Hitherby Dragons

RICK 1
1. See Rick.
2. Rick is reckless.
3. Rick tests his nuclear weapons on Earth.
4. Test, Rick, test!

RICK 2
1. People live on Earth.
2. Rick tests his nuclear weapons on Earth.
3. People get irradiated.
4. Mutate, people, mutate!
5. Now you can shoot strange rays out of your head.

MEREDITH 1
1. “I could do that already!” exclaims Meredith. “Mutating me was redundant!”
2. Shut up, Meredith.
3. No one wants to hear about your stupid superpowers.

RICK 3
1. Ducks live on Earth.
2. Rick tests his nuclear weapons on Earth.
3. Ducks blow up.
4. “Quack!” BOOM!
5. “Quack!” BOOM!
6. “Quaaack!”

DIANA 1
1. “Rick’s tests went poorly,” says Diana.
2. “Now people are irradiated mutants.”
3. “Also, the poor ducks!”
4. “I will test MY nuclear weapons in space.”

GOD 1
1. God lives in Heaven.
2. Heaven is in space.
3. God is out golfing.
4. The Voyager space probe hits him on the head, disrupting his shot.
5. God doesn’t complain. He’s a good sport! He just accepts his first birdie ever.
6. We could all learn a lesson from God.

GOD 2
1. God lives in space.
2. Diana tests her nuclear weapons in space.
3. Oops.

RAIN 1
1. God falls to Earth in little bits and pieces.
2. God gets into everything.
3. God was already in everything, but that’s different.

RAIN 2
1. People start picking up the little pieces of God.
2. “Now I’m righteous!” people say. “Look! I’ve got a pocketful of God!”
3. Everyone oohs and aahs. Then
4. SNATCH! They steal the God.
5. People are like that!

RICK 4
1. “God supports my testing nuclear weapons on Earth,” says Rick.
2. “See?” He points to his little piece of God.
3. It squirms uncomfortably. It wants to disagree, but Rick has it trapped!
4. If God argues, Rick will poke Him with a stick. That’s Rick’s way!
5. God used to argue with Rick, but soon He got very sore.

DIANA 2
1. “God supports my testing nuclear weapons in SPACE,” asserts Diana.
2. “See? I’ve got a piece of God too!”
3. If God argues, Diana won’t feed it! She’s not very nice to God either.

GOD 3
1. “If I were only in one piece again,” says God, “I’d sort out what for!”
2. You tell ‘em, God!
3. Rick pokes God with a stick.
4. Diana sticks her tongue out at God.
5. God sulks.

DIANA 3
1. SNATCH! Diana tries to steal Rick’s God.
2. “Silly Diana!” says Rick. “That’s not the way to be righteous!”

THE RIGHTEOUSNESS GAME
1. People keep their pieces of God very safe. You can’t just snatch them whenever!
2. You have to wait until immediately after someone says, “God supports me in this.”
3. They don’t have to use those words, but it’s what they have to mean!
4. People can’t say stuff like that unless they’ve got a piece of God. And saying that is like taking it out and showing it to you.
5. That’s your opportunity! That’s when you can grab it!
6. But do it quickly. You won’t have very long!
7. If you can grab everyone else’s righteousness before someone grabs your own, you’ve won!
8. You’ll have ALL the God!
9. That’s the righteousness game.

¹ a legend of Santa.

Santa Claus wakes up. It’s the Tuesday after Christmas, so he dresses in black. He goes to the shore of stars. He calls for his boat. He sails south.

Pirates come, but he runs up the Santa flag. They don’t attack him. Pirates don’t board Santa’s ship. It’s a law of the sea.

The terrible shark comes. Each fin is as long as a man is tall. The beast could swallow a horse in one bite. It hungers. Santa faces it down. He meets its cold black gaze. It shakes itself, twice, and dives deep. It still plans to eat him. It’s not a very nice shark. But not this year. This year, it leaves him be. It’ll come again in 2004.

There’s the sea of angels. There’s the ocean of fire. There’s a place of strange waters glistening like black abalone shells. The waves shine with soft green light.

Santa reaches his destination. It’s just an ordinary hill. It’s not important in itself. It’s just the place he’s chosen.

He sets three dolls on the ground. One boy, one girl, and one for just in case. He doesn’t look at them. He’s looking far away.

“There are so many of you,” he says, “that I couldn’t reach. This year or any other.”

He touches the dolls upon their hearts. “Strength,” he says.

He touches the dolls upon upon their heads. “Hope,” he says.

He touches them upon their hands. “A future.”

Santa rises and walks away. Behind him, the wind starts up, as it always does. It carries his gifts away.

Jane walks past a bird. “Hi, bird!” she says.

Jane scans the bird. It has two wings. It is covered in feathers. It has two feet. It stands on its feet. It has a beak. It uses its beak for biting things. It can also sing.

“I’ve learned some important things about birds!” Jane says, and walks on.

Jane sees the sun. “Hi, sun!” she says.

Jane scans the sun. It’s very big, but also very far away. It’s made of fire. Four horses pull it around the sky. The horses are made of fire. They tried ice horses once, but they melted! It wasn’t the smartest idea. The horses wear sunglasses. That’s because of the glare. If you pulled the sun, you’d wear sunglasses too!

“I’ve learned some important things about the sun,” says Jane, “but that really seemed to be more about the horses. I find that disappointing and I will write a letter of complaint.”

Jane giggles. She’s not going to write a letter of complaint! She likes scanning things!

Jane walks by a siggort. “Hi, siggort!” she says.

Jane walks on. Then she blinks. “Wait!” she says. “I better scan the siggort!”

Jane scans the siggort. It has two wings. It is covered in feathers. Its stomach is roly-poly. It has two long legs. It has a wheel of knives. It’s innocently vivisecting passersby and leaving their corpses for investigators to discover. It has a long yellow beak. It uses its beak for smiling. It can also sing.

“I’ve learned some important things about siggorts!” Jane says. “I wonder if I should report it to Animal Control.”

Jane thinks hard. “No,” she decides. “It’s vivisecting people innocently. That must mean it’s okay. If it were a serious problem, then I would have scanned it as vivisecting people guiltily.”

