“The basilica of Hippo Regius has a hostel for visitors,” says Possidius. “Many now staying in it are refugees, but you, too, may shelter there. So why defame our hospitality?”
“Your flea-ridden hostel be damned!”
“Sir,” says Possidius. “Sir, you try our—”
“I have no intention of deserting Father Augustine—not until death itself abstracts him from history!”
The old bishop, stunned by the astronomer’s presumption, pounds his fist on the desk. “What gives you the right to impose yourself on a dying man in this unconscionable way?”
“One thing only: I’m your son, old man. I’m your son.”
The fever in Augustine makes his head feel like the inflating hood of a cobra. He can think of nothing to say.
“Once, Father, you wrote of me, praising my virtues but taking no credit for them: ‘I had no part in that boy, but the sin.’ More recently, supposing me dead and quoting Cicero, you declared, ‘You are the only man of all men whom I would wish to surpass me in all things.’ A most poignant declaration.”
“But you are dead,” the bishop manages, woozier than ever with both brain heat and the fever of incomprehension.
“Iatanbaal means ‘given of God,’ Father. Adeodatus does, too, and my name—my true name—is Adeodatus.”
3
Augustine remembers Carthage. There he acquired a concubine, a woman not of his class. The happiest issue of that union was the boy whom they named Adeodatus, ‘given of God.’ In those days—Christ be merciful—Augustine was a Manichee, a dualist proclaiming his belief in two contending gods, one benevolent and caring, one so malign and cruel that you could fix on it every sort of calamity plaguing the world. That was sixty years ago. Recently, a letter from Paulinus, bishop of Nola, has accused Augustine (facetiously, of course) of championing dualism again:
“What is The City of God but a manifesto dividing Creation into two camps? It seems, Aurelius Augustinius, you’ll never completely elude the ghosts of your wayward past.”
One such ghost has just popped up. Adeodatus—the boy he thought had died with the noble Nebridius in the undertow off the beach at Ostia—has reentered his life. He has done so only days before a mortal fever will—how did “Iatanbaal” put it?—oh, yes, abstract him from history. A reunion that renders mundane even the Gospel parable of the prodigal son.
How did Adeodatus survive those currents? And did Nebridius, Augustine’s dearest companion after Alypius, also survive?
A single oil-burning lamp hisses in the bedchamber. Possidius has retreated to his own room. Genseric’s soldiers shout obscene challenges along the inland walls of the city: shouts that clash, echo, fade, resurge.
Augustine’s son—a “boy” of sixty—sits cross-legged on the floor, recounting in a monotone the story of his and Nebridius’s adventure off the Italian coast. Adeodatus had been sixteen and his father’s friend thirty-five.
“Nebridius, Father, had no adventure. I’m certain he drowned. I, though, was whipped out to sea. Prayer kept me afloat. Libyan pirates picked me up west of Naples. For the next nine years I was a helpless witness to their raids around the coastal towns of the Mediterranean. Finally, unwisely trusted to carry out a theft on my own, I escaped into the arms of some Greek mariners. These kind Greeks transported me to Alexandria.…”
Heavy-lidded and hot, Augustine listens to Adeodatus with half his attention. The details of his story are not important; vitally important, however, is the fact that after venturing to Cathay from Alexandria and living there an adult lifetime, his son has returned to Numidia. To keep filial vigil at his deathbed and to bring him … well, the Truth.
The old man feels his son’s dry lips kissing his forehead; his own papery eyelids flutter open.
“Sleep, Father. In the morning you’ll easily comprehend all the miraculous things I intend to tell you.”
“Adeodatus—”
“Sleep. I’ve come home to stay.”
Augustine remembers Carthage. He dreams of it. There he met his son’s low-born mother. There he deceived the blessed Monica, his own mother, by boarding a ship to Italy while she supposed him awaiting a fairer wind. City of rowdy “scholars,” pagan shrines, vain theatrics, and vulgar circus shows. In his dream—his fevered memory—Carthage rises again, raucous with trade and pageantry. He sees it as it was then, four decades before the globes of Seneca the Illuminator set its streets and windows ablaze even at deepest midnight. His memory, carried into dream, quickens every emotion—the four great perturbations of the mind—that he experienced as a self-conscious youth in Carthage.
