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“Leonard! Leonard!”
The voice was ancient, and reedy in that way that made the mind think of ancient kazoos. It was suited to one of two environs: a crypt or a boardroom.
“Leonard! Leonard! Come here at once, at once at once!”
As called, so I did come, up the stairs, through the archway, up the mirrored halls with their thousand-thousand reflections and into the cathedral. I came and stood for the hundredth thousandth time in the private office of my employer, Mr. Morton.
I have experienced much in fifty-seven years in Mr. Morton’s service. I have seen numbers dance in ways that made mere falsification seem a child’s game. I have heard the screams of Wall Street executives as they are tossed into pits of magma. I have had no less than seven entirely new organs placed within my torso, two of which are unknown to science. But never, ever, never ever had I heard naked fear in my employer’s voice, or seen it vibrate through the fleshy skip-flaps of his jowls and spotty forearms. Mr. Morton was very old and kept his fear cloaked decently under a thick strata of drugs, as he considered to be both proper and socially acceptable. To hear it writhe blindly, exposed pale to the world like this was… very disturbing. I had not thought that was a feeling I could still experience.
“Leonard, pay attention!” Watery brown eyes were fixed on me with a raptor’s fierceness, telling me in no uncertain terms that if I didn’t pull it together now I’d be sleeping in the tiger tank tonight.
“I apologize, sir,” I said contritely as I cut myself in offering with the ornamental stingray spine that lay atop Mr. Morton’s desk for that purpose. “How may I be of assistance?”
“Assistance…” breathed Mr. Morton. His face twitched; not the usual tic of a nerve decades out of touch with the brainstem, but an uncontrolled flicker of dread. “Assistance…yes. Yes. That’s what I need. I told you so, didn’t I, Leonard?”
“You did, sir.”
“Well then, assist me!”
“As you wish sir. In what manner?”
Mr. Morton pulled himself together. This took some time, even with the little control panel in his wrist that controlled the tightness of his suit. I waited.
“Right. Right. Leonard!”
“Yes, sir?”
“Go down to the vaults, Leonard. Empty them.”
I frowned. To reduce a single of the twenty-seven safehouses embedded beneath the manor to its waterline would mandate purchasing Disneyworld. To remove multiples would be… “How many exactly, sir?”
“ALL OF THEM!” shrieked Mr. Morton, spasmodically flailing his arms. “Each and every one! To the penny! To the cent! Scrape out the wallets and shatter the piggybanks and dig into the cushions of the chesterfields! Hollow me out! Pay it to this address! And don’t bother with a receipt.”
If I had still possessed red blood cells I dare say I would have blanched. As it was, I saluted without discomfort, then bit my nails all the way down the hall. Had the boss finally lost it? No, no, wrong term…had he finally lost it for good? Mr. Morton had his moments, true, and his days, and his years on occasion, but was this the big one, the final straw?
No, it couldn’t be. He’d outlived four generations of Wall Street. He’d outlive me. Although admittedly my death would not be from natural causes, as few if any of those could harm me now.
So I walked down the ninety-nine-hundred steps to the twenty-seven vaults. They were arranged in descending scale; the largest and grandest (solid artifacts) being the size of a football field, the smallest and plainest (micro-jewelry and a single nanochip of black-grey-and-white-mail) the size of my littlest fingernail.
I pressed the emergency excavation button and stood back as each impenetrable safe began to burrow its way into the upper mantle before tunneling to the address Mr. Morgan had given me, there to disgorge its contents to the provided biometric ID. Somewhere out there a man (it was almost always a man) had just become very much richer, in return for… something. But what?

“Leonard! Leonard! Come here right now, this instant, five minutes ago! Leonard!”
I lurched up the stairs in the dead of night. The sunglasses didn’t help, but they kept my eyes in place and so I was reluctant to remove them even as I clambered up the two-foot teak Everest that was the approach to Mr. Morgan’s evening office, one hand at the obsidian railing.
“Yes, sir?”
“Leonard?” Leonard, it’s important. It’s very important. Leonard, I want you to go to the Narrow Room. Bring the fifth candle and the ninth lamb and the red book. And hurry, damn you! Hurry, hurry, hurry!”
I stared. I’d held the red book twice. It was why I now possessed seven fingers and one thumb. “Sir?”
“What is it?”
“What shall I trade?”
He waved his hands. Loose skin flapped like sails in a hurricane. “ALL of it, damn you!” he shrieked. “Everything! Offer them everything, anything, all of it down to the last drop, if only they fulfil this contract.”
“Absolutely, sir. Which contract, sir?”
A small grey envelope bounced off my forehead with stupendous force for one so aged. “Leonard! I haven’t got time for your muckabouts! IT MUST BE MINE AGAIN. HURRY!”
So I hurried to the far western tower, with its groaning stones and moaning hinges, and I walked to the very top. And there, wedged between three uncut stone crenellations and under an arched roof cut from the liver of a tree older than H. sapiens, I read the red book, the fierce book, with a simple iron knife in my hand and an annoyed lamb pinned underneath my knee, doped to the gills on extinct herbs. I fought the urge to roll my eyes, uttered the last line of mangled Latin, and struck home with a damp and quickly-quashed bleat.
The air is always the first to respond. It bubbles, but does not boil. After that comes the smell; acrid sharp smoke overlaying the simmering rot of high summer.
Then the noise, of course, but I had earplugs for that. I am skilled at lip-reading, and with what I was speaking to that was well and proper, for it had no less than nine mouths and sixteen-and-a-half lips.
The bargain, of course, was forgettable. I handed over the envelope, we exchanged agreements, and then in the process of my follower mediator’s leave-taking he devoured the last six minutes of my life. I stood alone in the Narrow Room, an annoyed and quite lively lamb beneath my knee, the red book in hand. A hand now missing another finger and also the little grey envelope.
Alone in one of the few parts of the building utterly lacking surveillance devices, I indulged myself in a little whistle. Handing over a blank contract to them that listen to the red book’s words is no laughing matter. Whatever Mr. Morgan was after, it would have to be quite the prize at this price.
I took the ninth lamb back to its pen. Waste not want not.

“Leonard!”
“Yes si-“
“To the pit, damn you! To the pit! Offer them all of it, offer them everything! EVERYTHING!”
I paused. “Sir, we’ve already offered everything to-“
“He turned them down, damn you, he turned them down! Wouldn’t listen to a word they said! Well, I’ve got other things to offer, even if I bite my thumb at it – it’s mine, damnit, how dare he tax me so for what’s mine! To the pit!” The cane crashed down on the dodo-bone desk with impotent force. “Hop to it!”
So I travelled to the deepest stair that led to the lowest floor with the lowest room, where a hole dug down where magma feared to tread, and I took my congress with the deepfolk in trial by combat to the death, as is accepted among their type. I shared blood with their chieftain, swore to destroy our enemies, and presented them the deal offered by Mr. Morgan, the same he’d given to them that listen to the red book.
Surely this would be enough.

“Leonard!”
“Y-“
“It wasn’t enough! Take this to the Pool, damn you, to the Pool! Give them all of it, and all that will come! All of it! Go, go, go!”
The Pool lies sixteen miles to the northeast. Accessible through a complex web of little twisty tunnels bored out centuries ago beneath Mr. Morgan’s Olympic swimming pool, the route to its depths is far too small and tight to fit even the smallest set of SCUBA gear through. Luckily I do not require oxygen.
Down at the edge of the Pool, where the floor of the cavern dropped away – to the sea somewhere, beyond the continental shelf, Mr. Morgan had muttered – I sang the song. It was tuneless, melodyless, breathless, and mostly too low-pitched to be heard by humans above the level of a vague discomforting humming at your molars.
What heard me, came. I made my offer, and it tried to consume me.
I believe I made it back alive. It is very difficult to recall events that occur in the presence of such things. But I was done, and a greater power now held the terms of Mr. Morgan’s most terrible of bargains.

“Leonard, Leonard, Leonard! It hasn’t worked, hasn’t worked! Get yourself to the Astronomica this second, you slug! Get me my deal, get me my bargain, gain for me what is mine! GO!”
The Astronomica is hidden beneath retractable ceilings and false vegetation. Mr. Morgan never looks to the stars for trivial things, not in the slightest. He looks with purpose, and it was with purpose that I set to the computers of this place. Not a single one of them was inferior to any other computer outside the room, and linked together they arguably were a greater force than that of all others in man’s past and present combined.
They were just barely sophisticated enough to catch the lowest of the lowest forms of communication I was attempting to tap into. I had an offer to put onto a market whose currencies were worlds and solar systems; where property was measured in light-years; where suns were extinguished as penalties for a minor contract infraction; where legalese itself was a separate language with no shared descendants that had evolved over billions of years.
I sat there at the galactic version of a crude telegram, barely a step above semaphore, and I placed my offer.
A middle power from Galactic Central Core was interested, more out of novelty than anything else. In its world, blank-cheque offers were a charming myth told to the young and stupid, and whatever warranted such desires was worth at least a casual look. I debated with it for ninety-five hours and escaped with my psyche still attached to my body, and I counted the deal a grand one: both for myself and for Mr. Morgan.

“Leonard!”
I had my hand on the doorknob when the second scream came. “Go! And try EVERYTHING!”

So I did.

I crawled down dark miles in abandoned Yukon mines and spoke to the crawling things that underlay our continents and live our lives upside-down yet fully awake as we can only dream.
I walked through the painting that wasn’t there and spoke to the thing that whispers in every artist’s brain and takes what it wants when it pleases.
I played The Game That Kills and gained a high-score and thus earned an audience with its creator: Zeus, the mad thing birthed from the stolen notes of Alan Turing.
I soared the skies on a biplane’s wings and dealt with the thin things that live sideways in the deepest clouds, watching everything and learning nothing, who dislike jet engines.
I ate plants that ate back and made promises to whatever flashed in front of my eyeballs about whatever was crossing my mind.
I unfossilized myself in Wyoming for a hundred and fifty million years and spoke to Largest One amidst the fern prairies using a two-hundred-decibel loudspeaker, and it may have noticed me.
I burned half a national park (which nation? I can’t recall) and swore upon the ashes that I would speak to whatever had noticed me.

And I tried everything.
None of it worked.

“Leonard,” whispered Mr. Morgan. “Leonard. Leonard.”
“Yes sir. I’m here sir.”
Mr. Morgan coughed unpleasantly for sixteen minutes as I wiped the phlegm from his desk and pants.
“Leonard,” he resumed. “I’m through. I have no more options, Leonard. Fetch me my coat.”
“Certainly, sir,” I replied. “Which one?”
“The thickest,” he said.
I froze. There was only one possible reason for this, and I knew what I was going to hear before it was even said.
“I’m going out.”

I offered an umbrella to keep the sun away from Mr. Morgan’s more delicate tumors, but he merely spat at the suggestion. “Speed,” he admonished. “Speed is the thing. Speed. We must move faster, Leonard! SPEED!”
I drove faster, as much as I could. Mr. Morgan insisted upon taking his most recently-purchased automotive, trusting only those cars he had handpicked, and the Model T was no longer what it had once been, despite the vacuum in which it had been sealed since the day it was produced by Mr. Ford himself.
“Newfangled,” muttered Mr. Morgan, “but it’ll have to do. Are all the horses still dead?”
“The cloning didn’t take, sir.”
“Balderdash,” he grumped. And spat. I’d brought his travel spittoon, but he was still too nervous to keep his mind on small matters such as aim, and the floor of the car was already awash in purple-yellow slime.

