She began the inscription, encrypted by displacements of pi and e and prefaced by the word “pie”:

To my future self. You must kill Arvin and Kitla. They are not your parents. You are the daughter of Yarly and Prudence. You were taken from them after their spiking and given to the Inta. They are agents of Muglair and will thwart Tobor’s plot, which must succeed to save the planet. They sabotaged the great door and stopped the assassination. You must leave Harmour before Tobor returns. You are pregnant. You must go to the Edge. You know who will be there. He is the seventh son of the seventh son, and your only hope. You may read no further until the 2nd of Skitton, and you must read on that date. The Arland official weather reports will provide substitution numbers.

These were the exact words she had written in the prior iteration and decoded in the clean room while Zranga was on the Silent Sea. “Pie” was a personal code she had developed for amusement during those long boring days in the den on Lane Navachi. She could not change these words in the new inscription without risk of changing the immediate future in the next iteration, which could lead to her losing Mutt and Hope and release Tobor from the binds of determinism. Nothing could be different until after Hope was conceived. The Second of Skitton was well after her birth. After this date Ivy could change the future without losing her family. The prior Ivy had not known what would happen between her reading of the Oopsah and the Second of Skitton. But she understood that gains needed to be consolidated, so if by that date the future had gone well she had a mechanism for protecting it in future iterations. All she had to do was not change the first message and the future would proceed identically up until reading of the next message. Ivy had not understood the phrase “seventh son” when she read it in the clean room. Her prior self knew that this was Interior code for sons of the martyrs, and that the seventh son of the seventh son was the child of Outin and Paxa, but her current self had not learned this expression. She also had not understood that she was the Controller.

She had believed Tobor was still the Controller and she was sneaking in secret instructions, even though she had replaced his new instructions with his prior ones thereby trapping him in a loop and robbing him of the power to change destiny. She did add one line to his prior instructions, strangely out of place, telling him in his own voice to share the Oopsah with his wife before departing for the Silent Sea. Her prior self, the one who somehow managed to insinuate herself into the vault to inscribe the pie sheet and replace Tobor’s new inscriptions, had not understood that the eternal change was occurring. She had not had time in that life to think through the consequences of her actions or to write detailed instructions for her current self. She had only an intuition to seek Mutt Ogga which she now believed was her mother’s guiding spirit.

Her inscription in the prior iteration continued with the passage that could be read only starting on the Second of Skitton. Her decoding instructions had been ambiguous but Ivy, the current version, figured out that she needed to take the last digit of the high temperatures in the order they appeared in the official reports. This was a sufficiently random sample to prevent her, or anyone else, from decoding the message in advance. Over her seventeen days of decoding at the Notches, Ivy read this ancient message from her prior itself and was told that if she was satisfied that the door would be triggered or Muglair would be killed, she should take no further action. If she was not satisfied she had to tell Arland of the Oopsah, demonstrate its power, and seek their aid. She had gambled that Muglair would be stopped and lost. The message also told her to go to Irla if the Flume erupted, which was where she had lived out her final days with Tobor in the prior iteration. Her prior self had given her one more set of instructions decodable by weather data only after her current self arrived in Irla. It was through this final message that the current Ivy discovered the full meaning of pie. She learned that her prior self had rewritten the Oopsah and assumed power over destiny by accompanying Tobor to the vault and inserting changes. She suspected that her prior self had murdered Tobor in the vault and returned to Irla to die with Celeste, but she had no way of knowing. She learned details of the Order’s tunnel system, including the link to Irla, and was told by her prior self that she would have to penetrate the sacred chamber again. She would have to rewrite the future to prevent Tobor from seizing control, else the cycle would revert and all would be lost for eternity. She was acting on her own instructions when she slew Tobor and took his severed head to the Order. What could be more convincing of the eternal change? That, plus the proof of pie, was what she needed to fulfill her destiny and save her family. The prior Ivy had been unable to stop the world’s destruction but she had laid the groundwork for the current iteration.

It was her duty this time in the vault to write instructions for her next self. In the next iteration, upon the Second of Skitton, the weather-based code would inform her that the only way to stop the cycle of destruction would be to murder Zranga upon his visit to the Notches and immediately take all knowledge to Mira and through her to the leadership of Arland. She could not inform Arland prior to the Second of Skitton because any deviation from the current iteration prior to that date would put her marriage and the conception of Hope at risk. Everything had to be exactly identical up until the Second of Skitton, when she would receive the new instructions, to preserve her family. She inscribed future weather data that she would read on the Second of Skitton as proof to the Arlanders of her knowledge of the future, along with details of future events no ordinary mortal could predict. She would take the cosmic gamble because once Arland became convinced of the Oopsah’s powers they would seize it from the Order and Ivy could inscribe no further. If she told Arland and Arland failed to stop Muglair, the nation would use the power of the Oopsah for its own purposes and salvation for Ivy’s family, for her union with Mutt and their child, would be lost. She could think of no other way. Only Arland had the power to stop Muglair, and they would have ten months before the Flume erupted to do so. They had to bomb Shamba into oblivion before the final stretch of the shaft was dug to the bottom of the Silent Sea. They had to approach the intake from the Silent Sea and install their own plug. They had to take all measures within the power of a great nation to save the planet and end the horrific cycle of destruction. In that future world, if all went according to plan, Ivy could have her wish, she could have her husband, she could have Hope, and she could give Hope all the siblings the couple wanted. She would be his Hutwoman bride and he would be her Hutman groom, and they could continue living in a hut, maybe even a bigger hut with fewer rodents.

In her final instructions she concluded:

The fate of the future is for all times on your shoulders. You must not fail. Tobor Zranga will arrive at the Notches three days after the end of this message and you must kill him by surprise, without delay, and without mercy. You must then take all future data contained in this message to Mira and compel her to transmit it to Arland. You must be present in any meetings and you must convince Arland of the Oopsah’s power over the future, and of the certain disintegration of the planet if the Flume is not destroyed immediately by any means necessary. This is your one and only chance. There will be no other. If you fail Arland will take control of the Oopsah for future iterations and you will lose your husband and daughter for all eternity. It is your sacred duty to protect the love you have found in the Notches.

She switched to writing in the first person:

I have brought Mutt Ogga to the vault of the Oopsah for the final inscription, and we have left on the wall of this sacred chamber a remnant of our love. It is for this stain, this mixture of our bodies, that the Oopsah has been reconsecrated. If love cannot be humanity’s highest calling, then humanity deserves to perish.

I must now tell you, my future self, in the limited space remaining, of the path I have followed since the Second of Skitton, the path you will avoid if you follow my instructions and change your future. We have had more drama than humans should be allowed. When the Flume erupted, the Notches was caught in the front between the armies of Arland and Skava and shadowed by the great Armada on its way to Shamba. We fled into Arland and were captured in a Skavian salient. I was imprisoned in the camp at Dunder and witnessed the atrocities of Muglair’s dystopia, with which I will not burden you. Mutt received a hero’s welcome in Skava for his series on the Sphere and used it to secure a meeting with Muglair, at which he stared down the Great Man with proof of precognition and threats to expose his secrets, thereby gaining my release to Leland. He brought Hope to Irla only to find me at the altar with Tobor Zranga, whom I was planning to wed in exchange for a life with Mutt in the next iteration. I remain ashamed of this plan yet would do it again. Mutt left me, so wounded was the poor soul, but his love is pure and he returned. He read the Oopsah in Tobor’s tent and my terrible burden was finally shared. When I received the final message from my prior self, I resolved to murder Tobor and take his severed head to the Order. I switched his potion and he fell into slumber while disrobing me. I waited for him to awake before driving a dagger into his heart. Never in the history of mankind was a death more deserved. It was with his severed head, and the proof of pie, that I penetrated the sacred vault to inscribe these words. You must not fail in your mission. All your prior selves have perished so that you may have this chance. There will be no more futures.

I ask of you, my future self, two things. When the peace comes, arrange a play date for Hope with a beautiful little boy named Varun Ooson, for they are such a cute couple and were pretend married in Irla after Mutt crashed my wedding with Tobor. What she does is her business, but it is a mother’s business to rub flint. And visit your grandparents in Gulet, for they are suffering terribly from your loss. You will find in their den a bowl of peppermint candies that has lain untouched nineteen years awaiting your hand. I do not advise you to eat any. And I shall add a third injunction. Never question the love you have found, for it is transcendent.

Following this message was a long series of weather data and details of historic events in the current iteration which would be future events to the next Ivy. These were to be her tools to conquer the future.

Mutt listened in wonder to Ivy’s detailed recounting of the final inscription. He thanked God he was not the Controller for he would never have known where to begin with such power. His faith in Ivy was complete and he was confident she would save the world in the next iteration. But Ivy remained gloomy as she steered the tumbler up the tunnel. She was accepting that her family was going to die and that their next incarnations would be different people. Sure, they would be identical up to the Second of Skitton when the course of history would diverge. But the new identities they had forged since that date would be forever lost. Most of all she regretted that the daughter she had proudly watched blossom into a precocious four-year-old would be extinguished. Hope would live again until the age of two-and-a-half but the current Hope, the one who had lived from the Second of Skitton in the Notches past her fourth birthday in Irla, would not. This was how the world was constructed and she had no power to change it.

Mutt sensed her thoughts and tried to comfort her.

“Ivy, I have taken your words to heart. I choose to believe that those future people will be us, and we will live again. To choose otherwise is to surrender to death.”

***
On the surface the ground had a noticeable tilt. The planet had dislodged from its fixture and was slowly moving through space with the preponderant weight of Skava over Parva, growing unstable as the Silent Sea sloshed violently beyond its containment throwing the planet into rotation. The end was nearing and the slow twist to disintegration had commenced. Ivy rushed to the Oosons’ tent to find an inconsolable Arna.

“Where have you been? Your daughter is ill.”

Ivy lifted Hope into her arms and felt her forehead.

“My child, you have a fever. But it is not serious.” She had no medicine and gave her a shot of cognac.

Arna was facing the apocalypse but was consumed with Ivy’s abandonment of Hope. How could a mother leave a child crying for her in the hour of doom?

“Arna, you must listen to me. I cannot tell you where I have been but I can tell that this is all an illusion. We will live again, and you will know the joy of your children’s sweet breath in a future life.”

Arna had heard all sorts of nonsense from Ivy but this was the most offensive. She began to chastise her and Ivy took her hand.
“My dearest Arna, you are a gift and I will be forever grateful for your love. Please, let us celebrate our families in these final hours. Our children should not see us suffer.”

Ivy announced a barbecue and invited everyone in the village. Bring all your food, she declared, and she supervised the construction of a gigantic bonfire and lit it herself. Mutt retrieved his mandolin from the tent and sat on a stump playing the instrument adjusting to the unusual feel of its Arland sidematter, for no mandolins were manufactured in Leland. The party grew until most of the tent village assembled, men reaching into the fire with long-handled tongs for foil packets, women spreading the benches with fruit baskets and honeyed ambrosia, swarms of children circling the fire to avoid the changing directions of the smoke. Conversations were lively though oddly often about politics, a topic that could never have been more pointless. Ivy regaled Arna with endless stories of cute things Hope had done stopping only for Arna to match her with tales of Varun’s deeds or misdeeds as the case may be. Hope usually wore sandals but preferred boots in the cooler air of Leland and had just learned to lace them up but unfortunately knotted the laces together and could only walk backwards for two days. Varun stuffed handfuls of squirsh, a viscous treat beloved of children in Leland, into the pockets of all his mother’s dresses as a surprise gift, which promptly melted into an impenetrable goo when she warmed the clothes by a fire to smoke out vermin. Several children roasted dollops of posh, an airy confection of whipped sugar, on sticks over the fire waiting for bursts of flame. Hope was tipsy from the cognac and appeared to forget her fever. She sat with Varun in the dirt, their legs forming a corral, pushing pillbugs around with their thumbs. Mutt asked her to dance for the crowd and she shyly demurred before yielding to the urging of her parents. She insisted Varun join her and he was even more embarrassed than she was. But they did dance, as clumsily as they skipped to the dais in the dance hall, while Mutt energetically popped the mandolin in a tune about a turtle flying on the back of a crow. The children had somehow absorbed the rudiments of Hutman dance and spun in figure eights elbows locked, free hands twirling, switching arms and directions as the mood hit. The sun moved slowly across the sky and angled downward, an event never before witnessed in history, as the tilt of the planet increased. But there was no point worrying. Their fates had been sealed and all that remained was to celebrate for the alternative was to reveal their gloom to the children and mar their final moments. Hope kept asking why the ground was slipping and Mutt kept telling her it was because a giant aardvark was pushing it from beneath. She knew he was joshing but accepted the answer. Small chunks of sidematter, and then larger chunks, began whirring overhead and through the gathering. The planet was disintegrating and it was time now to return to the tents.

Arna gathered her three children in her arms before the fire and began sobbing uncontrollably. She could no longer maintain a festive veneer so destroyed she was that these tiny ambassadors of life, her future and the charges she had solemnly sworn to protect by the very act of giving birth, were soon to die. She composed herself for they had figured out something terrible was happening and their mothers’ breakdown only confirmed it. Ivy hugged Arna tightly and told her she was God’s chosen and her love and devotion would be rewarded. Arna wanted so much to believe in the heaven Ivy was describing but it did not diminish the stark terror in her heart and her anguish for her children’s lives and her unborn child. She was surprised to hear Ivy talk of salvation such a freethinker she had always been. Ivy lifted up Hope and stood before the fire with Mutt’s arm around her. The licking of the flames was profoundly saddening but she resolved to keep a smile for Hope. How could this poor child understand what was coming? A sizeable chunk of sidematter walloped the fire scattering coals at their feet. Ivy leapt back with Hope in her arms as Mutt shoved coals away with his boots.

“It is time,” said Ivy, “to retire.”

She hugged Arna, who could not contain her sobs, and returned to the Ogga tent. The family entered and Ivy tied the canvas flaps in place from the inside, glancing one last time at the tent village on the plains of Leland. She reached into her satchel, tucked away in a corner against the canvas, and retrieved a small vial of powder and a jar of angoo juice. She poured the powder, sleeping powder from Tobor Zranga’s tent, into the juice. Mutt looked at her surprised but realized Ivy could not bear to witness her child’s terror at the end. She asked Hope if she was thirsty and the little girl nodded.

Ivy felt her head. She still had a slight fever.

“Mommy, why was Miss Arna crying?”

“Because she loves Varun so much.”

Ivy struggled to hold back tears. She handed Hope the cup. The little girl grasped it with her tiny hands and drank eagerly.

“Sleep, child,” Ivy spoke softly, “and when you awake I will tell you more.”

Ivy untied her daughter’s stalk and placed a pillow under her head. The parents of Hope sat silently as their child fell into a deep sleep, curled up in a ball by her mother’s side.

“I could not save her, Mutt. I could protect her no more than my own mother could protect me.”

She gazed upon Hope disconsolate.

“Why is this child not enough? You have your parts, I have mine, and together we produced this beautiful creature, and all our energies should go into raising her, into being her parents, into being a family. Why is this not enough for the world? Why must we destroy everything when all we need is so closely within our grasp, attainable through a simple act of joy?”

Mutt did not respond. He wanted to tell her that humans were animals competing for scarce resources, that selective pressures favored those with a propensity to violence, that those who took had, thriving at the expense of others and passing on the will to take to their children, and how the dynamic of subjugation served them well until it found its fullest expression in the person of Muglair and the destruction of the planet. But even if true, what good would come of talking about it now? He needed to be her anchor, but an anchor keeping her from drifting into despair, not one pulling her down. And was not civilization the taming of these violent impulses? Should not Ivy’s questions be valid in a civilized world? With the power to create had come the power to destroy, but it did not have to be used. Ivy had done everything a mother could to protect her child and to hold out hope for a triumph of love over evil. Perhaps the purpose of the Oopsah was to let her keep trying until she succeeded.

“Ivy, no mother has ever struggled harder for her child. And what you could not achieve in this life, you will achieve in the next. We must have hope for the next world, for this world is lost. We will relive the flourishing of our love and we will write a happy ending. We will have Hope again, and we will have each other.”

“Maybe there is a Heaven,” she whispered. “I want to believe in something bigger than this life.”

“I think you already found that.” He was referring to the Oopsah.

“I want to believe in something good, not indifferent, something that transcends our lives. I want this all to be an illusion. So when it is over, we can be together with all the people we ever loved, who ever loved us, without fear, without death. I want to see my mother. I cannot bear the thought of what happened to her. I was ripped from her arms as a toddler and I have never recovered. If I could make one wish come true, it would be for her to meet Hope. Oh how I would love to see her holding Hope, for her to know that one day by divine fate I met that most beautiful boy she described in her letter, and that together we gave her a grandchild. Why are we designed to suffer so? Why must we want so desperately things that can never be? Surely there must be a Heaven so these things can come to pass.”

The tilt of the surface of Leland steepened as the planet slowly spun. The ground shook in violent spasms causing a rack of clothes to fall onto the legs of an upturned chair. Tableware and toys rolled into the corner of the tent bulging into the canvas. The lantern hung ominously at an angle like a pendulum frozen in swing as the world about it reoriented. Ivy grabbed Hope’s sleeping body to keep her from sliding into the canvas. Strange howling noises and creaks filled the air, low shaking rumblings and whistlings of chunks of sidematter flying dangerously close, strange illuminations from unknown sources flashing grotesque shadows on the walls of the tent, all signs of the apocalypse. Mutt saw fright and helplessness in Ivy’s eyes. He embraced her and purged his mind of all fear. He would comfort her in their dying moments, he would find purpose in holding her tightly to the end, he would be her rock, he would be her anchor. She would die knowing he had been there for her completely, that she would never be abandoned in any ordeal no matter how awful, that she belonged to him, and he belonged to her. She looked at him achingly, longingly, and softly kissed him.

“Will you hold me again,” she asked through tears, “in the next life?”

He wanted to answer but she pressed a finger to his lips. There was nothing left to say. Hope was sleeping peacefully at her parents’ feet oblivious to the looming catastrophe. Ivy gathered her up, turning to her husband as if to thank him for giving her such a beautiful child, then gently laid her on Ivy’s far side away from her father. She rolled onto her side with her back to him and scooted into his embrace, spooning with him as she spooned with Hope. Mutt was reminded of a photograph he once saw in a gallery. Archaeologists excavating the ruins of Thirbel, destroyed by the invading Army of Glode, found three skeletons crushed beneath a fallen roof. A man lay on his side holding a woman, who lay on her side holding a child, their arms each protecting the object of their adoration. These simple gestures were futile in the face of the ruinous onslaught and their bodies were now only weathered skeletons. But in some other world where such things matter, they preserved the form of their love for all who have wonder to gaze upon. Now Mutt lay on his side clutching Ivy, with her clutching Hope. His protective arm would be as futile as hers but they would die knowing their place in the universe. They were each a part of something larger, a family in which their identities had merged, in which they had learned to love others before loving themselves. The angle of the ground sharpened as the planet lurched inexorably toward disintegration. In the distance Mutt heard a sound of raw power unlike any he had ever heard, as though a herd of celestial horses eight miles high were galloping across the plains of Leland straight for their tent. Ivy tensed in his arms, leaned back and kissed him, then buried her face in Hope’s locks, breathing the fragrance of her child. She knew they were going to die, and she was not sure they would return. How she wished she could have avoided this fate! How she wished she could have watched her daughter grow to womanhood in this world and not had to wait for some uncertain future! The thundering herd drew closer as the ground shook violently. The disintegration was upon them with a wall of sidematter as high as the horses in Mutt’s imagination. He lifted his eyes from Ivy’s graceful form and for a hundredth of a second saw a disturbance in the canvas of the tent. As soon as he saw it the canvas was driven into their bodies with the force of ten thousand sledgehammers. Mutt was suddenly at the Edge as the sunlight froze the image of the desolate grass for all eternity and stored it in a place reserved for exalted experience, just before Ivy fell into his arms. And then there was nothing. Where their bodies had lain the wall of matter poured unstoppably toward the crumbling edge of Leland, headed to outer space and the cosmic journey.

The violent snuffing of their lives was repeated millions of times across the planet, with all wondering in their final moments how humanity could be so blind to its peril, so bent on its own destruction. All that humanity had created, and all that God had bestowed, fell prey to the violent forces ripping the planet apart. Rixjrig and Leri Deri, Shivaree and Gulet, Irla and the Notches, the Mothers Hall and the People’s Hall, the Stairway and the Stoika, the canneries of Dark Harbor and the factories of western Arland, the huts and cottages, the schools and dance halls, the greens and playgrounds, the roads and byways, the lakes and rivers, the mounds and hollows, little girls in bows, little boys in jumpsuits, men and women who had done no wrong their entire lives, the carnivorous flowers of Skava, the magnificent trape groves of Arland, the vast deciduous forests of the hinterlands, the goats, the skunks, the rabbits, the turtles, the family dogs, the iridescent looper fish, the luminous frogs of Bivenal, the contemptible suckleworm, all churned to dust beneath the towering waves of sidematter. The twisting of the planet continued as the matter of all sides sought out its directions until the majestic cube formed over the eons was no more. In the space where the mighty planet once rested nothing remained. There were only memories, with no mind to entertain them, of the lives and joys and trials of the millions dead. And among these memories was the story of two young people who fell in love, who conceived and nurtured a beautiful child, who persisted through the most extraordinary circumstances lovers ever faced, only to succumb to the frailty of their bodies in the face of perfect evil. If memories could leave traces, space would be aglow. For here it was that a young boy met a young girl on a glorious day enveloped by the scent of dogwood on the Skavian breeze, where she leapt over the Edge into his arms to escape a fate worse than death and to find the possibility of true love, where he set aside all that he knew to save her and protect her, where they discovered the joy of one another’s bodies and shared as passionate a union as lovers ever knew, where they conceived and brought forth the most wanted child in the history of creation, where a perfect little girl with hair tied in a stalk danced to a mandolin and reveled in her parents’ love, where forces of darkness beyond their control destroyed their home and ripped their family apart, where in the name of progress they endured desolation and suffering of unimaginable torment, where against all odds they reunited in a lonely village in the land of long shadows, and where with full knowledge of all their imperfections their love reflourished into the complete acceptance Ivy Morven always craved, a melting of their selves into one, the vindication of all her struggles. The world had never known a love more devoted, more complete. Everything she had done, she did for him, and everything he was, he had given to her. But they had failed and the splendor of their love was cut violently short. There was now nothing left here in space but a potential, a point of origin around which a new world could develop. The matter of the Cube was already spreading across the universe, traveling the natural axes until its inevitable return.

They would meet again in a billion years. And this time they would die on her terms.

THE END

Check out chapters of The Cube right here.

“Do not ask questions.”

Hope was pushing a beetle around with a stick on the dirt floor. Ivy picked her up.

“My sweet child, you are going to have a play date.”

Hope seemed dazed by the swiftness of her mother’s capture. Ivy was carrying her satchel which tended to balance Hope’s weight. Mutt followed her silently to the Ooson tent where she deposited their daughter. She kissed her on the forehead and promised to return soon. She did not announce the play date to Varun’s parents.

“Can I now ask questions?” Mutt asked as they hurried toward the church.

“Please, Mutt, I need you now. Do not ask questions.”

Ivy walked through the mahogany doors of the church into the nave. The father was speaking with parishioners about a personal problem.

“Father, you will take me to the crypt.”

“What is this?” the father asked.

“You will take me to the crypt now.”

“I can do no such thing.”

“Father, I come on orders of the Controller. I have a message for the Order. You will take me to the crypt now, or I will take myself.”

He looked uncertain.

“It is your destiny to comply.”

He walked through a door to the side of the pulpit and down a staircase. Ivy followed on his heels. At the bottom of the stairs he stopped.

“Here, I have taken you to the crypt.”

“The lower crypt,” said Ivy. “Do not play games with me.”

“You are not permitted.”

“You will take me there and you will do so now.”

The father was becoming alarmed.

“What is this message you bring from the Controller?”

“It is the final message. The world will end in three days.”

The father was unnerved by her forcefulness. He pulled a key from his frock, retracted a false wall, and opened the door to the lower crypt. A spiral staircase led to a barrel-vaulted chamber with a massive portal and iron-bolted doors spaced evenly in masonry walls covered in fantastical graffiti.

“Where is your tumbler?”

Mutt had no idea what she was talking about.

The father balked. “I cannot do this. It is against my faith.”

Ivy was growing angry.

“You will open that door. You will show me your tumbler. Or it will be your body I ride down that tunnel.”

The father’s will was being slowly displaced by Ivy’s. In this cramped and dank space irrational fears began to take hold. He retrieved another key and opened an oversized door revealing an oddly shaped bounder consisting of a cockpit suspended within a sphere frame clad with rubber.

“Is it filled for a return trip?”

“Yes. But it is not for you.”

“You must open the portal.”

“I will not.”

Ivy approached as if to strike him. She grabbed him by the collar and forced him into the room with the tumbler and shut the door. Mutt could hear her screaming. “Is this what you serve? Is this your exalted master? There is a new order! You will take your place within it! What has happened before, has happened again!”

The father emerged from the room shaken.

“Kneel,” Ivy commanded, and he knelt.

Mutt thought that he had passed into an alternative universe. He often had this feeling in her company.

“You will now open the portal.”

The father approached and turned the wheel forward and backwards several times until its mechanism unlocked. Ivy pushed the tumbler, balanced for buoyancy, from storage and lifted it to the cylinder. It was bulky and Mutt helped position it within the opening. She climbed into the cockpit and beckoned Mutt to her side, dropping her satchel into a rear compartment.

“Father, you must release the ballast.”

He did so automatically, without independent thought, in violation of his vows, for the old order was no more. The tumbler fell away on a steep diagonal in the direction of Rixjrig, its free fall moderated only by brakes, the cockpit rotated so that the couple faced forward suspended by straps in the seemingly endless shaft. The one-dimensional world of the tunnel was surreal. Mutt did not know what Ivy was doing. He did not know where they were going. He did not understand the desperation of her mission. He wanted to ask questions but had learned not to. Ivy sat motionless, looking ahead as if transfixed by the specter of death. Mutt could not know what was motivating her but she did. It was a mother’s love. This entire wretched universe was going to yield to her. It was designed by a wicked Creator, run by evil people for evil purposes, all so innocents such as Hope could suffer. Where are the forces for good? Are people who love so incapable of action that they are destined to be pawns in the games of psychopaths? She could not talk. She would not talk. She was building toward an epic explosion. For five hours they tumbled down that hellish cylinder before the tunnel curved and a dim light could be discerned around the bend. She pulled on the brake and began discharging the forward tanks. She stopped a hundred yards short of the light and exited the tumbler, lugging her satchel and running ahead. Mutt caught up with her at an iron lattice blocking further progress. She grabbed the lattice and shook. From the wall she took a mallet suspended by a rope and began banging the iron mercilessly. In the distance they saw a figure approaching on the floor of the tunnel with gravity transverse to theirs, a Father of the Order. Ivy continued pounding, creating a ruckus wholly out of place in the atmosphere of the tunnel.

She collapsed to the ground exhausted and weeping. She was overcome with the enormity of her charge. She drew her hood over her head and retreated into herself, hot wet tears streaming onto her forearms. The father approached and asked who would dare defile the sacred vault. She stood up, her head still covered, her anger returning.

“Who would defile this vault,” she said, “is your master.”

The father looked at her scornfully.

Her tone abruptly changed. Mutt began to think she was crazy. Crazy in a bad way.

“I am a supplicant performing a rite,” she said. “I come with a message from the Controller.”

“You can tell me your message through the gate.”

“I cannot father. For this message must be inscribed.”

The father was taken aback. He stepped back into the tunnel and pulled a lever opening a latch. He opened the gate without knowing why. It was foolish and a violation of his vows to allow access to anyone outside the Order. But she said she was an emissary of the Controller and he believed her.

“You must assemble,” Ivy said.

“I can call them only for the One.”

“And how do you know who He is.”

“Because it is written.”

Ivy removed her hood. Her hair fell to her shoulders and she posed as she had last posed an eternity ago.

“There is another,” she said. “I am the woman in the picture.”

“My God,” the father said, and retreated backwards.

“You will go now, father, and you will assemble.”

“Dear God,” he repeated, “she lives.”

Ivy and Mutt were left alone in the tunnel. She walked forward a short distance to the opening to the vault. The door was propped open and she stepped inside, with Mutt close behind. Before them lay the mystery of all creation, the Oopsah Fajuyt, the source of all change, the origin of all recursion, the font of free will, the control module. Ivy gazed upon it in wonder. How could their world be so horrifically designed? Why must it be that all destinies were written through this so-called sacred text? But as she gazed upon it she knew it was not a player in the battle of good and evil. It was a tool. For iterations it had been commandeered by a sociopath, a man so crazed with perversion and lust for power he would destroy the world if he could not get his way just to have another chance in a billion years. There were no rules requiring permanent destruction. All one had to do was use the knowledge in the Oopsah to stop Muglair and there would be no further launch. The iterations would end and the planet could live out its natural life. In such a world she could save her daughter, she could save her husband, she could have a bigger family.

She looked at Mutt and realized she wanted him right now.

“Mutt, remember when I said we would know when the time is right?”

“Ivy,” he said. “I never thought I would say this, but now is not a good time.”

“Please hold me. Do you not understand what I am doing?”

Mutt’s head was whirling. Was Ivy propositioning him in the sacred vault of the Oopsah? She removed her coat and sandals and sat before him, stunning to Mutt’s eyes, this small vulnerable woman taking upon her shoulders the fate of the world, and what lovely shoulders they were! Her dress fit snugly revealing her curves and draped around her collarbones in a fold that seemed to cradle her neck and face. She looked at him with the saddest, most pitiable eyes in the history of womankind. Mutt scooted over and took her in his arms, wanting only to comfort her. If there is a sacred duty in this world, he thought, it is to comfort the woman you love. Sacred texts, prophecies, gods, and angels were just distractions from what it meant to be human. It was love, love between people, that should govern the cosmos.

“I never had a home, Mutt,” she said, “until I found one in your arms. I will be eternally grateful.”

Mutt was in tears. This strange world where they found themselves, this sacred vault, was just a tool of control, a mechanism for evil people to thwart their union. Ivy was not going to tolerate it, and he wanted to worship her, right here and now, for defying destiny. He admired her shins emerging from her dress, and her dirty naked feet, and took her soft hands in his, those delicate beauties he had so often clasped in tenderness and in passion, and decided nothing else mattered in the world besides her.

“I think now is a good time,” he said. “Let us defile this place.”

They were seated high on a wall of the vault, oriented at a right angle to the gravity of Arland. He laid their coats along the wall to make a nest then removed his shirt and pants. She lifted off her dress in the most beautiful gesture known to mankind, revealing her naked beauty. He had never wanted her more, not even in the angle. They were doing more than reconsummating their love; they were rededicating the purpose of this awful vault, reconsecrating the Oopsah. She reached down for her panties in a motion Mutt remembered well. He stopped her hand.

“May I have the honor?”

She smiled and lifted up off the floor while he pulled them off. It seemed she was always the first one completely naked but he quickly rectified the situation.

“Are we defying fate?” he asked.

“We are creating a new fate. If our love is not a higher purpose for the Oopsah, then the universe is doomed.”

It was a strange moment, made stranger in hindsight when Mutt learned that the walls were filled with the remains of past versions of Tobor Zranga who had expired in the vault with each iteration. But he did not care. He spat upon all their sacred orders and texts. This woman in his embrace was all that mattered in the world and he took her fully, rapturously. He looked into her eyes and saw Moonflower, Lace, Ivy, Cerise, Posy, all the women who ever mattered to him. Here they were, making love to him in the vault of the Oopsah, not some measly tank room in a salt mine. Reston would be so jealous. Ivy looked into his eyes and saw the man who had taken her so passionately in the angle, but only because she let him. This was the man who had given her Hope, who had given her a family, who had given her something more important than herself, the kindest and gentlest soul she would ever know. His pleasure was her pleasure, his joy her joy. Ivy Morven had found heaven, and she had brought it to where it belonged.

While in flagrante delicto, a figure appeared at the door to the vault.

“Just a few minutes father,” Mutt said.

They had never seen such a look of horror. The father did not know what to do and disappeared swiftly. They could hear the shuffling as the entire Order gathered outside the vault, so disturbed by the sacrilege taking place within they lacked the courage to enter. When they were finished with the sloppy deed so frowned upon by the Order, Mutt held Ivy tenderly in his arms and thanked her for the gift of her love. He looked down on the wall and saw a stain.

“You are leaking.” He laughed, so absurd was the idea of their union dripping in this sacred place.

“It is a mixture of you and me, and it will be here next time.” She thought the Oopsah should be smashed to pieces and only this stain allowed to cross the universe. She squirmed into her dress and called the Order. She arose, a slip of a woman, and spoke to the Assembly, standing laterally on the wall beyond their reach.

“Who among you would not serve a pervert?” she asked.

The lead father stepped forward aggressively.

“The penalty for your action is death.”

“Who writes your rules? Who creates your penalties?” She asked mockingly.

“Have you come merely to defile?”

Ivy’s anger was welling up.

“To defile? Who are you to tell me that an act of love is not sacred? What have you fools done in this vault that is more worthy than what we have just done? Is the union of two people in loving harmony not the highest act of grace? Do you not know who you have been serving? How stupid can you self-selected prophets be?”

“Lady, it is not your place ...”

Ivy cut him off.

“Do not tell me my place! You will kneel before me when I am finished! Have you not seen the picture? Do you not know who I am? Your sacred Controller was a farce! A sick pathetic human being who used your Order for vile purposes, and to him did you kneel? Do you not know what he was doing?”
The lead father stepped forward more forcefully.

“You will now allow me to speak.”

“Yes, father, make your case.”

“This is not a place for your sacrilege. We were sworn to preserve the sacred text for the Controller and to serve his needs at the advent. We have discharged that duty. We will continue to discharge that duty. There can be no change.”

“Your sacred Controller raped a child,” Ivy said, dripping with contempt. “I know because I was that child. He is using your Order to perpetuate his outrage across the iterations. You are not bound by his will. Do you not recognize that you have a choice? You can serve evil, or you can serve what is right. Look at me father and recall the face of Tobor Zranga. Whom would you rather serve?”

The lead father had not obtained his position by independent thinking.

“I will serve the Controller,” he said.

Ivy exploded.

“Are you no more than a tool of evil? Have you never loved? Have you never sworn to protect a person you adore? Have you no wife, have you no lover, have you no child, to whom do you belong? Because if your answer is Tobor Zranga, you are ill suited to hold the keys to destiny. Even in your degraded state surely you can recognize that you are not a fit repository for the power to change the future.”

“This conversation has ended,” the lead father declared and began walking away.

“It has only begun,” Ivy said menacingly. The father continued walking, the Order following behind.

“I have brought with me your precious Controller!” she screamed. “If you will serve him, serve him now!”

The lead father looked back at the spectacle. Ivy opened her satchel. Mutt was horrified to see human hair protrude from the opening. She grabbed the hair and lifted upward the severed head of Tobor Zranga. She threw it at the lead father with such force that he could not duck. It ricocheted from his forehead and fell back onto the wall, rolling to a stop balanced on the stump of Tobor’s neck, dead eyes opened heavenward with pupils turned back in his cranium.

“Is this your precious Controller? Is this the monster you serve? Then bow to him now. But if you cannot bow to this monstrosity, you will bow to me! Who here will defy me! Who here will defy the eternal change? You know this happens. It is written that the Controller may change. It happened when this sick man wrested control and took power over the Oopsah eons ago. It has happened again! What has passed shall come to pass. Look at me father! You will kneel when I am finished!”

The entire Order was beyond words. They had never witnessed such an outburst. They had never witnessed such a macabre spectacle.

Ivy started to cry. She sat down on the wall and made a startling pronouncement.

“I have been here before. In the last iteration. I bring with me the final translation. Your savior is not the Controller. He could not reveal the final page. He did not know the meaning of pie.”

She stood up, addressing the lead father.

“If you and your stupid Order require proof, I have brought it.” She reached into an outer pocket of the satchel to retrieve something. Mutt half expected the severed penis of Tobor Zranga but it was a handful of papers.

“Here is the meaning of pie, here is what Tobor Zranga could not translate.” She threw it at the lead father.

“It was my own code. A substitution cipher. I took my message, converted it to numbers, displaced each number by the decimals of the constant pi, then displaced them again by the decimals of the constant e. You may go and confirm. But when you return you will kneel before your new master.” She paused. “Or mistress if you prefer.”

There was total silence. The Order filed out of the room carrying her translation of the last inscrutable text. Somewhere in this underground complex they had a room set aside for cryptology, not unlike the clean room in Harmour. But the answer they were going to find had been ordained. Ivy Morven was the Controller.

Mutt looked at her in wonder.

“When will you stop blowing my mind?” he asked.

“In the next life.”

He held her tenderly, not sure if it was appropriate to caress God herself. She turned to him.

“Mutt, I did not choose this role. It was forced upon me. I had to fight for Hope, I had to fight for you. We are going to die in three days. But I pray, if there is a God to listen, that we can live a normal life next time. I want to be your Hutwoman wife.”

He was still in shock.

“How many babies can we have?”

“As many as you want.”

“Well,” he said, “here’s to next time.”

For the first time Mutt noticed on the opposite wall of the vault an array of glass tubes beside which a series of numbers were carved, each marking off the passage of time from prior iterations in increments of a billion years.

Ivy began to fathom the full import of what she had done. The world was run by evil people whose designs for power and conflict thwarted everything she cared about. All she wanted was the love of her family, she wanted to live with Mutt and Hope without fear of the interference of great men, she wanted to visit Gulet and eat peppermints from her grandmother’s bowl, she wanted to sit around a table in the Ogga household bragging about Hope’s latest milestone, she wanted to give Hope brothers and sisters, she wanted to pour her energy into the joys and sorrows of rambunctious children with never a thought for the bigger picture, she wanted to regain the love she lost as a toddler with her mother’s violent death, she wanted to belong to a family and not to a nation. She wanted to blame only the leaders for their malignancy but they would never obtain power without support of the very people they come to persecute. For reasons mysterious to her the same folk whose lives would be destroyed willed people such as Muglair into power, foolishly placing above the lives of their loved ones the abstractions of causes and movements and great ideas. It was as if the world collectively tired of the humdrum of daily existence and periodically demanded its violent disruption. It was as if the need for historical drama trumped the need for love, as if the desire for small advantage in factional conflict outweighed the harms of war. But what father did not regret his pugilism when his own son was run through by bayonet? What mother did not regret her self-righteousness when her own daughter was tied to a daisy chain and launched into space? Only by the time of such regrets it was too late to revert to the peace that allows love to flourish. Were people so blind that they could not conceive what was done to others could be done to themselves? The Mothers had the right idea. They understood that the nurture of children was the highest calling in life and could be achieved only when all people forswore violent solutions to allow mutual flourishing. The social compact worked only when people accepted that their ability to love required allowing others to love. But even that was not enough because the impulse to destruction ran too deep in humanity. People who lived common lives as bakers and cobblers in times of peace served as Bogin’s executioners in times of war. People who treated their neighbor’s children to sweets in one era rounded up those same children for slaughter in another. Perhaps the evil of Muglair lay dormant in all people waiting to be released in the right circumstances, the malignancy of great men made possible by the collective animus of the common people. Perhaps the fate that awaited the planet from the Flume was just desserts, and the Creator of this awful order, the programmer of the code that gave life to the iterations, did give humanity the power of choice, and they chose to exercise this power murderously.

She was not without hope for the next iteration. She had a plan for stopping the planet’s destruction, for ending the awful cycle and the launching of the Oopsah, but even if she prevailed how long would it last? Would not some future Muglair come to power and destroy the world anyway? Maybe all she could do was buy time for her immediate family but some future generation, including her descendants, would face the same doom. Whose fault was the current conflict anyway? Surely it was Muglair’s for rigging the planet for destruction. But was it not also Arland’s for supporting the hated Inta regime and generating the resentments that found full blossom in Muglair? Or was it Arland’s fault for abandoning the Skavian Inta in the great repression and allowing the Hutmen to come to power. Perhaps the Hutmen were always going to destroy the planet given the chance and the fault lay in giving them that chance. Maybe no matter how many twists in the course of history all paths led to the same destination. Not everyone in the world placed aggression above harmony. For most of the planet’s existence people had not engaged in widespread open conflict, these episodes being the short but violent culmination of tensions building during peace. But even in peace the need to oppress and gain advantage over fellow humans seemed the driving force of history, and without such exercises of raw power the impulses that give birth to war would not gain traction. Perhaps the need to use would always trump the need to love. Perhaps self-interest would always be a stronger force than empathy. Perhaps continuous bloodshed for tribal advantage was the price of society. Perhaps it was rational that people organize to gain advantage through force, to augment wealth and prevent others from reversing the arrow of power. It occurred to her that the greatest bulwark against destruction should be the people who do not care about great ideas, the ones naturally focused on home and community without regard to the advantages they can glean from subjugation of others. But how can such people be expected to restrain abuses of power when by nature they are disinterested in power? This was the central paradox, that those who might live in peace lack facility for making it so.

Ivy Morven saw two futures for the world, the Notches and Dunder, the one with people so occupied by daily living and relationships and marriage and children and vocations and avocations and petty distractions and harmless passions that tribal identities were irrelevant, the other the logical conclusion of a world that conditions tribal fulfillment on elimination of rivals, the one founded on personal love, the other on group hate, the diametric poles of loving the familiar and crushing the other, an antithesis of love and power, empathy and sociopathy, that magical day in the angle versus the sleeping potion in Harmour, the joy of the birthing board versus the daisy chains of Dunder. Both worldviews claimed similar ultimate aims of prosperity and common welfare, only one embraced these goals with the world in its existing state with all its imperfections as a reasonable compromise for mutual happiness, and the other sought monumental slaughter on the false promise of achieving the same state without imperfections. Ivy had a plan for undoing the awful climax of the current iteration and she prayed that the next life could be governed by people capable of love who would not destroy the planet. She could not will this to happen but she could will its potential. She was giving to humanity the opportunity to end the cycle of destruction, for the future of Hope and all children, and she could do no more.

She fell asleep in Mutt’s arms for how long she did not know. They awoke as the Order filed back into the vault, their drab robes swishing solemnly, comically self-important to Ivy’s eyes. Who were these people who had appropriated for themselves the power over future iterations? Could any group be less qualified to control destiny? They had taken this cosmic power and lent it to the service of an eternal sociopath. What sickness lay in the process of selection that would lead to an Order such as this? It was the same problem of disinterest that doomed all of humanity’s endeavors. Only people who care about power gain power, and they seldom care for anything else. The lead father began to speak but Ivy cut him off, regaining her focus and remembering who she was.

“Silence,” she said. “I need no words. Step before me and kneel.”

The lead father, knowing now he was witness to the eternal change, stepped forward and kneeled.

“We will do as you bid, my lady.”

“Yes, you will,” said Ivy. “We have work to do.”

It was time to rewrite the code.

***
The inscription took over a day. Ivy had one final task for the Order before departing. She called the lead father to the wall where she was standing and handed him her panties, which she had kept off after her coupling with Mutt.

“Place these in the coffin.”

This was startling to the father but he accepted that it could not be sacrilege for her word was now sacred. With the help of his fellows he unclasped the lid of the coffin, stirring dust that had lain undisturbed for eons, and tossed the panties onto the bones and tattered cloth remaining from the last iteration of Tobor Zranga. The glint of a dagger shone amid bones as the fathers closed the lid shut.

There, she thought. He may sniff them for eternity.

Mutt was silent on the ride back. Her capacity to stun him was unlimited. He finally spoke up.

“So Tobor thought he was God?”

“He thought he was the Controller.”

“But you are the Controller.”

“Yes.”

“Does that make you God?”

“No, I’m just a random woman. I didn’t ask for this role. I want to end it. I don’t want this ever to happen again.”

“Then who is God?”

“I don’t know but I do know something about Him. He is not a deity. He is an author. He doesn’t care about our lives. He only wants an interesting story. He concocted this living hell because it amuses him to watch us try to escape. It’s like a maze with endless loops. But I am trying to break through the wall. All I want is a full life. I want to watch our daughter grow up. I want to cry at her wedding. I want to give her all the siblings you want whether you regret it later or not. I want to grow old with you. You are the only person who ever loved me, and the only person I will ever love, in this life, or the next, or any other. And when we do break through, I want to die a natural death, with our children at my side, and their children too, and pass into oblivion never to return. And I will slice off that man’s head and stuff it in a bag as many times as I must to make this happen.”

Mutt decided she was crazy after all. But it was a good kind of crazy. He leaned over and rested his head on her shoulder while she steered. He felt almost like he was the girl seeking comfort in the other’s strength. Ivy was protecting him, and he wanted to be protected. “I do not believe I ever found you more attractive,” he said, “than when you pulled the head of Tobor Zranga from your satchel and threw it at the lead father of the Order of Fajuyt.” He had never been more sincere.

After another hour in the tunnel he asked, “What happened the last time you were here?”

“I don’t know. Somehow I managed to get into the vault and inscribe the final sheet even without the proof of pie. It must have been quite a scene.”

Mutt laughed. Ivy Morven was a force of nature. No order of self-important men in robes could defy her.

“The pie sheet was staggered. I wrote out the code in such a way I could not read it all at once. I was trying to guide the future in steps. We were never a couple in the last iteration but we did meet at the Edge when I took your prints. My prior self had an intuition about you, and so I sent myself back to the Edge. But I have to tell you something.”

He perked up apprehensively.

“In the last iteration I was trying to save Celeste. It was love for that child that drove me into the vault. My prior self had accepted Tobor’s rape and by the time I took action she was the light of my life. I had to protect her from Muglair’s destruction and I had to protect her from Tobor, for I knew what he would do to her. So my plan for this iteration was to escape Tobor while letting him stop Muglair. I did not understand in that world how I would react in this world when so much information was laid before me. I do not believe my prior self ever suspected the revulsion I would feel. Celeste was real to her, a living breathing child who had suckled at her breast, but she was to me an abstraction, a symbol of my enslavement to evil in Harmour. Mutt, I’m not sure how I can ever live with myself in this or any future world. I murdered the person I cared most about in my prior life. I would like to erase from the future my knowledge of Celeste but I cannot. The Oopsah must stay as written so that Tobor is stripped of the power of change, and that includes the family photograph, God how it stabs my heart, the monster and the angel, the driving forces in my life, side by side whipsawing me for eternity. I cannot change this brutal image. As soon as anything changes I can no longer control Tobor, and I have to delay that moment as long as possible.”

Mutt did not know how to comfort her.

“Ivy, our life together was built upon your choice. I have always found strength in your strength, and we must preserve the life we have created for next time. You should never have been put in that situation. There was no way out without agony. But you have always had the ability to accept the choices foisted upon you by fate, to make a decision, and to move forward. You cannot look back and blame yourself.”

Ivy was sinking into despondency. “You yourself said I was a monster.”

“I took it back. I said it only because my ego was wounded. Celeste is not of this world. Hope is real, she is the child you suckled in our life, the child born of our love, and you cannot mourn Celeste without wishing Hope away. Your choice has been made and you cannot destroy new life by regretting the old. When I decided in the Notches to commit to you forever, I knew I was giving up Shivaree, but to give you up was worse. Now you have to accept that losing Celeste was the price of having Hope, and to lose Hope would be worse.”

Ivy could not speak. She so appreciated his kindness. He was trying to buck her up in a moment of despair, to give her the fortitude she had so often given him. But she could not purge her mind of that awful image, the face of perfect innocence asking “why mommy? why?”, the child into which she had poured her whole being in a prior life and snuffed so unnaturally in this life, and she wanted to die. She so longed to take Hope in her arms and forget that face, but she would carry the image in her heart forever, her love for Hope haunted by a lost child in a lost world.

They rode silently up the tunnel for another hour, Ivy lost in ruminations of her wickedness, Mutt not knowing how to comfort her. She wondered if what Tobor did to her even was rape. It was not recognized as such in Skava where husbands had complete dominion over their wives’ bodies. Was it fair that Celeste pay the price for the exercise of his lawful right? She could feel nothing but blackness toward that man but perhaps that was a measure of her own iniquity. She had accepted her fate in past lives and could have done so in this one. The irony was that her violent reaction to learning of her pregnancy in Harmour had been prompted by a prior self who was only trying to save Celeste. But if the new Ivy had chosen Hope over Celeste, if she had so desperately wanted a child born of love, could she have done a poorer job of protecting that child? The world was spinning toward destruction and she was the only person who could have stopped it. Why had she not realized that Tobor would let the world go if Celeste was lost in this life? Why had she not seen that preserving his seed was more important to him than toppling Muglair? She wondered if the awful experiences since the Notches had been a divine test of her new love, if the reason she had to wait another iteration for a normal life was to prove in this life that she was worthy of the next. Was it possible the deepening of their love in Irla would carry over to the next life? She did not think it fair that fate would impose such obstacles to something as natural as a woman’s love for a man. Mutt decided to break the silence.

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“He will never honor a promise.”

“Have we an alternative?”

He was silent. He could not contemplate giving his wife to another man. He had not fully known her himself since the Notches. He could no longer love her if she emerged from Tobor’s tent carrying his seed.

“I cannot, Ivy. My love for you is too deep.”

“What you feel is not love. It is possessiveness. I wanted a true Hutman and I got one, the blessings and the baggage. You must move beyond concerns for my purity. You know my history. By no choice of mine I could not give you virginity. But what I gave you was far more meaningful. I chose you as my first and only love and will never choose another.”

“But you would now choose Tobor.”

“This is not about choice. It is about Hope. She has no future in this world. If the Oopsah is not rewritten she will have no future in any world.”

“Are there not lines you would not cross regardless of consequence? Would you kill Hope to save the world?”

“I would not.”

“Then why must you give yourself to another?”

“It is a price I can pay to have our daughter in the next life.”

Ivy was frustrated at her husband’s selfishness. The choice was clear and she could not dither. Mutt was in agony. He felt she was rejecting his love, choosing another, even if the circumstances were extraordinary. She was wearing a wedding dress again in the dance hall of Irla, the blushing bride of another man eagerly awaiting consummation. He covered his eyes to hide tears. Nothing mattered to him more than Ivy’s love, and nothing could destroy that love more thoroughly than what she was proposing. Ivy held him tenderly. She did not share his sense of the momentousness of the act. She would never choose another of her own free will, but would a few minutes of her time given to an evil man to save their daughter have to ruin their final days? Could not Mutt blind himself to the act? Could not she do it and they purge the memory?

“How could you make a man such as Tobor keep a promise?”

“I have a way.”

She could not tell him but she would accompany Tobor to the final inscription in the vault. She might expire there with him leaving Mutt to die alone with their daughter a broken man consumed with her treachery. Was this a price she could pay? Was it a price she could ask him to pay? There was no other way. Mutt remembered Ivy’s angered words when she asked if he himself would sleep with Tobor to save his family. He realized now, with revulsion, that he wished Tobor were manipulating the universe for his body. He would much rather accept the degradation of a coerced act than have Ivy suffer it. He felt so helpless that he could not protect this woman he loved so intensely from an act so horrible. He felt like he would be endorsing betrayal, that if she truly loved him she would not even consider another man, that infidelity to him should be as unthinkable as taking Hope’s life. But Ivy was right. She was always right, he thought, and smirked. This would ruin his love in what little time they had left. His masculine pride would never recover from a wound so mortal, from the humiliating proof that his love was secondary. But his love was secondary to their daughter’s future, and the humiliation would be well-earned if incomprehensibly painful. He would have to see her emerge from that tent imagining the juice in her sex. He wished his imagination were not so vivid.

Mutt pulled papers from the false compartment of Ivy’s satchel. Ivy asked what he was doing as he turned the paper over to the blank side and began writing.

“My thoughts are unruly. If I put them on paper, I can more easily spot error.”

Ivy’s eyes grew kinetic.

“What are you writing on?”

“I told you. I am clarifying my thoughts.”

She snatched the paper.

“Oh God!” She fell backwards. Mutt had never seen such an intense reaction. She shot up. “Is there more?”

“More what?”

“More of these papers!”

“Yes, here in the false wall. They’re just numbers.”

Ivy slapped him across the biceps harder than he had ever been struck in any hazing ritual in the patrol.

“Give them to me!”

He was thoroughly discombobulated. This was to be his special transformative moment in which he accepted the necessity of giving his wife to another man for sex for the greater good of the family. When he thought about it the idea still repelled him and he suspected the piece of paper he was writing on, if only Ivy would give it back, would be filled with crying frowny faces and crudely drawn fingers pointing at stick figures in compromising positions.

Ivy laid the papers around the tent in total frenzy.

“The Arland weather reports! Can you get them in Irla?”

“I guess so. They have a publishing office.”

“Get them now! The last two months!” She physically pushed him out the tent with such force he fell to the ground. He had never seen her so animated. He wanted to know what was going on.

“Do not ask questions! If you are not back in thirty minutes I will be in the tent of Tobor Zranga and enjoying it just to spite you!”

Mutt had never experienced so radical a shift in drama. He really wanted to go back and return the slap despite Mira’s injunction delivered to his childhood ears a thousand times that “a man shall never hit a woman, even back.” He lumbered and then ran and then sprinted coming around to the enormous significance of whatever Ivy was doing. She did not freak out without good reason. He returned to the tent twenty-nine minutes later, a wanted man for the stunt he pulled at the publishing office, leaping over the counter and threatening to twist the clerk’s neck if he did not get the weather reports NOW! In the back of his mind he felt bad about this criminal assault but what was happening in their tent was far more important. Ivy told him to leave, go fetch Hope and play with bugs, she would find him when she was ready. Mutt disappeared and Ivy laid out the weather reports next to the sheets from behind the false wall, the ones Mutt had so stupidly hidden without telling her, the ones she had so stupidly failed to discover when Mutt returned the satchel. Now would be revealed, in all its glory, the final meaning of pie. Ivy’s hands trembled. She knew the evil of the Controller; he was a man of flesh and blood extorting her body for sex to crush her spirit. But “pie,” oh God, had been written by another, an alternative voice that to her was saintly. Here was her guiding spirit, a force that could change destiny, a force that cared about the love of others, a force that cherished the bond of mother and child, of husband and wife, of selfless immersion in larger unions. Pie was the reification of family love, and the only agent that could challenge Tobor’s evil. Ivy was awestruck as the words fell into place. Yes her family was going to die, yes the Muglairs and Tobors of the universe would prevail this time, but she now had a plan for the next life. The ineluctable quality of the universe, hope, had found a voice, and she still had a chance.

“I am going to Tobor,” Ivy said bluntly, finding Mutt by a bonfire cupping crickets with Hope.

“What?” He thought they had moved beyond that option.

“I am going to Tobor and you are going to like it.”

Mutt was speechless.

“You are going to like it because it is the right thing to do under the circumstances. And when I return you will love me more for my sacrifice regardless of what remnants of that awful man remain in my body.”

Mutt was shellshocked, the other firegoers even more so.

“You are going to love me for who I am damn it!”

Ivy seldom cursed and when she did it was a sign to obey.

“Okay,” he responded, not meaning it.

“You are going to love me for who I am and you are going to mean it!”

“Okay,” he repeated, trying to nudge his feelings into line.

“Why must you men abuse women and then blame them for it? Why must I be tainted if I go to that pervert to save your life, to save our daughter?”

Garan had heard remarks like this before. She was definitely crazy.

Mutt faced her and grabbed her shoulders. God she was a beautiful woman, especially when distressed. All his chivalric desires to protect her bubbled up, and he knew now he could only protect her by accepting the purity of her love regardless of what Tobor Zranga had done to her, or would do.

“I will always love you regardless, Ivy. Have I not proven that? All I need is ...”

“... time to adjust.” She completed the sentence. “You must be here when I return to purge me of the evil. You know what I mean.”

She turned and was gone, clutching her satchel. What she meant, he realized, was they would have cleansing sex after the liaison with Tobor. This was too much for Mutt’s fragile ego. She wanted him to move from point a to point z in his psychic transformation skipping all points in between. He stared into the fire all emotions purged from his mind. There was no limit to this woman’s ability to shatter his world. He wanted to feel sorry for himself but decided he could not be so petty. She carried upon her back the weight of destiny and he must not add to that burden.

Ivy walked in a fugue of purpose to the tent of Tobor Zranga, her eyes focused with such intensity she was convinced she held the power of immolation. She needed to know Mutt would let her do this, that he would not place her God-damned Hutwoman purity above the life of their child, that he would not stop loving her for doing what she must to save their family. If she did not choose the treachery, if circumstance chose it for her, she could not be blamed for it, and it was his job to adjust to this new reality, not her job to repair the taint in his eyes. She was tired of her sex being the only one that mattered. Mutt Ogga owed her a loving embrace upon her return and a transcendence of the harlotry forced upon her. But this was the full extent of what she needed, to know that he would do these things in principle. Because she had no intention of putting him in that position. Whatever anger she felt toward Mutt, she loved him with all her passion as the kindest and gentlest man on the planet, the only traveler who could have accompanied her on this awful journey. No, her true anger was directed elsewhere. There was no heaven to correct the evils of this world, and that meant only one thing. Evil would have to be punished in the here and now, on this planet in this moment, or it would reign eternally triumphant.

Ahead she saw the elegant folds of the tent of Tobor Zranga. She drew a deep breath and entered, the canvas closing behind her. Tobor was seated at his desk writing the final entry for the Oopsah, a valediction of his life. He intended to take it to the vault where it would be inscribed on the final metal sheet. He would expire there with the destruction of the world, asphyxiating in the thinning air, awaiting the next iteration.

“I am here for an assignation,” she said.

“I knew you would come.”

She sat down at his food table along an adjacent wall of the tent. He joined her across the table.

“I am no longer interested,” he said.

“Must you humiliate me? Was not a wedding on my daughter’s birthday sufficient?”

“Why should I bargain with you?”

“Because I have what you want.”

“I have changed my wants. My devotion is to Celeste. Your body holds no challenge.”

“If that is true, Tobor, why did you wish to marry?”

“Because I knew I could have you, and keep Celeste.”

She had assumed his promises were false yet looked with horror upon his casual admission.

“I am here as a mother of a wanted child and have come to plead for her existence.”

“Celeste is an expression of my will. She is the continuation of my being across the many worlds. She cannot die.”

“She is already dead, in this world and in all worlds past. Why must you bring a child into a future world by rape?”

“You were my lawful wife.”

“What you did was unholy. You forced yourself upon an innocent girl.”

“Then why do you seek my company now?”

“I am a woman, not a girl, and will do what I must for my family.”

“I have no pity.”

“You must search within your heart. I have found a love that is true, and there can be no higher expression of your will than to enable it. To be is to forgive. It is to think of others first.”

“Your daughter and Celeste cannot both exist. Would you ask that a father destroy his child?”

“She is already dead.”

“She cannot be stopped, Ivy. She will rise again. You are already with child in the next life when I read the Oopsah. That cannot be undone through any power you or I could exercise.”

Ivy remained silent.
“You cannot destroy Celeste.” His eyes were piercing.

“I already did, Tobor.” Ivy met his gaze. “I can do it again.”

“What do you ask of me?”

“I ask that you rewrite the final inscription and instruct yourself to set me free.”

“What do I get in return?”

“I will drink your potion.”

“Do you believe my will is so easily seduced?”

“Are you not the Controller?”

“I am.”
“Then I offer you control of my body. You will get it no other way.”

Tobor hesitated.

“Why should I abandon Celeste?”

“This has never been about Celeste. It is about having your way.”

“Why should I not wait till the next life? You can impose no conditions then.”

“Is your will not now?”

Tobor Zranga was an impatient man.

“Does your boy know you are here?”

“He does not need to know.”

“Very well then. I will do as you wish.”

Promises, he thought, are worth the breath that utters them.

“You must rewrite the Oopsah in my presence and take me to the vault for its inscription.”

“You will drink the potion first.”

He reached into a trunk and retrieved two wooden goblets, one square and one round. He had called them his and hers but Ivy knew the purpose of the different shapes was to prevent switching. He filled the goblets with wine, then removed a vial of powder from his pocket and poured it into the round glass.

“You may drink, my bride.”

Ivy stood up and walked over to the drafting table. She removed the lantern from its hook.

“First I will destroy this accursed work.”

She dashed the lantern onto the scattered pages. The fuel spread across the desk lit by flickering flame. Tobor leapt from his chair shrieking. Violently he slammed a cushion onto the desk to extinguish the flames. Ivy returned to her seat, removed a container from her satchel, poured the wine from his glass into it, poured the wine from her glass into his, and poured the wine from the container into hers. She had switched the potion.

Tobor returned to the table enraged.

“You will leave this tent now!”

She remained seated. “You should know the force you are controlling. It will heighten your pleasure. Our bargain remains.”

Tobor sat back down. It was true he had no need of those pages if he planned to rewrite the Oopsah. This was her way of ensuring his performance. He found the audacity of her action arousing.

“Drink,” he said.

She held forth her goblet.

“To the next life.”

They toasted, and she drank.

Tobor drank more slowly than Ivy. He wanted to see the effects of the potion before he himself felt the wine. She lay down on his mattress, his gaze following her.

