Like a Tea Tray in the Sky


The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

~ Albert Einstein


They walked on, the sun touching them with soft rays that streamed past the Bong trees. To the left, over the hedge, they could see the rolling green hills, sloping on like unmoving waves on a silent sea. On one hill, golden with waving wheat, they saw a low house with an orange roof, shaded by a towering cypress tree.

"That house looks entirely normal," Xenon said, "the tree is not perfectly symmetrical and even the hill isn't round like the others below it. It looks just like somewhere on the Lone Islands."

"It does," Peter agreed. As they went on, the immediate scenery did not change, yet in the distance, the very far distance, it did change. They saw jagged mountains, purple as the Western Mountains in Narnia, just as the sun touched them with many hued glory. Later, they saw patchwork fields, the farmers laboring, their backs burnt gold and glistening. The rays of the sun slanted across a rolling desert, waves of sand peaked like a still ocean. Struggling up one of the dunes, they saw a pair of horses, one dapple gray, the other chestnut, their riders sitting tall and scanning the horizon. Once, for a fleeting moment, rising out of purple mist, they saw the silhouette of Cair Paravel, beautiful as a gem on the ocean.

"It's almost like we are in a world parallel to our own," Peter said suddenly. "It's all so strange. Look, there is the Black Swan."

And they even smelled the salt sea air and felt the breath of the wind on their faces as the rolling hills gave way to rolling sea and a ship tossing on the sparkling waves, black bows amid white foam, all sails taut and drawing. Then that image was gone as well and there were only the hills tumbling on in the distance.

The stream that they followed dashed and gurgled at their feet, lines of gold shimmering like a faery's hair as it twisted between boulders the color of emerald and amethyst. Cyan slipped and staggered and they began to grow alarmed when Mystic stumbled and fell in the stream, a peculiar expression on his face. Peter went forward to help him and watched in worry as the horse staggered out of the water, swaying on his feet.

"What happened?" Xenon exclaimed, "The others are wobbly too!"

"Did they eat anything?" Peter asked, quickly running his hands over Mystic, feeling for fever or a running pulse. Everything seemed normal.

"They drank from the stream," Glumkin said.

Peter knelt down and smelled the water, then dipped a finger in and tasted it. His eyes widened, then he laughed, "they're drunk."

"What?" Xenon asked.

"Try it," Peter waved a hand.

Xenon scooped some up, "Why, it's mead!"

"The best mead I've ever had," Peter agreed, standing, "anyway, we've got to keep on. Don't let the horses drink any more. They're all under age."

They continued on and the trees opened before them, spreading around a little meadow. In the center of the meadow, amid the long grass, stretching over the stream, there was a table set for several, but with only three present. There was an oversized dormouse fast asleep, and leaning on him on one side was a peculiar fellow with a large hat, with a message explaining he was a hatter, and leaning on the dormouse on the other side was an overlarge hare.

Peter stopped as he saw them, a puzzled expression on his face, then he strode on to stand at the end of the table.

"Friends!" he said, "can we sit a while at your table for a while? We have come far and are weary."

"Oh, do as you like," the hatter said with some dissatisfaction, "so many people showing up lately wanting to sit down."

Peter pulled out the arm chair at the end of the table and sat down, the others followed his example.

"I am Sir Gavin," Peter said, looking at them keenly, "who are you?"

"I'm A and he's Bi," the hatter said gesturing vaguely at the hare on the other side of the dormouse, "we're a complex number…or at least we would be if we could only get rid of him." he gave the dormouse a bit of a jab.

"Then you're imaginary?" Peter asked, the algebra he learned in secondary school slowly coming back to him.

"Don't get uppity with me," the hatter said with a sniff, "You're made out of gluons, quarks and the strong force just like the rest of us."

Tea was laid on the table and Peter wasted no time in pouring himself a cup. There was a pie, too, a peculiar one, square instead of round, Peter asked if they might try a piece of it.

