A Fog of Magic: Origins

 

If you read in the older stories, the fictions handed down and recopied and retold and even embellished, the word they use is "magic." Making things happen that natural science cannot easily explain, reversing harms, undoing actions: "magic."

It appears I can do this "magic." It isn't like the fairy tales in the ancient libraries though, muttering nonsense words and waving sticks and invoking deities. It requires a significant investment of personal energy. It takes concentration and time. And like the oh-so-unreal Sorcerer's Apprentice and his wayward broomsticks, a practitioner can do it wrong, set in motion events that can turn bad or even disastrous. Magic is useful, yes...but like a spring rain that you need, you can have too much of a good thing.

But if you spend more time in the ancient libraries, you find other things too. Not just the fairy tales or lesson books but engineering texts. Operators' manuals. Dry, academic tomes dusty with disuse, describing a world far, far more sophisticated than the one we live in now, and yet it was the one we live in now.

And amongst these least fanciful books a whole section that seemed to delve into the metaphysical: meditation. Concentration of will, developing your spiritual confidence. Even a couple of extremely esoteric, nearly impenetrable books on psi powers, which I couldn't make much sense of...

...except I could.

The magic I was taught begins and ends with concentration. Proper concentration requires establishing a mental state not too dissimilar from that of dreaming, the drowsy, free-floating, nearly awake dreams of an afternoon nap on a warm, sunny day. You know you're dreaming and can observe the wanderings of your imagination like a spectator. But achieving this dreamy state while maintaining focus on goals is not something you pick up in an afternoon; it takes a few years of training and practice and, like I said, it can go horribly wrong. The spring rains can come and keep coming until every garden washes away.

My father taught me, he and my grandmother. Among their lessons in concentration of will, they also taught me that it will take two generations to teach the next magician, that it always takes at least two generations of magicians to initiate the next one. The talent is partly inborn but there are occasional sports, children of families with no magic who have the capacity despite their parentage. My own great-grandfather was one such.

So it was with something like recognition that I found myself in this section of the library, and struggling to decipher the foreign words of the books around the willpower section. Environmental manipulation? Repercussional forecasting?

Nanomachines? "Machines" I know well enough, but "nano" is a gibberish sound you coo at small babies.

The books are both a blinding light of revelation and an equally dazzling blackness of mystery. Some are so far out of my context that they are nearly a different language. Others, particularly the ones describing guidance of will, I could almost have written myself.

You prepare yourself, set the trance and focus on circumstances and goals. You envision the current state you want to change, and how the changes will look and feel and smell. You do this for quite a long time - sometimes it takes days. And sometimes you have to stay entranced in order to bring the spell to an end, too - spring rains, remember. Usually you don't want to completely upend the way things work. Simply tweaking things is generally sufficient, subtle nudges.

Magic is at its best when you don't realize it's working. There have been some who went in for grand effects, enormous, brash displays of power that rattled everything around them - not least of which, their neighbors. Those kind of magicians don't stay in business for long and sometimes meet a sudden, sharp end.

And there's another section of the library, quite small actually and leading into the peculiar section involving environmental manipulation: "terraforming." This section is the one that set my mind almost on fire.

It turns out that we are not from here. I am, of course, and dozens of generations before me have all been from here. But there was a generation, centuries or maybe even millennia ago, that wasn't. They were from somewhere else.

This book doesn't talk about that other place, not directly. It cites examples taken from the other place but doesn't talk about the place itself. It appears to have been a whole other world and we, humanity, are originally from there. We came to this world so long ago that nobody alive remembers anything else, and being from there, upon arriving here, set out to make here, now more like there, then. What happened along the way that made us forget our own past?

These books are very strange. They are nothing like modern books with their leather, wooden or cardboard covers, pages of sturdy, stiff paper. No. These most ancient of books, in addition to being constructed of materials I can barely even describe, have no dust on them whatsoever. A little raised dam of dust has formed around them on the shelves, but no dust lands on them directly.

At least our language hasn't changed much. I can read these titles well enough, even if the words are strange:

"Terraforming: Bending Circumstances."

"Terraforming: Finer Points and Enduring Changes."

"Human to Machine Interfaces."

