saliva. "Don't ask me how I know—I just do. But before I go any further about the cyclops God, I want you to know that you'll find someone to love and who'll love you back, and whatever happens you'll always have that because no one can take away the past."
"You're scared of going blind," I said.
"I am going blind."
"Not yet."
"And I'm learning not to be scared because everything I see until that day will always belong to me."
"The doctors said it would be gradual," I reminded her.
"That's horrible."
"Why?"
"Because you wouldn't want to find someone to love and then know that every day you wake up the love between you grows dimmer and dimmer, would you?"
"I guess not," I said.
"Wouldn't you much rather feel the full strength of that love up to and including in the final second before the world goes black?"
"It would probably be painful to lose it all at once like that."
"Painful because you actually had something to lose. For me, I know I can't wish away blindness, but I sure wish that the last image I ever see—in that final second before my world goes black—is the most vivid and beautiful image of all."
Because I didn't know what to say to that, I mumbled: "I'm sorry."
"That I'm going blind?"
"Yeah, and that we can't grow eyes."
This time I looked over, and she was the one gazing at the stars. "Before, you asked if we were insignificant," she said. "But because you're sorry—that's kind of why we're the most significant of all, why Earth is better than the other planets."
"For the cyclops God?"
"Yes."
"He cares about my feelings?"
"Not in the way you're probably thinking, but in a different way that's exactly what the cyclops God cares about most because that's what it's looking for in an eye. All the amazing stuff we've ever built, all our ancient civilizations and supercomputers and cities you can see from the Moon—that's just useless cosmetics to the cyclops God, except in how all of it has made us feel about things that aren't us."
"I think you're talking about morality."
"I think so, too."
"So by feeling sorry for you I'm showing compassion, and the cyclops God likes compassion?"
"That's not totally wrong but it's a little upside down. We have this black matter garden and these planets the cyclops God has grown as potential eyes to replace its own eye once it stops working, but its own eye is like an eye and a brain mixed together. Wait—" she said.
I waited.
"Imagine a pair of tinted sunglasses."
I imagined green-tinted ones.
"Now imagine that instead of the lenses being a certain colour, they're a certain morality, and if you wear the glasses you see the world tinted according to that morality."
I was kind of able to imagine that. I supposed it would help show who was good and who was bad. "But the eye and the tinted glasses are the same thing in this case."
"Exactly, there's no one without the other, and what makes the tint special is us—not that the cyclops God cares at all about individuals any more than we care about individual honey bees. That's why he's kind of a monster."
"Isn't people's morality always changing, though?"
"Only up to a point. Green is green even when you have a bunch of shades of it, and a laptop screen still works fine even with a few dead pixels, right? And the more globalized and connected we get, the smoother our morality gets, but if you're asking more about how our changing morals work when the cyclops God finally comes to take its eye, I assume it has a way to freeze our progress. To cut our roots. Then it makes some kind of final evaluation. If it's satisfied it takes the planet and sticks it into its eye socket, and if it doesn't like us then it lets us alone, although because we're frozen and possibly rootless I suppose we die—maybe that's what the other planets are, so many of them in space without any sort of life. Cold, rejected eyes."
From sunglasses to bees to monitors in three metaphors, and now we were back to space. This was getting confusing. The stars twinkled, some of them dead, too: their light still arriving at our eyes from sources that no longer existed. "That's kind of depressing," I said to end the silence.
"What about it?"
"Being bees," I said, "that work for so long at tinting a pair of glasses just so that a cyclops God can try them on."
"I don't think it's any more depressing than being a tomato."
"I've never thought about that."
"You should. It's beautiful, like love," she said. "Because if you think about it, being a tomato and being a person are really quite similar. They're both about growing and existing for the enjoyment of someone else. As a tomato you're planted, you grow and mature and then an animal comes along and eats you. The juicier you look and the nicer you smell, the greater the chance that you'll get plucked but also the more pleasure the animal will get from you. As a person, you're also born and you grow up and you mature into a one of a kind personality with a one of a kind face, and then someone comes along and makes you fall in love with them and all the growing you did was really just for their enjoyment of your love."
"Except love lasts longer than chewing a tomato."
"Sometimes," she said.
"And you have to admit that two tomatoes can't eat each other the way two people can love each other mutually."
"I admit that's a good point," she said.
"And what happens to someone who never gets fallen in love with?"
"The same thing that happens to a tomato that never gets eaten or an eye that the cyclops God never takes. They die and they rot, and they darken and harden, decomposing until they don't look like tomatoes anymore. It's not a nice fate. I'd rather live awhile and get eaten, to be honest."
"As a tomato or person?"
"Both."
I thought for a few seconds. "That explanation works for things on Earth, but nothing actually decomposes in space."
"That's why there are so many dead planets," she said.
About the Author
Norman Crane lives in Canada. He writes books. When he's not writing, he reads. He's also a historian, a coffee drinker and a cinephile.
His first novel, A Paunch Full of Pesos, is a spaghetti western.
On the internet, he keeps a blog, has Facebook and tweets (@TheNormanCrane).
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