by Ian Watson
‘I do not think that would be wise or comfortable,’ advised Ntenga. ‘You might give birth to a stone baby.’
‘In that case, dearest brother, we might begin to return to the most ancient, solid time of all, don’t you think? When plant life first diverged from the rocks. We’d be almost at the time when the sky was blinding white, before the world settled into shape. We might soon become not stone, nor even stone’s sire, lava, but stone’s grandsire: clouds of flaming gas.’
‘Dearest sister, you can’t cross six crevasses in a single leap. First we must become beasts. Then plants. Unless you can lead us to the egg, in which case we may become plants immediately. Only after that, stone; then lava; then gas.’
Consequently Laliani did not carry out her proposed experiment – which was perhaps just as well, since Great Ngana’s parts might well have softened in her liquid warmth, attached themselves to her, and turned inside out. She might have become a man-woman.
Indeed a comic variation on the legend pretends that just such an event occurred that night; and thereafter Laliani the man-woman pointed the way, with the phallus of his-her own body.
In our version Ngana’s parts remained firm stone.
The seekers walked on all the next day and the day after, spearing a couple of bush-piglets to eat their flesh and drink their blood.
On the third day the pointer which Laliani held suddenly jerked downward and became dead.
The brothers tore up grass and sieved soil through their fingers till Angwinu found what he thought at first were two little shells that had turned to stone.
‘Those are a pair of Ngana’s eyelids,’ said Laliani.
She fixed them with a paste of mud and spittle to the lids of her own left eye, blinked, and stared westward. ‘The trail lies that way.’
Eventually Laliani led her fellow seekers to another spot where they found Ngana’s other eyelids.
Wearing these too, she pointed southeast.
A longwinded variation of the legend has it that, after this, the seekers needed to recover each petrified hank of hair from Ngana’s head, a hundred stone worms. In this version their search led them to every corner of the world. Thus they visited a land where the sky was several hues of blue; where no wind-giants raced whirligig, where Thunder was inarticulate – which is why I mentioned phlegmatic meteorology earlier.
They visited a country so high above the clouds that the stars shone steadily by day, sharing a black sky with the Sun. And then a realm of ice, where hills and valleys were of ice, and vegetation too, and even the crackly cows and the lions were of ice, not to mention the frigid human inhabitants. Then they visited an underwater land where white people with gills and fins hunted and herded huge fish and where their King (who sometimes ate his own people) had eight arms.
But let us ignore all this embroidery upon the plain cloth of the quest.
At last the six (plus the memory of Chtolo) arrived back at one part of the Plain of Grass which wasn’t excessively remote from their hometown of cones and craters.
Laliani’s stone eyelids blinked furiously and dragged her gaze downward.
The brothers tore up sheaves of grass and began to dig the yellow soil, while Laliani stood stroking her swollen belly, for she was now far advanced with child.
Thunder began to growl. ‘Lightning, Lightning – they will find your egg! Wind, Wind, hurry if you want to scoop up that egg and threaten Lightning!’
Thunder obviously hoped to curry favour with both. Wind started to rise. Lightning began to flash.
‘Scoop faster, brothers!’ urged Laliani.
‘Ah!’ exclaimed Kampinga, from the bottom of the pit.
He hurled some more soil over his shoulders; Madonga caught it and piled it. A moment later Kampinga’s fingers were brushing clean a hefty bulge – something like the ostrich egg for which they had originally set out, only larger.
‘Here is the egg! We have found it!’
Angwinu, now acting as lookout, spied Cyclone twisting across the plain. Even as he called a warning, Lightning’s silver spear dived at Cyclone, knocking it off course.
‘My pains are coming on,’ announced Laliani. She sank back against the excavated rampart, drew her legs up, spread her knees wide.
Down in the pit, Kampinga squatted on the egg, warming it with his bare bottom, bouncing up and down impatiently.
Laliani’s waters burst, soaking soil.
Cyclone and Lightning skirmished, while Thunder chuckled nervously.
‘Ouch!’ Kampinga leaped off the egg. He danced around the pit, howling with offended dignity, slapping his rump as if it were on fire.
A crack had opened right across the dome of the egg. Like the double shell of a clam, the egg had opened and shut, pinching Kampinga’s buttocks.
