The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 3
The Big Bang
Content warnings (may contain spoilers)
This chapter depicts corpses and explosions.
“I couldn't—I couldn't find the third book.” It takes Pala three tries to form the words. Around them, the corridor sinks to a hush. “The whole building where it was meant to be…it was destroyed.”
Liss' eyes narrow. “Did you at least try?”
Pala can feel her will subliming beneath Liss' sweltering stare. Still she cries, “I did! I crawled inside to look. But there were rotting corpses and wreckage everywhere and I couldn't—” She pulls her arms close to her body. “I couldn’t go on.”
Liss sighs. Her voice softens as she grasps Pala's elbow and says, “Then bring me there. I will look. You will stand watch.”
Pala swallows, then nods.
“Pala,” Liss goes on. “I know you are terrified of many things. But if you are to become the person you could be…if you cannot vanquish your fear, then you must do those things while terrified.”
“But the fear makes it hard to even move, sometimes.”
“As long as your body can still move, you can keep going. It isn’t as hard as you might think, I promise. Look, you’ve figured out how to Travel without Fen. That’s a big step forward.”
She wrings her hands together. “Yes…you’re right. That surprised me, too.” She glances at where Liss’ hand tugs on her arm. “Wait, are we going…now?”
Liss nods. “You can do it, can't you? Do you have the strength?”
Pala closes her eyes. “For two leaps? Yes.”
The pair land by a sliver-thin crack that opens into a hall of shattered walls, feet skidding on the wreckage. The air is dry, static, yet it is not dead.
Liss' head perks up. She can feel the afterimage of an explosion in the air. All about them, a graveyard of crumbled buildings glows beneath the bloodshot sky, metal frames pricking from the concrete fragments like bones from flesh, all invisibly alight with traces of a fire like her own.
“Quick, inside,” she breathes, waving at the triangular opening formed by two slabs of rubble. Pala scrambles in after Liss; she hears those unsteady footsteps scattering concrete behind her.
Lifting her eyes, she surveys the dim collapsed hall they have entered, before Pala pulls a torch from her backpack and turns it on with a click. The thin stream of light lances through the dust, revealing hundreds of shelves partially crushed beneath the stones. The ceiling slumps to one side, the hall tapering to jagged shadows at the far end. They entered on the side that is still mostly upright.
They begin to forge in deeper among the shelves. Far as they can see, and farther still, are tens of thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of books lying sprawled on the ground, or draped over snapped shelves, bent, faded, broken at the spines, coated in a carpet of stone dust.
As the lonely torch sweeps across these papery carcasses, they glow briefly with ghostly white, before melting once more into the blackness.
From inside her collar, Liss pulls the looking glass that hangs from her neck: an old lens set into a tarnished metal ring. She holds it in front of her eye. “Alright, let us find that book,” she says, peering down at the first pile of books scattered on the floor. “Who was the author again? Sanjaya Hartono. A book about the structure of the many universes…”
*
For about five hours they venture through the frigid air, scouring the titles on the floor. Rank by rank of fallen shelves she plies, Pala trailing timidly behind, hunched and shivering, pointing the white-blue torch at the covers while she peeks at them through the glass.
Every time a tattered corpse rears its head—or its ribcage, if even that—she hears Pala gasp and stumble back, ceasing to walk until Liss has shoved it aside. Bones tumble like stacks of cards, clattering with a sound like rolling dice.
From what is still readable of the titles here, she sees books on myriad topics: kingdoms that surely no longer exist, armies beyond imagination, wars given numbers—one, two, three. Through that film of dust, there are titles that distantly remind her of theoretical concepts she has encountered in the depths of the temple: of invisible emissions from matter, of weapons that split the cores of particles.
They reach the part of this shattered library where the titles begin to speak of space and galaxies and stars born in clouds of dust. Through the window of that moving beam of light, Liss pieces together a story of this world. Once upon a time, humanity saw into the far reaches of space. Centuries later, it launched bullet-shaped ships into its endless hollows, in search of the nearest star. Humanity lost some of its kind to the space between star systems, and never again tried to transport anyone beyond. All of that dreaming came to naught.
