Both of them looked around the city they seemed to be in, as seen from the lip of the parking lot where it intersected the sidewalk. Around them was a slightly-busy-for-a-Saturday midtown business district, in a slightly nicer Norville. (...)
They passed a boy sitting on the sidewalk, drawing arcs and lines with chalk that meandered around in complex turns towards the drawing's center. (...) As Charles stared at the boy and his MILF, wondering if the chalk drawing meant something, he realized he was feeling an odd sense of reverse deja vu. It wasn't a feeling that Charles had once seen something similar. He didn't half-remember having already seen a boy chalking arcs on the sidewalk. It was like Charles was precognitively anticipating that he would later see another boy chalking arcs on the sidewalk. And he was foreseeing that he would experience deja vu at that later time, including a feeling of deja vu about how he'd already known he would later experience deja vu.
The strange possibly-imaginary feeling stayed with Charles as they walked past a bus stop showing an ad for some horror movie called Don't Look. On the opposite side of the bus stop was a cheaper-looking movie poster, just black text on a plain white background, advertising Rules of Knowing. If those were messages, he couldn't understand them. Both posters gave Charles the sense that he had never seen them before, but would later experience a sense of deja vu on seeing them again.
A young girl looked down at the dirt of a house garden one step removed from the business street. A muscular fatherly figure stood beside her. She was staring at one flower in a bed of dirt with a despondent expression. It would not be the last time Charles saw this, or so part of him insisted.
They passed (for the first time) a beautiful and not overly dressed street busker who was setting up a page of music for herself, a guitar resting in a case beside her.
They passed (for the first time) a boy and girl in their mid-teens, striking dramatic poses in the front yard of a corner house and reading lines from printed scripts. Possibly practicing for a high-school performance of Pirates of Penzance, if Charles had overheard a couple of phrases correctly.
He and Cindy were drawing closer to the suddenly-appeared neighborhood park. Coincidentally, nobody else seemed to be using it at the moment.
Like everything else in this span of the parallel dimensions, the approaching park looked nicer than Norville should have been. Most of the surface area was green, well-watered grass. The bounds of the territory were drawn by stands of healthy bushes and trees. The drinking fountains were polished to a shine. The mandatory merry-go-round in its mandatory pit of sand had no traces of rust or crumbling paint. A clean bathroom building was decorated with multicolored murals instead of graffiti, with the wall facing the sidewalk showing silhouettes of children playing on a merry-go-round. <hidden_text>Something about that arrangement seemed visually disturbing, like the mural was showing a distorted projection cast from the actual merry-go-round nearby.</hidden_text> A quiet place, a peaceful place, filled with life in an unobtrusive way.
A wooden signboard-monolith standing at the front of the park showed winter hours and summer hours in small letters, along with the apparent name of the park, Tara Gardens. At the bottom of the wooden signboard-monolith was a quote in large text:
"We shall not cease from exploring, / and the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started / and know the place for the first time." --- T. S. Eliot
The park's most striking feature was a wide spiral pathway of red material, polished and smooth like marble. The outer part of the pathway circled through the park's whole diameter, turning inwards until it reached the park's center. Charles realized that Starry was walking straight for the start of the red pathway, at the boundary where the park met the sidewalk. He, too, had the sense that this was the obvious next step to continue the journey. The two of them stepped onto the spiral pathway together. Each fall of Starry's high heels on the material made a tock sound like a grandfather clock, or somebody clicking their tongue.
Even at the center, the spiral continued. First it narrowed into a thin ledge, set just above the grass. Then a transparent embedding capped the park's midpoint and protected the last fragile bits of the path, as the spiral narrowed into a red wire and continued to coil around itself, to the limits of visible detail like a fractal. Neither of the two made any attempt to keep walking on the red path once it got too narrow to walk on. Neither tried to step onto the true center.
(...)
He glanced back behind himself, but it didn't seem like a good idea to try retracing the red spiral pathway. Moving at the same time, he and Cindy both stepped off the last walkable part of the red pathway, onto the mostly-dead grass around it. There was still enough green there that it counted as a color. They walked back out of the park, this time turning along the green anti-spiral, the space defined by the red spiral's absence. Or was it the green that was the spiral, and the red that was the anti-spiral?
