The absurdity of destroying what was essentially a small nuclear reactor by fire now seemed to him so glaringly obvious that he wondered how he ever could have missed it. What had he been thinking?
In the end, the orb didn’t explode. Instead, it eventually began to soften and liquefy until it collapsed into a bubbling soup-like substance in the center of the flower’s burning petals, where it remained for several minutes before it eventually boiled out. What was left of the husk of the flower didn’t explode, either, and continued to burn and burn until there was nothing left.
The color of the sky had begun to change from black to a deep, tangelo orange. The night was coming to an end, and as Shawn snuffed out the last embers from the fire with a canteen, he wondered for just a moment whether it could all have been some kind of sham. The body of the flower had given way to no metal exoskeleton underneath, no fancy network of wiring, no final fireworks of wild chemical reactions, nothing besides the orb that was at all indicative of anything other than standard organic plant matter. In truth, had he ever had any proof that this thing had otherworldly origins besides the word of a known liar? None at all.
But the thing itself had been proof enough. Its bizarre appearance was one thing, but that was nothing compared to the strange sense of otherness the flower exuded, that unclassifiable unreality that had struck Shawn the first time he’d seen it and had never dissipated. He couldn’t explain it, but it was something like the difference between an object in real life and an object in a dream. It felt like it belonged to another plane of reality, and yet here it was in our world. Or rather, here it had been.
No more.
As dawn broke and the color of the woods took on a deep burgundy hue, Shawn stood and stared at that small mound of ash that was now all that remained of the plant. Soon, the wind would scatter it, and then it would be as though the flower had never been there, not at this spot, not in these woods, not anywhere in this world. He should go now, he realized. It wasn’t safe to stay in one spot for so long, especially with sunrise not far off. But he stayed standing there for just a few more minutes. He had done the right thing, he was certain of that; he had no regrets. All the same, he couldn’t escape the feeling that he had just destroyed the most strange and wondrous thing he would ever encounter.
CHAPTER 31
The window in Leland’s room at the clinic looked out upon what must have once been a courthouse or municipal building, an isolated redbrick structure whose ivory pillars still looked regal and impressive, while the rest of it appeared dilapidated, with boarded windows, missing roof shingles, and the white paint on the windows and door frame chipped and yellowing. Out in front of it, in the center of a circular driveway, was a small tiered fountain long out of use, and at this moment, two young teenagers, a boy and a girl, were circling it on bicycles. The boy, Leland could see, was faster than the girl, and though she tried to keep up with him, it seemed that for every cycle she made, he made two. She kept trying.
“I’m sorry, I’m afraid I just don’t understand,” said Reverend Daniels, seated in a chair beside Leland’s gurney. “I mean you were there. You had experiences.”
“I wasn’t me. Not in any normal sense.”
“So you don’t remember anything?”
“Nothing.”
Daniels shook his head wistfully. Then his eyes suddenly alighted, and he smiled knowingly. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Is this some kind of test?”
Leland sighed and shook his head. When he had first regained consciousness, he had intended to leave immediately, especially when he’d realized where he’d ended up. However, the doctor had explained to him that having just awoken, he would be placing himself in grave danger if he didn’t wait at least a few days before leaving, and yes, he was well aware that Leland was no typical patient, and no, that would not protect him in the slightest from severe post-coma neurological complications. He needed a limited time for rest and monitoring. As Leland didn’t feel 100 percent, anyway, he had reluctantly agreed. He’d been enduring these insufferable conversations with the reverend since.
“You have to understand,” the reverend was saying, “we gave up everything we had ever believed in, everything we were, just for you.”
Leland could see the desperation in the man’s eyes. And there was something else in his expression, too, something vaguely familiar, though Leland couldn’t place it. “I didn’t ask you to,” he replied.
“No, you certainly didn’t. But that was the most beautiful part about the whole thing. You never asked anything of us, but we gave it freely. Our love, our devotion. Our faith in your message.”
This was too fucking crazy. What to do with this poor, sad idiot? And how much more of this could he take? He took a deep breath and turned to the reverend.
“Okay,” he said. “There is something. A vague, distant memory. From up there. I’ll try to remember if I can.”
He shut his eyes for several moments, and when he opened them, the reverend was gazing at him reverentially and expectantly.
“There was some sort of … shaman,” Leland said. “I can’t remember what he looked like, but all the others said he was very wise. I was seeking answers, just like you. I sat down in his tent or whatever it was, and he told me things.”
“What things?”
Leland shut his eyes again and furrowed his brow in concentration.
“He said … he said science could take our physical selves to all kinds of spectacular places, geographically. The farthest reaches of the heavens. But our real selves, he said, our souls, are stuck on the ground until we realize that the big stuff happens only in the infinite space inside of us. The ‘Great Infinity Within’ is what he called it. It’s in there, he said, that you’ll find true salvation, true discovery, and adventure.”
Leland opened his eyes. On the reverend’s face was an expression of sheer wonder. He looked like he might just burst into tears.
“I think I understand,” he whispered.
“Good,” said Leland, pretty certain he didn’t.
There was a knock at the door.
