The 13.5 Lives of Captain Bluebear

by Walter Moers

  by Professor Abdullah Nightingale

  Carefree Catalepsy. The muscular and cerebral paralysis into which one’s mind and body subside when confined to a dimensional hiatus for a considerable length of time. This state of almost complete physical and mental torpor renders one unimpressed by anything, even a plunge down a dimensional hiatus. The body is pervaded by an agreeable feeling of lassitude, the ears become abnormally hot, and the face takes on a broad, fatuous grin. This condition is very distantly related to the state of helpless ecstasy engendered by two 360° loops on a roller coaster.

  Such was my condition when I encountered Qwerty. I was roaming the constellation of Orion and Qwerty was clearly still in free fall in the dimensional hiatus into which I had pushed him. Either that, or he’d fallen down another one.

  Since anyone in a dimensional hiatus is everywhere at the same time, as I have already said, it was really only a matter of time before we met up again. Qwerty came sailing weightlessly towards me in slow motion, revolving on his own axis, and gave me a foolish grin as he sailed past. Like me, he was obviously in a state of carefree catalepsy, hence our remarkably blasé reaction to this incredible coincidence.

  ‘Hi, Qwerty!’ I called.

  ‘Hi, Bluebear!’ he called back with a casual wave.

  Then he sailed on towards the Rigel Nebula while I zoomed off in the opposite direction. Now that it had taken place, this fantastic incident completely banished the possibility that our paths might cross again somewhere, at least according to the general laws of probability.

  The condition known as carefree catalepsy even enables a person to sleep while falling through a dimensional hiatus – indeed, it’s positively soporific. I became more and more sleepy as I plummeted through endless, universal space.

  My eyelids drooped and I sank into a sleep filled with dreams of just about everyone who’d played a role, however minor, in my life to date. Minipirates bellowed pirate sea shanties, Babbling Billows sloshed past, Hobgoblins whispered requests for encores, I plunged again and again into the jaws of the Gourmetica and was rescued from them each time by Mac, Fredda bombarded me with meteorites, Professor Nightingale rode past on his Nightingalator, brains clicking furiously, a Mountain Maggot nibbled an iron moon, and – needless to say – the Troglotroll also sailed past, waving amiably. But there were also creatures and things I’d not yet encountered: black-clad figures riding beasts like camels, a floating city, a head the size of a mountain, and an endless stream of fantastic, simultaneously frightening and fascinating life forms: giants, dwarfs and demons, monstrous worms and huge avian predators. At the time I took this to be an incoherent phantasmagoria, but I realize now that I was dreaming of my future.

  Then I was jolted awake by an earsplitting blast on a horn. No, in reality I was still dreaming, because now it was the Moloch I encountered for a second time. The ship seemed very real – I could even see the underside of her vast hull, which was overgrown with coral reefs, shellfish cities, and forests of seaweed. Escorting her through the universe were thousands of sharks, jellyfish, and moray eels.

  That is how you soar through time and space, in a state midway between dreaming and carefree catalepsy, until you suddenly tumble through one of an unimaginable number of dimensional hiatuses and emerge at some point in the cosmos. I wondered where that point would be. Not, I hoped, in another dimension.

  From the

  ‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’

  by Professor Abdullah Nightingale

  Dimensional Hiatuses. Anyone venturing into a dimensional hiatus should realize in advance that everything in an alien dimension can be fundamentally different. It may lack something important – air, for example – or the atmosphere may consist of water, or lead, or concrete. The laws of nature that prevail there may be quite different from our own. There may be no gravity, no time, or no space. Another dimension could, for instance, consist of congealed boredom or musical frigidity, of lethal poison gas or a solar temperature registering many thousands of degrees, of high-voltage electricity or unfulfilled wishes.

  There are said to be dimensions in which sorrow is the staple food of creatures that vegetate in little pools of grief. Many dimensions are so tiny – minidimensions with very, very small natural laws – that our planet would be compressed to the size of a pinhead on entering them. Others, again, are so big that even their atoms are bigger than our native planet. There are some dimensions in which only thoughts can survive and others inhabited exclusively by unpleasant sensations like hunger or envy in the form of little red pretzels that can sing. Anything is possible!

