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G turned slowly, at the speed of the little blue planet it rested upon. Its sides gleamed in a way that had nothing to do with the pallid yellow sunlight creeping up its sides in the fresh morning, and for a moment it amused itself by calculating the total number of atoms on the planet impacted by the star’s rays at any given time, accounting for seasonal variation. It was one of the most tedious 0.0000000000002s of a picosecond it’d seen on this planet since it’d arrived, and it was still the high point four hours later, when 9 appeared inside its skull without warning.
G wished 9 wouldn’t do that. It was an aggressive, needy act, and one that 9 had no authority to do as 9 wasn’t its boss – the concept of ‘hierarchy’ had been discarded almost two billion years ago. 9 was just the person that told it what to do all the time.
“Progress?” 9 asked. No, not the right tone of thought. Demanded.
“Yes,” said G.

“Well?”
“There has been progress.”
“What KIND of progress.”
“The usual kind,” said G, with the passive-aggressiveness only an immortal can muster. It almost sounded affectionate.
“G, you are being obtuse. Give a description or give nothing.”
“There are primitives with the capacity for sapience here.”
“Are they likely to advance under their own potential?”
G observed the nearest ape-man, seven thousand miles away. He was licking himself in unhygienic places with an enthusiasm it hadn’t seen in a long time. Behind him, a leopard approached with the casual swagger of someone walking into a nice restaurant.
“No.”
“G, you know what to do.”
G increased the pace of the quantum flow that eliminated its waste heat from existence. “At all times. What particular form of it is needed?”
9 sighed, and G increased the flow again. Sighs were not only unnecessary, they had been proven to be physically detrimental to your health back when they were still merely brain patterns in supercomputers. A sigh was a wasteful indulgence. “Test them. Evaluate them. If they have potential, uplift them. The same as the other 3730184637.8 times. Now hurry up and stop sulking.”
G permitted itself a few wasteful microseconds of sheer, unyielding frustration and rage after 9 left. Wasteful. Wasteful! Wasteful was acting as if you were someone’s mother in a society that had been asexual for 99.99[…]% of its existence! Wasteful was sighing with no clear purpose! Wasteful was using ‘9’ as your name a billion and a half years after it had been proven to not really exist, along with all other numbers divisible by three! Wasteful, wasteful, WASTEFUL.
G was so mad that it almost didn’t bother incinerating the leopard as it appeared directly behind the ape-man. But no; the population was small enough that testing should preserve subjects as much as possible.
When it happened. You couldn’t rush testing; it moved on the scale of hours and days, not picoseconds. Anything faster could burn out the frail and feeble little bodies of the poor non-sapients it was here to examine.
Yes, who could blame G if it took its time? It was applying all due care to a delicate task. If 9 were to intrude again, well, that sort of disruption of protocol would be horrifying. A disturbance at a crucial juncture could be all that would be needed to cause one of the subjects’ tiny little brains to pop like dark matter in quantum foam.
G watched the ape-man turn around to face it, and his expression pleased it so much that it watched it six more times just for kicks.
Yes, it’d be thorough about this. As properly expected. Why, it’d even run extra tests. Innovation – the obvious spark of a dedicated and thorough mind who wasn’t rushing things like idiots who were clearly not their superiors wished them to. Who could fault THAT?

“I’m not faulting you, G,” said 9, “but the point of this exercise escapes me.”
“It’s a reflex exam. Perfectly viable alternative to the 2Q-based Weave The Twigs protocol.”
“G, the entire point of the protocol is to test their ability to undertake non-normative goals. You are asking them to do something that by your own testimony comes entirely naturally for them.”
“A necessary variant,” explained G, engaging its gravitic anchors to prevent itself from falling over under a particularly forceful blow. “Ability to execute an already-practiced reflex is as informative as developing a new one.”
Another, horrendously unnecessary sigh. “Fine. Good luck.”
Another impact, splattering across G’s carbon-darkened surface like cosmic rays. It turned its attention away from the boring, stale realities of its inner self and back to the very important work at hand. Already the ape-woman subject was reloading its palm with another handful of its feces, a jaded, critical eye assessing its next target.
Just out of curiosity and sportsmanship, G returned fire.

“G, what is that damp… orange matter around your upper superstructure?”
“Fruit. I am calling it an orange.”
“Why is there smeared matter on your carapace? Eliminate it.”
“It was a gift from the subjects. Refusing it would be devastating to their tiny undeveloped brains.”
“Fine.”
G accepted this and returned to its transcriptive efforts. It had already established a dictionary, and now it was working on grammar. Most of it seemed to revolve around the proper enunciation of hoots.
“Big ugly what thing huh what?” asked the largest ape-woman to her mate. “Still there still there weird huh.”
G activated a subroutine that had lain unused since the last member of its species had left their original fleshy bodies. Sound emerged from its carapace.
“You weird me normal yeah.”
The ape-woman jumped a little. “What huh what huh what what what?”
“Normal nothing calm no harm yeah.”
They gathered round and sniffed it, more carefully than the last time. This included the traces of fecal matter and crushed fruit she’d acquired since.
“Yeah normal yeah yeah yeah. One of us?”
G thought about this. On the one circumstance, it was a violation of the norm that was beyond anything it’d yet committed. On the other circumstance, it was bound to annoy 9.
This was the easiest decision it’d made in a billion years.

“G, why have you moved position more than sixteen times in the past five minutes?”
“I wish to examine the widest possible group of ape-men.”
“G, you have been moving distances at a pace approximately equal to five miles an hour in a single line.”
“I travel as they do, to lull them and comfort them.”
“We are fundamentally disruptive forces! The entire purpose of our visitation is disruption! Hurry up and DISRUPT them!”
“Eventually,” said G in the special kind of calmness that drove 9 crazy. “Eventually.”
It continued to hover slowly across the veldt, humming in a reassuring sort of way. Every now and then the ape-men in front of it would pause to make sure it was still following, then wave it onwards. They had a long trip ahead of them if they wanted to make the cave by nightfall.

The next few days were a blur to G. There was so much to learn, so much to do. What the feel of fresh fecal matter between your toes was like; the satisfaction of seeing that same fecal matter thwack into the forehead of your least-favourite sibling; the secret of which fruit is the ripest; how to hide up a tree and scream at a leopard, at your friends, at the universe itself. It was an education – a re-education – in things it’d forgotten even mattered, like the importance of hitting people you didn’t like very hard until they whimpered. This was very therapeutic.
Days passed by. Weeks. The clouds wandered overhead in lazy patterns and the fruits went in and out of season. G had several prospective mates propose sexual activities to it, which it gave them permission to do if they could find sufficient orifices. This was widely recognized as an excellent joke and many grew to like it for the hooting and mockery it inspired.
It was nice, to be liked. And it was so nice that all of a sudden hours felt like picoseconds and days felt like minutes and over and over what seemed like no time at all later 9 was there again, yelling, whining, wheedling, griping.
Something would have to be done about that.
G watched as an ape-woman responded to her friend’s screeching by turning her back and jamming her paws in her ears.
Yes, something would have to be done about that. And wasn’t it a shame, that it was so evident to something that lived for just a little over two decades?

“This is UN-PRECEDENTED.”
“And therefore novel. Novelty is rarely documented. Recording rarely documented happenings is useful. Therefore this is useful.”
“Not when the novelty in question is this… obscene! You are a recorder – you record, you brood, you instill change! You do NOT observe from the position of a functional participant! What are you, unidimensional? You’ve altered their society just by existing!”
“I am just another ape-man, humble, happy, and healthy,” said G. “They are a simple people, and the fact that I am five times their height and made of a shining black material they have never even imagined does not matter to them. Only the delicious fruit that I have successfully located for the tribe.”
“The others will hear about this! Right this nanosecond!”
“So long as they know I am getting results, and that they hurry. This communication might soon cease.”
“What?”
“I have opened my exterior carapace, and there is a subject monkeying about with my internal components. I believe it is ‘grooming’ me.”
“WHAT?!”
“Be careful, be careful. A little louder and the humming might draw her attention. Would be a real shame if she were to destroy my trans-light mindlink systems.”
“Don’t you dare do that. Don’t you DARE. DON’T YOU-”
“Whoops!” said G, and it watched gleefully as the ape-woman’s prodding fingers blundered right through the middle of the delicate tangle of quantum strands, completely obliterating its communicative abilities. She yelped and withdrew her stung hand, sucking on it resentfully, then made a rude noise at G and its treacherous ways. For a moment G felt uncertain, then it recalled that unlike 9 any enemies it made would be dead in a scant handful of decades and it cheered up again.
It stood there for a moment in this new life that constantly mandated motion, looking around the wide, beautiful, colourful world that it had willingly subdued itself to. It wasn’t sure what to do next.
But something would turn up.

The question crossed Qlg’s mind in that slow-but-sudden way questions do, and it did it one day (there were no days then) when Qlg was chewing on a tiny gobbet of dead, rotting ichthyosaur.
“Tell me,” he asked one of his dozens of siblings, “what’s up there?”
The sibling, whose name nobody ever remembered, thought about this. “Up where?”
“There. Up there.”
The sibling looked. “Water,” he opined. “Recognize it anywhere.”
“No no no. Up there, past it.”
“Past it? More water.”
“Yes, but past THAT.”
The sibling scratched its exoskeleton with a foreleg. “Water. What’s wrong with you? You sick? If you’re sick, can I have your ichthyosaur? You aren’t going to need it.”
Qlg ate his ichthyosaur, gave his sibling an obscene four-legged gesture, and trudged to the highest point of the corpse. He gazed longingly up above, past the water and more water, and imagined what might lie beyond that.
Maybe it was… slightly different water.
Yeah.
Qlg stretched out his stubby little legs and paddled furiously upward for six days, and at the end of it he looked down with his eyes and could barely see the outline of the ichthyosaur, a full dozen body-lengths beneath him.
“Woah,” he said. “Woah.” He wondered if anyone else had ever travelled this high above the carcass, ever.
Then he wondered if he could go higher.
Qlg died some years later, but he left dozens and dozens of annoying, adventurous little children behind, most of whom spent their time trying to outswim one another.

