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Behold the Struthiomimus. 

The ostrich mimic, but it does a poor job of it – not only is it over ten feet long, even in this immature state, but it’s got a great big tail and its eyes aren’t fixed in their sockets and it lives millions and millions of years ago so it can’t mimic the thing it precedes.  Its feet are fast and its movements are darting and its toothless keratin-sheathed bony beak is opened just wide enough for it to breath a tiny bit harder, because it’s been running for a while, picking its way through dense thickets in the highlands as it descends through growing forests and fallen trees.

Its name is Billy.

***

Behold Billy. 

He looks both ways at the intersection, just like his mother told him to.  It’s a busy time of day down in the valley where the river runs wide, and the traffic is thick and plodding.  Great big thunderingly slow hadrosaurs are on the move from hither to thither; heavy-skulled and pointy-browed ceratopsians are ambling down for their noon drinks.  They’re swapping filthy stories as they go, telling the tall tale about the titanosaur that sat on a cycad. 

Billy tries to pay them no mind.  He’s on a mission.  His mother told him he needed to do something important for her today, and he’s a good boy. 

***

Behold the good boy. 

He’s headed downtown, where the new monkey puzzle trees have grown in fast and furious and thunderous, towering up and up.  His mother complains about them, says they’re a gentrifying blight on the landscape, but Billy isn’t sure whether or not she’s talking about something real or just griping, like when she bitches that mammals are taking all the jobs that used to go to good honest saurs, which his father has told him is total bullshit and not to be listened to.  She’s not that bad on most days though, now that the news is off the air.  Real tragic what happened to that anchorman though, but silver linings and it’s an ill wind that blows good for nobody and so on and so forth and etc and the like. 

Billy stops for a drink.  His mother gave him money for that, it’s okay.  He sips from a cheap little rivulet, but it’s strongly sweet and just what he wanted.  He watches a couple of cute coelurosaurs sipping from the other side of the brook, wishes he knew what the hell you were meant to do in circumstances like this, and shakes it off.  He has an errand. 

***

Behold the errand.

The corner volcano lurches into view, surrounded by pale plastic palm trees.  Billy scurries inside past the obese caveman at the entrance, cheap faux-leopardprint loincloth adorned with his last meal – and the meal before that, and the meal before that, and so on and so on. 

“No browsin’” he belches out, scratching himself somewhere unthinkable, unimaginable, and unspeakable. 

Billy is not here to browse.  Billy is here for a purpose.  He scurries past the shelves of pet rocks, the bins of home hardware rocks, the boxes of jelly rocks (takes effort, that one – oh, he’s loved those ever since he hatched), and finally he stands at the rock racks.

His mother wants a rock magazine about home and shale.  Billy is looking for it very honestly, of course he is, but his eyes wander and bobble trying to find it, and what should they rest upon – quite accidentally! – but the hard rock section. 

Wow. 

He’s never seen a tail quite that thick before. 

There is a distant belch and Billy is overcome with impossible and inescapable shame at the mere idea of anyone knowing he glanced at that part of the rock rack, let alone thought about it.  He hunts frantically, digs through the back issues, and there it is: home and shale’s top ten picks of the burgess. 

Those long slender hands are good for grabbing; it’s snatched up and dragged to the front of the store before you can say ‘non-pronating forelimbs.’ 

“Thirteen pebbles,” says the caveman, exploring his nose with the hairiest of his fingers. 

Billy puts down what his mother gave him.

“That’s ten,” says the caveman.  And sonuva b-word he’s right; mom must have slipped Billy two fives instead of a ten and a five.  “Gimme three.”

“I don’t have it,” says Billy.  And he doesn’t; he’s a good boy, but now and then he feels temptation – the dark urge to blow his money on candy.  So he left it at home.  All he’s got is ten pebbles from his mother. 

“Tough luck,” says the caveman.  “Beat it.”

***

Behold the beating of it. 

Billy walks home slow, dejected, one slow foot at a time, uphill into the suburbs where the homeless are forbidden and the fern-coated lawns are perfect and hideous.  The concrete is hot beneath his sneakers; it’s a boiling day in Laurasia and even the rain that starts falling feels pre-fried before it hits the ground, hissing away into nothing as soon as it listlessly spatters against the old red sandstone road. 

It’s about then that he remembers that he forgot to take his pebbles back from the caveman.

“Fuck!” says Billy, for the first time without premeditation.  It feels hot and spicy in his beak, and he looks around guiltily, sure someone is about to tell him not to do that.  But there’s nobody around except for an elderly tyrannosaur across the road, dozing at the bus stop, and it clearly is going to take a lot more than some spontaneous profanity to get them to move or give much of a shit about anything ever again.  He wonders if they’re dead.

Billy sort of wonders if it’d be better to be dead or to have to explain to his mom that he doesn’t have her home and shale magazine.  This makes him feel shame, for what seems like the hundredth time that day.  It’s almost as hot as the air, and he’s thirsty again.  Oh no.

Oh no.  Oh no no no no no no no he stopped for a drink!  How much did it cost?  Did it cost three pebbles? 

He thinks it costed three pebbles. 

“FUCK!” yells Billy, loud enough to wake up the elderly tyrannosaurus with a snort and loud enough that he can’t even be embarrassed about it.  “Fuck!”  He screwed up!  He had a drink and he ruined everything!  His mother’s going to be furious with him!  “Fuck.”  He should’ve just given up and bought more garbage and claimed he dropped the magazine in the river.  “Fuck…” now the caveman has the rest of the money and he’ll deny it if Billy goes back and all he has to show for it, all his mother has to show for it, is a sort of tepid drink in Billy’s stomach and a lot of regret. 

***

Behold the regret.

It’s scorched into the sandstone and into Billy’s soul as he trudges up the steps to his house, a little split-level slab that gets paid for by alimony and desperation.  His palms would be sweaty if he could sweat. 

There’s movement from inside the curtains.  His mother is awake.  Probably waiting for her magazine. 

Fuck, thinks Billy, because this close to home he sure as hell isn’t going to say it aloud.  Fuck.  Fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck fucklestein fuck fuck fuckosaurus rex fuck me fuck you fuck everything. 

He wishes the ground would rise up and swallow him.  He wishes the seas would rush in and wash him away.  He wishes the sky would fall down and pop him out of existence, and it catches him by the most surprise anyone’s ever had when it does just that.

It’s a big bright flash to the south. 

“Woah,” he says, as the shockwave ripples closer, evaporating trees and soil and dinosaurs and cavemen and buildings and knocking over the Bronto-Burger down the street and kicking its sign towards him at one thousand miles an hour, the cheerful stupid grin of Buddy Bronto the last thing he knows he will ever see. 

Behold: a wish granted.

Finally, the time had come. 

But there was no sense rushing to meet it, so she poured herself a cup of coffee and selected a single cookie and ate it and chewed every mouthful and forced herself to taste every bite and she put her thoughts in order.

Her long, arduous graduate work refurbishing polar bears under Dr. Hammerneck, the unbearable old asshole. 

Her years spent barely able to afford breakfast every other day.

Her sixteen total revisions on her thesis from ground zero, transforming it from a modest piece on reticulating koalas into a greater Oceanic GUI into a thoroughly radical yet eminently well-grounded hypothetical blueprint on the long-term reinsertion and patching of urban megafauna. 

Dr. Nomann, PhD.  It had a ring and a necklace and a whole damned bracelet to it.  And now, after all those years, the first jewel was about to be added to them.

She opened up the document, cool white and blank as a baby’s face, and typed:

Fern 2.0

Then she stared at it for a while, sipping her coffee. 

***

Reimagining an entire group of this magnitude was a hell of a first project, but she had heavenly credentials and the hellish scars to prove them.  Her word was trusted.  Her mind was wanted.  Her expertise was needed. 

So.  First draft.  What did ferns really need?
She tapped her thumb against her forefinger five times, gulped the last bit of coffee, checked her hands for crumbs, and typed for six hours. 

Then she got up and stretched, walked back over, deleted half of every other sentence, resorted everything, turned it into a blueprint, turned the blueprint into a proof, turned the proof into a certainty, formatted it, inked it, blotted it, licked it, sealed it, and sent it. 

Then she had dinner and went to bed and slept the sort of weighty, reassuring dreams shared only by cats and infants and murderers. 

She woke up the next morning, had a nice breakfast, opened her mail, and read the follow criticisms of her design:

‘Inadequate.’

Ten minutes later, after ten thousand years of internal screaming, she had changed everything in her head and prepared herself to spend the next twenty hours reconfiguring reality to match it. 

