Excerpt
Four Billion Years Ago
In his defence, it was his first day in a new job.
Creative Creationist Solutions Unlimited had won a surprise contract to redevelop a rather misbegotten corner of multidimensional space-time. The pre-existing universes had been swept away and the new "brown space" site had been made ready for development, but there simply weren't enough qualified deities to go around.
And so it was that Ericaceous Mudd, on attachment from the Youth Obscuration Bureau and, by all accounts, two tentacles short of a fry-up, found himself assigned to the least promising reality of the most hopeless dimension. Because, in circumstances like this, it was all appendages on deck. Mythology doesn't write itself, after all.
So it was that the newly ennobled Lord Eric, probationary member of the celestial pantheon, surveyed his new domain and smiled. Yes, this would do nicely. Raw materials, gamma radiation within tolerable limits and plenty of space. Tick, tick, tick. Location, location, location.
Well, he thought, there's no space-time like the here-present. With a flourish, Eric raised his hand and swept it from right to left, causing eddies in space-time and, after a moment that might have lasted a billion years, a dusty, multi-armed spiral coalesced and began to rotate. The centre of the dust cloud bulged and sputtered and, lo, there was light and its often underrated sibling, heat.
With god-like care, Eric stuck a finger into the orbiting dust cloud and gave it a twiddle. He then watched, with delight, as clumps of rock turned into asteroids which then collided to form protoplanets of molten magma. Leaving them to cool down a bit, Eric had fun playing around with the gas giants (especially the one he'd made entirely out of helium which was hilarious) before returning to the inner planets and his particular favourite, the greeny-blue one, fourth out from the adolescent sun. Yes, this one would be perfect.
And then he was gliding over the rocky surface of the blue planet, luxuriating in the feel of wind on his beak and dirt in his suckers. He would give this world a name, and he would call it … Mud. Perfect.
Eric knelt beside the sea and scooped up a handful of algae. He peered into the protoplasm and sighed. At this rate, it would be billions of years before Mud became the garden he desired. He looked over his shoulder and, after scanning the heavens and finding them empty of YOB Assessors, he turned back to the green water in his curled-up tentacle and gibbered a word of command he'd seen scrawled on the walls of the siphon cubicles back in the office.
Instantly, the water began to bubble and foam as evolution received a shot of adrenaline and skipped forward several million generations. Eric dropped the seething mass into the sea and deflated to watch with interest. Within god-seconds, he spotted fins breaking the ocean surface before, an instant later, a slimy fish heaved itself onto the virgin mud.
If he were honest with himself, Eric would confess that he napped for a bit at this point, construction being pretty exhausting even for gods. He was woken from his Sabathical nap by a sharp pain in his mantle and a squelchy sound as he slapped a celestial tentacle against it. He looked up just in time to see a gaggle of hairy arses disappear into the tree line.
"Not again!" Eric cried. He was angry at the impunity of the humanoids and their universal default position of attacking anything they didn't understand. Oh yes, he'd read about them in the Planetary Health & Safety Manual. He was furious with himself for falling asleep at the crucial moment. If only he'd been awake a few seconds ago, he could have stopped the hairless apes before they'd climbed down from the trees. And he'd been having such interesting dreams about elves and dwarfs, goblins, trolls and other non-tentacled monstrosities. Such very interesting dreams, they almost seemed real.
Well, it was too late now. Eric raised himself, pausing only to vaporise the forest containing the humans, or at least most of them. He leapt into the firmament, thinking about how he was going to explain this and hoping he'd get a decent plot to have another go.
He didn't look back. If he had, he might have spotted the other planet, there but not there, out of the corner of his eye. A malevolent twin overlapping his creation like a Venn Diagram. And where they intersected, zigzags of energy broke through their crusts and demons danced in the rainbow lightning. Where once there had been Mud, now there was the Tworld.
Because, for gods, even dreams have power.
