The Leap of Faith

The Arithmetic of Not Knowing

Probability is a strange thing.

Ask a scholar and he will tell you it is a kind of algorithm, a machine of numbers that weighs an action and reports how likely it is to end in success or in ruin, depending on which of the two you have decided to call the ending. Ask a gambler and he will tell you it is a mood. I have come to believe they are both right, and that the difference between them is only the difference between studying the machine and being inside it.

It is an abstract thing, because nobody owns the future. And if someone did, if a single mind ever held the whole of tomorrow in its hands and read it like a page, then the reading would already have altered the page, the way a hand laid upon still water alters the reflection it came to admire. To know the outcome is to disturb it. I find that both intriguing and faintly indecent, and it is the reason I have never trusted anyone who tells me they are certain.

It is also, in a roundabout way, the reason I am about to tell you what I am about to tell you.

This happened a few eons ago, in a time so far before Flora that the door she would one day come through had not yet been built. Flora, who was a plant like me, and a woman with a past that had frozen her heart solid, and who would arrive in the Between and, eventually, in mine. But that is another door. I was not the person you know. I am not sure I was yet a person at all. I was a thing that had been rooted for a very long time and had only lately learned to stand.

What I remember first is the clouds.

They were not sky-clouds. Sky-clouds are a garnish, a thing that happens above the real business of the world. These were the business. They lay in every direction, a sea of them, thick and slow and luminous, rolling in long swells that never broke against anything, because there was nothing for them to break against. The light came from within them, a pearl-grey, pearl-white glow with no sun to explain it. Even time looked pale here. It had the color of something left out in the rain for too long, and it moved as if it were embarrassed to be seen moving.

I was standing on a shelf of stone no wider than a table set for two.

Ahead of me, the world stopped. I do not mean it ended. Ends have edges you can describe. I mean it stopped the way a sentence stops when the speaker forgets the rest of it, mid-thought, mouth open. There was the shelf, there was its lip, and past the lip there was the sea of clouds and nothing else that I could name. What lay beneath the sea, I did not know. I had a suspicion that nobody did, and that this was rather the point.

I turned around, slowly, the way you turn when you already suspect what you will find.

Behind me was the same. The path I had come by was gone. The seal that had carried me here, which I had broken between two fingers only a moment before, had folded the world shut behind it like a book closed on a pressed flower. There was no door. There was no road. There was the shelf, and the sea, and me, and the arithmetic of the situation, which was simple enough that even I could do it: forward was death, and backward was death, and the stone beneath my feet was the only place in all that shining emptiness where I was not yet dead.

A false step and the sea would swallow me, and wherever I fell, I would stay fallen.

I want to be precise about the fear, because I have spent a long time since learning what it was made of. It was not the sharp fear, the kind that quickens a body and sends it running. I was not built for that fear, and I had not yet built a body worth running with. It was an older and slower thing: the fear of an organism that has never been afraid before and does not yet know that fear has manners, that it comes in waves and passes in waves, that it can be sat beside like a stranger on a bench. I only knew that death was standing at both of my shoulders, and that it was standing very politely, and that this was somehow worse.

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I should say what I was, in those days, so that you understand how little I had to fight it with.

I was a plant newly arrived in the Between. I do not count the time I had spent rooted before that, because it was not time in any sense you would recognize; it was a long, green, unremarked stillness in which nothing happened to me and I did not mind. Then I woke, and there was a world, and I was standing in the middle of it on two legs I did not fully trust. I knew very little. I knew a handful of names and one or two rules. My senses were poor, poorer even than the ordinary poverty of the dead, and if you do not yet know how poor that is, you will by the end of this story.

But there was a peculiar thing that happened next, and it is the reason I have never been able to tell this story as a tragedy, though every ingredient of one was present.

My mind went blank, and it was a good blank.

I did not sigh. I did not pray. I did not do any of the things that people in stories do when they are cornered at the edge of a cliff. I simply stood in the emptiness of my own head, and the emptiness was tranquil, and after a while I became aware that I was looking at something beautiful.

It was a hopeless, spacious, gorgeous view. The sea rolled on. The pearl light shifted by such slow degrees that I could only tell it had moved by looking away and looking back. Somewhere in the far distance the clouds had heaped themselves into towers and slopes and long pale valleys, like the ghosts of countries nobody had ever built, and the light lay in the valleys and did not leave.

I lifted my hands and reached toward it.

I could not touch it, of course. You will have to understand this as a fact, not a complaint. In the Between, the dead wake as silhouettes without faces, and the first thing they lose, before names, before memories, before the faces themselves, is the world's ability to press against them. Nothing is warm. Nothing is cold. Water is a color. Wind is an idea you have to be told about. The only way to feel anything at all is to earn a World Fragment, and a World Fragment is rarer and dearer than anything I had ever seen, and I had seen very little.

So my fingers passed through the cloud, and the cloud did not push back, and I felt nothing.

But I could see that it was soft, in the way you can see that a stranger is kind. I could see the cloud part around my hands and close behind them, and it looked like a courtesy. It looked like the sea was making room for me, and I thought: someone should be allowed to feel this. Then I thought: no. Someone should be allowed to feel everything, and this would only be the beginning. And then I was quiet, for a while, because the second thought was larger than I was and I had to let it settle before I could carry it.

My feet, at some point, stopped holding me up. I do not remember deciding it. I lowered myself onto the shelf, folded my legs beneath me, and sat with my hands resting on my knees.

A plant, contemplating a sea of clouds.

That is all it was. It was not a metaphor. Or it was a metaphor that I have grown too fond of to surrender, and that has, over the eons, worn a groove in me the way water wears a stone. I sat on the edge of something I could not name, on a contract I had signed in secret, with a debt I could not repay if I failed and a wish I could not say out loud if I succeeded, and I was calm.

I will tell you why I was calm.

It was because, sitting there, for the first time since I had woken, I was not being asked to be anything.

And I remember thinking, with the simple clarity of the very small: if I am going to do this, I should at least remember how I came to be here.

So I did. And because you have been patient with me, I will let you remember it too.