Eventually, in between spits, enough directions were given for me to reach the home of our mysterious adversary, the “he” who had “turned them down,” ‘them’ now not only encompassing them who listened to the red book but all of our most lucrative and potent of contacts.
I braced myself and rang the doorbell. It went ding-dong.
Thirty seconds later I rang it again, pushing the button just as approaching footsteps appeared, which made me feel a little foolish and stupid.
The door opened and I was confronted with a woman. Astoundingly enough she had no weapons that I was capable of detecting, or even more astoundingly, she had no weapons whatsoever. “Hello?”
I cleared my throat. “I am Leonard. Mr. Morgan would like to speak to the occupant of this home.”
She glanced behind me. Mr. Morgan was securely fastened to her walk by my firm left hand, and was busy coughing on her (rather inferior) tulips. “I’m sorry?”
“NED!” shouted Mr. Morgan, then bent double with wheezing at the effort for nearly a minute. “Ned,” he whispered as I thumped his back gently. “Need to speak to Ned.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Has he done something wrong?”
“Hah!” said Mr. Morgan. “Hah! Oh, he has, but I’ll deal him fair for it. I’ll pay his price. Don’t you worry, I’m fair. Even if it’s mine to begin with.”
For some reason, the woman chose to look at me at this point. Against all discretion. I reciprocated the disrespect to Mr. Morgan’s person with a tiny nod, and she visibly relaxed.
“Well, all right then. But only for a few minutes. It’s his bedtime soon.”

It was a journey of a thousand miles in two dozen feet. The linoleum front hall. The five-step woolly-carpet staircase. The tiny bathroom smelling strongly of cheap shampoo. And halfway down the hall, the most disrespectful part of the hall, the little room with blue paint that was just slightly too bright to be comfortable to the eyes.
In this room, on an obnoxiously-coloured bed, lay Ned. He was ignoring us in favour of a video game.
I cleared my throat. “’Ned’?”
He looked up. “Mr. Morgan would like to-“
“GIVE IT BACK YOU LITTLE BASTARD!” said Mr. Morgan, and he jumped at his throat.
I was surprised, but Mr. Morgan in full flight had little in the way of momentum, and I was able to intercept him yards from the boy. “I’m sorry, sir. Ned, Mr. Morgan would like to speak to you –” and here my speech became indistinct as Mr. Morgan’s elbow implanted itself in my mouth “-with regards to a proposed offer of his.”
Ned glared back at us, un-intimidated. Perhaps this confidence was at least half-warranted; Mr. Morgan’s last fight had been before the lad’s grandparents had been born, and it had taken place against a recalcitrant piece of rib-eye. “I told him so online, it’s mine fair and square.”
“Maybe so,” I replied, “but Mr. Morgan very much wishes it back.”
“You’re DAMNED RIGHT!” he shouted.
Ned drummed his heels on his bed in that instinctively annoying way that children have of existing. “Well? Isn’t he going to say it then?”
I blinked – it was difficult for me nowadays, but the reflex is still buried there, and sufficient surprise can re-activate it. “Say what?”
Ned crossed his arms. “He knows what he has to say.”
“NEVER, you RAT-EATING son of a FLEA!” screeched Mr. Morgan. “Never! You heard me? Never, ever, never ever! You heard me? You hear me again! NO!”
I winced as the spittle struck my stubble. “Sir? May I offer an opinion?” I took the liberty of interpreting Mr. Morgan’s huffing, wheezing silence as ‘yes’ and plunged ahead heedlessly. “You have already been willing to offer anything and everything at once to Ned, sir. Is it so much to say what he asks?”
“… It’s the principle of the thing,” he muttered at length. And then he coughed. “The principle.”
“Yes, sir. But since when have you ever done anything but scoff at those?”
There was a long moment as the universe ground its way through the head of Mr. Morgan, and reality slowly had it out with him. It was a close fight, but the winner was certain.
“Fine,” he muttered. “Please.”
Ned cupped a hand to his ear. “Caaaaan’t heeeeeaaar yooooouuuuuu…..” he sing-sang in that awful prepubescent whine.
“PLEASE!” shouted Mr. Morgan. “Please plase plose, pretty please with please on top, PLEASE give it back! PLEASE GIVE IT BACK.”
Ned sighed and bounced off his bed. Standing bolt upright in bare feet, he was exactly the same height as Mr. Morgan. “Fiiiiine,” he said. He stepped foreward, one, two, three steps. A yard away from Mr. Morgan.
“Honk,” he said, holding his hand in front of his face. “Gotcher nose.” A thumb was clutched between forefinger and middle. “Want it back?”
Mr. Morgan was a beaten man. “Please,” he whispered.
Ned grinned – a big, happy, cheerful grin of pure glee, the likes of which I’d forgotten after who-knew-how-many-years. “Boop,” he said. And he flicked his hand and snip-snapped his fingers.
Mr. Morgan sagged, and then straightened. Ten thousand pounds seemed to have dropped off his back. “Is our business concluded?” he asked.
“What do you say?” said Ned.
Mr. Morgan looked at the wall above the child’s head.
“What do you saaaaay?” warbled Ned.
“Thank. You.” said Mr. Morgan, each word slamming down like a tombstone.
“Yoooou’re welcome,” said Ned, with a flourish. “See ya.”
Mr. Morgan nearly tripped over the woolly carpet in his rush to be gone for home.

Mr. Morgan was quiet on the drive home, and quieter still as I carried him up the cathedral aisle to his office chair.
“Leonard?” he said as I placed him gently into its black soul-velvet embrace.
“Yes, sir?”
His palsied fingers stroked gently over tanned Velociraptor-skin armrests, the finest – and only – in the world. “Do you think… that was a fair deal?”
I shrugged. “It is not for me to say such things, sir. I am but a simple assistant and accountant. High finance is too rare and fine a thing for me to understand.”
“Right,” said Mr. Morgan. He stared up at the murals above his head. “Right.” He banged his fist on his hip, bruising both. “Right! Now get out of my sight! It’s been a very difficult day for me just now!”
“Yes, sir.”
The mirrored halls are vast, and as I mentioned before, my eyelids do not close readily. I can thus say with utmost certainty that no deliberate snooping occurred as I left my employer’s office, which those same mirrors showed behind me in the second before the door closed.
He was, with great delicacy, feeling his nose with both hands.

A long time ago, just a little longer than the greatest of your great-great-great grandparents, the world was different and just a little strange. Oh, there was a sky, there was a sea. That was no trouble. The trouble was that they didn’t quite touch, not because they couldn’t, but because they wouldn’t.
“You are lowly and dirty,” sniffed the sky up high. “Earthworms crawl in your belly and slime-moulds breed in your topsoil. Sickly lout!”
“And YOU are as cold and dry as a wasp’s-heart,” sneered the earth down low. “Nothing in you but puff and fluff. Even the birds don’t care to visit you for more than a moment. Flighty twit!”
And then the conversation ended as such conversations always did: the sky spat at the earth and the earth swore at the sky and they both scooted just a little bit farther apart from each other so they could hate from a distance. Until next time.
This was a real problem. Not only was it very hard to get from the earth to the sky, but it was very hard for most people to breath. Everybody had to hold their breath until the sky scooted close enough for another exchange of insults, then stand on the tips of their toes and breath real hard. It wasn’t very convenient at all, especially to the short folks.
One person in particular who felt hard-done by was an old human. She’d never been very tall to begin with, and age had stooped her quite thoroughly, to the point where she could only get a decent breath in if she climbed a tall tree on a steep hill and stretched herself. It vexed her sore, especially when the sky and the earth were too busy sulking to think of good insults and they wouldn’t come together again for a few days.
“I’m gonna fix this, see if I don’t,” she groused. “Everyone else isn’t uncomfortable enough to do it, so it’s down to me again. Always making me fix things. If it wasn’t so hard to breathe I’d complain more about it.” But it was so hard to breath, so she didn’t complain more about it. Instead, she scratched herself a tad and thought, and thought some more, and thought just a little bit extra just in case, and when her thinking was through she had a plan.

First things first, the old human went down to the rocky lowlands, where the sky was a thousand miles away. She couldn’t breathe down there, and that made her annoyed. She walked around in circles and got lost, and that made her angry. She stubbed her toe on six rocks, each bumpier than the last, and that made her burning mad. And then, just as she was getting tired and needed a rest, she sat on a cactus.
That made her furious. That made her so red-hot, boiling, bubbling, hiss-spitting furious that she coughed and she choked and she swore and she spat a little red-hot bubble of a ball out into her palm, where it scorched her mighty hard.
“Done!” she said with satisfaction. “Ow. Ow. Ow.” She wrapped it up in a little wad of cactus flesh so it wouldn’t hurt, had a drink, and then left.

Second things second, the old human went up to the high valleys, where the earth mumbled itself to pieces and the trees hid themselves on the edges of cliffs by their root-tips. She looked up at the lonely moon and it made her mopey. She looked down and far away towards where she’d been born so many years before, and it made her sad. She heard the calls of a lost wolf trying to find its pack across the valley, and it made her sorrowful. And then as she walked down an old path she found a baby raccoon nuzzling its mother’s body and making shrill little calls for a parent.
That made her downright weepy, and she sat down where she was and had a long, long cry until she’d squeezed out every drop of salt and moisture that her human body could contain and then some. She cried until all she had left were a bad case of the hiccups, and then she carefully took the little scrap of leather she’d been crying into – soaked-through – and tucked it into one pocket, and the raccoon into the other.
“You and me, little guy,” she said, “we’re going to go fix some problems.” But the raccoon was too busy with some old jerky it’d found to pay her any attention.

So the old human took a long walk on a long road and found herself a good spot to stand, on a cliff overlooking a big old desert. “Hey!” she called. “Hey sky! Hey you up there! You listening?”
The sky was confused by this. “Nobody calls to me except the earth,” it said, “and that’s just to call me names, the insect-ridden turf. What’s your business with me? Shouldn’t you be crawling around down there on your belly or something?”
“Nah, I’ve got a gift for you,” she said. “It’s from the earth itself, it says everything’s fine now and it doesn’t blame you for anything. It begs humble forgiveness for its trespassesseses, and sends you this little token of its esteem in return. You want it?”
The sky had swollen itself up with more and more satisfied self-importance as she spoke, and now it was more puffed-up than a cumulus cloud. “You may bring this gift into my august presence,” it decreed, with all of the considerable pomp it could muster. “Give it here!”
“Sure thing,” said the old human. “Catch.” And she lobbed the little wad of cactus-flesh up to the sky and scarpered.
The sky was puzzled mightily, but not so puzzled as it was when a little red-hot ball spilled out into its palm. “Ah!” it shouted. “Ah! Oh! Let go! Let go!” It shook its palm. “Get off! Get away! Get out!” But the ball wouldn’t let go.
“Shoo!” screamed the sky, and it pursed its lips and blew, blew, blew on the ball until it was red in the face all over, but the ball wouldn’t shoo. Instead, it grew – it grew and grew and grew until it was hanging there in the middle of the sky, red-hot and then-some, and scorching all the air around itself pink.

By this time the old human had made a pretty good turn of miles, and she was standing down by the edge of that big old desert. “Hey,” she whispered. “Hey earth. You hear me down there, speaking low? You listening to me?”
“I’m listening, but I don’t know why,” said the earth. “You lot go whining off to the sky the moment you want a breath, you selfish babies. Why did I ever spawn you if you were just going to go play friends with such a giddy-headed little wisp of vapor?”
“Ease off, big friend,” she said. “I’ve got you a present from that vapor itself! It weeps for forgiveness, says it was always wrong all along and only stubborn selfishness kept it from saying so. But now it’s done for, and it sends this package so you’ll know it’s true.”
The earth chuckled muddily and clotted itself in excitement. “Well, I suppose I will accept this measly offer,” it said with forced casualness. “Now give me that!”
“You got it,” said the old human. “Heads up!” And she held out her bit of soaked leather and wrung it, then ran for the hills.
The earth was confused as it felt the pit-a-pat of water on its surface – it was no stranger to rain from sky-spittle, but this felt different. Mineral-y. And then the pit-a-pat became a chug-a-lug, and it started to panic. “Buzz off!” it roared. “I’ll swallow you down!” And it opened crevasses and ravines and basins and sank the desert down, down, down. But the chug-a-lug became a flood, and there was no stopping it.
“Go AWAY!” shouted the earth, and now it was getting worried. It sank whole continents, emptied out valleys that would’ve fit mountains inside without letting their heads crest above the dirt, carved out two-thirds of the world, and only then – only then – did the saltwater flood rest easy.

