Under Plum Lake

by Lionel Davidson

  I'm trying to keep it simple.

  It wasn't simple when he said it.

  It's only a fraction of what he said.

  Most of what he said I couldn't understand. There weren't any words to make me understand. He said my brain wasn't big enough, and it never would be. He said it was like trying to tell a dog. He said he'd done all this stuff himself when he was sixty, years before, when his brain was ready. He said his sister hadn't started yet because hers wasn't ready. All their eighteen-year-old baby could do, so far, was play the violin.

  I know it looks mad.

  I thought I was mad.

  I found I wasn't later; but I can't stop now. I've got to keep going.

  He said that the land above the sea used to be one continent. There was no Asia, Europe, Africa, America, Australia. They were joined. And the climate was good and everything grew bigger in it. There weren't grotesque things like huge flying beasts. They came later, with even weirder creatures, after the mess-up. Thousands of different forms came later, and passed out of existence.

  At this earlier time, with conditions stable for millions of years, all life on the continent developed fully. There were more apes and man-like creatures. But man was the most intelligent. There were no black men or yellow men or white men; all were brown and of the same build and appearance; and they controlled the life on the planet.

  At this time nuclear energy (he only mentioned it because I asked him) was already buried far into the past. It was as ancient as the discovery of fire. He said that for ages there'd been flights to the stars. (And I've got to interrupt again, because of what I put earlier about the impossibility of reaching the stars and how the speed of light was the fastest thing in the universe and it would take too long.)

  He just looked at me when I said it. He didn't know how to explain it to me. He said could I remember what my bedroom looked like at home? I said I could. He said could I remember where I put my watch in the cave? I said I could. He said in that case a part of me had already moved faster than the speed of light. He said it was a question of using that part. He said the first twenty-five years at school were spent just learning the idea of it. It was as basic as reading and writing. It was as basic as the difference between brain and mind.

  I said what was the difference between brain and mind, and again he looked at me and hardly knew what to say. He said it was obvious what the difference was. He said you got people with identical brains but you couldn't get them with identical minds. Making a brain work was what produced mind. Brain was a basic thing like stone.

  (I don't want to go on, but ideas keep coming back. He said if you blew up a balloon, and drew a map of the world on it, and let the balloon down, you'd see not only that all the continents came together more or less as they used to be, but that what they used to be was the shape of a brain.)

  He said so many things.

  He gave me the look you give a dog when it can't understand. He said we'd skip it and he'd tell me about Egon.

  He said millions of years ago science had become so advanced that they needed a better power source than the sun. The sun was too tiny a star for the power they needed. In exploring the universe they'd found many stars more useful than the sun.

  The idea was to pick one with a suitable planet and move there. But the problem was to find a planet as suitable as Earth. Earth was the finest and most beautiful planet anywhere. So a different idea had developed.

  Instead of finding another planet, they decided to shift the Earth. They'd focus all they could of the sun's energy and use it to launch Earth into a different star system. There were disputes about it for generations, and it was difficult (it meant making changes to replace the gap left by Earth in the solar system), but it was possible, so they did it.

  They did it, and failed; and that was the mess-up, he said.

  He said it started with a gigantic lurch which shifted the equator and made it into the north and south poles. It split up the whole continent of land. And it split up the foundation underneath.

  He said the foundation was the third layer of the earth's skin, the crust. He said that this layer was thicker than the other two layers put together. It was thirty miles deep. It supported everything on top, the sea and the land.

  When it split, it split into six main “plates”. One carried away North and South America. Another carried most of Asia, Europe and part of the Atlantic. Another carried the whole Pacific Ocean, and so on.

  And a crazy cycle of weather changes began: ice ages, tropical ages, then ice ages again — as if the great stone brain had gone mad when it split. But before then they'd taken everything they needed from on top and gone down to Egon. Egon had been discovered long before, and he was just telling me how when Mura began roaring, and said his father was in the projector.

  We were in the room by that time, and she switched the projector on there, too. A girl came through it and told him to wait. Then she looked round the room and went.

  Dido licked his lips nervously.

  He said, “Barry, I'd better say goodbye now. He might erase you himself. He can come in and do that. He can do everything like that.”

  “But —”

  “Don't say a thing. It's just that I wanted to show you everything. Egonia, the fantastic city, and Mount Julas, and Plum Lake . . . Well — goodbye.”

  He was patting my head, and I didn't know whether to pat his. I didn't know how you said goodbye here. I just said awkwardly, “Goodbye,” when the projector glowed again, and a man was there. He was speaking to someone beyond us, and the girl we'd seen was putting papers on his desk. He was a stern-faced man. He didn't bother coming in the room. He just stayed where he was and looked straight at us.

  I felt Dido almost shrivel beside me, and he tried to say something. But the man cut him off, and spoke a few sentences more. Then his face seemed to soften, and I looked at Dido's and saw a look of surprise and delight come over it. He began speaking, but the man just gave him a nod and the projector went dead.

  “Oh boy!” Dido cried. “Oh Egon!”

  “What is it?”

