Wind screamed in their ears as Hermes’s muscular arms clutched them close to his chest. The world fell away, and they shot straight into the night, accelerating so that Alexios felt the blood pooling in his feet, the g-forces rippling in his cheeks. He barely had time to gasp with fright before they were above the clouds, with the horizon now curving into a sphere below, while ahead more stars shone than he had ever seen—so many there seemed to be no gaps between them. The wind faded to a breeze, then a breath, until it vanished, and there was no sound save their voices. Miriai’s torch went out, and when she released it, the wood floated into the darkness.
“Behold the world,” Hermes said. “The world is nothing.”
“But there’s no air out here,” Alexios said. “How are we even alive? How did you pick us up and fly out here?”
“Is that,” Miriai began, looking down, “is that—”
“It’s all the world you’ve ever known,” Hermes said. “And far more besides. Yet what is it except nothing?”
“But there’s so much I’ve never seen,” Miriai said. “So much I’ve never known. What are all those lands? What are all those oceans? Do people live there?”
“They are nothing,” Hermes said.
Alright, we get it, Alexios thought.
“That’s not true,” Miriai said. “I’m one of them. I’m something.”
“Everything and nothing,” Hermes said.
They were moving so quickly now that the Earth was shrinking into a blue crescent, an oasis in the void of death. The moon was there, too, a fingernail of glowing gray gravel.
“The moon,” Miriai said. “It has another side. I never knew. It must have been turned away from us for all this time…”
“Even the most philosophical ant,” Hermes said, “cannot fathom beyond her ken.”
Earth and moon shrank together as Hermes, Alexios, and Miriai rose above the sun and the multicolored lights that were the planets moving against the constant backdrop of stars.
“But where are the crystalline spheres?” Miriai said. “The seven heavens? And the Shuba, the planets—they go around the sun? But that would mean that Aristarchos of Samos was right, and all the others were wrong!”
“What difference does it make?” Hermes said.
“It makes a difference to me, my lord,” Miriai said. “When I studied the cycles and epicycles in Basra, the way the planets go back and forth was of such utter complexity, slowing down and speeding up again. Now I understand—they seem to move like that because the Earth itself is also moving…”
“Earth is just another world,” Hermes said. “Turning with the awesome machinery of nature. And yet nature is far from mere machine.” His burning eyes swiveled to Alexios. “Even where he comes from, the most complicated machines are like child’s toys compared to the essence of being.”
Learning that the planets orbited the sun wasn’t exactly news to Alexios, yet to see the solar system below his feet with his own eyes was so shocking he was amazed that Miriai could even speak. No human had ever traveled so far—except, apparently, for Hermes, though the question of his humanity was an open one.
They traveled farther. First the background stars danced a little, then they moved faster, and now they were rushing away like snowflakes in a blizzard, as the solar system vanished into the dark. Soon the travelers were rising above the Milky Way, something more magnificent than any photograph from any telescope Alexios had ever seen. His mouth fell open in awe.
Miriai was having trouble speaking. “What is—what is—?”
Alexios looked at Hermes. “Let me guess. It’s nothing.”
“Now you begin to find the end of philosophy,” Hermes said. “You are not just searching for wisdom. You are not just loving wisdom. You have found wisdom.”
“This sounds like taoism or hippy-ism or something,” Alexios said. “Nothing matters, so you might as well just chill. And meanwhile, you can laugh at all the other people who are actually trying to change things for the better. Isn’t that what the Young Hegelians were all about? That’s what Jackson used to tell me. You can tell people everything is pointless, that contradiction can’t be overcome, everyone’s bad, everyone’s a hypocrite, there’s no point in trying to change anything because some new group will just oppress another—one hierarchy will replace another. What Lacan says is that we really just want to fuck our own mothers, but society doesn’t allow us to achieve that desire because of inbreeding, so instead we just spend our days chasing false desires that can never satisfy us. Therefore it’s pointless to try to change anything because you’ll always just desire something else. This is the way of the armchair scholar with his cushy university gig. It’s how you manage to sound smart while avoiding committing yourself and taking risks.”
