Dreams of Gods & Monsters(59)
Author: Laini Taylor

The kasbah was called Tamnougalt, and in spite of having been greeted at the gate by unsmiling children making stabbing gestures with pointed sticks, Eliza kind of loved it. It was this mud city in the heart of a palm oasis, the bulk of it a deserted ruin with just the central part restored, and not to any kind of grandeur. It still looked like sculpted mud—if fancy sculpted mud—and the rooms were comfortable enough, with very high beamed ceilings and wool rugs on the floors, and there was a rooftop terrace overlooking the waving tops of the palm trees. Last night, when she’d eaten dinner up there with Dr. Chaudhary, she’d seen more stars than she ever had in her life.

I’ve seen more stars than anyone alive.

Eliza stopped walking and closed her eyes, pressing her fingertips against them as if by doing so she could tame the stir within her. Conjure some psychic mind spikes and skewer some freaking dream pigeons.

I’ve killed more stars than anyone will ever see.

Eliza shook her head. Traceries of the familiar terror and guilt were slicking into her conscious mind. It made her think of the pale, desperate roots that force their way out through the drainage holes in potted plants. It made her think of things that cannot be contained, and she didn’t care for this thought at all. Ignore it, she told herself. You’ve killed nothing. You know this.

But she didn’t. All of a sudden she was “knowing” things, experiencing highly unscientific feelings of conviction about big cosmic questions like the existence of another universe, but certainty of her own innocence was not among them—at least, not in that deeply resonant way. The voice of reason was starting to seem flimsy and unconvincing, and that probably wasn’t a good sign.

Step by heavy step, Eliza climbed the stairs back up to the terrace, telling herself that it was just stress, and not madness. Still not crazy, and not going to be. I’ve fought too hard. Emerging into the night air, she felt a surprising chill and heard the dogs more clearly, barking away down in the hardscrabble terrain.

And she saw that Dr. Chaudhary was still sitting where she’d left him hours earlier. He gave a little wave.

“Have you been here all this time?” she asked, walking over.

He laughed. “No. I tried sleeping. I couldn’t. My mind. I keep thinking of the implications.”

“Me, too.”

He nodded. “Sit. Please,” he said, and she did. They were silent a moment, surrounded by the night, and then Dr. Chaudhary spoke. “Where did they come from?” he asked. It was a rhetorical question, Eliza thought, but it was followed by a pause long enough that she might hazard a guess, if she dared.

Morgan Toth would dare, she thought, and so she replied simply, “Another universe.” Trust me. It’s a thing I know; it was lying around my brain like litter.

Dr. Chaudhary’s eyebrows went up. “So quickly? I had thought, Eliza, that perhaps you believed in God.”

“What? No. Why would you think that?”

“Well, I certainly don’t mean it as an insult. I believe in God.”

“You do?” It surprised her. She knew that plenty of scientists believed in God, but she’d never gotten a religious vibe from him. Besides, his specialty—using DNA to reconstruct evolutionary history—seemed particularly at odds with, well, Creationism. “You don’t find it difficult to reconcile?”

He shrugged. “My wife likes to say that the mind is a palace with room for many guests. Perhaps the butler takes care to install the delegates of Science in a different wing from the emissaries of Faith, lest they take up arguing in the passages.”

This was unaccountably whimsical, coming from him. Eliza was astonished. “Well,” she ventured, “if they were to bump into each other right now, who would win?”

“You mean, where do I think the Visitors have come from?”

She nodded.

“I am obliged to say first that it is possible they came from a lab. I think we can rule out surgical hijinx based on our examinations today, but might not someone have managed to grow them?”

“You mean, like, in a supervillain’s lair inside a volcano?”

He laughed. “Exactly. And if it were only the bodies—the ‘beasts,’ as it were—then this theory might seem to have some merit, but the angels, now. They’re a bit more complex.”

Yes. The fire, the flying. “Have you heard,” Eliza asked, “that facial recognition databases got no hits on any of them?”

He nodded. “I did. And if we consider, prematurely, that they might indeed be from… somewhere else, then our contenders are?”

“Another universe, or… Heaven and Hell,” Eliza supplied.

“Yes. But what I find myself thinking, out here, staring at the stars… ‘Gazing’ is too passive, don’t you think, for stars like this?”

Very whimsical, Eliza thought, nodding agreement.

“And perhaps it’s the guests in the palace mingling—” He tapped his head to clarify what “palace” he meant—“but I find myself thinking: What does that mean? Might they just be two ways of saying the same thing? Suppose ‘Heaven’ and ‘Hell’ are just other universes.”

“Just other universes,” Eliza repeated, smiling. “And the Big Bang was just an explosion.”

Dr. Chaudhary chuckled. “Is another universe bigger or smaller than the idea of God? Does it matter? If there is a sphere where ‘angels’ dwell, is it a matter of semantics, whether we choose to call it Heaven?”

“No,” Eliza replied, swiftly and firmly, a bit to her own surprise. “It isn’t a matter of semantics. It’s a matter of motive.”

“I beg your pardon?” Dr. Chaudhary gave her a quizzical look. Something in Eliza’s tone had hardened.

“What do they want?” she asked. “I think that’s the bigger question. They came from somewhere.” There is another universe. “And if that somewhere has nothing to do with ‘God’ ”—It doesn’t.—“then they’re acting on their own behalf. And that’s scary.”

Dr. Chaudhary said nothing, but returned his gaze to the stars. He was quiet long enough that Eliza was wondering whether she’d smacked down his newfound loquacity when he said, “Shall I tell you something strange? I wonder what you’ll make of it.”

The horizon was paling. Soon the sun would rise. Seeing it from here, such a horizon, and such a sky, it really made you mindful of being plastered by gravity to a giant, hurtling rock, and from there it was a hopscotch to picturing the immensity that surrounded it: the universe, too big for the mind to compass, and that was only the one universe.