A Box of Nothing (10 page)

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.

The sun would be here before them. Somewhere below the earth it must already be spiralling in, and when it rose tomorrow it would fill half the sky, licking the earth with its outer flames, burning everything black. The sun was enormously bigger than the earth, and if the earth got too near it was supposed to crash into the sun and get swallowed up, but that wasn't going to happen. Huge as it was, the sun was going to be swallowed by the hole.

Before the sun, the moon. That was nearer still. James looked up, screwing his eyes almost shut against the brightness. He could see it on both sides of the gas bag now, and as he watched it grew bigger and bigger still, spreading and widening as it raced down, with the airship directly in its path.

Something moved beneath his hand where it clutched the edge of the basket. He looked down and saw that the airship was coming apart.

All this while—these few millionths of a second—the airship had simply hung there. When the rest of the Burra had thrown itself overboard with all its bits and pieces, what was left ought to have shot into the sky because of losing so much of its load, but it hadn't. It had something to do with James being there and not belonging to this world. It was the same with the rat. The hole wasn't going to suck them in, or the things they were touching. But it was taking what it could. It was taking what the Burra called the “life” away—whatever it was that had made all the separate pieces of rubbish agree to join up and become an airship. The actual part of the basket James was holding was really a bit of branch off a tree, as thick as a broomstick, left over from someone's bonfire. All the strips of old TV antennas and metal crate ties and curtain rods and electric cord were unweaving themselves. The ropes that held the bag to the basket and the cords that made the net were losing their knots and unravelling. The bag itself was separating into the odd patches of plastic it had grown out of. As each piece came loose it flipped away down into the hole. In another few millionths of a second James was left floating in midair with a branch in his hand, the great black gulf below, and the huge moon rushing down toward him.

He closed his eyes.

“I want to go home,” he said.

Chapter 20: Home

When James opened his eyes he was sitting in a chestnut tree, with his right hand gripping a living branch. The roaring was still there, loud but ordinary, as the bulldozers cleared the Dump level, getting it ready to turn into a park. Mum said that the Council had been promising to make a park here since before James was born. That was why they'd never cut down the tree. It was the one you passed on your way to school, just inside the Dump fence before you got to the Nothing Shop.

James was gripping the branch as hard as he could because he was scared of falling. That was why he had shut his eyes too. He wasn't usually afraid of heights, but he'd come too far out along the branch, trying to reach a chestnut, and the branch had started to sway and he didn't feel safe. He didn't dare move. He was stuck.

With half his mind James could remember quite well how he'd got here. He'd left home before the others to try to find a chestnut but the rubbish trucks had squashed them all so he'd wriggled through the fence, which he wasn't allowed to, and used the bars on its inside to climb up into the branches and then climbed higher and higher and worked his way out along a branch till it had begun to sway with his weight, and then …

But with the other half of his mind he remembered visiting the Nothing Shop and buying the box and Mum throwing it over the fence and him wriggling through the fence and finding himself on the far shore of an iron sea—and then the Burra and the airship and Rat City and the gulls and the race across the desert and the new Burra universe blazing into being while the huge moon rushed down toward him, and then …

Then the two halves of his mind coming together again as he opened his eyes and found himself sitting in the chestnut tree. Both things were true. Neither was a dream. But the one in the Burra world must have happened in a different kind of time because he could still taste the after-breakfast toothpaste in his mouth. It was a pity he'd never be able to tell anyone about his Burra memory. They'd laugh at him and tell him he'd made it up or dreamed it. But he hadn't. It had all happened to him, James.

Thinking about it, and the things he'd done and endured on the Dump, far more dangerous than climbing a stupid tree, he felt ashamed of being frightened. He'd faced General Weil in his dreadful camp, hadn't he? He'd fought a duel with a great gull. He'd towed an airship across the desert. He'd started a universe off. He wasn't going to let himself get stuck in a tree.

He looked down. It seemed miles to the ground, but he forced himself to go on looking. The hard, potholed tarmac of the street was directly below him. In another gap between the big five-fingered leaves he could see a patch of bare earth inside the Dump where the bulldozers had finished scraping the ground level. He was wishing he was over that side because it looked softer to fall on when a large, dark rat scuttled into the gap, raised its head, and looked boldly around. Its long whiskers quivered with interest and excitement. It didn't look frightened, though it must have been pretty bewildered by what the bulldozers had done to its world. Perhaps, James thought, it had two sets of memories, too, one about the bulldozers and one about racing a strange airship across a desert. He hoped so.

Seeing it there, so brisk and brave, made James even more ashamed of his fright. He started to edge his way back toward the trunk. At once the branch swayed sickeningly and he had to shut his eyes and hold on tight. He felt the whole tree was swinging to and fro, but after a bit he managed to open his eyes and try again.

He would have got down in the end, of course, without any help. It was sheer bad luck that Angie saw him. It was just like her, a totally useless kid, always mooning along and losing her gloves and tripping over things because she wasn't looking where she was going, but then noticing her brother stuck up a tree when he especially didn't want to be noticed.

The first James knew about it was Mum standing straight underneath him, with her hands cupped around her mouth, shrieking up through the roaring of the bulldozers.

“Don't move! Hold on tight! I'll call the Fire Department!”

She did too. It wasn't bad, being rescued by the Fire Department, which came in a regular fire engine with a red extension ladder that poked up between the branches, and a grinning, friendly fireman who said it made a nice change from getting people out of burning buildings and used the ladder to pick the chestnut James had been aiming for. The fireman kept calling him “sonny,” which was a pity, but otherwise it was all right. And there was a photographer from the paper, too, except that a lot of other things happened that week, so in the end they didn't print the picture after all.

It was even all right with Mum. It usually was when something serious happened. It was things that didn't matter she used to be boring about sometimes.

When everybody had gone away and they were tramping off to school with a twin gargling and the wheel buggy twittering and Angie mooning along behind, Mum said, “I want you to tell me, James—I promise I won't be angry—but what on earth did you do that for?”

“I wanted a chestnut to go with my tree picture.”

“Couldn't you find one on the ground?”

“The trucks had squashed them. Anyway, I wanted a whole one.”

“It's a pity you decided to do a chestnut tree. It's a bit ordinary, don't you think? I bet that's what a lot of the others have done.”

“No they haven't, and anyway, I haven't either.”

James took the piece of paper out of his pocket. It wasn't as crumpled as he'd have expected after all his adventures, but when he unfolded it he saw it wasn't the messy picture he'd drawn last night, watching the TV program. It was the star tree the Burra's pencils had helped him make in the cavern. And there were some circles on the back, too, which he'd drawn when he was trying to do the equation about how far it was to the centre of the dune circles. That proved it, he thought. Not to anyone else, of course, but that didn't matter.

He showed the picture to Mum.

“Oh, that's pretty,” she said, “though I wouldn't have known it was a chestnut tree. I suppose the stars are shining through the branches.”

“It isn't a chestnut tree. I told you. It's a star tree.”

They walked on, but she must have been thinking about it. They'd nearly reached the school when she said, “I still don't get it. If it isn't a chestnut tree, why'd you want to go climbing up for a chestnut?”

James put his hand into a pocket and pulled out the chestnut the fireman had picked for him. Carefully he levered the covering open, teased out the glossy nut, and put it back in the pocket. He fitted the spiky green sections of shell together.

“I need a rubber band to hold it,” he said.

“Am I being stupid?”

“It's a box of nothing, you see. Everything came out of nothing. That's what my tree means. The nothing is the seed, and it exploded itself into stars, and the universe started up.”

“BOOM!” said Angie.