“Pardon my interruption,” said Dr. Rogers, peeking his head in, “but, well, we have a visitor.”
The reverend looked shocked. “For who?”
The doctor gestured toward Leland.
“That’s impossible!” the reverend exclaimed. “No one knows he’s here!”
* * *
With the two of them seated in wicker chairs on a back porch overlooking the forest behind the clinic, Shawn recounted for Leland everything that had occurred between the drone attack on the highway and the death of the mysterious lotus flower. He tried to leave nothing out, from the unique, rock-embedded architecture of Ambius’s underground lair to how the flower had looked as it was perishing in the flames. When he was finished speaking, Leland didn’t respond. He just sat there in silence for several moments, seemingly lost in thought.
“The Illumination,” he finally muttered, more to himself than to Shawn.
“The what?”
“That’s what it was called, that flower you burned. Or, you know, what it was called in my memory, at least. But they never told me what its actual power was. They said what it did was beyond my comprehension.”
Shawn gave a confused look. “Maybe how it worked might have been beyond your comprehension. But what it did, at least on a functional level, was fairly simple! It produced nuclear fusion, created new stars. Why would that be beyond your comprehension?”
Leland had no answer, so he just continued to stare out at the Texan hickory trees. Shawn did the same, and, after a while, Leland got a funny feeling that maybe Shawn was waiting for some sort of formal recognition, some pat on the back. Maybe he wanted to hear that he had done a good job. That he had saved the future of the human race by destroying the potentially dangerous Illumination. Or maybe that he had ultimately been right to return to Ambius and confront them, that contrary to all Leland’s warnings, it had all worked out for the
good.
“Glad you’re alive,” was all Leland said.
“Thanks,” Shawn replied with a hint of a smile. In truth, he couldn’t have cared less about validation from Leland.
* * *
Shawn spent that night at a nearby Motel 6. Though Reverend Daniels had offered to put him up in his own home, Shawn was concerned his presence might place the reverend and his family in too much danger. Leland, meanwhile, remained at the clinic, and at around 8:00 P.M., the reverend arrived at his room with a glass of tea and a worn Braille copy of Don Quixote from the local library (though curious, the reverend thought it wiser not to ask Leland why he had requested a book in Braille). After Leland thanked him, the reverend lingered uncertainly in the doorway a few moments. Leland looked at him expectantly.
“May I ask you a question, if you don’t mind?” Reverend Daniels asked. “Just to clarify something?”
“Sure,” Leland answered. In seeing the reverend’s nervous, unsure expression, he had suddenly realized with a jolt of recognition why he looked so familiar. How had he ever missed it?
“What you said earlier today,” the reverend began. “Do you mean that your message to the world is that there’s a piece of outer space inside all of us and we can find the answers there?”
By now, Leland had lost all patience with this whole business. “My message,” he said, “is that there is no message.”
“What? I don’t understand.”
“I have nothing to tell you people. I’m sorry that you wasted so much of your time. And your community’s.”
“No, that can’t be. You’re testing me!”
“This is not a test.”
“Everything’s a test. Every minute of every hour of every day is a test. And I won’t fail you, you hear me? I believe in you! With all my heart and soul, every fiber of my being. I will not fail you.”
“I’m sorry about your boy.” The words surprised even Leland. He hadn’t meant to say them; they had just come out.
A shocked Reverend Daniels was about to ask Leland how he knew about his missing son, but he stopped himself. Of course Andrew Leland knew about him! He knew all, the seen and the unseen. He surely knew where the boy had run off to, as well, but now was not the time to ask about such things. The message itself had yet to be declared. For some mysterious reason, Leland was holding out now, playing coy, testing him. But soon, all would be revealed. He was certain of that.
“Thank you,” the reverend said with a smile. Leland, however, didn’t smile back.
When Daniels finally left him, Leland continued to read, though he found himself continuously distracted. Not by his conversation with the reverend but by his earlier conversation with Shawn, which he continued to go over in his head. Shawn’s question bothered him greatly. Shawn was right; the Illumination’s power had ultimately turned out to be quite straightforward: it could produce nuclear fusion and create new stars, create suns. So why had the leaders on the other world always claimed that the nature of its power was completely beyond Leland’s mental reach, something he could never truly understand? Had they all just underestimated his mental capacities? That answer seemed unlikely, especially given that they knew he had already built for them a powerful cosmic shield whose precise workings they themselves didn’t fully comprehend.
A more plausible and disturbing explanation was that, as a nonnative, he had been deemed simply not trustworthy enough to know the truth, to hold information that had such enormous implications for the survival of their world. As the Ambius scientist had explained to Shawn, when their planet’s sun had died out, they had somehow used the Illumination to create a new one. It was obviously the most important resource they had, and truthfully, given that their own general populace didn’t know much about it, he, an émigré from the most hostile planet in the galaxy, shouldn’t have expected to be any exception. He had helped them, yes, but he still wasn’t genuinely one of them, and he never would be. (He supposed he eventually proved this once and for all when he refused to take down the shield so they could destroy Earth.)
