Everything Is Broken; or: It Takes a Village to Survive an Apocalypse

Everything is Broken, by writer John Shirley is perhaps not exactly a SF novel, but it does fit under the general umbrella of Post-Apocalyptic Fiction. Shirley emerged on the cutting edge of cyberpunk in the 1980s-- William Gibson once called him "cyberpunk’s patient zero, first locus of the virus, certifiably virulent". Since then has written some notable science fiction and horror, as well as political satire and commentary. The Apocalypse of Everything is Broken is a relatively small one: not a nuclear Armageddon or an ecological attack or a zombie invasion; but the catastrophe his characters face is no less frightening.

It's the Tea Party.


Russ Haver is a rootless young man who has been drifting since leaving college. Lacking a purpose in life, or more importantly, an income, he accepts his father's offer to come to Freedom, a small coastal community in Northern California. Russ isn't too thrilled about meeting his Dad, who divorced from his mother many years ago, but he doesn't have many options and he's to the point where an entry-level lawn-care job in a rinky-dink little town looks good.

Freedom is a small town with ambitions of becoming a resort community. It's name used to be Ferry Landing, but the mayor, Lon Ferrara, persuaded the town to change it to better fit his conception of a libertarian utopia.

We meet several of the residents of Freedom. Lon Ferrara, the mayor and a prominent businessman, who has gutted the town's infastructure and emergency services in the name of privatization and small government; His brother Mario, who runs the local tavern and does pretty well, mostly by going along with what his brother says.

Jill Hushbeck, a vocal member of the liberal Old Guard of the community, who used to be editor of the town newspaper before Ferrara bought it out. Brand Robinson, a weary and cynical writer. Pendra, a nice girl who lives with her grandmother next door to Russ's Dad and who becomes friends with Russ.

Then there's Dickie Rockwell, the leader of a local gang; a punk who has visions and who believes he has been touched by destiny to make Freedom his personal domain.

Russ has only been in Freedom for an hour or less when the tsunami hits. There have been reports of earthquake clusters up and down the coast for the past week; now one has triggered a tsunami which strikes the town. Like the Wrath of God smiting the sin of tacky tourist traps, the wave obliterates most of the community.

Russ finds himself with Pendra and with his Dad among the small group of survivors who band together in the aftermath of the destruction. Lacking a fire department or any emergency services, cut off from the rest of the world by the wreckage left by the wave, with no power or fresh water, they they desperately try to hang on until help can arrive.

But other people have other agendas. Lon Ferrara has just seen pretty much his entire business empire wiped out; but he still runs the town and he is not letting FEMA and the Black Helicopters take it away from him. He declines any outside aid and plans to re-make Freedom into his personal fief.
Dickie Rockwell has much the same goals as Ferrara, except he's less subtle about it. He simply loots whatever he wants and kills anybody who gets in his way. Ferrarra recruits Dickie's gang to augment his own personal militia, but it is soon obvious who is really in control.

In one scene where Dickie's gang has broken into the house of an elderly couple and is about to kill them, Rockwell launches into a rant which underscores the theme of the novel: where Ferrara's self-centered anti-government philosophy will lead.

"Oh well, the police!" Dickie said, strolling around the bloody smear. "Now they want the police! Our ol' pal Mayor Ferrara got rid of them! And you know he got rid of anything connected with 'big government,' so that means no one's here helping, which means, guess what -- real freedom in Freedom! You people are free! We're free! You're free to defend your shit and we're free to take your shit! It's like the pioneer days when they crossed a fucking mountain range and found some people living on the other side and they killed them dead and took their shit away! Now we get to do that! We came over the mountain -- so, we can just take your shit! It's the inspiration of history! Breathtakin' as the Grand Canyon! Ain't freedom grand?"

The story isn't entirely Good Liberals vs Evil Libertarians. There's a flakey New Age "life coach" and a middle-aged stoner who fit into the conservative stereotype of the liberal who are useless or worse. Ferrara even talks up "pooling resources" for the greater good, although in his case the greater good is himself. The author has a strong appreciation for the Right to Bear Arms; it's what enables the surviving townsfolk to defend themselves against the Mayor's militia. The hero, Russ, learning how to use and respect a firearm is a big part of his development from a drifting youth to joining the adults.

Thinking about this book reminded me of some of the other post-Apocalyptic stories I've read. It struck me that a lot of them were about community rather than individualism. Which is odd, given that most people who prepare for Armageddon seem to lean the other way. One of the first post-Apoc novels I ever read was Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon, set in a small Florida town isolated by a nuclear war. How the people in trapped in the town work together is a major part of the story. In David Brin's novel The Postman, it's stated that what caused the Fall of Civilization was not the limited nuclear exchange, or the ecological disaster or the financial collapse -- the country could have survived all of those -- but rather the survivalists who took advantage of the crises to loot and destroy the remaining props of the social order.

Of course, as soon as this notion came to me, I thought of exceptions. Ayn Rand's Anthem came to mind, which is entirely about the exaltation of the Individual over the Group. And the hero of Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold is a square-jawed rugged individualist. On the other hand, Anthem is set many generations after the Fall of Civilization and says nothing about how people initially survived. And although Heinlein is certainly a strong libertarian, he also uses as a recurring theme the individual's responsibility to the community in which he lives.

And perhaps this is a science fiction theme too. Poul Anderson, one of my favorite authors, was like Heinlein a libertarian; but he was also an engineer and I think this latter is why so many of Anderson's stories dealt with fighting against chaos.

In Everything Is Broken, the community is able to defeat the forces of chaos and so will be able to rebuild. Russ, who at the beginning of the crisis can only follow his father's lead, grows in maturity so that he is not only accepted by the "adults" of the community; he is an adult. By the novel's end, he has found a purpose in life. He's going to go back to school to study law enforcement. He wants to do something to contribute to the community.

H.P Lovecraft Part 3: The Colour Out of Space

We're going through a sampling of the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, whose blending of science fiction and horror and a tremendous influence on both genres, selected by S.T. Joshi from his collection The Annotated H.P Lovecraft. Last week we descended into the depths of Exham Priory to discover the ghastly secret of the de la Poer family in "The Rats in the Walls". This week we investigate a horror of a different... (heh heh) ... colour.


"The Colour Out of Space" was one of Lovecraft's favorite stories, and not just because it gave him the opportunity to use the British spelling of "colour" in the title. Lovecraft felt that too many aliens in science fiction stories were simply humans in funny suits, like the "rubber forehead aliens" in some Star Trek episodes. Lovecraft saw no reason why aliens should have either human shapes or human motivations, and he strove to make his Entities From Beyond wholly incomprehensible. In "Colour" he succeeded, probably better than any of his other stories.

I read "The Colour Out of Space" in high school, and it was my first exposure to Lovecraft. I didn't care for it. The story didn't seem to have a plot. A lot of things happened, but the characters mostly observed them. Or were consumed by them. And I found the ending disturbing and unsatisfying, (which is probably the reaction in his readers Lovecraft was going for). Upon re-reading it now, I can appreciate it a little better.

