Chasing the Moon

by A. Lee Martinez

  “Sharon, I just don’t see the point.”

  “I’m asking, Greg. That’s the point. I’ve been contributing to this venture for years now, and I’ve never asked for any favors. This is my favor. You don’t want to go into the future with a debt hanging over you, do you?”

  “Debts won’t matter in the—”

  “Goddamn it, Greg.”

  He was silent for a few moments.

  “Okay. We’ll arrange a meeting.”

  “Thank you.”

  She hung up and stared at the bronze cast of a crescent moon with a human face and a great big smile hanging beside the bathroom mirror. For the first time in a long time, she saw the smile as the grim grin of a dangerous universe.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Diana found West on a ladder, changing smoke detector batteries in the hall.

  “Hi,” she said.

  He grunted.

  “You’re not busy, are you?” she asked.

  “Just taking care of a few things, Number Five.”

  He descended, and she helpfully held the ladder.

  “I’m not distracting you? Because if this is important…”

  He grabbed the ladder, moved it a few feet down the hall, and climbed it again. There were a surprising number of detectors. So many that West had a paper bag full of batteries in his right hand to replace them all.

  “These aren’t like cosmic smoke detectors or anything?” she asked. “It’s not like if the batteries die in them the universe blows up, right?”

  “Nope. Just being safe. Can never be too safe.”

  “Oh, good.” She laughed to herself. It was silly to think everything West did had grand importance. It was ridiculous to assume that everything in the apartment building was connected by invisible strings to something vital to the universe outside.

  He climbed down and repeated the short journey down the hall to another detector. She tried to be helpful and pointed out he’d missed one.

  West stopped and wheeled upon her with unexpected energy. “We leave that one alone, Number Five. We don’t ever change the batteries in that one. No matter how often it chirps for them.”

  The detector beeped.

  He glared at it. “Shut up.”

  It chirped louder.

  “Just ignore it,” said West.

  Diana pondered the small white disk affixed over her head. What great and terrible effect would it have if she slipped in while West wasn’t looking and popped in fresh batteries?

  She wanted to know. She blamed Zap’s transferred curiosity, but it was deeper than that. The mind detested mysteries. It liked things to make sense or at least be predictable. It was human nature. It was why some people became scientists, theologians, philosophers, dedicating themselves to exploring those mysteries, and why most others took the easy way out and resolutely pretended those mysteries didn’t exist. But her species hadn’t crawled its way to civilization by not thinking about things, analyzing them, tearing them apart, putting them back together in fanciful, experimental combinations just to see what happened. Zap’s influence had only amplified her natural inquisitiveness.

  It wasn’t all her and Zap, though. The smoke detector itself whispered temptations to her. She’d gotten used to those types of whispers and pushed them aside, along with her questions.

  She made herself useful by holding West’s ladder as he crept down the hall.

  “I need your help. I don’t know who else to talk to this about, and I thought you might have a useful perspective.”

  He grunted.

  “You help people, right? You keep the universe running and all that, right?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “But I’ve seen you do it. I’ve helped you.”

  He nodded. “I keep a few things in check. Nothing terribly important, though.”

  “Not important? If not for you the world would be crawling with giant bugs from the future or we’d all be floating around in space.”

  “Those things would take care of themselves regardless. Or not. It’s not as if it matters much in the long run.”

  The conversation paused as they moved to the next detector.

  “Doesn’t matter? How can you say that? People would be dead without you. Heck, they might not have ever existed if not for you.”

  He leaned against the ladder. “And if they never had, who would notice?”

  “You can’t be that indifferent. Otherwise why would you do this job?”

  “That’s a strange question. Why does anyone do anything? Why does anyone take a bath when they know they’re just going to get dirty again? Why does anyone eat when they know they’re just going to be hungry again? Over and over again until eventually they die. And they will die. So why go to the doctor when you’re sick? It’s only postponing the inevitable. But at least it’s something to do while waiting for the inevitable to happen.”

  “But that just makes it all sound so meaningless.”

  West replied, “And who says it isn’t? Humans. You’re always so obsessed with finding meaning in things. But not really. Because when you say meaning you really mean specialness. You want a nice warm hug from a cold, indifferent universe. You want everything you do to be important and everything you think to be catalogued and recorded.”

  “It’s not like that,” she said, “but it would be nice if it meant something.”

  “Yes, I agree. It would be nice.”

  He climbed down the ladder and knocked on the door of Apartment Three. Peter-thing answered.

  “Here to replace the batteries,” said West.

  Peter-thing absorbed the information, smiled. “Safety first.” He checked on a batch of baking cookies while West did his task.

  “Why are there so many smoke detectors in this building?” asked Diana. “I don’t remember seeing so many before.”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  West sighed, and while he was normally a flat, unreadable soul, she sensed some annoyance on his part.

  “I’m sorry, Number Five. I’m trying to see your point. I am. But I’m not exactly sure what it is.”

  She sat on Peter-thing’s couch and blew a raspberry.

  “Neither am I.”

