"Like the sisters taught you in the home, eh?"
Nico nodded. "My name is Niccolo d’Angeli. ’D’Angeli’ means from the angels," he recited. "That’s where I came from, before the home. The angels left me. I say my prayers in the morning and before I sleep. Hail Marys."
"Brav’ scugnizz’, Nico. You’re a good boy," Frans said aloud, but he was thinking, The angels who dropped you off must have been short a few last names in their genealogy, my friend. "You believe in God, then, do you, Nico?"
"Yes, I do," Nico affirmed solemnly. "The sisters told me."
Frans chewed for a while. "I have a little hypothesis about God, Nico," he said, swallowing. "Want to hear my hypothesis?"
"What’s a hy…?"
"Hy-po-the-sis," Frans said slowly. "An idea. A testable guess about the way something works. You understand, Nico?" The little skull nodded uncertainly. "Now here’s my idea. There’s an old story about a man and a cat—"
"I like cats."
Why do I try? Frans asked himself, but soldiered on. "The man was a famous physicist named Schrodinger—don’t worry, Nico, you don’t have to remember his name. Schrödinger said that a thing isn’t true unless there’s someone to observe that it’s true. He said that observing actually makes an event turn into being true."
Nico looked miserable.
"Don’t be worried, Nico. I’ll make it easy for you. Schrödinger said that if you put a cat in a box with—okay, let’s say with a plate of good food and a plate of poison food, and then you close the box—"
"That’s mean," Nico observed, glad to be back on concrete.
"So is beating the crap out of ex-priests, Nico," Frans told him, taking another bite. "Don’t interrupt. Now: the cat’s in the box, and he may have eaten the good food or the bad food. So he might be alive or he might be dead. But Schrodinger said that the cat isn’t actually alive or dead unless and until the man outside opens the box to see that the cat is alive or dead."
Nico thought that over. "You could listen to hear if it’s purring."
Frans stopped chewing for a moment and pointed at Nico with a fork. "That’s why you’re a thug, and not a physicist or a philosopher." He swallowed and went on. "Now here’s my idea about God. I think we’re like the cat. I think that God is like the man outside the box. I think that if the cat believes in the man, the man is there. And if the cat is an atheist, there is no man."
"Maybe there’s a lady," Nico suggested helpfully.
Frans choked on a piece of pasta and coughed for a while. "Maybe so, Nico. But here’s what I think. I think because you believe in God, maybe there’s going to be a God for you, when you get out of the box." Nico opened his mouth and then closed it again, and appeared about to cry. "Don’t worry about it, Nico. You’re a good boy, and I’m sure God is there for good boys."
Frans got up and waddled back to the galley for something sweet. "That’s why I need you to pray for something," he called as he rummaged through the bins. "Because God is there for you, but He might not be there for people who aren’t sure if they believe in Him." He came back to the table with a generous portion of Black Forest cake. "I want you to pray for a miracle. Okay, Nico?"
"Okay," Nico agreed with utter sincerity.
"Good. Now here’s my problem. Do you know why I’m so fat, Nico?"
"You eat all the time."
"I’m an Afrikaner, Nico," Frans said wearily. "Eating is our national sport. But I ate all the time before, remember? And I wasn’t like this two years ago! Sometimes when you’re out in space, your DNA—the instructions that make your body work, understand? Your DNA gets nicked by a few atoms of cosmic dust. That’s what happened to me, Nico—a random speck of shit just passing through on its way to the rim of the universe hits some critical piece of biological machinery and all hell breaks loose…"
Suddenly, whatever he ate was used and used and used, every last erg of energy torn from each molecule of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen, and stored away in miserly, paranoiac fat cells waiting for a famine of mythic proportions to call upon them for heroic rescue of the body they were slowly, inexorably suffocating. "I fought it, Nico. In the beginning, I fought it. Exercised like a maniac. Starved myself. Spent all my time Earth-side going from doctor to doctor," Frans told him.
He had taken any drug anyone would prescribe or sell, looking for a cure or even just some hope, and became grosser and grosser, more and more a stranger to himself, scared shitless by the prospect of congestive heart and kidney failure.
There was a sort of poetic justice in it, he supposed, and Frans Vanderhelst was nothing if not philosophical about such things. For years, he himself had profited from other people’s pathetic belief in a miracle cure. Carlo had run the scam for almost a decade before the insurance companies caught on. He preyed like a wolf on the weak—selecting only the richest and sickest, the most desperate and suggestible marks, assuring his hopeful, hopeless half-dead passengers that if they went fast enough, time would slow down for them and when they got back, medical advances on Earth would have caught up with their diseases and they’d go home to be cured. Convincingly sympathetic to their plight, Carlo explained how they would pay nothing now, that it was only necessary to list the Angels of Mercy Limited as the beneficiary to their life insurance policies.
It was bullshit, of course. Frans just took them up and ran the engines at quarter-power for a few weeks, far from the unblinking gaze of medical ethics boards and police surveillance. The marks themselves never knew the difference. Most of them died on their own; Carlo’s drunken, defrocked doctors made sure of the rest.
But now, Carlo had parlayed a scam into something real and Frans Vanderhelst actually was on his way to Rakhat—accelerating at an increasing percentage of the speed of light. And this time Frans himself was the poor, dumb fuck who hoped that during the four decades of his projected absence from Earth, someone would figure out how to make his body right again. Because, underneath an ever-thickening pad of adipose, behind now piggish eyes peering over puffed and pasty cheeks, Frans Vanderhelst was only thirty-six, a man in his prime. And Frans wanted very much to live.
"So, here’s the miracle you should pray for, okay, Nico?" Frans said, laying down his fork. "Pray that we get back to Earth alive and pray that when we get there, someone will be able to fix it for me, so I can eat and still be normal? You got that, Nico?"
Nico nodded. "Pray so we get back alive and you’re normal."
"Good, Nico. That’s good. I appreciate it," said Frans as Nico went back to Verdi, picking up the Duke of Mantua’s aria where he’d left off a few minutes earlier.
Frans sat for a time, thinking about Pascal’s wager. It was then that he realized he really did appreciate Nico’s prayers. After all, he thought, the one thing an agnostic knows for sure is: you never know.
21
N’Jarr Valley, Northern Rakhat
2078–2085, Earth-Relative
DURING THE FINAL DAYS OF HIS LIFE, DANIEL IRON HORSE WOULD watch the tripled shadows on the walls of his stone house in the N’Jarr valley and think about the past. He was lucid until the end, but his mind would constantly take him back to the awful months spent on the Giordano Bruno. It would seem to him that he had existed then in a kind of silent limbo, aching for the end of his punishment, while the years rushed by on Rakhat.
His penance had begun at the moment he gave his assent to the abduction, and it was the very one he had laid on Vincenzo Giuliani—to live with what he had done. His own was the lighter sentence. There was, for Daniel Iron Horse, some hope that he might live long enough to know the answer to a question Giuliani would carry to his grave: What if I am wrong about everything?