They left Santiago after lunch, later than Hortensia had wanted and earlier than Juana had expected. The difference amounted to twenty minutes, most of which had been spent deciding what food they had forgotten. Once they were out of the city there was little reason to hurry. The road narrowed as it climbed, and conversation gradually gave way to the engine, the loose things shifting in the back, and the occasional stone thrown against the underside of the car.

They had been talking about going for weeks. Juana had assumed, as she did with most casual plans, that it would survive indefinitely as something they ought to do. Hortensia had apparently understood it as an arrangement. She arrived that morning with blankets, food, a borrowed tent and enough coffee for several days.

The campsite was not far from the road. Other people had used it before them. There was a fire ring, flattened earth and a few pieces of charred wood pressed into the dirt. Hortensia had camped often enough as a girl that some of the work returned once she began doing it. She remembered where not to put the tent before she remembered the names of the knots, and discovered that this was sufficient. Juana did what she was told with unusual obedience and otherwise showed little interest in organizing the place.

By evening they had the tent standing, the blankets inside and a fire which smoked more than it burned. They ate bread, cheese, fruit and the sausages Hortensia had nearly left in the car. Juana had made the coffee too strong. She drank it without acknowledging the error.

There was little to do after that, which had been part of the purpose.

They moved the blanket beyond the smoke and lay down while the ground still held some of the day’s warmth. The hills had gone dark before the sky did. Once the remaining light disappeared, Hortensia realized how much of the sky she had ordinarily been missing.

In Santiago the stars arrived selectively. A few survived the streetlights and roofs, enough to notice on a clear night, but never enough to occupy the whole sky. Here, the longer she looked, the more appeared. The bright ones came first, then smaller ones between them, until the spaces she had taken for emptiness turned out not to be empty at all.

She had known several constellations as a child. Her father had taught her some. An uncle had supplied others, although with age she had become less certain that all of his constellations had existed before the evening on which he described them. There had been three brothers, a horse, and a woman who became some sort of large bird. Hortensia could no longer remember which stories had come from books, which from relatives, and which had probably been invented because a child had asked a question at an inconvenient time.

She told Juana what she could remember. They found several plausible horses.

The stories led easily into the stars themselves. Hortensia had understood for years that the points making a constellation were not really arranged beside one another, but the knowledge remained difficult to see. Her mind still flattened them against the same dark surface. From somewhere sufficiently distant, she supposed, all of those familiar shapes would collapse. The horse would lose a leg, or acquire several. Three brothers might never have met.

She told Juana this too. Juana listened, correcting nothing except when Hortensia accidentally used the name of a planet for a star. From there they wandered into whether the night sky would look recognizable from another planet, then whether anyone living there would divide it into pictures at all. Hortensia thought they probably would. Juana asked why. Hortensia said she had no evidence whatsoever, but it seemed difficult to imagine intelligent people managing to leave a perfectly good collection of dots alone.

The conversation faded after that. Neither of them had decided to stop talking. There simply came a point when the next thought took longer to arrive, and the quiet around them was comfortable enough not to fill.

Hortensia kept looking upward.

“Juana?”

“Mm?”

“Do you think we’d be friends in other universes too?”

Juana laughed when she asked.

“What?”

“There is no other you for me to be friends with.”

Hortensia turned her head toward her. She looked pleased with herself, which made it difficult to tell whether the answer was supposed to be sweet or merely annoying. “You don’t know that. Who knows what’s out there? People used to think the Earth was flat.”

“You think too highly of the universe.”

Hortensia looked at her. “What is that supposed to mean? Either there are other universes or there aren’t.”

“There are plenty of them,” Juana said. “You simply flatter this one by assuming the others are trying to imitate it.”

Juana sat up.

There was still paper around the bread. She took one of the cleaner sheets, unfolded it and flattened it against her knee. It was thin white wrapping paper, translucent in places where oil had soaked through. One corner had torn where the crust had caught it, and a pale ring of fat remained in the center.

“When people like you talk about other universes,” Juana said, smoothing the edges with her palms, “you are very vain about it. You imagine a long corridor of rooms, all built to the exact same measurements as this one, so that another Hortensia may sit on another mountain and decide whether she likes coffee better than tea. You think the rest of existence has nothing better to do than rearrange your furniture.”

