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MICROCLIMATE

65

The Sign Upon Ky

Mosh was about four-thousand light years out from his dinner when his ship let out a wump like a two-by-four had been swung against a metal gourd. He knew he was somewhere in the Great Cluster of Melvin, but to wump near there? He was flumoxed. He pulled from the shelf his Guide to Impossible Auditory Events: Spacefarer’s Edition – which he had brought with him for these very incidents – and leafed through to the page on wumps. “Impossible,” it read. “Wumps are non-existent.” It then continued, cautioning that anyone who believed otherwise was a fool. But he’d heard a wump, he was sure. With his foolishness at risk, he left his seat to investigate the side-hatch. He lifted the port blinds. There by the window, as if suspended in agar, was a wooden sign. It looked like it was on long journey in an attempt to explode, almost finished. It had something to say, and spoke in the language of bold blue paint:

Miracles, this way please.

It finished its announcement with an arrow pointing off to the right at some freckled blinking, black void. A veteran of signs and spontaneous directions would chance a glance to the left to be sure, and Mosh did just this. Ah, there, a second sign, that hung above a celestial sphere a-hundred times larger. This one imparted information via the electric hum of pink neon. It’s photons danced these words:

Welcome to Rubrub.

Mosh kindly corrected the first sign for future travellers and flew his ship to Rubrub.

The surface of Rubrub, apart from being green all over, looked like an impassioned baker had attempted to cook three-hundred sticky buns in a single small pan. Each hill that made up Rubrub was about six-hundred and fifty kilometres across and completely covered in grass. A bun near the north caught Mosh’s attention because there was something non-green right at its top. The peak was covered in a plain of long green grasses that swooned under their own weight. The hill rolled away after only a few yards, and from this point Mosh could see the other hills in the distance, like bubbles on a swamp. And Mosh and the grasses were not alone. There, right in the centre of the hill, a third sign. Welcome, this one said. And then: to Ky.

“Thank you,” Mosh said to himself.

“Humph,” said a noise.

“Sorry?” said Mosh a little louder. He began grabbed for his auditory guide, surprised surprised by this unforeseen sounds streak. His journey had so far offered nothing to his ears but the enigmatic sounds of the great vacuum.

“There is no magic here, I assure you,” spoke a voice.

“Who? Where?” challenged Mosh, spinning in all directions in his seat. His mind went to the myth of the Chattering Planet. He looked about, but not a mouth could be seen on the blades of grass, the sign, or the hill. “Get yourself together,” Mosh told himself. “You’re a scientist, not a mythmatician. Hmmm, what else, what else is out there.” He inspected his radar and it shared this knowledge: Rubrub had contours like a spotted egg.

“One-thousand light years away is the origin of all serendipities,” spoke the voice again, “Go there quick and be saved.”

Mosh told his tranquillizing nozzles to be on high-alert. He now spoke loud so that the voice may hear him, “Do you not have some more practical serendipities on hand? I’m tired from travel and could use a coincidence or two right now.” Mosh continued to crank and bang his ship’s sensors – searching, seeking a sign of life.

“No, they are far, far, from here. Forget this place and seek the light of faith which will open your mind to beliefs you believed impossible – states of matter you only could dream to become.”

“Hmmm,” Mosh was intently focused on his ship screens. He spun the search streams, thumbed on the ultrasonic, and licked around the lidar. Not a disturbance around apart from a sign and a hundred rolling hills.

“Hmmm,” hummed Mosh to himself.

“Depart at once! For these aberrations of time only remain for twenty spins of the galaxy and no more. You must leave to this place now or your belief – your virtuous self – it will never forgive you.” And then a strong wind blew through the hill and it spun the sign atop it around three times to reveal the back of it. Upon that back sat two eyes, a nose, and a mouth in shock.

“Is that you?” asked Mosh. His various screens around him blinked with red dots, frustrated that they weren’t being attended to.

“No! No! Off quick, to the distant moons of Mageez where you’ll find oh far greater experiences than any that can be had here,” shouted the sign.

“The sign. This spaking sign. That’s you?”

“Curse the disproportionate coincidences of this expansive vacuity!” and the sign’s face seemed to sag like angry dough. “You are one of those. I tried, I did try. Far too many of you have come through here and you frankly frighten me.”

“Excuse me, but of whom am I one of?” Mosh defended. “You are certainly being presumptuous about a visitor who has idly checked in. Not a rock have I disturbed!” The sign, he now noticed, was similar to the other two in shape but this one was built of metal. The metal did not shine, it had scratches and bent away at the corners.

