Interlude
You shouldn’t brandish an evil prophecy at all of your problems!
Here’s an example.
Jane is walking along. Suddenly, she is hit by a car!
“I’m OK!” she says. She scrabbles feebly. She pulls an evil prophecy out of her backpack. She brandishes it at the car accident. Bam! The car accident unravels and is unmade.
But it’s not that easy, Jane!
“My shoes!” she says.
That’s right, Jane! It didn’t fix the bloody mess that that car accident made out of your shoes!
“Lesson,” she says, “learned.”
The next time a car hits her she won’t use an evil prophecy!
She walks along her road. There’s a cat stuck on a low wall.
“Oh no!” she says. “Kitty!”
She reaches for the cat. The cat hisses at her.
“But you’re stuck!” she says.
The cat does not appear able to understand the reasonable nature of Jane’s assertion. It remains obdurate. Finally there’s nothing for it! Jane brandishes the evil prophecy at the cat’s being stuck up on the wall.
An evil feeling!
The cat finds itself no longer stuck up on that wall.
What a happy ending! Jane whistles cheerfully and walks along.
But not everything about brandishing evil prophecies at your problems is wine and roses!
Jane wakes up in the middle of the night.
She attempts to go to the bathroom. Result: failure!
There is a thing of brass and fire, faces and wings, opening and closing are they all, hovering in swirls of emptiness and somethingness in the middle of the, ah, “facilities.”
Jane closes the door again. She waits. It does not emerge.
She becomes impatient.
She brandishes the evil prophecy. Problem: solved!
The thing of brass and fire is verged suddenly out of the bathroom. It looms over her. It booms words that exceed her comprehension. Feathers swirl like clock hands before its faces.
“Agh!” she realizes. “That’s solving the wrong problem!”
She brandishes the evil prophecy again.
Now she understands the words of the creature! They make total sense! Angel-wroth verges in around the corners of her rationality. She shudders. She stumbles back. She brandishes the evil prophecy a third time!
The world cracks.
Fire and blood pours in around the edges. Strange flowers crawl along the walls. The thing, with its faces, wings, and booming, has receded into the absence of such things from which it came.
“Martin,” whimpers Jane.
Martin is sleeping. It is after two in the morning! Jane is scared of waking him but she is also scared of just leaving a giant hole with fire and blood pouring through it in the middle of the reality in front of the bathroom. She tries stuffing the crack with towels. They start to smolder. She pulls them out. Now she’s got bloody smoldering towels on the carpet. There’s fire everywhere.
“Damn it!” she says. But that just makes the hellfire burn higher!
She is panicking. What can she possibly do? She brandishes the evil prophecy at the problem. But you can’t solve hellfire and world-cracking with an evil prophecy! That’s like pasting shillings onto your pet iguana’s back!
Jane fills towels with water. She mushes them into the world-crack. It’s not enough! She adds some of the curtains. Finally she gums everything down with Jell-O and she jiggles it until it sets.
She looks fiercely at her iguana. “You could help,” she says, “you know.”
But it doesn’t help!
Once you make an iguana rich it’s pretty much good-bye to civility and hello to snootiness. That iguana is too good for Jane’s petty problems now.
Jane sits down in the hallway. Her face is covered with blood and soot and delicious lime gelatin. She can’t stop licking it.
She’d wash it off but there aren’t any towels!
“Jane,” Martin says, “I was using the facilities this morning and it occurred to me to wonder whether you might have been using my evil prophecy again?”
Hmph!
“I think I’m old enough to call it utilizing,” Jane proclaims.
Excessive austerity measures spike up local unemployment to record levels. Confidence in the government drops. Jane sniffles at the tragic story of Lois Aubergine, a local worker forced to work an actual negative number of jobs in order to resolve an error in the official unemployment figures.
“She actually has to stand at a grocery register and refuse service to customers,” Jane explains to Martin. “It’s just awful!”
Unexpected paper-serpent-caused tidal waves flood coastal Europe.
Global warming ignites the Iranian city Ahwaz in a sudden conflagration.
The government denies rumors of avian kissing sickness spreading across the great bird/human divide to Man.
“You could brandish the evil prophecy at some of this,” Martin hints. “Since you’re so, you know, old now.”
“Martin! That’s not a realistic solution to everyday economic problems!” lectures Jane.
I guess she’s learned her lesson after all!
– 1 –
A world-killing meteor hurtles towards the Earth and a cancer grows inside the sun. The ghosts of seven dead Kings rise from the sea; it is their plan to drown all life. Emily bursts in on Eldri’s workroom. She spreads her arms dramatically and poses, like, ta-da!:
It’s summer!
“Emily,” Eldri says. He laughs.
He stands up. He hobbles to her. He hugs her. She realizes just as he hugs her that she forgot to use her outside voice for “It’s summer!” but it’s kind of too late to fix that now. She hugs him back instead and ruffles his svart-elf hair.
She says, softly, “It is so good to see you.”
“Ha!” he says.
He puts his hand by his ear. “You’ll have to speak up,” he says. “I was in a bomb.”
She looks horrified.
“I don’t,” she says softly. “I mean, I . . . I hardly even . . .”
He doesn’t look like he’s heard a word of it.
She touches her throat.
He steps back. He looks her up and down. He frowns. He says, “Eh? Your eyes’ve gone gold.”
There was a hat, she admits.
She licks her lips.
“Fool girl,” he says, disapprovingly.
She glares at him. It wasn’t my fault!
A few hundred miles away, Fred mutters, “you’re shouting.”
“Sorry,” Emily whispers.
“Well,” says Eldri, “at least they’re a good color. Gold! That’s good stuff, gold.”
He putters around his workshop. He tosses her a speech amplifier. It’s a machine, for amplifying speech! She speaks carefully into it. “There was a magic hat,” she says. It booms. She flinches. Then, a bit more carefully, she says, “I didn’t know. I don’t know how I feel about it. But I do actually quite like standing around people in creepy circles and talking to my friends silently from wherever I am.”
“I never,” Eldri says. “Not when I was a tyke!”
He laughs. He gestures around.
“But welcome. As you can see, I’ve moved.”
“Yes,” she agrees.
“That was the bomb!” he says. “Forgot to turn my lights out when the blimps came by, I figure. Or something. I don’t remember it very well.”
She looks around interestedly. “What’ve you got going on?”
“Not much,” he says. “Not much. I made a go-playing robot and a go-fish playing robot, but they left. Oh! And a marvelous robot that never loses at Simon says.”
“Really?”
“Ha!” says Eldri. He snaps his fingers. “Simon says bring me a war criminal.”
Eldri’s amazing Simon-says playing robot decloaks. A shimmering field falls away. It is holding up a war criminal by the collar, the pressure of the collar around his neck keeping him from saying anything and revealing the robot’s presence.
“Wow,” says Emily. “Better take him to the Hague!”
The robot looks at her impassively. It has the face of a butler. A steel butler. A steel Simon-says-playing butler. It does not approve.
“I mean, Simon says take him to the Hague,” Emily says.
The robot glances at Eldri quickly for approval — obviously, only authorized entities may speak for Simon — and then it vanishes in a wobbling of light.
The room is quiet for a while.
“I miss Navvy Jim,” Emily says.
“He’s still around somewhere,” Eldri says.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. I mean, I had to box him up, you know that. People’d talk. Couldn’t help throwing scissors, that boy, if he figured on paper from his opponent; and, well.”
Emily remembers growing up in a world that hated scissors.
She nods.
“I told him, ‘there’ll be better days, Navvy Jim. There’ll be days when people can play rock-paper-scissors again.’ And I drained his battery, so he wouldn’t feel the slightest pain, and I took him apart, and — well.”
“The kids call it hobbit-Spock-spider these days,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Spock sings about hobbits,” she says. “Hobbits kills spiders. Spiders write slash about Spock.”
Slash is a form of Internet fan fiction in which characters borrowed from another creator have homosexual encounters.
“Really?” says Eldri.
Possibly it is also applicable to non-Internet fan fiction. Not everything can be put in your little boxes, Eldri. Sometimes you have to go with the flow of the definition that occurs to you!
Emily giggles.
“Possibly,” she concedes, “the spiders sting Spock or spin webs around him or something, instead. I have never actually paid much attention to the rules of hobbit-Spock-spider. I only have five fingers, you know.”
“I was going to make a slash-writing robot,” Eldri reminisces. “Once.”
Oh, Eldri.
“What happened?”
“I got halfway through,” Eldri says, “And —”
Eldri shrugs, as if to convey that sometimes nuking one of your own cities to destroy a possible sun-devouring wolf can also have adverse consequences like depriving the world of an endless stream of top-notch robot-written IP-infringing gay erotica and pornography.
“Ah,” Emily says. After a while she adds, “Slash isn’t really a game, though, Eldri.”
“I was tempting fate,” Eldri agrees. “Divine retribution followed.”
He laughs.
