Exhalation: Stories

Omphalos

Lord, I place myself in your presence, and ask you to shine your light into my heart as I look back upon this day, so that I may see more clearly your grace in everything that has happened.

Right now I’m content and grateful for such a satisfying day, but it didn’t begin auspiciously. My mood was poor when my aeroplane arrived this morning. As I was looking around the terminal for the cabstand, a man thought I was lost and tried to come to my rescue. He told me Chicagou was no place for a woman traveling alone, and I replied that I had managed well enough in Mongolia and that I doubted Chicagou could be any worse. Forgive me, Lord, for being sharp to a man who sought only to assist me. I ask for your help in being patient with those who believe women helpless.

I admit, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to stopping here. It’s been so long since I wrote the book that my attention has moved on to other things, and in the last month I’ve been entirely focused on preparing for the Arisona dig. After Dr. Janssen’s electric mailgram, all I could think about was those spearpoints and what they might tell us. When my publisher arranged for me to give a public lecture here, I thought he was just taking advantage of my travel plans, getting me to promote the book without paying for the aeroplane ticket, and it felt more like a delay than anything else.

My mood improved after I got to the hotel and was met by an assistant from the theater where I was to speak. At first, when she told me how much she was looking forward to my lecture, I thought she was simply being polite, but then she spoke in some detail about how my book had given her a renewed appreciation for the work that scientists did, and I realized her enthusiasm was unfeigned. Hearing such a response from a reader was gratifying, but more important, it was a reminder that education is just as important a part of an archaeologist’s job as fieldwork. Thank you, Lord, for gently showing me how self-absorbed I was to regard the public lecture as a chore.

I had a light supper in the hotel restaurant and then proceeded to the theater. It was by far the biggest audience I’ve had for one of my lectures; men and women crowded the hall like puffins on a beach. I knew better than to imagine the turnout was a reflection of my popularity; the name “Dorothea Morrell” on a poster has never been a major draw. They came because the Atacama mummies are being sent on a fund-raising tour around the country, and their first stop is here in Chicagou. Archaeology is on everyone’s mind right now, and I was incidentally benefiting from that. But that was fine with me; I was happy to have such a large audience, no matter what the reason.

I began my lecture by discussing the growth rings of a tree trunk, and how the thickness of each ring depends on the rainfall during that year of the tree’s growth, so that a succession of narrow rings indicated a period of drought. I explained that by counting back from the year a tree was felled, we can compile a chronology of weather patterns going back many decades, beyond the memory of any person living. The past has left its traces on the world, and we only have to know how to read them.

Then I described the technique of cross-dating: matching the pattern of growth rings across different trees. I offered an example where we see an identical sequence of thick and thin rings in two pieces of wood: in one case it’s near the center of a recently felled tree, whereas in another it’s near the perimeter of a piece of timber found in an old building. We know those trees’ life spans overlapped; the former was a sapling when the latter was mature, but they experienced the same sequence of abundant and scarce rain. We can use the growth rings in the older tree to extend our record of weather patterns further into the past. Thanks to cross-dating, we’re no longer limited to the life span of any individual tree.

I told the audience that archaeologists have examined the timbers from older and older buildings, matching the patterns of growth rings along the way. Even without the benefit of written records, we knew that the timbers in the top of Trier Cathedral in Germany came from trees cut in the year 1074, while those in the base came from trees cut in 1042, by examining the growth rings they contained. And it didn’t stop there, I told them; there were even older timbers we could use, like the pilings in the Roman bridge at Cologne and the beams that reinforced ancient salt mines at Bad Nauheim. Every timber served as a volume in a history written by nature itself, an almanac of yearly rainfall reaching back to the birth of Christ.

Then I told them that going back further was trickier. It meant finding tree trunks preserved in bogs, beams excavated from archaeological digs, even large pieces of charcoal found in the firepits of cave dwellers. I explained that it was like assembling a jigsaw puzzle; sometimes we found many pieces that fit with one another, but we didn’t know where they belonged until we found the piece that connected them to our main chronology. Over time we filled in the gaps, until our unbroken record of growth rings became five thousand years long, then seven thousand years. I told them how thrilling it was to examine a piece of wood and know that the tree it came from was felled eight thousand years before the present.

But even that thrill can’t compare to that inspired by examining samples of wood a few centuries older. Because in those tree trunks, there’s a point at which the growth rings stop. Counting back from the present, the oldest growth ring was formed eight thousand nine hundred and twelve years ago. There are no growth rings before that, I told them, because that is the year you created the world, Lord. In the center of every tree of that era is a circle of perfectly clear and homogeneous wood, and the diameter of that ringless area indicates the size of the tree at the moment of creation. Those are primordial trees, created directly by your hand rather than grown from seedlings.

I told them that the absence of growth rings in these tree sections is just as significant as the absence of navels in the Atacama mummies. In fact, the tree sections tell us things that the human remains, skeletal or mummified, do not. Without the growth-ring chronology, we would have no way of knowing when those primordial humans appeared; their bodies tell us that humanity was created all over the world, but the tree sections tell us exactly when it happened.

Then I told them that, while trees without growth rings and men without navels are wondrous and surprising, they are also logically necessary. To help them understand why, I asked them to consider the alternative. What would it mean, Lord, if you had created primordial trees with growth rings all the way to their centers? It would mean that you had created evidence of summers and winters that never took place. That would be a deception, no different than if you had given a primordial man a scar on his brow as a remnant of an injury suffered during a childhood he never experienced. And to support that fabricated memory, you would have to create the graves of the parents who raised the man during his fictitious childhood. Those parents would surely have mentioned their own parents, so you would have to create graves for the grandparents as well, Lord. In order to be consistent, you would fill the ground with the bones of countless generations past, so many that no matter how deeply we dig, every spadeful of soil we turn would disturb the grave of an ancestor. The Earth would be nothing except a boneyard of infinite extent.

