The morning light drifted through the tiny cracks in the shelter where Dasen and Teth silently slept. The sun maintained the warmth of summer with only a few high clouds to break its luster. Despite that heat, birds sang and squirrels played in the trees. As far as they were concerned, this day was the same as any other, and it was good to be alive.
The rains of a few days before had left everything green, lush, alive. In the distance, the water from that rain ran into a river, which flowed into another and another until it boiled into the endless seas. Those rivers did not stop on this day or any other. They did not care who they buried or what they washed away. The rivers simply were and always would be.
The trees along the banks of those rivers stood tall and proud sucking in the warmth. One day they would be covered with winter’s snow, but that day seemed far away. For the moment, birds sang to them, squirrels played in their branches, and the sun was never ending. Some of those trees would die, lost to winds, water, fire, or a thousand other catastrophes, and when they had gone, new ones would take their places. So the cycle went: death replaced by life, falling into death again. It did not stop on this day or any other. It played no favorites, made no favors. It simply was and always would be.
Those trees stretched on to the west where they met the mountains whose unyielding power had stood for thousands of years. They would stand for thousands more as a barrier to all who dared cross them. They welcomed the challengers and defeated most, but they did not celebrate their victories or mourn their defeats. They were cold and solitary, not knowing, not caring. They too simply were and always would be.
It was the order of the world. Nature had its ways, its formulas, and those did not change for man. They did not alter when men killed one another in war or when they laughed together in peace. Those patterns had been set when the world was created. Men were a small factor in their outcomes. They lived with the laws or were run asunder by them. The Order did not concern itself with them either way.
Thus it was, on that pristine morning, that Dasen found himself floating above it all. Below him were the trees, the rivers, the mountains, the whole world stretched out clear and bright. He floated higher and higher taking in more and more of the view until he realized that he could understand, could see all of the patterns for which men had searched from the beginning of time. They were simply laid out before his unbelieving eyes. He studied those patterns, began to understand them, and realized that he was no longer seeing trees, rivers, and mountains; he saw formulas. A great myriad of formulas covered the whole of his vision. Incredibly complex, they overlapped, sharing variables in a great spider’s web of interdependencies. He could not hope to understand them, but he found that if he concentrated, he could bring the formulas to him, could even change them.
As an experiment, he concentrated on the formula for a river. It appeared before him, he changed one of the coefficients, and the river flowed away from the sea. He grabbed another formula, made another change, and clouds drew moisture out of the ground instead of depositing it. Another formula, and fire radiated cold that froze everything near it. He soon understood how to read the formulas and control the changes he was making: men became pregnant, fish came on to the land while land animals moved below the waves, mountains grew not up but into gapping valleys. Finally, he found the formula for life itself: there was no more death, people came back from the dead, new lives were created, healthy people died for no reason. . . .
He had lost control. The formula was changing without him, transmuting on its own. He tried to hold it together, to reverse the changes he had made, but the coefficients were changing too fast, rattling through a thousand combinations of life and death. He fought to regain control and discovered that all of the formulas were changing. The alterations were random and the more he fought to restore them, the faster they changed. He worked franticly to repair what he had done, but the damage only got worse until the formulas flew apart, scattering their coefficients.
And he was the cause. The very fabric of the world was rotting in his hands, and the more he tried to hold it together, the more it crumbled. Searching for an escape, he looked out and found himself at the center of a vortex of shattered formulas and errant coefficients. The formulas collapsed on him then scattered in disarray. He was tearing them apart, destroying the bonds that held the world together. Where there had been order, there was chaos, and he was its lord, the eye of the storm, the pitch of battle, the heart of revolution, the death of understanding.
He threw his arms out in futility, but it was too late. The formulas smashed together on top of him. The sun blinked out, and the world shattered into all the pieces of the order he had destroyed.
From Across the Clouded Range Page 37
