Third Day Lights

ALAYA DAWN JOHNSON

Alaya Dawn Johnson lives in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2004 with a BA in East Asian Languages and Cultures. At Columbia, Alaya worked as the News Editor for the Columbia Spectator, and interned at the Village Voice and Smithsonian Magazine. She has been published in Internet Review of Science Fiction, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Chiaroscuro, and Arabella Magazine. Currently, she works as an editorial assistant at QPB (the Quality Paperback Book Club).

“Third Day Lights” was published in Interzone, which began to hit its stride again in 2005 under new editorship, and ended the year with a new, more commercial look as well. It starts as fantasy, and becomes SF, in the template of planetary romance, the Leigh Brackett and Michael Moorcock tradition. In the very far future, humanity is destroying universes to drain as power sources for a huge posthuman project.

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The mist was thick as clotted cream, shot through with light from the luminous maggots in the sand. And through that mist, which I knew would entrap almost any creature unlucky enough to wander through it, came my first supplicant in over thirty cycles. He rode atop one of the butterfly men’s great black deer, which greeted me with a sweep of its massive antlers. His skin was as pale as the sand was black; his eyes were the clear, hard color of chipped jade. A fine, pale fuzz covered his scalp, like the babies of humans. He had full, hard lips and high cheekbones. His nose had been broken several times, and was quite large regardless. His ears protruded slightly from his head.

He was too beautiful. I did not believe it. Oh, I had, in my travels, seen men far more attractive than he. Men who had eagerly accepted me in whatever form I chose, and had momentarily pleased me. But I had never seen this kind of beauty, that of the hard edges and chipped flakes of jade. That aura of bitterly mastered power, and unspeakable grief subdued but somehow not overcome. He gave the impression that he was a man to respect, a man who would understand my own loneliness despite my family, a man who might, perhaps, after so many cycles

But I have not lived for so long away from my Trunk by believing in such things.

Eyes never leaving mine, he touched the neck of the deer and it knelt for him to dismount. His bare feet should have frozen solid seconds after they touched the sand, and the maggots begun devouring the icy flesh, but instead he stood before my staircase, perfectly at ease. From within the hostile mist, lacy hands and mouths struggled toward him but never quite touched.

That is how I knew he wasn’t human.

I anticipated with relish the moment when he would speak and allow me to drop him on the other side of the desert. But he stared at me and I glowered back and then I understood: he knew what I was. He knew who I was. At the time, I thought this meant that he was incalculably old. Now, I am not so sure.

“Why do you stand before my gate? Tell me your purpose.”

He stayed silent, of course. His impassive expression never wavered, and yetperhaps from his slightly quivering shoulders or faintly irregular breathingI had the impression that he was laughing at me.

It had been a long time since I had been the subject of even implied ridicule. Not many willingly mock a demon of the scorched desert. I had chosen one of my more forbidding guises before I opened the door. My skin was black as the sand, my naked body sexually ambiguous and covered with thousands of tiny horns that swiveled in whatever direction I looked. The horns had been one of Charm’s ideasthe kind he gets when he’s drunk on saltwater. At his request, I wore them on this occasionthe one day each cycle when I accept supplicants. I had thought that my appearance be appropriately awe-inspiring, and yet from the look in the not-quite-a-man’s eyes, I realized that he had not been inspired to awe. I growled to cover my uneasinesswhat creature is this?

I stormed back inside the house, sulfur gas streaming from between the growing cracks in my skin. The mist groaned when it touched me and then receded. I didn’t need to look back at the man to know that he hadn’t moved. Inside, door shut, I changed my appearance again. I became monstrous, a blue leviathan of four heads and sixteen impossible arms. I shook my wrists in succession, so the bracelets made of human teeth clacked and cascaded in a sinister echo off the walls of my castle.

Yes, I thought, faces snarling, this should do.

I stepped forward to open the door again and saw Mahi’s face on the floor beneath me, grinning in two-dimensional languor.

“You look nice,” he said. “Some upstart at the door? Drop him in the maw, Naeve. I’m sure it’s been some time since she’s had a nice meal.”

The maw is Mahi’s mother, but she rejected him because he can only move in two dimensions. She considered him defective, but I have found his defect to be occasionally very useful. He vents his anger by suggesting I toss every supplicant across the scorched desert into her mouth. I did once, nearly three hundred cycles ago, just for his benefit, but we could all hear the sound of her chewing and mating and screaming in some kind of inscrutable ecstasy for days.

Two of my faces snarled down at him, one looked away and the fourth just sighed and said, “Perhaps.” The maw is all the way on the Eastern border of the desert, but that day her screams pierced as though she were gifting it to our earssome property of the sand, I suppose. Charm, Top and I nearly went crazy, but Mahi seemed to enjoy it. My family is closer to me than the Trunk ever was, but I know no more about their previous lives than what they choose to tell me. I often wonder what Mahi’s life was like inside the maw.

