The Journey to Eternity · A Philosophical Novel by Nurit Rozenblat
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Chapter Twenty-Four — What Was Before the Beginning
The three knocks still echoed within me as we left Nera's room.
I didn't know if the voice we had heard really was the voice of the woman she had left behind. Nera wasn't sure either. But the last words heard through the transparent wall were clear.
He is not asking to leave. He is asking to enter.
We stood in the receiving station's corridor, and none of us hurried to speak.
Naama examined the watch stone. Eliya stood beside her, and Adra tried to reconstruct the last signal. Sahar looked toward the room we had left, as if expecting the voice to call us again.
"Enter where?" he asked at last.
"That is the question," Adra said.
"The receiving station?"
"Maybe. But we still don't know who is asking to enter, and whether the warning refers to him or to something waiting for him on the other side."
Naama enlarged the record.
"The request is still active. No destination confirmation was registered, and no signal was received indicating a completed passage."
"Can the source be identified?" I asked.
"Not from the data stored here."
Nera stood in the room's doorway. She looked more tired than before, although I knew tiredness in this world didn't always come from the body.
"I want you to check the voice," she said. "Even if it isn't her."
"We'll check," Naama promised.
"And don't let them open before you know who stands on the other side."
Naama nodded.
She transferred the record to a separate stone and placed it in Eliya's hands.
"I need to go back to the workshop and compare the signal with the old records. Adra will be able to check the activation signs."
"And what about us?" Sahar asked.
"I want you to stay in contact. We may need to return here."
Nera looked at me.
"Will you come back?"
"I want to come back," I said. "But first we'll need to understand what's happening here."
She nodded.
For a moment I thought of the promise she had given the woman who remained behind. How easy it is to say we'll return, and how little we sometimes know about the way that will allow us to keep it.
We returned to the City of Consciousnesses by the way we had come.
The transparent spaces passed around us, but my thoughts stayed at the station.
I couldn't free myself from the feeling that the warning we had heard was connected to something larger than the passage itself.
Someone asked to enter.
Someone else tried to prevent it.
And the ancient system went on operating, as if the years that had passed had changed nothing.
When we entered the city, the lights on the buildings had already changed, and in the central square consciousnesses moved among the open passages.
Naama turned to her workshop. Sahar followed her, and Eliya and Adra continued to the library to check the stations' records.
Liara stayed with me.
"Do you want to come with me?" she asked.
"Where?"
"To the garden."
I looked at her.
"Right now?"
"Right now. Naama will need time to compare the records, and you can't help her just by standing beside her and worrying."
"There are consciousnesses waiting for help there."
"I know. And if she needs you, she'll call you."
I went with her.
The garden outside the city was almost empty.
A wide tree grew in its center, and on its branches were silver leaves that returned the light of the distant structures. Beneath it stood a stone bench, and beside it a small pool.
I sat down.
Liara remained standing.
"What troubles you most of all?" she asked.
I thought about the question.
"That we keep discovering more things we didn't know."
"That's not new."
"No. But every time we think we've understood something, it turns out there's something else behind it."
I looked at the water.
"We found trapped consciousnesses. Then we discovered the records had been altered. We found a station that managed to receive someone, but it had no exit record. And now there's someone trying to enter, and we don't even know where to."
Liara sat beside me.
"You want to reach the beginning."
"Yes. I want to understand who built the system, what its original purpose was, and how something meant to allow passage became a place where consciousnesses remain trapped."
"And what if whoever built it relied on an older system?"
"Then we'll need to investigate that one too."
"And what if it too had another beginning?"
I looked at her.
She didn't smile.
"Do you understand what I mean?"
"That one can keep going backward without reaching an answer."
"Maybe."
I sank into silence.
I remembered Naama, who had explained to us that the record "separation completed" doesn't necessarily testify that the consciousness reached freedom. It testifies only that the system performed the action required of it.
