God Doesn't

God Doesn’t is the single oldest short story that I’ve written (from 2015) that I consider good enough to share with the public. (Well, if when I visit my mom later this spring I can track down my first ever short story I wrote, from, like, first grade or something, I might share that with y'all.) I’ve mostly kept my hands off of God Doesn't, aside from a few typo fixes and prose tweaks for clarity I just couldn’t resist. 

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On Thursday, a government office in Gantapest, deep in the central pip, was destroyed in an explosion. Shells landing in the cities of the outer four pips were hardly unknown, but the central pip was far out of range of even the mightiest artillery pieces, and any explosive merely dropped from one of the other faces would pass harmlessly overhead, to land eventually on the opposite face of its origin.

By Sunday, two more explosions hit Gantapest. The telegraph lines were down, severed by more of the perpetual rock bombardments from the sixth face, so riders were sent by the First Minister's office to fetch me.

I was consulting with Professor S-, a colleague from the world’s third face. We were sitting at the cliff, with our bodies perpendicular to one another, each apparently just over the edge of the cliff from one another. I leaned forwards to take her offered flask, and sipped the proffered brandy. I leaned forwards so as not to spill any, and grimaced as it pooled at the back of my stomach, trying to sink past my spine. I handed the flask back, and we sat in one of those companionable silences that one can only know with friends of many years. The Minister's messengers found me there and relayed their alarming message.

We passed with as much swiftness as we dared through the craters and rubble of the murrain, then redoubled our speed through the scrubland and desert between pips. The first raindrops hit my head then. We did have to stop at one point for an avalanche released by the bastards from the sixth face- dozens of rocks, ranging from pebbles to rocks bigger than my head, appeared to fly above the ground towards the first face. They would keep falling until they landed on a wall or tree, or until they passed the cliff towards the first face, and then arced over and landed on the murrain there.

We got to Gantapest a week after the first explosion, to find the city racing with rumours. Guided clockwork weapons built by the sixth facers, using components from every face, in order to fly in predetermined arcs. Tunnels built all the way from the sixth face. Traitors within the government. Second facers smuggled onto our face to act as saboteurs, cutting the draglines that protected the city from sled-bombs. This last actually began inciting acts of violence against the small second-facer population in the city, which the police promptly began using as an excuse to put the second facer refugees in “protective custody,” not that they normally needed much excuse to arrest them. I was no investigator, yet all of the rumours seemed unlikely. 

I was escorted into an underground bunker filled with scientists, professors, and every type of learned individual you could shake a stick at. The rain had just picked up from a light sprinkle to a shower.

We theorized, modeled, calculated, compared notes, inspired, plotted, hypothesized, and graphed. Ever more complicated models scattered the worktables and walls. One fellow, we never found out who, began creating little scale models of buildings out of third face paper, and propping them on the wall towards the fourth-face in the canteen, where they would hang unsupported. Others began following suit, using first-face paper on another wall, and fourth-face paper on the third-face wall, and second-face paper on the ceiling, and before too long, the walls of the canteen were covered in a tiny, twisted, backwards paper city, facing inwards rather than out.

Every military man and minister who came in came in dripping wet. The rains seemed a blessing at the time- otherwise, the city would have burnt to the ground from the bombardment. The cities in the other four pips soon began being hit as well.     

We argued, fought, debated, despaired, drank, shoved, quibbled, and dented the walls with our heads. One geometer beat her husband, an engineer, with a lamp. The civilian population was being evacuated from the pips, hidden behind huge earthen berms to protect them from rock bombardments. Tales reached us of the brave men and women who cleaned the sixth face rocks off the berms to keep them from toppling over, squelching through the deep mud and dodging the oncoming rocks.

The military found an unexploded bomb. It was still sodden and in pieces, but we now had confirmation that whatever weapon the sixth-facers had built was airborne in nature. 

Disease was racing through the refugee camps behind the berms, and many had already drowned in the rapidly deepening mud. The lakes at the bottoms of the pips began to overflow their banks.

We worked frantically, men and women possessed. More than one of us collapsed into unconsciousness where we stood, after days of sleepless work. Before long, we'd reassembled the bomb, with its sixth face shell, fifth face inner shell, and assorted flywheels and weights from other faces. It had been designed to be launched out at a great distance over the sixth face cliffs, then release the sixth-face shell on a timer to drop the inner shell and explosives onto the fifth face. It seemed that the rumours had been right after all.

