by Huskyteer
“Where is here? And what do you mean physical laws?”
Abby was at a loss to explain this, and stammered for a moment before speaking again. “The world you created…I called it Canvas when I was a child. I used to go there every night in my dreams. They put me on medicine so I could sleep and I didn’t go back until there was an emergency.”
The heron did not reply, and her face was impassive. Abby hoped it meant she was at a loss for words and not weary of this conversation.
“The world you created,” Abby said. “Canvas. Why did you make it? Where did all of you come from?”
“We came—”
Abby’s door slammed open and her mother stood in the frame. “Abby, what is the meaning of this noise?!”
Abby froze. She waited for her mother to look at Omar’s side of the room. Instead, her mother stared deeper into her.
“Who are you talking to this early!?”
Abby looked at the heron. The bird was facing Abby’s mother. “Who is this? Who created her?”
The woman in the doorframe did not take her eyes off Abby. “Abby, I’m not kidding! What is the matter?!”
“I’m sorry, mum. I forgot my pill. I must have been talking in my dream.”
Her mother’s stare became harder. “Take your pill, go to sleep, and if you wake me again I will shove the whole damn bottle down your throat so you’ll never wake up again!”
She turned, slammed the door and stomped back to her room. Abby could hear the faint sound of her weeping through the wall.
The heron rose, stepped closer to Abby and wrapped a wing around her.
“She can’t hear us now.”
“How?”
“I think I understand a little better now.”
Her body shrank, drew inward, softened into that of a woman instead of the imposing figure of a giant animal. Now instead of a large heron standing in the bedroom, she resembled a compromise between a bird and a woman. Her face was still birdlike, but her stature was very human. Her body was still covered in feathers, but her wings now resembled arms, with wingtips that functioned like fingers.
“You visited my world in dreams. Your world is also like a dream to me. Everything you’ve told me matches what the other Animals have said when they saw you. Tell me everything.”
* * * *
Scientists have been struggling to understand why their instruments have picked up no wind readings since the wee hours of the morning. One need not consult mechanical devices. One only needs to step outside and feel that there is no breeze. None at all. My friends, I assure you that this is not local to our broadcast area. All across the globe, there is no wind. Furthermore, airplanes do not rise, even when traveling fast enough. Balloons do not rise. Various other devices that rely on the wind in any way simply do not work. It is as if the laws of physics on which air travel depend no longer hold true.
Various houses had the radio tuned to the same frequency, but most were not listening to it. As Abby walked with the heron, who had taken on a humanlike body of similar proportions to her own, people were out on the streets.
Two men burst from the door to the apothecary’s shop. The first man, Magreer, was shouting to the whole town that Patel was a cheating thief for charging twice for a medicine what the apothecary the next town over was charging. Patel followed him out to the street and pulled Magreer around and argued the price in his face.
The price was the same it had always been, he was saying.
Magreer was shouting back that it was always robbery.
They went back and forth like this for a while. The heron was watching, listening, head tilting and staring in a very birdlike way. Nobody could see the heron-woman but Abby. The heron had hidden them both from view, and being able to view what people were like when they thought nobody was watching was a perspective she would not wish on anyone. Patel threw a punch at Magreer. The two men went down to the dirt in a brawl.
“My apothecary,” said Abby. “Patel. He makes my medicine. Never heard him raise his voice to even his own son. Look at him now.”
The heron hurried them along. Another radio came into hearing range as they moved down the street.
…have established the rains have stopped as well. No rain has fallen anywhere on the globe in the last twelve hours, which baffles scientists.
Further up the road, a man was struggling to keep his horse from kicking him. He was rearing up, resisting every effort.
“That’s mister Kjold. A farmhand. His horse has been agreeable for years, and now all of a sudden…”
The heron was taking in the sight as they walked by.
…just received word that the solar time does not equal the measured time in any part of the world. My friends, it’s as if the rotation of the Earth has stopped. Those of you with pocket watches, check them now, and compare that time to your local sundial. You will confirm they do not match. For example, it is currently nine-thirty-six in the morning in the city of Eastlake, but the sundial reads eight-forty-one, and the sun is still not moving in the sky.
Even further up the road were young girls throwing rocks into the school building. Then two women were arguing about how one looked at the other this morning. They began pulling hair and swinging kitchen equipment at one another.
…power plant is running at maximum capacity, but output is less than half what it should be. Those of you able to hear this broadcast, consider yourselves lucky. It is as if the electron has decided not to do what it always has done since the beginning of time.
Women were beating dogs that had wandered into their line of sight. Children were kicking neighbors, and pets were turning on their owners. The heron watched each incident with an impassive expression.
…on a similar note, it also appears as though combustion is not predicable either. Foundries and factories the world over are reporting an inability to maintain a fire, or set anything alight. Trains all over the world are halted due to the inability to light a fire in the boiler. Some boilers are lit, but at greatly reduced flames relative to what they should be. It is a baffling mystery that authorities are still working on. This on top of the strife that seems to have engulfed…
The broadcast became static, and then the power went out.
