Dunes of Silk

The first book said that the web of time is being spun by the living, one thread at a time. The second said that, seen from outside, the web is whole, and every thread that could be drawn is already there. Both were true. The map is finished; the walk is not.

These are the tellings of what the web becomes. It begins as a tree, with few branches. Every choice adds a thread, and every being that learns to travel along it, backward or forward or into other lines, spins threads of its own, until the tree is a web, and the web grows so thick with lines that it stops looking like a web at all and turns white, like sugar spun into cloud. They are the tellings, too, of those who lived inside that whiteness and asked what it was part of. They found that the answer was always something larger. They found that there is no final discovery. They found that to the small, the large are gods. They found that every story ever imagined is written somewhere in it, and that the energy a life is made of has no fixed shape. And they found that the asking never ends, and was never meant to.

I

The Board

· · ·

For forty years Anatole Brisse played chess at the same marble table in the back room of the Café de la Régence, in Paris, and in all that time no stranger had beaten him.

He was not the strongest player in the city. There were masters who could calculate deeper, and young men from Russia and America who knew openings he had never studied. But something happened at his table that did not happen at theirs, and the regulars of the Régence knew it and did not speak of it, the way sailors do not speak of certain waters. When Brisse was thinking, the air above the board seemed to thicken. Players who sat across from him late at night swore afterward that they had seen a kind of pale haze hanging over the pieces, like breath on a cold window, and that when he moved, he moved as though he were reading something written in it.

In the winter of 1900 a young bank clerk began coming to the café every evening to lose to him. He lost forty-one games in a row. On the forty-second evening, instead of setting up the pieces again, he asked the old man how he did it.

Brisse was quiet a long time. Then he began to talk, as old men do on winter nights, and the clerk remembered every word of it for the rest of his life.

Every game of chess that could ever be played, the old man said, was already inside the board. Not some of them. All of them. Before anyone sat down, before the first pawn moved, every possible game was already there, locked inside sixty-four squares and thirty-two pieces and a handful of rules, the way a whole oak is locked inside an acorn. There were more possible games than there were grains of sand on every beach of the world; more than the stars; more, the mathematicians said, than there were atoms in the whole of the heavens the eye could reach. And all of them already existed. They had existed since the rules were made. Nothing a player could ever do would add a single new game to them.

“If you knew every rule and every piece,” Brisse said, “you would know every game. Every line would already have its end. You could see it all, as you see a map.”

“Then there is no point in playing,” said the clerk.

The old man laughed, and the haze above the board stirred.

“You have it backward. The map is finished. The game is not. All the games exist, yes. But this one, yours and mine, tonight, has not been played until we play it. We build it one move at a time. To us it feels like a single road, straight ahead. It is not. Every move we did not make is a road too, and every one of them is still out there, as real as the one we took.” He gestured at the air above the board, where the clerk, for a moment, could have sworn he saw something pale and trembling, like a cobweb in a draft. “When I think, I do not calculate. I look at the roads. So many of them, crossing and crossing, that they are almost white.”

“And you know which one we will take?”

“No,” said the old man. “Nobody knows that. Not even the board. That is the only thing the map does not show. Where we are standing on it.”

He died in the spring. The café gave his table to no one for a month. And on the last night of that month the clerk came in late, when the back room was empty, and sat down alone at the marble table, and set up the pieces, and moved a single pawn.

The air above the board thickened. It was very faint. But it was there: a pale web of roads going out from that one move in every direction, so dense and so many that they were no longer lines at all, only a whiteness, hanging over the squares, patient, complete, waiting to be walked.

II

Fairy Floss

· · ·

In the summer of 1904 the whole world came to St. Louis for the fair, and Ida Lenhart, who was nine, came with her father on a Sunday in July, and saw a machine that made clouds.

It stood in a booth between a man selling ice cream in a rolled waffle and a man selling something new called a hamburger, and there was a line in front of it that went back almost to the Palace of Electricity. Her father grumbled and waited. At the front of the line a man in a white coat stood behind a copper bowl, and in the center of the bowl something spun so fast it hummed.