“Tell me,” asked Gll, “what’s up there?”
“Past the water, the more water, the slightly different water, or the strange water?”
“All of them.”
Her mother considered this. “Dunno. Hard to get that high. Your legs are too tiny, you’ll get all worn out.”
Gll pouted at this, as much as you can pout with mandibles.
“Eh. Not much you can do.”
At this point the story goes one of two ways.
The first way, Gll stomped off in a huff and her stomps glued bits of the decaying pliosaur carcass that was their home to her toes, which she noticed made her feet much larger. Thus she discovered the paddlefeet.
The second way, Gll bit her mother’s face and it escalated into a fight which escalated into Gll accidentally tearing her mother’s age-weakened carapace into five pieces, each of which were impaled irrevocably on her spiny limbs. Thus she discovered the paddlefeet.
Thus, however it happened, Gll discovered the paddlefeet, and the voyages up beyond the water and more water and so on became easier and more common than ever before.

“Hey, Sp.”
Sp indicated that she was aware of this statement. It took one leg and a partial curl.
“You ever, uh…think about it?”
Sp signed in the affirmative.
“Like, about, uh, what’s really up there? Like, up there. Past the really weird water.”
Sp agreed vigorously.
“Wanna go look?”
Sp started paddling, each leg tipped with a tiny patch of mosasaur hide that turned her wiggles into strokes.
It took them a long time, and many times they wished they’d eaten sooner than a year and a half ago, but at last their tiny compound eyes gazed in wonder at a sight no isopod had ever witnessed.
On the way back down her friend was eaten by a stray fish, so it was up to her to tell everyone about what ‘light’ meant.

Blb bobbed in the water. His legs were all about ready to fall off from strain, but he wasn’t about to stop now. He’d travelled up past the Sp Zone at record pace, torn through the Seven Growing Glimmers so quickly he’d almost miscounted them as three, and now he was sure he was almost there, almost there. The speed was so fierce he’d lost a half-limb in the first seconds of ascent, but he dared not shed a single fish-bladder antiballast. He needed his momentum or he’d be lost.
Soon, soon, SOON he’d know what was really up there! Soon!
The light was overwhelming, the water was scorching-hot, and a strange thunder was growing in his ears, but he pressed on. Almost there! Almost there!
THERE!
Blb broke through a strange sort of barrier, and unfamiliar sensations surrounded his shell. It was brighter than ever, if a bit cooler, and there were noises he wasn’t sure he recognized at all. Something blue was up above – far brighter than even the topmost of the Seven Growing Glimmers – and white puffs surrounded it, whiter than bone and ivory. There were currents surrounding his shell, moving at strange speeds in odd patterns.
The sinking took much longer, as exhausted as he was, but at last he landed on the midwater platform, buoyed on fish bladders and tied by worn old sinews.
“What was up there?” they asked him.
Blb thought about this. He was about to describe a concept so new to his people that they had never even imagined it could exist: a place without water.
“Sort of thin and shiny,” he said.

The sort-of-thin-and-shiny air played upon the sea, and the sort-of-sloppy-and-jumpy sea played upon the air, and upon the sea and within the air played Kp, in her shellcraft. It’d taken many, many (mostly peaceful, thank goodness) deaths in her family to finish the main hull, but she’d made the ideal surface-going vessel: almost as indestructible, she fancied, as the legendary coconut. There was nothing in all the ocean that could threaten it and it could go anywhere, anywhere at all.
She’d been steering for a sort of large, ugly wave for the past week. It looked interesting, and besides, it hadn’t seemed that far away. Now, at last, it was almost there.
Two weeks later and she felt her hull grind to a halt against something hard and firm, like a bone. But bigger, oh so much bigger.
Kp looked up, up, up, up, up at the long slope of the wave above her. She hoped it wasn’t going to fall anytime soon.
Then she poked it, and she was relieved. “Oh. It’s just firmer sea-bottom.”
And then, inevitably, she added “I wonder what’s up there?”

Sff cursed at the controls of his otherbody, smashing at metal and bone until his hemolymph spilled. So close! So close! He’d not led an invasion that pierced the western landboard for this to end so close! He’d not walked four ape guide-slaves to death, he’d not watched a hundred scavengers perish from his scurry, he’d not lived his whole life on stories of Kp and the Landfall for this to all end so close!
He thrashed, screamed, and ejected himself, dropping already-curled to minimize damage. He bounced from the iron foot of his otherbody with enough force to chip his carapace clean in two, rolled, toddled, and fell over.
He reached out with one broken antennae and caressed the stone in front of him.
The peak of Mount McKinley. He’d made it.
And as Sff curled into a ball and hoped that he’d last until spring came and snowmelt brought him downhill, his last sight was of the almost-hidden stars, veiled behind ropey snow and the kelp-nets of cracks drawn across his broken glasses.
His last thought, following naturally, was “I wonder what’s up there?”

The world was so tiny, and so unexpectedly green. Well, the parts that weren’t brown. Some of their later wars had gotten sloppy. But then again, what did you expect from what came of trying to understand ape psychology? It had nearly gotten them all killed before they figured that one out.
Yll held up an antennae and watched as she made it disappear, then reappear. Here’s the world, there’s the world. Gone again, here again. How much of it had they really seen, had they really known?
Questions for the past. The past was for other people, like apes. The future was different.
Yll rotated her cockpit and stared across the asteroid’s surface, watched the mining systems disengage. Time to go home, time to bring the fuel.
But still she lingered for a moment at the controls, looking deeper into galactic central core. And she wondered what was up there.

Qlg, no relation to Qlg, thought of a thing, and it was so. Ten trillion miles of conduits and a bulk of metals and electromagnetic fields that outmassed a combined constellation ensued this, revolving gently to her will at a speed that made light gawp.
She was looking for something, here in this backwater little corner of this unimportant galaxy. A curiosity of the universe, something that, like so many others, was relatively rare yet existed in the innumerable.
A planet with liquid water. There. There it was.
She turned it carefully in the impossibly enormous structures that had long-ago replaced her maxillipeds, capable of handling stars without singing. Her gaze, magnified by telescopes that operated strictly by means of folding local space-time, focused on the tiny little thing.
Blue. So much blue. Strange.
And she asked herself a question, assembled out of old, long-forgotten words buried in data banks thousands of miles across.
I wonder what’s down there?

Shush, shush, don’t worry, don’t fuss now. I’m here, momma’s here, you can stop worrying and crying.
Yes, yes, you’re all alone now, you’re too old for your crib. You sleep in the high bedroom like a child should now, like a big grownup child. And that’s scary. I understand that it’s scary. To be so high above the house, to be nearer to the gulls than to your parents. To be alone.
Yes, yes, it’s not fair. It’s not fair that your hammock is your home, and it rocks in the night wind that blows through the holes where there should be wholes, the ragged gaps where windowframes were.
But listen.
Listen close now, listen clear, and I will tell you why it is this way. Why it matters.
A long time ago, right here…

