And she and the angel are one. She lies within its bosom, resting, regaining her strength steadily, moment by moment, as its great warmth fills her and revives her.
After a while she is strong enough to rise and move about within the angel. She discovers that she can travel freely and at will, going as she pleases into any sector of the great being. She drops down beyond the zone of outer turbulence, past the huge fiery cells of angel-stuff that come constantly floating up from the interior, and disappears into the tranquillity of the angel’s core, the cool hidden place where no firestorms rage and the deepest of wisdom resides. There she remains for a considerable while, feeling a peace that she has never known before, until at last it comes to seem to her that if she does not move along she will stay there forever; and so she moves upward again, toward the surface, entering the realm of fiery turmoil that is the angel’s outer semblance. But the fire does not harm her. She is of the angel now; the angel is of Noelle.
Come. Let me show you things.
They drift across the face of the cosmos together. There are angels everywhere, a vast choir of them wherever she looks — great ones, small ones, bright ones, faint ones, some massed in clusters, some burning in solitary splendor. The sound of their voices fills the heavens.
She and her guide halt in a place of deep darkness, and there Noelle sees what she understands to be a new angel coming into being, barely glimmering as it is born. It coalesces swiftly as she watches, out of a cool, dark cloud of dust that is collapsing inward on itself to become a compact ball. As it shrinks and takes on spherical form it begins to turn, slowly and then faster and then much faster yet, and to give off heat, faintly at first, and then with increasing force, until it is glowing red-hot, white-hot. It has begun to spit matter into the void too, feverishly hurling segments of itself in every direction in what seems like a tantrum: a prodigious and prodigal outpouring of energy, ferocious and yet somehow comical.
A playful baby. An infant angel savoring the first throes of life. They watch for a while; and then they leave it in the midst of its sport.
Come along, now. Onward.
Onward, yes. The sky is very bright here, full of angels, and all of them are singing as angels should sing, a wonderful celestial choir whose harmonies fill the void. There is brightness everywhere, a sea of light.
Here Noelle sees a giant angel that burns with so steady and fierce a radiance that she does not understand why it has not already exhausted its own substance. It blazes in the firmament like an angry blue eye, unwearyingly hurling its fires outward to an immense distance. It is more like a god than an angel, this giant, an angry god, pouring itself forth in inexplicable wrath upon the fabric of the universe.
And then here, farther away, in one of the deepest places, are angels all in a cluster, old angels, ancient ones, thousands of them, millions, each pressed up close against its neighbor so that they seem to form one huge shining wall, a single brilliant mass. But Noelle’s angel shows her that they are many, not one, and lets her reach toward them so that she can experience their great age, their inordinate wisdom. How old are they? Millions of years? Billions?
We were old before the sky was young, one of them tells her.
And another says — or perhaps it is the same one — We came out of the All-Engulfing and one day we will return to the All-Engulfing, but we have been here since before the before, and we will remain until after the after.
And a third tells her, We precede and we follow, and we exist when there is no existence, and we are love when love no longer is. And we are you and you are us.
Noelle understands perfectly, or at least thinks she does; and when they give her their blessing, she gives them hers. And moves along, for her guide has other things for her to see in other parts of the cosmos.
And here is a very old angel, an angel that is dying.
That surprises her. She says that she would not have believed that it was possible for angels to die, and her angel tells her calmly that it is, it is not only possible but necessary. If angels can be born, angels must also die. Everything dies, even angels; and everything is born again. The only thing that has neither a beginning nor an end, it says, is the universe itself, which was there at the beginning and before, and will be there at the end and afterward.
Look. Here.
They have reached the dying angel, in a region apart from the others. Its light is very dim, though there still is warmth coming from it, the midday warmth of a winter day, perhaps. There is no brilliance to this angel. Its face is dull and dark, as though it is covered by an ocean of heavy mud, or thick lava, perhaps, sultry in color, a deep purple streaked with occasional widely separated regions of crimson and scarlet. Across the cooling surface of the dying angel there still is some sparse sign of sluggish activity, the slow, difficult movement of lumpy masses of matter sliding forward in the mud, some of them black or gray, some glowing dull red like metal ingots that have fallen from the forge but are not yet cold.
There is no roaring here, no hissing, no crackling, no sizzling. There is only the deep muffled sound of titanic forces grinding to a halt, of colossal energies winding down. Even as Noelle watches, the painful movements of the traveling masses grow even more slow and the bright streaks of crimson and scarlet give up much of the richness of their hue. Everything here will stop, soon. There will be nothing left but cinders and ash. But when she looks up, beyond the place where the dying angel hangs in the firmament, she sees dust already coalescing in the distance, the first glimmers of brightness taking form. This angel is going; a new one will soon be arriving. And so it has been, Noelle understands, since the beginning of time. And before the beginning.
