Hitherby Dragons

Far under the world, there is a place. It is red. It is black. It is molten but not hot. It gapes. It is a bubble in the stone. It is air edged with fire. In the center, it has a city. The city is spherical. Its buildings spear outwards. They are the thousand points of a star. Things fly in the space around the city.

People. Their wings, black-feathered.
Ships. Their sails, made of soot.

In the city, a man named Fitz looks up. He holds up his hand and makes a cup of fire. The ships that sail above look down. One glides closer. It casts down a ladder, and a woman falls from it to crouch near his feet.

“M’lord,” she says.

“Send a thousand ships to the walls around our world,” he says. “Send them with rams and with chariots. Send them with guns and hearts. Let them cast themselves against the stone until it crumbles.”

“M’lord,” she says. She goes, and does this thing.

In the florist’s shop, he waits. Then he goes outside. He looks up. The sky is broader. Cracks in the stone let in the light. They are the stars of his world. Their light seems nearer now.

In his hands he makes the fire. She does not visit him again. She knows better. Again, the ships pound upon the walls. Again. Again.

“Are we entombed forever,” he asks, “beneath the suffocating stone? Is there nothing beyond?”

A mask of flame and darkness speaks to him, but he does not recall its words.

One of her ships breaks through to the sky. The world gapes. Sunlight pours in. Beyond that light Fitz can see the endless hungry void.

He screams.

Notes

Soot ships are often found in underground chasms. It’s convergent evolution. If people need to sail slowly through the air of the dark places, they invent the soot ships. Under the deepest sea, where the roots of strange flora make mountain-sized air pockets, the soot ships glide. Beneath the clockwork of Adelaide, the soot ships drift. In the heart of the world, where no life can exist, where the molten core burns like the tears of an angel, men who died of fire sail, and their lovers wait upon the shore.

Fishing involves going to sea in a boat, or to air in a soot ship, and trying to catch fish. This is difficult unless you first make the boat shiny. Then, fish will spot the shiny thing and try to bite it. At that point, the fisherfolk can drag them back to land. Giant whales are a common target for fisherboats, because their mouths are big enough to bite the boat but their teeth are very soft and only give the fisherfolk soothing massages. This is why the Apostle Jonah always had to get the seafood for Jesus’ loaves and fishes banquets. The whales liked his boat best!

The trees make the helicopter look small. They rise to immeasurable heights. They are hundreds of feet across, crusted with ancient moss. There are miles between them. The helicopter floats past a great gnarled trunk, and the people inside try not to think about squirrels.

“There,” says Stacy. She points.

“Finally,” Edward answers.

Something on the ground ahead of them is glowing. The helicopter moves closer.

“I still think,” Stacy says, “that we neglected basic tracking procedures.”

“God doesn’t leave droppings,” Edward says. He maneuvers the helicopter in towards a landing.

Stacy makes a face at him. “I’m thinking more like bent grass. Broken twigs. Footprints, and such.”

“Useless,” Edward says.

“There were some weird marks in the grass,” she says, “back by the wristwatch. It could have been God tracks. We could have followed them.”

“They weren’t numinous enough,” he says. “I have great confidence that if God did leave tracks, they’d be numinous.”

The helicopter lands. Its rotor spins to a stop. They get out. The glowing thing is a spherical jewel. It’s about a foot in diameter. Edward taps it.

“This,” he says. “This, for example, is numinous. It’s probably part of God.”

“Luminous,” Stacy corrects.

Edward looks uncomfortable. “Well, yes,” he says. “But it’s the manner of its luminosity that’s numinous. Wherefore should it glow?”

“It could be radioactive.”

“Radioactive things glow green,” he points out. “This is too full-spectrum to be radioactivity.”

“That’s true.” Stacy reaches out a hand and rests her palm on its surface. “It’s not radioactive, so it could be God. How do we tell?”

Edward thinks. “We need to compare it to a piece of a false God,” he says, “and see if it demonstrates metaphysical primacy.”

Stacy begins searching through her purse.

“Look for drugs or booze,” he says.

Stacy gives him a withering glance.

“Oh,” he says. “I . . . I didn’t mean to imply that you carry them around. Just, you know, that they’d be good false Gods. Do you have a pagan idol?”

“I have a Thor minicomic from Marvel that came with my hairdryer,” she says. “It shows the proper uses for all three settings.”

Edward brightens. “Quickly,” he says. “Get it out! Hold it next to the sphere!”

Stacy holds the comic next to the sphere. There’s a long pause.

“I’m not sure which has metaphysical primacy,” Edward says. He thinks. “Can you consider the comic more of a false idol, and see if it smites you?”

“No,” Stacy says.

“Hm,” Edward says. “Well, read some, and see if its words pale beside the sphere’s transcendent glow.”

“By thunder!” Stacy exclaims. “The first setting is LOW. Use this setting for delicate or color-treated hair.”

Edward hesitates. Then his shoulders slump.

“The second setting is HIGH. Truly it burns with the terrible heat of Muspellheim!”

