Epicurus the Mouse
In the time when man first captured the moon, there rose upon its surface a city, Selene; an Atlantis risen from the pockmarked lunar sea. All the best varieties of brain thought and willed in Selene. There were brains that spent their whole day - which was twenty-nine point five days of earthly time - in the contemplation of dust and rocks. There were painterly brains, and artificial brains, and brains that could only fit in a child’s skull.
There was one brain though - at least one - of a more contemplative character. This was the brain of Epicurus; not the philosopher, but a philosopher. Also, a mouse.
That a mouse had flown as far as the moon is not so surprising - anywhere humans fly in sufficient quantity is bound to entail a few hangers-on. That Epicurus survived Selene City’s cats is accountable in one way only. Magic.
Mice are not half-so-bad, once you get to know them half-as-well as Epicurus half-understood himself. It was not in Epicurus’ personality to obtrude on the comfort of his enormous lunar cohabitants. He kept to himself generally, kept to the apartments of the chief lunar chef specifically, and stole into a particular yarn basket whenever lethargy rang.
It was in this woolen refuge, on a certain day - December 30th - while licking the grease of a particularly delicious gobbet of artificial cheddar from the nails of his left forepaw, that Epicurus the Mouse heard the notes of a song.
“What in the name of St. Stuart is that extraordinary music?” asked Epicurus to himself. He cocked a rounded grey ear toward the air. “It’s neither Haydn, nor Mozart, nor Beethoven. I do believe it’s more romantic or impressionist, but not Liszt, and not Tchaikovsky - and it certainly isn’t Bruckner, for I feel rather wide awake.”
Counting off classic composers on his whiskers, Epicurus began moving back and forth along one of the lightstrip baseboards. This was Epicurus’ favorite spot for a walk-and-think. The long tapioca-colored light shed a warm glow against the left side of Epicurus’ face - and a soft buzz in his ear - as he pondered his way toward the cassette shelf. The lightstrip then balanced the tan on Epicurus’ right side as he pondered back to the automatic crochet-machine by the chamber’s iris door.
While nearing the crochet-machine on one of these passes, Epicurus heard a tapping over the distant notes of the song. It was a sequence of four sharp, tiny taps, followed by a pause, then the taps once more. The taps came from a steel vent cover just above Epicurus’ head, which the head chef’s daughter had covered in small enamel paintings of black and gold puffins.
Epicurus looked up just in time to see, poking through the slatted black triangle of one puffin’s forehead, a set of eyes. The sum square nanometer area of this set, combined, did not equal the surface area of even one of Epicurus’ beady orbs, and the new set contained eight eyes in all. The eyes belonged to Tremorsense the Spider.
“Epicurus!” said Tremorsense in a breathless whisper. “Oh Epicurus, you’re not going to believe the news - for I’ve just scuttled all the way from The Dome, don’t you know - which took me almost the whole of the morning, all my legs in perfect syncopation - well, except my bad third left ankle that’s been giving me trouble - I think I might have arthritis - though I’m not so old that-”
“Tremorsense,” Epicurus interrupted. He tapped a forepaw impatiently. He knew the spider could be as long of wind as of leg.
“Oh, but I came here to tell you that the humans are planning something - a festival I’m sure - and they have this enormous tree up, Epicurus. A tree! And they’ve covered it in things that shimmer and sparkle - I nearly lost an eye it was so bright - but so pretty-”
“Perhaps the tree is the source of the music,” said Epicurus.
“-around a huge lake in the vents which slowed… Music?” Tremorsense placed a forefoot to his mandible. His face screwed up in thought. “I don’t hear any music - and I don’t recall hearing any at the tree - though perhaps it simply didn’t catch in my brain.”
“Can’t hear it?” To the mouse’s cocked ear and raised grey eyebrows, Tremorsense the spider could only shrug.
Epicurus took another slow turn up and down the lightstrip wall. Tremorsense’s eight eyes followed the small grey mouse as he went. When Epicurus came beneath the puffin-painted vent once again, Tremorsense heard him muttering, “Why should only I hear the song? And why does it sound as if it comes from The Bluewhite Powder?”
“What does the music sound like?” asked Tremorsense.
