Page 22 of Inkpot Gods

“What, and you’re afraid I’m going to go off half-cocked and blow a bunch of shit up? Not my style, moon-boy.”

“Just let me tell Judy first.”

She rolls her eyes again, gesturing toward the stairs. “Be my guest.”

David smiles encouragingly, then takes off, loping up the stairs two at a time while Dodger shakes her head and goes back to the front room and whatever ridiculous thing she was doing before he disturbed her.

The house from the outside is no bigger or smaller than any of the houses around it; there’s nothing remarkable about it, once you discount the paint job, something that’s almost impossible to do. Still, paint can’t change architecture, and even someone dazzled by the captive rainbow that is the exterior would be hard pressed not to see that there’s something wrong with the internal geometry of the place.

The house isn’t, shouldn’t be, can’t be this big. He climbs stairs until he passes the second-floor landing, then keeps going to a third floor that is absolutely not reflected from the outside, where the stairs end in an airy U-shaped hall, the ceiling brightened by periodic skylights. (Like the windows downstairs, they’re filled with carnival glass that paints everything they shine on in still more rainbows. Their patterns are mathematical and abstract, twisting and shifting when he looks at them too closely.) The windows are their own impossibility, because he knows there’s an attic above this floor, a dusty, cedar-scented space where all the unwanted objects the household generates get put.

He doesn’t dwell on that. He’s learned that the key to walking in impossible spaces is to forget that they’re impossible, to push that fact aside and let it go. “Possible” and “impossible” are just words, after all.

The door at the top of the U creaks open as he approaches, and the narrow, bespectacled face of a man with shaggy brown hair and unsettlingly gray eyes pokes out, scanning the hall. Roger brightens when he spots David, smiling the earnest smile of everyone’s favorite college professor and waving David forward, beckoning for him to come closer.

“There you are,” he says, like he’s been waiting for hours for David to arrive. “Dodger told me you were on the way up. You have any issues with the second floor? It’s just that Kim and Tim have been experimenting with moebius strips and it can get sort of dicey sometimes.”

“If they bent reality somehow, Dodger shut it down before she sent me up,” says David.

“Good, good.” Roger looks over his shoulder at the room behind him. His smile is different when he turns back to David, less placating, more sincere. “Judy’s ready for you.”

“Great.” David heads for the door, and Roger pulls it wider when he gets there, letting him inside.

(Kim and Tim are also the incarnate Doctrine, or would be, if the Doctrine could manifest as more than two people at a time. It can’t, not yet, and so they’re effectively human teenagers trying to navigate a world in which their only purpose has been snatched away from them by the adults who now have to act as their caretakers and responsible parties. They’re not okay. If they’re making successful moebius strips on the stairs, it’s because Dodger is enabling it somehow to help them feel better. But it’s just as likely that there was never a moebius strip at all, and Roger was just buying Judy time to get her shirt back on.)

David steps through the door and into a library that wouldn’t be out of place in a house ten times this size, with shelves that stretch well beyond the supposed roofline, and walls that make a lie of any remaining scrap of logic to the floorplan. This room belongs in a university, not a suburban home. And the books. The walls are lined with built-in bookshelves made of some dark, polished wood; some of them have glass fronts, like the volumes they’re holding are in need of constant protection. Every shelf is packed to bursting with books, cloth-bound and leather-bound, spines etched in gold or silver or strange mercury lettering. This is a bibliophile’s wet dream brought to life.

David’s never been much of one for reading when he doesn’t absolutely have to, but even he’s awestruck by this cathedral to the written word. It’s impractical and probably not real when Roger doesn’t remember that he wants it to be, but it’s still breathtaking for all of that. Sometimes you need to just let beautiful things exist.

Judy is seated in an overstuffed leather armchair, big enough that she takes up less than half of it, her cheeks reddened and her lips slightly swollen in that thoroughly kissed sort of a way. David almost smirks at the sight of her. If they weren’t both members of the same rigid social hierarchy, he’s quite sure they would have tumbled into each other in one of the off-campus bars long since; Judy has a reputation remarkably similar to his own, no insult intended. But much as he slowed down his extracurricular activities since Eliza died and broke his heart in ways he’s still trying to understand, she slowed and apparently stopped hers when she finally met Roger Middleton.

If Dodger is Math, Roger is Language: the concept of it, the execution of it, the yearning for it. And Judy, when she’s not the Chinese goddess of the moon, is a linguist. David can’t decide whether her relationship with Roger is equitable due her divinity balancing out his … whatever it is you’re supposed to call the Doctrine, or whether it’s an extremely advanced form of monsterfucking. Either way, they’re both happy, and Roger swears he’s not mind-controlling her, so if two consenting adults want to get their freak on, he doesn’t get to judge.

Judy’s smart and she’s pretty, which isn’t essential, but is nice. Half-Chinese, half-Scottish, with long black hair streaked in early silver, like shafts of moonlight across the skin. It’s easy to tell the difference between Judy the person and Chang’e the goddess: Judy has yellowish hazel eyes, while Chang’e has eyes the color of ripe peaches, to match the lambent peach glow that rises from her skin.

Roger doesn’t change, because Roger isn’t two people in a single skin. He’s always Roger Middleton, professor of linguistic theory, and he’s always the living Doctrine of Ethos. And right now, he’s looking at David with the mild disapproval of someone whose afternoon make-out situation has just been disrupted for no apparent reason.

Forcing his attention to stay locked on Judy, no matter how uncomfortable it is to stare at his superior when she’s clearly just been thoroughly kissed (and he would have the same problem if it were anyone else he had to talk to in a serious and professional manner, he wouldn’t be able to talk to Raven or Snake if they looked at him with excitement still lingering in their cheeks and the last glints of lust fading from their eyes, this isn’t about Judy, it’s not), David says, “Chang’e, I need to speak with you.”

Judy lifts an eyebrow and steps up into her divinity, the spark of lust receding as her eyes turn peach-colored and her skin begins to glow. It takes less than a second before the woman looking at him is older and calmer than Judy has ever been, shrouded in an unshakeable conviction of her own place in the universe. It’s as impressive as it is terrifying. Every time.

“I never get tired of that,” says Roger.

For an instant, David finds himself wondering if they have sex while Judy’s consigned to the back of her own mind and her body is in the sole custody of Chang’e. Does consent count when the body’s owner leaves the premises in the middle? This whole situation is raising a lot of questions his own more-mundane love life has never required him to answer. It’s with a strong feeling of relief that he lets go of his own mortality, allowing the god Máni to step up to the front of their shared existence, allowing himself to fade into the background.

(Consent must transfer over, when the mortal and the god are in agreement, he decides as he goes. The use of the mortal body is a form of consent, and one that can be revoked, even if it almost never is. Content that Máni knows why they came here, David sinks deeper and allows himself to slide into a meditative state, the world fading to sounds and colors, like a film projected on a distant wall.)

“Máni,” says Chang’e. “Why are you here?”

“David wanted us to tell you what he’s been observing. We have a new roommate in the apartment.”

“You’re still over the food court? Living with the woman named after a bird?”

“Raven, yes. She offered rooms to a man named after a snake who keeps cockroaches in our bathroom, and to a woman named after a flower who moved here from Alabama. It’s the woman named after the flower that we wanted to talk to you about.”

“What about her?”

“We think she’s an alchemist.”