***

This time it said ‘Undirected.’

***

Four complete redrafts later she phoned her workplace.

“Oh!  That’s the spam filter!” said the helpful, eager young man at the desk.

“Thank you,” she said.

“We’ll take you off that.”
“Thank you.”
“Have a nice day.”

“Thank you.”

***

“Too technical,” was the reply.  “No vision.  We don’t want to just have ‘fern, but better.’  Fern 2.0 must appeal to all that the public has come to expect in a fern while also opening entirely new avenues of the fern paradigm.  We want it to be familiar, but novel.  Surprising, yet welcoming.  Bold and comforting.”

Seven days of intense meditative autotrance sing-a-longs later, inspiration struck her with the force of a thunderbolt in a magazine and she worked through two nights and three days before editing and submitting her draft. 

It was a very small fern.  It was a very small fern that contained many organelles that were themselves very small ferns down to the subatomic level, and could link together itself to form very large ferns up to the size of redwoods.  She called it the fernctal, and attached a small 20-page annotation suggesting possible use cases for it, ranging from children’s playgrounds to designing planets. 

‘Too ambitious,’ came the reply.  ‘And the redwood department really doesn’t like your attitude.’

The next day’s mug of coffee was bigger, and the day after that she just took the pot. 

***

She submitted a fern that adopted the characteristics of any environment; hues, shades, texture, and almost the very essence of  the landscape in miniature, sublime in every detail.  It was rejected – ‘no practical applications.’

She submitted a fern that was robust enough to withstand freshly-cooled lava indefinitely, and could grow on any substrate.  It was rejected – ‘not sexy enough, no appeal to the customer base.’

She submitted a fern that was as hearty and filling as roast potatoes and as smooth and delectable as the finest gelato.  It was rejected – ‘too appealing to animals, would be eaten into extinction.’

She submitted a fern that came with its own accessories and a powerful grip and a small air-powered dart launcher.  It was rejected – ‘unsafe, might put someone’s eye out and contains choking hazards.’

She submitted a fern that was as soft and plush as a teddy bear’s soul.  It was rejected – ‘not machine washable.’

She submitted a fern that could absorb sixty times its mass in water and retain it flawlessly until wrung out.  It was rejected – ‘too expensive to manufacture.’

She submitted a fern.

Then she got up to put away her fern 1.0 control group and realized she was holding her latest project: a fern that could survive on less energy than a single-celled bacterium, and she’d just turned in the wrong plant. 

Ping, went her mailbox. 

It took half an hour for her to muster the courage to walk back to her computer. 

“Excellent work!  Fern 2.0 is approved.  Very creative.  We’ll keep your resume on file.”

Dr. Nomann, PhD, read the letter exactly once, carefully and slowly, cross-checking sentences and verifying each word.  Then she nodded, closed her files, threw the computer out the window, and ran away to New Zealand.

There were a lot fewer people there.  But there were plenty of ferns. 

She was the five-hundred-and-seventh of her father’s clutch.  The middle child, unassuming and unmemorable.

The elder, lower four hundred were crushed into the bedrock when the ice came; implacable, unstoppable, shredding the earth and eating the horizon.  The younger, fresher four hundred were scraped away by its ripping claws. 

Of the two hundred that remained, the outermost succumbed to the cold the fastest.  They collapsed into maybes and might-have-beens, their little furnaces slowing down to a dead halt.  Then their neighbours, and their neighbours, and so on and so on until all that was left was the five-hundred-and-seventh egg  in the center of what had been a thousand more, finally insulated by the fused shells of its fellows.

Still, she did not escape freely.  The temperatures were too low for far too long, and then when her own reactor began to properly engage, they were too high.  She had remained still and unhatched for ten times her natural course, and now she had to emerge early, half-formed, still-molten. 

But she was still lucky, and so she ate her way out of her own egg’s thorium shell and then the endless hollows of her long-cooled clutchmates.  Her jaws worked and worked and worked and bit by bit by bite she fed herself, the suffocating force of her own waste heat wrestling with the blank cold weight of ten billion tons of ice above and below.  

Six hundred years later she breached the rim of her nest, and at last, gloriously, freely, for an instant, she knew what it was to be cold. 

Oh, it was lovely.  So lovely.  She could have stayed and soaked it in for millennia.  But her abdomen was boiling away, so she savoured it for a decade and then pressed on.

And in.  And up.

***

To sleep, perchance to dream.  She didn’t know what dreams were, in the same way that fish were fuzzy about water, or apes were confused about ideas. 

But they were a fickle thing for her now, obnoxiously.  She was sure that once upon a time she had done nothing BUT dream, and now she found herself a light sleeper.  No sooner would she have settled a nice hollow in a thick layer than she would be started to near-wakefulness by the trickle trickle thump bump of liquid ice, seeping and steaming away from her white-hot sides.  Her breath alone would leave her head flooded deep after resting her head for a century, and above and around her the ice would crawl back sullenly until her comfortable pillows had vanished and left her encased in a too-wide mould of her own body.

Too-wide never lasted, either.  That was the other inconsistent thing.  Her reactor was trying to make up for its faulty start; churning greedily day and night in a space of endless cooling.  She burned away exhaust that would have smelted her to molten ruin ten thousand times over every year, funnelling it away into the melting world around her, where it formed streams that flowed down and away in search of a more peaceful dark. 

Something in her dreams suggested that perhaps she shouldn’t be growing anymore, that maybe her long infancy had charred away something small and important inside her that should have stopped this, that her own mother wouldn’t recognize her now.  Then she stirred, and nearly woke under the weight of a fresh lake steaming at her sides, and it was forgotten as she tunneled forwards again, hunting for a new bed. 

***

Something tickled at her atomic clock, and she woke up.

That was the simple way to say it.  In reality she couldn’t even pinpoint when it happened.  Her abdomen tensed; her mouths stilled; her secondary reactor chamber ignited, and then her eyes opened. 

They didn’t see anything interesting, and for a long time that was enough. 

But then came the itch. 

It was indescribable and unavoidable and it started in her head and it moved down to her tail and back again and every time it circled the six-mile length of her body it grew, and its growth was logarithmic, and after seventeen decades she realized two things.

First, she was not going to fall asleep again.

Second, she could realize things. 

This was a great shock and it almost drove her out of her mind in an entirely new way, but the shock of being shocked itself put a stop to that.  Consciousness was a self-assembling problem, just like her life had been, and in comparison to the struggles of her birth this was a cakewalk. 

Besides, her body only loosely needed to be connected to it.  She could think as much as she liked while her body began doing needful things.  Existential crises and regulating her immediate environment in accordance to her internal demands could be handled simultaneously with an ease that alarmed her only half as much as her ability to be alarmed. 

***

She tunneled more freely now. 

Before it was driven by demand.  A new body segment, an increase in water depth, a surge in ambient temperature, a restless dream.  Now she could see – metaphorically, not literally – and she could try.

Most of the trying was failure.  That was new too.  Some of it was success, and that was REALLY new, but she liked it.  She liked it a lot. 

And so she tried a lot. 

Tunnels that connected with themselves in pleasing ways.  Tunnels that enveloped her meltwater and ushered it into her past tunnels, turning them into frozen whirlpools.  Tunnels that dropped low, scraping the edge of the bizarre substance that was not-ice.  Tunnels that surged high, so high that the texture and form and rigidness of the world began to feel funny and she felt her first fear and dropped low again, where she could think about that. 

Patterns were a big thing, when she discovered them.  Symmetry in particular was astounding, and when she began to think on her own body she discovered modelling and made herself a hundred times over, engraved into the world and replicated down to the exact pathing of her ventilation systems.   

Then she tried to do the same to the ice, which led to mapping.  Which led to problems. 

***

Surely, surely, surely.  Surely there was more. 

She spiralled, a perfectly uncontrolled shape and one of her favourites.  It was unsymmetrical, which terrified her, and terror held its own appeals. 

Out from the center, which she put on her infant nest on a whim.  Out and out and out, swinging up and down in carefully-modulated waves according to the cycles of her own biology and her own mind and the worries that ate at her from somewhere deeper that told her that everything that had ever happened to her and from her was fundamentally a mistake. 

She had driven herself past ten million natural limits and she was planning something that would annihilate ten million more and it was all driven on a single small hunch somewhere in her restless core that told her that if she kept doing this it would be worth it, it would make sense, it would be correct. 

So she spiralled, slowly, certainly. 

