World Builder

My imagination is starting to get out of control, I think.

East is worried about me. I can see it in her eyes when we take tea this morning in the courtyard. The three of us, just East, West and I, with South off on another of your walkabouts.

I think it’s a new courtyard, although I’ve long stopped keeping track. If I ever did keep track. How long did I keep track? Infinite courtyards in infinite houses, or one courtyard in one house; or at least four, I suppose, since four border the house, but then four houses border each courtyard, so how does one factor that, numerically? It’s a matter of opinion at this point, I suppose. You can pick a direction and just start walking – house, courtyard, house, courtyard, all the same. You often do, even now, and he does it occasionally, to, although he’s more interested in the eternally futile and honestly quite pointless task of mapping the world. It’s not mappable. It never has been. He can break pots or mark the walls to mark his progress but it won’t matter, because the house and the courtyard slowly return to their natural state over time, exactly the same as the four of us do. Put a knife through my heart and it will heal. Put a stone through the window and it will heal. I’ve seen enough of my own works scrawled upon the walls to know that.

It’s unmappable by position, too. West has tried that, enlisting the help of the rest of us; walking away and counting how many courtyards until we meet again to estimate the size of the universe. Sometimes it takes five courtyards to meet again, sometimes twenty. Once, he disappeared for six days and counted one hundred and twenty three courtyards before running into East again in the courtyard he’d left her to mark position. West’s journeys are short compared to South’s, who can disappear for dozens of days at a time and then return claiming you’ve only been travelling in one direction. I don’t know if psychology plays a part, or if you simply have a poor sense of direction.

West is present for tea this morning, although I see he’s been busy in the night. Of the four gates at the four edges of the courtyard each leading to a copy of the house, the four that we whimsically named after ourselves some time ago, three gates are missing their large ornate urns. All eight urns are piled in West’s gate, completely blocking it, along with many more, a massive pile of at least fifty urns, several of them already broken.

“Collecting urns?” I ask him as East collects the lifewater from the fountain to heat over the sacred flame.

He grins. “He’s tracking the mess.”

“The mess.”

“The healing. He has a theory that it creeps in, from the edges. Remember?”

“I’ve heard the theory.”

“Right, so. What happens if he collects the urns from all the surrounding courtyards? And keeps piling them in here, over and over? The pots should regenerate out there before they’re removed from in here. So if he keeps collecting, he can increase the amount of pots!”

“Why?” she asks as the water heats, transmuting it into tea. “There’s already infinite pots. We have as many pots as he could ever need.”

“It’s the principle of the thing.” He points at me. “I get it.”

“I do,” I agree. If West is right… if it’s possible to preserve an area against healing…

We all have our little ways of dealing with the passage of time, but I think East worries about mine the most. Mine certainly looks the strangest, I agree; it takes time and effort to develop a visual code to record thoughts outside the mind, to protect them from the foibles of memory as the mind, too, heals over time, to mark them instead in the environment and then watch as the healing landscape eats them over time, replacing scratches and scrawlings with clean, perfect walls. The worlds I build in my mind to escape the inherent limitation of the real world have gotten more complex, more intricate, more divorced from reality, over time, but I have no way to impose them on a perpetually healing landscape, or a perpetually healing body, or a perpetually healing mind. But if West is right… if we could hold territory against eternity, damage the edges of a held area enough that they are being perpetually healed, that the middle can never be touched…

East hands me my little cup, and I meet her eyes, and I see in them that she’s already thought further ahead than I have, seen the futility in the attempt. I could cover every surface in this courtyard and in the four adjoining houses with frantic scrawlings from my imagination, build my deluded world concept by concept, vandalise the neighbouring courtyards and houses beyond recognition and… then what? There’s limited surface area. I could write until I run out, and then it would be a war of attrition, harm against healing, and one cannot win a war of attrition against eternity. I’ve tried before. We’ve all tried before. Every day I’d have to go out and break things, with neither time nor space for more invention, protecting written ideas as they grow more and more stale and I forget why I cared so much in the first place until one morning I don’t do it, just one morning, and all of my hard work vanishes in the night, rendering the hundreds of days of effort completely pointless.

