Robert Paul “Tad” Williams (born 1957) spent several years in a rock band, hosted a radio talk show, made commercial and uncommercial art, and ran and acted in theatre, before settling down (an expression he won’t thank me for) to write several best-selling multivolume series, in particular Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, which George R R Martin cited as an inspiration for his own Song of Ice and Fire. Williams’s output straddles high and urban fantasy, science fiction and the supernatural, Sometimes, as here, he manages to mash up all these expectations at once, delivering something truly unexpected. His first novel, Tailchaser’s Song, is soon to be a CG-animated feature film from Animetropolis and IDA. Williams and his wife and writing partner Deborah Beale leave in northern California with their two children.
Giant could make little sense out of the ancient ideas, although he had been studying them a very long time, but something about them felt… true.
Across a dark sea
the distant cries of wild ducks
and faintly, traces of white
These thoughts had been words once, spoken aloud when such things were still done by living beings, spoken and heard by fragile, primitive creatures. Somehow, though, these impossibly old concepts seemed to float free of their origin. They seemed to speak as though meant for Giant alone, and he could not understand why.
Across a dark sea… It was easy, at least, to see the relevance there. How did Giant perceive anything outside of himself, after all, but across a dark sea, not of water but of emptiness, a sea made from the last cooling bits of the universe, on whose invisible tides Giant had sailed all his long, long life? Was it really so simple a resonance in the imagery that fascinated him? The animals called ducks seemed to have been creatures known for migration, so their cries might portend something beyond the obvious departure, death. Giant was not particularly interested in death, although he knew his own was not far away now. In his early days he had sailed through a perpetual storm of energy and matter, sustenance so omnipresent he had needed to consume only the tiniest fraction. Now Giant sailed ceaselessly along the edges of universal expansion in search of the last decaying particles that could keep him viable, and even that process could not go on much longer – he was using up his reserves now much of the time. Still, it seemed odd to him that the thoughts of extinct one extinct creature from one extinct world among the countless billions should fascinate him so.
Embroiled in the antique words and ideas, Giant had not noticed the respectful inquiry waiting at the edge of his consciousness, although it had been sent to him some time before, but now it grew stronger; it became clear to him he would have to answer it or continue to be bothered. Why did none of his kin appreciate silence as he did?
He allowed the minimum of contact, filtered through several layers of gatekeepers. “?”
“Giant!” It was Holdfast, of course – who else? “Giant, I have waited so long to reach you,” she said. “Spinfree is gone.”
“So?”
“He’s gone! He doesn’t respond!”
“I am not surprised. He was always profligate with his resources.” Giant was about to end the conversation, but a detail occurred to him. “Does his heart still function? Does it hold his components together?” If so, Spinfree’s remains would continue competing for the dwindling resources they all shared.
“Barely. But no thought comes from him!”
Unfortunate, Giant thought, but there was no remedy. Giant no longer had the strength to stop Spinfree’s heart. “At least it means less noise the rest of us must suffer.”
“The rest of us? That leaves only you and me, Giant! The rest have all gone silent. I can no longer touch their minds.”
“Ah.” Apparently he had been considering the ancient thoughts longer than he had realized. “No matter. I can still think, and that is what I will continue to do.” And before Holdfast could inflict some other pointlessness on him, he ended the contact.
*
Giant had received his name long, long ago, when he and the others of his kind had first come into existence – matrices of intelligence in a magnetic field that governed an entire small galaxy, an artificial star cluster formed around a heart so dense it swallowed everything, even light, and emitted just enough energy in the process to keep the titanic living systems alive. Giant had been a success, and others had followed him – Edgerunner, Star Shepherd, Timefall, eager Spinfree, curious Holdfast and thousands more. Long after all other living things had vanished from the universe, long after the planets that had sheltered those earlier lives and the suns that had fed them had also vanished, Giant and his breed lived on, roaming space/time’s expanding edge in search of sustenance, sailors on an ocean with no shore.
But even these last, astonishingly durable travelers were not immortal; Giant knew that he too would end when the great entropic cold, the ultimate dispersal of matter and energy, finally made him too weak to forage successfully. That moment was not far away now. How novel it would be, to come to an end! How unusual, to simply not be after existing for so long. He was sorry he would not be able to appreciate the subtleties of his own non-existence.
For some reason, this increasingly imminent ending had driven him to examine some of the memories he carried that were not his own, the legacy of nearly all previous intelligent beings that had been built into him at his creation. To Giant’s mild surprise, he had found himself arrested by some of these flickers of other, smaller lives and other thoughts. Life’s stored remnants – ideas, languages, images, records of events great and small, invasions, conquests, evolutions, meditations – were now important only insofar as they interested Giant himself, but he had found to his surprise that some of these received memories of life before the intelligent galaxies did interest him.
