Thirty-Four: The Things We Can't See

Earlier this evening Eleen and I were in bed together, and talking. It’s been a while since we had the chance to do that or, well, much of anything else but sleep in the same bed. She’s been working with Tashel Ban day after day on the computer, as often as not from first light to late in the evening. The rest of us finally sat the two of them down two days ago and told them that it wasn’t going to do anybody any good if they worked themselves to death, and they agreed to take it a little easier.

Well, to be a little more precise, we made them take a couple of days off. Berry, who’s been learning how to run the computer from Tashel Ban, promised that he’d keep an eye on it in case anything happened, and the rest of us bullied the two of them into going to bed. I don’t know how long Tashel Ban slept, since he wasn’t the one I was supposed to bully, but I can say for a fact that Eleen didn’t do much yesterday but eat and sleep, and she slept pretty late today, too. During the day, since Berry was still standing guard over the computer, she spent some time with me in the room where all the alien-books are. Her idea, which I should have come up with myself but didn’t, was to go through all the books at once, and sort out the alien-books from anything else we found.

I figured it wouldn’t do her any harm to sit and read a bit, so I hauled books and we sorted them, and by the time dinner came around we had one really big pile of alien-books and another, much smaller pile that was mostly stories, with a few other things we couldn’t figure out. I put the books from the small pile on the top shelf, and all the alien-books on the ones below, so I’d be able to pick something different to spray and bundle up when the thought of leafing through one more book about Roswell and people being kidnapped and how the government was going to have to ‘fess up any day now was just that little bit more than I could take.

At dinner Tashel Ban and Thu swapped stories about Jinya pirates they’d tangled with, and everyone else ate and drank and hoped that we wouldn’t find anything that would force the two of them to take care of their argument the old hard way, knife in hand, in a chalk circle four meedas across. Afterwards we lounged around for a while, talking about nothing in particular, and then Eleen and I went to the room we share and things pretty much followed from there.

Afterwards we lay curled up around each other, feeling warm and comfortable and not saying much for a while. I was hoping Eleen would fall asleep, because I was pretty sure she still needed more rest, but instead she shifted and said, "All those books about flying saucers."

"What about them?"

"I can’t help thinking about the people who spent their lives waiting for the aliens to land, back in the old world. There were millions of them, you know."

I didn’t, not until then. "The government had that many people fooled?"

"It was more than that." She moved, settled on her back. "There’s a thing called the Big Bang effect."

"That sounds fun," I said, and kissed the nearer of her breasts. She laughed and said, "Not that kind . In the old world, right up until a few years before it ended, scholars believed that the whole universe started out with a big explosion: the Big Bang."

I gave her a puzzled look. "How could that be the beginning? If there’s an explosion, you have to have something to explode first."

"I know. That’s what they thought, though, and they had reasons for it. Did you ever hear something go by you fast, making noise?" She moved a hand past my head and whistled, and the whistle dropped from high to low as the hand went by.

"Sure."

"That’s called the Doppler effect—the way the sound is higher in pitch when it’s coming toward you, and lower when it’s moving away. The same thing happens with light, and when scholars studied the stars, they found that the light from the stars is redder—lower in pitch—than it would be if they were still. So they figured all the stars are flying apart, like bits of stuff from an explosion. Do you see?"

I nodded. "But..."

"There’s more. There was also a theory about the way the universe was put together, written by one of the most famous scholars back then, a man named Einstein. There were many ways to make the math in the theory work out, but the simplest way only works if the universe is getting bigger." I gave her a baffled look, and she went on: "Again, think of an explosion. Something small gets much bigger."

"But.." I tried again.

She put a hand over my mouth. "And some scholars figured out that outer space had just a bit of heat in it, more than they thought it should have, and they decided that the heat was left over from the explosion. So everyone thought, well, the stars are moving away from us, and the theory of relativity works best in an exploding universe, and here’s the heat from the explosion—it’s got to be true."

She took her hand off my mouth, and I said, "But none of those proves that."

"Of course not." Then, smiling: "Why not?"

