He had waited in the vault mesmerized by the stain while Ivy dictated the final message to the Order, which then inscribed the pie sheet and inserted it into the Oopsah in the same place as Ivy’s sheet in the last iteration. They snapped off two upper corners of the frame of the Oopsah, bent back the vertical members, inserted the sheet along with Zranga’s original sheets from the last iteration, and reassembled the frame. Mutt had no idea what she had written.

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.

“Where?” Mutt asked

“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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“Mutt, there is no choice. You must let me go to Tobor.”

“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.

Check out chapters of The Cube right here.

Mutt followed him to the notices and saw amidst exclamation points the breaking news that Muglair had relented. A cooperation force from Arland was on its way to the Flume. Together the armies of the great nations would lay giant metal cylinders across the rush of water, stopping the flow and saving the planet. This was what Garan needed, hope for his family. His days in Irla had been the blackest of his life as he became increasingly convinced he would lose his wife and precious children to Muglair’s madness. Mutt smiled weakly then forced a generous grin.

“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.

He was wounded. He could not believe she loved him if she did not want him physically. If he could accept her for who she was after all the recent revelations, could not she receive him as his wife? He wanted to argue but felt that would be more humiliating. Begging for scraps was worse than lying silently in the cool Leland air fantasizing about the rhubarb girl who undoubtedly never would have rejected him. How many children would they have by now? Three at least. They would have their own house, maybe even a spread like his childhood home, and all the people he grew up with, the extended community from which he had been so precipitously torn by his commitment to Ivy, would be there to love and comfort him. The rhubarb girl was no Ivy, he had to admit that even in his jilted state, but Ivy was no Shivaree. She could not substitute for a whole people; she could not replace his home. All he had received from their marriage was a brief shining moment in the Notches followed by endless misery and knowledge no human was designed to bear. How could she not love him enough to be his wife after all they had been through?

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.

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“I have come for Hope.”

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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