Multiverse

We all have to start somewhere.

1. The Universe was born in an unremarkable corner of absolute nothingness, one Thursday morning at about 5.30 AM.

Not that it was known as Thursday at the time. There was no intelligent life around so early in the morning, for whom the concept of Thursday would have meant something. In fact, it was only known as Thursday on a single watery blue planet that circled an ordinary star in a more or less average sort of galaxy several billions of years after the great event. If we are going to split hairs, the term Thursday was applied to one of the days of the week for only a couple of thousand years amongst the English-speaking minority of the species homo sapiens sapiens. When life is looked at from the viewpoint of the Universe, everything is rather relative.

From the perspective of the singularity that gave rise to the Universe, the birth pangs were relatively horrific. Sheets of searing plasma shot out in all directions. If there had been anyone around to hear the first cries of the infant Universe, they would have been deafened. As well as burnt to a crisp. But the world was orphaned at birth. Being a singularity, the Universe was by definition alone and could know nothing of her origins, shrouded as they were behind the event horizon of her own becoming. The Universe was an only child.


2. From her inception, (there was, of course, no conception), the Universe was driven towards her destiny by immutable natural laws and an overwhelming desire for company. This was hardly surprising when one stops to consider that for several millennia, the Universe consisted solely of an unimaginably hot soup of energy and primary particles, with no apparent structure. Nothing was solid. Everything was constantly changing into its opposite with bewildering rapidity. In a sense, everything was possible but nothing happened. Time oozed out in all directions, but things were too fluid. Indeed, that was the problem: there were no things.

Building on these uncertain beginnings, the Universe decided that she existed solely to tell her own story. This was her reason to be, her meaning in life, even if both life and meaning were only to appear later in history, sorry her story. The initial problem for the finite but unbounded young cloud of expanding energy was to find both a storyteller and an audience. This was a challenge that was to occupy the lonely aeons of her early adolescence. Having no role models or parental guidance whatsoever, it is remarkable that the Universe did not end up imprisoned in some atavistic borderline activity with no future. Or worse. The dark side is a perpetual temptation, but the Universe has turned out to be essentially well adjusted with a balanced perspective on life.


3. Isolated, uneducated, totally lacking in culture though she may have been, the early Universe was endowed with the assets so characteristic of youth: boundless energy and time on her hands. Within what would much later be termed the slightest fraction of a split second after springing into existence, the Universe had used her infinite scope to conclude that she was faced with a very serious problem. This hurdle was so grave and seemingly insurmountable that the Universe was almost convinced to give up completely and collapse back into nothingness. But the Universe was nothing if not a fighter. Taking the bit between her teeth, the Universe steeled herself for the long haul. Life was not going to be easy.

The problem was this. Given that the Universe was the sum total of all that existed, she already contained within herself all possible futures, including the one she would prefer to follow; the one with the best story and a happy ending. To know completely in advance how things were going to turn out in the end was quite depressing. The essence of a great story is to keep the tension building until the last chapter, when all the pieces of the puzzle finally fit together and the audience cries out, almost with one voice, "It's the butler!" Imagine waiting perhaps billions of years to find out what you already knew all along. It was the butler!


4. The Universe pondered for only the barest inkling of a further instant, before she found the solution. She would let the story tell itself. The Universe would merely set the stage, a vast arena of time and space with no shortage of raw materials to build interesting, well-rounded characters, thrown together in a gripping drama of good and evil, with a slender hope of finding redemption before the final curtain. Yes, that was it! The Universe would set the ball rolling, so to speak, and then put her feet up and wait to see what turned up. The crucial ingredient, the key that would ensure that the future could not be read, even by the Universe herself, was hazard.

To give a realistic chance for hazard to work its magic, the Universe immediately realised that space would have to be immense. As near as dammit, infinite. And time would have to go on and on and on. Strictly speaking, time and space had come into existence along with the Universe. They were dimensions along which things and events could be structured, but they were not separate from each other or independent of the Universe. And at least in the beginning they were numberless. This vast array of dimensions of time and space, fine as it was for the Universe, indeed it was the source of her creative powers, turned out to be a real obstacle to effective storytelling. Too many dimensions let the narrative spin off in myriad different directions. Even worse some impossible contradictions could arise. In the end it could be both the butler and not the butler at the same time. Yes, hazard was a necessary ingredient to preserve an element of mystery but causality was important too. Without cause and effect, where in the world would we be?


