Aesop's Foible
How can he make a world of joy from Man's horrific imagination? Perhaps he will ignore Man, just this once.
Very sorry to everyone who still has me on author alert for Twilight fanfiction, but this is not a Twilight fanfiction.
This is Narnia fanfiction, I wrote it on a lark, and I realize it is quite idiosyncratic. But it's fanfiction, that's allowed. And if you feel theologically offended, sorry, but it is just fanfiction.
I borrowed a major plot element from the Myst universe. Everything else is property of CS Lewis and me.
He sits in the state of abject horror. How had it all gone so wrong?
Sentience requires creativity, which requires freedom.
Yes, but freedom to do this?
He needs some fresh air. A change of scenery. Anything. He goes outside, slamming the door behind him.
Unnecessary force.
But a necessary response.
At first it had been amusing, in a way, when Man had imagined that animals could speak. Which was...odd, yet he wasn't one to argue with how Man tried to explain how to be good, as long as Man tried. But talking animals teaching morals? The irony was inescapable.
It probably wasn't Hesiod and Aesop's fault at all, what he had just seen happen. It had been thought before, but to create a whole society around it, and all the ugliness it entailed, and then calling it good? Calling it divine?
He gasped in pain as he saw the scene again, and heard the girls screaming in fear as they died.
There were deliberate steps between animals who could talk, to half-human half-animal beasts who embodied all the animal passions that sentience defied, to...Minotaur.
Man had taken those steps, and had carried out the consequences.
He realized that he had walked into the midst of the Woods, and was now standing at Earth's pool. He contemplates it for a long time, Earth had been such a stunning achievement.
It still is.
Except for the sentient creatures.
Especially them.
He had worked so long on the equations. The delicate interplay of energy and neutrons and atoms, the interactions between minerals and animals and plants. The physics of the expanding universe, the biology of photosynthesis, and the anatomy of life. And what does Man think of? Water spirits, tree spirits, star-gods, and lecherous half-animal men, and then they send little girls to be abused and gored and eaten by an animal as if that's worship.
He stares at the pool in anger, and a part of his brain considers just jumping into the pool as the ridiculous Zeus and actually striking the lot of them with lightening. Sure, it would break all the laws of physics he had set down, but at this point he didn't care.
But he could not destroy his own image like that, even if they had ceased to care for their image themselves.
But even without the form, they expand sentience.
He snorts. What's the point in expanding sentience if it involves murdering innocent girls?
But what if...
What if what?
What if they were real?
What if what were real? Satyrs and fauns and naiads and dryads? Centaurs and Minotaurs? He shivers in disgust.
They are creatures of the creativity of our image.
He blinks. They are ugly creative aberrations of our image.
But what if they were real?
He looks down at the pool of Earth. It's absurd. Absolutely absurd.
He turns and walks back to his cottage. He has work to do.
He is, in fact, incredibly busy. Slowly but surely the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve are getting sorted. There are highpoints and lowpoints, but there is progress.
But even this is tempered by extreme sadness. The random variables which had infected his careful calculations occasionally run amok, causing utter devastation. On one sad long night he watched over the Earth pool and wistfully wished for a simpler world, a more transparent one, one where joy can be constant and his grace immediate. The constant stillness of the trees around him suddenly irritated him. They should dance, with satyrs, and sing songs of joy and love.
What if they were real?
He thinks he's mad, but he goes back to his library and pulls out all his thick tomes where he had laboriously calculated the aspects of creation. Without pausing to think about what he is doing he mixes the books on chemicals together with the books on animals. The books on vegetation together with the books on Man. He pulls out a new journal and begins to write new equations. It is all a jumble, and it feels sacrilegious. But it is cathartic, and he releases all his frustration with a flat earth, sentient stars, god-planets, and half-human creatures in a furious scribble of algorithms and sequences.
He finally pauses, and realizes he has already filled up half the book. The equations are valid, of course. But is this a world he actually wants to create? He carefully replaces his tomes on the shelf in their proper order, and puts the journal off to the side.
Eventually the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve begin putting their sentience to good use and even start discovering his equations of physics, biology, chemistry, and the rest. He feels happy feelings of belated gratification. This soon turns back to horror as he sees that they have overcome their previous barbarism only to become barbaric in more advanced and destructive ways. They do not use their knowledge for joy, only dullness.
He opens the abandoned journal again and, in a fit of impishness, writes in Bacchus. The whole idea began as an imposturous orgy, yes, but what if just the parts of free happiness, uninhibited joy, and complete joy were included? When he's done he nearly rips the page out of the book. Even with the new parameters it seems like a slap in the face of every girl whose life was ruined by its practice on Earth. But he picks up his pen and instead binds Bacchus more completely to himself. He dislikes limiting freedom so much, but he thinks it is quite justified here.