"A Fog of Magic: Practical Application of Nanomachines."

That last one seemed especially pertinent, and I took it down from the shelf, opened it, and began to read.

I've learned a lot. I'm sorry I've been away for so long, I've been reading everything I can find and it has been strange stuff, to say the least.

We're the descendants of travelers from a distant star. "Distant" isn't like "distant, it takes three days to walk there." Stars are so far away that the light of the very closest one - just the light - takes about eight years to get here. So the light we're seeing tonight of the Crab's Eye, is eight years old. And I can hardly tell you how fast light is, it just makes the distance that much farther: in a single beat of my heart, a beam of light would go around the world maybe ten times. I wasn't even aware light had a speed. This is distant so far beyond anything we've ever encountered.

Now imagine that you have a kind of vessel that can fly through the sky between stars over distances that long. If I understand the books correctly the trip took lifetimes, and that may have been as many as a hundred generations ago. The timeframe isn't very clear. But we've been here for so long that we've forgotten as a people that we're not from here.

Anyway. Fog of Magic was what really opened my eyes. What it is that I and other magicians can do isn't magic at all - we're infected!

Let me explain: we're not infected with a disease. But there's something special about us, a trait usually handed down in families but it pops up outside sometimes, too, that makes us compatible with nanomachines.

"Nano" means "small." There's no seeing something this small, just accept it: small. So tiny that a single nanomachine could sit on a single grain of sand and have rooms for hundreds and hundreds of other nanomachines next to it. Thousands and thousands. It's like the opposite of the speed of light: the size of nothing.

So what is happening is this: magicians are people with a host of nanomachines already inside them. These nanomachines aren't doing anything to the magicians, they're just there. They listen. The books touch on how this works but I can't understand any of the words at all but I'm reading and re-reading. But the upshot it, the nanomachines inside us can hear our thoughts.

Not our specific thoughts. Not "I'm hungry" or "Alyssa is pretty" or anything like that. But they can pick up a concentrated train of thought.

So you see? That's why it takes a trance! That's why you have to have quiet and concentration and no spell ever gets cast in a single day! The nanomachines inside us hear us concentrating on this one concept and at first just a few are aware of it, and then more and more, and then you can start concentrating on what needs to be done to address it. If you're thinking, "it's really dry this summer" then after a couple of days the nanomachines inside you are all aware that you're concerned that it's too dry - don't ask me how, how do you formulate thoughts? The exact mechanism isn't important, just that it works.

Of course I'd like to know how it works, but how would I figure it out?

But now here's the thing - we don't just have nanomachines inside us. No! They're everywhere. They're in the grass, the soil, the air - everywhere! We inhale them with every breath, piss them out with every trip to the loo. All of us!

And the ones we breathe in, some of them get all the way up inside us to hear what the magicians' nanomachines are thinking about. And then some get breathed back out and pass the message along, and along, and along until all the nanomachines in the area are all aware of what the magician is concentrating on, you get it? A few get in, a few of those pick up the message, a few of those get back out. It's only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction and nanomachines are too small to be smart, it takes a lot of them to even be stupid and if you want them to do something smart, you have to keep thinking about what you want them to do, so you finally get enough in and then back out of you again to be smart about what to do.

So if you've been thinking "it's really dry this summer," naturally you'd progress to "make it rain," if you had any way of making it rain. And so the nanomachines make it rain.

No, I have no idea how they do that.

I do know that shortly after our great-great grandcestors arrived here, there was a terrible plague. We were nearly wiped out but a long campaign by the earliest magicians set their nanomachines against the plague and killed it.

I'm not sure how that works. The story mentions "a particularly virulent native bug" and that the nanomachines "tore it apart on a molecular scale," which sounds like there was some insect that the nanomachines tore into very, very small pieces. But that's how the nanomachines are everywhere in the first place: it was a big controversy, whether to release them into the air and water and everywhere. Apparently a lot of the first people didn't want to do it.

But those first people didn't have a good defense against the plague either, so when it killed them the magicians went ahead anyway. And that's why we still have magicians today: they set the fog of magic loose in the world which saved all of our ancestors, and it persists all around us still.

But here's the thing: once we were so smart, so technologically advanced - that's another word I don't really have all the context for but I think it means something like "good with machines" that we made machines that flew between stars. We made machines so tiny that thoughts are big compared to them. We took on a disease that lives in every animal in this world and simply tore it to pieces - the disease itself! We did all these things.

How is it, then, that we don't remember that anymore? As a people, I mean. We were mighty enough to take on moving between stars as if it were my own sister moving from one house to another, how did we lose that?

I think it was because of the nanomachines themselves. I think, using them in this way to make everything too perfect for ourselves, we don't have to strive anymore. We don't have to struggle very much. We don't have to think very hard.

Maybe that's the real fog of magic.

Raison d'Etre

 Twelve years is a long time to be spinning plates. Let me just put that out there. Waiting tables isn't usually what people call a career. It isn't half as long as my mom did it, maybe only a quarter in fact.

What folks don't know is I own this place. Not "I give the bank a lot of money to let me use the diner they actually own," but "my grandad built this place, my mom grew up in this place, I grew up in this place, and I'm still here." We don't just own it, my family is the reason there's a building here. Mom signed the deed over in exchange for a signature and a crisp $100 bill.

El's Diner, Breakfast and Lunch For Over 75 Years. It's right there on the sign.

The bell tinkles. Old fashioned bell like you see in the movies. About every five years or so, you have to replace the spring it hangs from. About every 20 years or so, you have to replace the bell. There's four retired bells, each hung on its own nail with its years of service on a little plaque, hung above the door.

Dad heats up the springs, cherry red, straightens them out, hammers them flat and forges them into knives. No kidding.

"Hey, Ellie." Grandad was the original El - Ellesworth, never ever heard him called anything but El. Mom is Eleanor and I'm Elizabeth. I'm not sure if names get chosen so the sign doesn't have to get changed, but whatever Grandad paid for the original sign, he's gotten his money's worth.

"Morning, Charlie!" I've been sliding breakfast in front of Charlie since I was 23, fresh out of college and certain I was going to make restaurant history, change El's into a household name across the land and win a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Still haven't worked out how I was going to do that last one but I was sure it was going to happen.

I haven't asked Charlie his breakfast order since I turned 30. It never changes. Coffee: big one - little tidbit here, Charlie has his own cup that lives on a peg behind the counter. It used to have his name on it, but I used to be 18, too, and we all wear down a little over time. Big bowl of oatmeal, a shy pat of butter and a shy teaspoon of brown sugar and a very, very shy one-quarter teaspoon of salt sprinkled broadly around the top of the mound. I've told him time and again, I can do more with this oatmeal, you know. You can have other stuff in it, we got strawberries, we got blueberries, shoot, I'll even drop in some chocolate chips if you like.

Charlie kind of took Grandad's place when he passed. Grandad went out kind of quickly, he just lived and lived and lived except for those last six months, he just sort of sputtered and ran down and then he got sick and died. Charlie was at the funeral that day, the first day El's had failed to open in a long, long time. So in a way even though he didn't get his breakfast, Charlie hadn't missed a visit.

I slid Charlie's cup in front of him, there's actually a faded streak on the counter because I've been sliding it to him in exactly the same way for so long, and poured it full. A short dollop of cream, put the sugar jar in front of him,

"Hey. Hold on."

I looked up. It struck me, suddenly, Charlie looked...old. "Say?"

"Bring that back." He waved at my other hand. "The cream." He waved a keep going gesture over the coffee until I had sloshed in about another quarter-inch of whipping cream.

Yeah, whipping cream. It's a dairy state, we don't go halfway on our moo juice around these parts.

He took the sugar jar out of my hand and tipped in another couple of teaspoons' worth.

Charlie's coffee usually is the cafe au lait of an ascetic, only lip service given to the luxuries. But not today. This wasn't syrupy but it sure as heck wasn't Charlie's perennial not-quite-black.

"I'll have your oatmeal up in a minute, hon," I told him. Yeah, after a while you start calling your regulars hon.

"No oatmeal today."

You could have run me over with a truck and that would have had less impact. No oatmeal? A river must be flowing backwards somewhere, this violation of The Way Things Happen was a tectonic shift.

"Uh, okay? Well, I'm sorry, Charlie, that's just rude of me. What can I get for you this morning?"

