The traveller did not forget the gate.
For many days he walked beneath the sky, thinking about what the voice had told him.
Do not ask what happened before the beginning.
Ask what must already be possible for anything to begin.
But the old question kept returning.
Perhaps, he thought, there really had been something before the world.
Perhaps he had simply not found it.
And so, one morning, he set out again.
This time he carried no map.
He had learned that maps were drawn inside the world.
Instead he carried a single question.
“What was there before?”
He walked until the road became narrow.
Then the road became a path.
Then the path disappeared.
Still he walked.
At last he came to a valley filled with clocks.
There were great clocks and little clocks.
Clocks with hands.
Clocks with bells.
Clocks with pendulums.
Some ran quickly.
Some ran slowly.
Some had stopped.
And some had no hands at all.
In the middle of the valley sat a woman wearing a robe made from strips of calendars.
The traveller approached her.
“Are you the Keeper of Time?”
“No.”
“Then perhaps you are the Keeper of Before.”
The woman smiled.
“Who told you that there was such a thing?”
“No one.”
“Good.”
The traveller sat beside her.
“I have come to ask what was there before the universe.”
The woman looked at the clocks.
“Which one is before the others?”
The traveller pointed to a clock whose hands showed three o'clock.
“That one is before this one.”
He pointed to another.
“And that one is after it.”
“How do you know?”
“Because the first clock shows an earlier time.”
“Earlier according to what?”
The traveller hesitated.
“According to the order of time.”
“And where is that order?”
He looked around the valley.
“In the clocks.”
The woman shook her head.
“The clocks show it. They do not contain it.”
The traveller thought about this.
“Then where is it?”
She pointed towards the sky.
The traveller looked up.
There was nothing there but clouds.
“Is it in the sky?”
“No.”
“Then where?”
The woman laughed softly.
“You are trying to put before somewhere.”
The traveller remembered the gate.
He frowned.
“But surely before is real.”
“Of course.”
“Then where does it live?”
“Wherever two things can be distinguished in an order.”
The traveller looked at the clocks again.
“Breakfast comes before lunch.”
“Yes.”
“Monday comes before Tuesday.”
“Yes.”
“Childhood comes before old age.”
“Yes.”
“And all of these are different.”
“Exactly.”
The woman picked up a small clock.
“This clock cannot be before another clock merely because it exists.”
She placed it beside another.
“They must first be related.”
The traveller nodded.
“One must come before the other.”
“Yes.”
“But then—”
He stopped.
The woman waited.
“But then before cannot be the thing that exists before everything else.”
“Now you are beginning to understand.”
The traveller stood.
“Then what was before the first moment?”
The Keeper of Before looked at him.
“Which first moment?”
“The first moment of the universe.”
“What came before it?”
“Yes.”
She pointed to the valley.
“Show me.”
The traveller looked around.
There were clocks everywhere.
He pointed to an empty patch of ground.
“There.”
“What is there?”
“Nothing.”
“When was the nothing?”
The traveller was silent.
“Before the universe.”
“When?”
“Before time.”
The woman nodded.
“And how long did it last?”
The traveller opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
He looked at the empty ground.
Suddenly he saw what he had done.
He had imagined nothing.
Then he had given it a duration.
He had made emptiness wait.
He had made nothing endure until something appeared.
He had turned nothing into an old country through which time had been passing.
“But if nothing was there,” he said slowly, “then it did not last.”
“Correct.”
“And if it did not last—”
“It was not a period.”
The traveller looked troubled.
“Then there was no empty time before the universe.”
“Not in the ordinary sense.”
“What about a cause?”
The woman handed him a clock with no hands.
“Perhaps something caused the universe.”
“Then that something came first.”
“First?”
“Yes.”
“According to what?”
The traveller stared at the clock.
He had forgotten that it had no hands.
“A cause comes before its effect.”
“Usually.”
“So if something caused the universe—”
“Perhaps.”
“Then it was before the universe.”
“Perhaps.”
“But if before belongs to time—”
The Keeper of Before nodded.
The traveller sat down.
For a long while the clocks ticked around him.
Then one of them stopped.
The silence was enormous.
“I think I have made the same mistake again.”
“What mistake?”
“I have treated the edge of something as if it were another place.”
The woman smiled.
“Tell me.”
“You reach the beginning of time and imagine more time behind it.”
“Yes.”
“You reach the edge of space and imagine more space beyond it.”
“Yes.”
“You reach the absence of everything and imagine a condition in which nothing is sitting, waiting.”
“Yes.”
“And when we reach the boundary of causation, we imagine another cause standing behind it.”
The woman nodded.
“You keep turning boundaries into landscapes.”
The traveller looked towards the far end of the valley.
There the clocks became fewer.
Then smaller.
Then they disappeared altogether.
“Is that where time ends?”
“No.”
“Then what is there?”
“Nothing that you can call before.”
He watched the empty horizon.
“Because there is no sequence?”
“Because the relation has not yet been established.”
The traveller thought about the word.
Established.
Not found.
Not crossed.
Not discovered.
Established.
He looked back at the clocks.
Before.
After.
Earlier.
Later.
First.
Last.
All of them depended upon things being distinguishable and ordered.
And suddenly he wondered whether he had been asking the wrong question all along.
Perhaps before was not a road leading backwards.
Perhaps it was a bridge.
And bridges did not exist merely because there were two places.
They existed when the places could be related.
The traveller rose.
“Then perhaps the universe did not begin with a moment that had another moment behind it.”
The Keeper of Before said nothing.
“Perhaps the beginning of temporal order is not itself a temporal event.”
Still she said nothing.
“And perhaps the conditions under which causes become meaningful need not themselves have a cause in the ordinary sense.”
The woman smiled.
“You are becoming careful.”
The traveller laughed.
“I would rather become confused.”
“That is often the beginning of becoming careful.”
He looked once more at the valley of clocks.
Then he asked the question that had been waiting behind all his other questions.
“If before is a relation, what happens before the relation exists?”
The Keeper of Before stood.
She gathered the strips of calendar around her and began to walk away.
The traveller followed.
“Wait!”
She turned.
“I still have one question.”
“You have many.”
“This one is different.”
She waited.
“What must happen for there to be a before at all?”
For the first time, the Keeper of Before did not answer.
Instead she pointed towards the horizon.
There, where the valley ended, two stars had appeared.
They were not moving.
They were simply there.
And between them, for the first time, the traveller noticed something that had not been there before.
A distance.
He looked at one star.
Then at the other.
And understood.
Before had not yet appeared.
But difference had.
And perhaps that was where the story truly began.