LEVIATHAN

IT WAS WELL AFTER DARK. For Leviathan it was always well after dark. It spent its life solitary as a monk…in a black hole…with heavy drapery, which is why dreams were so important. It saw the world through the minds and dreams that had the wherewithal to see. Those minds that didn’t were much the same as cancer cells in its brain driving it inexorably mad. It swam Atlantis’ deep undercurrents in the way that islands don’t swim but would if they could. The grotto where veins of the Mount’s magnetic and fluidic ore rooted into the earth to ground the huge mountain in reality was the perfect size for sleeping. It had hollowed the space out itself eons ago with its own body, where it slept according to its own schedule. Leviathan had dreamt so many species and evolutionary advances into being it lost count. It actually missed the dinosaurs. Their dreams had been full of large thoughts and hungers, sometimes the one indistinguishable from the other. Expansive was the word, and Leviathan had roamed the true world—the water world—openly. Leviathan’s passage was always cause for herds of brontosauri, pods of plesiosaurs to stop what they were doing and enjoy feeling small. Not so these idiot humans with their constant, manic ant dreams of enlarging themselves.

And here it was, fully awake and involved in their affairs. The last time it had been fully awake Spanish Conquistadors were sailing about like dragoons hungry for tuna. It didn’t like being fully awake. Twice now powerful minds had disturbed it. Those twelve minds shouting at it the first time had been like an icy alarm clock suddenly dropped onto its brain.

It made a slow arc away from the Mount, idly ingesting a giant squid that had already been damaged by a singularity. It moved toward land. Toward Atlantis. More precisely, the capital city.

Leviathan didn’t like being awake at all.