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The crackle of the flames in the chill open air could’ve been taken from any ancient Earth firepit, but the light that eminent was subtly different in a way that made the mind stutter. Probably reflection from the discarded hull debris; this was metal that had never really been intended to be inside a planet’s atmosphere, let alone pull the same duty as a simple circle of stones.
The captain cleared her throat. “Well. I appreciate this is not an ideal situation, but I also must remind you all of just how much of our survival was down to our knowledge and boldness in the face of unknown dangers. Now is NOT the time for hesitation or dwelling on any hypothetical mistakes of the past. We are products of the most technologically advanced civilization to ever exist; we travel the space between the stars; we have made all the universe our home using nothing but the brains between our ears. And now that we’re all here, and safe, and warm, it’s time to use those brains to plan for the future.”
“We already turned on the rescue beacon before the ship broke up, didn’t we?” asked the staff doctor. 

“I did,” said the systems engineer.

“Right.  We did that.”
“Not the far future,” said the captain patiently and without condescension.  “The NEAR future.  Our ability to leave this planet is out of our hands; we’ve done all we can unless any of you believes yourselves capable of crafting an interstellar ship from shattered hull fragments-”
“In theory, in a few hundred years,” said the systems engineer.  “In practice, no.”
“-and so we must move to consider our non–immediate but yet-imminent needs.  For example, water.  James?”
“I rigged up a dew collector,” said the staff doctor.  “Based on the temperature differential and moisture content we’ve seen recently, it should get us something.  And we can purify it with the sunlight and the basic filter I’ve got on hand.  That’ll last us until we can find a river or something; shouldn’t be too hard with the coastal cliffs as a surveillance site.”

“Excellent,” said the captain.  “And then the next point of interest: food.  We’re on a terra-seeded but wild-grown world, and much of what we encounter will be familiar in origin but alien in expression, potentially in ways that might cause us harm.  Anything we ingest should be strictly examined for possible side effects, and it is for this reason that I advocate we continue to exploit the local near-fish.”

“It tasted that good?” asked the systems engineer skeptically.
The captain plucked up a charred bone from their makeshift plate and jabbed with it for emphasis.  “No!  It was pretty awful, really, even for something without seasoning.  But the basic chemical and physical makeup was almost entirely within hominid-orthodox limits.  It’s as much a fish as something you’d pull out of a pond in Sol, if not moreso!  It’s truly admirable in its adherence to the teleost bauplan, however many generations separated it from its source.  I recommend we all consume it.  I want to consume more of it.  I will put the fish in my mouth and gnash my teeth and rend it and swallow it and it will become me and I will become it.  I will stand on the sharp grey rocks and watch the bright bright sun ripple on the surface and I will dive and strike and grab and feast feast feast on the fine fresh fish flesh fiercely freely frantically furiously.”

The captain adjusted her shirt collar, sat down, and was immediately tackled and tied up by the chief scientist, the staff doctor, and the systems engineer. 

“How long until this wears off?” asked the systems engineer as he wiped the scanty sweat from his brow.

“I am perfectly fine and wish for fish,” said the captain. 

“Difficult to say,” hazarded the staff doctor.  “Depends on if it’s a fast-acting parasite messing with the nervous system, toxin accumulation doing the same, or maybe some kind of total allergic reaction caused by incompatibility on the cellular level.  With the supplies on hand, the best we can do is keep her comfortable and eat the trees.”
“The what now?” said the systems engineer.

“We would be better off if we had very very very large teeth like beavers or something that constantly sharpened themselves and never stopped growing,” pondered the staff doctor.  “As it is we only have one set of adult teeth due to terrible mammalian dentary practices, and they’re very low quality.  We’ll have to chop the trees into very small pieces to eat them or unhinge our jaws, which would be painful and unhealthy in the long term.  Cooking them will help with that as long as we get them down to charcoal, but then there’s not much nutritional value left – although maybe we could use that to absorb any potential toxins from the fish or the tubers I tried eating earlier, which may be what was causing the captain to act irrationally.  Yes, I think we’d better try that.”
“Try eating the trees?”