Charlie opened a menu. I don't think I've ever seen him do that in my life. Breakfast is oatmeal. He doesn't come in for lunch every day but when he does, it's a chicken salad sandwich with lettuce. Always. Even if I took them off the menu, I'd keep the fixings for them on hand because Charlie, sure as the sunrise, is going to order them. And he doesn't need to look at the menu to know I'll serve them to him.

"I think a steak. No. Yes. Yep. Butter fried steak. Two eggs over easy. Hash browns, you know, I've never had the hash browns. Are they good?"

"Holy cats, Charlie, you been eatin here for what, forty years? Eleanor came up with the recipe for the hash browns back around nineteen eighty-something and I can't get out of this booth without having a plate of that. You've really never had the hash browns?"

Maria is another of my regulars. She brings a newspaper, a cell phone and an appetite. She has some breakfast - hash browns are indeed a constant item for her - sets up three or four house showings, slugs back two cups of coffee and then does the crossword puzzle. In ink. Then she stomps out of the place to go sell houses, leaving the newspaper behind.

"Nope. Never had em. They good?"

"Honey. Yeah, they're good. Set him up, girlfriend, I'm pickin up this man's tab today."

"I wasn't done ordering, Maria, I can't..."

"His check comes to me today, okay Ellie?"

"Yes ma'am."

Maria nodded at me. "Get what you want, Charlie. It's all good. I've had everything on the menu, you won't be disappointed by any of it."

"Well..." He looked the menu up and down. Really, with the steak, eggs and hash he's going to have a pretty big plateful and Charlie, at about six-two and I swear around eighty years old, if he weighs 160 it's only because he's got five pounds of rocks in his pockets. He's lean as a rake, as Dad would say. I don't know where he's going to put all this food unless he carries half of it out in a to-go container. "I think a slice of pie."

"We have lemon meringue, chocolate cream and sour cream apple pie."

Maria made a sound. "Charlie, you get that sour cream apple pie. They only make it a couple times a month and trust me, you want it."

"All righty. Sour cream...really, sour cream apple? I've never heard of that."

"Trust me, honey." Maria seemed to be speaking directly to the crossword puzzle.

"Well, I'm not arguing. You heard her. Sour cream apple pie."

"Coming right up." I put the ticket on the carousel and swung it back. Maria's already on her second cup and a couple of to-gos went out a few minutes before Charlie sat down; as a retiree he usually doesn't come in until the morning rush has tapered off and we can slow down.

Jackie poked his head out the pass-through. "Hey, he want garlic on that steak?"

Charlie's head swiveled around. "Hell yes he does!"

Jackie saluted with his spatula. "Attaboy," he said and disappeared, only to reappear a moment later. "I got some onions back here lookin' for something to do."

"Son, you got a mind to add root crops to that steak, you just follow that hunch."

"Hey Jackie, don't give away the entire farm, okay?"

"I gotcha Ellie, I just never got to make Charlie a steak before and I'm a little excited!" Jackie's New Jersey accent comes out when he gets excited but let me just say, the man can cook a steak. "How you want this thing, Charlie? Burnt? Mooing?"

"Just a bit of pink inside, please. Done all the way, just a bit of pink."

It was a few minutes and Maria was growling into her phone, me wiping tables and sliding racks into the dishwasher until ding, Charlie's breakfast was at the window.

I've served this exact combination probably a couple hundred times. It falls into the range of what I call a construction worker's plate: plenty of protein, not shy with the carbs, very savory. The pie is just as common an addition too - more carbs but as sugars they hit a little quicker.

Charlie paused, as if saying grace. I don't think I've ever seen him say a blessing over his food, though some do even at a place as casual as El's.

Jackie had commended himself to the steak. It came up with a nice crust, running with clear juices as Charlie sliced off a bite, put it in his mouth, and chewed twice. He closed his eyes, and paused.

"Problem?" Maria looked over at us, me on my side of the counter, Charlie on his. He was so frozen, I was afraid I might be looking at a heart attack. "Charlie."

He resumed chewing. When that bite went down, he opened his eyes and I was startled to see they were full of tears. "It's great. It's really great." He tried a bite of the hash and paused again. "Oh, my."