Some of them interested him very much.
*
The long-vanished creature from a long-vanished planet whose thoughts had so inexplicably caught Giant’s attention had been named “Bashō”. His species, mammals from a planet orbiting a minor sun in a middling galaxy, had contributed their small share to the lore of the living, but this was the first time Giant had ever thought about them – or, more precisely, thought about of one of them. The Bashō life-form had been a “poet”, an organizer of thoughts into clusters of meaning that were meant to be aesthetically pleasing as well an expression of ideas. Giant wasn’t sure how that distinguished this particular being from the billions of other living things, primate and otherwise, that had swarmed Bashō’s own planet so long ago, let alone the uncountable number of other thinking creatures who had existed during the life of the universe, or even how they had found their way to Giant across such a distance of time. Some of those strings of thought had been remembered and perpetuated on the world of the poet’s origin and also afterward, remembered long after Bashō himself was gone. Perhaps that was what the idea “poet” actually described, thought Giant – a maker of thoughts worth re-thinking.
Bashō had traveled widely around his small part of his small world, and as he traveled he had collected, arranged, and written down his thoughts, choosing a form of expression distinguished by the number and arrangement of the sounds that made up the thought-clusters. The creatures of his land had called these arrangements hokku, later haiku, although Bashō also laid out his thoughts in less formal arrangements, as at the start of a collection of poetic considerations entitled, “The Narrow Road to the Interior,” over which Giant had been puzzling for no small time. As much as they fascinated him, there were also aspects to these thoughts Giant simply could not grasp.
He knew that the ancient words had more than one meaning: if “road” could mean a path or a trail, it also could mean the record of that trail left in the mind of a traveler, the sum of his or her experiences; it could also signify the procession of a living thing from its birth to its death, or merely from the beginning of the solar day to its ending. But what confused Giant about the idea of this “Narrow Road” was that the procession from being to nothingness was not narrow at all – quite the reverse: as the space around Giant expanded, as he grew farther and farther from everything else, Giant himself also grew greater, if only because his own thoughts became more intricate as the span of his existence stretched. The universe might be dying, but Giant felt the process to be one of spreading. In fact, that expansion would continue beyond the day when Giant himself had become too diffuse, too dispersed, to think and to live any longer.
A group of less rigorously constrained thoughts began (and seemed intended somehow to help define) this collection of Bashō’s haiku:
The moon and the sun are eternal travelers. Even the years wander on. A lifetime adrift in a boat, or in old age leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.
The last cluster of thoughts seemed to Giant a piece of wisdom that transcended its origin and spoke across the uncountable ages. The journey itself is home. But how could the creature Bashō have understood that – a creeping, planet-bound primate who had barely existed long enough to qualify as life? How could such a primitive being have perceived the ceaseless journey of matter to energy, of heat to cold, of something to nothing…?
An interruption touched Giant’s edge.
He was being summoned again. A tendril of thought, much less patient this time, was probing his outermost layers. Giant sighed, in his fashion, a faint spin of annoyance imparted to certain swirling forces, but he answered.
“What do you wish of me now?”
“You don’t need to be so brusque,” Holdfast told him across unfathomable distances. “We are all that remains, Giant. And I am lonely out here at the edge of things.”
“I am not. And there will only be more and more of the same in these last ages, so I suggest you accustom yourself.”
“But we are the last two!”
“Which reduces the distraction but does not eliminate it.”
“After us there will be nobody left to distract or be distracted, Giant – only our cooling remains.”
“And I envy those final decaying particles. Still, there should be enough existence left for several good thoughts and perhaps even a discovery or two, so please let me get on with what I am doing, Holdfast.” He was doing his best to be patient. She was smaller than Giant, after all, so it seemed likely would have a substantial time between her last communication and his own demise – an era of blessed silence before the end.
For a long interval Holdfast was so quiet, although still connected to him across the folding of space and time, that he wondered if her systems had finally begun to fail. As the interval stretched, and against his own better judgement, he said “Are you there?”
Her thought, when it touched him, was small and very quiet, although he could perceive no physical weakness to make it so. “Do you really hate me so much? After all the time and life we have shared?”
“Hate you?” It was a thought so bizarre Giant could not immediately understand it. What did such extreme, archaic emotions have to do with him? “Naturally I do not hate you. You are like me. We have, as you point out, shared many thoughts and experiences, and we are probably the last living intelligences. Why would I feel such a thing?”
“I couldn’t say, but it sometimes seems that way.”
It was certainly true that he had never had much patience with the excesses of his juniors, and Holdfast had been one of the most frustrating offenders with her wild, sudden obsessions, but he could no more have hated her than he could have hated an important part of himself. “No, I do not hate you. But I am not much interested in conversation. You know that.”