Obviously, I said, that’s not the world we live in. The world we see around us cannot be infinitely old, so it must have had a beginning, and it’s only logical that when we look closely enough, we discover confirmation of that beginning. Trees without growth rings and men without navels attest to our reasoning. But more than that, I told them, they provide us with spiritual reassurance.

I asked them to imagine what it would be like if we lived in a world where, no matter how deeply we dug, we kept finding traces of an earlier era of the world. I asked them to imagine being confronted with proof of a past extending so far back that the numbers lost all meaning: a hundred thousand years, a million years, ten million years. Then I asked, wouldn’t they feel lost, like a castaway adrift on an ocean of time? The only sane response would be despair.

I told them that we are not so adrift. We have dropped an anchor and struck bottom; we can be certain that the shoreline is close by, even if we can’t see it. We know that you made this universe with a purpose in mind; we know that a harbor awaits. I told them that our means of navigation is scientific inquiry. And, I said, this is why I am a scientist: because I wish to discover your purpose for us, Lord.

They applauded when I had finished speaking, and I admit that I took pleasure from that. Forgive me for my pride, Lord. Help me to remember that all the work I do—whether it is excavating bones in the desert or giving lectures to the public—is not for my own glory, but for yours. Let me never forget that my task is to show others the beauty of your works and in doing so bring them closer to you.

Amen.

Lord, I place myself in your presence, and ask you to shine your light into my heart as I look back upon this day, so that I may see more clearly your grace in everything that has happened.

Today was filled with reminders of your majesty, for which I am grateful, but it has also troubled me. It began with the breakfast I had with cousin Rosemary and her husband, Alfred. I don’t see Rosemary very often, but I always enjoy the time we spend together. Thank you, Lord, for giving me at least one relative who thinks archaeology is a suitable profession for a woman, and who does not ask me when I’m going to marry or have children.

After Rosemary had given me the latest news about her side of the family, she revealed she had an additional motive for meeting me for breakfast. “I bought a relic last week, but Alfred thinks it’s a fake,” she said.

“It’s because of the price she paid,” explained Alfred. “‘If it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t.’ That’s my motto.”

“We were hoping you could settle the matter for us,” said Rosemary, and I told them I’d be happy to take a look at it. When we had finished eating, she went to the front desk to retrieve a parcel that she’d left with the clerks there, and we found an unoccupied seating area in a corner of the hotel lobby.

Inside the box, wrapped in a yard of muslin, was the femur of a deer, immensely old but in an excellent state of preservation, and I could immediately see that it wasn’t an ordinary one. The bone lacked an epiphyseal line, the remnant of the growth plate where new cartilage is added as a juvenile’s bones lengthen into an adult’s. The femur had never been shorter than it was now; the deer it had come from had never been a fawn. It was the femur of a primordial deer, created at its adult size by your hand, Lord.

I told Rosemary and Alfred that it was real; she was triumphant and he was sheepish, both muting their reactions because I was there, but I could tell they’d be discussing it at length later. Rosemary thanked me, and I told her it was no trouble; but where, I asked, had she purchased it?

“I went to see the mummy exhibit. You’re probably used to seeing things like that, but I thought it was spectacular. Anyway, there’s a gift shop accompanying the tour. It’s mostly postcards and books about the mummies, but there were also some relics for sale. Clamshells and mussel shells, of course, but some unusual items, too: bones like this one, abalone shells.”

That caught my attention. Was she certain there were abalone shells?

“Definitely,” she said. “I’ve shopped for relics before, and I’ve never seen an abalone shell. I had to ask the dealer about it. I was tempted to get it just for the novelty, but you can’t see the lines.”

I understood what she meant. The shells of ordinary clams and mussels have concentric growth rings like those of a tree. But the shells of a primordial bivalve are preternaturally smooth near their centers; only at their margins do they exhibit rings, each indicating a year of growth after creation. Such shells are the most popular relics among collectors; they’re not too expensive because they’re relatively common, but they display clear evidence of being made directly by your hand, Lord. By contrast, an abalone is a univalve, and the growth layers of its shell are only visible by drilling a hole and examining it with a microscope. To the naked eye, the shell of a primordial abalone is indistinguishable from that of any other abalone.

But that wasn’t why I was surprised to hear of one being sold in a gift shop; it was that I knew of only one place where primordial abalone shells had been discovered, and I couldn’t see how they could have come to be for sale at all. So after I finished my visit with Rosemary and Alfred, I took the bus to the church where the Atacama mummies were being exhibited.

There was a long line of visitors outside, and I suppose I could have gone directly to the gift shop and bypassed the main exhibit altogether. But contrary to what Rosemary assumed, I had never actually examined the mummy of a primordial human. I’ve read scholarly papers about the mummies, of course, and perused the accompanying photograms, but before today that was as close as I had come to an actual mummy. So although I had misgivings about the tour itself, I decided to buy a ticket and wait in the exhibit line.

As I stood in line, I overheard two people standing behind me talk about the mummies. A boy, maybe ten years old, asked his mother if it was a miracle that these bodies had remained intact since creation. His mother said no, and explained that they’d been preserved by an extraordinarily arid environment. She told the child, quite correctly, that so little rain falls on Chile’s Atacama Desert that the hoofprints of mules remain visible fifty years later, and such conditions prevented any bodies buried there from decaying.

I found this very heartening to hear, because many people are so quick to classify events as miraculous that it devalues the word. It’s that type of thinking that leads people to look to the mummies for a cure when medicine can’t provide one, and even if the Church no longer makes claims about the healing power of relics, it doesn’t do enough to dissuade the desperate. Among the ticket holders were one blind person and two confined to wheelchairs, all presumably hoping that proximity to one miracle could induce another. I pray that their suffering might be lessened, Lord, but I follow the secular consensus that there has been exactly one verified miracle—the creation of the universe—and all of us are precisely equidistant from it.