The unnamed Narrator of the story is a surveyor, who has been sent up to the wild hills west of Arkham to survey a new dam. The fictional town of Arkham, Massachusetts is perhaps the center of the Lovecraft Universe. It often turns up in Lovecraft's stories, usually in connection with Miskatonic University, located in that town; and Lovecraft sometimes referred to those particular tales as his "Arkham Cycle". Lovecraft loved the weird, wild corners of New England and placed Arkham and the Miskatonic River right in the middle of it.

While surveying the area the new dam will flood, the Narrator finds a strange, grey patch of land; five acres of desolation upon which nothing grows and which the locals call "The blasted heath."

It must, I thought as I viewed it, be the outcome of a fire, but why had nothing new ever grown over those five acres of grey desolation that sprawled open to the sky like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields? It lay largely to the north of the ancient road line, but encroached a little to the other side. I felt an odd reluctance about approaching, and did so at last only because my business took me through and past it. There was no vegetation of any kind on that broad expanse, but only a fine grey dust or ash which no wind seemed ever to blow about. The trees near it seemed sickly and stunted, and many dead trunks stood or lay rotting at the rim. As I walked hurriedly by I saw the tumbled bricks and stones of an old chimney and cellar on my right, and the yawning black maw of an abandoned well whose stagnant vapours played strange tricks with the hues of the sunlight.

The locals don't talk much about the blasted heath, other than to mutter vaguely about "the strange days". At first the Narrator assumes that this is some old legend of the region, but he learns that the "strange days" occurred within living memory. Old Ammi Pierce knows most about it, but people warn him not to pay attention to Ammi's crazy tales.

So naturally, the Narrator goes to visit Ammi; and after hearing the old man's story, the Narrator decides to return to Boston and resign from the job. He does not wonder that Ammi might be a little cracked or that the local dislike talking about the blasted heath; he doesn't want anything more to do with it either and will be happy when the new reservoir obliterated the cursed spot. He hurries back to town before nightfall; he feels uncomfortable with the thought of being out under the stars of the open sky.

Another writer might have given us Ammi Pierce's story in the man's own words, using the surveyor character only as a framing device. Lovecraft does not. He allows the main narrator to paraphrase Ammi's tale of the strange days. Perhaps Lovecraft just didn't want to write the whole story in dialect, which was a good call on his part; it would have been annoying. Telling the story this way lets the narrator control the foreshadowing and the pacing of how events are revealed. It also allows the narrator to fill in certain technical and scientific details which Ammi would not be able to clearly understand.

The strange days began about fifty years previous, when a meteor landed in the field of Ammi's neighbor, Nahum Gardener. The meteorite caused quite a sensation, and some Professors from Miskatonic University in Arkham came to study it.

The meteorite is quite puzzling; it shrinks in size overnight; it shows no sign of cooling; it's substance is soft and yielding rather than hard and brittle. Most noteworthy, the scientists find a globule inside it of a peculiar color, (sorry, colour), which when struck with a hammer bursts like a bubble, leaving a spherical cavity. The samples taken back to the University for study do not react with any known acids, but do react with the glass containers they are placed in, gradually disintegrating both the beaker and the sample. Most noteworthy, spectroscopic analysis of the samples reveal unknown bands of color, similar to the color of the mysterious globule. Lovecraft describes the analysis in great detail. He had an interest in chemistry in his youth and in spectroscopy in particular, and his description builds the mystery.

A couple days after the meteor lands, a freak thunderstorm comes and the meteorite site is struck repeatedly by lightning. The next day the meteorite is gone. The scientists are disappointed, but they shrug and go back to Arkham.

That autumn, the trees in Nahum's orchard grows a bumper crop of large fruit; but the harvest is disappointing. All the fruit is bitter and uneatable. The same proves to be true of the melons and tomatoes growing near the meteorite site. Nahum guesses that the meteorite has poisoned the soil somehow. His crops upland from the meteorite seem unaffected though. More strange signs appear. During the winter, Nahum notices that the animal tracks he finds in the snow seem peculiar. In the spring, skunk cabbages growing up through the mud have a peculiar colour -- much like the globule -- and emit an odor foul even for skunk cabbage.

Neighbors begin avoiding Nahum's farm, and the Gardeners stop going into town. Soon Ammi is the only neighbor to still visit the Gardener farm. He notices that their water has a bad taste to it and tells Nahum to dig a new well, but Nahum ignores the advice.

Things go from bad to worse. Nahum's wife slowly goes mad and he locks her up in her room. We think of insane family members locked in attics as something out of Jane Eyre, but as late as the 19th Century the state of mental health care was such that there were few better options for treatment, especially for poor rural families. Nahum and his sons go about their routines listlessly, like automatons, and they continue to drink the water. The animals all come sick with a strange malady, their flesh becoming grey and brittle; and all the vegetation on the farm emits a faint glow at night of a peculiar... colour.

One of Nahum's sons falls victim to the same disease as the farm animals. Another goes mad and disappears. What of the third? When Ammi asks of him, Nahum distractedly says that he "lives in the well." Ammi goes upstairs in the farmhouse to try and talk to Nahum's wife. What he finds is horrifying. She too has met the same fate as young Thaddeus and the livestock. She's just not dead yet. Her body still moves as it slowly crumbles. Ammi also encounters something like a cloud, or some hateful current of vapour and for a moment strange colours dance before his eyes.
When he returns downstairs, Nahum has also turned grey and crumbly.

"Nothin' ... nothin' ... the colour ... it burns ... cold an; wet ... but it burns ... it lived in the well ... I seen it ... a kind o' smoke ... jest like the flowers last spring ... the well shone at night ... Than an' Mernie an' Zenas ... everything alive ... suckin' the life out of everything ..."

Ammi flees the farm and goes to the police. Three policemen, along with the coroner  the medical examiner and the local veterinarian accompany him back to the Gardener farm to investigate. They find the grey remains of Nahum and his wife. Examining the well, they find the skeletons of the two missing boys.
 
Their investigation takes longer than Ammi would like and night falls. Light begins pouring out of the well and the trees outside the farmhouse begin to writhe on their own accord with no wind to stir them, the tips of their branches glowing like St. Elmo's fire. The very planks and beams of the old farmhouse begin to glow eerily.

A column of the unknown colour shoots out of the well, straight up into the sky, taking with it all the trees, all the wood, everything organic in the farm. The men only barely escape.

Something had come with the meteor, that was clear; something from another world, something the sucked the life out of every living thing it touched; something which had now returned to the stars which spawned it, leaving nothing but grey desolation behind it.

Or has it completely gone? Ammi has his doubts. As they fled the farmhouse, Ammi looked back and thought he saw something feebly rise after the cataclysm, only to sink back down into the well. And the toxic grey blight of the blasted heath continues to spread about an inch more every year.

Once the dam is built, the waters of the reservoir will cover the site and put an end to the last vestiges of the strange days. Perhaps. But the Narrator thinks he will not want to drink any of the water in the Town of Arkham when it does.

Meanwhile I hope nothing will happen to Ammi. He saw so much of the thing -- and its influence was so insidious. ...I would hate to think of him as the grey, twisted, brittle monstrosity which persists more and more in troubling my sleep.

