Guard Flutter

by Impossible Numbers

Guard Flutter, Part VI: Tank Makes a Friend

Tank the tortoise crested the hill and found himself staring at the city. He had to stop for another lifetime while he strained with tree-like patience to encompass it.

His tiny reptilian mind struggled to comprehend the vastness of the city. Oh, there had been vast vistas aplenty before now – vast deserts, vast mountains, vast roads that never seemed to end – but he’d grown around those types of vastness and then simply marched on. They were vast tracks of nothingness, which he’d found oddly reassuring. It was easy to feel philosophically smug about being the only… well, the only being in a vast world of nothing.

True, there had been towns and villages. He would never forget finding himself in his first village, a mass of blocks and statue-like Big Ones – all of them false, he noticed – towering over him, canyons of streets, and flowerbeds like ancient savannahs.

Every town and village had been so twisty and compacted that each one must’ve taken a lifetime to cross, which was odd because looking back, they now seemed to be little more than brief fireworks between miles of open sky. They were punctuation in the saga of his travels.

Besides, the False Ones – he no longer credited them with the “Big” epithet – had left no impression on him whatsoever, despite his initial intellectual interest.

But here was the city, and if up to now he’d crossed planets and suns of bewildering complexity, then this time he was coming to terms with finding his first galaxy. Lights spelled out constellations even here; it seemed to be a glimpse into the night sky, as though some giant had pulled back the cloud just enough to peek out. It ran from horizon to horizon. All around it was darkness, which meant the city lights reached out and gripped his head and stared back no matter how many bits of him wanted to flee.

For the first time in his journey, he stopped dead and gaped.

In that pause, his life was laid out before him. There was the peaceful slumber under the Big One, savagely torn apart by a change of routine that had hit his entire body; the burning throbs from the depths of his belly which prodded him and haunted him with images of the lost Big One; the explosion when the world turned out to be merely one among many in a cosmic panoply that had tormented yet fascinated him. Against all that, he was just going to find the Big One and return to his slumber?

Despite himself, he plodded onwards, and for an hour or so kept himself occupied by deducing from basic principles the existence of rice pudding. It didn’t take long, however – for a tortoise – to notice how the darkness began swallowing up the lights until they were a veneer.

There was the inevitability of continental drift on his face as his scales cracked and rumbled their way into a frown. He felt the chill flicker within his heart, and examined it with detachment. For want of a better word, he called it “doubt” and tried to file it away for later study. It flickered on nevertheless.

What was he going to do? So far, his mind had gone forth determined to find the Big One, but now he was coming to terms with the fact that this was not just all riding on him, but all riding on him riding on a dogma: that the Big One made things Good.

The Big One had always been there, and things had been good. The Big One had left, and things were bad. Now, he was close to the Big One – the scent was insistent even when he tried holding his breath – and a hundred thousand new thoughts had flooded into his mind, and the dogma supporting it all was cracking under the weight.

There was also the small matter of the city wall.

Tank had solved most of his problems – lack of water, lack of food, too many ponies milling about – by pointing due Big One and walking. Even small wooden fences and stone garden walls were simply minor nuisances, at least compared to a body that never stopped groping for footholds or digging its way under things. It helped he had a mind perfectly capable of wandering off for several happy hours at a time. Patience was not so much a tortoise virtue as a tortoise’s ground state of being.

This wall, however, was where the sky ended. Go no further, it said. You cannot walk on sky. For a moment, his relentless front legs placed themselves on the surface, but they soon slid off and his mind went blank.

Several more hours passed while it went fishing for a clue. After a little while, his inner self sighed wearily. This, it decided, was not a wall. This was a Wall. It might even be the Wall at the End of the World. A part of him found this strangely thrilling, but it was up against the rest of him, which was noticing how long it’d been since his last lettuce leaf.

Perhaps there was a way around the Wall? His legs began to turn him around for the onslaught, and at this point, he caught the flash of pink just on the edge of his vision. Intrigued and starting to feel hope well up inside him, he forced himself to turn around further.

Beside him, the creature stared back. Thoughts rummaged around behind his eyes and turned up a file: duster. Big duster. Big, pink, yellow, orange, red duster. Big, pink, yellow, orange, red duster with blue eyes.

At this point, his memory ran out of file, so he craned his neck and peered closely. Two clawed feet had splayed their toes as though afraid the sky would suck the body up any moment. The wings shuffled, revealing large patches where something unkind had apparently pulled feathers off. Lastly, he turned his attention to the thing’s head, which was beaked and pointy and had an obvious underbite.

Bird? His memory scratched its head.

If so, a peculiar bird. It was about as tall as the False Ones, but each time it moved – and it moved a lot, twitching and jerking back and forth to examine him with its blue eyes – embers trailed in its wake. It pecked his shell; instinctively, he began to pull his head in, but the bird made no further attempt on him, and he cautiously eased back out. Feathers were sticking out all over the thing; avian ways were beyond an old reptile like him, but he suspected birds weren’t supposed to be that scruffy.

The thing made a noise that sounded to him like “rowl?” He blinked up at it politely until it made the noise again.

Then he lost interest and made to turn around. No good ever came of mixing with anything except the Big One, and birds did nothing but peck and tweet. He had no time for pretty scenery. The Wall awaited him.

However, he only managed two steps before talons clamped around his shell and jolted his body. At once, he withdrew every extremity. Tortoises may be patient, but they knew when not to hang about.

Shutting his eyes against the rising lights, he was hit by gravity up and down as a totally different dimension opened around him. His emotions were hitting his insides. Even his thoughts had given up to the maelstrom of chaos that his fear had kicked up.

He had no idea how long he waited in the darkness. Scarcely had his maelstrom mind slowed to something resembling a mere traffic of gales when the talons let go and he couldn’t tell up from down anymore.

To his shock, he hit something soft. And carried on living, and that was what really blew his mind away.

Lights surrounded him, and he knew at once that he was within the untouchable city. Paradoxes and contradictions jostled and scrambled for purchase inside his dizzy mind.

Nearby, something made a noise that sounded like “rowl?”

He listened keenly.

“Rrwark! Rrwark! Rowlowlowl, rowl? AARK!”

Tank the tortoise nodded. Words of wisdom indeed. Truly, he was in the presence of an unfathomably great intellect, which had magnanimously purged him of his old and childish life before delivering him, reborn, unto the City at the End of the World. Brimming over with testudine gratitude, his lips ached towards a smile and he paid closer attention to the blur closing in, thoroughly ready to learn many secrets from his new mentor.

Whereupon the bird coughed. It landed with a shower of feathers and a splat. It coughed again.

“Rowl?” it moaned.

Thus blessed by the great mind, Tank withdrew into his shell and set to work unravelling the mysteries of the cosmos.

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Comments

[Impossible Numbers]

8871745

I think that's normal for stories that haven't surpassed 10 ratings yet. At the moment, I can see seven likes, so that's probably all it is.

Thanks! And don't worry; Tank's got the patient mindset for this kind of ordeal. He'll be perfectly fine.