{Fair point.}
Everyone jolted up. Dark-Face yelled in pain. The girl shot up like she’d been hit with a jolt
of Valsom. Pale-Face said nothing, but looked at me and rubbed his shin.
“Hi,” I said. The girl looked at me, sighed with the air of an exhausted mother, and lay back
down on the bed.
“That was dangerous,” said Pale-Face.
“Very dangerous, said Dark-Face.
“Yeah, I’m sure I nearly just broke Reality itself. But we’re all alive, and that’s what
matters.”
“What do you want?”
“A castle on a planet made of gold. Edible gold. Next question.”
“Why are you here?”
Should I keep taunting him with literalism?
{I mean if you want to…}
“No one wants to transport you to the Polar Zone. Believe, me, I checked. I even checked
with the drunk and indifferent. No dice. They can’t even conceive of the possibility of going
there. It’s a cultural mental block. It doesn’t exist. Whatever is out there is so bad you’ve got to
pour spice rum down people’s throat for an hour to even talk about it. In short…”
“Too late,” said the girl.
“… You have a problem.”
“We feared this would happen,” said Pale-Face.
“So what’s the backup?”
Pale-Face and Dark-Face looked at each other as though there was a conversation they were
trying to have psionically.
“You said you would handle it,” said Dark-Face.
The girl sat up again on her elbows and looked at me. I smirked at her.
“You have no plan,” I said.
“We have no plan,” the girl said. “We have a purpose, not a plan.”
“True believers,” I said. “To plan is to set your stock in your own will and reason, which the
Universe punishes. To have no plan is therefore virtue.”
“Exactly,” said the girl, and she said this without either irony or fanaticism. It was baldly
true.
“All right then,” I said. “Then it’s about time we chatted about your purpose.”
TO BE CONTINUED...UJ