Later, thinking on it, he told himself that this had been Heaven, his own personal Heaven. Not the high shining towers, the great broad golden staircase, the winding of celestial trumpets that was Mary’s Heaven – this was the real Heaven, this, the quiet autumn afternoon that fell upon the land after the blazing summer sun and the long and dusty roads.
He went away, reflective, after only a courteous exchange with the blithe custodian. Walking back to his suite, he had tried to catch it all again, to see it and experience it all again, only to become aware of its insubstantiality, the ephemeral quality of this autumn land, somewhere deep in space.
He told Jill that evening, ‘It was as if I’d gone back to my home planet, the days of boyhood and early manhood before I left to enter medical school. My home was an Earthlike planet, an astonishingly Earthlike planet. I can’t really judge, for I’ve never been on Earth, but I was told that my home planet was Earthlike. British settled. It was called Paddington – a planet named for a town, if “ton” means “town” and I think it does. The inhabitants never saw anything wrong with that. The British have no sense of humor. I judge we were very English, very British, whichever is the right term. There was a lot of talk of Old Earth, Old Earth being England, although that was strange, for in my later reading I became convinced the planet tallied more with North America. In my boyhood I was obsessed with England, or with the legend of England. I read a lot of English history. The library in our town had a large section-‘
‘I’ve been meaning to tell you,’ said Jill, ‘but it always slips my mind. Vatican library has a lot of Old Earth books – I mean books brought from Old Earth. Books, not tapes. Pages between covers. Anyone is welcome to come in and browse. I think, too, you can manage a loan if you find something that you want.’
‘One of these days,’ said Tennyson, ‘I’ll come in and browse. I was telling you about Paddington. The land, I was told, was almost a duplicate of Old Earth. The people there were always saying how lucky they had been to find it. There are livable planets, sure, but not many of them that are like Old Earth. Many of the trees and plants were much like those found on Earth – but, mind you, the kind that were found in North America rather than in England, although North America and England do have some trees and plants in common. And the seasons were the same as they were on Earth. In my hometown, we had a glorious autumn – Indian-summer days, trees aflame with color, the distances smoky with an autumn haze. I’d almost forgotten it, but today I saw it all again. Or I think I saw it. I smelled the autumn and heard it and walked in it again….’
‘Jason, you’re all upset. Try to forget. Let’s go to bed.’
He questioned Ecuyer. ‘This world of equations,’ he said. ‘It makes no sense. Was your Listener able to go back again?’
‘Several times,’ said Ecuyer.
‘And?’
‘It still made no sense. No sense at all.’
‘Does this sort of thing happen often?’
‘Well, not places with equations. You seldom repeat a specific sighting. In a universe where anything, anything at all, statistically will happen at least once – where everything possible will happen at least once – there’s not much chance of repetition. It does happen, but not often. But, yes, these kinds of things do happen, the inexplicable situations that have neither head nor tail to them.’
‘Then what’s the use? What profit is there in it?’
‘Perhaps profit for Vatican.’
‘You mean you just hand this stuff over to Vatican?’
‘Certainly. That’s why we do it. For Vatican. They have the right, the chance, to review everything. They review it and evaluate it and then send back the cubes to us for storage. Sometimes they may follow up the leads, sometimes not. They have ways of doing things.’
‘But to follow up on this equation place, someone would have to go there. Actually go there physically, in person. Viewing it from one’s own viewpoint, not seeing it through the eyes of an inhabitant. I’m convinced of that.’
‘Well, there are times that Vatican can go to places that we find.’
‘You mean actually go there? Travel to those places?’
‘That is correct,’ said Ecuyer. ‘-I thought you understood that.’
‘No, I hadn’t,’ said Tennyson. ‘No one ever told me. So it’s not always just a matter of peeking through a keyhole?’
‘Sometimes it’s more than that. Sometimes not. Sometimes we have to be content with our keyhole peek.’
‘Then why doesn’t Vatican go out and pin down the Heaven sighting? I would think-‘
‘Perhaps they can’t,’ said Ecuyer. ‘They may not know where it is. They may have no coordinates.’
‘I don’t understand. Can the Listeners at times pick up coordinates?’
‘No, they can’t. But there are other ways to go about it. Vatican people, in things like this, can be very tricky. One of the simpler ways is to pick up star patterns.’
‘There are no star patterns in the Heaven cube? I suppose there wouldn’t be if it were really Heaven. Heaven probably would have nothing to do with either time or space. But if Vatican did locate it, what would they do? Send someone out to Heaven?’
‘I really do not know,’ said Ecuyer. ‘I cannot speak for Vatican.’
It was a dead end, Tennyson thought. The Heaven sighting was so tied with gut philosophy, the touchiness of theology, the awesome wonder of it that everyone in authority would be scared to death. He remembered what Jill had said about the deep rift of opinion it had brought about among the robots of Vatican.
‘Heaven,’ said Tennyson, ‘would presume an afterlife, a life after death. Can you tell me – have the Listeners found any clues that would point to such an afterlife, even the outside possibility of an afterlife?’
‘Jason, I don’t know. I honestly can’t be sure. There’s no way -‘
‘What do you mean, you can’t be sure?’
‘Look, there are so many kinds of life. The universe, it seems, seethes with life, both biological and nonbiological, and the non-biological, in turn, may be divided into several classifications. We can’t be sure.’
‘Well, yes, of course,’ said.Tennyson. ‘There are the robots.’
‘Dammit, I’m not talking about the robots. They are nonbiological, certainly. Manufactured nonbiological. But there is natural life, or what seems to be life, that is nonbiological as well. There is a cloud of dust and gas out in the Orion region, or what on Earth would be designated as the Orion region. A small speck of dust and gas. From here even the largest telescope would fail to pick it up. A welter of magnetic fields, high gas density, massive ionization, heavy drifts of cosmic dust. And there’s something alive in there. Perhaps the gas and dust itself. Or maybe something else. But whatever it is, it’s alive. You can feel the pulse of life, the rhythm of living – and it talks. Maybe talks is not the right word. Communicates would be the better term. It can be heard, or sensed, but it can’t be understood. There is no way to know what it is saying. The life forms within it may be talking back and forth or all of them may be talking to themselves. . .
‘But what has this got to do with afterlife?’
‘Did I say it had something to do with afterlife?’ Tennyson said, ‘No, I guess you didn’t.’
At times, Tennyson prowled the countryside, following faint trails, trudging along narrow, green valleys, climbing steep hillsides, with lunch and a bottle of wine in his knapsack, a canteen over his shoulder. Always the mountains were in view, looming over him, blue and purple, majestic and always fascinating, with shadows drifting along their spurs, the sunlight glinting off the icy peaks. He spent long hours sitting atop the rugged hills, staring at the mountains, never seeing quite enough of them, the mystery and the wonder of them persisting no matter how long he might look at them.
Then, turning back toward Vatican, he’d finally find one of the few roads, little more than a broader trail, to lead him home. He’d trudge along it happily, his feet raising little puffs of dust, the warmth of the sun upon his back, the peace of the mountain on his mind. And a few days later, he would go out again, perhaps in a different direction this time, to prowl up and down the land while the mountains watched.
One afternoon, heading back toward Vatican along one of the narrow roads, he heard something approaching from behind. Looking back, he saw a beat-up surface vehicle, with a man sitting at its wheel. Tennyson was surprised, for this was the first time on any of his hikes that he had seen another person, let alone a car. He stepped well out of the road to give it room to pass, but it did not pass. When the car drew up to him, it stopped and the man said to him, ‘Are you so dedicated to your walking that you would refuse a lift?’