The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear (Zamonia Series #1) Book

Oh, My! Here goes the Zamonian shoplist of curiosities.
Q:
A bluebear has twenty-seven lives. I shall recount thirteen and a half of them in this book but keep quiet about the rest. (c)
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A bear must have his secrets, after all; they make him seem attractive and mysterious. (c)
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Winter is following autumn in its time-honoured way. The sun, cold as the moon, is sinking into the icy grey sea below my cliff, and the wind smells of snow. But there's something else in the air as well: the scent of bonfires burning in the distance. It carries a hint of cinnamon, a whiff of adventure! I always used to follow that scent, but today I've something more important to do. My memoirs must be preserved for posterity. Frost-sprites are insinuating their clammy fingers between the floorboards of my cabin and groping for my feet. Invisible ice-witches are painting frost flowers on the windows. Hardly my favourite season of the year, but the ideal time to brew a pot of hot cocoa (with a wee dash of rum in it), fill thirteen-and-a-half pipes with tobacco, make thirteen-and-a-half slices of bread and jam, sharpen thirteen-and-a-half pencils, and begin to record my first thirteen-and-a-half lives. A bold and arduous undertaking of epic dimensions, I fear. For, as I already said, there was a lot more of everything in the old days - more adventures, too, of course. (c)
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PEOPLE USUALLY START life by being born. Not me, though. (c)
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When you're little you tend to overestimate the size of things, but I now know that it really was the biggest sound in the world. (c)
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The Minipirates were the masters of the Zamonian Sea. Nobody knew this, however, because they were too small to be noticed. (c)
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I have often witnessed such encounters and listened to the Minipirates' grandiose rodomontades. I must, however, admit to having been influenced by their richly embroidered tales and extravagant flights of fancy. They taught me that a good white lie is often considerably more exciting than the truth. Telling one is like dressing up reality in its Sunday best. (c)
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I could even, in a dire emergency, tie a knot in a knot. (с)
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Knowing your waves (c)
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Watch waves for long enough, and you'll realize that every one is different. (c)
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It was, in fact, the first time I'd ever thought at all, because I'd never managed to form a clear idea about anything in the eternally noisy atmosphere of the Minipirates' ship. (c)
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People always covet what they themselves do not possess. (c)
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At first they wanted to take me with them on their gourmet excursions, but they dropped the idea when they saw I couldn't walk on water. (c)
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I myself was completely unaware of how hard I was trying to become a Hobgoblin. It's quite natural for a young person to want to be like other people. The worst of it was, I'd clearly reconciled myself to spending the rest of my days on the Hobgoblins' island. (c)
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Where would the wind and waves take me? I had dispensed with a rudder on the principle that fate must be given a chance. (c)
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I was feeling wonderful. It seemed that the wind in my fur and the wild sea beneath me existed solely to transport me into a world of adventure. Could anything be more exciting than a journey into the unknown, a voyage of discovery across the great, wide ocean? (c)
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Their spitefulness had long ceased to be perceptible, probably because they had never before been engaged in such a responsible and interesting activity. (c)
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Anyone who had traversed the oceans for centuries, as they claimed to have done, was bound to have seen a few things in his time. (c)
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You make friends quickly when you're young, and you think things will remain the same for evermore. (c)
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Assemble ten thousand sea cows at the bottom of a mine shaft, persuade them to utter a simultaneous sigh of love and add the wingbeats of a million bumblebees drunk on honey, and you might produce something akin to that penetrating, contented hum. (c)
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To Mac, an iceberg drifting in the rays of the setting sun was a hazard to shipping, not a breathtaking spectacle; a forest waterfall a threat to inexperienced boatmen, not a welcome source of refreshment; a cloudcastle hovering over a Caribbean island the precursor of a tropical typhoon, not one of Nature's paintings. Even empty desert could turn out, under Mac's stern gaze, to be a death trap replete with dangers: venomous gila monsters, giant spiders, electric scorpions loitering under stones, mirages that led the credulous astray, heat capable of driving a person insane with sunstroke. (c)
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Many customers wanted to entertain us, make a fuss of us, shower us with gifts, adopt us, marry us, and so on. (c)
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He was flying fast, but in the wrong direction. (c)
