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“I’m SO excited,” said Gracie.

“I know,” said Harry.  One arm was at the wheel; the other clutched the car door as if afraid it would fly away without him. 

“I mean, you’ll get to see the family!”
“I’ve met your family.”
“Yeah, but like, REALLY see them.  The great goose is when the town really comes alive, y’know?”
“Sure,” said Harry. 

“And I mean you can feel the difference in everyone.  You’re going to love it so much.”
“Yeah.  Hey, where do we park?”
“Oh just up ahead and turn right.”
“That’s a field.”
“Yeah!  The McClures let people park in it during the great goose.”
“This is a new car,” said Harry in a very patient and understanding voice that was more filled with hate than any mere venomous sneer. 
“Oh it’ll be fine, it’s all clean!  Come on, we’ve got to get in before the lines are too long if you want to grab a big sausage!”
“Pardon?”
“You’ll see!  You’ll love it SO much!”

***

The lines were thirty deep and two wide.

“Oh good we’re still early!” said Gracie.

“Great,” said Harry.  “You can get us these.  I’m going to go get us beer.”
“It’s a little early in the day for that, and-”

“Three hour car drive, it’s late enough for beer.”
“Okay sweetie.  What do you want on your sausage?”
“Nothing.”
“Plain?”
“I don’t want one,” said Harry.  And he was off, trudging into the dewy post-dawn greyness of a drizzly day in a coat that was NOT a rain jacket.

Nobody was selling umbrellas. 

“Getting a bit damp happens,” said Gracie when she found him again an hour and forty-nine minutes later, sitting on a particularly uncomfortable rock underneath a fall-dappled tree.  “It’s all part of the fun.  Here’s your sausage!”
“I don’t want a sausage,” said Harry. 

“It’s a local special.  See?  They hollow out the baguette and put it right in there.  All home-made, delicious!  And it was only five dollars.”
“You have mine.”
“It’s got onions in it.”
“I hate onions.”
“You’ll love them like this if you try them.  And all the rest, I’m sure – there’s like a thousand things to do here!”
“Great,” said Harry.  “Great.  Great.”
The tree bent gently in the wind and dropped a bucket of water on him. 

***

A thousand things were indeed available at the Galviston goose festival.  Provided you were willing to count each of them a few times each. 

There were carnival games, which Harry said were a waste of money.  Gracie won him a little teddy bear, which he quietly threw out when she was in the toilets. 

There were toilets, arranged in neat rows and rows and rows.  Harry went in the bushes and was accosted by an irate parent for being next to the playground. 

There were playgrounds and bouncy castles for the young and for the parents to have a quiet smoke.  Gracie asked Harry how he felt about kids again, and he pretended he was suffering from earwax buildup again. 

There was a first-aid tent, well-stocked.  Harry slipped the guy a twenty to say he’d cleaned out his earwax, and got a lollypop into the bargain.  He gave it to Gracie, and that kept her mouth shut until they reached her parents.

There were Gracie’s whole family, cousins, uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews, parents, siblings, grandparents, great-uncles, great-aunts, and god-knows-whats, all of them loud and happy and cheering and urging them to get into the good seats they’d gotten right at the front of the pier, overlooking the corn barge.

There was the corn barge.

“What the hell is this?” asked Harry.

“It’s the corn barge!” explained Gracie. 

“Great,” said Harry.  “When are we eating it?”

The Great Goose touched down at the other end of the lake. 

***

It was a small event in the grand scheme of things, but in the local scheme of things that meant a brief but spirited twelve-foot swell that set the corn-barge slamming against the docks like a gong, a gale that stripped the red-and-orange leaves from the trees, and Harry’s heart nearly stopping in his chest. 

“WONK,” said the Great Goose.  It paddled gently forwards, crossing the entire lake in about four seconds.  “WONK.”
“Holy fucking shit piss Christ fuck,” said Harry. 
“Language,” giggled Gracie.  She nudged him.  “I told you this’d be great!  How you like the Great Graviston Goose Festival now, eh?”
“How does nobody KNOW about this thing?”
“WONK,” said the Great Goose, who was investigating the corn-barge cautiously.  It rearranged all its feathers three times. 