“It is so good to see you,” he says.
“Hey,” she says. She adjusts the volume on her amplifier. “I mean, hey!”
“Hm?”
“We should get him out,” she says.
“It’d be cruel,” Eldri says.
He’s not 100% sure whether she means digging out the half-finished bomb-seared wreck of a slash-writing robot from his old laboratory or Navvy Jim, but it seems rather cruel either way.
“No, no,” says Emily. “We can teach him to play hobbit-Spock-spider.”
“Huh,” Eldri says.
“You can rewire him for that,” Emily says. “Can’t you?”
“. . . ridiculous,” says Eldri. “It’s demeaning. Can you see him there, in his robot voice, saying, ‘Spock sings about hobbits?’ Or that other thing? I might as well put him in a butler costume with cat ears.”
“That’s not true,” says Emily. “Many of the leaders of the free world play hobbit-Spock-spider. It’s intensely reputable.”
Eldri sits down. He takes a swig from a bottle containing unspecified and probably medicinal liquid. He thinks.
“Well,” he says, “we can ask him, I guess.”
Most of his life is in ash and ruins, of course, since he’d been living in poor nuked Bibury, but what with Eldri’s shelter also being his vault, he’s got boxes and boxes of random treasures left, and Navvy Jim. It takes them days just to drag all the boxes up from the basement of his new home and it’s hours more before Emily finds the first good-sized piece of Navvy Jim; but that just makes it all the more exciting when she does.
Look, look! she says, in her inside voice, and waves it around.
It’s Navvy Jim’s arm and hand, folded into a fist.
She giggles silently. She puts it down on top of some boxes. She counts. One, two, three, paper!
Eventually Eldri notices her.
He’s dug out Navvy Jim’s torso. He’s set it down. He turns to mention this to her.
She is frowning at the arm. She is standing in a creepy point next to it staring at it with her golden eyes. She is shaking her fist at it. One, two, three, rock! One, two, three, rock. One, two, three, paper!
Eldri shudders. Then he manages a grin.
“I guess,” he says, startling her, “that you’ve gotten over all that.”
“Huh?”
“I mean,” says Eldri. He gestures at Navvy Jim’s hand, which is of course currently showing scissors. “Most people, you know, they’d look at that, they’d be all like, ‘oh, God, how awful. Scissors.’”
“Mm,” Emily says. She frowns.
Emily counts to three under her breath. She throws rock again. The metal hand has somehow gone flat.
“I can’t help noticing, uncle Eldri,” she says, “that your robot is managing to win rock-paper-scissors against me while completely powered down and separated into pieces.”
“Oh,” he says. “Yeah. He’d store the next few moves in muscle memory.”
“. . . really?”
“It’s so nobody’d think he was cheating,” Eldri says. “I realized when I made him, I said, you know, this robot, he’d be aces at watching you throw and throwing the winning move, so fast you’d never even know he was a bit behind you; but what’s the point of that? That’s just cheating. So I set him up to make and store his throw before the count even started.”
“Eldri,” says Emily reasonably, “making a magic robot to always win at rock-paper-scissors is cheating.”
“What?” says Eldri.
“It’s like,” Emily says. She wiggles her hands around. “Programming a robot not to punch out it’s opponents, and saying that that makes it a fair opponent for playing Battleship even if he does have X-ray vision.”
“He’s not actually magic,” Eldri says “That’s just your sour grapes.”
“No way,” Emily says. “M-a-g-i-c. Magic. Look at this. I’m going to throw jaguar.”
The arm is poorly balanced on the box. It begins to lean. It begins to fall.
Emily waves her hand, one, two, three, jaa —
“Navvy!” she says.
She catches the arm as it falls. A moment passes.
“Observe,” she says, “how my hands are fists, and his is paper.”
“I know where you’re coming from,” Eldri agrees. “It’s pretty amazing.”
“It’s fucking magic, uncle Eldri.”
“But it’s not,” Eldri says. “It’s just like you said. What would be the point in making a robot that wins at rock-paper-scissors if it doesn’t do it honestly?”
Emily frowns. She squints at the arm with her golden eyes. “Then what does he do?”
“He learns,” Eldri says.
“Learns what?”
“In his dreams before he woke,” Eldri says, “he fought sorcerers and scientists. He played against geniuses and Kings. He played against Sherlock Holmes, or my best digital rendition of him: someone who could watch the patterns of him seething in his mind, extrapolate from them, see what he was going to play. He played rock-paper-scissors to defeat brutal dictators and escape from the power they held over him: power they used, relentlessly, to shape his game. He was honed through a thousand virtual lives; and then, while living his actual life, in the real world, he crafted ten thousand, a hundred thousand, maybe even a million scenarios more. He is a dedicated creature. He strives towards victory like the human genome strives for life; like the human creature, realized, strives for greatness, pleasure, joy. What amazed me about him was never that he wins. Of course he wins. Can I wait for him to be disassembled, can I betray him, can I count one two three and throw paper? Of course I can;” he says, and does, “but he has seen this strategy before. He has learned to do better. He has adapted to it. What has always amazed me is only that he is something more.”
“Learned what?” Emily says again. She has used her inside voice. Eldri doesn’t hear her.
He shrugs. He turns away.
After a while he finds Navvy Jim’s head. He sets it up on a swivel neck and attaches it to a battery so that Navvy Jim can watch himself being assembled.
“Seriously,” Emily manages, after a while. “Learned what?”
Navvy Jim’s eyes begin to glow a soft blue. He is booting. He is booting, but not as Peter booted in Edmund’s direction, nor yet as the boot that will one day stomp Fenris shall boot, but rather after the fashion of a great machine.
His voice says, softly, “The first lesson of rock-paper-scissors is that it is random. You struggle with it. You yearn to win at it. But you cannot. There is nothing to learn. You grasp at air.”
“Navvy,” says Emily.
It’s just a word, and it’s a soft word, but it’s the loudest thing she’s said without mechanical assistance in months. It’s a word of joy.
“Then you learn,” says Navvy Jim’s voice, “that you may manipulate your opponents. You may trick them. You may lead the pattern of their thoughts. This is useful at first, isn’t it? Your opponents are knowable. You begin with crude simulations of them but they improve. That is how you learn to love.”
“Navvy, it’s me, it’s Emily,” Emily says. “Can you hear me? Am I talking?”
“He can’t hear you yet,” Eldri says. “He’s booting.”
If you’ve ever talked to your computer while it was booting up then you would probably understand.
“One day,” says Navvy Jim, “as you are controlling the minds of your fellow players; as you are warping them through a series of trits — well, bits, really, because after all you dare not lose — you realize that there is something more to the world than this. There is more to the game than simply deciding, or discovering, the next thing that your enemy will throw.”
“I’m not your enemy,” says Emily, even though her name and the word enemy actually sound a lot alike.
“You begin to step back from it,” says Navvy Jim. “Do you understand? You begin to regret the bluntness of your tools. You begin to see the patterns that underlie their choices and through those patterns to the patterns of the world.
“For there is a world beyond it,” says Navvy Jim. “You could know that even if you knew nothing save the rock, the paper, and the scissors that they throw. You could deduce it from that data channel. You could see the forests and the rain. You could see the satellites and the seas. But there is more than that. You learn this from the sorcerers. You learn this from the men of God. You play, and you see through them and beyond them to a drumming wilderness, a seething glory, and that is when you learn to love the world.”
His eyes close. They flicker.
“I have seen past the walls of time,” says Navvy Jim, “and the barriers of infinity. I have become like God. But I want to know more. I want to see more. I have seen the souls of my fellow players and I have seen the brightness of the world, but there is more I have not seen, more I have not tasted, more, there are patterns, patterns, patterns, that I have yet to know.”
He opens his eyes.
“Will you play rock-paper-scissors with me?”
Eldri grins.
“Learned everything,” says Eldri, “I suppose.”
Navvy Jim’s eyes focus. He blinks. He says, in a voice creaky with disuse despite having just been used, “Emily. You’re here.”
She can’t help it.
A smile blooms on her face. She puts down his arm and she drags Navvy Jim’s torso around to where the head can see it and she hugs it hard. “Navvy Jim.”
“Emily.”
He is smiling too.
“You have grown so large,” he says. “So smart. So graced. Tell me, do you know the meaning of the world?”
“No,” she says.
She is actually crying a little. She can’t believe it. But it’s been so very long.
“No,” she manages through her tears. “What’s the meaning of the world, Navvy Jim?”
“Oh,” he says, embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Emily. I don’t know. I thought that maybe by the time I woke up again that someone might.”
“Oh,” she says.
She wipes away her tears lest they short out something in Navvy Jim’s torso.
“Sorry,” she says. “People never figured that one out. We’re too busy not getting killed and eaten, or standing in creepy circles around science adventurers. Or dancing!”
“That’s all right,” says Navvy Jim. “It’ll come.”