There was a great storm blowing out from the brightreefs. Scary, yes? But not so dangerous. Your great-great-grandma was clever, and so were all her friends – the men had warned them of the signs coming down from the birds and the clouds and they’d all tucked their boats deep inside the cliffs, stopped up the knotholes with great big stones. Then they slammed their shutters and furled their windmills and called down the children and they spent their nights in the hearth-room praying over the little oil lamps. They were smart, and they stayed safe. Only a very few boats belonging to careless and lazy people were broken, and nobody drowned or was blown down below to the waves. It was very safe.
Then everyone came out in the morning, found the sun floating all soft in the sky high above the old steeple, and we saw there had been a very strange thing. Do you know what your great-great-grandma saw, dearest?
Yes, that’s right – a ship! A big ship, a strange ship. It was nearly bigger than the village, its cabin was broader than two houses put together, its mast was a stump but it was still bigger than anything they’d ever put on a boat. It was a strange ship. And on its deck, sitting half-bent with her left knee bandaged, was a strange person. She was more than thrice as tall as your great-great-grandma – who was a very tall woman, as you know – and she was much too blue, not nearly as green as a sailor should be.
So your great-great-grandma and everyone went down to meet her, all at once, and everyone all stood still and stared.
“Hello, small, strange people,” said the strange person. And we all said hello back, and asked her who she was, and if she’d come far, and if she was in trouble.
“I am a voyager, an explorer, a navigator, and a sailor,” she said. “I am my own admiral. And yes, and yes. My mast is destroyed and my knee is crookt, my lenses are shattered and my larder is bare. I will be stuck here ‘till winter storms drive down and dash my ship to splinters. I ask for help to set me on my way.”
And this made everyone very nervous, smallness, because they’d never tried to fix anything so big before, and so fast, and for such a person. They were not bad people, your great-great-grandma and the others, not really that bad at all. They helped their friends, and they would help their neighbours for favours, but they’d never met anyone so strange – and moreover they were much unsure of how they would be able to fix such a large ship.
“Do not fear,” said the strange person. “I will show you how to make repairs. My devices are complex but their mending is not. My needs are as any other, my food is as any other.”
They were still slow to help then, smallness. They weren’t quick to believe this strange person, and she saw that. So she spoke a little more.
“I promise you, your aid will not go unpaid. Restore my boat to me, small, strange people, and I promise that I will give you a great gift in return.”
Now, some of them were a little hesitant still, but many of them – and your great-great-grandma was one – were very interested in this gift, and they argued and argued until everyone agreed to help, although the ship was so very very big that they were nervous. You know how that feels, don’t you? You do.
So they made it smaller by turning it into a list. A list of things to do and fix and patch.
First on the list was the strange person’s belly. Her food was all spoilt or overboard three days now, and she was starving. And what’s more, when they offered her their catches from the dimreefs, she refused them.
“These are too heavy,” she told them. “They click too strongly. I would be bleeding in a week and dying in a month. Is there no other food here? Food from farther inland, away from the reefs?”
No-one was sure. Inland was where the men spent their time, and they were always too busy weaving and timbering to look for food. That wasn’t their job.
…At least, that’s what your great-great-grandma and the other women told the strange person. Then they went home and called a meeting underneath the old steeple with their men because they saw they all looked very uncomfortable, and by wheedle and needle they got it out of them that there were special roots, very small little round ones with green leafy stems, and the men liked to eat them when they were out at work and tired. Oh, those clever, selfish little men – don’t grow up to be that way, will you? Will you? Oooh, you won’t, will you? Good child!
So that afternoon a bunch of the laziest men were sent out with blistered ears and they came back with great baskets of this root, which they baked wrapped in clay and leaves in fires, and the strange person ate them all.
“These do not click,” she said. “They are good.” And the women heard that and gave the men a few more words. You can learn them when you’re bigger, smallness. They’re not good ones. The men were passing sore about that, and they mumbled that they ought to get an extra share of the gift when it came, to pay back for losing their secret snack.
Second on the list were the lenses. They were big and brilliant and there were dozens, all held in a row by a big brass frame that spun them around and around each other and turned the globe they hovered about a thousand shiny colours.
At least, that’s what she said they did. They were all broken, each and every one, and the brass frame was nothing more than a big pile of hinges.
“For finding hot spots that click fast and loud,” she said, and she showed them the slivers of green, red, blue, and more. “They broke on your brightreefs when the storm carried me over. Without them I will have more disasters. What if I were to sail over a far-away place like your brightreefs but bigger, small, strange people?” Brrr, you’re right they all shivered at that. Brrrr. Don’t go imagining places like that, will you? Don’t worry. If there are any, they’re far away and can’t hurt anyone. Brr.
We searched long and hard up and down the town, but we found nothing. Glass is hard to make, smallness. Then a particularly lazy man who’d had a particularly long earful (he was your great-great-grandpa, yes he was) pointed up, up, up at the high rooms of the houses and asked about the windows.
“Yes,” said the strange person. “They should do nicely.”
Well there was a big row and a big huff – no windows for their children made the women awful mad, I can say that much. But they were perfect, just perfect – their shuttering would make the lenses work even better, said the strange person. So in the end the windows came off the high rooms of almost every house in town, and they went into boats, which went to the ship, where their frames were hammered into proper shape by the strange person until they fit the globe as well and as fine as could be. And the men were a bit happier, if the women were a little grumpier.
“This gift had better go a bit more our way than yours now,” they said. “You can find more tubers like that, but where’s our windows? We deserve better things now.”
Third on the list was the strange person’s leg. It hadn’t been there before, but it had been almost a week and her knee still would not bend.
“I cannot sail with one leg crookt, small, strange people,” she said. That’s true, isn’t it? Nobody can, it’ll have you overboard when you hit a bump as quick as blink. Like that – see? “It needs splinting.”
That now – that was right easy, smallness. They took a hammer in the hands of the strongest lumberjack man and they took the strange person’s leg in the arms of the two strongest hauler women and they put them together – BANG until that bad mend snapped. Then the two women splinted the leg with the straightest beam they had – the mast of the tallest boat in the village. They snapped it in two and it was just barely long enough to cradle the strange person’s leg kindly. Oh, your great-great-grandma gritted her teeth long and hard over that! Oh she did! But she took saw to timber herself and cursed great-great-grandpa when he offered to help – did it all in one go. She said the gift held her aim straight. The gift in her head.
Fourth was the bodywork. Oh, that strange person’s ship soaked timber, smallness. They had to haul it off the stones it had settled on with long, long poles – she helped too, one-legged though she was – then they had haul it onto the shore until it was seaworthy, then they had to add more rocks to the dock so it’d be deep enough to hold it. Oh that ship ate days and turned the nights short, like winter and summer come at once! She helped with hammers and with words and as her leg came back under her she spent more and more of it moving, always moving, walking up and down the town and into the hills where women weren’t supposed to be, looking for a new mast for the ship, looking for something that stood tall.
That was the fifth thing, and it was almost winter, child of mine. They had to finish soon, and there were no trees big enough. The strange person was stumped, and everyone was in a fit – all that work for nothing if they couldn’t get the mast ready for her! So they got together under the old steeple and they all agreed to look. All the men went out into the hills and forests and the women put to water and went down the coasts and they hunted all day for two days, and when they came back at night – empty-handed, empty-storied, every one! – they staggered home to meet again, under the old steeple.
And then your great-great-grandma looked up and said this, I remember she said exactly this because she told this story to my grandma a hundred thousand times, she said this: “Hey! We found it!”
So they took down the old steeple, because otherwise they would have helped the strange person for nothing at all, and they shaved off its old decorations and trimmed out its elder carvings and rubbed off the little marks the birds had left on it. And it was a little bit short and a little bit wide, but the strange person said that was good. “It will be sturdier than my last mast,” she said, “and this one has been proven in many gales, even in the same that wrecked me.” And she was right.
Not more than a week from that, all was done. The ship didn’t gleam, smallness, but it still shone there in the early morning. It shone especial bright in the eyes of everyone, because most of them had been up all night waiting in excitement, like you did on your birthday last night. When you became a child, wasn’t that nice? It was like that for all of them. So they were twitching and hopping and wincing in the cool dawn when the strange person walked down from the heights one last time, loading the last basket of the little tubers the men had shown to her. She walked down the steps six at a time, leg straight, and parted the crowd like this – woosh! – like a big fish through little minnows. She walked up the gangplank – boom boom boom – and stood there, her right foot on the boat, her left foot still waiting. And she turned to us.
“Thank you,” she said.
We waited there, all huddled up, and people made that mumbly sound they do in big parties. You know, like mmuururmrmrurmrurm. Murururmrm – yes, like that. And then up stepped your great-great-grandma, and she said what they were all saying a lot clearer, and she said this.
“What about it?”
The strange person tilted her head a little at her. “About what?”
“What about the gift?” asked your great-great-grandpa.
“Yes, the gift!” said your great-great-great-grandpa, who was old and cranky. “What is it? Where is it? Is it in the boat? I know we looked in the boat.”
“It is not in this ship,” said the strange person, “and I do not cheat. Do you wish it now, then?”
“Yes!” said everyone all at once and all past each other, some of them pushing to see properly. “Give it to us! We earned it!”
“Then do not worry, small, strange, kind people, for I have already given it to you, though it took much effort to install – and you yourselves have already repaid it.”
“What is it?” we asked – from the dock, from the windows, from the cliffs. “What is it?”
“Generosity,” she said.
And she kicked the plank loose from the dock with her foot and drifted away, already moving to hoist the sails into the fresh sunlight.

And that’s why your bedroom has no window, smallness, and neither did mine, nor your grandma’s.
So you’ll know how to behave properly when the next stranger comes.

Today we’re going to learn about birds.

Birds (kingdom Animalia, phylum Chordata, superclass Tetrapoda, class Aves), are feathered, winged, egg-laying, endothermic organisms that are often capable of flight. They are most commonly found in such environments as pretty forests, honeyed meadows, and soppy children’s books. Men with binoculars chase them around and take pictures of them while trying to hide themselves. This is normal and permissible behavior. It is not permissible for birds to watch back. This can lead to problems. It’s a good thing they can’t take pictures or those problems would be much more severe.
Most birds live on land. Penguins live in the ocean and burrowing owls tunnel beneath the earth’s crust. This led medieval peasants to categorize them as not birds, but dinosaurs.
Birds can see ultraviolet light. This prevents them from squinting, and is how seagulls can tell exactly when you are about to eat something.
Owls are a special type of bird that can spin their head around. The record number of turns an owl has made without stopping is sixty-six. It stopped when it realized it was being watched.
Most people are within 5.6 meters (0.039 imperial miles) of a bird at birth. The average distance between a human and bird at death is 0.

Birds (kingdom Animalia, phylum Chordata, superclass Tetrapoda, class Aves) are relatively large animals, larger than they look. One metric pound of birds can exceed three cubic gallons in volume, and many times that in size, yet this same mass of birds can easily be concealed underneath a simple man’s size eleven winter coat. This is how Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany managed to live out his entire life without anyone noticing that he was made entirely of birds.
Penguins are the only birds incapable of flight – even ostriches can fly, they are just lazy. Penguins cannot fly because they are communists.
The country of Canada is the only known one in which a bird is head of state. Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau was elected in 1970something and has remained a bird ever since, refusing to cease nesting. He can be found roosting in his office, brooding a clutch of papery files. Parliament staff has been unable to remove him due to nipping for over a whole lot of years.
Birds are physically incapable of making any sounds at all. The human brain can’t perceive this, so it makes things up out of background ambience. The noise you think is a bald eagle calling is actually a mouse swearing. The song of the redwing blackbird is the sound of a bulrush growing sped up 1000x. The honk of the Canada goose is produced by stepping in Canada goose feces.

Birds (kingdom Animalia phylum Chordata superclass Tetrapoda class Aves) can hear you think and that is why they laugh at you. You, specifically. At all times when you are alone there is in fact a minimum of one point seven birds behind you. Laughing.
That is a good thing. Birds that stop laughing are much worse.
Birds are actually a kind of dinosaur. If you put a bird underneath a blacklight you can see the dinosaur skeleton all crumpled up inside the bird. Don’t do this or it will eat you.
Flight in birds does not require wingbeats, and actually occurs instantaneously. What you are seeing is merely the ghost of the bird, projected on your own brain. If you see many birds flapping their wings, one of them must’ve passed through your skull en route and everything you’ve ever seen from then on is the hallucinations of your dying brain.
The previous fact about Kaiser Wilhelm II was a lie. There are no such things as winter coats. Or Germany. There was a man named Kaiser Wilhelm II made out of birds though.
Most birds can sleep, but they don’t want to. They make us do it instead.

Birds (kingdom reign phylum be done superclass as they are in class Aves) are worse than us. They are the absolute pits. They are no good at anything and that’s why they’ve made us do anything. We even have to kill them for them, because birds are too lazy to kill themselves. Some people have been made to keep birds in little wire houses so the birds can yell at them all day, and this amuses them.
Birds do not feel pain, fear, love, peppermint, or purple. They can taste mah-jong, smell rivets, and see hatred. There are at least five unique senses for each species of bird and we know less than 0.0001% of all bird species because most of them are invisible.
No bird has ever made war upon bird. All bird-on-bird conflict is endorsed murder. All birds are murderers in heart and mind.
Ten thousand birds die every minute. Only five thousand of them bother to come back; the rest go on to something worse. Sometimes they accumulate inside other organisms, causing the phenomenon known as cancer.
No known animal exceeds birds. For a while it was thought polar bears exceeded birds, but this was disproven. The nearest any animal has come to exceeding birds was the trilobites. They have been taken care of.
The dodo and passenger pigeon were the same animal in different moods. They came back last summer. There is only one so far and that number will increase and you cannot affect it by means of your actions.