I must have waited in line for an hour before reaching the mummies, but that’s an estimate I made in retrospect, because seeing them was such a profound experience that I forgot all about the wait. There were two, both male, each in its own temperature-and-humidity-controlled display case. Their skin looked as delicate as the paper of a wasp’s nest, while simultaneously seeming to be stretched across their skulls as tight as a drum skin; I imagined that a slight jostling would cause it to tear. Both mummies wore guanaco hides around their pelvises, but nothing else; they lay recumbent on the reed mats they’d been buried with, their abdomens fully exposed.

I’ve handled the skeletal remains of primordial humans before, Lord, and as wondrous as it is to hold a cranium that has no sutures or a femur that has no epiphyseal line, it frankly cannot compare with the experience of seeing a body that lacks a navel. The difference lies, I think, in the fact that we are not conscious of the detailed structure of our own bones, so it requires some anatomical knowledge to recognize what distinguishes a primordial skeleton. But we are all conscious of having a navel, so seeing a torso without one induces awe of a more visceral, even intimate, variety.

When I left the exhibit area, I overheard the boy and his mother behind me again. The mother was leading the child in prayer, and they thanked you, Lord, for ensuring that the mummies were discovered by Church archaeologists rather than secular ones, because now they were being exhibited to the public instead of being hidden in the back rooms of a museum, where only select scientists could see them. I was less heartened to hear this. It’s not because I disagree with her, precisely. On this question, I’m of two minds.

I appreciate how powerful an experience it is to see the mummies directly, and this tour will bring tens or hundreds of thousands of people closer to you, Lord, by giving them that experience. But as a scientist, I feel that preservation of the tissue is the highest priority. No matter what pains the Church is taking, exhibiting these mummies across the country is bound to cause more deterioration than if they were stored in a museum. Who knows what techniques for analyzing soft tissues will be developed in the future? Biologists believe they are close to identifying the particles of inheritance through which organisms transmit their characteristics to their offspring; perhaps one day they’ll be able to read the information those particles carry. When that day arrives, we could have access to your original blueprint for the human species, uncorrupted by time. A discovery like that would bring all of humanity closer to you, Lord, but it requires us to be patient and not damage the tissue in the meantime.

In any case, I proceeded to the gift shop, where a number of visitors were lined up to purchase postcards. While waiting for the salesman to become available, I looked at the display case of relics; just as Rosemary had said, there were abalones among the various more conventional shells for sale. I had wondered if the gift shop would claim the abalone shells came from Chile along with the mummies, but in fact the card describing the shells said they were found on Santa Rosa Island off the coast of Alta California. It said they were found at the bottom of middens, the trash heaps of prehistoric communities.

Once there was a lull in the visitors making purchases, the gift shop’s salesman came to attend to me. Perhaps he was accustomed to people being put off by the shells’ origins in trash heaps, so he explained how that enhanced their status. “Not only do these come from primordial shellfish, but they were actually handled by primordial humans. Men made directly by God held these in their hands.”

I told him I was curious about the abalone shells; had they been found by Church archaeologists, like the mummies were?

“These were donated by a private collector. He provided the information that’s on the cards.”

I asked him if I could get the name of the collector, and he asked why I wanted to know. That was when I introduced myself and explained that I was an archaeologist; he told me his name was Mr. Dahl. I said that the only excavations on Santa Rosa Island were funded by the University of Alta California. Any and all recovered relics became part of the collections of the university’s museums, so there should be no primordial abalone shells in the hands of private collectors.

“I didn’t know that about abalone shells,” he said. “If I had, I would’ve asked more questions. Are you suggesting these were stolen?”

I told him that I couldn’t be certain, and that there might be an innocent explanation for it, but I’d be very interested in hearing what that was.

Mr. Dahl was obviously concerned. “We’ve received donations from private collectors in the past, and there’s never been an issue with provenance.” He looked through a ledger and then wrote down for me the name and address of the donor: a Mr. Martin Osborne, at a post-office box in San Francisco. “He sent a large selection shortly before the tour began, and asked that the items be priced inexpensively so that everyday people could afford them. It was such a generous sentiment that I agreed, even though it meant fewer funds raised for Yosemeti Cathedral. Would he do that if he had stolen them from a museum?”

I told him I didn’t know. I thanked him for his help and told him I would write to him once I had verified the source of Osborne’s donated relics; I suggested that, to avoid further complications, he might not want to sell any more of them until he had heard from me, and he agreed.

Now I confess that what I did next was to lie. Forgive me, Lord, but I couldn’t think of any other way to meet this Mr. Osborne if he’s in fact guilty of theft. I have sent an electric mailgram to Mr. Osborne, claiming to be Mr. Dahl, saying that I believe the relics he donated were stolen and I’m shipping them back to him immediately. I’ve also prepared a package addressed to Mr. Osborne, which will travel via train to San Francisco. I have exchanged my aeroplane tickets so that, rather than taking the flight to Arisona tomorrow, I will leave on the same train as my package. Once I’m in San Francisco, all I have to do is watch the post office and question whoever picks up the package. If he can’t explain how he acquired the relics, I’ll report him to the authorities. Then I’ll take the train south to Los Angeles, and from there I can make arrangements to get to the Arisona dig.

I know how unorthodox this is. If Mr. Osborne had provided a residential address, I could simply knock on his door. The fact that he’s using a post-office box not only makes it difficult to confront him, but leads me to think that subterfuge is justified. I hope I’m not leaping to conclusions.

