Free Monster by A. Lee Martinez Page B

swum the ocean depths as a plesiosaurus and spent several hundred years as cave moss. She’d been there to see the invention of the wheel, the first flint ax, several hundred ice ages repeated over and over again on planets now dead and long forgotten. On this planet, she’d been there for the rise of the Roman Empire, the fall of Camelot, every Chinese dynasty, the Dark Ages, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution. She’d marveled at the wonders of the written alphabet, the discovery of fire, and Velcro. And she’d witnessed the horrors of Genghis Khan’s conquering hordes, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Pet Rock craze.
    She’d seen every wonderful advance and every boneheaded mistake of humanity and nature repeated ad infinitum to the point that the whole world felt like a script she’d read a thousand times before. And it was. Yet inevitably, despite these mistakes, the universe would continue to advance its own misguided agenda. Humanity was only the latest tool toward that goal.
    She could not allow that. There was a balance to the universe, a way things were supposed to be. And every so often she had to remind the universe of that natural order. And if she had to remove humanity from the equation… well, it wouldn’t be the first time a species had to be removed.
    On the positive side, she didn’t feel nearly as bad about this as when she’d had to undo the dinosaurs.
    Lotus sat in her kitchen, drinking tea, communing with the stone. Everything was recorded within it because everything sprang from it. Without its vital energies feeding the existence of the cosmos, there would be no cosmos. If one bothered to look deep enough into the stone’s depths, one could read the history of the atoms themselves, and of the tinier parts that made those atoms, and so on and so on. Vast and incomprehensible histories that were beyond imagining.
    She wasn’t interested in any of that. She already knew most of it.
    The stone told her what she wanted to know, albeit reluctantly. It had grown resistant lately, even a bit tricky. It couldn’t hide from her the information that the time was near for the next ascendency. Very near. Even without the stone, Lotus could feel it. She’d seen the pattern often enough to recognize it.
    The ascendency was close. She was in the right place; the usurper lived somewhere in this city. And she knew the usurper’s first name, but it wasn’t quite enough to go on.
    Judy was a very common name, after all.

8
     
    Judy awoke clutching a notebook. At first she wasn’t sure where she was, but the strange odors, and the soft melodies of Barry Manilow coming from the stereo helped to remind her. If those weren’t enough of a hint, Paulie was sitting in the chair across from the sofa. He was staring at her with half-closed eyes. At first she thought he was naked, but he was wearing underwear. It looked a little too tight, and the spandex around his thighs and waist appeared to be cutting off his circulation. It didn’t conceal much. Better than nothing, though, she decided.
    She stirred. Her back was a little stiff after a night on his sofa. She couldn’t remember why she’d spent the night here. Something had happened to her apartment, but the details were fuzzy.
    Paulie had yet to react to her awakening. He just kept staring. She didn’t know if he was really staring or if he’d just fallen asleep with his eyes not quite closed. She almost tested him but figured she didn’t care.
    The bathroom was occupied. She waited a minute, but had to get up and knock at the insistence of her bladder.
    “Just a minute,” a woman said on the door’s other side. Grumbling, Judy slid down the wall and sat on the floor to wait. She noticed a few white feathers scattered on the carpet. Maybe Paulie had gotten a bird. A big bird.
    A woman stepped out of the bathroom. Her robe sat high on her shoulders, like she had a hunchback. The woman noticed a feather held in Judy’s hand.
    “Sorry,