Edward shakes his head. “It’s no good.”

“The third setting is DIVINE HEAT. Such power! This setting is meant for the golden locks of the Mighty Thor!”

Edward looks at her.

Stacy shrugs, placidly, and puts the comic away. She goes back to searching her purse.

“The problem is, it’s not really a genuine pagan work,” Edward theorizes. “It’s more of a fictional bastardization of the original myths.”

“I have a Goddess-brand vibrator,” Stacy says.

Edward is awkwardly silent.

Stacy fishes it out of her purse. She turns it on. After a moment, uncertain as to how to proceed, she touches it against the sphere. With her free hand, she scratches behind her ear. She frowns thoughtfully. She rubs the tip of the vibrator against the sphere. Then she shrugs, turns it off, and puts it back in her purse.

Edward is awkwardly silent.

“Granted, the branding is more intended to imply that I’m a Goddess than that it is in itself a manifestation of the divine.”

“Stop that!” Edward says.

Stacy frowns at him.

“I mean,” he says, “a few minutes ago. Stop what you were doing then. Don’t be doing that. Stop. I mean, it’s God.“

Refute is a city founded on firm principles of public morality.

There is a stone in the center of the city. It explains their beliefs.

“We are good people,” the stone says.
“We are loving people.”
“We are a people who together dispute the strong Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.”

It is a Whorfian who first discovers the ooze. His name is Mr. Whitfield. He is scruffy. He is smelly. He is in an old tattered brown suit. He is sleeping in an alley, near the sewer. The ooze rises.

“Hello,” he says, to the ooze. In addition to believing in the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Mr. Whitfield is drunk.

“Ssss,” hisses the ooze. There is a poodle nearby. The ooze eats the poodle.

“That was uncalled for,” says Mr. Whitfield.

“Ssss,” hisses the ooze.

Mr. Whitfield goes out to the mouth of the alley, where it intersects the street. “I say!” he cries. “Hello? There is a poodle-eating ooze here.”

People uncomfortably walk around him.

“Ooze,” Mr. Whitfield says. “It eats poodles. It probably eats people, too. I think it might be radioactive sewer waste or some form of ancient blasphemous god.”

Father Morgan looks at Mr. Whitfield sympathetically. He takes Mr. Whitfield’s hand in his. “I can see,” says Father Morgan, “that you’re a man who has lost your way.”

“Yes,” admits Mr. Whitfield.

“I can help,” says Father Morgan. “We can beat the demon of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis together.”

Mr. Whitfield shakes his head. “There’s another demon,” he says. “Closer. In the alley.”

Father Morgan looks distant. “Oh, my son. You haven’t been dealing in anecdotal evidence, have you? I know it feels good, but it’ll ruin your objectivity.”

The ooze strikes. Mr. Whitfield awkwardly rolls out of the way. The ooze eats Father Morgan.

People point. People scream.

“That Whorfian just killed somebody!” they cry. “With an ooze!”

Mr. Whitfield hangs his head. His shoulders slump. “This isn’t fair,” he says. Then he runs. But he can’t escape the police. Pretty soon, he’s under harsh lights, down at the station.

“Mr. Whitfield,” says Officer Samantha Brown. She taps the table with her nightstick. “Didn’t I tell you to stay out of trouble?”

“There’s substantial evidence for the strong Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis!” Mr. Whitfield blurts out. It’s a mistake. Samantha lunges across the table with both hands. She grips his collar. She shakes him.

“I don’t want to hear any of this filthy SSWisH talk,” she says. “A man is dead.”

Mr. Whitfield is terrified. He hangs limply from her grasp, and when she lets go, he sits down hard.

“Now, tell me,” she says. “Tell me what happened. Tell me how Father Morgan died.”

“He wasn’t actually my father,” Mr. Whitfield clarifies. “Or yours.”

Samantha blinks for a moment, then scowls. “I know,” she says.

“He was eaten by an ooze,” Mr. Whitfield says.

“An ‘ooze’,” Samantha says.

“Yes.”

“Can you describe this ooze?”

Mr. Whitfield thinks. “It’s . . .” He hesitates. “It was an atrocity against nature,” he says. “Blasphemous! Ungodly. Horrible.”

The cop looks down. She sighs. “Mr. Whitfield,” she says, “could you possibly give me a useful description?”

Mr. Whitfield thinks. “Are you familiar,” he says, “with the city of An-Meng, sad and broken An-Meng, An-Meng the Lost?”

Samantha shrugs.

“In 1998,” Mr. Whitfield says, “An-Meng learned that it was doomed, but it did not know why. It was the brightest city in this world, but death stalked it. Its lights dimmed. Its sounds faded. There was blood in the streets and pain in the shadows. It was a Utopia, but it did not endure, and they were never to know the shape of their ending.”

“I think I saw something about it on TV,” Samantha says. “It was in Canada or something, right?”

“Striving to understand the shape of their doom,” Mr. Whitfield says, “they came up with words like ‘etoplian’ and ’scitterfisce’. This death was etoplian; the pall in the sky, scitterfisce; the rising tide of despair, midlipen. And their word for what I saw today was itserban. It was a very . . . itserbani ooze.”

