“You two are becoming very tiresome. First, you blind my avatar’s guards and now, you’ve frightened my poor little dragon flower.”
The twins swivelled around to discover an enormous, squishy-looking thing with waving tentacles and beady, purple eyes.
“What the…who or what are you?” Thyme demanded.
“More purple,” muttered Iris.
“Many people have called me by many names; all were wrong and all were right.”
“First, it tries to kill us, complains when we protect ourselves, and now answers our questions with stupid riddles.” Thyme detested inconsistencies.
“If you must possess something as trivial as a name before answering my questions, ‘The Elder God’ will do as well as any.”
“Thank you. I’m relieved we have that settled,” said Iris.
“Now, will you have the courtesy to answer me? Whatever are you doing here? Why have you invaded my home?” While the creature was saying this, oily tentacles had extruded from hand-like appendages and were slithering across their faces, caressing their hair and examining their ear-cavities.
“Argh! What in the name of bastard kittens do you think you are doing?” Thyme barked.
“I’m trying to discover your weaknesses—your price. Everyone has one.”
“And you think that rubbing slime and squid spit in our hair will make us reveal it?”
“Do you know a better way?” The mouth part of the monster smirked.
“Stop that!” Iris pushed an intrusive tentacle away from the corner of her eye socket.
“Yes. Why don’t you just ask us what our price is?”
“What an intriguing idea. No one has ever suggested that before.” The monster leaned back, appearing to be deep in thought. “All right, what is it that you care about more than all else in this life?”
“Books!” they shouted in unison.
“Ouch! Not so loud, if you please.” Several tentacles clutched the places on its head where—in a humanoid—ears would be, and grimaced.
“Books, book, books!” they screamed again.
“Books on paper, whole books, old books, new books, books between cardboard covers…” shouted Thyme.
“With leather bindings,” added Iris. “Unexpurgated, uncut, undoctored, unelectronic—real books!”
“Books for children—that they can hold.”
“And young adults and students.”
“All right, I get the point. So, tell me how I can use that to get you to leave my pets, my sweet little nekrobees, alone.”
“’Sweet little nekrobees,’” Thyme mimicked the Elder. “About as sweet as a tarantula crossed with a rattlesnake.”
“You don’t like my little pets?” it asked, as one settled on its frontal area. A tentacle reached down and caressed the bee before popping it into a mouth. Crunch and it was gone. The Elder belched a stench of rotting violets.
“Euw! Don’t you ever brush your teeth?” Iris complained.
“My, you are a silly girl. Answer my question, please. How can I persuade you to stop persecuting my bees?”
“Keep the damnable, flying vermin out of our library,” said Thyme.
“Oh, but I can’t do that. They have work to do there—important work.”
“What’s that, then?” said Thyme.
“And what kind of work causes my books to cry and scream?” demanded Iris.
“Surgery is always painful—is it not?”
“Surgery! What kind of surgery?” They cried, this time in unison.
“When something is diseased or broken or wrong, it should be cut out, like a cancer. Don’t you agree?”
“There are no cancers in my books, only ideas,” said Iris.
“Ah, my dear Iris, I’m sure you would agree that ideas can sometimes be dangerous, that wrong ideas can spread like disease until they infect entire civilisations.”
The creature’s beaming, oily smile made Thyme want to smash her fist right into the middle of that blubbery gob.
Iris thought about The Elder’s words before she answered. “I believe, if people read enough, are educated enough—think about hard things enough, they can protect themselves against dangerous ideas.”
“My darling Iris, you are so idealistic. “
“I’m not your darling.”
“And who gets to decide which ideas are good and which are dangerous?” Thyme demanded.
“In this case, I do.”
“Wait! No…I get it.” A shining yellow globe lit up above Iris’ head. “That’s what those horrid bees are doing. They’re changing texts—to suit…YOU!”
“What a clever child you are.”
“That’s monstrous.”
“Why bother? Nobody reads these books—nobody but us, anyway. The rest of the world gets its ideas from electronic libraries.” Thyme, muttered.
“That’s right. And where do you think electronic libraries get their texts from?”
“Huh?”
“Your books, and those in the other central depositories, are the foundation texts for all the world’s electronic media.”
“So, if you change our copy, you change all the rest.”
“What smart little girlies you are.”
Growling and hissing, Thyme was temporarily beyond speech, so Iris took up the cudgel.
“Let me see if I understand you correctly: You’re not re-writing history….”
“That’s so passé. Nobody believes what’s in history books, anymore.”
“Because monsters like you have re-written them so often.”
“I’ll ignore that, but yes, history books have become irrelevant. Facts don’t influence individual actions—except for soldiers, anyway.”
“And you think novels do?”
“Certainly. The world’s great books form the underlying paradigms of all human behaviour.”
“At least we agree on something. What’s wrong with our books the way they are?”
“Oh, Iris, are you really so naïve? Your books are so nice…so moral. They have nothing to teach us about how to live in a modern world.”
“You’re saying that if Madame Bovary hadn’t been so guilt-ridden, she wouldn’t have ended up riding around the French countryside with her lover’s head on her lap?”
“Exactly. Had she been more pragmatic, she’d have lived a long and happy life.”
“Next, you’ll say Anna Karenina shouldn’t have thrown herself in front of that train.”
“Stupid, stupid, stupid…a sorry waste of human resources.”
“You think that, by changing the plots of great novels, you can influence how people behave? That’s nonsense—nobody cares about literature these days.”
“Not necessarily. Even if very few have read a particular book, everyone knows the basics. The ideas in them permeate our global consciousness.”
“You think altering the core ideas in our books will change human behaviour? said Thyme. “It won’t work. Nobody but people like us reads, anymore. The general population won’t be exposed to your changes,” said Iris.
“That’s because your books,” the Elder sneered, “are so removed from real life. But if I and my bees bring these into line with current realities…Do you have any idea how many people think popular media—novels, TV, films…ARE the truth? Remember the flap back in the ‘oughties caused by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code?”
“Yuck! Unfortunately.” Iris looked as if she had bitten into something rotten and very bad-tasting.
Thyme said, “You want to Dan-Brownify our classical heritage?”
“Please.” The creature looked affronted. “Nothing so egregious as that. I like to think I’m a better writer.”
“Irrelevant. We can’t allow you to pervert our books.”
“How do you plan to stop me?” the monster sneered. The effrontery of these two simple young women delighted him.
“We’ll burn the Necronomicon—all the copies, in all the depositories. How many copies exist? Five?” asked Thyme.
“Six,” prompted Iris.
“You can’t…you wouldn’t do that,” it said, horrified.
“We can and we will, if you don’t leave our books alone.”