“What did it seem to be?”
The gunslinger was silent, thoughtful. He felt for his tobacco, but there was none. The man in black did not offer to refill his poke by either black magic or white.
“There was light,” the gunslinger said finally. “Great white light. And then — “ He broke off and stared at the man in black. He was leaning forward, and an alien emotion was stamped on his face, writ too large for lies or denial. Wonder.
“You don’t know,” he said, and began to smile. “0 great sorcerer who brings the dead to life. You don’t know.”
“I know,” the man in black said. “But I don’t know… what.”
“White light,” the gunslinger repeated. “And then — a blade of grass. One single blade of grass that filled every.’ thing. And I was tiny. Infinitesimal.”
“Grass.” The man in black closed his eyes. His face looked drawn and haggard. “A blade of grass. Are you sure?”
“Yes.” The gunslinger frowned. “But it was purple.”
And so the man in black began to speak.
The universe (he said) offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a nonliving brain — although it may think it can — the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite.
The prosaic fact of the universe’s existence singlehandedly defeats the pragmatist and the cynic. There was a time, yet a hundred generations before the world moved on, when mankind had achieved enough technical and scientific prowess to chip a few splinters from the great stone pillar of reality. Even then, the false light of science (knowledge, if you like) shone in only a few developed countries. Yet, despite a tremendous increase in available facts,
there were remarkably few insights. Gunslinger, our fathers conquered thediseasewhichrots, which we call cancer, almost conquered aging, went to the moon —(“I don’t believe that,” the gunslinger said flatly, to which the man in black merely smiled and answered, “You needn’t.”)
— and made or discovered a hundred other marvelous baubles. But this wealth of information produced little or no insight. There were no great odes written to the wonders of artificial insemination —(“What?” “Having babies from frozen mansperm. “
“Bullshit.” “As you wish.., although not even the ancients could produce children from that material.”)
— or to the carwhichmoves. Few if any seemed to have grasped the Principle of Reality; new knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries. Greater physiological knowledge of the brain makes the existence of the soul less possible yet more probable by the nature of the search. Do you see? Of course you don’t. You are surrounded by your own romantic aura, you lie cheek and jowl daily with the arcane. Yet now you approach the limits —not of belief, but of comprehension. You face reverse entropy of the soul.
But to the more prosaic:
The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but Size. Size encompasses life, and the Tower
encompasses Size. The child, who is most at home with wonder, says: Daddy, what is above the sky? And the father says: The darkness of space. The child: What is beyond space?
The father: The galaxy. The child: Beyond the galaxy? The father: Another galaxy. The child: Beyond the other galaxies? The father: No one knows.
You see? Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which
he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where hugh bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box and cover it with wet weeds to die?
Or one might take the point of a pencil and magnify it. One reaches the point where a stunning realization strikes home: The pencil point is not solid; it is composed of atoms which whirl and revolve like a trillion demon planets. What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by gravitation. Shrunk to the correct size, the distances between these atoms might become leagues, gulfs, aeons. The atoms themselves are composed of nuclei and revolving protons and electrons. One may step down further to subatomic particles. And then to what? Tachyons? Nothing? Of course not. Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest conclusions to things is one impossibility.
If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence and signs reading DEAD END?
No. You might find something hard and rounded, as the chick must see the egg from the inside. And if you should peck through that shell, what great and torrential light might shine through your hole at the end of space? Might you look through and discover our entire universe is but part of one atom on a blade of grass?
Might you be forced to think that by burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities? That existence rises not to one infinite but to an infinity of them?
Perhaps you saw what place our universe plays in the scheme of things — as an atom in a blade of grass.
Could it be that everything we can perceive, from the infinitesimal virus to the distant Horsehead Nebula, is contained in one blade of grass. .. a blade that may have existed for only a day or two in an alien timeflow?
What if that blade should
be cut off by a scythe? When it began to die, would the rot seep into our own universe and our own lives, turning everything yellow and brown and desicated? Perhaps it’s already begun to happen. We say the world has moved on; maybe we really mean that it has begun to dry up.
Think how small such a concept of things makes us, gunslinger! If a God watches over it all, does He actually mete out justice for a race of gnats among an infinitude of races of gnats? Does his eye see the sparrow fall when the sparrow is less than a speck of hydrogen floating disconnected in the depth of space? And if He does see… what must the nature of such a God be? Where does He live? How is it possible to live beyond infinity?
Imagine the sand of the Mohaine Desert, which you crossed to find me, and imagine a trillion universes —
not worlds but universes — encapsulated in each grain of that desert; and within each universe an infinity of others. We tower over these universes from our pitiful grass vantage point; with one swing of your boot you
may knock a billion billion worlds flying off into darkness, in a chain never to be completed.
Size, gunslinger… Size….
Yet suppose further. Suppose that all worlds, all universes, met in a single nexus, a single pylon, a Tower. A stairway, perhaps, to the Godhead itself. Would you dare, gunslinger? Could it be that somewhere above all of endless reality, there exists a Room…?
You dare not.
You dare not.
“Someone has dared,” the gunslinger said.
“Who would that be?”
“God,” the gunslinger said softly. His eyes gleamed. “God has dared. . . or is the room empty, seer?”
“I don’t know.” Fear passed over the man in black’s
bland face, as soft and dark as a buzzard’s wing. “And, furthermore, I don’t ask. It might be unwise.”
“Afraid of being struck dead?” The gunslinger asked sardonically.
“Perhaps afraid of an accounting,” the man in black replied, and there was silence for a while. The night was very long. The Milky Way sprawled above them in great splendor, yet terrifying in its emptiness. The gunslinger wondered what he would feel if that inky sky should split open and let in a torrent of light.
“The fire,” he said. “I’m cold.”
The gunslinger drowsed and awoke to see the man in black regarding him avidly, unhealthily.
“What are you staring at?”
“You, of course. “
“Well, don’t” He poked up the fire, ruining the precision of the idiogram. “I don’t like it.” He looked to the east to see if there was the beginning of light, but this night went on and on.
“You seek the light so soon?”
“I was made for light”
“Ah, so you were! And so impolite of me to forget the fact! Yet we have much to discuss yet, you and I. For so has it been told to me by my master.”
“Who?”
The man in black smiled. “Shall we tell the truth then, you and I? No more lies? No more glammer?”
“Glammer? What does that mean?”
But the man in black persisted: “Shall there be truth between us, as two men? Not as friends, but as enemies and equals? There is an offer you will get rarely, Roland. Only enemies speak the truth. Friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.”