Wonders of a Godless World

by Andrew McGahan

  Calm, orphan. No one has touched you yet.

  Gratitude swept the horrible apparitions away. It hadn’t happened. It wasn’t too late. The foreigner had rescued her. For a while she merely drifted, happy. But the tug in her belly remained. And it was cold, wherever she was. Cold and silent.

  Open your eyes, and see.

  There was an excitement in his voice quite unlike anything she had ever heard from him before. She opened her eyes. And there was the earth, hanging directly in front of her, shining against a backdrop of pure black.

  But it was so small, so far away! Why, if she stretched her arms out, she would be able to encompass the whole world between her hands. A terror rose in her, a wild vertigo. She was falling. The earth was at the bottom of a deep pit, and she had just leapt over the side, and now she was dropping, dropping, picking up speed…

  You are not falling. Quite the opposite.

  She clung to the reassurance, and her panic receded. She focused her senses, and this time saw that the planet, rather than looming up, was actually slowly shrinking. They were moving away from the earth.

  Yes. At least, our shadow selves are…

  Nor was she deceived by the slowness. If something so vast as the world had been reduced by distance to a shining bauble, and was visibly dwindling further even now, then their speed must be impressive indeed.

  It is. We can go faster still—but already, this is faster than anyone else has ever gone.

  How?

  We weigh no more than a thought, orphan.

  She shivered, uncomprehending, but aware again of the cold, more penetrating than any earthly chill. And the silence around them was more than just the lack of any noise; it was, somehow, the impossibility of any noise.

  It’s a vacuum. There’s no air here.

  No air?

  We are in space.

  Ah…The orphan let her gaze stray from the earth, and finally she understood. The backdrop to the shining planet was not merely darkness. It was a gulf, a chasm that reached off in every direction, bottomless. It was space. This was where the foreigner had lived in the weeks before his last fiery death. This was where he had felt, more than anywhere else, at home.

  Yes, but we are already far beyond the reach of the shuttles. Indeed, only a few men have been further out than we are now. But they were in small metal capsules, with tiny windows. They were not free to fly, as you and I are free.

  She could hear the joy in him, and wanted to share it. This was the escape he so craved—the planet left behind, impotent to pull them back, their ghost selves too strong and too fast. But somehow all she felt was afraid, and cold, and strangely alone, the tug in her belly like an ache of sadness.

  He was not holding her hand, she realised. In all their other flights, their shadows had been holding hands, just as their real bodies had been. But now their real bodies were in different rooms. She could not go to him and he could not go to her. Maybe that was why she felt so detached from him. His shape was at her side, a wraith faintly aglow, as beautiful as ever. He held her now by the sheer force of his mind. But it wasn’t the same as the grip of his fingers. She missed holding hands.

  The earth was smaller still. And even though there was no wind, no feeling of acceleration, she sensed that their velocity was becoming tremendous.

  Where were they going?

  There is something out here I want to show you.

  But what about her operation?

  It is not going to take place right away. The surgeon is a busy man. He cannot fit you in until a week from now. So you have time, a little at least. Alas, I may not have as long. The crowd in front of the hospital will not wait forever.

  So they weren’t safe, and this flight was only a reprieve, no better than a dream from which she would wake, still strapped to the bed.

  It’s no dream. Only wait. You’ll see soon.

  But with that he fell silent, and the orphan could sense his intense concentration. The earth had become no bigger than a melon, swirling blue. They were flying backwards, she realised, facing the planet but moving away from it. Towards the sun. She did not dare turn to look, lest she be blinded, but she could feel it over her shoulder. An inferno, unshielded out here by any atmosphere, hideously bright.

  But now—how bizarre—something white and huge was looming over her other shoulder. She turned to it, stared in wonder.

  It was the moon!

  But so gigantic! So wide and round, etched hard against the blackness. It had never occurred to the orphan that the moon could possibly be so large. It had always seemed such an ethereal thing. Yet here it was, not ethereal at all but brutally solid, and seemingly as massive as the earth.

