The 13.5 Lives of Captain Bluebear Page 8
Alpine Imps are trusting and affectionate by nature, but their feelings are seldom returned – a circumstance that has led to their gradual extinction. They make a habit of landing on mountaineers’ rucksacks from a great height. Having done so, they give full vent to their affection by letting out a blood-curdling scream. This behaviour accounts for the fact that any climber who has ever encountered an Alpine Imp never scales another mountain and becomes a deep-sea diver or a mine superintendent.
Fredda was startlingly immature and silly for her 400 years. She continually interrupted our lessons by making peculiar noises and bombarding me with paper pellets on which she’d scrawled hearts and arrows or declarations of love. She used to trip me up during break, sit on my back, and stick her pencil in my ear until I promised to marry her. I was powerless to resist these attentions, for Fredda possessed the strength of ten mountain gorillas, the reflexes of a puma, and the stamina of a dolphin. No one in school was a match for her except Professor Nightingale himself.
Fredda couldn’t speak, only scream, but Nightingale had begun by teaching her to write and presented her with a pen and a thick memo pad. This she took everywhere with her. She communicated with us by means of these slips of paper, on which she wrote in copperplate. A conversation with her looked something like this:
I: ‘Hello, Fredda.’
Fredda:
* * *
‘Good morning, Bluebear.’
* * *
I: ‘Sleep well?’
Fredda:
* * *
‘So-so. I’ve got a nestful of Gloomberg bats in my hair. They squeaked all night long.’
* * *
I: ‘Ugh!’
I couldn’t return Fredda’s feelings, as I’ve already said, but I was very fond of her. If somebody loves you, you always love them a little in return, even when they’re an Alpine Imp.
Qwerty:
The gelatine prince
A gelatine prince from the 2364th Dimension, Qwerty was as transparent as a jelly and the best friend I made during my schooldays. We were all exceptional, but Qwerty was the most exceptional of us all. His place of origin, the 2364th Dimension, is a world that cannot be conceived of by anyone possessing fewer than four brains.
Qwerty was not only a prince of the 2364th Dimension. He was really its king, because he had been on the way to his coronation when he tripped over a fold in the red carpet and fell head first into a dimensional hiatus. The 2364th Dimension is dotted with such holes. If you fall into one, you go tumbling through the entire universe into some other galaxy. Making your way back is extremely difficult. First you have to locate a dimensional hiatus, which is hard enough in itself. It must also be the right one, of course, so that you find your way back into the right dimension. But more of that later. Qwerty was a prisoner in our world, therefore, but he bore his fate with remarkable composure. He liked to act tough and was always cracking jokes. He also devoted a great deal of thought to other people’s cares and concerns, but being his best friend I knew that, when he was alone, he shed gelatinous tears and yearned for his home.
Milk music
Everything there was quite different from our own world. For instance, Qwerty was accustomed to feeding on music, but even our most highbrow music struck him as crude and primitive. It should be explained that in the 2364th Dimension music is played on instruments made of milk. Professor Nightingale had devised a method of keeping Qwerty fed. Using sophisticated underwater microphones, he recorded the song of the sea horse, mixed it with the rhythm of thunderclaps, the baying of Baskerville hounds, the inaudible squeaks of bats, the groans of graveyard worms, and a few highly original noises of his own. He then played the whole thing backwards at twice the original speed. Qwerty confirmed that this bore quite a resemblance to the music of his homeland. The rest of us always left the room when he had his musical meals.
Professor Abdullah Nightingale:
Over and above his educational activities, the professor enjoyed an awesome reputation in contemporary Zamonia as a world-class scientist, explorer, and inventor. He had invented the ant motor, a form of propulsion based solely on the industriousness of Zamonian glow-ants. These produced heat and, thus, sufficient energy, when necessary, to drive a steamroller at a speed approaching that of sound. Fuel consumption was limited to a cup of honey poured into the machine from above.
