‘Are we there? Where are we?’
‘You see that red dot over there? The one with the orange aura?’
‘Yes. Is it a star?’
‘No, it’s a Galactic Gully. We’re taking a short cut, it’ll be quicker. Gullies are a bit bumpy, but they’re faster than those sluggish black holes. You don’t get transformed into light or elasticated like spaghetti, either. You retain your original shape. All that happens is, the words sometimes come out longer when you speak.’
‘What is a Galactic Gully?’
‘It’s the Milky Way’s drainpipe, so to speak. An elevator into the future, a slide that’ll take you into the day after tomorrow. I told you: up here there’s everything. Black holes, white holes, red holes. I once saw a hole near Betelgeuze whose colour I couldn’t even find a name for.’
Meanwhile, the red dot had expanded into a purple vortex that occupied half Gustave’s field of vision. Spiralling through it, and glowing like molten lava, was a long, dark red streak.
‘That looks like Wanderlust Wine,’ said Gustave, ‘only much bigger.’
‘Wanderlust Wine?’ The Time Pig chuckled. ‘Sounds like a drink I could use a swig of right now.’
‘It’s very beautiful.’
‘Yes, dangerous things often are.’
The roar had swelled to ear-splitting proportions. Gustave saw the vortex capture swarms of meteors, comets, moons and whole planets. They were sucked into its rotating centre and vanished without trace. He felt as if he were being flayed alive.
‘Hang on tight!’ the Time Pig yelled.
They plunged into the purple whirlpool, and Gustave’s head was filled with its crackling, crepitating roar. He saw stars: black, white, yellow, red, orange, green, yellow, blue, lilac, gold, silver, and red again. He went hot and cold and hot in turn. Then everything disintegrated into innumerable multicoloured snowflakes that formed whirling patterns of breathtaking beauty. Simultaneously, absolute silence fell.
‘Wwwhhhaaat wwweee’re doooiiinnng heeere hhhaaas nnnooot rrreeeaaallly bbbeeen dddefffined yyyettt,’ shouted the Time Pig, its words sounding as if each were made of rubber and had been individually stretched.
‘Sssccciiieeennntttiiifffiiicccaaallly dddeeefffined, I mmmeeeaaannn,’ it went on. ‘Bbbuuuttt sssooommme dddaaayyy sssooommmeee-ooonnne wwwiiilll cccooome aaalllooonnnggg wwwhhhooo wwwiiilll dddeeefffiiine iiittt aaalll. Aaannnddd ttthhhaaattt iiinnndddiiivvviiiddduuuaaalll wwwiiilll ccclllaaaiiimmm ttthhhaaattt I’mmm ooonnnllly rrreeelllaaatttiiive!’ The Time Pig gave a hoarse laugh. ‘Aaannnddd yyyooouuu kkknnnooowww wwwhhhaaattt? Hhheee’lll bbbeee aaabbbsssooollluuutely rrriiiggghhhttt!’
The tunnel continually changed shape. It was sometimes circular, sometimes rectangular, sometimes triangular, then circular again, then flat, and so on. In the end, everything around them went as black as the bottom of a well, and they flew on unmoving through the starless darkness—for an eternity, or so it seemed to Gustave.
‘I’m sure this seems like an eternity to you,’ called the Time Pig, ‘but it’s less than a hundred years.’
‘You mean we’re travelling a hundred years into the future?’ asked Gustave.
‘Not quite, but more or less.’
The Time Pig looked round with an uneasy expression on its rosy face.
‘I don’t like this dark stretch of the Gully. It’s a part of the universe I prefer not to linger in—there are too many riffraff around. But that’s how it is with short cuts, they can often be hard going.’
From the depths of the Gully came a sound that seemed familiar to Gustave. He couldn’t quite place where he knew it from, but he involuntarily associated it with extreme danger. Although still distant, it seemed to be approaching rapidly.
‘Talk of the devil,’ groaned the Time Pig. ‘Now there’ll be trouble.’