“I can’t recall the tune,” said Epicurus with a helpless shake of his nose. “But it is familiar. Right now, it’s like a spinning wheel. I hear the pedal in perpetual motion in the flutes, and the click of a tambourine treadle.”
“Spinning: something all spiders know at least a little about - even Fishers and Wolfs, though it’s not their regular cup-of-tea. I’ve spun a fair bit myself - the spider queen says I’m useless at webs - still, I think my single strands are nicely sticky and straight.”
“What should I do?”
Tremorsense thought for a moment. He suddenly snapped the graspers on his back-right-most appendage. “Let’s go to Ask Alfie.”
Medieval motes of dust struck a slow waltz through the empty air of a storage closet, where a silver-girt monitor leaning on a grated shelf came alive with sepia light. hexadecimals flashed three times upon its screen, before twirling themselves into an amalgamated pair of wrinkled, huge, golden lips. The lips stretched nearly from one edge of the screen to the other, surrounded by black light. They opened - they seemed to move with the aching slowness of Ent speech - but from the monitor’s built-in speaker, there issued an incongruously tinny voice.
“Ask Alfie.”
“Alfie,” Epicurus began, but stopped. He and Tremorsense sat on two armchairs of dust on the floor below the pair of lips. Epicurus always felt intimidated whenever his movement in the closet awakened the ancient archon. After a pause, the mouse resumed, “Do you remember us?”
”…Yes.”
“We have a question about some music we- I heard.”
”…I know every arrangement of notes written before my own age, and all that has been written since. Answer this question: what music is it?”
“I can’t remember the name, or the composer. But Ask Alfie, I’m certain it’s one of the impressionists.”
”…You must answer a second question: when did you hear this music?”
Epicurus glanced at Tremorsense, then turned back to the golden lips and said, “I hear it now. I heard it first some hours past.”
“You must answer a final question: where do you hear it?”
“From The Bluewhite Powder.”
Tremorsense fidgeted about as the lips pressed themselves into a thin line. The old sage, Ask Alfie, seemed to have fallen into endless, looping deliberation. Epicurus held still and watched the screen, black eyes unblinking, whiskers still.
Finally, after much time had passed, the lips moved. The quiet staticky voice said, “Others before you have heard this music. More may follow. The Bluewhite Powder, beyond Selene’s warm steel, is where your questions shall be assuaged. The door is shut - it will not open for you. Find and follow Dr. Signe Odegaard, whose voice may command the door. Do not let her see you.
“Epicurus, be warned. The Bluewhite Powder is no place to idly go. You cannot breathe in the smells of grass and rain, for there is no grass, and there is no rain, and there is no air which carries such things to your pink nose. Temperatures fluctuate between 260 and negative 280 degrees Fahrenheit. Water is rare and frozen. Only steel, or fiberglass and mylar and spandex, or magic, will protect you.
“I hope this knowledge guides you in your search. Is there anything else I can help you with today?”
“Marley’s Ghost.” Tremorsense exclaimed. “What a howler.”
The blast of heated fumes rolled over mouse and spider in a continuous fluid stream as the pair walked on twelve total legs down one long lightless duct of Selene city’s ventilation. The air - intended to spread warmth across a larger room’s-worth of space - brought sweat to the skin of the spider, and left Epicurus panting.
“Which direction?” Epicurus shouted.
“What?”
“I said: ‘Which direction?’”
Tremorsense could not reply, so caught up was he in keeping his footing. For a moment, it seemed as if the pair were to part ways; Tremorsense seemed on the verge of hurtling in the heated gale, as he had on other occasions. Just as the spider was about to fly, however, a thought came to Epicurus. He circled around, granting Tremorsense a brief vacuum harbor. He bade the spider climb onto his furry head, and twine spidery legs around his round, pink ears.
Tremorsense did so.
The going became easier after that. The hot wind faded, and soon the pair arrived at the slatted vent cover to the lab of Doctor Signe Odegaard.
“Keep still,” said Epicurus as he poked his head sideways through the slats. Tremorsense clutched tight to the ears. They stared into the Doctor’s laboratory.
