The Adventures of a reluctant... |
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This leaves a very tricky question. Should we do anything at all? Is it chaos or stasis? Does the interaction of the smallest particle at the furthest distant point of existence to the present that we experience in the now of our awareness have any discernible effect on that present? Does it mean that the infinite bigness of the infiniverse renders the interaction so small that it becomes unmeasurable and therefore entirely negligible? Or, does it mean that the now of the present is so fleetingly small that any interaction, no mater how tiny, can only have a major impact on all the subsequent nows of our perception. Worse still, can there even be any subsequent nows? If there is an infinite number of interactions taking place throughout the infiniverse and if for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, do they all cancel each other out, leaving us with stasis?
The man’s head hurt. He stood up, groaning quietly as the stiffness in his knees caused his back to hurt. He straightened up, causing the breeze to divert around him. This was too much; he was going to the alehouse to get drunk, again. The man limped off in the direction of the town. The breeze was getting up and dark clouds were beginning to roll in from all sides, leaving an ever-decreasing patch of blue as a reminder of the bright hope that is still sometimes possible even in the face of years of life.
Laister Ure spent a lot of his time drinking. He used to drink mainly to stop himself thinking. Now he drinks mainly to stop his head from hurting. He is still a handsome man: tall, lean and fair-haired. His face is beginning to be lined and there are a few thread veins showing on his cheeks. His eyebrows sprout a few long, unruly hairs but the hair on his head is not yet showing gray. There are a few white hairs among the long waves, as he pulls his hair straight back from his face, but he likes to think that these are the remnants of the white hair he had as a child. Laister walks on towards the town and pulls his tunic closer, trying to stop the cold wind finding the gaps between clothing and skin. His clothes still have a good few years of wear but he will soon have to visit the cobbler. The damp always seems to find its way through the leather of his boots. Laister stamps his feet on the wooden boards outside the door of the saloon and enters the low ceilinged room. Against the wall opposite the door is a long trestle with wooden beer kegs perched atop. One or two have already been broken, even this early in the evening, but Laister decides that this night calls for the ‘uisge’ – a drink distilled from the local barley. He throws a copper coin on to the wooden trestle and indicates a small stoneware jug, stoppered with cork, that lies on a shelf on the wall behind the serving table. The keep wipes a bowl taken from the shelf, places it on the table and pulls the cork from the stone bottle. The sharp smell assails Laister’s nostrils and his stomach contracts. It is perhaps as well that he has not eaten as he may have vomited on the fresh sawdust that covers the floor of the alehouse. Laister carefully picks up the drinking bowl with shaking hands and pours the contents into his mouth. The liquid burns as he swallows and he has to fight to stop himself from retching. He stands leaning on the trestle for a few moments, waiting for his stomach to settle and feels the warmth of the liquid flow from his stomach, easing the aches of his body, like an inkspill on a piece of parchment.
The alcohol works on his frayed nerve endings, stopping the itching of his skin and slowly calming his shaking hands. Laister looks up and smiles, catches the keep’s eye and nods towards the stoneware jug once again. A second shot will put some life back into his tired body and perhaps reinvigorate his worn spirit. Laister does not think about the effects it will have when he eventually finds himself sober again, it is enough that he feels better now. The cycle of drinking to senselessness, reviving, contemplating options then starting over again continues until his body can’t take any more and he has to go through the days and weeks of slowly putting himself back together and picking up the pieces of his shattered life. Perhaps this time will be the last.
* * *
The ghosts have left and Laister’s stomach is accepting solid food. His mind turns again to his work. Why is it that these idiot merchants have fine clothes, beautiful wives and warm homes when it is he that has to scribe for them? It is he that understands the language of the priests, it is he that records their transactions, it is he that lets them keep earning their money. Laister always gets angry at himself after a long drinking session. “Have you finished those ledgers yet?” asks Bootman the Cobbler. Bootman is one of the more common (better) traders in the town. He does not have the supercilious tone of most of the men of business. Bootman still enjoys doing much of the skilled parts of his craft himself, employing others to do the heavier, dirtier work involved in the carrying and cutting of the leather hides used for making his shoes and boots. Laister has noticed that the more removed people are from the dirt and the smell of labour the more they are likely to forget that it wasn’t so long ago that they too were standing knee deep in piss, treading cloth, or scraping congealed meat from hides before laying them out to dry.