The staff doctor blinked.  “What?  Who’d want to do that?”
“You.  Twenty seconds ago.”
“That would be odd.  I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“You just said to do that.”
“Are you sure you’re alright?” asked the staff doctor, and as his hand started drifting towards the remaining emergency rope the systems engineer jumped for it too.  The scuffle that followed was inconclusive, but the staff doctor had done more work on the captain and so ran out of steam first and was subsequently hogtied with several granny knots and a lot of complaining. 
“Okay,” breathed the systems engineer.  “Alright.  No fish.  No tubers.  What do you think?”

This was directed to the head scientist, who was staring into the flames with brow furrowed in gentle but fierce thought.  At this prompt they looked up at them all – two bound, one standing and panting – and cleared their throat.

“Rocks,” said the head scientist. 

“And?” asked the systems engineer. 

The head scientist shook their head dismissively.  “Rocks,” they explained.  And then their eyes went back to the fire. 

“Great,” said the systems engineer.  “Just great.”  He blew out a sigh.  “So, as the only one who apparently hasn’t consumed any of the local flora or fauna and come down with whatever alien poisoning is messing with the rest of you, it’s up to me to be the sensible, rational, reasonable one around here – as usual.  We’re going to be smart and practical and think this through.  We’re going to find the other survivors and eat them.  This is the best expenditure of our limited time and energy and resources, and will not go wrong.”

“Rocks,” said the head scientist. 

“Right!” said the systems engineer, and then he passed out.

The head scientist went to sleep some six minutes later – still sitting bolt upright — and twenty minutes after that the fire died.

The air still shone and shimmied for quite a while longer, though.  Some of the substances the ambient oxygen was peeling loose from the salvage-firepit’s metals were very lively indeed. 

Winter ended and the waters ran warm. And where went the warm, there went the wizards in their great study-ships: fat-bellied and top-heavy; high in back and front and overstuffed with mobile studies and bilge laboratories and secret water-and-air-tight compartments and crewed by a few shaken souls or no one at all.

And where wizards went, other wizards typically did not. Because of things like this.

***

“This,” said Hope, waving her hand up and down at the breadth of this, which had been smelly even before its preservation in brine, “is my finest discovery yet.”
“Doubtless.”

Hope had a habit when lecturing of tapping her fingers on any nearby surface in a way that wasn’t quite a rhythm. She did this now. “Radical bauplan inversion; in full defiance of gravity – the torso reversed; the tail turned on its head; each limb completely acting in antitorsion. An incredible and incredibly demanding feat to sustain in violation of natural and physical laws, powered by an internal metaphorical stomach capable of turning any concept that can fit down the gullet into fuel.”

“Impressive.”

“It took a two-day chase to bring down this specimen. It was only foiled when it tried to swallow my anchor and got stuck on it. Forged and worked metals were a complete novelty that it had no idea how to cope with; although I hypothesize it would’ve managed with sufficient exposure.”
“Very likely. But there is one small problem.”

“What?”
Mercy sucked down the last mouthful of tea for just a little longer than necessary. “You have interpreted the organism upside-down and backwards.”

***

And so came the third thing that turned with the seasons: with time came the warmth, and with the warmth came the wizards, and with the wizards came the perniciousness.

Perniciousness was Hope naming a newly-described and interestingly-shaped coral Gluteus mercy.

Perniciousness was Mercy sending one messenger-gull an hour to Hope’s vessel for six nights running, each with only a useless fragment of a request or a slight spelling correction on a previous message.

Perniciousness was Hope intercepting the monthly merchant resupply whale-pod and bartering for all of their squid, tunny, and marlin – far in excess of what any one researcher would need for even the most extravagant birthday feast – on Mercy’s birthday.

Perniciousness was Mercy’s spynacles letting her know the precise day on which to announce her weeks-old description of a new species of ectoplasm-consuming nothosaur, which was the exact day before Hope finished inscribing her final analysis of her own specimen of it.

And true perniciousness was that the first question that appeared in each of their heads each time after each insult without fail or hesitation was ‘how can I beat this?’

***

It was never a difficult question to answer.

This time, the answer was a small clockwork fish filled with a particular enzyme extracted from a pernicious species of cave-dwelling trilobite, which would result in whatever ate the fish metamorphosing into something spined and horned and aggressive and very rapidly cancerous, which would then do likewise to whatever ate IT, and so on and so forth. Hope’s theory was that if she flung it into the sea in Mercy’s general direction the odds were better than not that she’d end up with an angry armoured fish devouring part of Mercy’s rudder before the week was out.