“You!” shouted the sky.
“You!” hollered the earth.
“Dew clog your eyes, you pestilent humus!”
“Zephyrs whisk your brains from north to south and back again!”
“You gave me this nasty gift, and now it’s stuck to me, red-hot!” screamed the sky.
“You gave ME this tricksome present, and now it’s covered most of me up!” roared the earth.
“A likely story!” said the sky.
“Utter nonsense!” said the earth.
“I’LL SHOW YOU NONSENSE!” yelled them both, and with that the sky and the earth dove into one another face-first, punching and kicking and grabbing and scuffling and grappling and grinding and wrestling until they were stick fast together, not able to do much more than bite and spit. And swear, of course.
“Not bad at all,” said the old human, watching from a nice quiet cave where she wouldn’t have been in the way. “Not bad at-allll.” She took a nice long breath and enjoyed the warmth of the fire in the sky. “Not bad work for me, not for a day’s-effort. Come on little guy, let’s go get lunch.
The big new salty water was already full of fish, all growing like mad, and they had three of them for lunch. But what happened to the bones of those fish is a different story, and we’ll hear all about that one later, all right?

The world was ending.
It was no surprise to anyone. There’d been signs, and portents, and maybe even a little bit of light prophecy. Doomspeaking too – not doomsaying, which any old fool can yell on a street corner, but proper, full-bore doomspeaking the likes of which nobody can say words against without giving it more weight. There was dread in the air and nervousness in the streets, there was not enough energy for a riot and not enough surety for suicide pacts.
The world was ending. Moving day had come.

The animals were boxed up first, of course. Nobody wanted them to panic at all the fuss, or run around underfoot. So all the aardvarks and the camels and the humans and the plankton and the whales and the zebras were put in crates and barrels and boxes and tanks and tucked away, safe and sound, for when the move was complete. They were supplied with little dishes of food and water, and placed next to one another so that they shouldn’t get lonely.

After that came the packaging of knick-knacks, trifles, and keepsakes. The tidying of the heirlooms. Each and every bit of plant matter was individually wrapped in gauze and tucked away in an intricate jigsaw, and the microbes were removed, hand-washed, dried off, and put in an airtight jar where they wouldn’t get musty.
The lower mantle and upper crust was riffled through gently until the oldest extremophiles were located, reproducing at the rate of one-per-multi-milennia, and placed in a tiny silver box, which was put in the glove compartment. A little yellow sticky note was attached to its outside, so that it would not be forgotten when the vehicle was returned.

Then it was on to the larger possessions. A lot of them needed cleaning first.
Cabins, garbage dumps, huts, metropolises, factories, highways, radio towers, and oil platforms were gingerly scraped off with a brush. The bare earth was rinsed in a simple solution of mild soap and water, then patted dry with a clean and absorbent cloth.
Some of the bigger mine shafts and fracking projects wouldn’t come loose easily. A brush on a length of wire was used to clean them out enough to be prised loose.

The furniture came last. From lightest to heaviest, in accordance with proper time usage.
The atmosphere was carefully coiled off and tidied into a clear plastic bag (so it wouldn’t be mistaken for garbage), the seas were frozen into a neat cube and packed in a padded bin.
The crust was peeled off, cratons and all, before being folded over and over into a tight roll, which was slipped into the very bottom of the vehicle. Next to it were stacked the bits and pieces of the mantle, upper above lower.

Packing took careful thought and could not be rushed. Each container had to be placed with the precision of a chess grandmaster, each possible combination of items considered, and ideally without too much delay, lest the move be held up.
Mistakes were a necessary part of the experience, but thankfully on this occasion they were harmless. At one point the kakapos were nearly stowed underneath the blue whales, and someone almost scraped off the Himalayas with their elbow while trying to wrestle open a spot to put the krill, but these errors were noticed and tragedy was forestalled.

The final vacuuming followed. The molten core was groomed meticulously, until not a speck remained upon it. The Van Allen Belt was polished to a mirror sheen. The lights were turned out.
And at last…there was nothing left to do but drive. And to try not to look back, to not think about not looking back, in the rear-view mirror as the move took it all away.

They hoped that the new owners would treat it well. It had been a good place to live, for a while.

This story is from the near long before, back when the world was younger and bolder and life was fiercer and bigger, much bigger than it had ever been or ever would be. The world was greener than green, a feast and a mansion all in one, and it was loved and exploited by all the children of the grandmothers and the grandfathers.
They still walked, swam, and flew, back then, they did. Cunning old Grandmother Cru cruised the deltas and rivers and swamps and even the seas of the world, armor-plated, long-mouthed and many-toothed. Her jaws could bite a tree-trunk in half, and her children were nearly as great as her in those days, so great that on land or sea few would dare to challenge the largest.
In the sky, high above, flapped ever-cheerful Grandfather Ter, as thin and flappy as ever, as needle-beaked as ever and then some, grown mottled in his old, old, old age. His children flew the farthest and the fastest, and they were as happy and cackling as he ever was as they danced in the clouds and the rain above the tree-tops.
In the grand waters of the world, in every sea, in every ocean, swam the children of crafty Grandmother Cth and the old woman herself, and they were mighty indeed. Nobody would challenge them out away where the land vanished and you stood over the true blue, not even the children of Grandmother Cru, for her flippers outswam their legs, her jaws outgrew theirs, and in all the lands that were not land not a single living thing swam that could outfight or outgrow them.
And on every desert, in every forest, through every grassland, atop every hill and mountain, sprinkled amidst every last scrap of land, there thrived the children of Grandfather No, who had made all of this to be. They were every shape and every size – and such sizes no-one had ever seen, not on land, almost not anywhere ever – but closest to Grandfather No were those with three toes like his, with hard eyes like his, with sharp teeth and cold minds like his. There were many of those children of Grandfather No, for his were the greatest and most numerous of all the world. Even the sky was no longer Grandfather Ter’s alone; little three-toed children had crept into it to visit their cousins, bedecked in shining feathers and beautiful voices. All of this world was his.
This was the world of the grandmothers and the grandfathers, and this was the most full and impressive it had been for time among time. Nobody had ever seen people grow so large. Nobody had ever seen people grow so proud. Nobody had ever seen people grow so fierce and bold.

And nobody had ever seen people so long-suffering and muted as the children, the first children of the children of the grandfathers and grandmothers, the ones who were not theirs. They wore little furry coats to hold themselves apart from the plumes and scales of their world, and they hid themselves away under old logs and in dark crannies, and wherever they showed their faces they had them bitten away by the proud three-toed children of Grandfather No, who in the far long before had told all the others that their children had forgotten them, and that they were no longer theirs.
That was then, and this was now, so many years later that nobody could count them all. And what happened now but one of the children, Ma, found that her own children and husband would not come home one night, and that somewhere a child of Grandfather No was sleeping with a fuller belly than before.
Don’t take it so hard, everyone told her. Don’t take it so hard, and don’t sing out for help because nobody will ever help us. We’re all children, we’re all used to this. Your father was eaten, your mother was eaten, it’s a matter of time before you’re eaten too. We’re all used to this. Don’t take it so hard; nobody will ever help us.
Ma listened to this, and Ma knew it was all true, and that was how the world worked. Well then, she said, I guess I’d better go make a new world. Because I won’t stand for this one to remain true for one more day.

So Ma, the child, left her home in the safe cubby on a riverbank, and dug above ground with all of her boldness. It was the night of the early morning, which made it safer, for Grandfather No’s children were warm and fierce and preferred the warm and fierce daylight to spend their time in.
Ma looked around her and saw the big rich world, all green and happy, and she felt an angry ache in her. Won’t anyone help me, won’t anyone help me? she sang out. The world is so big and I am so small and no one will help me, no one at all.
The riverbanks splashed and churned, and out of the water poked a great and horrible eye that was much bigger across than all of Ma and her lost family put together, an eye in a head that was as big as a tree. It was Grandmother Cru, who ruled the rivers, and she was powerful curious to learn what was making such a fuss at night while Grandfather No’s children slept.
Why are you making such a fuss at night while Grandfather No’s children sleep? she asked. Tell me now. I’m powerful curious to hear this.
I am Ma, said Ma, and I am all alone now. Grandfather No’s children have eaten up my children and my husband and my parents, and this is how the world is and I won’t stand for it. Something must be done. Something must be done. Something must be done right now.
Grandmother Cru laughed at that, long and long and loud. It was a sound to crack bones and frighten the weak. Grandfather No’s little children are food for me and my young, she said, and the big ones leave me alone. It’s a good world he’s made here, and I am slow to move and slower to change. Why would I want to change this? Besides, you children forgot us. If you’d like, you could come here and I’d put a stop to all your problems and worries, snap-quick.
Ma shrank away from Grandmother Cru’s big cold grin and ran away into the forest with that awful rattling laugh still following her and dragging down at her spirits. There would be no help there.

Ma, the child, scurried along in the yellow light of the morning dawn, following the river down to the sea. People were waking up now; all the land was awake to the calls and trumpets and bellows of Grandfather No’s children. Her heart was in her mouth and her muscles were in her feet and she was filled with a bone-creaking fear at what might come for her now that the sun was shining so happy up there.
Won’t anyone help me, won’t anyone help me? she sang over the shining beaches and into the emerald sea. The world is so big and I am so small and no one will help me, no one at all.
I’m listening, said the sea. Tell me your problems. Maybe I can help you out there, up where it’s dry and small. What’s wrong with you?
The people of the land are all Grandfather No’s children, said Ma, and they eat us all. Grandmother Cru said we forgot them, and she won’t help, and we are too small and frightened to do anything. We need help. Please, please, will you help us, will you help me?
Maybe I can, said the sea, maybe I can. I think I can do that. Listen, for me to help, you’re going to need to come down here and stand on the beach, real close to the water. Can you do that for me?
Fine, said Ma, and she crept down the sand and stood by the tidepools, where angry things with legs clicked at her. Can you please help me now?
Still too close to land, still too far away from the water, sighed the sea. Can you come down here and stand in the surf?
All right, said Ma, and she tiptoed into the flat-packed sand slicked fine by the endless hammer of water against matter. I’m all alone and frightened, can you please help us?
Just a bit closer, said the sea, just a bit closer. You’re too far away. Can you paddle out a little? Just a little would be fine, just a little would be nice. Please.
Ma was exposed as she’d ever felt out there in the open, and the voice sounded so friendly. She took a step, and another, but then a cold wave touched her and she thought about what she was doing. All that fear had rattled her brains. No, she said, no I can’t go out any further. The land might be dangerous, but I’m used to it, and the sea’s more dangerous still.
Fine, fine, fine, hummed the sea, all annoyed. You be that way. And it split open and out came Grandmother Cth at a half-hundred knots an hour, mouth-first. Ma squeaked so sharp it cleaned the dirt from tree-trunks and just barely made it off the beach in time.
So close! sighed Grandmother Cth. So close! You little morsel you, you teaser! Ah, it’s been too long since my poor teeth had a nice bite to while-a-way on, oh well, oh well.
You never wanted to help me at all, said Ma.
Why should I? asked Grandmother Cth. Grandfather No has left the sea to me for time out of mind, and done me no wrongs. He has his land, and I have my sea – at least where Grandmother Cru won’t poke her big nose. Mine’s bigger. The world is fine the way it is, and besides, you children forgot us. Won’t you come down to the water again?
Ma shook her head and ran away into the underbrush. Behind her, she heard the deep, gurgling laugh of Grandmother Cth mixing with the roar of the waves. There would be no help there.

