Strange Cosmology

by Alex Raizman

  “Light changed,” Athena said. Ryan took a step further, and Athena’s hand snapped out to catch him on the chest before he could actually enter the street. Surprised, he looked up. Traffic continued to zip by.

  “Why’d you tell me the light changed?” Ryan demanded.

  “Wanted to see how aware you were of the world around you,” Athena said with a smirk.

  Before he could retort, the light actually did change, and they began to cross the street. Annoyed, Ryan looked back to the notification. Jacqueline’s message was simple. “You know this guy?”

  Ryan couldn’t fathom why she had done that. It wasn’t like they were friends. Probably just curious. That didn’t sit right with Ryan, but there were more important things to worry about. Like the headline of the article: “Man claiming to be Anansi starts Civil War in Ghana.”

  Eyes widening, Ryan opened the article. The picture directly under the headline showed soldiers opening fire on an indistinct shape. Ryan couldn’t make out the creature’s form, but whatever it was, it clearly wasn’t human. Humans only had two arms. He skimmed down to the article.

  Accra, Ghana - For the third day, government soldiers clashed with arachnid humanoids in the service of a man claiming to be Anansi, the ancient Ghanan trickster god.

  “Lamppost,” Athena interjected, breaking Ryan’s concentration. Frustrated with himself, he stepped to the side to dodge the obstacle as he kept skimming the article.

  He responded to Jacqueline’s tag with a simple, “Nope, but I have some friends who might. TY for the heads up.” Then he looked at his companions. “Either of you know Anansi?” he asked.

  Athena curled her lips in apparent distaste. “I can’t say I do, but I know his type.”

  Ryan blinked. “His type?”

  Athena nodded. “Trickster gods. They’re devious, underhanded, and like getting the last laugh whenever they can. Loki, Anansi, Hermes, Puck, Morgan Le Fay... they’re all like that.”

  “Anansi’s one of the nice ones, though,” Crystal interjected. “Like Prometheus, Coyote, Hare...they like getting their laughs in, but they’re good people.”

  Athena sniffed.

  “He’s also the first god we’ve heard break cover since Enki died,” Crystal remarked. “That makes him a potential recruit we actually know how to find.”

  As they stepped into a restaurant, the smell of freshly baked bread, sizzling steak, and barbeque sauce reminded Ryan that a mountain as high as Olympus was a pretty steep climb, even for a god.

  The conversation lagged as they tended to the business of settling in and ordering food. The break gave Ryan a chance to consider Crystal’s point. Taking the help of the first person to come along was how they’d gotten saddled with Moloch last time and look how that had gone.

  After the waiter left, Crystal resumed the discussion as if there had been no interruption. “And I always liked Anansi. I mean, we haven’t spoken in a few hundred years, but he was always a fun bugger to have around.”

  “He’s a Trickster,” Athena repeated. She managed to lace that last word with enough scorn that Ryan wondered if Anansi’s ears were burning even across the Atlantic. Both Crystal and Ryan waited a moment, but Athena seemed to think those three words should settle the argument.

  Ryan couldn’t help asking, “But since you’ve never met him, and Crystal knows him...?”

  “I know his ilk. Tricksters, as their name implies, should not be trusted.”

  Ryan met Crystal’s gaze, and she only shrugged and rolled her eyes. “I’m not a big fan of discounting someone because they belong to a group,” Ryan said carefully.

  “Please,” Athena said. “Tricksters are something you chose to become. It’s not something you’re born into. It’s not like being the Eschaton. If someone was a god of murder, would you think it fair to judge them based on that?”

  Ryan grimaced and looked at Crystal. “What are your thoughts?”

  “We kind of have a dearth of options, love,” she said.

  “Last time you thought that way, didn’t you end up allying with Moloch?” Athena asked, echoing Ryan’s earlier thoughts.

  “Okay, low blow. You’re not wrong, love, but it’s still a low blow.”

  Athena gave her a cold smile. “It still proves my point. Tricksters are treacherous. It’s in their nature.”

