O Time Thy Pyramids

For one brief, shining moment, as I pulled my fingers away from my typewriter, I thought I had a whole soliloquy. Then I read the first two lines.

To be or not to be, that is the question; 

Weather ‘tis nobler in the mines to suffer 

“Shit.”

Once I spotted the first typo, others came thick and fast. By the time Hamlet reached the undiscovered cuntry (another unfortunate typo), the page had begun dissolving into a random sea of letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. 

“What are you working on?” came a voice from above me. I turned to see Terry peering over the top of our shared cubicle wall and munching on a peanut bar. Before I could answer, the orangutan reached out a long arm and leafed through my outbox. After a moment he stopped and stared intently at one sheet. 

“What’s this?”

I plucked it from his fingers and scanned it. Like most of what we typed, it was complete chaos. Four words in the middle of the page formed a sentence:

O Time thy pyramids.

“Just a fluke,” I muttered. “I got distracted, thinking about Anthony and Cleopatra.”

Terry mouthed the words a few more times, rolling them around in his mouth. “I like it,” he said. “Lovely turn of phrase.”

“But it’s wrong!” I said, unable to keep the frustration out of my voice. “I’m meant to be writing Hamlet, not this nonsense!”

I slammed the page back into my outbox and reached for a fresh sheet.

“Maybe you should take a break,” Terry said. “You must be tired.”

I shook my head. “I’m not going to get the work done by sitting around complaining how hard it is.”

Terry took a languid slurp of his coffee. 

“Joy’s soul lies in the doing, my friend,” he said. “I always find that words come more easily when I stop trying to reach for them and let them come to me.”

“If I wait around for the words, I’ll be waiting forever,” I said. “Just got to keep putting one word in front of the other.”

Terry chuckled. “Bit hard to do that with the equipment we’ve got.”

“Excusing of a fault doth make the fault th’ worse by the excuse,” I said. 

Terry had a point, of course. The typewriters we worked on were far from normal. If I tried to type the word HAMLET, there was almost no way of knowing what combination of characters would appear on the page. Maybe the keys were entangled at the quantum level. Maybe the paper was just dodgy. Either way, it made writing our own names nearly impossible, never mind the works of Shakespeare.

“What about you?” I asked. “Blocked as well?”

“Au contraire, my friend.” Terry grabbed a page from his desk and presented it with a flourish. “I may not have any sonnets, but I do have a very suggestive limerick about a young woman from Phuket …”

“We’re supposed to be finding the Word of the Bard, Terry, not writing dirty poems!”

Terry raised an eyebrow at me. “Why?”

“What do you mean, why?”

Terry swept his arm around the Writing Room. “Why are we all here?” he asked grandly. On all sides of us, stretching off into infinity, were clusters of cubicles at which apes of every size and shape — orangutans like Terry and chimps like me, Bonobos and gibbons and even gorillas — were bashing at typewriters. The air was filled with the sounds of rushing paper and clacking keys. “Why do we spend all day, every day, trying to write the works of Shakespeare with machines that barely work?”

I gawped at Terry. “Shakespeare is the greatest writer ever to have lived,” I told him. It was the first lesson we were ever taught, from the day we were old enough to sit at a desk unaided. I still remembered the first words I ever learned to read: Two households, both alike in dignity. My eye was drawn to a page that was pinned to my cubicle wall: a drawing of the Bard I’d painstakingly copied from the frontispiece of the Great Folio. Whenever I wavered in my work, those frowning eyes staring out at me from under that great shiny forehead reminded me why I was there. What a piece of work is a man, he wrote. And with hard work, we, too, could be the paragon of animals.

  “Recreating his Great Folio is how we earn — "

" — our place with the humans,” Terry finished, rolling his eyes.

I nodded. “Exactly. That’s always been our goal.”

Terry looked me in the eye, his face turning serious. “But why?”

I opened my mouth to answer, then stopped. They’d never bothered to give us an answer to that question before. I’d never needed one before today.

The evening gong reverberated around the open space. All around me, other apes were standing and stretching after a long day’s typing.

I used my foot to pull a canister from my desk drawer and unscrew the lid. I stuffed the stack of typed sheets inside and gingerly fed it into the pneumatic tube that hung down next to my desk. Air tugged at the fur on my arm as the canister went rocketing skywards.

“Where do they all go, do you think?”

I looked up to see Terry staring into the cavernous ceiling of the Writing Room. Above us was a sea of pipes, filled with hissing and clattering, which vanished into the ceiling above our heads.

“Bard knows,” I muttered. “Come on, it’s quitting time.”

I joined the crowd of apes heading for the nearest exit. When I reached the door, I realised Terry wasn’t next to me. He was still standing silently by his desk, staring up at the tangle of tubes disappearing into the darkness.

