Wonders of a Godless World. Andrew McGahan

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      By next morning the hospital had mostly recovered from the effects of the eruption. The electricity had been restored overnight, the ash had been swept from the interiors and from the roofs, and in the yard the pathways were clear again. The laundry had even caught up with the washing.

      It was virtually an ordinary morning, but to the orphan, roaming the back wards, such ordinariness was itself extraordinary. Obviously, no one at the hospital knew what she now knew—that the world was round, that it spun in empty space. They couldn’t possibly, because how could people just carry on as usual if they had known—if they understood that the buildings they lived in, the ground they stood on, even the air they breathed, was all spinning on an immense, glowing ball?

      The orphan hugged the discovery to herself like a treasure. Never in her life had she possessed knowledge that no one else did. Always she was the slow one, the one left mystified. But this—this was a secret greater than any other. The patients would never guess it. It was beyond even the nurses and doctors. Why, if she told them, even if she could find a way, they would think she was mad. Or madder.

      But she wasn’t going to tell anyone.

      You must pretend nothing has happened, the foreigner instructed. He had been too exhausted to speak to her after their flight the previous afternoon, and she had left him for the evening. But, delightfully, he was there in her mind again when she woke at sunrise, quite audible, even though she was in her room and he was all the way across the compound in his. No one would understand. They’d only be scared of you.

      The orphan didn’t think she was capable of scaring anybody, but there was no question of arguing. Not with him. So she attended to her usual morning chores as if she was still the same old orphan. As if she couldn’t feel the floor moving and moving and moving as the earth revolved beneath her. As if, when she went out into the yard and looked up at the sky, she couldn’t remember what it had been like to soar beyond the warm blue air into a pure and freezing and silent blackness. As if the foreigner wasn’t with her, hour after hour—no matter where she was in the hospital.

       We’re connected now, you and I. Distance doesn’t mean anything. We’ll always be able to talk…and do other things.

      Other things? Did that mean they would fly again?

      A rueful laugh. When I’ve rested more, maybe.

      She was sorry. She had pushed him too hard and too high.

       Yes, you’re very strong, and I’m much weaker than normal. But when I’m fully healed, I’ll be able to match you. Don’t worry.

      Wonderful!

      But she was aware of a strange frustration. She was so grateful to him, so open to him, so enmeshed with him—quite unlike anything she had experienced with any other person—and yet it seemed that she had no word to define that to herself. No word to identify the sweet uniqueness of him.

       My name—that’s what you’re searching for.

      His name! But she could never know names…

       No…but there’s no reason that should be a barrier between us. Names aren’t the same thing as knowing. After all, you can’t tell me your own name, and yet I know everything about you.

      Yes, he did, it was true. But what did she know about him? Their connection flowed in only the one direction, it seemed. They had soared together, yes, and it was the most sublime moment of sharing she had ever experienced—but the sharing was all on her part. His own mind had remained closed throughout. Who he was, where he had come from, of those things she knew almost nothing.

      You will, in due course.

      When? Why not now?

      More laughter. Mine is a longer story than yours, and much more complex.

      But that wasn’t good enough. She needed to know, because not knowing frightened her. He had been trapped under a falling mountain and somehow survived and that was ninety-two years ago and she believed every word—but none of it made sense, and if it didn’t make sense, then maybe it wasn’t real. Maybe she was imagining it all, making it all up in her head. Maybe it was just her madness.

       It’s not madness. How could it be? Could you imagine flying? Could you make up the things you saw yesterday?

      The orphan wouldn’t have thought so. Certainly, she had never before imagined anything so exquisite as the shining world, spinning in space. But wasn’t that the cruelty of hallucinations? That they could be fatefully beautiful?

       Forget the beauty. What matters is—did it feel right?

      And, oh, it had felt so right. Indeed, the orphan had recognised the essential truth of what she was seeing even as they first rose above the volcano and looked back down. Those initial, minor revelations—that there were other towns on the island, that in fact there were other entire islands across the ocean—they had all seemed self-evident to her, even at the time. Of course there were other towns and islands. It was just that she had never travelled to them, or heard of them before.

      And the greater revelations felt just as manifestly true. Why, having seen it now, how else could the world be but round? Yes, it seemed flat, but it couldn’t actually be flat, otherwise it would have to go on forever, a stretched bed sheet that never ended—and a deep part of the orphan’s mind rebelled at that thought. Besides, if she stood on a high place, she could see for a long way, but not eternally, no matter how clear the air was. The view had edges. And those edges were simply where the world curved away from sight. The solution was so elegant that the same deep part of the orphan’s mind rejoiced in it. This could only be reality.

      Even the things she had seen that weren’t obvious, that indeed seemed the opposite of obvious, did not shake her conviction. There was the mystery, for instance, of how people were held to the earth—despite it spinning—rather than being flung away. She had no explanation for that. But nor did she doubt that it was a natural phenomenon, a force rooted in the fabric of the world. Something in the earth pulled objects to itself, and she and the foreigner had only been able to escape it and fly because they had been in shadow form. Weightless. And even then, it had cost them pain.

      No, she could not believe that any of this was madness, nothing she had seen, nothing she had heard. It wasn’t in her to create such marvels and puzzles. It was a knowledge that came from outside of her. It was a wisdom.

       And it’s all ours, my orphan. Yours and mine alone.

      Again, wonderful.

      Yet questions remained. In particular—was she truly clever now? If she had learnt so much, was she no longer retarded, or stupid? Had the foreigner made her smart?

      By mid-morning, she wasn’t at all sure.

      For one thing, if she was smart, then why was she still having so much trouble understanding people when they spoke to her? The foreigner, oh yes, when he was talking his words fairly hummed with meaning—and she’d hoped that it might be that way when anyone spoke now, that the old failing in her mind had been repaired or removed. But it seemed not.

      In fact, the problem was worse than ever. In all her various encounters that morning with the СКАЧАТЬ