Ellis started working it out. Sol was 1,718 years old—nearly two thousand years herself—only she hadn’t skipped any of it. She was a Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner comedy routine come to life.
“You look shocked. You come in here with this crazy story of flying through time on a set of plastic boxes, and you’re looking at me funny because I can still remember when people had sex? How you making out with that, anyway? I’m guessing you might be experiencing some withdrawal.” Sol gestured at the books. “I read, you know. So few do these days. I like the old paper books, as you can tell. Hard to get. Most of the things I have were antiques when I was born. The books I created from patterns I put together myself and based on the few genuine relics. So little survived the Great Tempest. Everyone relies on holos and grams. That’s the one thing my mother gave me that I appreciate. She taught me to read. Sex is in almost all the books. Men especially have a need for it—a failing sometimes. A lot of the books call it a natural drive. I don’t know if I buy that. Can it be a natural drive if you can choose not to? Eating is a natural drive, but I can’t abstain from it.”
Sol scanned her bookshelves, and so did Ellis. She had a fine collection. Plenty of history books, which must be like photo albums for her. One was titled The Age of Storms, another The Empty Holo. Most of the titles and authors he didn’t know and guessed the books had been written in the intervening millennia, but he did spot Dickens, Poe, Dante, Cervantes, Austen, Hemingway, and Kafka. Ellis smiled when he saw Orwell, Jules Verne, and Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. He also noted King, Patterson, Steel, Roberts, and was particularly pleased to see Michael Connelly—a title he’d never seen before. And there were at least twelve books with the name of Sol as the author. These appeared to be a variety of fiction, memoirs, and history texts. “In books it seems as though men need a woman, physically. Is that true? Are you dying?”
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 why part 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 God has 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.”