***
The Cause refused to pay a royalty for The Sphere, a source of endless consternation for Volp. The authority received hundreds of letters a day, now running three to one in favor of the story, and he found the Party’s wholesale theft unconscionable. Eventually he settled on product placement as a way to generate revenue from the success of the series. He instructed Mutt, who in turn instructed Ivy, to work in various references to specific products with predictable comic effect. When Huston high-kicked an enemy agent in the throat instantly killing him, the story carefully labeled his boot as a “genuine Tri-bar leather workboot,” as if that detail mattered to the dead spy. When Posy drank prune juice under the misconception it was a contraceptive, it was identified as “Hollow Farms One Hundred Percent Bug-Free Prune Juice,” as if that might increase sales. The story line was developing beautifully though and readers kept sending letters offering advice on how to raise a love child in a sapper nest, or how to cure Huston’s growing addiction to the nabana peel, or whether Posy’s interest in the undertaker was justified given Huston’s dalliance with the telegraph operator, and so on. Readers agreed that the scene in which Huston’s dead body mysteriously rolled in on an embalming cart just as the undertaker embraced Posy by the vat of formaldehyde, only for Posy to collapse onto the cart declaring her undying love for her departed, with Huston then dramatically awakening and carting her back out the door from whence he came, was a bit overwrought, yet it generated more letters than any other scene.

Despite Ivy’s control of the story Mutt continued to supply many of the plot ideas, including the formaldehyde scene of which he was especially proud. So now Posy had been banished to the vat room by a father angry at her unplanned pregnancy while Huston’s sapper brigade was burying seven tons of dynamite beneath that very same room and he knew he would soon receive orders to blow up the compound but if he did so he would lose the love of his life and their unborn child and if he refused he would lose his own life. He was leaning toward explosion under the evil spell of the telegraph operator while Posy was busily convincing her father that this was a virgin pregnancy and God was speaking through her body all the while still meeting Huston for passionate liaisons through the secret tunnel behind a huge pile of alum laced with toxins.

“This is not a good idea.”

The puppy leaped about a corner of the hut trapped by Skavian gravity. Hope stepped forward to her daddy.

“I wanna puppy.”

Ivy had been coaching her. She was irresistible when she spoke in complete sentences.

“We don’t need a dog,” Mutt pleaded.

“But the mice get lonely,” Ivy pleaded back.

Hope held the puppy in her arms and uttered another complete sentence.
“It’s my birfday.”
Mutt had been completely outfoxed on this one.

“What shall we name it?” he relented.

“It’s a he,” said Ivy.

“Kippers,” said the little girl. Her mother had been showing her a picture book about a dog living in a cannery in Dark Harbor that ate only kippers and accompanied a lifeboat crew on rescues.

It was her second birthday.

Ivy knew she faced berating for not consulting her husband on the new addition so she took him aside, cradling the licking puppy in her arms, and told him they were going to kill the poor creature if nobody took him. Kippers apparently kept wandering over the edge from Skava until the gendarmerie gave up on returning him. Mutt wanted to argue on principle but decided he could not be a spoilsport on his daughter’s birthday. The celebration had taken place the day before – he thought a rocking ox was a sufficient gift – and the puppy, a common fetcher, pounced about party debris Ivy had tossed into a corner. Mutt set to work nailing plywood into the corner to give him a flat surface to romp on, much like the rotating wall panels in the church. Now began a crash course in puppy gravity conversion. For all his disorientation Kippers handled it quite well, recovering quickly from the frequent bouts of retching.

Mutt collapsed in exhaustion after the party having skipped the last sleeping hour engrossed in his story. When he awoke the hut was immaculately clean as Ivy sat in a tubestalk bowl chair admiring their sleeping daughter. He felt guilty because he had promised to share clean-up duty but Ivy told him not to worry, there was plenty he could do outside. He walked around the perimeter of the mound gathering up dislodged thatch, detached the loft ladder and set it up in various locations around the roof line, and began the treacherous job of reridging the roof. He found the physical labor clarifying, a welcome respite from his fixation on Huston and Posy. But he also worked out in meticulous detail a vat room scene that he decided would dominate the second installment.

