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

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

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

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

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

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

In her final instructions she concluded:

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

She switched to writing in the first person:

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

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

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

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

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

Mutt sensed her thoughts and tried to comfort her.

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

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

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

Ivy lifted Hope into her arms and felt her forehead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It is time,” said Ivy, “to retire.”

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

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

“Mommy, why was Miss Arna crying?”

“Because she loves Varun so much.”

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

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

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

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

She gazed upon Hope disconsolate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE END

Check out chapters of The Cube right here.

“Do not ask questions.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is this?” the father asked.

“You will take me to the crypt now.”

“I can do no such thing.”

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

He looked uncertain.

“It is your destiny to comply.”

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

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

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

“You are not permitted.”

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

The father was becoming alarmed.

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

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

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

“Where is your tumbler?”

Mutt had no idea what she was talking about.

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

Ivy was growing angry.

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

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

“Is it filled for a return trip?”

“Yes. But it is not for you.”

“You must open the portal.”

“I will not.”

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

The father emerged from the room shaken.

“Kneel,” Ivy commanded, and he knelt.

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

“You will now open the portal.”

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

“Father, you must release the ballast.”

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

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

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

The father looked at her scornfully.

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

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

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

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

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

“You must assemble,” Ivy said.

“I can call them only for the One.”

“And how do you know who He is.”

“Because it is written.”

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

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

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

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

“Dear God,” he repeated, “she lives.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“May I have the honor?”

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

“Are we defying fate?” he asked.

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

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

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

“Just a few minutes father,” Mutt said.

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

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

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

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

The lead father stepped forward aggressively.

“The penalty for your action is death.”

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

“Have you come merely to defile?”

Ivy’s anger was welling up.

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

“Lady, it is not your place ...”

Ivy cut him off.

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

“You will now allow me to speak.”

“Yes, father, make your case.”

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

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

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

“I will serve the Controller,” he said.

Ivy exploded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She stood up, addressing the lead father.

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

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

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

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

Mutt looked at her in wonder.

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

“In the next life.”

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

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

He was still in shock.

“How many babies can we have?”

“As many as you want.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We will do as you bid, my lady.”

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

It was time to rewrite the code.

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

“Place these in the coffin.”

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

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

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

“So Tobor thought he was God?”

“He thought he was the Controller.”

“But you are the Controller.”

“Yes.”

“Does that make you God?”

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

“Then who is God?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

He perked up apprehensively.

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

Mutt did not know how to comfort her.

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

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

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

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

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

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“He will never honor a promise.”

“Have we an alternative?”

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

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

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

“But you would now choose Tobor.”

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

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

“I would not.”

“Then why must you give yourself to another?”

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

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

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

“I have a way.”

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

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

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

Ivy’s eyes grew kinetic.

“What are you writing on?”

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

She snatched the paper.

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

“More what?”

“More of these papers!”

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

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

“Give them to me!”

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

Ivy laid the papers around the tent in total frenzy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mutt was speechless.

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

Mutt was shellshocked, the other firegoers even more so.

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

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

“Okay,” he responded, not meaning it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I knew you would come.”

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

“I am no longer interested,” he said.

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

“Why should I bargain with you?”

“Because I have what you want.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You were my lawful wife.”

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

“Then why do you seek my company now?”

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

“I have no pity.”

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

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

“She is already dead.”

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

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

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

“What do you ask of me?”

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

“What do I get in return?”

“I will drink your potion.”

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

“Are you not the Controller?”

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

Tobor hesitated.

“Why should I abandon Celeste?”

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

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

“Is your will not now?”

Tobor Zranga was an impatient man.

“Does your boy know you are here?”

“He does not need to know.”

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

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

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

“You will drink the potion first.”

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

“You may drink, my bride.”

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

“First I will destroy this accursed work.”

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

Tobor returned to the table enraged.

“You will leave this tent now!”

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

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

“Drink,” he said.

She held forth her goblet.

“To the next life.”

They toasted, and she drank.

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

“Will you drink to me?” she asked.

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

“You switched the potion.”

“Yes.”

“It will do you no good.”

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

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

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

“You cannot kill me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I made up the story about your mother.”

“I know.”

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

“Why don’t you motivate yourself?”

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

“I do not know that.”

“Maybe Prudence is guiding us.”

“Do not say such things.”

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

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

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

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

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Appreciating you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

“How were you going to end The Sphere?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Honey, what’s the matter?”

“I saw her.”

She was not going to fall for this trick again.

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

He sounded deathly sincere.

“Ivy, it was not just me.”

She felt a powerful surge of emotion.

“It was me, and you, and Hope.”

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

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

“What?” She so wanted to believe.

“She is protecting us. All of us.”

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

All she needed was a sign.

Check out chapters of The Cube right here.

Ivy sensed he was brooding and turned to face him.

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

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

Mutt had plenty of ideas.

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

She laughed.

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

“I can pull out.”

“Have you ever?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She slapped him on the back.

“Up, dreamboy. We must return Varun.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why?”

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

Mutt was offended.

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

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

“I have something for you.”

“What is it?” Her heart was racing.

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

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

My Dearest Cerise,

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

Your loving mother,
Prudence

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

She looked at Mutt, tears streaming down her cheeks.

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

“Darling, what’s wrong?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who? Who did you see?”

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

“I saw her.”

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

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

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

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

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

“It was Prudence. She came to me.”

Ivy was trembling.

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

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

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

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

“Did you put this here?”

“Put what?”

