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Katie’s day was off to a bad start already: she was awake, and there was some godawful radio in her ear chirping happily about how fabulously the war was going and wasn’t that peachy.  She groaned, scratched herself in unspeakable places, found coffee, stared at the coffee, tried the coffee, discarded the coffee, put on a halfassed impression of a normal human being’s clothes, and went to work. 

“Hey girl,” she asked as she got into the lab, still sleep-grimy with an uncleanness no sanitization protocol could fix, “how you doing?”
The frizeen said nothing.  Not a mandible-click, not a thorax-chirr, not even a deep-abdomen pulse. 

Katie’s own pulse lurched.  “Oh come on,” she said.  She pulled up diagnostics at the terminal.  “Oh come on come on come ON fuck’s sake not AGAIN” and it was again. 

All vital statistics were regular, even, and relaxed, and her patient was no longer present. 

“Come ON!”

Sixty times.  Sixty times in three months.  At this rate she’d never get through a full vivisection. 

***

Humanity and Frizeenity had gotten off to a bad start, but in an inevitable and blameless sort of way.  Humans were humans, and the frizeen looked sort of like giant bugs with glowing eyes, and there were centuries of poorly-written novels that explained how that could only ever end one way.

So there was war, and bombardments, and tactics, and manoeuvering, and bold gambits, and lots and lots of money and time and effort being spent in odd places.  One of those odd places was Katie, who was supposed to be a veterinarian and was now some sort of complicated auxiliary or draftee or something or other.  Her knowledge was being used for the good of the many, and since a surgeryAI could put a higher primate back together nigh-flawlessly nowadays that good was principally dissection of the enemy, where nothing had ever quite been found that could replace the ingenuity of the human being.  

Katie and her ingenuity did a desultory exploration of her patient, skipped the hard parts, washed herself clean of the odd purple jelly that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere within the average frizeen, and went to lunch for breakfast. 

She wasn’t the only one.  Table 40C was occupied by the only person in the building as annoyed as she was.

“Hey,” said Katie.

“Hey is for horses,” said Gloria, without looking up, “and if you ask for it too much you’ll start to whinny.”

“That’s stupid.”
“My grandmother told me that.”
“She was stupid.  My job’s stupid.  Everything’s stupid.  Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid stupid stupid.  Did they make eggs this morning?”
“Yes.  Scrambled.”
“Fuck I want fried ugh damnit.”

Gloria still hadn’t looked up.  She was apparently reading the future in her coffee.

“You looked like you’re reading the future in your coffee,” said Katie.

“God, I wish.”
“Morning that shit?”
“Completely.  And you?”
“Yes.”
They shared a sigh and so much more. 

“They just…slip off,” said Katie.  “But nothing changes!  Biologically speaking.  Organs keep running, basic brain function’s there, but nobody’s home and everything stops reacting properly.  And I can’t tell you what’s causing it.  Not a hormone, not a protein, not a neural impulse, not an invisible goddamned unicorn.  There’s no signal.”
“I can’t tell you what’s causing it either because I can’t tell you anything new and I haven’t told you anything new for the past six months,” said Gloria.  “And you know it.”
“Yes,” said Katie.  “That’s why I complain to you.  You’re the only person here whose job is even more shit than mine.”
Gloria slowly and delicately flipped her the bird.  The fingernail shone like a diamond in the orange light that peered through the cafeteria windows. 

“So, how is it?” replied Katie to the finger.

“The what.”
“The more shit than mine.”
“Same as it is.  I go over the texts, I get myself hopped up on false hope, I get in the interrogation room, I start asking the real tough questions, and they get all confused and then stop replying  and then we break out the direct neural stimulation needle complex and then they turn off.”

“I thought you got a full library after Kepple Beta got seized.  Nothing new in there for you guys?”
“Nothing new.  Just the same old nonsense.  Everything’s religious with these jerks – can’t go two paragraphs in the middle of a textbook on lichens without stating the oneness and immortality of all life in the universe – but there’s no angle in there.  I’ve brought in forty kinds of religious thought and they just stare at me.  They’re the least evangelical fundamentalists I’ve ever met, and I can’t believe I’m saying this but I HATE it.”

“Psych major, psych major, psych major,” sang Katie deliberately off-key.

“Dog-prodder,” said Gloria.

“I worked with cattle mostly.”
“Whatever.”
Breakfast or lunch or whatever arrived and Katie ate some of it but the real meat of what she’d needed had been someone else’s irritation.  The day didn’t feel so bad anymore.

***

The scalpel slipped in, the inner lung-plating slipped aside, and the patient slipped away with a little sigh.

“PISS FUCK”

The day felt so bad anymore. 

Katie’s hands were tired and her mouth was dry and her head was hurting and the assistants were wheeling in subject number sixty-two and something in her said ‘sure, why not.’

“Give me the gurney,” she said.

“Pardon?”
Katie took the gurney, and took it to the halls, and took it at a run. 

***

General Gracie Goodman was old and tiny and shrivelled and lived by spite.  She reminded Katie of her mother, her father, and possibly her aunts. 

“This day’s a mess,” she complained bitterly.  “I had a full half-hour extra for lunch before the physics department filled my line up with complaints and the finance department told me the entire Enormous Quark Splitter would have to be refurbished from scratch and the MPs hauled you in for vandalism and you yelled at everyone that you’d finally found something and just HAD to tell me about it right away.  What was it?”
“It was more what we didn’t find,” said Katie.

Gracie gave her a look that communicated itself fully and entirely. 

“So, my dissections never confirmed an agent behind the frizeen…. Shutting down.  Nothing.  No cause.  And after this morning’s spontaneous test in the particle accelerator –”

“Which you will be docked pay for, for the next ten million years.”
“-we can confirm my lack of confirmation.  Nonconformation.  A living frizeen was bombarded with everything while our instruments measured anything as it underwent its alteration: there is nothing that causes this, no change in state of matter.  It looks like their fundamental being and self are contained in a strictly nonphysical form independent of their bodies.  In other words, or repeating my words, we have confirmed – or at least, confirmed through nonconformation – the existence of the immortal soul –”

“what”

“- in the frizeen,” finished Katie. 

There was a long and brutal silence while the general chewed that over.

“By fuck,” she said at last.  “Do you know what this means?”
Katie did not know what that meant.

“It means,” said the general with violent relish, “that I can ask the folks down in R&D to design weapons that annihilate souls.  Shit in a mustard bottle, your job is a smashing success.  Take the week off from the war and have some fun.”

***

Katie slept in, avoided coffee, and ate a lot of cupcakes.  It helped more than it should’ve. 

The deed was old and carefully-kept, folded once with caution twice for necessity and never ever opened or closed without great need.  The drawer it lived in was well-made and kept out dust and draught and sun so the ink wouldn’t fade and the paper wouldn’t crease and it would stay there until it was needed or the end of time itself.  It had taken my great-great-great-grandparents their entire lives to earn, and they’d taken some pains with it.  They’d seen what happened to my great-great-great-great-grandparents when they didn’t have one. 

It crumpled up in the palm of the faeman’s hand until it looked like last autumn’s leaves.

“Chicanery,” he said.  Every syllable was neat and tidy and tight-lipped, which matched him in every bone. 

The fae were peculiar as a rule, but I’d never heard of one like him before (at least in dress; in ice-pale face and dead-man’s hair he was every inch what I’d expected).  The faeman was dressed in a suit that would’ve sobered a lawyer, had shoes that didn’t shine so much as simmer, and an expression that never wavered or loosened that reminded me of my dear great-grandmother, whose funeral had been attended by three, counting the gravedigger. 

“Pardon?” I asked. 

“No,” he replied without hesitation.  “No pardon granted.  You are unlawful.  A hundred thousand lifetimes ago I dwelled with my kin under barrow we carved, under hill we delved, through glen we shaped, in this place we seized.”  A long slim scroll sprouted from his hand like a mushroom; banded and branded with cold silver and red sealing wax: a deed to make mine shrink.  “A thousand lifetimes ago your meager folk came here crawling and begging and grovelling for shelter.  Your land-deed is purest fiction, and I am under every right to claim my rights against your squatting.  By my right to barrow, and to hill, and to glen.”

And as the faeman held his deed the barrow groaned under his heels and the hill shuddered and the glen’s trees reached out long and fine so that they covered the sky from me.  My house wasn’t big, and it looked smaller still in this shade. 

“Now begone,” he said.  “Three days you have to forsake your false deed and gather yourself and begone yourself.  Past that, there will be consequences.”

“I will appeal,” I told him.  And he didn’t laugh at me, because I wasn’t sure he could.  But his mouth made the smallest smile you could think of. 

***

I took my crumpled deed in my pocket and I walked down to the town hall, where the mayor was working very hard.  People were giving him money and papers and he was taking the money and giving it to someone else and signing the papers and giving them to someone else. 

“I would like to protest against my eviction,” I told the mayor politely after a few hours. 

“Give it to me and go away,” he said without looking.

I gave the deed to him. 

“Yes, yes, yes, excellent,” he muttered, and folded it up very very small and handed it to someone else. 

“This isn’t money,” they told him politely.

“Hmmph,” he said.  He folded it up very very small again and handed it to someone else.