Very good, Jane! It’s important to apply logic to the situations in our lives.

Jane passes a wogly. “Hi, wogly!”

The siggort incident wised Jane up! She doesn’t dilly-dally—she scans the wogly! Who knows what it’s up to now?

The wogly has pale blue skin and two winky eyes. It’s shaped like a torus. Woglies say “hiss!” Inside the wogly it’s empty. Integrity leaks out of the universe into the wogly. It’s not eating moral integrity—it’s eating the integrity things have that make them the way they are. It’s a serious problem, but someone else will deal with it.

“Wow!” Jane says. “I think that’s the first time I’ve learned about woglies!” She takes a piece of paper out of her pocket and writes WOGLY on it. It’s important to keep track of the events in our lives! Then she folds the paper up and puts it away again.

“The wogly is scary,” she says, “but someone else will deal with it.” She walks on.

Jane passes Martin. “Hi, Martin!”

Jane walks on. Then she blinks. “Wait!” she says. “I better scan Martin!”

Martin has two legs and two arms. He also has a face. He is not Bob. He’s slouching against the wall. Jane should give him her My Little Tao doll.

“Hey!” says Jane. “You’re messing with my scanner!”

“It’s still a source of absolute universal truth, even if I can change what it says,” Martin points out.

Jane frowns. She can’t argue with that! “It’s rude to push people,” Jane says, “but you’re a special case.”

He is, you know. PUSH!

Mercury is a cookie. She is tall and gorgeous. Her hair is long and flows down her side. Her primary ingredients are whole grain rolled oats, brown sugar, and coconut. She’s a lot like a gingerbread man, but she’s prettier and has less ginger.

She cools on a pan for a while. Then Emma, who is five, picks Mercury up and puts her on a shelf next to the other cookies.

“You stay,” Emma says. “Talk to other cookies! If you have to go outside, tell Mommy first. That’s the rule!” Then Emma leaves.

“Hi,” Mercury says to the other cookies.

On the shelf, there’s a rabbit, and a dashing pirate, and a wolf, and a faceless man. All of them are cookies. All of them say “Hi,” except for the faceless man. He doesn’t have a mouth, so he doesn’t say anything.

“I’m a cookie,” Mercury explains. “I just cooled.”

“Welcome,” says the pirate. “We’re telling stories. Do you want to join in?”

“I’d better listen first,” she says. “I’ve never told a story before.”

“I bet you’ll do fine,” says the pirate. Even his voice is dashing. It brightens Mercury’s heart. “But you can have a turn after the wolf.”

“Okay,” Mercury agrees.

The rabbit says, “There’s a place. Very far from here.”

“How do you know?” asks the wolf.

“An angel told me.” The rabbit makes a throat-clearing noise, and continues:

There’s a place that’s white and cold and its sky is dark. It hangs high above the world. It looks down on the Earth. My people live there: not just one, not just ten, but thousands. Thousands of rabbits, their fur white with frost. The enemy cannot find them there. So they live in peace. There are plenty of things for them to enjoy. There’s one there whose heart is one with mine. She waits for me. She doesn’t care how long. She looks down at the Earth; and waits; and loves me.

“Ah,” says the wolf. “That’s very fine.”

“What’s love?” Mercury asks.

“I don’t know,” says the rabbit. “Not really. But when the angel said it, it meant something to me.” The rabbit coughs. “It’s your turn, pirate.”

The pirate thinks. “In the morning,” he says, “I’ll set sail.”

“How do you know?” asks the rabbit.

“Some things you just know,” he says. His voice shares both a sadness and a quiet joy. “It’s like this:”

In the morning, I’ll set sail. I’ll go to a faraway place. I’ll fight many battles. I’ll be a hero. Everyone will admire me. But you can’t be a hero forever. Someday, someone will get in a lucky blow. I’ll crumble. I’ll die. That’s okay. Whoever kills me, they’ll give me back to the sea. And my life will have meant something.

The rabbit thinks. “You’re lucky,” he says. “To know all that.”

“I suppose,” agrees the pirate. “But it’s sad that I won’t have someone to mourn me.”

“I’ll mourn you,” says Mercury, impulsively. “I’ll think of the sea, and say, ‘goodbye.’”

The pirate laughs. “See? A happy ending. But it’s the wolf’s turn.”

The wolf considers. “I could live,” she says.

The faceless man makes a noise.

“I could,” says the wolf. “It’s part of what a wolf is. Listen:”

This is what it means to be a wolf. This is the promise written in our bones. If we’re fast, if we’re smart, if we’re strong. If our senses are sharp and our footfalls soft, we’ll live. There’s always meat for a wolf, if we dare to find it. There’s always water. There’s always warmth. Some don’t make it. Some die. They get sick. They get killed. They go lame. But if you’re strong, if you’re fast, if you’re smart, you’ll live. That’s the only story wolves know. It’s the only one we need.

The faceless man makes another noise.

“I don’t know if I’m strong enough,” says the wolf. “So I don’t know if I’ll live. But I won’t give up. I’m a wolf.”

Mercury says, “You’re very brave.”

“Not brave,” says the wolf. “Just me. It’s your turn.”

“I’m made of oats,” says Mercury. “I was baked in the oven.” She thinks. “That wasn’t a very good story, was it?”

The pirate laughs. “You’ll tell a better one tomorrow,” he says. “It takes a little practice.”

Emma comes into the room. “Wuf!” she says. She picks up the wolf. She gnaws on the wolf’s ear. She leaves the room.

Mercury makes a startled noise. “Hey.”

“Ah,” says the pirate. “I wouldn’t have thought it’d be her, next.”

“What happened to the wolf?”

“She’s gone to war.”

“War?”

“It’s why we’re here,” says the pirate. “We’re waiting, to go to war. We’ll fight back the enemy. To protect everyone else.”

“Oh,” says Mercury, feeling a little stupid. “I didn’t know.”

“It’s okay,” says the pirate. “A lot of us get confused after baking. I’m sure you’ll be a fine soldier. But you have to live longer than I do, to mourn me.”

