Italo Calvino: Cosmicomics

My father was the first to notice something was changing. I had dozed off, when his shout wakened me: "Watch out! We're hitting something!"

Beneath us, the nebula's matter, instead of fluid as it had always been, was beginning to condense.

To tell the truth, my mother had been tossing and turning for several hours, saying: "Uff, I just can't seem to make myself comfortable here!" In other words, according to her, she had become aware of a change in the place where she was lying: the dust wasn't the same as it had been before, soft, elastic, uniform, so you could wallow in it as much as you liked without leaving any print; instead, a kind of rut or furrow was being formed, especially where she was accustomed to resting all her weight. And she thought she could feel underneath her something like granules or blobs or bumps; which perhaps, after all, were buried hundreds of miles farther down and were pressing through all those layers of soft dust. Not that we generally paid much attention to these premonitions of my mother's: poor thing, for a hypersensitive creature like herself, and already well along in years, our way of life then was hardly ideal for the nerves.

And then it was my brother Rwzfs, an infant at the time; at a certain point I felt him – who knows? – slamming or digging or writhing in some way, and I asked: "What are you doing?" And he said: "I'm playing."

"Playing? With what?"

"With a thing," he said.

You understand? It was the first time. There had never been things to play with before. And how could we have played? With that pap of gaseous matter? Some fun: that sort of stuff was all right perhaps for my sister G'd(w) n. If Rwzfs was playing, it meant he had found something new: in fact, afterwards, exaggerating as usual, they said he had found a pebble. It wasn't a pebble, but it was surely a collection of more solid matter or – let's say – something less gaseous. He was never very clear on this point; that is, he told stories, as they occurred to him, and when the period came when nickel was formed and nobody talked of anything but nickel, he said: "That's it: it was nickel. I was playing with some nickel!" So afterwards he was always called "Nickel Rwzfs." (It wasn't, as some say now, that he had turned into nickel, unable – retarded as he was – to go beyond the mineral phase; it was a different thing altogether, and I only mention this out of love for truth, not because he was my brother: he had always been a bit backward, true enough, but not of the metallic type, if anything a bit colloidal; in fact, when he was still very young, he married an alga, one of the first, and we never heard from him again.)

In short, it seemed everyone had felt something: except me. Maybe it's because I'm absent-minded. I heard – I don't know whether awake or asleep – our father's cry: "We're hitting something!," a meaningless expression (since before then nothing had ever hit anything, you can be sure), but one that took on meaning at the very moment it was uttered, that is, it meant the sensation we were beginning to experience, slightly nauseating, like a slab of mud passing under us, something flat, on which we felt we were bouncing. And I said, in a reproachful tone: "Oh, Granny!"

Afterwards I often asked myself why my first reaction was to become angry with our grandmother. Granny Bb'b, who clung to her habits of the old days, often did embarrassing things: she continued to believe that matter was in uniform expansion and, for example, that it was enough to throw refuse anywhere and it would rarefy and disappear into the distance. The fact that the process of condensation had begun some while ago, that is, that dirt thickened on particles so we weren't able to get rid of it – she couldn't get this into her head. So in some obscure way I connected this new fact of "hitting" with some mistake my grandmother might have made and I let out that cry.

Then Granny Bb'b answered: "What is it? Have you found my cushion?"

This cushion was a little ellipsoid of galactic matter Granny had found somewhere or other during the first cataclysms of the universe; and she always carried it around with her, to sit on. At a certain point, during the great night, it had been lost, and she accused me of having hidden it from her. Now, it was true I had always hated that cushion, it seemed so vulgar and out of place on our nebula, but the most Granny could blame me for was not having guarded it always as she had wanted me to.

Even my father, who was always very respectful toward her, couldn't help remarking: "Oh see here, Mamma, something is happening – we don't know what – and you go on about that cushion!"

"Ah, I told you I couldn't get to sleep!" my mother said: another remark hardly appropriate to the situation.

At that point we heard a great "Pwack! Wack! Sgrr!" and we realized that something must have happened to Mr. Hnw: he was hawking and spitting for all he was worth.

"Mr. Hnw! Mr. Hnw! Get hold of yourself! Where's he got to now?" my father started saying, and in that darkness, still without a ray of light, we managed to grope until we found him and could hoist him onto the surface of the nebula, where he caught his breath again. We laid him out on that external layer which was then taking on a clotted, slippery consistency.

"Wrrak! This stuff closes on you!" Mr. Hnw tried to say, though he didn't have a great gift for self-expression. "You go down and down, and you swallow! Skrrrack!" He spat.

There was another novelty: if you weren't careful, you could now sink on the nebula. My mother, with a mother's instinct, was the first to realize it. And she cried: "Children: are you all there? Where are you?"

The truth was that we were a bit confused, and whereas before, when everything had been lying regularly for centuries, we were always careful not to scatter, now we had forgotten all about it.

"Keep calm. Nobody must stray," my father said.

"G'd(w) n! Where are you? And the twins? Has anybody seen the twins? Speak up!"

Nobody answered. "Oh, my goodness, they're lost!" Mother shouted. My little brothers weren't yet old enough to know how to transmit any message: so they got lost easily and had to be watched over constantly. "I'll go look for them!" I said.

"Good for you, Qfwfq, yes, go!" Father and Mother said, then, immediately repentant: "But if you do go, you'll be lost, too! No, stay here. Oh, all right, go, but let us know where you are: whistle!"

I began to walk in the darkness, in the marshy condensation of that nebula, emitting a constant whistle. I say "walk"; I mean a way of moving over the surface, inconceivable until a few minutes earlier, and it was already an achievement to attempt it now, because the matter offered such little resistance that, if you weren't careful, instead of proceeding on the surface you sank sideways or even vertically and were buried. But in whatever direction I went and at whatever level, the chances of finding the twins remained the same: who could guess where the two of them had got to?

All of a sudden I sprawled; as if they had – we would say today – tripped me up. It was the first time I had fallen, I didn't know what "to fall" was, but we were still on the softness and I didn't hurt myself. "Don't trample here," a voice said, "I don't want you to, Qfwfq." It was the voice of my sister G'd(w) n.

"Why? What's there?"

"I made some things with things…" she said. It took me a while to realize, groping, that my sister, messing about with that sort of mud, had built up a little hill, all full of pinnacles, spires, and battlements.

"What have you done there?"

G'd(w) nnever gave you a straight answer. "An outside with an inside in it."

I continued my walk, falling every now and then. I also stumbled over the inevitable Mr. Hnw, who was stuck in the condensing matter again, head-first. "Come, Mr. Hnw. Mr. Hnw! Can't you possibly stay erect?" and I had to help him pull himself out once more, this time pushing him from below, because I was also completely immersed.