THE MAYA REPORT

Previously: the assignment, the six million, the question nobody asks, the test nobody ran, and Rome. Her last line was: one of them is not on Earth.

In Part Two, Maya explains why the universe works like a video game, why millions of strangers a year stare down at Napoleon’s tomb and call it a museum, and why France once gave us a ninety-three-meter copper woman, an event she confirms has happened only once. She also has a dream. I want to be very calm about the dream, and I want you to notice that I am being very calm about the dream. The dream is where this stops being about bones.

She ends this installment by refusing to tell you something. She has a rule about guessing first and she is going to make you use it. I have already looked. I am not going to help you either.

6. Pluto

Pluto takes about 248 years to go around the sun.⁵

Pluto is named for the Roman god of the underworld. The god of the dead. The one in charge of everything under the ground. And the name was not chosen by an astronomer. It was suggested by a girl. Venetia Burney, eleven years old, at breakfast, in 1930. The men with the telescopes took a schoolgirl’s word for it and put the god of death on the planet permanently. She could not have consciously known what the name would come to mean. Maybe she did. There is no test for that, and I do not cite things there is no test for. So I am recording it as a fact with a question standing behind it: the underworld was named by a child, and nobody objected.

248 is not 200. I know. I am not going to pretend the numbers snap together, because my rule is honesty. Orbits are not calendars. But Pluto’s orbit is lopsided. For part of it he swings in closer than Neptune. Then he falls away into the dark for centuries. He sweeps past.

When I lined up the sweeps against my dates, the surfacings, the fillings, the emptying of cemeteries into the ground, the fit was close enough to make my hands cold. Close enough that “coincidence” started to sound like the word people use so they can stop looking.

The hypothesis, stated as a question, the way you taught us:

What if the god of death is not a story? What if whoever is in charge of this planet collects, on a cycle, and the catacombs are not where empires bury their dead, they are where the collection is stored? What if every time Pluto comes around, somebody reaps?

And the second question, which is worse: why would anyone need to collect people?

I have an answer. It came from physics class. I am sorry in advance.

7. The Rendering Problem

In physics we learned about the observer effect and the double-slit experiment. The simple version is the famous version: at the quantum level, a particle does not settle into a definite state until it is measured. Things that are not looked at are not formed. The universe does not decide what something is until something looks.⁶