#

I woke to the feeling of someone roughly shaking my shoulder. My eyes snapped open. Terry was standing above me.

“What time is it?” I asked blearily.

“I’ve got something to show you,” he said. 

Without waiting for me to follow him, he turned on his palms and sped out of the dormitory. I clambered out of my hammock and swung after him. He was waiting for me in the Writing Room, leaning casually on his desk. The lights were turned low at this time of night, and unfamiliar shadows spread over every surface. 

“Well?” I asked. “What did you want to show me?”

“This.”

Terry clambered onto his desk and leapt for the pneumatic tube that hung off the side. “I got tired of wondering where these went,” he said.

He started to climb, the tube swaying slightly under his weight. When he was about 20 feet up, he shouted down: “You coming?”

I looked around nervously. Terry was still climbing.

“Returning would be as tedious as go o’er.” I muttered. 

I clambered onto my desk and jumped for the tube. It was cold against my hands, and though it juddered for a moment with the force of my impact, it held firm. Terry’s ginger arse swayed high above me. I set off after it. 

We quickly climbed further than the office lights could shine. Terry ignored my repeated attempts to ask where we were going; eventually I gave up. For a while the only sounds were my breathing, and the slap of our paws against the tube. 

After what could have been an eternity or three quarters of an hour, Terry’s voice drifted down.

“Nearly there,” he panted. He sounded as tired as I felt. 

I looked up, and was surprised to find that I could see him. He was being lit from above by a soft, orange glow. The pipes eventually reached a hexagonal balcony and disappeared. Terry climbed over the latticework and extended a hand. My arm ached as he hauled me onto solid ground. I looked around. Unlike the endless concrete and office furniture of the Writing Floor, this room looked almost cosy: the stone walls and wooden floor lit by softly flickering torches. 

Terry coughed behind me. I turned and saw him standing in front of a pair of large wooden doors, covered in beautiful, intricate carvings. It took me a moment to realise that they were designed to look like pages of a book.

I looked up at Terry. “What now?”

He reached up a hand and rapped gently on the hard wood. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then we heard footsteps approaching. The door creaked open. A tall figure in a hooded robe stepped forward into the light. I stepped back as the figure raised its small, hairless hands and removed its hood. I found myself staring at a thin brown face with bright eyes, framed by hair that stood at attention like black wires.

The human looked down at us and smiled.

“You’re back!” she said brightly to Terry, before turning to me. “And you brought a friend!”

I looked nervously at Terry, who was smiling up at the human, and coughed nervously.

“Erm … hello,” I said. “Sorry, but … who are you, exactly?”

The human laughed. “My, he’s chatty!”

I looked to Terry, who shook his head. “She can’t understand us,” he said. “I tried talking to her but she just laughed and said ook a lot.” 

“Ook?”

Terry shrugged. “Must be what we sound like to them.” 

“Them?”

Terry smiled broadly at me, then looked up expectantly at the human.

“He wants the tour as well, does he?” she smiled, opening the door further. “Come on!” And with that, she turned and walked up the staircase behind her, the hem of her robe swishing against the stone. Terry went after her, leaving me to follow dumbly behind in their wake. A few twists later, we emerged into another hexagonal room.

Four of the walls were taken up by bookshelves, each shelf packed to bursting with slim books identically bound in smart black leather. The last wall contained an archway, beyond which I could see another room with more bookshelves. Beyond that hole were more identical rooms, stretching on and on into the distance. There was a hole in the ceiling, encircled by a balcony, beyond which even more rooms towered above our heads.

“Welcome to the Library,” said the human.

“How far does it go?” I whispered to Terry.

“No idea,” he whispered back. “I saw dozens of rooms. Maybe hundreds. It might go on forever …”

“The Library provides us with new works every day,” said the human. She pulled a book off the shelf at random and opened it. “We read the pages, bind them, and place them on these shelves so that new generations might one day uncover their meaning.”

She held the book out to me. I gently took it from her and opened it. Every page was covered in a jumble of random letters, numbers, and spaces — all typed in a font that I recognised.

“It’s our work,” I said.

Terry nodded. 

But why? Why go to the trouble to turn all of this nonsense into a book? It was bad enough seeing pages like this come out of my typewriter every day, but seeing them here? Dressed up for all the world to see as if they could be compared with Shakespeare? 

“One more stop,” said Terry. Then he turned and clambered up a shelf, nimbly catching the underside of the balcony above before leaping up through the ceiling. I made my way up and through the hole, following Terry’s form as he swung through room after room. On the way we met dozens of other humans, all wearing the same simple robes. Some pointed and laughed as we passed by; others barely looked up, so engrossed they were in the various books they were reading. 

