Cosmicomics

that Mrs. Ph(i)Nk₀ was uttering those words: '… ah, what noodles, boys!' the point that contained her and all of us was expanding in a halo of distance in light-years and light-centuries and billions of light-millennia, and we were being hurled to the four corners of the universe (Mr. Pber^t Pber^d all the way to Pavia), and she, dissolved into I don't know what kind of energy-light-heat, she, Mrs. Ph(i) Nk₀, she who in the midst of our closed, petty world had been capable of a generous impulse, 'Boys, the noodles I would make for you!,' a true outburst of general love, initiating at the same moment the concept of space and, properly speaking, space itself, and time, and universal gravitation, and the gravitating universe, making possible billions and billions of suns, and of planets, and fields of wheat, and Mrs. Ph(i)Nk₀s, scattered through the continents of the planets, kneading with floury, oil-shiny, generous arms, and she lost at that very moment, and we, mourning her loss.

WITHOUT COLORS

Before forming its atmosphere and its oceans, the Earth must have resembled a gray ball revolving in space. As the Moon does now; where the ultraviolet rays radiated by the Sun arrive directly, all colors are destroyed, which is why the cliffs of the lunar surface, instead of being colored like Earth's, are of a dead, uniform gray. If the Earth displays a varicolored countenance, it is thanks to the atmosphere, which filters that murderous light.

A bit monotonous, – Qfwfq confirmed, - but restful, all the same. I could go for miles and miles at top speed, the way you can move where there isn't any air about, and all I could see was gray upon gray. No sharp contrasts: the only really white white, if there was any, lay in the center of the Sun and you couldn't even begin to approach it with your eyes; and as far as really black black is concerned, there wasn't even the darkness of night, because all the stars were constantly visible. Uninterrupted horizons opened before me with mountain chains just beginning to emerge, gray mountains, above gray rocky plains; and though I crossed continent after continent I never came to a shore, because oceans and lakes and rivers were still lying underground somewhere or other.

You rarely met anyone in those days: there were so few of us! To survive with that ultraviolet you couldn't be too demanding. Above all the lack of atmosphere asserted itself in many ways, you take meteors for example: they fell like hail from all the points of space, because then we didn't have the stratosphere where nowadays they strike, as if on a roof, and disintegrate. Then there was the silence: no use shouting! Without any air to vibrate, we were all deaf and dumb. The temperature? There was nothing around to retain the Sun's heat: when night fell it was so cold you could freeze stiff. Fortunately, the Earth's crust warmed us from below, with all those molten minerals which were being compressed in the bowels of the planet. The nights were short (like the days: the Earth turned around faster); I slept huddled up to a very warm rock; the dry cold all around was pleasant. In other words, as far as the climate went, to tell you the truth, I wasn't so badly off.

Among the countless indispensable things we had to do without, the absence of colors – as you can imagine – was the least of our problems; even if we had known they existed, we would have considered them an unsuitable luxury. The only drawback was the strain on your eyes when you had to hunt for something or someone, because with everything equally colorless no form could be clearly distinguished from what was behind it or around it. You could barely make out a moving object: a meteor fragment as it rolled, or the serpentine yawning of a seismic chasm, or a lapillus being ejected from a volcano.

That day I was running through a kind of amphitheater of porous, spongy rocks, all pierced with arches beyond which other arches opened; a very uneven terrain where the absence of color was streaked by distinguishable concave shadows. And among the pillars of these colorless arches I saw a kind of colorless flash running swiftly, disappearing, then reappearing farther on: two flattened glows that appeared and disappeared abruptly; I still hadn't realized what they were, but I was already in love and running, in pursuit of the eyes of Ayl.

I went into a sandy wasteland: I proceeded, sinking down among dunes which were always somehow different and yet almost the same. Depending on the point from which you looked at them, the crests of the dunes seemed the outlines of reclining bodies. There you could almost make out the form of an arm folded over a tender breast, with the palm open under a resting cheek; farther on, a young foot with a slender big toe seemed to emerge. As I stopped to observe those possible analogies, a full minute went by before I realized that, before my eyes, I didn't have a sandy ridge but the object of my pursuit.

She was lying, colorless, overcome with sleep, on the colorless sand. I sat down nearby. It was the season – as I know now – when the ultraviolet era was approaching its end on our planet; a way of life about to finish was displaying its supreme peak of beauty. Nothing so beautiful had ever run over the Earth, as the creature I had before my eyes.

Ayl opened her eyes. She saw me. At first I believe she couldn't distinguish me – as had happened to me, with her – from the rest of that sandy world; then she seemed to recognize in me the unknown presence that had pursued her and she was frightened. But in the end she became aware of our common substance and there was a half-timid, half-smiling palpitation in the look she gave me, which caused me to emit a silent whimper of happiness.

I started conversing, all in gestures. 'Sand. Not-sand,' I said, first pointing to our surroundings, then to the two of us.

She nodded yes, she had understood.

'Rock. Not-rock,' I said, to continue that line of reasoning. It was a period in which we didn't have many concepts at our disposal: to indicate what we two were, for example, what we had in common and what was different, was not an easy undertaking.

'I. You-not-I.' I tried to explain, with gestures.

She was irked.

'Yes. You-like-me, but only so much,' I corrected myself.

She was a bit reassured, but still suspicious.

'I, you, together, run run,' I tried to say.

She burst out laughing and ran off.

We ran along the crest of the volcanoes. In the noon grayness Ayl's flying hair and the tongues of flame that rose from the craters were mingled in a wan, identical fluttering of wings.

'Fire. Hair,' I said to her. 'Fire same hair.'

She seemed convinced.

'Not beautiful?' I asked.

'Beautiful,' she answered.

The Sun was already sinking into a whitish sunset. On a crag of opaque rocks, the rays, striking sidelong, made some of the rocks shine.

'Stones there not same. Beautiful, eh?' I said.

'No,' she answered, and looked away.

'Stones there beautiful, eh?' I insisted, pointing to the shiny gray of the stones.

'No.' She refused to look.

'To you, I, stones there!' I offered her.

'No. Stones here!' Ayl answered and grasped a handful of the opaque ones. But I had already run ahead.

I came back with the glistening stones I had collected, but I had to force her to take them.

'Beautiful!' I tried to persuade her.

'No!' she protested, but she looked at them; removed now from the Sun's reflections, they were opaque like the other stones; and only then did she say: 'Beautiful!'

Night fell, the first I had spent not embracing a rock, and perhaps for this reason it seemed cruelly shorter to me. The light tended at every moment to erase Ayl, to cast a doubt on her presence, but the darkness restored my certainty she was there.

The day returned, to paint the Earth with gray; and my gaze moved around and didn't see her. I let out a mute cry: 'Ayl! Why have you run off?' But she was in front of me and was looking for me, too; she couldn't see me and