by Walter Moers
‘That’s the Valley of Discarded Ideas,’ 1600H said sadly. ‘My home.’ We descended into the valley by way of a switchback neuron path.
1600H explained the hopeless predicament of the bad flashes of inspiration that lived in the valley. To justify their existence they spent their days roaming the lanes and trying to marry themselves off in the vain hope that two bad ideas might produce a good one.
It was like a fish market. Blobs of light stood on every street corner, loudly extolling their own alleged virtues. Others kept clutching me by the arm and claiming to be the idea of the century. Many stood around in groups, arguing over which of them was the best. None of them took offence at my unusual appearance, they were all too busy pursuing their futile activities.
1600H was detained and engaged in conversation. Meanwhile, the crowd swept me on. When I reached a fork and turned to look, I found that I’d lost 1600H in the seething mass. I decided simply to stay where I was and wait until he was borne past on the tide.
Something caught hold of my arm and accosted me. ‘Hey, want an idea? You look like you could use a good one.’
The bearded idea
The first thing that struck me about this idea was his mouth odour. He pressed against me, wafting his foul breath into my face. The second thing was his beard. None of the other blobs of light were bearded, but this one had a beard that covered his body almost completely from the nose down. I concluded that I was dealing with a particularly stale specimen.
‘What are you offering?’ I asked, to be polite.
The idea gave me a lopsided grin. ‘Er … This is my idea: How about short-circuiting a few nerve fibres? Well, how about it? Are you game?’
‘You think I should short-circuit a few nerve fibres?’
‘Yes. A good idea, don’t you think?’
I couldn’t help laughing – a tactless thing to do, as I realized too late. ‘Yes, well, I know I’m not the Fount of Wisdom …’ The bad idea sounded positively hostile all of a sudden. ‘What did you expect – the secret of perpetual motion? Picky, aren’t you!’
I looked around for 1600H. The situation was getting unpleasant. The walking beard eyed me suspiciously. ‘What sort of creature are you, anyway? You don’t look much like an idea to me. You wouldn’t by any chance be from the other side of the brain, would you?’
The idea clutched my arm and raised his voice. ‘Hey, everyone! Look what we’ve got here!’
The noise and bustle around me died away, all eyes turned in my direction. The pressure on my arm increased.
‘This young gentleman thinks he’s too good for us!’
Curiosity turned to anger, the busy hum of voices gave way to malevolent mutters.
‘What’s he doing here?’ called someone. ‘He’s probably one of the riff-raff from the right hemisphere!’
The other ideas formed a close-packed ring round me. This incident seemed to be presenting them with a welcome diversion from their futile activities. ‘He looks quite different from us!’ cried a high-pitched voice from the crowd.
‘I’m just passing through!’ I said defensively, but my words were drowned by the general tumult.
‘He’s a spy!’ crowed the bearded idea. ‘He’s planning to steal our good ideas!’
That really got my goat. I wrenched my arm away and gave the idea a shove. ‘Don’t talk rubbish!’ I yelled. ‘What is there to steal here? Not a thing! You’re just a bunch of totally useless, crackbrained notions!’
The mob fell silent. There are times when the truth is the worst possible thing you can come out with. The ideas looked more hostile still, the ring drew still closer. It was the bearded idea that uttered the clincher.
‘We ought to throw him into the Lake of Oblivion!’
The Lake of Oblivion
I was seized by numerous hands and hoisted into the air.
‘Yes! Throw him into the Lake of Oblivion! He’s a spy! Into the Lake of Oblivion with him!’
I was borne off by the mob like a cork on the high seas.
‘Into the Lake of Oblivion with him!’ croaked the bearded ringleader. ‘And then we’ll start a revolution. This time they’ve gone too far. We’ll reduce the whole brain to chaos. They’ve trampled us underfoot for too long. Into the lake with him!’
Bollogg Brain, The [cont.]. Situated in every Bollogg’s brain is a so-called Lake of Oblivion, a pool of liquid forgetfulness not unlike a lake of boiling pitch. Anyone or anything that falls into it dies of oblivion, a peculiarly drastic form of demise because nothing remains of the deceased, not even a vague recollection.
