The Agency’s Choice

Skoll moves in that fashion that wolves ought not to move. He rises in that fashion that wolves ought not to rise. He is all searing flame, and poisonous gasses and thrashing wires. He is a wolf of many parts and awfulness, and the eyes that he turns upon the agents burn an awful, killing orange: he breathes the light of suns.

Bibury is consigned to darkness. It is written off in the Agency’s books.

Oh, Agency!

It is bad!

Eldri, torn from his sleep by a sudden premonition, drags himself and a handful of his robots to the shelter underneath his house. He doesn’t get all of them. He doesn’t have the time.

He is blown down the stairs, as it is, by a wave of shock and fire; he is caught by his ultimate Frisbee-playing robot, even though it wasn’t there; staggers back with it and slams a lower door; and up above, as the explosion spreads through Bibury in a wave of white light and heat, as it melts away, as it blackens and burns, as the pattern of it is disrupted, a certain robot realizes at the last, and at the first, that it has lost the Game.

<< . . .

. . . >>