He ran his new idea by Ivy who told him absolutely no. How could he top such a scene in the third chapter? Mutt had to agree he had left too little to the imagination, perhaps taking Volp’s advice too far. Ivy’s other point was that readers should be interested in these characters before throwing them together in a vat room. She was all for a lusty scene eventually but felt tension needed to be developed first. Mutt thought maybe Huston could rescue Posy from a diabolical creature with noodly appendages but Ivy had other ideas. The girl, she said, should be deeply mysterious. This seemed like a good idea to Mutt. But should not the boy also have secrets? No, said Ivy, the voyeur instinct runs mainly to women, even among women readers. The imagination is more stoked by a woman’s hidden past. For a man the thoughts that come to mind are too conventional, too non-transgressive. For a sweet innocent girl like Posy the mind subconsciously supplies dark horrors that keep a reader titillated. Mutt realized Ivy was seizing control of the story but liked where she was taking it.

Ivy stood at the chopping block dicing celery in a vise, Hope perched on a hip secure in the crook of her mother’s arm. It was the child’s first birthday and she watched the knife intently, little arms flared outward from a sleeveless vest, tiny thumb twirling against tiny forefinger. She just now had enough hair for Ivy to gather in a stalk albeit without much spillage above the tie. Her hair remained sandy like Mutt’s but Ivy was convinced it would darken to charcoal in due time. They celebrated the little girl’s birthday by giving her a pudding muffin to see how big a mess she could make.

The real party would be in three days when they would host a gathering for all the children of the Notches including the two born after Hope. It had been a bumper year. The chopping block was a familiar chunk of wood that Mutt had been forced to recondition into a table. He had lost the debate over the inherent ickiness of eating food from the same block on which Ivy had given birth. In a last ditch effort at compromise he proposed flipping it over and using the other side but Ivy would have none of it. She took a certain earthy pleasure in connecting the processes of food preparation and childbirth. They both required effort; they both yielded delectable results. This was her domain and he would have to obey. Mutt could always figure out how long they had lived in the Notches by taking Hope’s age and adding nine months. So here it was a year and nine months later, the length of a normal courtship, and they were married with a one-year-old and Mutt plotting to sneak in another. He had the feeling he had known Ivy much longer, as if they had experienced a trial period before marriage and passed the compatibility test. She was an easy wife to live with. What she wanted, she got. He learned that lesson early and often. But she did not ask for much and took great pride in her role in the family.

If he had one complaint it was the reduction in lovemaking, as if there were a fixed amount of baby care and coupling in a relationship, and the increase in one led to a decrease in the other. Ivy was adamant she was not going to whelp on an assembly line and Mutt was content to accept her wisdom to a point. In his mind two years was a good spacing for children and he looked forward to giving Hope a sibling in the near future. Indeed that had been a clenching argument for keeping the birthing board. “What will we use next time?” Ivy settled on plotting her fertility according to her period, hardly a precise method, and strictly denied Mutt access during that window. She did not trust him to show restraint if she displayed weakness. She was living out the dream that filled her head in her last days in Harmour. She never had a particularly romanticized notion of sex or marriage. She enjoyed the bickering and bargaining as much as the sharing, the warts and calluses along with the smiles. She wanted to be his Hutwoman wife, and wives were creatures husbands fought with as well as, hopefully, loved. She viewed all love, even true love, as a process of mutual manipulation, the true part being genuine affection and consideration of the other’s feelings and an occasional willingness to confess error. What she liked most was feeling that she belonged to a family, that her person was important to other people, that they would face challenges big and small together, that her travails were shared.

After a few weeks they achieved nearly adjacent strips in the rounder and could, by resting on a slight upslope, sleep together again, much to Ivy’s relief. It was now time to find a normal house. They were able to navigate the Notches without need of weight suits, walking about on a ten degree slope which could be tiring but manageable. The slop-lady, the father’s wife, was a central repository of useful knowledge and directed the couple to a listing of available housing on the bulletin board. Cottage, cottage, apartment, flat, barn loft, converted shed, deluxe tent, sty keeper, and so on they read. But when their eyes came across the words “hut for rent” they knew they had found their home. Mutt had to cash in his entire canteen credit and Ivy had to increase the wholesale price of her cravats but they managed in short order to scrape together a deposit.

