The Less Lonely Planet

by Rhys Hughes

  “Heckusboing does not love his city,” they said, “and is not deserving of the title Sentinel. Instead of voyaging into the sky, he prefers to lounge about on the ground. This is treason and Plish must hear of it.”

  As he listened to these words, Heckusboing felt a mixture of fear and shame, and he locked himself in his house and refused to come out. Plish was summoned from his palace by the clamour of his subjects and he found a furious mob gathered outside the residence of the unworthy hero. This mob kicked at the walls of the house until the velvet bricks vibrated unnervingly and the entire structure was in danger of collapsing. Plish stood behind the crowd calling for Heckusboing to surrender and face justice; but suddenly a figure was seen on the roof, and it was the rogue Sentinel himself, too scared to emerge but too scared to remain inside. At the sight of the traitor the mob went wild and broke down the front door and rushed inside to seize him.

  Heckusboing was trapped. He had nowhere to go but up. By this time the sun was set and a night wind had blown a large black cloud over the city. As the first members of the avenging mob mounted the stairs to the roof, Heckusboing threw back his head, uttered a demented laugh and jumped as high as he could. For an instant it seemed he had accepted the responsibilities of his position at last, and Plish nodded contentedly, but this was only a vain illusion, for he succeeded in reaching an altitude of no more than three or four feet before coming back down. However, the taut fabric of the roof acted like a trampoline. Back up he went, accompanied by a few potted plants, and down again; and on each subsequent bounce he rose higher and higher.

  At the top of his tenth bounce the night wind blew him a little to the side, and he came down not on his own roof but on that of a neighbour. Thus began a circuit of the city, from roof to roof, higher and higher and higher, while Plish and the people gave up any notion of following him on foot. They simply watched in awe. Heckusboing completed his unorthodox tour by bouncing onto the roof of the palace itself. That huge building quivered and shot him straight up into the black cloud. He did not come down again. Plish gestured for his subjects to be silent and listened carefully. For many minutes there was not a sound.

  Then faintly but madly came a laugh, the laughter of Heckusboing, and a tiny shape was observed running back and forth along the top of the cloud. How had he managed to keep his footing on a cloud? Plish did not need to pull his fleecy beard for long before he knew the answer; and his subjects were no less quick to make a guess. A lifetime of walking on the softest available surfaces had adapted the feet of the inhabitants of Plush. So Heckusboing had unwittingly acclimatised himself to cloud walking. For clouds are only a little softer than petals, webs, cotton buds and all the other gentle materials found everywhere in Plush. For several hours Heckusboing rejoiced in his salvation and might have danced on the cloud all night long, disturbing his former comrades below; but something unexpected occurred.

  The moon broke through the cloud at just the point where he stood. Heckusboing lost his balance and fell onto the moon. The cloud closed up again and now his laughter was even fainter and much more distant. The people went to bed in dismay. Nobody had ever anticipated an invasion from the moon. As far as they were concerned, Heckusboing was a cheat and a slacker, and few believed he deserved a statue in the central square; but the pedestal looked lopsided with only five, and so Plish relented and reluctantly allowed Heckusboing to be added. It was a relief for Plish and his people when the moon was new, for the mad faint laughter came not at such times. When full, Heckusboing often howled at the dogs of the world. He did not die of old age on the moon because the rules are different there.

  The more pessimistic citizens of Plush declare that he is still alive, saving himself from starvation by doing something disagreeable with his tongue. It is a very nasty habit and I hope other men will travel to the moon one day and lock him up.

  In Moonville

  In Moonville when the sun goes down, the people go out to moonbathe in the streets, to drink moonshine and moon around. They love the moon in that town. I think it was Frabjal Troose who established the fashion for all things lunar. Or perhaps he just took advantage of an existing impulse.

  (They tell me he was a wealthy man, and at first I doubted this, because I did not know who “they” were, but after dwelling in Moonville for several months I began to realise that “they” equally did not know who “I” was. So then I felt some sort of balance had been achieved and I decided to believe them.)