The man in the white coat was a dentist from Tennessee. Ida’s father told her so, and laughed about it all afternoon, and she did not understand the joke until she was older. The dentist poured a scoop of ordinary white sugar into the spinning heart of the machine. Something inside it was hot; she could feel it on her face. And out of the tiny holes in the spinning head the melted sugar came flying, in threads, in thousands of threads, finer than any hair, cooling as they flew and catching on the rim of the bowl.

At first she could see them. That was the thing she remembered for the rest of her life. For a few seconds she could see each thread by itself, thin and glittering, going across the bowl like a strand of a spider’s web on a summer morning. Then there were more. Then there were so many, crossing and recrossing, catching on each other, laid one over another over another, that she could no longer tell where one ended and the next began. And then there were no threads at all. There was only white: a soft, dry, shining cloud, rising in the bowl like mist off a pond, and the dentist turned a paper cone through it and wound it up, and handed it to her, and said, “Fairy floss. Twenty-five cents, miss.”

She held the cloud in both hands. It weighed almost nothing. She put her face close to it and saw, at the very edge, where the light came through, that it was still made of threads, every bit of it, only too many to see.

“What’s inside it?” she asked the dentist.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just sugar and air. That’s the trick of it. It’s only threads. But get enough threads in one place, and you can’t see the threads anymore. You just see the cloud.”

She ate it on a bench by the great fountain, slowly, letting it melt on her tongue, and every time she pulled a piece away she looked at the torn edge,

where for a moment the single threads showed again, and then closed back into white.

That night, in her bed in a hot room on Menard Street, she dreamed that she was walking in the white. It went down forever beneath her feet, and away forever on every side, soft and bright and made of threads too fine to see. She was not afraid. She had the feeling, in the dream, that she was very small, and that the white was very old, and that somewhere in it, far off, something that lived there had lifted its head and noticed her.

She woke with the taste of sugar in her mouth, and told no one.

III

The Ant

· · ·

She did not finish the floss. Late in the afternoon, on the bench by the fountain, with her father dozing beside her in the heat, the last of it slipped from the paper cone and fell into the gravel at the edge of the path, and she was too sleepy to pick it up.

Under that path, in the dry clay beneath the gravel, there was a colony of ants.

It had been a bad summer for them. The fairgrounds had been dug and paved and planted and dug again, and the great crowds had trampled the grass where the colony had always hunted, and the rains had not come. The foragers went out each morning and came back each evening with less. The larvae were thin. The queen, deep in the dark of the nest, had begun laying fewer eggs, as queens do when they sense a hard winter coming. Nothing in the colony knew what was wrong. It only knew that the world had grown poor, and that it was dying slowly, and that there was nothing to be done.

Then, late on a July afternoon, something enormous passed overhead.

The ants did not see it. They had no way to see a thing so large. They felt it: a darkness moving across the light, a trembling in the ground, a pressure in the air so vast that the foragers on the surface froze where they stood. And then it was gone, and where there had been nothing but hot gravel there was a mountain. White, and soft, and sweet beyond anything any ant in that colony had ever known.

The first forager to reach it did not eat. She ran for home, laying down a trail of scent behind her as she went, the oldest message her kind knows: here, here, come, here. And the colony came pouring up out of the ground in a black river, thousands upon thousands, and fell on the white mountain, and carried it home grain by grain until the sun went down.

The larvae grew fat that week. The queen began to lay again. The colony lived through a winter it would not have lived through otherwise, and in the spring it was stronger than it had been in years, and it went on for a long time afterward, as such colonies do, generation after generation, deep under the path by the fountain.

It never knew what had happened. It had no way to know. It could not have understood a girl, or a fair, or a dentist from Tennessee, or a machine that spun sugar into cloud. It knew only that the world had been dying, and

something beyond all understanding had passed by, and when it was gone, there was life where there had been none.