As they exited the park, stepping back onto the sidewalk, Charles again scanned the surrounding world to see if he could figure out what had changed. It all looked like a normal residential street in Norville to him. Abandoned lawns taken by weeds, graffiti on a STOP sign, a rusting car with four flat tires, houses that needed paint.
(...) Everything looks normal. But I still have this feeling like..."
"Like something changed but you can't tell what," Charles said.
"Yeah. It feels---it feels like if I could recognize what I was seeing, I would be scared. Very scared. Maybe that's why I'm not allowed to recognize it. This isn't supposed to be about me, right now."
In front of one house, a boy was bent over on the sidewalk, drawing curves and arcs on the concrete with red chalk. Kneeling beside was the figure of a mother-on-Saturday, her makeup undone and her hair put up into a sharp utilitarian knot. Something about that felt off, but again Charles couldn't put his finger on it.
He had the oddest feeling of deja vu, an almost perfect rhyme inside his memory. Like he'd seen something similar before, and furthermore, had known at that time that he would experience deja vu later. And what's more, he had the feeling that he would see this sight again in the future, and experience deja vu then about how he was feeling now. Memory recalling the past, prediction showing the future, and both echoing the present including those thoughts, like standing between two mirrors in an endless corridor of time.
"So it goes back to where it started?" the boy was saying.
"Not exactly where it started," said the woman, the mother. "That would be a circle, which is technically a degenerate spiral in which the radius is a constant function of the angle. You want to move to almost where you started, but not quite. The chalk should end up further inward, closer to the center."
"Why not go back exactly to the starting point?"
The mother paused, with the helpless expression of somebody who had been asked a deep and yet silly question by a child who clearly expected an answer. "Well, for one thing, because then you'd go around and around in circles forever with no way to escape. It's the difference between setting time backwards by one week but keeping your own memories intact, or resetting everything including your state of mind. Even if you have to repeat something, you need to keep a hint of what changed."
Neither the boy nor the woman said anything else that Charles could hear until they'd walked on out of earshot. He wanted to stop and ask questions of the mother, but that seemed embarrassing, and even more embarrassing with a little boy present and Cindy watching him.
They approached (again) (as they would in the future) a bus stop, with no passengers waiting. The side facing them showed a movie advertisement for some horror film called Don't Look, with the subtitle If you can see it, it can touch you. The poster didn't show the monster, but that, of course, was only common sense.
After they'd walked past, Charles looked back and saw that the other side of the bus stop showed an advertisement (familiar and yet not familiar) for a movie called Rules of Knowing, a simple white poster with short lines of text below the title:
1. At no time does any being know everything. / 2. Every fact is known by some being at some time / 3. Some beings forget nothing.
"I don't think it's only you who's not being allowed to recognize things," Charles said. "I also feel that I am not being allowed to think clearly, and that I would be worried too". Part of Charles wanted to be offended at mind-control being used on him, yet that part was given pause by the certainty that this was happening for a reason. He didn't know that reason. It might be a good one. Maybe this particular journey of enlightenment was showing him, instead of telling him, why he shouldn't ask so many questions. Or something was talking to his subconscious and leaving his conscious mind out of the loop. Or dialoguing with some part of himself that wasn't his whole conscious self, because the whole person that was Charles would panic. Or the whole Charles would go off on a tangent that wasn't what this ritual needed to be about.
&&A young girl looked down at the dirt of a house garden one step removed from the business street. A man stood beside her, dressed in worn-out clothing. The girl was looking down at one flower in a bed of dirt, with a despondent expression. It had not been the first time Charles saw this, or so part of him insisted.&&
"Why not just leave the flower where it is?" the girl was saying. "Just leave it be, by itself. Maybe the raccoons won't get this one."
"No," her father said, gently but with utter certainty. "This flower can't exist here anymore."
Charles really had the feeling that if he was allowed to clearly process what he'd just heard, he would be concerned. As opposed to his current emotions, which felt more like nodding sadly along to the true thing that had been said.
They came to a street intersection, and turned left. This was a commercial street, or as commercial as the wounded town of Norville ever got.
On the other side of the street as they walked past, a street busker was strumming on a guitar. A thin woman, one who looked thin more in the hungry way than in the way of conventional standards of beauty.