When Madongo told Laliani what had happened, she laughed loudly. ‘How like a man! I’m busy giving birth. I’m splitting apart. He only had his bum nipped.’
All of a sudden the crack yawned wide. Like a hinged fish-basket, the egg flipped open, revealing the dense wrinkled green meat of the egg within.
A waft of wind reached a prying finger into the crater. And what had looked like wrinkled green meat began to unwrap itself. A green leaf peeled loose, became a sheet, became a sail, then ten sails all together growing up out of the egg to flap overhead. And still more!
The new sky was unfolding from the egg! Up it billowed, spreading enormous wings, still spilling from the egg, ever flying up into the air. The new green sky!
By the time that Laliani gave birth, half an hour later, a whole new sky was in place, stretched tight across the entire dome of heaven, not a single wrinkle to be seen.
The child of Laliani and her age-brothers was a beautiful little girl. Laliani named her Yaijani, meaning ‘egg-leaf’. The six seekers (with one other in spirit) took turns to carry Yaijani in the top half of the eggshell as they trekked back homeward to the town of craters and cone-huts; and a new world had begun.
So says the legend.
Certainly this explains why the sky is green. To some extent it also explains why we people have begun reverting back toward the beginnings of life. Already many are born with fur on their bodies and never walk upon two legs. Yet the legend is obviously misleading, too, since we are not becoming plants immediately.
The speech of the new generation is much simpler. Maybe mine is the last generation in which this legend can be told and understood. The animals who succeed us, and the plants who succeed them, will have no interest in such matters. Nor will the rocks who succeed the plants.
Yet when at last we become lively beings of fiery gas circling around the Sun, perhaps we will remember how the world once was, and in those future joyous days we will recall the legend of the Seven who found the true egg of Lightning.
Why do you frown, Stranger?
Hyperzoo
‘And this,’ said Zoo Director Riggers, ‘is a hypertiger. We call it a tiger by analogy with three-dimensional creatures. It’s a fierce carnivore. We believe its habits are solitary. It’s the tiger of the four-dimensional world.’
‘Doesn’t look much like a tiger to me,’ drawled Mrs Tarkington-Svensen, whose late husband’s foundation had funded this new wing of the zoo. ‘In fact it looks like nothing so much as a jumble of gooey orange tubes. Like some stupid bit of modern sculpture.’
Harry Svensen’s tax-write-off bounty had also endowed the Museum of Contemporary Conceptual Sculpture. Unfortunately the perceptive Mr Svensen had died of a heart attack just the month before, leaving control of the bulk of his fortune to his recently acquired fifth wife, Adelle Tarkington, about whom he had not nearly been as perceptive. Except externally; she’d been a beauty queen, not recently to be sure, but not in olden days either. She was still a golden-blonde, tanned, and well-tended memorial to former glories.
‘At least it’s orange, Adelle,’ pointed out Sonya Svensen, teenage daughter of Harry’s third marriage who had exercised her child-charter rig
hts by electing to stay on with him through his fourth marriage to an exgeisha Japanese lady conservationist and designer of avant-garde topological netsuke.
‘Tigers are orange, sort of,’ said Sonya.
‘I,’ proclaimed Mrs T-S, ‘smell a rat.’
Actually there was no smell to speak of in this particular animal house apart from a crackle of ozone produced by the glow-bars of the enormous cages. Did Mrs T-S imagine that Riggers was mounting some equally enormous lucrative hoax and had in fact borrowed some mobile pneumatic conceptual art to stick in these beast pens?
‘I do not believe these objects are animals from this fanciful Fourworld the university domeheads say they had dreamed up.’ (She wasn’t very respectful about scientists.) ‘I think this thing is hollow. Yes, hollow, that’s it.’
‘Hollow?’ Riggers looked puzzled. ‘Obviously there’ll be a certain amount of hollowness, else how could the hypertiger eat and excrete?’
Mrs T-S wrinkled her nose disapprovingly at his mention of excretion. She considered herself a fine lady, and high society tended to agree.
‘Analogically, that’s to say,’ Riggers hastened to add. ‘I mean, no 3-D animal is solid all the way through.’
‘Are you deliberately misunderstanding me, Dr Riggers? Are you trying to make a fool of me?’
