Mouse-creature’s whiskers vibrated wildly. “Age is immaterial. In any case, it so happens that I was born only yesterday.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
Mouse-creature drew itself up; now it reminded Meg not so much of a mouse as of a small shrimp with antennae waving wildly. “There’s only one of us farandolae born every generation or so nowadays, and we start our schooling the moment we’re born.”
“You’re a farandola!”
“Naturally. What did you expect me to be? What else could I possibly be? Everybody knows that the farandolae—“
She interrupted. “Everybody doesn’t. The existence of farandolae wasn’t even guessed at until a few years ago when we began to learn more about mitochondria, and my mother has just now isolated the effect of farandolae on mitochondria with her micro-sonarscope. And even with the micro-electron microscope, farandolae can just be proved to exist, they can’t really be seen.”
The mouse-creature’s, the farandola’s, whiskers twanged. “It’s a very stupid breed of creature that doesn’t know its own inhabitants. Especially if it’s fortunate enough to be inhabited by farandolae. We are extremely important and getting more so.”
Past the farandola, behind Proginoskes and Louise the Larger, the shape of a Mr. Jenkins blew rapidly across the horizon.
Mr. Jenkins, standing near Meg and Calvin, quivered.
Blajeny looked grim. “Echthroi at work.”
The mouse-creature-farandola paid no attention. “My quercus, my tree, hasn’t had an offspring for a hundred years—our years, of course. It will take me that long to become full-grown myself, and this is only my second phase.”
Meg spoke in her most ungracious manner. “You’re going to tell us about your first phase whether we want you to or not. So go ahead.” The glimpse of Charles Wallace, followed by the sight of another Echthros-Mr. Jenkins, had forced her to realize that the successful passing of the first test did not mean that everything was going to be all right.
Mouse-shrimp- farandola reacted by an intensified trembling of feelers. “Yesterday morning I was still contained inside the single golden fruit hanging on my tree. At noon it burst and fell open, and there was I, newly hatched. In my tadpole stage I was delivered to Metron Ariston and transmogrified, and here am I. My name is Sporos, by the way, and I do not like your thinking names like mouse-creature and shrimp-thing at me. Sporos. When I have finished this phase of my education—if I finish—with one of you for a partner, I will root myself, and Deepen. After an aeon I’ll send up a small green shoot out of my kelp bed, and start growing into an aqueous deciduous spore-reproducing fruit-bearing coniferous farandola.”
Calvin looked horrified. “You’re mad. I’ve studied biology. You’re not possible.”
“Neither are you,” Sporos replied indignantly. “Nothing important is. Blajeny, is it my misfortune to be paired with one of these earthlings?”
Louise the Larger lifted her head out of her coils and looked at Sporos, her heavy lids met and closed.
Blajeny said, “You are hardly making yourself popular, Sporos.”
“I’m not a mere earthling. Earthlings are important only because they are inhabited by farandolae. Popularity is immaterial to farandolae.”
Blajeny turned away from Sporos in quiet rebuff. “Calvin. You and Sporos are to work together.”
“Oh, well, you can’t win them all,” was more or less the effect of what Sporos was vibrating, and Meg thought it would have been a more appropriate response coming from Calvin.
Mr. Jenkins said, “Blajeny, if I may presume—“
“Yes?”
“That other—I did see another copy of myself just a few moments ago, did I not?”
“Yes. I am afraid you did.”
“What does it mean?”
Blajeny said, “It means nothing good.”
Proginoskes added, “You see, we aren’t any place. We’re in Metron Ariston. We’re simply in an idea which Blajeny happens to be having in the middle of the Mondrion solar system in Veganuel galaxy. An Echthros—Mr. Jenkins oughtn’t to be able to follow us here. It means—“
“What?” Meg demanded.
Like Blajeny, Proginoskes said, “Nothing good.”
Sporos twingled his whiskers. “Need we stand around chittering? When are we going?”
“Very soon.”
“Where?” Meg demanded. She felt prickles of foreboding.
“To a far place, Meg.”