Most troubling of all was that she, too, had always told him that the powers of the Illumination were beyond his abilities to comprehend. But she, too, must have known this wasn’t exactly accurate. So did that mean she hadn’t trusted him, either?
Leland read for a while longer, trying his best to ignore these unanswerable questions. Eventually, after an hour or so, he put down his book and went to sleep.
In his dreams, he and she were standing on some elevated platform, staring out on a vast expanse of outer space. He couldn’t see her face, but he knew it was her, could sense her presence. And then, suddenly, the imagery changed, and he wasn’t sure where he was anymore or whether she was still with him or what exactly he was looking at. Whatever it was, though, it was absolutely stunning, an enormous whirlpool of light or energy or gas, colors swirling at its center.
And that center was heating up, he could see that, and the colors were changing accordingly, brightening and intensifying. Something was about to happen …
He awoke in a cold sweat and sat straight up.
It created stars, he reflected. The Illumination created stars. That’s what it was, that’s what it did! The terrible truth was starting to dawn on him, and now he struggled to remember exactly how Shawn had described the Illumination’s appearance.
A flower! A flower with beautiful violet petals encircling a shiny green core.
Violet, green.
Leland could feel his heartbeat quickening. Those two colors had passed through one ear and out the other the first time he’d heard them. Now, they pounded in his skull, and he clutched his head with both hands, trying to control the panic and horror that were steadily rising to the surface.
And what had Shawn done with the Illumination? He had taken it into the forest and set it on fire, burned it down to ash, utterly destroyed it.
“No,” Leland whispered repeatedly, shaking his head. “What did you do, kid? What did you fucking do?”
As usual, Shawn had simply been doing what he thought was right. Leland knew that. Nevertheless, at this moment, he hated him more than anything on Earth.
* * *
In the morning, Andrew Leland’s room was empty and his few belongings gone. The doctor informed the reverend, who immediately summoned Shawn, but Shawn insisted he knew nothing, that Leland hadn’t indicated to him any plans to leave.
Days went by, and when it became obvious Leland wasn’t coming back, Shawn left town, as well. Meanwhile, not the reverend, the doctor, nor the nurses could figure out why Leland had taken off so abruptly, though all hoped that whatever the reason had been, he had left in good condition and of his own accord. Under orders from Reverend Daniels, it was resolved that no one else in the town should ever know who had been their guest for several unforgettable days.
Afterward, the reverend tried to move on, to lose himself in church affairs, distract himself by spending more time with Anne and Kayla, but he struggled. After years of hoping and praying, the Bearer of the Great Message had finally arrived and cryptically declared that the message was that there was no message and then disappeared without a trace. What did it all mean?
All he could do was reflect on an old quote from John Adams: “Admire and adore the Author of the telescopic universe, love and esteem the work, do all in your power to lessen ill, and increase good, but never assume to comprehend.”
His runaway son, meanwhile, never returned home.
CHAPTER 32
Summer had finally arrived for the students and faculty at Pennsboro College, but there was still the usual vexatious business of tidying up loose ends. Professor Armond Jordan’s eyes drifted to the Saturn-shaped wall clock in back of his office, lingered there for several seconds, then glided back down to the young, broad-shouldered Thor look-alike who was seated across from him, watching the professor with nervous anticipation.
Professor Jordan forced a smile through his exasperation. “I appr
eciate your predicament, I really do,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to see the Meerkats playing without you, either. Problem is, you’re telling me that if you were to take the final again, right now, you wouldn’t do any better! So how can I possibly raise you to a B?”
“I know, Professor J. I don’t wanna lie to you is all. I just don’t think I have the right head for all this.”
“Okay, but if you don’t have the head for this, can I ask why you signed up for the course in the first place?”
The student shrugged. “We had to take a science. Everyone else was taking geology, but I love Star Wars, and I thought this would deal with more of that kind of stuff.”
The professor smiled sadly. “Yes, well, I suppose we could have spent a little less time on Newton and Einstein and a little more on Jabba the Hutt. I’ll make a note for next year.” He sighed, stared at the desperate student before him. “All right. Look, son. There’s a planetarium over on White Street. If you can give me a full ten pages on the history of the planetarium and at least some account of how the damn thing works, I’ll give you that B. But don’t go advertising it, okay?”
The student’s eyes lit up. “Thank you so much, Professor J! I really owe you one.”
“Well, if you do wind up scoring the winning touchdown in a bowl game, I’m going to expect a full analysis of why your acceleration, velocity, and speed made the victory inevitable.”
“Sorry?”
“Never mind. Just a joke.”
When the student had walked out the door, Professor Jordan opened his drawer and removed a small flask of Tennessee whiskey and took a quick swig.
Star Wars. Wow.
Once upon a time, having recently received his Ph.D. from MIT, he’d had his sights set on several Ivy League programs in the Northeast. A series of family illnesses, some run-ins with nasty academic politics, and at least one case of bona fide racial discrimination had derailed these ambitions, and Pennsboro, which he’d once considered nothing more than a way station, had eventually become home. Still, you made the best of it, and there were surely worse physics programs one could wind up at. Almost definitely.
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