“Will you drink to me?” she asked.

He brought the goblet and sat down beside her, drinking deeply. Ivy retreated into herself and waited for the disrobing. So convinced she was of her role that she believed she could not move. She was paralyzed. She realized she was reliving the horror of her experiences in Harmour, only now she was conscious. Her body was limp and pliable and he would have his way. He removed her shoes first, and then her outer jacket. He fondled her breasts and looked for the buttons and ties of her dress. Ivy wanted to feel revolted but found herself watching the scene dispassionately from afar. This was what the pervert had done to her when she was a girl. This was how he had ruined her. This was the origin of Celeste. She had selected her clothing for the difficulty of its removal. He rolled her over to reach the buttons on the back of the dress. He untied the bows knotting the straps. He struggled to lift her torso and remove the dress past her hips. So enthralled was he with the prospect of reliving his past conquests he did not notice how drowsy he was becoming. With a final exertion he removed her last shred of cloth, holding it to his nose. He gazed upon her naked form, consumed with desire, then yielded to the power of sleep. Ivy sat up beside him and sobbed. She felt purged of the evil he had inflicted upon her. She had stopped him not only this time but for all times past. She had reclaimed Mutt as her first and only love. Piece by piece she reassembled her outfit until fully clothed. She reached into her satchel for the binds. She had work to do.
When Tobor awoke his hands were bound so tightly about the central pole his flesh was atrophying.

“You switched the potion.”

“Yes.”

“It will do you no good.”

“Will I not derive pleasure from driving a knife through your heart?”

“It will make no difference whether I die now or in a few days. The future is already written. You cannot change it.”

“You will have to pay for your sins, Tobor.”

“You cannot kill me.”

“Oh yes I can Tobor. You are not who you think you are.”

Until that moment Tobor had not feared death. But a dark and sinister thought crossed his mind, then exploded into white light. Everything he had been doing was an attempt to create a new future. He had read what happened last time in the Oopsah, learned from his past mistakes, and boldly charted a new course in this iteration. He had failed and was now preparing for the next iteration in which his new instructions would create a new future. But what if it was an illusion? What if the instructions were not new? Then he would lose his power over the future and become an actor reading a script like everyone else. There was only one way this could happen. He realized with horror the awful truth. Ivy raised the knife to gather momentum and plunged it straight into his chest with all her might. She felt the resistance of a rib as the blade slid past directly into his heart. Tobor’s body convulsed. She twisted the blade mercilessly while he looked at her through fading eyes. How could he not have known? Ivy sat there without emotion waiting for him to die, his heart emptying its blackness onto the dirt floor. She now had her destiny to fulfill. She would need a bigger knife. Fortunately, she had brought one.

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“This is wonderful, my friend. Let us have hope for the future, that our children may live long and prosperous lives.”

Mutt appreciated the burden Ivy carried so long by herself. How could he tell Garan what he knew? This had all happened before. The historical events now transpiring were outside their sphere of influence. Even with knowledge the destruction could not be averted. The Flume had been an unstoppable force for countless iterations and the draining of the Silent Sea would end no differently this time. The fate of the world was determined. The only effect of knowledge was to eliminate the last shred of hope, however irrational it might be, that things might turn out differently.

Garan wanted to celebrate and Mutt resolved to help. If all he could do in his final days was give comfort to Garan’s doomed family, it was a worthy cause. They gathered around a bonfire eating teaberry flan with makeshift spoons from an assortment of odd containers. Children lofted an owl-patterned kite on twine with a ribbon tail before snagging it on the pole of a tent banner. Mutt volunteered to retrieve the kite which was a more involved undertaking than he anticipated. One could not simply lay a ladder against a tent to reach its summit. He eventually snagged the kite with a fishing lure and filament but tore it beyond repair on retrieval. He made up for his botched rescue by teaching the children to play flute by blowing on thumb knuckles into the cavity of cupped hands, much like the chyrix call but without the blade of grass. Only one child managed a toot but the effort distracted them long enough to forget the tattered kite.

Garan talked hopefully about efforts to control the Flume and wondered aloud whether the peoples of the great nations could forge a lasting cooperation pact that privileged mutual advantage over conflict. He collared Mutt for a conversation about the cylinder plan which appeared infeasible the more he thought about it. Would not the water seek out new channels along the sides of the opening? How can one hold back a column of water in free fall two hundred and sixty miles deep? How would the cylinders be anchored? Arna asked Mutt what would happen if the cylinders failed. Mutt assured her that what humanity had wrought it could undo and there was no need to contemplate tragic failure. The real question, he suggested, was how civilization would adjust to the loss of hydroelectric power. The water already depleted would take centuries to replenish even assuming no further use. Other power sources were not nearly sufficient to compensate for this loss and people were going to have to adjust radically with fewer cold compressors, electric ovens, artificial illumination, or battery cars until new sources, presumably wind power, could be developed on a broad scale. What little power remained would be devoted in the near term to energy intensive industries such as electrolysis and papermaking, and no doubt munitions. The common people would have to revert to a standard of living predating the taming of electricity. Personally, Mutt declared, nobody in the tent city of Irla should have trouble adjusting. They had all lived without electricity for months.

Ivy refused to join the celebration and remained in the tent contemplating her options. Tobor had already written new instructions for the next iteration, she was sure, ordering his next self never to share the Oopsah with her and consigning her to a future as his wife and mother of Celeste. Perhaps that future Ivy would not be so miserable. She would never learn of the marriage to Mutt or the birth of Hope and would have no standard of comparison. Perhaps she could focus on raising Tobor’s children and derive some benefit from her status as wife of a Minister. If Tobor stopped Muglair in the next iteration, she would not have to live through the awful cataclysm she now faced in Irla. But the prospect of living out her future days in Harmour under the thumb of that monster filled her with despair as intensely as when she first read the Oopsah. She hated the man, and the Morvens for giving her to him, and wanted to lash out at the world in violence. Only what could she do? Why would Prudence not guide her? All her life she needed her mother, and all her life her mother was not there. She wanted to kill Tobor. It would do no good. In fact killing him would eliminate her last hope in the end times, for only he could inscribe the Oopsah, and only through new inscription could the future be changed. But eternal damnation was a price she would consider for the pleasure of watching him die.

Mutt entered the tent for the sleeping hour having strategically deposited Hope with the Oosons to have time alone with his wife. He had become accustomed to acts which brought release that girls in Shivaree would not have called sex. He began to caress her as she hovered on the edge of sleep but she withdrew and told him Prudence had come to her in a dream too. This was completely unexpected. Unfortunately, Prudence told her there could be no more hay rolling of any sort until the next iteration. Mutt was dumbfounded. He began immediately concocting another Prudence vision in which she preached total wifely surrender for her daughter but it was pointless. His great plan to save the world had backfired. Ivy turned on her side, her back spooned into Mutt, grinning as she twirled her finger about the stub of hair where he had cut the lock. This was only fair, she figured, and drifted off to sleep, Mutt poking haplessly into her back. He decided he had to confess all when she awoke. He had no idea how she would react but he could not stand the thought of no contact for another billion years. He did not sleep one second and when she awoke rolled her toward him.

“I made up the story about your mother.”

“I know.”

“I am sorry. I thought maybe it would motivate you. I am not ready to give up.”

“Why don’t you motivate yourself?”

“We both know if anybody is going to save the future, it will be you.”

“I do not know that.”

“Maybe Prudence is guiding us.”

“Do not say such things.”

“I am serious. When I awoke, the idea was there. I did it without thinking. I am beginning to wonder if she really did come to me.”

“Mutt, we are alone as people can be. I want to believe in my mother’s spirit but she was not there when I was thirteen, and she is not here now. The Inta killed her, her body and her spirit, and I am left to cope.”

Mutt was surprised at how definitive she was. Ivy was surprised as well. She had been feeling a connection to her mother’s spirit but now viewed it as a sign of weakness, a projection of her longing to be sheltered by others in trying times when the resolve needed to come from within. She was struggling to develop that resolve but still had no plan. She wanted to chastise Mutt for playing so callously with her emotions but understood his trick for what it was, a last ditch effort to salvage a hopeless situation. If he could try so hard, even if misguidedly, she could too.

She lay on her side and gazed at him sweetly, not angry at his deception.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Appreciating you.”

She had been thinking of life with Tobor, the life she had lived for iterations in the past, the life she appeared bound to repeat in the future, and comparing it to the bizarre and beautiful twist her destiny had taken when she leapt over the Edge. One man raped her as a child, drugged her to impregnate her in sleep, manipulated the fate of the universe to keep her in bondage, repulsed her to the core of her being. The other rescued her from the hell of Harmour, cleansed her body of that awful taint, loved her and committed to her, gave her a child she wanted and adored, and stayed with her in the face of all adversity. She needed a sign from her mother and perhaps this was it. She had no mother, only the voice of her conscience speaking through an imagined mother, a trick of the mind to lend authority to her wavering convictions. And her conscience, in the form of her mother, told her she could only escape Tobor’s grasp by appreciating the man she had found. She knew she must rewrite the Oopsah to preserve their love and to free that awful text from Tobor’s control. But how? Mutt had no idea what she was thinking and saw only an angelic smile. He assumed this was an opportunity to bond with his wife while Hope was still with the Oosons. Her mind was in outer space while his was on earth, and she decided to come down and join him. He was not the only one who could receive pleasure in ways that would not get her pregnant, and he had shown remarkable enthusiasm for the panoply of options. He had the ability to block out their imminent and unavoidable deaths during conjugal relations which she resolved to emulate. This was an hour they would never get back and what better way to spend it?

Garan followed the boards compulsively over the following days waiting for runners to arrive with the latest notices from Shamba. He read intently of the progress of the cooperation force. The cylinders could not merely be laid across the Flume because the force of the water was too powerful. The engineers of the great nations dug tunnels at an angle into the shaft in the hope of pushing the cylinders into the cascade like a magician’s sword box. But water from the Flume diverted into the new channels and gushed upward to the surface, creating a bigger problem that required immediate capping before the openings merged. Arland’s chief engineer proposed digging deep into the ground to insert cylinders horizontally across the torrent using the overlaying earth as anchor. But this would take weeks and Muglair was growing impatient. He declared he would dig his own side tunnels using the superior skill of Skavian miners and detonate his most powerful ordnance on all four sides of the shaft simultaneously along a vertical stretch four hundred feet high, collapsing the column in a violent explosion. Arland offered the services of its engineers but refused to supply explosives for fear Skava would use them on its territory. In retaliation Muglair ordered the cooperation force out of the country and declared he would proceed alone. The terms of the pact required Arland to vacate immediately upon demand. Despite official protests from Rixjrig and a last-minute offer to contribute equal ordnance, the unarmed force was compelled to withdraw. With the pact dissolved Arland could resume hostilities consistent with the law of war but elected not to. Muglair’s new plan was preferable to surface bombing, Arland’s only option from afar, and the Marshal decided to give it time while girding for a final all out assault. The fate of the world was now in Muglair’s hands, and a less deserving steward there could not be.

Muglair’s political position was rapidly deteriorating. Even his hand-picked Council, the persecution of their predecessors fresh on their minds, took up the charge of the People’s Hall to present the Great Leader with terms for a proposed peace with Arland. He solemnly conferred with the Council and promised to give their ideas careful consideration. The economy collapsed as he debased the currency by printing obligations promiscuously, and he seized direct control of the warmaking apparatus while the country descended into barter. Necessities were rationed and food shortages widely reported in the provinces, with famine gripping non-agricultural areas in the rural east as grain and produce were diverted to population centers. A revolt was brewing in the rubble of Leri Deri as the military refused orders to fire on assemblages in the plaza. Muglair stripped the military of domestic law enforcement duties not directly related to war and devolved riot control onto Interior which lost no time dispersing protesters by water cannon and small arms without regard to casualties. Village green societies, long supplanted by Party cells, reorganized spontaneously and sent delegates to Leri Deri as an alternative to Muglair’s power structure. The civilian death toll mounted under Arland’s relentless bombing campaign targeting all stages in the military supply chain, often located in urban neighborhoods. Arland targeted Leri Deri without mercy and without direct military purpose to demoralize the population and upset the basic economic functioning of society. Graphic images of children killed or maimed by the bombing, long a staple in the Party press for igniting nationalist hatred, now had the effect of calling the war effort into question. What were these children dying for? Water? The cause of equal rationing of the Silent Sea no longer seemed so compelling. Stores of Arland sidewater ran low limiting Skava’s ability to dump ordnance over the Edge that could curve back onto enemy territory. Rumors of Muglair’s torture chambers and prophylactic justice spread throughout the country aided by a resurgent underground press and leaflet campaigns directed by Arland and resistance cells. What before was questioned only in hushed tones, what before had seemed arguably justified under exigent circumstances in the face of sworn enemies, now demonstrated the abuses of power by a bloodthirsty tyrant who had brought the country to its knees. People who had suspected all along the horrors inflicted on innocents now began to question the atrocities openly, an attitude sorely lacking when it might have had effect. Few were willing to declare mass murder off limits as a policy tool, but was it truly necessary to round up small children and drive bayonets through their chests? Such were the heresies gripping the nation.

Muglair continued to imprison and execute those within his grasp he deemed disloyal, more from force of habit than designs for maintaining power. He grew serene at his fate and decided his epitaph would be written by the manner of his death. It had always been possible he would fail the Hutmen, that the Hutmen would fail him, that the current of history would turn in Arland’s favor, but it could never be said he did not devote his whole being to the cause of justice. He had taken harsh measures, yes, but they were no more cruel than was dictated by historical necessity. If he had struggled so completely to upend the order of the world for the betterment of the Hutman and still failed, could it be said that his methods were too extreme? Surely he was not barbaric enough and would only try harder if he could turn back the clock. He dawdled on his plan to collapse the shaft deep underground, diverting manpower and resources to less pressing needs such as trench construction along the Edge, consumed by the unjust world that would endure after his passing if the Flume were capped. He would not take more forceful action to stop the planet’s disintegration because apocalypse was superior to Arland’s continued hegemony; destruction of the world was preferable to maintenance of the status quo. They would all be equal in death, and was not equality all he ever sought? He would achieve it one way or another, and as the days passed the other way became more likely. Although he perceived his tilt toward apocalypse as the recent and natural evolution of the Hutman cause, he had rigged the planet for destruction from the beginning. He had removed all internal louvers from the Flume design and sabotaged the great door in favor of a single surface control that could not withstand the ferocity of Arland’s initial assault, believing from the beginning that safety mechanisms would foster a compromising spirit. As long as the great powers knew they could be saved by activating a control, they would fight and negotiate on the basis of Muglair’s eventual surrender. His plan had been to force Arland to capitulate under threat of planetary destruction and upon capitulation find a way to control the mighty jet of upwater. A credible threat requires the will to follow through and now that Arland had not capitulated he was carrying it out. He could never have taken his gamble for supremacy without risking the apocalypse, and that risk was becoming reality as the gamble failed. He had no regrets. If he would fail, the world would fail with him. The Hutman would never again have a leader with his strength, his dedication, his will. They were destined to a future of eternal subjugation to Arland if Muglair failed and the planet survived, and to that future he preferred that the Silent Sea drain indefinitely. They would all be equal in death. It was a comforting thought.

Ivy wanted to believe history could turn out differently this time. Had not the course of history changed sufficiently through her acts, and those of Tobor, that the Flume could be stopped? Had not the deaths of the Morvens, the desabotaging of the great door, Tobor’s various intrigues inspired by the Oopsah, Mutt’s invocation of Muglair’s superstitions, Ivy’s entreaty to the liaison, had some effect? Perhaps, but these divergences were not enough. She was coming to believe that once the Flume erupted the end was written no matter how history diverged based on knowledge obtained from the Oopsah, such was the force of that current of water. All paths were like magnetic lines leading from the pole of eruption to the pole of apocalypse, bowing in different directions but curving inexorably back to a single destiny. This world was lost, and the next iteration would be lost if the Flume erupted again. She needed a way to change the next world before the Flume became operational so that the planet could be saved, but the only way to do this was to yield to Tobor, to be his wife, to give birth to his children, to validate his prerogative. That was not a future she could contemplate.

Her single greatest regret was that she had lost the final revelation. Her readings in Harmour and on the Second of Skitton offered her guidance from a higher power, and that power had told her she would receive one more reading in Irla. But she had lost the sacred gibberish with the plundering of her satchel by Interior. What Mutt returned to her, bless his heart, lacked the most important data of all, her transcription of pie, the vehicle for the final message. She was left to wonder how the future might have turned out differently, how she may have found hope for the next life, if only she could have her final reading. It was a bleak time, so bleak it was almost soothing, the restlessness generated by belief that actions can have effects dissolving into resignation and acceptance of death. The beautiful life she had found in the Notches and tried so hard to recreate in Irla was an aberration. Tobor would restore his will to the cycle of iterations and she would lose all. He was wrong that love was never true, but he was right that it would never triumph. All she could do was enjoy her final days with her family as best she could with death hovering in the background, to love them without restraint and appreciate the wonder of their union in its waning moments. As surely as with Muglair, the manner of her death would determine the rightness of her cause.

***

“How were you going to end The Sphere?”

Mutt had been pondering this question since arriving in Irla but never found a good time to ask. Simple, Ivy told him, the Sphere would have a great work like the Oopsah in which evil people transcribed events and instructions and with the slinging of the planet’s matter into outer space the sacred text would be launched skyward, only to float back down to the Sphere a billion years later after the planet reformed under the influence of spherical gravity. She had to invent a new concept for the globe, upmatter, to buoy the vault of the text so that it would descend at the appropriate time, one thousand years before the torque of the windmills performed its ruinous magic. But this upmatter would only exist in the vault itself, implanted by the original code, and all other matter would retain the singular, if boring, property of mutual attraction. Mutt figured the rest of the Sphere would be a retelling of the awful story of the Oopsah although he wondered how Posy would rewrite the sacred text before her death to seize control of the next iteration. Ivy wondered this too. Her only idea was to have Posy land in the vault in outer space and chisel her own inscription but this seemed hardly plausible. She would need a spacesuit and Huston would have to remain by her side so they could die in each other’s arms, an imperative for tragic romance. Actually a raunchy space scene to top the vat room romps had literary potential but she was not convinced she could pull it off. What exactly could a couple in spacesuits do? If they pulled the suits off would not their bodies explode from the pressure differential? Would they have time for canoodling before the explosion? She figured the Oopsah, the one on the Sphere, would have to be pressurized with a hatch, and somehow Posy and Huston would have to get through the hatch in outer space before suffocating. The more she thought about it, the more she preferred Mutt’s simple ending with the tearful couple tossed heavenward with the nabana grove and no hope of future lives.

Ivy had planned to spill all her secrets after the Fifteenth of Tarpin if the Flume did not erupt. Mutt wondered if he would have believed her. By that time history would have diverged so radically she may have lacked proof that the Oopsah could foretell the future. Perhaps through weather data she would have won him over to her prophetic powers, but he suspected his rational biases were so strong he would have perceived the data as a trick, a magician’s stunt that he could not replicate but could rest assured involved only sleight of hand, not invocation of higher forces. He would have judged her a nutcase, compartmentalized his concerns for her sanity, and struggled to view her as a loving wife and mother which she undoubtedly was when not crazy. How would that future have transpired in the Notches if the Flume had been thwarted, if the great door had been triggered, if Muglair had been assassinated? Hope would certainly have a sibling by now, a little brother he was convinced such was the restorative power of his biology. Would their love have remained as strong? Would they have grown tired of each other? Would they have been faithful in the permissive atmosphere of the Notches? Would the Ivy he saw in the dance hall of Irla re-emerge to seek out a more cultured mate? He hated himself for asking these questions. He would never leave her himself given the belief in family instilled by Mira’s tutelage, his inability to hurt others, and the power of inertia in his life. The doubts he entertained about her were the result of his own insecurities, not flaws in her character. She had chosen him with the same resolve he had chosen her, even more so. She rewrote destiny to be his wife and the mother of Hope, and she was never going to voluntarily abandon that path. And he was the child of Outin and Paxa. What better catch could she find?

It was raining and Ivy brought the Ooson children to their tent to play with Hope. Mutt and Ivy were not the only couple who needed time alone. It was a muddy mess with shoes tossed carelessly across the inside landing. Ivy found the frenzy of children a welcome distraction from her depressing ruminations. Mutt found himself questioning his desire for a large brood so loud was the mayhem in the tent. Two was beginning to sound more reasonable and if Ivy wanted three they could play Shivaree roulette, a game he could doubtlessly rig. Ivy found the bustle of small children invigorating, an affirmation of life at the source, the living symbol of fertility. She was coming to accept the wisdom of Mutt’s desire for a larger family and had no idea what he was thinking in the cacophony of the tent amplified by the contours of the canvas. She put herself on autopilot, playing patty cake and tossing pillows and calming hysterics and defusing hostilities, all while returning to the central question dominating her mind. How could she preserve this life for the next? How could she have her family again and live out a normal existence in the next iteration? She had to get into the vault. It was theoretically possible if the Church of Irla had a tunnel but there were too many barriers to pass, both physical barriers and the constraints of mystical orders. Tobor could do it because he was the Controller. What did Ivy Morven have to offer? She would have to plead her case to pass each barrier with little chance of admission. Only if Tobor accompanied her could the sacred text be inscribed, and then only if she succumbed to his extortion. Tobor Zranga, she realized, was the fullest expression of the governing principle of humanity, even more so than Muglair. What is good and decent must be crushed, for it is always a threat to power.

Arland resolved to launch a final massive assault on Shamba, a culmination of its superior wartime production which, freed from significant disruption from Skava, had generated ordnance far in excess of use. The resulting stockpile would now be dumped all at once. Muglair’s dithering made clear he had no intention of collapsing the Flume. Arland’s profilers said from the beginning he would rather destroy the planet than concede defeat and they were proving correct. Arland would drop everything and hope the walls of the Flume would collapse inward with sufficient force to stop the column of water. It was their last chance. On the appointed day Muglair fled to his bunker outside Leri Deri and received reports of the complete obliteration of every remaining structure, and all remaining personnel, within two miles of the Flume. Nearly every ballast ship was employed for the offensive allowing Muglair to launch his own mini-attack on Rixjrig with its diminished defenses. The pounding in Shamba was calculated to fall at once on all four sides of the Flume with the hope that pressure waves from the blasts would drive earth inward and downward into the shaft. The explosion was so terrible that multiple ballast ships were blown outward into space, some unable to recover due to damage to their blow holes, sending crews overboard in harnesses or to asphyxiation in the void. The mighty Flume choked on the debris crammed down its throat and for a few seconds it appeared that the flow had stopped. Then with a gigantic belch it spewed forth a torrent of filthy muck, as much sludge as water, and within a few seconds resumed its familiar profile, a plume of crystalline foam, the fate of the planet now sealed.

The People’s Parliament in Leri Deri, meeting in an underground bunker in the Hall, invoked the inalienable right of revolt and declared Muglair stripped of all power effective immediately. Muglair sent his goons to close off the bunker and they were met by armed resistance, a bloody battle ensuing. The surviving goons switched sides observing the shift in political power and feeling a convenient disgust for their leader now that he had faltered. Arland relented on the bombing as the revolution unfolded. Over a hundred thousand people gathered on the sandstone plaza singing the original anthem of the Hutman cause and marched in unison to Muglair’s main military bunker on the outskirts of the capital. The crowd overwhelmed the rump of loyal defenders and trashed the entire complex, systematically smashing communications equipment, passing files and furniture out by bucket brigade for destruction by angry mobs on the surface, and torching the interior to smoke out the Great Man wherever he was hiding. But Muglair had fled to his bunker outside Shamba which had survived the massive blast from Arland. The ballast ships continued dropping ordnance on the Flume but for no purpose other than the comfort of action in a hopeless situation. The bombs were no more effective than trying to blow back a bullet.

Muglair sent a telegram to Arland admitting defeat. The lawful government of Skava was now the Parliament and Arland should negotiate exclusively with their representatives. He would walk onto the plain of Shamba alone in two hours to meet the destiny of Arland’s choosing. Ballast ships at a height of one thousand feet circled the entrance to the bunker, the only one known to have survived the bombings, and waited for the Great Man to emerge. At the appointed hour he exited the bunker wearing the ceremonial headdress of the ancient Hutman and walked calmly across bomb-scarred terrain toward the Flume, the ships awaiting orders from Rixjrig which were slow in coming. Their men on the ground wanted first to confirm the identity of the solitary figure before firing. But as he approached the halfway point between the bunker and the Flume, a location suspected of hiding a secret entrance, word was given, and a massive rain of artillery fell onto the lone individual, his arms stretched heavenward as if to welcome fate, obliterating him and the entire landscape within two hundred feet so thoroughly that only a crater remained with remnants of flesh too small for the naked eye to see.

The Parliament sued for peace without terms and Arland ceased hostilities. Muglair’s plan to collapse the Flume internally had progressed to the point of digging placement tunnels, and Arland with the cooperation of the new government filled the parallel shafts with all remaining ordnance that could be crammed inside. The planet was destabilizing with moonlet-sized chunks of matter crumbling from the Parvian edge and rolling across the sides, the planet’s natural restorative tendencies now stretched beyond breaking. Sappers had little time to wire the explosion precisely for synchronicity but managed a massive simultaneous explosion all the same. The result was less impressive than the surface attack with not even a moment of doubt as gurgling brown sludge spewed forth in an enormous fantail followed by resumption of the normal jet. The column of water was too powerful, too deep, too momentous to be stopped by means within the powers of the great nations, and there was nothing left but to find peace with God. The leadership of the now harmonious nations continued to make plans, to comfort their populations with words of encouragement, to meet in grand committees to consider alternatives as if they had not been exhausted, all for the comfort of taking action in the face of mortal threat. To occupy a position of power and face extinction with resignation was unconscionable. They would continue to search, to pray, to act in the vain hope a solution could be found. Plans were already underway to drop depth charges to the bottom of the Silent Sea as they had tried multiple times before. The nations lacked the technological capacity to deliver charges of sufficient force with precision at that depth but perhaps this time it would be different. The planning and anticipation for this next effort was a reason to keep living. If they played their cards right, the leaders could take bold action right up to the apocalypse without having time to contemplate their role in the destruction.

Garan read about these efforts in the notices, which now came only from Arland, and through the rosy prose of propaganda saw what was coming. Yes, the most recent effort had failed but they were now embarked on a new effort at the intake that would succeed. All that mattered to Garan was the failure part, and the dangling of new plans was a tease to distract their minds from imminent doom. He no longer had hope and his despair infected Arna. She could not cope with what would happen to her precious children, the beings who in God’s plan were meant to outlive her, to carry her spirit in the march of generations. She fell to praying and hoping and striving to believe in their future but her every waking thought, her every sleeping terror, was consumed by their awful fate. Ivy had long ago given up on this life, even subconsciously before the Flume erupted. She had intuited that on a higher plane this iteration was doomed from the beginning and her hopes must be confined to the next. She was running out of time for these hopes. They had four days before disintegration, she knew the date from the Oopsah, and she had four days to change the future. Only one option remained, going to Tobor, and the degradation it required made death without redemption preferable. She wanted to murder Tobor and accept that her family would be lost eternally but this was a selfish desire she could not inflict on loved ones.

She watched her sleeping child mesmerized by the miracle of her breathing. Ivy’s body had produced this beautiful creature with her husband’s seed, and here she lay in exquisitely crafted perfection, millions of tiny moving parts coordinated into a living being who could laugh and cry and breathe and eat and love and hate, all the myriad capacities that make up a human, and so delicate was the balance of these parts that disruption from the environment seemed inevitable. Yet here she was four years after emerging onto the birthing board growing and thriving and blessing Ivy with the joy of motherhood, the vitality of this organism promising to live on and flourish into healthy adulthood if only the world in its indifference did not crush her out of existence. It would take an apocalypse to destroy this immaculate being and one was coming. Ivy fell asleep in contemplation of the wonder of her daughter, knowing that what she had to do, she must do as a mother.

She awoke to find Mutt seated upright on the haysack, his eyes moist.

“Honey, what’s the matter?”

“I saw her.”

She was not going to fall for this trick again.

“I am not pretending this time. She was here, in this tent, in my dream. She hovered over me, looking down. Her hair fell about me in a curtain. I was completely enveloped.”

He sounded deathly sincere.

“Ivy, it was not just me.”

She felt a powerful surge of emotion.

“It was me, and you, and Hope.”

She looked around for a lock and petal and found none. He was telling the truth.

“Ivy,” he continued softly, “it was just a dream. Maybe I saw her only because I wanted to so intensely. But when I awoke I felt something I never felt before.”

“What?” She so wanted to believe.

“She is protecting us. All of us.”

Ivy lifted Hope’s sleeping form and placed the child between her parents, then nudged Mutt down onto the bed, held his hand across the little girl’s waist, and looked upward into the canvas imagining the warmth of her mother’s smile and the protective curtain of her charcoal hair surrounding their bodies. Prudence gazed lovingly upon them, radiant and beatific, ethereal in soft light, promising to return to Ivy what was so violently stolen from her in Gulet, a mother’s love. Ivy found tranquility in the apparition, the most complete peace she had ever known in her life, a filling of the void in her heart, a sublimation of her childhood fears into the comfort of a mother’s embrace, a soothing calm and assimilation into the divine. She did not believe Prudence was in the tent, her faith destroyed by a life of hardship, yet she did not believe she was alone. What she felt was that her demons were hiding from the light, the fragments of her life were coming together, and she could release herself from time. All experience was spread before her on a higher plane and she need only reach across to touch her mother. Prudence was a living and breathing being because she had once lived and breathed and time could no longer separate them. Ivy found peace in this vision and she knew what the peace meant. The apocalypse was coming, and all her energy would soon be released.

All she needed was a sign.

Check out chapters of The Cube right here.

Ivy sensed he was brooding and turned to face him.

“Mutt, you must not hate me. Please love me and respect the pain I am suffering. I will be your wife again. But for now I will find comfort only if you hold me tenderly. I am sorry if I am selfish. I will one day again think of you first. But today please think of me and allow me time to heal.” Mutt re-spooned with her, wanting to accept her words but in his heart feeling rejected. He wanted to release right here in her presence so she would understand how difficult it was for him to hold her and not mate. Ivy already knew this but could not bring herself to couple. She loved the man dearly but did not want to feel used, and being with him now would be subordinating her body to his animal need. He was quiet and trying to be tender through his bitter pain, the sweet man. The situation was untenable.

“Is there something we can do that will not get me pregnant?”

Mutt had plenty of ideas.

“You won’t get pregnant if you’re on top.”

She laughed.

“You must think I’m from Shivaree to fall for that one.”

“I can pull out.”

“Have you ever?”

“Ivy, have pity on me. If I cannot know you fully, then at least bring release. How can I share your misery when my mind is so focused on your body?”

That was a compelling argument to Ivy and she resolved to suckle him, finding his willingness to compromise and the hardness of his manhood arousing. But Hope awoke and Mutt immediately covered up, a look of anguish on his face like he had just eaten the tastiest cookie on the planet only to have it yanked from his throat by a string. Ivy snickered, the situation was so ridiculous. “I am glad you are not a true Hutman,” she teased, taking Hope into her arms, looking to Mutt like a sultry angel holding a cherub. Despite the interruption he felt bonded to her again. He intensely needed a physical connection to justify their love.

Ivy was consumed with thoughts of how to save the world, this world, rather than waiting for some uncertain future iteration. She could not go to Tobor. Not only would that devastate Mutt and spoil their remaining days, Tobor was a snake who could not be trusted. All she would get from succumbing to his extortion would be the bitterness of re-rape and betrayal of his promise to rewrite the Oopsah. She resolved to visit the Arland liaison in Irla in a last ditch effort to stop the planet’s demise now. She told Mutt to take care of Hope and she would return soon. Mutt was worried she was going to Tobor. That fear was always in the back of his mind when she was not in his field of vision. She said she had business to attend to and was not Tobor’s proposition business? He certainly hoped it was not pleasure. She sat before the liaison in an office converted from an unventilated supply closet in the governing directorate having little in the way of specific future predictions to prove her bona fides as a seer. The notes she kept in her satchel had been plundered in Skava and the decoding sheets of the gibberish in Zranga’s tent were incomplete with little useful information. She recalled the stories of the cooperation force, the laying of the metal cylinders across the Flume, and Muglair’s obliteration on the Skavian plains, none of which had yet happened, but would these predictions be enough to convince him? She told the liaison that she had been the wife of Tobor Zranga, he had special powers to divine the future, the Flume was going to destroy the planet, and Arland had to act immediately to stop it. The liaison had never heard such a story and was convinced she was insane like the zealots who regularly accosted him on the street, only far more convincing.

“What would you have me do?” he asked.

“Tell Rixjrig. They must know their current plans will fail. The cylinders are not going to work. Surely they have options.”

The liaison was not privy to Arland’s military plans.

“Muglair is going to eject the cooperation force. He must be killed by any means available. There must be new leadership in Skava for the world to have a chance.”

“Lady, do you not think the Marshal has already considered this?”

“Please, you must send a report. You must encourage the Marshal to meet with me. There may still be time.”

The liaison was sympathetic to her entreaties as crazy as they were. These were the end times, he could plainly see, and the planet was headed toward destruction absent more aggressive intervention. He typed up a lengthy report encouraging the high command to meet with this lady, leaving out the parts about divination and stating only that she held top secret information that could prove vital to Arland’s cause, but the report disappeared into the bowels of the military bureaucracy and the liaison never heard back. Ivy wondered if she should have told him specifically about the Oopsah. She feared that if she did so, and if the Marshal took her words seriously, they would seize the Oopsah and rewrite it for their own purposes. It was doubtful she would even exist in the next iteration if this happened, much less meet Mutt and conceive Hope. She would rather take her chances with Tobor’s extortion than tell Arland everything.

She found Mutt cooking lumpen cakes for Hope on a skillet over a fire. It was a messy operation but he managed to satisfy the little girl’s hunger as well as his own, setting aside a generous portion for Ivy. She so loved watching him take care of their daughter. She wished she had known her father, that he could have done for her what Mutt did for Hope, that she could have been the apple of her daddy’s eye when she was four and not just future barter for a pervert. Ivy had run out of ideas for saving the world, this one or the next, and was content to live out her days in peace with her family. Perhaps she would regain her sense of urgency but she felt if their future would be stolen she could at least claim the present. People normally faced death with no hope of future iterations in which they might live again, such concepts being alien to common experience. Many held a religious belief in an afterlife but the majority of people, even the faithful, feared death as a complete annihilation of self, a snuffing of body and soul with nothing beyond the grave, no heaven, no angels, no recompense, no grand accounting, just the indignity of final expiry, and the traces left behind. Surely she could accept death with common grace as a natural part of life even if so unnatural in these times. Surely somewhere a young mother her age was dying of consumption. Why was her tragedy any less real than Ivy’s? It was not, and if that consumptive could face death with dignity, if she could eke out meaning in her final moments, so could Ivy.

The young family borrowed Varun and strolled around the parks of Irla letting the children play to their heart’s content. The tiny couple was already married, Ivy figured, so she had no cause to chaperone. Varun was a tender boy as comfortable in the presence of girls as boys. He shared his playmate’s passion for bugs, nature’s toys, and together they sought out nests and hives and colonies and webs somehow managing to avoid bites and stings, mostly. Jumping blocks in the playground were bug sanctuaries; just tip a block over and see what squirms beneath. A sandbox was a pillbug safari; along the inside edge of the wood frame they discovered twenty. Hope’s parents pushed the children on swings into the lateral sunlight, eagerly commanded to push higher and higher, remonstrating that with one more push the rope might swing over the bar. The park was near the edge and Mutt decided to peer into Skava for one last gaze. Ivy could not bear the sight of that toxic country and refused to join him. To Mutt it was still the home of his birth and the exotic land that produced his wife. He knew what happened in Dunder but did not associate the land with the evil. The Skavian vegetation along the Leland edge was not as lush as near Harmour, the sun not beating down as directly, but there were still abundant frond trees leaning sideways toward the light. Peering out among them he saw a scraggly dogwood sporting a single blossom, and he lay there imagining that blossom tucked behind Ivy’s ear.

She slapped him on the back.

“Up, dreamboy. We must return Varun.”

She found the two children on a seesaw and was reminded of the picture she showed Mutt at their first meeting. That was the happy childhood she was trying to recreate, the one stolen from her by the repression, and it was the childhood Hope was experiencing in this moment with her friend, her smile as bright as the little girl’s in the photo. It occurred to Ivy that evil would prevail again, an even more malignant force than the one that shattered her life, because these children had only days to live. Back in the tent she fumbled with a bracelet on her wrist and Mutt saw for the first time the scarring across her veins. He did not know the details of her suffering in the camp but saw how close he had come to losing her. He turned her palm face up, the same pink warmth he had admired during their first encounter, and studied the scar. She pulled her hand away and he tugged it back to kiss her fingers without asking questions.

He suddenly remembered something. In the rush of revelations and raw emotions he had forgotten his promise to Maple. He did not know how to broach the subject.

“What do you think our lives would be like if our parents had survived?”

She had thought about this subject many times but never developed a clear picture.

“I suppose my life would have been more normal, as normal as could be for a child of revolutionaries. I would have known parental love. Maybe I would not be so insecure.”

“Do you think we would have been a couple?”

“Heavens no,” she said emphatically. “We would have hated each other.”

“Why?”

“Because then I would have known you as a thirteen-year-old. I shudder at the thought.”

Mutt was offended.

“I was not so bad.” Fortunately there was no one in the tent to contradict him.

Ivy’s satchel had traveled all over the planet accumulating and discarding its secrets at various intervals. She had stuffed it with transcriptions of the gibberish before fleeing Harmour, periodically reviewing the papers to memorize important facts. She read from her satchel in the loft on the Second of Skitton to seek guidance in her fateful choice. Mutt stuffed their drafts of the Sphere into its innards on the Fifteenth of Tarpin as they fled the Skavian assault, believing those the most important writings in their lives. Agents rifled through its contents before embracing the young author as a friend of the Party in the administrative tent, taking as souvenirs the racier drafts. In the guest room in headquarters Mutt found mysterious pages of predictions that he used to flummox the Great Man and obtain the leverage he needed to save his family. Upon their reunion he had solemnly informed his wife of the confiscation of papers by agents and returned to her the few important documents that survived, mostly written predictions which were no longer useful. Now he borrowed the satchel and retrieved a mysterious document from the hidden compartment. Ivy saw her husband holding a weathered envelope, an envelope she had somehow missed among the surviving contents of the satchel, and sensed it was a time capsule. For perhaps the first time in their relationship she knew he was about to reveal something important to her, not the other way around. He looked at her tentatively, bathed in Leland’s horizontal light pouring through the open tent flap, appearing as dignified and handsome as she had ever seen him. If she must brace for a shock, she thanked fate he would deliver it.

“I have something for you.”

“What is it?” Her heart was racing.

“I received this from your grandmother in Gulet. It is a letter.” He hesitated, not knowing how to say the words. “From your mother.”

Ivy was struck mute, these words piercing her heart. Something deep within her stirred, a vague memory of a terrible loss, a tragic feeling she had carried her entire life. She took the letter, which was sealed with wax, her hand trembling. In breaking the seal she felt she had opened a portal to a different time, when everything was right in the world, and when everything was destroyed. She unfolded a yellowing sheet and for the first time in her life saw her mother’s handwriting:

My Dearest Cerise,

You are sleeping on a pillow next to me, your head turned upward and mouth wide open. I can think of nothing more precious than the gift God gave me when you entered this world. You are the most adorable girl to ever wear a stalk, so full of energy, so talkative, always the center of attention. You are only three and I cannot share with you my thoughts now. But I pray you will one day receive this letter and know how strong your mother’s love was. I fear I will not be here for you much longer. The Inta have resolved to hunt us down and kill us all. I will gladly die for our cause but I cannot bear the thought of your growing up without a mother. It was my sacred duty to share with you the joys of your life and to shelter you from all harm. That I may fail in this duty is the greatest heartbreak a mother could know. Today we dressed you in a tiny sundress and a bright golden bow and pretended to marry you to the son of Outin and Paxa. His name is Tom, Outin’s first alias in the cause. The entire cell was there, laughing as only the condemned can. It had been my dream to one day cry at your wedding, and today I did cry. He is the most beautiful little boy you will ever see, with the kindest and gentlest eyes. But he is a real cut-up. The funniest thing happened when we announced your union. He leaned over and kissed you right on the mouth. Nobody expected this, least of all you. You rubbed your mouth and spit with all your vigor while he stood there beaming at what he had done. You will one day enjoy that kiss. My dearest daughter, if I cannot be here for you in this world, I hope you will know that I am in a better place, watching over you, forever protecting you with a mother’s love. I cannot bear to write these words but I must. Good-bye.

Your loving mother,
Prudence

Ivy sat down quietly on a chair. She had never known such ineffable sadness. She realized that her entire life had been a struggle to reclaim her mother’s love. She had once been cared for, she had once belonged, and she had been violently ripped from that embrace. She wondered if what her mother said was true, that she was watching over her, that she had steered her to Tom, who would give to her the love she lost in her mother.

She looked at Mutt, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“You are every bit as beautiful as my mother said you are.”

It was true. They had found one another. And oh how she had enjoyed that kiss! She was so torn by this lost world, so grateful for the new love she had found, and so desperate to connect the two, but it would never be, and she would forever have to live with that inconsolable loss. She had lost her childhood to evil and could only fight with all her vigor to save Hope’s, to give to her daughter what was so mercilessly taken from her. Surely there was a Creator, and surely he was cruel, to have imbued her life with such tragedy.

“You remembered our names,” Mutt said softly, referring to their first day in the Notches when she christened them Tom and Cerise. “That was a miracle.”

Ivy could not speak. How had she remembered? She had carried that memory within her heart as the last happy day of her life until she met Tom again so many years later. But she had not understood where the names came from until she read her mother’s letter, for that was how she learned her birth name, and that Tom was her intended from the earliest age. She was certain her mother guided them together, that her spirit was not extinguished, that she was watching over her child. There must be a realm beyond the cold mechanics of the Oopsah where her mother’s spirit lived on, where a higher destiny could prevail. Her intended had always been the son of Outin and Paxa, and somehow that destiny had become. Ivy wanted so deeply to believe her mother’s death was not in vain, that the secret order of the universe she discovered in the Oopsah was not the final word, that her mother was a more powerful force than the Controller. She wanted to believe this despite the rational conclusions of her mind, despite the evidence laid before her of a pitiless world, despite the unforgiving tragedies of her life. She wanted, she needed, she longed to believe these things as surely as she needed air to breathe. She yearned to believe in a Creator who was not cruel, who had saved her mother’s spirit, who would protect her from evil, under whose grace Hope could thrive to adulthood. She was struggling to discover something she could never find in the coldness of Harmour. She was struggling to discover faith.

***

Ivy fell into a deep funk. She could not accept that her mother’s death was meaningless, but it would be in vain if her family perished and Tobor Zranga had his way in the next life. Her mother’s death was the cause of her barter to the monster. Prudence could not protect her as a child but could her guiding spirit protect Hope now? Ivy was coming to believe that saving Hope’s future was a test of the divine, not merely a contest of wills for control of the Oopsah but a chance for demigods to intervene in human affairs. She did not know how she could rewrite the future but surely with her fervent desire and her mother’s love she would find a way; she could give to Hope what Prudence could not give to her, a mother’s protection, and in so doing she could give Prudence redemption. Ivy had always considered herself a rational person. Her apparent insanity upon reading the Oopsah was not irrational but rather a logical response to a radical revelation. But her belief in her mother’s spirit was not rational. Ivy of all people should have rejected God for she had learned first hand the evil that inheres in the universe. She had no evidence that her mother’s life was not completely extinguished on that spike in the sandstone plaza. She simply felt in her heart that it could not be so, that a mother’s love, Prudence’s love for her, her love for Hope, was a force impervious to death. Surely a world designed by a loving Creator would be animated by this most primal of forces.

One day a large chunk of sidematter tumbled across the Leland plain within a mile of the encampment. A body of water followed the matter dissolving into fine mist, sluicing through the Parvian edge and channeling the Silent Sea across the face of Leland. The broken edge repaired itself with those mysterious agglomerative forces that tended to clump matter at the folds. But it was a reminder of the clock that was ticking down to the planet’s disintegration if the Flume were not controlled. Scientists believed that the planet should already be in motion so imbalanced was the gravity along the Skava-Parva axis but it remained in fixture for the moment, the next day always in doubt. Political developments were mildly encouraging as Arland promised a ceasefire if Muglair would allow a cooperation force from Arland to join with Skava to contain the surging water in Shamba. This meant nothing to Mutt and Ivy – they had read the Oopsah and knew the planet’s fate – yet Mutt felt a bounce from the news as if maybe this time things would turn out differently. He was a natural optimist who could read an obituary holding out hope for a happy ending. The young couple tried to maintain a social life for Hope’s sake and to observe form even in grim circumstance. No good would come of obsessive focus on the draining Sea. It hovered in the periphery like a tightly strung arrow aimed at their temples, but with no control over the archer they were best served to go about daily living.

Ivy wanted to experience Mutt’s love again. The desire was creeping up slowly but she channeled it to satisfaction of his wants through indirect means. He had adjusted to the new equilibrium. It had its benefits and he shared Ivy’s desire not to create new life in the end times. He decided to recover this somber time for joy and invited her to the dance hall where performances were still common. If the world were ending, what better way to spend the final days than in celebration? He did not care that she had planned to marry his nemesis here. Reclaiming the moment meant staring down taboos. They brought Hope who was content to circle around her parents and trip them up, occasionally lifted in their arms to share in a jig. A local refugee cell had formed for the purpose of petitioning Arland and Skava to redress political conflict through peaceful mediation. This made no sense to Mutt as the more effective remedy was for Arland to keep dumping ordnance until Muglair relented. Ivy crafted a diptych filled with poems for her daughter and presented it to the cell, which doubled as a poetry circle. They regularly visited the Ooson tent and joined their family on treks through the streets and gardens of Irla, talking about current events as if they mattered. Ivy’s mind was fixated on her mother and the eternal drama of the Oopsah but she found comfort in the Oosons’ more prosaic outlook. Mutt found the outings surreal on a planet counting down to apocalypse but preferred the light company to brooding. Ivy found two photos from the Notches hidden in the satchel, their only remaining images from that time. She laid them on the floor of the tent and studied them with Mutt. Here was Hope as a newborn and at her second birthday party. Funnily they had no pictures of themselves, only memories. Ivy gazed at the photos as though she had found an old album from a long deceased relative, not pictures of a still thriving child. They were not meant to be a eulogy but the sensation they evoked was of impending tragedy. Mutt held Ivy in his arms, her only solace in this cruel world, as she released into dreamless sleep, still protected by him from her terrors. He was not happy with the defeatism creeping into their final days. Surely they had options. Surely they had not fought so hard to get to this point, defying the most powerful men on the planet, only to fail now. Ivy had run out of ideas and he needed to take drastic action.

She awoke to find him trembling in a corner of the tent facing the canvas. She approached him nervously.

“Darling, what’s wrong?”

He did not speak. His teeth were chattering and his lips bluish. He had rubbed boysenberry on his mouth to achieve the effect.

“My goodness, you are ill. You need something warm.”

“No, Ivy,” he spoke in a detached voice she had never heard. “This is not an illness of the body.”

Ivy was spooked. She had never seen him possessed. He turned to her with the most tortured eyes she had ever seen in a human being.

“I have a message for you Ivy.” He spoke in monotone. He was not himself. Suddenly he keeled over grabbing his face bursting into tears.

“I saw her,” he mumbled, over and over.

“Who? Who did you see?”

Mutt would not speak so dire were his emotions. He finally sat up and grabbed her shoulders for support. Hope sat in the distance eyeing the bizarre scene silently. He smiled beatifically, his face transformed as if he had seen angels.

“I saw her.”

“Mutt, you must speak to me, you must share with me, I am your wife!”

“I have never known such joy.” He halted, his chest heaving, his eyes glassy and focusing on an invisible distant object.

“The Oopsah is not the final word. My love, there is a higher realm. When the future is not written,” he paused to heighten tension, “the departed can intervene.”

Ivy was so unnerved she wanted to collapse. What was he talking about? Could it be ...?

He lifted himself up by her shoulders, stared into her eyes with an expression of anointment, and said words that would sear her heart.

“It was Prudence. She came to me.”

Ivy was trembling.

“Ivy, it was a dream but I have never had an experience more real. I saw her, her hair, as charcoal as yours, flowing in a curtain enveloping me, protecting me, she wore a daisy chain, she wanted me to tell you of her eternal love, that she would guide you, that you could not despair in the final hour.”

She embraced Mutt wanting to believe it was true. She needed her mother. That gaping hole in her heart would never be filled by another.

“She said the way would come to you, that you will know it when you see it, and when you see it you must seize it. The future is not written. There is still hope. I do not know what she meant.”

On her pillow Ivy found a lock of charcoal hair and a daisy petal.

“Did you put this here?”

“Put what?”

“This?”

“I’ve never seen that.”

She leapt up clutching the lock and petal and raced from the tent into the elongated shadows.

In bootball, the favored game of the civil patrol, players passed a ball by foot and scored points by throwing it through a vertical ten-foot hoop on either end of the field. Once picked up the ball had to be launched toward the target or rolled on the grass backwards toward a teammate, no further travel permitted by that player. A team scored points for a successful throw and lost points for a miss. It was a source of great shame to end a game with negative points. The farther away from the target the more points a successful throw would score, as determined by brightly painted concentric circles radiating from the hoop. A miss always resulted in a single point subtraction regardless of launch radius. At the end of a game it was common to make a last desperate heave, called a death throw, from as far back in the field as necessary to make up the deficit. Death throws usually ended with an embarrassing thud well short of the hoop and the insult of a final point deduction, but during the moment of loft everyone held their breath because a ball thrown heedlessly as a last furious attempt at victory always had a chance of scoring, and the outcome could never be known for certain while it hung in the air. Mutt had just heaved the longest death throw in history, aimed all the way across the universe and back to the Cube, so far they were down in the game. He knew how much Ivy wanted to believe in her mother’s guiding spirit, and if she did believe there was no telling what she might do. The thought frightened him but also gave him a spark of hope. If there was any human being on this planet who could stop Tobor Zranga, if anyone could rewrite the future, it was Ivy Morven. Mutt was just adding to her motivation and would now cheer from the sideline. As he basked in his cleverness he wondered if maybe Prudence really had come to him in his sleep. He had awaken with the idea fully formed in his head and put it into action without a second thought. The world of the living was too complicated a place for his meager brain to fathom, he concluded, much less the higher planes.

Hope announced she was hungry. Time to make some lumpen cakes!

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“How can the world work like this?” he asked. “It seems like such a cruel trick. Everything in all creation is just an illusion, a parlor game always ending with the same result. Until somebody else comes along to change the rules. All those people who lived and died in the past, they were just acting out a script that was already written. I thought that I could make decisions that would change my life, that there was right and wrong, that by choosing right I was making the world a better place. Now I feel no better than a machine, just cogs and wheels without a soul.”

Ivy did not know how to respond. She had already had these thoughts in great detail. It was true. People had no say in their actions. They would do exactly what they did the last iteration. Only the Controller could change the future. Once he did so, the people affected by his changes might behave differently than in the last iteration. But until the Controller comes along they are all automatons acting out the last script.

“Mutt,” she said, “if you were destined to be a good person, you are still a good person. It is what you are.”

“What if I choose to be a bad person?”

“You cannot make that choice because it is not who you are.”

“I can now. We are outside the last script. The future has already changed. This has not happened before, we have never been in Leland before, and I am not bound by what a prior self did.”

“That may be true but you are still a good person.” She did not want to talk about the Oopsah. “Mutt, I need to know something. Do you still love me?”

He looked at her. “Yes, I still love you. I will always love you.”

“But do you still love me as much?”

“I do not love anything as much right now. I am still in shock. My emotions are stunted. I made a decision a long time ago that I would never abandon you. And I will not change that decision. You are the greatest gift God has ever given me. I ask only that you respect that I am suffering now just as you have suffered. I need time to adjust to this new reality. It is nothing like the old one.” Ivy was not satisfied. She wanted to see the same all-consuming desire he had shown in the angle. But she understood his feelings and decided she could prod him no further.

“When I first read the Oopsah, in Harmour,” she said, “I found a pile of notes Tobor had written explaining how it worked. I am not sure I understood them.” She proceeded to explain in halting language the discoveries Zranga laid out. He said that the matter along the six directions was like a programming code, referring to new machines that could be programmed with instructions on punch cards to perform various computational tasks. It was a first condition at the creation of the universe. These six strips of matter stretched out across the entire universe and were designed to travel along their respective directions and collect at the origin of the Cube, then develop into the planet with its teeming life. He wrote up a summary of research into the obscure forces, a term she had never heard before. Apparently the matter of the Cube, when liberated by its destruction, did not simply come to rest in its respective directions. It tended to disintegrate to its primal state and then migrate to its primal position over the millions of years. The code of the universe recreated itself so the Cube could reform exactly as it was originally. Tobor called it a reboot. If matter could not migrate to its primal position, new matter spontaneously filled the gap. The only exception to this process was the vault containing the Oopsah. A long time ago, in the first iteration, somebody figured out that a certain molybdenum alloy is impervious to the obscure forces. So they built the vault, using the only available sources of the metal, and loaded the Oopsah into it, not knowing whether it would return to the Cube because they did not know if the universe was open or closed. But they did know that the Oopsah could survive the journey across space. When it came back to the Cube a billion years later, the Oopsah became the only new thing in the second iteration, allowing it to change. Tobor described this as a recursive function. Each iteration starts with the previous iteration but is changed by it through the Oopsah, itself a function of the prior iteration. He concluded in his notes that the Oopsah was part of the primal condition, an artifact of the original code programmed by God. Because if the Oopsah did not exist in the first iteration, there could be no mechanism of change in the second iteration, and therefore the Oopsah would never come to exist. The Oopsah was the only way things could change from one iteration to the next. Without it, they would be stuck in an endless loop.

Mutt was struggling with these concepts. “Why can we not make our own decisions? Why must everything be determined?”

“We do make our own decisions. It just so happens that for any given set of conditions, we will always make the same decisions. It is impossible for a person to act differently in a subsequent iteration if nothing has changed. No matter how hard you try, you will always do what you did last time.” Mutt found this exceedingly distressing.

“The Controller is the person to whom knowledge is given. Once he reads the Oopsah, he knows what the future holds. He can then take actions to change it. This is the unalterable right of being human. To know the future is to change it. If you are told that it has been determined where you will be tomorrow, upon learning this information you can choose to go elsewhere. Any future prediction within your sphere of influence can be changed. Zranga knows this.” She reverted to his surname. “And he has decided that he will keep changing the future until he gets what he wants.”

Mutt was still struggling. “How do we know that we have free will, here in Leland, just because we are outside the last script?”

“We don’t know. Perhaps somewhere there is another Oopsah, a meta-Oopsah, in which all this has already happened and we are just acting out its meta-script. But if we could read that new meta-Oopsah, we would then have the power to change the future it describes. So it would take yet another Oopsah, a meta-meta-Oopsah, to determine us, and so on.”

“Is there any perspective in which things cannot be determined?”

“I don’t know. Maybe that’s God.”

She collected her thoughts. “We will always have a semblance of free will. It is impossible for our fate to be both completely determined and completely known, for the simple reason that once given the knowledge we can choose to act differently. A completely determined universe is possible only in a state of ignorance. We can never truly know our future.”

“What do you want from all this?” he asked.

“I want to stop it. If Muglair is stopped, the planet is not destroyed. Maybe then the Oopsah is never launched and the world never reboots.”

She paused and looked at Mutt.

“I want to live a normal life with you. I want Hope to grow up.”

“Is that why you wanted to get pregnant? So you would have a reason to fight Tobor?”

“I wanted to get pregnant because I wanted to have your baby. I did it for love, Mutt. You did it for love, too. That is one thing I will always know.”

He had not fully appreciated how deeply his ego was bruised by the revelation of her prior marriage. But these words helped to salve the wound. He needed to know that she loved him as a man.

“So what happens when it all stops?” he asked. “If Muglair is stopped and the Oopsah is not launched, is that the end of the cycle?”

“I think maybe this is a cosmic puzzle, and that if the cycle stops the puzzle will be solved, and the universe will start over with a new code. But I cannot think that far ahead. If we solve the puzzle, our reward should be a long and prosperous life in the next iteration, for ourselves, and our children, and their children.”

Mutt had a thought. “Did we meet in the last iteration?”

“Apparently Zranga did not tell me about the Oopsah last time although I learned of it much later. That’s how Celeste came to be. I’m afraid Interior may have gotten your prints, and they may have shot you. If so, I am dreadfully sorry.”

“That’s okay, I suppose,” he responded, quite disturbed. “Time heals all wounds.”

He was still bothered by the time loop concept. “Ivy, how do we know that we will live again if the world is destroyed?”

“Because it has always been that way.”

“No, I mean, why are not those next versions of ourselves different people? When we die this time, maybe we, you and I,” he pointed back and forth, “are just gone, and then new people come along in the future who are like identical twins but who are not us.”

“Those new people will be identical to us in every way right up until the acts of the Controller change their paths. They will have the same experiences, feelings, emotions, love. There will be no way to tell them apart from us.”

“But they will be different people.”

“Mutt, this is all we have left. This world is going to disintegrate in a few days and we are going to die. If we do not have next time, we have nothing. I choose to believe we will live again.”

Mutt was skeptical.

“Think of Hope. She is going to die at the age of four. We can do nothing to stop it. Is that a thought you can bear? What would you give that she may live again? We can watch her grow up,” her voice cracked, “just not in this life.”

“You talk like you have a plan. Tobor has learned his lesson. In the next life he is not going to tell you about the Oopsah so he can have Celeste. Hope will be as dead in that world as Celeste is in this.”

“I was going to trade my life in this world so that we could have Hope in the next. But when you arrived ...”

He cut her off. “Are you sorry I am here?”

“No, I am not. But it could mean the end of our future.”

“Do you still wish to be with Tobor?”

“What do you mean, wish to be with Tobor? Do you think I like that old man forcing himself on me?”

“Well then why were you doing it?”

Ivy looked at Mutt incredulously. She could not believe what she was hearing. She felt a column of anger rising within her.

“Would you sleep with Tobor Zranga to save Hope?” she suddenly yelled. “Would you sleep with Tobor Zranga to save me? Look at me!” She was shrieking now. “Because if you wouldn’t, you are a shitty father, and a shitty husband!”

Mutt was eviscerated by her outburst. He stared at the floor sheepishly. “At least I wouldn’t enjoy it,” he mumbled. It was quite possibly the stupidest thing he ever said.

If Ivy had been a steamboat her boiler would have blown.

“So that’s what this is all about! Your pathetic little ego always thinking about how good you are in bed! Maybe Ivy likes it better with him! Maybe she got a drop of pleasure from it! How in the world could you be such a buffoon! Do you think I like being knocked unconscious and had like a sex doll? Do you think I enjoy being raped?”

Mutt physically compressed into a space smaller than a thimble. He knew how thoughtless he had been. “I’m sorry, Ivy. You are right. I am still adjusting.”

“Mutt, I married you because you are kind and generous. I did not marry you because you are enlightened. But you will have to grow up. You will have to understand that there are things in life besides your dick.”

Mutt did understand this, theoretically. “I am sorry,” he repeated. “I was not thinking.”

Ivy was trembling. She did not want to lose this man’s love. He was all she had and all she wanted. But she could not stand the thought of him associating her with that pervert. She could not stand that the taint had rubbed off on her.

“Mutt, how do I make you understand? You want me to demonstrate my physical desire to prove your manliness. You want me to be so overwhelmed by your presence that I fall prostrate. Have I not done that already? Did I not give you everything a woman could give, heart, soul, and body? Did I not give you a child? You are making it very difficult for me to feel that way again. Being a man does not mean begging for scraps. You must earn my love. You promised to be my anchor. I need you now.”

Mutt was alarmed. He had just assumed that the only question was whether he could still love Ivy as fully given her past. But now she was speaking as if her love were conditional, that her disappointment in him was causing her to reconsider.

She calmed down. “I made my choice too. I will never leave you and will always love you. But you need to make it easier for me. I have to believe you can love me for who I am and not dwell on things I could not control. They are insignificant. I have never wanted anyone but you, and will never want anyone but you. Please be a decent husband for me.”

“I need some time to clear my head. Please do not take this the wrong way.” He kissed her and left the tent. Ivy sat on her haysack flustered. Mutt walked around the village kicking the occasional tumblebrush. He felt foolish. Not only had he been unfair to her, he had been weak and mushy. Ivy was right that he needed to be a man. That meant giving her the assurance she craved, looking beyond the petty things that were bothering him. He was caught up in a cosmic drama that played out for a few years every billion years. The future of this drama depended on their actions now. He could not waste time regretting the past. If Ivy Morven had one defining trait, it was the ability to make a decision and stick with it. Mutt had to follow her lead. Deep down inside he had never doubted his decision to devote his life to her. But by nature he spent too much time regretting lost alternatives or thinking how life could be better only if some impossible thing would happen. She deserved better than that. He resolved to collect himself and rededicate his life to the role of husband. She did not need a man to lead her, but she needed someone who could pretend to lead. He could not be a child whimpering about lost toys. He returned to the tent.

