Part 23 (1/2)

She drove to Ca.s.sadaga during her second trimester, and found Earth Cathedral. She parked exactly where she would that fateful day years later, and made her way to the front doors. She stood there for some time, her heart beating madly, her hands shaking. She stared at the door, thinking of what Dan had told her about her people's habits of opening doors to other worlds, to other times. Finally, she knocked.

After a second knock, she heard shuffling feet echoing inside, then a large bolt being drawn. The door opened, its bottom sc.r.a.ping along the cement floor.

Sarah's mouth dropped open. Her eyes darted from the man's face to his feet, then back again. His skin was the color of marble in moonlight; it was at once wrinkled and tight, his body stiff but somehow supple beneath it all. He looked to be covered in a kind of bark. But he was, beneath all the years, unmistakably the boy she had once known. ”Montague?” she whispered.

The man's dry lips cracked open, formed a strange smile. His eyes, still young and alert, were bright. ”Sarah,” he said.

”Dear G.o.d, I never thought I'd see you again,” the old man said.

They sat in Montague's-Monty, she thought, he calls himself Monty now-office, which consisted of two benches sitting against opposite walls. Sarah's head was spinning. ”How . . .” she began, her hands up in a kind of protest.

Monty only smiled. ”Dan broke his cardinal rule. I learned quickly, and I found I had a gift he didn't have.”

As it had been since she'd arrived, her mouth was wide-open. She just didn't have any words to fill it.

”This world, this universe, and all you see around you is only one plane of existence. I've heard people talk about parallel universes, but most of them speak as if there were only a couple.”

”And there are-”

”Infinite, Sarah,” said Monty, leaning forward. ”All you need to do is find the doors. But as in most gifts, there's a catch.”

”Which is?”

The old man leaned against the wall, pointed at the cracked and sagging flesh of his face. ”It's dangerous. If you open a door, things can get out as well as in.”

Sarah didn't answer.

”And what about you?” he asked, suddenly changing the subject. ”As I expected, you've become a beautiful woman. And not alone, I see.”

Sarah glanced down, smiling.

”Your first?”

She nodded.

”You must be scared. You've been disconnected from your people for so long.”

”I'm terrified.”

Monty stared at her. At first, she thought he was only thinking of what to say, but then it became clear he wasn't. He looked her over, not speaking, for a long time. Finally, he got up, left the room and returned with a box, which he set at her feet. ”A few years ago, an old woman gave me a set of blank diaries she'd made herself. She told me she'd always wanted to set the story of her life down, but had never gotten around to it. Am I right in thinking you won't be introducing your child to his relatives?”

Again, she nodded.

”At least share a piece of yourself, Sarah. This child won't be quite like everyone else, and he's bound to have questions. And at some point, my dear, we all die, and when you do, you won't be able to answer his questions, will you?”

Sarah remembered Monty's remark the day she gave birth. She was laying in the hospital bed, waiting to meet her son, when her hand grazed her neck. And she felt it.

Just under her chin was a rock-hard lymph node.

Chapter Twenty-Five: Beyond the Door.

1.

Robert had been walking for what felt like years. His lips were chapped, his throat parched, his legs aching.

There were no paths. He knocked away branches, kept an eye out for whatever wildlife might inhabit this place, and drove on, telling himself that he'd find water sooner or later, or a branch heavy with fruit. Beyond this he did his best not to think, at least for now. Here, under a sky that should not exist, walking on land that should not hold him, watching out for beasts that should not have been, thoughts were only a special kind of madness. Above all, he did not think of his mother. He did not think about her standing nude before him when he was only a boy; he did not think about the vaporous light that had swirled around her, taking her; he did not think about what she'd told him-oh, son, follow me, you won't believe it-and he did not close his eyes now and again to see her disappearing, her arms outstretched, her eyes gla.s.sy with tears and visions.

