A Ghost for a Clue

by C L R Draeco

  Triana raised a hand, stopping my explanation. “From what I know of life so far, I’m forced to accept one conclusion. At some point in time, I won’t be around anymore to take care of my baby girl.” She paused and closed her eyes as she curled a hand and laid it against her solar plexus. She took a deep breath, her brows pinched, and when she opened her eyes again, they’d gone misty. “I need to find someone who could take over for me—even though she’s absolutely certain she doesn’t need anyone looking after her.”

  I couldn’t believe I’d gotten it all wrong. “I must apologize. All these years, I thought you were the reason she kept pulling away.”

  Triana smiled warmly. “Love can’t die just because someone gave an order. Nothing ever dies that way. Death is a decision, Bram. Love, like life, can only end after you decide it’s over.”

  25

  In The Chapel

  A knot formed in my stomach as I approached Torula seated on one of the pews halfway down the aisle of the chapel. A candle by the altar cast a soft, flickering glow while stained glass saints looked down at us, as though eager to hear the conversation.

  Torula’s eyes were fixed on the altar. “Mom thinks hospital chapels are among the most emotionally charged places around.” Her voice echoed in the empty place. “Because many people come here in times of despair, she thinks the prayers here are the most potent.”

  “Triana? Believes in prayers?” I took a seat next to her.

  “She says it’s a matter of affirming your belief in the possibility. You don’t need to believe in God to get a spontaneous remission or placebo effect.”

  “She has a point.” My gaze fell on the lone candle that flickered in the distance. I took a deep breath and sent out a wish . . . or was it a prayer . . . that Torula and I would make the right decisions.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you something. Obviously.” I curled my hands into fists so tight, my knuckles cracked. “What I have to say is something only you and I can know about. I have clearance to divulge only so much information, and only to you. I’m even supposed to have you sign a confidentiality agreement—” I let out a nervous chuckle.

  Her brow knotted slightly. “I understand.”

  I stared into her eyes. “I’ve been offered a mission. But there’s one thing still clouding my mind about accepting it. And that’s . . . what you have to say about it.” My lungs constricted, making it hard to breathe, even harder to think.

  Torula sat motionless, looking at me, waiting.

  “It’s not a short-term mission. And accepting it means saying goodbye to the life I’ve always known.”

  “What kind of mission is it?”

  I rubbed my hands over my thighs. “NASA found me a way around the height limit. I got in.”

  She gasped. “You’re going to Mars? Bram, that’s—” Her eyes lit up as beautifully as the Northern Lights, and she hugged me. “I’m so happy for you!”

  “No, I . . .” I shook my head and gently pushed her away. “It’s not to Mars. And I can’t imagine going without you.”

  “What?” It was almost a whisper.

  I licked my lips, but it seemed my entire mouth had gone dry. “You can’t imagine how difficult this is for me to ask. But if you say yes, I’m sure everything will work out.”

  She tilted her head. “Say yes to what?”

  “First, you have to understand, I never knew about your claustrophobia. And even though they’re called space-ships, they don’t give much of it at all. Star Trek, Star Wars and Star Base. They’re all far too optimistic about the size of—”

  “Will you just get to the point? You never will if you keep driving in a roundabout.”

  “Would you consider coming with me?”

  Silence followed, with both of us just staring at the other. Only the flicker of candlelight told me the world itself hadn’t frozen over with my question.

  The Eagle has landed. Mission accomplished. Package delivered. I let out a heavy sigh.

  At last, she blinked. “You’ve never really said . . . where to.”

  “Somewhere in the constellation Ophiuchus.”

  Her breathing became ragged. “A constellation . . . so obscure and unremarkable, I’ve never even heard of it?”

  I nodded. “Unremarkable to most people, I suppose. But space exploration, it’s the most remarkable thing one can ever do. Carl Sagan wrote beautifully about it. Stephen Hawking always spoke of its importance. And Elon Musk keeps spreading his vision of preserving and extending the light of consciousness to other planets. We. You and I. We could be bringers of that light.”

  As poetic as I tried to make it sound, she seemed on the brink of cringing in horror. “What happens if I say no?”

  A brick wall crashed down in front of me without making a sound. “I don’t know.” I swallowed, bewildered, as the dust and debris floated invisibly around me. “I probably will still go . . . or decide to stay. I don’t know. I could choose to go but could still be weeded out in the end.”

