Arch/Eternal - Chapter Five

The End of the Beginning

This is Arch/Eternal, a sprawling novel-in-progress in the genre of philosophical sci-fi. Think Dune meets Harry Potter, and maybe channeling a little bit of Dan Simmons.

If you’d like to start from the beginning, here’s the Prologue.

And if you’d like to follow along with the world-building behind the story, take a look at the companion series shamelessly titled A Terran’s Guide to the Galaxy.

One more note: I’ve heard from some of you that reading a novel in an email is not ideal. This is entirely understandable. To that end, I’d like to recommend checking out the Substack App, which offers a much cleaner reading experience with long-form content, including nice little features like “dark mode.” Give it a spin and let me know what you think.

---

30 Days & 7 Years

Rita stayed with us for a month.

During which time, she made it her priority to teach me how to teach myself everything from math to literature to history to human and machine linguistics. She knew that at 11 years old, my mind was an infinite sponge, and she also knew how to keep that potential from going to waste. With unrelenting passion and patience, Rita introduced me to a degree of academic rigor that I couldn’t have imagined, and she seemed to increase the exhausting pace of study every day.

And then, every night, after I had collapsed into sleep, she stayed up with Nali, lending her ears and her love to help her old friend rediscover her own confidence. But whenever Nali asked Rita about herself, Rita deflected and redirected the conversation toward Nali and I, with disarming and genuine curiosity. 

Nali told me later that it was only very late, when she was alone in bed, that she allowed herself to openly wonder at Rita’s secrets — her true identity, her apparent agelessness, the nature of her motives. Nali tossed and turned most of those nights with the unsettling suspicion that Rita was actually an angel, sent from God to heal and help her tragic little family. 

And yet, whenever the topic of religion arose in conversation, Rita found a polite way right back out of it. The mystery ended up shaking Nali’s faith more than anything else could. Because, she reasoned, if Rita was some supernatural being, as she sometimes seemed to be, and she was also disinterested in the topic of theology, as she also very much seemed to be, then that suggested proof positive that Nali’s own faith was far off base. 

But if that was true, if Rita really was some sort of divine or supernatural being, and Nali’s faith was false, wouldn’t Rita put some effort into dispossessing her of false notions? 

On the last night of her stay, all three of us stayed up, making the most of our remaining hours together. Eventually, I fell asleep on the couch, and Nali realized this was the last opportunity she had to ask Rita, point blank, the questions that had been keeping her awake at night. 

“Tell me what you are,” she said. “Please. I need to know.”

Rita looked up at Nali with that imperturbable gaze, and said, “I’m a person. Just like you.”

“No,” Nali said. “I’ve known plenty of people. You are not just like me. When we met, I thought we were the same age. But it’s been almost thirty years, and you…you still look like you did when I met you.”

“I promise, I’m older than I look.”

“That’s what I mean! I would swear you are older. Maybe much older. I’ve never met anyone who makes me feel young like you make me feel young — not in a good way. I mean you make me feel like I don’t know anything. That I haven’t seen much, haven’t lived much, that I’ve still got a LOT to learn.”

Rita tried to protest, but Nali cut her off.

“No, no, don’t misunderstand me. It’s not that you’ve been condescending or superior. Of course not. The opposite. You’re—you’re somehow beyond all that. You’re beyond it the way that an older person is, should be, beyond a young person. I’m trying to say that you seem very old to me. You seem older than anyone, and you look like you’re 30. Like a baby. What I’m trying to say, and I’m just saying it now because I’m really tired, and it’s really late, and you’ll be on your way tomorrow… what I’m trying to say is that sure I believe in angels, but I don’t think I met any before I met you.”

“That’s incredibly kind of you to say—“

“No, let me finish. The problem is that I believe in angels, and I believe in God and Jesus, and in the Gospel as I’ve learned and lived it—well, as I’ve tried to live it. I’ve always prayed and gone to church, and I’ve read all the scriptures, many times over, and I believed. Even when…even after everything…I kept my faith. I kept it close. I believed that the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, because sometimes that’s all you have, when He just keeps taking.”

There were tears on Nali’s face, and she couldn’t bring herself to meet Rita’s piercing eyes, but she couldn’t stop talking either.

“I am a woman of faith, Rita. But you...you are some kind of person I can’t understand. And so either you’re an angel on God’s own errand, or you’re something else. And if you’re something else, I want to know it. Because what you are is real, and I’m not interested in keeping my faith rooted in anything that isn’t real. God gives, and God takes away, and if God gave me you so He could take my faith away, then so be it. I just need to know.”

Rita bowed her head. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

And then silence fell down like a sheet. Nali could tell Rita was working up to something, and she wasn’t about to interrupt whatever might be coming. 

Then Rita traced something quick on the palm of her hand, and looked up. She had tears at the corners of her eyes.

“I haven’t treated you with the respect you deserve,” she said. “And I am truly sorry for that. But it can be hard to know…to—to know how to…”

Without warning, Rita stood up and said, “Follow me.” Nali said nothing as she followed Rita out the front door, leaving me asleep on the couch.

As she guided Nali outside, Rita wondered how her friend would react. She didn’t want to disrupt or damage her old friend’s faith, but two things had become obvious. First, this woman could be trusted with anything. Rarely had Rita met someone of such unshakeable integrity. Two, Rita didn’t want to live with the guilt of gaslighting her. It was foolish to assume she could come out here, spend all this time, and then leave without saying anything. 

Or showing anything. 

As they rounded the trailer to face the desert, Nali stopped and stared. Her brain struggled to interpret the image her eyes were passing along. 