"Oh my darling, oh my darling / Oh my darling Clementine / You have gone and lost forever / Awful sorry, Clementine
In the warm air of the summer / While the sunlight still can shine / There's a hope that springs eternal / Everything will turn out fine
You were hopeful, you were careless / And you stepped across the line / It's too late now to be sorry / No use crying for Clementine"
"Holy shit that's as bad as the song about the muffin man"
Okay, so she was also getting creepy ambient music on her walks. Good to know, in a way. "The muffin man?"
"I am not singing it for you. I probably shouldn't even be talking about it, not here of all places. The muffin man might show up."
"So where the hell are we and what are we doing here, again? (...) I at least know who has the answer to that. Charles, where are we and what are we doing? If you don't know the answer, make up some bullshit."
"Uh," Charles said. Make up some bullshit. "This place isn't exactly a dream. If anything, it's closer to reality than the place we left. Getting closer to reality is appropriate for doing something... extra-real. If that's not just some weird idea I picked up from reading Amber novels as a kid. And there's a question I have whose answer wasn't inside..." Charles stopped talking, disturbed at the words coming out of his mouth.
"What question?"
"Uh, the non-bullshit version would be something along the lines of, what is this whole thing about? What's going on? What was the alien doing here in the first place? Why are parallel Earths mixing together around you? What the actual hell is going on? I think that's the number one thing I'd want to read in the license agreement, if I get to pick one."
They'd just been walking past a homeless woman, sitting with her back to the blank wall of some building whose front was facing the unseen street beyond. The blank wall of the building seemed familiar, but the woman herself looked too different. She had just been another face in the crowd, not a homeless person, in whatever inaccessible memory was giving Charles this feeling of deja vu. The homeless woman had her eyes closed, a heap of her things scattered around her. A cardboard sign next to a cup read:
no home / lost everything / somebody help
(...) "It meant something," Charles said. "We noticed her right after I asked what was going on. What does that mean?"
"I---I don't know. No. I can think of one thing. I, I had this thought, earlier today, and it seemed like a cruel thing to say to you--- Things on Earth were pretty bad. What if they weren't going to get better?"
"I mean, you talked about---about Earth getting to an interstellar-level future that we made for ourselves, with fully automated luxury gay space communism or whatever the conservative equivalent is. What if that's not what was scheduled to happen if the alien hadn't shown up? Not that we were heading for some huge disaster. Just, stuff was only going to get shittier from here. Like all the statistics showing that people in our generation are leading worse lives than our parents did at our ages. That was just going to continue. And the same thing was going to happen in all the developing countries, they'd just end up in the same place we did, shitty lonely lives inside a more developed nation."
"One Sunday afternoon like any other, we crossed a threshold that nobody even noticed. Some genius in India who could have developed better power plants got rezoned out of their school instead. And somebody's computers calculated that the probability of us fixing our own problems had dropped from point zero zero zero zero one to zero. A whole region of---of possibility---got labeled as a disaster zone. That region lost the right to determine its own future. Like if the United Nations voted to say that North Korea screwed up and wasn't allowed to be its own country any more. The rights to the failed timelines got given away, or auctioned off, or something, and were bought out by things that weren't human at all. Things with weird sexual fetishes. But the regulations say they have to do stuff like spreading the Ero Virus through the worlds they bought the rights to... I don't know. I don't feel like it's the truth. Just a thought I had. Would it change your answer to me if that was the truth?"
"Are we supposed to fix the Earth, then?" - "What if we're not? The package of superpowers I got really doesn't seem like a first-aid kit. What if it doesn't make any difference to the Earths whether you decide to come with me? Say the alien's going to do whatever it's going to do, and we don't have much influence after all. The Ero Virus would have happened no matter what."
The words weren't True, but they were hitting too hard for them to not be relevant. "Yeah," Charles said, and swallowed. There was some part of him that knew things he wasn't allowed to consciously recognize, and it was crying.
Cindy shot him a concerned look. "You didn't think you were supposed to save the world last Saturday, right? Has that much changed? You didn't have the power to help the Earth a week ago, and you were fine with that. (...) you can still be a good person and help the people right around you. I---I should just say this. You can help me. I---I do---need you, Charles."
