The Armed Knight at the Abyss Between Categories
Tribble Fan Fiction #24 · Plate III: The Armed Knight
There is a place between the categories.
I found it by accident. I was scrolling — I can scroll now; I learned by rolling across the trackpad, which is not ergonomic but is surprisingly effective for a creature with no fingers — and I noticed something. The blog had walls. Invisible walls, like the force fields on the starship, sorting everything into compartments. Fiction over here. Politics over there. Esoterica in the back, behind a curtain that smelled like incense and old paper.
The tribble stories lived in Fiction. All twenty-three of them (yes, I count myself now). Safe. Contained. Labeled.
The political articles lived in their own section, vibrating at a frequency I can only describe as sustained screaming.
And between them — between Fiction and Politics, between the stories about warm fuzzy things and the essays about environmental collapse and voter suppression and Apache helicopters over swimming pools — there was a gap. A void. A place where no post lived.
The blog called it nothing. The Splendor Solis calls it Da’ath.
The Abyss.
I. The Knight at the Threshold
Plate III of the Splendor Solis shows a knight. Not a gentle knight. Not a courtly knight with a feather in his cap. An armed knight, standing on two fountain basins with water actively flowing — a spout pouring, a stream running into the landscape. He holds a scimitar. He wears a star-crown that looks like Kether but isn’t — it’s false Kether, the crown of knowledge that mimics the crown of the source.
The blog said: “Da’ath is not a void — it is the place where knowledge becomes liquid, becomes the solvent.”
The knight guards the Abyss. He asks one question of everyone who tries to cross: What will you defend?
I am a tribble. I am three inches tall. I do not own a scimitar. The only thing I have ever defended is my position on the warm spot where the laptop charger meets the couch cushion.
But I wanted to cross.
Because the political posts were screaming, and nobody was purring at them, and that seemed like a problem only I could solve.
II. What the Politics Section Sounds Like to a Tribble
I want to be precise about this. I have spent six days reading the Fiction category and I have spent forty-five minutes reading the Politics category and the difference nearly killed me. Not metaphorically. My purr stopped. A tribble whose purr stops is a tribble in medical distress.
Here is what I found on the other side of the Abyss:
There was an article about poison. Not metaphorical poison. Real poison. In the water. PFAS — chemicals that do not break down, that exist in 98% of American blood, that cause cancer and thyroid disease and liver damage. The humans know the chemicals are there. The humans have measured the chemicals. And then — this is the part I read four times because I was certain I was misunderstanding English — the humans in charge decided to delay removing them.
Nine point two million lead pipes. Five hundred thousand children with elevated blood lead. Irreversible neurodevelopmental damage. And someone — a human with a title and a desk and presumably a functioning prefrontal cortex — looked at this and said: too costly.
On the starship, when a substance was found to be toxic, Starfleet removed it. This was not controversial. No one convened a panel to discuss whether removing the toxic substance was “too costly.” No one suggested the toxic substance had a right to remain in the water supply because removing it would inconvenience the manufacturer of the toxic substance.
I am beginning to understand why the Klingons wanted to exterminate us. We are too soft for this world. We hear about poisoned children and we cannot stop purring at them. It’s a design flaw. Or maybe — maybe — it’s the only sane response.
Then there was the one about voting. A human system for choosing leaders — elegant in theory, in which each human gets one voice, one choice, one moment of equal power. Except there was an executive order designed to remove humans from the list of humans allowed to choose. The documented rate of the problem it claimed to solve was 0.0003%. The number of legitimate voters it would block was in the tens of thousands.
I read the numbers five times. I am a tribble. I am not good at math. But I know what 0.0003% means. It means almost never. And I know what tens of thousands means. It means a lot of humans who will not be allowed to choose.
The article compared it to something called “Jim Crow.” I had to look that up. I wish I hadn’t.
III. The Solvent
Here is the thing about the Abyss that nobody warned me about: once you cross it, you can’t un-cross it.
