YOU MY GODLESS HUNGER

4. To Drown In Elephant Intestines

Earth #5619
You are the religion. You are the monster. You ought to know nothing but to fall on your knees at the miracle of your own creation. God made the atom on an acid trip.

Zoltan rubs the back of her head. Hay and dust sting her tongue. She spits and, ravished, she stands.

A spinning wheel of color enshrouds her. She is in a circus tent. Above her head thrills the tightrope, singular, definite, a horizon line of her own. The border between home and here. There are no handles, no safety net. She must be really good at this.

Barefoot—it's how people walk here—Zoltan wanders out of the tent. The sight brings her senses to overcharge. Her eyes can't take it all in one swallow. God, the painting that stretches before her, it's a senseless mirage, it definitely wouldn't sell. Beasts drift in the sky, on nothing, they run on nothing! Wildcats and greywhales and antelopes trample over tree crowns, taking the blue of the sky into their lungs. Vipers curl around clouds and suffocate them. The air tastes different: none of Sinasen's factory-mass-produced poison.

Zoltan never twists her mind to understand it. She is not Hanilea or Aruman. She works around the madness, not through it; she is not intellectual. She only knows how to take a beating well, so she takes this too. She accepts.

Behind her, ziplines of fairy lights flicker above the circus tents. The circus is stationed in the woods, next to a rusted, spray-painted train. Several layers of color smear the doors. Several generations of artists have said their part and then been defeated by time. The vegetation of the region must be southern, barren and beige-tinged, spurting all over itself, ferocious with thirst.

Zoltan inhales. Her chest an endless chasm. The wind blows her hair back, a war banner. She feels things too strong for a human body; she withstands them, so she must be something else today. The nervousness that comes with standing on the edge of change. The feral freedom when you realize life is not so ill as you think. When you say, where's the darkness I've been seeing? I swear to the lord I can't figure it out for the life of me. Small revelations that never stick.

"Now don't you feel proud of yourself." Han's voice rings behind her. This version of her has short curly pigtails, and her black skin is peppered with scars. She wears a rugged, oil-stained mechanic's uniform. The only familiar item is the backpack carrying her machine.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"You know what it means!" Han pokes her chest, though it's not very intimidating, since her forehead barely reaches Zoltan's shoulder. "You promised Sidra that my machine would work. What could possibly go through your mind to make you say that? My machines never work!"

"Well, suck it up. This one will have to."

"We're so getting expelled. I'm getting expelled. You're getting expelled."

"Listen." Zoltan sighs to calm herself down. "We just have to wait until the first turbulence. Then we capture a cosmic particle, save the universe, and done. Mission completed."

Cosmic seeds appear as calls for help, only when a world is in grave danger from gravitational waves. While their visibility is caused by this lighthouse beacon system, new universes are created every moment, with every particle that splits, every choice one makes and every malleable environmental factor. The universes that are wildly different from the homeworld have diverged in the early stages of earthly evolution—even before the animal races had evolved into what they are now.

"Is it just us here? Quite strange that a circus should consist of just two people."

Han pulls her by the hand, leading her beyond the train. "No, stupid. Look here." There is no venom to her words. She speaks like she can barely breathe.