Desire, joy, fear, and sorrow.
I knew them all there, the dreaming Augustine reflects. I know them all again every time I reenvision the city.
God, too, he discovers and rediscovers in memory and dream, as he inwardly quests for the One Thing to fill the emptiness created by his own temporary amnesia. That One Thing is God. If he ever forgets God, he finds Him again in memory, a fact that seems to the bishop a rational proof of His existence. For you cannot remember what you have wholly forgotten. God, however, resides within; and when you trip over That Which refurnishes the emptiness, you say to yourself, “This is it,” and you know that the processes of your own mind have led you ineluctably back to Him.
As memory can resurrect the Carthage of old, Augustine dreamily reasons, so can it reacquaint us with our changeless Father.…
Adeodatus has made a pallet for himself in the bedchamber. He is using his doubled-up telescope bag for a pillow.
The cries of the barbarian heretics beyond Hippo’s walls—Arian Christians who deny that Father and Son share the same substance—buzz in Augustine’s head like evil flies. When he moans, his own son touches a wet cloth to his brow.
And another thing, Augustine thinks: As my memory holds every unforgotten moment of my life, God contains every possible reality, but without possessing either a past or a future. Everything that has ever happened, is happening now, or will happen tomorrow abides in Him. He foreknew—knows, rather—that Adeodatus would return as I lay on death’s threshold, and He has ever known what he will tell me tomorrow about Sung Hsi-chien’s “New Cosmogony.”
Dear God, you are indeed an unpredictable dramaturge.
4
Morning. Augustine’s fever has broken. He offers a prayer of thanksgiving and another for deliverance. Then he and Adeodatus eat the pears that Possidius brought to him last night.
“The universe is far vaster than any Greek or Roman astronomer has ever told us,” Adeodatus says.
It would not surprise Augustine if the universe were infinite in size. Can the omnipotence of the Creator have limits?
“And far older,” Adeodatus continues. “And far stranger than even Ptolemy himself supposed.”
Augustine has read—long ago—Claudius Ptolemaeus’s great book on astronomy. Once, in Milan, he even perused a Latin translation of a star catalogue compiled by Hipparchus, much of whose original work, in Greek, Ptolemy summarized and supplemented in his own book.
But Adeodatus has already begun his recitation:
“First, the Earth circles the Sun, just as Aristarchus of Samos posited. Second, beyond Saturn are three planets that no Western observer has ever beheld. Third, there is a force that I can best call attractiveness that governs the movements of both planetary bodies and stars. Fourth, the Sun is but an unprepossessing minnow of a star in an enormous school of stars that the Cathayans call the Silver Whirlpool. Fifth, as many of these ‘schools’ of stars swim through the universe as do solitary stars in our local Silver Whirlpool. The Cathayans have their own picturesque word for these enormous stellar families, but let me simply call them lactastrons, for they resemble whirlpools of curdled milk. Sixth, light travels at a speed—accurately determined a century ago by an Eastern Chin astronomer named Wang Mi—that is a universal constant. Seventh, this speed, altogether peculiarly, does not increase if you add any other velocity to it. Eighth—
”
Just as I first supposed, Augustine thinks. My visitor—my son—is a madman. Flesh of my flesh, a lunatic.
Aloud he protests: “How can you add something to something else without making it larger?”
Adeodatus hesitates. “I don’t know. But Wang Mi conclusively determined that nothing exceeds the speed of light, and from this discovery eventually sprang Sung Hsi-chien’s … well, I can only translate these remarkable constructs as his ‘Postulatum of Temporal Comparativity’ and his ‘Postulatum of Attractive Comparativity.’ From them, Father, Sung and his best students were able to go on to the formulation of a ‘New Cosmogony,’ and it is that great truth—with its implications for faith and eschatology—into which I want to initiate you.”
“Add one to ten,” Augustine growls. “It sums to eleven. You cannot add something to something else without enlarging it.”
Adeodatus puts a hand on his father’s forearm. “Add Christ to God, Father. Have you made the Almighty greater?”
The old man is stymied. “No” is the only orthodox answer. To say “Yes” would be to embrace a heresy akin to Arianism, the chief spiritual error of Hippo’s besiegers.