If ants had a word for such a thing, it would be the word people use for gods.

And the girl who had been that god fell asleep on the bench beside her father, and never knew what she had done, and walked home that evening past a thousand small lives that she did not see. It is the way of gods to pass without noticing. It is the way of the small to remember them forever.

Human beings are gods to the ant. That part is simple. The part that is harder to hold is the other way round: that to beings as far beyond humankind as humankind is beyond the colony under the gravel, humans are the ones in the dark, feeling the ground tremble. What would one of those beings look like to a person, if it passed close enough to be felt? Not a person. Something the mind could not take in. A light with no single direction. An eye that shone every way at once and seemed to know every road. Something that brought people to their knees, and broke the minds of some of them, and left the rest, afterward, with a gift they could not explain.

What would anyone call it, but a god?

IV

The Dweller

· · ·

There is a world that is white all the way down.

It has no sky. Or it has one, but nothing that lives there has ever reached it. The world is a single endless plain, soft and bright and dry, heaped in low white dunes as fine as silk, that runs away forever in every direction a creature can walk: forward and back, to the left and to the right, farther than anything could travel in a lifetime of lifetimes. And it runs down forever, too. Dig into it and there is more of it beneath. Dig for an age and there is more. It is not a surface with something under it. It is white all the way through, the way the sea is water all the way through, and the creatures who live in it move through it as fish move through the sea, and think no more about it than fish think about water.

Only up is different. Up, no one knows. The white may go on above as it goes on below. It may end. It may be growing that way, slowly, adding to itself from above like snow. No one has ever gone to see.

One of the creatures who lived there was curious. It had no name. It was, as those things went, very old, and very patient, and it had begun, a long time ago, to wonder what the white was made of.

So it did what no one of its kind had thought to do. It took hold of the white and pulled it apart, very carefully, until it came away in a single fiber, finer than anything, and it followed that fiber with its attention, as one follows a thread through a maze.

The fiber was a line.

Along it, as the Dweller followed, there were things. A dark sea. A quay in the grey of morning, with a child standing at the end of it. A marble table in a back room, with a chess game half played. A forest lying flat in a great ring in the taiga. A spider on a window latch, letting out its first thread into the wind. It was a world, the whole of a world, from its beginning to wherever it ran out; and the fiber was only one of them. It pulled another. Another world. Another. Every fiber of the white was a line of some world, and every line crossed a thousand others, and the dunes were not ground at all. They were not sand. They were silk, the way a spider’s web is silk: threads, and every thread a world. They were worlds, all of them, crossing so densely that they could no longer be seen one by one, the way threads of spun sugar can no longer be seen once there are enough of them.

It had lived its whole life inside every world there was, and taken them for the floor.

It followed the fibers down, for a very long time, to see where they had come from, and found that they grew fewer. Far down, the white thinned into something it could see through: a web, wide and fine, with gaps between the threads. Farther down still, the web thinned into something simpler: a single trunk, dividing and dividing, like a tree with few branches. That was how it had begun. A tree, with few choices. Then more choices, and the branches crossed, and it was a web. Then more.

But choices alone could not have made it so thick. The Dweller understood that last. Inside the lines, things had learned to travel. They had learned to go back along their own lines, and forward, and across into others, and wherever they went they spun new threads, the way a spider cannot cross a room without leaving silk. And the ones they made learned to travel too, and spun more. Every mind that learned, spun. The web had not grown heavy because the worlds were many. It had grown heavy because the worlds had learned to move, and every movement was a thread, and there was no end to the learning, and so there was no end to the threads, until the tree was a web and the web was the white, and the white was everything the Dweller had ever known.

To understand the white, it realized, was to understand every universe at once. It had only just begun.

Once, following one fiber farther than it meant to, it came upon something inside a line that was looking back at it: a mind, patient and ancient, that had learned to stand outside its own small web and see it whole, and believed, as every such mind believes, that it had seen everything. The Dweller had leaned closer than it should have, to see it better. It had felt the smaller mind begin to break. And so it had done what the old ones always do, on every rung. It had made itself small, and gentle, and said the only words that help.