"I suppose you might," the hatter said dismally, "the expansion of pi is getting longer every year. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that they've found the millionth place by now. Go ahead, do as you like. Have you heard the sad affair of how seven eight nine?"

"I didn't," Peter said. "What are you doing here?"

"We're osculating," the hatter said sadly, "we're stuck in a plane. I had the cheek to tell Father Time that the speed of light is slowing down. He walked out on us, left us alone. Now we've only two dimensions and we're stuck with him." he jabbed the dormouse. "Dimensions," he shook his head sadly, "don't mess with them. I draw out a point and get a line, I draw out a line and get a plane, I draw out a plane and find myself with a cube, I try to draw out the cube and what do I get?"

"Haven't the faintest," Peter said amiably, sipping his tea.

"A battered cube." The hatter shook his head, "it's worse than the strong force, the square root of negative one and the fact that 0.999999 into infinity equals one."

"That's a pity," Peter said.

"Just make sure you take the absolute value," the hatter said dismally, "or you might end up with the opposite of one. Don't ask the platonic solids for help, they seem to think that since there are only five of them they have the right to be uppity." He paused, struck, "what about the square root of i?"

"Or even the square root of negative i," Peter added.

"What have you been going on about?" Xenon asked in a fearful whisper. "Is it some sort of spell?"

"Mathematics can be a spell sometimes," Peter said, winking, "It's nice to know. It's a language everyone ought to speak."

"Or even…" the hatter's voice was shaking, "the third root of negative i…"

"Think on it, my friend," Peter said, slapping the hatter on the shoulder. "Tell me when you've figured it out."

"The stream's missing," Glumkin said suddenly.

"Missing?" Peter started up.

"I think we've gone off on a tangent," the hatter said, "I suggest we return to the origin."

"Meaning it's not there anymore," Glumkin continued, "what shall I say? The stream equaled one a moment ago, now it equals zero. Make sense?"

"Perfect," Peter said, looking under the table, "Where did it go?"

"Let's find it," Xenon said standing up and going to the horses where they had wandered away to graze.

They left the tea party behind and entered the woods again, searching vainly for the stream. Loud barking brought their attention to another of the strange plants of the area, one sprouting up and down the stalk with howling dogs frantically wagging their tails.

"It looks to me like Barkia Howlaloudia," Xenon remarked.

"How did you know that?" Peter asked.

"Just made it up."

"But where has that blasted stream got to?" Peter asked fifteen minutes later after that had blundered through more strange plants then I would care to name.

"It wondered."

They looked up to see a bat hanging upside-down from the branch of a tree.

"Chessy!" Peter exclaimed, "What are you doing here?"

"Exactly what I'm not doing somewhere else," the bat said, then blinked, hiding the light from its sparkling eyes. "Twinkle, twinkle, little bat. How I wonder what you're at. Up above the world you fly, Like a tea tray in the sky…come now, I'm sure you've all heard it."

"I don't believe I've had that pleasure," Peter said with half a smile. "Have you seen the stream? We lost it."

"It lost you." Chester corrected him, "it wondered what it was like on the other side of the hedge and wandered away. Or you wandered. It's all relative."

"Which way would it be?" Xenon asked.

"Try that way," the bat spread his great, ribbed wings to each side, then closed them again, wrapping himself tight. "Your brother and sister are safe. I thought you might like that bit of news."

Peter started, "I do. Where are they?"

"Sailing the high seas." Chester informed him, "they slipped away as I'm about to do. Wander a bit and you'll find the stream…or it might find you. It's all relative."


A/N: I wanted to dedicate this chapter to OldFashionedGirl95 who brought up the mad tea party. Rose is a mathematician, so I had no trouble finding out from her how the Mad Hatter and the March hare are possibly a complex number oscillating in a plane (the table) since the removal of a forth dimension, time. Lewis Carrol was a mathematician himself, so I think its more than possible that this is what he had in mind when he wrote Alice in Wonderland.

Does the Chessy the Bat remind you at all of the Cheshire Cat?

~Psyche