A woman talking on a cellphone, walking towards them. Charles recognized her. This time he did remember where he'd seen her before. "Do you?" Charles said, his voice feeling stuck. "Do you, in fact, need me? No, don't answer. Listen to what your mating field said to me."
And they walked past his memory of that woman, as she repeated exactly the same words Charles had heard her speak. "It's just that neither of you need to feel stuck in the relationship, you know?" the woman said into her cellphone. "There are other options for both of you."
"Oh," Cindy said softly under her breath.
"Yeah," Charles said, the words sticking in his throat. "That was it. That was what was wrong with the license agreement you gave me and the question you asked. That was what I would have felt, later, was signing over my soul under false pretenses. I thought you needed me, and I needed you, and that I could help other people if I went with you. All of those things were false. So where does that leave us?"
Cinderella Sheen had water in her own eyes. "It leaves us free," she said. "It leaves us with only the question of whether we want to be around each other. With no other reasons at all, but whether you want to be around me, for you to make that choice."
They were standing in front of the neighborhood park again, a small dingy place suited to a small dingy town like Norville. Most of the park's surface area was browned by inadequate watering, though there was enough green to leaven the color some. Struggling bushes and trees demarcated the boundaries of the territory, with metal fence exposed beyond that. The drinking fountains looked old, but functional. The paint was peeling on the mandatory merry-go-round in its mandatory pit of sand, exposing rusted metal beneath. Bathroom stalls painted an unappetizing brown had been sprayed over with white graffiti like a distorted projection of the merry-go-round, a vision that triggered a deep disquiet in the back of Charles's mind, something worse than anything yet said out loud.
A wooden signboard-monolith at front showed winter hours and summer hours in small letters, along with the apparent name of the place, Tara Memorial Park. At the bottom of the wooden signboard-monolith was a quote:
"The end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started / and know the place for the first time." --- T. S. Eliot
Bordering the sidewalk was a wide spiral pathway of red material, polished and smooth like marble. The two of them stepped onto the spiral pathway together. (...)
The two of them approached, once again, and now for the last time, a boy sitting in the sidewalk and drawing on it with chalk, with his mother kneeling beside him.
"What do you mean, you can't get to the center of a spiral?" the boy was saying. "I thought I just did."
**"Not if it's a hyperbolic spiral," his mother said. "Those loop around an infinite number of times at the center. If you looked closely at the center of a hyperbolic spiral, you'd just keep seeing more of it. You could keep zooming in and it would keep going around an infinite number of times. So to draw it, you'd have to make an infinite number of circles with your chalk. Which you can't do."
"Because it's not allowed?" said the boy.
"Well," the mother said, "if you tried, I'd make you come inside for lunch before you starved to death. So in that sense, yes, it's not allowed."
"What would happen if I got to the center of the spiral anyways?" said the boy in fascinated tones. "Would it kill me?"
"It'd wipe out the whole Earth," the mother said solemnly, in the tones of somebody who didn't want to discourage this interest in mathematics no matter where it had come from, and would go to any lengths to play along. "It would destroy the rest of the Milky Way too. Enough sidewalk chalk in one place would form a supermassive black hole that pulled everything else into it."
"It destroys the whole world if you draw it?" said the boy, looking very impressed by this.
"That's right!" said the mother. "A hyperbolic spiral is one of the simplest kinds of entities where it's easy to draw part of them, but if you drew one in too much detail it would destroy you and your world and everything else you knew existed."
"Can you know about the center of a spiral?" said the boy.
"That's a very smart question!" said the mother. "You can know about the center in some ways but not others. It's no problem if you just look at the equation for a hyperbolic spiral without visualizing the figure it draws. But if your brain represented enough of the details inside, it would form a supermassive black hole and then we're back to destroying galaxies again. It's like a story that can only be told in metaphor, because showing a movie of it would destroy the movie theater."
"Wow!" said the boy. Then he suddenly looked worried. "Can that happen if I think too hard about the centers of spirals?"
"Honeybuns," the mother said, "if that could happen, I'd never have hinted to you about the possibility of hyperbolic spirals existing. That you can't think about the center in enough detail isn't a rule like taking your medicine is a rule. It's just something that's true."
"Who made it be true, though?" said the boy. "Was it somebody who didn't want me destroying galaxies?"