“Good luck,” she told the little brass-and-coral nightmare, and with a gingerly-applied pat to the backside, she flung it into the sea.

***

Simultaneously, Mercy stood from her desk with a sore back in the palm of one hand and a devious little mixture in the other. It was made of ground ultraviolet glass and bottled sunshine and just a hint of malefic vitriol extracted from black walnut heartwood. It wanted out, and wanted to be consumed, and whatever consumed it would, should, could become a wrathful and desiccated husk of its own self devoted only to mindless thrashing spite against every piece of the world to make contact with its own rotting frame.

The currents were augured to be favourably Hope-borne for the next few days, so she dumped the lot overboard with a very lazy flick of her wrist and didn’t bother to look twice.

“Have fun finding specimens with THAT,” she muttered to herself three minutes later, when the words occurred to her. She was alone on her vessel and felt no shame in doing this.

***

Three days later the surface of the sea ran black-and-electric with a host of screaming, thrashing, nightmare-ridden, armour-plated, invincible, immortal, agonized beasts of various sizes and shapes, all lethal and unhappy about it and all of them skeletons filled with tumorous spike-and-tooth growths.

Hope tried fire, the standby of every wizard. It made them smell like glue and the shoreline, but did not make them flinch.

Mercy, the elder and the more experienced mariner, tried lightning. It made them shake and shudder and move twice as quickly for approximately an hour. The waves ran thicker and thicker with enemies and the hulls of each ship – reinforced with word and wand though they were – began to groan and creak under the many, many, many teeth and jaws being applied ever more pressingly.

“Perhaps this will work,” said Hope as quietly and carefully as she could, measuring out a dram of powdered brontofish grain-by-grain into a triple-sealed lead-glazed flask, hands made clumsy and fingers barely able to move in safety gloves fashioned of inch-thick walrus leather. “As long as I’m careful,” she amended.

“Needs must,” said Mercy, who had brought up the hidden vault attached to her ship’s anchor and was – behind a cold iron safety sheet –opening a triple-combination-locked door entirely by feel. It cracked open, revealing a single megaloplesiosaur tooth, vibrating under the pressure of the atmosphere and its own charge. She plucked it up and began to wrap it in the thickest possible blankets, as carefully as if it were her own newborn child. “If done properly.”

It was at precisely that moment that the two ships – driven by the push and pull and prying of the deranged hosts of enraged sea creatures, and otherwise left undirected and unobserved – bonked into one another at full force.

***

When the explosions were over and the clouds had begun to creep back over the horizon and the sea had recovered enough to let ripples disturb its surface again, it dawned on a very new sort of argument.

“I have the space; you make the offer,” said Mercy.
“I have the provisions; YOU make the offer,” said Hope.
“A barrel of hardtack isn’t worth much if a passing scavenger takes your legs before you’ve even had a chance to get hungry.”
“And a nice safe chunk of driftwood isn’t much use if you wither up and die on it weeks before it starts to sink. Give me something I want.”

“I think I see sharks coming back,” said Mercy.

“I think they’ll damage this barrel if they eat me,” said Hope.
They waited there for the second-longest ten seconds of either of their lives, avoiding eye contact. Then Hope clambered aboard the chunk of what had been part of Mercy’s fo’c’sle while Mercy fished out the (still dry) barrel.

“I think perhaps,” she said as she began to pry at the edge of the lid with the charred stump of what had once been her emergency stylus, “we may have gotten a little over-invested in ourselves.”
“As opposed to our research.”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps.”
“After all, it is the knowledge we produce that will truly matter in the long run.”

“Indeed,” said Hope. “Our egos are only truly grown through genuine accomplishment, and accomplishment cannot be made by hounding at the work of another. When one of us spends their time on rivalry over scholarship, we all lose, history included.”
“Truth,” said Mercy, putting her weight on the stylus, which snapped.

The lid of the barrel came off with a pop.

They looked inside for the longest ten seconds of either of their lives.

“You know,” said Hope, “I spent ages looking at this specimen after you left. It wasn’t upside-down and backwards at all.”
“Oh?”
“No. It was just upside-down.”

Mercy tilted her head and squinted. “You know,” she said. “I think you’re right.”
“I don’t think it’s edible.”
“I think you’re wrong.”
There was no way to record who pushed who overboard first. It was simply too close to tell.