He faded into the floor, off in some two-dimensional direction I couldn’t see. I stepped back outside.

The man was still there, absolutely motionless despite the veritable riot of mist-shapes that struggled to entangle him. My uneasiness returned: what is he? When he saw me, his eyes widened. No other muscles moved, and yet I knew. Oh, for that economy of expression. Even my malleable body could not convey with a hundred gestures the amusement and understanding and wary appreciation he expressed with a simple contraction of eye muscles. I did not scare him.

“Who are you?” I used my smallest head and turned the others awaythe view of him through four sets of eyes was oddly intense, disconcerting. He didn’t answer. “What are you?”

I turned my head to the deer who was kneeling peacefully at his side. “Why did you bring him, honored one?” I said in the language of the butterfly men.

The deer looked up, purple eyes lovely enough to break a lesser creature’s heart. Before I saw this man, I would have said that only demons and butterfly men could look in the eyes of a deer and keep their sanity.

“Because he asked me,” the deer saidgracefully, simply, infuriatingly.

I went back inside. Because I only had one more chance to get rid of him, I stalked the hallways, screaming and summoning things to toss at the walls. Top absorbed them with her usual equanimity and then turned the walls a shimmering orangemy favorite color. Charm screamed from somewhere near the roof that he was attempting to rest, and could I please keep my temper tantrum to myself? I frowned and finished changingit was a relief to have one set of eyes again. Some demons enjoy multiplicity, but I’ve always found it exhausting. Top turned that part of the wall into a mirror, so I could see my handiwork.

“It’s very beautiful,” she said. A hand emerged from the wall and handed me a long piece of embroidered cloth. I wrapped it around my waist, made my aureoles slightly larger and walked to the door.

The corners of his mouth actually quirked up when he saw me this time, and the understanding in his eyes made me ache. I did not believe it, and yet I did. I walked closer to him, doggedly swaying my mahogany hips, raising my arms and shaking my wrists, which were still encircled with bracelets of human teeth. This close I could see that his skin was unnaturally smooththe only physical indication that he was something other than human.

“Come,” I said, my voice pitched lowbreathy and seductive in a human sort of way. “Just tell me your name, traveler, and I’ll let you inside.”

I leaned in closer to him, so our noses nearly touched. “Come,” I whispered, “tell me.”

His lips quirked again. Bile of frustration and rage choked my all-too-human throat and I began to lose my grip on my body. I could feel it returning to my mundane form, and after a moment I stopped trying to resist. My skin shifted from glowing mahogany to a prosaic cobalt blue. My hair turned wild and red; my second arms grew rapidly beneath the first and my aureoles contracted.

My skin tingled with frustration and not a little fearI didn’t need anyone else in my familybut I refused to show it as I took a passing glance in his eyes. No triumph there, not even relief.

I walked up the stairs, but I didn’t hear his footsteps following.

“Well,” I said, gesturing with my left hands, “are you coming?”

The man took a step forward, and then anotherhe moved as though he were exhausted, or the cold of the maggots and mist had subtly affected him after all.

“Go home,” he said to the deer, who had risen beside him. “One way or another, I will not need your help when I leave this place.”

His voice made me want to weep tears so large Charm would dance beneath me, singing as though nectar were falling from the sky. It was uncompromisingly strong, yet tender all the same, as though he had seen too much not to grant anyone the tenderness he had been denied.

Do not believe it, I told myself, but I was already losing the battle.

“Are you coming?” I repeated, forced by unexpected emotion into a parody of callous disdain.

“Yes,” he said quietly. I do not think I could have stood it if all that unexpected tenderness were suddenly directed at me, but he seemed distracted, watching the mist long after the deer had disappeared.

“What is your name?” I asked, just before I opened the door again. An unlikely gambit, of course, but I had to try.

Amusement suddenly returned to his eyes. “I’m called Israphel,” he said.

Mahi had positioned himself in front of the door in his best impression of three-dimensionality. It nearly worked, if you didn’t look at him too critically, or move. He grew indistinct when viewed from oblique angles, until he disappeared altogether. His appearance was, in some ways, even more malleable than my own. For this occasion he had fashioned himself to look like one of the wildly costumed humans we sometimes saw in our travels: decked entirely in iridescent feathers of saffron and canary yellow, strewn together with beads that glinted in an imagined sunlight.

“You let him in?” Mahi shrieked, several octaves higher than normal. I’ve often wondered how a two-dimensional creature can create such startlingly loud sounds in a multidimensional universe.

Something in Israphel’s demeanor exuded fascination, though when I looked closely at him I didn’t know how I could tellhis expression was still one of polite interest.

“The maw’s only son, I presume? I had heard she rejected you, but

this is an honor.”

