The Voyage of the White Cloud

by M. Darusha Wehm

  Gina heard the sound of the door opening and quickly closed the file. She turned in time to see Devon walk into their quarters. She stood and walked into his warm embrace. “How was your morning?” she asked when he’d withdrawn.

  “Good,” he said. “Great, actually. There’s a prime spot coming free in the market and I’ve been given first bid.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Gina said. “Location matters a lot.”

  “I know,” Devon said, sinking into the soft chair he favoured. “I really think that this might start paying off for us.”

  Gina sat on the arm of the chair and smoothed Devon’s long hair. When they had met it had been black, a shock of darkness against his pale skin. Now it was shot through with silver, but still luxuriously full. “The credits don’t matter,” she said. “You paint so beautifully that it would be criminal not to share your talents. I don’t mind bringing home the credits so long as you don’t mind making do with this.” She spread her hands out to indicate the small quarters with their spartan furnishings.

  “I’d be happy living in an access tube so long as we could be together and I could paint,” Devon said, finishing his part of this well-worn conversation, “but hopefully we can do better than this soon. It’s about time, Gina, don’t you think? About time we had a little luck?”

  She kissed his forehead. “About time,” she echoed.

  Devon spent his mornings at the garden, to catch the good light he said. It was convenient for Gina, because she worked the second shift at the water reclamation plant. Devon’s early morning session gave her a few hours on her own each day. A few hours to watch her image, to focus on her own practice. She knew she couldn’t tell even Devon, knew what would happen if anyone learned about it. It was her secret, her own private worship. She knew that there were forces in the universe beyond human understanding, and she also knew what would happen if she talked about them. It had happened before. She was careful now.

  She was barely a teenager the first time. That was the only reason she got away—she told the people who interviewed her that she didn’t understand, that she just did what she was told. They’d believed her and let her go, but she saw what happened to her friends. She saw them taken away to the medclinic, their kin told that they were sick and that they had to be removed from society and helped. She shook her head, fighting the anger that still rose in her when she thought about it.

  Even then, part of her died a little when she denied her faith. She knew it was a sin to parrot the false theories they taught in school. But Reverend Sproule was clear—it was a greater sin to be denied the ability to worship than to pretend disbelief. Gina herself heard the reverend claim not to be a member of the outlawed cult when the meeting had been raided. They’d been caught in the act, though, the illegal act of worship. It had been impossible for the others to plausibly deny involvement. Gina knew she had been blessed in her escape.

  Of course, she was watched. She was only thirteen, so it had been easy to monitor her. Until she was caught at the meeting, she’d been left more or less to herself. Gina’s mother, Barbara, was a senior engineer. She spent far more time away from home than she did in their double-sized quarters, so Gina had the run of the place. Even so, she had a room of her own with a bed and a half dozen of her very own toys. As soon as it was practical, Barbara hired a caregiver for Gina, a young woman from a neighbouring farming community. Zola.

  From the beginning, Gina loved Zola with the fierce loyalty of the very young. She would cling to Zola’s hand when they walked to the park and Zola would have to coax Gina with promises of treats in order to get her to go play with the other children. It was while Gina was climbing up the rope ladder castle that she first saw Reverend Sproule. Of course, she didn’t know who the woman talking with Zola was, she just knew that Zola treated this woman with more respect than Gina had ever seen her free-spirited nanny exhibit.

  “Zola, Zola, Zola!” she called from her perch at the top of the ropes. Her beloved face turned away from this newcomer to see Gina waving at her. Gina saw a look she didn’t understand cross Zola’s face as she waved back at Gina, a look that seemed to hold fear, hope and self-consciousness in equal measure.

  She was immediately curious about this person who could make someone as constant and strong as Zola lose her confidence.

  “Did you have fun today, little one?” Zola asked as Gina clutched her hand on the walk back to Gina’s quarters.

  “Uh huh,” Gina said, looking up at Zola. She stared at the woman, questions she didn’t have the vocabulary to form filling her gaze. Zola stopped around the corner to the entrance to the food market and knelt down before Gina.

  “Can you do something for me?” she asked and Gina nodded earnestly. “Can you keep a secret?” Gina nodded again, her lips parting a little in excitement. “The lady I was talking to at the park today, it’s important that no one else knows that I was talking to her, okay?”

  Gina frowned. “Is she a bad person?”

  Zola shook her head and Gina saw a flash of anger in her eyes. “No,” she said, “she is definitely not a bad person. But there are people who don’t understand that and they want to hurt her. And if she gets hurt, I will be very sad. So, can I trust you not to tell anyone?”

  Gina didn’t hesitate. “You can count on me,” she said. Anyone who was important to Zola was important to her, too. Gina would protect this strange person at any cost.

  At first Gina didn’t like sharing Zola with Reverend Sproule, who began spending more and more time with them. She missed the days when Zola would spend all day playing with her, reading stories or drawing. Now, Zola still woke her in the morning with warm bread drizzled with honey, then helped her get dressed, but now as many days as not Reverend Sproule would arrive and Gina would be, not ignored, but not the centre of attention. There were times when she thought seriously about breaking her word and telling her mother about Reverend Sproule. She was certain, even though she did not know why, that her mother would be very unhappy if she knew what was going on.