5. The Universe put out some feelers towards the multitude of possible futures. Pretty quickly it became evident that any more than three dimensions of space and there would be utter chaos. Everyone and his dog would be both a possible eventuality and a contradiction in terms. There were even some improbable worlds where everyone was his dog. That would never do! Then again, less than three dimensions of space left very little room for manoeuvre. In a two-dimensional Universe, everything would be very plain, in fact very plane indeed and life would be completely flat. You could forget about ever seeing a leopard leap towards a gazelle, grazing at dusk, unsuspecting that a perfectly adapted machine of muscle and teeth was about to hit it from downwind. In two dimensions, the best you could ever hope for was a kind of flimsy amoeba that would ingest the occasional sliver of detritus through what was probably its mouth but could equally well be its armpit. Hardly three-dimensional characters. It was decided. Three dimensions of space was the only horse in this race! In fact, there was no alternative. It was the only choice that left a reasonable chance for the development of both races and horses. Coming from a betting background, (remember, she originated from a chance fluctuation of the quantum vacuum), the Universe was quite prepared to put her money where her mouth was, if you get my drift. The Universe let go of all the other dimensions until just three were left. Interestingly, the Universe kept a handful of dimensions of space, just in case, and rolled them up into tiny strings so small that they could never get tied up in anything. Much, much later on in history, a lumbering species of three-legged giraffe that inhabited the lush garden planet of B'jerknees on the other side of the Universe from the Milky Way, would blame minute invisible strings for their tendency to fall over for no apparent reason. However, this characteristic turned out to have a great deal to do with the intrinsic instability of tall, three-legged creatures and nothing at all to do with rolled-up dimensions of space.


6. The Universe then turned her not inconsiderable attention to the vexing question of time. Yes time, pondered the Universe, seemed to be a rather different kettle of fish. It was not immediately obvious how many dimensions of time would be required. Would one dimension of time, which seemed more than ample at the outset, prove to be too limiting ? Perhaps only time would tell. As it turned out, time refused to tell, even after being threatened with undreamt of forms of torture. Time guards its secrets jealously, but one clue it did let slip was that it has very little to do with kettles of fish or any other lifeform carried around in a kitchen utensil, for that matter. What was crystal clear was that time was going to be relentless. It could be bent, it could be bowed, it could even run backwards in some exotic circumstances if the observer was willing to make certain heroic assumptions, but time could not, would not, ever be confined and stopped. For the sake of even-handedness, the Universe decided to keep three dimensions of time as well. This would avoid any arguments between the dimensions of the Universe and pre-empted any accusations of favouritism. Equipped with a brand new six-dimensional space-time stage on which to see acted out the unfolding drama of history, the Universe sat back, admired her work and promptly took the rest of the afternoon off.


7. It is perhaps worth clarifying here that when we talk about afternoons, the term is being used figuratively. An afternoon, when used literally, presupposes a whole panoply of complicated structures involving planets, their motions around stars, clock-making skills or at the very least a rudimentary intelligence capable of noticing when the sun, or whatever the local star happens to be called, is at the highest point in its passage through the daytime sky. None of these things were remotely near coming into existence at this early stage in history.

You see, we are still teetering on the very brink of what is or can be. We are perched on a precipice; beneath us lies the endless plain of reality. The slippery slope. To be or not to be? That was the question that needed to be answered. As Jean-Paul Sartre would eventually understand it, after a great deal of thought, we are caught between being and nothingness, (one of the Universe's favourite books, incidentally, she being perhaps the only reader to grasp the full sweep of his intellectual achievement). There was still time to go back but we are fast approaching the point of no return. Once the first instant is over, there is no escape back to the comfort of oblivion. Time would have to run its course.

Instants, it is true, tend to be rather fluid concepts, varying as they do between different cultures and divergent life-forms. Particularly slow-thinking species, such as the giant mud-sloths of Alathfar 4, for example, would tend to count their instants in hours, if not days. Whereas the hyperactive Zappamaniacs, in contrast, who circle Aldebaran in a large asteroid hollowed out to form one vast living room could not resist constantly changing television channels with the remote control. The result is a species that spends its entire life eating TV dinners and zapping through the gazillions of channels now available to anyone with a powerful sub-hyperspace satellite dish, at an average of 30 per second. A realistic case can be made for considering that an instant for these poor creatures resembles the barest subliminal glimpse of a low-budget foreign-language soap opera, their entire lives a sordid patchwork of concealed affairs, power-crazed matriarchs and betrayal. A sad commentary indeed on one of the casualties of technological progress.


