Offshoring

I didn’t know which one was about to blow their gasket, so I kept an eye on all three of them. And let me tell you, it’s frikiastikós difficult to tell them apart on a good day. They keep shuttling themselves into each others’ positions, and none of us can tell them apart any more.

The one holding Atropos’ shears was rattling them agitatedly, stabbing at invisible threads only they could see. I kept studying the part of the tapestry I was holding for suspicious holes, but nothing seemed amiss. Yet.

I was reasonably sure I was holding the twentieth century section. There was only one nymph between me and the loom, which was in quite a state of dismantle. Clio, the Muse of History, and incidentally the primary weaver of the Tapestry of Time, was full-throated screaming in Zeus’ face, and he had no choice but to take it.

The perils of demotion.

We were all feeling the budget cuts.

Thunderbolts were useless in this place.

There were more people gathered around than I could recognize. One old crone-looking woman stomped by, and with that apron dress and festoons of beads, I could swear she was one of the Norns. I assumed the dog-headed god in a crisp, pleated kilt was Anubis, but the monster he held on a chain I didn’t know. In the impossibly far distance, I could see Athena struggling to roll the Tapestry on a wooden bar, helped by a rail-thin woman with a feather perfectly balanced on her head.

Saturn was also roaring, but at some humble-looking man in a plain robe with bloodstains on it. That one wore a crown of thorns that looked wickedly sharp. “Look, I get it, my son was destined to be replaced like he did to me, but this is mentula stupid! Blah blah Son of God, whatever! Stop this! Tell your followers to knock this stercum off immediately!”

The mild guy shrugged. “Dude, they ain’t my followers. They follow Mammon instead, and do exactly the opposite of what I taught. You know that, man. None of this crap is my idea, it’s seriously harshing my mellow.”

Atropos heard, paced over with all the menace of a stalking cat, those shears making little snip snip snip sounds in the folds of their robe. I have never heard such a chilling sound in my life. Their eyes were wild, like they were contemplating mass murder on the greatest scale they could imagine – and this was a creature that had seen, measured, and recorded every disease outbreak since Pandora spilled the beans. “Are you saying,” they said, chill and deadly quiet, “that none of us gathered here are responsible? That this mandate comes from… somewhere else?”

The room fell silent. Completely silent. We didn’t even have to breathe, so we didn’t. Anubis produced an abacus, and the flick flick flick of the beads on the wires was the only sound. His eyes and ears seemed to take in everyone. “By my calculations, every god and goddess ever worshipped is here. All of us. So, who ordered us to pack up and ship our operations overseas?”

Silence.

Joshua bar Joseph was staring at a fat blob covered in money bags, and even that being was shaking its head no.

Hades came forward, if that term means anything in a distant pocket of space and time. There was a blur and a split, and then there were two – Pluto walked beside his twin, looking like the Gemini brothers. “Osiris? Hel? Arawn? Yama? Mictecacihuatl? Our respective underworlds are getting rather full, are they not?

They did not have to speak; we all suddenly knew the answer.

“Hmm. Then, perhaps, the answer comes from above us?”

What is above the gods?

Juno sighed, and pulled out her smart phone. All the rest did the same, including myself. Why, yes, we can hold a tapestry and scroll at the same time. While some checked the news, others scanned their follower’s media pages, and many traced the ethereal ISP for the origin of the message that we all received. Mercury, fast as always, sighed as he reached the conclusion first. “Death. Death and his minions. They’re trying to do an end run around Life itself, and Father Sky and Mother Earth.”

Geb and Nut bristled, but said nothing.

Jove snarled and threw his phone on the floor, shattering it into thousands of sparkling pieces. Stabbing it with thunderbolts did nothing, because it re-formed itself seconds after he finished.

Cronos came forward, the shaft of his scythe making thumping noises that sounded like a corpse pounding on a coffin lid – from the inside. “We must inform the essence of Life. Death should not get too big for his britches. None of us should.”

Jove looked embarrassed, and both Juno and Hera made a face.

Atropos came forward, Clotho and Lachesis right behind. The Norns approached from a different side, Tridevi from a third, Wyrds from a fourth. All the lesser fate deities stretched out behind them, arms on a spiral galaxy, the primaries standing on the edge of the event horizon.

They meant to evoke that image. Atropos spoke for them all. “Fine. That’s what Death wants? Then he gets what he wants. All of it.”

We paled.

“Death wants us demoted? Death wants us to move the Tapestry beyond even its own reach? Fine. Then we will. It gets that demand… and all that the demand implies. We will separate ourselves from space and time. Outsource us? Export us? Then pay the tariffs for the imports!”

A swoosh, and a SNIP, and it was so.

We felt the warping beneath our feet, the weft threads snapping, the twisting of the loom into a giant knot, the transport of this pocket of nowhere to somewhere else, the change of the balance, the scales tipped and shredded by the emission of a dying star. This pocket of space and time, and the Tapestry, and all our gods, hurtling down the biggest black hole we had ever seen.

And we heard Life’s shriek of outrage as she was left behind, and Time’s groan of fear as he was brought with us, and everything stretched as we tipped and fell into the black hole, drawn out, impossibly thin, rocketing to another space and time. Or nothing like, we didn’t know. But would all go together.

I hadn’t heard Life this pissed since Death created cancer, which is an overabundance of Life itself gone horribly out of control, feeding on itself.

Atropos grinned, their visage like a skull. “I may have neglected to bring the moths,” they casually mentioned.

I was terrified. Those moths? They can eat time, and we gods contained them in the strongest way possible. Tapestry threads are created, twisted, spun, woven, snipped. Along the way they gain color, as the human soul they are connected to lives and breathes and experiences.

What feeds on the Tapestry of Life?

And now it was beyond their reach.

They were left behind, trapped in a world with a Death gone out of control.

What would they feed on now?