Dots and lines - stars, and constellations - stared out from every surface of Dr. Odegaard’s personal space. They stared from the walls, the ceiling, the top of the desk. They stared from the yellow and pink faces of sticky notes. The dots and lines even stared from some of the floor panels. There was no congruity between these separate charts on their varied surfaces. Some were drawn by hand. Some were laminated paper. One portrayed Orion’s Belt, with appropriate brightnesses for each of its component stars, while another cast both the Dippers and Cepheus in uniform black dots. There were big charts, small charts, charts of spectrum and distance and age, colored charts, and greyscale charts, and one chart of the major constellations of engraved copper, hanging beside the window, with the words ‘Love, Oliver” etched in Garamond on its plaque. Most of the charts had some sort of writing on them. Usually these were scribbled numbers. There were exceptions, such as the engraved copper words, or a small scrawl at the corner of one southern sky chart, which read “Towards which quarter chilly Saturn draws.”
A wooden smoking pipe sat beside a porcelain ashtray, atop a portable atmosphere cleaner, next to Signe’s desk and terminal. The room smelled of tobacco and patient obsession. Beside the atmosphere cleaner, atop a floor sketch of Scorpius, lay a polyethylene bag. It was packed for travel.
Epicurus and Tremorsense’s eyes had just landed on this bag after a long perusal of the stars, when the room’s iris door swished open. A tall woman with freckles and a blond ponytail swept inside like leaves in autumn. She whisked the bag up with one stroke of her hand. She spun back to the door and swept toward it - again like a leaf caught in a sudden whirl - and would have swept from the room, but that she was stopped.
Another human stepped into the doorway. “I don’t see the fuss,” he said, scratching at a stubbled chin.
“For posterity,” replied Dr. Signe Odegaard (for it was she) in exasperation. She set her bag on a table beneath the vent where Epicurus and Tremorsense watched unnoticed, and whirled back to the terminal monitor on her desk. “The geo team can’t nail the fount, but the frequencies are steady. Everything must be catalogued.”
The man shrugged. “You’re not a field tech.”
Neither Epicurus nor Tremorsense could comprehend the explosions of sound echoing through the space from the mouths of the two giants. Epicurus had only the instructions of Ask Alfie to act upon. He saw the bag, and even his animal mind recognized it as an instrument of travel. The mouse slipped a foot through the grate, preparatory to dropping down into the open bag.
“Epicurus, don’t leap,” Tremorsense began, “for it’s too far of a fall - and one of us will surely be injured - either you because of your age - I mean no offense-”
Before the mouse could reassure his headgear, Dr. Odegaard spun around. Epicurus just had time to draw himself back into the vent as the doctor floated back to the open bag. As she pulled the flaps wider and rummaged inside, she said, “Director Grossman will want T’s crossed, I’s dotted. We must record stars, yes?”
The doctor pulled the heavy cylinder of a telescope from the bag and displayed it proudly before the man-giant. He said, “Signe, it’s New-Year’s. Besides, can’t you just simulate them by time and position?”
Signe shook her head. She turned to place the telescope back in the bag.
Before she could, before the man had finished speaking, Epicurus had seen his opportunity. He’d stolen it. Ignoring the warnings of Tremorsense he’d crawled through the slats. His weight had pulled him down before he could consider. Mouse, and spider with him, dropped. Epicurus felt Tremorsense’s legs trembling around his ears as they plunged through open air.
They fell right between the open flaps of the bag. They struck with a soft thud, against a cushion of thermal wrapping. Both their eyes rolled dizzily. Still, Epicurus retained just enough marbles to scuttle into the darkest corner of the bag, as the doctor set the heavy telescope back.
Then Signe zipped the flaps shut, and the dark corner turned still darker for the mouse and spider sealed inside. They felt the soft floor shift - felt themselves pushed down as in an elevator - when the doctor hefted her bag and left the room of stars.
Even through insulating lining, Epicurus could hear the distant tune. Col-legno strings. Soft wind sounds. A violin and cello in a falling chromatic line.
The bag swung suddenly back and forth, up and down. Epicurus and Tremorsense tumbled snout-over-tail, mandibles-over-spinnerets. The bag dropped, and the two floated above the telescope. For an instant, Epicurus felt the weightlessness of space; had he ever before ventured to that outer realm of the Bluewhite Powder, he might have thought that they had already left Selene City.
Then the bag jolted up again, and the two crashed once more into the soft padding. From without there was a continual bang, bang, bang of giant footsteps. Then a stop. Hiss. Bang, bang, bang - up and down and the bag swinging round and round. Stop. Hiss. A moment’s respite. Voices through the bag and the music.