8. For the Universe herself, an instant is quite precisely defined. It is the point at which the smooth flow of time breaks up into discrete units, the scale at which time can no longer be subdivided into smaller bits. It is much like looking at a large swath of beach which really consists of many, many rough-hewn boulders of sand when seen from the viewpoint of an ant. Now the grains of time are actually very, very, very small indeed. Each one is a mere 10 -43 of a second, to be exact. For those of you that feel dizzy or sick when faced with such numbers, stick with us. This is going to be a little convoluted, but the nettle has to be grasped sooner or later, and the effort will be worth it in the long run if we are ever going to get to grips with the sort of frightening notation that fills science textbooks. Frankly, saying an instant of time is one ten million, million, million, million, million, million, millionth of a second is no better, so let's try and use our daily experience to get a better definition.

Let's make the quite reasonable assumption that you are reading this text not too far from the surface of a watery-blue planet known to its English-speaking inhabitants as Earth. This puts you about 15 billion years down the line from the first instant, a year being the time it takes your planet to go once round its star, or your star once round its planet if you happen to be reading this before the age of Copernicus. Your heart probably beats around 50 million times during each of these years, depending on factors such as diet, exercise and how often you watch scary movies or have sex. Try to imagine therefore the sum total of your heartbeats, had you been unfortunate enough to have been waiting around since the beginning of time. A very large number. Agreed? Not from the point of view of an instant of time. There are far, far more instants in one of your heartbeats than there have been heartbeats since the origin of the Universe. In fact, if you added up all the accumulated heartbeats of all the people living today on Earth, you would still be way short. All the people who have ever lived? Now we are starting to get somewhere. Trouble is we are also running out of heartbeats, at least human ones. May be 10 -43 was not so bad after all.

In any case, you will agree, no doubt, that having achieved all that the Universe had achieved before the first instant had elapsed, some kind of break was justified.


9. Meanwhile, in a pub somewhere in south London, at the beginning of the twenty-first century....

Ron looked up from his newspaper and took a sip of his pint on the bar.

"Did you know they've discovered a lake under Antarctica?"

Dave looked up from the barmaid's cleavage. He had been imagining himself driving a Ferrari up to a Tuscan villa, nestled amongst cypress trees, Sylvie's cleavage by his side. Dave's sexual fantasies always began like a slick advert for luxury cars and always started with breasts.

"I thought Antarctica was a continent," said Dave.

"It is," said Ron.

"Then how can it have a lake under it, unless it's an incontinent continent?" smirked Dave.

"Good point. Well, the lake is actually on top of Antarctica but under the ice cap," said Ron.

"Wouldn't it be frozen though, if it's under all that ice? How do they tell the difference between the water that's a frozen lake and the water that's the ice cap?"

"Another good point," said Ron, turning back to his paper to read on. Dave turned his regard back to Sylvie the barmaid, who was bending over looking for some salt and vinegar crisps. Dave raced to fast forward his fantasy to the appropriate point.

After a few moments, Ron said, "they don't say in the article why it's not frozen. May be its the pressure or something. But in any case, it must be bloody cold down there. It's under more than three kilometres of ice. They've named it Lake Vostock, which is probably Russian for freezing cold."

"Does that make Vladivostok, Russian for bloody freezing cold," said Dave, smirking again, inanely.

"No, Vladivostok is Russian for Lord of the East," said a slightly faltering voice behind them.

Ron and Dave both turned to look over at old Toby, who was sat at a table just behind them. Sylvie came over with the salt and vinegar crisps, which were for Toby's dog, Rover. "Here you go, Not-Toby," said Sylvie, opening the crisps and pouring them on the floor. Everyone, apart from Toby, called Rover Not-Toby. There was some doubt over who had made the original joke. Dave thought that he had been the one, but most punters who counted The Enmari as their local, thought that it was probably Spencer the Marxist who had come up with the nomenclature. It had to be said that Dave's very poor knowledge of Shakespeare stood against him. Then again, Dave argued, he didn't understand why Shakespeare had named his play after a cigar, but that did not stop him knowing the opening words of the world's most famous soliloquy.


