Haroun and the Sea of Stories Read online

  ‘To ruin an Ocean of Stories,’ muttered Iff the Water Genie, ‘you must add a Khattam-Shud.’

  ‘Say what you like,’ the Cultmaster told him. ‘Say it while you can.’

  He went on with his terrifying explanations: ‘Now the fact is that I personally have discovered that for every story there is an anti-story. I mean that every story—and so every Stream of Story—has a shadow-self and if you pour this anti-story into the story, the two cancel each other out, and bingo! End of story. —Now then: you see here the proof that I have found a way of synthesizing these anti-stories, these shadow-tales. Yes! I can mix them up right here, in laboratory conditions, and produce a most efficient concentrated poison that none of the stories in your precious Ocean can resist. These concentrated poisons are what we have been releasing, one by one, into the Ocean. You have seen how thick the poison is here—thick as treacle. That’s because all the shadow-tales are packed together so closely. Gradually, they will flow out along the currents of the Ocean, each anti-story seeking out its victim. Each day we synthesize and release new poisons! Each day we murder new tales! Soon now, soon, the Ocean will be dead—cold and dead. When black ice freezes over its surface, my victory will be complete.’

  ‘But why do you hate stories so much?’ Haroun blurted, feeling stunned. ‘Stories are fun …’

  ‘The world, however, is not for Fun,’ Khattam-Shud replied. ‘The world is for Controlling.’

  ‘Which world?’ Haroun made himself ask.

  ‘Your world, my world, all worlds,’ came the reply. ‘They are all there to be Ruled. And inside every single story, inside every Stream in the Ocean, there lies a world, a story-world, that I cannot Rule at all. And that is the reason why.’

  Now the Cultmaster pointed out the refrigeration machines that kept the poisons, the anti-stories, at the necessary low temperatures. And he pointed out the filtration machines that removed all dirt and impurities from the poisons, so that they were one hundred per cent pure, one hundred per cent deadly. And he explained why, as part of the manufacturing process, the poison had to spend some time in the cauldrons up on deck—‘like all good wine, the anti-stories improve if they are permitted to “breathe” for a while in the open air before being released’. After eleven minutes of this, Haroun stopped listening. He followed Khattam-Shud and Iff along the high catwalk until they reached another part of the ship, in which Chupwalas were putting together large, mysterious segments of what looked like hard, black rubber.

  ‘Now this,’ said the Cultmaster (and something in his voice made Haroun pay attention), ‘is where we are building the Plug.’

  ‘What Plug?’ cried Iff, as an appalling idea took shape in his thoughts. ‘You can’t mean …’

  ‘You will have seen the giant crane up on deck,’ said Khattam-Shud in his most monotonous voice. ‘You will have noted the chains going down into the waters. At the other end of those chains, Chupwala divers are rapidly assembling the largest and most efficient Plug ever constructed. It is almost complete, little spies, almost complete; and so, in a few days, we shall be able to put it to good use. We are going to Plug the Wellspring itself, the Source of Stories, which lies directly beneath this ship on the ocean-bed. As long as that Source remains unplugged, fresh, unpoisoned, renewing Story Waters will pour upwards into the Ocean, and our work will only be half-done. But when it’s Plugged! Ah, then the Ocean will lose all its power to resist my anti-stories, and the end will come very soon. And then, Water Genie: what will there be for you Guppees to do, but to accept the victory of Bezaban?’

  ‘Never,’ said Iff, but he didn’t sound very convincing.

  ‘How do the divers enter the poisoned waters without being hurt?’ Haroun asked. Khattam-Shud smiled a dry little smile. ‘Paying attention again, I see,’ he said. ‘The obvious answer is that they wear protective clothing. Here, in this cupboard, are numbers of poison-proof suits.’

  He led them on, past the Plug assembly zone, to an area occupied by the largest machine in the entire ship.

  ‘And this,’ said Khattam-Shud, almost permitting a note of pride to enter his dull, flat voice, ‘is our Generator.’

  ‘What does that do?’ asked Haroun, who had never been of a particularly scientific turn of mind.

  ‘It is a device for converting mechanical energy into electrical energy by means of electromagnetic induction,’ replied Khattam-Shud, ‘if you must know.’

  Haroun was unabashed. ‘Do you mean it’s where your power supply comes from?’ he persevered.