  “There's a storm up there. They've made inquiries. Nobody can get to that cave. They won't be able to get to it for three days. You can stay! You can come home with me!” He was pulling my ears and patting my head.

  And that's how it happened. It's how I came to see it. It's how I remember what I'm not supposed to remember.

  11. The Fabulous City

  I remember another road, and doing 300 miles an hour on it. And he must have told me how transport worked by then because I wasn't surprised when we flew. It worked by magnetism. It used the earth as a magnet which could attract or repel like any other magnet. According to the controls you could go forward or backward, or up and down, and according to the power you could increase or decrease speed.

  We came to traffic, and he muttered and slowed. He said there was a speed limit — and not because of the danger of crashes, because vehicles couldn't crash. When you switched on, you also switched on your “force line”, which meant that cars repelled each other and couldn't touch, however fast they were going. But they repelled each other so violently at speed that equipment and people could be damaged. And you had to be careful about spare parts.

  (The spare parts weren't only for machines. But I'll come to that. There's no pain in Egon.)

  We had to slow so much that he looked anxiously at the sky, and I saw the sun was setting. Clouds had appeared, and the countryside was turning mauve.

  “I'll have to turn off,” he said, and began muttering again. And after a few minutes we did turn off, up a country lane.

  We went a few miles, and he stopped and switched on a panel on the dashboard. It lit up a bluish colour, with little points of light moving in every direction on it. Then he pressed something else, and we took off. We took off vertically. The ground seemed to telescope below, and I could see the motorway, and on all sides rolling countryside. Then he stopped, and we hovered while he s
tudied the panel.

  “I'm not supposed to do it,” he said, and muttered a bit, and began flying forward, very fast. We did it for just a few minutes, Dido studying the panel all the time. Then he said, “Now — right ahead!” and I looked and saw . . . something like hundreds-and-thousands on a cake. It was a mass of little dots of colour.

  “I can't go closer,” he said, and stopped, and we stayed still in the air.

  He moved a control on the dashboard and, as before, the glass of the windscreen became a lens, and the little dots moved forward.

  In short, sharp movements the dots turned into shapes — into cubes, spirals, octagons, needles; all marvellously coloured, and sparkling so brilliantly in the last of the light that I gasped out loud.

  I didn't know where to look first. The shapes moved closer and closer. The whole screen filled up with them.

  They were buildings — I could see now. And the teeming mass of them was a city. But it was like a carnival. Some of the buildings were like twists of striped candy; others like flowers or mushrooms. One had a pear-shaped dome, the colour of a pearl.

  He heard me exclaiming, and laughed himself.

  “You had to see it in the light,” he said. “It will be dark when we get there.”

  “It's beautiful!” I gasped.

  “The most beautiful,” he said. “It's the finest city on the Earth — the finest there's ever been. I'll show you the centre, the old part.”

  He touched a control, and the city began rushing past in a great blaze of colour, the fantastic buildings whirling away on every side. Then he slowed and several beautiful plazas came into view. Broad avenues radiated into the most spacious of the plazas. There were fountains spaced out over it, and in the centre was a tree.

  It was the strangest tree.

  It was huge, a luminous purple, and its upper branches were in constant motion. There was water all round it. Fish were in the water; they were going in a steady procession round the tree, and I caught the flash of tails in the last sunlight.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “The president's palace.”

  “The tree is?”

  “It's the symbol of Egon. It's the image of a sea anemone. A sea anemone is an animal but it acts like a plant. It can move if it wants to, but it doesn't. It stays in one place and gets everything it needs with its tentacles. It's the sign that we'll never try and move again . . . Well, you've seen it. And we'd better go!” he said urgently. “We've been spotted.”

  Among the little lights on the panel, one had begun to flash red and was growing bigger.

  He touched the controls and we dropped sharply.

  The moon came out, and the stars.

  I watched them.

  Moon and stars — under sea, under earth?

  He wouldn't answer my questions. He just concentrated on his driving. There were several lanes of traffic now.

  Lighted restaurants passed, floating in the air; people danced in them, in the air. I watched them bobbing over the countryside. But now I could see the glow of Egonia; a vast cloud of purple and gold in the sky. I couldn't take my eyes off it. Yet when we came to the city, I couldn't all at once understand it. There was no ordinary light, but everything glowed. The roads glowed, from within, a pale golden colour. The buildings glowed, in every colour. We passed one of the multi-coloured spirals I'd seen in the sunset. Its twisting candy stripes, of green and pink and white, were glowing the same colours, though more softly, and sparkling all the way up with pinpoints of light that were evidently windows.

  On every side the fabulous structures passed, and as we crossed an intersection I could see along the broad thoroughfares hundreds more of them. The pavements were thronged with people, the night air full of the buzz of conversation and laughter and music. Shops and stores of all kinds were open, and people were seated at outdoor cafés. As before, it looked like a huge carnival, but now that I was in it, even better. There was an air of such excitement and gaiety everywhere that I found myself laughing out loud. And it didn't seem strange because most other people were, too. When I looked at Dido he was grinning away himself.

  “What do you think of it?” he said.

