Alecto (2) ”The Tsar wanted an ice-free port with access to the oceans for the Russian navy. The Baltic is controlled by the Danes, frozen half of the time and the Black Sea ports are bottled up behind the Bosphorus,” said Toby. 11. “Or may be the ice cap simply floats on top of Lake Vostock,” said Ron. ”If its three kilometres thick, it wouldn’t float. It would be too heavy. It would sink!” said Dave, now getting agitated. ”If ice sank, then the Titanic wouldn’t be at the bottom of the Atlantic,” said Ron, cuttingly. Toby added, with a cackle, “I can just imagine all those icebergs breaking off the polar ice cap and sinking to the bottom of the Atlantic.” Ron frowned and his brow wrinkled. “They break off the Greenland ice sheet actually. But, still, there wouldn’t be any polar ice cap, if ice didn’t float! It would all be at the bottom of the Arctic sea.” ”And it’s cold at the bottom of the sea, I can tell you,” said Toby. ”It’s cold at the bottom of all the oceans,” added Ron, “because sunlight doesn’t penetrate very far. The oceans would gradually freeze up from the bottom.” ”So are you telling me all the oceans would be frozen solid if ice didn’t float?” asked Dave. ”Yes, as far as I can tell, if ice didn’t float, we would live on an ice-bound planet,” said Ron. “Or rather we wouldn’t be living here. It would be too cold for life to exist.” ”Like Europa, the ice moon of Jupiter,” added Toby. ”What! Are you telling me that ice floats on Earth but sinks on Jupiter’s moon? Don’t be daft! It’s got to be the same everywhere,” said Dave. ”No, Europa is frozen solid because it is much further from the Sun than we are,” said Ron. Ron turned back to his newspaper article about Lake Vostock. Toby turned back to Not-Toby. And Dave turned back to Sylvie’s cleavage. 12. The Universe is curious by nature and has an exhilaratingly broad range of interests. One of her favourite pastimes is to meet and try to understand the diverse cultures that are constantly springing up and becoming extinct (once things had cooled down sufficiently for there to exist places where cultures could spring up upon). For these encounters, the Universe is particularly fond of travelling by train, finding the railway carriage with its gentle rocking motion and wide windows displaying constantly changing landscapes, by far the most civilised form of locomotion. Some of you may be on the point of raising the reasonable objection that while railways are a perfectly adequate means of getting from A to B when the intervening distance comprises several hundred kilometres, the same cannot be said when the distances have to be measured in millions of light years, especially when there is nothing but empty space between stations. You would be forgetting however, the infinite scope of the Universe, for whom both time and space are merely a twinkle in the eye. When it is your train set, right down to the last elementary particles that make up the tracks, well, you can do pretty much whatever you want with it. This is not to say that the Universe is ever indiscreet in her voyages. The Universe is a most unassuming traveller who goes to great lengths not to unduly terrorise the indigenous populations with her visits. She will always take on the precise look and feel of a local inhabitant right down to speaking the language with only the slightest trace of a foreign accent. The required linguistic competence is quite a challenge on certain planets where language has evolved in unexpected directions. Take the dancing planet of Rumbo-Tangoid, for example. Here a species of dainty yak has become so obsessed by the elegance of ballroom dancing that all communication now takes the form of quick-steps and foxtrots. Whereas the humble bee on Earth uses an elaborate dance to explain, more or less, “the nectar is over there, north-by-north-west at about 250 yards”, the dancing yaks of Rumbo-Tangoid have a whole vocabulary of ambulatory sonnets and bodily oratory. Few translators, however, have mastered the gestural subtleties of the Rumbo-Tangoid language. One unfortunate linguist even hazarded that an odd hopping movement on one leg should be translated by the term uni-verse. The younger yaks, as is the case in all cultures, have a tendency to graze indiscriminately across the higher pastures where certain hallucinatory herbs do grow, with the result that their social intercourse takes on a somewhat frenetic character. Nonetheless, any yak would be appalled by the disjointed writhing on display at the typical Earthbound rave party. Even shouting matches on Rumbo-Tangoid retain a certain rhythmic harmony. On her most recent visit to Rumbo-Tangoid, the Universe was welcomed with open hooves as an honoured guest, fondly remembered as the originator of the three-four time bovine waltz, that has since become such a favourite amongst the older members of yak society. 