Lamp out, head on pillow, 'round the track again.
If it weren't for the time I served in Blacksmyth's prison, he thought, this would all sound mad: a world made out of suggestions accepted, nothing's real but thinking makes it so.
Hey . . . don't assume belief's some limp-wristed half-heart. Belief has ferocious power, it's the steel vise of the game, clamps us to it every second till we die.
We die from our beliefs, he thought, every minute someone's dead of terminal illusion.
The only difference between the reality of Blacksmyth's prison and the reality of the walls arou
nd me now, he thought, is that the prison would have dissolved overnight without my dedicated reinforcement, believing. The room will take longer than that. The prison needed my personal consent to exist, this room is built from the consent of every person in spacetime: Walls hold things in.
Eyes closed against the dark. There is no world out there, it is every bit of it in here, he thought, suggestions become beliefs become perceptions become every socalled solid thing in our playground.
Jamie Forbes went to sleep with that.
Woke five minutes later, an attack of reason. Are you crazy, man? Thinking this stuff, the world's not really here, there's nothing out there but your imagination? Are you so susceptible to suggestion that the minute some lady comes along and says nothing's real you swallow it all one gulp?
Went back to sleep, glad that he kept his sanity.
Woke ten seconds later, what about relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory? If you think Suggestion's crazy, what about Science?
There's not just four dimensions here in spacetime, folks, because you see there's really eleven dimensions, but of course seven of them are wrapped up in little tiny balls so we don't see those. But honest, they're there!
There's holes in empty space where the gravity's so strong not even light gets out.
There's an indefinite number of alternate universes existing side by side, don't you know, a universe with every possible outcome of every possible difference that anybody could ever make in this one . . . universes with no Second World War, universes with a Third World War that we don't know, and a Fourth and a Fifth, universes with people exactly like we are, except in about a billion of them you're called Mark instead of Jamie and you have brown eyes instead of blue.
Back to sleep again. How does it work?
Five minutes later, annoyed at himself. This is not differential calculus and me some mathophobe, he thought; this is drop-dead simple. How do we see what we see? How does a painter see the picture he paints? Here's how:
Painter look at canvas.
Dip brush into paint.
Drag wet brush on canvas.
Painter look at canvas.
Dip brush into paint.
Drag wet brush on canvas.
Painter look at canvas.
One stroke at time. Every day of our lives.
That's how it works.
Here's your paint bucket, Jamie, swirling with suggestions. Here's your brush, dip from the bucket what you'll accept for true. Here's your canvas: we call it a lifetime.
Now you try painting a picture, OK?
You need explanations how that works, he thought, you've got to go back long before school.
I'm hypnotized, he thought. I know how that feels, myself, personal experience, nobody has to explain. Accept suggestions and they're real, every stroke. Thirty years ago, and still I remember. There was no way I could have pounded through Blacksmyth's wall, on stage, and the wall didn't exist. I only thought it did.
Some Christian zealots on holy days, he knew, there's blood on their palms from miracle nail-wounds like Jesus’ imagined in old paintings. Next Zealots Convention are you going to tell them that's not blood that's belief? Give your presentation: we've just discovered that when folks got nailed to crosses in those happy olden days they weren't nailed through the palms but through the wrists so why are you bleeding from your palms?