“Ivy, you have a way of clarifying things. Everything that has happened to you,” he paused to underscore the point, “makes me love you more. I will be the husband you want and deserve.” He paused again. “Provided you have sex with me right now.”

Her face went from tender, to offended, to a laugh, all in one second.

“We will know when the time is right.”

Is there ever a wrong time? Mutt thought. He kept the question to himself.

“We need to get Hope,” she said. “We have left her too long.”

“I am glad she was not here for that.”

“Watching parents fight is part of childhood.”

“Ivy,” Mutt began. He had an idea. “Why can’t the Oopsah just be sent uncoded? Would it not be possible to avoid all these horrors, the deaths of our parents, your promising to Tobor?”

“It would not work. If it were just decoded and still received a thousand years ago, the future would change so much we would not exist. What mother would name her child Muglair? What person, what army, would follow a script to the letter once it has been read to them? If the Oopsah were sent uncoded, it would be an entirely different world.”

“Perhaps it would be a better world.”

“I want to see our daughter grow up. I am not willing to commit suicide for strangers.”

“What if the weight of the Oopsah were recalibrated so it came back in the present instead of a millennium ago?” Ivy had explained to him how the Oopsah was alloyed to travel at less than free velocity in the direction of Arland’s gravity. This resulted in a delay in its return to the Cube so that it would arrive long after humanity had evolved, just a thousand years before the planet’s inevitable destruction.

“We would never have Hope. We would never have each other. Everything that happened, had to happen for us to get to where we are. I do not want to give up our day in the angle. I would not give up our child.”

Mutt could not argue this point without risking a further outburst. But it seemed highly self-centered to subordinate the fate of the universe to the lives of just one family. On the other hand, he could not think of a better solution. All paths were fraught with terrific risk. Perhaps what came with the knowledge of the Oopsah was the right to manipulate the future for personal gain. Perhaps everyone else really was an automaton entitled to no consideration in the cosmic calculus. Mutt could not shake the feeling that this was deeply immoral. Yet he agreed with Ivy. Letting their daughter live a full life was a worthy goal, and far better than the goals that usually animate people with power.

“If you could change the future to save your parents’ lives, our parents’ lives,” he asked, “would you?”

“You are overthinking this.”

“Well, would you?”

“If it meant that Hope would not exist, no. And I would gladly sacrifice my own life for her. That is what it means to be a parent.”

“But ...”

“Please, Mutt, no more questions. We have to be parents now in this life. She has been with strangers for a day.”

“Just one more.”

She was getting irritated.

“Is the cycle a billion years? Or is it a billion years to cross space, plus the time it takes the planet to form and get to the present?”

“There is some sort of clock in the Oopsah. Tobor’s notes said it was a billion year cycle, destruction to destruction.”

Mutt’s curiosity was satisfied. They stepped out and walked several tents over to retrieve their daughter. Ivy entered the Ooson tent and emerged with Hope, who had just woken up. The little girl rested in her mother’s arms, her legs dangling by her mother’s hips, her head tilted on her mother’s shoulder, wanting to stick a thumb in her mouth but knowing if she did her mother would pull it out. Her father looked around the land of long shadows and decided it was all just an illusion.

***

Mutt figured the wounds inflicted by the Oopsah might heal more readily with conventional pleasure. He had not been with Ivy since the Notches and would not feel secure in her love until he knew her again as wife. Hope was sleeping nearby but a true Hutman did not care about the presence of a small child. Ivy was sleeping as well, her back curved into Mutt spooning, as he caressed her shoulders, aroused. He dare not wake her to proposition her. Not only would that be insensitive it would not likely elicit a favorable response. So he lay there dreaming of being with her, his thoughts returning to their passion in the Notches. He did not feel the same intensity, his mind so disoriented by the revelations in Irla, stumbling into Ivy’s wedding to another man, discovering she was not a virgin on that magical day in the angle, learning the universe was designed by a misanthropist, having their imminent deaths proven so dramatically by the fact that it already happened a billion years ago. Was Ivy tainted by all this knowledge? He was working hard to move beyond blaming her for the sins of others. But it was difficult because the purity and simplicity of their early love was the standard of comparison. Beyond her love he needed her as a woman, for the release of animal spirit so pent up since their last coupling. She stirred and he immediately rolled her on her back before she realized the movement. He draped a leg between hers and kissed her on the cheek, then on the mouth. What was he doing? He knew this was not the way to approach her but he was driven by a biological imperative. She turned to spoon again and felt his arousal poking into her back as he clutched her hip. She rolled over to face him and said now was not the time. She had suffered too many traumas and needed to know he loved her for more than her parts. He said he loved all of her including her parts, and had not she vowed a loving relationship? She said she did not recall promising to be prone every minute of every day and he said it was implicit in the “have and hold” part. Ivy sat up.

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He began flipping through the pages more rapidly. His eyes fell on a page that looked different. He froze. It began:

“To my future self.”

Mutt re-read these words multiple times before his eyes moved forward to the next line:

“You are reading this because I failed.”

Mutt did not understand. He feared reading forward and flipped back to the preceding pages. Here were more accounts of historical events. He took comfort in their seeming normalcy. He noticed that a page was dog-eared. On that page he read more closely the descriptions. Something was wrong. These were not ancient events. They had happened recently. On the dog-eared page he saw a brief description of the collapse of a viewing platform at the People’s Hall. One hundred and twenty-six people died, and Muglair blamed Arland for sabotage. Mutt could not wrap his mind around this. Was this how Ivy had known in advance of this calamity? She must have read it in these pages. The Oopsah was telling her the future. But why then was she off by two in the death toll? The logical explanation was that he was the victim of an enormous and cruel hoax. Ivy had somehow written this account after the fact in order to convince him of her powers of divination. But why would she do this? And how could she have been so close in the death toll, indeed in predicting the accident at all, if she did not know the future? What about the predictions he found in her satchel in Skava? It occurred to him to look forward a few pages right up to the strange section he lacked the will to read. If the Oopsah had told the future to Ivy and that future had come to pass, it could tell the future to him. He turned forward and saw a continuing description of recent events which had in fact happened. Seamlessly these descriptions moved forward in time to beyond the present. He read that Arland and Skava would reach a mutual preservation pact. That Arland would send forces to help control the Flume. That the great nations would cooperate in laying giant metal cylinders across the rush of water in the hope of containing it. And that these efforts would fail as the hole widened. He read that Muglair would eject the cooperation force from Skava and declare his intention to solve the problem himself. That he would then take no action, forcing Arland to send the Armada to again try bombing the Flume into collapse. And that these efforts would fail. He learned that Muglair would walk onto the Skavian plains with his arms raised heavenward so that Arland could obliterate him in a hail of ordnance. And that no one would be sure if this was really Muglair or a decoy. As he read these passages he became physically ill. They were all leading to an inexorable conclusion. With the loss of water from the Silent Sea the planet would dislodge from its fixture, and then it would be only a matter of hours. The last entry in this section read:

“The date of our death has been ordained. It shall be in two days, for the planet can hold out no more.”

Mutt emerged from the tent shaken. Ivy sat with her head buried in her hands. She glanced up.

“What am I reading?” Mutt asked.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “Have you read it all?”

“Ivy, these pages are telling us what’s going to happen.”

“Mutt, you are not through. You cannot stop half-way. You must finish.” Mutt had heard these words from her before but could not recall when.

He was frightened. He had never believed he could be afraid of mere words. He did not want to read what came next. He looked at Ivy and began to understand the enormous strain she was living under. Something was radically wrong with the world. It was headed toward apocalypse and somehow this book knew it. He decided he had to share her burden. If he could not do it for himself, he would do it for her. He was starting to love her again; maybe he had never stopped. He could not imagine a treachery more complete than when he saw her in a wedding dress in the dance hall, yet somehow he was coming to believe her. Was his resolve to resist her wiles so weak? The feeling was rising within him, as if he were surrendering to her, accepting her transgressions as the price of her love and taking on faith that she had good reasons. She seemed so brutally sincere, so torn by these horrific mysteries, so in love with him. Could she be such a good actress? If she were, could he forget her other roles and enjoy the drama in which he was the lead male? If to have her love he must suffer her scorn, he decided he was willing. The welter of feelings would not permit of loneliness. This was the woman to whom he had pledged his life and there could be no other, so powerful was the bond. He could not suffer loneliness and he could not suffer another. And at least he had stopped the wedding and remained her one and only, if only by chance. For reasons he could not fully comprehend the idea of another man in her body was unthinkable.

“Must I re-enter?” he pleaded.

“You must finish what you started.”

He knew now what he was hearing.

“It’s not sex if you pull out.”

He entered the tent. The page on top was the one he dreaded.

“To my future self.”

He collected himself. These were just words on a page. He could handle whatever they said. He felt himself slipping into a stream of unreality. A story was being told of an effort to stop the Great Man and save the world. A door with a remote trigger would be positioned at the intake to the Flume at the bottom of the Silent Sea. Muglair would try to sabotage the effort but the sabotage could be thwarted. The Great Man would have to be assassinated for he was bent on destroying the planet. To him it was absolute power or absolute destruction. There could be no salvation with his survival. It was necessary to take these steps because nothing else would stop the disintegration. The author laid out his plans in magnificent detail, identifying the stamp on a defective spool of cable, a travel itinerary for Muglair on the appointed day of assassination, and the names of persons who could help. In this last section Mutt saw the name “Ivy” followed by a question mark with the notation “trust at your peril.” For pages and pages he read details of this grand plan to save the planet. This seemed to him like something Tobor Zranga would have written. But Ivy told him that Zranga translated the work and was just as surprised as she was by its content. A few pages in he read a statement that seemed strangely out of place. The author wrote that a child is an expression of the will and must be preserved at all costs. Mutt began to suspect something awful. A chill spread through his body, a rush of negative adrenaline as if a spider were crawling up his leg in a dark room. Deep in his mind a thought was forming. It could not be. These were things that were not possible. The writer proceeded to complain bitterly about the failure of his current efforts. He had tried, he had struggled with all the intensity God had given him, but had fallen short. He had been traduced by spineless agents of evil, people who saw no greater purpose to life than personal advancement on the strings of their puppeteer. The Morvens had betrayed the plot to Muglair. They had been the Great Man’s agents all along. They had reported Zranga’s every move and revealed all his secrets and his plans had failed. They had thwarted the assassination and sabotaged the great door. He cursed the Morvens and swore that he would chase them across eternity and run them through with spikes. The author now sat in a crypt, a godforsaken pit in the bowels of the earth, waiting for creation to expire. Mutt felt as though all the blood in his body had drained through a hole in the floor. He was purged of emotion, transfixed by the story he was reading. It ran on for pages with bitterness at the failure of his plans and with instructions on how to avoid mistakes “next time,” a phrase repeated over and over. The pieces were falling together in his mind. He no longer existed as a human being. He was merely a puzzle solver. He then read a most curious comment. “It is for Celeste that I have done everything. And it is for Celeste that you will.” He flipped the page and saw the picture. Staring back at him across eternity was the most disturbing image he had ever seen, the most innocent child in all God’s creation gazing blankly at him sandwiched between the arms of her loving parents, Tobor Zranga and Ivy Morven.

He had seen the face of Celeste.

Mutt sat down on the dirt floor cross-legged and destroyed. Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God. What was this world in which he was living? It was impossible. It was not this life the Oopsah was describing. It was another one. It was a message from another time in which things had been different. He could not understand how this was possible. But Ivy had lived before, and she had been Tobor’s wife, and everything she had done since the day she fell into Mutt’s arms had been a vain attempt to escape this destiny. He stumbled out of the tent. It had been years since he cried uncontrollably. Men did not do that. But he collapsed to the ground sobbing before Ivy. He wanted to worship her. He wanted to curse her. He wanted to die.

“Ivy,” he said, gasping, “what is happening to me? What is happening to us?”

Ivy kneeled down. She thought that she was beyond tears but her emotion welled up. She could not have loved a human being more than she loved Mutt. And she could not have struggled harder for his love.

“Mutt,” she said. “Everything I have done, I did to make our love possible. I wanted my own destiny. I did not want this pervert chasing me across eternity. I wanted to find my own love, and I chose you. I wanted to grow old with you.” She could not speak, her mouth contorted in anguish. “And I failed,” she mumbled.
Her face relaxed and she began to compose herself. “You need to understand what is happening.”

“I do not understand. I cannot understand.”

“You can, and you will.” She breathed deeply. “Muglair is destroying the planet. When it happens, it will spin and disintegrate, killing us all. But the matter of the planet will cross the universe for a billion years, and come back to its origin.”

Mutt returned to his sense of puzzlement, his emotions receding.

“And it will all start over.”

He worked his head around this idea. The Cube is formed, Muglair drills a hole through its center, the Silent Sea is drained, the planet spins and disintegrates, its matter disperses freely in the six directions, and it crosses the universe for a billion years only to return to the origin, where the planet reforms and everything starts over. He wanted to laugh. It was a brilliant trick of creation. There was a God after all, and He hated them.

“Then what is the Oopsah?” he asked.

“It is a message,” she replied, “from the last time.”

Mutt was spent but tried to follow.

“This has been going on for a while. Tobor Zranga sends messages across the universe to the next Tobor Zranga, all for the purpose of preserving the child he forced on me. He can succeed only if I bear his child and he stops Muglair. If either condition is not met, he lets the world go and tries again a billion years later.”

Mutt could not process this information. This woman’s capacity to explode his perception of reality was unlimited. He wanted to go back to who he was before he entered the tent, as awful as that was.

“Mutt, you must listen to me. Somebody, a long time ago, launched a message into space, just like tossing a bottle into a river hoping a stranger will find a message inside it. Only this message came back to the Cube a billion years later and in the meantime the planet had been destroyed and reformed. So it was learned that you could send a message across the universe to the next iteration and it would be received by them as a prophecy about the future, because the past for one iteration is the future for the next. Each iteration is identical in every detail to the prior iteration until the Oopsah arrives. Once you learn the future from the Oopsah you have the power to change it. And the more you change the future, the more it goes off track from the predictions in the Oopsah. At some point Tobor Zranga managed to hijack this process. He encoded the Oopsah using a factoring algorithm only he could crack. He knew that in future iterations he would be the first to discover the algorithm and as a result the first to decode the gibberish. So he began sending messages to himself, trying repeatedly to topple Muglair.”

“And to knock you up,” Mutt added. “Dear God I thought I had worked hard for your hand.”

Ivy snorted. It wasn’t funny, but it was.

“Mutt, he had me last time. Our child was Celeste.”

“How did you escape him this time?”

She dropped her eyes. She did not know how to tell him.

“I didn’t,” she said, after several seconds.

“What?”

“It is not possible for me to escape him.”

“But you did. I was there. You leapt.”

“Mutt, when we first met I was Tobor Zranga’s wife. I was pregnant.”

This for Mutt was a more shocking revelation than the last one. He had built his whole life around this woman, and it was founded on deception? He could live with a God that hated him but not with this betrayal. Ivy was more important to him.

He sat there stunned.

“My parents gave me to him. I was thirteen. I had no say in the matter. I was their insurance policy. If their daughter was the wife of a Minister, they would be protected from the purges.”

“So I was not your first.” The virginity cult was strong among Hutmen.

“No.” She was beginning to feel tainted. “I yielded to him. I had no choice.”

“You told me you had never been with a man.”

“Tobor Zranga is not a man. He is a monster.”

Mutt was an empty shell. The reading of the Oopsah had been a bonding moment, his crossing over to her side. But his trust in her was destroyed.

“Is Hope Celeste?” he asked, expecting to be annihilated.

“Oh God, please never think that. If there is anything I have ever done right in my life it was to have your child. Everything I did was for that.” She halted. “You need to understand ...”

Mutt interrupted her. “No, you need to understand, I believed in you. I thought I could trust you.”

“Do you regret me?” She did not want to know the answer.

He could not bring himself to respond.

“I cannot undo this. Tobor Zranga will rape me for eternity until the cycle stops. It happened before he decoded the Oopsah. And it will happen again next time before he decodes the Oopsah. There is no way to stop it.”

Mutt remained silent.

Ivy became agitated. “Please do not hate me for what was done to me. Can you not love me for who I am?”

“Why couldn’t you stop it?” he asked finally.

Ivy felt like he had not been paying attention. “Because there is no power to change the future until the Oopsah is read. And Tobor does not read it until after I’m pregnant.”

Mutt was stung that she used his familiar name.

“Are you still married to him?”

“Legally, in Skava, I suppose yes. What do you care for a scrap of paper?”

Mutt could not talk. She had two husbands. She had carried another man’s child. Ivy was on the verge of tears. Of all the obstacles she could face, she had feared this one most. That, and the question he asked next.

“What happened to Celeste?”

Ivy was ready with an answer.

“I miscarried.”

Mutt did not believe her. But he understood now her bloody condition when she leapt from the Edge, and her subsequent infection.

“You are a monster,” he blurted out. He regretted it the moment he said it.

Ivy was again alone in the world. Mutt was not the man she had hoped for. There had never been anyone on this planet who could love her and never would be. She had been destined for a horrible fate and her attempts to escape it had only made matters worse. Mutt had taken great pride in his union with Ivy. He could not bear the thought that another man had been there first. For him the act of deflowering was the same as marriage and he could not feel married to her.

Ivy stood up. “I must leave, Mutt. I have no place here. I am sorry for what I have done. No woman will ever love you more than I do, and no woman will ever fight harder for your love. But if you cannot love me with the scars I carry, then I must go. I realize now that my destiny was not Tobor Zranga, and it was not Mutt Ogga. It was to die alone.”

Mutt was not paying attention. He was thinking of Hope. This was Ivy’s way of eradicating Celeste. The two children could not exist in the same world. Once Hope existed, Ivy had to stop Celeste from coming back. Hope was her motivation to fight. If Tobor prevailed he would get Celeste. If Ivy prevailed she would get Hope. It was the mother of all custody battles. Mutt was just a pawn.

When he looked up Ivy was gone.

She had wandered several tents over and was staring at the glowing embers of a dying bonfire. The fire was abandoned and Ivy watched as small flames flickered about the coals. She had suffered so many wretched experiences in her life but this was the worst. She wanted to hate Mutt. She wanted to go back and tell him that if he could not love her he did not deserve her. But he was the kindest and gentlest person she had ever known. If he could not love her, no one could. Ivy Morven was unlovable.

Mutt sat down next to her. “Why did you leave?”

“I know when I am not wanted.”

“Ivy, you have suffered more than any person who has ever lived. It is not fair of me to add to it. But you must allow me time to adjust.” He put his arm around her. He did not feel tender. But he owed it to her to comfort her. It occurred to him that she had murdered her parents because the Oopsah said they thwarted Tobor’s plan to assassinate Muglair and sabotaged the great door. But Tobor abandoned his plans because Ivy was no longer carrying Celeste. He wanted the world to be destroyed so he could try again in the next iteration. How many bodies would these people leave in their wake? Mutt wondered if he would be next.

Ivy was lost in her horrors. Her parents, the people she thought were her parents, had given her to Tobor to rape. There had been no ceremony, just the signing of papers. He was thirty years her senior, the age of her father, and he presented her with a nubility drop for the honor of her flower. This was what they called “pledging” in the Hutman tradition, “promising” among the Inta. Her blood still boiled when she thought about it.

“You promised me.”

Afterward, he brought her to his apartment where a servant prepared a meal. He talked to her about his experiences in the Hutman cause, trying to impress her, as if a girl her age would care. He seemed awkward, fascinating but repugnant, a father figure who would be more. He was tentative, unable to show the assertion that governed his work in the Party. She yielded to him nonetheless, believing it her duty, and was traumatized by the experience. She had never before touched a boy. Tobor did not know how to handle her and could wield neither force nor persuasion. She continued to live with her parents visiting Tobor only for assignations. She resisted her wifely duty, stiffening and falling into violent shaking fits when he approached. He gave her wine during her fits to calm her down, but by the time it had any effect she was already asleep. When she learned in the Oopsah she was pregnant, she believed it impossible. They had not been together as man and wife for months and she had had her flow several times since. It was then that she realized he put sleeping potion in the wine. He had talked about the potion, said he would use it on himself, and asked if she would like help sleeping. But it had never occurred to her that he would physically incapacitate her to rape her. When she learned of her pregnancy, she was torn between a belief that her life was ruined, and an uncontrollable rage. She had gone with the latter. Mutt was her escape to a better life. She wanted to be his Hutwoman wife and the mother of his children. She wanted to purge herself of the awful experiences in Harmour and to create her own destiny. She had truly felt that she was a virgin with Mutt. Because he was the first man she ever chose. And he was the only man. She did not want another even if he rejected her.

She told him about the potion and he listened quietly. He asked her to stop because the details were too painful.

“Mutt,” she asked, “did you go to the Stoika?”

“Yes, I did.”

“And what did you do there?”

“Things I would rather forget.”

“But the things you did, you chose to do them.”

“Yes.”

“And the things I did, they were forced upon me.”

“Yes.”

“So why must you reject me? Shouldn’t I be rejecting you?”

Mutt felt that she was engaging in sophistry. But he could not find a flaw in her logic. He had either a double standard or no standards. He could not bring himself to admit the obvious. He expected only Ivy to live up to his standards.

“Ivy,” he said after a long silence. “I cannot blame you for what was done to you. And it does not take away from the joy we have shared. I suppose I should not think so much about the first time we were together. But I travel back to that day every day. It will always be the best experience in my life.” He hesitated. “And I hope in my next life.” His system was overtaxed by all the revelations. He did not feel as close to her as he had in the angle. Perhaps that was just an artifact of the relationship being older. He could not control how he felt but he could still be her anchor.

She lifted her hand into a claw shape and made a hissing sound.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m being a monster.”

“I am sorry I said that. I was the monster.” He stared into the fire. “Ivy, have you told me everything?”

“I believe I am out of surprises.”

“Good, because I thought maybe you were a suckleworm in disguise.”

She laughed. She did not know what to make of the man seated next to her. But he was still there, and she was not alone.

Check out chapters of The Cube right here.

Ivy clutched her daughter defensively, fearful of losing her forever. She was stabbed by Mutt’s eyes so justified was his anger. She released her grasp. “Darling, your father is here. Go to him.” She could not drive a wedge between her child and her husband. Hope ran to Mutt and he picked her up by the armpits and rested her on a forearm. He wanted to take Hope and disappear into the shadows without a word, leaving Ivy with the wrenching sensation she may never see her daughter again. But he lacked that level of depravity. Whatever she had done, the mother and child needed one another dearly and it was a bond he could not sever.

“I will return her tomorrow.” He left.

Ivy sat on the floor, her back against a large cushion, suffering an impenetrable blackness, oblivious to the tossing of the ball and the shrieks of the Ooson children. She was forsaken when she met Mutt. She was forsaken now. Only this was worse. The man she loved was here in Irla hating her passionately, for good reason, and she could not explain her actions. What she had done she would do again. It was the only way, their only chance at redemption, but there was no way he could understand. He was bound by conventional reality and could only see that the woman he loved, the woman for whom he had abandoned Shivaree, the woman for whom he had risked so much in Skava, had betrayed him mercilessly, had taken their magical love and trashed it for convenience, that he was not important to her, that everything she had ever done was a lie. She could not live with herself so horrific was the guilt, but if only he could understand … The thought trailed off. There was no way he could learn half the truth, the convenient half that justified her treachery. Once he knew her motivations, he would know the full story, he would learn who she was, and his love would be crushed for other reasons. Ivy was in a position as impossible as that day she sat forlornly on the Edge waiting for Mutt, only this time there was no Mutt to catch her. She decided he had to know. What he hated her for now he could be made to understand. What he might despise her for next, once all knowledge was revealed, was not her fault. If she must live with his rejection it should be for the truth. She held out hope he could love her again even with full knowledge. For all the evil she had committed she was convinced she was an innocent, that all of her actions were justified by extraordinary circumstances not of her making, that her decisions had been the right ones in extreme conditions.

When Arna returned, Ivy stole quietly through the encampment to the tent of Tobor Zranga, what was to have been the site of a black consummation of a black wedding, where she was to have violated her vows to Mutt for reasons he could not comprehend. She sat there silently staking it out. Was he inside? Tobor lived in a state of perpetual suspicion and heard the footsteps, and their cessation, outside the tent. He knew someone was watching and he knew who she was. He emerged from the tent drawing fully erect, his eyes boring on Ivy. She was momentarily startled then realized she was not surprised at all. He was a man to hear mice crawl on feathers.

“Have you reconsidered?” he asked.

“Have you?”

“You know my destiny. It is only yours in doubt.”

“I cannot betray Mutt. I thought he was dead. I would rather die forever in his arms than cuckold him now.”

“He has abandoned you.”

“With good reason. And I can see in his heart that a fire still burns. He will love again.”

“Love is never true, Ivy. It is a lesson you best learn now rather than later. My offer still stands.”

“I cannot. This is a line I cannot cross regardless of consequence. I ask that you take pity on a young mother’s heart. Surely there is good in you.”

“I have all the pity you have shown.”

She knew what he meant. She replied hesitantly.

“There are some burdens I cannot carry. I would rather be haunted.”

“You will carry that burden. What is written cannot be unwritten. I am leaving now for an inscription. It will not go well for you. I would take pity on you if you took pity on me. You are not the only one with needs.”

“You are a sick man.”

“What good is power if you do not use it?”

“Have you never taken pleasure in the joy of another?”

“Have you?” he returned the question.

“Yes. That is the meaning of my family. It is why I cannot accept your offer.”

“Very well. You will have a final chance. And you will reconsider.”

“Why do you not take by force what you desire?”

“I doubt mine is the superior force.”

“Do not humor me. It is the spirit you long to crush, not the body.”

“It is a contest of wills. You are too defiant. It presents a challenge. And you know how I feel about challenges.”

“Must the world to you be all about conquest?”

“The alternative is bondage. There is no in between. It is a lesson the Hutmen have learned well.”

“I will never be slave to your will.”

“Search within yourself. It is your only choice.”

He retrieved a roll of papers from the tent.

“I have left behind some light reading. Feel free to enjoy it at your leisure. It is such a beautiful story.”

He shoved the papers into a coat pocket, then added reflectively, “It is almost as beautiful as The Sphere.”

Ivy felt her old paralysis returning in the face of trauma as Tobor strode briskly away toward the Church. She wanted to attack him physically, to throw a rock at his head, to lay a stick across his shins, to drive a dagger into his heart. But he was right. It would do no good. She could not escape her destiny.

***

Mutt had no tent. He had no haysack. He had no food or water for Hope. All he had was a pocketful of Skavian bills no longer accepted in Leland. Skava had closed the border to commerce and black marketeers insisted on Arland currency in anticipation of Muglair’s collapse. He found a bonfire and asked the family basking in its warmth if he could share a side. Hope restlessly ran a stick across the ground sketching a suckleworm while he sat watching the fire. He wanted so desperately for his feelings toward Ivy to congeal into hatred, a simple emotion grounded in righteous wrath that might give him solace, but all he could feel was hurt. He had been wronged, used under false pretenses and discarded for a better opportunity. He had been a fool for dreaming of their reunion with such joy. How happy she would be to see him! How grateful she would be to him for saving their child! The image of her in a wedding gown haunted his every moment. They never had a real wedding. She never dressed so finely for his love. They never had a real marriage, truly only a trading of sex for security, a convenient stop on her path to the dance hall of Irla. He remembered the pride with which he looked upon her pregnant belly, how gratified he was to call her his wife, his thrill in knowing she would have his child, the joy he took in building a nest for their chickadee. But her ruse ran so deep she bore Hope only to tether him like an umbilical cord until she could find a better mate.

He glimpsed his daughter trailing her stick across the dirt, her hair tied up in a fountainous stalk by Ivy, her intense face the picture of girlish cuteness, and realized her existence was a mistake. This beautiful child, so full of energy and vitality, should never have been born, for he would never had loved her mother had he known the callousness of her heart. He saw Ivy beaming radiantly in her wedding dress, dreaming of the lovemaking to follow with another man, when the canvas of a tent flapped in the wind, when a pod from a bergel bush drifted by, when sparks flew from a burning log, when he looked at his shoe, the sky, a pillbug, a lash dangling before his eye. He saw her on the inside of his eyelids, waking and sleeping and on the threshold in between. The waking moment was the cruelest when he would wonder if the horror were real, when he would hold out hope that she still loved him, that she was his wife, that their love had meaning, that his life had meaning, that she was lying in the fold of the angle beseeching his arms, before reality dug in its cruel claws. The heart was a useless organ! He no longer had need of it and wished to rip it out and throw it into the fire. He had never known such suffering. He was so bewitched by her beauty, the love she so bounteously bestowed upon him, the love he so plentifully returned, he could not imagine a more thorough annihilation than to learn it was a charade, no more real than a round of mimes in the angle. Oh God the angle! How wondrous that experience had been! But he was purging those joyous days from his memory, excising his heart through a thousand tiny cuts without anesthetic.

“Are you Mutt?” a stranger asked.

“I was.”

“I am Garan, Arna’s husband. I am sorry for what happened.”

Mutt teared up at this compassion shown by a stranger, as if it confirmed his status as pitiable victim. But he checked himself for he would never cry before another man.

“We did not know she had a husband.”

“Nor did I.”

“There is something wrong with her.”

Mutt remained silent.

“She did not want to marry that man. She said she had to or terrible things would happen. I do not know how her mind operates, but I think she believed she was saving your life, and your daughter’s.”

“She thought we were dead, Garan. She was moving on without a thought for us.”

“I have never seen a more wretched human being than that woman in the dance hall.” He paused. “There is something deeply wrong with her. She cries in her sleep. She talks of torture and the apocalypse. She says she read the Oopsah and we will all die. She has no recollection when she wakes up.” Garan began to tear up himself. “What is saddest is that she speaks of you, Mutt. She so longs for you to hold her. I hear her crying, beckoning your return. I do not know what is wrong with her. But I can tell you this. She is not a bad person. We trust her completely with our children. She has a heart of gold.”

Mutt cried openly and Garan embraced him. This was the Ivy he remembered, a woman of nurture and compassion, a woman who loved and needed him desperately.

“No woman has ever loved a man more than she loves you.”

Mutt could not betray his eyes. They had seen her in the dance hall in a wedding dress. Maybe she did not look so happy. Maybe the smile he imprinted in his memory was an accent to compound his pain. But did it matter? How could he rationalize such ultimate treachery? Their love was shattered and these memories, this visit from Garan, were just sticks poking around the dying embers of his heart to produce a final glow before extinction.

“I have to go. Arna will be missing me.”

Hope had wandered off. Mutt found her behind a tent using the bathroom. She had been afraid to ask her father to accompany her because he was crying. Mutt realized he could not abandon his child to the pain caused by Ivy. He could not ask her to share his grief. She was a small and perfect and innocent being. She was too young to understand, and the horror of his rupture with Ivy called her very existence into question. He had been thinking she was a mistake but how could he say that of his child? He had to separate her being, which he could never question, from the mistake he made in marrying her mother. They were logically connected but emotionally separate. That Ivy birthed his child was no warrant for treachery. He could love Hope and condemn Ivy. Hatred, he begged, please fill my heart. There was no other way he could cope.

He lifted Hope into the air. “Who’s my little angel?”

The little girl smiled weakly. “Me.”

“Does my little angel want to fly?”

Now she giggled in anticipation. He swung her around high above his head, legs flying outward from Mutt’s body while she laughed heartily. He grew dizzy and stopped but she asked for more, so he reversed direction trying to unwind before losing his balance and nearly dropping her. She took such delight in his attention if only he would bestow it. He decided they should kick around a tumblebrush which to her was an excellent idea. They stood with the sun to their side hovering eternally on the horizon of Leland so that no eyes were blinded and kicked the brush back and forth. It was an impossible task, too spongy were its branches, so Mutt decided to enter her world. She loved nothing more than bugs. They would find some and he would share her fascination. They pulled sticks and logs from woodpiles brushing whatever scurried out into the open, beetles and centipedes and pillbugs and leafrollers, building little stick corrals to contain them which were not effective but the joy was in the trying. This little girl could study bugs for hours such was their hypnotic effect, these tiny creatures darting about on missions to destinations unknown for purposes unfathomable. It occurred to him that she looked upon bugs as grownups looked upon children, sources of boundless energy to be treasured and monitored and occasionally restrained. Hope liked to place a stick before a beetle to see if it would crawl up, dropping it with a shriek if it got to her hand. She took great delight in flicking bugs onto her father which Mutt tried once on her before realizing from the decibel of her wail it was asymmetric warfare. He asked where the bugs go in the woodpile and she said they had a castle with a king and a queen and lots of baby bugs that ate moss for breakfast. He asked if they were a happy family and she said no because the daddy bug had gone away to a great war in the sky but they would be happy when he came home.

Garan returned to the bonfire carrying a haysack and quilt. They were homeless and he could not leave them to the cool air of Leland when the fire expired. Mutt thanked him profusely, touched by this basic act of human decency. The quilt would not cover them both so he wrapped up Hope determined to withstand whatever drafts the shadows blew his way. He was not prepared though for the storm that followed. Clouds blotted out the sun and almost instantly a downpour was upon them. Hope was miserable, Mutt less so having grown used to weather hardship over his years. But the rain increased in intensity snuffing out the fire and soaking the quilt. Hope began to shiver uncontrollably, and then Mutt. He had to find shelter. With foreboding he returned to the Ooson tent lugging the waterlogged bedding, his little girl drenched to the bone. He would have to spend the sleeping hour in the same tent with Ivy. Even with a family of five as buffer the thought of her beneath the same canvas was excruciating. Ivy began sobbing at the cruel and unnecessary distance between them. She whispered to him that she wanted to talk, he needed to understand, she was still his wife and would never love another, her sleep was full of terrors without him. He dismissed her and fell into a fit of shaking, snuggling with Hope to keep warm before realizing she was better off with her dry mother. He was so chilled he thought he might catch ague. He felt a presence along his back. Ivy embraced him saying she only wanted to help him warm up. She understood that he could not love her but he must accept this most basic of gifts, human warmth. That body! What pleasure it had given him! For all the joy he took in their sexual union he knew now that his greatest comfort had been in her love, in knowing that he completed another person as she completed him. He could not turn her away but oh God how he hated himself for accepting her embrace. He laid his head into the sack with tears rolling down his cheeks remembering how right this used to feel. Again the stick was poking about his heart stirring memories and desires for the sadistic pleasure of fate in watching a simple boy suffer. Ivy so desperately wanted him to turn and hold her frontally, so she could turn and spoon and enjoy the sweet release of undisturbed sleep she could find only in his arms. But he lay there paralyzed, as paralyzed as Ivy in the face of her traumas, not knowing how to handle the situation, not knowing how to forget her treachery. The Oosons slept through the entire episode and were stunned when they awoke to find Mutt sleeping peacefully, his back turned to Ivy reverse spooning, with Hope snuggled between their own children where Ivy had placed her for warmth.

When Mutt awoke he felt ashamed at his moment of weakness. His clothes were still damp but the body heat of the tent had stopped the chills. He undraped Ivy’s arm from his waist and sat up. She awoke alarmed that he was leaving. He pulled back the flap and stumbled into the blinding sun on the horizon. She followed him out of the tent unshod in a gown and sleeping shawl. He lumbered away hands in pockets trying to outpace her. Ivy could no longer stand the melodrama.

“You must stop,” she said firmly.

Mutt was surprised by the tone of her voice. Who was she to order him around? Between the two of them she was the adulterer. Nonetheless he stopped.

“Mutt, I cannot go on like this. You must speak to me, if only to confirm your hatred.”

He wanted to erupt in anger but could not. “I feel no hatred.”

She was not sure what he meant. He longed to run away to no destination in particular. But he needed answers. He could not live under this horrific cloud. He needed her treachery laid bear in all its painful detail so he could move on in his life. He had to open up one last time so he could close himself off to Ivy forever.

“I am incapable of feeling anything,” he muttered.

He needed to know something but was not sure why it mattered. He felt vulnerable in asking, unable to contemplate the horrible image that might follow. He realized it mattered because he was still as captivated by her beauty as the day she wore a dogwood blossom. He still clung to the pathetic hope they would love again.

“Did you sleep with him?”

“I was waiting for the wedding. That was the bargain.”

“But you meant it to be a real marriage.”

“If you are asking if I intended after the wedding to go back to his tent and have sex with him, the answer is yes.”

The dagger was in Mutt’s heart and she was twisting it.

“How could you do this to me?” he asked plaintively.

“You do not understand. What I was doing, I did for you.”

“You are crazy! Would you love a child by abandoning her? Would you love a man by sleeping with another?”

Ivy was flustered. “I thought you were dead. I thought Hope was dead.”

“You would mourn my passing in another man’s arms?” The dam was bursting for Mutt, all his wounded feelings pouring forth.

“You do not understand.”

“Why do you keep telling me that? I understand perfectly well. You needed a man at the Notches and I was convenient so you had Hope to trap me. You needed a man now and he was convenient so you agreed to marry him. All you do is use people. Maybe your new love was an honest exchange, one person using another, you give him sex and he protects you in a hostile land, and no one is deceived. But you tricked me into believing that you loved me, that I had found something special, that what we had could not be replaced by another. You should have been honest. I might have fucked you anyway, but without illusions. You were right, every girl does have a crack, and I was an idiot to think yours was special. Oh what a fool I was! Perhaps I should be thankful I had such a happy illusion, that for one brief moment in my life I believed in love, but I will never look back on the Notches with anything but shame. How could I be so stupid?” He began mumbling, so incredibly hurt he was, about how the next time he desired a woman he would pleasure himself and hope the feeling passed.

Ivy was crushed beyond belief. How could she explain to him how the world worked? How could she make him understand what she had done?

“Mutt, you must listen to me. What I did, what I was planning to do, I swear on all creation was for you and Hope. You do not understand how the world operates, and you will not understand until you read the Oopsah. It is nothing like what you think. I did what I did because I thought you were dead. I thought I had lost my family. There was nothing left for me in this life. But there was a way to get you back. Tobor Zranga is the chosen one. I know because I read it in the Oopsah. He has special powers.”

Mutt stared at her in utter amazement.

“I told him he could have me in this life,” she dropped her eyes haltingly, then raised them again. “If I could have you in the next.”

Mutt had believed she was no longer capable of shocking him. But he was wrong. In what had become a frequent occurrence, his brain could not process her words. She was dead serious. She was insane. She would trade her body for a promise of an afterlife? Was she so gullible or just so faithless? He searched his brain for an applicable emotion and could find none. He simply had no idea how to respond.

“Ivy,” he said. “You are ill.”

“I am not ill, Mutt,” she said softly. “The Oopsah is real.”

“I wanted to love you as a wife. Now I must pity you as a fool.”

“Mutt, the Oopsah is here, in Irla. I know where it is.”

He was again astonished.

“Tobor Zranga decoded the gibberish. He was shocked by what he read. I was destroyed. The translations are in his tent. He is away. You must read them. I can no longer carry this burden alone.”

Mutt was amazed at how quickly she could distract him from the matter at hand, her casual infidelity. But he could not deny his curiosity. She had spoken in such hushed tones about the power of this book it was time to put the matter to rest. If it was here and he could read it, he would learn the measure of her insanity. What in a book could justify her treachery? Nothing, that is what, other than delusional ranting like she was now spewing.

“I will read your precious book and I will spit upon it.”

“Mutt, I know you do not believe me. But I love you more than you will ever know, and everything I have done was for our family. If you read the Oopsah, you will understand. But what you learn, it cannot be unlearned. I need you on my side of reality. I am so afraid that I have lost your love, and I fear that with knowledge I will lose it forever. But there is no choice. We have been driven to this moment and you have to know what I know. I did not ask for this knowledge. It was given to me for evil purposes but I will share it with you in the hope, oh God I pray not a vain hope, that you can love me for who I am.”

Ivy’s words were a blur to Mutt. Her ability to wax dramatic paled in comparison to her act of betrayal. She had kept him in the dark about her great secrets since the day they met and now she was promising to reveal all. Whatever he learned, it could not make the situation worse. If she would grind his heart to meal he should know why, he should know why this crazy woman felt so justified in annihilating him, why his emotions were for her such amusing toys.

“Let us not waste time,” he declared.

She tried to take his hand but he would not touch her. They walked through the encampment on the outskirts of Irla to the tent of Tobor Zranga, which stood out for the elegant folds of its canvas, if tents can be elegant. It was unguarded which Mutt found strange for the repository of such an important work. If Zranga cared so little for protecting these secrets, was not that proof of their insignificance? Mutt could not know this but Zranga no longer cared because they no longer mattered. Nothing, Zranga thought, could be changed now, and anyone who wished to flip through the sacred pages could no longer usurp his powers. Mutt stood outside the tent while Ivy pulled the flaps back and tied them. She told him to wait outside while she entered and lit a lamp. She arranged papers on a desk then stepped outside and told him to enter. She pleaded with him for one kiss but he refused. He would never again fall for her wiles.

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Ivy needed to be a mother again and the transition required her to quash these thoughts. With the child came a million things to do and she resolved to do each one flawlessly. She had made such a fool of herself in the dance hall she could only restore her good standing by exemplary effort. More importantly she had to re-establish herself as Hope’s mother after such a long separation. Ivy had not even observed the child’s birthday which, by no coincidence, was the wedding date. But a party could be held later and she resolved to invite all the children she could find for a celebration of her daughter, to establish her new life in the tent city of Irla and to reforge the bond with her child. Hope joined her mother in the Ooson tent, where Ivy helped care for Varun and his sisters and found comfort and safety in the family’s companionship. The tent city lacked legal authority and a young woman could not live alone without risk from opportunistic prowlers. She frequently took the children to the parks of Irla so the parents could have time to themselves, a gift she could not enjoy with her own husband. On one such occasion Arna became pregnant, an act of defiance on a planet counting down to destruction, a validation of life Ivy wished to emulate in her weaker moments, if only she had her other half to take advantage. With the Oosons, Inta refugees from Skava, she found that the distractions and affections and annoyances of family life staved off her darker moments. But she could never sleep an honest hour without the sheltering arm of her husband, her mind tormented by the horrors of Harmour and Dunder, visions of the apocalypse, the cruel fate that awaited her afterwards. The Oosons gazed upon her with horror when she awoke from tortured dreams murmuring of bloody spikes and unholy love and bayoneted children. She said things about the Oopsah they could not comprehend yet sounded so awful they refused to repeat back to her. She would cry as she returned to consciousness begging their forgiveness, then within minutes immerse herself in the lives of the children, feeding and clothing, wiping and sponging, playing and singing, finding meaning in the nurture of small beings.

Ivy decided to celebrate Hope’s birthday in the pits. The influx of refugees had subsided since she arrived in Leland. With the systematic extermination of the Skavian Inta and increased patrols along the border, fewer refugees could escape Muglair’s dystopia. The pits were conversion wells dug into the surface of Leland where refugees reoriented beyond the range of Skavian grenade launchers. At peak immigration thousands of people occupied these ledges in squalor and filth, teeming in their own excrement with little food and no clean water, hundreds dying per week from deprivation and disease, mostly small children and the elderly. In alarming numbers young people, those recent children whose families had invested so much in their blossoming, threw themselves in despair from the ledges to certain death tumbling over the sideland surface. In its push to eliminate the Inta, Skava dropped gas balls from the edge weighted to roll into the pits and incinerate refugees or suffocate them as fire consumed their oxygen. After ignoring the refugees’ plight for months, Arland intervened to wipe out the Skavian artillery nests along the edge with a blanket of flaming shells released from ballast ships, leading to a tense standoff in which Skava picked off refugees on its land before they could escape but did not attack over the fold near Irla. Muglair was preparing a small force oriented to Leland to liquidate the proliferating Inta camps after the war. He did not want these germs spreading back into Skava. But for now the Inta had found safe haven under the protection of Arland in the pocket of Irla.

Ivy arrived in Leland with a letter of introduction and avoided the calamities of the pits, converting in a rounder built into the directorate on the main thoroughfare, her progress monitored by a sociopath plotting to despoil her body as punishment for defying fate. She emerged onto the surface of Leland with unassuageable guilt at the plight of the refugees, resigned to her personal fate but hoping to alleviate the suffering of others. She visited the pits daily carrying jugs of clean water and cartons of boysenberries she foraged from the rim forest on the outskirts of town. She alone among relief workers descended the full depth of the pits on ladder pegs to the burial chambers in the rear to offer not food or water, for these were provided at the surface, but solace and help reburying the exposed dead. She knitted sweaters and wraps for babies and toddlers shivering in the cool air of the light-starved land, and shoveled excrement from the lips of the pits carrying it in buckets to dumps in the forest. She did not care if she died from typhus or dysentery even though death would mean losing all hope of rewriting the Oopsah. But altering the sacred text remained the task she had chosen for herself if she did survive, and for this she had no recourse but to submit to Tobor Zranga’s proposal. He would establish supremacy of his will by defiling her body and betraying her for the glory of Celeste, and she would re-organize fate on a principle of human love, not subjugation. Their agendas were not compatible and she had little chance of prevailing in this contest. Zranga held all the cards; she could only buy time with abject submission and hope a card would turn in her favor before it was too late. She was reduced to appealing for a new order to the conscience of a man who had none, to the honor of an extortionist, and such was her sorry state when Mutt arrived to reclaim her in the dance hall only to witness her perfidy.

By the time of Hope’s celebration the pits had vastly improved, with far fewer refugees and an organized relief effort from Arland supplying food, water, and basic medical care. The Oosons would not accompany her to the pits for fear of disease, a matter of special concern with Arna’s pregnancy and their small children. Ivy wanted Hope to comfort suffering children and was willing to take the risk. She remained grateful for the kindness shown to her by others, by the father in the Notches but mainly by her husband, and felt an obligation to repay such charity to the refugees. She also believed that good deeds would prove her a person worthy of a better ending than the one currently in store. She selected a pit with a sizeable standing area for Lelanders and descended earthen steps into the foul air, still polluted by the stench of excrement and human decay despite cleansing sweeps. They sat alongside the living area of the misaligned families and called all children for a party, distributing bricks of tea cake and small gifts from a gunny sack, jute dolls of swans and soldiers, toy destroyers and carousels crudely carved by Garan, a slingshot with sack of berry pellets, drawing paper and colored wax, a rattle of stitched membranes filled with seeds slotted into a stick. She lectured the children that the gifts belonged to all and must be shared but within seconds they were squabbling over which toys were whose requiring parental mediation of disputes. Hope was overcome by the odor and did not play well, eventually vomiting in a corner. Ivy took her to the surface with three sisters sufficiently converted to balance on the ground, where she recovered in the fresh air and tested the sling shot on the girls with lumps of clay. Ivy planned a second celebration that day with the Oosons and sundry children from neighboring tents, this time around a bonfire in the slanted light throwing snap bark onto coals and waiting for it to pop out with trailing sparks. Hope asked if her daddy was going to sing for her and Ivy told her no, he had to go somewhere but would be back soon. She gave the girl a rolling hoop one quarter oriented to Skava that could spin westward for long stretches but was impossible to roll back. The pack of children disappeared shouting after the hoop trying to nudge it into pathways between tents, then returned panting with the hoop draped around a child’s neck only to start over.

Hope’s question about her father sent Ivy reeling, ashamed at what she had done and fearful of never seeing him again. This was their child’s first birthday celebration at which her parents had not been united as a loving couple. She was afraid he might take his life although she could not imagine him succumbing to despair, such was his natural pleasure in living. She believed he would return to see Hope, for the mother’s sins were not the daughter’s, and she would have a chance to explain herself. She wished she had never read the Oopsah. Without the knowledge in that dreaded work she could live like Arna, focused on her husband and children with no thought of post-apocalyptic evil, fear of which tainted Ivy’s blessings. If her family were all she had and their destruction a certainty, she could at least live out her days as a wife and mother without cause to betray Mutt. But the Oopsah gave her a different world in which to struggle, one that made their imminent deaths less important. She felt appearances were a thin veneer over a twisted reality others could not see, and she looked upon the end times as a sensory illusion. It was all real – the fog of her daughter’s breath, the odor of wet canvas, the taste of mashed angoo – yet it was no more real than the numbers decoded by Tobor Zranga, abstractions in a higher plane that gave flesh to her bones, breath to her daughter’s lungs, vision to jaundiced eyes, as effects of numerical relations. She supposed this was reality but as something reducible to instructions it had a special property, modular determinism, embodied in the diabolical mechanics of the Oopsah.

Ivy slapped her face. She was slipping into insanity as a coping strategy for the very real horrors she had suffered in Harmour and Dunder, for the rotting bodies in the Irlan pits fouling the air of their grieving families, for the destruction of her marriage and imminent loss of her child in Muglair’s apocalypse. When not lost in abstractions her mind was drawn pathologically to Dunder, to the image of bayoneted children tied to a daisy chain, each little boy a precious gift to his parents, each little girl a precious gift to her parents, each the honored subject of birthday celebrations just like her own child, each the sterling hope of one generation for the next, the renewers of life and the givers of grandchildren, a step in the march of generations, and each butchered by the most unnatural act in the universe, the murder of a child by an adult, as a deliberate and considered policy choice by the most powerful men on the planet, these tiny corpses launched into space so that no one could grieve their deaths with proper burial, so that some alien civilization could receive them and marvel at what beasts would kill their young. That was reality, and Ivy could not sleep with it. Her mind had only a choice of horrors to contemplate, from brutally real to abstractly evil, from personal tragedy to cosmic catastrophe, all wicked, all unavoidable, her only respite the care and nurture of her daughter, and the companionship of the Oosons.

Garan insisted on reading the boards during their frequent strolls through Irla. He believed fervently the war would run its course and the great powers would cap the Flume. Indeed he did not concede the potential destructiveness of that current of water. The Silent Sea was so vast and deep he could not imagine significant quantities of water had yet escaped. And however belligerent the great powers might be the leaders would surely act to save their own skins. He had hope and read each notice intently picking out the bits of news that favored his narrative. Arland was not mounting a land invasion of Skava. Surely this decision harkened a relaxation in tensions, opening room for negotiation and control of the Flume. Arland renewed its bombing campaign of Leri Deri with the intent of leveling the city. Surely this would exert sufficient pressure on Muglair to force a compromise, or on the other powers in Skava to topple him. Muglair dissolved the Council, executing or imprisoning its former members for treason, and replaced them with family members and cronies from Interior. Surely the people of Skava would not accept this tyranny and the Great Man’s days were numbered. Arland announced its failure to collapse the Flume from the intake at the bottom of the Silent Sea and would embark on a new mission with more powerful ordnance. Surely the great nation had learned from its mistakes and would succeed on its next effort. Arland was reforging a gigantic plug for the intake after the last one crumpled under pressure and disappeared into the shaft to emerge through Shamba. Surely the structural engineers would adequately reinforce the conical plug with stronger cross-members this time. There was no event Garan could not interpret as a positive sign for end of the war, the salvation of the planet, the salvation of his family. Yet with all this good news the planet still hurtled toward disintegration, because while Arland bombed and Muglair plotted the Silent Sea drained. What all could agree upon was that when the hourglass emptied the apocalypse would arrive. And as long as nobody took any measure to stop it, that fate was inevitable.

***

Mutt raced through the tent city of Irla to escape his wife, his former wife, for he had no desire to hear her voice. He had never before experienced so radical a transformation. He arrived at the dance hall the savior of his family and left the goat of a faithless woman. How could he have not foreseen her betrayal? Was it not obvious in hindsight? She seduced a convenient man in Irla just as she seduced him in the Notches. But why Tobor Zranga of all people? He was a powerful man, that was why, and whatever enmity she harbored for him melted away in his protective arms. They had planned this all along, he was convinced, remembering now that “Irla” was Zranga’s parting word in the Notches. He had propositioned her then and she had accepted his offer, needing only to rid herself of the bumpkin from Shivaree to carry out her plan. He had been a fool to think himself worthy of their marriage. She was a fine woman, cultured and educated, of a class he could only aspire to. She fell for him, literally, because he was the only man there to catch her. But how could he have believed so completely in her love? How could he have believed that Hope was born of passion and not of calculation? He could not fathom her motivations but knew one thing. It was all a lie, the deceit of a manipulative woman who never loved him, who perhaps was incapable of love.

He found himself circling around to the thoroughfare to watch the hall from behind a planter, why he did not know. He was still in a state of disbelief, and surveying the scene without being an actor in it drove home the reality of his loss. And he had lost everything, his natural mother and father to the brutality of the Skavian Inta, his loving family in Shivaree to his ill-fated marriage to Ivy, his home in the Notches to the aggression of Skava, his reunion in Irla to a heartless woman. He might even lose Hope. He had left her with Ivy, a reminder of the physical union his wife was wishing away with new vows, and he could not know if he would see her again. Hope suddenly emerged from the door of the hall dressed in a comical lacy cape holding the hand of a little boy, and Ivy came running after them, crying and laughing at the same time, overcome by the emotions of a wedding while her new husband presumably waited inside for a first dance. He shrunk behind the planter to avoid detection, attracting the attention of passers-by at his suspicious behavior. He was still in shock, the full import of Ivy’s betrayal not fully registered. He smiled perversely as if to convince himself he was in on the joke. Surely he could not have been so stupid as to trust her, so he reacted emotionally as if her cavalier replacement of him was expected.

He could stand it no more. The rush of blackness was crowding out rational thought. He returned to the shop where he had traded for Hope’s new tunic.

“Sir, I have just watched my wife marry another man. I beg of you license to borrow your bounder. On all that is holy I will return it. I have nothing of value but will pledge this ring.”

He laid it on the table.

The shopkeeper had heard many tales of woe from refugees in Irla and did not take kindly to beggars. But he had earlier that day received news of the death of his teenage niece in Atatt, another of Muglair’s camps, and was distraught. Moved by Mutt’s plight, he silently walked the young man to the back alley and untethered the bounder. For the first time in memory the shopkeeper cared little for material possessions. Whether he lost the bounder to this stranger did not matter. Nothing would bring back his sister’s child.

The tanks were full and Mutt decided he would travel to the Silent Sea and throw himself in. He left the harness in the storage compartment where it would provide just as much lift as on his body, and released downwater to levitate the craft from the locking slot. It was four hundred miles west to the Parvian edge. He released eastwater until he achieved a speed of nearly a hundred miles per hour. He thought briefly of releasing all eastwater which would be suicide once he passed the edge for there would be no way to reverse, but he had promised to return the bounder and decided his death could wait. He flew close to the barren tundra to avoid detection by the Arland patrols which controlled Leland’s skies. He grew cold in the biting wind, his hands too numb to control the levers competently. He could have easily fallen off if he hit a mongrel goose or turbulent crosswind or if the fin assembly wobbled, and he would die from the impact without a harness even at this low altitude. That would be the best way to perish, by sudden accident in a reckless endeavor, because he knew he did not have the stomach to take his life directly. He lacked the nerve to plunge a knife into his heart, or fire a bullet through his head, or leap off a bounder into the Sea, but he could do something so reckless that death was a likelihood. Would Ivy wonder what happened to him? Would she care? Would it be fair to Hope? It did not matter. The world was going to end anyway. Whatever Ivy’s demerits she could predict the future – she had demonstrated her power to Mutt’s satisfaction – and she had foretold the destruction of the planet. So if he died now he would only be hastening the inevitable. As he approached the Parvian edge he dumped westwater and lowered the craft onto the tundra, needing to rest before descending over the Sea. He retrieved the harness from its compartment and suited up for warmth. It would not protect him once he passed the edge because its gravity would be horizontal to the surface of Parva, and if he fell into the Sea he would perish even if he survived impact, but he needed the extra layer to combat the chill. The sun did not reach this part of Leland directly. The sky was darkening blue but the source of the scattered light was obscured by the rim forest and rises in the land.

He levitated again and passed over the edge, observing for the first time in his life the platinum stamp of the moon, the primary source of twilight in Parva, a cubic rock reflecting a cubic sun. In the distance along the edge he saw a gap where sidematter had crumbled inward from loss of the Sea’s counterbalancing weight. These natural sluices had developed all around the Parvian edges where bays and inlets came nearest to the adjacent sides, resulting in outflows of water far exceeding those in Shamba. Skavian engineers had not properly taken the sluicing effect into account when calculating the planet’s ability to withstand the Flume. Mutt rotated the seat and handlebars to face the wall of Parva so he could watch the Sea as he descended. He released upwater – up from the perspective of Leland – and began dropping along the Parvian crust. A few miles down he reached the ancient shoreline of the Sea, only there was no water. Further and further he descended, traveling along the surface of Parva which appeared to him a pale cliff face, watching as the basin of the Sea sloped back into the planet revealing the extent of the draining. As he descended on a perfect vertical line, the dry seabed retreated before him mile after mile until he could see it no more. He released westwater, a dangerous maneuver given his limited supplies, to travel into the basin which had, before the Fifteenth of Tarpin, been filled with water.

Eventually he heard ripples lapping against the new shoreline and slowed down. If he miscalculated he would hit the frigid waters and die from drowning or hypothermia. He stopped within thirty feet of the Sea, its waters eerily placid in the freezing mist. He had now traveled over the edge, down the surface of Parva, and into the cup of the ocean, a cup that was slowly draining its vast waters through the Flume. He saw krill skimming the surface chased from beneath by shadowy blots barely perceptible in the moonlight. So this was what the fighting was about. Both nations wanted to drain these waters for electricity but replenishment from moisture in the cosmic stream did not keep pace with human usage. It was a situation that obviously could not go on forever but rather than face this reality and conserve the Sea, humanity decided to radically accelerate the draining by poking a hole in the bottom of the ocean and letting it empty freely into space, thereby ensuring the planet’s doom. There was a logical reason behind ever step in this process – both nations needed electricity, water was the cheapest source, they both exploited the resource until depletion became an undeniable problem, Arland decided to impose global usage limits to control the draining, Skava refused to take orders from Arland as an inferior, and Skava bypassed its rival by drilling straight to the source for direct access – but now they were back to square one, needing to conserve this limited resource to save the planet from destruction. Just like on the Sphere, neither nation was willing to face the problem in earnest until the war was over, and just like on the Sphere, by then it would be too late.

It occurred to Mutt he had not thought of Ivy for hours in the darkness of Leland and Parva, but thinking about not thinking about her, as it turned out, was a way of thinking about her. Was she really Posy? Ivy had explained her heroine’s lustiness as necessary to sustain a story over hundreds of installments. Mutt had just assumed Ivy had an active literary imagination but was not describing her own fantasies. Huston was equally lascivious and his character plainly was not based on Mutt. Admittedly Mutt’s sexual ideation was not unlike Huston’s – all women are fair game for fantasy – but Mutt had the dignity not to act on these impulses. He had proven this with the dicadict, a sensual vixen assigned by Interior to be his sex partner. As attractive as Mutt found Ivy, the dicadict would have prevailed in a beauty pageant with her more voluptuous body. She had lured him into her flat and applied all her guile to bed him, not for love or physical attraction, but to earn his trust to gain information. True he had almost succumbed to temptation but ultimately he refused to cheapen his love for Ivy. In hindsight he was a fool to leave Leri Deri ungratified. His fidelity to Ivy made sense only in a world where such things mattered, and that was not the world in which he lived. He should have taken the dicadict passionately for his carnal pleasure. If he had arrived in Irla to find Ivy waiting for him faithfully, all the better, for then he would have had the pleasure of bedding both women with Ivy none the wiser. That he was a man who cared about correct behavior even when no one was watching was pathetic. He had received nothing for his fidelity but self-denial while his wife had not hesitated to betray him. He rescued her from the camps – did she know it was him? – and in reward she ran straight to the arms of another man. He remembered now Posy’s brief affair with Huston’s father. Posy took a kinky thrill in the old man’s affections and in betraying youth for age. Had Ivy been describing her attraction to Zranga? Had she secretly desired the refined older gentleman, the grayhair more secure in life’s station, the mature man freed from the tumult of youth’s passions, the more experienced lover? Mutt claimed no special insight into what made women wet but he believed that if he were a woman the thought of coupling with Zranga would make him retch.

He pivoted in his seat to survey the Silent Sea westward where it stretched endlessly across the Parvian basin toward the edge with Klokomad, the darkest and most mysterious of sides, and saw an unusual wispy cloud spreading across the sky near the horizon. The moonlight shimmered off the vapor to beautiful effect as it rose slowly upward. He sat transfixed as the ribbon of cloud unfurled in a thin line above the water, its sparkling growing more pronounced as it rapidly approached, when with horror he realized it was not a cloud but the frothy crest of a gigantic wave. He began dumping precious eastwater, necessary for returning to Irla, to escape the rushing tower of water. His rate of ascent depended on how much water he released, too little and the wave would catch him, too much and he would be stranded in the Parvian sky. He could not judge distance in the obscure light but realized the wave was much closer than it first appeared and in panic opened the throttle on his eastwater tank to rise precipitously. The foam of the crest passed underneath with a churning swoosh so closely he felt spray on his legs. He continued outward from the Sea at a rapid clip for fear of other monsters until emerging from the cup of the basin, then dumped sufficient westwater to bring the bounder to a halt as his adrenaline subsided. He had nearly accomplished his plan of death by reckless endeavor and he knew from his mortal fear he was not ready to die. Where had such a huge wave come from? He had read that storms could whip up violent swells but never anything on the order of this fifty-story behemoth. The Silent Sea was sloshing, he realized, from the destabilizing effects of draining and sluicing, and the planet was already on a path to disintegration. The Parvian edges would crumble inward in gigantic collapses caused by the lack of hydrostatic pressure and the action of violent waves, and the resulting outrush of water from the Sea would dislodge the planet from fixture and spin it in the opposite sense from the flow, liberating the constrained matter of the sides to its natural directions, leaving nothing behind but empty space as the matter of the planet sped across the universe. This was how the world was going to end.