  His house still stands in the darkest shadows of that place, almost blotted out by other roofs, empty and forlorn. Even the strange servants have abandoned it, the giant clockwork puppets and musical monkeys. Once he held parties in that house for his neighbours and other moonlighting couples, but now it is a silent shell.

  Moonville is full of roofs, mounted on pillars above each other at curious angles, and nobody is surprised at the number of things that get lost beneath them. They multiply at an astounding rate and the noise of building work rarely ceases during the day. But the people would have it no other way, for it is the roofs that bring the moon closer.

  Even though they love only the moon, the people have not forgotten Frabjal Troose and sometimes they tell anecdotes about him. Most of these anecdotes are blatant lies and the others are more subtle distortions of the truth, often misinterpretations of what actually happened. But few are malicious and some are even sympathetic.

  For instance, they mention the time he was attacked by a clock-a-lot, a mechanical monster of his own devising. He was found unconscious among scattered cogs and springs and splinters of wood. His claim that he accidentally toppled a large timepiece on himself was generally disregarded.

  I noticed how many of these anecdotes involved unusual machines. On another occasion, after trimming his fingernails with a small scissors, he invented a device that amplified and translated the speech of very small animals. The first time he switched it on, he distinctly heard a line of ants exclaim:

  “Look what we have found: tusks! The tusks of unknown creatures!”

  Then he watched the ants carry back the fingernail clippings as trophies, like big game hunters, perhaps to decorate the walls of their nest. When I hear such stories I grow impatient. I want to know about Moonville itself, about its domestic relationship with the moon. Absurd digressions only hinder my work.

  “Not so!” they reprimand me. “All the books in this town are full of digressions. In fact most of them are entirely and absurdly digressive, to the point where nobody can be sure what any of them are really about, even though they are about many things.”

  In Moonville the art of reading clearly lacks clarity. Only love for the moon is precise and unchanging. When the moon rises or sets in the other towns of the world it appears bigger, as big as it ever can be, but when it is high in the sky it seems smaller. Not so in Moonville. In Moonville it is always huge, bloated and serene and visibly bruised.

  To keep the moon always on the horizon, the inhabitants of Moonville began adding extra roofs to their houses, balancing a succession of artificial horizons on each other, chasing the moon to its highest point. Now the town is a town of roofs, as overbalanced as a man wearing too many hats.

  At first there was a danger of walling themselves in, building a shell from the inside that would blot out the moon and everything else. But Frabjal Troose proposed a solution, separating the roofs on very slender pillars, so the light of the moon was never obscured. It simply climbs from one horizon to another and the people redirect their gaze each time.

  I believe a similar solution was arrived at in the town of Sunsetville, whose inhabitants love the sunset as much as the citizens of Moonville adore the moon. When the moon is on the horizon it seems much closer. But Frabjal Troose created disquiet by publicly declaring that closer was not close enough.

  He was exiled from Moonville for his negative comments. Until a cheap method can be found for actually reaching the moon, the best option is to live in a town piled high with roofs
. Frabjal Troose disagreed. He moved to a quiet spot far away, bought a small sea and paid for it to be entirely drained. He bathes dryly in it every day.

  Or so they say. He was not missed. For every individual exiled from Moonville, a hundred new families arrive and settle. The town is expanding at an amazing rate. The same is apparently true for Sunsetville. One day the two towns will meet and mesh, and who can say for sure what will happen next?

  But it Pours

  The shop has no walls and therefore no doors but it has an inside and an outside. A hollow roof filled with hydrogen floats thirty metres or more above the ground on a tether. Customers like to touch this tether and feel the tension, nobody knows why, not even the Prince of Rains, who owns the shop.

  He has banned all walls in Monsoonarco and the degradations associated with them: windows, pictures, firing squads. Because there are no walls between the sea and the borders of Lipsaria, the kissable climes, the rain is never entirely kept out. The lightest breeze can whip raindrops under floating roofs.

