Chasing the Moon (33 page)

It went like this for several minutes. Sometimes the moon god would draw closer to his goal, and the cult would change into fearsome, four-armed beasts and overwhelm Diana. Then Fenris would be pushed back, and she’d start winning.

Calvin stayed with Sharon. Each of her transformations seemed more difficult, more painful than the last. And her body was losing cohesion. Her hair fell out. The outer layer of her skin liquefied, dripping into a grayish puddle at her feet.

A beast latched on to Diana’s arm with its jaws, and she yelped. She’d felt it. Her monsters, the source of her invulnerability, were losing to Fenris. She punched the cultist and threw him across the garden, even as more advanced on her.

“What the hell am I doing?”

While her powers were almost unlimited right now, she was still too mortal to use them effectively, too bound by cause and effect. But she was tapped into Unending Smorgaz, and there was no reason to fight this horde alone.

Two dozen Diana clones materialized. They were naked and purple and their hasty assembly meant that they weren’t great conversationalists, but they were perfect for what she needed.
Her personal army engaged the cultists, keeping them busy as she approached Calvin.

Diana turned to Calvin. “You have to stop this.”

He hesitated. “I can’t.”

“I know it has to stink what you’ve been through, how you’ve spent the I-don’t-know-how-many eons trapped here, just waiting for this. But you don’t have to do it this way.”

“You don’t understand. I can’t stop it. It’s not my decision.”

“Whose is it then?”

Calvin pointed to Fenris. “His.”

The tentacle horror had decided to ignore Diana’s monsters. They did their best to get in his way, but he inched closer to the moon.

“He won’t be reasoned with,” said Calvin. “He doesn’t even have reason. That’s sort of my job.”

The monsters in the sky raged. The night cracked in two, and behind the rift strange things stirred, clawing their way into the universe.

“There are lives at stake,” said Diana. “Billions of them.”

“What about me?” he asked. “I didn’t ask for this either. It just happened. Don’t I have the right to move on, to finally be free? If you stepped in an anthill and someone told you not to move your foot for fear of stepping on any more ants, would you do it?”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“Isn’t it? To you, Fenris is a monster, an incomprehenle behemoth to be feared. To him, you’re just a tiny dot on the horizon that isn’t even worth noticing. Why is your convenience worth a million ants, but mine isn’t worth a billion humans?”

“But you’re destroying my universe.”

Calvin smiled, shaking his head. “You don’t get it, do you? I’m not the destroyer. You are.”

As they wrestled with her clones, the Chosen’s brittle limbs snapped off. With every wheezing breath they expelled gray clouds of their own vaporizing organs. The fight went out of them. She willed her clones to disappear, no longer having any need of them. The cultists lay on the ground, dying, along with the lush grass beneath them. Even the marble steps seemed to be crumbling into dust.

“I was never meant to be here. Your reality can’t tolerate my presence any longer. If you don’t let me leave now then your universe won’t just change. It’ll disintegrate with the thrashing fury of Fenris himself. One way or another, I’ll be leaving this world behind. The only question is what’s left in my wake.”

Diana strained her senses. She glimpsed the threads of creation frayed to the breaking point. Lesser horrors like Vom and his ilk were irritants in the ordered chaos that was everything around her. They might cause weirdness here and there, might throw things out of whack, but they were tolerable nuisances.

Fenris was different. His very existence was unbearable in the long run. The universe had kept him from destroying everything up to now, but the end of the road was here.

Her monsters managed to hold Fenris at a standstill. With every bit of their titanic power they held the moon god at bay. Fenris’s tentacles whipped desperately at the silver orb just out of his reach. If he had been just a bit smarter, he might have used those tentacles against his opponents, who were barely
able to hold him in place. But his obsessive pursuit of the moon drove all such strategies from his absent mind.

Diana could see only pain and confusion reflected in Fenris’s hundred eyes. He was just an animal trying to escape from a trap, trying to find his way home.

She didn’t know what to do. Her fragile world seemed doomed. Either it would be transformed into something unrecognizable or it would be destroyed entirely.

She sat on the crumbling marble steps. It wasn’t an easy decision.

Calvin and Sharon sat beside her. Sharon’s body was holding together reasonably well, though her flesh was pale, her body thin and fragile.

If Diana had been able to change along with the universe and have her own genetic code rewritten to match the new world, she could have found some comfort in that. But whatever new reality awaited, she would still be herself, an alien in a twisted, unfamiliar realm.

“Damn it,” she said. “This sucks.”

“Tell me about it,” agreed Calvin. “I don’t even know what’s waiting out there for me. Can’t really remember. But it’s all a question of scale, isn’t it? Fenris ght be an indestructible force in this plane of existence, but for all I know I’m just a small fish in an infinitely larger pond. I might float free of this reality, only to be devoured by something even greater.”

“It’s just an endless string of mysteries and questions, isn’t it?”

“Maybe that’s just the way life works,” he said.

“Well, crap. That’s just unsatisfying.”

The manor spontaneously collapsed into a heap. No one commented on it.

“I can’t really tell you what to do here, Diana,” he said. “It’s your decision.”

She closed her eyes and willed her monsters to give up their fight. They released Fenris. Her roomies materialized beside her. She found restoring their sentience easier than expected. They shrank to their mortal proportions, stripped of the bulk of their awesome might.