  Land in a two-dimensional dimension and you’re squashed as flat as a pancake. A one-dimensional dimension will stretch you like an endless rubber band, a five-dimensional one will transform you into a radio wave with a headache. As for an eight-dimensional dimension, its appearance cannot be conveyed in our language. Only one thing is certain: those who enter another dimension must change their way of life, possibly in the most drastic manner.

  In another dimension

  When I came tumbling out of the dimensional hiatus I felt as if a hand had reached down my throat into my stomach and turned me inside out like a wet sock (I can’t think of a less distasteful simile). I turned a few somersaults, first through the air and then across the ground, before I came to rest.

  I sat on my backside, trying hard not to be sick, and looked down at the surface I’d landed on to see what it was made of.

  It’s extremely important to know what material the surface of an alien dimension consists of when you land on it. If it’s concrete, for example, you can expect relatively stable natural conditions; if it’s lava or cometary gas, you’re done for. The ground beneath me was not only soft but strewn with artistic designs.

  It was a carpet.

  Very long and some hundred yards wide, it was flanked by yawning expanses of outer space. Other strips of carpet criss-crossed the dimension like intergalactic motorways covered with pretty patterns, and flying carpets were zooming around all over the place.

  About a hundred yards from me stood a magnificent throne. Still rather dazed, I got up and tried to adjust my clothing. Then someone nudged me from behind and I turned round. It was Qwerty Uiop.

  Actually, it wasn’t Qwerty Uiop – it was someone who looked very like him. But so did the two hundred thousand-odd other creatures arrayed on the strip of carpet behind me. These endless rows of gelatinous, Qwertylike figures pulled me back, ever further into their wobbly ranks. It seemed that I had been blocking their view of the throne, which they considered very important for some reason. That apart, they didn’t take umbrage at my presence. A group right next to me struck up a kind of tune. Not only did it sound awful but – this is the gospel truth – they played it on instruments made of milk.

  Then a great commotion arose, and thrusting its way through the restless crowd came a little procession. At its head – and this time I was sure of it – marched Qwerty. You can recognize your very best friend when you see him, even in the midst of two hundred thousand look-alikes. I called his name, but my voice was drowned by the general tumult and I was pushed back still further. Qwerty oozed majestically along, then detached himself from the crowd and slowly and deliberately approached the throne. The music took on a dramatic flavour, which made it sound even more frightful than before. Qwerty couldn’t possibly have heard me above the din, so I wormed my way forwards and went up to him.

  A historic moment

  How it had happened I couldn’t tell, but I’d obviously landed in his dimension just as he was about to be crowned. I had to get to him before he fell into the dimensional hiatus.

  An angry murmur ran through the crowd as I hurried towards him, but Qwerty didn’t hear that either – the music was too loud. Tremendously excited, no doubt, he continued to make for the throne. I was just behind him, so close that I could almost have grabbed him, when my foot caught in a fold in t
he carpet. I stumbled, nearly lost my balance, and blundered into Qwerty from behind. Propelled by me, he rolled to the edge of the carpet, toppled off it into space, and vanished into thin air. The crowd froze, the music died away. I went to the edge of the carpet and stared helplessly into the void.

  There was a faint smell of genff.

  It wasn’t Qwerty who had tripped, as he had always believed, it was me. I was responsible for his having landed in our dimension – in purely mathematical terms, the most improbable happening in the universe and one that no one would credit. By now the crowd was wobbling angrily towards me. Without a moment’s hesitation, I launched myself into space.

  From the

  ‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’

  by Professor Abdullah Nightingale

  Equitemporal Tunnelling of Dimensions, The. The time known to us is divided into EARLIER and LATER, NOW and IMMEDIATELY, SHORTLY and PREVIOUSLY, YESTERDAY and TODAY, TOMORROW, SOON, EVENTUALLY, AT ONE TIME, FINALLY, ULTIMATELY, FORMERLY, HITHERTO, and MEANWHILE. But all of these junctures once occurred in the PRESENT and will sometime be in the PAST, and, after a considerable period, IN THE OLD DAYS – or, to use somewhat more old-fashioned terminology, IN DAYS OF YORE. How can this be? It’s hard to say. The only certainty is that dimensions are connected by tunnels whose entrances and exits are dimensional hiatuses, and that time flows back and forth through these tunnels from one dimension to another. This may provide an answer to the major question of how time can vanish while remaining omnipresent.