“This isn’t a signature,” they said deferentially.

“Hmomph,” he harrumphed.  Finally he looked at it himself. 

“Well, that’s a deed,” he said.  “How dull.  What’s the problem?”
“I would like to protest against my eviction,” I repeated.

“Ugh, that’s boring,” the mayor said.  “So tedious.  Well, tell them to stop it.  Who is that, anyways?”
“A faeman,” I told him.  “Tall, with a suit.  No joy in his face, but dangerous shoes.”
The mayor jumped so badly his chair popped apart.  “Oh NO,” he said hastily.  “Fae matters are a legal matter for the courts, not for the civic authorities.  Precedence, you see, loads of precedence, laid down in tomes of legality and criminality and generality long long LONG ago.  Go somewhere else to handle this, to someone else, who will do something else.  Go away now please please please before anything happens.”
“I have three days-” I began.

“Good.  Don’t be standing near me when this happens.”

I went home and ate onions and potatoes.   

So.  That was a day wasted.

***

I took my crumpled and creased deed down to the courthouse in the city, which was made of large grey bricks and filled with large grey men and held a judge with a large grey wig atop a high bench. 

“This seems to be in order,” he said.  “Who is this alleged landlord?”
“A faeman,” I said.  “With a suit, and painful shoes, and a frozen pinched face.”
The judge turned greyer than his wig, lost six pounds from fright, and threw my deed back at me with shaking hands that tore little strips out of it sixteen times sixteen.  “Precedence favours the fae,” he said.  “Best be gone with you.”

“What precedence?” I asked. 

“Who knows!” he said.  “But they cite it, and they site it, and if you gainsay it then they SLAM it.  Get out before you drag us into it and under it!”
“I,” I said.  Then the bailiffs picked me up before my thought was finished and put me outside to finish it, where there was no point.

I went home and ate carrots and peas.

So.  That was the second day done for.

***

I took my crumped and creased and torn deed to the homes of my relatives, asking aid from cousins to uncles to aunts.  But when I told them of the faeman they all turned away, turned down their eyes, turned their voices low and sad and told me I could have a place to sleep at their homes until I could get my feet under me again. 

“Precedence favours him,” they told me.  And so on and on I heard. 

I didn’t go home because I’d eaten everything in the house and had been too busy to harvest more from my garden.  So on the evening of the third day I wandered, and when I was too tired to wander I laid down, and I closed my eyes, and I cried a little bit, and when I wiped my tears away I found out of sheer stupidity I’d used my deed.  Crumpled, creased, torn, and tear-stained. 

“This doesn’t mean anything to anyone,” I said.  And I threw it down on the dirt, and I stomped on it and at it as if it were my worst enemy, and when I was done there wasn’t anything left but specks and fragments that could’ve come from a bird’s nest or a mouse-house or an ant’s crumbs. 

Then I went home, and the faeman was waiting.

***

He was even longer and harsher in the twilight.  His face gleamed and his shoes still rippled, but everything else about him was smeared dark and vast by the darkness that seeped from the sky, from the great shadow of the deed in his hand.  It looked like a sword. 

“Three days have passed,” he told me sharply.  “I will take your deed now.  And if you hesitate I will take it and take more than that, and if you deny I will take it and everything and everything else.”
“I don’t have it,” I said. 

“How unfortunate,” he said, and that horrible little smile took his mouth again.  “For whoever takes it is a thief in equal measure.  Tell me, who is your accomplice.”
“Nobody,” I told him.

“Lies, lies, lies,” he chanted solemnly.  “Your case is now plagued by false testimony.  I demand of you now, by the barrow, by the hill, by the glen: WHO HOLDS YOUR DEED.”

Everything shook or I did, and it shook words out of me.  “The dirt,” I gasped. 

“What,” he said.  There was no question, just a demand.

“The dirt, and the soil, and the wind, and the air.  It meant nothing to anyone.”
It was the oddest thing.  As my head swam the faeman was all that was fixed in the world to me, solid as a rock in my eyes.  And with each word I said his face changed and changed until it was contorted in a perfect rictus of horror.

“What did you DO?” he shrieked. 

“I threw it away,” I said.  “It didn’t mean anything to any-”

“It’s not ANYONE that’s the problem here!” he screamed in my face.  “Oh no, it’s not ANYONE.  No ANYONE can gainsay me!  No ANYONE has place over me!  I am the first owner!”

“But-“

His arm shot out and his deed slapped me sharp across the face as fast as a snake.  It made my skin hiss and I bit my tongue. 

“You voided your deed, and gave it to the land,” he said.  He wasn’t looking at me, and he wasn’t talking to me either.  I’d seen that face on people before, but nobody’d ever warned me of what it’d look like on a fae.  “But it doesn’t mean anything.  It was a false deed.  Precedence is on my side.  Ownership is on my side.  The land is on my side.  It is mine.  It is mine.  It is mine.”

The trees reached up. 

They reached up, and up, and up. 

And the sky reached down.

And down, and down, and down. 

They clasped above our heads and I felt like a puff of soap bubble above the sea.  Around us the soil sighed, the dirt breathed. 

The faeman was very still, except for his mouth, which was moving faster than anything I’d ever seen.  “-precedence,” he was saying.  “Precedence favours me I retain ownership ownership is for persons not places things cannot own themselves belongings do not belong.  You are mine.  You are not you.  I am the lord of this land.  I am the lord of this land!  I AM the lord of this land!”

Sound left, and the faeman stood there, proud and upright and with fiercely shining shoes.

Then the barrow fell in with a sigh, and he fell with it and every stone after him, until nothing was left but an odd dent in a perfectly normal hillside.

***

I moved in with one of my relatives anyways.  Staying there wouldn’t have been frightening, but it wouldn’t be right.  I had no desire to infringe upon another’s space, not after it had been taken up so fervently. 

It was the greatest show on earth.  It was the highest-stakes gambling history had ever seen.  It was the ruination of nations, the menace of all men, the last-ditch absolutely-desperate attempt by the greatest powers of human history to come together and solve a problem that had defeated all of them alone.

A tall serious man with tall serious hair climbed to a tall serious podium.  Six dozen translators watched him like hungry hawks.

He coughed.

He snorted. 

He spat, then cleared his throat.  “’Scuse me.  The bidding for the first Interintraglobal Proposal to Permanently Solve All Parking Issues is now open!”

Paddles flew.  Spittle sprayed.  Blood was shed. 

“Applesoft bids to replace the north pole with a giant helicopter that will fly cars around, instead of letting them clog the highways!” screamed some nerd in a t-shirt.  “Seven septillion dollars!  It’s the future”

“Exxon-Mobil-Standard-Nestle will drain the entire Atlantic for use as garage space!” hollered an emaciated and wan-faced old coot, driving his cane deep into the spine of the CEO in front of him.  “Imagine the amount of space that can be reclaimed in the suburbs!  A hundred billion trillion million dollars!”

“McDonalds will donate one out of every seven hundred pennies we make for one year towards funding solutions for individuated parkers in need of parking,” wheedled a sack of flesh in a half-sack suit.  “No charge…. Although we WILL be wanting tax rebates for our time and charity and effort.”

“I will pave the entire horizon of the Earth for one hundred dollars.”

That got people’s attention, and as sure as if a giant drain had opened up in the floor all other noise swirled away into nothing.

“How?” asked the auctioneer.

“The power and wonder of imagination,” said the bidder serenely.  He was an older man with an older man’s beard and a warm smile somewhere in there. 

“How much again?”

“One hundred dollars – in advance, if that’s alright.  Oh, plus expenses.”

“Sold!  To the old coot!”
“Constructioneer, if you please,” he corrected.

“Sold to the constructioneer coot!”
“Ah, much better.  ”

***

The one hundred dollars were crisp and clear and as freshly-made as a dewy daisy, and the constructioneer took them down the street to an orphanage and purchased six children at a nickel each.

“No bulk discount?” he asked. 

“Each of our children is a priceless little tootsie-angel in their own special way,” declared the manager.  “And we don’t do refunds either, so no bitching allowed.”

“No worries, no troubles, it’s fine.  C’mon kids, we’ve got a job to do!  Have any of you ever wanted to be construction workers?”
Feet were shuffled, eyes were averted, no hands were raised. 

“Perfect!”

***

It was a very simple procedure.

“Up and at ‘em!  Just a little hike!  You can be malnourished later, we’re almost there!  Last stretch!  Don’t lag too far behind, Suzy!”
“Stacey.”
“Sure!  C’mon!  C’mon!  C’mon!  We’re here!”

It was an unpretentious little hill at the edge of a modest little parking lot – wedged full of cars criss-cross-cranny-crammed atop one another, naturally.  The spring thaw had been unkind to it; and most of it was exposed sand, mud, and sad. 

“Alrighty.  Back to back, please.  Wait, you too, you two.  And you other two!  All of you!  Back to back to back to back to back to back now, chop chop!  There we go!  Now hold this in your left hands – your LEFT hands.  I don’t care if you’re a southpaw, Andre.”
“Why are we holding lumps of asphalt?  And it’s not Andrew, it’s And-”

“It’s fine!  Are you all ready?”
Vague mumbles.

“Good!  Are you all steady?”
Shrugs and nods.
“Great!  Are you set?”

