But Nigel could remember nothing more of Killeen.
Been edited out, he realized.
He wondered for a long while, which number he was. Two, eight, ten? Measuring the span of time, the scattered event-slabs, it had to be more. Fifty?
“That’s why,” he said to the wall of blank blackness that sheared away half the space. It was like standing next to a wall that absorbed every sound, giving nothing back.
WHY DO YOU ASK?
“I don’t want to be recalled and used. Not the next time some glitch surfaces in the Syntony.”
THAT MAY BE GRANTED. BUT IT IS NOT YOUR RIGHT.
“I’m not talking bloody rights.”
YOU DO NOT HAVE THE PHYLUM RANK TO EVEN PHRASE THE QUESTION.
“Phrase it for me.”
THE SYNTONY SHALL DISPOSE.
And that was all it would ever say.
NINE
The Pain of Eternity
Naked chance means order springing forth from chaos.”
He was sitting on a wooden bench. Back of the lecture hall. Cold morning, fingers too chilled to take notes. Cambridge. Smell of freshly poured asphalt from the window cocked open a mere inch.
The lecturer looked as bored as the class. Black robe tattered, ostentatiously so. Worn over a tweed jacket, maroon trousers. Awful. Nigel yawned, stretched, wished for tea.
“If the fully developed eye—yours, for example—evolved in one leap of untamed chance, in one generation, that would be utterly unlikely. Eyes came into the world by gradual addition of slightly better traits. The difficulty comes when we try to imagine higher orders than ourselves. We must argue that the odds against untamed chance giving forth fully fashioned, perfect beings are remote, impossibly remote.”
Nigel sat upright. If evolution was universal, then this rule applied to deities as well. They would arise from incremental change. And none be perfect.
The Syntony included.
“I’m competent to deal with a gentleman who is a bit worn out. In fact, I’m adept.”
“I know. My memory is not completely gone, you’ll find. I believe I can even find the right places without a map.”
“Just feel your way along? I can help with that.”
“So I see.” The warmth never waned for him. “Um. Such an earth mother you are.”
“Mmmmm.”
“Well, at least you can’t talk.”
“Mmmm.”
“Talk later.”
“Mmmm.”
“Later, yes, much better. There, right.”
A long drifting time. Gray curtains of light folded him.
“I thought you said the advantage of this way was that I couldn’t talk?”
“Talk later, I said. This is partly later.”
“Eliot.”
“I know it’s bloody Eliot.”
“How wonderful, to have such a lofty conversation while—”