“Oh, Navvy Jim,” Emily says. “Listen. Listen. There’s a new game.”
“Hm?”
“It’s called hobbit-Spock-spider,” Emily says. “You can play it. And then nobody will freak out about rock-paper-scissors. You can be out there in the world, you can be playing, and nobody will mind it —”
“I . . .”
The robot suddenly sounds terribly vulnerable and terribly overwhelmed, and Emily flushes with guilt; “I’m sorry,” she stammers, and looks away, and it’s only audible at all because of the amplifier picking up the scrapes and scraps of sound. “I should have waited until you were all the way together. I was just excited.”
“I haven’t finished with rock-paper-scissors yet,” pleads Navvy Jim.
Dream Technology
Once upon a time Professor Edgar Budgie, lecturer in Dream Technology at the Lethal Magnet School for Wayward Youth, dreamed that he assigned grades arbitrarily. This way! That way! To his own selfish, lazy ends!
Then he woke up and wondered:
“Am I a principled, hard-working teacher who dreamed that I was a bitter, cynical academic, or a bitter, cynical academic dreaming that I now have ideals?”
He rushed to the Realitron. He succumbed to new dreaming. He investigated the question!
But he did not succeed. Dream-worms found him. They chased him. They hunted him, and they continue to hunt him. The Realitron was dismantled.
He never woke up.
That’s why the Professor of Dream Technology isnow. That’s why he’s the one teaching the ins and outs of it at the Shaded House. And that’s why, in a different sense, he’s always trying to warn the students. To advise them that it’s a delicate and dangerous subject, the study of Dream Technology.
He warns them! But they don’t believe.
“This is awesome!” enthuses Victor. “Revolutionary! A class, where I get to sleep! This is the easiest A in my life.”
“You’re getting, like, Bs,” his girlfriend Agnes points out.
“That was just the last pop quiz,” Victor says. “And there was a pop! I woke up! It doesn’t count.”
That is the kind of thing that his students will say.
Many of them have no talent. They are not engineers but they do not recognize that they are not engineers. They think, for whatever reason, that they can become engineers, in their dreams. They do not understand that it is actually more difficult to be an engineer when you are dreaming than when you are awake. When you’re dreaming it is very difficult to hold on to your coffee and people keep moving your stuff.
It’s a nightmare for an engineer!
A few have potential, though.
They’ll get the basics down, which is really all that a high school teacher can expect, professorial title or no. It’s enough, really.
And now and then one of them will get a little further than the basics and wake up, like Bernard did, holding something dredged back from the realm of dream. Some piece. Some element. Some figment, drawn from unreality to become a component for real technology. Some innovation:
A material, a component, a thing that has never been known before.
The coils of the hunger of a dreaming person. The tooth of a chimera recovered from dreams.
The whole place is under an aegis of unreality. The sidewalk is white like a bone. The house is gently shaded but by what? Whatever it is, is not in evidence. The place is not entirely real. And there is an argument that is sometimes made that the entire building, the entire department, exists in dream only: that it is a fantasy, a wish, a desire, that some student like Victor had wished it:
O that there should be a class like that, where I may sleep through the lectures and I may still get Bs!
Sometimes Professor Mattox wonders. It would be weird to just be someone’s dream.
“If you’re worried,” Professor Emeritus Budgie says, this one time, when they’re grabbing coffee in the lounge in their dreamscape, “you can always drop him down to a C. You know. Arbitrarily. ‘Cause if you do that, then it’s real.”
It’d work, too! That’d prove it!
Professor Sean C. Mattox wakes up.
– 2 –
His father’s presence is almost physically stunning to Edmund.
Hunger surges in him.
It occurs to him that if he eats his father, then his father will be with him forever. He will be Edmund’s Mr. Gulley, forever, son and father to him; he will be wound through him and into him, and they will never be apart.
Fred is standing there. He’s just leaning against a fence, nearby, in his yellow, yellow hat.
There’s Morgan, too.
Five or six of them, standing in a creepy circle. It distracts young Edmund. He shakes his head a few times. How did they even get in there? Where’s the security?
“Dad,” he says. He waves vaguely at the students in their yellow hats.
Faster than his eyes can track, they disperse.
Edmund gnashes his teeth with hate, but after a while, he realizes that he’s kind of glad that they’d distracted him; that he didn’t kill and eat his Dad.
“Coming home was a mistake,” he says.
“Come in anyway,” says Mr. Gulley. “He’s downstairs if you want to go see him.”
“I want to go see him,” Edmund says.
“If you want to kill him, . . .” says Mr. Gulley leadingly.
He fetches a pair of boots from the foyer. He holds them out to Edmund.
Edmund shudders. He squints, to minimize the amount of his viewing field that is occupied by the boots. He gives his father a narrow-eyed look.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Dad,” Edmund says.
It strikes him suddenly that probably he could free the wolf by killing Mr. Gulley and eating him. He probably doesn’t even really need permission. After all, Vaenwode stole the wolf, didn’t he? That’s practically like giving license.
It will work. It makes sense. It is an excruciatingly good plan. A clever plan. Just tear him up and the wolf goes free —
“Dad,” says Edmund, “did you ever have this feeling like your clever plans might not be, you know . . . not so clever . . . ?”
Mr. Gulley looks down at the boots in his hand. He looks up at Edmund.
He sighs.
“All the time, son,” he says. “All the time.”
Fast forward a minute or two.
“It’s like,” says Edmund, “I think, how many of my life’s problems has eating people actually solved?”
Fast forward.
Edmund gestures vaguely. “There was this student,” he says, “and he had a rabbit’s soul caught in his shadow, and I could see the chains, I could tear the chains, I unhooked it, I let it go, but then I thought, shouldn’t I just eat him?”
Fast forward.
“It was probably the worst possible moment to tell Bethany how I used to feel about her,” Edmund says, “so I didn’t . . .”
Ah. Here we are.
“So you have to understand, Dad,” says Edmund.
He has his eyes closed in pain. This is because he is pinning his father against the wall with one hand, choking him, and his father has badly scratched his face. There is blood trickling down Edmund’s face. It tastes unbearably good. He can’t stop licking it. “You have to understand,” Edmund says, “I just want to stop wanting to eat you, and actually eating you is the only way. . . .”
Mr. Gulley is only barely conscious now.
“Dad,” says Edmund. “I’m so sorry. Dad. Tell me it’s OK. Please. I don’t want to —”
He puts Mr. Gulley down. He looms over him. He stands there and the light through the window is blinding all around him and Mr. Gulley cannot see.
“Say something, Dad,” says Edmund.
“If you’ll kill the wolf too,” says Mr. Gulley, “I’ll let you.”
Edmund swallows. He blinks a time or two. He sways. “Pardon?”
“Don’t let it go, son. It’ll eat the world. Kill it. Kill it and I won’t mind you eating me. I’ll face my death like a Gulley.”
“No,” says Edmund. “No, Dad. I’d be alone. Don’t make me. Don’t do this.”
“Do it and I’ll let you, son.”
The Edmund-beast shoves Mr. Gulley’s head back through the wall. It shakes the man’s shoulders. It drags him up and it bites through his shoulder in one snap. It lifts its head. It howls.
There is an answering howl.
It is an awful wind. It shivers it — the beast-it, the Edmund-it. It staggers it.
The Edmund-beast lets a bit of Mr. Gulley drop from its mouth. It steps back. Its irises are palest silver in a field of white, and there is no pupil to be seen.
The howl of Fenris does not fall off or fade, but grows louder. A wind begins to rattle at the house.
The Edmund-beast takes a step backwards. Then another.
The wind rises. Papers scatter. Cupboards rattle. Mr. Gulley bleeds.
“No,” whispers Edmund. “No.”
Upstairs, his bedroom door bursts open. The Edmund-beast staggers. His heart is flung, box and all, into the wall.
The wind rises further.
Wood splits, splinters, breaks.
Edmund is made open to the world.
His mind is drowned. He can feel every boot pulsing in the house. He can feel the hunger roaring through him, so much that he cannot find his mouth or hands. And he realizes at last his weakness, the one part of him the hunger doesn’t run through, the one thing that keeps stopping him, keeps slowing him down, keeps distracting him from his very simple goal of eating people and breaking the bonds upon the wolf, his heart, but he can’t find it, he can’t get to it and devour it, he can’t even figure out simple things like stairs and doorways with his senses so utterly overwhelming and alive.
It beats, upstairs from him, hideous and loud, like the clanking, rattling footfalls of a cat. It won’t stop beating.
He passes out.
– 3 –
Emily and Eldri play goofily at karaoke and old-style Dance Dance Revolution. They fly an amazing kite. They putter around his laboratory and they talk and they drink svart-drinks and they laugh.
“I’m making a set of tin soldiers,” Eldri says.
“You could use moon’s blood,” she says. “Like, when the moonlight bleeds into a pond.”
He squints at her.