“But it’s different now! We’re all that’s left!”
He didn’t see how that made it different at all, but it was just such meaningless back and forth that had always fascinated Holdfast and the others and frustrated him, so he made no reply.
“Do you remember when we first traveled to the end of Time?”
“I remember, yes.” Much earlier, when even Giant had been in his youth, the discovery of how to fold the substance of reality not just to communicate, but to move themselves to other locations, had been a source of great excitement for the travelers. In those days they had learned to empty themselves through those perpetually collapsing moments into the farthest spreading edges of space/time. The living galaxies had watched star systems eons younger than themselves come into being along the farthest wavefront of existence, seen new, strange conglomerations of life rise and fall.
But that was all over, of course, left behind in the distant past; even those new galaxies they had watched being born had eventually collapsed, decayed, and disappeared. Entropy was inexorable. The only real difference between Giant’s kind and other types of life was longevity, but nothing in the universe would outlast the universe.
But he had said this all before and could not be bothered to say it again. Giant ended the conversation and returned to his solitary thoughts.
Like the buck’s antlers,
we point in slightly different
directions, my friend
How simply the Bashō creature had put it, but how convincingly! Separation was in all things from the beginning, as Giant knew; it was far more sensible to recognize that early on, as this ancient mind had done, than to try to bend reality into a shape it could not hold.
The poet-creature had apparently spent most of his time traveling. From Bashō’s writings, Giant learned that he had preferred the isolation of the road and the calm (but inwardly ecstatic) contemplation of his natural world, of times that were past, and of people and especially poets that had passed through life before him. Perhaps, Giant thought, that was what he found most fascinating about this unknowable being Bashō – that like Giant, he had been most interested in things outside himself, but those things had affected him as though they were part of him.
Perhaps this interest of mine is a shadow of the end of my own existence, Giant thought. This obsession, this… narrowing.
Which brought to mind another of Bashō’s haiku.
Crossing long fields,
frozen in its saddle,
my shadow creeps by
Even as the ancient poet had moved outward into the unknown, he had focused ever more rigorously on what was inside. Something important was contained in those simple words, an idea that tugged at Giant as strongly as anything he could remember in all his long span… but he could not quite say what it was.
It is too far away from me, Giant thought. Both in experience and time. He did not think he would be able to puzzle it out in the time he had left.
*
Holdfast reached out to him again, this time without even the pretense of patience. It had been so long since he had last heard from her that it occurred to Giant she might be sending him some sort of final message before her dissolution, and that saddened him more than he had expected it would. But when he opened contact, the first thing he heard was:
“I have an idea.”
Giant hadn’t felt amusement in a long time, but now he came close. If in some unimaginable situation he had been asked to characterize Holdfast by an exclamation, those were exactly the words he would have chosen. She had always been the one to have ideas, most of them pointless or even disastrous, but that hadn’t stopped her from having more. In their youth it had seemed much of the travelers’ time had been spent figuring out where Holdfast had gone or what she was doing and how they would set it right again.
“Why tell me?” he asked.
“Because I need your help.”
He was so beyond this kind of youthful madness that he almost ended the conversation. “Help?” he asked at last.
He could feel her carefully marshalling her thoughts on the other side of the fold that connected them: this was important to her, whatever it was. She probably feared he would only listen once, and so wanted to make it all clear the first time. She was right, of course.
“What if we could start it again?”
He waited a long time to hear the rest, but she only waited. “Start what?”
“Everything! The universe. Space. Time. Draw it all back together so it can begin again.”
This was a folly so great Giant did not even expend the energy of a sigh. “Foolishness,” was all he said. Perhaps Holdfast’s field had begun to decay and she was losing control of her mind. The thought disturbed him. Must he spend his last eons, not in the peace he sought, but beset by Holdfast and her delusions? He felt a certain sentimental attachment to her, more so now that they were the last two living things, but it did not extend nearly that far.
“Don’t judge so quickly,” she said. “I know it sounds like it, but I’ve been thinking…”
“Are you certain it is worth disrupting the last moments of my peace?”
“The stars have all died while you’ve been enjoying solitude, Giant, and you still want more?”
“Yes. After all, there is no other pleasure left to enjoy. May I return to it?”
“But when we are gone, nothing will remain? Ever!”
“Nothing is only a little different than something.” It was hard not to let his impatience overwhelm him. “These days I can scarcely tell the difference.”
“But it doesn’t have to be that way! We could change it.”
Now he was all but certain that important strands of her consciousness were beginning to stretch beyond their capabilities, creating ideas unsupported by the most basic correspondence with reality. “We can change nothing, Holdfast. In our early days we talked of very little else. I know you were young, but it is all there in your memory. Did you glean nothing from what others have said and done?”