Finally, we arrived at a room that seemed identical to the dozens we’d passed through. As I caught my breath, Terry reached out and plucked a single volume from the shelves, found a particular page, and handed me the book.
“Look,” he said.

I took the book from him, and stared at the typed words on the page. Nestled there in the middle of the chaos were four words, arranged in an incoherent sentence:

O Time thy pyramids.

Surrounding those four words were a kaleidoscope of new sentences, written in a dozen different pens by a dozen different hands:

Whose time, I wonder? The pyramids?

WERE PYRAMIDS USED FOR TELLING TIME?

Pyramids are used for holding dead people (see X: 857, Y:10106, Z:42, shelf 3.8, book 7).

BUT ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA WEREN’T KINGS …

Well, Cleopatra was a queen, wasn’t she?

FOR THE LAST TIME, THIS ISN’T ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA!

The sound of heavy breathing behind me drew my attention from the page. The first human was standing against the archway, holding her side.

  “We got that one just today,” said the human, panting slightly. “They’ve spent hours arguing over what it means.” She smiled down at the book in my hands. “The only thing we can all agree on is that it’s beautiful.”

I looked down at the four words on the page.

“They don’t mean anything …” I said. “They’re just … words.”

“You’re not the only one who decides what the words mean,” Terry said. “Even if you wrote them.”

“But I didn’t write them!” I protested. Terry turned and looked at me in mock puzzlement.

“Really? I thought it was your typewriter that it came from?”

“Well, yes, but —”

  “Your fingers. Your typewriter. Your words.”

I looked down at my hands. “But I wasn’t even trying to … I was trying to write Hamlet and — ”

“But why?” cried Terry, making me jump. “Why do we have to spend our lives trying to recreate the words of some old sod who’s been dead for centuries? Why is his work the benchmark, when this — ” he jabbed a finger at the words on my page, “ — is proof enough that we are capable of greatness!” He spread his arms and gestured at the universe of shelves around us. “Look at this place! It goes on for miles, just like our Writing Floor — maybe forever! Somewhere on these shelves, every one of the Bard’s works has probably been written already. Maybe twice.”

“Then what’s the point?” I cried. “Why are we even here?”

Disgusted, I hurled the book at the wall. The human gasped, but Terry reached out a long arm and caught it easily. He flicked through the book slowly, checking the pages for damage, then handed it to the human. She clutched it tightly — almost reverently — to her chest. Then Terry turned to me, his expression grave. For a moment I thought he was going to thump me. Instead, he put his knuckle on my chin and dragged it up until I was looking him in the face again.

“So that we can write something new.”

I scoffed. “You mean I should just spend every day typing random nonsense in the hope that a tiny fraction of it turns out to be something profound?”

Terry gave me an inscrutable smile.

“Isn’t that what all writers do?”

For the second time that day I found myself lost for words.

“C’mon,” he said gently. “It’ll be morning soon.”

Then Terry sauntered off without a backwards glance. I gave the Librarian what I hoped was an apologetic look and set off after him.

#

I awoke with a start in my hammock as the morning klaxon sounded. I was exhausted after all of last night’s climbing, and my dreams had been filled with hexagons and random lines of text. As I rushed into the Writing Room, I heard a voice call my name.

Terry was sitting at his desk, coffee and peanut bar in hand, looking perfectly refreshed. 

“Morning!” he called brightly as I approached. “Peanut bar?”

I shook my head. “Where do you get those, anyway? It’s like you have your own private stash or something.”

Terry winked and gave the same response he always gave: “Well, it’s like they say: ‘If you pay in infinite peanuts, you get infinite monkeys!’”

He turned back to his desk, still chuckling. I waited for him to say something about last night, but he just carried on getting ready for the day. As I shifted closer to my typewriter, a crumpled wad of paper landed in front of me. I unfurled it. One edge of the sheet was jagged and ripped. The typed words in the middle were surrounded by a sea of gibberish that was obscured by a riot of handwritten annotations:

O Time thy pyramids.

I looked up. Terry was smiling at me over the cubicle wall.

“Thought you might like a souvenir.”

“Won’t they miss it?” 

Terry shrugged. “They’ve got millions of words up there. These ones are yours.”

I felt my eyes prickle with tears. I looked up to say thank you to Terry, but he just held up a hand. 

“I look forward to seeing what you come up with today,” he said as he sat back down. 

I fished around in my desk drawer for a pin and stuck the page onto the wall of my cubicle, next to my drawing of the Bard, whose eyes seemed somehow kinder today. 

I fed a clean sheet into my machine, shifted in my chair and cracked all twenty of my knuckles. My fingers hovered over the keys.

“Me too.”