– 1 –
Long ago, in the winter before the world, a goat began to sharpen itself.
What a bad goat!
It grew sharper and sharper. It began to trouble the great smiths of the svart-alfar. Karl the smith went to subdue the goat, but it was too sharp for him. It cut the rope Karl used to bind it. It ripped the nets. Its fur made Karl’s hands bleed and one horn made Karl’s gut bleed and it left him dying on the snow.
Hans came.
Hans the smith knelt by Karl. Hans fed Karl the svart-drink, but it did him no great good.
“Don’t worry,” says Hans. “I’ll kill it.”
Karl shook his head.
Hans frowned at him. “I shouldn’t?” he said. “Why not?”
But Karl died.
What terrible timing! Hans wound up having to guess.
Temporal Administration
It had proved disturbingly difficult to arrange for a paradox; eventually Professor Sutedja simply accepted that her younger self would attend the Lethal Magnet School for Wayward Youth and her older self would act as a Professor of Temporal Administration there and nothing could really be done. She tested some lottery numbers to check for a butterfly effect, found the results satisfactory, and ceased to worry about the details thereafter, allowing the School’s visitors from the 20th and earlier 21st century to take care of themselves.
The time travelers from the future were a different matter.
“It’s not something you can avoid,” she explains to a student. Jared. “If you want to build time machines.”
“You avoided it!” he protests.
“My case was a little weird,” she says. It was, in fact. She’d bought a cursed staff at a con. “If you’re going to actually build time machines, and learn to travel to the past and the future, this is what happens.”
Jared looks at the window for a while. He stares at the mysterious visitor. After a while, he fills out the paperwork.
“It’s you, then?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s all right to want it to not be you,” she says. “If you want to schedule a dummy. We can do that. We can bring in someone to pretend to be you. It’s easier to send paperwork than people back through time, you know, and we’ll gladly cover the actor’s costs from a sports page.”
He goes back to the window. He looks through it a while.
“He’s screaming,” he says.
“You can take his stuff,” she says. “I bet that it’s cool. There’s probably a message. I bet it’s important. But please remember. You don’t have to. You can wait. You can ask for an actor. That’s fine.”
“Do they ever . . . stop? Screaming?”
They’re all so very young. It’s ridiculous. All the kids, before they actually grow up in the future and start sending back warnings, are so terribly, risibly young.
“Yeah,” she says. “Yes, of course. Give him time.”
– 1 –
Many years later —
A whole world later, really —
Bethany alights for a moment in Virginia. She stands and sways at the top of a tree and the nithrid rushes towards her.
She smiles at it, though she’s tired and her arms and hands are raw.
“I need a minute,” she says to the sky.
The nithrid skirls out. It plays for a minute around George Mason. It runs little rivulets of lightning up and down the river. It comes back.
It is almost upon her. She is bracing for the dance.
It does not reach her.
Her life is left empty. She sits down numbly. She cannot even cry. Her garments of red are crumbling to show her stained and faded school uniform underneath.
“Andrea?” she says.
That was the name of the nithrid.
“Andrea?”
And she knows in that moment that there is something worse than a wolf; worse than a nithrid; something worse than Hans or the Devil himself; and there is no reason to oppose it, because there is no thing good in all of life.
She drops to the ground. She curls over. She loses the memory of the lightning.
And there is no nithrid remaining at all.
– 1 –
It hangs over the Lethal Magnet School, their marvelous station, the incredible warship and battle-boot of the House of Dreams.
It’s not just for stomping wolves, although that’s why it gets funding.
You can do so much more than that with a giant boot!
Sid accidentally summons a whole Thing, for instance. It is obviously beyond the power of a lower sixth student to contain it. It’s a whole Thing!
It ravens across the Lethal Magnet School for Wayward Youth.
Keith presses a button. Bombs fall from space. They have trouble falling for a bit, because there is limited gravity, but Keith assays a bomb-assisting meditation and they blow a full one quarter off the Thing.
Sid’s strong enough by then for a three-quarter Thing.
He takes it down.
A sea-drinking toad lifts its flabby bulk from the depths. It opens its mouth. It goes to drink the sea.
Magical jaguars do not stop it. It is Sunday. The magical jaguars do not stop world-ending threats on Sunday.