I thought of all the systems human beings had built in my life. Devices, computers, cities, institutions. Almost always we tried to improve something that already existed, solve a problem created earlier, fix someone else's mistake.
But where did the first principles on which things were built come from?
The more I tried to return to the system's beginning, the farther the beginning itself receded from me.
Then an older question arose in me.
What was before the beginning?
Not before the stations were built.
Not before the first human was born.
But before everything.
Since my childhood I had difficulty understanding how something could exist without having been created beforehand.
In the home where I grew up, everything had stories.
I knew who built the table, who planted the tree in the yard and who sewed the curtains in the window. Even old objects whose origin I didn't know came from somewhere.
But when I asked what was before the world was created, the answers became less clear.
Some said the world was created by a Creator.
And I asked who created the Creator.
Some said he had always existed.
And then I asked why he in particular could always exist, and the world could not.
I didn't ask out of a wish to argue. I truly wanted to understand.
Even when I grew up and learned about stars, galaxies and the expansion of the universe, that same question remained within me.
How can there be a first moment?
And if there was a first moment, what was before it?
Liara listened as I told her.
"There's a place I want to show you," she said.
"A place where they know the answer?"
"No. A place where they tried to understand it for a very long time."
"Where is it?"
"The Archive of First Possibilities."
"And who is there?"
"Consciousnesses researching the most ancient structures of reality. They gather observations, compare worlds, and examine ideas others have stopped asking about."
I looked at her.
"Can we get there?"
"Yes."
I thought of Naama and the others.
"We can't be away for long."
"We'll leave them a way to call us."
I agreed.
The way to the archive was not a passage of the kind we had investigated at the old stations.
Liara explained we were about to move between spaces open to free consciousnesses. No transfer of a consciousness from one closed system to another was required, and there was no need for a passage request or a reception confirmation.
"It's more like walking a path you cannot see," she said.
"And how does one know where to go?"
"One needs to know the way."
She asked me to concentrate on the question for whose sake I wanted to arrive.
I thought of the universe.
Of the first light.
Of the possibility that time itself began once.
The space around us changed.
The city's lights receded, then disappeared. I didn't feel we were moving, but every time I looked around I discovered the previous place was already gone.
At last a vast structure appeared before us.
Its walls were made of transparent layers, and within them moved shapes I couldn't identify.
Some resembled distant galaxies. Others looked like living cells dividing and joining. There were also shapes that resembled nothing I had seen.
At the entrance stood a tall figure, dressed in a dark garment.
Her face changed slightly every time I looked at it, as if my eyes had trouble keeping its form.
"Liara," the figure said.
"Arena," Liara replied.
She turned to me.
"Welcome."
"Thank you."
"You've come to seek the beginning of creation?"
"Yes."
Arena smiled.
"That is one of the oldest questions asked here."
"And did you find an answer?"
"We found many possible answers. None of them solved all the questions."
She invited us to enter.
The first hall was so large I couldn't see its end.
In its center floated a round shape, and within it millions of points of light.
Some connected to one another. Others moved apart, split or vanished. From time to time a broad movement arose that resembled the expansion of a universe.
"What am I seeing?" I asked.
"Models of the beginning of reality," Arena replied. "Some are based on observations. Others are meant to test what is theoretically possible."
I came closer.
I saw a small point expanding rapidly. The light within it spread, and after it more complex structures appeared.
"Is this the Big Bang?"
"This is a model describing the development of the universe you know from an ancient, very hot and dense state."
"So that's how everything began?"
"That's how we can describe part of its development. It doesn't necessarily answer the question of why reality exists in the first place."
I looked at the expanding light.
"And what was before that?"
"The word 'before' may not be suitable."
"Why?"
"Because time is part of the reality you're trying to investigate. If time itself changed or began at a certain stage, it's not certain one can speak of a moment that preceded it."
I thought about it.
In my human life I always imagined time as a long line, on which all events are arranged.
