The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Vol. 1 Page 17

  So Filk would carefully type his four pages, consume some chemicals, and lie back down on his dirty sheets until hunger or thirst or the pressing needs of his bladder caused him to rise again. Usually a single diurnal cycle. Although once, after a particularly crucifying experience, it had taken him three days to rise again.

  Filk had no loyalty to the past, as he was not that person anymore, so he never picked up a previous train of thought, always starting a new one. As a result, his writing had a peripatetic style and pace that few other authors could match.

  Or understand.

  Every hundred and twenty days, give or take a few, allowing for the occasional bouts of physical incapacity, Filk would have accumulated four hundred pages of text, give or take some number divisible by four. On that day, as if blinking awake from a long sleep, Filk would dutifully type a title in the center of a blank page and put that at the front of the stack; he would type “the end” in the center of another blank page and put that at the back of the stack. He never made up a title until the book was finished; because until it was finished, he did not know what it was about.

  Then Filk would put the stack of pages into a box, and take the box to the local office supply store and have two copies made. He would also buy two more reams of paper and a new typewriter ribbon. On his way home, he would stop at the post office and mail one copy to himself as insurance, and another to his publisher in New York.

  Filk’s publisher was a man named Thorbald Helmholtz, the owner and operator of Helmholtz Publishing, Ltd. Like most publishers, Helmholtz was a thief. On receipt of the manuscript, Helmholtz would write a check for $2,500 to Dillon K. Filk and drop it into the mail the very same day. Without actually reading the work for its content, Helmholtz would copy-edit it for spelling and grammar errors. He would pick a cover that he thought would sell, regardless of whether it matched the book or not—and if it had a near-naked girl being ravished by Things, so much the better—and then he would hand both cover and manuscript to his wife, who would manage the actual process of production.

  Approximately six months after the receipt of the manuscript, copies of the book would arrive in the bookstores. The books would stay on the shelves for three-and-a-half weeks, when they would be removed and replaced by the new books for the following month. The copies that had not sold would have their covers ripped off. The covers would be returned to the publisher as proof that those copies hadn’t sold.

  A book with Dillon K. Filk’s name on it would only sell a paltry 90,000 copies, grossing only a half-million dollars in reported sales. Although Helmholtz always paid Filk a generous two percent of the net (minus the original advance, the cost of production, distribution, advertising, and various miscellaneous expenses called “overheads”), this rarely amounted to more than a few hundred dollars at a time.

  Filk understood that Helmholtz was cheating him. Because publishers always cheated authors. But he assumed that any other publisher would probably cheat him a lot more than Helmholtz. And at least, Helmholtz paid him immediately. Of course, the royalties were always two years late, but Helmholtz assured Filk that was due to slow reporting by the bookstores and distributors.

  So Filk sat alone in his room and talked to himself. And after he finished talking to himself, he typed.

  Hi-ho.

  See?

  So it goes.

  ON THE PARTICULAR day that this story begins, Filk was thinking about a planet. He didn’t know anything about this planet yet. He wouldn’t know anything about it until he found the right name for it.

  Whenever Filk had to name a planet, he would pace around his room, speaking deliberately meaningless syllables, assimilating the flavors they suggested. The name of an alien planet had to sound exotic to a human ear, and it had to suggest the nature of the people who came from that planet.

  Today Filk was saying things like “Tralfadormin” and “Trantilusia” and “Tryspanifam.” He didn’t like those names. They sounded antediluvian and medicinal.

  Eventually, he mumbled, “Tranticleer, Tranquiloor, Trandilor.” Trandilor. He repeated it a few times. Then he turned to the typewriter and typed it out to see what it would look like on the page. Trandilor. No, didn’t look right.

  He considered Trazendilorr and Trassenadilor, but those seemed overburdened.

  He finally settled on Tryllifandillor.

  The existence of the world of Tryllifandillor, he typed, is impossible. Impossible means that it cannot exist in any domain where existence exists.