They found the ancient hut perched several feet atop a mound having survived the last deepening of the Notches eighty years ago. While they were hoping to fall in love with its rustic charm it was a tad dilapidated, its thatch having significantly thinned and its mud-moss walls discolored from a rusty cistern leaking on the roof and the relentless assaults of edge storms. But the price was right and they had found their home, the Hutman dwelling of their dreams. It was here, they decided, they would have their child. Ivy threw herself full force into the role of homemaker. This was her Hutman, she was his Hutwoman, and this was their hut. The one-room interior with loft was sparsely furnished. She set about the garbage heaps and secondhand lots of the Notches looking for decorations and furnishings on the cheap. The Notches had little manufacturing and most household items were oriented to Arland or Skava, requiring brackets and nails and cords and creative positioning for use on the angled plane. She hit upon a lake theme for the interior, having in mind the huts on the floating islands of Lake Looda outside Leri Deri. Mutt was not consulted on this decision but was expected to help implement it. She found driftwood with the gravity of both great nations and had Mutt construct various shelves and ensconcements for it. She strung powder blue prayer flags across the ceiling interspersed with white netting to simulate sky and clouds and potted dwarf lotus trees in the corners to mimic the forests on the shores of the great lake. She found a captain’s wheel which Mutt mounted along the railing of the loft next to the ladder and placed a couple of bottled boats on counters positioned to hide cracked glass.

Mutt was the first to awake. Ivy lay on her stomach, rising at a right angle from the edge of the haysacks. Her limbs spilled out from a sheet wrapped around her torso, still naked underneath. He watched her breathing, mesmerized. He could not believe what had happened just hours before. How stupid could he be? He did not know this woman. She had terrible secrets she would not share. He could not fathom throwing away the life he had known and confining himself to this small patch of ground with a stranger. Yet he had tried to get her pregnant. It occurred to him now that she seduced him. He had been so concerned about not using her that he never considered she might be using him. She wanted to have a baby because that was the only way to force him to stay. He felt like his dick was a leash and she was leading him around by it. Ivy awoke. She turned toward him and ran her leg between his. She was still thinking of the gift he had given her. She had received all of him and had no desire to go back. She sensed he was brooding and propped her head on an arm.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said.

She drew her leg back and sat up.

“What are you thinking?”

He smiled uneasily. “I’m just thinking about what we did.”

“I am too. They are good thoughts.”

“Ivy, what are we doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t make any sense. We shouldn’t be together like that. I was trying to get you pregnant.”

Ivy was alarmed.

“I was trying too, Mutt. I want,” she paused, “I wanted ...” She breathed unevenly. She was about to cry.

“How can we have a baby? We’re helpless here. We can’t even take care of ourselves. We’re not, I mean, we didn’t really plan to be married.”

“You think I’m trying to trap you.”

He had kept open the possibility of returning to Shivaree because he took comfort in having options. But he could not drag out his indecision forever. He reached across the table and took her plate. He held it vertically in front of him so that the food, which had the gravity of Skava, stayed on the plate. With his free hand he scooped polenta in a spoon and brought it to his mouth, holding the spoon vertically so it would not spill. He was not sure how to get it into his mouth. He wedged it in from the side, closed his lips, turned the spoon horizontal, and withdrew it, his lips smacking on the wood as it exited.

“This is not going to be easy.”

She reached across and took his plate. As she ate she began to tear up. He was converting his gravity for her. He was willing to stay in the Notches.

“You do not have to do this,” she said softly.

“I am past the point of no return. I will stay with you as long as you wish.” He felt this was the honorable thing to say.

She had never before experienced the sensation of such a promise. It was the natural continuation of the kindness he had shown since rescuing her at the Edge yet it was completely alien to her prior life. Here was a person willing to help because he cared about her. She was deeply emotional and wanted to do something for him. The radical thought she had earlier was no longer seeming so radical. Mutt halfway suspected she might be his lover if he agreed to stay. But he had no idea what she was really thinking.

