sapiens and erta never existed, these things would still have been here exhibiting the same behaviour, moving with the same laws. They do not require any belief to exist, they merely are, and because we do exist we can watch them and manipulate them, if we know how they work. Which we do. Stop your horse.’
Haralia pulled on Corona’s reins and I dismounted beside a pile of boulders. I surveyed the wide beach, the arch of coast running north and south from where we stood.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘And tell me what you see.’
Haralia turned her head, slowly taking in what we both could see.
‘Horizon, sea, cliffs, the earth at peace. What do you see?’
‘I see many things. Things within things. The beach, for example. At first it appears to be a single thing, a piece of land with its own distinct shape, its valleys, planes and mountains.’ I knelt and scooped a handful of grey sand, letting it fall through my fingers. ‘But look a little closer and it is made of individual grains.’
Haralia laughed.
‘Do you think I do not understand basic science?’
‘And look closer at these grains and they each appear differently. They have their own size, their own colour, their own shape. They too have their valleys, planes and mountains. They are entire landscapes in themselves.’
I held aloft my finger, to which some sand still clung.
‘To count the grains of sand upon this beach appears infeasible. But it is not. How many grains on my finger?’
Haralia glanced at it.
‘One thousand seven hundred and twenty-two.’
I checked.
‘Twenty-three. One lies behind another in the lower-left cluster.’
A breeze blew by as I swung my finger between the farthest edges the beach.
‘Knowing what I already know about the dimensions of this beach and the 1,723 grains of its sand upon my finger, I am now able to make a crude estimation of the total number grains of sand upon which we stand. But if I took a further sample, that estimate would improve. Another, inspecting each one closely so that I knew the variety of rock worn into each grain, and the range of shapes and sizes they made, and my guess would be better yet. Spend an entire day taking samples from north to south, firming up boundary measurements and reading the changes in depth, gathering a complete set of grain varieties and their distribution throughout the whole, forming mathematical models to describe their propensities to tesselate with one another, and I will have something approaching an accurate figure.’
Haralia smiled with her mouth but not her brow.
‘I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me.’
‘Data, Haralia. All we need is the data.’
She rolled her eyes, but I struck up again before she could speak.
‘Look at the sea, the distribution of waves upon the surface of the water. At first it seems there is no pattern to them, but there is. Short rollers occur with frequency in the south, where we know there is a shelf, and of the larger waves to the north every seventeenth results in a break that collides with the wavelets dissipated from the south. With more observation we can quickly predict the starting position of every wave along this beach, and with the correct understanding of fluid dynamics we can extrapolate a four-dimensional shape—albeit fairly squat in terms of time—representing this small section of ocean.
‘But there is yet more data to be gleaned. The volume of the ocean, its salt content, the shape of its bed, its contents, the species that reside within it and their life cycles. The more granular the information we have, the greater the size and accuracy of our four-dimensional shape. The shape of each coastline this body of water touches, the rock content of the cliffs with which it collides, this geological history of each of those cliffs, the birds that nest within them, the crabs that scuttle the shores beneath. More data. More accuracy. More predictability.’
I turned my face upward. My voice was loud now, louder than I had heard it for decades, and my goodness, it felt fine.
‘The sky, Haralia. My home. That place of winds, clouds and thermals, storms, tornadoes and hurricanes that pummel the water and strike the coast. The layers of temperature that draw up moisture and carry it landward. Each system resonates and feedbacks with the next. Nothing is separate. All is connected. The moon itself—’ I threw my sand-dusted finger at the pale, gibbous globe above the cliffs, its craters scattered blue, and its own tiny,