“Bring forth exhibit T.”
Onto the platform stepped a leaned old man, with shoulders that shrugged at everything. Along with the tattered brown cape on his back, he carried a planet in a wicker basket built for red giants. The poor planet rolled around like loose change, but for all the stretching in the world, the old man would never be able to reach behind him to steady it because he was completely crippled with arthritis.
The platform bowed once the man and his little planet had made it halfway to the podium, not for the weight of the planet or the old man, for one was frail and the other tiny, though which was which I am not sure. It bowed because it was choked full of chewing guzgoos. And guzgoos loved to turn iron into a sponge. At the center of the platform was a podium which stood at attention, before it a seated audience swam up and along the walls. Where the middle of the second-row would have been was cut, instead, a seat so large that it occupied a space for fourty seats. On this seat sat a scowl, hung on a clock tower face, on a head propped up by a neck fit for a blown-glass museum. The whole appearance balanced like a vertical pool cue atop a mound of flesh that flowed off the side of the seat that was a throne. The scowl was a full-time employee of the face, its job to mask one thing: an unpleasant thought in the mind of this entity. This entity we shall call, Magnamus Morgus.
“Begin,” said Morgus. When she spoke, her face bellowed like the surface of refrigerated blue jelly, the ceiling panels rattled. She had a thousand little orifices that spoke each degree of frequency of what was said. Now at the podium, the old man tapped some papers on the wood, reached next to him with one hand to steady the wicker basket, and then wet the tip of his finger with his tongue. All this he did carefully, so not to disturb his bones. He turned the first page before him to reveal the second, and read:
“Privilege of the house, privilege of the people, and the deepest-dug respects for the privilege of her majesty, Magnamus Morgus herself, whom just the observation of the photons that reflect from her flesh is but an unworthy gift.” The old man paused to attend to the wicker basket. He clear his throat.
“My exhibition – exhibition T – that I have for you here today is, under article twelve of the Parcius Divine Doctrine, one which I am certain you will be most pleased to receive. Before that though, I must warn you that some of the information I will present here will disturb you, and if it were not for the most imperative reasons that I scheduled such a prompt presentation, I would rather the great Goosh turn my mouth into a sea of mud than speak these words among holy men and women, for I fear I may mar their sanctified souls by their very sound. But,” and the old man spent a good time wetting his finger, as if he had forgotten his audience, “I will accept the consequences, for speak them I must.” He turned to page three.
The audience shifted uneasily. Magnamus remained unmoved.
---
As the hours passed, the shadow of Magnamus Morgus traveled across the hall. It began at row twelve. Those seated at the front were attended to last. Each person had their time for Magnamus to entirely swallow the light around them. The shadow was now upon the toe of the shoe on the foot of the old man. “The definition of a planet, under article twelve of the Parcius Divine Doctrine of Things in the Universe, reads the following:” said the old man.
“A planet is celestial body, spherical by nature of its spin, usually found near suns and stars and larger celestials. It’s constituents are so variable that there is no requirement for what it contains, but the layered organization is the identifying characteristic of this object. For this reason, many civilizations refer to them as ‘onion-bodies’, named after a common vegetative shoot organism.
“The social opinion of planets is usually a minor one in the galaxy, but their applications have been so variable. Construction material, entertainment, and cuisine, to name a few industries, have relied on planets as a resource long since the first galactic arms spun. Some reports have found that some planets have a variety of microscopic motile entities that occupy the space between the gaseous and the solid layers. The general consensus among scientists whom have studied these entities is that they are too small to posses any complex operation and multiple research studies have undeniably demonstrated that they fail the Wrackus-Heath Awareness Test, or WHAT.”
The old man paused. He explored the edge of his mouth with a tongue and bent it into many shapes. He opened his hands and winced a bit. Like an image of a universe’s birth, eyes blinked on and off before him, surprised to now be something. He feigned interest in his shoelaces, hung on his next words. Magnamus’s shadow was upon the wicker basket.
“Exhibit T, I wish to posit,” from the edge of his eye, the old man looked at the little planet almost imploringly, “is a resource worth more than its depth in taste or its weight in rock. There is, in fact – for the first time – an output from this object that is not streams of gas or spits of magma. Its output is not a tangible one. Intangible and cryptic as my words might be right now, if heard by an ear from a mind far larger and more alien to us – if such a being you can imagine. That output is...”
Again, the old man used his tongue to stop himself. He looked everywhere except the faces before him. Had Magnamus Morgus grown twice the size? She pulled the attention of the room like a black hole, tore it apart mercilessly. Even the nibbles of the guzgoos below could be heard now, it was that silent.
Finally, some courage bubbled up to the old man’s lips. “You will be familiar with the term ‘flabber-blabber’, I am sure. At times, referred to as ‘drollery’ or ‘comedy’ by lesser beings. Perfect presences as yourself don’t have the time for this galactic trash, this wasteful space of cognitive function. To laugh is to divert to an embryonic state, a phase of matter indistinguishable from a head of corn. But. You must agree that flabber-blabber is a drug that shackles the lower society, for imagine all those idle existences with nothing to live for and, worse, nothing to – may Goosh strike me down for saying it – nothing to laugh at?”
