by Anne Corlett
Lowry looked down at his mug, his thumb rubbing the smooth curve of the handle. After a few seconds he looked up, a resigned expression on his face. “Take a walk down to the shore with me.”
They passed the vegetable patch on their way. Finn was standing by the chicken run with Brother Dominic, who was pointing out different birds by name.
“He’s young,” Jamie said. “For a monk. You always think of them as old men.”
Lowry shot her an amused look. “Like preachers?”
“I don’t . . . I mean . . .”
Lowry raised a hand. “I’m joking. Yes, he’s young. He only converted a few years ago. You often find the most unwavering faith in those who come to it late. It’s like falling in love, that first flush when all you need is to be with the object of your desire and everything will be all right.”
“You sound cynical.”
He shook his head. “I’m not. Not really. I have no doubt that his faith is real. But it’s not something I understand.”
“Was it not like that for you?”
He smiled. “You mean when I found God.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t find him,” Lowry said, as they picked their way down a rocky path to the shore. “I was brought up with him. Lost toy. Ask God to help. Cut knee. God will comfort you. The night too dark. God has his arms around you. He was always presented to me as though he were some sort of cosmic nanny crossed with an all-powerful bodyguard.” He gave another smile, this time edged with cynicism. “It’s a wonder my faith lasted beyond the first time a girl refused to give me a second glance, after I’d asked God to please make her notice me.”
They found a flattish rock and sat down.
“You were going to tell me about Rena,” Jamie prompted.
“I’m getting there. By a roundabout way.” He drained the last of his tea and wedged his mug into a hollow in the shingle. “My faith did last, and I went to Campion Hall in Oxford and became a priest. I never felt quite like I fitted in, even though I had the pedigree. Old Catholic family, educated by the Jesuits, a mother who did the church flowers every Sunday. I couldn’t have been more soaked in the faith.” His voice twisted a little on that word. “Maybe everyone felt like that. It was an odd time. The world was changing so fast. At Oxford we were surrounded by the brightest minds of our generation, the ones who were going to keep us all pushing into the future.” His smile turned ironic. “Brave new world. I could never quite shake this image that kept popping into my head. The pope, sitting at his window in the Vatican, looking up at the sky as vapor trails shot straight up, heading for heaven—for the place he’d always been able to claim for his God—and thinking what now?”
“The church survived,” Jamie said. “People were still packing St. Peter’s Square, before the virus.”
“It was never quite the same. When heaven came within reach, faith found that it wasn’t welcome after all. Very few people took their religion with them to other worlds.”
“But you were a priest on Alegria.”
“The capital had the only Catholic community of any size at all. No church, but there was a small circuit of private homes and rooms in institutions.”
“That’s where you met Rena.”
She had a feeling that if she didn’t keep nudging him he’d be quite happy to let the conversation wander off in some other direction.
“That’s right.” Lowry picked up a handful of shingle, selecting a pebble and throwing it toward a pointed rock. It landed well short, splashing into the surf.
“And she was working for the administration.”
He tossed another pebble. This time it was closer but still adrift by a good few inches. “I never could throw,” he commented. “Yes, she was already tangled up in it when I met her.” A third pebble bounced neatly off the pointed tip of the rock. “Bingo.”
Jamie felt a surge of unfamiliar irritation with the old man. “Lowry.” He turned, with clear reluctance, to look at her. “What happened? You said it was your fault. Do you think you should have done more?”
Lowry gave a harsh bark of laughter. “More? The opposite, actually. I should have done less. Much less.” He turned his hand over and let the remaining pebbles fall back onto the shingle. When he spoke again his tone was brisk. “I told you back on Alegria that Rena was bright and kind. What I didn’t tell you is that she was so beautiful that it kept me awake at night, looking for any justification I could find for breaking my vows.”
“Breaking your . . .” Jamie’s brain caught up with her. “You and Rena?”
Lowry nodded. “If I’d had an ounce of integrity I’d have walked away and never looked back. Or maybe I should have left the priesthood for her. As it was, I tried to have the best of both worlds, and I nearly broke her in the process. I told you that her work at the department ripped her apart. Well, a good deal of the blame lies at their door, but not all of it. A good part was down to me. The deceit, the subterfuge, she wasn’t cut out for it. I told myself that all her problems were down to her work. I tried to persuade her to leave the research program, when I should have been persuading her to leave me. I was too selfish for that, of course. All that happened was that we swapped the privacy of the confessional for the intimacy of the pillow. She told me how she felt, and I made meaningless noises, the lover’s equivalent of two Hail Marys and an act of contrition. And then, one night, she told me she thought she was pregnant. She was lit up from the inside. Not glowing, like they say pregnant women do. The kind of light that hurts to look at. She was manic, talking about us being a family. And all I could think was, This is the end of everything.”
“I thought you said she couldn’t have children.” Jamie was reeling. She’d never dreamed that something like that lay between them.
“She’d been doing her own research, using herself as a test subject.” His lips twisted. “And me as well, I suppose.”
“And it worked.”