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There was method in these seemingly nonsensical statements: by the time we'd grasped their total idiocy, our thoughts had strayed in every conceivable direction. This was precisely what the professor wanted: to steer our thoughts in as many different directions as possible. (с)
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In normal lighting they have an IQ of 4000, but when darkness falls it attains astronomical heights. (c)
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Professor Nightingale made it a rule only to accept life forms of which it could be proved that only one example existed on earth, so the Nocturnal Academy was very much an elite establishment. (c)
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If somebody loves you, you always love them a little in return, even when they're an Alpine Imp. (c)
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Using sophisticated underwater microphones, he recorded the song of the sea horse, mixed it with the rhythm of thunderclaps, the baying of Baskerville hounds, the inaudible squeaks of bats, the groans of graveyard worms, and a few highly original noises of his own. He then played the whole thing backwards at twice the original speed. Qwerty confirmed that this bore quite a resemblance to the music of his homeland. The rest of us always left the room when he had his musical meals. (c)
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With the aid of a few grimaces or contortions, nothing more, he turned before our marvelling eyes into a zebra or a bluebell, a piece of rock crystal or a microbe, an atom or a Pythagorean theorem. …
We were taught no lessons, no single subject, in the traditional manner. Instead, every day was devoted to a long, nonstop lecture by Nightingale in which he jumped from subject to subject, seemingly at random, holding forth sometimes on wind power, sometimes on poodle-breeding or vegetable drugs, and pausing occasionally to scrawl a formula, foreign word or diagram on the blackboard. (c)
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I did, in fact, spend years at the Nocturnal Academy, but they passed so quickly and eventfully that I never got around to counting them. (c)
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I began to grasp how everything was connected, from the cellular structure of a dandelion seed to an exploding star in the Horsehead Nebula. (c)
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I learned about their background, their boyhood, their eating habits, and the exalted or scatterbrained ideas that had prompted them to favour a particular form of government or driven them insane. (c)
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We all suddenly felt like dinosaur food. (c)
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Having jointly solved astronomical problems of the greatest magnitude, we would surely locate the exit together. (c)
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I tried to find the right words - words that were simultaneously motivating, sympathetic, heartening, comforting, and irresistibly persuasive.
'Go on, jump!' I said. (c)
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'a clear conscience. It really perks you up.' (c)
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First right and second left - hurray,
it's easy to remember.
If only I can find the way
I'll get out by December. (c)
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There are times in life when you become convinced that the entire universe has assembled in some gloomy back room and resolved to conspire against you. This was one of those times. But there are also times that restore your faith in Lady Luck. The two or three seconds it took for my tears, having shot past their target, to rebound off the petals of an orange lily on to the branch of a birch tree, which bent and released a captive fern frond, which sprang erect and projected my tears at a canopy of chestnut leaves laden with raindrops from the recent Gloomberg Tempest, which in turn sent them pattering down on me like a cold morning shower - those seconds were one such fortunate moment in time. It was the moment when fate released my hands from the spider's web and signalled the start of my marathon run through the Great Forest. (с)
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Multidimensional Space. It is really quite easy to picture a square yard of multidimensional space - provided you have seven brains.Simply picture a train travelling through a black hole with a candle on its roof while you yourself, with a candle on your head, are standing on Mars and winding a clock precisely one yard in diameter, and while an owl, which also has a candle on its head and is travelling in the opposite direction to the train at the speed of light, is flying through a tunnel in the process of being swallowed by another black hole which likewise has a candle on its head [if you can imagine a black hole with a candle on its head, though for that you will require at least four brains]. Join up the four points at which the candles are burning, using a coloured pencil, and you'll have one square yard of multidimensional space. You will also, coincidentally, be able to tell the time on Mars by the clock, even in the dark, because - of course - you've got a candle on your head. (c)
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And, just to make matters even more puzzling, you're in every other unknown universe as well! So anyone falling down a dimensional hiatus really goes places - everywhere, to be exact. (c)
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Land in a two-dimensional dimension and you're squashed as flat as a pancake. A one-dimensional dimension will stretch you like an endless rubber band, a five-dimensional one will transform you into a radio wave with a headache. As for an eight-dimensional dimension, its appearance cannot be conveyed in our language. Only one thing is certain: those who enter another dimension must change their way of life, possibly in the most drastic manner. (c)
