Dispel Illusion (Impossible Times, #3)

by Mark Lawrence

The two saving graces of explosions are that from the outside they’re pretty and from the inside they’re quick.

My father once told me that the equations that govern the universe don’t care about ‘now’. The mathematics of time don’t care about ‘now’, they just ask what value you want to set ‘t’ to.

Mia set the scene for us. Her biggest strength as a dungeon master had always been her ability to create the atmosphere and play the parts of everyone we met.

‘I’m Anna Mazur. The woman you were speaking to is employed by Miles Guilder.’

Miles of shingle coast stretched out between crumbling cliffs and wild waves, offering the very best of the Jurassic Coast, a fossil hunter’s paradise. Ammonites littered the beaches in gleaming iron pyrites, or fools’ gold as it’s better known. Belemnites lay like scattered stalactites in lustrous flint-like stone, intermingled with shells galore . . . So, of course, we were all indoors playing D&D.

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.

Stray magnetic fields escaped the array as usual, giving me a momentary trippy feeling, as if I were larger than my body, a god with boundless power who could step outside the universe and behold it all as a gem containing time within it, all the years from the Big Bang onward held as a single vision. The sensation passed, leaving me back in my own flesh with that familiar disappointment at having something glorious snatched from my grasp.

I might have spent a life studying time, but it still had the capacity to surprise me. Years crawl by but once they get behind you in a big old stack, it’s amazing how they seem to have done it in the blink of an eye.

Boredom, like hunger and the necessary consequences of feeding that hunger, is one of reality’s ways of nailing us down. It’s nature’s way of telling us that however much we aspire to be spiritual beings, and even the atheists among us seek to be in some way greater than the biomechanics that supports them, our efforts are doomed to fail.

I think a lot of us dream about a life we know we’ll never have, but we hold it out there as a light to follow, even so.

Love had come into my world unexpected, unannounced, like a gentle breeze, hardly noticed at first, yet where it wandered it moved everything. Now there was no end to where I would let it carry me.

Perhaps it would be the same even if I lived to be eighty. Perhaps it’s the same for everyone, no matter how many years they’re trailing behind them. Always the child standing there wearing an old man’s clothes, an old skin hanging from old bones, and wondering where the days went, remembering how marvellous it had been to fritter away so many slow and sunny days. And wanting more.

A dying child is a mirror. What you find to say to them is a truer reflection of who you are than anything you’ll see over your toothbrush.

All along the hall are marvels: some bigger than a man and standing alone, others smaller than an egg and resting on velvet cushions on stone plinths. There’s a mechanical giant built from bronze and silver with its workings visible through windows set all across it. A black sphere hovering in the air, a great clock with multicoloured clockwork jesters juggling amid the swirl of cogs and the swing of the pendulum. A burning horse that seems to be made of water, a flower larger than a man with petals whose iridescence shades into colours never seen before, a pillar of electric blue stone from which a voice sings songs in unknown tongues that would break your heart if you listened too long, a golden pool, a bolt of lightning. On it goes, stretching the whole length of the hall.’

Little mage, you have been most amusing, but do not presume to threaten me. I am the great and marvellous Hoodeeny. I am the alpha and omega. All the world is paint upon my canvas. I decide what is real, what is true; it is me that says what is up and what is down, what is black and what is white.”’

But time is just a different kind of illusion. Though one seems fundamental and the other a human conceit, they are in fact deeply connected. Memory and time, time and memory. The universe doesn’t care about time. We care about time. Because we remember.

I thought about where and when we might go next. Where and when our story had started and the time and place it might end. It seemed to me that those weren’t questions that could be answered, however much you knew. 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.

Time and memory. Memory and time. 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.