“I was a mother once.” She wasn’t sure why she said it at all until long after it left her mouth.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
“I had a miscarriage. After it happened, I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t save the baby. I was supposed to protect it. So I know that feeling. I feel it even now for John in kind of the same way. I would do anything to protect him . . . even if it meant damning my soul.” She looked at the ground. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
“Because you trust me a bit, perhaps?”
“I probably said it for a lot of reasons, but that sure ain’t one of them.”
“Forgive me, Kendra,” he said after a long period of concentration, “but you do seem to think of things in black and white. Someone or something is either all good or all bad. As I understand it, isn’t the whole point of Christianity the idea that all men must be regenerated in order to truly become the immortal creatures they’re intended to be?” Receiving no response, he asked directly: “Come now, do you really think you’re going to be damned?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Quite right. But let me illustrate my point in a different way.” He gestured at the trees around them with the stem of his pipe. “No one knows when one will get a perfect piece of fruit. Sometimes we discard fruit because it’s sour or tiny or even just a bit bruised. But perhaps that piece we carelessly toss over our shoulder has seeds that, once they become mature trees, may ultimately produce the perfect piece of fruit.”
“So you’re saying what? That my child will redeem me?”
“What I’m saying is that life is trial and error. It’s about how we face our trials and overcome our errors that matters most. We must keep trying, and we shouldn’t think of ourselves or others as simply bad fruit. We might just need a bit more love and careful tending. And then, with that tending, our seed—what we do—might produce something truly wonderful. And then we would find ourselves awake inside our greatest dreams.”
“That’s a pretty story.” Kendra finished her cigarette and extinguished it with her heel. “Belabored but pretty.”
“You’ve not seen me on my best day,” he said with a grin. “Give me time; I may yet convince you. In the meanwhile, would you mind telling me what you mean by the—Nephilim, was it?”
She shuddered. “You know, I’d like to go back now. I’m getting a little cold and tired.”
CHAPTER 14
And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars: And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.
—The Book of Revelation 12:1–2
It would be winter soon. The cold rains of late autumn had swept almost all of the leaves from the fruit trees in the grove and turned the rich fallow soil of the fields a deep reddish brown. Since Lewis and Kendra had walked the fields around the cabin, neither had spoken about what passed between them. The Lewises remained considerate hosts and Kendra a helpful, although still-recovering, guest. Much of their time was now spent indoors. They concentrated on prepping the home for the winter—stocking up on firewood, canning and preserving food, salting meat, finding and sealing cracks in the log walls where tingling fingers of cold air might try to poke in. By the end of that same week, John felt well enough to walk around the fields with his arm about Kendra. She supported him as much as he was willing to let her. As they walked, he told her about the time he’d been ill with scarlet fever and how Christian had carried him over his shoulder back and forth to the privy several times a day because he was too weak to walk on his own. At the barn he joked about their building a cabin next door to the Lewises. She wrinkled her nose and said she’d think about it only after the last frost. Neither of them said what they were really thinking: that they had to go home. And soon. People back home—people they loved—were depending on them. But they also needed to get well in order to survive the journey. In the meanwhile, they would find out as much as they could.
They had learned a great deal from both Lewises since John’s recovery. Childhood stories bubbled out of Jack Lewis all the time but often during or after a meal. He told them all he could remember about the early days in this wilderness with his parents, being reminded here and there by Prisha about something he had once told her and her two brothers and two sisters about their grandparents. Often he smiled while recalling a story. A childhood like his didn’t seem to lack smiles, despite the hardships.
He hadn’t been more than nine when his parents decided to leave the camp the Remnants had established on the beach, just before the building of New Philadelphia. This was not long after the elders had agreed—John and Kendra had always been told unanimously—to build a city. Even though he had been just four during the Arrival, the impression the Orangemen had made had never left him. He recalled how they had hovered in the sky and asked the humans to love one another, so they had always tried to. They had said to rebuild the race, so he had had five children with his now-deceased wife, Prisha being his youngest. He talked little of his late wife. Her loss seemed too painful a subject.
The Orangemen had also said to begin anew. But they had never told them how. Lewis’s parents—independent thinkers both of them—decided to do that in their own way, as did many others who did not agree with the decision to build New Philadelphia.
Lewis had no explanation for why the other Remnants had never told them about the people who didn’t come to live in the city. By his count, at least fifty couples and families had trickled away from the beach to find their own paths in this new world. While to them they seemed like a good-sized group, it was hard to imagine they’d been missed on the beach.
These fellow iconoclasts who’d chosen to live in isolation even from one another had one thing in common: a willingness to try to build a different kind of humanity in the days ahead. They all hoped that separation might help people to love one another more and thereby prevent another near extinction. So they would make their stands apart from one another and live as best they could.