"We'll talk about that more when you're older," said the mother. "How to divide up responsibility between God and the anthropic principle, I mean. Now finish up drawing as much of the spiral as the truths let you draw, because lunch is almost ready."
The boy went back to drawing red and green spirals on the ground, each one filling the negative spaces of the other.
They were approaching, for the final time, the bus stop with no passengers waiting, on whose side was the movie advertisement saying Don't Look: Learning too much about it can give it a way to reach you.
They were beyond it, and looking back, for the final time, at the movie poster for Rules of Knowing.
- At no time does any being know everything. / 2. Every fact is known by some being at some time. / 3. Some beings forget nothing. / 4. Eventually, they will know.
They were walking past where a young girl looked down at a bed of ruined dirt, a single white flower still growing up from it.
"Is there no way to leave it be?" the young girl was saying. "Picking it up and moving it seems---wrong. Isn't there any way to protect it where it is?"
The father figure standing behind her shrugged. "Too expensive."
"Our family can't afford it?"
"In principle, we have that much money in our bank account, but we'd have to give up something else we wanted. Are you willing for our house to have only cereal for breakfast for one week, so that this flower can stay where it is, instead of moving it to the perfectly good flowerbed in our backyard that we already fertilized?"
"No," the girl said, sounding like her heart was breaking. "It's just---sad. I feel like the flower would rather stay where it is."
"It would be lonely there, what with it being the only flower left."
They were walking past the street busker, whose guitar sat lifeless beneath her hands, as she sang a mournful song that was more of a chant.
Some die in their waking life
Some die in their dreams
If you're good the angels will bid more against your screams
Never break your solemn oath, for if your soul should fall
There's bidders in the darkness that are stranger than us all
Her voice segued from there into the chorus.
Inside the dreams of Azathoth
Azathoth, Azathoth
Inside the dreams of Azathoth there's things that trade their votes
On the lawn of a house, a boy and a girl were reading lines, now the lines of the real play, this one time and never again.
"I just want her to be happy, and to never lose her care."
"Happy? Well, whatever. But she does need weirder hair."
They passed the wall where the homeless woman had been, in the last reality or vision. In this version her blankets and coats lay abandoned on the ground, unable to follow where she had gone.
They stood in front of the park once more.
The air had a tang of smoke to it, familiar to anyone who'd driven through California during wildfires. Thin clouds were enough to render the sun invisible, as the haze of ash would have already reduced the sun to a red disc. Instead there was only a red ambient light all across the sky, the color of a sunset cloned. Charles tried reflexively to hold his breath, then gave up after he realized he had nowhere to find an N95 particulate-filtering breath mask in the next minute.
The fiery light tinged the endless road beneath them, turning it into a red pathway as it spiraled unbroken into the center of the park.
To either side of them, abandoned houses rested in decaying peace. Unbroken windows set in the middle of peeling paint told a story of a place so lifeless that nobody had come through to loot the houses. All the lawns were dead, as were the bushes, and the weeds, everything crumbling into browns or greys. No vines crawled up any of the decaying houses.
The sign by the entryway into the park had been covered over by soot. All that was still readable were the letters ---ra Memorial. Tiny scratches seemed to cover the black soot below that, like an unseeably vast list of names in almost that many different alphabets.
The sides of the bathroom stalls had also turned black, except for a silhouette of the merry-go-round, that was still painted in the original brown color beneath. He should have known then what that meant, but he hadn't realized, not yet.
And the two of them continued walking down the spiral pathway.
As they came closer to the center, the hellish light from above dimmed further, from the red of smoked sunset to the more deathly red of smoked twilight. The smell of ash grew thicker in the air.
As they reached the almost-center and stopped, they heard distant, irregular rumbles of thunder.
Worry was starting to filter through his altered state of mind. Whatever this meant, it was obviously not good news. Stay calm, Charles thought to himself. As he could do it in his waking life, so could he do it in his dreams.
"Charles," Cinderella said. There was an undertone of locked-down panic in her voice. "What question did you have in your mind this time?"
"I'm not sure yet," Charles said. "Something about---whether I was leaving any responsibilities behind if I followed you. Do you know what this answer means?"