Professor Nightingale’s inventions
The professor had also invented the volcanic suit, an all-enveloping garment of woven quicksilver galvanized with un-meltable ice (another of his inventions) in which you could not only immerse yourself in molten lava but, if you removed the hood, cut a dash at cocktail parties.
During one of his dives in Krakatoa’s still active crater Nightingale discovered the lava-breathing fire-fish, a species he not only caught and tamed but contrived to use as the basis of a new invention, the fire-fish-powered cave-heating system. If fire-fish were deprived of lava and placed in ordinary drinking water, they automatically changed their cellular structure and transformed themselves into a kind of living lava. These aquatic creatures breathed water like normal fish and thus made it boil. Fire-fish could also be used for brewing coffee, although they left a slightly fishy aftertaste. They were only really suitable, in the gastronomic domain, for making bouillabaisse.
In the chlorophyllaceous circulation of the Gloomberg alga Nightingale had localized the so-called supercalorie. A single one of these was sufficient to sustain an adult for a whole week. The professor endeavoured to make Giant’s Teeth algae the Nocturnal Academy’s official school meal, but was thwarted by his pupils’ aversion to them.
His aquashoes, which enabled one to walk on water by solidifying it with the aid of H2O rays, remained in vogue only until it was found that the water, which had congealed into a jelly, could not be restored to its original consistency. Because every body of water in and around Zamonia would eventually have been rendered undrinkable and unnavigable, aquashoes were banned throughout the continent. But Nightingale tried to make a profit even out of this setback. Having collected the solidified water, he diluted it with aromatic substances, cut it into slices, and sold it as edible water in an assortment of flavours. This product he named ‘Professor Nightingale’s Solid Soup’. It didn’t sell, however, because no one felt like eating soup on which people had tramped around in his peculiar shoes.
Nightingale was also the inventor of the scintilla shower, a small plywood cubicle surmounted by a hopper in which, he believed, scintillas would accumulate if the occupant pondered on major problems. According to Nightingale’s celebrated scintilla theory, scintillas were the basic material of the ideas, or invisible electroparamagnetic aerial worms, which pullulated throughout the atmosphere. Because good ideas always crop up when least expected, Nightingale had advanced the theory that this phenomenon depended on the density of the scintillas in the surrounding air. He also believed that scintillas had a special predilection for dark, confined spaces smelling of pinewood. If a person sat in a dark, confined space smelling of pinewood and thought big thoughts, therefore, the scintillas would stream out of the hopper into the scintilla shower and come rattling down on the seated thinker’s head. Although the existence of scintillas and the effectiveness of the scintilla shower could never be scientifically proved, we pupils happily retired to the cubicle to smoke home-rolled cigarettes of Gloomberg algae.
The Chamber of Unperfected Patents
Another of the professor’s inventions was a gold extractor that filtered the gold out of the most worthless pebbles, compressed it, and minted it into beautiful coins. He also devised the handy diamond press, with which a lump of anthracite could be compressed into a diamond in one second flat. (The last two inventions had rendered Nightingale financially independent.) He had taken out patents on self-cleansing toilet paper, magnetic paint, a flying carpet, chameleon wallpaper, the Diabolic Elf microscope (with which Qwerty and I examined specimens in our spare time), cyclopean spectacles, and a chi
sel so tiny it would split an atom – if your fingers were small enough to hold it. More romantic than useful was the furiometer, which could convert paroxysms of rage into harp sonatas.