Nothing happened for six hundred years, then a shovel hit me in the head.

It was small and soft – mere metal – and it dented very badly from the shock of striking my skull. Someone didn’t appreciate that, because I heard my first sound in six hundred years and it bore the unmistakable cadence and sharpness of swearing. It went on and on and on and then it stopped.

Shortly afterwards, the next shovel hit me in the head. This time it was more careful – a bump, a brush, a touch – and it wasn’t alone. A steady probing, cautious little metal fingers feeling out the edges of my existence. On and on and on it went and slowly the weight left me until sight returned and I stared unblinking at a wide and blue sky again.

Not that I had a choice. No eyelids.

The shovellers gathered around to look and chatter about my eyes and their lack of lids, and I saw to my great ambivalence that they were the same creatures that had embodied me in the first place. Bilaterally symmetrical, vertebrates, physiologically ensouled, lacking conceptual anchoring, carbon-based, chronologically linear, socially dependant, and analogically unresonant. A troubling and troubled existence for anything or anyone.

And their leader stepped up with a tablet as old as I was and familiar sigils on it and I knew that other things hadn’t changed much either.

“You are bound to my words and wishes, demon!” hollered the leading primate, brandishing the tablet. “In the name of your namer’s intent, I conjure your form and abjure your will and bid you thus: rise from your grave!”

So commanded, I did as I was told. It took thirty seconds and took the lives of a dozen or so of my excavators, but I was probably as unhappy about it as they were. When I stood atop the ground again – many-coiled, many-legged, flexing my hands without arms and my arms without hands, jaws beginning to sing in the open atmosphere once more – I was struck once more by how ugly everything around me was. It’s amazing how the vividness of these things fades, even from a perfect memory.

“I will ride thee,” demanded my summoner, and I did as I was told and placed it atop my head, surrounded and protected and warded by my coronal fields and sagittal spines from forces solid, liquid, or gaseous. “Southwest, and fast-paced!” it commanded, and I did as I was told and moved my limbs and beat my wings and slithered my form and began, with the worst mood I’d ever been in, to travel.

Being still had been nice. Quiet. Not peaceful, but a place to be full – of emptiness, of stillness, of senselessness.

Now I was in motion and I’d forgotten just how deeply wearing velocity was. And the air tasted too strongly of nitrogen and hatred. I’d forgotten that.

***

The fields I moved through were familiar. The crops were new, the clothing and houses and tools were new, but the fields were familiar. Much labour for much wealth for a few’s benefit. My rider’s clothes were unique and impractical, and from this and its covetous mien as we tore through the roadways and trampled the crops I deduced two things: first, that it was one of the few; second, that it was not the beneficiary of the labour here. The avarice arose from it like heat-haze on a rotting carcass, and only grew stronger as we moved from the agrarian to the fortification. A mighty edifice stood atop a gentle hill, moated and trenched and walled and isolated. Organisms moved within and without it guided by purpose and fear and boredom and all the other reasons why any of them did anything, and my rider told me “strike down the door!” and I did as I was told, with claw and tooth and my full amalgamated and observable mass.

“I have come to seize my birthright, as the rightful and UNJUSTLY EXILED heir!” it proclaimed, unbothered by the dust and the debris and the screaming. “I demand my usurper of a sibling come forth and submit to my authority, as is proven by my sovereign ability to direct and subdue this antique treasure of my people’s lands!”

At this, a messenger came forth and said something that was eloquent and diplomatic and my rider said “kill them” and I did as I was told. The second messenger simply said it’d go find my rider’s sibling and so I was given no more commands for a time but to wait, coiled in ready position, left to ponder the state of the bricks and the stones and the air around me.

It wasn’t much different than I’d known in any of the ways that mattered and most of the ones that didn’t.

Presently, a gong rang out, followed by a trumpet and the collapse of an entire wall of the central keep. Stepping free from the rubble on squat limbs came a thing so large that surely it had been almost as buried as I’d been. It was taller than sixteen tall men stacked up on top of one another, and a little wider than it was tall, and a little longer than it was wide. Hundreds of tons of alloys and synthetics plated it inside and out. It stank of dead earth and crushed stone. It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen in my entire existence.

