Wonders of a Godless World (7 page)

She nodded eagerly, her mind wide open.

We won’t be leaving our bodies this time, all you have to do is listen, but you might want to sit down anyway. You won’t be disturbed?

No, no one would come to the office this late, except maybe the night nurse, and the orphan knew that he was already asleep in one of the empty rooms. She dropped her broom and sat down on the floor.

Very well then. We’ll return to the day of my birth.

Ninety-two years ago now…

You saw me. I crawled out from beneath that landslide, and I was the same man, but not the same man anymore. I stood on top of that pile of stone and there was nothing but frozen mountains all around and an empty sky above, and I knew that I was alone in an inhuman place that was entirely without pity
.

I could have lain down and died then, of course. I’d lost enough blood, and I was naked, already suffering from exposure. There was little reason for me to go on living. Everything I had ever known or loved was now under half a kilometre of rock. But I turned and walked away from that place. Exactly why…that I can’t remember. The things we do, they are decided deep within us sometimes, without our knowing.

And how I managed to walk, when nothing was left of my foot but bone, that I can’t remember either. Which is also the way of it. The body—I know this from long experience—doesn’t want to remember pain. In any case, somehow I made it all the way down the valley to the next village. It took me a day and a night, without sight of another person, and I really was pretty much dead when I drew near. The first
thing I found was a body, a man, in the ruins of a collapsed stable on the outskirts. And the first thing I did was steal his clothes, despite the fact that my fingers were so crippled with cold I could barely strip his corpse.

The village itself was in chaos, the population weeping and wailing. The earthquake had levelled half the houses. At least three days had passed, but the dead and the injured still lay out in the open. Everyone was living on the streets, afraid to enter those buildings left standing. The closest thing to a doctor was the village midwife. She was wise enough in her way, but she had no equipment and no medicine. There was thirst and hunger and soon there would be disease. What frightened people most, however, was that the river had mysteriously stopped flowing. The water was gone. No one knew why
.

I could have told them, if anyone had asked, but no one spoke to me. This was a bigger village than my own, and there were so many injured, I was merely one more. The midwife took one look at me, shook her head, bandaged my shredded limbs with a few rags, then left me there on the street with the rest of the dying.

And yet, even then I wondered if there wasn’t something else to it. I had travelled to that village before, and was known to many of its inhabitants. But now when they looked, they didn’t recognise me. They were in shock, of course. So was I. But in truth, I felt as if I really was a stranger, that there was nothing left of me to be recognised.

A day later, outside help finally arrived.

Now, you mustn’t think of ambulances or fire engines, like today. This was a long time ago, and in a remote part of a poor country—even poorer than your little island here. The nearest large town was many miles distant, and the nearest city far, far away. So the only assistance that came up the valley was a small train of wagons, carrying a little food and water, some blankets, and a collection of government officials, there to investigate the damage and to make a count of the dead.

There was no doctor. The midwife debated furiously with the officials, and it was decided that two of the wagons would go back down the valley with the worst of the injured. The midwife walked along her makeshift ward and selected those to go. She looked hard at me, and I knew she was wondering whether I would live long enough to make my inclusion worthwhile. I was sure she would say no—and I was too weak even to argue.

But right then the ground trembled. An aftershock. There had been others, but this was the strongest. People screamed, dust rose, and dread took hold of me. I would be buried again, the mountains would not let me go. All the pain of climbing out from under those rocks and marching all those miles, none of it mattered. The earth recognised no suffering, rewarded no effort. It would kill me as unthinkingly as it had tried to the first time.

The midwife was watching me still, her eyes on mine, and she saw my terror. My anger too. My outrage. And I think that’s what decided her—if I was alive enough to feel fear and fury, then I was alive enough to save.

The aftershock passed, and I was put into a wagon. They gave me a mouthful of water and a crust of bread. Then we rattled off down the road. The jolting of the wheels was agony, but I didn’t mind—food was warming my belly, and I was propped up so that I was facing backwards and could watch as the village dwindled away behind us. I was going to live. I believed it finally. I was escaping from those cold walls of stone and ice. And I swore that I would never return to that valley again
.

A government official was riding beside me. He was writing reports, and in time he turned to me and asked my name, his pen poised above the paper. And in a whisper I told him. A lie. I gave myself a new name—just a made-up name, the first that came into my head. And I gave myself a new home too, a town far away. I was, I said, merely
a traveller, a salesman, caught up in the disaster. I knew no one in the valley, had no family there, and had lost all my possessions when the earthquake struck.

He wrote down everything I said and, as simply as that, the person who was me was pronounced deceased—or he soon would be, along with everyone else, when they discovered the fate of my village—and the new me came officially into existence. Take note of that, my orphan. It was my very first death.

Meanwhile, after a slow and painful trip, we arrived in a town called…ah well, I’d hoped to show you on the globe…it was the closest large town. There I was treated in a proper hospital—although, again, a very primitive place by today’s standards. I don’t recall much about it. My wounds had become infected, and I grew very sick, lapsing in and out of consciousness. But I recovered—it must have taken some weeks—and when I was finally awake and alert once more, I discovered an amazing thing. My foot had healed.

Oh, it was gnarled and ugly, but there was flesh there, it was a proper limb again, whole and functional. And I remembered—I knew for certain—that I’d ripped the entire thing away, leaving only a stub of shattered ankle. The doctors should have amputated it. A foot could not regrow from nothing.

Yet it had. My whole body, in fact, had seemingly repaired itself. It was crisscrossed with scars, yes, but much less so than it should have been. You can imagine my confusion. Had it really happened? Had I actually been buried by the landslide and then torn myself free of it? Had I perhaps been caught in a smaller rock fall and merely imagined the rest? Might my village still be standing?