  “It's the most fantastic town I ever saw!”

  “It's the most fantastic anyone saw. It has the best of all towns in it. You can do anything with a town. It doesn't have to be just streets with big buildings,” he said. “If a building gets boring, you put another one up. Most of these have only been up a few hundred years.”

  Just then we passed one like a pineapple, an elongated pineapple, and I could see people sitting out on the glowing segments.

  We were going slowly now in the traffic, and he was careless with his driving. Sometimes he didn't slow in time when the car in front slowed, and I felt the rebound as the force line stopped us from touching, and the car behind rebounded from us.

  (And there's so much I've no time to put. I haven't mentioned the “rainbows” where the cars from the intersections passed over; or how the giants everywhere so soon became normal to me.)

  We just drove on. We drove a long time through the fabulous city before I began to recognize again the areas I'd seen from the air. I saw the series of beautiful plazas begin, and the broad ceremonial avenues, and then the broadest avenue of all, with the sea anemone palace at the end. There was a huge glow of purple in the sky; and I could see the town going on beyond it.

  “Are we going the other side of town?” I said.

  “We're going into town,” he said. “The centre.” And just then we swung round a huge square, and came to golden gates, and uniformed giants at each side saluted and opened the gates. We drove through, and I looked at Dido, but he didn't look back.

  Fountains were playing all over the plaza, but the splashing sound didn't come from them. It came from the immense moat all round the palace. Spouts of water and spray were flung high as the procession offish cruised steadily round, and I saw with incredulity that they were whales.

  We took a rainbow over the whales, and headed for the palace, and I said, “Dido.”

  “I know,” he said. “I'm sorry. I should have told you. My father's president of Egon. He runs the world. Welcome to the palace.”

  12. The Anemone Palace

  Can I just say it's fantastic? It's true, but what's the use? The palace at Egonia is so fantastic there are no words for it. He told me the style had always been the same but every few thousand years they rebuilt it, and this one was due for rebuilding now because it was 9,000 years old. All the materials of the world were in it. There were rooms built of diamond, and of ruby.

  Also, it was enormous. The whales looked ordinary because it was so enormous. It had a “stalk” over a hundred yards across, and I don't know how high (except it was over half a mile), and the rooms were in the stalk.

  The entrance was bustling with officials, and we went through the main hall to the lifts and escalators that circled the building. The private apartments were on the top floor, and he took me up in the lift right away.

  It's all a jumble to me what happened after we got out of that lift. A little kid was waiting for us there (this was his sister, the sixty-year-old, Neila), and she couldn't stop looking at me and touching me and feeling my hair. She kept dancing up and down tugging me, and he muttered that we had to go to the nursery because she wanted to show me to the baby.

  We went in the nursery and there was the baby, sitting up in its cot, playing the violin.

  It was amazing. It was playing it really well, and its giant nurse was sitting there singing away and nodding in time.

  The moment it saw me it gave a yell and threw the violin away (there were smashed-up violins all over the room) and started reaching out to me, bouncing up and down in the cot. Everyone was grinning at the baby, so I grinned too, though it scared the life out of me. It had a big head. It had big green eyes.

  They all had green eyes and white hair, and the baby saw I was different.

  The nurse pick
ed the baby out of the cot, and while it was pulling at my hair, Dido's mother came in. I recognized her right away, from the projector, but she just nodded coldly at me.

  Then we were in another room, the living room, just the three of us; and I saw she was furious.

  She was like a queen, Dido's mother. She wore jewels in her hair, and had it piled high on her head, which made her taller. She was colossal, anyway; like a huge painted statue twenty feet tall. She barely looked at me, and I was too frightened to look up at her.

  I looked round the room instead.

  I saw I'd seen it before; that I'd even been in it before. I'd been in it through the projector. And I realized now what was so weird about it.

  It was a sea shell.

  It was a gigantic, perfect, beautiful sea shell, with a soft pink glow.

  It had a long curved window, the mouth of the shell, that looked out high over the city. Through the shell of the ceiling, you could see the tentacles flickering above.

  Dido spoke English so I'd understand, and she answered him the same way. She said his father was so angry with him he'd be lucky to keep his vehicle. She said, for a start, there was no way he'd be going to Plum Lake.

  He nearly went out of his mind.

  He said he had to go. He said all his group was going, and he was booked in for a week, and he was going to take me.

  She told him not to shout. She said he should have thought of Plum Lake before bringing me. She said in any case he couldn't go now; and he had social duties tonight, so he'd better get himself properly dressed. Then she dismissed him, and we went to his room.

  It was all of tigra wood, his room. It was maroon and silver, and full of the fascinating smell of tigra, so that I couldn't breathe in enough of it.

  But he was gloomy, kicking things about.

  “Never mind,” he said at last, and patted my head. “We'll have a good time tonight, anyway.”

  He said his “social duties” were a round of student parties he had to attend. He had to make a speech at each about the coming exams. They were important exams, to be held after the holidays, and the results would decide what each of them would study next year, when they'd be a hundred, and for the following eighty years till they started university.