<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The station rises fast, but not fast enough.<\/p>\n
Cheryl wakes from troubled dreams and she knows it; she looks down at the Earth and she knows it; she can feel it.<\/p>\n
The air and the sea, knitting together are they all. They are weaving themselves into one thing, folding themselves, sewing themselves; they are becoming a fabric, and from that fabric quilting themselves Ouroboros: a snake-wroth is rising in the winds and the waters of the world, and its eyes look up the bootstrap at Cheryl of the House of Dreams.<\/p>\n
\u201cGod,\u201d she whispers.<\/p>\n
She rides down the bootstrap. The clouds are in turmoil; the sky stirs like great blue waters; the wind strikes at the lift as she descends, rattles it, shakes it, tries to throw her off into the sky.<\/p>\n
When she lands there is salt everywhere in the air.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not ready,\u201d she says. She makes her way through the school to her ground laboratory. She collects what she can. \u201cI\u2019m not ready,\u201d she says again.<\/p>\n
Tom is waiting for her on her flight platform.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t invite you,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m poorly socialized,\u201d Tom says, cheerfully.<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean, get off.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo time,\u201d says Tom. \u201cI can\u2019t hear you! That\u2019s the time pressure. It\u2019s clogging my ears!\u201d<\/p>\n
She glares at him.<\/p>\n
Then, more softly: \u201cI\u2019ve made a hat,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cPardon?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFor if it\u2019s beating you,\u201d he says. \u201cFor if it starts winning. I\u2019ve made a hat to cut you free of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s filthy and wrong,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
He shrugs.<\/p>\n
\u201cGet off,\u201d she whimpers, but he doesn\u2019t leave.<\/p>\n
Smoothly her flight platform lifts into the sky. It arrows towards the center of the phenomenon. She dares not wait for the serpent to completely reform; leaving aside the edge it would give the beast in their confrontation, it would probably kill everybody left on the planet.<\/p>\n
They are in the coastal waters off Virginia when the sky and sea become serpents for them; when they are surrounded by clusters of them, striking in at them from every direction, snapping and seething in the foam.<\/p>\n
She uses the Penguin Gun.<\/p>\n
There are no serpents but rather great waves of penguins now, all in the air around her, snapping and seething and coiling in at her all a\u2019wroth with their flightless, avian rage. Then they fall, with the awful teeterings of penguins trying to suspend themselves a hundred meters above the Virginian coast by sheer spite (and failing).<\/p>\n
The sea swirls. It tears them apart. It reintegrates them. Serpents rise again from the sea below.<\/p>\n
She is calm. She lets the passion bleed from her.<\/p>\n
She says to Tom, \u201cYou will turn my last assignments in for me, of course.\u201d<\/p>\n
His jaw stiffens.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d he says. \u201cDon\u2019t die.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI want a perfect record,\u201d she says. \u201cI am already teetering on the brink of a B+ or two what with spending all my time on a space station. An incomplete is not acceptable.\u201d<\/p>\n
She holds up a rod. The rod turns into a serpent. She throws it out there. The serpent wrestles with the serpents of the air and sea.<\/p>\n
Tom bats away a pair of scissors as they fall.<\/p>\n
\u201cI also expect at least one major galactic world named after me,\u201d Cheryl says.<\/p>\n
Her origami is incomplete. Her snake cannot hold out. It reconfigures itself into a sprawling mass of dozens of tentacles and unnameable organs; it wrestles in every direction, but the venom of the snakes pulses through it and more than a few of the snake-heads are sneaking past it to die against the laser grid defense system of Cheryl\u2019s flying machine.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re too young,\u201d he says. \u201cI promise nothing. Don\u2019t die.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDamn it, Tom, I\u2019m your rival<\/em>. I\u2019m your biggest competition. One day I\u2019ll probably fold you into a swan and take over the headship of our House!\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re my friend,\u201d he says. \u201cI promise nothing. Don\u2019t die.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou did promise,\u201d she reminds him.<\/p>\n I will bend life and death and dreams for you, if I must, to make you a girl who can kill a giant snake made out of paper and wax \u2014<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cThis isn\u2019t paper,\u201d he protests.<\/p>\n \u201cThe matter is inessential.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not!\u201d<\/p>\n But her words are right. He knows her words are right.<\/p>\n Finally he hangs his head.<\/p>\n \u201cIf I could die in your place,\u201d he says. \u201cIf I could \u2014 but it wouldn\u2019t help, would it?