Snakes and Ladders and the Destinies of Unborn Universes: Chapter 21
A Novel
If you’re joining us just now, follow the snake’s tail to the Prologue or climb a ladder to the Table of Contents.
Chapter 21: The Garden of Fractal Paths
“Oh my!” Niyati cried out, as Evan exited the Tower of the Tumtum Tree and sprinted down the steps toward her. “You’ve certainly changed!”
She fiddled with her hair and tried to look unblushing and nonchalant, because Evan was clothed in . . . well, he was clothed in very little. He wore the two-toned headband of a Mauryan warrior-king. And on his naked chest hung beaded necklaces and a medallion inscribed with enigmatic symbols that she assumed were Vedic. Beneath his six-pack was a loincloth that disclosed far more than it was only half-heartedly trying to conceal.
He looked for all the world like the star of a hilariously pretentious and ostensibly “educational” soft-core pornography video, produced on a backlot in Miami (titled something like Unlocking the Secrets of the Kama Sutra), complete with a supporting cast of fresh talent recruited from the Spandexed rollerbladers of South Beach (check), soulful narrators with British accents reciting inaccurately translated excerpts from the original Sanskrit text (check), a “soundtrack” consisting of tuneless bansuri flutes and ineptly plucked sitars (check), and stock footage of the Kissimmee River standing in for Mother Ganga (check).
“I think I passed the test,” Evan said, hoisting Niyati in the air as if she were “Baby” in the final sequence of Dirty Dancing. The folds of her crimson saree encircled them both majestically without clinging un-cinematically to either.
“What happened in the tower?” Niyati asked.
“I’m still processing it. And I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about it.”
The librarian cleared her throat. She stood at the edge of the tree-line. “Dr Evan, your love may be in your arms, but your heart is still in the clutches of Manat. Did you find the way to the Shattered City?”
“Yes, it’s on the other side of those trees. Come on!”
They walked a thousand paces—and there it was!
In a depression beneath them stretched an expanse of decayed and collapsing buildings with tongues of fire quivering between the avenues and gaunt towers. Black smoke wreathed the charred temples and untenanted palaces. The flying monkeys from the Canadian Colony of Norway patrolled the skies over what Evan deduced to be the Shattered City’s midpoint, which he should not have been able to see from this distance, since it was several millions of light years away.
“The Shattered City,” the librarian explained, “lies at the bottom of a crater of infinite diameter. To get there we must pass through the garden surrounding it.”
“The Garden?” Niyati inquired. “Is this another hedge maze?”
“No,” the old woman said portentously, curling her lips into a wry smile. “It’s called The Garden of Fractal Paths.” She pointed behind Evan and Niyati.
They turned and saw a rust-colored path of bricks coiling upward.
“This path goes up, not down.” Evan groused.
“Dr Evan, you’ve been on the Astral Plane long enough to know that the so-called three dimensions have no relevance here.”
Niyati had a few more questions to ask. But when she turned back around, the crater and Shattered City were gone; and, swooping up behind the librarian, high over the mist-clad trees of the Deccan jungle, was a complicated network of self-replicating rust-colored paths branching off into copies of themselves. The tip of each path never touched, overlapped or intersected with the path it sprouted from, nor with any of the other paths around it. It fall looked very M.C. Escher-esque.
Niyati’s mouth fell open.
Evan saw the spectacle too, but was unimpressed. “I guess we’ll take this path,” he said, turning around and starting up the path the librarian had indicated to them.
They walked miles along an Archimedean spiral that always led up. Whenever they rounded a bend, the setting sun and trees seemed to change position relative to where they had been moments before. Furthermore, the sun was sometimes large and close to them and at other times it seemed far away.
Niyati broke the silence. “May I ask a question?”
“Of course,” the librarian replied in that schoolmarmish tone of hers.
“If the Shattered City is in a crater of infinite diameter, how were we able to stand on the edge of it?”
“Ask your lover. It’s his dream. He’s also the one, I might add, who came up with the rather barmy notion that infinity is hedged round by a garden of fractal paths.”
“What?” Niyati turned to Evan.
“Just something I’ve been thinking about.”
Niyati rolled her eyes. “Evan, you shouldn’t think about nonsensical things like that.”
“Why? Because I’m not a scientist like you? Because I don’t know math or fractions like you?”
“Fractions are part of math.”
“I wasn’t using ‘or’ in the exclusionary disjunctive sense.”
“How do you know that phrase?”
