I am the GodVolume III: The Void Speaks
Three weeks after Chuck Norris brought an answer through the edge of the universe, something sat down across from him.
Not in the kitchen — in the space between Wilson and the edge of everything where he went when the thinking required the scale. He had been there alone, in the early morning before the run, sitting with what had changed since the answer went through and what had not changed and the specific quality of the after that was different from anything the narrator had put in the category called after.
He had been sitting with the Question.
Still present, as he had told the youngest entity it would be. Different — being itself now, settled into what it was, carrying the answer inside it the way a river carries the rain that fell into it upstream, the rain no longer separate, the river more itself because of it.
He had been sitting with it in the quiet way he had learned to sit with things.
Then something sat down across from him.
Not in the physical sense.
The space between Wilson and the edge of everything does not have chairs. It does not have a surface on which chairs could be placed. It is the kind of space that exists before the conditions that produce chairs and surfaces, before the conditions that produce sitting in the ordinary sense.
But something sat.
The way the Question had arrived — not from a direction, not through a recognizable channel of approach — something was simply, after a moment in which it had not been present, present.
And the quality of its presence was: seated.
Settled.
Not urgent.
Not hostile.
Not the pressure of the Last Enemy, which had been weight and patience and the deep operational intention of something that had a job to do. Not the question of the Question, which had been addressed, specific, pointed at a recipient.
This was something that had arrived and sat down.
As though it had been meaning to come for some time and had finally found the occasion.
Chuck looked at it.
It looked at him.
The narrator will call it the Void.
This is not its name — it does not have a name in any language currently available, and the translator's note on this point, if there were a translator and a note, would be extensive. The Void is what it most nearly is. Not emptiness — emptiness implies an absence of something that was meant to be present. Not darkness — darkness implies the absence of light, which is a specific absence in a specific medium. The Void is prior to both of those. Prior to the conditions that make absence a meaningful concept.
It had existed since before the word for before.
It was not malevolent.
It was not benevolent.
It was — the narrator finds the word carefully — honest.
Absolutely, completely, without qualification or exception, honest.
This was, Chuck would understand later, the most dangerous thing about it.
They sat with each other for a moment.
The Void looked at Chuck with the patience of something that has been waiting since before waiting was a concept and has developed, across that duration, a complete comfort with silence. It was not pressing. It was not impatient. It was simply there, present and clear and honest and waiting, apparently, for Chuck to begin.
Chuck, who had negotiated with gravity and time and death and fire and the assembled upper registers and the Question from outside the universe, looked at the Void and felt something he recognized from the edge of the inside of everything.
Small.
Not diminished. Not threatened. The specific smallness of something in the presence of a scale large enough to produce it.
He had felt it at the edge and turned back and found the answer.
He felt it here.
He did not turn back.
"You've been waiting," he said.
The Void was quiet in the way of something that does not communicate through ordinary channels and is now making the accommodation of communicating through them because it has decided the accommodation is appropriate.
"Since before you were born," it said.
Its voice, insofar as it had a voice, was — the narrator searches for the description and finds only this: the sound of something that has never needed to say anything, speaking for the first time. Not unpracticed. Not awkward. Prior to the distinction between practiced and unpracticed.
"Why now," Chuck said.
"Because now you can hear me," the Void said.
"I couldn't before."
"You could have," the Void said. "You weren't listening in the right direction."
Chuck sat with this.
"What direction," he said.
"Inward," the Void said. "You were listening outward. To what you could affect. What you could negotiate with. What you could correct or resolve or renegotiate. You were listening to the noise."
"And now I'm listening inward," Chuck said.
"You learned to," the Void said. "In a kitchen in Wilson, Texas."
Chuck looked at it.
"You know about Marcus," he said.
"I know about everything," the Void said. "I'm the Void. I predate knowledge but I contain it."
"That sounds contradictory," Chuck said.
"Yes," the Void said. "Most true things do."
The narrator records that this was the first sentence spoken by the Void that Chuck did not have an immediate response to.
He sat with it.
Most true things do.
He thought about the answer he had brought through the edge — recursive, containing the reason it could never be complete, the incompleteness being part of the completion. He thought about the spiral that moved toward the center without arriving. He thought about the between that was everywhere in the inside, the between being what the inside was.
All of it held together in ways that looked contradictory until they looked inevitable.
"What do you want," Chuck said.
"To talk," the Void said.
"That's all."
"That's everything," the Void said. "Talking is not small. Talking is where the between happens."
Chuck looked at it.
"You've been paying attention," he said.
"Since before you were born," the Void said. "I told you."
"To me specifically."
"To everything," the Void said. "You are not the center. You are a part."
"Yes," Chuck said. "I'm learning that."
"I know," the Void said. "That's why now."
The conversation that followed lasted approximately forty minutes.
The narrator will record it over the course of this volume because forty minutes of the Void talking is not forty minutes of ordinary conversation — it is forty minutes of the most honest thing that has ever spoken saying what it has to say, and what it has to say requires the space that it requires.
The narrator will not rush it.
The narrator will not soften it.
The narrator will record it the way the Void speaks — with the specific clarity of something that has existed since before the conditions and has no reason to be anything other than what it is.
The Void's first question was this:
"Have you ever created something you cannot destroy?"
Chuck was quiet.
He thought about it honestly — not defensively, not with the instinct to resist the question. He turned it the way he had learned to turn things, without rushing, looking at what was actually there.
He thought about the arrangements he had made.
The gravity arrangement, fifty years old, holding. He could end it — he had renegotiated it once, he could renegotiate again. Not unable to destroy. Not that.