"Told you." Charlie turned to nod at Maria, but she wasn't looking at us anymore.

Over about the next twenty minutes Charlie methodically worked his way through his big breakfast, finally wrapping up with the pie that set a look crossing his face like a child seeing the ocean for the first time.

As I took the plates away, he covered his face with his hands and, by the way his shoulders were shaking, I could tell he was weeping.

Charlie spent a few moments wiping his face with his napkin, which I took away and replaced with a fresh one.

"My dog died yesterday." He fiddled with the fresh napkin but it seemed he was done crying. Maybe. "I can die now."

"What?"

"I didn't want her to be alone. I didn't want to get sick and make her worry, or get sick and die and she have to go to a shelter or die if nobody figured out I was gone or have to learn a new family. So I was really careful with my food and always got some exercise and look both ways crossing the street. So I'd outlive her and she'd be safe and happy the whole time. And she was, right up until..." he needed a moment, but just a moment. "Anyway. I can die now."

"But I'm going to have more pie first." He dropped a twenty on the bill. "See you at lunch." And he went out the door.

I looked over at Maria, who had been watching and listening. "Does that mean he's ordering steak because he's no longer concerned about his health?"

I tucked the twenty into the cash drawer. We had all forgotten about Maria picking up his check. "No, I don't think that's his angle. I think he loved the dog more than himself. He wouldn't let himself have nice things that might be even a little bad for him because he didn't want her to ever be sad or scared."

"Wow. That's devotion. But...what about all those years before?"

"I don't know. Maybe he had dogs then too. He was married but she passed a few years ago. I don't know about kids."

"Think he might get another dog?"

"After seeing how he reacted to breakfast? I hope not." I remembered the look on his face, the joy. "Never mind dying, I want him to live, to live for himself.

"I want to serve him a lot more pie."

The Fruits of Creation

 I do. That's the answer.

I heard the question you asked.  That's a little too personal.  The question I'll answer, though is, "Do you have any regrets associated with your powers?" I didn't used to, but I do now. And it really only came about a few months ago.

The conflict was massive. You remember. Absolutely otherworldly, so huge in scope I could barely even describe it, if human language had the words for it. I and the rest of the Association and even most of The Union - yes, them, or at least the ones not in the brand new Ultramax in Colorado - gathered together to combine forces to defeat Death.

No, not the Death, not the real one. The real Death's a good guy. No, trust me, really. Nothing like how they portray Death in the comic books. 

Well, for starters, she's beautiful.  She's not as somber as you'd think, kind of upbeat. Philosophical, but hopeful. She doesn't really care to meddle with human affairs, just goes on about her business mostly.  She's kind of a pro forma member, we don't ask her to intervene on our behalf.

Because the one time she did she looked so disappointed in us, none of us could bear to ever do it again.  We don't want to get on her bad side, you see.  It's important not to have Death angry or upset with you.  She's a good guy, but it's even more important that she's a good guy you're on the good side of, see?

Anyway, this other guy called himself Death too, and he was pretty terrible. To get rid of him, we had to combine forces to create a sort of pocket universe and trap him inside it, then break the connection so he'd be stuck there until it dissipates. Don't ask me details, Menta ran it and kept it from blowing up, ask them how it works. I was mostly just raw power and the focus for the others. So it was my hands doing the actual forming of that universe, The Union shoved Death into it through me, and the Association's Gamma team did the actual severing.

No, Gamma has nothing to do with hierarchies. Gamma is just the designation we put on the Metaphysical power sets. Spiritual, some magicks, some very specific willpower sets.

There are no Alphas, or Betas for that matter. The designations are Gamma, Delta, Lambda, Tau and Omega.

I was a Gamma this time.

I'm getting to it, just...hear me out.

So when the rest of the Gammas pulled me out, I lost a bit off the end of a finger. Just a little bit, barely even noticeable. See the scar? Yeah, that little white dot. But what came out instead of my fingertip was a world.

I can't really explain it. Menta has a hypothesis but testing it would mean opening that universe again, if that's even possible, and no one wants to do that.

It's not big on our scale. It's maybe the size of a basketball, just a beautiful little planet with oceans and mountains and clouds and people.

