Dispel Illusion (Impossible Times, #3)

by Mark Lawrence

After all, forward time travel is just an advanced form of waiting.’

In real life, when you miss a target you tend to be able to assume that you will at least get somewhere near what you were aiming at. If I aim at the bullseye I may miss, but I can be fairly sure my dart will hit somewhere on the board, and even if I’m having a particularly off day I can still pretty much guarantee that it will at least hit something in the pub. When mathematics goes wrong the consequences can be more severe, rather like the dart missing the bullseye, the board and the pub, and hitting a three-toed sloth instead, somewhere in the Bolivian jungle. Or perhaps drifting away through interstellar space off the shoulder of Orion.

I followed the signs, doing that almost-walk where all that holds us back from a flat sprint is the misplaced sense of embarrassment that so often keeps people in check. It’s as though somehow we think that if we throw decorum to the wind and run, the universe might disapprove and raise the stakes still further, greeting us with a greater disaster than we might find if we just walk there like civilised human beings.

There are various processes in life where you’re carried on past the point of no return despite yourself, and you find that the only option is to plunge on. An argument developing into a fistfight gathers its own momentum; ill-advised sex, too: with both of them you reach a point where pulling out ceases to be an option.

I had left that boy behind in my wake, just as we all abandon the children we were. Slow or fast, the years pull us apart from them, sometimes in one savage yank, sometimes by degrees, like the hour hand of the clock, too stealthy for us to perceive its motion and yet when you look again it is no longer where you left it.

There’s a certain pain associated with doing even things you love and knowing that it is for the last time.

The stories of our lives don’t behave themselves; they don’t have clear beginnings, and even death isn’t a clear end. We just do what we can, we take what kindness and joy we find along the way, we ride the rapids as best we’re able.

The forking of timelines might seem to take away meaning from our own path, but surely it’s the ultimate comfort. We can look at ourselves and say that this isn’t everything we are. We know now that all of us are explored across an infinity of universes, and that’s the big kind of infinity, not one of those pokey countable infinities. We are all of us endless. Every possibility gets its chance. The best and the worst of us walk the stage. All of our choices sampled. Every mistake made and avoided.