Noncommittal noises.

“Now hold your pointer finger on your right hands across your eyes and block out the horizon in front of you GO.”

They did.  And the constructioneer chuckled warmly. 

“Excellent!  Now hold your asphalt that’s in your LEFT hands up behind your right fingers.”
They did.  And the constructioneer giggled happily. 

“Wonderful!  Now drop your right hands.”
They did.  And the constructioneer chortled merrily. 

“Beautiful!  Now drop your left hands.”

They did.   And the asphalt wasn’t in their hands anymore.  It was very, very, very, very, very far away. 

“And we’re done!” said the constructioneer.  And he laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed until his cheeks and his beard and his warm smile were all red as a cardinal’s crown.

***

Reconvening the delegates of the first Interintraglobal Proposal to Permanently Solve All Parking Issues took more time than expected.  For one thing, many of them had already gotten up to leave.  For another, every single axis surrounding the planet was now covered in pavement

“I have paved the horizon, thus circumferencising the planet with the aid of six nickel-priced children and their imaginations,” said the constructioneer proudly.  “Well ahead of time and very under-budget.  Please shower me with applause.”
The sound of vigorous clapping echoed throughout the vast halls.

“Alright that’s enough.  Now, my expenses: everything.”
“I’m sorry?” asked the auctioneer.

“Everything.”
“All the… money?”
“No, everything.  Everything ever.”

“But… but… you said that the children only costed you a nickel each!” exclaimed a vice-president with an unearthly wail.

“A nickel each for the children,” corrected the constructioneer, kindly but firmly.  “The imagination of a child is priceless.  And I will be reimbursed as such.  Really, I’m within my rights to demand this six times over.”

“We shan’t,” said a president. 

“We won’t,” said a prime minister.

“Nix,” said a premier.

“Oh yes you will,” said the constructioneer.  “After all, you only have a few minutes left.”
“I hardly think losing out on a little sunlight will snuff out the planet in a few minutes,” said the world’s most famous political cartoonist, with the world’s most derisive snort. 

“That won’t be the problem,” said the constructioneer.  “But you’d better hurry if you want a spot.”

And he smiled his big warm smile. 

Thirty seconds later every human being on earth with a driver’s license was dead.  Primary causes were road rage, pedestrian collision, parking-lot fistfights, and ferocious rear-enders. 

***

The constructioneer dug up the horizon’s pavement and put some tulips in.  He felt he owed it to the neighborhood. 

“I want to be a doctor,” said Julie.

“I want to be a writer,” said Tim.

“I want to be an economist,” said Larry.

“I want to find dinosaurs and giant apes and forgotten peoples and evidence of aliens landing on the planet in younger days,” said Montgomery. 

“Write something shorter in the text box that makes more sense,” said their teacher, unscrewing the lid on her third thermos of ‘tea’ that morning.

So Montgomery wrote ADVENTURER on his what-I-want-to-be sheet, and he received a B- for it. 

***

When Montgomery was seventeen, a passing hurricane kept his family grounded on vacation.  Into the storm shelters they all went, and as the wind whined and wailed and roared outside he gazed hungrily at the sheets of rain that tore and ate at the forests beyond the reach of the emergency lights. 

“Tomorrow,” he said, “I will find my dinosaur.”

“That’s nice,” said his mother.  “Now pass me the can-opener.”
“We’re all going to die,” said his father. 

And Montgomery was right and his father was wrong; for everyone lived until the very damp dawn of the next day, when Montgomery prowled the surf and the wreckage and the foliage for hours and hours and hours and at last – triumph of triumphs – he pulled aside a half-fallen tree and was eyeball to eyeball with the beady red-ringed and brown-eyed stare of a dinosaur, crouched protectively over its nest. 

“Hello!” he said.

“AIIIYK!” the seagull said.  And it bit him. 

***

When Montgomery was twenty-one, he spent his summer hitching illicit rides on cargo ships carrying containers of anything to anywhere for anyone.  It was cheap, even if it was a bit lonely and most of what he saw was empty blue. 

“Somewhere out there, or maybe in here,” he told the crew he negotiated and bribed and wheedled with, “is a giant ape, unknown to the world.”
“Yuh,” they said, counting the money.  “Yah.  Yep.  Uh-hm.  Yes.”

So Montgomery took this as permission and scanned the horizon with binoculars and prowled the decks with powerful microphones and tapped on every wall for secret compartments and poured over shipping manifests and once or twice cracked a container open for a quick peek inside. 

He found furniture.  He found timber.  He found metals.  He found plastic shaped into funny little animals.  He found more water than he could ever have imagined in a million lifetimes.  And at last, as he stumbled back to his berth exhausted and empty-handed, he pulled open the door and there before him, rising up to the ceiling and staring back at him with the calm gaze of those who have every right to exist, was a great hairy ape the magnitude of which he’d never seen; stooped, broad-shouldered, heavy of gut and impossibly bipedal. 

“Gracious god,” said Montgomery.

“Wrong room,” said the able-seaman, and slugged him amidships.

***

When Montgomery was thirty-six he spent the last of his grant on a mad dash to the wilds of Papua New Guinea, where he annoyed many people by talking to them very loudly and slowly instead of using any form of interpretation.  This approach, the final step of his self-published ‘Montgomery Method,’ did not produce results. 

“I was so sure,” he sighed, “that it was maybe this time.  Oh well, perhaps the next.”

So Montgomery went home on an economy flight that stopped over for sixty hours in a place called Burnside, where he was turfed out to make his own way for the time being.

“Is there a hotel you could recommend?” he asked the flight attendant.

“Eh,” she replied. 

From street to street he wandered, but the only places he could find were murderously wealthy, with entire lobbies and carpets designed entirely to warn prospective guests of the price ranges at work within their walls. 

“Needs must,” he muttered.  He thought far back to his childhood, and the wise things his mother and father had taught him.  He girded his loins.  He consulted a map.  He even – god forbid – asked directions.

And so it was that he found a hidden place unseen by human eyes in many years, cobwebbed, abandoned, and forgotten.  A place to rest, and more besides.  This was what he had sought and failed to find in New Guinea – in Egypt, in the Andes, in the Rockies, among the shallow waters of Greece and in the burning deserts of central Australia. 

Montgomery’s subsequent paper, On the Rise and Fall of the Burnside YMCA: an Archaeological Microstudy of a Vanished People, was surprisingly well-received.  He still got in a lot of trouble about the grant money, though. 

***

When Montgomery was fifty-five, he spoke with conspiracy theorists and alternate historians and people with little divining rods.  He read self-published books.  He analyzed ancient folktales.  He read the interpretations of old petroglyphs, and then reinterpretations of those, and reinterpretations of THOSE. 

He also looked at many blurry photos of things in the sky that looked like trashcan lids.

Finally he left his home without notice in the dead of summer and stepped off the plane into a flat dry heat that smelt like burnt lightning.  He hired a car, he hired a driver, and they slept in shifts as they went for miles and miles and miles off the road, into the dust and the crags of the badlands, into sunlight so hard it hurt. 

After a week they found nothing and turned around and as Montgomery stepped out of the car with a full bladder, town nearly back in sight, his urine washed the dust from an innocuous-looking stone and revealed something that he’d been looking for without knowing for half a lifetime. 

The meteorite was small and crushed and old, very old.  And of course it was contaminated by lots and lots of human DNA.  But it was still laden with little funny things that could’ve been maybe trace fossils left by bacteria or maybe traces of extraterrestrial sugars or maybe not, and that stirred up the whole damned panspermia debate in astronomy all the hell over again. 

***

When Montgomery was seventy-seven, one of his organs protested unexpectedly and took the rest of him on a short and eventful if well-trodden journey, and he entered the most mysterious land of all.  His funeral was a little muddled – which his family agreed he would’ve wanted – and the burial happened more by luck than design.  In the milling mob, some few of his old classmates found each other.

“Bit of a surprise,” said Julie.

“Him going first?” asked Tim.

“No, it taking so long.”

“Well, he got plenty of exercise,” said Larry. 

“Not much of that for the rest of us – least of all an economist,” said Julie.  “How’d you stay so trim?”

“Oh, I gave up on that after undergrad.  Went into forestry.  I climbed more than I walked for thirty years.  At least a doctor gets to sit still now and then, eh?”
“Flunked medical school, got into politics, still a sitting senator,” said Julie.  “But yes, I do get to sit all I like.  Sometimes more than I’d like.”
“I should be writing this down,” said Tim. 

“What, you going to use us as material?”
“No, no, as affirmations.  Had a nervous breakdown halfway through my second novel, got into psych work.  Don’t have the biggest degree but it helps the community, you know?”

“Yeah,” said Julie.

“Yeah,” said Larry.  “Never know where life’ll take you, huh?”

“Seems so,” said Tim.

They watched the funeral some more.  One of Montgomery’s grandchildren had found the headstone and was trying to get it to stand up straight as two aunts directed him. 

“You know,” said Tim, “I have the feeling it all mostly worked out for him like he planned.”
“Yeah,” said Larry.

“Yeah,” said Julie.  “Do you think HE knew?”
“Oh who the hell could say for sure,” said Tim. 

The tombstone fell over again.

“Lunch?” asked Larry. 