Mahi sniffed, put out at having been discovered so quickly. His feathers bristled. “Yes, well. A two-dimensional mouth is not particularly useful for three-dimensional food, is it?” He turned to me, his human mouth stretching and widening as it always did when he was hurt or angry. If it continued to expand, it would settle into a shape even I sometimes found disturbing. Mahi was still, after all, the son of the most feared creature in the scorched desert. He grinnedcruellyrevealing several rows of teeth that appeared to be the silently wailing heads of countless ancient creatures.

“I’m surprised at you, Naeve,” he said, his voice a studied drawl. “Confounded by a pesky human? Losing your touch, are you?”

I frowned at him, trying to decide if he was being deliberately obtuse. “He’s not a human, Mahi,” I said carefully.

Mahi’s face had now been almost entirely subsumed by his hideous mouth, but he still managed to look thoughtful. “No

he isn’t, is he? Well, I trust you’ll get rid of him soon.” He folded himself into some inscrutable shape and seemed to disappear.

Israphel turned to look at me. He smiled, and I felt my skin turning a deeper, more painful shade of blue. For a calculated moment, eyes were transparent as windowpanes: amusement and fascination and just a trace of wonder

By the Trunk, who is this man ?

“What is my first task, Naeve?” he asked, very gently.

I turned away and walked blindly down a hall that had not been there a moment before. I didn’t look, but I knew he was following.

I could practically feel his eyes resting on my back, radiating compassion and equanimity. Out of sheer annoyance, I shifted my body slightly so a gigantic purple eye blinked lazily on my back and then stared straight at him. I had hoped for some kind of reactiona shriek of surprise, perhapsbut he simply nodded in polite understanding and looked away. His eyes focused on the indigo walls, and he jerked, ever so slightly, in surprise. For a moment I wished for a mouth as big and savage as Mahi’s to grin with. I knew he had noticed the gentle rippling of Top’s smooth muscles. Israphel looked sharply at my back, but my third eye was beginning to make me feel dizzy, so I subsumed it back into my flesh. No use, I could still sense him.

I ran my hand along Top’s indigo gizzards and silently drew the symbol for where I wanted to go. The walls shivered a little in her surpriseit had been nearly a hundred cycles since I had last visited there. But I needed to get rid of this not-a-man quickly, and it was in Top’s second appendix that I had saved my cleverest, most wildly impossible task. Even Israphel, with all of his jade green understanding and hard-won wisdom would not be able to solve it.

A light blue membrane slammed across the corridor a few feet ahead of us, blocking the path. Seconds later, a torrent of unidentifiable waste roared just behind it, smelling of freshly digested nematodes and one-eyed birds. Top tried her best, but it was difficult to keep things clean this deep in her bowels. As soon as the last of the waste had gone past, the membrane pulled back and we continued. I surreptitiously glanced at Israphel, but his expression was perfectly bland. Too bland? I wasn’t quite sure. Top shunted her waste past us several more times before we reached the entrance to her second appendix. The air here smelled funny, not quite foul but still capable of coating your throat with a thick, decaying mustiness.

“Are you sure about this, Naeve?” Top asked, just before she opened the membranous gate. “It’s taking a lot of energy to shunt the digestive flows around you. I’m having difficulty keeping things up. Charm is complaining that his bed feels like cartilage.”

“Charm always complains. Let us in.”

Israphel paused before the open membrane. “Are you from the scorched desert?” he asked, addressing the walls as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

I could tell that Top was just as mesmerized by his eyes as I was. Of course, she had always loved eyesmostly for eating. Perhaps I’ll give his to her as a treat once he fails the taskbut the thought made me unexpectedly ill.

“No,” Top said. “I’m the first of Naeve’s family. She found me on another world.”

Israphel frowned, such an unprecedented expression that it had the impact of a fiery declamation. “Another universe?” he said.

“I’m not sure. It’s been many triads. You have quite beautiful eyes.”

Israphel must have heard the predatory overtones, but he simply smiled and thanked her. Irrationally annoyed, I stepped through the opening into the chamber. Israphel followed me, glancing at the pulsing yellow walls and then the enormous heaps of bric-a-brac that littered the space. Some, including the one for my impossible task, had been there for countless cycles, but they were all immaculately clean. Dust was one of Top’s favorite things to eat, which was one of the many reasons that made her an excellent castle.

I summoned the object to mea fantastic, mysterious device that I had discovered on my travels and had saved for just this sort of emergency. In the far corner of the room something crashed to the floor as my object began its slow, lumbering way toward us. The humans of whatever place I had found it clearly hadn’t designed their objects for summoningit moved gingerly, as though its stubby wooden legs or wide, dark glass screen were in danger of breaking. It had a dark brown tail made of some strange smooth-shiny material that was forked at the end.

