A Wild Ride Through The Night (14 page)

‘So Death is growing older too?’

‘Of course,’ said the Time Pig. ‘Even
I
am growing older, damn it, and I’m time itself! Nobody can escape that fate. Anyone who doesn’t like it must find himself another universe.’

Gustave once more heard the sound that had greeted him when they entered the Galactic Gully: the sound of rapids gurgling over boulders. It quickly swelled and became a roar. The darkness paled, the tunnel transformed itself once more into an immense, multicoloured shaft filled with whirling specks of red, yellow and blue light.

‘We’re nearly there!’ yelled the Time Pig. ‘Hang on tight!’

Crunching, crackling sounds rang out once more inside Gustave’s head, and all at once he and his mount were catapulted back into the darkness of space. All movement ceased. The black void was cold, silent, and filled with stars.

‘First floor,’ the Time Pig announced solemnly. ‘The future.’

TO GUSTAVE THE
future looked just like the present: a black void with white holes in it.

‘I know how you’re feeling now,’ said the Time Pig. ‘You’re disappointed.’

Gustave nodded.

‘You pictured the future differently, didn’t you, but up here almost nothing changes—not dramatically, at any rate. You see that mist over there?’

‘That cloud of gas? The one that looks like a horse’s head?’ Gustave couldn’t help thinking of Pancho again.

‘Precisely. It’ll look just the same a hundred million years from now, yet it’s changing all the time, every second.’

‘Why does it look like a horse’s head?’

‘No idea. Why does a horse’s head look like a horse’s head? Why do I look like a pig? Why do you look the way you do? I don’t think there’s any deeper significance in it.’

Suddenly, music could be heard—beautiful, ghostly music such as Gustave had heard once before: it was the song of the seahorses. A fleet of jellyfish sailed past. Yellow, red and orange, they kept time to the music like ballet dancers.

‘What are the jellyfish doing here?’ asked Gustave, who thought he recognised one of them. It had a red body and was trailing some yellow tentacles behind it.

‘Those are the
Last Jellyfish
. They’re cosmic mourners, so to speak. They slosh around up here until someone drowns down on earth. The jellyfish appear to those who meet their death by drowning.’

Gustave now caught sight of some more creatures: feverishly fluttering hummingbirds, clouds of multicoloured butterflies with
wings
the size of open newspapers, flamingos, deep-sea fish, stingrays, and huge dragonflies whose chitinous bodies glittered like polished semi-precious stones.

‘Depending on the way you die,’ the Time Pig went on, ‘you see one of the
Last Creatures
. The
Last Butterflies
appear to people who burn to death, the
Last Hummingbirds
to victims of heart attacks. There’s a regular menagerie up here.’

An armada of octopuses floated elegantly past. Snakes with yellow and green stripes wriggled weightlessly through the void. Pink flamingos strutted along with military precision.

‘The less painful the death, the less attractive the creature you see. If you die peacefully of old age, all you see is a chicken—the
Last Chicken
. It clucks, and you’re a goner.’

‘Is it true that Death gets your soul afterwards,’ asked Gustave, ‘and tosses it into the sun to keep it burning?’

‘You mean you know the great mystery of the universe?’ said the Time Pig. ‘You never cease to surprise me, my boy.’

Gustave gave a modest little cough. ‘Death told me by mistake.’

‘Of course he told you, but not by mistake. He broadcasts it far and wide—he tells everyone, whether or not they want to hear it.’

The Time Pig flapped its wings, and the creatures disappeared from Gustave’s field of vision.

‘But to revert to your question: I’ve no idea whether such things as souls exist. Death makes a big fuss about them, but nobody knows what he really puts in those coffins of his. It may be souls, but it may be just hot air. The sun goes on burning come what may—it was burning before there was any life or death in the solar system. Know what I think?’

‘No.’

The Time Pig glanced round furtively, as if afraid of being overheard, then lowered its voice to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘I think the whole thing’s a monumental hoax. I think Death kicks up this fuss just to distract attention from the futility of what he does.’

‘So there aren’t any souls at all!’

The Time Pig raised its voice again. ‘I didn’t say that. I’ve no idea, as I already said. I’m pig ignorant, that’s all.’ It stopped flapping its wings. ‘We’re there!’

Gustave couldn’t see a thing, just cosmic darkness strewn with twinkling stars.

‘Look beneath us!’ said the Time Pig, and turned so that Gustave could see past its head into the depths below. He felt dizzy. Beneath them yawned a shaft perhaps three hundred feet in diameter, a seemingly endless tunnel suffused with green light.

‘Hold on tight!’ called the Time Pig. ‘We’re now entering the cosmic records department!’

Folding its wings, it plummeted downwards, and they plunged into the luminous shaft like a stone falling down a well. Gustave now saw that the shaft possessed a geometrical structure, a framework of vertical and horizontal lines that created a pattern reminiscent of a filing cabinet.

He even thought he made out some drawers, and each drawer bore the letter A.

‘This is the
Corridor of Possibilities
,’ the Time Pig called as they continued their nosedive. ‘It’s where the cosmic bureaucrats try to instil some order into cosmic chaos. They fail, of course, just as they
do
in real life. They try to get control of things and classify them— file them away in drawers. They try to assemble all the possibilities in the universe and file them alphabetically. An absurd idea, naturally, but that’s bureaucrats for you.’ The Time Pig gave a contemptuous grunt. ‘Can you imagine how many possibilities the universe has to offer? No, you can’t. That’s why this shaft is so deep—unimaginably deep. We could go on falling for another few million light years, and we’d still be at letter A. Whoops! We’ve reached the honeycombs!’