“They hired a food truck,” said Tim.
“Good,” said Julie.  “My feet hurt.  Let’s go for it.”

So they did. 

Evening’s meal was done and the company-bench had been cleaned and put away in the hall.  The children’s dormitory had been sullenly silent for an hour now.  The last of the surly-lynxes had grumbled themselves to sleep in their dens.  And every single adult was inside and locked up tight and trying to sleep because if anything bad happened they didn’t want to see it coming.

Except for Shorr, the storyteller.  Because she’d woken up a few hours ago, had evening’s meal as her first, and was wandering to the edge of the holdfast, looking for her treestump.

There were several to choose from, but she played favourites.  And maybe it was a little fussy of her to put stock in such things when the light was almost gone from the edges of the hilltops, but her job was stressful and such things that comforted her were things that she insisted on doing.  If they were good for her and harmed nobody, they were good for everybody.  So said her mind. 

That said, she hoped she found that stump soon.  It was getting dark and oh ow ow ow there it was.  Her toe resented her for that.  Well, the rest of her would appreciate its sacrifice.  And none too soon; there was more dark than sky now. 

Shorr sat down on her stump, which by now was as polished and gleaming as if her behind were the world’s softest velvet.  Time has a way of smoothing things like that.  She knocked out her pipe on her boot and she lit it and stared at it and then put it out.  She’d promised her daughter she’d stop. 

So instead of smoking she sighed, and scratched herself, and into the gathering, thickening, smothering dusk she spoke stories. 

She told the tale of Toll the Gecko and the wind calmed.

She told the tale of Little Gret and the bushes ceased whispering.

She told the tale of the Four Brothers and Three Sisters and the glint of light-on-tooth just beyond the edge of sight ducked backwards, slow but sure.

And then she told the tale of the Lost Sun and how the Moon saved her, and the sky was lightening itself already, and her throat was sore, and she was alone in that little shallow valley while everyone else was asleep. 

Shorr’s throat reminded her of her pipe, which reminded her of her promise to her daughter.  So she didn’t smoke, but went and sat by the well and drank it down, down, down instead, cool and crisp.  And she drank more, because her throat was still sore, and a little extra, because it was even worse now, and by the time her daughter was up (first from the children’s dormitory and indeed the whole holdfast to wake, as usual) Shorr was on the ground, coughing and wheezing and making noises that were probably curses but were awful jumbled and came out as mostly-snorts. 

***

A little wheezer was nothing to a child.  To an adult that had gotten it before, less than nothing.  Even an elder who’d escaped the bug for all their years would be at most abed for a few days. 

Shorr had never had it before, but she was strong and healthy and so merely lost her voice for a few evenings, which would be long enough to see the holdfast torn down to shreds and shards and stones. 

Most of them dealt with this by not thinking about it, the oldest solution.  But four of them didn’t have that luxury, so they gathered in the cozy comfort of the decisions-cabinet (one window wide open, to catch the breeze) and drank tea and argued while Shorr dozed in the corner.  It was midday, and she was well tuckered. 

“Troublesome,” said Killy, the firmsmith.  She tapped her giant scarred fists together in the little pat-pat-pat that meant she was thinking.  “Maybe if Nnon sang for the night instead?”
“No,” said Nnon, the singer, and she packed a lot of scorn into that syllable.  “Don’t be dopey; they can’t stand me.  Song is for the songbirds, and those are for the daytime.  Perhaps Shorr could be given emergency medicines?”

“Absolutely not,” said Pruut, the bloodfixer.  “Look at how limp and listless her face is.  I’d have to pack her full to the gills with fillypowder to wake her throat up enough to rasp, and then she’d be sleeping THAT off for half a week.  Borrowing from Petra to pay Polly won’t do us any good.  How about her apprentice?”
“Oh no,” said Killy.

“Definitely not!” said Nnon.

“Might as well give it a try,” said Grar, the charcoal-cutter. 

The others grumbled at that, but it was Grar’s turn to hold the Myturn stick and so they agreed that this was more or less a fair gamble.  Besides, it wasn’t like there were any other ideas coming.   

***

Fli was Shorr’s apprentice in storytelling.  She had a lovely smooth voice that she could make a tree blush, a calming presence, and a firm, reassuring presence.  And she climbed up a tree and refused to come back down. 

“Get down here,” said Pruut.  Besides her, Killy gave the tree another shake.  No good; Fli also had a grip like a barnacle. 

“I shall not,” said Fli politely. 

“Your teacher, your family, your friends, and your fellows have all agreed on this and think you can do it,” said Killy. 

“Nothin’ doin’,” said Fli serenely.

“If you don’t get down here,” said Nnon, packing her voice full of civic pride and determination, “the entire holdfast will end up torn to bits.”
“Maybe they should climb trees too.”

“Get me my sawblades,” said Grar.

“Oh, FINE,” said Fli in bad grace, and down she came. 

“Good,” they all agreed.  And that was just fine until evening’s meal was over and someone asked the question ‘where’s Fli?’ and nobody could answer it. 

“Let’s get her,” said Grar.
“We can look for her or we can find trees for everyone,” said Pruut. 

So they found trees for everyone, and that took a long time they didn’t have, so they were all too busy to notice when Shorr’s daughter walked down to the holdfast’s edge. 

***

Shorr’s daughter walked the path much less surely than her mother, but also more quickly.  Short legs stride fast. 

She took the longest and windingest way possible down to where the ferns grew and the waterfalls grew quiet and plunked down on her mother’s stump, which she recognized from being shown and also because it was as smooth and seamless as a marble from overuse. 

And she said “hi.”

Nothing said hi back.  Darkness does not say ‘hi.’  But there was heightened attention paid, just past eyesight. 

“I’m five years old,” she told the darkness.

The grass breathed in and out, slow and low and steady. 

“Wanna hear a story?  Mom told me stories.  I like the one about the fish.  See, there’s this big fish.  It’s the biggest fish, and it eats anything it wants, and everyone was frightened of it, but then it ate so much it couldn’t fit in the water anymore and the sun baked it and and it stopped working totally and then it was dead.”

The wind rose, dropped, dipped and twirled, then settled into a state of confusion. 

“And she told me about the rabbit-person.  And what the rabbit-person did for breakfast.  See the rabbit person was hungry but was lazy and the rabbit person told her family she was sick and they all brought her food and she ate all of it until they had no food so then then they brought her hot peppers and she ate them and they said it was medicine and they brought her live bugs and said they were medicine and they brought her a biiiiiiiig rock and said it was medicine and she swallowed it and you know what happened?  It stuck.  It stuck in her butt.  Now rabbits have heavy butts and that’s why their back legs are so big and strong.”

Shorr’s daughter frowned for an instant.  “Mom always tells me the stories about people eating too much.  I’ve heard them too many times.”

The shadows lightened a little.  Maybe. 

“Wanna see what I found in my nose?  Here, look.  Look.”
The wind came back, fierce and quick. 

“Okay!  Okay!  Stop it.  Stop!  Don’t DO that.  You know, you know that one time the wind didn’t ever stop blowing?  It did that.  Back in the old days it blew all the time and there was no earth, or water, or animals, or plants, just big bugs with big bug wings.  And they flew everywhere.  But the mosquito queen said she could outwail it, since she was the biggest bug, and she tried so hard with her wings that it broke the wind into little pieces and everything fell down to the ground.  But it shriveled her up.  That’s why mosquitos are so small, and why you should let them have a little blood.  I don’t like that.  Mom says it’s okay to swat them after the first one.  The first one gets blood for being polite.  Are you polite?  Mom says I need to be more polite.  She always tells me the stories about people being polite too.”
Something settled in the brush, far away yet closer than it should be. 

“Okay your turn.  I said your turn.  Come on, I told you three stories in a row.  It’s your turn now.  That’s only fair, right?  Mom always tells me the stories about people being fair too.  Like the story about the old flatsmith with the crooked myturn stick, that always came rolling back to her whenever she made a decision, so it was always her turn even if everyone else watched the stick very carefully.  So she got to do anything she wanted and nobody could do anything they wanted, until her apprentice took a rock, and she reversed the crook in the stick, so no matter what she did it wouldn’t come to her and it rolled away and everyone made decisions one after another except her.  But they didn’t do anything to her, they just made everyone else happy and that made her mad.  I don’t know why that made her mad.  Are you mad?  I don’t think so.  Can you tell me a story?  It’s fair.  Come on, be fair.  It’s fair.  Come on. Come ooooon.”
It was fair. 

So it told her a story. 

***

There was rushing water, and breezes in branches, and pebbles in sand, and bright eyes and brighter teeth, and the sort of urgent, thoughtless patience that formed something more complicated than an imagination. 

***

“Oh,” said Shorr’s daughter.  Except it was more of an exhalation, because syllables seemed too clumsy and indirect for this conversation. 

And she listened.  And she talked back, and in what way she wasn’t sure.

Then it was later and she was gently being picked up by someone and put in her bed even though it was just getting bright out. 

***

Fli was up in a tree, but a different one.  She came down with much protest until someone told her a child without a name had done her job for her, then she came down with much muttering until Killy picked her up and put her in the decision cabinet with Shorr for the rest of the morning.  She was a lot quieter after that. 

