Link Arms with Toads! (21 page)

“
Baron! Can you hear me?”

The voice was not inside my head. I was not yet mad. In as nonchalant a manner as possible I replied, “Yes indeed. What do you want?”

“
I am Sneakios, the creator of the machine.”

I peered in all directions but saw no man: he was part of the blur of the revolving walls. I pulled my ears. “Will you join me for supper?”

“
By no means. I am standing in a doorway of the hall and dare not approach more closely. The
orrery
is about to detonate. I am using a special device to communicate with you, an amplifier that modulates sound waves relative to your velocity. Another one of my astounding inventions! All solar systems have finite lifespans and this one is no exception. Your sun will die in an extremely violent fashion.”

“
What became of my family, you rascally Bulgar?”

“
The religious authorities decided to formally denounce modern astronomy and declared that all adherents of a sun-centred system were potential heretics. The
orrery
was too bulky to dismantle and its existence here became a fatal liability, so it was prudent for the inhabitants of this castle to depart. As for myself, the edict almost ruined me: I have returned to my former profession of repairing clocks.”

“
Why did you arrange for the machine to explode?”

“
That was not my doing. I merely programmed the sun to swell and then collapse into a cool white star, but somehow the central furnace has acquired extra mass, enough to ensure that it will destroy itself in a supernova, a word I recently coined.”

“
Bah!” I snorted, but I could not shrug off my guilt. The debris from my plunge through the roof, the shattered moon, the comet, the asteroids, Ganymede, the spacecraft, my dung: all had contributed to changing the destiny of the sun. The fault was entirely mine. As if aware of my thoughts, the sun began to groan.

“
Farewell Baron!” called Sneakios. “I wanted to pay my respects to all my wonderful toys. Now I must depart, but if you wish to save yourself you should visit Italy and peer down over Puglia, where you will observe a tiny dot. That dot is your own castle and inside its largest hall is a second
orrery
, a microscopic version of this one. It controls everything. Squash the castle with your thumb and you will stop time and shut off the sun. I wish you luck!”

Cursing myself for a dullard, I strode to the coast of North Africa, splashed through the Mediterranean Sea, hauled myself up spluttering on Sicily. Why had it not occurred to me to take this course of action before? I hurried onwards, stood high above Puglia and leaned forward to search the landscape. At this point the sun exploded. I felt myself flung high and closed my eyes, certain I would be dashed against the sides of the hall. But the walls no longer existed. I was soaring away from a ruin, over the forest, the sun sinking in a sky that was bounded by no walls. I was outside again, in the real world. I was free!

I saw that I was approaching the castle of our nearest neighbour. No lights shone on the battlements: the place appeared to be deserted. An open window gaped wider before me. With a howl of dismay I shot through it into a vast chamber. Spheres rotated around a central furnace. I landed with the birth of many bruises on a planet larger than the Earth. Several moons rose on its horizon. I recognised the furnace: a representation of the star Alpha Centauri. There are planetary systems everywhere in the universe, or so I now believe. Indeed they are almost as common and unremarkable as unlucky men.

(2006)

The Mirror in the Looking Glass

Mad inventors are plentiful in this world of ours but only one sits on a genuine throne and rules his own city like an ancient king. Frabjal Troose of Moonville has many dubious talents, including the ability to flap his ears; they squeak. But his cybernetics expertise is considerable and his contributions to the design and manufacture of artificial nervous systems are almost unparalleled. Only his perversity prevents him from becoming the saviour of the human race.

Perhaps I am overstating the case, but his monumental achievements are singularly unhelpful to his own subjects and the citizens of every other realm. What amuses Frabjal Troose is to install human intelligence in inanimate objects. With the aid of extremely small but excessively clever devices, part electronic and part mechanical, he can bestow the gift of consciousness with all its attendant emotions on chairs, crockery, table lamps, shoes, clocks, flutes.

He can and he does. Frequently.

His other hobby is to worship the moon…

One morning Frabjal Troose awoke with the urge to give thoughts and feelings to a mirror. He foresaw all manner of comic and tragic potential in the reality of a self-aware looking glass. To make the joke even more piquant he decided to equip his victim with prosthetic legs and allow it to roam freely around the city. He left his enormous bed and went to the bathroom and there he saw an appropriate mirror hanging on the wall above the moon-shaped sink.

The operation took several days. Frabjal Troose is a perfectionist and he wanted the circuits and cogs to be tastefully integrated into the frame of the mirror. In the end the workings ran over the surface of the wooden frame like complex ornamentation. By this time, the mirror could already think for itself and was slowly coming to terms with its sudden awareness and the need to develop an identity. It was no longer a mere object but a precious sentient being.

It even had a name. Guildo Glimmer.

Guildo learned to walk within his first hour. Wandering the palace of Frabjal Troose, little more than a large house stuffed with components for new gadgets, he came into contact with the occasional servant. At each encounter the same thing happened: the servant bent down and made a face at Guildo. Sometimes the servant picked him up and held him at arm’s length while plucking a nose hair or squeezing a pimple. What did this mean? Guildo was bewildered.

He continued his explorations and discovered that the front door of the palace was open and unguarded. Through it he hurried, into the lunar themed spaces of the city. Moon buggies rolled past on the roads and the public squares were craters filled with people dressed in silver and yellow clothes. I know that Frabjal Troose once issued an edict forbidding any grins that were not perfect crescents. He also forbade any cakes that were not perfect croissants.

Guildo proceeded down the street. He desperately needed time for reflection, but citizens just would not leave him in peace and they treated him in precisely the same way as the palace servants had, making blatant faces at him, grimacing and yawning and even frowning in disgust. Guildo began to experience the state of mind known as ‘paranoia’. What was wrong with his appearance? What was it about him that provoked such reactions in strangers?

