Wonders of a Godless World

by Andrew McGahan

  His tone had sobered. It’s not enough to trust me?

  And how she wished that it was, but the doubt persisted. If he was a product of her madness, then this was exactly what he would say.

  For a time he didn’t answer. The orphan sensed that his mind was roving away from hers, searching for something. Then he was back. Look.

  Her eyes were drawn into the ashen ravine, and she saw a surprising thing. There were people down there, small figures among the confusion of stone.

  In fact, they must have been there for some while, because they had set up tents. They were camping. The orphan knew about camping—how people came sometimes to look at the mountain or to climb it. Occasionally a line of them would walk past the hospital on their way, young and foreign and laden with backpacks. But why would anybody want to camp there now, amid the rocks and smoke? And odder still, some of them were dressed in silver suits, with big masks over their heads. They were clambering all about the place, peering into the fissures.

  Do you know who they are?

  Of course she didn’t know.

  They’re vulcanologists. They came here yesterday, because of the eruption. It caught them a little by surprise. This mountain has not been active for hundreds of years. Now everyone is worried—will it erupt again? Right now, in fact, back at the hospital, your friend the old doctor is holding a meeting to discuss new evacuation plans, just in case. How does he get all the inmates out, where does he send them, who will pay for it? Oh, a lot of people are waiting to hear what those scientists down there discover.

  Fascinated, the orphan watched the figures. Vulcanologists. So were they like her? Could they read the earth’s vibrations in their bones?

  Scorn. Not them! They need their instruments to do that, and even then they can’t be certain of much. They don’t even know if it’s safe to be up here right now, or if they might get caught in an eruption themselves. But you know, don’t you?

  Yes, she knew. She’d known before setting out. The ground had been quiet beneath her feet. There would be no eruption today.

  And that gas coming out of the cracks in the ground—what about that? Is it hot? Is it poisonous? Do they need those silver suits?

  The orphan blinked. She hadn’t thought about the steam except to note that it was an ugly colour and smelt bad. But now she felt her curiosity bloom. Her inner senses reached forth and she saw, as she had on the day of the eruption, that the mountain was not a single mass of stone, but rather a rough pile of debris, vomited up over ages and jumbled together only loosely. Far below waited the chambers of molten rock that had caused it all. They were in abeyance now, but even so they bubbled and heaved in their prisons, and plumes of gas rose continuously through the earth to emerge from the fissures that riddled the ravine floor.

  But no, the steam wasn’t dangerous. Most of its heat had been spent as it rose—warming layers of stone down below until they glowed red. And while the fumes at their deep point of origin would have poisoned anyone who breathed them, they were filtered by the earth as they passed through, leaving behind deposits in a multitude of shapes and colours, yellow and green and purple, like noxious forests in the depths. Beautiful. And deadly. But at the surface, harmless.

  The foreigner was laughing. Oh, you’re wonderful.

  The orphan could hardly contain herself. She wanted to tell someone what she knew, to run down to the people in the silver suits and make them understand.

  Is this proof then? Is this real?

  It had to be real. It had to be. But even now, the doubter in her remained defiant. Had she been down there inside the earth? Had she seen those colours with her own eyes, or tasted the poisons on her own lips? Did she know for absolute certain it wasn’t the madness putting lies and visions into her head?

  Very well. If you need to see something with your own eyes, something you could not possibly have known about, then there’s a place I can show you.

  Where?

  Go back down the path a bit, the way you came.

  The orphan hesitated, but there was no way forward in any case. She took a last glance at the peak, then turned away and stumbled down the incline, sending small stones cascading ahead of her. For some time the foreigner did not speak, and the heat grew, and the orphan felt more and more thirsty.

  Turn off the path here.

  She veered off, skidding sharply down a scree of rubble and ash. Eventually she found herself in high grass. She kept descending, the sun burning on the back of her neck, and then abruptly she plunged into jungle. That was better. It was still hot under the canopy, but there was shade, and the pleasant smell of damp earth.