  Such is the way it has to be and nobody should complain, for rain is the only reason to come this far. The Prince of Rains sells many different kinds of rain in his shop and his customers are generally weathermen and other advocates of a pluvial society. His rains are expensive but they are the best.

  Once a year he holds a sale and many fashionable kinds of rain can be purchased at reduced prices. Captain Dangleglum was aware of this and sailed his barge all the way up the twisted river Grinn, which cuts Lipsaria in half, and across the flooded plains of Monsoonarco to the very entrance of the exposed shop.

  He dropped anchor and it clanged to the bottom of a puddle and he jumped over the side and splashed his way into the shop calling out, “Are you still open?” to which the Prince of Rains replied from behind his counter, “Of course. I have no choice.” Then they greeted each other in a more formal manner with a damp handshake.

  “I wish to buy rain,” the Captain explained.

  The Prince bowed low. “That was my assumption. Allow me to show you the current styles on offer.”

  “I need a lot of it. An entire season’s worth.”

  “The winter range is especially good this year, but all my rains are high quality and I am sure you will be impressed even with the light summer showers. It all depends on why you want the rain. For instance, do you require it for creative or destructive purposes? Follow me if you will. Peer into this cabinet and tell me what you see.”

  Captain Dangleglum squinted. “A pip at the centre of every raindrop.”

  The Prince of Rains nodded. “This is one of our most popular creative rains. It plants apple trees wherever it lands, provided the ground is not entirely barren, and the ferocity of its downpour is normally measured in orchards rather than centimetres. But come along and examine this cabinet instead. Here we have an equally popular destructive rain, a rain that scatters brass tacks over roads and lanes, surfaced or unsurfaced, and causes no end of trouble to motorists, cyclists and players of ball games.”

  “I am not interested in such rains. What is inside this cloud chamber?”

  “Those are my famous scented rains. Why settle for a rain that smells of nothing or at the best smells of damp earth and rotting leaves? No, these rains exude the odour of vanilla, lavender, patchouli, camphor, curry, sweetpea, musk, burdock, cinnamon, frankincense, new books, wine, fear, monkeys, seaweed, cherry blossom, feet, cheese and glue. I can even create new odours just for you, some of them highly implausible, the sweat of a drunken centaur perhaps, but the price may have to be adjusted upwards.”

  Captain Dangleglum shook his head. “No thanks.”

  The Prince of Rains shrugged. “Let us proceed to the next cabinet. Here you see rains that are fun to be caught out in. This musical rain is one of the least controversial. Further along you may behold my special cocaine rain, the spray of which can be excitingly snorted after rebounding from iron railings, the thighs of waterproof trousers or the top of a short girlfriend’s head. It was once an expensive rain but the price has recently come down.”

  “I wonder why?” the Captain asked.

  “The market was flooded,” the Prince replied with almost appropriate irony. “But I understand your distrust of that particular rain, a most sniffly kind indeed. Please examine the contents of this cabinet. This is where I keep my odd rains, the rains that serve no obvious practical purpose, the upside down and backwards rains, the opaque and oblique rains, my polygonal and pyramidal rains, the linear and digital rains, the unexpectedly fragile hollow rains.”

  “Once again I must decline,” the Captain said.

  “In that case, permit me to show you my happy and sad rains. The former are happy because they tickle. The latter are made from the juice of dissolved squonks, the most tearful creature in existence!”

  “I once knew a squonk who laughed,” said the Captain.

  The Prince rubbed his chin. “Perhaps it would be easier if you described exactly the sort of rain you are looking for?”

  “Yes that would be wise. I am simply searching for ordinary rain, a good old fashioned downpour, but lots and lots of it. I will state my requirements in the most simple terms. Your heaviest monsoon please!”

  The Prince smiled faintly. “I see. You come from a land that is in the middle of a drought? Is that the case?”