Shorr, by contrast, had her voice back by that evening.  She brought her daughter with her, and let her choose the stump, and sat there and for the first time in years she didn’t say a thing all night. 

It was interesting.  And a lot easier on the voice too.  So she brought Pruut, and Pruut brought Killy and Grar, and Nnon brought herself, and well, by then everyone knew about it.  

So everyone came down for the evenings, and some of them stayed till sunup and some of them went to bed early.  Who can say how much anyone learned.

But they all understood one another better.  And that’s important too. 

It’s a pleasure to meet you.

Feeling’s mutual!  Thank you so much for inviting me for this chat today.

You’re a busy institution; I wasn’t sure you’d have time for this. 

Nonsense!  I haven’t been asked to chat in ages and ages and AGES.  Everyone just wants to kick in the door and get it done, you know?  Happy to have a conversation for once.  Love it.

Then let’s get started, shall we?  Introduce yourself, please.

Hello!  I’m the Plundered Tower on the Edge of Darkness, and I’m a dungeon! 

Now when you say ‘dungeon,’ this brings to mind a wide array of possible meanings.  Please describe which of them you feel identify with personally, if that’s no trouble.

Certainly!  I’m not a dungeon in the traditional sense of being a jail you throw prisoners into – although I certainly contain a few of those, let me tell you!  Rather, I am a dungeon as the place of excitement and intrigue and reward and mystery, existing just one possibly-perilous journey away from a conveniently homely settlement.  More specifically, I’m an overgrown and ruined watchtower some six stories high (and my lesser outbuildings clustered around my base, which are in greater disrepair than myself) left to moulder for centuries, signifying that this place was once considered ‘civilized’ and other such concepts and has now been overcome by the forces of entropy and barbarism.  I’m an ironic mirror held up to the follies of empire – and as such, a subtle advocate for its benefits and a warning against its enemies!  Devious, aren’t I?

Indeed.  What are those enemies?  Are they represented within you?

Oh, of course – I have a wide variety of inhabitants, all of them symbolically rich.  For example, my gatehouse is full of gigantic rats and there’s a huge centipede in my belfry.

Ick.

Oh yes, that revulsion is the entire point!  See, these are household vermin… but on a scale fit for a nation!  My infestation with outsized pests represents the disrepair that the household of humanity has fallen into in my immediate vicinity, and thus expunging them through violence is transformed from the simple killing of animals into a heroic deed akin to cleansing a poorly-maintained house for the benefits of its hapless inhabitants.  A blade-as-a-broom, you could say.

That doesn’t sound like quite the kind of heroism most would sign up for.

Well of course – that’s why it’s all symbolic, to suck people in.  It’s like my biological metaphors for societal outgroups.

Pardon?
I call them BMSOs!  It sounds cute, and it’s a lot simpler than remembering what the hell they’re called.  Kobolds, goblins, trolls, apemen, lizard people, troglodytes, cannibals, gnolls, orcs, hobgoblins, goatmen…nobody can keep all that straight!  And most of them are basically the same anyways.  They’re really just dehumanized embodiments of those that fall outside the boundaries of the society represented by both my original state and the humble little hamlets that adventuring groups come from.  Their bizarre but ultimately superficial quirks hide this ugly symbolic reality behind a façade of manly slaughter and pulp.

What kind of superficial quirks?

Well, there’s a few kinds.  There’s the trivially obvious stuff, like the visually bizarre, biologically gross, and standard slurs – stuff like making them ugly and bestial and caricaturized and making it clear they’re all stupid and filthy and live only to destroy.  That’s easy, and the physical aspects can be used as little motifs to make killing them interesting – orcs having light-sensitive eyes, for instance, not only marks them as disturbing and antithetical to diurnal hominids but also rewards clever adventurers for using terrain, time of day, and careful use of supplies against them!  That’s the sort of shtick that gets people invested – and that kind of thing can be useful in ANY monster, not just the BMSOs.  It can get really complicated with the big ones.

Give me some examples of those – do you have any inside you?

Oh yes; every dungeon needs a big showy finish, or at the very least a motherlode where the danger and potential for reward meets a fever pitch.  That’s where you put your showstoppers.  I’ve got two, an evil wizard and a juvenile dragon.

Which is your favourite?
Oh gosh that’s always such an unfair question – I love them both, of course!  But in different ways, you know?  An evil wizard is like French fries: they’re welcome EVERYWHERE, no matter what.  Cave in a hillside?  Evil wizard, mixing foul potions.  Tower on a cloud?  Evil wizard, besetting the countryside with magical storms.  Magical castle inside a glass orb in a dungeon embedded beneath the continental crust?  Evil wizard trying to erase the concept of free will and become a god and also maybe cross-breeding an owl and a bear.  So versatile, so simple – the concept of an old guy who can command and the universe obeys him, wrapping up the concepts of knowledge and social hierarchy in a single robed crazy bearded scrawny man.  Mine’s a necromancer, I think.  He’s raised the captain from his crypt underneath the tower as a wight-lord, and most of the dead guards from the bonfire-grave as horrible cinderwraiths.  Bless his crooked nose and cracked heart. 

And the dragon?

Well, they’re classic.  Can’t have a dungeon without a dragon – some big ugly monster that loves treasure is a MUST, and if it’s a literal dragon that’s just all the better, the bester!  Also they’re sort of fun because they embody a societal vice but externalize it as originating from OUTSIDE the society.  See, a dragon’s about lustful greed, wrath, pride, and usually a good pinch or three of sloth – but it lives by itself in a cave and indulges all of those just by existing,, which it then inflicts upon the countryside.  All at once it warns you that These Things Are Bad but tells you that their REAL cause is people like you becoming akin to stuff from Far Away, rather than any inherent flaws within your home or town or kingdom or whatever.  And of course they breathe weird nonsense.  Mine’s a juvenile mauve drake, so it spits flans. 

That sounds delicious.

Oh no, they’re molten flans.  Six hundred degrees inside, animate, try to ooze inside your orifices.  There’s a surprising amount of monsters named after foods.

Is there any particular reason for that?
Oh, some.  But not all.

You’ve lost me.

There’s lots and lots of detail within me, but it’s sort of selective and fixated on particular KINDS of information.  Like, I can tell you that molten flans were created by an anonymous mad wizard, and I can tell you that you can find one to six of them 20% of the time if you linger in my ruined kitchen.  But I can’t tell why the hell they’re called flans.  Similarly, I can tell you there’s a tribe of 32 BMSOs lurking in my old stables, where they build crude altars of horse bones to worship my mauve drake whenever they see it fly out to prey upon the cattle of the villagers, and I can tell you they have 2 shamans and 1 chieftain with a magical axe and fourteen women which are noncombatants for some reason and eight young which frankly are just bait to rationalize child-killing as morally and biologically logical, and that their altars contain a single rough-cut agate apiece worth a specific monetary value (more if it’s cut properly; gets people invested in their treasure beyond just looting it).  But I can’t tell you why they’re worshipping the dragon, or what’s led them to take up residence here specifically, or why they’re so fixated on kidnapping and sacrificing villagers every full moon.  The traps are where it REALLY sinks in: I’ve got a secret door behind a bookcase in the captain’s quarters that leads to a secret passage that has another secret door in it (press the discoloured flagstone three times) that leads to a spiked pit and if you pull the eighth spike in it a secret door opens in the pit’s wall to a treasure chest.  The treasure is a cursed necklace.  I have no idea why any of that makes sense. 

I see.  Speaking of treasure, you seem to have an awful lot of it for a long-ruined tower.

Oh, absolutely.  Treasure goes where danger goes, so that sort of thing just happens – basically every inhabitant I’ve got is a magpie, inadvertently or deliberately.  The drake is greedy and hoards anything shiny; the wizard uses obscure and obscenely lavish implements in his blasphemous rites; the BMSOs are festooned with crude trinkets from their victims despite having no concept of money; my graves are filled with valuable pieces of armour and coin just ripe for robbing.  Hell, even my weathervane has an emerald stuffed in the eye of the manticore that decorates it.  Sometimes there’s an explanation, sometimes it’s just…there.  The explanation for each given item of value is nice if it’s there, but it’s not as important as the underlying assumption at work: that places outside your home are dangerous but full of value and that those that dwell there either don’t recognize it or are morally unfit to be its custodians or have stolen it from the deserving folk who are just like you.  Or all three.  Usually it’s all three.  Anyways the important part is that people come to me seeking violence and financial gain. 

And what do they do when they’re done?
Wander off, usually.  That’s the thing about adventuring: nobody really PLANS to retire; they just keep going until they just lose interest.  I’ve seen a lot of folks loot me top to bottom before going home, swearing they’ve got to do this again next week, then never ever coming back.  But there’s always some oddballs that get addicted.  They don’t come back again, though.  They usually just move on to other dungeons.  Fine by me; that’s when I get refilled. 

Are you acquainted with these ‘other dungeons’?  How do you get along with them?

Oh yes and it depends, respectively.  I’m what you call a ‘starter dungeon.’  Just a little bit of danger from a little bit of nasty a little ways away from a little town that’s facing a little bit of a problem from it, filled with a little bit of treasure. 

That’s a lot of diminutives.

