by Rhys Hughes
Then I wondered if only beaches have antipodal equivalents, so I went to locate the inverse of my house, and also its owner, my own reciprocal, and I found both in place in the low hills. In the twilight I used her good arm to rap on the door and to my astonishment it was opened from inside by her other good arm. I sank to my knees.
“Don’t be hasty with your ecstasy,” cautioned a voice.
“It’s not a miracle?” I blinked.
He shook his head, a bearded man with dust in his wrinkles, and I saw that he was wearing her left arm as a prosthetic limb, having lost his own in an industrial accident or an explosion. Then he explained that the bone had been removed to make this false arm lighter, more usable, and that he was perfectly satisfied with the result.
Something about this wasn’t logical. “But how could you perform such a delicate operation with only one arm?”
“The extraction of the bone and fitting of the limb were included in the price,” he said, “and required no effort from me. Take further questions to the curio shop where I purchased it.”
Then he closed the door in my face. I had wanted to ask the way to the curio shop but obviously that was one of the so-called further questions I had to ask at the curio shop itself. Maybe I could locate the information at the local library? If everything truly had its antipodal equivalent here, that musty building should be no exception.
I proceeded down a curving road, turned the final bend and to my mild surprise discovered the curio shop in the place I had calculated the library would be. Not all equivalences are exact, not all reciprocals symmetrical. I pushed my way inside and lost myself among the leftovers of a hundred thousand cultures, valid and imaginary.
The curio shop seemed to contain for real all those things described by all the books in my library. A close enough mirror image, possibly even a superior reflection. I negotiated the unique maze and reached the counter after a long struggle. The shopkeeper rapped his fingernails on the dented surface while I rummaged in my quiver.
I withdrew the arm, laid it down. “It’s no longer special to me and so I must sell it. How much is it worth?
“Plenty, but we don’t buy things here, my friend.”
“Will you swap a curio for it?”
He pensively stroked the marble wrist. “Perhaps I can convert it into an artificial Zen applauder, or something along those lines, as the Venus de Milo herself has no resonance for me. But wouldn’t you regard that as a violation of your ultimate woman?”
I tugged my beard and dust trickled from the wrinkles in my face as I frowned at the arm. “It’s quite useless without the left limb, for my dream of being fully embraced is ruptured.”
“But how does she feel about it?” he wondered.
“She’s not my girlfriend yet,” I said.
With a sigh, he turned and mounted a ladder to a high shelf. “I think I have a solution that will satisfy both of us,” he remarked, as he selected a murky glass phial from the shadows.
I studied the swirl of the liquid inside and pocketed the phial carefully after he explained that it was a potion that encouraged broken statues to regrow their missing parts. But they would regrow those parts differently according to updated circumstances. “If the context has changed, the new growth will adapt to it,” he pointed out.
This news filled me with delight. It was imperative I reach Paris with my treasure rapidly and smear it over the stumps of my cold darling. Her limbs would sprout with the force of long repressed passion and entwine my torso like the branches of a fig tree, clasping me tightly to her perfect bosom, to her classic bounty, forever.
I trudged narrow paths, forded broad rivers…
In the Louvre I finally stood before her and secretly applied the lotion, but the desired effect wasn’t instantaneous. How could it be? I knew that lustful impatience had distorted my reason and so I resolved to return the following week. When the fateful day arrived I smartened myself as best I could and walked into her presence.
But the spectacle that greeted me was both awful and inevitable. Too many centuries adrift in the ocean at the mercy of currents, dragged along the seabed over reefs, battered by the breakers of wild shores, alone with crustaceans, had wrought their alchemy. Even statues will evolve to meet the demands of a fresh environment.
While ghoulish tourists flocked to take photographs and guards vainly attempted to push them back, I passed blandly through the mob and stood directly before her, gazing up sadly, unflinching. Then I laughed. In place of the smooth enticing arms of a beautiful goddess were now the upraised menacing claws of a gargantuan crab.