It was a perfectly smooth, perfectly black, and shaped like fat, oblong seedpod. The top and bottom sloped toward a ridge that ran the  circumference of the whole. The surface was acutely non reflective, which made it very hard to see clearly. The eyes first registered it as a large shadow, an absence of light.

At twenty meters on its longest edge, it was the size of a house, and hovered motionless a few feet off the ground. Nali blinked, rubbed her eyes, and ducked to try and get a better angle, which wasn’t really possible.

“What…is this?”

“This,” Rita said, “is my ship.”

Nali took a step back from Rita.

“So you’re an alien,” Nali stated flatly.

“No, but… Let me show you some things.” With a subtle wave of her hand, the ship lifted up as a circular platform descended from the bottom.  

Nali gasped, then stepped further back.

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” It was a lot to process, but Rita was confident she’d catch up.

“It’s OK. We’ll be back before long. We can talk inside.”

Nali looked back and forth from the ship to Rita, then closed her eyes. “I’m dreaming. This is insane. This is a dream.”

“Come inside. You’ll be fine.”

Rita gently took Nali’s arm and guided her toward the platform as it settled into the ground. As Rita knew it would, Nali’s reluctance melted as she approached this impossible marvel, and they stepped up onto the soft carpet.

The platform lifted them gently into the belly of the ship, and then, if anyone had been watching, it would have seemed to disappear. 

Well, as it turns out, I was watching.

“Where did they go? What did they do? What did you do??”

This is me imagining all the questions you’ve got. 

I don’t want to disappoint you, but here’s the thing. I was eleven. After some amount of time — it might have been twenty minutes or an hour — I went back to sleep. 

Oh, I walked outside first. I paced excitedly. But what could I do? They were gone, I was alone. There was no evidence of anything. It was really late. I was tired. There was nothing for me to do but wait. And while I was waiting, I fell back asleep. On the couch.

When I woke up again, it was morning, and Nali had breakfast for me. She told me Rita had an early flight, and she’d just gotten back from dropping her off at the airport. Nothing in her demeanor suggested a joyride on a spaceship, so I immediately became suspicious that I’d dreamed it. 

Days passed. 

Then weeks.

Then years. 

Meanwhile, Rita continued our mentoring relationship remotely, over email, and the occasional call. But nothing in those interactions gave me a reason to believe she was anything other than a generous teacher who was very invested in my education. I started feeling dumber and dumber every time my brain surfaced the memory of that dark obelisk behind our house.

When are you going to stop fantasizing like a little kid?

My mom wasn’t going to come back from the desert and take me with her into the stars, and Rita was not an alien with a spaceship. I was, I became certain, plagued with an overactive imagination. 

And an overactive imagination was not going to help me get into MIT.

Rita had showed me how, with a little guidance, a person could learn almost anything on the Internet. By the end of my first year, I was devising thought experiments on the special theory of relativity, and deconstructing various causal relationships between the barbarian raids in northern Europe and the formation of modern England.

Sometime later, after diving headlong into the major philosophical works from the ancient and modern worlds, I said to Rita during one of our phonecalls, “They’re all saying the same thing, aren’t they?”

“Keep reading,” Rita replied. “Everything important happens in the margins. If you think two things are the same, look for the differences. If you think they’re completely different, look for the ways that they are the same.”

I’m not trying to brag, here. I’ve met truly gifted people. I was smart, and thoughtful, but what I was able to achieve with my education was not evidence of how special I was. It was, rather, an incriminating indictment of almost every other academic institution. What “school” denotes for most kids is abjectly appalling. They are prisons that teach inmates how to hate learning.

Anyway, everything went great until puberty almost ruined everything. After having spent nearly two years forging my mind into a disciplined tool of problem-solving and discovery, I felt my whole world turn over and roll under unseen forces of nature that had utterly no interest in any of the books I’d read, or the essays I’d written.

Right along with outgrowing everything like it was my job, I also picked fights with Nali, blew off my studies, and devised plans to steal the truck to drive into the city. At one point, I sold the telescope Rita had given me to buy a beat up car from someone in town. I was hunted by the insatiable desire to find my peers, to find girls my age, and to prove something to them. 

I remember Nali waiting for me one late morning, as I pulled sheepishly up to the lumpy trailer home after some fevered and fruitless excursion. “You’ve got River blood in you,” she said. “It took your father, and it’ll take you just the same if you don’t bank it right.”

As with most hard things, we dealt with the reckless force of adolescence one day, one conversation, one instance of damage control at a time. 

And then, before I could register the substance of it, my childhood was over, and it was time to go to college.

I should note here that this is no longer the obvious choice for ambitious young people. But I had kept my eye on MIT just as I had kept my attention on the stars. I wanted to study astronomy and theoretical astro-physics with access to the tools and resources a school like that could give me. 

I also didn’t have a lot of doubt about getting accepted. In addition to my letter of recommendation from Rita, I had letters from several professors I’d worked with during the last year or so of my independent study. They didn’t use words like genius, but you could tell they wanted to. It also didn’t hurt that more than half my blood was registered Native American. I didn’t even bother applying anywhere else.

After I got the acceptance letter, I started spending a lot of hours hogging the little bit of bandwidth we had on taking virtual tours through Boston via Google streetview, and fantasizing about what it would be like to be a student in the cradle of American history.

I was nervous. I was excited. I had absolutely no idea what I was in for. 

Do you remember, at the beginning, when I said it would be tempting to start my story in Boston? It’s not because that’s where I found out that I wasn’t imagining what I saw that night with Nali and Rita. And it’s not because that’s where an enigmatic man named Callan Tate tested the limits of my personal integrity. It’s not even because that’s where I was formally, if haphazardly, invited into the Fellowship.

It’s because that’s where I met Esther Quinn. 

---

Any and all feedback is earnestly welcome.