“Seem I that way to you?” Hermes said.
Alexios gulped. “No.”
“Were I an overeducated fool like the ones you describe,” Hermes said, “I would have perished long ago. Science—true knowing—could not be more different.”
Miriai nodded. “That’s just what I told him, lord.”
“Then you have done well,” Hermes said. “You have learned much.”
“Thank you, lord.” Miriai beamed.
“Perhaps you may join me soon,” Hermes said. “We shall see.”
Before long, the Milky Way fell into the abyss, and more galaxies shot past like the stars had done before—just as many, just as quickly, a snowstorm of galaxies whipping by as fast as meteors. But this part of their journey took such a long time Alexios found himself feeling a little bored. It seemed there were far more galaxies in the universe than there were stars in the Milky Way. Yet eventually the galaxies coalesced into what looked like veins, arteries, synapses, with bright spots among them signifying superclusters.
“It’s just like one of those cosmic TV shows,” Alexios said.
“This is more,” Hermes said.
“What’s a TV show, dear?” Miriai said.
Alexios frowned, and sometimes wished that he didn’t have to explain everything to everyone all the time. Then he reprimanded himself: he should never tire of explaining. It was his duty to explain.
Because when the people understand, they cannot help but join us.
The universe was now a sphere reddening as Hermes brought them into the endless darkness beyond. Eventually the universe shrank into a red point, one that held still for a long time. Until, suddenly, at the edges of that void, more red lights appeared.
“We have now traveled beyond the knowledge of Alexios’s time,” Hermes said. “We have entered into the realms of speculation.”
“Are those other universes?” Alexios said. “We’re in—what should I call it? The multiverse?”
“You were always in the multiverse,” Hermes said. “Yet you never knew. Regardless, it is nothing.”
“I mean, I wouldn’t call it nothing,” Alexios said. “Isn’t it actually everything?”
The red lights were soon falling away and rushing past them like the galaxies and stars before.
“What’s the point of all this?” Alexios said, glancing at Miriai—who was, like him, still clutched in Hermes’s muscular arms against his chest. “We get it, we don’t matter, we’re less than insects—less than bacteria. So what?”
“So this,” Hermes said.
The red lights were blazing past them so fiercely that Alexios was forced to shut his eyes. Now he felt solid ground beneath his feet. Hermes released him. When Alexios opened his eyes, he found himself standing somewhere he had thought—until that moment—he would never see again.
Stolen novel; please report.
“What is this place?” Miriai said, looking around. “Where are we? Is this the Abode of Light? The World of Ideal Counterparts?”
“My old classroom.” Alexios laughed and shook his head. “From Pemetic High. It’s where I came from. This old dump. I dreamed about it once all the way back in Trebizond with Dionysios.”
“Ach, everything’s so flat and straight.” Miriai knelt to the floor and then rose to the tables and chairs. “All the objects here make me feel dizzy. They look identical. How can that be? It’s like a geometric diagram made with stencils. The Museum of Platonic Ideals.”
Alexios felt this, too. Until now he had failed to realize how he’d gotten used to all the uneven surfaces in the Middle Ages. To make something flat, straight, or circular was no small feat in the absence of modern machinery and division of labor, yet it had been so normal for him when he lived in Maine. He had never noticed that even an abandoned classroom in a painfully normal American high school was like one of those Renaissance paintings which seem to worship perspective, where all the different characters in their shimmering billowing silk robes are standing on straight flat landscapes created with rulers and compasses.
To speak of the Renaissance, it was jarring for Alexios, too, to see the nude burning muscular Hermes walking among the factory-made high school desks and chairs, his bare feet gracing the dusty floor tiles. Smoke and flame continued to pour from his head and hands, pooling beneath the ceiling which was stained here and there from all the leaks over the years. Thankfully no fire alarm went off.
Miriai also looked absurd here, with her white clothes and long white hair. People would have assumed she was an actor who had wandered offstage—or a cultist who had escaped some religious commune located deep in the woods. Yet the costume she wore possessed a medieval aura which was impossible to duplicate in 2020s America. This was also the case for Alexios’s clothing, which he had bought in Melitené.