Guide me toward the proper course of action, Lord. I recognize that my desire to seek answers, while necessary in scientific endeavors, is not always welcome outside of it. Help me to know when it’s appropriate to keep looking and when it’s better to ignore my doubts. Let me always be inquisitive, but never be suspicious.

Amen.

Lord, I place myself in your presence, and ask you to shine your light into my heart as I look back upon this day, so that I may see more clearly your grace in everything that has happened.

Just as I feared, the relics in the gift shop were indeed stolen. But I don’t want to focus on that to the exclusion of everything else; today gave me many reasons to think of you, and I shouldn’t ignore them.

My first full day in San Francisco began well; thank you for a good night’s rest in a hotel bed. The days of train travel took their toll; or, should I say, the nights. I’ve always had trouble sleeping on trains, so they’ll always be my least favorite form of travel. I would much rather cross a desert in a motorcar and sleep under the stars at night.

San Francisco is a city where no one can forget your presence, Lord. The moment I left my hotel, a petitioner asked me for a donation for Yosemeti Cathedral. Presumably they’re outside every hotel, targeting visitors from out of town because every local resident has long since reached the point of fatigue. I didn’t donate, but I did admire the paintings on the sandwich boards next to the petitioner. There were some lovely depictions of what the cathedral will look like when it’s completed. I was particularly impressed by one that showed the main gallery illuminated by the setting sun. I’ve read that the gallery will be a thousand feet high from floor to ceiling, and the painting did a good job of conveying the scale.

No one can deny, Lord, that you’ve sculpted a landscape of great beauty on the surface of the Earth. I’ve been fortunate enough to have visited three continents, and I’ve seen cliffs of chalk, canyons of sandstone, pillars of basalt; all spectacular. But for me, the knowledge that they’re no more than a decorative façade tempers my appreciation; perhaps it is my scientific mind-set that makes me want to look deeper. I have more reverence for the granite that lies just beneath the surface of all those features, the ocean of stone that the Earth is actually made of. So it’s when I see those places where the granite is exposed, where the true essence of the Earth is visible, that I feel a more profound connection to your handiwork.

The Yosemeti Valley is one of those places, and I wish I could have visited it a century ago, when it was pristine and untouched. I’ve seen photograms of the rock formation from before they began hollowing it out, and it was magnificent. I don’t mean to criticize the archdiocese’s decision. Or perhaps I do. Forgive me, Lord. I know the Yosemeti Cathedral will be awe inspiring when it’s completed, and I hope it happens within my lifetime. It will no doubt bring countless people closer to you. I just happen to think that the sight of the granite peak itself could have done so just as well.

Is it wrong of me to question whether the construction of cathedrals is, as we approach the twenty-first century, the best use of countless millions of dollars and the effort of generations of people? I agree that a project lasting longer than a human life span provides its participants with aspirations beyond the temporal. I even understand the motivation for carving a cathedral out of the Earth’s substrate, to create a testament to both human and divine architecture. But for me, science is the true modern cathedral, an edifice of knowledge every bit as majestic as anything made of stone. It fulfills all the goals that Yosemeti Cathedral does and more, and I wish more people appreciated that.

Perhaps I’m merely envious of the Church’s ability to raise money; forgive me for that, Lord. They are trying to celebrate your glory, Lord, just as we in the scientific community are, so I cannot disagree with them too strenuously. Our commonalities are more important than our differences.

I went to the post office where Martin Osborne received his mail and sat on a bench at a bus stop across the street. I had sealed the package with colored tape so I’d be able to recognize it easily when he left the post office, so I waited and watched. I felt conspicuously awkward as people arrived and got on buses while I continued to sit there. An hour passed, and then another, and more than once I wondered if I had gone about this in the wrong way. I am more accustomed to hunting for bones than for living prey, Lord; I know very little about stalking or camouflage.

At last I saw the package that I had prepared. I had almost missed it, because I had been expecting to see a man, but instead a young woman had carried it out and set it down on the curb while she hailed a cab. She was young, no more than eighteen, and maybe younger; too young to be an employee of the museum. At first I thought she must be an accomplice of Martin Osborne, perhaps someone he’d inveigled into his scheme, but then I realized that I was being a chauvinist just as much as the men whose preconceptions constantly irritate me.

I approached her and asked if she was “Martin Osborne.” She hesitated for a long moment and then, accepting that she’d been caught, said, “Yes, I am. Did you send the mailgram?” I told her I did. I’d been prepared to hurl fiery accusations at the brigand I expected to find, but faced with a young woman, I was uncertain how to proceed. I introduced myself, and she said her name was Wilhelmina McCullough. The surname was familiar, and struck by a sudden suspicion, I asked if she was related to Nathan McCullough. She answered, “He’s my father.”

That made things clear; the girl was the daughter of the director of the University of Alta California’s Museum of Natural Philosophy in Oakland. None of the staff would question the presence of the director’s daughter in the storerooms.

She asked me, “I take it this means this package doesn’t actually contain the relics?” I told her it didn’t. She picked it up and dropped it in a nearby trash container. “So now that you’ve found me, what do you want?”

I said that for a start, she could explain to me why she had stolen from her father’s museum.

She said, “I’m not a thief, Dr. Morrell. Thieves steal for their personal benefit. I took the relics for God’s benefit.”

I asked her why, if she wanted to support the construction of Yosemeti Cathedral, had she asked that the relics be sold at modest prices. She said, “You think I was trying to raise money for the cathedral? I don’t care about that at all. What I wanted was for as many people as possible to be able to appreciate the relics. I would’ve handed them out for free, but who’d believe they were real if I did? I couldn’t sell them myself, so I donated them to someone who could.”

I said that people could appreciate the relics by visiting the museum.

“No one could see the relics I took; they were gathering dust in cabinets. It makes no sense for the university to collect so many things it can’t display.”

