The night sky looks smeared, as if it were a windscreen with all the night and all the rain happening behind it.
Adam calls up the console.
"There's a train station just around this corner," he says. "Hurry."
But I am not moving. I am not following him as he starts walking.
"Adam," I say to his back.
"Come on."
"Adam."
He turns to face me, water dripping down his face. "What?"
"I'm not going back."
"Ariel..."
"There's nothing you can say to change my mind. I don't want to go back."
"But you've got your life to live. You heard what Lura said—you've got the potential to become the kind of thinker who can change the world. You could be the next Derrida, or ... anything you want."
"But I know what I want."
"I'll always be here. I'll always be in your dreams," he says.
The rain is bouncing off the pavement like tears on a table.
"That's not enough," I say. "That's not enough in so many ways."
There's a crack of thunder in the sky. I think this may be the end for me.
"Ariel!"
Adam has to shout now because the rain is so loud. Lightning fissures the sky, ripping it open so that more rain and darkness can fall out. I can hardly see in front of me, but I can feel Adam's hands on my arms. I can feel him pressing me against the wall and kissing me hard.
"You have to go," he says.
"Don't stop," I say. "I want to be making love to you when it ends."
He pauses. Nothing is happening except for the rain falling down.
"Adam, please," I say. "I can't get what I want outside of here, I know that. And I also understand that this is the curse. But I want the knowledge I can find in here. I want us to go to the very end of this together. I want us to go back as far as we can go, to find the edge of the Troposphere. I want to know how it all started, and what consciousness is. I'm staying."
The thunder stamps all over the made-up sky as Adam and I sink to the ground, our clothes melting off by themselves. But I can feel the rain on my face and dripping in my hair. This time, I can feel the rain.
And this time when he enters me I black out.
But when I wake up, the sun is shining.
Epilogue
It's impossible to say how long it takes us to get to the edge. There is no time anymore. We've been camped here for days now, at the edge of consciousness, wondering what to do next. It's like being on the edge of a cliff, but the edge is thinner than any cliff I've ever seen.
It doesn't feel like the edge of something: It feels like the middle.
But somehow there is an edge. You can walk to it and it seems as if you can look down, but you can't. And there's something that looks like an electric fence: a wavy line crackling around the whole thing, like electricity.
We've made love here at the edge of consciousness; we've done it thousands of times. And we've told each other everything we know. And sometimes it feels as if we are in fact on a cliff top, and that there may even be sea down below, and the ground is sandy underneath us, and little wildflowers grow in clumps. But other times it feels as though we are stuck here on the head of a pin, and the void isn't just below us, but all around us, and it's impossible to turn back because there is no back. There's no forwards, backwards, up, or down.
Today, we've decided (although this place is one long day), we'll actually make the choice, because the problem when you go to the very edge is that the console seems to break down, and there's static and crackle when the voice says, You now have infinite choice. And when we hear that we retreat, because we can't make that choice.
It's as if we're looking at something that has never been looked at before.
You now have infinite choice.
We've already been everywhere in the Troposphere: We had to, to get here.
So we look at each other and, holding hands, we walk towards it.
And today, yesterday, whenever this moment is: We walk through it.
And now I thought we'd be falling (and I hoped for the void).
You now have infinite choice.
But we carry on walking, anyway. We don't have to say anything.
And all the choices are there in front of me. Every single one.
But what we walk into is a garden. The most perfect garden that I have ever seen, with more trees than I have ever seen, and a river shimmering like a mirror running down the edge of it. I think that this makes sense, for consciousness to have begun in a garden, because consciousness evolved from plants, after all. And I look at Adam, but I can't speak anymore. I'm not sure I can even think. And there's one tree, standing by the river, and we walk towards it.
And then I understand.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Jenna Johnson, a wonderful editor without whom this book would not exist. Thanks also to others who believed in this project in the early stages: Tom Tomaszewski, who makes everything possible; Simon Trewin, my agent and friend; Sam Ashurst; Hari Ashurst-Venn; Emilie Clarke; and Sarah Moss. I'd also like to thank my fantastic American agent Dan Mandel for all his support, and my mother, Francesca Ashurst, for always being there.
Thanks also to Rod Edmond, Jennie Batchelor, David Herd, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Jan Montefiore, Caroline Rooney, David Stirrup, Peter Brown, Donna Landry, Sarah Wood, David Ayers, Dennis Borisov, Deborah Wright, Stuart Kelly, Sam Boyce, Tony Mann, Andrew Crumey, Mel McMahon, Jason Kennedy, Mick Owens, Suzi Feay, and all my other friends and colleagues for their moral support.
Several friends, relatives, and colleagues were kind enough to read the completed manuscript and provide feedback, and I am very grateful to Tom Tomaszewski, Sarah Moss, Jennie Batchelor, and Hari Ashurst-Venn. I'd particularly like to thank Couze Venn for his insightful and thought-provoking comments and suggestions. Ian Stewart also took the time to read and comment on the manuscript in detail, for which I am very grateful. All errors remaining in the text are, of course, my own.
I would like to acknowledge the influence of some ideas I first found in Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku and Big Bang by Simon Singh. The idea of the primordial particle in chapter 11 was directly inspired by Kaku's work; and most of the material, including the Gamow quote, on page 120, comes from Simon Singh. The quote on page 106 is from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. The quote on page 118 is from Lectures on Homoeopathic Materia Medica With New Remedies by J. T. Kent. Literary Portraits of the Polychrests, on page 118, is fictional, but was inspired by Portraits of Homoeopathic Medicines by Catherine R. Coulter.