The Less Lonely Planet

by Rhys Hughes

  She thought she did, but remained impassive as he slid the anemones into place. Then he began to deliberately spoil the ritual. Although she had no eyelids, her expression was clearly a blink of surprise. Urgently she signalled with her tail.

  – What are you doing, fishbreath? You dare to offer me a lopsided pattern? This shape is asymmetrical! What sort of prototype whale do you assume I am?

  – It is not my idea, my love. I have been... inspired! Yes, that’s the word, even here in the deep. The work I had for you has slipped away and a new one has stolen its place.

  – Coelacanth’s wallop! I believe you not.

  – By pearl and mussel, my mind is filled with extrinsic images and ideas which cannot be translated into a form intelligible to zeuglodons. This sequence is the best I can do.

  – It is inadequate, Loop. You are a poor lover.

  – Now I’m the unhappiest cryptozoological slitherer in the teeming seas. Please stay and listen to my compliments! Your sinuousness is like the shockwave of a submerged volcano. Your whiskers are finer than wires spun from manganese nodules by bored crabs. And your rows of sharp teeth also deserve a flamboyant metaphor.

  – Can’t you think of one now? What a loser!

  – Wait! I have been infected with a mysterious art! My own talents have vanished to make space for it.

  But she did not reply to his words and untied herself haughtily and slowly from the pillar, black mane rising and falling in the currents of his ignored kisses, projected through lips as hot as hydrothermal vents, pumped by a giant heart as equally bursting. He felt powerless to stop her as she oscillated away, and his enormous sigh speeded her departure, so that he caught only one sentence of her departing grumble. It was not an encouraging message, not at all.

  – Inspiration indeed! What a load of baleen!

  The tears of a zeuglodon are not moist, for those would not show up down here. They are bubbles of oxygen which float up the cheek and away, to burst in the tragic upper world.

  Before the Earth had cooled enough to conceive the coral which broke the tides of sweet seas, or even the marble which chipped under the blows of master sculptors, it existed only as sundry states of heat. There was no land or water, no continents or oceans, merely a seething mass of molten metals and boiling gasses. The night sky was no less chaotic. There were at least a thousand planets competing for prime orbits around the sun. A deadly war between too many worlds in a narrow zodiac. Collisions beyond the scope of screams were frequent.

  Life should not have evolved then, and it is still arguable whether it did, but there were men of a kind. No bones, skin or brains, nor even outlines, but desires, wills and minds, purely those. Thermal organisms, beings composed of changing temperatures, minor fluctuations in the deep plasmic soup. Blind, deaf and insensitive, but not absurd, for they were incandescent members of a society whose values were calorific instead of moral, and more dependable as a result. They had separate names, beliefs and crafts based on cosmic passion.

  Hot, Ruddy Boiling and Ouch were three such individuals, who bulged and shrank and spewed over the equator. From hour to hour (because the world span so rapidly, ancient hours were shorter than modern minutes) any one of them might grow too large to perceive his friends. Sometimes he might absorb them into a vague volume of slightly higher or lower calefaction. The numbers involved were mostly fractions of degrees, and a personality could never be stable. Fickle currents in the seething plasma broke them up into countless flickering blobs.

  Positron lightning in the atmosphere had a similar effect, slashing into communities, tumbling, bursting, dispersing them. To kiss a fork of descending energy with a tongue of fire was considered a sentimental act and tolerated, but to ululate in protest was not. Beings born to stew in a global cauldron should accept their destiny with the tender solidarity of all domestic broths, and mostly do. Only if temperatures averaged out over the surface would they cease to exist, and the unlikelihood of that can be demonstrated in any kitchen.

  Birth and entertainment for these inhabitants were one and the same process. The soft planet, awake but sluggish, torn from the sun’s heart, a summer home for neutrinos, was constantly bombarded by huge meteorites of solid iron, nickel, ice, diamond, frozen in the random rush above the fledgling atmospheres and magnetic fields of the largest worlds, created only to fall down and puncture the surface ripples and vaporise in their haste to attain the unimaginable cores. Each collision added mass to the Earth, slapped its amateur gravity.