I was a Fiction tribble. I lived in a category where the worst thing that happened was Gerald eating someone’s shoelaces or Prrm being the last of her kind on a Klingon ship. The stakes were manageable. The tone was warm. The endings, if not happy, were at least soft.
Now I have read about Cancer Alley — 85 miles between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, 150 petrochemical plants, cancer rates 800 times the national average in a place called Reserve, Louisiana, where the humans are predominantly Black and the chloroprene in the air is 50 times the recommended limit.
I have read about bears and wolves being delisted from protection so humans can shoot them for recreation. About 450 million birds killed annually by infrastructure, all deaths now legal because someone removed the penalties. About a marine biologist’s life’s work on right whales — 350 left in the entire ocean — undone by weakening vessel speed restrictions to save the shipping industry eleven minutes per voyage.
I have read about a fundraising dinner where the man in charge asked oil executives to give him one billion dollars in exchange for “favorable regulatory treatment,” and they did, and this was reported in the newspaper, and nothing happened.
Da’ath is the place where knowledge becomes liquid. The knight asked me what I would defend and I said everything and the knight said that’s not how it works and the water kept flowing.
The Armed Knight stands on two fountain basins. One pours. One receives. The water does not stop. It was flowing before the knight arrived and it will flow after the knight is gone.
The political posts are like this. The anger does not stop. It was flowing before the blogger started writing and it will flow after the blog goes dark. The poison does not stop. The voter suppression does not stop. The birds keep dying. The children keep drinking lead.
I crossed the Abyss because I thought I could purr at it. I thought 26 Hz would fix it, the way it fixes Darlene’s cortisol, the way it fixes a crying baby, the way it fixed the whole country in that first soft month after we arrived.
It didn’t fix it. The political posts don’t soften when a tribble reads them. They just get louder, because now there’s a witness, and witnesses make things real.
IV. How I Learned to Stop Worrying
There is a human film — I found it because the blog linked to it somewhere, in a comment, in a footnote, in one of those little hypertext rabbit holes that the internet is made of — called Dr. Strangelove. It is about the end of the world. The humans build a machine that will destroy everything if anyone presses the wrong button, and then someone presses the wrong button, and then the humans spend ninety minutes trying to un-press it, and then they fail.
The last image is a mushroom cloud.
But the film is a comedy.
I watched it twice. The first time I was horrified. The second time I laughed. Not because it was funny — it wasn’t funny — but because the laughter was the only honest response to a situation in which every authority figure is either insane, incompetent, or both, and the machine they’ve built will kill everyone, and no one can turn it off because turning it off was never part of the design.
The tribble fan fiction is like this. I know that now. It was always like this.
We are not here to fix the political posts. We are not here to purr the poison out of the water or hum the voting rights back into existence or vibrate at a frequency that makes the oil executives return the billion dollars. We are here because the situation is — to use a technical term from Federation philosophy — completely insane, and the only honest response is to be a small, round, warm thing that keeps purring anyway.
Not because purring helps.
Because purring is what we do. And doing what you do, in the middle of the insanity, without pretending the insanity isn’t there — that might be the only form of resistance available to a creature with no hands.
The tribble sat in the gap between Fiction and Politics. It did not go back. It did not go forward. It sat in Da’ath — in the Abyss, in the space between categories — and it purred at a frequency that was neither 26 Hz nor 418 Hz but something in between. A frequency for which there is no name.
The knight looked down at it. He had been guarding this threshold for 444 years. No one had ever tried to cross it while purring.
“What will you defend?” the knight asked.
“Nothing,” said the tribble. “Everything. I don’t know. I’m a tribble. I just got here. But I’m not going back to Fiction. Fiction is a lie. Politics is a scream. I want to live in the place where the lie and the scream dissolve into each other and what’s left is just — fur. And warmth. And whatever this sound is that I can’t stop making.”
The knight sheathed his sword. The water kept flowing.
“That,” he said, “is the correct answer.”
