Page 16 (1/2)

The wind, oh, the wind screa up to me—

Darling, darling, it doesn’t matter now Hush, hush, thebed—

Hsin, you have to wake up You’ll be punished if you don’t wake up—

On Gunkanji but air It inhabits erassy floor; it rustles the shreds of ceiling paper that hang down like prayers tied to the branches of black trees

It falls It climbs back up with the sun to lie exhausted on a sodden floor beside itself

The tide rolls in and out again

THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT SPACE/ TIME

I

In the beginning was the Word and the Word ith God and the Word was a high-density pre-baryogenesis singularity Darkness lay over the deep and God moved upon the face of the hyperspatial luon plasma and said: Let there be particle/anti-particle pairs, and there was light He created the fish of the sea and the fruits of the trees, the moon and the stars and the beasts of the earth, and to these he said: Go forth, be fruitful and mutate And on the seventh day, the rest ravitationally dominate the photon radiation, hallow it, and keep it

God, rapidly redshifting, hurriedly foranisms, called him Adam, and caused him to dwell in the Garden of Eden, to classify the beasts according to kingdom, phylum, and species God forbade Man only to eat from the Tree of Meiosis Adam did as he was told, and as a reward God instructed hienesis Thus was Woman born and called Eve Adam and Eve dwelt in the pre-quantum differentiated universe, in a paradise without wave-particle duality But interference patterns ca her in its matter/antimatter coils, it said: Eat from the Tree of Meiosis and your eyes will be opened Eve protested that she would not break covenant with God, but the Serpent answered: Fear not, for you float in a randole bite will rise an inexorable inflation event, and you will beco forever outward

And so Eve ate froent universes She took the fruit to Adas you do not understand, but I do And Adary and snatched the fruit froround radiation, God sighed, for all physical processes are reversible in theory—but not in practice Man and Wo sas placed through the Gates of Eden as a reminder that the universe would now contract and soration of entropy, only to increase in density, burst, and expand again, causing further high velocity redistributions of serpents, fruit, men, women, helium-3, lithium-7, deuterium, and helium-4

II

This is a story about being born

No one res are very difficult

A science fiction writer on the Atlantic coast once claiht a door was open which was not, and ran full-tilt into a pane of plate glass The child version of the science fiction writer lay bleeding onto a concrete patio, not yet knowing that part of her thigh was gone and would always be gone, like Zeus’s thigh, where the lightning god sewed up his son Dionysus to gestate So to do with experience and memory, which in normal children travel in opposite directions, without—slowly, but speeding up as children hurtle toward adulthood and death What the science fiction writer actually remembered was not her own birth, but a lass and her brain stuttered, layering several experiences one over the other: