Gojiro by Mark Jacobson Read Free Book Online Page B

cosmogonic council? No music for a theophanic string quartet? Not an ontological crumb for the hungry heart? Hey Budd—fuck you!”
    Of course, there was no reply. There hadn’t been for years. Had there really ever been a Budd Hazard? Or was the supposed Muse nothing more than a smirking demiurge, a prank of philosophy perpetrated by one north forty of his mammoth cogitator against another? “Should have known,” the monster grumbled. “Jive won’t get you Zen.”
    So many times Gojiro attempted to renounce the Triple Ring Promise, quietly resign. “Maybe there’s still a chance for Radioactive Island to become a place of joy and warmth, like Angulome City, Houyhnhnmland, or Mount Daumal,” he told Komodo as tenderly as he could, “but it can’t happen with me around. I’m a five-hundred-foot-tall cancer! You got to cast my raggedy fate to the winds.”
    “No!” Komodo shouted, his face wild, his tears flying. “I won’t allow it. I won’t let you renounce all we know to be so.”
    “Don’t you see where all this crazy Cosmo has got us? Cosmo’s Hell’s own soldering gun, cementing us in this cell forever and ever. Screw Cosmo. Get Leo G. Carroll in here and cancel his goddamned contract! Don’t you get it? We killed our Promise, we overloaded its circuits and blew it out with bullshit.”
    Komodo would not be moved. “The Triple Ring Promise is what it is. Whatever it says, we shall seek to fulfill it. And fulfill it we shall.”
    “But we got to face facts,” the monster wailed. “We’re just two pathetic mutants, victims of an arbitrary force that doesn’t care about any kind of aspiration one way or another. The Heater, that’s our God, the burning center of our little system. We’re nothing but distantly orbiting bits of dust, points in space, remote from the Endless Flow, unconnected to anything, part of no Beam or Bunch . . . Never destined to be.”
    Komodo’s eyes grew wide, full of fury and sorrow. “I refuse to accept that!”
    * * *
    That was worst of it, Gojiro told himself, the way Komodo continued to believe. Even now, a week after the hideous near double suicide, he was down in his lab, cooing to those funky chickadees sitting on the branches of that glassed-in Fayetteville Tree. It was crazy how much time Komodo spent codifying the behaviors of those mat-feathered fowls, checking on their manic reproductions, trying to isolate the Instant of Reprimordialization.
    Reprimordialization—it was Budd Hazard’s central point, and his most perplexing. According to the long silent Muse, Reprimordialization was the “engine of the Evolloo,” a continuous, unending series of “invisible Instants” during which Beamic energy cleaved to create new Bunches, thereby springing forth “more life, different and unique.” It was in the space of these mysterious Instants, which Budd Hazard called the “realm of Change,” that Komodo planted the flag of the Triple Rings, where he sought to fulfill their Promise. In the early days, Gojiro was often moved to tears whenever his friend spoke of Reprimordialization. But now, watching Komodo attempting to isolate the moment when one species of chickadee transformed into another, the reptile saw it as just one more lie of the mind, another cheap trick.
    “Cheep, cheep,” those crappy birds called from Komodo’s lab. The monster hated the sound! Just as he hated it when Komodo would parrot back Budd Hazard’s other shopworn koans. “Going on is all! To stand still is defeat! The Evolloo is a vast river, not a mordant lake. A rich man can build a fence around a lake, claim it belongs to him. But no fence can be built around a river. A river is Freedom!” How many times had Gojiro heard that one? “Sure,” he’d scream back at his friend, “maybe once we rode that river, that homeboy’s Mississippi—but now the silt’s built up, the Army Corps of Engineers stabbed their stark white dams in the magic places, and there’s no way