by Neil Gaiman
“Only a handful of seconds have passed there since we came through it,” his father told him. “That is the nature of time. It flows faster when it is younger and the course is narrower: at the end of all things time has spread and slowed, like oil spilled on a still pond.”
Then he removed the sluggish spell-creature he had placed on the casement as a lock, and he pushed against the inner casing, which opened slowly. A chill wind came through it which made Farfal shiver. “You send us to our deaths, Father,” he said.
“We all go to our deaths,” said his father. “And yet, here you are, a million years before your birth, still alive. Truly we are all composed of miracles. Now, son, here is a bag, which, as you will soon discover, has been imbued with Swann’s Imbuement of Remarkable Capacity, and will hold all that you place inside it, regardless of weight or mass or volume. When we get there, you must take as many stones as you can and place them in the bag. I myself will run up the hill to the nets and check them for treasures—or for things that would be regarded as treasures if I were to bring them back to the now and the here.”
“Do I go first?” asked Farfal, clutching the bag.
“Of course.”
“It’s so cold.”
In reply his father prodded him in the back with a hard finger. Farfal clambered, grumbling, through the casement, and his father followed.
“This is too bad,” said Farfal. They walked out of the cottage at the end of time and Farfal bent to pick up pebbles. He placed the first in the bag, where it glinted greenly. He picked up another. The sky was dark but it seemed as if something filled the sky, something without shape.
There was a flash of something not unlike lightning, and in it he could see his father hauling in nets from the trees at the top of the hill.
A crackling. The nets flamed and were gone. Balthasar ran down the hill gracelessly and breathlessly. He pointed at the sky. “It is Nothing!” he said. “Nothing has swallowed the hilltop! Nothing has taken over!”
There was a powerful wind then, and Farfal watched his father crackle, and then raise into the air, and then vanish. He backed away from the Nothing, a darkness within the darkness with tiny lightnings playing at its edges, and then he turned and ran, into the house, to the door into the second room. But he did not go through into the second room. He stood there in the doorway, and then turned back to the Dying Earth. Farfal the Unfortunate watched as the Nothing took the outer walls and the distant hills and the skies, and then he watched, unblinking, as Nothing swallowed the cold sun, watched until there was nothing left but a dark formlessness that pulled at him, as if restless to be done with it all.
Only then did Farfal walk into the inner room in the cottage, into his father’s inner sanctum a million years before.
A bang on the outer door.
“Balthasar?” It was the voice from the courtyard. “I gave you the day you begged for, wretch. Now give me my thirty stones. Give me my stones or I shall be as good as my word—your sons will be taken off-world, to labor in the Bdellium Mines of Telb, and the women shall be set to work as musicians in the pleasure palace of Luthius Limn, where they will have the honor of making sweet music while I, Luthius Limn, dance and sing and make passionate and athletic love to my catamites. I shall not waste breath in describing the fate I would have in store for your servants. Your spell of hiding is futile, for see, I have found this room with relative ease. Now, give me my thirty stones before I open the door and render down your obese frame for cooking fat and throw your bones to the dogs and the deodands.”
Farfal trembled with fear. Time, he thought. I need Time. He made his voice as deep as he could, and he called out, “One moment, Luthius Limn. I am engaged in a complex magical operation to purge your stones of their negative energies. If I am disturbed in this, the consequences will be catastrophic.”
Farfal glanced around the room. The only window was too small to permit him to climb out, while the room’s only door had Luthius Limn on the other side of it. “Unfortunate indeed,” he sighed. Then he took the bag his father had given to him and swept into it all the trinkets, oddments, and gewgaws he could reach, still taking care not to touch the green flute with his bare flesh. They vanished into the bag, which weighed no more and seemed no more full than it had ever done.
He stared at the casement in the center of the room. The only way out, and it led to Nothing, to the end of everything.