10. Ron looked at Not-Toby, who had demolished the salt and vinegar crisps in a flash. Not-Toby was staring into Sylvie's eyes even more imploringly than Dave stared into her cleavage. But there were no more crisps to be had. Ron said to Not-Toby,

"It's in the East, that's for sure, but what is it Lord of?"

Apart from calling Toby's dog Not-Toby, all the locals of The Enmari were in the habit of looking at Not-Toby when they were talking to Toby and vice versa. No-one could remember why this practice had been developed, but everyone played the game strictly by the rules, including Not-Toby. Never in living memory had Toby come to the pub without Not-Toby. If one day he did, it is questionable whether anyone would speak to him.

Toby said, "Well, it's the terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway, that's why. Though there was nothing there until they built the railway, of course."

"Why did they build a railway all across Siberia then, if there was nothing there?" said Dave, still smirking inanely at Not-Toby.

"Because of the ice," said Toby.

"What, they built a railway across Siberia to transport ice? The Russians don't need ice. Siberia's full of bloody ice! There's probably more ice in Siberia than anywhere else on Earth, apart from Antarctica, of course," said Dave.

"Which brings us full circle," said Ron, to no-one in particular.

"Though not to the Arctic circle," said Dave, smiling even more inanely. He was on his fourth pint by now.

"The Tsar wanted an ice-free port with access to the oceans for the Russian navy. The Baltic is controlled by the Danes, frozen half of the time and the Black Sea ports are bottled up behind the Bosphorus," said Toby.


11. "Or may be the ice cap simply floats on top of Lake Vostock," said Ron.

"If its three kilometres thick, it wouldn't float. It would be too heavy. It would sink!" said Dave, now getting agitated.

"If ice sank, then the Titanic wouldn't be at the bottom of the Atlantic, would it?" said Ron, cuttingly.

Toby added, with a cackle, "I can just imagine all those icebergs breaking off the polar ice cap and sinking to the bottom of the Atlantic."

Ron frowned and his brow wrinkled. "They break off the Greenland ice sheet actually. But, still, there wouldn't be any polar ice cap, if ice didn't float! It would all be at the bottom of the Arctic sea."

"And it's cold enough already at the bottom of the Arctic sea, I'd imagine," said Toby.

"It's cold at the bottom of all the oceans," added Ron, "because sunlight doesn't penetrate very far through water. If our logic is not faulty, the only conclusion to be drawn is that the oceans would gradually freeze from the bottom up."

"So are you telling me all the oceans would be frozen solid if ice didn't float?" asked Dave.

"Yes, as far as I can tell, if ice didn't float, we would live on an ice-bound planet," said Ron. "Or rather we wouldn't be living here at all. It would be too cold for life to exist."

"Like Europa, the ice moon of Jupiter," added Toby.

"What! Are you telling me that ice floats on Earth but sinks on Jupiter's moon? Don't be daft! It's got to be the same everywhere. Hasn't it?" said Dave.

"No, Europa is frozen solid because it is much further from the Sun than we are," said Ron.

Ron turned back to his newspaper article about Lake Vostock. Toby turned back to Not-Toby. And Dave turned back to Sylvie's cleavage.


12. The Universe is curious by nature and has an exhilaratingly broad range of interests. One of her favourite pastimes is to meet and try to understand the diverse cultures that are constantly springing up and becoming extinct (once things had cooled down sufficiently for there to exist places where cultures could spring up upon). For these encounters, the Universe is particularly fond of travelling by train, finding the railway carriage with its gentle rocking motion and wide windows displaying constantly changing landscapes, by far the most civilised form of locomotion. Some of you may be on the point of raising the reasonable objection that while railways are a perfectly adequate means of getting from A to B when the intervening distance comprises several hundred kilometres, the same cannot be said when the distances have to be measured in millions of light years, especially when there is nothing but empty space between stations. You would be forgetting however, the infinite scope of the Universe, for whom both time and space are merely a twinkle in the eye. When it is your train set, right down to the last elementary particles that make up the tracks, well, you can do pretty much whatever you want with it. This is not to say that the Universe is ever indiscreet in her voyages. The Universe is a most unassuming traveller who goes to great lengths not to unduly terrorise the indigenous populations with her visits. She will always take on the precise look and feel of a local inhabitant right down to speaking the language with only the slightest trace of a foreign accent. The required linguistic competence is quite a challenge on certain planets where language has evolved in unexpected directions. Take the dancing planet of Rumbo-Tangoid, for example. Here a species of dainty yak has become so obsessed by the elegance of ballroom dancing that all communication now takes the form of quick-steps and foxtrots. Whereas the humble bee on Earth uses an elaborate dance to explain, more or less, "the nectar is over there, north-by-north-west at about 250 yards", the dancing yaks of Rumbo-Tangoid have a whole vocabulary of ambulatory sonnets and bodily oratory. Few translators, however, have mastered the gestural subtleties of the Rumbo-Tangoid language. One unfortunate linguist even hazarded that an odd hopping movement on one leg should be translated by the term uni-verse.