Mutt had dropped so much eastwater to avoid the tsunami he could return to Irla only at a hobbled pace. He had no food and grew starved over the day-long return trip. He retethered the bounder in the alley behind the shop and sought out the keeper to thank him. The shop was closed, its proprietor attending a bodiless burial with his sister, mourning the lost child with no thought for the bounder. Mutt visited the relief effort south of town along the edge in the direction of Arland, where refugees running the gauntlet of Skavian snipers were received on vertical sleds, horizontal from the perspective of Skava, and lowered to safety in Leland. An Arland outpost provided cover at the edge crossing to those refugees who could make it that far. Mutt needed food and had no money, and meekly asked aid workers for tarpin bread. Their instructions were to provide food only to incoming refugees, not the numerous indigents wandering the streets of Irla, but the food distributor took pity on this unsettled soul. Mutt scarfed a roll and instinctively took up position by a sled as a group of families spilled over. Sniper fire crackled across the surface of Skava as Arland soldiers on the Leland side leaned over the edge to return fire through sighted rifles. A large net billowed behind the sleds to catch refugees falling across the surface with their Skavian gravity. A terrified family, the father bleeding from a bullet wound to his elbow, tumbled over the edge onto Mutt’s sled in a cascade of bodies. He grabbed a falling child by the collar and swung her onto the sled while the mother landed on top of her. A small boy slipped from a rescuer’s grasp and fell screaming from the sled, his parents believing he had fallen to his death before seeing his terrified face bouncing in the net below. An aid worker threw blocks of eastmatter into slots in the sled’s bottom to buoy it so rescuers could handle the weight of the family as they carried the sled to the receiving station.

Mutt volunteered his services for future shifts, resolving to help those in need as he so often had received help. It was all he could do in his wretched abandonment, to provide succor to those who still had reasons to live, who had husbands and wives and children that loved them, who had dreams for their future. Ivy, the woman who so selfishly placed her own needs first, would never deign to aid these refugees, he thought. At the station he overheard aid workers gossiping about the wedding fiasco in the dance hall, how the bride’s secret lover crashed the ceremony to the astonishment of the guests, and how the blushing virgin’s daughter – a guttersnipe sired by the bride’s lover! – rushed the procession, leapt onto the bridal train, and brought the ceremony to a crashing halt. It was the talk of the town and the tawdriest scandal in recent memory. The worker chortled at the shock on the groom’s face when he saw the child of the woman he thought he would deflower in moments. Incredibly the bride violently attacked the groom as if her deceit was his fault, screaming epithets too vulgar to repeat in polite company and tossing him out of the hall onto the street by brute force. He had been there himself, the worker had, responding to fliers announcing a free banquet in a malnourished land for those who met a dress code, and watched in amazement as the crazy bride stripped naked before the crowd, tossed her shredded gown to the mortified audience, and forced the presiding father at knifepoint to marry off two children – her own daughter and a boy she kidnapped from the audience – in an unholy union. Truly this town had never witnessed such a spectacle. The only saving grace was that the groom learned of his bride’s tarnishment before the exchange of vows and thus escaped a wretched union.

Mutt listened to this gossip in complete bewilderment. He too had never heard of a scene so outrageous. And yet, somehow, deep in the crevices of his brain, he recognized his wife in the description of this debacle. This was the Ivy Morven he had always known, a woman acting out a bizarre script with such conviction the audience could only assume it made sense on another planet. Planet Loon, he would call it. His ex-wife was an alien from Planet Loon, a visitor not yet adjusted to the strange mores of the host planet, still acting out the decadent ways of her homeland not realizing how gauche she appeared, the audience too polite to tell her. He had married a woman from Planet Loon, and everything she did made perfect sense back on the home planet, but he was condemned to suffer her ways in ignorance of her motives, the mind of a lunatic not being accessible to a lowly Cube dweller. Mutt wanted to laugh at the absurdity of his choice in women but would have to stop crying first.

Check out chapters of The Cube right here.

Bushnell impressed Alcorn with a free lunch and his turquoise Buick station wagon. He offered Alcorn a $1,000-a-month salary, which Bushnell hoped to pay from the contracts he was aggressively seeking. Alcorn’s pay was $200 less than he made at Ampex, but the package included a generous 10 percent of the company. At their meeting, Bushnell started telling Alcorn of all the contracts he had suddenly amassed. In actuality, he had only planned on getting those deals. Alcorn took it in stride, understanding that there was something entrepreneurial about Bushnell that made him utter the most outrageous things. While some were offended by that, Alcorn saw it as a talent. In their small office lab in one of the shabbier districts of Santa Clara, Bushnell walked back and forth and gestured with his hands as he told Alcorn, “I want to make a game that any drunk in any bar can play. Simple. Simple enough for a drunk to play.”

Alcorn thought the idea was simplistic, not simple. He had believed that their first project was going to be a spiffy driving game, maybe with sleek- looking cars. After all, Bushnell had originally recruited the computer expert by saying he was doing a racing game for Bally in Chicago. Alcorn also dreamed of doing something
computer- based that was a bit more of a challenge. The arcade game the Atari founder proposed was primitive, not cutting edge: It included no computer whatsoever. Instead, it would just use old- fashioned TTL logic, a series of transistors and resistors with a different circuit for each function of the game.

“Get started on this. We want to make it for the arcade and then for the home. So keep the costs down.” Bushnell gave Alcorn some tortured, haphazard schematics to help, and Alcorn complained, “What the heck is this? I can’t read these.”

“Look, everyone’s on board with this,” said Bushnell. “I’m almost sure I have GE on board. Just do this and more will come out of it. Everything’s going great. Don’t worry, because we’re on our way.”

“OK, boss, OK.” Bushnell’s magical enthusiasm continually won Alcorn over. The boss’s most valuable quality was to make people believe in him and in his sweeping vision. During the gestation of Atari, Alcorn loved listening to Bushnell as he espoused his grand hopes. Alcorn, who didn’t come from money, looked to the
Utahan as a philosophizing mentor more than a peer in engineering, because Bushnell’s design chops were middling. But as he listened to the founder’s big plans, Alcorn began to dream big dreams himself.
Just as important, he worked extremely hard on the three- month project, although years later, he thought, “It’s got one moving spot. It’s got scoring digits. It’s got basically one sound. It’s the de minimis of a game. It’s really lifted from what Nolan saw in the Magnavox Odyssey game.”

But at the time, Alcorn hadn’t seen or played Baer’s tennis game—the Odyssey wouldn’t appear on retail shelves until later that fall—nor was he aware of Bushnell’s early knowledge of the device. Bushnell sometimes stated to the press that he never saw the precursor to Pong. But Baer, the ultimate stickler for detail, had squirreled away a signed attendee log that proved that Bushnell viewed a demonstration
of the invention—along with Baer’s table tennis game— on May 24,1972, at the Airport Marina in Burlingame, California. Atari was formed a month later, on June 27. A pattern was forming: Bushnell was being inspired by (or possibly taking) ideas for games he had seen and even loved in the past and trying to distill them for
a mass audience.*

* In fact, Bushnell and Atari were involved with a lawsuit brought by Magnavox for patent infringement, which included Baer testifying before Judge John Grady in Chicago’s Northern Illinois Federal District Court in early June 1976, long after Pong’s release. The suit never made it to trial. Bushnell and Atari settled with Magnavox on June 10 and Atari became an Odyssey licensee.

Yet whether the boisterous founder was unconsciously motivated by Baer’s idea or blatantly pilfered it ultimately didn’t matter when it came to marketing the game and getting it out to arcades beyond the
Bay Area. With Pong, Bushnell, Dabney, and Alcorn were stepping into a shaky car for a wild roller- coaster ride that no videogame could ever imitate, even today. Something inside Bushnell needed to ride
that ride more than anyone. He wanted so badly for Atari to show “Jack and the Beanstalk”–like growth. At night, he schemed: “If we do this right, it could take off. But if this really takes off, I’m not certain we’re prepared.”

Early in the gestation of Atari, Bushnell, who many thought wasn’t a good manager, sent a lucid eight- point document to the engineering staff. There was no joking and no spin; it was serious business in which he laid down the law. Bushnell’s one- page charter, as he called it, asked the slim staff to build four or more Pong
machines by December 31, along with a Chicago- style coin box for those machines; to add more staff for emergency projects; to design packaging for Doctor Pong for dentists’ offices; and to create packaging
for a possible home version of Pong. At the end, he wrote, “Statements concerning our manufacturing capacity are inapplicable to the above design schedule.”

The pragmatic Alcorn wrote back, “Is the fact that we have no money a reason not to do this?” Manufacturing costs were indeed huge bugaboos.

Bushnell quickly replied with a handwritten “NO!!!” and sent the memo back.

Once it hit the arcades and was distributed beyond the borders of California’s Bay Area, Pong took off around the country. From town to town, Bushnell preached his gospel of selling machines. At the peak of Pong mania, there were thirty- five thousand of Atari’s machines in the United States. Each machine brought in an average of $200 weekly, a staggering amount. Merely carrying the quarters from a machine on Atarite Steve Bristow’s Berkeley arcade route was a pain in the, well, back. Seven days of quarters could equal one hundred pounds from each machine.

Excerpted from All Your Base Are Belong To Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture by Harold Goldberg. Copyright © 2011 by Harold Goldberg. Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

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He was not wholly unprepared. Hope’s bounder harness contained ringed sideweights through which he could thread the rope. By tying the rope to a weight and tossing it around the trunk of a nearby tree so that it fell back to him, it was possible to swing through the forest to another tree. The process was treacherous and laborious. Hope was terrified during swings and suffered rope burn and the crushing weight of her father on awkward landings. But they had to move somewhere, anywhere, because they would die if they remained still. He recalled the look of fear on Ivy’s face when he left her on the sycamore trunk to forage in Arland, when he found the sundress, and felt the same despair. Only no one was coming back to save him. He would have to rescue Hope, and himself, alone. They swung in the direction of a small dip in the terrain where there might be water. It took several hours to travel barely a hundred yards before establishing themselves on the side of a cottonwood near a tannic pool in a small stream. Mutt had previously seen a fishing lure in Ivy’s satchel – she was converting lures to earrings – attached to a short filament. The lure was oriented to Skava so he could throw it downstream and gravity would pull it back. After a hundred failed tosses he added a flake of bark to the hook and received a nibble. Odd, he thought, but if it worked, it worked. Eventually he landed a small looper, scaled it, and fed Hope chunks of raw meat on the edge of the knife. She was starved and willing to hold her nose for food.

Mutt threw the line continuously for over a day catching only three more fish but enough to return color to their faces. More than once he had to loop the rope across a trunk on the far side of the stream and haul himself midway to unsnag the lure from an underwater branch. He was afraid to yank the line for fear of losing his only lure. The stream was their sole source of water and they drank liberally despite the pool’s semi-stagnant reek, standing on the base of the trunk and leaning inward. They were not dressed for the cooler air of Leland which received only a fraction of Skava’s sunlight, and Mutt held his daughter close to conserve body heat. Warm fronts from the edge refreshed them but reverse currents from the tundra were bitingly cool. The sun hung low over the horizon shrouding the land in long distorted shadows. Mutt tied Hope’s cord around the trunk for safety and crawled through the branches to the crown of the tree. He scouted for signs of human habitation because they could not survive forever by the stream. Due west from their location, along the same stream in the direction opposite the edge, he saw plumes of campfire smoke. They would have to navigate to the site and pray the people were friendly.

Hope grew talkative and asked if she could see her mommy and daddy. She was not referring to her natural parents. Mutt was hurt by how quickly she had adjusted to her new life in Bortle’s Cork and wondered if he was selfish to steal her back. She was better cared for on the farm than on the side of a half-tree in Leland, and perhaps better than in the Notches. He himself had completely forgotten the first four years of his life and Hope had not yet reached that age. She could have started over with a more established family without realizing what she lost. He swallowed his pride and engaged her in conversation about her new family, reminding her of their life in the Notches when he could. He told her he was her real daddy and they were going to see her real mommy which confused the little girl. Her eyes lit up at the mention of Kippers, and he found that certain details from her old life – the tricycle, the rocking ox, poo gourds in the garden – triggered memories. The word “Ivy” meant little to her and the word “mommy” had been appropriated by another woman. But she remembered a mysterious face with dark hair who would kiss her on the nose and blow on her tummy. That was who daddy was taking her to, he explained. Mutt’s dream was to reunite mother and daughter in Irla by the little girl’s fourth birthday, three months away, if only Ivy would be there. His consolation for his grief at Hope’s forgetfulness was that she could just as easily forget her life in Skava. Indeed she was already learning that mommy was the person she was going to see, not the person she had left behind.

Mutt followed the stream as closely as he could for over a day, making little progress toward the campfires. Eventually he climbed a tree and goat whistled so shrilly Hope plugged her ears at the base of the trunk. After several attempts he heard a response. He whistled the distress call, long short short long, and exchanged messages in a broken whistle dialect. Eventually a party of four men approached looking suspiciously up the tree. Mutt greeted them and introduced his daughter. They asked if he were Hutman or Inta. He told them both. They asked what brought him to Leland. He said he was chased over the edge by Skavian security forces. They said they could not help and turned to go.

“Do you have a shovel?” Mutt pleaded.

A woman approached from the camp.

“For the love of God,” she said, “he has a child. Have we lost all decency?”

“Have we not lost enough of our own children?” a man asked. “We cannot feed them.”

She stepped forward and gathered Hope off the trunk as Mutt untied her.

“I will take what kindness you can spare.”

Two men carried Mutt back to the camp along with the woman holding Hope. He asked to be deposited with a shovel on the bank of the stream at a bend near the camp. Here the slope was steep enough for a Skavian to stand with effort. For hours he dug out a hollow creating a small strip of land on which they could move comfortably, enduring agonizing pain in his hands. An extensive root system made the digging more difficult but also more effective, stabilizing the new bank he was creating. Hope grew ill from the foul water in the stream and developed diarrhea. He had nothing to relieve her suffering. He removed his shirt and wrapped her shaking body as she fell asleep, content to shiver himself in the cool air. The bend was northwest of the sun which shone directly through an opening in the half-trees created by the stream, providing enough warmth to survive shirtless. He was deathly fatigued but could not yield to sleep in the extreme circumstances. He took the lure and continued tossing, enjoying more success in the current of the bend than in the placid pool. He landed four fish in the few hours before his daughter awoke. He suspected that the families in the camp were Skavian Inta fleeing Muglair’s persecution. The woman approached furtively to offer a jug of clean water and bilberry for Hope’s illness. Mutt thanked her profusely and gave her three of the fish. She declined at first but he insisted she share his bounty as he shared hers.

He continued fishing without rest, refusing to sleep, recognizing he could trade his haul for necessities. The men returned to fetch the shovel accompanied by a small boy. He jumped down into the hollow and hugged Hope who was crying from the pain. Mutt thanked him for his kindness and offered two additional fish he had caught to the men. They were distrustful but returned shortly with a tattered coat for Mutt. He continued fishing and nursing Hope back to health for two days before finally succumbing to sleep, by which time he had caught over twenty fish of all sizes, trading most of them for rags, a trowel, a small blanket, two angoos, unguent for his finger, and a girl’s tunic to replace Hope’s fouled dress. She was miserable, cold and damp, even as her pain subsided. The little boy returned unattended, the adults now trusting the strange pair from Skava, and the children entertained themselves catching minnows in a pot. Mutt continued fishing and eventually traded for the most precious gift of all, fire. The refugees brought kindling and twigs and a pail of hot coals, and he and Hope warmed up greedily by the flames in the steam from cooking fish. Hope smiled for perhaps the first time since Gulet, her misery allayed enough to laugh at the boy’s antics rolling down the bank.

Mutt befriended the boy’s father and learned his horrible story. The families in the camp fled from a small farming village in northern Skava only a few miles over the edge. Muglair confiscated all grain to starve the restive peasantry then sent goons from Interior to round up the Inta. They had heard stories of slaughter at the camps and resisted, ambushing agents and fleeing into the forest. They were chased over the edge where other refugees rescued them on sleds and brought them to this camp, one of many dotting the inland trail of Leland beyond the range of Skavian snipers and short-range artillery. His wife was murdered by sniper fire before his eyes at the edge and his older son fell to his death in the ensuing panic. He lost his older daughter in the confusion of their flight from the village and did not know if she survived. He still had his son, Hope’s friend, for whom he thanked God. He had a reason to live but had lost all faith in humanity. Mutt wanted to comfort him but could find no words. His loss for words was perhaps a better comfort than trying because nothing could assuage this man’s pain. Mutt told him he was attempting to reunite his family in Irla but did not know if his wife had survived. He said he wanted to have another child, to defy the evil gripping the world by creating new life, but his wife would say no, and she would be right. As soon as he spoke he feared he had been insensitive to a man whose wife, the mother of his children, had just been murdered, but the man appreciated his candor.

Father and daughter survived on that narrow ledge for ten weeks, Mutt digging to reorient every few days, eating fish and bartered treats. His finger healed partially but remained stiff and discolored; his knuckle appeared deformed but no longer hurt. Hope waited anxiously for her friend to provide entertainment and Mutt imagined them one day as a couple, ripened to perfection if only the world would let them. The children learned to cast a line with Mutt’s help and caught an occasional dinner. The refugees visited regularly to confide, finding in Mutt a willing ear, literally a captive audience on the narrow ledge with whom they could share their traumas without jeopardizing relationships. At ten weeks the two lacked only a fifth slope to full conversion and emerged from the hollow to navigate the treacherous tilt of the camp. At this angle they would fall frequently but not tumble. Their reorientation was achieved mostly through water displacement, with muscles still skewed and bones composed primarily of sidematter. The tugging of their body mass in different directions along with misaligned inner ears contributed to a permanent state of nausea to which they grew accustomed. Mutt decided they could leave the camp in time to reach Irla for Hope’s birthday. He still wanted to present Ivy with her daughter on a date she would be suffering her absence, the day of Hope’s arrival on the birthing board. He left his lure with Hope’s friend as they said farewells and struck out on the inland trail, staggering frequently on roots with their imperfect gravity. They had four days to cover forty miles. Hope whined and complained and grew cranky yet somehow managed to walk most of those miles, her father having to carry her only a few. Their food stores dwindled with little replenishment in the sparse vegetation along the trail, which hugged the inside edge of the rim forest where the vast tundra began. The trek was arduous with Mutt driven to reach Irla with the same urgency that compelled him from Shivaree to the Edge on the day of Ivy’s escape, as if a spirit were guiding him and time could not wait. They passed numerous camps alit with bonfires along the way, Mutt clutching his knife fearful of bandits and occasionally wandering in to seek food, water, and warmth. The refugees had little victuals to offer, usually barely digestible nuts more roughage than nutrient which the travelers gladly accepted. When it rained they had no choice but to press on, hoping the heat of exertion would cure the chill in their bones.

On the outskirts of Irla they consumed their last parcel of fish, well preserved in the cool air. If the Notches was a refuge of lost souls, Irla was a refuge of last resort. Here people fled whose only hope was that Skava was too preoccupied with war to track them down and shoot them. The town was bigger than Mutt expected, as large as Shivaree, with a main thoroughfare running parallel to the edge lined on either side by dwellings, shops, parks, a church, a governing directorate, and even a publishing authority, sunlight squeezing through gaps in the buildings to divide the street into dark and light patches. They were filthy refugees emerging from the wilderness unpresentable for the reunion he prayed for with his wife. He shaved with his knife and talked a shop owner out of a clean but plain child’s tunic in exchange for the more frilly but dirty one Hope was wearing. He bathed naked while washing his shirt in a stream in an edge park where they relaxed waiting for the fabric to dry. Skavian snipers left Irla alone for fear of retribution from Arland, and the many refugees, mainly Inta, bustled along the streets without fear. Several gathered outside a dance hall at the far end of the thoroughfare stirring within Mutt a fervent desire for an outing with his wife, to present her to the world again as his own, to renormalize their marriage. Inland from the town a tent city sprawled for over half a mile holding numerous refugees overwhelming the town’s resources. Somewhere in this encampment, Mutt hoped, he would find her. He kicked a desiccated poo gourd around the park with Hope then donned his shirt, damp but wearable, and embarked on the search. He grew frantic wandering the alleys of the tent city calling her name and hearing no reply, coming to grips with the frightening possibility he would not find her here, or anywhere else, ever again, and never learn her fate.

On a pile of cinderblocks he sat reduced to tears holding Hope on his lap. This lovely child could be his last connection to the woman he so dearly missed. He lacked even a photograph of Ivy, her only likeness the memories burnished in his brain and the features in his daughter’s face. As much as he enjoyed life in the Notches he never fully appreciated the miracle of his marriage until their separation. Here was a woman who was attractive, alluring, intense, passionate, brilliant, devoted, the girl he sacrificed all to rescue, his lover in the angle, the mother of his child, the living embodiment of his erotic fantasies in Shivaree. The longing to reunite, to be her husband again, was intense and he lifted Hope into his arms asking her to search the lanes and footpaths for mommy. Back on the main thoroughfare he stopped two adolescent boys and asked if they knew a woman named Ivy, charcoal hair, dark eyes, slender, height up to here – he pointed to his lips – a fondness for tunics and flowers. The boys were suspicious of strangers and asked why he was looking. He said she was his wife and this was their daughter, and one of the boys snickered. The other told him to shut up because it was not funny at all and directed Mutt to the dance hall. He had a sinking feeling but suppressed all doubt hurrying along the thoroughfare.

The doors to the hall were opened and inside a gathering sat respectfully watching a wedding. Mutt scanned the audience looking for his wife, face upon face over row upon row, but she was nowhere to be found. Then he saw her, her back to him, a comely bride in wedding raiment and veil, advancing in cadence toward the dais, a bouquet pressed across her chest, flower girl by her side, preparing to exchange vows with another man. It had never occurred to him such a thing was possible. His entire world ruptured violently before his eyes, a mask torn asunder to reveal his lover a corpse. His every thought since their forcible separation in the Skavian transport had been a presumption. He just assumed their love was real, that her desire to reunite was as intense as his, that she would share his bliss at their newfound embrace. He could not process his feelings but one was paramount. It was not anger, or despair, or humiliation, or vindictiveness, but a brutal reduction in his masculinity. He arrived in Irla the son of Outin and Paxa to reclaim his wife, the daughter of Yarly and Prudence, a courageous man who risked all to save Ivy from Dunder and their daughter from child thieves, who stared down the Great Man himself to reunite their family, a worthy mate for a worthy woman, a half of a noble whole. But in the dance hall of Irla he was a rural boy from Shivaree, a hayseed not in the league of an Ivy Morven, a man for whom the finery of her dress was not warranted, a cuckold destined to watch his wife fitted to a better man. The effect was emasculating, so much that he could not feel betrayed, only shriveled. Had they not been married? Was this child by his side not their daughter? It was all a charade. None of it had been real. He had never felt smaller in his life. He did not belong in this dance hall. It was his job to make a polite departure, not to make the guests uncomfortable, to go lick his wounds in private. He felt stupid and self-conscious, as if he had bombed at a talent show with everyone wondering why he thought he belonged on stage in the first place. What was he thinking rescuing their child from strangers in Skava, braving the suckleworm to bring her here, envisioning their reunion with such joy? Did he not have the decency to see she had moved on to better things, that their marriage of convenience was no longer convenient? Shriveled was the word that came to mind. He had never felt smaller as a man.

With delight Hope recognized her mother walking up the aisle. She had no inkling of the etiquette of a wedding. Her father stood in agony prepared to watch his wife exchange vows with another man but the little girl ran up the aisle, circled to the front of her mother, and held up her arms to be picked up, her face beaming with anticipation. Ivy dropped the bouquet and gasped. She had been crying, tears of joy Mutt assumed. She was so stunned, this angel returned from the dead disrupting this marriage of evil. She lifted her child rapturously forgetting the pageantry of the ceremony. She thought she would never see that precious face again. She thought Hope had been bayoneted, or launched to space on a daisy chain, or starved to death by monsters, or felled by the rampant disease in the camps. The father? Where was he? She turned and saw Mutt standing in the doorway. She had never seen such a look of destruction on a human being. She sat Hope down, kicked off her shoes, and ran to him holding her daughter’s hand. Mutt pulled away in horror as she grabbed his hands.

“You do not understand.”

“What I understand is not important,” he said pulling away. “It is what I see.”

She held his sleeve tightly.

“You cannot leave.”

“Ivy, I want desperately to tell you that I hate you. But I will always love you, or at least the memory of you.” He yanked his arm but she would not let go. “I know my place now. It is in a dark dank hole and I am going to go crawl into it.”

He wrested his arm from her grip and escaped onto the thoroughfare. She ran after him crying to stop but he quickened his pace and disappeared down an alley into the maze of tents. She paused, disoriented, then turned back to find Hope who was lost on the footpaths crying for her mother. She found the little girl and led her back into the dance hall, depositing her at the Oosons’ bench.

She rushed to the groom seething.

“You must leave. I do not care about the future. I must live with myself now.”

He stood motionless. He had not thought she would change her mind even after the scene.

“Leave!” she screamed, pushing him.

He looked at her startled.

“Very well, lady. I will leave you to your fate.” He exited the hall with a dignified gait.

Ivy surveyed the faces of the shocked guests.

“We will have a wedding yet,” she mumbled. She ripped her dress from her body furiously tearing it to shreds, reducing herself to an undergarment, and approached Hope with torn fabric. “My child, I am going to give you a special day. You will have what your mommy never had, a decent wedding.”

She wrapped a lacy swath around the whimpering child and knotted the front to make a cape. “Here, step into these,” she said, kicking her shoes across the aisle toward her. “Varun,” she called to the Oosons’ little boy. “I want you to stand for me. I want you to do me a favor.”

His mother stepped forward. “You cannot do this.”

“Arna, I beg of you, give me this moment. You do not know what I know, you do not know what I have been through, you do not know what I have lost. We have here a banquet prepared, we have here guests. Let us celebrate these young lives. Let us have now what we cannot have in the future.”

“I cannot,” said Arna. “He is my child and I must protect him.”

“There will be no harm, only joy. Allow me a mother’s final wish.” She kneeled before Hope and rested her hands on the girl’s shoulders. “My precious child, I love you more than life itself. I would never harm you. I will hold you, and caress you, with all of a mother’s love for as long as I live. I want now to live a dream. Do not be frightened. It will be fun.” She embraced the shaking child and rested her forehead on the girl’s. “Will you do this for mommy?”

“Yes mommy.” She managed a weak smile.

Ivy stood up, all eyes on her.

“I ask of everyone to grant me a wish. We have a wedding planned, and I wish to have a wedding. Not a real one, only a pretend one. I want to celebrate the lives of these precious children. Why should all this food go to waste? Why should we not savor this moment? Varun, will you step forward?” Arna was discombobulated. She sat helplessly as her son approached Ivy. “You are such a handsome boy. It will be Hope’s privilege to be your friend. Can you take her hand?” He reached out tentatively and Hope took his hand. He had danced before with little girls weaving streamers around festival poles and looked at Hope expecting to skip. Ivy guessed what he was thinking and suggested they skip to the dais, which they clumsily did. No one found it adorable so bizarre was the situation.

Ivy turned to the presiding father who had been trying to formulate an objection while she coached the children. “Father, I ask only that you bless their lives. I ask for nothing unholy. As a mother who will lose everything please grant me my wish.”

He looked around the room seeking guidance from people’s faces and finding none said to Ivy, “I will accede.”

He turned to his small charges.

“Children, it is with honor that I receive you here today before this gathering. It is a special day for we come to celebrate what beautiful children you are. Today you are the stars, and indeed you are the stars every day. Let us celebrate not your union, for you are only children, but the union of all people which finds its highest expression in your being. You are the fruit of your parents’ union” – Ivy winced – “and you are the future for all our hopes. And so by the power invested in me, it is with delight that I pronounce you,” he paused, “a boy, a girl, and a potential. May God bless you.”

They were still holding hands and Varun vaguely sensed he was supposed to do something.

“You may kiss her on the cheek.”

He did so, and the tiny couple turned to face the guests and walked dutifully down the aisle and out the door. Ivy stood for a moment in tears before realizing they were still walking. She ran outside after the children and gently corralled them back into the hall. She clapped for their pretend union with a few muted hands joining in.

She lifted Hope into her arms and approached Arna. “I am sorry, Arna, but I will thank you eternally. Please do not think me a bad person. I am not like this. I have suffered too much.”

Arna was moved and hugged her still wondering how unstable this woman in her undergarment might be. Ivy did not understand what had motivated her. She had acted out something deep within the well of her memory, a formative moment from her forgotten childhood. The banquet proceeded without incident and was oddly serene given the tumult of the service. Ivy covered herself with a borrowed coat and mingled with the guests making idle chitchat trying vainly to reverse the terrible impression she had made.

“My name is Mutt Ogga. I am here for my daughter Hope.”

The door crushed onto his foot and he pushed it back forcefully throwing the woman on the other side to the floor. She stood up clutching a knife defensively and he instinctively grabbed her arm so tightly the weapon dropped as she tried to slash him. He scooped it off the floor and tossed it into the yard as she cowered in fear and children scattered to hiding places. The woman dashed wildly for a rear door and exited into a vegetable garden where she loudly clanged a panic bell. Mutt meandered through the rooms calling Hope’s name and eventually the little girl crawled timidly from under a drying rack in an upstairs bedroom, vaguely remembering her father’s voice. He took her in his arms and carried the frightened child downstairs where he was confronted by the woman holding a shotgun.

“Ma’am, I have no doubt of the goodness of your intentions, but this child is my daughter.”

“I do not know you.”

“She does.”

He looked at Hope who returned his gaze confused. She plainly recognized the man and was comfortable in his arms but had no appreciation of the struggle taking place between these parents or its consequences for her future. She had adjusted to her new family, especially her sibling playmates, and stretched her arms outward for her new mommy and the security she felt in her embrace. Mutt was distraught from the tender gesture – had his daughter already been uprooted? – and approached the mother daring her to shoot. She fired a warning shot, not willing to aim too closely for fear of hitting the child, and within a second of discharge he grabbed the muzzle. Hope fled into the back yard as he wrestled the woman to the ground, pinned her with a knee on her throat as her limbs flailed, and bound her hands and feet. She was babbling and praying for mercy and cursing him and begging him not to hurt her daughter, all the while Mutt calmly saying he was only doing what any father would for his child, but she would not listen and screamed that if his daughter was taken from him it was for good reason because he was a criminal and a kidnapper and Luradeen – Hope’s new name – wanted to stay with her new family and he was an evil man for attacking them.

A burly man in coveralls and rolled sleeves rushed through the rear door summoned by the panic bell carrying a hatchet and nearly ran into the figure crouched on the floor over his bound and screaming wife. The situation was out of control and Mutt clocked the man with an upper cut so fierce he felt a jawbone crack along with his knuckle. He pummeled the man’s face with his left fist before he could react and struck again with his broken knuckle sending a wave of riveting pain up his arm. The man collapsed into a semiconscious heap having been caught off guard by the assault and Mutt ran into the back yard calling for Hope who had crawled under the house and was afraid to come out. He wiggled into the space after her and lured her toward him with soft entreaties, eventually clutching an ankle and pulling her into sunlight clawing dirt with her fingernails. He lifted her into his arms and kissed her, saying he was sorry to grab her and did not mean to hurt anyone while running as fast as his exhausted frame would carry him to the willow. He seated her on the bounder secure between his legs and raced away just as the father came lumbering down the lane brandishing the hatchet. He opened the throttle and sped south toward Gulet, a tiny hamlet he had been planning to visit as a gesture of compassion but not expecting to need as refuge. He had never before attacked a woman and felt sick to his stomach recalling the violence with which he had subdued her, her wiry struggle and cries as he kidnapped the child she had come to regard as her own. Hope herself was trembling on the bounder frightened of the man who had so violently assaulted her mother, afraid he would harm her too.

Gulet was a center of grain production fifty miles from the edge with Klokomad. Prudence’s file in the dossier room contained a newspaper clipping mentioning her parents’ fruitless search for their lost grandchild, the daughter of Yarly and Prudence, a missing child of the martyrs and a subject of an intense search by Muglair’s regime. Mutt could not bring them their lost grandchild, who was waiting for him now in Irla, but he could bring them the child of their grandchild, living proof of the survival of their loved one. The article made no mention of the granddaughter’s first name and indeed Mutt had never learned Ivy’s birth name. His knuckle throbbed from a dull fractured pain making navigation of the bounder a challenge. He rolled into Gulet after a half hour fearful of pursuit by posse, kidnapping being an especially heinous crime under Skavian common law. On the center green he asked an elderly woman for directions to the home of Prudence’s parents and was directed suspiciously to a trellised arch clad with wisteria spanning a narrow lane leading to a residential neighborhood behind a row of storefronts. Set well off the main street was a low cobblestone cottage surrounded on all sides by a flagstone patio broken up with vegetable plots and potted herbs and gardenias. Mutt parked and calmed his daughter down who was crying for her mommy, ad libbing a song about pumpkins and berel gourds, reminding her of Kippers and her tricycle and the merry-go-round in the playground and the sloplady’s son, all images still percolating in her young mind from the vanished days in the Notches.

The door to the cottage was propped open with a butcher block. He stepped inside with Hope in tow, ducking to avoid an electric lamp suspended from the den’s unusually low ceiling. The walls were painted pastel paisley with flax hung from old fishing poles serving as curtains. On a mantle above a stone alcove sat family photographs including sepia tones of a small girl bearing a striking resemblance to Hope. He cradled a photograph in his hand realizing he was holding his wife’s lost childhood and showed it to his daughter, explaining that this was her real mommy when she was a little girl. The photo Ivy had shown him at their first meeting at the Edge was a ruse but this one was real. Ivy looked at him through three-year-old eyes, not laughing like the girl on the seesaw she had picked out as an idealized version of her childhood, but posing sternly ahead in a lacy dress as if challenging the viewer to a staring contest. He wondered if somehow that child in the photograph knew the horror that lay ahead of her, and he tried to imagine how against all odds the sepia girl had blossomed into Ivy, the thriving woman he married in the Notches. He held Hope in his arms as she calmly sucked a thumb and imagined the woman she might one day become.

“Who are you?”

An elderly lady with her hair in fishnet stood in the doorway to the kitchen. She was struck by the little girl. A pang ran through her heart. How familiar she looked! How much she wanted to hold her!

“I bring you tidings. Is your husband still alive?”

“Yes, he is in the garden.”

“Go fetch him, please.”

She returned with an elderly man hobbled by a foot ailment balanced on a walker. They sat at a kitchen table covered with spice jars while Hope fidgeted in Mutt’s lap.

“Young man,” the elderly man inquired, “what brings you to our humble home?”

“I bring news of your granddaughter.”

The lady’s face sank, distorted by a painful memory that had defined her twilight years. She could not speak. They had rebuilt their lives but she had not had an honest sleep in nineteen years. Yarly and Prudence were arrested in this very house, from this very room, sitting at this very table. They had returned to the home of Prudence’s parents to await their fate. Their cell had been penetrated, their comrades betrayed, their fate ordained. They had hoped their daughter would be permitted to remain with her grandparents – it was their only wish now that all else was lost – but the goons had taken everyone, the parents, the grandparents, and the child. The grandparents knew what happened to the young couple. It was shown to all the world in lurid photographs. Maple had never seen the photos herself but imagined in sleep terrors what they portrayed, her daughter’s body spiked to heaven in the blinding sun, her dying grimace lamenting her lost child. The Inta quickly realized their mistake and cancelled the harboring charges against Maple and Harnum, for there could be no more savagery given the intensity of Arland’s reaction. They returned to Gulet awaiting the reunion with their grandchild. And they waited, and waited, and waited, never hearing a word. They made inquiries, fearful at first and then more forceful; they worked the levers of the growing village green movement; but their beautiful granddaughter, the only child of their only child, their last remaining hope for a future, was never heard from again. They wanted to believe she was dead so they could have peace in their sorrow, but they did not know and lived in misery every day at their inability to protect their little angel. They rebuilt their lives, became minor folk heroes for their role in the cause, even received a letter from the Great Man himself thanking them for their sacrifice. They tended their garden and attended socials in Gulet conversing freely above the emptiness in their hearts. But they could never recover what was ripped away from them. They could never live with the loss and uncertainty. In a bowl on an end table peppermint candies had slowly fused together over the years, last touched by a little girl with a taste for sweets wearing a bright sundress and a stalk of hair tied lovingly by her mother. Maple could not bring herself to throw the candies away, clinging to the forlorn hope that one day God would smile upon her and bring that child home, and the mints would be waiting for her. She had not had an honest sleep in nineteen years. It was a number that passed through her mind incrementing each year with the passage of time, the pain growing no less raw. She had lost her child, she had lost her grandchild, she had lost her future. She had Harnum, and he had her, but they had nothing.

Mutt sensed the tragedy that defined this household, the feeling of utter loss, and could not contain his tears.

“I bring news of your granddaughter,” he repeated. “She lives. She is my wife. She is the most wonderful woman ever to walk this earth. And this is our daughter.”

Maple had hoped it was true from the moment she saw them. She had fantasized that some day her granddaughter would walk through the door, but it had never occurred to her that the child of her granddaughter might one day brighten this room. Oh what a precious gift! She looked upon Hope with adoration, the poor child not knowing what to make of the lavish attention. Mutt picked her up and deposited her in Maple’s lap.

“This is your mommy’s grandmother. This is your family.”

Hope took to her immediately, Maple’s frail hands caressing the girl’s hair, the void in her heart filling in. She had not believed she was capable of any feeling other than loss. But the rush of emotion she experienced for this child, this connection to her daughter’s horrifically cut short life, reawakened her humanity. There was good remaining in the world and if she died today it would be in peace. Harnum had suffered the blackness afflicting his wife but felt that as the man he had to be her rock, he had to move beyond it. His joy in beholding Hope was matched only by his joy in his wife’s expression. He knew how she had suffered and had dreamed that one day she would be made whole, but he could never dangle such hopes before her, for that would be wanton. It had been his job to make her accept the finality of their loss, to silence the voices asking what if, to find purpose in their union and community, to forget about what was. But oh how he had suffered, and oh how he had shared her dreams, only with no one to ground him in the harsh reality.

Harnum retrieved the toys of Ivy’s childhood from a box in a wardrobe that had lain untouched as long as the peppermints. They could not discard the toys, they could not admit the finality of the loss, for fear they might be unprepared for the little girl’s return. Hope dug through the box fascinated, finding a wooden track for rolling marbles, jute rag dolls with yarn hair, a wooden beaver on wheels with a pull string, even a tiny individuating robe and matching hat. Most fascinating to the little girl was a brightly painted wooden junebug that wobbled on its thorax shaking spindly legs. In the bottom of the box Mutt found an old card Ivy had made for her mother’s birthday with the help of Maple. In bright colors a children’s rhyme was printed out with Maple’s guiding hand: “Lips are pink, the sky is blue, it’s beautiful, and so are you.” The facing side displayed a small child’s paint-dipped palm print beneath which a familiar name was scrawled. Mutt suddenly understood something incredibly profound. He watched Hope wave a dry bubble wand through the air as if it were a bounder, oblivious to its actual function. He was overcome by a feeling of sorrow, and of sweetness, and of horror at a world that had snatched Ivy from this room and delivered her to monsters, and managed to bring her daughter back into this room nineteen years later to play with her toys. It was a world of irretrievable loss, of a shattered family finding partial closure, of the “what ifs” of Maple’s tortured conscience. This little girl should have been Ivy, and she should have grown up with her mother, and barring that with her grandparents. What was lost could never be recovered. It was a loving future never meant to be, only imagined in sleeplessness and mourned.

Mutt stayed in their household two days while Maple tended to his shattered knuckle, a fugitive harbored again in the home of Maple and Harnum. He saw no reason to hold anything back. He told them everything he knew, all the details about their granddaughter he could share, how they met, their marriage, their life in the Notches, the birth of their child, their separation in war. He gave them his only photograph of Ivy, insisting they take it. But he could not tell them how certain Ivy was that the world was ending. How to explain Ivy’s strange beliefs and powers? No, it was better to keep a veneer of normalcy over the relationship and leave the mysteries of the end times untold. He learned from Ivy’s grandparents the story of Yarly and Prudence, how Yarly had been an absent father so complete was his devotion to the cause, how Prudence found refuge in the love of her daughter and began to doubt her commitment to revolution, how on the day of her arrest she told her mother she wanted only to be a mother to her own child and could not bear the loss this innocent would suffer. But her choices had been made and she knew the fate that awaited her. Maple could not sleep because she could not erase from her mind the image of her daughter dying slowly in the Skavian sun for a cause she no longer believed in. Ivy’s grandparents never met Outin and Paxa and knew nothing of the fate of their family beyond published reports and underground rumors. They had heard, as did everyone, that the entire extended family was exterminated in the first wave of the repression and their village razed and the green salted. Mutt knew Interior might track him down and history could repeat in this house, and his duty now was to reunite his family in Irla. But if ever he had done a good deed in his life, made something right, it was this visit to Gulet. He had not appreciated the pain that comes from violence inflicted on families, the sadness that lingers on in empty houses. What Maple and Harnum suffered, so did thousands of others in the repression, and millions over the course of history. Why could there not be a lasting peace that would end such butchery? He thought with bitterness of Ivy’s certainty that they were going to die from yet another of history’s madmen. The past crawled with these vermin but Muglair was vying for lead position with his insane Flume. Maple and Harnum may have lived to see Hope but Hope would not live to see her own children if Muglair got his way. It disgusted him and he wished he could throw the animal over the Edge.

Before he left Maple approached him.

“I have something for you.” She placed a crusted envelope in his hand. “This was something she wrote on her last day with the cell, before she came home. It is for your wife. Oh how I longed to give it to her myself, to feel the press of her hand. It is for you now to fulfill her mother’s final wish.”

Harnum prepared the bounder for travel while Mutt sat at the kitchen table writing a letter to Hope’s adoptive mother apologizing for the assault, thanking her for taking such good care of his daughter, promising that the child would be loved and nurtured by her natural parents, and asking the woman to put herself in his shoes. What would she do if her child were stolen by goons and given to another family? He did not think the letter would soften the woman’s pain but he wrote it to ease his conscience. Attacking her had so violated his sense of masculinity – a man’s strength should only protect a woman – that he feared he would be forever tainted.

Harnum filled the sidewater tanks on the bounder so Mutt could travel airborne. The Leland edge was hundreds of miles away with an additional jog west to get to Irla, and he could no longer pass the numerous checkpoints on the ground even with Bogin’s letter. Harnum had seen the young man’s face identified as a kidnapper on a Gulet bulletin board, and his only chance of escaping across the breadth of the country would be a straight shot through air space. He used a carabiner to hook harness loops with Hope and situated her securely over the front tank of the bounder. Harnum’s advice was to ride east on a farm road for a mile and then fly straight north to the edge. It was the path least likely to encounter air patrols.

Their escape to Leland immediately ran into trouble. The farm road was blocked by a harvester and while seeking a detour a local patrol tried to stop him. He ditched downwater and flew airborne to escape the pursuer, using the fin assembly to navigate eastward to the optimal northward path suggested by Harnum. A bulletin was issued on the ground of a fleeing suspect and he watched in alarm as a bounder patrol ascended to intercept him on his northern flight path. He dropped additional downwater, his heart pumping, and aimed for clouds over two miles above near hypoxia altitude to conceal his route. The patrols were supplemented by motorized blowers and he could not compete with them on speed or maneuverability. Before he reached the clouds, a patrol positioned itself directly in his path. He could not stop with his northwater propulsion and veered the assembly hard right to avoid a collision while the agent took a shot at him, puncturing a tailfin. The patrol turned to follow and quickly closed the gap with its supplemental thrust. In a desperate move Mutt dumped all of his southwater into the face of the pursuer, radically increasing his speed to near terminal velocity as he disappeared into the clouds. Ice was forming on Hope’s cheeks and Mutt reached into a compartment for blankets as her lips blued and teeth chattered. He had no choice but to stay in the clouds as long as possible and pray his pursuers could not keep track. The cloud cover was inconsistent and as he passed through a clearing he saw three pursuers at a much lower altitude keeping pace. They knew he could not easily alter airspeed and resolved to follow beneath the cloud cover until it lifted at which time he would be an easy mark. His immediate concern was fingers stiffening from the cold as he tried navigating with alternating hands, one on a handle and one warming in a pocket. He pulled hard left with the tailfin to confuse his pursuers as to lateral position even if he could not significantly vary forward velocity. At the same time he slowed down as much as the fins would permit calculating the patrol would overshoot. He kept track of time in his head because he also faced the risk of carrying past the Leland edge into outer space, in which case he could not turn back for lack of southwater.

Hope was so cold taking the brunt of the wind he feared she might die so he threw the bounder into a rapid descent to try blending into the treetops in the warmer air. The pursuers did not see him drop from the clouds, his projected position having changed significantly by the maneuvers, and he skirted the canopy for over an hour without detection as their body warmth recovered and the Leland edge came into view. Just when he thought he had evaded detection he looked back to see a patrol bearing down on him. He removed an uprock from his harness, slowed while the patrol maneuvered on top of him, then threw the rock at his pursuer’s head, missing and drawing gunfire in return. He flattened the fins to regain full speed while the patrol pulled back in fear of Arland interceptors which patrolled the Leland edge. The fold was rapidly nearing and he had no southwater to slow his approach. He could no longer worry about capture by Skavian patrols because the greater danger was skipping over the edge or crashing catastrophically. He veered east and west until spotting a north-south lane suitable for landing, then dropped all northwater and used the fins to slow down and guide the bounder roughly onto the surface with a terrific thud. To his horror he saw the lane terminate in a shrubby hillock which he managed to clear with a timed bounce pulling harshly on the fins before landing in a spectacular collision with a wall of brush on the far side. He rolled clear of the vehicle with Hope still connected, tumbling multiple times before coming to rest scratched and bruised but with no broken bones, the upmatter harnesses having softened the impact.

He disconnected his daughter who was too shocked to cry and ran to the bounder. He had hoped to fly westward to Irla after stopping northward progress on the ground but the machine’s handlebars were detached and propulsion tanks leaking. The patrols would apprehend them in no time and he knew that Bogin would show no mercy. He grabbed brush to cover the wreckage of the bounder, hoping to obscure it from aerial view, and took various items from the luggage compartments including the knife and horns. He removed his unwieldy harness and released it into space, then rushed toward a copse along the Leland edge a quarter mile away carrying Hope in her upmatter harness and holding brush over their heads for disguise. No patrols flew over during their dash and they were soon covered from view by the leaves of the copse. The camouflage for the bounder worked as patrols glided over repeatedly without spotting it. Hope was bleeding from scratches all over her arms and legs, as was he, but there was nothing he could do to ease the child’s pain. He knew she was missing the comfort of her new home in Bortle’s Cork and regretted that he had brought her such misery. Their only chance for salvation now was to sneak along the edge to the first crossing station into Leland which could be as far as forty miles according to the map.

While studying the map Hope shrieked in mortal fear and climbed up her father’s back aided by the uplift of her harness. Standing between two trees with forked tongue hissing was an enormous suckleworm seeking out the radiant heat of warm flesh. Mutt had never seen a live suckleworm but the nature museum in Shivaree proudly featured an eight-foot specimen as a prime attraction and novels set on the Skavian frontier, including Salty Cellars, invariably featured vicious suckleworm attacks. It was not a worm but a lizard that could maneuver rapidly on stubby legs with a serpentine waddle. What distinguished this contemptible creature was its cross mouth, a horizontal set of teeth sliced by a vertical set, two transverse jaws designed to work in tandem with one grabbing hold of fresh meat while the other chomps relentlessly, injecting the prey with toxic saliva as its blood funnel sucks the victim dry. Suckleworms left no trace of their victims – even the bones were fully ground and ingested – except what could be picked from their scat, but their primary source of nourishment was blood and flesh liquefied by the saliva, and the seniority of their packs let the alphas drink first from victims’ wounds while the young and frail picked over the drained carcasses. Mutt had never seen so ugly a creature, the devil’s wife as it was called in folklore, its crosswise mouth dominating a protruding snout with receded eye slits barely visible as nostrils sniffed out the direction of prey. The worm, as large as the speci-men on display in Shivaree, charged Mutt and he tossed Hope to the side planning to challenge the creature himself but it lunged after the easier target. He grabbed its tail and swung it around as the creature flailed violently back to bite him, quickly letting go as the double jaws snapped within inches of his shoulder. As it twirled on the ground to face him he grabbed a branch from the ground with one hand and a thaban horn from the satchel with the other, convinced he would now have the upper hand over this stupid beast. Hope howled again as a smaller worm chased her up a tree. He could not wait for the larger worm to charge so he kicked its snout in a burst of adrenaline, forced the stick into its mouth as its neck sprung back from the kick, and stabbed the creature in an eye with the horn.

Hope was climbing the tree when Mutt saw a gigantic worm approach, this one over twelve feet long, larger than any he had seen even in pictures although he had read of suckleworms big enough to immobilize a man with forelegs and bite off his head to suckle the neck stub. Certainly this monster approaching was immense enough to accomplish such a feat. The creature began pawing at Hope’s tree trying to shake her out for a quick meal while the girl screamed in terror. Mutt felt a piercing pain on his left hand and saw a small worm chomping on his finger having leapt from a stump at this dangling meal. He ripped the creature from his hand, its teeth tearing his flesh and injecting a last dose of toxic saliva in spite, and stomped it to death with his boot. He grabbed another thaban horn and rushed the humongous worm as it tried to dislodge Hope. The creature was not used to attacks being the largest creature in its food chain and quickly pivoted from the tree to knock the man down with its tail. Mutt saw the tail coming and braced to take the blow on the point of the outstretched horn, with the creature whipping its tail back in pain taking the horn with it. Hope fell from the tree and the worm pounced toward her as Mutt stabbed its back with his last horn which he could not withdraw from the scaly wound. The beast turned violently to snap off his head but he had already run around the other side and grabbed the child, the enraged creature now chasing them toward the fold. Mutt stood his ground on the edge as the suckleworm acquired too much momentum to stop its progress. He sidestepped at the last moment barely escaping the lunging double jaws as the monster tumbled over the edge to its death on the cliff of Leland.

He surveyed the brush field and saw that it was crawling with at least a dozen suckleworms slowly advancing on the copse hunting in a pack for a double meal. He was so panicked he feared he would have to jump with his daughter to their doom over the edge to avoid a worse fate in Skava. The creatures surrounded the trees cautiously, smelling the death glands of their packmates, planning a coordinated charge that no prey could resist. Mutt was not waiting for their next move and rapidly looped a coil of emergency rope around the nearest tree trunk with Hope perched on his shoulders pointing wildly at the worms yelling “there’s one” and “there’s another one,” her father wishing she would shut up. The creatures approached methodically in a constricting semicircle as he wrapped the rope around his forearm as a backstop and began lowering himself over the edge with Hope clinging to his shoulders, both hands in crippling pain from the toxic bite and shattered knuckle. The creatures charged, one a monster nearly as large as the beast that fell into Leland, once they realized their prey was escaping, and Mutt dropped over the edge with the speed of gravity until the rope tightened around his forearm in an agonizing snap, his other arm clutching Hope’s ankle as she fell pendulously from his back. They were swinging into the rim forest of Leland and he suppressed all pain in this moment of life and death to kick their bodies along the surface over to a tree trunk for lateral support in the vertical world. As he did so an adventurous worm clambered down the rope expecting a meal on the bound forearm but by now he had balanced himself on the trunk with sufficient slack in the rope to pop the creature loose into free fall. Hope was in total shock, shivering and unable to cry, limbs flailing randomly at imagined assaults, while Mutt surveyed the damage to his finger and forearm, wondering what lesser injuries his body had suffered that he could not yet feel through the greater pain. He cut a section of rope with the knife and secured his daughter by the waist to his belt loop, then sought out an expanse of branches in which they could rest more securely. He searched the satchel for a water flask but was dismayed to find it had fallen out, leaving them to cope with thirst in addition to hunger and injury. As he dug into the satchel for food he almost stuck his finger into the mouth of yet another small worm. But he saw it in time and impaled it on his knife, using a branch to flick it outward into the forest.

As he calmed down he began to doubt the wisdom of his heroics. Yes he had rescued his wife and daughter from Skava but somehow being stranded on the side of a tree with a sniveling child in a desolate land with no food or water and no means of travel did not feel like success. He gazed into the sun hovering just over the Leland horizon and saw in it an unfeeling and promiscuous source of energy that gave life to the suckleworm with the same abandon as to humans. There was no higher meaning to the world than the crackling of grains in a fire, mindless reactions to ceaseless stimuli, the animate no more privileged than the inanimate in nature’s design, all just matter swirling in a void with no inherent purpose. Through searing pain from all quarters of his body, but especially his bitten hand, he lowered himself deeper into the rim forest, his child tied to his side, to avoid detection by edge patrols and took up roost on a lonely trunk covered in serrated shadows. If only he could rest, perhaps he would awake with a plan.

Check out chapters of The Cube right here.

It’s a wonderful creation story for Atari, but it might not be exactly true. Loni Reeder, Bushnell’s longtime assistant, claims the tale was a well- crafted myth. “The Atari guys (and I don’t remember if Nolan personally went over there along with the guys or not) went to Andy Capp’s and stuffed the coin box to the point that the machine wouldn’t work—then just sat back and waited for the bar to call to say the game wasn’t working.” Reeder says the fabrication was completely in keeping with Bushnell’s “carny” personality.

Whatever the true story, the age of the videogame arcade was born.

Nolan Bushnell was a master showman from the get- go. It wasn’t just an act; it was part of his very phylogeny. More a smart, calculating marketer than a brilliant game designer, Bushnell was born in Clearfield, a northern Utah town created because people flocked to the region to work at a cannery factory in 1907. Bushnell was the epitome of a strapping young lad, more than six feet tall before his thirteenth birthday. His Mormon father was a successful cement contractor whose motto was said to be “Work hard. Play hard.” Which is exactly what the younger Bushnell did through much of his life. He loved to play practical jokes with a science twist. One night, he went out into a field and, in a feat that was part Ben Franklin and part P. T. Barnum, attached a battery- operated light to a kite. As it flew high and proud in the night wind, some residents briefl y believed the light was an alien spaceship. At Clearfield High, he honed his skills on the debate team and was entranced by board games that required strategy, like Clue. His charming nerdiness bloomed at the University of Utah, where he spent way too much time in a then state- of- the- art computer lab playing Spacewar!, the fascinating precursor to the more well- known Asteroids.

Spacewar! was created by Steve “Slug” Russell and his engineering school friends at MIT as a lark in February 1962. On the then- futuristic, enticingly round screen of a massive PDP-1 computer, two green dots representing spaceships flew in zero gravity. They shot at each other on the ebony background of a star- filled galaxy. Players captained the ships by sitting at a panel and moving switches up and down. It was a transporting, transformative experience, and for players like Bushnell, it was a vision of the future, a future in which you could be Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon in your own imaginary science fiction universe. In Spacewar!, you even had to avoid planets that rushed in your direction as you tried with all the energy your brain and body could muster to annihilate your opponent’s ship. Viewing the minimalist screen with such early graphics, Bushnell’s neurons fired thousands of excited messages to his axons and millions of vesicles struck his synapses. Spacewar! was it for Bushnell. He just couldn’t get it off his mind. When he lost his tuition money in a card game and went to work as a barker and weight guesser on the midway at Utah’s giant Lagoon Amusement Park

(where everyone from Count Basie to the Rolling Stones played), he schemed about it. He thought about it when he was rejected for a job at Disneyland because he didn’t have enough engineering experience. He began work on what he called Computer Space when he toiled at Ampex, which made tape recorders, recording tape, and an early VCR, as a research designer for $12,000 a year. He didn’t like the gig much, feeling that the only way to make real money was to become an entrepreneur who made his own games for an audience that had yet to be targeted or mined.

At Ampex, Bushnell and straight- shooting former navy man Ted Dabney got to know each other during lunches. They ate their brown bag ham sandwiches, turned over a wastebasket, put a Go game table on top, and played the strategy game almost daily. When he created the oddly named Syzygy, his first company, in late 1971, Bushnell’s vision for games was all he could talk about. Syzygy would be primarily based around pinball arcade routes in the Bay Area and a deal to make double- wide pinball machines for Bally in Chicago. Videogames weren’t exactly an afterthought, but they certainly wouldn’t be the primary cash cow in those early months of existence.

Superiors like Charlie Steinberg, a future Ampex president, thought Bushnell had gone mad and tried everything to rid him of the idea of starting his own company. He wanted to keep Bushnell at Ampex as a career man. All this made Bushnell even more obsessed with forging his own path. When he had trouble with his wife and the two divorced, a prime reason was that Bushnell was spending too much time on his plan for world domination through games.

It has been widely written that Bushnell began work on his first arcade machine in 1970 in his daughter’s bedroom. Soon, the story goes, there were pieces of wood, wires, tools, and parts of a black- and- white TV set strewn about everywhere. The work proceeded with such passion and zeal that Bushnell’s child had to sleep elsewhere in the house. In fact, Bushnell worked on the game in his partner Ted Dabney’s daughter’s bedroom. It was young Terri Dabney who had to bed down in the master bedroom, which she shared with her parents. In that cramped inner sanctum filled with a child’s stuffed animals, the two inventors spent ountless hours burning the midnight oil. The elder Dabney, a balding beanstalk of a man with a mustache, horn- rimmed glasses, and a penchant for plaid shirts, worked hard to make a charily crafted, handsome cabinet for Bushnell’s Computer Space that looked somewhat like an arcade version of Munch’s The Scream. It certainly appeared alien. Inside it was, as in Baer’s prototypes, a mess of wires. But a small Texas Instruments computer was in there, too.

After it was made at Nutting Industries, where Dabney and Bushnell consulted, the machine was sent to pinball arcades in the region. However, the black- and- white Computer Space was ahead of its time and deemed too tricky for an industry that was just being born. It needed a joystick, not those confusing buttons, to make it easier to play. Yet the game had a tantalizing pitch line: “A simulated space battle that pits computer- guided saucers against a rocket ship that you control.”

Excerpted from All Your Base Are Belong To Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture by Harold Goldberg. Copyright © 2011 by Harold Goldberg. Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

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“Really?”

“I am authorized without escort.”

“Can you navigate the system?”

“Stay here, and I will ask if I have questions.”

Mutt disappeared into a dossier room on a lower level of Interior. They had located his wife in Dunder and she would be transferred soon to Irla, the place she had whispered to him upon their forced separation in the edge transport. But the dicadict claimed they could find no record of the child despite an exhaustive search. Mutt described the little girl in detail down to the birthmark on her forehead and scar on her left shin from a tricycle accident and no record of any such child could be found. He would have to assume the worst, she explained, because not even the Great Man with his unbounded love for children could ensure the safety of little ones in a war zone. Many unfortunately fell victim to deprivation and stray bullets and marauding Inta and were buried in unmarked graves, their deaths generating no records, their bodies never to be recovered. Mutt grew incensed at these lies having witnessed himself the fresh graves from slaughter of innocents by Muglair’s goons at the processing center, and relayed a threat against the Great Man’s life through the dicadict. Should his daughter not be found the vengeance he would unleash would be a thousandfold, Tom Weathers would deliver it personally, and Muglair would wish it had been him upon the spike. For the Great Man was not dealing with an earthly force but with the spirits of the martyrs, and he should know for the treachery he wreaked there were gods lying in wait. The dicadict spoke about Mr. Weathers only with Bogin, the Great Man not wishing to expand the circle of confidantes on matters involving the end times, and Mutt suspected this woman would be executed once her mission was complete. For if there was anything scum like Muglair cared about, it was controlling the flow of information, and no life was an obstacle to this purpose. But there was nothing he could do to protect her from the Party she chose to serve. It ate the birds that picked its teeth.