“Enough!” came the voice from beyond the door. “My patience is at an end, Balthasar. My cooks shall fry your internal organs tonight.” There came a loud crunching against the door, as if of something hard and heavy being slammed against it.
Then there was a scream, and then silence.
Luthius Limn’s voice: “Is he dead?”
Another voice—Farfal thought it sounded like one of his half brothers—said, “I suspect that the door is magically protected and warded.”
“Then,” boomed Luthius Limn, decisively, “we shall go through the wall.”
Farfal was unfortunate, but not stupid. He lifted down the black lacquer box from the nail upon which his father had hung it. He heard something scuttle and move inside it.
“My father told me not to move the casement,” he said to himself. Then he put his shoulder against it and heaved violently, pushing the heavy thing almost half an inch. The darkness that pervaded the casement began to change, and it filled with a pearl-gray light.
He hung the box about his neck. “It is good enough,” said Farfal the Unfortunate, and, as something slammed against the wall of the room, he took a strip of cloth and tied the leather bag that contained all the remaining treasures of Balthasar the Canny about his left wrist, and he pushed himself through.
And there was light, so bright that he closed his eyes, and walked through the casement.
Farfal began to fall.
He flailed in the air, eyes tightly closed against the blinding light, felt the wind whip past him.
Something smacked and engulfed him: water, brackish, warm, and Farfal floundered, too surprised to breathe. He surfaced, his head breaking water, and he gulped air. And then he pushed himself through the water, until his hands grasped some kind of plant, and he pulled himself, on hands and feet, out of the green water, and up onto a spongy dry land, trailing and trickling water as he went.
“THE LIGHT,” SAID THE man at Denny’s. “The light was blinding. And the sun was not yet up. But I obtained these”—he tapped the frame of his sunglasses—“and I stay out of the sunlight, so my skin does not burn too badly.”
“And now?” I asked.
“I sell the carvings,” he said. “And I seek another casement.”
“You want to go back to your own time?”
He shook his head. “It’s dead,” he said. “And all I knew, and everything like me. It’s dead. I will not return to the darkness at the end of time.”
“What then?”
He scratched at his neck. Through the opening in his shirt I could see a small, black box, hanging about his neck, no bigger than a locket, and inside the box something moved: a beetle, I thought. But there are big beetles in Florida. They are not uncommon.
“I want to go back to the beginning,” he said. “When it started. I want to stand there in the light of the universe waking to itself, the dawn of everything. If I am going to blinded, let it be by that. I want to be there when the suns are a-borning. This ancient light is not bright enough for me.”
He took the napkin in his hand then, and reached into the leather bag with it. Taking care to touch it only through the cloth, he pulled out a flute-like instrument, about a foot long, made of green jade or something similar, and placed it on the table in front of me. “For the food,” he said. “A thank-you.”
He got up, then, and walked away, and I sat and stared at the green flute for so long a time; eventually I reached out and felt the coldness of it with my fingertips, and then gently, without daring to blow, or to try to make music from the end of time, I t
ouched the mouthpiece to my lips.
“And Weep, Like Alexander”
THE LITTLE MAN HURRIED into the Fountain and ordered a very large whisky. “Because,” he announced to the pub in general, “I deserve it.”
He looked exhausted, sweaty and rumpled, as if he had not slept in several days. He wore a tie, but it was so loose as to be almost undone. He had graying hair that might once have been ginger.
“I’m sure you do,” said Brian.
“I do!” said the man. He took a sip of the whisky as if to find out whether or not he liked it, then, satisfied, gulped down half the glass. He stood completely still, for a moment, like a statue. “Listen,” he said. “Can you hear it?”
“What?” I said.
“A sort of background whispering white noise that actually becomes whatever song you wish to hear when you sort of half-concentrate upon it?”
I listened. “No,” I said.
“Exactly,” said the man, extraordinarily pleased with himself. “Isn’t it wonderful? Only yesterday, everybody in the Fountain was complaining about the Wispamuzak. Professor Mackintosh here was grumbling about having Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” stuck in his head and how it was now following him across London. Today, it’s gone, as if it had never been. None of you can even remember that it existed. And that is all due to me.”