  Therefore, it can only exist in a domain where existence does not exist. You will find it only where existence is impossible. Because the domain of non-existence can only exist elsewhere than existence, it creates a profound cosmological loophole. Only things that cannot exist, can exist in the domain of non-existence.

  Filk was one of the few people on the planet who could think these thoughts without hurting himself. This was his particular superpower. Everybody on Earth has a superpower of some kind or other. Only three people know this. Filk was not one of them.

  In other words, because Tryllifandillor is impossible, its existence is inevitable—within the domain of impossibility.

  See?

  Filk never thought about what he was typing. The moving fingers moved, then moved on, practically of their own volition. Like pink anteater snouts picking busy insects off the keys. Unless the typewriter was clashing its mandibles, and knock wood, that hadn’t happened lately. Today his fingers were little pistons, merely following the loudest orders that the voices shouted inside his head.

  Tryllifandillor is a gas giant that failed to ignite. The winds of inevitability blew across its heart for billennia—he loved that word and tried to use it once or twice in every book—but as hard as they blew, nothing ever happened. Because of its condition of impossibility, the embers at its core only smoldered, never erupted. Instead of blazing in ferocious rage, it simply simmered. Instead of becoming a sun to its planets, blasting them with harsh light and killing radiation, Tryllifandillor remained only a large, lonely failure with a scattered handful of frozen oversized satellites. Instead of planets, Tryllifandillor had ice-encrusted moons.

  The moons, of this massive disappointment, circle in improbable orbits. They keep the huge brown sphere stabilized on its axis. As the moons orbit, they create vast tidal currents and storms in the upper reaches of the planet’s turbulent atmosphere. This is where the Jellyfish People of Tryllifandillor live.

  Hi-ho.

  The Jellyfish People would not be recognized as sentient beings by human beings. A Jellyfish Person begins as a glistening pink seed of possibility, three meters in length. It doesn’t hatch, it doesn’t sprout; one day it slowly and gracefully unfurls itself to become a soaring umbrella-shaped veil, two or three kilometers in diameter, and trailing many long strands of translucent beads.

  A Jellyfish moves by sailing the winds of Tryllifandillor’s upper atmosphere, spreading its sail to rise on the warm thermals, crumpling its edges inward to fall again, curling its edges this way and that to catch the various gaseous currents that sweep across the vast troposphere. As it drifts, it filters the warmth of its world for bits of proto-organics, silicates, and various trace metals—not so much feeding on the flying detritus as assembling itself from the available materials.

  The young Jellyfish seed by the thousands. They travel in swarms, and until they are large enough to sustain a self-aware webwork in their umbra, they are feral. They are vicious predators. They will seek out larger Jellyfish and lash their veils with their strings of sharp beads, slashing the hapless giants and shredding them into fragments. The young will eat their own parents, incorporating bits and pieces of nascent sentience. If there are no parent Jellyfish in their jetstreams, the young will feed upon each other.

  Over time, a Jellyfish will reach an extended diameter of hundreds of kilometers. The oldest and wisest of the people are more than a thousand kilometers across.

  The veils of a Jellyfish are l
imned with faint glowing traceries—a webwork of nano-scale ganglia that give the vast creature its impenetrable infinite wisdom. The more intricate the webwork, the more intelligent the creature is—and the more attractive it is to its fellows. Jellyfish communicate and interact by displaying coruscating patterns of shape and color along their vast flanks.

  Adult Jellyfish are so large, they function as giant nets. They take in far more energy than they can use. To survive, they must burn off the extra kilocalories. They do this by—

  Filk hesitated. He always hesitated when he had to make up a word. Finally he half-smiled and uttered an approving grunt.

  Frelching.

  Frelching is a combination of multiple art forms. The Jellyfish paint themselves with light and color and patterns that match and complement the rippling movements of their veils. At the same time, they sing; they play themselves as magnificent instruments, vibrating the atmosphere around them in intricate harmonies. Moving singly or in groups, they describe complex patterns in time and space, that describe vast emotional landscapes.

  Actually, what they are exploring is hypersexual combinations.

  Gender is irrelevant to these combinations. The Tryllifandillorians have invented over a hundred and thirteen different genders and they expect to invent several hundred more before this cycle of frelching completes.

  A frelch can last ten or twenty centuries. Or longer. The Tryllifandillorians are as slow and patient as glaciers, and they will continue until they have exhausted all the possibilities of each specific frelch. Then, they will re-invent themselves so as to make new variations and combinations possible. A typical cycle of a hundred and twenty frelches can last as long as three hundred thousand years.

  At this moment in not-time, the Tryllifandillorians have made their way halfway through a cycle of ninety-seven complementary frelches. Because every frelch includes, recaps, deconstructs, and comments on all of the previous cycles before expanding into new explorations, each successive frelch is longer than its predecessor. In this way, the Jellyfish People of Tryllifandillor pass on their heritage to the survivors of each new seeding.

  To the Tryllifandillorians, frelching is an exquisitely sensual experience. At its peak, the frelchers will intertwine their tendrils. Adult Jellyfish are likely to have tendrils several thousand kilometers in length. The physical intertwining is so intense that it transcends all concept of sexuality.

  Filk stopped typing there. He had reached the bottom of his fourth page and he had typed exactly eight hundred and eighty-five words. There was room for one more line. So he typed,

  Hi-ho!

  And he was done for the day.

  He rolled the page out of the typewriter, put it face down on the stack of finished pages, and sat back in his chair.

  So it goes.

  See?

  THE NEXT DAY, without rereading anything he had previously typed, Filk began typing again:

  Because of their size, the Tryllifandillorians function as vast radio antennae, and they can easily sense the long-wave vibrations of their universe.

  Just as jellyfish in the sea are sensitive to the ebb and flow of the tides, so are the Jellyfish of Tryllifandillor tuned into the peaks and troughs of the millennial rhythms of time. They can feel the rise and fall of universal emotion that underlies the existence that does exist—what we would call the universe. The universe of existence is very sparsely inhabited. At any given moment, there have never been more than twelve sentient races at a time. This is because there is a limiting factor in the universe. It is called the Law of Conservation of Sentience. Almost every time a new sentient species arises, at least one or more of the older ones self-destructs, or simply dies out from exhaustion.

  Because there are so few sentient species in such a vast arena, the emotional radiation from each individual race will stand out in the night like a beacon. Any profound event that happens to any sentient species resonates throughout the Sevagram the same way ripples of sound radiate outward from the violent plucking of a taut violin string. Eventually, as it makes its way from existence to non-existence, the resonance will reach the Tryllifandillorians.

  On this particular day, something happened in the realm of existence that was so startling that when the ripples reached non-existence, it unsettled an entire frelch, producing the Tryllifandillorian equivalent of a false note. The false note was immediately recontextualized as the ground-of-being for an entire new frelch, based solely on the moment of discordance.

  But this particular moment of discordancy was the essence of discordancy and refused to be recontextualized. Even in its own frelch, in the realm of impossibility, it stood out as an impossible thing.

  Apparently, something in the universe of existence had become aware of the universe of non-existence. Even more startling, it had become aware of the existence of impossibility. And in its most astonishing realization, that thing that had become aware, had also become aware of the existence of the non-existent Tryllifandillorians. The external knowledge of the frelch had soured not only this frelch, but the possibility of all frelching forever after.

  For the Tryllifandillorians, this was unthinkable.

  Hi-ho!

  The result was a moment—actually a century and a half—of unthinkable silence. During that time, three separate seedings came to fruition, fed upon themselves, shredded themselves in hunger, and died without ever approaching sentience. The Tryllifandillorians noted the events with interest, and at some point in the future planned to base a whole cycle of frelching on the tragedy of the three lost generations.

  But at the moment, the existence of an external awareness of their non-existence was such an unsettling realization that the entire species was struck with a profound curiosity. Who or what in the entire Sevagram had leapt to such an incisive achievement without traversing any of the necessary steps that should precede such an enlightenment?

  It would have to be investigated.

  Hi-ho!

  Filk stopped. He had typed five hundred and seven words. He had completed two pages and half of a third. He still had a page and a half to go.

  He did not know what to type next. He had run out of ideas before he had run out of paper.

  This was not an uncommon event. Many of Filk’s ideas were simply unable to sustain eight hundred words of examination. He had that in common with E. A. van der Vogel, another advocate of eight-hundred-words-and-out. And if an idea ran short, that was evidence that it wasn’t worth the investment of any more time. Nevertheless, if he didn’t type four full pages, Filk felt incomplete.

  In moments like these, Filk found it useful to stop and boil water. Sometimes a sentence would pop into his head before the water boiled and he would return to the typewriter and resume typing. If the sentence were the first of a long inevitable string of sentences, the kettle would boil itself dry, unnoticed by Filk.

  But if a sentence didn’t pop into his head, then Filk would end up sipping peppermint-flavored tea or forking noodles out of a Styrofoam cup while he stared at the crack in the opposite wall that looked a little bit like the northwestern coast of Australia.

  Today, before he could put the kettle on to boil, before he had even risen from the bed where he sat facing the typewriter on the TV tray, there was a knock on the door. Not exactly a knock. More of a slithery sound. But the intention was a knock.

  Filk rarely answered the door. When he answered the door, people wanted things from him—attention, time, money, sometimes even what little was left of his soul. Not wanting to give up any of those things—he simply didn’t answer the door. If he didn’t want to be interrupted, he had the right to choose not to be.

  The sound repeated and there was something imperative about it.

  Dillon K. Filk made his own sound now, one of annoyance and frustration. He pushed himself up off the bed, causing the ancient springs to squeal their own annoyance and relief. Then he padded barefoot to the door and opened it suspiciously.

  He peered out
of the narrow crack between the door and the jam.

  He saw a small brown man. The man had brown eyes, brown skin, and wore a brown suit. He had brown hair and a brown hat. The ring on his brown finger had a brown birthstone.

  “Dillon K. Filk?” he asked.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “My name. Is Brown. Small Brown.”

  Of course.

  Small Brown held up an ID card in a leather folder. It had a brown picture on it. It looked very official. But the type was too small for him to read.

  Filk blinked from the card to the man. They had found him again.

  What Small Brown saw was a grizzled old hermit, forty-six years old, with a six-day growth of gray beard, an unkempt frazzle of thin graying hair, small beady unfocused eyes, a possibly blue sweatshirt, a sagging pair of shorts, and two skinny hairy legs ending in two ugly dirty feet tipped off by ten very frightening yellow and black toe-nails. He smelled of unwashed decay.

  “Mr. Filk, may I come in?”

  “No. I’m working.”

  “I’m here. On behalf. Of the. Tryllifandillorians.” Brown pronounced the words as if he were unfamiliar with the task of using a larynx and a tongue to cause air to vibrate in a precise pattern of sound. He was particularly uncomfortable with the last word of his speech.

  Filk blinked again.

  “The Tryllifandillorians?”

  Filk took an involuntary step back. Startled.

  Brown took that as assent and pushed the door open. He stepped in. The door shut itself behind him. Without Brown touching it. Filk’s eyes narrowed. “You a lawyer?”

  “Lawyer?” Brown considered the word. “I am. Representing. Yes.” Then he added, “But not. Lawyer.”

  Filk scratched himself. First his belly, then his head. Then his neck. He itched a lot. Especially when he was awake. “Okay. Fine. What do you want?”

  “It is not. What I want. It is. What. Tryllifilli— excuse me. Tryllifandillor. Wants.”

  “What?”