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What had woken her then, if not the dream? The dogs, maybe? No. There was something.…
Not thedream, but adream, something dancing away from her conscious mind, like shadows before the sweep of a flashlight beam. She lay where she was, and there was a moment when she felt she might have captured it, if she’d tried. Her mind was still tiptoeing along the boundary of consciousness, in that state of semi-waking that spins threads between dream and real, and for a moment she felt herself to be a girl who has come down off a porch to confront a great darkness with a tiny light.
Which is a really, really dumb thing to do, so she sat up and shook her head. Shook it all away. Shoo, dreams. I welcome you not.There are spikes you can put on window ledges to keep pigeons from landing; she needed some for her mind, to keep dreams away. Psychic mind spikes. Excellent.
In the absence of psychic mind spikes, however, she just didn’t go back to sleep. She doubted she’d have been able to anyway, and the four hours she’d gotten were probably enough to stave off death by sleep deprivation for a little while. She swung her feet out of bed and sat up. Her laptop was beside her. Earlier, she’d downloaded the first batch of photos, encrypting them before dispatching them to her secure museum e-mail and then deleting them from the camera.
She and Dr. Chaudhary had started collecting tissue samples from the bodies that afternoon, and would return in the morning to continue. She guessed it would take them a couple of days. With the bizarre composition of the bodies, they needed samples from every body part. Flesh, fur, feather, scales, claws. The rest of their work would happen in the lab, and this brief sojourn would feel like a dream. So quick, so strange.
And what would their findings tell them? She couldn’t begin to hypothesize. Would they be composites of different DNA? Panther here, owl there, human in between? Or would their DNA be consistent, and only expressed differentially, in the same way a single human genetic code could express as, say, eyeball or toenail, and every other thing that made up a body?
Or… would they find something stranger yet, stranger by far, unlike anything they knew in this world? A shiver shot through her. This was so big, she didn’t even know where in her head to put it. If she were allowed to talk about it, if she could call Taj right now, or Catherine—if she even had her phone—what would she say?
She rose and went to the window for a glimpse of the view. It opened onto an interior courtyard, though, nothing to see, so Eliza pulled on her jeans and shoes and crept out the door.
Creeping, surely, was u
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 fancysculpted 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 di
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’vekilled 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 ca
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 i
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. Ibelieve 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 Ithink 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 growthem?”
“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?”