It was a sundering Dawn -- Incandescence to which all later lights are less than candles -- Heat to which the heat of all later suns is but a burnt out match -- the Polarities that set up the tension forever.
And in the middle was a whimper, just as was felt the first jerk that indicated that time had begun.
The two Challenges stood taller than the radius of the space that was being born; and one weak creature, Therese, stood in the middle, too craven to accept either challenge.
"Um, how long are you going to be gone?" she asked.
The Creative Event was the Revolt rending the Void in two. The two sides formed, opposing Nations of Lightning split above the steep chasm. Two Champions had it out with a bitterness that has never passed -- Gabriel wrapped in white fire -- and Mephisto swollen with black and purple blaze. And their followers with them. It has been put into allegory as Light and Dark, as Good and Evil, but in the Beginning there was Positive and Negative, the Polarities by which the Creation is sustained.
And between them, like a pigmy, stood Therese alone in whimpering hesitation.
"Get the molten lead out if you're coming with us" Mephisto growled, as he led his followers off in a fury to build a new settlement.
"Are you going to be back before nightfall?" Therese called.
"Oh...get the hell out of here," Gabriel roared.
"Not with us she's not," Mephisto snorted. "You keep her, she hasn't got enough brimstone in her to set fire to an outhouse."
The two great hosts separated, and Therese was left alone in the void. She was still standing there when there was a second little jerk and time began in earnest, bursting the pod into a shower of sparks that traveled and grew. She was still standing there when the sparks acquired form and spin, and she stood there yet when life began to appear on the soot thrown off by the sparks. She stood there for quite a long time.
"What are we going to do with her?" Gabriel's secretary asked him. "We can't have her fouling up the landscape forever."
"I'll think of something, Kitabel," said Gabriel. He knew that Therese would have to be punished for her hesitancy, and that it was up to him to select a suitable punishment and see it carried out. "You know, she made time itself stutter at the start." he told Kitabel. "She caused a randomness that has affected everything. It's got to be a punishment with something to do with time."
"Got any ideas?" Kitabel asked.
"Not yet."
Quite a while after this, Gabriel was thumbing through a book one afternoon at a news-stand in Boston.
"It says here," Gabriel started, "that if a dozen monkeys were set at a dozen typewriters and typed at random for long enough, they would type all the words of Shakespeare exactly. Time is something we've got plenty of. Let's try it, Kitabel, and we'll see how long it takes."
"What's a monkey, Gabriel?"
"I don't know."
"What's a typewriter?"
"No idea."
"What's a Shakespeare?"
"Don't bother me with trifles, Kitabel. Get the things together and let's get the project started."
"It sounds like a lengthy project. Who will oversee it?"
"Therese, of course. She's a natural. It will teach her patience, a sense of order, a healthy dose of respect for me, and truly impress upon her the majesty of time...and show her what her hesitation has done."
So they got the things together and turned it over to Therese.
"As soon as the project is finished, Terry, your time of waiting will be over. Then you can join our group and enjoy yourself with the rest of us," Gabriel said.
"Well, I suppose it is better than standing here doing nothing," she agreed. "It'd go faster if I could educate the monkeys and let them copy it."
"No, the typing has to be random, Terry. You introduced randomness into the Universe, you suffer for it. I have your master copy of 'The Complete Works of Shakespeare' here. The monkeys have to produce an exact copy of this edition. I've had a little talk with the monkeys, and they're willing to stick to it. It took me eighty-thousand years to get them to where they could talk, not to mention type, but that's nothing when we're talking about time."
"Man, are we ever talking about Time!" Therese moaned.
"I made a deal with the monkeys," Gabriel continued. "They'll be immune to fatigue and boredom. I cannot promise the same for you."
"Uh, Gabriel, since it may be quite a while, I wonder if could have some sort of a clock to keep track of time, and how fast things are going."
