The Unfinished Web

It has long been said that time is a tree. All that has happened, the saying goes, hangs from a single trunk; every act divides a branch as a stream divides at a stone; and whoever climbs back down a branch saws it off behind him. These are the tellings of those who found it otherwise. They found that nothing which has existed has ever ceased to exist, but only moved. They found that the past is a country, fixed and real and still inhabited by what it held, and that the present is a coastline forever being laid down. They found that the future is not a place at all, but open air through which no thread has yet been drawn. And they found that the whole of it, every line and every crossing of lines, is not a tree but a web: one that was never finished, and is being spun still, at its edges, by the living, who stand upon those edges without knowing it.

I The Dry Flower · · · The greenhouse stood at the end of a coast road the sea was slowly reclaiming, a long vault of whitewashed glass and rusted iron in which Agathe Morel had kept, for twenty years, the things other people were content to let die. Her customers called it the nursery. Her children, who had learned to walk by gripping the rims of clay pots and had grown up breathing its green, wet, faintly rotten air, called it only the glass, as though there were no other glass in the world. It was in the glass, on an afternoon in late October of 1996, when the light came in low and yellow across the benches, that the girl found the flower. It lay in a drawer of the potting table among twine and grafting knives: a single rose, pressed flat and gone the color of old blood, its petals thin as the skin on boiled milk. The girl was eight, and had reached the age at which a child begins to suspect that adults keep the most important things in drawers. She carried it to her mother cupped in both hands, the way one carries a bird that has flown into a window. “It’s dead,” she said. It was not a question. It was a verdict. The mother set down the tray of cuttings she had been sorting and looked a long time at the thing in her daughter’s hands. It had come from the wreath at her own grandmother’s burial, a dozen years before, and she had forgotten that she kept it. The old woman had been a fisherman’s daughter, and had outlived her husband, her sisters, and two of her children, and had died at eighty-four with her hands still hard from mending nets. “Is it?” the mother said. The boy, who was five and followed his sister everywhere with the grave persistence of a small moon, came to stand at her elbow to see what the matter was.

The mother took the rose from her daughter and, without ceremony, closed her fist on it. It broke with a sound like paper taking fire. When she opened her hand it held a little drift of rust-colored flakes and three or four seeds no larger than grains of sand, and these she tipped into a pot of black earth on the bench and stirred in with one finger. The girl’s face went white, and then red. “Where did it go?” said the boy. “Where it was always going,” said the mother, and wiped her palm on her apron, and began, as she always began, not with an answer but with a history. The rose had been a seed first, she told them, and the seed had been nothing but a small locked room of stored sunlight, packed there by the plant that made it. Given water, the room unlocked. The light inside became root and stem and the tight red fist of a bud, and when the bud opened it drew more light down out of the sky and made more of itself, and a bee came for it and carried a dust of it away into some other flower in some other garden, where it became something else. When the rose was cut, the life in it, the part that drank and leaned toward windows, went out into the air as warmth and as that faint sweet rot cut flowers give off in their last days; and the room took the warmth, and the mourners in the room took it on their skins and carried it out into the street. What was left was the body the light had built. That body had waited in a drawer for twelve years, patient as a coin. Now it was in the earth, where small blind things would find it and eat it and die in their turn, and become the dark richness in which something else would take root. “So nothing’s ever gone,” the girl said slowly, testing the thought the way one tests ice. “Nothing is ever gone. Everything is going.” And because the thought led there, the mother told them of the old woman’s father, the fisherman, the children’s great-great-

grandfather, though the boy could not hold so many greats in his head at once, who had gone out one morning in the autumn of 1905 into a sea that was flat at dawn and was not flat by noon. He had never been found. The family had put up a stone in the churchyard at Douarnenez with nothing beneath it, and his daughter, who had been five that autumn, had spent the rest of her life looking at the water as though it owed her something. “Then he’s gone,” said the girl.

“The sea has him. The sea made him into crabs and weed and the silver sides of fish. Some of him has been eaten by people who never knew his name. Some of him is very likely still down there in the dark, becoming stone. He never stopped. He only stopped being a fisherman.” The girl was quiet a long while. Beyond the glass the sun was going down into the water in a long bar of fire. “But then why does anything get old,” she said at last, “if nothing’s ever lost?” It was a better question than the mother had expected, and she answered it honestly, because she believed children could bear the truth more easily than the soft lies that are fed to them. Nothing was lost, she said, but everything spread. The light that built the rose had been gathered tight, the way a fist is tight, and at every passing it loosened: the fist opening into a hand, the hand into a spray of fingers, the fingers into a warmth too thin to hold anything at all. The rose’s last warmth had gone into the room, but no one alive could gather it back into a rose. That was the one direction in which the world ran, and it ran in it always. The only reason there were still roses was that the sun, every morning, poured new light onto the world, young and gathered and tight, and the world caught it in leaves and made bodies of it before it could spread and cool and drift away into the dark between the stars. The circles of the world were real circles: water rising into cloud and falling back as rain, the leaf becoming soil becoming leaf. But they turned the way eddies turn in a river. They went round and round, and the river went one way. The boy had fallen asleep against a sack of peat. The girl had not. She sat on the potting bench with her chin on her knees, looking at the pot where the rose had gone, and on her face was an expression the mother would remember many years later, when the girl was grown and the thing she had grown into had carried her beyond all remembering: the look of someone who has just been told where a door is, and has resolved, quietly and without telling anyone, to find the key.