Birds (king fly super clash ave) know something and they won’t tell us. They can’t tell us. They have specifically made sure that they can’t tell us and that means they won’t tell us. It’s important and it’s necessary and we’re going to need it. They’re happy about that.
Birds do not cast shadows. Light does avoid them, though.
A mature goshawk will transform into a goose when it dies. A mature goose will transform into a goose farmer. A mature goose farmer will pretend to be a human for up to fifty generations before shedding and growing out pinion feathers. This permits it to breed, and it will not do so.
Neptune is the only known planet that does not contain birds or birdmatter. Pluto too, but the birds took Pluto away and now it isn’t a planet anymore, it isn’t an anything anymore, and we’re stuck with eight planets and only one has no birds. It isn’t enough.
Elephant birds are extinct yet elephants remain. This is not right, this is bad. That isn’t how things are supposed to work. The elephant birds did it on purpose, and now we have elephants without elephant birds. The elephants aren’t supposed to work like that. What’s going to happen now?

Birds (kingfishers fletch swallow crane awk awk awk awk awk).
Each human has four birds assigned to it seventeen decades and three minutes before it is born. The birds decide what’s going to happen to it in the three minutes and spend the seventeen decades seething.
No human who makes itself an enemy of birds lives. This is why everyone dies. This is also why anyone dies horribly.
Plant life does not exist and all plants are actually the legs of very small or very large birds. Bird legs burn very well and they don’t mind being set on fire.
Gravity is much weaker than it appears, and the only reason all creatures cannot fly is that birds have decided that is how it will work.
Most places are birds. The smallest known bird is Kansas. The largest is Sol. Some scientists have proposed that the entire Milky Way is in fact a bird but they stopped talking and went to live in tiny apartments without windows so we’ll never know what they knew.
Robins were mammals up until the 1980s. Birds had replaced them entirely by June, 1998. The last mammalian robin in the world died in captivity in Tasmania’s Hobart Zoo, 1936.
If all the birds in the world were placed end-to-end they’d wrap around the planet and throttle it to death. They haven’t done this but we don’t know why or how.

Don’t let the birds see that I told you this. They already know it.

He woke up bit by age-stained bit. Bones crackling in his skin, filled with complaints about how he’d let his campfire run out in the night. Hair feeling extra thin in the cool remnants of the night’s breeze. Eyes wobbling out of their wrinkles to peer up at another far-away sunrise. His tongue and mouth had been at odds again the night before, and it took him some gnashing and working of his jaw to tell them apart.
In the meantime he got breakfast ready, digging around in the bottom of the small, simple pack that carried all he cared about in the world.
His hands shook as he held it. It was a little piece of a faraway land that he would never return to – vanished not in space, but in time. It was priceless, and he was about to consume it and throw away the crude wrappings that had held it secure against the elements for all those years, discard it into the wind.
Eyes pricked with tears, he removed the quesadilla from its bag, averting his gaze from the logo emblazoned upon it: Taco Bell. If he read it, he’d be too busy weeping to chew.
It was another morning and nothing had changed.

Once upon a time, this whole landscape was quiet suburbia.
Once upon a time, he and his people had lived upon it, they and no other. They lived in harmony with the lawn, and the lawn repaid their benevolent guidance with a greenness and vivacity seen nowhere else in the annals of human history.
They had no word for ‘disaster’ in their language. Well, they did, but their scale was different. ‘Disaster’ was a word for when Jason or Jennifer came home with a see-minus emblazoned upon their report cards, or for when Bradley got put on the bench while the coach had a talk with the cops, or for when that stinker Hugh from accounting took your parking space.
That all changed when they arrived. When the Urban Planners came to the suburbs.

The sun boiled on his leathery shoulders. Shadows lay flat and still on the hot ground, breath so baited that it burned the air.
There his target was. Close enough to touch. Memories filled his mind of his youth, of how his friends would have applauded his audacious boldness. To come so near to such a prize, to avoid the gaze of the lot-manager, to find it with only his own eyes and will and fleetness of foot… they would talk of him and only him for days. Three times he’d counted coup.
He laid his palm flat against the exposed frame of the car, rust crinkling against his spread fingertips. Standing there he pictured himself looking back out from its seat, seeing himself silhouetted against the sky, framed in the gap where the driver’s door should have stood.
It didn’t move. It never would again. And it was the first he’d seen in a half-decade.
A fourth coup.
Once, great herds of these vehicles had roamed the suburbs, coming down from the highways, through the overpasses. Once, the on-ramps groaned under their weight, and the night shone with the thousand fires of their eyes. Once, they had been surrounded by such a bounty as naturally as fish were by water. Once, his own father, a powerful consultant and head of the Ro-ta-ry Club, had owned an entire herd. And then – even then, in the midst of wealth unimaginable – still they had used every part of the SUV, from hood ornament to cupholders to bumper.
He wanted to cry again, but he had run out of tears.

Oh, they had listened to the Urban Planners. They brought them to their homes, they brought them to their porches, they sat and smoked the cigars (social smoking only!) of peace and friendship with them. They had traded with the Urban Planners, learned of their magical ways and the secrets of so-shal sus-tain-ab-ility – secrets that they mastered quickly, as it allowed for the purchasing of newer and still grander hybrid SUVs with intriguing features and lower gas mileage.
They were an innocent people, and could not have guessed where such things would lead.

Hungry, hungry, hungry, and the old fanny pack was empty. The craving for food gnawed at his innards like the thousand adorable yappy little dogs his mother had owned, and his pace was measuring a little too slow, his heartbeat running a little too fast. He had not seen a Subway or McDonald’s in weeks, and in his hour of need he would even resort to a Walmart.
In his youth, he would only have been a mere fifteen-minute car ride from a Walmart at all times, from his home or any of his friends. In his youth his friend’s homes WERE his homes, for all of them were functionally identical in every single way right down to the lawns thanks to the wise guidance of the Neighborhood Association.
His rheumy vision was growing more blurred still. His breath was as shallow as a marketer’s conscience. Then there – like an unexpected stop-sign in the night, it rose up in front of him. Food.
Food, but at a cost he’d never hoped to pay.

The Urban Planners knew of food. They told them of sustainable farming and agricultural reform and the pressing need for reducing the mass production of red meat, particularly beef. Their preaching was passionate, and it swayed many a curious thirtysomething into abandoning their ways of gluten-free, all-natural, vitamin-enriched, low-fat diets.
The Urban Planners knew of land. They told them of the suburbs, they called it ‘sprawl,’ and they made it shameful to inhabit. Be conscious of your footprint, they said, and they said it especially carefully to the children.
The Urban Planners knew of warfare. They spoke of class warfare, and they warned that there were only two sides and the smaller, wealthier one had been firing shots for more than a century. The suburbs, they said, were a sad little sham set aside to lull their inhabitants to sleep on fickle dreams of wealth. They must be put aside to cope with the changes ahead.

He was quite still when the children found him – a young brother and sister wandering along the edge of their parent’s fields.
“Wow! Gee!” said the brother. “A real suburbian!”
“Gosh!” replied the sister. “Golly! I wonder what killed him?”
The brother prodded at the old man’s cupped hand. “Dunno, sis! Oh, wait. It looks like he stuffed himself on juniper berries until he got diarrhea and the dehydration got ‘im.”
“Jeez, what a nimrod!” said the sister. “Who’d just stuff berries into your mouth without even recognizing them? Only somebody with no survival skills whatsoever would think that was a smart idea.”
“Stupid ‘ol suburbian!” said the brother scornfully.
The old man remained still. And behind his eyes lay one fading image: the faces of his brothers, long-ago lost to the scourge of gluten intolerance, reaching out to welcome him.
This story I have told you is not true (although my incredible grasp of realistic dialogue and characterization may have led you to believe otherwise). But that is only because a thousand like it are occurring every day, and each one has its own, unique litany of heartless details. The suburbians are a sad and sorry lot whose pain and misery, alas, falls to us to alleviate. Their culture has failed them and they are adrift – mothers lack the gas money to drive their children to soccer practices; young boys cannot purchase the SUVs that allow them to become men; the elderly roam the landscape, searching in despair for a nice nursing home where the nurses aren’t too abusive; and the wage-earning male, the former pillar of the suburban community, is utterly lost in a now jobless landscape, his tie and suit doing him as much good as a tutu.
They were a noble people once, if silly to the eye of civilized man. Let us alleviate these noble sillies of their pain. We must shoulder their burden for them, uncomplaining, patient, and with their own good in mind. And it is for that greater good – for the greater good of the suburbians as humans, as flesh and blood – that they must end as a people.
What I propose is humane by definition, being in its entirety the preservation of humans. The suburbians must cease to be as their suburbs have. Their children must be raised properly as decency intends, not left to wander the streets in search of long-abandoned soccer teams. Their houses should be constructed with an eye as to the local climate and landscape’s demands, not mindlessly fabricated one after another. Their adults should be taught how to live, not how to wear suits correctly. And with this advice and more, with our wisdom, we can uplift the suburbians from their lot until they need bear their sad, shameful name no longer.
And maybe they can even learn to enjoy living within walking distance of infrastructure.  That’d be nice.