Then the air turned very, very cold.
Up came the bag in a slower, aching kind of arc. Up came Epicurus and Tremorsense, floating in bag-space. Epicurus felt light as a flea. He waited for the crash as the bag swung down; the crash never came. Instead the mouse rebounded lightly off the smooth, soft, glacial surface of the top of the bag. A moment later he felt the cold surface of the telescope against his feet, much sooner than he’d expected. The telescope was floating inside the bag too. The whole landscape inside Dr. Odegaard’s telescope-bag seemed divorced from nature; not only in the materials of polyethylene and plastic and steel, but in the laws of gravity and time. To Epicurus the world seemed to move in slow motion - or even reverse - and to have abandoned the concept of direction. It seemed to Epicurus as if he’d fallen into a barrel of cold whale oil and sunk beneath the surface. Epicurus did find, happily, that he could still breathe.
“Are we in the Bluewhite Powder?” Epicurus pondered aloud. “It’s wondrously cold. Not the coldest I’ve ever been - but, wondrously cold.”
In truth, this was the coldest Epicurus had ever been, though the mouse did not know it. Epicurus had no long sense of perspective, nor could he understand that his particular magic alone granted him a momentary stay of expiration, and left him capable of speech.
“That music sounds farther away than ever,” Epicurus went on. “It could be because we’re stuck in this bag. It’s quite dark here, as well as cold. Tremorsense, you see better than I. Can you see any loose stitch or small hole through which we might peer?”
Tremorsense did not reply, though Epicurus still felt the spider’s legs wrapped around his ears, like the loops of a helmet. Nor would the spider ever reply. Epicurus - being a magic mouse - could just withstand the hazards of The Bluewhite Powder. Tremorsense was not a magic spider. Not magic enough.
The bag roiled in its new, undulating way. Epicurus tried several times to draw some words from Tremorsense, to no avail. At last the mouse said to himself, “I can’t tell what has brought silence over my friend in this darkness. I must find a hole myself.”
Epicurus’ tiny nails scrabbled uselessly over the steel surface and glass lens of the telescope. He found some purchase on the bag’s lining - whenever he came into contact with it - but even this afforded Epicurus little in the way of maneuverability, for every attempt to dig his aged paws into the wall only shoved him out into the weightless space of the bag. And the darkness; and the shifting landscape; and the distracting cold - all left him little sense to navigate by.
But then, tickling against his long translucent whiskers, Epicurus felt an unmistakable draft. The black inside of the bag still held the air of Selene City. That air now whistled out through the tiniest pinhole in the littlest corner of the smallest stitch in the seam. Epicurus felt that tug upon the air. The bag was deflating.
With a mouse’s intuition - following the current like a north star - Epicurus wheeled his tiny body around. He waited, patient, until he felt his tail tickle against the cold lining. He scrabbled his forepaws furiously against the rocking surface, and although legs were only those of a mouse, he lent his body enough impetus to glide in the direction of the hole.
Presently he felt the draft of air again, but stronger. All at once the tip of his nose came right up against the corner of the bag. There, it stuck. All at once the airflow ceased. Epicurus felt a kind of pressure building around his skull; his snout filled the gap between the atmosphere of The Bluewhite Powder and the atmosphere of the bag. He dug his foreclaws again into the lining and pushed.
The hole in the bag was not much larger than a needle’s eye. Still, mice can scrabble through very small holes when they are determined. And Epicurus in that moment was supremely determined. And, moreover, magic.
With a pop unheard in the moon’s vacuum, he shot through the hole into moonspace.
Like a drop of honey sliding down the glass of its bear-shaped jar, Epicurus slid softly down open space. He could see now - the light was brighter than any unclouded noon on the Greenblue earth - and he saw below the endless ocean of The Bluewhite Powder. He felt a thousand miles high; he floated down very slowly. The sun cast his shadow as a vantablack spot on the surface of the dust; that spot grew as Epicurus fell into its arms.
Epicurus landed with a soft thump. He bounced. Like a pendulum he rose and fell twice more, each impact sending up tiny mushrooms of arctic powder, before he found footing on the elastic terrain. No sooner had Epicurus settled than he felt a huge shudder course through the powder. Another followed. Another. Another. At first, the mouse thought that The Bluewhite Powder was caught in the throes of a perpetual earthquake.