The younger yaks, as is the case in all cultures, have a tendency to graze indiscriminately across the higher pastures where certain hallucinatory herbs do grow, with the result that their social intercourse takes on a somewhat frenetic character. Nonetheless, any yak would be appalled by the disjointed writhing on display at the typical Earthbound rave party. Even shouting matches on Rumbo-Tangoid retain a certain rhythmic harmony. On her most recent visit to Rumbo-Tangoid, the Universe was welcomed with open hooves as an honoured guest, fondly remembered as the originator of the three-four time bovine waltz, that has since become such a favourite amongst the older members of yak society.


13. In contrast, the Universe had a much more difficult time of it on the tactile planet of Tutche. Here a dense cloud of bituminous fog shrouds the landscape for 300 days a year. When you consider that the Tutchean year consists of precisely 300 days, you will appreciate why communication tends to take place by using touch rather than sound. Words, no sooner uttered, are swallowed in a kind of sticky echo, that can render communication, if not impossible, at least impasse-able. Before the development of their tactile language, the Tutcheans were perpetually confused as meaning changed, on the fly, between the mouth of the speaker and the ear of the listener. A typical Tutchean conversation would go like this:

Him: slim and wiry, sitting at the bar in a singles club, singing under his breath, "Guantanamera, Guajira, Guantanamera?"

Her: largish, roundish and reddish, sitting next to him, "Who are you calling a One Ton Tomato? If you suffered from the kind of lower intestinal problems I do, you wouldn't make such cruel comments. I'm not going to stay here and be insulted by the likes of you. Goodbye!" She marches out in a huff.

Him: changing his tune, "the girl with colitis goes bye!"

Old soldiers, who could remember the origins of the first of Tutche's many world wars, recount what may be an apocryphal story. It is said that the war began when the newly betrothed Crown Prince Ferdinand, while driving though the streets in an open carriage, turned to his wife and shouted, "Get out of here, there's a bum!" This caused a diplomatic incident that eventually escalated into all-out war between the great powers.

Another story from the trenches of the very same war tells of a shell-shocked and bewildered captain, crouching beneath the parapet under heavy enemy fire, who sent a messenger back to headquarters with the request, "send three and four pence, we're going to a dance." A few minutes later he received a platoon of reinforcements with which to advance.

A final example of the dangers of communicating on Tutche, (known as being hoisted on the horns of a dilemming in Tutchean). One of the Big Five firms of auditors on Tutche, Anders Arthursen was almost eaten alive by its competitors following a garbled mobile phone conversation when a top client, known only as Ron "N" went bankrupt. The partner in Ooston was understood to have said "Rip all the Ron N documents to shreds," when he actually said, "ship all the Ron N documents to the feds."

The Universe, despite being a very quick study, by anybody's standards, never quite got the hang of the subtlest nuances of Tutchean discourse. She found that innocent conversations with children could turn out to be particularly dangerous. On one occasion, she was forced to leave in a hurry in order to avoid what would have been long, drawn out court case on charges of corrupting the youth.


