When I Was An Old Man

To celebrate and reflect the Large Hadron Collider's momentous re-start this weekend - its fears and hopes, its retrocausal, infinitely retropausal implications - I reprint below my short story 'When I Was An Old Man', first written in the early Nineties and first published appropriately in ZEST magazine in 1998.  You can also hear me read it aloud here: http://www.filefactory.com/file/ah80559/n/VN650086_WMA

I am not obsessed with the LHC, but the LHC has become obsessed with me - following the publication, last June, of CERN ZOO. This is not solipsism on my part, but possible diversionary tactics to avoid the world's visit to Switzerland for assisted peace-making with itself before final closure.  Or maybe it's to make that visit more likely, more necessary, more as if it-has-happened-already.

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WHEN I WAS AN OLD MAN 

I recalled a time when ordinary people were able to build their own inventions from scratch, like that wondrous Great Drill.  Whilst the ramp had looked like a giant youthful Meccano model, it did bear the weight of the Drill, a mighty monster of metal which glinted in the setting and rising suns.  This was to be home—for me, my family and friends together with a single stranger—lasting at least an optimum length of time. 

          The bodywork of the Drill sloped towards the ground upon the ramp and creaked like a regular clock, each tick representing a separate strain on its rivets.  It could be measured in hundreds of metres, and even thousands, widening out towards the top, tapering down to the deeply spiralled Bit which was poised half a centimetre above the desert floor.  The Bit spun gently as the powerful engine above in the main body took light revving exercises and clambering labourers leaned from the gantries to squirt huge gouts of black sludge into the moving parts.  As the sun rose—blinding off the shiny areas of the mighty contraption—the Bit spun harder; then I, being the project leader, pressed a button which I knew was the real starter-switch, all the other switches built into the pilot's console being just for show.

          Years of arranging—poring over incomprehensible charts of futuristic engineering—debating the ways and whyfores of the avenues towards which it might lead me—vicariously enjoying the false start romances which alternated like misfiring currents between members of the crew—carefully monitoring my own sanity—yes, after all these things, surely the day had arrived.  I got to get there.  Really got to. 

          A futuristic Noah's Ark, yes, but one with no need to take to the open skies, as had been predicted.  It was to be home for humanity's hope not as the Lark Ascending but, in darker moments of delving doubt, more a Lurk Descending.   

          The lady was younger than myself, although we both dreamed independently that we had once been the same age—separate dreams that neither could admit to the other.  She had peach-blossom cheeks and a name she kept hidden, making me call her by all manner of endearments.  She played on my good nature and my deep desire for a sex partner (even at my advanced years).  She stood beside me as I pressed the starter switch.

          The ignition turned the mighty engines, one sparking off another, until the Bit spun so fast it was just one among many scintillating shafts of the dawning sun.  The tip met the hard redness of the Surrey desert, throwing up a wormcast fit to outshadow an Ancient Egyptian pyramid.  It eased into the undersoil, to where centuries of misbegotten seasons had sunk.  Then it ground into the first layer of bedrock, setting off a rain of white-hot splinters which cascaded past the windows of the Drill's cabins.

          My family and friends merely sat and stared, amid the juddering, as the darkness of Earth enveloped them.  No need for concern, I told them: the lights on board would not even flicker, since the relentless power of the Drill's torque would feedback and regenerate the cells.  I showed them where the fuse membranes were stored, so these could be replaced with just one turn of a screw and a snap-on-snap-off cassette.  The chosen stranger in the crew was less confident, for I did read fear in his eyes, behind the hope.  He was suspicious of why I had chosen him to ride at all.  Suspicious, indeed, of himself for having agreed to come on such a wayward mission.

          "On to the core!" I announced over the ship's tannoy.  "That's where we shall pitch our tents!" 

          She laughed.  She knew at the bottom of her heart that it was far too hot at the core for anything to exist, especially for our bodies of human parchment and the spontaneously combustible brains that our skulls freighted. 

