Yes

He pressed YES.

There was no deliberation in it, because deliberation requires alternatives, and he had two words and one of them was shorter. Something in the arrangement of the pane suggested that YES was the answer it would prefer. He was aware, pressing it, that he did not know what he was agreeing to.

He was also aware that this was true of everything currently available to him.

The alternative was standing on a rise in a forest until something happened, and nothing had happened to him yet except a morning, and he had begun to suspect that the world was not going to start without him.

The pressing was satisfying. He noticed that, and filed it, and did not know he was filing it.

Then the map opened, and it was almost nothing.

* * * *

A circle, perhaps forty paces across.

Himself at the centre of it, and inside the circle the world rendered in complete and unnecessary detail. The rise he was standing on. Three trees. A fallen branch he could see from here by turning his head. The grass in its individual clumps, each clump apparently worth drawing.

And past the circle's edge, grey.

Not fog. Fog implies a thing behind it. Not dark, which implies light somewhere else. It was the absence of any drawing at all, flat and even, going out in every direction to the border of the pane.

He looked at it for a while.

The world he could see with his eyes went on for miles. The map admitted to forty paces.

He searched the circle for anything with a name on it and found nothing named. No road. No settlement. No marker of any description. Certainly no Grennet, which was where he had been told to go, and which he had assumed would be somewhere on the thing that was for telling you where places were.

He tried pushing at the grey, which did nothing.

He tried pulling the view outward, which the pane permitted, and the grey got larger, and larger again, an ocean of nothing with one small lit island of grass in the middle of it, and himself standing on the island.

He closed the map and opened it again to see whether it had been a fault.

It had not been a fault. This was the map.

He was being sent somewhere the world had no opinion about.

* * * *

He closed it, and the arrow appeared.

It sat at the edge of his sight where the map had been, small and patient, pointing northeast into a stand of trees that looked exactly like every other stand of trees.

It did not explain itself. It did not offer a distance. It had the specific quality of a thing that would still be there in an hour, and in a day, and that had no interest whatsoever in whether he looked at it.

He looked at it for a while anyway, out of politeness.

Then in case it changed.

It did not change.

"Right," he said, out loud, to a forest, and was briefly startled by his own voice, which he had not used since the counting.

* * * *

He walked.

Twenty paces along the rise and down into the treeline, and he was not thinking about the map at all when something made him check it.

The circle had grown.

Exactly twenty paces. The grey had retreated by the distance he had come and not one step further, and the ground it had surrendered was rendered as completely as the rest: bark texture, root, a particular fern that he could turn and identify.

He stood still with the pane open and worked out what he was looking at, which took him some seconds, because he had no prior world to compare this one against.

Then he stopped, and tested it.

It was the first deliberate experiment of his existence and he did not know that, and he took it seriously.

He walked backward, watching the map. Ten paces. Then fifteen.

The grey did not close behind him.

What he had uncovered stayed uncovered, rendered and permanent, and the circle was no longer a circle but a stretched shape with a tail on it where he had been.

He walked forward again to be sure. The shape extended.

He went back a second time and the tail held.

* * * *

The finding sat down in him properly.

The world existed where he had been.

Not where he was. Where he had been. Everything he had walked through had become a fact and stayed a fact, and everything else was grey, and the only instrument in existence for turning one into the other was his own body, moving.

He turned it over.

He found it fair. He could not have defended the fairness under questioning and did not need to, because there was nobody to question him, and the finding had the solidity of a thing arrived at rather than a thing issued.

He repeated the test twice more, and by the third repetition he was enjoying himself.

That was the notable part, and he noticed it while it was happening.

He was standing in a forest at the beginning of everything, with no name, no history, no explanation and no company, pacing back and forth watching a shape on a pane get longer.

And he was pleased.

He filed that as the first fact he had about his own character, which was that it was apparently possible for him to enjoy things, and that the enjoyment attached itself to finding out how something worked.

* * * *

He tested the arrow next, because the arrow was the other variable.

He walked deliberately away from it. West, at ninety degrees to where it wanted him, at a good pace, watching it out of the corner of his eye the way you watch something you are expecting to object.

It did not object.

It did not flash, or repeat, or raise its voice, or produce a second pane about it. It simply rotated, smoothly, keeping its point on the northeast, and went on sitting at the edge of his sight being patient.

He went fifty paces the wrong way to see whether the patience would run out.

It did not run out.

