Fate is not a river. It is a loom. We are told we are the weavers. We are the thread.
— inscription on the Slab of Ancients
Oris did not make Origin. He has been given the credit for it ever since and he has never once corrected anybody, and the correction is this: the leap made it. The wheel split, and a branch came out of the split the way bone comes out of a break, and it was burning, and there was no law in it at all.
The leap had torn something. Not metaphorically: there was a place where the loom’s pattern ran out and a place where it resumed, and between them a width of nothing that the fabric was trying to close by pulling on itself from both sides. Left alone it would have closed. It would have closed the way a wound closes when nobody attends it, dragging everything either side of it out of true forever.
What he did was furnish it. It had arrived raw and it had arrived lying across the tear, and he went into it and made it into an instrument, and that is the work he afterwards allowed to be called the building of a world.
He made it crystalline because crystal does not creep. He made its order absolute and its law prior to its inhabitants, so that nothing in it would ever have to be decided, because a decision is a place where a thing could have gone another way, and a place where a thing could have gone another way is a place where somebody can stand and ask why it went this way. He made it perfect in the exact sense that a splint is perfect: it did one thing, it did it without variance, and it would do it until it was removed.
And he made it incapable of growth. That was the part he would be praised for, later, by beings who believed they were describing his ambition.
A thing that grows drifts. A thing that drifts reveals the seam.
✦✦✦
He was setting the last of the law when he understood that the tidying behind him had not stopped.
It had not been tidying. He turned round properly for the first time since the wheel had jumped, and he looked down the length of the loom at what was holding his tear closed, and it was not his branch doing it. His branch was carrying the load. Something else entirely had gone into the gap.
There were people in it.
Not made. He would have known if they were made; making was the one thing in existence he could not mistake, the way you cannot mistake your own handwriting. These had not been made. They had been inferred — the loom reading what a torn stretch of pattern must have contained, and then weaving it in at full weight, because a thread that is woven holds and a thread that is only intended does not.
None of it had come through yet. It sat in the pattern the way a sentence sits in a sealed letter — finished, in force, and nobody’s news. He could read it because he could read the loom. Nothing living below him could read anything at all.
He went in and stood among them for a while.
They had grandmothers. That was the detail he could not get past, and he stood in a village that was four heartbeats old and turned it over and could not put it down. They had grandmothers, and the grandmothers had died, and the graves were there with the earth settled on them, and the ones still living came to the graves and were grieving. Correctly. In every particular. For women who had never drawn a breath, because there had been no breath to draw, because there had been no time in which to draw it — and the grief was not a copy of grief. He checked. He was the Creator and he checked, and the grief went all the way down.
The loom had not patched the tear with matter. It had patched it with lives, because lives were what the missing stretch of pattern had been made of, and it had not asked him, and it had not needed to.
He stood there a long time.
Then he went back up to his crystalline unfinished branch and thought, with the part of himself that had never once failed him and had never once been kind:
They will do.
If they hold the seam, they can hold the seam. And nobody audits a thing that is grieving.
He did not stay to watch it come through. It would come through; the loom finishes what it begins. He had checked the parts of it that could be checked — the grief, the graves, the settled earth — and they had held, and they were small and dull and had not asked for his attention, and that had always been enough for him. A thing verified in its particulars is a thing you can stop looking at.
He went back to setting the law. Somewhere between one clause and the next he stopped thinking of it as something that was going to happen and began thinking of it as something that had.
And he kept one thing out of that day, which he did not write down and did not need to.
A loom does not leave a hole. Tear the pattern and it will find something to put in the gap, and whatever it puts there will arrive already old, and nothing living inside the repair will ever be able to see the seam — not because the seam is hidden, but because the thing that would notice it has been rewoven too. He filed that the way he filed everything: completely, and without once asking himself why he was keeping it.