  It was no wonder people went crazy. She was adrift. She couldn’t think of a good reason why she should be concerned about any of this. It was like politics. Getting involved seemed like a good idea sometimes, but ultimately it only served to disillusion and disappoint. West was right about the search for meaning. Nobody really wanted meaning. They just didn’t want meaninglessness. Except for maybe anarchists, but even most of them tried to shoehorn some kind of sense into it.

  West’s annoyance changed to something stranger. Sympathy.

  “Okay, let’s go then. I have something to show you.”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “No, I don’t want to go on another of your bizarre, otherworldly sightseeing tours where I fight dinosaurs or destroy planets with my sneezes. Those don’t make anything clearer. They only leave me more confused than when I started. I just want to figure out what I’m supposed to do. Can we just skip the weirdness this time?”

  “I suppose. If that’s what you really want.”

  “It is.”

  “Are you certain? Because the Isthmus of Skrunb is beautiful this time of year. As long as you ignore the shrieking butterflies.”

  “Oh, I’m certain.”

  Peter-thing lumbered over with a plateful of gingersnaps and snickerdoodles. He offered one to each, which they graciously accepted, even though Diana didn’t care for either type of cookie.

  “Meaning of life is cookies.”

  She nodded politely, took a nibble of her gingersnap.

  “Cookies are good. Cookies make people happy. Cookies don’t question what they are here for because cookies know.”

  “You do know cookies aren’t alive, right?” she asked.

  “Maybe not,” said Peter-thing, “but does coo
kie know that?”

  “Okay, this is getting a little existential for me. Thanks for trying, guys, but this isn’t working.”

  She nibbled her treat but didn’t have the heart to finish it off.

  She started the trudge back to her apartment. Somehow West beat her to the top of the stairs.

  “It’s not the end of the world,” he said. “Fenris will tear his way from this reality, but the damage will only be temporary.”

  “Aha! I knew that you knew.” Grinning, she stabbed her finger at him, though it made very little sense since she hadn’t caught him lying. He hadn’t slipped up. But she’d take all the victories, real or imagined, she could.

  “The universe will survive. It will stitch its broken shards into something workable. It always does. It’s not any different than when World War Three was postponed to next week. Or that time brown became yellow and yellow became the number seven. This change will be bigger than that, but if you’re speaking of the literal end, then it’s not that.”

  “Stop that.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Stop trying to get me not to care.”

  “Are you sure about that?” he asked. “It’s a lot easier when you n’t.”

  “This is my world we’re talking about. Maybe stuff like this happens all the time. And maybe I never noticed before. But I’ve noticed this time, and I don’t like it.”

  “So it’s about you then?” asked West.

  Her first response was to deny that, but it came to her that he was right. If the world ended tomorrow, who would be left to mourn it? Just her. She didn’t want it to end or change or whatever because she didn’t want to be left alone, to be deprived of her lifeline to the sane and normal, although even that was an increasingly frayed thread.

  “Yes. Damn it, yes. That’s what it’s about.”

  “Fenris is inevitable.”

  She knew she had him here. Having fortuitously, if accidentally, lured him into a verbal trap, she wasn’t about to let him go.

  “According to you, it’s all inevitable. It’s inevitable that I’ll go mad, and it’s inevitable that the sun will blow up someday. It’s inevitable that bugs from the future will one day travel back in time and rewrite history. It doesn’t mean I have to sit back and take it.”

  “No, you don’t have to. But it’ll be better for everyone if you do. Because interfering in this one will only make it worse.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says me. When you’ve been doing this job as long as I have, you get a sense of these things. And I can tell you that some futures can be averted. Some changes should be avoided. And some are unavoidable. Some cannot be stopped, and to try will only cause more harm than you can imagine.”

  “And I’m just supposed to take your word on that.”

  “That’s up to you. But you came to me for my perspective, Number Five. Seems strange to ignore it just because it wasn’t what you wanted to hear.”

  His bag of batteries clacked like a maraca as he descended the stairs.

  Diana almost swore, but her frustration left her drained. She wanted to save her world, but it wasn’t about her world. It was about her. If she could do something positive in the midst of all this confusion and madness, then she just might be able to convince herself that she wasn’t so trivial and unimportant after all. Just because she wasn’t certain there was any grand plan to this didn’t mean she couldn’t come up with one.

  She walked back to her apartment, where her monsters waited for her. Vom and Smorgaz sat on the couch, watching a version of the old Land of the Lost TV show that seemed to be filmed from the Sleestaks’ perspective. Zap hovered in the corner, staring at the wall or maybe the greater mysteries behind it. And Pogo hopped at her feet and whimpered.

  It was comforting. Like a Norman Rockwell painting populated by infernal manifestations. The monsters were just like her, lost souls, and if there was anywhere she belonged, this was it. She wasn’t an outsider. Not anymore.

  All things considered, there were worse places in the universe to call home.

  The phone rang. It was Sharon.