"I---I've gotten hints that something is very wrong, I was putting them out of my mind before---I was playing a video game and the world ended inside the game---God. I hope I don't remember knowing this after we wake up. Charles, I think that by the time the alien shows up inside a world, things must already be broken. Just as broken as you'd think they'd have to be, logically, in order for something like the alien to be able to manifest there. The alien isn't the cause of the rules shattering. It's a symptom of it."
"But what happened?" Charles said. He knew the question was distressing her, but it mattered. There'd been other people in his Earth besides him. "If you don't know, can you make up some bullshit? Please?"
"It's---it's---okay. Bullshit it is.People got too atomized by modern society, everyone hated everyone and the news wasn't true. There were fewer and fewer people that each person knew well enough that they could have used Hands Across Forever to bring them back. The---the degree of people knowing which other people they lived in the same world with---one day the metaphysical fabric of Earth just fell apart. We fell out into the darkness and other things picked us up."
It didn't feel true. They weren't close enough to the center of reality that the truth could be spoken here.
It did feel like things were at least that bad. They had to be, for all of this to be happening. By the time you checked out of your motel in the morning and met a fiery-haired girl who could stop time, reality had already disintegrated far beyond the point where it could be restored.
Whatever peace had been forcibly laid upon his mind was starting to break down, leaving dismay in its place and rising horror. Things wouldn't just be normal everywhere else except around Cinderella's alien. Why had either of them ever thought that?
"And," Cinderella said, she was crying now, "and, I think, what I really offered you, is that I'm fleeing the wreckage, somehow, and I can take some people with me when I run away. Oh God, I'm glad I won't remember this."
(...) Charles realized what he'd been seeing from the beginning.
"No," Charles said, interrupting her chant. "No." He looked back and forth between the bathroom building, the merry-go-round, again and again. The building whose wall was black except for the silhouette etched there.
In the photos, they always picked a building that had been painted white, to make the silhouettes easier to recognize.
In the movie version, there would be children playing on the merry-go-round when it happened, because it was more poignant that way.
In reality, there hadn't been any children in this park when the light had come, and painted black what it touched.
"Charles?"
"No," Charles said, "no, no, no, that can't be, there isn't, there isn't any reason for, the world was---more peaceful than that---there weren't any international incidents, nothing worse than usual---why? Oh god, why? We were doing better than---" The air. Was he breathing nuclear fallout? Was he already dead? Cindy's mating field shouldn't have sent him to die so easily. Was this all a dream in the first place? If this was a dream, he wanted to wake up.
"Charles?"
The first stage of grieving was denial, and putting all the power of his grief behind his denial, Charles spoke. "No," he said hoarsely. "No. This makes no sense. There wasn't a nuclear war. This is not reality."
The sky was gone. Everything overhead was pitch blackness. The world was lit only by frequent dim flashes, some violence so terrible that it burned all the way through whatever had fully blacked out the sun.
He was kneeling amid what was barely recognizable as the ashes of where the park had been, a melted metal puddle substituted for the merry-go-round. In periodic intervals the ground below his knee felt blurry, and he knew that the sounds he wasn't hearing would have liquefied his bones.
Illuminated faintly in nightmare blinks, its color unreadable in the deathly light, a single flower rested in the ashes before him.
Another metaphor. Charles shook his head, and pushed himself to his feet. "No," he spoke again. "This is also not reality."
From behind him, a familiar voice spoke. "It's not," said that voice. "But this is as close as I'm letting you get."
Charles turned, some part of him having expected this from the beginning, and looked at his dead grandfather.
"Bob, I presume," Charles said. "Or are you claiming to be the real Marcus Adan?"
"It's complicated," the form of his grandfather said, the flashes of dim light now showing a wry grin. "That does distinguish me from all the beings where the answer would just be no. But if you're asking me whether I am the Marcus Adan you love and remember, the one whose hand you are holding across eternity, the answer is no. Him you will meet in time."
He could remember the dream fully now, and the squiggly thing with the face and voice of Grandpa Mark. "Did you eat my grandfather?" Charles said. "Did you eat a copy of my grandfather?"
"This is a story featuring Marcus Adan," Grandpa Mark the entity snapped back at him. "That doesn't change the story of Marcus Adan any more than you could rewrite the history of Europe using whiteout and a pen."
"Okay, look," Charles said. "Leaving aside a whole lot of other things, can we put all that on hold and have you explain what's actually going on?"
"It's not that simple," said the form of Grandpa Mark. "If it were, you could have been told already without all this rigamarole. Cinderella Sheen can know some things. Charles Adan is allowed to know some other things. If you remember things you can't tell each other, it has consequences for your relationship. And that is far from the only complication here. As you've guessed, the real truth is something you lack the background to understand. But speaking metaphorically, on her Sunday afternoon, Cinderella Sheen touched a multiverse that is vaster than anything you've ever tried imagining. Some of the existences in that multiverse have broad-ranging powers over reality, enough to influence stories like Cindy's own. And some of those forces have opinions about what people like Cindy ought to know, and in what manner they should learn."
A spark of anger lit in the back of Charles's mind. "What gives them the right to think their opinions should matter a damn to our---"
"Shut your fool mouth until you know what you're saying," Grandpa Mark said, looking more grim than angry. "Never tell the powers of existence to buzz off and leave you alone. Never, Charles, do you hear me? The forces of reality that care about your consent are the nicer ones, and you don't want them to go away and leave the playing field to the others." He folded his arms across his chest. "There, you got a glimpse of what's really going on. Did it make you happier? Did it give you the power to make anything better? No, no it didn't."
Charles would have tried to reserve judgment. But in this place Charles knew that, though the words were only a metaphor, the thing they were a metaphor for was true. Just like that, there was no point to arguing the facts further. It felt like walking his mind into a wall.
"What is this place?" Charles said instead, gesturing around him at the plain of ash and melted metal, seen in dim flashes burning through a black sky. "No, let me guess. You're showing me what's left of a world after the Democratic Party gets through with it."
Marcus Adan laughed, with a bitter undertone. "If I was going to blame this on one of my usual suspects, I'd trace it to the anti-nuclear protests in the Sixties."
"Runaway greenhouse effect?" Charles said. He tilted his head within the blackness to look up at the identical blackness that was the sky.
"No. Also, absurd. Even the surface of Venus isn't hot enough to melt iron." Marcus Adan sighed. "There's enough blame to go around that castigating my favorite targets would be pointless. Especially since this never happened, not to our own world at any rate. Some worlds end in waking life, ours died in a dream. We didn't get the chance to destroy ourselves the way we were scheduled to do. If we had gotten that far, the backlash that the anti-nuclear scare produced among the more technically inclined parts of society... well, it doesn't matter. I didn't see this coming either when I was alive, which makes me as much of a sinner as most anyone from our world got the chance to be. We never had the chance to destroy our own world, but it was destroyed by the certainty of us destroying it and that's not much credit to us either." Marcus Adan's arm showed itself in the middle of a staccato sweep, lit in stop-motion flashes. "This was the future of our Earth, Charles. The most probable outcome since the start of World War Two, growing steadily more likely over time as the possible diversions from it failed to materialize. And because reality is a more complicated place than we used to believe, the more the story we'd been inside had only one possible ending, the less real it became. One Monday morning like any other, your world crossed a threshold. With some torturing of the metaphor, you could say that the plot became too predictable and boring, and the metaphysical readership stopped buying the serials in which the laws of physics had been publishing. Cinderella Sheen walked into your motel lobby a few minutes later."
"I know on a deep level that everything you said is true and I'm still not buying it," Charles said.
"I don't blame you. But there are matters Cinderella would rather not hear about just yet. On other points I literally can't say more, because it's been rendered true that nobody tells you---and unlike some things that have been made true, we'd see that one as having good sense behind it." Again Marcus Adan's arm swept around him. "This is not the real death of a world. More like an artist's conception, as drawn by someone who was carefully not told enough to make accurate guesses. There are ideas that can see anyone who thinks about them, there are books that know when they are being read. Looking towards the true ashes of reality would have destroyed your soul as thoroughly as this destination would have destroyed your body, if not for my paternalistic interference."
Charles shook his head. "Thanks for protecting me, but I don't like these riddle-answers," he said. "People I care about are at risk. I need to know what's actually happening, not just metaphors for it."
