Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [70]
Describe her? I cannot do her justice. She was Oriental, I thought at first, with full lips and dark eyes, and hair so brown it was almost black. The cut of her tresses was short but finely styled, not like a man’s, and her ears were pierced with gold. She was dressed in a way you would find most immodest, I am sure, in some kind of silken uniform, with trousers instead of a dress, a high collar, and gloves; all deep purples and greens, very harsh to my eye. Her smell was rich and tropical, like Amazonian flowers. She looked curiously about her, nodding as though finding her surroundings familiar, before she turned to me.
When she spoke, I knew that she was the being who had visited the night before. I will hear that voice the rest of my days.
“Hello, Doctor Gordon,” she said. “My name is Abiha, and I have been looking for you.”
AT THIS POINT in his tale, Doctor Gordon became too distraught to speak. He begged my indulgence, and I allowed him a moment or two to gather himself. When it became clear that his distress was mounting, not receding, I offered him a calmative draft, which he accepted.
“Don’t knock me out, though, will you?” he asked me. “I must finish what I have begun.”
I left the cell and returned some minutes later with a sedative of my own concoction. He drained the vial readily enough. Before long, he grew calm again and his limbs lost some of the restless energy that had made listening to him an exhausting experience. I felt that he was nearing the crisis at the heart of his story, and that he knew, at some level of his being, that to continue would be to confront the true depths of his illness.
I was not disappointed.
“Abiha stayed for one hour,” Gordon told me. “She assured me that she was not a spirit from beyond the grave, and that she was no more or less human than I. She said that she had journeyed to our world from another, one called Surobia, although that was not the place of her birth. That was yet another world, Arora, which she had left more than a year ago—to explore, she said, like some female Livingstone. These other worlds she spoke of are not transcendental dimensions or Heaven’s empty halls, apparently. They orbit the sun as the earth does, home to animals and plants and civilizations like ours. Sometimes they approach one another, and for periods lasting around a fortnight, which Abiha described as ‘congress,’ those few individuals who have the trick of it can make the crossing.
“Yes, Michaels, raise your eyebrows. I won’t deny I did the same at first. Where are these worlds, exactly? If they were as real as she claimed, would we not see them through our telescopes and feel their effects in our world’s stately progression about the sun? But as she talked, I remembered the alchemists of old and their insistence that this world was not the only one of human experience. I thought of the ice ages and the various other cataclysms that have befallen our changeable Earth. What if there truly are such worlds in a reality alongside ours, orbiting a sun that exists in all realities? What if the ancients were right and we moderns so very, very wrong?
“Take Philolaus. He imagined a Central Fire that bright Sol orbited, and about which another Earth, the Antichthon, also circled, forever hidden from us. Then there are the levels and spheres of Cabalism, all reaching out from a central, fiery point. What about the Heart of the Sun in Uthman ibn Suwaid’s Turba Philosophorum? Or Hermes Trismegistus’s Utmost Body, that alchemists could fly to with the Philosopher’s Stone?”
I cut across his lecture—almost a sermon, such was the intensity with which he spoke—to convey my surprise that a man of science could place any faith at all in the ravings of lunatics and mystics. Hadn’t their theories been proven wrong centuries ago, or exposed as the carefully encoded ceremonies of a depraved cult of sensualists?
“Sir Isaac Newton was an alchemist,” Gordon responded. “Did you know that? The man who gave us calculus and the laws of gravitation,