"That seems a reasonable request," Gabriel agreed. "I'll get you a clock." He then summoned his bag of possessions and went rummaging through his things. "Now, let's see....clock, clock, no clock here, clock there? No, no, no, chainsaw....ball peen hammer....... tape measure.....no clock.....hmmmmmmmm. Well!" he said at last, "no standard clock, so I'll have to improvise. What could be used? ...hmmm ................ heh-heh...hahaha .......Oh, that's perfect!" he said, taking up the tape measure again.
"What have you got in mind?" Therese asked.
"A little extra punishment and a clock for you, a good laugh for me. You see," he explained, "your breasts will be your clock. They will grow, very, very, imperceptibly slowly. By a little teeny bit each day. Once every millennium I will send a giant bird to bring this tape measure to you. It will automatically measure your bust line, then the bird will take it and leave for another thousand years. It's not much, but you'll be able to tell that time has passed."
She stared at him with a look of horror on her face. "But..but, but, but what if..."
"Now don't worry. You're not going to get pinned under your breasts or anything, and it's not like you have any clothes to replace. Your breasts will never be too heavy for you to carry, although navigation may start to be a problem when you can't see anything, heh heh heh."
"This is going to be a drag," Therese complained. "I'm starting to think time sucks."
"Well, I'll tell you what I can do, though. I can chain you to a giant rock and have that same bird dive bomb you and tear your liver out of your side every day while the project is going on. That was a story in another book on that news-stand."
"No, no that won't be necessary, Gabriel. I'll make do somehow."
Therese set the monkeys to work. They were conditioned to punch the typewriters at random. Within a short period of time (as the Larger Creatures count time) the monkeys had produced whole Shakespearian words: "Let" which is found in scene two of act one of Richard III; "Go" which is in scene two of act two of Julius Caesar; and "Be" which occurs in the very first scene and act of The Tempest. Therese was greatly encouraged.
Some time after this, one of the monkeys produced two Shakespearian words in succession. By this time, the home world of Shakespeare (which was also home to a news-stand in Boston where was born a great idea) was long out of business.
After another long while, the monkeys had done whole phrases, By then, quite a bit of time had run out.
Gabriel's bird never failed in its millennial visits, but Gabriel wasn't exaggerating how slowly Therese's breasts would grow. The bird would arrive, the tape would measure, the bird would fly off. The monkeys took a half day off on measuring day, but Therese was getting irked at how tedious it all was. Yet, after no more than a thousand visitations, the bird announced that Therese's bust measurement had increased by one inch. It was a hopeful sign.
Therese began to see that the thing could be done. A monkey -- and not the brightest one of them -- finally produced a whole sentence: "What say'st thou, bully-rook?" And at that very same moment another thing happened. It was surprising to Therese, for it was the first time she had ever seen it. But she would see it in spades before she was finished.
A speck of cosmic dust, on the far reaches of space, met another speck. This should not have been unusual; specks were always meeting specks. But this case was different. Each speck -- in the opposite direction -- had been the outmost in the whole cosmos. You can't get farther apart than that. The speck (a teeming conglomerate of peopled worlds) looked at the other speck with eyes and instruments, and saw its own eyes and instruments looking back at it. What the speck saw was itself. The cosmic tetradimensionate sphere had been completed. The speck had met itself coming from the other direction, and space had been transversed.
Then it all collapsed.
The stars went out, one by one, and billion by billion. Nightmares of falling! All the darkened orbs and oblates fell down into the void that was all bottom. There was nothing left but one tight pod in the void, and a few out of context things: Gabriel, and Mephisto, and their associates, and Therese with her monkeys.
Therese had a moment of unease. She had become used to the appearance of the expanding universe. But she need not have been uneasy. It began all over again.
A few billion centuries ticked by silently. Once more, the pod burst into a shower of sparks that traveled and grew. They acquired form and spin, and life appeared again on the soot.
This happened again and again. Each cycle seemed damnably long while it was happening; but in retrospect, the cycles were only like a light blinking on and off. And in the Longer Retrospect, they were like a high frequency alternator, producing a dizzy number of cycles every over-second, and continuing for the tumbling ages. Yet Therese was becoming bored. And big. There was no other word for it.