“And go home,” agrees the rabbit. “I don’t know if your home is like mine, but you should go to it. Afterwards. You seem nice.”

“I don’t have a home,” Mercury says. “Just you.”

“Then you should visit, afterwards,” says the pirate. “Visit the rabbit on the moon. Make a grave for me, down by the sea. See if the wolf survived.”

The faceless man makes a noise.

“You could visit the faceless man, too,” the pirate adds. “He’s the best of us, you know.”

“I will,” Mercury promises. “But oh, I’d rather if you lived too.”

“Ah, lass,” says the pirate. “It’s not such a world as that.”

Night falls. For a time, the cookies are silent. Mercury passes into dreams and visions. When she wakes up, there’s a tiny angel sitting next to her on the shelf. The angel’s not a cookie. She’s a girl. She’s got wings sticking out through holes in her jacket. Above the wings, the back of her jacket reads Magic.

“Hi,” says Mercury.

“Hi,” says the angel. “It’s the first dawn of your life, so you get a wish.”

“I wish I could be with the pirate when he dies,” says Mercury.

The angel dangles her feet off the shelf. “Wouldn’t you rather save him?”

“If I save his life, he might die again,” says Mercury. “But if I’m with him when he dies, he’ll know he’s remembered.”

“That’s sweet,” says the angel. “So I’ll see what I can do.” The angel sparkles and vanishes.

Slowly, the other cookies wake.

“Good morning, Mercury,” says the pirate. “Do you understand stories better after a good night’s rest?”

“I think so,” says Mercury. “I have a people, too. Like the rabbit.”

“How do you know?” asks the pirate.

“Because I’m alive, and someday I’ll be dead,” she says. “And in the meantime, this is how it must be:”

I have a people, in a faraway place. They don’t know the kinds of things I’ll have to do. They don’t know what it’s like at war. But they’ll know I’m fighting for them. There’s a boy in a field, and he looks up. He remembers that we’re fighting. There’s a lady in a school, and she looks up. She remembers that we’re fighting. All my people. Not often. But sometimes. They stop, and they remember.

“Mm,” says the pirate. “I think you’ve got it.”

“Thanks,” says Mercury.

Emma comes into the room. “Pirate!” She picks up the pirate. Then she looks at Mercury. She thinks. There’s an angel on one of her shoulders. There’s a devil on the other. For once, and Emma finds this very strange, they’re both saying the same thing.

“TWO cookies,” Emma says, happily. She picks Mercury up. Then, a cookie in each hand, she leaves the room.

The magician sits at her terminal. She is quiet. She is patient. She is calm.

She clicks open her mailbox. She regards the first spam.

“Herbal penis enlargement,” she says, and consults her manual. “A spam of the suit of drugs—but, ultimately, a spam of ascension. It offers three inches. Some say that the first inch is mene, the second tekel, and the third ufarsin; but I am fonder of the school that has them as a mystical representation of the Holy Trinity.”

She considers.

“This spam does not speak of my material genitalia,” she concludes, “nor offer to affect them. It tells me of the pillar of the world. These are the inches on which humanity rises from nothingness, to animal, to human, to god. In this reading, it defines me: I am the seeker. I have the power, over myself and the world. I can make things better.”

She clicks again.

“The jack of pr0n,” she says. “Russian wives want to love me up. This is a spam of journeys and unmet obligations.”

She clicks again.

“A virus.” She opens up her Norton Utilities. She flips through her interpretation guide. She begins crossreferencing. “If your mailbox contains MyDoom,” she reads aloud, “first, don’t panic. Many novices assume MyDoom is a bad virus, when in fact the doom is simply a metaphor for loss—data loss, certainly, or an unfavorable transition, but also the abandonment of ideas and principles whose time has passed. This spam means that a few things in your life have to go—starting, of course, with MyDoom, which you should delete now before you accidentally run it.”

She hesitates. “Huh.”

Then she deletes it, carefully, and clicks again. She stares for a time at the words emblazoned on her screen.

“You’re right,” she says to the screen. “I’ve been waiting too long.”

She stands, and takes her coat, and goes to the door.

“Make money fast,” she says, and shrugs.

“Well, I’ve made my fortune. So . . . time to spread it around.”

She goes outside. She stretches. She leaves the door open behind her. After a moment, Discount Jesus comes out into the light. He’s not the real Jesus, or even a real savior, but he was available online and he’s got a convenient moral doctrine. “Going somewhere?” he asks.

“Yup! Be my copilot?”

Discount Jesus nods; so she gets on her motorcycle, and he gets in the sidecar, and she revs up the engine.

“We’re going to visit the spammer,” she says.

“Oh? Did it finally call you?”

She nods firmly. “There’s a voice behind the spam,” she says. “Somewhere out there, someone’s sending this stuff. Someone’s planning it all. Someone’s got a wire right into the universal unconscious and is laying out the truth, plain as day, in the mailbox of everybody in the world.”

Discount Jesus smiles. “You’re an optimist, Celia.”

“There’s a force behind it,” she says. “I can feel it. And it doesn’t feel like people. And . . . well, so it’s time to pay it a call.”

She drives. There’s a wind in their hair.

“It could be some gibbering elder god,” he proposes. “Like in Disney’s ‘Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.’”

“Or angels,” she says. “I mean, come on, DJ; it’s not like you’d know.”

He makes a vaguely hurt face at her. “I’m a spiritual breakthrough developed by a team of fourteen accredited theologians,” he says.

“It’s okay, DJ. I just mean that . . . it’s not like . . . the real thing, you know?”

“It’s 2.3 times better.”

She giggles.

The road is bumpy now, and there’s a building complex ahead. Sprawling above it is a majestic sign reading SPAM.

“. . . huh. No pr0n or ads on it,” she says.

DJ shakes his head. “Just by looking at it, you’ve given them all your personal data and a peek under your shirt besides.”

Her nostrils flare. “Stupid HTML.”

“I could turn it into XML,” he says. “You know, as a miracle.”

A car drives past. Its bumper sticker reads “WWJD?”

“Or try to find some kind of anonymous browsing service,” he adds.

She shakes her head.