“Just blotting the ink, Master Bootman” Laister replied.
“Do you wish to take these boots as payment or would you prefer coin?” asked Bootman. Laister stops. It has been three weeks since he last had a drink. His body has recovered from the pain of withdrawal and his spirits are once again rising. He was almost cheerful when he arose this morning. Laister also knows that this is the most dangerous time for him. He can almost forget the agonies that he has gone through and he can almost convince himself that this time he will only get drunk this day and he will keep his appointment with the farrier tomorrow. Laister looks at his booted feet. He feels the dampness of his toes. He knows that the skin of his feet has puckered, like a worm dug from a freshly ploughed field, and has turned the white of maggots in a rotting carcass. Dry feet are almost worth fighting for. “I’ll take coin, Master Bootman” Laister answers.
* * *
The first drink is always the best. There is a warmth flows through the body and up to the head that allows you to feel cocooned in its intoxication. It feels as if you are wrapped in a warm blanket, withdrawn from the world but still able to look and observe, to think and to wonder. Alcohol can be a kindly companion and a cruel master. Time seems to slow down at first, the trees seem greener and more defined, the noise of the water is sweeter as it gurgles and bubbles over the rocks of the stream-bed; the whole world takes on a feeling of health and vibrancy that is missing in sobriety. This is the allure of the substance that he both loathes and loves. It gives free reign to his imagination while destroying his capacity to imagine. Laister begins to scratch in the dirt around him, writing down some of his thoughts while he can still hold the stick. Unaware of his actions, functioning in a blackout, Laister eventually drinks himself unconscious.
The universe was born from the smallest unimaginable (because it is so small) particle of something. I don’t know what that something is; just that it is a part of the life of the universe. From that small beginning, it began to expand. It expanded in every dimension at once. It grew in length and breadth and height. It grew in time. The universe became bigger in every way that it is possible to grow.
Imagine that the universe is a bladder and that the neck of the bladder, the part that you breathe into to blow it up, is where it began and the skin of the bladder is the edge of the universe. Now imagine it blowing up. The universe grows in volume as more air is breathed into it; its sides expand to accommodate the space of its interior, the front of the bladder moves away from the entry hole and keeps moving away. This is nothing like the way our universe behaves but it does give you some sense of how things work. Now, let’s complicate things a little. It is not just our universe that is growing. There are an infinite number of other universes all around us doing exactly the same thing. Each one of these infinite number of universes is expanding in an infinite number of dimensions, each one only the smallest fraction away from the one that we inhabit. These universes exist alongside one another, within one another and contain one another. It is the most complicated jigsaw puzzle that has ever existed.
It is difficult to come up with superlatives when discussing the infinite. If a universe were to exist within a second we would see it come from nothing, expand to encompass the totality of everything and then shrink back to nothingness, all in the blink of an eye. It is like a star burst firework going off in the blackness of the night sky, it is like a pulse of light in the eternal void, (except there is no such thing as void,) burning brighter than its surroundings for a fleeting moment that lasts forever then fades to nothingness. There is no void because there is just so much of everything that it takes up every available space, yet there is so little of everything, when compared to the infinity of existence, that our universe is made up mostly of void. Each universe has a beginning and an end. Try forcing water through a hole that is just small enough to let a molecule through. The water comes through the aperture and then begins to spray a fine mist in every direction. This is what happens with universes. Each one forced through a hole so small that it comes out the other end in a fine spray. The spray consists of particles and there is distance between the particles. All of the universes are expanding and fitting through the gaps in universes, while still maintaining their outer skin and their own identity. They are like multi dimensional Ven Diagrams with each universe containing the totality of everything while at the same time being completely distinct from each other. They may share certain rules, they may share certain characteristics, or, they may be so distinct from one another that they are barely recognisable as universes. It all depends on your point of view. Imagine a world consisting of only two dimensions, up and down and left and right. How does an entity that exists in these two dimensions imagine depth? Our new three-dimensional entity has no problem conceiving of length, breadth and depth but how does it conceive of a forth dimension. Each subsequent dimension contains all of the lower orders but cannot conceive of the next, or, they may be virtually identical except for the final undulation of a leaf falling through the air.
