. . .
Time passes and Thon-Gul becomes concerned. He has a terrible foreboding. If the scissors do not cut the earth —
If they do not cut —
“I will send forth a world-killing meteor,” says Thon-Gul X, the wicked warlord of space.
You shouldn’t do that, you wicked warlord!
Oh, Thon-Gul!
It is bad.
Interlude
How embarrassing! I seem to have forgotten to post this between chapters 3 and 4. Adding, backdated.
British people often throw down their hats. It’s a fervent gesture! However, they do not always pick them up again.
Over time the hats accumulate.
They become a . . . there is no word for it. There is no standardized word for it, anyway. Where they are damp they become layers, bogs, and morasses of hypersaturated hats. Where they are dryer they stack into hills, though mush and mold often lurk just beneath the outermost layers of crisp and dry abandoned hats. They become a phenomenon — a geology.
A hat cemetery.
Police officers often come to a hat cemetery when they have just finished a car chase. The criminal has gotten away — that villain! The cops mark the occasion. One takes off their hat. They throw it down. They stomp on it. The hat joins the cemetery.
That’ll teach that criminal!
(Though, it is possible that the lesson is actually given to the cop.)
The haberbogs and haberhills — no. That is wrong. The . . . hatyards? I must settle for “the hat cemeteries,” again — are also a common destination for people of all political affiliations during an election. British elections are very complicated so sometimes everybody on every side wants to throw down their hat and teach the world what for. Sometimes when there is a boxing strike both the boxing managers and the boxing laborers (or “boxers,” but not as in the boys’ underwear) will throw their hats into the ring.
The ring, I mean, of dead hats.
The point is, I mean, there are very many hats there. They decay. They become a single tattered expanse of felt, covered by mud and clinging grass. If you touch them they will be mushy. They will offer up the mucilage of dead hats. They have their own ecology. There are special ants that only live in British hat graveyards. There are special anteaters that feed only on those ants. Sometimes you’ll just be walking down the street and a hopeful, hungry anteater will fwip your hat right off its head with its tongue. If you’re not British, you might not have understood what that was about, and I’m sure that you’re relieved that that circumstance has finally been explained.
It is not like the anteaters would wear the hats.
That would be ridiculous!
Over time the hat cemeteries have connected together, like rivers running to the sea; only in this case, it’s hat cemeteries conjoining through natural processes into a single hat mega-cemetery. Sea-slogs and cucumber millineries stretch across the English Channel to bind the cemetery together with the coastal hat graveyards of the continent. Underground tunnels originally created by urchins, pickpockets, and ne’er-do-wells link geographically disparate hatyards together as if by a milliner’s subway routes.
A comprehensive survey eventually established what British police officers and anteaters have always known: there is only one hatyard, only one hat cemetery, in all the British Isles and beyond.
It may seem sinister if you’re not used to it but it is in fact a perfectly natural thing.
The hat cemetery is part of the normal British environment, just like the American bullet warrens and the spontaneous kung fu monasteries of the mystic east. You shouldn’t listen to the corporate interests that proclaim the hat cemetery “unnatural” and propose paving it over and turning it into a gigantic pleasure palace for corporate executives. They genuinely believe that this will stimulate the economy and help everybody, but that’s just voodoo economics!
– 1 –
All her life a toad has glowered at Amelia Friedman. She has lived an ordinary, sensible life, twenty-two years of it, and every time she thought to do anything different — even something so small as a wild haircut, or a spontaneous trip — she’s looked up to see the bile of the toad.
“That’s unnerving,” she says. “Stop toadying!”
That isn’t really an accurate description of what the toad was doing to begin with, but either way, it doesn’t stop.
Sometimes she cries from it. She wears her ordinary clothing and she lives her ordinary life and she cries because no matter how sensible she is she’s still a weird girl who gets glared and glowered at all the time by a toad nobody else can see.
. . .
Then one day Hans stops feeding the toad. He stops feeding his toad, because he’s dead.
Its eyes grow sleepy as it glowers at her.
It is losing interest.
One day Amelia daringly tries a bit of glitter on her fingernails and she looks up at the toad and the toad, it doesn’t even seem to care.
“See?” she says. She brandishes them at the toad. She can’t help it. It’s been serving as her superego all her life and her brain really can’t help running potential issues past the toad. “See? Glitter!”
The toad weightily turns away.
It drags itself out of her field of view.
. . .
A tingle rises from Amelia’s feet, lingers in her belly, then rises upwards with her arms and explodes in a yell of happiness. “Yeehah!”
She scatters the books from her bookshelf. She looks wildly up towards the toad.
It isn’t there.
. . .
Amelia calls her mother. She asks for I. P. Freeley. Her mother asks if she’s all right.
She throws out her pads and buys tampons, under the mistaken impression that this decision is somehow more wild and more free. She wears different-colored socks. She stays up until 11:30pm, wildly partying, and finally she begins to practice renegade alchemy and work on an elixir to make her immortal, omnipotent, and live forever.
That’s what the toad was for, of course.
It’s to glower at renegade alchemists, so they don’t do things like that!
. . .
She’s got talent, does Amelia Friedman. She’s barely started on her alchemy before she’s drawing bubble-diagrams and transmutation matrices all over the walls of her room — and in wild lipstick colors, no less! It’s less than a month before she’s transmuted gold into lead for the first time, and hardly two months longer than that before she’s done it the other way around.
“I could be rich,” she says, but then she laughs at herself. Rich! Her! Amelia Friedman! As if!
She blows through her money as fast as she makes it, instead, funding expeditions to dark and dangerous corners of the world, investigating old myths and mysteries, and forming a crack team of heroic archaeologists, chemists, and explorers to assist her in her work.
. . .
Deep under Lemuria, where a person ought not go, she loses her virginity to Brad Hamstock and threatens to marry him, whereupon he mysteriously vanishes from the expedition. Despite assiduous searching, no explanation is forthcoming; she concludes, after a while, that he must have been eaten by a snark.
Later she discovers herself pregnant.
“Oh, really,” says Amelia, in disgust.
. . .
Amelia corrals Bertram Gulley — he’s Mr. Gulley’s cousin, once removed, and a wizard at archaeology — and she complains to him. She puffs out her cheeks, then exhales. “Look at this!”
She shakes her belly at him.
He gives her a remarkable look.
“Do you realize what this means?” she says. “I shall have to stop drinking mercury.”
“Amelia,” Bertram says. “You shouldn’t be drinking mercury anyway.”
“Because I’m pregnant,” she explains.
“No,” he says, frustrated.
“It’s OK,” she says. She pats him on the head. “You’re a wizard at archaeology!”
He has a crush on her which shall never be requited.
. . .
“No mercury,” Amelia mutters. “No arsenic. Not even a jug of brandy. Think of the child!”
She goes a little spacey. She giggles. She thinks of the child, of her and the child, of running through the fields of the future, forever young, with her half-twin immortal child at her side —
“Do you think he’ll be a renegade alchemist?” Amelia asks, eagerly.
“I don’t —” says Bertram Gulley, but she’s already realized that the lost tablets of Lemuria and their bleak prophecies of the future may hold useful and relevant information about her child. She’s dashed off! She’s gone!
“I, I don’t know,” says Bertram, staring at an Amelia-shaped space of air where he can’t quite process that she’s gone.
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