Chapters are serialized here for paid subscribers.About This Novel

In Clifford's Spiral, the stroke survivor’s past is blurry, and his memories are in pieces. He asks himself:

Who was Clifford Olmstead Klovis?

Stroke sufferer Clifford Klovis tries to piece together the colorful fragments of his memories. Why not confer with your fellow wizards?

Chapter 21

On Clifford’s television, Neil deGrasse Tyson was talking about the size of the universe. The accompanying animated illustration started with a micro view at the atomic level, then spiraled out — there was the spiral again! — expanding the view over and over until the entire known universe, a network of filaments containing more than two trillion galaxies, fit on the small screen.

Appalling to Clifford, the immensity of the universe was beyond words. Not just for him, for any breathing human. Certain mathematical notations can express its unimaginable size, but it’s a useless abstraction unless all you want to do is more math. He remembered some of his science lessons from the 1950s. At the time, students learned about the solar system. And lots of people understood that most of the stars in the sky were other suns. But no one had the data to calculate — much less imagine — the size of the universe as it has become known based on deep-space observations in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. And now that new telescopes and sensing arrays were being stationed a million miles from Earth — how much bigger, in our calculations if not in our minds, could it all get?

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