“I what?” said Professor Mackintosh. “Something about the Queen?” And then, “Do I know you?”
“We meet,” said the little man. “But people forget me, alas. It is because of my job.” He took out his wallet, produced a card, passed it to me.
OBEDIAH POLKINGHORN
it read, and beneath that in small letters,
UNINVENTOR.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” I said. “What’s an uninventor?”
“It’s somebody who uninvents things,” he said. He raised his glass, which was quite empty. “Ah. Excuse me, Sally, I need another very large whisky.”
The rest of the crowd there that evening seemed to have decided that the man was both mad and uninteresting. They had returned to their conversations. I, on the other hand, was caught. “So,” I said, resigning myself to my conversational fate. “Have you been an uninventor long?”
“Since I was fairly young,” he said. “I started uninventing when I was eighteen. Have you never wondered why we do not have jet-packs?”
I had, actually.
“Saw a bit on Tomorrow’s World about them, when I was a lad,” said Michael, the landlord. “Man went up in one. Then he came down. Raymond Burr seemed to think we’d all have them soon enough.”
“Ah, but we don’t,” said Obediah Polkinghorn, “because I uninvented them about twenty years ago. I had to. They were driving everybody mad. I mean, they seemed so attractive, and so cheap, but you just had to have a few thousand bored teenagers strapping them on, zooming all over the place, hovering outside bedroom windows, crashing into the flying cars . . .”
“Hold on,” said Sally. “There aren’t any flying cars.”
“True,” said the little man, “but only because I uninvented them. You wouldn’t believe the traffic jams they’d cause. I’d look up and it was just the bottoms of bloody flying cars from horizon to horizon. Some days I couldn’t see the skies at all. People throwing rubbish out of their car windows . . . They were easy to run—ran off gravitosolar power, obviously—but I didn’t realize that they needed to go until I heard a lady talking about them on Radio Four, all ‘Why Oh Why Didn’t We Stick with Non-Flying Cars?’ She had a point. Something needed to be done. I uninvented them. I made a list of inventions the world would be better off without and, one by one, I uninvented them all.”
By now he had started to gather a small audience. I was pleased I had a good seat.
“It was a lot of work, too,” he continued. “You see, it’s almost impossible not to invent the flying car, as soon as you’ve invented the Lumenbubble. So eventually I had to uninvent them too. And I miss the individual Lumenbubble: a massless portable light source that floated half a meter above your head and went on when you wanted it to. Such a wonderful invention. Still, no use crying over unspilt milk, and you can’t mend an omelette without unbreaking a few eggs.”
“You also can’t expect us actually to believe any of this,” said someone, and I think it was Jocelyn.
“Right,” said Brian. “I mean, next thing you’ll be telling us that you uninvented the spaceship.”
“But I did,” said Obediah Polkinghorn. He seemed extremely pleased with himself. “Twice. I had to. You see, the moment we whizz off into space and head out to the planets and beyond, we bump into things that spur so many other inventions. The Polaroid Instant Transporter. That was the worst. And the Mockett Telepathic Translator. That was the worst as well. But as long as it’s nothing worse than a rocket to the moon, I can keep everything under control.”
“So, how exactly do you go about uninventing things?” I asked.
“It’s hard,” he admitted. “It’s all about unpicking probability threads from the fabric of creation. Which is a bit like unpicking a needle from a haystack. But they tend to be long and tangled, like spaghetti. So it’s rather like having to unpick a strand of spaghetti from a haystack.”
“Sounds like thirsty work,” said Michael, and I signaled him to pour me another half pint of cider.
“Fiddly,” said the little man. “Yes. But I pride myself on doing good. Each day I wake, and, even if I’ve unhappened something that might have been wonderful, I think, Obediah Polkinghorn, the world is a happier place because of something that you’ve uninvented.”
