A Wrinkle in Time Quintet

by Madeleine L'engle

  “Mr. Jenkins,” Meg said. “You know what the Echthroi are—”

  “But I don’t. I only know that they impersonated me.”

  Blajeny placed both great hands on Mr. Jenkins’s stooped shoulders and looked down at him gravely. “There are evil forces at work in the world.”

  Mr. Jenkins nodded mutely. He did not dispute that.

  “They are throughout the universe.”

  Mr. Jenkins glanced at the cherubim, who had stretched out his wings to their fullest span as though to flex his muscles. “How—how big are they?”

  “They are no size and they are every size. An Echthros can be as large as a galaxy and as small as a farandola. Or, as you have seen, a replica of yourself. They are the powers of nothingness, those who would un-Name. Their aim is total X—to extinguish all creation.”

  “What do they have to do with Charles Wallace?”

  “The Echthroi are trying to destroy his mitochondria.”

  “But why would they bother with a child?”

  “It is not always on the great or the important that the balance of the universe depends.”

  Louise the Larger whistled urgently, and Meg was almost sure that the snake was telling them that she would stay with Charles Wallace, that she would encourage him to keep on fighting to live. “Oh, Louise, please, please, you won’t leave him? You will help him?”

  “I will not leave him.”

  “Will he be all right?”

  Louise answered with silence.

  Blajeny said to Mr. Jenkins, “Charles Wallace will die if his mitochondria die. Do you understand that?”

  Mr. Jenkins shook his head. “I thought he was making things up with his big words. I thought he was trying to show off. I didn’t know there really were mitochondria.”

  Blajeny turned to Meg. “Explain.”

  “I’ll try. But I’m not sure I really understand either, Mr. Jenkins. But I do know that we need energy to live. Okay?”

  “Thus far.”

  She felt Blajeny kything information to her, and involuntarily her mind sorted it, simplified, put it into words which she hoped Mr. Jenkins would understand. “Well, each of our mitochondria has its own built-in system to limit the rate at which it burns fuel, okay, Mr. Jenkins?”

  “Pray continue, Margaret.”

  “If the number of farandolae in any mitochondrion drops below a critical point, then hydrogen transport can’t occur; there isn’t enough fuel, and the result is death through energy lack.” She felt the skin on her arms and legs prickling coldly. To put into words what might be happening within Charles Wallace was almost unendurable.

  She felt Blajeny prodding her and continued. “Something’s happening in Charles Wallace’s mitochondria. I’m not sure what it is, because it’s all words I don’t know, but his farandolae are dying—maybe they’re killing each other—no, that’s not right. It sounds to me as though they’re refusing to sing, and that doesn’t make any sense. The point is that they’re dying and so his mitochondria can’t produce enough oxygen.” She broke off, angrily. “Blajeny! This is all nonsense! How can we possibly stop them from doing whatever it is they’re doing, when they’re so small they aren’t even visible? You’ve got to tell us! How can we help Charles?”

  Blajeny’s kything was calm and cold as steel. “You will know soon.”

  “Know what?”

  “What you must do to overcome the Echthroi. When you get there, my children, you will know.”

  “When we get where?”

  “To one of Charles Wallace’s mitochondria.”

  EIGHT

  Journey into the Interior

  Now that Blajeny had said it, it seemed to Meg the only logical, the only possible course of action. If they were to save Charles Wallace, if farandolae were causing his illness, if the Echthroi were at work within him as well as without, then the only hope was for them to become small enough to go into one of his mitochondria and see what was happening with the farandolae.

  “Metron Ariston—” Calvin spoke softly. “Size. Where sizes don’t matter. But—to be as small as a galaxy is huge: can you make us that small?”

  Blajeny smiled. “Size is really quite relative.”

  “Anyhow”—Meg looked at Sporos—“we’re already talking with a farandola.” If she had tried to imagine a farandola, it would not have looked like Sporos.

  Mr. Jenkins rose stiffly and moved with his peculiar stork-like gait to Blajeny. “I don’t know why I thought I might be of help. This is all over my head. I will only be a hindrance to the children. You had better send me back to my school. At least there are no surprises for me there.”