  She looked at me . . . no, gawked at me, as though my face had become indescribably shocking.

  I swallowed back the acrid taste of dread inside my mouth. “I’ll understand if you say it’s not possible. Your claustrophobia—”

  “Is treatable, like I said. What happens if I say yes?”

  A smile crept its way across my face as a flock of white doves fluttered up from somewhere deep inside me. “Then I’ll submit an application to the screening committee to consider you as my partner. And only then, if you qualify, will we know for sure that you really can be among the candidates. But even after that, we’ll need to go through training and screening. There’s no guarantee we’ll end up in the final selection.”

  “Really? With such a preposterous invitation, they’re going to be picky about who accepts?”

  “At least I know we’ll be sharing a new world with good company.” I flashed a confident grin, even as I squirmed uneasily inside.

  Her gaze drifted towards the altar. I watched her for several seconds, trying to guess what she was thinking, then turned towards the altar too and waited in silence. My heart was pumping as though I’d just run a mile.

  “How many friends or family are you allowed to ask along?”

  “Just one, as far as I know. Why?” She wasn’t going to ask me to take her mother along, was she? My hand tightened around hers.

  “How many others have you asked before me?”

  A thousand questions to ask about the mission—and this was what she wanted to know? “No one. Just you.”

  A pleasing tilt appeared at the corner of her mouth. “Eight and a half billion people, and you chose me.”

  “You had to ask?” I looked into her eyes that seemed a deeper shade than usual. “Of course, there’s only you.”

  Her gaze slid down to my lips, and with a subtle, teasing lift of one shoulder, she leaned forward and moved closer. I held my breath, hoping that what was bound to happen next would really happen next. She laid her fingers on my cheek and planted a light kiss on my mouth. She trembled as she rested her forehead against mine, and I let the exquisite moment linger. I slid my hand up to trace the curve of her neck and buried my fingers in her hair. I pulled her closer, and she parted her lips to meet mine, this time with no restraint.

  Before the intoxication could overpower me, she pulled away and whispered, “I don’t think this is the right place to be doing this.”

  “I’m an atheist, so it shouldn’t matter.” I kissed her again. I wouldn’t have cared if the Pope himself were standing right in front of us.

  She pushed away gently. “I’m zetetic, so it partly matters.”

  I let her go and took a very, very deep breath, then waited for my pulse to settle down before I spoke. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Zetetic? It means I’m still questioning—”

  “No, I meant . . .” I touched my fingers to my lips. “Was that a yes?”

  “Oh . . . no.”

&
nbsp; “No?” The brick wall crashed down again—right on top of me.

  “I mean, it didn’t mean anything.”

  “Ouch.” I thumped a fist over my heart, stabbing myself with an invisible knife.

  “No, that’s not what I meant either.” She gave me a playful shove. “It’s neither a yes nor a no. I need time to pull my thoughts together. It’s all so . . . staggering.”

  “Of course.” She’s giving it a chance. “We’ve still got over a month before we need to give an answer.”

  A curious expression flitted across her face. “We,” she said, as though it were a concept she’d never encountered before, then flashed a wistful smile.

  26

  E Equals Mc Squared

  Torula, in her knee-length lab coat, stood with her back to me. All I could do was watch as she reached down to trace the seam of her black stockings leading slowly upwards from the back of her stilettos. Just as things got interesting, Starr, wearing the same white coat, sashayed by in her red stilettos. Both of them turned to face me, revealing what they had on underneath: Nothing but slinky lingerie.

  “I need some time and space,” Torula said, her voice reverberating.

  More women walked into the scene—each one a Torula- and Starr-clone. Every Torula in black lace, each Starr in vivid red beneath their white coats. I glided backwards for a distance, and a goal post and green turf came into focus. We were in a football field, and I heard Roy shouting, “E equals MC squared! E equals MC squared!” He was in a straightjacket, bouncing and catapulting wildly about the field, like a pinball on a pogo stick. The high-heeled clones multiplied in number, trying to block the path of the raving mad Roy.

  The women pounced on top of him, but he continued to resist like a frenzied lunatic. The mass of bodies pulsated as he struggled, but I could still hear him yelling his mantra of Einstein’s equation. As if to shut him up, more botanists in white coats and lingerie fell from the sky with one solid—

  THUD.