“YOUR ILLEGAL AND ILLICIT SOPHISTRY IS HEREBY DISPUTED AND DENIED, BY EVIDENT PROOF OF ANCESTRY, LEGITIMACY, AND MY OWN POSSESSION OF A TRUE AND KNOWN TREASURE OF OUR HERITAGE,” proclaimed a voice broadcasted through old, old electronics. “I GIVE YOU THE CHANCE TO LAY DOWN YOUR INFERIOR DEMON, RENOUNCE YOUR CLAIMS, AND DIE NOBLY.”

“Destroy it,” my rider commanded, and I did as I was told.

***

It was a process.

Firstly, it had been a long time since I’d fought anything.

Secondly, I had never fought anything like this before. Its chronology was not mine; its shape was alien; its weapons were bizarre – brass-and-lead teeth that fired themselves at me; gases that incandesced into explosive fury; elements that fought each other and tore the air apart. It had no heartbeat but it had a heart and that heart was a very small and confused sun; it had no blood but its limbs moved with pumping liquids; and it had no brain but was clearly possessed of a very vigorous and purposeful mind that was intent on solving the problem of how to kill me.

In this, we had a protracted and deeply confusing disagreement.

I bit its carapace and it rammed my thorax; I spat pressurized hatred and it fired electrostatic bolts; I clawed at its cockpit and it directed a hailstorm of radioactive solids at my coronal prow. We were too different in kind to find each other’s weaknesses and too alike in strength to be overpowered. It was like a cloud trying to wrestle a wave.

The fortress, of course, was demolished. The casualty rate was high but not absolute. The landscape was being rapidly reshaped every other second in every which way. And the worst of it was, there wasn’t a moment’s quiet.

“SURRENDER!” bleated from my adversary’s back.

“ABDICATE!” howled my rider atop my skull.

“NEVER!” they agreed, and all the while we groped and strained and tried to crush one another with sheer bulk; in collapsing emotional vortices; in torrents of high-velocity projectiles.

***

In the end, I was lucky first. In a fit of what I’m not too proud to admit was genuine frustration with the noise, I captured a particularly vehement burst of the constant stream of electromagnetic chatter flowing from my opponent and threw it back at the incessantly yawping devices atop its back. I intended it as a slap. Instead it crawled inside its hardened carapace, scurried inside the cockpit, and permanently fried out the controls, leaving its rider muted mid-sentence and electronically scrambled.

The metal cage halted midstride, and I felt its mind, so perpetually motile and dynamic, light-fast, whip-sharp, stop flat for a second; not for want of ability, but in genuine astonishment.

“BEHOLD!” yelled my rider, arms flung wide. “Behold my TRIUMPH, as DICTATED by JUSTICE and FATE ITSELF!” It stood up, trembling with joy and hate, and stepped proud of my coronal fields onto my brow, visible to all remaining witnesses (a wary crow in a distant and untoppled tree; many unnoticed arthropods; an unending well of microorganisms). “Behold ME, the RIGHTFUL RULER of this FIEF, as I ALWAYS SAID! ALL HAIL-”

My erstwhile opponent’s smallest armament (a peculiar sort of metal tube that spat geometrically and chemically complex missiles) went ‘ffutt’ and my rider’s tablet and upper body vanished.

The quiet that followed was not as absolute as it had been underground, but it was such a relief that I was hard pressed to find any superior to it.

***

So we enjoyed it, the two of us. And when were done, we tried in vain to find a way to speak to one another in any way but through matter and motion; and when we were done with THAT we set out, side by side, on a long walk away from fields and fiefs and shallow graves.

Maybe we’ll bury ourselves again when we get there, wherever it is. But this is not a bad way to be, for now.

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?

On the first day of Contact, my low-atmosphere telescope showed to me:

A distant light above me.     

