I see you have reached the same impasse I once did.
— Oris the Creator, to his First
Ages. Then more of them.
Nothing came apart. That was the part Oris had not been able to plan for and the part that turned out to require nothing of him at all. Origin held, because he had built it to hold and because he had built it incapable of the kind of growth that shows a seam. The interpolated ones below multiplied and buried each other and built and grieved and got older, correctly, in an order that made sense to them. His children would get their history later and all at once, and would know the hour it came, and would ask. He had thought about that and made his arrangement and gone on. He had not thought about where he would be standing when they asked.
He was not miserable. This is the part of him nobody has ever been willing to allow.
He was good at it, and he was busy, and he was loved — genuinely, by seven of them, and by everything under them — and there were long stretches in which he did not think about the slab at all, and he came to understand that a lie of omission does not require maintenance. That is the entire advantage of it. A lie you have told has to be told again. A thing you simply did not say sits where it is, and the world grows over it, and after a sufficient number of ages the world growing over it is indistinguishable from the truth having been there all along.
And in the long middle of it he went back to the field.
Not the one below — that one was the loom’s and always had been, and he had let it stand, and letting a thing stand is not the same as owning it. The tear was closed with stitchwork he had not laid. He could not audit it. He could not take it apart to see how it held. He had spent his existence unable to mistake his own handwriting, and the largest object in his realm was in somebody else’s.
So he grew his own.
He was patient about it. He made husks first: bodies with no one in them, clean, and no history at all — no grandmothers, no graves, nothing inferred. A controlled line, filled only as needed, with measured traits and rationed light. He made them in pairs, because a line has to start somewhere and two is the smallest number that can be called a beginning. He made a great many pairs and kept the ones that held. The pair he kept last he kept in a garden, and gave them a tree, and told them not to.
He told himself it was a perfect machine for a perfect world, and it was, and that was not why he was doing it.
He was doing it because a species he had made himself could be accounted for, and a species that had arrived to cover his mistake could not, and he had discovered that he could live with the lie indefinitely but not with the evidence.
✦✦✦
Nobody audited him. There was nobody left who could, and the one being in existence who might have was in a place he could not see and had stopped, at some point he did not mark, writing.
✦✦✦
The boy came to him in the garden that was not a garden but a tolerance.
He was the finest thing Oris had ever made. That had been the intention and the intention had been met, exceeded, embarrassed — and what it meant in practice, what it had always been going to mean, was that he was the only one who checked.
“Father,” he said. “I have seen a world where you are not present.”
Oris looked at his son for a long moment, and in that moment he was not a Creator. He was a man in a doorway with his hand still on the latch, hearing a sound from a room he had locked a very long time ago and had stopped, some ages back, thinking of as a room.
It was not a prophecy. He knew that immediately and completely, the way he knew his own handwriting. It was a reading. The finest mind he had ever built had looked at the pattern and found the place where it did not close, and had come, correctly and in good faith, to the only being who could explain it.
There was an answer. There had always been an answer. It was four words long and it would have cost him less breath than the question had cost the boy.
The result was false.
That was all. Four words, and then everything after them: the null age, his brother’s name, his sister’s nine volumes in her small clear hand, the seventh name with nobody left behind it, the species below that was a stitch and knew it was a species. All of it available. All of it survivable, probably, by someone as capable as this one.
He did not spend it.
He turned his back, and the turning was the whole of his reply, and it was enough to break a universe.
And it will.
The question was not my sin.
The silence was theirs.
— carved, later, into the Gate of Perdition
Thus began A Ballad of Chaos