Pax looked at Ellis with an awkward pout. “I think you might have unintentionally offended Vin a little.”
“I offended him?—ah—Vin—whatever. Sort of a jerk, don’t you think?”
Pax’s eyes widened. “You have to understand, Vin is an artist.”
“Yeah, I got that—paints all these pretty pictures, which is nice, but nothing compared with this view. That’s like thinking your picture is better than the real thing. Talk about arrogant.” Ellis pointed across the valley. “And the light moves with the passage of time. Incredible. Are you sure we’re underground?”
Pax nodded.
“And you call it falselight?”
“When they made the first sub-farms, they had imitation sunlight for the plants, but not for the farmers. They lived in little cubicles. People need sunlight as much as plants do and workers became depressed. They kept returning to the grass whenever they could, driving down productivity. So they invented falselight. It became this whole industry and finally an art form—one of the first native to Hollow World, really.” Pax gestured at the walls. “Vin did the paintings here, but those are just for fun. Vin’s real work is out there.” Pax pointed beyond the balcony. “Vin makes Hollow World.”
“What do you mean, Vin makes it?”
“Like a sculptor chisels beauty out of a block of stone—that’s what Vin does. Only Vin’s stone is the whole of the earth—the entire lithosphere. We all live in Vin’s creation of height, width, form, and function. Not just Vin, there are many renowned artists in all kinds of different schools. Like the ones who make the falselight or water artists—masters of reflection, drip, and splash.” Pax recited this with a cadence and little dance step. “It’s sort of their motto. All artists are highly revered for their talents. They’re more respected than anyone, except the geomancers, of course.”
“What’s a geomancer?”
Pax looked at him and sighed. “Alva, what did you do all the time I was gone?”
“I showed Ellis Rogers where the shower was. Did you expect me to explain the history of the world during a morning bath? And since I have your attention, dinner is served.”
The dining room was like entering Dracula’s castle. A long marble table set with crystal stemware and porcelain plates was illuminated by candelabras and surrounded by dark walls of carved paneling. At the far end was a massive pipe organ that dominated the room and began playing a dramatic fugue the moment they entered. It began deafeningly loud but, after a grimace from Pax, dropped to a whisper. None of the “outside” light reached this darkened chamber that, with its cathedral ceiling and vaulted supports, reminded Ellis of a church nave.
“Alva?” Pax said.
“Yes, honey?”
“Can we have something a little less morbid?”
“Vin always likes—”
“I know, but we have a guest. How about something from that Big Sky series you like?”
“Really? Okay!”
The paneling vanished, as did the pipe organ and ceiling. In their place, Ellis stood amid a field of spring flowers in a valley surrounded by distant mountains and capped with a vast sky. Gorgeous thunderhead clouds billowed up in the distance as the sun drifted toward the horizon. The grand table was replaced with a rustic picnic bench covered by a traditional red-and-white-checkered cloth and set with ceramic cups and a wicker basket. Ellis held still, disoriented and uncertain what had just happened. Was he still in the dining room? He figured he was, imagined Pax had just adjusted the decorations like he might have dimmed the lights in his own house, but he wasn’t just seeing it. Ellis could feel the breeze, smell the sunbaked grass, and hear the distant drone of a cicada.
“Are we still in your house?”
Pax looked amused. “Yes. It’s just that Vin’s taste tends to run a bit more heavy—more serious—than I prefer.”
A shadow crossing the table startled Ellis, and he looked up to see a hawk. “Whoa. That’s really cool.”
Pax looked concerned. “Alva, turn down the breeze, please.”
Ellis laughed. “Oh—no. I didn’t mean…I meant it is very nice.”
“Twentieth-century slang, Pax,” Alva put in, and Ellis realized she sounded a lot like his aunt Virginia. “Cool is a respected aesthetic, what we might refer to as grilling or magnetic.”
“Really?” Pax said, looking dubious, then turned and began walking across the field. “Let me grab the meal and see where Vin got off to.”
Ellis took a seat at the picnic table. When he looked back, Pax was gone, leaving him alone in the landscape.
In all directions the flat land extended out to a distant horizon. He was in a John Ford movie or a Windows screen saver and couldn’t stop gawking. Ellis had spent the majority of his life in Michigan, mostly around Detroit, never able to get away from work. Aside from M.I.T., his one big trip was his honeymoon in Cancun. He’d always planned to go places, but never really had until he pressed the button on the time machine. Even then, he had remained in Detroit, but was now supposedly somewhere under Paris. None of that mattered. Perched on that picnic table, he knew he was a long way from home.
A blade of grass brushed Ellis’s leg. He snapped it off and rolled the plant between his fingers, feeling the moisture in it. He held it to his nose and smelled the scent of summer lawn cuttings. How is this possible?
“Vin’s not feeling well.” Pax appeared again, walking back through the tall grass and holding a tray of food, the frock coat whipping with the breeze.
I bet. Ellis tried not to jump to conclusions, but he didn’t like Vin. “Just us then?”
Pax nodded and set two steaming plates on the picnic table in front of them filled with pasta topped with a white sauce laden with minced vegetables. Ellis waited to see if Pax would be saying grace. Not everyone did, and it wasn’t as big a deal as it had once been.
Pax began eating without a pause.
Ellis looked down at his plate and whispered, “Thanks.” He wasn’t really thanking God for the meal or even the miracle of surviving the time travel. He just appreciated that God had been there to listen when he needed Him the most. Maybe that was God’s whole purpose—a hand to hold. Then again, just the day before he had expected to die of starvation, and if anything was likely to make him feel religious it was the miracles of the last two days. And there was something else—in this brave new world, God was the only one he knew.
“Whatever happened with the murder?” Ellis asked.
“Cha arranged for the disposal of the body,” Pax said. “I spent the rest of the day and most of the night with those students who witnessed the scene to make sure they would have no lingering trauma. They were upset, obviously, but they’ll be fine.”
“Wow. Are people that fragile nowadays?”
“Murders might have been commonplace in your time, Ellis Rogers, but we don’t have them. And with the various safety features, even accidents are extremely rare. Death is alien to us.”
“You mentioned that before. But how is that possible? What about old age and disease?”
Pax sucked in a noodle and reached for one of the red-checkered napkins. “The ISP eliminated diseases hundreds of years ago—aging took longer, of course. They only slowed it in the previous versions, but it was eradicated in this last pattern.”
“Pattern?”
“Ah…are you familiar with genetics? DNA?”
“I know of them. They completed work on the Human Genome Project—mapping genes—a few years back, but were just starting work interpreting the data when I left.”
“Right, okay. So, in a way the sequence of base pairs that make up DNA is like a recipe. Everyone—back in your day, I assume—was a little different, right?”