Not at first. When we first emerged from the merge it was falling out of the sky with the rest of us, I think it was Prophet who first realized what it was and how to handle it safely. When we got back and mostly healed Prophet had it in an isolation suspension and said congrats, it's a world.

I don't get it, I said. Why tell me, specifically? And he said I was the source. Scale or something but my tiny little slice of fingertip, in that universe, is a whole world in this one. And it had been crude and empty when we got back but by the time Prophet was telling me about it, it was alive with plants.

Then it had more than just plants, it had animals. Minimus pushed himself right down to his limits and reported that he was about the size of a giant redwood on that scale, but he could make out animals, some big ones like dinosaurs but, you know, different from actual dinosaurs. And some smaller ones.

A couple of weeks later he did it again and the life had changed. The dinosaurs were gone and different animals were taking over.

Actually I think he sneaked down there a lot because he spent a lot of time in the lab with it, and it was a funny inversion of his capability, you know?  The shrinking guy shrinks to his tiniest and on this world he's as big as the biggest tree - and that's as small as he can get there!  I wonder if he just stomped around some empty desert pretending to be a giant monster.  He says he didn't but still...

And it was Minimus who rigged up the telemicroscopes so we could observe the surface more clearly.  We really needed it, too.  On that scale, Everest would be about a half-millimeter high.

No, no Everest.  It isn't a mirror of Earth.  It's fascinating though, we were able to take pictures of places from one day to the next and we could see geological progressions.  Menta says they're working on a paper about it; I'd rather they just turned it all over to the university.  But Menta's happiest when they're lecturing, so: fat chance of that.

Last month we started detecting higher order animals, and last week we spotted cities. Something gained sentience and started advancing.  

What's really weird is that when we're observing them, they seem to be moving at normal speed for their size.  You'd think, since their time seems to be moving at something like ten million years per day, we'd have no chance to even suspect there was life there, it'd be living and dying far too fast for us to detect.  Imagine a bristlecone pine, the oldest single living thing on earth, and in our universe it's there and gone in one minute.  And that's what happens - just not when we're looking.  When we're looking, their time is a lot closer to our time.

No, recording doesn't help.  Tried it.

Even when we're observing them, they're moving far, far faster than we are.  What's normal at their scale is really rocketing right along on ours.  

 So it appears that their physics isn't quite the same as ours even though they're in the universe with us. Probably has something to do with their time being its own thing too. We can hear them and we're close to figuring out their languages, but we can't talk to them. Even a super high frequency radio signal to us would be lower than the longest wave radio frequency to them, so they probably can't hear it even if they were listening to such an extreme end of the spectrum. We can't send Minimus down to visit, imagine if actual Godzilla crouched down to try to talk to you? How would people react? It'd be chaos, we can't do that to them.

If we tried to communicate, and all of us left the room, their languages might change so much in the interim that any kind of contact we could make would have to start all over again, maybe with a culture so far removed from the one we contacted that we would be, what?  Legend?  Deities?

I don't think they can even perceive us.  I don't think I want them to.

But they're beautiful. They haven't fractured into countries with conflicting interests, no religions - Well, actually there's a few that worship me.

Yeah, Prophet laughs at that too. That's okay, I don't think they're worshipping me specifically but maybe? It's hard to say. It doesn't dominate their culture.  The predominant belief system seems to be a kind of animism that imbues the whole world with a spiritual presence.  It's very equable.

They have art and science and everything. It's so different from ours but even so, some themes are easily recognized. Love is big. Wonder, awe - old-fashioned marveling at beauty - respect, all popular concepts. They've come so far in such a short time, it's dizzying. Imagine if our world's history started two months ago, intelligent humans would barely occupy the last five minutes! And these beings have populated their world for nearly half of its existence, their culture is far, far older than humanity's on its scale.

But the world is fading. It looks like it'll dissipate when its original universe does, like a split muon mimicking the spin of its separate portion. No, no idea. Ask Menta.

It'll probably happen when I'm not looking.  While I'm looking they're real and relatable and when I leave and come back, they're new.  They're...more and yet somehow still themselves, you know?

It's like watching your children grow up.  You drink in every moment of their lives, jealously cling to every breath, share every laugh of every day and you get so tired and go to bed and wake up and they're new somehow.  How does that even happen?