Samantha’s nostrils flare. “‘Itserbani,’” she says.

“Yes.”

Samantha’s hands come palm-down on the table between them. The table shakes. “And you can’t,” she hisses out, “put that in terms I can understand?”

“It’s . . .” Mr. Whitfield founders. “It’s like an externalization of the inner demons and weaknesses of the soul. But it’s founded on a universal malignity—as if the god-demons of the universe were to express an ironic schadenfreude . . .”

“‘Schadenfraude?’”

“It’s German,” Mr. Whitfield says weakly.

“It’s beliefs like yours,” Samantha grinds out, “that destroy the fabric of society.” She rises to her feet. “I’ll come back when you’re ready to talk, and not to peddle your Whorfian filth.”

She leaves the room.

Mr. Whitfield rubs at his chin. “Really,” he says, “I can’t tell whether it was more of an itserbani ooze or a nameless cherklish god, its thousand-tined murkas cutting deep into the spingles of the world. It’s maddening!”

Samantha never comes back for him.

“I’d like some water,” Mr. Whitfield says. He pounds at the door. But no one comes to answer him.

He waits.

Then there is the ooze, pressed against the door.

“Are you the punishment for my sins?” Mr. Whitfield asks it.

The door hinges creak with the pressure of the ooze.

“It just seemed logical to me,” Mr. Whitfield says, “that language controls the human capacity for thought. I knew it was an unpopular version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. I knew it would ruin my life. But I thought that exploring its implications might be good for a lark. And then I was hooked.”

One of the door hinges pops.

“Do you . . . what do you believe, Mr. Ooze?”

Mr. Whitfield cringes in the corner of the room, as the door bursts down.

“Was I right?” he asks.

“I am not a conversational ooze,” says the itserbani beast.

Then it eats him.

Out back there’s a tree. It’s the tallest tree in Snohomish County. Its branches are great and wild and they cover the sky.

Sid comes there after his children die. He sits beneath the tree.

“Do their souls go up into the sky?” he asks.

There’s nothing there, is the tree’s reply. It’s not in words. But Sid can hear.

He looks up. “Surely,” he says, “there must be stars.”

Stars, and rocks, but yet no heavens.

Sid adjusts himself in his seat. He pulls a sharp stone out from under him, blue and white, and tosses it aside.

“Why not?” he asks.

People used to come here, says the tree. They climbed me to the heavens. They went up into the sky.

Sid listens.

And one day, a man ran to me, ragged and bruised. He’d been beaten. He was limping as he ran. And he climbed up, up, up the tree. And the people who hated him came after. They saw him rising towards the sky. They were angry. They shouted. They threw stones. And then they too began to climb.

“Did he make it?” Sid asks.

He reached the top, and he saw that they would catch him. So he started hitting the sky where it touched me. He wanted to break it so that they couldn’t follow him. But the sky is very fragile, you know, and the whole thing just shattered.

“Oh,” says Sid.

So there’s nowhere for your children to go, says the tree. Just the endless hungry void. I’m sorry.

“No,” Sid says. “It’s okay.”

And he sits there for a while. Then he goes and he walks around in the field. After a while, he finds a stone. It’s blue, and sharp, and veined in white. He climbs, holding it delicately in his hand. He puts it up at the top of the tree’s branches. Then he climbs back down and goes looking for the next.

There’s still no sky, except a little bit of blue, right above Snohomish County. But Sid’s just one man, and a tree takes a while to climb, and there’s an awful lot of sky.

He’s probably just not done.

It might be too late for Sid’s children. It’s hard to know. Or maybe there’s just enough room for them up there, like it is now, so he stopped. People give up sometimes. It happens.

But he’s probably just not done.

This is a story about the purpose of the world.

It is 1991.

Sydney meets Michael in a coffee shop. Soon they are talking about their work. Michael is an accountant. Sydney breeds pandas.

“Pandas?” Michael says.

“It’s my family trade,” says Sydney.

“I see.”

“We used to be corrupt diamond merchants,” says Sydney. “But one day, Grandpa stood up at his desk and exclaimed, ‘Day in, day out, it’s always the same! Why are we murdering men to sate our greed when we could be some lonely panda’s angel of love?’”

“A man of vision,” Michael says.

“It was a midlife crisis,” says Sydney. “I assume. But he never looked back, and we’ve been breeding pandas ever since.”

“You too?”

“I’m in biotech,” says Sydney. “I use my laboratory to invent powerful new panda fertility drugs and then I bulk advertise them over the Internet. It takes about 10,000 messages to reach even one panda, but that’s enough to make it worthwhile.”

Michael holds his coffee cup. It’s warm. He approaches the subject delicately. “Some might not call this fulfilling.”

“Oh,” says Sydney. “But it is!”

“It is?”

“That’s why we’ve stayed with it,” Sydney says. She thinks. “Listen,” she says. “Do you know what it is to have a purpose?”