  And yet it was nothing like the earth. There was no blur of air to soften its edges, no swirl of clouds, no shimmer of water. Its surface was a wasteland of monochrome grey, shattered into craters or pulverised into dusty plains. A lifeless veneer. And the orphan could tell there was no life below the crust, either. There was no hot magma pulsing, no iron core spinning, no warm magnetic heartbeat. The moon was tepid rock right through. Not even a volcano would ever be born there.

  She hated it immediately.

  But up it rushed, as if they must surely crash into it headlong. It was only at the last moment that they veered slightly, and instead went swooping across the moon’s face, hugging the surface in an arc from horizon to horizon. And so astonishing was their speed that in less than a second they had crossed the entire hemisphere and were shooting off into space again at a new angle. The orphan barely registered the transit—a flicker of white, and of stark black shadows—and when she looked back, the moon was already shrinking behind them, a ball hurled away over a cliff.

  The foreigner was laughing, but she felt none of his elation. The dead moon, the pale earth, the silently roaring sun, from out here she could sense that they were all in motion, circling each other in some perpetual dance of the spheres, another wonder—but it was too forbidding, too inhuman in scale. It filled her only with dread. Life was unwelcome out here. She felt it as almost a personal hostility. She was unwelcome here. She had a rightful place to belong, and empty space wasn’t it.

  But her rightful place had diminished now to no more than a small blue marble, the details of land and sea lost. The tug in her gut had become sharp enough to be painful, and at last she knew what it was. Her body missed the earth. It was rebelling against being ripped from its proper environment. It wanted to go back, and the ache in her would only increase with distance. But they were accelerating still.

  She looked at the ghost flying at her side. Didn’t he feel the pain too? But no, he had talked of this—of the affliction that struck down space travellers when they were taken from earth, the loneliness. But it hadn’t affected him. He’d been glad to be rid of the planet. And now he was stealing her away too…

  There’s no need to be afraid. We’ll return quite safely.

  But it hurt!

  It’s an emotion, not a physical pain. Look away from the earth now. Look away from the moon. Look ahead. Look out into the universe.

  She felt her shadow body revolving. The earth, with its moon shrunk to a dot, shifted from her field of view. For a moment she was dazzled by a glimpse of the sun, a ferocious glare, but then it was gone and she was facing forward into darkness. The cold seared her eyes and she wept. The sun, the earth, the moon—everything she had ever known was behind her now.

  Yes, but out there…

  Out there were the stars, a multitude of blurred pinpoints through her tears. But as her vision cleared she saw just how brightly those pinpoints blazed, not merely hinting at colours but boldly shining out red and green and blue. And space itself was not black—between the stars it was dusted with sheets of pink, and with clouds of faint silver, twisted in ribbons and blown like the thinnest gauze. So much colour, so many stars. What were stars anyway? She had never thought of it before. They had seemed such tiny things from the earth, so twinkling, so delicate. But out
here they were fierce and hard and frightening. They did not seem tiny, they only seemed far away. And then there were the great wheels and discs of brightness that she intuited were made of even more stars, further off.

  The foreigner spoke as if it was something wonderful. They are suns, all of them, like our sun.

  A kind of horror filled the orphan. Suns? They were all suns? It was too much, it was too dizzying. Was there no end to it, no edge, no finality? She would be lost out here, with no way home. They had gone too far already.

  Not far enough yet. Nor fast enough.

  He was pushing them even harder. But the velocity that had come so effortlessly before was costing him severely now. There was no longer the sensation of simply flying or falling, now it was like fighting forward into something, as if the structure of space, empty as it might appear, was beginning to resist.

  Not space exactly, but the law of relativity…His voice was taut with effort. But still they accelerated.