But the hopeful fantasy was soon dispelled. I heard other patients in my ward talking. The earthquake was real, and the landslide. Everyone knew now that a village far up in the valley had been buried, and that a giant dam had blocked the river. Fifty-four people were
presumed dead. The sum population of the village. Myself included, as far as anyone else knew.

But there I was, not only miraculously alive, but miraculously hale as well. Here was a mystery to ponder. The earth had crushed me, it had declared that I should die, and it was impossible that mere flesh and blood could survive against a mountain. But I had. I caressed the scar tissue of my leg, wondering. What was I to do with this new life, this impossible life, this second life?

I found that one desire burnt in me brighter than all others—the desire to learn. I was, I realised while lying in that hospital, an ignorant man. When I had looked up on that terrible night and seen the face of the mountain fracture and fall, I had felt fear, yes, and anger, but the root of those emotions was confusion. I had not understood what was happening. I was too ignorant. The processes of the earth—even though I’d spent all my short life living upon it, a peasant familiar with the soil—were a mystery to me.

A frightening mystery, as my nightmares attested. Physically I was recovering, but mentally I was still bleeding and broken, scarcely able to sleep for cold sweats and fits of screaming. Paranoias haunted me—that another earthquake was going to strike, that a tremendous flood was on its way, that the ground, if I ever dared venture outside again, would open up and swallow me.

In short, I no longer trusted the earth. I suspected, almost, a conscious malice in it towards my person. And no man can live like that. So I decided I would spend my new life studying the very thing I feared. I would devote myself to understanding the workings of the world. I would learn why the earthquake had struck my valley that day, and why it was that all my friends and family had died.

But more—I would learn about floods too, and volcanoes, and storms. Can you see what I wanted to do? It was the
violence
of the world that I sought to comprehend. I had to somehow fathom those
moments when the natural forces turn on man and destroy him so casually—because if I could understand what caused those events, then I could strip them of their mystery. And if I could strip them of their mystery, then I could strip them of their terror and their power over me. And end my nightmares.

Ah yes…a grand plan.

Of course, I’m sure I didn’t think in those terms while I lay in hospital. I was just a goatherd who could barely read or write. All I really knew was that I never wanted to feel so stupid and afraid as I had the day the mountain fell on me.

So I set out to get an education.

It wasn’t easy for someone like me, penniless and homeless. But there were jobs in the cities, and schools and libraries too, so to the cities I went. I worked all day in factories or dockyards—and struggled by night over my books, learning to read and write properly. I hired tutors with my meagre wages. And then, when I was reasonably literate, I spent my evenings in the libraries. And hired more tutors. And passed the basic school exams. And then began to prowl the corridors of universities.

I made note of the fields I would need to study. Geology. Hydrology. Meteorology. Oceanography. Chemistry. Physics. All just words to me then, many of them disciplines in their merest infancy. And all out of reach for a poor man anyway. But then, only three years after the landslide, a great war broke out across much of the world. It lasted four years, and not only did millions die, but revolutions came, and whole societies were turned upside down, including my own. Me—well, all that matters is, again, I managed to survive. And afterwards, all the education that had been denied to me by poverty was suddenly made available, if I had the desire and the intellect to seize it.

I had the desire and the intellect.

So I went to university, and my long study began. And for ninety-two years, it has gone on. Oh, not always as a humble student, no—but the tales of my many careers and fortunes and failures can wait for the moment. All you need know for now, my orphan, is that in one way or another, ever since that landslide, I have been examining this world. And I can safely say that my understanding of the earth is now unequalled. No one else knows nearly as much about this planet as I do. No one else can read its signs or appreciate its subtleties or untangle its complexities as well as I.

And yet for all that, I’m nothing—compared to you.

I sensed it, even as they wheeled me into this place. My sleep was disturbed by a presence. There was someone close by, someone with powers. Comatose, I reached out with my thoughts and went searching among the minds around me, only to discover that I was in a madhouse, and that most of those at hand were insane or catatonic or senile. The mind I actually wanted, for some reason, remained hidden. So I waited. I was sure that the presence would sense me too before long, and seek me out in its turn.

But what irony! My only regular visitor was a retarded girl who came to change the sheets. A girl whose mind, on the surface at least, was blank. A girl I dismissed, summarily, as being of no use to me. What a fool I was!

But meanwhile I felt the earth trembling minutely, and I calculated that there must be a volcano nearby, and that soon it would erupt, in minor fashion. I decided that I may as well be outside to watch. It was no trouble to plant the necessary thought in a nurse’s head, hence I was there when it all happened.

And I saw, disbelieving, what you did
.

I saw how easily you read the faint vibrations in the earth, long before any machine could have registered them; when even I, for all my expertise, could only just detect the activity. I saw how you knew,
innately, where to look for the source of the tremors, and I saw how your mind pierced the earth to see down to the magma chamber. I saw that you knew exactly what form the eruption would take, how long it would last, and how little damage it would do. I watched you laugh in the face of the blocks falling from the sky, and stand firm as the pyroclastic flow rolled down the mountainside.

No one else could have done that. Not the cleverest scientist alive today, with all the most sensitive instruments that technology can produce. Even I can’t do that. Oh, I can analyse a volcano’s behaviour better than anyone…but I could never simply glance at an eruption and instantly know its every detail, as you did that day.

And so, as the ash rained down, I finally looked—really looked—inside your head, and discovered the miracle that is there. Such a shock. Like all the idiot doctors and nurses in this benighted place, I thought you were just a simple child who knew no better. When all the time you are a wonder. This world and all its secrets, from the heights to the depths, lie open to you. That’s why I want to help you, my orphan.

Because only you can help me.