Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life Read online

  That’s right. I. Deliver. Pies.

  Cherry pies. Apple pies. Strawberry-rhubarb pies. True, my pies happen to be the glue that holds the very fabric of the universe together, but have no illusion—they are still pies. I guess you could say they’re pretty big pies, but size—like time—is relative. To a creature living on one of the millions of inhabited planets that it is our job to oversee, the pies might be as big as a moon or as small as, well, a pie. Hard to say for sure, since I’ve never been out of The Realms. But that’s a whole other gripe.

  The point is, a long time ago, the Powers That Be (known simply as the PTB) decided it was getting messy trying to control the forces that keep the stars and planets and galaxies from crashing into each other. So they decided to combine the fundamental forces of nature, like gravity and electromagnetism, and somehow shape them into a nice, sweet-smelling pie. Why a pie? Why not a pie! Who doesn’t like pie?

  It’s my job to pick up the pies fresh from the oven, box them up, and deliver them to the correct department at the Powers That Be headquarters, which currently looks like a giant boot but can change depending on the whim of the PTB. My favorite shape was the six-legged Fangstrich from a small planet in the Virgo Cluster, but no one asks for my opinion.

  Anyway, when I pick up the empty pie tins at the end of my shift, only crumbs are left. Somehow the Powers That Be distribute the pies to the far reaches of the universe, wherever new star systems are forming. Since the universe is constantly expanding, this means my job is never done. I don’t actually know the nitty-gritty of what happens to the pies once they reach their destinations, which is unfortunate because I have this big report due for school next week on what my job entails, and that’s the kind of detail teachers eat right up.

  Yes, even immortal sons of Supreme Overlords have to go to school, which doesn’t really seem fair. I mean, I might have only begun my teen years, but years here last forever, so really, I’ve been in school since before the Sombrero Galaxy took its first siesta billions of years ago. It’s enough already.

  Anyway, right now I’m heading to my last pickup of the day and then I have to go home and write the annoying report. At least the pickup is at my best friend Kal’s house. Kal’s parents are OnWorlders, which means they live most of the time on different terrestrial planets, doing research and writing reports. As a rule, we never interfere with the planets’ natural evolution. That said, I’ve heard rumors. After all, there’s only so much one can take of watching dinosaurs stomp around aimlessly for a few hundred million years before you need to send an asteroid their way.

  No matter how many times I walk this same path, I never get bored of it. The central Realms—home to most of the residents and buildings—are set up like a grid, with walking paths crisscrossing each other at even intervals. On either side of the paths trees loom high and streams weave their way between them. When I was younger, before I started delivering the pies, I could usually be found in one of the distant fields with Kal or Bren, watching the clouds change color. The sky here is without color, but the clouds more than make up for it. I learned in school that on the planets, clouds and trees and water are solid objects, providing some sort of purpose in nature. In The Realms, they are more like suggestions of such things, until someone wants to use them. A lake becomes a lake when someone wants to go fishing. A flower becomes a flower when someone wants to water it, or admire it, or put in a vase. Even then it’s not a “real” flower, like the type that grows in the soil of many of the terrestrial planets. But that doesn’t make them any less beautiful.

  Aunt Rae’s front lawn is full of flowers growing from nowhere and rootless trees. She’s very proud of her garden, and when she’s not making pies, I usually find her gardening out here.

  “Took you long enough,” Kal says, swinging the door open. Kal—whose after-school job is to welcome new arrivals to the Afterlives—has a greater sense of time than most of us here in The Realms. Since he deals with life-forms whose lives actually have beginnings and endings, the whole thing sort of rubs off on him and he gets impatient easily. I plop down on the couch and say, “I’m here the same time I always am.”

  He mutters something that I choose to ignore. I put up my feet and breathe in deep. Their house smells soooo good. Aunt Rae is one of the best pie makers in all the The Realms, but she is also the slowest. Can’t rush perfection is her motto. I never mind waiting. Any time I get to put my feet up and do nothing works fine for me.

  “Is that you, Joss?” Aunt Rae calls out from the kitchen. She always knows when I’m here, even though she’s nearly completely deaf. She sticks her head out from the kitchen, apple pie juice running down the front of her apron.

  “Hi, Aunt Rae,” I yell. “How are you today?”

  Kal’s aunt is one of the Old Ones. All the pie makers are from the first wave of immortals. It’s not like their bodies are breaking down or anything, but they don’t self-repair as well as the rest of us. Of course, Aunt Rae could get her hearing fixed instantly instead of wearing an adjustable ear volumizer, but she says the silence helps her focus on baking her pies. Personally, I think she likes not having to hear Kal’s music blaring all the time. He has terrible taste in music, even with all the music in the universe to choose from. He’s been working on his own “masterpiece,” which is even worse.

  “Can’t complain,” Aunt Rae replies cheerily, wiping her forehead and leaving a smear of flour behind.

  “Wanna hear my latest and greatest?” Kal asks me, picking up his drumsticks without waiting for an answer.

  Aunt Rae switches her volumizer to the off position and ducks back into the kitchen. I cover my ears with my hands. As usual, this is the point where I get even more jealous that my oldest brother, Thade, gets to hear the Music of the Spheres—that melodic tune made by the planetary bodies as they go around their orbits—while I get to hear Kal doing things to the drums that should never, ever be described as music. Kal claims he learned this latest piece from a drummer in a band he recently escorted to one of the Afterlives. The guy had come from Earth, which is a particularly well-liked planet around here due to its being one of the few where the inhabitants developed a sense of humor.

  It’s only when Kal pauses to flip his drumsticks dramatically in the air that we hear the sirens. He drops the drumsticks, and one hits the cymbal with a tszing! The sirens mean only one thing—someone on one of the inhabited planets is zeroing in on our location with whatever technology they’ve developed to peer into their night sky. Normally, The Realms can’t be seen from anywhere in the universe. But every once in a while a rip occurs in the fabric of the space-time continuum. Quantum entanglement becomes untangled. If someone happened to be looking at exactly the right spot, they could catch a glimpse of us. And just the tiniest glimpse is catastrophic.

  I was only a billion or two years old, a baby really, when the sirens last blared. Intelligent life in the first batch of planets had just started peering into the skies. The viewer at the other end of the primitive piece of equipment spotted a garden party at one of the fancier estates in The Realms. The old guy was so shocked at what he saw that he dropped dead of a heart attack on the spot. Dying in this way was actually a bit of luck for everyone else on his planet, since the penalty for laying eyes on any of the beings living in The Realms is the immediate disintegration of the entire planet. Under the circumstances, in an uncharacteristically charitable move, the Powers That Be allowed the planet to continue existing. A dead man tells no tales, as the saying goes. But I doubt they will be so forgiving again. No one knows exactly why the punishment is so harsh, but since this almost never happens, the whole issue doesn’t get much attention.

  “DUCK!” Kal screams, throwing himself to the floor. Between the intermittent wails of the siren, I can still hear Aunt Rae humming.

  “Aunt Rae!” I yell. “You have to duck!”

  But she doesn’t hear me. Even the sirens don’t get through when her volumizer is off.

  I half-sli