14. Though she normally plans her visits around arrivals and departures that go completely unnoticed, if the Universe is ever obliged to change location in mid-voyage through force of circumstance, she will always try to do so in the middle of a tunnel to create the minimum of fuss. She sometimes has to take the railway carriage she is travelling in with her and this fact does account for a small proportion of the inexplicable disappearances of individuals that is a common feature of all cultures, although it accounts for none of the reported cases of kidnapping by aliens and subsequent intimate probing of sexual organs, which are actually the repressed memories of gynaecological clinical apparatus and post-natal obstetric examinations. It also accounts for almost all of the mysterious disappearances of rolling stock in tunnels which are the curse of railway managers throughout many a galaxy, but which are always glossed over when inventories are examined by the auditors. One such case occurred when the Universe first visited the watery-blue planet of Earth, which she stumbled across almost by accident. She was drawn to what looked from a distance like a shimmering sapphire clothed with wisps of white lace, drawn by a tug in her stomach that told her something had gone seriously wrong.


15. She found herself on a train packed with people, most of them women and children. It was stiflingly hot. There were no windows in the railway carriage, just slits in the walls through which sunlight slanted in on one side. The wagon rocked and creaked as it crossed points in the track. The little air that filtered through from the outside ceased once the train jolted to a halt. The Universe could hear the panting of the steam locomotive up ahead and the barking of dogs. A child standing close by fainted, but she did not collapse. She was kept standing by the crush of bodies all around her. The doors of the cattle truck were wrenched open from the outside. The surge of pale faces, blinking in the sunlight, pushed forward, gasping for fresh air. Bodies tumbled to the ground in the rush to escape the fetid stink of three days accumulated human waste. Several crumpled bodies remained motionless inside as steam wafted from the top of the opening. A soldier pulled himself up into the cattle truck and kicked the bodies firmly, rolling them over onto their backs with an expert flick his boot, verifying they were indeed corpses.


16. The guards shouted orders in a language no one seemed to understand. But they explained their meaning clearly enough with the butts of their rifles. The people were herded into a large compound surrounded by high wire fences, a wooden watchtower at each corner. The snout of a machine gun poked out from the shadow of the small tiled roof that offered respite for the guards under the broiling sun of a Polish summer. Beyond the compound were a series of wooden shacks. The Universe thought that she could see emaciated faces glaring with hollow stares from behind the windows. Between the compound and the huts there was a long low concrete building. At the far end were two brick chimneys. From the tops of each chimney streamed thin, yellowish smoke and a sickly, soapy odour filled the windless air.

Some of the children whimpered. Their mothers tried to keep them upright clasping the weakest to their skirts to stop them falling. The Universe noted that each person had a yellow star of fabric sewn onto their clothes and so did she. A little girl next to her looked up at the Universe and asked, "What's your name?" The Universe looked into the young girl's eyes and beyond. "Hope," she replied.

After being registered in a large book by a man wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, they were forced to give up any jewellery that had escaped the notice of the guards. The men were separated from their families and marched off to another compound. The remaining women and children were filed into the low concrete building. Inside, the walls were painted a kind of sterile, operating-theatre green. There were rows of benches and the people were forced to undress under the leering eyes of the soldiers. Those who were slow to obey felt the prod of a bayonet in their flesh. One woman, young and blond, was dragged, screaming by two guards to a side room. The rest were corralled roughly towards an opening with the word "Dusche" in large painted letters above two heavy iron doors. Inside the dimly lit, windowless room, there seemed to be shower heads protruding from the ceiling. The iron doors clanged shut. There were no handles on the inside. A strange caustic smell impregnated the tiled floor and walls. A slight hissing sound began to issue from the shower heads in the ceiling. Some of the braver souls reached out anticipating the water, hoping to gauge its temperature.


17. The Universe could smell bitter almonds. A colourless gas was beginning to filter into the room. Chemical composition HCN, molecular weight 27, hydrogen cyanide. The Universe looked into the bodies of her fellow prisoners and could see these organisms used an enzyme, cytochrome oxidase, that was vital for supplying their hearts and brains with oxygen. This enzyme would be blocked by the invisible poison pouring into the room. In minutes they would all be dead through metabolic asphyxiation. The Universe took hold of each hydrogen cyanide molecule as it emerged from the shower head, combined the hydrogen with oxygen from the air, bent the carbon atoms into minute balls of sixty atoms each and let the nitrogen diffuse away into the air. The heat from the chemical reaction brought the water now falling from the shower head to a pleasant 40 degrees centigrade. The dirt encrusted bodies of the people were soon dancing and splashing under the warm showers of clean, pure water. Even without soap, after days cooped up in their prison train, to wash was wonderful.