  But Gina also guessed that if Reverend Sproule was sent away, Zola might go with her. And she had promised Zola to keep her secret. If she told, Zola would be angry and Gina did not want that. She forced her young, impatient mind to abide.

  By the time Gina was about to start her first day at school, she had become almost as fond of Reverend Sproule as she was of Zola. The three of them would spend hours talking about the universe beyond the walls of the ship, about old Earth and their ancestors. Reverend Sproule explained that many people of Earth had believed in creatures of infinite power which had created the universe, the Earth and everything on the planet. She explained that they were called gods and the people worshipped them as if they could affect their everyday lives. Gina had laughed and asked if the people of Earth were stupid.

  “Not stupid,” Reverend Sproule said, “just ignorant. And when they had science to explain their world, many of them still clung to the old beliefs because the stories were powerful to soothe them. It gave them rules to live by, a community to join. And they knew, deep inside, that to worship that which is greater than yourself is one of the most fundamental parts of humanity.”

  Gina frowned. “But, did they not have kin? Laws? Why did they need imaginary beings to make their rules?”

  “Well,” the reverend said, “the beliefs themselves were kind of like those nettles in the gardens—once they attached themselves to someone it was hard to get them off, and people passed them on to their children and grandchildren. You know how those nettles are—long after they’ve died and can no longer spread their spores, they still hang on to the fabric of your jacket.”

  Gina nodded, but she wasn’t entirely sure she understood the metaphor. “Well, at least no one here believes in imaginary gods.”

  The reverend and Zola looked at each other and Gina wondered if she had said something wrong. “No,” the reverend said. “No one believes in gods. Not like that.”

  Gina
remembered sitting at the large table in her quarters, her tablet in front of her, puzzling over her homework. “Is a parsec bigger or smaller than an Astronomical Unit?”

  “Why don’t you look up the definition of each?” Zola said and Gina sighed. She wished Zola would just answer the question. It wasn’t math homework, she was just trying to understand this poem, Infinite Stars in a Finite Sky. She knew there would be a question about it on her literature test. That was how Zola always was, though. Even if she knew the answer, she always made Gina find it herself.

  She looked it up and then went back to the poem. Hope as wide as a parsec, she wrote in her notes, is really big. “I can’t even imagine distances that big,” she said absently to Zola, trying to stall finishing her homework.

  “It is an awesome concept,” Zola said, her voice serious, “the vastness of the universe in all its wonder.”

  “Yeah,” Gina said, not really thinking about it.

  “Would you like to come to a meeting with me sometime?” Zola said, almost nervously, Gina thought.

  “I…” She didn’t quite know what to say. She’d always thought that the meetings were something for adults, like open mouthed kissing or drinking the stinky cider. “Yes, please,” she said, finally. She would still do anything for Zola.

  There were only seven people in the room and Gina had seen most of them before in the neighbourhood. Reverend Sproule, of course, and Zola. Gina recognized Danny Fischmann, the medic’s assistant, from the time she’d broken her ankle from jumping off the top of a train car. She smiled at him and saw his eyes go wide. He glanced at Zola who nodded and he smiled, but Gina could tell he was scared. Why would a big man like Mister Fischmann be scared of her, she thought. She was only eleven years old.

  She sat next to Zola and waited. She was nervous, though she couldn’t have explained why. It just felt like this was a big deal, a secret event that she’d been specially invited to. It seemed important and, even though she didn’t know why, she felt proud to be allowed to be there.

  Everyone had been chatting with each other, then all of a sudden they seemed to know to stop. They looked expectantly at Reverend Sproule, who was staring up at a spot in the ceiling. Gina looked up, too, but she didn’t see anything particular there. She looked over at Zola, who was sitting quietly with her eyes closed. Nothing happened for what seemed like forever to Gina, so when Reverend Sproule finally spoke, Gina jumped.

  “It is time,” she said and the others responded, “time is everything.” Then nothing happened for another long period. Gina’s bottom was starting to get sore, but she could tell that she was supposed to be quiet and still. She wondered how long this was going to go on when one of the other people suddenly stood up. He was a young man, younger than Zola or her mother, and Gina had seen him before, but she couldn’t remember where. He opened his eyes and began to talk.

  “I can feel it,” he said, “the passage of space around me.” He paused and looked around the room. Gina wondered what that meant. “The illusion of change, the lie of death, it is all falling away as I focus my mind on the atoms around me. All praises to the master of all things, the mother of the universe.”

  “All glory to time, and to time all glory,” the others intoned. Gina didn’t understand any of it, but there was something magical about being with these people. The looks on their faces were serious yet full of some kind of joy she’d never seen before. They seemed to experience something very different in that room than Gina had ever seen. She wanted to feel what they felt.