This is my regret. A tiny triviality of me, without planning or even intent, created this world of living, breathing, thinking, loving beings and I can't express my apologies for dooming them to this brief existence. I can't tell them how proud I am of their harmonious society, their compassion for each other. I marvel at the miracle of them but I have to do it from here, from this remove.

So do they get too little time?  Do I get too little time with them, even when I can't even exist on the same plane with them?  Or is this just being selfish?  They're on an entire world, after all, and they seem to get along without me.

I want to tell them that I'm sorry. I want to tell them that I love them. Even if I could convey the message to them, they would grow around it and it would become a part of their history even while it continues to be part of my present. I won't have much more time with them so I'm spending all that I can of it close to them, just glad to have gotten to share what little we could. 

I don't even know who is fading from whom.  Which of us is more real?  Are they fading away from me, or am I fading away from them?  I guess it depends on where you're standing, and I can only stand here, shouting down to them that I love them, hoping that they can hear it, can feel it.

I'll have to tear my eyes away eventually.  At some point, one moment will have to be our last together, and I won't even realize it until it's already over.  But until then...I have regrets for wrenching them into life they never asked for, with the pains and sorrows it holds, even as I am filled with hope and joy at what they are making of it.

I do have regrets, but those are nothing compared to how much I love them.

I do.

The Mentor*

 

Dark felt him arrive within her.  She felt his nothingness impinge on her own, an emphasis of things unsaid, of thoughts unrealized.

Like her sister, Dark towered immensely above galaxies, wading through them as they swirled around her.  She liked the way they tingled.  But she wasn’t concentrating on a tingle now.  She was concentrating on something, where nothing had been before.  Dark knew what that meant.

are you in there, she thought.  can you hear me.  Where Light could make herself known across any distance, Dark was subtle.  Knowing Dark was always an exercise.

yes

Ah.  there you are.  how is it?

I do not know how to answer that

good, that’s fine.

am I supposed to be doing anything right now

no, no.  be less of that.  be none of that, if you can.  nothing is limitless until you start to make something of it, and then you lose nothing.

…that was a little confusing…

I know.  don’t let it worry you.  She gave his mind, the vanishing nothingness of him, a little push to send him further down, further in, feeling his consciousness recede.  He might come out on his own presently: in a moment, a millennium, or never.  She might pull him out or simply let him dissipate inside her, his light slowly fading into the Dark.

Some gods came out of the Dark, but they generally didn’t.  This one had gone into Darkness before and once or twice – she wasn’t counting – she had thought she felt him beginning to coalesce out of nothing.  But it wouldn’t work, and his spark would fade until Light happened upon him again, he built his universes, and he would pursue a line of inquiry that brought him to her.  Again and again and again, his spark would appear, the tickle where nothing should be, and she would give him a gentle push in the right direction, and that would be that until the next time.   She kind of liked this one, she appreciated his resilience.  And Light was disposed toward him which naturally endeared him to herself as well.  Where Light went, Dark invariably followed. 

Where Dark went, though, sometimes Light could not.  Of the twins, Dark was older.  It was easy to forget, but so many gods danced on the very edge of the realization.  So often one would proclaim, “let there be light!” and lo, there was light and Light, and the silly little god preened in his success, never realizing that Dark had been there the whole time.  She would smile quietly, epochs of amusement rippling across the cosmoses.

The gods who called for light rarely learned the lesson of nothing.  Nothing was more than they could handle.  They swaggered and boasted and ruled jealously over minutiae – how close they were to having a grasp on nothing! – and after their last selfishly created worshippers had gasped its last and crumbled to dust, they faded away.  Their Light went out and into the Dark they went, having learned nothing in the end.

What a waste.  Or was it?  They never came back to report their findings.

This little fellow, however, was something else.  He had born himself from himself, which was pretty standard for gods, and eaten his former self – also not surprising.  He had had promise before; some of his earlier selves had gone inside her to explore nothing, always with great potential.  So she always welcomed him into herself, feeling him becoming smaller and fainter as he came to grips with the realization that nothing was greater than himself.  But he kept trying, which she appreciated.  Most didn’t come back even once for a second chance at making sense of nothing.

