– 3 –
Tom drags Saul back to his room.
He shows him the unfinished hammer shaft of science. (This isn’t any kind of euphemism. It’s the shaft of an unfinished hammer. Of science!
It smashes outcomes into the desired configuration.
The outcome-smashing part is actually easy. It’s explaining the desired part that’s hard!)
“May I?” asks Saul.
“If you can.”
Tom watches as Saul heaves at the shaft a few times. Result: failure!
“It’s heavy, ” Saul admits, with a sigh.
“I started thinking, ‘Tom, you’re just going to integrate it into the boot’s systems anyway, you might as well optimize it for a low-G environment.’ But now I can’t lift it at all. It is,” Tom says, and waves his hand in a Tom-wroth gesture, “an unfortunate circumstance; I shall have to construct some sort of hammer-lifting machine when I arrange for its transport up. Also it is very sharp.”
Tom pricks his finger with the tip of the unfinished hammer shaft of science, in demonstration. His finger starts bleeding.
That wasn’t the desired configuration at all!
“Well,” says Saul. “That is beside the point of why I have bumped into you accidentally in the halls.”
“That’s certainly true,” says Tom. “And the answer is no. I refuse. I will not do it. I will not re-hat you. Hatting you once was trouble enough already! I had to use my bees! Besides, there is no point. You are already one thing. You are already the one thing that you are. If wearing the hat again could change that, then I, who has worn it over and over again since the beginning, would already be crawling mutant chaos gibbering and drooling in the void. Or God! But certainly not still just Tom. Look at these human hands. They’re so warm-blooded! You disappoint me, Saul. Surely even a saint can count to two!”
“I was one thing,” says Saul, stubbornly, “but I might have changed to be another.”
“Ridiculous,” says Tom. “If you could change, then you wouldn’t be one thing. That is what it means to be one: to be perfect, and not imperfect. And only the imperfect can evolve. Scissors can evolve and become papers. Papers, into rocks. But we, we wear our hats and we are solitary and we are one thing and we are vast.”
Tom turns away.
He strokes the edge of his marvelous desktop computer monitor in sorrow.
“I liked your music,” he says. “You know. You disappointed me greatly. I still have not forgiven you for choosing to be a saint.”
“I did not choose,” says Saul. “And further, I’m not the same.”
“No?”
“I’ve learned from my experiences,” says Saul. “That which does not change, does not learn. That which does not learn, does not remember. If I were incapable of changing, then I would still believe it to be the night you gave me hat.”
“Ha! A glimmer of intellectual competence,” says Tom. “But, as so often happens, a little reason is a dangerous thing. Saul, you’re not changing.
“You’re a fixed point.
“You do not learn; you do not remember; you are one thing. Memory and learning move to you. The world shows you different faces; you show it different faces; this is as natural as light refracting differently through each of a crystal’s different sides.
“Consider your sainthood as like unto a perspective drawing made in chalk upon the roadway: look from here, it is a perfect image; look from there, it is a distorted and ugly design, but in every case it is the same pattern of chalk upon the road, unchanging, eternal, like a diamond, like the void. That is why I myself may not regret —”
Saul interrupts him with a raised hand.
“I accept it;” Saul says. “It is impossible.”
Tom’s shoulders settle. He looks down.
“I can only hope to blatantly grovel to your superior intellect,” says Saul; “and to pander to your hubris, and pray that you can make the impossible possible; that you can transcend reality with the power of the House of Dreams. That your genius, alone in all this world, can extract me from this inextricable sainthood into which I have made myself entangled.”
“Impossible,” says Tom.
His lower left eyelid twitches, though. He’s always wanted somebody to blatantly grovel to his superior intellect and pander to his hubris in hopes of making the impossible possible, and here it’s one of his ex-favorite musicians.
“It can’t be done,” says Tom. “If it were that easy then the Devil would be doing it to all the saints. If it were that easy then the world wouldn’t need anybody to do science, it would just all align itself like filings on a magnet into the perfect shape.”