“But Mother and Father—Charles Wallace—the twins —we can’t just go off this way with Charles Wallace so ill and—“
“That is why we are going, Meg,” Blajeny said.
Sporos rippled his undulating notes, and Meg translated something like: “Can’t you just call home, or just reach out and talk to each other when you want to?” and then a horrified, “Oh, my goodness, I don’t see how anybody as ignorant as you three earthlings seem to be can possibly manage. Do you mean on your earth host you never communicate with each other and with other planets? You mean your planet revolves about all isolated in space? Aren’t you terribly lonely? Isn’t he?”
“He?”
“Or she. Your planet. Aren’t you lonely?”
“Maybe we are, a little,” Calvin conceded. “But it’s a beautiful planet.”
“That,” Sporos said, “is as it may be. Since I was only born yesterday and came right into Metron Ariston and to Blajeny, I don’t know the planets except the ones in the Mondrion solar system, and they talk back and forth all the time; they chatter too much, if you ask me.”
“We didn’t,” Meg tried to interrupt, but Sporos twingled on.
“I do hope I wasn’t born in some dreadful mitochondrion which lives in some horrible isolated, human host on a lonely planet like yours. You are all from the same planet? I thought so. Oh dear, oh dear, I can see you aren’t going to be the least help to me in passing any of the trials. I’d better see what time it is.”
“How do you tell time?” Calvin asked curiously.
“By the leaves, of course. You mean to say you don’t even know the tune of day?”
“Of course I do. With my watch.”
“What’s a watch?”
Calvin extended his wrist. He was very proud of his watch, which had been a prize at school, and gave the date as well as the hour, had a sweep hand, and was a stop watch as well.
“What a peculiar object.” Sporos regarded it with a certain contempt. “Does it work just for your time, or for time in general?”
“Just for our time, I guess.”
“You mean, if you want to know what time it is anywhere here in Blajeny’s galaxy, or in a distant mitochondrion, your watch thing won’t tell you?”
“Well—no. It just tells the time for whatever time zone I’m in.”
“Mighty Yadah! How confused everything must be on your planet. I only hope my human host isn’t in your planet.”
Mr. Jenkins said plaintively, “If someone would just explain to me what is going on—“
“Mr. Jenkins,” Meg said. “You know what the Echthroi are—“
“But I don’t. I only know that they impersonated me.”
Blajeny placed both great hands on Mr. Jenkins’s stooped shoulders and looked down at him gravely. “There are evil forces at work in the world.”
Mr. Jenkins nodded mutely. He did not dispute that.
“They are throughout the universe.”
Mr. Jenkins glanced at the cherubim, who had stretched out his wings to their fullest span as though to flex his muscles. “How—how big are they?”
“They are no size and they are every size. An Echthros can be as large as a galaxy and as small as a farandola. Or, as you have seen, a replica of yourself. They, are the powers of nothingness, those who would un-Name. Their aim is total X—to extinguish all creation.”
“What do they have to do with Charles Wallace?”
“The Echthroi are trying to destroy his mitochondria.”
“But why would they bother with a child?”
“It is not always on the great or the important that the balance of the universe depends.”
Louise the Larger whistled urgently, and Meg was almost sure that the snake was telling them that she would stay with Charles Wallace, that she would encourage him to keep on fighting to live. “Oh, Louise, please, please, you won’t leave him? You will help him?”
“I will not leave him.”
“Will he be all right?”
Louise answered with silence.
Blajeny said to Mr. Jenkins, “Charles Wallace will die if his mitochondria die. Do you understand that?”
Mr. Jenkins shook his head. “I thought he was making things up with his big words. I thought he was trying to show off. I didn’t know there really were mitochondria.”
Blajeny turned to Meg. “Explain.”
“I’ll try. But I’m not sure I really understand either, Mr. Jenkins. But I do know that we need energy to live. Okay?”
“Thus far.”
She felt Blajeny kything information to her, and involuntarily her mind sorted it, simplified, put it into words which she hoped Mr. Jenkins would understand. “Well, each of our mitochondria has its own built-in system to limit the rate at which it burns fuel, okay, Mr. Jenkins?”
“Pray continue, Margaret.”