It was precisely for that reason, to have a bit of a quieter life, that my grandfather came and settled here—Qfwfq said—after the last supernova explosion had flung them once more into space: grandfather, grandmother, their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The Sun was just at that stage condensing, a roundish, yellowish shape, along one arm of the galaxy, and it made a good impression on him, amidst all the other stars that were going around. ‘Let’s try a yellow one this time,’ he said to his wife. ‘If I’ve understood it right, the yellow ones are those that stay up longest without changing. And maybe in a short time from now a planetary system will form around it too.’
This idea of settling with all the family on one planet, maybe one of those with an atmosphere and beasties and plants, was one of Colonel Eggg’s old ideas for when he would retire, after all those comings and goings amidst incandescent matter. Not that he suffered from the heat, my grandfather, and as for upheavals in temperature, he had had to get used to such things for some time now, after so many years of service; still, once you’ve got to a certain age, everyone starts to like a temperate climate around them.
My grandmother, though, immediately butted in: ‘And why not on that other one? The bigger they are the more I trust them!’ and she pointed to a Blue Giant.
‘Are you mad, don’t you know what that is? Don’t you know about the blue ones? They burn so fast you don’t even notice, and barely a couple of thousand millennia go by and you’ve already got to start packing!’
But you know how Grandma Ggge is: she’s stayed young not just in her looks but also in her outlook, never happy with her lot, always craving change, no matter whether it’s for better or worse, attracted by everything that is different. And to think that the bulk of the upheaval, in those hasty and panicky removals from one heavenly body to another, always landed on her shoulders, especially when there were small children around. ‘It’s as if she didn’t remember from one move to the next,’ Grandpa Eggg would say, letting off steam with us grandchildren. ‘She never learns to calm down. I’m telling you, here, in the solar system, what can she complain about? I’ve been travelling all across galaxies for a long time now, so I’ve got a bit of experience, haven’t I? And does my wife ever acknowledge that?’
This is the Colonel’s obsession: he has had plenty to make him happy in his career, but he has never had this one satisfaction, the one he would like above all else: hearing his wife finally say, ‘Yes, Eggg, you were spot on about this, I wouldn’t have given tuppence for this Sun but you immediately managed to see that it was one of the most reliable and stable stars, one that wouldn’t start to play tricks two minutes later, and you were also able to put us in the right position to get a place on the Earth, when it later took shape . . . and this Earth, with all its limits and defects, still offers good residential areas, and the kids have space to play and schools that are not too far away . . .’ This is what the old Colonel would like his wife to tell him, indulging him just for once in his life. No chance. Instead, the minute she hears of some stellar system that works in a completely different way, for instance the varying luminosity of the ‘RR Lyrae’, her cravings begin: there life is probably more varied, you’re more in the swing, whereas here we’re stuck in this corner, in a dead end where nothing ever happens.
‘And what is it you want to happen?’ asked Eggg, appealing to all of us as witnesses. ‘As if we didn’t’ now know that it’s the same story everywhere: hydrogen is transformed into helium, then come the usual tricks with beryllium and lithium, the incandescent layers collapsing on top of each other, then swelling like balloons and getting paler and paler until they collapse again . . . If we could only, while we’re in the middle of it all, manage to enjoy the spectacle! But instead each time the great worry is not losing sight of the parcels and packages for the removal, and the kids crying, one daughter with inflamed eyes, a son-in-law whose denture is melting . . . The first to suffer from all this, everyone knows, is her, Ggge; she talks and talks, but when it comes to the actual event . . .’
Those early days were full of surprises for old Eggg too (he told us this so many times): the condensation of gas-clouds, the clash of atoms, matter clumping together and swelling and swelling until it ignites, and the sky swarming with white-hot bodies of every colour, each one seemingly different from all the others in diameter, temperature, density, in its way of contracting and dilating, and all those isotopes that nobody imagined existed, and those puffs and explosions, those magnetic fields . . . one unpredictable thing after the other. But now . . . all he needs is a glance and he’s worked it all out: what star it is, what its spectrum is, how much it weighs, what it burns, whether it acts as a magnet or spews out stuff, and how far away the stuff that is spewed out stops, and how many light-years away there might be another star.
For him the expanse of void is like a cluster of tracks in a railway junction: these and no others are the gauges, points, diversions; you can take this or that route but you can’t run in the middle or leap over the ballast. The same for the flow of time: every movement is slotted into a timetable which he knows by heart; he knows all the stops, delays, connections, deadlines, seasonal timetable variations. This had always been his dream for when he would retire from active service: to contemplate the ordered and regulated traffic that runs up and down the universe—like those pensioners who go to the station every day to see the trains arriving and departing—and to feel happy that he’s no longer the one to be bounced around, laden with luggage and kids, amidst the indifferent comings and goings of those contraptions, each one whirling around on its own . . .
An ideal spot, then, from every point of view. In the four billion years they’ve been here, they’ve already settled in more or less, got to know a few people: folk who come and go, of course, that’s the kind of place it is, but for Mrs Ggge, who loves variety so much, this ought to be a plus point. Now they have neighbours, on the same floor, Cavicchia they’re called, who are really nice people: neighbours who help you out, pleasant neighbours you can rely on.