They were walking by the town hall now, and Abby stopped at the sundial. The clock tower read nine-fifty-six, but the shadow on the sundial read eight-forty-one. The heron stepped up to it, standing opposite Abby, and compared the two.
“This lack of harmony,” Abby said. “It’s the wolves, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” She was staring at the sundial. “We all recognized everything we were doing needed to work together. The wolves took charge of making sure of that. When they fight, everything stops. This is exactly what we see in my world when it happens.”
“What about the electricity? What’s happening?”
“It’s the fox,” she said. “He wanted to create lights in the sky to impress me. He’s been trying to convince me to be his mate since he arrived. Now that I’m gone…he has no reason to do so anymore.”
“That one act of trying to win you over created the laws of electromagnetism that we use to make radios work. Notice the wind. There is no wind.”
“I can’t make the wind blow here. I can change myself, but I can’t change this world.”
She looked up at the clock tower, then turned to the sun. Abby let her take in the sight for a moment with nothing but the background noise of violence to fill the gap. Finally, Abby spoke up.
“I don’t know how, but it’s because of you we have physical laws. Until right now, they have been predictable and constant. If those laws change, we die.”
“This is unbelievable,” said the heron.
People were running around them, threatening each other with weapons, cursing, destroying houses and businesses. It was like watching a radio drama happen before her eyes. She was a narrator. She was an observer. None of it touched her.
“Nobody created you,” t
he heron continued. “Nobody created this world. The fox’s electricity, the horse’s fire, my wind, my lover’s rain… All of it added up to create something bigger. We never thought…”
She lowered her eyes to the sundial. The shadow hadn’t moved the entire time. The sun was still as high in the sky as it had been hours ago. She turned to the sun now.
“And the lion. The lion! He isn’t running across the dome of our world to bring light to everything! They’ve all stopped! The other Animals are panicking! They don’t know what happened to me, so they’ve stopped everything!”
“The jackal creates disease,” Abby said. “Why?”
The heron met Abby’s eyes. They were still birdlike and expressionless, but far less intimidating now that she was Abby’s height.
“The jackal came to…to Canvas late. We were already making creatures in our image by then. He didn’t want to do what everyone else was doing, so he started creating animals too small to see.”
“What is Canvas?”
“It was a place we created to do as we pleased.”
“Where did you come from?”
“Another world already created by other Animals. We wanted to make things of our own, in our image. This must be the reason leaving that world was forbidden. They didn’t tell us it would affect events somewhere else, or creatures would emerge from it we did not intend.”
She followed a man running from one building to another, carrying a torch, screaming. He was trying to light things on fire, but the fire was not spreading. Nothing was lighting up. This angered the man even more, and he used the torch to club the nearest person he could find.
“We have to go back,” said the heron. “You must take me back, please!”
Please? Abby thought. She was silent for a moment, staring into the bird-woman’s unreadable expression. “I can only visit Canvas in dream. If I take medicine to fall asleep, I won’t dream.”
“Then show me more. Let us walk until you can sleep.”
“I would show you the city, but the trains aren’t running, and it’s many days walking.”
“I will take us there,” said the heron-woman, walking around the sundial to Abby’s side. “As you could will yourself to appear anywhere in my world, so I can in yours.”
She took Abby’s hand in her wing and closed her eyes. Moments later, the village of Nariss faded away, and the city of Eastlake came into view.
Everything that was happening in Nariss was also here, but magnified. People were running about, demolishing windows, buildings, electrical poles, animals, and each other. Horses had broken away from carriages and were running in circles, kicking anyone that came near.
There was no fire anywhere. Water was not flowing from any of the open hydrants. Abby noticed some beverage mugs in a corner tavern overturned, but the liquid was still inside as if the glass were upright.
“The crocodile,” said the heron, noticing where Abby’s attention was. “She isn’t making the water flow now. They’re all upset, and they have no idea what’s happening here…”
As they wandered the streets and observed the chaos and looting and violence, Abby did not feel like she was in the presence of a vengeful deity who demanded respect. The heron had been surprised at every turn, and had even been polite to Abby.
Abby thought less of the rioting and more about the idea that the Animals were ignorant of their power over this world. Everything they had done was an accident. The book of myths was wrong. Now that she thought of it, something had been explicitly omitted from the book: who was making these observations about the Great Animals? Who wrote the myths?
There had to have been people like Abby in the past. People who went to Canvas in their dreams and told stories about what they were seeing. They assumed the deities were vengeful and knew about what they had created, but the Animals had no such knowledge. The sacrifices, the pleas, the prayers; all were for nothing.
She had once felt in awe learning about the men and women who figured out the laws of aerodynamics, electromagnetism, and thermodynamics. Abby’s vision glazed over as she realized she was walking with a creature who created those laws, and this bird didn’t even know she had done it. All the heron wanted to do was help her lover spread the rain across the land. From that simple act of compassion had arisen a whole system of mathematics describing lift, pressure, turbulence, and drag.
