Penguin Highway

by Tomihiko Morimi

  “Wow,” Suzuki said.

  It was definitely an exciting spectacle.

  “The town’s on lockdown,” I said. “If we don’t get through that line, we can’t reach the dentist’s office.”

  “Proceed with caution.”

  Everyone there was staring in the direction of the water-tower hill, so we crossed the main road like marbles rolling across a carpet. We took the alley between the stationery supply store and the dry cleaners into the residential area.

  I’d hoped it would be a clean run from there to the dentist, but we were spotted by three uniformed firemen on patrol.

  “What are you doing here?” one asked nicely. “There’s an evacuation warning…”

  “Ready! Go!” Suzuki shouted.

  At his signal, we all broke into a run. The firemen spread their arms, trying to catch us, but we scattered, and they couldn’t catch us all. I saw Uchida and Hamamoto get nabbed out of the corner of my eye, but I got past the firemen safely.

  Suzuki was running ahead of me.

  “They got the others!” I shouted. Suzuki looked over his shoulder, still running. Someone grabbed my shoulder from behind. “Hey!” an angry voice shouted.

  Suzuki spun around, came running back, and grabbed the man who’d caught me by the side.

  This allowed me to slip free of his grasp.

  “Run! Run!” Suzuki yelled behind me. I ran like I’d never run before. I was so fast, I thought it was a shame no one was recording my speed.

  I ran down a deserted tree-lined road.

  When I passed Seaside Café, I saw the lady sitting in a seat at the window. She had her elbows on the table and was nodding off. The lights in Seaside Café were off, and there were no other customers. Yamaguchi wasn’t there, either. Everyone else had evacuated.

  I went inside and sat down opposite her. Her eyes opened. She didn’t bat an eye at me being there. I was glad I’d found her.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hello,” she said, yawning. “You feeling better?”

  “I am. I thought you’d be at the dentist’s office.”

  “There’s an evacuation warning out. The office is closed today. But I didn’t feel like evacuating. I thought you might come by, so I waited here.”

  “You knew I’d come?”

  “I know exactly how you think.”

  The lady looked out the window. “Ah,” she said. The fireman had come chasing after me.

  We hid until he passed by.

  Under the table, the lady put her forehead on mine, smiling.

  “So, kiddo. You’ve solved the mystery?”

  I nodded.

  I sat under the table, reviewing my notes, organizing my hypothesis.

  “You aren’t human,” I said.

  “Right, I’m not human.”

  “Because you told me that, I was able to formulate the Aoyama Hypothesis. If you’re not a human, but something more like the penguins, then your No Food Experiment makes sense, and it explains why you got sick on the train like the penguin did. You survive on Penguin Energy.”

  “Where does Penguin Energy come from?”

  “I compared the charts of your health and The Sea’s size. Your health is linked to The Sea’s diameter. When The Sea gets bigger, you get better. And when it gets smaller, your health deteriorates. You and the penguins are both living on invisible energy radiating from The Sea. If The Sea gets bigger, it gives off more energy, so you get better. This also explains why you and the penguins got sick when you rode the train. Because the train took you too far away, and energy from The Sea could no longer reach you.”

  “No, that doesn’t make sense,” the lady said. “The penguins destroy The Sea, right? Isn’t that a contradiction?”

  “The penguins do break up The Sea, making the pieces of it smaller. That’s why the more penguins you make, the more The Sea gets broken, and the more it shrinks, and the less energy it gives off, and the sicker you get. But in return, the penguins have their mortal enemy, the Jabberwocks. The Jabberwocks eat the penguins, there are less penguins, and The Sea starts waxing again. And you feel better.”

  “Like the food chain.”

  “I’ve named this the Penguin System. The penguins and the Jabberwocks are opposites, and The Sea’s balance is maintained by the two of them. So what exactly is The Sea? I’ve been thinking about that for a while. We’ve discovered a number of strange aspects to it. It bends certain kinds of light, causes people to travel through time, and can change the shapes of clouds in the sky. For Project Amazon, we followed the stream that runs through that clearing but discovered that it flows forever in an infinite loop. That’s physically impossible, but The Sea makes it possible.”

  “If it’s physically impossible, then it’s still impossible.”

  “It’s impossible in our world. That’s why I’ve spent all this time thinking The Sea was something unbelievably strange. But then I started to think that The Sea was actually something that shouldn’t exist in our world. All along, I thought of The Sea as a physical object. But what if it was a hole? What if it’s a tear in our world, a mistake God made, and The Sea is just how we perceive the resulting hole?”

  “You’re losing me.”

  “We said the penguins destroy The Sea. But that isn’t accurate. The Sea is already broken. The penguins are repairing it. We only thought their actions were a contradiction because we didn’t know that the entire reason they exist was to repair the broken spot we called The Sea.”

  The lady raised a hand, thinking about this.

  “Then by making penguins, I’m helping to seal the hole in the world?” she said.

  “I think so.”

  “But I haven’t made any lately.”