After a time, he came to the edge of the forest. Beyond it was an uneven land of stone. They appeared to have been shoved into the ground by huge hands: some stood perfectly vertical, reminiscent of Stonehenge, other were flat, and still others skewed or broken, as if they'd fallen from the sky and crashed here. He cursed, couldn't imagine climbing over and around them. He was so tired. So he collapsed on the ground, leaned back and stared at the sky. It was dense with clouds, which were no longer gray but tinged with a red as dark as brick. Behind this brick, a yellowish ribbon of light swirled through the heavens. All was backlit and split by lightning. Tilting his head back, he opened his mouth and tasted rain. It fell slowly at first, in fat drops, then the sky burst open and Robert flattened himself against the dirt, finally satisfied that this was no dream, that he could think about where he lay.

The rain tasted good-it tasted clean.

As he lay there, he thought back to some time ago. (You could not measure time here-nothing set or rose, so it got neither brighter nor darker. It was a world of eternal twilight.) Shortly after Monty had shoved him through the door, ha had seen the beach to the east of the forest and had burst through the foliage and over a dune, only to stop before the motionless and eerily silent sea. He sat in the sand, scooping it over his legs, watching the ocean almost imperceptibly whisper before him. Then he searched the sky, but found no sun, no moon. Only beasts roamed the clouds. The sky was gunmetal highlighted with pastels, the sand a soft tan, the forest behind him a washed-out green that spiraled around lemon-shaded bark.

He stood, licked his lips, wondering if the water was heavy with salt. He almost didn't care. Approaching the water, which stretched flat as a pond, he watched for signs of life beneath. There was only his face, and it stopped him. He c.o.c.ked his head, staring-he was no longer bony, no longer gaunt, and he could find no traces of the disease. Was he dreaming? Had he failed to awaken from the hypnosis? He shook his head, dropped to his knees, and reached out his hand over the water, dangling it over the mirror, and finally touched it down.

And screamed.

Something like a seizure ran through him. He reared back, his hand stuck in water that no longer looked like water at all, but like an endless floor of silver, solid enough to walk across or to be buried under. But Robert couldn't see it. He was seeing past the world, through to the river of time, of s.p.a.ce, of All: In the center of a vast jungle a pyramid touches the sky. Painted men encircle it, shouting, jabbing the b.l.o.o.d.y tips of spears into the air.

The surface of a lake is broken by skin, a blue-gray head. A ma.s.sive tail propels it toward a rain forest. Above, the sky is ice and fire. The animal is dying. The world is dying.

At the bottom of a sea across a universe, a broken vessel lies forever still. Beasts no eye has witnessed move in and out of a grand room, their great mouths snapping in the darkness.

In the center of the cosmos lies a dark planet, a dead planet. Buried in its surface are the remains of several civilizations, each unknown to the next. It is only a single world, but it is every world.

Still screaming, Robert escaped the sea, toppled back into the sand. These images had not come in a sequence, but all at once. It was madness.

After a time, he realized he was lying on a beach. He stared at the sky. It was darker now. Like a boy, he tried to make shapes out of the clouds.

”What is it?” he whispered. ”What was it?”

The memory of what he'd seen rushed toward him again and he shut his eyes but it didn't help, and days pa.s.sed, years pa.s.sed, a century pa.s.sed, or perhaps it was only a moment, but then, under the pale light of an alien sky, Robert Lieber fell asleep.

He thought of that day often. Perhaps it was a day ago, perhaps a week, or a year. It had taken him some time to clear his head of what he'd seen, but then again, although the sheer weight of the images had nearly crushed him, he did not want to merely forget. He did not know what that silvery surface beyond the sand was; rather, he only knew what it was not: It was not an ocean. Beyond that, who knew? All he had was conjecture, or perhaps an untenable hypothesis, which was this: This place was not a place at all. It didn't make sense in a material way. But if it were some sort of physical manifestation of a spiritual way station, if the water, the lake, the ocean, the whatever, was some sort of continuum, if it was some kind of current of . . . what? Of what? Robert sat up, stood, started for the stones. Of life? No, that wasn't it, but he was close. He'd seen things that only made sense if you thought in terms of the cosmos's history, if you thought about all of humanity. But even that wasn't enough.

And then he knew. He didn't think of it. It didn't come to him in a flash of excitement. Robert exhaled, stopping atop a jagged stone, a peace spreading through him. He stared into the sky. He hadn't quite figured out what this place was, or where, but he understood the water.

It was everything.