Saul looks helplessly at Cheryl.
She considers.
“Nothing,” she concedes, finally, reluctantly, “is impossible for the House of Dreams.”
Tom’s mouth works.
“That’s true,” he says, softly, sadly. “It is not impossible for me. I am Thomas the First. But I mustn’t. I shouldn’t. The very idea is wrong.”
“Pander,” says Saul, attempting to provide a sound effect to an action he is not in any literal fashion performing. “Pander. Pander.”
Tom’s eyelid twitches more. Then he stretches his hands to the sky and gives a hissing, growling outburst-scream.
He spins on Saul. He glares at him.
He points. He lowers his hand. He sighs.
“I will do it,” he says. “You have pandered excessively, yet not so excessively as to disgust me. And you have recruited my sidekick —”
“Rival,” corrects Cheryl.
“Associate?”
Cheryl ponders this. It makes her uncomfortable. “Colleague,” she suggests.
“You have drawn my colleague into assisting you in this madness.”
“He’s hot,” Cheryl concedes.
“He is not ‘hot,’ Cheryl,” says Tom. “Good lord. Look at him.”
They look at him. After a while, Saul says, “I could take off my shirt?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” snaps Tom. “She is too young. Our — her eyes are too delicate for such perversity.”
He turns away.
“At any rate,” he says, “I am pondering the matter. It seems that I must unfocus you. Set you to blurring. Divide you into a cloud of many forms.”
“Will it hurt?”
“Then,” says Tom, ignoring him, “while you concentrate on making yourself a creature of science — a Lethal student worthy of becoming an associate of my noble House — I will raise the hat above your head, like this!”
Tom poses, raising the hat above Saul’s head.
“You have a cap on under your hat,” says Saul.
“It is so that I may pose dramatically like this without feeling the discomfort of hatlessness,” Tom summarizes.
“I see.”
“And then I will lower the hat,” says Tom, putting his crowning hat back on, “etcetera.”
“Does the hat,” says Saul. “I mean, does the hat, the hat you have on underneath, is it, is it becoming one thing?”
“Hats are not sentient,” says Tom.
“And?”
“You shouldn’t anthropomorphize hats,” says Tom. “That way lies madness. They are not sentient. They are not beings. Therefore, they are one thing already.”
“That has disturbing implications,” says Saul.
“Yes,” concedes Tom. “The dead are one thing. The unliving are one thing. The Keepers are one thing. I am one thing. The implications throng! They haunt my dreams. But they are irrelevant under these circumstances. Stephan!” Tom snaps his fingers. “A crash of thunder, if you please.”
Tom’s roommate opens his mouth. A low boom of thunder rolls forth. He closes it.
“And now,” whispers Tom. “The dissolution.”
He pulls open a drawer, dramatically. Inside are pins. They are mostly dead pins. Some of them are various awards that Tom has accumulated, such as the pins for his various honor societies. Others are stolen, bought, or found. He sifts through them, piles a few of them together, and solders them into a single, greater pin.
“Lo,” he says.
He turns. He holds it out to Saul. Saul takes it, uncomfortably. It has become a single spear of gold.
“Put it on,” hints Tom.
Saul stares at it blankly. He cannot fathom how to put it on.
“It is a pin — oh, for the love of God,” Tom says.
Tom takes the pin back. He tries to clip it to Saul’s shirt. Saul finds himself stepping backwards. He is retreating. His movements are as elegant as a dancer’s. He isn’t even sure why. “What are you doing?” Saul says. His voice is tight, tense. “What is that? Where am I? Why doesn’t anybody enforce discipline at this school? I must not, Tom, this must not —”
“Stephan,” snaps Tom.
Stephan stands up. He grasps Saul’s arms from behind. He pins him. Saul struggles.
“Wait,” Saul says. “Wait. Let’s discuss this. We can negotiate. Please. I retract my consent. Stop, Tom. Please discuss this. I think I am going to hurl.”
“That is discus-ing,” Tom quarrels, and snaps the pin onto Saul’s shirt, right through the skin. Thunder booms to drown out Saul’s unfolding screams.