  The impacts stoked the furnace, but the general trend was toward an imperceptible cooling. The planet grew bigger, pushing through the chill of space, attracting more interplanetary ice and rock. By disturbing the chthonic casserole, these smaller bodies were an important factor in the nourishment of sentience, agitating the bulging radioactive meniscus and the cultures it maintained, encouraging entropic diversity and inspiring the substance of the brainless thoughts which wondered and misunderstood among the principles of convection.

  Differences in the style of penetration were almost as important as elemental variations in determining the personality of a thermal entity. Dirty water comets tended to create an aloof individual, a mathematician or ontologist, a being generally content to spend his bubbling life in a proto-ivory ur-tower deep in the frothing mantle. The vaporisation of an iron asteroid, in contrast, was a guarantee of practical intelligence, a cosmographer or strategist. A sapphire moonlet was the rarest and oddest seed, growing a pretentious artist.

  The equatorial trio were a tribe of misfits, invented and clustered by three discrete impacts. Hot was the child of a comet with a perimeter which extended six thousand miles under his companions. Ruddy Boiling claimed a rhodium asteroid as direct ancestor and gave his occupation as salesman. Ouch relished his status as an heir of blue facets and enjoyed making conceptual pottery. His works were sold by Ruddy Boiling and bought by Hot, who utilised calculus to convert them into eternal abstractions. The profits of the syndicate were astronomical.

  Ouch’s pottery involved no clay or wheel, neither of which might be found on a molten world. His material was raw life. Whenever a meteor sparked through the glowing atmosphere, visible as a firm speck amid the cascading chaos, he waited and watched. If the location of impact was on the equator, he flowed to that point as fast as possible. His object was to claim the explosion before his rivals. The thermal entity who reached a collision first was permitted to bring up the resulting differences in local temperature as his own child.

  The education of this new arrival was the spinning of the clay into pots which fired themselves, vessels brimming with knowledge, if the art succeeded. Failure in the metaphorical moulding or glazing resulted in a high-joule delinquent, a piping hothead. Ouch was a respected artist, with nothing but masterpieces to his credit. His afflatus was dependable but progressive. He was a restless experimenter, full of novel ideas and theatrical improvisations. He attuned his formless senses to the sky and felt his charm quarks turn strange.

  Today a misshapen ellipse of frozen helium was turning down through the magnetosphere. It was the rejected ring system of a planet which had tripped down a hole in a miniature nebula into the interstellar void. As it revolved, the ring flashed one of the early spectrums fated to become obsolete with the standardisation of primary and compound colours. These hues were zello, yerod, spaut, onk, cheen, gue and quartigo. Ouch was delighted that this oval was heading for him. It was the nicest piece of space junk he had ever encountered.

  It splashed down a mile or so from his circumference and he swirled over to it, enfolding the explosion, absorbing the exotic gasses, energy and dimensional traumas which bulged in every direction. The helium ring had dissolved in an instant, generating a thermal babe, a potential mind ready for manipulation. Ouch set to work, flexing his rationalist and empirical insights, pouring them quickly into the scorching tabula rasa. But there was a twist in the procedure. He could scarcely explain it. As if he was no longer the controller.
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br />   Hot and Ruddy Boiling slurped around each other, blending and splitting in unseemly haste to appreciate Ouch’s latest opus. They were profoundly troubled by what they witnessed. Tongues of flame wagged. They begged to know why this child was not recognisable as art. The artist shrugged his eddies and mumbled that the piece he had planned was no longer valid. A superior idea had come to him from outside his own consciousness, from a source located in the remote past. He nodded in a direction opposite the near future to emphasise his claim.

  External inspiration? The consequences were unthinkable. At last it was Ruddy Boiling who gave verbal form to the shock. He cried: you have brought this infant up as a girl! A meaningless noun until this very moment. The thermal beings were all male. This aloof, intuitive, gorgeous, dangerous and sweet creature, this female, was something far too revolutionary for an immature globe. Ouch shrugged again. It was not his fault. His own genius had departed elsewhere and this substitute notion gushed into the chasm. An exchange of excellencies.