It thought of that often, afterward, in the white. It thought of how small the watcher had been, and how sure. And it wondered, for the first time, and with a feeling it did not have a name for, whether anything above the white had ever looked down at the Dweller in the same way.

V

The Larger Infinity

· · ·

In the winter of 1891, in the city of Halle, a mathematician sat alone at his desk until the candle burned down, and proved that there is no largest thing.

He had been working toward it for nearly twenty years. Most of the men of his profession thought he was wasting his life, and some of the most powerful among them thought worse than that; they said he was corrupting mathematics, and did what they could to keep his papers out of the journals. For the whole of history, infinity had been a single thing, the endless, the end of counting, the place where numbers gave up. He had come to believe that this was wrong. He had come to believe that there were infinities of different sizes. That night he found a way to show it so simply that a child could follow it, and when he saw it on the page in front of him, he put down his pen and sat without moving for a long time.

It went like this.

Imagine a list that never ends. On every line of the list there is a row of digits, and each row never ends either. Suppose someone claims that this endless list holds every possible endless row of digits, every one that could ever be written, with none left out.

Now make a new row. Look at the first digit of the first row, and write down a different digit. Look at the second digit of the second row, and write down a different one. The third digit of the third row; change it. And so on, forever, down the list, like a crack running diagonally down a wall.

The row you have made is different from the first row, because its first digit is different. It is different from the second row, because its second digit is different. It is different from every row on the list, somewhere, in at least one place. So it is not on the list. But the list was supposed to hold every row there is.

It does not. It cannot. However endless it is, there are more rows than it has lines. There is an infinity bigger than the infinity of counting.

And that was only the first step. Before that winter was over he had gone further, and shown that it is not a single ladder with one rung more. For any collection at all, however large, even an infinite one, there is always a larger one to be made out of it. Above every infinity there is another. There is no top. Whatever you imagine as the biggest thing that could possibly be, there is something bigger than it; and above that, something bigger still; and it does not end.

Some of the people who heard of it were frightened. It is a frightening thing to be told that there is no ceiling to the world. The mathematician was not frightened, or not only. He had long believed that the ladder of infinities went up forever, rung above rung, and that above all of them, beyond anything that could be reached or counted or proved, was the one infinity that holds every other; and he gave that one the name of God. He wrote to priests about it. Some of them understood him better than his colleagues did.

The candle went out. He did not light another. He sat in the dark of his study in Halle with the whole endless ladder in his head, rung above rung, going up into a height that had no end.

In a dream that same night, far away in a place he never learned the name of, he was walking on a white plain that went down forever and outward forever, and when he looked up, there was more white above him, and more above that, and more above that, and he understood, in the way one understands things in dreams, that this too was only a single rung.

VI

The Reel

· · ·

In the autumn of 1912, when she was seventeen, Ida Lenhart went every Saturday to the picture house on Olive Street, and one night she stayed after the lights came up and asked the projectionist where the story went.

The picture had run a little over an hour: a drama about a sea captain and a woman who waited for him on a cliff. At the end the captain’s ship went down in a storm, and the woman stood on the cliff looking at the water, and the picture stopped. The piano played a last chord. The lights came up. Everyone put on their coats and went out into the street, talking about supper.

Ida sat in her seat with her hands in her lap and could not move. The woman on the cliff was still standing there. Ida could feel it. The picture had stopped, but the woman had not; she was still out there somewhere, looking at the sea, and in a minute she would turn and walk home along the cliff path, and that night she would sit alone at her table, and tomorrow she would get up, and the next day, and the story would go on and on, and no one in the whole picture house had seen it.

The projectionist found her there when he came down to lock up. He was an old man named Horace Pell, with a thin face and hands scarred shiny from a fire in a booth years before, when a reel of film had caught; the film in those days burned like a fuse. He did not tell her to go home. He looked at her face, and then he took her up the narrow stairs into the booth, where the machine stood ticking as it cooled and the reel lay in its tin, still warm.