I had wanted to destroy his easy composure, and yet I still wasn’t prepared for his reaction when he saw the object laboring toward him. He shook with laughter, his hands opening and closing as though they were desperate to hold onto something. He laughed, and yet his eyes nearly seared me. Top gave a sort of giggle-sigh that made the walls shudder. Was it the pain lurking behind his eyes that had made them so beautiful? But the pain wasn’t lurking anymore, it was pouring and splashing and nearly drowning both of us. I looked awaywhat else could I do?

He stopped laughing almost as abruptly as he started, with a physical wrench of his neck.

“Where did you find this?” he asked quietly. It had stopped in front of him and shuddered to a halt.

“I don’t really remember. Some human place.”

He turned to me and smiled. I coughed. “The first human place,” he said.

I tried to mask my dismay. “Do you recognize it?” I asked. None of my tasks were allowed to be technically impossible, but I had hoped that this one would be about as close as I could get.

“Yes. They didn’t really look like this, whenyes, I do.”

“What’s it called?” I asked, intrigued despite myself.

“A tee-vee. Television. Terebi. Many other things in many other dead languages. So what task have you set me, o demon of the scorched desert?”

His voice was slightly mocking, but raw, as though he hadn’t quite gotten over the shock.

“You have to make it work,” I said.

Back through Top’s lower intestines, he carried it in his armscarefully, almost lovingly, the way I imagine humans carry their babies. I had often pitied humans because of their static bodies and entirely inadequate one pair of arms, but Israphel did not ask for my help and I did not offer. Awkward though he was, he still managed to look dignified.

By the time we reached the end of her intestine, Top had managed to redecorate the front parlor. I can’t say I was entirely pleased with the changesfine, gauzy cloth of all different shades of green draped gently from the ceiling, rippling in an invisible breeze. The floor was solid, but appeared to be the surface of a lake. It reflected the sky of an unknown worldjade green, just like Israphel’s eyes.

I could have killed her, only it was notoriously difficult to kill a castle. Instead, I felt my skin tinting red, like my hair.

Israphel gently set the tee-vee down on the rippling lake floor and looked around contemplatively.

“It’s quite nice,” he said to the ceiling. “I thank you.”

Top knew how angry I was, so the only response she dared was a kind of wistful “good luck” that made me turn even redder. My own family!

Perhaps, after all, they wanted a

I didn’t even want to think of it.

“You have until first light,” I said curtly, and walked straight into a nearby wall.

Hours later, when twilight had sunk onto the scorched desert and the maggots were giving their farewell light show as they burrowed deeper into the sand, Charm found me. I knew he was there because of the peculiar smell wafted toward my nose this high in the castlethat tang of fresh saltwater could only mean that Charm had been drinking again.

“He’s interesting, that fellow,” Charm said in a studied drawl.

“You noticed?” I summoned several balls and began juggling them in intricate patternsa nervous habit.

“Not really human, but

I mean, he doesn’t smell like one, he doesn’t smell like anything I’ve ever encountered, but he still feels like one. Looks like one. The way he stares at that tee-vee thing of yours? Very human.”

I nearly fumbled my balls and had to create an extra hand just to keep the pattern going. “He’s succeeding, then? He’ll get it to work?”

“I don’t know. He isn’t doing anything, just sitting there. But still

something’s just funny about him. Powerful, that much is obvious.” He paused. “Mahi is sulking,” he said, after a few moments.

I let out a brief laugh. “Typical. Does he really think I’ll let this man succeed?”

“I don’t know, will you?”

I lost the pattern of the balls entirely, and glared in the direction I guessed Charm wasa challenge even when he wasn’t trying to hide.

“Don’t be stupid,” I said as the balls clacked and bounced on the floor. “I’ve lived this long without a

why would I need him now?”

Charm laughed and I caught a strong whiff of saltwater. “Why, indeed? But Top was telling me about your fixation with his eyes, his broken nose”

“My fixation

“

“You can’t fool us, Naeve. We’re your family. Why else do you think Mahi’s sulking? Maybe you’re lonely.”

“But I already have all of you.”

“Not that type of lonely, Mother.” I felt him lean forward until his breath tickled my ear. “Mahi and I could never have passed the third test.” His deep whisper sounded louder than an earthquake. “But he can.” His voice grew fainter and I knew he was vanishing in his own strange waydifferent parts of him at once.

His voice was the last to leave. “Are you lonely, Naeve?”

I sat frozen at the top of my castle, staring at the blackened desert with its shivering, luminescent sand for several minutes. Then, almost involuntarily, I conjured an image of Israphel.

He was sitting in the parlor where I had left him, a few feet away from the tee-vee. His brows were drawn up in concentration and his fingers occasionally stroked the strange object’s forked tail. I stared at him for minutes, then hours how many, I’m not sure. He never stirred, but once in that long night he whispered someone’s name. I couldn’t hear him clearly, but I saw his lips move and the pain that briefly flitted across his eyes.

Was I lonely?

I waited for the dawn.