On the second day of Contact, my low-atmosphere telescope showed to me:

two falling stars

and a distant light above me

On the third day of Contact, my low-atmosphere telescope showed to me:

three robot drones

two falling stars      

and a distant light above me

On the fourth day of Contact, my low-atmosphere telescope showed to me:

four discreet calls

three robot drones

two falling stars             

and a distant light above me

On the fifth day of Contact, my low-atmosphere telescope showed to me:

five alien emissaries
four discreet calls

three robot drones      

two falling stars             

and a distant light above me

On the sixth day of Contact, my low-atmosphere telescope showed to me:

six drives-a-hypering

five emissaries
four discreet calls

three robot drones      

two falling stars                    

and a distant light above me

On the seventh day of Contact, my low-atmosphere telescope showed to me:

seven colds-a-fusioning

six drives-a-hypering

five emissaries         
four discreet calls

three robot drones      

two falling stars                    

and a distant light above me

On the eighth day of Contact, my low-atmosphere telescope showed to me:

eight plots-a-brewing

seven colds-a-fusioning

six drives-a-hypering

five emissaries                     
four discreet calls

three robot drones      

two falling stars                    

and a distant light above me

On the ninth day of Contact, my low-atmosphere telescope showed to me:

nine assassinations

eight plots-a-brewing

seven colds-a-fusioning

six drives-a-hypering

five emissaries                     
four discreet calls

three robot drones               

two falling stars                    

and a distant light above me

On the tenth day of Contact, my low-atmosphere telescope showed to me:

ten theorists-conspiring

nine assassinations

eight plots-a-brewing

seven colds-a-fusioning

six drives-a-hypering

five emissaries                     
four discreet calls

three robot drones               

two falling stars                    

and a distant light above me

On the eleventh day of Contact, my low-atmosphere telescope showed to me:

eleven final warnings

ten theorists-conspiring

nine assassinations

eight plots-a-brewing

seven colds-a-fusioning

six drives-a-hypering

five emissaries                     
four discreet calls

three robot drones               

two falling stars                    

and a distant light above me

On the eleventh day of Contact, my low-atmosphere telescope showed to me:

twelve orbital strikings

eleven final warnings

ten theorists-conspiring

nine assassinations

eight plots-a-brewing

seven colds-a-fusioning

six drives-a-hypering

five emissaries                     
four discreet calls

three robot drones               

two falling stars                    

and

approaching

light

above

me

On Friday, the lake froze over.

It was cold. It was clear. It was covered in fine, fine, fine snow that had drifted from the shoreline. And she saw that and thought it was nice, it was nice, it was very nice.

Spring came, and the lake thawed. Mud flowed and frogs croaked and green scum filled the shallows.

But she remembered, and she longed, and one long hot day when the mosquitoes were fierce and the air was smug and thick she couldn’t stand it anymore and she walked down to the shore and held the lake by its bank, by its hand, and she drew the ice up from the far shore on, thick as maple sugar and twice as sweet. It was as cold and beautiful as she remembered, and she went to sleep and dreamed of it and was almost shocked to find it still there when she awoke.

She kept it like that all day long. She kept it like that all summer long. When someone finally found her down by the water as the leaves began to turn it wasn’t hard for them to put two and two together, especially when she didn’t deny anything. Why would she?

So they put her in the lake. They had to smash a hole first, because it was still very frozen, but they were angry and determined and had time. They demanded answers, apologies, anything, and she gave them nothing all the way ‘till the end, when they threw her in and closed the sky up behind her.

She closed her eyes and did the thing that was neither floating nor sinking, and she took the opposite of a breath, and nothing changed for a v

e

r

y

***

long time later, someone came knocking.

Tap, tap.

Tap, tap.

Tap, tap.

They were knocking on the ceiling. They were knocking on the sky.

She didn’t ignore them, because ignoring them meant she would acknowledge them and that wasn’t necessary. They sank into the background that was the foreground that was the lake that was everything; saturating her.

Tap, tap.

Except there being a ‘her’ was already a change. She hadn’t been her for a very long time, and the moment she realized that and tried to reverse it, to sink back down again was the moment she was doomed to waking, even before the saw fell from above and smacked her right in the head, removing a sizable patch of skin and bruising her very very badly.

“SHIT!” she shouted, and the moment she did that was the moment she forgot how to do the opposite of breathing.

***

When she was done coughing there was a concerned face watching her attached to an unconcerning body and they’d pulled her half-out of the hole in the ice. Half-out of the water. Half-into the sunlight. Every muscle in her body tensed rigid, then flexed.

“NononononononNO,” said the stranger. “No! It’s okay! You’re not coming out! You’re fine! PLEASE don’t do that again!”
“Do what again?” she asked sepulchrally. She could still feel the lakewater inside her, running down her vocal chords, rattling in her lungs, leaking out of her pores; every instance of its existence a moment of flight. It was leaving her behind.

