“If the number of farandolae in any mitochondrion drops below a critical point, then hydrogen transport can’t occur; there isn’t enough fuel, and the result is death through energy lack.” She felt the skin on her arms and legs prickling coldly. To put into words what might be happening within Charles Wallace was almost unendurable.
She felt Blajeny prodding her and continued. “Something’s happening in Charles Wallace’s mitochondria. I’m not sure what it is, because it’s all words I don’t know, but his farandolae are dying—maybe they’re killing each other —no, that’s not right. It sounds to me as though they’re refusing to sing, and that doesn’t make any sense. The point is that they’re dying and so his mitochondria can’t produce enough oxygen.” She broke off, angrily. “Blajeny! This is all nonsense! How can we possibly stop them from doing whatever it is they’re doing, when they’re so small they aren’t even visible? You’ve got to tell us! How can we help Charles?”
Blajeny’s kything was calm and cold as steel. “You will know soon.”
“Know what?”
“What you must do to overcome the Echthroi. When you get there, my children, you will know.”
“When we get where?”
“To one of Charles Wallace’s mitochondria.”
8 Journey into the Interior.
Now that Blajeny had said it, it seemed to Meg the only logical, the only possible course of action. If they were to save Charles Wallace, if farandolae were causing his illness, if the Echthroi were at work within him as well as without, then the only hope was for them to become small enough to go into one of his mitochondria and see what was happening with the farandolae.
“Metron Ariston—“ Calvin spoke softly. “Size. Where sizes don’t matter. But—to be as small as a galaxy is huge: can you make us that small?”
Blajeny smiled. “Size is really quite relative.”
“Anyhow”—Meg looked at Sporos—“we’re already talking with a farandola.” If she had tried to imagine a farandola, it would not have looked like Sporos.
Mr. Jenkins rose stiffly and moved with his peculiar stork-like gait to Blajeny. “I don’t know why I thought I might be of help. This is all over my head. I will only be a hindrance to the children. You had better send me back to my school. At least there are no surprises for me there.”
“What about this morning?” Blajeny asked. “That was not a surprise for you? I cannot tell you why you have been sent to us, Mr. Jenkins, because I myself do not yet know. But Meg Named you—“
“The full implications of this are not yet clear to me.”
“It means that you are part of whatever is going to happen.”
Mr. Jenkins moaned.
Blajeny stretched out his arms, embracing them all in the gesture. “The mitochondrion to which I am sending you is known as Yadah. It is Sporos’s birthplace.”
Sporos danced around, twingling in outrage.
Meg shouted at him, “If you are in Charles Wallace, if he’s your galaxy, you couldn’t be in a more special place!”
Louise sent her sibilant song towards Meg. All anger vanished when Meg caught, from Louise’s song, another projection of Charles, huddled under the blankets. His mother lifted him to prop him up on pillows to ease his labored breathing, then pulled down the blankets so that Dr. Louise could listen to his heart with her stethoscope. She looked up gravely and Meg understood that she was suggesting that perhaps they had better call Brookhaven.
“Oxygen, then!” Meg cried out to Louise the Larger and Blajeny. “Wouldn’t oxygen help Charles?”
“For a while. Dr. Colubra will see to that when the tune comes.”
Tears rushed to Meg’s eyes. “Oh, Louise, take care of him. Don’t let him stop fighting.”
Mr. Jenkins asked, “Would anybody in his right mind let a snake near a sick child?”
“Dr. Louise will,” Meg said, “I’m sure she will, from something she said in mother’s lab the other night. Blajeny! Is Dr. Louise a Teacher, too?”
Blajeny nodded.
Meg’s heart gave a leap of hope.
“Snakes,” Mr. Jenkins murmured. “Mitochondria. Echthroi.”
Meg swallowed a hiccupy sob, took off her glasses and wiped the tear-smeared lenses.
Mr. Jenkins looked at her and spoke in his most stilted, academic voice. “Man. The mean point in the universe. And Charles Wallace—is that it? At this moment in time Charles Wallace is the point of equilibrium?”
Blajeny nodded gravely.
“So what happens with his mitochondria and farandolae—?” He looked to Meg for explanation.
