jamieproctor.ca

The moment Mult stepped back into the woods, she knew what had happened.
The grass was bent.
The branches had been snapped.
And the ground – so soft and spongy from last night’s rain – had been pulverized, torn, and stomped by feet bigger than she was.
She swore – silently, as per mission protocol – unholstered her longgun, checked her surroundings, waited for five minutes, and began a stealthy approach (for all the good any of it would do her).
Ten minutes of patient scuttling through the undergrowth later her bunker did not come into view because it was squashed underneath ten tons of bleeding flesh and bone, which had until the last hour or so belonged to a very large and healthy specimen of Lee’s Greater Chatterback. Its slackened mouth, removed spine, and dangling limbs gave it a look of surprise even in death, possibly prompted by the way its entire carapace had been scooped out and all of its organs placed in it.
Mult wasn’t surprised herself, but she was annoyed.

***

The bunker door was accessible after only a few minutes of machete-work, mercifully. The second time she’d had to blow some hi-incendiaries on the corpse and let the embers settle until the door was cool enough to touch. Then she’d had to re-camouflage it and ugh ugh ugh. Sleep was an important resource and a vexing limit for her; she’d resented that timewaster for days.
She’d stopped resenting it this morning, actually. It had been a good night. A little light reconnaissance had turned into a little light bushwhacking with the smoothness of an oily breakfast, five separate shots and five bodies bang bang bang bang… bang. And then the last one had made a foolish and brave dive for her squad leader’s communications equipment, and hadn’t lived long enough to be embarrassed at not noticing her first shot had blown through it and into his chest.
A good night. A nice relaxing walk home. And then she got back and for the third time that month her hidey hole had become an open air abattoir.

***

Mult’s grandmother had raised her with a simple set of basic skeptical tools for life, and they had served her well for almost forty years.
If shit happens once, shit happens.
If shit happens twice, sometimes that’s just how it is.
If shit happens three times someone is fucking with you.
And that was all well and good and had allowed her to kill many people that had attempted to kill her very successfully, but it had never before been applied to… a whatsit. A thingy. Damnit, she’d never been very good at macrofauna. A uhh. An uhm.
Mult opened up a half-eaten ration and popped her fieldguide, searching by footprint.
Ah, there it was, page…ninety.
A Bosian Anvil. About sixteen feet tall and sixty feet long (eighty with its forelimbs extended fully) and one of only two animals on the planet listed as ‘dangerous to armoured vehicles.’ You could kill them with long-distance precision strikes from the air or low orbit, slow them down with concentrated artillery fire, and sensible infantry tactics was to scatter and hope it ate the least important person.
There was no advice on what to do if one of them turned your hiding place into a garbage can.
She’d have to get rid of the corpse again. God. It was tempting to try and use it as camouflage, but the scavengers would come and make things difficult, and ugh ugh ugh ugh.
She’d do that.
Tomorrow.
It was too late and it was getting dark; the fire would be noticeable, and her legs were killing her. So this was a tactical decision. Right. Not lazy. Right. Tactical.
Tomorrow.
Then Mult passed out, lulled to sleep by the siren songs of chores postponed and wilfully ignorant bliss.

***

She awoke instantly and knew that it was just after four, it was still dark outside, she had to piss, and someone had just rapped something metal against the bunker’s main exit hatch.
“Fuck,” she said aloud in clear breach of mission protocol and immediately wished she hadn’t because the banging stopped immediately.
Well, she might as well screw up every way possible at once and get it over with. Of course that damned carcass had attracted attention; she just hadn’t thought anyone who noticed it would’ve been crazy enough to approach it.
Of course, she had been killing foraging parties, so maybe they were just that hungry.
“Fuck,” she said aloud, because why not and she felt like it. “Fuck.”
At least while she was busy swearing her body had made itself useful, loading up her field kit and emptying her bladder. She clipped together a few things and slapped together a few more and planted four or five packages around her room and one on the door.
They probably wouldn’t set it off unless they were REALLY stupid, but at least she wouldn’t be leaving any useful evidence, and the shockwaves should crush the escape tunnel’s entrance oh right she should probably use it before that happened. Could be painful otherwise.