  ‘Precisely,’ the Cultmaster replied. ‘I see that education is not quite at a standstill on Earth.’

  At this point something wholly unexpected occurred.

  Through an open porthole a few paces from the Cultmaster, bizarre rooty tendrils began to enter the Dark Ship. They came in at high speed, a great unformed mass of vegetation, among which was a single, lilac-coloured flower. Haroun’s heart gave a great leap of joy. ‘M …’ he began, but then he held his tongue.

  Mali had escaped capture (as Haroun later learned) by reassuming the appearance of a bunch of lifeless roots. He had floated slowly towards the Dark Ship, and then used the suction pads on several of the tendrils which made up his body to climb up the outside of the vessel like a creeper. Now, as he completed his dramatic entry and whirled himself in a trice into his more familiar Mali-shape, the alarm was sounded: ‘Intruder! Intruder alert!’

  ‘Switch on the darkness!’ screeched Khattam-Shud, his usual, insipid manner falling away from him like a mask. Mali began to move at high speed in the direction of the Generator. Before the ‘darkbulbs’ had been switched on, he had reached the gigantic machine, having eluded numbers of Chupwala guards whose eyesight wasn’t what it should have been, owing to the dim twilight (and in spite of their really rather fashionable wrap-around dark glasses). Without pausing for an instant, the Floating Gardener leapt into the air, disassembling his body as he did so, and flung roots and tendrils all over the Generator, getting into every nook and cranny of the machine.

  There now began a series of loud bangs and crashes, as circuits blew and cog-wheels broke, and the mighty Generator came to a juddering halt. The ship’s entire power supply was cut off at once: stirrers stopped stirring and whirrers stopped whirring; blenders stopped blending and menders stopped mending; squeezers stopped squeezing and freezers stopped freezing; poison-storers stopped storing and poison-pourers stopped their pouring. The entire operation was at a standstill! ‘Hurray, Mali!’ Haroun cheered. ‘Nice work, mister, too good!’

  Chupwala guards now attacked Mali in large numbers, pulling at him with their bare hands, hacking at him with axes and swords; but a creature tough enough to withstand the concentrated poisons which Khattam-Shud had been pouring into the Ocean of Stories wasn’t bothered by such flea-bites. He hung on to the Generator until he was sure it was ruined beyond hope of quick repair, and, as he clung to that machine, he began in his rough Gardener’s way to sing through the lilac flower that served him for a mouth:

  You can chop a flower-bush,

  You can chop a tree,

  You can chop liver, but

  You can’t chop me!

  You can chop and change,

  You can chop in ka-ra-tee,

  You can chop suey, but

  You can’t chop me!

  ‘Okay,’ Haroun told himself, seeing that Khattam-Shud’s attention was wholly focused on the Floating Gardener, ‘come on, Haroun; it’s your turn, and it’s now or never.’

  The ‘little emergency something’, the Bite-a-Lite, was still hidden under his tongue. Quickly, he put it between his teeth, and bit.

  The light that poured out from his mouth was as bright as the sun! The Chupwalas all around him were blinded, and broke their vows of silence to shriek and utter curses as they clutched their eyes. Even Khattam-Shud reeled back from the glare.

  Haroun moved as fast as he’d ever moved in his life. He took the Bite-a-Lite out of his mouth and held it over hi
s head; now the light poured in every direction, illuminating the entire vast interior of that massive ship. ‘Those Eggheads back at P2C2E House certainly know a thing or two,’ Haroun thought in wonderment. But he was running now, because the seconds were ticking away. As he passed Cultmaster Khattam-Shud he stuck out his free hand and grabbed Butt the Hoopoe’s brain-box from the Cultmaster’s hand. He ran on, until he reached the cupboard containing the protective clothing for the Chupwala divers. A minute had already passed.

  Haroun shoved Butt the Hoopoe’s brain into a pocket of his nightshirt and began to wrestle his way into the diving-suit. He had placed the Bite-a-Lite on a convenient railing, so that he could use both hands. ‘But how does this thing go on?’ he groaned in frustration as the diving-suit refused to slip on smoothly. (Trying to pull it over a long red nightshirt with purple patches didn’t exactly help.) The seconds ticked away.