He looked into his remaining scotch, swirled the liquid around in his glass.
“The trouble is,” he said, “with the Wispamuzak gone, that’s it. I’m done. It’s all been uninvented. There are no more horizons left to undiscover, no more mountains left to unclimb.”
“Nuclear power?” suggested “Tweet” Peston.
“Before my time,” said Obediah. “Can’t uninvent things invented before I was born. Otherwise I might uninvent something that would have led to my birth, and then where would we be?” Nobody had any suggestions. “Knee-high in jet-packs and flying cars, that’s where,” he told us. “Not to mention Morrison’s Martian Emolument.” For a moment, he looked quite grim. “Ooh. That stuff was nasty. And a cure for cancer. But frankly, given what it did to the oceans, I’d rather have the cancer.
“No. I have uninvented everything that was on my list. I shall go home,” said Obediah Polkinghorn, bravely, “and weep, like Alexander, because there are no more worlds to unconquer. What is there left to uninvent?”
There was silence in the Fountain.
In the silence, Brian’s iPhone rang. His ringtone was the Rutles singing “Cheese and Onions.” “Yeah?” he said. Then, “I’ll call you back.”
It is unfortunate that the pulling out of one phone can have such an effect on other people around. Sometimes I think it’s because we remember when we could smoke in pubs, and that we pull out our phones together as once we pulled out our cigarette packets. But probably it’s because we’re easily bored.
Whatever the reason, the phones came out.
Crown Baker took a photo of us all, and then Twitpicced it. Jocelyn started to read her text messages. “Tweet” Peston tweeted that he was in the Fountain and had met his first uninventor. Professor Mackintosh checked the test match scores, told us what they were and emailed his brother in Inverness to grumble about them. The phones were out and the conversation was over.
“What’s that?” asked Obediah Polkinghorn.
“It’s the iPhone 5,” said Ray Arnold, holding his up. “Crown’s using the Nexus X. That’s the Android system. Phones. Internet. Camera. Music. But it’s the apps. I mean, do you know, there are over a thousand fart sound-effect apps on the iPhone alone? You want to hear the unofficial Simpsons Fart App?”
“No,” said Obediah. “I most definitely do not want to. I do not.” He put down h
is drink, unfinished. Pulled his tie up. Did up his coat. “It’s not going to be easy,” he said, as if to himself. “But, for the good of all . . .” And then he stopped. And he grinned.
“It’s been marvelous talking to you all,” he announced to nobody in particular, as he left the Fountain.
Nothing O’Clock
I
THE TIME LORDS BUILT a prison. They built it in a time and place that are equally as unimaginable to any entity who has never left the solar system in which it was spawned, or who has only experienced the journey into the future one second at a time, and that going forward. It was built solely for the Kin. It was impregnable: a complex of small, nicely appointed rooms (for they were not monsters, the Time Lords. They could be merciful, when it suited them), out of temporal phase with the rest of the Universe.
There were, in that place, only those rooms: the gulf between microseconds was one that could not be crossed. In effect, those rooms became a Universe in themselves, one that borrowed light and heat and gravity from the rest of creation, always a fraction of a moment away.
The Kin prowled its rooms, patient and deathless, and always waiting.
It was waiting for a question. It could wait until the end of time. (But even then, when Time Ended, the Kin would never perceive it, imprisoned in the micro-moment away from time.)
The Time Lords maintained the prison with huge engines they built in the hearts of black holes, unreachable: no one would be able to get to the engines, save the Time Lords themselves. The multiple engines were a fail-safe. Nothing could ever go wrong.
As long as the Time Lords existed, the Kin would be in their prison, and the rest of the Universe would be safe. That was how it was, and how it always would be.
And if anything went wrong, then the Time Lords would know. Even if, unthinkably, any of the engines failed, then emergency signals would sound on Gallifrey long before the prison of the Kin returned to our time and our Universe. The Time Lords had planned for everything.