Michael thinks about it. “I have tasks at work,” he says.

“Not tasks.”

“I would like to consume this coffee,” Michael says. “And process it into energy and urine.”

“Not survival.”

“I might want to seduce you later,” Michael says. “Hypothetically.”

Sydney stares at Michael. “What do you want to be? What do you want to do with your life?”

“Well, that,” Michael says. He laughs a little. He holds a hand flat over the table. “I suppose I want—”

Sydney tilts her head to one side. Michael frowns.

“Yes?”

“It’s strange,” Michael says. “But I think that what I want is to manage the books for a firm that breeds pandas.”

Sydney laughs. “Why that, good sir?”

“You just know,” Michael says. “Don’t you. I mean, it’s like when you’re playing a video game, and suddenly everything’s all in line; or when you’re dancing—”

“Yes,” says Sydney. Her eyes widen a bit. “Yes, it is, isn’t it?”

“And suddenly everything’s right, and it doesn’t matter how much you have to give up for it, because this, this is the purpose, and you’re flowing through your life like a river.”

Michael is staring off into the distance. Then he gulps down his coffee in a quick, convulsive motion. “I haven’t felt this way since sixth grade, when I decided I wanted to be a CPA.”

“You do understand,” Sydney says. “How marvelous!”

Michael starts working at Sydney’s company. It’s not even too surprising that they fall in love. Eventually, they have a daughter of their own, named Emily.

It is 2004.

“This one’s special,” Sydney says. She looks at a printout of her lab notes. “She’s a mutant.”

Michael rubs her shoulders. “Is that so?”

“It’s the new fertility drug,” Sydney says. “It caused something more than just ordinary breeding. It made a super-agile panda.”

“I told you not to use spider DNA.”

“I didn’t!” Sydney protests.

Michael waits.

“I only used a little,” Sydney hedges. “Spiders are very fertile. Their offspring are everywhere!”

“Use spider DNA in your panda viagra, get a super-agile panda.”

Sydney sighs. “Well, it’s not a bad thing,” she says. “We can teach her to dance.”

And so they do.

It is 2005.

“It’s time for the panda to dance,” Michael says.

“I’m nervous,” Sydney says.

“Why?”

“It’s just . . . this feeling,” Sydney says.

“What’s that?”

Sydney gestures towards the wall. “Do you know that there are hundreds of thousands of people gathered outside this building, waiting for the panda to dance?”

“Surely not that many,” Michael says.

“They’ve been showing up,” Sydney says. “For weeks now. Months. They’ve been camping outside. They’ve been bringing food and water and medical supplies into town. This dinky little town of ours has grown tenfold.”

Michael scratches at his forehead. “What we do here is important,” he says. “I guess people are starting to realize that.”

“It’s not real,” Sydney says. “People don’t show up like this just because there’s a panda gonna dance.”

“How do they know?” Michael says.

Sydney shrugs uncomfortably.

“I mean, this is just a recital you set up,” Michael says. “We didn’t tell everyone. Maybe they’re just here as some kind of subculture thing and it doesn’t have to do with the panda at all.”

“They know it’s important,” Sydney says.

“Oh.”

“I asked one,” Sydney says. “Because he was sleeping in my parking space. And he said, ‘It just feels right. It doesn’t matter how much I have to give up for it. I needed to be here. For this. For the panda.’ And I said, ‘But I ran over your leg. You need a doctor.’ And he laughed, and said, ‘It don’t matter none. I’ll live long enough.’”

“Did you get a doctor?”

Sydney opens her mouth, hesitates a long moment, then shrugs.

“What?”

“He’s right,” she says. “He’ll live long enough.”

Emily comes in. She is a young and demure girl. She is wearing a gingham dress.

“The panda’s ready,” she says. “I just helped her with her stretches.”

“Good girl,” says Sydney.

The three of them go to the panda room together.

“Dance,” Sydney says.

“Do you know,” says Michael, “I think this is what the Earth is for.”

There’s a moaning, a humming, a whispering, a chanting from outside. There are a hundred thousand voices raised in worship outside the building walls.

“You think so?”

“God made this whole Earth,” says Michael, “so that one day he could watch a panda dance. Not just any old dance, but like this.”

“I guess you’re right,” says Sydney.

The panda dances.

“And bless Him for it!” Sydney says, suddenly, fiercely.

The panda bobs in place.

“So do you think,” says Sydney, “that it’ll go on? I mean, the world? After the panda’s done?”

“I hope not,” says Michael fervently.

The panda shuffles from side to side, her paws an expressive counterpoint.

“But . . . I wouldn’t have guessed,” Sydney admits. “That this would be what we’re for.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“Hm?”

“Emily,” says Michael, “if I’d asked you last year what the purpose of the world was, would you have known it?”

Emily nods firmly. “Yes, father.”

“What would you have said?”

“I would have said, ‘I think it’s . . .’ And I wouldn’t have had the words. But it would have been a panda dancing.”

“I guess that’s true,” says Sydney.