“Well, we try to keep it zipped.  Nobody wants it getting popped by a hunter, right?”
“With what, a fucking cannon?  Jesus Gracie.  What the hell is wrong with this place?”
“Oh, nothing you haven’t already seen,” she said airily. 

“What if it gets cranky?  We’re leaving.”

“Sure!  It’s about done now anyways.”  Gracie’s little hand smoothed down the back of his jacket one last time.  “Anything else?” she asked.  “Another sausage?  More popcorn?  A beer?”
“Just shut up for a moment,” he muttered.  His eyes felt like they were too big for his skull. 

“Alrighty!” she said, and gave a little shove with that little hand, helped by a few anonymous arms from various cousins, uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews, parents, siblings, grandparents, great-uncles, great-aunts, and god-knows-whats. 

“Farewell, sweetie!” she sang out. 

“Hooray!” cheered the crowds.

“WONK,” thundered the Great Goose.

“mmlrooph,” mumbled Harry through litres and litres of corn, buried head-first. 

“WONK,” replied the Great Goose.  And then it reached down and bit Harry and twisted, and it bit Harry and twisted, and it bit and twisted and bit and twisted until there wasn’t really anything left.  It nibbled aggressively at the corn bin for twenty minutes before a rapturous audience, ruffled its feathers, shook its wings, and – filled with spite and maize – produced a single, glorious pellet of barely-digested poop. 

Then it said “WONK,” and took off again. 

The feces were carted away and praised and prayed over and spread over the fields for a good harvest, that sort of thing. 

Crown Princess Madeleina Von de Compte Schwanmept Rupert Twissy (third of her name) sat on a broken stalagmite, scratched her shoulders under the shawl she’d made of half her best gown, gazed upon the broken and jagged stones of Kalamity Peak, and pondered upon the pros and cons of being violently abducted by a dragon on her eighteenth birthday. 

Well, she didn’t have to wear her best gown anymore.  The damned thing had almost stifled her to death before the dragon’s claws had pierced several of its mainstays, gaffs and booms as she was plucked up from the Tsaress of Ammygdala’s garden. 

The dragon’s name was Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar.  Madeleina had asked her if she could shorten it to ‘Rxix,’ or better yet, ‘Rix.’  She had been denied this. 

Learning how to fend for herself on the greatest of the Shattered Trinity peaks had been exhilarating.  Madeleina had never imagined herself so happy to snap a rabbit’s neck with her bare hands, or so cunning at finding fresh wild onions growing in the finger-deep soil in the lee of a boulder. 

So on the whole things seemed to almost be more good than bad.  But the way Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar kept offhandedly informing Madeleina she was going to eat her… well.  She could do without that.  It made the whole affair a bit sour to her mouth. 

Oh right!  That reminded her.  It had been five minutes (counted by heartbeats; Madeleina had always had a nice even pulse since she was a child), and it was time to flip the little rabbit steaks where they sizzled on the flattest stone she could find, placed close enough to the fire that the flames almost licked it salaciously. 

The second side would move much more quickly. 

Onions, onions, little green onion sprouts, and the biggest safest mushroom she’d found (bless her childhood tutor and her odd fascination with fungi), all sizzling merrily away in what little fat she’d scraped off the sides of the poor rabbit.  Good thing they were well away from winter. 

Browned all.  As good a crust as she could make without iron.  Bless the days she’d spent eavesdropping on the kitchens, bless her father’s inattentiveness to her studies when she was a child, and bless the palate of Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar be fond of coneys. 