I told her that all museum curators wish they were able to display more of their collection. I told her that they rotate through their collections.

She responded by saying, “There are plenty of items that will never go on display,” and I couldn’t deny that. She pulled an item from her purse; it was a primordial clamshell, with a smooth section surrounded by growth rings. “I show this to people when I talk to them about God, and everyone who sees it has been impressed. Think of how many people could have their faith strengthened by the relics that sit in the back rooms of the museum. I’m trying to put them to good use.”

I asked her how long she had been taking relics from the museum, and she said she had only begun recently. “People’s faith will be tested soon, and some of them will need reassurance. That’s why it’s important for the relics to be available. They’ll dispel people’s doubts.”

I asked her what kind of test of faith was coming. She said, “There’s a paper that’s about to be published; I know about it because my father was asked to review it. When people read it, a lot of them will lose their faith.”

I asked her if the paper had precipitated a crisis of faith in her, and she was dismissive. “My faith is absolute,” she said. “My father’s, on the other hand…”

The idea that her father might be experiencing a crisis of faith seemed incredible to me; as a scientist, he was the last person to have reason to doubt. I asked her what kind of paper it was, and she said, “Astronomy.”

I admit, Lord, that I’ve never had much regard for astronomy; it has always struck me as the dullest of the sciences. The life sciences are seemingly limitless; every year we discover new species of plants and animals and gain a deeper appreciation of your ingenuity in creating the Earth. By contrast, the night sky is just so finite. All five thousand eight hundred and seventy-two stars were cataloged in 1745, and not another has been found since then. Whenever astronomers peer at one more closely, they confirm that it’s identical in size and composition to every other, and to what end? It’s the essential nature of stars that they have so few characteristics; they’re the backdrop against which the Earth stands out, reminding us of how special we are. Choosing to study them has always felt a bit like choosing to taste the plate that food is served on.

So it doesn’t completely surprise me that an astronomy paper might cause people to lose sight of what’s important, although I would have expected such a reaction from a layperson rather than a scientist. I asked Wilhelmina what was in the paper, and she said, “Nonsense.” I asked her to elaborate, but all she would say was that it was a theory designed to instill doubt. “And all based on something someone saw in a telescope!” she said. “Every relic I gave away was a piece of evidence you can hold in your hand. You know it tells the truth because you can feel it.” She brought her clamshell to my hand and pushed my thumb back and forth across the border between the smooth and ringed areas of its shell. “How can anyone have doubts about that?”

I told Wilhelmina I would have to speak to her parents about what she had done. She seemed unconcerned. “I won’t apologize for bringing people closer to God. I know I’ve broken rules in doing so, but it’s the rules that need to be changed, not my behavior.”

I told her that people couldn’t simply disobey rules just because they disagreed with them, because society would cease to function if everyone did that.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “You lied when you sent that mailgram as Mr. Dahl. Was that because you believe we should all be free to lie? Of course not. You thought about the situation and concluded that lying was justified. You’re prepared to take responsibility for what you did, aren’t you? Well, so am I. That’s what society needs us to do, not to follow rules without thinking.”

I wish I had her confidence when I was her age. Indeed, I wish I had her confidence right now. It’s only when I’m doing fieldwork that I am certain I am following your will, Lord. When it comes to matters such as this, there is always some uncertainty in my mind.

“My father is in Sacramento today,” Wilhelmina said. “If you want to speak with him, you can come by our house tomorrow morning before nine.” She gave me her address.

I told her she had better be there as well, and she looked insulted. “Of course I’ll be there. I’m not ashamed of what I’ve done. Weren’t you listening?”

Tomorrow I go to speak with Dr. and Mrs. McCullough. This has not turned out at all the way I expected when I left Chicagou. I was preparing to bring a criminal to justice, and instead I have to inform parents about their child’s misbehavior. Or, I should say, their daughter’s misbehavior. She is neither child nor criminal, but I’m uncertain as to what she is. Had she been a criminal, I would know better where I stand. Instead I’m just perplexed.

Help me to understand other people’s positions, Lord, even when I don’t share them. At the same time, grant me the strength to not ignore wrongdoing simply because it is committed by someone who is well intentioned. Let me be compassionate while remaining true to my convictions.

Amen.

Lord, I’m frightened by what I’ve heard today. I need your guidance desperately. Please help me make sense of what has happened.

I rode the ferry to Oakland today and from there hired a cab to the address that Wilhelmina had given me. A housekeeper opened the door. I introduced myself and told her that I needed to speak to the McCulloughs regarding their daughter, Wilhelmina. A minute later they appeared. “Are you one of Mina’s teachers?” asked Dr. McCullough.

I explained that I am an archaeologist with Boston’s Museum of Natural Philosophy. Mrs. McCullough recognized my name. “You write those popularizations,” she said. “How is it that you’re acquainted with our daughter?” I suggested that we speak inside. Both of them turned to look at Wilhelmina, who was standing on the stairs behind them, and they let me in.

Once we were in Dr. McCullough’s study, I described how I came to suspect that relics were being taken from the museum’s storerooms, and how I discovered Wilhelmina was behind it. Dr. McCullough turned to Wilhelmina and asked if it was true. “Yes, it is,” she declared, with neither shame nor belligerence.

Dr. McCullough was plainly incredulous. “Why on earth would you do such a thing?”

“You know why,” she said. “To remind people of what you’ve forgotten.”

His face grew red, and he said, “Go to your room. We will discuss this later.”

“I want to discuss it now,” she said. “You can’t keep denying—”

“Do as your father tells you,” said Mrs. McCullough. Wilhelmina left reluctantly, and then Dr. McCullough turned to me.

“Thank you for bringing this to my attention,” he said. “You can be assured that nothing else from the university’s collection will leave the premises.”