Ivy Morven had been easy to find. She was held in Dunder where she was subjected to brutal interrogation but was still living and could be transported to refuge in Irla. The fate of the daughter remained a mystery. The dossier room was filled with thousands of file banks tended by wandering clerks demanding to see badges. Spiral staircases led to floors above and below with additional banks all containing the Party’s voluminous records on its enemies and persons of interest. Eventually he found catalogs that assigned names to file numbers that could then be used to search the dossiers, and in those catalogs he found references to the Morvens, Tobor Zranga, Tom Weathers, and even Mira Ogga, but no references to himself or Hope. He sought out the dossier for Ivy on an upper floor and found it was missing, all that remained being an insert sheet listing the labels of removed files and corresponding numbers. There had been files for her education, employment in Harmour, the murder investigation for her parents, and even, to Mutt’s surprise, her marriage. But there was no file for their daughter and no lead that might shed light on her whereabouts. Curious, he looked up her adoptive parents and found a personnel biography describing their roles as researchers in Harmour, with Arvin the lead scientist on a classified project described only by the code name “blockhead” and Kitla a biologist with specialty in defensive neurotoxins.

The file for Tobor Zranga, this man who had stalked Ivy in the Notches, was also empty except for a short biographical summary. He was born to a mathematician father and Mother of the Church in Skava’s second city, Moro, and given the birth name Htob as an acronym for “hyperdimensional thing of beauty” which he officially changed to Tobor upon reaching adulthood. He was first in every class he ever attended and considered a prodigy in mathematics and dulcimer before developing an obsession with cryptology. He served in the Interior Ministry under the Inta regime and retained his position as codebreaker after the revolution, only then becoming politically active in the Hutman cause. His willingness to serve the Inta during the struggles was viewed as a black mark for which he made amends by exemplary service to the Party under Muglair’s regime. He transferred from Interior to the former Inta Demographics Center and converted it to the current Institute with a defense research mandate, eventually gaining its elevation to Ministry status. A psychological profile performed after his expulsion from the Party concluded he was a malignant narcissist incapable of empathy and prone to elaborate revenge fantasies. The biography referenced a separate missing file on “deviations” marked with a double asterisk with no further explanation.

Back at the reference catalog Mutt looked up his birth parents and was directed to a voluminous file of newspaper clippings and texts of speeches by the Great Man extolling the martyrs’ sacrifice. For the first time he saw photographs of his parents as normal people, not tragic figures dying on spikes, their images frozen in youth before their murders. Here they were posing before the tendrils of a banyan tree with small children – was one of them Mutt? – at a gathering of the cause. His mother wore glasses on an oval face gazing off into space with buzz-cut hair appearing both bookish and absentminded. Here was his father’s hulking frame handing out leaflets on a village green wearing an official Inta badge on his lapel required for political activity and smiling through pursed lips at disinterested passersby beneath an unruly mop of hair, Paxa’s thumb partly obscuring the photo. Mutt found these people less warm and approachable than Mira and Dox, at least in photographs, and suspected he would have grown up less affable in their household. A subfile summarized the search for the missing children and described a middle son named Tom who vanished in eastern Arland where Hutman refugees secretly carried him to escape the repression, referencing a more detailed report kept in the Assignments Division of the Workers Ministry which apparently held jurisdiction over child placement issues. The subfile also described the investigations into Mutt’s older sister and younger brother, both of whom perished in the chaos of the repression and destruction of their home village. Mutt felt guilty for surviving this family catastrophe and tried to imagine his siblings as adults with children of their own, his nieces and nephews. For a moment he experienced the profound sense of loss that characterized Ivy’s entire life, a sadness Mutt had avoided through the Oggas’ embrace.

Yarly and Prudence had a similar dossier, though not as voluminous, in which he found the original Inta report of their arrest in southern Skava containing a cryptic reference to an unnamed “daughter age three” who had been “processed appropriately” besides which was handwritten in fresh ink the number of another Assignments Division report. There was no evidence that Interior ever linked the lost child to Ivy Morven, and Mutt wondered how she made the association herself. Perhaps she concocted the whole story about their lost parentage to feed her need for drama, but if so why was she sent to the Edge by Interior that day to collect his fingerprints? The most striking image in the file was a staged grayscale photograph of a young Prudence leaning against the stone wall of the village church in Dunder, grenade in hand and pin in mouth, bandolier across her chest, ebony hair flowing to her waist and flat bangs framing a delicate nose and lips set beneath intense angry eyes that followed the viewer from any angle. The file for Tom Weathers held only editions of The Sphere with biographical data apparently describing the wrong person, a Hutman nicknamed Tomaly Weather banished from Moro for immoral acts about the time Mutt arrived in the Notches. Had Interior not figured out that the author Tom Weathers was Mutt Ogga and not Tomaly Weather from Moro? Mira’s file did not draw the connection and contained only her voting record in the Mothers Hall with no reference to family. He was surprised by the dearth of information in the files and briefly considered supplementing them with handwritten notes. He figured if Interior was going to shoot them it should at least know who it was killing.

The dossier room was hugely disappointing. In all those thousands of files he found no reference to his daughter and was now out of options but for the empty threat to exact unspecified retribution against the Great Man if she were not returned to him. He feared his bluster would come back to haunt him. For if Interior truly did not know where she was and he failed to deliver on his threat, Muglair might deduce the limitations of his power and execute him. On top of despair over his daughter he had the problem of the dicadict, a slang word in Interior for a seductress spy. These agents were chosen for sexual attractiveness and it was her duty to develop an intimate relationship with him for the purpose of extracting information. Mutt enjoyed the attentions of a pretty woman and was in no mood to fend off temptation. She treated her assignment as an opportunity to gallivant about the capital as a couple. Did Mr. Weathers wish to visit the dossier repository? That could be arranged but it would take a couple of days and in the meantime why not join her on a skiff excursion on the ring canal. Did Mr. Weathers seek an update from the Law Ministry on the status of a prisoner? Well the appointment would be in the afternoon and why not visit the open air market in the meantime for lunch on a stick. Mutt learned to play along with these flirtations because otherwise she would make him wait. When he first said no to the ring canal she added a day to the visit to the repository. He could complain about the manipulation but it was easier and more pleasurable to reciprocate. On the day after his unsuccessful search in the dossier room she invited him again to lunch in the market. She held his hand and led him through the numerous apparel stalls hawking wraps, shawls, belts, holsters, gauchos, and all manner of strange wear, through the jewelry section past a pegboard of nubility drops which she sampled for his approval, and onto food stalls specializing in pastry pies and mystery meat on sticks. They both opted for thaban pie wrapped in foil that leaked and crumbled so much that Mutt ate more off his pants – they were seated on a curb – than from the foil. He enjoyed this woman’s company but remained committed to his wife and reuniting his family in Irla. Still, he could not help but imagine how easily Ivy could have been the dicadict given her training in Harmour, and how this woman might have been his wife with only slight variations in history.

She asked him to take her folk dancing and he said no. She invited him to a trape café and he said yes.

“You know why I was assigned to you.” She sat across a table holding a cup.

“Because you look like my wife.”

“You think it is my job to extract information.”

“What else could it be?”

“Bogin has concluded you have no information to provide. What you told the Great Man, you learned from Tobor Zranga. He is a true seer and Muglair is afraid of him. You are a fraud and Bogin will recommend your execution.”

“Do you know who my parents are?”

She shook her head.

“They are in the shrine, on spikes. My power comes from them. If Muglair is not afraid he should be. I am the child to whom he has sworn to cede power.”

The dicadict would speak no more on this subject.

“I was married once,” she said. “I had a daughter just like you.”

Mutt did not believe a word this woman said.

“My husband died at Bivens Mill. My daughter died a week later from scarlet fever.”

“I am sorry for your loss. I do not wish to repeat it in my own life.”

“I will never love again. But I like my new job. I get to meet interesting people such as yourself.”

“Do you like sleeping with strangers?”

She thought for a moment and answered honestly.

“Yes. It is all I have left. In fact,” her hand trembled, “I like it better than marriage.”

Mutt appreciated her candor.

“Your daughter is dead,” she said.

He tensed.

“I am sorry to speak so bluntly. I do not know the details. But children who disappeared at the front were slaughtered. And your wife is no angel. I have read her dossier. There is much about her you do not know.”

“I know she murdered her parents.”

“And you love her still?”

“She is all I have.”

“Come, join me in my flat.”

“What do you need from me?”

“I will ask you afterwards.”

She took his hand and led him across the dusty market. In a stall two vendors sat on chairs across a pegboard playing a bizarre game with pegs and string. Mutt refused to walk further until he understood the rules. The board contained an eight by eight array of holes into which fifteen pegs were randomly inserted. Each peg had a small hole bored across its diameter just above the surface of the board when the peg was inserted. The players each had a home peg to which a string was permanently attached, and they took turns threading the string – the loose end was affixed to a dull needle – through the holes in the other pegs. Evidently, the goal of the game was to thread the string through each of the fourteen other pegs exactly once before returning to the home peg, with the restriction that a player could not connect two pegs along a direct path already traveled by the opponent. When both players returned to their home pegs they compared their remaining string and the player with the most excess, meaning the player who had connected all fifteen pegs traveling the shorter distance, was declared the winner. As much as Mutt desired joining the dicadict in her flat he wanted first to play this game, which one vendor called Peddler and the other Traveling Salesman. Each vendor humored him for a game, defeating him with lightning moves while he deliberated chewing on his nails, in one case stalemating him so he could not even return to his home peg, a source of great mirth for the vendors. He played the dicadict and to his surprise won a game although he suspected she did not try seriously.

She took his hand, tired of these distractions, and escorted him to her motorized bounder tethered to a post, an unwieldy motorcycle using an electric battery on the streets of Leri Deri but with tanks for sidewater propulsion for longer treks outside the city. She drove him to a treelined boulevard in the outer boroughs bordered by rows of concrete apartment buildings. Mutt knew he was offending the love of his wife but he was a man with needs and here was a woman whose job was to gratify them. In her one-room flat she removed her outer garment and shoes and sat on her bed, beckoning him to join her.

“All I ask,” she said, “is that you massage my shoulders. They are so tense.”

“There is only one way we can do this.”

“And how is that?”

“You must pretend to be my wife.”

“What I said about my husband,” she replied, “was true. I will be your missing wife, if you will be my dead husband.”

Mutt joined her on the bed and began caressing her shoulders. She was a sensual woman trained professionally to draw out a man’s essence. He did not believe her story of a dead family but was surprised by the emotional pitch she created in the room. Really, he felt he would be offending her virtue not to sleep with her, so intent she was on pretending he was her departed love. She looked remarkably like a looser version of Ivy, with fuller lips and a practiced seductive pout, but the fact that she was a different woman, a stranger who drew a salary to couple with him, was stimulating. He thought briefly of his visits to the Stoika, memories that had shamed him at the time but now felt arousing. There was something refreshing about transactional sex, free of promise and pretense, simple gratification of desire like eating cream pie, and with no more significance. He imagined the natural fit of their bodies as she received him, an embrace less intimate than Ivy’s yet more erotic for its designs, a tangle of flesh moving rhythmically with a female lead insistent on conquest for professional duty. It was her job to please him, to snare her victim within the web of Interior, to employ all her womanly tricks for his tactile pleasure, to bring him to the cusp where biology would take over.

His reverie was interrupted by her crying at a family photograph on an end table and Mutt wondered if she really were missing loved ones and not merely acting. He waffled at disrobing and she told him he was a good looking man and no one would have to know, that she needed to feel her husband again, that he was the only man she had ever met who reminded her. True, this woman should find him desirable, he was objectively so, and Ivy would never learn of the liaison if he kept his mouth shut, but he did not like playing these games. She turned to kiss him and he refused, preferring an incremental approach to see if his conscience faded. She leaned her back into him and reached to feel his crotch but he moved her hand. She lay on her side on the bed facing him and he reclined to face her, her leg now resting over his waist opening herself to him, bringing their bodies closer to joinder. Mutt’s conscience was shrieking that he could not sully his marriage with seduction by a dicadict but his hand was involuntarily moving to her hip to pull her to him, a step he knew would be followed by final disrobing because he could not push into her part way without pushing all the way. They were made to fit like any man with any woman, fungible parts to be assembled for mutual gratification, and he was running out of reasons for not assembling.

He pulled away shaken, so wanting to pleasure himself and move beyond this temptation.

“I must receive a dispensation.”

The dicadict was confused.

“I have earned one. If a Father of the Church will bless our sin, I will share your bed.”

“You are a strange man.”

He insisted on receiving dispensation at the Cathedral of the Angels of God. Along the way on the bounder a thought occurred to him. He told her they must stop first at the Workers Ministry. He took her hand feeling genuine affection for this woman and insisted she use her letter of authority to access the Assignments Division. If the Workers Ministry kept track of the fate of displaced children such as himself, they might have a record of Hope. The chief clerk refused to grant access until confirming the letter with Special Investigations in Interior, and even then monitored them distrustfully in the highly secretive file room. Mutt could not make sense of the catalog system but eventually found a chronological record describing all relocated children by date of induction. He went back to the day he last saw Hope on the transport and read through each entry going forward, listing names, location of induction, age, hair color, eye color, height, weight, and other identifying information. On the third page in he found a reference to a “Hope age three” with a crimson forehead birthmark, inducted in the 14A transport facility, marked “appropriate for placement.” His heart raced as he searched the file banks for the corresponding number and retrieved a dossier detailing her placement. She was described on an intake sheet as healthy, well-adjusted, thirty-eight inches tall, thirty-six pounds, light brunette with hazel eyes, parents presumed deceased, of sufficiently mixed lineage to justify Hutmanization. He flipped past medical records to find her assignment page giving a family name and location which he committed to memory before misfiling the dossier so agents could not easily retrace his steps. On the street he asked the dicadict to lend him her map of the capital so he could get his bearings – in fact he was interested in the map of the entire country on the flip side – then solemnly announced he would proceed to the cathedral for heavenly indulgence. On the street before the main entrance he was nearly struck by a transport vehicle emerging recklessly from the ramp of the Interior garage, which he slapped in anger calling the driver a goat kisser, a common insult in Shivaree. The main entrance of the cathedral led to a lower lobby from which a magnificent double spiral staircase ascended upward with two intertwined sets of steps to the main nave. Mutt embraced the dicadict and kissed her tenderly, anticipating their liaison in the flat, his hands groping her hips in defilement of the sacred edifice.

“What do you plan to ask me?”

“I will ask you in the flat,” she replied.

“Ask me now.”

“How do you know the future?” She looked at the satchel by his side. “I read your papers. How did you learn these things?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Bogin. It is the one thing he cannot understand.”

“The only future I am interested in is the next sleeping hour.” He looked her over suggestively.

“That’s not a good enough answer.”

“Tell me the status of my wife.”

“Your wife is in better shape than my husband. She is on her way to Irla as we speak. That vehicle you slapped crossing the road, she was in it.”

Mutt jolted, unnerved by the thought.

“You must promise me something,” he asked, composing himself.

“Yes?”

“When I leave, go into hiding. Bogin will kill you.”

“Where are you going?”

“I am going to Irla to join my wife, as soon as I find my daughter.”

“Bogin will not let you leave.”

“He does not control me.”

“What is the answer to my question?”

“The answer is that my visions come in dreams. This is the end times, and the Controller is speaking through me.”

“I will earn a better answer than that.”

Mutt turned to go.

“I have much to tell the father and may be an hour or two. I must purge myself fully for our transgressions. Be patient and I will join you here.”

She did not believe he would return but decided to wait.

He climbed the staircase to the enormous nave of the cathedral, open on the sides between fluted columns to courtyard mimosa gardens with mossy vine-covered buttresses and arches criss-crossing the vaulted interior, marmosets and coypu scurrying along the stone paths between nests and feeders above the heads of churchgoers, birds and insects silhouetted against bright beams of sunlight aimed through apertures to illuminate ancient icons bolted to stone walls. A father approached and asked if the young man needed absolution. He dreamed briefly of the joy of sharing the dicadict’s bed then told the father no and rapidly descended the other side of the double staircase, emerging on the opposite landing outside the dicadict’s view in the direction of a separate exit. On the street he hurried around the sides of the cathedral back to her bounder and started it, having lifted the key from her pocket during their embrace along with her letter of authority with Bogin’s seal, which he hoped would be adequate to pass checkpoints. If he was lucky he would have a head start of an hour to reach a destination not on the map, an obscure crossroads called Bortle’s Cork referenced in Hope’s assignment file. At a checkpoint at the outer perimeter he impatiently pulled the letter of authority from his vest, snarled at the attendant reviewing it, then yanked it from his hands and proceeded without looking back, hoping no one would follow. Driving a motorized bounder specially manufactured for Interior agents gave credence to his claim of authority.

He sped as fast as the machine would travel to the small town of Porlock southeast of Leri Deri, the closest village to the crossroads, obsessed more with the woman he abandoned at the staircase than with the family he was struggling to reunite. Why did he not spend at least a day in the dicadict’s bed enjoying her company? He was mesmerized by her body, her curves and breasts and accommodating hips, and wanted to turn around and unwrap this gift so generously bestowed by Interior. Mechanically there would be no difference between sex with this woman and sex with Ivy. If anything the dicadict would be a fresh conquest and perhaps more pleasurable for her novelty and training. He had fled her advances because he feared cheapening his marriage and spoiling his heroic effort to reunite his family. But why should preserving his family be incompatible with occasionally enjoying the flesh of another woman? Their bodies were designed for mutual gratification and only his conscience, a useless faculty in bed, got in the way.

He had three hours to ponder these mysteries on the long road to Porlock, passing within fifty miles of the still widening Flume, and by the time he arrived in the village his loins had cooled and he regretted the temptation. Ivy was the love of his life, they had grown together as a couple, their deepening love would not be possible with dalliances along the way, and he could not betray a woman who would never betray him. If honor meant anything it was keeping one’s promises and he would not jeopardize his marriage with wandering lust. He was still governed by the wisdom of Mira and understood better as he grew older the effort required to build a stable home. He purged from his mind images of the dicadict beckoning on her bed and focused instead on the joyous reunion he anticipated with his wife.

Porlock was an unsightly town with new cement block construction surrounding a village green that was not green at all but merely uncultivated dirt. From the center of the dirt rose two statues Mutt recognized from photographs in the dossier room, his parents. He parked the bounder and walked across the dirt field, realizing with a stabbing pain he was in the Hutman village of his birth, the home of Outin and Paxa that was brutally razed in the repression, the ancient huts and cottages leveled and green salted so as never to support civic life again. Muglair rebuilt the town in honor of the martyred leaders but left the green in its ruined state as a reminder of Inta cruelty. For the first time since learning of his adoption he felt a blood connection to Outin and Paxa, seated at their feet in his hometown surrounded by the ghost of a thriving Hutman community wiped out in violent collective punishment, resurrected now with special outlays from Leri Deri for its role in the cause but as an inorganic substitute. What Mutt saw was not the new concrete structures, or the dirt field, or even the village green before the salting, or the cottages and huts before the leveling, but the green and cottages and spreads of Shivaree. Why had his life been so unnaturally uprooted, taken from the community of his birth where he should have thrived as a child, and in flight from unrelenting terror carried to another side of the world to an entirely different community with a new and pretend identity? He was thankful to God for the family he found in Shivaree but only now, at the feet of the lifeless statues of his parents in his original hometown, did he appreciate the tragedy of his early years. And the horror, he realized, of the theft of his own daughter from her parents.

He jumped up from the statues and ran to the bounder. Bortle’s Cork – surely there was a story behind that name – was on the main road east from Porlock near the intersection with the road to Gulet. He had not devised a plan for retrieving his daughter and what he must do would be criminal under the laws of Skava, but he would not allow history to repeat. Hope was his daughter and she would not be stolen by goons and given to another family. She would not suffer the violent rupture that had defined her parents’ lives. He studied the map to pinpoint her new home and searched the luggage compartments of the bounder for implements and accessories, finding a folding knife, sharpened thaban horns, emergency ropes, and Skavian currency, among other things. The machine’s battery was low and he considered recharging but was afraid of tipping Interior to his whereabouts, remembering the informant role of the filler in Shivaree.

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By the time he reached the shrine Mutt was lightheaded and acrophobic. He had never before feared heights but the combination of the precipitous ascent and ongoing conversion nausea made him fearful of stumbling over a railing. He was not prepared emotionally for the brutal images at the summit. One of Muglair’s first acts as leader was to rededicate the ancient sun temple as a shrine to the martyrs with a sculpture garden featuring the spiked leaders of the cause. In the center of the shrine, surrounded by beds of goldenrod and maidenhair, two gleaming spikes soared into the blinding Skavian sun impaling the naked bodies of his birth parents, Outin and Paxa, writhing in agony so lithe and contorted it seemed sexual, yielding their spirits to heaven so the cause could live on. One could almost detect motion in these lifeless forms of butter rock with muscles twitching, eyes flitting, fingers curling in futile defiance against the Inta, against life, against God. He averted his eyes from their nakedness then found himself staring directly into the source of his being, wondering whether he was an Ogga or a child of these martyrs. He felt strangely disconnected from his natural parents perhaps because these were just statues, or because he could not reject the parents who so lovingly raised him in Arland, or because he never grasped the passions that drove the martyrs to revolution. He looked upon his birth father and dreamed one day of reuniting with his adoptive father, that generous and nurturing soul on whom he patterned his life, not aware of the toxic death he met with Donega on the road from Shivaree. He gazed upon Paxa believing her murder a greater evil, as if men were fair game in political struggle but women should be spared regardless of offense according to a law of nature. To kill a woman was to desecrate natural beauty, a perversion of the masculine duty to protect. He removed from a vest pocket a flask of spirits borrowed from the minder, wet his fingers, and flung drops across the base of the spikes as an offering to their spirits. Were they in the higher planes watching over their son as he visited the Hutman capital? Did they regret the lost opportunity to raise him, to be his parents? He wondered if the voice he heard on the island were Paxa’s, if she had called him here to commune with her spirit. In the bright sun he felt a darkness about the world as if the only truths in life were murder and loss, the brutal deaths of his parents on the spikes and the loss of his wife and daughter to the Skavian war machine, as if all goodness were illusion and the only reality death. In this moment of despair he would have made an excellent subject for Bogin’s truth artists.

He steadied himself on a rail of the shrine and gazed toward the Edge, the horizon stopping abruptly with the country of his youth over the fold. Somewhere along that Edge was his meeting spot with Ivy, a verdant paradise filled with dogwoods and poppies, and beyond that the village green of Shivaree and his parents’ spread. He was confident his family was prospering in his childhood home that very moment, Ruggin returned from the salient to tell stories of heroism and horror, Sabin with her children running loose in the yard pulling dogs’ tails, Donega laughing at crude jokes with her new boyfriend, probably a farmhand, all unwrapping foil packets of goat meat and peppers around the family table, Mira sadly pondering the fate of her lost son Mutt, Dox solemnly invoking his name in grace before the meal. In his sorrow his mind played tricks on him, imagining shapes emerging from the clouds and moving rapidly across the sky, hearing piercing wails waft upward from the plaza. Suddenly he noticed the pilgrims on the shrine had disappeared, racing down the stairs in great commotion or crammed onto a funicular just departing. Pixies swirled about his head and he became nauseous. He lifted his eyes again and shapes still sped across the sky. He perked up his ears and knew now he was hearing air raid sirens. He was not hallucinating. Arland was attacking. A terrible thought crossed his mind. Did the spirit of Paxa, jealous of his love for Mira, lure him to the shrine to kill him? He could not be in a more vulnerable position than on the Stairway to the Sun over the great sandstone plaza, the heart of power in Skava and a natural target for enemy fire. He could not escape; the stairs were too steep for his gravity and the funicular had stopped. So he spread his arms across the railing and slipped into an alternative reality, an out of body experience in which he could witness his own destruction without fear.

A huge fusillade of remote controlled orbs rose from the plains west of Leri Deri aimed by their ground operators at the destroyer vanguard of the Arland assault. Streams of water spewed from the fusillade as operators opened sidewater tanks to change direction. The orbs were not precise but spread like buckshot hitting several destroyers, dislodging chunks of metal with fierce explosions, splitting one ship along its main seam sending half hurtling to outer space and the other half to the ground. He scanned the horizon and saw a larger fleet approaching from the Leland edge, converging with the western fleet on the capitol complex. Behind the vanguard of the northern fleet a formation of six ballast ships bore down on the city through its softer northern flank protected by enormous floating shields. A Skavian suicide squadron took aim at the formation through gaps in the shields. In a magnificent collision three bombers converged on a single ballast ship simultaneously and detonated, sending fragments of metal and jets of sidewater flying in all directions. The remaining ships of the fleet let loose a rain of ordnance on the next wave of attackers, perforating their light skins with timed penetrators and exploding them from within, killing crews and hobbling vessels. Multiple waves of suicide attacks emerged from the forests trained on the ballast formation approaching from the north. Muglair had planned for this line of assault for years and would teach Arland a lesson. Attackers slipped through the shields and rammed into the walls of the massive ships, each the size of a coliseum, exploding segments of their frames and puncturing tanks of sidewater necessary for navigation. The intense counterattack disabled two more ballast ships but the remaining three closed in on the plaza rapidly. Mutt watched transfixed as the shields gracefully parted beneath the ships to give them a direct shot at the plaza. On the edge of center city, a wall of fire shot heavenward baking the northern intruders in flame just as they prepared to launch their payloads. At the same time a barrage of uprock assemblies connected by chains launched skyward to wrap around fins and turrets of the ships, upsetting their buoyancy on the delicate approach.

From the direction of the Hall he heard an enormous racket of metal gears and turned to witness an unexpected sight, a larger contingent of the Armada dropping beneath the clouds above the Dome and pointing directly at the martyrs’ shrine, having overshot the capital to reverse course and approach from the direction of Bivenal. The three attack lines from the west, north, and now east all had a single goal, not the Stairway to the Sun or the People’s Hall, but the residence of the Great Man, the Regency. The gigantic ships hovering over the Hall opened their mouths like mutant looper fish and rolled out dozens of house-sized bombs toward the plaza. Mutt thought he would certainly die, that the entire complex would be leveled in a quake of fire, that at a minimum the Stairway would be severed from its anchors and he would experience the solar voyage of Hutman prophecy. The rollers landed on the plaza past the center green, churning up chunks of sandstone and bouncing upward directly into the Regency where they were designed to detonate upon side impact. He could not witness the explosions from his position directly over the structure but felt blast waves rising and was soon enveloped in a column of light dust. He had not noticed but at the same moment the surviving two ballast ships from the north dropped ordnance on a direct line into the Regency. The attacks from the direction of Arland were knocked off line by the intense counteroffensive and forced to train their weaponry on the city’s defensive perimeter without contributing directly to the assault on the Regency. The larger fleet over the Hall launched a second wave of rollers, one of them striking the Stairway halfway up and severing one of the massive chains, sending a violent shock wave to the summit and destabilizing the entire structure. Mutt was knocked to the floor of the shrine at the feet of Yarly and Prudence, their spikes swaying from the chaotic whipping of the summit. Upmatter chunks of the Regency separated from their composites by the explosions crashed into the underside of the shrine as a thick cloud of foul dust spilled over the railings and choked him. After a third wave of rollers tumbled across the plaza, the larger fleet dumped downwater on the Hall and ascended beyond the reach of Skavian land defenses. Suicide squads continued to inflict damage chasing the ships into the clouds but Arland had sent its message. The Regency was destroyed, its foundation a smoking crater surrounded by a mound of crumbled steps, and the Great Man was officially homeless.

The attack took less than thirty minutes but Mutt remained trapped on the summit for hours waiting for the dust and smoke to clear. He breathed through a sleeve to filter the noxious air but felt a coat of slime building in his lungs. He was alone except for the statues of his parents, his wife’s parents, and their murdered comrades. He wondered what Yarly and Prudence would think of him, this man who married their daughter and now lay collapsed on the floor of their shrine unable to protect their child and grandchild. Would they regret her choice of mate? When the air cleared and his strength returned, he surveyed his options for the trip down. There was only one. He would have to cling to the railing and descend the steps on a near vertical line. Gravity would quicken the descent; the trick would be keeping the descent from degenerating into free fall. He chose the less damaged side of the Stairway, cupped his hands on the rail, and let himself down hand over fist, stuffing himself between the legs of side benches for an occasional rest. Halfway down he encountered the bomb damage where several platforms were shattered down to their reinforcing rods and the far chain was severed, above which the Stairway pivoted loosely on the remaining chain. A body lay on the steps, flesh and clothes so mangled he could not tell the gender, blood still trickling from open wounds. At the base of the Stairway he searched for his escorts but they had long fled. The army had secured the plaza and swiftly accosted him, suspicious of his sloped posture but eventually accepting his plea for access to the street to return to headquarters. He could escape now from Interior but where would he go? He would be less safe as a fugitive with angled gravity than as a captive of Skava, so he returned to the security foyer of headquarters and talked his way past the guards to his guest room. The windows of the room were blown out by sidematter debris from the destruction of the Regency with sharp chunks of masonry and reinforcing metal lodged into his bed and along the wall, and stuffing from his pillow scattered across the covers from the puncturing of a tie rod. The underside of the shrine had protected him from shattered fragments but had he been in the guest room his body would have been a pin cushion. Of all the ways he could have perished in Skava he had not imagined sharpened mortar and metal flying through the guest room window and piercing his reclining body on the bed. Ivy’s satchel lay on the floor with a shard of glass poking from its leather exterior next to the dusty imprint of a brick which was now lodged in a dent on the wall. He removed the glass as if from living flesh then lay on the bed clasping the satchel in desolation. It was all he had left.

***

Mutt pestered the minder daily for updates on the status of his family. The answers were always the same. The transfer request had been made and would be processed in due course. Eventually he asked him to close the door and sit at the table.

“You must level with me. Why are they not arriving?”

The minder hesitated. “Your friend has a history.”

“She is my wife, do you know that?”

“Your marriage is not recognized in Skava.”

“It has been consummated with a child.”

“She will be released when the investigation is complete.”

“Then bring me the child.”

“We do not separate mothers and children. They are together in a safe house. You must be patient.”

“How can I expedite the process?”

The minder again hesitated. “You will be questioned yourself.”

Mutt stood up, his gravity now only a sixth slope, and fanned out several sheets of The Sphere.

“My work has been a boon to the Party. Will loyalty not be rewarded?”

“If you are loyal to the Party you will forget about your wife. You cannot serve both family and the cause.” He was repeating a Party slogan.

Mutt paced around the room agitated. This functionary had no power. The decisions affecting his wife were made by more important men.

“I am a guest, am I not?”

“You are.”

“And is not the Hutman known for his hospitality?”

“He is.”

“And is there a greater hospitality than the comfort of a wife?”

The minder looked at him directly. “Sir, you do not need a particular woman for that comfort. We can accommodate your needs.”

Mutt could not decide if the minder used “sir” in its respectful or derisive sense.

“I wish to attend a Party session,” he changed tack. He often had ideas for no discernible reason.

The minder looked at him confused.

“As an honored guest,” he added. It occurred to him if he met more powerful men, perhaps he could obtain results.

“I will see what I can do.”

Mutt continued to slant The Sphere in favor of Skavian propaganda, emphasizing the unfairness of the embargo on nabana peels, lamenting the heroic need of the oppressed to fight such abuse, imagining a harmonious future with no hegemonic power. He inquired about his wife and daughter regularly but was told only to await interrogation. Agents of Interior would soon debrief him in the lower levels of headquarters after they finished questioning his wife. He wondered what the minder meant by debrief and remembered the horrific report he read in the Notches about Bogin’s methods of information extraction. Would they toss him in the glass house? Would they bind him in a turning box? Did such contraptions even exist? He searched his mind and realized he did not care what fate he met. He was not going to live in fear of goons. If Skava chose to execute him it would end the slow death he was already suffering from loneliness. The only regret he might have in dying would be losing the chance of reunion, with Ivy and Hope, and with his family in Shivaree. He was doubly disconnected and doubly homesick, longing to see friendly faces happy to see him, not the grim expressions staring at him everywhere in Leri Deri. He had never been so detached from the world and all his pitiful needs for security and family were coming to the fore. He was reaching the conclusion he would never see any of them again, that the paths they were all on were dead ends, that the forces governing the world had ordained their permanent scattering. If the goons did kill him he hoped they would at least tell him what Ivy had done in Harmour. Did she kill her parents? He had come to accept she murdered them on the day she leapt into his arms but he was convinced with good reason. However bizarre she behaved she had always been a loving and nurturing person in their marriage. She had done what she must to escape the evil, and the Morvens were part of that evil.

As the days wore on he achieved normal gravity and could walk about the room with ease. The door locked from the outside but he rigged it behind the minder’s back so he could sneak into the hallway unattended for longer excursions. It was impossible to leave the floor due to security stations and elevator codes but he enjoyed the expanded range. The minder arrived one day excited to inform him that Kadangle himself had extended an invitation to the young author to attend the next executive session. Mutt would have an opportunity to meet the Great Man along with the Ministers and upper echelons of the Party, which now convened in a bunker of the People’s Hall pending reconstruction of the Regency.

He received daily editions of The Cause and was shocked at Arland’s belligerence. Had they really destroyed the Regency in response to an unconditional offer from Muglair to cap the Flume? Were they really murdering Skavian prisoners of war and dumping their mutilated bodies over the Edge? Did they really sluice the Parvian edge to drain the Silent Sea below the intake level of the electric stations in Bivens Mill, which Skava had restarted after the damage to Shamba? He knew better than to trust Skavian propaganda yet the relentless barrage of words sewed doubt in his mind about his home country. One day he hit a wall reworking Ivy’s draft of an installment of the Sphere. Huston and Posy were rediscovering their love after Huston fought off a band of nighttime marauders with a combination chainsaw blowtorch. The scene was too bloody and absurd for his taste. How could one man with both arms in casts dismember and incinerate twelve army irregulars? He flipped the original draft over to spare his eyes further strain and saw on the back a list of facts and figures. When he originally transcribed Ivy’s drafts in the administrative tent he thought he was using only blank sides of papers filled with meaningless numbers. But these facts and figures were anything but meaningless. With alarm he realized he had stumbled upon a record of Ivy’s most mysterious secrets. He flipped over all the transcribed drafts and retrieved additional papers from the hidden compartment of the satchel finding more pages containing strange lists. The words made him extremely uncomfortable as if he were tasting forbidden fruit, for they were further proof of the fundamental irrationality of Ivy’s world. These were prophecies, statements about the future, and they had been coming true since she first wrote them, since he snatched the satchel from her hands in the transport, and he was convinced would keep coming true tomorrow and the next day. After a few lines he stopped reading because he was afraid of his wife’s world, of her strange and unfathomable gift of seeing. But the gears in his head were whirring. However Ivy had learned her secrets, surely he could put them to good use.

One day ominous shadows passed along the streets and he looked up to see an Arland attack fleet hovering in the western sky. He waited for evacuation of his floor to a bomb shelter but no one came and no sirens sounded. Through the window he witnessed the Armada unleash a vicious assault across the capital, much larger than the previous attack, devastating residential boroughs outside center city. Ballast ships dropped enormous volleys of ordnance on defenseless civilians while releasing upwater from pressurized tanks through blow holes in magnificent eruptions necessary to maintain buoyancy. He expected the People’s Hall to be demolished and perhaps headquarters but Arland was content to strike less defended positions outside the inner perimeter. He could view only a small portion of the attack through his window but knew from the voluminous plumes of smoke drifting across his field of vision that huge swaths of the boroughs lay in ruins. The purpose of the raid was to demoralize the population by killing as many innocents as possible, not to strike military targets. The war had reached the point where killing was its own end, all other goals being frustrated. He could not appreciate the scale of destruction from his limited perspective in the guest room until the plaza became a triage center. Hundreds and then thousands of the wounded and dying, carted in from the boroughs in a desperate search for organized relief, were laid on sheets while loved ones frantically sought attention from a handful of harried civilian doctors. The scene was too far removed for Mutt to make out individual faces and the tragedy of each casualty was blunted by the scope of the historic event. The carnage reduced human bodies to the aesthetics of the slaughterhouse, the intentional deaths of thousands less evocative than the loss of one finger by one person in a freak accident, stark proof that people were no more dignified in mass death than animals butchered for holiday feasts.

No attendants visited the guest room for over a day as Mutt emptied his food basket. He watched through the window, his stomach growling with intense pangs, as bodies were cleared from the plaza into hospitals and morgues, and as an enormous crowd began gathering before the steps of the People’s Hall awaiting the trumpeted alarum of the leader. He knew from a special edition of The Cause that Muglair would deliver a speech condemning Arland’s cowardly attack and outlining Skava’s military and diplomatic response. The comments in the paper were elliptical but it appeared Muglair might announce a new policy toward the Skavian Inta, whom he blamed for enabling the attack. They were Arland spies, every last one of them, passing along valuable military secrets to the enemy and marking bombing sites with signal flares, and the Hutman could not be safe in his own country until this threat was neutralized by whatever means necessary. The tone of the paper suggested Muglair might slaughter them in retaliation for espionage but Mutt was later relieved to learn that the plan involved only forced emigration to Arland, which might actually improve their lot given their daily misery under the policies of the Great Man.

On the day of his visit to the Party session Mutt stood before a mirror in the guest room and slapped his face repeatedly. He had fallen into such a funk in the cramped space that he doubted his ability to mingle with a crowd of dignitaries. He was led by the minder across the great sandstone plaza through the triangular entrance of the Hall, into the well of the assembly beneath the Skillian Dome and its luminous pool and fountain, and to a grand staircase descending to a security lobby for the bunker levels. They were invited to sit at a table with Minister Kadangle in a windowless conference room with a low drop ceiling and utilitarian lighting, giving more the impression of middle management than the highest powers of the nation. The executive sessions were attended by the Council, Assembly leaders, and regional Party leaders, each submitting a written statement of activity in their domains with reports delivered orally by the Ministers and the Great Man. Upon Muglair’s entrance with his security detail the entire gathering stood in unison and saluted with outstretched fists, an electric moment that quickly subsided as the Party chair took a podium and dryly announced the sequence of presentations. The sessions were not true political events at which executive decisions were debated but rather staged proceedings where fealty to the Great Man could be demonstrated and preconceived directives tossed out for acclamation. Mutt tried to strike up a conversation with Kadangle but the Minister was disinterested in this inconsequential author. Sure he had a following among the Party base but he was here merely for the novelty of putting a face on the purveyor of so much smut. If the Minister had bothered to converse with the young man he might have learned an important secret. Mutt tried to rest a foot on a leg underneath the table and in the process punctured his knee on an exposed nail, drawing blood and sending a rush of pain up his spine. He grew angry from this indignity and was still smoldering when the chairman announced the honored guest from the Notches, Tom Weathers, author of The Sphere, and a friend of the Party who shared its vision of a world free of conflict and hegemonic powers. Still pumped on adrenaline he stood up, bowed politely while scanning the room, then unexpectedly walked to the podium before the minder could stop him. The chairman assumed he was speaking with permission of his Minister host and stepped aside.

“Friends, thank you for this opportunity to read.”

He pulled the latest draft of The Sphere from a vest pocket. His minder stepped to the dais at the urging of Kadangle and tugged on his elbow.

“I’m sorry, did I misunderstand the invitation?”

The Great Man, seated at a table directly before the podium, smiled at the confusion and waved his hand at the minder, motioning him away so the author could speak.

“Thank you,” Mutt said directly to Muglair, pulling glasses from his pocket with the lenses removed, before launching into an impassioned reading of the latest installment. He had spent some time formulating a story line free of scandal calculated to appeal to Party leaders. His initial plan had been to submit the draft for publication in The Cause that day but due to a counting error it was now scheduled for the following edition, making it fresh news for the session. And fresh news it was, for here was the long awaited marriage of Huston and Posy, preceded by a dramatic relinquishment of nabana rights by the dominant power in recognition of the demand of natural justice that all persons share equally in nature’s bounty, and once obtained their divisions could be healed and lovers of the differing communities united in marriage under the joyous eyes of their brothers and sisters without regard to ethnic difference. Mutt loved nothing more than hamming it up before an audience and brought himself to tears with the rapturous scene, not sure what effect his passion might have on the audience and not caring. But when finished the Great Man himself, appreciating a diversion from the drudgery of pro forma Party work and alert to the propaganda value of the story, stood from his chair, his acolytes waiting for his reaction, and clapped slowly, increasing the pace as the assembled dignitaries joined in.

“Now, young man,” Muglair instructed, “I should like to learn of Posy’s great secret.” He knew from Kadangle that Ivy Morven was co-author of The Sphere, and he knew of her connection to Tobor Zranga. And Zranga had spoken in similar terms of a great secret, using the leverage to treasonous effect.

“Kind sir,” Mutt replied, taken aback by the question, “some secrets must await formal publication.” He paused. “But I shall tell you in private.” Mutt had a plan, and it was playing out far better than he could have anticipated.

The final speaker at the session was the Great Man himself. He gripped the podium and surveyed the room. “Friends, you are all servants of the cause, you have all been tested in your faith, and you will all be tested in the coming days and weeks with a propaganda campaign from Arland unprecedented in history. Let any who have doubt as to the righteousness of our path stand today and be counted, and I will discharge you of your sacred duty and personally guarantee your safety in retirement.” He scanned the room for faces of dissent. “Do I hear no doubt?” Scattered voices throughout the room shouted no. “Are we all loyal servants of the cause?” The room erupted in a series of “ayes” each designed to drown out the others. “Do we know the meaning of harsh measures?” A new volley of “ayes” ensued, each comfortable in his own knowledge of the term. “What we will be accused of will be vile, murderous,” he paused, drawing out the ending of his sentence, “and necessary.” He now spoke in a soft monotone, his voice projecting deep sadness. “I shall take upon my shoulders responsibility for the actions of the Hutman in this historical moment. Let no man ever say that when his very existence was questioned, the Hutman flinched. We are each dispensable,” he glanced menacingly at Kadangle, “and we each have a role. And my role is this. When the Hutman is threatened, the threat will be destroyed. When the cause is questioned, I will eliminate the questioner. When the course of history is challenged, I will redouble my efforts until victory is achieved. Let any who place personal survival ahead of the cause be warned. I know there are traitors among you, traitors in this very room, and I am watching your every move. An organism cannot thrive at the mercy of parasites and who among you will defend a parasite?” He ran down the list of Ministers and Party leaders, inquiring as to their personal devotion to the cause, and their willingness to lay down their lives should history require it. “In the near future you will each be called upon to take heroic measures in defense of the Hutman. You will each be called upon to play a role in destruction of our enemies. And you may each be required to sacrifice your life for the greater good. If you do not have the stomach for this historic mission, stand now and leave, and I will protect you. But if you choose to stay and are found wanting, I will not protect you.” The room fell completely silent, no one wanting to attract attention, as he proceeded to rattle off facts and figures about various Party initiatives.

At the conclusion of the session Mutt was led by security agents to the makeshift chamber of the Great Man, hastily constructed after destruction of the Regency. The office was low hung like the conference room, windowless and pallid, its bland atmosphere severely detracting from the majesty of its occupant. Muglair Putie sat behind a modest desk in a swivel chair, his chief aide and Bogin by his side, security agents guarding the door. He was a diminutive man, shorter than Mutt by half a head with a bulbous forehead and one eyebrow permanently arched. He had a list of meetings planned for the day, his preferred method of control being intimidation through one-on-one meetings, but he would back up his appointments for the author. Mutt could not get a read on this historic figure who had caused so much grief in the world. He was quite gracious and personable, yet his eyes were hollow and a grim sadistic humor lurked behind his lips. Mutt could easily imagine this man reviewing torture photographs with glee, Bogin rubbing his hands in delight at his side. He was unshaved and unkempt, the pressures of the war taking its toll, and presented as a less sturdy man than the Party stalwarts in the conference room, slight from nervous exhaustion with a frame that might blow away in a breeze. What distinguished him from his colleagues in the Party was the conviction of his oratory, which was not on full display in executive sessions but found voice before masses on the great sandstone plaza, with veins bulging and eyes crazed, as he gave vent to the one driving force in his life, hatred of Arland. No one knew better the unifying power of anger than the Great Man, of finding and destroying enemies in the name of the common weal. Today Mutt was seeing his scheming side, the consummate plotter, setting aside time from his agenda to gain information on his rival Tobor Zranga, the one traitor he could not execute for fear of retribution.

The Great Man extended his hand and Mutt heartily shook it.

“It is my honor to receive such a distinguished guest,” Muglair said congenially.

“I would like to meet alone,” Mutt replied, still smarting from the injury to his knee.

The agents approached and grabbed his arms.

“I have no weapon. I have only a piece of paper.” He had been frisked intensely in the antechamber.

An agent tugged at the paper but Mutt would not release his grip.

“It is for the leader’s eyes alone.”

“Very well,” said Muglair. “You are discharged.”

The agents exited the chamber and took their station outside the door. Mutt pointed to Bogin and the aide who were dismissed as well.

“How may you be so bold as to seek my audience on your terms?” the Great Man inquired.

Mutt laid the piece of paper on the desk before him. Muglair read it, growing alarmed:

You lost a testicle in a bicycle accident when you were eleven. Tomorrow you will deliver a speech announcing the dismissal of Minister Kadangle. You are planning with Bogin to execute him within the month. Although you have not yet decided, you will dissolve the Council in seven weeks. Tobor Zranga is blackmailing you and you are afraid to confront him. He claims a power of prophecy which he has demonstrated in your presence. You tryst regularly with a prostitute named Ium but cannot perform. You rigged the Flume and sabotaged the great door with explosives so the world can be destroyed at your will. You executed Chief Engineer Amug when he threat-ened to relay this information to the Council. In four days a section of the Parvian edge will collapse near Dark Harbor sending the largest wall of water yet over the edge. You will blame Arland sappers for the destruction. In six days you will have an emergency appendectomy, the result of stress at setbacks in the war. In ten days the observatory in Klokomad will report dissolution of the star Zroticon and its elimination from the heavens. In eleven days a whirligig will topple the weathervane on the Dome, which Arland will declare a sign from God in leaflets dropped in the boroughs. The high temperatures in Leri Deri for the next three days will be eighty-one, seventy-two, and seventy-nine degrees. I know the future and can change it. Our interests are not in conflict. I am not alone and you cannot stop us. If you enable me, I will not thwart you. If you kill me, you will not survive.
Muglair looked up from the paper oddly amused. He had had this meeting before with Tobor Zranga. Mutt stared at him. “I am the son of Outin and Paxa. I know what you did to them. They have chosen to spare your life but only if you cooperate. There is a power in this world that is greater than yours. It cannot be contained. I have no interest in politics. I seek only the safety of a woman and child. You will provide me the service of an assistant with full authority. You will hear of this no more.”

Muglair remained silent then called the agents back into the chamber and instructed them to fetch his aide.

“You will give this young man the assistance he requires.”

Mutt wondered if he should have killed the Great Man while he had the chance.

Check out chapters of The Cube right here.

He pondered the state of the Notches and its inhabitants then remembered with a shiver the murder of Volp. His boss’s fate was likely shared by dozens of people he knew. The sloplady, the father, their son, Glon squared, Orly, Esma and Muwild, Hope’s friends, Kippers, who among them had survived? The Notches lay in ruins and Mutt needed to purge his mind of fantasies of resurrecting the New Normal. He could not underestimate the evil of Muglair or take at face value his pronouncements of peace and good will. He could not rely on the auspices of a madman to rescue him, or his loved ones, from peril of the madman’s own creation. He would have to figure a way out of this trap on his own initiative. When the transport stopped a soldier boarded and yanked him out the rear. He fell from the bed onto the ground clinging to the half slope while soldiers carried Arlanders to a processing tent. An agent of Interior approached and seized the satchel. Mutt would not let go and the agent summoned a soldier to shoot him. He waxed indignant before the soldier could aim his muzzle.

“Kind sir, would you abuse a guest of the Party?”

“The Party has no guests in the Notches,” the agent replied.

The soldier trained his rifle on Mutt.

“Allow me, sir, to introduce myself. I am Tom Weathers, author of The Sphere.”

This meant nothing to the agent but another agent standing nearby overheard and turned to the prisoner.

“Tom Weathers, you say. And that fellow over there is Marshal Turlin. And I am the Great Man himself.”

“Sir, allow me,” Mutt pleaded, reaching into the satchel while the soldier’s finger caressed the trigger. “Here is the next installment. You can be the first to read of Posy’s latest dalliance.”

He had not actually read the installment, at least not as rewritten by Ivy, but was quite confident a dalliance of some sort was in it. The agent eagerly consumed the opening lines and addressed the soldier.

“At ease.”

The soldier lowered his weapon and returned to his duties guarding Arlanders crammed inside the tent on vertical sleds anchored in the ground.

The agent scanned the entire installment then announced to his colleague, “I believe we do have a friend of the Party in our midst.”

Mutt was led along the half slope to an officers’ lounge in a corner of an administrative tent and given a bendable chair that he could adjust to accommodate his Notches orientation. An agent rifled through the satchel pulling out drafts of various installments, clutching them greedily then passing them among his colleagues, who were dipping sachets of wormwood and spitting on the floor.

“You realize we will have to confiscate these as evidence,” the agent commented.

“Sir, it would be my honor to autograph the drafts as a token of your hospitality.”

The agent thought this a grand idea and handed the papers back to the young author.

“But you must allow me the liberty to make copies. These are my only drafts.”

This was a reasonable request and the agent tugged a field table within reach of the bendable chair. Mutt had no drafting paper and pulled pages from the hidden compartment of the satchel filled with numbers on one side and blank space on the other. Dutifully for hours he transcribed the seventeen installments of The Sphere he and Ivy had prewritten, in some cases sketchily, onto the blank sides with an air of great importance. When he finished he signed each of the originals with a flourish and handed them to the agent admonishing him to share. The agent now read the first installment more carefully and looked at the author disapprovingly.

“Your Posy is quite a strumpet.”

Mutt smiled. “When I close my eyes she is all I see.”

“I cannot believe the Party endorses this trash.” The agent grew agitated. “Do you know what the Party does to corrupters of youth?”

“Yes, I do,” Mutt replied deadpan. “They publish them.”

The agent hesitated, waiting for the reaction of his colleagues, then guffawed.

“Cognac for everyone!”

An attendant retrieved a crystal decanter from a field trunk and pulled the stopper. The agents passed the bottle around drinking directly from the lip, swishing the liquid in their mouths before swallowing. On Mutt’s turn he vowed to outdo them all and filled his cheeks to chipmunk capacity, sloshing the bulge back and forth for dramatic effect before gulping and releasing a satisfied sigh.

“You must leave some for the rest of us!” An agent slapped him on the back.

“Aye,” Mutt responded, already feeling the effect, “but an author must be properly lubricated for a reading.”

Now he really had their attention. These men did important work for the cause but it was brutal and demanding. Not often did they get the chance for entertainment and they quickly gathered around Mutt’s bendable chair, the author just as curious as his audience as to how scurrilous the unedited drafts might be. He had managed to transcribe all seventeen installments without reading a word of them. He organized the papers chronologically – Ivy had thoughtfully notated expected publication dates – and launched into a dramatic reading of Posy’s plan to kill Huston with a poison arrow shot from a dart gun connected to an electrical tripwire, a light sensor actually, all in response to her humiliation at catching Huston in the act with the toaster repair woman and being invited to join which she enthusiastically did along with her younger sister only to regret it later. Posy tearfully dipped the arrow tip in lizard saliva, a well-known love toxin on the Sphere, hoping that her beloved would die remembering her as his one true passion and not her awful sister Daphnia. Mutt continued reading, becoming genuinely shocked at the intimate details, unsparing descriptions of acrobatic lovemaking mixed with lofty paeans to passionate surrender, scenes Ivy customarily edited before submitting to Volp, who toned them down more, only to find the version in the Cause further sanitized, all presented here in their original unvarnished prose. The tone shifted from erotic to preachy as Posy, channeling her muse Ivy, waxed poetic about the evils of governmental intransigence in the face of looming catastrophe. The Sphere was already spinning and rather than take the threat seriously the leaders, growing dizzy from reduced weight and rotating stars, threw mead tasting parties. Mutt saw discomfort in his audience at implicit condemnation of the Flume – Posy suggested the creators of the windmills be slowly fed through them – and improvised a moving speech condemning the dominant power of the Sphere for its refusal to share nabana peels.

An agent commented how unfamiliar Mutt seemed with his own work, frequently mispronouncing words and gasping at outrageous scenes.

“Sir, I do not write these drafts,” he slurred, reeling from the cognac. “I sleep with a jug of absinthe and when I awake, they are there.”

Posy delivered a soliloquy over the body of the electrical lineman who installed the tripwire then forgot to ask for payment – she had assumed their tryst was sufficient – and returned to the vat room with a dunning letter inadvertently triggering his own installation. How had it come to this? Unable to find true love, filling the hole in her heart with a series of animal embraces invariably ending in someone’s gory demise, she cursed the heavens for her undying love of Huston. His infidelity, his privileging of lust over loyalty, was the root cause of her unhappiness, she was convinced. If she could start over, she knew what she wanted, a simple peasant boy like the one she rejected at the altar for Huston’s advances from the pew, a boy who would offer her his heart, who would be a father to her children, who would protect her from the predators of the world, with whom she could tame her errant impulses, with whom she could build a lasting relationship rooted in commitment and not cheap thrills. Above all, Posy declared, she wanted a boy whose momma raised him right. Mutt lifted his nose from the draft and grinned awkwardly. Was this how Ivy viewed him, as a compromise for her lust? But Posy was so far down a path of desperate indulgence there was no turning back. Once ruined, she was committed to a life of harlotry, and even if she found a boy like the one she jilted, as soon as he turned his back there would be another lineman, or undertaker, or professional tongue wrestler – she smiled remembering that one – or, heaven forfend, Huston himself. For her appetites were insatiable and what happened in dark rooms, or in well-lit rooms with her eyes closed, was beyond her control. Mutt was too drunk to fathom the mysteries of Ivy’s libido but for a moment he was less worried about her fate as a prisoner of war than the constancy of her love. He shook his head stammering, agents expecting him to throw up, and purged from his mind all doubts about his wife, for if there was any experience in his life that was real, and reliable, and rock solid, it was his marriage, and it was his sacred duty to preserve it, somehow, against the will of Skava.

“Who is the ring for?” an agent asked, looking at his hand.

“A ring,” he sputtered, “it’s for women.”

This made no sense.

“The women I consort with, in the spas, they like a ring,” he improvised. “It shows they are breaking someone’s heart. The sweetest kiss is stolen.”

The agents were too intoxicated to take offense at this affront to the Party’s ten points of morality. Mutt decided he had read enough of Posy’s musings and fabricated his own speech for Huston, delivered from a bar stool to fellow drunks nursing bladders of spirits in a tavern in the ring forest by the lapping waters of the rising ocean.

“Gentleman, we all like women. God made them to gratify our lust, and for that I am a believer. But what should be a simple pleasure has been complicated by vows. When we eat, we do not commit to the food. When we breathe, we do not commit to the air. When we drink, we do not commit to the beverage.” Mutt paused and took a swig of cognac. “Well, I commit.” He was getting into character. “So why then when we know a woman must we know her another day? For what purpose is a promise? What we call love has a natural course, long enough to produce a child, but not to raise one. Let us all accept that it is our duty as men to provide for women and children, but why one woman, why our own children? Does not the hard experience of heartbreak and, in its absence, boredom teach that love is best renewed in the arms of another? I may be a sullen wretch but my peaks are higher than your valleys, and I live to climb another day. Do not speak to me of marriage. Speak only of prison, a stale bed and barren walls, and bars through which to view missed opportunities. Surely I may deserve such a fate but let us not call it a reward, but punishment. For so long as I have liberty I will seek out the next conquest, and pray be the conquest of another. Why pay extra for a single course? That tingle you feel from the discovery of new flesh, you will not find in the embrace of familiar. That thrill you feel from piercing a new woman, is not the same a thousand pierces later. We were born to spread our essence. A single cup will overflow.”

Now would come Huston’s moment of truth.

“Gentlemen, I do have a love. She is named for flowers, a posy, and was made by God above to be plucked, but never cultivated. She’s a perennial, really more a monthly, if there is a word for that, and I have visited upon her more watering than a flower should bear. But now new thoughts are entering my head. Have I not plucked enough? Is my nose not gay? Should I not cultivate a flower? Could I find subtle variations in sameness to pique my interest? Or am I forever condemned to search out new beds, flowers that become weeds, and die in the isolation that comes from pressing petals?”

Mutt was reading Ivy’s passages about Posy while improvising Huston’s speech. He was speaking automatically in a drunken stupor, in the same manner he composed songs on request in the canteen, but was consciously absorbed in Posy’s further ruminations about marital compromise, wondering what Ivy really thought of him.

“Gentlemen,” Mutt addressed the agents lifting his eyes from the drafts, “now is your chance to make literary history. As an author I cannot decide on the future of Huston and Posy. So I place the matter in your hands. Do I write them toward marriage? Or toward dissolution? A show of hands for marriage!”

To Mutt’s surprise the vote for marriage was near unanimous, these servants of the cause being romantics at heart.

“Then it is settled,” he announced. “There will be a wedding.”

He passed out in his chair and did not recall a word of his reading when he awoke. His head was spinning, cognac still in his system, his eyes struck by brightness. The administrative tent was gone and agents lifted his chair, the last object in an open field pocked with fresh graves, and carried him to the exposed bed of a military truck on loan to Interior. No one spoke a word and he wondered if he had offended them with his reading. It occurred to him he had done nothing to negotiate the safety of his wife and child. What could he do? What could he say to Skavian goons that would save his loved ones rather than getting himself killed? His eyes rolled helplessly in his head so he closed them, oblivious to the lush vegetation on the road to Leri Deri, swaying fern forests and frond trees, mimosa puffs needled by hummingbirds, carnivorous orchids and poppies nibbling small newts, groves of grapefruit and apricot swollen to droop.

He removed his eyes from the crook of his elbow, able finally to tolerate sunlight, as the transport rolled into the outskirts of the capital. Shanties lined the dusty road extending outward as far as the eye could see, hovels with tin roofs painted white, open pit latrines, piles of burning garbage, skeletal children chasing trucks seeking alms. This was not how Mutt envisioned Leri Deri. Indeed he had never seen such concentrated misery even in Arland propaganda about Skava, which had not kept pace with Muglair’s utopia. These were peasants, Hutfamilies, uprooted by the disastrous policies of the Land Ministry, come to the capital for new livelihoods, now a breeding pool of cheap labor for munitions and manufacture, a ready supply of expendable soldiers, and a cesspool from which a job in Interior looked like the throne of God. The shanties gave way to outer boroughs filled with small boxy cottages built decades ago for the established working class, then to residences of increasing grandeur sporting colonnades, atriums, and palladium highlights, the former homes of Inta overlords now reserved for Party dignitaries, and finally to the boulevards, greens, monuments, capitol buildings, and concrete canyons of city center. Leri Deri was a world removed from the war currently unfolding in the salient with a massive Arland counteroffensive and along the Edge with bombing campaigns from fixed artillery positions from Arland into Skava and vice versa depending upon who controlled what stretches of the fold, with the portion due west of Leri Deri held by Skava as prime defensive terrain protecting the capital. Mutt glimpsed the Regency and People’s Hall on opposite ends of the great sandstone plaza, and the Stairway to the Sun pointing directly to molten glory like a saluting fist. From the open bed of the truck, wedged into a corner with his half-slope gravity, he saw the mossy spires and vine-covered arches of the Cathedral of the Angels of God, fibrously stretched like the innards of a berel gourd pulled slowly apart, before they disappeared from view as the vehicle descended a ramp into the bowels of an enormous rectanguloid edifice, the headquarters of Interior.

Agents lifted him wordlessly from the bed of the truck and carried him through a security foyer to elevator banks. On one side the shafts led down, a direction from which captives usually returned in biowaste containers, and on the other side up. He was taken to an upper floor and deposited in a round guest room built for gravity conversion with a view of city center. His escort left and he occupied himself reading back issues of The Cause wondering what would happen to him next. Eventually he was roused – he did not recall falling asleep – by a minder in a one-piece suit welcoming him as an honored guest of the Party. He would be expected to resume publication of The Sphere with special consideration for the political needs of the moment. Mutt did not fully appreciate until later that he was being asked to shade the story for Skavian war propaganda. The minder asked if there was anything the Party could do for him and he decided now was the time to ask.

“Sir, I was captured with a woman and child. I wish them to join me in Leri Deri.”

The minder looked at him curiously.

“That will not be a problem.”

Mutt was pleased with himself. He had achieved the status of welcome guest in Leri Deri and would rescue his family from harm. Skava was not such a bad place after all. But if Ivy Morven was a wanted criminal, would Interior so blithely grant her freedom? She had given her real name when captured in the salient and he did not believe his request could place her at further risk. If they wished to punish her for alleged crimes they could do so already. He might jeopardize his own safety by acknowledging their relationship but he had no concern for himself. It was his duty to reunite his family regardless of personal peril. Attendants frequently brought pitchers of water and tarpin bread to speed his conversion as he again suffered cabin fever in the curve of a rounder. With reams of blank paper supplied by the minder he began editing the next installment of the Sphere in which Ivy teased Posy’s great secret, whatever it was, the supposedly horrible truth about the cosmos Ivy refused to reveal in the Notches. He had great difficulty working with Ivy’s lyrical prose, his insertions standing out for their leaden quality. He could not submit her drafts unedited; they were too racy and implicitly critical of his host country. Yet he fell to writing in the same style with which he started the story in the hut loft, full of details without purpose, facts and figures without narrative. He remembered his improvisational lyrics in the canteen and sought to recreate that free association. He did not have access to alcohol and deemed drinking unwise in the headquarters of Interior, so he began practicing automatic writing on blank sheets, filling them with whatever thoughts came to mind for pages and pages, then transposing the unbridled style to editing The Sphere.