  “Greg wants to meet you. Tomorrow night.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Diana and her monsters pulled up to the estate. There was something off about it. It wasn’t only that it was a huge plot of land, bigger than most neighborhoods. The entire place shimmered like a heat mirage. Like her apartment, this place had become disconnected from the rest of reality. It was an island tethered to her world, a waypoint before greater mysteries beyond.

  Vom’s fur bristled as he turned a sicklier shade of green. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “Oh, God,” said Diana. “Don’t do it in the car.”

  Vom stuck his head out the passenger-side window and vomited a gazelle, twenty-two pounds of gravel, and a bar stool. The bewildered gazelle stumbled to its hooves and dashed away.

  Spawns jumped off Smorgaz’s back like popcorn. They even made popping noises when they did so.

  Zap blasted a hole in her roof before shutting his all-seeing eye.

  “Sorry.”

  Pogo buried his head under his paws and tucked his tail between his legs.

  “What the heck is wrong with you guys?” she asked.

  “It’s this place,” said Zap. “It’s throwing everything out of whack. I don’t think we can go in there with you.” Cosmic lightning flashed under his eyelid.

  “Are you sure?”

  Vom regurgitated half a shark and some slightly chewed office furniture. Smorgaz’s spawn were rapidly filling up the backseat.

  “Get out then,” she said. “Especially you, Vom. Before you throw up acid or something.”

  The creatures exited the vehicle.

  “Maybe you should reconsider this,” said Vom, who then vomited up a misshapen limb that flailed at the air with its claws before he managed to gulp it back down.

  “Agreed,” said Smorgaz. “I don’t like the idea of you walking into Fenris’s lair without any backup.”

  Diana said, “It’s not a lair. It’s a house. And I don’t need backup. This isn’t a commando mission.”

  “Still seems a touch reckless,” said Vom.

  “Safety in numbers.

  Pogo rolled over on his back and whimpered.

  “I don’t like it either,” she said, “but maybe it’s better this way. How would it look if I show up with you guys behind me like some private army of the damned? It’d be too confrontational.”

  “But aren’t you being confrontational?” asked Vom.

  “I’m not really sure what I’m doing,” she admitted, “but from what I’ve glimpsed Fenris is unstoppable. Even you couldn’t really do anything against him other than maybe annoy him.”

  Zap bobbed. “It’s true.”

  “Well, if there’s nothing to be done about this, then why bother going at all?” asked Vom.

  She’d asked herself the same question. Several times. The only answer she could come up with was that she had to do something. If her only two choices were hiding from the inevitable or facing it head-on, she had decided the latter was preferable, if only because it gave her the illusion of controlling her own destiny.

  “I know I’m your lifeline,” she said, “but you don’t have to worry. Everything will be fine, and you won’t get stuck in the closet again.” It surprised her how certain she sounded when she couldn’t be sure of anything.

  “Closet? Is that what you think this is about to me?” Vom shook his head. “Do you think I really give a damn if I’m locked away for a few hundred years waiting for the next witless sap to inherit me? I’m ageless. I could wait a million years in that closet. It’d be a little boring, but I’ve been bored before.

  “No, we like you, Diana. We don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

  Smorgaz and Zap echoed the sentiment. Pogo wagged his spiky, whiplike tail.

  She smiled despite herself.

  “I like you too. Hell, you g
uys just might be the best friends I’ve ever had. But this is my reality, my fight.”

  They started a new round of protests.

  “No arguments,” she said. “I’m in charge here, right? That means we do things my way. If it makes you feel any better, I give Zap permission to keep watch over me via that all-seeing eye of his.”

  “I can’t see in there,” said Zap. “There’s interference in the space-time continuum, a fifth-dimensional collapse along the polyfractal axis that’s condensing all possible futures into a single unobservable waveform.”

  “What does that mean? You can’t see anything?” asked Diana.

  “Oh, I can see.” Zap rose in the air, waved his tentacles. “I can see into realmsyond imagination. I just can’t see much into this one.”

  “Does that mean it’s all done? That the future is over?”

  “All it really means is that someone has shoved Schrodinger’s cat into a box and nailed it shut until this thing is all over. Whether that means your world is over or not… honestly, I can’t say. But considering the situation, I wouldn’t lay odds on anything positive. When you get down to it, reality is a stack of potentialities, some more potential than others. But when chaos becomes certainty, then that certainty is usually oblivion.”

  “Right then,” she said. “I’m going in. Wish me luck.”

  They did. Except for Vom who was busy regurgitating a bus.

  She pulled away, taking one last glance at the extradimensional refugees in her rearview mirror. She wondered at the wisdom of driving willingly into a place where immortal horrors feared to tread, but she’d come this far.

  The unattended manor gates opened for her. She knew they were probably on an automated system or operated by a security guard via a remote switch, but it was mysterious and otherworldly just the same. A wave of heat and cold hit her as she drove onto the property. The gates closed behind her, and there was a twinge above her right eye. The heat vanished. The cold remained.

  It’d been noon on the outside, but on this side of the gate twilight was falling. The full moon spread a bright blue light across the sky. Fenris glistened like a moist emerald.