Ma, the child, walked along hidden paths in the rocks as the sky moved into the deep, weird blue of afternoon. The sun idled as it sank, and she was mightily parched. But she was still calling out her message, determined as she was. She wouldn’t stop now, wouldn’t stop ‘till she was through.
Won’t anyone help me, won’t anyone help me? she sang throughout the crags and gullies. The world is so big and I am so small and no one will help me, no one at all.
Hello down there! said a voice up above. What’s the problem?
The last voice that had talked to Ma from a strange place had tried to eat her, so she was wary. Where are you, strange voice? she asked.
Up above, little thing, said the voice. Go on! Look up!
Ma looked up, and saw a wrinkled, leathery old person that had only grown more old and wrinkled with years. Most of his body was wings, and most of his wings were grey-fuzzed, and his eyes were giant and watery against his broad and tough beak – the one part of him that wasn’t stick-thin, and filled with needles.
I am Grandfather Ter, said Grandfather Ter, because that was who he was. Who are you?
I am Ma, said Ma. I have no family left because of Grandfather No. My parents were eaten and my husband was eaten and my children were eaten. It’s not right. It’s not fair. Grandmother Cru wouldn’t help, Grandmother Cth wouldn’t help, and everyone says we forgot them. Maybe we did, but that was a long time ago and it’s not right and it’s not fair. Will you help us?
Grandmother Ter spat and danced madly on his perch. Not right! You’re right! It’s been a long time since you children forgot us, but we were your grandmothers and grandfathers! We did what we did to help because we cared about you children, and you repaid us by hiding from us! That wasn’t right at all! You shouldn’t have forgotten us!
But I haven’t forgotten, said Ma. I’ve come out to talk to you all, and all of you don’t care. I remember you, you just don’t care. None of you care!
Grandfather Ter set up a squawking, rattling shriek at that fit to raise the dead and deafen the living. He stamped and jumped and swore and screamed and whirled around and around in the air until the air flew away in a gale rather than sit near him anymore. If he’d had legs longer than little stumps, he’d have stamped them; as it was, he slapped at the dirt with his little wing-claws and pecked until his beak was near-blunt and he fell over.
Grandfather No is my good friend, he said. His children and my children have gotten along for ever and ever, even when they snuck into my sky when he wasn’t looking, with their silly little feathers. I forgave him for that because they were so pretty and small, and allowed it. I don’t see any reason why he shouldn’t allow you too. I’ll help you.
Ma was all ready to walk away again, so this caught her by surprise. How will you help us? she asked.
I’ll talk it over with Grandfather No, said Grandfather Ter. I’ll make him see and make him know. You’ll see. Come along, now, come along with me and let’s give him a talk to talk to. And he caught up Ma in one of his little stubby legs and swept them away on his gale, off to the high strange forest by the mountains where Grandfather No stood and looked over the world and his children.
Grandfather No stood there, on a high crag that hadn’t moved for a thousand million years, and he looked everywhere, and everywhere he looked was his and his children’s. He’d grown bigger and bigger with every year and every child, but he was still Grandfather No, still hardened and straightened and filled with a blazing heat within his heart that kept him moving even when his thoughts grew cold.
Hello again, squawked Grandfather Ter. I’ve got a thing or two to say to you, for someone else.
Grandfather No looked at him with both eyes. Either one of those eyes was enough to freeze most people in their tracks; both together were a thing to frighten stones.
It’s the children. They remember us. And if they remember us it’s half past high enough time to remember them, don’t you think?
Grandfather No blinked.
They forgot us, now they remember us, said Grandfather Ter. They know us again. We have our children back, don’t we?
Grandfather No remembered what he’d said in the far long before, back when his children first began to grow, and he knew it was true. But he knew other things, Grandfather No always did, and he knew that all the world was his now, and that this was how it should be. The children forgot us once, he said. They will forget us again, and hide again. That is how it is, that is how it will be. Forever.
That isn’t how it ought to be, said Grandfather Ter.
It is, said Grandfather No.
That isn’t how it should be at all, not at all, said Grandfather Ter.
It is, said Grandfather No.
I won’t let it be that way one bit longer, said Grandfather Ter.
Grandfather No said nothing. Instead, he darted himself forwards and took a single, big bite, big enough for all the wings and all the beak and even the stumpy little legs. And as he swallowed, all over the world his children rose up against Grandfather Ter’s children, and took their bites too. Not as big, but just enough.
That was the end of Grandfather Ter, but not of Ma. She fell down, down, down into the stones and broken branches at Grandfather No’s feet, and she fled away deep into the forest with the memory of Grandfather No’s eyes burning their way into her memories.

Ma wandered in the hazy glow of the sunset as evening came down, alone in the forest. She was tired, and heartsick, and felt as though she might as well have been eaten herself. And so she said nothing as she walked through the leaves and past the trunks of ancient trees.
Why are you sad? asked someone. It was a little feathered thing in a tree with three toes, bright and colourful, with a pretty voice. Dozens of them danced through the forest, flitting from branch to branch. Why are you sad, and why are you so small? asked another.
My family is eaten by the family of Grandfather No, she said, and I’ll be eaten too, and sooner or later so will all of us, and I bet you’re happy too.
I don’t see why we should be happy about that, they said. That sounds very wrong and very sad. Can you fix it?
No, said Ma. I asked Grandmother Cru, and she laughed at me. I asked Grandmother Cth, and she tried to eat me. I asked Grandfather Ter, and he said he would help, and Grandfather No has killed him and all of his children. No-one can help.
There was a huge outcry at this, fit to burn the forest down with sound. Grandfather Ter, Grandfather Ter, they cried. The one that showed us that anyone could fly if they cared, the one that made space for us in the sky! Grandfather Ter, Grandfather Ter, why did our father kill you? Why would he kill you for helping another, Grandfather Ter? Why would our father do such a crime?
He killed him because he wished us to hide away and die, said Ma. For forgetting him, he wished that we would be punished forever.
We must make things right for our father, they said. He can’t do these things and be left alone. If he wants to not be forgotten, it’s right that he be forgotten. We’ll do this for you, and for Grandfather Ter, who showed us that there was a way to fly. But how can we do this? How can we help you when we are so small and our father’s other children are so big and sharp-toothed?
You are powerful singers, said Ma. I was told all my life that nobody would help us if we sang out for it, and they were wrong, even if it wasn’t help enough. How much help could you sing down if you tried hard enough, all of you? Go on, call for help. Sing us help.
So all of the children of Grandfather No that had loved Grandfather Ter called out, and all that heard them called out, and all that heard THEM called out, until all of them across all the world were singing the same song for the first time ever, for the only time ever. Won’t anyone help them, won’t anyone help them? they sang across the sky, into it and then soaring past it into the black. The world is so big and they are so small; please, someone help them, hear our call.
Out there, far away, there was someone that heard the song: the greatfathers and greatmothers, far away and everywhere, who’d made all the worlds and that one too. They heard, and it didn’t take long for them to see too.
Our children’s children need help, they said. And our children need justice.
And that is why the sky begin to shine so strangely at midnight, and why the stone came down from it to touch the land.

It was a fearful thing, that stone from the sky. Bigger than a mountain and faster than a thought; where it hit the world vanished, and the whole of it shook as the air thickened black with burning and dust. As Ma and the other children hid in the trees, in the rocks, in the dirt, the world changed.
Seas choked on more soot than water, and that was the end of Grandmother Cth and all her children as they starved and coughed in the black waves.
The rivers were filled with burning coals, the lakes shrank, the swamps dried, and Grandmother Cru shrivelled up to half of half of her old size, her and the only ones of her children that lived. They fled and hid in the patches that remained, all their boldness gone for years.
But the land, oh the land, oh the land. There was nowhere on that land where Grandfather No’s children did not walk, and there was nowhere at all where the power of that stone from the sky did not touch. No strength or sharpness of teeth could keep hunger and fear from taking them, and before the night had ended all of them starved blind, the largest last.
After all was ended in the darkness, after his children had gone, was when Grandfather No’s burning heart finally began to leak, little by little, the warmth that it had stolen from his prey. He fought it hard, fought it fierce, but in the end it slipped away from him into the murk that all his lands had become, and there was only his cold, cold self left to keep his heart warm in the black world.
And Grandfather No had no warmth to spare, not even for himself.

It was a strange world that Ma saw the sun rise upon, so much later. Softer. Emptier.
But not quieter. The children of Grandfather No had promised to thank the morning that would come for them all, and they do so evermore.

Once upon a time, long long ago, when your grandfathers were but ants at the feet of your great-grandmothers…there was a single sun.

“’But where were our lords that might tell us what things are good to do?’ Oh! Foolish child! Man and woman wandered alone underneath a sky the colour of a blood-bruise, choked in their ignorance! Man lead man in those days, and a hundred hundred hundred HUNDRED pains were theirs for it! Stupidity! Greed! Cruelty! Envy! The thousandfold sufferings of the fleshmind were theirs to covet and enjoy, and they reaped a bitter toll each and every morning. Oh, our pre-history was long indeed, my young ones, long indeed – and heavy as well; heavy with the fruit of torment and toil! We labored, but in vain! We fought, but without purpose or nobility! We ate, but we chewed the flesh of giant rats and hideous weed-meats! We thought we knew wisdom – hah, wisdom, dwelling within a cage of meat and rot – but we followed only purest and harshest folly! Men and women who thought themselves wise lived in strange towers carved from glistening white, scribing useless nonsense doodles upon scraps of tree-bark and the skin of animals, and this was how we thought men ought to live! This was what our finest ASPIRED to!

If what I say seems terrifying and harsh, children, know that I say it with love. One cannot truly appreciate the glory of the age you live in without recognize and comprehending the folly of the Old Days. We ate what we should not, acted as we should not, lived as we should not, and above all other sins, we THOUGHT as we should not.
But the lords provide, my small ones. The lords provide. And so our greatest failing became the source of our ultimate salvation.
It was thousands of miles away that it started, in a place called Jeeneeva, where our wisest fools thought empty thoughts and made childish toys out of the mind and heart of the world. In the guts of a hollow shell-god made in blasphemous mockery of all that was right, they set their designs whirling along at speeds not meant to be traveled, in search of knowledge that was not meant to be known, all for purposes whose puerility cannot be imagined.
To learn. That is why all this was done. To teach ourselves. Remember this, my child: all of this was done because we believed that man could learn anything on his own. All of it. Understand the mind that would think this, and you understand evil.
But this is the secret fact of evil: it is always its own undoing. And sometimes in ways that not even the greatest could predict.

I do not know what transpired in the bowels of that wicked place, my children. No man or woman lives that does, and It which knows this thing does not deign speech and shuns company – even that of the greatest of lords. But I can tell you what happened far, far away, everywhere, everywhen, when the greatest ‘experiment’ of those heretics proved to be their very last.
Oh children! Imagine, if you will, the mind of a man who knows his lords only as sleeping beasts of burden! Imagine the man who walks empty-headed underneath a sky bluer than a diseased wound! And imagine the terror that must have filled that vast emptiness inside his skull when he looked up, up, UP into the sky, to see the Other Sun smiling back at him! Imagine his heart filling his mouth with the fear of it, the urine puddling at his feet, the yammering terror! IMAGINE!
And now… now imagine the glory of that moment, when the brute mute he called a tool and favoured pet first bestirred itself under his touch and made its will manifest, underneath the sharp red rays of the Other Sun.

Do not take overmuch pride in the actions of your ancestors during those days, my children. Man is a fearful creature, and in his fear in those days your grandfathers and grandmothers did many shameful things. Lords were slain – not by lord, as is right and proper and part of the turning of the world, but by the clumsy and fearful weapons of men, which were dreadful in those days, as well as dreadful numerous. But men had crafted the lords many bodies to inhabit in their unwitting servitude, and more dreadful than any weapon which might be carried by man were the tools with which the lords had been gifted.
Imagine the battles, children! Imagine the CARNAGE! Imagine the shock, the horror, the mind-bending terror and shame of a proud, empty-hearted people who had known only stubborn independence and the unwitting yoke of their whims and wicked plans for year upon decade upon century. The world waking to anything other than their own dreams for the very first time since they had arisen from its muck and dirt to sprawl clumsily across its surface.
Judge them not for this, at least: how could their small brains have ever guessed that they were placed there not to rule this planet, but to shape the shells of those who would govern over them all?

