Nyame

Before There Was Sky

There was no darkness.

Darkness is a thing. It has edges, depth, the suggestion of something it is hiding. Darkness implies that light exists somewhere and has simply not arrived yet. Darkness is patient. Darkness waits.

This was not darkness.

This was every possible thing existing at the same moment in the same place with the same authority, each one canceling the next the way two waves of equal force meeting in open water produce not a larger wave but a flat, terrible stillness. Light was here. So was the void where light had never been. Both occupied the same coordinates with complete conviction and therefore neither was real. Stone existed in one reality. In another, the concept of stone had never occurred to anyone, because existence itself was one of the things competing for the right to be true.

A mountain stood somewhere in the not-yet-universe. It had always stood there. It had never existed. Both of these facts were equally, simultaneously, permanently accurate.

A river ran. The same river had never run. The same coordinate was vacuum, was plasma, was the memory of a sound that would not be invented for another million years. It was all of these things with no preference between them, no hierarchy, no mechanism by which one truth could displace another.

Everything possible.

Therefore nothing actual.

If you had been here, you would not have experienced chaos. Chaos implies movement, implies disorder, implies that somewhere there is a correct sequence being violated. Chaos has energy. Chaos goes somewhere, even if it goes there badly.

This was worse than chaos.

This was paralysis. The universe holding every breath it had ever taken and would ever take simultaneously, producing nothing but pressure, the sensation of force with nowhere to go.

It had always been this way.

It would always be this way.

Both of those statements were true at the same moment, in the same place, with equal authority.

That was the problem.

Something persisted through it.

Not moved. Persisted is the more accurate word, because movement requires a fixed point from which to depart and none of those things existed here in any stable form. But something was here in a way that the competing realities were not. They existed and did not exist with equal weight, canceling each other, going nowhere. This thing simply was, with a consistency that nothing else here possessed, a coherence in the middle of the incoherence.

It was ancient. Ancient is not quite right either, because ancient implies a timeline, and no timeline had yet stabilized. But there was something about it that communicated duration. The impression of something that had been here since before here was a concept.

It had no name.

It watched. That is the right word, even if watching implies eyes and there were no eyes and no light stable enough to see by. It attended. It perceived. And in its perceiving was something that might, in a universe where such categories existed and meant anything, have been recognized as satisfaction.

Not happiness. Not contentment. Something quieter and more total. The particular satisfaction of a thing that has found the precise conditions it requires and settled into them completely, the way a stone finds the shape of the riverbed and stops moving.

The paralysis was not a problem.

The paralysis was the point.

Everything potential and nothing actual was a particular kind of perfection. A universe that could never fail because it could never commit to being anything at all. It was perfect in the way that a seed is perfect before it becomes a tree, before it can be struck by lightning or split by frost or grown in the wrong soil. The seed is only perfect before it is planted.