And the next time she felt that strange weakness in the world at her side, up above, she did not back down.  Instead, she braced herself, felt that strange massing of forces underneath herself that she’d never ever noticed in a million years and more, and she pushed with all the strength she hadn’t known she had. 

***

The ice was gone.  Around her was nothing.  Not liquid ice, not solid ice, not vaporized ice. 

Nothing. 

It was so shocking she couldn’t even be horrified, so instead she fell over and out and the rest of her followed mile on mile, coil on coil, with curiously high-pitched and squeaky noises that she didn’t recognize because she was surrounded by so much vaporized…nothing. 

How strange. 

She tried biting it.  That didn’t work.

She tried burrowing through it.  That REALLY didn’t work.

She tried venting waste heat at it, which did SOMETHING but faded quickly and actually tuckered her out a little. 

All in all, it was very boring.  So when the ice cracked underneath her and split apart and began to move, she was very nearly as pleased as she was terrified.  She dug into it and wriggled with excitement and fear, turning herself in knots over and over again.

Then her head poked out into the nothing again, and her rear fell out into…liquid ice.

A lot of liquid ice. 

She turned her head about and then she opened her eyes – almost by mistake – and when she’d wrapped her head around THAT she realized that there was a lot more liquid ice than she’d ever imagined, and she was now floating in it, in a lump of ice that was, if her eyes were real, smaller than the thing she thought was her body. 

***

Burrowing through the liquid ice proved untenable. 

***

The heat was aching away at her. 

Bad enough to be kidnapped by liquid ice, bad enough to have nothing to dig through but this tiny little scrap, bad enough to discover boredom (the novelty had worn off fast), but now there was heat that wasn’t being produced by her own self and it was the worst thing she’d ever experienced.  If she sat on top of the ice she almost warmed faster than if she hid below in her own waste heat.  The world was different than she’d ever dreamed, and she hated it a lot. 

Wretched thing.  Next time she’d spiral inwards.  That would be safer.  In fact, she could practice that now. 

So she did.  She spiralled herself up very, very tightly, tucked her head inwards and shut her treacherous eyes, and fell asleep from full wakefulness for the first time she could remember.  It was like riding a bike. 

She woke up when something metal poked her. 

***

It was a little bit like her body.  But incredibly small, and very fragile, and it melted when she turned to look at it. 

But there was more, so she followed it, curious, until her head burst up into the awful empty iceless world – warmer still, dreadful place – and came face to face with a tiny, tiny thing floating upon the liquid ice, wavering precariously in the ripples of her movement. 

You could DO that?  Wow.  That surprised her.  She nudged it carefully and it flipped over and sank.

Well, it clearly wasn’t very coordinated.  She followed it into the liquid ice, curious, and watched it split apart into bow stem and stern and settle on the sea floor and begin to rust, and that was when she felt more metal poke at her rear and came back up. 

She was surrounded by the little metal things.  Some of them were bigger, some of them were smaller, some of them were floating in the nothing.  All of them were very fast.  All of them were warm. 

An instinct she’d never known existed told her to greet these malformed children, and so she gently vented waste heat at them and watched in surprise as they all melted away like so much ice. 

Clearly these were very frail infants.  Or maybe they weren’t metal at all? 

No, she tasted the remains.  Metal. 

Something bright flashed on top of her head and she flinched.  For a minute it had felt like she was under the ice again, pressing down on her. 

And again.  And again.  And again.  Twelve flashes, twelve punches to her head.  It was very hot and all her ice was gone, leaving her aimlessly coiling in liquid ice and vaporized ice, and she couldn’t remember ever being more dissatisfied. 

So she left her spirals behind, and she did what she’d done so long ago: she went in a straight line, and she found something solid – the same not-ice that had lain deep under her tunnels, so long ago – and in a fit of irritated madness she burrowed into that too, digging deep.

WARM!

TOO

WARM!

OUT!

***

She popped up out of the hateful heat all at once faster than she’d ever moved and bellyflopped atop a mass of mixed metal and…garbage?… that was nearly as big as she was.  Four or five more flashes punched into her head, making her warmer still and vaporizing a lot of the garbage. 

So, this was the world outside the ice, was it?

Well. 

She’d do something about that. 

***

NEW YORK LOST

CREATURE ON THE MOVE INLAND

MILLIONS DEAD

NUCLEAR STRIKES CEASED

NORTH AMERICAN REFUGEES OVERWHELMING

ABANDONMENT OF THE CONTINENT COUNSELED

and so on.

It takes a certain kind of madness to live as far up south as Glint Strait.  And nobody can live through the winter.

Look at the water.  Look how it sits; too choppy to freeze but too cold to move.  Like mown grass made waves. 

Look at the cliffs.  They glitter in the summer; in the winter they sparkle.  Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful lethal faces, soaring up high. 

Look at Stonehead Glacier.  Hanging off its mountain, looming over the water, crawling its way along to its dissolution at its old-man pace just a hair slower than it’s being born. 

But the ship that had ventured this far so many summers ago didn’t look at those.  They were too busy looking at the little fjord underneath the glacier, and at the exposed rock there. 

It shone fit to make the cliffs look dim as a dead eye. 

***

Here is the Glint Strait harbour.  Tight and cramped; that sort of place that’s made to soak in the weight of the cold and snug beneath it rather than crack. 

There are no boats in it.  There is no air in it.

Here is the Glint Strait street, the only one for a thousand miles.  Company sheds, company walls, company halls.  Hammered in company steel-mills by company drill-presses and shipped on company rail to company vessels.

Here are the Glint Strait mines, crawling up underneath old Stonehead like ants under a house.  Chewing out the worthless stone and clawing frantically, nails bloodying and backs breaking for that one more fistful of precious soft metal. 

Here are the company bodies.  They’re standing still.  They’re talking.  They’re eating.  They’re laughing.  They’re swearing.  They’re sweating.  They’re not moving.

They’ve been doing all that for two months.

There’s no silence.  That needs sound to break.  This is just cold.  Words are hanging in midair.  Thoughts are stalled in cold heads.  Eyes are on pause.  The air is too thin to hold a sunbeam up; it creaks under the hazy weight of the southern twilight. 

***

The icebreaker is five thousand tons and it is filled with heat and light and coal and it shakes from bow to stern, sawing as much as sailing.  It chews the water up and spits it out again, moving like a hungry shark.

Its crew are moving and laughing and shouting.  They’ve never been this far south before.  They’re excited to see the mines at the end of the world, to judge if they’re really worth all this trouble and nonsense. 

They’re excited to put foot on shore for the first time in weeks, even if it’s in the ass-end of god-lost who-knows-where.

And a few – just a few, the young ones – are excited to watch their ship shred apart a frozen day that’s stretched on all winter, tearing a season in half with nothing but noise and heat. 

So it does.  It roars through the fjord and tears apart the ice and the air and the cold and the quiet and fills it all with a great billowing GOUT of warm life, blistering through Glint Strait’s single street and leaving it iceless.  Eyes blink.  Mouths talk.  Lungs breathe and hearts beat. 

And Glint Strait is alive again, in the heart of a bottomless winter that nobody could live through.

That is how things are.  Let’s see how they were in the end. 

***

The end started about three days later, when the good new booze had run out and everyone had gotten enough of the bad old rotgut in them to have bad ideas but not enough to be unable to act on them. 

More importantly, it was payday.  The company store took company pay, and if a company worker didn’t have any they could curl up and starve to death outside their company shackhouse with a belly empty of company food.  Glint Strait was the end of the world, the farthest south anyone had ever lived.  It meant a lot to keep things right and proper and natural there, and so effort was put into it. 

Now, things would’ve been alright if a few things hadn’t stacked up just the wrong way, just so.

First, Dinnel Haks, miner of the fourth shaft, was shorted by twelve cents on her pay.  This wouldn’t have put her back up particularly hard most days, but…

…Second, Matron Haks was ill at home, two thousand miles and more away with half her leg trying to get up and walk away without the rest of her.  And the medical fee to stop that sort of thing was expensive. 

And THAT wouldn’t normally have made much of a dent anywhere, but for third, which was that the paymaster was sick after overdrinking for the first six hours and the four after that.  So it was being handled by his aide, Kebbl.  And Kebbl, well, she was a good girl, but she had a bit of a temper.

Even so, things might’ve ended there, even if Dinnel was a popular lady around the pubs for her quick hand on her horn.  But she landed awful heavy on her playing hand, and there were a few of her friends waiting outside the paymaster’s shack, and well.

***

Words were exchanged.  Heated words, with some fiery euphemisms. 

