Story: 'Triangles', X

(Part IX , XI)

Crossing the barrier between realities is confusing or distracting enough without being diverted. Especially if you've landed in a working fountain. Looking on the bright side, at least the fountain was of the water variety.

Suddenly the sheer weirdness and the coolness of the water began to have an inexplicable effect upon her. She began to laugh, and to cry and to do both very loudly. She splashed water, waved her arms about jumped up and down, and finally sat down with a mighty, silly, calm wallow. It was a surprisingly deep fountain so she stood up again and looked at the man in a rather abashed manner.

The man looked at her in a thoroughly shocked manner. Then he spoke.

"My name, for the purposes of this discussion, is Ernest. I am an interdimensional guardian of the cosmos. I have watched time wind in and wind out innumerable times and can fathom every physical process in the world. Typhoons and whirlwinds are mere simple playthings to me, black holes a bauble on the fabric of space-time, each universe a shred of reality flying through the inter-dimensional void. And yet, despite all that, I have no idea why you did that."

"What?"

"It's true that I'm a little disappointed. Here I am - blithely throwing out exposition like a trained wolfhound - and you respond with a mostly inarticulate 'What?'. I've been alone for countless multiversal cycles, gone mostly mad on several occasions, played solitaire with whole planes of reality on occasions and never once bothered any of the tiny infinitesimal and short-lived life forms for fear of disturbing their development. I have no idea how I came to be, how anything came to be, and blankly fulfil my function as best I can. Finally, in a moment of direst crisis, I seek out someone who seems to have some inkling of what's going on, who has traversed the membranes of reality in fact and I get this. A wet young woman in a fountain, splashing and saying 'What?'."

The man paused. "Am I making sense? Correct language and species? Yes?"

"Yes. You're making sense in every way except I don't understand any of it. Not a clue. I may still be having hysterics about having been dragged through a 'magic circle' into a massive hole in the world and ending up in a fountain in a strange place with a beardy man who likes monologues. All this after being stranded in a batty place where everything is based on triangles and slowly starving to death while surrounded by pointy food."

"Monologues?"

"Never mind. Did you say guardian of the multiverse? I picked out something about a direst crisis while I was staring in a wide-eyed fashion too."

Beardy Ernest collected himself and set up for another run at it. "Your universe is on a cycle of expansion and contraction. Each Big Bang is eventually followed by a Big Crunch, a reset, and then another Big Bang and so on. On each iteration things begin differently and history unfolds in utterly new ways. Now try to imagine that at the moment of the Big Bang, there are innumerable other Big Bangs happening in every other plane of reality. There is a moment, as the dimensions return back to their origin, that every plane of reality touches every other... And in a touch of utter beauty death and birth combine into one. I am the person, the entity, that watches over the different levels of the multiverse. I do it alone, and have forever done it thus. And now there is something else out there."

"Something else? But you're the only one. You just said so. I don't understand."

"Something else is there. Something that is threading connections through all the planes, building tunnels and bridges, fixing the structure of the realities. Even in my madness, I would not do this, this mangling of the natural order. If the structure is rigid then the dimensions will never be able to collapse in toward one another and the cycle will be broken. And if the links are soft, springy, then one tug could cause the collapse away from the origin. And if that happens, then we are all truly lost, for there can be no renewal. The renewal is a function of the place as well as the event. And the renewal is essential; Without it every level of reality would crumble into dust from which nothing could ever recover or rebuild."

Delores wondered. "So we're dealing with not the end of the world, not the end of time and space as I know it, but the ending of time and space not as I know it as well?"

"Yes."

Her belly rumbled menacingly. "Can it wait until after food?"

To be continued...