The Boy Who Lost Fairyland (8UP8) by Catherynne M. Valente

Author:Catherynne M. Valente [Valente, Catherynne M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250072795
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER IX

THE EMERALD THERMODYNAMICAL HYPER-JUNGLE LAW

In Which Tom and Tam Host a Very Boisterous Party in Apartment #7, Play a Game of Red Light, Green Light, and Are Kidnapped by a Baseball Thomas and Tamburlaine played for seven hours, which is the proper number for this sort of thing

It takes a span of seven, at a minimum, to make a new world.

Seven days, seven hours, even seven minutes, if one has had a very good breakfast. Less won’t do; you spend the first bit just measuring fabric and trying to find the hammer you had in your hand just a moment ago. And if you go on and on and procrastinate and sleep in weekends, before you know it you’ve spent a year on one little curlicue on one tiny blue fjord and the whole thing starts to seem less interesting than starting over with a shiny new gas giant.

Don’t look at me so suspiciously—you and I make new worlds, too. It is only that our hands are too small to manage seventeen moons at once, or a great red storm that goes on blustering for centuries. We make our worlds of stranger stuff: We choose people who do not annoy us, places of green or glass and steel that feel as alive and necessary as our brothers and sisters, houses in which everything has a place, rules such as Do Not Take Things That Aren’t Yours Unless No One Is Looking and Good Things Happen to Good People and A Year Is 365 Days are agreed upon, even when they aren’t true, perhaps especially so.

You and I have made a little world here together, a world only we know, with a lovely red door and glinting eyes peeking out from under the geraniums. A secret world all our own inside the one everyone knows about, and a very fine one, at that. A new world is always made when one creature speaks and another listens. There is no gravity in here, but oh, how everything flies!

Thomas Rood managed two worlds in seven hours. We should, frankly, congratulate him on a new land-speed record. The first one was a matter of survival. He didn’t mean to do it. No one does, really. It’s only that when nothing is as you thought it was, a body has to cobble together a new universe out of the rubbish left over when the old one burst and turned into a wombat. Nothing could be certain anymore. New gravities were necessary, new boiling points, new E’s and mc’s and squares. Why settle for the second law of thermodynamics? That’s the old world’s tune. When gramophones dance and girls grow plums like earrings, the reign of the Emerald Thermodynamical Hyper-Jungle Law has come: Everything lives and grows and thickens, nothing decays, nothing fades, nothing ends.

He didn’t make his worlds alone, of course. No one does. Moving alone upon the face of the deep is awfully boring.

And lo, in the first hour, Thomas and Tamburlaine went

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