I. The Land That Was Made

There was once a traveller who came to a place where three roads met.

Behind him stretched the road he had travelled.

Before him stretched two roads he had not yet taken.

And beneath his feet was a small patch of earth upon which he stood.

The traveller had been told that this was the Present.

He looked behind him and saw the country of things that had happened.

He looked ahead and saw the country of things that had not yet happened.

And between them, he thought, was the little patch of earth called Now.

So he stood there for a while, as travellers do, believing that the Present was simply the place between what had been and what would be.

But then an old woman appeared beside the road.

She was carrying a basket of stones.

“Why do you stand here?” she asked.

“I am waiting,” said the traveller.

“For what?”

“For the future.”

The old woman smiled.

“And where do you think you are standing?”

“Here.”

“Yes. But what is here?”

The traveller looked down.

Only then did he notice that the ground beneath him was not natural earth.

It was paved.

He knelt and touched the stones.

Some were smooth and ancient. Others were newer. Some bore marks that had almost disappeared. Beneath them he could see older stones, and beneath those older stones still.

“Who built this road?” he asked.

“Those who came before you.”

“And why?”

“Because they were going somewhere.”

The traveller looked behind him.

He had imagined the past as a country he had left.

But now he saw that the road behind him had not simply vanished into history.

It was still there.

More strangely, it had become the road upon which he stood.

He walked a little farther and found a bridge crossing a river.

He stopped.

He knew this river.

He had seen it before, far upstream, where there had been no bridge.

There had been a time when anyone wishing to cross had needed to descend to a ford, or build a boat, or turn back.

But here the river could simply be crossed.

The traveller stepped onto the bridge.

“Was this always possible?” he asked.

“No,” said the old woman.

“But the river was always here.”

“Yes.”

“And the banks were always here.”

“Yes.”

“Then what changed?”

The old woman placed another stone into her basket.

“The bridge.”

The traveller stood silently.

He had thought of the past as a collection of things that had happened and were now finished.

But the bridge had taught him something stranger.

Something that had happened yesterday could still alter what was possible today.

The bridge did not command him to cross.

It did not tell him where he must go.

It had not determined his journey.

It had merely changed the world through which his journey could proceed.

The traveller began to notice other things.

The houses around him had been built by people who were gone.

The words he spoke had been spoken by countless mouths before his own.

The customs of the town had grown from decisions whose makers had long been forgotten.

Even the names by which he called things had histories.

He began to understand that the Present was not an empty clearing between two forests.

It was a country with foundations.

Everything around him had a history of becoming.

And yet the old woman warned him not to make another mistake.

“You are beginning to think that the past made this place inevitable.”

“No,” said the traveller. “Did it not?”

“Look at the bridge.”

He looked.

“Did its builders decide where you would go?”

“No.”

“Did they decide whether you would cross?”

“No.”

“Then the past has not written your future.”

The traveller looked again at the road.

He saw now that the bridge had not written a single path upon the land.

It had changed the paths that could be taken.

Some crossings had become easier.

Some journeys had become shorter.

Some routes had become possible that had once been impossible.

Others had become unnecessary.

The past, he realised, did not merely explain why the present was here.

It had changed what the present could do.

The old woman nodded.

“That is the secret most travellers miss.”

“What secret?”

“The country you inherit is not merely the country that remains after everything has happened.”

She lifted her basket of stones.

“It is the country that everything that has happened has made.”

The traveller looked toward the road ahead.

For the first time, he understood why the Present seemed so strange.

Behind him lay the things that had become.

Before him lay the things that might become.

But beneath his feet was neither one nor the other.

Beneath his feet was what the past had made possible.

He looked back at the bridge.

Then he looked forward.

The road did not tell him where to go.

It offered him possibilities.

And he understood something else.

One day, whatever road he chose might itself become part of the country inherited by someone who came after him.

The bridge had been built by the past.

But what he did upon it would belong to the future.

The traveller stood very still.

The Present was no longer a point between two lands.

It was a place where inheritance became possibility.

A place where what had become could become something else.

And suddenly the traveller wanted to know something that had not occurred to him before.

If the present was made from the past—

what, exactly, had the past given him?