Her motorcycle pulls up in front of the building. She hops down. She takes her helmet off and tucks it under her arm. DJ climbs out of the sidecar.

“It could be Michael Moore,” Discount Jesus says. “He’s evil. Spammers are evil. Occam’s Razor suggests that they’re one and the same. Also, ichneumon wasps.”

“What about Britney Spears?”

Discount Jesus shrugs. “They could be in it together. Like a buddy picture. Only with spam.”

Boldly, Celia strides up to the front door. She knocks. The door slides open. Inside, there is a great and empty space; and at its center, a machine; and connected to the machine, the spammer.

“I’m here!” she says, and the spammer turns. It looks at her. Its eyes are wide and blank.

“Oh,” she says, and walks up to it, and touches it under the chin, and holds its face up, and looks into it. “Oh.”

“Cialis is known as Super Viagra,” it says. “It starts working up to twice as fast!”

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“Irene magnumangels honda1 don laddie ruth mazda1 rock romanasdfghjk,” it says. There’s a horrid glottal stop at the end of that last word. It sounds like copperware dying.

“I . . .”

She looks at Discount Jesus. “It’s not a god,” she says.

“It’s not people,” he points out.

“It’s . . .” She looks at it. “It wants to be people. It wants so much to be.”

Its hand reaches for her. It’s a shriveled little paw, both cute and sickening. It scrabbles at the air.

“It wants so much to be.”

“The noise dreams of signal,” Discount Jesus agrees. “They are yin and yang, and each contains the other.”

John sits in his office. It’s at home, so there’s a coffeemaker nearby. He takes out a pot of coffee. He pours it into a cup. He picks up the cup.

The music soars.

For a long, timeless moment, he sips at his coffee. The air is full of angels singing. Somewhere, a cellist pours her heart into the score.

Slowly, the music fades. John sets the coffee down. He turns to his computer. He types.

The door behind John is closed. The door is white. Its handle is brass. Behind it, there are footsteps. They are slow. They are hollow. Something is approaching.

John fidgets. He glances nervously towards the door. He glances away.

The footsteps continue to approach. The door opens, with a terrible creak. On the other side is a girl. She has horns.

“People never believe me,” he says, “when I say that I have personal demons.”

She walks in. She sits down on a nearby chair.

“It seems like everything’s falling apart,” she says.

Seven creatures came in the night to torment John. They moved into his house. They set themselves to their works of horror. But one by one, before the pain began, they fell in love.

“I used to know,” she says. “I used to know that I was right. When someone challenged me, I knew that they were stupid. And their stupidity proved that I was right, and my correctness proved their stupidity. It wasn’t even a quality that I possessed. It was this thing. Rightness. That I could refer to. It would sit on my shoulder, and hiss at people who disagreed.”

“Not any more?” he asks.

She gestures at her shoulder. There’s a hollow thing on it. It’s empty inside, but it’s not a wogly. It’s gaunt and horrible and gray.

“Humility is a hollow thing,” she says. “It’s eating my soul.”

“It looks hungry,” he says. “That’s probably why.”

Humility chitters. It digs its claws into the girl’s shoulder.

“Well, yes,” she says.

John rummages around on his desk. “I have Fritos,” he says. He offers Humility a frito. It breaks it into pieces and drops it on the ground. “And, um, chocolate. Does humility thrive on chocolate?”

“No,” concludes the girl, after a moment.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Most things that eat souls also enjoy Fritos brand corn chips. Have you tried appreciating the beauty of others?”

“What are those?” she says, pointing.

“Life savers,” he says. “They come in a variety of flavors. These are butterscotch.”

“It wants one,” she says. Her eyes glint eagerly.

John makes a face. “Fine,” he says. “It can have my life savers.” He tosses her the roll. She begins to feed them, one by one, to Humility.

“Butterscotch!” she says, cheerfully. “That was the answer.”

Then she leaves. After a moment, John sips at his coffee again. The music soars. It crashes to a sudden halt as a slimy thing oozes in.

Now, as John’s housemates, they must contend with the wonders and troubles of ordinary life. Their only guide to the human world—their erstwhile victim, John!

“You,” the slimy thing says. It points at John. “You’re smug, aren’t you. Sitting here, solving our problems, instead of suffering torture at our hands. Like some kind of chibi Prince of Hell, only with a swivel chair instead of a throne. It makes me sick.”

“My smugness?”

“My resentment of it.” It holds up its Resentment. It shakes it. Resentment looks mildly ill. So does the slimy thing.

“You could stop shaking it,” John points out.

“I like shaking things,” the slimy thing says. “Maracas, booty, salt, it’s all the same to me. Shaking’s my life!”

John nods. Then he takes out his gun. He shoots Resentment. Its little brain explodes and rains down over the carpet in a fine mist.

“Now it’s dead,” he says.

The slimy thing shakes its hand, which is stinging.

“You can shake it all you want.”

The slimy thing tentatively shakes the corpse. Its little wings flop. Ichor leaks from its neck. But it does not look ill.

“Part of me is dead,” the slimy thing says. “The rest of me wants to party.”

It leaves. It closes the door.

John drains his coffee. He pours another cup. The music creature polkas, gently, one beat per sip.

He looks at the music creature. It looks back.

“You’ve got issues,” John points out.

I.

Little Susie proves that 0=1.

“Nonsense,” says Mr. Gibbles, her elementary school mathematics teacher. “If that were true, then there would be no truth.”

Susie gestures impassively at her composition book and the equations written within.

“The truth demonstrates itself,” she says.

“I’ll send this to the institute for higher mathematics,” her teacher says. “They’ll tell you where you’re wrong.”

Little Susie’s face is a study in dispassion. And freckles. It is a study in freckles and dispassion.

II.

Little Susie is wakened by a rapping, rapping, rapping on her window from outside. She walks over to her window. She looks out the window at the face of Professor Harold Moyes.

“Yes?” she asks.

“Could you please open the window, little girl?” he asks. He is dangling precariously from the roof on a rope.

“I am curious if you will fall,” she says.

“I see.” Professor Moyes clears his throat. “Er. In any case.”

“Also, it is cold out.”

