– 2 –
Cheryl sets a small fleet of paper boats on the water. They float out into the ocean as the sea serpent eddies towards her.
“ ‘Too attached to it, ’ ” she mutters disdainfully.
Her boats become waterlogged.
They sink.
Waterlogged, they fold themselves into mines. They land against the rocks. They belly themselves down.
The serpent comes closer.
“I’ll show you attachment, ” she says.
And she does.
The serpent is blasted. Its head is nothing but burning chunks of paper. The sea is groaning where her weapon has cut; but she herself has unintentionally folded snake-wroth, folding-wroth, and even origami-wroth into the substance of her attack.
The bits of remnant paper burning flutter to the sea.
They get mushy.
They spiral around one another. Her heart is in her throat, metaphorically at least (it’s in her chest actually), and she pleads that the raw chaos of the ocean’s return to the emptied space will disrupt the pattern that she and the serpent together have lain down; but it does not.
The bits of paper swirl. They stick to one another. The waters of the sea fold up. The atoms of it twist, connect in an unorthodox fashion; the serpent howls as it becomes one with the drink that enfolds it, as it raises its head, fire, water, and paper all, shakes itself, screams with the burning of its brain, its tail, its brain, its tail, its brain —
Its pain is worse now. Its durance is worse now. Its flesh is sea, paper, and fire.
It stares at her through smoldering dank eyes.
The impact of its sudden hatred strikes through her. It transfixes her. She pleads: I am sorry. I am so sorry.
But her enemy is no longer her friend, her ally, her beloved; it no longer looks to her as a savior. It plunges towards her as if to kill her, and it is the waves of the sea itself, it is rising with the waves of the sea itself, a sheet of water and fire plunges down towards her and it drowns the island of Little Ganilly, and it is only the one-use matter transmission device attached to her left heel, crushed when she stomps the ground in utter screaming panic, that saves her from its unremitting wrath.
The water laps at where she had been.
It coils up.
It hungers in its agonies for its enemy, Cheryl’s, death.
– 1 –
Peter is a saint who hates scissors! “If I see any scissors, I’ll smush ’em!”
That’s the motto of Peter, the saint.
– 2 –
St. Peter wanders the campus of the Lethal Magnet School of Wayward Youth. His hat’s gone all red with his sainthood. At his holiest, his eyes gleam red too.
Peter stops in at a forbidden theater.
He’s drawn to it by an instinct. Students are stealthily watching Girls with Scissors. They scream and run when they see him standing in front of the movie screen:
They scream: “Run! It’s a saint!”
Peter frowns after them. Then he turns and stares at the movie from far too close.
“Good grief,” he sighs.
He tries not to yell at the girls on the screen to fight back against the scissors. He tries to remember that this is pornography and not a horror film so his advice is not apropos.
He licks his lips nervously.
“That’s really inappropriate,” he explains, to the movie, instead.
And it’s there, as the girls of the scissors-swarm work their cinematic wiles on the protagonists and viewers, that he realizes that the scissors are returning. They are coming back.
The Second Coming of the Scissors — it’s almost there.
They are coming back, and Peter is not ready. They have circled around Alpha Centauri — a good two thirds of the surviving scissors — and they are coming back to rain down again upon the Earth.
It isn’t a plot point in the movie. He’s shut down the movie and he’s staring at the canvas. It’s just an inspiration that the world pours directly down into Peter’s mind. They are coming, and he has no idea how he can actually defeat them.
He turns the movie back on, embarrassedly, and he walks out.
Everywhere it seems that there are omens of scissors to him. The shadow of the chapel is bent dramatically by angled light; the cross that tops it is made to seem as a pair of scissors would. He stomps on the shadow but it does no good.
A mouse stares at Peter from the bushes. It is wearing a little hat.
He ignores it.
A four-armed ape battles Lucy Souvante in an alley. They’re playing rock-paper-scissors. It is winning, it is losing, it is tying, but somehow she is holding a lead.
He’s not really much for rock-paper-scissors. He’s much more of a hobbit-Spock-spider man, is Peter.
So he just shrugs a little, he just laughs a little, and he walks on by.
Students wander past him, talking. They remind him of scissors. All he can hear is scissors, scissors, scissors in the soft susurrus of their speech.
That night he stands under the stars, under the great crisscrossing shadows of the orbits of the planets and the moon, and he spreads his arms.
He yells, “Fine!”
And: “Scissors, you want me? Come get some!”
The sky above him boils with the malice of the wicked god of space.
– 1 –
“We have reached the limit of what we can do on land,” decides Cheryl, at the last.
