– 12 –
And sometimes I think that if Fenris had got loose, then it wouldn’t have really eaten everything. I mean, it wants to, of course, so very much it wants to, but there’s no way it actually could.
It would have run out of steam somewhere along the line. Got full. Got killed. Got linear in appetite rather than accelerating as it goes. A linear process can eat everything in finite time but that’s like pointing at that guy down in accounting and saying, “He can eat! And just keep eating, every day! He just won’t stop! He’s going to eat the world!”
That kind of boundless appetite — it doesn’t count.
. . .
Or maybe it really would have been the accelerating, overwhelming, singularity scenario that everybody was worrying about; only before it got there, the wolf would have stopped, ’cause of eating somebody’s conscience.
Dreadfully infectious things, consciences.
I ate one once! I know!
. . .
Or maybe it would have eaten everything, just like they feared, only, you know, only somehow it would have been OK.
Sometimes I think that.
. . .
It’s not that I would like to be cut up by Fenris’ awful teeth and sent rocketing gleefully down its throat into the doleful, digestive-fluid-filled prison of its gut.
I just think, sometimes, that it might have been OK to try . . . not tying up or killing giant world-eating wolves.
. . .
But in America there is this guy, and he’s sweeping up the scissors. He’s homesteading a bit of his old drowned neighborhood in the ruins of Respite. He’s gathering up the ruined metal to melt it down for scrap.
He’s a good man, I think. He’s a pure man. He’s a cleaning man.
His name is Jeremiah Sandiford.
. . . He disagrees.
– 13 –
And as for Emily, she meets a jaguar. It’s just like the ones she’ll call down one day, in the waste at the end of the world —
Only, this one is probably warmer.
Listen.
She’s always loved tigers.
When Emily threw “claw” in rock-paper-scissors — not that anybody plays rock-paper-scissors any more, not after that —
She called it “tiger’s claw.”
She loves tigers just that much.
Tigers, and lions, of course, and panthers — but it all pales before her new-born love now that she’s seen a jaguar at last. Tigers are nothing to her now. Lions and panthers are dirt and muck. She forsakes such childish things as pumas, lynxes, and drakes, because jaguars?
Goodness/Badness Report: JAGUARS
. . .
The jaguar is stalking his cage.
He is fiery and magical. He is Bahlum, king of beasts, and his eyes hold the eras of the world.
He looks at Emily and that look sweeps through her. It cuts through her like the wind. She is adrift. She feels herself to be floating. Her eyes are widening. She points.
“Mommy,” she says. She cannot find a better way to put it. “Mommy, mommy, jaguar!”
“He’s on fire, honey,” prompts Emily’s mom.
“Jaguar, jaguar!”
It is an instant, unconditional, and terrifying love.
. . .
If you had to ask her, do you love this thing — for whatever thing you like — more than you love jaguars, Emily?
Right then?
She couldn’t possibly have agreed.
The love of jaguars is a pillar through her. It lifts her up like Isaac Newton’s giants. It burns through her like a sacred flame.
. . .
Later on when the crispness of that moment departs from her —
Though it never truly leaves her —
She would have to shamefacedly admit that of course she loves her mommy and her daddy more than jaguars; and Eldri; and Navvy Jim. Maybe even her first boyfriend, I mean, not after, but during, and for a moment, almost, Sid —
. . .
And the Konami Thunder Dance, of course. Many years later, when she’s learned it. She’ll love that rather a lot —
. . .
But already we’re getting into questionable territory, because she will dance the Thunder Dance, when she dances it, in the very same spirit of holiness given her by the sight of Bahlum on that day.
. . .
Standing in creepy circles around people while wearing a yellow hat?
Will she love that more?
Hm.
I . . .
I don’t think so. I don’t think that she would think so. I think that her love for that is made small by her love for jaguars. At the very least it is different.
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