by T. A. Pratt
Pelham looked at her blankly.
“In science fiction, they talk about ‘terraforming,’ making hostile planets habitable. Pumping greenhouse gases into the air on Mars so an atmosphere will form, engineering plants that can grow in alien soil, melting ice to create water, stuff like that: creating new Earths, or reasonable facsimiles. But this black star is alien, and I think it’s trying to make the Earth into something it finds more habitable: xenoforming. Only the sand seems conscious, so maybe it’s trying to turn the Earth into... itself, instead. The ultimate vanity project.”
“We must stop this,” Pelham said. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Just keep doing the good steward thing here. My attention is super divided lately, and the underworld is suffering. I’m going to do some clean-up on the mystic realm, and deal with some other necessary business. Then I need to go have a conversation with a friend, because there’s one thing I don’t know about this black sand. Okay, there are a million things I don’t know, but there’s one big one.”
Some hours later, Marla drew her new sword from the hissing barrel of blood she’d quenched it in. In terrestrial blacksmithing, only an insane (or very dramatic) person would think to quench a blade in blood, for a variety of reasons practical and aesthetic, but this was the underworld, and sometimes symbolism won out. This blade was much like her old one, straight and workmanlike, double-edged, with a plain crossbar and hilt. The only ornament was a large black gem on the pommel, and with a frown, she turned the jewel red. Fuck black stones. The demon blacksmith she’d conjured to forge the blade bowed, all four arms held behind his broad, gray-skinned back. “Is there anything else, Majesty?”
“No, that will do.” She paused, looking at the demon, who had the placid face of a bull and the body of a comic book space gladiator. “Huh. You demons are pretty useful. How do you know how to do all this stuff? Forging and whatnot?”
“When you create us, and express your needs in thought or word, we borrow the knowledge necessary to complete our tasks from any relevant minds in the afterlife. Thus, I have access to the occult knowledge, and swordsmithing knowledge, and occult swordsmithing knowledge, of anyone who has ever lived. If not specifically imbued, our personalities are an emergent property based on various factors—your subconscious preferences, the sort of knowledge we’ve acquired, and so on.” He paused. “Or so scholars of hell have theorized.”
“Ha, right. Thanks. Carry on.” She walked out of the burning cavern onto the cool plains by the banks of the River Lethe, and gave her sword a few experimental swings through the air. It wasn’t quite ready yet. It was an amazing magical blade, capable of slicing through concrete pillars without losing its edge, but it wasn’t yet an artifact. She put the blade against her palm and drew it along her flesh, allowing herself to bleed. Her blood was faintly luminous, and the sword drank it up, taking a bit of her divinity into itself.
Now it was her terrible sword, and it could cut through anything at all. Except black sand. But at least she’d learned that lesson.
The sword was no help against the black star’s grainy spawn, but maybe the demons.... They were her proxies, in some way: they took on aspects of her own power, and wielded it on her behalf. Maybe she could outsource some of her duties a little bit.
She concentrated and drew a wellspring of primordial chaos up through the ground, opening a pool of shimmering silver liquid ten feet across before her. “Something for the Pacific,” she murmured, and a figure rose up from the water and stepped onto the shore. He was humanoid, more so than many of her demons, but his skin was slick and smooth as a dolphin’s, and he had stubby wings, like a manta ray’s, spreading out from his shoulders, and a long tail with a stinger on the end extending from the base of his spine. (Not unlike the shark-man that had attacked Bradley, actually, but this one seemed more fully integrated, like one strange purposeful thing, and not a broken chimera.) When he grinned, his teeth were broken shards of seashell, and his eyes were the black of lightless oceanic depths. He gave a little wave, and his fingers were webbed. “Oh, it’s good to be alive again. It’s been a long time.” He bowed. “I am Cosmocrator, an angel of the waters. You’re the new lord of hell?”
“I... wait. I just made you. You’re new.”