It is, but I am!  And I like that, and I take pride in it.  No matter who you are, everyone’s been in a starter dungeon.  Nobody moves on to the Doom-Mines of Far Low Deep Kruuk without passing through me first and finding the ancient rubric in the wizard’s chambers that leads you to its hidden back entrance.  And they know it, and they appreciate it!  Me and Doom-Mines, we’re like THAT, you know?  Just like THAT.  Tight as thieves.  Specifically, thieves stuck inside a magical chest of devouring teeth. 

Are there any other starter dungeons near you?

No.  Not really.  I mean, not that it’s worth knowing.  The Forest of Fruundy doesn’t count.  Is it a dungeon if it isn’t a series of discrete rooms, I ask you?  You know what that place is?  A bunch of random nonsense stapled together with no organization.  Anyone could go anywhere in there and just do ANYTHING.  No rhyme no reason no sense no ORDER.  Stay the hell away from that place.  UGH.

Well, thank you for-

I think it has elves.  ELVES.  In a FOREST.  There’s traditional and there’s unimaginative and tell you what I don’t NEED to tell you what THAT is. 

-spending some time so generously with us today-

And a UNICORN.  What good is a unicorn?  They won’t fight you unless you’re a jackass.  The kind of jackass we don’t encourage, at least.

…Is there anything you’d like to say to all the prospective adventurers out there?

Not even any good treasure on ‘em.  Huh?  Oh.  Yes.  Live nobly, fight constantly, loot everything, and bring your friends.  And tell them to bring theirs too.  Always room for more.

Thank you.

Thank YOU.  Mind the trapdoors on the way out.  They’re under the flesh-eating fungus. 

I’m awake at sunrise, same as always.

Awake, but not UP, of course.  I’m too smart for that, even with my brain still cool from the night.  The best of sleep is when you’ve just finished it and are deliciously, completely at rest and unable to think or move, just feel how sweet it is and how warm and soft the world remains and breathe in the gentle snores of Driver next to me, curled against my head. 

So to maximize that time I don’t move an inch and I keep my eyes shut and I don’t change my breathing and I stay in that beautiful place for all of six minutes before That Fucker comes around to my pen and starts loudly asking Driver if I’m awake yet lazy beast come on there’s aa battle to be won abluh bluh bluh bwuh. 

Longer than usual.  Oh what a fine rest it was. 

So away with my rest, up with my body (at the gentle prods of Driver at least, rather than the hasty and careless hands of That Fucker), down with breakfast (cold and lumpy: someone doesn’t want me too content before the fight), and on with the armour.

The armour takes six of them to put on.  Too many buckles in my opinion.  I stand there and watch as the sun goes up and pretend I’m a tree and don’t have to care about any of this and none of it’s my business and today I will live a good dull tree life and NOT have maniacs try to stab, arrow, cut, etc. my face, belly, or legs.

Of course, I’ve seen what these folks do to trees.  Can’t win for losing, frankly.

Tara, tarantatatratatraaaaa.  Alarm, shouting, waving of arms.  That Fucker is here early and is hopping mad. 

Surprise attack!  The sneaky enemy have decided they’d rather fight early over here than on time over there like civilized people.  How deceitful.  How diabolical.  At least I had time for my lumpy breakfast. 

Up my side stomps That Fucker, feet even heavier than usual on the ladder (all that weight on their mind, I suspect).  Then the two bows.  Then the two pikes. 

Then Driver, who is wrapped up in a little ball of armour that’s much less fancy than That Fucker’s but is unconstrained by a need for maneuverability.  Like a baby bird balled up in iron feathers. 

I want to tickle them very badly.  But ah, there’s no time.  The battle has already turned up, and it’s burning down the tents next to us. 

To war! shouts That Fucker.

For That Place We Live In! shout the others.  Death!  Bloodshed!  Defeat (for them, not us please please please).  And so on. 

I don’t get to shout until Driver pokes me behind the ear just so, which happens pretty fast so I guess Driver is as sick of hearing from the others as I am. 

I don’t shout.  I ROAR.

So I do that for a good thirty seconds that feel like three years as I start walking and accelerate and run and then I’m in the battle. 

***

These are the things I saw.

A tent.

A tent on fire.

A person setting a tent on fire.

Two people screaming.

One person running.

Three people standing to fight.

Three people flying away through the air.

Six people fighting four other people while two other people shout at them.

A little bird crouched down low in the grass pretending it isn’t here. 

Someone who’d been swarmed and stabbed in the belly while they were eating breakfast, before their armour was put on. 

Sixteen people braced for a charge.

Eight people throwing away their weapons and trying to run. 

A person screaming – maybe in anger – and waving a very small knife. 

The kitchen and its awful breakfast and twenty people fighting over and around and in it. 

Trampled grass stained red and bile. 

More people. 

A big bright beautiful day turning from golden to blue in the sky. 

Driver.

***

Those are the things I saw in the order I stepped on them. 

***

Driver must have slipped free when the armour around the side of my head took a nasty cut, blowing out some crucial strapwork.  All that weight on them for their own protection dragged them down and off and under my legs where it was no protection at all.

They could have dug in, of course.  They had the prod, and the prod had a big spike on the back.  A real nasty one, just in case I got Ideas.  But Driver never used it.  And so off Driver went.

That Fucker is shouting more than usual.  Probably mad that I’m standing still instead of charging.  But I can’t charge and look after Driver at the same time, so tough shit. 

I think Driver’s alive.  It’s really hard to tell, they’re so tiny.  I need to get all these stupid armour off them. 

Ow.  There’s a pinprick at the back of my skull.  That Fucker is trying to goad me.  Ow.  Ow.  OW. 

Okay, that was a pike.  That Fucker isn’t trying to goad me, they’re trying to have me skewered. 

But I’ve lost some crucial strapwork recently, so I shrug and all the armour and the bows and the pikes and That Fucker slide off and land in a heap and I walk away and don’t even bother trying to step on it. 

I pick up Driver and put them back in their spot as I walk.  Nobody tries to stop me.  I guess they’re busy killing and dying and all of those other things. 

***

It’s not long until it’s quiet again.  Real quiet.  Not sure I’ve been in a place like this since my youth, before I got picked up and hauled off to meet Driver and everyone else.  No little voices.  No fields.  No orchards.  No roads or buildings.  No people. 

Driver doesn’t count.  They’re good for that. 

I pick fruit as I walk and offer it.  Some of it is taken, some isn’t.  We go until the sun starts to drop and I stand and I watch as it turns red over a little river with cool water that tastes like ice against my teeth.

We’ll stay here for the night.  And maybe tomorrow Driver will be okay, and maybe tomorrow Driver will have taken that soft sleep that never stops. 

It will be alright.  The best part of sleep is being not quite awake; but second best is getting there, and it’s a close second. 

The Prepaleoplostic Eon

Most nothing, or at least nothing worth noting geologically.  The stones of the planet fart their way together into tectonic harmony. 

The Paleoplostic Era – the Yurtomitvitch Period

Organisms figure out what to use all this boron floating around in the ocean for the past billion years and start constructing the first visible evidence of their presence recorded in the fossil record: very very small yurts.  Construction is incompetent but diligent.  The form of the inhabitants is unknown and presumably they were still mostly liquid. 

The Rufflupogust Period

Organisms discover that boron-based structures can ALSO be used to create structure within oneself.  Immediately life displays two great lineages: the blohardynopsians, who make elaborate internal scaffoldings and then swallow them; and the bunngowlisia, who make elaborate internal scaffoldings and then force them up their anuses.  Both live side by side for entire years before the bunngowlisia abruptly go extinct at the end of the Rufflupogust, about instantly after they first appear. 

The Greater Krimmidgish Period

Often called the ‘glory days’ of the Paleoplostic, the Greater Krimmidgish sees blohardynopsian life spread far and wide through the boron seas of Yurm, becoming bottom-dwelling scavengers, bottom-dwelling grazers, bottom-dwelling predators, and even a brief and terrifying experimental period where they floated just above the ocean floor. 

The Lesser Krimmidgish Period

The inanimate and insensate bacterial mats that are at the base of all blohardynopsian food webs develop the capacity to float at the water’s surface.  The entirety of the blohardynopsian lineage is wiped from the surface of Yurm within mere centuries; their only modern survivors are those little slimy things that try to eat your toenails in swamps. 

The Whorlibord Period

A small and innocuously group of bacterial mat-dwelling creatures develop the snoot, an anatomical wonder that allows both breathing and eating with a simple flex and snivel.  The group, termed innocuopods (after the late Horthord P. Innocuous), thrives and diversifies into a breathtaking array of forms, spreading into many of the old blohardynopsian niches and more besides. 

One lineage of creatures become known around now, although their past remains hazy.  Like the blohardynopsians and the bunngowlisia they use boron structures to keep their internals structured; unlike either they shun housing and don’t creature their internal support externally; instead building inside themselves using little tiny hands on the inward-facing surface of their skin, called creepi.  The animals themselves, creepodonts, will remain a fixture of the seas for a very long time, thanks to their powerful crotchetiness. 