  Ryan swallowed and looked at her. “Wait, if it’s a choice, how can it be in their nature?”

  “Well…” Athena stopped and frowned. “We just don’t know if we can trust him.” From the look on her face, she knew how weak her argument was starting to sound.

  “I’m not saying we should repeat the Moloch mistake, love,” Crystal jumped in. “Bloody hell, I learned my lesson there. But we should at least give it a chance. Just...make sure we spend a bit more time talking to him before we dash off into a life or death fight, yeah?” Athena opened her mouth to object, but Crystal wasn’t done. “Besides, you’re not exactly a paragon of good decision making. If you want to bring up Moloch as bad judgment, don’t forget you teamed up with Enki, and he’s leagues worse.”

  Athena stiffened at the reminder. “I certainly haven’t forgotten that, Crystal,” she said through clenched teeth.

  “Okay,” Ryan said, drawing out the word before things could get heated. Athena and Crystal were staring daggers at each other, and it felt like the tension was going to erupt at any moment. “Why don’t we all dial it back down to eleven, okay?”

  For a second, Ryan didn’t think he’d gotten through to them, as their gazes were still locked in mutual fury. Then Athena took a deep breath and glanced at Ryan, then back at Crystal. Athena sighed. “What does that article say he’s doing?” It wasn’t an apology, but it seemed enough to mollify Crystal for the moment.

  “Uh…” Ryan shrugged. “The headline says he started a civil war, but that doesn’t seem as clear from the article.”

  “The things Tricksters do are rarely clear,” Athena said sourly.

  Ryan raised an eyebrow. “You really have a problem with Tricksters, huh?”

  “You say it like it’s a bad thing,” Athena countered, her voice harsh. “Having a problem with Tricksters is just being smart.”

  “I dunno about that, love. It seems to be a bit past the point of rational,” Crystal chimed in.

  Athena ground her teeth. “I expected you to understand, Crystal,” she said. “Everything is a game to them. You really want to hinge anything important on the word of a Trickster?”

  “We don’t have many other options,” Ryan said, not pointing out that so far, Athena hadn’t done much to convince them that Tricksters were anywhere near as bad as she claimed. “And I’m not saying we go up to him and say ‘you seem trustworthy. Come, let us tell you all of our secrets’. I’m just saying we should talk to him, find out what’s going on, and go from there.”

  Athena scowled but conceded the point. “Fine. Anything else on the phone?”

  Ryan returned to checking his notifications, eating mechanically once the food arrived. It wasn’t long before he came across a tag that made his blood run cold.

  “Moloch Establishes Venezuelan Cult,” he read aloud.

  Both Athena and Crystal gave him sharp looks. “Any more details?” Athena asked through gritted teeth.

  Ryan skimmed the article. “There’s something about a national park: ‘El Ávila National Park has been cordoned off by the Venezuelan military’. Um...Authorities think Moloch has holed up in there, but it’s a pretty big area to search.”

  Athena nodded. “We can’t let that go unattended. We at least need to know if he’s in there, and what he’s doing.”

  “Too bloody right there,” Crystal said, leaning her elbows on the table. “Ryan, I think you should go talk to Anansi. He’ll like you. Athena, you can go be sneaky in Venezuela and check on Moloch.”

  “And what about you?” Ryan asked with a frown.

  “I’ve got a third lead to pursue. Someone I expected to help us out b
ack during that mess with Enki. I want to make sure she’s okay, and if she is, I want to know why the hell she didn’t answer when we called for help.”

  “Who?”

  Crystal shook her head. “Not important, love.”

  “It sounds pretty important to me,” Athena objected. Then she cocked her head. “Oh. Of course. Dianmu.”

  Crystal nodded firmly.

  “Dianmu?” Ryan asked.

  “One of the few people who have remained friends with Crystal throughout the millennia,” Athena said. “I honestly was surprised when you showed up without her. I’d warned Enki to plan for her.”