***

The bunker’s main exit was a solid metal door, designed to hold the enemy’s attention as much as their progress.
The escape tunnel was a scummy dirt-and-mud tube writhing unknowable yards through the soil, just deep enough that it wouldn’t collapse when stepped on unless the thing stepping on it was a Bosian Anvil, in which case Mult ended up pawing her way into a blockage of sloppy earth.
She poked it with her machete. Nope. Solid. Probably collapsed it all the way upstream.
Well, only one way out. How deep had she dug this again? Best not think about it, it won’t help.
She stabbed up. And up. And clawed, too. Grasp and slash and shove and pack down the earth behind her.
There was a deep THUD and she felt as if someone had squeezed her entire body and then let ho. Oh, there went the mines. And probably her air source.
Slash and grab, slash and grab, slash and grab and dig and delve and someone screamed because she’d just carved into her foot from underneath.
“Shh,” said Mult, grabbing the ankle with one hand and stabbing up farther. “it,” she concluded her thought, as she saw seven people turn to look directly at her.
Blood was on her face, but it wasn’t in her eyes. They’d shipped their longguns (thought she’d blown herself up or run for it? maybe). It was almost light on the horizon, and there was no rain.
Those were all very good things but she was probably going to die. Her body didn’t know that yet though, so it violently yanked her longgun out and started shooting.
One, two, which was very good considering how much mud coated her weapon inside and out. But then the only ones left were smart and lucky and they were in cover and she was half in a mud puddle and half behind a wheezing corpse.
Oh well.

The ground didn’t shake, which was why the Bosian Anvil came as a surprise.
It shouldn’t have been, because Mult knew enough basic biology to be aware that any loud noises from a creature that size just walking around meant it was also probably going to break its feet under its own weight.
But she’d seen a lot of movies, and it was amazing how a bad idea could stick with you.
Those were the thoughts she had as she saw two long, long paws come out of the trees, pick up a woman each, and shake them hard enough to snap something important loose.
“Shit,” she said. And then again “shit” for rhythm.
It was bigger than the statistics had made her think it was.
It was also looking directly at her, which made sense because the three remaining soldiers had enacted sensible infantry tactics when confronted with a Bosian Anvil.
Damnit. She’d just read that chapter, and it seemed unfair. Normally her body would’ve taken care of this sort of thing on its own but it was still stuck in a collapsed hole and didn’t want to leave.
The Anvil stepped forwards, gills fluttering, feathers quivering, and it plucked her out of the ground like a carrot and set her down again with all of her limbs and then it picked up the two people she’d shot and started making snuffly noises like a sleeping dog the size of a freight train as it ate them, one after another.

Then it tore the (gun-bitten, explosive-battered) corpse of the Chatterback in half and offered half to her.

***

Sixteen years later the war was over the forest was back to being a national park and Professor Mult had finally managed to have the army fieldguide updated to include the courtship behaviours of the Bosian Anvil, which included leaving carcasses out in the woods for your beloved.
Because even if shit happens and that’s the way it is, some things are nice to know ahead of time.

It was just a little red-and-brown smear on the white tile of the shower wall, but it wouldn’t come off. Lisa tried with her thumb, then she licked her thumb, then she spritzed it with tile cleaner, then she swore at it, and finally she lost her temper and started chanting, whereupon a tattered, shrieking form clad in its own dissolving flesh lurched through her wall and halted an inch from her face, eyes boiling in its sockets.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” said Lisa.

