Page 73 of Meet Me in Another Life

Thora frowns. “What’s wrong?”

“The usual,” Santi says with effort. He pinches his forehead until it passes.

Thora bites her lip. “Maybe you need to cut back on the coffee.”

He smiles. They both know his dizziness has nothing to do with what he drinks, any more than food can satisfy Thora’s hunger. She gives him a look of pained understanding. “Let’s go,” she says, taking his arm.

It’s Monday: the Odysseum is closed. The doors are chained shut, held by a simple padlock.

“This is where my skills come in handy,” Santi says, unfolding his knife, as Thora picks up a rock and hurls it at the glass.

Santi braces for a siren that doesn’t sound. “No alarm,” he observes as he ducks through the shattered door.

“Who would break into a children’s museum?” Thora asks, boots crunching on broken glass.

As Santi follows her past the ticket booths, his vision blurs. He stops, rubbing his eyes.

Thora comes back, touches his shoulder. “Dizzy again?”

He shakes his head. “Something new.”

“How exciting.” The worry on her face belies her sarcasm. “You’d better not die on me again. I’m starting to take it personally.”

They pass through into the planetarium under the mirror gazes of empty spacesuits. Together, they stand looking up at the softly twinkling lights. Santi feels a sinking sense of anticlimax.

“We’ve been here a hundred times,” Thora mutters. “What could there be that we haven’t seen already?”

At the same moment, they realize. Without saying a word, they cut left into the hallway where the image from the Kepler telescope paints infinity on the wall. Ahead of them is a boarded-up door with a sign reading “im Bau/Under Construction.”

“How many worlds?” Thora asks in a whisper.

“Every one I remember.”

They look at each other. They step forward and grab the board from both sides.

“Three, two, one,” Thora says. Santi heaves with her, and they use their combined strength to wrench the board away from the door.

The room beyond is dark. Santi hears a deep, whooshing hum as he gropes for a light switch. A glow from the ceiling falls on a series of display panels. At the other end of the room, where the sound is coming from, an image flickers on the wall. They splitup: Thora heads for the wall, and Santi for the exhibit. He’s ready for revelation, for truth no matter how terrible, for anything except what he sees.

This can’t be right. He runs to the next panel, then the next, clutching at them like a drowning man. “They’re blank,” he says, choking. “All of them.”

Thora doesn’t answer. Santi stares at the terrible vacancy, embodying his worst fear: that the world is an empty cipher, that the message he has been waiting to hear for so long is nothing but white noise.

Dizziness rushes through him. The floor seems to move under his feet. He falls onto his back, staring up at the ceiling. The soft lights scatter randomly across the dark like chance constellations. No: not randomly. He raises himself up on his elbows, squinting through the blur. He’s not imagining it: the lights form a star map. At one edge of the room, he recognizes the solar system. A course charted from Earth cuts across the ceiling in blue light. He follows it through swathes of darkness to the other side of the room, where it ends at a planet orbiting a small, pale star. There, a green light pulses, soft and expectant like a silent alarm.

“Santi.”

In all their lifetimes, he has never heard Thora’s voice sound like this.

He scrambles to his feet and runs to where she stands, facing the wall. Santi stares up at the giant image, trying to understand what he’s seeing. A man and a woman in loose blue jumpsuits, tied up in tubes and wires, their eyes closed. He thinks he’s looking at a still picture until he sees a green light moving infinitesimally along a small black screen. Over the minute and a half that he and Thora stand silent, it draws a crawling peak and subsides. A heartmonitor in slow motion. In a flash of insight, he understands the humming sound: breathing, slowed down a hundredfold.

The man’s hair is long, his beard untrimmed. The tips of the woman’s hair are dyed blue. Santi’s eyes flicker across the image, landing on the tattoo of a constellation on the woman’s wrist.

“I don’t understand,” Thora whispers.

Santi looks into her eyes. “Thora,” he says. “That’s us. That’s where we really are.”

Thora stares at him in desperation. “Where?”

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