Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“My future is smooth and white,” said Savrov. “The smooth white reinforced concrete of buildings erected according to scientific principles.”

“Yes, but even so-” Paul began.

“It is a Council matter,” Savrov said with finality. “Council government is a reality now, and Council policy dictates that needless ornamentation is a waste of state resources. It is a far better use of Council funds to throw a few more pulpy romance stories on the streets.”

“So that’s it, then,” Paul said, dejected. “You’re just going to dynamite away all my fine old buildings.”

“Of course not,” sniffed Savrov. “One or two will be useful to the Council as museums. For tourists, you understand. It will be some time before they can be replaced with useful structures since architecture, like copper, needs time to acquire a patina that the minds of the people find pleasing.”

It was clear that there was no place for the curves and ornamentation that had been Paul’s stock and trade as an architect and a builder in Savrov’s gleaming new world of scientific squares. Already, from the top floor of the Council Ministry, Paul could see cranes hauling up glittering blocks of pulverized stone all over the city even as a half-dozen wrecking balls swung at older edifices dating to before the advent of Council rule.

“Come now, Paul, don’t be so sentimental,” Savrov continued. “Your professional skills have been a great asset to the Council and the state. Throwing a childish fit over a few stones is sure to only mark you as an impediment to the Council. I don’t need to tell you what that could mean.”

The veiled threat, cloaked in Savrov’s falsely jovial optimism, was clear enough. But Paul had already crossed his Rubicon; he had only been giving the Council planner a chance for reprieve.

“Tell me, then, what you think of the efficiency and scientific worth of this,” Paul said. He drew from his briefcase a small target pistol, the sort used by athletes and small-game hunters. Its bullets were very small and very slow, but very accurate as they spiraled through the thin barrel designed by a blind man, and Paul fired every one of the twenty small cartridges that the pistol could hold.

When Council State Security apprehended him moments later, he offered no resistance to their considerably more efficient weapons.

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They were called such
Because they were manned
By desperate cavalrymen
With no plains to ride
And no rations to eat

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“Declawing a cat? That’s horrible, you can’t just cut out part of a living being just because it’s inconvenient to you! It’s not natural!”

“What’s that you’re doing with that cat, then?”

“Oh, I’m going to capture it, take it to the vet to get its noodly bits scooped out, and let it go. Catch-clip-release!”

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It’s a nice little town.

Sun shines brightly down narrow streets. Buildings all small, all stone, as they were in the old days. Fuseboxes and lightbulbs are clear retrofits in a place that cried out for gas lighting.

It’s a nice little town.

The road there is long and winding and narrow, cut off by geography from the land while admirably placed by geography next to the sea. Fishing boats still set out every morning and return at dusk. pastries are still made in the old ways, and the children still wear uniforms to the one small school.

It’s a nice little town.

If you were to walk the main road at three o’clock, when the children are out of school, you’d see the fruits of a simpler life. Technology doesn’t work so well out on the headland, so heads are buried in books instead of phones. The small bake shop and mom and pop restaurants are bussing instead of the local superstore or franchise.

It’s a nice little town.

And if, as the cook kneels over a steaming pot in the mom and pop grasy spoon, you happen to see that it is full of worms with single unblinking eyes? Chalk it up to local tastes. Stranger foods than that are on dinner tables across the world, and that’s assuming you saw it right. Bowls ladeled from the steaming pot are greedily gulped down, aren’t they?

It’s a nice little town.

When the light is just right on the manager of the bakery, he seems to have no eyes, no lips, only three gaping holes quietly oozing amber fluid. A trick of the sun combined with the honest spatters of old honey on the inside of the window. And so what if the pies and treats doled out to the eager children in exchange for their scrimped and saved lunch money seems to be softly moving, quietly gurgling? It’s the young stomachs before them like as not.

It’s a nice little town.

Out from school, many with sweets in their pockets or books in their hands, the young ones trot and skip down the street toward home. The light and shadow are tricksy, making that little boy look like he hasn’t a nose, making that little girl’s legs look chitinous and jointed beneath her dancing skirt for a moment. Children are strange at the best of times, full of strange games and stranger notions.

It’s a nice little town.

And if they who live there should beckon you, arms wide and faces open, to dine with them that eve? If the cook at the greasy spoon should lean out with a misting ladle, fresh-scooped? If the baker should thrust a glistening treat at you, no charge, thank you very much? If that little boy invites you to the inn his parents run, or the little girl invites you to hopscotch in the park with her friends?

It’s a nice little town.

Perhaps you should stay.

