Deep in that cloud of unlived histories were unlived lives, infinitesimally small, buried in eons of time and light-centuries of space, unreal only because they had never been enacted or observed. I understood that it was within my power to touch them and thus to realize them. What followed, if I made such an intervention, would be a new and unpredictable tributary of time: not obliterating the old history but lying alongside it. The price would be my own awareness.