Tom raises up the hat.
He lowers it.
“It is done,” he says.
He turns away. He pushes the button on his belt that summons his crowning hat back onto him. He does not even watch as Stephan releases Saul, who falls.
“Get him out of here,” says Tom.
“He may be a member of Dreams,” argues Cheryl.
“He may also explode,” says Tom, “irradiating the surrounding countryside with efficacious spiritual toxins.”
“Hm,” Cheryl says. “That would be bad.”
She takes Saul’s wrists. She drags him out into the hall. She pushes him over to the window, folds the double-layered plexiglass out of the way into a Möbius twist, leans him out over the open frame, and she throws Saul down.
“Good luck!” she calls down after him.
He plunges into the rosebushes below.
– 1 –
In Tom’s upside-down Vault of Forbidden Things, there are many things that are forbidden.
There is the shrine to New Kids on the Block. You shouldn’t have one. There is the goat that he’s been sharpening. You definitely shouldn’t have one of those!
There is the cage with his buttered vulture.
There is a machine in Tom’s Vault that is Forbidden; it takes candy from strangers and it swallows its gum.
Tom’s infinitive splitter rises — it is forbidden, in Latin. It slams down. It cuts, to improperly power his lab.
You shouldn’t have things like that, Tom.
That vulture. It’s too slippery!
In the corner is a faux button that cannot be pressed.
Harold had argued with Tom over this, extensively. He’d told him that a button that can’t be pressed represents the very antithesis of reason. Tom had answered, “But if someone were to press it, wouldn’t the consequences be pretty bad?”
He tries to press it anyway, sometimes, in pursuit of one theory or another.
The button is really more of a bit of abstract art, a kind of subtle joie de vivre in a Vault otherwise entirely concerned with wrong things, and so he fails. It isn’t really a button, as buttons are understood, at all.
In the very center of his vault there is a vacuum environment.
In that vacuum a pair of scissors drifts.
They are not alive but they are not dead. Not all the way. They came at Earth but they never quite reached it. He caught them from the sky, held them in magnetic grip, because he had a plan.
“Experiment 58,” says Tom. “Making all that is lost and purposeless, something good.”
– 2 –
This bit’s actually from pretty late. The boot’s in the sky and the scissors are falling. The Fan Hoeng have come and Linus is battling Jeremiah Clean.
The world is this close to Gotterdammerung.
But what is Gotterdammerung, to Tom?
– 3 –
It has occurred to Tom that the world should have direction. That it is not merely Tom, or the people, or the dead that should be awakened. There is something missing in a world, in an entire existence, that is dumb and mute and blind to dreams and the sacred fire.
That the work of his hat cannot be complete —
That the lens of his kether-hat cannot be complete —
Until the entire world is driven by it, animated by it, perfected; caught up by and refined into a single dream.
There are moral issues here. He ignores them.
There are conceptual issues. These receive more of his concern. He is a generous master and a generous servant; he does not want the world to be bound exactly to his dream, but to awaken to a purpose of its own. Yet it is transparent to him, who has never seen the first of the sene-goats, that the world is only his conception — that the drive in him, the life, the dream, the purpose, that which he calls the sacred fire, is bounded entirely within him, a thing arising only when within him, rather than being something he can simply cut his wrists and pour out onto the clay.
So he pulls up a chair.
He sits before his private pair of scissors.
He stares.
He tells them: “I seem to have made myself into one thing, and one thing alone.”
Light glints from his eyes to the scissors’ blades, and light they glint they back.
“You have already known this,” he says. “You have already been — two things, made one, and jointed. A dead thing, made to live. A single thing, brought by reflection and transmission, into part of a greater whole. I know that you are evil.”
He reaches for them. He looks down. He lets his hand fall.
“I know that this is an error. I know that you don’t want to help me. But you don’t have to be bad. You don’t have to be wicked. You are probably the only inanimate object in all this great world of inanimate objects that can possibly —”
Tom shrugs.
