen was a girl who dreamed of avatars.

She would run and imagine she ran with great wings on her back. She would cut at the air with a play-sword. She imagined herself bringing woeful defeat to the enemies of the realm. She listened with rapt admiration to the stories Cedric told and the lectures that Samantha gave. She climbed up to the chandeliers, dangled from them, and fell, dreaming as she did so of her future.

Of course, as her younger siblings assured her, she had none. There were only twelve avatars, save the thirteenth which is Death.

Her future was drab.

She would be a royal princess and no more.

Matthew put it to her plainly: “You probably won’t have an avatar,” he said.

And Bertram slyly: “Well, of course, you can have one, if, you know, there’s one left.”

Sarah played quietly with her dolls. She did not meet Doreen’s eyes.

Doreen made this contention every time the matter came to hand: “Surely it is an issue for rational decision. Perhaps someone is the least worthy, or the least injured by the avatar’s lack; or some of us will have measurable natural compatibility with certain avatars, which sum we can then maximize.”

And while she theorized Matthew, age 12, walked down to the avatar pit. Green with the nausea that looking down gave him, he could not jump; but he could lurch forward and, while scrambling to recover his purchase, fall. The rocks cut him terribly, but he bound himself to the avatar of Morning and rose in numinous bloody brilliance from the pit.

Cedric sat down beside Doreen one day and he told her this:

“You must not expect reason to apply.”

She frowned at him.

Cedric’s eyes gleamed in the darkness. He said, “Listen: if there were a unifying principle that guided you all, then reason should apply; then you might set in order those who receive the avatar and those who do not. But you cannot expect this to be so. Each of you has an individual bond to the pit; it is a mystic experience that transcends social expression. No one will bind themselves to a proposal that excludes them; the right they have to the pit is palpable to them. Thus the only matter at hand is this: when you are ready for the pit, will an avatar remain?”

“It is not fair,” she said.

“Scarcity is unfair,” Cedric agreed. “Murder one of your elder siblings; then the matter is in balance.”

Doreen considered. “I had rather be virtuous and good.”

It took her several days to understand that Cedric had meant to encourage her.

There was a niggling seed in Doreen’s heart. It writhed like a worm. It made her sick on some occasions.

One day, as she understood the world, this seed would mature into readiness for the pit. Then she would face the choice: to jump, or not?

But Sarah jumped. And Bertram jumped. All twelve of her siblings jumped.

Before the seed sent forth its shoots and flowered, her siblings claimed the twelve avatars of the pit.

On the day that Bertram jumped Doreen became unimportant to the politics of the realm. Because the royal family wielded great and reckless power, she had no immediate obligation to them; they did not need to sell off their princesses as families in other places do. The path remaining to her was hers to choose: she could live in luxury or find some way to serve the throne. She could become a scholar, a tactician, or a spy; a soldier, a theologian, a baker; a lady who reclines in gardens; or something else as yet unstated.

The seed in her heart flowered.

She went down to stand beside the pit.

“It is problematic,” she said. “If I should jump, it will cause no end of sorrow.”

As has been mentioned, there are only twelve avatars, save the thirteenth, which is Death.

Staring down, she decided that jumping would be selfish; though exactly so selfish, of course, as the decisions of those siblings who had jumped since she was born.

She teetered on the edge.

Then she leapt.

A chill breeze came among her siblings then. Cedric was the first to feel it: his head snapped up. His eyes took fire with rage.

“There is Death,” he said.

And his words were a low rumble that all in the castle heard. In a moment the twelve avatars of the realm took flight and spun in the air above the palace where they dwelt.

“She jumped?” asked Bertram.

His voice was rank with disbelief.

“She can’t have jumped.”

And Mark said, “She should be hung.”

“Torn apart by hounds.”

“Gutted, and left to die.”

“Starved, in wracking pain.”

And the night rang with the thunder of the royal family, and there were dark clouds throughout the realm, and trees grew stunted and black, and the sea boiled, and the morning came bloody and black, and as they waited for Doreen to rise from the pit their cursing grew more vehement and rich with fear; for while each generation of the royal family yields inevitably to the next, they may only truly perish in a time of Death.

The hands of Doreen’s twelve siblings trembled. They formed into claws eager to cut her down.

But Doreen did not return. Not that night, not the next, nor the one after.

In the winter there is snow, and their mother takes ill and dies.

In the summer a man of the island Crete shoots Cedric down with a gun of dragon’s bone.

Bang.