  Although he was frantically busy with the diving-suit, Haroun did notice a number of things: he noticed, for example, that Khattam-Shud had personally grabbed Iff the Water Genie by his blue whiskers. He also noticed that none of the Chupwalas had shadows! That could mean only one thing: Khattam-Shud had shown his most trusted devotees, the Union of the Zipped Lips, how to detach themselves from their shadows, just like himself. ‘So they are all shadows here,’ he understood. ‘The boat, the Zipped Lips gang, and Khattam-Shud himself. Everything and everyone here is a Shadow made Solid, except for Iff, Mali, Butt the Hoopoe, and me.’

  The third thing he noticed was this: as the brilliant light of the Bite-a-Lite filled the interior of the Dark Ship, the whole vessel seemed to quiver for a moment, to become a little less solid, a little more shadowy; and the Chupwalas, too, trembled, and their edges softened and they began to lose their three-dimensional form … ‘If only the sun would come out,’ Haroun realized, ‘they’d all melt away, they’d become flat and shapeless, like the shadows they really are!’

  But there was no sunlight to be found anywhere in that dim twilight; and the seconds were running out; and just as the two minutes of light came to an end, Haroun zipped up the diving-suit, pulled on the goggles, and dived head-first out of a porthole, towards the poisoned Ocean.

  ~ ~ ~

  As he hit the water, a terrible feeling of hopelessness overcame him. ‘What are you going to do, Haroun?’ he asked himself. ‘Swim all the way back to Gup City?’

  He fell through the waters of the Ocean for a long, long time, and the deeper he went the less filthy the Story Streams were, and the easier it was to see.

  He saw the Plug. Teams of Chupwala divers were at work, bolting pieces on to it. Fortunately, they were too busy to notice Haroun … The Plug was about the size of a football stadium, and very roughly oval. Its edges were raggedy and uneven, however, because it was being constructed to fit precisely into the Wellspring, or Source of Stories, and the two shapes, Plug and Wellspring, had to be a perfect match.

  Haroun continued to fall … and then, wonder of wonders, he caught sight of the Source itself.

  The Source of Stories was a hole or chasm or crater in the sea-bed, and through that hole, as Haroun watched, the glowing flow of pure, unpolluted stories came bubbling up from the very heart of Kahani. There were so many Streams of Story, of so many different colours, all pouring out of the Source at once, that it looked like a huge underwater fountain of shining white light. In that moment Haroun understood that if he could prevent the Source from being Plugged, everything would eventually be all right again. The renewed Streams of Story would cleanse the polluted waters, and Khattam-Shud’s plan would fail.

  Now he was at the low point of his plunge, and as he began to rise towards the surface he thought with all his heart: ‘Oh, I wish, how I wish, there was something I could do.’

  At that moment, seemingly by chance, his hand brushed against the thigh of his diving-suit; and he felt a bulge in the nightshirt pocket beneath. ‘That’s strange,’ he thought, ‘I’m sure I put Butt the Hoopoe’s brain-box in the pocket on the other side.’ Then he remembered what was in that pocket, what had lain there, completely forgotten, ever since he first arrived on Kahani; and in a flash he knew that there was something he could do, after all.

  ~ ~ ~

  He returned to the surface with a whoosh, and lifted up his goggles to take several gulps of air (while taking care not to let the poisoned waters of the Ocean lap his face). As luck would have it—‘and it’s high time I had some luck’ Haroun thought—he had surfaced right next to the gangway to which the disabled Butt the Hoopoe had been tethered; while the search-party which Khattam-Shud had sent out to recapture him was heading off across the clearing towards the weed-jungle, using torches fitted with ‘darkbulbs’ to help them see. Long beams of absolute pitch-blackness raked the weed-jungle. ‘Good,’ thought Haroun. ‘I hope they search in that direction for a long time.’ He hauled himself out of the water on to the gangway, unzipped his diving-suit, and took out Butt the Hoopoe’s brain-box. ‘I’m no engineer, Hoopoe,’ he murmured, ‘but let’s see if I can plug this back in.’

  The Chupwalas had fortunately neglected to screw the lid of the Hoopoe’s head down again. Haroun climbed aboard Butt as stealthily as he could, lifted the lid, and looked inside.

  There were three loose leads inside the empty brain cavity. Haroun quickly found the three points on the brain-box to which they had to be connected. But which went where? ‘Oh well,’ he told himself, ‘here goes nothing,’ and he plugged the three leads in at random.

