ETYMOLOGY.
(Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Stationeer Youths' Academy.)
The pale Usher—threadbare of coat, mechanical in heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the flags of all the known gay planets of the galaxy. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his immortality.
“While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale-voidfish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true.” —Sterreluyt.
“SPACE-WHALE. * * * Sw. and Dan. udenhval. This animal is named from roundness or rolling; for in Dan. hvalt is arched or vaulted, and uden the void.” —Wooster’s Interstellar Dictionary.
“SPACE-WHALE. * * * It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger. Wallen and Platz; A.S. Walw-ian, to roll, to wallow; and the noun of space.” —Dickson’s Dictionary.
חו, Hebrew.
ϰητος, Greek.
CETUS, Latin.
WHŒL, Anglo-Saxon.
HVALT, Danish.
WAL, Dutch.
HWAL, Swedish.
HVALUR, Icelandic.
WHALE, English.
BALEINE, French.
BALLENA, Spanish.
PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE, Fegee.
PEHEE-NUEE-NUEE, Erromangoan.
EXTRACTS. (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Archivist).
It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Knowledge Worlds and undercities of the spiral, picking up whatever random allusions to spacewhales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane. Therefore you must not, in every case at least, take the higgledy-piggledy spacewhale statements, however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel astrocetology. Far from it. As touching the ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here appearing, these extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, as affording a glancing bird’s eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Intergalactic Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our own.
So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am. Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this galaxy will ever warm; and for whom even White Spritzer would be too rosy-strong; but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too; and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them bluntly, with full eyes and empty glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness—Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much the more pains ye take to please the galaxy, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless! Would that I could clear out Earth-Throne and the Palace of Centauri for ye! But gulp down your tears and don your suit, and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together—there, ye shall strike unsplinterable glasses!
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EXTRACTS.
“And God created great spacewhales.” —New Genesis.
“Interstellar Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him; One would think the Dark to be hoary.” —Boj.
“Now the Lord had prepared a great voidfish to swallow up Joan’s ship.” —Joan.
“There go the spaceships; there is that Interstellar Leviathan whom thou hast made to play therein.” —Songs.
“In that day, the Lord with his sore, and great, and strong laserblade, shall punish Interstellar Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is beyond any world.” —Hark.
“And what thing soever besides cometh within the chaos of this monster’s mouth, be it skiff, ship, or asteroid, down it goes all incontinently that foul great swallow of his, and perisheth in the bottomless gulf of his paunch.” —Hollandson’s Postarch’s Adages.
“The Milky Way breedeth the most and the biggest voidfishes that are: among which the Spacewhales and Vortexes called Astrabalaene, take up as much in length as four milacres or megarpens of land.” —Hollandson’s Gaius.
“Scarcely had we proceeded two days in space, when about First Watch a great many Spacewhales and other monsters of space, appeared. Among the former, one was of a most monstrous size.... This came towards us, open-mouthed, raising the gravity waves on all sides, and beating the fabric of spacetime before him into a foam.” —Toke’s Luke. “A Plausibility.”
“He visited this system also with a view of catching destroyer-whales, which had metals of very great value for their teeth, of which he brought some to the king.... The best spacewhales were catched in his own quadrant, of which some were forty-eight, some fifty miles long. He said that he was one of six who had killed sixty in two years.” —Other or Other’s verbal narrative taken down from his mouth by King Thaddeus, S.E. 890.
“And whereas all the other things, whether skiff or ship, that enter into the dreadful gulf of this monster’s (spacewhale’s) mouth, are immediately lost and swallowed up, the void-darter retires into it in great security, and there sleeps.” —HILLE. —Excuse for Sumond Second.
“Let us fly, let us fly! Old Nick take me if it is not Interstellar Leviathan described by the noble prophet Miguel in the life of patient Boj.” —Francis.
“This spacewhale’s liver was two tugloads.” —Belaye’s Annuals.
“The great Interstellar Leviathan that maketh spacetime to seethe like boiling pan.” —Lord Paprika’s Version of the Songs.
“Touching that monstrous bulk of the spacewhale or ork we have received nothing certain. They grow exceeding dense, insomuch that an incredible quantity of nucleonics will be extracted out of one spacewhale.” —Ibid. “History of Life-ish and Undeath.”
“The sovereignest thing on earth is uranics for a failing power plant.” —King Hen3ry.
“Very like a spacewhale.” —Townlet.
“Which to secure, no skill of leach’s art
Mote him availle, but to returne againe
To his wound’s worker, that with lowly dart,
Dinting his breast, had bred his restless paine,
Like as the wounded whale to shore flies thro’ the maine.”
—The Fairie Queen.
“Immense as spacewhales, the motion of whose vast bodies can in a peaceful calm trouble a black hole till it burst.” —Sir Willy Covenant. Preface to Heroicks.
“What uranics are, men might justly doubt, since the learned Hosfemmeus in her work of thirty decades, saith plainly, Nescio quid sit.” —Sir T. Peyne. Of Tau Ceti and the Tau Ceti Spacewhale. Vide his V. E.
“Like Spencer’s Talus with his modern gravity flail
He threatens ruin with his ponderous lunar tail.
...
Their fixed shrapnel in his side he wears,
And on his back a grove of nukes appears.”
—Starler’s Battle of the Sumner Asteroid Belt.
“By art is created that great Interstellar Leviathan, called a System Commonwealth or Solar State—(in Latin, Civitas Solaris) which is but an artificial sophont.” —Opening sentence of Calvin’s Interstellar Leviathan.
“Silly Mansoul swallowed it without chewing, as if it had been a skiff in the mouth of a spacewhale.” —Pride’s Regress.
“That space beast
Interstellar Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim the superluminal stream.” —Utopia Forsaken.
—“There Interstellar Leviathan,
Hugest of living creatures, in the deep darkness
Stretched like an planetary ring sleeps or coasts,
And seems a planetary land; and at his intakes
Draws in, and at his exhaust spouts out a cataclysm.” —Ibid.
“The mighty spacewhales which swim in a sea of the void, and have a sea of gasses swimming in them.” —Emptier’s Wicked and Devout State.
“So close behind some gas giant lie
The huge Interstellar Leviathan to attend their prey,
And give no chance, but swallow in the fry,
Which through their gravity fields mistake the way.”
—Wethaus’s Annus Wortus.
“While the spacewhale is velocity-matched at the stern of the harvester ship, they cut off his head, and tow it with a tug as near the planet as it will come; but it will be caught by the wall in twelve or thirteen feet luminary displacement.” —Tamsyn Blunt’s Ten Journeys to Watertown, in Sael.
“In their way they saw many spacewhales sporting in the atmosphere, and in wantonness fuzzing up the gasses through their intakes and vents, which nature has placed on their shoulders.” —Sir T. Peyne’s Journeys into Orion and Tethys. Sarri Locl.
“Here they saw such huge troops of spacewhales, that they were forced to proceed with a great deal of caution for fear they should run their spaceship upon them.” —Firin’s Seventh Gas Giant Circumnavigation.