Christmas on a Rational Planet

Once upon a time, she said, this was your universe. Long
before your time, before any time that you could measure. A
place of endless miracles, non? No harsh sciences here, no
mundane little laws of physics, no guiding principles. There
was just possibility. An infinity of possibility. Now. Look.

Chris wasn't watching the city any more. There was a
different world etched into the Carnival Queen's expression
now, a world inhabited by people; people he could recognize
as people, not monsters or automatons. The cities were just as
large, but there were less of the impossible things. The planet
looked... well, reasonable. Sort of.

– This was the world of the Watchmakers, Christopher.
One of the first Great Races. Things of extraordinary power.
Perhaps more power than they ever realized. See?
Chris concentrated on her smile, and focused on the
Watchmakers in their cities; grim-faced men in robes of grey,
their hands busy at machines, turning handles and pressing
switches. They looked ordinary. They looked drab.

– The Watchmakers. Logical, masculine creatures. They
rejected the possibility, and denied the world of wonders.
Perhaps it scared them. They wanted existence to be precise,
to be mechanical, so that they could live their lives to a solemn
timetable. They wanted to understand the universe in the same
way you might understand a piece of clockwork. As a cold
machine. No room for cities of brass or dragonfly-gods. They
invented rules, and tied creation down to those rules.

'Rational,' Chris heard himself say.

– Yes. They were beings of Reason. They proved that
horses couldn't fly, so horses didn't fly. They proved that
cities couldn't dream, so cities didn't dream. The shadeling
gods, the children of the Pythia... one by one, they all died,
pushed out of a cosmos that was too rational to let them live.
The Watchmakers took away the glamours and the mysteries,
then built machines in their places. They became kings of
Reason. Masters of space, lords of time
And there they all were, in the folds of her face. The
monsters and angels and impossible things, retreating into the
darkness as Chris watched, vanishing into the whirlpools of
her eyes. Everything strange and magical dropped out of the
universe. The Watchmakers held creation in a hard grey fist
and squeezed it dry.