  Hot and Ruddy Boiling turned up their deuterium noses and trickled away in righteous fury. The invention of girls will bring ruin to the cosmos! It was impossible to believe they could improve it. From now on: heartache, mooning, shopping, hairstyles, intuition, all worthless at auction. Plus the worst aspect: beauty. Inordinate, incredible. His friends ostracised Ouch at that instant, and always after, and his sadness was expressed in such an outburst of power that he cooled and solidified. Two gifts he gave his world: gender and geology.

  Shadowland: the very first society. Ten billion years prior to the boiling antics of the thermal beings, before the Earth had even begun condensing from star stuff, which itself did not exist, indeed before matter of any pedigree started its career, a single blink after the actual creation of the universe, there was a civilisation of two dimensions. Height had not yet been developed. Reality was horizontal, with only sideways and along as valid directions. It was logically contradictory to feel down or grow up and climbing ladders was safe.

  This was acceptable to the geometrical shapes who glided within the surface of space. They had no concept of anything more. But thinking was still deep, even if lateral by necessity. They constructed cities, towns and hamlets, designed exactly like maps, and habitable structures inside them, and material expenses were lower without thickness. Every door and window of a house was a break in a line and the roofs were angled toward north, from where rain fell in literal sheets, drawn by the magnetism of convenience. Real estate: unreal.

  The palaces and castles which reared on the very low, utterly flat, imaginary hills above the capital were cheaply produced as well. Pencils were the only tool required in construction. Rococo carvings on a facade might be added with a single stroke. But erasers were in poor supply, so mistakes were emotionally costly.

  There were also stalls in the markets and these were even easier to sketch. Rents for the vendors were trifling. And where vegetables rot in boxes, philosophers will talk it.

  Rot, that is, not vegetables. Although...

  Concealed among the marquees and crates, lovers cuddled and adopted submissive or dominant roles. Without distinctions of sex, figures might flip from one to the other on a whim. Geometry is neuter, so couples had no impetus for misunderstandings.

  Abbot was a square, currently male, a poet with rightist tendencies to match his angles. Pubis was a triangle, and at this moment almost his mistress. Her sines were less than seven but still deadly. In an attempt to seduce her, he was reciting verses. These formed visible waveforms in the ground, for the atmosphere and the sounds it carried were also flat. Erotic amplitudes skipped to her.

  He said with little shame: x²+y²=r².

  Pubis was delighted. No square had ever paid her such a compliment. He had compared her charms favourably with those of a circle. Her points blushing, she batted a curly isosceles-lash. Provoked by this display of demure ardour, he added: x²/a²+y²/b²=1.

  Now she was enraptured. He had confessed to wanting to squash those circular allurements into an ellipse, with his own body weight. It was a rude, frank, fervid admission and she remembered the warning her parents had given her that same morning, about not talking to strange squares, a caution she had never cared to heed. The fact that Abbot was improvising his own lyrics, not just declaiming the odes of trigonometric laureates, was a torrid bonus. No stuffy penpusher, he, despite his pinstripe area, but a quadrangle of pure passion.

  His equations were so musical and flawless she felt quite unable to turn her hypotenuse on him and flow away. He was not her usual type, for she was currently favouring a pentagonal suitor named Hoover, but as her friend Bea (a hexagon) kept insisting, four sides had one advantage over five, taking up less room in bed.

  Now he praised her centre of gravity: x²=4ay.

  He was close to winning her heart, but on the borders of victory he ruined everything. After this parabolic thrust, guaranteed to seduce the symmetry off a mandala, let alone the omega off a delta, he shivered and furrowed his brow, lips sweating.

  He stuttered out: ∞=a+b+c.