And as she thought of the devil, so she appeared.  There were many words and many ways to conceptualize the arrival of the dragon, of her scale and of her scope and of her span and so on, but perhaps the most clear way to encompass her in the moment of her landing was a single word that wasn’t a word at all, and that word was

WHOOOOMP.
“Now what have you been up to this time?” asked Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar.  She sniffed, a surprisingly delicate affectation, but then again Madeleina  had learned after four or five escape attempts that she had a nose that made a bloodhound look like an elder with a head-cold.   “Smells burned.  Promising!”
“The onions are CHARRED,” said Madeleina  with a severity that she took from her chaperone and knew full well would have no effect. 

“Synonyms, synonyms, synonyms,” chanted the dragon.  “And who is this for?”
“Why, you,” said Madeleina .  “In hopes that you’ll find something tastier for your plate than Crown Princess.”
“I have no plates.”
“Palate, then,” said Madeleina .  “Go on.  It’s just finished.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” said Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar, and she scooped up the meat,  the mushrooms, the onions, the rocks they were cooking on, the entire campfire, and very nearly Madeleina if she hadn’t fallen over backwords, then she tipped the whole lot into her maw and swallowed once. 

“Hmm,” she said.  “Hmm.  Mpph.  Ack.  Well, a bit crunchy and tasteless.  Promising hint of warmth, but not much substance to it.  I think I’d rather still eat you, sorry.”
“You weren’t meant to eat the stones,” said Madeleina crossly. 

“What, surely you didn’t intend  for me to consume the meat alone?” said Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar in astonishment.  “That little thing?”
“It wasn’t a small rabbit.”

“Princess, princess, princess,” said Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar solemnly, shaking her head that was bigger than a plough-horse, shark-jagged teeth still shedding crushed granite.  “There ARE no big rabbits.”
“Perhaps there are no big Crown Princesses either,” said Madeleina. 

“Big enough,” said Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar, as she eeled her way down, down, down into the dark chasms of the cave, where no light would disturb her nap.  “Big enough.”

***

The next day, Crown Princess Madeleina Von de Compte Schwanmept Rupert Twissy (third of her name, and may there be others after her), went hunting. 

And the next day.

And the next.

And the next day she went again and finally found something, which (bless the slow digestion of dragons) was just in time.  It was an elk come up the mountain slopes to feed on the little summer meadows in full flower downslope from where Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar did her business (volcanic ash was a wonder for plants it seemed), and it was majestic and alert and entirely unprepared for a very small but targeted landslide. 

Madeleina had learned a lot of very specific geological facts in her time on the peaks.  Where to put her feet and when had been number one. 

Digging the elk out was hard, but it was nicely tenderized and not too badly mangled.  She dragged it upslope an inch at a time. 

There were no scavengers.  Predators kept well out of the way of a dragon’s scent. 

The liver, the kidneys, the heart, all separated and chopped and minced as best as she could with a knife made from a stone-sharpened snapped femur, then boiled in its stomach, in a wooden bowl filled with fire-heated stones. 

The meat of the flank and the haunch and the shoulder and the ribs and EVERYWHERE, cut free in flaps and sliced and scorched senseless on the thinnest, flattest, hottest rocks she could find. 

The application of what few herbs she could pluck from the meadow that probably weren’t poisonous, along with a very few, very small, very hot little peppers that she’d sampled herself and determined to be as close to human-inedible as any fruit could be. 

It wasn’t a feast, but it was more than she’d have ever thought she’d managed, with less than she’d ever dreamed of having. 

“I smell meat,” said the dragon’s voice, rich and thunderous and wrapping around Madeleina like a velvet blanket.  “And blood.  And oh my that’s a LOT of blood.  Are you going to be sick?”
“No,” said Madeleina, who’d scrubbed off as best as she could in the little cave-stream. 

“Good.  Now, what is this?”
“Elk haggis,” said Madeleina.  “And elk…” Steak?  Roast?  Rump?  Chuck?  Shoulder?  “…bits,” she decided on. 

“What’s haggis?”
“A bit of everything.”
“What a good idea,” said Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar, and she plucked up the haggis and the roasted meats and put them all in her mouth, moved her tongue in a curious manner, swallowed, and spat out the basket. 