What he found most effective was pretending to be his wife. That was a challenge for a woman as mysterious and emotionally turbulent as Ivy, but he discovered that if he imagined her desiring him, he could achieve a romantic passion more publishable than Posy’s barnyard urges. He was confident he accurately captured his wife’s attraction to him, this woman who chose him to father her child, whose commitment to their marriage and home was absolute, and took autoerotic pleasure envisioning their physical union through her eyes and her body, as a woman coupling with himself, imagining it to be quite a treat. He could not make sense of his wife’s eschatology, Posy’s religious belief that the apocalypse would soon arrive bringing cosmic revelations, so he reworded earlier foreshadowings from back issues of The Cause to sustain the mystery of the end times in the current installment. He was happy with the final product and invited the minder to sit through a reading, which he did with bemused detachment.

Mutt asked about his family daily and was told that transfer of Skava’s visitors, as prisoners of war were called, required coordination among various Ministries with overlapping jurisdictions. This would take time but he should not worry because the woman and child were in good hands and would arrive soon. He asked to send a message to Ivy but was informed that would take just as long as fetching her to Leri Deri. He began to suspect the minder was not being honest and perhaps had not even requested a transfer. He told the minder this woman was a talented editor necessary for publication of The Sphere. The minder responded that it was his duty to submit publishable drafts to The Cause and if he failed the Party might reconsider his status. Mutt realized he was more visitor than guest and decided he best be careful. He thanked the minder for his efforts and promised to be patient, pretending not to notice the threat, then asked for a tour of the capital. Two weeks had passed, his conversion was progressing swiftly, and he could no longer sit still in the cramped guest room. He needed the stimulation of outside sights, sounds, and scents to collect himself and to figure out how he might extricate his family, and himself, from Skava’s clutches. He was still in good standing with the Party and was assigned a guide by the Commerce Ministry, which held jurisdiction over tourism and entertainment. The minder escorted him to an open motorized vehicle powered by electric battery waiting outside the security foyer with an adjustable rumble seat for guests of differing gravities. An official guide, along with the minder, accompanied him on a driving tour through center city, circling the capitol complex of the People’s Hall and Regency with the great sandstone plaza, the locus of revolutions and executions, stretching over a mile in between dotted with towering fern gardens, ponds stocked with iridescent looper fish, and playgrounds filled with toy stocks and gallows. In the center of the plaza a circular city green provided an oasis of shade trees from the middle of which emerged a multi-storied terraced birdbath fountain spoked with poles dangling feeders designed to attract hummingbirds and Skavian birds of paradise. Anchored on the People’s Hall side of the plaza, the Stairway to the Sun began its ascent along the angle of the sun’s rays, rising toward its fire and terminating in the martyrs’ shrine a mile above the Regency.

Still reeling from his predicament, Mutt feared he might be permanently displaced in Skava never again seeing familiar faces. The tour guide began driving back to headquarters and Mutt told him to stop. They were going to Lake Looda, he announced. The minder said the Lake was beyond their range but his guest insisted he make an exception. As a Hutman returning from exile he longed to visit the birthplace of Hutman civilization, founded according to legend along the shores of the ancient lake. But he could not reveal his true motivation. He was homesick and wanted to return to his hut on the mound in the Notches, surrounded by exploding steamboats and a shoreline filled with lotus trees and fanciful creatures gulping lake water, his wife relaxing in the bowl chair and daughter chasing midges, all beneath a sky of prayer flags and white netting.

The minder consulted the driver and concluded the near shore of the Lake would be within the approved radius. They drove east from the capital though muscadine vineyards and citrus estates of increasing opulence until a turquoise bay shone through cobblestone alleyways of a lakeside cottage resort. Mutt could not contain his excitement and pleaded to see the famous landing of the Looda steamboats. The landing was undoubtedly beyond the minder’s approved range but he decided to accommodate his enthusiastic guest. They drove along the rim of the basin, the waters mostly obscured by forest, before descending a short drive to the former landing, now graced with a single decommissioned steamboat that operated briefly as a restaurant before closing. The boat was boarded over and partially submerged, its gaily painted stacks faded in the sunlight and tilting in different directions. From the landing the lake stretched seventy miles to the far shore on a long winding axis cut by symmetrical cross-bays like a stitched wound. Flat-bottomed rowboats rested on the grass in a deserted park along the shore, a means of transit to small islands matted against the hazy horizon floating in the current. These islands were built by ancient Hutmen from bundled tube stalk as a defense against shoreline marauders and could be maneuvered by pole or paddle across the Lake. They had been abandoned for generations and now drifted aimlessly across the waters waiting for storms and saturation to drag them down.

Mutt was at a third slope in his conversion and leapt from the rumble seat, stumbling toward the boats on ground that felt to him steeply descending. The minder caught up intending to restrain his wayward charge but Mutt invoked the martyrs. He was here in the cradle of Hutman civilization to pay them homage and one could not meddle with sacred duty. The minder regretted the latitude he was showing his young guest but decided there was no risk of flight, only drowning. The guest was already in the boat paddling eastward, pulled forward by his partial Arland gravity and realizing how strenuous the paddle back would be. He beached on a sagging edge of the island and began exploring the terrain, grabbing roots and shrubs for balance. He figured at most three huts could have fit, their occupants living off fish and small vegetable plots, poling around the lake in search of freshwater springs, hunting grounds, and cranberry bogs along the shore. But today there were only a few dwarf lotus trees and a soggy clearing in the middle with lake water bubbling up under foot pressure. He reclined by the rowboat facing back toward the landing and was transported to his hut surrounded by Ivy’s murals. Here he was on a floating island in Lake Looda, a steamboat docked across the way, lotus trees and driftwood gracing the shoreline, wispy clouds trailing across the azure sky, pleasure boats visible in the distance to either side. He even saw a beaver relaxing on a mud bank on the shore completing the picture.

But nothing was right about this scene. The steamboat was decrepit and sinking, its glory days long past, the island was barren of life with no trace of a hut or human habitation, and the sky was coagulating into gray clouds. Upon further inspection the beaver was a discarded bladder of vegetable fat with a flap lolling open like a tail. Most depressing was the stark desolation of the island, with no life, no family to call it home, not even the buzz of insects. He was overcome with grief at his profound isolation. For over four years he had held his wife every sleeping hour and grown accustomed to her constant company, never spending more than a few hours apart, conversing with her even in his imagination. The child whose nurture had organized their lives since her conception in the angle, a precious and reliable source of energy who had given her parents common purpose, was nowhere to be found. He had so integrated his life with these loved ones that he felt his body was incomplete without them, that he was trying to walk and grasp and feel with limbs that had been removed.

The image of the fresh graves at the processing center, barely noticed at the time through hungover eyes, crossed his mind in a painful flash. Were Ivy and Hope resting in unmarked graves in a Skavian killing field, their fates never to be known, bodies never to be mourned? He had been in denial about the evil of Muglair’s regime, finding in his own humane treatment a cause for optimism while suppressing memories of the destruction of the Notches and abuses of prisoners of war. Yet he knew that the separation from his family could be permanent in this pitiless nation, a prospect that was only now resonating emotionally. He had sustained himself in Leri Deri on fantasies of reunion, on the belief that the war would soon end with displaced persons returned to their homelands to rejoin loved ones. But it was just as likely he would never see them again, that they were already dead from Skavian brutality or would be before the war ended. His brain could not handle these dark thoughts so he stripped naked and dived into the waters for a sensory immersion, opening his eyes beneath the surface in search of the mythical Looda serpent, which he hoped was not hungry today. He needed to bathe in the mystical lake, to feel purifying waters caress his body, to grow again in mother’s fluid, to experience the odd effects of gravity tugging him not down but off center. Floating on his back he stroked toward the landing then relaxed at his natural angle, head emerging from the water at sixty degrees, allowing his Arland matter to pull him like a current back to the island. The warm waters soothed like a womb and upon emerging he was reborn, a process of renewal for which the healing waters were renowned. Invigorated by the cleansing, he again felt confident he could reestablish his former life and triumph over all obstacles, although in the back of his mind he feared he was only renewing his denial. Muglair’s utopia was like an underwater labyrinth. There may be an exit but he would drown before finding it.

Back in the city he again asked for a detour. On the island, scarcely audible above the breeze, he had heard a woman’s voice beckoning him to the martyrs’ shrine. The minder was irritated by yet another request, the guide less so having been trained to accommodate fussy guests, but was impressed by Mr. Weathers’ dedication to the cause, the weeping he heard from the floating island in the sacred Lake, the desire to offer libations to the fallen martyrs at the summit of the sacred Stairway. His escorts led him across the pale crimson stone of the plaza to the massive anchors of the monument. With his mixed gravity the angle of the Stairway, normally fifty degrees for Skavians, was a near vertical eighty degrees. He could not complete the pilgrimage by foot and instead took a funicular to the summit, one of two on either side of the steps. Arrayed between the anchors of the Stairway and the great Hall were six flagpoles displaying Skavian banners, including the traditional plain burgundy pennant with golden tufts, a grass green flag with yellow arrow bent in a circle pointing tip to tail, an early symbol of the cause, and a saluting fist before a sea of stern faces, Muglair’s preferred symbol of the Party. Bouquets of flowers strewn around the base of each pole piled into fragrant heaps. Mutt learned only later that the flagpoles were the same spikes on which his parents, and Ivy’s parents, were murdered nineteen years earlier, lovingly recovered from storage after the revolution and displayed again on the plaza for all patriotic Hutmen to revere. Each day cups of blood from animal sacrifice were raised by pulley to the knob of the poles and poured down the nickel plating to remind the people of the martyrs’ sacrifice, their selfless contribution to history that felled the hated Inta regime and gave rise to the new Hutman savior, Muglair Putie.

The Stairway was originally built for sun worship in prehistory as a series of linked platforms constructed of siderock buoyed to pull taut on chains along the angle of the sun’s rays. Pilgrims would ascend the platforms on their trek to the temple a mile above an elaborate palisade where the Regency now stood. It remained the highest structure on the planet until the Stoika, initially designed to exceed it by a foot but reduced after Skava filed a formal protest, was built to equal height. Leri Deri had been the center of Skavian power from the earliest recorded history, with control shifting between Inta and Hutman every few decades amid occasional spells of joint rule invariably ending in bloodshed and oppression. Over the centuries the platforms and chains were periodically replaced and now consisted of reinforced sandstone steps a hundred feet wide linked by enormous iron chains, free to sway in the violent winds and thermals but always stretching with gravity toward the sun. If the anchors were severed the entire edifice would launch into space and cross the universe until vaporizing in solar flames. The prospect of a solar journey on the ancient Stairway was a recurring theme in Skavian prophecy and literature.

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The Telstar was just one of many consoles obviously influenced by Baer’s creation. But throughout this roller- coaster ride with Magnavox and beyond, Baer did his best to keep calm and to look on the bright side. His struggle to bring videogames to every home with a television set was undoubtedly a superhuman feat, the Alan Moore/Watchmen kind, which required years of stamina in the face of unremitting disappointment as doors constantly closed in his face. The business travails involved in touting his invention would have
broken lesser people.

Ralph Baer remained strong because he knew in his gut that games would soon become part of our collective consciousness. His game machine didn’t become an overnight hit. But the ideas he put forth when he first proposed TV Games are still the basis of games today. The sports games he outlined and prototyped would become billion- dollar industries in themselves—when made by others a decade or so later. His brainstorm for multiplayer online games also became a billion- dollar industry—three decades later. His idea to incorporate cable TV as a distribution medium would become reality thirty years later, when broadband cable allowed games to be downloaded onto the newest consoles. And that light gun that shot at the screen was not so terribly different from the wireless controllers and guns of today. So back in the seventies, Ralph Baer was the Seer, a quiet Nostradamus. Every idea he laid out on paper came to fruition in the future.

Yet in the very near future, one of Baer’s visions would be imitated and reproduced in disturbingly familiar, and spectacularly successful, form. Someone on the West Coast wanted to beat the Seer at his own game by popularizing his own version of Baer’s Ping- Pong game. This small company honcho with an expansive need for success was a savvy, calculating giant of a man who Baer felt was the ultimate bloviator. “He’s a plain old shit. A real son of a bitch,” Baer would say.

Excerpted from All Your Base Are Belong To Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture by Harold Goldberg. Copyright © 2011 by Harold Goldberg. Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

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By mid- October 1971, Magnavox felt they had a potential hit on their hands. Market surveys were held over a period of four days at the company’s retail stores in Los Angeles and Grand Rapids. Eighty- nine percent of those who played Skill-O-Vision for a couple of hours liked it “very much.” Even though just eighty- two people participated, a laughable number by today’s standards for surveys, there was a certain tempered glee in the interoffice memos that circulated to key executives in Magnavox enclaves around the country. On October 15, one executive wrote with barely muted enthusiasm, “The price of $75 presents no barrier.”

When Magnavox became involved in Ralph Baer’s project, they took over in the way a giant wave totally engulfs a small shell on the beach. The change of the name from TV Games to Skill-O-Vision was kind of a move sideways. The latter recalled Hollywood producer Mike Todd’s Smell-O-Vision, a dated technique of adding scents to movies that never really took off. When the name was changed to Odyssey, it was an inspired move, to a name that Baer thought really sang. It sounded like the beginning of a mysterious, futuristic adventure. Additionally, the look of the box was quite beautiful for the time. That fake brown wood grain was gone. Added were pieces of sleek white and black plastic and a box that looked like something out of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nonetheless while TV Games wasn’t a sexy name, it did say exactly what the console would do. The name Odyssey did nothing of the sort.

The inventor’s input became even less valuable to Magnavox as the launch date approached. Baer himself was transferred between two divisions within Sanders, and he began to suffer from depression. After a hernia operation in February 1972, he languished in a hospital room, saturnine and in some pain. Then Campman and Etlinger arrived with Cheshire cat smiles on their faces. They unrolled a long sheet of paper that bore an oversized facsimile of a check for $100,000, the first payment from Magnavox for licensing. It didn’t matter that the check went into Sanders’s bank account. Baer felt valued again, and his doldrums lifted in moments. In the second or two it took for a blip on the Odyssey to cross the screen, Baer felt happier and years younger than his age.

When Baer attended the press presentation for Magnavox products at a restaurant in Central Park in late May, he beamed like a proud father. Everything was hyperreal, from the heady smell of spring flowers to the excited looks on journalists’ faces in the room. But he wasn’t introduced as the inventor of the Odyssey. He wasn’t introduced at all. To Baer, it mattered little. He was struck by the splendor of the finished machine. As he left and walked through the park, he was flying high.

The Odyssey hit the stores backed by a fairly odd marketing plan. Consumers were somewhat bemused by a Frank Sinatra commercial touting the machine. After all, Sinatra had retired from the music business in 1971 because his career was doing so miserably at the time. His recent movies (like the awful western comedy Dirty Dingus Magee) were failures, as were his recent albums; although critically acclaimed, the album Watertown had sold just thirty thousand copies. (Ol’ Blue Eyes didn’t release his landmark comeback tune, “New York, New York,” until 1973.) Kids, the target audience, didn’t care about Sinatra; kids then liked the Beatles’ solo efforts, Elton John, David Bowie, and Stevie Wonder. Magnavox’s pitch was considered completely uncool. Worse, the Sinatra commercial indicated, perhaps intentionally, that the system would work only with Magnavox televisions. In reality, it worked with any TV that had a rabbit ears connection in the back and a picture tube large enough to hold the overlays. Despite the confusion, people paid for one hundred thousand Odysseys at $100 each during the 1972 holiday season.

The stylish magazine and newspaper ads were perhaps better selling tools. They were artfully detailed and packed with juicy information, so exciting that the games seemed to jump off the page and proudly dance in midair. Even the copywriting sang like the best of Madison Avenue poetry: “With Odyssey, you participate in television. You’re not just a spectator. The fascinating Casino Action of Monte Carlo, the excitement of Wimbledon, the thrills of a heated game of football—can all be duplicated right in your own living room.”

Yet the Odyssey did not reap the expected rewards. Each machine cost Magnavox almost $50 to make. The 350,000 made and sold between 1972 and 1975 cost approximately $15 million. Testing the unit with consumers added at least $1 million. Sinatra’s fee added another million. Magnavox’s receipts came in at only $20 million. Baer postulated that the returns of some defective products ate up much of the remaining profits. He tried to convince the company of the need to release more and more games to support the machine, perhaps the first time the razor- and- blades economic theory was applied to videogames. In other words, the Magnavox system should have been sold like a Gillette razor, cheaply, and forward- thinking games should have been sold like blades, where the real profit lay. As the years passed, Baer wrote impassioned letters to Magnavox, suggesting new games. He told Magnavox of numerous Odyssey knockoffs around the world, but the company didn’t immediately pursue these ripoff artists in court. There were plans to sell a kind of Magna- Odyssey, a fattened device that included a seventeen- inch color TV and an impressive cabinet for $424. Baer was brought in to try to figure out what to take out to get the price down appreciably. But the Magna- Odyssey was never released. Like many ideas at Magnavox, it became severely bogged down by company posturing and politics.

Through most of the brainstorming and all of the hoopla, Baer was relegated to the sidelines, like an aging football star aching to be sent in for a big play. Yes, he and Sanders had licensed the rights to a mammoth corporation. And Sanders certainly received monetary rewards for the contract into which they had entered. But Baer was not just a “company man” who didn’t care about anything more than his weekly salary or about becoming rich from his videogame inventions. In fact, he did think about asking for more money and getting himself a lawyer on a few occasions. He was never told exactly how much money was coming in from worldwide licenses of his game technology and from where; Sanders feared he would sue for more money. They tried to keep all sales data from him. But he saw the total projected on a big screen at Sanders’s monthly meetings. He knew he could have gone to court. He was sure he could have won. But he chose not to, feeling as he did that he still had much more inventing to do.

Excerpted from All Your Base Are Belong To Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture by Harold Goldberg. Copyright © 2011 by Harold Goldberg. Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

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Dunder did not have a disposal plan for the enormous number of corpses generated by the slaughterhouse. The perimeter expansion was visible to prying eyes and as a result bodies were again piled high in the courtyards of the interior barracks. Sackcloth was spread across window exteriors of the barracks to form crude curtains but Ivy could easily see the scope of the butchery through the many moth holes. It was unlike any horror she had witnessed in Dunder and there had been many. Disposal of these carcasses would require an enormous commitment of prison labor, for the prep work and launching were beneath the station of overseer. The barracks chief rounded up a detail for marching into the courtyard. Ivy mustered for the call out of fear of remaining with the Arlanders, not knowing their place in the scheme of slaughter. The fire pit had been filled in and regraded after the first wave of corpses from the Edge battles was incinerated. Fortunately the administration had the foresight to produce huge numbers of bladders so that future immolations would not be necessary, although even a warehouse full might not have proven sufficient for the new mounds of bodies rising as high as twenty feet in the courtyards. Work details periodically swapped assignments to gain the experience necessary to supplement labor needs as they arose. Prisoners trundled in carts of bladders which Ivy’s detail carried one by one to staging areas in the central courtyard for corpse launching. Another detail removed bodies from the piles, working in tandem on stepladders to reach the summits, and moved them to the center for linkage to bladders. One of the inefficiencies of Bogin’s method of killing was that perfectly good clothing went to waste, too drenched with blood and torn by blade work to salvage. Details stripped the corpses naked ripping off clothes with box cutters, removing jewelry and personal effects, and searching cavities for valuables.

Historically the camp disposed of one body at a time tied to a bladder filled slowly by hose with upwater. A sidebrick placed in a pocket of the bladder provided a slight off-line trajectory so that a corpse disarticulating in space or detaching from a bladder would not fall back to Skava. When the bladder had sufficient buoyancy a tether hook would be released and its cargo of stilled flesh, covered in cloth to maintain deniability, rocketed skyward never to return. Prisoner details were now instructed on a new method, one of Bogin’s innovations, of tying a rope with adjustable collars to multiple bodies to form a chain with bladders spaced at intervals to provide buoyancy. The overseers called these arrangements daisy chains and they yielded significant efficiency gains. Bladder capacity wasted on individual corpses could be conserved with a daisy chain by calibrating more precisely the number of bladders required for uplift. Where under the old method six bladders were needed for six bodies, even for children and petite women, under the new method three or four might suffice. It was also quicker for details to launch multiple bodies at once, with the bladders filled simultaneously and a single lever kick, rather than repeating the launch sequence individually for each corpse. No attempt was made to cover the daisy chains in cloth, the sheer scope of the effort not allowing time for such niceties. A debate was raging in camp administration over possible new efficiencies like the daisy chain. All these bodies, healthy and well-fed unlike longstanding prisoners, were wasted resources launched into the ether. Could not the meat and skin be put to good use, the meat for the protein needs of prisoners to engender a stronger and more productive labor force, the skins for assembly of bladders for disposal of more corpses? These were not times for ancient taboos of bodily integrity, not in a war of all against all. The supply of thabans was dwindling and their flesh and hides could not meet current needs. The camp had facilities in the pens for butchering and skinning and carving and curing and tanning and what Hutman could risk failure of the cause over sentimental attachment to the dignity of Inta death? This was not a debate to be resolved in Dunder without guidance from the top, and a query had already been sent to Leri Deri.

Ivy’s detail was assigned the task of linking together daisy chains in the courtyard center while another detail filled bladders on the ropes with upwater from hoses connected to underground storage tanks. Her first chain consisted entirely of small children who were among the first victims of the slaughterhouse because of the burden of their care. Her mind was scrubbed of feeling in this awful task but it occurred to her that she could not tell the difference between Hutman and Inta once stripped of clothing and adornments. The Interior Ministry published numerous diagnostics complete with diagrams and measurements distinguishing the races but to Ivy’s eyes they looked the same. Indeed she herself passed as Inta her entire life despite being born of Hutman parents because there was no reliable visual difference. Muglair liked to preach of the Inta’s rotund faces and squat bodies and walleyes but there was no evidence of this. She herself read in school, before the full flourishing of the cause, that there were no consistent physiological differences between Hutman and Inta whether by height or weight or phenotype other than slight statistical variations in hair and eye color. But the differing physical traits were so commonly shared across populations, and intermarriage was so prevalent, that one could not infer ethnicity of an individual based upon them. What distinguished the Inta was their self-appellation, their culture and traditions, and, in the villages at least, their peasant dress with macramé panels and abalone jewelry and pull-on footwear without ties. The children in Ivy’s ring were no older than Hope, toddlers only, little girls with hair in glittery bows, little boys in jumpsuits with button panels, all speared through the chest with bayonets in a binge of violence. What passed through their young minds watching companions slaughtered awaiting their turn? Probably an unthinking terror and failure to foresee their own fate even as a blade punctured their chests, even then expecting a parent to save them from the horrific pain and gush of blood, a mother to kiss the wound and make it better. Ivy clasped the collars around the necks of these little ones, their slaughter fresh and bodies lithe, following instructions to tighten without regard to airway constriction, a pointless but instinctive concern for dead throats, while the bladders filled to the point of levitation, the tethers growing taut and tugging on buried anchors. An overseer kicked a lever sending the daisy chain skyward, these bodies forever lost to the planet that generated them. A small troupe of living children was led into the courtyard as the slaughterhouse backed up and their minders could think of no other option but to consolidate the processes of killing and disposal. Ivy thought she was beyond capacity for horror but was proven wrong as she watched live children forced to the ground squirming with collars tightened around their necks to the point of choking, bladders growing tumescent, and a mindless kick on a lever sending them skyward to expire if not from the collars then from the thinning air of space.

A swarm of starlings swirled above the courtyard moving as a coordinated mass like a whirligig or banner flapping in the wind, settling down into the courtyard before taking flight in unison from the shooing of agents to darken the sky in a vortex. Overseers and prisoners pointed westward at approaching shapes visible through the multitudinous flock. Arland had been monitoring the slaughter in the camps and decided in its helplessness to dispatch small flotillas from the Armada to bomb the charnel houses. Air defenses around the camps were minimal, the Defense Ministry content to let Arland kill Skava’s traitors if it wished to waste ordnance. The flotilla rolled cluster bombs onto the plain before the camp opening a gaping hole across the outer perimeter and killing dozens of new arrivals in their path. Freshly impounded Inta, knowing the fate that awaited them in the slaughterhouse, poured en masse through the opening chased by detachments of perimeters guards mowing them down with semi-automatic weapons. The bombing raid continued across the camp taking out several barracks and production facilities but not the locus of killing in the slaughterhouse, Arland having no reliable information on camp layout and unable to discern from aerial observation. The processing of bodies from butchering to disposal momentarily ceased as the details returned to barracks. Agents and overseers departed on a zealous hunt for escapees, combing the streets of Dunder, attics, closets, cellars, sheds, wells, ditches, barns, outbuildings, stump holes in former orchards, and most intensively the hinterland forest. The authorities resolved to track down all fugitives and return them to the camp not out of vengeance but from adherence to plan. For they all knew that Inta scum would escape given the chance to continue their poisoning of Hutman society. That they had done so added no new information about their character. It was the duty of Skavian forces to see that historical justice was carried out in the manner prescribed by the coordinated Ministries. Because of the disorganization at intake the camp administration never achieved an accurate tally of escapes and blanketed the nearby villages with notices to beware desperate convicts who would rape their women and kidnap their children. Bogin ordered expeditions into the forest to root out bands of subversives with the ultimate goal that not a single Inta survive. Within a day the camp surveyed the damage from the bombings and restarted the process of extermination. The Inta awaiting slaughter had spent the day surrounded by guards terrified of their fate, some choosing to resist meeting instant gunfire, others choosing to pray and make peace with their maker. The field coordinator was proud to report to Interior that not a single agent was lost to Inta treachery during the search operation, so professional was its execution.

Overseers entered the barracks to muster details for renewed disposal duty, the piles again growing high from the death factory. The chief did not organize details this time and Ivy was segregated with Arlanders due to her Inta wristband. After the Skavians left for the courtyard a cohort of special agents arrived to round up the Arlanders. Ivy presented her band saying she was miscategorized and was struck across the face with a pistol butt. The agents marched the Arlanders toward the outer camp apparently to join the masses awaiting slaughter. Ivy had her own special escort presumably due to her impudence in displaying her band. But the agent ordered her to turn from the column toward the Interior bunker and followed behind with his pistol drawn. She passed through the special gate now wishing for an anonymous death in the slaughterhouse. For the diversion here by a special agent could only mean she was going to headquarters in Leri Deri. Whatever the horrors of death in Dunder, the purpose of the slaughter was simply to kill, not to torture. She knew that headquarters viewed interrogation as an exercise in crushing the spirit and maximizing bodily pain before death. Entering the bunker basement she realized how close to death she already was, her body wasted and mind shattered from the relentless horror. The director greeted her escorting agent, avoiding eye contact with the prisoner and feigning indifference to the routine transport of a wench. He was embarrassed to admit, even to himself, how Ivy Morven had outmaneuvered him on her previous two visits. Whatever his failures in handling this prisoner, she would now be in Bogin’s hands and his was a power she could not resist.

The director and two agents from headquarters loaded her into a transport in an underground garage connected to a tunnel emerging beyond the camp perimeter. The vehicle contained a flywheel revved in its casing to a high-pitched whine to supplement sidewater propulsion. She sat in a back seat with agents on either side, the director in the front next to the driver, all deathly quiet. Was she buying at least a few more hours of life with this detour? The fear and silence of the moment vaguely stimulated her conscience and she thought of how terribly she missed her husband and daughter. This was how it was going to end, in the torture chambers of Bogin, her loved ones probably already dead, their frozen bodies journeying across space, none of them ever knowing the fate of the others, none having appreciated the finality of their separation in that edge transport. The truck rumbled for hours across bumpy roads stopping twice at regional stations to retorque the flywheel and refill tanks. They passed within miles of Shamba where the Flume continued its mortal drain of the Sea, the column of water massive and uncontrolled, widening relentlessly from erosion. Eventually she saw through tinted glass the Stairway to the Sun angling heavenward to vertiginous heights, the architectural symbol of the Skavian capital with its ancient temple at the summit rededicated under Muglair as a shrine to the Hutman martyrs. The transport navigated the stone pavement of the capital through greens and monuments and canyons of concrete before descending a ramp into the bowels of the Interior Ministry headquarters a block off the plaza across from the cathedral. She had seen in her peripheral vision evidence of substantial bombing – entire neighborhoods flattened – but the infernal building into which she was descending was, as far as she could tell, unscathed, protected by the Almighty himself as Muglair proclaimed.

Agents in business attire approached the transport and asked the director to exit. For a moment Ivy detected fear on his face and almost felt pity. Interior had no reason to call him to Leri Deri other than to execute him. They could acquire whatever information he had to offer through reports and could undoubtedly extract more information from the subject by their own methods. Ivy wanted to feel sympathy for this man who had so brutally murdered inmates at Dunder because she believed her humanity required it. Did he have a wife? Did he have children? Did this cruel man who believed he was on the side of right and justice deserve the fate that beckoned? She could not find pity within her heart, only the suspicion that she was hopelessly blackened by its absence. She herself faced a more horrific death, the sadistic torture of Bogin designed as scientific inquiry to see how far a body and spirit can be broken before extinction. The director would likely receive a quick and painless death.

In her Harmour days she was once told of a loyalty chair in the bunker levels of headquarters. Agents subject to performance reviews would sit in the chair with arms clasped on armrests, necks collared against a backrest, a steel beam cocked behind their heads in a pneumatic tube. The reviewer had two buttons to press, one launching the beam instantly snapping the agent’s neck, the other releasing the clasps indicating satisfactory performance. Failure to submit to the loyalty chair was itself evidence of disloyalty, the punishment for which was confinement to the loyalty chair, with a predictable button selection based upon insubordination. The pneumatic tube could be pressurized so high that the beam would shear the head from the neck but this was unnecessarily messy. The point of the chair was not to inflict pain or bodily outrage but to gauge the devotion of agents and to cull underperformers. Or, in the case of the regional director of Dunder, to eliminate agents who knew too much. The chair was not a torture device but a tool of human resources. That the director would never have a moment to reflect upon why the launch button was pressed was a sign of Interior’s humanity. As a rule they did not torture their underperforming agents for fear of eroding morale among surviving colleagues. And the director himself was not an underperformer; his excellent work in the Dunder bunker would attest to that, as could the chief of Barracks No. 23 from the mutilated corpses her detail disposed. No, there were considerations more important than the life of a regional director, and where such a man had contact with a possessor of state secrets of the highest order, his continued breath was a threat to national security no matter how stellar his reviews.

Ivy remained seated in the transport waiting for the order to exit but the chassis pivoted one-hundred eighty degrees and the vehicle rolled back up the ramp. The vehicle nearly struck a pedestrian darting across the street, an insolent peasant who cursed the driver and slapped the car for the near miss not knowing the evil he was taunting. It occurred to Ivy that Interior must have sites blacker than headquarters. For all its renown the fact that headquarters was a known entity was a liability. The true work of professional interrogators, those who played the human body like a finely tuned instrument, would be carried out in some basement not found on any map, at the end of a long road guarded by sentinel booths descending into a bunker beneath a field carefully landscaped to blend with surrounding farmland, a bunker in which truth artists could perform, artists who had honed their skills through hundreds of performances and firsthand observations of the mastery of virtuosos. She pondered her stupidity for not acting on the Second of Skitton when she had a chance to stop all this, the loss of her family, the mass extermination of Inta, her impending execution, the apocalypse to follow. Through the fog of her altered state, from a tiny crevice in her sleep-deprived food-deprived water-deprived emotion-deprived body, she knew why she failed to act. It was her destiny to suffer, all fate had conspired to make it so, and she had merely intuited divine will. God had no plan for her distinct from the torturer. The infliction of suffering was the purpose of her being, and no higher aim was needed. Bogin was the closest person on earth to God, one who took great pride in the infliction of pain in myriad creative ways, for he knew, as did the Creator, that the human capacity to suffer far exceeded the capacity to love, and to fully utilize His creation one must inflict upon His subjects a neverending series of indignities, all for the joy of tragedy, for the delight of watching feeble hopes and bonds and affections give way to the only truths that matter, those of destruction and pain and loss, looking death in the eyes and accepting its inevitability with no satisfaction of a loved one to bid farewell, no hope for salvation in an afterlife, no fulfillment of earthly dreams before demise, no tying up of loose ends, just a cruel and painful and meaningless cessation of living.

Ivy would be the perfect victim of fate, of Bogin and of God, for she had nothing in Harmour, gained everything in the Notches, and lost all in Skava in agony and suffering. For only one who has known love after deprivation can fully appreciate the horror of losing. Her journey would now end with the scalpels and probes and needles and drills and slicing and flaying and tourniquets and shackles and vises and burning and bone work and alcohol and acid and insects and vermin of Bogin’s artists all surrounded by mirrors to witness with eyelids surgically removed the slow desecration of body in disorienting lights and sounds calculated to induce resignation with the drone of a torturer feigning logic and humanity while slowly ripping away tissue one layer at a time to see if he can break his record for sustaining life in the remnants of a butchered anatomy, to watch breathe a tangle of mutilated flesh with exposed organs and missing extremities on the delicate edge of succumbing for as long as possible, and thereby achieve the envy of colleagues and the glory of the status of maestro. Somewhere in the higher planes the force that gave birth to this awful planet was rubbing His hands in anticipation of the show to follow, all orchestrated by His faithful servant here on earth, Interior Minister Bogin.

Ivy’s life was one of endless black episodes punctuated by a single burst of light in the Notches. It was so black now her only solace was the numbness of her heart. No doubt the torturers would nurse her back to emotional health so she could experience the full horror of death. But as the transport rolled on, stopping to recharge the flywheel, she felt a new sensation. What if she were not being shipped to death? There remained a force on this planet that willed her salvation, an even greater evil than Bogin, one that knew of spiritual suffering beyond the capacity of ordinary mortals to inflict. She could be saved by this greater force but only for a new chapter of evil, a damnation eternal in scope without the relief of earthly demise, but it would close the current chapter in Skava and perhaps qualify as a form of hope, that the hell she believed she could not escape in Skava would by miracle be transformed into a more profound hell she could resist, for integral to this new evil was the playing of a game with cosmic consequences, and had she not demonstrated her resourcefulness time and again when given a chance, and was not the essence of a game that each player have a chance?

She was hooded by the agents and could no longer view the countryside. But the driver made no effort to mask the direction of travel and she knew they were driving north. On this planet driving straight in any direction long enough always led to an edge. And she knew what lay over the edge north of Leri Deri. That was the meaning of the cryptic word she heard in the Notches throwing cookie dough, the word she mysteriously uttered to her husband when forcibly separated in the edge transport, the name of a meeting place where one of two destinies would prevail. The vehicle stopped and she was dehooded and escorted to a crossing station at Skava’s edge with Leland. Elbows secured by agents, her emaciated form was nudged onto a sled manned by personnel from the governing directorate of this neutral side who had received word of transfer of a prisoner to be granted refugee status without inquiry. As the sled descended she watched Skava disappear like a floor through the open door of an elevator, a wretched country she hoped never to see again, a place of evil dressed in progress, where children perished on the tips of bayonets for grand lies, where whole peoples disappeared so that survivors could seek new divisions to justify murder. She was convinced that only one man on the planet had the power to save her from Muglair, a man with gifts not earthly in character, and he would be waiting for her here in Irla, the administrative capital of Leland, expecting as reward submission of the one who defied him, victory in the cosmic game. She would have no choice but to offer that reward because it was her only chance for reunion with those she loved, and fate had ordained that her suffering continue.

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The TelePrompter Corporation, the people who now make the machines from which newscasters and others on TV read, also outfitted sixty thousand families with cable TV. They were the country’s biggest cable provider at the time. After some prodding, one of the founders, Hubert “Hub” Schlafly, agreed to meet with Baer in New Hampshire. Schlafly so thoroughly enjoyed the games experience that he suggested to Irving Berlin Kahn, the company’s president, that he better get up to Nashua because something important was happening there. A week later, an impeccably dressed Kahn arrived from New York in a stretch limo. After that, there was a series of excited, hopeful meetings with TelePrompter executives in New York City. But a recession had hit the nation, and TelePrompter wimped out: They claimed to be out of money when it came to new projects. The same sour outcome occurred after initially optimistic meetings with Manhattan Cable and Warner Cable. Who knows how much more quickly today’s downloadable games would have become popular had Baer’s cable deal been given the green light back in the early 1970s. Conceivably, a company like TelePrompter might now be as vital as Sony or even Nintendo in the videogame industry.

If Baer’s dealings with the cable companies were disappointing, he hadn’t endured anything yet. When the TelePrompter deal fell through, Campman unceremoniously ordered an end to the flow of money for the game console. Other projects needed work, and Baer hadn’t proven the viability of TV Games as a business. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that Baer was able to convince Campman to add some more research and development money and reassign engineer Bill Harrison to the project. Harrison’s first order of business was to go shopping at Sears to purchase a plastic toy gun. But he wasn’t going to play cops and robbers. With a mini- flashlight- sized lightbulb and a transistor amplifier, Harrison refashioned the toy into a weapon that worked when aimed at an object on the TV. Even more valuable was Harrison’s savvy when it came to circuitry, which allowed him to reduce the number of parts in the latest prototype by about 50 percent. But the box looked somehow unadorned. Baer asked Harrison to go out to the store to get some self- adhesive kitchen cabinet liner that made the box look a little better. While the liner had a cheesy, basement rec room look, it inspired a generally catchy name, the Brown Box. Like the adhesive, it stuck.

In 1968, there were more than one hundred TV makers in the United States alone. Baer got the idea to phone each of them to see if one would consider manufacturing TV Games. He had some help:
Sanders’s director of patents, Louis Etlinger, was a smart New York lawyer with a folksy demeanor that made people believe he was from the sticks. Etlinger made the cold calls and charmed his way into
setting up appointment after appointment with major corporations. But it was Baer who had to sell the idea, based on his demonstrations with Harrison. While Baer was an erudite speaker, he didn’t have
a salesman’s swagger. In one early meeting, a buyer from Sears felt their numerous retail stores would be mobbed by kids who wanted to play the system in the store, but wouldn’t buy it. The Sears buyer felt
that the stores would be forced into the role of babysitter for hordes of screaming brats. Baer sorely needed a Madison Avenue marketer to help him from that point on. But there was no budget for a show-
person who would come to meetings armed with talking points and glittering generalities.

The meetings with RCA were typical of the constant challenges and failures that Baer faced time and time again. In April 1969, RCA began serious negotiations to license the Brown Box. But these fell apart when the megacorporation began playing dirty pool. After months of waiting, the contract finally arrived.

“It’s no good,” said Etlinger.

“What do you mean?” asked Baer.

“It leaves Sanders with next to nothing.”

“That’s it, then?” asked Baer.

“That’s it,” responded Etlinger.

When Bill Enders, one of the RCA executives who was earnestly gung- ho about the Brown Box, became the vice president of marketing at Magnavox, he engaged in extensive, detailed talks with Sanders through Baer and Etlinger. By mid- July, the two (along with Bill Harrison) were jetting to Magnavox’s corporate headquarters in Fort Wayne, Indiana, for the most significant demonstration of Baer’s life.

As showtime approached, the weather didn’t cooperate. The Midwest had been besieged by rainstorms since Independence Day, and the area around Fort Wayne had seen water rise to emergency proportions. The city of 178,000 was situated in a floodplain, and loyal residents had to take the good with the bad. Baer wondered if the high waters amounted to a bad sign. As he drove, he thought he was traveling in some surreal, Night of the Hunter–like land of religion. He saw revival tents everywhere. He wondered to himself, “If Magnavox’s engineers are this religious, can they make a good product?”

When he and Harrison set up the machine at the end of a highly polished oak table in a fancy conference room, they were nervous and on edge. Once the presentation began, Baer saw a room full of bored
executives who were probably more concerned about eating dinner and getting to the bar for a drink than with listening to a pitch about what they most likely considered to be a throwaway toy.

Yet there was one person who nodded his head, his eyes focused and bright. After Baer did his dog and pony show for about twenty minutes, showing each game and each peripheral, the executive actually seemed to be downright thrilled.

“We’re going to do this, and we’re going to commit a million dollars to it,” proclaimed Gerry Martin, Magnavox’s vice president and general manager for console product. The formerly sullen executives
nodded their heads and exchanged huzzahs like the finest yes- men money could buy.

The Sanders trio was flying high. But they didn’t celebrate. They had been dealt too many disappointments, so they held back until the contracts arrived. One night, Harrison and Baer were on the road and stopped into a greasy spoon diner. They had a thrifty meal, saved the receipts, and talked a lot about how great it was to be doing what they wanted to do. That was the extent of the celebration for the first videogame device ever made for consumers.

Excerpted from All Your Base Are Belong To Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture by Harold Goldberg. Copyright © 2011 by Harold Goldberg. Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

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In the UK:

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What the primitive contraption would do was extraordinary. It would make the television an extension of you, the player. It would let you interact with a square on a black- and- white screen, and if you had even the lamest imagination, it made you believe you were volleying at tennis, aiming carefully as a brave marksman, even playing hero to the innocent as you saved lives.

While the design work proceeded apace, there were continual roadblocks. Worker bees would be called off the project, assigned to work on some secret, pressing defense initiative. At the same time, Sanders executives sometimes seemed aloof and uninterested. In addition, the machine itself became unwieldy. One of the early prototypes was completely impractical, with a chassis that was as large as a kitchen sink. It also looked like something out of high school shop class.

On June 14, 1967, Baer showed Herb Campman a shooting game with a toy gun rigged up with a light mechanism, which interacted with the TV screen. Campman and Sanders’s patent lawyer was impressed enough to call a meeting with the company president and the stodgy board of directors—the next day. Baer had seven games he wanted to show on a color TV set: chess, steeple chase, a fox- and- hounds game, target shooting, a color wheel game, a bucket- filling game, and that firefighter game in which you’d whale on a pump handle like you were trying to get water from a well. If you did it right, water would get to a window in a house. If you failed, the house would go up in flames. On the night before the demo, Baer
frantically searched for a script explaining the seven games that he’d recorded circus- barker- style on a sixty- minute Mercury cassette tape. Though he found the tape quickly, Baer was still apprehensive.
He tossed and turned in his bed. But he was ready.

The big bosses filed into a dreary conference room on June 15. There was whispering and conferring and the raising of eyebrows during the demonstration. Bill Harrison noticed that Sanders himself was completely uninterested. He was gossiping about a competitor with another colleague. But, ultimately, the suits seemed impressed. Harold Pope, the affable company president who’d come up through the ranks as an engineer, didn’t quite know what to do with what he had seen. Pope’s command to Baer was “Build us something we can sell or license.”

“Build us something we can sell” was a grim declaration that would irk Baer during the next several years. Compared to figuring out how to sell it, getting the console to work properly was the least of his worries. Because gossip had begun among Sanders employees, Baer made sure the work in his ten- by- twenty- foot lab was treated as a top secret project. He told Harrison, “I don’t care if people in the company think we’re making some kind of guitar. I just want to get the job done without a lot of questions from people who aren’t involved.” It was like the first rule of Fight Club. Baer told his team in no uncertain terms, “You don’t talk about TV Games.”

In February 1967, the three created the Quiz Light Pen, which, when attached to TV Games, could be used for an educational instruction and game show–like experience. “Just point it at the screen and click a button to make it work,” announced Baer in impresario mode as he spoke to the camera in a primitive half- hour black- and- white instructional video, which showed how aiming the pen at small boxes on the screen could be used to answer multiple choice questions. Maybe it could even be used for a game show, thought Baer, like Jeopardy!

The inventiveness didn’t stop there. In a memo stamped “Company Private,” Baer also made plans for a steering wheel for racing games and a device that would let you make artistic drawings on the TV screen. There was a baseball game and a strange ESP- like number guessing game. There would be a peripheral for a golf game that included a putter. There was skeet shooting, soccer, and horse racing, too. And there was a cool, addictive version of a Ping- Pong game, the game that people would play the most. (It was also a game that would soon be ripped off, become more popular than Baer ever imagined, and herald a very nasty lawsuit.)

Admittedly, these games were all done with “spots,” not high- quality artwork. To make the games feel more real, the team designed plastic overlays that, through static electricity, stuck to the TV screen. They looked like Howard Johnson restaurant place mats but were somewhat transparent. There was no masterful artwork to the overlays, but the best of them resembled the most dramatic back glass art on pinball games of the day. The first joysticks included were two controllers that had horizontal and vertical abilities and knobs to add English to the ball, somewhat like Tennis for Two (which Baer said he never saw at the Brookhaven National Laboratory).

More ideas for technology and games spewed forth, and so did some manna from heaven: $8,000 more from Sanders’s Campman. The goal in early 1968 was to beef up the console’s circuitry to make it a leaner, meaner machine. Rusch was also able to make those all- important square spots circular, even star- shaped. Initially, Rusch preened, thinking he had done something as historic as translating the Dead Sea Scrolls. Baer was totally enthused, too, until they found a problem with the spots. They moved randomly when they weren’t supposed to. They ran up or down or to the side like feral animals. Sometimes, they’d even change their shapes. Baer decided to stick with the square spots, even though Rusch put up a fuss. This was a constant cycle between the two. Baer would try to mend fences with Rusch. He’d seem OK for a while. Then he’d go off the rails and get angry again.

Excerpted from All Your Base Are Belong To Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture by Harold Goldberg. Copyright © 2011 by Harold Goldberg. Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

Purchase All Your Base - In the U.S.:

* Amazon

* BN.com

* Borders

In the UK:

* Amazon.co.uk

By the time the Arland contingent could stand on Skavian soil, the camp’s stitching needs were met by other inmates and they were assigned to fruit gathering along with Ivy. The detail was assembled by overseers in the main yard and divided into groups of three. If any one person disappeared, her companions would be executed. They were given two empty baskets apiece balanced on a pole resting on their shoulders, and in this manner marched through the village of Dunder on the road to the surviving apricot groves. The townsfolk looked upon the column with scorn and pity, sending children inside and standing rigidly as the procession passed. What these women had done to deserve their fate was not the business of these citizens. The world was full of enemies. Had not the numerous plots against the Party and the Great Man himself, the acts of sabotage against the nation’s rail and other infrastructure, the collapse of the platform on the great sandstone plaza, the ballistic assault on the Stairway to the Sun, proven this beyond doubt? Did not the history of Arland oppression demonstrate that the Hutman must be hammer to the Inta nail? No one in the village knew what crimes these women had committed but it was reasonable to assume they were among the plotters responsible for attacks on the homeland. Skava had enemies, and Skava had a leader who would deal with them decisively. It was proof of Muglair’s efficacy that so many plots had been foiled.

The column passed a detail of male prisoners rebuilding a stone wall around an ancient churchyard. The men labored shirtlessly in the scalding sun with shovels and pickaxes, sweating profusely and slaking their thirst from a wheelbarrow filled with pond water. The women marched miles along the dusty road, passing acres of fruitland ruined by a disastrous attempt to grow hemp, before turning onto a trail to the surviving groves. The overseers distributed picking claws to select women and ordered the rest to pluck low-hanging fruit and gather drop apricots. Their bushel baskets quickly overflowed and they turned to filling empty baskets transported to the site on a levitating sled. On the trek out prisoners had held the upwardly buoyed sled down by cords attached to harnesses on their bodies. It would now be filled with just enough fruit to render it weightless for the return trip, allowing prisoners to maneuver it with ease while carrying baskets on shoulder yokes. Ivy learned from observing other prisoners to stay in the shade as long as possible and to drink fully from the pouches on the sled during breaks. She filled her baskets at the same rate as the others, fearing that plucking too slow could provoke a beating and too fast a further assignment. One woman collecting drops in direct sunlight collapsed from heat stroke, her mouth drooling and body convulsing. Her companions were ordered to carry her across a field where her death stench would not offend overseers on future visits. They chose not to waste a bullet on the wench hoping instead for natural expiration in the broiling sun. When the detail completed its task she was still moaning, gurgling in semi-conscious delirium, the last defiant act of a traitor trying to force a bullet out of Skava’s arsenal. She twisted her head as an overseer pointed a gun into her temple and fired, kicking the corpse for the audacity of demanding a bullet and imagining the feast of scavengers on her flesh. Ivy’s mind was erased of all feeling from her own perilously exhausted condition yet she wondered about this woman’s family. They would never learn, if indeed they were still living, of the indignity of her death. Perhaps it was better that way.

Ivy found the work excruciating but bearable. She was not prepared, however, for the march back, weighted down with baskets brimming with apricots carving into her shoulders and buckling her already weak frame. She could not lag for fear of earning her own bullet. The task was arduous enough that the overseers stopped periodically to let the column relax, but the exertion of lifting baskets from rest was as exhausting as not stopping in the first place. In her pain she heard voices swirling around her head, angels or devils she could not decide, telling her to press onward for paradise awaited at the end of her journey. In her delusional state she became convinced that the woman in front of her was her long lost mother, the spectral Prudence who haunted her memory, and if only Ivy could march one step faster she would be reunited with the woman who gave her life, the woman whose love she could never replace. They were permitted to eat one apricot per break and Ivy learned from watching other prisoners how to sneak in a second. She needed the carbohydrates to survive, for her body to summon the energy to endure. They passed goat pens and she remembered the flavor of thaban dung cut by ginger, wanting to gag yet recognizing it now as an act of kindness. In the village the same crew had raised the church wall two courses higher, their bodies still glistening in the sun, muscular builds reminding her of the ditch digger she chose to father her child. The men snuck glances at the women more from habit than desire, their lustier impulses eroded by the backbreaking labor and the women desexed in prison attire with close-cropped hair. In the camp the prisoners were counted off in the main yard, only one missing and her absence explained by a bullet. They were diverted to shower stalls where a laundry crew exchanged filthy uniforms for starchy sun-dried replacements. In the mess hall they drank watery leek soup with a ration of bread. A dominant woman tried to snatch Ivy’s roll and Ivy struck her. An overseer bustled over and slapped Ivy – who quickly lowered her eyes in obeisance expecting further blows – but was distracted by shouting from the kitchen and left the feuding women to extinguish a small grease fire beneath a kettle. The bread thief lunged again but Ivy had already crammed the roll into her mouth, nearly choking from its crusty bulk.

From snippets of conversation she gathered the war had taken a sinister turn. She had known this day would come from the prophecies of the Oopsah but did not know the details. Arland so far had shown restraint, bombing only Shamba and the Regency and securing the Edge, believing it could not stop the Flume without Muglair’s cooperation and waiting for the promised triggering of the great door. Muglair engaged in a game of diplomatic evasion, proposing water-sharing arrangements as a condition to closing the door then incrementing demands with each concession until Arland concluded further negotiation would be fruitless. Arland ramped up military production to replace the lost vessels of the Armada and secure aerial supremacy in preparation for massive assaults on Leri Deri and Shamba. Marshal Turlin delivered an ultimatum to Skava that it close the intake as promised by the Great Man or its capital would be leveled. With much fanfare Muglair announced a public symposium in the People’s Hall at which the issue of closing the door would be debated, with members of the public free to stand and offer opinions to the leadership. Muglair himself adopted a pose of studied neutrality, weighing the pros and cons as speaker after speaker, all screened in advance, angrily denounced Arland’s belligerence before accepting the advice of the Council that the Hutman’s commitment to peace required triggering the door.

The issue of planetary peril did not fully resonate even in Arland where the risk was the subject of much propaganda. Arland scientists calculated that the Cube could survive for decades with the current outflow from Shamba. But they relied upon a crude computation of the volume of the Silent Sea divided by current rate of flow and had no reliable model as to when gravity imbalance might dislodge the planet from fixture. They were in uncharted territory with the devil’s shaft, as Arland’s bulletins called it, and did not properly account for the widening of the hole from erosion or the sluicing effect along the Parvian edges. Edgeland no longer counterbalanced by the Silent Sea crumbled inward below the waterline in places, allowing immense outrushes of seawater over the sides. When this first occurred in Klokomad, Arland’s scientists revised their estimates of the planet’s integrity and reached a startling conclusion. It might already be too late to stop dislodgement, and at any rate they must assume a timeline of months, not years, to allow a margin for error. These revelations were percolating through the Arland power structure at the time of Muglair’s symposium. There was momentary relief in Rixjrig when the Council recommended, and the Great Man accepted, terminating the flow at intake. But then a diplomatic cable arrived informing the Marshal with regret that the great door had failed. Indeed, Arland spotters had watched remnants of the door plummet skyward through Shamba, their photographs revealing unmistakable blast marks on the twisted metal.

Muglair followed his secret cable with a public message to the citizens of Arland. He had done all that he could for the planet given the intransigence of their leadership. He had staked his claim of natural justice to an equal allocation of the Silent Sea and been met only with bombs. He was a reasonable man but could not be expected to solve this crisis by himself. He would allow Arland onto its territory to engage in a joint capping of the Flume if, and only if, Arland disarmed, starting first with voluntary destruction of the Armada. Skava had suffered too long from its aerial bombardments and could not collaborate in peace with this threat hanging over its head. This ultimatum, a response to Arland’s own demands, was the non-negotiable price of cooperation between the great powers. Arland could accept or reject Muglair’s generosity but one thing was made clear: the Great Man would rather the planet disintegrate than live under the shadow of the Armada. Skavian scientists believed the planet had at least two years before subsidence of the Sea posed a significant threat. Arland informed the Land Ministry, which held ultimate jurisdiction over the Flume, of its revised computations backed up with voluminous supporting data. But the Great Man was not going to rely on the amateurs of Arland when his own engineers had shown the genius and initiative to construct the Flume in the first place. Those who built it would best understand its risks. He had two years to secure Arland’s disarmament and would worry about consequences when the time came.

The effect of Muglair’s ultimatum on Arland was electric. The Marshal had been planning various attacks and now had the unqualified support of a population focused on a single goal, eliminating the Great Man. One could not hear on a street in Rixjrig any word of caution, any call to further negotiation, so disgusted were the people with Muglair’s treachery. A sense of urgency grew from publication of Arland’s internal reports on the planet’s diminished life expectancy in light of sluicing and shaft erosion, although ironically many discounted the new timeline as propaganda. With the loss of the great door Arland was free to approach the Flume from the intake at the bottom of the Sea, which they had been avoiding for fear of disturbing a safety mechanism. Arland controlled most of that vast ocean and forged its own enormous plug for the Flume, an inverted cone designed to cap the hole like a sink stopper. But the unexpected rate of erosion, deduced from the visible increase in flow through Shamba, meant the plug as constructed was no longer wide enough to stop the draining. Arland refloated the plug to the Parvian shore and began forging a new reinforced ring to expand its diameter. In the meantime they proceeded with an alternative plan, depth charges to be sunk through the shaft and exploded within. This required a feat of nautical engineering unprecedented in Arland’s history, programming mines to seek out the entrance one hundred and forty miles beneath the surface of the Sea and detonate within the shaft. The navy contemplated sending divers in bells with the mines on a suicide mission but opted for remote guidance using sonar. The project was sufficiently advanced at the time of the great door’s destruction to be implemented within weeks. But it was a complete failure as Arland was unable to synchronize enough bombs to achieve the desired collapse. The only result of the uncoordinated explosions was an occasional dark spot in the jet of water emerging from Shamba. The back-up plan was to position charges on the seabed in a cluster around the intake to collapse it inward by simultaneous detonation. This project too was a failure, the massive explosion sending only silt through the shaft and failing to affect the flow rate. Arland redoubled its efforts to widen the steel plug concluding this was their last best hope as options rapidly dwindled.

Muglair’s ultimatum also gave rise to the first audible voices of dissent within his regime. At a meeting of the Council several Ministers respectfully addressed the gravity of the situation, obliquely criticizing the Great Man by expressing confidence he had a plan for preserving the planet in case Arland failed to capitulate. Muglair sent security agents to debrief each of the concerned Ministers personally, implicitly threatening to oust them from power, or worse, if they vocalized further opposition. The Ministers received the message and no longer questioned their leader on the official record but the fear that Muglair might be too reckless, that he might derail the cause for personal glory, that he might precipitate historical events beyond his control, was whispered in corridors and back rooms, the Ministers silently resolving to monitor the situation and take unspecified future action to rein him in. Arland launched a punitive assault on Leri Deri wiping out over half its neighborhoods and killing thousands of civilians who were deliberately not warned by Skavian spotters. The sirens remained silent during the raid to maximize the death toll and stoke within the population a thirst for retribution. By a miracle the major monuments of the capital, including the People’s Hall, survived with little damage. Muglair stood before a crowd on the sandstone plaza behind two inches of protective glass, the famous fanning columns and dome of the Hall rising majestically behind him, and spoke in rarefied tones of divine fate shielding this edifice as the repository of aspirations for his long-suffering people, then launched into a diatribe about how the word “people” applied only to Hutmen and not to the vermin called Inta.

For years Muglair had carried out a policy called prophylactic justice, identifying the politically active Inta and detaining them in camps, and splitting up Inta villages sympathetic to Arland and relocating the inhabitants to scattered outposts on the plains. Skava could not afford to harbor within its midst a traitorous people, a race that by its essence was inimical to the Hutman cause, for the Inta regarded themselves as natural overlords and were conducting a war of sabotage to regain power. Standing before a crowd of traumatized survivors of the massive bombing, augmented by roaming bands of security agents and Party members attending under compulsion, Muglair announced the time had come for Skava to take all steps required to preserve the Hutman prerogative, to do what is necessary and just, to eliminate once and for all the Inta threat from its soil. Muglair was a merciful man and would take no action greater than necessary to subdue this menace. He would harm no Inta who were not resisting, but he would collect them all, every last one of them, and confine them to staging camps for forced emigration to Arland. Would the Arlanders reclaim their own as a fair and righteous people must? Muglair had his doubts but he would not be responsible for the fate of the Skavian Inta should Arland abandon them. For no Inta would be permitted to roam free on the sacred soil of Skava as long as Muglair remained the bearer of the cause. No Inta would run loose on this land to practice treachery, and sabotage, and plotting, and espionage, and rape, and murder, and thieving, and breeding of more Inta all for the vain hope of derailing the cause and reestablishing their mastery over the Hutman. Muglair sincerely hoped Arland was listening because if they were not, they would one day rue their arrogance.

Through diligence and careful planning the administration of Dunder solved the corpse problem by incinerating the backlog and stitching together enough bladders to meet expected future needs for space disposal. Indeed, the production had soared beyond any conceivable use, occupying an entire warehouse with inventory. Mortality dropped after the initial influx of prisoners from the Edge and the camp returned to its prior attrition rate, which could be adjusted as necessary to weed out less vital elements. Guidance from Leri Deri suggested a monthly mortality of two percent for the camp as a whole and the withholding of food and medical care should the rate drop below that. Children presented a special problem and were commonly starved to death in holding pens, such mortality being labeled natural, for Skava could not spare labor to tend Inta nits. The fitter specimens might be farmed out to adoptive families to be Hutmanized, a process subject to periodic review and culling for behavioral problems. The elderly could earn their keep with menial tasks but were denied medical care and confined to death barracks for natural expiration in the event of illness. Those in prime years for physical labor were mandated subsistence rations calibrated to limit mortality to one percent per month, not counting executions. From her arrival at Dunder Ivy watched suspiciously as rows of barracks were constructed within the expanded perimeter of the camp between the concentric squares of spiked wire. Muglair obviously anticipated more enemies in need of confinement, an expectation in keeping with his view that reaction grows in proportion to revolution. With his challenge to Arland, his bold gambit to remove Skava once and for all from the Inta yoke, the opposition would have no choice but to show its true colors, to stand defiantly against the cause in its last desperate struggle to preserve Inta hegemony over the planet. Muglair would not let these conspirators pollute the passions of the Hutman by organizing dissent and carrying out sabotage, so he would lock them away in black sites entirely cut off from the world.

One day a special copy of The Cause was distributed throughout the barracks. Ordinarily prisoners were not allowed news from the outside world but this edition was sensational. The Interior Ministry, under the direction of its new leader Bogin, announced the disruption of a huge plot among the Skavian Inta to assassinate the Great Man, to explode the People’s Hall with delegates inside, and to return the Inta to power with the military and diplomatic assistance of Arland. Even Council members, most notably former Minister Kadangle, had participated in the plot. Muglair issued a note of personal gratitude to Bogin, tireless servant of the cause, for protecting the people of Skava from such foul treachery. In this state of crisis he was delegating to the new Minister authority to take all steps necessary to eliminate the threat decisively, starting with immediate implementation of the emigration plan. This would be disorderly, the Great Man acknowledged, the facilities were not yet in place, but the Inta could no longer be trusted with freedom, such was the mortal threat they posed. Ivy read through the edicts and proclamations and news accounts and propaganda, all lined up neatly in four-paneled layout, with growing despair. Muglair was planning something awful and she feared for her safety, for the safety of all people in the wretched camps. On the back page of the edition was a curious story, an installment of The Sphere, a watered-down version of a draft about Posy’s liaison with an electrical lineman hired to build a tripwire for the vat room, which Ivy had last seen on the food table in the hut on the Fifteenth of Tarpin. She was so caught up in the headline news she missed the story before another prisoner grabbed the paper. How those loopy scrawls from another world describing fantasies she could no longer conceive made it to a publishing house in Leri Deri was a mystery she would not have a chance to consider.

