The Less Lonely Planet

by Rhys Hughes

  His plot of land is small but productive. In a sentence or two you’ll see that for yourself. Follow me through the gate and along the path but take care not to slip on the mud and impale yourself on the bamboo beanpoles. There he is, bending to turn the soil with the prongs of one of his garden forks. He has many spare forks lined up along this path, I don’t know why the fork is his favourite tool, but communal allotment gardens are always full of eccentrics, so I never ask.

  “Mr von Ryan, might you spare a moment?”

  He stands slowly and puffs his cheeks and exhales condensation from his nostrils and I’m reminded of one of those steam trains powered by hot geysers instead of fossil fuels that the inspired engineer tried to sell to the Siberians a few years ago. Strange that the scheme wasn’t successful! The geysers were carried safely on board in big bathtubs and there weren’t any safety or efficiency issues, but it’s often something as arbitrary as fashion that dictates technological progress.

  “I’m quite preoccupied, to be honest,” he replies.

  “I do appreciate that, sir, but I brought the reader with me all this way to convincingly settle a dispute.”

  “Is it about the title of this story again?” he sighs.

  “Yes, I’m afraid it is.”

  Shaking his head dolefully, Flann lays down his fork and stands like a scarecrow specially designed to scare off other scarecrows. His mouth is set in a grimace and his eyes betray a cumulative pain. Then I notice that his bare legs below the hemline of his shorts have turned black, not black with gangrene but some other way almost as bad, and I recoil in terror as he steps closer, a terror that objectively is rather mild but quite sufficient in the context of this paragraph.

  “Ants,” he explains. “My plot has been invaded.”

  His lower body is literally alive with ants, seething, pulsing and biting, tiny actors in an evil costume drama, irritating his skin like no fabric ever could, hundreds of ants in the shape of an awful pair of formic trousers, a garment of repentance that can’t be flung, and when Flann reaches down to brush the nasty insects off with his hand he gains a dark glove as many ants jump over, while new ants rapidly climb up from the ground to repair the sudden gap like impish tailors.

  He is the very sorry personification of itchiness. “That’s a terrible thing to happen to a gardener,” I shout.

  And he doesn’t disagree with my sentiment. “Indeed!”

  “Have you tried any remedies?”

  “For ants there are none,” he replies impatiently.

  “Are you quite sure? What about a chalk circle? I read somewhere that ants will never cross a circle marked out in chalk. Another solution might be the importation of an anteater.”

  “Our local climate is too wet for either!”

  “Fair enough, but there’s another creature in existence that’s the doom of ants. Although called an antlion, it doesn’t resemble a mermecolion in the slightest and in fact it’s just the larval form of an insect that’s a sort of lacewing. Antlions are also known as doodlebugs and they make traps by digging pits and lurking at the bottom. When an unlucky ant falls into the pit, the antlion soon devours him.”

  “What’s a mermecolion?” Flann wonders.

  “A mythic beast, half lion, half ant, half absurd fiction, and I apologise if those figures don’t add up but it’s not really my fault. Anyway, it seems you’ll just have to suffer without any hope, because ants can’t be defeated by any force in the universe, that’s plain from your demeanour. What can possibly rid an allotment of ants? Nothing. That’s the message I’m getting loud and clear from your stance and it’s a fact you’re much more clever in all subjects than I could ever be.”

  Flann sneers at that. “Are you being sarcastic?”

  “No, I’m not,” I reply honestly.

  “Cleverer in all subjects?” Flann persists.

  “Apart from the taxonomy of imaginary beings,” I concede.

  “I’d better learn fast,” he sniffs.

  “It’s a pointless subject, don’t bother,” I say.

  “Very well. Back to ants…”

  Suddenly the reader speaks up. That’s you, by the way, you out there. Yes, you. I’m not referring to an abstract figure with no more substance than the fictional characters in this tale, but to a flesh and blood person, the only solid lifeform in the vicinity. Don’t attempt to hide and pretend you’re not there. You betray your presence by sucking the words off this page into your mind and they make a noise when that happens, a gloopy sound, and I can hear it right now.

  So I know you are there, even though I can’t see out of the story. That is how you’ll never evade your responsibility while I’m the narrator. With a superior sort of smile you say:

  “You need to kill the queen, that’s what.”

  Flann von Ryan narrows his eyes and licks his lips. “What?”

  “To get rid of the ants,” you add.

  “Yes, I see,” he comments.

  “They have clearly established a nest somewhere in your plot and they probably regard your land as belonging to them now, so they are here to stay, and killing the workers won’t make any difference at all. You must kill the queen. It’s the only way.”

  I whistle through my teeth in amazement at your insight. “Superb! I’m sure that’s the one viable tactic.”

  “Kill the queen?” echoes Flann ponderously.

  “The only option, absolutely.”

  He rubs his chin and studies the ants on his legs. Then the ants on his hand that have transferred themselves to his chin because of that rub run across the rest of his face and he closes his eyes and opens them abruptly, using his eyelids to flick some of them off. But it’s clear that soon he will be utterly covered in ants, that he’ll turn into a statue of ants, that there’ll ultimately be sufficient ants for them to cut him up into tiny pieces with their mandibles and take him home.