She tried to pull herself together. “Remember, Mr. Jenkins, you’re great on Benjamin Franklin’s saying, ‘We must all hang together, or assuredly we will all hang separately.’ That’s how it is with human beings and mitochondria and. farandolae—and our planet, too, I guess, and the solar system. We have to live together in—in harmony, or we won’t live at all. So if something is wrong with Charles Wallace’s mitochondria—“ Her voice trailed off.
Mr. Jenkins shook .his head. “What can we do? What can we possibly hope to do?” Then he cried out in horror. “Oh, no!”
The pseudo-Mr. Jenkins they had seen before was moving rapidly towards them. Louise reared her black coils upwards with a horrible hissing.
“Quickly!” Blajeny spread his arms wide, pulling Mr. Jenkins, Sporos, and Calvin into their span. Proginoskes caught Meg within the strength of his wings, the beat of his heart. She seemed to become part of the cherubim’s heartbeat.
The oval pupil dilated, and she went through to—
She could not tell where they were; she could only sense the presence of the others. As through a vast, echoing tunnel she heard Blajeny: “I would show you something to encourage you before you go.”
Meg looked about. Ahead of her was a tremendous rhythmic swirl of wind and flame, but it was wind and flame quite different from the cherubim’s; this was a dance, a dance ordered and graceful, and yet giving an impression of complete and utter freedom, of ineffable joy. As the dance progressed, the movement accelerated, and the pattern became clearer, closer, wind and fire moving together, and there was joy, and song, melody soaring, gathering together as wind and fire united.
And then wind, flame, dance, song, cohered in a great swirling, leaping, dancing, single sphere.
Meg heard Mr. Jenkins’s incredulous, “What was that?”
Blajeny replied, “The birth of a star.”
Mr. Jenkins protested, “But it’s so small I could hold it in the palm of my hand.” And then an indignant snort, “How big am I?”
“You must stop thinking about size, you know. It is both relative and irrelevant.”
At this point Meg could not be bothered with size. She wanted to know something else. “Progo, will the star be Named?”
“He calls them all by name,” the cherubim said.
Meg looked in wonder at the star. It was indeed so small that she could have reached out and caught it in her hand, but its flaming was so intense that the song itself came out of the fire and was part of the burning. She thought in wonder, —I must be the size of a galaxy.
And then all thoughts dissolved in the glory of the melody and the dance.
Blajeny’s voice came like thunder, “Now!”
She was pulled into Proginoskes again, into the beat of the great heart, into the darkness of .the eye, into the—
No!
She was being consumed by flame. She sensed a violent jolt to the cosmic rhythm, a distortion of wild disharmony—
She tried to scream, but no sound came. She felt pain so intense that she could not bear it another second; another second and the pain would annihilate her entirely.
Then the pain was gone, and she felt once again the rhythm of the cherubic heart, very rapid, faintly irregular. “Did it have to hurt that much?” Shock and pain made her loud and angry. Her limbs trembled weakly.
Proginoskes seemed to be having trouble; his heart continued to race unevenly. She thought she understood him to say, “We had a brush with an Echthros.”
Her own breathing was a shallow panting. She felt that she was all there, all her atoms reassembled, that she was Meg; and yet when she opened her eyes she could see nothing but a strange, deep green-blackness. She listened, listened, and through what seemed at first to be a sound somewhat like the shrilling of insects on a summer night, she thought she could hear—or perhaps it was feel—a steady, regular pulsing.
“Progo, where are we?”
“Yadah.”
“You mean we are in Charles Wallace? In one of his mitochondria?”
“Yes.”
It was not conceivable. “What’s that sort of thrumming I feel? Is it Charles Wallace’s heartbeat?”
Proginoskes moved in negation in her mind. “It’s the rhythm of Yadah.”
“It feels like a heartbeat.”
“Megling, we’re not in earth time now; we’re within Yadah. In farandolae time, Charles Wallace’s heart beats something like once a decade.”
She shivered. Her arms and legs still felt trembly and useless. She blinked, trying to adjust her eyes to the darkness. “Progo, I can’t see.”