Hymnal
Lee Allred
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2011 Rookhouse, Inc.
Cover Photo by BrianAJackson/istockphoto
Cover Background Image courtesy of NASA
Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day.
Earth's joys grow dim, its glories pass away.
The prelude had started without him. Sam could hear the music seeping through the church's thick oaken outer doors high up on the second story landing.
He sighed. He had meant to be on time for the end of the universe. He had arrived before anyone else—his wife Ellie or the sixty-eight others now seated inside—but he couldn't go inside without one last look.
Change and decay in all around I see;
O thou who changest not abide with me.
He climbed up the rain-slicked stairs. Dark green moss oozed like putty from cracks in the concrete. His rain-soaked dress shoes squelched with each step.
The sky, what there was of it, was the leaden grey of an Oregon November. Rain drizzled from low hanging sheet clouds, coloring the asphalt streets an inky black. Up the hill was where Sam's house should have stood sixteen trillion years ago.
Only an empty void gaped there now. Sam hadn't the heart to recreate it.
Should they have gathered somewhere else? No, this was the place. Here, here in this rundown, second-hand church of pink-beige stucco, he and Ellie and the others would watch as the universe died.
***
Eight trillion years after Earth died, eight trillion left before the universe joined that death, came the day of decision. Not many of them were left to make it, only Sam and Ellie and old Charlie.
They found Charlie alone at the Boundary. The line marked the approach of total entropy, the universe's creeping heat-death. The old man squatted there tossing pebbles into it like a little boy skipping stones across a pond.
Sam glanced at Ellie before he spoke. "No one else is coming," he told Charlie.
Charlie grunted. "Given up, have they? All of 'em curled up and died, have they?"
He flung the rest of his handful of pebbles. As each pebble struck, the careening of its atoms rippled energy outwards ever-so-briefly until all heat and motion were leeched out.
He stood and dusted off his hands.
"'Spirit, nearing yon dark portal at the limit of thy human state, fear not." He shook his head. "Tennyson," he said, "'God and the Universe.' Amazing what muck the subconscious will dredge up, given half the chance."
He stared out across the nothingness.
***
The music transitioned to the opening bars of "For the Beauty of the Earth." Ellie's way, Sam supposed, of reminding him it was time to come inside the chapel.
Sam stood on the landing and looked back that one, final time:
Across Main Street sat the red brick First Presbyterian Church whose towering grandeur shamed the shabby squatness of his own chapel. The Moose Lodge lay kitty-corner, still badly painted in that dirty lime green that no one, not even the Mooses, liked. The shining chrome of Newberry's back entrance glistened in the rain. Across the Umpqua, towering above the sleeping town, stood Mt. Nebo, its craggy face marred by a painted American flag and the high school senior class's graduation year scrawled underneath. Roseburg. 1970. It was all there. Every detail. Just as his memory pictured it.
Of course it was, Sam thought bitterly. He had recreated it himself from that memory, a memory perfected with the aid of the very atoms that had once made up this scene.
He turned towards the door, knowing that as he turned, everything he had just gazed upon would cease to be. Every atom, every wave of light would slow and die, giving up their life to buy Sam and Ellie and the others just a few more moments to find the answer.
Now only the church, a tiny building in a vast dying universe, was still safe, still vital. Only those inside still alive.
No. That wasn't true. Of the seventy beings inside, only Sam and Ellie were still alive.
***
Eddies of approaching entropy lapped at Charlie's feet. "What about Turley?" Charlie asked without turning around. "Or Sanchez? Or that stringy old biddy Hallister?"
"Gone. All of them," Sam said. "Eda Hallister, too."
Nothingness swirled scant valences away from Charlie's feet. He did not step back, but tensed as if he meant to leap forward.
Sam put a hand on Charlie's arm to pull him back. Charlie shrugged it off. "Eda, too," Charlie mouthed. He lifted up a foot to step forward.
"Charlie," Ellie said in her quiet voice. "Please don't."
The old man hung his head.
"Please."