II The Stopped Clock · · · The chronometer froze on the fourteenth day of the polar night, and it was the opinion of the navigator, so far as anyone aboard the Varg was later in a position to hold opinions, that everything which followed began there. She was a sealer out of Tromsø, squat and tarred and reeking of blubber, caught in the pack north and east of Spitsbergen in the autumn of 1896 and carried north by the ice as helplessly as a beetle in amber. Anders Hjelm had shipped aboard her as navigator: a slender, quiet man, too educated for the trade, who had come to the sea from a failed apprenticeship in a surveyor’s office in Christiania and had brought the surveyor’s affliction with him, a need to know, always and exactly, where he stood. In the ice he could no longer know it. The sun had gone down in October and would not rise again until the end of February. The stars, when the fog allowed them, wheeled about a point nearly overhead, and with every week of drift that point crept closer to the zenith. Then the chronometer, the ship’s one true clock, seized in its gimbals despite the lamp kept burning beneath it, and its hands stood at twenty past four and stayed there. There was no longer any way to say what hour it was at Greenwich, and so no way to say where on the curved skin of the world the Varg lay. The crew took it for an omen. The navigator took it for a lesson. He spent the long dark at his chart table with a candle and a terrestrial globe the size of a man’s head, which had been his father’s, turning it slowly beneath his palm. More and more his attention went to the top of it: the brass pin on which it spun. Every line of longitude, which ran so proudly and separately down the charts, converged at that pin into a single point, and at that point ceased to mean anything at all. A man standing on the pole could not walk east. He could not walk west. Every step he took, in

whatever direction he chose, would be a step south. East and west, then, were not features of the world. They were agreements, made by the people who lived along the lines so that they could tell one another which way to turn. They were true, as true as anything, for as long as one stood on a line. At the place where all the lines met, they dissolved. He began in the log to write of time in the same way, and those entries were read afterward by the ship’s owner in Tromsø and judged the work of a disordered mind. They were not. They were the work of a mind that had been stripped of its clocks and had discovered that it could do without them. The day, he wrote, was a line. Morning lay one way along it and night the other, and those who lived upon the line called one direction before and the other after, and were right to, exactly as a man walking the equator is right to say east. But the ice had taken the sun and the cold had taken the clock, and he stood now in a place where every hour was the same hour, and he had come to suspect that the hours had never been anything but addresses. Yesterday was not gone. It was elsewhere, as Tromsø was elsewhere. The Varg had not unmade Tromsø by sailing away from it; the harbor and the drying racks and his wife’s window above the chandler’s shop remained exactly where they had been, and a man with a sound ship could sail back to them. That no ship could sail back to yesterday was a failing of ships. It said nothing whatever about yesterday. “And tomorrow?” the mate asked, the one time the navigator tried to explain it aloud. The mate was a practical man from Lofoten who believed in God, in aquavit, and in the tide tables, in roughly that order. The navigator was quiet for some time. Beneath the hull the ice groaned, a sound like enormous doors being tried one after another somewhere far down in the dark. “Tomorrow,” he said at last, “is further out on the ice than anyone has walked.” He meant it lightly. Afterward he was not sure it had been light. The address called yesterday was real, because every man aboard had stood in it; the ship’s timbers still held its cold, and his own body still held its hunger and its fatigue. But the address called tomorrow had no one in it and nothing in it, not so much as a footprint. It lay ahead of them in the dark like the white, featureless country beyond the bow, which might be ice all the way

to the pole, or open water, or nothing at all, and which would be none of these things until the drift carried them into it and made it real by arriving. The Varg came out of the ice in the spring of 1897, two hundred miles from where she had gone in, with eleven of her fourteen men. The navigator was not among them. In the last week of February, the mate said, he had walked out onto the pack to take a sight of the first sunrise of the year, the first in a hundred and twenty days, and a fog had come down, and he had not come back. They found his sextant lying on the ice and his footprints going out from the ship; and at a certain place, the mate would swear to it until the day he died, the footprints simply ended. There was no hole, no crack, no blood, no sign of a bear. It was as though the man who made them had walked to the end of some line that no one else could see, and stepped off.