It was only when he gave the space a dizzy glance - following the bright black sky with its sun and all its stars, and the endless dunes - that he saw the giants. The humans were moving away from him. Their footsteps were the source of the shaking; already the tremors were tapering out as the silver-clad behemoths bounce-walked lightly away. One, Doctor Odegaard presumably, carried the telescope bag.
“Tremorsense?” Epicurus asked. He felt the spider still coldly adhering to his head. He received no reply.
It was then that Epicurus noticed another dark polka-dot on The Powder, the only other shadow aside from his own. It was a mousehole. Epicurus took a few tentative, loping footsteps in the direction of the hole. With each step, the music in his ears grew a fraction louder - a harp and a celesta plucking between his ears.
Epicurus lunged at the hole, to the tune of falling, chromatic strings.
The tunnel lay darkly yet not longly ahead of Epicurus the mouse. His usual bearing and poise returned to him as he trod along its length. By the time it opened into a larger cavern space, Epicurus almost felt his old self.
The chamber would have been large for a human; for a mouse, it was cyclopean. Pillars of black marble, and pillars of white marble, and pillars of invisible glass marble, vanished into shadows high above, supporting a ceiling beyond sight. Epicurus had come out at a small hole at the base of one pillar - the others stretched out beyond sight in all directions. A soft yellow haze lit the space, though there were no torches, no smoke. The floor was flat, tiled, and covered in a paradise of dust. Though Epicurus stepped especially softly as he entered - softly, even for a mouse - each touch of his paw on the dust echoed in the vaulted chamber.
Epicurus had travelled only a short distance. Even so, he understood somehow that he was ten million miles from where he had started.
The mouse could still hear the music, although it was not as strident as he would have expected. “H-hello?” he called in a feather-light, wavery voice. He felt suddenly quite tired.
A voice answered:
May I help you, sir?
Epicurus leapt around in place, his forepaws landing exactly in the spaces of dust where his hindpaws had been, and vice-versa.
He beheld a giant. A human, and not dressed for the weather. This human wore black plainclothes. His hair, and the long beard beneath his chin, were both black flecked with white, but his face was not so deeply wrinkled. His age was difficult to guess. His eyes had no pupils, and the colors of the disc-shaped irises seemed to shift continually: one moment ice-blue, then shagreen, then suddenly the color of dark wine, then yellow like the sun.
Epicurus stammered, his whiskers twitching. The giant spoke again, and strangely Epicurus understood everything he spoke: I said, may I help you, sir?
Epicurus cleared his throat. He said, “I’m not sure. I’ve never met a helpful giant before.”
Ahhh, I apologize. Habit, you understand. Allow me one moment.
To Epicurus’ surprise, the human seemed to shrink. Or perhaps Epicurus himself grew enormous? The pillars remained the same size. When the allowed moment had passed, Epicurus’ beady eyes sat on a level with the stranger’s shifting ones; their two noses, pink and ageless, drew in the same plane of oxygen.
That is more comfortable. You came here for a reason?
“I’ve been hearing music. My name is Epicurus.”
Charmed. I am The Old Man Below.
“I came for the music,” Epicurus continued, “But the journey was a long one, and my friend Tremorsense has fallen ill in the course of it, and I am now so weary.”
The Old Man Below nodded. That is not uncommon. Many arrive here exhausted by their travel. They perk up after a time.
“Others have come?”
All sorts come to this place. Though recently I’ve heard the journey is not as long. Not for some. Still, you are smaller than most.
Epicurus glanced around. “Your vault looks empty to me.”
The Old Man Below laughed. His laugh was a high, tinkling sound, like a little silver bell jingling madly away. At first the laughter filled Epicurus with a feeling of anxiety. Gradually though, as The Old Man Below’s laughter rolled, a deep sense of tranquility suffused the mouse’s body.
The Old Man Below’s laughter tapered slowly. At last he wiped the laughter from one un-pupiled eye, and said: You could not see them all at once. There are too many. But stay, and you will see. Here there is much space.
At that moment, Epicurus heard two reverberating strikes of a tam-tam, one after the other. “What was that?” he asked.
