He had been a little carried away, as if preaching to the multitudes from the pulpit of a great cathedral, and when he opened his eyes it was with a small self-deprecatory smile. They walked down a vast avenue, flanked left and right by enormous whitewashed radio telescopes straining at the sky, and after a moment he spoke in a more conversational tone.
“Your story has been foretold. It’s happened before. Somewhere inside of you, you must have known. None of your details are in the Book of Genesis. Of course not. How could they be? The Genesis account was right for the time of Jacob. Just as your witness is right for this time, for our time.
“People are going to believe you, Eleanor. Millions of them. All over the world. I know it for certain…”
She shook her head, and they walked on for another moment in silence before he continued.
“All right, then. I understand. You take as much time as you have to. But if there’s any way to hurry it up, do it–for my sake. We have less than a year to the Millennium.”
“I understand also. Bear with me a few more months. If we haven’t found something in pi by then, I’ll consider going public with what happened up there. Before January 1. Maybe Eda and the others would be willing to speak out also. Okay?”
They walked in silence back toward the Argus administration building. The sprinklers were watering the meager lawn, and they stepped around a puddle that, on this parched earth, seemed alien, out of place. “Have you ever been married?” he asked. “No, I never have. I guess I’ve been too busy.”
“Ever been in love?” The question was direct, matter-of-fact.
“Halfway, half a dozen times. But”–she glanced at the nearest telescope–“there was always so much noise, the signal was hard to find. And you?”
“Never,” he replied flatly. There was a pause, and then he added with a faint smile, “But I have faith.”
She decided not to pursue this ambiguity just yet, and they mounted the short flight of stairs to examine the Argus mainframe computer.
CHAPTER 24
The Artist’s Signature
Behold, I tell you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed….
-ORINTHIANS 15:51
The universe seems…to have been determined and ordered in accordance with number, by the forethought and the mind of the creator of all things; for the pattern was fixed, like a preliminary sketch, by the domination of number preexistent in the mind of the world-creating God.
-NICOMACHUS OF GERASA
Arithmetic I, 6 (ca. A.D. 100)
She rushed up the steps of the nursing home and, on the newly repainted green veranda, marked off at regular intervals by empty rocking chairs, she saw John Staughton–stooped, immobile, his arms dead weights. In his right hand be clutched a shopping bag in which Ellie could see a translucent shower cap, a flowered makeup case, and two bedroom slippers adorned with pink pom-poms.
“She’s gone,” he said as his eyes focused. “Don’t go in,” he pleaded. “Don’t look at her. She would’ve hated for you to see her like this. You know how much pride she took in her appearance. Anyway, she’s not in there.”
Almost reflexively, out of long practice and still unresolved resentments, Ellie was tempted to turn and enter anyway. Was she prepared, even now, to defy him as a matter of principle? What was the principle, exactly? From the havoc on his face, there was no question about the authenticity of his remorse. He had loved her mother. Maybe, she thought, he loved her more than I did, and a wave of self-reproach swept through her. Her mother had been so frail for so long that Ellie had tested, many times, how she would respond when the moment came. She remembered how beautiful her mother had been in the picture that Staughton had sent her, and suddenly, despite her rehearsals for this moment, she was wracked with sobs.
Startled by her distress, Staughton moved to comfort her. But she put up a hand, and with a visible effort regained her self-control. Even now, she could not bring herself to embrace him. They were strangers, tenuously linked by a corpse. But she had been wrong–she knew it in the depths of her being–to have blamed Staughton for her father’s death.
“I have something for you,” he said as he fumbled in the shopping bag. Some of the contents circulated between top and bottom, and she could see now an imitation-leather wallet and a plastic denture case. She had to look away. At last he straightened up, flourishing a weather-beaten envelope.
“For Eleanor,” it read. Recognizing her mother’s handwriting, she moved to take it. Staughton took a startled step backward, raising the envelope in front of his face as if she had been about to strike him.
“Wait,” he said. “Wait. I know we’ve never gotten along. But do me this one favor: Don’t read the letter until tonight. Okay?”
In his grief, he seemed a decade older. “Why?” she asked.
“Your favorite question. Just do me this one courtesy. Is it too much to ask?”
“You’re right,” she said. “It’s not too much to ask. I’m sorry.”
He looked her directly in the eye. “Whatever happened to you in that Machine,” he said, “maybe it changed you.”
“I hope so, John.”
She called Joss and asked him if he would perform the funeral service. “I don’t have to tell you I’m not religious. But there were times when my mother was. You’re the only person I can think of whom I’d want to do it, and I’m pretty sure my stepfather will approve.” He would be there on the next plane, Joss assured her.
In her hotel room, after an early dinner, she fingered the envelope, caressing every fold and scuff. It was old. Her mother must have written it years ago, carrying it around in some compartment of her purse, debating with herself whether to give it to Ellie. It did not seem newly resealed, and Ellie wondered whether Staughton had read it. Part of her hungered to open it, and part of her hung back with a kind of foreboding. She sat for a long time in the musty armchair thinking, her knees drawn up limberly against her chin.
A chime sounded, and the not quite noiseless carriage of her telefax came to life. It was linked to the Argus computer. Although it reminded her of the old days, there was no real urgency. Whatever the computer had found was not about to go away; ? would not set as the Earth turned. If there was a message hiding inside ?, it would wait for her forever.
She examined the envelope again, but the echo of the chime intruded. If there was content inside a transcendental number, it could only have been built into the geometry of the universe from the beginning. This new project of hers was in experimental theology. But so is all of science, she thought. “STAND BY,” the computer printed out on the telefax screen.
She thought of her father….ell, the simulacrum of her father…about the Caretakers with their network of tunnels through the Galaxy. They had witnessed and perhaps influenced the origin and development of life on millions of worlds. They were building galaxies, closing off sectors of the universe. They could manage at least a limited kind of time travel. They were gods beyond the pious imaginings of almost all religions–all Western religions, anyway. But even they had their limitations. They had not built the tunnels and were unable to do so. They had not inserted the message into the transcendental number, and could not even read it. The Tunnel builders and the ? in-scribers were somebody else. They didn’t live here anymore. They had left no forwarding address. When the Tunnel builders had departed, she guessed, those who would eventually be the Caretakers had become abandoned children. Like her, like her.
She thought about Eda’s hypothesis that the tunnels were wormholes, distributed at convenient intervals around innumerable stars in this and other galaxies. They resembled black holes, but they had different properties and different origins. They were not exactly massless, because she had seen them leave gravitational wakes in the orbiting debris in the Vega system. And through them beings and ships of many kinds traversed and bound up the Galaxy.
Wormholes. In the revealing jargon of theoretical physics, the universe was their apple and someone had tunneled through, riddling the interior with passageways that criss-crossed the core. For a bacillus who lived on the surface, it was a miracle. But a being standing outside the apple might be less impressed. From that perspective, the Tunnel builders were only an annoyance. But if the Tunnel builders are worms, she thought, who are we? The Argus computer had gone deep into ?, deeper than anyone on Earth, human or machine, had ever gone, although not nearly so deep as the Caretakers had ventured. This was much too soon, she thought, to be the long-undecrypted message about which Theodore Arroway had told her on the shores of that uncharted sea. Maybe this was just a gearing up, a preview of coming attractions, an encouragement to further exploration, a token so humans would not lose heart. Whatever it was, it could not possibly be the message the Caretakers were struggling with. Maybe there were easy messages and hard messages, locked away in the various transcendental cumbers, and the Argus computer had found the easiest. With help.