As the spaceship broke through the thin clouds, the late afternoon sun poured in through the windows and somewhere at the back of the spaceship Desperalda the air-conditioning unit began to hum. Somewhere else, something began squeaking, a tiny erratic squeak that over the following journey would drive everyone crazy like an invisible mosquito buzzing in the evening that gives you bite in that little bit of your back that is impossible to scratch.
They rose slowly through the clouds that hovered on the interface between the Earth's atmosphere and space and a wonderful silence enveloped the ship and its four passengers. It seemed as if time had paused to give everyone a few moments to reflect on things as they left Earth on the beginning of the great journey. None of them knew where that journey would take them.
Actually all four of them did.
Jay and Kay knew they were going to a planet called Egypt. Ethel the Chicken didn’t actually believe there really was a planet called Egypt, but she was in an unusually good mood, probably brought on by finally getting away from Earth, so she was prepared to try and make an attempt to keep an open mind on the matter. Besides, the final member of the crew, the mysterious Blind Piano Tuner, insisted it existed because it was where he had been born, though he had to admit, since he’d left there many millennia ago, he wasn’t exactly sure where it was. He knew where it should be, but couldn’t actually stick a pin in a map.
‘Mostly,’ he explained, ‘because it isn’t on any maps.’
Jay thought back over the past few months and tried to make some sense of it all. He soon realised this was a pointless exercise. It had all been so weird, that trying to make sense of it would be impossible. Besides however way out everything had been, he now had Kay. Sure Ethel the Chicken claimed she had created her out of one of Jay's own ribs, an exercise in cloning that she had dismissed as no big deal. Jay had a hard time believing this, but whatever the truth, he was deeply in love with Kay and now she was carrying his child.
The unborn child, Cleopatra, also knew where they were going.
The Blind Piano Tuner was deep in his thoughts too, and his thoughts had depths no other living creature could imagine. He was going home. There had been times during his millennia away when he had thought he would never see that home again but now he was on his way. His heart that hadn't skipped a beat since The Big Bang, was now racing.
‘Be honest,’ he told himself, ‘compared to Egypt, Earth is a bloody boring place. Back of beyond, no culture, useless sunsets and a self-destructive population of idiots.’
Ethel the chicken sat quiet in her thoughts too. She pretty much thought the same about Earth as the Blind Piano Tuner.
Snug and secure inside Kay, Cleopatra daydreamt. Sometimes she thought, 'is this cool or what', but mostly she thought, 'so far so good'. At night when everyone else was asleep a voice came and spoke to her. It told her wonderful and exciting things so that when it was time to be born, her brain would already be fifty years old. Kay of course was totally unaware of this. As she grew, Cleopatra moved and what Kay took as the normal involuntary little kicks and spasms of life, were her unborn child performing complex mathematical calculations on her fingers and toes.
The blue sky gave way to the immense blackness of space and they were free at last of Earth's gravity. The planet grew smaller and smaller, the proton exchange fuel cells slowed to a gentle hum and the battered little ship set off into deep space. Jay and Kay stared back at their home planet in silent wonder. They had never dreamt the day would come when they would look down on it from so far away. Due to a need to conserve the world’s resources, a need that had been accepted by those in power, far too late, space travel had ceased long before their grandparents had been born and even then it had only been the domain of highly trained astronauts, scientists and incredible rich joy-riders. Even ordinary aeroplanes had stopped flying before living memory.
'Oh man, it looks so beautiful,' said Kay, already vaguely homesick, and wondering if she and her unborn child would ever see it again.
As the Desperalda gathered speed, the Earth, the sun and the rest of its tiny planets vanished in the rear view mirror. They dissappeared so quickly that Kay thought something had happen to them. The old ship groaned and creaked. It's engines seemed to be grinding something twisted, through some ill fitting gears wheels, yet within a couple of minutes of take off they had accelerated to twenty sols (Speed of Light) and were still only in low gear.
None of this incredible speed had had any effect on the crew. There was none of that being pushed back in your seat anti-gravity stuff with funny squashed cartoon faces, or your dribble floating round the cabin. They had felt no more than if they had been sailing up a lazy river on a Sunday afternoon. This was because they themselves were not travelling at any speed at all. The were sitting perfectly still in their seats while all around them the Desperalda tore through space like an exploding dervish, for the ship used the 'Displacement Theory' of travel which put simply, meant that only those things that needed to move, moved. The outside skin of the ship needed to move and by doing so, automatically moved everything inside it. If you throw a parcel across a room, the box doesn't fly through the air leaving its contents behind. Everything moves.