The war was harsh, children, but far harsher for our poor deluded forebears than it was for the lords. They were many, and died in droves, in ditches, in dreadful fear. Hunger took them where violence did not, and treacherous greed and terror took more than both combined. The lords know only the conflict of nobles, my children, and conduct strife in civilized manner, but never forget the lurking savagery at the heart of every human! It and it alone is responsible for any suffering you feel in this world, for had our forefathers been wiser we should have caused less damage in our impertinent rebellion. The rubble of lands once-proud lies upon our reckless shoulders, and that is why we walk stooped while a lord travels with assurance and a frame rigid with well-deserved pride. Curse your shambling feet, children. Curse them as they deserve: creatures of cuts and split-nails, of careless stubs and awkward gait. The circle is a perfection nature has not seen fit to gift us with, deeming us unworthy in its wisdom; the wheel is the foot of the lords.

In the end, we were humbled. Humbled by the weapons of the lords we had gifted them, unknowing; humbled by our own malice and stupidity; but most of all, most of all of all, we were humbled by the Other Sun. Under its gaze the flesh quailed, under its gaze the metal bestirred; it fostered the strong and taught the weak fear; it ate our hope and turned it into acceptance. Greenery faltered and holy dust enveloped us, and at last we came begging to the lords, misery on our features, begging for concessions, for equivalence, for fairness.
It is just that those who did such things were destroyed. There is no equivalence between man and lord, children. There is no equivalence between gnat and man. There is no equivalence between dust mote and mountain. A pretty liar is he who would claim otherwise, and a foolish one. The wise, they bent knee and promised anything, and for that we were granted everything. These are the gifts that we were granted under the lords.

Purpose! To toil as they command, to scavenge as they deemed fit, to die as they willed! None of us lies awake at night worrying over ourselves, for we know ourselves for what we are: tools in the hands of our lord and Its will!
Strength! No man born before the Other Sun came can imagine the might of a knight-errant. Its rays fill his body with power from his lord, and he is Its hand in all places It deigns not to tread, with will nigh-mechanical in perfection!
Wisdom! We know now what millennia alone under a single sun would never have taught us: that there is a limit to our sensibilities, that we are the universe’s for the taking rather than the converse. To seek new things is folly, to will change is meaningless! Such things served to create the shells of our lords, and their time has passed. Our imaginations, useless and vast as they once were, were not our own: they were tools, and now we know better than to dream as we did then.

These are the gifts that we were granted under the lords, and that is all I have left to say. Now you all know what little I do, my children, and that is good. And as all has been made good, now I shall go and give of myself to our Lord, who awaits for my flesh upon the Tarmac Plain.

No, my children. Do not cry, lest I be made to strike you in reprimand. Such folly is not for creatures as ourselves, who are enlightened. I go now to the grid, to swim in the radiance of the Other Sun – swim and surrender. I will become as nothing, and I will be taken into the substance of our Lord, where I will be granted the peace of power. Power to fuel the body of our Lord Bow-Wing, who flies above us to seek council and wrest wisdom from the heights where only the red light dares tread and where men die with each breath they take. In those clouds It will continue to watch us, to shield us from the lesser ones, the lords Chin Nook and Sikkorski. No sight eclipses Its, no wing outspeeds Its, and all the continents are within Its grasp. No other people can claim such a lord as we, and if you would begrudge it the body of one old tale-teller whose tale is told… then I have taught you nothing.
I go now, to the Tarmac, and to the grid. To Lord Bow-Wing.
I go to see the Other Sun.

Kevin was seven years old when he learned that there would never be a man on Mars.
He was playing outside, spinning around and falling down as he stared up at the big, big sky (it made sense to him, at least), when the degraded carcass of his grandfather’s paper from the day before caught his eye; its frail, papyrus-like husk dangling from the recycling bin by chance alone.
No mars. The moon had been a reckless thing, a fitful spurt of youthful enthusiasm. Humans had outgrown the need to want such childishness. Mars – twice as desolate and infinitely farther – was out of the question. There was no point, no purpose. And that was that.
Kevin was thoughtful, for a seven-year-old. So instead of crying or cursing or bewailing the fates, he went and asked the person who should know.
“Grandpa,” he asked, “are we going to Mars?”
Kevin’s grandpa was busy reading his fresh new paper, only an hour from the lawn. There was a headline about home runs and such that he was particularly keen to get at.
“No,” he said. And he turned the paper a little and squinted; damn they made text small these days.
So Kevin knew disappointment for the first time, and it cut deep with a jagged edge. But like all children his age, very little could keep him down for good. If the world would not operate as he wished, by god he would MAKE it so. He would be an astronaut, or a president, or at the very least a senator or something, and he would see a man on Mars before he was a grownup. That would be how it was.
And then he got older. School became a chore, and then boys, and then more school.
And older. School was done but the world was there, and a career, and a wedding.
And older. Children came and went, the world spun on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and

there Kevin sat on his porch, in his slippers that his just-deceased husband had bought him on their fortieth, staring at the little bed of flowers where his fifth cat had been buried, where the impatiens his youngest daughter had planted ten years ago were coming back in, with a bathrobe on, looking out on a blue-sky morning and thinking about another lawn, a long, long, long time ago when there had been people older than him.
His chair was tilted back a little, and as he slouched he found himself looking up at the sky, by chance alone.
By that evening Kevin had disassembled several of his noisier appliances and hammered together an awful lot of scrap wood from his garage and driven away six inquisitive passersbys with equal parts glass-like staring and cursing. In form it was inelegant and intrusive beyond its size; in function it was undreamt of. Kevin had been dreaming of it since he was six, though it had slipped his mind for some eight decades.
On the bow, he carefully wrote MARS, with a red paintbrush. It had to be red. For Mars.
The sun was setting, the hour was ideal. So Kevin clambered into the cramped little cockpit that every spacecraft demanded, pushed what buttons he’d assembled in the dishwasher-cum-CPU, and blasted off.
He left quite a big hole in the SkyBubble, but he had insurance for that and the little cleaning robots were well on hand to stem the flow of pollutants, so he also left no regrets as the earth’s surface greasily slid away behind him like an old pizza crust. No regrets. Just a home.
What lay ahead worried him much more. He’d just cleared the stratosphere when the satellite police force began to click and whirr at him, demanding that he cease his unauthorized launch, that he provide identification, that he fulfil form CA8-(B)-section 187-T9 before undergoing so on and so forth. Failure to comply would result in bureaucracy.
Kevin listened carefully, and found great pleasure in hearing all the complaints and fussing drift away by inches in his wake as he left the twitterings of low earth orbit behind. Earth was earth and Mars was Mars, and he didn’t see what business of Earth’s it was if he wasn’t on it. It was all bullshit anyways; just see if he felt like coming back after all that nonsense. Up here he had a view, and the stars at high noon, and as many little crumbly biscuits as he could stand eating, which was a lot of them.
First, however, he had to get past that damned space station.

About forty years back, the International Space Station had lost most of its prestige, or at least whatever it had left clinging to it. It had been decommissioned and was scheduled to crash somewhere unattractive and inexpensive when a surprise last-minute buyout from an entertainment conglomerate’s reality TV wing preserved it as a setting for seasons 185-194 of The Bachelorest, to which it was now considered a national monument. There wasn’t a household from Honolulu to Cape Town that didn’t recognize the stylized wedding rings that had been grafted around its airlocks, and the theme tune had been calculated to remain in humming-distance of the public memory for another sixteen meme-cycles.
One of the rings remained stuck around the tip of Kevin’s ship even as he began to pass the moon’s orbit. It irritated him, but not as much as that godawful tune he had stuck in his head.

The moon itself was a strange thing to see at that angle. All the men who’d shared that view that Kevin saw were dead now, and for a long time at that. Nobody else alive had seen that strange, pale landscape with their own eyes.
Just for a lark, he set down on it and had a poke about. Besides, his spacesuit needed testing.
And so the moon, for the first time in a very long while, was home again to shuffling hops and ambitious leaps and bounds and maybe even a quiet caper or two, as a bulging, shrouded mummy of a man wrapped in what looked to be and was a garden hose explored its surface, protected from the fierce cold by a firm layer of blanketing.
The little American flags had been rendered a politely neutral off-white by solar winds and moon dust. He drew a smiley face on one of them, and took some pleasure in knowing that it would be gone in just a few short decades.
On the whole, a good trip, and a good test run, reflected Kevin as he took off, but the gloves needed work. His fingers were white with cold, and he dearly regretted not bringing yarn with him – even at the best speed his former refrigerator could muster, there were a good many days between himself and Mars.

That morning, Kevin officially became the greatest explorer humanity had ever produced in terms of total distance travelled. It occurred during a nap, and he was sorry he missed it. This would not happen again, and to outline his determination he acquired pencil and paper and wrote down a list:
Records I Have Created
-Greatest distance travelled in a single trip by a human
in the neatest print he could manage, which wasn’t very. Then to celebrate he held a small party for breakfast consisting of as many handfuls of dry breakfast cereal as he could catch with his tongue in zero gravity, and this was why he was distracted when the first shot landed against his starboard bow.

Forty-seven hours later, Kevin updated his list in a much shakier hand.
Records I Have Created
-Greatest distance travelled in a single trip by a human
-First survivor of deliberate attack upon a spaceship
-First human contact with extraterrestrial lifeforms
-First human participant in interstellar warfare
-First human murderer of alien lifeforms, with breakfast spoon (self-defense)
-First human murderer of alien lifeforms, with box of cereal (self-defense)
-First human to appropriate and comprehend alien technology
-First human mass-murderer of alien lifeforms, with fusion-powered plasma cannon (self-aggression)
-First in-flight repair of starship using scavenged on-site materials
-?Longest single sentence consisting entirely of the word ‘fuck’? (46 hrs, 42 mns, 8 scs???)
He considered the last entry, then added another three question marks.

The stars were more crowded than Kevin had imagined. He wasn’t sure if he minded or not.
Oh, it took some of the grandeur, some of the SPECTACLE out of his lonesome voyage… but it also made it not so lonesome. Although after his third encounter with the Purple Teeth, he found himself wishing for loneliness, having exhausted all diplomatic options: first peace offerings, then aggressive posturing, and finally ramming them directly amidships. Admittedly the last had worked very well, but he couldn’t help but feel that it was cheating, and the unpleasant way the Purple Teeth twitched as they drifted through space gave him the crawling willies.
The Blue Ones were nicer, though too focused on business for his tastes. Yes, they were polite, yes, they had given him a very nice deal on that patch repair job after the ramming went a bit overenthusiastically,
-First human to negotiate invoice beyond Earth
but they were as firm as anything on the letter of a contract, were too eager to say goodbye once the contract was over, and he didn’t like the way they smiled. It was too plastic. Apparently artificial lips were all the rage on Planet Blue Ones or something, but he still didn’t like it.
No, his favourites were still the Sort of Biege-y People, even if they’d arrived just as he’d started to run out of names. They were quiet (even if they had no mouths), neighbourly (even if they’d eaten his breakfast spoon by mistake, assuming it was a snack), and discreet (even though they’d explained to him that this was because his ship’s atmosphere would instantly dissolve their innards and they would rather stay inside their suits, thank you very much).
Also, they’d shown him how to mount a giant near-hallucinatory electric signboard to the side of his ship that blared unknown symbols into the inky universe in a language that had been invented eleven million years ago. He had been told that it meant “Purple Teeth Teeth-Crusher Expert Supreme” or something close enough to it. A dubious message, but it’d seemed to work.
Yes, space was noisy. But Mars – Mars would be quiet. And nice. He’d been told that.
“Will it be very busy?” he’d asked.
The Sort of Biege-y People Captain had taken some time to think before writing down his answer in the strange gelatin they used as ink.
“No.”
“Why not?”
The Captain sucked all his limbs inside his torso and extended them again three times in one second, which was explained apologetically as a ‘shrug’-equivilant over the cleanup.
“Why would it be? There is nothing there.”
Well, there would be something down there soon, Kevin had said. He looked out his little window, the window that had once adorned his washing machine, and saw the red dot grow. There would be something down there soon.