‘I’d like to have seen you,’ Eggg says to his wife, ‘in the Clouds of Magellan: I bet you’d never have found such civilized people there!’ (The thing is that Ggge, in her craving for other homes, even brings up extra-galactic constellations.)
But when someone has reached a certain age, there’s no way you can change her ideas: if the Colonel hasn’t managed it after so many years of marriage, he certainly won’t manage it now. For instance, Ggge hears that their neighbours are leaving for Teramo. They’re from the Abruzzi, the Cavicchias, and every year they go back to visit their relations. ‘There,’ says Ggge, ‘everyone’s leaving and we’re always stuck here. I’ve got my mother whom I’ve not been to see for billions of years!’
‘When will you ever understand that it’s not the same thing?’ old Eggg protests.
My great-grandmother, you see, lives in the Andromeda Galaxy. Yes, at one stage she always travelled with her daughter and son-in-law, but right at the point when this clutch of galaxies started to form, they lost sight of each other: she went one way and they went the other. (Even today Ggge still blames the Colonel: ‘You should have paid more attention,’ she claims. And he replies: ‘Oh yes, I had nothing else to do at that particular time!’ This is all he says, so as not to point out that his mother-in-law, a wonderful woman, of course, but as a travelling companion, well, she was one of those people specially designed to complicate things, especially at moments of upheaval.)
The Andromeda Galaxy is straight up here, above our heads, but in between there are always a couple of billion light-years. For Ggge light-years seem like flea-jumps: she hasn’t realized that space is a glue you get stuck in, just like time.
The other day, perhaps to cheer her up, Eggg said to her: ‘Listen, Ggge, we won’t necessarily stay here for ever. How many millennia have we been here? Four million? Well, let’s say we must be halfway through our stay at the very least. Barely five million millen
nia will go by and the Sun will swell up until it swallows Mercury, Venus and Earth, and a series of cataclysms will start all over again, one after the other, at tremendous speed. Who knows where we’ll land up? So, try to enjoy this small amount of peace that we have left.’
‘Is that so?’ she says, immediately interested. ‘Well then, we mustn’t be caught unawares. I’m going to start putting aside everything that won’t go off and is not too cumbersome, so we can take it with us when the Sun explodes.’
And before the Colonel can stop her, she runs into the attic to see how many suitcases are there, what condition they’re in, and to check they lock properly. (She claims to be thinking ahead by doing so: if you’re flung out into space there is nothing worse than having to gather up the contents of suitcases that have been scattered in the midst of interstellar gas.)
‘But what’s your hurry?’ Grandfather exclaims. ‘We’ve still got several billion years in front of us, I told you!’
‘Yes, but there are so many things to be done, Eggg, and I don’t want to leave everything till the last minute. For example, I want to have some quince jam ready, in case we meet my sister Ddde, who’s crazy about it: heaven knows how long it’s been since she last tasted it, poor soul.’
‘Your sister Ddde? Is she not the one on Sirius?’
I don’t know how many there are in Grandma Ggge’s family, scattered here and there throughout every constellation: and at every cataclysm she expects she’ll meet some of them. And in fact she’s right: every time the Colonel explodes into space, he finds himself in the midst of newly acquired in-laws and cousins.
In short, there’s no stopping her now: totally caught up in her preparations, she thinks about nothing else, and leaves the most urgent chores half done, because ‘any moment now the Sun will finish’. Her husband is beside himself at this: he had dreamed so much about enjoying his retirement, allowing himself a rest amidst the ongoing conflagrations, letting the heavenly crucibles fry in their different fuels, sheltered from it all, contemplating the passing of centuries as if it were a uniform flow without any interruption, and now look what’s happened: just when they’d reached more or less the exact mid-point of the holiday, Mrs Ggge starts getting him all worked up, with the suitcases flung open on the beds, the drawers turned upside down, shirts piled on top of each other; all the thousands of millions of billions of hours and days and weeks and months that he could have enjoyed as if the holiday were endless, from now on he’ll have to live through them as though always on the point of leaving, just like when he was in active service, always waiting to be transferred. He won’t be able to forget even for an instant that everything around him is temporary, temporary but always repeated, a mosaic of protons, electrons, neutrons, that will fragment and come together again indefinitely, a soup that will be stirred until it cools or heats up: in short, this holiday in the most temperate planet in the solar system is completely ruined.
‘What do you think, Eggg, some of the crockery if it’s well wrapped up, I think we’ll be able to take that with us without it breaking . . .’
‘No, what are you thinking of, Ggge, with all the space it takes up, think of how many other things you’ve got to get in . . .’ And he is forced to take part as well, to offer an opinion on the various problems, to share her endless impatience, to live life as though it were always the day before leaving.
I know what this old pensioner is now yearning for, he’s told us clearly so many times: to be eliminated from it all once and for all, to let the stars perish and re-form and perish again a hundred thousand times, with Mrs Ggge and all his sisters-in-law in the middle chasing and embracing each other, and losing their hatboxes and umbrellas and finding them and losing them again, and him having nothing to do with any of it, staying at the bottom of matter that has been squeezed and chewed and spat out and is no use for anything . . . the White Dwarves!