"Wrong on both counts," Marcus Adan snapped. The cast of his expression, revealed in a flash, had taken on a bitter twist. "There is no more risk. It's all already happened. The candle is extinguished. Almost all the mirrors that reflected it, shattered. No danger comes now to approach the castle walls, for beyond them is only ash and ruin. There's nothing left for you but to live out your own pages in the books that continue on."
Again the sense of slamming his mind into a wall, this time hard enough to hurt. There were truths being spoken in metaphor that were antithetical to what he'd considered his basic principles of life, and now some part of himself knew them. His own fault for asking, and then insisting. It was perilous to speak before the forces of existence that cared about your consent.
"Why is my sort-of-grandfather talking to me?"
The figure shrugged. "There is not much rhyme and reason to it from our own perspective. There are forces of reality which prefer, when a sapient lifeform is stopped from destroying itself, that the intervention be carried out by whatever that lifeform most sees as its parental figure. Those forces aren't watching you personally. It's more of a universal influence, the way they believe a story should go when that situation arises."
"Oh," Charles said.
"But enough of this," said a story about the person who'd behaved the most like a proper father to Charles. "There's only one choice you have to make in this place, and you need to make it soon. This isn't a place where mortals should stay for long, even in their imaginations."
Charles looked down at the flower by his feet, illuminated by the dim flashes of a tale that could not be told.
The knowledge came to him then, of what the flower represented, and in this place Charles Adan knew that here at last was his true choice, as informed as it was permitted to be.
When he raised his head to ask one more question, the form of his Grandpa Mark was gone.
In his place stood a more adult and yet more beautiful version of Cinderella Sheen, recognizable now as he had failed to recognize her before, wearing the long white dress that she'd worn in the second painting. On her forehead gleamed a crown set with broken blue-white gemstones, far too many to be counted.
The Princess of the Shattered Earths stretched out a hand to him, the offer and the question implicit in the act itself. There was a wistful smile on her face, sadness mixed with happiness.
And Charles understood then that this moment was stitched through time, that it was happening now and before the story began and also in the future, all three instants the same, so that his choice now determined all that had already followed, and yet the choice was real.
Some fraction of all the worlds where human beings exist have destroyed themselves, or been destroyed, or ended in other ways. The exact fraction is not relevant to the decision that Charles faces, and it has not been revealed to him. In absolute magnitudes, there was a very large quantity of Earths to begin with, and a very large quantity of Earths was destroyed.
Of those many dead Earths there is a remnant, a flower growing in the ashes. There are human beings who have been preserved, by some nearby Power or force of existence, so that their story continues on after the book ended. The exact fraction, again, is not relevant to Charles's decision. The absolute numbers, again, are ungraspably large.
Among the forces and powers that would pick up a refugee of a lost origin-world, some are inclined to do a thorough job. Many of Earth's refugees are not only preserved, but empowered in a way that spans more than one lesser reality.
Some of those begin as Worldwalkers, traveling to other places. Some become Nexuses, calling other places to themselves. Some wrap themselves in shadows of what was lost, less real than Earth-that-was, and yet not unreal, for Snow White has no way of knowing if you think yourself more real than her. Some families (of blood or otherwise) labor to build new homes for themselves, dungeons and restaurants and brothels that span dimensions. Some of the empowered travel together in bands or tribes. Some travel alone, into previously untouched shadows, if they or the powers preserving them are not ready to contend with equals. *Some strange subcultures have imbued their adherents with the desire to be hit by a truck so they can defeat the Demon Lord, and it is not unheard-of for some power to oblige. Some empowered who are of an exploratory bent come across refugees of other heritages, from planets that were once as real as Earth. Others, who set little store by their former humanity, find their way to cities vaster than galaxies.
Charles Adan was a good human as humans go. He kept those promises that sounded like they were meant to be kept. He spent more time helping others than harming them. He donated small amounts to charity, and did his job diligently, and was not nasty to people on Reddit. In the end, nothing Charles Adan did contributed to the long-term welfare of sapient life. But he tried, and there are forces of existence that respect that, and would have the stories of people like him not end so ill. Other forces of reality hate anything that ate innocent plants, but they do not have things all their own way.
To Charles Adan, and to many other beings similar to him, is given now a gift, and a choice.
The gift is not, of course, controlling the entire fate of the last flower from the ashes.
But Charles Adan may exert a tiny portion of influence over the course of humanity's epilogue.