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It seemed that I had been blocking their view of the throne, which they considered very important for some reason. (c)
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My past lay behind me, my future ahead, and I had no commitments either way, so it didn't really matter what the date was. (c)
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… always sought the most acceptable solution. Even when they disagreed on which way to go, as they sometimes did, they didn't take a vote on the matter because a vote would have betokened a conflict; they compromised by adopting a zigzag course. (c)
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And so, on the strength of a crackbrained message-in-a-bottle, the Muggs had devoted themselves to the task of finding, trapping, and occupying a city named Anagrom Ataf. (c)
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In view of the fact that natural phenomena such as catastrophic tempests, the Northern Lights, volcanic eruptions, meteor storms, et cetera, never occur simultaneously, it may be assumed that they observe something akin to a set of rules - a sort of highway code respected and complied with by all large-scale natural phenomena. No hurricane would intrude on a devastating earthquake, just as no tornado would spoil the effect of a mirage. (c)
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The subject need only be computed, catalogued, tabulated, made the subject of numerous doctoral dissertations, and formally included in the university syllabus. (c)
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Until now they had never devoted much thought to how to spend their time; they had simply roamed because roaming was their way of life. Now that they had reached their destination, they didn't know what to do with themselves. (c)
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I found a steaming dish of mashed potatoes on the kitchen table the first time I entered my house. That was why I'd chosen the place, on the principle that there couldn't be much wrong with a house whose kitchen table bore a steaming dish of mashed potatoes. (c)
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If there was a way into the tornado there must also be a way out. (c)
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Incoming mail falls into the top of the tornado. You only have to gather it up.'
'You mean you do receive incoming mail?'
'Not so far, but it should be here any minute.'
'Er … How long have you been waiting for it?'
... 'Er … Two hundred years? Three hundred? What's the date today?' (c)
Q:
Have you ever sat on a palm leaf and tobogganed down a frozen waterfall a mile high?'
I was forced to admit that I'd not yet had that pleasure. (c)
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I collected stories. It was my intention to become the chronicler of Tornado City and record the biographies of all its inhabitants. (c)
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Many of the inhabitants had developed the mentality of long-term prison inmates. They were afraid of freedom, of the world outside, of an unregulated mode of existence. (c)
Q:
'I'm an idea.'
'Delighted to meet you,' I replied. 'My name is Bluebear, and I'm a bluebear.' (c)
Q:
'Well, I'm an idea, but a bad one. Everyone began by making a tremendous fuss of me, but they eventually discovered that I wasn't a good idea. When that happens, people simply drop you. There are masses of us roaming the passages in this brain. We're the dregs of the cerebral community. Could you find a use for a bad idea?' (c)
Q:
'Then why did this one remove his head, if he was so intelligent?' 1600H glowed red for a moment. He hummed and hawed, then:
'Well … That was one of his bad ideas …'
'Why are you blushing?' I asked.
1600H groaned. 'To be quite honest, the bad idea was me.' …
He was the best bad idea I ever had. (c)
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To justify their existence they spent their days roaming the lanes and trying to marry themselves off in the vain hope that two bad ideas might produce a good one. (c)
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There are times when the truth is the worst possible thing you can come out with. (c)
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'This is the beginning of a new age!' he cried. 'We shall seize control of the brain. Away with the old order! Long live anarchy! We shall fill every corner of the brain with chaos. And this creature - this henchman of the old cerebral establishment - will be our first victim. On the count of three, throw him into the Lake of Oblivion!' (c)
Q:
It's hard to say what made them, in particular, such good politicians; perhaps it was their ultrasensitive hearing. According to one Atlantean proverb, a Norselander could hear the wind change before the wind itself became aware of it. …
Everyone respected the Gryphons, not only because of their physical superiority but, above all, for their Solomonic integrity and sportsmanlike fairness. Like symbols of justice carved in granite, they perched almost motionless on the tops of the city's skyscrapers, minarets, and pyramids, their keen eyes scanning the busy streets below. You had to have witnessed the arrival of a Gryphon to know how authority should be personified. (c)
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The city displayed every conceivable form of architecture plus a few more besides. (c)
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The people of Atlantis really governed themselves, a system that worked well at times, less well at others, and sometimes not at all. Total chaos broke out about once a month. (с)
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you can't be courageous unless you know what fear is and overcome it. (c)
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'Walk very slowly!' I hissed between my teeth. 'Then they'll mistake us for water.' ...