The past behind.
The future ahead.
But if that line had a beginning, where was its starting point laid?
And if there was no line before that, what does it mean to ask what happened before it?
Arena led us to three small structures floating at the hall's side.
In the first, a universe was seen expanding from a very dense state.
In the second, a vast space contracted, reached an extreme state, and then began expanding anew.
In the third appeared cyclical processes, with no single identifiable starting point.
"Which of the possibilities is correct?" I asked.
"We don't know if any of them describes reality in its entirety."
"But you've existed for so long."
"A long time doesn't mean we were everywhere. And even one who saw an event doesn't necessarily know why it happened."
I looked at the three structures.
Suddenly I thought of the record we had found in the old passage station.
It showed the separation was completed, but didn't tell what happened afterward.
Nera was the proof of that.
The record described a real event, and yet omitted a significant part of the story.
"So what we see here too may be only part of the picture," I said.
"Exactly."
Arena led me to a round surface standing before the models.
"Do you want to try something?" she asked.
"What?"
"To examine for yourself the relation between time and cause."
She pointed at three points of light floating above the surface.
"Choose one of them and move it."
I touched the point nearest me.
It moved slightly to the right.
At once the two other structures changed. In one of them dozens of new points appeared, and in the other some of the lines holding the shape vanished.
"What did I do?" I asked.
"You changed one condition in the model."
"But I didn't touch the other two structures."
"They are connected to one another."
Arena pointed at the surface.
"Now try to return the point to its place."
I did as she said.
The point returned exactly to where it had been before.
But the other structures didn't return to their first form.
"It doesn't work," I said.
"What do you mean?"
"I returned the point. Everything was supposed to go back."
"According to your assumption, yes."
"So why didn't it happen?"
"Because this model also keeps the changes created along the way."
I looked at the surface.
"But if I returned the cause to its place, why did the result remain?"
"Because in some systems, after a change has occurred, the new state cannot be treated as if the way to it never existed."
I tried again.
This time I moved the point in another direction.
The structures changed once more.
Then something happened that I didn't expect.
One of the points of light in the distant structure began to move before I moved the point in my hand.
I stopped.
It went on moving.
"Arena," I said. "Look."
Arena came closer.
She examined the surface.
"Interesting."
"Why did it move before I touched?"
"The model may be responding to the state of the whole system and not only to the action you performed."
"But it looked as if the result appeared before the cause."
"So it looks from your point of view."
She opened another layer of the model.
Beside the point appeared thin lines I hadn't seen before. They stretched to distant parts of the structure, and some vanished beyond its boundaries.
"Do you see?" she asked.
"Yes."
"The point is not isolated. It is part of a system with connections you don't see at first glance."
"So I didn't discover that the result preceded the cause."
"Not necessarily. You discovered the model is more complex than it seems to you."
She looked at the movement again.
"But the way it responded is interesting. I want to examine the conditions that created it."
Liara came closer.
"Does that happen often?"
"Not in this configuration."
Arena saved the model.
I looked at the small point of light.
Until a moment ago I was sure I understood what made it move.
Now I was no longer sure even what I should examine first.
I thought of the receiving station.
Of the passage request that appeared without our knowing who sent it.
Of the voice that came through another channel and warned us not to open.
Maybe there too we were trying to understand an event from too small a part of the system.
"I want to receive a copy of this model," I said.
Arena looked at me.
"Why?"
"Because we're investigating an ancient system with actions we still don't understand. Maybe Naama can learn something from the way the connections here influence one another."
"I can prepare you a record of the experiment," she said. "But don't treat it as an explanation of what is happening at your station."
"I know."
She smiled.
"Good."
We moved to another hall.
In its center floated a long chain of points of light. Each point was connected to the one before it.
"Here we examine the question of the first cause," Arena said.
She touched one of the points.
At once more points appeared behind it, receding until they vanished.
