‘This Inquisitor – it’s a legend?’
Drake shrugged. He seemed suddenly nervous again, evasive. So Holly tried another tack.
‘You cast God aside so easily?’
‘Easily?’ Drake asked. ‘Not easily at all, as far as I’m aware. When I was a child God was a comfort to many, though not all. Much like in your world, I suspect. My father was a true believer but, since the Furies, God has been down there with them. And any mention now is an offence.’ He shrugged, at the same time trying to smile.
‘Just because this happened doesn’t mean that He doesn’t exist,’ Holly said.
‘Perhaps in your world. But keep it to yourself. There are people here who’d attack you if they heard that, and some who might even kill you.’
‘I don’t understand.’ Holly shivered.
‘We believe the End was God’s fault,’ Drake said. Holly snorted, but he continued. ‘That’s what most of us believe. It’s what the Coldbrook journals tell us – that the Inquisitor was a servant of God, and it came through to ensure that the Fury plague took our whole world. It oversaw our demise, and then took Coldbrook’s chief with it. To another new world. A new Inquisitor to continue spreading the disease.’
‘The Inquisitor sounds like a ghost.’
‘Most people believe in it.’
‘And what do you think?’
‘I think God was as much to blame for the Furies as he was for a hundred wars through history.’
‘But that was forty years ago. You’re maybe forty yourself? I haven’t seen anyone here old enough to remember.’
‘There are a few. But blame is handed down through the generations. And there is proof.’
Holly leaned back against the wall, saddened, and convinced more than ever that Drake was only telling her parts of the story.
‘I’d like to know . . .’ Drake said, but he trailed off as if he was unsure.
‘Know what?’
‘Where we parted,’ he said. ‘Where our Earths became different possibilities.’
Holly smiled. ‘You’re talking Jonah’s language now.’
‘We seemed to be far ahead of you,’ Drake mused. ‘Our technology a long way further on than yours. Perhaps that’s why the Furies hit us first.’
‘You don’t seem that far ahead,’ Holly said defensively. But then she thought of the casting room, the incredible technology of the mini-black hole, and wondered just how much Gaia had lost.
‘You’re aware of the many-worlds interpretation?’
‘Jonah’s tried explaining it to me. An infinite number of universes, created at every possible quantum event? Everything that could have happened in our history but didn’t has happened in some other universe. Or something.’
‘Every decision, every event, creates another possible universe,’ Drake said.
‘Much more eloquent than me.’
‘So which decision or event separates our Earths?’
‘How can we ever tell?’ Holly asked.
‘It could be something as small as someone turning left instead of right,’ Drake said. He stared at her, his piercing eyes filled with his sense of wonder. Jonah would love him, Holly thought.
‘You had Beethoven?’ she asked. ‘Mozart? Brahms?’
Drake nodded. ‘Shakespeare, Dickens, Melville.’
‘The First World War?’ she asked. ‘Hitler? Nagasaki?’
‘Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt and Truman.’
‘The Swinging Sixties?’
‘I’ve read about that,’ Drake said, and Holly could see that he did not understand. How different his forty years must have been here, compared to her thirty-seven years on Earth. So different that she could not count the ways.
‘Kennedy?’ she asked. ‘Led Zeppelin? The Beatles?’
‘“Lucy in the Sky”,’ Drake said. ‘This could take for ever.’ He shook his head, smiling, and his sense of wonder was more visible than ever.
‘Jonah would so love to meet you.’
‘And I him.’ Drake stared at her, more intensely than ever, and for so long that Holly felt the true impact of the distance between them. Then he smiled again, and held her hand.