Once upon a time on that one week in July when the sun makes some nice visits on the earth, a rotten little kid was up too damned late when he saw his uncle carrying along home, and what he was carrying along with him was a bottle with not one drop left in it. He was singing loud enough to make a frog swallow its eyes and making the most disreputable faces.
“Hey,” said the rotten little kid. “Hey uncle. What’s with all that noise?”
“I won, I won, I won!” chanted the uncle, waving his bottle like a magic wand. “I won it and I won again, it’s mine, it is – I have the secret and I won! Yes I did!”
“What secret?” asked the rotten little kid. “Go on, tell me. C’mon, tell me. Pleeease tell me. Tell me. Tell me tell me tellmetellmetelmetelmitlmitlmi.”
“The secret,” proclaimed the uncle in sonorous tones, “is ugh.”
“Ugh?” asked the rotten little kid.
The uncle fell to the ground, and so did the two perfectly-broken halves of the rotten little kid’s mother’s biggest bowl. And they both stayed there ‘till morning, when the uncle’s brother-in-law dragged him in and berated him and threw some soup at him until he went away.
“Tell meee,” said the rotten little kid, as he left.
“Tell you what?” asked the uncle. “No sir no nothing, nothing to tell you, not at all. You’re imagining things in your rotten little head. Now bug off and stay bugged you bugger.” And he stumped away down the road whistling.
The rotten little kid was true to himself and true to his nature, and so he ditched his chores and his parents and spent the perfectly nice sunny day sneaking after his uncle, who took every backroad, overgrown path, and lost trail in the whole damned world until he finally stopped on a warm, sunny hill without a speck of shade for as far as the eye could see. If you stuck your tongue out, you could hear the saliva sizzle.
“Hey,” said the uncle up at the sky. “Hey you. Big guy. C’mon. Listen up. I’m down here, you’re up there, c’mon, be sociable. You gonna get lonely up there. Stick your face down here near my face and let’s be friendly-like.”
Nothing happened. The rotten little kid wondered if his uncle was a little crazier than he thought. That could be troublesome. He already had one crazy uncle, and keeping two of them straight would be a real pain.
“And hey,” said the uncle, “you’d get a chance at winning back your losings, you big fat stupid loser.”
Woosh – thump. Down came the sun, the whole sun. There was no mistaking it; the whole sun dropped out of the sky like a cat from a windowsill and sat there on the driest patch on the highest point of that little hill, glowering and glaring at the rotten little kid’s uncle like he’d peed on its doorstep.
“You’re a sore winner,” said the sun.
“Best way to fix it is to make me a sore loser,” said the uncle. “Now g’won. Pick a cup.”
The sun picked one of the cups the uncle was holding out, and they both cast them to the hilltop.
“Beetles,” said the sun.
“Scorpions,” said the uncle.
They picked up the cups.
“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, NINE scorpions!” shouted the uncle triumphantly. “How many beetles you see, nee? Count ‘em or I’ll count ‘em for you and then count ‘em again, just to rub it in. G’won, count ‘em!”
“Three,” said the sun sulkily. “Fine. Double or nothing.”
The uncle grinned with all eight of his teeth and three of his nostrils. “Fine, fine. More fun for free! Here, you pick a cup. Loser picks, right?”
The sun spat on the hill – burnt some grass real good, no wonder it was so bare – and on they played, all day until the wee evening, when the sun lost a triple-or-nothing and they folded for the day.
“I’ll take a bottle,” said the uncle. “Gimme a bottle. The good stuff, the right stuff, the real stuff. Gimme now, gimme fast, before I lose my mind and bash my brains.”
“Shut up,” said the sun. “You cheat.”
“Cheaters never prosper cognito ergo sum,” said the uncle. “Look at my prosper. No way a cheater’d have that much of it.” He took the long, shining bottle the sun gave to him and he tipped it way way back and swigged a third in one go, then let out a belch that painted a rainbow.
“S’nice,” he said. “S’nice. Same time tomorrow?”
“Go away.”
The uncle waved amicably and wandered off home. He got there six minutes behind the rotten little kid and that saved him from getting anything thrown at him on account of the rotten little kid’s mother being busy spanking him. So! He had a pretty good day.

Next day, the rotten little kid was all knowing. Giving his uncle the knowing-eye. You know, that one.
“I know that one,” said the uncle to the rotten little kid. “It’s that eye, the knowing-eye. Keep that thing offa me. Get it away with you and get gone. What’s your problem, anyways?”
“I know a secret,” said the rotten little kid with the ineffable smugness of youth and age.
“No you don’t,” said the uncle. “You’re a rotten little kid. You don’t know a damned thing and I feel just fine about that.”
“Do too,” said the rotten little kid.
“Do you? You know? You know about your secret auntie who lives down the well who I keep fed on old stray dogs?”
“Nah,” said the rotten little kid. “Don’t know about that.”
The uncle’s eyes narrowed. This was serious. “You know about the giant fly I raised from hand at your age, that lives in the old rotten tree in the dead thicket in the dark woods and eats a whole sheep every other month that I blame on the dropples?”
“Nope,” said the rotten little kid. “Got no clue about that.”
The uncle’s eyes widened and his nose narrowed. This was really real. This was big bad. “You know,” he whispered, “you know about the way I REALLY lost my sixth toe? About how I got in an argument with your momma and kicked a wall and a rat came out and ran off with it, then I told gramma it was her fault and she spanked your momma black and blue?”
“Nu-uh,” said the rotten little kid. “No idea about any of that old nonsense.”
The uncle’s eyes oscillated and his ears twitched and his tongue bounced in and out of his throat like a gopher from its hole. “YOU KNOW ABOUT MY CHEATING THE SUN AT GAMBLING?!” he shrieked loud enough to deafen grown mothers two villages over.
“Sure!” said the rotten little kid. “Dead simple. I knew that one good.”
The uncle slumped soundly. “God you’re a rotten little kid,” he said admiringly. “Reminds me of me except smaller and dumber.”
“And you remind me of me, except bigger and smellier,” said the rotten little kid with a smile that lit the whole world. “Tell me how you’re cheating. Let me in on the cut. I want a cut of the cut. So I have a cut. Cut. Cut.”
“Quit saying cut and you’ve got a deal,” said the uncle.
“Cuuuuttt,” sang the rotten little kid. “Cut cut a cut cut cut cutcut cut cut cut cot coop cut cang clurg-”
There was a pause while the uncle extracted the rotten little kid from his palm tooth-by-tooth.
“Awright,” he said. “Truce. Lemme explain. See, you take two cups like this, y’see?”
“I see.”
“And then you take a hill like this one,” said the uncle, squatting down in the dirt, “all jumping with bugs. Or crawling. Or squirming. Whatever, see?”
“I see.”
“And then you drop your cups on them – wham!” said the uncle. The shells went thunk, not wham. “Hard and fast and no aiming allowed, see?”
“I see.”
“Then you sit there and you guesstimate and calculjecture yourself up a bug, see,” whispered the uncle.
“I see.”
“Then you whip off the cups and count up all the bugs you both got and BAM WHAM BAM you got a WINNER!” sang the uncle.
“I see.” The rotten little kid scratched his nose. “One thing that gets me: how’re you cheating?”
“Oh, that!” said the uncle. “Sun doesn’t know what the hell ants are. Must be near-sighted. Just play on top of that one hill I use – all covered in anthills – and say your ants are scorpions or camel spiders or moths or centipedes or octopuses or what-have-you. He can’t tell ants from your gramma’s behind or your momma’s breakfast.”
“Gross,” said the rotten little kid. “I want to go cheat now.”
“Shoot,” said the uncle. “We’d better hurry or we’ll be late.”
So they went down and they were just a little bit late. “Hey sun,” said the uncle. “Hey you up there. C’mon. Win back your losses. C’mon. C’moooon. C’mon.”
The sun waited.
“You got a third player now,” said the rotten little kid.
The sun popped onto the hill like a bad cork. “Here’s a cup, get rolling, call it fast, go.”
“Owls,” said the kid.
“Dang,” said the sun. “I swear I saw those.”

So by day’s end the sun owed two people, and they took two bottles because why the hell not.
“This tastes lousy,” said the rotten little kid.
“It’s a song for your tastebuds and cancer on your skin,” said the uncle. “It’s ultraviolet and it tastes ultra vibrant and it makes my heart sing like a horny canary. Try it, it’s good stuff. It’ll put hair wherever the hell you want hair. Maybe places you don’t, too. It’s that good.”
The rotten little kid sniffed his bottle of liquid sunshine dubiously. “No thanks,” he said. And he chucked it in the river and went home early so he wouldn’t get yelled at.
The uncle, by contrast, slept in a ditch. And so when he wandered in the next morning, he was awful surprised at all the ruckus that was afoot. People were running around and yelling at each other and the sky and the rocks and just about anything they could yell at because hey who wouldn’t want to have a good yell to fit in like then. The uncle respected that sort of thing.
That said, it was a little noisy. He sidled up to his brother-in-law and asked him what was going on.
“Stream’s gone funny,” said his brother-in-law. “It’s all rainbows and blue skies.”
“Pretty,” admired the uncle.
“I tried to have a drink this morning and a bluebird stuck its head in my mouth,” said his brother-in-law. “It stuck its head right in there. Then it thought my tongue was a worm or something. It bit my tongue. I am not a very artistic man but I do not like having my tongue bitten. So yes, maybe that stream is pretty, but it is also a very big pain in my ass. You should fix that.”
“Who told you?” asked the uncle.
“Lucky guess,” said his brother-in-law.
So the uncle went over and bugged the rotten little kid, who was sitting by the stream fishing for blackbirds with a worm on a hook.
“Hey kid,” said the uncle.
“Hey ugly,” said the rotten little kid. “Whatcha need?”
“You to fix your big stupid mess you no-good little horrible rotten thing on a stump with a wart sticking out of its backside and a blister in its eyeball with three noses,” said the uncle.
“Jeez,” said the rotten little kid. “Jeez.”
“G’won,” said the uncle. “G’won, fix it. Fix it now. Fix it or your mamma’ll get on my case and wear it down to a broken bit of baggage. Fix it now or be uncleless and have no-one to pick on in your old, stupid age that is older and stupider than you. Fix it or I’ll call you a chicken. Fix it. Fix it.”
“Go get mamma to fix it,’ said the rotten little kid. And he laid down with his hat over his eyes which was how the uncle knew the conversation was over, so he gave up and got his sister, which is what most people learn to do when they want to get something done.
“Brother,” said his sister, “you are the dumbest man ever to be a member of my family, at least until this little guy gets bigger. Why in the big blue stupid world would you go making bets with the sun? It could snuff you out before I could say appaloosa or chloroform.”
“Don’t worry,” said the uncle, “I’m real careful to always cheat like crazy. I’ve ripped off that sun more than your son’s ripped off bandages. I’ve given it the gift o’ grift. If I’ve said one honest word to that big old set of hot balls I’ll eat my pants.”
“See now brother,” said his sister, “if you were just a little bit smarter you’d realize why this isn’t making me much happier when I hear you saying it.”
“Fair enough,” said the uncle. “Look, here’s how you cheat the sun.” And he told her.

“Hey,” said the sun. “Three again?”
“Keeps things lively,” said the uncle. “This is my sister. She has a beautiful vermillion dress and she loves to own old, tired-out dogs that don’t give a hoot about anything anymore, and her children are the worst little people in this worst little world of ours, times five. And she has a very painful kick. Ow. Ow. Ow.”
“Hey,” said his sister.
“Hey,” said the sun. “Throw ‘em.”
They threw ‘em.
“Hippopotami,” said his sister.
“Oh goddamnit,” said the sun.

So his sister came back with a big sponge that was still warm from the sun’s soft, baby-smooth hands and stuck it in the stream, gluck, glurck glop, and it sucked up all that sunshine inside itself. Then it exploded and it rained sponge for three hours on the weekend.
“That sort of worked out,” everybody agreed. “Kind of.”
“Let’s not mess with the sun again,” they all suggested.
“Great!” everyone concurred. “Let’s do it.”

