How does the martyr remain true, although put to the ultimate test? Whence comes the endurance of the last man standing, his unbroken will to survive? And what is that moral fiber investing the woman who runs always to the succor of other lives, never balking at risk to her own? Can a coward fight the kaiju – will a selfish woman, or a waffling, indecisive man? So, yes, then, to near-sonic flight, to static apnea in vacuo, to electrogenerative plaxes; and, yes, as well, to all the various exoskeletal enhancements. But as we engineer the superhuman corpus, again I say, let us not neglect the heart!
And should the spouse freely offer up the greatest sacrifice, then the hero’s biomagicite shall become charged with +100 mana: finally sufficient to induce a VOLCANIC HOTSPOT, whereby a perforation in the earth’s crust causes superheated magma to discharge explosively from the aesthenosphere, instantly destroying kaiju minores, and causing pleni and the maximus...
SPRAYING THE SKY the count of stars must go to billions, and the singular moon shone down as well, just a sliver waxing from new. From unlit lunar lands far from the bright crescent – still burning more than a century on – the wrecked mothership winked and flared with eerie phosphorescence. Yet apart from their fire on the hilltop, not another light could be seen over the whole dark and untenanted earth. Barring this one little camp, there was nothing to proclaim that apes had ever come down from the trees, or women once decked themselves in silk and diamonds, or men in times past waged war upon each other.
Lest the wind blow it away, he tangled up their laundry to dry in the boughs of a tree-canopy all knotty and interlaced as arthritic fingers. By the time he’d rejoined the children fireside and stretched out his hands to ease their cold-ache, the boy and baby’s talk had turned to chocolate.
He protested. “But if we make it tonight, there’s none for later. That’s it, all gone.”
The boy extended a litigious forefinger. “You said we’d have our chocolate when Mama fights the kaiju. You promised, Papa.”
No, he’d said “maybe,” for he never made promises. What on earth could he guarantee? “It’s the last little bit, y’all.” He could feel himself doing the ugly, tiresome thing, whereby you put off some pleasure best enjoyed now, for fear nothing good will come again. “Are you both sure?”
Yes!
So he put on water to boil and shaved the chocolate into their tin cup and, finishing the honey as well, sweetened it all up. Sitting between them with the cup, he parceled sips back and forth, but could as well have left the arbitrage to them. For sister and brother were best of friends tonight – angels of fairness – and this camp saw such smiles as none had in some time. What else do you hope to see? Only that your children be warm and well and glad. While they ran fingers round the inside of the cup, chasing dregs, the hero came down from the air and it was time.
Her wings folded invisibly into her carapace. And two metres tall and more, she, kneeling, brought herself down to child’s-reach. “Bless me for the fight,” the hero said, and all the lightness left their camp, as if hawk, suddenly switching quarter, had blown the fire out. She picked up her scabbard from where it lay, pulled forth the sword, and beckoned the boy forward to kiss the flat of the blade.
“Papa,” said the boy.
“I’m here.” He set the baby back safely from the fire and took his son’s hand. “I’ll catch you, buddy. You won’t be hurt.” Last time, a bolt of lightning had struck down abruptly from the cloudless sky: charging the sword, but also felling the boy in passing. For a week he lay shivering and mumbling in some half-awake state, and thereafter for months was ill and weak.
They walked over to the hero at his son’s slow pace. Small folk know that unreckonable caprice flickers always through the heart of the great, and they know as you may not that so-called love – that the benevolent smile – may turn on the instant to wrath and ruination. Therefore the children never approached the hero with steps less wary than those of the old Israelites coming before Yahweh.
The boy looked up into his mother’s face: her stillness and regard, insectile or statuesque. Going to his knees beside his son, he whispered urgingly of the planetary importance of this single fight above all the rest that had ever gone before.
The boy said at last, “I hope you win, Mama,” and touched his puckered mouth to the sword even taller than himself. At once the pommel in the hero’s grip took light, brilliance spilling out between her fingers. The cold gray steel began turning to white-hot fire.
He snatched the boy back into his arms, tumbling over, and kicked desperately against the ground to get distance between them and that incinerative heat. Their coats smoked, hair crisped. “Take it away from us,” he shouted at the hero. “It’s too hot.” She got up holding the incandescent beam, and with each step farther seemed to bear away a furnace going full blast, its doors ajar, and then some vagrant midsummer’s day, and thereafter lesser and lesser warmth, until the cold of the boreal night closed rightfully about them again. At the summit’s edge the hero plunged the sword down into solid rock that sputtered and smoked like grease scorching in a pan much too hot. Leaving the bright blade bobbing in liquid stone, the hero came back and knelt as before. Then she bowed until her forehead rested on the ground, for the baby’s kiss upon her back.
Already the hero had wonderful wings, but to fight the maximus she’d need much better. As a rocky shelf, one thousand tons, falls off some mountainside and onto the unlucky walker below, just so did the kaiju hit, with as much force. And their alien effluents, whether spat, shat, or bloodlet, reduced the flesh of earthly creatures to runny sludge, a fertile dung for the world’s resurgent wilderness, feed for the forests that arose where every city fell. They couldn’t guess what shape, this time, the hero’s metamorphosis would take; she had no idea herself. Their only forewarning was that, whatever changes, they would be always perilous, always a shock.
“Pumpkin,” he said and squatted on his haunches. He reached out his arms and sucking her thumb the baby came to him. But when he urged her from his embrace and toward the hero, saying, “Give Mama a kiss, just like you did before,” the baby seized a fistful of his coat, nor wished to let it go. “Are you scared?” He stroked his daughter’s hair and smiled at her in complicity, allowing a little of his own fear to show. “I know; me too. But I need you to do this one little thing for me. Just for your papa: won’t you give Mama a kiss on her back?” (A kiss compelled held no power – nor did a loveless one.) His appeal shifted something in the child’s heart prior words had not, and her fear-blank eyes began to clarify. He said, “Please?” and the baby nodded. Toward the hero and away from him, he set her walking with gently propulsive hands.
The baby cast back one uncertain glance. At his nod, she bent to kiss the hero’s dorsal carapace. Fretfully his two hands hovered to grab his daughter back. No sooner did the baby’s lips alight than her mother’s torso – indeed limbs and whole self – returned to a more human shape, but not made of flesh and bone, rather become some kind of living marble.
At dead center of the hero’s smooth adamantine back, a thin-lipt mouth pursed open. From this hole erupted a long and rotary tentacle of spiked stone. With full decapitatory powers, this flailing rotor tore the air just centimets overhead where he cringed, pressing the baby and himself down, noses flat to earth. Hysterical from terror the baby fought to get free and run, while he shouted at the hero to go up into the air before she killed them both. When the hero had gone aloft, he let the baby go. Sister fled back to brother fireside where the children clung together like half-drowned cosurvivors who had won to shore by grace of God alone, and through shark, shipwreck and storm, had not gone down with all the rest.