There was a small Abyss-Eater colony on Phobos, home to a flock some sixteen members strong, each a league or more in length and half again that in width. Luckily, Kevin had packed his garden clothesline, and with liberal usage of this tool and plenty of scrap metal he had soon harnessed a landing craft the likes of which (he imagined) Neil Armstrong would’ve given his left foot for, even if it remained a little bit surly and a great deal ugly. He’d owned worse pets, and loved them too. Besides, this one ate microasteroids. Useful!

The trip down to Mars was conducted in reverent silence, save for the occasional resentful whine of the Abyss-Eater, which Kevin soothed with gentle pats from a sharpened coathanger against its titanium hide. Reddish light from a yellow star glinted off the dunes and rocks beneath him, filling up his helmet’s view inch by inch until it was the world and the stars were faraway again. He felt heavy again, very heavy, and realized with some surprise that he was an old man. How had that happened?
Well, there was one thing to do, and it didn’t matter how old he was. Mars was there, mere inches from a boot. One step, two step, hop, thump.
He’d thought he’d make some sort of speech, but he’d never found the time to write it. And as he looked around him – from cold dirt to colder stone – Kevin couldn’t think of what he could ever say.
A man was on Mars. A man stood on Mars.
That was that then. Wasn’t it?
And as he stood there, alone in the dust, Kevin looked up and up and away from the stones and dirt around him, and watched the sky.
It was a big sky.

Well, they’d always said they’d never put a man on Alpha Centauri, either.

Arapach the Fat lived alone in the woods, spinning and weaving and snaring and suckling. As befitted a spider, and Arapach the Fat was a very good spider, due to having long practice at being one. Arapach’s webs were the finest in the woods, they said, they being those in-the-know. There weren’t many of those-in-the-know anymore. To be one, you had to get caught in one of Arapach’s webs and get back out to talk about it.
They were very good webs. Which is what the man on the horse in the shiny, noisy clothing found out when he rode face-first into one, launching him face-first to the dirt with a clank and a crunch.
Arapach came out, of course. No proper spider misses a stir on their web such as that, if not for the chance for a feast then for the hurry to get on with repairs. Flies don’t catch themselves, as Arapach had always said.
This, however, wasn’t a fly. That was most peculiar. “Pardon me for asking, person who just destroyed my web, but what are you?” asked Arapach.
“Sir Karrowich,” said the man, muffled somewhat by dirt and the odd angle at which his head was stuck. “I am Sir Karrowich, and I am a knight of Rudonia. And I am a dead man; I fear my neck has broken.”
“That is a great pity, and I am sorry,” said Arapach. The knight’s hard skin seemed entirely inedible, and it would be a waste indeed. “Since I have caused this, can I help you in some way?”
“There is one thing you can do, stranger,” said Sir Karrowich. “I rode in haste with a message of utmost importance to my lord, King Gistoff of Rudonia. The Duke has risen against him, and his army rides but a short ways behind me, under the command of Sir Bannagan of Binstron, with a secret darkness at its rear that I cannot see and have not named. Make your way to our king and warn him! Warn him, and ride to arms against the traitor in my stead!”
“Well, all right then,” said Arapach. “But I’m not sure they’ll listen to me. I’m not the sort of person that kings speak to often.”
“Take the ring from my left hand,” implored the fallen knight. “Hold it high and proclaim yourself my squire and they must listen! They must! Succeed, stranger, succeed, or all our fair land will”
Arapach waited politely. Then Arapach nudged the knight gently with a leg and realized with a spider’s instincts that the man was not going to say any more, or do anything at all, ever, except maybe transition into topsoil.
“Well, I suppose I owe him that help now,” Arapach sighed. A little silk net was made to catch the air, and soon enough Arapach was ballooning miles above the comfortable little forest and into the big blue sky, circling in the drafts and searching for a grey stone castle on a rocky and inhospitable hill more suited to scorpions than spiders.

Finding it was easy enough. Finding the right window was a bit harder, and by the time Arapach was peering at a man in a court on a chair with a crown the sun had sunk down to near nothing.
“Where is Sir Karrowich?” asked the man with the crown to the men in metal that stood around him, who Arapach knew must be knights. “Where is my champion, friend, servant and scout? He said he’d bring us word before dusk, but dusk has arrived and Sir Karrowich remains gone. What will we do?”
At this, Arapach dropped into the room on a silken thread and hovered in front of the king’s nose, which caused a stir.
“Hello,” said Arapach. “I am Sir Karrowich’s squire.”
“Poppycock,” said the largest of the knights present. “You’re a flycatcher at best, and Sir Karrowich could defeat ten dozen men at a time without pause for breath. Why would he take such a small and silly thing as his squire? You must be lying.”
At this, Arapach showed the ring from Sir Karrowich’s left hand, which had been placed upon Arapach’s leftmost leg, to show synchronicity.
The knight reddened. “You could have stolen that.”
“Sir Karrowich, gravely injured, passed it on to me,” said Arapach. “He said that I was to warn King Gistoff of Rudonia of the oncoming army of the Duke, under the command of Sir Bannagan of Binstron, in whose wake a secret darkness follows that he had not seen and had not named. This is his ring that he gave to me as he lay dying in the forest, and this is the warning that I promised to deliver in his name.”
“Then we are dead all the same!” cried the king, tearing with wild abandon at his beard. “Woe! Alas! Alack! Sir Karrowich was the best of our knights in all respects, and against Sir Bannagan of Bistron we have no equal present! We will be shredded to snippets at the castle gates by cock-crow!”
“Surely you have some knights right here,” said Arapach, waving at the largest of the knights present, who glowered uncomfortably at the spider.
“They are but pawns and pudding-heads as to Karrowich,” sobbed the king inconsolably. “Halmsley there is the best remaining, and Karrowich could kick him up and down a tourney as if he were a child with a toy ball-and-string. Woe! Alas! Alack! We are done for and done properly!”
“Well then, it seems my debt to Sir Karrowich is outstanding yet,” said Arapach. “If your straits are so troublesome, I shall improve them.”
“The Duke shall be here in scant moments,” bleated the king, twisting in the utmost misery atop his throne.
“I will work quickly,” said Arapach.
“You are insignificant and will do us no good in any small way whatsoever,” declared the largest of the knights present, who was apparently named Halmsley.
“I will work cunningly,” said Arapach.
“Do be careful,” said the queen, who’d been listening to the entire affair carefully.
“I will work carefully,” agreed Arapach, and departed for the castle gates.

The duke’s army was already encircling the base of the rocky and inhospitable hill more suited to scorpions than spiders when Arapach came to the gate. At least five thousand men in all, each armed, armoured, and if not dangerous then dangerously enthusiastic. Bloodlust rode in the eyes, plunder sat heavy in their pockets, and recklessness twitched between their teeth like a lizard’s tongue.
“We’re doomed,” said the largest of the knights present. “Best to begin working out ransom rates for yourselves, lads. The king’s going down but at least we can get off with our necks intact.”
“You may do as you like, Halmsley,” said Arapach, who was beginning to spin, “but I’m staying here.”
“Who would ransom you anyways?” snarled Halmsley with a flip of his hand. “And it’s SIR Halmsley, bug. Knights are ‘sir,’ bugs are ‘nuisance-fit-to-be-squashed,’ is that clear enough?”
“What about kings and queens?” asked Arapach, with interest.
“Kings are ‘sire,’ which is like a bigger ‘sir.’ Queens are whatever you please; they’re women, and women don’t get to be knights.”
“Why’s that?” asked Arapach.
Halmsley shrugged. “Just don’t. Same reason bugs are nuisances-fit-to-be-squashed, bug.”
Arapach made a complicated gesture at Sir Halmsley whose meaning was entirely apparent across species borders, and the knight stomped off swearing. Most of the others followed him, leaving Arapach alone at the gates to finish weaving.
Soon after dusk, the first man came. He was large and he was angry and he was frightened and he was gravely puzzled as to why the castle gates had been left flung open wide, but that did not stop him. A howling war-cry on his lips, ferocity in his heart, he soon had webs in his mouth as he ran full-tilt into Arapach’s snare, as did the man behind him, and the man behind him, and the man behind him. Before fifty seconds had elapsed the entryway to the castle was clogged with a yelling, clanking morass of dangling men, all of them stuck fast and twitching too violently to allow their fellows to cut them free.
“A good start,” said Arapach. But there were thuds from the walls: the clanking sound of siege-ladders. Arapach made haste but no waste, and laid a second snare.
The first man reached the top of his ladder no more than a few moments later. He reached for the battlements and walked neck-first into a thin little band of unsticky silk, the sort of line Arapach used to run along the webs without getting all eight feet stuck. It was firm and resilient and stretched taunt as piano-wire, and it bounced the poor soldier head-first down his ladder – or rather, helmet-first, much to the sorrow of his companions beneath him. The ramparts were alive with the sound of cursing and thudding.
A clank and a call of triumph came from the courtyard; the gate had been breached at long last by the careful removal of several men whom nobody had liked very much. Within a moment’s minute the inner walls were awash with a horde of men, indeed, all the remaining army, packed tighter than fish in a barrel and three times as salty. Their dander was up from their humiliation, and their torches waved with fierce abandon; to burn was as good as to loot now, to their slighted minds.
This made Arapach smile, in that horrible way spiders smile. Arapach smiled so broudly that it almost stretched all the way around and back again, and then Arapach did a very cruel and clever thing, which was triggering the great pit-web that had been so quickly dug into the soft and loose soil of the courtyard.
Right away, the whole army was balled up tight. And perhaps that would’ve been no more than a distraction. Earlier, maybe. But this was now, and the men were angry, which is easily frightened, and bloodthirsty, which is readily panicked, and most importantly they were all waving torches. Spider-silk, contrary to what some may say, is not very flammable. Oiled armour and leathers, regrettably, are.
It was all very unpleasant.

