For Malcolm, Chanukah 2006 / 5767

A long time ago, so long ago that there was not even such a thing as time, before the sun stretched for the first time and felt its bones glowing bright and hot, the Universe was a vast blank Nothing.

In the Nothing it was not light, it was not dark, it was not clear, it was not foggy, it was simply nothing. Endless nothing, nothing at all. There was no curve to the nothing, no walls, not even the suggestion of a shape, and no time either, nothing that would tell you how long ago it had been or how far in the future it might be, only a single unending moment so dense in its nothingness that when Something finally appeared in the Nothing, the Nothing didn’t even notice it.

The Something noticed, though. Huge and majestic, it noticed in its sleep. Eyelids so large they looked as if they had been stitched out of blue whales’ bellies fluttered but did not open. There was a booming grunt, a colossal fart. Then the Something rolled over, cocooned within swirls of chaos and spouts of sound and skeins of primal Stuff, all of which swaddled the Something head to toe. The Something, the Stuff, the chaos, and all the rest, even the grunts and farts, were in turn contained within a vast eggshell.

The Egg was not contained in anything at all. For eighteen thousand years — or so people say — the Egg waited in the Nothing while the Something slept. Every so often the Something would shift position, and drift close to the surface of the water of Dream that it sensed the Nothing beyond its eggshell bed, but there was no reason to wake up yet.

Until there was.

The Something opened its eyes, blinking away the crusts of symphonies yet-to-be, the someday breakfasts of kings and concubines, and future seaside villages. It yawned, and the cataclysm of sounds within the eggshell arrayed itself in sympathy, vibrating the eggshell so madly that a crack opened up in the shell.

The Something could feel the crack in the Egg like you feel a change in the weather. The pressure of the Stuff rushing toward the crack, compelled by its nature to go toward the Nothing, made his ears pop and his skin tingle. The Egg itself, heretofore a silent player in the drama, gave a shuddering, juddering, miles-long moan of weary yearning.

Oh well, the Something thought. No time like the present.

The Something kicked out with one mighty foot, a foot as big as Chomolungma, on the end of a leg as long as the Amazon, and smashed the eggshell into a million times a million luminous shards.

The chaos rushed out. The sound rushed out. The Stuff rushed out. Glittering fragments of eggshell flew into the Nothing, turning end over end like certain sorts of leaves. And everywhere the chaos went, everywhere the sound went, everywhere the Stuff went, everywhere the eggshell went, they left trails of Something behind them.

In the middle of it all was the Something, titanic and naked. His broad face gleaming and his mighty arms outstretched, he spun madly, fingers splayed, in the middle of what had formerly been the void but now contained him, P’an Ku.

As he got over the shock of it, P’an Ku looked around. The new place was exciting and noisy and busy. It would be impossible to sleep, now. Everything was rushing all over everywhere, now that there was an everywhere for it to rush all over. P’an Ku was spattered all over with globs of it. He wiped Stuff and fragments of eggshell out of his eyes and winkled it out of his ear with a pinky finger. No sooner had he cleaned his face off than another clot of Stuff as big as England hit him square between the eyes.

This will never do, P’an Ku thought as he recovered from the blow. He might have said it aloud but he didn’t want to open his mouth under the circumstances. Instead he started sorting.

P’an Ku plucked Stuff from the air as it passed him, caught sounds as they flew. He snatched scraps of shining eggshell as they hurtled by, and snagged hanks of chaos without even looking. The work made him happy. It seemed to be what he was meant to do.

P’an Ku rolled the Stuff into neat balls, some larger, some smaller. decorating them with fantastic, rich, lush arrangements of sound, and wrapping some of them in lovely complicated webs of chaos, all anchored firmly in the Stuff lest it come loose again. The eggshell bits he put in his mouth, feeling the powerful tingling of them slowly penetrate his whole head until his ears buzzed and his eyes glowed. Now and then he would grin just because it was so amusing how the light of the dazzling eggshell pieces shone through the spaces between his teeth.

Eventually P’an Ku had collected and sorted everything that had come out of the Egg when he cracked it open. Exhausted after all his work, P’an Ku looked around glumly. The last time he slept he had had the Egg to lie down in. Now there was no place to lie down.