The Simon-says-playing robot, of course, is dead.
But this event stirs Cheryl from her grief. She stares down at the toad with reddened eyes. That a toad would dare to drink the sea!
She almost untethers the boot, drifts it out over the sea, and stomps the toad.
Tom puts his hand on hers. He restrains her.
They blow it up with space bombs, and Amber’s hula javelin, instead.
The scissors-rain intensifies, but gravity has stretched out and thinned out the swarm. There is time to analyze it. Time to dissect it. Time to rebuild and enhance humanity’s old defenses.
The world turns on its axis. Magical jaguars in a decaying orbit, GPS satellites, and all kinds of space junk float above it — and a boot.
And from that boot a scissors-shield extends.
Those bursts of a billion scissors that come by, now and then, are harmlessly repelled. Only a few dozen get through.
“Those are my shoes,” brags Mr. Brown’s daughter Susan, of Sussex, and she stares up at the booty glimmer in the sky.
– 1 –
Linus Evans walks forbidden paths. He emerges at a financial services firm in America. He uses his antichrist powers and corrupts his way to a position in middle management.
“You wouldn’t turn away the antichrist?” he says, trailing a finger down the throat of the HR manager, who shakes his head.
The walls begin to bleed.
Linus Evans stakes out a nice office, even though he doesn’t have his general certificate yet. He hires an assistant. He thinks about killing and eating his assistant but winds up writing awful, Gothic poetry instead.
Then he arranges for an orgy.
He makes subtle plans. He dreams teenaged boy dreams. In the end, though, he chickens out. He just cannot make himself attend.
He wanders the room afterwards.
He tries to figure out what exactly happened; what the various articles of mess mean, what they portend.
Then he sighs. He is distracting himself unnecessarily.
This is not for edification nor for sexual gratification. This is a test: Linus Evans vs. Jeremiah Clean.
So he wanders the room. He worsens the mess in subtle ways.
He shutters the windows.
He slinks away.
That night the building is dark. Jeremiah Clean comes in. He cleans up everything obvious. He mops the blood from the walls. He corrects an unsavory vibe. He marks up the grammar in a few pages of brooding poetry that Linus Evans has left tauntingly on the desk.
He is the building’s janitor.
His expression is equable and calm.
He looks like just another janitor, albeit a janitor with a particularly strong stomach and powerful copy-editing skills. At least, until he looks around the room again, he looks like that.
Then there’s something odd in him. Then there’s a strange light around him, a strange sense of strength.
He frowns a little. He shakes his head.
“I know you’re there,” he says.
His voice has an echoing ring to it. It breaks the barrier of the ordinary. The dirty stockings that had been hiding behind a piece of abstract wall art slink out.
Jeremiah Clean, he picks them up. He gives them a scolding look. He tosses them into the incinerator chute.
They cling for a moment to the metal, above the fire, but their heart is not pure.
They fall in.
They burn.
They die.
Linus Evans is standing in the door of his office now. He is standing in shadow, his body a silhouette. His thoughts are unreadable, particularly if you are not a telepath.
“How did you know?” he asks.
He says: “I didn’t think anybody would find those.”
“Mr. Evans,” says Jeremiah, and he nods his head, and he walks right out that door.
You wouldn’t think there’d be room, what with Mr. Evans standing right there in it, but no one can stop Jeremiah Clean from going anywhere he wants to go.
No one can stop him from anything, really.
No one can stop Jeremiah Clean, because his heart is pure.
“God bless it,” cries Linus. “How did you know?”
But Jeremiah Clean just hands him a glass of water to put out the fire in his mouth, and he walks away.
– 2 –
Later.
Mr. Jenkins of America opens the office refrigerator. This proves to be a mistake! He is drawn into a terrible pain dimension.
What a bad Mr. Jenkins! That wasn’t what ought to have happened to him at all.
Mr. Higgins acts almost as unwisely. But this time, the departure is observed! Ms. Cloud sees him. She lifts her hand to her mouth in horror.
Then she goes and she fetches the janitor, Jeremiah Clean.
“We have a situation,” she tells him.
She drags him away from his contemplation of the smooth clean floor of their Zen garden. She drags him past the Mondrian he has scrubbed down to a single sheet of red. The server room door slams before they walk past it; the techies know better than to ever let Jeremiah Clean look in.