First day light. Mahi awoke me from my trance-like stupor, wiping out the vestiges of Israphel’s image with a flick of his two-dimensional tongue. He was all mouth this morning and his grotesquely abundant teeth were screaming a morning aria that I supposed might be pleasurable to the son of a creature who climaxed while she chewed.

“You seem happy. Charm told me you were sulking.”

“Why would I sulk? Our green eyed intruder has failed!”

I sat up straight and stared at him. “Failed? How do you know?”

He cackled like a magpie and his teeth groaned with him. Positively unnerving, even for me. “He hasn’t moved. He’s just sat there all night, and the tee-vee hasn’t done a thing. Go down and see for yourself.”

He compressed himself into a line and started darting around me, giggling even as his teeth wailed like damned souls.

“I knew you wouldn’t let him pass, Naeve,” he said, flattening himself out again. “Are you coming? I want to see you toss him out.”

My throat felt like someone had lit a fire to it. “Soon,” I croaked.

After he left, I turned to stare back out at the desert. The maggots had started popping back out of the sand, making crackling noises like the sound of bones being slowly crushed. Light sprayed and twisted in the rapidly thickening air as they emerged. Just from the timbre of the pops, low and crunchy, I could tell that it must be fairly late in the season. In two days, perhaps, the desert would have its lights. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been here to see it, but my sudden longing was mixed with dread.

If Mahi was wrong like I thoughthoped?then in two days we would all see something more than just the lights.

By the time I arrived, the others were all there, staring silently at Israphel who stared just as silently back at them. Even Top had fashioned a body for herself for the occasiona seductive brown human connected to the wall with an orange umbilical cord. He still sat on the floor, the tail of the tee-vee balanced on the tips of his fingers. It appeared that what Mahi said was truehe had not gotten it to work. The object looked just the same as it had yesterday. I fought a surge of disappointment. After all, why should I be disappointed? Just one less nuisance in my life. I could still stay and watch the lights if I wanted.

Israphel looked up as soon as I appeared, and a smile briefly stretched his hard lips. My nipples hardened and I felt Charm flit over them with an almost-silent laugh.

“There, I’ve been waiting for you,” he said. The night had brought shadows under his eyes, and he held himself with a dignified exhaustion that made him seem very human.

“I’ve completed the task,” he said, when I didn’t respond.

Mahi giggled and then stopped when Top glared at him. “You have?” I said, walking closer. “I don’t see anything.”

“Watch,” he said. The black glass on the TV flickered for a few moments and then seemed to come to life.

Strange shapes darted and moved inside the box. After a second I realized that they were human, but oddly seemed to resemble Mahi more than any humans I had ever encountered.

Mahi shrieked and rushed closer to the glass. “What is this? What is this thing?”

An odd, distorted voice came from inside the television: “What time is it?” I realized that one of the flat humans was speaking.

“It’s howdy doody time!” smaller humans with gratingly high-pitched voices shouted in chorus.

I turned to Israphel, whose skin was faintly glowing with a sheen of sweat. “How did you do this?” I asked. But before he could answer, Mahi shrieked againprobably in delight, though it was difficult to tell through the distorted sound on the tee-vee. He had managed to enter the picture.

Israphel watched with every appearance of rapt fascination as the humans scattered from Mahi’s giant jaws, screaming and blubbering. He gathered up three small stragglers with one swipe of his blood-red tongue and began mashing them up with his teeth. In fact, his teeth themselves seemed to gobble up the two-dimensional humans, and when they finished they spit the masticated globs deep into Mahi’s apparently bottomless throat.

He tore through the humans, screaming as he ate them, like his mother had all those cycles ago, and laughed at their obvious terror. “You’re all like me, now,” I thought I heard him say, but his mouth was too full of screaming humans for me to be sure.

“Unbelievable,” Charm said beside me. “I never knew the kid had it in him.”

Minutes later, there were no more humans left on the screen. Mahi had relaxed himself into a vaguely anthropomorphic shapemore like a giant mouth with legs and armsand was reclining in a steaming vat of blood and still-twitching body parts. He giggled and splashed some of the blood at the screen.

“More

want more.” His words were slurred, as though he was drunk on the killing. “Give more,” he said, and giggled again.

“How odd,” Israphel said softly. “It must be a property of this universe.”

“Naeve,” Top said, sounding torn between disgust and envy, “get him out of there. That many humans at once can’t be healthy.”

“Can you?” I asked Israphel.

He shrugged and let go of the forked tail. Immediately, the screen went black again and Mahi came hurtling back out. I expected him to wail and throw a tantrum, but he was surprisingly quiet as he turned his mouth toward me.

“Keep him,” he said. Then he fell down and drifted straight through the floor.

Israphel stood up gingerly, as though his bones ached. “I take it that I’ve passed the first test,” he said.

I nodded, afraid to even speak. The very novelty of what he had just done terrified me.