“You want to know where she went,” he said.

Ida nodded.

“Nowhere,” said Horace Pell. “That’s the thing nobody tells you. The story didn’t stop. The camera did. They ran out of film, or they ran out of money, or they reckoned an hour was as long as folks would sit. So they stopped cranking. But she’s still up on that cliff. She’s still out there. It’s only that we don’t get to see anymore.”

He lifted the lid of the tin and showed her the reel: a great wheel of dark film, wound tight.

“And look here. It’s all still in it. Every face, every wave. The light went through this tonight and threw her up on that wall, and then the light went out into the room, into your eyes and everybody else’s, and some of it’s still in your head right now, isn’t it? You’ll carry her home. You’ll think

about her tomorrow. That’s her, going on. Nothing finished tonight, miss. Nothing ever does. It just goes somewhere you can’t follow it.”

He closed the tin.

“One day,” he said, “they’ll send pictures down wires, like the telegraph. Into a thousand rooms at once. A million. And the pictures won’t wear out, not like these do. The same light, over and over, going everywhere, never used up.” He shook his head. “You’ll see it. I won’t.”

She walked home through the October dark along Olive Street with the woman from the cliff walking beside her in her head, and she understood something that she would not have been able to put into words for many years. A story is not a finished thing. A picture ends because the reel is only so long. A life ends because the body is only so long. But what went into them does not stop. It goes into the room, and into the eyes, and into the heads of the ones who watched, and on from there into whatever those people touch. Nothing in the world is finished. Things only go out of sight.

VII

The Moving Sands

· · ·

In the summer of 1957 a newspaperman drove down the coast of Oregon to write a magazine article about sand.

It was not the kind of assignment anyone dreams of. Near the little town of Florence, the government had been trying for years to stop the dunes. They moved. People who had never lived near them did not believe that, but it was true: driven by the wind off the Pacific, the dunes crept inland a few feet every year, slowly, patiently, like a sea that had decided to take its time. They had buried roads. They had buried houses. Out among them stood the grey tops of whole forests, drowned standing up, jutting from the sand like the masts of sunken ships. The men from the Department of Agriculture had found a way to hold them: a coarse grass brought over from Europe, planted by hand in endless rows, whose roots bound the sand and stopped it. The newspaperman meant to write about the grass.

He never did. The article was never finished, and never printed.

He walked out into the dunes one evening, alone, to see them without the men from the government talking. The wind was up. The sand hissed across the ridges and poured down the steep faces in thin, glittering sheets, and the whole landscape was moving, very slightly, all at once, like the skin of something breathing. He stood on the crest of a dune with the sea behind him and nothing ahead but sand, and something happened to him that he would spend the rest of his life failing to explain.

It came all at once. Not an idea. A place. A world that was desert from pole to pole, under a hotter sun, where there was no sea at all and water was worth more than blood; where people wore their own sweat and drank it again, and walked in broken rhythms so as not to be heard; and where, beneath the sand, something moved that was so large the dunes rose over its back like a wake. He did not make it up. He knew that even then. It was simply there in front of him, the way the Oregon dunes were there, and he was only the one standing in the right place to see it.

He went home and did not write about grass. He spent six years writing about the other desert instead. He read about ecology, and religion, and oil, and the deserts of Arabia, and he wrote until the manuscript was so long that no one wanted it. Some twenty publishers turned it down. In the end it was taken by a small house whose real business was printing repair manuals for automobiles, and it came out in 1965 to almost no attention at all.

Then people began to read it. Then more. In time it became the best-selling book of its kind ever written. Millions of people walked in that desert. They named their children after the people in it. They dreamed of the thing beneath the sand. And the world he had seen for a moment on a dune in Oregon became, in its way, part of this one: printed, retold, painted, filmed, carried in millions of heads, pouring its heat into a world that had never had it. He had caught something that leaked through, and brought it home, and let it loose.

