What was the journey like? What did we feel? Did I miss Earth, my Jesuit brethren and my scholarly friends? Yes, I did miss their companionship. Did I worry that we might not find the source of the AMF, or be unable to extinguish the field? Yes, but strangely, I did not worry much. For the most part I was simply content.
Angstrom was good company. At the end of the day's journey he would light our fire with his magnifying glass and when darkness fell we would talk by the fire, lying under the strange stars of that alien sky.
"What is your thesis?" he asked me one night. "By thesis, I mean what is the central idea from which all your thought stems?"
Thoughtfully, I replied, "When I was five I sat by the fire the first time my mother cut my hair. She cut off a lock and threw it into the flames. It curled and burned and was gone. I saw how fragile I was and how easily the stuff of my body could disappear. The next day I buried a heavy old key in the garden, seeking to prove to myself that at least some things were permanent. Later I dug and I dug but I could never find it. These two events bothered me greatly and, in some sense, helped me decide to become a priest. I desperately wanted to enter the world of the spirit, you see, for the tenuous insubstantial world of the spirit is the world that endures."
"And your journey to Paschal?" asked Angstrom.
"We humans explore the material world using reason as our tool," I said. "We observe, experiment, question, hypothesize, refute and refine our ideas. But in the spiritual world our tool is faith. Experimentation is expressly forbidden and, by definition, dogma cannot be refuted by reason. In defiance of this separation, my thesis is that the material world of reason and the spiritual world of faith are frail human interpretations of a single deep reality."
Trained in theology, you know that this dichotomy between reason and faith pervades our Christian thought, and all our science too. But the aliens did not think in terms of reason or faith. Their machines used both physics and metaphysics. Did I mention the Tower of Echo? Yes, I remember that I did. But I can see you look shocked. I told you I was a heretic, sometimes subtle, but sometimes more brash. Sit back on your bench while I finish my story. You can always say your prayers later, when I am done.
As for Angstrom, he had his own thesis. He said, "Like you, I came to Paschal to answer a question. Like you, I work with an impossible dichotomy, but mine is one of waves and particles, momentum and position, the EPR paradox. Yet this quantum dichotomy works. Quantum gravitational engines lifted the battered Chardin across 50 light-years but quantum theory makes no sense. Behind the impossibilities must be a better, more complete, truth. Perhaps alien minds have different logics that resolve these problems."
"A truth you will find here on Paschal?" I asked.
"I hope I will. Alien machines manipulate time and space in clever ways. Human minds scarcely know what is happening, let alone how it happens."
Much of Angstrom's career was spent in advancing his thesis of alternate logics which was, of course, ridiculed by his peers. I remember Angstrom standing at the podium before an audience of five hundred skeptics at a meeting of the American Academy of Xeno-Technoarcheology in New York. The lights were bright for the video cameras and the sweat shone on his bald head. After he had finished his presentation, the first question from the audience was, "Are you really proposing the existence of a logic which is illogical to human minds, yet logical to other minds, and though illogical, yields conclusions that are correct?" The questioner was a confident young man who smelled blood and was eager to impress his professors. He was from what they call in America an Ivy League school. There was some laughter which the questioner allowed the audience time to enjoy before he added, "Perhaps you used this new logic to write your paper. That would explain a great deal."
Angstrom seized the edges of the podium in his gigantic hands and started to reply but his words were lost on the scientists all jostling for the exits.
After this, the sweating, malodorous, iconoclastic Angstrom became as welcome at scientific gatherings as Martin Luther at the Vatican. His papers, unwanted in the editorial offices of the journals of our field, were sent to his harshest critics for peer review.
When my book was rejected by the Curia, Angstrom still had his tenured position--in Quebec, I think it was. But by the time of the discovery of Paschal II his whole department had been eliminated. A purely financial decision, he was told, and nothing to do with the fact that this was the only way to fire a tenured full professor. At 50 years of age, with no family, friends or professional future, Paschal II was as good a destination for Angstrom as it was for me.
"Is professional vindication so important? I asked.
"No, but truth is," he said, and rolled over to sleep. The way he pulled his blanket over his shoulder made me think he was comforted by the discovery that we were following paths more similar than we had thought.
I was less certain. I lay in the dark, thinking of the Tower of Echo. The Roman poet Virgil wrote that bees were killed by echoes. (Those of us with time on our hands acquire arcane information. It is an occupational hazard of the priesthood.) Eighteen hundred years later Gilbert White, an English curate who was well-versed in Virgil and an excellent diarist, wrote that he spent a summer afternoon bending over his hives, shouting into a speaking trumpet to see if his bees would die.
Have I have already mentioned my love of metaphor?