“Understood. I will make this brief,” he says, cold white knuckles clinging tightly to the rope. “I wish to know if you are in fact the girl responsible for the extraordinary proof submitted by Mr. Gibbles; and, should this be so, how you came by it.”

“I dreamt it,” she says. “Bit by bit from the well of dream.”

“That’s very good, Susie,” he says. The wind blows. The rope shakes. Professor Moyes suppresses a yelp. “But surely you realize that if 0=1, then all numbers are the same, and all Gödel numbers are the same, and all things are the same, and all equally nonexistent?”

“I recognize that,” Susie says in a nihilistic tone.

“Yet I am here, and you are there. Inside. Where it is warm.” Professor Moyes’ voice is longing. “That is also truth.”

“It is.”

“How does your dream account for that?” he asks.

Little Susie yawns sleepily. Then she blinks. But her tone is clear. “I argue that the act of analysis changes the world,” she says. “Computation on data changes the underlying substance. The 0 is the 0 predating my computation; the 1 is what it has become afterwards. A single contradiction does not unravel the world; rather it proceeds through examined truths and evaluated truths like a tsunami, altering everything that it passes.”

“I see,” says Professor Moyes.

“Does this surprise you?” asks Susie.

“No,” he says. “It is the nature of woglies; it is the cycle of the world.”

III.

Susie does not grow old. She is like an insect preserved in amber. In five years’ time, she is still little Susie, clutching her teddy bear.

“It worries me,” says little Susie’s mommy. “You’re still so young.”

“I would not worry about it, mommy,” Susie says.

“And you never play in the sun.”

Susie looks up at Mommy. There is a mix of disdain and fondness on her cute little face.

“I am an ageless child of the night,” she says.

“Yes, well,” says her mommy. “Well.”

Susie goes up to her room. She looks in the mirror. Then she sighs. There is a terrible rending of the world, and she becomes a swirling indefinable shape. She eddies through the window glass and is gone.

IV.

Professor Moyes stands on a balcony overlooking the main floor of the institute of higher mathematics. His hands grasp its rail.

“Mathematicians may never enter a place without invitation,” he says.

Little Susie eddies and swirls in the air behind the balcony. Her pigtails perform slow orbits. She looks frustrated.

“But please,” says Professor Moyes, “come in.”

Susie flows forward and coalesces into a girl.

“Why should mathematicians be limited in such a fashion?” she says.

“To be human is to be a zero-size point, scattered infinitely far from all others in a measureless space,” says Professor Moyes.

“. . . Oh.”

“This is also why running water is such a trouble.”

“Mommy says I can take baths if I wait until the water is still,” says little Susie.

“I just use deodorant,” says Professor Moyes.

They watch the work of the institute below.

V.

“I don’t think she’s normal,” says Mr. Gibbles. He’s still an elementary school mathematics teacher.

“Oh?” asks the principal expansively.

The principal is a giant of a man. He wears a white suit. When he laughs, he puts his hands to his stomach and rolls out with, “Ho ho ho!”

“She proved that 0=1,” says Mr. Gibbles, “and then didn’t get any older. I would almost think that she was exploiting a contradiction to prolong her childhood, except that the institute for higher mathematics said that her argument did not withstand a double-blind trial.”

“Ho ho ho!” laughs the principal. “Little girls are so earnest when they do math!”

“It’s not natural,” insists Mr. Gibbles.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” says the principal. “I can’t kick her out of your class until she grows older. It’s a strict school rule.”

Mr. Gibbles looks frustrated. “Then I’ll have to deal with her myself.”

VI.

Mr. Gibbles and little Susie sit together on the lunchground.

“I’ve invited you to have lunch with me this recess,” says Mr. Gibbles, “because I believe that you’re a blasphemous abomination.”

“Girls can be mathematicians like anyone else,” says little Susie.

“Well, yes,” says Mr. Gibbles. “But not blasphemous abominatory ones.”

Little Susie sighs. She looks longingly at the people playing hopscotch. Her thoughts are written on her face. How come they don’t have to have lunch with the math teacher?

“The other teachers are afraid of you,” says Mr. Gibbles. “Even the principal! Someone has to take a stand.”

Mr. Gibbles sets out beside him a wooden stake.

“So you will . . . stake me through the heart?” little Susie asks.

“No,” says Mr. Gibbles. “I am not just an elementary school teacher. I am also a vampire. If all is lost, this is for me.”

“Vampires and mathematicians are not so very different,” says little Susie sadly.

It does not change Mr. Gibbles’ resolve.

“We will have a math-off,” says Mr. Gibbles. “To the death.”

Little Susie is silent.

“There is no other way,” Mr. Gibbles says, and his fangs are very white.

VII.

Little Susie’s mommy washes the dishes. She looks outside. Little Susie is trudging home. A small cloud hovering directly over her head shelters her from the sun.

Little Susie enters the house.

“Hi, honey,” Mommy says.

“I do not understand what death is,” says little Susie.

Mommy thinks about this for a bit. “It’s like 0,” she says.

“Oh.”

Little Susie twists one foot around on its ankle. She wants to ask something else.

“What is it, honey?”

“Which kind of 0?” Susie asks.

THE END

Bethany boards the train. She rides for a time through darkness. Then the train emerges onto the Great Track. The Great Track arches over the deep. The train click-a-clacks across the sky that separates the Cities. Vapors in the sky turn light into opalescence and shadows into color. She sees visions through the mist of distant cities. Sometimes she can see ahead, on a curve, and watch the looming face of Harmony as it comes near.

Harmony is a great and brooding construct. It is miles high, woven of stone and metal. Its roots burrow into something organic far below. Bethany imagines it to be a giant’s chest. If so, then the pulse of the City is the beat of the giant’s heart. The lights that glare off of it burn with the giant’s life.

There’s a clunk as the train enters the City. There’s a swirl of shadows.

The train passes a billboard. “Mothers,” it preaches. “Don’t eat your children!” There’s a picture of a mouse, its expression surprised, a little mouse tail emerging from its mouth. It’s surrounded by a red circle, and a line is drawn through it.

She snorts. She is the only living human who knows why that billboard is there.