III The Cross-Spider · · · When the university at Breslau retired Casimir Wendt with a silver inkstand and a speech he did not hear, he went home to the village where he had been born and gave the remainder of his life to a single species of spider, and his neighbors took this as proof of everything they had long suspected about professors. The species was the common cross-spider, which hangs its wheel-

shaped snares in every garden hedge in Europe and is so ordinary that no one looks at it. The old man looked at it. He looked at it for eleven summers, from a camp stool set among his roses, with a hand lens and a stack of oilcloth notebooks, until the village children stopped daring one another to steal his hat and simply accepted him, as one accepts a scarecrow. He had spent forty years among men who drew trees. It was the great image of his century, the tree of life: every living kind a twig, every twig traced back to its limb, every limb to the trunk, the whole vast branching thing rooted in some first warm puddle at the beginning of the world. He had drawn such trees himself, in chalk, for three generations of students, and he had believed in them. It was the spider that took the belief from him, and it took it without cruelty, the way water takes the edges from a stone. What undid him first was the way the web began. Not at its center, as the village children supposed, and not at any root. The spider climbed to the tip of a cane in the evening and faced into the wind and let out from its spinnerets a single thread finer than a hair, and gave it to the air. The thread streamed out behind it, invisible except where the low sun struck it, and wandered and lengthened, and at some moment the spider could not choose and did not foresee it touched something, a lilac twig, a fence rail, once the old man’s own sleeve, and caught. Then the spider drew it taut

and walked out across it. That was the first line. All that followed was built upon it, and it had been placed by the wind. From the first line the creature let itself fall and fixed the thread below, and so made a Y, and at the joining of the Y made a hub; and from the hub it ran out spokes, one after another, to a frame of stouter threads; and then, working round and round, it laid down the spiral. It was the spiral that finished the old man’s trees. A tree only divided. From any twig there was one road back to the trunk and one only, and no twig ever touched another. But in the web the spiral came round and crossed every spoke, again and again, binding each to the next, so that from any point in the whole structure the spider could reach any other by a hundred different roads. There was no single way back. There was no road that was the road. A tree, the old man wrote, is a thing that remembers only where it came from. A web is a thing in which everything that was ever made remains joined to everything else. He began to draw history that way in the notebooks: every event a strand, every strand crossing others, a man’s life not a twig on a branch but a thread across which other threads had been laid, and which might be reached from far away by roads he himself would never walk. His former colleagues, to whom he sent a page or two, were courteous in their replies, and did not reply again. There was a second thing, and he did not know what to do with it. The spider was always at the edge of what existed. Wherever the new silk was being drawn, there the spider was; the web did not build itself. Behind the creature lay the finished structure, fixed and trembling under the weight of the dew, every crossing exactly where it had been set. Ahead of it lay nothing. Not a web waiting to be revealed, like a figure under a sheet, but plain air, waiting to be crossed. The web did not exist ahead of the spider. It existed only where the spider had already been. The old man sat with that for most of a summer and could make it mean only one thing: that the present is not a place one stands in but a place one is making, and that the whole of the made world lies behind the maker, and none of it in front. The third thing he found almost by accident. When the web was torn, or worn past use, the spider did not abandon it. It went round and ate it, the whole ruined wheel, spokes and spiral and frame, and that night, from the same silk made new inside its body, it spun again. Nothing was thrown away. The old web became the new web, as the old leaf becomes the new leaf. It was a small thing to

watch, and he wept at it, alone on his camp stool, without entirely knowing why. On the first page of the last notebook, in a hand grown unsteady, he wrote a single sentence and underlined it twice: It does not grow from a root. It grows from its edges, and it began with a thread given to the wind.

IV The Wax Cylinder · · · Signe Hjelm kept her husband’s voice in a pasteboard tube on the top shelf of the linen press, and in the five years since the Varg came home without him she had listened to it nine times. He had made the recording in the spring before he sailed, at the Tromsø fair, where a traveling exhibitor from Bergen had set up a brass-horned phonograph in a tent and charged two kroner for the privilege of speaking into it. Most people shouted their names and laughed. Her husband, who never did anything he had not first thought through, stood a long time before the horn and then said, quite quietly, eleven words, her name and the date and a remark about the weather, and paid, and carried the little brown cylinder of wax home in its tube as though it were an egg. She had bought a machine of her own that summer to play it. She had not imagined she would need to. The exhibitor had warned her, and she had not forgotten: every time the stylus ran through the groove it wore the wax a little, and the voice grew a little thinner, and a day would come when there would be nothing left but hiss. So she rationed him. On the anniversary of his leaving, and once at Christmas, and once, the ninth time, on a night in the winter of 1902 when she could not remember, try as she might, exactly how he had said her name. That night she did not play it at once. She sat with the tube in her lap at the kitchen table and read, for the first time, the pages the ship’s owner had sent her with his effects: copies of her husband’s log from the months in the ice, enclosed with a letter suggesting, delicately, that she might prefer to burn them. She read them twice. Then she understood why the owner had been afraid of them, and why he had been wrong.