“No,” Lowry said. “It didn’t work. I lay there beside her, all night, listening to her whispering in the dark, promises to her unborn child. And the very next day she bled. It was a false alarm. It was like something inside her shattered. She barely seemed to register when I told her we couldn’t be together anymore.” He rubbed his face. “I didn’t leave her straight away. I stayed for a while, made a few attempts to get her some help, but the only thing she was interested in was her work. She spent hours in the lab, barely eating, barely sleeping. I couldn’t reach her.” He picked up another handful of pebbles, but this time he just let them run through his fingers, back onto the shingle. “So I left.” He gave Jamie a slow, heavy smile. “I know what you must be thinking. Any name you can give me, I’ve already pinned it on myself, time and time again. Coward. User. Hypocrite. I can’t even use the excuse of youth. I was forty when I met her. She was twenty-six.”
Jamie was silent for a moment, trying to superimpose this new picture of a young, fragile Rena over the sharp angles and edges of the middle-aged woman she knew. “But she did leave the program. Eventually. She came and found you on Soltaire.”
Lowry gave another humorless laugh. “There’s a whole load more to the middle of the story. We didn’t see one another for a few years, although we exchanged the odd mail. I came back to Earth. My faith limped on for a while, but the cracks were already running all through it, and eventually the inevitable happened. I had a breakdown, left the priesthood, and came here. I thought I might be able to shape some new beliefs out of the broken pieces of my faith.” He looked out to sea again. “I used to walk on this beach and watch the sun going down, vast and red and perfect, and I’d almost remember how it felt to believe. There it is, I’d think. And then the sun would disappear behind the horizon and the moment would be gone. One sunset I saw one of those green flashes sailors talk about, the whole sky lit up in emerald, just for a split second. I stood here, looking out toward the horizo
n and I thought, If that doesn’t make me believe again, nothing will.” He was silent for a moment, as though waiting for the sky to light up again, like it had all those years ago. “Eventually I realized I could only rebuild by going out into the world and starting over. Figuring out what I believed, moment by moment. I worked on various projects all over the place. In between I’d come back here and try to piece together what I’d seen and done.”
“And then Rena came.” Jamie thought she could see the shape of the story. Rena had been so desperate to get here. Had it been the place where she’d rekindled an old love?
He nodded. “Rena came. I’d thought she was broken when I left Alegria, but I hadn’t realized how much of her was still left to be destroyed. She was gaunt and graying and looked like she hadn’t seen daylight in months. She wouldn’t talk to me when she first came, and when she did say anything it didn’t make much sense. After she’d been here a while, I put all those little pieces together and realized what she was telling me. She’d found a new faith, an obscure little sect that hadn’t attracted many followers. It preached austerity, silence, space.”
“The space between the stars,” Jamie said.
Lowry nodded. “I never really got to the bottom of how she fell in with the Pretergnostics, but she thought finding them was a sign. It fit with what she was doing in her work. Now it was God’s work. Stopping the population from growing and growing, keeping the emptiness of space for his voice.”
“Why did she leave?” Jamie said. “If she was so sure.”
“Because she wasn’t sure. She had all the fervor of a convert, with none of the bricks and mortar of long-held faith. There was too much crowding around her. Her new faith, her old faith, her work, whatever she still felt for me, all pulling at her. But she seemed calmer after a few days here, and I thought I could see a few traces of the old Rena. I thought I might be able to save her.” His face twisted. “I might have left the priesthood, but I still had all the arrogance of someone who’s certain that God has his back.”
“What went wrong?”
“She got a message from the head of her department. She didn’t tell me exactly what he’d said, just that they were close to some breakthrough and they needed her back.” He looked out across the waves again. “I remember how her hand rested on her stomach. Her fingers were curved out in front, around the empty air, like there was something there that I couldn’t see. She left that day, and it was nearly ten years before I heard from her again. I’d founded Longvale on Soltaire by then. Her mail was almost incoherent, full of ramblings about the gods of life and death. But she wanted to get away. She said there was something terrible coming. I arranged for her to come to Longvale. I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing, but I still felt responsible for her. She turned up just a few weeks before the virus hit.”
He stopped talking and plucked at the edge of the rock, a quick, nervous gesture. Jamie’s mind was turning over, trying to piece together everything he’d told her. There were gaps there, she was sure. Some of them were just little chinks of omission. Things too private to share. But there was something else. Something that was stopping the pattern from becoming clear.
There was something terrible coming.
Close to a breakthrough.
The space between the stars. The space between the stars.
And then, like a full-force punch to the stomach, she had it. She felt a lurch of nausea, and she clutched at the rock, the sharp edge digging painfully into her fingers.
“My God.”
Lowry lifted his head and gave her a long, level look. “Not God. Just men.”
“The virus . . .” The way it had attacked the fertility of survivors. Its strange, self-destructive pattern. Its atypical life span. “It wasn’t something natural. It was them.”
