I was only a child, but I was already aware of it—Qfwfq narrated—I was acquainted with all the hydrogen atoms, one by one, and when a new atom cropped up, I noticed it right away. When I was a kid, the only playthings we had in the whole universe were the hydrogen atoms, and we played with them all the time, I and another youngster my age whose name was Pfwfp.
What sort of games? That’s simple enough to explain. Since space was curved, we sent the atoms rolling along its curve, like so many marbles, and the kid whose atom went furthest won the game. When you made your shot you had to be careful, to calculate the effects, the trajectories, you had to know how to exploit the magnetic fields and the fields of gravity, otherwise the ball left the track and was eliminated from the contest.
The rules were the usual thing: with one atom you could hit another of your atoms and send it further ahead, or else you could knock your opponent’s atom out of the way. Of course, we were careful not to throw them too hard, because when two hydrogen atoms are knocked together, click! a deuterium atom might be formed, or even a helium atom, and for the purposes of the game, such atoms were out: what’s more, if one of the two belonged to your opponent, you had to give him an atom of your own to pay him back.
You know how the curve of space is shaped: a little ball would go spinning along and then one fine moment it would start off down the slope and you couldn’t catch it. So, as we went on playing, the number of atoms in the game kept getting smaller, and the first to run out of atoms was the loser.
Then, right at the crucial moment, these new atoms started cropping up. Obviously, there’s quite a difference between a new atom and a used one: the new atoms were shiny, bright, fresh, and moist, as if with dew. We made new rules: one new was worth three old; and the new ones, as they were formed, were to be shared between us, fifty-fifty.
In this way our game never ended, and it never became boring either, because every time we found new atoms it seemed as if the game were new as well, as if we were playing it for the first time.
Then, what with one thing and another, as the days went by, the game grew less exciting. There were no more new atoms to be seen: the ones we lost couldn’t be replaced, our shots became weak, hesitant, because we were afraid to lose the few pieces still in the game, in that barren, even space.
Pfwfp was changed, too: he became absent-minded, wandered off and couldn’t be found when it was his turn to shoot; I would call him, but there was never an answer, and then he would turn up half an hour later.
‘Go on, it’s your turn. Aren’t you in the game any more?’
‘Of course I’m in the game. Don’t rush me. I’m going to shoot now.’
‘Well, if you keep going off by yourself, we might as well stop playing!’
‘Hmph! You’re only making all this fuss because you’re losing.’
This was true: I hadn’t any atoms left, whereas Pfwfp, somehow or other, always had one in reserve. If some new atoms didn’t turn up for us to share, I hadn’t a hope of getting even with him.
The next time Pfwfp went off, I followed him, on tiptoe. As long as I was present, he seemed to be strolling about aimlessly, whistling: but once he was out of my sight he started trotting through space, intent, like somebody who has a definite purpose in mind. And what this purpose of his was—this treachery, as you shall see—I soon discovered: Pfwfp knew all the places where new atoms were formed and every now and then he would take a little walk, to collect them on the spot the minute they were dished up, then he would hide them. This was why he was never short of atoms to play with!
But before putting them in the game, incorrigible cheat that he was, he set about disguising them as old atoms, rubbing the film of the electrons until it was worn and dull, to make me believe this was an old atom he had had all along and had just happened to find in his pocket.
And that wasn’t the whole story: I made a quick calculation of the atoms played and I realized they were only a small part of those he had stolen and hid. Was he piling up a store of hydrogen? What was he going to do with it? What did he have in mind? I suddenly had a suspicion: Pfwfp wanted to build a universe of his own, a brand-new universe.