NEXT:  What's with weird Wilbur Whateley? And what does it have to do with the Necronomicon? The hills are alive with the sound of "The Dunwich Horror"! Tell 'em Yog-Sothoth sent you!

H.P. Lovecraft Part 2: The Rats in the Walls

Last week we took a very brief look at the life and career of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the Grand-daddy of Cosmic Horror and Elder Godfather of the Necronomicon. From here we're going to look at a few of Lovecraft's best stories, as selected by S.T. Joshi in his collection The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft. We're starting off with "The Rats in the Walls", a tale which Joshi calls "a nearly flawless example of the short story in its condensation, its narrative pacing, its thunderous climax, and its mingling of horror and poignancy."


"The Rats in the Walls" was an early story of Lovecraft's, published in Weird Tales, and considered by some critics to be the first story specifically written for the pulp market.
It's narrator, a man named Delapore, comes from a wealthy Virginia family whose founder had come to America in the 17th Century because of some un-named scandal. The records relating to this family secret were lost when the Delapore's house was burned during the Civil War, and so the narrator is ignorant of this secret when he goes to England to research his family history and buys the ancient family estate, Exham Priory.

The Priory is a ruin, having been left vacant for centuries. The locals will have nothing to do with it, and Delapore has to bring in outside contractors to renovate. The de la Poer family, it seems, has had a bad reputation going back to the reign of Henry III, and Delapore's ancestor, Walter de la Poer, murdered his entire family with the help of four servants after making a "shocking discovery" and then fled to America. That the locals do not blame Walter for this says something about the family's reputation. The narrator begins delving into his family's history with the help of Captain Edward Norrys, one of his son's army buddies whose family had owned the land on which Exham Priory stands.

Although the narrator claims to be repelled by the gruesome hints of his family's misdeeds, and is repelled by the one black sheep on the American side of his family, (a cousin who "went among the negroes and became a voodoo priest after he returned from the Mexican War", one gets the sense that he has a morbid fascination with it all.

Shortly after moving into the renovated Priory, the narrator finds that the cats, of which he owns several, seemed to be highly agitated in the building. He notes in particular that the old black tom cat he brought with him from the States seems disturbed about something in the house.

I mention the cat in particular because it's an example of one facet of Lovecraft that many modern readers can find disturbing -- and not in the way he hoped they'd be disturbed. Lovecraft was raised as a child of privilege in an exclusively white upper-class New England home, and from that upbringing unpleasant bits of racism occasionally arise in his writing. His exposure to a more cosmopolitan environment when he lived in New York and widened his circle of friends mitigated these views to some extent; but at the same time, struggling to find work in a city flooded with immigrants helped intensify his dislike of foreigners.

We saw a hint of his racist attitudes in the narrator's comment about his cousin the voodoo priest. Here we get something a lot less subtle. Lovecraft names the narrator's black cat "Nigger Man".
I am sure Lovecraft was not intending to be offensive here. He named the cat in the story after his own cat. The cat has no connection to blacks in the story other than his color. I suspect that this was more of an unconscious, oblivious racism arising from his sheltered upbringing rather than an intentional demeaning of a race of people; I find his comment about the cousin who lived among the negroes more indicative of Lovecraft's attitudes about race than the name of the cat is. Still, there it is.

Whatever the cat's name he seems agitated about something. At first the narrator guesses that some sort of odor, undetectable by human senses, was emanating from the walls. Either that or the place is infested with rats; there was a local legend about swarms of rats pouring out of the Priory a couple months after Walter de la Poer's departure. But the workmen had found no evidence of rodents during the renovation project.

At the same time, the Narrator begins having hideous dreams:

I seemed to be looking down from an immense height upon a twilit grotto, knee-deep with filth, where a white-bearded daemon swineherd drove about with a his staff a flock of fungous, flabby beasts whose appearance filled me with unutterable loathing.

The cat's nocturnal agitation leads the narrator down to the Priory's sub-basement, a crypt constructed in Roman times and used to worship an eastern god named Attys associated with the goddess Cybele. The foundations of the temple were believed to have dated back to the time of Stonehenge. Now the narrator can plainly hear the sounds of rats scrabbling in the walls which are driving the cats crazy.

He summons his friend Norrys and together they investigate the crypt. The cat seems intent on something underneath the crypt's big stone altar, but the two men can't budge it. Here Lovecraft does something remarkable.

He has his hero do the sensible thing.

Instead of trying to break into whatever lies beneath the crypt on their own, as characters in a bad horror movie might, the Narrator and Norrys recruit several eminent authorities, experts in the fields of archaeology, history and psychic phenomena to help investigate the mystery. Lovecraft did not like the "idiot plot" where the protagonists have to act like idiots in order for the plot to work. His heroes are perfectly willing to bring in experts to aid in facing the Unknown.

Not that it helps the protagonist much.

The Narrator and his team of Eminent Men of Science uncover an ancient stairway beneath the prehistoric altar; stairs worn down by unknown millenia of footsteps. Scattered about the steps lie bones; mostly human, but many displaying sub-human qualities, suggesting that they have degenerated. Some of these sub-human skeletons seems to be quadrupeds. They also see the bones of many rats

At the bottom of the steps they find a huge grotto; the grotto from the narrator's dream. In that grotto are several structures from varied periods of history: a neolithic circle of standing stones, a Roman ruin, a Saxon house. One of the buildings contained the remains of pens where once dwelt the pale, flabby beasts of the narrator's dreams. Most ghastly, perhaps, is the most recent building, dating to the early English period, containing a butcher's shop and kitchen.

This is clearly the secret that William de la Poer discovered; an antediluvian cult whose unspeakable practices had continued down through the Romans and through the Narrator's own family.
The Narrator ventures beyond the buildings into the dark abyss deep in the grotto. He loses track of his companions and begins to rave. His free-association rantings spiral backwards in time, going from modern English, to Elizabethan, to Middle English, Latin, Gaelic and finally degenerating into inarticulate grunts.

He ends up in an insane asylum. Exham Priory has been dynamited to forever seal the secret beneath it.

When I speak of poor Norrys they accuse me of a hideous thing, but they must know that I did not do it, They must know it was the rats, the slithering  scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep...

Even in the barred room in the asylum, he still hears the noises of the rats, the rats in the walls.

NEXT:  HPL's Wonderful World of the Colour Out of Space! Taste the Rainbow!  Fear the Rainbow!

H.P. Lovecraft: Part 1: Introduction

(Originally posted on Daily Kos)

I've never been a big fan of H.P. Lovecraft. Although I loved monster movies as a kid, that love didn't really translate over to horror fiction. I read "The Colour Out of Space" in high school and later borrowed a collection of Lovecraft stories from a friend who was a Cthulhu fan, but I didn't really get into them. I found Lovecraft's prose to be dense and his characters not terribly engaging. Most of all, I found Lovecraft's over-riding theme that Humanity is but a meaningless speck in a vast, uncaring (if not outright hostile) cosmos, unappealing.