The situation in the angle was becoming unbearable. Mutt refused to convert to the orientation of the Notches and Ivy refused because he refused. He pleaded with her to find help. Surely she knew someone in Skava who could take her in. Ivy told him that he was it, that she had no one else on the planet to protect her, and that if he abandoned her she would go back to Skava and be killed. Mutt had not signed on to be her actual husband. He had not even signed on to be her pretend husband. That was all Ivy’s improvisation and he foolishly went along. Mutt’s refusal to convert hung in the air as a threat of abandonment, of returning to Shivaree, but although this seemed to him the reasonable course of action, he could not bring himself to do it. He could not sort out his feelings. He knew if he left, he would think of her the rest of his life. Her presence, her body, was so immediate in this small room. He wanted to be her lover. He felt that if he were her husband, even a pretend husband, he should not be so cruelly teased. If they were to share this room he wanted to share her body. But when he thought of converting his desire to action he felt dirty, like he would be taking advantage of her, like he would be letting his mother down. Perhaps Ivy would relent in desperation but he could not so callously put his interests above hers. If caring about a woman meant anything it was putting her interests first. She was here only because she had no options. Life had steered her into a dead end and he was her only salvation. The measure of his self worth was how he handled this situation. He could not coerce her. It was his duty to protect her.

His resolve was not helped by their frequent touching. Ivy needed to be held in her sleep. She wanted the comfort of a man, to feel secure in his arms. She had lost everything and was clinging to this last hope fate had thrown her way. The world had turned incredibly hostile toward her, malicious and evil. She wanted refuge; she wanted escape. She found him attractive, even beautiful, but what she liked most was the gentleness of his face. She could not imagine him ever hurting her. Although he tried to conceal it, she could feel his arousal when he held her. She loved to know she had this effect on him. They had not kissed since the pretend wedding, with Ivy turning her head when they got close and burrowing backwards into him. She was uncomfortable being physical in this environment, surrounded by haysacks and a lack of alternatives, not knowing where it might lead. She was content to be held, to at least mimic the feeling of love, of having a husband to protect her. Mutt could not contain himself when she lay with him and took to kissing her lightly on the back of her neck, or on the ear, occasionally resting his hand on her hip. She was stimulated by the touching and eventually turned to face him, to kiss him tenderly, then more aggressively. She struggled to keep his hands at bay and ultimately settled into a clothed sexual posture, with her leg pulled over his midsection, as a compromise between his desire and her reserve. They would lay like that for hours and kiss, their bodies increasingly bonding in the fold of the angle. Eventually she relented and let him feel her breasts over her cloth. She loved the massaging and tweaking and soon he worked his way under for a direct feel. He was surprised at how focused he was on each part of her body as he explored it. He had just assumed that sex was the goal and foreplay the means of transit. But the novelty of the touching, the tenderness of her reactions, the feeling of a million little conquests, her reluctance giving way to pleasure, their growing intimacy all melted him into her, arousing him more thoroughly than any shortcut to paradise could.

***
The walk to the angle house was excruciating with the newlyweds negotiating a series of traction studs and angular garden stones like goats on a steep incline. The father could not support them both simultaneously and elected to support neither. Through an arch in the colonnade of the cloister they emerged into a small garden across which rested a bizarre block house set in the ground tilted on a corner, a partially submerged four-sided diamond clad in cream stucco with teal shutters. So this was what the father called an angle house. A small half-pipe led from the cloister through the garden to a decline down to the door of the house. The father opened the door and led them inside to a narrow landing on which he stood upright with the gravity of the Notches.

The floor turned upward from the landing on either side at a forty-five degree angle to form a “v” shape, creating two floors at perfect right angles to one another, one for the gravity of Arland, the other for Skava. Where the landing stopped the two floors met in a corner at a right angle extending to the far wall. Here in this house people from the great nations could coexist, the floor for one being a wall for the other. Each floor looked like a sparsely furnished bedroom with a sideland bedroom oriented at a right angle taking up a wall. Haysacks lay against the far walls of the respective floors such that a person sleeping on one would perceive the other as sleeping at the top of a bedroom wall. By a window at the far end of the corner from the landing, in the fold of the two rooms, stood an L-shaped table at which an Arlander could break bread with a Skavian, each using one segment of the “L” as a flat surface with their dinner companion using the other, their heads converging in the space above the table at an implied corner of a crude square formed by the two floors underneath and their seated bodies.