“Well!” she said in a pleased way.  “That’s certainly better than raw, I’ve got to say.  Now I see a use for this cooking besides satisfying your sad little stomachs.”
“Would you like more?” asked Madeleina. 
“Not quite as much as I’d like to eat you,” sighed Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar.  “But it was close!”
“Really?”
“Well.  Maybe not THAT close,” admitted the dragon.  And she curled up quite tightly and went to sleep immediately with a satisfied little grunt. 

***

Four days later Crown Princess Madeleina Von de Compte Schwanmept Rupert Twissy (third of her name, god willing, not the last) had found four tough little mountain potatoes and a long-dead grouse that had perished in a crevice out of reach of fox and crow and stoat but not, alas, of ants. 

She watched the sun rise and had never seen anything more fully in her life, hungry and cold and depressed as she was.  It spreads its rays across the Shattered Trinity, and across the far green lands her father ruled, and all the way to the world rolling away beyond her sight and past. 

It was a lovely place.  Pity she’d not get to see more of it.   Pity she’d never learned more about foraging, or hunting, or cooking.  Pity that Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar wanted to eat a princess so badly.  But there was precious little space in that sunlight for pity or regret or the future so Crown Princess Madeleina Von de Compte Schwanmept Rupert Twissy (third of her name) cleared her throat and said the following:

“I, Crown Princess Madeleina Von de Compte Schwanmept Rupert Twissy (third of her name), hereby renounce my title, my peerage, my stature, my family, my crown, my birthright, and all other particulars.”

She shut her eyes tight for a minute, then risked opening one a crack.

The sunrise was still very pretty.

So Madeleina sat and watched it for a long, long time until the stones behind her crackled and crunched and ground away under the great rolling gut of a dragon’s passing. 

“Hmm!” said Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar sharply.  “Hmm!  What have YOU been doing?”
“Nothing much,” said Madeleina, truthfully. 

“Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm,” said Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar.  “That doesn’t SMELL like nothing.  You’ve done something.  Come on, tell me.”
“I’ve renounced my title,” said Madeleina.

“Oh wyrmtitties,” said the dragon in the crossest voice Madeleina had ever heard.  “No wonder.  Ugh, you’re all off now.  Nothing there but hard work and sweat.  If I wanted peasant I have villages close by, and I never have and never will.  Bah.  Bah!”

“You… wanted to eat me just for my title?” asked Madeleina.

The dragon snorted and the ceiling shook.  “Certainly,” she said.  “It’s where all the sweet and spice comes from.  Fancy living and soft lives and cushy money make for tender flesh, you know – but nothing adds to flavour like wealth and power.”
“Then why take me?” asked Madeleina.  “You plunged down to my father’s first summer ball of the year!  The gardens of Borjeport are SWARMING with the titled gentry!  You could’ve had a double handful of earls and countesses for breakfast every day for the past two weeks!”
Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar looked at her.  “You mean to say… there are nobility that aren’t princesses?”
“Yes.”
“Or royalty in general?”
“Yes!”
The dragon stared into the sun.  “Perhaps…” she ventured cautiously “even the untitled can live like nobles?”
“Some of them.”
“And they will be at these summer balls?”
“Absolutely.”
“Wonderful.  I’ll be home tonight.  Feel free to be about your business.”

WHOOOOMP.

Madeleina, first and probably last of her name (she’d never been very fond of it, or the grandmother who’d insisted on it), watched the dragon fly until her wings faded away in  the vast blue of the morning sky. 

Well. 

Perhaps it was for the best that she’d never been terribly fond of high society. 

I looked out my bedroom window.  First mistake of the day. 

Up above me, the skies poured down vaporwave rainwater, broken only by the passing shelter of a zeppelin’s underbelly.  Down below people shook hands and spoke of shares and futures as they stepped over the bodies of the corporateless in the gutters, and there was a McDonalds in every hand.  And across the interstate I saw the face of some gutless unshaven slob staring back at me in the reflective glass of a skyscraper. 