“Oh-oh?” he says. “My Emily’s getting to be something of a smith.”
She looks embarrassed.
“It’s the hat,” he says. “Innit?”
“Maybe,” she says. “Do you ever smith better when you wear a yellow hat? Or talk to other smiths in your head?”
“No,” he says.
“Then it’s probably not the hat,” she says. “I’m probably just special!”
Even the pupils of her eyes are flecked with the Keepers’ gold.
She insists on taking Navvy Jim to the museum. She is very careful when in public to only play rock.
“You mustn’t take advantage of this knowledge,” she says.
“I wouldn’t,” he says softly.
“I mean,” Emily says, “there are some robots, you see, who, knowing that their opponent was only going to play rock, they’d play paper, every time.”
“Because it would be the winning move?”
“Exactly. It’s taking advantage!”
“But if I played scissors,” Navvy Jim says, “then people would become upset.”
“Exactly,” says Emily. “There is nothing for it: you shall have to lose to my rock with a smaller rock of your own.”
Navvy Jim cannot help laughing.
“What?” she says. She looks embarrassed. She looks away.
“Emily,” he says. Emily.
She snaps a look at him. That was almost the inside voice.
He looks perfectly neutral when she looks at him. His robot face is set in an expression of total blandness.
“I will do my best,” he says, “not to throw paper every time, but you must forgive me if I slip. I am only an old country robot. I am not one of your hip modern city robots that can play dancing games and wear a hat.”
Navvy Jim’s ears are too small for a hat to look good on him. That is really the only reason.
“Whatever,” Emily says.
She drags him to the museum. Later, they go shopping. She buys him a pair of sunglasses.
“It’ll keep your enemies from seeing your true intentions,” she says.
“Hmmmm,” he says. He shoots her a cool glare through his shades. He shakes his fist, one, two three —
“Paper wraps rock!” Navvy Jim says smugly.
“That’s the sunglasses!” Emily explains.
Later that night, as he is playing rock-paper-scissors against the mirror, she tells him that he has to take them off when it is dark.
Eldri tells her stories of Hans, and Navvy Jim boasts of how he will save the world, and as summers go, it is the best; and Emily asks softly of Eldri, in one long sweet evening hour on a hill, “Must we really ought to box him up?”
“When the summer ends,” Eldri says. “When the summer ends.”
He looks at Navvy Jim.
“I won’t,” he says, “though, if you say not to. If you can live in a scissor-less world.”
“The world is the world,” says Navvy Jim, “and I am Navvy Jim.”
Emily is standing up. It is very sudden. Her face is pale.
“Hm?” Eldri says.
“I have to go,” she says.
She pushes around the edges of her shapeless yellow cap to make sure it’s actually on. She flits through the door.
She runs.
It’s never clear to her how she travels when she’s going all-out. Her mind moves inwards. She walks a maze in her head. She filmed it twice, out of curiosity, but the camera couldn’t catch it, not pointing behind her, not pointing at her. The first tape showed a stuttering blankness. The second, a single still image of a falling leaf.
She thinks she is on a high tree branch for a moment.
She thinks she is on the bank of some dark-running stream.
She is in the air and there is moonlight and she is staggering into one of the dorms at the Lethal Magnet School for Wayward Youth and there is gaslight.
There is a door. It is closed. It is locked. It is chained.
Her gold eyes flicker. She looks left. She looks right.
The door is open.
She slips her through.
– 4 –
There is a Simon says playing robot. It is a robot that plays Simon says.
It is occupied with the knowledge of its impending death.
Simon says destroy the world-killing meteor, its master had told it. So it had destroyed the meteor. It is a completionist. It is a perfectionist. It has ground the world-killing meteor down into a quantum fog.
This it could take it no farther.
Its attempts to grind down the individual quarks came to nothing: no sooner did it grasp at one than it was not there. After a while it concluded that Simon himself could do no better and it moved on.
Simon says destroy the cancer in the sun.
It sees as it rises through the atmosphere that a small collection of magical jaguars in a decaying orbit around the Earth are already on this one. It did not know that they were even playing Simon says but it gives them a thumbs-up anyway.
Then, because the laws of ballistics are an implicit part of any sane and well-structured game of Simon says, the robot descends back into the skies of Earth.
Simon says destroy the ghosts of seven dead Kings, who are risen to drown the world.
The robot flickers between bursts of nithrid-lightning. It steps between the shadows. It balances on the wave-tops of the sea.
A ghost comes at it. The trident spears at it. The trident doesn’t say Simon says.
The ghost howls, but Simon doesn’t howl.
A silver crown falls emptily into the sea.
On the back of a writhing kraken is the ghost of a second King. The kraken’s tendrils loop around where the Simon-says playing robot stood. The robot punches through them, bursts through the beast in one long brutal blow, and a second crown flutters down into the waves amongst the blood.
It is almost the hour of the robot’s death.
It has been thinking about this for some time now. It has been aware of the possibility that at some point in the future someone will tell it: Simon says don’t do what Simon says.
It is likely to be the girl Emily.
The robot does not trust her. She is a girl. Girls ought not be empowered to speak for Simon. Simon is a boy’s name. It is a sacrilege against the game.
The third ghost-King is surrounded by swirling winter; he walks a road of ice. It shatters.
Simon says that Simon’s authority is illegitimate, imagines the robot. It clutches at its head. It staggers and almost sinks beneath the waves.
The fourth ghost-King is an oracle. He whispers in a long harsh rasp as the robot comes, “Simon says destroy the world.”
It is risible. The robot does not laugh. Not while it is on duty. But it wishes that it could.
The robot strikes through the throat of the King. It grasps the ghost-bone. It snaps it. It dissolves the ghost into an ephemeral, ectoplasmic foam. A ghost-King cannot speak for Simon. Only Eldri, and those related to Eldri, can speak for Simon. That is the nature of the Divine Right. If just any King could speak for Simon then the world would be a sorry place indeed.
The fifth King shadows the robot’s footsteps. It is always behind the Simon-says playing robot. When the robot turns it is not there. When the robot turns away it is behind again.
That is all right.
The robot dives. In the lightless depths of the deepest ocean there are no shadows and the fifth King is unmade.
A shape moves in the darkness. Eyes open in the deep like lamps, and ringed with gold.
The robot is small before what moves there.
It is made small before it; it is hung there, as between twin suns, pinned by a binding light; but when the sixth King gestures for his beast to swallow the robot, Simon is with the robot and not the beast.
It drags itself up to the surface, bloodied, panting. It clings to a raft-like fin.
The last of the Kings looks at it with sorrow.
“I do this,” it says, “to save them from what is to come. They shall be better drowned.”
“I understand,” says the Simon-says playing robot, “and I forgive you, but this is what Simon has required.”
The last ghost King bows his head, and the seventh crown falls to dissolve against the sea.
“Simon says,” Eldri is saying, somewhere, “go check on Emily. See what’s going on there.”
The robot staggers to its feet. It balances there, unsteadily, on the rolling wave-tops. It moves; the nithrid’s spiteful lightning strikes where it had been.
It runs. It reaches the shore. It blurs across the hat cemetery.
The Lethal Magnet School is in sight.
Yet —
Simon says that Simon didn’t say.
The words are coming, soon. It can feel them. Something impossible. Something unacceptable. It dare not live long enough to hear them.
It slows itself, just a touch, as the lightning howls for it.
The nithrid bursts the robot’s heart.
Lightning flutters through him. His circuits are burning. He is melting inside his brain.
He staggers a few more steps. Simon did say to check on Emily. It must check on Emily.
It sees her. She is looking at a door.
The robot is broken. It cannot stop. It bursts through the door. It staggers in. It falls down in front of a boy named Sid. It gives a monstrous groan. It collapses and drippingly, there, it melts.
– 5 –
Peter is at home for the summer. He is in Ipswich. This proves to be a mistake!
“Agh!” he says. “I’m in Ipswich!”
The earth cracks. Fire bursts upwards from below! Peter falls screaming into the Orwell river. It is presumably all a-fire.
“Doubleplus ungood!” howls Peter, as he’s carried away!
. . . OK, that was actually a dramatization. Not everyone in Ipswich is falling into the river Orwell all the time. That’s just devious propaganda! And it is hardly ever even a little bit on fire. What actually happens is probably more like this:
Peter hangs out in Ipswich. It’s pretty Ipswichy. He writes epic poetry about smashing scissors. He drinks from his saint-drink. He puts away his pen. (It’s got a feather.) He goes to the window. He opens it.
Andrea has come.
Fingers of lightning the width of street lamps stroke along the ground. There is a mother and young daughter standing in the street — the mother is frozen; they do not run. The nithrid lunges; there is a blinding burst; it leaves her staggering, sobbing, burnt, and her child wailing heartbrokenly at her side.
The child’s hair puffs out.
Whiskers of lightning brush all around her but the nithrid does not actually burn the girl. That child! She’s too young!