The myths always portrayed the people sacrificing and pleading to these Animals to keep things as they were and to fill their Canvas with joy. A person in Abby’s position coming from a primitive culture would do the same out of fear, but Abby had an idea.
“We need to bring them all here.”
The heron turned, met Abby’s eyes. Abby held her gaze, then took her feathered hand as they watched chaos engulf the city.
* * * *
Abby awoke on the roof of one of the farmhand’s houses. The harvest was over, the fields bare, so there was no one here now. The sun was high in the sky, and the light was overwhelming.
She felt the heron’s wing around her, gently raising her up to a sitting position. On the roof, and on the ground below, were the Great Animals. There were over a hundred of them, all assuming a form that was between human and animal to make themselves appear less intimidating. All the wolves, the tiger, the lion, the fox, the jackal, and many others. Even the desert snake was here, somehow finding a way to assume a disarming human form and still appear snakelike.
The wind was not blowing. The sun would stop in the sky for as long as the lion was here. The strife that had engulfed the world had long ago eased, and so long as the wolves were in harmony when they left Canvas, this world would still be in harmony.
Abby had a tremendous headache from traveling to Canvas and back so many times over the last few weeks. Though she had slept every night, she never rested, and now had a difficult time remaining on her feet. The deity of the wind helped her to her feet and held her upright. Abby spoke to all the Animals.
“By now all of you have seen what happens when you change something in Canvas. Anything you do can lead to thousands of deaths here. You saw what happened to the people when the wolves began fighting! Imagine what would happen to them if the horse made fire impossible, or if the heron and the shark started fighting again!”
She had their complete attention. Over these last few weeks Abby and the heron had brought the others here to see the results of their whims. They had seen for themselves what happened when they no longer performed their habits, and what the result was when they resumed. The wolves were the first to try it. When they realized their fighting caused Abby’s world to be in disharmony, they made up and were harmonious again. They then returned to Abby’s world and saw the change.
Animal after Animal saw what their role was, and how it affected the people inhabiting it. Everyone understood what it meant for Abby’s people. She made sure to show them. She guided them to the most relevant sights, most of which she had only read about in books. The Animals made it possible for her to travel there and show them.
Abby realized on the day she stood at the sundial with the heron that Doctor Hagim was wrong. The book of myths wasn’t a chronicle of dead possibility; it was a glimpse into a potential future. The relationship was just starting, and Abby decided she did not like the future the myths represented—one full of fear and sacrifice and subservience to omnipotent beings who cared nothing for how their actions affected anyone. She had the power to build this relationship on understanding and compassion, and she did not waste the opportunity.
Now they stood outside the village of Nariss, on and around the farmhand’s house, waiting to meet the people whose lives they affected. They had followed her lead this whole time. They recognized the people were fragile, and if any of them made the slightest change, people would die. Their first reaction was not to swell up with power and demand respect, but to be careful where they stepped. Abby cultivated this reaction in her every word and deed.
“No one person creat
ed us,” Abby resumed. “The sum of your individual creations made us, so we are all your children. The world you created is my world. It’s yours to take care of and protect, and so are all the people in it. It’s time everyone knew who created the laws that make my world. It’s time they met you and understood you, even thanked you. They will be eager to know who you are, just as you are eager to know who they are.”
Knowledge came to Abby. The Animals had made themselves visible to all now. The sun was stuck in the sky. Within hours, reports would be going out that electricity, fire, the progression of the day, wind, and everything else they took for granted had ceased.
The Great Animals were silent, waiting for Abby to lead the way, eager to meet everybody who relied on the laws their whims had created. Abby was certain the people were ready to understand who created those laws. Science had done an excellent job preparing them for this moment, and Abby hoped she had done a good enough job preparing the deities as well.
DRAWN FROM MEMORY, by Renee Carter Hall
It had once been a summer cottage, a weekend getaway, a place couples might come for a tryst or fathers might bring their boys fishing. It was salt-washed gray now, the wooden stairs uneven, paint blistered around the dull windows. Beyond the house, the sound stretched calm, reflecting the late afternoon light. The driveway was paved with broken clamshells, so I was glad I’d worn flats.
It was hard to believe he was here. It seemed so far away from everything, and I wasn’t sure whether to envy him the peace and quiet or wish that somehow he were still out in the middle of everything, out performing where he belonged.
Everyone in my generation had grown up being able to sing the Jungle Jam theme song. We laughed as Terrence Tiger foiled both the poachers and his nemesis, the evil but ultimately inept elephant Lord Longtusk. The show had a couple of bumbling monkeys, a few humanoid toons as the rangers of the wildlife preserve, and a handful of other secondary characters, but Terrence was the star. And the show wasn’t just funny, it was smart. It had fans from elementary school to graduate school thanks to its skewering of pop culture, celebrities, political figures, you name it—but still with plenty of sight gags and cartoon comedy to go around. When I watched the series on DVD years later, I was amazed—and delighted—at how much had gone over my head as a child.