When only a few billion cosmic cycles had been completed, Therese's breasts were large enough to each contain a horse. The bird made very many journeys back to measure Therese. And Pithekos Pete, the smartest and most rapid of the monkeys, had now random written the Tempest, complete and perfect. They shook hands all around, monkey and angel, though they had to come around to Therese's side to reach her hand. It was still something of a moment.
The moment did not last. Pete, instead of pecking at furious random to produce the rest of the plays, wrote his own improved version of The Tempest. Therese was furious.
"But it's better, Terry," Pete protested. "And I have some ideas about stagecraft that would really set this thing up."
"I don't care. I don't want it better, I want it exactly the same. Don't you realize that we're working out a problem of probability? Do you think I want to get any bigger?"
"Let me have that damned book for a month, Terry, and I'll copy the plagued thing off and we'll be finished."
"Rules, you knucklehead, rules. We have to abide by the rules. You know that isn't allowed, and besides, it would be found out. I have reason to suspect, and it pains me to say this, that one of my own monkeys is an informer. We'd never get by with it."
After that brief misunderstanding, things went better. The monkeys typed, and Therese grew. They stayed to their task, and after a number of cycles expressed by a nine with a trail of zeroes sufficient to stretch around the universe at a period just prior to its collapse (the radius and circumference of the ultimate sphere are, of course, the same), the first complete version was ready.
Therese's breasts, each large enough to hold couple of good sized planets, were always bouncing off of things as she tried to walk to Gabriel's office to deliver the manuscript. A sound startled her, and she swept away a handful of stars when she spun around. She finally made it to Michael's office, well, that is, the tip of her breast made it there. Gabriel sent Kitabel out to fetch the copy.
It was faulty, of course, and was rejected. But there were less than thirty thousand errors in it; it presaged great things to come, and ultimate triumph.
Later, much, much later, they had it quite close. By the time that Therese's breasts could contain a couple of good sized solar systems, they had a version with only five errors.
"It will come," Therese said, now full of hope. "It will come in time, and time is the one thing we have plenty of....well....that and breast flesh."
Later, (people, was it ever later!) they seemed to have it perfect, and by this time Therese's bust measured a parsec on each side.
Gabriel himself read the version and could find no error. This was not conclusive, of course, for Gabriel was an impatient and hurried reader. Three readings were required for verification, but never was hope so high.
It passed the second reading, by a much more careful angel, and was pronounced letter perfect. Therese's chest would have swelled with pride, if that weren't redundant. But it was late at night when the second angel had finished it, and he may have gotten a little careless at the end.
And it passed the third reading, through all thirty seven plays of it, and into the sonnets and poems at the end. This was Kitabel, the scribing angel himself, who was appointed to that third reading. He was just about to sign the certification when he paused.
"There is something sticking in my mind," he said, and he shook his head to clear it. "There is something like an echo that is not quite right. I wouldn't want to make a mistake."
He had written 'Kitab--', but he had not finished his signature.
"I won't be able to sleep tonight if I don't think of it," he complained. "It wasn't in the plays, I know that they were perfect. It was something in the poems -- quite near the end -- some dissonance. Either the Bard wrote a remarkably malapropos line, or there was an error in the transcription that my eye overlooked but my ear remembered. I acknowledge that I was sleepy near the end."
"Oh by all the worlds that were ever formed, SIGN!" pleaded Therese.
"You have waited this long, a moment more won't kill you, Terry."
"Don't bet on it, Kit. I'm about to blow, I tell you."
But Kitabel went back and he found it -- a verse in the Phoenix and the Turtle:
That is what the original said. And what Pithekos Pete had typed was nearly, but not quite, the same thing:
And if you never saw an angel with galactic cleavage cry, words cannot describe to you the show that Therese put on then.
They are still at it tonight, typing away at random, for that last sad near victory was less than a million billion cycles ago. And only a moment ago, halfway back in the present cycle, one of the monkeys put together no less than nine Shakespearian words in a row.
There is still hope. And the bird has announced that Therese's breasts are each as large as a complete galaxy.
My apologies to R.A. Lafferty for ruining his story. Well, ruining from his point of view, anyway.
Contact me at [email protected]