She slams down the blueprints on the table. They unroll.
“If we are to kill such things as wolves and serpents,” she says, “I think, we must first rise up to conquer space.”
Tom looks at the blueprints.
“It is a boot,” says Tom.
They have gathered there to listen: the House of Dreams.
Cheryl reiterates: “In space.”
Tom looks at her sideways. “You can’t just make anything scientific by adding ‘in space,’” he says.
Cheryl shrugs.
“I’ve tried,” Tom says, softly. “You know. Space and time are closed to me.”
“If necessary,” says Cheryl, “we can make an astonishing space boot using Lethal Corporation funding and ordinary, un-dreaming science.”
Tom’s lower eyelid twitches.
“He took them from me,” says Tom: space and time, he means, and Jeremiah Clean.
Then he closes his eyes. He opens them. He looks haggard for a moment. He looks small.
“But fine,” says Tom. “Tell me how to do it. Open up this path for me, which I can no longer see.”
“It’s impossible,” Cheryl decrees.
– 2 –
Tom squints at her.
“I have speculated,” says Amber, after a moment, “that the world is as it is because of the passing of some . . . sense-making figure, right? Some entity or entities that held all of time and space into a single coherent shape?”
“That fits,” says Keith.
“We crawl within the warped lens of our existence,” says Amber. “We strive to reach things —”
“Space,” says Cheryl.
“Meaning,” says Harold.
“A happy ending,” wryly observes Tom.
“But they are projections of our reason onto the space that is no longer accessible from here. It is like believing that we live in three dimensions, when we in fact dwell on the surface of a warped space-time frame — a sort of a sheet of cling-wrap stretched over the image of a world.”
“That’s too bleak!” Tom protests.
“Not at all,” says Amber. “The solution is obvious. It is staring us right in the face. To escape our boundaries, we must turn at right angles from our own thinking.”
“Think,” says Tom, “as we are not thinking. Act, as we are not acting. See, then move tangentially to ourselves?”
“Exactly so,” Amber says. “Though, I do not know how it may be accomplished.”
Cheryl is grinning. She is waiting.
Tom pores over Cheryl’s plans.
“I can’t actually,” he says, “make head or tail of these papers. Cheryl, there are two major problems with this amazing boot-based space station.”
“Yes?”
“Well, first, it appears to me that your space elevator pulls itself, and the boot atop it, up into position.”
“Yes,” she says. “It’s a bootstrap.”
“And second,” he says, “the explanation for this is ‘a miracle occurs.’”
“Oh!” says Amber. “That makes sense.”
“Does it?”
“Well, of course,” says Amber. “The House of Saints is at a right angle to our thinking, and the House of Hunger is at a wrong one. We just have to model ‘what would Peter do?’ or ‘what would Edmund do?’ any time we want to exceed the scope of our ordinary thoughts!”
“I’ll smush scissors!” says Keith, who is very familiar with Peter.
“I’ll complain about wolf dander?” suggests Tom, who knows Edmund quite well.
“Seriously?” says Cheryl.
“It is what Edmund would do,” Tom says, soberly. “Ask him to build a giant boot in space, and he’ll be all, ‘this one time, I went to put on my shoes, and they were completely full of loose Fenris fur. It was exceedingly squishy.’”
“Gah,” says Amber.
“That is a pretty wrong turn,” establishes Keith.
“So. Squishy,” Tom emphasizes, in the fashion of Edmund Gulley, of Hunger’s House. Then he shrugs. “Then,” he says. “Do I take it we have access to miracles?”
Cheryl grins. She looks at her watch. She counts seconds.
“Oh, God,” says Keith. “This is going to be showy.”
“Seven,” mutters Cheryl. Then some other numbers, which you can probably extrapolate, like seventeen, eight, and five. “Two. One!”
She thumps the door hard with her elbow. It dilates open. An eavesdropping boy stumbles in, backlit, and shining with the glory of a saint.
“Lo,” says Cheryl, spreading a hand, as if she had created him from nothing.
“I wasn’t skulking and listening,” St. Peter clarifies. “I was just trying to figure out whether you guys could get me into space.”
“Haha!” says Tom, understanding. “Hahahaha haha! I think that we very well can.”
After a while Harold wonders where they can possibly get a boot large enough to use as the core of their space battlestation, but he is quickly hushed; because, seriously, Harold, how blind do you have to be?
– 3 –
“I’ve been trying to make a science hammer,” says Tom, at the afterparty.
They’re looking out over the campus and drinking sparkling water they are pretending is champagne.
“Yeah,” says Cheryl.