"Human beings are used to asking what caused a thing to happen," she said. "They see a tree that grew from a seed, rain formed from clouds, and a child born to his parents."
"And so we ask what caused the universe to come into being."
"Yes. But then another question arises: if everything must have a cause, what caused the first cause?"
"And if one says there is a Creator?"
"One can ask who created him."
I smiled.
"That is exactly the question I asked in my childhood."
"And what did they answer you?"
"That the Creator had always existed."
"And that is a philosophical possibility," Arena said. "Some believe there exists a fundamental reality that doesn't depend on an external cause. Some call it a Creator, and others try to describe it through laws of nature or a deeper structure of reality."
"But if something can exist without being created, why shouldn't that be the universe itself?"
Arena nodded.
"That too is a worthy question."
I looked at the chain of lights.
"So we don't know if there was a first cause."
"Correct. And we don't know if the question itself suits every kind of reality."
She placed her hand on the chain, and all the points vanished.
For a moment an empty space remained around us.
"What do you see now?" she asked.
"Nothing."
"Are you sure?"
I looked around me.
I saw no light, shape or movement.
But I still stood there.
I still thought.
"I see a space with nothing in it," I corrected.
"And that is not necessarily the same thing as an absolute absence of all reality."
I understood the difference.
Even when I tried to imagine nothing, I imagined an empty place.
But a place is already something.
If there is no space, no time, no matter and not even a possibility of occurrence, how can that state be described?
"I want to know why there is something and not nothing," I said.
Arena looked at me.
"So do I."
I was surprised.
"You're still searching for an answer?"
"Yes."
"After all this time?"
"After all this time."
She smiled.
"I found many things along the way. But not an answer I can present as a final truth."
"Isn't that frustrating?"
"Sometimes."
"So why do you continue?"
"Because I love to understand. Even when I discover I was wrong."
I thought about it.
There was something calming precisely in the fact that she didn't try to impress me with knowledge she didn't have.
Liara led me to a wide window from which the central hall could be seen.
We stood there for a while.
"I have another question," I said.
"I know."
I smiled.
"Do you think there is a Creator?"
Liara didn't answer at once.
"I think there is much more in reality than we understand."
"That's not an answer."
"That's the most precise answer I can give."
"But what do you feel?"
She looked at the distant lights.
"Wonder."
"Wonder is not proof of a Creator."
"Correct. But I don't need to turn every feeling into proof."
I looked at her.
"And if there is a Creator, do you think he is good?"
Liara leaned on the window frame.
"I don't know."
"I have difficulty understanding how one can create a world with so much beauty and so much suffering."
She turned to me.
"So do I."
I thought of Earth.
Of the sea.
Of the sun that warmed my face in the morning.
Of the moments when my children would fall asleep in my arms.
And of everything that existed beside them.
Diseases.
Wars.
Children who lost their parents.
Good people who were hurt without having done anything to bring the pain upon themselves.
"If there is a good Creator, why does he allow all this?" I asked.
Arena, who had quietly approached us, heard the question.
"That is one of the hardest questions," she said.
"Do you have an answer?"
"There are many attempts to answer it. But I am wary of explanations that present every suffering as if it were necessary for a greater purpose."
I looked at her.
"Why?"
"Because one who lost a loved one doesn't have to believe the loss was meant to teach him something."
The words touched me in a place I didn't expect.
I thought of my mother.
Of my brother.
Of people I loved and lost.
I could remember good moments we had experienced together. I could learn from the way they lived and from the things they left in me.
But I didn't want anyone to tell me their death had been needed for me to become a different person.
"Meaning can be found after a loss," I said quietly, "without thinking the loss had to happen."
Arena nodded.
"Yes."
Liara placed her hand near mine.
"Do you miss them?" she asked.
"Very much."
"Even now?"
"Maybe now more."
I had thought eternal life would let me understand death better.
But the more I learned about worlds and consciousnesses, the clearer it became that no knowledge can replace the voice of a loved one.