I take the tea. I stare at it. I consider, for a moment, not drinking it.

We’ve all done that before. In every courtyard, there is the fountain, and in every courtyard, there is the firepit, and every morning, we heat the lifewater over the sacred flame and transmute it into the tea that keeps us alive one more day. But we don’t have to. Sometimes, somebody will decide they’ve had enough and refuse to drink, and simply not wake up the next morning.

This solves nothing. We simply lie inanimate in our beds, or wherever we went to sleep, until somebody decides they’re bored and wants to talk to us and trickles tea between our lips, and we wake as if no time has passed at all. South does it the most often – when you’re on one of your walkabouts like this, there’s a 50/50 chance you’ll walk into a courtyard with somebody else again or that somebody will find you passed out in some house a dozen days from now – but we’ve all done it. A few times, we’ve all done it at the same time, on the logic that there will be nobody around to rouse us. This doesn’t work either – we all simply awake in our beds one morning. Maybe it’s the next morning, maybe it’s a thousand mornings hence – we have no way of knowing.

Once, with South’s permission, West took South’s comatose body and dismembered it, cutting it into the smallest pieces he could and scattering them far and wide. He wanted to see if a comatose person would still heal. They do, although we’re not certain what criteria the universe uses to decide which piece to re-heal into the person and which pieces to eliminate. We did learn a lot about all the different parts inside a body, though.

In any case, on this particular morning, I drink the tea. I taste the taste. I imagine, like I do most mornings, a world where there is more than one taste.

“Imagine plants on that,” East says suddenly, pointing at West’s pile of urns, and I look at her in surprise. It must have been at least four or five hundred mornings ago that I’d explained my idea of plants to her, and I don’t think I’d done a very good job. I’d been trying to convey the idea of an opposite world, of regression as change; I’d watched my stories erased from the wall of the courtyard and imagined it not as an absence but a growth, like something new crawling over the words and destroying them. East and I have been disagreeing on this point recently (‘recently’ being ‘as long as I can remember’. Maybe we always have. Maybe we forget old conversations, over the thousands and millions and billions of days, and tread the same paths forever in a cycle) – the idea of creation and destruction. She views my and West’s vandalism as destruction, and the healing of our environment a rebuilding. I, for my part, can’t view my writing as anything but creation, and its erasure as an act of destruction. I’d built the concept of plants, a living, growing thing that eats light itself, as a sort of formulation of her perspective from mine, to try to make my point.

It had failed, of course – most of the things I say are too removed from reality for the others to make any sense of. She’d forgotten the idea immediately, so far as I’d thought, and instead I’d become fascinated with it, building it into my concept of an ideal universe.

But she had remembered, apparently.

I finish my tea. I’m usually the fastest drinker. And I propose my new bit of insanity.

“If plants were real,” I say, “we could drink them.”

She chokes on her own tea. “What?”

“It’s this idea I’ve been tinkering with. The whole infinite growth thing isn’t really an improvement on infinite stasis. I’m playing with the idea of… dynamic equilibrium, I guess. What if the people drink the plants to live, like we drink the tea?”

“The billions of people?”

“Yeah.” I grin, remembering the first time I’d proposed to the group my radical, unbelievable idea – ‘what if a fifth person existed?’ South had called me an idiot and refused to engage with the idea at all. East had listened, but seemed really distressed by the idea – we already knew everyone, what could a fifth person be like? Where could they come from? Had they been hiding from us for eternity in this hypothetical, or had the universe kept them away, in other houses and courtyards, and why would that change? West, meanwhile, had gotten really confused over the idea of fitting five people in the four person houses, and how the courtyards have four sides, and started designing pentagonal house-and-courtyard arrangements.

“They turn the plants into tea?”

“No, they… hmm.” I hadn’t thought of that. I’d envisioned them drinking the plants directly, but my imaginary world had water and fire in it – they could, theoretically, put the plants in the water and heat it. Something to think about. “Sure, maybe. The point is, they consume the plants. And the other animals. And the other animals consume the plants. And the plants eat the sunlight, it all comes back to the sunlight.”