“Mmm, I would never contradict you, but perhaps I can clarify. You drew me forth, certainly, Majesty, but this is a rebirth, for me. I walked, and swam, and flew over the Earth in the service of some of your predecessors, though the last time was, oh, the 1880s, I think, in the American West. Some humans have mistaken me for a manifestation of Satan, and I never much disputed it. People give you respect when they think you’re their Adversary. At any rate, it’s good to be back. What can I do for you, my Highness? Given the particulars of this incarnation, I’m guessing something... aquatic?”
She frowned. Conjuring intelligent life was weird. “We’re dealing with an alien invasion. There are patches of black sand on the ocean floor, in the Pacific Ocean, killing the local wildlife and transforming everything into more black sand. I want you to turn it back.”
“And you’ll give me—ah, I see, yes, a reservoir of primordial chaos.” Cosmocrator’s grin was fixed and unnerving.
“Change the sand into ocean floor or dirt or whatever, and then return here.”
“Of course. Do you want me to tempt any mortals while I’m out and about?”
“What? No. What are you even talking about?”
Cosmocrator shrugged. “You aren’t one of the Deaths who likes to play at games of temptation and damnation? Fair enough. I’m very good at such things, if you ever change your mind. Eternity is a long time, and temptation is a reliable diversion.”
“Just... do the thing.” Marla gestured, and a shadow rose up from the ground and enveloped the demon, taking him away to the sea.
Had Cosmocrator really lived before, or was his backstory somehow built-in, and if so, what did that say about her subconscious? If these demons were sentient and had continuity of personality, did she owe them rights? Freedom? Personal sovereignty?
Maybe because of her discomfort with those questions, the rest of the demons she conjured were either mute or exceedingly quiet. First, a towering figure made of stitched-together corpses emerged from the pool, followed by a sled pulled by pale hellhounds. He gave her a nod, and she sent him to deal with the sand patch in the Arctic. Next, a thing like a man-sized albino penguin waddled out of the pool, and she shadowed that one off to the Antarctic. A horse-sized lizard with nine snakelike heads struggled onto the shore next, its heads weaving and hissing at her, and that beast was dispatched to the Mediterranean. A wooden shack rose from the pool next, then stepped out, walking on oversized chicken legs. Marla quirked a smile at the manifestation. She hoped Jarrell’s ex, the current Baba Yaga, wouldn’t be offended by the plagiarism, or homage. The hut loped away through a portal of shadow to Siberia. The last demon she conjured was a great bird, as large as a human, its whole body gleaming like jewels, and it showered down gold dust with every flap of its wings. She dispatched that to deal with the black sand in the desert in South America.
All of their demonic consciousnesses buzzed in the back of her head as they approached their targets. Ideally, they’d engage the black sand from a distance, transform it back into terrestrial matter, and return here to either be disincarnated or to make themselves variously useful the way Muscles Malone and some of her other persistent demons did. But, worst case, any of them could suicide-mission themselves by diving right into the heart of the sand piles, and when the sand tried to assimilate them, it would find itself being assimilated by the primordial chaos the demons were composed of instead.
Having dispatched her demons, she turned her attention to getting someone else’s attention. Death’s terrible sword could cut through anything, when wielded by a god: including the fabric of reality itself. She concentrated on tearing a hole from this place to another, and raised the blade.
“Wait!” a voice
called from the river.
She strolled over and looked down into the sluggishly flowing water. Instead of her own reflection, she saw Bradley’s face, but not quite her Bradley; this one was more clean-shaven, and looked a little younger, probably because all his component selves had stopped aging when they’d ascended to meta-godhood. “Hi.”
“Were you seriously about to cut a hole through reality and walk into a parallel dimension? You shouldn’t even be able to do that!”
She shrugged. “So work on your border security. It was the only way I knew to reliably get your attention, without bothering Little B, and he’s got enough to do right now. You and me need to talk.”
“About what?”
“’About what,’ he says. About the alien forces from another world attempting to xenoform my planet.”
Big B covered his face with his hand for a moment. “Fine, yeah, okay, but I’m dealing with some stuff—I’m always dealing with some stuff, do you know the multiverse gets bigger every femtosecond?—so you’ll have to come here. I’ll tell you in advance, though: you won’t like what I have to say.”
