Blasphemy, blasphemy, thought the gardener, and that really was the oddest part.

Though the gardener was a filthy disbeliever – a rotten agnostic-or-atheist (alternating with dependence on factors as the quality of his day, his health, the weather, et al), dirty to his bones, faithless (frequently, anyhow) in topics involving anything more spiritual than a hot cross bun – despite all this, he found it blasphemous. A rumbling in his gut. A dark vague weight on the back of his brain. The sinking heaviness of his face into a frown.

But blasphemy, blasphemy, so on: the gardener sunk into it. Felt it absorb him up to his ankles, hips, chin. So he stepped, silent, frowning, broiling internally, warm ash hugging his boots, gentle and snug as a lover.

The planet had ‘military relevance’. Hills of ash, death-grey, rolling over and down, flat in great far-off plains. Ash twisting in gales, rattling off the gardener’s helmet. A corpse-land, beaming with white light, but grey everywhere, grey-skied, grey-earthed. Grey corpsed, and the gardener, grey-suited, looking like some ambulatory smudge, a man watched through mist. A grey no-one with a gleaming visor.

And another one: legs splayed, scorched on the back, deserting. No judgement from the gardener. That was none of his business. He placed his nozzle under the boy’s face and spun him over: terror and smattered ash. But that was none of his business, and the gardener spun the crank and aimed at the boy, and with a noise like an electric zipper being pulled up sent jittering tendrils of light over him, fizzling away at him. They worked away, jaggedy and vivid, turning him blacker and blacker until there was nothing left but another mound of ash, sinking into the hill, steaming into the sky. Blasphemous, felt the gardener, in spite of all he kept saying to himself.

For instance: they were hardly innocent, were they? Glimmering like stars in those low ashen fields – weaponry. All those centuries developing, inventing, philosophising, and it all led to this: magic wands that made guts and life come flying out instead of nicer things like doves or rabbits. All the evidence was there: homicide. Murder in all of them, murder gleaming in even the most wide, terrified eyes. So the gardener explained to himself.

And, for instance: they were already dead, weren’t they? They certainly weren’t asking for his manager, let alone weeping over their fate, which, frankly, was probably bound for them anyway, gardener or not. Cremation was in. Next to all such newfangled hologramming, mechano-taxidermy, clone museuming, and sun-launches, it was cremation that was the most fashionable. Cremation was retro, like mounted deer heads and fireplaces. It was the best treatment you could really get in that state of being and the gardener would have even appreciated a ‘cheers, mate’ now and then. So the gardener explained to himself.

The new kids understood it. Esoteric figures who all looked similar, spoke similar, had Anglo-Saxon names never longer than seven letters. The new kids were as invincible as djinni because they never seemed to think about anything at all.

‘Nasty stuff, isn’t it?’ Asked the gardener some weeks ago. He and a new kid (John or Brian or Adam) met on a hill, ended up walking alongside each other. They talked like robots, traded word for equivalent word. So they came upon a field where the bodies were piled like the ashes. They were clean as the day they had all been born but for their throats. Chemicals in the air tasted like lightning.

‘Ahum?’ The new kid replied.

‘I said, “It’s nasty stuff, isn’t it?”.’ The gardener checked over his apparatus and said once more: ‘Isn’t it?’

‘Um, yeah, sure?’

And that was the end of the discussion. It was noiseless but the zipping of the vanishing corpses and the rattling ash on their visors. That was when the gardener realised that the new kids were invincible, safe as Adams and Eves (before that nasty tree business). They were unlike people like the gardener, who were mortal, disgustingly so, oozing flesh and snapping bones, squelching, leaking and bruising. The gardener envied them. In fact, the gardener despised them, with a howling, white fury he had never felt before. They were wretched, vapid, hateful creatures, brainless, and the gardener wished he could be even a tenth like them.

He wondered bitterly upon these things until the apparatus broke. Thank God, thought the gardener. There was no greater blessing upon the gardener than the apparatus. It might have been fashioned by Hephaestus. It was a dirty mass of metal and tubes. On one end there was the nozzle and on the other was the handle, and on the other was the crank. The Holy Trinity.

The apparatus had jammed right as he had come to a small squad and they lay like gentle sleeping babies under the white sky as the gardener tugged at the machine. It was a perfect world in those few moments as he worked at the device and everything might have been right forever had he never fixed it: those dead bodies would have been nothing more than sleeping children and the gardener would have been plugging away at the machine in mindless peace, and all would have been well forever. But the gardener wasn’t half as smart as those new kids and soon the thing was tittering back to life, sweeping over them.

One of the bodies moved.

The gardener paused, of course.

The body shuddered. The visor was cloudy and cracked on the edges and the gardener couldn’t see anything of the soldier’s face except his wide eyes, blinding as searchlights. They blinked.

So the gardener shot the soldier dead. The noise resounded like a bell and the air smelled like thick ozone. He looked like a burnt out candle, a clean hole in his face, tendrils of coiling smoke. So the gardener turned all of it to ash. These things happened.

Blasphemy, blasphemy, thought the gardener, dragging himself across the ash hills, towing the apparatus, heavy. He felt binded. There were ropes on him, connecting all around, back to that boy he killed, and to that gun in its holster, and to every particle of ash he walked on. All of it together, tied, pulling at him. The gardener understood, then, that he was dead, too. Dead the instant he had killed that soldier – probably long dead before that, too. Back when he first thought of blasphemy. Back when he was born, he had been dead. That really was the oddest part.

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