  “What about this morning?” Blajeny asked. “That was not a surprise for you? I cannot tell you why you have been sent to us, Mr. Jenkins, because I myself do not yet know. But Meg Named you—”

  “The full implications of this are not yet clear to me.”

  “It means that you are part of whatever is going to happen.”

  Mr. Jenkins moaned.

  Blajeny stretched out his arms, embracing them all in the gesture. “The mitochondrion to which I am sending you is known as Yadah. It is Sporos’s birthplace.”

  Sporos danced around, twingling in outrage.

  Meg shouted at him, “If you are in Charles Wallace, if he’s your galaxy, you couldn’t be in a more special place!”

  Louise sent her sibilant song towards Meg. All anger vanished when Meg caught, from Louise’s song, another projection of Charles, huddled under the blankets. His mother lifted him to prop him up on pillows to ease his labored breathing, then pulled down the blankets so that Dr. Louise could listen to his heart with her stethoscope. She looked up gravely and Meg understood that she was suggesting that perhaps they had better call Brookhaven.

  “Oxygen, then!” Meg cried out to Louise the Larger and Blajeny. “Wouldn’t oxygen help Charles?”

  “For a while. Dr. Colubra will see to that when the time comes.”

  Tears rushed to Meg’s eyes. “Oh, Louise, take care of him. Don’t let him stop fighting.”

  Mr. Jenkins asked, “Would anybody in his right mind let a snake near a sick child?”

  “Dr. Louise will,” Meg said, “I’m sure she will, from something she said in mother’s lab the other night. Blajeny! Is Dr. Louise a Teacher, too?”

  Blajeny nodded.

  Meg’s heart gave a leap of hope.

  “Snakes,” Mr. Jenkins murmured. “Mitochondria. Echthroi.”

  Meg swallowed a hiccupy sob, took off her glasses and wiped the tear-smeared lenses.

  Mr. Jenkins looked at her and spoke in his most stilted, academic voice. “Man. The mean point in the universe. And Charles Wallace—is that it? At this moment in time Charles Wallace is the point of equilibrium?”

  Blajeny nodded gravely.

  “So what happens with his mitochondria and farandolae—?” He looked to Meg for explanation.

  She tried to pull herself together. “Remember, Mr. Jenkins, you’re great on Benjamin Franklin’s saying, ‘We must all hang together, or assuredly we will all hang separately.’ That’s how it is with human beings and mitochondria and farandolae—and our planet, too, I guess, and the solar system. We have to live together in—in harmony, or we won’t live at all. So if something is wrong with Charles Wallace’s mitochondria—” Her voice trailed off.

  Mr. Jenkins shook his head. “What can we do? What can we possibly hope to do?” Then he cried out in horror. “Oh, no!”

  The pseudo-Mr. Jenkins they had seen before was moving rapidly towards them. Louise reared her black coils upwards with a horrible hissing.

  “Quickly!” Blajeny spread his arms wide, pulling Mr. Jenkins, Sporos, and Calvin into their span. Proginoskes caught Meg within the strength of his wings, the beat of his heart. She seemed to become part of the cherubim’s heartbeat.

  The oval pupil dilated, and she went through to—

  She could not tell where they were; she could only sense the
presence of the others. As through a vast, echoing tunnel she heard Blajeny: “I would show you something to encourage you before you go.”

  Meg looked about. Ahead of her was a tremendous rhythmic swirl of wind and flame, but it was wind and flame quite different from the cherubim’s; this was a dance, a dance ordered and graceful, and yet giving an impression of complete and utter freedom, of ineffable joy. As the dance progressed, the movement accelerated, and the pattern became clearer, closer, wind and fire moving together, and there was joy, and song, melody soaring, gathering together as wind and fire united.

  And then wind, flame, dance, song, cohered in a great swirling, leaping, dancing, single sphere.

  Meg heard Mr. Jenkins’s incredulous, “What was that?”

  Blajeny replied, “The birth of a star.”

  Mr. Jenkins protested, “But it’s so small I could hold it in the palm of my hand.” And then an indignant snort, “How big am I?”