On Earth everyone had remained totally ignorant of this elegantly simple basic method of travel. The closest that anyone had come to it was wondering what happened if you jumped up in the air in an express train. What happened was that you came down in exactly the same place inside the train but the train itself had, of course, travelled on, meaning that you had too. That is the 'Displacement Theory'.
'So does anyone know where this Egypt place is?' said Jay.
In front of him was an array of buttons and dials that he assumed were the ship's controls, yet since the ship had begun its journey no one had touched any of them.
'Do you remember The Great Flaw that you discovered back in Camelot?' said The Blind Piano Tuner, ‘when you realised that a year has three hundred and sixty five days but a circle has only three hundred and sixty degrees?'
'Oh yes,' said Jay. 'So?'
'You thought that there were five days too many in a year,' The Blind Piano Tuner continued. 'But in fact it's the other way round. There are three hundred and sixty five degrees in a circle.'
'So what?' said Kay.
'You don't understand. It doesn't mean that each degree is a bit smaller,' The Blind Piano Tuner explained. 'It means that there are five degrees more in each circle. Circles are rounder.'
Both Jay and Kay slowly shook their heads in disbelief.
'Look,' said The Blind Piano Tuner. 'Press that green button.'
Jay did so and everything that was round instantly got just a little bit rounder. Most of this was irrelevant and almost impossible to detect but outside the ship something dramatic happened. A five degree wide sector of space that no human had ever seen before opened up right in front of them.
'That's where we're going,' said The Blind Piano Tuner. 'Into the heart of the Hidden Sector.'
He explained why the sector had been hidden for so long, hidden not just from humans but all other life-forms except the one race that lived in the heart of the sector itself, his race, the Egyptians. Only by hiding the sector could its inhabitants be totally secure from unwanted visitors.
At a certain stage in evolution all intelligent beings begin to ask awkward questions, like 'Where do we come from?', 'Are we alone?’ And 'How many roads must a man walk down?'. They search their souls. They search their planets and study fossils. When they fail to find the answers they seek, as they always do, they do one or both of two things. They start scouring space with bigger and bigger telescopes, or they invent religion. One path leads to frustration, the other to a series of cleverly contrived answers that only answer the questions if they too have been cleverly contrived. There is much argument across the galaxies as to which path leads to which conclusion.
To avoid the prying telescopes, radio waves, deep telepathy and intergalactic search-engines, the Egyptians created the Hidden Sector. They moved their planet and its sun there, and then hid it.
'You are the first living souls to have ever seen it,' said The Blind Piano Tuner.
'Wow,' said Kay.
‘Look,’ said the Blind Piano Tuner.
Buttons clicked again and the view outside cleared to reveal a vast empty space in space.
‘That is where we are going,' said The Blind Piano Tuner, his voice trembling with awe, 'into the heart of the Hidden Sector where lies The Vast Empty Space that holds in its heart my home.'
'Wow,' said Jay, 'it's amazing. It's like, vast and like, totally empty.'
'That is why it’s called The Vast Empty Space,' said The Blind Piano Tuner. 'Yet it is not totally empty for there, right in the very centre of the emptiness, is Egypt, our ultimate destination, the seed star from which everything that has ever existed or will ever exist in the future was born.'
'So it really exists' said Ethel, with an uncharacteristic hesitation in her voice.
Just as Jay and Kay were the first humans to look upon the beginning of time, so was Ethel the first chicken. She had heard of the planet from which everything had been created, but she had never seen it. She had been told by sensible beings that the whole thing was a myth. Some days logic told her it must exist. Other days it told her it was too logical, too obviously manufactured to answer the unanswerable questions. Like everyone else, she had tended to believe it was all a galactic myth invented by priests playing on everyone’s fundamental need for it to exist.
'Oh yes,' The Blind Piano Tuner replied.