The Notches was not a place where anyone chose to live. Circumstances chose it for them. Once there a person was confined to the small strip of land practically barred from visiting the great nations due to the enormous time and resources necessary to convert gravity. Many of the residents could not return to their homelands having been banished for various reasons ranging from political agitation to unsanctioned love. Children were a rare commodity in the parks and only playground, most people having fled from mistakes of youth, or so passionate for a calling they had no time for family, or disinterested in fertile wants, or reclusive by nature. But there was a small contingent of little ones spanning the ages of development, and the birth of a new child on this plane was a widely celebrated event, a reification of life in a refuge of lost souls. Stairs within the half-pipe descended to the plane where the trail leveled out into a worm path winding through the Notches spanned by overhanging footpaths and byways. The six spires of the church, each representing a facet of the planet, could be seen towering over the lip of the half-pipe. Mutt continued to hold Ivy’s hand wondering where they were going. They each followed the other and together were aimless.

In the distance a man in a brightly flowing gown descended a side staircase into the half-pipe and gazed upon their advent. He was a Father of the Church garbed in an individuating robe. By tradition the lower fathers weaved colorful patterned gowns symbolizing their personal relationship with God and the cosmos, often with the help of their flock at weave gatherings, such events being a source of endless merriment. The more striking and colorful the robe the better, for they were designed to transport the viewer into an alternative universe in which color and pattern reigned, much as the faithful conceived of heaven. The father had seen this odd couple descending the half-pipe from the Edge, their bodies oriented at right angles, heads nearly touching in the confines of the scoop, hands spanning the gap between their waists. Ivy realized what he must be thinking. Surely they could not be the first couple to wander out of the wilderness into the Notches. She pulled Mutt forward energetically by the hand and approached the holy man, her face radiant.

Mutt sat her down on the side of a hillock. He was famished from the exertion and they had little food. She realized how difficult this was and offered him her last angoo. He declined for he would not take food from a sick woman. Finally she proposed that he carry her to the Edge and she would forage for fruit in Skava. Arland had only berries to offer in this area and neither could tell which ones were poisonous. He was leery of approaching the Edge where patrols could easily spot them and the military might be deployed. But he was starved. He dropped her into Skava and she ran off into the forest, grimacing from the exertion, returning a half hour later with a satchel full of semi-rotten drop angoos. They lay on the grass on their respective sides with sated but dyspeptic stomachs, Ivy thankful for the level ground. The tree trunks and hillocks, and Mutt’s lumbering body, were not comfortable perches in Arland’s vertical world. She was startled by a noise in the woods and quickly rolled over the Edge into his arms. After another mile of trekking he thought his right arm would fall off. He sat her down on the side of a large sycamore where she reclined on the slanted trunk using her satchel as a headrest. Her dress was in tatters and she occupied a hand full time holding it together.

“How far do you think we’ve gone?” she asked. “Halfway?”

Mutt stared at her incredulously. “If three is half of seventy-five, yes.”

She looked pitiful. For the first time in days pain was not her dominant sensation. She realized the absurdity of her situation, stuck on the side of a tree in Arland trusting for her survival in a total stranger. She had believed intuitively that he of all people would be the one to save her from the hell of Harmour. But she was helpless and would not be surprised to find herself abandoned to die on this trunk. Her life had been defined by painful loss and there was no reason for her losing streak to stop. Mutt could not fathom her expression but she could fathom his even less. He was living out a chivalric fantasy. This completely helpless woman had literally fallen into his arms from another world and it was now his sacred duty to rescue her. He imagined the reward she might be willing to offer for his sacrifice and completely swore it off in his mind, for to seek favors for rescue was to sully the purity of intent. He unconditionally had to save this girl with no regard to his own interest or he had failed as a man. His mother had taught him no less. But looking at her, as the glow of her face was returning with her health, he wanted to kiss her. He lowered his gaze and resolved to suppress any further desire.