But recently, I've been reading through a couple volumes of Lovecraft edited and annotated by Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi that have been making me look at his work in a different light. I hadn't really thought of Lovecraft as a science fiction writer, but actually his Cosmic Horror springs as much from his understanding of Science as it does from a sense of the Supernatural, and Lovecraft took great pains to check his stories against the science of his day. Although I've read little of Lovecraft's work before, the truth is that all my life I've been reading stories that were influenced by him.


Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in 1890 to a prosperous upper-class family in Providence, Rhode Island. As a boy he had an intense love of reading and a burning curiosity about science. His favorite authors were the great Victorian authors of imaginative literature, like Arthur Machan, Lord Dunasy, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe. Raised to privilege, he tried to model himself as a gentleman. But with the death of his grandfather and the subsequent mis-management of his grandfather's estate, the family fortune dwindled. His family's lack of money and an illness which prevented him from finishing high school kept him from attending college. He found himself an unemployed gentleman with no marketable job skills, except his imagination.

What saved him was blogging. The Internet, of course, did not exist in 1914, but something else did: Amateur Publishing Associations. These early fanzines were publications in which amateur journalists could write about things that interested them and distribute them. Lovecraft had already earned a small reputation writing to the letters columns of magazines such as Argosy, and was invited to join once such APA.

This proved to be a perfect outlet for Lovecraft's self-expression because it allowed him to find an audience for his writing and make friends. The lack of pay did not bother him, because he felt that a gentleman ought not to stoop to writing for hire; he believed in Art for Art's Sake. The contact and correspondence with other views also allowed him to somewhat broaden the insular outlook his sheltered childhood had given him.

One of his friends was starting a humor magazine and asked Lovecraft to contribute a series of stories for it. The resulting serial, "Herbert West -- Reanimator", was a broad parody of the horror genre and Lovecraft detested it. Still, it was an entrance into the world of Commercial Fiction.

In 1923 the magazine Weird Tales was founded, considered by many critics to be the first Pulp Magazine. Lovecraft's circle of friends urged him to submit to it. Although many of his stories were published in the pulps, Lovecraft never considered himself a pulp writer. He disdained writers who cranked out verbiage by the yard according to formula and tried to hold himself to the artistic standards of Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe.

By this time, Lovecraft's life had undergone dramatic upheavals. His mother had died after a lengthy illness. Sometime afterwards, he met a woman named Sonia H. Greene, a widow seven years his senior, at an amateur journalism convention. She persuaded him to move to New York and they married. Sonia was a businesswoman who owned a hat shop; but shortly after their marriage, the shop failed. She was able to find a new job in Cleveland, but her husband stayed in New York.
Life in the Big City did not suit Lovecraft. He found it threatening and impersonal. In addition, he had difficulty finding work. About the only good thing about his "exile", as he called it, was that it gave him greater contact with the friends he had made through his correspondence. His circle of friends became known as "The Kalem Club", because most of it's members had names starting with the letters "K", "L" or "M".

After a few years, his aunts in Providence invited him to move in with them. He welcomed the chance to escape the hated metropolis. The invitation did not extend to Sonia. She was, after all, in Trade, and the idea of her opening a shop in Providence was unthinkable. And the fact that she was a Russian Jew probably had a lot to do with it too. Lovecraft acceded to his aunt's demands. He rarely saw his wife any more anyway; now he saw her even less, and they divorced in 1929.

His return to Providence marked a burst of output, and here he wrote what are considered some of his best stories, including the stories associated with what later became known as the "Cthulhu Mythos". Many of these stories were set in upstate Massachusetts near a fictional town called Arkham where the fabled Miskatonic University was located and many referenced a nebulous body of lore found in that unspeakable tome, the Necronomicon.

Lovecraft is sometimes regarded as a man born in the wrong century, because of his outdated notions of gentility and his pre-Victorian mannerisms, but in many ways he was very much a man of his time, the early Twentieth Century. He had an abiding interest in science, but his philosophical interest led him to make connections that others might not have. For him the great revelation of Einstein's Theory of Relativity was not in physics, but in metaphysics; by demonstrating that Matter and Energy are interchangeable  Lovecraft felt that Einstein had demolished the ancient duality of Matter and Spirit. On a broader theme, mankind has known since Copernicus that he was not the Center of the Universe; but most people didn't think much about what that really, really meant. Lovecraft did.

Lovecraft died in 1937 of intestinal cancer. After his death, one of his friends August Derleth started a publishing company, Arkham House, to keep his works in print. He also appointed himself a sort of keeper of the flame, organizing and expanding upon Lovecraft's stories into a kind of continuity, codifying the amorphous, non-Euclidian lore of Old Ones and Elder Gods into organized pantheons. Derleth's "Cthulhu Mythos" is controversial among Lovecraft fans, but he did much to keep Lovecraft's stories alive.

Since Lovecraft wrote mostly shorter works, instead of discussing a single story of his, I'll be looking at a few of his short stories and a novella, which are collected in The Annotated H.P Lovecraft, edited by S.T. Joshi. I intended to start on the first one this week, but my biographical sketch would up a bit long; so next week we'll find out what's with "The Rats in the Walls" and experience the terror of "The Colour Out of Space."

Lord of Light part 7: End of the Yuga

(Concluding my look at Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light)



As last we saw, Sam, the Binder of Demons and fraudulent Buddha has once again been captured by the gods after a bloody and destructive battle. To keep him out of their divine hair once and for all, the gods have used their mind-transfer technology to beam his consciousness into the magnetic cloud that encircles the planet. And here the narrative finally fits back to the first chapter, where we saw Yama, the god of Death, retrieving Sam's soul from Nirvana. Most of the novel so far has been one lengthy flashback; but now we are finally back in the present.

The Yuga is about to begin.


But before we rejoin Sam, we're going to visit with someone else.

Jan Olvegg was once the captain of the Star of India, the colony ship which landed on this planet in the legendary past. Unlike the rest of the crew, who used advanced technology to develop god-like powers and rule the other passengers as deities; Olvegg has been content to keep his head down and try to stay under Heaven's radar. We met him in Chapter Two, when Sam broke the Body Merchants of Mahartha. The young body Sam aquired for him then is ancient now, and Olvegg has spent many years sailing the southern seas. But now, his ship has been captured and he has been brought before Nirriti the Black.

Nirriti has been something of a boogeyman thoughout the novel so far, mentioned in passing, usually with a shudder. He is an enemy of the gods and commands armies of zombies. But his full story only comes out in bits and pieces.

Nirriti's original name was Renfew and he was the ship's chaplain. He objected to the crew making themselves gods, and eventually left their company, taking with him a group of his own followers and some equipment, including the body-transfer tech used by the gods to keep themselves immortal. Ganesha, the Karl Rove of Heaven, permitted him to do so under the assumption that it might be convenient to have an Enemy some day to use as a political scapegoat. Nirriti used the cloning equipment to make his army of "soulless ones", mindless minions with enough intelligence to follow orders, but no more.