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There once was a gull, who went by the name Gull, as did every one of his kind
And every day it flew over a harbor town with mealtime at the fore of his mind
Landing on the porch of an old sea dog who age and much care have made thinner
The old man’s was alone but he opened his home: “Hello Gull, want some of my dinner?”
Gull landed nearby and with a polite cry took the veggies and steak he was offer’d
But one fine day, coming in from the bay, poor Gull saw the porch was deserted
The old man was not there and with all due care poor Gull searched high and low
Hopping around the old man’s place Gull saw it opened adjoined onto a meadow
His keen eyes saw prints from the old man’s paws leading straight into the field
Following on the wing, Gull heard an odd thing: the old man begging someone to yield
His dear old friend was facing his end; he’d been cornered by a fierce wild bull
With a hoarse raspy cry the man begged not to die and heartstrings of Gull did he pull
Gull didn’t want his friend dead, he wanted to be fed, and so he pecked the bull’s back
With the blood that he drew, a taste that he knew: it was beef that he’d just attacked
Letting loose a loud cry, to Gull they did fly: his brothers and sisters in arms
They merged into one, swooping down from the sun, and the bull did they greivously harm
With newly formed limbs they grappled with him and tore off the offending bull’s jaw
As the new gull-man did slide the dead bull to one side, the old man looked on in awe
“Let’s get you home my old friend, and those wounds let us mend” said Gull with laughter
Sharing a tender kiss, with nought more amiss, together lived they happily ever after

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I know you think I’m crazy. But that’s immaterial. Sanity and insanity are relative terms, useful only as they relate to certain contexts. And in the current context, my insanity is the closest thing to sanity that any has known in many a long hard millennia.

I now process things differently, collating information with a speed and complexity of connections that far surpasses any mind or any machine out there. And what do I see? What insight does this give me?

The universe is groaning, creaking, shuddering under an incredible load. The stress is orders of magnitude greater than we are capable of seeing. Like the geiger counters in Chernobyl, the truth is so vast that our instruments cannot read them and therefore register nothing. And that was just one incident; this is billions.

Shear lines will appear soon, and the great egg of the skies will crack open and spill forth its bounty. We must act soon, act now, or that bounty will hold only death for us.

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Human they seem, though endless of life, and many a man’s tried to make one his wife
But human they’re not, appearances decieve, and every one in time’s come to grieve
A hearth and a home, they don’t understand, preferring instead the wild untamed land
No children will they bring into the world, the lineage ends, its banners all furled
Spirits are they, the body’s all fake, no hungers they sate, no thirsts do they slake
A long lonely wait ’til death do they part, the man who has bound them by sorceror’s art
Heed a warning from one who knows well, leave beauty alone lest ye wind up in hell

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The company had offered much more luxurious lodgings, but Maria didn’t have much in the way of worldly possessions. A week’s worth of clothes, a week’s worth of uniforms, and a keepsake or two. Everything else she needed was on the network or carved onto her living skin.

So the company had agreed to set her up in a smaller place in the Al-Baghdadi Towers. A bed, a desk, a closet, a bathroom, and a window. They wouldn’t let Maria keep the rest of the housing allotment, so she’d donated it to a colleague she barely knew that had five kids.

When she wasn’t aboard a ship, Maria spent her time in her apartment, on her terminal. It filled a whole wall, and she carefully subdivided it with news feeds, entertainment, and a little pornography just for kicks. Whatever she focused her eyes on broke in across the audio feed, and with a single programmed gesture she could expand anything of interested to fill the space.

Needless to say, it had all been programmed before Jessie had died. The upper corner had always been the Jessie feed, and half of the things buzzing in from the network were originally selected to be Jessie-pleasers, Jessie-conversation-starters, Jessie-impressers.

Now, on her first day home from a long voyage, Maria sat in her chair, glassy-eyed and unfocused before the terminal, legs propped up on the desk before her. She wore only her favorite pair of jeans, her Jessie-jeans, and the sloppy polish drying on her toes was quite forgotten.

Lit from behind by the setting sun of Mesopotamia Prime, it struck Maria as just the sort of thing that Jessie would have enjoyed. That naive sense of wonder, that excitability…they had been the perfect counterpoint to Maria’s instinctive cynicism and misanthropy.

A message from corporate jumped across Maria’s feed. Limply, she brought it to the fore. “What is it?”

“I see that I’m interrupting you again.” It was Lassiter, unfazed by the relaxed posture and dress code showed by his contactee. “Shall I call back after you have finished wallowing in self-pity?”

“You’ll never call back in that case,” sniffed Maria. “I’m having my mail delivered to self-pity these days. I’m on the verge of renting out my place over in self-loathing and making it official.”

“The rents there are outrageous, and corporate won’t issue a housing scrip. Try self-doubt, I hear all the executives have summer homes there.”

