Salman Rushdie - Luka and the Fire of Life

At first they were no more than a white, cloudy mass on the horizon, but their true immensity became apparent as the carpet hurtled towards them. They stretched from horizon to horizon like a soft wall across the world, flowing across the River’s course and swallowing it up, engulfing the enchanted landscape and gobbling the sky. Any moment now they would fill Luka’s entire field of vision, and then there would be no Magic World left, only these clammy Mists. Luka felt the optimism and excitement drain out of him and a cold, bad feeling crept into the pit of his stomach. He felt Soraya’s hand on his shoulder, but did not feel reassured.

‘We have reached the Limits of Memory,’ Nobodaddy announced. ‘This is as far as your hybrid, surf-and-turf friends here would have been able to bring you.’ The Elephant Birds were most displeased. ‘We are not accustomed,’ said the Elephant Duck with immense dignity, ‘to being described as menu items.’ (That had been the true Nobodaddy speaking, Luka realised, the creature he didn’t like, and indeed had every reason not to like. His own father would never have said such a thing.) ‘Also,’ said the Elephant Drake, ‘may we remind you of the old cautionary saying regarding what you should do when you reach the Limits of even an elephantine Memory?’

‘What should you do?’ Luka asked.

‘Duck,’ said the Elephant Duck.

No sooner had she spoken than a fusillade of missiles came flying out of the Mists of Time, and the carpet had to take swift evasive action, diving and climbing and swerving to right and left. (The animals and Luka lost their balance again, and once more there was much rolling about and many noisy ursine, canine and duck-elephantine protests.) The missiles seemed to be made out of the same substance as the Mists themselves: they were white Mistballs the size of large cannonballs. ‘Can they really hurt us that much if they’re made out of fog?’ Luka asked. ‘What happens if one of them hits you?’ Nobodaddy shook his head. ‘Don’t underestimate the Weapons of Time,’ he said. ‘If a Mistball struck you, your entire memory would immediately be erased. You would not remember your life, or your language, or even who you were. You would become an empty shell, good for nothing, finished.’ That silenced Luka. If that was what a Mistball could do, he was thinking, what would happen when they plunged into the Mists of Time themselves? They wouldn’t stand a chance. He must have been crazy to think he could penetrate all the defences of the Magic World and reach the Heart of Time itself. He was just a boy, and the job he had given himself was far beyond his capabilities. If he went on, it would mean not only his own destruction but the ruin of his friends. He couldn’t do it; but, on the other hand, he couldn’t stop, because to stop would be to give up hope for his father, however slim that hope might be.

‘Don’t worry so much,’ Soraya of Ott said, interrupting his anguished thoughts. ‘You are not defenceless here. Have some faith in the great Flying Carpet of King Solomon the Wise.’

Luka’s spirits lifted a little, but only a little. ‘Does somebody know we are coming?’ he wondered. ‘Mustn’t that be why the missiles were fired?’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Nobodaddy. ‘I believe we may have triggered an automatic defence system by coming so close to the Mists of Time. We are about to break the Rules of History, after all, young Luka. When we enter the Mists we will leave behind the world of Living Memory and move towards Eternity; that is,’ he went on, seeing from the confusion on Luka’s face that he needed to be clearer, ‘towards the secret zone, where clocks do not tick, and Time stands still. Not one of us is supposed to be there. Let me put it like this. When a bug of some sort enters your system, when it starts moving around your body and making you feel unwell, your body dispatches Antibodies to fight it until it’s destroyed, and you start feeling better. In this case, I’m afraid, we are the bugs, and so we must expect… opposition.’

When Luka was just six years old he had seen pictures of the planet Jupiter on television, pictures beamed back to Earth by a tiny, unmanned space probe that was actually falling slowly towards the surface of that great gas giant of a planet. Every day the probe got closer and the planet loomed larger and larger. The pictures clearly showed the slow movement of the gases of Jupiter, the way they created layers of colour and movement, arranging themselves in stripes and swirls, and, of course, forming the two famous Spots, the huge one and the smaller one. In the end the probe was pulled down by the planet’s gravitational force and disappeared for ever, with what Luka imagined to be a soft gloop , a slow sucking sound, and after that there were no more pictures of Jupiter on television. As the flying carpet Resham approached the Mists of Time, Luka could see that their surface, too, was full of movement, just like Jupiter’s. The Mists, too, flowed and swirled and were full of intricate patterns, and there were colours there, too – as Luka got closer and closer he could see the whiteness breaking up into many subtly graded hues. ‘We are the probe,’ he thought, ‘a manned probe, not an unmanned one, but any second now there will probably be a gloop , and that will be that. End of transmission.’

The Mists were upon him, all-encompassing and blinding, and then, with no sort of a sound at all, the flying carpet had entered the whiteness, but the Mists of Time touched none of them, because the carpet, too, possessed defence mechanisms, and had put up some sort of invisible shield around itself, a force field that was plainly strong enough to keep the Mists at bay. Safe in this little bubble, just as Soraya had promised they would be – have faith in the carpet , she had said – the travellers began the Crossing.

‘Oh, goodness,’ cried the Elephant Duck, ‘we are going into Oblivion. What an awful thing to ask a Memory Bird to do.’

It was like being blind, Luka thought, except maybe blindness was full of colours and shapes, of brightnesses and darknesses and dots and flashes, which, after all, was how things looked behind his eyelids whenever he closed his eyes. He knew that deafness could fill up your ears with static and all sorts of buzzing, ringing sounds, so perhaps blindness filled up your eyes in the same useless way. This blindness was different, though; it felt, well, absolute . He remembered Nobodaddy asking him, ‘What was there before the Bang?’ and realised that this whiteness, this absence of everything, might be the answer. You couldn’t even call it a place. It was what there was when there wasn’t a place to be in. Now he knew what people meant when they talked about things being lost in the Mists of Time. When people said that it was just a figure of speech, but these Mists were not just words. They were what there was before there were any words at all.

The whiteness wasn’t the same as blankness, though; it moved, it was active, stirring round and round the carpet, like a broth made out of nothing. Nothing Soup. The carpet was flying as fast as it could, and that was very, very fast, but it seemed to be motionless. In the bubble there was no wind, and around the bubble there was nothing to look at that might give you the feeling of movement. It would probably have felt the same, Luka thought, if the carpet had stopped dead in the middle of the Mists, so that they were marooned there for ever. And the moment he thought that, that was how it began to feel. They weren’t moving at all. Here in this time before Time they were adrift, forgotten, lost. What was it the Elephant Duck had called this place? Oblivion . The place of total forgetting, of nothingness, of not-being. Limbo , religious people used to say. The place between Heaven and Hell.