He is a fanatic and one gets the impression he is more than a little unhinged. And yet, in the Second Chapter, Sam refers to him as his patron; and at the battle of Keenset, Sam accepts the zombies Nirriti sends in defence of the city. Yama distrusts him. Nirriti may be an enemy of the gods, but he is no champion of science or technology; and Yama fears that Nirriti would set up a theocracy as opressive as the one Sam seeks to topple.

Nirriti is delighted to meet Olvegg. "One of the First, and -- yes! -- a Christian!"

"Occasionally, when I run out of Hindi swear words," Olvegg admits.

Nirriti gladly welcomes a new ally in his crusade against the false gods of the Celestial City. For his own part, Olvegg would also be happy to see Heaven fall and agrees to join up with the Black One.

Taraka, chief of the Rakasha has also allied himself with Nirriti. Why a fanatical Christian would join forces with a demon is not explained. Perhaps Nirriti considers the gods to be the greater evil. Perhaps, (and this would be ironic), Nirriti does not consider the Rakasha to be demons because he knows that they are not supernatural and the demons he believes in are.

But we are more interested in Taraka's motivations. Although his kind left their physical bodies untold ages ago, he still seems to be driven chiefly by testosterone. He feels a macho need to test himself against every male he encounters. He respects Sam, the Binder, because Sam bested him long ago. He tried himself against Agni, the god of Fire, and was scared by the intensity of the Fire god's power. But Agni was killed by Yama, whose deathgaze is capable of sucking the life out of any creature, even one such as Taraka. And even the Binder expressed respect for Yama's power. Taraka's only encounters so far with Yama have been inconclusive, and he's been itching for a rematch.

Since Keenset, Nirriti has been amassing his power, building his zombies into a mighty army with armaments and sky gondolas. He is now ready to strike against Heaven. With the aid of Taraka's demons, Nirriti's forces have been working their way northward, city by city. Eventually, the gods will have to get involved.

Brahma, ruler of the gods, and Ganesha, his advisor, are discussing just this very thing. The city of Mahartha is about to fall to Nirriti's forces, and Brahma is recieving pleas for help from tha city's temple.

"In the old days I would have taken the thunder chariot--" Brahma gumbles.

"In the old days there was not thunder chariot," Ganesha reminds him; "Lord Yama --"

"Silence! We have a thunder chariot now. I think the tall man of smoke who wears a wide hat shall bend above Nirriti's palace."

The "tall man of smoke" pretty clearly seems to be an allusion to a mushroom cloud. The two decide to let Nirriti take Mahartha to assess his power, and when Nirriti tries to hold that city, "then let the man of smoke nod his wide white hat -- over Mahartha." Brahma tells Ganesha to recall Indra, one of their mightiest warriors who has been off-stage for most of the book fighting a vaguely-defined campaign against the witches of the Eastern Continent; and to warn those cities next in Nirriti's path: Lananda, Khaipur, and Kilbar.

It is in Khaipur, in the Palace of Kama, that Sam and his friends have made their new headquarters. The establishment is run by Ratri, goddess of the Night, under an alias, and is known profanely as the Fornicatorium. The last place anyone would look for the Buddha.

"During the weeks we have dwelled here in Ratri's palace, I have meditated on my past lives," Sam says to Yama. "They were not all failures, deathgod... Though Heaven has beaten me at every turn, each victory hs cost them much."

"Yes, it would seem you are a man of destiny. They are actually weaker now than they were the day you challenged their power at Mahartha. They are also relatively weaker. This is because men are stronger. The gods broke Keenset, but they did not break Acceleration. Then they tried to bury Buddhism within their own teachings, but they could not. I cannot really say whether your religion helped with the plot of this tale you are writing, by encouraging Acceleration in any way whatsoever, but then none of the gods could say either. It served as a good fog, though -- it diverted their attention from mischief they might have been making, and since it did happen to 'take' as a teaching, their efforts against it served to arouse some anti-Deicrat sentiment. You would seem inspired if you didn't seem shrewd." 

"Thank you. Do you want my blessing?" 

"No, do you want mine?" 

"Perhaps, Death, later."

While Sam has been indulging in multi-chapter flashbacks, Yama has been gathering their own forces. Kubera has returned. He escaped the fall of Keenset and has been covertly leaking technology over the past fifty years. He hooked up with Sam's former personal physician, whom Sam gave charge of the body tranfer equipment he stole from the Lords of Karma in Mahartha. Yama has also sent word to the small kingdom Sam used to rule back when he was Prince Siddhartha, and they are willing to send an army to aid their former ruler. Yama has also tracked down Krishna, a lechreous drunk much of the time, but one of the most formidable fighters of all the gods when he is sober. Krishna left Heaven rather than participate in the battle of Keenset. He did not wish to fight his brother Lokapalas, and has been an exile ever since. "Yama, Kubera, Krishna, and if you're willing -- Kalkin!" Yama says, addressing Sam by one of his oldest names. "We will be the new Lokapalas, and we will stand together!"

"I've been designing new weapons. It is a shame that there must be so many separate and exotic ones. It is quite a drain on my genius to make each a work of art, rather than to mass-produce a particular species of offence. But the plurality of the paranormal dictates it. Someone always has an Attribute to stand against any one weapon. Let them face, though, the Gehenna Gun and be fibrillated apart, or cross blades with the Electrosword, or stand before the Fountain Shield, with its spray of cyanide and dimethyl sulfoxide, and they will know that is its the Lokapalas thsy face!"

Sam suggests also enlisting the Rakasha and Nirriti. Yama resists both suggestions. The demons, he says, cannot be trusted; as for Nirriti, perhaps the best thing would be to stand back while he and the gods slug it out and then attack the victor. Yama asks if Sam can persuade his Buddhist followers to fight. "Possibly, but I might have to assume an identity I now find distasteful." He's developed some ethical qualms about using religion to scam people since returning from Nirvana.

Kubera reunites with Ratri in her garden. She barely recognizes him; he has gotten a new body and Yama's been keeping him so busy building things that he hasn't had the time to let it go to fat. Kubera apologizes for dragging her into exile that day in the Celestial City when he fled with Sam. She tells him not to feel guilty. "I would have left the City soon, at any rate."

Tak joins them. He has had the opportunity to gain a new body also, but has elected to remain as an ape for the time being because it is a useful form for spying. They discuss news about Nirriti and speculate on what Sam's plans may be. "I have always wanted to go to battle at the side of the Binder," Tak says. "In the weeks to come, I am certain that almost as many wishes will be granted as broken," Kubera replies.

Sam has decided on a course of action. He summons Taraka and has his carry a message to Nirriti. He is willing to ally himself and his supporters with Nirriti's crusade against the gods if Nirriti will agree to neither attempt to convert Hindus nor Buddhists by the sword, nor to try to repress technology as the gods have done.

"He knows that, if the gods were no longer present to enforce Hinduism as they do, then he would gain converts. He cas see this from what I managed to do with Buddhism, despite their opposition. He feels that his way is the only right way and that it is destined to prevail in the face of competition. I think he would agree to fair competition for this reason."

Sam tells Taraka to "look upon his flames" when Nirriti answers to see if he's answering truthfully, and then bring back that answer.

Before he goes, Taraka asks him, "Which one is the right way?"

"Huh? You're asking me that? How should I know?'