The Lubbery Period

The oceans of Yurm dry up abruptly, forcing most of the organisms in them to stand on their own ten legs for the first time.  Most perish, some grumble, a few thrive.  In particular several of the most powerfully-snooted innocuopods do quite well for themselves – now their snoots can breathe, eat, and loco-mote for them!  Truly a marvel of evolution.  Many bacterial mats discover that adhering to dry rocks is at least as pleasant as a soggy water’s surface, and within ten million years of the Great Drying, life appears quite congenial. 

Then the oceans of Yurm return from near-orbit in the greatest precipitation ever to occur, wiping out ten times the number of species disturbed in the initial hubbub.  The Sog remains the most titanic disaster in the history of life on, around, and generally in the vicinity of Yurm.  We can only aspire to top it. 

The Mezzosorpanoplostic Era – the Quintuplic Period

The Quintuplic is a time of great hardship and great innovation: the few lucky snoot-bearers and bacterial matters that survive go apeshit across the surface of Yurm, sea and water and air alike.  The sky buzzes with a thousand thousand whiny little heliwings; the water is abroil with fierce and chewy creatures from shorks to shirrts; and on land one million different kinds of creepodont-related creepostrophes lurch sulkily across the landscape in great pouts that shake the very ground. 

At the close of the Quintuplic all five remaining continents bump together at once and the resulting shockwave exterminates all of the innocuopods, most of the creepodonts, a bunch of the creepostrophes, and all of the shirrts.  None of the shorks though.  They did quite well for themselves. 

The Phlegmic Period

The violent wobbling of the continents produces a permanently shaky and highly wiggly climate for life; and the Phlegmic is famously home to the dawn of the jiggliest animals ever to swerve their way drunkenly over Yurm: the jauntertrophes.  This extreme branch of the creepostrophe family tree squiggled their way to ever-more-scrambled heights throughout the entire Mezzosorpanoplostic Era, and indeed early scientists refused to believe the most impressive of their kind could even exist on dry land without undergoing fatal and immediate squiggling.  Modern math has proven otherwise. 

The Boddaceous Period

The Boddaceous was a period mostly consistent of lava, and the way life responded to this in many ways determined its future success.  The jauntertrophes shuddered their way above it and around it and a bit to the side of it; crossing entire trans-continental lava fields without so much as wobbling into a single plume of smoke.  The shorks dove deep and ate rocks.  The creepostrophes ate the lava.  And the creepodonts dropped dead. 

Then a very large rock slammed into Yurm and everyone’s ingenuity was at best a huge waste of time. 

The Seeloplostic Era – the Postpaleoplesic Period

The Seeloplostic begins with a much-diminished Yurm.  The jauntertrophes are dead; the creepodonts are dead; the creepostrophes aren’t doing too hot, and the most prevalent type of animal on Yurm were little ugly bug things that ate fast and died faster – a dubious ecological niche, it’s got to be said.  With little competition and a vast, devastated world open to all, they were free to eat faster and die faster than they ever had before.  They were called copeiforms, and they were our ancestors, except for all the ones that died. 

Which were most of them.  Copeiform evolution believed in error moreso so than trial, with such luminaries as Puborre’s Witherbling (which fed entirely upon its own young); the Lesser Mock Skammer (which possessed eight pairs of redundant legs); and the Rippled Wharf (whose courting rituals appeared to consist of building a tiny ball and sealing itself inside forever). 

The Postpostunpaleoplesicish Period

The beginnings of the modern ecosystem are more clearly visible as the Postpaleoplesic gives way to the Postpostunpaleoplesicish.  Copeiforms begin to settle down into the sober middle-management phase of their existence, with the vosperoids and their plain colouration, bland legs, spherical torso, and modest, unassuming little brains reigning supreme in most niches thanks to a great efficiency of effort.  Their exciting and whimsical wuuly competition were reduced to relictual fauna, surviving only in isolated paradise islands whose gorgeous, peaceful serenity and plentiful food left them plump, flightless, and – according to our ancestor’s records – delicious. 

The Now

It falls to us, as examples of the mightiest single species ever birthed upon Yurm, to record its events for all posterity, which will doubtlessly not include us.  As this chronicle is written we are locked into an irrevocable death spiral, having spent the last two hundred years industriously mining ocean sediments formed of dead creepodonts only to realize halfway in that they were filling our atmosphere with deadly oxygen (knew those would come back to bite us, the surly little bastards).  Since changing things is somewhat difficult for vosperoid organisms, our principle strategy has been to resign ourselves to our fates and grimly trudge towards our deaths.  I hope this chronicle of our world’s history of life explains why this was a winning tactic for our ancestors, and so too for us.  Soon this volume will be loaded onto a satellite and launched beyond the farthest limits of our solar system.  May it never reach another organism benighted and stupid enough to read it. 

-Walmpurt Toos, Chief Botherer of Finklefaak United Collegiate Pit.  Esteemed. 

Gary finished his cigarette and he dropped the smouldering stub and he crushed it underfoot and lifted his foot and the rush of air restarted it as he went back inside and that was how fifty people died. 

Not all immediately at once, though.  It went something like this. 

***

The fire roamed the little patch of mouldy greenery outside the backdoor for some minutes as it figured itself out and came to terms with its life outside the old Mortimer Mansion.  Inside was noise and light and reckless danger; outside was the cold night and the damp air that smelled like autumn mould year-round and the branches of the gigantic tree in the neighbour’s yard that overshadowed the entire block and somewhere in the distance an owl absolutely losing its shit. 

The choice was obvious, particularly when the fire caught hold of a little bit of splintered wood off the deck that was covered in some sort of ancient long-since-illegal varnish that might as well have been pure gasoline.  It ate it up in a blink and dove into the basement headfirst. 

The basement was a dour wonderland of unfinished concrete floors, unpainted wooden walls, and uncoordinated and unsatisfying makeouts.  But behind the walls was gloriously flammable insulation the likes of which hadn’t been manufactured in centuries, and so the fire let them be and roiled upwards invisibly, leaving only some wisps of transparent smoke and a lingering odour of burnt mouse feces. 

Above was the kitchen, and as it scuttled its way beneath the sink the fire felt a great and clammy moisture above its head where Jules Mortimer was trying to wash the fucking dishes.  They should’ve used paper plates, but hey, it’d be cool to use the old place’s dishes, right?  Pretend posh.  Well pretend posh was real dirty and the real estate guy was coming over in three days whoops rescheduled to day after tomorrow so guess who had to do the fucking dishes in the middle of a party whoop de fucking doo fuckity doo fuck?  Him.  Because he was the oldest Mortimer on the premises.  Never mind that it had been Katie’s idea to have the party.  Ugh.  It had been Katie’s idea to try and start a paint-snorting competition too.  Ugh. 

The fire crawled all the way up his pant leg and into his boxers before he noticed, so intense was his snit.  Then it gave him a Brazilian and he started yelping and kicking and running and on his way he kicked the sink so hard the tap broke. 

No more water!  Joy!

The living room was filled with bodies and yelling and music and yelling and vomiting and yelling so it was all equally inaudible until Jules ran in and somehow screamed over all of it.  This distracted the partygoers, at first to point and laugh (didn’t work), then to shout and stand there (didn’t work), then to try to stomp out Jules’s pants (didn’t work), then to pour their drinks on him (worked, eventually).

By the time all was said and done laughing, people had finally started to ask themselves questions like ‘where did that come from?’ and it was too late because the kitchen fire had found the old paint tins under the sink.

It made a noise like FWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMP

But much louder and hotter. 

***

By now most of the party was aware something odd was happening.  Either there was smoke drifting through the floorboards, the walls were warm to the touch, they’d just put out a brushfire in Jules Mortimer’s crotch, or an enormous gout of flame had just rocketed upwards through the ventilation system and set fire to the bed they’d been sleeping in.  Also, everyone was yelling “FIRE.”

Several solutions were attempted and beset with difficulties.  The mansion’s fire extinguishers were filled with dried spiderwebs and air; hugging the floor to avoid smoke was complex due to the intricate vomit-and-cotton-candy covering that laced much of the floorboards six hours into the party; and the fire exit was on fire. 

Clearly, improvisation would be needed.  Mercifully, liquid inspiration had been taken.  Sadly, proclamation was outspoken: “THROW THE BOOZE ON IT.”

Which didn’t help much at all, particularly when it vaporized and filled the air with eye-bleeding alcohol fumes and covered the floor in glass shards as people tried to crawl on it.  Still, it was all in good faith and most people were willing to concede it had been better than nothing. 

***

So the evening went on in the spirit of competition, fire against festivities.  The fire consumed the basement and its inhabitants joined the rest of their kind in the living room, where they contributed much confusion and panic.  The partygoers tried to phone for help and the Tinco Valley fire department filed the deluge of reports as spam and said they’d have to verify things first.  The fire feasted upon the discarded coats and purses and shoes in the front hall and their owners retreated up the stairs to the third floor to look for a fire escape. 

And the fire’s humble roots just outside the back door raced up through the gutters and the eavestrough in a snake of embers, until it crept in through the attic window and found the bags and bags and bags of old dry leaves from the autumn of ’32 that Mortimer Senior (dead forty years, god rest his soul) had been keeping for a rainy day.  Like finest tinder they were. 

Things were beginning to get a little bit desperate.  Many were the tears shed and the regrets spoken.