The stars, she knows from the temple library, are not specks of light in the sky but spherical bodies thousands of times larger than the world itself, whose hearts churn with elemental gases for aeons until they run out of fuel and either fade or collapse into themselves.
Running out, running out, everything is always running out of fuel. Machines can only run for as long as they have something to burn.
But she—she tears fire out of the matter of existence itself, and she will have fuel as long as there is something she can hold. Not even the Being can claim this much.
Yet there is a limit to the universe, too. All those planets floating like specks of dust in a breeze—there must be a limit to how many there are, no?
Liss peers through more books: ones about galaxies and star clusters, about how to read the signatures in their pulsing light. She scours the row pace by pace, her heart racing like an engine, until she reaches where the fallen books are about numbers, about gods and death and knowing one exists and truth and then…
Nothing. Liss halts, two feet from a slanting wall. She peers up its height, at the sliver of roiling red sky that peers starlessly back down at her.
She grits her teeth. “It must be here. This is the right aisle. Let’s keep looking.”
“Yeah, I think you're right,” Pala offers, eyes also scanning the floor.
On the return, Liss finds her thoughts astir. She kicks aside every book that doesn't match. She crawls at times between rotting limbs, flipping the tomes over. Nothing. Nothing with an author remotely resembling Sanjaya Hartono.
Then, as she is flipping another book over to scan it through her lens, the light winks out.
“Pala, turn it back on,” Liss says, pausing with the last grimy title still grasped between her fingers—Measuring the Universe.
Liss hears a switch click a few times, the sound echoing dimly. “I—can't. It's out of power reserves. Sorry.”
Liss’ mind races and calculates. She doesn't have more days to waste on this search. But she is here without the axis machine. There is no failsafe—if Pala leaves to get a new light, Liss would briefly be stranded without a way back to her universe. If she gives up the search for a lost cause, whatever knowledge it holds remains out of her reach. Her eyes glaze over as they sweep the thousands of books piled on each other, the pages crushed against planks in the dark.
No, she will carry on while she has the time and resources. She could light a torch of her own—but what can she burn here but a book?
Plucking the smallest nail she can find from her pocket, Liss kneels to pick up Measuring the Universe, laying it in a sconce of cracked stone. Then she places her nail atop it.
She steps backwards and lifts her hand in front of her. The world whirls darkly around her like matter around a gravity well. Just a small explosion will do. Not the whole nail. Not even half of it…
She squeezes her hand into a fist, and light tears the scene in two.
Fire rips the volume apart, the flash consuming the entire book at once with an acrid stench. Pala screams and dives away as what remains of the shelf creaks and snaps, books about the stars cascading into a burgeoning nebula of dust. The corpse’s remains are buried beneath an avalanche of wood and paper.
Briefly, as the sparks blow past her, Liss recognises the resemblance of the new destruction to the old: the slabs caving in one direction, the debris crashing inward from above, the toppling force of the shockwave.
In a blinding moment of clarity, she can see it all: the splitting of atoms, the formation of the universe—the cataclysmic explosion that sent this library collapsing inward.
Then from beneath the echoes of the crack rises a much deeper groan—above, beneath, and all around.
The hole in the ceiling overhead is opening like a mouth. A pillar creaks and begins to crumble.
“Pala! Let’s go!” Liss hisses, snatching the Traveller’s arm. Pala’s eyes grow very round. Amid a chorus of crunching shelves and cracking stones, the world warps into rings around them, pulling them into the epicentre of the ripple and through the puncture hole.
Pala and Liss land on either side of Fen in his little storeroom. They lie panting there for seconds, Liss still staring on at the ceiling as that cloud of thoughts and revelations tries to settle.
“Um…everything alright?” he murmurs, crawling out of the bedroll to where Pala is dusting herself off.