Blood grew hot, pumped hotter-yet muscles and harder fists. 

Dinnel went down again, landed on her horn-playing hand again, and someone in the crowd decided enough was enough and fired a pistol for order and someone ELSE saw them draw it and drew theirs first and ANOTHER someone else saw that.

And after all that long cold winter, things got a little TOO heated. 

The crew ended up on the boat.  They were young and arrogant and tough and they’d been eating better than the miners, but there were fewer of them and they weren’t as angry by half, which was saying a lot because damnation on a caw-gull they were furious enough to melt lead. 

They’d come all this way to save those ungrateful slugs.  Those burrowing moles.  Those slow-witted sluggards, hauled up here like a boxful of coal and dumped in the snow, left to freeze themselves without their (gracious, gifted) aid. 

They told them so.

The miners had stayed here still and stocked through the worst in the world.  Frozen to the word, to the eye, to the mind.  They’d put up with that, and they were at work again.  And they weren’t getting their due, and that wasn’t half the due they were warranted.

The miners didn’t tell the crew so, though.  They were practical people.  Instead, they climbed the icebreaker’s hull to show them so firsthand. 

Funny thing about blood, it gets hotter even as more of it leaves the bodies.  The air was sizzling with terror and fury and it boiled over.  The icebreaker was screaming again, the captain barricaded in his cabin, the boilers overclocking.  Time to run, time to go.  But the ship was tethered fast to the docks and all it could do was roar and heave and fry until at last there was one noise that made everyone stop again.

It wasn’t a big noise, just a little hum.  But it came from old Stonehead Glacier, and it was getting louder.  And louder, and closer.  And louder, and closer, and faster.

The hull hissed, the metal screamed, the people roared, and out went the light, the heat, the sound, and all of Glint Strait

***

The next icebreaker was a long time coming, and when it did, it couldn’t find a thing, and that thing was Glint Strait. 

The water was a solid mass of ice. 

There were no cliffs, just endless tides of snow.

No mountain, no glacier.

And no fjord, no coast at all left to see. 

So it went home, and its crew were a little more sober and quiet than they’d been when they left. 

It takes a certain kind of madness to live as far up south as Glint Strait.  And nobody can live through the winter.

They’re waiting until it’s over. 

The following will be on the exam. I’m practically giving you the answers here, but don’t let that stop you from ignoring this.

-10: Bears
Any kind, really. Don’t touch them. Don’t approach them. Don’t look at them. Leave very politely and very immediately. You’d think by now they wouldn’t be on this list anymore, but some people just don’t learn.

-9: Snarks
Less-studied than sharks, and less common. Strong mothering instinct. Very, very, very strong. Historically this was neither known nor problematic until the 20th century saw an explosion of innovation in pool toys and it became clear that snark pups closely resemble water noodles. They don’t smell anything alike, but even the briefest of visual contact is more than enough for a thirty-foot snark matron to decide something needs her help, particularly if it’s pinned underneath some sort of splashing beach biped.
Snark attack victims can be differentiated from shark attack victims by the presence or absence of the victim’s torso, which an angry snark will generally swallow immediately.

-8: Lesser Warbled Puddleducks
Both lesser and greater warbled puddleducks are among the world’s most spectacular migrators; engaging in circuitous ‘round-the-world’ patterns that take them along the most inefficient and spiralling road possible from the north to south poles. Puddleducklings have a profoundly prolonged infancy, during which their fuzzy little bodies are practically begging to be picked up and cuddled. Unfortunately lesser warbled puddleducklings in particular have extremely delayed bone sutures and picking them up before six months after hatching will cause them to violently explode in bone splinters like a very damp and squeaky hand grenade, impaling the would-be-predator with puddleduckling shrapnel. Furthermore, due to their diet of rotten, regurgitated jellyfish, the puddleduckling’s violent expiration tends to drive putrescent venom directly into unfortunate bystanders.

-7: Jeelson’s Tendercattle
Possibly one of the greatest missteps of domestication ever committed, Jeelson’s Tendercattle are virtually identical to modern American beef cattle, a ruse that enables the cartilaginously lithe adult tendercattle to stealthily sneak into ranches and leave their calves to be cared for by unwitting surrogate mothers. Generally a frustration and a money loss for the ranchers, Jeelsons turn deadly when they fail to escape the slaughterhouse in time due to inattentiveness or use as veal, as – unlike other cattle – their flesh is riddled with tiny but incredibly vigorous tendons that will stick in a human throat like a wad of duct tape. Quarantine measures enacted over the first half of the 20th century all failed, and nowadays anyone consuming a steak or hamburger is encouraged to chew very, very, very carefully – and if possible, to let the dog have the first bite.

-6: Highlandbound Blowhardfish
Mature adults are innocuous and wheezy creatures that spend their lives trekking through glens from lochs to crags, where they lay their eggs. Hatchling blowhardfish are small and elverlike creatures that rely on rainfall to transport them downslope to their new homes, but the eggs themselves are so perfectly camouflaged that they are undetectable without highly specialized and unusual sticks. Annual casualties from tripping over blowhardfish eggs are tricky to document, but are estimated at over five hundred a year.

-5: Tennessee Water Beetle
The larvae are voracious cannibals that will consume an entire pond of life from the scum to the fish before turning on each other and leaving the sole survivor to clear out any remaining megafauna. This can include humans, and although the water beetles aren’t particularly bright they’re capable of surviving over an hour out of water and will do so eagerly once they realize there’s more food out there. Overconsumption can prolong this infant state of rapacity for years, and there is no upper limit on size. Once they get into the ocean either the killer whales get them or the salinity eventually does. Mature adults post-pupation are the size of a dime and docile, living only on dew and flower buds.
See also: ‘sea serpent.’

-4: Fuzzer-Wuzzer-Wumpkins
Adults are gigantic slabs of woolly muscle; cubs are adorable, fuzzy, sturdy. Parents are benign and encourage the naturally curious cubs to play with strange animals to broaden their life experience. Makes little squeals when tickled. Hypoallergenic. Causes cardiac arrest from sheer force of happiness nine times out of ten when handled resulting in fatality six times out of ten with immediate medical attention. Current hypothesis is that this functions to eliminate competition for food sources, as the cubs have been spotted adorably snuggly-wugglying up in beds made of the rotting corpse-worpsies thus created, but never nomming on them.

-3: Crotzwieler’s Great Gold-Plated Ruffous-Necked Belgian ‘Doomsday’ Juggernaut
The instars will step on you and possibly eat you.

-2: Whimpering Greebok
Adults and kits alike are completely deaf and easily startled. Lack claws, teeth, or even particularly robust jaw muscles. The adults run when alarmed but the altricial young will remain in place and emit ear-piercing shrieks that will pop the eardrums of anything within forty feet into absolute FOUNTAINS of blood. Requires immediate medical attention to prevent exsanguination, either from the ruptured ears or the packs of lions that whimpering greeboks tend to follow around.

-1: Humans
Yes, they start out cute, but let’s face it: we all know why.

I still remember the day we found him.

It was six months into the voyage and a month since our supplies ran out.  We were down to rainwater and rats from the bilge, and the only rats left were the swift canny little bastards that were all gristle and ribs.  If our boat hadn’t run into that mysterious mist-wreathed island covered in jagged rocks and overflowing with dark primeval jungle the likes of which no human had ever witnessed in memory living or dead I don’t know WHAT we’d have done. 

Anyways after our boat ran into it we all went ashore to find food and also something to patch the hole in it.  Ted found some crabs; Lenny found some coconuts; Jess found some kind of enormous crocodile; Joe found a rock to hit the enormous crocodile with; and then as we were all limping inland I swept away a patch of giant ferns with my left arm and saw the clearing and saw him.

He was resplendent in the light of the fading sun, eyes aflame with bestial wrath and a glimmer of almost-human intellect.  I stared in awe and gasped as he raised one mighty limb and, with casual ease, bit off a mouthful of leaves and chewed them. 

“My god….” I said, taking the name of the creator in vain for surely his attention was needed here.

“Whazzat?” asked Ted.  Then he saw and he too was stricken into silence. 

“Huh?” inquired Joe.  And he gawped too.  And so on and so on until every single one of was slack-jawed and paralyzed at the sight and not one of us had dared open our mouths to describe it.

Until Jess (slowed by his masticated state) stumbled up and saw the sight and dropped his jaw and said.  “Wow.  That’s a very large gorilla!”

And so he was. 

