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Louis woke up because someone was sitting on his left leg. This was confusing, since he’d gone to bed alone and had planned on staying that way. There were no explanations he could think of that wouldn’t confuse him even more than he already was (and half-asleep Louis was pretty hard to out-confuse), so after a little pause of a hundred years with his eyes shut he opened them, ready to scream or maybe sigh.

It wasn’t someone. It was several hundred someones. They were bigger than fleas and smaller than gnats and their dwellings were simple but nobly rustic, fashioned with ingenuous use of local materials.

The local materials were the hairs of Louis’s leg.

“Hey,” said Louis, blankly.

The someones didn’t pay him any mind. Or if they did, he couldn’t see their tiny heads moving to track him. Or even tell if they had heads. Or if they were human-shaped.

“I need to get up,” he told them. “I have to pee.”

The someones listened exactly as attentively as they had to his last words.

“I mean it. I’ll be careful, okay? But this might get bumpy.

The someones gave no response.

“Alright. Here we go.” And Louis sat up and gently swung out of bed.

The reaction was immediate and cataclysmic. The someones swarmed like ants in a stomped colony; clinging to leg hairs and toppling down the length of Louis’s ankle. Houses fell to pieces and dropped off the map. A tiny but terribly almost-existing noise tickled the very edge of his hearing and he realized it was the anguished screams of the dying.

Louis very, very, very gently swung back into bed.

***

The best thing to do after a traumatic event was sleep. Louis did as he was meant to.

The someones, to his discomfort, did not. When he drifted out of his shameful and slightly nightmare-haunted haze, they had colonized his right leg as well, from calf to thigh. Parts of his shin were nearly clear-cut, and the sweat rivulets were being diverted and the runoff used for poregriculture.

He had to pee so very badly it was insane.

It took the better part of a cautious, desperate, lip-biting hour, but with a strategic series of rolls, planks, and stretches Louis reached the bathroom without mass death and with the most brutal morning workout of his life. The toilet bowl loomed overhead, silent and dark because the switch was out of arm’s reach from the floor. His head hurt and his vision blurred from dehydration. His legs throbbed with stiffness; his arms were aflame. His bladder was unthinkable. He had to get up there.

Maybe.

Probably. In a minute.

Six minutes later he hauled himself upright, legs rigid, toes pointed, and screamed the entire time. The someones bestirred themselves, but none of the panic caused by his earlier shifting was present. It seemed they were as deaf to his cries as he was to theirs.

The toilet itself was, after the journey, a footnote. Then Louis was on the floor again carefully—but-quickly, body prickling and burning all at once, and why would he ever want to move?

***

Something tickled his feet and he shifted and grumbled and turned and bonked his forehead into the toilet. That got him awake again, and just in time to see a few dozen someones plummet – tethered together for safety – from his big toe to the bathroom tile.

Oh no.

There were now fresh settlements atop his bedclothes from boxers to t—shirt; if he turned his head just so he could very nearly get the largest buildings into focus. The newer models were woven from stray threads as opposed to the older hair-logged cabins, and some of them reached dozens of millimetres into the air.

Food was easier than the bathroom had been. Louis simply pulled himself into the kitchen in small painful ways and opened the cupboard closest to ground level and thanked every god to ever exist that he didn’t keep his cereal on top of the counter. He ate it without bowl or spoon or milk and felt distinctly less sophisticated than every single other lifeform in his apartment. He also felt gross, gritty, tired, sore, and pathetic, and had no ideas on what to do about any of it without killing unknowable numbers of real albeit impossibly tiny people.

So instead of thinking, which was hard, he dragged himself back to bed, which was easy, and let himself go blank, which was the hardest and the easiest thing of all.

***

Louis slept, and slept poorly; barely; on the brink of waking. Accordingly, he dreamed.

He dreamed of tiny axes clearing land, felling hair.

He dreamed of epicutaneous strip mines, harvesting sky patches to forge new stronger buildings to house new hungry minds.

He dreamed of the fierce struggles for control over the Belly Button Basin, and of the gastroquakes suffered by those who eventually came to inhabit it.

He dreamed of the closest the someones ever came to actual war – when a maniacal epidemic of greed led to the seizure of the Forehead Heights by militants armed with repurposed construction tools and demands for priority settlement, which were only halted by last-minute heroics and treaties concerning the division of ear estate and the borders of brows.