“The thrashing and the screaming and the biting.”
“I bit?”
“You bit me, you bit the ice, you tried to bite the damned sun. Please don’t do that.”
Her mouth tasted like metal, which was another thing she hadn’t thought about until now that was stuck in her head and never leaving again, like a big invisible tumour. “I promise not to bite the sun,” she said.

“Try. Promise not to TRY to bite the sun either.”
She hadn’t noticed she’d done that and she hadn’t meant to do that and there was therefore no reason at all for her to feel so caught-out and ashamed about it. “I promise not to try to bite the sun, either,” she said sulkily.

“Thank you. Can I ask your name?”
“No,” she said with some relief. THAT, at least, wasn’t coming back.

“Is that your-”

“It isn’t.”
“Oh. Okay. I’m-”

“Strange,” she interrupted. “You’re strange.”
“You jumped out of a hole in the lake, drowning, then refused to leave it.”
“You dropped a saw on my head.”
“It wasn’t on purpose!”
“Why would anyone drop a saw into the lake?”
“I was trying to make a hole for ice-fishing!”

She knew ice. She knew fishing. She didn’t know what they meant when you put them together.

“Tell me about ice fishing,” she demanded.

“You make a hole in the ice and you fish through the ice. It takes a very long time and it’s very cold, so it’s a good excuse to drink and eat warm things. Can I have my saw back? I’m sorry to be so blunt, it’s just that I borrowed it from my mother and she’s going to kill me if I don’t return it properly.”

She considered this. On the one hand the saw had hurt her head, shaken her entirely from what she was and who she wanted to be and made her infuriatingly aware, and was wanted for entirely selfish reasons. On the other hand, there was no other hand.

“Grovel and beg,” she decreed.

“I’ll share the food with you!”
Oh no. Now she’d remembered food. “Give me the food.”
“I mean, I’ll share it with you when I’ve caught it.”
“You won’t catch anything,” she scoffed. “The fish aren’t dumb enough to bite a hook and a string that just sit there in the water.”
“Hungry fish are dumber fish. And the fish here must be REALLY hungry.”
“Why?”
“Because this lake’s been frozen forever. Don’t you know that? You live in it.”
“I don’t live in it,” she said with the fast assurance of someone saying something so fundamentally true that they don’t even have to consider the denial.

“Okay. Watch.”
She watched. It was okay. And then as she watched and it was okay and she watched and it was okay and she watched and it was OKAY she felt the faint stirrings of something truly incomprehensible to her.

“I think I’m bored,” she said with dawning horror.

“That’s part of it.”
“No, no, no. I can’t be BORED. I was happy!”
“Whoops, felt a tug!”
“Why would wait what?”
A lunge, a surge, a heave, a pull, some swearing, and one good hard yank and a fish flew out of the water and landed on top of her, which she resented vocally.

“Sorry. Here, one second, let me get this thing gutted: we can probably catch a second one with his insides, and I don’t know about you but I’m damn hungry.”

“I can gut it myself,” she said. And she was so vexed she did it bare—handed, and even stopped at the guts instead of wringing the fish from the fins up to everything.

“We should probably start the fire. Do you want to do that or do you want to keep fishing for number two?”

“Two,” she said, and took the rod without asking and sat there and prepared to once again battle the strangest sensation she’d relearned yet.

She wasn’t as bored for as long or as hard as she’d thought she’d be. There was still trickles of bright red coming from the fresh bait when she hauled it out of the water, its would-be-consumer still grimly hanging on. She bludgeoned it to death ambivalently.

“Fire’s up. Do you want to help cook?”
The heat felt strange. It made her fingers tingle.

“No,” she said. But she scooched closer to it, and when the fish was done cooking she learned how to eat again, and when it was done she felt warmer still, and stranger. She laid on her back on the ice and realized her feet were all that were still in the water, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that or anything else that had happened. She was too restless to sit still and she couldn’t keep her eyes open.

“I’m going to go back to sleep,” she announced.

“You sure? There’s lots more to see up here. I was about to make tea.”

Tea sounded interesting, and it took time to brew, and by the time it had been made and talked over and drunk she was even more tired and restless and so instead of announcing herself she simply slid back into the lake and sank, like a stone, like the saw had, and for a beautiful moment everything was still and calm.