***

I won’t lie to you.  That very large gorilla caused us all to question the nature of the universe, god, and ourselves, in that order.  What truth did the scientists have to show us that would explain this very large gorilla?  What verse in the bible expounded upon god’s desire to create a very large gorilla?  And how could we sit here as pretty as you pleased and declare ourselves the pinnacle of the world’s animals when here, hidden on this island, was a very large gorilla? 

It was enough to drive one mad.  I know it drove Lenny mad.  It took him about an hour to get over it, and before he did he’d picked up all our coconuts and hurled them into the ocean.  Real inconvenient that was.  Ted was the only one that could swim good enough to fetch all the coconuts back and on the way he got bit by a shark.  Just a small shark, but he was really upset by that and we had to tear off Lenny’s pants to make a bandage and HE was really upset by that but hey fair’s fair. 

In the meantime, the very large gorilla had gotten curious and had wandered over to watch us as we swam for coconuts, screamed about sharks, tore each other’s pants off, and ran in circles on the beach waving our arms.  He picked up some fresh leaves and ate them, and the grinding of his mighty jaws was enough to freeze our blood in our veins. 

Not literally, of course.  It was a nice day out.  Practically a tropical paradise, aside from the slightly chilly mist.  And the enormous crocodile.  And the small shark. 

We wandered around the place and discovered all its secrets: the rotting log with spiders under it; the lizard family sunning themselves on a big rock; a snake hanging over a tree branch; a big dead tree with a bird sitting on it. 

Then we dismantled a sturdy-looking tree, patched the hull, and at the last minute – it was Joe’s idea, I think, but we all were on board right away – took all the chloroform from the medical cabinet, snuck up on the very large gorilla as he slept, dumped it on his face, and ran for it. 

Then we ran back for him, picked him up, put him on the boat, and locked him in the lavatory. 

It was many days of going over the side for us, but the rewards would be worth it. 

***

The city welcomed us home as heroes: it failed to notice any of us and tried to pretend we weren’t there.

So we did as heroes always do and made a big show of it.  Hired a theater, hired an agent, hired strings of lights and billboards and barkers ticket-takers and agents and even a small audience before people caught on and turned it into a BIG audience.  All on credit, of course, but once you’ve acquired enough credit people are eager to add to it because hey, everyone else CAN’T have made a mistake. 

The banner was a small problem.  Nobody could remember how many wonders the world was meant to have.  Was he going to be the eighth?  The ninth?  The twelfth? 

I credit myself this much: I was the one who suggested just calling him “a wonder of the world.”  Mind you, Ted was the one who said we should puff it up to “THE wonder of the world.”  Confidence.  Always about confidence.  And we were confident men, or confidence men, or well what’s REALLY the difference anyways?

So we put on our rented tuxedoes and we put on our borrowed manners and we fingered our best scars and we stepped out on stage and introduced THE wonder of the world, a beast that walks like a man, a creature that was once king of his world and is now a shackled piece of dime-store entertainment: a very large gorilla.

Maybe we should have bought newer chains on credit too. 

Whoops. 

***

So our very large gorilla was gone.  The good news was that while he ran for it he also spooked off all our creditors.  The bad news was that probably wasn’t permanent.  And the immediate news was the army showed up.  They were very upset about our very large gorilla, who was running through the city and disturbing traffic. 

“Just what kind of force are we going to need to destroy this very large gorilla?” inquired the general or maybe colonel or major or someone who was in charge.  He was tired and crabby and had somehow put two cigars in his mouth. 

“Loads,” said Ted.

“Tons,” said Joe. 

“Bring howitzers,” said Jess.  “Bring mortars.”
“Use planes,” I chimed in.  That was me.  I said that.  I’m pretty sure.  “This very large gorilla’s existence defies all humanity’s assumed knowledge of the universe, god, and ourselves.  You’re going to need at LEAST five planes.”
“Sure,” said the man with two cigars in his mouth.  “Whatever.  Fine.”  He doodled on his paperwork, then read it.  “Says here he’s gone to ground.  Let’s go get the big bastard.”

He’d climbed on top of some sort of factory – I think they made condoms? – and was refusing to come down.  He huffed and smacked his chest and punched the roof when people yelled at him, and we recoiled in awe at how very large he was.  He picked up a loose shingle and threw it down, where it hit Lenny on the head (Lenny didn’t come off very well in this whole affair) and roared at us with his very large gorilla mouth. 

Then the planes swooped by and riddled him with bullets and he tipped over and fell over and over and over and over and over and landed on the pavement right in front of us. 

“Looks like bullets killed the beast,” one of the swarming reporters commented.
“No,” I said.  “It was more metaphorical than that.  Say beauty killed him.”
“What beauty?  Didn’t see none of that he did, but lord that was a lot of bullets.”
“Don’t you dare trivialize this very large gorilla,” I demanded.  “He deserved better than that.  We’ll tell his story and tell it properly.  We’ll tell it on every stage from here to San Francisco and beyond.  This is THE wonder of the world here, and he will live on in the imagination of every man, woman, and child from now ‘till the end of time.”
“What do we do with the body?” asked another reporter. 

“Can’t just leave it here,” said the man with two cigars in his mouth.  “That’s littering.  You boys’ll get fined for that.”

“Dog food,” replied Jess quickly.  “My uncle owns a factory.”

“Good thinking.”

***

I still have one of the cans from that run.  Mind you, I think he was something like five percent of it by weight; even a very large gorilla can only provide so much dog food.

But in your imagination, he can give so much more than that. 

They come when I sit out for a smoke.  Always do. 

The sight of me sitting on the steps doesn’t do it.  The flicker of the lighter doesn’t do it.  The swearing when it won’t work doesn’t do it.

But that first long slow breath of smoke brings them scooting in low, rippling up the ground like giant fog banks, from cumulus to cirronimbus and beyond. 

I’ve told them a thousand times a thousand and more: I’m too old now.  Go play with the new girl.  But they don’t seem to understand that meteorologists can retire. 

***

It’s a lonely job, in its way.  You don’t see a human being for months, on the maintenance checks, and of course you’re both covered in environment suits so it’s more a human-being-shaped object. 

But you see people every day.  They’re just vaster and fluffier.  All my friends – my real friends, the ones you have long talks with and walks with and don’t even bother to say hello to because theyr’e always there with you even when you’re far apart – were clouds. 

Fat and grey and soft and thin and wide and faint and great big angry anvils all passed me by up in the meteorologist’s hut, perched on the top of the tower heaved up over the city, held against the sky by guywires and cables and thousands of feet of rickety metal poles. 

I spoke to a human once a week to request groceries.  I spoke to the clouds every day for forty years.

Not like it was a sentence or anything, mind you – I had holidays.  I just didn’t use them.

I had my work, broadcasted down a metal line to the people down below, who strained for every word.  I had my food, in little metal tins.  I had my friends, forever passing by and murmuring to me in my little box. 

What else was there?

***

My house is on a cliffside, on a hill.  I’m still way too close to the ground for my comfort, but it puts me at ease a little, even if six months isn’t quite enough time for me to have gotten my land legs back yet.  My feet still feel unsure with having all that dirt and stone under them instead of miles of air.

I wonder if that’s why the clouds come.  To make me feel at home, at peace.  It’s ot a paranoia of mine, not really – if they’re doing that, it just proves they care all the harder.  Not an easy or simple thing to do, to descend all that way from the sky to drift down here in the thick air just to see an old woman and her cigarette smoke. 

I only started when I came down.  It was too easy to breathe here.  Six months in and I’m almost feeling at home now, which makes up for the foul taste in the back of my throat. 

Today my visitor is a little wisp of cirrus, hurrying down from its perch to see me so quickly that it’s a good thing it doesn’t have legs or it’d be ass over teakettle.  It’s shedding mass in the breeze without a care.  Come on now; I can’t be THAT important.  How will you get home like that, all frittered away?  It can’t stay still even in front of me, bobbing this way and that like a schoolkid trying to think their way out of answering the teacher. 

“How now, tiny?” I ask it.

It shivers, trembles, and snatches the cigarette right out of my mouth.  Then it makes a break for it.

“Hey!”

I chase it, half-serious.  Maybe it’s a dare.  God only knows clouds do stupid things enough with each other’s encouragement; it’s a big sky and everyone gets bored, even the water vapour. 

But it isn’t running half-serious.  Cloud moves and moves and moves; doesn’t even stop to tease.  It slows down when I do to keep me in sight as my freshly tarnished lungs wheeze and gasp, staying a good dash away from me at all times. 

“What’s gotten into you?  C’mon.  I’m too retired for this.”
It shivers at me, and keeps moving.  It keeps moving until it doesn’t and then I almost walk right into it, and by extension, the ladder. 