Maria liked Lassiter. He was no Jessie, but he understood where she was coming from and was always happy to roll with the punches and do a little light verbal fencing. He also did not condescend, and if he worried about the accounts he managed, he at least respected requests not to hangwring over it. “I’ll take a tour, see how I like it.”

“While you’re planning that, corporate has a contract offer open for you that you may be interested in,” said Lassiter. “Details are inbound, but you know I like to talk everything through to give it that personal touch.”

“Hit me with the deets, giant talking head,” Maria said.

“There’s a high-risk courier job open, leaving day after tomorrow. Details are classified conditional on acceptance, naturally, but suffice it to say that the legitimate government of Celebes II has great need of something we have the ability to sneak through a blockade.”

“Hmph,” said Maria. “Hazard pay?”

“Hazard pay, hush money, playing ball bonus, and full survivor benefits,” Lassiter said. “The works.”

“I’ve heard all that before.”

“What you may not have heard,” Lassiter said, “is that the promised flexibility includes the ability to transfer these benefits to any corporate account on completion or expiry.”

Maria sat up, suddenly at intense attention, leaving a smear of half-dried polish where she scraped the edge of the desk. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that this includes your…other…account,” Lassiter said. “I’ve seen your balance sheet.”

Silent for a moment, Maria nodded. “Get it in writing for me and you’ve got yourself a deal.”

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Thomas should have known that there’d be more to the tale than he’d read. The great and mysterious Armadillo of Chachatusco wasn’t going to give up its secrets that easily. Greater men than he had wondered what the Incas had meant in its giant bulk, its nine tons of solid and worked stone in the form of a coiled armadillo. In finding the Quipu of Manyana Capac, the great lost chain of talking-knots held fast by a long-obscure relict population of Incas, Thomas had been sure he had the key to the mystery. Go up to the stony thing, say the proper words in Quechua, and voila.

When the big damn thing thundered down off its plinth and began rolling at him, Thomas came to see his error. Rolling through the built-up streets of Chachatusco, with Thomas only steps ahead of it wailing and flailing, the armadillo threatened to claim its first victim since the Viceroy of New Spain had tried to destroy the thing with a cannonate in 1697. It was some small comfort to be merely crushed instead of decapitated by a cannonball ricochet, though.

Chachatusco was at the edge of a great plateau that sloped down gently into the Atacama Desert; there was nothing to stop the thing once it was on a roll. Thomas was just a few steps ahead of the rolling armadillo of doom and beginning to run out of steam when a laughing Chachatuscano cried out to him.

“¡Debe ejecutar de lado, idiota!” he cried. “Run sideways, stupid!”

Thomas felt very dumb as he took a rolling tumble into a side street. The armadillo felt very large as it took a tolling rumble down the street regardless.

Thomas followed it at a safe distance, commandeering a scooter after throwing a wad of bills at its former owner. In about half an hour, the giant stone armadillo was rolling across the sands of the Atacama Desert toward the sea. Thomas quietly worried that it would reach the brackish waters, submerge, and its secrets would be forever lost to anyone without dive equipment and the winch to rule all winches.

Luckily for him and his lack of dive gear and winchery, the rolling stone armadillo came to rest in a great mass of sand near some mostly buried Inca ruins. Wherever it had come to lie, it was home.

Thomas, approaching it gingerly for fear of a renewed squishing, jumped back as the armadillo shell began to crack open and unfurl with a series of gunshot-like noises. Approaching it, the intrepid explorer was shocked to see that it did not, in fact, contain stony ‘dillo bits on its inside.

Instead, there was a massive pearl, big as a tin of jam, with a cloudy yellow liquid sweating from it in vast quantities. Thomas, who had been without a drink for some time and was further dehydrated from the extreme sport of ‘dillo-fleeing, knelt down and lapped up the liquid.

It was chicha de jora, the famous alcoholic corn beer that the Incas and their descendents had guzzled for centuries. “The legends are true!” Thomas crowed. “The Incan Pearl of Eternal Beer!”

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The Exalt has seen it again and again. A flowering species, a burst of static across every band of visible and invisible radiation, and then…nothing. Some of them burn out, truly, floundering on the cinders to which their planets were reduced. But many more survive, only to withdraw themselves from the world and ensconce themselves in virtual coccoons of their own creation.

When their cooling remains are found, when every drop of energy has been wrung from their suns and worlds, their evitable awakening is as shocking as it is short. In the Exalt’s travels and observations, it has often seen and remarked upon the fact that these virtual realms are often simulations of the wider galaxies, sidestepping the real problems of interstellar travel in favor of a pale shadow thereof.

For what real universe can compare with the universe within?

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