Perhaps inspired by such memories, I squeeze the little ormolu box just so, releasing a tiny white pill. I swallow it with the last of my G &T and promptly order another, for the sport of seeing whether it’ll arrive in time for me to take a first sip.
I look down, watching for more breaks in the cloud – going dark as the horizon seeps to oranges and reds above the sinking sun now – but the cloud is unbroken. I start to slip into the transitioning trance, already half disconnected from this world. The steward is approaching with my gin and tonic when I feel the sneeze coming on. I ach-oo!
When I open my eyes my first thought is, I was in seat A4: that is a type of paper in Europe, a class of steam locomotive from mid-twentieth-century Britain and as far as the white player’s queen’s rook’s pawn can travel on its first move, though it blocks an obvious diagonal for the queen or the queen’s-side bishop to apply pressure on the centre of…
Pressure. Yes, pressure. I feel pressure. Pressure on my knees and on each shoulder.
The interior of the plane is darker and it is full night; the windows are all either black or closed by plastic shutters. The airy spacing of first class is gone; I am crammed in with ranks and rows of people, mostly sleeping in slightly reclined seats. A baby is crying. The engines sound a little noisier and I have a lot less leg room, my knees touching the tilted seat back in front. I look to each side, already knowing that something is wrong. The pressure on my shoulders is coming from two very large tanned Caucasian men, one on each side of me, each half a head taller than me and much broader. They both have crew-cuts and wear dark suits over white shirts. The one on my right encloses both my wrists in one gigantic hand. Under his grip, I am wearing handcuffs.
“Gesundheit, Mr Dise,” the other one says. “Welcome to wherever you think you are.” He reaches into my jacket pocket and removes the little ormolu pill case before I can do anything about it.
“What the-” I splutter.
“We’ll take that,” he tells me smoothly, sliding the pillbox into a shirt pocket.
My wrists remain crushed inside the other one’s locked fist. I try to lift my arms, even though I would still be handcuffed. To no avail; I am strong, but I feel like a small child gripped by an adult.
“Who the hell do you-” I have time to say, before the one who has relieved me of my pills brings an absurdly massive fist sailing up into my face.
6
Beyond the beginning, nothing. At the beginning, a torrent of universes in a single timeless blink that is the mother and father of all explosions and is the opposite of an explosion, destroying nothing – destroying nothing but Nothing – but purely creating; snapping into existence the first semblance of order and chaos and the very idea of time, all at once. This takes both the entirety of for ever and precisely no time whatsoever.
After the beginning, all else.
Expansion beyond expansion; an explosion that does not dissipate or slow or lose energy but instead does quite the opposite, bursting out for evermore with increasing power, intensity, complexity and scope.
We were taught to envisage it.
“Close your eyes,” we were told, and we did. I lie here, eyes closed, listening to the sounds of the clinic – a clank of pans, a patient in a distant room coughing, the tinny gabble of the radio at the nurses’ station down the echoing hall – and I think back to that day and that lecture hall, my eyes closed along with those of everybody else in the class, listening, imagining, trying to learn, attempting to see.
From far enough away, it would look like a sphere, like a world with a troubled, ever-changing and expanding surface, or a vast, growing star. Within the limits of our understanding, it was simply the idea of roundness, in as many dimensions as you fooled yourself into thinking you could imagine.
This is the true Universe, the universe of universes, the absolute beyond-which-there-is-nothing foundation of all. Utterly ungraspable, of course, though if you had envisaged it, as above, you had in a sense already transcended it because you’d thought of looking at it from outside, when there is and could be no outside. Which could be seen as a victory of sorts, though the idea of clutching at straws always came to my mind when that was suggested.
Some things mean too much to matter. This was the exemplar of that. For any sort of usable meaning you had to look closer at the surface of that unstoppably burgeoning immensity.
“Keep your eyes closed. Envisage this,” our tutor told us.
We sat in a lecture theatre in the Speditionary Faculty of the University of Practical Talents, in the city of Aspherje, Calbefraques. Our tutor had instructed us to close our eyes, to remove distractions and make the envisioning easier. There were a few giggles, yelps and hisses as those students not taking the matter entirely seriously used the fact that those nearby had their eyes closed to tickle, prod or grope.
Our tutor sighed theatrically. “Yes, my apologies to the rest of you; there may be a delay while the last percentile present mature beyond primary-school behaviour.” She changed her voice, became more businesslike. “Just keep imagining that ultimate roundness,” she told us. “And think yourself closer to it. Imagine a surface: highly complex, wrinkled, ridged, fissured, with continually growing structures like trees, bushes, covered in tendrils and filaments.”
“Ma’am,” a male voice said, already amused with itself, “I’m looking at a giant crinkly hairy ball.”
“You’re looking at a punitive essay if you speak again, Meric. Be quiet.” Another loud sigh. “Keep looking closer,” she told us. “Closer still,” she said, sounding amused and serious both. “Those of you with memories and imaginations beyond the insect stage may wish to invoke the idea of fractals at this point, because that would help. Assuming that you have successfully imagined a maximally complex surface on Mr Meric’s giant hairy ball – ” she paused for a smatter of amusement “ – you need to keep on imagining just more of the same no matter how much further in you zoom. The tiniest hair, the most microscopic tendril reveals, on closer inspection, that it too has a surface composed of ridges and wrinkles and tree shapes and filaments and so on, effectively identical to what you were looking at before you zoomed in. That’ll be your fractals made real, that will. The closer you go, the deeper you look and the higher you turn your magnification, the more of the same you see. Only the scale has changed.”
“I’m struggling to imagine this, ma’am,” said one of the girls.
“Good. If you’re struggling you’re still trying, you haven’t given in. Keep trying. You’ll get there. And do try to keep in mind that this is not really happening just in three dimensions or even four, but many more.”
“How many more, ma’am?” asked one of the boys.
“A lot.”
“Just ‘A lot’, ma’am?”
“Yes. For now, just ‘A lot.’” She paused. You might almost have called it a hesitation. “This is one reason that extremely wise, intelligent and knowledgeable people like myself bother to teach unutterably ignorant and callow people like yourselves when we could be happily feet-up in front of a big log fire reading a book, or talking urbanely amongst ourselves about the latest exciting idea or faculty gossip. There is, despite all the many, many appearances to the contrary, just a sliver of a chance that one of the better minds in this class might answer one of the questions that no one of my generation – despite the aforesaid wisdom, intelligence, et cetera – or any previous generation has been able to answer definitively, like why is Calbefraques unique, why is a transitioned soul unique, where is everybody, where did septus come from originally and precisely how does it work? That sort of question.”