The Wolverine Truck Stop and Motor Lodge

No Time — Truespace

If I could tell this story properly, you would not be able to hear it. If I could project images of it, your eyes would not be able to see them. If I could represent it accurately in thoughts, your mind would not be able to encompass them.

What I can do is tell a parable.

If I do that well enough, you will understand.

So:

Once upon a time there lived a prince and princess, and they were in love. They created a beautiful life together, and the beauty of the life they created arose out of their love for each other, and their love for each other arose out of the beauty that they created.

The land they cared for was a country of gentle green hills, dark ancient forests, occasional rocky heights, and slender plunging waterfalls. They walked their land often, teaching the plants to grow beautifully, wading in the cool streams, conversing with the birds and beasts.

And above their land, high up among the clouds, floated their castle.

The castle was elegant yet strong, a place of sunny courtyards and airy balconies, cloistered libraries and grand ballrooms, spice-scented kitchens and bread-scented bakeries, wide viewing-balconies and warm comforting bedrooms. It floated a mile above the land and the prince and princess came and went as they pleased, floating on silver disks that bore them from the castle to the land and back again.

In the castle, the prince and princess busied themselves in works of every art and science as the mood struck them. Sometimes the princess would create works that were something like moving paintings, or something like symphonies: they would last for hours, filling a room with their images and colors and music, engendering in every viewer thoughts and feelings, memories and longings. Sometimes the prince would spend long hours in the night at an observatory atop the castle’s highest tower, using powerful instruments to descry the mysteries of the farthest reaches of the cosmos, bathed in the light of distant stars.

But above all arts and every science, the favorite occupation of both the prince and princess was the design, planning, and hosting of parties.

Their parties were legendary, and often drew guests from castles at a distance of many days’ travel. The symphony/paintings of the princess were performed in the grand ballroom with the prince as one of the performers. In the nights there were grand meals and discussions in private nooks over fine wine on every topic from astronomy to politics, and from zoology to philosophy.

In these wine-fueled discussions, the prince’s favorite topic was the rumored Great Project at the edge of the world. Always spoken of in lowered voices, it was claimed by the mysterious subject’s aficionados that the Great Project’s history stretched into the most distant past, and that its purpose was nothing less than the creation of intelligence itself.

A party might last for many days and nights, only gradually winding down as guests complemented their hosts once more on a magnificent gathering and straggled away in their flying vehicles, banners waving.

In the lazy and languid time after such parties, the prince and princess would sleep, make love, wonder how they would ever clean the place up again, watch clouds from the balconies while discussing the new thoughts they had discovered, the new feelings they had found.