  See, there’s no path. Nothing has led you here but me.

  It was true. The orphan could see no sign that anyone had ever been there. She was in a steep-walled gully. And what luck—there was a stream trickling along the gully floor. She fell to her knees and drank handfuls of water, only slightly muddied with ash. The foreigner waited until she was done.

  Just a little way now, up the gully.

  It was simplest to follow the stream. The gully climbed back towards the mountain, the sides becoming more sheer the further she went, until a darkness loomed ahead of her, and the rocky walls sprang up to meet overhead in an arch.

  It was a tunnel. Running away into blackness.

  You’ve never seen this before, I know. Neither have those scientists, although they would like to. But you’re the first ever to come here.

  The orphan stood on the boundary between daylight and dark, fascinated by the shadows ahead, cool and beckoning. What was this place?

  It’s called a lava tube.

  Lava. The orphan did not know the word, but it made her think of something slow and heavy and hot. Yes, she saw it now. The melted, mushed-up stone that churned deep underground—that was lava.

  But lava tube…what did that mean?

  Some time, probably many thousands of years ago, this volcano was in eruption. In the process, a flow of lava spilled from a rift higher up the mountain, and flowed down into this gully. It cooled as it went, and the outer crust hardened into rock. Under that exterior, however, the lava kept flowing until it drained away completely and left the crust standing behind in the shape of this hollow tube.

  The orphan was still staring in under the arch, her eyes adjusting to the dark. The tunnel was not as smooth as it had first appeared. In fact the walls and the floor were only crudely fashioned, widening and then narrowing again, irregular. Yes. The foreigner’s explanation made sense. She could imagine the lava surging and slowing through here, and hardening unevenly, before draining away.

  But could she go in?

  Well…

  How odd—was it reluctance she sensed in him? A wariness? Was something wrong? Was it unsafe to enter?

  No, it’s safe…

  What then?

  It’s just that, even now, I still don’t like going underground.

  Of course! The orphan felt terrible for not realising it sooner. After everything he had been through beneath the landslide…

  It’s a fear I have to live with. Go in, if you want.

  Was he certain?

  I’ve been down far worse holes than this, I assure you.

  She ventured inwards, stepping carefully because the floor was pitted with holes. Tree roots dangled down from the ceiling and brushed her face. When she looked up she saw that they grew through cracks in the roof, and here and there beams of sunlight stabbed down from the surface. But soon she was beyond the roots and the sunbeams, and only blackness waited ahead.

  So why had the foreigner gone into holes, if he was afraid?

  His reply was subdued. There was no choice. I realised it even all those years ago, at the beginning of my new life. If I wanted to understand the workings of the earth, then at some point I would have to go beneath it.

  The orphan advanced. Despite the dark, some part of her mind remained aware of all the edges and pits in the ground, and she did not stumble.
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br />   The foreigner’s voice dropped lower still. To have escaped the earth once and then willingly go below its surface again, that was a dreadful thing. My first descent was into a coalmine. The terror I felt! Understand, mines in those days were little better than the landslide itself. Men died below ground by the hundreds. Poisoned by gases, or drowned by floods, or burnt by fires, or obliterated by explosions. But it wasn’t those deaths I feared. I feared the collapse. The cave-in. I feared that I might be crushed again under a fall, or even worse, trapped on the wrong side of one, buried alive. I knew I could never go through that experience again.

  For a moment the tube seemed to grow suffocating and hot around the orphan. It became an airless, lightless prison that she could never escape. Then the foreigner shrugged off the memory, and the heaviness lifted.

  How I hated those places. And it turned out they had relatively little to tell me about the earth, anyway. What are mines, after all, but scratches on the surface, two or three kilometres deep? I needed to look much deeper.

  This tube, for instance. How far down do you think it goes?

