Ten Tributes to Calvino (8 page)

He had to climb down and confront Og on the ground. An idea jumped into his mind, almost as if it was an edible animal, and he trapped it there, examined it, grinned with the joy of the catch.

Running back to the egg, he entered and fumbled in the yolky shadows for the coiled sinews, his fingers closing on them, extracting five from the hiding place like the innards of an endless pig. He loped back to the edge of the mesa and looked over the side again.

Og was making slow progress. He still had far to descend.

Ra-Kel was whimpering softly now.

Ug tied the five sinews together to make a rope.

Frantically looking around, he located a projection of rock that stuck itself out a few inches into the void. He tied one end of the rope around it with a knot his father had taught him and then he dropped the tangle and watched it unwind, the far end striking the dusty ground with an audible slap ten seconds later. A mythical snake.

Taking a series of deep breaths, Ug abruptly pushed himself into space and dangled. His large hands clutched the sinew and burned as they slid down and for a terrifying moment he thought he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from sliding all the way to the bottom at a speed comparable to a fall. He gripped tighter and braked slightly.

Then he worked out that if he wrapped one of his legs around the rope, he could control his descent even more accurately. He passed the level of Og and snarled at him. Og jerked his head up with a frown but Ug already was below him, the pain of his blisters truly forgotten in the swelling and joyful fury of triumph that suffused his being.

His feet struck the ground with a force that jarred the bones in his hips and he keeled over, grimacing through the agony until it began to fade, to become a comfortable ache, like a frost burn.

The sun flared high overhead. That huge yellow ball had been in a bad mood lately, flinging arcs of fire over itself. Ug could almost hear the sun hissing in the sky as it cast shadows with very sharp definition from every solid object, including himself as he stood up.

He bunched his fists and waited for Og to reach the ground.

“Ra-Kel!” screamed Ug in anticipation.

“Ug!” she responded as she came lower, still on the left shoulder of an ugly brute, a treacherous rival, a predator…

Og jumped the final few feet, landing upright.

Ug bared his teeth and charged.

To Ug’s amazement, Og didn’t brace himself to absorb the impact but turned and ran. He was fleet of foot, even with a woman on his shoulder, and easily outpaced his pursuer. Ug was vaguely aware of the entrance to a cave at the base of the mesa that passed in a blur as he forced himself to increase his speed. He howled in frustration.

But his ululation achieved nothing.

Og didn’t race off across the plain, but circled the massive outcrop, the mighty cliff, keeping close to the root of the sandy rock. Panting, Ug held his aching side and found his vision blurring.

But he didn’t give up. He bit his lip, tasted blood.

The sun beat down in boiling waves.

Sweat made Ug’s eyes smart, as if nettle juice had been squeezed into them, and he wiped both with a hairy forearm. He staggered, the bloated bursting sun seeming to pulse inside his head. Loops of fire leapt from the surface of that relentless orb, chiding tongues of unbearable energy. With a sickening gasp, Ug turned the next corner.

He had completely circled the mesa…

Back to the spot where he had descended; and Og was waiting for him and so was Ra-Kel, but the result was hideous.

Og had made a noose from the end of the long sinew, the rope that Ug had used to descend from the top of the cliff, and had placed it around the neck of Ra-Kel. He was holding the woman up in his burly arms and Ug knew that if he let her go, Ra-Kel would hang.

Ug didn’t know what to do. If he attacked Og, then his woman would choke to death. If he ran to help her, Og would take the opportunity to kill him while he was distracted. He stood still.

But Og made the decision for him. He let Ra-Kel go.

Her scream was cut off, turned into a gargle as the noose tightened and she dangled in mid-air, her feet a few inches above the ground. Og moved aside and beckoned at Ug, mouthing obscenities. Ug ran at him like a bull and Og danced nimbly aside, laughing.

He was standing near the entrance to that other cave, Og was, and with his hands on his hips he was grinning at Ug, mocking him, while Ra-Kel kicked ineffectually in her death throes.

Then something large rushed out of the cave.

A bear! The bear from above…

Ug was sure it was the same beast that he had chased out of the egg. It must have climbed safely down the cliff, using its claws to grip the stone, moving into this new home, making a life for itself here; but always ready to take revenge on humans, those who had evicted it, persecuted it, hurt it with the sharp edges of broken pebbles.

Og didn’t have time to turn, to see what form his death had taken. The bear broke his neck with a single swipe.

Ug ran to help Ra-Kel. Then the sun stopped spitting.

Everything lurched, faded, congealed.

The sinew snapped. Ra-Kel sprawled to the ground, to the sidewalk, a pavement of neatly fitting slabs. Ug crouched over her. “Are you alright? I think the sunstorm has finished now…”

Ug remembered the way things really were.

The mesa was a skyscraper. An experimental rocket had landed on the flat roof and the chimp inside had managed to open the capsule hatch and escape. Here it was now, lurking in the shadows of the lobby entrance. It made a series of rude gestures at Ug.

The parachute fabric, the cords attaching it to the capsule. Everything had been interpreted differently, hadn’t it? The chimp had been a bear. It wasn’t possible, was it? Just because a violent solar storm had jammed all the communications satellites in orbit…

The man on the ground stood and dusted off his suit.

“Oglethorpe!” bellowed Ug.

“Yes, it’s me. The solar storm is over.”

