Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“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.”

“ Justother universes,” Eliza repeated, smiling. “And the Big Bang was justan 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.

Too big for thehuman mind, perhaps.

“You know of Piltdown Man, of course,” said Dr. Chaudhary.

“Sure.” It was maybe the most famous scientific hoax in history—a supposed early human skull unearthed in England about a hundred years ago.

“Well,” said Dr. Chaudhary, “it was in 1953 that it was proved a fake, and the year is important. With all the haste of shame, it was removed from the British Museum, where for forty years it had served as erroneous ‘evidence’ of a particular wrongheaded view of human evolution. Only a few years later, in 1956, another discovery was made, in the Patagonian Andes. A German amateur paleontologist discovered a cache of…” Here he paused for effect. “Monster skeletons.”

And… it all went screwy for Eliza, somewhere in there. Dream siege, and a failure of psychic mind spikes. Dr. Chaudhary had said he was going to tell her something strange, and even as she swerved into some kind of altered state, she had the clarity to understand that the monster skeletons were the relevant fact here, not the site. But it was there that her mind took her.

To the Patagonian Andes.

As soon as he said it, she saw them: mountains that were pitched and pointed, sharp as teeth honed on bone. Lakes, absurd in their purity of blue. Ice and glacial valleys and forests dense with mist. Wildness that could kill, that didkill, but hadn’t killed her, because she was not easily killed and had survived so very much worse already—

She had been turned inward somehow, like a dress pulled inside out, and she was still sitting there with Dr. Chaudhary, and she could hear what he was saying—about the monster skeletons, and how in the days of scorn after Piltdown they’d been nothing but a joke, even though they were a joke that rather defied explanation—but his words were as a rushing of water over a streambed, and the streambed was a thousand polished stones, a thousand-thousand, and they gleamed beneath the surface, beneath hersurface, and they were her and more than her. Shewas more than her, and she didn’t know what that meant but she felt it.

She was more than herself, and she could see the place Dr. Chaudhary was talking about—not the monster skeletons unearthed there, but the land and, most of all, the sky. She was leaning back and looking up and she saw the sky above her now and the sky above her then— What then? When?—and it was with the grief of mourning that it came to her that it was denied her.

The sky was denied her, then and now and forever.

She felt the tears on her cheeks right as Dr. Chaudhary noticed them. He was still talking. “The Museum of Paleontology at Berkeley has the remains now,” he was saying. “As much for curiosity as scientific merit, but I have a feeling that is going to change.… Eliza, are you all right?”

She swiped at the tears but they kept falling and she couldn’t speak.

For a vertiginous moment, staring up at the stars—not gazing, but staring—she felt the scope of the universe around her, so vast and full of secrets, and she sensed the presence of more and greater beyond that… and beyondbeyond, and then beyond even that, and somehow the unknowable depths within herself corresponded to the unknowable scope without, and… there wasn’tanother universe.

There were many.

Many beyond many, unknowably.

I’ve seen them, thought Eliza. KnewEliza. Tears were streaming down her face now, and she finally understood the nature of the dream, and it was worse, so much worse than she’d even feared. It wasn’t prophecy. They’d had that wrong all along. It wasn’t the end of the world she was seeing.

At least, not the end of thisworld.

The dream wasn’t future, but past. It was memory, and the question of how Eliza could possibly have such a memory was overshadowed by what it meant. It meant that it couldn’t be stopped. It had already happened.

I’ve seen other universes. I’ve been to them.

And I destroyed them.

39

SCION

Siritharhad drawn her to him like a musk, through passages of wending stone within the mountain fastness of a dead people, and thus had Scarab, queen of the Stelians, found the magus she had come to kill.

She had hunted him halfway around the world and here he was, alone in a close and quiet place. With his back to her, he was stripped to the waist and scooping water from a cha

It made the shape of a closed eye, and though she felt power in the mark, she was unfamiliar with the design. It was not from the lexica. Like the world-wind and the despair, she supposed that this was his own creation, though it had not been wrought of stolen siritharor she would have felt the tremor of its making. Still, siritharclung to him, electric. Like ozone, but richer. Heady.

Here stood the unknown magus who plucked at the strings of the world and who, if they didn’t stop him, would destroy it. She had assumed that she would feel a corruption on him, and that her soul would cry to the killing like lightning to a rod, but nothing here was as she had expected. Not the mixed company of seraphim and chimaera, and not him.