“Just the possibilities," Hortensia said. "If there are enough worlds, every combination has to happen somewhere.”

Juana gathered the sheet between both hands and crushed it into a small, uneven ball. She did not do it carefully. She simply squeezed her palms together once, opened them, and left the crumpled paper sitting on her knee.

“This is one,” Juana said, looking down at it. “Every crease is a condition. One fold decides how heavy an atom is. Another decides whether stars can burn at all, and ten thousand smaller wrinkles near the edge have to meet in a very particular way before a rock can cool down and produce a city, or a language, or your parents.”

She reached toward the bread basket and touched a second sheet of paper with two fingers.

“If I take another piece of paper from the basket,” Juana said, “and I close my hands in the very same way, that is another universe. Do you think the creases will match? Even if I practice for a whole year, the second ball will always have different folds from the first one.”

Hortensia propped herself up on one elbow. “The universe isn’t a hand. It has laws.”

“What differs universes from papers? Artists and philosophers always going round and round and saying they are all canvas, no?” Juana said pleasantly. “Still, if a single fold shifts by the width of a hair at the beginning, the rest of the sheet goes somewhere else entirely. The crease that produced this mountain does not happen. The crease that produced the Earth does not happen. There are plenty of other balls of paper, Hortensia, and most of them do not even have light in them, let alone Santiago. As for a second sheet accidentally folding itself into another you and sitting beside a fire with a bad pot of coffee, the probability is so small that it is not polite to call it a number.”

Hortensia frowned at the white ball on Juana’s trouser leg. In the weak light from the coals it looked like a dried mushroom. “You talk as if you had folded them yourself.”

“No,” Juana said. “I do not make the paper. I am a mailwoman, remember?”

Hortensia laughed, though not very loudly, and lay back down on the blanket. She worked four afternoons a week at a small radio station in a jail on a small island, reading livestock prices, weather reports from Valparaíso and whatever foreign science dispatches arrived on the wire before six o’clock. She had no training in mathematics beyond what had been required at school, a fact which usually embarrassed her only when she tried to argue with men who had been to the university. With Juana she had never needed to be careful.

She decided to ask a difficult question to see how long Juana would maintain the joke. She asked what remained when a heavy star finished collapsing, which had been the subject of a three-line filler from London the week before.

Juana answered immediately. She did not pause to choose her words, and she did not look up at the sky for inspiration. She spoke in the clear, complete sentences she always used, which sounded a little like the English records they played for beginners at the institute downtown. She explained how the weight overcame the structure of the matter, and what happened to light near the boundary, and why the time measured from outside disagreed with the time inside.

Hortensia listened, waiting for the part that sounded invented. It did not come.

“You read the Tuesday bulletin,” Hortensia said.

“No,” Juana said. “I was busy on Tuesday. Furthermore, the bulletin was not entirely correct. The people in London still believe that nothing can leave such an object once it has fallen in. In six years, a young man in England will publish a very short paper demonstrating that they leak heat and eventually evaporate. His body is already failing him, which is quite, sad.”

Hortensia stared at her profile. “You just made up names.”

“Ask me something else,” Juana said kindly. “It is a pleasant night, and you have been wanting to know these things for a long time.”

Hortensia sat up again. Her legs had gone stiff from the cold ground. She asked another question, and then three more in quick succession, pulling them from old magazine articles she had clipped, from half-understood chapters in library books, from the margins of her own notebooks where the arithmetic always gave out before the idea did.

Juana answered all of them. When Hortensia objected that nobody had the instruments to verify what she was saying, Juana obligingly supplied things that could be checked, or at least things that someone in the world already knew and was trying very hard to keep quiet. She described a Soviet submarine that had broken apart and settled onto the floor of the Pacific three months earlier, giving the depth in meters and the names of two officers whose bodies were still wedged behind a bulkhead while Moscow and Washington pretended to look for them in the wrong square of ocean. She recited the exact radio frequencies being used that evening by an American reconnaissance satellite passing over the cordillera. Then, because military secrets bored Hortensia, Juana returned to the stars.

