And stasis, of all states, demands the single condition consciousness cannot meet peace. Thus, my answer is no, such a threat is not real, because such a threat, if it became reality, would be imperceptible and so unreal. Unreal for as long as there exists consciousness. And if consciousness does not exist, then nothing--"
"Stop!" howled the Devil, his fists balled over his ears, his wig's flaps pressed against them like earmuffs. "You know, you smartass word-monger, you really do belong here! Some of them don't, Ill admit ... bureaucratic muck-ups and the nature of big systems to malfunction. But you're as bad as Aristotle, who told me that his precious geometry proved the threat false in as masturbatory language as you're using."
"Sorry, Sir Nick, but you asked..."
"Asked!" This time, the yowl was so loud that Michael flattened himself before the bowl of milk and began to choke. As Zeno watched, the cat/bat/familiar seemed to bloat to twice its size as every hair stood on end. Its whole body convulsed from back to front. Then, its neck stretched to double its former length and its tongue sticking an inch out of its mouth, it vomited all the milk it had drunk back into the bowl.
And this was a very interesting phenomenon, because the bowl was still full before Michael began to vomit. And yet, as he vomited and after he vomited the milk he'd drunk back into the bowl did not overflow. When the animal lay exhausted and panting beside the bowl with its eyes glazed, having vomited into the bowl the entire contents of its prodigious stomach, the bowl was exactly, as full as it had been before the beast had begun vomiting. As, fall as it had while Michael had been drinking. As full as it had been when Zeno first brought the bowl, sloshing milk against its rim, to place it on the floor before Michael in the first place.
Zeno had stopped listening to the Devil, who was yelling. He said quietly, "Sir Nick, do you realize what this means? The bowl... the quantity of milk in the bowl was unchanging throughout the entire interval of not-drinking, drinking, and regurgitating. And after."
When Zeno again looked up at the Devil, the face he saw was as red as the sky above New Hell when Paradise was trying to set.
"No. Tell me. What does it mean?" said the Devil, spittle riding his words as he expelled them from purpling lips.
"It means that your informant was correct ... at least partially correct; In some places - for example, where Michael and the bowl are, but not here, only a few feet away on either Side, where you and I are - space-time is becoming anomalously subject to different laws."
"No shit," said the Devil as he rose from his chair in disgust "Michael!" The call shook the very rafters of Zeno's cell.
And the familiar rallied to it - or tried to. It twitched its ears, it got up on its hind legs, it sought to back away from the bowl. But for every moment away from its bowl, it exhibited an equal and opposite movement toward the bowl. To Zeno, the cat seemed trapped in a tape loop. First it went forward, then it went back, but it never managed to execute more than a circumscribed set of motions.
And the Devil, watching the familiar, began to rage. "Michael! Michael!" he screamed as if the beast were his only child. And strode forward, toward the bowl.
"No! Don't! Sir! Nick" Zeno called, and lunged for the Prince of Darkness, hoping to stop the Devil from becoming stuck like a fly on flypaper, as the familiar was now, in some temporal glitch.
The familiar was yowling, intermittently, whenever it reached a forward instant in its forward/backward/forward/backward minuet...
Now the Devil was cursing so horribly that demons started appearing-coming out of the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the very air. These were horrid creatures and Zeno (seeing acid spittle drip on floorboards and begin to smoke, spittle that dripped from gaping jaws which could chomp him in two), covered his head with his hands and sank down to curl himself into as small a ball as possible.
He heard noises his ears couldn't sort into sensible sounds. He heard the ripping of the firmament and the fundament.
And then he peeked, spreading his fingers. Through them he saw Satan, not a don now in human robes, but a gigantic fiery-eyed thing with horn and tail, beset by a great serpent and by winged clocks with spear-like arms.
He saw chariots with wheels of flame and mushroom clouds on which they rode.
He saw creation and dissolution. He saw the sun swallow up the sky. He saw the earth charred to a cinder, deep within the corona of that sun. And he saw a cloud of gas in which angels darted -
hundreds, thousands, wing brushing wing as they worked. He saw a huge ball forming in the midst of pregnant gasses.
And around all of this wound the serpent, and in the serpent's coil the Devil toiled.
And in the Devils arms Michael was cradled, fangs bared at a hungry sky as the serpent's wide-spread jaws came closer - jaws that contained an entire universe within the maw they circumscribed.
Zeno's fingers closed of their own accord, shutting out the awful sight. His head bowed down until it touched his knees. He curled up, hiding from the chaos he had seen. And though he could no longer see a struggle that his mind could not comprehend, he could still hear it.
He heard the Devil snarling that Michael was his and no Power had the right to take Michael from him. He heard a chorus of demons singing songs to sear the inner ear.
Then he heard nothing. Silence. Utter peace.
Unutterable peace. He couldn't even hear himself breathing. He couldn't hear the pulse in his ears. He couldn't hear the wind whipping Sinai.
Then he did hear something. He heard the squishy sound of a terrified man losing control of his bowels. Himself And he smelled his fear in its most base form.
And he heard a clearing of someone's throat. Then: "Zeno?"
He raised his head and the Devil was there. Alone but his familiar, riding now upon his shoulder, wings unfurled the Devil had wings now, also, great leathery wings and deep-burning yellow, slitted eyes.
This horror made Zeno raise his hands before his face.
But out of the gaping, sharp-toothed jaws of the Devil's new aspect came the same cultured voice of an Oxford don: "Now that we've determined that there is a threat, I'd like you to work on some solution. Now that the physics are clear to you." And the Devil began to laugh.
Squinting, Zeno saw why he laughed: the familiar had sunk its teeth into his neck and was gnashing them there. Blood began to drip from the wound, down over Satan's shoulder.
"A solution?" Zeno gasped. "Me?"
"You. A way to keep the clocks right. I'll deal with what's throwing the larger temporality out of balance ... it's, ah, certain mischievous souls among the dissidents and elsewhere who're to blame." From a pouch at his stomach, of the sort nature gives a marsupial, the Devil brought forth an object and held it out to Zeno.
Zeno scrambled to his feet to take the artifact. "But ... it's just an hourglass. A mere hourglass, big, but not the sort of thing I need to keep-"
"Just an hourglass?" boomed the Devil, his wings moving restlessly. "This is the hourglass. The primal standard. If you lose it, you'll find yourself with first-hand experience of a multi-temporal hard time. For now, your job is to keep the observatory running like..." White teeth gleamed.
"...Clockwork."
"But...."
"But what, mortal?" thundered the Father of Lies. "Its the nature of Hell to give every man a problem he can't solve. I'll leave a few demons here to make sure you've got the proper motivation."