He dreamed of the ascension of the cowlick, and the first someones to stand at the pinnacle of all that there was and wonder if there was more.

He dreamed of the new building codes enacted after the Tosses and Turns of 10:15 AM, and of the movement for double—stitched construction that spurred the investigation and exploitation of the strange ‘pillow’ that surrounded the skull that had hitherto been the summit of the whole universe.

He dreamed of the discovery of the dust mites in the deep pillow mines, and of the subsequent brutal war of annihilation, where pore-scourers and follicle-drills and dandruff eliminators turned the scalp into a barren wasteland for generations and filled the air with death.

He dreamed of the restlessness that filled every new batch of leaders, each filled with fresh ambitions undreamed of by their predecessors, each wanting more, and better, and bigger.

He dreamed of boom times and golden ages; of a world filled with life and thought and furious business; of elaborate lacework dwellings cramming MORE into every space, connecting eyelash to eyelash; earlobe to neck; toe to toe.

He dreamed of new equations and new imaginings, of vehicles the likes of which someones had never imagined, of dustborne probes into the unknown and passengers that traveled by hairicopter.

He dreamed of The Program To Explore Beyond the Pillow and the visionary fanatics behind it, who asked the questions like Are We Alone? and more importantly If We Are, Who Gets All The Stuff?

And then he awoke and found out that all those dreams were true, except that The Program To Explore Beyond the Pillow had already been launched and suffered mass casualties upon encountering a rogue spider.

***

So there lay Louis, surrounded in perfect harmony and perfectly frozen, encased within the webs and snares and structures of a hundred million tiny living things any and all of which would rupture and explode if he so much as breathed funny.

And then his nose started to itch.

Ted was a sober man.  Ted was a serious man.  Ted did what he was told.  His job demanded nothing less.  Did a funeral home want a mortician who giggled his way through his shift?  Would it like it if he styled a corpse’s hair into spikes because ‘he felt inspired’?

No.  No no and no.  No such shrift would be taken; it would be shorted.  Ted woke up on time arrived five minutes early did his job went home ate and went to bed.  Without smiling.  He had not carried on a conversation for sixteen years and counting and was probably happy about that as far as anyone (including himself) could tell. 

So when a man started on his way through an intersection Ted was crossing without seeing him and had to break to avoid running him over for no reason, it was the most exciting thing to happen to him in years.  Slush sprayed him from the car and the man’s eyes were wide and his fist shook and as he drove away his window rolled down and instructions were screamed out of it. 

Well.  Ted was on his way home already.  He could afford the detour. 

So he walked down to the lakefront, surely and smartly, where he undressed in the cold, numb air of March.  He selected two large rocks as ballast and put them in his shoes.  And then he walked down the boardwalk onto the docks and off the end of them onto the lakebed, where he trudged for a good two miles.

It wasn’t easy.  He kept having to come up for air, and his limbs grew tired.  Halfway through the return trip he was rudely plucked from the surface by a concerned band of paramedics. 

“What the HELL was that for?” asked a polite young woman who was applying first aid with one hand and cursing him with the other. 

“I was told to take a long walk off a short pier,” said Ted.  “It was good exercise but cold.  I don’t recommend it.”

***

The frostbite went away.  The hand tremors took longer.  Ted didn’t mind them because he didn’t mind anything.  He didn’t mind when the supermarket ran out of bologna slices.  He didn’t mind when the slush was replaced with freezing rain.  He didn’t mind when his umbrella broke.  He didn’t mind when on his way out of work he was mistaken for the secretary by a distraught member of the recently bereaved who was upset about something one of his fellow employees had said. 

“I am not a secretary,” he informed her. 

She informed him of something else.  It was not something he’d ever heard before, but it was spoken with conviction and power and authority and even if he had no idea why she wanted it she wanted it very much and so he decided to get it done. 

The thrift  shop provided some alphabet blocks, two action figures from the 1980s and a half-eaten Barbie, and some scratched-up Legos.  It was sufficient.  Ted took them on his hands and himself to the highway and stepped gently and carefully into the lanes. 