It was around then that buildings began to break free of their foundations in great mudslides,  flowing into the greedy lake in the depths of the pip, though our bunker stood firm against rain and bombs both. Scouts and messengers returning from the cliff edges reported that the rain seemed just as bad on the other faces, with new rivers twisting and writhing back and forth along the edge, descending over one side as a waterfall only to fall back over the edge a mile down.

We built, tinkered, measured, tore down, rebuilt, argued, and threw tools. Countermeasures took shape- kites, balloons, cannons-  and were taken apart again more swiftly. Those last days were a blur, a frenzy. More progress was made in that bunker in those days than had been made for years before. No one bothered to tell us it was all for naught, if anyone even remembered we were there. The bombs had stopped soon after the last reports came in- the sixth face had it just as badly. Their troops were all pulled back from the cliff's edge to help evacuate their own city. No side was spared the flooding, and no one counted everyone who died. 

We knew the truth when the leaks began in the canteen. The little paper city resting on the walls was slowly swept down, to dissolve into pulp smeared on the lower walls. No one had visited us for days, and when someone opened the huge steel security doors, it was to find that the lake was lapping against the front step.

We fled, then, so many lab-coated and tweed-wearing pilgrims, bearing sheafs of notes, lab equipment, and whatever else we valued. Few of us thought to brought food, and most forgot water as well, thinking to drink the rainwater. Those who drank from puddles soon sickened, so it was not uncommon to see us trudging through the deep mud with our open mouths facing to the sky. We crossed rivers that were once streets, on the spines of broken buildings once tall enough to allow those atop them to peer across the rims of the pip. 

Once we saw another group of people walking away from us, but yell as we might, the sound of the rain drowned us out, and they soon passed out of sight. If you could see through mud, you may have seen a trail of journals, compasses, and slide rules behind us, but all we saw was the ever-hungry mud that had already claimed several of our number. We slept leaning against walls and each other, tying ourselves together with ropes and torn clothing. The lake would be pooling at our feet every morning when we awoke. If the storm had perhaps struck with wind, thunder, and fury, perhaps it would have been better. Perhaps we could have just considered it a just punishment for some unknowable crime against a vengeful divinity, then. But it didn't. There was no wind, no lightning, no fury. It just rained, and rained, and rained. 

I recall at one point deliriously doing math in the mud, convinced that we were sliding down the mud faster than we could hike upwards. The trek just becomes blurrier and blurrier after that, with flashes of trees and buildings jutting out of muddy, torrential rivers, my colleagues simply falling to the ground and sinking beneath the mud, and the rim of the central pip always just tantalizingly out of reach.

I don't remember being found by a patrol, but I'm told I was ill for several weeks, finally regaining coherence as the storm began to ebb. I remember the cheering as we all stared out at the sun again. 

There isn't much demand for universities anymore. Once I recovered, I spent as much time as I could stand, helping rebuild around the shores of the new lakes filling all the pips to the brim.

I stood up and left one day. I took a canteen, a pot to boil water in, some food, and some tools. I might have been arrested for it by the new provisional government, but no one really cared that much. I just... walked. I didn't have any goal in mind, or any plan, so perhaps it wasn't really surprising that I found myself in my old camp by the third face. I set my meager possessions on a rock, and walked to the edge.

Professor S- was waiting there for me. We said nothing for some time. Soon enough, we both gathered our things, and began walking along the edge, facing out at right angles from each other. Eventually the silence of old companions broke, and we couldn't stop talking.

In time, we made it to the vertiginous corner, where the fifth and third faces met up with the first. We built a boat, then, with pieces from all three faces, with the majority made of wood from the first, but enough from the others that we wouldn't need sails, when combined with our own weight. We could merely climb about the boat, and have gravity pull us the direction we wished to go. My floor was a wall for Professor S-, and likewise her floor was a wall for me. It was an ugly, top-heavy boat, but it was ours.

And from there we set sail down a new river, each of us sitting at right angles to one another, waiting for the gravity of the first face to claim us as its own.