  I hope this affords the reader a reasonably satisfactory explanation of how I was able to participate in a future event that had taken place not only in the past but in another dimension. I myself was temporarily less preoccupied with this problem than interested in knowing where I would land this time. After the incredible coincidence that had landed me in Qwerty’s dimension, my chances of emerging in my own, native dimension were very slim – indeed, absolutely nil.

  From the

  ‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’

  by Professor Abdullah Nightingale

  Dimensional Hiatuses [cont.]. Once a person has travelled from one dimension to another, returning by the same route is the unlikeliest thing that could happen to him in the known dimensional system. The odds against his landing in the original dimension are a nightillion to one.

  A nightillion?

  Nightillion. A mathematical unit of measurement first computed by Professor Abdullah Nightingale. A nightillion is a quantity unimaginable by the normal brain, only by one that has at least six ancillary brains. In common parlance, a nightillion signifies ‘inconceivably many’.

  I went plunging down through the depths of the cosmos. To be absolutely honest, I didn’t find this journey half as exciting as the first. Once you’ve seen one spiral nebula you’ve seen them all and know what they look like, so a repeat performance isn’t anything like as thrilling. Like an old space-flight pro, I was preparing myself for a longish bout of carefree catalepsy when my descent was abruptly cut short and I tumbled out into another dimension.

  I realize that I’m running the risk of losing my last well-disposed reader, but I have a duty to tell the truth and can only report what actually happened: I popped out of the very same dimensional hiatus into which I’d originally fallen. This was not only the most improbable of all the possibilities in the universe, but the most unpleasant. Why? Because the Spiderwitch would be waiting for me beside the hole, and the odds against my escaping it had been drastically shortened, not lengthened, by my fall. Already exhausted by my marathon run, I had since been subjected to the stress of falling through a dimensional hiatus.

  In any case, my existence between the dimensions was at an end. Had it been the longest or the shortest of my lives to date? Hard to say. Both, perhaps.

  But there was no Spiderwitch in sight.

  Nor was it night-time, as it had been when I fell down the hole, but broad daylight.

  Same place, different time

  It would, after all, have been a truly impossible coincidence had I tumbled out of the dimensional hiatus at the very same moment in time. That simple fact accounted for the spider’s absence: I had emerged on another occasion. It was another day, perhaps. Another week. Another month. A year or a century later. Or a million years earlier. Any juncture in history was possible.

  The spider had gone, that was the main thing. Perhaps it had crawled back into the forest to die of starvation. Perhaps it had yet to be born. Perhaps it had tumbled into the dimensional hiatus after me and was sailing through outer space. Best of all, perhaps it was even now cooking in a primeval lake of boiling pitch or would in the future be devoured by monsters still more frightful than itself.

  But one shouldn’t bear a grudge. It was conceivable, though not very probable, that the creature had found its way back into the dimension from which, according to Professor Nightingale’s theory, its ancestors had come. The universe abounds in possibilities.

  For all that, I hurriedly proceeded to quit the sinister forest. The trees became steadily sparser, and within an hour I had reached the edge. A curtain seemed to part, disclosing a view of a new world. I was looking down at a pale brown, apparently endless plain whose extremities melted indistinguishably into the sky. There wasn’t a single tree or mountain for as far as the eye could see. This was quite all right with me, after all the dire experiences I’d previously undergone in mountainous or wooded areas.

  I was completely dehydrated, so I replenished my reserves at a forest spring and drank, greedily and noisily, for minutes on end. Then I made my way down a hill and across some withered grass until I reached the edge of the great plain. The surface consisted of very fine brown, sticky sand that smelt of vanilla. I stuck a paw in it and tasted some: it was pleasantly sweet. This had to be the Demerara Desert of which Nightingale had told us in class. Somewhere over there, at the far end of that desert, Atlantis must lie. I wanted to go there.