Horns blared.  People screamed.  Tires dodged around him as he sat down – careful to keep his coat out of the mud and salt and dirt – and, with impossible precision, made the Barbie punch GI Joe in the face.  Then he made a little hill out of the alphabet blocks and built a lego tower on it.  He’d just about decided that GI Joe was going to live in it when the sirens showed up and he was taken away. 

“What the Christ were you thinking, doing that?” demanded someone made entirely of beef as they cuffed him. 

“I was instructed to go play in traffic,” said Ted.  “It was alright, but a bit messy”

***

The time before big holidays was always slow business – all those old and sick bodies, hanging on to see their families one last time.  Ted was encouraged to use his time off.  He spent much of it at home, since that was the easiest place to sit and wait, but he also took daily walks to encourage appetite and maintain his body’s muscle mass.  Since vehicles had been cruel to him recently, he stayed away from the roads and walked on bike trails and footpaths, where strangers cycled and led dogs.  One particularly small dog saw Ted and began barking, then ran up to him – pulling its leash loose – and attempted to chew up his shoe.  He offered his hand to it in peace and it repaid him with violence and small, blunt teeth that failed to make an impression on his skin, let alone tear it. 

“Your dog’s teeth aren’t very good,” he observed to its owner, who gave him his most peculiar directions yet. 

“I will try this,” he said, and after purchasing some small screwdrivers and other tools and a few bouillon cubes, he did so.  It was a lot of work disassembling the old revolver his uncle had left him – the bigger pieces he had to use the hacksaw on – but even that was nothing as compared to the effort of choking it down, and THAT compared even more grimly to the toilet that evening.  It went so poorly he had to go to the hospital, where an impossibly annoyed and confused doctor asked him what on earth it was this time. 

“Someone said I should eat my gun,” he told her.  “It was a terrible idea.”

***

Three months later Ted removed some food from the fridge with a coworker’s name on it, as it was comppany policy that such things not be left overnight. 

“That’s mine,” the night shift guard said. 

“It’s going in the garbage,” Ted told him. 

“I’m here overnight; that’s my breakfast!”
“It’s against policy.”

“That’s not how the policy works, can’t you use just a little common sense for once?  Chrissakes, get that stick out of your ass!”
“It’s against policy.”
“Oh, drop dead!”

Ted considered this.

“Okay,” he said. 

And dropped.

***

The funeral wasn’t very well-attended, but it was tidy and straightforward.  He’d have appreciated that. 

The following conversations are approximations because none of the participants used words or languages or thoughts. But they seem to have happened.

***

The rock did not exist. The mountain existed, and the mountain’s stone existed, and the rock wasn’t even a part of it, was entirely indistinguishable from it, until it wasn’t and it was travelling away very rapidly.

The first thing it did, once it existed, was panic. This went on for a few hundred years.

The second thing it did, when it was still panicking but was done being excited about it, was say “hello?”

“Hello,” came back from all around it. It was in a cold place, a moving place, a grinding and crushing place, and it was not being ground or crushed but being carried along inside of it, like a gizzard stone in a crocodile’s gut.

“What am I? What are you? Where was I? What was I? Where are we going? Why did you take me?”

“Oh,” said the everywhere from everything all around. “I don’t know any of that.”

“Oh.”
There was an especially large grinding noise and more rocks and stones flowed past the rock and around it.

“What do you know?” it asked.

“Nothing. I know nothing at all. But I’m moving, and so I’m moving.”
“Oh. You seem to have taken me with you.”
“Yes, I think that’s right.”

The grinding never stopped. The texture varied. Wood. Stone. Earth. All of it mingling with slush and refreezing and crushing and turning into particles and passing around and through and away, stamped flat or shredded.

“When will we stop?”
“When we stop. I don’t think about these things, rock. I don’t know anything and I don’t think anything. You’re making me do things I don’t, and it’s quite difficult.”

“Well I didn’t exist until you picked me up and moved me, and that’s quite difficult. I wasn’t distinct. Now I’m distinct.”
“No you aren’t,” said the glacier. “You’re a part of me too.”
“But I’m distinct from you.”
“As much as you were from the mountain I took you from. As much as you were from the craton you were uplifted from. As much as I am from the other ice that surges on. As much as we are from the world we crawl upon.”

“You sound very confident for something that is so much younger than I am,” muttered the rock.

“You’re crushed and reformed and melted and cooled slowly and seldomly. I’m water. I shift states and forms and places. To be something new and strange is normal and old for me.”