Twenty minutes later, the large iron door at the far end of the chamber opened. There were two soldiers outside wearing gas masks. Behind them were about twenty men, with hollow cheeks and stooped shoulders, pushing large wheelbarrows. Their eyes were staring wide and scared. One of the guards dropped his machine gun, turned and ran, tearing off his mask as he gasped for air. Three of the prisoners in rags nearest the remaining soldier grabbed him from behind, wrestled his weapon from his hands and clubbed him to the ground. A burly man, no doubt a recent arrival, picked up the abandoned weapon and signalled his colleagues to follow him towards the armoury, that lay unguarded behind the oven house. The Universe clothed the women and children in pure white silk robes that reached to the ground. They followed her calmly back through the gas chamber. As they approached the closed iron doors that sealed the opening through which they had entered, they watched the metal turn to rust in front of their eyes. It crumbled to their touch. Outside, in the compound, she walked them back towards the train. The guards shouted "Halt!" from their watchtowers and then opened fire. The Universe turned the flying lead to a powdery blood-coloured pigment before it splattered with the force of a medicine ball against the white silk robes. Though the people were knocked to the ground, bruised and winded, they got to their feet and continued to march towards the train. At this sight, the remaining guards dropped their weapons and ran away. The people boarded the train which had brought them to Treblinka and the Universe deposited them on a pleasant planet in a neighbouring galaxy where genocide was still unthinkable.


18. Returning the next morning, figuratively speaking, the Universe was appalled and wounded by what had happened billions of years in the future on Earth. Her first instinct was to put a stop to everything, right there and then. There was still time. The canker could be nipped in the bud. The Big Bang could be aborted. Too bad if the future was stillborn. It was her right to choose.

Then she began to have second thoughts. Wasn't she throwing out the baby with the bath water? Genocide was one of the most odious crimes imaginable. But was cosmocide any better? Could she really apply THE final solution to prevent the final solution? She thought of all the things that would not be, if she chose to turn back the clock for good. Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Those delightful chocolate mousse desserts that she had savoured at Luigi's, probably the best restaurant in the Universe. And the cheese. The Universe recalled the vast variety of cheese that graced the table at Luigi's. "Cheese was milk's leap towards immortality," as Luigi had said to her. Her mind began to wander.

True enough, milk was to be found throughout the Universe. It was a common evolutionary solution to the problem of how to feed young that were not equipped to digest the food normally eaten by their parents. Milk was almost always a liquid, though a notable exception was to be found amongst the gas whales of Harbin. It was commonly a creamy white in colour, even if milks of virtually every colour could be found if one was willing to search long and hard enough. Those who had, foolishly looked long and hard enough, were surprised to find that the very mammals which produced exotic coloured milks were particularly savage and thus very difficult to milk. Biologists had even identified one carnivore whose diet consisted solely of foolish peasants who would come within striking range of the beast carrying three-legged stools.

All things being equal, milk was just milk. It was natural, fresh and fatty. It was a wholesome food. In short, it was an ingredient but not a creation. Cheese however, was in a quite different league. Cheese had not just evolved as a neat solution to a biological problem. The Universe would not stop if cheese ceased to exist. Cheese wasn't necessary. But what a delight!


19. According to the definitive "Universal Encyclopaedia of Cheese" originally compiled by Simon de Montfort Belk, there are more than eighteen billion distinct types of cheese to be found throughout the Universe. Interestingly, only two galaxies have been positively identified to be completely cheeseless. These are to be found amongst some of the most ancient galaxies where civilisation has progressed beyond the milking of mammals and where cheese may be said to exist only in an entirely virtual form, though, even this kind of cheese may still lead to bouts of severe dreaming.

As the Universe itself is expanding, so too is the total number of known cheeses. Indeed, keeping the Encyclopaedia up to date requires a considerable effort, not just from cheese scouts out in the field, but also amongst the tasters, or "nouths" as they are known back at headquarters in de Montfort. On average, around twenty new types of cheese are added to the reference guide each day while some three or four are removed. Cheeses disappear from the Encyclopaedia for a number of reasons: new guidelines on food safety from Galactic hygiene authorities; loss of ecological niches leading to the extinction of either the milk-producing life-forms, their habitat or the cheese-makers themselves. Some cheeses prove to be transient, such as the notorious worm-infested goat cheese from Corsica, on Earth, which managed to hold its place in the Encyclopaedia for several years, only to be ruled ineligible for being no longer a simple cheese but an entire biosystem.