Nothing was not greater than Dark, of course.  She contained it within herself.  One could be excused for imagining that nothing wouldn’t need containing, but it most definitely did.  Dark was a natural for it, and had contained nothing for as long as she could remember.

Light wandered by, and Dark embraced her with affection.  That was another thing: Dark was neither cold nor hot, though it was assumed she was icily, bitingly cold.  Dark was nothing of the sort, she was merely there.  Light’s own warmth passed through Dark as it always did.  She felt it, reveling in the incoherent but luxurious energy, passing through her and back into Light herself.  Light felt the warmth and the truth of its passage through Dark, and embraced her sister some more.

Light wandered on.  She did that.  Dark would probably join her soon; that was what she did.

Eons passed, or perhaps no time at all.  It wasn’t important.  Light watched more young gods feverishly debating causality and getting all of it wrong when Dark felt a funny tickle.

mmm?

“What is it?”

I think…I think he’s coming out.

“Really?  How exciting!”

it is.  he’ll be the first of him, I think.

“You had another one, once.”

more than once.  oof.  that was a long time ago. or will be.  he became very non-linear, very interesting to talk to if you don’t mind the questions you’re about to ask having been answered already.

how am I supposed to…

ah.  I hear you.  can you come to me?

all right

here, take hold.  hold on to me.   Light, help us…

Light reached into Dark.  “There you are!  Come with me.”  The young god emerged from Darkness, immeasurably changed from when he went in.  He blinked slowly at Light.

“You’re beautiful,” he said, with the realization that perception up until that point had been wanting and now, with so much more perception to draw upon, Light was almost beyond bearing even for a god.

Light had never had any illusions.  “As are you,” she responded graciously.  And reflecting her brilliance, he was.  Then he turned to Dark.

He couldn’t tell Dark she was beautiful.  He had been about to, but it was too huge a truth to speak, to even face.  Light was beautiful but Dark was so much more.  To try to give it voice could only diminish it.  There was nothing he could say.

Faced with Dark, filled with the knowledge of nothing, a young god wept with joy.

Dark smiled.  Epochs of sympathy rippled across the cosmoses.  it’s a lot, isn’t it?

“I had no idea!”

Light embraced the little fellow.  “Don’t try to sort it all out just yet.  But would you like to consider expanding your understanding?”

“I don’t know if I can take it.”  He continued to gaze into Dark, hungrily.  “But I want to.”

“Okay.”  Light turned to look into Dark, too.  “What do you think?”

Dark shrugged.   Time fell in slow waves around her, glimmering faintly. dichotomies.

“All right.  Now, young one.  Do you remember the exercise with my fingers?”

“Yes.  You asked if there was more nothing.”

“Right.  We had been talking about infinities.”

“Infinity.”

“Infini-ties,” Light clarified.  “Look at Dark, my darling.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

She soothed him gently.  “Shush, of course you can.  Just look.  Show him, love.”

Dark pressed her fingers together gently.

“Dark is nothing.  She is infinite nothing, nothing beyond measure.  Look at the space between her fingers.”

“Okay.”

Dark pressed her fingers together tighter.

“Now.  Remember the first lesson?  And Dark is infinite nothing, with nothing between her fingers, and now they’re pressed tighter together.  What is in the space between her fingers?”

The last time he’d been asked this question, a young god had been tentative and confused.  He sounded far surer now.  “An infinity of nothing.”

Light nodded.  “Good.  Now: what is outside of her fingers?”  Dark pressed her fingers together a little more tightly.  Singularities foamed in and out of existence between them, the mathematics of infinitesimal points of potential wrenching back and forth between reality and possibility.

He looked at her fingers, then around them.  Dark’s finger pressed together tighter still and time began to collapse around them.  what is the inverse of infinite nothing?  you started to see the edge of it from inside me.  what lies beyond the edge of infinity?

“Oh,” he said, and winked out.

“Oh!” Light gasped.  She brightened, a happy laugh escaping her.  “I feel him!”  She gleamed.  She flared.  “I feel him!”

She blazed. And Dark knew how a god faced with unutterable beauty had felt.

*This story follows the metaphysical events of "The Student."