“And the second?” he said, very gently, as though he understood my fear and wished to reassure me.

“Tell me who you are. Why are you here?”

He seemed surprised, which I took a perverse pleasure in, considering that I was just as surprised myself. Why had I laid such a simple task? But as any sign of emotion fled his face, I realized that perhaps I had stumbled upon an adequate task after all. He didn’t want to tell me, but if he wanted to stay, he would.

“Top, Charm,” I said, suddenly. “Leave us.” They left with hardly a murmur, since of course I could hardly stop them from eavesdropping.

Israphel stared at me silently while I smiled and settled myself against the rippled lake-floor.

“I take it you don’t want to tell me,” I said.

“You don’t want to know.”

“I’m waiting,” I said. “You have until second daylight.”

Hours passed in silence. I amused myself by changing my body into various imaginativeand perfectly hideous forms. A gigantic pair of jaws as close to Mahi’s mouth as I could manage emerged from my stomach, growling and sweeping its fleshy tongue over the floor. Israphel, staring with a bizarre intentness at the wall behind me, didn’t even flinch. I looked over my shoulder once to see what could possibly be so interesting, but of course the wall was blank. Whatever horrors Israphel witnessed that night, they were of his own creation. A thousand tiny arms sprouted from my face and filled the room with the cascading sound of snapping fingers. That, at least, he acknowledged with a slight upward quirk of his lips.

The night dragged on. I wondered if he would remain silent, if he would choose death over revealing his identity. The implications disturbed me on many levels, none of which I particularly wished to examine.

The floor still looked like a lake, and quite possibly was one, since various fauna periodically swam beneath us. A fishthe color of days-old dung and large as my torso passed underneath me and paused just before Israphel. Its jagged teeth peeked over its lips and a strange appendage on its forehead gave off an ethereal glow that cast our faces in shadow.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” I said, without really meaning to.

He turned to look at me, and I flinched. “Beautiful? In its own way, I suppose. But it’s not of this world.”

“Maybe from Top’s world, then?” But after a moment I realized what he had implied. “No

from yours. From the human world.” He remained silent, and despite myself I was drawn out. “Time acts strangely in our universe, but something tells me that when you traveled here, your human world had long since been destroyed. So how would you know what creatures once lived on it? Unless

are you one of those humans? The ones reborn on the other side of the desert?” The very idea seemed ludicrous. Those humans were barely capable of seeing the desert, let alone crossing it.

The fish dimmed its light and swam away, leaving us again in semi-darkness.

“Can you die, Naeve?” he asked.

I snorted. “Am I alive?”

“But old age can’t kill you. Or disease

probably not even an atomic bomb.”

“I’m not human, so why would I die in a human way?”

He looked at me so intently that I felt my skin begin to shiver and glow in response. If his expression hadn’t been so serious and inexplicably sad I would have thought he was courting meI had only ever seen that kind of stare from a demon of the third sex who wanted to mate.

“What do you think happens when you die?”

“My body will take its final journey, back to the Trunk. The Trunk will crush my bones and my siblings will masticate my flesh and I will be remembered by my etching in the bark.”

His eyes narrowed and I struggled to stop my skin from mottling iridescent ochre and gold. Sex ought to be lovely and ephemeral, but with him I knew it would mean far more. I couldn’t afford to reveal my desire.

“The prospect doesn’t scare you?” he said, as though it would certainly terrify him. “What about an afterlife?”

I gave a disbelieving smile. “Afterlife? You mean, some sort of soul-essence surviving somewhere after death? Who believes that but humans? Though,” I said thoughtfully, “I suppose you humans might have a point. Wherever you come from, a few of you are reborn here. Maybe this is your afterlife?”

Israphel clenched his hands so tightly I could hear the constricted blood pounding through his veins. “And what of those humans reborn here? And what of their children? None of them die of old age either, but they can be killed. What do you think happens, Naeve, when you die in your own afterlife?”

I gave up and let my skin explode into whorls and star-bursts of color. In the extra light, I could see how the grief I had only glimpsed before now twisted his face.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I never thought about it before. But I assume the humans feed the maggots, just like the rest of us. Does this have a point, Israphel? You don’t have much time until daylight.”

He briefly closed his eyes and when he opened them again, the pain had nearly left his face.

“Let me tell you a story, Naeve, about a human boy who became a posthuman and then became a god.”

I looked at him curiously. “Is that what you are?”

He shrugged. “It’s what I might as well be. Or an angel. A Nephilim, perhaps?” He smiled bitterly, as though at some private joke. “So I was born on the first human world earth, as it was unimaginatively called at the time. After humans had traveled to space but long before we really colonized it. I grew roseslike the ones in this world, only you couldn’t use the thorns for impaling stakes. I had a wife who liked to write stories about monsters and death.”

