Part 18 — Another Telling of the Lyre Story

The story of the lyre introduces universal quantities and tells how they grow from the speed of light. It is the sort of fable that might be thought up and told to children in many cultures, and not only those of earth. I suspect the story of the lyre is told differently, with different numbers of strings and relations between them, in different places. It may even be that people in other galaxies have their own physics-Kiplings and cosmological Just So Stories, differing in various ways from ours. Here is how a storyteller somewhere else might describe the lyre's invention:

When the world was new, the first to come and see it was the god Orpheus and he discovered that a bugblatter* had already been here. He found a bugblatter's shell, dried by ages of time, and he strung strings on it. The first string he strung to the shell was that of speed; and when the god plucked it, it sang:

Her swiftness is the speed of light,
Her energy: the square,
Her force: the square of the square,
Her voice is woven into width and height.

The second string which the god strung to the shell was Rumpa, the fourth power of top speed.

[The top speed is ten-to-the-ten dimes, my inquisitive one, and thus can you see that Rumpa is ten-to-the-forty quartic dimes. It is a great fracas and how-de-do!]

The third string which the god strung on the shell was Magna, the string of great force. It is the force of the world, and the most attraction that two distinct things can have for each other. Orpheus divided Rumpa by Magna and called the ratio Gê, which was the ancient name for our planet.

[The Magna is ten-to-the-forty tons, O thou of insatiable curiosity. It is begotten of the Rumpa by substituting tons for quartic dimes.]

The fourth string he strung to the shell was the string of power: the Full power of the world, which arises from Magna pushing at top speed. The fifth was the River of full-power light — its rush the square frequency which goes with Full power. And the sixth was the string of frequency itself — the world's Core rhythm which is at the heart of space and time.

[Core is the square root of the River, little one.]

Orpheus divided the world's Full power by the River and called the ratio Helix, which means spin. When the god struck the strings of speed and rumpus and force and power and rush and frequency all together, they sang harmoniously to the god:

Two rates are in the rush of light:
the rate the wavelets come, and weave.
And multiplied they interleave
to tell light's strength as they unite.

At cosmic speed the cosmic force
drives cosmic power with its push.
The square root of the power's rush
is heartbeat to the universe.

The seventh and last string Orpheus strung to the bugblatter's shell was the string of temperature. This is the Worldfire temperature, which the world had when it was born. Worldfire has Core frequency as keynote in its radiance. When Orpheus had strung all seven, the Lyre was made. He strummed it to be sure its strings were true, and as he strummed he noticed that the star where you live had come into being.