Her husband had written that yesterday was an address. That it was not gone but elsewhere, as a harbor is elsewhere once the ship has left it. She looked at the cylinder. Here was yesterday: not a picture of it, not a story told about it, but a piece of it. A spring afternoon in 1896, the air of a canvas tent, the breath out of a living man’s chest, all of it pressed into wax and still here, in her hands, in a kitchen in 1902. The past had not ended. It had left a residue in the world, and the residue could be touched, and weighed, and set turning, and it would speak. And it was not only the wax. She saw that now. Her own head was full of such grooves. The smell of his coat when it was wet. The way he cleared his throat before disagreeing. The weight of his hand at the small of her back in a doorway. Every one of these was a trace the past had left in her, a warmth that had gone into her years ago and had not yet gone out, and when she remembered, it was that old warmth she was spending, burning a little of it in the act of calling it up, as the stylus burned a little of the wax. Memory was not a picture of the past. It was the past, still in her, still being used up. Then a colder thought came, and she let it come. There was no cylinder of tomorrow. There could not be. No one had ever carried home from the fair a little tube of wax with the voice of a day that had not happened yet, because there was nothing there to press. The past left grooves everywhere, in wax and bone, in the rings of trees and the layered mud at the bottoms of lakes and the hollows worn in the stone steps of churches, and the future left none, anywhere, ever. Not because it was hidden. Because it was not yet anything. It would have to be made, as the ship had made the ice ahead of it real by drifting into it, as her husband had made eleven words by standing before the horn and choosing them. She understood, too, reading the last pages, what the mate had seen on the ice, or believed he had seen: the footprints that stopped. She did not know what it meant. She knew only that the man who had written these pages had not been mad, and that he had spent his last weeks at the edge of a country no one had walked, and had walked into it. At last she wound the machine, and set the cylinder on the mandrel, and lowered the stylus.

Through the hiss, fainter than before, thinner by nine playings, came her name, and a date six years gone, and a remark that it looked like rain. She lifted the stylus before the last word could wear away, and put the cylinder back in its tube, and put the tube on the top shelf of the linen press, and did not take it down again. It seemed to her, that night and for the rest of her life, that some things are better left in the place where they are kept whole; that the past is not less real for being left alone; and that a woman might do worse than to stop spending it.

V The Absence · · · The sister vanished on a Tuesday in March, in the present year, from a laboratory on the fourth floor of a building by the harbor, and the brother learned of it the way one learns of most catastrophes now: from a telephone ringing in another room while he was doing something else. He was thirty-five. She was thirty-eight, and for twenty years she had worked at something he did not understand and she did not explain, in rooms that required badges, among people who spoke to one another in a notation he had once, as a boy, mistaken for music. Whatever it was, it had eaten her the way the sea eats a coast: slowly, and then all at once. In the last two years she had come home to the glass only at Christmas, and had sat among their mother’s benches of seedlings with a look he could not read, as though she were memorizing the place. The police found the door of her laboratory locked from within. They found her coat on its hook and her shoes beneath her desk, set side by side, as though she had stepped out of them to walk somewhere barefoot. They found an apparatus on the bench that her colleagues declined to describe and that was removed within the day by men who did not give their names. And they found, taped to the inside of the door at the height of her eyes, a card in her handwriting that said only: Nothing is ever gone. Everything is going. The brother recognized the words at once. It took him a week to remember where they came from, and when he did he drove out to the glass at two in the morning and stood among the benches in the dark until his mother came down in her dressing gown and found him there. What he learned in the months that followed was that an absence is not an empty thing. He had imagined, when he imagined such things at all, that a person who vanished left a hole the shape of themselves, and that the world closed over it as water closes over

a stone. It was not so. The hole she left put out threads in every direction. The detective who had the case put in for early retirement that autumn and would not say why. Her colleagues scattered to other laboratories in other countries, and two of them stopped speaking to each other. Their mother sold half the land to a man who wanted to build holiday houses, and then refused to sell him the rest, and then lay awake over both decisions. The brother left his work, and went back to it, and left it again; and at every one of these turnings he could feel, almost bodily, the road he had not taken peeling away from him like a thread in the wind. The man who had stayed. The man who had called the police a day sooner. The man who had driven to the harbor that Tuesday instead of eating his lunch at his desk. Each of them walked off down some other line, as real as he was and forever out of reach. The world did not stop because she had gone out of it. It did the opposite. It went on, and it went on faster, and it went on in more directions at once, like a web shaken at one strand. It was his mother, old now, with the hard pale hands of a woman who had worked soil for fifty years, who said the thing he afterward could not stop thinking about. They were sitting on the potting bench where, thirty years before, the rose had broken in her fist. It was October again, and the light was the same. “She weighed something,” the mother said. He waited. “Everything that has ever been here is still here somewhere. I taught her that. She believed it more than I did.” She turned her hands over and looked at the palms, as though the answer might be written there. “So if she isn’t here, if all of her, every ounce, has gone out of this place, then somewhere else is heavier by exactly that much. Somewhere the ground took her weight. Somewhere there’s a woman standing on a beach who wasn’t standing there before, and the world she’s standing in has had to make room.” The brother did not answer. Beyond the glass the sea was taking the last of the old road, one grey bite at a time, and turning it into something else. He understood, much later, that his mother had been describing a kind of accounting: that the ledger of the world was kept not line by line but whole, across every line at once, and that what one line lost another gained. He did not understand it then. That night he only sat beside her in the cooling dark and knew, with the flat certainty of a man hearing a verdict, that his sister was not

dead, and that she was not coming back, and that there was no road, not one among all the roads, that led from where she stood now to the glass.