To die of oblivion – to vanish for ever without leaving behind the smallest memory, to simply dissolve without having etched myself into the minds of my contemporaries – was the most unpleasant end I could conceive of. I had been born to become famous – even, perhaps, immortal. What now confronted me was the diametrical opposite.
The Lake of Oblivion seethed beneath me like boiling lava, sending up sulphurous fumes that almost took my breath away. I was poised on a cliff above it with four ideas holding me tightly by the forepaws while the bearded one stood beside us and harangued the others, who had gathered around the lake, in a demented voice.
‘This is the beginning of a new age!’ he cried. ‘We shall seize control of the brain. Away with the old order! Long live anarchy! We shall fill every corner of the brain with chaos. And this creature – this henchman of the old cerebral establishment – will be our first victim. On the count of three, throw him into the Lake of Oblivion!’
I racked my brains for a means of escape, but it would have been pointless to start a fight with so many opponents.
‘One!’ cried the bearded idea.
What did liquid forgetfulness feel like? Was there a chance of escaping from it by swimming?
Bollogg Brain, The [cont.]. Liquid forgetfulness, which consists of equal parts of hydrochloric acid and Bollogg bile, is inhabited by millions of voracious mortality bacteria. Anyone taking a dip in the Lake of Oblivion is as unlikely to survive as if he had jumped naked into the crater of an active volcano.
‘Two!’ The ideas thrust me to the edge of the cliff.
‘And …’ The bearded one raised his arm in readiness to give the crucial signal.
‘STOP!’ bellowed an imperious voice.
It was 1600H. My diminutive friend had managed to elbow his way through the throng. He strode resolutely up to the ringleader, who recoiled, looking rather taken aback.
Then he did something I really hadn’t been expecting: he seized the bad idea’s beard and wrenched it off. It was false! What came to light beneath it was the most repulsive sight I’d ever seen. Not even the offspring of a Hobgoblin and a Troglotroll could have looked more loathsome.
’You fools!’ cried 1600H. ‘Don’t you know who this is? It’s Insanity!’
The crowd let out a yell and drew back. The idea that had turned out to be Insanity spread his sharp claws and hissed: ‘Don’t touch me! I’ll bite anyone who dares to lay a hand on me, and you know how infectious I am! Sssssss!’
The crowd parted like a piece of cloth ripped down the middle. Nobody wanted to come into contact with Insanity, who forged a path through the others, hissing and lashing out with his claws.
‘Out of my way! Sssssss! I’m Insanity, so take care! Sssssss!’
Insanity vaulted some cerebral furrows and gained the mouth of a tunnel. There he turned and shouted, ‘One day you’ll all be mine! As for you …’ He levelled a finger at me. ‘I’ll settle accounts with you personally! Sssssss!’
Then he disappeared into the tunnel, followed by the echoes of a peal of laughter that made all my fur stand on end.
1600H addressed the crowd. ‘Have you nothing better to do than fall for Insanity’s stupid tricks?’ he demanded.
Sheepish murmurs and shuffling feet. Odd words of apology could be heard: ‘Sorry … we only thought … pretty good disguise …’
‘This is Bluebear, who’s passing thr
ough,’ 1600H continued. ‘He’s my personal guest, and I want you all to treat him accordingly, is that clear?’
The mob dispersed in silence. Then they started scurrying around and hawking their wares as if nothing had happened.
‘He keeps trying it on,’ 1600H told me when we had left the Valley of Discarded Ideas and were walking along a quiet tunnel. ‘Insanity is the most evil creature imaginable. He creeps along the cerebral passages and tries to inflict as much damage as possible.
He saws through nerve fibres and causes short circuits in the synapses. He’s a master of disguise and intrigue. His object is to drive the whole brain insane.’
‘But that’s stupid,’ I said. ‘He’d destroy himself.’