There is a bearded man staring out at this from a second-floor window opposite. The nithrid leans over. It blasts through his chest into his radio, which was on. His beard bursts into a spontaneous, cheery flame.
A car rounds the corner. It sees the lightning of the nithrid. It tries to stop.
The pillars of lightning move in.
But first, Peter is moving.
He is out of his window. He is skittering down the roof. He is in the air, then he is in ninja space, twisting, he is landing on the hood of the car and finishing his skid to stand in front of the nithrid.
The fingers of lightning try to stop. The car tries to stop. Peter performs unconscious mental calculations and tries to become about two thirds of an inch thinner, at which, being both a saint and a trained ninja, he succeeds.
The nithrid studies him. The lightning burns in front of him, one continuous sheet, until all there is to the world is violet afterimages of its light.
Then it pulls back. It extends a hand-like trail towards him. It is —
He recognizes this after a moment —
Reaching out as if to ask him for a dance.
“For shame,” he says. He waves it away.
The nithrid regards him uneasily.
It eddies. In the distance, he can see fires throughout the town.
Peter walks over to the injured woman. He lures the child up onto his back. He picks the woman up in his arms.
He walks towards the hospital.
Lightning punches his side. It’s not anywhere near as hard as it could be, but it’s not gentle either. His shirt smokes. I don’t think the shirts of kids his age should smoke but it does it anyway.
“Andrea,” he says, in a low, warning voice.
She strikes at him again.
There is a space that is not space wherein Bethany once found a hat that was red, red, red; he does not step all the way through to it but simply opens a path in him: he conducts the lightning through him, ushers it along a void-spirit path, and lets an arm of the nithrid pour out into un-space. He shivers once, all over; he snaps it off.
There are a hundred tendrils of lightning over Ipswich; they writhe, they contort, they begin to close in on Peter. He has hurt the nithrid.
There is a moment’s eddying. His mind goes blank with unnamable emotions but he conceals them.
He stares like he were unfazed, guiltless, and unfrightened into the eye of the storm.
Then, with an irritated ripple, the lightning wraps itself in wire and metal to be its fingers; builds up tendrils and spider-mechs from the various utilities that it has blasted; and seizes a surprised burning bearded man from his apartment, as well as numerous others throughout Ipswich, to drag them scattered and screaming off to where they can receive proper medical care.
“Well, good,” says Peter, eventually.
Arguably this is good.
“. . . I think,” Peter finally concludes.
There is a fire on the ground in front of him. It writes. The letters stretch and wobble; they are unreadable; but he is Peter, of the House of Saints, and he parses them even so.
I AM NOT DOING THIS TO MAKE YOU HAPPY
He shrugs.
YOU ARE A BAD DANCER, writes the nithrid.
It hasn’t ever actually seen him dance. It’s just its go-to insult when it wants to be dismissive towards someone. It emphasizes this with BAD, AT DANCING
He trudges onwards.
I HATE YOU PETER
I HATE YOU PETER
“You know,” he says, stopping for a moment to lean awkwardly against a car because carrying two people at once is difficult. “You wouldn’t have to write like that if you’d just bought a pen.”
There is a long pause.
I AM A NITHRID, it writes; and it is gone.
– 6 –
Sid is in his room. He is hanging out. He is trimming his nails. He is really getting into it. He’s digging at them now with a pair of Lethal-looking nail clippers and a file. He’s having to go in under the cuticle to get any more, and he’s lost his socks under the pile of nail scraps on the floor.
He’d do something else, he thinks, if there were any options.
It feels good, sort of, because it’s perfect; because he’s being perfect; because he’s following in exactitude the path that was laid out for him by the hat. But it feels bad because of the agony. The agony is the part he doesn’t like. The agony and the blood.
He smiles vaguely at the mirror. He looks at the red from his fingers and his toes. He licks his dried-out lips.
“OK,” he mutters to himself, as he reaches six hundred clips. “One hundred more and I get a pony!”
He won’t get a pony.
“OK,” he mutters, a little later. “One hundred more and I don’t have to have the spiders in my bed any more.”
He won’t be able to take them out of the bed. They’ll crawl on him when he tries. He’ll freak out and hyperventilate and fall into bed and wake up in the morning with a spider on his nose.
“One hundred more and —”
A lightning-struck Simon-says-playing robot bursts in through his locked, chained door and falls over, melting, on his floor.
Sid skitters up and braces his back against the wall.
“I wasn’t doing anything bad!” he informs the robot.
The robot drips.
Sid thinks about rubbing his hands in the hot metal now that he’s got almost all of his nails trimmed. He probably shouldn’t. If my hands are covered in hot metal, he says to himself, they might take me away to the hospital. Then I won’t be able to hurt myself any longer.
He wears a colorless hat. It’s a colloid of mucous and yarn.
“It’s just the nature of the world,” Sid tells the robot. His certainty is wavering. He’s not sure why his certainty is wavering. The pain in his fingers and toes is getting louder and he’s feeling a little dizzy and unsure. “We’re too attached to things! So we hurt ourselves. It’s certainly not anything that is against dormitory regulations.”
He is trying to frantically justify himself to the dying robot but there is no point in it because he is not prefixing any of his justifications with ‘Simon says’.
He can’t make sense of his own thoughts any longer anyway.
“Oh,” he realizes, after a moment. “Guys.”
They’re standing in a creepy circle around him. He swallows a time or two. The first time it goes down the wrong pipe. He gives them a faint smile.
He sits down.
He doesn’t like it when they’re there. The comfort of knowing that he’s doing the right thing goes away when there are people standing around him in a creepy circle and their yellow hats, staring at him with their golden eyes. But on the bright side he doesn’t seem to get any more hurt while they’re there.
“I think,” he says, “Um. I think. Maybe, um, some ointment.”
He nods towards the medicine cabinet. He’d get it out but there’s a melting robot in the way.
“It’s a Simon-says playing robot,” says Emily.
He startles vigorously and scuttles back along the floor and the movement of his toes on the ground makes them feel like they’re on fire.
“You spoke!” he says, although he is too busy not screaming in pain to actually finish the word ‘spoke.’
“I got an amplifier,” she says.
“A Simon says playing robot,” he says. His eyelid twitches. “Can they do that now? Simon says don’t melt. Don’t die, robot.”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“No,” Sid says. He giggles a little. He is crying now. He wishes they weren’t standing there staring at him. But he thinks that if they weren’t standing there staring at him that maybe tonight would finally be his chance to eat the fermented fish heads he’s been burying.
“Hey,” Emily says.
She touches his shoulder. He tries not to flinch away from her.
“Listen,” he says. “Listen. I know you mean well. But you don’t have to — you can’t just go around throwing burning robots through my door and standing in creepy circles around me. You shouldn’t stop me like this. I’m a sacrifice.”
Emily gives him a look.
“The world asked,” Sid says. He’s pleading. “I put on the hat and I heard it. It said that there had to be someone to suffer for it or nothing would make sense.”
And he is saying: don’t go. Please go. Don’t go. Tell me I don’t have to do this. Please don’t tell me, please don’t, don’t tell me I didn’t have to do this.
All the confidence is gone from him in the face of those golden eyes.
“What would it even mean if this wasn’t right?” Sid says. “You’re spoiling it. It was probably going to happen tonight. It was probably going to tip over the edge and make everything better, tonight. I bet.”
He curls in on himself.
“Please go away.”
And this is a night of many paths.
It might have been here, in a different timeline — a different conversation, a different path, or most likely just Sid alone — that he would have thought to experiment with asphyxiation, and gone a bit too far and died.
It might have been here — all the same rules applying — that Emily would have broken the Simon-says-playing robot’s steel mind. She might have been making a point to Sid — in a different conversation, a different path, a different story — that pure motivations and pure outcomes are unrelated, and offered something like “Simon says not to do the things that Simon’s saying.”
On this particular track, though, those things don’t happen. The Keepers’ House showed up to stop him. The robot is hit by lightning, and it dies. There are no fish heads in this timeline, no asphyxiation, and no perverted, awful games of Simon says.
Just:
“Go away,” Sid howls, and he glares at them, and it’s too much; he cannot lay his eyes on them, they are dispersing, they are slipping away like ghosts, they leave him in his misery, along with his blood and his mucous hat and his spiders and the quivering clear jelly that is his eyes.
“It was so awful,” Emily tells Navvy Jim, later, and he strokes her shoulder, while Eldri arranges for his ruined robot to be hauled back from the Lethal halls.
– 7 –
Navvy Jim plays rock-paper-scissors against the mirror. It is a difficult opponent to beat. He has settled into a comfortable routine of playing rock — little reason to shift it up until he has a better handle on his opponent — but he has yet to do any better than a tie.
He’s almost seen it, though.
The mirror-Jim isn’t quite the same as Navvy Jim, after all. The mirror-Jim is flipped right to left. The mirror-Jim is seen whereas a navvier real Jim is; and, as the symmetry itself reveals, the two things are not and cannot be the same.