What to do? Poor P’an Ku was all alone, with nothing but a mouthful of eggshell and a collection of Stuff-balls, hovering in the deep dark black of space. He still had to figure out what to do with his wonderful collections, his carefully-crafted orbs and his mouthful of luminous eggshell. But he was so weary that his magnificent bones ached. He needed rest before he could continue. So P’an Ku tried to lay down where he was.

This worked, after a fashion, and P’an Ku relaxed, wrapped arms like peninsulas around a torso broad as a desert, and began to shut his eyes. Whereupon a Stuff-ball thwacked him hard in the back of the head. He sat up, clapping a hand across his Grand Canyon mouth lest he give in to the temptation to shout and lose all the eggshell bits.

When P’an Ku looked around he could see that his Stuff-balls, no longer corralled, had gone spinning off into space, and were caroming about wildly just as the Stuff and the chaos and the sound and the eggshell had before.

Fine, thought the exhausted P’an Ku, if that’s the way the Stuff is going to behave, I’ll just have to show it who’s boss.

Rallying the scrag-ends of his strength, P’an Ku began to round up Stuff-balls, leaping through space to catch them in their flight. Each time he caught one, he would mash it into a wad with the others, forming a huge ball of Stuff that got bigger and bigger and bigger with each captured ball, chaos and sound interleaved throughout the enlarging mass, no longer elegant but crushed together willy-nilly.

The more Stuff-balls P’an Ku caught, though, the further he had to go to catch the next, because they were still bouncing and flying, still drawn by the inexorable tendency of Stuff to go where there is none. Too, P’an Ku was carrying his enormous amalgamated ball of Stuff, which rapidly became even larger than he. Because P’an Ku was mighty, he kept carrying it, even when his ball began to dwarf him, and because P’an Ku was determined, he kept hurrying after the missing Stuff-balls while carrying his gigantic prize.

Eventually, though, poor P’an Ku could catch no more. He was simply too tired. By this time, though, his collection had formed a Stuff-ball so huge that even P’an Ku realized it would crush him flat if it should hit him in his sleep. So instead of taking the risk of having the enormous Stuff-ball land on top of him, P’an Ku decided that the solution was for him to get on top of the Stuff-ball.

Depleted to the point that his eyelids sagged and his knees wobbled, P’an Ku stood precariously atop his huge ball. He looked out into the black, dimly able to see hints of faraway rogue Stuff-balls, and sighed so hard that the Essence of Life itself was knocked from its fragile moorings within him. Eyes popping fully open in surprise, P’an Ku watched the slender blue wriggling form of the Essence of Life as it danced away into the black, then toppled onto his back, dead as stones.

Instantly a fountain of light erupted from P’an Ku’s head. His mouth, knocked open by the fall, released its glowing shards of primordial eggshell and they plumed up and up and out into the black, spangling the length of space with stars. The stars lit up the body of the dead P’an Ku, half-buried in the soft Stuff he had collected, smeared with chaos.

Blood ran from his ears, turning clear as it hit the surface of the Stuff-ball, running in rivulets and rivers, collecting in ponds and lakes and even seas. The Essence of Life, drawn by the promising sound of rushing water, came to watch, and her delighted dance made P’an Ku’s thick black hair grow leaves and bark, flowers erupting from its whorls. Even the hair on his toes turned to grass that waved in the breezes and winds that had been set in motion by P’an Ku’s final great sigh. As massive in death as he had been in life, P’an Ku’s flesh turned to stone, his bones to precious jewels, his nerves to veins of gold and silver, which is why the most precious gems and metals are found deep underground, layered in the rock.

By and by, probably through the mad whirling whispers of the Essence of Life, who is the only entity to travel between our Universe and the Realm of the August Personage of Jade whenever she will, word of the magnificent P’an Ku traveled to the Court of the Immortals.

“Hm,” mused the dragon goddess Nü-Kua, preening her beautiful blue body so that it shone almost as brightly as the eternal glow of the heavens. “That sounds like something I would like to see.”

With a flick of her powerful tail, Nü-Kua set off to the resting place of the great P’an Ku, navigating by the stars until she found him.