'Gah? They'll think we're water? What gives you that idea?'
'I've got an encyclopedia in my head. It sometimes tells me things like that,' (с)
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I couldn't even tell whether it was male, female, or demonic. It sounded like a trumpet endowed with the power of speech. (с)
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To obtain a teaching post you had to have spent years working your way up through Atlantis's intricate educational system, and nearly every learned profession required hard-to-get permits from mysterious government departments. … All the professions were controlled by obscure committees. In short, organized chaos prevailed here as elsewhere. (с)
Q:
The South Zamonian Mountain Dwarfs celebrated at least one wedding a week because they were always swapping spouses, and every wedding was the occasion of a riotous party at which all their relations were present by invitation and a brass band played Mountain Dwarf music. Mountain Dwarf Music was played on phnagguffs, instruments resembling alphorns with cymbals mounted on them. The phnagguffists bashed the latter with an iron drumstick while blowing into the mouthpiece. Phnagguffs were so long that they projected out of the windows, which made the noise pollution even worse, but this counted for little because there wasn't a door or window pane in the entire building. The rest of the wedding guests did their utmost to drown the phnagguff music with curses, that being the traditional way in which South Zamonian Mountain Dwarfs congratulate a bride and groom. (с) Oh, is this really a good topic for kids?
Q:
When a Bluddum goes to the lavatory you mustn't expect him to emerge for three hours. You will also have to wait another hour before you can enter it without losing consciousness, and the noises he produces inside are even more horrific than those he makes when coughing into a tin bucket. (c)
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Getting home could be a perilous adventure in itself, particularly in winter, when the outside stairway was slippery with ice and a blizzard was blowing, or during violent summer thunderstorms, when the shafts of lightning made you feel like a target in a shooting gallery. (c)
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Wednesdays were the best thing about Atlantis. The middle of the week was a traditional holiday there. Everyone stopped work and celebrated the fact that half the week was over. © Can I go there?
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The Museum of Ineffabilities, which displayed objects people didn't care to talk about … (c)
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Stripped to the waist and accompanying himself on a diamond-encrusted harp, he sang all his songs, which told of eternal love and the purchase of exorbitantly expensive engagement rings, with tears streaming down his cheeks. © Which is basically what De Bierce did.
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To keep his name on everyone's lips, the reigning King of Lies has it stamped on every loaf of bread baked in Atlantis. (с)
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The only absentees were the Invisibles, not that one knew this for certain because they couldn't be seen in any case. (с)
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I had no idea what politics had to do with the weather, but a few derogatory remarks about Norselanders and their intellectual capacity always went down well with the public. The reporters scribbled away busily. (c) This is all too well reminding of the mass modern media style.
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Being accustomed to voices in the head, I was only moderately impressed. (c)
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They didn't believe me - the story of my lives. (c)
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I don't know what's harder: to think the opposite of what you're doing or do the opposite of what you're thinking. It's particularly hard when the opposite of what you're doing is nothing, or when what you're doing is the opposite of what you ought to be doing. (c)
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'Life is too precious to be left to chance, my boy.' (c)
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Life is short, they say.
A matter of opinion, say I. Some lives are short, others long, and many are middling.
Besides, I still had another thirteen-and-a-half to go. (c)
Q:
I hugged Avriel tight to shield her from the cold and drew in great gulps of sea air. Borne on the sea breeze was a familiar scent reminiscent of distant bonfire smoke mingled with a hint of cinnamon. That, as I have already mentioned, is the smell of adventure.
'We could always try our luck elsewhere,' I said.
'But not now,' Avriel replied.
And we walked back into the sheltering forest. (c)