‘You’re right. There’s only one explanation for his behaviour.’ 1600H tapped his forehead and lowered his voice. ‘He’s not quite right in the …’
In the Planmaker’s cave
The Planmaker was occasionally a cube that hovered about three feet above the ground. He lived in a spacious cavity beside an exceptionally quiet cerebral convolution. The cavity was completely empty apart from him. I said he was occasionally a cube, because he was forever changing shape and texture. At the moment he was a cube illuminated from within, and abstract symbols were flickering on each of his rectangular sides.
One side seemed to be displaying a paper pattern for a man’s shirt, another a weather map, another the ground plan of a cathedral. Then the surfaces changed once more. They now displayed a chart, a timetable, and a view of some solar system or other.
The Planmaker changed shape completely from one moment to the next, becoming a pyramid, a tetrahedron, or an entirely smooth sphere inscribed with all the orbits followed by our planet. He also rotated continuously on his own axis, which made it quite a strain to watch him.
His voice seemed to issue from deep within him. It was a high-pitched, almost sing-song voice, and it gave an electric crackle whenever it uttered a sibilant, but it wasn’t disagreeable.
‘All right, ynchronie your watche!’ the Planmaker said in an authoritative tone.
1600H glanced at his wrist – he wasn’t wearing one at all – and mechanically replied, ‘Sixteen hundred hours.’
‘Er, nineteen hours forty-seven minutes,’ I called out at random.
The Planmaker looked triumphant. ‘ixteen hour even minute!
Exellent!’
This, I assumed, was a form of ritual greeting.
‘Permit me to introduce Bluebear,’ said 1600H. ‘He’s passing through and he needs a plan of the brain so as to get to the other side. Can you help?’
‘T…’ hissed the Planmaker, and transformed himself into a rotating disk bearing a medical diagram of a brain.
‘A brain map, eh?,’ he mused. ‘It’ bound to take a while. Don’t you realie how complicated a Bollogg’ brain i? How many mile of paage there are inide it? If all the paage in thi brain were put together, they’d tretch from the earth to the moon. You don’t by any chane need a map of all the moon’ crater, do you? I could ell you one for a ong …’
A very handsome map of the moon, with the craters neatly drawn in, appeared on the back of the rotating disk.
‘Come now,’ 1600H cut in. ‘How long will it take?’
‘Two month,’ lisped the Planmaker. ‘At leat.’
‘How much?’
‘eventeen thouand intilla.’
‘Seventeen thousand scintillas? Come off it!’ said 1600H. ‘Ten thousand, not a scintilla more.’
The Planmaker turned into a truncated cone resembling the fez of a Moroccan carpet dealer. His upper surface was now displaying something that looked like the street map of a casbah.
‘ixteen thouand.’
‘Twelve thousand five hundred.’
‘You’re imply ruining me, but it’ a deal! Twelve thouand five hundred intilla two month from now, ame place, ame time. ynchronie your watche!’
The Planmaker turned back into a cube, which was evidently his favourite shape.
‘Sixteen hundred hours,’ said 1600H.
‘Fourteen twenty-nine,’ I lied.
‘ixteen fifty-ix,’ cried the Planmaker, and showed us out of his cavern. ‘It’ high time I tarted work.’
Scintillas
Not content with having saved my life on two occasions and helped to procure me a map of the brain so that I could cross it, 1600H now proposed to shame me by generously offering to put me up.
I had to stay somewhere for the next two months, after all, so 1600H invited me to overnight in his small sleeping cave. It was a modest cerebral furrow near the Lake of Oblivion, whose sulphurous vapours came drifting over at times, but it was relatively peaceful. This was to be my base for the next two months, and it was from there that I had to get hold of twelve thousand five hundred scintillas. I had heard of these at the Nocturnal Academy, where I smoked my first Gloomberg algae cigarette in a scintilla shower.
