“Who doesn’t pick at random?”
Josh won’t say the name.
She watches him.
“Or because you were there with me, maybe?”
Then her eyes lift higher. “I don’t know,” she responds, her voice quiet, nothing deceitful in its tone or her expression. “If either of those things played a role in its choice, I can’t say.”
He jumps on one word. “Choice,” he repeats. “So you know that it does. Choose, I mean.”
She shrugs, pulling her strong young legs against her sagging breasts. “You haven’t told me,” she mentions. “What do you really think about this strange woman?”
Josh has read the butterfly diary at least a dozen times, and there have been little moments when he almost feels that he understands what the creature wrote. Not in words, but she wrote them as scents. As pheromones. Yet despite the damage done by translations and the pervading alienness to every portion of this text, Josh feels an eerie sense that he already knows this Other. Understands her, even. That she is his friend, or some distant sister. Or she is the lover sitting in his own bed, watching him with her own secret gaze.
He closes the book and places it back inside its cage.
In the corner of an eye, he sees a knowing grin. But her face goes blank when he looks straight at her.
Again, he says, “Thank you.”
As always, she asks, “For what?” Then she shrugs, laughing with tenderness. “Like I told you. You came that day looking so sad and desperate, and alone, and I wanted to help.”
“Did all of you come help me?”
The question is ludicrous, and he knows it. What Josh wants is to hear her answer, and the tone of her voice.
“Only me,” she says.
Not true.
But then she touches his bare knee, and smiles, and asks, “Really now. How many more than one would be enough?”
Almost as easily as you kill yourself, you murder whole worlds.
Fusion exchanges. Nanochine blooms. Conscious plagues, or simple kinetic blasts. Your methods of annihilation run the gamut from what is likely to the slightly less likely, and your reasons are pulled from the same bloody mix of excuses: Self-hatred. Self-pity. Self-righteous fury. Or some little accident happens to slip tragically out of hand.
Every moment, you kill too many worlds to count.
And within each of those brutal moments, a trillion times as many worlds continue to prosper, happy and fertile beneath a loving, well-loved sun.
After eons of uninterrupted exploration and conquest, The Divine One finally discovers an opponent with real muscle and heart. The world has Jupiter’s mass, oceans of acid sloshing against continents built of warm black iron. Its aliens are decidedly alien; their physiology, genetics, and basic morphology conform to an entirely different evolution. But they are organized, one leader at the helm and all the rest willingly enslaved. For thirty centuries, the war is a clash of equals. But The Divine One is quicker to adapt, and at least in this one reality, He finds one tiny critical advantage, and in a matter of hours, He manages to defeat and butcher the entire alien horde. Then alone, He descends. He finds His opponent, the once-great despot, hiding inside a steel temple, and with a thought, He kills the creature. Kills it and drains it of its strange white blood, and tosses the corpse over the far horizon. Then He sets out to explore the broad hallways and giant rooms of the temple, examining sculptures made from body parts and images of parades celebrating suffering and sacrifice. His enemy was remarkably similar to Him. Despite all of their profound differences, they were very much the same. Here lived a god in mortal clothes, and what if He had spared the creature? What if they had spoken? How much more would they have found in common?
In the backmost room, behind a series of massive doors, He discovers the bottomless gray ocean waiting.
“What are you doing here?” The Divine One roars.
The Authority calls to Him by name, and then says, “Hello again, my friend.”
“You aren’t the same puddle,” He complains. “I don’t believe this. What kind of trick is this?”
“Three offerings,” the Authority calls out. “And as always, in return, I will give you three items of your choice.”
The Divine One orders His journal brought to Him. Riding in a high-gravity walker, a slave girl enters the room. Then He carves the journal into three equal hunks, each portion enormous, each describing a separate million years of wandering through the Milky Way. One after the other, the offerings sink into the thick gray fluid, and then with a quiet, decidedly unimpressed voice, the Authority says, “Accepted.”
Standing beside the ocean, The Divine One shivers.
“Do you want your usual?” the Authority inquires. “Three genealogies leading up to lesser incarnations of yourself?”
“No,” He whispers.
“No,” He rumbles.
Then with a sorry shake of the head, He says, “Show me three journals. From minds like Mine, and bodies that are not…”
Thinking the truth is easy. You fit together the puzzle more often than you realize, and in the normal course of days, you dismiss the idea as ludicrous or ugly, or useless, or dull.
Understanding is less easy. You have to learn a series of words and the concepts that come attached to those words, and real understanding brings a kind of appreciation, cold and keen, not too different from the cutting edge of a highly polished razor blade.
But believing the truth… embracing the authentic with all of your self, conscious and otherwise… that is and will always be supremely difficult, if not outright impossible.
Josh sits alone, studying his lost love’s journals.
“Something obvious has occurred to me,” he reads, hearing Pauline’s voice. “And ever since, I can’t think about anything else. But I can’t talk about it. Not to anyone. Not even Josh. Not even after sitting here for an entire day. I can’t seem to put down even a single word that hints at this thing that I know…
“How can I tell Josh? Show him? Help him see…?”
Closing the journal, Josh wipes at his eyes. And thinks. And after a very long while, with a courage barely equal to the task, he starts to examine every treasure that his lost love acquired over the last five years… given to her by an entity that does nothing by chance…
He cries for a while, and then He stops.
Another voice is crying. Astonishingly, He forgot about the slave girl. She remains inside the walker, waiting to be killed. Sad and hopeless, she wipes at her wet eyes, and her bladder lets loose a thin trickle of urine, and she very nearly begs. Please kill me now, and remove me from all this misery…!
He won’t.
With a gesture, He wraps her inside a more subtle exoskeleton. Then He beckons to her, saying, “Come here. Sit next to Me.”
She has to obey. Doesn’t she?
“Sit,” He says again. And then, unexpectedly, He says, “Or stand. Whatever makes you happiest.”
She kneels beside the bottomless ocean.
“Give it three offerings,” He suggests. “Three things you have made, or written down. Three examples of