  Crystal’s eyes flashed. “If she got hurt because -”

  Athena held up a placating hand. “He said he didn’t want to pick a fight we didn’t need, so we could deal with Dianmu if she showed up.”

  “And you trusted him?” Crystal spat.

  “Woah,” Ryan jumped in, “Crystal, I thought we were past all that.”

  Crystal’s glare softened, but only slightly. “I’m just saying that if my oldest friend is dead or worse because of you, we’re going to have a sodding tough conversation.”

  “If Enki had gotten to her,” Athena said, choosing her words with evident care, “he would have had a third nanoverse to add to that abomination he made. I’m sure she’s fine.”

  Crystal took a deep breath. “You’re right.” Athena gave Crystal an expectant look, but if she was waiting for an apology, it didn’t seem to be forthcoming. “Anyway. Ryan to Anansi. Athena to do some recon on Moloch. And I’ll go check on Dianmu and find out what the hell happened there. After we have dessert.”

  Chapter 4

  Blight

  As soon as Crystal was alone in her staging area, she let out a long breath.

  “Switch to real display.”

  She knew what to expect, but still watched closely, hoping that this time would be different. C’ mon, love, you’re too old for that level of self-delusion. The display shimmered, and the colors began to run like rain. The image of her nanoverse went from being a young and healthy universe, full of bright stars that were alive and brimming with energy and potential, to something Crystal had never imagined possible.

  The stars should have been brilliant white and yellow and red, just like in the core universe, and as her nanoverse had always looked before. Now, though...the first star she saw as the real view asserted itself was the pale purple of a bruise. Other stars were an unnatural green, looking like pools of algae floating in the void. There were red stars, but instead of flame-red of red dwarves, they were a deep crimson that made them look like spots of blood. A scattering of yellowish stars reminded her of pallid, sick skin.

  Stellar matter stretched between the stars in immense gas clouds, making the entire galaxy look like a great mass of unhealthy flesh, a tumor that stretched across the sky. Crystal shuddered. After the battle with Enki, she had needed to do a Crunch and restart the nanoverse, but it should never have reformed looking like this. At first, she had thought could be a passing change, a strange new stage of early universe development, but as the nanoverse progressed and grew, that hope had faded rapidly.

  So your nanoverse looks like a bunch of infected open wounds, love. This can’t possibly be a problem, yeah? She bit her lip. None of this should be possible. Yet here it is. How?

  That question was the one that was eating at her the most. There had to be a cause for this, something behind it. Was it just that she was getting old? No god had ever endured for as long as she had, at least not to her knowledge. Maybe this was a natural part of a nanoverse’s life cycle if it stuck around as long as hers. Just as flesh and bone broke down after years of use, no matter how healthy the mortal was, maybe entire universes succumbed to natural decay. Crystal frowned as she considered it.

  “It’s possible,” she said aloud. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, however, she decided they were wrong. Yes, it was possible that mere age had finally taken its toll, but that rang false to her. If it was age and wear and tear, it should have happened gradually over time, each iteration showing more and more signs of this unhealthy universe. This abrupt change, on the other hand, couldn’t be attributed to pure entropy. Especially not when a better answer exists.

  Enki’s dual nanoverse. The unnatural abomination he’d formed by taking over Tyr’s nanoverse and merging them together, making him so powerful they’d needed a nuke to defeat him. Crystal remembered destroying it, how wrong it had felt. How she’d gagged to touch it, how it had taken so much effort to destroy the damn thing when it should have just been an act of will. She’d thought it was done after that, but now...It was a contagion, she thought, like popping a pox pustule on a plane. I let all of it out in my nanoverse, then collapsed damn thing around it, bringing all the foulness into one place, and let it infect everything right from the bloody big bang.

  That answer, as much as it disgusted her, at least made sense. Well, at least it made sense in a “none of this should be happening, so normal logic doesn’t really apply here” kind of way. Nothing else had changed, at least not that Crystal knew about.

