The Time Invariance of Snow

by E. Lily Yu

  It is.

  K. squinted at her, as if looking into radiance.

  I see you’ve made your glass into a sword.

  And you’ve made yours into a door.

  A tempering all your life, then. A tempering and a war. As I have lived openings and closings. As I have yielded and withstood.

  So you and I have been made of use.

  We have, K. said. We have indeed.

  Notes

  1. The Devil and the Physicist

  1.  The more we peer myopically into the abyss of time, the more we understand that there is no such thing as once, nor a single sequential line of time, but rather a chaos of local happenings stretching from improbability to probability.

  2.  Here too the concept of mirror is an approximation, for the phenomenon in question extended into a minimum of seven dimensions; but mirror is a close and useful metaphor.

  3.  Theology hopes for local boundedness, but as yet this remains unproven.

  4.  A poetic simplification to describe a quantum event affecting neural perception.

  5.  This too is a poetic simplification.

  7. A Brief Digression on Hans Christian Andersen and the Present State of Physics

  6.  S = k log W, which is to say, entropy is directly related to the number of states of a system. If we somehow could perceive all the possible microscopic states of the universe, S would be constant.

  7.  Imagine, say, a boy forming the icy shards of reason into a picture of eternity. The metaphor is not inadequate.

  About the Author

  E. Lily Yu is a writer and narrative designer whose fiction has appeared in places such as McSweeney’s, Boston Review, Clarkesworld, F&SF, and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Her first novel, On Fragile Waves, is forthcoming from Erewhon Books in Fall 2020. You can sign up for email updates here.

  Thank you for buying this

  Tom Doherty Associates ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  1.  The Devil and the Physicist

  2.  K. and G.

  3.  The Ravens

  4.  The Robber Queen

  5.  The Lap Women

  6.  The Snow Queen

  7.  A Brief Digression on Hans Christian Andersen and the Present State of Physics

  8.  G. and the Devil

  9.  G. and K.

  Notes

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2019 by E. Lily Yu

  Art copyright © 2019 by Audrey Benjaminsen