Unknown 9 by Layton Green (each kindness read aloud txt) 📕

Oh, wait—it’s both. What’s the percentage of energy in the universe we know nothing about these days? Ninety-six percent? Ninety-seven?”

“We don’t have all the variables yet. God, Cal, we have to make certain assumptions, or we’ll never move forward with anything. At least scientists—unlike religious leaders and politicians—admit their mistakes and carry on.”

“Do they? You think scientists can’t be bought or ever consider their reputations? It doesn’t pay to be wrong. Listen, make your assumptions. I understand that’s how it works. But don’t expect me to act all starry-eyed about cosmological theories that happened billions and trillions of years ago, whatever that even means. That evidence could have been tainted by all sorts of intervening events.”

“I think you’ve made your point. Good luck getting through life without trusting basic science.”

“Good luck seeing the truth from the attic of your ivory tower.”

“God, you’re infuriating sometimes.”

“Listen,” he said calmly. “I get it. Humans are significance junkies. We want to assign meaning to a bewildering world, and it’s easier to go along with a well-meaning narrative that’s made all the popular rounds instead of continuing to swim in ignorance. But we have to keep asking questions, Andie. We really do. I hate to say it, because I’m a journalist myself, but with the internet and all the competing political and commercial interests in play, we can’t even trust the goddamn daily news.”

Andie had to admit that, while his scientific arguments were a little rough, they had real meaning. In truth, Cal had probably thought more deeply about these issues than some of her colleagues—many of whom refused to consider alternate theories when it was not considered en vogue or professionally sound to do so.

“I agree,” she said quietly. “We have to keep asking questions. And Dr. Corwin agreed too. Which was the point of the story I was trying to tell. After that lecture, he invited the class—a five-person research seminar—to dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant in Durham.”

“Let me guess: Only the people who had seen it for themselves knew about the secret sauce?”

She couldn’t help but chuckle. “During the meal, he used Vietnam as an example of knowledge and misinformation. He told us about the lies the US government propagated during the war to sustain popular support—the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident and fictitious body counts, for starters. Even today, the only knowledge most Americans have about Vietnam is filtered through biased history books and the legacy of that war. Dr. Corwin said we had to see a place for ourselves to really know it, and that this was an important lesson for physicists, who work in the realms of the mind and rarely leave the classroom. Even astronomers are mostly limited to mathematical calculations and observations of light from the distant past. He made some of the same arguments you just did. Outside of a few satellites, we haven’t been to deep space, so we have to be careful of our assumptions, and always be willing to test and reconfigure.”

“He sounds like an extremely wise man. Especially the part about agreeing with me.”

Remembering the dinner with her mentor caused a tingle of hope to spread through Andie. This was tempered by the reality of his situation. Even if Dr. Corwin is still alive, where is he being held? What will the Ascendants do to him to find the Enneagon?

“He spoke so passionately about Southeast Asia—he visited on a number of occasions—that it sparked my own interest. I went home that night and started reading up. It’s true that China, and not Vietnam, was a stop on the original trade route between East and West. But by the eleventh century AD, a second and lesser known Silk Road had developed, with a city called Thang Long at the heart of it. Thang Long means ‘rising dragon,’ and it was the capital of Vietnam at the time.”

Cal sat up straighter. “The dragon on the map.”

She nodded. “Today we know Thang Long as Hanoi.”

Three hours later, they touched down at an airport near a broad river they had seen from the plane snaking through the countryside, coiling around Hanoi like the city’s namesake serpent. The reddish-brown hue of the river and its lush, reed-filled banks was evocative of the Indochina of Andie’s imagination, an exotic waterway winding through jungles and terraced fields of rice paddies.

As in Kolkata, their pilot took their passports and disappeared to converse with customs. Not long after, presumably after an exchange of money, Andie and Cal found themselves hustled through the stifling midday heat and into a white van on the outskirts of the airport. Soon they were speeding down a multilane highway. She did not know how they had escaped the airport so quickly, and the whole affair left her with a queasy feeling about the porous nature of international borders.

When the transport bus had picked them up, it was already half-full of passengers. She and Cal did not feel comfortable talking freely, so Andie pressed her face to the glass and absorbed her new location. The modern design of the airport and the newly paved highway lulled her into a sense of Western familiarity—right before they crossed the Red River, left the highway to enter the city proper, and their surroundings dissolved from rural calm into sheer pandemonium.

Delving into the heart of Hanoi was like plunging into a white-water rapid of humanity. People were everywhere, far more than she had ever seen in one place, even in downtown Kolkata. Though the architecture possessed an unmistakable French influence, full of atmospheric but dilapidated colonial buildings lining both sides of the wide street, her connection to the familiar ended there. Twisting spires of pagodas pierced the sky in the distance, and closer in, roadside shrines crowded sidewalks warped by the roots of mighty banyans bursting skyward among the buildings as if seeking to wrap them in their limbs and reclaim the jungle. What must have once been a stately avenue was now a river of unmarked asphalt heaving with