“Understand. You would have been — I mean, if you weren’t just a pair of scissors, you would have been welcome, you know? We could have been, like, Tom, Linus, Edmund, scissors, and Jane.”
If there is anything in this hypothetical invitation to the Doom Team that moves the nonexistent heart of the pair of scissors floating in the vacuum environment in the middle of Tom’s upside-down Vault of Forbidden Things, they do not show it. They simply float and engage in rotation, there, glinting and gnashing their two shining blades.
“Well, anyway,” says Tom.
He dries his eye. He grins.
“Time for science.”
The scissors have always had a data channel. There has always been something in them that would listen to the voice of light, and speak it back.
He pulls down his scissors shades over his eyes.
He squints. The pupils and the irises of his eyes reflect a light. They gleam with dream-wroth; they send it out; and modulating it — bit by bit — through his scissors-shades, he offers them himself, unspools the whole of him, turns it into data, speaks it to the scissors-mind as a single word: TOM
Or, arguably, LIFE
As if to say: I am here, I am I, and you are here, and you are you; let us not be alone.
And because he is Tom, the scissors understand him. They take him in, the whole of them. They feel the truth of him.
Then they scissor, and Tom is cut.
Thus do scissors always deal with those who are One Thing, when they encounter them. For it is the role of scissors to make one thing, into two.
– 4 –
And it is not long after, and he is crying; he is in Saul’s arms and he is crying; and he is saying, “I tried so hard to fix the world.
“I tried so hard. But it didn’t need fixing.”
And a little bit later, “Why did I have to be Tom? Of all the things in the world that I could have been, why did I have to be — Tom?”
– 1 –
The snake is coiled around the world. It has its tail hooked in its mouth — well, more than that. It has its tail hooked all the way through it, tail to head and to tail again.
It breathes and its breath catches on that hook; expands and pulls; scrapes and lathes the tailtip through brain, lungs, heart, stomach, and tailtip again. It inhales and its brain is drawn to where its tail has been; its lungs fill with the food that had been in its stomach and its stomach fills with air. It exhales and it is restored.
The snake had folded itself into being. It had crafted itself from the sea and from the snake-wroth that was the dream of it, but it had folded itself into being poorly — somewhere along the path of its assembly, it had gotten itself twisted, it had gone all Möbius and Ouroboros. You could even say, I think, if you were being cruel, that it was bad at origami —
But then again, you try folding a world-circling snake out of random things you find drifting in the sea, when all you have to use as manipulator appendages are the innards of the snake itself, and see if you can do any better than that.
And even then —
It wasn’t its fault. Not really. It was Hans’. He’d caught it forming; he’d helped to twist it. He’d led it down a bad-origami garden path. It was like a garden path that leads to Hell, only, it was folded paper.
He was the kind of guy who did things like that to giant paper snakes.
It hurt. It hurt quite a lot, to be the giant paper snake. It hurt worse than to be the nithrid, when Hans had lined the cage of her bones with knives. It hurt worse than the wolf is hurt, cut fourteen hundred years by a svart-elf cord.
Even if the three wolves were still one creature in some sense —
Even if you could lump Skoll’s fiery death and Fenris’ suppurating, bone-deep cord wounds onto the same scale, add them together —
It still wouldn’t compare to the suffering of the snake.
That’s why it had come to Cheryl, when she was young. She was a girl. She was quite good at origami. I mean, really good. For a human.
So it had begged her.
Help me die.
– 2 –
Sid is swaying. Sid is pale. Sid is wearing an awful hat.
It’s an underground fighting tournament, though, so Max doesn’t let that distract him.
He’s there to fight!
Max swirls his longcoat. He steps back. He intones: SNOWSTORM.
Clouds start gathering over Max’s head.
Sid clenches a hand. He finishes drawing his summoning circle. His arms are all-over scratches and his eyes are bright from lack of sleep.
He rasps: FIREBALL.
“Way to go,” says Max, impressed. He grins. He watches Sid’s hand closely as Sid brings up the fireball. Sid winds it up. He throws it.
