art by Shannon N. Kelly
Worlds Like a Hundred Thousand Pearls
by Aliette de Bodard
Exponential: the transcendental number that is the base of Napierian or natural logarithms, approximately equal to 2.71828. The number also has applications in probability theory--symbol e, first referenced in work by John Napier in 1618 AD.
Shall I tell you a story?
Not the Buddhist fables in the sutras, about kings and their sons--the cryptic wisdom you stopped believing when war stole your husband from you, leaving you with only a hologram on the ancestral shrine, and your son Hoang, too young to understand, who kept asking you why Daddy wasn't coming home. Not a Daoist story either, full of heroes with peach-wood swords and demon-fights--where the dead can rise, and walk again: the miracles that never happen. For you have stood at too many funerals, watching the coffins covered with a yellow shroud, and no one ever woke up, not even to become the shambling monstrosities that used to frighten Hoang so much.
No, it is a far, far older tale; older even than Gautama Buddha himself. You might have heard some of it already, in one form or another--the Lotus and the other sutras, for instance, speak of worlds upon worlds, stacked atop each other like Hoang's toys--each awaiting the Honored One's coming, that he might teach them the way to Nirvana.
Before you ask, I know nothing of Nirvana, or the Honored One. I have never seen them on my travels. But the worlds...
The worlds are there, scattered like a broken necklace--a hundred thousand pearls ready to be picked up, and the way between them requiring only a thought to be opened.
A thought. You don't say it, but I hear it all the same. You think it's not a much better story than the ones I mocked. You sit in your deserted house, your hands smelling of dirt--thinking that you should wash them, that you should check the Eight Diagrams mirror above the door of your house, make sure the angry ghost won't find his way home--though you cannot imagine Hoang ever angry, or vengeful: merely lost and bereft, weeping for the descendants he'll never have. You listen to me as you listened to the elders who told you not to mourn--who told you that the old shouldn't break their hearts over the young, that a child's death is a tragedy, but not so great as losing a parent.
Let me tell you about the worlds. I've walked a hundred thousand of them--under red suns, in deserts strewn with glass, by lakes shining under starlight. I have seen a city so large the sun never set on its gilded pagodas; a world of habitats in the Heavens, where the people released their dead on metal kites that slid down towards the scorched earth; a forest of crystal on a vast sea, where the wind sang songs like fisherman's laments.
They're the worlds of paths not taken, of choices not made, of outcomes that never came to pass. Everything that happened around you--every direction taken by the myriad aircars in Hanoi's Old Quarter, every brush of a butterfly's wings, held in Hoang's cupped hands--every moment, every gesture, every held or released breath--they all gave rise to universes, the new rising from the debris of the old.
Your eyes narrow. You watch me--you see me for the first time, standing by your side with my hand outstretched--holding out a piece of crystal that trembles with the weight of our breaths, scattering faint notes in the silence of the room. You see my face--which isn't Viet or Chinese, or Westerner, which is like nothing you have seen before--and for the first time, you realize that this--all of this--might be for real.