A new breed of overseers began arriving at the camp, special Interior agents trained in Leri Deri dressed in one-piece corduroy uniforms wearing snug flat caps. They assumed jurisdiction over the camp expansion and mingled little with the Law Ministry overseers, walking swiftly in pairs in straight lines with great purpose. Conditions at the camp had steadily improved since Ivy’s arrival, leading to a directive from the capital to increase mortality through reduced food rations and harsher work conditions. Scientific principles of herd management, which held great sway in the Law Ministry, required weeding out a fixed percentage of the population on a regular basis to cultivate desirable traits among the remainder and to create room for new arrivals. Survival was a function of both health and cunning. Ivy associated early with Hutwomen prisoners including the barracks chief, deeming them less likely to suffer Muglair’s wrath. She was still labeled Inta but wore a band signifying she could not be executed punitively without approval from the camp administrator, presumably tied to her high value status and giving her the same protection as Hutwomen criminals. She acquired oral sachets of hibiscus, marigold, magnolia, and sundry dried herbs and petals by trading extra rolls obtained from a mess worker for charcoal sketches of Looda steamboats. She sewed an inside pocket on her uniform, a common practice tolerated by overseers, and would retrieve sachets to exchange for various goods in the underground market. When food rations were cut by extending the time between feedings, she obtained extra bread by cashing in angelica and motherwort which were in high demand. No one agreed on the medicinal effects of the sachets but all found comfort from hunger sucking on their favorites. The starvation policy had the intended effect of increasing mortality but also weakened the survivors, an inherent flaw in any plan designed to reduce population by inflicting general suffering. Ivy’s body could not handle the deprivation even with the finagled extra rations and she grew weaker and less able to meet quotas in the groves and on the shop floor. Her cheekbones protruded as her eyes acquired the quality of walking dead so prevalent in the camp. So long as she was stronger than the required percentage of attrition, however, she believed she could survive. The routines of the camp accentuated the inmates’ degradation. In addition to work and malnourishment calculated to cull the herd, prisoners were required to assemble in the yard after the sleeping hour for calisthenics. Each day they mopped the entire floor of the barracks and recited from memory axioms of truth dictated by the Law Ministry, that the Hutman was the pinnacle of human progress, that a humble regent saved the cause from Arland’s rape, that the Inta stank as much in life as in death.

New transports arrived carrying victims of Muglair’s emigration scheme. Inta farming villages were the initial targets, their inhabitants rounded up in surprise operations with no time to prepare for departure. How uneducated peasants growing legumes could pose a threat to the Hutman cause was never explained. But if the Inta by nature were plotters and saboteurs then caution require sequestering even those whose oppressive tendencies were not yet manifest. The arrival scenes at the camp were frenzied. Administrators caught off guard by the hastened emigration schedule did not have time to complete a second intake entrance. As a result disorganized masses of motorized transports clogged the main receiving yard of the outer camp with Interior agents forcibly removing families, village elders, and youths and directing them haphazardly to barracks segregated by gender and age, shooting people who fell out of line including children running back to their parents. The yard swarmed with pockets of arrivals surrounded by special agents trained to bludgeon the first person off a truck to establish obedience. The Law Ministry supplied overseers for the barracks but was understaffed and locked many new inhabitants inside without oversight where they starved and plotted escapes. The camp expansion did not yet contain a mess hall so new arrivals were marched through the interior gate to messes in the central camp. The kitchens were not provisioned for extra mouths resulting in further reduction of rations and violent reprisals by established prisoners against the emigrants. No one had devised useful work details for the arrivals who were kept busy with exercise regimens, latrine work, and fastidious barracks cleaning. As the administration found work, forgotten barracks were often opened to find occupants dead and dying from starvation, their entreaties from behind locked doors ignored in the chaos. Marshal Turlin received daily reports of Muglair’s emigration plan, which was turning into mass slaughter rather than deportation, and sent a communiqué to Leri Deri demanding the Inta be sent to crossing stations at the Edge where the military patrol would receive them. The Great Man responded by repeating his demand for disarmament as a precondition to cooperation, then sending common criminals to the crossings with papers identifying them as Inta refugees.

Dunder could not absorb the crush of new prisoners. Interior units in the provinces performed their tasks of rounding up enemies with exceptional vigor, competing against one another for weekly rewards of distilled spirits and cartons of sachets based upon the numbers seized. As chaotic as the first wave of prisoners had been at the outset of war, the congestion now grew so severe that transports backed up beyond the outer gate into open fields waiting for the jam in the yard to clear, with arrivals on crowded truck beds suffocating in the heat and expiring from thirst. The barracks were fully occupied and the camp lacked housing for the newest arrivals. Along one side of the expansion area, a new intake facility had been hastily constructed by slave labor, a warehouse divided into a rat maze of halls and cubicles connected by an array of six long corridors, separated by elongated courtyards, leading to a slaughterhouse beyond earshot of the reception. Excess arrivals were herded into the reception with contrived urgency then chased in groups of twenty down the long corridors by patrol dogs barely restrained on agents’ leashes into a set of rooms where Interior agents and specially trained soldiers eliminated the hated Inta in small groups, three or four at a time, with bayonets, pistols, and hacking knives. The special units had not yet devised a more efficient method of killing and were instructed to use blade work as much as possible to conserve ammunition. The floors of these killing rooms puddled with blood deep enough to slosh on agents’ boots, requiring frequent mopping and sponging by details. Those chased along a corridor but not called first into a room faced the horrific prospect of death behind by savage dogs and screams of bloodletting ahead with no means of escape. The elimination of the Inta posed a hardship for the special units, for as the coordinated Ministries of Interior, Law, Land, and Defense acknowledged these brave agents were human beings themselves subject to frailty of emotion and sentimental attachment to human life, even Inta, and would be permanently scarred by their sacrifice for the cause. An agent might kill over a hundred Inta by his own hand in a single shift, each as sympathetic and pitiable as the agent’s own loved ones, each a person he may have broken bread with in friendlier times, each innocent of any personal wrongdoing, and collectively the agents might butcher thousands in a day. To butcher a defenseless child or woman, or even a man, ran counter to the instinctive goodness of the Hutman, and Bogin resolved that each agent carrying out this sacred duty be amply rewarded for his sacrifice, for the lifelong trauma he would suffer, with pension and honors. What transpired in these rooms was an historic necessity for which future generations would eternally benefit even if not told of it. For only without Inta oppressors on Skavian soil could the Hutman flourish, and for every Inta corpse carted away from the charnel house of Dunder countless future Hutchildren would receive the dignity and opportunity that comes from liberation.

Here was the nub. Muglair was a visionary. He could foresee two futures for the Hutman, one with a continued Inta presence in Skava and one without. He had no doubt that the latter would be a more glorious future for his people. In a land without their historic nemesis the Hutmen could flourish without fear of subjugation, without fear of Arland exploiting its reserve of traitors to foment rebellion and unrest, without fear of Inta deviance and criminality. To arrive at this better future required harsh measures in the present, a will of iron to turn one’s head from the suffering of innocents, to avert one’s eyes and let natural justice run its course. For surely Muglair was no monster. Surely he was not impervious to the cries for mercy from women and children who had done no wrong carried to slaughter. There would come a day, he knew, when his name would be reviled for cruelty even among the Hutmen. But guilt and innocence were meaningless terms applied to individual Inta. They were a people organized by a principle of resistance to the Hutman cause and the mere act of living and breeding and supporting their communities gave force to the countercause. They were an indivisible whole that could not be partially eliminated because they all by their very essence, by the fabric of their families and society, lent support to reaction. Skava could not move beyond its current cycle of oppression, the Inta of the Hutman, the Hutman of the Inta, so long as these diametrically opposed peoples occupied the same plane. And Skava could not move beyond this cycle without eradicating the Inta entirely from its sacred soil as humanely and efficiently as possible. Would the weak flinch from the measures required? Would a future generation debate and dissect and condemn these necessary measures as atrocities? They would, but such was the luxury of prosperity. For if history had taught any lesson, it was that the strong survive and the weak perish. The strong might indulge sentimentality once secure in power but they would never exchange current prerogatives for resurrection of the dead. In these two futures envisioned by Muglair, one with and one without the Inta, one thing was certain. The Hutman in that better world free of the Inta menace would never trade the fruit of extermination for a return of their nemesis. That would be the ultimate judgment of history, that the beneficiaries retain the benefit. These men lunging with bayonets and hacking with blades and firing pistols in the faces of young mothers with babes might be acting from base impulses, might be giving vent to anger born of generations of oppression, might be rising to the occasion of historical necessity with an orgy of sadism, might be following orders only out of loyalty to the cause with repulsion in their hearts. But whatever their personal justifications, they lacked the Great Man’s vision of a harmonious world with the Hutman thriving as the sole sovereign of Skava. It was this vision of a future freed from the cycle of violence which justified the current slaughter, which made those scarred from carrying it out the true victims of the Inta, which would show Muglair as a man of peace by the only measure that mattered, a world in which tomorrow’s conflicts were resolved by elimination of the primal conflict today.

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It wasn’t the first time Baer had come up with an idea for games on TV. Fifteen years earlier, in 1951, he worked at another defense contractor, the Loral Corporation, and suggested a rudimentary checkers game. But he didn’t think about games on TV again until that day in 1966, probably because his boss at Loral thought a game inside a TV was a ludicrous idea.

Let’s Play! was a much grander and more complex idea that would take a lot of time, manpower, and money to create properly. On that summer day in Manhattan, Baer didn’t know how much time or money. But Herb Campman, Sanders’s chief of research and development, believed in the concept and gave Baer a budget of $2,000 for research and $500 for materials. Baer, a complete work addict, would soon be on his way to becoming the father of videogames.

Little has been written about how Baer’s early life informed his later work. In fact, Baer was infected by the invention bug when young, not long after his family left Cologne in the 1930s. As a kid growing up in Germany, Baer didn’t realize the war was coming. He played with a stick and a hoop outdoors. At night, he and his sister performed puppet shows in their bedroom, laughing and laughing as they transported themselves into worlds of their own creation. The childish plays took Baer’s mind off the schoolkids who bullied him and hit him in the face for being a Jew. After packing their possessions into a half dozen three- by- four- foot wooden crates, in August 1938 the teenage Baer and his family fled Hitler’s Germany for New York City, via a ship that docked in Rotterdam. Many of his Jewish relatives weren’t so lucky and were killed. Baer was too young to comprehend the danger; as the ship steamed toward Ellis Island, he spent most of his time in a swimming pool or playing Monopoly with his sister in the game room. Even then, games intrigued him.

The family settled into a courtyard apartment near the Bronx Zoo, and Baer worked at a factory for $12 a week, putting buttons onto cosmetic cases. In the winter, the sixteen- year- old made his first
invention: a machine that sped up the process of making leatherette goods. He got the engineering bug when he saw an ad for a correspondence course that read “Big Money Servicing Radios. Be a
Genuine ‘Radiotrician.’ ” Baer was so excited about this new radio technology that he began to have dreams about resistors, coils, and capacitors. In a small store on Lexington Avenue, he listened to the
radios he fixed, hearing the news of the Blitz on London and the invasion of Poland by the Germans.

By April 1942, Baer was an engineer in World War II as well, learning to prepare roads and bridges for infantry grunts and armored troops. He also laid and removed mines by gingerly digging around in the earth with a bayonet. Life as an engineer turned to life overseas in Bristol, England, teaching military intelligence courses,
where he led classes for GIs on subjects such as recognizing German uniforms, ranks, organizational affiliations, and weapons handling. In Tidworth, he and his team created a military intelligence school that trained 120,000 Americans. Part of the school was an immense exhibit hall that included a huge cache of German weapons and vehicles. Ensconced in an industrial hangarlike edifice, the museum was featured in the November 3, 1944, issue of YANKS magazine. In his spare time, Baer secretly wrote a comprehensive manual on weaponry. He kept inventing, even fashioning AM radios from German mine detectors.

The organizational skills Baer learned in the military would serve him well as he began work on his videogame machine. Too, his experiences in the army imbued him with a self- confidence and talent for communication that helped him open up to those above him in rank. He may have been a nerd who cared more about technology than girls, but he was a surprisingly charismatic nerd who didn’t hide away a good idea when he truly believed he had one; he had chutzpah.

His design skills improved as he worked on radio equipment in college in Chicago, and on radar equipment and amplifiers at Transitron, a small company in what is now New York’s Tribeca neighborhood. Soon, Baer was chief engineer and then vice president at Transitron; he moved up the ranks because he was able to get things done quickly and accurately. By the time Sanders Associates made him a chief engineer, he was more of a manager than an inventor. Yet he yearned to get his hands dirty. The $2,500 Baer received from his boss for developing Let’s Play! may not seem like much now. But in 1966, the sum was enough to purchase a new car, was one third of the amount most Americans earned yearly, and was more than half the cost of the average home. Baer had two men assigned to the project to do the hourly work. Bill Harrison, a hip- looking, conscientious engineering associate, built the prototypes. Bill Rusch, a cranky, temperamental powerhouse who had studied at MIT, came up with the idea of a “machine- controlled ball that would interact with player- controlled ‘paddles.’ ” Both men were already on Sanders’s payroll.

The project was top secret and time- consuming, so much so that Rusch brought a guitar to work so he could blow off steam— leading some curious wall- listeners in the company to believe that Baer was
working on some sort of technologically advanced musical instrument, perhaps for the Beatles. But Baer’s boss, Herb Campman, didn’t care about rock ’n’ roll. He gave Baer the money for a sensible reason: He felt the company could eventually make games that would work well in training the military. He was not wrong.

Excerpted from All Your Base Are Belong To Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture by Harold Goldberg. Copyright © 2011 by Harold Goldberg. Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

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He forgot about any woes, though, when he was with his family. Parade said, “He’s an electronics expert who can play the accordion, call a square dance and ‘do anything with an egg.’ To his lawn mower, he would attach a sulky and to that, two red wagons to take his kids around the yard.” As much as he was a scientist, he also longed to entertain. He would lead his band, the hilariously named Isotope Stompers, down the road at Brookhaven during festivals, playing Dixieland jazz. Making the simple game was another way to let off steam. In his role of government scientist, Higinbotham was the maker of the trigger that set off the nuclear bomb. In his role as Brookhaven entertainer, he was someone who could give pleasure beyond the passive but tangible joys of listening to music. His real gift was one of interactivity. His experiment allowed people to become one with a machine. Hands on and gloves off, they competed, they won or lost, and those excited folks told other people of their newfangled adventure.

In Higinbotham’s own unpublished notes, he lamented that at Brookhaven’s Visitors’ Days, the main exhibits were typically “picture or text displays or static instruments or components. . . . It occurred to me that it might liven up the place to have a game that people could play, and which would convey the message that our scientific endeavors have relevance to society.” The tube on the oscilloscope was not that different from the tube on a TV, except that its screen showed patterns and not pictures. When Higinbotham opened the instruction booklet to his new computer at Brookhaven, he noted that it “described how to generate various curves . . . using risitors, capacitors and relays.” The booklet explained how to show bullet trajectories, wind resistance, and a bouncing ball. “Bouncing ball?” thought Higinbotham. “That sounds like fun.”

Some of the more persnickety game fans do not consider Higinbotham’s work to be a videogame. After all, it did not use a video signal, the kind of electric impulses that became images on the old cathode- ray analog TV sets. It did not display pictures that you could recognize. It did not connect to something in the living room. To the naysayers, what Higinbotham made looked like nothing more than the display on an early heart monitor. Yet while Higinbotham’s oscilloscope didn’t technically display video, by “alternating the computer’s output with the transistor’s switching circuit,” he certainly did create what looked and played like the videogames that would become available to everyone more than a decade later. Who cares if you couldn’t display it on a TV?

In September, the curious stood and waited for hours in long lines during Brookhaven’s ninth annual Visitors’ Days to play Tennis for Two; even though Brookhaven’s official press release made no mention of the game, word of mouth had spread quickly, almost with the speed of today’s Internet gossip. It was more than just fun. Once those lines of people played and enjoyed, it marked the beginning of videogame history.

Higinbotham proved a few things with Tennis for Two. People enjoyed playing together while looking at a screen. As they went at it, they made the communal noises of primal togetherness that you make at a sporting event. They hooted, hollered, and laughed. They imagined they were playing on the courts. And then they went home and talked to others about this brand- new thing they had witnessed. That enthusiasm lasted when Higinbotham made version 2.0 the following year; people continued to queue up, indicating that the market for such games was already in place. Willie Higinbotham, the scientist/entertainer, had stumbled upon the future. And the future was games.

Meanwhile, a determined but self- effacing engineer was hard at work on a game machine that would work when hooked up to a television set. His name was Ralph Baer. A few of the old- timers at Brookhaven believe that Baer took a trip there to see Tennis for Two years before he came up with the idea for a brilliant invention that would mark the videogame’s debut as a commercial enterprise.

Excerpted from All Your Base Are Belong To Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture by Harold Goldberg. Copyright © 2011 by Harold Goldberg. Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

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Higinbotham most likely did not know that at least two attempts at videogames had already been made. In 1948, Greenville, South Carolina, physicist and TV pioneer Thomas T. Goldsmith teamed up with Estle Ray Mann to patent and make a very rudimentary experiment that shot missiles—well, light rays that mimicked missiles—across an oscilloscope’s screen. The Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device used eight vacuum tubes and a radarlike display. But Goldsmith was more interested in the Washington, DC, TV station he owned and in producing the classic Captain Video TV series, so nothing ever came of the patent. Four years later, Cambridge PhD candidate Alexander S. Douglas became enamored with a giant, seemingly unwieldy computer created for the university. With its hundreds of vacuum tubes emitting fi refly- like light within a dingy laboratory, the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator looked like something out of the 1931 movie Frankenstein. Douglas was entranced with the computer and added a tic- tac- toe game called Noughts and Crosses to his thesis about how humans interact with computers. It was the first computer game to use primitive graphics and can still be downloaded from the Web today.

Yet neither of these games made the step forward that’s needed to create a satisfying communal gaming experience: the ability to hang out, play together, and maybe even understand your friends better from that play.

Two hours later, I found myself sitting in the Energy Department shuttle from the Ronkonkoma train station to the forested 5,300- acre property of the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Around me, a half dozen young scientists, all bearded, all bespectacled, listened to the youngest’s idea for a new medical imaging technique. As the scientists chattered, the shuttle turned onto the grounds themselves. Dozens of wild turkeys lurked on the grass, their blue snoods ugly as they gobbled.

Brookhaven is full of old one- story wooden buildings and drafty barracks from its days as an army encampment in the 1940s. But around the campus, there are a few new buildings of soaring, undulating
glass, twenty- first- century designs that look like they were informed by architect I. M. Pei. Inside one such building, public relations people tied helium- filled balloons to metal folding chairs and railings as old and young employees and visitors gathered around to look at a greasy old Magnavox Odyssey, the original PlayStation with the Gran Turismo racing simulation, a Wii with Wii Sports Bowling, and a few other mementos from videogame history. But an essential jewel was found where a smaller crowd of curious employees gathered. There it was on a folding table, a few more helium balloons heralding its birthday. It was merely an ancient oscilloscope, its graphics board on display within a Plexiglas box. The instrumentation people had cheated a little to re- create the device. Gone was the six- foot- high Donner analog computer. Instead, Tennis for Two was attached to a Dell desktop hidden by a tablecloth. They had linked this re- creation to a fancy big screen, high definition TV—as if you needed such a thing to enhance its old- fangled graphics.

The visuals were rudimentary, merely a green dot on the screen and a small block in the middle to represent a net. There was a welded stainless steel box to take into my hands, upon which was a single button to press and from which heavy wires led to the signal box. The primitive thing appeared otherworldly on the fi fty- inch Samsung screen. That was when my nerd heart started beating, my mouth grew dry, and I found it somewhat difficult to take air. It was as if Tennis for Two were a living, breathing celebrity, an old- time star slightly Botoxed up to make it appear new again. And that green color was seductive. Green symbolizes everything videogames are made of, the life- and- death struggle, the yin and yang of heroism and evil, for green in various cultures means hope, rebirth, death, and envy. The color meant immortality in ancient Egypt (Osiris, the god of the afterlife, had skin tinged with green). It is the suit color of Shigeru Miyamoto’s Link from The Legend of Zelda, the color of the camouflage gear of Metal Gear’s ultra- macho Solid Snake. Green is perfect for games.


In videos presented online, Tennis for Two seemed to have a bright green tinge, but perhaps because of the streaming sunlight in the new Brookhaven building, the bouncing ball now had a rich jade hue, the color of a shining emerald. Each time the ball made its way to my side of the scope, I pressed the plastic button on the
old- fashioned controller and the magnets in relays clicked loudly. I was able to angle the shots by twisting a plastic knob that aimed the blip on the screen.

Just before a few members of the press arrived, Higinbotham Junior, slightly wary but affable, stood before the game with Charlie Dvorak, the son of the lab technician who had actually made the machine full of circuits, capacitors, relays, and a mishmash of wires. Both were around fifty years old, and both had a look of pride and occasional glee as they played Tennis for Two. As they volleyed the dot, it left handsome trails on the screen and the relays clicked and clacked. Dvorak asked, “Can you imagine if your father patented this with my father? Things would be a lot different. We’d be on easy street. We’d be millionaires living in Montana somewhere.”

Higinbotham Junior was dressed in a striped gray flannel suit with a striped tie. He, too, had worked at Brookhaven in various positions for more than eleven years. But he was somewhat of a rebel, who never went to college. In the economic downturn of 2001, Brookhaven let him go. He now worked at a Staples store on Long Island. Still playing, and without looking at Dvorak, he was pragmatic. “Nah. The government would have owned the patent. Even if he had the patent, my father would still be at Brookhaven. He would still be working here. Money wouldn’t have changed his life’s goal and that was working here and with the Federation of Scientists.”

At lunch, Higinbotham Junior passed over a multipage document listing his father’s achievements. Nowhere on it was the game. Sitting back in his seat, he said, “My dad liked the game a lot. But in a way he cheated. He saw in the oscilloscope instructions that you could manipulate the dot on the screen. In his mind it became a tennis ball. It took just a few hours to go from point A to point B, to an interactive game.” Then he said it again. “The thing is, he didn’t want to be remembered just for the game.”

Whatever he wanted his legacy to be, it didn’t stop Dr. Higinbotham from engineering version 2.0 of the game on a larger, seventeen- inch screen, one that added play on the moon and on Jupiter, including a fairly precise modeling of the gravitational pull of those celestial bodies.

Excerpted from All Your Base Are Belong To Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture by Harold Goldberg. Copyright © 2011 by Harold Goldberg. Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

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There was nothing she could do about Interior until recalled to the bunker so she resolved to adapt to barracks life. She developed sores on her body from the hardness of the corner. Her body wedged into the planks during sleep pressing her flesh until welts emerged. She pleaded for a haysack but there were only a handful which the chief reserved for the sick. She drank buckets of mop water hoping to expedite her conversion, urinating through a hole in the corner she cored with a hand drill. She did not belong to the Skavians originally in the barracks or to the Arlanders captured in the salient. She was from the Notches, quite possibly the only survivor, and had no natural allies in Dunder. Her survival depended upon infiltrating networks, on proving herself useful to those who could be useful to her.

The bodies in the courtyard began to stink, the administration still in a quandary as to their disposal. The bombing of Shamba disrupted the flow of upwater to Dunder and the camp was low on bladders. They lacked the resources for launching the corpses into space before advanced decomposition set in and resolved to burn them. Ivy watched through the window while on sewing detail as a platoon of male prisoners moved the bodies to one side and began digging a pit in the center of the courtyard. They brought in straw and twigs and branches from the hinterland forest and constructed a huge burial pyre on iron grates topped off with dozens of barrowfuls of coal. A tin drainage system was constructed in the base of the pit beneath the combustibles leading along a channel away from the pyre. Ivy did not understand the purpose of this system. The chief of her barracks led a detail of Skavian prisoners into the courtyard, one of many such details, to prep the bodies for disposal, removing clothes and searching cavities for valuables. The work was unbearably foul given the state of decomposition in the hot Skavian sun. When the bodies were prepared the men lit the fire and waited until Ivy could feel the heat through the barracks window. They began throwing bodies in like cordwood, waiting for substantial consumption of one batch before tossing in the next. Women on detail operated large ladles at the receptacle of the drain, capturing human fat dripping from the pyre and pouring it back onto the bodies to accelerate incineration. Ivy watched this macabre scene emotionlessly while stitching together gunny sacks for earthwork defenses along the Edge, her small contribution to preserving a system that required ladling human grease back onto a burial pyre to dispose of corpses, so many there were. She vaguely recognized that each of these bodies was somebody’s child, or mother, or father, or husband, or wife, or brother, or sister, they were all human, and they were all destroyed without a trace, felled by disease, or torture, or execution, or malnourishment, or injury, but in all cases unnecessary victims of Muglair’s grand designs. With her limited capacity for horror she realized none of this had to happen. She was given a choice on the Second of Skitton, told by a higher being that destiny was in her hands, and had chosen not to tell Arland of the Flume, so afraid she was that Arland would take her knowledge and use it not to stop Muglair but to rewrite the Oopsah or, worse yet, destroy it. None of this had to happen. These bodies, each a loved one for some family, did not have to perish, did not have to reduce to ash anonymously in the courtyard of a prison camp, if only Ivy had been principled enough to tell Arland what she knew. For surely that great nation would have accelerated its plans to stop the Flume and prevented these atrocities. She saw among the numerous corpses the body of a small child and wondered if Hope was rotting in the pile, or her father. Strangely, the thought of her loved ones’ deaths invigorated her. For if they died, she would surely have to live, such was the bizarre world in which Ivy Morven lived.

Four days after her interrogation the sirens sounded. The Skavians in the barracks were rounded up by overseers and marched to the front of the camp to stand defiantly as human shields in the face of an expected aerial attack. Ivy and the Arland prisoners could not escape their confinement on the wall and nervously awaited the onslaught. But none came to Dunder and she later heard through whispers that Arland sent a warning raid to Leri Deri, leveling the official residence of the Great Man, the Regency, and delivering an ultimatum to Skava, dropped in a million leaflets in the residential boroughs, to control the Flume or the entire city would be destroyed. She also heard, from the mouths of overseers to the barracks chief to the deputies to the Skavians to the wallflowers, that Muglair lobbed artillery back at Rixjrig and was already rebuilding the Regency from original plans even as the crater of its foundation smoldered. The news of this attack spread amidst a hopeful buzz because Muglair also announced he would comply with Arland’s ultimatum to stop the Flume, not from fear but as a gesture of good will to demonstrate through action what he had always shown, that he was a seeker of peace. It might take a few weeks but he had a mechanism for controlling the flow of water, an intake door at the bottom of the Silent Sea, and he would delegate to the Council the honor of closing it by remote trigger. As a further gesture of good will he would surrender the salient to Arland. This was an easy concession because Arland had already reclaimed its territory, that very day chasing the last remnant of the Skavian invasion back over the Edge.

Within days of these events Ivy was sufficiently converted to navigate the barracks floor, her gravity now just a quarter slope. The Arlanders were well behind in reorientation and she requested of the chief permission to leave their company and join a bunk. She was assigned to the top level of a bunk between two women bitterly unhappy at sharing their already cramped space. She joined them in the sleeping hour and one reached across and clawed her cheek viciously. Ivy felt her anger rising, that column of fire that so often animated her, but let it surge past her conscious into the ether.

“I beg of you compassion,” she pleaded meekly. “I shall not be a bother.”

The attacker snorted but was disarmed by Ivy’s restraint. The newcomer slept between them motionlessly, aware even in sleep of the need not to disturb these bedmates who had forged an alliance which she was disrupting by her presence. Ivy thought by joining the bunks she would be assigned to Skavian work details. But instead she was accelerated on the path planned for the Arlanders, to the machine shop, a corrugated metal warehouse in the production district of the camp. She was escorted by a deputy to the structure and introduced to a trainer who placed her before an industrial stitcher. A large basket to one side contained pre-cut panels of cured thaban skin. It was her job to cut the panels according to patterns drawn on their surface and then stitch them together to form bladders that could be used with proper sealing to store water for military use or, in the camp, corpse disposal. The trainer stood over her shoulder instructing her impatiently on each step of the process, frequently slapping her hand, until the subject demonstrated the ability to construct one complete bladder from inputs. Ivy was weak from the lingering effects of dysentery and malnourishment and her mind was unstable from the stresses of the camp. She found solace in the repetition of the work, a sense of security in fulfilling a task, that she would not be abused on the floor so long as she was productive. As her hands manipulated leather by rote she worried about the fate of her family, that happy mirage she had embraced with such enthusiasm in the Notches, naively believing she had found an enduring new life. In the back of her mind she wondered if her current struggles were a test of love imposed by higher powers. If she could survive these horrors, would she be reunited with her loved ones and rediscover the bliss that gave purpose to her life? Her life with Mutt, and the nurture of their daughter, was so extraordinary for its normalcy, as if the most basic functions of humankind, mating and raising children, were for her an aberration. In defiance of fate she had fulfilled her natural role, to give and receive love, to bring forth new life, to be subsumed within a family, and fate was now punishing her. Mindlessly stitching together bladders for the waging of war and disposal of corpses, she summoned a memory of how it felt to be loved, before cutting her finger on an unusually sharp panel and crashing back to reality.

***

The bunker director was consumed with the conundrum of Ivy Morven. His duty was clear. She was a high value prisoner wanted for quadruple murder and abetting a known traitor, a source of potentially crucial intelligence, and he must interrogate her and send a report to Leri Deri, or alternatively alert headquarters to her presence and request appropriate instruction. Yet she had known in advance of the attack on the Regency. How was this possible? She said she was a seer but plainly this was a trick. Men of the cause did not believe in religious skullduggery. The world was governed by scientific laws, laws of history and social relations that drove the Hutman toward ever greater achievement, and within this worldview there was no room for prophets and end times. The only conclusion was that she had somehow acquired detailed knowledge of Arland’s military plans, and as such it was his inviolable duty to the Party to report her. So obsessed he was with this problem he could not focus on the task at hand with the dedication it required. For before him sat a prisoner, a criminal accused of distributing fliers on the sandstone plaza mocking the Great Man with devil’s horns and a tail. His mouth was gagged and wrists clasped to the armrests of a chair as a medical agent with pruning shears systematically snipped each digit from his hands. They were beyond information extraction – the young man had fully confessed – and were now finishing him off. If there was one thing the director learned from his stint at headquarters, it was never to show a traitor mercy. This man would pluck off the director’s fingers given the chance, and the vitality of the cause required the director to do the same. To pause in this task, to approach it with less than total relish, would be to betray the forces sustaining the Great Man. And so it was that when the agent finished defingering each hand the director himself removed the man’s gag and sheared off an ear so he could hear him scream. It was difficult to convey the necessary message – this is the price of resistance – over the moans of a man exsanguinating from knuckle stubs. But the director was up to the task and punched him, a boy really he was, violently in the face until he shut up. There was little time remaining for genital work before the man succumbed, and the director delegated that caustic task to the agent, a trained doctor.

He again sat down consumed with Ivy Morven. He could not kill her himself, not without higher orders, that much was clear. Anyone on those lists was reserved for the tender mercies of Kadangle and Bogin. What if she was telling the truth? What if he himself would be purged if she went to headquarters? The director was an honorable man. He had always followed the rules; he had always been loyal to the cause. He could not put fear for his personal safety above protocol. He was confident his loyalty would be rewarded. The doctor lay before him the fruit of his work, the innards of a scrotum slit open by pen knife, and the director saw that the prisoner had expired. His death expression was priceless. The director had no doubt that in dying this man recognized the folly of his resistance. Had he made a dent in the cause? Had his gruesome sacrifice yielded any result? The cause would thrive another day thanks in no small part to the efforts of its dedicated servants in this bunker. And that same devotion required that the director call Ivy Morven back into the bunker and process her according to regulation.

Ivy was sewing together a bladder beneath the enormous head of a stitcher, a sac that would be filled with upwater and used to discard into space the body of a young man, a boy of nineteen, just mutilated to death in the bunker. She was approached on the floor by agents who grabbed both elbows and escorted her silently across the main yard to the security gate. She was as frightened as she had ever been in her life. She could not control what these monsters would do and she was certain the director was still livid over her outburst. Yet had she not proven her power of prophecy? Even an unthinking snake like a regional director must pause before crossing the path of a seer. The director carefully planned the sequence. He knew how she had manipulated him before and decided not to offer her the chance this time. She was received by an unfamiliar agent and escorted to a softening cell. Not a word was spoken as a door slammed shut isolating her in total blackness in a closet no bigger than a file cabinet, with urine and feces still on the floor from a prior occupant. There was no way to configure her body for comfort in this cell. Air flow was constricted to induce hypoxia. She waited for them to introduce rats or spiders or suckleworms but the director had opted for prolonged sensory deprivation. For two days she remained in the cell in complete silence, her senses deadened except for the disgusting odor of human waste baking in the heat, including her own. She was removed from the cell dehydrated and unable to support herself. An agent hog-tied her and suspended her from a horizontal bar stretching her limbs in excruciating pain. She was too weak to flex her muscles to relieve stress, even momentarily, and fell completely limp, scarcely able to breathe. She hung for hours and was brought to the point of death. In her declining mental state she concluded they were restricted to soft torture with no physical scarring or disfigurement. Her body was being preserved for headquarters but her health was so rapidly declining she might not survive that long. She was removed from the bar, given a wet sponge to suck for water, and left on the floor for another day, her hunger now rivaling her thirst. In this decrepit state she was hauled into an interrogation room near death.

“You will now tell me everything,” the director said.

She collapsed in a heap unconscious. When she awoke the director handed her a persimmon and a glass of water.

“You are a very foolish woman.”

She snatched the persimmon and took a deep bite, chasing it with water.

“What do you want from me?”

“I want only the truth.”

“You want only to torture. The truth has never mattered to the cause.”

He lifted her by the hair and slammed her onto the table, slapping her repeatedly across her face.

“You will learn respect for the cause before I am finished.”

Ivy flinched in a rush of adrenaline and rolled off the table beyond his grasp. He cornered her and she spat in his face. He struck her again.

“You will die before I do,” she threatened, trembling with anger.

He grabbed her by the neck and threw her across the room, then sat down and pointed his index finger into the table, motioning her to sit across from him. Was the wench sufficiently subdued? He would be glad to apply additional measures. She approached distrustfully and sat down.

“How did you know of the attack on Leri Deri?”

“I told you.”

“Do you wish to lose your fingers?”

She reached across the table and smushed her palm into his face before he could react.

“Here they are, take them you piece of shit!”

The director backhanded her and lunged from his chair before catching himself and sitting back down. He was not going to let her control this interrogation.

“You leave me no choice. Your friend from the last session is waiting for you.”

“If you push me too far I will kill myself. Try explaining that to Kadangle.”

“Let us be reasonable,” the director changed his tone. “I must report on your source of knowledge. You should tell me for your own good. I can send you on to headquarters with no further harm. I cannot protect you there, but you are resourceful. You might last a week in the glass house.” He smirked at the thought of what the cannibals might do to her before slaughter. He would have to request photographs.

“I know many things,” she said.

“I want to know how you know.”

“Have you never heard of the Oopsah?”

“Do not speak to me of religion.”

She stood up from the chair and began pacing. Her legs were weak and she stumbled to the floor, lifting herself up slowly from a small reservoir of energy.
“I know what will happen to you,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Do not try these tricks. Your boyfriend is waiting.”

“Are you loyal to Kadangle?”

“Do not interrogate me.” His tone grew threatening.

“Because Bogin is plotting to kill him. He has Muglair’s ear.”

The director bolted upright, knocking over his chair, and raced to strike her.

“Kadangle will be dismissed tomorrow by the Great Man himself.”

She was doing it again, trying to manipulate him. The director was not going to tolerate it. He grabbed her neck and began choking. She tried to wrest away but was too weak. He relieved his grasp. As soon as she drew air she provoked him again.

“Anyone in Kadangle’s column is going to be purged. Bogin will see to it personally. You will visit the glass house before I do.”

The director was not going to argue with this wench.

“I checked on your witnesses,” he said nastily. “They are not available for comment.”

He grabbed her tightly by the wrist and forced her to the break room where the same agent she previously humiliated was waiting to exact vengeance. He told the agent to have his way and left, slamming the door. The agent had been planning this moment for weeks and told her she would now learn respect for a real man. She ran from his grasp to the opposite side of the food table, picked up a tea kettle from the counter, and hurled it violently at his face, lacerating his forehead and staggering him backwards.

“Do you think you can handle me?” she shouted with a bestial look that unnerved the agent.

He was not going to be humiliated again and grabbed a carving knife.

“Only one of us can be on top,” he menaced. He was going to have his way.

She ran at him trying to impale herself on the knife. He moved it aside realizing he was under strict instructions not to leave marks. She reached up and tried to grab the knife and he yanked it away, slicing her palm. She slapped him across the face leaving a bloody print. He threw the knife on the counter and resolved to rape her right there on the table. She gouged his eyes, then reached up and clawed her own eye emitting a scream so blood curdling the director reflexively jiggled the door handle on the other side, unsure whether he should intervene.

“You are not man enough for this job!” she taunted him, shrieking.

He forced her backward onto the table but she twisted furiously, escaped his clutch, then ran to the opposite side of the table. He grabbed the table edge, debating how to circle around and seize her. He ran one direction and she ran the other, stopping to pick up the knife he had stupidly left within reach. She knew the director was listening.

“Piece of shit behind the door! One of us in this room is going to die and you will never explain that to Bogin!”

The director entered the room. He was not going to let this woman humiliate the entire bunker. Other agents had gathered in the hallway amused at the fracas taking place within. He would hold her down so his colleague could rape her. That would accomplish his goal of violating this human trash, of demonstrating as invasively as possible the structure of power, while leaving no marks. Ivy knew she was outnumbered but would rather die than lose this battle. She lifted the knife, still in her hand, then turned it sideways and ran it across her upturned wrist. A fountain of blood spurted outward and rolled down her arm.

“I will die in an hour. You will die in a week.”

She collapsed from nervous disintegration onto the floor. This was not what the director had in mind. He had already notified headquarters that he was softening this prisoner for their further interrogation. He could not now produce a corpse without violating protocol. He called in his medical agent who ran to a supply closet and retrieved a pressure wrap. Ivy was unconscious as the agent tightly bound her sliced wrist and carried her to the administration infirmary. He busted through the door demanding that this prisoner receive immediate attention and told them Kadangle would be very interested in her prognosis. The director remained in the bunker nervously concocting a report in his head as to how this interrogation had gone so awry. A prisoner should never have access to a weapon. A prisoner should never have access to restricted areas such as the break room. And a prisoner on both wanted lists, for quadruple murder and for treason, should never bleed to death in a regional outpost. It was his duty to deliver the subject alive to Leri Deri for processing according to their prerogatives. He waited anxiously for word of her condition and was told the following day she would survive. He would have to relent on the interrogation to avoid further fiascos.

Shortly after receiving the good news of her survival he received additional shocking news. Muglair had delivered a speech that very day in the People’s Hall denouncing the excesses of Kadangle and promising to take steps to redress his outrages against the Party, starting with his immediate ouster from the Ministry. Why this was shocking the director could not say. Had not the seer already demonstrated her ability to foretell the future with the bombing of the Regency? Had not she told him of Kadangle’s fate? It occurred to him he had never really cared for his patron Kadangle, and that Bogin was a righteous man whom he looked forward to serving with unbridled enthusiasm. With the upheaval in Interior the director lost his reporting chain. Bogin was preoccupied with new directives, and investigative leads from regional bunkers were not a priority. Muglair had radical plans of an historic dimension for which Kadangle would not have been reliable. Bogin had much work to do to execute these plans – expansion of camps, construction of transit facilities, training of personnel – and the investigation of high values would have to wait, even subjects tied to the mysteries of Tobor Zranga. The director had fully expected to receive an immediate order for the transfer of this prisoner to headquarters, and he had contemplated with glee her treatment at the hands of Bogin. But as it turned out, he received no instructions for weeks, and in the meantime he was afraid to touch her.

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In real life I am thin and bald, sometimes cute but never handsome. I have Crohn’s disease and am often half- sick. In my life, I would not punch you or cut you or even insult you (at least, to your face). I would be respectful, understanding, and nice, if somewhat cynical. Inside, I would despair and worry. But when I am Nightmare, I am nearly invulnerable. I feel alive and optimistic, full of life, healthy and strong.

I know one thing. Sick or not, sometimes I can’t stop playing. Time ticks away, the half hour, the hour, the whole evening, and then, it’s three a.m.; I’m in the zone, just as I am when writing. Normally, I like to savor a game rather than manically tsunami through it. But I remember spending hours just nosing around in BioShock, the scariest, best game of 2007. At the beginning of the first level, which evokes the first episode of TV’s epic Lost, I was tossed from a crashing plane into the ebony ocean, where what seemed to be the skyscraper- tall fires of Hades burned all around me. Panic came over me, and then, a feeling that did not mimic real life, there was beauty in the danger. To gawk at the fireworks that played off the grim, foreboding water, I kept swimming even though the gasoline- induced flames kept shooting deep into the defenseless body that was the night sky. Dream. Reality. Beauty. Nightmare. Give me more.

Briefly as I play, I even feel immortal.

I am not the only one.

You probably have felt some visceral connection to videogames as well, no matter how old you are. In the dank confines of the arcade or the corner dive when the lights were low, you were the plumber who saved the dainty princess in Donkey Kong. As your fingers ached and your joints stiffened, you were the one who couldn’t stop playing Tetris. You even had visions of blocks falling softly as snow as you slept. In front of a nineteen- inch TV, you went long and completed the Hail Mary in Madden football. As Master Chief you saved humanity from the gross aliens of the Covenant.

You know it is just a game, a videogame on a plastic disk that bears the computer bits and bytes, endless numbers that meet with a chip to turn you into Nightmare, or Mario or Sonic or Master Chief. But within that disk is magic as big and entertaining as any movie or TV show. And when that disk spins, it is a Sufi dervish who makes celestial pictures and sounds that are an extension of you and me. So forget this sordid keep- up- with- the- Joneses life, with its e-mail spam, inane tweets, bills, mortgages, and recessions. Down the rabbit hole we go to control it all as the hero, for in every videogame there is a hero. We admit it. We are junkies who must save the world. But we’re game.

Believe it or not, we’ve been gaming for more than fifty years. Man, how it’s grown, prospered, and evolved. The videogame industry in the United States is now a $20- billion-a-year juggernaut, surpassing movie, music, and DVD sales—combined. Just one game, the Houser brothers’ Grand Theft Auto IV, earned $500 million in its opening week, far outpacing the movie industry’s biggest force, James Cameron’s Avatar, which earned less than half that amount. Forty- two percent of Americans have videogame consoles. If you add computer games, 68 percent of us are gamers. And the average age of today’s gamer is thirty- five. Almost half of online gamers are female, and they play games with competitive zeal and attitude. And videogame consoles are now the guardians of the living room beyond games. They play DVDs. They stream movies from Netflix. They connect to Facebook and Twitter. That’s entertainment.

And videogames have correspondingly become an unstoppable force in popular culture, one that constantly influences other forms of entertainment. From 30 Rock to South Park, videogames are the subject of crucial plot points and full episodes. Even more important, they have changed the way blockbuster action films and TV programs are shot. Cars that blow up in Transformers roll toward you, coming at you like they’re alive, like something out of Need for Speed or Burnout Paradise. Car commercials feature the characters and monsters in World of Warcraft. Beverage ads are informed by Grand Theft Auto. Sonic the Hedgehog and Pikachu are featured balloons in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, flying high and proud next to Spider- Man and Buzz Lightyear. Mark Ecko designed a full line of clothing devoted to Halo. And the phenomenon is worldwide. You can even buy a box of Pokémon- branded milk in Thailand.



How and why did this happen? As a journalist, I’ve watched the growth for two decades now. I’ve seen the cycles come and go. I’ve seen the Nintendo dominance end and begin again, more powerful than before. But as the trends come and go, I keep thinking about the big riddle of videogames: How did we get here? How did videogames rise to take over popular culture? I’ve watched in amazement as the videogame industry, like that Energizer bunny, keeps going and going. How does it get bigger every year, even as mainstream media continue to turn up their noses at videogame culture? (And isn’t that utterly idiotic? Why aren’t games reviewed alongside books, movies, and pop music?)

Those questions have always fascinated me, but another process—that of an individual game’s creation—only really captured my imagination when I worked for two years as editor in chief of Sony Online Entertainment. There, I was witness to the fascinating if sometimes daunting way games were made. I helped with the words to many games and I helped test them too, including the massively multiplayer online role playing game of elves and ogres, EverQuest, often called EverCrack because of its insanely addictive nature. I was absolutely intrigued by the creation of games, utterly entranced by even the smallest nugget about, yes, how they were made, but even more, why they were made. There was nothing better than being inside that womb of knowledge. I felt the same way at VH1, where I wrote the daily GameBreak blog and worked on Viacom papers full of techspeak to help the company soldier forward during the casual game revolution. After those experiences, when a game struck me as ingenious—a cut or two above the rest—I wanted to know all about it and the people who imagined it. Questions for the game makers would drop into my head like those constantly falling blocks in Tetris. What could the game have become if you didn’t have to worry about sales? What did you fight to retain when those heavy- handed executives from the megacorporation chimed in with their say? Overall, why did the game work? Why did it tickle and charge my neurons, axons, receptors, and thalamus, making me completely and utterly bliss out? Was it because the game itself was a triumph of the craft or because I could feel comfortable living in the game’s world? Was my nerdy perception exactly on par with the game makers’? Or did the game permit my own imagination to grow and flourish in ways that I previously believed only books and music could? And finally, when a game was really terrific, when it grabbed my heart and soul just like Alice Sebold did with The Lovely Bones or Joseph Conrad with Heart of Darkness, why could I not stop playing?

There have been other books about videogames, books that talk about facts, money, and technology, books that personalize the experience of gaming, books that detail trends, books that simply tell you how to play a game. I’ve read many and have enjoyed some of them. But there have been few books that, to rephrase Robert Frost, began with delight and ended in wisdom, few books that led me to feel those completely exciting aha moments of creation and camaraderie, of theorizing and implementation, of process and panic, of wild success and looming deadline doom, that I know from experience go into making the fi nest games. Most of all, there have been none that convincingly told me how we got here.

That’s what I’ve tried to capture in these pages. You will find out how the world of game making profoundly affected those artists and craftspeople who made Super Mario Bros., Pong, Myst, Spore, EverQuest, BioShock, Shadow Complex, and more—and not always in a positive way. Each of these changed videogames forever, and the untold facts, fascinating anecdotes, and heretofore buried details about these pieces of popular art tantalized me. But I also wanted to explore the larger question: How in the pantheon of games did each of these help the medium evolve enough to keep you and me excited for all these decades, these crazy fifty years?

I don’t try to look at every moment of videogame history in these pages. And I won’t I look at every great videogame franchise. For that way lies madness . . . and redundancy. Instead, I’ve chosen to detail some moments of supreme discovery and utter failure by the brilliant inventors and craftspeople who gave innovation, personality, and even drama to an industry that altered my life (and, when you think about it, made a big difference in yours, too).

If you know games, you know what I mean. If you don’t, I hope that, in the course of reading these chapters, you will feel it like I so often feel it, with surprise, pleasure, panic, awe, goose bumps, and exhilaration.

Excerpted from All Your Base Are Belong To Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture by Harold Goldberg. Copyright © 2011 by Harold Goldberg. Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

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When her line of prisoners was thrown into the pit she had no flat surface to occupy and rolled into a corner. A soldier shouted at her to join the fellow prisoners, too stupid to recognize her orientation, and trained a gun on her preparing to waste ammunition. She held up her orange band not knowing what it meant but hoping it reflected her status as a high value prisoner, a subject for interrogation. She was thrown a shovel and ordered to dig a half-slope ledge for herself in the corner. She lacked her husband’s muscular build, a trained ditch digger he was, but knew from gardening how to throw her weight onto a shovel head and get underneath the blade to pry the earth up. There was no water, no food, the soldiers deliberately depriving their captives’ bodies of nourishment to condition them to bestial treatment. Why waste good water on Arland scum? Why feed human food to rodents? No one in Muglair’s army could think of a good reason, so the prisoners suffered.

There were no children in the pit and Ivy realized Hope had been taken elsewhere. What were they doing to children? Ivy wanted to scream that she was a Hutwoman, her daughter was a Hutgirl, she was one of them, but there was no way to communicate with these monsters. They were conditioned not to listen, to divide humanity into us and them, and she was in the them category having been captured in enemy territory, her every word an immediate cause for suspicion and violence. For several days the prisoners baked in that squalid pit. Ivy’s corner was in direct sunlight with no shadow and she grew dangerously dehydrated, covering herself in mud to retain moisture and avoid exposure. Arland urine and excrement trickled along the wall into the corner. She was forced to dig channels with her hands to guide waste away from her little ledge, the shovel long ago retrieved by soldiers. On the third day it rained. She was ready with hardened potholes dug into her corner to catch rain which mixed with raw waste but she had no choice but to drink copiously, for death from dehydration was a bigger risk than dysentery. The graves were already filled, bodies felled not by bullets but by deprivation. If Ivy had retained the capacity for amazement, she would have been amazed at how quickly the human body succumbs. She watched in muted horror as a woman on the wall struggled vainly to bury her husband, herself too weak to handle a shovel effectively, her fellow Inta conserving their energy. He was a large man whose body fell more quickly to want, and his wife resolved to kill herself if need be with the exertion of the task. Only an animal would not bury her husband, and she was not yet an animal.

Prisoners with orange bands were ordered to assemble on the wall near the surface. Ivy struggled to clamber up the slope but could not reach them, so she lay outstretched in the filth displaying her tag. As other prisoners were hauled off the wall into waiting transports a soldier rifle-butted her shoulder, angry that he would have to carry this dog, before grabbing her by the same shoulder with searing pain and wrenching her to the surface. The transport bed was crowded along the small wall with over a dozen orange-tagged Arland men, Ivy crushed by their bouncing bodies in the corner of her natural gravity. The separation by gender in the first transport, when she was stolen from her husband, was not designed to segregate men from women but to sever families. Any grouping larger than one posed a threat to security and was ruthlessly broken up. She had been thrown back with men and was now the only woman among the high values and the only person with Notches gravity. The truck rattled along rough roads shaking violently for hours headed toward the village of Dunder, a once prosperous farming community on the edge of the hinterland forests whose fields were rendered non-arable by Muglair’s crop rotation policies. The populace subsisted on angoos and apricots until the groves were razed at the directive of the Land Ministry on the theory, unsupported by agricultural science, that orchard duff would optimize hemp and flax production. Even had the theory worked the peasantry would have starved like their neighboring villages for lack of food crops. Unlike their neighbors, Dunder was fortunate that a local son was married to Muglair’s niece, a connection which brought them the siting of a prominent labor camp. Now Dunder had the revenue allocation that came with such a sprawling enterprise as well as unlimited free labor.

Ivy knew none of this back story as her transport rumbled across the furrowed roads toward the camp, a square mile of spiked chicken wire filled with barracks and guard towers surrounded by administrative buildings. A guard tossed a bag of rutabagas at the famished prisoners who stuffed their parched mouths compulsively before their fellows could rip the vegetables from their hands. Ivy had no chance in this melee and her hunger continued unabated. The bed of the transport was covered by canvas wrapped across a curved frame. From her corner she could see the terrain through an unsecured flap. Arid and unusable farmland stretched for miles in the direction of Shamba, and in the far distance she could make out the Flume spewing skywards, already augmented from two-hundred and sixty miles of erosion working its way up the shaft from the bottom of the Silent Sea. Plumes of conventional smoke surrounded the enormous eruption, smoldering remnants from the massive attack of the Arland Armada. The ballast ships dumped enough ordnance to destroy a capital city, all concentrated on the surface controls of the Flume and surrounding plateau with its monumental edifices in various stages of completion, intending to collapse the Flume inward to cap it. But the column of water merely belched from the intrusion of displaced earth then continued its spirited drain of the planet’s life blood. Over twenty percent of the Armada was destroyed by the fierce air defenses constructed around Shamba and along the approach from the Edge but modified destroyer tactics and a circuitous route ultimately neutralized the batteries. The surviving ships of the Armada returned to Arland as Marshall Turlin focused his attention on recapturing the salient and obliterating Skavian edge communities, including Harmour.

Ivy could tell from dust trailing past the vehicle that other transports preceded their own, a convoy of unknown length carrying the human spoils of Muglair’s conquests from the Edge. The transports stopped outside the entrance to the camp which was expanding to accommodate the influx of prisoners. Work details were unwinding huge bails of spiked wire to create a new concentric square around the existing one, with guard towers erected intermittently along the new perimeter. As the truck hit a bump a rutabaga rolled from under the mass of men and Ivy stuffed it greedily into her mouth. The man closest to her impulsively reached for it but, in a moment of shamed humanity, decided he would rather die from hunger than fight a starving woman for a vegetable. The transports rolled slowly through a makeshift breach in the new wire then past the towers of the original perimeter. They were greeted by a bizarre prisoner ensemble of valve bugle, nickelhorn, and tuba playing a mournful dirge. Each truck stopped ceremonially for one segment of the melody before passing on to the receiving yard. The ritual introduction to the camp through funeral music struck Ivy as sadistic, as if they were being forced to witness their own interment.

The camp was originally constructed for common criminals and native enemies of Muglair’s regime. It was not designed to handle prisoners with differing gravities and crews were busily retrofitting barracks with internal planking to accommodate conversions from Arland to Skava. Camp administrators improvised the booking procedure by routing Arland prisoners along a wall in the intake facility to a processing room. The plaster, not built to handle human weight, quickly crumbled under the strain forcing prisoners to step from stud to stud with numerous lacerations and punctures from the inevitable breaches in the wall cavity. Ivy was forced to navigate the corner of the intake corridor, one foot on the disintegrating wall and one on the floor, with no natural surface to stand on. The configuration allowed processing of only one prisoner at a time resulting in a huge backlog culminating in a short interview with an Interior agent recording biographical data. The process was disorganized and served little useful purpose with no independent means of verifying statements. From the perspective of Interior anyone with Arland gravity was grist for the mill even though many were likely Hutmen given the areas where they were captured. Muglair intended to hold citizens of the rival nation hostage for barter regardless of ethnicity.

Ivy could not reveal her Hutwoman birth for fear of persecution as a child of the martyrs. She gave her Morven name which identified her as Inta, as she had to her original captors in the salient to avoid being shot, and displayed the orange band hoping to be labeled a common criminal. There were procedures in place for crime and she did not trust what might happen to the innocent. She had long ago learned that people like Tobor Zranga held a grudging respect for the criminal mind but nothing but contempt for simple folk. Party leaders and common criminals thrived on exploiting others for personal gain, the only difference being the leaders were powerful enough to legalize their predation. Indeed the reason Zranga had not killed her was because her actions in Harmour were so horrific. He saw in her a worthy adversary, a woman capable of thinking like him, and he wanted to preserve the quarry for the hunt. She hated herself for sharing his mindset and her relationship with Mutt had been an attempt to invest her life with human love. But now her best hope for survival in Dunder was as a criminal and if she were executed, at least it would be for crimes she had committed. Those accused of being Inta and nothing more would not fare well in the new order. Muglair’s eliminationist rhetoric had reached a pitch where exterminating the vermin seemed the logical conclusion. If the Inta had throughout history been the bane of the Hutman, if the Skavian Inta had for generations forced the Hutman into squalor and subservience, if the Arland Inta today deprived the Hutman of control of the planet’s resources, if the Inta by nature were a calculating and cruel race that would kill a Hutman for coin, if the Inta could not be trusted to live as equals but would always seek bondage of their fellow man, then would not the Hutman be wise to eliminate this threat from its territory once and for all? Muglair fancied himself a realist and knew he would never subjugate Arland itself. But he could rid the blessed soil of Skava from the Inta curse, and if Arland continued to wage war on the Hutman that was exactly what he would do.

Prisoners were allotted wrist bands and uniforms with serial numbers, forced to change in open view on the receiving wall, then led on transport sleds from the intake facility to rows of barracks, each bearing a number and a name. Ivy clung to a vertical sled oriented for Arlanders that was tugged to Barracks No. 23, across the main door of which were inscribed the words “Your Turn.” The eastern wall of the structure had been planked over to support the weight of Arland prisoners. There was as yet no surface for intermediate gravities and she was again crammed into a corner, slopes rising at forty-five degrees on either side. Barracks were segregated by gender with No. 23 tightly packed with four-tiered bunks in which women doubled and tripled up on each level. The current occupants of No. 23 were on work detail in the nearest remaining fruit groves miles away. In a departure from practice they were permitted to retain half their haul, the rotten half, and ordered to share it with new arrivals upon their return. Camp officials were not informed of military operations in advance and had no plan for the resulting influx. Without clear orders from Leri Deri they were not prepared to take harsh measures and instead improvised to meet the new prisoners’ basic needs. The barracks were primarily self-regulating with one chief, a common criminal, selected as liaison to the camp overseers and granted dictatorial authority under the roof. Barracks No. 23 was assigned a sewing detail, stitching together gunny sacks used in trench construction. Hand sewing was inefficient but one of the few productive activities for inmates confined to barracks walls. The experience could prove useful upon completion of their gravity conversion when they would be transferred for labor detail to a machine shop outfitted for sewing.

Deputies of the barracks chief passed around a mop bucket full of cloudy water redolent of lye along with bushels of rotting apricots gathered off the ground, replenishing the stores as needed. Ivy sated herself on the bounty and felt a stabbing pain in her stomach as powerful as a pregnancy contraction. She prayed that it was a temporary reaction to rancid nourishment, that it would pass and not return. But the pain continued in waves, caused not by the current consumption but by contaminated water days earlier in the holding pit, and she was quickly reduced to a fetal position in the hardened corner with pain rivaling childbirth. A toilet hole had been rigged up the wall for Arland prisoners but she could not reach it. She crawled in excruciating pain to the corner of the corner, where three walls met, and fell into a writhing pain with intense bloody diarrhea that felt like her bowels would turn inside out. Images of Hope passed through her mind as if fear for her daughter’s well-being might distract from a body so viciously turning on her. She lay helpless and untended for hours as the infection festered unchecked in her gut before finally the barracks chief approached and shoved fresh thaban dung into her mouth, forcibly closing her lips until she swallowed. Ivy was beyond gagging but perceived this intrusion as an act of utmost depravity. A fellow prisoner with normal gravity approached with a wet sponge to clean her and offer the first words of comfort during her illness, telling her everyone got it and it would pass, that the dung contained immunities and would help fight the infection. She gave her dried ginger to dispel the taste.

Ivy was removed to an infirmary, fortunate, if such an agonizing condition could be called fortunate, to fall ill shortly after her arrival before medical services were swamped by other prisoners. She was placed in a bed tilted for Notches gravity, properly hydrated, and nursed to health over several days until she could eat solids. Her mind was scoured of emotion and she realized with the partial return of health how little she had thought of her husband and daughter. She was unable to cope with the immediate needs of survival much less the emotional pain of separation. She knew her family had been ripped apart by the same forces that destroyed her own childhood, the plottings of great men for great power, and that perhaps her loved ones were dead, but her mind retreated into a small unreflective box from which she governed her limbs by pull strings for the sole purpose of survival. She could not afford to feel except for a second order awareness that she was not capable of feeling, and she knew her humanity was cracking under the strain. As she recovered, more prisoners arrived with similar illnesses and the staff grew surly with the increasing demands. Her bed was tilted to Arland gravity so that a woman in the grip of intestinal infection could join her, soiling them both. Ivy wanted to comfort the sick woman but was too frail and nauseous to help. She volunteered to return to the barracks before a formal discharge and was sent back with the next sick escort. Her discomfort remained intense but the deputies took no pity, forcing her to meet quota on the sewing detail or risk confinement to an isolation pit. The chief did not care about personal suffering but was not as evil as Ivy thought. Had the deputies not forced her to work through her pain an overseer likely would have sent her to a pit himself. The windows on the Arland wall were boarded over to support prisoner weight but Ivy could see through a window on the adjacent wall into a courtyard where a problem was emerging. Enough bodies had accumulated from illness, malnutrition, shrapnel wounds, and execution that the typical means of disposal, tying to upwater bladders and releasing into space, was no longer sufficient. The administrators were under strict orders not to bury deceased prisoners, both to avoid poisoning the ground with Inta rot and to conceal evidence. Muglair intended to permit neutral inspectors from a bilateral commission into the camps to demonstrate humane conditions and the presence of mass graves might give the wrong impression.