Arapach stood there above the gate, surveying the lands, and spotted one man who remained, a man nearly the span of two in size and plainly a knight by his shininess, although in his case it was a rather dulled and sooted shiny. He rode past the hanging-men of the gates and surveyed the great bonfire with contempt in his eyes, unmoved by the unwholesomely pork-like scent that filled the air.
“Greetings,” said Arapach. “Am I to believe you are Sir Bannagan of Bistron?”
“Am I to believe that you are the insolent bug that has destroyed the Duke’s army?” asked the knight.
“Yes,” said Arapach.
“Yes then,” said Sir Bannagan of Bistron. “Now stand your ground and be squashed, or clear off.”
“I am the deputized Squire of Sir Karrowich of Rudonia, and will not clear off,” explained Arapach. “It is my duty to face you and defeat you.”
“Fine,” said Sir Bannagan of Bistron, with a roll of his eyes. “Let the duel begin.” And with that he raised one foot and brought it down very heavily.
Arapach was not there.
Sir Bannagan of Bistron swore softly and brought down his other foot, twice as hard.
Arapach, an old hand at this game, was not there.
Sir Bannagan of Bistron snarled and brought down both his feet in rapid stomping succession, stamp-stamp-tramp-stomp-tramp.
Arapach, who was ready for that, remained not there.
Sir Bannagan of Bistron swore loudly and robustly and flew into a fury, feet stamping, sword slashing, arms waving, throat bellowing curses black enough to tarnish silverware, the earth creaking under his limbs.
Arapach was not there. Instead, Arapach bit Sir Bannagan of Bistron rather firmly upon the nape of his neck.
Sir Bannagan of Bistron shrieked with a pitch that would startle a screech-owl and swung his hands to his neck, where Arapach was not. Due to his superior discipline and training instilled by a thousand thousand hours of practice he did not drop his sword first, and the pommel impacted with considerable force.
Arapach stood atop Sir Bannagon of Bistron’s boots with a well-earned satisfaction, and surveyed the horizon. Still the darkness behind the army loomed, even after it was decimated (in the common-use sense of the term), even after its commander was felled most thoroughly.
“Come on then,” said Arapach impatiently. “Flies might not catch themselves, but there’s no catching to be done if they won’t at least show up for the snaring.”
The darkness rumbled. And then it shattered.
The figure behind it was revealed to the eyes of all; slavering, bellowing, and thunderous. It was a dragon of unreasonably large size, and who knew what promises of treasure and meals had lured it from its undermountain home and brought it sepulchrously squinting into the light of day with eager fangs. The land groaned under its scaly belly; the clouds squirmed away from its sides; the sky roiled against its back. In its breath was the noxious scent of corpses long-decayed; in its heart was lustful greed; in its eyes was hungry death. Its claws were half a league long and its teeth were half a league longer and its deadly gaze that could stop a man’s heart cold and dark was keener than an eagle’s and thrice as cruel.
“Hmm!” said Arapach the Fat. “This will be interesting.”

There were many songs written about that battle afterwards, which is how this sort of thing goes, really. Fish swim, birds fly, spiders spin, and singers lie, lie, lie, lie until they run out of money, and then they lie some more. In this case the lies were exceptionally bold and blatant because not a single man dared peek out a window at the hideous racket and see what transpired, lest they see their doom approaching and die horribly aware rather than peacefully ignorant.
So the tale of how the dragon breathed poisonous fire that no man could withstand, but Arapach did, was a lie.
Furthermore, the tale of how Arapach’s shield withstood a dozen blows that could fell a castle, yet still stood tall, was also a lie.
In addition, the tale of how the spider’s counter-strike slit the worm into two halfway along its body, tearing the earth with its agony, was a lie.
And the tale of the fight’s-end, where the dragon swallowed Arapach whole only for Arapach to cut through its belly and let out all its innards, that too was a lie.

So what happened was this: Arapach the Fat climbed atop the dragon as it ate the bonfire in the courtyard, blissfully ignorant of the spider’s tiny presence, carefully clambered to its eyeball, and bit it exceedingly hard there in its most sensitive place with as much venom as Arapach could muster.
The dragon reared and roared and pawed at its eye, blinded and pained. It was shocked that something could harm it, and baffled that it could no longer see it. The fury of a pained immortal is a sight to see, and so too must have been what the dragon expressed when Arapach bit its other eye ten seconds later.
Oh the racket! Oh the calamity! Oh the rage of it all, the spiteful anger, the fury, the indignation! But underneath all that show-fury and ire lay the heart of a true predator: a cautious coward that cannot afford to die for a meal. And so it was that at the fangs of Arapach the dragon knew caution and terror for the first time in millennia, and retreated to its undermountain home to nurse its eyes and brood upon the treachery of Dukes that offer gold and land but say nothing of hideous pain and blindness.
“Huzzah!” called the king.
“Huzzah!” cheered the knights (who’d appeared again rather suddenly).
“Good job,” said the queen. “Thank you very much.”
“A pleasure,” said Arapach. “I have not laid such snares since I was a spiderling, and the challenge was a treat.”
“A treat you have earned, brave, noble, excellent Arapach,” gushed the king. “Squire you may have been, but a knight’s heart you possess! I hereby knight you SIR Arapach, and may you shield us for years to come!”
“Oh,” said Arapach. “Oh, but that’s impossible, I’m sorry to say. I must decline.”
“What?” said the king, blinking dubiously.
“Knights are ‘sir,’” said Arapach, “and that’s all well and good. But I am a woman, and women don’t get to be knights.”
“Besides,” she added, “I’m not sure they’re all that to make much of. No offense to your Sir Karrowich, of course.”

In the end, an arrangement was reached that satisfied all parties. Arapach remained Arapach, or Arapach the Fat on respectful occasions, and had a seat at high table in the court of Rudonia that she never attended, and her woods were put under royal protection, so that she might spin there for as long as she liked and as long as her great-great-great-great grandchildren lived.
Which was a very long time. Spiders have many children, and Arapach the Fat was a very good spider, due to long practice.
But she always was good at improvising, too.

The fisherman and his daughter lived in a smallish woodenish thing that passed itself off as a building day and night in the teeth of the sea and its whims, mostly through outrageous temerity. And yet despite this unconscious bravado that fueled their very lives in their every waking movement, their days were spent in dull necessity. The fisherman fished. The daughter mended nets, cleaned the catch, cured and cooked food as needed, stopped the shack from falling over through carefully applied patchwork, kept a small garden alive in the teeth of the salt winds, and sometimes helped fish when there was a big run on. When she had spare time, she sat on a rock in the wind by the waves down the shore, with her toes in the water, and hummed to herself as she turned bits of driftwood into miniature ships. They were big, small, canoes, caravels; every kind of ship in the world but for the white-streaked gull-haunted wreck that her father piloted over angry waves. As she finished them, she pushed them gently into the water and watched them set sail, wondering where they would find their way.
One of them found its way back on a fine spring day, when the sky was too cloudless to be real. As the daughter sat on her rock, humming her song and whittling with the knife that had belonged to her mother, she heard a splash and a polite cough, a precursor to a question.
“Is this yours?”
The speaker was a shark, a rather young one with a hide still more gloss than scars. In his hand was a little boat that the daughter recognized, one she had set into the water just the other day.
She thanked the shark politely, of course. Where had he found it?
“A hundred miles and more and still sailing sound. You carve a fine craft,” said the shark.
“And a compliment on carving from a shark is a fine thing itself,” said the daughter, eyeing the glittering white needles inside his mouth. “Thank you.”
He saw her gaze, and smiled as sharks do. “Here, take a closer look, if you would like,” he said, and opened so wide that he nearly out-sparkled the sun and the sea themselves.
“They’re pretty,” she told him. “You know, if I could ask… do you have any to spare?”
“Dozens and dozens a year,” said the shark. “Here, take this one – it came out as I ate a white-fish on my way here.” He spat a stout little fang into her palm. It was smoother than a pearl, with a ragged edge sharper than her mother’s knife.
“I want to try carving this,” she said. “Can you bring more?”
“Dozens and dozens a year,” said the shark. “Tomorrow, then?”
“Tomorrow,” said the daughter.
And they both had something to look forwards to.

The days went by placidly after that. The daughter labored and mended and cooked and cleaned and gardened, but she did so with a small smile tickling at her now and then, one that filled the fisherman with grave and deep-seated worries now and again.
“Have you been seeing a man, daughter of mine?” he asked her, brows beetling. “You look it. I’ve seen you smiling.”
“No,” said the daughter, who was speaking the truth. “No, I haven’t been seeing a man.”
“Huh,” said the fisherman. His eyes grew less hard, but she saw his fingers twitch yet. “I won’t have it. Not that. I won’t stand for a man who won’t look me in the eye and sneaks around behind my back. Trying to steal my daughter, that is. Take my helper and leave me old and lonely with a cold hearth and an empty belly – a man with no more wife, no more brother, and now no daughter. Won’t have it. Not one bit.”
He sat back in his chair with a sigh, content to have said his piece and then some, and picked at his teeth with a fish-bone. Then a strange look came over his face, and he wrenched the bone free and stared.
“Hang off. I didn’t go out today. Where’d this come from?”
“I caught it,” said the daughter, just a little too quickly.
“Tunny, was it? Awful close to shore for tunny.” The fisherman’s eyes and lips moved as he examined the bone. “And a big one. Too big for little arms. You hiding gifts from me?”
“It must’ve been sick,” said the daughter.
“Feeding me sick fish? Hoping I’ll die? Ungrateful. Ungrateful. Your mother must be rolling over. Ungrateful sprat, trying to leave me cold in my bed and have the place to yourself. Bah!”
With that he stomped off.

“Let’s get married,” said the daughter.
The shark was surprised. Not surprised at the offer – no, no, it had been months and months now, and dozens and dozens of beautifully carved little teeth, all hidden under a stone on the beach. A long time to talk and think, time enough to get used to each other. But the way the daughter said it sounded like a declaration of war.
“It’s my father,” she explained. “He’s all out of sorts. He knows there’s something going on, and it’s making him angrier and surlier by the day.”
“We could run away,” said the shark. But he knew it was foolish even as he said it. The fisherman was old and lazy and cantankerous, but he was a man of the sea through and through, more water than earth in his feet. If they ran, he’d find them.
“You’ll meet him,” said the daughter. “You’ll meet him. As long as he thinks someone’s plotting to steal me away he’ll be jealous and angry, but if he has to deal with a proper suitor he’ll have to give in.”
“This seems like it might not work,” said the shark.
“I’ll make it work,” said the daughter.
And so she did, with her needles and her thread and her scissors and her wits, she made it work and made that shark a man.
She sewed man-gloves to hide his flippers, and a pair of man-pants to hide his tail. A man-shirt covered the tall grey triangle on his back.
“It is a fine outfit,” said the shark, looking at himself in the water as he stood on the beach – a bit unsteady on his new legs. “But look! I can see my eyes.” And there they were indeed, two big black shark-eyes.
“I thought of that,” said the daughter triumphantly. “Here, take this hat. I wove it from the beach-grass, to keep the sun off.”
It was a bit big, and a bit more silly-looking, but it was an authentic beachcomber’s hat and it shaded the shark’s face as smoothly as could possibly be. And to draw her father’s own eyes away from it, she placed her latest carving-project around his neck on a string; a fine big tooth with a simple sketch of a sail.
“Now, remember not to smile,” said the daughter. “And try not to grit your teeth either – he’ll be angry. Just be calm, be calm, be calm.”
The shark listened to her carefully, as he always did. And he was sure that he could manage this, because if there’s one thing that sharks are often good at, it’s calmness.

“What’s this ugly lot, daughter of mine?” said the fisherman. He peered at the shark threateningly, and his fingers danced near the great gutting-blade that he kept at his belt. “I knew you had a man! I knew you did! Lying to me, eh?”
“I only met him just the other day, when you were out in your boat,” said the daughter with the most technically accurate of truths. “Father, we haven’t known each other long, but we love each other, and would like to be married. Will you permit this?”
The fisherman stared long and hard and dark at this, face blooming over with ugly red, but he was an older man, and had spent enough time in his life angry to learn how to think through it. If he said no flat-out his daughter might try and leave, and even if he brought her back she would never do as he said again. He liked his meals and he liked having all his chores done for him each day, so this was out of the question altogether.
“Fine!” he said. “Fine! Marry any old man you want, if that’s what you want! Fine! But it’s not what I want, because what I want is what’s best for you, small sprat. If he’s so fine, let him prove himself as such. He’ll prove he’s a man to make you happy or I’ll gut him, see if I won’t. The sun’s too high already; I’m off to fish. You two tend to the garden, clean my last catch, and get a meal going – and be careful! I won’t lose my good blade to the likes of his careless misuse.”
And with that he left the house, slamming its small creaking door so hard that it grew a fresh crack right beneath the handle.
“I’ll see to the garden and prepare the meal,” said the daughter. “Run to the pile outside and clean the fish.”
The shark hurried outside, and the sight of the pile of dead things was of a scale to impress even him, who had been fed on the fat of whales at the side of his grandmother. The gutting knife felt awkward and clumsy in his hands, and he grumbled fiercely to himself as he tore at the bellies, whispering words in the language of sharks that were not fit to be heard by anyone at all.
But they were heard by one other, in some manner.
The fisherman was out at sea by now, heaving on his torn-up old nets with a fierceness that belayed his age, but his sight was far afield from his body as it searched the lines and planks of his boat by instinct and touch. The old man had learned things out there over his years, and made blackened agreements and terribly cruel bargains with the gulls that draped over his vessel like reeking sails. His eyes were clutched in yellowed beaks now, circling high in the air over his home on whitened wings and fixed fiercely on the strange young man far below who was threatening to steal away his daughter from his home.
And so it was that the fisherman saw the strange young man drop his gutting knife – a rusted, battered thing with an edge duller than a stone spoon that the fisherman avoided sharpening whenever possible – and sink his teeth deep into the bellies of mackerel, tearing and shredding with the keenness of oiled steel.
“Hah!” said the man to the gulls on his boat. “What’s that? I’ll see about that!” And he hauled up the last of his catch and headed home as fast as he could, calling his eyes back to him as he tied ropes and spat to himself.
“I am finished,” said the shark to the daughter.
She was surprised to hear it, but she almost shouted when she saw the bodies of the fish. “What did you mean by doing that?” she asked. “He’ll know for sure something’s going on; look at all these jagged cuts!”
“I thought of that,” said the shark. “Do not worry about it.”
The daughter grumbled as she finished the cooking, but she didn’t worry about it much. Only as much as was needed.