"Because something else could have caused each of those things."

"Exactly." She kissed me, then said: "If A causes B, and B shows up, that doesn’t prove that A must have happened—not unless you know for certain that A’s the only thing that can cause B. People forget that. They forget it all the faster if A can cause B, and C, and D, and all three of those things show up—it’s easy to think that A’s got to be the cause. If things come up that don’t fit the model,people don’t weigh things evenly; they don’t say, B and C and D suggest that A happened, but E and F and G and H suggest that it didn’t. They take each piece of contrary evidence one at a time: here’s E, but E by itself doesn’t outweigh B and C and D, and neither does F by itself, and so on. So you can end up with far more evidence against a theory than for it, but nobody notices, because they’re taking the evidence for the theory all together, and the evidence against the theory as though each piece stands all by itself. That’s what scholars nowadays call the Big Bang effect."

"So how did they figure out that the Big Bang didn’t happen?"

"Somebody figured out that there’s another effect that makes starlight look redder when it comes from further away. It wasn’t the Doppler effect after all. Then somebody else took a second look at Einstein’s theory, and it turned out that some puzzles that nobody had been able to solve were easy to work out once you realized the universe wasn’t getting bigger. The heat had other explanations, too, but nobody had time to figure out which was right, because that’s as far as they got when the old world ended."

"There must have been a mother of a lot of embarrassed scholars."

"It was much worse than that." Her face went somber. "The Big Bang was the foundation of most of what had been worked out in half a dozen sciences. People spent their entire lives working on theories that depended on it—and suddenly there they were. I don’t think any of them killed themselves, but there were scholars who kept on insisting that it was all wrong and the Big Bang was real until they went back into Mam Gaia’s belly. It was that or admit that they’d wasted their lives."

I’d realized a while earlier where she was going with all this. "And the people who believed in the aliens, they made the same kind of mistake."

"Yes, but there was even more reason for them to make it. I was taught that the people who believed in flying saucers thought the aliens were about to land and solve all our problems for us. When the old world was ending, most people hoped that something like that would happen—that somebody would somehow fix everything, so that the old world didn’t have to end. So every light in the sky, and every story about—what was that place in the desert?"

"Roswell."

"Yes. Every story about Roswell, every faked picture and faked sighting the government put into circulation, and everything else, had to add up to aliens visiting Mam Gaia, or the last scrap of hope they had was gone." She shook her head. "So they waited, and waited, and waited, and the flying saucers never landed. For all I know some of them are still waiting, the way the Old Believers wait for their god to come back."

I thought I could name at least one who was still waiting for the aliens, but right then Eleen turned to face me and reached for me. "Waiting?" she asked.

"Not any more," I told her, and I didn’t, either.

Afterwards, we curled up again, and a little after that she fell asleep. I waited until I was sure she was good and deep, then slipped out of bed and got some clothes back on.

The hallway outside the room we share was as hushed as it must have been in the years between when Anna’s people left it and when we arrived. I closed the door as quietly as I could and went down to the room where the alien-books were. It was dark and empty. I turned on the light, and noticed that there was a gap in one of the shelves where I’d put the alien-books earlier that day. It was just about wide enough for one large book. I looked at the gap for a moment, and wondered who else was reading about aliens—Anna, or one of the others?

After a bit, I pulled down one of the stories from the top shelf and tried to read it. It was another of those make-believe stories set on other worlds, like the one with the worms I mentioned a while back; this one was about someone who figured out how to predict the future, and the future he saw coming was the fall of an empire like Meyco’s, except this one covered the whole galaxy. It was a good story, too, and I’ll go back and read it tomorrow, but just then my mind kept on wandering off and I finally put the book down and just sat there on the floor with my chin in one hand.

I was thinking about Eleen—about how we met, which I’ve already written about, and how we met again in Sisnaddi after I’d come back from the Lannic shore where I’d found the one thing I needed to know to find Star’s Reach and watched the Spire fall and run for my life from the wave that came after it. I’d come back along the same road through the mountains, past Cumlun and Pisba and then down the Hiyo to Sisnaddi, every step of the way on foot because all the money I had in the world just then was barely enough to keep me fed, never mind pay my fare on a riverboat.