“I think we should integrate it,” he says. “I couldn’t get it to work. I couldn’t ever get —”
He waves his hands around.
“It’s really hard to make a hammer,” he says, “to smoosh outcomes into the desired configuration. It’s like, how do you get enough of an understanding of desired from your head, as it were, into its?”
“But you think a boot can do it?”
“A boot’s full of people,” says Tom. “A boot’s full of life, and minds, and people who can operate the various levers and . . . eyelets . . . and whatnot. A boot can manage what a hammer cannot.”
They can already see it, both of them, in their heads — the world, blue and honest below them, as they hypothetically stare down on it through Amber’s pseudo-glass shielding from space.
“We could smush it all,” says Cheryl. “Not just wolves and cannibals.”
“The snake,” says Tom.
“The living storm,” says Cheryl.
“Bad grades.”
“Haha,” laughs Cheryl. She’s pretending to be tipsy. She leans a bit, over the balcony edge. “It’s perfect, Tom. We can do it.”
“The future of humanity is a boot stomping down from the Heavens,” Tom says.
They clink glasses.
“Forever!”
– 4 –
“I miss it,” says Tom, after a while. He’d been out there, in his childhood, before Jeremiah Clean had had it from him. He’d flown through space; he’d wandered time; he’d been perfect and amazing, except for that little thing about being the death of humanity —
“I miss it so very much.”
And over the days and nights of autumn, their amazing space station — the construct and sky armory that they will name Vidar’s Boot — rises up to claim the stars.
Elf Wrangling
The faculty position in Elf Wrangling at the Lethal Magnet School for Wayward Youth in Brentwood is the result of a peculiar historical accident.
The problem of atypical— read, inhuman— students had been raised at the board meeting.
Known species were quickly disposed of.
Vampires? Ineligible. Demons? To be trapped in the bodies of children and resocialized, using standard disalienation techniques. Ghosts could be exempted from P.E.; nithrids would power the school. Svart-elves would be carefully monitored—
Someone asked: “what about regular elves?”
And nobody knew.
That’s why Professor Gregory Rapawy, Lethal Magnet Professor of Elf Wrangling, goes out every morning to the wrangling fields. That’s why Professor Rapawy stands there, with lasso firmly at his hip, just in case the elves show.
It’s only paid off once.
There was this thing. Kind of like a dinosaur. Kind of like a moth. It came up from the elf-fields. It had a number of heads and a number of eyes. It breathed fire, or something that was kind of like fire, anyway. The science kids said it was weird.
Professor Rapawy subdued it, of course. You don’t train for everything from Fingolfin to Keebler without being able to handle some random dinosaur-moth. But there wasn’t a bounty.
It wasn’t an elf.
– 1 –
And listen.
This is a story of Gotterdammerung. So I have to tell you up front that by the time it’s over there won’t be all that much left. No summoners and no Slurpee Sages. No robots, no alchemists, and no toads.
No more oceans. No more bears and no more Brentwood.
I mean, there won’t be hardly anything left at all.
There’ll be Emily, of course.
She survives it.
There’ll be some cling wrap. And there’s a wolf and a wooden boy.
But there isn’t hardly anything else.
If you go out too far past the cling wrap, you’ll find yourself amidst the howling chaos that is dissolving and devouring the last remaining work of Hans. It is rendering the world that we used to know back down to the seething void.
Take one or two steps from there, if you like, but don’t you go three steps out.
If you do that you’ll be lost.
Now listen.
This isn’t the end of the world. Not the final end, anyway. This isn’t the blank and endless emptiness that we almost had.
Now and then new things come out of the chaos, I mean. Like, there’s that cow. That cow! It’s a new cow. That proves that new things can still be born.
Its horns are sharp, that cow. It sits on a throne of skulls. It’s . . . probably not a very good cow, really, but it’s also the only cow, and maybe it’s even the first cow, so we all try to get along.
And then there’s those snakes. Those silver snakes.
Their tongues are made of paper. I don’t know how they can smell anything. I mean, seriously. That’s pretty flip.
And there’s the trees. They’re pretty sticky. And that staring skull. And maybe —
Just maybe —
There’s still something up there, up there somewhere, in the sky. Maybe there’s still jaguars and the scissors, up there, jaguars and scissors and the Fan Hoeng. Maybe there’s still all the worlds of the endless cosmos, out there, and bits of old light and older dreams. There was a great infinity of space and time once, before the coming of the cleaning man. There could be yet.
It could all still be somewhere out there. It might not have been lost completely.
I . . . just can’t really make any promises.
I just don’t completely know.
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