“They couldn’t have known what would happen,” Lowry said. “They just got something terribly wrong. When it first started, Rena was hysterical, raving about Yama and Kali, the Hindu gods of death, and about Oppenheimer and Hitler. Later, when I put it all together, there was a terrible moment when I thought they’d decided it wasn’t enough to limit the fertility of the people they didn’t want. I thought they’d tried to wipe them out. But I think it just got away from them. They overreached themselves and unleashed Armageddon, when they’d been trying to create Utopia.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Jamie stood up, looking down at him. “Back on Alegria, you knew what had happened, and you didn’t tell me.”
“Because you would have hated her,” Lowry said. “And there are so few of us. I tried not to know. I never asked her outright. But knowing, it’s not about logic and thinking things through. Callan was right. It’s deeper than that.”
“But she was part of it.” Jamie thought she could taste dust in her mouth. Cranwell. Cathy and her children. Everyone on Soltaire. Her half sisters too; they were out there drifting on some unknown wind because of Rena and the others like her.
“Don’t.” Lowry stood up. “It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t know . . .”
“That’s not what you told me yesterday. You said we all have to take responsibility for our part in things. Or does that not apply to people you’ve slept with?”
“All right.” Lowry made a sharp gesture. “It was her fault. Among others. But she didn’t know what was going to happen. No one ever thinks they’re doing the wrong thing. The choices we make, we’re all just trying to muddle our way through. It’s not a flowchart. If this, then this.”
The blood was thumping in Jamie’s ears, and everything seemed to be receding around her. Maybe when it was all small enough, she’d be able to see the pattern in all of this. Because there had to be a pattern. It couldn’t all just be a scatter of moments, colliding and sparking off one another until one day you looked around and realized you’d been part of the end of all things.
She felt an odd little flicker of something that was almost relief. A hard, bitter relief. There was a pattern. There was a reason, an explanation. There was someone to blame.
“Don’t,” Lowry said again, searching her face and seeing something there that made his own expression fold in on itself. He reached for her, but she turned and stumbled up the beach, not looking back.
CHAPTER
29
Jamie found Rena kneeling on the grass amid the broken-teeth pillars of the old abbey. She turned at the sound of Jamie’s approach.
“You did this.” Jamie was surprised how calm she sounded. “You killed them all.”
For a moment something raw and frightened looked out from behind Rena’s bloodshot eyes. Then the older woman blinked and it was gone, her expression hardening.
“It was all part of the pattern,” she said. “I can see it now. Soon you’ll all see it too.” Her lip curled. “Maybe not you. I should have realized sooner. Not everyone can be saved. You’re only half a person. Deformed.” She looked past Jamie as Lowry approached. Father Dominic and Finn were just behind him. “We’re all deformed. A broken priest. A barren woman. An idiot boy. Don’t you see?” Her voice was almost pleading now, and she scrambled to her feet. “It has to end. God’s breath on the wind. I am become Death.”
“Rena.” Lowry stepped forward, reaching for her, but she shrank back, hatred stark in her eyes.
“Don’t touch me. You should never have touched me. God will punish us.” She rubbed her hand across her eyes. “No. That god was never real. There was never just one. They are legion.”
“It was your fault,” Jamie said again, but the heat of her anger was fading, leaving her cold and heavy. What was the point of raging at this broken shell of a woman? Whatever she threw at Rena would be absorbed by her madness and sink without a trace.
“We were saving the world.” Rena’s eyes blazed once again. “We could have saved everyone.”
“Everyone?” Jamie said.
“The righteous.�
� Rena’s face twisted again. “Not the broken. Not the ones who should never have been. We could have made a new world.”
“Full of people like you.” Jamie’s whole body felt as if it were curled tight, like a spring. “Go forth and multiply.” She gave a harsh laugh. “Not that you were exactly in a position to contribute to the new master race. You’re broken too.”
She was about to turn away, but Rena suddenly took a step forward, her hands curling like claws. Then a body lurched in between them. Finn’s own hands came up, fending her off.
Rena shoved at him, but Father Dominic stepped up to her side and threw an arm across her shoulders.
“Come.” His voice was calm and gentle. “Come with me, sister.”
For a moment Rena resisted, and then she sagged in his hold. Jamie and the others stood frozen, a strange tableau against the backdrop of an ancient ruin, as the monk led Rena away toward the cottages, one halting step at a time.
Finn was standing stiff and very upright, fists wedged beneath his chin, like a child just learning to box. “Are you all right?” Jamie asked him.
“You have to be brave,” he said. “That’s what she told me.”
“Who?”
“Emily,” he said. “She said you have to be brave and look out for other people. Then they’ll look out for you.”
Emily? Even in the middle of her turmoil, Jamie had time for a quick flick of curiosity. But that was a question for another time.
Her gaze fell on Lowry, but she didn’t want to talk to him. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. She needed time to process what he’d told her.
“Come on, Finn.” She turned her back on Lowry and started toward the harbor.
• • •
When they got back, her stepmother asked if they’d had a nice trip, and Jamie smiled and said, “Yes, thank you.” Finn’s brow creased in confusion, but he didn’t question her.
For lunch she made omelets with the eggs from the Lindisfarne chickens, stuffed with spring onions and fresh herbs from the box Finn had brought back.