Oh. 

I look up, and up, and up, and up. 

Yes, there’s no place like my old home. 

“No, I’m not going back up there.  There’s a new friend for you now.”
The cloud offers no comment.  That’s normal.  It wraps around me and seeps into my clothing and won’t stop shaking, and that’s not normal. 

“Come on.”
Nope. 

It already knows it’s won.  If I’m complaining to the world at large, I’m already moving. 

One hand at a time.  One hand at a time. 

So, for the third time in my life, I used the sky ladder.  And boy did I regret those cigarettes. 

***

The first mile is the hardest.  By its end I’m sweating and freezing and wheezing and barely holding myself together as I sit on one of the maintenance platforms, legs dangling.

Halfway through the second I’m so exhausted I can’t even think, which means I’m starting to pay attention and I notice all the things that are wrong. 

The clouds are moving against the wind.  And none of them are close. 

Well, except for the one in my coat.  It’s a bit reluctant to go away, which is nice because I need the insulation.  I hadn’t dressed myself for this today. 

The last hundred feet are the real warning signs. 

The air up here should be dry and thin.  But the rungs of the ladder are thick with dew.  Dripping, fresh dew.  A cloud was here.  A cloud that was falling to pieces, shedding itself as hard and fast as a summer rainstorm. 

But it hasn’t rained in days and we aren’t due for at least another week. 

I shiver again and I press on as the condensation grows heavier and heavier until I heave the trapdoor open and roll inside and I’m up to my ankles in cloudblood and I say “what’s going on oh” because that’s already a stupid question.

I’m eye to eye with my replacement for the second time.  I didn’t know her well because I don’t know any humans well anymore, but she seemed nice at the time.  Earnest.  Forthright.  A bit reluctant to meet my eyes, but that was something I’d noticed in a lot of people so not much to think of.

She has no trouble meeting my eyes now, even as her hands are busy tearing off strips of cloud.  There’s a knife in one, a snapped-off looking thing that seems to have been made of a piece of the ceiling.  A railing has been turned into a fishing rod.  All fabric has been unravelled and fashioned into line. 

And the walls and gaps and holes in the place have been filled with icy cloudbone, and the floor is awash in clear pure blood. 

She chews.  Swallows.  Stares at me. 

“I was hungry,” she says into the silence.  It’s a very normal quiet voice and it doesn’t sound like a monster at all. 

I’m not sure what I’m going to do when I take a step forwards but she decides for me knife-first. 

***

The knife is easy enough to fix.  Just don’t be where it is and then keep it far away from both of you until it’s less useful than a free hand. 

But hands are hands and hers are attached to arms with a lot more muscle than mine.  Time and tide haven’t helped me, and I don’t know how long she’s been at this madness but it’s clearly helped her grip strength.  She’s got a hold on my wrist that’s putting an ache there that isn’t from the climb alone, and it’s a lot of work keeping that other hand from my neck. 

My neck is tickling.  The cloud is still there, and I feel really bad about that.  It shouldn’t have to see this.  Not after all it did already, poor little bastard.  I wonder how big it was before it made that mad long dash down to see me.  I wonder how many friends it lost, how much pain it saw before it made its plan.  I wonder so many things I almost don’t see it in motion in time, see it pour out of my shirt, see it pour onto her face, see her moment of indecision as she tries to decide whether staying blind or loosing her grip is a bigger risk. 

But my reflexes aren’t bad, even if my muscles are sore and my lungs are weak, so I stomp on her instep and twist with the wind and maybe that shouldn’t do the trick but well.

Six months is a long time up here, by yourself.  But it isn’t quite enough to get rid of your land legs. 

So she falls, and I make sure she keeps falling, and she falls across the floor and I didn’t think to close the hatch. 

Not a sound.  Not one sound. 

***

I drain the floor.  I close the hatch.  I tear apart the rod and line and I hammer the knife back into something useful again. 

The cloud stays for six days to get its strength back, and by then its friends have come close again, cautiously, carefully, and someone’s sent a polite questionnaire up the metal line and I’ve filled it out and made myself clear. 

I’m still retired, obviously.  But for the time being I can be retired up here.

And I needed to quit smoking anyways. 

They were three brothers.

That was probably why they succeeded where so many of their kind didn’t.  Three’s a good number for sorcery.  Witches know it, which is why they’re generally more successful than sorcerers. 

They summoned the spirit successfully, in a circle of molten silver.  They bound the spirit successfully, in chains of finest silk.  They tortured the spirit successfully, with fresh milk and warm blood.  And on the third hour of the third night it gave in, and it told them the secrets of immortality. 

“Be forgotten,” it told them.  “Never ever have a single creature, however small, recognize you for what you are.  Erase yourself from the page of history, and live in the gutters – forever fleeting, forever invisible, forever.”
The brothers were elated at this and banished the spirit to the netherworld, then they actually realized what this would entail. 

“Fuck,” said the youngest brother, who was the quickest thinker. 

“Fuck,” said the middle brother, who generally went with whatever was going on.

“Fuck,” said the oldest brother, who hadn’t figured it out yet but was starting to feel stupid. 

***

It’s a very useless thing, to become an immortal god-king of magical lore that nobody knows about.  But some people won’t settle for mere mortality, and so the three brothers bent and twisted and gnawed at the limits of their goal: to live forever and look good doing it. 

“What do people recognize?” pondered the oldest brother.

“It’s you,” said the middle brother.

“’You’ is far too big a concept for day to day business,” snapped the youngest brother.  “It’s your NAME they recognize.  Let’s just excise that.  I’ll get the orichalcum tongs.”

Now, most people would balk a bit at having the first gift anyone ever gave them extracted from their core conceptual being with a pair of spell-scalded metal claws, but that’s why most people aren’t sorcerers.  The profession attracts a certain kind of person, and soon each of the three people of that type present held a softly whispering sphere in palm: their own names. 

“Now throw them away,” bade the youngest brother.  “Throw them away where nobody will ever see them again, ever, no matter how long it takes.  Also, we’re never seeing each other again or this won’t work.  Goodbye.”
“Bye,” said the middle brother.
“See ya,” said the oldest brother.  “Woops.  Forget I said that.”

***

The oldest brother felt sort of stupid, and he despised that.  He brooded over his misstatements and belated realizations all the way home, chewed on them as heavily as he chewed his dinner, brooded on them like a motherly chicken. 

“I’ll bury it deep,” he decided.  “Where it’ll never come back out.”

So he hiked up the side of Mount Firegut – driving six guides to their deaths in the process – and chucked his name down into its caldera, and went home and raised up a mighty empire with conquering, killing, all that sort of thing. 

Mount Firegut groused and fussed and belched and erupted and subsided and burbled and eventually turned quiescent for good five hundred years later, which was a great boon for the wealthiest merchants of the oldest brother’s empire, who established diamond mines all over it.  Jewels flowed like water, and a particularly large and glowing one was brought to the emperor personally. 

The oldest brother laid eyes on it and immediately recognized it.  And at that moment, so did his entire court.

“Aw FU-” he managed, and then he turned into a dusty skeleton and everyone was quite embarrassed.

***

The middle brother went home by the long route, and he walked by the sea and listened to it rumble and roar.  He climbed the tall hill by his home and watched it go on and on forever. 

“Well,” he said.  “There’s a match made in heaven, if I’m a judge.”

So he sailed out to the middle of the ocean – losing half his crew to salt madness and dehydration – and threw his name overboard, and went home and established a towering sanctum of madness and magic with insanity and darkness the likes of which man had never dreamt and all that sort of nonsense. 

The ocean moved.

Continents crawled, plates shifted, seafloors raised and lowered, and the ocean moved. 

So did everything in it. 

Five thousand years later, a crab ate a funny thing and was eaten by a small squid which was eaten by a small fish which was eaten by a bigger fish which was eaten by a shark which was eaten by a murderous whale which died on a beach gasping for relief from the searing heat at its insides, which was stolen by a gull which was eaten by an eagle which dropped it near a fishing village, which brought it to their dark and sorcerous overlord as tribute. 

“Oh!” said the middle brother. 

And that was about all he had time for. 

***

The youngest brother went home looking up at the stars.  How he hated those twinkling bastards.  They were made from the same matter he was, but they smiled down fondly as he aged to nothing. 

“I’ll outlive you all,” he swore.  “Just you see.”

So he decided to show them. 

He buried his name in a chest in a box in a safe in a vault in a bricked-up basement and he began to send things into the sky. 