She tried exorcisms first, of course, starting with gentle rebukes and moving up to firm nudges and stern commands before concluding in fiery demands to Get The Hell Out Of My Shower.
None of them worked, they just made the spectre soggier and more desperate. Its wails intensified and heightened in pitch, reminding Lisa of her childhood music lessons before mom had given up and admitted her daughter couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. With a lid.
So after the sixteenth failed effort (it cost her the last of her mistletoe, too) Lisa swallowed her pride and picked up her phone and dialed a number that was marked very firmly with an EMERGENCIES label.
“Hello?”
“Hi, grandma.”
“Oh, Lisa, darling. How’ve you been?”
“Bad, grandma.”
“Oh no honey, you always seem to have problems when you phone. What’s wrong?”
“Ghost in my bathroom.”
“Well that’s not appropriate.”
“I think it was a lady.”
“Still, she should’ve asked. Manners cost nothing, for fuck’s sake.”
“She’s tied to the tile on the shower wall and I can’t seem to exorcise her.”
“Is it ceramic?”
“I think so?”
“Well, that’s nice nonweathering material, sweetie. Ceramics last for ages, that’s why your brother won’t shut up about them, most of what he digs are the damned things.”
“Grandma, please.”
“Oh come on honey, you’ve got to admit he’s a bit of a bore.”
“He’s got tenure.”
“And a fat lot of good that’ll do him if anyone looks in his basement. Material possessions are a weight and a burden, honey.”
“Speaking of, my shower…”
“Oh, right. Well, the only thing to be done is either renovation or killing the one who wronged her. I’m guessing you’ve got a factory worker, so you’ll need to hex her boss – ooh, or better yet, her boss’s boss. Generally blame for this sort of thing is like a tree: it gets bigger farther up. Aim high and you’ll be sure to kill the whole thing.”
“Trees are cut at ground level.”
“Oh shut up. Do you want a hand? You know I love a good hexing.”
“No entrails.”
“What? Why? I have some on hand, you wouldn’t have to chop them yourself.”
“I’m a vegan.”
“Shit. You’re going to have to get over that someday.”
“Thanks, grandma.”
“Aim for the guts, mind you. Capitalists tend to be susceptible to blows in the digestive tract.”
“Thanks, grandma.”
“Good luck!”
“Thanks grandma.”
“And call more of-“
“Thanksgrandma,” said Lisa, and she hung up.
Guts. Right.
She could work with those. Sort of.

There were no entrails. There were, however, many pulverized cashews. The seed of potential life in them wasn’t very big but if you got a big enough bowl together and boiled it into a thick mush it was both a convincing entrails substitute AND easier to work with.
Lisa had told her grandma this a dozen times. She continued to insist she was being childish.
The tile was tricky; the diagrams kept dripping off. Finally she used a combination of cellophane and duct tape to strap everything in as she drew it, and even if it did end up being the ugliest hex she’d ever scrawled at least it stuck to the damned wall.
The ghost was behind her again; her back hair was standing up.
“Quit fussing,” she said. And she bit her thumb and jammed it just off the center of the diagram, in the stomach.
The ghost shivered, hummed, and stopped existing.
“Great,” said Lisa.
And she washed the wall off and had her first shower in three days. It felt like creaky and faintly tin-scented victory, and she was in there for at least forty minutes before she realized the phone was ringing.

“Hello?”
“Lisa!” The voice was enthusiastic, with pauses in odd places and a hint of sandpaper wrapped around a dried bone.
“Hi grandpa, how’ve you been?”
“Just peachy, but there’s something I need your help with.”
“Me?”
“Yes. You see, I was at a meeting just now-”
“I don’t think I can help with that.”
“-and the dean’s stomach erupted across the table.”
“He had the flu?”
“He had every organ in his abdomen escape at once.”
Lisa winced. “Oh.”
“Now, Lisa, you wouldn’t know anything about this, would you?”
“Uh…was the dean an investor in any tile-making businesses?”
“Just one.”
“Oh.”
“Joint partner.”
“Oh.”
“Lisa, I’m the other partner. And now I’ve got buboes on my groin.”
Lisa winced. “Grandpa!”
“Think carefully: DID you have anything to do with this?”
“Grandpa, it wasn’t personal. My shower was haunted.”
“Well, that’s pretty bad luck. Did you know ninty-nine thousand times out of a hundred thousand times it just makes the tiles more stain-resistant?”
“Grandpa that’s just ninety-nine times out of a hundred.”
“This isn’t about math. This is about practicality and quality and the buboes you’ve cursed onto my groin.”
“It wasn’t intentional!”
“Well, that’s not how the real world works. Consequences don’t care about your intentions, Lisa.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Won’t do the job. I’m greasing up the table.”
“Grandpa that’s dangerous.”
“That’s the POINT.”
“No I mean with your back.”
“My back’s fine!”
“You can’t walk around the block without taking a sit down.”
“So hoisting a small goat onto a table should be easy-peasy.”
“You’re going to throw out your back and the goat is going to stand on your chest and make it worse.”
“Don’t give me your lip, it’ll only make this worse for you.”
Lisa hung up.
Then she drew some circles around her bed – just in case – and passed out.

