“What? No. Why would you think that?”
“Well, I certainly don’t mean it as an insult. Ibelieve in God.”
“You do?” It surprised her. She knew that plenty of scientists believed in God, but she’d never gotten a religious vibe from him. Besides, his specialty—using DNA to reconstruct evolutionary history—seemed particularly at odds with, well, Creationism. “You don’t find it difficult to reconcile?”
He shrugged. “My wife likes to say that the mind is a palace with room for many guests. Perhaps the butler takes care to install the delegates of Science in a different wing from the emissaries of Faith, lest they take up arguing in the passages.”
This was unaccountably whimsical, coming from him. Eliza was astonished. “Well,” she ventured, “if they were to bump into each other right now, who would win?”
“You mean, where do Ithink the Visitors have come from?”
She nodded.
“I am obliged to say first that it is possible they came from a lab. I think we can rule out surgical hijinx based on our examinations today, but might not someone have managed to growthem?”
“You mean, like, in a supervillain’s lair inside a volcano?”
He laughed. “Exactly. And if it were only the bodies—the ‘beasts,’ as it were—then this theory might seem to have some merit, but the angels, now. They’re a bit more complex.”
Yes. The fire, the flying. “Have you heard,” Eliza asked, “that facial recognition databases got no hits on any of them?”
He nodded. “I did. And if we consider, prematurely, that they might indeed be from… somewhere else, then our contenders are?”
“Another universe, or… Heaven and Hell,” Eliza supplied.
“Yes. But what I find myself thinking, out here, staring at the stars… ‘Gazing’ is too passive, don’t you think, for stars like this?”
Very whimsical, Eliza thought, nodding agreement.
“And perhaps it’s the guests in the palace mingling—” He tapped his head to clarify what “palace” he meant—“but I find myself thinking: What does that mean? Might they just be two ways of saying the same thing? Suppose ‘Heaven’ and ‘Hell’ are just other universes.”
“ Justother universes,” Eliza repeated, smiling. “And the Big Bang was justan explosion.”
Dr. Chaudhary chuckled. “Is another universe bigger or smaller than the idea of God? Does it matter? If there is a sphere where ‘angels’ dwell, is it a matter of semantics, whether we choose to call it Heaven?”
“No,” Eliza replied, swiftly and firmly, a bit to her own surprise. “It isn’t a matter of semantics. It’s a matter of motive.”
“I beg your pardon?” Dr. Chaudhary gave her a quizzical look. Something in Eliza’s tone had hardened.
“What do they want?” she asked. “I think that’s the bigger question. They came from somewhere.” There is another universe.“And if that somewhere has nothing to do with ‘God’ ”— It doesn’t.—“then they’re acting on their own behalf. And that’s scary.”
Dr. Chaudhary said nothing, but returned his gaze to the stars. He was quiet long enough that Eliza was wondering whether she’d smacked down his newfound loquacity when he said, “Shall I tell you something strange? I wonder what you’ll make of it.”
The horizon was paling. Soon the sun would rise. Seeing it from here, such a horizon, and such a sky, it really made you mindful of being plastered by gravity to a giant, hurtling rock, and from there it was a hopscotch to picturing the immensity that surrounded it: the universe, too big for the mind to compass, and that was only the one universe.
Too big for thehuman mind, perhaps.
“You know of Piltdown Man, of course,” said Dr. Chaudhary.
“Sure.” It was maybe the most famous scientific hoax in history—a supposed early human skull unearthed in England about a hundred years ago.
“Well,” said Dr. Chaudhary, “it was in 1953 that it was proved a fake, and the year is important. With all the haste of shame, it was removed from the British Museum, where for forty years it had served as erroneous ‘evidence’ of a particular wrongheaded view of human evolution. Only a few years later, in 1956, another discovery was made, in the Patagonian Andes. A German amateur paleontologist discovered a cache of…” Here he paused for effect. “Monster skeletons.”
And… it all went screwy for Eliza, somewhere in there. Dream siege, and a failure of psychic mind spikes. Dr. Chaudhary had said he was going to tell her something strange, and even as she swerved into some kind of altered state, she had the clarity to understand that the monster skeletons were the relevant fact here, not the site. But it was there that her mind took her.
To the Patagonian Andes.
As soon as he said it, she saw them: mountains that were pitched and pointed, sharp as teeth honed on bone. Lakes, absurd in their purity of blue. Ice and glacial valleys and forests dense with mist. Wildness that could kill, that didkill, but hadn’t killed her, because she was not easily killed and had survived so very much worse already—
She had been turned inward somehow, like a dress pulled inside out, and she was still sitting there with Dr. Chaudhary, and she could hear what he was saying—about the monster skeletons, and how in the days of scorn after Piltdown they’d been nothing but a joke, even though they were a joke that rather defied explanation—but his words were as a rushing of water over a streambed, and the streambed was a thousand polished stones, a thousand-thousand, and they gleamed beneath the surface, beneath hersurface, and they were her and more than her. Shewas more than her, and she didn’t know what that meant but she felt it.
She was more than herself, and she could see the place Dr. Chaudhary was talking about—not the monster skeletons unearthed there, but the land and, most of all, the sky. She was leaning back and looking up and she saw the sky above her now and the sky above her then— What then? When?—and it was with the grief of mourning that it came to her that it was denied her.
The sky was denied her, then and now and forever.
She felt the tears on her cheeks right as Dr. Chaudhary noticed them. He was still talking. “The Museum of Paleontology at Berkeley has the remains now,” he was saying. “As much for curiosity as scientific merit, but I have a feeling that is going to change.… Eliza, are you all right?”
She swiped at the tears but they kept falling and she couldn’t speak.
For a vertiginous moment, staring up at the stars—not gazing, but staring—she felt the scope of the universe around her, so vast and full of secrets, and she sensed the presence of more and greater beyond that… and beyondbeyond, and then beyond even that, and somehow the unknowable depths within herself corresponded to the unknowable scope without, and… there wasn’tanother universe.
There were many.
Many beyond many, unknowably.
I’ve seen them, thought Eliza. KnewEliza. Tears were streaming down her face now, and she finally understood the nature of the dream, and it was worse, so much worse than she’d even feared. It wasn’t prophecy. They’d had that wrong all along. It wasn’t the end of the world she was seeing.
At least, not the end of thisworld.
The dream wasn’t future, but past. It was memory, and the question of how Eliza could possibly have such a memory was overshadowed by what it meant. It meant that it couldn’t be stopped. It had already happened.
I’ve seen other universes. I’ve been to them.