He must be ugly, a horrible freak, a grotesque mutant: there was no other explanation. He was overwhelmed with a desire to view his own face, to confront his visage, to learn the foul truth for himself. But he could think of no way to accomplish this. Are you stupid, Guildo Glimmer? he asked himself. There must be a method of seeing one’s own face, but what? Because he was so new to the conventions of society, he always spoke his thoughts aloud.

“
I know a reliable way,” declared a passerby.

This passerby was a droll fellow, a practical joker. He told Guildo that when men and women wanted to look at their own faces they made use of a ‘reflection’. What was one of those? Well, reflections existed in a variety of natural settings, in quiet lakes and slow rivers and the lids of clean saucepans, but only in the depths of mirrors did they realise their full potential. That is where the highest quality reflections dwelled, untroubled by ripples or cooking stains.

“
You must look into a mirror!” he announced.

Guildo was astonished but grateful and he decided to follow this advice. The passerby chuckled and passed on. He was later arrested for not chuckling in the shape of a crescent, but that is another story. No, it is this story! No matter, I will ignore it in favour of what happened to poor Guildo. His little metallic legs carried him to the market, a bustling place where anything one desired might be bought, provided one’s desires were modest or at least plausible.

Guildo’s were. He approached a stall selling mirrors.

The man who owned the stall was talking to another customer and so Guildo was free to hop onto a table and examine the mirrors on display. He chose a circular mirror that was nearly the same circumference as his own head and he stepped in front of it. What he saw was totally unexpected and utterly profound. He saw an immensely long tunnel, a tunnel that stretched perhaps as far as the moon or infinity.

It must be pointed out once again that Guildo Glimmer was a living mirror. A mirror is simply unable to view its own reflection. The moment a mirror gazes into another mirror, its image will be endlessly bounced back and forth between the two reflecting surfaces. Hence the illusion of a tunnel. This is a law of geometry and a rule of physics, but Guildo knew nothing of such disciplines. His education had not covered the sciences.

As far as he was concerned, the illusory tunnel was an accurate representation of his form. This meant that he really was a tunnel! Now he understood why people kept frowning at him and why he was so dissatisfied. It was because he was not fulfilling his correct role. He was a tunnel and ought to do what tunnels do, act like tunnels act, think what tunnels think. He rushed out of the market to embrace his true destiny.

Later that afternoon, the splinters of a smashed mirror were picked up from the tracks of the main railway line leading into Moonville. When pieced together they could be identified as the remains of Guildo Glimmer. There was no way of resurrecting him. Frabjal Troose came to pay his hypocritical respects but he quickly lost interest and returned to his palace in a land-boat powered by moonbeams. By this time the sun had gone down and the moon was up.

People said that Guildo committed suicide, that he was too full of despair to continue his existence. Why else would he stand in the path of a moving train? But as I watched the billowing sails of the receding land-boat, I realised that I knew better. Guildo was simply serving a mistaken function. Tunnels are there for trains to pass through, after all. I was the driver of that train: in fact I am the train itself, an earlier example of the unnatural quest to give intelligence to inanimate objects.

(2007)

Oh Ho!

Because people like ghost stories, and refuse to stop telling them, ghosts exist. Because people want ghosts to be malevolent, that is how they are.

But Sidney Fudge believed that rage, frustration and pain were the main ingredients necessary to turn a normal human being into an evil phantom after death. In this he was mistaken.

Such emotions, indeed emotions of any kind, can only be experienced and authentically expressed by a corporeal body, never by a disembodied spirit, for the reason that lack of a nervous system renders impossible the biological changes vital for the generation, development and cessation of a
feeling
. Hatred and a thirst for revenge do not merely increase heart rate and raise blood pressure but are intimately connected with those physical processes in a positive feedback loop.

With no blood pressure to raise, no glands to secrete hormones, no lungs to quicken breath, no pulse to throb to bursting in the veins, ghosts must be curiously emotionless beings. This is not the same as saying they are serene, gentle or forgiving. No.

The dead feel a cold, distant, purely cerebral, almost indifferent anger, for no other kind is available to them.

In time Sidney Fudge discovered this fact for himself.

He was a sickly child, the sort of boy who is easy prey for bullies and seems to attract them almost against their will. Despite his eagerness to capitulate immediately to any aggression, to submit to every humiliation, the aforementioned bullies were unable to resist beating him savagely as a regular fixture of school life.

Black eyes and bloody noses became Sidney’s trademark. In addition he had the rare talent of encouraging casual bystanders, who otherwise might have interfered with the punishment he received, to unconsciously adopt a policy of neutrality. Even mature adults watched his ordeals with blank faces, unaffected, bored.

Sometimes the adults quietly assisted the bullying. When a group of pupils resolved to push Sidney down the disused school well, the elderly janitor loaned his chisels and a crowbar to the conspirators to help them break the seal on the hole, to no avail as it happened, for the ancient well refused to open just for that antic.

It never occurred to Sidney to fight back, nor even to protect the most vulnerable parts of his anatomy in a manner wholly instinctive in other boys, nor would resistance have availed him, for already he had caught the attention of Pincher Gottlieb, the worst bully in his town and possibly the entire district. Mental torment was now added to physical, for Pincher was a specialist and fanatic and regarded bullying not only as a dignified artform but also as a sacred duty.

Sidney became the quivering shrine at which Pincher worshipped the Gods of Bullying, perfecting his techniques until he attained a level close to sainthood in the terms of his personal religion. Destined for greatness, at least in the estimation of his tutors, Pincher was openly admired for his extreme ferocity and inventiveness.