“This?”

“I’ve never seen that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But do you still love me as much?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know. Maybe that’s God.”

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

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

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

She paused and looked at Mutt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Because it has always been that way.”

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

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

“But they will be different people.”

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

Mutt was skeptical.

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

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

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

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

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

“Do you still wish to be with Tobor?”

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

“Well then why were you doing it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We will know when the time is right.”

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

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

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

“Watching parents fight is part of childhood.”

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

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

“Perhaps it would be a better world.”

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

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

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

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

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

“You are overthinking this.”

“Well, would you?”

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

“But ...”

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

“Just one more.”

She was getting irritated.

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

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

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

***

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

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

“To my future self.”

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

“You are reading this because I failed.”

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

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

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

“What am I reading?” Mutt asked.

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

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

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

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

“Must I re-enter?” he pleaded.

“You must finish what you started.”

He knew now what he was hearing.

“It’s not sex if you pull out.”

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

“To my future self.”

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

He had seen the face of Celeste.

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

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

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

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

“I do not understand. I cannot understand.”

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

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

“And it will all start over.”

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

“Then what is the Oopsah?” he asked.

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

Mutt was spent but tried to follow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How did you escape him this time?”

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

He sat there stunned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He could not bring himself to respond.

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

Mutt remained silent.

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

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

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

Mutt was stung that she used his familiar name.

“Are you still married to him?”

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

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

“What happened to Celeste?”

Ivy was ready with an answer.

“I miscarried.”

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

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

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

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

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

When he looked up Ivy was gone.

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

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

“I know when I am not wanted.”

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

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

“You promised me.”

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

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

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

“Yes, I did.”

“And what did you do there?”

“Things I would rather forget.”

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

“Yes.”

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

“What are you doing?”

“I’m being a monster.”

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

“I believe I am out of surprises.”

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

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

Check out chapters of The Cube right here.

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

“I will return her tomorrow.” He left.

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

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

“Have you reconsidered?” he asked.

“Have you?”

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

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

“He has abandoned you.”

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

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

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

“I have all the pity you have shown.”

She knew what he meant. She replied hesitantly.

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

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

“You are a sick man.”

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

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

“Have you?” he returned the question.

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

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

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

“I doubt mine is the superior force.”

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

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

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

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

“I will never be slave to your will.”

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

He retrieved a roll of papers from the tent.

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

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

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

***

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

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

“Are you Mutt?” a stranger asked.

“I was.”

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

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

“We did not know she had a husband.”

“Nor did I.”

“There is something wrong with her.”

Mutt remained silent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The little girl smiled weakly. “Me.”

“Does my little angel want to fly?”

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

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

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

“You must stop,” she said firmly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you sleep with him?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You do not understand.”

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

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

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

Mutt stared at her in utter amazement.

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

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

“Ivy,” he said. “You are ill.”

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

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

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

He was again astonished.

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

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

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

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

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

“Let us not waste time,” he declared.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

He laid it on the table.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out chapters of The Cube right here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do you have a shovel?” Mutt pleaded.

A woman approached from the camp.

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

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

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

“I will take what kindness you can spare.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You do not understand.”

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

She held his sleeve tightly.

“You cannot leave.”

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

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

She rushed to the groom seething.

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

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

“Leave!” she screamed, pushing him.

He looked at her startled.

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

Ivy surveyed the faces of the shocked guests.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes mommy.” She managed a weak smile.

Ivy stood up, all eyes on her.

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

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

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

He turned to his small charges.

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

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

“You may kiss her on the cheek.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I do not know you.”

“She does.”

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

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

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

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

“Who are you?”

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

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

“Yes, he is in the garden.”

“Go fetch him, please.”

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

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

“I bring news of your granddaughter.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before he left Maple approached him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out chapters of The Cube right here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“Really?”

“I am authorized without escort.”

“Can you navigate the system?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Because you look like my wife.”

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

“What else could it be?”

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

“Do you know who my parents are?”

She shook her head.

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

The dicadict would speak no more on this subject.

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

Mutt did not believe a word this woman said.

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

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

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

“Do you like sleeping with strangers?”

She thought for a moment and answered honestly.

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

Mutt appreciated her candor.

“Your daughter is dead,” she said.

He tensed.

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

“I know she murdered her parents.”

“And you love her still?”

“She is all I have.”

“Come, join me in my flat.”

“What do you need from me?”

“I will ask you afterwards.”

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

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

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

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

“And how is that?”

“You must pretend to be my wife.”

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

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

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

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

“I must receive a dispensation.”

The dicadict was confused.

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

“You are a strange man.”

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

“What do you plan to ask me?”

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

“Ask me now.”

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

“Who wants to know?”

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

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

“That’s not a good enough answer.”

“Tell me the status of my wife.”

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

Mutt jolted, unnerved by the thought.

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

“Yes?”

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

“Where are you going?”

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

“Bogin will not let you leave.”

“He does not control me.”

“What is the answer to my question?”

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

“I will earn a better answer than that.”

Mutt turned to go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

“She is my wife, do you know that?”

“Your marriage is not recognized in Skava.”

“It has been consummated with a child.”

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

“Then bring me the child.”

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

“How can I expedite the process?”

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

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

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

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

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

“I am a guest, am I not?”

“You are.”

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

“He is.”

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

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

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

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

The minder looked at him confused.

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

“I will see what I can do.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The agents approached and grabbed his arms.

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

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

“It is for the leader’s eyes alone.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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