‘Adelle means it’s a holo-graph,’ whispered Sonya. ‘I think.’
Nothing wrong with Mrs T-S’s hearing. ‘That’s what I said: a hollow.’
‘If she could, well, poke a stick through the bars and, er, nudge it, she’d know it was for real.’ Sonya hesitated. ‘Or would she need to use a 4-D stick to make any impact?’
‘You oughtn’t to poke sticks through the bars,’ I said. ‘Who knows but the hyperfield could short out, and then we’d lose our specimen?’
‘Oh I hardly think so,’ Riggers said hastily to me. ‘And a security guard isn’t exactly qualified to pronounce!’
I had taken a quickie course about the Fourworld at the university, but in fact Riggers was right. The subject was still pretty much a mystery to me. Indeed, until the could-be never-never-time when the aforesaid domeheads should discover a method to four-dimensionalize a human being and translate the bold volunteer into the Fourworld, I supposed that domain must remain, of its very essence, a total mystery to almost everyone.
I wondered whether the Profs and PhDs had merely been babbling when they hinted at inserting a person into the Fourworld? What a voyage of exploration, what a safari that would be – through a hyper-landscape where the hyperbeasts roamed! The most suitable candidate for explorer might well be a raving nut-case, a certified lunatic whose rapport with our own Threeworld was already totally out of synch.
‘In any case nobody should poke captive animals with sticks,’ said Sonya, changing her tune. ‘That’s medieval, like bear-baiting.’ She was trying to be helpful, to ensure that her Daddy’s pet projects were carried on.
‘Quite,’ agreed Riggers. He sounded relieved. Plainly he was under a strain. Not inconceivably Mrs T-S could lean on Harry’s foundation to withdraw its support. Rumour had it that her lawyers had found some loophole. The hyperfields soaked up a hell of a lot of costly energy, never mind all the other maintenance costs. It was no secret that Mrs T-S nursed a passionate whim to fund the sending of handsome young astronauts, beholden to her, out to the unexplored frontiers of Threespace. Since spaceflight was all Earth-orbit, battle station stuff, those frontiers weren’t too far away. If NASA was to be revived, it would take a private sponsor. Mrs T-S was positive there was life on Mars and Venus and the moons of Jupiter, and couldn’t understand why there shouldn’t be any four-armed barbarian warriors and green-skinned princesses. She could see herself at a society ball arm in arm with her own doughty spacefaring heroes.
Even I could see that the Fourworld was more exciting – potentially – than Threespace, which simply spread out and out for zillions of miles full of vacuum, bits of rocks, and balls of gas.
Potentially. The trouble was that the hyperanimals which the zoo had trapped, whilst utterly weird, didn’t exactly turn the populace on as more than a seven-day wonder. How could they, when by definition you couldn’t see more than a bitty part of any of them? Visiting this section of the zoo wasn’t as grabbing an experience as goggling at the last few rhino alive in captivity (and alive nowhere else – score a point for pathos). But equally, if our Threeworld’s livestock was diving helter-skelter down the drain in the great man-made mass extinction, undoubtedly the ecology of the Fourworld was still bursting at the seams by comparison. So far we had only netted a tiny sample, by no means enough to start talking confidently in terms of species and family trees and 4-D evolution; though Dr Riggers sometimes pretended so for public relations purposes. This had to be the zoo of the future – if only we could get a better idea of the beasts. At the moment, and perhaps forever, visiting here was like trying to admire some giant Renaissance canvas by peeping through a keyhole which only showed you inches at a time. (Cancel Renaissance. A giant abstract canvas. Jackson Pollock or some such.)
Just then the mass of orange tubes inside the cage began to twitch and pulse, and expand and shift.
‘See, it’s woken up,’ said Riggers with forced cheerfulness. ‘It was resting before. Now it’s active.’
‘How convenient.’ Mrs T-S sniffed disdainfully, her own vision no doubt locked on a valiant cadet in space armour, bulging muscles of brass, blasting an attacking Jovian crystal-lizard to smithereens.
‘I’m sure these supposed creatures can’t possibly be pulled here from Mars,’ she went on. ‘Mars can’t possess creatures like this. It must have, well –’
‘Thoats and Zitidars,’ supplied Sonya. ‘No, Adelle, Burroughs made those up.’