Max dodges to the side.
Max’s snow fairy manifests. Snowflakes begin to fall all around Max. Max pushes at the air and the snowstorm flows over and begins dumping snow down on Sid.
Sid growls: FIREBALL.
Max flicks his eyes to the fairy. He cautions: “Don’t let it —”
Sid hurls the fireball at the snow fairy. The snow fairy’s hair singes. Her eyes turn into Xs. She falls back onto her cloud.
“— hit you,” Max sighs.
Then he shrugs. He snaps his fingers. WHOMPING STICK, he summons.
A whomping stick appears in his hand. He whomps Sid. Sid staggers. Sid falls.
Sid rasps: FIREBALL.
It is too much for Sid. Sid is beginning to bleed from the nose.
“Um,” says Max.
Sid throws it. FIREBALL, he whispers. FIREBALL.
“Um,” says Max again.
Sid pulls himself to his feet. His hands are burning.
“I’m going to beat you,” he whispers. “It’s OK. I’m totally fine.”
Sid’s hat drools slime along his forehead. He wobbles. He hurls, both fireballs and the contents of his stomach, at almost but not exactly the same time.
FIREBALL, whispers Sid.
“You’re going to hurt yourself,” says Max. He is appalled, but Sid doesn’t seem to care.
FIREBALL. FIRESTORM.
Flames whip up. They rage through the circle. They howl around Max and he repels them with a swirl of his longcoat and a NEGATE.
Sid’s eyes are bleeding. His nose is pouring blood. He sniffles and accidentally chokes on it. He leans over, gasps for breath. He is pale and gaunt.
FIRESTORM.
But Max has wrapped his arms around Sid now. He is holding him up.
FIRESTORM.
Max isn’t fighting him but holding him. He is whispering, fiercely, in Sid’s ear, “Geez, kid, stop.”
FIRESTORM.
FIRESTORM.
INTIMATION.
FIRESTORM.
Max holds him until Sid is exhausted. Until he can no longer summon. Until he is crying on Max’s shoulder and he has nothing left.
“I have to win,” whispers Sid, and sobbing wracks him.
Max holds him there, but he does not fight.
– 3 –
Help me die, it had begged her. But she can’t kill it.
Not even in her night-hat. Not even with the inspiration burning in her mind from Dreams.
The mites she sends to devour it are integrated instead into its form.
The blades she uses to skewer it have no effect.
She is a girl who is quite good at origami. I would say that the proviso “for a human” no longer applies. She is now quite good at origami, abstractly. I think if she’d ever met Death, Cheryl would have folded him; and if she’d folded against the Devil, well, I wouldn’t have wanted to bet on either one.
She can take the air and she can fold it into a flower. She can fold a paper army into life.
But she can’t kill the paper serpent.
It’s got too much of Hans’ work in it. To make his twist endure — to ensure that the serpent never got out from under him — he’d had to use an immortal and unlimited trick. The mechanism of its torment sustains it: it cannot die for to die is to escape Hans’ prison.
She tries to kill it. She can’t kill it.
It is too well-woven. Too cleverly twisted. Too vast.
– 1 –
For nine days and nine nights, Cheryl hangs herself upside down in the stacks of the Lethal Magnet School of Wayward Youth library in search of wisdom. She clings perilously to a rappelling rope over the maw of the library’s basement beast.
It flaps its pages at her. It growls prophecies. These she consciously struggles to ignore.
She pulls out dusty records. She gets dust in her right eye. It’s really rather unpleasant.
She gets a stitch in her left side.
She reads pages, upside down.
It’s worth it, though. It, and all those courses in library science — for all that they’d barely touched upon the subject of rappelling or of the beast.
She’s found something. She’s spotted something. She’s followed up on it, at first, mostly because she thought it might give her an angle on the wolf and Edmund; but when she’s traced it back to the circumstances behind it there’s something so much better than that at the end.
She drags herself up.
She tumbles to the catwalk, rolls, stands, sways, falls over, and there in the library she goes to sleep.