  After the service was over, Gina and Zola stayed behind. “What did you think?” Reverend Sproule asked Gina. She looked at Zola, wanting to say the right thing. She wanted to impress Reverend Sproule, to make her think she was smart and deserving. But she didn’t know what to say.

  “It’s okay,” Zola said, as if she could read Gina’s fears in her face, “no one expects it to have made much sense to you.”

  Gina frowned. That sounded like the kind of thing that people said when they thought a kid couldn’t understand something complicated, but Gina was good at figuring thing out. She understood a lot more than most grown-ups gave her credit for. Zola wasn’t usually like that, though, so she let it pass. After all, the service really hadn’t made much sense.

  “Well,” she started, “I didn’t really understand what was going on. What that man talked about—I don’t know what that meant. And at first it was kind of boring,” she said, her face flushing with embarrassment, though Reverend Sproule smiled, so she went on. “But then, after a while, it was nice just sitting in the silence, letting everything kind of just go by. Like time sort of stopped for a bit, you know?”

  Zola looked over at Reverend Sproule, her smile making Gina’s heart beat faster. “I knew it,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

  Reverend Sproule nodded. “Gina, would you like to learn about something that is very important, in fact it is the most important information in the whole universe?” Gina nodded. “The thing is, it’s secret knowledge. So secret, that just telling you about it could get me in a lot of trouble. These meetings, this worship we do, it’s not allowed on the ship. So you need to know, before we go on, that there is a cost to this knowledge. Do you understand?”

  Gina thought for a moment. She knew there were many things that weren’t allowed on the ship—taking something that belonged to someone else, hurting other people, refusing to become a mother. But those things were all bad, she knew that, too. She couldn’t imagine that Zola would ever do something bad, would let her do something that was bad. So this knowledge, these meetings, why would they be forbidden? She asked Reverend Sproule to explain.

  The reverend sighed. “It’s complicated,” she said. “But most simply, it’s because the people who make the rules don’t believe that what we know to be true is true. And they don’t like the consequences of what we know, either.”

  Gina frowned. “Consequences?”

  “Yes,” Zola said. “The way you believe the universe works affects the choices you make. It is the most important piece of understanding you have, because everything you do is based on that knowledge.”

  “So,” Gina said, trying to put together everything they had said, “you believe the universe works differently from the way everyone else thinks it does. And people don’t like that?”

  “Exactly,” Reverend Sproule said, smiling. “Now,” she said, leaning forward in her chair and looking Gina squarely in the eye, “do you want to know?”

  In the two years between Gina’s first confused meeting and the day they had sentenced the others to confinement in the medical lab, Gina had spent all her free time studying the teachings. At first it was really just to please Zola and Reverend Sproule, but the more she learned the more she thought it just made sense. She had often wondered what came before the universe, what would happen when it finally crunched back in on itself. Because there had to be a before and there had to be an after, that was how everything worked.

  But what if things didn’t really work that way at all? What if, instead of time flowing through the universe, the universe flowed through time? What if time was the creator of matter, what if it was matter that was suffused with entropy but time stood still? Then there was no waiting, no need to hope. No fear of death. If all is now, then everything that was and all that will be exist now, too. The very possibility made Gina’s eyes water.

  She had known her whole life that she was part of the Glorious Middle—those who would never see a planet, never be held by real gravity. It wasn’t something that had ever bothered her before, it was just reality. She hardly even thought about where people came from, where they were going, until she learned about Time.

  When the medics came and took Zola away, Gina cried and cried. Her mother took two days off work to be with her, and spent the whole time apologizing for leaving Gina with a “religious freak.” Gina knew she had to be careful, had to repudiate her closest friends, and it was so hard. The lies she tol
d about them were half the reason for her tears, but her mother and the others believed them. Her mother said, more than once, that no daughter of hers would be poisoned by such ignorant thoughts.

  “Worshipping time,” she said, disgust clearly in her voice. “Who would think such a thing? A person might as well kneel before the great god of distance. How ridiculous. It’s such a shame you had to listen to their nonsense, Gina my darling. I’m so sorry you had to go through this.”

  Gina nodded and sniffled and clenched her fists so hard the nails bit into the skin of her hands. “It’s all right now, mother,” she said. “I’m just glad that they’ll finally get the help they need.” As she said the acid words, in her mind, she prayed. Father of the past, mother of the future, hold my kin close to the heart of your spiral. Let them pass from this point in space to another, free from the indignities they suffer in your name’s sake. Let it be, now as it is and as it was and evermore shall be.

  It is one of the great things about ideas, about beliefs—they require only to live in your mind, they can be kept secret. Alone in her quarters, Gina worshipped daily. She developed a reputation as a bit of a loner, one of the quiet kids. Other members of her class at school were getting in trouble for wrecking the gardens with their parties and sneaking bottles of wine, but not Gina. Her teachers praised her studious nature and her mother was convinced that she would follow in her footsteps with a career in engineering. But when Gina left school, she chose to take the first job she could get. It was the closest she ever came to letting her secret out.

  “But why?” her mother asked, “you would easily be accepted at the Academy if you applied.”