          I had always felt that I possessed two brains: two lumps of grey matter with hot-rod lightning Z-tracking between.  I was not schizophrenic, but merely overburdened with thoughts and ideas which, by turns, conflicted and merged.  It was like being married to myself.  And as the mammoth Drill delved downwards between rocks which shifted amid the sluggish marrow of Earth's inner sky, I had to calm the nerves of everybody on board, needing to contain their fears concurrently while not allowing my own sanity to slip.  I boasted that we were the ultimate pioneers, ones that history had foretold would boldly bodily go to the outer reaches of the Universe, finding a new home to flee a terrible world.  But this great escape, I told them, was not up, but down.  The dire diseases, you see, were wilder, deeper, stronger in the places where the stars flowed. 

          They listened open-mouthed, but I soon saw that none of them had ever believed me.  No wonder they couldn't even trust themselves.

          How could I have even hoped that any of them possessed the nous for such concepts, when times were so backward?  There were other questions, too.  Indeed, I set them pub quizzes to pass the time along its rightful channel, tested them on knowledge and on historical perspective.  Until the stranger pointed out that we had forgotten to stow the books.  How were we meant to preserve the spirit of the world, the very posterity we hoped to further?  Old people were meant to have wisdom, weren't they.  Otherwise, they'd be young again. 

          I unconsciously bit my lip and indicated towards the carved slabs of map-crazed rocks which slid past the windows, but if I were meant to speak, to smooth away the puzzles on our brows, I could only find two words: "Trust me".

          Suddenly, we all heard an edge-toothed rasping and outlandish crunching noise, like the strongest tide upon loose shingle, when trying to claw a way back from drowning.  The Drill ground to a ricocheting halt, sending the passengers in all tilting directions, my lady collapsing on top of me with a screech which the Bit itself must have felt as it met an impermeable Hard Core.  Sparks in a molten silver river flowed past the portholes, as my family clambered across the steepening floor towards me, yearning for comfort and words of unalloyed wisdom.  But she, my lady, spoke first:  "The air is escaping, we can't breathe."

          Two brains merged—at this optimum point of time.  We gathered that the hull of the Drill had been stove in by the force of the jolt, and the carefully preserved life support systems were seeping out—not rapidly as they would have done in outer space, but gradually enough to warrant immediate donning of Q-shaped masks.  My mask was in the image of Ancient Pan, and my lady's in that of a birdlike creature with oversize beak.  The stranger’s mask was designed along the lines of my own face whilst the rest of the crew presented a motley array of fictitious heroes and villains, spinning on their rumps like dying bluebottles, all doped to the white-clogged gills. 

          Only two masks possessed the secret air supply instead of the snorts of dope.  But such supply was to last for a mere one minute—suitable for my lady and I to reach orgasm on this delving Love-Ark of the Covenant.  But, instead, we took the opportunity to speak a gratuitous message——

          "The Core will split asunder like a lanced boil and give forth Great Old Ones which will use their tentacles to crawl up the vertical chimney, a chimney we've gouged for them." 

          Seeing what these creatures used as faces slide past the Drill's cockpit, my two brains alternated endlessly between Death and Life.  Until, finally, even endlessness eventually ended and, after much debate, Death itself can write. 

          "Trust me," the stranger said with his last words—but he knew, in his heart, if not his two brains, that these words were trapped between the hard covers of a book, the ink-trod paper crumbling to choking dope-dust in his throat.  The lady tugged a washing-line of pure white oblong flags from under her skirt.  She smiled and held it out for him to help pull them free from endlessness.  They were the virgin pages for a book which became banknotes for invisible money, most blank but some bearing the head of Charles Dickens in the corner.  A few even were denominated.

          One eye, I somehow know, weeps an old man's tears; the other sparkles like a child's.  Got to get there.  Really got to.  Right to the core of dreams. 

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MORE RECENT FANBLADE FABLES HERE: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2009/11/new-fanblade-fables.html

IMMORTALITY TAKES ON A NEW ACHIEVABILITY: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2009/11/immortality-takes-on-new-achievability.html

WEIRDMONGER WHEEL COLLIDER: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/weirdmonger_wheel_collider.htm