“Those ideas were built on dull convention – hardly examined,” she said. “‘Entropy is the one ruling truth.’ ‘Time itself will not outlast the end of matter.’ ‘Dispersion and cold will continue forever’ – I know them like I know my own thoughts.”
“But you have not learned from them, young one. Go back and examine those thoughts again and you will see.”
“No. It is they – and you – who would not see! Entropy is not the ruling force of existence. Not yet.” She seemed excited in a way he didn’t understand, hurried and impatient.
“Here is the truth, Holdfast. Our hearts, unfed, will finally lose their energy and grow colder than the surrounding blackness, then they will disperse what remains of the energies they have long harbored. Even if anything of us still exists at that point, it will certainly end then. Our last remnants will cool and disperse and then everything will be finished, forever. What could possibly gather together all this dull dust and then run back the clock of entropy precisely enough to make it all begin again?”
“I don’t want to repeat it. I want to start it anew!”
“These are old speculations, Holdfast. It is narrowly possible that something like that will happen anyway when stasis is final and absolute, by some process we cannot foresee… but even if it does, I will not be there to experience it and neither will you. Anything to do with outliving the end of our universe is foolishness, and I have no time for it. I wish to spend my last days, not in vain striving for something that cannot be, but contemplating that which was and that which is.”
“But there is something that moves against entropy,” she said a moment before he severed the connection. “A force that swims against its current, even when it seems that current is too strong to resist…!”
Another of Bashō’s haiku came to him with surprising swiftness, as if that long-ago poet had heard Holdfast across the length of time and responded.
Nothing in the cry
of cicadas suggests they
are about to die
But Giant kept that idea to himself.
“Life!” said Holdfast. “Life is as strong as entropy.”
It was such a reckless statement that Giant was taken aback. “What do you mean? Life is no defense against entropy. Every creature that ever lived has fought against those processes and lost. The more primitive forms fought gravity, fought extremes of temperature and radiation, fought the frailty of flesh every moment of their existence, and every one of them failed. We are the last, Holdfast, and even we will fail soon. If Time itself cannot outlast the cold, what chance could mere life ever have?”
“There’s more to life than physical processes,” she said. “Or else we would both have ended long ago. Life organizes against chaos. We repair. We reproduce. We remember.”
More of Bashō’s thoughts rang in Giant’s memory.
Father and mother,
he quoted, the archaic words escaping before he realized he had not thought them silently this time, but had exposed them to Holdfast,
long gone, suddenly return
in the pheasant’s cry.
“What,” she said, “is that?”
“Nothing. A stray thought – a memory from a distant time.” Giant was embarrassed to have lost the distinction between what he considered and what he uttered. After all, he had just suspected the same of Holdfast! It was almost amusing. In fact, it was amusing.
“Are you… laughing, Giant?”
But even as the odd moment played out, he realized he was awash in memories of his own, sudden recollections of the days the galactic travelers had all communicated regularly with each other. Strange, so strange! He felt unstable in a way he could not remember feeling before, and yet unmistakably alive. What was happening? “I am weary now, Holdfast,” he said. “I will think on what you said and respond in due time.”
“But, Giant…!”
“Later, please. Later.”
*
When he was alone Giant examined his strange reaction, which disturbed him far more than Holdfast’s ungraceful struggle against the inevitable. He had been moved to unplanned utterance, not by Holdfast herself, but by a mere poem, an ordered arrangement of primitive symbols. Yet it had also unlocked a series of memories that had been so far from his daily thought that they might have been lost, a flood of remembrance from long-vanished eras, of times when he and the others of his kind had been full of their own importance and the future that seemed to lay before them like a bright burst of radiation illuminating all that had been dark about the universe.
Oh, how bold they had felt, back when they first began! Brightest Pilgrim, clever Edgerunner, Hot on the Outside, Deep Resonance, Light Drum, and Giant himself, the oldest and the largest of them all – how they had exulted in their newness and power! They had solved problems even their forebears could have barely imagined, witnessed the universe in ways no previous life could understand, from its greatest sweep to the tiniest perturbations of its component quanta. They had even marveled at emptiness itself, the true darkness where energy and matter did not travel, and had tried to unravel its secrets. The travelers had known that one day that same emptiness would be their end, but then it had seemed no more than a bitter spice that deepened the taste of what they consumed. Now Giant remembered them all – remembered himself, even, in a way he had not done for a very long time, and in his slow, intricate way, mourned the end of their shared invincibility.
But why? Why should all of this spring from the words of one ancient poem about the cry of birds? Giant had no mother and father, of course, nor could he find any trace of a pheasant’s call in his inherited memories, but he imagined it as a provocative, disturbing sound – a haunting sound, as Bashō’s people might have termed it. The bird’s cry itself had been meaningful to Bashō, for whom it brought back memories of his long-dead human progenitors, but why should the mere mention of it have an almost identical effect on Giant, a being so different as to be incomprehensible to the mind that penned the words? Were some ideas simply so common to intelligence – to life itself – that they triggered automatic responses, memories flushed from cover like a flock of Bashō’s birds?