Cold and sore from lying on the hard ground, Laister feels something pushing at him. He hears a voice saying something that he can’t quite grasp. He tries to ignore the discomfort, not wanting to awaken and have to face the consequences of what he has done, particularly since he cannot remember. Laister struggles to work out where he is. “What is the last thing I remember”? Bootman paid for his ledgers with coin, I opened the door of the tavern, holding the stoneware jug of uisge, walking through the woods, finding a spot near the river’s edge and bringing the jug to my lips…
Laister sits up too quickly, the pain in his head forces a groan from his lips; he lies back down and opens his eyes to the brightness of the day. Someone is standing over him, blocking the sun and casting his shadow over Laister, kicking him and saying something. Laister concentrates on the words “…up, wake up, you useless excuse for a man.” Just before the next kick arrived, Laister rolled away and struggled to his feet. Hunkering, he raised his hand to shield his eyes from the too bright sun. He was confused, not remembering how he had gotten here, not knowing where ‘here’ was and not knowing who this loud person, who was too free with his feet, is. Confusion, guilt and resentment got the better of him and he lashed out.
“Who in God’s name are you”? he roared.
“I see the drink has finally addled your brain,” said the man. “Ah well, it was only a matter of time”.
The brown robed man strode over to Laister and pulled him up by his tunic.
“You smell bad”, the man’s nose wrinkled with distaste, “about a week since you’ve seen the inside of a bathhouse, if I’m any judge”.
The man turned Laister around, grabbed his collar and the rope that held his breeches and ran him to the bank of the river. It was late spring and the last of the snow had only recently melted from the hills. The sun had not had long enough to heat the water after the cold winter. Laister was dazed and weak, not strong enough to put up much resistance but he managed to dig his heels in to the soft ground, stopping himself from falling or being pushed into the icy water.
“Wait, wait, let me get my breath back,” Laister pleaded.
“Too late,” said the man in the brown robe and heaved Laister up and into the water.
Laughing, the man made his way down the bank and strode into the water. He plunged his arm under the surface and pulled Laister, coughing and spluttering, to his feet. Standing waist deep in the burn, the spring run-off making the water level unusually high, the two men regarded each other. Laister, still dazed and now cold and wet, looked at the older man, a spark of recognition registering briefly in his eyes. The older man eyed Laister with amusement tinged with sadness.
“I had hoped you would have grown out of this drunken sulking of yours by now,” said the man and turned to wade out of the stream. Laister caught a glimpse of a coloured marking on the man’s skin as he straightened his robes. Laister’s hand moved to his chest where he too was marked. The device irrevocably etched on the skin over his heart. He hesitated, not knowing what to say. This man should not be here. Laister had believed that he would never see him again when he had been ejected from his order.
Too many years ago now, Laister had chosen to leave the brothers who had taught him from childhood. ‘Give us the boy’ they had said ‘and we will give you back the man.’ But Laister had been forced to leave them before he had finished his education, before he had finished becoming the man that he wished to be. Laister had felt his loss acutely and oft times felt, in the cold, dark nights when sleep eluded him, that he could not complete his growth without his brothers. But what is he doing here, why now, after all this time?
“Brodic,” called Laister “I am dazed, I didn’t recognise you, it has been many years since we last spoke.”
Brodic stood looking at the scratched earth where Laister had used the stick to record his thoughts in the dirt. “This is dangerous, to use the glyphs in such a way and in the open.”
“No-one can understand them, Brodic. They mean nothing to the people here.”
“That is as may be,” said Brodic “nevertheless; to leave these marks out in the open is folly. In your state you do not know who may have come cross them.” Brodic scraped the dirt with his leather-shod foot, erasing Laister’s thoughts from the recorded history of the world. Laister did not recall those thoughts.
“Why are you here Brodic?” asked Laister.
“I must speak with you about matters that concern us both, but not here in the open. Come; let us go to your home and to your good lady. She has been worried for you.”
* * *
Madhraig placed a bowl of steaming broth before Laister and Brodic. “Eat,” she said, handing them both a wooden spoon. Laister’s hand trembled as he tried to sup the broth and he only managed to consume half the soup before his stomach rebelled and he was forced to rush to the back of the cottage where he retched until his body ached. Still shaking he returned to the table. Madhraig watched her husband with mixed emotions. She was glad that he was home and safe, but also mad as hell that he had chosen to leave her again.
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