‘Or if they are from Mars, the process warps them out of all recognition. Only lets poor bits of them squeeze through. That’s why we should explore Mars the proper way. By rocket.’
Riggers looked perplexed. ‘Mars, dear lady?’
‘Yes, Mars. Mars is the fourth world. Every child knows that. Earth is the third world.’
‘Ah… Perhaps a slight case of cross purposes here? When we speak about the Threeworld and the Fourworld we’re referring in the first case to the world of three dimensions which we inhabit; namely length and breadth and height. “Fourworld” doesn’t refer to the fourth planet. Mars is just another threeworld, part of the threeworld universe.’
‘Just another?’
‘A very special and exciting planet, to be sure! But even so. The Fourworld has an extra dimension, diagonal to those other three we know and love.’
‘It’s like this, Adelle.’ Sonya waggled her fingers, trying to stick them all out at right angles to each other, but quickly gave up.
Since everyone else was giving lessons to Mrs T-S, and Riggers was looking distraught, I decided to join in.
I pointed to the nearest glow-bar. ‘The hyperfield casts a four-dimensional net into the Fourworld, Mrs Tarkington-Svensen. It snares a fourbeast and pins it down for us, so it can’t escape from the cage, though of course the fourbeast isn’t all here.’
‘Are you?’ she enquired. ‘Are you all here?’
I laughed politely at her wit. ‘Most of the fourbeast is still in the Fourworld, which is how it can feed itself, since we can’t provide any fourfood and threefood would be no use. That would be like us trying to eat a picture of a meal on a magazine page.’
‘Why, that’s cruel! The poor things could starve!’
All this while, the hypertiger had been expanding and changing configuration. By now it was the size of a real Bengal tiger – apart from the fact that real Bengal tigers went extinct a couple of years previous – and it resembled a spherical rug armed with teeth or claws. This started to roll back and forth, ‘pacing’ the cage. A long pink tentacle or tube appeared near the ball and presently joined up with it. An intestine? What might have been a fourleg put in an appearance, then changed its mind.
It w
as, of course, hard to be sure of the exact anatomy of a hyperbeast even when you’d seen and filmed all sorts of aspects of it. You couldn’t simply stick all your pictures together or even digitize them and feed them into a computer, and bingo. A hypertiger wasn’t lots more tiger superimposed upon tiger, like a stack of film transparencies shot from different angles. The beast would have its own unique four-anatomy, evolved by the struggle to survive and breed amidst a whole hyperecology. However, we had once seen what we decided were aspects of its fourjaws, chewing hyperprey to pieces, and another time we had witnessed part of its fourface and foureyes, burning bright. ‘Tiger’ seemed to fit the bill. Approximately. Analogically.
‘I mean to say,’ continued Mrs T-S, ‘it’s stuck in a trap.’
‘Ah, but only 3-D slices of it are hampered. It can still hunt in the Fourworld,’ I assured her. ‘The geometry’s different there. More complicated than here.’
Riggers had revived. ‘Thank you, Jake,’ he said to me. He turned quickly to Mrs T-S. ‘Naturally, we have observed hyper-creatures impinging on our own world in the past. At the time we didn’t realize what they were. If people glimpse a meaningless shape their brains tend to impose a plausible pattern, to make sense of what they’re seeing. All those tales of mythical creatures, dragons, monsters, demons, and UFO phenomena immediately make sense when we realize that people were witnessing an aspect of a hyperanimal intersecting with our own Threeworld as it went about its 4-D business. A UFO would be a hyperbird, or whatever. And now we can genuinely cage this fantastic menagerie! Isn’t it wonderful? To be able to see with our own eyes the actual source of basilisks and behemoths, minotaurs and griffins, flying saucers and Bigfeet and abominable snowmen, angels and devils! Isn’t that more wonderful than…’
Than Jovian crystal-lizards. Than Thoats and Zitidars. But he tailed off, wary of pulling any rugs out too brusquely from under Mrs T-S’s cherished and fanciful dreams. He gestured grandly down the air-conditioned hall paid for by Harry, and which was large enough to house a modest spacefleet under construction, destination Jupiter.