Giant scanned several million poems and artistic statements from Earth and other worlds at a similar state of development. Although he felt some sympathy with many of them, and even found bits that engaged him on a deeper level than mere consideration, none of them disordered his thoughts so quickly and re-ordered them as profoundly as the words of the little wandering creature Bashō. How odd, that such an unlike thing should speak across the eons to him. Did it have something to do with life itself, the property that seemed to interest Holdfast so greatly? But even if it did, it was not the commonality of all life that had touched Giant’s thoughts, but the commonality of his own great span with one particular, fleeting life from long ago.
He was grateful the end had not yet come, Giant discovered, because he was finding so many things here at the end he wanted to think about.
Weather-beaten bones,
Little Bashō had written in that impossibly distant time,
I’ll leave your heart exposed
to cold, piercing winds
How had such a being understood then what Giant felt now? Could there truly be something hidden in the essence of life? Something beyond reduction that connected him to another living thing more surely than even the slow unfolding of atoms and the bleeding away of elementary particles?
A question came to him then, and once it had presented itself, he could not unthink it:
Could life be stranger and stronger than I could have guessed…?
*
“Tell me. Tell me your idea to start things again.”
“Giant?” Holdfast seemed startled. “You have never spoken to me first in all our shared time.”
He did not want to talk about himself – it seemed a pointless subject. “Your idea, Holdfast. What is it?”
It took her a moment to compose herself. “We live,” she said at last. “Of all that remains, only we that live are organized specifically to survive. Because of that, we fight and prevail against the growing cold.”
“Not for long.”
“But we do! We have for countless eons! And that is because we live. Because we fight against disorganization. What is life but a plan to swim against the current of dissolution? What else does life do?”
“Even if I grant this, Holdfast, it is not a plan but a statement.”
He could feel a little amusement ripple through her. “Grumpy as always. Do you admit that if we do nothing, we will cease to be? And that sometime afterward, everything will cease to be? Movement, heat, organization, all gone?”
“Yes, yes.” He was surprised at his own impatience to hear what must surely be a grand piece of futility. “I have said these things many times. The death of heat is the great inevitable of our universe.”
“But what if we joined together, you and I? What if my heart and your heart were to come together, through one of the folds we can still create? At this point, our hearts are nearly infinitely deep. Might the combination of those forces be enough to draw back the dispersed energies of existence? To start things again?”
Oddly, he felt disappointment at this plan for pointless self-destruction, although he had expected nothing better. “No, Holdfast. Even if we were still in the greatest flush of our strength it would not be enough. If your heart was not bounced away from mine by the forces of their proximity, the combination would still not suffice. We do not contain enough energy in the two of us to begin things again.”
She was silent for a long time. Giant discovered and consumed a drift of energies as she considered, the first substantial meal he had taken in a long time. It occurred to him that it might be his last feeding.
When she communicated again, it was as though they had drifted immeasurably farther apart during that short span, her thoughts without force.
“At least I have given birth,” she said.
“We have all created children, Holdfast.” He did not mention that the copies of themselves the travelers had once made had all predeceased them, early casualties in the struggle for dwindling resources since they had been unable to compete with their larger parents. For some reason, he feared her mood and did not want to make it worse.
“I don’t mean that sad little experiment.” Her amusement was tinged with bitterness in a way he found unpleasant. “I mean that our universe will end, but we have at least spawned other universes.”
“Our universe has created pocket universes like that from the beginning,” he said. “On the far side of every black hole. But they are limited things, of course.”
“Yes, but at least those pocket universes, as you call them, came from us. They came from our hearts, even if we cannot perceive them or reach them. That is immortality of a sort!”
Giant was confused, and so he did not respond for a time. “What do you mean?” he finally asked. “I do not understand you, Holdfast. From our hearts…?”
“Of course, from our hearts.” She was brusque, as if talking to a young traveler she had just created, which confused him even more. “The engines at our centers that are made of black holes just like that which occurs when a star collapses. All that is drawn into them and crosses the singularity then bubbles out and creates new universes, however small. It is a cold comfort, but I will cling to it.”
He had never before hesitated to tell the truth, but Giant did so now. “But Holdfast,” he said at last, “how can that be? Have you forgotten? We are not natural galaxies. We have no such natural black holes for hearts. Early in our history we created something more reliable, a heart that conserves the energies it harvests and does not allow them to escape into a singularity.”
“What are you talking about?”