Confirming the existence of his audience was not necessary. What he did not want to look upon was the eyes of revolt that were certainly all upon him now. Magnamus Morgus, he did not dare let enter his peripherals.
“Through a device which we shall call a Flabber-Blabber Tabulator, but is in fact a Drollery Detector, scientists have proven that T is a rich source of the chuckle. The gaff. The laugh. A flabber-babble fountain, if you will.”
The old man suddenly struck the podium. “Undeniably!”
When a-thousand suns meet at one point, a phenomenon occurs: their gravity fields tangle, solar flares are thrown back and forth faster than the heat inside can dissipate, reactions go exponential. The product? A flare with a girth of a million light years and bright enough to tear a galaxy into a pip. At the last word of the old man, this very phenomenon happened in the room, upon a mass far heavier than a-thousand suns. The face of Magnamus Morgus went supernova.
---
Straight pillars that held up the ceiling bowed as Magnamus lifted herself. Those sat next to her unbuckled from their seat and made to flee, but the gravity field of Magnamus held them. Over the course of an hour – the old man, the audience pinned by her greatness – Magnamus rose. Magnets on the old man’s feet were all that kept him from being ripped from the podium. Like a wind tunnel, the room rattled, as every orifice spoke at once from the billowing mass at its center:
“Undeniably?! Undeniably?!” Magnamus Morgus now lifted her foot, which met the floor eighteen minutes later and formed a crater.
“Before my rippling image you have spun a tale so sickening, so vile! Even the moons in my orbit hid in the folds of my sides. Revolting! Foul! Your presence on my stage collapses the quantum state of my fields to a certain state of embarrassment. You will be defiled by Goosh’s wrath for eternity!”
Whether it was his arthritis, the strength of Magnamus’s gravity, or the magnet’s holding strong is unclear, but the old man shook as he held fast to that podium, his free hand tight on the little planet.
“Release it! Release. The. Onion-body.” said Magnamus and she pointed at the old man’s hand over the ball of rock.
The old man managed to shake his head. It took great effort to speak. The force of gravity coming from Magnamus was too strong. “For the sake of your roiling royalty, I must resist – I insist! Sit please, this planet is no geological snack!”
“Release it!!” And the arm of Magnamus Morgus came down from the ceiling after thirty-two minutes of flight and cleaved the stage in two. On one half was the old man, on the other the wicker basket and the planet which instantly flew towards Magnamus who, by now, had accumulated most of the loose debris in the room in orbit around her.
The one-thousand tiny orifices of Magnamus serve a second, digestive, function. Feeding in space requires filtering between drivel and dravel, drivel being inedible, dravel being nutrient rich. Those orifices sung out for exhibition T as it spun closer and closer. It passed right through the surface of Magnamus and became encased in a blue mucus as it traveled inside. Magnamus laughed as the old man looked on in horror. The old man opened his mouth a few times as if the air around him had gone thin. Eventually he found his words.
“Oh no, no, no. Magnamus – her divine engorgement – Magnamus, you must release that planet at once. I implore you with my life! It is unsafe! It is drivel to its core. Undigestable!”
“You withered old fool. I have grasped a pulsar at the moment it tears apart, I have dipped my eyes into the holes of the universe, I have watched expand and collapse fifteen times over the very the fabric of reality. There is not an arrangement of quarks that can do more than initiate tides on the reams of my flesh. You insult my expansiveness with your words.”
“Your majesty a-thousand, your intergalactic greatness. Please. This is no matter of matter we speak of, but a psychological phenomenon. It is not a case of an elemental battle, you are as robust as crystal but it won’t save you. It is the mind with which this planet works. Despite your sweeping form, you still operate under the intercommunication of smaller entities. Though robust, it is still the content of this communication which can change, even if their communication has not erred since the universe’s life a-hundred times over! Spit it out! Spit it out! I implore!”
Magnamus did not wish to understand the old man. What she did understand was that an entity of lesser mass was attempting to rattle high-amplitude sound waves at her, and this blasphemy required eradication. Again, her fist she lifted to the ceiling. It’s mass bent the light of the room like a lens, so that from where the old man cowered he saw up high an eye, with a fist as an iris, the sclera made of the bending light. The fist began its accent, the air below it began to crush and this created an enormous amount of pressure and heat that descend onto the old man. As he felt himself cook, the old man closed his eyes and muttered the prayer of Goosh.
One-thousand guzgoos were crushed in an instant. The planet of a fist tore their home apart, melted it down to a ferrous puddle. The old man winced as the sound – the heat – consumed him. When it passed, he opened his eyes. The other side of the stage, wicker basket and all, was gone. In his dance with death he forgot himself and he met directly with the eyes of Magnamus Morgus, her enormity swallowing the room. She was still.
But as he stared – for he could not fathom that she spared him so – slowly, that Magnamus mug transformed. The edges of her orifices turned up. Each one started to shake and bellow, rhythmically. They squeezed opened and closed and this produced a high-pitch noise which grew so loud the iron stage sung like a tuning fork. These orifice shakes drove the whole body of Magnamus into action and it rumbled like the surface of sun drum. The eyes of the old man grew wide. She fought it for too long, but she was consumed by the reaction inside her, the full force of her motion unleashed.
Magnamus Morgus laughed and laughed and laughed.