Most surprising of all about the classroom was the fact that three teenage students were sitting around a wooden game board which was placed on one of the tables. Another student was hunched over her nearby desk with her headphones on. Although she was facing Miriai and Hermes and Alexios, she had kept still since their arrival. All four of the students seemed to be frozen in time. Miriai remarked that they were dressed almost like Persians, due to their pants, although these were woven from unfamiliar materials. It took a moment for Alexios to remember the students’ names.
“This one’s Boucher,” he said, approaching a strong-looking youth. “Austin Boucher. Just the biggest fucking asshole. A jock. Never had a good thing to say about anything or anyone. A rich lobsterman’s son—of course. God, I couldn’t wait for climate change to drive all the lobsters north into Canada. The lobstermen will throw such a fucking tantrum when that happens, begging on their hands and knees for bailouts so they don’t have to get real jobs. I guess he got sucked into the game with us, but we never found out what happened to him.”
“What’s a jock, dear?” Miriai said.
Alexios laughed. “It’s not worth explaining.”
“I’d like to know.”
“They’re people,” Alexios said. “They play sports. Games like football, soccer, baseball. Do they ever play games like that where you live? Do people ever kick a ball around?”
She nodded. “It can be dangerous. Sometimes the peasants will get drunk at a festival and play the ball game, though it often devolves into many different simultaneous wrestling matches which grow so severe that the players forget the ball. Everyone in town is involved. Many people break bones or lose teeth.”
“That honestly sounds pretty entertaining,” Alexios said. “With these guys, though, they play all the time, and it couldn’t be more boring. They aren’t allowed to hurt each other. There’s nothing at stake except their careers. It’s pretty much what their entire lives revolve around.”
“They don’t farm? How do they eat?”
“Other people farm for them.”
“So are they nobles?”
“They’d like to be, but they were born in the wrong time and place. No, they aren’t nobles. They’re just pieces of shit. Most of them don’t have what it takes to be professional athletes, so they usually turn into gym teachers. My dad subbed in a few different schools for awhile and he said teaching gym was the easiest job he’s ever had in his life.”
Miriai looked at him. “Gym…gumnasion…do you mean to say this place is some kind of academy, dear?”
Alexios nodded. “It’s supposed to be. But you know, it’s really one step forward, two steps back. The more random arbitrary hoops you jump through, the more the people in charge reward you. Study hard, memorize random facts, tell your teachers what they want to hear, prove that you can follow orders without even being told, and you can go pretty far, assuming you’re rich enough to get here in the first place. After you graduate and go to college, you just might be able to get some cushy nonprofit job where you sit in an office all day filling out spreadsheets and sending emails begging rich people for money. Just don’t ever think about all the other people you stepped on to get there.”
“Who are these people you speak of?” Miriai said.
“You can’t see them.” Alexios looked around at the windows, the ceiling, and the floor in the old classroom. “But they’re there. The money to build this place wasn’t generated out of thin air. It came from slaves, indigenous people, and workers around the world.” He touched one of the walls. “Ghosts exist, and they’ve been busted. They’re locked up inside these materials. Child laborers in Victorian factories, banana farmers in Central America, all the people who died in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and Syria—they’re all right here, right in front of you, entombed in this stuff. You just need the right eyes to see them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Stick around a little longer, and you will, at least as long as you aren’t materially invested in the carnage. I never liked it here, but I needed to spend some time away before I figured out why. I learned so much from Dionysios, the manual, Mazdakism…”
“Ach, I don’t know how you can possibly tell me that you dislike this place,” she said. “It’s truly magical—truly beyond my skills and understanding.”
Miriai approached the windows, and stared for a moment at how finely the glass was made. Nothing so large, translucent, or uniform could be constructed in the Middle Ages. Hesitantly she touched the glass, and said it was like ice. Then she noticed the large objects outside.
“What are those?” she said. “They look like…turtles wrought of metal…by an astounding level of craftsmanship.”