  Back to the nest. Back to the queen. The queen that must die, I remind him, winking at you, the reader.

  “I’ll do that,” he cries. “I’ll really do it!”

  After we have left, Flann staggers up the path to his shed, shaking off the ants as he goes, then he pulls off his clothes and uses them as mild whips to lash away the irritation of the acidic wounds on his flesh. Next he jerks open the shed door and lurches inside. A hurricane lamp suspended from a rafter on a chain illuminates the interior with a solitary candle, but it is the brightest candle in history, one of his own inventions, and no shadows find refuge in any corner. Not one.

  In the exact centre of the room stands a wide table and on this table are the technical sketches of his ultimate innovation, the Infinite Train. It was this very project that was spurned by every government he took it to, but he has since refused to destroy the plans and occasionally consults them for nostalgic reasons. The Infinite Train is still a viable concept and one day it might be adopted by some futuristic regime. Then he should finally receive the real respect he deserves.

  An ordinary train has a finite and easily measurable length and moves like a metallic sausage on a predetermined course along a track. When it reaches the end of the line it presumably turns back, either by reversing or by being rotated on a giant turntable. The Infinite Train isn’t like that. The Infinite Train is a closed loop made of millions of carriages that run on a track that also forms a closed loop around the entire country so that every station lies somewhere along the loop.

  Because I currently reside in Britain, allow me to use British locations in the following example of how an Infinite Train could work in practice. In a simple version, a single track might connect London, Bristol, Cardiff, Swansea, Wrexham, Liverpool, Lancaster, Carlisle, Glasgow, Inverness, Edinburgh, Sunderland, Leeds, Sheffield, Norwich, Ipswich and back to London. That’s the loop the track would make and an Infinite Train would make an identical loop on top of it.

  The loop that is the train would go round and round the loop that is the track, allowing any willing passenger to get on board at any
point without needing to wait for the train to arrive, for how can it possibly arrive when it’s already there and will always be already there? The only tricky part is the transition from solid ground to moving train or vice versa. A perilous jump is required for that, or as an alternative maybe rows of springboards and safety nets could be installed.

  To render the journey even faster and more efficient, the Infinite Train actually carries its own conventional railway inside its carriages, for they are wide enough to easily accommodate a track that runs the entire length of the loop. On this track race orthodox electric locomotives, doubling the relative speed of a commuter who takes advantage of them. Eventually a second Infinite Train may replace these locomotives, with a third loop of railway line inside them, and so on.

  Round and round in the same direction forever…

  That’s enough about that. Flann von Ryan turns over the piece of paper covered in the drawings of his most futile scheme to expose a blank side that he’ll use to design a new project for the eradication of the ants in his allotment. He sets to work with a pencil. The candle burns to a stub, the moon rises over the silent gardens outside, the herb spiral he has been tending gleams in its beams. When he finally nods to himself at midnight there’s no pencil left to throw down.

  His plan seems perfect. He will devote the rest of the week to building a working prototype of the thing, but now he needs to sleep. He stands up and crosses the room to a trapdoor in the wooden floor. He raises this and descends a metal ladder to a secret underground platform where a sealed train of his own devising glides him smoothly down a vacuum tube to the basement of his own house, where he mounts another ladder and emerges in his cosy living room. On time too.

  He moves into his kitchen and brews a soothing mug of herbal tea. His herb spiral provides him with all the herbs he might ever need, including coriander, dill, curry plant, lemon balm, sage, oregano, thyme, rosemary and lavender, but you don’t really need to know that. Nor do I. He carries his tea up to his bedroom and sips it under the covers. He is too weary to clean his teeth or wash his feet. His bedroom was once his workroom but now it’s a much more relaxing place.

  Having moved all his tools and apparatus to his allotment shed, there’s little on display to indicate that he was ever an engineer of rare skill. Just a model of the shed on his windowsill, in every way a perfect copy, with an interior exactly the same as the real one, full of scaled-down working representations of all his tools and apparatus, even including blueprints of the Infinite Train and a trapdoor in the floor that leads to a secret platform for a subterranean vacuum train.

  If he can’t sleep after an overly relaxing day with his vegetables, Flann von Ryan will occasionally get out of bed and tinker with the contents of this model shed, designing prototypes of prototypes that he can build the following day in his big shed. He’s not sure the model shed came after the big one. Maybe the big shed was actually designed inside the model one? In that case, what’s the model shed a model of? It’s an enigma. Luckily an enigma makes a comfortable pillow.

  He sleeps the deep sleep of any collection of words on a page. But he’s sleepy, so his sleep is even deeper.

  Have you seen the newspapers yet? The headlines are incredible. Yes, I’m talking to you, so don’t sit there with a look on your face as if you’ve done nothing wrong. That innocent expression of yours won’t fool anybody and you’ll certainly get the full blame for what occurred. After all, you are the one who put the idea into his mind.

  Yes, the police are coming right now but don’t imagine that I’ll be held responsible too. I’m the author and can rewrite the tale to provide an alibi, to prove I wasn’t there when you concocted your treacherous plot. As for Flann von Ryan, he won’t suffer either. He’s just a character in a story and doesn’t exist, whereas you are real.