“It was a quick Stone Age, thank goodness. I suppose we’d better get back to work now,” said Mr Ugolino.

Mr Oglethorpe nodded. They both glanced at Raquel.

She rubbed her bruised throat.

“We ought to file a report about this too.”

“Later. The accounts take priority. The auditors are arriving tomorrow and there can’t be any irregularities.”

She nodded. Then she squinted. “Was it painful?”

“Being killed by a bear? You bet!”

They went inside the building and took the elevator to the top floor. A mammoth that was slow to change back lumbered past them in the widest corridor, knocking over the water cooler.

“The sun regularly has Earth-sized storms on its surface that end up ejecting dangerous radiation and particles into space. Mostly these dangerous bits of energy head off into deep space. But what would happen if the Earth got in the way? You could kiss goodbye to the Internet and your electricity supply. Banks and governments would not be able to function. Satellites would be blinded.” —
The Doomsday Handbook

“I’ll tell you why I hate the moon so much,” said the Pig Iron Mouse, his whiskers twitching and picking up radio broadcasts from far away. “I don’t have any secrets, and if I did I wouldn’t keep them from my friends, and even if you weren’t my friends I would tell you anyway, I would,” he added with magnetic sincerity.

“The light, that’s why, that’s the reason! That mellow spreading on the charred toast of the shadowy landscape of night, it makes life harder for any nocturnal creature that fears predators. And I live in constant dread of the Molybdenum Cat, that prowling howling demon with the electric headlamp eyebeams.

“He can switch them off when the moon’s full and then he’s more dangerous than ever and only last year he pounced on the Cupronickel Vole and dented him to death with his teeth, and that’s not the way I want to go, no sir, no madam, not the way at all! Pounced on from behind a tumbled stack of science journals.

“So I decided to get rid of the moon, do away with it, break the blasted thing and even the odds a little, a smidgen, a sliver. And I thought of ways I might accomplish this feat and it occurred to me that maybe the best course of action would be to catch the moon as it touched the horizon on its way to bed. I decided to impale it.

“Now I’m not cruel, not at all, and I didn’t want to make the moon suffer, so I raised a very long thin sharp pole on the horizon and I greased it for the entire length, and I knew that the moon’s doom would be quick on that slick skewer and nearly painless. I used all my engineering expertise to make that deadly pole, truly I did.

“Then I waited for the moon to rise in the east and travel across the sky and settle down unawares on my lethal spike, but for some reason the full fool missed my trap, cunningly wrought and perfectly positioned as it was, and set
behind
the pole. I was dismayed, let me tell you! Had I made an error with my calculations?

“Well, I set off on foot and reached the base of the pole and there I saw that it no longer stood on the horizon. Somehow the horizon had moved further away to the west. Maybe it was migrating for the season, heading elsewhere to breed or feed or do whatever it is that horizons do to keep themselves in line, I don’t know.

“So I made another pole at the place where the horizon had gone to, it was an identical greased spike, long thin sharp, and I waited again and once more the moon missed the point and set behind it. I puffed my cheeks and popped a rivet in the left one, that’s how exasperated I was, and I set off to locate the new site of the horizon.

“This went on and on and I never succeeded in impaling the moon and one morning I reached the horizon and saw that a pole was already there. It was the first one I had fixed in place. I had gone right around the entire planet! That realisation annoyed me slightly and I felt despondent and very tired and I was embarrassed also.

“You are going to ask me where the Molybdenum Cat was during this time. It’s a good question and the answer is that I don’t know, no sir, no madam, but I guess he was around about, lurking smirking, metal fur bristling, waiting for the opportunity to pounce, but that opportunity clearly never came for here I am, still here, me, talking to you.”

“I wanted to know,” continued the Pig Iron Mouse, “how the moon was avoiding my traps so successfully, so I decided to find out. What I did was this,” he added, his whiskers drooping and the signal fading and the strange dance music from distant lands dying. “I plucked out my left eyeball, the one above the cheek that had popped the rivet, I did.

“I plucked it out and it was already loose, so it didn’t hurt much, and I made a rocket engine powerful enough to carry that eyeball, which after all was a minimal payload, out of our atmosphere, with its odour of buttercups and weasels, and into space, outer space, and through the void, the external void, all the way to the moon, and down.

“When the eyeball was safely down on the surface of the moon, it was able to peer up at our planet, the world we’re standing on right now, and watch as the Earth travelled across the sky and set on the horizon. That’s what it saw, and because it saw that then so did I, because it was my eye, still my eye, up there on the moon, our moon.

“And then I realised that it was all a matter of perspective. That’s why I had failed to impale the moon! From the surface of the moon things looked very different, very different indeed, yes sir, yes madam, and in fact it was the Earth that was doing the setting on the horizon, not the moon. Which explains why it wasn’t landing on my spikes.

“Perspective was to blame, that’s what I concluded after my eye saw all that, so I decided to approach the problem from that angle. I went to the government department responsible for perspective and I knocked on the front door but it didn’t open, so I knocked on it again even harder and it still remained shut, but a window gaped wide.

“The window was high up, on the top level of the building, and an unseen voice called down at me, saying: ‘Sorry, no member of the public is allowed inside the Department of Perspective, please go away and don’t come back!’ And then the window was closed with a bang and I pretended to go away but in fact I hid and waited for nightfall.