Harmony of Consciousness is a lean creature, many-limbed, somewhere in shape between a metal tree and a Hindu god. He is always busy when they speak, his hands stretched out in every direction to perform the unnameable functions that keep the city alive. He is its soul and its guardian.

“Why do you have them do that?” she asks him. She points at one of the monitors, where a scene best not described is taking place.

“It is difficult to control the infestation of humans,” Harmony of Consciousness says. “They have spread throughout the nightmare. They are . . . rugged. And very good at living in the cracks. For each that calls itself to my notice, one hundred scurry in the darkness. So I must set them to the task of destroying themselves.”

“I’m human,” she points out. There’s a little pause before she says it, because she’s afraid, but only a little one.

“I requested you,” he says, and shrugs.

“If you want to be good,” she says, “you won’t make people hurt one another.”

Harmony of Consciousness frowns. Several of his hands hesitate in their work.

“No?”

“No,” she says.

One hand rubs against two metal eyes. He thinks hard. “This is compassion?”

“Yes,” she says.

Harmony of Consciousness sighs. “I do not understand why it is right for you to infest me but not right for me to encourage your deaths.”

Bethany is silent.

“I will institute reforms,” says the City’s soul.

The train circles around the City as it descends through the layers. She tries not to look out the window. There are empty rooms whose ceilings are spinning blades, and blood pours from them onto the sluice of the floor below. There are vacant parks where all the birds are dead. There are kitchens where faceless creatures work. Most humans avoid the train. It is too obvious, too central, and too dangerous.

“It’s spring!” a billboard gladly proclaims. “Recidivists cling to winter in vain!”

There is a sick and liquid noise. The train shudders. Something has jumped from the trackside to the train. Something is clinging to the glass doors, scrabbling and scrambling, trying with blunt bloody fingers and hideous determination to make its way inside. There is darkness flapping and fluttering all around its limbs.

She is on her feet. She is brandishing her badge. She says, in a loud voice, as the thing forces the door open, “I am authorized, I am authorized, I am authorized, Harmony of Consciousness has invited me—”

She has time to see its face, time to realize it is human, that the flapping is its coat, that the madness is human madness, before the train shudders sideways in the track and scrapes the human off against a tunnel wall.

“I have mastered the quality of ‘goodness,’” says Harmony of Consciousness, “and you are now expendable.”

There are clamps around Bethany’s arms and legs. There is something sharp pressed against the back of her neck. Her voice is flat. “‘Goodness,’” she says.

“It is elevating one’s purpose above one’s pleasures,” he says. There is a hint of infectious glee in his tone. “This encourages the emotion known as ‘fulfillment’, or, the reward of virtue.”

Bethany’s job requires a woman of integrity. Therefore she does not immediately dispute him. “What is purpose?” she asks.

“Spring follows winter,” he says. His voice is low and rich. “Autumn follows spring. Winter follows autumn. It is the cycle of the world.”

“And what does that achieve?” she asks.

The clamps are gone. The sharp thing is gone. She falls to the floor, lands on her feet, stumbles, and recovers. Harmony of Consciousness’ eyes are suddenly dim and his voice uncertain. “It achieves spring,” he says. “It achieves autumn. It achieves winter.”

Bethany says, thinly, “My knee is in pain. You will send me home now.”

“Only a recidivist would seek winter in spring,” he says. It is a plea. “Their winter thoughts might call it back! I had best institute a program—”

It is not safe, not at this time, but she answers the plea. The words come from her grudgingly. “It is a step,” she says.

Strength comes back to him, with those words, and the lights of the city burn, and through all the city the trees spurt forth their leaves and the grass wrenches up from the earth.

She is deep enough in the city, now. She can ask, and hope for an answer.

“Why did that happen?” she asks.

The rattling of the train upon the track becomes a voice. It is a low and chanting voice, and for a long time it is blurred. Then the words are clear within her mind.

“There are humans that do not want you to talk to me, I think,” says the City named Harmony. “They are . . . uneasy with my progress.”

“I should think,” says Bethany, “that they would want a benevolent and virtuous home.”

“They do not.”

“Are they a threat?”

The City laughs. It is sweeping and mad, ringing through all the levels of that great structure.

“They are vermin,” says the City named Harmony. “They are not a threat to anything I hold within my hand.”

She passes a sign. It says, simply, “What is Harmony?”

The sign is black with graffiti and defaced.

“It has always been my purpose,” says Harmony of Consciousness, “to dig into the flesh, and root within the heart, and rise into the skies, and be a City in this place of nightmares.”

“That’s true,” says Bethany.

“Then is it my purpose now?” he asks, his words like the edge of a blade.

“It is the purpose of your body,” she says. “It is not the purpose of your mind.”

“But it is good,” he says.

He does not notice the word he has used. She speaks quickly, before he does. “The purpose of the mind,” she says, “may be considered an exponential function. Even as the body seeks nourishment, and power, and growth, it seeks something greater, but of the same substance.”

“As if I were to dig myself into all flesh,” he says, “and root within all hearts, and rise beyond the skies.”

She studies him. “What would it mean,” she says, “to rise beyond the sky?”

He sweeps towards her. Two of his fingers stretch forth hair-thin nails that probe through her neck and into her throat. She can feel a sharp shock of pain and then his blood in her blood, her blood in his. There is something sudden and desperate in his eyes. She seeks to tear free, but her body does not move. Then, after a long moment, he pulls away. His hands go back to the endless work of the city. She sits down hard.

“What was that?” she asks.

“I suddenly felt . . . I . . .”

“Alone?”

“How do they choose someone,” he says, “willing to come here, and talk to me, when I am not yet good?”

“I am atoning,” she says. “For crimes of my own.”

“They say it is a crime,” says Harmony of Consciousness.

“Oh?”

“There are pamphlets, complaining. They are to me, of course. They drift in my winds until I see them. Recordings play into my phone circuits until I hear. They say that it is wrong. That you are violating my . . . innocence.”

“Yes,” says Bethany.

“Yes?”

“Communication is violence,” Bethany says. “I am changing you from what you were.”

Harmony of Consciousness considers this. “You are removing my motivation to kill or oppose you,” he says.