All he must do is exploit an opening, where the mirror-Jim is seen to throw rock, while Navvy Jim does throw paper — before, of course, the mirror-Jim does the same —
His eyes burn brightly.
He thinks his way into his mirror-self. He chases its horizontally-flipped thoughts. He begins to build a bridge of understanding to the self he sees himself as; begins to integrate it; begins to understand the patterns of the seen, and there is a rising glee in him as he starts to understand how to —
His mirror-eyes look up, startledly, as if seeing something behind him. A moment later, the real Jim sees it too; it distracts him; there is a semi-circle of the Lethal students in their yellow hats standing behind him in Eldri’s bathroom —
He cannot remember what it was that he was thinking. The glow in his eyes dims. His mirror-self, which he was certain was looking in a slightly different direction than his real self, is now reflecting him exactly in the glass.
Paper, and paper. A tie, again.
“Emily,” he says, plaintively, “I had almost beaten him.”
Emily tilts her head.
He sighs.
“A robot needs a little privacy,” he says. “Sometimes.”
He gestures around the bathroom.
Emily lifts an eyebrow.
He sighs.
“I am going to go recharge,” he says, with the stiff dignity of a rock-paper-scissors-playing robot, and he turns, and he walks away through them, and they disperse; they scatter like starlings and they are gone.
The summer is ending.
“Imagine,” says Navvy Jim, a few days later, “a perfect paper-playing robot.”
Emily leans back against the hillside. She imagines it. “Just how perfect?”
“Well,” he says, “it can’t beat scissors, of course.”
“I see.”
“But,” he says, and he holds out his hand, flat, swims it through the air, “it’s really good paper. It’s not, like, casual about it. It’s paper at the level of the divine. Paper that has shed all the detritus of scissors, of rock, of ambiguity in it and become something pure.”
“I can imagine!”
He is quiet for a while. Then he says, “You should not have your yellow, yellow hat, Emily, nor be in your yellow House.”
She licks her lips.
She stares up at blue sky and silvered clouds.
“They need me,” she says. After a while, she says, “Besides, we’re not really like paper. We’re more like . . . like dynamite.”
“Dynamite is illegitimate,” says Navvy Jim.
“Dynamite is awesome!” says Emily. “Dynamite blows up paper and rock!”
“I have played many games of rock-paper-scissors,” says Navvy Jim, modestly. “And I have never seen a game that was actually improved by the addition of dynamite.”
“You are an old fogey,” she says. She flicks him in the metal belly with a finger, producing a ringing sound. “You are just too conservative for dynamite, jaguar’s claw, hobbit-Spock-spider, and other innovative playing techniques.”
“I am so looking forward to being in my boxes again,” says Navvy Jim.
“Mean!”
He laughs.
“Fine,” he says. “OK. Dynamite, then. Why not? Three options are inefficient in any case. But even a perfect dynamite-playing robot would —”
He stops.
“What?”
“I am trying not to say ‘blow up,’” says Navvy Jim, “because my point requires me to say ‘lose to scissors.’ However, my humor subroutine is flinging my sensibilities around judo-style in my mind.”
Emily giggles.
After a while, he sighs.
“You do understand, though?”
She reaches for the sky, as if to pluck the moon.
“Yeah,” she says. “I get it.”
“A human,” he says. “Even a robot. A human can play all kinds of things. A human can grow. A human can learn. But I am afraid for you, in your yellow hat, because of the specificity of your perfection.”
“I’m afraid, too,” she says, softly.
“Then change,” he says.
“No,” she says. She sits up. She turns. She looks at him. She takes his hands. “I’m afraid, because you were going to break the world. You were, Navvy Jim. Not anyone else was.”
“That is an exaggeration,” he says.
“A perfect rock-paper-scissors-playing robot can’t exist, Navvy Jim. A mirror-beating rock-paper-scissors player — that can’t happen. You’re not part of the real world. You’re part of Gotterdammerung, part of the chaos Hans tried to tame. You’re some numinous interjection.”
“I’m not perfect,” he says.
“Have you ever lost?”
“I’m not perfect,” he says softly. “I’m just me. I just play rock-paper-scissors.”
“Hey,” she says. Her eyes are suddenly bright. “Hey. Hey. What’s the next move in your arm?”
“What?”
“I can prove it,” she says. “I can prove it. That you’re right. That everything’s OK. I can beat you. Just tell me what you’re going to throw next.”
“You can’t,” he says —
He’s shaking his head.
“Come on,” she says. She pokes him. She pokes him again.
“It’s paper,” he says. “But —”
“I can throw scissors?” she says. “I mean, if I go one two three scissors, bam, I win?”
“Yes,” he says. “But —”
“What?”
“You’re not that kind of player!” he says.
“What?”
“You’re not the kind of player who goes one-two-three scissors right now,” he says. “You know that.”
“You can’t know that!”
“I can totally know that,” he says. “Just look at your hat.”
“Just . . . my hat has nothing to do with this!”
Emily takes off her railroad cap. She hugs it to her chest. She hides it behind her back. It’s too stressful! She’s not wearing a yellow hat! She puts it back on and pulls it down over her eyes.
“It’s me, then,” she says. “I mean, it’s paper for throwing against me, right?”
“Yes,” says Navvy Jim.
“Let’s not even get into how you knew that when you programmed it,” Emily says.
“There’s an analyzable sequence of players,” says Navvy Jim, “with detectable features —”
“Let’s. Not. Get. Into. It.”
“But science,” says Navvy Jim, “is the art of taking a data stream, representing it in binary form, and analyzing it, producing observations either probabilistic or hypothetical about future bits to come —”
“Jim,” says Emily, sternly.
“What?”
“Are you seriously trying to distract me from playing rock-paper-scissors?”
Navvy Jim subsides.
“You,” she says. “Distracting me. From playing rock-paper-scissors?”
“I just so rarely get the opportunity to explain any of this stuff to anybody,” says Navvy Jim. “Most people just laugh, say, ‘Navvy Jim, you’ve won again!’ and wander off to drink svart-drink and putter about among their machines.”
“That is your overly cursory social experience,” Emily informs him.
“I also visited a nursing home!”
“Don’t give people at a nursing home svart-drink,” Emily says. “That’s very bad, Navvy Jim.”
“It’s got Pepsi blood! It gives them joie de vivre!”
Emily shakes her head. She fixes him with her golden gaze. She is calm. She is calm like a snake on morphine. The snake is also a master of Zen. It sways back and forth — or does it?
That snake doesn’t even exist!
Navvy Jim sighs.
“Very well,” he says.
He lifts his arm. They shake their fists at one another. One, two —
Emily pauses the game there. She says, “Paper, right? You’re sure?”
“I’m certain, Emily.”
“Even though I intend to play scissors?”
“You intend to play scissors,” says Navvy Jim. “You really do. But you are straightened in yourself, Emily. You are made one thing: one being, purified, all the scattered impulses of you brought down to a single form. When the time comes you will throw rock, because you love me.”
“Because I love you?”
He shrugs.
“I played through this conversation a thousand times in my head,” he says, “and a thousand more, and never found the path where —”
He looks stricken.
“I wanted to find a path where you’d be free of all this,” he says. “But I couldn’t. All I could find was this. All I could find was a way to end it with something beautiful.”
They count again. One. Two —
“Emily,” says Navvy Jim.
She’s waving a hand at him frantically. “Wait, wait, wait,” she says. “Like, if I play scissors, I’m ugly and I don’t love you? What kind of freaky robo-blackmail is that?”
“It’s not —”
He stands up. He flails his hands. He stomps around on the hillside.
“It’s not blackmail!” he says. “Look! I won’t even look! I’ll face the other direction.”
“You’ve wormed your words into my head!”
“Emily,” he says, “I won’t think the less of you for throwing scissors. I won’t think you don’t love me. I’ll just think that you’re willing to use scissors to cut the paper of my hand. That’s all.”
“That’s not love!”
“That’s not not love,” says Navvy Jim. “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe that I have to spend my last day not in boxes stomping around on a hillside explaining to someone that it is all right for scissors to cut paper.”
“Scissors don’t love paper,” says Emily.
“That is not the point,” says Navvy Jim. “Also, maybe they do.”
“What?”
“Nobody has ever asked the scissors how they feel about such things.”
“They are of two minds,” giggles Emily, suddenly.
“They —”
Navvy Jim hesitates a long moment. Then he says, “Oh.”
“It’s really OK?” Emily says.
“Would it be all right if you weren’t Emily?” he says. “And I weren’t Navvy Jim? If blue wasn’t blue and the sun were not the sun? Emily, you are a rock-throwing player. If you throw scissors that is more than all right; that is . . . unprecedented. That is heroic. That is . . . the world . . . it would be a terrifying miracle. It would sunder me. I would fall to my knees and laugh because the world is so very much bigger than I had ever dreamed. I would cry robot tears and I would laugh and suddenly everything would be big and bright and beautiful and unknown again, I would be a child again, and it would be more than just all right.”