From that moment on, I couldn’t rest easy: I had to get even with him. I could have followed his example: now that I knew the places, I could have gone there a little ahead of him and grabbed the new atoms the moment they were born, before he could get his hands on them! But that would have been too simple. I wanted to catch him in a trap worthy of his own perfidy. First of all, I started making fake atoms: while he was occupied with his treacherous raids, I was in a secret storeroom of mine, pounding and mixing and kneading all the material I had at my disposal. To tell you the truth, this material didn’t amount to much: photoelectric radiations, scrapings from magnetic fields, a few neutrons collected in the road; but by rolling it into balls and wetting it with saliva, I managed to make it stick together. In other words, I prepared some little corpuscles that, on close inspection, were obviously not made of hydrogen or any other identifiable element, but for somebody in a hurry, like Pfwfp, who rushed past and stuck them furtively into his pocket, they looked like real hydrogen, and spanking new.
So while he still didn’t suspect a thing, I preceded him in his rounds. I had made a careful mental note of all the places.
Space is curved everywhere, but in some places it’s more curved than in others: like pockets or bottlenecks or niches, where the void is crumpled up. These niches are where, every two hundred and fifty million years, there is a slight tinkling sound and a shiny hydrogen atom is formed like a pearl between the valves of an oyster. I walked past, pocketed the atom, and set the fake atom in its place. Pfwfp didn’t notice a thing: predatory, greedy, he filled his pockets with that rubbish, as I was accumulating all the treasures that the universe cherished in its bosom.
The fortunes of our games underwent a change: I always had new atoms to shoot, while Pfwfp’s regularly misfired. Three times he tried a roll and three times the atom crumbled to bits as if crushed in space. Now Pfwfp found one excuse after another, trying to call off the game.
‘Go on,’ I insisted, ‘if you don’t shoot, the game’s mine.’
And he said: ‘It doesn’t count. When an atom is ruined the game’s null and void, and you start over again.’ This was a rule he had invented at that very moment.
I didn’t give him any peace, I danced around him, leaped on his back, and chanted:
‘Throw it throw it throw it
If not, you lose, you know it.
For every turn that you don’t take
An extra throw for me to make.’
‘That’s enough of that,’ Pfwfp said, ‘let’s change games.’
‘Aha!’ I said. ‘Why don’t we play at flying galaxies?’
‘Galaxies?’ Pfwfp suddenly brightened with pleasure. ‘Suits me. But you . . . you don’t have a galaxy!’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘So do I.’
‘Come on! Let’s see who can send his highest!’
And I took all the new atoms I was hiding and flung them into space. At first they seemed to scatter, then they thickened together into a kind of light cloud, and the cloud swelled and swelled, and inside it some incandescent condensations were formed, and they whirled and whirled and at a certain point became a spiral of constellations never seen before, a spiral that poised, opening in a gust, then sped away as I held on to its tail and ran after it. But now I wasn’t the one who made the galaxy fly, it was the galaxy that was lifting me aloft, clinging to its tail; I mean, there wasn’t any height or depth now but only space, widening, and the galaxy in its midst, also opening wide, and me hanging there, making faces at Pfwfp, who was already thousands of light-years away.
Pfwfp, at my first move, had promptly dug out all his hoard, hurling it with a balanced movement as if he expected to see the coils of an endless galaxy open in the sky. But instead, nothing happened. There was a sizzling sound of radiations, a messy flash, then
everything died out at once.
‘Is that the best you can do?’ I shouted at Pfwfp, who was yelling curses at me, green with rage:
‘I’ll show you, Qfwfq, you pig!’
But in the meanwhile my galaxy and I were flying among thousands of other galaxies, and mine was the newest, the envy of the whole firmament, blazing as it was with young hydrogen and the youngest carbon and newborn beryllium. The old galaxies fled us, filled with jealousy, and we, prancing and haughty, avoided them, so antiquated and ponderous to look at. As that reciprocal flight developed, we sailed across spaces that became more and more rarefied and empty: and then I saw something appear in the midst of the void, like uncertain bursts of light. These were new galaxies, formed by matter just born, galaxies even newer than mine. Soon space became filled again, and dense, like a vineyard just before vintage time, and we flew on, escaping from one another, my galaxy fleeing the younger ones as it had the older, and young and old fleeing us. And we advanced to fly through empty skies, and these skies also became peopled, and so on and on.