VI The Drowned Man · · · She arrived before dawn on the sand below Douarnenez in the October of 1905, and the first thing she felt was weight. It was not the weight of her body, though there was that: the knees buckling, the palms driving into cold wet sand. It was something larger and stranger, which she had predicted on paper and had never quite believed. The world had taken her the way a scale takes a stone. The line she had arrived in bowed beneath her, very slightly, as a thread bows when something lands on it. And far away, in a laboratory in another century at the end of another line, a scale had risen by exactly the same amount, and a pair of shoes stood side by side beneath an empty desk. Nothing had been made. Nothing had been lost. She had simply been carried from one part of the web to another, as the bee carries the dust of a flower. The traveler knew the date because she had chosen it. She knew the man because she had grown up in the shadow of his empty stone. She found him on the quay in the grey half-light: a broad, weathered fisherman of about forty, with a short black beard and a cold clay pipe in his teeth, coiling line into the stern of a blue-

hulled boat. The sea lay flat as pewter. The sky was clear to the horizon. Three other boats were making ready along the quay, and the men in them were laughing. By noon, she knew, a squall would come out of the southwest with no more warning than a slammed door, and by evening four boats of the Douarnenez fleet would not have come home, and this man’s would be one of them, and his five-year-

old daughter would spend the next seventy-nine years looking at the sea as though it owed her something. She had rehearsed a hundred ways to stop him. In the end she used the simplest: gold. She told him she was a traveler who had missed the coast steamer and must reach a village on the far side of the bay by nightfall, overland, and that she would pay him a

month’s catch to take her there in his cart. He looked at her a long while, at her strange clothes and her strange accent and the strangeness in her eyes that he could not have named, and then at the gold; and then, being a practical man with a family, he shrugged, and put away his lines. The squall came at a quarter past twelve. They watched it from a hill road above the bay: the sky going the color of a bruise, the water standing up white in long ridges, the far small shapes of boats vanishing into the rain. The fisherman crossed himself and said nothing for a long time. When he looked at her again it was not with gratitude but with something nearer to fear. That evening she stood in the lane outside his cottage and watched through the window as he sat down to his supper, and as a little girl with enormous dark eyes climbed into his lap and was not sent away. She had come a very long way to see that. She had given up everything that had been hers to see it. And standing in the lane in the cooling dark, in the smell of woodsmoke and tar and wrack, she understood at last what she had done, and what she had not. She had not saved him. Not in any way that mattered to the girl who had grown up in the shadow of his stone. In the line she had come from, her line, the line with the glass in it, and her mother, and her brother, the squall had still come at a quarter past twelve, and the blue-hulled boat had still gone down, and the stone with nothing beneath it still stood in the churchyard and would stand there always, because that line was finished behind her and fixed, every crossing exactly where it had been set. She had not reached back into her own past and mended it. No one could. The moment her palms struck the sand, the web had put out a new thread from this address: a line that had not existed until she arrived in it, a line in which a strange woman with gold had come to the quay. The fisherman lived in that line. Only in that one. And in that line, she realized, looking at the child in his lap, anything at all might now follow. The girl might marry the same man, or another. The daughter who would have been the traveler’s great-grandmother might be born, or might not. There might never be a glass at the end of a coast road, nor a woman in it who crushed a rose in her fist. The traveler herself might never be born here. It made no difference. She was here already. Her weight was here. She had not grown from this branch; she had been laid across it from another part of the web, as the spiral is laid across the

spokes, and nothing that happened here could reach back along the thread she had come by and unmake her. That was the answer to the old riddle, the one every student of the problem is asked on the first day: what becomes of the traveler who undoes her own beginning. Nothing becomes of her. She is not a twig that can be sawn from its tree. She is a strand from elsewhere, and the web holds her. It was also, she saw, a sentence. There was no road home. The future forward from this lane was not her future. It belonged to the fisherman and his daughter and to the line that had sprung up around her arrival like water rising around a dropped stone. Her own line ran on without her somewhere, fixed behind and growing at its edge, and she could never set foot in it again; and if by some art she found her way to its address, the moment she arrived it would already be a new line, and not hers. She had not fixed anything. She had only left. She walked away down the lane before the fisherman’s wife could come to the door, and did not look back, and in the morning she was gone from Douarnenez. The fisherman told the story of the strange woman with the gold for the rest of his long life, and no one ever believed him.

VII The Longer Line · · · In the months after Douarnenez the traveler learned that she could not see forward. She had known it in principle. Now she knew it in the body, the way one knows a wall in the dark. The line she had made by arriving ran on from that October morning, and she ran on with it, a day at a time, like anyone. The address called tomorrow was empty. There was no ice out ahead to walk on; there was only the walking. If she wished to learn what became of the fisherman’s daughter, she would have to live the years, one after another, until they were real. But the web was wide, and there were other lines. Somewhere far back, so far back that the physicists of her own century would have named it a single atom deciding in the dark, and the old women of the coast would have named it a man who lingered over his coffee on a Monday morning and missed a meeting that would have changed a century, a line had parted from her own and run on beside it. It kept almost the same course: the same coasts, the same wars, the same names in the churchyards. But it ran a little fast. Its events came early. At the address where her own line stood in the October of 1905, that other line stood decades further on. It was a longer line. If she could not see her own future, she could stand in its nearest likeness. She went in the winter of 1906, by the art that had carried her down the web the first time. She knew as she went what her arrival would do: that the moment her foot touched ground there, the line would bend around her weight and put out a new thread, and she would be standing not in the longer line itself but in an offshoot of it, as no one steps twice into the same river. She had learned that there is no such thing as merely watching. To arrive anywhere is to change it. She went anyway. She came out at dusk, at the end of a coast road.