  There’s a vast difference between those two conditions, so you’re alone to face the brewing storm and it’s going to be a huge one, mark my words, so I suggest you get out of that chair and start running now. I can’t believe you’re still there, still reading this sentence, instead of fleeing for your life and liberty. What’s wrong with you?

  It’s as if these words have some hypnotic effect on you, as if you can’t abandon them until they come to an end of their own accord. If that’s the case, then maybe I can help you by breaking this sentence and ending the spell like this… What, you’re still here! But why? The police are coming for you. Because of what happened.

  What do you mean, you have no idea what I’m talking about? That’s a very poor joke. You should be reading newspapers instead of this story and then you’d know. Always read the news first and fiction later. But as I have no choice other than to believe you, I may as well give you all the details. The event occurred yesterday.

  Buckingham Palace was involved in a collision…

  It was hit by another Buckingham Palace, an exact replica of the first, that came from nowhere at high speed. Someone must have laid invisible rails for the second palace to travel on.

  When it collided with the original Buckingham Palace it smashed it to bits and came to rest in the same location, so it appeared to tourists that nothing had really happened other than a loud crash. When they blinked again and looked, the palace was there.

  What a cunning trick! What a devious ruse!

  The queen is no fool and ran out of her palace the moment she heard the sound of the oncoming building, so her atoms weren’t dissipated by the mighty force of the impact and even her crown remained balanced on her head and utterly untarnished.

  But then she stopped and turned around. Buckingham Palace was still there! The crash must have been a strange hallucination and it was clearly safe to go back inside and resume her normal regal life without reference to such a revolutionary scenario.

  So that’s what she did. She noticed nothing amiss as she trudged back up the stairs to her bedroom. To settle her nerves she pulled a silver cord that was connected to the servants’ quarters. Footmen rapidly materialised in eager response to her summons.

  She ordered a pot of tea and a large plate of scones with clotted cream and raspberry jam. She didn’t say please or thank you. Queens don’t need to have manners, everyone knows that, but she didn’t get what she asked for. She had walked into a trap.

  The footmen weren’t really footmen but assassins in disguise and they cast off their livery and revealed themselves to be animated garden forks equipped with limited electronic intelligence. The queen raced down the red carpet of a hallway but they quickly caught up with her and then they stabbed and jabbed her to death.

  Thus was treason committed in accord with Flann von Ryan’s vision. It can be a messy vision sometimes.

  And not just any old treason, but the high kind!

  Yes, you’ll be cast into the deepest dungeon for that, dear reader, and I doubt they’ll even let even your skeleton out. Now there’s a knocking on the door. Must be the police. As you still seem too lazy or blasé to get out of your chair, I’ll open it for you.

  Not the police after all. Flann von Ryan.

  He has a complaint to make.

  “I did exactly what you said and killed the queen but it didn’t help my problem with ants at all,” he says.

  He waits for you to reply, but you don’t utter a single word, so he adds angrily, “My allotment’s still infested!”

  “Come on, Mr von Ryan,” I cry, grabbing his shoulder. “Let’s get out of here pronto and save ourselves. The reader can bear the full brunt. He’s just sitting there, the dullard!”

  “Where shall we escape to?” Flann wonders.

  “Beyond the end of this story, less than seven sentences away. We’ll take a leap off the edge of the prose into the void, while this sap answers the door and gets bundled to jail.”

  “Sure, that’s fine by me, I agree,” comes the reply, but I never know if it issues from Flann or from you.

  Together, we run and jump and get away…

  But at no point
along its entire length does this tale bear a resemblance to the famous Borges story. So Flann von Ryan was right in the very first paragraph and I was wrong. Damn!

  Afterword

  Interview with the King of Shush

  (who knows everything)

  Q: It is a great privilege to be talking to the King of Shush, perhaps the wisest man of all time, but one who has preferred to remain silent and unapproachable for most of his life. If anyone is able to answer the mysteries that still surround the fusing of Earth and Happenstance into a single planet, then it is he and no other. I would like to begin by asking his noble majesty to finally solve one of the most fierce debates concerning the collision, namely the speed at which the two worlds struck each other. Was it about 5 Kph?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Such a low velocity is highly unusual for astronomical bodies and suggests that gravity was somehow in abeyance at the time or that some form of repulsive force was generated between the approaching worlds. The way the continents jumped up and landed again, jumbled but undamaged, is also indicative of an unprecedented negation of gravity, either as the result of a hitherto unguessed natural phenomenon or else by artificial means. In the latter case, the implications for humanity and all the other species are alarming.

  A: Sure.

  Q: Well this really is remarkable news! Many scientists will be relieved to have their minds put to rest on that one and I daresay several thousand bets will now be settled in the canteens of cosmology institutes. Moving on, it has struck me how many of the Happenstance lands are kingdoms rather than republics. Does this show a genre laziness on the part of the author, and by extension other authors of fantasy tales, an overreliance on the models created by Lord Dunsany or perhaps an unwillingness to get to grips with more complex political systems?