“Sure. But who doesn’t love a field trip? Will there be any... consequences... if I depart my reality for a little while?”
“What, like, will everyone stop dying? Maybe. How should I know? That’s your department. Probably you shouldn’t stay too long, just in case.”
“Like you can’t mess with subjective time and squeeze eternity into an hour.”
“Even I have my limitations. Look behind you.”
Marla turned to find a white gazebo standing on the bare plain. It was incredibly odd to see something in the underworld she hadn’t personally willed into existence. The gazebo’s presence felt wrong, like a splinter in her finger. As she approached the structure, the sense of wrongness increased, and by the time she mounted the bottom step, the intrusion was more like a knife in her eye.
Once she was inside the gazebo, the pain vanished instantly, and her underworld was gone. The gazebo was surrounded instead by a garden in riotous bloom, under a summer blue sky painted with artistic clouds. A little white farmhouse, trim and pleasant and neat, stood beyond the garden, a little bit of solid home at the center of the ever-spiraling vastness of the multiverse.
The screen door swung open, and a man emerged, carrying a tray with a pitcher of lemonade and a few glasses. It was Bradley’s husband Henry—one instance of the most common love of Bradley’s many human lives, saved from the moment of death in his world and brought here to live eternally, or a least for as long as he felt like it. Henry greeted Marla like an old friend, which was typical of his essential kindness, because at best, they were old acquaintances. “Good to see you again, Marla. I hear you’ve moved up in the world.”
“Or down to the underworld, anyway. How’s life in an unchanging paradise?”
Henry put down the tray on the gazebo’s wide railing and began pouring lemonade into glasses. “Oh, it’s not unchanging. I just convinced B to let autumn happen, finally, and we’ve instituted a pilot program of occasional thunderstorms. Try this. I made it with the lemons from our tree.”
Marla took a sip, and the lemonade was perfect, the exact right balance of tart and sweet. “This is great. You’ve perfected it.”
“When you have all the time in the world, why not strive for perfection?”
She glanced around. “Henry, if you don’t mind me asking, what the hell do you do here all day?”
“I tend the garden. B and I take walks. Our landscape can be anything we want, you know, and this land goes on... forever. The terrain changes, mirroring the landscapes of various places in the multiverse, chosen at random, unless we choose deliberately. I’ve scaled mountains and rafted rivers and explored the ruins of civilizations that only existed on a tiny handful of branches of the multiverse. I’ve walked on alien planets, too.” He smiled. “I took up painting. You should see my landscapes. B and I spend a lot of time together, too. There’s always some crisis, but he’s composed of billions of selves, so he can usually bud off one to keep me company. Sometimes more than one, if we’re in that kind of mood.”
“Ha! Multiversal threesomes. An advantage of your situation I hadn’t considered.”
He sipped. “Also, I can read any book written in any universe, see any film from any universe, hear any song.... I’m not saying I never get lonely, but I’ve learned the pleasures of being alone. This world may not satisfy me forever, but for now, there’s no place I’d rather be. It is nice to get visitors, though.”
Big B emerged from the house, clearly distracted, and when he reached the gazebo he gave Henry a perfunctory kiss on the cheek, then looked Marla up and down. “Godhood suits you.”
Marla grinned. It was good to see him, even if she was here to yell at him and make him do things he didn’t want to do. “I think so. Meta-godhood looks like it’s doing a number on you, though.”
Big B ran a hand through his already messy hair and shook his head. “I’ve been trying to deal with this briarpatch thing.”
“What kind of thing is that?”
“You know... maybe talking to you about it will help me get my head around it. Having another god to bounce ideas off of could be nice.”
“Hmph. I thought I was a god to you.” Henry raised an eyebrow.
“Nobody surpasses you in your areas of expertise, darling. Do you want to hear me go on about the briarpatch again?”
“No, I’ll leave you to your shop talk. I’ve got season four of Firefly waiting for me on the DVR.” Henry raised his glass to Marla, gave her an ironic wink, and sauntered back to the house.
“So,” Marla prompted. “You’ve got briars in the garden?”