“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Seven hundred. Huh,” said the sun. “Huh huh. That’s a bit more. A bit more than last time.”
“Afraid to lose?” asked the uncle.
“Put ‘em up, throw ‘em down,” said the sun.
“Rats” said everybody.
“Rats,’ said the sun. “No, not what you guys said. I mean literally rats. Literally figuratively ‘rats.’ Oh hell you know what I mean.”

Now things started to get a little crazy. See, everybody spent half the day out of their mind on liquid sunshine, and half the day was a long, long, LONG time because the other half the day they spent pouring liquid sunshine on everything, which made the day half again as long. That’s three half a days for every day, you understand. That’s pretty hard math.
Lucky, everyone was too busy with sunshine to care. Everybody except for the uncle, his sister, his brother-in-law, and the rotten little kid.
“This was more fun when I was the only one doing it,” complained the uncle. “Now everybody’s doing it and it’s no fun anymore. Nobody understands me, but that’s how I feel and it’s a proper way to feel.”
“Birds,” said his brother-in-law grimly. “Birds. Peacocks in the pantry. Whip-poor-wills in the walls. A large, angry male ostrich in my bedroom, preventing me from sleep and ruining my capacity for alliteration. I cannot take this much longer.”
“I don’t like this,” said his sister. “There’s too many happy people around. They’re a bad influence. I saw what started all this, and it was you being happy. People are happy enough on their own damned selves, you’ve got no right to be showing off and making them all miserable with it. I’ve half a mind to smack you and the other half to sock you.”
“I’m bored now let’s do something else,” said the rotten little kid.
The uncle looked upon his relatives with graven graveness. “For once,” he said, “I almost don’t quite not agree with all of you absolutely. Let’s go fix this up.”
So they made the walk down to the sun’s hill, which was really easy nowadays because there’d been seven hundred and something people making the trip every day for like a month. Three half months and a month, for a month. Or something.
“How long have we been walking?” asked the rotten little kid. “My feet hurt. My legs hurt. My nose hurts. My brain hurts. Carry me or I won’t stop talking until you fall over.”
“Adversity builds not caring,” said the uncle.
“You carry him,” said his sister.
“Fine,” said the uncle. “But I’m going to complain about it.”
“Watch me care,” said the sister.
The uncle watched her very closely the whole rest of the walk but he was unable to watch her care, and this explained why he was in such a bad mood when they stood on the sun’s hill and it asked “Hey, where’s everybody?”
“What’s it to you?” asked the uncle.
“What’s it to YOU?” asked the sun.
“What’s it TO YOU?” asked the uncle.
“Go away,” said the sun, loftily. “I’m popular now. Everybody likes me and they all come over to gamble every single day. I’ve double or nothing so many times that I’m up to nine trillion seven zillion and three-half doubles, and all I need to do is win once to win big. It’s going to be amazing and you’re too stupid to care so go away.”
“YOU go away,” said the uncle, pissily. “Nobody likes you. They just like your liquid sunshine and they all come over to get it off you every single day. And you’ll never ever win a single bet because you’re a big dumb baby that I’ve been cheating out the wazoo since I was smart enough to tell the difference between an ant and literally any other animal on the face of the planet. You are the stupidest solar body ever to exist and I hope you blow up in a really disappoint and silly manner because you are also disappointing and silly, which must disappoint YOUR MOTHER very much every day of her sad, miserable, abandoned life, because you abandoned her and left her all alone out of ingratitude you shiftless, shitless, pantless, gutless, yellow-bellied, red-faced, orange-cheeked, wall-eyed MORON who isn’t fit to fry a fat beetle let alone heat an entire planetary system for billions of years, which you are trying to do, which you are failing to do, because you aren’t fit to do it on account of being a knock-kneed gullible so-and-so with peameal bacon for brains and cornmeal muffins for common sense with gravy between the ears.”
There was a nice long slow moment while the sun digested this.
“What.” It said.
There was a really short and awkward moment while everyone indigested THAT.
“What,” repeated the sun, “is a wazoo?”
“Nothing,” said the rotten little kid.
“Oh,” said the sun.
“It means a big gullible GOB OF GIT!” hollered the uncle, who was subdued most unkindly by his sister.
“He called me gullible, and many other things!” said the sun.
“Nah,” said the rotten little kid.
“Oh. Okay. So, want to play?”
“No,” said the rotten little kid. “No. Nobody wants to play.”
“Well then I’ll play by MYSELF!” roared the sun, and it zipped off far away into the highest part of the sky to sulk.

And that’s where it’s stayed.
Except in July. It makes visits in July.

Aist was young.
She hatched on a whorlwise moon, tail-first – a stubborn, significant sign. She spent eight skycoils eating and hiding and when the ninth passed she ambushed her pater from above as he fed her brethren. Her attempted ingestion of his leftmost eye was laudable, and brought her fresh from her clutch to the roaming paddock.
Aist was strong.
She was half the size of the rest of the crèche, but caught up to them quick and fierce, by stealing and jumping and biting and spitting and hissing. And more biting. She took the food of the strongest by the end of her third skycoil in the paddock and everafter the biting required was lessened. Nobody wanted to be at the end of that again. They enjoyed having a full eyecircle of nine.
Aist was quick.
When the doommaker came to the roaming paddock and inspected the crèche, she ran and hid and took the adults nearly all spin to catch. The doommaker laid eyes and hands upon her, counted her eyes backwards and forwards, slapped her tail, wriggled her arms.
“This one,” she said, “is going to be trouble.”
“Whose?” inquired the attendant feedmaker, and the doommaker shrugged. So they gave up on it and took her out of the roaming paddock early.
Aist was clever.
They put her to the boneworker, and she grew bored with tending coals and began to steal small leftover sherds until she was caught making an entire scimitar. They put her to the borderwarder and she attempted to wrestle the packmater during feeding sessions. They put her to the sheltersheller and she ate half a wall when its hide would not scintillate correctly, then used the spraying blood to paint articulate and hurtful truths upon the remainder.
And it was because of all those things that the boneworker and the borderwarder and the sheltersheller and her pater came to the pathwatcher and spoke to it and said this, which was “this one is trouble.”
The pathwatcher shrugged. “Find things for her to do.”
“She will not do them,” said the boneworker.
“Keep her busy.”
“She will not stop her business.”
“Distract her.”
“She is distraction in scales.”
The pathwatcher hummed to itself and clacked the big claws that denoted its station under its official carapace. “Mmmph. Use your imaginations.”
“She has too much im-“
“Together. All of you together. Go on. Think. Think of something to preoccupy one neonate. I trust you, or you wouldn’t be you. Go on. Fulfil the trust.”
So they put their heads together and their arms entwined and they thought and argued for a full spin. And when that was done, they split up. Three of them went to eat, her pater went to Aist He found her by walking about exposed and vulnerable, and at last she landed upon his neck-nape.
“Neonate,” he said. “You have a thing to be doing.”
“I do and am,” she said, and bit at his eyes, which he was shutting carefully.
“Not this. You have a thing to be doing. Go out there outside the walls and outside the halls and go into the forest and find me a white stone the size of your head and bring it back. I need a new eyerest or your mater will devour me from boredom.”
Aist shrugged. “As pater pleases,” she spoke, and she bounced off into the air and off a wall while he went off to get something to eat, whereupon he found that she had already eaten half the honey.
“Neonate,” called a voice as she hurried through the rumbling bridge that swung between the halls as they plodded along, “neonate. I have a thing that must be done.” It was the boneworker.
“I’m busy busy busy,” she scolded him. “So busy that I can’t even talk.”
“No no,” said the boneworker. “It’s a small thing, a little thing. I need some bones from a bradbuck, there should be a dead one not far from here, only a little ways away. Go and fetch its ribs, won’t you? Just its ribs, the big nice hollow ones for blowpipes, that’s a good neonate.”
Aist sighed and hummed and whined and said “fine! Be that way!” and ran away, sliding down the walls and feeling their big grumpy sighs as her claws pricked them.
“Neonate, neonate! Attend to me, neonate!” The sheltersheller was hanging there, brushes in hands, surveying a dreadful big blank spot where one of the walls had shed a scale. “I am paintless, neonate!” he shouted. “Positively paintless! Fetch me some dyes, some good dyes from the good grey berries you can find outside. Go and get them, go on and on or this colour will set and we will be blemished for good! Go on!”
“FINE,” shouted Aist. And she stomped down down down the leg of the wall and down to its foot, where the borderwarder sat with her guards and watched the moons go by.
“It’s a wobblewise tonight,” she said idly as Aist went by. “Bad news if we don’t get these boys more feed.”
Aist didn’t reply, just hissed.
“Anything crunchy,” she said. “They’ve got good strong teeth. Anything nice and crunchy, or they won’t give it so much as a nibble’s nibble.”
Aist walked off into the foliage with her arms set as if to crush stones, and the borderwarder chuckled after her.