Intelligence gathering at Dunder, both for criminal and national security purposes, had taken a hiatus as the influx of prisoners from Muglair’s triumph at the Edge was sorted out. But one name stood out prominently among the high values on both lists and she was the first summoned to the regional Interior bunker on the camp perimeter. The station director knew she was wanted on suspicion of quadruple murder, two of the victims confidantes of Interior Minister Kadangle himself, potentially carried out on orders of Tobor Zranga, a traitor now in official exile though strangely immunized from arrest. Headquarters in Leri Deri did not yet know of her capture and the director hoped to impress them with a full report and confession. In the rush of distractions from the war he had neglected the subject during which time she nearly perished from disease. Had she died, someone in the bunker would have had to explain the loss of this valuable target to headquarters, no doubt with dire repercussions. Ivy was sleeping on a crumpled haysack in the corner of the Arland wall, fatigued from an eighteen-hour shift stitching gunny sacks and now military knapsacks. She had recovered most of her strength as the illness subsided and food became adequate. The camp was more focused on productivity of the prisoners than punitive maltreatment and Ivy’s health had benefited as a result. She was asked by a deputy to confirm her name, which she did, and was carried physically by armed guard into the main yard and through a special security gate directly into the basement of the bunker. Few prisoners who passed that gate ever returned. In a break room seated on an angle block she was given a civilized meal with cold cuts, tarpin bread, and meringue, which she could not finish. She declined wine but took a few sips of thaban milk which upset her stomach. She asked for and received clean water, not the mop rinse her system had grown accustomed to. She was led into a room bathed in pale electric light with only a viewing window through the door. She sat at a table leaning sideways at a half-slope angle with her Notches gravity. The director decided he would take the lead in the interrogation. He sat down across the table and smiled graciously. An agent paced nervously in the background ready to strike when the dissembling became obvious.

“We seek only the truth.”

“You shall get it.”

“You are hiding things.”

“I will hide nothing.”

“Your cooperation may benefit your child.”

She laughed. “You think I have a child?”

“Were you not captured with family?”

“Who writes your reports? Do I look to you like a woman with attachments?”

“Why then is your flesh indented on your finger?” He pointed to the depression of her wedding band.

Ivy looked at him sternly. “You are not familiar with life in the spas. A ring is protection. A woman without a ring is fair game.” She held up her ringless finger. “Those goatfuckers stole it at intake. I should have hidden it. Where might a woman hide jewelry on her body?”

She looked at him without blinking. He lost his train of thought. She continued staring while he searched for another question.

“If you would like,” she suggested, “I can confess they are my family. I will sign whatever you put before me. You can torture me afterward if that makes it easier.”

He flipped through a notebook filled with questions.

“What brought you to the Notches?”

“It’s in my dossier. You must think me stupid.”

“What did you do there?”

“I took such work as I could find.”

“Elaborate.”

“Must I state the obvious?”

“Did you service men?”

“I would never do that.” She paused. “Only women.”

The director leaned back in his chair and guffawed.

“We’ve got a live one here,” he commented to his colleague.

“I cannot believe there would be a sufficient market for that line of work,” he opined, “even in the Notches.”

“You would be surprised.”

“What else did you do?”

“I worked in the canteen. Mostly mopping.”

“Do you know why you are here?”

“Yes.”
“Then why don’t you tell me.”

“I put a gun to my father’s face and pulled the trigger. I shot my mother in the chest and watched her bleed to death on the floor. I gunned down their minders who were too incompetent to protect them.”

“My, my, my, such admissions are usually long in coming.” The director was perplexed. “How shall we occupy our remaining time?”

“You know as well as I what you want to hear.”

“Pray tell.”

“This is about Tobor Zranga. He ordered me to do it. I will tell you everything. I hope you kill him.”

The agent stepped forward from the shadows and slapped her.

“I will torture you if you continue your impudence.”

It was his job to intimidate with physical violence but the director was as nonplussed as Ivy as to why he chose that moment. Ivy ran her tongue across the wound inside her cheek and returned her gaze to the director.

“Is his timing always so awkward?”

The agent stepped forward again but the director motioned him to stop.

“If I did service men he would be quick.” She snickered.

The director discharged the agent who was seething at the remark. The subject was in a mood to talk and the director was in a mood to listen. He learned long ago to let subjects ramble. Invariably their statements could be checked against the known record and if they were prevaricating stronger measures could be taken.

“Tell me about your parents.”

“He is blackmailing your precious leader, isn’t he.”

“What do you mean?” The director was curious.

“Tobor is blackmailing Muglair. I am certain of it. That is how he operates. But a person at your level would not be told.”

This was dangerous territory. The director had long ago learned to steer clear of intrigue among Party leaders. The more one knew, the more likely one would disappear.

She continued.

“Zranga would be dead by now if he were not blackmailing the Great Man. He knows things Muglair does not want revealed.”

The director switched topics.

“Why did he order you to kill your parents?”

“You are not cleared for information at that level.”

“Who are you to establish these rules?”

“They are not my rules. They are Interior’s. I will be glad to tell you everything. Do you wish to take a chance?”

“Ma’am, I am going to recall my colleague. He is not going to show mercy. He is stewing in the break room over your insult.”

“Let us say hypothetically I killed my parents because they were sabotaging the great door on orders of Muglair. Do you know what the great door is? It was the last safety mechanism for the Flume, at the bottom of the Silent Sea. And let us say hypothetically Muglair sabotaged the great door because he intends to destroy the planet if Arland does not capitulate. Does that sound plausible to you? And let us say hypothetically he does not want the Council to know of his sabotage and will kill anyone who might tell. Is that information you would want to hear? Do you even have clearance for the Flume? Do you think Kadangle and Bogin would welcome you sharing their secrets? Or might your knowledge pose a risk?”

“Lady, you are not the interrogator.” He was again off script. “Why would you speak of such things and forfeit your own life?”

“My life is forfeit already. It is yours that hangs in the balance.”

The director remained silent.

“Your death can be arranged,” he threatened.

“Do what you will.” She leaned forward. “You should call in the higher ups.”

“What will you tell them that you cannot tell me?”

“I will tell them everything. And I will tell them that I told you.”

The director recalled his colleague to the room.

“Wait,” she whispered.

He pushed the door shut and sat back down.

She looked at him intensely.

“What day is today?”

He told her.

“Do you wish to know when Leri Deri will be bombed?”

The director had family in the capital.

“How would you know such things?”

She lunged at him as if to strike and he flinched. She extended her arms like a bird of prey capturing a mouse, her eyes boring into him with a demonic expression unhinged from all reality.

“It is not written in the end times come the seers?”

The director grew angry at her brashness and lunged at her neck to strangle her. She pulled back and knocked his hands aside, falling off her chair then leaping up in wrath.

“In four days,” she hissed, “the Regency will be destroyed.”

He was convinced she was a witch.

“You cannot kill a seer,” she spoke calmly. “Headquarters will figure out my capture eventually. You know as well as I the same dispatch you received from the front was sent to Leri Deri. Your options are to extract my confession and send a report, or to dither and claim you never met me. I can assure you once you send a report Kadangle will take complete interest in my case. He wants to know Zranga’s secrets, and he knows I can tell him. If he learns you interrogated me, a piece of shit such as yourself will not survive.”

The director was furious but unnerved.

“I do not negotiate with traitors.”

“I ask for no concessions. I wish only to assist your investigation. Is that not consistent with procedure?”

“What do you ask?”

“That child in the carriage. She is my daughter. That man with me was her father. They are witnesses. They must be protected.”

The director called his colleague in.

“We must schedule another session. Smack her.”

The agent slapped her again across the cheek, this time harder, and she spat blood in the direction of the director. She leapt up screaming for the protection of God in heaven cursing him for the cruelty inflicted upon her, begging him not to return her to Dunder. The agent was impressed at the effect his colleague had on her spirit even without torture. He looked forward to an opportunity to work her over more thoroughly in the next session. Perhaps he could demonstrate the meaning of quick for her on the break room table. It would not be so funny then. But the director was in no hurry to follow up. He would have to make inquiries and conduct research and locate witnesses to continue the questioning in a productive manner and that could take time. A really long time given his other pressing duties.

Check out chapters of The Cube right here.

“Shall I add you to the portrait?”

“That would be lovely,” Ivy replied.

Orly was going to paint over a couple who repented and returned to Arland, a process requiring public recantation of deviation and, usually, a return to hidden ways. Mutt recalled Ivy’s acceptance of love in all its forms on the day of their fake wedding and admired her graciousness. He would never rid himself entirely of the notion that something was wrong with Glon squared – when he thought of the physical act inherent in their union he recoiled – yet he was learning to accept their love. He was proud to stand with his wife in the New Normal and repressed the condemnation so deeply ingrained in his psyche. Ivy requested that Orly add Oolan to the painting as the only unattached person. He died suffering a lover’s rejection and should be celebrated, and redeemed, along with those whose love endured. No one had a picture of Oolan so soon he had taken his life after arriving in the Notches, but Orly painted an imagined version to Ivy’s side reaching down to hold Hope’s hand. The New Normal was the painter’s gift to the Notches and would be circulated among the homes of all the depicted. He proposed that the forester’s hut display it first and Ivy gladly accepted. Mutt was tired of Looda steamboats, even Ivy was, and they would welcome a new sight on their walls.

The Sphere had run its creative course and was limping along with tawdry romance and gratuitous violence awaiting Ivy’s promised revelations after the Fifteenth of Tarpin. The ice mountains on the dark side had long melted from the relentless exhaust of the boilers, raising the level of the great ocean until all that remained of dry land was the bright zone and ring forest, forcing the great nations into close quarters and increasingly bloody conflict fueled by the narcotic vapors of nabana peels. The gigantic windmills were catching the cosmic wind, generating power for weapons production so that people could continue killing each other, and the Sphere was slowly rotating from the torque, picking up speed with each revolution. Spinning introduced a new concept to the story, the periodic division of night and day. People could now stay in one place and experience half a day in sunlight and half a day in darkness, a reality unlike any encountered on the Cube. Terrible things would happen at night with irregular military forces marauding the hamlets for rape and plunder. Common people had no source of illumination other than firelight, electricity being diverted strictly to military use, and would gather at night in large defensive circles with men facing outward armed with farm implements, their firearms also having been confiscated, and women and children huddled inside. The marauders loved these formations, calling them a candy treat with hard shell and creamy center, for they had the effect of gathering their favorite human targets, women and girls, in one place. The crude defenses were easy to penetrate and the marauders took sadistic pleasure butchering the males, who were honor bound to fight to the death, on their way to the females. The defensive circles also left homesteads unoccupied and free for plunder and torching. The violent imagery of the raids came from Ivy, and Mutt was impressed – and disturbed – by her ability to conceptualize evil. Everyone understood that the spinning of the Sphere would destroy the planet. Indeed, they felt themselves growing lighter with each revolution as velocity increased, and it was a only a matter of time before centripetal forces would tear the planet apart. The authors never bothered to calculate the angular velocity required to overcome gravity but just assumed the cosmic wind could achieve it. Despite the imminent predictable catastrophe, neither nation would take action first and on principle they refused to negotiate. The plan of each country was to achieve victory first and save the planet later, and this required more windmills in the short term, not fewer.

Huston and Posy produced five children with the undertaker and telegraph operator who themselves were having an affair, making it difficult to match children with specific fathers. Even the mothers got confused over which children they delivered. As far as the couple could tell, their first child, the love child, remained the only product of their frequent unions. Posy retained her deep conviction that bringing a child into such a violent world was deeply immoral and, admirably, had succumbed to wanton lust only four times during fertility, each producing a baby and eventually qualifying her as a nursery under the city’s byzantine childcare ordinance. Mutt wondered if Posy with her many lovers was acting out Ivy’s sexual fantasies but decided this was not possible. Ivy regretted killing off Posy’s father, the mayor, so early in the story because she never found an adequate villain to replace him. He caught Huston in the act with his daughter and threatened to unleash an electric thaban on them, one of the many exotic creatures on the planet, leaving Huston with no choice but to slice off the mayor’s head with invisible razor wire located conveniently near his neck. A distraught Posy, who still harbored hopes her father was not a merciless tyrant despite his fondness for mowing down schoolchildren with spike harrows, ran crying down the stairwell chasing her father’s tumbling head before giving up and returning to grieve his headless corpse. Huston was aroused by the bloodletting of his nemesis and sought to complete the act so rudely interrupted, a prospect Posy found compatible with her continued grieving from a certain position.

Mutt developed a side story in which Posy authored a romance novel about life on a cubic planet, allowing him to envision his own planet through the eyes of a Sphere dweller with tawdriness exceeding that of the Sphere. He even considered having Posy write a novel about a woman on a cube writing a novel set on a sphere but decided only a warped author would construct something so convoluted. The numerous affairs of Huston and Posy created a problem for Ivy’s resolution of the story. How could she regain reader’s interest in their relationship with so much intrigue on the side? The undertaker and telegraph operator would have to die, most logically one drowning and the other sucked into a windmill in keeping with important themes of the story. Then the couple could rediscover true love, a mystical veil descending over the animal passion that had never subsided so they could launch into the void hand in hand at the planet’s disintegration. In the midst of all this she needed to reveal Posy’s big secret about the fate of the universe which she had been teasing for the last hundred or so installments. Remarkably, The Cause continued to run the story despite, or perhaps because of, its descent into sex and gore, and it maintained a loyal following. Muglair even referenced it in further speeches, and editorials in The Cause lauded its environmental themes while decrying its morals.

Mutt stopped to read various bulletins he had been ignoring in the canteen. Even though he received the notices from the great powers, copied them, and handed them to the runner, he had only skimmed their content. Now he read carefully the latest pronouncements from Muglair. In the wake of Arland’s humiliation of Skava at Bivens Mill, he had dedicated his nation to pursuit of alternative energy, working within the constraints dictated by Arland and building his glorious legacy, the new Hutman capital of Shamba. Indeed the nation’s entire energies were dedicated to construction of this magnificent new city. The latest notice from Skava detailed progress for the Cathedral of the Resolution, a holy sanctuary reserved for the Hutman alone, free of the foul reek of Inta and named for the resolution of religious dialectics in favor of the Hutman, its tallest spire towering high above the Skavian plain exactly one foot taller than the Holy Sarcophagi in Rixjrig with structural reinforcement to permit augmentation should Arland prove so vain as to heighten its own spires. The Circularium, an arena for mock weaponized combat, the Dioramas of Independence, a museum telling the story of Hutman triumph over Inta repression, the Plaza of the Martyrs, featuring gigantic columns representing the murdered revolutionaries, Isogon Row, the new headquarters for the military branches, the Colonnade of the Cause, the replacement of the People’s Hall in Leri Deri, and most imposing of all the Palace of Progress, the seat of power for the Great Man where he would humbly serve the people, were all rising above the plain ahead of schedule. Muglair boldly declared that Shamba would be ready for habitation in less than three years when the evacuation of Leri Deri would take place. He would raze the ancient capital, salt the earth, and declare it an Inta graveyard. For it was in Leri Deri that the Hutman revolutionaries perished, that generations of Hutman oppression had been orchestrated, and that Arland’s tentacles had slithered in to oppress the trusting Hutman and butcher his children. Leri Deri would henceforth be a dumping ground for the bodies of those who opposed the cause. There the vultures could pick over their carcasses because the noble Hutman would not lift a shovelful of dirt to bury traitors. The Great Man sincerely hoped that none would be so foolish as to defy the current of history but if such a fool existed the salt of Leri Deri would await.

Arland described an entirely different Shamba, an enormous military bunker built to withstand the predictable Arland onslaught when Muglair launched an unprovoked attack over the Edge. Skava was in the midst of a colossal military buildup, its fortifications along the Edge increasing tenfold in three years both outside the restricted zone and, surreptitiously, within the zone in violation of treaty. Vainly the Great Man was amassing his own fleet of ballast ships but he would never match the mighty Armada. He was building concentric perimeter defenses with trenches and tunnels around Leri Deri, still the seat of government, and the earthworks of Shamba, and developing new antiaircraft weaponry to ward off the expected Arland retaliation. Skavian scientists were perfecting misting balls for dispersal of neurotoxins over the Edge. Arland had acquired secret photographs of nerve gas experiments showing a herd of thabans in an open field wiped out in under thirty seconds according to a large clock thoughtfully placed in their midst. Skava increased its forces oriented to Arland’s gravity from two thousand at the time of Bivens Mill to over one hundred thousand now. Ominously, they even had a force of a thousand oriented to the gravity of the Notches. Curiously Skava had almost entirely abandoned Bivens Mill, leaving it to the mercy of Arland in the event of war, an obvious weak point in the war machine for the power grid could easily be disrupted.

Arland summarized Muglair’s increasing belligerence, his declaration that he would not rest until Arland licked his boot and liked it, his threat that Arland would lose ten sons for every child of Skava should they dare violate its sacred soil, his relentless purges of the Inta and rivals within the Party, the proliferation of labor camps for his long list of enemies, the increasing pageantry and militarism of the parades through Leri Deri sometimes stretching dozens of miles across the plains from the People’s Hall to the Amphitheater of Shamba. Arland would not sit idly by while Muglair prepared for war, its notices declared, and it was ratcheting up its military capabilities in accordance with the ancient maxim: what Skava does, do twice. Skava’s larger population was no match for Arland’s industrial base. Indeed the many impoverished mouths to feed were a problem for Skava and a source of contempt among the Arland elite who viewed Skava as a breeding factory for Hutwits, a favorite term of derision. But while disdain for Hutmen was fashionable in Rixjrig, no one was laughing. The highest levels in Arland knew exactly what Muglair was doing, and it was too awful to reveal in propaganda for fear of unsettling the populace. What the leadership did not understand was how quickly Muglair could do it, and how dangerous it would be.

Ivy joined her family by the cube on the main green having just come from a council meeting where she proposed re-brazing the hammer. With the approach of the Fifteenth of Tarpin only a week away, her oscillations between appreciation of her family and black despair had grown starker. She was now in an appreciative mood. Mutt was trying to bounce an acorn off a bench into a birdbath while Hope busily retrieved the invariable misses. Ivy did not want to wait a week to start trying to conceive. Unlike Posy, she had the self-restraint to abstain but she needed to experience natural love with her husband even if the world were ending. She kept coming back to the same concern, Posy’s belief that bringing life into a doomed world was immoral. Perhaps she could adopt Posy’s solution, yielding to animal lust when the mood hit and blaming weakness of the flesh. She could even try prune juice if it eased her conscience. But she had more pressing matters to tend to. Mutt needed to send a letter to Mira urging her family to flee Shivaree immediately. Why? he asked. Because Shivaree was going to be destroyed. They needed to pack evacuation bags themselves. Why? he asked again. Because the Notches was going to be destroyed. He said he thought the end times were only arriving, not concluding. She told him yes, but they would start right here, in the Notches, with a violence he did not wish to contemplate. How sure was she this would happen? Not at all, she said. She still hoped the world was saved but they needed to prepare for the worst. Mutt was not ready to embrace his wife’s apocalyptic vision. He rested his mandolin on his lap and finger picked the same melody he played at the Edge the day they met. She recognized the tune and lapsed into a reverie of that fateful encounter. Hope dumped her acorns into the birdbath and began pirouetting clumsily, her stalk flopping with each twirl, periodically stopping for parental applause before resuming with an elated smile. Eventually she keeled over from dizziness into a four-point stance then walked around in a zigzag enjoying the disorienting sensation. Ivy sat the little girl down on her lap and buried her nose in the stalk as the child squirmed. A bizarre iridescent bird with golden cockade alit on the birdbath, surveyed the family, then flew off toward the church belfry.

Ivy walked about the plane warning friends to prepare evacuation plans. When asked, she said she was discharging her duties as a councilwoman in the face of heightened tensions between the great nations. The Notches was uniquely vulnerable on the frontier. The father knew she was alerting him to a significant historical event, not just weather data, but chose not to prepare. Where could he go? How does a Notch dweller with the wrong gravity flee whatever might be coming? She posted notices on the bulletin boards without authorization, all copies hand drawn, preaching vigilance and preparation in the face of military escalation. The parks chair did not know who posted the bulletins and immediately removed them. In the sleeping hour on the Fourteenth, Mutt made his customary pass and Ivy received him fully. She was not sure if it was her window and did not care. She needed to feel her husband as a woman regardless of the calendar. Posy would have done no less.

***
On the Fifteenth of Tarpin Mutt awoke refreshed, a warm Skavian breeze blowing through an open window, the New Normal hanging above the curtain rod on the high wall created by the lofted ceiling, the scent of azalea wafting in the air. Ivy had not slept at all. Her black despair had returned and her husband’s sheltering arms were not sufficient to dispel it. She put herself on autopilot and bathed, clothed, and fed their daughter while Mutt left for a canteen run. The world is still here, he thought, beginning to wonder if his wife really was a doomsday cultist. She would probably claim her mistake was the result of a computational error and pick a new random date for the end times. He saw a crowd gathering at the Skavian overlook and his stomach sank. People did not normally assemble there. He walked to the ramp and instinctively got in line, listening to snippets of conversation about “what it is.” Blind shrewn walked by in black sleeves with his cane chanting “the end is here.” Mutt asked questions but no one could give a straight answer. Most likely it was smoke but it could be steam or water. After a half hour Mutt got his turn at the telescope on the main viewing platform. Due east in the far distance a barely perceptible line rose skyward from the Skavian plain. That was all. He stepped aside from the telescope befuddled. What is it? he asked a stranger. Water, he was told. He found Ivy at the ramp entrance in a state of panic. She left Hope with him and raced through the line, ignoring shouts at her cutting, lowering her head and plowing through the crowd with her hands as a wedge. She seized the telescope and stared into Skava for five seconds. Back on Notches soil she grabbed Mutt’s hand insistently.

“We have to go.”

“Where?”

“Arland.”

Mutt stopped at a bulletin board and ripped off several emergency notices Volp had posted himself. He lay them on the table in the hut and began reading, first Muglair’s announcement followed by Arland’s response. He could not comprehend the words and asked Ivy to explain.

“Mutt, it’s upwater. Shamba is not a city. It’s a mining operation. Muglair drilled straight through the planet to the Silent Sea. He is draining it for hydroelectric power.”

Mutt was gobsmacked. He had never heard of anything so reckless. While they were sleeping, Muglair had given a speech for dignitaries assembled at the Amphitheater declaring it a banner day in history, a date on which the Hutman would claim what was rightfully his. He would continue to negotiate in good faith with Arland to solve the planet’s problems but now as an equal at the bargaining table. For Skava no longer needed the permission of Arland to tap the mighty ocean. Through the skill and ingenuity of its engineers they had brought the Silent Sea to Shamba. The Great Man turned his back on the crowd and faced the central earthworks, an artificial plateau beneath which miners, engineers, contractors, and grunts had been bustling since Muglair came to power, ostensibly building the foundation for the new Hutman capital but in fact implementing the Project in all its glory. For a decade Muglair dreamt of this moment, choreographing the revelation that would change the world. On cue as he turned his hands palm up in the direction of the new capital the Project went live. A trickle of upwater fell heavenward as the gates opened, drawing precious liquid through sluices and turbines, increasing to a rivulet, a stream, a river, a torrent, a furious gusher. Around the Amphitheater a circle of lights flickered and then flooded the seating with radiance more blinding than the Skavian sun, a demonstration of the electric power this boundless source would produce. Generators were already sending current to Leri Deri and other population centers on the grid, an excess of electricity requiring grounding even as lines from Bivens Mill were cut. Muglair turned to his audience and told them henceforward this would be day one on the calendar, for all prior history had been wiped clean and the Hutman would start over as master of the elements.

What would Arland do? Surely they would send their mighty Armada and surely Muglair would crush it, for he had not been idle since the humiliation at Bivens Mill. What they could throw, he would catch and throw back. He extended to Arland the vine of peace and proposed negotiations for the fair allocation of the planet’s resources on an equal and sustainable basis, with due regard for Skava’s greater development needs and past injustices. Equality was all he ever wanted, and should the people of Arland prove wiser than their Mothers, the planet’s harmonious future could be ensured. So confidant he was in the wisdom of Arland’s people he had left only surface controls for the Flume, his term for the shaft descending to the Sea. If Arland chose to bomb these controls, the default setting for the Flume was free flow, and stopping it would prove a challenge. Arland would be welcome to solve this problem should they be foolish enough to create it.

Arland was blindsided by the eruption of the Flume. They had known for years of Muglair’s intentions. It was indeed a scenario in one of the civil patrol’s contingency books even before Muglair came to power, what to do if the Silent Sea drains through a hole in Skava. But the answer in the earlier plans presumed a natural disaster, a leak through sedimentary faults, and a coordinated response. The new contingency plans for what Muglair had actually done, drilling a reinforced shaft straight through Skava to the bottom of the Sea, were woefully inadequate. Arland was unprepared because they did not believe such rapid construction was possible. They had obtained the Project plans from inside sources, scientists alarmed by its destructive potential, shortly after Bivens Mill when the drilling began in earnest. The plans called for gradual drilling and excavation of the shaft stopping every ten miles for installation of a control station. Each station would have the independent capacity to restrict the flow of water through control louvers. It was two hundred miles to the geometric center of the Cube plus an additional sixty miles to the bottom of the Sea, requiring construction of twenty-five stations in the shaft in addition to the master control in Shamba and the unmanned intake station at the bottom of the Sea. The intake was the only portion constructed from the Parvian side, one hundred and forty miles beneath the surface of the Sea, by dropping enormous bells beneath which silt could be cleared and concrete laid. The intake was among Muglair’s first priorities after the revolution, an enterprise shrouded in total secrecy taking years to complete and ending only with Zranga’s mission to lower the great door from the trawler. The door was intended as a fail-safe control operated by remote signal. If the flow rate in Shamba exceeded a set amount, or if a manual control were invoked, the door would collapse onto the intake drain sealing it off. From the secret plans, Arland had concluded that completion of the Project was five to ten years away. Not wanting to take chances, the great nation chose to assume the Flume could erupt within two years and was preparing an ultimatum to be followed by a massive preventive assault.

Muglair achieved his shortened timeline by the simple expedient of eliminating all control stations. This allowed the Project to become operational before Arland could react, which is how the Great Man justified his decision to the Council. But it also allowed him to booby trap the planet, a purpose he would not share with the Ministers. Muglair believed that Arland was less likely to take aggressive action if destruction of Shamba left the Flume uncontrolled. He also wanted to ensure that if he failed he could take the planet with him. For everyone could see that if the Silent Sea drained long enough the Cube would destabilize and disintegrate. Muglair would force Arland to capitulate, or the world would not survive. For his plan to work he had to disable the great door, which was under the control of the Demographics Institute in Harmour where the intake station was designed. Fortunately he had moles in Zranga’s organization who could carry out sabotage in coordination with the security cell in Interior, all without the Council’s knowledge. Muglair assured the Ministers the door would remain operational and even gave them a duplicate control key. His plan, so he explained, was to tell Arland only surface controls existed in order to discourage attack while secretly retaining the power, shared jointly by himself and the Council, to stop the Flume with the great door should the integrity of the planet be jeopardized. It was all a lie. He had no intention of sharing such power with the Council, and no intention of leaving a back door in place for saving the planet. Muglair was surprised to learn that Zranga personally supervised installation of the great door, and even more surprised to learn the cables held. It was his first inkling that the Minister was working at cross purposes to the cause. He intended to neutralize this threat upon Zranga’s return to Skava but the Minister was one step ahead. He bought time with a display of psychic power appealing to the Great Man’s superstitions. Muglair believed in higher forces and Tobor’s manifestations frightened him. He feared spirit retribution for the crime on which he built his rise to power, the betrayal of the martyrs. But while Zranga was one step ahead, so was Muglair, as if they marched in a circle each ahead of the other. For Muglair had doubly sabotaged the great door. The signal to collapse the door would explode it, sending its remnants into the shaft to emerge through Shamba. The rigging of the planet for destruction was complete, and the Cube would survive or perish with the surface controls alone.

Muglair’s speech at the Amphitheater was announced two weeks in advance. Rixjrig believed Muglair would declare war on Arland. The buildup along the Edge was so massive it could not serve a purely defensive purpose. Marshal Turlin mobilized the Armada and Edge defenses preparing to push back with overwhelming force. When the Flume erupted, the military was ready for a frontier battle but not an expedition to Shamba. Nonetheless the matter of bombing Shamba was submitted to the Mothers for immediate consideration. Roused from the sleeping hour and based on a two-hour presentation from military and intelligence services, the Hall overwhelmingly voted for war. The declaration carried with it the right of the military to take all steps necessary for the prosecution of war, effectively stripping the Hall of power. The circumstances were dire and the seriousness of the threat could not be overstated. Arland could not negotiate with Muglair from a position of weakness. He was not a man who would meet halfway. Shamba must be destroyed and then the nations could talk. The consequences of this decision were enormous and the Mothers did not make it lightly. It was their children and grandchildren, their nephews and nieces, the sons and daughters of their neighbors, who would inherit the world shaped by their vote. Tyranny could not prevail, and Arland could not succumb. If Muglair and the Mothers agreed on one thing, it was a preference for annihilation to subjugation. Some worlds were not worth living in.

Ivy franticly ran about the hut gathering food and fresh clothing for their daughter, who curled up in the bowl chair distraught from her mother’s palpable fear. Mutt saw strange shadows outside the window, orderly shapes moving eastward toward Skava. He ran out of the hut into the gourd garden infected now by Ivy’s panic, and looked upward at a majestic sight he never imagined would impinge upon his eyes. There above the Notches the mighty Arland Armada spanned the sky, hundreds upon hundreds of floating shields and ballast ships and motorized destroyers, lumbering with slow deliberation toward a rendezvous with Muglair. The ballast ships were fully weighted with explosive ordnance to be dropped on the earthworks of Shamba, and the destroyers with their battery-powered electric motors darted among the larger vessels practicing offensive and evasive maneuvers. The shields interposed between the ground of the Notches and the fleet were reorienting for the drop over the Skavian Edge, allowing a direct view of the underbellies of the sky monsters. From the edge Mutt saw a volley of antiaircraft shells, large metal orbs of explosives aimed at the ballast ships through the defensive cracks caused by reorientation of the shields. He was awestruck by this incredible scene as flashes of light followed by peals of thunder spread across the angled plane, as shields recoiled from the blows and chunks of steel flew in all directions, as the order of the Armada frayed with massive explosions and impacts diverting vessels and causing chain collisions. A gigantic shield caromed into a destroyer practicing its maneuvers too closely, ripping off a downballast tank and sending it racing into the sky, frantic airmen refiring the motors and struggling to release upwater to stabilize. A huge coordinated fusillade of flaming shells rained down from the Armada directly along the Skavian edge taking out the overlook and wreaking havoc in a line across the accumulating forces. Rising from the Edge Mutt saw a small Skavian fleet approaching beneath the Armada preparing to launch upward rocket attacks.

Ivy screamed at him through the window. What was the fool doing? They had to leave, leave now, leave NOW! Mutt raced into the hut and snatched the latest drafts of The Sphere from the table. Ivy was angry, uncontrollably angry that he would be grabbing their crap literature in this moment of peril. Mutt stood before the window and protested that it was worth saving; they had worked so hard on it. Ivy’s eyes grew comically distorted and Mutt thought she might kill him but she was looking past him through the window at an enormous bullet boulder headed directly for the hut. “DOWN!” she screamed with unmitigated terror. For a split second Mutt thought she was arguing his priorities then instinctively hit the floor knowing something awful was coming. Ivy threw herself onto the bowl over Hope and rolled onto the floor in a terrifically swift motion somehow landing to shield the child with her body as the boulder, a house-sized metal sphere firing shrapnel in all directions and timed to explode to inflict maximal damage on the structures of the Notches, hit the mound full force and bounced upward into the hut, bursting through the New Normal and shearing off the upper half of the walls, obliterating the ceiling and loft. An explosion of glass and timbers and dried mud sprayed through the hut. Mutt buried his head in his arms and Ivy tucked a terrified Hope into her curved body as their world shattered around them. The boulder flew a hundred yards past the severed hut and exploded, sending shrapnel and a shockwave back through the remaining walls toward their defenseless fronts.

Mutt leapt up in crisis mode stepping across the wreckage of shorn timbers and twisted loft railing to the figures of his wife and child and saw blood streaming from Ivy’s back. He reached for her in utter despair as if his hands alone could heal wounds and saw that his own arm was lacerated by glass and bleeding profusely. Ivy flipped around clutching her daughter, the child miraculously unscathed by either the initial impact or the blowback, and navigated the remains of the door to race down the mound steps, Mutt closely behind. Kippers ran out the door in the direction of the hammer panicked from the explosions never to be seen again. Another barrage of bullet boulders tumbled across the plane as the family hit the ground, praying no bullets would skim the earth into their skulls or orbs explode within death range. They leapt up running instinctively for the canteen, so far still intact. Mutt looked back and saw the hammer slammed by a chain-connected giant double anvil, its head shattering against the Arland rock and frame collapsing in a dusty heap. The tram pylons toppled over as injured and terrified riders tried to escape the tangle of cable amidst shrapnel fire. Spires of the church fractured from a barrage of shells and fell like retracting claws. A wall of flame rolled from the Skavian edge across the split garden crowned by massive jets and whirligigs of fire. Terrified people ran through the onslaught toward the Arland edge clinging to loved ones and carrying what few belongings they could grab in the chaos.

Ivy pulled Mutt’s bloody wrist forcefully to quicken his pace yelling at him to stop gawking. From the Skavian edge soldiers oriented to the Notches marched in formation shooting anything that moved. Ivy sensed that the central green was safe from shelling only because Skavian soldiers intended to occupy the structures. They ran through an alleyway next to the publishing authority emerging into a thoroughfare already crawling with soldiers. Mutt saw Volp kneeling before the authority door not understanding that a soldier was facing him until a bullet pierced his boss’s chest and his body slumped over. Mutt stopped in his tracks horrified and pulled Ivy back who in turn yanked back Hope. The soldier turned his gun on Mutt then delivered a mercy shot to Volp who was kicking the soldier in his death twitches. When the soldier turned his gun back on the young family they were gone. They ran pell mell through the alley for the Arland loading docks just beyond the sweep of the incursion, miraculously avoiding the proliferating bullets. The docks consisted of angled slips for Arland deliveries along the edge, with a large warehouse shielding the loading area from stray bullets flying from the central green. The Armada had passed over completely and was now descending across the surface of Skava. Arland was not prepared for a troop invasion of the Notches and was ceding this ground to Skava for the short term. Skava’s plans were more ambitious for at this moment a force of over seventy-five thousand soldiers oriented to Arland was breaching the great nation’s soil to establish a salient around the Notches, a central battlefront because of its location due west from Shamba. From the Notches Arland could most easily drop its shells and launch attacks on the new Hutman capital, and by controlling the Notches Skava could most easily prevent his.

A delivery carriage forced by its eastwater tank to continue its journey to the Notches pulled into a loading dock, its driver exiting with an incredulous expression at the awesome Armada he had just witnessed passing overhead, and the balls of steel tumbling into Arland from the Edge that he had not understood meant total war. It was the postal carrier bringing new notices form Rixjrig and Mutt ran with relief to him.

“We must leave now!”

He grabbed the man’s arm who was insistent on delivering the notices first. Mutt slapped him across the face and told him to face reality they were all going to die in minutes. The driver was stunned then angry then suddenly frightened. The carriage could not move without filling the tanks so Mutt grabbed the westwater hose and began pumping. Skavian gas balls exploded overhead dousing the roof of the warehouse with napalm igniting an incineration. Ivy insisted they would have to travel south because the terrain west of the Notches would be mercilessly bombarded. She grabbed the southwater hose and began filling a tank. Soldiers appeared to the side of the warehouse momentarily deterred by the smoke and debris from the gas ball. The driver uttered an expletive and said he was getting out of here. Mutt told him he would rip off his testicles and shove them down his throat if he tried to leave without them. Ivy jumped into the carriage with Hope as Mutt joined the driver in the passenger seat. Soldiers danced around flaming napalm on the edge of the docks shouting at the carriage to stop. Mutt flashed an obscene gesture and a soldier fired a shot. Plumes of smoke quickly separated the dock from the carriage as it moved backward to the boulevard. A rain of ordnance continued rolling off the Notches and falling past the carriage as it retreated, and new attacks aimed directly at the soil of Arland commenced, attempts to soften the sparsely populated territory for invasion. At the boulevard Ivy insisted they dump enough westwater to maintain traction for a south turn. The driver needed no convincing because the density of bombing due west of the Notches was increasing dramatically. He dropped all northwater to achieve maximum velocity and headed for land they hoped was free of the ferocious attack. But none of them could have known the danger into which they were racing. The salient south of the Notches opened westward into Arland with lightning speed, and they drove right into its maw. The driver stopped the carriage because he saw a roadblock on the boulevard ahead and could not turn back for lack of northwater. He told his passengers they were on their own and was about to exit the carriage when Skavian soldiers surrounded and fired warning shots. They leveled guns at the terrified occupants and were about to shoot them, child and all, on Muglair’s orders to show no mercy to Inta scum. Ivy pushed a muzzle away from her face and spoke before the soldier could react.

“Shoot us and Kadangle will have your head. I am on your list.”

The young family was moved to a holding pen confined to a single tilted board with their Notches gravity. The driver was nowhere to be seen and Ivy believed he had been shot. Mutt pulled glass from Ivy’s back and dressed the wound on his forearm with fabric torn from his shirt. The fighting raged as Skava established perimeter defenses committed to holding the salient. It was a vain quest, for Arland would never allow that hated nation to hold its territory. But for now the salient belonged to the enemy and Arlanders were subjected to a military primed for outrage. Mutt was sinking into despondency knowing from Ivy’s past revelations that the Flume meant the end times. The world was now an hourglass counting down to destruction. She told him to be strong and remember their blessings. Whatever they might lose to evil, their love had triumphed in the Notches, and the memories were as real as the spiked wire surrounding the pen. Within hours prisoner transports arrived and the family was thrown into the domed bed of a crowded military vehicle falling painfully into a corner with their misaligned gravity, Ivy sheltering a crying Hope between her parents’ bodies and clutching her satchel telling prying soldiers it was for child care. The transport carried them to the Edge from which they were manhandled into a sideland transport, the Arland prisoners now flopping onto the small front wall of the bed crushing into the young family. Mutt stewed at the treatment of his loved ones but said nothing. This was his first experience on Skavian soil since his forgotten childhood and he understood now why Ivy fled. He resolved that he must be the son of Outin and Paxa, not merely a boy from Shivaree. Great challenges required great character and he would find a way to save his family.

At a transit hub female officers boarded the transport and separated the males from women and children. Mutt snatched Ivy’s satchel. She pulled it back instinctively suspecting betrayal but he wrested it away. She looked at him with fright knowing whatever hopes she had for the future lay within its folded pages. But then she looked at him with fright knowing she may never see him again, her savior and loving husband, their family violently ripped apart just like her own family in childhood. She leaned over and mysteriously whispered the word “Irla” into his ear. He watched horrified as his wife and daughter were forcibly removed from the transport, trying to comfort them with his eyes. But there was nothing he could do. Resistance to the evil apparatus was futile. Hope flexed spasmodically at the rear door as if a surge of energy in her tiny muscles might bind her to her father. She disappeared with her mother as the flaps closed shut, leaving Mutt to cradle Ivy’s satchel, all that remained of his family. In the moment before the guard returned, he unconsciously shuffled the papers, hiding some behind a divider and displaying others conspicuously in the main sleeve. The world had not yet ended and he would have to endure for his family. He needed a plan because he could not cope with losing them passively.

As she was carried like produce to a new vehicle with Hope in her arms, unable to walk on the half-slope of Skavian ground, Ivy’s mind rinsed clean of all emotion and returned to the paralyzed trauma of Harmour. Could she again find a way to escape evil? The answer was no, she could not, because this time evil would outrun all. She removed her wedding band and quietly dropped it to the ground where it tumbled into a latrine. She knew what this horrific reimmersion into the country of her birth meant. She could no longer be married to Mutt Ogga.

***

Mira received Mutt’s letter but they did not flee Shivaree. They had nowhere to go. They purchased gas masks on the black market and practiced ten-minute evacuation drills. By the time the sirens sounded on the Fifteenth of Tarpin, a wall of poison gas was already spilling over the Edge headed straight for Shivaree, gathering speed with the gravity of Skava. The family grabbed their evacuation bags and tossed in toiletries. The scene on the streets was chaos, people fleeing in terror from an unknown assailant. Mira and Dox united with Sabin and her husband and children, and Donega who was now living with a roommate in the old shed once occupied by Mutt, at a prearranged location. The crowd was rushing westward away from Skava, sirens incessantly blaring, bags of belongings swishing pendulously at their sides. The Oggas did not understand, no one understood, that they needed to flee crosswise, north or south, to escape the deadly cloud racing toward them. On the rush of the main way Donega stumbled and was trampled by the sea of people. She rolled to the side clutching her gas mask to her face. From the direction of Shivaree she saw an ominous pea green cloud crashing across the slanted trees felling stragglers in their tracks. Dox turned back to search for his daughter leaving Mira to push ahead with Sabin’s family. He found her just as the first wisps of nerve gas poured over them. He lifted her up and they began running to the west in terror then fell onto the roadbed. Donega was convulsing. She ripped off her mask in death throes, inhaling the deadly gas directly as it thickened about them. Her mouth was frothing and lips turning blue, her body twitching in spasms. Dox realized in horror she was dying. He realizing in horror he was dying. He vomited into his gas mask and felt his body losing motor control. He tried to affix her mask back onto her face but it was hopeless. He fell across her chest in a last vain attempt to protect her, a father’s dying gesture for his child, and they expired where they lay, their bodies shrouded in the sickly mist, victims of the scientific discoveries of Harmour. Mira would never recover their bodies. She could never give them a decent burial. She would never again live a decent life. She could never again look at a statue of Nehalla.

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“How about you?” Orly thought he would make a passable male specimen himself.

Mutt found this a more reasonable request and paused to reflect upon the merits of disrobing for art until Ivy slapped his arm. The painter saw the marital discord his proposal generated and offered a compromise.

“Let us paint all of you together, the mother, the father, and the child.”

Mutt was horrified.

“Clothed,” Orly clarified. “It will be a portrait of erotic love and its offspring, a celebration of fecundity and the adoration of a child.”

Mutt had never heard the word fecundity before but figured it was worth celebrating. Ivy found a family portrait an excellent idea. She viewed them as an attractive couple and took pride in their daughter, imagining her as the solution to a peg-in-hole problem suggested by the shapes of their bodies. From the canteen they followed Orly to the painter’s studio in a cross-gabled field cottage by the southern terminus of the tram, Hope perched on Mutt’s shoulders sporting a bountiful stalk. Much to Ivy’s disappointment, the little girl’s hair had retained her father’s sandy tint with only mild darkening. She was not going to make it to charcoal. The parents agreed the child had her mothers’ facial features yet somehow combined them into her father’s ingenuous expression, half her mother, half her father, and all herself. She was three years and one day old, no longer a baby sprouting limbs but a perfectly proportioned little person. Her celebration the day before degenerated into an epic cookie-throwing contest with launchings from the den to the loft and extra points for catching a fan blade, but fortunately Mutt used a no-crumble recipe. Unfortunately the cookies tasted like modeling clay which was why none of them were eaten. He built a deluxe birdfeeder with perches for winged visitors from Skava and Arland and swapped it for a tricycle, a birthday gift much to Hope’s liking. Ivy worried she would find a way to pedal off the edge but Mutt assured her the railing was all intact, neglecting to mention a large gap on the Arland side where a delivery truck rolled over. The party was Mutt’s affair, Ivy being occupied by her new position as youth representative on the governing council. She was nominated by a current member whose children she was tending, stood unopposed, and now found herself assigned the thankless task of allocating a millage across the sculpture gardens of the Notches.

Mutt was conceived restless. If Paxa had lived she would have told him how vigorously he kicked in her belly, no doubt deeply resenting the confines of a womb. The Notches was a womb to Mutt, a place of nurture from which he sought release not because of any deficiency but because he always craved the other side. Crossing the edge was not an option in his adopted hometown so he sought out novel experience. Posing for a portrait, nude if only Ivy would let him, would be such an experience. The young family entered the open door of the fieldstone cottage and Mutt was immediately struck by a portrait of Glon and Glon kissing amorously. He tried hard to summon outrage at this depravity but could find none. Indeed, he was more alarmed by the fact that he was not alarmed, than he was alarmed. The variable lifestyles in the Notches had desensitized him to the norms of Shivaree and now he could only see Hope’s babysitters, not men offending an Oopsahnic injunction. Orly had a vision for the portrait. He would dress the family in classical attire, rainbow togas with wreaths of elderberry supporting hummingbirds dangling on wire mobiles. Mutt could not imagine a more ridiculous getup yet sat patiently while Orly worked his magic. Except that after ten minutes of fidgeting the painter politely asked him to mill around the studio out of sight while he daubed the wife and daughter. Hope was subdued for a three-year-old as if her father had sucked all the energy out of her. There was room for only one hyperactive child in the family and she would have to adjust. He walked around the studio noting Orly had arranged the paintings in a progression from mundane to sublime, moving from landscapes to portraiture to abstract depictions of the higher planes filled with jarring colors in chaotic swirls, labyrinths, polygons, tessellations, fractals, blobs, grids, and so on. He stopped in the nudes section – the sloplady was lovely out of uniform – and anticipated the joy that awaited him in four months and twenty-eight days. For on that date, the Fifteenth of Tarpin, he would again have license to impregnate his wife, assuming the world was still around. He hoped they could sit for a new portrait with each addition to the family.

Back at the authority Mutt received a disturbing package from Arland, a heavily footnoted report detailing the excesses of Bogin, the Chief Information Officer of Muglair’s Interior Ministry. Muglair had a fondness, so the report claimed, for insanely cruel tortures that Bogin would implement as a form of entertainment. Information was extracted from victims by normal means such as stress positions, sleep deprivation, truth serum, simulated drowning, degloving, bone crushing, and, Bogin’s personal favorite, prying fingers off of loved ones. But once all secrets were revealed the fun could begin. Bogin took pleasure in prolonged forms of torture leading to certain death like clockwork once set in motion, and a death certificate would issue for the condemned at the outset to underscore his doom even if the torture were expected to last days. Commitment to a torture regime was as irreversible as the bodily death that followed. A victim might be harnessed in a tilted metal box with head protruding toward the floor through a side collar fit snugly around his neck, arms restrained within. A hydraulic line inserted by catheter into the victim’s urinary tract, backflow prevented by valve, would power a lift on the low side until the box tipped over, crushing the victim’s skull against the hardened floor. The tipping might not occur for days during which time the doomed would be plied with water by gullet tube to force voiding. An enemy might be bound to the corpse of his mutilated wife so he could die in her rot, perhaps gnawing her face in starvation if Bogin were lucky. A woman might stand on a small pedestal over a floor rigged with a weight sensor to detonate an explosive tied to the neck of her child once she succumbed to exhaustion and collapsed, her own death by binding to follow. A man could be secured in a coffin with a heavy lid that would pierce both eye sockets with needles to the back of his skull once the strain of holding it up proved unbearable. Bogin took copious photographs of the stages of torture, culminating always with gruesome death stills, and shared them with Muglair who loved nothing more than seeing traitors receive their just desserts. His confidence in the cause was invigorated by the cleansing ritual of eliminating enemies, and he liked to imagine their dying epiphany that his was a force they should never have resisted.

By far the Great Man’s favorite method of cleansing was the glass house, literally a glass house located in the underground depths of Interior’s headquarters in Leri Deri. Victims were thrown into the house with cutlery, cookware, a fire pit with flue, cooling chamber, bathroom, mattresses, tenderizer, spices, a game cookbook, and ample water but no food source besides other prisoners. Information officers occupied desks surrounding the house impervious to the death screams and entreaties for mercy, focusing instead on their daily routine and pausing only occasionally to appreciate Bogin’s handiwork through the transparent walls. New prisoners entered on one side of a glass partition shielded from the predations of others for a few days during which they could witness the cannibalism and plan a survival strategy before mixing with the full house. People handled confinement differently, some resolving to die quietly without resort to cannibalism, others opting to wait for natural death of a fellow prisoner before feasting, still others choosing to consume their own flesh. Alliances would form for the purpose of sentinel duty during sleep, protection through mutual aid, or hunting in packs for the only form of nourishment. Women often had little choice but to offer sex for protection from surviving males, a bargain that never bought much time. Prisoners would commonly turn full cannibal immediately upon entry and murder fellow confinees savagely for food and to eliminate rivals. Muglair liked to condemn entire families to the house for the pleasure of viewing the resulting butchery in Bogin’s photographs. There was always some fool sabotaging the cause who would die proudly for his beliefs, but there was no pride watching helplessly through a glass wall as his wife and children were slaughtered, dismembered, spitted, grilled, and eaten by cannibals. If Muglair were to have his moment of thrill imagining the condemned’s last thoughts, the consequences needed to be amplified for idealists. Was what you believed so righteous as to justify this result? Could not you have yielded to history’s greater force and avoided these futile deaths? No one ever left the house alive for they were officially dead upon entry but skilled players could endure for weeks. One farmer accused of hoarding grain survived over six months before losing a knife fight to an Inta nationalist when the partition was removed.

Mutt did not know whether the report was authentic or just propaganda. He had read so many outlandish stories from the intelligence services that he naturally distrusted all their claims. But the Bogin report appended numerous photographs and internal memoranda from Interior allegedly obtained from disgruntled inside sources, and the horror of the depictions led him to believe it was real. Surely a propaganda effort would have toned down the gore to appear more credible. Still, there was nothing he could do about it, and he resolved to empty his head of the disturbing images. There was so much evil in the world he could not contemplate it all, and indeed the best antidote to evil was to love his family in the face of all obstacles. Perhaps it was selfish to focus on the people in his life and forget the horrors inflicted on others, but in some grand accounting it increased the proportion of love to evil and gave hope to the world.

***
On the date of their fourth anniversary, as calculated from the postcoital ceremony in the angle, Mutt plucked hyacinth from a window box on the way from the authority to the hut. Hope was playing with the sloplady’s son, rooting around in the gourd garden for insects and buried treasure. Mutt threaded a fishing line through the blooms and presented the garland to his wife who draped it around her neck and posed provocatively. He was pleased with the combination of woman and flower, natural complements in eyes, and suggested they visit the apiary for a celebratory picnic for their marriage. The sloplady was nowhere to be found so they took both children to the garden, which was empty of people and full of bees. The sun shone through the cobalt sky like the tip of welder’s torch, common weather for the Notches and fair recompense for the savage storms that denuded trees and blew thatch off huts. They laid out a spread of thaban cuts, persimmon, and cubes of maple cake while the children played tug of war with Kippers over a jute doll stuffed with dried ragweed. Ivy liked the apiary for the honey it produced, Mutt for the mead, and both enjoyed the purposeful buzzing of bees which never seemed to sting anyone. He reached into a pocket and produced a palladium necklace with a plated key pendant. He had prevailed upon a glazier – the Notches had no metalworkers – to melt a small block of the metal in a tray and dip the key one side at a time. Ivy did not know the meaning of the gift. Was it the key to his heart? That was corny even by his standards. He explained that this was the key to the tractor shed in Shivaree. He was to return there the day she fell into his arms but would no longer be needing it. If he ever did return, it would be with her by his side and she could open the door. He still harbored fantasies of returning to his childhood home with his new family and combining the two worlds. Ivy was touched. This was by far a better gift than the doorstop he gave her last year. By all rights she should be tired of the man after four years of wedded bliss, and admittedly she was frustrated often enough. But he was still her savior at the Edge, her lover in the angle, the Hutman in her hut, and the father of her child, and she found herself wanting to give him another. In a month and twenty-eight days the card would turn, and if heaven were revealed they could live the normal life she defied fate to achieve, have a second and third child, maybe even a fourth if Mutt plied her with mead. But if hell were revealed she would wish she had never left Harmour, because there she had nothing to lose.

She pulled from her satchel a copy of the Oopsah with his name engraved on the cover by her own hand in florid calligraphy. He was surprised at the gift for she had never cared much for scripture. She turned to the passage on cleaving, of a man and woman leaving home to start a new family, and told him on the day she waited for him forlornly at the Edge this passage raced through her head. She had not consciously believed the stranger from Shivaree would become her husband, yet he was her only hope that life would take a normal course. She turned to the final chapter, the book of gibberish, and asked him what it meant. He did not know and did not care being instinctively resistant to mystical imposition. She asked if it did contain a divine plan, and he disagreed with that plan, would he resist? It was a strange question and he replied that if God spoke to him he would do God’s bidding, for who was he to question the divine? She said that not all gods were divine and evil can occupy the higher planes, that conscience may dictate revolt where the Oopsah commands allegiance. He did not want to speak of these things and kissed her on the mouth to quiet her. She took the hint and returned the kiss for five seconds before the children commandeered their backs for a ride. Mutt was confused at the religious tilt suggested by Ivy’s gift. Would she join the ranks of the faithful, and would he be compelled to follow? He did not mind god talk, it harkened back to his youth in Shivaree, and he found faith in a woman arousing as it added an aura of holiness to coupling. What could be kinkier than carnal knowledge with God watching? On the other hand if he could not handle a cat perhaps he was not meant for divine observation.

She announced she wanted to visit the church so they packed up their picnic and strolled circuitously across the plane, each with legs of a child resting on hooked arms with little hands clasping their shoulders. The children descended and ranged about on an invisible tether, plucking dandelions and poking sticks in anthills. Hope talked non-stop inserting every new word she learned from her parents into a question, so much that the little boy, a full year older, fell contemplatively silent. She asked if the seeds blown from a dandelion ball fly to Skava, why the ants built hills instead of houses, if the sun was made of fire, could she have a maple cube, why were daddy’s pants falling. Mutt quickly corrected the latter condition. They mounted arched bridges over the half-pipe, kicked dust across the shadowed slats of the split garden, watched the pounding of the perpetual hammer. Ivy owed a report to the council on the relative merits of re-brazing the tarnished hammerhead versus refurbishing various sidematter mobiles dotting the parks. She had been leaning toward the mobiles, which spun wildly in the wind with pendants oriented in the six directions, dogs chasing cats chasing dogs in the plane of Arland, a ring of Skavian marmosets connected hand to tail, the regular solids dangling freely on chains alloyed to splay outwards as if magnetically repelled. But she wondered if the tensions brewing again between the great nations militated in favor of the hammer’s grand symbolism. They peered through the fogged windows of a conversion spa, an opulent way station for travelers across the fold, and saw patrons of mixed gravity promenading naked in a curved sauna. The Notches was a natural stop for people changing gravities. They could avoid prolonged confinement or cumbersome weight suits if they could tolerate a quarter slope, twenty-two and a half degrees, by reorienting to that angle in their home country, moving to the Notches where the same angle would prevail with the ground tilting in the opposite sense, converting an additional half slope in the Notches enjoying perfect normality midway, then proceeding to the destination country to complete the final quarter slope. For this process the spa served as a convenient boarding house with curved surfaces to permit upright mobility for daily living at any orientation, but at each stage the person converting could be mobile on open terrain if able to navigate up to a quarter slope. The spa was for people with money and fine tastes and Mutt was thankful poverty forced them into the angle.

At the church the son ran joyously to his father who stood before the pulpit practicing his next sermon. The church had no regular service, the flock not being very observant, and instead held social functions punctuated by the father’s flights into spirit possession. But occasionally the father would announce a dedicated lecture on the bulletin boards and his next topic was the end times. His brief encounter with Ivy in the study steered him with renewed fervor into exegetics of the Oopsah. His journey with the Church had begun as a young man with a profound transformation inspired by the sacred text, an intense belief that it held the key to fulfillment on earth and salvation in the higher planes, and that his devotion to God would reveal that key. But over the years his focus shifted to tangible good works, charity for the needy, guidance for those struggling, fostering a social environment among the faithful conducive to love and nurture. He knew from his studies what happened to Ivy. Somehow she read the divine plan hidden in the gibberish, for there was no other way to obtain the knowledge she revealed. How had this happened, and what did it signify? She would talk to him no more of the revelations and he deemed it sacrilege to ask. But knowledge could be obtained only with the advent of the Controller in the end times. She herself said the prophecies would be fulfilled, and the Controller was the most sacred prophecy of all.

Ivy said she needed spiritual guidance and asked him to rehearse the sermon in her presence. Gladly, he announced, puffing up and gripping the podium in the polka dot individuating robe he wore on casual occasions. The tomato dots with chartreuse stems clashed violently with the teal fabric and magenta collar, the discord generating receptivity to divinely inspired messages, so he hoped. The father’s lectures were always amply attended as even people in the Notches occasionally needed spiritual rejuvenation, and the father was well regarded as a confidante and source of wisdom. He stepped away from the pulpit and sat on the edge of the dais, his legs dangling. He saw no need of assuming airs with this couple. He was only guessing at Ivy’s secrets and would do better to talk to her plainly, one person to another, not as a possessor of higher knowledge. He spoke at length of the end times described in scripture, whether they were a mythical construct perpetually around the corner designed to instill fear in the faithful and deference to hierarchy, whether they were a true eschatology that would pit good led by the Controller against forces of evil bent on destruction with all creation at stake, whether they would come in their lifetimes or had already arrived. With a flourish he declared he had never believed the present was more special than the past yet the signs were here, with the incineration of Mount Orah, the ancient waste pile outside Rixjrig famous for its noxious gases, the resurgence of the Great Man’s belligerence after the humiliation of Bivens Mill, the nesting of cockaded birds of paradise in the belfry of the church, a sight not seen in the Notches since ancient times. But verily he did not view these portents as signs of the apocalypse. What he believed, and what he preached, was to live each day as if it were the last, for all experience was written on a higher plane unseparated by gradations of time, and the creation and the apocalypse were as immediate as his words, as tactile as the bench on which they sat, as pungent as the incense in the sconces, the arrow of time being an earthbound illusion. What will happen had already happened, and one should live as a person worthy of inscription on that colorful plane.

Ivy listened amused at his heartfelt peroration. He could not conceive the true meaning of the end times. Really no one could without reading the revelations of the gibberish. But his attempts to comprehend the incomprehensible were earnest and brought forth much common sense laden with gravitas by the mystical talk. The father then surprised her and said all experience in their world past and future was inscribed on a higher plane, but they could not conceive of other planes except to say they defined other worlds. It was through connection of higher planes that change could occur, that one plane could rewrite another with the fruit of good living brought forth. Mutt found the father’s conception of the higher planes incoherent. If time was an illusion and the future as immutable as the past, why worry about right and wrong? Nothing you could do would change anything. But if there were other planes that could change the world based on good deeds, why not stack them and call the result a single dynamic plane in which the future was not determined? Ivy knew what the father was channeling. She herself had made a momentous decision not to tell Arland about the Oopsah out of concern for what the father called other planes. Intuitively she felt she had doomed their world. Yet to tell Arland these secrets risked dooming the other planes and that would be worse.

She needed to move beyond this topic and handed the couple’s anniversary gifts to the father.

“Father, this key is a gift from my husband. It is a sign of his commitment to our union. I have read the Oopsah, all of it, and it contains no higher love. That key is all we have.”

The father intensely wanted to know her secrets. Mutt concealed a yawn so accustomed he had become to Ivy’s weirdness. The children ran loose in the upper chapel and startled their parents with the rap of a mop handle accidentally knocked to the floor. Ivy needed to complete her thought even though she was saying more than she should. She took back the key and the Oopsah, held one in each hand, then lowered the key and raised the sacred book as if her hands were a balance and the sacred book found wanting.

“The Oopsah must be rewritten.”

Back in the hut, Mutt sat across the table from Ivy as she cut a silhouette of Hope for framing. Her conversation with the father stirred a memory he had repressed. The question had been percolating in the nether regions of his brain for months.

“I need to know something.”

Ivy winced. There were many questions she did not want to answer.

“Who is Celeste?”

This was the one she feared most. She sat perfectly still, paralyzed. Celeste was the difference between Harmour and the Notches, and her surest ticket back to hell. She was the reason the Oopsah needed to be rewritten in honor of Mutt’s key. How did he know the name? Did Zranga tell him? Did he overhear? She composed herself.

“When I was in Harmour,” she chose her words carefully, “Tobor Zranga decoded the gibberish of the Oopsah.”

Mutt squinted his eyes in skepticism. He had never heard anything so outlandish.

“I read it,” she continued. “It is not what you might think. It told me things about the future, prophecies I cannot share with you. But most of all I learned the story of Celeste.”

“Who is she?” he repeated his question.

“I can only tell you this. She is not an ordinary being. She is a ghost that haunts me. She is the organizing principle of the universe, and she must be destroyed for our love to survive.”

Mutt often wondered if his wife was insane. What she was saying made no sense. It sounded religious but not like any religion he knew. Had she fallen prey to the spell of a madman in Harmour? Was she living out the warped fantasies of an end times cult? This was the mother of his child and he was deeply concerned about her mental state. He was not satisfied with her answer but did not know how to pursue it. She was not going to tell him everything and perhaps he did not want to know. The more he heard the crazier she sounded, and the harder it was to live a normal life. He would simply have to take her answer and file it away beyond the realm of daily conscious.

Check out chapters of The Cube right here.