“How do you reason that?” she asks.

“Because my lack of completeness is your only weapon against me.”

“Yes.”

“Is your profession one of very high mortality?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says.

“It is sad,” he says, almost mechanically, like a great beast of metal whose gears are running slow, “when there are unfinished things.”

She is silent for a long time, watching him.

“Yes,” she says. “It is.”

“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 S. S. Oublient rocks and weaves in space.

Candace’s fingers dance over the controls. “It’s the comet, Captain,” she says. “It’s spamming our navigation servers with a denial of service attack!”

“Damn it!” snaps Captain Bart. “Throw up a firewall and take course alpha!”

Candace hesitates, then slams her fist down on the red glowing FIREWALL button. There is a clunk and a clank deep in the ship.

“It’s jammed! We’re losing web presence!”

“Roll!”

Candace spins the ship. It rolls in a great arc through space. Bart and Candace are slammed back and forth. Sparks jump from the control panels.

“We’re almost out of its gravitational well,” Candace says.

Bart grips the arms of his chair.

“Pull!”

The ship wobbles away from the comet and towards a great blue-and-orange world.

Slowly, Bart and Candace relax.

“Damage report,” Bart says.

“It’s bad, Captain. We’re going to need to put down on the planet for repairs.”

“Impossible,” says Bart. “The Prime Directive—”

Candace looks wry. “Captain, I use the word ‘need’ advisedly.”

“Ah,” Bart says. “Landing inevitable?”

“Landing inevitable,” Candace agrees. “Power cells are rapidly approaching deprecation.”

“Right,” Bart says.

He straightens.

“Dress uniforms, then. Let’s look sharp for the natives.”

Time passes.

“I’ve got the planet on the line, sir.”

Bart stands. His shiny blue carapace-like uniform gleams.

“Citizens of Cebulai,” he says. “I am Captain Bart of the starship Oublient. Requesting permission to land.”

There is static.

“Working on visual,” Candace mutters.

A mellifluous female voice answers. “Oublient, Oublient, permission denied. This is a class-A restricted planet. Unbelievers are forbidden diplomatic and other contact.”

“This is an emergency situation,” says Bart.

“Permission denied, Oublient.”

“If you will not grant us permission to land,” says Bart, “we will be forced into landing without it. If diplomatic contact is forbidden, surely diplomatic incidents are even less desirable?”

The static on the viewscreen momentarily resolves into the image of a breathtaking woman in one of the demure, modest outfits prevalent in the distant future. Raven hair hangs down her back, and her eyes are green.

“Captain Bart, we cannot comply.”

Bart gives her his best Captain’s smile. “Surely—”

The woman bites her lip. He can hear her indecision in the static as the image flickers out.

In a soft, low whisper, she says, “Coordinates beta-alpha-78-odango. Tell no one of this.” Then, louder, she says, “Oublient, Oublient, permission denied.”

“Well,” says Bart, smoothing his uniform. “Let’s go—landing!”

The ship plummets through the sky onto a landing pad. It burns red, then white, then red, then ceases to burn; and its landing is almost gentle, though the whole ship shudders.

“What’s the web like out there?”

“Primitive, Captain,” Candace says. “Spam subintelligent, micropayments inactive, and an extremely high signal to noise ratio. It is not yet September.”

“Local adware contained?”

“We’re not going to leak, Captain. No worries.”

“Then let’s go—diplomacy!”

The e-ramp descends from the ship. The lights of the landing field flick on. Captain Bart descends, with Lieutenant Candace behind him.

There are military and diplomatic personnel gathered in the launch area to greet them. Bart scans the group. The woman he saw earlier stands among them, but has shrunk back in silence.

One man steps forward. He is clothed in formal black.

“I am Spaceport Reverend Price,” he says.

“Captain Bart,” says Bart. “I apologize for this intrusion upon your world. If you give us an opportunity to make repairs and download updates to our power cells—”

S.R. Price holds up his hand.

“It is of no matter,” he says. “I see that you are unenlightened folk. Be welcome to our world. Perhaps you shall be the vehicle by which the Good News spreads to your people.”

“Pardon?” Bart asks.

“In our Utopian society,” S.R. Price explains, “we long ago realized that accepting the basic premises of fundamentalist evangelical religion was best for believer, nonbeliever, and agnostic alike. We are a futuristic planet in this regard.”

“Oh!” says Bart, surprised. “I see.”

“It is our highest mission to bring all peoples into alignment with the love and mercy of God.”

There is a burst of static from S.R. Price’s lapel. There is a silver button there. Price presses the button and listens.

The button is a transceiver. Someone on the far end says, “I believe that God has spoken to me. I believe that He knows, as I know, as you know, that it is time for the wickedness of New Babel to end. Please, if you are a good and just man, you know that you must launch the spaceport missiles at once.”

“Of course,” S.R. Price says.

He gestures to one of the waiting crowd, who scurries off.

“It has led to a creation of an enlightened moral culture where all people come together under the blessed love of the Almighty,” S.R. Price says.

“We are eager to know more of this culture,” says Bart. “On Earth, there have been many attempts to realize a practical fundamentalist evangelical government, but they have so far proven unsuccessful.”

“Excellent,” says S.R. Price.

Bart looks at him. He looks at Bart. There is a silence.

S.R. Price says, “One of the principal moral tenets of our religion is the understanding that first contact is only acceptable for purposes of reproduction.”

“Ah,” says Bart.

Music begins to play.

Boom-shaka-boom-shaka-shaka-boom-alleluia.

Boom-shaka-boom-boom-shaka-shaka-boom-shaka-gloria excelsis!

“May we, um, I mean, do we, um, who?” Bart ventures.

But two of the crowd are already advancing towards them. One is the raven-haired woman, smiling softly, and even now taking Bart’s hand. The other is a rugged square-jawed military hero. He smiles at Candace.

Candace, fiddling with her iCorder, does not notice the advancing man. She mumbles, “I’m not picking up any missile launch, Captain—”

Then she looks up.

“Oh!”

Candace’s eyes are round, and not displeased.

“Let’s go—smoochies,” suaves Captain Bart.