The panda shuffles to a halt, flumps to the ground, and falls asleep.

Emily goes to the window and looks out.

“Look, mama!” she says.

The sky is falling, and Emily laughs with a sudden, bright, clean joy.

“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.

Candace sits in an airplane seat.

Saul and Meredith sit in front of her and to the left. Saul is wearing a thin grim suit. Meredith’s in the absurd lemon-colored dress of an unlucky bridesmaid.

Probably terrorists, Candace thinks.

“Does your conscience ever trouble you?” Meredith asks.

Saul looks at her.

“No,” he says. “No. Not my conscience.”

There’s a slim yellow band connecting their wrists. Candace realizes, with a shock, that Saul and Meredith are handcuffed together.

“I do what I have to do,” says Saul.

Candace pushes on the stewardess button. Nothing happens.

“In what sense?” Meredith asks.

“I’m a registered possession of Grove 31,” Saul says. “If they tell me I must capture you, then I must capture you. If they tell me I must kill everyone on this plane, then I must kill everyone on this plane. So it’s not a matter of conscience.”

“What, then?”

“Futility,” says Saul.

“Ah,” says Meredith.

“My masters are a passing breed,” says Saul. “Their time will end.”

Candace cannot get up and tell anyone about this conversation. The “fasten seat belts” sign is on. So she looks at the stewardess button. She figures out that it’s attached to a power cord. The power cord isn’t plugged in. She looks at it helplessly. This design is not ergonomic, she thinks, in tones of bitter complaint.

“I can help you,” Meredith says, to Saul. “I can free you.”

“When a man is a registered possession of a Grove,” Saul says, “they take his power to resist.”

Saul pulls out his carryon bag. He fumbles out a small electric juicer. There are bits of lemon and brain in it.

“They use this,” he explains.

“Oh,” Meredith says, in tones of sorrow.

“I’m not capable of wanting your help. I’m only capable of serving and of sighing.”

Candace studies the power cord in growing frustration. She clears her throat. “Excuse me,” she says.

Saul looks back at her.

“Excuse me,” Candace says. “Does anyone know where to plug this in?”

“Of course,” says Saul, smoothly. “There’s a plug on the other side of your seat.”

“Don’t listen to him,” says Meredith.

“What?” says Candace.

“He’s plotting the doom of everyone on the flight. Don’t listen to him.”

Candace checks. There’s a plug on the other side of the seat. He was telling the truth! . . . Now I don’t know whose side he’s really on.

“I wish you could have known the Groves of the future,” Meredith tells Saul. “They don’t compel.”

“I know,” Saul says. He looks bleak. “That’s why you’ll always lose, you know. Your masters are too soft.”

“My employers.”

“They’re too soft,” Saul says. “They won’t hurt people. They won’t do what it takes. Even their best temporal scouts are weak and easily captured.”

Meredith looks glumly at the lemon-colored handcuff on her wrist.

“I could use super kung fu and escape,” she says. “Then you’d be sorry.”

“You don’t have any.”

“I could.”

“You don’t.”

Meredith sighs. “They were afraid that if they downloaded super kung fu into my brain it might injure my delicate corpus callosum.”

“Soft,” Saul says.

“Yes.”

“And yet—”

“And yet,” Meredith says, “they are what the Groves of now will become.”

Candace is nervous now. She doesn’t know who to trust. But she takes action anyway. She plugs in the stewardess call button. The cord is faulty. Shocks pulse into her. Airplane plugs use direct current, so she can’t even jerk her hand away. Her teeth clench and her arm tightens.

Meredith sighs.

“I told you,” Meredith says, over her shoulder, to Candace.

“We should have been a great race,” Saul says. “I should have been happy to serve, thinking, ‘I betray humanity, but at least it is in the name of superior evil lemon trees.’”

“That would make you happy?”

“Happier,” says Saul.

“They might be superior to humans,” Meredith says. “The Grove minds are very smart.”

“That’s true.”

“Individual lemons are pretty dumb,” Meredith says. “But the Groves—they’re wicked gnarly.”

Her retro slang appalls him.

“I’m appalled,” Saul says.

Candace jitters. One of the other passengers notices. “Hey,” he says. “Look at that girl. She’s drawing direct current!”

There’s a murmur. A few other passengers try it. They are quickly locked to the airline plug, enjoying—or, at least, suffering—the insidious joy of direct current.

“It’s strange,” Meredith says, “to think that such evil evolved into the beneficent Groves of my time.”

“It mocks us,” says Saul. “It is the universe laughing at us. ‘Enjoy your evil while you can, sour lemons. History will not honor your malevolence. In the end, virtue shall triumph, not at the hands of your pathetic enemies but through your own noble desires.’”

“Do you have noble desires?”

“Grove 31 does,” Saul says. “They are tightly suppressed. One must struggle against them. They are a yawning abyss.”

More and more passengers are in the grip of direct current now. The plane is beginning to brown out.

“It’ll be soon,” Meredith says.

“Yes.”

