The Old Man of the Celestial Court

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. But little Susie needed a new toy, so, as it was written in the opening words of one of the many holy books the humans had come up with in order to explain the batshit place they lived in, “It had to happen.” There weren’t always unicorns, either; it had to happen. There weren’t always manticores, jellyfish, dogs, rats, lions, cows, scorpions, whales, snails, or anything else in the Valley, really. All of it had come from the insistence of little Susie. Humanity itself had at one time been the answer to one of Susie’s demands to her father, the god of creation: “I want a creature that looks like a god but thinks like a baby all the days of its life.”

The god of creation was a “big picture” kind of celestial, slightly limited in his palette, and naturally somewhat lazy. He had a tendency to create not much more than other celestial beings who looked similar to him and could do jobs for him, rather than simply doing the job himself. (Outsourcing was a concept several millennia in the making, but this was in the beginning, so hadn’t really been named yet. Humans in skyscrapers would later pat themselves on the back thinking they’d created this amazing new thing, but the god of creation had been doing it since before that first celestial breakfast.) He’d known the Valley was rather empty at the beginning, but didn’t really want to spend a bunch of time thinking about what needed to be done to spruce the place up.

So he created Susannah, the goddess of curiosity. In doing so, he also accidentally created the concepts of entropy, time, growth, change, birth, infancy, and childhood, all in one being. Within moments of her creation, little Susie had demanded there be light, darkness, day, night, men, women, children, green things that the people could eat, furry creatures they could hunt, and furry creatures they could pet. (Within celestial moments of their creation, humans had set about the task of explaining why they lived in a place where literally every new thing that appeared might be a joy in their old age or might just as easily chew their faces off. But, as children are wont to do, they didn’t actually ask the gods for the reasons, they just went off and invented it out of whole cloth for themselves, and then proceeded to kill each other over the conflicting definitions.) In short, the god of creation had really outdone himself with little Susie.

To Enki, the sole immortal human in the celestial court, little Susie represented nothing more or less than the most monstrous pain in the ass in all of creation. It was like having a permanent three-year-old with god-powers on a sugar high. She didn’t use her own god-powers because she felt it was “boring” to commit to a final vision long enough to actually create it. Creation was for old stuck-ups like her father. She vastly preferred to wheedle him into doing it for her so she could sprint off to the next wild idea. And while the god of creation acted annoyed by the incessant demands, Enki thought he was secretly delighted to have outsourced his own ambitions. That way he could blame any craziness or unfortunate side effects on Susannah. Enki himself was just grateful he’d raised his kids before many of Susannah’s inventions...like dragons. Or, much later, the internet.

Talk about something that could chew your face off.

But Enki’s being taken up to the celestial court was one of Susannah’s earlier whims—“I want a human who doesn’t die, like, ever, and I want him up here so I don’t have to go far to ask him questions”—so he couldn’t complain too much. On his good days he even remembered to be grateful that Susannah had demanded humans have an eternal part that couldn’t die; the earliest humans had simply vanished from creation when their entropy overwhelmed them. He could just as easily have been one of those poor bastards. (Indeed, the god of creation had the devil of a time resurrecting their substance from the dust when Susie demanded the ret-conning of all humans to have souls. His grumbling about it was so loud that different humans wrote different holy books about a spiteful god of thunder and a merciful god of resurrection at the very same time. They later got those books confused, and more wars ensued. It was a damn fine thing Susie had demanded souls be created, because that particular set of wars sent a whole bunch of them to the part of the celestial court that other gods had demanded be split off to house the humans. Enki was the only human in the actual celestial court. The others all just thought there were no gods but the god of creation, because he was the only one who went walking over there in the unfashionable end of Heaven.)

On his bad days, however…Enki and Susannah would square off like a crochety old grandpa with someone else’s kid who was opening lollipops in the checkout line at the grocery store and licking them.

On one particularly bad day, when little Susie had been an endless font of questions (“why do humans think there can’t be variation in sexual characteristics in humans, and put other humans to death for having variations in sexual characteristics, but study the exact same variance in animals and call it the ‘majesty of creation?’” and “why do humans eat things they know will make their guts hurt?” and “why are humans convinced they’re always right?” and “why is it I’m the only celestial who asks questions?”) and she’d dragged Enki from one side of the celestial court to the other, pointing down below to events in the Valley and demanding still other answers before Enki had even answered the previous questions...“the old man of the celestial court” had had enough.

Because, of course, when Susie had demanded Enki be brought to the celestial court and never ever die, she hadn’t thought to ask that he remain eternally youthful and pain-free. So on days when the weather was out of the north, Enki was a very cranky human, feeling his entropy in every part of his body, especially his back and knees. So, on this bad day, when Susie had physically dragged him like a rag doll from one side of the celestial court to the other and demanded answers to one human folly after another and even the god of creation had given up and gone to visit the human Heaven, Enki blew up at her.

“It’s the same answer to the first billion times you asked: Because humans are stupid and short-sighted!” he bellowed, spit flying from his mouth the way it often does with older folks, and Enki was very old indeed—old enough to have seen both dogs and the internet get invented. “You seem to think you can wish anything into being and never have to deal with the fallout. But your vapid curiosity and your ridiculous ideas have one really critical blind spot at the center of them: You. You have no idea what it means to be a human and live in the Valley. You have no idea how much it hurts. You have no idea of what it’s like to know death is coming. I gladly put up with being the celestial court’s lapdog for a few million years because death was so terrifying. But until you’ve known what it’s like to stare death in the face and not know what comes after, you will always be Daddy’s little annoyance factor, because you. Will never. Grow up!”

And Susannah, the goddess of curiosity—who hadn’t really been “little Susie” for a very, very long time—stared the old man in the face and said, “Fine. I want to know what it’s like.” She called over her shoulder in the direction of the human Heaven, knowing her father would hear, “Daddy, make it happen!” Then she looked back at Enki, and her bright green eyes narrowed to a squint. “But you’re coming with me.”

And in the human year 2022, a pair of twins were born that were something very new indeed.

And humanity had to decide whether this new thing was going to chew its face off.

It had to happen.