Elizabeth counted in her head, at the giant stars roaming outside the port windows. Her cattle of the sun, here before any sun would have risen, on black pastures, and she was counting cups of milk for oatmeal.
Never forget, she thought to herself, that there was a long long time where none of this happened. Then we were earthbound. Monkeys. But she had some intimation, she knew, but perhaps she could not say, that freedom is in the heart, that the vast plain speaks in its tongues to whoever can hear. And long before they got here, and asked, what else, what else, there they hung in the sky, god’s baubles, the nine Chinese lanterns which named a tiny galaxy in a huge universe. It should seem small. It didn’t.
She remembered, as a little girl, not knowing what would someday be possible, her favorite: the red chord of Mars, quivering in the sky like a string of an abandoned harp. Perhaps that was why she was attracted to Aneirin. The sting of things remembered. . It had been a long time since anyone had heard that music. The belt of Orion, who never came down from heaven.
Aneirin himself was sitting in the corner, tuning his harp, lost in his own world. She was in hers, but the universes touched. He said, “houses have stories before you get there. Ships don’t.”
She answered, but didn’t answer. She was speaking to herself. He was there.
“Do you understand that voyaging is what we are made for? The human body dropped from a tree, like humpty dumpy, lost all its hair, and suddenly it could move. Five years later it invented the car, then slapped a rocket on it and took to the air. Your Odysseus, like you said, he could have walked home. But he didn’t. He didn’t because something grows in a person, when they’ve got the world to learn from again. There, we are babies, and we are geniuses. We learn everything we’re shown. Infants could swim the English channel. Teach them fifty new languages.”
He bent over the harp, his dark hair sweeping over his brow. Hummed a note and plucked a string.
“You have to get out, I know. There, the nose wakes up. The eyes start seeing things. You’re too young, I suspect, to remember cities well, but I can tell you it was an animal house. Walk down the street like a herd of buffalo, devoted only to the art of not noticing anything. Is that house new? No, you bastard, no. It’s been there years, You forgot not to use your eyes.”
“Do you know that’s where the gods come from? Hypersensitive agency detection, I’ve read about it. Your monkey ancestor has to know, when he hears a twig snap in the forest, that a tiger is there. The brain just never stopped knowing that. Do you hear the music when no one is playing it? Do you dream, Aneirin, do you dream anything?”
He played a chord, which rippled the stale air into something liquid and strange. She was talking to him because almost nobody heard her say anything, but he had magic too, she knew, and somebody had to hear it. She was challenging him now, to see what he was made of, to see if he could take it.
“It’s the twig snapping in the forest, and we can’t stop imagining tigers, even out here, where the stars line up like runways, but we never ever land.”
“So we’re out here,” he said at last, “to create new gods.”
She smiled, a proud smile. “It’s the only thing to find in nothing, boyo. It’s the only thing that could be there.”
She turned around and cupped his face in her hands. “Listen to me,” she said, and it seemed to Aneirin, then, as if something were speaking through her, some great white thing, whose wings he could almost feel. “This is the most important thing I’m ever going to tell you. If some day, Allah forfend, I have to tell you to abandon ship because some mutant space dog has mistaken this ship for some kind of giant chew toy, it will not be as important as what I am about to tell you now.” He nodded.
“The Universe did not begin with a bang. It began, like Stephen Hawking says, with a Big Bounce. It didn’t begin at all. For decades, scientists have wondered whether the universe is infinitely expanding or whether it will reach a certain point where it loses enough energy to start contracting again. It’s the second one. But when it contracts, when it rolls up into that little primordial egg again, then, Aneirin, then, it all starts again, which has probably happened several times before. This universe is 15 billion years old, but there is just no telling how many universes there have been. Which means that I, you, and everyone we know have been as many things as there have been universes, and will be a thousand things, again and again, and we’re all just bits of recombinant matter floating down an unobvious string.”
Aneirin looked at her for a long moment. She kept his face cupped between her hands.
“So,” he said, “are we a couple now? Or what?”
She laughed, and kissed him on the nose.