In one of these propagations, I heard: ‘Qfwfq, you’ll pay for this now, you traitor!’ and I saw a brand-new galaxy flying on our trail, and there leaning forward from the very tip of the spiral, yelling threats and insults at me, was my old playmate Pfwfp.
The chase began. Where space rose, Pfwfp’s galaxy, young and agile, gained ground, but on the descents, my heavier galaxy plunged ahead again.
In any kind of race there’s a secret: it’s all in how you take the curves. Pfwfp’s galaxy tended to narrow them, mine to swing out. And as it kept broadening the curves, we were finally flung beyond the edge of space, with Pfwfp after us. We kept up the pursuit, using the system one always uses in such circumstances, that is, creating space before us as we went forward.
So there I was, with nothingness in front of me, and that nasty-faced Pfwfp after me: an unpleasant sight either way. In any case, I preferred to look ahead, and what did I see? Pfwfp, whom my eyes had just left behind me, was speeding on his galaxy directly in front of me. ‘Ah!’ I cried, ‘now it’s my turn to chase you!’
‘What?’ Pfwfp said, from before me or behind me, I’m not really sure which, ‘I’m the one who’s chasing you!’
I turned around: there was Pfwfp, still at my heels. I looked ahead again: and he was there, racing off with his back turned to me. But as I looked more closely, I saw that in front of this galaxy of his that was preceding me there was another, and that other galaxy was mine, because there I was on it, unmistakable even though seen from behind. And I turned towards the Pfwfp following me and narrowed my eyes: I saw that his galaxy was being chased by another, mine, with me on top of it, turning at that same time to look back.
And so after every Qfwfq there was a Pfwfp, and after every Pfwfp a Qfwfq, and every Pfwfp was chasing a Qfwfq, who was pursuing him and vice versa. Our distances grew a bit shorter or a bit longer, but now it was clear that one would never overtake the other, nor the other overtake one. We had lost all pleasure in this game of chase, and we weren’t children any more for that matter, but now there was nothing else we could do.
The Aquatic Uncle
The first vertebrates who, in the Carboniferous period, abandoned aquatic life for terrestrial descended from the osseous, pulmonate fish whose fins were capable of rotation beneath their bodies and thus could be used as paws on the Earth.
By then it was clear that the water period was coming to an end—old Qfwfq recalled—those who decided to make the great move were growing more and more numerous, there wasn’t a family that didn’t have some loved one up on dry land, and everybody told fabulous tales of the things that could be done there, and they called back to their relatives to join them. There was no holding the young fish; they slapped their fins on the muddy banks to see if they would work as paws, as the more talented ones had already discovered. But just at that time the differences among us were becoming accentuated: there might be a family that had been living on land, say, for several generations, whose young people acted in a way that wasn’t even amphibious but almost reptilian already; and there were others who lingered, still living like fish, those who, in fact, became even more fishy than they had been before.
Our family, I must say, including grandparents, was all up on the shore, padding about as if we had never known how to do anything else. If it hadn’t been for the obstinacy of our great-uncle N’ba N’ga, we would have long since lost all contact with the aquatic world.
Yes, we had a great-uncle who was a fish, on my paternal grandmother’s side, to be precise, of the Coelacanthus family of the Devonian period (the fresh-water branch: who are, for that matter, cousins of the others—but I don’t want to go into all these questions of kinship, nobody can ever follow them anyhow). So as I was saying, this great-uncle lived in certain muddy shallows, among the roots of some proto-conifers, in that inlet of the lagoon where all our ancestors had been born. He never stirred from there: at any season of the year all we had to do was push ourselves over the softer layers of vegetation until we could feel ourselves sinking into the dampness, and there below, a few palms’ lengths from the edge, we could see the column of little bubbles he sent up, breathing heavily the way old folk do, or the little cloud of mud scraped up by his sharp snout, always rummaging around, more out of habit than out of the need to hunt for anything.