“Disturb! Cahoon a great one into the sky – at your pleasure, and certainly at mine too. I’d like to see someone cleave down a cove of trees or raze the grasses with a good inferno. Ha, disturb.”

“I don’t follow.” And he did not want to follow. Mosh restarted the introduction with another question, “Is this Ky and are you its inhabitant?”

Where the base of the sign entered the hill, no grasses grew around it. Here, the exposed surface soil was orange. As the sign spoke its base rattled as if it was not quite in secure in the ground, “If I tell you, will you fall upon your knees, prostrate to the sky, and demand a spanking?” said the sign. “No, I have sworn off my days of spanking, my two arms flung to the two winds of Rubrub, and I won’t gather them for a traveller with an attitude like yours. All you seers, you soothsayers, you idle-brain ritualists, you pedestal-hollering, white-collared, liar-spouting holy bipeds, all of you just want spanking. And what – and after a hundred years of this I certainly deserve the right to ask – what pleasure do you think it brings me?”

Mosh’s was inexperience with wild signs and he had never met one with a countenance. “Dear, sign, or sign-upon-Ky, if you would prefer. I do not come too see, nor spake sooths, nor do I perform rituals while my brain is idle, and I can provide a list of references for whom would cross their heart organ that I have never stood within a meter of a pedestal.” Mosh had avoided making eye contact with the sign until now. He now took a chance to look upon it and saw that each of its eyes had two pupils a piece. “Allow me to introduce myself, I am Mosh, I come from – “

“Treeble probably.” interrupted the sign.

“Treeble?”

“The whole lot of you. You always come from Treeble, seeking your penance with some gritty pilgrimage through the nether regions of space, seeking a sign to restore your faith.” The sign frowned and shook itself side to side. This made a terrible creaking noise.

“I haven’t a clue where Treeble is.” said Mosh.

“Look.” said the sign, intending for Mosh to do anything other than that. It’s pupils shrunk away from the sunlight, focusing in on Mosh, “How did you get here?”

“I followed the signs,” Mosh said.

“Hah! Q.E.D., you four-orificed fool,” said the sign. It spun back around, and again, informed Mosh of where he was. “I thought I’d moved them,” it grumbled.

For a moment and then some, Mosh and the sign sat in silence. Only the flutter of the grasses around them said anything. The sky was still, pinned in place by thousands of bright stars. Mosh looked down from the hill of Ky, tried to see if any of the other hills held possible excuses on them. But it was all green, rolling waves. None seemed to be crowned with a chattering occupant like this one. Mosh looked back at the sign.

“Moved what?” said Mosh.

The sign instantly spun back around to face Mosh and it was rattled and its metal pranged. “The sign! The Treebles loved pink, but the Gibbets, oh they demanded blue. The pinned a second sign in my orbit and then they came from the darker solar systems. Twelve years it took me, but it has sent those Gibbets everywhere but here. They find their miracles elsewhere, I am sure.”

“Well,” Mosh said, “I am only familiar with signs that point in the correct direction. Space is grand and full of empty parts – you cannot blame a spacefarer for correcting a sign out of good will. It is so easy to get lost in all the blackness of the vacuum and waste a lot of time.”

The sign shook and some of its bolts spun. “No! You moved my sign!” Its bolts spun and spun and a patch of metal fell loose to the ground.

“You can lay the blame on my shoulders – but just one minute before you shake yourself apart!” And Mosh looked down, for he did feel guilty.

“Oh no, it is too late. Too late! Soon they’ll be here.” said the sign.

Mosh scoured his screens all over. Four buttons he pushed and zoomed in on Rurub’s orbit. “Who will be here? Should we prepare?”

“Gibbets. It’s always Gibbets.”

Mosh found nothing about Gibbets and he asked his ship twice to be sure. “Who are the Gibbets?”

“Not who, but what. Far less creative in the theological department, a Gibbet is a prayer machine with a brain to think and a leg to locomote. In the darkest corners of my frontal lobe circuitry I can find nothing but words beginning with the letter ‘f’ to describe them.” The sign was really heating itself up over the Gibbets now and began to glow orange. “Such as ‘frightening’, and ‘facsimile.’“

“You’re really heating yourself up over Gibbets now.” said Mosh.

“And then,” continued the sign, glowering red at its core, “and then you and these Trebbles take it upon yourself to mix me in all your theologically foolery! I’ve had enough, simply enough I say. Ten years is what it took me. Tactically, theoretically, and certainly unattractively, I managed to pivot the sign that the last wave of Gibbet pilgrims pinned to my sky. All that work! Undone.” The sign looked dejected by its own words.