13. In contrast, the Universe had a much more difficult time of it on the tactile planet of Tutche. Here a dense cloud of bituminous fog shrouds the landscape for 300 days a year. When you consider that the Tutchean year consists of precisely 300 days, you will appreciate why communication tends to take place by using touch rather than sound. Words, no sooner uttered, are swallowed in a kind of sticky echo, that can render communication, if not impossible, at least impasse-able. Before the development of their tactile language, the Tutcheans were perpetually confused as meaning changed, on the fly between the mouth of the speaker and the ear of the listener. A typical Tutchean conversation would go like this: Him: slim and wiry, sitting at the bar in a singles club, singing under his breath, "Guantanamera, Juanita, Guantanamera?" Her: largish, roundish and reddish, sitting next to him, "Who are you calling a One Ton Tomato? If you suffered from the kind of lower intestinal problems I do, you wouldn't make such cruel comments. I'm not going to stay here and be insulted by the likes of you. Goodbye!" She marches out in a huff. Him: changing his tune, "the girl with colitis goes bye!" Old soldiers, who could remember the origins of the first of Tutche's many world wars, recount what may be an apocryphal story. It is said that the war began when the newly betrothed Crown Prince Ferdinand, while driving though the streets in an open carriage, turned to his wife and shouted, "Get out of here, there's a bum!" This caused a diplomatic incident that eventually escalated into all-out war between the great powers. Another story from the trenches of the very same war tells of a shell-shocked and bewildered captain, crouching beneath the parapet under heavy enemy fire, who sent a messenger back to headquarters with the request, "send three and four pence, we're going to a dance." A few minutes later he received a platoon of reinforcements. The Universe, despite being a very quick study, by anybody’s standards, never quite got the hang of the subtlest nuances of Tutchean discourse. She found that innocent conversations with children could turn out to be particularly dangerous. On one occasion, she was forced to leave in a hurry in order to avoid what would have been long drawn out court case on charges of corrupting the youth. 14. Though she normally plans her visits around arrivals and departures that go completely unnoticed, if the Universe is ever obliged to change location in mid-voyage through force of circumstance, she will always try to do so in the middle of a tunnel to create the minimum of fuss. She sometimes has to take the railway carriage she is travelling in with her and this fact does account for a small proportion of the inexplicable disappearances of individuals that is a common feature of all cultures, although it accounts for none of the reported cases of kidnapping by aliens and subsequent intimate probing of sexual organs, which are actually the repressed memories of gynaecological clinical apparatus and post-natal obstetric examinations. It also accounts for almost all of the mysterious disappearances of rolling stock in tunnels which are the curse of railway managers throughout many a galaxy, but which are always glossed over when inventories are examined by the auditors. One such case occurred when the Universe first visited the watery-blue planet of Earth, which she stumbled across almost by accident. She was drawn to what looked from a distance like a shimmering sapphire clothed with wisps of white lace, drawn by a tug in her stomach that told her something had gone seriously wrong. 15. She found herself on a train packed with people, most of them women and children. It was stiflingly hot. There were no windows in the railway carriage, just slits in the walls through which sunlight slanted in on one side. The wagon rocked and creaked as it crossed points in the track. The little air that filtered through from the outside ceased once the train jolted to a halt. The Universe could hear the panting of the steam locomotive up ahead and the barking of dogs. A child standing close by fainted, but she did not collapse. She was kept standing by the crush of bodies all around her. The doors of the cattle truck were wrenched open from the outside. The surge of pale faces, blinking in the sunlight, pushed forward, gasping for fresh air. Bodies tumbled to the ground in the rush to escape the fetid stink of three days accumulated human waste. Several crumpled bodies remained motionless inside as steam wafted from the top of the opening. A soldier pulled himself up into the cattle truck and kicked the bodies firmly, rolling them over onto their backs with an expert flick his boot, verifying they were indeed corpses. 