Nightingale was famous for the suicidal courage he displayed in the interests of scientific progress. One of his most daring experiments was a personal trial of the vibrogirdle. This belt was capable of causing the atoms in a body to vibrate so violently that the wearer could pulsate his way through any given object or someone else’s body. Armed with a vibrogirdle, one could pass through a wall or a tree, the door of a safe or a pane of glass, without harming them (or oneself). After several small-scale experiments with solid brick walls and sheets of metal, the professor decided to vibrate his way through the Gloombergs. The experiment was very successful at first. Nightingale swiftly penetrated the atomic structure of the ferruginous mountains and had reached their midpoint when the vibrogirdle simply cut out: he was imprisoned in the mountains’ densest concentration of molecules and could neither advance nor retreat. Anyone else would have found this a nightmarish experience, but to Nightingale it was the best thing that had ever happened. Why? Because he had discovered absolute darkness for the very first time. It is said that the basic ideas for all his subsequent scientific feats occurred to him in this state of utter darkness. After this incident, which transformed his life, he devoted himself almost exclusively to the study of lightlessness. This, of course, was possible only because his vibrogirdle was reactivated after a moment or two by a mild earthquake registering two on the Richter scale. He kept the vibrogirdle and other unsuccessful inventions in a room at the Nocturnal Academy. This was secured with an airlock (a Nightingale device consisting of oxygen concentrate) and bore the following inscription:
* * *
Unperfected Patents Chamber
* * *
The contents of the room included a square-wheeled bicycle for climbing stairs, a type of vacuum cleaner for sucking up lightning, a pair of so-called quicksand trousers, and – of course – some aquashoes. Nightingale had an interesting anecdote to tell about each of these objects. Deus X. Machina featured in the one about the quicksand trousers. Years before, Mac had rescued the professor from a swamp into which he had waded to test the efficacy of his quicksand trousers. The latter were based on an inversion of the vibrogirdle principle and suffered from similar defects. Grains of sand got between the contacts of the sparking plugs of the crude motor that propelled the trousers, which cut out and left Professor Nightingale sinking in the quicksand. If Mac hadn’t rescued him – at the very last moment, needless to say – there would have been no Nocturnal Academy.
In the classroom
Although I really can’t pretend I went to school willingly, the professor’s lessons did possess a unique quality. Once he started teaching, you forgot about everything else. When he finally tottered into the classroom (he was nearly always late) and removed his four mortarboards (which he wore partly out of vanity and partly to keep his external brains warm), he got down to it right away.
He also, at that moment, lost his tremulous movements and frail appearance. Prancing up and down in front of the class, lightfooted as a ballerina, he presented his subject matter with a gift for mime and vocal acrobatics that would have enabled any actor, dancer or singer to gain international stardom. Whatever the subject he was teaching, he had the knack of putting it over physically.
With the aid of a few grimaces or contortions, nothing more, he turned before our marvelling eyes into a zebra or a bluebell, a piece of rock crystal or a microbe, an atom or a Pythagorean theorem. Professor Nightingale had taken the teaching profession into the realm of art, and in art, as in all the other disciplines he had mastered, he was a genius.
We were taught no lessons, no single subject, in the traditional manner. Instead, every day was devoted to a long, nonstop lecture by Nightingale in which he jumped from subject to subject, seemingly at random, holding forth sometimes on wind power, sometimes on poodle-breeding or vegetable drugs, and pausing occasionally to scrawl a formula, foreign word or diagram on the blackboard.
Whenever he changed subjects one could see him switch from one brain to another. This he did by inserting his little finger in his left ear and turning it fractionally, screwdriver fashion. There was a faint click like a dislocated finger springing back into place. Sometimes, when he crashed his gears, it sounded as if a crowbar was being crushed between two cogs. It always set my teeth on edge, and Fredda’s bristly hair stood on end in any case, but Qwerty liked the sound because it reminded him of a pop song from the 2364th Dimension.
These abrupt changes of subject were far from arbitrary, however, but that I didn’t realize until much later. Listening to Nightingale was like reading a very long novel with a complicated plot whose threads don’t converge until the end, or like spending years watching a painter at work on an enormous mural. I did, in fact, spend years at the Nocturnal Academy, but they passed so quickly and eventfully that I never got around to counting them.