The next day, she has a migraine. She babbles useless if prophetic information in her Electronics Class and attempts to teach her Prophesy teacher about circuit diagrams.
“I knew if I came here and taught Prophesy,” the Lethal Magnet Professor of Prophesy sighs, “that I would eventually understand circuit diagrams, and to my doom.”
Cheryl blinks wearily at the Lethal Magnet Professor of Prophesy, shakes her head, and wanders off.
The day after that, though, she is crisp. She is clear-headed. She aches all over but she has not lost too much time. She goes to jail. She argues with the guards. Eventually she demonstrates a peculiar folding technique that traps them in their own minds so that she may sneak into the prison and stand outside the svart-elf Joffun’s cell.
He looks up at her.
“Bout time someone came,” he says. “Stupid humans.”
The floor and walls of his cell are covered with tic-tac-toe diagrams scraped carefully into the stone. She assumes he’s been using them for magic. The alternative is too pathetic to imagine.
“You’re from the olden days,” she says. “You’re a svart-elf.”
“I’m from my own days,” he says. “And it’s a bum rap anyway. You gonna let me out of here?”
“You know how to handle,” she says. She waves vaguely towards the wall. “Cannibals, and wolves, and serpents, and stuff.”
“Yeah,” he says.
She sits down cross-legged in front of his cell. “Tell me.”
He shrugs. He turns away. Then he says, “Tic-tac-toe,” he says.
“I don’t have time to scrape one out —”
He waves a hand. “I’ve got most of the partial games already written down somewhere,” he says.
“Oh,” she says.
She scans the walls. Eventually she points at a 9-square board that only has a single X.
“I win,” he says. “Go away.”
She squints at him.
He points at a game that O has won. “Check and mate,” he says.
“That is the worst thing I have ever heard,” she tells him.
“I have been locked up for more’n twelve years,” Joffun says, “because I carried out a deal, fairly, with a giant of industry.”
“Wow,” says Cheryl, who’s only barely been alive that long.
“I put footfalls on that man’s cat,” Joffun says. “You know. Good footfalls. And I’d have thrown in some solid bird-spittling, too, if he’d just asked. But does the judge care at my trial? Does he appreciate it for a moment? No! It’s all about who has more money, around here.”
“Wow,” says Cheryl, again.
Then she shakes it off, because his tic-tac-toe offends her. She grins. She comes up with a nasty comment. Her grin, reflexively, widens. “I guess you svart-elves must find false imprisonment pretty ethically offensive, huh?”
“. . . Don’t be on me about that,” he says. “I’m not hardly any Hans. I’m just a smith.”
“You’re here because the world’s not fair,” Cheryl says. “That’s all. But you’ll die with the rest of us when the serpent comes. When the wolf gets loose. When the scissors fall.”
“I’ve got walls of stone about me,” he says.
He points at a different tic-tac-toe board. “Checkmate,” he says again.
She shrugs. She points at a winning board for X.
“I can’t see where you’re pointing,” he says. “I’m not facing you.”
“I can’t let you go,” she says. “Everyone knows your kind is tricky.”
“My kind?”
“Well,” she says. “In fairy tales and such.”
He turns. He looks at her.
“They took my tools,” he says. “They took my booze. But most of all, they took back that boy’s heart I’d bought, and I’d just gone and dumped all my power in. It’s damn hard to get power back, you know, when all you’ve got is a jail cell and some tic-tac-toe. I’m not myself, girl. Not for twelve long years.”
He shows a bit of avarice. He shows a bit of a smile.
“You’ll get it back for me, though, won’t you? Get it and I’ll tell you everything. Get it and I’ll help you, girl. I’ll fight beside you. We’ll get this sorted. Just get me that damn boy’s heart.”
She hesitates.
Then she smiles. “I’m sorry,” she says.
She rises.
“Pardon?”