Wordlessly, Liss rises to her feet. “Yes,” she says, marching towards the door. Fen and Pala are already grasping each other’s hands. “Everything is fantastic.”
*
“We couldn’t find the book,” Pala finally bursts out. “Then the torch battery died, so Liss tried to light a book on fire, but the explosion was too strong and the shelves caved in and then the walls started to collapse, so we leapt back before we could get crushed!”
Fen pulls her abruptly into a hug. “You—you could’ve died there!”
“I know. But I got us out. I did it. Just in time. I…” A smile breaks through her scrunched-up face. “I feel…like I did well.”
He returns her smile. “That’s the best thing that could come out of it.” Then his gaze dips. “You’re learning so fast. It’s kind of amazing to see.”
“Aw…that's only because you're here to support me. Look.” She gestures around them at the little room—the yellow papered walls, the cushions they have gathered in the corners from the common spaces, the slatted window. “I still ended up coming back to you. Almost like I can’t help it.”
“Can you help it?” he asks, leaning in. “I think it would be even better if you weren’t bound to me somehow. Not that that upsets me… It's kind of an honour.” He clasps his hands together on his lap.“ I hope that’s not weird to say.”
Pala beams back. “I'm glad I can always find you.”
As her head drops against his shoulder, he sighs, arm slipping around her back. “At least,” he murmurs, “there’s one thing we can always be sure about.”
Noma is waiting for Liss at the doorway to the dining hall. When she shows her face, they fly together into a spinning hug, Liss lifting Noma briefly off her feet, then bowing to kiss her forehead.
“By the way, Pala has come back, right?” Noma says as they let go.
At this, Liss sighs. “I went with her to search for the third book, but we couldn't find it. I accidentally blew up the shelves and maybe caved in the walls on top of it, too.”
Noma shakes her head, rubbing Liss’ back. “You were always much better with power than finesse.”
“I know. In fact…I think I did realise something, while I was there.” They start strolling into the dining hall where the buzz of voices keeps their words out of everyone else’s earshot. “That place, that library, was destroyed many years ago, by something powerful enough to level cities. It dawned on me that this must be that thing we read about…the explosives that split particles to release the power that holds them together. And then I realised…I think that is what my powers do, too. Maybe not in the same way. Maybe not splitting particles. But unlocking—releasing power from inside matter.”
“Oh, whoa—and—“ Noma's brow knits the way it does when her mind is racing, “maybe the reason it works better with metals and rocks is because—it’s more of the same type of matter clumped together?”
Liss grins, clapping Noma on the shoulder. “I think you may be right. You are so much cleverer than even I realise sometimes. And that’s saying a lot.”
Noma clasps her hands over her cheeks. Liss obliges to pull a chair for her, gesturing for her to sit. “I—I feel like I’m never going to get used to this,” Noma murmurs as she drops into the seat. In answer, Liss leans over and pries her hand off her face so she can peck her on the cheek. Noma lets out a high pitched yelp, as if Liss’ mouth were burning her.
“If you never get used to it then I will always have an easy way to please you,” she chuckles, stretching for the nearest pair of tongs. “And if you do get used to it, well, then I get to try something new.”
Despite the mixed success of Pala’s retrieval quest, Liss gets what she wants: a series of reference texts filling holes in the knowledge she has been piecing together. Every day, every word is clarifying more of the picture to her.
In a way, the work of Sanchai has burgeoned into a mild obsession. All these volumes and documents are, of course, not authored by several separate scholars. Sanjaya, Victor, Shanying—they are all him: the one known to this world and this temple as Sanchai, the Nomad.
Across the decades of his travels, he chased a singular blazing hunger like a comet in the sky, sowing knowledge across the universes as if laying a trail for someone matching him to find.
That someone, Liss has surmised already, is she. He is speaking directly to her across the winds and tides of space and time, not the voice of a man but of the universe itself, beckoning her towards the one true answer to all the agony and malaise of existence.