The phone woke her, vibrating with petulant force against her nightstand.
“H’lo?”
“Hey. Grandpa’s in the hospital.”
“Hi bro how are you.”
“Oh? Fine. I guess. Maybe. Anyways, it’s his back.”
“Yeah, he threw it out trying to curse me.”
“What?”
“I told him not to.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t intend to give him buboes on his groin. He was collateral damage.”
Her brother hung up, and Lisa slept through the morning with the peace of the righteous.

And her shower didn’t even smell that much like tin anymore.

The world ended.
It happened very nearly as they’d been warned. One slip, one faltering instant, one crack in a lance, one death on the skyline, one moment of weakness and the whole thing fell apart.
In came the auroras, the other skies. They seized the breach and the knights and their icy lances and the walls and the towers and all of it and they threw it away, into the sky, so far away that it couldn’t be seen.
And then they came south, and began in earnest.
Up went the keeps.
Up went the ice-farms.
Up went the occasional unlucky bastard who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and didn’t see the sky change.
Up went trees, stones, surprised deer, anything but not everything, just some things, yanked into the air and carried up and away to who knew what for god knows what reason.
The cities fell apart in chaos. The high command was torn apart. The sky ran bright with alien colours.
The world had ended.
So what was everyone supposed to call where they were living?

The sun came up.
The sun went down.
The sun came up.
The sun went down.
The sun came up and went down and the auroras muddied the sky and the world still had ended and it still wasn’t gone.

People began to come back.
They crept back into the cities, slunk out from cellars, emerged from the woods and all of them realized they still weren’t alone. There were other people out there.
Some of them reacted very poorly to this.
Maniacs and madmen aside, there were voids that needed filling. Safe places (what was safe, with the sky now alien?), food, water, and direction to all of those things. Leadership was sought.
Some of them reacted far too eagerly to this.
Little tyrants rose and little tyrants fell. It was very hard to oppress anyone when your iron grasp began and ended at arm’s-length, plus two of your friends. Harder still when there was nothing to tie anyone to anywhere beyond their feet. And hardest of all when even the mightiest would-be-ruler still scurried inside for fear of the night sky… and may just find that someone had removed the roof of their dwelling.
The auroras took fewer these days, but memories were very vivid things.

The sun came up.
The sun went down.
It wasn’t going anywhere. Neither were the auroras.

Some things started growing.
Not the icicles – the auroras might be less fierce in the skies, but they still came down like lightning on any attempts to make new lances.
Not the old crops.
Strange things. Fruits that sprouted from roots; tubers that dangled from the tops of the trees. They smelled red and tasted loud but they nourished and that was more than enough to make them desirable.
Farming was being relearned, slowly but surely. Crops needed water, and sun, and the midnight suns that glowed in the air and dragged them skywards, inch by inch. And they were ripe when they began to sing.
Some of the old guard, the ones that had been powerful once, they said nothing good would come of it. They ate the old crops, the wheat, the barley, the maize.

The sun came up.
The sun went down.

At night, songs came. It was hard to tell if this was new or something that nobody had listened to before.
They used colours instead of melodies, and they spooled themselves away before dawn could spoil them. No harmonies were used.
Covering the ears did nothing; beeswax did nothing; singing loudly to yourself annoyed your friends but otherwise did nothing.
Covering your eyes worked, though only the most stubborn insisted upon it. Former knights, mostly, who insisted that they’d never heard this sort of thing before, back on the skyline. The auroras had been quiet then, desperate and fierce and quiet, even in the deep heart of the long night.
Some of the younger ones said they could still hear them at midday, faintly. Somewhere up above, where the sky was always dark.

The sun came up.
The sun went down.
The world moved on regardless.