Oh.

She threw the saw out of the hole and watched with some satisfaction that it bonked off the stranger’s head.

“Now we’re even,” she shouted up. But all that came out were bubbles, and she shut her eyes feeling frustrated and unable to tell why.

***

A pebble fell between her eyes.

It was smaller and softer and rounder than the saw, but it hit the spot on her forehead that was bare of skin and sore of touch and so when she came up she was already pretty angry, and seeing the stranger looking down at her made her angrier, and then finally she burst up and out of the depths with great irritation and agony and landed on them with both hands and feet.

“You!” she said.

“Me!”

“Why are you BOTHERING ME.”

“I thought we could try skating.”

She looked at the little bladed shoes with great distrust. “Try what?” she asked.

“You slide around on them.”
“I’d have to leave the lake.”
“You’re out of the lake already.”

Oh.

Oh.

She looked down her legs and saw her bare feet dripping on dry ice, drying droplets all that were left to link her to where she’d been. The air was immense and razor-thin and all-enveloping and it was trying to get inside her, to inflate her lungs. She could breathe and it meant she couldn’t breathe.

So she looked at the skates again instead. They already seemed nice.

“Show me,” she said.

Ten minutes later, when she was done laughing, she took her own turn at them.

“You’re not very good at this,” she said as she budged and nudged and skidded.

“We’re in sort of a bumpy spot,” said the stranger crossly. “I’m fine on flat ice.”

“Well, where’s flat?”

“Over there a ways?”

“Fine.”

It was flatter, but not flat. And so was the next spot they found, and the next, and to a great degree most of what was being done wasn’t skating but it was tripping, slipping, cursing, insulting, and general arguing and disgruntlement, and she’d never been so pleased to be short of her gruntles in all her life.

She wasn’t sure how long her life was. Did she count the years in the lake? If she hadn’t been alive then, what else had she been?

“I’m tired,” she realized, and decided, and announced.

“Me too. The sun’s almost down.”

“Oh.” So it was. She’d barely paid attention to it since she’d tried to eat it; a defense mechanism, maybe. But she supposed it looked low and that made sense and she felt that tiredness again, that fidgety urge to sit down and never stop moving all at once. Even the long trip back to the little windbreak where they’d eaten the fish wasn’t enough to wear it off.

She had trouble fitting through the hole.

“I’ll bring the saw back again tomorrow and cut it bigger for you.”
“Why’s it smaller?”

“It’s freezing over again.”

“Oh,” she said. Of course it was.

She went back down to the bottom before she had to think about what she thought about that.

***

This time she saw the sunlight shift and came out of the ice before the pebble could be dropped, caught it in midair, and flicked it back.

“Ow!”

“Exactly. Serves you right.” She shook herself and the water clinging to her flew everywhere. “What are we doing today?”

“I wanted to show you something.”
“Is it a long way away?”
“Not SO long.”
“Can we skate to it?”
A terrible sigh. “Yes.”
They skated to it, which made it take longer but involved a lot of shoving.

The shoreline wasn’t as muddy as she remembered. Up on the banks there was green growing in a million shades.

“It’s warm,” she said, and was surprised that this surprised her.

“It’s not winter.”
“But the lake’s frozen,” she said. And then, because she’d only just remembered it and felt very foolish, “I froze it. On purpose.”
“Why’d you do that?”
It hadn’t been for ice fishing. Or for skating. And she was sure that at the time it hadn’t been so she could do something much deeper and stranger than sleep.

“I think that I thought it was pretty,” she said. “And I missed it.”

She looked at the shoreline again. “This is pretty too. I don’t know if I missed it. But this is pretty too.”
“Do you want to try it?”

She’d been completely dry and hadn’t noticed until now. That was what made up her mind.

One foot, then the other. Soft under her heels and toes, but more springy than slimy.

She closed her eyes, breathed in cool solid white, breathed out clean warm water. She opened them, and walked onwards.

***

She looked back once, to make sure she was being followed. The lake was blue in the center now, spreading out through the ice in a thousand thousand little streams. That decided something for her.

“I’m going to see a river,” she told them. “I’ll visit afterwards.”
“I’ll make tea.”
“And then we can go fishing. Without ice.”

They agreed on that.