  The orphan considered, letting her mind roam forward into the shadows. She could feel the bulk of the volcano rising away to the unreachable peak. And she could imagine the tube burrowing beneath it, all the way to the core, to join with the other fissures, leading downwards together in the twisting throat of the volcano, but descending ultimately to where the lava reserves lay sleeping.

  Magma, actually. It’s only called lava when it reaches the surface.

  The orphan rolled another new word around her silent tongue, thinking that yes, it too sounded right, and felt right.

  And below the magma chamber? What then?

  She frowned. In none of her visions of the under-earth had she thought to go any deeper than those molten pools.

  But you should. You’ve seen that the earth is shaped like a ball—but what’s inside the ball? Is there anything at all in there? Or is it hollow?

  Which stopped her short. It was true, a ball could be empty, she had seen that herself. The patients sometimes kicked a white ball around the hospital grounds, and it was only plastic, pumped up with air. Oh, but the scale of it! To think that the world might be just a thin shell around a vast empty nothingness.

  Who says the space must be empty? Why could there not be an inner sun glowing at the centre of it? And why couldn’t the interior side of the shell be populated with lands and buildings and people, all of it upside down?

  Which stopped her short again. An inside world. The orphan felt an immediate attraction to the idea. Perhaps if she followed this very tunnel she would emerge, wrong way up, into an enormous space within the planet. And in the middle of the cavity, floating, would be another bright sun, illuminating oceans and mountains and plains as great as those outside. It would be a reverse world, the opposite of everything above, where there was no night, where the dumb could speak, where the slow would be quick, and where the mad would be the sane.

  Could it be?

  Ah…but no. Even as she delighted in the vision, she knew that it wasn’t right. When she had beheld the planet spinning in the void, she had felt its weight, and the ponderous inertia that kept it revolving. It was not a thin-skinned bauble that could be punctured like a toy. The earth was solid, right through, she was sure of it.

  The foreigner projected satisfaction. Look then. Go as deep as you can.

  She did. She went searching downwards with her mind. But not in one hurried plunge, as she had before, but more deliberately this time, in great descending circles, careful to observe everything around her. Down through the base of the volcano she went, with its familiar rents and cracks, and then down through the base of the entire island, which was nothing but the remains of a larger and older volcano. She was spiralling outwards all the while, until, far down, she was beyond the island’s foundation, and searching beneath the ocean floor.

  Yes, but you are still only in the crust of the earth’s surface, and the crust is at best only twenty or thirty kilometres thick. It holds the entire human realm, true, but on a planetary scale it’s no more really than the skin that forms on soup.

  And yet already she had found surprises, buried deep. Layers of brightly coloured stone that no sun would ever illuminate. Arched caverns where the air would never stir. Secret lakes of water, so motionless and clear they might have been glass, and rivers that roared and raged beyond hearing. And then there were dry places of a crystal hardness so sharp that even in thought they set the orphan’s teeth on edge.

  But in other places things bubbled down there. Liquids oozed and plopped amid the rock, sometimes in great masses trapped in domes, sometimes in a kind of oily sweat that permeated sheets of stone, black and slick and redolent with decay. There were gases too, greasy and invisible, squeezed into uneasy levels that rumbled with indigestion. Indeed, so much did the underworld squelch with sound and smell, it seemed to the orphan that the crust was not solid at all, but rather a layer of rotting mulch, like the compost heaps in the hospital gardens.

  Deeper, girl, you must go deeper.

  She went deeper, sinking still in slow spirals. Now she was into rock that was barren and parched, all cracked and folded back on itself in ways too tangled to unravel. Here and there she came across pockets of magma, similar to the chambers under her own volcano. They were like balloons that had ascended from below and were squashed now against the ceiling, trying to squeeze beyond it. From one such balloon, she found a thread of magma descending. She followed the thread, twisting and turning through the rock, down, and then down further still.

  You are entering what scientists call the mantle. And what you see here, far more than anything above, is the true substance of which the world is made.