Just another day on the mean streets of the 20^th century, where freedom reigned and there was a world war around every corner.  I took a long drag on my breakfast cigar.  GMO marijuana, of course – the real stuff was hard to come by ever since the Cuban embargo kicked in – and I brooded on how sick I was of this life with the help of this morning’s paper.  Hitler, Mussolini, Archduke Ferdinand, and Vader… I was sick of war.  I’d done my time back in the trenches of Vietnam and now I couldn’t sleep for memories of the A-bombs going off inside my brains. 

My doorbell rang, my door slammed open, and in walked Trouble, first name Big middle name Time.  She was a platinum blonde flapper with a suit whose shoulder pads could’ve cut the eyes from an unwary passerby or a handsy coworker without blinking. 

“Mister Bogart?” she inquired. 

“Just ‘Schwarzenegger’ is fine,” I told her.  You don’t stand on ceremony when you’re talking to someone from C-level.  This was a corporate class dame if I’d ever spotted one, and she had the hard and spiked look in her eyes of someone who’d clawed their way into it by force rather than birth, who’d placed coke plants with her own two hands and personally funded disinformation on smoking health hazards.  In her mother’s day she would’ve harpooned whales. 

“Good.  I’m here for a delicate situation, and a little bat told me you’re just the man for it.”
“Then you can call me by my maiden name instead,” I said.  “’Discreet.’”

“Wonderful.  There’s been a murder and the police aren’t investigating it.”

“Who’s the victim?”

“My husband.”
I didn’t frown, but it took concentration.  I’d been sent on  a lot of wild pigeon chases by spouses too desperate to believe that a loved one’s death was an honest accident.  “Any suspects?”

“Oh, I killed him,” said the C-level airily.  “I just need you to prove it.”

My cigar stub vanished somewhere into the 50-yen shag linoleum carpet.  I didn’t notice.  I didn’t care.  I barely managed my first question, which was “huh?”
“I’m Vice President Hunter S. Margaret Atwood,” said the dame with a smile you could’ve sharpened a bowie knife on, “and I’m delighted to make your acquaintance, Schwarzenegger Discreet Bogart.”

***

First things first, I ziptied her to a chair.  She helped. 

“Spill the beans, sister,” I told her.  “What’s your angle here?”
“Why, I have no angle whatsoever, Schwarzenegger,” she said innocently.  “Simply report my deeds to the police with enough evidence to support my claims.  They’ve denied me so far.  I will hire you for a retaining fee of a hundred Euros a day, plus expenses.”
A man could get pretty far on that money.  But there was something at work here I didn’t trust.  “Why’d you do it?” I demanded.  “President George Roosevelt was the highest in the polls since William Churchill.”

“Oh, I loved him so,” she said.  “But it had to be done.  This country’s new wars will not be over worlds, or even stars like Mr. Vader believes, but over temperature gradients.  I knew the field was too important to be left unattended.  So did my husband.  But we…disagreed on policy.  And now that he’s dead, I myself am president of the United Nations of Americas.  There’s just one problem…”
“No body?”

“No body!” she spat at me.  “The slippery pigfucker tripped and fell down the garbage disposal in our kitchen after I slit his throat.  And until he’s proven dead, I’m the vice president.  Only the president can declare a new war!”

“Damn,” I mused.  “Profit preserve us, this is a pretty pronounced pickle we’re facing here.  Did his x-files survive?”
“No.  The disposal left only meat and mangled polyester.  Not even his credit card was left intact.”

This was getting intense.  “I’m going out for a smoke,” I told her.  “Be back in a minute.”
Then I stepped outside my door, pulled out my matches, and lost consciousness. 

***

When I woke it was in a murky haze that reminded me of Vietnam, where I’d left so many of my friends behind in Flander’s Fields. 

“Rise and shine, gaijin” said a man’s mouth next to my ear in a heaven Texish accent.  I tried to turn my head and couldn’t because I was tied down at wrist and ankle. 