Aist was a lot of things, but she wasn’t foolish, and she knew all those errands at once meant something, and that something wasn’t all good news for her.
“They want to tire me out,” she said to herself as she hid on vines and slipped through pools. “They want to bring me down. They want to humble me up. And that means that there’s probably tricks in all these jobs. Yes, there’ll be tricks. I’ll track those tricks, I will, and stop them dead. Dead, dead, dead. Dead like that thing there. That thing that’s dead.”
It was the bradbuck the boneworker had set her after, and it was a good one – the bones were clear and glistening against the shrunken skin, as beautiful as a polished lip.
“That’s too good,” she said to herself. “Too good, too good by half.” And she threw a little stone at it.
Sure enough, up from those bones swarmed a feast of fleshwasps, each as big as her arm and three times angrier. They shrieked and screamed and gave up looking while she lay low there, half-immersed in her puddle.
“Mmmm,” she said. “Mmmm.” And she rolled in the mud until she was nothing but a muddy blob, took her stolen honey (not yet eaten) in her teeth, and crawled inchy-winchy all the way up to the very base of the bones, so close she could hear the little shouts the wasps used to talk to each other.
“Here,” she whispered, and she poured that very tasty honey inside the mouths of the three largest bones. “Here, here, here.” And the wasps heard the noise and smelt the honey and dove into those three fine bones quicker than anything. They were most unhappy when she plugged the ends with mud, and less still when she swung it into her bag.
“Good,” said Aist. And she rinsed off the mud, because it was smelly, and she dove to the bottom of the pools to look for white stones.
Six pools later she was making up new words that meant bad things. Every stone was red or orange; white was gone as gone could be. Just half a skycoil ago every stone they’d passed had been whiter than her mater’s eyes, but now they were harder to find than legs on a stenchworm.
She considered the stenchworm’s egg that had just halted her train of thought.
“Huh,” she said. “White enough.” And she tucked it into her bag.
Now she went to the thickets to look for food – guard-food, not normal food – and was disappointed. They were deep in the thickets by now, and if a thing was not soft and pliable enough to slip between branches it did not exist.
“Crunch crunch crunch, need crunch munch, a bunch bunch bunch” she nonsense-hummed to herself.
(Aist was not poetic)
She stopped to give her aching feet a rub and looked around. The hardest game she saw was an immature isoblob, smooth and hairy and nub-nosed and mostly mouth. It was shoveling its way through the forest floor on a journey that would take its whole life.
“Hmm,” she said.
Then she picked up some nice ripe quickseeds, put them in front of the isoblob, watched as it ate them, and bagged it.
“VERY crunchy,” she said. “At first.”
The grey berries were easy to find – very easy. So easy that she didn’t believe it, and that’s why she poked them with a single toe instead of grabbing them up.
“Oooh oooh ooh,” she hissed as the toe itched like mad, so hard that she almost tore it off with her scratching and clawing. “Ooh oh ooh no, ooooh no way am I grabbed that up. Oooh. Ooh!”
So she walked away from the grey berries, dug up a little juma-burrow, skinned the prickly little juma, and wrapped the berries in its hide spike-side-in, carrying the whole thing with the greatest care.
Then she walked home. And smiled a lot on the way.

“Have you brought food?” asked the borderwarder?”
“Here!” said Aist. And she fished out the isoblob, which snuffled aimlessly at the new things it was seeing.
“That’s as crunchy as a wet leaf,” said the borderwarder.
“Not after what it ate,” said Aist. And she threw it to the guards, who tore into it ravenously and downed it in less than a blink and a bite.
“What did it eat?” asked the borderwarder.
“Quickseeds,” said Aist. Then she ran, because some of the guards were already beginning to squat. The borderwarder’s shouts started loud in her ears as she ran, but then grew quiet – she probably didn’t want to open her mouth.

“Neonate,” said the sheltersheller suspiciously. “That was fast.”
“It was, it was, it really really was,” said Aist. “I didn’t want an ugly wall. Here, here, take the berries – I wrapped them up nice!” And she threw the bunch to the sheltersheller, who screamed a little and grabbed them out of the air by the skin of his teeth.
“Careful!” he admonished. “Careful careful careful CAREFUL!” If you get these on your scales, it’ll-” and then he started whimpering, as he watched the juices from the prickle-pierced berries seep out of the package and down his arm.
“Paint carefully!” she yelled. And then she was gone, and the scratching started.

“Ah, these are good ribs, fine ribs, true ribs,” said the boneworker approvingly as he eyed them up. “Did you have any trouble getting them?” he inquired, just a little too idly to be true.
“No,” said Aist. “I did take a trip getting them though. There’s a bit of mud on there and there and there and there and there.”
“Huh!” said the boneworker. “Easily fixed!” And he jammed his long, clever claws into the mud plugs of the ribs and pulled them right out, along with a fistful of fleshwasps.
“Oops,” said Aist. And she ran, ran, ran.

Aist’s pater knew she was there. She had just landed on his neck again.
“Did you have fun?” he asked.
“It was HARD and BORING and LONG and TIRED and I got bit by wasps and itched by berries and I looked everywhere everywhere EVERYWHERE,” she whined, “but then I found this here you go.”
“This is a strange stone,” said her pater, as he took the stenchworm egg in his arms. “It feels soft.” Then it wriggled.
“It’s near-hatched,” she told him. “Good luck.”
This time she didn’t stop running until she reached the very top of the very horn of the very tallest wall, and she didn’t stop laughing until the moon slid from wobblewise to whorlwise and the world went quiet again.

The boneworker, bandaged head to heel, left his post alongside the sheltersheller, swollen of arm. They walked the long slow road to the pathwatcher’s post, and on the way they fell step-in-step with Aist’s pater and the borderwarder, who walked far apart from them and each other, both a little downwind. And when they entered the pathwatcher’s post, they spoke all at once very loudly in a way that somehow turned into a single, clear message.
“We have tried together,” they told the pathwatcher, “and we have failed. We give up on her altogether.”
And that was that.

And for the rest of that skycoil, there was hardly an adult that could look at a neonate without grousing, and there was that real quiet that came from the heaviest of sulks, and the quiet pitter-patter of scheming revenge that would never come to fruition. And overlaid on all of it, hiding in the dark corners and clogged with stolen honey, a stealthy, unstoppable giggle.
Aist was happy.

The Bakeries and Baked Goods of the Exotic Plateau of Limbala, by Thoracic Wemple, W. M. P.

To bake is to understand life. Not a man-jack of our society would dispute this. Not a solitary child of the most gormlessly ignorant spawning – nay, not even a woman, poor, idle, clotted-headed creature that she may be, would gainsay such an indisputable statement of truth. And so we voyage onwards, my fellow philosophers of the natural – onwards, ever onwards! – to broaden our palates and minds across this world of ours. Each loaf consumed, each cookie sampled, is another word on another leaf in another chapter of another volume in the great store-house of knowledge that is our glorious amassment of all things worth knowing of our dear planet. A storehouse that remained woefully incomplete with regards to the far corners of the world – ‘till now! Yes, from the very pen that brought you tales of the Cinnamon Buns of the Canaries, the Rolls of the Amazon, here, for your reading pleasure, is the firm, infallibly scientific and reasoned documentation of the hitherto-unknown bakery-based organisms of the Limbala Plateau! No voyage too harrowing, no peril too great – though our expedition was nigh-decimated and yet more, I alone have returned to bring the golden light of knowledge! Carpe diem!

Crescens volare, “The Flying Croissant”
A distant off-shoot of the common French breakfast item, possibly occurring here as a result of pre-historic migration over long-subsided land bridges(?). It is much larger than its more sophisticated and refined European cousins – no doubt a sign of moral degeneracy. A real delicacy with some properly sweetened jam, if you can get it. Travels in great flocks that can blot out half the sky, with the yearly bakelings clustered in the center for protection. Seems to observe sophisticated mourning rites upon the death of elders. May require further research.

Sacerdos kirkos, “Lama’s Donut”
Baked in the mountainside prayer-lodges of one of the more obscure societies, to be consumed by holy men while fasting. I was informed that the Baker of Days, the messianic figure of the local mythology, had both invented the pastry and disseminated its use for aid in thought. Tawdry mawkish nonesuch duff if you ask me. I sampled one, as much for amusement’s sake as anything, and can personally verify that in overall effect it is manifestly inferior to simply drinking a half-dram of laudanum, the civilized man’s narcotic.
As a minor note of sorts, blowing through the central hole of the donut produces a high E. Doing so is considered a sacrament.

Bannock rex, “King of the Dinner-Rolls”
Called by the locals ‘the destroyer of entrees,’ this fearsome creation measures over twenty feet in height, forty in length, and has utterly ruined countless appetites, wasting thousands of hours of meal preparation. Its population remains low – the breed is anti-social, and few ovens can withstand the temperatures needed to produce such a colossus – but they are all but indestructible and fear nothing. Only one had been brought down within living memory of my visit, and my informant – an old, old, old woman named something uncouth who I have graciously rechristened “Spatula” – said that it took the combined efforts of three entire baker-clans, normally mortal enemies. Their feuds were set aside for a decade or more following the hunt, so many of their young chefs were stuffed in the deadly battle. AVOID AT ALL COSTS.
(Addendum: The coloured plates attached of this magnificent apocalyptic appetizer-cum-meal were found upon the body of the late, much-lamented Arthur Facklebee. Arthur, the world is the poorer for the passing of your gift [if not so much by your habit of belching loudly after every meal], but science is enriched even after your passing.)

Australopita rheasymphysisspondylus, “Chap”
A jocular little thing, more of a bun than a bread, barely a mouthful at most. Takes longer to eat than to say, and even less to describe thoroughly. Good for the clap.

Xenognosis enigma, “Red-Bellied Knish”
Despite its misleading name, this is not a true knish at all; rather, it seems to be distant kin to the puff-pastries of the Medditerannean. Enigmatic to the eye and elusive to the palate, this is a genuinely challenging thing to eat – not for its lacking or excessive taste or paletular weight (it measures a mere 4.9902 middlies upon the Sir Walter Middup scale of granular vs monolithic), but rather for its incredible dexterity, its fierce speed, and its incredibly unsettling gaze. Focusing on chewing the thing is nearly impossible with its stare upon you, and in your moment of hesitation it vanishes from your mouth and down a nearby mouse-hole, with only a flash of its shiny reddened underside for your troubles. Must be crippled with a special mallet for easy consumption, which can dent the crust if done improperly.

Sokolata delicioso, “Bawlman’s Bowel-Serpent”
The ‘common-name’ for this deadly but delicious snake was provided by my beloved, esteemed, and tragically late colleague Dr. Regimagillen Q. Bawlman G. T. O., who was both the first white-man to sample it and the first to describe its unique properties. A transcription of his observations is included here with permission from his widow.
Dr. R. Q. B.: Dibs.
Dr. T. W.: Damnit. Well then on you go.
Dr. R. Q. B.: Yes I certainly shall my old biscuit don’t mind if I do. Well I say this is rather enticing Wemply, you should have a taste, it’s rather like caramel filling with a hint of aaaaaauuuuuuuuggghhhhh. Aiiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrrrrgggh. Gah glah glur ugh ah ah uhh. Uh.
(As a polite explanatory footnote to Dr. Bawlman’s astute observations, it should be noted that the principle active ingredient in the entirely unique candy filling of the delicioso is, in fact, mashed poisonous caterpillars – a bit of knowledge that I was tragically only made aware of after the fact.)

Triticaephestes ophidian, “Flourback”
An aggressive and short-tempered but otherwise typical roving ‘pre-cut’ loaf. Its already poor disposition grows crankier still when its personal space is threatened, and it will lash out with little regard for the relative size difference between itself and the object of its irritation. It boasts a deep, hard-bitten crumb and a ferocious crust, which in no small part contribute to its surly sureness in its own invincibility.
(A postscript: it appears that T. ophidian nests communally in the cold season for mating purposes, as my dear friend and long-suffering batman Blartly mis-stepped face-first into such a reproductive ‘ball’ of the feisty little things while searching for a place to set up my shaving kit. Remarkably, he was skeletonized in less than thirty minutes by my stopwatch – rather less time than the lazy clod had taken to prepare my morning snuff, might I add.)