She named scholars who were currently twenty-two years old and failing their preliminary examinations in Zurich. She summarized a paper on the early expansion of space that would be written in 1979 by a man in California who was presently undecided between physics and banking. She explained the equations without using numbers, translating them into shapes and pressures so plain that Hortensia, who had never learned calculus, felt the loose pieces in her head slide together with a dry, terrifying click.

It was not like learning a lesson. It was like being shown the back of a stage set after spending thirty years trying to guess how the painted clouds stayed in the air.

At some point Hortensia had stopped asking questions, though Juana continued speaking for another minute or two in order to finish her point properly. When she was done, the camp was very quiet. Even the green wood in the fire had stopped hissing.

“Wow,” Hortensia said. Her voice sounded thin to her own ears.

Juana picked up the crumpled bread paper, turned it over once, and set it down beside the tin plates.

“I am fond of you,” Juana said. Her tone was warm and entirely proper, like a hostess thanking a guest for a small gift. “I have looked at many people, Hortensia, and I have always enjoyed watching you try to understand things.”

Hortensia did not move. Her hands were pressed flat against the wool blanket between her knees. She looked closely at Juana’s face and realized, with a small, odd shock, that it was impossible to say what she actually was. In the street Juana did not draw attention, yet when one examined her features separately in the light of the coals, they refused to settle into any single origin. She could have been Latin American, or indigenous, or white; from another angle the eyes and cheekbones looked Asian, or she resembled a very light-skinned Black woman. It was not that she looked mixed. It was rather that every human possibility seemed to exist in her face at the same time. It was weird. Hortensia was already starting to forget what Juana was supposed to look like. Hm. As if her face were shifting all the time, just to keep some silly man from defining her.

“Most people are quite sensible,” Juana continued. “They think about their shoes, or their cousins, or whether the bus will arrive before the rain. You are never satisfied with what is placed in front of you. Whatever you happen to be doing, whatever small tools you happen to have in your hands, you are always trying to measure the distance between the stars with a ruler that is missing half its marks. It is very much like watching an ant on a garden path. The ant finds a dry twig that is ten times too heavy for its body. From an objective point of view, the twig is completely useless to the colony. Nevertheless, the ant drags it over the stones with tremendous determination. I find the effort deeply charming.”

She turned her head and smiled at Hortensia in the dark.

“Now I have helped you with the twig,” Juana said. “When we return to Santiago tomorrow, you may do whatever you wish with it. You may shout these facts in the street, or print them in pamphlets, or write letters to the professors in England and tell them what they will discover in 1974. Or you may simply keep a notebook and wait for the newspapers to prove that I was telling the truth. Nobody will prevent you from sharing your knowledge.”

A piece of charcoal shifted in the ring and broke in half.

“However,” Juana added gently, “I should be honest with you about my own habits. The pleasure of observing an ant lies entirely in the difficulty of the journey. Once the ant has successfully carried the twig inside the nest, the activity loses its interest for the spectator.”

Hortensia looked down at her friend’s hands, folded neatly in her lap. They were ordinary hands.

“Perhaps it will happen tomorrow,” Juana said, in the same helpful, even cadence. “Perhaps it will happen in ten years, when you have grown accustomed to knowing how the sky works. You will step into the street while looking at a clock, or a water heater will leak gas while you are taking a bath, or a small vessel in your brain will simply fail while you are eating an orange. It will have no connection whatsoever to tonight, and the doctor will write a very ordinary word on the certificate. The only difference is that from this moment onward, you will know that it was my doing. I wish you the very best of luck with your thoughts, Hortensia. See you in your next life.”

Juana stood up. She brushed a few pine needles from the back of her skirt, first the left side and then the right.

“It is getting quite cold out here,” she said. “You ought to come inside soon, or you will have a sore throat on Monday. Please sleep as late as you like in the morning. You drove all the way up the mountain today, so I will drive the car on our way back. Good night.”

She stooped, lifted the flap of the borrowed tent, and went inside. For a few seconds the canvas moved as she arranged her blankets. Then the movement stopped.

Hortensia remained where she was. Above the dark line of the hills, the sky was still crowded with points of light that had nothing to do with one another. Beside the plates, in the cold air coming off the dirt, the small ball of greased paper gave a faint rustle and slowly began to uncurl by itself.

Oh. She could see that horse now.