One evening at twilight, just before dinner, Danlo returned to Old Father’s house in a state of intense agitation. He rushed inside with news of an unbelievable thing that he had learned earlier from one of the Scientists. For most of the afternoon, he had been skating down near the dangerous Street of Smugglers, skating and skating as he breathed in the musty smell of poached shagshay furs and brooded about cosmic events. He tromped into Old Father’s thinking chamber not even bothering to kick the ice from his boots. (He had remembered to eject the skate blades only after stumbling across the doorway and grinding steel, chipping the square blue tiles in the outer hallway.) ‘Ni luria la!’ he shouted, lapsing into his milk tongue. And then, ‘Sir, I have learned the most shaida thing, shaida if it is true, but … O blessed God! how can it be true? About the blessed –’
‘Ho, careful now! Careful you don’t drip water all over my mother’s carpet!’ Old Father caught him with both of his eyes, looked at the snowmelt running down Danlo’s boots, and shook his head. Like all Fravashi, he revered pure water and considered it somewhat sacrilegious to scatter such a holy substance over his mother’s woven fur. That evening, he was engaged in a thinking session with one of his students. Across from him on his carpet (very near the spot where Danlo had once vomited) sat Fayeth, a good-looking woman with a quick smile and an even quicker tongue toward making jokes. She had come to Old Father’s house after a long search, after spending years as a student of Zanshin and the Way of the Rose. She was the best of Old Father’s twelve students, the kindest, and the least slavish, and Danlo was a little in love with her. But her age was more than twice his, and she had taken a vow of strict celibacy. Even so, she never resented his attentions; she didn’t seem to mind at all that he had interrupted her time with Old Father.
‘Danlo,’ she said, ‘please sit with us and tell us what is blessed.’
‘You’re early,’ Old Father said to Danlo out of one half of his mouth. ‘But, yes, please sit down. Take your boots off and sit down.’ And then, from his mouth’s left side, at the same time, he continued speaking to Fayeth: ‘We must try something more difficult this time, perhaps something that humans know very well when thinking about it but find impossible to explain.’
They were playing with realities; specifically, they were playing a game called spelad in which Fayeth, prompted by a hint from Old Father, would name some object, idea, personage, historical movement, or phenomenon. Old Father would then choose a particular worldview, which Fayeth was required to enter. She would behold the named object through this worldview, describing its various aspects as if she had been born a tychist or a Buddhist or even an alien. Points were scored according to her knowledge, her sense of shih, and above all, her mastery of plexity.
‘I’ll name a concept this time,’ Fayeth said. She smiled at Danlo and continued, ‘And the concept is: the future.’
‘Oh, but this is not precise enough,’ Old Father said. ‘Do you know the doctrine of the sarvam asti?’
‘The Hindu doctrine or that of the scryers?’
‘It’s your choice,’ Old Father said.
‘Then I’ll choose the scryers’ doctrine.’
‘Very well. Then let me choose a worldview. Aha, abide with me a moment.’ Old Father looked at Danlo knowingly, then turned to Fayeth and said, ‘I choose the view of the scientists. Aha, aha – and to make this more difficult, the ancient scientists. Before the mechanics and holists split off from them to form their own arts.’
Danlo had never heard of the sarvam asti: the doctrine that everything exists, past and future, because the mind, at the moment of conceiving all things, could not do so if they didn’t exist. In truth, at that moment, he didn’t care about games or doctrines because he had discovered the existence of a terrible thing that he could barely conceive of. He tried to sit patiently across from Old Father, but at last he blurted out, ‘Sir, the blessed stars are exploding! Why didn’t you tell me about this?’
‘Ah, ah, the stars,’ Old Father said. ‘We must certainly consider the stars. But do you mind if I play the spelad with Fayeth? She’s scored nearly enough points to be excused from cooking next season’s dinners.’
So saying, Old Father continued his dual conversation, talking in two different voices at once. The first (or right-hand voice) was his usual melodious baritone; the second voice was high and raspy, as of a saw cutting through ice. Danlo struggled to separate the dual stream of words that spilled out of Old Father’s adroit mouth. It was a confusing way to hold a conversation, and it demanded his intense concentration. ‘Oh ho, Fayeth, you might begin by exploring the intersection of the ontic realm and platonic space. Oh, Danlo, the stars are exploding, you say? The existence arguments and suchlike. This has been known for some time. Space is space and the stars go on endlessly through space only –’
‘Sir,’ Danlo interrupted, ‘people are killing the stars!’
‘Ah, oh, oh, oh,’ Old Father said. Then he lifted a finger toward Fayeth and smiled. ‘You may begin.’
Fayeth hesitated a moment before saying: ‘The sarvam asti states that the future, in every future, the possibilities are actualized through an act of will, and –’
‘Oh, oh, Danlo, you’ve learned of the Vild, so it’s so. The Vild, the far part of the galaxy where a million stars are exploding, or ten million stars – and why?’
‘– because existence cannot be understood as other than quantities of matter distributed throughout a homogeneous space and –’
‘Because human beings have a need to deform space,’ Old Father said. ‘And for other reasons.’
While Old Father had been talking with Danlo, Fayeth had transformed herself into something like a scientist (or Scientist), and was continuing to hold forth about the future: ‘– can be an intersection of these two spaces only in mathematics which –’
‘Shaida reasons,’ Danlo said.
‘– certainly the mind can conceive of things that have no existence in spacetime –’
‘Oh, ho,’ Old Father said to Fayeth, ‘but what is mind?’
‘When I was a child,’ Danlo said, ‘I used to think … that the stars were the eyes of my ancestors.’
‘– runs parallel programs, and reality represented by symbols –’
‘The stars … this splendid eyelight.’
‘– is not reflected in the natural world, nor is the world really reflected in mind –’
At this, Old Father shut his eyes for a moment and said, ‘Be careful about this word “reflect”.’
‘But stars are … just hydrogen plasma and helium,’ Danlo said. ‘Easy to fusion into light.’
‘– processing information, but macroscopic information decays to microscopic information, and therefore the future –’
Old Father said to Danlo, ‘To understand the Vild, we will have to discuss the Architects and their doctrines of the future.’
‘– the future is completely determined but unknowable because –’
‘It is the Architects who have created the Vild, yes?’
‘– the creation of information is a chaotic process and –’
‘The shaida Vild.’
‘– there is no way for the process to run any faster than time itself.’
Here both Danlo and Old Father paused in their conversation while Fayeth criticized the many-worlds hypothesis of the mechanics and went on to declare that there could be only one timeline, one reality, one future. The scryers’ doctrine, she said, was completely