They hurry through the halls.
“Perhaps,” says Jeremiah Clean, as they wait for an elevator, “we would not have ‘situations,’ if something could be done about Mr. Evans.”
“He’s not the problem here,” says Ms. Cloud.
“Where he walks,” says Jeremiah Clean, “the walls start bleeding. It is very untidy. I believe he has damned most of our company’s HR.”
“I’m not defending Mr. Evans!” she says.
They go up. They hurry through more halls. They are rapidly approaching the refrigerator.
“I’m just saying,” she says, “that the problem is Monday’s sushi, today.”
“This is Tuesday,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Perhaps,” he says, “you mean to say ‘the problem is that which once was Monday’s sushi, but is Tuesday’s sushi, on this modern day, instead.’”
“Sometimes I think,” Ms. Cloud says, “that you are overly particular.”
He frowns.
“But in this case,” she says. “It may be just what this company needs. Listen, Jeremiah. It shouldn’t have gone bad. Not this fast. Not this soon. It was supposed to be tuna, you see. Safe, ordinary tuna. Good old tuna! But I think it was not tuna. I think it was made from a Tuna Horror. Do you understand me? A Tuna Horror. The ‘devil of the sea.’”
Jeremiah has stopped moving. He is laughing. She has to wait him out. He is laughing. “‘Overly particular,’” he says.
She waves it off.
He looks back up at her, and his eyes are clear and bright. “Tuna or devil,” he says, in calmness, “it is all the same to me.”
There is a rising tide of chaos across the world; the incidents are become ever more outré; but not in America.
In America, there is the Patriot Missile; and the Lion of the Dominion; and the living spirit of Uncle Sam, and they defend it — but most importantly of all, there is Jeremiah Clean.
He disposes of the sushi beast, and it does not devour him, because his heart is pure.
– 3 –
A few days later Linus walks the roads the antichrist can walk. He’s going to test himself again against the janitor, having already aced his exams.
He stops before he gets to the company.
He laughs.
It looks like today he won’t have to.
The cleaning man’s already busy. He’s already hard at it. He’s dealing with a different world-ending threat!
“Oh, man,” says Linus. “This is going to be good.”
He pulls up a chair. He gets out a bag of popcorn. He uses balefire to pop it. He sits down.
He watches Jeremiah Clean, against a goat.
The man has a mop in his hand. He twirls it. He strikes forward. It breaks against the sharpness of the goat. Clean goes to the left. -liness goes to the right. The mop itself is split, then split again, until not even the quarks of it survive.
The goat lunges forward.
Linus thinks it is a goat. He is not sure. It is really remarkably sharp. His eyes are bleeding a little, just from looking at it. His concept of a goat — his ability to see the various sensory ephemera and assemble them into a larger sense-impression of a goat — keeps going all julienne; the longer he looks at it, the less he can understand what it is he sees at all.
Perhaps it is a goat.
Perhaps it is an n-dimensional, n-sided razor, as n tends towards infinity: a star of metal and lethality, stuck into the world of things and ideas and impressions but not strictly a part of what is there.
Jeremiah Clean stops it. He catches it in one heavily-gloved hand; he heaves the goat over. He pulls his hand back. The goat falls on its side — if it has sides — and cuts away at the sidewalk.
The glove explodes into yellow fragments and yellow mist.
“Try a little baking soda?” Linus calls out. He gulps a handful of popcorn.
Jeremiah looks at him, for all the world as if this does not help.
The goat staggers unsteadily to its feet. The lamp posts up and down the street split down the middle. They fall open. One or two lamp globes remain hovering, awkwardly, in the air.
Reality peels away.
Shapes and shadows move behind it.
Jeremiah Clean pulls a spray bottle from his cleaning cart. He shakes it. The cold electrons of the cleaning solution mash one against the other to fill up all the available energy levels. He spritzes the goat.
It’s like reality is brand new!
Even the sene-goat’s sparkling! But if it’s sparkling, that means it’s not dead.
“Get ’im,” whispers Linus Evans, to the sharpened goat.
The city is in flames and ruins; the dead are ravaging through the world, and ants.
“Get ’im,” says Linus, the future Mr. Enemy.
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