‘Uncle N’ba N’ga! We’ve come to pay you a visit! Were you expecting us?’ we would shout, slapping our paws and tails in the water to attract his attention. ‘We’ve brought you some insects that grow where we live! Uncle N’ba N’ga! Have you ever seen such fat cockroaches? Taste one and see if you like it . . .’
‘You can clean those revolting warts you’ve got with your stinking cockroaches!’ Our great-uncle’s answer was always some remark of this sort, or perhaps even ruder: this is how he welcomed us every time, but we paid no attention because we knew he would mellow after a little while, accept our presents gladly, and converse in politer tones.
‘What do you mean, Uncle? Warts? When did you ever see any warts on us?’
This business about warts was a widespread prejudice among the old fish: a notion that, from living on dry land, we would develop warts all over our bodies, exuding liquid matter: this was true enough for the toads, but we had nothing in common with them; on the contrary, our skin, smooth and slippery, was such as no fish had ever had; and our great-uncle knew this perfectly well, but he still couldn’t stop larding his talk with all the slanders and intolerance he had grown up in the midst of.
We went to visit our great-uncle once a year, the whole family together. It also gave us an opportunity to have a reunion, since we were scattered all over the continent; we could exchange bits of news, trade edible insects, and discuss old questions that were still unsettled.
Our great-uncle spoke his mind even on questions that were removed from him by miles and miles of dry land, such as the division of territory for dragonfly hunting; and he would side with this one or that one, according to his own reasoning, which was always aquatic. ‘But don’t you know that it’s always better to hunt on the bottom and not on the water’s surface? So what are you getting all upset over?’
‘But, Uncle, you see: it isn’t a question of hunting on the bottom or on the surface. I live at the foot of a hill, and he lives halfway up the slope . . . You know what I mean by hill, Uncle . . .’
And he said: ‘You always find the best crayfish at the foot of the cliffs.’ It just wasn’t possible to make him accept a reality different from his own.
And yet, his opinions continued to exert an authority over all of us; in the end we asked his advice about matters he didn’t begin to understand, though we knew he could be dead wrong. Perhaps his authority stemmed from the fact that he was a leftover from the past, from his way of using old figures of speech, like: ‘Lower your fins there, youngster!’, whose meaning we didn’t grasp very clearly.
We had made various attempts to get him up on lan
d with us, and we went on making them; indeed, on this score, the rivalry among the various branches of the family never died out, because whoever managed to take our great-uncle home with him would achieve a position of pre-eminence over the rest of our relatives. But the rivalry was pointless, because our uncle wouldn’t dream of leaving the lagoon.
‘Uncle, if you only knew how sorry we feel leaving you all alone, at your age, in the midst of all that dampness . . . We’ve had a wonderful idea . . .’ someone would begin.
‘I was expecting the lot of you to catch on finally,’ the old fish interrupted, ‘now you’ve got over the whim of scraping around in that drought, so it’s time you came back to live like normal beings. Here there’s plenty of water for all, and when it comes to food, there’s never been a better season for worms. You can all dive right in, and we won’t have to discuss it any further.’
‘No, no, Uncle N’ba N’ga, you’ve got it all wrong. We wanted to take you to live with us, in a lovely little meadow . . . You’ll be nice and snug; we’ll dig you a little damp hole. You’ll be able to turn and toss in it, just like here. And you might even try taking a few steps around the place: you’ll be very good at it, just wait and see. And besides, at your time of life, the climate on land is much more suitable. So come now, Uncle N’ba N’ga, don’t wait to be coaxed. Won’t you come home with us?’
‘No!’ was our great-uncle’s sharp reply, and taking a nosedive into the water, he vanished from our sight.
‘But why, Uncle? What have you got against the idea? We simply don’t understand. Anyone as broad-minded as you ought to be above certain prejudices . . .’
From an angry huff of water at the surface, before the final plunge with a still-agile jerk of his tail fin, came our uncle’s final answer: ‘He who has fleas in his scales swims with his belly in the mud!’, which must have been an idiomatic expression (similar to our own, much more concise proverb: ‘If you itch, scratch’), with that term ‘mud’ which he insisted on using where we would say ‘land’.