  Butt the Hoopoe emitted an alarming sequence of giggles and quacks and other strange noises. Then it burst into a weird little song:

  You must sing, a-down a-down,

  And you call him a-down-a.

  ‘I’ve connected it up wrong, and I’ve sent it insane,’ Haroun panicked. Aloud he said: ‘Hoopoe, be quiet, please.’

  ‘Look, look! A mouse. Peace, peace! This piece of toasted cheese will do it,’ ranted Butt the Hoopoe, nonsensically. ‘No problem.’

  Hurriedly, Haroun disconnected the three leads, and changed them round. This time Butt the Hoopoe began to buck and bounce like a wild horse, and Haroun jerked the leads out to prevent himself from being bucked off into the Ocean. ‘Third time lucky, I hope,’ he thought, and with a deep breath, reconnected the leads again.

  ‘So what took you so long?’ said Butt in its famiiar voice. ‘All fixed up now. Let’s go. Va-va-voom!’

  ‘Hold your horses, Hoopoe,’ Haroun whispered. ‘You just sit there and pretend you’re still brainless. I’ve got something else to do.’

  And now, at last, he reached into his other nightshirt pocket, and drew out a small bottle made of many-faceted crystal, with a little golden cap. The bottle was still half-full of the magical golden liquid which Iff the Water Genie had offered him what seemed like years earlier: Wishwater. ‘The harder you wish, the better it works,’ Iff had told him. ‘Do serious business, and the Wishwater will do serious business for you.’

  ‘This may take more than eleven minutes,’ Haroun whispered to Butt the Hoopoe, ‘but I’m going to do it all right. Hoopoe, you just watch me try.’ And so saying, he unscrewed the golden lid and drank the Wishwater down to the last drop.

  All he could see was a golden light, which had wrapped itself around him like a shawl … ‘I wish,’ thought Haroun Khalifa, squeezing his eyes tightly shut, wishing with every fibre of his being, ‘I wish this Moon, Kahani, to turn, so that it’s no longer half in light and half in darkness … I wish it to turn, this very instant, in such a way that the sun shines down on the Dark Ship, the full, hot, noonday sun.’

  ‘That’s some wish,’ said Butt the Hoopoe’s voice admiringly. ‘This will be pretty interesting. It’s your willpower against the Processes Too Complicated To Explain.’

  ~ ~ ~

  The minutes passed: one, two, three, four, five. Haroun lay stretched out on the back of Butt the Hoopoe, oblivious of time, oblivious of everything except his wish. In the weed-jungle, the Chupwala searchers
decided they were looking in the wrong place, and turned back towards the Dark Ship. Their ‘darkbulbed’ torches sent probing beams of darkness through the twilight. By chance, none of these beams fell upon Butt the Hoopoe. More minutes passed: six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

  Eleven minutes passed.

  Haroun remained stretched out, with his eyes shut tight, concentrating.

  A dark beam from the torch of a Chupwala searcher picked him out. The hisses of the search-party foamed across the waters. On their dark sea-horses, they galloped towards Butt the Hoopoe as fast as they could go.

  And then, with a mighty shuddering and a mighty juddering, Haroun Khalifa’s wish came true.

  The Moon Kahani turned—quickly, because as Haroun had specified during his wishing, there was little time to be lost—and the sun rose, at high speed, and zoomed up into the sky until it was directly overhead; where it remained.

  If Haroun had been in Gup City at that moment, he might have enjoyed witnessing the consternation of the Eggheads in P2C2E House. The immense super-computers and gigantic gyroscopes that had controlled the behaviour of the Moon, in order to preserve the Eternal Daylight and the Perpetual Darkness and the Twilight Strip in between, had simply gone crazy, and finally blown themselves apart. ‘Whatever is doing this,’ the Eggheads reported to the Walrus in consternation, ‘possesses a force beyond our power to imagine, let alone control.’

  But Haroun was not in Gup City—whose citizens had rushed open-mouthed into the streets, as night fell over Gup for the first time that anybody could remember, and the stars of the Milky Way Galaxy filled the sky. No, Haroun was on the back of Butt the Hoopoe, opening his eyes to find brilliant sunlight beating down on the waters of the Ocean and on the Dark Ship. ‘What do you know?’ he said. ‘I did it! I actually managed to get it done.’