“You’re married? Then you can’t”

His sudden glare was so inimical that I cut myself short. “She died,” he said, his words clipped staccato, “when she was thirty-five. An eon later, I discovered that she had been reborn here and that she died here toonearly a triad ago, by your count.” He was silent for a few moments and then answered my unspoken question. “She tried to cross the desert.”

“Which is why you’re here?”

“Yes. No. Not entirely.”

“What else, then?”

“To retrieve the last of the humans, the ones we spent centuries hunting for before we found this strange pocket universe. Do you know how statistically improbable it is that a universe so unlike anything ever burped into the cosmos could exist? We didn’t even realize it until the computers showed a discrepancy of precisely one billionth of a percent between the predicted numbers of retrieved humans and actual ones. But I already knew something was wrong, because no one could retrieve my wife. So I came here, and I realizeda person can’t exist in two places at once, and they can’t be retrieved if they don’t exist at all.”

I had spent my life traveling between universes, and yet what Israphel was implying boggled me. Humans were that dominant in his time? “This retrieval

you mean, you’re trying to revive every human who ever existed?”

“And everyone who might have existed. Those are easier. It’s a moral duty.”

“But

that must be

do numbers that large exist? Where could you possibly get the resources?”

His eyes looked very hard, and the last of my sexual arousal shivered as it left my skin. “You don’t want to know,” he said. “It will be easier for you if you don’t.”

“Or you don’t want to tell me.”

He met my eyes, but twitched as though he longed to look away. Some strange emotion was tearing at him, I could tell that by his posture, but what? “Other universes,” he said, his voice rough. “We strip other universes, and then convert them to power sources, and when they burn out, we find other ones.”

Of course. Now I understood the elusive emotion: guilt.

“That’s why you’re here?” I said. My eyes turned glassy and golden as magma with anger. “To save all the humans and then destroy this universe and every other creature in it? What about saving us? Does your moral imperative only apply to yourselves?”

He looked away and stared at the lake floor. “It would be a never-ending task. Humans take care of humans.” It sounded like a mantra, something recited frequently to stave off doubts or reason.

I snorted in self-furyI had thought better of him. “I’m sure they told you to believe that. And you call us demons. Of all the monumentally selfish

I suppose you came here and petitioned me so you could use my powers to hunt down the stragglers from your project?” I laughed, high and brittle. And I had thought I was too old to feel such bitter disappointment.

I elongated my lower left arm and forced him to meet my eyes. He looked positively tormented, which pleased me. “You would kill me too, wouldn’t you? If you get your way, you would use me and then strip this universe and kill me too.”

He grimaced and roughly knocked my hand away. “I’ll find a way to save you”

“And my family?”

He remained silent, but met my eyes.

I sighed. “No, of course not. Well,” I said softly, leaning in closer and letting my eyes burn so hot he flinched, “lucky for us that you won’t succeed.”

“Naeve

I told you what you demanded. I’ve passed the second task, and you know it. You can’t break your own law.”

I smiled. “You want your third task, human? First tell me, you wish to become a member of my family, but which one? I already have three children. Would you be my fourth child? Or someone else?”

“Someone else,” he said.

My turn to dance. “Who?”

The unexpected compassion in his smile made me feel like tearing at my skin. “Your husband,” he said.

I leaned in so close our noses touched. “Then your task is to pleasure me.” Before I could pull away, his eyes caught mine and his fingers gently traced my lips.

Abruptly, I stood up. “You’ll have to do better than that,” I said, shaking. I turned my back on him and headed toward the nearest hallway.

“Don’t let him leave,” I said to Top. Even after the wall had solidified behind me, I had the eerie sensation that I could feel those unfathomable eyes on my back.

I lay on the roof, shivering and devouring bits of Trunk bark laced with black sand. Usually this treat comforted me, reminded me of my childhood, but today it merely deepened my loneliness. Oh, I had a family but I was still lonely. Israphel’s presence made me realize itif only because of how much I had foolishly hoped he would comfort me. He was lonely, tooanyone could sense thatbut he had chosen to deal with it by brainwashing himself to a cause whose end result was the complete eradication of the non-human universe.

My hysterical laughter became confused with sobs and I fell asleep.

When I woke, it was dark. The maggots had buried themselves for the night, but in the final stage of their metamorphosis they glowed so brightly that their light was visible even through the sand. The desert now looked like the skin of a giant black leopard.

The maggots would die too, if Israphel succeeded.

Charm lightly brushed my shoulder and offered me a jug filled with saltwater. I took a swig just to be polite saltwater didn’t affect me the same way. He took it back, and when he drank I could momentarily see the outline of his long neck and squat torso. When he first petitioned I wondered what his face looked like, or if he even knew. Now I figured that he didn’twhy else would he drink so much?

“Desert’s beautiful,” he said. “I think they’ll change this morning. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. “I remember

they were changing the day I cut off from the Trunk

I thought all the world would be that beautiful.”