The mood in Shivaree was tense. The Mothers Hall had taken its vote. War was declared. No one knew for certain what this meant. But in the short term it meant the patrols were being called. Ruggin might be deployed to Bivenal. Mutt would be called to military reserve duty in the interior. The Armada was assembling for an attack on Bivens Mill. Opinions in Shivaree were split on the wisdom of the war declaration. Muglair’s assertion of a natural right to an equal allocation of water per person was compelling to many of the Arlander Hutmen, but few doubted that he was pushing for war unnecessarily by his refusal to compromise. The Mothers Hall passed a resolution along with the war declaration proclaiming that the ratio of water usage would be adjusted over a ten-year period provided each country met certain alternative energy targets. While the resolution would not achieve equal sharing at the conclusion of the ten years it would increase Skava’s per capita allotment while reducing Arland’s, with an overall reduction to allow the Silent Sea to replenish. Muglair rejected the resolution outright as a cynical ploy to maintain Arland’s hegemony and announced that he would proceed to bring the new hydroelectric plant online. The Mothers had little choice but to declare war. Permitting Muglair to dictate international relations would set a dangerous precedent and embolden him to even greater belligerence.

Muglair had been girding for war for years and his moment had arrived. He had stationed over twenty thousand oriented troops in Bivenal, mostly at Bivens Mill. He had commenced construction of his own armada although he had nothing to match the mighty ballast ships of Arland. But what he lacked in raw military might he made up for with nationalist fervor. Skava was ready to fight and was not afraid of defeat. As Muglair often proclaimed, defeat was preferable to ignoble compromise. Arland’s presence in Bivenal was weak, limited only to a few outposts housing not more than a thousand soldiers. Bivenal was on the opposite side of the planet from Arland and held little strategic interest. Its utility to Skava was limited to hydroelectric plants and way stations for travelers to the canneries of Dark Harbor, located just over the edge in Parva. Like Parva and Klokomad, the other dark sides, Bivenal was beyond the reach of the sun and mostly barren. Not since the age of exploration, when Bivens first charted the territory and discovered a small species of luminous frog in the edge moss, had Bivenal received so much attention.

***
Muglair Putie had been a fixture in the Hutman cause for two decades. He was a lieutenant to the leadership during the great repression when the Hutman leaders were arrested for treason and subjected to summary trials in the People’s Hall. The Inta regime concluded that the cause had become a threat to its maintenance of power and that piecemeal accommodation would no longer work. The conviction of the leaders was a foregone conclusion once they were arrested. Within a day of trial they were trundled to the vast sandstone plaza before the Hall where people, primarily Inta, regularly gathered for official pronouncements. The condemned were led naked in shackles up scaffolding to the tip of a needle, a sharpened spike over forty feet high. Executioners raised their bodies above the tips and slowly forced them down, piercing their abdomens and impaling them. The scaffolding was pivoted away from the needles allowing the bodies to slide to a small handle in the spike fifteen feet above the ground. There they came to rest like insect specimens, limbs splayed outwards and agonized faces turned heavenward. Death came slowly and mercilessly in the sun’s blinding rays beneath the bloodstained needles their bodies had just descended. Spiking was the ancient form of execution designed to instill fear in a restive populace, and it had been resurrected by the Inta for that purpose.

It had long been rumored that Muglair betrayed the Hutman leadership to the Inta. Arland published what it claimed were informant reports obtained from the Skavian Inta detailing his treachery. He had worked secretly with the Inta regime, so it was claimed, and revealed the hiding places of the leadership to save his own life when it became clear the Inta would take a hard line. Muglair denounced these rumors as foul Arlander propaganda and took harsh measures against anyone in his domain who spread them.

After the repression Muglair assumed leadership of the Hutman cause which now pursued a policy of working within the rules of the Inta regime, abandoning the platform of revolutionary change. As Arland pressured the Skavian Inta to expand the rights of Hutmen, Muglair organized village green preservation societies, local political collectives based in Hutman villages which sent non-voting delegates to the People’s Hall in Leri Deri. As the number of societies increased the representation of Hutmen grew. It was only a matter of time before the delegates gained voting power, first in an advisory capacity and then, after the bloodless revolution, as a binding Parliament.