  It was getting very hot, and the rock was now soft and glowing. But more than heat, the orphan was becoming aware of pressure. Even as a disembodied mind she could feel the weight from above mounting and mounting. And eventually she was no longer following an isolated stream of magma, it was everywhere around her, mixing inextricably with the stone, until the entire under-level was a congealed, melting, swirling mass of rock that was not a liquid or a solid in any way that she knew.

  The mantle goes down to a depth of thousands of kilometres, and the pressure becomes so intolerable that it changes all the rules. The rock here is not liquid, and yet it flows like liquid, it has currents and tides. Above us, the crust floats on those currents, and moves in great slabs, crashing slowly together. And if a crack should open between those slabs, this tortured stone will boil to the surface to explode.

  But the orphan was diving deeper. More rapidly now, a plunge not a spiral, because she knew she would not be able to stand the pressure or the heat for long. Faster and faster, and there were no distinct layers anymore, nothing to see, there was only the uniform mush, growing hotter and hotter, and glowing brighter. And then abruptly she was in liquid, an ocean of it, infinitely wider and deeper than the seas of the surface above. But not an ocean of water, it was an ocean of metal.

  This is the outer core. It’s made of liquid iron, heated to incredible temperatures. But only a little further down, the pressure grows so indescribable that no matter what the temperature, the iron cannot stay in liquid form.

  There! The orphan was at her utmost limit, but at the very centre of the planet she saw something that was indeed like a hidden sun after all, an inner sphere of agonised iron that was hard and huge and white hot, blazing.

  And at the centre of that? At the centre of that?

  She reached—

  But could hold no longer. Her thoughts fled from the heat and pressure, and went tumbling away back to the surface.

  The orphan opened her eyes and found that she was standing in the tunnel as before, but breathless now, a sheen of sweat on her skin, her legs quivering. She had been so close! Just a little further down, she was sure…

  No, it was amazing you got as far as you did.

  But she had
wanted to see!

  Never mind. No one else knows what lies at the very core, either. And for our purposes, it doesn’t matter anyway.

  The orphan was sucking in disappointed air. The gloom in the tunnel had dissipated—as if, having delved so deep, her eyes had no trouble at all piercing ordinary darkness. She saw now that only a few dozen yards ahead the tube came to an end. It wasn’t blocked by some collapse or upheaval, it simply stopped there, and always had. There was no tunnel through to the heart of the volcano, or beyond it to some hollowed interior of the earth. It wasn’t a tunnel at all, just a cavity that led nowhere.

  Exactly. And what does that tell you?

  But she felt too tired now for his riddles. She didn’t know what it told her. It was time, she thought, to go home.

  It is indeed. But think—if all this was truly a product of your madness, then a hollow earth is precisely the sort of thing you would have found today. Something dramatic, something fantastic. And this tunnel would have taken you there. Indeed, there are thousands of people around the world who believe in exactly such tunnels, and don’t even know how mad they are. But you didn’t find any such fantasy. You found what’s really there—as confusing and complicated as it is. That isn’t madness.

  No. It wasn’t. He was right about that…

  And if none of that satisfies you, my orphan, then remember the simple fact of this tube’s existence. Remember that no one else knows about it. That it’s an undiscovered secret—and yet I led you right here.

  Isn’t that proof enough, finally, that I’m real?

  And for the weary orphan, finally, it was.

  12

  It was a different orphan who arrived back at the hospital. She felt lighter. Cleansed somehow, despite being filthy with ash and sweat. It was relief, she knew. Her doubts had been settled. Now she could trust in the foreigner wholeheartedly; now she could accept, without all the misgivings, the happiness he brought her.

  Good. Then we’ll continue tonight.

  She was standing at the hole in the back fence of the hospital grounds, and the sun was low in the afternoon sky. He had been with her all the way down the mountain, guiding her from the lava tube back to the path, and then home.