He thought about the handbook. The revised Texas Rangers handbook. Could he find every copy and unmake the revision? Theoretically. The knowledge was out in the world, in the officers who had trained from it, in the institution that had absorbed it. Could he unmake the institution's knowing? He thought about it.
He thought about Roy Briggs. The shoulder corrected. The character improved. The two championships. The gym in Riverside. The young man who had come in looking to test the instructor and stayed two years and left changed.
Could he undo that?
He thought about Gerald Marsh. Eighty-four years and Friday evenings and Walker, Texas Ranger.
Could he undo that?
He thought about the answer he had brought through the edge.
Could he take it back?
He sat in the space between Wilson and the edge.
"No," he said.
The Void was quiet.
"No," Chuck said again. "There are things I've — touched. Changed. Not by force. By being in the between with them. And the change is permanent. Not because I locked it in place. Because things that have been in the between don't go back to what they were."
"You've created things you cannot destroy," the Void said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"And therefore," the Void said, "you have created."
Chuck sat with this.
"Is that what creation is," he said. "Making something that can't be unmade."
"Creation is making something that continues without you," the Void said. "Something that is now its own thing. Not yours. Not controlled by you. Existing in its own right."
"Roy Briggs," Chuck said.
"Roy Briggs," the Void confirmed. "The gym in Riverside. The young man who came to test the instructor. The chain of betweens that extends from one shoulder correction outward in time and space, each link in the chain being its own creation."
"I didn't plan that," Chuck said.
"You never plan creation," the Void said. "You plan correction. Creation is what happens in the between."
Chuck sat with this for a long time.
"I've been creating since 1962," he said.
"Since 1940," the Void said. "Since Dr. Fitch fainted in the hallway. He thought about that morning for the rest of his life. It changed how he practiced medicine. Small changes, accumulated over twenty-two years of subsequent practice. Four hundred patients, slightly better care, because of a morning that rearranged something in him."
"I didn't know that," Chuck said.
"No," the Void said. "That's the nature of creation. You don't know what you've made. You can't see it from inside it."
"But you can," Chuck said. "From outside."
"Yes," the Void said. "From outside everything. I can see what's been made."
"What have I made," Chuck said.
The Void was quiet.
"Would you like to know?" it said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
"Then come back tomorrow," the Void said. "I'll show you."
"Tomorrow," Chuck said.
"We have time," the Void said. "Or rather — you have the arrangement with time and I predate time and between us the scheduling is flexible."
Chuck looked at it.
"Was that a joke," he said.
The Void considered.
"Approximately," it said.
Chuck sat in the space between Wilson and the edge of everything and looked at the Void and felt the specific feeling of being in the presence of something larger than himself that was not threatening but was — demanding. Not demanding in the way of something that required performance. Demanding in the way of something that required honesty.
He could be honest.
He had been learning to be honest.
He had a plumber who had been teaching him.
"Tomorrow," he said.
"Tomorrow," the Void said.
Chuck went back to Wilson.
He went to Marcus's.
He knocked.
Marcus opened the door.
"Coffee's on," he said.
"I need to tell you something," Chuck said.
Marcus looked at him.
"Come in," he said.
They sat.
Chuck told him about the Void.
Marcus listened in the way he listened to everything — the facility running, reading the system, finding what was there.
When Chuck was done Marcus held his cup.
"It asked you if you'd created something you can't destroy," he said.
"Yes."
"And you said yes," Marcus said.
"Yes."
"Because of Roy Briggs."
"Among others," Chuck said. "It said Dr. Fitch. The doctor who fainted in the hallway when I was born."
"You changed how he practiced medicine," Marcus said.
"Without knowing," Chuck said. "That's what it said. Creation is what you make without knowing you're making it."
Marcus was quiet.
He turned his cup.
"Chuck," he said.
"Yes."
"Me," he said. "Am I—"
"Yes," Chuck said.
Marcus looked at him.
"What have you made in me," he said.
"I don't know yet," Chuck said. "The Void said I can't see it from inside. Tomorrow it's going to show me."
"And then you'll know," Marcus said.
"And then I'll know," Chuck said. "What we've made in each other."
Marcus sat with this.
"We've made things in each other," he said.
"The between goes both ways," Chuck said. "It always has. I was learning from you. You were—"
"Learning from you," Marcus said.
"Yes."
"What have I made in you," Marcus said.
Chuck held his cup.
He thought about gravity renegotiated.
About the between.
About the answer.
About Robert's laugh and two thirty in the morning and the weight going all the way in.
"Someone who can fall," he said.
"That's what I made in you," Marcus said.
"Yes," Chuck said.
Marcus looked at the table.
He looked at his hands.
He looked at Chuck.
"That's not nothing," he said.
"No," Chuck said. "That's everything."
The Void, which had been in the space between Wilson and the edge and was now nowhere specifically and everywhere generally in the way of something that predates location, sat with what had just happened.
Not the conversation with Chuck.
What had happened in the kitchen.
That's everything.
The Void had been listening.
It had been listening since before the conditions.
It had never heard that word — everything — used with that specific weight before.
Not the everything of scale. Not the everything of completeness.
The everything of someone who had found, in a specific small thing, the full weight of what the word contained.
The Void sat with this.
The Void, which had existed since before patience was a concept and had therefore been patient in the most complete sense possible, felt something it had not felt since before anything had been there to feel.
The Void felt curious.
About what the between would make next.
About what continued to become in the kitchen in Wilson, Texas.
About what Chuck Norris would be by the time the conversation was finished.
The Void had been waiting since before he was born.
It had not, until now, been looking forward to anything.
It was looking forward to tomorrow.