"Mortals call you Buddha." 

"That is only because they are afflicted with language and ignorance." 

"No. I have looked upon your flames and name you Lord of Light. You bind them as you bound us, you loose them as you loosed us. Yours was the power to lay a belief upon them. You are what you claimed to be." 

"I lied. I never believed in it myself, and I still don't. I could just as easily have chosen another way -- say, Nirriti's religion -- only crucifixion hurts. I might have chosen one called Islam, only I know too well how it mixes with Hinduism. My choice was based upon calculation, not inspiration, and I am nothing." 

"You are the Lord of Light."

Taraka also asks Sam if he could defeat Yama in battle. "I don't think so... I don't think anyone could." Sam does not realize the importance of this question.

The Demon Lord leaves Sam but does not go to Nirriti. He does not want Sam and Nirriti to join forces; not while Yama is on Sam's side. Taraka wants his rematch with Yama to determine which of them is the baddest badass on the planet. So he delivers Sam's message to the heart of a storm. "For the storm never lies ... and it always says No!"


But Nirriti does receive an offer from an unexpected quarter. Ganesha shows up in his camp. "You know I am a Christian sympathizer," Ganesha says, reminding Nirriti how he aided him in his flight from Heaven. Ganesha tells him that the gods plan to let Nirriti tire himself out taking the next few cities, then meeting him in force at the city of Kilbar; but Ganesha's own plan is for the demigods who have been dispatched to defend Kilbar to take a dive. A lot of the younger demigods are dissatisfied with Brahma's rule; and perhaps Ganesha has decided that this Brahma is not as malleable as the previous one. He does not say exactly what he gets out of all this; he merely asks Nirriti to remember his visit and his offer.

"Would you trust this one?" Olvegg asks after Ganesha has left.

"Yes, but I would give him his silver afterward."

Sam holds a council of war. Taraka has told him that Nirriti has rejected his offer. Nirriti's forces are advancing, city by city, up the river. Khaipur, where Sam and his friends are, lies right in their path. "We could not make a deal with Nirriti. Do you think we could make one with Heaven?"

This outrages Yama. Hasn't Sam's whole campaign been a war against the gods?

No, Sam tells him, the campaign has been about Acceleration; empowering the humans of the planet to improve their tech level and their lives without an oppressive hand over them. The gods have actually been doing very little these past fifty years while Sam dreamed in Nirvana to hinder technology; and humans have shown a greater willingness to defy the mandates of Heaven. "Since this is the situation as it actually exists, they have nothing to lose by acknowledging it. In fact, they could make it a show to their favor, as a benign gesture of divine graciousness. I think theat they would be willing to make the concessions Nirriti would not --"

"Heaven fell that day at Keenset," Sam continues. "Another generation, perhaps two, and its power over mortals will have passed... They have reached their peak. Their decline has set in."

Yama is still not happy. He has personal reasons for wanting Heaven to fall: he still has an obsessive love for Kali, his one time lover and wife who now wears the body and the role of Brahma; as well as an implacable hatred of her for her betrayal of him. Not a good situation. Sam promises that he will deal with Brahma.

As he did before in Mahartha, Sam calls Heaven through the local temple's communication system. "Who are you who wears the turban of the First and goes armed in the Temple," Brahma demands.

"Rild didn't kill me. The phantom cat who shall remain nameless did a good job, but it wasn't good enough. And now I've crossed back over the Bridge of the Gods. The Lokapalas have chosen me as their leader. We will defend Khaipur and break Nirriti, if Heaven will help us." 

"Sam... it couldn't be you!' 

"Then call me Kalkin, or Siddhartha, or Tathagatha, or Mahasamatman, or Binder, or Buddha, or Maitreya. It's Sam, though. I have come to worship thee and make a bargain."

Sam lays out his offer: roughly the same one he had for Nirriti. He wants Heaven to sanction Acceleration and religious freedom. In addition, he wants an end to the Lords of Karma's religious monopoly on reincarnation. "The first two merely amount to agreeing that something does exist and has a right to go on. The third will come to pass whether you like it or not, so I'm giving you a chance to be graceful about it."

Brahma agrees and tells Sam to untie the temple's priest. Then adds:

"After the battle, should we live, I would talk with you -- concerning mutual worshp." 

"You wish to become a Buddhist?" 

"No, a woman again..."

Unlike the Battle of Keenset in the previous chapter, we get very few glimpses of the Battle of Khaipur. Ganesha tries one last bit of treachery, attempting to stab Brahma in the back in the heat of the battle, but he is killed instead by Olvegg. Nirriti, clad in Kirbyesque battle armor, engages Brahma in hand-to-hand combat.

As Yama rides to Brahma's aid, he gets hit by several gallons of water. It's not a premature victory bath of Gatorade; it's Taraka, washing the demon repellant of Yama so that the two of them can fight. Now Taraka finally gets his wish; he gets to test himself againt the full fury of Yama's power. Brahma breaks Nirriti's neck but is attacked by Indra who tries to complete the betrayal planned by Ganesha.

Sam rides up to the scene in time to see Taraka as the demon's life is extinguished. "Oh foolish demon! ...It need not have been..." Olvegg is badly wounded. Nirriti is dying. Indra is dead. And so is Brahma.

Yama drops down beside Brahma, the deathgod desperately trying to revive the one who had been his lover. "Too late," says Nirriti, "Or rather, just in time. You're Azreal, aren't you? The Angel of Death..."

Furious, Yama slaps Nirriti, who responds by reciting the Beatitudes: "Blessed are the poor in spirit... Blessed are they that mourn... Blessed are the meek..."

"'And blessed are the peacemakers,'" Yama snaps at him. "'for they will be called the children of God. Where do your fit into the picture, Black One? Whose child are you, to have wrought as you have done?" In disgust, Yama turns from the mad cleric; picks up Brahma and walks back to the city.

Sam, however, offers the dying man a drink from his canteen. Nirriti recognizes him. "You? You rose again?"

"It doesn't count," says Sam. I didn't do it the hard way."

One gets the sense in this poignant conversation that this was not the battle Sam ever wanted to win, or even to fight. "I agree with everything you said to Yama, and so do the followers of the one they called the Buddha.... Whatever the source, the message was pure, believe men That is the only reason it took root and grew."

"It was a greater will than mine that determined I die in the arms of the Buddha, that decided upon this Way for this world," Nirriti says. "Give me your blessing, oh Gautama. I die now."

The battle is over now, and Khaipur stands. Kubera brings the badly wounded Olvegg to the Halls of Karma and and finds unexpected carnage; all the technicians have been killed. The dead body of Brahma lies on one of the transfer tables. "Someone must have told Yama he couldn't use the machinery to try a transfer," Kubera says.

Tak has been given a human body again, and has decided to join up with Jan Olvegg, now healed, and go seeking adventure. "I'd like to see the rest of the world, Kubera, before you manage to mechanize all the magic out of it." He also looks up Sam to say good-bye. "I knew you'd win. I knew you'd find the answer."