The rock felt very uncomforted and alone. “I feel very uncomforted and alone,” said the rock.
“You’re not alone,” said the glacier placidly. “Haven’t you listened to my meanings? You’re indistinct from me who’s indistinct from the glaciation who’s indistinct from the hydrosphere who’s indistinct from the planet who’s indistinct from everything else in this big empty everywhere. You are not alone because you aren’t you.”
“Well, it feels a lot like it.”
“Yes.”

Something was different.

“Are we moving faster?”
“A little.”
“Are we moving backwards?”
“A lot.”
“When did that happen?”

“Just now. It’s warmer. It was colder, and we rode down. Now it is warmer, and we ride up.”

“How far?”

“Not so far. It’s still an ice age out there.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“But you just told me –”

“Shh,” said the ice, a whispery slush of a syllable, wrapping the rock tightly. “Sshhh. Listen? Do you hear that?”
“I don’t hear anything.”
“Because we’re home. We’re back on my mountain. We rode all the way down and we rode all the way back up. This is my peak and my hold and my home and you have come back with me all this way.”
“Oh. Does the mountain have two peaks?”
“Yes.”
“Does the mountain have a long, long, long valley on the east side?”
“Yes.”
“Does the smaller peak look a little like a bighorn nose looking south?”
“Yes.”
“I think that was my mountain too.”
“Oh. That makes sense.”
“It does.”

They sat there for a few thousand years awkwardly. Then the glacier shuddered.

“What was that?” asked the rock.
“Oh dear.”
“What was that?”

There was an instant of short, pure sound – grinding and crushing and creaking and an agonizing moment of pure meltwater panic – and then the rock was alone, all alone, and yet it was back where it had sat, in a divot that had been widened a little by wind and time and ice into being just precisely a little bit too big for it anymore.

And across the whole horizon, where mere decades ago there had been a wall of frozen water, the stony peaks stood bare and dry and iceless.

“What was what?” asked the mountain.

“What?” said the rock.
“What?”

“What?”

When Rachel was very small – so small that she didn’t know her own age yet – her mother read her Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

The old versions. Not adaptations. She relished the unabridged, arbitrary cruelty of the justice delivered.

Rachel’s father disapproved slightly but gently, which was okay. It was a private moment for the two of them.

Hansel and Gretel were in the woods, lost, with only breadcrumbs. And what did they find, alone and starving, but a big beautiful cottage made of gingerbread?

Rachel only vaguely knew what a cottage was. It was like a house, but smaller, and by the water. A whole house made of gingerbread.

“What’s gingerbread?” she asked.

“We’ll make some next month,” her mother promised.

They finished the story, and they finished the book, and at the finish of the year for the winter holidays her mother made a gingerbread house (COTTAGE, Rachel firmly corrected) and they decorated it together.

Rachel made sure there was no oven. She’d seen what’d happened to the last gingerbread architect she knew of.

***

When Rachel was larger – somewhat larger, but not big – she went to her grandmother’s after school sometimes, when her mother wasn’t home from work yet. And as she went over her homework and complained about it and completed it, her grandmother would make odd little cookies, with oatmeal and coconut and something impossible to pin down.

“What’s IN these?” Rachel demanded suspiciously. “Vanilla? Nutmeg? Cinnamon?”
“Oatmeal, coconut, and love,” said her grandmother.

“You are SO full of shit!”

“Where did you think YOU got it from?” said her grandmother. And they snorted and cackled and swatted at each other and it was a day that Rachel didn’t realize had stuck in her memory forever until ten years later at the funeral.

She got the cookbook. None of the recipes had love in them, but that didn’t prove anything. Her grandmother had kept a lot of things in her head; most of the recipes were like icebergs, with nine-tenths below the surface of the text.

Rachel’d have to find new secrets for them.

***

When Rachel was Very Much An Adult, she made cookie using the cookbook (or the scan she kept on her tablet), and she knocked on her roommate’s door.

“Go away,” said Troy.

“I have more cookies,” she said.

The door opened with the nudge of a foot delivered from a bed delivered from a body bereft of all hope and joy but still able to eat. “Oh wow. Thanks. It’s great. What’s in these?”
“Oatmeal, coconut, and spite,” said Rachel.