They didn’t look well. Like they’d just woken up with a terrific hangover.

“Did we do it?” asked Vom. “Did we save the universe?”

Diana shrugged. She didn’t have a good answer.

Fenris squealed delightedly as it wrapped its many tentacles around the moon.

Calvin’s flesh fell away. His ebony ethereal form rose into the air. The universe stopped crumbling. The Chosen rose, trapped in their beastly shapes but whole and restored. They didn’t attack, instead submissively slinking toward their master.

Sharon was at the head of the pack. She whimpered, and in all the universe it was the only thing Calvin noticed. He reached out to touch her muzzle, but his immaterial hand passed through her.

He spoke, but the voice resonated from both this shape and the great cosmic monster embracing the moon.

We both knew this day was coming. I carry on, but know this: long after your world has faded to dust, I will remember you.

“See that you do,” Diana said.

The moon god turned his attention to her. His gaze was a blast of heat that nearly knocked her to the ground. She dug in her heels and forced him to confront the insignificant thing before him, to remind him that all these tiny things were still down here.

“Maybe it’s our nature to not worry about stepping on ants. But we’d probably think differently if we spent a few thousand years living among them. Do us a favor,” Diana said. “On your way to… whatever… try not to step on too many of us.”

His face lacked features, but she sensed a smile. The pressure let up, and she could stand without feeling as if a thousand worlds rested on her shoulders.

Fenris swallowed the moon. Calvin zipped away in the blink of an eye to merge with the other two parts of his divided selfreat entity glanced down at them, and though he also had no mouth and his body was nothing but a mass of tentacles and eyes, Diana thought she saw something in those eyes.

Fenris winked (or at least blinked half of his eyes in what she took as a wink). Delicately, he tore a rift in the sky with two tentacles. He exerted a fraction of his limitless might to hold the broken strands of the universe together, keeping it from falling into chaos. With a joyous howl Fenris, now possessed of the power to free himself, rejoined with the intellect to do so in subtle ways his monstrous third would never have fathomed, slipped from the universe. On his way out he tied a few threads back together, restoring all the mounds of moss to their former human shapes and erasing all the damage left in his wake. The universe itself took care of the rest, repelling the alien ecosystem and rebuilding everything as it had been.

Except for the moon. There was only a dim star-filled sky left in its place.

The cult howled with ecstasy at the triumphant departure of their god. Except for Sharon, who released a long, miserable wail. For several seconds after the other cultists had returned to their human shapes, Sharon stayed a beast, reluctant to give up the last bits of Fenris left to her. But even she couldn’t hold on to it for long.

Diana took Sharon’s hand. “It’s for the best.”

Sharon nodded. “I know.”

A tendril dipped back into reality just long enough to slide along the celestial rift in Fenris’s wake and seal it shut like an undone zipper. And he was gone, off to whatever and whenever, to realms of possibility that Diana didn’t bother trying to imagine.

From one bewildered hapless entity to another, she wished him the best of luck.

She sat on her lawn chair, enjoying a tall glass of iced tea in the peace and quiet. Not all possible worlds were those of giant mutant insects or mole people. The universe was not just home to cosmic monster-gods and inconceivable horrors. And this reflection of an Earth that might have been (or perhaps once was or would be) was a good place to get away from it all.

This particular world was quiet. Humanity was gone. Here and gone like the hazy details of a forgotten dream. Or perhaps it had never been. The only possible trace of its existence in the endless fields of green was the silhouette of a tower on the horizon. It could’ve been a skyscraper. Or a peculiar rock formation. Diana had never bothered to check.

The floating door opened, and Sharon stuck her head through.

“There you are. West said you’d be here.”

Diana glanced at her watch. “Oh, damn. Sorry. Lost track of time.” She jumped to her feet and exited the universe.

“Are you going to leave your iced tea there?” asked haron.

“It’s not mine.”

“Whose is it?”

“Don’t know. But it’s always there. Sometimes it’s lemonade.”

Sharon didn’t ask for any further explanation. She understood as well as Diana that there were mysteries meant never to be solved.

The door closed on the universe with a peculiar pop. The door was one of five in a cramped hexagonal room. The door they had just exited had the word safe written across it in black marker. Two of the others were marked iffy. One was unmarked. And the last one was stained with red handprints and deep scratches.

They climbed the tight spiral staircase up and out of the room and entered the apartment hallway. The staircase was visible only from certain angles, but that was true of many things in the building. Thanks to Zap’s transference, Diana was getting better at perceiving reality beyond a standard fourdimensional model. It’d bothered her at first, making her think she was losing her humanity, but humanity was found in more than limited awareness. And being able to see into the sixth dimension meant never having to lose her car keys again.

West, holding a broom in each hand, shuffled forward.

“Not Apartment X again,” said Diana.

“’Fraid so.” He held a broom out to her.

“Can’t you take care of this one without me?” she asked.

He stared at her.

She smiled. “I’ve got a dinner date.”

West shrugged. “Fine, but don’t come cryin’ to me when Dread Ghor absorbs the stars, Number Five.” He shambled away, mumbling.

West wasn’t so bad. In his own way he was a friendly sort, and she didn’t mind helping around the building, pitching in here and there. Keeping the universe in order helped pass the time.