The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

We, telling this, are not bound by the same ignorance he carried away from that field, and it would be a small dishonesty to leave the reader as confused as he was, so let this be said plainly, the way the truest things in this account are usually said plainly, without ornament, because ornament would only get in the way of how simple the answer actually is.

The fly was not a fly. Not only a fly, in any case — nor was the pig only a pig, nor the trident only a trident. They were, each of them, something Something itself had reached for, the way any sufficiently vast and patient system reaches for whatever tool happens to be nearest when a correction needs making and the correction cannot, for reasons of its own vast indifferent logic, be made directly.

Caedmon's strength by then bent both worlds around him without resistance, the way we have already seen it do, and a system built on equilibrium does not, as a rule, enjoy watching one variable grow indefinitely unopposed. It does not think this, precisely — thinking would require an interior neither Something nor Nothing has ever possessed — but it does, in its own mechanical and utterly faceless way, respond, the way a scale responds to weight added on one side by producing, somewhere, a counterweight on the other.

It could not stop him outright. Nothing in existence, at that particular hour, could have stopped him outright, and the system knew this the way water knows a stone is heavier than it is, without needing anything so grand as awareness to know it. What it could do — what it had, in fact, been doing in small, scattered, largely unnoticed ways for longer than Caedmon had any idea to suspect — was slow him. Redirect him. Spend, on tiny, disposable inconveniences, the smallest possible fraction of the vast correcting pressure that equilibrium always eventually musters against anything grown too large to ignore.

Why a fly, specifically. Why a pig, and a trident sized for neither of them.

Because the world does not discriminate. This is, perhaps, the single most important thing to understand about Something and Nothing both, underlined now for the second time in this account because it will matter again before the story is finished: neither system plays favorites, not even toward its own most dangerous anomalies, not even toward men who believe themselves chosen. Whatever resistance existence has left to spend on slowing Caedmon down, it spends without preference, without design beyond the barest, most economical shape the correction can take. A fly was simply what happened to be nearest, in that particular fold of Something, at that particular moment resistance needed manufacturing. It was given, without ceremony, everything the moment could spare — a mount large enough to close distance, a weapon large enough to matter, and a fury it did not choose for itself any more than Caedmon had chosen his own strange, borrowed strength.

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The fly did not know why it hated him. It only knew, in whatever small and total way a fly can know anything, that hating him and charging him and refusing, against all sense, to let him pass unbothered, was suddenly and entirely the whole of what it existed to do.

It would go on doing it, in scattered fields across scattered stretches of Something, for as long as the correction judged the effort worth spending. Caedmon would meet it, or something enough like it that the distinction ceased to matter, more than once before this story is finished.

There is a temptation, telling this part of the account, to make more of it than it deserves — to suggest that Something had somehow noticed Caedmon specifically, formed some deliberate intention about him the way Iris might form an intention, or the way even the ordinary, patient architecture of the Between's mission-economy occasionally seems, to a soul walking through it, almost too well-timed to be coincidence. This account resists that temptation, because giving in to it would be a lie, and this account has promised, from its very first line, to tell nothing it has not earned the right to tell plainly. Something did not notice Caedmon. It could not notice anything, in the sense that noticing requires an interior, and neither Something nor Nothing has ever possessed one. It only responded, the way a scale responds, the way water responds to a stone, mechanically and without malice and without anything resembling the personal attention a man alone in a room with an unfinished portrait might, in his loneliest hours, have wished for instead.

That is, perhaps, its own kind of quiet sadness sitting underneath the whole absurd encounter: that even the resistance the universe sent against him carried no more feeling behind it than the correction that let him grow this strong in the first place. He was neither chosen nor hunted, in any sense that implied someone, somewhere, cared enough to choose or hunt him deliberately. He was simply large enough, now, to generate a response, the way any sufficiently massive object generates gravity whether or not it wishes to be noticed doing so.

He never once suspected any of this. He walked away from that first encounter believing, as far as this account can determine, that he had simply had extraordinarily bad luck with wildlife.

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