Chapter 5959 The Farmer’s Existence

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The mighty Hoe had been lying across THE Farmer’s knees when it happened, and so she felt all of it. When he sank his fingers into the soil and spoke to the cat about wheat and the first farmers, the farm began to move with him, and she moved with it, every one of her five pieces rising and falling in the same slow rhythm as the soil and the rivers and the snow. For a moment there was no line anywhere, not between him and the ground, not between the ground and the sky, not between any of it and herself, and she was only one more part of something very large that was breathing.

Her seams did not ache at all while it lasted. The current that ran through THE Farmer ran through her as well, straight through the center of her and out again into the farm, and she understood, in the slow and simple way she was beginning to understand things, that he had not done anything to the farm. He had only stopped standing apart from it, and everything had settled into its right place on its own.

Afterward, he went on talking to the cat. He asked her about the Mountain and the place near the top and the climb, and she answered in her proud, sulky voice, and the mighty Hoe listened with half of her attention.

The cat had been purified, and her hunger was gone, but she still smelled pungent to the Hoe, sour and old underneath the cleanness, and she did not think that smell would ever entirely go away.

The other half of her attention was on THE Farmer. Since the fifth piece had joined her, she could feel more of him than she ever had, not only the warmth of his authority in her handle but the shape of everything it was connected to, and she found that she wanted to know what that shape was. So she followed his authority outward, gently, along the many threads that ran out of him into existence, until she found one she had never noticed before.

It was crimson and gold, and it did not run toward any place she knew. It ran out of THE Farmer and away into somewhere that was not quite anywhere, toward a weaving of existence that was tied to him alone, and the mighty Hoe blinked, in her own way, and followed it.

She came out in a place that was and was not. A crimson sky hung over everything, written all across with faint scrolling lines that moved too fast to read, and the air smelled of rain on a forest that was very green and very alive. But the forest was not quite there, and neither was the ground beneath it, and everywhere she looked, things were both happening and not happening at once, a tree standing and fallen and never planted, a river running east and west and dry, each possibility laid over the others and all of them real.

This was the Ruined Quantum Existence of Ruination, and the mighty Hoe looked at it with great calm, because it did not frighten her. It was only every road that existence might have taken, kept and remembered instead of thrown away, and she found it rather beutiful.

In one small corner of that vast place, a Legacy stood whole. The Legacy of THE Acharya, which THE Farmer had carried out of the Undefined Gaps and set down here where no one could follow it. Its terraces and towers and long crimson stairs were solid in a way nothing else in that place was, and people moved along them, small and busy and safe, and none of them seemed to know how many possibilities flickered just past the edges of their home.

On one high crimson terrace, a body sat very still, and it was THE Farmer’s. The mighty Hoe looked at it for a moment with something close to fondness, because it was only another piece of him, sitting and watching and giving, just as all the others did.

Then she saw Ruination. She stood at the heart of the Ruined Quantum Existence in a long iron coat, with crimson gold hair that shifted and moved without any wind, and her eyes were scrolling, line after line of record running across them faster than the Hoe could follow. She was not still at all. With every breath she took, the place around her grew, new probabilities unfolding out of her in long bright sheets, roads that existence had not yet walked spreading out and settling into the crimson dark and becoming part of what she kept.

The mighty Hoe watched her for a long time, and then she saw why it was happening so fast. THE Farmer’s authority was here too, flowing into this place in the same slow, warm way it flowed into the farm, and every time it reached Ruination, she took it and unfolded it into more possibilities, and the Ruined Quantum Existence grew larger and richer for it. He was not only giving to the existence that was, the soil and the rivers and the snowing dark. He was giving to everything that might have been as well, and both of them were giving back.

It felt like a grand, endless Tide.

Was this why his authority felt so warm and so pure? The Hoe turned the question over slowly. Perhaps it was because it never stayed in one place, because he passed it endlessly through so many different parts of existence, the real and the possible, the farm and this place and all the others she had not yet seen, and every one of them refined it a little more before it came back to him.

She could not be certain, and she did not try to be. She only watched a little longer, the people of the Legacy going about their evening and THE Farmer’s body sitting still on its terrace and Ruination unfolding road after road into the crimson dark, and once, very briefly, Ruination’s scrolling eyes paused on the place where the Hoe was watching from, and then went on scrolling. Then the mighty Hoe drew herself back along the crimson-gold thread, out of the place that was and was not, and returned to the snow and the farm and the warm hands of THE Farmer, where the cat was still talking.