“They’re cars,” Alexios said.
“Cars? But how do you attach the horses? And where are so many horses kept? I see no grooms, no hay, no mounds of dung, no drivers, no stables. The road is black, and somehow made of rock—it looks almost like a kind of volcanic pumice. How can such things be forged?”
“They’re horseless carriages,” Alexios said. “They drive themselves.”
She turned to him. “And you were impressed with my abilities.”
Alexios nodded to Hermes. “Some of the alchemy he discovered turned into chemistry, physics, biology. That’s pretty much how it happened. I think most of the early scientists were into alchemy. Newton was obsessed with it. Gravity is an alchemical concept, now that I think about it. ‘Everything is connected.’ The gravity from the galaxies at the edge of the universe is tugging on us right now. And Hegel, too, he was into alchemy, wasn’t he? ‘As above, so below’ sounds like base and superstructure. And without Hegel, you could never have a guy like Ma—”
“Too many new riddles for an old bat like me.” Miriai turned from the windows and approached the student with the headphones. “This one is a lady, is she not? She has an odd headdress, of a style unknown. How can a lady of marriageable age be left unchaperoned? Do ladies study in this place?”
“Long as they have the money,” Alexios said. “The school’s for everyone who lives around here.”
“That sounds like a very good thing.”
“It could be,” Alexios said. “Trouble is, to live here in the first place you have to be pretty rich. She came from wealth. Like all of us, I guess, if you compare us with, like, the average person living on Earth in the 2020s. I think her parents were doctors or something. What was her name? Helena. Helena Lee. Somehow the game turned her into Gontran, my friend.”
“Game?” Miriai said. “What game?”
Alexios nodded to the game board the three students were hunched over. “We found Jumanji, only it took us into Byzantium.”
“It looks like shatranj,” Miriai said. “Each of these complicated answers of yours prompts me to ask a dozen questions.”
“I’m honestly speaking as plainly as I can,” Alexios said.
“Tell me more about this Helena Lee. It fascinates me that you come from a world where youths and ladies study in the same rooms together unchaperoned. How then can the ladies protect their virginity?”
Alexios laughed. “Some don’t.”
“But then their families…how can they be sure that their own children will inherit? That they will not be bastards?”
“Bastards are a big problem in America.”
Miriai narrowed her eyes. “Has this lady here kept her virtue? Tell me about her.”
“Alright. I know a lot more about Gontran, to be honest. I never knew much about Helena. We weren’t really friends in school. She was obsessed with studying. Like she was really into student council, I remember. She was always running in elections, writing articles about civility and norms in the student paper, doing theater, or organizing peaceful protests and donations to raise awareness about the latest issue of the week, telling people to write their congressmen. Now that I think about it, it’s actually amazing how much I forgot. I’ve only been gone a few months, but it seems like I haven’t been here in a hundred years…”
Miriai regarded another student. “What of this one?”
“Darius Jackson,” Alexios said. “A friend. Somehow he turned into Herakleia.”
Miriai looked at Alexios. “You care for this person.”
“Here he’s my bud,” Alexios said. “In Byzantium she’s a bit more than that.”
“And this one?” Miriai looked at the last student playing the wooden board game.
“Julian Torres,” Alexios said. “Me.”
“You?” Miriai said. “But you look different from this fellow here.”
“Tell me about it. I got an upgrade when I turned into Alexios. I mean, I knew I didn’t look great, but I had no idea just how bad the situation was. It’s so strange looking at me now.” Alexios winced at the sight of Julian. “I was so pudgy and pimply and greasy…I had no fashion sense. All I did was play video games. I was dateless eternal.”
Miriai regarded Alexios. “Fortunately for you, the situation seems to have improved.”
“Indeed it has,” Hermes said. He had been standing by the windows while Miriai and Alexios conversed.
Alexios looked at him. “Are we really here? Or is this some kind of illusion?”
“It is as real as you,” Hermes said.
“Then what’s the point?” Alexios said. “Why’d you bring us to this place?”