His thoughts actually pained him. Giant wished the conversation had never begun. Instead of explaining her mistake himself, he brought up the thoughts of lost Edgerunner, who had always been one of the most questing minds among them. Instantly she was there, a third party to the conversation, although her energies had died and dispersed long ago. She was explaining to some of the newly hatched traveler children how they lived and what would keep them that way.
“Your hearts are nothing like those with which we first began,” Edgerunner’s voice, silenced for eons, was now explaining just as if she lived again, “—that is, natural singularities that bleed energy and matter out of the universe.” Edgerunner described the lattice of black quanta that the travelers had created to serve them, a holonetic froth of particle-sized black holes, buffered by a core of white gravity, perfectly balanced to draw and consume the universe’s bounty without letting it create new universes, a model of economical consumption.
“… So we do not waste what we find,” Edgerunner said to those long-dead children. “And someday, when the universal cold is great and our resources grow scant, you will thank your forebears for such a gift…”
“Do you see?” Giant asked as he ended his summoning of Edgerunner’s thoughts and returned her to his memory. He almost felt he should apologize, although he had done nothing wrong. “Do you see, Holdfast? We do not make other universes, large or small. We contain everything that we have consumed except that part we have used in our own living, but soon even those reserves will be emptied and we will end. You must accustom yourself to the idea.”
“I… didn’t remember that.” The admission seemed to be wrenched from her as if by a terrible squeeze of gravity. “Giant, it was so basic, so important – and I forgot…!”
Giant did not know how to respond, since they both knew what she meant. “Forgot” meant failure, and failure on that scale meant Holdfast’s ending must be very close. Had he done wrong? Was there a time when even the truth was inappropriate? He had never considered such a thing. At last, he broke the silence.
Lonely stillness—
a single cicada’s cry
sinking into stone.
An eon passed before she said, “What is that?” She seemed to barely have the energy to communicate now; even her unquenchable curiosity was muted by despair. “What is ‘cicada’?”
“An ancient life form. The words are a haiku, a ritualized form of thought, almost as distant in time as the sound they describe.” Suddenly he wanted to tell her all he had been thinking. “I have been very interested in these words lately, Holdfast – or rather, this particular maker of words. He lived long ago, in the morning of intelligent life. He traveled across his world and he recorded thoughts that still exist. His name was Bashō.”
“You always brought us so much,” Holdfast said slowly.
Giant thought he could hear something in her words beyond despair, and this puzzled him, too. How could she change so quickly, unless it was just another symptom of her impending failure? “What do you mean?”
“You, Giant. You. Always you kept away from us, as if to tease us, but when you did speak you had such big thoughts, such interesting thoughts. Do you wonder we troubled you? That I trouble you still?” A mournful current moved through her essence. “I am sorry my idea was foolish. I will leave you alone now.”
“Wait.” Giant was confused. “What do you mean – that is why you troubled me?”
“Because you were our elder and we thought respectfully of you. Because your thoughts were longer and deeper than ours and you saw things that we younger ones couldn’t see. It inspired all of us – it inspired me to think in bigger ways, and I thought I was doing that here. But now I understand I am not merely foolishly optimistic, I am disordered. I’m sorry, Giant. I could not help myself. I thought I saw a gleam of hope and I reached out to it too quickly. I won’t trouble you again.”
It was only after the connection had been broken that Giant realized it was he who had reached out to Holdfast in the first place. When he resumed his musings, it was in a solitude that no longer felt quite so much like something to be defended.
*
Near the end of his short life, Bashō had sensed his end coming – not that he had been overly attached to the thing called life. At the beginning of another ordered collection of poem-thoughts, he had written, “Within this temporal body composed of a hundred bones and nine holes there resides a spirit which, for lack of an adequate name, I think of as windblown. Like delicate drapery, it may be torn away and blown off by the least breeze.”
How true that was, Giant thought – how like the way he felt about himself in this late hour. Windblown. Torn away by the smallest breeze. And so he would be, by the last breezes of the last act – the final dispersion of all that was Giant, into nothing, and nothing to follow.
Sick on my journey,
only my dreams will wander
these desolate moors
Bashō had written those words in his final days, and his followers had thought it would be his final utterance – a jisei as they called it, a death poem. And indeed the poet’s dreams had continued to wander after his physical end, father than he could have guessed: could there be a terrestrial moor more desolate than the cold reaches where Giant spun? But Bashō, as always, had embraced simplicity without actually being simple, Giant recognized. He had written another poem near the end, and it was these words that had captured Giant in a deeper way than almost any other. It floated through his thoughts so continuously (but without becoming more comprehensible) that he nearly forgot the labors that kept him alive, mending the tatters of his intrinsic field and stoking the dying embers of his hungry heart.