16. The guards shouted orders in a language no one seemed to understand. But they explained their meaning clearly enough with the butts of their rifles. The people were herded into a large compound surrounded by high wire fences, a wooden watchtower at each corner. The snout of a machine gun poked out from the shadow of the small tiled roof that offered respite for the guards under the broiling sun of a Polish summer. Beyond the compound were a series of wooden shacks. The Universe thought that she could see emaciated faces glaring with hollow stares from behind the windows. Between the compound and the huts there was a long low concrete building. At the far end were two brick chimneys. From the tops of each chimney streamed thin, yellowish smoke and a sickly, soapy odour filled the windless air. Some of the children whimpered. Their mothers tried to keep them upright clasping the weakest to their skirts to stop them falling. The Universe noted that each person had a yellow star of fabric sewn onto their clothes and so did she. A little girl next to her looked up at the Universe and asked, “What’s your name?” The Universe looked into the young girl’s eyes and beyond. “Hope,” she replied. After being registered in a large book by a man wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, they were forced to give up any jewellery that had escaped the notice of the guards. The men were separated from their families and marched off to another compound. The remaining women and children were filed into the low concrete building. Inside, the walls were painted a kind of sterile, operating-theatre green. There were rows of benches and the people were forced to undress under the leering eyes of the soldiers. Those who were slow to obey felt the prod of a bayonet in their flesh. One woman, young and blond, was dragged, screaming by two guards to a side room. The rest were corralled roughly towards an opening with the word “Dusche” in large painted letters above two heavy iron doors. Inside the dimly lit, windowless room, there seemed to be shower heads protruding from the ceiling. The iron doors clanged shut. There were no handles on the inside. A strange caustic smell impregnated the tiled floor and walls. A slight hissing sound began to issue from the shower heads in the ceiling. Some of the braver souls reached out anticipating the water, hoping to gauge its temperature. 17. The Universe could smell bitter almonds. A colourless gas was beginning to filter into the room. Chemical composition HCN, molecular weight 27, hydrogen cyanide. The Universe looked into the bodies of her fellow prisoners and could see these organisms used an enzyme, cytochrome oxidase, that was vital for supplying their hearts and brains with oxygen. This enzyme would be blocked by the invisible poison pouring into the room. In minutes they would all be dead through metabolic asphyxiation. The Universe took hold of each hydrogen cyanide molecule as it emerged from the shower head, combined the hydrogen with oxygen from the air, bent the carbon atoms into minute balls of sixty atoms each and let the nitrogen diffuse away into the air. The heat from the chemical reaction brought the water now falling from the shower head to a pleasant 40 degrees centigrade. The dirt encrusted bodies of the people were soon dancing and splashing under the warm showers of clean, pure water. Even without soap, after days cooped up in their prison train, to wash was wonderful. Twenty minutes later, the large iron door at the far end of the chamber opened. There were two soldiers outside wearing gas masks. Behind them were about twenty men, with hollow cheeks and stooped shoulders, pushing large wheelbarrows. Their eyes were staring wide and scared. One of the guards dropped his machine gun, turned and ran, tearing off his mask as he gasped for air. Three of the prisoners in rags nearest the remaining soldier grabbed him from behind, wrestled his weapon from his hands and clubbed him to the ground. A burly man, no doubt a recent arrival, picked up the abandoned weapon and signalled his colleagues to follow him towards the armoury, that lay unguarded behind the oven house. The Universe clothed the women and children in pure white silk robes that reached to the ground. They followed her calmly back through the gas chamber. As they approached the closed iron doors that sealed the opening through which they had entered, they watched the metal turn to rust in front of their eyes. It crumbled to their touch. Outside, in the compound, she walked them back towards the train. The guards shouted “Halt!” from their watchtowers and then opened fire. The Universe turned the flying lead to a powdery blood-coloured pigment before it splattered with the force of a medicine ball against the white silk robes. Though the people were knocked to the ground, bruised and winded, they got to their feet and continued to march towards the train. At this sight, the remaining guards dropped their weapons and ran away. The people boarded the train which had brought them to Treblinka and the Universe deposited them on a pleasant planet in a neighbouring galaxy where genocide was still unthinkable. 