Things came from above. Some of them were unrecognizable and some of them were just barely familiar and some of them hadn’t changed at all and it was hard to say which of the three was the most unsettling.
Cats were the same. Except for the floating.
Deer didn’t have legs, or eyes, and they had stone teeth. They fed on pebbles now.
It was entirely possible that the Longarm had been some kind of spruce before, but nobody wanted to get close enough to confirm it. Any distance from a Longarm had a nasty way of becoming close.
It was their arms. They were very long; to say nothing of their needles.

The sun came up.
The sun went down.
That was just the way the world worked.

The world worked.
Oh, sometimes it creaked here and there. Someone was lifted too high and never came back down; a field grew too tall to be harvested; a mad old relic tried to grow icicles in her basement and her whole house vanished overnight.
Sometimes an aurora died and the corpse landed on someone. Those things could happen. Those things did happen.
But that was just the way the world worked. It was normal.

It was normal to listen with your eyes at midday.
It was normal to drift up above the trees as you slept and descend by daybreak.
It was normal to ask permission of the Longarms before you walked into the bogs.
It was normal to send any message that needed speed (if not accuracy) by cat.
It was normal, because it was natural, because that’s how things were.
And if it was a little different from the way it was before, well. That was just the old days, when things were strange and they hadn’t discovered normal yet.
Back before the world began.

“Hellllooo! Anyone alive down there?!”

“Hellllooooooooo?”

“HEY! C’mon now, no fuss. I can hear you swearing.”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“Hah! Now you are!”
“Oh fine, you caught me. I’m here. Now will you stop trying to shoot me?”
“If I said yes would you step out from behind that hummock?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”

“You’re not stepping out from behind that hummock.”
“I don’t think I can trust you, not after you shot Lord Archie.”
“I shot him fair and square!”
“You yelled ‘ahoy the climb!’ and then when he looked up you popped one right between his monocles. It was pretty dirty.”
“Nonsense! Nothing can be dirty on top of a mountain! Look around you – nothing but the most pristine white snow such as God himself could have laid down on the third day!”
“Fourth day.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Third day is the separation of water and land and the plants show up. Fourth day is when you get day, night, seasons, and so on.”
“Don’t be stupid. Snow up here exists year-round.”
“Alright, fine, have your technicalities.”
“I shall, thank you!”
“Now that you’re in a better mood, will you stop trying to shoot me?”
“Yes.”

“Well, that didn’t work again.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m still a little reluctant to take the word of a man squatting on a mountain peak shooting honest mountaineers for no reason.”
“I’ve got plenty of reason!”
“Name it.”
“Well… I’m on break.”
“I can wait.”
“Well I can’t. Not while you’re here.”
“Why not?”
“You might steal it.”
“I might steal a mountain?”
“You might climb it. Before I can.”
“I could just let you climb up first.”
“And nip away the glory the moment I let my guard down? Fat chance. You may as well ask me to stop trying to shoot you!”
“I’ve done that already.”
“And now you can see the serious breach of trust I’m already trying to work through.”
“Why don’t you work through it by climbing that peak so you can stop trying to shoot me?”
“You’ll just shoot me in the back the moment I take my eyes off you.”
“How?”
“With the gun you’ve got on you.”
“I don’t have a gun on me.”
“Prove it. Throw it out and come out with your hands up.”

“There, now you see why I can’t trust you.”
“Even if you thought I had a gun, why not just climb the damned peak already? It’s twenty foot from where you’re sitting!”
“You’d shoot me in the back.”
“Why?”
“To claim all the glory for yourself!”
“Glory? On a glorified hillock?”
“None more glorious.”
“We only climbed this thing because Lord Archie said it had a lovely picturesque front slope. It’s practically rolling.”
“Grand horns are a dime a dozen. Truly lovely little summits like this are PRICELESS and I will not have you stealing my thunder.”
“What thunder? ‘Mad hiker arrested for murder after defending summit of hill’?”
“Well, nobody has to know about that.”
“How in your paranoid little delusions do you reckon that?”
“Well, just come up here and promise me you’ll never tell.”