Hard to believe we were the same person: that young demon crawling out of her sac, covered in amniotic fluid, staring in mesmerized joy at the swarms of fluttering light

“Will he really destroy all this?” Charm asked.

“I’ll kill him in the morning, but others will come. I think there may be too many of them.”

Charm took a long pull from the jug. “You know why I like saltwater?” he said. “It tastes like tears. I had some of yours while you were sleeping. I hope you don’t mind.”

I shook my head. “What did they taste like?” I asked.

“Bitter, like despair. Like disappointed love. I don’t think you should kill him.”

“What else can I do? Let him kill all of us?”

“He keeps asking a question down there. Top wouldn’t disturb you but I thought you should know. He says: ‘Do the humans here know that the desert will kill them?’”

I looked sharply at himor at least, his bottle. “Do the humans know? Of course they do. They know jumping off a cliff will kill them too. What kind of a question is that?”

Charm’s breath dusted my ear. “His wife, Naeve,” he said.

I stood up and started running down the stairs.

Israphel looked startledalmost afraidwhen I burst into the room.

“Come,” I said, grabbing his elbow. I dragged him to the front doors and pushed them open with my right hands. We stumbled down the steps and onto the sand, where the buried maggots wiggled away from our feet. I bent down and plucked one from its lair. I held its squirming form between usit was a particularly fine specimen: juicy and fat and bright enough to make him squint. I grew a third arm on the left side of my bodyglowing mahogany, just like the human body I had used in my failed attempt to seduce Israphel that first day.

“This is a human hand,” I said. “Watch what happens.” Steeling myself, I dropped the maggot on my new left palm. Immediately, it started burrowing into my flesh, devouring my skin and blood in great maggot-sized chunks. It chomped through my bones with reckless abandon and I gasped involuntarily. My hand had nearly fallen off by the time it finished gorging and settled itself in the ruined, bloody mass of my palm.

“Do you see?” I said between gritted teeth. I needed to withdraw the nerve endings, but not before Israphel understood. “This is just one maggot. You can find this out without dying. Anyone who lives alongside the desert knows what they do. I’ve heard the humans even sometimes harvest the maggots for their farms. They all know. How long was your wife here before she went to the desert?”

He swallowed slowly, as though his throat was painfully constricted. “By your count

seventeen triads.”

“She was older than me

time enough to die.”

He started to cry, but they were furious tears, and I knew better than to touch him. “What if she didn’t know? What if she lived far from the desert, and when she came here no one told her”

I picked up the maggotwhich was by now nearly the size of my palmand held it in front of his face. “Look! She knew. She was older than me, Israphel, and I am very old. She knew.” I let the maggot drop into the sand and withdrew my ruined hand back into my body.

He sank to his knees. I knelt down so my face was even with his. “Do you know how demons die?” I said softly.

He shook his head.

“We choose,” I said. “If we wanted to, we could live forever, but every demon dies. Some die sooner than others, but we all, eventually, make the choice. Death doesn’t scare me, Israphel, but eternity does. Seventeen triads is a very long time.”

“We could have been together forever,” he said.

“No one wants forever, even if they don’t realize it. I imagine that your project hasn’t been operating long enough to discover this, but it’s true

life is sweet because life is finite. Do you really want to live forever?”

He met my eyes for a moment and gave a brief, painful smile. My skin started tingling again. “No,” he said.

The ground began to shake, softly at first, then more violently. Then came the sound I remembered so wella low, buzzing hum that gouged my ears and made my spine shiver. The lights under the sand grew even brighter. Israphel looked aroundcurious, wary but certainly not scared. It was a good attitude for someone who planned to live with me. I started laughing, first in soft giggles and then in unstoppable peals. I lay down in the sand to get closer to the buzzing. When I felt Israphel touch my cheek, I laughed even more and pulled him on top of me with all four of my arms.

“What is it?” he asked.

“The lights!” I couldn’t seem to explain anymore. While I laughed he kissed me slowlyfirst my eyes, then my mouth, then my nipples. I was coming by the time the maggots burst from the sand, metamorphosed from fat little worms to gigantic, glowing moths. They swirled around us, dipping into my hair and alighting on Israphel’s fuzzy scalp.

“I’m going to fight you, Israphel,” I said. “I won’t let you destroy my universe just because you passed the third task.”

His laugh was deep, like the buzzing just before the lights. “I wouldn’t have expected otherwise,” he said.

We held each other as we rolled around on the sand, buffeted on all sides by the glowing moths. The maggot that had eaten my hand had also metamorphosed and now swooped on its gigantic wings down toward our faces, as though to greet us before flying away.

“What happens after you die, Naeve?” Israphel asked softly, as though he didn’t expect an answer.

“Nothing,” I said.

And then we laughed and stood and I danced with my husband in the lights.