It was a wonder of nature that trees sloped toward the sun at just the proper angle to make a comfortable back rest. Mutt leaned against a tree and scattered seed corn to a yard full of chickens. It wasn’t feeding time. He simply enjoyed watching them scurry about. As it rose the tree curved toward the sun in a delicate balance to obtain maximum light without toppling over, its leaves tilted at an angle to receive the sun’s rays on a perpendicular.

A popular fairy tale told of a day when the sun danced in the sky on the orders of a wizard. But in fact the sun had never moved. For all eternity, as far as anyone knew, it had occupied the exact same spot in the sky, a miraculous dot of brilliance from which all life drew sustenance. Mutt placed seed on the hem of his fatigues and waited as a bobbing hen nervously approached and pecked. He then held some out in his hand but no chicken was brave enough to bob that close. Chilly marine breezes from the west were giving way to a warm Skavian breeze blowing over the edge. He loved these periods of alternating gusts which were both stimulating with the temperature fluctuations and soothing like caresses from many hands. The sweet warm wind from Skava was sometimes called dragon’s breath, but he imagined that actual dragon’s breath, if such a thing existed, would be foul.

Across the yard his childhood home spread gracefully in two wings separated by an open breezeway crowned by a gabled loft. Through the corridor he could see wisps of smoke rising from an open fire pit in the back yard. His father was turning cuts of goat meat wrapped in foil with peppers and onions. Mutt had never mastered the art of holding long-handled tongs and watched with envy as his father, tongs in each hand, effortlessly turned packages in the coals without drops. This was to be a special dinner. All the children were home for the first time in over a year, and his mother had taken leave from the session in Rixjrig for the occasion. In the kitchen she was chopping scallions and adding them to a large simmering pot. Mutt’s contribution to the feast was rhubarb pie. He had spent several hours earlier in the day with the daughter of a family friend baking the confection. He now considered it his duty to stay out of the kitchen while the remaining courses were prepared. His older brother refused to take part in the preparations at all. He sat in his childhood bedroom in the loft – preserved like a time capsule since his departure for the service three years earlier – intently sharpening a stick.

Intro
Were you disappointed by the ending to the series Lost? What follows is a story with as intricate a mythology as Lost’s but with an important difference: in the end it is all explained mechanistically, without resort to mysticism or religion. In the end the following summary of the core mystery, taken from the opening chapter, will be perfectly sensible:

The Oopsah told a story, a majestic, exalted, beatific story of the coming of the end times and the rise of the Controller. He learned how the world would end, who would destroy it, and how he, Zranga, could prevent it. He learned that he had been appointed by destiny – by the Controller himself – to carry out this mission. But above all he learned of the existence of a perfect being, the demigod Celeste, trapped beyond time in a cycle of eternal death. Only Zranga could rescue her, and to do this he had to place a giant door on the bottom of the Silent Sea, and kill the Great Man.

Read on to found out how far Ivy Morven will go to stop Tobor Zranga from realizing his destiny, and how this alternative universe is bizarrely structured so that the most rational acts are the most extreme.

Chapter 1 - Who is Celeste?

Tobor Zranga was seated on the ceiling, his gravity reversed. Through a window in the wheelhouse he could see whitecaps as the ocean roiled about the vessel. For Zranga the sea and sky were inverted, the sea forming a watery heaven, the sky falling away into an abyss. He knew that if he climbed through the window into open air he would tumble away from the planet to certain death, his body falling forever through outer space. Up and down were now relative terms, with down for him being the direction called up by the locals. It was a hostile and vertiginous world, as if he were condemned to live in a crow’s nest, teetering above an infinite void. One slip without a fastener meant a trip to oblivion, and Zranga did not like fasteners; safety devices that impeded his freedom felt like shackles and he refused to wear them.

His countrymen had a term for this condition – liquid sky – and anyone from his homeland who visited the Silent Sea without proper acclimation suffered from it. The only way to acclimate was to consume the local water and food until one’s body was composed primarily of local matter, causing gravity to pull toward earth. This was a slow and nauseating process with a disorienting period of weightlessness if one went straight from up to down skipping the horizontal directions. Dark Harbor was full of conversion spas but Zranga did not have time to reorient. Even with advance planning he would not have reoriented for he did not want to take the time away from Skava. The opportunity for intrigue in his absence was too great.