He got the distinct impression, walking, that he could do this for the rest of his life, and that at the end of it the arrow would still be there, unbothered, pointing.

So he stopped, and stood in the wrong part of a forest, and ran the actual arithmetic.

He could continue west. He would uncover more map. He would still not know what he was or where he had come from, and the grey would go on retreating at exactly the rate of his walking, and none of it would resolve into anything.

The arrow at least pointed somewhere.

Somewhere was the only word in his possession with any content in it.

He turned back and rejoined the line, and did it without resentment, because resentment requires a preferred outcome and he did not have one of those either.

* * * *

The forest went on being made with great care all afternoon, and he went on having nothing to compare it with, and after a while he stopped looking for the comparison and simply looked.

Some way into the afternoon there was water ahead of him.

He heard it before the ground showed him anything, a stream somewhere below the line of the track, and he stopped, because this was the thing from the morning and he had been waiting for it to come back.

He counted before he looked. Two stones close together, a lower one on its own further down, and past that something that was not a stone at all and made a hollow sound, like water going in under a lip of bank.

Two, one, and a hollow.

He went down off the line to check. The arrow did not object. The map took the detour and drew it.

It was a narrow stream in a cut, brown over pale gravel, and he stood on the bank and found the two stones close together where he had put them, and the one on its own below, and under the far side a place where the water went in beneath an overhang of root and came out again.

He stood there longer than the stream deserved.

In the morning it had been a strange thing that had happened to him. Now it was a thing he had checked, and it had held, and he could do it again whenever there was water. That was a different kind of fact, and he found he trusted it a great deal more, although nothing about the hearing itself had changed.

He climbed back up to the line with wet boots and his ears working differently.

* * * *

The map became a habit.

By late afternoon he was opening it more often than he needed to, because he liked what it had become.

* * * *

The light started going and he did not stop.

He was not tired in any way that suggested stopping. His legs did what he asked. The pack sat correctly. The sword rode his back in a position he had not chosen and had stopped questioning somewhere around midday, because questioning it produced nothing and the position was comfortable.

He was thinking about the guards.

He did not know there would be guards. That is not what he was thinking about.

He was thinking about what would be at the end of the arrow, and finding that he could not build it. He had the word Grennet and no image to attach to it. He tried assembling one out of the only materials he had, which were trees, grey, and himself, and produced nothing usable.

There was going to be something there that he had no picture of.

He turned that over and found, underneath it, sitting quietly, something that was not quite fear and was in the same family.

He kept walking.

* * * *

He made camp in the end because it got dark enough that the map stopped growing, which struck him as the correct signal to stop.

He did not make a fire, because it did not occur to him. He sat with his back against a trunk and the sword laid across his knees and watched the last of the light go out of the canopy.

He was not lonely. He established that carefully, testing for it, and found nothing.

He had been alive for one day. Everything that had ever happened to him had happened alone, and alone was therefore not a deviation from anything. There was no absent thing pressing on him. There was a forest, and a man in it, and a triangle at the corner of his eye that would still be pointing in the morning.

He was, he thought, in reasonable shape for somebody who had started the day face down in dirt.

Then he noticed he was counting.

* * * *

It was running under his breath, low and steady, and had presumably been running for some time.

He did not go looking for where it came from. He had done that on the rise in the morning and knew exactly how far it went, which was nowhere.

He tried something else instead.

He lifted the sword off his knees and laid it on the ground beside him, and listened. The count went on at the same pace. He unbuckled the pack and set that down as well, and sat with nothing on him at all but his clothes, and listened again.

One count. Two count.

Not a beat faster. Not a beat lighter.

So it was not keeping time for anything he carried. Whatever the weight was, it was not on him, and had not been on him all day, and the count went on bearing it anyway, patiently, the way a body goes on doing a thing it has done so often that it no longer needs the thing to be there.

He put the sword back across his knees, because the night was getting cold and the sword was something to hold.

The count did not notice that either.

* * * *

He slept, badly, in the way of somebody who does not yet know what sleeping is for.

He woke before the light, with the count already going, and lay for a while looking up at a canopy he could not see.

Then he got up, and shifted the pack, and checked the map.

The corridor was where he had left it, a long uncovered strip through grey, ending at a small patch of forest floor with a man standing in it.

Ahead of him, past the edge of everything the world would admit existed, the arrow sat waiting.

He walked into the grey.

Behind him, on the pane, the world came into being at exactly the rate he could carry it.