I told him I appreciated his saying that, but I wanted to know what had prompted Wilhelmina’s actions. She seemed to be acting in reaction to something he had said or done. Was that true?

“That’s no concern of yours,” he said. “We’ll deal with this as a private family matter.”

I told Dr. McCullough that it wasn’t my intention to pry, but the theft of property might legitimately be a concern of the museum’s board of trustees, and I needed a more detailed explanation in order to be comfortable with not informing them. I asked him whether, if our positions were reversed, he would accept an explanation like the one he had given me. He glared at me so severely that if I’d been a subordinate of his, I might have left the matter alone. I wasn’t, though, so it seemed like we were at an impasse.

Then Mrs. McCullough said to him, “Tell her about the paper, Nathan. She came all this way, and besides, everyone will know soon enough.”

Dr. McCullough relented. “Very well, then,” he said. He went to his desk and picked up a manuscript. “I was asked to review a paper for publication in the journal Natural Philosophy.” He handed the manuscript to me, and I saw the title was “On the Relative Motion of the Sun and the Luminiferous Aether.” I have only a layperson’s understanding of the aether, the medium that carries light waves: I know that, just as a shout carries farther when traveling with the wind than against it, the speed of light varies relative to the Earth’s own motion through the aether. I said as much to Dr. McCullough.

“Your understanding is correct, as far as it goes. However, detailed measurements suggest that the variations in the speed of light are not caused solely by the Earth’s motion around the Sun. Instead, there appears to be a steady aetheric wind across our solar system as a whole. Most physicists believe this has no significance, but the astronomer Arthur Lawson proposes an alternate explanation: he suggests that the Sun is not actually at rest, but is in motion relative to the aether, which is itself at rest.”

That seemed a bit like observing an incessant wind blowing across the desert and concluding that the desert must be in motion while the atmosphere was still. Dr. McCullough anticipated my objection, saying, “Yes, of course, it sounds topsy-turvy, but bear with me. Lawson hypothesizes that there is another star whose motion relative to the Sun is the same as the aetheric wind. Such a star would be stationary with respect to the luminiferous aether, and therefore truly be at absolute rest.

“Astronomers have only recently begun mapping the proper motions of stars, but they have detected some broad patterns, so Lawson began looking at the section of the sky where the stars’ velocities are similar to that of the aetheric wind. He found several stars whose motions are close to it, but none that match it exactly.

“Then he happened across 58 Eridani, a star in the constellation Eridanus. Based on its Doppler shift, Lawson measured 58 Eridani to be moving toward us at a speed of several thousand miles per second. That would be extraordinary in and of itself, but later measurements showed that its motion wasn’t consistent. The star was alternately moving toward us and then away from us, again at several thousand miles per second.”

I said that obviously some sort of measurement error must be responsible.

“Of course that was his first assumption. But after ruling out every source of error he could think of, Lawson asked astronomers at another observatory to take a look; they confirmed his findings. Together they determined that 58 Eridani’s motion varied with a period of exactly twenty-four hours. Lawson believes it is moving in a circle.”

I asked if it was in orbit around a larger body, and he said an object traveling in that manner couldn’t possibly be gravitationally bound. It defies everything we know about celestial mechanics. I asked if he thought it qualified as miraculous, whether this was finally unambiguous evidence of your ongoing, active intervention in the universe, Lord.

“It certainly does,” said Dr. McCullough. “But the significance of the miracle is the real question. What does this marvel tell us about God’s design?

“Lawson offers an interpretation. He suggests that 58 Eridani is actually orbiting a smaller body too small for us to detect, a planet the size of the Earth. The star is moving in such a way as to provide a day-and-night cycle of twenty-four hours for a stationary planet. He believes that it constitutes a geocentric solar system.

“He goes on to suggest that the planet that 58 Eridani is orbiting is stationary relative to the luminiferous aether, meaning that it’s the sole object in the universe that is at absolute rest. On that planet, and only on that planet, would the speed of light be precisely the same no matter which direction it was traveling. And although there’s no way to detect life on that planet, Lawson suggests the planet is inhabited, and that its inhabitants are the reason God created the universe.”

I was speechless for a moment. Then I asked how Lawson explained the existence of humanity and life on Earth. Dr. McCullough took the manuscript from my hands, flipped through the pages until he found the section he was looking for, and then handed it back to me.

Reading, I saw that Lawson offered three hypotheses for the presence of humanity. The first was that humanity was the result of a separate act of creation, an experiment or test performed as rehearsal for the main undertaking. The second was that the creation of humanity was an unintended side effect, a kind of “sympathetic vibration” induced because of our solar system’s similarity to 58 Eridani. The third was that humanity on Earth was in fact the main undertaking, and life on 58 Eridani was the rehearsal or side effect. He rejected this last one as unlikely, because if we assume that miracles are signs of your attention, Lord, then a continuous miracle like a star orbiting a planet must be a clear indicator of what you consider most important.

Lawson concluded his paper by acknowledging that many of his conclusions were necessarily speculative, and he invited other hypotheses that fit the observations just as well or better. As I stared at the page, I tried to come up with an alternate explanation, but couldn’t think of any. Then I looked up at McCullough, who nodded as if I were a student arriving at the correct answer.

“It’s a compelling theory,” he said sourly. “And it becomes more so when you consider that it solves many unanswered questions. The multiplicity of languages, for example.”

I realized he was correct. Why are the languages of the world so different? Philologists have struggled to reconcile their variety with the age of the Earth and the rate at which languages diverge. If you had imbued all the primordial humans with knowledge of a common tongue, Lord, we’d expect the world’s languages to all bear a family resemblance, like the Indo-European ones. But the vastly greater differences between languages of the world means there must have been more than a dozen completely unrelated languages spoken immediately after creation. We have long wondered why you would have done that, Lord. But if the disparate populations of primordial humans had each invented language independently, then there was no puzzle to be solved; the multiplicity of languages was accidental rather than by design.