The ruinmen’s hall in Sisnaddi isn’t part of Sisnaddi Core, of course. It’s a bunch of big shapes like mushrooms that rise up out of the tumble of buildings west of Core where the chemists, the burners, and the other guilds nobody lets inside the city walls live and do their work. What that meant is that I walked all the way around Core to get to the ruinmen’s hall, signed myself in, put up with the pitying looks from the old ruinmen there who were sure I was wasting my life chasing Star’s Reach, and went to the big west doors of Core just as soon as I’d washed up and gotten something to eat. Not three hours later I was back out the west doors of Core with a scrap of paper in my pocket that told me where Star’s Reach was and how I was going to get there.

I could have gone back to the ruinmen’s hall and showed it to the old men there, but I knew they wouldn’t believe I’d found anything that mattered, so I went to the big tavern right outside the west door with every intention of spending the last of my money getting thoroughly drunk. They probably would have had to carry me back to the ruinmen’s hall that night, too, except that I walked in the door and nodded to the barmaid and found myself staring straight at Eleen, who was sitting over by the side of the room at a little table with a glass of cheap whiskey in front of her and a look on her face that told me everything I needed to know right away.

After I got over the surprise of seeing her, I went over and stood in front of the table until she noticed me and looked up. She didn’t say anything at all, not at first, just looked at me.

"Mind if I join you?" I asked.

That got me a smile. "Not at all." She waved at the chair across the table from her.

She was still wearing a scholar’s gray robe, but the only reason a scholar from Melumi would be in a cheap tavern in Sisnaddi was if she’d failed and been sent away. I knew that, and she knew I knew it, and so neither of us had to say anything about it at first, which was probably for the best. "Did you have any luck finding Star’s Reach?" she asked.

"Not yet." I wasn’t ready to tell her about what I’d just learned. "Both the places you found for me turned up empty—not that that’s your fault."

"Thank you for saying that." She tilted her head, considering me. "Are you still looking for it?"

"Not bright enough to quit," I told her.

That got a laugh, and she reached past her drink with both hands, and took hold of mine. "Good."

So I got a glass of whiskey to match hers; I got a little drunk and she got a little more drunk, and talked about nothing in particular, and the end of it all was that I didn’t get back to the ruinmen’s hall that night. We stumbled up the stairs to the sleeping room she’d hired with the last of the money they’d given her when she left Melumi, and spent that evening pretty much the same way we spent this one.

The next morning, I told her about what I’d learned in drowned Deesee and what I’d found in the archives, and said, "I’m going to need a scholar to come there with me, and I’d like it to be you."

She thought about that for a moment. Then, bitterly: "I’m a failed scholar."

"That’s what ruinmen always hire."

She blinked, and then straightened a little. "I didn’t know that."

"It’s not like scholars who are still in the Versty will camp with us in the ruins, you know."

She blinked again, and I could just about see her thinking through what it meant to have a place in the world again, not to mention work that could pay her keep and maybe a lot more. "I suppose not." Then: "Trey, if you’re willing to take me, I’ll go. I’ll go anywhere." She put her arms around me. "Among other things, you’re good to spend time with, you know."

Of course I kissed her then, and since she wasn’t wearing anything and neither was I, things went pretty much the way you’d expect from there.

We’ve been together ever since then, all through the months of negotiating with Jennel Cobey, getting in touch with the others in our party, traveling west, getting here, surviving those last horrible moments out in front of the door, and then doing what we came here to do. Even now, though, I’m not sure whether we love each other or whether we were just two lonely people who needed each other for more reasons than one. I can point to B and C and D, that’s for sure, but is A what’s behind them all, or something else? The priestesses say that behind the things we see there’s another world we can’t see, and everything here is like a shadow or a reflection of something there. Maybe they’re right, but sometimes I wonder whether there can be anything in that other world that’s harder to see than the inside of another person’s heart.