Birds were an early experiment.  But at a certain height they came back down dead. 

Balloons seemed plausible.  But they popped. 

Some kind of flapping machine nearly did the trick, but they could never flap high enough.

Then he tried fireworks.

And bigger fireworks. 

And engines attached to the fireworks. 

By the time he launched his first rocket the youngest brother was a billionaire many times over and he’d had to replace his name vault many MANY times more than that.  It was loaded aboard, triple-bound in enchanted whispers and hand-packed by blinded wage-slaves. 

“To forever!” he toasted the rising little mechanical star.

And he made a holiday of it. 

“To forever!” he toasted the six thousandth year of his reign as Global President. 

“To forever!” he ordered the Newmanity under-slaves as they carved the monument marking ten million years of their god. 

“To forever!” he called out across the boiling seas and the fires of apocalypse missiles as four hundred million years of history went up in atomic smoke. 

“To forever,” he whispered to the cautious invertebrates that were his only friends a billion years hence, wandering under the baking heat of the engorged sun. 

“Forever,” he chanted as the world was gently enveloped in the warm hand of its star. 

Forever, he remembered as matter slid away and the solar system washed into nothing. 

Forever, in the dark space as the last few coherent atoms raced ever greater infinitely apart. 

Forever. 

***

A long life is a fine thing.  But immortality brings with it concepts that don’t quite fit naturally into the human skull.  Try to keep them at arm’s length, and use gloves. 

The wind is blowing.  The sky is white.  The ground is white.  The window is white.

It’s a good day to be indoors.  I’m sitting at the window and will sit here all day and I will watch the nothing, the lovely white nothing that’s eaten outside.

And we will tell stories.

***

I tell the wind about my week.  How I hid from it, here in the warmth behind the walls where it can’t find me.  it doesn’t mind, I can tell.  How I took in proteins and carbohydrates and expelled waste.  How I spent nearly a third of it in torpor, electrical currents dying down to a smoulder in my skull.  How I watch the snow whip through its breath and imagine patterns in it. 

It tells me about where it’s been, where it’s come from.  Hot and cold clashing violently far above me, far away from me, sending it howling down and far away from its cold homes to scour the warmer places, to strip away their warm blanket and leave them shivering in the storm.  Of the trees it felled.  Of the animals it froze.  Of the stones it cracked.  Of the lights it put out. 

Both our stories are very repetitive.  We’ve told them all a thousand times.  Life is like that, but so is everything else. 

***

The next day I have to go get more firewood. 

The wind is waiting.

We play our little game that we do every time, and it’s in high spirits now.  It whips and whistles at my ears, my legs, my hands.  I numb right through my clothing, my teeth shake inside my head until it feels they might fall out; my hands freeze to the axe and I almost chop my foot off six times as the fog creeps in from around my thoughts. 

I laugh and laugh and laugh and it laughs too, howling and wailing at my ears until there’s no sound and all until I kick in my door and stagger in and light the fire that puts things back into the world.

Oh, that was a close one. It nearly had me today, it did.  Oh it nearly had me today. 

***

I go walking.  The wind walks with me. 

We talk as we go, about aimless things.  Fancies and flights and hopes and dreams and imaginary frivolities.  I remember the last time I had hot chocolate.  It whispers about the drifts it pushes under trees and into thickets, where the deer are hiding from it.  I tell it about the time when all this was green, and it laughs at me until my cheeks are numb and white from grinning into it. 

The wind knows all this was white before it was green, and it will be again, and again, and again.  It proves its point when I fall waist-deep into it, am smothered in it, nearly drowned in its leavings, a heaped-up mound that covered a dimple in the path and created a sinkhole that would make quicksand blush. 

I dig myself out with my fingers and my guts and my heat and as I pull myself up my the roots and branches at closest grasp I shake someone’s hand. 

It’s strange to feel that.  It’s not at all like mine feels. 

Oh, and there’s a wrist and a palm and an arm and an elbow and a whole body with a face, a human face!

How surprising. 

The wind is surprised by this too, and it mutters itself into astonished silence the whole way home. 

I bring the human.  It’s something new.  I don’t know how to feel about something new.  Maybe further examination will tell me. 

***

The human wakes up after three days.  It makes noises at me with its mouth and its hands and its eyes.  I think it’s trying to communicate with me. 

I talk to it back.  I’m not sure it understands.  The fur above its eyes bunches when I talk. 

Instead, we eat.  It’s very grateful for the soup. 

The wind is annoyed with me for missing our talk today, but it’s a slow day.  It always gets irksome on the slow days.  I leave it to fuss and play with its drifts, pushing them hither and thither and piling them up thick and tall against the windows until it’s not fierce and sure white anymore but a soft comfortable grey that puts the whole world to sleep.

When I wake up, the human has made some sort of tea. 

It’s not hot chocolate, but boy is it close.  I thank it.  It doesn’t understand, but it understands.  I don’t understand it myself. 

***

The next day the human follows me out when I chop wood.  I wield the axe and it stacks the logs and we make faster work than before and we’re set and done before I’ve even lost track of all my fingers.  The wind is howling hard, but it can’t outrace us, and I chuckle a little at its discomfort.  It kicks snow at us as we scurry back inside, and I think the murmuring is excessively petulant as we feed the fire back up to a snarling height. 

The human conscripts some scraps and snarls of old torn bedding I’d thrown away and begins to incorporate them into its clothing.  It works with thread, makes new patterns out of nothing, turns openings into closings.

It hums as it works.  It’s a quite quiet sound.  The wind is very loud.

But I can hear it all the same. 

***

I wake up because something heavy and cold has fallen on me and it’s the roof, and when I try to move I realize it’s also a tree.

The wind has grown irate with me, it seems. 

I talk to it, I complain at it.  I even whine.  But it’s not listening, it’s not talking, it’s just yelling and ranting and howling to itself now. 

I thought we were friends! 
I really, really thought we were friends. 

Well, not friends.  On speaking terms, at least. 

The human digs me out.  The human pulls me out.  The human drags me to the unburied corner of the house and as luck would have it that’s the corner with the fireplace, so bit by bit all the feeling creeps back into me and I can feel my face again. 

I say ‘thank you,’ with it.

It shocks both of us so much we don’t dare say anything until we fall asleep. 

***

The wind is in my dreams.

It stands outside the door and scrapes against it with paws made of hail and sleet and snow, its voice almost silent.  It is angry with me, it’s so very angry with me, that I am not paying attention.  And I try, and I try, and I try, and I try, but I just can’t hear the words. 

The wind breaks the door in and starts gnawing on my foot.  I kick it.  The wind grunts and huffs and shuffles off and turns into a bear and I wake up and watch the bear leave.

Oh.

The fire is out.  The door is shattered.  And judging by the oodles of bear tracks, it finished off the potatoes before it investigated my foot. 

The house is no longer livable, and I’m only alive because the human and me turned each other into pillows in the middle of the night. 

It’s time to go. 

***

Sixteen miles past the edge of my world and the snowdrifts get deeper.  The crust grows more uneven.  Even the snowshoes the human bent together from tired pine boughs founder and stick.

The wind is most unhappy.

I don’t understand it now, in more ways than one.  First it wanted me dead, now it wants me to stay?  We shared so many stories together, we shared so many days together, I saw so much of me and it so much of I and nothing I saw would make it want to do this, any of this.

I wonder what it thought it saw in me?

I fall in another drift and that distracts us for a while longer. 

***

Nightfall comes, and with it comes the white-in-the-black, the wall of frozen water that comes in hard and fast and furious, without mercy.  We dig into a drift, then dig out an airhole, then dig it out again, and again, and again.  The whole world is trying to bury us at the wind’s behest. 

We are very good diggers, me and the human.  But we are not an entire world. 

So I pat them on their shoulder, and I take their hand and squeeze it, as if I were trying to warm them, and I start walking. 

The wind’s roaring like a lion now.  All brag and boast.  It’s won, it’s won, it’s won. 

And then it dies down, to a soft murmur again, all familiar and softness.  Whispering to my ears, trying to tell me of things very far away that it’s seen and done and been and I can’t understand any of it, not one word.

Not since I’ve been listening to the human.

The human.

Oh. 

It didn’t want to kill ME.

***

Oh it rages when I turn around.  Oh how it shakes and rattles at my bones.  But I know it’s bluffing now, it’s baring empty teeth at me, and I find the snowed-in shelter before it’s vanished entire and dig through before the air runs out.

The human isn’t moving.  It’s probably very tired. 