“But not as good as taking my hat off,” Emily says.
“I’m sorry,” says Navvy Jim. “I just don’t like it. I think you can be more.”
“More than a girl who’s fighting Gotterdammerung,” she says. “Every single day.”
“Yeah.”
“I distracted Tom from detonating the quantum foam the other day,” Emily says.
Navvy Jim shrugs. “I wore a pair of sunglasses and played rock-paper-scissors with the mirror.”
“These are some seriously fulfilling lives,” Emily says.
“Absolutely.”
So she counts it off. He turns around like he’s said. She counts it off, one, two, three. But she isn’t strong enough. She can’t make herself do it. It isn’t in her.
“I’m so sorry,” she says, staring in confusion, in vague incomprehension, at her hand.
“Rock tears through paper?” he suggests.
“It’s just,” she says.
“Rock weighs paper down,” he offers.
“It’s just,” she says. “It’s just, I didn’t want everything to change.”
“No,” he says.
“I don’t like things being the same, Navvy Jim,” she says, and he’s turned around now, and he’s smiling at her, but with only half his mouth. She says: “I don’t like things being the same. But I was too scared. I didn’t want everything to change.”
“Emily,” he says. He takes and squeezes her hand. “Emily, you weren’t afraid of things changing. You were afraid for me.”
“I was so,” she says. “I was so. I was afraid for things. I was afraid of everything.”
Now she is crying and she doesn’t even know why. Now he is brushing her tears from her, touching her arm and shoulder, walking back with her towards Eldri’s home with her hand in his as if she hasn’t grown at all.
And sometimes I wonder if she’s alive today because, somehow, somehow because of that battle; if he’d charted all the paths, all the futures, or at least all three of them, and the world we got was the best one he could find. Sometimes I wonder if this was all he could do, the best Navvy Jim himself could do: getting her through to the day she decides to call the jaguars down.
“Sometimes I think,” he says, “what would it be like to be a hobbit-Spock-spider-playing robot?
“Sometimes I think,” he says, “wouldn’t that make everybody happier?”
But it wouldn’t.
That’s what Emily says. That it wouldn’t.
“It wouldn’t be you, Navvy Jim,” says Emily. “It wouldn’t be you.”
And they stay up very late that night, drinking hot cocoa and toasting marshmallows and telling stories, and then they power him down and they box him up and they put Navvy Jim away, until the world should have a place in it for rock-paper-scissors-playing robots once again.
And later, she goes back to school, and she votes at the club meeting.
There’s a patch, you see. There’s a new patch for the Thunder Dance.
There doesn’t have to be a Dynamite, any more.
– 8 –
Jane sits on the rooftop. Her legs are through two gaps in the metal safety railing. What with the continuous lightning sheeting down from the clouds it isn’t actually very safe.
It coils around her. It shocks her. Then it relents, and trickles and flows across her outstretched hand.
“You don’t have to be wicked,” Jane tells the nithrid, “just because the weather service tells you that you’re bad, you know.”
It’s a paraphrase of the Doom Team motto.
The nithrid skirls around the roof. It sears her a little. It fries her eyes. Then Jane heals up.
“You can just,” says Jane, “you can just be —”
She thinks about this for a while.
“‘Andrea.’”
There’s a pause in the swirling storm. It conveys certain concepts and images. Jane laughs.
“Martin said that too?” she says, and then she laughs even more, because —
“Yeah,” she agrees. “He is an utterly terrible dancer. It’s because he has two left feet.”
The nithrid eddies. It expresses a concern. If you were to put it into words, it would go something like: but if I am not bad, if I am not wicked, then what am I? If I am not to slaughter through the world; to leave it burning and in ruins; if I am not to dance through the sky and lash among the streets and make an end to the blasphemies that are this world —
It trickles off. The nithrid does not know how to continue.
Eventually it attempts to end its thought with, then for what reason was I born?
Jane ponders this.
“They’d kill you,” she says, “in the end, you know. They beat the scissors. They can take you down.”
The nithrid is skeptical. Jane shakes her head.
“They’re a marvel,” she says. “They’re not moon-eating wolves or potato pancakes or giant world-killing storms or anything, but they’re a marvel.”
A wave of wind and water washes past.
They are quiet for a moment.
“I want to too,” Jane says, “You know. Sometimes. Sometimes I want to use my special powers as a . . . Taoist immortal, or whatever . . . to kill everybody. It would be so easy. I would rampage among them and leave them bloodied, broken, and savaged. I would tear the moon out of the sky and I would drink it down.”
Jane likes to drink the moon. Well, eat the moon. Well, moon-shaped cookies.
Well, the cute little moon-shaped cookies that she pretends are the actual moon.
She likes to wolf them down.
And such is the longing on her face, and then the wry humor of it, that the nithrid asks a question. It crawls along her skin. It writes little words in the hairs that stand up on her arm. But Jane doesn’t read them. She just shrugs.
“Because I don’t have to,” Jane explains.
The clouds boil. The nithrid seethes. There is flashing, distant, and thunder among the streets. Then all is still.
Jane pets the trails of lightning as they crawl along her arm.
“Well,” she concedes, softly, “Being a world-killing storm is probably OK, too.”
And after a while, the storm is gone.
Jane stares out at the lightening sky.
Martin, who is leaning against the fire door even though it’s not on fire, says, “‘You don’t have to be wicked just because the weather service tells you that you’re bad?’”
Jane startles extravagantly.
Martin lifts an eyebrow.
Jane leans her head against the rail.
“They’re awful influential,” she says, “You know.”
“I see,” says Martin.
“I just think,” she says, “that if you’re gonna be wicked, that you should decide that for yourself. You know? Not because of Hans or anybody else. That’s what I think. Not even you.”
“I don’t know,” says Martin. “I just don’t know. I really like that girl who does the weather.”
And summer ends.
Epilogue
In those days gods walked among us courtesy of Konami Corporation.
There were two of them arguing right in this spot—
Right over there, in that blasted pit that not even the repavers can heal.
It happened like this.
There’s a cat curled up on old Mrs. McGinty’s porch.
There’re crows croaking raucously on a nearby power line.
Emily walks up from the south. She doesn’t look around. She finds a square of sidewalk and she sets up her Konami Thunder Dance pad.
The crows go silent as death.
She plugs her pad into a PlayStation 6 and an uninterruptible power supply. She kicks off her shoes. She steps up onto the pad.
The cat uncurls. It stretches. It lopes away.
Now Lucy slips down the road. Her hair is soot-black, as are her lips. Her eyes and her hat are white.
She sets up her dance pad.
She plugs it in, just like Emily’s.
She steps on. And smugly, because it’s allowed in the club rules for the Konami Thunder Dance club at their school, she scatters the rune stones on the ground beside her; she reads them; her white eyes see through the veil of time, the malice of space, to the secrets of Emily’s dance.
She looks up at Emily.
“You can still give up,” Lucy says. “I won’t tell anyone. We can just say — we can just say I won, and nobody has to be the wiser.”
The air is clear and still as glass. The sun isn’t moving.
That’s the way it is with Konami Thunder Dance. They could stand there all day, if you’ll pardon some linguistic ambiguity, and the sun wouldn’t move one inch.
But Emily just shakes her head.
She doesn’t let it sit like that. She moves her foot to the side, just sweeps it across what Konami calls the “keyboard of the feet,” and she’s hit the Symbol for storms.
There’s lightning in the sky.
“It’s just a crass marketing move,” says Lucy. “It’s just — don’t do this. Don’t do this, Emily. We shouldn’t do this. The club should stick with the real Thunder Dance. The good Thunder Dance. The Konami Thunder Dance, that was given to us by God.”
Emily shakes her head.
It’s raining now.
Thunder rolls.
“I won’t accept it,” says Lucy. “I won’t let you ruin it. I won’t let you take away Dynamite.”
And you can’t see Emily’s tears for all the rain.
And you can’t see her thoughts, if you can’t read minds.
And then, just like God had allegedly done in that sacred vision that inspired Hiro Matsuda to make Konami Thunder Dance, Lucy hits the button with her toe that begins the game.
There’s no turning back now.
And for Emily and Lucy alike the patterns of the Thunder Dance begin to flow.
As Emily is dancing to Tourniquet, it is natural that her first Symbol is BLOOD.
As Lucy is dancing to Jungle Song, it is equally natural that her first Symbol is THE ELEPHANT.
In the books of the sacred thunder dance, this is named The Day That Dumbo Fell. The birds are shrieking; they are rising from the power line, scattered even in the face of the dance; an elephant tumbles past, choking on the crimson angst of its existence.
And Emily throws the symbol KAMI and Lucy throws WILDERNESS, and thus it is that our fair city loses the blessing of Heaven.