All along this road
not a single soul – only
autumn evening
Autumn evening, that was clear – the autumn of Bashō’s life, as it was now the late autumn of Giant’s. But “not a single soul” – did Bashō mean nobody else was on the road beside himself? Or that he himself did not exist, that ultimately there was the road and nothing else?
The narrow road… thought Giant, remembering the title that had confused but fascinated him. The Narrow Road to the Interior.
And as he considered, an idea came to him. Giant saw in his mind’s eye – no, he imagined, since it existed nowhere in his own memories – a flock of birds following one bird into night, but the travelers did not fear the dark because they were together. Because they followed a leader? No, because, they followed an idea.
Not a single soul – only autumn evening.
Am I on the narrow road? Giant suddenly wondered. Or am I myself the narrow road? And when I no longer think and feel and remember, will the road still exist?
*
Sustenance was all but gone, the universe approaching pure vacuum and complete entropic scatter. Giant could perceive himself growing smaller as he began to devour the last of his resources. His systems labored to keep something like normal efficiency, because he was seized with a strange determination to understand at the very last this thing that could not be understood, this tiny mystery which cast a shadow all the way to the end of everything. What was the narrow road? And why did it seem to matter so much?
Memories now came to him frequently as he spun in his dark course, his own as well as others’, confused images and ideas that did not seem to belong together. He felt again the flush of youth, of possibility, recalled Edgerunner and Light Drum and all the rest – at times he even forgot that they were gone, and spoke as if they still could hear him, despite the silence that was his only answer.
Sometimes he even imagined himself one of Bashō’s birds, wings beating as it dove forward into a darkening sky, conscious without seeing them that his kind were all around him, that they knew him and needed him. Alive, dead, present or memory, the differences became smaller and smaller to Giant as time’s edges frayed.
But Holdfast, who for a little while would remain both memory and present reality, wanted more. She wanted more than everything that had ever been, in fact. But how could that be? And what did it matter anyway, when Giant could not give it to her?
“… The day’s not long enough…” Basho had once written, a fragment abruptly surfacing through the swirl of Giant’s other thoughts. Why should he think of that poem now?
Then, as if he had fallen into one of the singularities of which Holdfast had spoken, the one-way heart of a dead star, Giant suddenly found himself in a new place, a new understanding. Suddenly at the end of everything, everything changed.
*
He waited so long for a response from her that the silence became frightening. With her smaller size and less powerful heart, Holdfast must be feeling the nearness of the end even more acutely than he did. How long since he had spoken to her? Had he waited too long? Giant sent out a more aggressive tendril of thought, half-fearful it would touch nothing, but at last he felt a dim flutter of response.
“… Yes?”
“You survive.” His relief was surprisingly powerful, especially since that survival could only be temporary – a sliver of dying time. For the first time in perhaps his entire long life, Giant thought that being alone with his thoughts might not be what he most wanted. “You still live.”
“After… a… fashion.” Despite all, there was a touch of resigned amusement in her thought.
“I think at last I understand the poet,” he said. “His collections of thoughts are ordered so they can be shared with others – but that is not the whole of it. No, the ordered thoughts are life. Do you understand? Perhaps not…” Faced with this most important idea, Giant could not find the correct expression he sought. “But I wish to share one of the creature Bashō’s thoughts with you. It is you, Holdfast – this thought is you. Listen:
All day long, singing,
yet the day’s not long enough
for the skylark’s song…
“Do you see? You have sung since you were made, but still you wish you could sing longer – even beyond the end of all singing and all songs.”
When she spoke again, he realized how weak she was. “I… think… I… want…”
“Yes, and so do I, but time is dying. We must gather together what we have while we still can. You said the others like us are all gone. Does that mean their hearts have collapsed and dispersed, or simply that they no longer speak and understand?”
“I… don’t… understand… what…”
“I will explain, but I have not sought them out in so long I do not know how to find them. Show them to me – let me touch them through you. I am stronger than you, so let me reach out to see what remains.”
Holdfast’s thoughts were very weak and chaotic. Giant had to use some of his own strength simply to help her cope with his presence, but together they were able to stabilize the connection long enough for him to reach out to the others.
They were still there, all of his kin, although nothing was left of his fellow travelers now but their hearts: the support systems had collapsed and their minds had run down like untended machines, too crippled ever to function again. But the hearts, the hearts still lived, the billions upon billions of points of nothing precisely balanced in their matrices, still ingesting when there was nothing left to ingest, still surviving on their own stores until the great cold forced even those most perfect constructs to give up their integrity and vanish.
“I am opening folds now,” he told Holdfast, and in his mind’s eye he pictured himself calling out to her across the endless night as they flew side by side. “I am opening a fold for each of them. Give me what strength you have and I will bring their hearts through into myself. Into us.” The energy to sustain even one such fold was almost beyond him, let alone so many, but Giant no longer needed to reserve any part of his own strength for the future. Still, the engines of his being were draining what was left of his resources so quickly that only moments remained to him, and he could feel Holdfast beginning to shred in the growing surge of forces, her thoughts now little more than tatters. “Be your name,” he urged her. “Do not fail – not yet. Release will come.”