The glass was still there. That was the first thing, and it nearly undid her. It was older than she had ever known it, half its panes gone and the rest gone green, the iron ribs rusted to lace, brambles grown up through the benches where the seedlings had stood. The sea had taken the road almost to the door. There was a light in the little house beside it. And in the doorway of the glass, on a kitchen chair set among the ruined benches, sat an old man with a blanket over his knees, looking out at the water. She knew him. She did not know him. He had her brother’s jaw and her brother’s way of holding his hands, one cupped inside the other, and he was perhaps seventy, and he was not her brother and could never be, because her brother stood on another line entirely, thirty-five years old, in a locked laboratory, looking at a pair of empty shoes. This was the brother of some other woman, born early on a line that ran early, who had watched a rose crushed in her mother’s fist, and had grown up, and had gone into a room with a locked door, and had not come out. Because she had. The traveler understood it the moment she saw his face. In this line too, a woman had gone out from the glass and not come back. The old man in the doorway had been waiting for her for forty years. She did not go to him. She stood in the dusk among the brambles, out of the light, and watched until the lamp in the house went out, and did not trust herself to do anything else. What could she have said? I am not your sister, but I am the same shape? He had waited forty years for someone. It was not her. When he had gone in, she did what she had come to do. She walked forward. Not along the road, but along the line: toward the edge of it, the address where the longer line stood living and unfinished, the place its own people called now. She could feel it as one feels the lip of a cliff in fog. The past of that line lay thick and fixed behind her, every thread in its place, heavy with the dew of everything that had happened there. And ahead of her there was no ahead. Not darkness. Darkness is a thing; it can be walked into. Not fog, nor void, nor an abyss full of stars. There was only the place where the web ended: where the last thread had been drawn a moment ago by the living of that line, and where the next had not yet been drawn by anyone. She stood at the very lip of it, as the spider stands at the tip of the cane with the wind in its face, and she

reached out, and there was nothing to reach into. The future of the longer line was not waiting anywhere. It had never been anywhere. It was being made, a thread at a time, by an old man going in to his bed and by every other living thing upon that line, and until they made it there was not so much as air. She understood then what she had half known since Douarnenez. No one can travel to their own future, because it does not exist. One can go down the web into the past, where every thread is fixed and real. One can go across it, to lines that ran longer. But every line, however long, ends in an edge. The only way to see tomorrow, any tomorrow, on any line, is to be one of the ones who spin it. She went back before the dawn. Behind her, in a ruined greenhouse at the end of a drowned road, an old man slept, and dreamed, so he told no one the next morning, that his sister had come home and stood out among the brambles and would not come into the light.

VIII The Knot · · · The strangers began arriving at the Vanavara trading post in the first week of June 1908, and Porfiry Lagin, who kept the post’s accounts and its single room of goods for the Evenki herders who came down out of the taiga to trade furs for flour and cartridges, counted seventeen of them before the end. They did not come together. That was what struck him first, and what he would tell the men of the expedition nineteen years later, when at last they came, and did not believe him. They came one at a time, and from nowhere: not up the Stony Tunguska by boat, as everyone came, and not along the herders’ paths, but simply out of the forest, on foot, with no packs and no guides and no mud on their boots. A tall man in a good grey overcoat, who spoke a Russian so correct it sounded dead. Two men who looked like brothers, who spoke to each other in a language the clerk did not know and the herders did not know either. An old woman who paid for her tea with a coin no one had ever seen. A woman of thirty or so in a long grey coat, with a quiet voice and a face that looked as though it had been out in weather it had not expected. Each of them seemed surprised to find the others there. More than surprised: alarmed. The clerk watched the man in the good overcoat catch sight of the two brothers across the room for the first time, and saw the color leave his face as though a door had opened on something behind them. It was the woman in grey who explained it, in the end, as far as anyone did. She was the only one who would talk to him. On a white night in late June, when the sun barely set and the whole taiga lay in a long bronze dusk, she sat with him on the porch of the post and drank his tea and told him what she believed was happening, in a way he only half understood and never forgot.

