Soul Music - Intervening Space

Death sat staring at nothing, chinbone resting on his hands. Albert approached very carefully. It had continually puzzled Death in his more introspective moments, and this was one of them, why his servant always walked the same path across the floor.

I MEAN, he thought, CONSIDER THE SIZE OF THE ROOM . . . . . . which went on to infinity, or as near infinity as makes no difference. In fact it was about a mile. That's big for a room, whereas infinity you can hardly see.

Death had got rather flustered when he'd created the house. Time and space were things to be manipulated, not obeyed. The internal dimensions had been a little too generous. He'd forgotten to make the outside bigger than the inside.

It was the same with the garden. When he'd begun to take a little more interest in these things, he'd realized the role people seemed to think that colour played in concepts like, for example, roses.

But he'd made them black. He liked black. It went with anything. It went with everything, sooner or later. The humans he'd known - and there had been a few - had responded to the impossible size of the rooms in a strange way, by simply ignoring them.

Take Albert, now. The big door had opened, Albert had stepped through, carefully balancing a cup and saucer . . . . . . and a moment later had been well inside the room, on the edge of the relatively small square of carpet that surrounded Death's desk.

Death gave up wondering how Albert covered the intervening space when it dawned on him that, to his servant, there was no intervening space . . .

***

Soul Music - p8-9