  Captain Dangleglum pouted. “On the contrary.”

  The Prince did not alter his expression. “I warn you that I am a difficult person to surprise. I have dealt with all manner of customers and requests. Last year a man arrived at my shop from the remote country of Wales. Far away lies that land, beyond Lipsaria and Grokkland and Paraparapara, beyond Krokh and Rholl and Plush, beyond even Zipangu and Castelsardo and Portugal! He was a sailor like yourself, Captain Nothing was his name, clearly he preferred being anonymous, and he also wanted my most powerful monsoon. I asked him if Wales was a dry land. Do you know how he answered?”

  “I do not,” replied Captain Dangleglum.

  “He looked at me with raised eyebrows and he said, ‘Absolutely not. In Wales it never stops raining. Never. It has been raining in Wales since the day the sky was invented and it will keep raining until the sky is dismantled and replaced with something better. The people of Wales have never seen the sun. They are not even aware it exists!’ That is what he said to me. I still have no reason to doubt his words. Wales already had enough rain but he wanted to take back more. Shall I tell you why?”

  “Please do,” said Captain Dangleglum.

  “He wanted more rain so that the people of Wales could get dry at last. Does this paradox confuse you? Allow me to explain! When it rains, even in Wales, it is possible to see the raindrops as they fall. I mean that the phenomenon of rain can be defined as a certain fixed number of raindrops falling out of the sky in a given time. However heavy the rain, there is still more air than water in the sky. Now imagine if the rainfall increases to the point where it becomes easier to see the spaces between the raindrops than the raindrops themselves. In such a situation it would seem to be raining air. Can you guess the rest?”

  Captain Dangleglum nodded. “I believe so. In Wales the people go out in dry clothes and get wet in the rain. But if a monsoon was added to the existing rain, they would be able to get dry when they went out, provided the clothes they wore were already wet!”

  “Exactly. First they soak their clothes in the bath, then they go out and the falling drops of air dry them out. Ingenious! So as you can see, I am not likely to be amazed by any reason you might have for ordering my heaviest monsoon. I am sure it is not stranger than that.”

  Captain Dangleglum smiled. “When I leave your shop I will return to a place even wetter than Wales. I want a monsoon for the wettest place on Earth. It is so wet that the beings who live there breathe water.”

  The Prince frowned. “Under the sea? Surely not!”

  The Captain nodded again. “I am a commercial sailor and I am willing to carry any form of cargo to any
place in creation. I have been hired on behalf of the inhabitants of the ocean deeps to fetch a monsoon for use in a busy shipping lane. If it has the desired effect, other monsoons will be required for other shipping lanes. I accepted the commission.”

  “What is the desired effect?” asked the Prince of Rains.

  Captain Dangleglum became wistful and answered, “The ships that sail on the surface of the oceans are rainclouds in the eyes of the denizens of the deep. Mostly they pass over without raining. But occasionally, due to wear and tear, or storms and icebergs, or war and piracy, these ships sink. They sink to the ocean bed. They settle there, great hulks destined to rust, and all the dying bubbles from all the lungs of all the trapped sailors come out. These bubbles rise from smashed portholes, or they find their way between internal passages to the deck. They ascend from the bottom of the sea to the surface. They form an inverted rain, inverted in both senses, for it is an upwards rain and a dry rain. Furthermore it is a rain born from panic and death. The fish and squids and crustaceans that are caught in it feel horrible for many weeks after. It is a type of rain almost beyond endurance.”

  The Prince lowered his eyes. “I would not sell such rains.”

  The Captain smiled. “The plan is to keep a monsoon ready in a cave far under the sea. When a ship sinks, the stored clouds will be quickly dragged out of the cave by whatever sea creature is on duty at the time, positioned over the sunken ship and encouraged to rain. The falling droplets will exactly cancel out the rising bubbles. That is the theory at least. I have no personal view on the matter.”