People like her, she said, did not wish to be seen arriving. It was dangerous to be seen, dangerous to them and to the place they came to. So when they traveled, and there were, it seemed, a great many more of them than she had known, each of them sought out the emptiest place on the whole of the earth, the place where no eye would ever be turned, and arrived there, and walked out quietly into the world. “And every one of them,” she said, “had the same idea.” She looked out at the forest, which ran unbroken for a thousand versts in every direction. “It isn’t only the place. It’s the week. Something about this week draws them; I don’t know what. Too many threads laid down in one place at one time. The web isn’t made to hold that. Every one of us brought weight that doesn’t belong to this line, every ounce of it taken from somewhere else and set down here, and all of it has been set down here.” She put her cup on the porch rail very carefully, as though it might go off. “You should go south, Porfiry Andreyevich. As far as you can, as soon as you can.” He did not go south. He had a ledger to keep and no reason to believe her. She was gone by morning. On the thirtieth of June, a little after seven, he was sitting on the porch of the post with the ledger open on his knees when the sky to the north split from edge to edge. He described it afterward, for the rest of his life, to anyone who would listen, and it was never enough. A light brighter than the sun, blue-white, standing up out of the forest like a column. Then heat, heat so sudden and so enormous that it seemed his shirt had caught fire on his back, and he tore at it with both hands. Then the ground heaved, and a wind came out of the north like the end of the world and threw him bodily off the porch, some twenty feet into the yard, and the windows of the post burst inward, and there came a sound, or a series of sounds, like the firing of great guns, like enormous doors slammed one after another, that went on and on until he could not tell it from the ringing in his skull. When he could stand again, the forest to the north was burning. The herders who came down afterward spoke of the god of thunder, angered. The newspapers of the cities spoke of nothing at all, at first, though for several nights afterward the sky over half of Europe glowed so brightly that people in London read their newspapers out of doors at midnight and did not know why.

It was nineteen years before anyone went to look. When the expedition reached the place at last, they found the forest lying flat across more than two thousand square kilometers, some eighty million trees thrown down at once. And every one of them had fallen outward, away from a single center, in long straight lines, so that from a height the whole country looked like the spokes of some vast wheel, or of a web, laid out upon the earth. At the very center, where one would have expected the worst, the trees still stood upright, stripped of every branch and every needle, like the charred masts of ships. There was no crater. There was no stone. There was nothing at the center of the web at all. Of the seventeen strangers no trace was ever found. Porfiry Lagin told the expedition about them, and was thanked, and was not believed. He spent his old age in Kansk wondering whether the woman in grey had escaped; and in the white nights when he could not sleep he wondered about what she had said. That the web is not made to hold weight that does not belong to it. That there are places where too many threads cross, and where the crossing draws more, and more, until the knot grows so dense that something must give. He wondered whether a line could break. He wondered whether a line could fall inward on itself, as a star, it was said, might fall. He wondered whether one had, a little, that morning; and whether what the expedition found lying in its great ring on the taiga was not the wound at all, but the scar of its healing.

IX The Red Star · · · In the September of 1909 the planet Mars came nearer to the earth than it would come again for fifteen years, and Ellery Voss, who had spent a small fortune on a sixteen-inch refractor and a whitewashed dome on a mesa in the Arizona Territory for no other purpose than to look at it, did not sleep for a week. He was drawing the canals. He had been drawing them for eleven years: the long, straight, impossibly regular lines that ran across the ochre deserts of the planet from one dark patch to another, which he and a small, embattled company of like-minded men believed to be the work of a dying civilization hoarding the last water of a drying world. He drew them by lamplight at the eyepiece, in soft pencil, on cards he kept in cedar boxes, and each card was more certain than the last. The visitors came on the sixth night. He never learned how they had reached the mesa, which lay nine miles by bad road from the nearest town; he heard no horse and no motor. He only looked up from the eyepiece a little after midnight and found them standing in the doorway of the dome: a woman in a long grey coat, and beside her an old man, very tall and very still, with a face so calm and so uncreased that it was not possible to say whether he was sixty or a hundred. They asked, with great courtesy, to see the planet. The astronomer, who had never in eleven years refused anyone a look, gave the old man the eyepiece. And the old man looked for a long time, ten minutes, fifteen, without moving, without speaking, with an attention so complete and so terrible that the astronomer found himself unwilling to break it. At last he straightened. “The lines are not there,” he said. “Your eye makes them. The eye is a maker of patterns; it joins what it cannot resolve.” He said it without unkindness, as one corrects a child’s spelling.

That same autumn, as it happened, an astronomer in France with a far larger glass would look at the same planet on a night of perfect air and watch the canals dissolve into scattered, ragged, natural markings, and would say so in print; but Ellery Voss did not know that yet, and did not believe it when he learned it. “There was something there, once,” the old man said, looking up through the slit of the dome at the small red coal of the planet itself. “Not lines. Not water. In a line that grew old before this one had grown at all.” The woman had not spoken. Now she did, and the astronomer, who had retreated to his desk and his cards and was pretending not to listen, heard every word, and wrote it out the next day as nearly as he could, and read it over many times in the years that followed without ever deciding what it meant. “They say that if it were possible, someone would have come,” she said. “That if anyone on any line had ever learned the way, the world would be full of visitors, and it isn’t. So no one ever learned it. That’s what they say, in the century I came from.” “And what do you say?” “I say I came.” The old man almost smiled. “They reason like a child in a cradle,” he said, “who reasons that the house was built on the morning it first opened its eyes. They know their own world, and their own sky, and a few thousand years of their own story, and from that they believe they know what hour it is on the web. They do not. They do not know whether their line is young or old. Whether it lies near the center or far out at the rim. Whether other lines ran long before theirs began, and grew old, and learned all there was to learn, and died, or scattered.” He looked up again at the red star. “Seeds go on the wind. Some of them take. The ground they take in does not remember where they came from.” “Then why have they never been met?” “They have been met,” he said. “They have not been known. There is a difference.” And he told her, as one tells a newcomer the customs of a house, what the astronomer afterward wrote out on a card and kept apart from all the others, in a drawer by itself. That those who travel do not stand where they already stand. That no traveler seeks the address of their own body, or looks into their own face; for where one thread is laid twice upon the same