  And now everything was turning strange. The stars had begun to spiral inwards to a central point directly ahead, their colours shifting. How was that possible? And the orphan’s shadow body, always so weightless, was becoming somehow solid and heavy. Suddenly space was like a gale into which they leant.

  Almost…almost…

  And then time stopped.

  At least, something stopped, and the orphan had no word for it other than time. It was as if they had run full tilt into a wall, even though they were still moving so fast that the stars ahead of them had been stretched into an elongated warp of light. An extremity had been reached. A boundary. A limit. And the pain! It ignited in her gut, an agony of separation as they raced away from the earth as fast as the universe would allow. For a timeless heartbeat they held there, then for another…

  Then with a cry the foreigner released his grip, and their speed was tumbling downwards from the ultimate, the stars were unwinding, and both of them were sobbing—she with relief, and he with vindication and exhaustion.

  Was that it? the orphan wondered, dazed. Was that what he had brought her out here to experience? Could they go home now?

  No…

  He had stopped pushing, and for a time they merely coasted, slowing steadily all the while, the pull of the sun at their backs dragging on them like an anchor. At length, however, he recovered, and spoke again.

  Well done, orphan. We have now travelled almost forty million kilometres. Most of it in those few moments at light speed. That’s a hundred times as far as the moon is from the earth. At this point, in fact, we are halfway out to the next planet in the solar system.

  But where were they?

  Nowhere. The end of our journey…

  But what had they come here for?

  Ahead there. Do you see it?

  The orphan looked, saw only the stars and the depths of space, normal again, unwarped, now that she and the foreigner had slowed down.

  There was nothing.

  He laughed wearily. Look again.

  And then, there it was.

  28

  At first she thought it was only a trick of her vision, a dark wrinkle caught against the background of the universe. But then she saw that something was rushing towards them, a blackness that blotted out the stars as it came. Quickly it swelled in size, and then a shape was hurtling by them, monstrous, and yet so dark that it defied the eye. Instantly it was gone again, diving towards the sun.

  But then the foreigner set off in pursuit, the orphan with him, and as they caught up with the object it was outlined briefly against the sun’s glare. The orphan saw a blunt, elongated mass. Awed, she understood that it was a chunk of rock they were chasing, as immense as the entire island on which she lived.

  It’s bigger. Official estimates have it as roughly fifty kilometres long, and about thirty-five kilometres across.

  But what was it?

  A comet.

  Satisfaction radiated from him. But the orphan was cold and aching, and saw little to like in a pile of black stone plunging blindly through space, whatever its dimensions.

  It isn’t plunging blindly. It’s following its orbit, at over one hundred and ninety thousand kilometres per hour. And it isn’t just stone. It contains ice, too.

  But ice was white and gleaming…

  True. But this body has been gathering dust and debris for millions of years, far out on the rim of the solar system. Its frozen elements are buried deep. They are black creatures, comets. Blacker than soot. It isn’t until they approach the sun—when the ice inside them melts and streams out into space—that comets shine.

  His mind showed her what he meant, and she saw a fuzzy nub of light with a fanned tail sprawling out, spectacular, big enough to dwarf any planet. And yet tenuous, a wisp of cloud blown by an airless wind.

  Some of them are famous. They’re given names, and come and go every few decades. But this one has no name, and will not come this way again for thousands of years. It’s what’s known as a long-period comet—so small, so dark, so far out at aphelion that it’s extremely difficult for astronomers to detect. In fact, they discovered this one only a few months ago, when it was already well on its way in. I remember. I was on the shuttle at the time.

  The orphan studied the dark mass. If it really contained the sort of life he was describing, then it defeated her sight. It seemed just as dead and hateful to her as the moon had. She lifted her eyes to the sun, rising like a miniature dawn over the comet’s jagged horizon. Bright, painfully bright. But turning her eyes well away from it, she saw, out in the blackness, a blue dot. Ah, and how the beauty of that dot pierced her. She thought of warm breezes on her skin, of the smell of dirt, of a hazy sky that softened the sunlight…and pain bit at her insides.