“Sign-upon-Ky. I have performed the most guiltless digression onto the surface of your planet, enamoured by its swollen mantle and its emerald lustre. As simply as I have arrived here I can depart – and, in doing so, can undo all the parts I have miscalculated in correcting. The only crime I have done is to correct a sign who’s intent was to point away from its destination and not towards it, which is the purpose of signs that I am more accustomed to.” Mosh started his ship’s engines. “I will leave you be, put your sign in its place, and spare us of any Gibbet assault.”

“It’s too late.” said the sign. It seemed to have given up completely and now it was red as magma. It turned away from Mosh. Mosh did not take off.

And then the entire sky fell upon them.

-- [ ] --

At the intergalactic meridian, about ten light years into the Great Cluster of Melvin – famous for a burnt charcoal smell throughout due to its tendency to produce double-electrons – there floats a ship. A ship by the name of Project Cease Languor. A ship loaded with Peddles of assorted proportions, such is the Peddlian anatomy.

A long time ago had all the engines on this ship broken, their software incapable of accurately weighing double-electrons to split. Error correction, exception handling – no! No automation, despite the diligence of the Peddlian software seamstresses, was of any help. It is a cruel lesson, but an important one: never allow a double-electron tuck into your single-electron engine. To do so is to build a device for stacking onion rings and someone hands you a duck.

Until their double-electron debacle, the universe had long been regarded as solved for the Peddles. Every manifold they had looked around and under, swam with the Hessians, dissected all Diracs that sprung upon them, and had concluded, unanimously, that physics was at its end. Where to look, then, if all that is before you is the tumbling of numbers through a sieve of equations?

Why, you look inward.

The Peddles are perfectly round, though their circumferences greatly vary. To move, they roll; to see, they choose one of their ten-thousand eyes that dapple their skin. They have knees, and with these, they don’t do much. Embedded in their curvilinear existence is a nervous system assembled bottom-up by billions of cells. Their form, it operates exactly and precisely according to the twenty equations of the Peddles’s physics, but these same equations still could not explain the I, of which every Peddle felt they were the sole owner of one. The Peddles were interested in purpose and their considerable lack of it.

And so they built a ship and sent it out.

Project Cease Languor’s purpose was purpose. That is, to find some of it in some quantity for the listless I’s of Peddles. Primarily, the Peddles considered faith a promising direction. Faith, and all its theological garb. Faith, the belief in the physically-impossible. Faith, the bottomless resource of purpose to plunder. Extensive research told them that faith could be found in the Kriddle Galaxy. Between the Kriddle Galaxy sat the Great Cluster of Melvin. In the Great Cluster of Melvin was a small green planet by the name of Rubrub. Atop a hill on this planet stood a sign.

Father faith and mother metaphysical had taken quite the hold on the Peddles onboard the Project Cease Languor after the failure of its single-electron engines. Five Peddlian-years was the estimated journey time to the centre of the Kriddle Galaxy. The digital clocks now display the number twelve-thousandth-and-ten. The Great Cluster of Melvin and its double-electrons had delivered the Peddles a humbling slap. The slap, which if the ripples of air it produced were parsed by a needle, would be read these words, exactly as depicted:

Dear Peddles,

Oh dear, dear Peddles. You silly Peddles.

Peddles, the species that have discovered, uncovered, and recovered every reordering of the left, right, up, down, and curvy spins of the quarks, who have believed for well over a millennium that what is black and spotted with stars and dust – that is everything – has been solved.

You Peddles, marching out into the known unknown, confident that all there is left to do is generate fancifications of the mind and lean on a crux of faith. You Peddles. Then why have your engines kahpoot themselves like the wheezing entrails of a space beast on a diet of nitrogen?

Why, look at yourselves. I see not a species at its pinnacle, but rather a pin-wheel, adrift in the Great Cluster of Melvin, slower than a closed-time curve.

Your equations have become exaltations, your theories now theisms, your derivatives but dogmas.

Oh dear, Peddles.

Sincerely,

slap

And the Peddles would have read this letter and penned worthy response in an instant. But the Peddles were not what they had been before. Faith had taken hold of all the Peddles aboard the Project Cease Languor. They did not use their supply of needles to parse the slap’s words and fire refute at it in full force. Instead, the great Peddles did this: they kneeled. Before the slap, before its words, for in blind faith they believed a message had been delivered from a higher plane. They sought ways in which they could incorporate it into their deities, their testaments, and their holy garbs. This theological endeavour consumed them, so much in fact that the knowledge of their drifting in the viscera of space was lost on bedraggled shelves in their corners of their minds.

This lasted for a good thousand Peddlian-years.