At last Gustave managed to identify the source of the sound— or rather, the sources, because they were heading straight towards him with an ever-increasing roar. They were the Siamese Twins Tornado, the two telepathic whirlwinds that had sunk his ship Aventure before disappearing into the sky. Now composed of rotating stardust, cosmic gases and eternal ice, they were tossing meteorites and bits of asteroid around and behaving no less tempestuously up here than they had down on earth.
The Time Pig flapped its wings and made straight for them. ‘A Siamese Twins Tornado!’ it shouted above the din. ‘You have to steer straight through the middle, it’s the only way.’
‘I wish I’d known that earlier,’ sighed Gustave. ‘If I had, my journey might have taken quite a different course.’
The whirlwinds piled up on either side of him like monstrous great millstones. Their roar was almost enough to burst his skull, and the cosmic turbulence they produced nearly wrenched him off the back of his mount, but he clung tightly to the Time Pig’s bristles and tried to duck beneath the thunderbolts the tornadoes hurled back and forth as a means of communication.
Gustave felt he was being torn apart as he and the Time Pig flew through their electrically charged field of force. A shaft of lightning entered one ear, went screaming through his brain, and emerged from the other. He was compelled to listen to the telepathic messages the tornadoes were exchanging. Incredibly savage and ruthless, they conveyed a blind and frenzied urge to destroy everything in their path. Fragments of rock whistled past Gustave’s head and cosmic dust filled his nose and mouth, almost taking his breath away. But at last came a jolt and a sound like a net being ripped apart, and they were out the other side. Still rampaging and hurling thunderbolts around, the tornadoes swiftly receded into the darkness of the Galactic Gully.
‘Phew!’ said the Time Pig. ‘Damn those tornadoes! I told you, this is where the worst riffraff in the universe hang out. Did you know they communicate by thunderbolt?’
‘Yes, I did,’ said Gustave.
The Time Pig raised its eyebrows. ‘You know a great deal.’
They glided along through the silence and darkness for ages, and Gustave began to doubt if this really was a short cut. Where did it lead to, anyway? Into the future, fair enough, but where in the future, exactly? Before he could put that question to the Time Pig, clouds suddenly welled up out of the darkness, and the Galactic Gully resounded with cries, howls and frantic whinnying sounds.
‘Not that too!’ groaned the Time Pig. ‘I hate this part of the cosmos!’
A rider on a wild, snorting charger came galloping towards them. Gustave recognised him at once, although he looked strangely altered. It was Death, wearing his billowing cloak and brandishing a scythe, and following him on foot came a band of rampaging demons. Whether or not he noticed Gustave and his imposing mount, he didn’t spare them a glance but galloped past with head erect. It struck Gustave that his face looked less … well, less dead than before. Once bare bone, his skull seemed now to be thinly covered with skin, although his eye sockets were as black and empty as ever.
The wild horde vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, heading in the same direction as the tornadoes.
‘That was Death,’ the Time Pig explained.
‘I noticed,’ Gustave called back. ‘But you said he was in his house on the moon.’
‘So he is. We’re in a Galactic Drainpipe—everything works rather differently up here, my boy. You must bid farewell to your traditional ideas of time, or you’ll lose your mind.’
‘Why did Death look so young?’
‘That’s easy: because he still was young. That was Death a few hundred years ago, in his storm-and-stress phase. He was probably on his way to afflict humanity with some plague or other.’ The Time Pig spat contemptuously into the darkness. ‘He was far more ambitious in those days—utterly convinced that his activities were worthwhile and full of bright ideas: epidemics, crusades, wars, massacres, revolutions! But no matter how hard he toiled, the world’s population doubled and redoubled in spite of him. At some stage he simply ran out of steam.’ The Time Pig gave a sympathetic laugh. ‘He used to have many more hanger
s-on, as you saw, but look at him today! Just a skeleton—a mere shadow of his former self. He does his job by the book and skulks in his retirement home on the moon. Little boys are all he frightens nowadays. His sole companion these days is his crazy sister. Death has become an old-age pensioner.’
‘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 anim
als 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.