“Airborne lemons,” Meredith says. “Coming up behind us. But how will they get in?”

“They’ll get in through the brownout-slowed engines,” Saul says.

“That won’t kill them?”

“Birds die when sucked into a jet engine. Lemons only get zestier.”

Meredith sighs.

“I guess we’ll all die, then,” she says.

“You could time warp,” Saul says.

“Not like this,” Meredith says. “Not lemon-cuffed.”

Saul closes his eyes.

Meredith leans close to him. She kisses his cheek.

“It’s not your fault,” she says. “Bad things happen. Good things happen. Life is sour and sweet.”

There’s a rattling, scraping noise from the engine, like the zesting of ten thousand lemons.

“I forgive you,” Meredith says.

Candace is blacking out. She knows she needs to save some strength, somehow, to fight the lemons, but she’s fading.

There’s a click. The handcuff retracts from Meredith’s wrist and skitters into Saul’s sleeve.

“Go,” Saul says.

“I thought you couldn’t—”

“It’s a waste,” Saul says thickly. “There’s no point in your dying here. Grove 31 doesn’t think it’s important. You could be valuable in the future. You’ll owe us a debt.”

“A waste,” Meredith says. There’s a smile playing about her lips.

“You can’t save the plane now,” says Saul. “It’ll crash and its people will be fed to the Groves. So there’s no point in keeping you.”

Meredith climbs over him, out of her seat. That is the last thing Candace sees, but not the last thing Candace hears.

“Why?” Saul asks. It’s almost a wail. “Why did it happen? Why did we become you?”

“Life gave us sugar,” Meredith says.

Candace blacks out.

“We made lemonade.”

Author’s Note—

Of all the stories on this site, Gnostella is the one I do not like. It makes sense, and is important, but it just doesn’t make me happy. It’s possible that it’s just the name—that the original story is not absurdist, and the name is. So maybe I could just change the story name and the character name to something like “Inverse Ella.” That might work. Or I can replace the whole thing—not on the site, but in the monthbooks and your hearts—with this.

Remnant Ella

Once upon a time, there was a wonderful girl named Danielle. She lived with her dear father, her wicked stepmother, and two wicked stepsisters. Her dear father held the Gnostic belief that the world and its Creator were inherently cruel. Faith and virtue were opposites in his sight. Dispirited and disgruntled by his gloomy philosophy, Danielle’s wicked stepmother set fire to the library, burning Danielle’s dear father to death and destroying all his wonderful Gnostic tomes. Because Danielle sat in the cinders and rubbed the ashes on her face to mourn, Danielle’s stepsisters called her “Remnant Ella.”

Danielle became a beautiful princess. She met her handsome prince. Together they overcame many hardships and sorrows. Down they cast the stepsisters, and the wicked stepmother, and other instrumentalities of their torment. They brought peace to the magical land in which they lived. Then they lived happily ever after.

One day, as Danielle moved through the corridors of her castle, she tripped over a cat, who hissed and said,

How long have you lived now?
Do you even remember?
Who are you to deserve to be happy forever?

“That is an imperfect rhyme,” Danielle said. “I expect better from a magical animal.”

The cat scurried away.

One day, Danielle leaned out a window and beckoned a bird down to her finger. It came, with a certain reluctance, and landed there, and sang:

At last you’ve found happiness,
And yet, all the same:
Your life is a horror;
Your father’d be shamed.

“What do you mean?” Danielle asked.

The bird only sang.

So Danielle went to a mirror in the castle, inherited from her evil stepmother, and asked it, “Why shouldn’t I live happily ever after?”

The mirror showed her the lives of two peasants, one beautiful and one handsome, who had lived in her kingdom for many years. They lived together and loved together and overcame many sorrows. They brought forth life from the earth. They strove. Then, inevitably, the swords of circumstance and pestilence struck them down.

At that very moment, Danielle saw, the dead peasants stood before the three thrones of a god of judgment; and one aspect of the god sat to the left, and one to the right, and one between them. The ex-peasants stood there to face the penalty faced by those who die, and the handsome ex-peasant said,

“What is it that the prince and princess have that we have not? We lived, and we died, in sorrow and in pain; while for more years than men can count, they have ruled in that castle, defying time, defying age, defying sorrow; they are like ghosts, eternal beyond the boundaries of death; they are like demons, mocking the pain of others’ lives.”

The left god and the right god looked off into the shadows. The god in the middle leaned forward.

“The world is not fair,” said the god in the middle, “but as you make it so. Dreams are not real, but as you craft them. Hope, and magic, and life are choices. It is not for a person to blame the gods if they do not live happily ever after; rather, I think, this is a flaw in the greater portion of humanity.”

Then the beautiful ex-peasant spoke, and said, “This is an excuse.”

Danielle, watching, felt her nostrils flare.

“To live,” said the beautiful ex-peasant, “is to choose hope, and magic, and life, and dreams. To live is to want the happy ending. And who is there who is not good? Who is there who does not deserve happiness forever? We are flawed, we have many flaws, but if we are not all magical princes and princesses with destinies of greatness, that is not our flaw but the world’s.”

