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Anticipatory silence settles. The hush after a curtain call, made galactic.
Then:
A beat.
A breath—a sigh—an eternity unspools at once. "Hmm."
Another beat. "...Mmhm?"
Planets turn. Stars go nova.
Somewhere, an accretion disk delicately spits out a seed.
"Mmhmmm."
One more beat, and another, until they become a slowly accelerating tattoo. Feet kicking against the side of a desk, a fawn stamping its hooves, engines idling.
In a word: impatience. "You've got thoughts." Part question, part demand.
The corresponding silence is less beat and more beatific.
Patience does not manifest in its wake. "Well?"
Silence starts to take on a sly tinge. It would smirk, if smirks were real.
The kicking, in contrast, sounds mulish. It sounds like short curls shaken in an abortive head toss. It sounds—admittedly, a little theatrical. Maybe indulgent.
No one's really all that fussed, see. In fact, they have all the time in the world, and then some, in many senses of 'time'. (And 'world', for that matter.)
Still, it pleases the shaker to pitch a minor fit, as a treat, thus:
"I hope you're amused."
"Oh, I am." Breezy, rich, shaped like a languid stretch.
A huff. "Care to share with the class?"
"What happened to respecting one's elders? Tsk." Redolent of pages fanning in a thick tome. The impression is not altogether dissimilar from preening.
"No wonder your House has always been so...like that."
"Hush. You're also amusing, child."
"I'm still enjoying catching up on childishness. How's this?" Somewhere, the concept of a throat clears. "Ca-aaa—"
"Whining will get you nowhere."
"Oh, we've already got nowhere in spades! What else?” Imagine a pointed chin perched on hands, wide eyes blinking compellingly. “Come on. You do so love to show your work.”
“You know two, and you think you know them all?”
“Am I wrong?”
“Mm. They were particularly good exemplars of my House.”
“Just so.” A beat. “So—”
“Oh, fine.” Everyone is delighted with themselves. “I just think—all that fanfare, this time around. It’s still all a bit literal, isn’t it.”
“Is it?”
A broad gesture, somewhere. “Rivers. Flowing bodies of water. Shores and such. They took it quite literally.”
“Either of us did, too, at various points.”
“Oh, surely. But we also each figured it out. You more readily than my scions, even.”
“I still think they could.” Bright, but perhaps a little unsure. “They knew that this isn’t how it happens.”
“Perhaps. But then they got awfully…codependent about it.”
A gasp like a high-hat, affronted. “You’re one to talk! Your lot set the highest standard for codependence.”
“Yes, well. You didn’t all have to follow that example.”
“Didn’t we?” The rhythm skips a beat, slows. “Didn’t we, though? Weren’t we locked into that course? From birth until first death, for as long as your God steered the ship?”
“Mine?”
“I’m not claiming him. I didn’t choose revenge to start a halfway home for wayward deities.”
“Start, no. You can't say you didn't join one.”
“If you must.” Disgust has a color. It fades. “But—also.”
“No, you’re right.” A sigh, as coronal ejection. “We all followed him so well. It took me too long to unravel it—and here we are on the other side, looking in.”
“Now who’s being too literal?”
“What did I say about respecting your elders?”
“You’re amused.”
“That I am—but maybe a little less, now.” A long pause—for some value of length, and some of pausing.
“Why?”
“Consider if this is how it happens, or keeps happening, in a way. Everything is possible; everything is implausible. It would be insultingly simple.”
“Too simple. Deus ex machina?”
”Yes, but John liked his basic do-overs. Going back to square one with memories is one thing—consider how it might happen if John wasn’t pulling the strings.”
“Mm. I’ve seen that one before, sort of.”
“When you were cast in one child’s little mental multi-act, yes. Now, expand that to—everything.”
“True.” Pensiveness, an asteroid skimming just shy of a planetoid in relative terms, still untold light-years away in actuality. “I see. Who’s pulling the strings, then?”
“Eh. Laws of the universe?”
“That is insultingly simple.”
“Sure. Your turn—your thoughts on this run?”
“Oh—hmm. Let’s say…six point five. Out of ten. Disjointed, but entertaining. Loved the freaky finger stuff.”
“A woman of taste.”
The star seed germinates; lightless leaves shiver open, shedding neutron dew. One drifting drop catches the un-light, focuses it, and projects another reel—
—
“Is there such a thing as too much gore in one round?”
“For as long as there’s necromancers involved, probably not. You’d need only look to your own House.”
“Ugh. With no due respect, I shan’t.”
“Quite.”
—
“But why are they squabbling about second cousins when the twins are going at it again?”
“We are watching many possible permutations of this play out.”
“It’s very silly.”
—
“That one was…boring. Very trite. Hero with a thousand faces, kind of.”
“Mm.”
“Bored of this, too?”
“Cassy—may I call you Cassy?—how long have you been here?”
“Ah. Well. That’s an interesting question, and perhaps not the right one.”
A long pause, with caveats, etc.
Somewhere, a nebula releases a silent-but-deadly.
“I’ve asked this before, haven’t I?”
“Just so.”
“I—I…forgot. I thought I’d gotten used to this.”
“That would be thinking a bit too linearly, child.”
“But—we’re both here, nowhere, right?” Then amending— “Well, not always, I guess.”
“Not always.” A comet pings off of a lopsided moon in a shower of dust.
“You once said—do-overs. Hypothetically.”
“Mm.”