  “At night, you make Jabberwocks. There were lots of Jabberwocks in the forest. The thing Suzuki caught that caused such a commotion was a Jabberwock. I gave you some advice, saying that you’d feel better if you made things other than penguins. But if you make things other than penguins, they become Jabberwocks and eat the penguins. The Sea gets bigger, and you feel better, too. You kept making Jabberwocks so you could avoid feeling awful. But as a result, the tear in our world grew larger and larger. Which brings us to right now.”

  We looked out the window.

  We could see the clouds above the Jabberwock Woods being twisted into funnels. We could see the top of The Sea rising above the forest. The Sea was swallowing the woods.

  “Wow. You really thought this through,” the lady said.

  She put her hands on her hips, staring out the window. Her face had a healthy glow. According to my hypothesis, she wasn’t human…but I found that hard to believe. Forming a hypothesis and believing that hypothesis were two different things.

  Eyes on the window, she said, “Let’s go, kiddo.”

  The lady and I left Seaside Café and walked through the deserted neighborhood. We were spotted by a patrol car once and yelled at through a megaphone, but we were able to hide successfully the rest of the time. From the park where the summer festival was held, we looked toward the woods and saw the massive dome of The Sea peeping over the top, rippling and reflecting light like the real sea.

  “It’s almost swallowed the entire forest,” the lady said.

  “The investigation team is inside The Sea.”

  “What happens if you go in?”

  “I don’t know. The probe we sent in never came out.”

  “I hope the penguins can help.”

  On our way through the neighborhood, the lady made penguin after penguin. The bulbs in the streetlights turned into penguins, falling down and swelling up like mochi cooking on the pavement. Penguins poured out of the vending machines. Everything turned into penguins, even empty cans and abandoned motorcycles in the vacant lots. The lady whistled, raising her hand, and the newborn penguins straightened up like British gentlemen and followed after her, shoving against one another.

  By the time we reached the parking lot at the athletic field, w
e were leading an army of penguins. The lady stopped at the lot entrance, and they stopped, too, all bumping into one another.

  She peered into the lot.

  “No one here.”

  “I think they all ran away.”

  There was a horrible sound coming from the forest. A sound like tree trunks splitting and leaves thrashing.

  The Sea was rising up beyond the trees at the back of the athletic field. The sound from the forest was the noise of The Sea shaking the trees as it passed. I narrowed my eyes, trying to observe it, but I couldn’t make out what was going on inside The Sea. All I could see was a bright sea-colored gleam in the depths of the forest.

  The investigation team’s base was already deserted. They’d left the tents and their equipment standing there. I wasn’t sure exactly what had happened to the team, but something bad had happened to Professor Hamamoto and the others, and the rest of them had beat a hasty retreat.

  The lady, the penguins, and I went into the parking lot.

  The equipment in the lot started swelling up, all of it turning into penguins, which waddled off in every direction. This phenomenon carried on the entire time the lady was walking across the parking lot, and the new penguins joined forces with the ones from the residential area until the lot was buried in penguins, like the shores of Antarctica in winter. The lady whistled, and the penguins started moving toward the forest.

  “It’s like you’re the ringmaster of the Penguin Circus,” I said.

  “That’s lovely. I should have done just that.”

  Beyond the base, we found a tall fence between the forest and the lot. It seemed like the investigators had gone in and out of a locked gate near the edge of the fence, but we didn’t need to.

  The wave of penguins hit the fence, shoving against it.

  The lady climbed over the fence, so I followed suit. The lady straddled the fence, looking back at the lot.

  “Whoa,” she yelped. “The penguins are breaking through!”

  As we stepped into the trees beyond the fence, we heard it come crashing down. A wave of squeaking penguins came rushing over it. The wave caught us and swept us both deeper into the forest.

  “Uh-oh, kiddo!” the lady yelled. “The Sea is right there!”

  The Sea was coming up fast. The border between it and the forest was like a wall of water, glittering with a blue-green light. There was a faint light on the other side that made the forest glow. A dodgeball-size ball of water popped out of the wall, rolling through the trees, and the penguins surrounded it, breaking it to pieces.

  I saw a number of Jabberwocks coming through the trees. There was no expression on their blue whale-like faces; the sheer quantity of penguins didn’t seem to surprise them at all. They opened their mouths wide and swallowed up some penguins, but there were just so many penguins that they hardly made a dent. In moments, the Jabberwocks were caught by the black tsunami of penguins and swept away.

  The penguins in the lead leaped into the wall of water one after another. Inside the wall, they spun once, tracing spirals in the glowing water, then took off like rockets toward the sky. Moving out of sight.

  Stuck between The Sea and the penguins, the lady and I had nowhere to run.

  The lady grabbed me and pulled me to her. A moment later, the penguin wave crested, shoving us into The Sea.

  There was a strange, soft light filling the space inside The Sea. I thought the shores of the Cambrian-period sea must be just like this. The lady had her face pressed against mine, her eyes screwed tightly shut. It felt both cold and warm. A few dozen penguins that had come in with us took off like space rockets, leaving trails of white bubbles in their wakes, darting in and out of one another’s paths as they headed up toward the sky.