“Come on.”
“No.”
“Aw, c’mon now, no whinging.”
“No.”
“You can’t wait there forever.”
“Longer than you can. I’ve got a thermos.”
“Oh, lucky. What’ve you got in there, hot chocolate?”
“Soup.”
“Oh wonderful. What kind?”
“Tomato.”
“Marvelous. Mind sharing?”
“Yes.”
“Selfish bastard. You can’t live on soup forever!”
“Lord Archie had a thermos too.”
“Oh no.”

“What wa-”
“Also tomato.”
“You fiend.”
“Tell you what. Both my hands are definitely busy while I’m eating this soup. Why not make a dash for the peak?”
“You could hold the gun in your mouth.”
“I’ve got a short tongue. Could never pull the trigger.”
“You could hold the thermos in your mouth.”
“It’s a broad-necked sort, although I’m flattered at your appraisal of my gape.”
“I’m still feeling a bit bushed.”
“Well, never failed just means never tried.”

“Promise not to shoot me?”
“I can promise not to shoot you.”
“You sure?”
“Only one of us has a history of shooting people on this hill, and it isn’t me.”
“Uppity little thing, aren’t you?”
“Mother always said as much.”
“Alright. No budging, right?”
“Right.”
“And no peeking, right?”
“Right.”
“And no trying to race at the last minute, right?”
“Right.”
“Alright! Here I goooOOOOoWOOOOOPS”

“SHIT”

“shit”

“shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii”

thump

“Huh.”

“I guess I claim this peak in the name of, well, Lord Archie, who died a little before reaching it but who the hell’ll ever know better. He was a peculiar man, but he did know the front slope was a lot safer than the back, which from this angle appears to be a sheer cliff of some three hundred feet. May this offering of tomato soup light your way, ol’ buddy.”

-First, create the universe.

-Second, check your materials. If you’ve got a proper universe you should have a lot of hydrogen right away, which you’ll need if you want to have stellar bodies and such instead of a distorted groaning trainwreck. For tips on crossing this crucial threshold, see pages 8-12: Baking A Bigger Bang.

-Third, stir repeatedly. You want continual expansion.

-Fourth, pick a star, any star. If you’re an expert try for one that isn’t going to burn itself out in the next few billion years but most of us aren’t and if you choose wrong you’ve lost nothing but time so who cares about that anyways.

-Fifth, find a planet near your star and prepare to get some kind of complex garbage in a self-replicating mood. Prod the atmosphere with whatever materials you have to hand in the rest of the solar system and just keep dropping rocks on it until you see something that looks sort of but not entirely like rock diarrhea. That’s the miracle of life.

-Sixth, wait.

-Seventh, wait some more.

-Eighth, keep waiting. What you’re looking for is life to get just complicated enough to be capable of stellar observation and stupid decisions. If your life seems to be stuck for more than a hundred million years or so, try dropping more rocks on it and seeing what happens. Again, time is not your limiting factor here.

-Ninth, make sure your life doesn’t invent light pollution before it invents astronomy. This happens more often than you’d think and it always makes you feel like a complete putz.

-Tenth, watch as they figure out how the sky seems to work. They’ll likely alternate between being dead on and totally and incomprehensibly incorrect, savour this while it lasts.

-Eleventh, cross your fingers. You’re hoping for a calendar that doesn’t run back to front or have a month inserted inside another month or get decided purely by whenever’s the best time to have elections but even those rejects can sort themselves out if you wait a few thousand years (see: Rome; Earth – Sol system).

-Twelfth, get ahold of a lot of something fermented and just barely this side of toxic. You want to feel like your ass is in orbit without removing your liver all at once.

-Thirteen, party down. Hoot, holler, eat whatever passes for food, make bad decisions and rash promises! You’ve successfully brewed up your very own New Year’s! Now that you’ve created one of the simpler holidays, why not try your hand at whipping up something more complex and unrelated to astronomical phenomena, like some kind of parade* or national holiday**?

*Only applies if your lifeforms are capable of marching in a somewhat straight line; nobody likes a zigzaggy parade.
**First see pages 7890-7891: How to Create Nationalism, and be sure to only do this in an open and well-aired space: nation-states explode easily when they feel threatened.