Knight’s depiction of endless life as an interminably serene hell.
At the night’s end, the trio drifted to a deck overlooking the darkened bay below. Their earlier meeting was neither strained nor joyous. They had already made the proscribed summation of the past twenty-five years. Ian and Jeremy had kept in contact, thus the axis seemed firmly on Nathan.
“Not much to say, really,” he said.
This was not true, of course, but he found himself not at all ebullient. The frog now sat in his suit jacket and seemed to twitch sporadically. After a while, Nathan imagined Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart”, that to describe his wife and daughter might provoke the animal suitably to tear free from his pocket in a discomfited frenzy.
So now they sat and drank. A table-umbrella leaned on the glass window folded against the night wind. Nathan imagined casting the frog to the deck, gaining the distance in a bound and spinning the thing above his head like a samurai wielding a spear. They would quail before him as he suspended the umbrella a moment in Kabuki stillness. Only then would he drive it down to slide ineffectually from the frog’s hide. Instead, he put his drink down.
“Well guys,” said Jeremy, “Anyone seen anything in the last 20 years to top that?”
The others laughed. Ian clinked some cubes about in his scotch.
“Did it really happen? I wonder sometimes,” he mused.
Jeremy leaned forward.
“A collective hallucination? Where we were all in the same place at the same time meeting Death and driving killer robots?” snorted Jeremy. “It happened, but to this day I have no idea why.”
“It was something to do with the Knight,” offered Nathan.
His friends were nonplussed. Nathan excused himself, went to the bar inside and freshened his drink, then returned and told them about the Knight, the Ancestral Hall, the book with their conversation already written and as much as he could remember about it. As he finished, Ian nodded vigorously.
“I don’t care, Nathan,” said Jeremy. “It's just the memory of a dream now.”
Ian bade Nathan to tell him more, but Jeremy cut him off.
“I don’t want to revisit that place, even in my imagination,” he said.
“Nathan has another piece of the puzzle,” said Ian. “He got to see something we didn’t. I owe it to that boy I once was to find out.”
Jeremy drained his beer. “I don’t need embellishment. I don’t seek a greater understanding because I don’t think there’s any to be had.”
“So it stands as the defining event of your life and you don’t seek greater understanding?”
Nathan could not help coating his last words in sarcasm.
“That’s my choice,” said Jeremy flatly.
“Not mine,” Ian enthused.
“Hear me out, Jeremy,” said Nathan. “Just for a little while.”
He looked to the bay.
“The Knight didn’t talk to me. I don’t think I ever told you guys that. He had a book which released a page every time he wanted to speak.”
“Like a kind of sign language?” asked Ian.
“No. This was his every response to our conversation, all pre-written.”
“I’d say that was impossible … ” Jeremy let the sentence die within his smile.
“He told me about Laplace's Demon, which is a creature that knew the position of everything at a set point in time, then could work out what would happen forever.”
“Except quantum states make that impossible,” countered Jeremy.
“Hold up,” said Ian. “I don’t know anything about quantum states. Speak to me like someone who knows nothing.”
Nathan replied that they did anyway, and Ian laughed.
“In quantum states, you can know information like the position or speed of a particle, but not both,” said Jeremy. “That is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.”
Ian considered this, then said:
“So you can’t predict how things will turn out. I get that. So that makes the book utterly impossible. So why use it? Why not lay everything out by just talking to you?”
“Perhaps the Knight was not alive at all,” Nathan replied.
“It all seems elaborate, don’t you think?” asked Jeremy, “Just to impart some kind of metaphysical lesson to a child for no apparent reason.”
“If we agree that we met Death, which I think we all do, yeah?” – Ian glanced at the others for affirmation as he nodded – “Then the lesson was Death’s also. The Knight was part of Death’s plan, not a fellow traveller in that place.”
Jeremy fluttered his glass upon the table.
“We’ll never really know then, will we?” he said. “Unless Death returns –“
“He will, sooner or later,” interjected Nathan, smiling.
Jeremy did not smile.
“Unless Death returns in a non-professional capacity, it’s all academic now. To reiterate and elaborate: It happened, I don’t know why, and don’t care to.”