“So now you know,” said Dr. McCullough. “The paper will be published soon, and everyone will read it. I wanted to recommend that it be rejected, but I couldn’t find any grounds for doing so. My commitment to scientific practice made me approve it.” He scowled. “But what if the entire practice of science is founded on a false premise? When I was a boy I used to wish that God had given primordial men the gift of writing, because they would’ve been able to record the dates on which new stars appeared in the night sky. Then we’d know precisely how far away each star was, because we’d know—to the day—when each one’s light first reached the Earth. But men didn’t invent writing until long after the emergence of the stars, so astronomers are forced to use more indirect means to deduce their distances. My teachers told me that God wanted us to reason things out for ourselves. But what if that’s not true? What if”—his voice cracked—“what if God had no intentions about us at all?”

This was the crisis of faith that Wilhelmina had referred to. I clumsily tried to offer some reassurance, saying that this was an enormously confounding discovery, but we could still retain our faith in God. Dr. McCullough shouted, “Then you understand nothing!”

His wife touched his hand, and he grasped hers, struggling to contain his feelings. The two of them were silent for a while. Then Mrs. McCullough turned to me and said, “We had a son, older than Mina by ten years. His name was Martin. He died of influenza.”

I told them how sorry I was. I recalled that “Martin” was the name Wilhelmina had used when donating the relics.

Dr. McCullough said, “You are childless, so you can’t comprehend the pain caused by losing a son.”

I told him he was correct and said that now I realized why this discovery must be especially difficult for the two of them.

“Do you really?” he asked.

I told him what I surmised: that the only thing that had made his son’s death bearable was the knowledge that it was part of a greater plan. But if humanity is not in fact the focus of your attention, Lord, then there is no such plan, and his son’s death was meaningless.

Dr. McCullough remained stone-faced, but his wife nodded. “I’ve enjoyed your books, Dr. Morrell,” she said. “They remind me of the things Nathan said when I was a student of his, before we married. In his lectures he talked about how scientific inquiry provided the strongest foundation for faith. He said, ‘Personal convictions may waver, but the physical world cannot be denied,’ and I believed him. So when Nathan threw himself into his research after Martin’s death, it wasn’t just for his solace, but for mine, too.”

“And I was successful,” said Dr. McCullough quietly. “I found wave oscillations within the Sun, the echoes of the initial compression God used to initiate the gravitational collapse responsible for its heat and light.”

“It was like finding God’s fingerprints on our world,” said Mrs. McCullough. “At the time, it provided all the reassurance we could have asked for.”

“But now I wonder if it proves anything,” he said. “All stars must have wave oscillations within them; there’s nothing that sets us apart. Nothing science has discovered carries any meaning.”

I told him that science can be a salve to our wounds, but that shouldn’t be the only reason we pursue it. I said we have a duty to search for the truth.

“Science is not just the search for the truth,” he said. “It’s the search for purpose.”

And I had no response. I had always assumed those were one and the same, but what if they aren’t?

I don’t know what to think now. It frightens me to imagine that you have never been listening at all.

Dear Rosemary,

The last few weeks have been very difficult for me, more so than I expected. I am writing to let you know that I have temporarily left the Arisona dig.

As I told you in my last letter, I thought I would be able to participate in the dig because, even with all that had happened, I believed my affinity for the physical work of archaeology would carry me through. As it turned out, it wasn’t as easy to carry on as I expected. The doubts sown by Lawson’s discovery have been gnawing at my mind like rodents. A few days ago it reached the point that, as I was removing a spearpoint from the soil matrix, I thought, What does this matter? Everything we’re doing here is irrelevant. I had to stop working for fear that I might smash an ancient artifact with a hammer out of frustration. That was when I knew I had to leave the dig. I don’t know if there was a real risk of me doing that, but the mere fact of it crossing my mind told me I was not in a fit state of mind to work there.

I have taken residence in a rental cabin about an hour away from the dig. I couldn’t explain to anyone why I was leaving, since I feel it would be inappropriate for me to talk publicly about Lawson’s paper before it’s published. Perhaps that contributed to my feeling of isolation while I was there, but I think the greater cause was that I feel estranged from God. I need time to decide what I should do next.

You asked whether the Church oughtn’t be disturbed by the discovery just as much as the secular scientific community, and to that I would say yes, they ought to be. But the Church as an institution has always been able to derive strength from the evidence when it’s useful and ignore it when it’s not. Take the story of Adam and Eve. The Church was willing to admit it could not be literally true after skeletons of primordial humans were found around the world, but they insisted the story retained foundational importance as an allegory. And you and I and every other woman continue to live in Eve’s shadow, for no reason except custom. So I expect that they will be able to explain away this discovery in a similar fashion and use it to advocate for the same values they always have.

I suppose one could argue that the idea of polygenism has been around for centuries, so it didn’t come as a surprise when archaeological findings confirmed it. Which is true. Church scientists have long struggled to explain how a single couple could populate the Earth so quickly, so they must have privately contemplated alternative theories before they were forced to change their official stance. By contrast, I have never heard a serious argument that humanity was not the purpose of creation before Lawson’s paper. So perhaps Church scientists will be just as taken aback as I was, before their loyalty to doctrine reasserts itself.

The problem for me as a secular scientist is that my faith has always been, first and foremost, shaped by the evidence. I admit that I didn’t previously appreciate the importance of astronomy in understanding our station, but now I do. And if we take as our premise that humanity was the reason for creation, then that should be reflected in the skies above just as much as in the earth beneath our feet. If humanity is the central fact of the universe, if our species is the omphalos, then a close examination of the celestial sphere should confirm that privileged status. Our solar system should be the fixed point against which all else is moving; our Sun should be at absolute rest. If the evidence doesn’t support that premise, then we must ask where our commitment truly lies.