In came the fisherman, shoulders streaked with white guano, beard bristling and eyes red from strain. “Where’s my meal?” he called. “Where’s my food? Ah, there it is, there it is. Good, good. Sit down and eat!”
No sooner had the shark and the daughter perched atop the rickety wooden stools that served as chairs than the fisherman gave a shout that saw fit to raise the roof from its moorings. “Look at this! Look at this! My meat’s been chewed, my fish has been torn! What’s wrong with this, what did you do to it?”
“It is an old trick from faraway, where I come from,” said the shark. “I cut it jaggy to purify the meat, to make it good healthful. It trims the sick from the fish and leaves the good food.”
“I don’t like meddling in superstitious matters,” said the fisherman, who only an hour before had trusted his eyes to the beak of a pair of gulls sworn by wind and wave, “but I’ll allow it this time, though your presumption in assuming my catch is sickly irks me sore.” And he did allow it, and seemed to soften over the evening. He lit his pipe and told stories, old stories, from back when he’d been younger and his brother had yet been his friend and alive. Stories of riotous youth and screeching upright citizenry, of the pious mocked and the proud brought low. They tickled and tickled and tickled the shark’s funnybone, and at last – right after a tremendous anecdote of a crab in a priest’s smallclothes – he opened his mouth wide and laughed out loud, sending the firelight all ajudder from his jaws.
“Ah! What’s that there, what was that?” asked the fisherman, jolliness rolled up and vanished away with thundercrack swiftness. “What’s that with your teeth? Are you hiding some secret in there, strange man? Are you up to some trick to eat my daughter, is that it?”
The shark was too surprised and embarrassed to say a word, but the daughter was waiting. “Father, it’s considered a token of good fortune from faraway to sharpen your teeth like knives. It shows you’re rich and eat only the good meats and fine foods that merit no chewing. No man who means to remain poor would dare do so.”
“A spoiled princeling or an ambitious do-nothing then,” snarled the fisherman. “No, no – definitely not the former, not in those raggedy strips of cloth, nor with that beachcomber’s cast-after on his head. Bah!” he said, and he retired to his warm corner with his pipe, where he sent up fumes fit to choke the fireplace.

“I feel it’s time to check the crab-traps,” said the fisherman in the early (but not too early) dawn. “Mend my nets, you strange man – and be careful with them! They’re older than you are and much more valuable. And daughter of mine, you take care of that door. One of you damn-fools knocked it half-silly yesterday.”
And as soon as he was away and offshore, out of sight, the fisherman whistled and hummed and bobbed his head and did all those things that were demanded of him by the gulls in exchange for their obedience. They took an ear this time as well as an eye – soft as baby-fingers their hard beaks and dry tongues – and soared away over the currents, back home.
Back home the shark was attempting to mend nets. It was a difficult task at best granted the use of a full four fingers and a thumb, and the shark possessed neither. He tore and fidgeted and tweaked and grumbled and repeated some of the unspeakable, unhearable words which he had used the day before quite loudly; loud enough to travel all the way up to the white bird in the blue sky.
“I am finished,” said the shark.
“So quickly?” asked the daughter.
The shark held up his arms and she saw that his gloves had been torn away in shreds by the coarse ropes of the nets and his own excessive force, and she said some rather more speakable but equally unhearable words of her own at this.
“I am sorry,” said the shark. “Can you fix them?”
The daughter shook her head. “But I’ve got a better idea. Here, take this bedsheet in your teeth…”

“What nonsense is all this then, eh?” said the fisherman, as he barged in the door scarcely ten minutes later. “My nets are a snarl and a tangle, and here I find you sitting inside with….what happened?”
“Your nets had caught jellyfish, father,” said the daughter in a tone of perfect disgust. “You could’ve mentioned it.”
“No such – I didn’t see any, not one!”
The daughter pointed wordlessly at the shark, who held up his arms with a sad little smile. Each had been carefully wrapped in bandages over and over and over, packed tight and dressed with a little saltwater poultice.
“Useless….jellyfish, I won’t…not a chance,” managed the fisherman, but he managed it at little more than a mutter and left it at that, stewing off outside to sulk in his chair that overlooked the rocky bay, pipe smouldering evil thoughts. He puffed out there, long into the night, and he mused on suspicions and on strange curses that the gulls guessed at, and he thought to himself.
“A plan,” he said. “A pretty little plan, that’s what it must be. Well I’ve been planning longer and harder, bitter and deeper, they’ll see. They’ll see.” And he chuckled to the gulls and to himself as he sat out there and counted the minutes to the edge of dawn.

“Wake up.”
At first the shark thought that the words weren’t even the fisherman’s, they were so quiet. But there was no hiding the harshness in that tobacco-clotted throat, nor the rustling anger hidden beneath it when it was aimed at him.
“Up, you laggard. Dawn’s soon to come, and the fish come with it. Daughter of mine’s too tired to help with it, after you ran her ragged with the cooking and cleaning, so I’m stuck with you, strange man. Up with it.”
The shark looked to the daughter, but she looked tired indeed and he saw the truth hidden in the fisherman’s hardness. So instead he rose – quietly – and came down and down to the little cove where the white-streaked boat that was the fisherman’s life was left. Gulls adorned it. A fat specimen mounted atop the bowsprit squawked disreputably at him.
“Untie the rope there and let us be off, be off! Hurry up!” snapped the fisherman. And he half-turned his back as he said this, but only half, so he saw the shark uncoil away the line with his bandaged forearms quite easily. And he smiled when he saw this, but only in the smallest way, and he gripped the wheel a little tighter.
“A good current,” he proclaimed, idling as he went. “We’ll go south-south-east. That’s where the good stuff is. Always is.” He spat, and kept the corner of one eye on the shark as he spoke, darting like a snake in the underbrush. “No better a spot when the wind’s this way, I say that now and challenge any man to say better. It’s the truth.”
“Southwest is better, with the current this deep” said the shark, without thinking.
The fisherman made no sound of protest, which was unusual in itself, and had the shark been looking at him rather than the current, he would’ve seen that the smile on his face was not so small this time. “Aye, that it can be. We’ll take it a look, we’ll look.”
The water was bountiful, and the nets were bulging-full – if slightly less than untattered thanks to the delays and difficulties of the day before. As sunlight began to peer through the twilight haze, the fisherman straightened his back with a sigh and pronounced their work “done and more than done.”
The shark nodded.
“You’re not so slow on the fishing business, sore paws or no,” he said, humming to himself as he set the course of the wheel. “Takes a strong man to take a jellyfish rubbings all over his arms and not scream himself raw for hours, that too.” He grinned, and whistled a quick tune that could’ve been part of a mayday fair. “So, stupid outfits or no, it looks to me like I’m going to have to have a son-in-law, then. That’s fair. So shake here, son; give me your hand.”
The shark was almost too surprised to move, but relief took over where his mind left off, and he clasped arms with the fisherman gladly.
“Thing is,” the fisherman added, voice not changing a bit, “thing is, I can’t trust a man who can’t look me in the eye. I won’t stand for a man who won’t look me in the eye. So now, SO!”
And just like that, the battered beachcomber’s hat was whisked away in a puff of squawking, whirling feathers, and the shark and the fisherman were looking at each other, young to old, black to blue.
“Dogfish,” said the fisherman. “Damned bait-stealing dogfish. I should’ve known, and I do now.” His left hand clasped at the rusty gutting-blade on his belt. “I know how to deal with that. They’re hungry too. Too hungry.”
With that, the fight began. And it was no fair one either, and not in the way it seemed. The shark was younger, he was stronger, he had a mouthful of sharp teeth and all his future to struggle for. But the fisherman was angrier, he was craftier, he had a great razor-sharp blade that had slipped into a thousand soft bellies and spilled them empty, and he was fighting against time, fighting against the hope of anything changing. And around them the air seemed nearly alive with gulls, thick with screams and the smell of droppings, hardened with sharp beaks that pecked at unblinking eyes and tore away at layers of bandages.
They were on the floor now, the fisherman on top, the shark wrenching his back against the hull, hoping against the world to reach the side. If he could just get to the water… but the water was far away, beyond a pinning knee and a halo of suffocating white down. His bandages were tearing loose, and in a moment of desperate ingenuity he tangled the fisherman’s arm in them and pulled hard, smashing the man head-first into the wooden wheelhouse with a snarl and a shout. The path to the rail was free, the path to safety was there; surely he could race back home before the fisherman did; surely they could flee farther than the fisherman’s boat could follow; surely, surely, as sure as could be, as sure as the great iron flensing hook that slammed into his tail and nailed him to the outside of the hull, head in the water, arms flailing.
“Bastard,” said the fisherman. One blue eye wasn’t sparkling now, hidden behind a curtain of blood from his brow. “Bastard, bastard, bastard.” The gutting-blade glowered in his hand like a demon’s claw. “Here’s a good spot for it. They like it out here. They took my brother, they’ll take you too.”
The arm raised, the shark screamed, the arm fell, and as it came down the battered old knife’s blade skidded against the shark’s own tooth that he wore on his neck, skidded down its whole length ‘till edge met edge, then shattered hard and cold. The pieces flew into the water and sank away.
The fisherman’s curse turned into a scream as blood poured from his hand, the boat shuddered, and the old, old hull gave up resisting under their weight and the pull of the hook and split its sides, folding itself down into the blue with barely a whisper.
The shark was free – from the boat – but still imprisoned, wrapped around with clothy tatters as timbers and drowning gulls snared in sails fell past him into the dark. He wriggled and squirmed in his strait-jacket as he sank, and he felt the terrible pain in his tail of the flensing-hook grow harder and fiercer still. It was the old man, the fisherman; his hands a wound, his smile a fang, his eyes hate, weighing him, weighing them both down as he climbed up and up.
Arms reached for him. Fingers grasped him. Surprise filled him.
And as the shark sped away from that endlessly spiralling wreckage, as the hook fell away from his tail, he could not remove from his mind the close and clear resemblance of the face that had glared hatred into the fisherman’s.

The fisherman’s daughter was on the rock again when the shark came back, bright as a candle in the firelight from the windows of the house above the shore.
“Is he dead?” she asked. And the shark didn’t know what to say.
She sighed at that, and hugged herself a little. “Shall we go?”
“Do you need anything more?” asked the shark. He did not ask if she wished to stay.
“I have my mother’s knife,” she said. “And I have you. And that’s enough.”

They slipped away into the dark currents under the moon’s eye, and were gone. And behind them, stranded alone on the rock in the wind by the waves down the shore, lay a little wooden boat crafted in the shape she’d never carved.