  “You must stop thinking about size, you know. It is both relative and irrelevant.”

  At this point Meg could not be bothered with size. She wanted to know something else. “Progo, will the star be Named?”

  “He calls them all by name,” the cherubim said.

  Meg looked in wonder at the star. It was indeed so small that she could have reached out and caught it in her hand, but its flaming was so intense that the song itself came out of the fire and was part of the burning. She thought in wonder,—I must be the size of a galaxy.

  And then all thoughts dissolved in the glory of the melody and the dance.

  Blajeny’s voice came like thunder, “Now!”

  She was pulled into Proginoskes again, into the beat of the great heart, into the darkness of the eye, into the—

  No!

  She was being consumed by flame. She sensed a violent jolt to the cosmic rhythm, a distortion of wild disharmony—

  She tried to scream, but no sound came. She felt pain so intense that she could not bear it another second; another second and the pain would annihilate her entirely.

  Then the pain was gone, and she felt once again the rhythm of the cherubic heart, very rapid, faintly irregular. “Did it have to hurt that much?” Shock and pain made her loud and angry. Her limbs trembled weakly.

  Proginoskes seemed to be having trouble; his heart continued to race unevenly. She thought she understood him to say, “We had a brush with an Echthros.”

  Her own breathing was a shallow panting. She felt that she was all there, all her atoms reassembled, that she was Meg; and yet when she opened her eyes she could see nothing but a strange, deep green-blackness. She listened, listened, and through what seemed at first to be a sound somewhat like the shrilling of insects on a summer night, she thought she could hear—or perhaps it was feel—a steady, regular pulsing.

  “Progo, where are we?”

  “Yadah.”

  “You mean we are in Charles Wallace? In one of his mitochondria?”

  “Yes.”

  It was not conceivable. “What’s that sort of thrumming I feel? Is it Charles Wallace’s heartbeat?”

  Proginoskes moved in negation in her mind. “It’s the rhythm of Yadah.”

  “It feels like a heartbeat.”

  “Megling, we’re not in earth time now; we’re within Yadah. In farandolae time, Charles Wallace’s heart beats something like once a decade.”

  She shivered. Her arms and legs still felt trembly and useless. She blinked, trying to adjust her eyes to the darkness. “Progo, I can’t see.”

  “Nobody in the interior can see, Meg. Eyes aren’t needed.”

  Her heart beat in frightened counterpoint to the rhythm of the mitochondrion. She could not pay proper attention as Proginoskes said, “It’s what might be called a circadian rhythm. All life needs rhythm to—”

  She interrupted. “Progo! Blajeny! I can’t move!”

  She felt Proginoskes within her thoughts. His own thinking had calmed considerably; he was recovering from whatever it was that had frightened him and caused her so much pain. “Blajeny did not come with us.”

  “Why?”

  “This is no time for silly questions.”

  “Why is it silly? Why can’t I see? Why can’t I move?”

  “Meg, you must stop panicking or I won’t be able to kythe with you. We won’t be able to help each other.”

  She made a tremendous effort to calm down, but with each heartbeat she felt only more tense, more frightened. How could her heart be pounding so rapidly if Charles Wallace’s beat only once a decade?

  Proginoskes thought noisily at her, “Time isn’t any more important than size. All that is required of you is to be in the Now, in this moment which has been given us.”

  “I don’t feel like myself. I’m not myself! I’m part of Charles Wallace.”

  “Meg. You are Named forever.”

  “But Progo—”

  “Say the multiplication table.”

  “Now who’s being silly?”

  “Megling, it will help bring you to yourself. Try.”

  “I can’t.” Her mind felt battered and numb. She could not even remember enough to count to ten.

  “What’s 7 times 8?”

  She responded automatically. “56.”

  “What’s the product of 2/3 and 5/7.”

  Her mind whirled, cleared. “10 over 21.”

  “What’s the next prime number after 67?”

  “71”

  “Can we think together now?” There was considerable concern in Proginoskes’s questioning.

  The concentration the cherubim had thrust on Meg had calmed her panic. “I’m okay. Where’s Calvin? Where’s Mr. Jenkins? And that—that Sporos?”