The Martian Monocles
It’s true: we know more about the surface of Mars than the bottom of the ocean, but not for want of trying. The problem with diving so deep is that the pressure is enormous and only the strongest bathyspheres can survive a journey right down to the abyssal plain. Many vessels and explorers have been crushed over the years attempting to plumb the ultimate limits of the deepest marine trenches.
Every time a bathysphere implodes somewhere far under the seas of Earth, the most advanced beings on Mars shed big oily tears in sympathy, but not because they assign a high value to human life. No. They aren’t even aware that those bathyspheres are crewed. Such misunderstandings are normal between the life forms of different worlds and only rarely can an authentic connection be made.
The Martians in question resemble giant eyeballs that have fallen out of colossal heads and a legend says that when they all weep together the ancient dry riverbeds of the red planet fill to the brim with doleful water, but, in fact, there aren’t enough of them to produce sufficient liquid for that. What is true is that the eyelids that slam like shutters to protect them are the same colour as the desert.
These eyeball beings are clairvoyant and that’s how they know about the bathyspheres on Earth. They see images in their minds that are almost as clear as the pictures they focus on for real. They dislike being stared at and are instantly aware when anyone or anything tries to study them from afar, and that’s why it took so long to detect them. They aren’t exactly shy but they do value their privacy.
The moment a telescope is trained on them or a probe passes overhead the eyelids close and they remain very still, so nothing can be seen but the endless desert with its scattering of spherical rocks. When the intruder has gone, the rocks turn back into eyeballs. They move by rolling and they derive nourishment purely from photons. In other words they eat whatever they see, just like fat men.
It was only by accident that humans first made contact with them and the circumstances of that encounter are so unlikely they are worth telling again. A habitual sleepwalker on one of the first exploratory missions got out of his hammock in the middle of the night, suited up inside his rocket, opened the airlock and walked off alone. He was still fast asleep when he blundered into a group of eyeballs.
Because his eyes were closed all the time, and his conscious mind was switched off, the Martians didn’t telepathically pick up his vibrations or take evasive action until it was too late. The astronaut woke up as soon as he hit the ground and then it was pointless for the eyeballs to pretend they still didn’t exist. So Mars and Earth were introduced to each other. Formal trade links were rapidly established.
Unfortunately, it turned out that the Martians had nothing the humans wanted, and the humans only had one resource the eyeballs valued at all. Books. To be precise, the books of one author: Ray Bradbury. Try as they might, the humans couldn’t interest the Martians in any other writer, not even Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert or Kim Stanley Robinson. So crates of Bradbury titles were rocketed to Mars.
As those rockets took off from the launch pads of Earth, the heat of the departing exhausts turned winter days into summer, melting snowdrifts and baking nostalgic cakes in ovens not yet lit. But that doesn’t concern us now. Every Bradbury volume was reprinted and small-press magazines from the 1940s were trawled in an effort to retrieve those numerous short stories that the au
thor had disowned.
The Martians devoured these works but, because the eyeballs were so big and the typeface in the books so small in comparison, severe eyestrain was the inevitable result. Soon every Martian was myopic. They bumped into each other constantly as they trundled over the desiccated continents and irritation turned to anger, then anger became a desire for revenge. An interplanetary incident was inevitable.
Disaster was averted by the resourceful owner of a spectacle shop who recalled an old fable about a Spanish lens grinder who made an enormous monocle for a cyclops. This was lucky, as nobody else seemed to know that story. He saw no reason why the spectacle factories of Earth couldn’t make monocles for the Martian market. His idea was taken up by various governments and rapidly implemented.
Soon the eyeballs could see clearly again and the wearing of monocles even imparted to them an aristocratic air they hadn’t possessed before and the reissuing of the entire Ray Bradbury back-catalogue was resumed and everything should have been fine but a new problem arose in the wake of the solution. That’s often the way. While wearing their massive monocles, the Martians were no longer able to roll.