“What if they run out of plants?”

“They can’t. When they don’t wake up, they stay down, remember? If there aren’t enough plants, there are less people.” This was a big part of my imaginary world – the idea that people could both come into and go out of existence. They were created, they grew and experienced and developed things, they were destroyed. I hadn’t realised it when I’d come up with the idea, but this meant that their numbers could change over time, just like the plants. “They can’t be infinite people or infinite plants because they don’t have infinite space.”

“Because they’re on the ball,” West says.

“Because they’re on the ball.” That had been based on West’s theory of the universe from awhile back. He’d posited that, since walking in one direction eventually had him wind up back in the same courtyard as the rest of us, the universe must be round. This idea had quickly been disproven (or at least rendered irrelevant, it was a little hard to disprove) by the inconsistent ‘size’ of said ball; there was no real way to predict how many courtyards one had to walk through to return to one’s starting place. But he had salved his disappointment by helping me build a model for my imaginary world on a ball, including a daylight source outside it – rather than the universe simply lightening and darkening periodically like the real one, he came up with this idea of the ball spinning in relation to a giant firepit some distance away, so it was always night somewhere and always day somewhere. I’d found it poetic.

“And what’s off the ball?” comes South’s voice, causing me to jump.

“You’re back!” East can’t be too surprised, because she has already prepared a fourth cup of tea, which she hands over.

South nods in thanks. “What’s off the ball, North?”

“The sun,” I say.

“And?”

I grin. I’m proud of this part. “Other suns and other balls. Infinite ones.”

“Huh. So, just like the houses and courtyards, then.”

“No! No, it’s not like that.”

“No? Infinite suns and balls is different, somehow?”

“They’re too far away. The people break, remember? They don’t have enough time for things to get repetitive.”

“So if they found a way off their ball – ”

“Why would they want to do that?”

“If they found a way off their ball, there’d just be nothing, and they’d break before finding something that could disappoint them. Great fix.”

“They wouldn’t want to,” I insist. “There’d be too much on the ball. They’d break before they could get bored of the ball.”

“Hmm. It’s a good try at any rate, North.” You turn and walk out of the courtyard, into one of the copies of the house.

I throw my teacup at the fountain as hard as I can, shattering it and chipping the edge of the fountain. Aside from a slight flinch at the sound, nobody reacts much to this. Why would they? There are infinite other fountains, and this one will be fine by tomorrow. The next day, perhaps, if West’s urn experiment works.

“I have some work to do,” I say, and fetch a piece of coal from the firepit (ignoring the way the sacred flame burns my fingers; that, too, will heal in a day or two as if it never occurred, as if I never took this coal, as if nothing that will happen today had ever happened), and I start writing. I start writing a world too varied and intricate to ever be boring, a world of billions of minds with billions of perspectives that write billions of worlds of their own, a world of billions of sights and sounds and flavours and things that stay made and things that stay broken. I write until my fingers bleed, until I run out of coals, and West brings me a broken urn full of coals from neighbouring courtyards.

“What do I think is outside of our actual ball?” he asks.

“What?”

“Think of it. The people on the ball – if they wanted to get off, what way would they have to go?” He points up.

I look up. “There’s nothing up there. Just light.”

“How do we know? What if there’s something behind the light? What might it be?”

“Honestly? I think it’d be more houses and courtyards.”

“I’m probably right. He’s off to find out!”

“How?!”

“By finding stuff he can build a ladder out of!”

“A ladder to the sky? Before it all vanishes in the night?!”

But he’s already leaving.

“His task is impossible!” I call after him.

“He knows that!” he calls back.

I reach into the urn and pull out a chunk of coal. I keep drawing, I keep calculating, I keep writing.

Time will eat the marks I make. And eventually, time will eat my memories of them, too. Every day in the future, this day will have existed a little bit less, until it, like the things I wrote yesterday, and the day before, and a day two thousand days ago, might as well have never happened.

But it exists today.