And then a Peddle, seeking a quiet room on the ship to perform the morning ablutions, accidentally came across a pile of papers on which were written the twenty equations and their derivations. The Peddle threw away their garbs and ran to shake the others loose from the faithful chains. And this would have saved the Peddles. They were spent of it all, tired of praying, slapping, and chanting. This would have awoken them from their religious virtualization, re-succumbed to the dreadful realization of their hopeless situation. This all would have happened, if the Peddle had been but a little quicker.

Something clunked against the side of the Project Cease Languor with a great wump. It sounded like a two-by-four had been swung against a metal gourd.

Those Peddle minds were still primed for signals and signs from unbelievable sources. No mathematical proof could save them now, for it was a sign they had hit and a very real one! Once they saw through the portholes of their ship that emerald lustre of the planet Rubrub below, the serendipity of it was all too much. To have come farther than the tail of a comet can stretch in its lifetime! Ten-thousand years, drifting, twisting, and to tumble into nothing but exactly the following: a sign – and one that directed them to a second, and a third. Faith rattled their spherical form like a tuning fork ablaze and they opened all the doors of the ship. They desired nothing more than to roll around Rubrub’s grassy knolls, to read that third sign, to devote themselves to an eternal state of kneeling. The first Peddles had hopped out the second their ship entered the atmosphere, and after one of them yelled, “A vision! A sign! I see a third, oh blessed is thy be-slapped existence, I am not worthy!” calamity ensued and, mad with the divine, the Peddles swarmed out of all exists the ship could provide.

They flew, all of them, through the atmosphere, like a faucet had been opened onto the planet.

-- [ ] --

It fell in little pieces at first, the sky. Mosh noticed it by the first thing to break the silence: a clink!, but dirty, like an arcade cabinet with a bad smoking habit.

And the sign, it was now gone. It had exploded only a moment ago, and left in its place a hole. Mosh was out of his ship, wading through the rising puddle of Peddles which were up to his knees. Clink! Clink! His helmet was battered by sentient rain. The Peddles had now began to chant as well, which made it even more difficult for Mosh to focus. Those ohms carried such a range of pitches that his auditory system was all out of wack and he grew dizzy. He fell just short of the spot where the sign was, right under the flowing fluid of Peddles.

He released a small balloon from a device on his arm, it floated up. He went down. One arm over the other he swam through that Peddlian sea, deeper and deeper. The sea sung to him and it sung this: ohm. Under such a pressure of a Peddles, Mosh found the sea floor which was all grass in a dance. As he made his way, he kept his hand within the grasses to guide him. But soon any effort of his own was unnecessary, instead some current pulled him. The flow, Mosh now saw, was towards a hole in the ground. Mosh let the flow pull him towards the hole-upon-Ky.

An emergent ritual had begun around the hole. Its width could only manage one or two Peddles at a time, and so the rest had to wait their turn. They put their velocity into spiraling around. In doing this, they all became a whirpool – a whirl-Peddle. Any Peddles that entered the hole passed through the hole. Mosh’s helmet was larger than the hole.

Mosh was pulled head-first into the hole.

His helmet was too big to fit into the hole so instead it plugged it.

The pressure was enormous. The whirl-Peddle spun off and petered out. The hole was tight, but Mosh could see through the hole because he was fortunate to have been of a species that has an underdeveloped monocular vision. The width between Mosh’s two eyes is only half an inch. So, with perfect monocular vision, Mosh could make out what was before him, but that did not mean he believed it. He shook his head. Mosh’s helmet wheezed and popped like a loose gasket.

He saw a space that was not black because a-thousand white splotches dabbled and kept it alive and bright. They lacked unison, each blinking erratically and to their own melody. He saw his mother, his dinner, he saw a king or queen that he did not know was a king or queen yet (but he would soon learn) – his name was Prudeen and he was sometimes a king, sometimes a queen. Prudeen had been his mother and his dinner only a moment before. Prudeen came to him in a state of constellation, drawn to life by the stars and the space between them.

The king or queen Prudeen was the image of a perfect ball, as that is how the Peddles are. Prudeen was not among those on the Project Seek Languer because the Peddle sizes were an unbounded Gaussian distribution and Prudeen was nowhere near the mean. That is to say, his presence on the Project Seek Languer would have caused serious gravitational disruption to the single-electrons, even before the double-electrons had smoked them.

With his eyes all over king or queen Prudeen, Mosh heard a noise. “Humph,” said the noise. Mosh called out a sound, it might have been something like, “Hello?”

“There is no magic here, I assure you,” spoke a voice.

“That is,” replied Mosh, “a situation I am perfectly fine with.”

And the next words that were spoken from the voice, they came from the very lips of king or queen Prudeen themselves, for the necessary stars twinkled out and back in in the way Prudeen’s speak holes and light holes would have shouted and blinked.