“Metaphorically, anyway. It’s hard to explain. The briarpatch is a network of passageways that lead to alternate universes.”
“I thought all the universes were supposed to be hermetically sealed off from one another, metaphysical disasters notwithstanding?”
“Me too! Only certain people with the right psychic make-up, or magical assistance, can even perceive entry points into the briarpatch, let alone move through it. Such travelers are rare, which is why I didn’t notice it until now, I guess. I thought the briarpatch was a bug in the system, some kind of weird universal dry-rot I needed to clean up, but when I shut down one passageway, two more grow. I’m starting to think the briarpatch is actually part of the structure of the multiverse, because the passageways aren’t triggering any of my alarms. I thought my diagnostic systems weren’t functioning properly, but maybe that’s not it.”
Marla sipped more lemonade. She wondered if she could steal the pitcher, take it home, and replicate the lemonade with primordial chaos.
“The bizarre thing is, the paths in the briarpatch, they don’t mainly lead to parallel branches of the multiverse. Some of those passageways lead to spaces in between, or alongside, or underneath, or half a step out of phase with other realities. The basic way our multiverse works is, anything that can happen, does happen somewhere, right? Modal reality is real.”
Marla nodded. “So I’m told.” It always weirded Marla out to think of near-infinite versions of herself going about their various businesses, especially since she’d met one of her parallel-universe selves once, and found her incredibly unpleasant to be around.
“I think it’s actually stranger than that, though. It turns out, things that aren’t really possible happen, too, and when those impossible conditions come to pass, they form their own little universes, in the briarpatch. They’re self-contained and incomplete worlds, though. They’re bubbles, almost like a sorcerer’s secret sanctum of pinched-off space. Worlds where the laws of physics are different, or where magic is wildly more potent than it is here. Places where eating the wrong berries can turn you into a were-bear, or where instead of the sun there’s just this mind-destroying beautiful light suffusing the air. There are immense bridges that shouldn’t be able to support their own weight spanning the sky, and giant hyper-i
ntelligent bees who produce hypnagogic honey.... I’ve interviewed a few travelers who’ve explored the briarpatch, and they describe the worlds as being more or less ‘plausible.’ The really implausible worlds, apparently, don’t last very long—they’re like those rare elements that can only be created in a lab, and decay quickly. You can die if you’re passing through one of those implausible worlds when it collapses. Some other ridiculous worlds are more plausible, though, and they don’t collapse, or at least, not as often. They’re stable. They might have different natural laws, but they have enough self-consistency to persist. It’s just weird. What even is the point of them?”
“So the briarpatch is just a collection of off-brand worlds?”
“No, see, it’s possible, at least theoretically, to pass from one real world, like yours, and travel through various winding trails in the briarpatch, and emerge into another branch of the multiverse proper. Almost nobody ever does it, apparently, because it’s punishingly difficult to even find your way home from the briarpatch, let alone get to some other branch of the multiverse. You could even conceivably get to other universes, ones that aren’t related to ours at all, like the place the Outsider came from, and the fact that there’s any linkage between our world and that one, however obscure and complicated? That’s terrifying.”
“So your beat is expanded to cover the briarpatch, then? Another border for you to patrol?”
“I wish! I can’t see into those less plausible worlds, not the way I can the rest of the multiverse. The briarpatch is largely opaque to me, unless I enter it myself, and I’ve already lost three of my consciousness in there—they haven’t found their way to a real branch of the multiverse to report back yet. Maybe they got eaten or turned into bears. I don’t know, and I am so not used to not knowing things anymore.”
“Huh. So... maybe the briarpatch isn’t your responsibility. Maybe there’s another god who oversees those implausible worlds.”
B looked troubled. “I have sensed a presence in the briarpatch, and some of the travelers have talked about an entity that appears in various forms, and seems to know all the secret passageways, and can even transport people who can’t perceive the briarpatch on their own... and sometimes prevents people from going to certain places. But, I mean, if this briarpatch is swiss-cheesing up the multiverse, it’s my responsibility to stop it, right?”