"It was just a small battle," Sam insists. "They could have done as well without me."
But he does concede that "Something always manages to draw me near the tree that lightning is about to fall upon." It's not Desinty, he insists, "Rather an accidental social conscience and some right mistake-making, I fear." Sam turns down Tak's offer to come adventuring with him, and muses that perhaps he'll take Tak's old job and become Sam of the Archives. Tak finds this unlikely.

Kubera has finally tracked Yama down. He finds the deathgod holed up in an inn with a girl, scarcely more than a child, whom he is trying to teach how to speak. "She is my daughter," Yama tells Kubera. "Her name is Murga." The reader might miss it, but one of Kali's other names was Durga. "She is retarded," Yama continues. "She suffered some brain damage..."

"Congenital, or transfer effect?" Kubera asks. He's not stupid. Yama had attempted to transfer Kali's soul into a new body at the Hall of Karma, but Brahma was already too far gone. But none of this is explicitly stated, and Yama insists, "She is my daughter... Murga." The cycle of reincarnation has ended for Kali. She has been reborn, but is now a completely different woman; a blank slate.

Kubera offers to help; and uses his power to infuse inanimate objects with emotional states, he stimulates the learning centers of her brain. "The Lokapalas are never defeated."

The narrative ends by once again taking a step back into the voice of the storyteller. We are given four different accounts of Sam's departure. Some say he left Khaipur to put on the saffron robe of an anonymous monk. Some say that he was called back to Nirvana by the Powers Beyond Life. Others say that he adopted yet a new identity and walks among mankind still to carry on the fight defending the lowly from oppression. Then there are those who say he reconsidered Tak's offer and journeyed off to the Eastern Continent where new battles and adventures awaited.

Yama departed also, leaving his daughter in the hands of Kubera and Ratri; and he too may have ridden off into the east. The fate of both are unknown.

But look around you... 

Death and Light are everywhere, always, and they begin, end, strive, attend, into and upon the Dream of the Nameless tha is the world, burning words within Samsara, perhaps to create a thing of beauty. 

And the wearers of the saffron robe still meditate upon the Way of Light, and the girl who is named Murga visits the Temple daily, to place before her dark one in his shrine the only devotion he receives, of flowers.

I was recently told that the internet is responsible for moral decay

Thus I've come to the conclusion, porn began with the internet.

Lord of Light Part 6: Murder in Heaven

Continuing my look at Roger Zelanzy's novel Lord of Light

Prince Siddhartha, the Great-Souled Sam, the Binder of Demons and the Buddha is no more; his body, torn to pieces by the phantom cats of Kuriburrha has been burned in the Celestial City amidst great celebrations. The gods have had their vengence. But events have been set in motion which cannot be ended by something as simple as a pride of mutant tigers, and Sam's subversive campaign against Heaven is far from over. Like Yellowbeard the pirate, saints are never more dangerous than when they're dead.


The gods have something of a problem on their hands. Lord Brahma, the Creator of the Universe and chief god of the ruling Triumverate, has been found in his garden with an acute case of mortality. Not only is he merely dead, he's also most sincerely dead.

The surviving members of the Triumverate, Vishnu the Preserver and Shiva the Destroyer, along with Ganesha, the god-maker, meet to discuss what to do.

"The first order of business must be the selection of his successor," Ganesha says. "Heaven must never be without a Brahma." The obvious choice is Ganesha himself, but the god-maker declines. He prefers being the Power Behind the Throne.

One by one, the Triumverate go through their options. They consider the Lokapalas, the tightly-knit brotherhood of gods who are highly respected; but Yama is "too serious, too conscientious -- a technician, not an administrator." Kubera is "Too smart. I'm afraid of Kubera." Indra is "too headstrong" and Krishna is "never sober."

Ganesha approaches the problem from another direction:

"What is our greatest problem at the present time?" 

"I do not feel we have any great probems at the present time," said Vishnu. 

"Then it might be wise to have one just about now," said Ganesha. "I feel that our greatest probelm is Accelerationism. Sam came back, stirring, making clear waters muddy." 

"Yes," said Shiva. 

"Accelerationism? Why kick a dead dog?" 

"Ah, but it is not dead. Not down among men. And it will serve to direct attention away from the succession within Trimurti and regain at least surface solidarity here in the City. Unless, of course you'd rather undertake a campaign agaisnt Nirriti and his zombies?" 

"No thanks."

Ganesha has an unorthodox suggestion. Kali should become the next Brahma. "The twin beasts, Buddhism and Accelerationism, draw a single chariot. The Buddha scorned her. She is a woman. She will carry on the campaign."

Assuming the role of Brahma will mean that Kali will have to forsake her female body and take on the form of a man. Her new husband Yama is not going to like that, but Ganesha is confident that he can handle the deathgod. Handling people is what Ganesha does best.


Back in the early days, there had been a split among the original crew of the colony ship, who had augmented themselves with god-like powers to tame the planet. Some of them, called Accelerationists, wanted to share their technology with the rest of the passengers, who had fallen into a relatively primitive state in the interim. The majority, called the Deicrats, wanted to maintain the status quo with them ruling over the rest as gods. Possessing a monopoly on the body-transfer technology that assured virtual immortality, the Deicrats were able to simply outlive their political opponents. Sam was the last Accelerationist; and who knew he would be the most dangerous.

Ganesha is correct that Accelerationism is not dead among men. We next get a vingette showing two men discussing a wondrous invention one is having installed in his house. "...a thing into which these items are dischared -- into the water -- and then a lever pulled, and then, with a mighty rushing sound, thse things are borne away, far beneath the ground... it involves great pipes and a seat without a bottom, or a top, really. It is the most wonderful discovery of the age..." Men are rediscovering technology.

Yama and Kali are called back from their honeymoon. Ganesha asks Yama to investigate Brahma's murder. Being the god of Death, and a genius to boot, he is the obvious person to ask. Ganesha also asks Kali if she would assume the golden saddle and silver spurs of Brahma. To Yama's dismay, Kali does not immediately reject the idea. Privately, he urges her to refuse Ganesha's request. Traditionally, when one partner in a marriage transfers to a new body, the marriage is dissolved.

"Then if you love me -- and you are truly my lady --" he says, "then let another be Brahma."

"I am sorry, Yama..." Kali replies.

Yama goes off to the Pavilion of Silence to brood, and spends a day and a night there. When he emerges, he learns another murder has been committed. Shiva has been found with his head bashed in by a blunt instrument. There is a new hole in the Dome of Heaven to show where he fired at his assailant with his trident of anihilation and missed.

He consults briefly with his friend Kubera. They agree that both murders were likely committed by the same person, and that it was a person known to both victims. Kubera doubts that the crimes are part of an Accelerationist conspiracy, but concedes that they might be the result of someone's vendetta. "Has the investigation been given into your hands?" he asks Yama.

"I am no longer certain. I think so. But I will find who did it, whatever his station , and kill him." 

"Why?" 

"I have need of something to do, someone to..." 

"Kill?" 

"Yes." 

"I am sorry, my friend."