On our way to the next hall I asked Arena about consciousness.
"Is it created from matter?"
"We know different forms of consciousness," she replied. "Some are tied to biological bodies, and others exist in ways human beings still don't know how to describe."
"But I exist now without my human body."
"Correct."
"So consciousness can exist separately from it."
"In your case, yes. But here too you exist within a reality that has structure and laws."
I thought of my body, which I had left beneath the Tree of Eternity.
Of the woman who woke in it.
Of the fact that she had returned home, to my children, while I continued the journey.
"And what about two consciousnesses that have the same memories?" I asked.
Arena looked at me with interest.
I told her about the woman who woke in my body, about our shared memories and about the decision not to force a union on one another.
She listened.
"Do you think she is you?" she asked.
"I think she is real exactly as I am."
"And that wasn't the question I asked."
I looked at her.
"I don't know how to answer differently."
Arena smiled a little.
"Maybe because the word 'I' is not as simple as it seems to us."
"But we are different now."
"Certainly. You experience different things, make different decisions, and create new memories."
She stopped.
"What matters is that you don't try to decide her existence solely through the memories she shares with you."
I thought of my children.
The woman who returned to them could hug them.
Prepare food for them.
Hear how their day went.
I couldn't do those things in the same way.
For a moment I felt a sharp pain of longing.
But beside it there was also relief.
They had not been left without a mother.
The last space in the archive was different from everything I had seen.
It had no expanding shapes or chains of light.
Only a large window.
Beyond it stretched a dark space, and in the distance a faint point of light was visible.
"What is there?" I asked.
"Our observation boundary," Arena said.
"Meaning?"
"The place beyond which we have no information we can verify."
I approached the window.
The distant light looked almost within reach.
"Can one cross?"
"Some tried."
"And what happened?"
"Some returned without being able to describe clearly what they saw. Others didn't return."
I felt curiosity awaken in me.
The same curiosity that had led me to the tree, to the fruit, and to the new life I had chosen.
I wanted to know what was beyond the window.
I wanted to discover whether there was another world there, or a place where the known laws don't exist.
"You're thinking of crossing," Liara said.
"Yes."
"Now?"
I looked at the light.
It hadn't changed.
It didn't call me.
It promised nothing.
And yet I had difficulty taking my eyes off it.
Then I remembered Nera.
The three knocks.
The voice that warned us not to open.
Nir, who still waited for answers before deciding whether to leave.
"Not now," I said.
Arena came closer.
"Why?"
"Because there are things I want to finish first."
She nodded.
There was no praise or disappointment in her voice.
"The window will remain here."
I looked at it once more.
Maybe one day I'll return.
We were about to leave the archive when Liara's communication stone lit up.
Naama's voice was heard from it.
"Do you hear me?"
"Yes," Liara replied.
"We need you to come back."
"Did something happen?" I asked.
"We checked the signal received at Nera's."
"Did you find the source?"
"Not exactly. But we discovered something we hadn't understood before."
"What?"
"The warning was not sent through the same route in which the passage request is waiting."
I looked at Liara.
"So those are two different sources?"
"At least two different channels," Naama replied. "We still can't determine who operates each of them."
"And the active request?"
"Still waiting."
"So what did you discover?"
Movement was heard beyond the stone, and then Adra's voice joined the conversation.
"We found a match between the sign on Sahar's map and an old record of the receiving station. The secondary route doesn't lead out of the station."
"Then where does it lead?"
"To a part of it that didn't appear in the later maps."
"Another room?"
"Possibly a whole space. We need to see the record together."
Liara closed the connection.
Arena looked at us.
"It seems your search continues elsewhere."
"Yes," I said.
"Did you find here what you were looking for?"
I looked at the vast halls.
"I didn't find an answer to the question of what was before the beginning."
"And are you disappointed?"
"A little."
She smiled.
"That's a good reason to come back and ask in the future."
