Ellis smiled. “We’ve already determined that I was married for over thirty years. I’m used to it.”
He didn’t think she’d get the jest, but Sol burst out laughing so hard she nearly spilled her tea.
“Oh, I do like you, Mr. Rogers.”
“I like you too, Sol. Sol…” He repeated the name thoughtfully.
“It’s another word for sun,” she said.
“And a Martian day,” he added.
“And an abbreviation for solution.”
“And an acronym for shit outta luck.”
This made Sol laugh. “I never heard that one. It’s nice to talk to someone more my age.”
“People in Hollow World pick their names, don’t they?”
“Yes. Everyone takes the Gaunt Winslow Evaluation Nascence, a sort of aptitude test developed by Wacine Gaunt and Albert Winslow that seeks to predict which endeavors will provide a person maximum happiness. Many people denounce the GWEN as ineffective, but everyone takes it, even if only out of curiosity. At that age most people pick a direction and choose a name that reflects their decision. In the early days, the test produced a printout that provided the answers in a series of three letters, and people adopted these abbreviations as their names. The tradition stuck. Silly, I suppose—as most traditions tend to be—but no different from when people were called Carpenter, Miller, Taylor, Potter, or Smith—and it helps skip the obligatory: So what do you do?”
“Thought so. I noticed a few. Pol seems short for politician, and Geo is obvious, but a few, like Cha, are baffling.”
“Physician, right?”
“Yes.”
“Usually it’s Hip, Par, Doc, or Wat, but some pick Cha, which is short for Charaka, a famous Indian physician born around 300 BC and referred to as the Father of Medicine.”
“And Sol?”
She smiled. “I’ll leave that for you to decide, but I can tell you this…they retired the name. I’m the only Sol.”
He smiled back. “Okay, I’ll give you that one.” He sipped his tea, and a question popped into his head, a question that had circled him the night before as he fell asleep amid the M&M’S and camping gear. “What’s the point?”
“The point?” Sol gazed at him, not so much confused as intrigued. She didn’t look any older than a college coed, but he wondered if Sol’s age isolated her just the same. Did her way of thinking,her interest in books and old things, make others shun her? Think of her as cute but out of touch? Did she appreciate company as much as a homebound grandmother?
Ellis nodded. “What’s the point to life? I never really thought of it too much before I traveled through time. I did it not only to look for a cure to a terminal illness, but also to escape my life, which as it turned out, didn’t work. But now that I’m here I think about it. Do you know what a parallax is? It’s an astronomy term. You can’t tell much about something looking at it from one point. You have no depth, no reference. If you move and look at it from a different angle, you can determine distance and such. Traveling through time is like that. I saw how things were, and, after shifting ahead, I see how they are and…I don’t know. I thought I’d be able to understand more about the whypart of life, but I don’t. You’ve lived through it all, had a lot more time to reflect.”
Sol looked empathetic, soft eyes blinking at him. “I think that’s one of those questions everyone has to find the answer to for themselves.”
“Had a feeling you were going to say that. Everyone always does.”
“But…”
“There’s a but?”
She nodded and looked down at her cup. “I can tell you what I found for myself. When you’ve lived through as much as I have, you understand that the old Buddhists were right in a way. Everything comes and goes. Nothing is forever. Not even God. My mother called Him eternal, but Jesus and His dad turned out to be a fad like all the others. At least that’s how I saw it when I was just a girl of one thousand—my rebellious stage.” She winked at him. “God was just a superstitious holdover from when we thought fire was magic. But it’s been centuries, and still people seek something. I can see it in their eyes, hear it when they talk. They don’t call it God anymore, but I think it’s the same thing. A natural drive like wanting food, water, and sex.” She smiled.
“Even after all the tinkering, the ISP got rid of sex, but we still have a natural longing to feel a connection with others. We’ve outgrown the concepts of magic and demons, but there remains a longing for something. The problem is, we can’t define it because the word Godhas become meaningless. It has the wrong definition. It means some all-powerful man who knows all and judges everyone, and I don’t think that God ever really was that, any more than lightning and thunder was Thor. We can still sense it, still feel it acting in our lives, and we yearn for it, knowing that somehow it has the answers we’ve always sought.”
“So what is God then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Really? All that and you are going to leave me hanging? C’mon. You don’t strike me as the type to have lived this long and not have a theory, at least.”
Sol smiled. “I do have a theory.”
“Can you tell me?”
Sol shifted in her seat, straightening up, smoothing out the wrinkles in her skirt. “It’s not a currently popular idea.”
“Why do I get the impression that isn’t a problem for you?”
Sol grinned. “Did I mention I like you, Mr. Rogers?” She drained the last of her tea. “It isn’t a problem. That’s the benefit of being this old. You get very lonely, and are bored a lot, but you also really don’t give a sonic bleez what anyone else thinks about you.”
“So, tell me. What is God?”
“The future.”
Ellis gave a puzzled face.
“Humans have longed for many things, and when we put our heads together we have usually found them. Weak as mice we tamed a planet and traveled to others. We satisfied our needs for food and shelter easily enough. Then we fulfilled our dream for peace and defeated death. But one aspiration remains. We’ve never satisfied one of our most primal desires: our lust for God, our need for a spiritual side. We’ve never really gotten close. But what if that’s because it hasn’t been possible—until now? What if we were caterpillars having precognitive dreams of flying? What if we were seeing our own future—and that desperate longing manifested itself in this ethereal hunger, this unfathomable lust for more out of life? My mother always said that we each had a little bit of God inside. It’s the part that guides us and tells us to treat others well. I think that’s true. I think we are all protective containers keeping precious treasures inside, but we are also holding them prisoner, isolating them from each other.” Sol leaned forward over her teacup. “What if God is simply humanity joined?”
“You’re talking about the Hive Project.”
Sol didn’t reply; she only smiled and ran a finger around the lip of her empty cup.
“My mother believed that heaven wasn’t really a place. It was merely the act of being one with God, and if you were, then you would know everything and never be frightened or angry or frustrated. You would experience eternal love. Everyone has an innate desire to be part of something greater than themselves, Mr. Rogers, and that’s what I think God is.”
“Good news,” Pol said after stealing him from Sol’s home.
Pol had popped into the middle of Sol’s living room. From the way Sol nearly dropped her cup, and the vicious look on her face, Ellis guessed forming unannounced portals in other people’s homes was considered impolite at best. Without so much as a hello to either of them, Pol waved him over, saying it was time to go.
Normally Ellis was happy for the go sign from Pol. Despite the low-gravity floors in the art shows and museums, he was always exhausted by the end of a visit. Part of it was physical—the standing for hours felt more taxing than swinging a pickax—but what really took a toll was the need to be “up.” The feeling that he had to entertain the mobs that followed him was grueling. When Pol entered this time, though, it was different. Ellis was genuinely enjoying his visit with Sol. The tea was good, he liked the homeyness of the room, and he liked Sol. Each time she answered a question, five flooded in to replace it. More than that, she was comfortable—like Pax.