  “They’re all here. You’ll be able to kythe with them soon. But first we have to find out what the second test is.”

  “Find out?” Her mind was still blurred from pain and fright.

  He was patient with her. “As we found out what the first test was.”

  “You guessed that,” she said. “Do you know what this one is?”

  “I think it has to do with Sporos.”

  “But what?”

  “This is what we must discover.”

  “We have to hurry, then.” She tried to check her impatience.

  “Meg, I have to work with you and Mr. Jenkins together, because he isn’t capable of letting me move about in his mind as you can, so you’ll have to help. The grown farandolae don’t talk the way people do, they kythe.”

  “Like cherubim?”

  “Some of the Ancient Ones, yes. With the younger ones it’s a little closer to what you called mental telepathy. Never mind the degree; Mr. Jenkins can’t understand kything at all, and you’ll have to help him.”

  “I’ll try. But you’ll have to help me, Progo.”

  “Stretch out your right hand—”

  “I can’t move.”

  “That doesn’t matter. Move your hand in your mind. Kythe it. Kythe that Mr. Jenkins is standing by you, and that you’re reaching out to hold his hand. Are you doing it?”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Can you feel his hand?”

  “I think so. At least, I’m making believe I can.”

  “Hold it. Tightly. So that he knows you’re there.”

  Her hand, which was no longer her hand in any way she had known before, nevertheless moved in the remembered pattern, and she thought she felt a slight pressure in return. She tried to kythe to the principal. “Mr. Jenkins, are you there?”

  “Hheere.” It was like an echo of a faintly remembered voice hoarse with chalk dust; but she knew that she and Mr. Jenkins were together.

  “Meg, you will have to kythe him everything I tell you. If I move into his mind I hurt him; he can’t absorb my energy. Now, try to translate simultaneously for him: make him see that a grown farandola’s matter does not move, except as a plant does, or a tree when there is no breeze to cause its motion, or as the great kelp forests move. A grown farandola moves
by kything. Kything is not going to be easy for Mr. Jenkins, because it has been a great many years since he’s known himself, his real self.”

  Meg sighed with a kind of anxious fatigue, suddenly realizing the enormous amount of energy taken by this intense kything. The cherubim moved lightly, swiftly within her, and his kything moved through and beyond her senses to an awareness she had never known before. She groped to contain it in images which were within Mr. Jenkins’s comprehension.

  The sea, a vast, curving, never-ending sea; it was as though they were in that sea, deep down under the water’s surface, deeper than a whale can dive. The surface of the sea, and any light which might penetrate the surface, was hundreds of fathoms away. In the dark depths there was movement, movement which was part of the rhythm she had mistaken for Charles Wallace’s heartbeat. The movement assumed shape and form, and images were kythed to her mind’s eye, visual projections superimposed swiftly one over the other; she tried to send them to Mr. Jenkins:

  a primordial fern forest;

  a giant bed of kelp swaying to submarine currents;

  a primeval forest of ancient trees with rough, silver bark;

  underwater trees with silver-gold-green foliage which undulated regularly, rhythmically, not as though the long fronds were being blown by wind or current but of their own volition, like the undulation of those strange sea creatures halfway between plant life and animal life.

  To the visual images music was added, strange, unearthly, rich, the surging song of the surrounding sea.

  Farandolae.

  She felt confusion and questioning from Mr. Jenkins. To him farandolae were little scampering creatures like Sporos, not like the sea trees she had been trying to show him.

  Proginoskes kythed, “The sea trees, as you call them are what Sporos will become when he Deepens. They are then called fara. Once he has Deepened he will no longer have to run about. A grown fara is far less limited than a human being is by time and place, because farae can be with each other any time in any place; distance doesn’t separate them.”

  “They move without moving?” Meg asked.

  “You might put it that way.”

  “Am I to learn to move without moving, too?”

  “Yes, Meg. There’s no other way in a mitochondrion. There’s nothing for you to stand on in Yadah, and no space for you to move through. But because you’re an earthling, and earthlings excel in adaptability, you can learn this motionless motion. Are you translating for Mr. Jenkins?”