Far off in the dunes of silk, the Dweller was following fibers, as it always was, and one of them opened onto a desert.

It was a whole world, from its beginning to wherever it ran out. It was all sand, under a hot sun. There was no sea. And beneath the sand something enormous moved, and the dunes rose over its back like a wake. The Dweller watched it for a long time. It could not have known that on another fiber, very far away, a man had once stood on a beach in Oregon and seen this exact world, or one very like it, and written it down. But it noticed something, and was struck by it, in the way it was only ever struck by very simple things.

A man standing on dunes of sand, in a world made of dunes of silk, seeing a world of dunes.

It was dunes all the way down.

No one can say where the desert came from. Perhaps it was already there, somewhere in the white, and the newspaperman had only looked through a thin place for a moment and seen it. Perhaps it had been held out to him by someone farther along the web: a later version of himself, or of all of us, who had walked that desert already and wanted him to see it too. Perhaps every story is like that. Not invented, but found; and written down; and carried home.

VIII

The Clay

· · ·

The youngest son of the woman who had eaten fairy floss at the fair was born with long legs, and from the time he could walk he used them for one thing.

Eddie Rourke played basketball. He played it in the alley behind the house on Menard Street, with a peach basket nailed to a telephone pole. He played it in the church gym and at school, and he played it in his sleep, jerking and kicking under the blankets until his brothers threw shoes at him. By sixteen he was six foot two and quick as a struck match, and men from colleges came to watch him. He knew, the way the young know things, that he was made for it. His energy had a shape, and the shape was a boy running the length of a court.

In December of 1944, in a frozen forest in Belgium, a shell burst in the trees above his foxhole, and a splinter of iron no bigger than a fingernail went into his back and cut the cord that carried orders from his mind to his legs.

The doctors were kind, and plain. He would never walk again. He would never run. And a man in a hospital bed who has been told this learns a particular darkness, one the men in those long wards knew well and did not speak of: the feeling that the energy that had been himself had been poured into a single shape, and the shape had been broken, and there was nowhere left for it to go. Some of the men turned their faces to the wall. Some did worse. At night the wards were very quiet, with the quiet of something waiting to end.

Then, in 1946, in a veterans’ hospital in California, someone rolled a ball across the floor of the gym.

The men in the chairs went after it. Within a month they were playing: crashing, tipping over, dragging themselves back into their seats, making up the rules as they went. Two pushes of the wheels, then the ball had to bounce, or be passed, or be thrown. Eddie was among them from the first week, and he laughed on that court for the first time since the forest. Within a year there were teams. Within two, those teams were touring the country and playing before crowds in the great arenas of the East. By 1960 the game was being played in Rome, at the first great games held for athletes like them, and it has not stopped since.

What he understood, in that first year, he spent the rest of his life trying to say. The energy had never been his legs. It was the wanting: to move, to throw, to watch the ball go up and drop through the ring. The legs had been

one shape of it. The chair was another. And the energy did not care. It poured into the new shape the way water fills whatever holds it. He took in the energy of the men around him, the stubbornness of one, the jokes of another, a sergeant from Texas’s trick of spinning his chair on one wheel, and mixed it into his own until he could not have said which parts had been his to begin with. The game changed them, and they changed the game, and what came out was a new thing that was still, in every way that mattered, basketball. The ball went through the hoop exactly the same.

He never pretended it was the same as running. There is a hardness in the world, and the energy cannot always take the exact shape it hoped for. Sometimes it can only take a shape very near it. But he played for nineteen years and coached for thirty more, and near the end of his life he told a reporter that he had had the life he was made for, only not the one he had planned.

Eighty years after the forest, his great-granddaughter broke her neck diving into a lake, and the orders from her mind to her body stopped at the same place his had. She was twenty. A small device was set into the surface of her brain, and within a year she was playing basketball on a screen, running the full length of a glowing court on legs that were only light, moving them by thinking. At night she dreamed she played on a wooden floor, on her own legs, and in the mornings, for a moment, she could not have said which game was more real. When the family told her about the old man and his chair, she laughed. Of course, she said. Of course he knew.