20. Currently, three cheeses from Earth are included in the Encyclopaedia, and a few excerpts follow to give you a flavour of what can be found in this unique reference work:

Stilton - known in England as the King of Cheeses, only cheese produced in the three counties of Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire and made according to a strict code may be called Stilton. There are just six dairies licensed to make Stilton. It is still made in much the same way as it was when Daniel Defoe, writing in his "Tour through England & Wales" in 1727, remarked that he "...passed through Stilton, a town famous for cheese". And yet, Stilton was never made in the town of Stilton!

Stilton is situated about 80 miles north of London on the old Great North Road. In the 18th century, the town was a staging post for coaches travelling from London to York. Horses would be changed and travellers served light refreshments at one of the hostelries in the town. Cooper Thornhill, an East Midlands entrepreneur, was landlord at the famous Bell Inn and it was he who introduced these travellers to a soft, creamy, blue-veined cheese which subsequently took its name from the town. Thornhill had brought the cheese from a farmer's wife by the name of Frances Pawlett who lived near Melton Mowbray.

Important note for travellers: most cheese connoisseurs in the Torcularis Septentrionalis star system insist on referring to Stilton as Melting Mowberry, a name they find far more poetic. And they go on to point out that as Stilton doesn't come from Stilton anyway, they can really call it whatever they like. Unfortunately the Torcularians love English cheese and apply the same sloppy terminology to other cheeses from that country. (This is known as "shooting the Brie" in the local argot, a turn of phrase that the neighbouring warlike Gurnarghians took rather too literally to heart. They developed their own equivalent of Swiss cheese by using Gruyere for firing practice. More about the Gurnarghians to come later.)

If you order Wensleydale in a Torcularis hostelry, it is just as likely you will be served Lancashire, which can revive age-old rivalries; a request for a slice of double Gloucester can lead to the arrival of two chunks of Cheddar instead; and anyone asking for Sage Derby is at risk of getting nothing more than a wedge of smelly Basildoncaster, (named after a new town planning disaster on Torcularis which sought to combine the easy shopping facilities of a dormitory suburb with the dour sense of identity of a mining community). Planners throughout the galaxy are unanimous in considering Basildoncaster and its cheese, the worst of both worlds.


21. Reblochon - was the first cheese of the Savoie region of the French Alps to be granted European certification, in 1958. The cheese is made by mixing the milks of three different breeds of cow : abondance, tarine, and montbéliarde. The birth of this fascinating cheese is due to the ingenuity of the Savoie herdsmen. In the 13th century, the farmers were completely dependent on landowners who insisted that all the herd's milk was their property. At milking time, the herdsmen did not quite complete the milking. After the controllers had left, the herdsmen finished the milking. They "re-blochaient". From this the cheese was named Reblochon, made with the creamy milk of a second milking. The cheeses are put into a cellar to dry, and are turned every 2 days and washed with whey. From this process, the rind turns an orange-yellow with a velvety texture. Reblochon is a well-proportioned cheese with a nutty after-taste that contrasts with a strong odour of the cellar. The creamy cheese often has a herbal aroma.

Historical note: this shining example of rural revolutionary action offered by the Savoyard peasantry became the guiding light for downtrodden masses under the rule of Gurnarghian feudal lords on the planet of Demesne. Groups of rebellious serfs would break out of bondage (those left behind were described as "vassalating") and form guerrilla units, rampaging around the countryside to extract their pound of flesh from wealthy landlords, normally from just below the knee. (This retribution was known colloquially as tugging the shylock). Their slogans were various; Milk the Rich, The Whey is the Path, Stop Treating Us Like Chattel or Free the Curds. Members of the underground movement were known as Rebolsheviks and their leader was said to be named Rennin, (apparently he came from the east and milk would curdle during his longest speeches).

A minority faction of radical pig farmers, inspired by the Rebolshevik lead, tried to apply the same techniques to their swine. They would cut the feet off their pigs at night and equip them with short painted stilts in the hope that their lords and masters would not notice the difference in the daylight. Their slogans were more urbane; Save Our Bacon, Stop Hamming It Up or Buddy Can You Spare A Rib and inevitably, they were termed Trotterskyists.