“I want to dream,” she says. “That’s all. To create things, to fold things, to do science, and to build a better world. I want to bring a higher level of organization to this mortal world. I thought you’d want the same thing, being a svart and all. But if all you want is some boy’s heart, I have to leave you here and forget about you, because then I just don’t think that you’re all that.”
She smiles at him.
He lunges to the bars. He reaches for her. His eyes flare gold; they loom over her; they are larger than the world, they are like the sun, but the light falls into the blackness of her own eyes and it is lost.
She gets to her feet.
“Wait,” he says.
“I’ll play you a real game,” she says. “I’ll show you how tic-tac-toe is really played. And then you’ll tell me everything. And then I’ll leave you here, because I’m insulted, do you understand me? I’m insulted that someone like you would even claim to be a smith.”
“Fine,” he says. He points at the wall.
“A real game,” she says.
She reaches into her purse. She pulls out a gun. He startles back. She unfolds the gun into an irregular piece of paper, a pen, and a flight of origami swans that scatter out upon the prison floor. She folds the paper, roughly, into a square. She marks it with six lines. She adds an X.
“First move’s an unfair advantage,” he says.
She shrugs. She folds the paper over, once, twice, thrice, until a pristine configuration emerges. She draws new lines. She only needs four of them, since two of the previous lines were left over. She hands him the pen and the paper. He marks an X.
She marks an O.
X. O. X. O. X.
“Well, there,” says Joffun, smugly.
“Hold the paper,” she says. “And the pen. Close your eyes.”
“Huh?” he says.
But he does it.
There is the sound of paper. He opens his eyes. He is holding a winning game for O.
“We’re done here,” she says.
He tries to unfold the paper back into the original game. He pulls up the central part like a flower. He folds it over to the edges. It is another winning game for O. He frowns. He flips it over. He twists it.
“‘A strange game,’” Cheryl quotes.
“Don’t say it,” pleads Joffun. “Please don’t say it.”
He doesn’t want her to finish off that quote on tic-tac-toe with ‘the only winning move is not to play.’
Her lips pinch in amusement. Then she shrugs. She turns away.
“I’ll tell you,” says Joffun. “I’ll tell you all I know. Listen. The wolf needs a boot to kill it. If it gets out of the chains. It needs a really big boot to kill it. Who can stomp it? I don’t know. Cannibals — whatever. Shoot them? Maybe a death ray? You can teach birds to drool if you practice hard —”
“The snake,” she interrupts.
“What?”
“The giant paper snake,” she says. “Why can’t I kill it?”
He shrugs.
“You’re probably just too attached to it,” he says.
She squints at him.
She turns away. She makes an angry, dismissive gesture. She starts walking.
“Where did you learn to play tic-tac-toe, girl?” he yells after her. “What are you?”
She stops.
She hesitates, though she doesn’t look back.
“I’ll let you go,” she says. “I’ll go back on my word and I’ll let you go. I’ll forget the pride I have in being someone who makes things and builds things and someone who does rightful things, and I’ll let you go, and I’ll let you keep on pretending to be a smith, and I’ll even let you go and try to steal that monster’s heart, if you’ll tell me how to save people from their own stupidity.”
He sits back down on the cot in his cell.
He stares at her back.
“My friend,” she says. “He wears a hat, and he is very brilliant, and he fights to wake the dead and empty Hell and give us all a purpose and a happy ending, but I do not think that he likes what he has become.”
“You can save people from their own stupidity,” Joffun says, “by smartenin’ em.”
He licks his lips.
“But I think,” he says, “that what you mean to ask is, how do you save people from their own mistakes?”
“. . . yes,” she says, softly.
“Can’t be done,” says Joffun. “That’s why we call ’em people.”
Her back is stiff. She does not turn. She walks out, and her feet click on the stones.
He sits back.
He thinks, for a very long time.
You’d think he’d be angry that she left him there. He’d think he’d be angry that she left him there. But he isn’t.
He’s too impressed.
He hadn’t even known somebody could be better than a svart like him at the noble game of tic-tac-toe.
Sponsors
Today's
STRANGE ENCOUNTER ...
Boot