  She’d considered telling Ryan and Athena. She really had.

  And how exactly does that conversation go? “Hey, loves, my sodding nanoverse is going to hell. No, you can’t do anything about it. Yeah, I think this is probably my last bloody go around. Go ahead and worry about it. It’s not like we have anything better to do.” Crystal kicked one of the chairs of her staging area, needing to lash out at something.

  It didn’t help.

  The truth, Crystal had to admit, was that she’d gotten used to being the expert. Whenever someone needed to know something about godhood, they’d been able to turn to her. Oh, sure, they often hadn’t, and it usually ended up being a giant bloody mistake for them, but there wasn’t any element of the divine experience she wasn’t intimately familiar with, either from going through herself or watching some god or another endure it. Nascency. Apotheosis. Hungers. Pantheons. Different categories of gods. Even the longing for the release of mortality that came in a god’s twilight years. She understood it all.

  Unfortunately, nothing in her experience had prepared her for this. Nanoverses followed a very predictable pattern from birth to death. There were exceptions, of course. Enki’s merger of two nanoverses had proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt. He’d done something she’d believed, she’d thought she had known, to be impossible. But at least that had just been a difference of degrees. Enki had become stronger than any other god had ever been, but in the end, it had only been a matter of fighting him, overcoming him, and destroying his nanoverse. None of that fell outside the range of what Crystal knew.

  This? The stars in her nanoverse turning the colors of diseases, the stellar matter spreading like an infection? It was so far outside her knowledge it might as well be written in gibberish. It was like she’d woken up one morning to find gravity pushed instead of pulled. No, not that. She’d still have context for that. It was like she’d found gravity suddenly caused people to burst into flame. There was no frame of logic for it.

  Why now? Of all the bloody times, why now? If it had been a different time, she might have gone to Athena to brainstorm. Or to Dianmu. Or, long ago, even Enki. That’s a sick joke now, Crystal thought with a grimace. He was the cause of this, even if he hadn’t meant to be. Now Crystal had to clean up his mess, and it had become her mess. But who could she go to now? Now, when the others needed her to have all the answers?

  “I didn’t ask for any of this,” Crystal said to the empty staging area. She was surprised at how bitter she sounded. It had been millennia since she’d resented being the last Eschaton. Those scars had healed with the passing of countless eons. Or at least, she’d thought they had. It seemed they were still rawer than she had imagined. I didn’t have anyone to guide me through this. Just…

  No. Crystal wouldn’t think about him now, not after so long. There was no point to dredging up ghosts from before the da
wn of man.

  “You need to quit bloody whining,” Crystal said, her voice the sharp reprimand she’d use on a small child. She tried not to think about how often she was talking to herself. “They need you to hold it together.”

  That was the rub, she realized, the real heart of the issue. Ryan and Athena, and anyone else they could convince to join up with their side, needed her to be the knowledgeable one. They were trusting her about the end of the bloody world, and that was quite a bit to ask people to take on faith. The last thing their group could stand right now would be doubts about her ability to manage her own nanoverse. So you’ll just have to bloody deal with it. You’re omnipotent, aren’t you? Get out there and sodding fix it.

  “Drop into real space,” Crystal said, watching as those cancerous stars stalled in their orbits. She took a deep breath and teleported herself to the nearest one.

  This star should have been a red dwarf, with a temperature of a few thousand kelvins. Up close like this, it should have been blindingly bright. Instead, it shone with a sullen, purple luminescence that bathed the orbiting planets in an unnatural ultraviolet glow. Crystal held out her hand. Best to start small. Let’s get this star right.

  She focused her will.

  The moment she did, a sickeningly strong wave of nausea hit her. She doubled over in empty space, heaving into the void. If she’d had anything in her stomach, she was certain she would have lost it. Instead, she had to fight down a burning sensation and the taste of bile in the back of her throat. No… she thought, shaking from more than just illness. She was supposed to be omnipotent here, she was the Goddess of this universe. Nothing was beyond her!