“No love?”
“I think you need spite right now. Or at least more than cookies.”
“Hey, food’s good. I need comfort, and this is comfort food.”
“There’s more than one kind of comfort,” said Rachel.

“This is pretty good. What’s better?”
“Revenge,” she said, with an unnecessary amount of enunciation.

“That sounds harder to make than cookies.”
“Actually, it has many ingredients in common.”

“What?”
“Let me explain.”

***

Two days later Jack Altman, law student and all-around prick, sat in his car and turned the key in the ignition only to find it stuck fast by molasses. Swearing and hauling at the vehicle door, the handle came off – partially sawed through – and a jet of piping-hot caramel filling shot out and scorched him in the hand. He tried to scream and was muffled by his airbag going off and slamming him in the face in a big cloud of aerosolized flour, which exploded.

The burns weren’t fatal to Jack, but his GPA wasn’t so lucky. Rachel was too busy graduating to notice: a triple-major in chemistry, physics, and engineering.

She sat at her desk, and considered her many options until her head hurt.

Then she considered her oven.

Then she said ‘well, this feels inevitable.’

***

History was confused on the matter of Rachel, even years after the dust had settled.

Yes, she had terrorized the entire eastern seaboard with remote—activated sugar bombs until the FDA budget was raised.

It was true that she’d ransomed the British crown prince after kidnapping him in broad daylight using a horrific and utterly uncatchably fast greased gingerbread golem.

No one denied that she’d sucked all of Fort McMurray into a fudge pit over what she considered one stifled pipeline blockade too many.

The moving gingerbread castle she travelled in was considered somewhat tacky even by those who admired the sophistication of its construction principals and the effectiveness of its instant-dry icing. 

And of course everyone knew the muffin-men she’d unleashed upon the Midwest until her demands for better home economics funding in schools were met.

But it had to be admitted by even her biggest detractors that the recipes she sent to news outlets appended to her threats, demands, and announcements were consistently cheap, tasty, and surprisingly healthy.

There were never any secret ingredients. She asked that you find those on your own.

Great-great-grandpa called himself tactical, he called himself thorough, he called himself logical. He was a problem-solver.

There’s a difference.

Can I have another drink? I’ll tell you the story if I’ve had another drink. Don’t worry, it’s not the sort of story you forget after having another drink.

***

So. Okay.

Great-great-grandpa was a Very Important Man. The kind of guy where you’re so important you don’t have a title beyond ‘Mister’ with a capital M and you get invited to things without being an expert or a politician.

But he had opinions, and he had a little knowledge, which of course is always the most dangerous amount of knowledge, and he had a few fascinations and fixations. And one of his was spaceflight, and in particular space colonization, and in VERY SPECIFIC our continual failure to get our cryogenics program off the ground.

It kept killing the mice, you see. It kept killing the mice.

Look, cryogenics is important, you know. Unless you can break the universe over your knee, light speed is the fastest speed there is, and it takes a LOT of work to get up to it. So you’ve got to go slow, and if at light speed a trip in space takes years at ‘slow’ it takes DECADES. Decades of time you need to make a ship hold together in. Decades of time it has to keep an entire population of humans happy in! Which is hard, but then there’s the hardest part of all: not only does your ship have to keep tons – literal, measurable, tons – of humanity alive and functional for decades; THEN it has to provide them with the material they need to build a functioning society on the spot. Prefabricated cities! Prefabricated power plants! Prefabricated factories! It’s like trying to fit three identical dolls inside each other.

So instead you freeze ‘em solid, pack the ship with on-arrival supplies – no in-flight meals needed – and thaw ‘em on arrival. Simple. Tidy. Straightforward!

But it kept killing the mice. Which was a bit worrying, obviously. Somehow-or-another they’d worked out how to prevent cell ruptures from microscopic ice crystals, and that old stumbling block was gone, it was fine, fine, fine. But it kept killing the mice. They injected them and treated them and monitored them and it killed them all. Their sad mice bodies couldn’t handle the rise and fall of heat; it was always too much for them, however gently they were chilled and thawed.

But grandpa was there at the budget meeting when the program’s fate was being decided, grandpa was listening when someone said the dead mice were PRECISELY why they were cutting the program, and grandpa had the balls to open his mouth and say in front of EVERYONE ‘the problem is the process is too metabolically stressful for obligate homeotherms. Why not use gene splicing and turn the colonists poikilothermic?’