After Yama leaves, Ratri, the goddess of Night also visits Kubera for some advice. She thinks that she was "either the last to see Brahma alive or the first to see him dead, depending upon what his twitching signified." Now she fears that she will be suspected of his murder. Kubera tells her it would be better to come clean to Yama now, rather than have this information come out once the Deathgod starts brain-scanning everyone; but he promises his protection.


Yama identifies no fewer than thirty-seven people who had opportunity to poison Brahma, several of whom are gods. He uses the psych-probe he designed to investigate each one of them; and they all came up innocent. For the moment, Yama is baffled, but Kubera has an idea which he investigates on his own.


While the investigations proceed, Kali, the new Brahma, announces plans to strike against Accelerationism. A city called Keenset, on the river Vedra, has been experiencing something of a technical renaissance. The printing press has been re-discovered; sophisticated plumbing is being developed and a clever glasscutter has invented bifocals. This kind of thing has to be nipped in the bud. Along with Agni, who has assumed Shiva's role, and Mara, they begin to assemble an army of demigods and mortals to crush Keenset.

Kubera finds who he is looking for lying on a grassy hilltop. It is Sam, but wearing the body of Murugan, whom we last saw demanding a fresh form for Kail and Yama's wedding.

"You killed a weak Brahma and a mighty one has replaced him... You killed a strong Shiva, but an equal strength replaces his," Kubera says. He asks Sam why. "What did you hope to gain? Revenge?"

"Revenge is part of the illusion of self," Sam says. But Kubera won't settle for koans. Pressed, Sam continues,

"I decided that mankind could live better without gods. If I disposed of them all, people could start having can operners and cans to open again, and things like that, without fearing the wrath of Heaven. We've stepped on these poor fools enough. I wanted to give them a chance to be free, to build what they wanted."

Sam asks how Kubera found him out. "It occurered to me that Sam would be the number one suspect, except for the fact that he was dead," Kubera says. "I had assumed that to be sufficient defense against detection," Sam replies.

Kubera had guessed that if Sam were one of Yama's thirty-seven suspects, Sam's electro-direction powers might have been able to cause Yama's psych probe to give a false reading. Kubera noted that Murugan had recieved a new body shortly after Sam's death. Comaring Murugan's brain scans to earlier scans on record, Kubera determined that they were of two different persons.

Sam confirms his guess, and tells how Takara the demon had "strengthened his flames," allowing him to exist as the Rakasha do in a disembodied state after his body was killed. Finding Murugan's new body being prepped for a mind transfer, he slipped in. "I went into Murugan's new body and Murugan went to hell."

Kubera is sympathetic to Sam's goals and offers to help him escape Heaven; but Sam is determined to continue his one-man war, exterminating the whole pantheon one god at a time. Sam likes Kubera and offers to let him go if he'll promise not to tell anyone about their conversation; except that Sam has expressed his intention to kill Yama, who is the most dangerous one to Sam's plan, and Kubera can't countenance that: "He is a brother Lokapala and a friend."

Kubera offers a wager. He proposes they have a contest to settle the matter. If Kubera wins, Sam will leave Heaven; if Sam wins, Kubera will keep his silence. The contest is an old-fashioned Irish stand-down, in which each party takes turns punching each other until one stays down. "With you, fat Kubera? And me in my magnificent new body?" Kubera says "Yes."

Yama hears a distrubance in the Garuda bird pen and sees Kubera lugging and unconscious Murugan to one of the huge birds. Yes, Kubera is fat; but he also cheats. Kubera comes up with an unconvincing story about why he needs to take Murugan out of the city that fails to satisfy the skeptical deathgod. Ratri is with Yama, and Yama commands her to lay an area of darkness upon the Garuda birds. Kubera tells her instead to blind Yama and to join their escape. Ratri makes her decision. Now she is a fugitive too.

The three fly to Keenset where they warn the populace of the coming attack and help them prepare. Sam and Kubera organize and drill the defending army. Kubera also begins training the local savants and artisans in basic principles of chemistry and engineering so that whatever happens, the knowledge will not be lost.

Takara arrives with a legion of demons in order to fulfil the promise he had made to Sam and broken. He also brings news of more reinforcements: Black Nirriti, one of the First who had left Heaven and who is considered an abomination by pretty much everybody is sending an armie of his zombies, mindless clones, to help defend Keenset; and Dalissa, the last of the Mothers of the Terrible Glow has also agreed to help Sam. We don't get much description of these Mothers, but they seem to be some kind of monsterous sea creatures whom the First fought when the planet was first tamed.

Another ally arrives unexpectedly: Yama. "Divorces are made in Heaven," he tells Sam bitterly. "And betrayals. And shamings. The lady has gone too far, and I know the reason, Lord Kalkin. I neither embrace your Accelerationism nor do I reject it. Its only mattering to me is that it represents the one force in the world to oppose Heaven." Yama has brought a new thunder chariot as well as his own high-tech arsenal. He also brings the Talisman of the Binder; the device Sam stole to amplify and focus his powers.

The forces of Heaven attack: men from nearby cities urged to a holy crusade by their temples, augmented by demigods, deities-in-training who have not yet fully developed their Aspects and Attributes; with air support by the new Triumvirate in Shiva's thunder chariot.

The battle is brutal and chaotic. At first the defenders seem to be prevailing. But Sam becomes reckless. "It is you, isn't it, Kalkin?" Mara the illusion god says recognizing Sam and mocking him. "This is your sort of war. Those were your lightings striking friend and foe alike." Sam has become less and less subtle of the course of his campaign against Heaven, starting out with quiet subversion, then recruiting allies, going on to theft, murder and now wholesale bloodshed.

The tide of battle turns, and Sam is forced to retreat. One by one, his allies are picked off and captured, and he too falls.

Keenset is destroyed.

Sam, Yama and Ratri are brought back to Heaven. Kubera is not found and remains at large. Mara warns that Heaven's victory has been a Pyrrhic one; but Brahma only cares that they have won.

Yama's body is found dead in his cell the next morning after the detonation of a small explosive device. It seems that he had build a mind-transfer device small enough to be hidden in his turban. Now Yama too is at large.

But Sam is not. The gods are not going to make the same mistake twice. So instead of killing him outright, they decide to complete the story of Buddha by declaring that Sam's soul has been judged worthy of Nirvana. They attach the leads of the body transfer apparatus to a radio transmitter and beam his soul into space to inhabit the golden magnetic belt that encircles the planet. Which is where we found Sam at the beginning of Chapter One.

"The Buddha has gone to nirvana," said Brahma. "Preach it in the Temples! Sing it in the streets! Glorious was his passing! He has reformed the old religion, and we are now better than ever before! Let all who think otherwise remember Keenset!" 

This thing was done also. 

But they never found Lord Kubera. 

The demons were free. 

Nirriti was strong. 

And elsewhere in the world there were those who remembered bifocal glassees and toilets that flushed, petroleum chemistry and internal combustion engines, and the day the sun had hidden its face from the justice of Heaven. 

Vishnu was heard to say that the wilderness had come into the City at last.

NEXT:  Chapter Seven: Götterdammerung! The End of the Yuga! The final battle between Sam and the gods; double-crosses; zombies; and the ultimate fate of the Buddha! Be there!