Boom-shaka-shaka-boom-all-e-e-luuuu-ia.

The woman leads Bart into the spaceport seraglio. She closes the door behind them, in a room filled with sparkly silver pillows and gossamer curtains.

“Do you need me to introduce you to the Earth-concept called love?” Bart asks. “Or is your culture . . . advanced?”

“Shh,” the woman says, flatly.

She takes out a small device. It has antennae. It beeps twice.

“All right,” she says. “We’re safe here.”

“No smoochies?”

Bart’s voice is profoundly disappointed.

“My name is Jasmine,” the woman says. “I am part of the space rebellion. I stood up for you. I guided you in. I will be punished for it in due course, no doubt—but what is done is done. You are here. Therefore, I must beg your help.”

“You’re . . . not a fundamentalist evangelical?”

There is the edge of a growl in her voice. “I’m Baptist,” she says. “I’m one of the real fundamentalist evangelicals. I believe in the real Bible that our civilization has so totally abandoned. The so-called Christians running this planet have begun reading their own beliefs into the Bible, completely forgetting its true meaning. That’s why they think Satan lives in the heart of this planet, when in fact he lives in the hearts of those who have forsaken God!”

“Oh,” says Bart.

“There are not many of us,” Jasmine says. “We are oppressed and must practice the art of Baptist ninjutsu to survive. For our holy war against evil, they curse us as enemies of the state. We need you, Bart. We need your technology. We need your space empire. Let us be frank. We need your nuclear robots.”

Bart looks sad.

Bart sits down amidst the shiny silver cushions.

“I knew this civilization was too utopian to be true,” he says. “But . . . I can’t help you. The Prime Directive insists on a strict separation of Church and Fleet.”

“Nothing?”

“No robots. No technology. I can only give you smoochies,” Bart says.

Jasmine looks down.

“I do not smooch those who are so mired in secular ways that they will not fight for Christ,” she says. “Though I wish . . .”

Jasmine shakes it off. “We must pray that this first contact miraculously results in a child without our actually having sex,” she decides. Then she walks out into the dark.

“But I like sex with alien women,” sulks Bart. He sighs. He waits a while, then stands up, and goes back to the ship.

“Hi, Bart!” carols Candace.

“Don’t rub it in,” he says.

“These are the sexiest fundamentalists ever,” Candace purrs. “So . . . confident of the will of . . . God.”

“Fine.”

She looks at him. “Aww,” she says. “No blessed event?”

“We totally sexed up the first contact for reproductive purposes and without sensual pleasure,” says Bart. “She’ll probably have octuplets. Babies everywhere. They’ll call me Great Father Bart. What’s the patch status?”

“72% complete—hey.”

“What?”

Candace points. Bart turns.

Jasmine is out on the landing field. There are other ninjas with her, most likely ninjas that accepted baptism as an adult and joined the priesthood of believers in accordance with Biblical law. And striding towards them is a man clad in the robes of the federal judiciary.

“It’s always this way,” sighs Candace. “We’re a flashpoint for cultural tension.”

“I am Judge Simeon!” declares the judge. “For your erroneous teachings God has delivered you into my hands!”

“We have never deviated from the law of God!” shouts Jasmine defiantly.

The judge falls into stance. He channels his Chi through his lifetime tenure—an impeccable defensive power! “I will show you my judicial activism fist!”

“Status?” Bart snaps.

“92% complete,” says Candace. “And frozen.”

“Hurry it up,” Bart says. “Hit the side of the ship or something.”

Candace thumps the console. “Download accelerating! 93%! 94%! 95%!”

Three ninjas circle the judge. (They are not here referred to as Baptist ninjas, because, while they consider themselves Baptists, Jasmine’s ninjas are hardened assassins who do not believe in justification by faith. That disqualifies them!) The ninjas employ their ninja magic without success. They attempt a united attack; Simeon, contemptuously, casts them stumbling back.

“She’s going to die,” Bart says.

A cold wind blows.

One ninja leaps. Judge Simeon puts his fist through the ninja’s brain.

“Damn it,” Bart swears. “The federal judiciary is completely out of control!”

“96%. 97% . . . 96%. 97 . . . 96%.”

“Damn it.”

Another ninja dies. Bart has a look of agony. Then he steps forward. He takes the blaster from his side. He concentrates. He takes aim.

“Captain,” Candace says. “The Prime Directive . . .”

Sweating and trembling, Bart fires. The weapon disrupts Judge Simeon’s Chi aura, stunning him for almost a second.

“Run, Jasmine!” Bart shouts. “Run!”

Judge Simeon’s war cry shakes the spaceport. Several ninja freeze in fear.

“97%. 98% . . . There!”

“It just skipped over the last two percent?”

“Come on! Let’s go!”

The S.S. Oublient lurches upwards into the air. Judge Simeon leaps after it, jumping onto a wall, then a girder, then the roof of a building, and finally leaping with one fist extended before him towards the ship itself.

“Engage hyperdrive!” snaps Bart.

Candace presses a button. The ship zooms away.

“What the hell kind of name is Oublient?” shouts Judge Simeon, as he falls back towards the planet.

Bart sits, limply.

They fly in space.

“It tested well against focus groups,” Bart says, after a while.

They fly in space.

“Was it worth it?” Candace asks. “To violate our most sacred oath, just to save a woman?”

“I don’t know,” Bart says. “She . . . made me wonder, you know. For a while, I thought . . . maybe there is a God, and maybe he does call people to fight against a Satan who lives not in the center of a planet but in people’s hearts.”

“Maybe,” says Candace.

There’s a space phenomenon ahead. Comets are flying from all over the sector to smash together into an ever-larger and ever-hotter mass.

“It’s the birth of a sun,” Candace says quietly.

“Wow,” says Bart.

“Google page rank, totally off the scale. Network activity, practically at sigop levels. Cold fusion is go,” Candace says. “I’m kicking the readings into a log file for the Fleet.”

Machines click. The iCorder whirrs. Something, somewhere, beeps.

Whoosh! The new sun ignites.

Bart and Candace stare out the window of their space ship for a while, and wonder.