I thanked her.
Before we left she gave me the record of the experiment we had performed.
"Show it to your friend," she said. "Maybe she'll find something interesting in it."
"Thank you."
"And don't forget the model is not reality itself."
I smiled.
"I'll try to remember."
When we returned to the city, we found Naama in her workshop.
Sahar stood before an open map. Eliya held the communication stone, and Adra examined a record projected above the table.
In its center appeared two parallel lines and a dot outside them.
Beside them was the additional sign Nera had identified.
"This is the secondary route," Naama said.
"What did you find?" I asked.
Adra expanded the record.
"The receiving station was built in layers. The part where we met Nera is the visible space. But there is also an inner area that wasn't included in the later records."
"Why did they hide it?" Sahar asked.
"We still don't know if it was hidden deliberately," she replied. "It's possible they stopped using it and simply erased it from the active maps."
Eliya pointed at a line at the bottom of the record.
"There's something else here."
I read the words that appeared before us.
An inner receiving route.
Entry requires source identification.
Exit requires destination confirmation.
"What does that mean?" I asked.
Naama looked at me.
"That the warning we heard may not refer to entering the space where Nera is, but to entering the inner area of the receiving station."
Sahar approached the table.
"And maybe someone is already there."
"Possibly," Adra said.
I remembered the model in the archive.
The point of light that began to move before I understood what was activating it.
I took out the record Arena had given me and placed it on the table.
"There's something I want to show you."
Naama examined the model.
"Where is this from?"
"From the Archive of First Possibilities. Arena gave it to me after we performed an experiment."
I explained to her about the three points of light, the change I had created, and the movement that appeared elsewhere in the system.
Naama looked at the record.
"This is a model of connections between states," she said.
"Yes."
"It can't tell us who operates the station, but perhaps its principle can be used to check whether the two events we're seeing are connected to each other."
She transferred the record to the work surface.
"I want to compare the signals' times and the changes in the system."
"Do you think it will help?"
"I don't know. But it's a check we haven't done."
She opened another record.
"And meanwhile we found a way to try to create a connection between Nera and Nir, without activating a passage."
"Have you checked it already?"
"Only through test signals. Not yet with a living consciousness."
"And Nir?"
"He received the proposal. He asked to hear first how the conversation would proceed, and only then decide whether to participate."
I smiled.
"That sounds like him."
Naama smiled too.
"I hope we'll succeed."
Naama opened the receiving station's map on the table.
The two parallel lines appeared in the center, and the small dot remained outside them.
"We need to go back there," Adra said. "But this time we'll check the inner route first."
"I want to be there," I said.
"So do I," Sahar said.
Liara approached us.
"Then we'll go together."
Naama began closing the records, but suddenly stopped.
"Wait."
The light on the map changed.
The dot that was outside the two lines began to move slowly inward.
"Naama," I said. "Is that supposed to happen?"
She approached the map.
For a moment she said nothing.
Then she quickly opened the watch stone.
An active passage request.
Destination confirmation: waiting.
Inner route: activity detected.
"Did someone enter?" Sahar asked.
"No," Naama said. "There's no record of a completed passage."
"Then why did the dot move?"
Adra was already examining the sign.
"Because something inside the station began responding to the request."
The light on the map strengthened.
The dot stopped between the two lines.
Naama opened the signals record and compared it with the new movement.
"There's a match in time," she said.
"Between what and what?" I asked.
"Between the change in the inner route and the last signal received at the receiving station."
"Does that mean the voice caused the movement?"
"Not necessarily. But both events occurred within the same system, and there may be a connection between them that we didn't identify before."
I looked at the dot that had stopped between the lines.
I thought of the woman who knocked three times.
Of Nera who answered with two knocks.
And of the voice that warned us about whoever asks to enter.
Then another line appeared.
A reply was received from the inner space.
The replier's identity: not recorded.
End of Chapter Twenty-Four
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