I understand, Rosemary, if this doesn’t disturb you or Alfred the way it does me. I don’t know how most people will react when Lawson’s discovery becomes widely known. Wilhelmina McCullough anticipated that others would respond the way her father did, and in my case she was correct. I wish this didn’t affect me so deeply. Would that we could choose the things that trouble us, but we can’t.

But if you find that this does disturb you, know that you can discuss your apprehensions with me, whatever form they take. While each of us must find our own way forward through this forest of doubt, it is only with the support of others that we’ll be able to do so.

Lord, perhaps you don’t hear my prayers. But I’ve never prayed with the expectation that it would affect your actions; I prayed with the expectation that it would affect mine. So I pray now, for the first time in two months, because even if you’re not listening, I need the clarity of thought that prayer provides.

I left the dig because I feared that Lawson’s discovery rendered the whole enterprise meaningless. The reason the spearpoints that Dr. Janssen discovered were so exciting was that enough of the shafts remain that we thought we might be able to use growth rings to precisely identify the years in which they were fashioned. If we could identify trends in stone-knapping technique, we hoped to learn if knappers’ expertise grew or waned in the first generations after creation, and from there draw deductions about what your intentions were regarding human knowledge, Lord. But that was based on the assumption that the primordial humans were the most direct expression of your will. If humanity’s creation wasn’t deliberate on your part, then whatever skills primordial humans possessed tell us nothing about your intentions. Their endowments would have been purely accidental.

Since I’ve been here at the cabin, I have spent a lot of time thinking about how much the primordial humans knew. They couldn’t have come into being with minds as blank as newborn infants, because they’d have rapidly starved to death in such a scenario. Even tiger cubs must be taught how to hunt by their mothers. There’s no way that humans could have, from first principles, learned how to hunt for food before they perished. The primordial humans must have possessed some knowledge of hunting and constructing shelters. Was that one of the experiments you conducted, Lord? Determining the minimum set of skills necessary for the species to survive? Or perhaps it was just another unintended side effect, a faint echo of whatever information you imbued the primordial inhabitants of 58 Eridani with.

There is another piece of information, just as vital as survival skills, that I’ve assumed the primordial humans knew from the moment they drew breath: that they were created for a reason. The possibility that they didn’t know this is something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. Rather than being filled with pride and ambition, they must have been afraid and confused during their first few days. I’ve tried to imagine what it must have been like to awaken fully formed, possessing certain skills but without a past to remember, lost in a world of amnesiacs. It seems terrifying to me, even more terrifying than what I’ve experienced these last few weeks.

And it raises another question. Why did the primordial humans set about building civilization, if not out of a desire to fulfill divine purpose? Avoiding cold and hunger would motivate them to secure necessities, but why did they advance beyond those? Why did they begin inventing all the art and technology that has made humanity what it is today, if not to carry out your will, Lord?

I don’t know, but I have formed a theory.

Archaeology may not be as exact a science as physics, but it relies on physics for its foundations. Physical law is what makes it possible to study the past; examine the state of the universe closely enough, and we can infer its state a moment earlier in time. Each moment follows inexorably from the previous one and is followed inexorably by the next, links forged in a causal chain.

But the moment of creation is where all causal chains end; inference can lead us back to this moment and no further. That is why the creation of the universe is a miracle: because what happened in that moment was not a necessary consequence of what preceded it. That primordial clamshell that Wilhelmina keeps with her is indeed proof of something: not of God’s plans for humanity, but of the existence of miracles. That border where the growth rings end marks the limit of physical law’s explanatory power. And that is something we can take inspiration from.

Because I think there are events of another category that are likewise not fixed in a causal chain: acts of volition. Free will is a kind of miracle; when we make a genuine choice, we bring about a result that cannot be reduced to the workings of physical law. Every act of volition is, like the creation of the universe, a first cause.

If we had no evidence for the miracle of creation, we might think physical law was sufficient to explain every phenomenon in the cosmos, leading us to conclude that our own minds were nothing more than natural processes. But we know that there is more to what we observe than physical law can encompass; miracles happen, and human choices are surely among them.

I believe the primordial humans made a choice. They found themselves in a world full of possibilities but with no guidance as to what to do. They didn’t do what we would have expected, which is to merely survive; instead, they sought to improve themselves so that they might become masters of their world.

We scientists are in a similar situation. The evidence has always been there for us to find: the trees without growth rings, the mummies without navels, the motion of 58 Eridani. It is up to us what we do with that. We have always seen it as determinative of the value of our lives, but that wasn’t inevitable. We chose to do that, which means we can choose to do otherwise.

I’ve devoted my life to studying the wondrous mechanism that is the universe, and doing so has given me a sense of fulfillment. I’ve always assumed that this meant that I was acting in accordance with your will, Lord, and your reason for making me. But if it’s in fact true that you have no purpose in mind for me, then that sense of fulfillment has arisen solely from within myself. What that demonstrates to me is that we as humans are capable of creating meaning for our own lives.

I don’t claim that this will be an easy path. I have nothing to offer the McCulloughs except my hope that they will be able to make sense of their lives despite the absence of their son. But our lives have often been difficult even when we believed there was a divine plan, and we’ve persevered. If we have only ever been on our own, then our successes in spite of that are proof of our capabilities.

So I will return to the Arisona dig, Lord, whether it is under your watchful eye or not. Even if humanity is not the reason for which the universe was made, I still wish to understand the way it operates. We human beings may not be the answer to the question why, but I will keep looking for the answer to how.

This search is my purpose; not because you chose it for me, Lord, but because I chose it for myself.

Amen.