“?” The question was so small, so stressed by the growing weight of the opening folds, that Giant barely caught it.
“Our hearts are meant to conserve what they hold,” he explained. “That is why they create no new universes. But if we bring them all together at once, it could be that the buffers will break down. Much of what remains of the universe is inside us those hearts, and when the white gravity no longer keeps them apart, the black quanta should combine into a black hole of the old sort.
“Do you see? We may still make a way out of this universe, not for us, but for what we have gathered and been. As our hearts collapse together and their substance moves through the singularity, it should concentrate the energies into a near-infinite point until they are released again on the other side… and explosion of being. You and I and all our kind will give birth to a new universe after all, Holdfast – or dissolve in the trying.” He paused, resisting dissolution until a crucial question was answered. “Do you consent, Holdfast? Will we do this?”
A whisper from far, far across the night sky. “Yes.”
Giant narrowed the focus of the folds so the hearts would come together where Giant himself spun, but the effort was almost impossibly great. Still, Radiantsong, Thar the Great Question, Shifted, Bright Pilgrim, all of them existed again in that contracting moment, even if only in his memory, as he brought them back together inside himself.
But as the titan forces surged through him, stretching and curving him into impossible spaces, Giant abruptly realized that he was not strong enough to hold them all, to do what needed to be done. He had exceeded his physical limits and he was collapsing into chaos. He had failed…
Giant. I am still here. It was only a thought, but it was Holdfast’s thought, which she had somehow found the strength to send him. And although she could have nothing left to lend him, the mere knowledge that she existed somehow made him stronger.
Another instant was all he needed to absorb the last of his kin and their contained energies. He consumed the last of his own reserves, throwing every resource into the fires of his being so that he could perform this last duty of bringing them even closer together.
Duty? Even as he struggled with dying strength to hold the folds open, as the black hole froth of a thousand dark hearts and more flowed together, dissolving the boundaries between possibility and reality, he was suddenly alarmed by his own dying thoughts. Duty? What could that mean? His duty to others – his duty, somehow, to life? It was such a ludicrous, unlikely concept that Giant hesitated. Perhaps this entire unlikely idea was not revelation after all, but the madness of the end. Dying, Giant felt panic stealing his last strength. Did his intentions even make sense?
But though he had paused for only a tiny fraction of the pulse of the smallest energies, the forces he held were impossibly, immeasurably potent; even that sub-instant was enough for them to begin to break free of his control.
No! Giant could feel himself coming apart, dense as the universe’s beginning, hollow as a perfect vacuum. Life is weak, he told himself, but it struggles against all winds. Life is weak, but it is also strong.
But is it strong enough for this?
“A little longer – only a little longer, then you can rest,” he told Holdfast, although he no longer knew if he was actually sending the thoughts or if she still existed to hear them. “You and the others followed a leader who flew always into darkness, and now you must follow him a little farther. Are you ready? It will take all that you have – and all that I have, too.”
And then he could no longer speak at all. The emptied hearts of his kind, the remnants of all they had felt and thought and consumed, filled him to bursting and beyond. He held on until he felt something begin to tear at the center of everything and the pent energies rushed out into the unknown. He felt them all going then, even Holdfast whirling past like a leaf blown from a branch, like a bird flying suddenly with the wind instead of against it.
Farewell, he thought as his thoughts were stripped away and sent spinning down into the vortex after her. Farwell, dear Holdfast…!
And then she was gone, and Giant felt himself finally beginning to disappear, pulled to pieces, the pieces sucked into the same stream of rushing, exploding transfiguration.
Birds, vanishing…
The road…
… Not long enough…
… Dreams wandering the desolate moors…
The energies seemed self-sustaining now, the process of seeding a new universe safely underway, but Giant would never know for certain, any more than little Bashō could have known where his dreams would wander, and to whom. Big Giant, little Bashō – they were one and the same now, rushing down into the endless dark together. Would things begin again, as Holdfast had wished? If so, it would happen somewhere else, somewhere that even Giant could not imagine. After all, he had been given only the one universe and one short lifetime in which to study it.
Giant found he did not care. He had lived. He had thought, and those thoughts had created everything and nothing. In the end, he had learned at least one truth. Perhaps now something else would come after him, seeking truths of its own. Or perhaps not.
All along this road, he realized, not a single soul – only autumn evening.
The universe’s last poem ended as Giant ended, spun into a mist of possibility at what might have been the end of all things, or another beginning.
(2013)
Translated by Sam Hamill