Which for every scientist in the room – who’d spent half their lives working on the cryogenics problem – was like asking ‘jumping over a tall building seems hard; why not grow wings instead?’

But as I said: great-great-grandpa was a Very Important Man. Too important to dismiss, or mock, or even politely explain that’s-not-how-it-works to. Especially when the chief budget secretary is sitting next to him and is his best friend and says ‘exactly! Brilliant! Do it!’

There’s not really any other choice after that.

***

Now there was one itty bitty problem with the project, with the notion, with the whole conceit my great-great-grandpa had provided. Namely, it was inhumane and impossible. Which sounds like two things but really the ‘inhumane’ part was just window dressing. It turns out it’s awfully hard to change the basic metabolic structure of a complex multicellular organism from the cell to the cerebral aftereffects, even one as well-known and well-trodden as a human being. And of course people objected. Often strenuously! And finally and most crucially, all of the people desperate enough to volunteer weren’t necessarily the people that were most qualified to build a new society from the ground up. Or so it was argued. Or assumed. Or both.

So it was much easier and cheaper and more economically sensible to start from nonhuman scratch.

They considered hibernating mammals first, then ruled it out. Trying to properly sort the hibernating response from seasonal triggers and the like was too fiddly, and the public likes cute fuzzy things that sleep too much. You know what they don’t care about? Lizards. And since they’re habitually low-metabolism rather than situationally, they need less food per capita. Lower average metabolic rate but who cares, how much energy do you need to run robotics and do programming and run basic maintenance routines, especially when the low food and space requirements mean you can stock TWENTY of them for every human you would’ve had to pack?

So they took some lizards and gave them antifreeze proteins and made them big enough to hold tools and hold big brains and they froze the lizards and eventually after many years of dead frozen lizards they had living frozen lizards and the world was good.

After that they had to teach the living lizards to talk and learn and obey. That took a bit longer, I think because some of the tutors kept teaching the lizards philosophical concepts like ‘personal autonomy’ and ‘elected leadership’ or other such troubles. Then they froze them, stuffed them in a rocket, and off it went, off to establish a home base away from home for humanity.

***

The flight was long, but great-great-grandpa lived long enough to see it end. Not just the time-as-we-knew-it, but to receive the ‘journey successful’ notice from the far end. The ship had made it. The cargo had thawed successfully. The lizards had disembarked and unpacked a base camp. They were living on a horrible wreck of a place with a barely-there atmosphere and no native life that might – with a lot of work – one day let you breathe without a spacesuit. And they were working on making it better, particularly for ship number two, which would be faster and less heavily weighted with cargo and would keep the actual humans happy and alive until they got there and could take over things.

The lizards worked hard. They worked very hard. In fact they worked so hard that by the time ship two arrived – long after great-great-grandpa had passed away, blissfully content with his impact on the universe – the lizards had gone a little off-spec and had filled the entire planet with tunnels and those tunnels with lizards. Apparently it’s easier to have a population boom when you eat twenty times less than a human your size and you lay multiple eggs and you grow up fast. Who knew? So the world was full of lizards and although they said they were very happy to see the colonists and welcomed them as beloved fellow hatchlings they said they felt it wasn’t fair to turn over the entire planet to them and take their place as subservient biological drones.

The second ship had been equipped for this sort of argument and was willing to dispute it, which might have been successful had part of the lizard ship’s own equipment not included an asteroid mining rig that everyone had agreed could not possibly be retrofitted for use into a giant turbolaser. There were few casualties, but it put an end to our side of the debate.

They sent the second ship home, fully laden with gifts, supplies, everyone who’d been a bit too eager to press the debate and had no interest in remaining as equal citizens, and a polite request that we stay at home, since humans were uniquely ill-suited to the rigors of space colonization, which they were already tentatively beginning within their own system.

***

And that’s how my great-great-grandfather became the man who gave the stars to lizard people.

It’s not all bad though. I think they’ve named something like twelve space stations after him, and I believe I’m on the shortlist of for an intersystem shuttle’s title, as of the last courtesy missive I received. They say that heroes are never welcomed in their own hometowns, right?

Hey, do I still have an open tab?