“I wish I’d eaten more than one bowl of chips, and that they hadn’t been nacho cheez flavoured,” mourned Dilbert Dabny. 

“I wish I hadn’t broken up with you ten minutes earlier,” said Daphne Yubo to her ex-girlfriend.

“I wish I’d broken up with you two years ago,” said Daphne Yubo’s ex-girlfriend.

“I wish I didn’t have these horrible suspicions about that one cigarette I had out back an hour ago,” muttered Gary Vorbleck under his breath. 

“I really really wish I hadn’t spent the past three hours doing dishes,” said Jules Mortimer.  At least his arms were still nice and moist, even if they were a little wrinkly.

“I really really REALLY wish you hadn’t talked me into hosting this party,” said Katie Mortimer.

“Excuse me, sir, but you’re a fucking liar,” her brother retorted.

“Excuse and sir yourself,” she said, “but you’re a big ol’ bitch.”
“Language.”
“Motherfucker, do you SPEAK it?”
The fire dropped a beam next to them in a shower of sparks.  Its contribution was misunderstood by its critics, who hastily relocated to the nor’west solar.  Flames were already curdling up from the roof around its base, and the glass of the windows and skylight twinkled merrily in the heat haze. 

There were many uglier places to die, most of which the fire had already set alight.  Bright red tongues and orange hands and the odd blue-and-white licks made outrageous and suggestive statements to the night sky. 

“Well,” said Jean Baltimore, “we’re doomed.”
“Yep,” agreed Sam Winmoore.  “Wanna have sex?”
“Sure why not.”
“Oh good idea!” said Mavis Bacon.  “Hey Claude?  You want in on this?”
“Might as well.”
“People, people, people,” said Jules Mortimer.  “Be REASONABLE.  We’re all about to die; you can’t just have sex!”
“Yeah, not just on the floor,” said Katie Mortimer.  “Have some standards.  Why not use these enormous bedsheets Mortimer Senior (god rest his soul) always kept stashed in the solar’s closet here, for midday trysts with his eighteen mistresses?”
Everyone examined the bedsheets and was very impressed.

“High thread count,” remarked Daphne Yubo, whose father was a tailor.

“Nice patterning,” said Mavis Bacon, whose grandmother was a mural-maker. 

“Could support a whole body with this,” said Boris Murt, who was an aspiring serial killer. 

Everyone looked at him.

“What?”
“Say that again.”
“All I said was oh right.  Huh.  How ‘bout that.”

***

The bedsheets burned away from the windowframe where they’d been knotted just as Katie Mortimer’s feet touched grass, nearly dumping hot coals onto her head as she scuttled away to the streetside with the rest of the partygoers to check out the last of the fireworks. 

They stood there, on the dimly smouldering edge of the lawn, watching the historic Mortimer Mansion disintegrate into base carbon, and they looked at one another in a sort of sobriety that had nothing to do with drunkenness and knew that from now on they would look at life very differently. 

That was when the Tinco Valley firetruck – laden with fifty heroic volunteers, foaming at the mouth one and all – hopped the kerb, tipped crazily onto two wheels for a heartbreaking twenty feet, and skidded nobly into the mansion, taking out it and everything inside it in a cataclysmic eruption of heat and steam.    

***

Most of the Mortimer Mansion partygoers evaded punishment in the days to come.  The public eye was focused on finding a more economical way to budget the fire department; it had been the sixth truck that month. 

Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer certainly weren’t complaining.  That had been one HELL of an insurance payout. 

A Record of the Final Daily Specials of Old Eddie’s Pub n Grub

*Bean Soup*

A rich blend of sumptuously fatty pork, slow-cooked beans, and caramelized onion, augmented with secret spices from our secretive master chef! 

*Soup de Yesterdaye*

A rich blend of sumptuously fatty pork, slow-cooked beans, and caramelized onion, augmented with secret spices from our secretive master chef and given an extra day or so to simmer and really get all those flavours mingling!

*Crunchy Salad*

Put some summer between your teeth and feel it crack!  Crisp carrot and apple slivers with a selection of seeds and nuts, all hand-washed in a raspberry vinaigrette by our master chef and topped with flavoured ice shavings formed from clear glacier water!

*Mozarella Sticks*

Soft, melty, tasty cheesey goodness, breaded in fragrant herbed bread crumbs.  Get a platter – or better yet, get two!  Or even BETTER, guess what’s coming up day after tomorrow?

*An Old Favourite Returns!*

Try some freshly fried pork crackling hors d’oeuvres tonight topped with a breathtaking variety of mix-and-match sauces, and while you’re at it, ready yourselves for the triumphant return of what you’ve all been waiting for tomorrow night!  Get a seat ready and set your Fridays to FUNdays!

*Bean Soup*

A rich blend of sumptuously fatty pork, slow-cooked beans, and caramelized onion, augmented with secret spices from our secretive master chef!  Don’t miss it this time; it’s never too late to correct a mistake!

*Soup de Yesterdaye*

A rich blend of sumptuously fatty pork, slow-cooked beans, and caramelized onion, augmented with secret spices from our secretive master chef!  Better try it now or you’re just proving you’re uncultured swine!

*Marinated Chicken Skewers*

Poke your nose into Monday tomorrow with a pokey little set of these in your belly.  Chicken soaked in a cocktail of spices and herbs before being threaded onto rosemary stalks and seared to juicy goodness, then placed right on your plate not a minute from the grill!  Almost as good as bean soup!

*Jumbo Shrimp*

The biggest and freshest shrimp in the finest breadcrumbs and the most golden frying but really this should be bean soup.  It’s not bad, but it’s not bean soup.  You could like this sort of thing if you like this sort of thing, I guess. 

*Cabbage Rolls With Cabbage and No Beans*

Why did you not eat the bean soup?  It’s a good recipe, my mother made it, my father loved it, my grandmother passed it down to us all.  It put peasants on the farmland and on the battlefield and in the grave for centuries, and now you think you’re too good for it, is that what’s going on?  Have some cabbage rolls and choke on them dry and flavourless.  Like your souls. 

Your last chance comes tomorrow. 

*Bean Soup*

Eat the soup or eat shit. 

*Now Hiring!*

Our dish of the day is… a career in delicious food service!  Why not step in?  Bring your most mouth-watering resume, and don’t skimp on the references!  We’re STARVED for applicants!

*Fried Basket – NEW CHEF SPECIAL!!!*

We all welcome new hands in the kitchen, and those hands are eager to get to know you too – or at least your stomachs!  Welcome our new master chef by purchasing a delicious fried basket, consisting of everything from wings to pickles to chicken fingers, topped with a delectable fried mars bar!

*Club Sandwiches*

You’d have to be knocked over the head to pass up on one of these bruisingly-good meals!  Fresh crusty bread in FOUR layers, encompassing cheeses, meats, vegetables, and a new sauce on every level!

*Macaroni and Cheese and Bean Soup – NEW CHEF MEMORIAL SPECIAL!*

Put the FUN in today’s funereal special with a salute to our old new master chef and a welcome-home to our old old master chef, featuring both their best dishes: golden and crumbly mac and cheese and a rich blend of sumptuously fatty pork, slow-cooked beans, and caramelized onion, augmented with secret spices from our secretive master chef!  Memorial service from ten pm until we’re all too drunk to stay awake. 

*Bean Soup*

You didn’t finish all the bean soup but you ate all the macaroni and cheese this disrespect will not be tolerated. 

*Donuts*

Try a basket of fresh-fried soft moist crisp and delicious donuts, complete with dipping sauces!  Officers of the law, feel free to stop by!  Very free.  We’ll give you the donuts free.  Please visit.  Please please visit quickly.  PLEASE.  Help help help.

*Meat Pies – NEW MANAGEMENT SPECIAL!*

Try a mouth-watering browned pastry packed to the BRIM with aged, marbled fat cut from the biggest pig you’ve ever met.  From the knife to the table within twelve hours!  Served with a hot ‘Sweeney’ toddy, made with secret house spices.

*Shepherd’s Pie*

‘Meat’ our health inspector’s visit this evening with a belly full of Shepherd’s pie!  Warmed to perfection and left with a hint of steamy simple herbs.  Contains everything that couldn’t be packed into the meat pies, but also delicious potatoes! 

*Ladyfingers – HEALTH INSPECTOR MEMORIAL SPECIAL*

In memorial of our health inspector, whom many of you knew for years, we will be serving ladyfingers tonight.  Juicy, meaty, falling-off-the-bone.  Served with plum sauce, because she would’ve wanted them that way. 

*Long Pork*

Get a piece of the forbidden taste with this most slender and succulent of ‘swine.’  No seasoning or sauces; the point is in the ‘pig.’  Applicants for early tasting come around through the rear alley and don’t look behind you.  Healthy yet plump only, please. 

*Molotov Cocktails*

A sumptuous bottle of vodka, half-drained, filled to the brim with oil and topped with a wick flambé before hurtling right into your lap.  I’ll take every one of you bastards down with me I swear if you can’t appreciate what’s on your plate maybe YOU should be on the plate  MAN IS MEAT MEAT IS MAN MAN IS MEAT MEAT IS MAN MAN MEAT MEAT MAN MAN MEAT MEAT MEAT ME

*Future Site of a New McDonalds!*