  Before I could set out on such a hazardous trek, with all its predictable hardships, I needed a whole capful of sleep. I simply stretched out on the soft, sugary sand. The sun was high, but I was too exhausted for that to matter. While slowly drifting off, I reflected on my somewhat unusual situation and tried to gauge whether it should be deemed good or bad.

  I didn’t even know if I was in the future, the past, or the present. There were only two certainties: first that I was in my home dimension, and secondly that I was in Zamonia. That, at least, was encouraging. Furthermore, I hadn’t arranged to meet anyone. My past lay behind me, my future ahead, and I had no commitments either way, so it didn’t really matter what the date was.

  Consoled by that thought, I fell asleep.

  From the

  ‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’

  by Professor Abdullah Nightingale

  DEMERARA DESERT, THE. Most deserts are wide, flat tracts of land rendered largely deficient in vegetation by lack of water except in places where underground springs favour the development of oases.

  Deserts are divided according to their nature into rocky, sandy, salty, or sweet deserts. The Demerara Desert, a mixed desert of the latter category, consists of Precambrian shell limestone, Early Zamonian lava flour, and prehistoric sugar with a thermal value of 55,000 calories per cubic yard. The sugar derives from an expanse of wild sugar cane which thousands of years of exposure to sunlight has concentrated into pure, crystalline cane sugar. The basic constituent of the Demerara Desert is a sweetish-tasting carbohydrate, soluble in water and alcohol but not in ether, which forms osazones when mixed with phenylhydrazine. These, depending on the number of carbon atoms in the molecule, may be trioses, tetroses, pentoses, hexoses, heptoses, octoses, or nonoses.

  Because of the baking properties of their staple material, the Demerara Desert’s surface formations are far more diverse and bizarr
e than those of other deserts. The wind, which both accumulates sugar dust and disperses it, makes a major contribution to the Demerara Desert’s sculptural appearance. It can pick up sugar, transport it through the air for many miles, and add it to an existing sugar sculpture, only to erode parts of the formation a few hours later. Thus the outward appearance of the Demerara Desert changes continuously and far more dramatically than that of other deserts. If the air is moist enough and the wind strong enough, they can produce works of art that would turn any sculptor green with envy.

  The fanciful appearance of this expanse of desert has always attracted adventurers, gamblers and other rootless individuals who prefer disorder to order. Many have gone off into the Demerara Desert to seek their fortune, but very few have ever returned, and many of those that did were in a state of mental derangement.

  A rude awakening

  I was awakened by the Spiderwitch – it was standing right over me when I opened my eyes. All I saw at first, being dazzled by the sunlight, was its long, thin, hairy legs. With relish, the creature dribbled some of its secretion right on to my face. The corrosive process was already under way, because I couldn’t move so much as a finger. Perhaps my body had already been destroyed or was at least half dissolved. I tried to scream, but even that was too much for me.

  Then I woke up properly. A friendly camedary was standing over me on its thin, rickety legs, licking my face.

  From the

  ‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’

  by Professor Abdullah Nightingale

  Camedary, The. Hoofed mammal belonging to the suborder known as Tylopoda. The hybrid offspring of a camel and a dromedary, the camedary possesses all the attributes of both animals and thus has three humps. Some ten feet long from muzzle to tail, it is sensationally unintelligent but capable of carrying heavy loads in extreme desert temperatures. Its three humps enable it to store immense quantities of water, and it can, if need be, work flat out for as long as three weeks without taking a drink. Situated on the humps are specially bred teats from which, with a modicum of skill, drinking water can be extracted. Camedaries vary in appearance between plug ugly and plain stupid. Although they seem far from ideal mounts, what with their matted coats, shambling gait, half-closed eyes, and irksome, bleating voices, they are faithful and amiable by nature, can easily be ridden with the aid of a crude bridle, and have no dietary fads. What is more, their dung makes excellent fuel. Camedaries are bred by the →Muggs, a nomadic tribe that has roamed the Demerara Desert from time immemorial, reputedly in search of a legendary city named →Anagrom Ataf.