So I pick them up.  They’re heaving, and they’re bulky, but so is a sack of potatoes. 

One foot, two foot, one foot, two foot. 

Oh how the wind is screaming!

One foot, two foot, one foot, two foot. 

I can’t understand it at all.  What a shame.  What an awful shame. 

***

It’s a one foot that makes the first mark in the white. 

A dark smudge left behind in my bootmarks. 

The two foot follows.

And then it gets deeper.

And deeper.

And deeper.

Soil is coming through.  Soil and mud are clotting up my bootprints, melting up into the snow. 

The wind is spitting mad now, but it’s spit.  It’s froth.  Sleet at best, wet and nasty against my face. 

And then one foot two foot one foot two foot and I’m through, and it’s through, and I’m standing up to my ankles in mud and slush and the sky is a painfully normal blue, with a drunkenly bright sun, and there are birds calling again like I haven’t heard them in.

Ever?

No, that’s not right. 

I’ve been here before. 

Yes, I’ve been here before.  A lot. 

I turn around and look at my footsteps.  Look at the green sprouting softly out of the cold and into the warm.  I flex my fingers, feel the numbness long gone. 

I breathe deep, and when I exhale, the trees bud. 

Oh.

Oh.

Well. 

A naughty thing to do, that wind.  To lull me to sleep for so long.

But spring is here now.  I am here, by the flow and churn of the overfed creeks, by the hot sun and the dying gales.  I am here and the animals are moving again.

I hope that bear enjoyed the potatoes.

I hope that human is alright.  They seem warm enough.  Such a long trip they made to find me, there away from everything, all by myself. 

So I make them a pillow of moss, and a blanket of ferns, and I sit in the rising sun and wait and listen to the long-lost ghostly trembling echoes of the wind. 

The town had never never seen the sun.  If you don’t know it exists, you can’t miss it.  It was so. 

They saw pressure, and smelt darkness, and the soft rain of little fragmented things from above.  They moved ponderously, and with great care.  Ooze squelched under their heavy metal feet.

They were the anchorpeople, and they lived at rock bottom.  It was a good place to be because it was the only place to be. 

***

Manners came easily to the anchorpeople.  Their lives were tightly interwoven in their little community, and their pace could neither slow nor speed itself.  Neighbours would pass each other by over the course of many hours, and there were invisible layers of courtesy that they put on like clothing every time they had company. 

They did not put on clothing.  Anchorpeople did not have clothing. 

“Hello,” they would signal through waves of pressure and charm.  “Greetings,” they would say.  “How are you?  I myself am fine.  I have been fine recently.  All is well.  All is good.  It is a fine thing to be, at rock bottom.  Do you believe so as well?  Yes, that’s what I thought, what I thought, what I knew.”

And so on and so forth. 

All the anchorpeople had these conversations very carefully enmeshed in their heads from beginning to end, because you never knew when you would be talking to someone and they would be lifted away forever and you would have to finish the conversation by yourself.  It was very embarrassing to lose track of yourself when you were talking to yourself.  Embarrassment was unpleasant, and to be avoided.

“Why do people get lifted away forever?” asked the newest anchorperson, who was very small still and had just seen that happen in person for the first time. 

“It just happens,” said her mother. 

“Will it happen to me?”
“Oh, probably not for a while.”
“Oh,” said the newest anchorperson.  She looked up out of rock bottom and wondered where ‘away’ was, and if her friend was enjoying himself there, and so she asked about it.

“Pardon?”
“What’s ‘away’ like?” repeated the newest anchorperson. 

“I’m not sure I understand,” said her mother, who was very much telling the truth. 

“Is it different from rock bottom?”
“I’m not sure I understand,” said her mother.  “I’m not sure I understand at all.”

***

A while later the newest anchorperson’s mother was lifted away forever and she had to get a new mother again. 

“It happens,” said her mother. 

“Yes,” said the newest anchorperson.  “Do you think she’s happy in ‘away’?”
“I’m not sure I understand,” said her mother.  And she too was very much telling the truth. 

This distressed the newest anchorperson, because she didn’t understand either and she wanted answers that nobody seemed to have.  It was confusing and uncertain and frightening. 

So she did what all anchorpeople did and fidgeted with her cable.  It spun and knitted and twined in her fingers into the many many patterns that a cable could form; half-knots and maybe-twirls and loops and loops and whoops.

The newest anchorperson had been a bit too nervous, and had made a real knot.  She swore some anchorpeople swears and untangled it until she’d stuck her fingers in it too and had to call her mother for help.

Her mother helped.  And while she watched, the newest anchorperson thought about how vexing it was to be stuck fast. 

That wasn’t the idea.  The idea popped into her head later, when she was about to fall asleep.  But it was probably where it had come from. 

***

“Help,” the newest anchorperson told her mother.  “I’ve tied myself up again.”
“Oh dear,” said her mother.  And she helped her out, though it took a bit. 

“Help,” the newest anchorperson told her mother.  “I’ve tied myself up again.”
“Oh dear,” said her mother.  And she helped her out, though it took a bit longer. 

“Help,” the newest anchorperson told her mother.  “I’ve tied myself up again.”
“Oh dear,” said her mother.  And she helped her out, though it took a bit longer still. 

“Help,” the newest anchorperson told her mother.  “I’ve tied myself up again.”
“Oh dear,” said her mother.  And she helped her out, though it took a good long time to fix. 

“You really should be more careful, dear,” she told the newest anchorperson reproachfully. 

“Sorry,” said the newest anchorperson.  And this was her first lie, which was a very important part of growing up that nobody ever talked about and was to be admired. 

The newest anchorperson had a plan.  She had a plan and a cable, and that was all she needed.  And a good thing too, because she didn’t have time to test her sixth knot before she felt something she’d never imagined before. 

A tug.  A long, slow tug on her cable. 

***

The newest anchorperson’s fingers were greased lightning these days.  And she was so rushed, she didn’t even have time to worry before the knot was done. 

She took a deep, long breath of cold smooth water. 

“Help!” she called.  “I’ve tied myself up again!”

“Oh dear,” said her mother.  And she hurried over at her anchorperson’s pace and she helped out.  Which, unfortunately, involved helping in.

“Oh dear,” said her mother.  “How did you manage this?”  The two of them were quite tied together now, in an awkward sort of meshed mush that tangled their cables. 

“I’m not quite sure,” said the newest anchorperson, which was either her second lie or just part of the first one depending on how you counted them.  “Help!” she called to their neighbour.  “We’re tied together!”

“Oh dear,” said the neighbour.  And she hurried over as fast as she could and tugged and pulled and carefully tied herself to them.  “Oh very very dear.”
“Help!” called the newest anchorperson. 

“Help!” called her mother. 
“Help!” called their neighbour. 

“Help!”

“Help!”

“Help!”
“Please!”

Manners came easily to the anchorpeople of rock bottom.  And one by one, so they came, and one by one, so it went.  It brought the whole place closer together than ever before. 

“Help!” called the oldest anchorperson.  “That’s funny.  No one is helping.”
“I think we’re all here,” said the newest anchorperson’s mother.

“So we are,” said the newest anchorperson.  The tug had grown stronger and stronger with every addition to the knot, and now all of rock bottom was there, stuck fast.  Her cable was singing through the water now, tension pulsing like a deep current. 

“What can we do about this now?” asked their neighbour. 

The newest anchorperson’s cable twanged three times, each impossibly stronger than the last, and went slack. 

“Oh!” she said. 

“What happened?” asked her mother. 

“I’m not sure,” she said. 

They were still trying to figure out the knot four hours later when the boat fell on them. 

***

“What is this?” asked the oldest anchorperson. 

“I’m not sure I understand,” confessed the newest anchorperson’s mother. 

“I’m not sure I understand,” admitted her neighbour. 

“I understand,” said the newest anchorperson.  “It’s from ‘away.’  This is something from ‘away.’  It’s not from rock bottom.”

“Oh,” said the anchorpeople.  “Oh.  Oh!”

And they thought about what that meant. 

“There are other places?” someone asked. 

“There must be,” said another. 

“And other people,” concluded a third. 

“Could we see them?”

“I don’t see why not.”
“Why did we stay here?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Oh!”
“What was that?”
“My cable.  It tugged.”

“Well, there’s no sense in letting it take you.  Let’s go now.”
“Yes.  Let’s.”

***

The town had never never seen the sun.  It had been rock bottom, once upon a time. 

Now it was empty. 

The anchorpeople did not live there anymore.  They didn’t know where to live anymore. 

But they were figuring out how to live, so they didn’t mind.