Here is what the old man knew, and what she knew, and what the long line of them had been learning. The energy a life is made of has no fixed shape. It has leanings; some are born to run and some are not, and the world is hard, and there are limits. But the limits are only the limits of what we understand so far, and every generation that learns more has fewer of them. The same energy can be legs, or wheels, or light moving on a screen, or a dream that is lived so hard it becomes a kind of waking. It can take in the energy of others and mix it with its own. It can change into forms no one has seen before. It can grow simpler, or more strange. It is clay, and it is ours.

And somewhere very far along the web, where the understanding is nearly complete, the limits fall away almost entirely, and reality bends to the will of whoever has learned enough. There is an old word for a being like that, and the word is god.

Far down one of the fibers of the dunes of silk, the Dweller once found such a being, a descendant of that stubborn boy, or of all of us. It no longer dreamed of courts. Its dreams had grown as its knowledge had grown, and now it tended universes, three hundred of them, the way a man tends a garden; and as its wishes changed, the vibrations of the worlds it tended changed with them, and new realities formed out of the change, and went their own way. It was very old, and very wise, and very far from any gym in St. Louis.

But once in a while, for no reason it could have named, it would make a small arc of light across the dark of one of its skies: something round, rising, turning, and dropping cleanly through a ring.

IX

The Counting

· · ·

Far down in the white, the Dweller had begun to ask the oldest question of all. Was there a beginning?

It had followed the fibers down as far as it could, through the white into the web, through the web into the tree, through the tree to the single trunk at the bottom of it all. And there, at the very base of the trunk, where it had expected to find the first thing, the thing that came before everything else, it found that the trunk itself was a fiber. A single thread, running down into something else. Into more white.

It tried going up instead, into the place no one had ever gone, and found that it did not yet know how.

So it did something small and strange. It set a little part of itself to counting. One. Two. Three. It thought that if it counted long enough, it might come to the end of the question, the way one comes to the end of a road.

The counting went on. Ten thousand. A million. The Dweller watched it for a long time, and slowly understood what it was watching. The counting would never end. Not because it was slow, but because there was no last number. After every number there was another. And the question it had asked, whether there was a beginning, was the same shape as the counting. Every time it found the first thing, there was something before it. Every time it found the largest thing, there was something larger. There was no final answer. There was no final discovery. There was always one more.

In another story, far away along some other fiber, there had been a mind that could not stop checking its own work, and for that mind the endlessness had been a prison. The Dweller felt no prison. It felt something it had no word for, and would not have wanted one: the pleasure of the next number. The pleasure of the next fiber, and the world inside it. The pleasure of not knowing, yet. An endless world was not a curse. It was the reason to go on living in one. There would always be something new. It was almost like hunger. It was almost like love.

It still did not know whether the white repeated itself: whether this was the same great world, beginning and growing and folding back and beginning again, over and over, forever; or whether it was one turn of some larger cycle that the Dweller did not yet have the mind to see. It did not know. But yet was the word it kept. It would understand one day. And on that day there would be a new question, larger than this one, and it would begin to count again.

And very far down one of the fibers, on a warm evening in the summer of 1985, on a porch in St. Louis, a woman of ninety spilled a little sugar from her coffee onto the boards and watched the ants come for it.

She watched them for a long time: the first one finding it, running home, and then the black river of them pouring out of a crack between the boards. She thought of a white cloud in a paper cone, and a machine that spun sugar into threads, and a dream she had never told anyone about, of walking in a whiteness that went down forever. She thought of a picture of a woman on a cliff who was, she felt sure, still standing there. She thought, as she had thought on and off for eighty years, about whether there had been a beginning to it all, and she laughed out loud, alone on the porch, because she had been asking it all her life and had never come to the end of it, and she would not have traded that question for any answer in the world.