An eyeball is a spheroid and spheroids move like balls, but a monocle is a disc and its flat surface impedes that kind of motion. Anger became a desire for revenge again. A second interplanetary incident loomed and it seemed that two worlds would be forced to engage in mutual destruction with futuristic rays because of a retrogeneric Ray, which sounds neat but isn’t. All because of short sightedness!
Fortunately, the owner of the spectacle shop was also a transportation expert. Neat coincidence that. He quickly grasped that the dry riverbeds of Mars could be utilised as roads, as twisting freeways that would enable joined eyeballs facing away from each other to employ their monocles as wheels, eating up the Martian kilometres on the transparent rims of those vision rectifiers. An ingenious solution.
Although the Martians were loose eyeballs and hadn’t lived in sockets for aeons they still possessed residual optic nerves that dangled like short tails from behind, just as the coccyx of humans is a residual tail. A pair of friendly Martians could splice these nerves into a flexible but strong axle, and that’s what they did, rapidly acquiring a taste for high speed cruising and irresponsible driving while blinking.
The owner of the spectacle shop had become an unofficial ambassador to the red planet and he warned the drivers to take more care, to cut their speed, to keep their eyes on the road, but the third part of that advice was a joke because no matter how inept they were they couldn’t do otherwise, and soon enough there was carnage everywhere and a third interplanetary incident was on the verge of erupting…
At this point the owner of the spectacle shop gave up. He couldn’t be bothered to avert another apocalyptic war. It was somebody else’s turn. He concentrated on relocating his entire stock into a subterranean bunker and living in close confinement with many wives. History doesn’t record his name, partly because history no longer exists, but rumour maintains it was Yrubdarb Yar. Sounds foreign to me.
It just remains to explain the significance of the Martian empathy for bathyspheres. They think that bathyspheres are the true dominant form of life on Earth because of their shape, so when they implode under the sea and a perfectly round bubble of gas escapes and breaks the surface, the Martians believe they are observing a soul leaving its physical body and ascending to the realm of eyeball ghosts.
Suddenly
Suddenly, I was confronted by Cirle, the low albedo albino, who entered my house through an open window. Suddenly, he demanded a cup of tea, so I went to the kitchen to boil a kettle. Suddenly, he changed his peculiar mind and asked for coffee instead and I was happy to oblige and, when I took it to him, he drank it down in one gulp, burning his throat without a murmur of discomfort, like an overflow.
Suddenly, he leaned closer and said, “Did I ever tell you about a man I met a month ago who is known as the Maltese Hunter S. Thompson? He practices Gozo journalism, that’s why!”
Suddenly, I felt apprehensive. Suddenly, I realised that Cirle was in one of his funny moods and that it would be difficult to get rid of him, to have a peaceful evening by myself. Suddenly.
Suddenly, he suggested that we catch a bus to London, to go and see a West End shah, (not the same thing as a West End show). Suddenly, I found myself nodding and leaving my warm house and travelling to the big, cold city, even though I didn’t want to, and buying tickets for the theatre and going inside and sitting down on a folding seat.
Suddenly, midway through the performance, Cirle shouted at the top of his high voice, “What shah is this anyway?” and the answer came back from an unseen spectator, “Abbas! It’s Shah Abbas, one of the greatest of shahs! Be silent and show some respect!”
Suddenly, I knew I wanted to leave, to find another form of amusement or lose Cirle and make my way back home alone. Suddenly, I felt a nudge in my ribs and understood that Cirle was bored with what was unfolding on the stage, which was just a figure in robes and turban talking about his conquests in the 17th Century, nothing more. Suddenly, Cirle stood up and stormed out, dragging me along with him.
Suddenly, as the cold night air hit me in the face, I wanted to be back inside the theatre, in the warm, away from this thin pallid demonic friend who unnerved me to such an enormous extent. Suddenly, he hailed a taxi and bundled me inside when it stopped.