18. Returning the next morning, figuratively speaking, the Universe was appalled and wounded by what had happened billions of years in the future on Earth. Her first instinct was to put a stop to everything, right there and then. There was still time. The canker could be nipped in the bud. The Big Bang could be aborted. Too bad if the future was stillborn. It was her right to choose. Then she began to have second thoughts. Wasn’t she throwing out the baby with the bath water? Genocide was one of the most odious crimes imaginable. But was cosmocide any better? Could she really apply THE final solution to prevent the final solution? She thought of all the things that would not be, if she chose to turn back the clock for good. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Those delightful chocolate mousse desserts that she had savoured at Luigi’s, probably the best restaurant in the Universe. And the cheese. The Universe recalled the vast variety of cheese that graced the table at Luigi’s. “Cheese was milk’s leap towards immortality,” as Luigi had said to her. Her mind began to wander. True enough, milk was to be found throughout the Universe. It was a common evolutionary solution to the problem of how to feed young that were not equipped to digest the food normally eaten by their parents. Milk was almost always a liquid, though a notable exception was to be found amongst the gas whales of Harbin. It was commonly a creamy white in colour, even if milks of virtually every colour could be found if one was willing to search long and hard enough. Those who had, foolishly looked long and hard enough, were surprised to find that the very mammals which produced exotic coloured milks were particularly savage and thus very difficult to milk. Biologists had even identified one carnivore whose diet consisted solely of foolish peasants who would come within striking range of the beast carrying three-legged stools. All things being equal, milk was just milk. It was natural, fresh and fatty. It was a wholesome food. In short, it was an ingredient but not a creation. Cheese however, was in a quite different league. Cheese had not just evolved as a neat solution to a biological problem. The Universe would not stop if cheese ceased to exist. Cheese wasn’t necessary. But what a delight! 19. According to the definitive "Universal Encyclopaedia of Cheese" originally compiled by Simon de Montfort Belk, there are more than eighteen billion distinct types of cheese to be found throughout the Universe. Interestingly, only two galaxies have been positively identified to be completely cheeseless. These are to be found amongst some of the most ancient galaxies where civilisation has progressed beyond the milking of mammals and where cheese may be said to exist only in an entirely virtual form, though, even this kind of cheese may still lead to bouts of severe dreaming. As the Universe itself is expanding, so too is the total number of known cheeses. Indeed, keeping the Encyclopaedia up to date requires a considerable effort, not just from cheese scouts out in the field, but also amongst the tasters, or "nouths" as they are known back at headquarters in de Montfort. On average, around twenty new types of cheese are added to the reference guide each day while some three or four are removed. Cheeses disappear from the Encyclopaedia for a number of reasons: new guidelines on food safety from Galactic hygiene authorities; loss of ecological niches leading to the extinction of either the milk-producing life-forms, their habitat or the cheese-makers themselves. Some cheeses prove to be transient, such as the notorious worm-infested goat cheese from Corsica, on Earth, which managed to hold its place in the Encyclopaedia for several years, only to be ruled ineligible for being no longer a simple cheese but an entire biosystem. 20. Currently, three cheeses from Earth are included in the Encyclopaedia, and a few excerpts follow to give you a flavour of what can be found in this unique reference work: Stilton - known in England as the King of Cheeses, only cheese produced in the three counties of Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire and made according to a strict code may be called Stilton. There are just six dairies licensed to make Stilton. It is still made in much the same way as it was when Daniel Defoe, writing in his "Tour through England & Wales" in 1727, remarked that he "...passed through Stilton, a town famous for cheese". And yet, Stilton was never made in the town of Stilton! Stilton is situated about 80 miles north of London on the old Great North Road. In the 18th century, the town was a staging post for coaches travelling from London to York. Horses would be changed and travellers served light refreshments at one of the hostelries in the town. Cooper Thornhill, an East Midlands entrepreneur, was landlord at the famous Bell Inn and it was he who introduced these travellers to a soft, creamy, blue-veined cheese which subsequently took its name from the town. Thornhill had brought the cheese from a farmer's wife by the name of Frances Pawlett who lived near Melton Mowbray.
Copyright © 2002 Nick Beck |