At first the rat seemed not to notice the airship, but continued to struggle up the slope. You could see from the way it moved that it was totally exhausted with heat and effort, but still somehow driving itself on. It seemed to hear the engine for the first time as it paused for a moment to rest at the top of the dune.
The rat turned and looked back at the sky, shading its eyes with one paw. It unslung its rifle and waited. When the airship came in range it started to shoot, but it was so tired that the barrel rocked to and fro and most of the shots went wild. A few may have hit the gas bag, but if so the Burra sealed them almost at once.
As the airship sailed by James saw that the explorer was a large rat with almost black fur, nothing like horrible General Weil. He knew it would have killed him if it could, and killed the Burra too—supposing there was any way you could kill something like the Burra—rather than let them reach the centre first, but even so he felt sorry for it. It had tried so hard and got so far. When they were out of range it slung its rifle onto its back and started on all fours down the next slope.
Now from this height he could see the centre. Or rather he could see where it was. The sun was shining slantwise again, and the ridged rings stood out strongly with the shadows between them. He could see their far sides dwindling into the distance. At the very heart was something like a huge pool.
Done it, he thought. We’ll be first. We should be there before the sun goes down.
The thought was still in his mind when the engine coughed, stopped, started, coughed twice, and stopped completely.
“Out of fuel,” said the Burra.
“We’re almost there. We can just drift. The rat can’t possibly catch up.”
James watched a ridge below slide backward, slow as dreams. The valley took an age to cross. Directly over the next ridge the airship stopped completely.
“No wind,” said the Burra.
Chapter 18: The Box Opens
The sun went down through bars of scarlet. The airship hung in stillness. Nothing moved. It was as though the black pool made the stillness, stopping the wind that had blown so steadily across the desert from ever quite reaching it. Suddenly the light left the ridges of the dunes and all the desert was in shadow. James stopped watching out aft to see how the rat was getting on. It had crossed three ridges since the airship stopped. There were four before it caught up and then six more to the black centre.
“Can’t you wiggle your fins and sort of row us forward?” he said.
“It may be worth a try,” said the Burra.
James heard a gentle swishing noise overhead. Slowly the airship swung around until it was facing the way they had come. The last rim of the sun dipped out of sight and at the same moment shadow swept up and covered the gas bag. Stars came out like lights being turned on. The airship was still over the same dune.
“I know,” said James. “If you go lower, you can let me down on a rope like you did when I went to look at the lizard. I’ll tow you.”
“Do you think you can?”
“We’ve got to get there first.”
The moment his shoes touched the cinders James started down the slope with the rope still knotted to his shoulders. His feet made rattling little avalanches at each step. Above him he could hear a different rattle and slither as every strand of cord the Burra could spare undid itself and then knotted itself to his line. The longer the better. There was no point in trying to tow until he was well up the far slope, because he’d be pulling mainly downward.
At last he crossed the valley floor and started to climb. It was just like his dream, step after plodding step, with the cinders slithering back beneath his weight so that it was like trying to run up a down escalator. Still no use pulling because that would just drag him back and down instead of hauling the airship forward. The weight of the rope began to be a nuisance. He gave up trying to climb straight and zigzagged instead, though at the end of each zig he was only a few feet higher than the last one. The dune was like a mountain. And the explorer rat had four feet. Much easier like that. It could probably climb straight. If it could cross two dunes while he was crossing one, it would catch up with him.
The thought drove him desperately on. Long after his legs had become floppy bags of jelly, they kept moving somehow while his lungs sucked at the crackling dusty air. At last the slope eased and he could climb straight. On, on. He staggered to the top and turned to pull. He wouldn’t be able to make the next ridge, not without a rest.
The moon had risen, full and bright. The airship glistened like a sleeping fish in the black of the night. James gripped the rope to haul it in, but as soon as he had his feet firm it started hauling of its own accord from the other end, pulling so hard that he had to lean right back, like in tug-of-war.
The Burra was right. It was that first bit of pull when the rope was almost level—that was what mattered. The closer the airship got, the more it would waste energy just pulling down, not longways. But the Burra judged its course beautifully, pumping gas so that it could swoop down directly toward James and skimming the basket past so close he could have put up his hand and touched it.
“Run and jump when I call!” shouted the Burra as it whistled by.
James turned. The Burra was pumping gas the other way now, making its flight curve upward. The rope was paying itself out. He got ready. The Burra’s grating cry floated across the night.
“Now!”
James ran, sprinting across the clogging cinders. The rope kept pace, so that it hung in an easy curve between him and the airship. The slope dipped down, steeper and steeper.
“Jump!” shouted the Burra.
It was more of a stagger than a leap, but it was something, a forward effort, and he was in the air. The rope had tightened at the last moment and now he was swooping through the air like Tarzan on a vine, with the wind whistling around him, out and down across the valley, faster and faster, and then up, slower now, and landing with a soft thump, sprawling on cinders well up the next slope.