  She recoiled. What was this? An extra coordinate! A third dimension distinguishable from the familiar pair? Had he flipped? Shadowland did not require a supplementary direction, nor could logic accommodate one. What was he up to? She demanded the meaning of +c. It was a request as futile as asking him to synthesise a bright shadow, but no trick on her behalf. She had no wish to humiliate him.

  He shrugged and explained that the error was not his. His own poems had fled from his brain, to be replaced by this alien conceit, this idea of height. She was unimpressed by his excuses. Height? Pure nonsense, an inconceivable prospect! Perhaps he should demonstrate this dimension, if he really wanted to convince her?

  But the temptation to do so failed him. Which way could he go other than in length or breadth? No, it was useless. He repeated that down and up, these new vectors, did not belong to his own world view, originating in a different continuum, probably the distant past. At least that was a feeling he had, however farcical.

  She clicked her tongue in disapproval. He was obviously raving. The entire universe had only existed for a few seconds at most. Before that, everything had been compressed into a singularity, a point of zero size. How could there be a past of any sort, especially a distant one, in such a situation? Shadowland, as he was well aware, was the first civilisation. An assertion to the contrary might earn for him an indefinite term in an asylum, drawn up for the purpose.

  Before he could deny her charges, she squeaked in alarm. His spouse had entered the market with their seventeen offspring, all in a line:

                   

  Time to hide! But where? His escape route was blocked by a crate of ionic pears, electrovalent fruit.

  In desperation he jumped. And went up. And came down, neatly on top of Pubis. He had passed through the third dimension! He was invisible up here, for the sensory apparatus of his fellow shapes was quite unable to track the direction in which he had travelled. Lying above Pubis, he was able to see inside her body and the irregular organs repulsed him. As he suspected, beauty is margin deep.

  His spouse and children passed by. Safe!

  Although he was unaware of it, his outrageous action had forced the universe to irreversibly balloon out in a new dimension. He had invented height. But again he believed the idea had come from elsewhere, from the past. Yet the oldest known date was much more current than yesterday, so how was this feasible? Then he had an abrupt vision of a time before the original singularity, when the cosmos was contracting to a single point, rather than rushing away from it……….

  ……….Creation was like a gargantuan lung, breathing in and out, and this present reality was a new inhalation, but not the first. Probably it had no beginning at all, but extended into a backward eternity. Near the end of the last exhalation, when the totality was shrinking, he imagined how matter was so cold and faded it was ready to be reborn. A prior cycle of exi
stence. An earlier present, hurrying to a Big Crunch that was both an inverse and precursor of its Bang. No energy there, either, but wise and weary metal, teleological alloys.

  The last civilisation of that dying, narrowing cosmos was comprised of rational musical instruments. They had evolved over billions of years from the days when organic players had plucked, blown, squeezed, cranked or tinkled them. They had been linked to computers and as those machines grew more sophisticated and achieved consciousness, the hybrids became a completely new type of life. Abbot imagined a million mile long mandolin playing to itself a peculiar melody which was unpalatable to its friends and which earned it their disapprobation. The tune it had hoped to strum had leapt out of its will, forward in time past the singularity, to him, a square. A mandolin as his muse!

  But, no, there was a difficulty with this speculation. If great art is inspired by an outside agency, rather than from within, even the muse must have another source. When artists claim external guidance for their finest work, they are simply distancing themselves from the problem, not solving it. They do not trust themselves to invent beauty. The excuse of the muse is shirking responsibility for creation. That mandolin may have shifted its inspiration to Abbot, but was hardly in a better position to compose what replaced it. Simple choice: either no artist has a muse, or all do, the muse itself included.

  And where does the cycle end? If the mandolin gave a song to Abbot, and this was translated into a lyric which represented height, where did the tune come from? From the mandolin’s own past! From a bigger universe which still had planets, old worlds with frozen cores, and one sphere in particular, an orb known as Earth, with an interior which had shrunk and split in the intergalactic frost, leaving massive canyons and gorges and passages running through the mantle, subterranean chambers infested with swine-things which often swarmed to the surface, to prosecute a war with dreamy clerks in thin storerooms.