“I just do.”—How did I know that phrase?
As they continued their ascent, they encountered copies of themselves walking toward them and passing them on the left-hand and right-hand side. These doppelgängers gawked curiously at them, but that was only fair since they were gawking curiously at the doppelgängers as well.
Suddenly, Evan, Niyati and the librarian found themselves moving forward and backwards simultaneously. And the reason they did not run into one another or trip as they moved in retrograde was that the doppelgängers in front of them were transmitting telepathically to them the layout of the road’s surface behind them.
The Emcee of the Astral Plane, who was standing in the DJ booth, waved his hands over the turntable and the needle lowered onto Track 1 of the album Youthquake by Dead or Alive, and the song “You Spin Me ’Round (Like a Record)” began to blare out of the hidden speakers that ran from one end of the universe to the other.
And when this happened, scores of powder-blue whirling dervishes began to glide past them on the path as well. These were the aliens of the desert planet of Satcitananda—those sentient moments of Absolute Time. And it was somehow fitting that they were spinning both clockwise and counterclockwise. The skirts of their robes created winds that threw everyone on the path hundreds of millions of light years into the past. But each of these reversals through time was answered by a compensatory wind from the skirts of the dervishes whirling in the opposite direction, which brought everyone back to the exact same moment they had just started from, since the reason the Satcitanandans were in this part of Evan’s dream was to ensure that he and Niyati made it to the Shattered City presently.
Niyati squinted suspiciously at the doppelgängers of herself, which were in turn squinting suspiciously at her. “How am I able to keep all these points-of-view straight in my head as I’m walking?”
“Welcome to my world,” Evan said.
The librarian leaned over to Niyati and, in a stage whisper, said, “As I understand it, this is one of the reasons your lover has been chosen.”
Evan overheard this and grinned. “If you think that’s trippy, watch this. . . ”—No sooner had he spoken than every point along the curving edge of the fractal path they were on (and every mathematical point in between) divided into new paths, forming identical curves; and the doppelgängers began to replicate and multiply as well. Niyati saw and experienced everything that every version of herself was seeing and experiencing, and was somehow not driven mad by this.
“This is extraordinary!” she gasped.
The fractal paths snaked around one another in ever more elaborate geometrical patterns, forming new vertical and diagonal offshoots (which is to say “vertical and diagonal” relative to each copy of each person walking on them). The only thing that gave coherence to these purely spatial loops and curlicues were the powder-blue dervishes who were filling in the gaps with the subtle skeins of temporality that stitched it all together into a single space-time continuum.
“Evan!” Niyati exclaimed, seizing his right arm. “What in the world does all this mean?!”
“The only thing that gives anything meaning to me . . . is you.”
On cue the Emcee faded into Barry White’s “You’re the First, the Last, My Everything”.—And, as he did this, the unborn universe in the right pocket of Evan’s salmon-pink Bermudas slipped smoothly under the economy seat of his sleeping body, until it fell out of the airplane, which was still about five hours out from LA.
Barry White was still narrating the introduction to his song, when the unborn universe turned into a rotating disco globe and plunged into the Astral Plane as big as the Milky Way Galaxy. The light beams glancing off the globe’s mirrored surface, combined with the spatiotemporal continuum the whirling dervishes were sustaining, facilitated the series of spectacular Lorentz transformations that were now taking place.
Marcus and Levi, with popped collars and hip-hugging slacks, advanced swaggeringly toward each other from every direction of the hypersphere encasing Evan’s dream. The Emcee took to the floor where the librarian, wearing a paisley gown and long ropy necklaces, was swaying to the music. In a white shirt and tan bell-bottoms, Evan danced with Niyati, who wore a slinky low-cut dress that twirled up every time he spun her around.
Now Levi and Marcus stood alone in countless strobe-lit cubes that formed the backdrop of a massive stage. And even though each cube Levi danced in was contiguous to four cubes containing copies of Marcus (below, above and on either side of him), and although this same state of affairs prevailed for Marcus, neither was aware that these copies of his lover occupied the Misner spaces adjacent to him. The moves that the “two” men (multiplied by infinity to the n-th power) were executing were entertaining each and every copy of Niyati and Evan (not to mention the librarian and Emcee), all of whom continued to multiply at an accelerating rate.
But now everyone’s attention was drawn to the trillions upon trillions of Gordons who entered The Garden of Fractal Paths in a powder-blue suit. He did the moonwalk, yet moved forward while doing it.