Pioneers. That’s how they thought of themselves—not unlike the Puritans who found a new life in the American wilderness but even more so because they didn’t have a single religious mind-set to guide and unite them. They believed they would have to pioneer an entirely new society, a whole new way of being that might someday incorporate itself into the prevailing thinking in New Philadelphia—or then again perhaps not. Their loose confederation had not gotten that far yet. Such isolation allowed for much reflection and a very slow decision-making process. It was hard to make quick decisions when one rarely saw one’s neighbors apart from a general meeting every ninety days.
Lewis told them all of this as they sat on his porch on what John’s grandfather would have called an Indian-summer evening. With his pipe clenched in his teeth as he rocked, Lewis might as well have been one of the nineteenth-century pioneers of the American West who sought to find their own purpose in a still-virgin country.
“So have you come to any decisions in all this time?” Kendra wondered aloud from her place next to John on the first step, a mug of Prisha’s delicious tea warming her hands.
“Not really,” Jack said with a sigh. “But we have come up with a number of working theories.”
John perked up. “Such as?”
The older man glanced at his daughter. She sat near him on a hand-carved wooden bench. “Well,” she began, “a number of us at least have a theory about what we’re all doing here.”
“Go on,” Kendra said.
“Our books tell us that a lot of the creatures around here are native to Earth—”
“Wait,” Kendra said, holding up a hand. “You have books here?”
“Our people procured a number of books from the campsite on the beach,” Lewis explained. “Books on building and agriculture and biology, Bibles, quite a number of Eastern texts—”
“Back up a sec,�
� John asked. “When you say Eastern texts, do you mean books about Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism?”
“Yes,” Lewis answered. “And Shinto and Taoism. All the religions born in the Asian nations of China, India, Japan, and the like.”
John shook his head. “I’m sorry. You’ve got to forgive me. You see, we only know of these religions, that they once existed. But we know nothing about them. The only books the Remnants had about these religions disappeared long ago.” He sighed. “Some of our people even believe they were spirited away by Orangemen who didn’t want the human race to go, well, astray again.”
“I see,” Lewis said. “No, as far as I know, we have them only because our parents took them and never returned them, like bad library patrons.”
“A weak explanation,” John suggested.
“I was quite young when they packed their supplies. I’m not entirely sure why they took the specific books they did take,” Lewis said with a shrug. “Let me turn the question ’round: If you were going off to rebuild civilization, what handful of books would you take with you?”
John laughed. “Fair enough.”
“Won’t Gordon Lee be pissed when he finds out?” Kendra asked, wrinkling her nose.
John shook his head again. “Sorry. Private joke. Please go on. You were talking about your theories.”
Prisha gestured around. “Have you ever thought that it’s entirely possible that the only reason we’re here is because this is the Orangemen’s, well, menagerie?”
John squinted at her. “Menagerie?”
“The books tell us that many of the birds and fish here are native to Earth. Unless there’s some remarkable parallel evolutionary development going on, these creatures came here with the people you call the Remnants.”
“Including me,” Lewis said, waving his pipe above his head.
John raised an eyebrow. “So the Orangemen—the ones who saved us—snatched up creatures great and small from Earth in some kind of cosmic Noah’s ark?”
“It has the beauty of having precedent.” Lewis pulled the pipe from his mouth and stopped rocking. “And it would explain a great many things.”
“Yeah, everything except those mammoths and saber-tooth cats,” Kendra said over the rim of her mug. “Maybe they’re native to Earth, but it’s not like they were walking around when anybody got into any cosmic ark.”
Thoughtful puffs of smoke encircled Lewis’s head for a few minutes before he pulled the pipe from his mouth. “Those here who believe in God feel that God, through the Orangemen, sought to populate this world by taking creatures from all periods of Earth’s history—that the reason the saber-tooths are here is because God chose them and other ‘extinct’ creatures to build a new world that was more suitable to his original design, before the original fall of man.”
“How is that possible?” John wondered aloud. “Those animals were long dead.”
Kendra’s pale face was suddenly bright with understanding. “From our perspective. God is above time.”
Lewis leaned forward, his thick elbows on his thicker knees. “Think of it this way, Captain. We perceive time as a line going from left to right. Birth is left, death right. Start of the world left, end of the world right. But God is a part of all of that and above it at the same time. Having always existed, he knows what has happened, what will happen. He sees, if you will, the entire page upon which the lines of our individual lives are drawn. Indeed, the lines of all existence, all reality.”
“As well as different planes of reality,” Prisha added. “The Eastern religions, particularly Hinduism, had no problem believing in an infinite universe—or even a multiverse—unlike their Western counterparts.”
“You’re being far too ungenerous, Prish,” her father said. “The Westerners came ’round—or back around—to the Semitic idea of infinity and nothingness once they gave Aristotle the heave-ho.”