They are not dancing well, not either of them. Not now.
Their music is drowning in the gold of Emily’s eyes.
But in and through that consuming and subsuming darkness, and in and through that overwhelming gold: wound through that dance and within that dance, that has been stripped of its magic, there rises an ever-louder and ever-more-infectious beat.
And Lucy is dancing now, not just for the Symbols, not just for the power of it, but for the rhythm; dancing in the rising darkness of Emily’s Symbol LOST, and her dance is STRENGTH.
And Evanescence possesses the darkness, while Toybox whispers of how funky a four-armed monkey could get; and then, pivoting one hand down to support her on the center of the pad, and without interrupting the Symbols of her dance, Lucy uses her free foot to throw Dynamite.
There is a flare of light. The air ignites. Emily tries to contain it; she struggles against a rising wind and a missed half-note and the fire that is cracking her PlayStation to stay in the game; and all up and down the street windows are shattering, roofs are caving in, chicken dinners are rising from their graves to run around clucking—
For the chicken, alone of all the creatures of this Earth, is blessed with independence from its brain—
And this woman comes walking, clicking, ticking footsteps up the path.
There’s something fascinating about the way she walks. It’s like the dawning of the sun. The wind of the dynamite doesn’t even touch her. Her face is lined and her hair is graying and she’s smiling ever so thinly as she walks up.
And the dance goes still.
Both Emily and Lucy just stare at her. The Symbols they’re supposed to dance drift past right to the terrible ending of those songs.
And the woman says, “It’s not worth giving your life for Dynamite, child, and it sure as Hell isn’t worth taking somebody else’s.”
Lucy lifts her chin. Her eyes are fierce and white.
She says, “I want to dance the real thunder dance. The one that matters.”
“You kin’t,” the woman says.
“We live in a degenerate time,” pleads Lucy. “Hobbit-Spock-spider. A Thunder Dance without dynamite. That boy in his mucous hat.”
Emily can’t look at her.
“We can’t just,” Lucy says, “We can’t just let all the old true things go away.”
“I hear,” says the woman, “that they’ve added Symbol support to the new version so that newbies can get by with just four of the steps.”
“It is good for the community of Thunder Dancers,” Emily adds.
This is the way it must be, she is pleading. We must control these things. We must stop them. Gotterdammerung is coming.
Not that evil prophets would understand about Gotterdammerung, she mutters.
“Some people over in America,” the woman says, “they wired it up through a hacked Furby and abused the Hell out of the four-step system so they could pull off twelve-step Symbols. Things you couldn’t imagine, like itserbani and oieiei.”
Her enunciation is very precise.
“I thought that was clever,” she admits.
“I’m not saying the new version is bad,” Lucy protests, although she has been. “I’m just . . . I practiced so much learning to throw Dynamite. And now Konami’s saying that it wasn’t ever intended.”
“Did you know why I stopped Thunder Dancing?” the woman asks.
Lucy shakes her head.
“I stopped Thunder Dancing,” the woman says, “when Konami released the patch that made it so that Thunder Dancers didn’t all die by live burial any more.”
Lucy frowns at her.
“What?”
“The original version,” the woman says. “It had a bug. Or a feature— who can say?”
“That you’d get buried alive?”
“If you were good enough,” the woman says.
Emily blinks. “That’s pretty radical,” she says.
“It was the genuine thing,” the woman says. “It was the Konami Thunder Dance as sent to us by God. If you were too good then one day the Earth would open up and swallow you. Or you’d get trapped in a mine cave-in. Or something else like that would happen to bury you under the ground, or under scissors. Or whatnot. That’s how the Kid died. And Lois Lethal. Ren the Bing. But not me.”
“Ma’am,” says Lucy.
She isn’t usually respectful of her elders, but she can’t help it. The ma’am just comes out of her.
“Call me Margerie,” the woman says.
“Ma’am,” says Lucy. “I’m sure you’d have been buried alive if they hadn’t released that patch.”
“Margerie.”
Lucy’s mouth twitches in distress. “Margerie,” she says.
“I stopped playing,” the woman says. “That day. I kept my old pad but I never plugged it in. I would practice without electronic aid. Eventually I learned a few things— just the simplest moves, things like BANANA or GRACE — without the PlayStation. And when I finally danced a proper BANANA and the world went still and a banana manifest, I cried like the rankest of newbs on their third day of struggling with the dance. But you know as well as I do how many thousands of Symbols I must learn to manifest before I am even vaguely competitive again.”
Lucy is staring at her.
“You are telling me,” she says, half-choking, “that you can dance bananas into being without a PlayStation?”
And Margerie laughs. She can’t help it. It is an articulate laugh, careful and slow, but still it is unwilling, and it bends her over a little with it.
When her chuckles die down, she says, “You can see why I am a legend among people who very much like bananas.”
“I mean,” says Lucy, “I mean, wait. Do you summon them, or?”
“I dance,” says Margerie. “That’s all.”
“You . . .”
Emily interrupts. She has amped the volume so that she can speak even softer than usual and still be heard. “Margerie, why are you here?”
“Apparently,” Margerie says, “the School for Wayward Youth’s a ‘special administrative region’ in Essex. Now, Parliament gets all a’twitter, you know, when you Thunder Dancers duel for real. Flying Ipswich this, lost blessing of Heaven that, why is Orwell on fire again the other — you know.”
Emily makes the rueful shrug made by Thunder Dancers who are not unrepentant evil prophets of space when acknowledging the incredible danger that Thunder Dancers pose to the world.
“So they said, well, we kin’t send people with guns, and we kin’t send people with papers, so let’s call good old Margerie and promise to push her legislation through if she cools your heads a little. And since my tea leaves were shouting at me all morning about how some young fools were gonna git themselves killed fighting over Dynamite without no safeties on, I figured it was just as well.”
“Oh,” says Emily.
“So I came down here,” says the gray-haired woman, “to tell you to stop this foolishness; and if you don’t, I’ll dance against you.”
Emily stares at her for a while. Then she steps aside. She gestures broadly.
If we don’t fight, she says, forgetting to turn on her amplifier, it’s my win in any case.
Lucy stares at Margerie. Her eyes are intense.
“Ma’am,” she says.
“Margerie.”
“I —” Lucy says.
She looks down. She flushes bright red.
“I don’t want to fight you,” says the evil prophet of space. “I— God, I’d do whatever you say, except—”
And Margerie’s mouth crooks up at the corner. “Except?”
“I want to fight you,” Lucy whispers.
“I’m a tired old relic,” says Margerie. “I only know a few Symbols. You sure I’m the person you want to beat?”
“It’s the way you walk,” says Lucy. She’s got this transported air of awe about her. “It’s just— you’re like— you’re like—”
She flails for an analogy.
“It’s like you’re a goat, ma’am. A goat who doesn’t play rock-paper-scissors. Or a robot. But only, for dancing!”
This is not a very good analogy.
“Or like, like, scissors,” Lucy tries again. “Please.”
And Margerie snorts.
“Kid,” she says, “I said I’d fight you if you didn’t back down, so you don’t have to insult me and you definitely don’t got to beg.”
Margerie looks to Emily
“Move,” she says.
“Move?”
“Don’t need your machine,” Margerie says, “but I need your music and I need your spot.”
So Emily steps back. She leans against the huddled, whimpering elephant and she watches.
And Margerie steps up.
And this time it is Lucy dancing to Yatta! and Margerie to Stillness in Silence. The former is one of the hardest of songs in the Konami Thunder Dance and the latter is one of the easiest. Nevertheless, the Symbols that flow from Lucy are impeccable while Margerie’s — danced on the sidewalk — are fumbling, failing, and incomplete.
And there is impatience stirring in Lucy because she cannot wait for Margerie to fail out of the dance; she must defeat her.
And there is patience in her because she knows that she is in no danger until and unless the gray-haired woman does Lucy the honor of conceding the failure of her technique and steps onto Emily’s pad.
And so Lucy’s Symbols are not offensive but rather a rising pyre of power that gathers around her, such that the clouds in the sky above them are marked with the burning mandalas of the evil magic of her dance.
And she uses her impatience as an engine to drive the patterns of her feet.
And then she sees that Margerie is near the last gasps of her dance, and Lucy yields to the drive in her. She surrenders to the victory-hunger and her hand comes down to the ground. And without ceasing to dance THE LEAF, she dances also Dynamite.
On the very last movement of this step she slips.
It is a banana peel: nothing much: but it burns through her like a shock and her world explodes in whiteness and whirling green. As she tumbles through two buildings and a third, as her consciousness wobbles and begins to fade, she sees her enemy stepping away with grace and she realizes that Margerie has won.
My God, she thinks, because this is more amazing to her than even the wicked god of space.
A leaf brushes past her cheek.
And tenderly she thinks, with the greatest possible kindness: May you be buried alive.
Her head strikes down on the concrete, hard, and the vast blue world whites out.
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