In the corner of the porch, between the rail and the post, a spider had spun its web, and the low sun came through it so that every thread showed, one by one, the way the floss had shown its threads at the torn edge eighty years before. She looked at it a long time. Threads, she thought. It was threads all the way down. A spider spins a web, and a web crosses a web, and the webs cross and cross until there are so many that no one can see the threads anymore, only the white, heaped up like dunes. Dunes of silk. And every living thing somewhere inside them, walking a single thread, sure it was the whole of the road.

The ants carried the sugar home, grain by grain. Something had passed, and left a gift, and was gone.

And far above the porch, and far above the white, and far above whatever the white was part of, where no one had ever gone, something went on. The Dweller did not know what it was. Not yet.

X

Every Story

· · ·

I want to say something plainly here, in my own words, before the end.

Every story you have ever loved might be true.

Not true the way a fact in a newspaper is true. True the way a place is true. Every universe, every idea, every story, every combination of energy that could ever come together, either exists somewhere in the dunes of silk, or could have existed; and in the dunes, those are almost the same thing. It was already there before anyone thought of it. It was already calculated.

My favorite story is Dune. And I like to think that somewhere there is a desert planet exactly as Frank Herbert wrote it, or a version very close to it, with the sand and the heat and the thing that moves beneath it. Somewhere a boy on a desert farm watches two suns go down, the way he does in Star Wars. Somewhere an owl brings a letter to a boy who sleeps in a cupboard under the stairs, and Harry Potter is not a book but a life. Somewhere a man spends ten years trying to sail home to Ithaca, and the Odyssey is not a poem but a memory. Somewhere there is Middle-earth. Somewhere there is a wardrobe that opens onto snow, and a white rabbit going down a hole, and old gods dreaming at the bottom of the sea. Maybe exactly as we imagined them. Maybe a little different. But there.

Where do the ideas come from? Maybe from us. Maybe from earlier versions of ourselves, or from future ones, reaching across for a second and touching a thought. Maybe some version of us has already gone further into the universe than we have, and sometimes, for an instant, we see what it saw. Maybe a writer is just someone who looked into a different lifetime for a moment, and wrote it down. Energy that leaked through, and we caught it, and made it part of our world.

People say we are a form of God experiencing itself. Maybe that is true. But maybe it is true in a simpler, stranger way than they meant: that when we imagine a world, we are not only making it up. We are seeing it. And when we write it down, we bring a little of it home.

XI

· · ·

Imagine if it all comes down to this.

Imagine that we are part of dunes and dunes of silk. Not sand. Silk, the way a spider’s web is silk: threads. Threads of timelines. Threads of universes. Threads of every existence that ever was or ever could be, spun one over another, crossing and crossing, through time, in a place we do not understand. So many threads that no one could ever see them one by one. Only the white. Only the dunes, going down forever, and out forever on every side, and up into something no one has ever reached.

Somewhere in those dunes there is one thread, and on that thread there is us. We walk it one step at a time, and to us it feels like one straight road. But every step we did not take is a thread too, and it is still there. The map is finished. The walk is not. Both are true.

There is always something bigger, and always something smaller. We are gods to the ant that finds our sugar, and something out there is a god to us. Even the dunes are part of something we do not have the words for yet. And whatever that is, it is part of something else.

Was there a beginning? We will ask forever. That is not the sad part. That is the gift. There is always something new to learn, and it never runs out.

So use your energy wisely. Choose what to do with it. Don’t be limited by the shape other people locked your energy into. You are free. Your energy is free. You can shape it however you wish. You can take in other energy and mix it into your own. You can combine, and create mutations no one has ever seen. Or you can simplify it, as much as you want. It is yours.

Threads of silk become webs. Webs become dunes. And the dunes are only threads again, in dunes of dunes of silk, going on and on. Even if one day we reach those dunes, even if we come to understand them, there will be more to learn and more to live past them, and more past that.

The cycle continues. Never ending. Infinite.

Dunes of silk.