Suddenly, he winked slyly at me and instructed the driver to take us to the nearest airport and I wanted to protest but I felt paralysed by the grim atmosphere of the unfolding vista through the windows. Suddenly, I knew that I would never see my home again.
Suddenly, we arrived at the airport and Cirle pushed me out of the taxi and we went to buy tickets for the most unlikely available destination and I felt feeble beneath his thin but hugely powerful grip on my shoulder; and I wondered where all my willpower had gone, my ability to assert myself, to strive against coercion, and I concluded that it had travelled on ahead of me and that I would catch it up in Iran.
Suddenly, I found myself on the aeroplane destined for Iran and sitting next to Cirle, who muttered into my right ear, “I’ll be a shah greater than Abbas, mark my words!” and I marked them carefully and he got six out of ten, a comfortable pass, if not a merit.
Suddenly, I understood part of his dastardly plan but before I had the opportunity to attempt to reason with him and talk him out of it, one of the flight attendants came down the aisle towards us and said in a friendly but firm voice, “Excuse me, gentlemen, but don’t you know that the word ‘suddenly’ should never be used in a work of fiction: it’s one of the main rules of truly great creative writing.”
Suddenly, I found myself answering her back with, “What may we use as a substitute then? Is ‘abruptly’ acceptable?” and she nodded with a thin smile and turned to deal with some other passengers and Cirle grumbled and refused to reflect much light despite the fact he was an albino and we landed in Iran and had lots of adventures.
Suddenly, more things happened and, suddenly, I realised I didn’t want to describe them and, suddenly, I regretted starting this tale, which after all is only a mockery of something that doesn’t really matter, as pale a satire as the colour of normal albinos in real life or other fiction, and no sooner had I resolved to stop writing it than—
Abruptly, nothing sudden happened!
Stand and Deliver
When Grub the postman finished his morning shift he usually had enough time to head out of town for a tankard of special ale before going back to work. There was an isolated tavern in a forest clearing that served the best food and drink he had ever experienced.
He didn’t bother returning his sack of mail to the depot. It would save valuable minutes if he simply took it with him. So he stood by the side of the road and waited for a carriage. The quaint, retrograde nature of life in the Duchy of Klipklop still amazed him.
A far cry from his former existence in England, in the city of Coventry where he was daily
abused on his rounds! Immigrating to this arcane state in an almost forgotten corner of Europe was the best decision he had ever made. He still believed that he was clever.
A carriage arrived and Grub climbed into it. There were no cars, or any other forms of motorised machinery in Klipklop, no internal combustion engines at all. Horses did the work. And women. And postmen. Everyone else sat around smoking pipes or grinning.
He was the only passenger today and he sank deeply into the padded seat. He knew this carriage would drop him near the doors of the isolated tavern and that another carriage coming the other way would convey him back to town approximately one hour later.
The carriage turned a bend and came to a sudden halt. A man blocked the road with a menacing smile, a sinister cape and mask, and a pistol that was aimed at the driver. This man approached closer, quickly opened the door and bowed rather mockingly at Grub.
“Stand and deliver!” he cried.
“But it’s my lunchtime. Can’t you come back later?”
The pistol was cocked. “No.”
Grub sighed. “Very well. If I have to do one or the other, I’ll deliver. I doubt I’m permitted to do both, as the regulations of the Postal Workers’ Union are very strict. I’ll be certain to lodge a complaint with them about this outrage. It’s my free period!”
And he jumped down from the carriage and began walking back along the road towards the town, shifting his mail sack from one shoulder to the other as he went. The highwayman was too flabbergasted to discharge his gun at him and merely watched him go.
Grub sighed and grumbled and cursed as he reached the town and then he proceeded to deliver all the remaining letters in his sack. He went up a granite stairway and down a twisting cobbled alley. Finally, he had to stop in front of a tall blue house and ring the bell.
A man opened the door and blinked at Grub who blinked back. “I have a parcel for you,” said Grub. “It’s too big to slide under your door. In fact it’s the biggest parcel I’ve ever carried.”