“Welcome back to the land of the living, Mister Bogart,” sneered the voice, which I’d heard a hundred hundred times on national radio. 

“Thanks for not killing me instead,” I said.  It was a bluff: the ache in my skull had brought last week’s hangover back from the grave twice as strong and twice as vengeful. 

“Don’t mention it, hombre,” said the voice, and its owner walked around in front of me and sat down on a backwards-facing chair like he was in a video about to warn high schoolers not to inhale LSD. 

There he was, two hundred pounds and six foot five, in a cowboy hat and a thousand-dime suit: ‘Big’ Billiam Gates, the biggest carbon-lord the fossilized fuels industry had ever seen.  Personally pulling a pair of wire cutters out of his pocket to fuck me up.  Some people would’ve killed to be in my position. 

“So, what’s gotten a bee in your bonnet, Billy?” I asked. 

“You’ve been in cahoots with the vice president,” he said.  “I bet I know what lies she poured in your ears.  Told you all about the glorious future of temperature warfare, didn’t she?  Told you about how she’s going to make a grillion dollars for every Amersican man, woman, and dog by sending the thermometer industry through the stratosphere and to the moon?”

“No,” I said, half-truthfully.  It didn’t matter.  One of the many things Big Billiam had enjoyed for much of his life was not having to pay attention to anything anyone said to him. 

“Well, that putz is full of shit and full of smarts.  Yeah, the future isn’t in world wars or space wars, and it even has a role to play in temperature.  But she thinks it’s gonna be cold.  Ice cold.  She’ll have us packing parkas and stuffing stockings and winterizing roads until the end of time.  Me?  I’ve seen the way we’re headed.  My Model-T and Windows XP are just the start: the whole world is going to run on a carbon economy sooner or later.  And when we do that?  Things are going to heat up.  She wants a cold war, but I say things are going to get HOT.”
“You’re insane,” I told him.  “Nobody’s going to happily sign up to cook themselves and  the  entire rest of the planet to death just  so you can make a few bucks.”
“Believe what you like, schweinhund,” he smiled.  “With you here the vice president will never ascend to the throne…and will never start her cold war.  Instead, me and my friend  here will get our way.  Isn’t that right, comrade Reagan?”
I would’ve gasped if my lungs weren’t fluttering desperately for air.  Instead I could merely stare, wide-eyed, as the leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of the California stepped into the room. 

“Indeedy it is old chap pip pip,” he said.  “Jolly good.  Arigato much for having me toodle-oo over here.  I say I say what shall we do with this fella here wot wot?”

“He knows too much,” said Gates.  “Let’s throw him out for the thylacines.  A last meal before we raise the temperature and it floods all of Australia, eh mon ami?”

“Fuck you,” I said weekly as I was wheeled over to the door.

“Dasvidaniya, ya son of a bitch,” chuckled Gates. 

And then the door flew off its hinges.  Behind it stood fourteen RAF SWAT officers, armed to the teeth with punji sticks and mustard gasses.  At their head stood the smirking figure of my old boss. 

“Alright, gentlemen, what seems to be the problem here?” asked FBIA director J. Edgar Nixon. 

One more inch, just one more, and I’d have worked my left hand free off the cuffs.  My right pocket protector held a PDA, a pen, and a pen that was actually a knife.  Any of them would be better than nothing at a time like this. 

That was when the white phosphorous bomb went off.  With a roaring groan, the great mass of the CN Tower began to slide away beneath our feet, suspending us over the bottomless abyss of the Grand Canyon.  My entire life flashed before my eyes from infancy during the Boer War to the icy plains of Northern Vietnam in my tragically cut-short teenage years to the freshly-constructed Death Star taking shape even now in the skies above New York and I knew that I’d seen too many wars…

…but if I acted fast, I could still stop this one before the Y2K crash. 

TO BE CONTINUED IN VOLUME  XXXIII OF 20^th CENTURY ACTION STORIES!  REAL HISTORY!  REAL ACTION!  REAL GOOD!

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.