Adeodatus resumes his lecture. He talks of lactastrons—milky clans of stars—thousands of annilumes away. The Cathayans, he says, have so refined the arts of lens- and mirror-making that they can see the microworlds at their fingertips as profitably as they can the cosmos annilumes beyond our own whirl of planets. Indeed, they have discovered the basic units of matter (atoms, to follow Democritus) and ordered the various earthly elements on a graph now used as a vital pedagogic tool in their science academies.
Yet another device—Adeodatus, with a Greek twist, translates it as chromoscope—enables Cathayan astronomers to deduce the physical composition of celestial bodies and so to classify them. What they know about the creation of the heavens and the Earth beggars the imagination; not even the poetry of Genesis is grand enough to hymn the boldness of their discoveries.
“You’re insane,” Augustine says. “These outlandish lies reveal your contempt for me. They blaspheme the Creator.”
“Father Augustine, I’m not asking you to deny God or to betray Christ. Once, Catholicism struck you as ridiculous. You were a Manichee who dismissed the faith of your mother, Monica, as beneath the consideration of the educated. Yet today, caught in orthodoxy, you spurn the knowledge I bring from Cathay because it seems—at first—contrary to your current thinking. When, Father, did your mind petrify? Don’t you see that not one item in my catalogue of wonders sabotages your faith at any essential level?”
Where does this graybeard boy get the audacity to prate of the petrification of my mind? Augustine asks himself. Why, from me, of course. He inherited it.…
Later that day, three men try to pay Augustine their respects: Possidius, who brings the prandium, a midday meal of cheese, fruit, and wine; Eraclius, the priest who succeeded Augustine in the basilica’s pulpit; and Vindicianus, a physician who wants to apply a poultice of grape hulls and olive oil to Augustine’s forehead.
Following his father’s wishes, Adeodatus allows the prandium to enter, but not the man who brought it. He also turns away Eraclius and Vindicianus. On departing, the latter announces that Augustine probably won’t live to regret declining his poultice.
The bishop eats another pear—forbidden fruit, it seems to him, and therefore gloriously sweet—while his son takes the cheese and most of the watered wine. As they refuel themselves, Adeodatus continues his recitation:
In addition to planets, stars, nebular bodies, and lactastrons of all shapes, sizes, and degrees of energy production, the cosmos contains such perplexing phenomena as “invisible abysses” (dying stars whose own terrible “attractiveness” has led them to collapse into colossal stellar deadfalls) and “quasistrons” (“almost-stars” which a Northern Wei observer, Hong-yi Chiu, detected twenty-five years ago with the sky-ray-gathering telescopes in the Takla Makan Desert). These latter phenomena, Adeodatus tells Augustine, appear to be the most distant objects in all the created universe. That they should even be detectable suggests that they are pouring into the void more candlepower and invisible-ray emissions than all the suns in the entire Silver Whirlpool. Perhaps each quasistron is a battlefield in the war between the fallen angels in Lucifer’s camp and the seraphic host still loyal to God.
“Those battles occurred near time’s nativity,” says Augustine. “Even if they continue today in every human breast, they began long before God made Adam.”
“Exactly. The light from quasistrons has been en route to us from five to ten billion years; we are peering not only to the far periphery of the universe but also to its temporal infancy. We are retro-observing the pangs of Creation.”
Augustine’s temples throb. He cannot say if he is exhilarated or demoralized by this news. Or even whether he believes it.
“Undoubtedly, most of the quasistrons Hong-yi Chiu has found and indexed don’t even exist anymore.” Adeodatus shows his father the luminopict again. “Look. This is Hong-yi. This stout, youthful fellow standing next to Sung. It was in his household that I lived for the last six years of my sojourn in Cathay. He believes that quasistrons—the term almost-stars was his coinage, and even Sung came to approve it—are the hearts of forming lactastrons, and that quasistrons derive their power from invisible abysses—‘attraction pits’—eating all the interstellar matter around them. If angelic war preceded the generation of lactastrons, Father, it was a war of unholy violence. But, on the macrocosmic level at least, that war has been over for billions of years.”
“More mendaciousness,” Augustine counters. “Reckoning by our sacred scriptures, we know that not six thousand years have passed since Creation.” But the authority with which Adeodatus states his case has sabotaged the old man’s certitude.