  The next thing I knew, the lady and I were rocking on the surface of the water, gazing up at the blue sky above.

  A single vapor trail cut across the sky.

  The lady sat up. “Are we in The Sea?” she murmured. I sat up and looked around. There was a bright ocean as far as the eye could see. I looked down and saw that we were sitting on a giant black kickboard made of penguins. Every now and then, a large wave would come by, lifting the penguins and us. I decided the SS Penguin was a wonderful ship.

  On the horizon, there were very summery cumulonimbus, but the clouds were rapidly changing shape, like time-lapse photography. Like somebody was playing with cotton candy, changing its shape. But then I looked in the other direction, and that horizon was dark as night, with purple lightning flashing.

  “Well, seems like we’re still alive.”

  “I wonder where the investigation team is?”

  “Penguins,” the lady said. “Bring us to them.”

  We moved slowly through the ocean.

  There were all kinds of islands scattered across this strange ocean. It was like the entire earth had been covered in water, and only a little land remained.

  The first thing we noticed was a large shopping mall. It was half underwater. It was a ruin, overgrown with ferns, but it was definitely the shopping mall from our town. There was nobody there. It was like an abandoned shipwreck. There was a mass of large birds on the roof, watching us as we floated by.

  “Seems like the ends of the earth,” the lady said.

  “I may be the first person to ever set foot on the ends of the earth. That means I’m humankind’s representative.”

  “One small representative.”

  “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

  There was nowhere to land at the mall, so we sailed on.

  We passed a row of high-tension towers rising out of the water’s surface and a savannah-like grassy island with zebras running across. Far in the distance, on the horizon, I saw a single line rising to the heavens. I thought that must be the space elevator.

  “Look there,” the lady said, standing up and pointing.

  The island had houses on it. Cute little houses, like the ones in our neighborhood. The island was divided into a grid with concrete, but only two houses were built on it. The lady and I landed and walked across the island for a while. Most of it was grassy lots. There was a single vending machine sitting all alone. As we walked, I remembered what our town had been like when my family first moved here. It was like our town back then, in miniature.

  “This is a strange island,” I said.

  The lady leaned against the vending machine, looking up at the sky. “It’s a mystery,” she said.

  Not far from this island was an even bigger one. A continent. Long before we landed there, we saw a huge crowd of penguins on the beach. Some were standing in the surf, doing nothing. Others were waddling along the beach.

  The lady and I stepped onto the shore, and the line of penguins stretched along the beach, far into the distance. At the end of this penguin highway, the beach suddenly gave way to a town. A town built on the slope of a hill.

  “There’s a town on the coast,” the lady said. “See?”

  We began walking along the beach, following the penguin highway. Listening to the sound of the waves.

  As we walked, the lady pointed out across the ocean. “Look there,” she said.

  A strange phenomenon was happening across the water.

  One section of the ocean was churning violently. Round, balloon-like things were rising to the surface, splitting apart and fusing together again. From the beach where we stood, the bubbles looked to be the size of balloons, but they were likely much larger than the lady. At last, we saw a blue whale’s head emerge from between the bubbles. It hadn’t surfaced from deeper in the ocean. A blue whale was being created on the surface of the water. Its body was made of seawater, so it appeared transparent against the blue sky. The giant see-through whale twisted its body, leaping into the air. Then it dived back into the water. It did this over and over. The whale’s body slowly disintegrated, its head growing narrower and narrower. I thought it looked like a long-necked dragon, and as I watched, it sprouted wings, the head and nec
k melting away, growing smaller. Or it grew horns, like a unicorn’s, all over its body. Or we caught glimpses of a long elephantine nose through the waves.

  This stunning phenomenon went on and on.

  Over and over, one thing after another was created, like something searching for a form it liked. When it didn’t like the results, it destroyed its creations. It was as if a giant child our eyes could not perceive was playing with LEGOs. I could have watched it change form forever.

  “God’s doing experiments,” the lady said.

  At last, we reached the end of the beach and the start of the coastal town. On the slope leading from the water up the hill were rows of foreign-styled houses, a maze of streets running between them. No sign of anyone living in them. Just penguins lined up in neat rows on the narrow paths. We walked through tunnels made of buildings and alleys with benches next to trees. At the top of the hill was a house with white walls and open windows, curtains fluttering in the breeze. It seemed like at any second someone would lean out the window, reaching both arms out toward the ocean.

  “If I’m not human, why do I have memories of a coastal town?” the lady said as we walked through one alley. “I remember my father and mother and have memories of a life leading up to this point. Are those all fake?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “But hey, at least we made it to a coastal town.”

  We took our time climbing up the hill. I glanced back and saw the alley full of penguins diligently chasing after us.

  “Are the penguins waiting before they destroy The Sea?”

  “If The Sea we’re in is destroyed and the world is permanently repaired, what happens to me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “…You do, don’t you?”

  “If my hypothesis is correct, the penguins will vanish.”

  “And me?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Is that your answer, kiddo?” the lady said gently.

  “This is merely a hypothesis.”

  “So there’s a chance you’re wrong.”