He flung out his arms and legs, spreading himself as wide as he could to stop himself from slipping down. Carefully he rose to his feet and started to climb. Much better than last time, most of the steep part done for him, but still harder work than he’d ever done in his life. If it hadn’t been so important—he didn’t know why— he would have lain down on the cinders and given up. It wouldn’t have been fair, asking him to kill himself, almost, climbing and hauling like that. But it was.
Slowly he staggered the last few steps to the top of the next ridge, turned, and dug his feet into the cinders, ready to be the anchor by which the airship could haul itself forward and on. The Burra seemed to understand how tired he was. Perhaps it could feel his feelings along the rope. Anyway, it gave him a bit of a rest before the rope tightened. As he stood there, gasping and shivering, a movement caught his eye. Not on the ridge he had just left, but the one beyond. For a few seconds a white spot gleamed in the moonlight, with a darkness below it too large to be its shadow. The thing scuttled across the cinders and vanished into the valley. In that moment the whole urgency of the race came back into James’s mind. He forgot his tiredness and leaned against the pull of the tautening rope, trying to hurry the airship on.
“That rat’s only one ridge behind,” he called as the airship skimmed past. “He’s running!”
“We know,” called the Burra. “We are just keeping pace. Ready? Now!”
Knowing what it was going to be like, James managed the Tarzan bit much better this time, and the Burra had had some practice too. James landed farther up the next dune and managed not to slither at all. So they moved on. Swoop, scramble, haul. Swoop, scramble, haul. The swoops were exciting, and the hauling bits weren’t too bad, but the scrambling, slithering climb seemed worse and worse, even though the Burra was landing him farther up the dune each time. Only the thought of the rat scuttling along behind kept him going. That rat, he knew,
had crossed hundreds of miles of desert. Its companions had died, and so had its lizards. It had travelled on foot over the burning cinders for a whole long day. And still, somehow, it was managing to run. General Weil didn’t deserve to have a rat like that exploring for him. He didn’t see it again, but the Burra did. They were just keeping pace.
The Burra counted the ridges still to go. There had been six when James had started to tow the airship. Four, three, two, last one … He staggered to the top of the ridge, turned, dug his heels in, hauled just as before, and then as the airship swooped by he turned again, ran and leaped …
Out over nothing. Out over an enormous blackness, with the rope lifting him in toward the swaying basket while the pumps chuckered away, shoving gas into the bag so that the airship would float up as well as out. He scrambled over the edge of the basket and sat down.
“Whew!” he said.
His legs were like cold modelling clay and he went on shivering with exhaustion even after his blankets had slithered along to wrap themselves around him. As soon as the basket had stopped swinging around, he crawled to its side and looked over the edge.
The blackness was a hole, but there was no bottom to it, and no sides.
The moon was well up by now. If the hole had been an ordinary crater, however deep and still, you would have seen a bit of its edges, cliffs going down into shadow, with a glimmer or two below. But there wasn’t anything, only blackness.
The hole was bigger than itself. If you looked at its edges, where the last circle of dune sloped down to it, it was about a mile across. But when you looked down into it you could see—although you couldn’t actually see anything—you could see that it was much, much bigger than that. Inside, it went on forever.
And it was still, far stiller than a stone or a pool. Stiller than empty sky. The stars in the sky flung their light out at 186,000 miles a second, but when the light hit the hole it stopped moving. It became nothing.
It became part of the nothing that the crater was. The original nothing, which was there before anything was there, like he’d told the man in the Nothing Shop. The same sort of nothing he’d got in his box.
This was where the box belonged. He took it out of his anorak pocket and looked at it in the moonlight. It hadn’t changed.
“What d’you suppose I’m supposed to do?” he said. “Just drop it in?”
“We don’t know,” said the Burra. “There is not much time. That rat is almost at the last ridge.”
“I’m sure I’m supposed to open it first.”
James was kneeling in the silence, twisting and tugging at the box as he’d done so often before, when he heard music. It was all on one note, the usual computer bleep, but it had a dancing sort of rhythm, like a song that suddenly comes into your mind when you thought you’d forgotten it. The computer’s indicator light was shining extra-bright.
“Well, someone is happy,” said the Burra. It produced its grating laugh and patted the computer casing in a friendly way. The movement froze. The Burra blinked.
“Oh,” it said.
In the silence and stillness you noticed every movement. James wasn’t looking that way, but suddenly he saw the explorer’s white sun helmet gleam on the last ridge. He was just going to call out when he felt the Burra’s furry, fingerless paw touch his forearm.
His mind fizzed. The only way he was able to think about it afterward looked completely stupid. He saw an equation in his head. He saw it so clearly that he felt he could have picked the figures and symbols up and moved them around, but he knew that as soon as he let go they’d slide back to the same place. The equation didn’t mean anything.
0 - 0 ÷ 0 = !
That’s all. But there was a sort of spinning excitement in the 0s, all possible possibles balancing each other out, meeting in the glorious explosion of the !, which was like the largest of all rockets roaring away toward the sky, bathed in the flame of its thrust, turning gravity inside out with the sheer power of its take-off, so that it would never be able to fall back into nothing again.