  The foreigner was still glorying in his prize. Bear in mind, the announcement of the discovery drew little attention. As comets go, this one is quite unremarkable, and on its inward fall will pass no closer to the earth than eleven million kilometres. But for some reason—a premonition, perhaps—I took note. I studied its orbit. And even through my fiery death, I remembered.

  So I knew where to find it out here.

  The orphan fought against irritation. This ugly lump excited him more than anything else about their venture into space. But why? It could affect nothing back at the hospital. So what were they doing here?

  We’re here, my orphan, because if you and I so decide, we can alter the path of this thing. It’s only a matter of giving it a sustained push.

  A push? But it was huge, it was—

  We’ve already tested the sort of power we can command. We were strong enough to throw down the landslide. This comet is far bigger, yes, but if we want to, we should be able to alter its trajectory. Just sufficiently.

  She still didn’t understand. Even if it was possible, what would be the point? How would shifting this rock’s course help anything?

  Because then the comet wouldn’t miss the earth by eleven million kilometres. Or even by one. We can make it hit the earth head-on.

  Shocked, the orphan tore her gaze away from the comet to look at him. In the cold sunlight his shadow self appeared to glow like flame.

  What did he mean, hit the earth?

  I mean—save ourselves. From all those who want to cut you open and ruin the astonishing thing that you are. From all those who are afraid of me and want to move me away from you. The doctors. The townspeople. If we could change this comet’s course, it could free us from all of them.

  But how?

  By clearing them out of our way. Oh, I don’t pretend that we could aim this rock so accurately as to hit your island directly, but we don’t need to. All we have to do is make it impact somewhere in the surrounding ocean. The wave created would be titanic. It would sweep your little island bare in moments.

  What?! The old doctor, the nurses, the patients, all those people in the little town and the big—they would die!

  They are lesser beings, orphan, and will die soon enough anyway. In ten years o
r twenty or fifty. What does it matter if it comes a little sooner?

  It would be murder! And they were her friends!

  Friends? They have you strapped down and are about to mutilate you in the worst possible way. They are not your friends. They pity you, they dismiss you, they have never appreciated you properly. And even if they did grasp just how wonderful you really are, they would only hate and envy you and want you destroyed.

  Emotions of every kind battled within the orphan. What he was saying was far too cold and cruel. And yet certain parts of her rebelled in wild agreement, a kind of wanton liberation from everything else she believed or thought right. Because they really could do this. They actually had the power.

  Oh, but it was nonsense. If the comet’s giant wave swept the island clean, then they would die too, she and the foreigner.

  Have you forgotten? I wouldn’t die. I would be injured, yes, lost again in the ocean, this body wrecked…but I would survive, as I always have.

  Ah. Yes. She had forgotten. But had he forgotten in turn? That she wasn’t like him? That if the comet struck, then she would die…

  His low laugh turned all her certainties to ash.

  Little one…you won’t die.

  Do you think for an instant that I’d risk you? Don’t you see? This is what your special abilities really mean. This is why you don’t need food or water or sleep. This is why you have only become stronger and more beautiful without them.

  Orphan, you are as immortal as I am.

  And there it was. The orphan found she was staring at the sun, only it seemed black now, surrounded by a halo that writhed in slow tendrils. She would not die. She would live on and on. She could be with him forever.

  I don’t say there won’t be pain if we do this. I know—who better?—how terrible even temporary death can be. But at least this way—if we use this comet to set ourselves free—we will both be reborn. Then the earth and the solar system and the universe can be ours to explore together, for as long as we could ever need.

  But if we do nothing, and they cut you open, if they mutilate you in that particular way, then we lose each other forever. Our one chance would vanish. You would return to simple stupidity, and I would be as I was before—alone in the world, wandering only in my mind, limited, chained to the planet, and powerless.