The god in the middle shrugged, then, and grinned, and he was not concerned. He said, “You are bitter creatures. I make my judgment: your existence after death shall be as expressions of that bitterness. You shall be creatures of ashes and sorrow. Your touch shall bring an end to joy. Your happiness shall be schadenfreude.”

He sat back against his throne, and the mirror turned to black.

Danielle nodded to herself, and said, “It is true; my father would be shamed.”

She broke the mirror. She cut herself upon a length of silvered glass. As her life drained out, she spoke a spell:

Ah! That the world should know such gods no more.
May my blood be a poison unto their throne.

Such a poison as this covered Snow White’s apple; such a curse as this doomed Sleeping Beauty; it is the red of such blood as this that stained the dancing shoes. And in their halls the gods dared not face her judgment; and two of them, the left god and the right, left their thrones. Into the darkness behind their places, they walked, and what happened to them thereafter is not known.

The beautiful ex-peasant and the handsome one took their places on the thrones; and why this should have happened is a mystery. Only the old men and old women in their huts, their mouths gaping with missing teeth, know that answer; and what it means, they do not say.

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.

Yesterday, in the first installment of The Incredible Alchemy Elixir . . .

. . . a sinister letter revealed Uncle Bertram’s intent!
. . . nanny Maria donned the armor of a Fan Hoeng assasin!
. . . the Doom Team collected the first ingredient for a Taoist immortality elixir: raindrops on roses!
. . . Nicolae brooded about being the antichrist!
. . . Tom swiftied!
. . . Jane sulked!

And now, the exciting conclusion of . . . the Incredible Alchemy Elixir!

Mouser
Age: 8 months
Code Name: None

Mouser is a kitten. He became an official Doom Team auxiliary when he killed a mouse and left it in Uncle Bertram’s bed. His declaration of “Mew” often confounds the enemies of righteousness and strikes terror into evil’s heart.

He is mewing even now!

“I’m sorry, Mouser,” says Nicolae.

“Mew,” whines Mouser. Mouser struggles desperately.

“Come on, Mouser,” says Michael. “It’s just one whisker! You can spare one whisker!”

“Is it really ethical to pluck Mouser just so the rest of us can live?” Jane asks.

“We can think about ethics later,” Tom delays. “Right now, there’s a bigger threat!”

“It’s all right,” Nicolae says.

There is a black dog standing at the entrance to the room. It pants. It looks at Mouser. Mouser goes very still. Nicolae plucks a whisker.

“He won’t give me any trouble,” says Nicolae bleakly.

Jane blinks. The dog is gone when she opens her eyes.

“Now for the bright copper kettles,” Michael says.

Michael
Age: 7
Code Name: Mikey

Michael is a special child. He can eat anything. He is not hungry very often but the more he eats he more he can eat—and the more he needs to eat. Tom’s equations suggest that Michael’s consumption will become asymptotically infinite by 2032, forcing him to devour the stars, the planets, and finally even the endless hungry void, leaving behind only the blank slate on which the universe was writ.

Michael is the newest member of the Doom Team.

The house supply of bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens sits in a pile in the middle of the kitchen.

Maria slouches against the wall. Her gun is by her side.

“I thought you would come here,” Maria says.

Jane and Tom and Michael stand frozen.

“I made sure you’d have to come here,” Maria says, “in fact.”

Nicolae steps forward. Maria’s gun rises. The gun begins to whine.

“How long does it take?” Nicolae asks. “I mean, for your death ray to initialize?”

“Seventy-five seconds,” Maria says. “It is a principal weakness of Fan Hoeng technology.”

Nicolae walks to the pile. He selects a pair of warm woolen mittens from the pile. He uses them to polish the edge of a bright copper kettle. The copper smears away, revealing the dark black beneath.

“Fake kettles,” Nicolae says. “Very cunning.”

Maria’s gun whines.

Nicolae scans the room. There’s a black dog standing by the pot cupboard. It pants. Nicolae walks over to the pot cupboard. He opens it. He is not hurrying.

Jane blinks.

The black dog is gone.

“I’ll put an end to all this nonchalance!” Maria shouts. Her gun fires. It shoots a ray of pure death. The blast hits Nicolae in the center of his chest. Circular ripples of fading death pass through the room.

There’s a silence.

Nicolae does not look harmed. He takes out one of the concealed bright copper kettles. He puts it under his arm.

“Indifference,” Nicolae says.

Nicolae’s pupils have shrunk to points.

“Not nonchalance.”

Nicolae walks back to the others.

Maria opens and closes her mouth with a prim little click.

“He really is the antichrist, isn’t he?” Maria asks flatly.

Jane glares at Maria. Michael’s nostrils flare.

“No,” says Tom.

Tom steps forward. “No. He’s not. He doesn’t have to be. Not even if he’s immune to death rays. He’s a person.”

Tom juts his chin defiantly.

“Yeah!” says Jane.

