Once upon a very long time ago and far nearby, someone was on the beach.
The air was still. The sky was clear. The sand hurt their feet. The heat soaked through the skin and bone and straight into the soul.
And they closed their eyes and said “that feels nice,” and that’s exactly where all the trouble began.
***
As a result of this, Steve shouldn’t have been surprised when he was arrested.
His neighbour was the snitch, they told him. It didn’t need to be said but Steve wouldn’t be able to ruin her good name or anything where he was going, so why the hell shouldn’t he know about it.
“Your neighbour was the snitch,” they told him.
“Well, I won’t be able to ruin her good name or anything where I’m going,” he concluded.
“Yes.”
So they took Steve out to the Everbeach, where the shore shone brighter and clearer than any of the others that blanketed the city, and they strapped him into the many beautiful and sparkling-clear mirrors, and they left him there at midnight, where he would have many hours yet to contemplate his impious lack of skin lesions and tumours before the holy orb cleared the lip of the horizon to sear away his sins.
It was a better fate than a suntan-lotion-smuggler deserved.
***
It was a big job to do, but it had to be done.
The brightsiders had come up with it, from their holy jets that chased the golden glow, never letting the sun set on their brilliant brains.
Impiety, it was clear, came from the shady. Why, therefore, to suffer shade?
Yes yes yes it was a lot of labour and toil, yes yes yes it was a project on a scale no human brain could admit, yes yes yes it had already claimed seven yillion lives and escalating.
But wasn’t anything worth doing difficult? The most sparkling achievements glittered in the sweat of the accomplished.
This was a great comfort to Beatrice Hogg, as she lay entombed underneath the seventeen killion tons of concrete she’d helped use to fill up Mammoth Cave entirely. At least her skeleton would clog the hole it was left in, so as to prevent an unsightly pocket of darkness.
It was a pity she’d never have a chance to sip the sacred margarita again before she passed, mind you.
***
The earth was undimmed; the people well-burned. A brighter time had never existed.
But did that mean it could not be imagined?
“NO!” shouted Her Sunniness, Brenda III. “There can always be better, always warmer! Shade has been driven out from underfoot, every crevice closed and yet it lurks among us even now! Mountains! Hills! Riverbanks! Everywhere the landscape bucks and rolls its shoulders, shadows form and mock our efforts. The world must be made beachly, and no beach worth its salt possesses an unevenness – only the purity of flatness can save us now! ROUND THE EARTH!”
The following heresy of the Sand Duners led to a great crusader, counter-crusader, counter-counter crusader, and ten thousand years of internecine strife before it ended in victory for the flatteners. Then came the simple task of removing all shade from the earth’s surface.
***
The last cloud died easily.
The vapourpoon lodged in its flank, its thin and mild mildew of a body drained away readily, the venting-nozzle smoothly siphoned it up into the rarest of atmospheres where it could be trusted to escape into space and trouble the ground no more with its noxious looming over the very holy and very high-albedo and very sparkling world.
The crew who killed it – all veteran self-mummies, every one – were immediately given the glory of ascending to the sun on the True Beach, where many satellites diligent reflected light so that their ashes might never languish in that blackest crime: the night.
No statues were ever commissioned. Statues cast shade.
But there were plans for the night.
***
It took a long time to find all the relics of the Old Wars and take them apart and put them back together and copy them and fail to set them off and succeed to set them off and make ninety dillion of them and ship them and aim them and do all the fiddly math and do it again and again and again to be sure and execute the project manager before she could sabotage it and get the word out.
But it was all worth it for that glorious sixty seconds, where the missiles launched and soared and swooped around the planet into that eternal foe and vanquished it for, as far as the population of the earth was concerned, all time.
They stood there on their beaches, sun behind them, sun in front of them. The air was still. The sky was clear. The sand hurt their feet. The heat soaked through the skin and bone and straight into the soul and out the other side and back again.
And they closed their eyes and said “that feels nice,” and that’s exactly where all the trouble ended.