place the web goes wrong, the lamps gutter, the air begins to hum, and worse things may follow. That those who travel do not announce themselves. An announcement is a knot. It draws others. The woman said quietly that she had seen what a knot does, and the old man inclined his head, as though he had known that she would have. That those who travel do not gather. They go singly to the quiet places, the old places, the places no one looks: to lines where no one yet looks at the sky; to worlds other than the one they left. And the young lines, the ones only beginning to spin, they leave alone, as one does not walk across a bed where the seedlings have just come up. “We are not hidden,” the old man said. “We are only quiet. And they are only young.” When the astronomer looked up again from his cards, the doorway of the dome was empty, and the night was very still, and there were no tracks in the dust of the mesa but his own. He went on drawing the canals until he died. But he kept the other card too, in its drawer by itself; and on clear nights in his last years, when Mars stood high and red above the desert, he would sometimes go out and stand beneath it with his hands in his pockets and wonder: not whether there was anyone there, but how long ago; and not whether anyone had ever come, but whether he would have known them, if they had stood at his door and asked, with great courtesy, to look.

X The Bridge Line · · · In May of 1910 the comet came back, as it had come back every seventy-five or seventy-six years for as long as there had been eyes to see it, and Casimir Wendt lay dying beneath it in a narrow bed by an open window, and did not mind. The newspapers had spent the spring in a small ecstasy of dread. The earth, it was announced, would pass through the comet’s tail on the night of the eighteenth, and the tail had been found to contain a poisonous gas; and in the towns men were selling pills against the comet, and masks against the comet, and in a village over the hill a family had stopped every crack of their cottage with rags and meant to sit out the night inside it in the dark. The old man found it very funny. He had watched the tail every clear night that week from his pillow, a long pale plume of light stretched across half the eastern sky like a thread drawn out on the wind, and it seemed to him the least threatening thing he had ever seen. It had been here before. It would be here again. It went out into the dark on its long ellipse, farther than any man could follow, and it came back. That was all. The woman in grey came on the evening of the eighteenth. She had first come to him three summers before, out of nowhere, asking about spiders, and he had shown her his notebooks and his camp stool and his cross-spiders among the roses, and she had listened with such attention that he had told her things he had never told his colleagues. She had come twice more since. He did not know where she lived, or where she went, and he had long ago stopped asking; he suspected that she would have told him the truth, and that he would not have been able to bear it. Now she sat by his bed in the blue dusk while the housekeeper made soup downstairs and the whole village waited behind its stopped-up windows for the end of the world.

On the sill, in the corner of the open window, a young cross-

spider was beginning its web. They watched it together without speaking. It climbed to the tip of the old wooden latch and turned its face into the night air coming in off the fields, and let out its first thread, and gave it to the wind. The thread went out through the window into the dusk, silver where the comet-light touched it and then invisible, and wandered, and lengthened. “What does it catch on?” the woman said, very low. “The first one. Before there is anything.” “Whatever is there,” the old man said. “It does not choose. It cannot see. It gives the thread to the wind, and the wind puts it wherever the wind puts it.” He was quiet a moment, breathing with care. “That is what I could never make my colleagues understand. The first thread is not part of the web. It is anchored to something that is not web, a twig, a stone, a latch, something that was there before. And the spider does not know what. It knows only that the thread has caught.” “Then what was the first line of the world anchored to?” “I do not know.” He smiled at the ceiling. “Neither do you. That is the only honest place to stop.” She told him then, because he had asked once, and because he was dying and it did not matter now, some part of what she knew. That the web grew outward from its edges, always outward, as in the century she came from the heavens themselves were known to be spreading, every star running from every other. That no one knew whether it would go on spreading forever into the cold, or whether one day, like the comet, it would reach the far end of its going and turn and fall back in upon itself, and gather, and burst, and begin again. That no one knew whether lines could die. That she had seen one knotted so tightly that it tore, and did not know whether a tear could spread. That everything which had ever been made on the web was still there, behind, fixed; that nothing beyond the edge was anything at all; and that every living thing on every line stood always at its own edge, spinning, whether it knew it or not. “Like the spider,” the old man said. “Like the spider.” “Then it is not so bad.” His voice had gone very thin. “To stand at the edge. Everything behind is kept. And everything ahead is ours to make.”

He slept then; and in the small hours of the nineteenth, while the earth passed through the long pale tail of the comet and took no harm from it at all, he died, so quietly that the woman beside him did not know the moment. The body that the light had built lay on the narrow bed. The warmth that had been in it went out into the room, and out through the open window into the fields, into the grass, and into everything. At dawn she rose and went to the window. The young spider’s web was finished in the corner of the frame, a perfect wheel beaded with dew, trembling in the first light. And from its upper edge the bridge line still ran out through the open window and away into the morning, silver, taut, holding, anchored somewhere out in the bright air to something she could not see.