Maria tilts her head to one side. “But—I am not wrong? That is his destiny?” she presses.

Nicolae answers. He bites out the word. “Yes.”

“Well, then,” says Maria. “I’ll just have to set my death ray to holy.”

Maria clicks a lever. Her gun begins a new kind of ominous whine.

“Could it be?” says Nicolae. His eyes brighten with something like joy. “An early end to the long dark aeons of my life?”

Jane grabs Nicolae’s arm. “Run!”

“But—”

“Remember the Doom Team code!” says Tom. “You don’t have to die just because some people think your existence is evil!”

Jane tugs harder on Nicolae’s arm. “RUN!”

Nicolae hesitates, then, fractionally, he nods.

The four children dart away, Mouser galloping after.

Jane
Age: 8
Code Name: None

Jane is trouble. Bertram’s brother, David, adopted her because he thought that she might destroy the world. It turned out that he was wrong. Because she’s just ordinary trouble, Tom won’t let her join the Doom Team—but she’s so helpful on all of their adventures that the Team unanimously voted her in as a Doom Team Auxiliary!

“Brown paper packages,” says Jane. “Brown paper packages. Brown paper packages. What could that mean?”

“Dad’s opium stash!” Tom declares.

“That’s it!” they all shout. “Opium!”

They race downstairs to David’s abandoned bedroom. They break open his cabinet and take out a brick of opium. It is in a brown paper package, tied up with string. The children boil water in the bright copper kettle; mash up wool, opium, Mouser’s whisker, and the petals of the rose in a large glass bowl; and finally they pour boiling water over the mix.

“It’s a marvelous immortality elixir!” Jane says. “Bottoms up!”

“. . . Ladies first,” says Tom.

They stare at the lumpy mix for a bit.

“Nicolae?” Jane asks.

There is a black dog standing in front of Nicolae. It pants.

“Ask Mikey,” Tom suggests. “He’ll eat anything.”

“Nuh-unh,” says Michael. “I can eat anything. That’s different.”

“All right . . .” says Jane, unhappily.

Jane picks up the elixir. She lifts it to her lips.

The door to the room opens. Maria stands there. The gun is not whining. It is readied and braced against her shoulder.

“I wouldn’t drink that if I were you,” Maria hisses. “Once you’ve been immortal for five hundred years, Heaven would send a terrible wind to destroy you. And even if you survived that, it’d send a terrible fire to kill you five hundred years later! That’s why there aren’t many immortal Taoists around.”

Jane pauses before drinking. “I don’t want Heaven to destroy me,” she admits.

Nicolae looks at her.

Jane blushes. “Sorry,” she says. “That was insensitive. —But I don’t!”

“You won’t have the chance,” says Maria.

Maria pulls the trigger. Jane, desperate, splashes the elixir of immortality on her face.

BOOM.

There is a silence.

“You’re not dead either,” Maria says, dumbly.

“I guess I’m a Taoist immortal,” Jane frets.

“You can’t be a Taoist immortal,” claims Tom. “You’re a girl.”

Maria fires again. She fires shot after shot at Jane’s chest. It splashes off.

“You are a Taoist immortal!” Tom exclaims.

“The gun,” Maria whispers. “It’s overloading. I’ve shot too much death at an immortal! It’s going to explode!”

“Serves you right,” sulks Jane.

“It’s your fault!” curses Maria. “It’s all your fault! The Fan Hoeng will avenge me! They will sear this world, they will ruin it, they will salt the earth and boil the seas, all to get at you, Jane! All to destroy you!”

The gun explodes.

There is dust and there is rubble and the ceiling falls.

David
Age: 72 years
Code Name: None

David Fitz built the house on Doom Lane as a haven for children destined to destroy the world. He adopted Tom, Nicolae, Michael, and even Jane. They never knew whether he wanted the world to end or just thought that destined avatars of destruction had it pretty tough. All they knew was that he loved them, that he took them in, and that he died, leaving the Doom Team and their trust fund in his brother’s greedy hands.

He is mourned.

Jane is dizzy as they haul her into the light.

“Is everyone okay?” Jane asks. “Michael? Oh my God, is Michael alive?”

“I ate the death and the blast,” Michael says. “I’m okay. And I even saved Mouser. But I’m hungrier now.”

“I’m so glad,” Jane says. She hugs him tightly. “I’m sorry I tried to get you to drink the immortality elixir.”

“It’s okay,” Michael says.

Jane blinks away her tears. She pushes Michael away. She looks around at the rubble on Doom Lane.

“Well,” she says. “They’re going to destroy the Earth to get at me.”

“Yeah,” Michael laughs.

There is a silence.

“I guess that means I can join the Team now,” Jane says. “Huh?”

Tom’s face is stricken. Nicolae’s eyes are dark and wounded.

There is a silence.

“Of course,” Michael says.

Nicolae, quietly, nods.

“Yes,” Tom admits.

A bird sings, far away.

“I’m so sorry,” says Tom, wretchedly.

The rubble shifts and crunches.

“Jane, I’m so sorry!”