The mighty Hoe was still curious. The crimson-gold thread had led her somewhere she had never imagined, and now that she knew to look, she could see that there were other threads running out of THE Farmer, many of them, each one leading to some other place he was quietly giving himself to. So while he went on talking to the cat in the snow, she chose another, a thread that shone in every color at once, and she followed it out of the farm and across existence.

It led her into THE Infiniverse. She knew the name the moment she arrived, because the place said it to her in every direction at once, and because it was so plainly his. It was a home, she realized, though it was larger than any home she could have imagined, a whole small existence of its own, filled with hundreds of thousands of Observable Existences and Dimensions, and Realms that were not places at all but ideas he carried, given room to grow.

She came in first at a quiet shore, where a soft veil of light hung over still water that went on to the edge of seeing. This was THE Early Veiled Shore, and on it stood the Dream Engine, a vast and patient thing of blue-gold light filled with cocoons of those dreaming turning slowly over the water.

The mighty Hoe watched it turn for a long moment and felt something in her own seams answer its rhythm, because it was made of the same Dreams that had been stitched through her.

Warm, and peaceful.

Then she looked outward, across Gigaparsecs of THE Infiniverse, and saw the Realms. There was a Realm of Infinity where nothing ever ran out, and a Realm of Dreams where the light was soft and blue, and a Realm of Quintessence that burned with his fire, and a Realm of Tyranny, hard and cold and orderly, and Realms of Prana and Manadynamics and more besides, each one vast and each one different. All of them were full, crowded with Observable Existences and Dimensions and the lifeforms living in them, and all of them were humming.

THE Farmer’s authority was here too. She could feel it flowing through every Realm and every Dimension, warm and steady, giving itself to this place the same as it gave itself to the farm and to Ruination’s place of possibilities, and this whole existence was taking it in and humming with it. And as she watched, something was happening across all of it at once.

Pillars were rising. Long blue-gold columns of light were growing up through the Realms and the Observable Existences and the Dimensions, connecting one to another, running between places that had never touched, and the mighty Hoe understood after a while that they were Existential Conduits, the same kind of roads that ran out from THE Mountain at the Center of Everything. They were being built here, now, one after another, and every one of them was carrying THE Farmer’s authority from Realm to Realm.

The Conduits all ran toward the same place, and so the mighty Hoe followed them. They led her to the very center of THE Infiniverse, where the dark was dense and heavy and full of singularities, countless small deep points of weight pressed close together, and in the middle of them all, something was being built. It was faint still, only an outline, but she could see its shape, and it was the shape of a mountain.

Around that faint mountain, in the dense dark, things were budding. There was a soft grey place that carried the feel of the Fallow, and a golden place of seas and cocoons that carried the feel of the Chrysalis, and a place of endless blue currents that carried the feel of the Carcosa, and a deep place of first beginnings that carried the feel of the Source Lands. At first the Hoe thought they were copies, but they were not, because they did not feel the same as those great regions at all. They felt clean and purified, with nothing heavy or sour left in them, each one a small and pristine version of something vast, budding and opening slowly at the center of THE Infiniverse.

From that region, Conduits were blooming in every direction, countless of them, and each one carried a trace of those budding places outward into the rest of THE Infiniverse. The places themselves were still growing, Proto Realms already larger than any Dimension, and the Hoe watched them swell and settle and swell again.

And floating among the singularities, guiding all of it, there was a figure. She was humanoid and made of every color at once, shifting and illusory, and with slow movements of her hands she was tending the budding regions, coaxing one to grow a little faster and holding another back, shaping the Conduits as they bloomed out of the center and sent them on their way. This was THE Infiniverse herself, and she was choosing what she would become.

The mighty Hoe looked at all of it for a long time. Here, too, THE Farmer’s authority was cycling, flowing out into the Realms and the Conduits and the budding regions and coming back again, and here it was refined further than she had seen it anywhere, so that everything in THE Infiniverse felt immensely rich, full to its edges with something clean and warm. She thought of the farm, and Ruination’s place of possibilities, and this place with a mountain growing at its heart, and she wonderd what THE Farmer was really trying to do.

It almost seemed that he was trying to make another existence. Not to take one, or to rule one, but to grow one, slowly and quietly, the same as he grew everything else.

Then the figure at the center turned. THE Infiniverse lifted her many-colored face away from the budding regions and looked directly at the place where the mighty Hoe was watching from, and her face was calm and curious and kind. "Hello," she said.

The mighty Hoe had never been spoken to by anyone but THE Farmer. She looked back at the shifting, many-colored figure for a long moment, and she thought about it very carefully, because it seemed important to answer well. Then she hummed, once, softly, a simple sound of acknowledgement, and in the tongue that only things like the two of them could understand, the hum meant exactly what it needed to mean. It meant hello.