All of this pain and struggle and death will be worth it at last, when she has linked all these revelations together…
*
While Liss has toiled at this puzzle of singular import, Noma has slowly carved out her own niche at the temple, to which she finds herself returning. This is especially so when Liss is neck deep in her translations and analyses, when Noma needs something of equal immensity to engross herself in.
Every work day evening, she sits with the priest-scholars in the prayer hall and trades knowledge with them. The knowledge held in the Temple tends to be of the mind: ancient teachings of the world before, of machinery and power, of languages and translation.
Less developed—or perhaps less well-preserved—is their knowledge of the body. She teaches them how to mix herbs to produce healing and salving effects, how to determine health by searching for swollen nodes in the neck, how facial coverings of cloth can limit the transmission of respiratory illness. In turn, they show her how to tie knots she has never seen before, and they teach her what they know of Pala and Fen’s language with the books Liss has borrowed for her.
But more important than the learning is the talking.
“Your knowledge is quite striking,” says Tomay at the end of a demonstration. “And to think you have learned it by piecing it together from both your own people’s teachings and those of your conquerors…such triangulation takes deep meditation and astuteness.” They chuckle. “Are you certain you wouldn’t like to be initiated into the temple? I would commit these learnings to literature if I could.”
Noma shakes her head. “I don’t think I could pass the trial.”
Kori sighs. “You are so very different from your friend. Your partner, rather. Where she is always pushing forth, you are always circling back. Where she is impossible to appease, you barely, if ever, make demands.”
Noma finds herself smiling despite herself. “Liss was always the one who leapt into danger and went places. She's the one who endeavours and achieves. And I am simply…the one who goes along.”
Daranth clicks her tongue. “Don’t you speak of yourself in that way,” she replies, sweeping their scattered leaves into a heap. “I have been on this world for well near seventy years now, and I have never had a youth like you teach me so much I didn’t know. Don’t you ever believe she is overshadowing you.”
“It isn’t really that I’m afraid to be overshadowed,” Noma replies. “I’m simply honoured she would bring me with her… I only worry about the day she’ll no longer need me.”
Daranth frowns. “Well, I will say, she does largely keep people in her vicinity only as long as they are useful to her. But I will also say that I believe you are the exception. That she likes your company simply because you are who you are: the one who kept with her through oceans and wars.”
“I suppose even someone as cruel as she can harbour love,” Kori replies. “Frankly, Noma, you’re the only reason I still believe she has a heart.”
At these words, Noma sighs, fingers curling around the bowl in which her crushed herbs lie. She never quite saw it the way they do before, but in some little way, these words both thrill and terrify her.
Everything moves faster around Liss, as if her mere presence stoked the coals beneath everyone’s feet.
Within two weeks, she has gone from tirelessly reading to feverishly setting the pieces of her plan in place—straight from the studies and into the driver’s seat.
It is time, she says, for Pala’s first true test. The world in the other direction is harder to reach than the Traveller’s own, but Liss has perfect faith that she can make the leap.
Once the party is there, there is a plan of many steps to be executed. Before Noma can even ask to have it explained in full, Liss is already busy gathering supplies for the journey from the temple stores.
They meet on the temple steps in the light of that fateful dawn, on the threshold between the first terrace and the ground. The sky is almost the same colour as Liss’ hair. Pala and Fen have yet to arrive; she is sitting alone on the second highest step.
She looks up when Noma appears and descends onto the step beside her. “All the best,” she says as they embrace. “Things really do keep hurtling forward when you’re around.”
“The work doesn’t do itself.” Liss folds her arms on her lap. “It’s the only way. It’s how we turn one day into ten. Ten days into a hundred. If we stop moving, we let that time slip away.”
Noma tilts her head to one side. “But don’t you think the hours feel longer when we’re just…lingering with nothing to do?”
“Like now?” Liss murmurs.
“Like now,” Noma answers, leaning into Liss’ shoulder. “If this could last just a little longer…”
“When we win,” Liss replies, looping an arm around her waist, “we’ll have all the time in the world.”