The Beginning of Time
by Claude LalumièreThe Earth was much smaller back then, and all the lands were connected, so there was no need for boats or anything like that. The Earth was so small that you could walk all the way around and come back to where you'd started, having only slept four or five times. Well -- maybe not that small. But not as big as it is now, at any rate.
There were babies and children and youths and adults and elders. The thing is, though, those babies had always been babies, and those children had always been children, and those youths had always been youths, and those adults had always been adults, and those elders had always been elders. No one ever aged. No one remembered anything being any different, because the world had always existed and it had always been the same. Time hadn't begun yet.
Because time hadn't begun, that meant the Earth didn't spin. So one half of the globe always faced the sun, and the other half was in a perpetual darkness tempered only by the faint illumination of the moon and stars.
Have I mentioned the demons yet? Oh yes, there were demons. Lots of demons. They weren't evil, despite what some people are saying now. They were just kind of mischievous. And fast. They were so fast you could barely see them. You could just catch fleeting glimpses as they zipped around and made your hair catch fire, switched lovers around from bed to bed while they slept, peed in your soup, farted in your face, ran on the water so as to produce giant waves that would splash all over everybody -- that kind of thing.
Eventually, the demons got too clever for their own good.
What an awesome prank it would be if they turned the world around so that the half in darkness would face the sun and the half bathing in sunlight faced the moon!
So they ran as fast as they could. Faster, faster, faster, until the Earth started spinning.
They hadn't counted on it continuing to spin. All the demons were flung off the Earth because of the speed of its rotation. Ever wonder about comets? They're the demons, flying through space, totally out of control.
Many people didn't think to hold on to anything when the Earth began to rotate, and they got flung off, too. Most of them eventually wound up on other planets.
Still, lots of people managed to hold on to good old planet Earth while it spun around.
The demons had kick-started time.
Suddenly, some of the elders died of old age. And some of the women felt a stirring in their wombs.
For a long time, it was pretty rough going, always having to hold on so as not to get flung out into space while the Earth spun on.
Eventually, someone invented gravity. But that's another story.
©Claude Lalumière
Claude Lalumière's Lost Pages, a mini-collection of six linked stories, will be published by GrendelSong in summer 2008. Claude's fiction has appeared in Year's Best SF 12, Year's Best Fantasy 6, SciFiction, Interzone, On Spec, and others. He has edited six anthologies, including Witpunk (with Marty Halpern), Island Dreams, Open Space, and Lust for Life (with Elise Moser). His website is www.lostpages.net, and he blogs at lostpagesfoundpages.blogspot.com. Claude lives in Montreal. To read Claude's other stories in RE, click here.