From the
‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’
by Professor Abdullah Nightingale
Scintillas. These are the bedrock of any brain, being the basic material from which thoughts can develop: thoughts that have yet to be thought, so to speak. Just as a butterfly can evolve from a caterpillar, so a scintilla can become a thought. Invisible at first, scintillas abound throughout the Zamonian atmosphere. Once they have penetrated the brain (I can recommend my scintilla shower as a means of accelerating that process), they assume the form of plump little worms that vegetate in the cerebral cortex. They occur in various colours. Many are red, many others ochre, golden yellow, copper-coloured, silver, green, grey, violet, pale brown, or dark blue, but all have a metallic sheen. Scintillas are, so to speak, the currency of every cerebral community, the basis of every idea, and the stuff of dreams.
How to come by some scintillas, that was my problem. They were like money: they didn’t lie around in the street, nor did people simply chuck them at you; you had to earn them somehow. If I wanted to make some scintillas I needed a job. Once again, it was 1600H who came to my assistance.
‘Are you imaginative?’ he asked me.
I admitted to possessing limited but adequate powers of imagination. ‘That’s a rare talent. Imagination can earn you a mint of scintillas in here. You could become a dream composer. Dream composers are always in demand.’
The dream organ
A Bollogg’s head sleeps all the time, so it must also dream continuously. Situated just behind the Bollogg’s eyes, 1600H informed me, was the dream organ, the instrument on which dreams were generated. The dream organ had to be manned day and night without a break, otherwise the Bollogg’s head would wake up – a disastrous development, because it would throw the whole brain into confusion. The head would try to walk or eat or perform some other action for which it needed the body, and this would create short circuits in the nerve fibres, or, at worst, enable Insanity to seize power. Thus the brain had to be lulled with a never-ending supply of dreams, a task that had, over the millennia, subjected dream composers to a certain amount of wear and tear.
Anyone who felt he had a vocation could become a composer of dreams, and this means of earning scintillas was practised by good and bad ideas alike. Work had to go on round the clock without a break, so the composers relieved each other in shifts and job vacancies always existed. Scintillas were paid into a cerebral exchequer by all the brain’s inhabitants, a form of taxation that funded the dream composers’ salaries. They got ten scintillas an hour, not a princely sum, but it was at least a start.
The dream organ wasn’t a musical instrument, of course. It was just a name for a big, multicoloured nexus of thousands of nerve endings in a cavity behind the Bollogg’s eyes. Different dream images were generated in the Bollogg’s brain according to which nerve ending you plucked or how hard you squeezed it. It took me a while to discover which endings produced which images, but I eventually, with constant practice, mastered the tech
nique. The images were projected on the back of the Bollogg’s eyes, which formed one of the walls of the organ loft. Most of my colleagues simply squeezed and tugged the nerve endings at random until their shift was over. This produced the sort of confused dreams nearly everyone has: disjointed, fragmentary recollections, bizarre nightmares, indiscriminately jumbled scenes from the past. I was attracted by the possibility of welding seemingly unrelated images into meaningful compositions; of constructing stories that made more sense than dreams of having forgotten to put one’s trousers on. If the image of a lion were wedded to that of an antelope – to take a simple example – the result would be a life-or-death chase lasting minutes on end. That was more exciting than simply projecting a haphazard series of images the way other composers did. Stored in the Bollogg’s brain were some incredible memories of antediluvian times: motion pictures of gigantic lizards doing battle, of Cyclopses playing football with mountains, of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods, meteor showers, primeval storms, tidal waves, extinct monsters, and wars with other families of giants. The Bollogg must have been so tall that his head projected almost into space. He could make out every last crater on the moon, see Mars and Saturn – indeed, survey the whole of our solar system.
There were images from the childhood and adolescence of the Cyclops, when he was still small and rode mammoths and wrestled with giant gorillas. He pelted other young Cyclopses, who merely laughed at him, with rocks the size of houses. He had traversed the whole of Zamonia several times and preserved some superb landscape shots of it in his memory. He had witnessed almost all of Zamonia’s early history and seen all its creatures, extinct ones included. Dinosaurs scuttled around at his feet like rats, volcanoes looked from his standpoint like dainty little soup bowls. He could wash his hair in a storm cloud and, if thirsty, drain a sizeable mountain lake. No one who aspired to compose magnificent dreams could have wished for more grandiose material.