Charlie slowly lowered his foot and stepped back. He put a gnarled hand to Ellie's hair. "Most blameless is he, centered in the sphere/Of common duties, decent not to fail." Tennyson again.
His hand fell to his side. "I can't believe you're the last two left. The rest of us were tougher, you know. Meaner, smarter, greedier. Hasn't mattered in the end, has it? One by one the rest of us have all given up, while you two still stand there hanging on, as full of hope as that first day. You two had each other, had each other from Before, and that has made all the difference."
"You're still here, Charlie," Ellie said.
The old man almost smiled. "Yes, I'm still here, I must have had something to live for, too, eh?"
The old man held out his palm. Above it appeared a schoolchild's model of a Bohr atom. "I spent my entire life seeking after this," he said. "The cold, rational obsessive pursuit of knowledge."
The Bohr atom began to change, began to refine itself, layer after layer, to grow more detailed, re-tracing the history of Man's quest for the knowledge of the universe. Protons and neutrons and neutrinos. Quantum theory with its quarks and charms. Tachyons. Wavicles. The grand miasma of Chaos Theory and the iron-rod unyieldingness of the Order Theories undergirding it.
Faster and faster it flashed, past the last stages of Mankind's understanding before Mankind's death, through the simplicities of the Unified Theory Einstein could only fumble at. Down through each level of existence, past the ken of human understanding until at last it reached the final level, the smallest discrete iota of Being.
There, above his hand, swam the jots and tittles of Existence. Each self-aware, each straining for the call of its own True Name.
Then, of their own volition, the iota forming the model atom shuddered as one and fled Charlie's presence for the safety of Sam and Ellie.
Charlie's open palm clenched into a fist.
"Do you realize how meaningless it makes me feel? To have spent my whole life—even from Before—scrabbling after the secrets of a grudging universe, finally conquering them all—only to have those same secrets come easily to you, seek you out without your even having to look for them?"
The fist curled open and dropped to his side.
"You have everything. And I…I have nothing."
The model atom faded away.
More to himself than to the universe, he whispered: "Let Science prove we are, and then/What matters Science unto Men?"
***
Sam slipped quietly into the chapel. Their Seventy made up the entirety of the —Turley and Sanchez and all the others he and Ellie had pulled back out of the Boundary, iotically reinfusing them for the final moment.
Though outward ills await us here,
The time at longest is not long.
Sam catfooted up the aisle. Charlie, seated in the back row, turned his head to look at him.
Charlie did so for the same reason he deliberately held up a dog-eared copy of Pratner's Notes to Myself rather than a hymnal: to prove that he was his own self, not merely the puppet of Sam's reconstruction.
Eda Hallister sat in the pew just behind Ellie. The old woman wore widow weeds. An ugly feathered pillbox hat sat perched on her bunned-up gray hair. A black veil draped down from the front of her hat, too sheer to conceal her tear-stained face.
She did not so much as blink as Sam passed by, but stared straight ahead at the hymn board with its cardboard letters indicating which hymns were to be sung. She held her hymnal with a white-knuckled grip as if as long as the music sounded, the universe could not die.
His purpose has not failed.
His promise is not foiled.
Oh, but it has failed, Sam thought. Oh, but it has.
***
Charlie stared at the Boundary. "It's not a question of whether it can be done. It's doable, all right. Just a question of whether or not it makes any difference."
"You mean you don't know?" Sam asked. "I thought you knew everything there was to know about the universe."
A flicker of the Bohr atom re-appeared between them. Not Sam's doing; the iota themselves were mocking the old man.
Charlie batted the atom away. "This universe," he said. "What you're proposing is another universe all together."
"We don't have any other option. Except, that is, of simply giving up. I'm not prepared to do that. Neither is Ellie."
"Well, maybe I am. Maybe I see nothing wrong in just sitting down and knocking back a few cold ones as existence spins itself down."
"Charlie—"
"We're talking about heat-death of the universe here. It's not something you can fix. Haven't you learned anything from your little friends?"