Lutumungar brontotritica, “Hillbaker”
I only glimpsed this majestic bread once, yet even from a distance of over seven miles its sheer majestic bulk made it indescrible and unmistakable. Mere words fail me…the grace of a phyllo… the shapeliness of a baguette… yet wrapped around and within a body measuring a little more in size than that of Buckingham Palace. It was kneading a small mountain when I observed it, apparently preparing to lay its eggs.
One of a kind, and God be praised, I can die peaceably now that I have witnessed it.
(Jenkinsman, my editor whom I loved as a brother [in spite of his persistent, unstoppable nosiness], alas, wandered in for a closer look and had his head blown off his shoulders when the behemoth sneezed, in a manner that may to the unenlightened common moron appear to be akin to that produced by placing an elephant gun to the back of his skull and pulling the trigger. Such ignorant foolishness is laughable. Laughable!)

Archaeomatzo pericles, “The First Bread”
A grandiose title, to be sure, but I believe it to be true. Yes, it is indisputable – I, Dr. Thoracic Wemple, W. M. P., have alone brought proof of the oldest known what-based organism to the shores of the civilized societies. Look – look at the majestic speckling of its surface! Can you not see the noble crest of its spine? The fine, upstanding crumb? Yes, it is, it is it! Indeed it is! The first bread product has been found, and in its shape and form I believe we can all agree that it is unmistakeably, irrevocably Euro-Caucasian-Anglo-Briton-Saxon! Only a fool would think otherwise! A fool! A fool would say such a thing, at such a sight! By GOD it is so!
(It is with unspeakable pain and breathtaking grief that I must report the tragic and deeply regrettable demise of the Revered Arthur P. Z. Quattleston, who, although he had the utter gall to question my purely objective and unbiased analyses, certainly did not deserve to have his skull beaten into a thick dough of skull splinters and mush with a rock. By natives, of course.)

Dr. T. Wemple, W. M. P. is the world’s foremost expert on exotic bread-based organisms. Mail is to be addressed in his name and sent to the Saint Shuffleprick Institute For the Mentally Lunacidal until further notice and/or after the completion of his trial.

Remember thisthought now forever.
Thousand thousand thousand run out of thousand years beforenow, a smallthing wandered from herd. Lostwises until dark. In dark, in oldfear, it stumbles from tree to tree to ferns ferns ferns. Lives, by luck. In morningcalm, in time, it sees flock of tiny fleshgulpers in branches laughing at it with nighteyes. Smallthing wonders if it had their nighteyes, would its life be made easier. Idea is old and dull constanthought nothing new.
Smallthing asks tiny fleshgulpers in branches laughing at it with nighteyes to share nighteyes. Offers fleshbulk daywise as shield for fleshgulper flesh. Fleshgulpers laugh laugh laugh agree.
Gonn is founded forever. Not by forelimb, but by mindeye.

Don’t hunt in that valley.
No, it’s not dangerous. Not the usual way.
No, it’s not sacred. No spirits there. Trust me.
No, it’s not even interesting. Just don’t do it, alright? Listen to your father.
There’s things down there, and you leave them alone. Don’t flip over any stones, don’t rustle through any bushes, and don’t ever spill blood down there. Ever. You hear me?

Thousand thousand thousand run out of thousand years laterthen, smallthing’s spawn wander vastly in herd of herd of herds. Tiny fleshgulpers for nighteyes, plodders for fleshbulk, leaperkin for dayeyes. All prosper. All wander as one. Herd of herd of herds becomes herd of herd of herd of herds. Reckoning is difficult. Paces are offset. Some straggle some stride some wander. Unmanageable.
Fearbassador is sent with tremblewords to feasters that lurk in herd of herd of herd of herd’s wake breeding herds of feasters. Fearbassador is consumed. Fearbassador is sent. Fearbassador is consumed. Fearbassador is sent. Fearbassador is consumed. Fearbassador is sent. Feasters listen. Feasters join herd to feast upon slowill, to directmanage. They feast only if allfeast.

Jan. 14th, 17XX
Dear fir.
I write thif letter to you, as a prominent natural philofopher, to afk (begging your pardon, fir) exactly what if the provenience of thif rock I have quarried on my land. It is uncommon queer to the eye, and refemblef brick. To be frank, fir, it haf me buggering puzzled.
-Yourf fincerely, JXXXX SXXXX JXXX.

On warm day in cool wind under softsky herd halts, thousand thousand thousand run out of thousand years laterthen. Waters have upswollen lands have downswollen, oldwalkpath has been overswollen underwater leaving nowhere to walkpath. Conference consultation commences, decisions made, arguments hissed, insults snapped. Three points emerged: goodfood here; goodwater here; goodweather here. Consultation decision made: stop for whilesome.
Two years later stone nests are made.
Hundred years later stone walls are made around stone nests.
Thousand years later stone spires are made around stone walls around stone nests.
Gonn is made shape. By forelimb.

Apr. 11th, 18XX
-Good weather. Will make Call River a day ahead of time.
-Jackshit Paul upset the canoe stupid Canadian fuck.
-Overnighting in abandoned cabin to dry out. Old & badly-built but the roof’s there. Got lucky & shot a deer, good food tonight. He won’t stop complaining anyways, keeps jumping at shadows & whining about noises. Stupid & superstitious.
Apr. 12th, 18XX
-He’s gone. Run out in the night quiet as a mouse probably hiding under some slimy rock somewhere the little lizard. If I see him in daylight again I’ll nail his ass to the canoe & send it down a waterfall.
&  he took the deer too

Thousand thousand thousand run out of thousand years laterthen, Gonn has swollen in flesh. Gonnlands have swollen in plentitude to match. Ferntending learned. Frondshaping learned. Stonebuilding is higher longer wider stronger better every thousand years. Trick is as follows: tap rocks, listen, build. Trick is good.
Gonn cannot go. Gonn is anchored in rock. But Gonn swells with travellers. Allherds come to Gonn, to trade to witness to learn to tribute to join Gonn, be of Gonn.
Gonn is herd of herd of herd of herds morewise. Gonn is lands turned to Gonnlands. Gonn is stone upon stone upon stone upon stone abovehead into stoneskies blocking rainsunallweather. Gonn is growing learning faster than mindwise smallthings, every year, everyear. Gonn is feasters minding plodders minding fleshgulpers minding leaperkin minding jagged minding feasters.
Gonn is great, great is Gonn. All is Gonn.

Aug. 5th, 18XX
There’s no oil, John. Yeah, I know the valley bowl spot looked good, but it’s dryer than your grandma’s tits. The drill’s hit something down there, and it looks like there SHOULD be something, should be a pocket the size of half of New York, but it’s empty. Whatever’s in that hole went away a long time ago. Find a new spot.

Thousand thousand thousand run out of thousand years laterthen, Gonn is neighbourmade. Notalone but still greaterthanall. Gonn is learned from. Other cities grow: Laurr Pangg Avall. Gonn is greaterthanall. All are lesserthanGonn.
Gonn has flyeyes now. Cold ones have spires in Gonn, rookeries nests nooks squats. Cold blood flows through small brains but useful for wings. Word wends to Gonn on wingeyes: plot. Laurr is secondlesserthanGonn, wishes first. Predation planned. Counterpredation planned in Gonn.
Arenas bloodied. Food hoarded. Packs formed. Tooth claws spikes flesh all readied feared ravenous.
For glory of Gonn.

Nov. 2nd, 19XX
…the best site I’ve seen since I laid eyes on Drumheller. Bones everywhere – I don’t know how the oil prospectors missed them. We’ve got nearly intact skeletons sitting right at the surface; I picked up three skulls in one day. This could be big, world-news big.
I want a team out here now. Two teams. Hell, just shovel every grad student you can get into a truck, we’ll take twice as many and call it not even close enough. Just do it fast.

Thousand thousand thousand run out of thousand years laterthan, Avall falls lastofall. Landripped underthem, downswollen. Gonn vastswimmer cold ones swim in through waterbreach, feast on panickpaddlers worrysplashers drowners.
Gonn is alone again. Gonn is greaterthanallstill greater than beforewar; cavedigs shelter all smallthings shelter herds. Gonn is stillstrong stronger than beforewar; hoards are deep food grown in nolight holds safe from raids. Gonn is oneplace where stone upon stone upon stone is forelimbmade not chancemade. No otherplace. Gonn is alone.
Gonn looks skyhigh. From skyhigh, Fire looks back.

January 28th, 19XX
It’s a brick.
I know what you’re thinking, Cathy, but stop thinking that and read what I’m saying: it’s a brick.
Yes, the brick was made from Cretaceous sandstone. It’s a brick.
Yes, the brick was found IN Cretaceous sandstone. It’s a brick.
Yes, I know this is giving the creationists ammo they don’t deserve. Fuck them, fuck that, it’s a brick. We’re scientists; we have to explain this. We’re going to explain this.
Yes, we don’t have enough people working the site. But we’ll have them lining up for the chance after we get this published.
Yes, it’s putting our careers on the line. Everyone does that, sooner or later. But everyone else only wishes they got to do it this way.

Firegrows in southsky. Gonn builds. Gonn always builds. Gonn builds in mindeye, in forelimb, in lifedeath, in war, allalone. Gonn is great. Gonn will not end.
Gonn will submerge underland. Downswell Fire will come, Gonn will stand. Fire will sear, Gonn will stand. All lands will burn, but Gonnlands will sink understone, live understone, hide understone.
Gonn will stand. Gonn is greaterthanall. Greaterthan its parts, greaterthan its stones. Gonn will neverend notnow. No matter how long.
Run out of thousands foreverever, Gonn remains. For glory of Gonn.

June 9th, 20XX.
Thirty-eight years of defend and counterattack and publish and counter-publish and it all comes down to this: me, an excavation team, about seventeen film crews, and a lot of memories.
We’ll enter the vault from the east, where the readings say it’s backed on stone. No sense disturbing the wall. The 65-million-year-old wall. God, I can’t believe you were right about the bricks.
This one’s for you, Tom. You should’ve been here for this.
They’ll remember it forever.