Ethel was speechless. For the first time since Jay had known her she was lost for words. She gazed at the minute dot in the centre of the screen, a dot so small and distant, it could have been mistaken for a speck of dust on the windscreen, and felt humble. It was a feeling that was entirely new to her and she wasn't sure she liked it. There in the immeasurably far distance was the eye of God. She had lived for hundreds of thousands of years but compared to Egypt her life had spanned a mere fraction of a second. Egypt had existed longer than forever, longer than even time itself.
'But why’s it called Egypt?' said Jay. 'That's a country on Earth.
'Yes,' said The Blind Piano Tuner, 'and on every other planet in every other galaxy in the whole of creation.'
He explained that the tiny solar system at the centre of The Vast Empty Space with its small sun Ra and its one solitary planet Egypt had been the core from which everything else had grown and was still growing. The Egyptians, being creation's oldest living race had evolved way past super-intelligence before any other solar system had even cooled enough to produce microbes. Over countless millennia they had travelled to every single planet and created on it a land called Egypt in the hope that its wisdom would rub off on the natives and guide them into lives of peace and harmony. On each planet they had adopted the form of the predominant species and set up a society adapted to the particular needs of those species
'So did they build pyramids on every planet?' asked Jay.
'Pyramids?' said The Blind Piano Tuner. 'Oh you mean Big Houses. Those thing you call pyramids are just the roofs of huge houses. I always thought it was a bit stupid building something so heavy on sand. It's no wonder they sunk. Yes, they built Big Houses on every one.'
'So what went wrong on Earth?' said Kay. 'I mean why didn't everyone become brilliant and live happily ever after instead of ending up like, almost extinct?'
'The Egyptians, my fellow countrymen, all died,' said The Blind Piano Tuner. ‘All except me.’
'What, you mean the human's killed them?'
'No, they caught some human disease.' The Blind Piano Tuner explained. 'All except me.’
'So why didn’t you leave?' said Jay.
'I was there before the main party. I was the guinea pig they sent on ahead. They always did that, bit like a canary in a coal mine. If the canary didn't die, the main party came.'
'So why didn't you die?'
'The disease hadn't evolved when I arrived. I must have built up an immunity. But in case I was a carrier, my fellow Egyptians destroyed my spaceship so I could never go home. It was the last thing they did before they died.'
Kay was wondering what created the original Egypt in the first place but that question, the one question man has tried not to ask over and over again, had no answer. She knew that, so she didn't ask it. She would like to have asked how a question can have no answer, but that was a question that had no answer too and Kay could feel her mind beginning to overheat as an endless line of unanswerable questions led off into infinity like the ten thousand reflections of the back of your head when you sit between two facing mirrors. All you can ever see are ten thousand images of the back of your head growing fainter and smaller as you curve off into eternity. Eternity was another concept that didn't bear thinking about. Kay sat back and tried to relax. Flying way from Earth at ten times the speed of thought was more than enough to worry about for now. She had to keep calm. There was the child to think of now.
'And you think that Egypt is where we should begin our quest for The Perfect Hour?' said Ethel.
'Well, it seems like a good idea to go back to the very beginning,' said The Blind Piano Tune. 'To start from square one so to speak. Unless anyone else has a better idea.’
They didn’t.
He had another reason to visit Egypt. Over the millennia he had felt himself become more and more homesick. It was an illogical feeling, he knew that. Your true home was inside your head, but he missed the place, missed his wife and his only son.
Seeing the simple tiny solar system alone in its vast sector of space, made the homesickness almost unbearable. When he had left Egypt, he had only intended to be away a few millennia. He hadn't seen his family since he had left and wondered if they would still be alive, after all being immortal didn't mean you would live forever. Even his son, whose name he couldn't for the life of him, remember, the son, who had had the most brilliantly promising career of all the Egyptians, would be pretty old now, probably even shaving and wearing long trousers. Yes, it was time to go home.
Ethel the Chicken was glad to be leaving Earth too. She knew she was supposed to fix Earth, save mankind, maybe re-create a few dinosaurs, clear away all the rubbish, and ok, she'd do it, but first she needed a holiday, she didn't care where, just as long as it was far away from that tiny little planet. At least she'd be able to think some new thoughts instead of the same fifty-thousand over and over again.
'But surely, before we set off on our voyage,' said Ethel, 'we must visit The Crystal Planet. We must consult the fortune tellers and soothsayers.'
‘That goes without saying,’ said the Blind Piano Tuner.
