There was a kind of numbness. Not the ecstasy, not the oceanic serenity he had once known, a lifetime ago. Just: numbness. When he could speak again, he asked, "May I share this music with others, Isaac?"
"Sure. That’s the point." Isaac yawned and handed Emilio the tablet. "Be careful with it," he said.
LEAVING ISAAC’S TENT, HE STOOD ALONE FOR A WHILE, EYES ON THE sky. The weather on Rakhat was notoriously changeable and the Milky Way was rapidly losing custody of the night to clouds, but he knew that when it was clear, he could look up and, without effort, recognize familiar patterns. Orion, Ursa major, Ursa minor, the Pleiades: arbitrary shapes imposed on random points of light.
"The stars look the same!" he’d exclaimed years earlier, standing with Isaac’s father, seeing Rakhat’s night sky for the first time. "How can all the constellations be the same?"
"It’s a big galaxy in a big universe," the young astronomer had told him, smiling at the linguist’s ignorance. "Four point three light-years aren’t enough to make any difference in how we see the stars back on Earth and here. You’d have to go a lot farther than this to change your perspective."
No, Jimmy, Emilio Sandoz now thought, gazing upward. This was far enough.
Like father, like son, he thought then, realizing that Jimmy Quinn had, like his extraordinary child, discovered an unearthly music that changed one’s perspective. He was pleased by that, and grateful.
EMILIO WOKE JOHN FIRST, AND LED HIM A LITTLE DISTANCE AWAY FROM the settlement to a place where they could listen to the music alone; where they could speak in privacy, where Emilio could study his friend’s face as he listened and see his own astonishment and awe mirrored.
"My God," John breathed, when the last notes faded. "Then this was why…"
"Maybe," Emilio said. "I don’t know. Yes. I think so." Ex corde volo, he thought. From my heart, I wish it…
They listened again to the music, and then for a time to the night noise of Rakhat, so like that of home: wind in the scrub, tiny chitterings and scratchings in nearby weeds, distant hoots, hushed wingbeats overhead.
"There was a poem I found—years ago, just after Jimmy Quinn intercepted that first fragment of music from Rakhat," said Emilio. " ’In all the shrouded heavens anywhere / Not a whisper in the air / Of any living voice but one so far / That I can hear it only as a bar / Of lost, imperial music.’»
"Yes," John said quietly. "Perfect. Who wrote that?"
"Edward Arlington Robinson," Emilio told him, and added, " ’Credo.’»
"Credo: I believe," John repeated, smiling. Clear-eyed and clear-souled, he leaned back, hands locked around a knee. "Tell me, Dr. Sandoz," he asked, "is that the name of the poem, or a statement of faith?"
Emilio looked down, silvered hair spilling over his eyes as he laughed a little and shook his head. "God help me," he said at last. "I’m afraid… I think… it might be both."
"Good," said John. "I’m glad to hear that."
They were quiet for a time, alone with their thoughts, but then John sat up straight, struck by a thought. "There’s a passage in Exodus—God tells Moses, ’No one can see My face, but I will protect you with My hand until I have passed by you, and then I will remove My hand and you will see My back.’ Remember that?"
Emilio nodded, listening.
"Well, I always thought that was a physical metaphor," John said, "but, you know—I wonder now if it isn’t really about time? Maybe that was God’s way of telling us that we can never know His intentions, but as time goes on… we’ll understand. We’ll see where He was: we’ll see His back."
Emilio gazed at him, face still. "The brother of my heart," he said at last. "Without you, where would I be now?"
John smiled, his affection plain. "Dead drunk in a bar someplace?" he suggested.
"Or just plain dead." Emilio looked away, blinking. When he could speak again, his voice was steady. "Your friendship should have been proof enough of God. Thank you, John. For everything."
John nodded once and then again, as though confirming something. "I’ll go wake the other guys up," he said.
Coda
Earth: 2096
ONCE AGAIN RADIO WAVES CARRIED MUSIC FROM RAKHAT TO EARTH, and once again Emilio Sandoz was preceded by news that would change his life.
Long before he arrived home, reaction to the DNA music had rigidified. Believers found it a miraculous confirmation of God’s existence and evidence of Divine Providence. Skeptics declared it a fraud—a clever trick by the Jesuits to distract attention from their earlier failures. Atheists did not dispute the music’s authenticity, but they considered it just another fluke that proved nothing—like the universe itself. Agnostics admitted the music was magnificent, but suspended judgment, waiting for who knew what?
The pattern was established at Sinai and under the Buddha’s tree; on Calvary and at Mecca; in sacred caves, at wells of life, amid circles of stone. Signs and wonders are always doubted, and perhaps they are meant to be. In the absence of certainty, faith is more than mere opinion; it is hope.
Emilio himself had read once of a savant in Lesotho who had memorized every street in every city in Africa. If such a person made names into notes, would he have found harmony in addresses? Perhaps—given enough material and enough time and nothing better to do. And if that happened, Emilio asked himself on the long voyage home, would the music be any less beautiful?
He was a linguist, after all, and it seemed entirely possible to him that religion and literature and art and music were all merely side effects of a brain structure that comes into the world ready to make language out of noise, sense out of chaos. Our capacity for imposing meaning, he thought, is programmed to unfold the way a butterfly’s wings unfold when it escapes the chrysalis, ready to fly. We are biologically driven to create meaning. And if that’s so, he asked himself, is the miracle diminished?
It was then that he came very close to prayer. Whatever the truth is, he thought, blessed be the truth.
The Giordano Bruno was nearly halfway home when Nico noticed that Don Emilio’s nightmares had ended.
WITH ONLY SIX MONTHS OF SUBJECTIVE TIME BEFORE THEIR ARRIVAL ON Earth, Emilio Sandoz concentrated on the task at hand: teaching Rukuei English, trying to prepare the poet for what might await him. It helped to worry about someone else, to put his own experience to work in Rukuei’s behalf. Suspended in time, Emilio refused to listen to the transmissions from Rakhat that Frans intercepted, ignored the responses from Earth. It will be well, he told himself, and let the universe take care of itself while he took care of one apt and eager student. So when Frans Vanderhelst finally docked the Bruno at the Shimatsu Orbital Hotel high above the Pacific, Emilio Sandoz was, in many ways, a man at peace. He was, therefore, completely unprepared for his reaction to a letter that had been waiting for him nearly four decades.
Handwritten on a fine rag paper, selected because it would not crumble during his anticipated absence from Earth, the note read: "I am so very sorry, Emilio. I will not stoop to the scoundrel’s defense—that I had no other choice. I was simply acting on the principle that it is easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission. Because I trust in God, I trust also that you will have learned something of value on your journey. Pax Christi. Vince Giuliani."
The middle-aged Jesuit who handed Sandoz the note did not know its contents, but he knew its author and the circumstances under which it was written, so he could take a pretty good guess at what that long-dead Father General must have said.
"One last jerk on the chain, you goddamned sonofabitch!" Sandoz cried, confirming the priest’s hypothesis. The rest of the commentary was heartfelt and in a splendid assortment of languages. When Sandoz was done, and he did not finish quickly, he stood in the curving air lock, the letter in one braced hand, arms at his sides, limp with exasperation. "Who the hell are you?" he demanded in English.