Young Tales of the Old Cosmos
Page 5
The Milky Way found it impossible to keep her arms close to her sides and soon they were fully extended. Then other gods lost their balance and were hurled clear. Ragluv the Vulgar collided with Chyme and knocked her off and they both went tumbling and laughing together into the void.
“What if her spiral arms snap off?” demanded the Small Magellanic Cloud.
“They won’t,” responded Andromeda in clipped tones. “Do the beams of a lighthouse break loose when they sweep around too fast?”
“What’s a lighthouse?” wondered the Small Magellanic Cloud.
But Andromeda wasn’t given a chance to answer. A dislodged god missed her by only a few parsecs and she was forced to duck as a second deity was catapulted in her direction. The afternoon of fun was turning hazardous. As the other divinities lost their grip, it became apparent the Milky Way was changing her structure. Left to herself, she would have completed a single revolution in 225 million years, the so-called ‘cosmic year’, but driven by the central shaft that jutted from her mind this period of rotation had accelerated to thirty three and a third revolutions per minute. The pseudo-music that issued from her bawling mouth seemed to be in stereo, a full album’s worth of amusement arcade jingles and circus instrumentals.
“She’s curdling!” gasped the Small Magellanic Cloud.
Andromeda blanched in dismay. “You’re right. I hadn’t foreseen this. Curds and whey… If I was an intolerable punster I would make a joke about the Milky Whey. But I’m not one of those at all. Our dear friend is turning into yoghurt!”
“Can’t you shut down the carousel?”
“It’s the property of the gods. I don’t even understand it!”
The final god to be flung off the whirligig was Allaflap the Flaky. Presumably this meant he had won the game, but the carousel didn’t stop spinning and without the weight of the deities it actually span faster. And now it began to shed other objects, things much smaller and plainer than gods. Andromeda squinted at them. Planets. This had been the plan all along, a dramatic cleansing of every infected star in her friend’s body, an expulsion of her fleas in a single haze of motion. The rejected planets rattled through space like carbine bullets and Andromeda threw up an electromagnetic shield to protect herself. The Small Magellanic Cloud did likewise. Then the fusillade was over…
But the carousel continued to spin and the Yoghurty Way was churned into something even thicker. It was friction that ended the nightmare, for the central shaft began to overheat and melt, strips of white-hot and red-hot alloy alternating like a barber’s pole while the fairground music momentarily increased in intensity. Then the cylinder vaporised entirely. The transmission of power was ended and momentum alone kept the poor galaxy in motion. Ages passed before she slowed to a standstill. There was a shocked silence as the reality of what had happened sank in and Andromeda was the first to find her voice again.
“She’s turned into the Cheesy Way!”
It was true. Stiff and soapy, the dizzy galaxy hung in the void like a crushed disc of Cheddar or Stilton. But her fleas were gone. And it didn’t take long for this fact to be noticed and responded to by all the galaxies both within and outside the Local Group. Without fleas she was no longer galaxia non grata but a perfectly respectable member of the community. And so the universe stopped expanding. It didn’t start contracting just yet, there was a watchful hiatus to allow further developments to occur before such a momentous decision was made, for no galaxy, however impulsive, casually switches its red shift to blue, but even this stasis was a remarkable indicator of how radically the situation had changed.
The Cheesy Way groaned weakly, “I ought to thank you, dear Andromeda, but I don’t feel too well. I have an urge to act in a maudlin manner and sing inappropriately sentimental songs. I’m excessively cheesy and I don’t like it.”
“Look on the bright side,” came the response. “You’ll go well with crackers.”
“What will happen to her discarded planets?” asked the Small Magellanic Cloud. “Isn’t there a risk they’ll migrate to other galaxies?”
Andromeda smiled with confidence. “No, it has all been worked out. The vast spaces between our gravitational fields are full of rogue black holes, collapsed stars that follow no predictable orbit. Every one of her planets is certain to fall into one of those black holes and be swallowed forever. The gods promised me that’s what would happen.”
“What will those gods do now?” croaked the Cheesy Way.
“Travel the long way back home, right to the edge of our universe and beyond it. For them it’s a sort of vacation…”
That was absolutely true, almost. One of the gods couldn’t forget his former role so easily or resist the temptation to fulfil his destiny. When Snooka saw the planets falling into the black holes, he followed his nature and reached in a white-gloved claw to retrieve them. One by one he gathered them up and returned them to their original positions, carefully placing them around each designated star. He was oblivious to the frantic pleas for him to desist. Collecting balls from pockets and returning them to the cosmic baize is what Snooka always does. He just can’t help it. But the Cheesy Way was distraught.
“The universe has started expanding again!” she wailed.
After Snooka had departed, Andromeda made a final effort to console her friend. “When he brought your planets back I happened to notice he had his own fleas. Even the gods must play host to pesky little parasites. So you’re in good company!”
“That god was covered in planets?” sobbed the Cheesy Way.
Andromeda shook her head. “Not planets. I think they’re called angels.”