Branching off the shaft was a horizontal passage filled with blue light. The Time Pig gave its right wing a vigorous flap, and they turned off along it.

Set in the immensely high walls on either side of them were vast numbers of superimposed and juxtaposed cells like those in a honeycomb. Some were triangular, others four-or five-sided, and each contained a living creature. There were men and women in the most diverse forms of dress: trousers, gowns, suits of armour and curious garments Gustave had never seen before. But there were also birds, bears, cats, dogs, fish, tigers, chamois, cows, ducks, chickens, armadillos, crocodiles, zebras, snakes, seals, rats—one creature to each cell. Many cells seemed to be completely deserted, but closer inspection enabled Gustave to make out an insect buzzing around or a shellfish clinging to the wall. In one cell, a solitary (three-headed) ant was crawling across the floor. Gustave saw many unfamiliar creatures with two, three, four, five, or even more heads. Some consisted of silver light threaded with pulsating blue veins, others had dozens of tentacles and glowing red eyes. Gustave saw flickering creatures made of gas and a bird made of water.
Were
they animals at all?

‘Well, there it is,’ said the Time Pig, slowing down, ‘the
Future Contingency Honeycomb
. It contains all the existences in the universe, neatly sorted out and filed away. All these living creatures have something in common. Have you noticed it, by any chance?’

Gustave looked round. They glided past another few hundred cells while he pondered the question.

‘Hm. Where the people and some of the animals are concerned, it strikes me they’re all very old.’

‘Very observant of you,’ said the Time Pig. ‘Now look carefully.’

It flew over to a cell in which an elderly man was sitting and hovered right in front of it.

‘Hey,’ said Gustave, ‘why do we have to look at this poor old geriatric? I’d sooner examine a few of these extraterrestrial life forms. They
are
extraterrestrials, aren’t they? Creatures from other planets? Later on I could draw them for scientists and—’

‘Hey!’ the Time Pig broke in. ‘Your task, remember?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re supposed to meet yourself, aren’t you? All right, then: that old man is
you
!’

Gustave was instantly fascinated by the sight of the old man. He studied every little detail of the cell and its occupant, as he always did in the case of objects he intended to draw.

The man was sitting in a high-backed wing chair. Gustave couldn’t tell how old he was. Seventy or eighty, perhaps, but he could have been a hundred. Hale and hearty-looking despite his gaunt frame, he was brandishing a slender sword in the air and vigorously stamping his feet as he read aloud from a book. Most surprising of all, Gustave could actually
see
what the old man was reading about:
the whole room was filled with adventures
—he couldn’t have described it any other way.

Kneeling at the man’s feet was a pretty young woman—from a well-to-do family, to judge by her clothes—who was being chained up by a brutal fiend with a knife between his teeth. One remarkable feature of the scene was the relative size of the figures: the young woman and her captor were less than half as big as the old man.

The room was teeming with even smaller figures, some of them really tiny. Jousting on the floor were two knights so small that they could comfortably have ridden on mice. A dragon the size of a domestic cat had crawled beneath the wing chair and was dismembering a big book with its claws.

Elsewhere in the room, a dozen or more knights and soldiers equipped with horses and long lances were engaged in a murderous battle. Gustave even made out a gryphon flying through the air with a maiden on its back. In the left foreground lay a giant’s head which had been hacked off and held up by the hair. The face bore a surprising resemblance to that of the giant named Emashtimact or Mathematics.

The old man remained unaffected by all the commotion around him. He continued to read aloud, defiantly brandishing his sword.

‘Yes,’ said the Time Pig, ‘that old man is you—more precisely, you in eighty years’ time. He’s ninety-two. Almost incredible, eh?’

‘Will I really live that long?’

‘That remains to be seen. You’re looking at your
spatio-temporal continuum projection
—your goal, but not necessarily your destination. It all depends how well you make out against disease, war, accidents,
et
cetera. Against death, in other words. But ninety-two? Pretty unlikely, with someone as ambitious as you. In your case I’d predict a heart attack in the fifties. A good way to die, incidentally. You’re there one moment and gone the next.’

‘But how can I be sitting there if I
don’t
live that long?’

‘Every living creature possesses a spatio-temporal continuum projection. Why? For, er, statistical reasons—something like that. The projections show every living creature in the universe at its maximum possible age. Don’t ask me how the system works. I don’t have to bother about all that stuff; it’s cosmic bureaucracy and accountancy, that’s all. Luckily, I deal with other problems.’

The Time Pig heaved a sigh of relief before continuing.

‘What I wanted to show you was this. You see that man, don’t you? He’s you. Or he could have been you. Or
he
certainly was
you
, but it isn’t certain that
you
will some time be
him
. Er …’ The pig broke off. ‘Now I’ve gone and lost my thread.’ It screwed up its eyes and peered at the cell once more. ‘Ah, yes,’ it went on. ‘We’ve no idea whether the old man is happy or discontented. Perhaps the creatures around him are all the figures you’ll devise during your lifetime as an artist, and they’re keeping you company—dispelling the loneliness of old age. Perhaps that’s what the projection is telling us.’

The pig gave a little cough.