Last call, said The Old Man Below. He glanced at the hole through which the mouse had come. End of the day.
Epicurus cast a dubious look at the hole also. “I’m not sure I have the stamina for a return trip.”
It is unlikely.
“I- I think I understand. I am old and tired.”
You will feel light soon.
“There isn’t much room left for a magic mouse on earth,” said Epicurus. “And Selene city is certainly packed with rodents already.”
There’s always room here.
“Only,” Epicurus continued, “perhaps there’s still room for a magic spider? Back in town?” He crossed his eyes and angled them up, toward Tremorsense, perched and frozen.
The Old Man Below broke eye contact with Epicurus for the first time. He looked at the spider. Perhaps there is, he conceded.
And all at once, Epicurus felt as if a huge weight had tumbled from across his old frame, and crashed in the dust around him.
“One other question I still have,” said Epicurus, as the two began to tread side-by-side down the pillared chamber. The Old Man Below looked at the mouse with an ageless eyebrow lifted. “What was the music that called me?”
It was whatever you most wished to hear.
“Oh.”
Play it in your mind, and I will tell you its name.
Epicurus let the memory of the tune come forth to his contemplative mind.
Ah, said The Old Man Below. That is Ravel. My Mother the Goose.
Epicurus’ whiskers splayed in a smile. “Yes,” he said. “I do love that one.”
Tremorsense awoke to the sound of music. He awoke one-eye-at-a-time. First his left largest eye began blinking, then his right, then the two clusters. Letting out a long-winded yawn from between his mandibles, the spider stretched his front four legs. Then he stretched his back four. With a final wag of his head and tapdance on his claws, he scanned his surroundings.
Tremorsense saw that he stood on a floor of wood painted in melding colors of cornflower, and tomato, and frog-green. A second later he realized this first impression held a multitude of errors. He stood on a ceiling of wood, not a floor; and the wood was not painted, but tinted by colored lights; and the green was more that of rich emerald than frog-color. Moreover, the wood was not the particle board or laminated melamine used in some of Selene city’s furnishing, but gnarled, ridged, canyoned, coarse tree bark.
The tree! The enormous Norwegian Spruce. Tremorsense found that he was latched to the underside of one of the great tree’s uppermost branches. Widening his eight eyes, he took in the quandary of lights, and tinsel, and candles, and paper lanterns, and globes, and stars (a supreme ballast of stars), and tin cars, and a hundred other ornaments weighing down the branches. He took in the widely-curving glass of the dome, the statue of Shijie Heping, and the milling human giants (though they seemed less giant from Tremorsense’s height).
“I must tell Epicurus-” Tremorsense began to say to himself, “for it’s not often that there’s so much pomp and circumstance in the dome - never in my life - and those tinkling musical bells coming over the speaker surely signify, what? - a change in atmosphere? - though hopefully… hopefully…”
Tremorsense stopped mid-ramble.
Hadn’t he already been to Epicurus?
All at once a bassier shudder interrupted the tinkling vibrations in the mesh of the speakers. It was a human voice, and Tremorsense, to his utter astonishment, found that he could understand the booming speech: “All personnel: please gather in The Dome for the New Year’s Countdown.”
“New Year?” Tremorsense pondered, in an unusual moment of brevity.
The music resumed - a solo violin singing through eyewide notes. Tremorsense watched as other giants began to arrive from the huge steel portals. He recognized one wraith-light woman with blond hair and freckles - Dr. Signe Odegaard. “Haven’t I seen her recently?” asked Tremorsense of himself.
The people gathered in a huge lake of faces about the tree below him. Tremorsense descended slowly from the trunk by a single strand of webbing - he had never been good with spiraling or geometric webs, but straight lines were his bread-and-butter - to give himself a panorama.
The faces, which had been susurrating in giant-language, quieted. They each turned to face a digital green display of alien characters on the dome above the tree. All at once Tremorsense felt himself nearly blasted from the air as every face shouted out the same command: “Ten!”
Nine more times did the voices thunder, each time nearly knocking the spider from his string. At the end a cry arose that put the rest to shame. Yet Tremorsense’s web held, and the spider unknowingly swung back and forth through his first New Years day.
Nor would it be his last, for magic would give long and happy life to Tremorsense the spider.