\u201d<\/p>\n And he stares at the snake-severing hat he has in his hands; and maybe something would have happened then. Like, maybe he would have stuck it on her anyway. Or maybe he would have accepted it, and held that snake-severing hat out over the water and let it go; and it would have drifted downwards; and the snake would have worn it, which is just ridiculous. The only thing goofier than a snake in a hat is a giant evil snake made out of salt, air, wax, water, paper, and fire that\u2019s in a snake-severing <\/em>hat originally made to free its enemy.<\/p>\n That hat even has a little feather in it. That\u2019s so ridiculous, you hat-wroth snake!<\/p>\n But he doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n He looks up and out at the waters and horror freezes him; stills his tongue, catches his mind, drowns his thoughts in thickened fog, instead.<\/p>\n He drops whatever he\u2019s holding. His eyes are wide. His breath comes in quick gasps.<\/p>\n And maybe she was going to do something amazing then, some bit of smithwork and origami, to tangle up her life in the life of the snake and then fold them both through to death \u2014<\/p>\n But she doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n She isn\u2019t as bad off as he is. She is in shock but not all the way in shock. She is pounding on the keys of her weapons console. She is unleashing the viruses; the memetic lasers; the ultimate post-nuclear barrage \u2014<\/p>\n But it is too late.<\/p>\n \u201cNo,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n The sea is like glass. The air is still. The serpent slowly falls apart to nothingness around the central figure that stands within it.<\/p>\n \u201c<\/em>No, no, no,\u201d <\/em>Cheryl screams, and pounds on the separate desperate flailing <\/em>keyboard that all devices of the House of Dreams possess.<\/p>\n He scrubs the last few bits of snake-wroth from his clothing; from the air and sea, and it is gone<\/em>; and he smiles at them, does the cleaning man: does Jeremiah Clean.<\/p>\n She has a gun in her hand. She cannot decide whether she is pointing it at him or at herself. It is pointing at her ear. It is pointing at him. Repeat, half-repeat, and stop.<\/p>\n He rolls his janitorial cart over.<\/p>\n He looks in on them.<\/p>\n She kicks the causality stutterer. It is a minute ago. It is two minutes ago. She turns to run. She is screaming to the paper serpent, the fire serpent, the ocean serpent, that it must run. <\/em>Then he smoothes out the timeline with Windex, and her escape is made as naught.<\/p>\n He has her chin in his hand. He is looking at her. Then he is staring off to the distant east.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re trying to keep things tame,\u201d he says. \u201cAren\u2019t you? Keep them settled down. You, and that school, and that boot. And the wolf.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes, sir,\u201d she says. \u201cI mean, no, sir.\u201d<\/p>\n That is not actually what the wolf is attempting to do.<\/p>\n Tom is whimpering under his breath. He keeps swallowing. He\u2019s doing it poorly. It\u2019s so hard to breathe.<\/p>\n He\u2019s told himself over and over again how cool he\u2019d be if he ever again met the cleaning man; he\u2019s prepared weapons, dozens of them, weapons, plans \u2014<\/p>\n He has backed into the farthest corner of the platform and is writhing his arms futilely against the metal behind him, instead.<\/p>\n \u201cWell, carry on, then,\u201d says Jeremiah. \u201cLet me know if you need any help over there on the continent. I\u2019m always here.\u201d<\/p>\n He tips his cap.<\/p>\n He turns.<\/p>\n He goes away.<\/p>\n Tom gasps, a great gasp, and then he is screaming. He cannot stop screaming. He is howling, he is keening, he is screaming, he is bent over, fallen, there is bloody spittle coming from his mouth, and he has clawed at the deck until his hands and his fingernails are all over red.<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t do any good.<\/p>\n The thing he\u2019s feeling is too big to express with his body. It\u2019s like trying to give birth to worlds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The station rises fast, but not fast enough. Cheryl wakes from troubled dreams and she knows it; she looks down at the Earth and she knows it; she can feel it. The air and the sea, knitting together are they all. They are weaving themselves into one thing, folding themselves, sewing themselves; they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5460,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"series":[50],"class_list":["post-5942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-vidars-boot-chapter-17","series-vidars-boot"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/Scissors-Large.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5942"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5942\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5943,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5942\/revisions\/5943"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5942"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fseries&post=5942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}