“Everything: the stars of my fabrication, the nebulic gases of my digestion, the spaces between – which has the darkest matter of all – all of it! My eyes a-hundred, my zero arms and feet, my knees aplenty. Especially do not discard the lack of something as its non-existence, for the very existence of its lack is the existence of the thing itself!”

To this, Mosh agreed with a nod.

“And what of it? Why speak of it all? Oh its far too much for my mind or yours to recall. You are asking a machine to memorize its entire simulation, a hopeless feat! Can your nervous system contain the entire mapping of itself – that is, all its connections, its firing – within itself? No! Too much detail and it would have to become a copy of itself to store such a glut of data.”

Mosh tested the seal on his head, which was plugging the hole good. The seal was strong and he was very stuck.

“Now look.” And the king or queen Prudeen vanished and took the form of a sign. One with two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. The sign met Mosh eye-to-eye.

“Now look,” it said again, but this time as the sign-upon-Ky. “This is all true and equally false. Nothing subsumes everything and, in fact, nothing – one nothing – is the seed of it all. There are no stars, there is only star. Nebulas – there are none! – only a nebula. What of Peddles? Gibbets? But one of each and then one more. The planets: Treeble, Rubrub, Kloppy-12 – your homeworld, Glosh – only one of these.

“And then one more! For, for all of these one, between them they share one space. And if we look closely at this space we find it folds into itself like flexible, fractal salami. We trace it with our finger, the same finger that is both mine and yours, and where to? Down to four, three, and then two. Two what? Two atoms? Yes and no. Take one atom, lick it, taste it, sniff it, stuff it in those sensory orifices of yours and tell me what you find. Hah! No atom but the home of the atomites which are the following three consciousnesses: protonites, electronites, and the neutronites.

“Protonites are neutronites in reverse, neutronites being a state of electronites gone cold. Inductively we prove thus,” To prove thus, the was-king-or-queen Prudeen, now in the image of a sign, created an arm at its side and raised it in the air, two fingers held high like a two vertical stumps. “We prove thus: everything is electronites?”

Someone screamed from near Mosh’s ear. He turned and saw that a Peddle had squeezed its way past his helmet and hurtled into the space with the celestial face. It was a minute Peddle, also far from the mean Peddle size, but unfortunately on the opposite side to Prudeen. It screamed because it had a question: “Oh great intergalactic omniscience! The very lightyears between your orbits shake me so, but I must ask you this: what of the double-electron? What of it?” The vacuum then ripped the minute Peddle apart into a million little parts and it did this twice until all that was left was electronites.

“You do not listen! Let us continue. We deduced thus: everything is electronites? Including the very electronites themselves? Of course! But then what? Well, then continue it: electronites assembled of electronites, themselves constructions of electronites. Finally we collapse them down to only ten electronites left in the universe. We don’t stop there. No! Continue! Nine! Eight! Seven!”

Mosh’s mind was shook and he did not like it. He put his hands on the grass around where his head was plugged.

“Six!”

He pushed. Pushed hard.

“Five!”

The ocean of Peddles above him was heavy and it pushed back. Still, he pushed.

“Four!”

Another tiny Peddle slipped by and exploded.

“Three!”

He felt himself come loose for a moment, but the gap caused a flood of Peddles to suck him right back.

“Two!”

One last time and with every ounce of his atoms atomites he heaved and he felt himself come loose.

“One!”

-- [ ] –

Mosh opened his eyes. His ship’s screens idly blinked around him. They told him all was well. He checked his distometer which measured by way of laser. Four-thousand light years still stretched between Mosh and his dinner. Out the ship window the sky twinkled, just as it had for the last one-thousand light years. Space travel was a drag. Mosh grabbed his copy of Guide to Impossible Auditory Events: Spacefarer’s Edition and thumbed through it to pass the time. Lumps, drups, prings, and prongs.

Mosh’s ship flew through a part of space that was famous for double-electrons. Double-electrons were single-electrons that moved twice the speed of light so there were always two outcomes when it was measured by a photon-based device. This gave this part of space a charcoal smell throughout because of it. Mosh’s ship was not expected to hit anything as it moved through this space. Space got its name from the fact that it was mostly made of that very thing: in-between stuff. But Mosh’s ship did hit something, and what it did hit bounced right off. But in this vacuum nothing is there to vibrate and so no noise happened. What could not make a noise was an object made of wood with some parts painted blue. The collision of the two would have made a noise like a two-by-four had struck a metal gourd. It would have made an impossible wump, but instead it made no noise at all and Mosh flew on.