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"Urizen would have figured out& "
"No, Urizen didn't figure it out! But it's true all the same. There is
another place outside of time, a place where all the different futures exist
together. There's got to be!"
"If there was, we couldn't find it."
"Yes, we can!" She grasped his hand. "Come!"
New Lambeth was gone. The place outside of time was sparsely
populated by lizard spirits who rushed past heedlessly on urgent but
unguessable errands. Uptime the battle was over and the rip in the sky
had vanished without a trace. The light was an even green, flickering only
when you moved uptime or downtime. The images were less vivid, less
alive than ever, and here and there Kate could see peculiar crumpling
effects, as if the very fabric of space was on the verge of collapsing under
some infinite weight.
She looked at William. He had a tail.
It was a small tail, but a tail nonetheless.
Kate thought, Perhaps I have one too.
She said firmly, "Concentrate, Mr. Blake, while you still have a mind
that can."
*
It was easy when you knew it could be done. She thought of the saying,
A prison is a home if the door's unlocked.
She had not known what to look for, and had almost ignored the effect
when it had first appeared. An impression of distance. That was all there
was at first.
Her impulse was to say, "That's not it."
But then she realized that she was seeing, more with her mind than her
eyes, both the world inside the time-stream and the place outside of time,
superimposed, neither more sharp than the other.
"I think it's coming," she said to William, and clutched his hand.
Quite suddenly, with a rush, she was falling back away from her vision.
Everything was shrinking rapidly. Other things were coming into view, but
they were too far away to see clearly. The light was growing brighter,
taking on a brilliant bluewhite color.
She glanced to her right. William, still holding her hand, looked so
startled she had to smile.
"You see?" she cried. "You see?"
She laughed out loud from sheer exhilaration.
The place they had come from was shrinking to a point.
A point is that which has position but no magnitude. A point has
neither length nor breadth nor depth, yet it exists.
The place they had come from was part of a thin, glowing line.
A line is the course of a moving point, having length but no other
dimension. In each line there are an infinite number of points.
Infinite! That was a word Kate had heard William use many times.
She'd thought she'd understood it, but she hadn't& not until now!
The line they had come from was one of many. It branched and
branched and branched again, and from each branch-sprang other
branches. It was like a tree or, better yet, a fan. Far away it all stretched
out endlessly, an infinite fan-shaped plane.
A plane is a surface such that a straight line joining any two of its
points lies wholly within the surface.
Her mind struggled to understand.
The point she'd come from was a point in time. That point was part of
a single timeline, the timeline of the lizards. But the timeline of the lizards
branched, again and again. There were an infinite number of lizard
timelines, and all the lizard timelines, taken together, were a branch of yet
another timeline. And where am I? she thought. Am I really outside of
time?
That could not be. Events still happened to her one after the other, in
an ordered sequence. Even here, above the fan of time, above the infinite
different branches of time, there was time.
She saw more. The fan could rotate. It could describe a vast cone& A
cone! But what was outside the cone? As if in answer to her question she
began to see another cone, completely within the first cone, yet branching
off from it at a right angle.
William screamed. She saw he was covering his eyes with his right
hand, clutching her with his other hand so tightly it hurt her.
She remembered, oddly, a line he'd written in his "The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell."
"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to
man as it is, infinite."
"There, there, Mr. Blake," she said soothingly. "Don't take on so. There's
nothing to fear."
He looked at her, his large eyes filled with more madness than she'd
ever seen before. "There's a limit!" he shouted.
"A limit to what?"
"You know!"
"The universe?"
"No! My mind!"
She turned away from him to look again at the cone. And the cone
within the cone. And the cone within the cone within the cone. There
could be no mistake. The light was very bright. It hurt her eyes.
There was light all around. It moved and undulated like smoke, yet was
somehow solid. Was it made of colored glass? She tried to touch it, but
could not.
And it seemed to her she could hear the light as well as see it, and the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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