Zamonian history
Having become acquainted with the world from above in Mac’s company, I now explored it from within. I began to grasp how everything was connected, from the cellular structure of a dandelion seed to an exploding star in the Horsehead Nebula. I learned all there was to know about the origins and population of Zamonia. I knew the names of all the kings, tsars, princes, sheriffs, presidents, caliphs, popes, tyrants, sultans and strongmen who had ever ruled the continent. I learned about their background, their boyhood, their eating habits, and the exalted or scatterbrained ideas that had prompted them to favour a particular form of government or driven them insane. I learned of the existence of such contrasting monarchs as Polpap Peth the Altruistic, who conducted affairs of state from a bed of nails, and Kivdul II, a megalomaniac who, purely for his personal delectation, erected a full-sized artificial volcano whose crater he used for staging operas based on the narrative poems of Wilfred the Wordsmith.
We heard of Zamonia’s emergence from the sea a million years ago, of its original population of dinosaurs, megadragons, huge insects, Bolloggs and protodemons, of their gradual extinction and the continent’s colonization by other life forms from all over the world. Nightingale told us of the Cyclopses’ Two Thousand Years’ War, of the great Waterkin rebellion, of the building of Atlantis, and countless other events in Zamonian history.
Miming the elements
From history Nightingale made an instantaneous transition to physics. He mimed every element that goes to make up our planet, starting with the basic ones: fire, water, earth, and air. As fire he writhed and undulated like the tongues of flame from a flambeau, producing such a genuine hiss and crackle that we began to feel quite warm and thought we could smell smoke. As water he began by rolling leisurely back and forth on the floor to illustrate the unhurried ebb and flow of the tides, then drew himself up into a tidal wave and rushed at us with such a convincing roar that we were all seized with a momentary fear of death by drowning. As earth he first crumpled up like an ordinary clod and then, delving ever further below the surface, mimed one rock formation after another until, having assumed the form of lava, he vented himself in an impressive volcanic eruption. I still recall how Fredda shielded her face with her hands.
As air he also began quite innocuously as a mere puff of wind. He frisked across the classroom, blew gently into Fredda’s unkempt hair, and fanned cool, agreeable breezes in our direction with his hands. By flapping them harder he generated stronger winds that abruptly developed into squalls and then into a tornado, which he mimed by rotating on his own axis like a demented Ventisprite, spinning across the classroom, sending papers flying, and sweeping the pencils off our desks. Meantime, he bellowed like a whole herd of panic-stricken buffalo. We gripped the desks and held on tight.
After that came subsidiary elements such as sulphur and iron, tin and iodine, cobalt and copper, zinc and arsenic, all of them perfectly illustrated in mime. Arsenic, for example, he portrayed by g
rabbing his throat and emitting a death rattle to show what happens if you swallow that element by mistake; mercury by twisting his arms and legs into such contortions that they almost looked like butter melting on a hotplate; sulphur by emitting loathsome farting sounds and disgusting smells that gave us a foretaste of hell.
Lastly, he introduced us to elements that are now extinct but then possessed attributes that strike us today as magical. Known as cemolium, rronkium, and perpenium or unzium, they were the subject of the wildest myths, and there were adventurers throughout Zamonia who still went prospecting for them.
Zamonium
But the rarest and most legendary element of all was zamonium. I pricked up my ears when Nightingale came to speak of it, possibly alerted by the strange undertone his voice had suddenly acquired. The professor seemed ill at ease with his subject for the very first time. He disposed of it in conspicuous haste, merely informing us that zamonium is the only element capable of thought, that only a small quantity of it existed, and that this had mysteriously vanished. Then he stuck his finger in his ear and quickly switched to another brain and a different subject.
In class Fredda kept passing me her little memo slips, most of them bearing poems that dealt with her two favourite subjects: her homesickness for the Impic Alps and her romantic obsession with me. They weren’t great literature, but at least they rhymed. For instance: