Nobody answered. 'Oh, my goodness, they're lost!' Mother shouted. My little brothers weren't yet old enough to know how to transmit any message: so they got lost easily and had to be watched over constantly. 'I'll go look for them!' I said.
'Good for you, Qfwfq, yes, go!' Father and Mother said, then, immediately repentant: 'But if you do go, you'll be lost, too! No, stay here. Oh, all right, go, but let us know where you are: whistle!'
I began to walk in the darkness, in the marshy condensation of that nebula, emitting a constant whistle. I say 'walk'; I mean a way of moving over the surface, inconceivable until a few minutes earlier, and it was already an achievement to attempt it now, because the matter offered such little resistance that, if you weren't careful, instead of proceeding on the surface you sank sideways or even vertically and were buried. But in whatever direction I went and at whatever level, the chances of finding the twins remained the same: who could guess where the two of them had got to?
All of a sudden I sprawled; as if they had – we would say today – tripped me up. It was the first time I had fallen, I didn't know what 'to fall' was, but we were still on the softness and I didn't hurt myself. 'Don't trample here,' a voice said, 'I don't want you to, Qfwfq.' It was the voice of my sister G'd(w)n.
'Why? What's there?'
'I made some things with things…' she said. It took me a while to realize, groping, that my sister, messing about with that sort of mud, had built up a little hill, all full of pinnacles, spires, and battlements.
'What have you done there?'
G'd(w)n never gave you a straight answer. 'An outside with an inside in it.'
I continued my walk, falling every now and then. I also stumbled over the inevitable Mr. Hnw, who was stuck in the condensing matter again, head-first. 'Come, Mr. Hnw. Mr. Hnw! Can't you possibly stay erect?' and I had to help him pull himself out once more, this time pushing him from below, because I was also completely immersed.
Mr. Hnw, coughing and puffing and sneezing (it had never been so icy cold before), popped up on the surface at the very spot where Granny Bb'b was sitting. Granny flew into the air, immediately overcome with emotion: 'My grandchildren! My grandchildren are back!'
'No, no, Mamma. Look, it's Mr. Hnw!' Everything was confused.
'But the grandchildren?'
'They're here!' I shouted, 'and the cushion is here, too!'
The twins must long before have made a secret hiding place for themselves in the thickness of the nebula, and they had hidden the cushion there, to play with. As long as matter had been fluid, they could float in there and do somersaults through the round cushion, but now they were imprisoned in a kind of spongy cream: the cushion's central hole was clogged up, and they felt crushed on all sides.
'Hang on to the cushion,' I tried to make them understand. 'I'll pull you out, you little fools!' I pulled and pulled and, at a certain point, before they knew what was happening, they were already rolling about on the surface, now covered with a scabby film like the white of an egg. The cushion, instead, dissolved as soon as it emerged. There was no use trying to understand the phenomena that took place in those days; and there was no use trying to explain to Granny Bb'b.
Just then, as if they couldn't have chosen a better moment, our visiting relatives got up slowly and said: 'Well, it's getting late; I wonder what our children are up to. We're a little worried about them. It's been nice seeing all of you again, but we'd better be getting along.'
Nobody could say they were wrong; in fact, they should have taken fright and run off long since; but this couple, perhaps because of the out-of-the-way place where they lived, were a bit gauche. Perhaps they had been on pins and needles all this time and hadn't dared say so.
My father said: 'Well, if you want to go, I won't try to keep you. But think it over: maybe it would be wiser to stay until the situation's cleared up a bit, because as things stand now, you don't know what sort of risk you might be running.' Good, common sense, in short.
But they insisted: 'No, no, thanks all the same. It's been a real nice get-together, but we won't intrude on you any longer,' and more nonsense of the sort. In other words, we may not have understood very much of the situation, but they had no notion of it at all.
There were three of them: an aunt and two uncles, all three very tall and practically identical; we never really understood which uncle was the husband and which the brother, or exactly how they were related to us: in those days there were many things that were left vague.
They began to go off, one at a time, each in a different direction, toward the black sky, and every now and then, as if to maintain contact, they cried: 'Oh! Oh!' They always acted like this: they weren't capable of behaving with any sort of system.
They had hardly left when their cries of 'Oh! Oh!' could be heard from very distant points, though they ought to have been still only a few paces away. And we could also hear some exclamations of theirs, whose meaning we couldn't understand: 'Why, it's hollow here!' 'You can't get past this spot!' 'Then why don't you come here?' 'Where are you?' 'Jump!' 'Fine! And what do I jump over?' 'Oh, but now we're heading back again!' In other words, everything was incomprehensible, except the fact that some enormous distances were stretching out between us and those relatives.
It was our aunt, the last to leave, whose yells made the most sense: 'Here I am, all alone, stuck on top of a piece of this stuff that's come loose…'
And the voices of the two uncles, weak now in the distance, repeated: 'Fool… Fool… Fool…'
We were peering into this darkness, crisscrossed with voices, when the change took place: the only real, great change I've ever happened to witness, and compared to it the rest is nothing. I mean this thing that began at the horizon, this vibration which didn't resemble those we then called sounds, or those now called the 'hitting' vibrations, or any others; a kind of eruption, distant surely, and yet, at the same time, it made what was close come closer; in other words, all the darkness was suddenly dark in contrast with something else that wasn't darkness, namely light. As soon as we could make a more careful analysis of the situation, it turned out that: first, the sky was dark as before but was beginning to be not so dark; second, the surface where we were was all bumpy and crusty, an ice so dirty it was revolting, which was rapidly dissolving because the temperature was rising at full speed; and, third, there was what we would later have called a source of light, that is, a mass that was becoming incandescent, separated from us by an enormous empty space, and it seemed to be trying out all the colors one by one, in iridescent fits and starts. And there was more: in the midst of the sky, between us and that incandescent mass, a couple of islands, brightly lighted and vague, which whirled in the void with our uncles on them and other people, reduced to distant shadows, letting out a kind of chirping noise.
So the better part was done: the heart of the nebula, contracting, had developed warmth and light, and now there was the Sun. All the rest went on revolving nearby, divided and clotted into various pieces, Mercury, Venus, the Earth, and others farther on, and whoever was on them, stayed where he was. And, above all, it was deathly hot.
We stood there, open-mouthed, erect, except for Mr. Hnw who was on all fours, to be on the safe side. And my grandmother! How she laughed! As I said before, Granny Bb'b dated from the age of diffused luminosity, and all through this dark time she had kept saying that any minute things would go back the way they had been in the old days. Now her moment seemed to have come; for a while she tried to act casual, the sort of person who accepts anything that happens as perfectly natural; then, seeing we paid her no attention, she started laughing and calling us: 'Bunch of ignorant louts… Know-nothings…'
She wasn't speaking quite in good faith, however; unless her memory by then had begun to fail her. My father, understanding what little he did, said to her, prudently as always: 'Mamma, I know what you mean, but really, this seems quite a different phenomenon…' And he pointed to the terrain: 'Look down!' he exclaimed.
We lowered our eyes. The Earth which supported us was still a gelatinous, diaphanous mass, growing more and more firm and opaque, beginning from the center where a kind of yolk was thickening; but still our eyes managed to penetrate through it, illuminated as it was by that first Sun. And in the midst of this kind of transparent bubble we saw a shadow moving, as if swimming and flying. And our mother said: 'Daughter!'
We all recognized G'd(w)n: frightened perhaps by the Sun's catching fire, following a reaction of her shy spirit, she had sunk into the condensing matter of the Earth, and now she was trying to clear a path for herself in the depths of the planet, and she looked like a gold and silver butterfly as she passed into a zone that was still illuminated and diaphanous or vanished into the sphere of shadow that was growing wider and wider.