And now see this one, Noelle’s angel tells her.
They travel onward, and come to a golden angel, a small one in a region of the void that has very few other angels around it. It pays no heed to them, but goes on turning steadily on its axis like a child amusing itself in a playground. Noelle understands that this is a young angel, not a newborn one by any means, but not yet mature — an adolescent one, perhaps. They remain in its vicinity for a time, watching its self-absorbed antics. There is something extremely pleasant about being near this charming young angel, Noelle thinks. Watching it, she feels almost as though she has returned to her own childhood. Yvonne seems very near, closer than she has been in a long while. They are girls again together, giggling, running, colliding, giggling again as they tumble down in a heap.
There is more to see. There is so much to see that Noelle is dazzled and dazed by it all, here in this universe of angels, this infinity of godlike beings, beings who were old when the sky was young, beings who have seen the before and will see the after. After a time she can absorb nothing more of it. Her guide seems to comprehend that; for the tour is brought to an end, and Noelle returns to the bosom of her own angel, and glides downward and inward, to that hidden zone of serenity that lies beneath the roiling tongues of fire, and there she rests, there she sleeps.
Sleeps. Sleeps.
How long has she been in the coma now?” the year-captain asks. “Is it a week yet?”
“This is the eighth day,” Leon says.
“The eighth day. Do you think she’ll come out of it at all?”
Leon shrugs. “How can I say? What do I know? Am I an expert on things of this sort? Is anybody?”
“I understand,” says the year-captain softly.
She has been wandering in delirium most of the time since losing consciousness. Troubled, fearful, the year-captain has kept a somber vigil at her bedside, losing track of the time himself as the days slide by and there is no change in her condition.
Sometimes it seems to him that she is rising toward consciousness; intelligible words, even whole sentences, bubble dreamily from her lips. The dreaming Noelle talks of light, of a brilliant unbearable white glow, of arcs of energy, of intense solar eruptions. A star holds me, she mutters. She tells him that she has been conversing with a star.
How poetic, the year-captain thinks: what a lovely metaphor. Conversing with a star.
A metaphor forwhat, though? Where is she, what is happening to her? Has she been speaking with angels, actual holy angels, or are they stars, or has she simply shed the last shred of her sanity during her venture into the gray nothingness beyond the ship? She seems lost in some unknown and unknowable realm. Her face is flushed; her eyes move about rapidly, darting like trapped fish beneath her closed lids. Words continue to come from her from time to time. Mind to mind, Noelle whispers, the star and I. Mind to mind. Sometimes she begins to hum — an edgy whining sound, climbing almost toward inaudibility, a high-frequency keening. It pains him to hear it: it has the force of hard radiation, expressed as sound.
He has never felt so tired before. He has scarcely slept at all since he and Huw pushed open the door of her cabin and found her in the coma.
She is humming again now, that terrible sound. He clenches his jaws, balls his hands into fists, and forces himself to withstand it. After a while she is silent again.
Then her body goes rigid, pelvis thrusting upward. A convulsion of some sort? No. She’s simply stirring, awakening, at last! He sees lightning bolts of perception flashing through her quivering musculature: the galvanized laboratory frog, twitching at the end of its leads. Her eyelids tremble. She makes a little moaning noise. And her eyes are open.
She looks up at him.
The year-captain stares into her eyes. There is something different about them now. Something new. Something astonishing.
Gently he says, “Your eyes are open. I think you can see me now, Noelle.” He moves his hand back and forth across her face, and her eyes follow the movement.
“I — can — see you, yes. I can see you.”
Her voice is hesitant, faltering, strange for a moment, a foreign voice; but then it becomes more like its usual self as she asks, “How long was I away?”
“Eight ship-days. We were very worried.”
“You look exactly as I thought you would look,” she says. “Your face is thin and hard. But not a dark face. Not a hostile face. I like your face, year-captain.”
“Do you want to talk about where you went, Noelle?”
She smiles. Nods. “I went to visit the … angel. I talked with it.”
“Angel? Really, anangel ?”
“Not really, no. That’s just a word, ‘angel.’ It wasn’t an angel, I suppose, not the kind people used to pray to. Not a physical being, either, not any kind of intelligent organic life-form. It was — was—”
He waits. He stares at her in wonder and bewilderment. He is stunned by the beauty of her eyes, now that her eyes are alive and focused on him.
She says, “It was more like the energy creatures that Heinz was talking about. Incorporeal, is what I mean. But bigger than we could have imagined. Bigger than a whole planet, even. Tremendously big. I don’t know what it was. Not at all.”
“You told me you were talking with a star.”