“Okay,” said Ian. “We’ve drawn a line in the sand.”
Jeremy’s tone was just a little more conciliatory now.
“My real point is that I’m not being a victim. I don’t want to wonder about that summer for the rest of my life, to plumb its meaning endlessly. I want to get on with my life.”
Ian looked at his feet.
“But you can’t, can you,” he mused. “You see that damn skeleton and the Plain Of Weapons and weep for lost chances, because if you could only return and see Death again you might just be able to tell him to never touch the people you love.”
Nathan nodded, thinking he could not have put this better himself.
“It was just so damn cruel,” said Jeremy. “That’s what I can’t excuse. And yeah, it keeps me up some nights.”
“I know if I preface something with ‘the Knight said’ you’ll roll your eyes, Jeremy, ”Nathan continued, “but he told me that paradox permeates the universe down to a fundamental level.”
Jeremy stated that this again was hardly the revelation of the ages, merely what an undergraduate physics student was told.
“I’m not claiming that,” said Nathan. “He told me that along a nearly infinite timeline, a nearly infinite number of possibilities will be realised, no matter how unlikely.”
“I read that too,” snapped Jeremy. “And this wasn’t some thought experiment. This was – this is – our lives. There is nothing left for me from that time but confusion and pain.”
“Aren’t you struck still,” said Ian gently, “At the wonder of it all? The veil was drawn aside for us and we saw the world beyond.”
“There is nothing beyond,” argued Jeremy. “What we saw was an aberration, a bastardry of cruel fates, a canker in space and time.”
A pause. Nathan saw that the pair regarded him expectantly. Nathan finished his drink.
“Say that Death found embodiment, that humanity’s fear had created a kind of …”
A perfectly ebullient phrase came to him, not one he might have used in any other circumstance save this, with Jeremy’s glare upon him:
“… mortal distillate; that the ethereal vapours between stars were receptive to our dread and found … they found quintessence.”
Jeremy made a shucking sound with his teeth and shook his head. Ian motioned for Nathan to continue. Nathan did:
“Remember that on a long enough timeline –“
Ian jumped in and completed the maxim for him.
“But you’re talking about an absolute state, not the formation of a conscious being,” Jeremy countered. “That’s like saying the number zero took us away to its magic playland. I don’t buy it.”
Ian smiled.
“It’s a leap, I grant you that,” Nathan said. “Anthropically though, it is the only solution.”
Ian placed his palms in a 'Time-Out' sign.
“The Anthropic Principle: There may be countless trillions of other universes,” Nathan said, “where life can never be, where the fundamental laws
of physics there make life impossible. We live in the one where the conditions are right”
Ian said he could understand that.
“There’s a line from the Torah,” Nathan continued, “talking about demons: If the eye could see them, no-one could endure them. They surround one on all sides. They are more numerous than humans, each person has a thousand on his left and ten thousand on his right.”
“So it’s like Goldilocks,” said Ian. “I get it.”
“It’s different,” said Nathan. He began again, but Jeremy jumped in:
“This universe has not come into being because we exist here and can perceive it. We are in this particular world because it happens to be perfect for us. A million tiny variables all aligned to make matter not decay the attosecond after the Big Bang, for example.”
Ian looked quizzical. Nathan clarified:
“The common metaphor used is the sea. Imagine you knew nothing about what it might contain, and one day you rowed a boat out and dropped a line. You hook a jellyfish and haul it in. With your limited frame of reference, you surmise then that every inhabitant of the sea must be a jellyfish.”
Ian nodded slowly.
“OK. So, there’s a universe where Death is a present entity and there’s one where he’s not. And we happen to live in the one where he is.”
“That’s it,” said Nathan. “Or we are in the one where he evolves. I’ve thought long and hard about Death all these years, guys. His motivation for becoming our slave was not, I think, to impart a metaphysical -”
“Or maybe the Knight was laughing at us the whole time,” Jeremy interjected. He leaned forward.
"It's just a thought exercise, nothing more," he scoffed. "A time-wasting confection following a dinner party. Bostrom's simulation argument is