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him further. After a moment, I said: “Force.”
    “Gravity. Impulse. Those two things, and nothing else. Push-me, pull-you. You can push an object to give it kinetic energy, or draw it towards you. Kinetic energy is always relative, not absolute. The driver of a car passing by a pedestrian possesses kinetic energy from the pedestrian’s point of view; but from the point of view of the person in the passenger seat that same drive has zero kinetic energy.”
    It was, in a strange sort of way, soothing to hear him elucidate elementary physics in this way. “All well and good,” I said.
    “That’s how things go in the physical manifold, which we call spacetime. Relocate the model to the temporal manifold—let’s call it timespace.”
    This was when the fizzing started in my stomach. “For the sake of argument, why not,” I said. I couldn’t prevent a defensive tone creeping into my voice. “Although it’ll be nothing but a thought-experiment.”
    “Why do you say that?” he asked, blandly.
    “We’ve centuries of experimental data about the actual manifold, the spacetime manifold. Your ‘timespace’ manifold is pure speculation.”
    “Is it? I would say we move through it every day of our lives. The question is—no, the two questions are: why are we moving through it, and why can we only move through it in one direction?”
    There was a blurry rim to my vision. My heart had sped itself up. “More why -questions.”
    “Let us ask instead: what is drawing us towards it, through timespace?”
    “Why must it be a what?”
    “Now you’re asking why questions,” he noted, with a wry expression.
    “The fact that we’re aware of the sensation of moving through time must mean we’re accelerating,” I mused. “If we were travelling at a steady speed, we wouldn’t feel it. It’s...” I stopped.
    He didn’t say anything for the moment.
    Time and space, like an Escher engraving. Look from one into the mirror of the other. Look from the other into the mirror of the one. So very obvious! Why hadn’t I thought of it before? But then I slapped those thoughts down, and my decades of conventional learning reasserted themselves, and I got a grip. A grip, a grip.
    “Your theory,” I said, in a sterner voice. “The reason we feel time as a kind of motion, one hour per hour, is because something is drawing us in, with its gravitational pull—is that it? Because it seems to me that we might just as well have been launched forward by some initial impulse. Don’t you agree?”
    “The reason I don’t agree is the fact that we’re stuck moving in one temporal direction.”
    I saw, then, where he was going; but I didn’t interrupt as he spelled it out.
    “Think of the analogue from the physical manifold. There’s no force that could propel an object, let alone a whole cosmos, so rapidly that it was locked into a single trajectory. But there is a force in the universe that can draw an object in with such a force—draw it such that it has no option but to move in one direction, towards the centre of the object.”
    “A black hole.”
    He nodded.
    “Your theory,” I said again, in a just-so-as-we’re-clear voice, “is that the reason we move along the arrow of time the way we do is that we’re being drawn towards a supermassive temporal black hole?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well,” I said, with an insouciance I did not feel. “It’s an interesting theory. Although nothing more than a theory.”
    “Not at all. Consider the data.”
    “What data?”
    “I understand your resistance, Ana,” he said, gently. “But you can do better than this. Who knows the data better than you? What happens to time as a physical object approaches the event horizon of a physical black hole?”
    “Time dilates.”
    “So what must happen as a temporal object approaches the event horizon of a temporal black hole? Physics dilates. Space expands—until it approaches an asymptote of reality. From the point of view of an observer