In that fizzing instant James’s hands knew the secret of the box. They had to pull and push at the same time, twisting in both directions at once, with a sudden little jiggle in the middle that had to come at exactly the right moment.
He did the pull-push and started the twists. He felt the box beginning to open, so he held it over the side and did the jiggle and finished the twists. It didn’t open into two. It opened into three. That was the real secret. It seemed to spring apart in his hands.
He dropped it and leaned over the side to watch it fall.
BOOM!
Chapter 19: Star Tree
The explosion was so huge that it could have blown the world to dust. Only the hole ate it. The box must have fallen just far enough before it finished opening, so that the enormous force loosed itself into that enormous nothing.
Then there was silence.
Something funny had happened to time. James watched a millionth of a millionth of a second go by. He didn’t need a clock or anything. Inside his mind he saw it happen, and had plenty of time to think about it. His mind was floating. The fizz the computer had put there, letting him understand how the box opened, was gone. Instead he had a feeling of pure light inside his head, like a perfect summer morning, dew sparkling on every blade of all the ideas that lay there waiting to be thought. The ideas were maths. You thought them with numbers, and they were beautiful. Now James understood why the computer had been so tiresome, not helping on the journey. It had to think about the box. It had to think immense and difficult formulas and then make them balance all the way down to the equation with the three 0s and the !. Besides, if you could think like that all the time, you’d never want to do anything else.
Something touched his arm.
“Good-bye, James,” said the Burra. “Thank you for coming. We could not have done it without you.”
“Where are you going?”
“The Dump is starting to function. Look.”
James turned his eyes toward the desert. Something was happening. The dunes, those vast, still ripples, had begun to move. They were sliding in towards the centre, falling in a roaring cindery torrent down into the hole of nothing over which the airship hung. The nearest circle was tumbling already. Halfway down its slope, riding it like a surfer, was the explorer rat. It was only a black spot on the huge grey curve, but for a moment it was the centre of everything. It was standing on its hind legs, propping itself on its rifle, and holding its other paw up in the rat salute. It came like a hero.
“We have got to get there first, you see,” said the Burra. “Good-bye, James.”
It lifted its head off and chucked it over the side. Legs, arms, and body leapt of their own accord. Everything was going. The basket plunged as the engine undid its bolts and rolled itself overboard. Only the computer was left, bleeping pitifully and trying to shrug itself along. It had always been so busy thinking it had never learned to move. James picked it up and tossed it out. It fell with a burst of electronic hurrahs.
James leaned over the side to watch. Down below, infinitely deep into the blackness, things were beginning. The blackness had arranged itself into a whirlpool, a whirlpool without a whirl, like soup being liquefied in a kitchen blender. Only the blackness wasn’t coming back up the sides, the way soup does in a blender, it was going on. Through. Beyond, to where a universe was being born. Stars and galaxies were streaming into existence like an upside-down fireworks display. An upside-down tree. They were fiery blossoms on the tree of darkness, all grown out of the box of nothing in that million millionth of a second when it blew itself apart, subtracting its nothing from its nothing and dividing it by its nothing and making !.
The new universe was the !.
James couldn’t use his eyes to see the stars and galaxies being born because the light from them could never come back through the hole.
Even light didn’t travel fast enough. He saw them with his mind, blazing with the pure light of thought.
He saw something else, too. It really had mattered, winning the race across the desert because it meant the new universe was now going to be a Burra universe. He had no idea what that meant, or what a Burra universe would be like, but he knew that however it finished up there would be a sort of kindliness in its nature, as there had been in the Burra. Brave though the big rat was, there was no kindliness in it. A Burra universe would be an odd sort of place, but it would be all right.
He looked to see where the rat had got to, expecting that it would by now have slid into the hole on its wave, but it hadn’t. It was still in the same place, halfway down the slope of the dune with the pouring cinders racing past it. It was like a solid ghost. The cinders seemed to be streaming through it and roaring over the edge without moving the rat an inch.
At first James thought this must be a trick of the moonlight, but it wasn’t. He could see surprisingly clearly. In fact, the night was becoming almost as bright as day. The moon was huge. Half of it was hidden by the gas bag, but the other half was too bright to look at.
He turned his eyes away. Out on the horizon, above the marching grey ridges of the dunes, something glittered under the brilliant moon. Not stars, but a jagged line of brightness, where snow on the peaks of mountains reflected the moonlight. But he couldn’t possibly see the mountains from here. They’d been out of sight for two days, below the horizon.
They were above it now. It wasn’t only the dunes moving. The mountains, too, were churning in, sucked by the terrific gravity of the hole. Above their peaks, the stars were growing brighter.
They moved and jiggled, as if James were looking at them through crinkled glass. As he watched, two of them collided in a burst of sharp white light, wincing bright. They had collided because they were moving in toward a central point and their paths had got too close to each other. So the stars were coming too.
A Box of Nothing Page 9
