came a moment when the light streamed in through a crack near the tunnel’s entrance.
It shot in at an angle, and for ten or twenty minutes, no longer, there in the pure darkness, the faint glow filled you.
You started and came to.
Who knows, maybe you had been asleep.
You noticed the sunlight bleeding into the space you were in.
IT’S MORNING, you thought.
And then, the next moment, you stiffened, stunned. Because you had discovered something. Immediately overhead—though of course you had no idea how you had landed, what was up and what was down—was an eye. A mammal’s eye. Enormous. Just one, one side of the head: an eyeball. It had to be a few times larger than your own, Anubis, or even bigger…maybe ten times bigger.
The eye stared down at you from directly overhead.
From within the ice.
You were face to face with a prehistoric animal encased in the permafrost. Suspended along the edge of the tunnel, inches away. It had tusks. Long, curved tusks. A long nose. Its body was covered in long fur. It was over eleven feet tall. Alive, it would have weighed six tons. It was something like an elephant that had lived ten thousand years ago, even longer ago than that, and had evolved to live in the cold. An enormous mammal, given the name “mammoth” by a French scientist in the eighteenth century.
One of these extinct creatures had been preserved, frozen, in the tunnel.
In the ground. In a layer of Siberian permafrost more than 160 feet thick.
Without decaying.
And now, Anubis, its huge eye, more than ten thousand years old, stared down at you.
WHO ARE YOU? Anubis asked.
WHO ARE YOU? The question bounced off the ice.
I’M…I’M A DOG.
The eye in the ice was not, of course, a dog. So it didn’t answer.
HAVE YOU BEEN THERE ALL ALONG? Anubis asked.
I’VE BEEN HERE ALL ALONG.
This time, the frozen earth answered. It transmitted the ice-packed mammoth’s answer to the dog’s mind: I’M FROZEN.
YOU’RE AN EYE. Anubis told the eye, very simply.
I’M AN EYE. The mammoth agreed, very simply.
YOU’RE LOOKING AT ME.
I’M LOOKING AT YOU.
AM I…ALIVE?
YOU’RE…ALIVE.
WILL I LIVE?
LIVE.
Anubis’s final question, rebounding off the ice, was transformed into a command. Anubis interpreted what he had heard as a command. He realized that this enormous eye, no one else, was his true master. It was not a dog. The eye (and the creature whose eye it was) had not said it was a dog. But neither was it a human. Anubis realized, then, at that moment, that this thing was his Absolute.
Anubis had no word to express his discovery.
Perhaps a human might have called this thing the “Dog God.”
And so Anubis, whose name itself means the “Dog God,” acknowledged this “Dog God” as his true master, and awoke.
Anubis, Anubis, at last you have awoken.
You were not asleep.
Ten minutes, twenty minutes passed. The brief period during which the tunnel filled with the morning sun’s faint glow was over. Once again pure darkness enclosed you. Your encounter with your true master had ended. What would you do? Obey the command you had been given, of course. The order. One simple word: LIVE. Already, you were trying. You had to break free. You twisted your body, twisted further. You moved. You slipped. You slid down the wall of the tunnel, you fell. But you weren’t afraid. The tunnel did not injure you. You descended.
Into a space.
You searched for your old master.
You looked for that idiot human.
You found him, deep in the tunnel, barely breathing but alive. Too weak even to groan. You were hungry. You knew you would need to build up your strength if you were going to escape from this place. So you saw him as food. You gorged yourself. There was nothing wrong with this. It had happened once before…then too, you’d had no choice; you had sated yourself on your former master’s corpse. You had been eleven months old, or maybe a year. It was the first time you had ever set foot on the Arctic Ocean, and you had almost died. You had eaten your master in order to survive, as if it were a sort of sacred rite. You had eaten that human, that former idiot. Then too. If there was a difference between this time and the last, it was that last time your “former master” had been wholly dead, whereas this master was still slightly…still breathing, barely. There was nothing wrong with that. You could stop his breathing.
Right?
RIGHT, you reply, to someone. To whoever it is that puts