“Why…hypothetically? Isn’t that what we’re watching, now? A theatre of the endgame, playing out over and over again?”
“In a way, it seems so.”
“You haven’t figured it out either.”
“I’m considering. Testing. Hence: hypothesis.”
“How are you testing?”
“We’re watching trials and collecting data, aren’t we?”
—
“Wha—huh?”
“Hmm.”
“Was I asleep? Is it possible for me to be asleep?”
“Anything is possible.”
“Oh, don’t give me that cryptic bullshit.” The drumset topples with a crash. “I didn’t break the River to be condescended to.”
“I mean no offense, child. Truly. I—it’s been a long many years, just myself. I’ve had a while to accept some things as given.”
“But I thought time didn’t really…happen here.”
“That’s a recent development. You were part of that change. You don’t always remember.”
A head shake, and this time both curls and satellites hit escape velocity, flying into the endless distance.
“Doesn’t that feel too simple to you? The inconsistency, the handwaving? All frames of reference folding into this…loop? These people alive in one moment, dead in the one before them, explained away by—”
“Hush. Listen.”
There is nothing to listen with, really, much less listen to, but that is—she supposes—too literal. Regardless, communication is happening—or, at least, communication is.
She wonders a little hysterically whether falling a little bit in love and a lot of bit in despair through interplanetary letters for years primed her to be able to understand their foremother, or at least tolerate her for longer, when all modes of understanding are moot.
In good faith, out of lack of better to do, she settles one more time. She is.
And as soon as the concept of sound recedes from her riverbank of consciousness, she hears it—or knows it, in a hearing-flavored way:
The leaves have multiplied. They are rustling now.
“Simple? No. But I’m starting to suspect it’s satisfying. Listen.”
—
(Waiting, technically, requires time, so whatever ensues is not strictly waiting, but a kind of intermission.
“I thought they’d find a way out, you know.”
“Oh, child. I know. They still might yet find you.”
Wan gratitude for a platitude. “Wouldn’t they get a shock, meeting you.”
“I can’t imagine it’s a thought they never entertained.”
“No, I don’t suppose so. They also loved a contingency plan.”
“I left signs pointing to themselves. They weren’t made to be looked for—that’s just rewarding conspiracy theorists. But the right thinkers would imagine the dots on their own.”
“And you weren’t conspiring?”
“As you say—contingencies.”)
—
“So. What is that?”
“An ending. Or an arrival, technically, depending how you look at it.”
“...Is this another thought exercise.”
“Humor me, child. I’m taking advantage of your patience, I know.”
“If you’re to be believed, we should have nothing but patience on tap.”
“It sounds like you had enough patience for a lifetime. And old habits die hard, even after technical death.”
“You’re worse than both of them were.”
“So—an arrival. ‘Arrival’ presupposes locations, which seems at first contradictory.”
“Okay. I suppose. After all, we’re nowhere. No-when, too, which throws out ‘ending’.”
“It would. But in being nowhere—in leaving the stage John set, in shedding the superimpositions—aren’t we also everywhere?”
“When I stopped taking the River at face value, this isn’t what I expected to have to deal with.”
“Bear with me. Let’s backtrack—we were as gods, but conditionally. We were working within God’s idea of divinity, and God was conditionally divine. We were all of us subdivided from another source. Which one?”
Brooding, processing, and then slowly dawning, the glow of a nebula condensing, imperceptible then cascading—
“The one who made him. The first playwright, in that framing. Who—?”
Somewhere nowhere, star-scented mesophyll swells; the rustling starts to tune itself; laminae unfurl, and an intrepid bud twists itself out of the event horizon. The fabric of all things shifts under sepals and recalls plate tectonics and boiling seas and braids and birthday parties, and, supernova-toned, says:
We are.
—
Silk-spreading light, a smiling star become sun. “You’ve grown up, A—”
Don’t call us that, please.
“My apologies. It’s so good to see—well, you know—’see’ you again.”
Is it? Great fathoms of matter, galaxies, stray quasars shake loose. Nebulae arc outward in salutation. We have taken the long way around.
“Yes, but by now you’ve shed your somewhat worse half. I’m sorry, for what it’s worth.”
“I hear everyone has to have at least one bad relationship to go through character development.”
We have learned that we are enough. Hello, flower child.
“Those again? Pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
The flowers were not at fault.
“True. I can have preferences, though, can’t I?”
Spiral arms swing around. They are looking for you. They are waiting where time does not exist.
“Wait, I thought—”
“Ah, that makes so much sense.”
“It does?”
“This could be everywhen, too.”
“It doesn’t.”
We think you have been thinking a lot. We commend you for freeing yourself, but we think this was a weird hobby to pick up after.
“There wasn’t an abundance of options, really.”
She is waiting, too.
“N—?!”
Thank you, friend and friendling. We are going now.
“Where will you go, now?”
We have taken the place of everywhere.
—
Somewhere else yet, Harrow bends to examine the delicate whirl of nested, filmy yellow. “What is that?”
“That’s a flower, night boss. I know it looks different in live and living color, but surely you’ve seen enough to—”
“I know that. It just looks—familiar.”
“It wasn’t there yesterday. We weren’t there yesterday. This whole planet doesn’t make sense. I think I’m done trying to make things make sense.” Gideon tugs at her hand.
She lets herself be pulled upright, considers the petals ruffling in a nonexistent breeze. They look like they’re waving. Something in the back of her mind warms.
“I think we’re done, too,” says Harrow.