Old Eggg is not one to talk just for the sake of it: he has a very precise plan in mind. You know those White Dwarves, those stars that are very dense and inert, the residue of the most violent explosions, searing hot from the white heat of the nuclei of metals that have been crushed and compressed inside each other? The ones that continue to go slowly round forgotten orbits, gradually turning into cold, opaque coffins for elements to be buried in? ‘Let Ggge go, let her go,’ Eggg chuckles, ‘let her get carried away by the spurts of flying electrons. I’ll wait here, until the Sun and everything that goes round it is reduced to a decrepit dwarf star; I’ll dig myself a niche amidst the hardest atoms, I’ll tolerate flames of every colour, as long as I can finally get to that dead end, that siding, as long as I can reach the shore that nobody ever leaves again.’
And he looks up with his eyes already as they will be when he is on his White Dwarf, and when the rotating of galaxies which light up and extinguish blue, yellow and red fires, and condense and dispel rainclouds and dustclouds, will no longer be the occasion for the usual conjugal bickering but something that exists, that is there, that is what it is, full stop.
And yet I believe that, at least in the early days of his stay on that deserted and forgotten star, he will want to continue mentally arguing with Ggge. It won’t be easy for him to stop. I seem to see him, alone in the void, as he travels through the expanse of light-years, but still quarrelling with his wife. That ‘I told you so’ and ‘brilliant discovery’ that accompanied the birth of the stars, the movement of galaxies, the cooling of planets, that ‘you’ll be happy now’ and ‘that’s all you ever say’ that marked every episode and phase and explosion of their quarrels and of heavenly cataclysms, that ‘you always think you’re right’ and ‘it’s because you never listen to me’ without which the history of the universe would not have for him any name or memory or flavour, that eternal conjugal bickering: if ever it should one day come to an end, what a feeling of desolation, what emptiness!
Solar Storm
The Sun is subject to continuous internal perturbations of its gaseous incandescent matter, which appear as upheavals that are visible on its surface: solar prominences that burst like bubbles, spots of diminished luminosity, intense flares from which sudden jets shoot up. When the Sun emits a cloud of electricized gas and this hits the Earth crossing the Van Allen radiation belts, magnetic storms occur as well as phenomena such as the Aurora Borealis.
There are people for whom the Sun provides a sense of security—said Qfwfq—stability, protection. Not me.
They say: ‘Here it is, the Sun, it’s always been there, it nourishes us, warms us, high above the clouds and the wind, radiant, always constant, the Earth goes round it subject to cataclysms and storms, and what about the Sun? It’s always there in its place, calm and impassive.’ Don’t believe a word of it. What we call the Sun is nothing but a continuous detonation of gas, an explosion that’s been lasting for five billion years and still hasn’t stopped spewing up stuff; it’s a typhoon of fire, shapeless and lawless, threatening constant aggression, totally unpredictable. And we’re inside it: it’s not true that we are here and the Sun is there; it’s all a constant whirlpool of concentric currents with no intervals between them, a single tissue of matter, denser in some places, less dense in others, stemming from the same original cloud that has contracted and caught fire.
Of course, the amount of matter that the Sun chucks down here—particle fragments, shattered atoms—arranging itself along the lines of force of the magnet that passes from one pole to the other, has formed a kind of invisible shell enfolding the Earth, and we can even pretend that ours is a separate world, where causes and effects answer to certain laws, which if we know them we can master them, safe from the maelstrom of chaotic elements whirling around us.
I, for instance, have obtained a long-haul captain’s licence and taken command of the steamer Halley: in the log I make note of the latitude, longitude, winds, data from the meteorological instruments, radio messages; I have learned to share your confidence in the fragile conventions that govern life on Earth. Wh
at more could I want? Our route is certain, the sea is calm, tomorrow we will be within sight of the familiar Welsh coasts, and in two days we will enter the tarry Mersey estuary, and cast anchor in the port of Liverpool, the end of our voyage. My life is regulated by a calendar that is plotted down to the smallest details: I count the days that separate me from the next voyage, and which I will spend in my house in the Lancashire countryside.
Mr Evans, the mate, appears at the door to the bridge, and says with a smile, ‘Lovely Sun, Sir.’ I nod, because really the Sun has an extraordinary clearness about it for the time of year and the latitude; if I sharpen my gaze (I who have the gift of being able to look straight into the Sun without being blinded) I can clearly make out the corona and chromosphere and the position of the sunspots, and I notice . . . I notice things that it is pointless to tell you people about: cataclysms that are even at this moment shattering its fiery depths, continents that are collapsing in flames, incandescent oceans swelling and overflowing out of the crucible, turning into currents of invisible radiation heading towards the Earth, almost as fast as light.
The choking voice of the helmsman Adams sounds in my loudspeaker: ‘The compass needle, Sir, the compass needle! What the hell is going on? It’s going round and round like a roulette wheel!’
The Complete Cosmicomics Page 32