The little journal becomes a hobby. Father Christmas is formed in the midst of poignant amusement. Dwarves on a more serious day. Talking animals formed an interesting ongoing challenge. Sure, he had accomplished the concept before on a donkey, so it was theoretically valid, but it was an exception based on an element of chaos. Algorithms don't like exceptions. After the stroke of insight of reducing the size differentiation the biology making it possible begins to take shape.
He begins to enjoy writing this book. He sometimes misses the strict laws of physics he had previously constructed, but sometimes he finds this new world freeing because of its lack of constraints. He decides that there is a certain amount of poetry lurking in even the more absurd ideas of Man.
It did not escape his notice that he was quickly filling the book and had yet to write Man into it. Perhaps if he simply filled the book with other things, the exclusion would be excusable.
One night, when he was emphatically not working on that strange little world he wasn't sure he would even name, he picks up the tome with Man's calculations and reviews it. Writing it had been an incredibly lengthy and challenging task. So many complications, so many variables. He stares at the equation that caused him so much regret, that caused her so much pain, for a long time. Finally he closes the tome and places it back on the shelf. Man had been created once, twice, he would not do it again.
The little journal is nearly full, and when he looks at Earth's pool he finds that he often also looks at the pool next to it. Not the one which he brought her to, but the other one. Wouldn't it be right if the world of Man's creativity be next to the world of Man?
He hesitates, even as he sees just how still her pool has become. It will soon be completely over, and its pain washed away. It would be fitting for its passing to give way to new world. He bends close to the virgin pool and realizes what he needs to write on the final pages of the little journal. He will make them real, these little creatures of Man's imagination, but only if he can be one of them.
Writing those pages proves more difficult than he had thought. He had exposed himself to his own creations before, of course. The situation with Man had been singularly memorable. He found the absence of Man in this world only a small comfort, however. It was the great paradox that the more immanent he made himself the more limited he became, and he wanted to be completely immanent in this world. Changing his own image was troublesome, but not when he realized that he needed only place himself into the form created by Man's imagination.
The world lacked only a name now, and he carries the journal out to the Woods along with a pencil. Man's imagination has proved wanting when it comes to providing a name, and he feels that it is finally time for him to sanctify the world with his sovereignty by deciding its name himself.
Upon entering the Woods he realizes that something very odd had happened. The stillness has been disturbed. There is a deep gouge by Earth's pool, and there by a tree, a creature. Earth, Mammal, Rodent, creature. It has, oh no. Surely not. But there it is, roughly tied onto the poor creature's back. What imbecile took primeval dirt and formed it into a ring, and then, what, tested it out on the back of this little animal? A Man did, he realizes, of course. Which could only mean...
He looks into the neighboring pools and feels immensely foolish. How could he think to leave Man out of his new world? And how long did he expect her pool to just sit in stasis? No, Man had already invaded the virgin pool, as did her last daughter.
Come, ye thankful people, come, Raise the song of harvest home!
He remembers standing exactly here with her, the First Wife. She had begged for his mercy, how could he not grant it to her? She was, after all, perfect as he had formed her. Her pride had been carefully balanced against her lack of self-preservation, which formed a part of the necessary equation for multiplication of a species. Yet that pride had spawned chaos in the primal equations of life, and he had been forced to remove her from Earth immediately.
All is safely gathered in, Ere the winter storms begin;
He had gone back to the tome of Man and rewrote the equations, reducing pride by tying it into will. He saw the weaknesses of the solution, but trusted in its overall strength. But when the Evil destroyed the will of the Second Wife, and the weaknesses spawned insidious variables in the whole, he could only mourn the way this turned Daughters of Eve away from their own self worth.
God, our Maker, doth provide For our wants to be supplied;
As for Lilith, he wrote an entirely new book for her. He gave her Samil to ease her loneliness and led them into the pool next to Earth to sing for them. They knew that together they formed absolute destruction, but they willed themselves to the path of life, and he had grown to enjoy the world he did not know he was meant to create. But the Second Wife had already showed him the weakness of will, and when that ran out, the world held nothing but death. Complete, tragic, terrible death.
Come to God's own temple, come; Raise the song of harvest home!
And now her last daughter, who has only pride and annihilation, with no will for life, was in the new world of Man's imagination. He opens the journal and begins scribbling in the margins with his pencil. He can not undo the way things are, nor change the way she is, but he can limit her within this new world. He finally adds some lines to the back fly-leaf, and realizes that all the limitations he has written on himself in this world will leave him highly vulnerable to her. His pencil pauses as he considers this, but he writes just one last equation, that his Father's will be done.
Narnia.
He hurriedly writes the name on the front fly-leaf. It is time.
He presses the little red and green book to his lips and steps into the pool. Man was already singing with joy, and he hadn't even started yet.