“The Doom that Came to Three Cities”

“We badgers,” said Georgescu, the green badger, sitting in the red sand in front of the Pielapiel Palace in the City of Sleep, “don’t much like violence. But when it happens, we’re ready.”

The palace had not yet been inaugurated. Otherwise rough-spoken Gente such as Georgescu would have been shooed away from the great court. She was a thoroughly practical thinker, this badger, and was considering the strategic, tactical and operative prospects for a new clean- up operation against Homo sapiens sapiens.

Trusted sources had told her that resistance among the defeated would soon flare up again. The news had not come as a surprise. Georgescu made a principle of not trusting the cheery reports that depicted a world in which all human resistance was broken. She knew all the dirty corners of the battlefields, the wrinkles and the classified documents. If it were left to her, the ecotecture would have been scoured with molten metal, rinsed with clouds of spores and strewn with ashes.

They were still there, perhaps for a long time to come, splay-footed lotus eaters with adaptors wired to the hypothalamus, poor sods from the shattered brigades of the last western redoubts. The badger kept her thoughts about these well to herself. She reckoned that there would be no golden age free of these pests. What had lasted so long against all reason would survive any attempts at extermination. She sometimes asked herself whether there wasn’t an upside here: given enough time, at some point the oldest god of all would become a father once more, that’s how things worked, and so far it wasn’t clear that he had nothing more in mind for these defeated.

Georgescu saw the Gente as a midwife civilization, hardly as the goal of all earthly evolution.

Dietmar Dath, Doppelhouse Press

Read more from this staggering work of imagination at DoppleHouse Press’ Nomadic Journal.