And all the Levis and Marcuses (in their respective cubes) pointed to the advancing Gordons, as if to say “You da man!” But the Gordons shook their heads in denial and cast imaginary fishing lines toward the young men, whose doppelgängers reacted by pretending to have been hooked in the mouth. The Gordons nodded and reeled in their catch, as the infinite copies of Levi and Marcus cartwheeled and/or back-flipped out of the cubes and landed on each and every one of the fractal paths in this dynamically expanding garden.
Unnumbered fireflies and unborn universes flew between the slow-spinning dervishes and the tendrils of the paths that kept dizzyingly irradiating into more evolutions and involutions. The lights of the fireflies and inert singularities reflected on each of the countless tiles on the disco globe, which were themselves magic mirrors and gateways into alternate realities where the exact same events were playing out along different timelines and through the application of mathematical constants and physical laws that differed from those of the universe that Evan and Niyati—at least the ones of this story—occupied.
Generally speaking, unborn universes were powerless in regions under Manat’s sway. However, Evan and his friends were not only deep in Manat’s territory, they were simultaneously dancing on the edge of infinity, a place of unborn possibilities which placed it under the inert singularities’ purview.
From her lair beneath the Shattered City, Kaa-Manat placed her hands over her ears because the mortals’ jubilation was hateful to her. But the tip of her serpentine tail flicked back and forth in time with the music. “Stop it!” she hissed. The tail went slack. But the demoness grimaced, because these strange powers of the child Evan were beginning to disconcert her.
The music changed again and a drag queen was lip-syncing C+C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat” as lasers pierced the sublimated dry-ice spewing from the fog machines. All part and parcel of the most roof-raising rave that had ever been witnessed in the history of humankind.
Marcus leaned forward on his barstool. “Dude, I’m so hammered,” he said, wiping sweat from his brow.
Shirtless Levi (who didn’t drink) stood next to him, wearing a coral necklace and a glow-in-the-dark bracelet. He fanned Marcus with a paper napkin and looked over his shoulder, because it was getting late and he was ready to go home.
The disco globe was gone. And in its place was an animated neon sign of Shiva Nataraja doing the dance of destruction. Beneath it, Evan and the Emcee of the Astral Plane were on stage doing the Roger Rabbit.
When the librarian saw the dancing Shiva frown, she grew somber. She finished off her Blue Hawaiian and set the empty glass on the tray of the passing waitress—who was none other than Manat disguised as a goth chick.
Niyati noticed the librarian’s change of mood and went to her.
“It’s nearly time,” the librarian said ambiguously.
“You mean until we make it to the bottom of the crater?”
“No . . . ” The librarian lowered her eyes. “Listen to me, Niyati. Evan is coming to a point in the game where he will have to make an important decision on his own. You will not be able to advise him.”
“What do you mean?” She looked up at the stage, where Evan was bumping butts with a buxom Fly Girl.
“I can’t explain now. I must leave. Go to him, Niyati.”
Without another word, the librarian disappeared into the crowd.
Manat saw her opportunity and snuck up behind Niyati, but before she could seize her with her talons, Niyati ran up the steps to the stage. Manat clenched her fists and vanished in a puff of brimstone.
Evan had just started doing the Running Man when the music cut out. And now he stood arrayed in his headband and loincloth once more, and Niyati, in her crimson saree, stood at his side.
Thick vines hung down the walls of the crater. And when Evan turned to look behind him, the Shattered City stretched as far as the eye could see. Advancing toward them was a sloth-bear.
“Hey, pal!” the bear said.
“Gordon?!” Evan exclaimed.
“The one and only! Quite a shindig back there, wasn’t it?”
“I’m so glad it’s really you!” Evan said. “The evil version of you has been following Niyati and me ever since we were in Hell.”
“Well, I got news for you. We’re still in Hell, pal. But it is in fact me and not the psychopath.” He gave Evan a bear-hug.
“Did you hear that, Niyati?!” Evan said. But when he turned, Niyati was gone, as was the crater’s vine-clad wall. He and Gordon were now standing in the middle of the Shattered City.
Evan panicked. “Niyati?! Where are you?!—And how did we get to the middle of the crater so fast?!”
A black panther climbed a heap of rubble and addressed them both in the librarian’s voice. “As Pascal says: Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Evan asked.
“It means,” the librarian said, “that you have reached your destination. Come, Mowgli, your Destiny awaits!”