“The scriptures are often metaphorical, Father, and Sung’s New Cosmogony invalidates their chronology.”
Augustine refrains from crying blasphemy; he has already done that. “Stop temporizing, then. Tell me Sung’s theory.”
Relieved, the graybeard boy talks of sky-ray transmission, the ongoing sibilance of the void, and a law whose discovery he credits to Hong-yi Chiu’s father, Hong-yi Pang, who stated it thus: “All lactastrons but the nearest are fleeing from our Silver Whirlpool at velocities in harmony with their distances.”
The “Formula of Hong-yi Pang,” as Adeodatus terms it, implies that every lactastron in the cosmos had its beginning in a compact central locale. Time and matter alike were frozen together in a lump in this primeval place. Presumably, upon God’s command they exploded like a many-vented volcano, flinging the ingredients of Creation out into the virgin dark.
But it was old Sung Hsi-chien who formed this idea from his own theories of comparativity, the observations of four generations of Cathayan stargazers, the hypotheses of a forward-looking school of microtheoreticians, and the lactastron law of the elder Hong-yi. Sung called his simple but startling explanation of the origin of the cosmos the “Earliest Eruption Postulatum.”
Adeodatus, Augustine senses, places more faith in Sung’s theory than in the opening verses of Genesis. Oddly, however, his son’s enthusiasm for the Cathayan’s cosmogony excites him, too. Excites and frightens …
He gropes for a response: “Billions of leagues, billions of years. Adeodatus, you play among these enormous figures like a boy stirring a stick in an anthill. How did Hong-yi Chiu, this friend of yours, arrive at the absurd conclusion that his ‘almost-stars’—his quasistrons—are so preposterously far away?” The bishop has realized that the vast stretches of time in Sung’s cosmogony depend for their validity—granting the accuracy of Wang Mi’s calculation of the speed of light—on the reliability of Cathayan assessments of interstellar distances; and so he seeks, halfheartedly perhaps, to attack the postulatum at this point.
A strategy that fails to disconcert his son. Adeodatus speaks of measuring the distance to stars by noting their differences in
observed direction when viewed at different times in the Earth’s orbit about the Sun. Again translating from the Cathayan, he calls this difference the transprox of the star. He goes on to talk of the chromolume patterns of heavenly bodies and of how those of his friend Chiu’s quasistrons disclose a sanguineous conversion typical of celestial bodies receding at high speeds. The evidence for the existence of great distances and of vast stretches of time in the constitution of the universe, he implies, is overwhelming; only an illiterate reversionary would question it.
“Now when I set out for home from Ku-shih, Father,” Adeodatus concedes, “a dispute was raging between my friend Chiu and another of Sung’s disciples, An Hopeh, about the meaning of the sanguineous conversions shown by Chiu’s quasistrons. Did the lengthening—the reddening—of the light rays from these almost-stars result from their rapid recession from us or from curious attractional effects that would permit us to think them much nearer our own lactastron, possibly even within it?
“This was an important dispute. If the reddening derived from recession, it would confirm Sung’s Earliest Eruption Postulatum: the universe is ever inflating. If, on the other hand, it results from a discordant attractiveness in Chiu’s quasistrons, the enemies of Sung’s postulatum—those who believe that something other than a primeval eruption began the universe—could rightfully take heart. Further, they wouldn’t have to explain from where the quasistrons gather all the ‘fuel’ to burn so brightly for so long. Because the almost-stars would be nearer than Chiu believes, they wouldn’t be as perplexingly bright as he has always claimed.
“In any event, Father, An Hopeh had many allies, astronomers jealous of old Sung or simply unhappy with the notion of a universe forever expanding. Not long before I left, however, the dispute seemed to be resolving itself in Hong-yi Chiu’s favor. Two of his pupils at the Lo-yang Academy of Sky Studies found some quasistrons surrounded by a faint, glowing pilosity. A luminous hairiness. It had the precise look of very distant lactastrons, and chromoscopic surveys of the light from this pilosity show it to exhibit the same sanguineous conversion—reddening—as the almost-stars embedded in it. This seems to prove that Chiu’s quasistrons are truly billions of annilumes away and that Sung is right in crediting the origin of the universe to a primordial eruption.”
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection Page 82