“Aristotle?” Kendra asked. “Sorry, I haven’t spent as much time in the Archives as John. Who’s Aristotle?”
“A significant and ancient Greek thinker, who lived long before the early Christians,” Lewis explained. “He was very influential on the thinking of early Christian scholars, so much so that they chose to agree with him that the universe had always existed in some form, even though their own Bible taught them that it had been created out of nothing.”
“Wait, go back,” John said. “There’s more than one time period? An infinite number of universes? How is that possible?”
Lewis looked at his guests. “Forgive me. We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s use mathematics. You accept the idea that you cannot subtract five from zero, that you still have zero? And that you cannot add any number to infinity and get more than infinity?”
“Sure. Of course.”
Lewis grinned. “That’s the same with God, Captain. He’s always the same, because he’s infinite. The very definition of the infinite, like its counterpart zero, is that it stays the same no matter what you subtract from it. So whatever is taken from whatever time period matters little. It is all part of the infinite.”
“So what are you saying?” Kendra asked. “That what happened to the human race is only one of an infinite number of possible outcomes?”
“Possibly.” Lewis shrugged. “Or that the human race itself is only one possible outcome.”
“But why?” Kendra shook her head. “If God knows everything that would ever happen, why did he let humanity die? All that destruction, all those dead children—”
Lewis gave an almost imperceptible shrug. “Free will, my dear. It all comes back to that. God loves us enough to not have made us automatons or machines. He gives us the choice to love him back and love one another and improve the world. Or he allows us to destroy ourselves—even while giving us this final hope of redemption in this new world.”
“Wait.” John held up a hand. “What about that other theory your people have as to why the saber-tooth cats and mammoths are here with us?”
The wind rustled through the deserted tree branches around them. It was still warm but growing colder.
“Some of our people are not at all inclined to find spiritual meaning in what happened to us,” Prisha added. “So they look elsewhere.”
John arched his eyebrows. “Where exactly?”
“I suppose it comes from the fact that it’s hard to ascribe specific intents to the Orangemen’s actions. Many of us believe it is pointless to try,” she added. “The Orangemen saved a handful of people and abandoned billions they did not kill outright to die in brutal and indescribably horrifying ways. And they left us only primitive tools to work with—no real knowledge. Did they want the survivors to live or not? Did they feel guilt or remorse?”
“I’m sensing an ‘or’ here,” John said.
“Or . . . is this all just some sort of bizarre experiment?”
Lewis let that thought sit with them for a time before he removed his pipe from his teeth and examined it. “So what do you believe, Captain?”
“You pretty much know it at this point.” John considered for a moment before answering. “Most of our people believe that the Orangemen, both good and bad, are angels, both pure and fallen. We believe this not only because of their physical appearance but because of all of their actions during and since the last days.”
Prisha looked at John and Kendra. “And you have evidence that they are in fact immortal beings and not living, as we understand living?”
John and Kendra glanced at each other almost shamefaced. She spoke. “We know some of them can die.”
“Then why do you think they can only possibly be angels and demons?” Lewis wondered without passion.
John found himself feeling defensive in a way he hadn’t since he used to argue with Sofie in the old days. “Come on, Jack. You were there. What they did here and on Earth—they fulfilled the book of Revelation to the letter. You have Bibles, so you know that.”
“Perhaps,” Lewis answered in a carefree way. “
But there are many inexplicable things in Revelation, as you know far better than I. Take the ‘woman of the wilderness’ in chapter twelve. Who is she? The Virgin Mary? It seems so, as she is crowned with twelve stars and clothed with the sun. But then a dragon stands before her, intending to devour her male child as she delivers him. And the dragon somehow doesn’t and she gives birth to a child who will rule all nations. So why then does she flee into the woods after seemingly being delivered from this dragon? Frankly, the entire section, as supposed prophecy, mystifies me.”
“As it does many people,” Kendra muttered through clenched teeth.
He held up a hand in apology. “Forgive all my questioning. But are we to expect this all will literally happen, dragon included, just because another section of Revelation describes the saving of a hundred and forty-four thousand?”
“Our intention is not to offend,” Prisha added. “But let me posit a different question, taking a middle ground of sorts. Isn’t it possible that the Orangemen may have acted as God’s agents and been mortal beings at the same time?”
“And in the end, does it matter what they are?” Lewis asked with a shrug. “It doesn’t really. What if they’re, I don’t know, Nephilim, for example?”
John looked at him, glanced at Kendra, then asked, “How the hell do you know about them?”
Lewis took a worn family Bible from a leather pouch strapped to the arm of his rocking chair. “As you remind me, we read the same book. And as a matter of fact, I read about them just last night and got to thinking about them. The children of fallen angels and human women—it’s an intriguing story.”
Kendra turned to the older man. “What are you?”
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