“Such a beautiful world he made!” she cried, marveling at the greens and blues and browns and golds and reds of it, at the steep majesty of the mountains that were P’an Ku’s body, at the delicious sensation of grass beneath her Divine feet. Nü-Kua swam in the lakes and proclaimed them beautiful and worthy too. She flew through the clouds and proclaimed them beautiful and worthy, too. Nü-Kua warmed herself in the sands of the fiery deserts and cooled herself lingering on the glittering ice shelves of the polar zones. For fun, she raced around the equator, chasing her own tail until she got dizzy and fell giggling into the warm, salty sea.

“The only thing wrong with this world,” Nü-Kua said as she floated on her back in the sea, churning up enormous waves with her superlative tail, “is that there is no one here to enjoy it but me, and I cannot stay forever. When I go back to the Realm of the August Personage of Jade, there will be no one here to keep poor P’an Ku company.”

Nü-Kua swam to shore. Taking mud from the coastal flats, she began to sculpt creatures. With care and precision, Nü-Kua shaped myriad creatures out of the stiff mud: fish and horses, spiders and ducks, gorillas and dogs, elephants and dung beetles, mudskippers and platypuses. Every kind of creature that walks or crawls or creeps or leaps or flies or swims, Nü-Kua made it with her long careful dragon fingers, lining them up at the water’s edge.

Nü-Kua took a step back and regarded her creations. There were almost enough, she thought, but not quite. Scooping up some more mud, she sculpted three more creatures: a woman, a man, and a cat.

“There,” Nü-Kua said, finally pleased. “That’s exactly what was needed. Now P’an Ku will always have company.” With that, Nü-Kua leaned down and breathed her Divine breath into every last one of the creatures, opening their bodies so that the Essence of Life could find a place within them to inhabit. Nü-Kua reached out to the heavens and beckoned to the Essence of Life, who rushed to explore all these new things, and one by one, all the world’s creatures were brought to life.

Having seen to it that P’an Ku would not lack companionship, and having seen all there was to see of the world, Nü-Kua made ready to return to the Realm of the August Personage of Jade. Just then she felt a tiny tap on her left forefoot and looked down to see what it was. It was the Man she had made, kneeling before her in fear, awe, and confusion.

“Please, Great Goddess,” the Man said, “Can you help me? I am so small and this place is so big and I’m afraid I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

Nü-Kua nodded, pity welling up in her heart. She had made him rather tiny, hadn’t she, compared to the size of P’an Ku’s world. Why, even had she made a thousand more like the Man, then crammed them all together in a bundle, they wouldn’t be even as big as P’an Ku’s littlest toe. The poor thing was going to need a sense of Purpose if he was going to survive. So Nü-Kua lifted the Man up to eye level and looked him over carefully, then gently brought the trembling creature to her lips. With the tiniest kiss she could manage, she imparted Purpose to the Man, then set him gently back down again.

Now Nü-Kua turned her attention to the Woman, who sat on a fallen tree trunk, playing with the cat with a long piece of grass. It would never do, Nü-Kua thought, to give a gift to the Man without giving a gift to the Woman as well, how unfair! But it was also perfectly clear to Nü-Kua that the woman already had a sense of Purpose, though where she’d gotten it from even Nü-Kua didn’t know.

Nü-Kua thought about it for a moment, then realized she knew exactly what to give the Woman. Nü-Kua encircled the woman’s shoulders with the tip of her tail, so as not to disturb her ability to play with the cat, and with a twitch of her inmost Divine essence, transmitted the gift of Endurance to the Woman.

The woman felt it and smiled, looking up and over her shoulder at the spiraling blue beauty of Nü-Kua. “Thank you,” said the Woman. “That will certainly be useful. I am eternally in your debt, mighty Nü-Kua.”

The Woman bowed deeply from her seat on the log, and when she straightened, she looked up at the dragon goddess again. Nü-Kua’s right eyebrow arched in question, sending sparkling rays of iridescent light arcing crazily across the seashore.

“I was just wondering, O beautiful, O powerful Nü-Kua, about the Cat,” the Woman said. “Have you no gift to give such a marvelous creature as this?”

“The Cat,” answered Nü-Kua with the faintest hint of a smile, “has everything it needs already.”

With that, Nü-Kua lifted her long splendid body into the air and flew off into the stars, guiding herself through and beyond the stars, back to the Realm of the August Personage of Jade.

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