  I jolted awake and felt the crick in my neck as I heaved my torso off the desk in my flat. I’d fallen asleep trying to plug up the holes in my Husserl proposal—the best distraction I could find while I waited for Torula’s answer.

  It was a quarter past three in the morning. The witching hour. I shook my head and snorted. “Bugger.” Working with Roy was driving me nuts.

  “Care for some coffee, mate?” Diddit asked.

  “Thanks, but I’ll go make it myself.” I needed to get my circulation going again. “Could you turn the TV on, mate? To a football game, but keep the audio down. Way down.”

  I trudged towards the kitchen for a fresh pot of coffee, images from my dream still dawdling in my head.

  It’s that blasted Deltoton puzzle. Asking what was masquerading as God in E=mc2. That world-famous equation—though sometimes labeled incomplete and even controversial—was still, in Einstein’s context, true. I’d only glanced at it briefly, but it seemed to have infected my mind. And Torula and Starr in a dogpile? I chuckled. My brain was defragging random thoughts from the past few days.

  The brewer’s quiet hiss served as the soundtrack of my dream fizzling away, and my gaze drifted lazily towards my laptop. The monitor cast a dim glow across the room as it displayed my wallpaper: A spectacular image of galaxy Messier 33 in the constellation Triangulum, a pinwheel of shimmering suns three million light years away.

  A collection of Deltoton threes.

  The trickle of freshly brewed coffee tapered off and dripped to a stop. I poured some out and stared at the black hole that was the coffee in my mug. I reached for the powdered creamer and let a dollop swirl into the center of the dark liquid. The creamy blotch stayed in place, its outward crawl barely perceptible.

  I scooped some sugar and drizzled it around the spot of cream and watched as the crystals sank quickly to the bottom. I turned back towards the spiral galaxy on my wallpaper and was struck by its similarity to the splotch of creamer in my mug.

  Cosmic Latte. What astronomers called the color of the universe.

  I looked back down at my coffee and tilted my head to observe the creamer, still making its languid way through the black liquid.

  Sluggish creamer. Hasty sugar. The coffee was in control.

  A barely audible “Hut hut hut” managed to break through my reverie, and I looked at the television.

  Saints versus Colts. Gold vs. Blue.

  An image from my dream flashed into focus. Torula in black, Starr in red.

  I looked down at the coffee, then back at the TV, then again at my laptop that displayed a galaxy of stars. An odd sensation bubbled up from deep inside me and quickly built up steam.

  I bolted to my desk and rummaged for a pen and paper. Grabbed my sketchpad and bit the cover off my pen.

  “You forgot your coffee,” Diddit said.

  Still on my feet, I scrawled out my jumbled thoughts.

  COFFEE / SLOW CREAM / FAST SUGAR

  The coffee is in control.

  I crossed it out and wrote a different combination.

  COFFEE / SLOW X / FAST Y

  Diddit glided over and placed my mug on the table. The creamer had given up its mission to spread. The coffee was in control.

  What the hell is the coffee?

  Energy?

  MATTER VS. ENERGY

  The vision of botanists in red and black lingerie falling on a wild Roy Radio played back in my mind.

  I shook my head, crossed the words out, and changed them to—

  INFORMATION VS. NOISE

  The girls are in control. I paused at the thought and stared at my sketchpad, blinked a few times, and wrote down, tentatively—

  REDS VS. BLACKS

  Whatever that meant.

  I stood there with pen poised to write down my next guess. Spanning from the top of the page to the bottom, I drew one huge question mark. I chucked the pen and stared at my sketchpad.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “New Orleans Saints versus Indianapolis Colts,” Diddit said, rolling past the television.

  I glanced at the screen just in time to catch a player doing a victory dance on the turf. The huddle of huge digits printed on the players’ shirts jumped out at me.

  As I stared at the sea of jerseys, the cogs inside my head whirred into motion and clicked an idea into place. Focusing my eyes back on my sketchpad, I picked up my pen and added one last pairing at the bottom of the page.

  ONES VS. ZEROS

  Data.

  Each bit was either yes or no, on or off, zero or one. Flipping from one to the other.

  Why?

  I laughed at my own question. I never used to think this way. Never asked why the universe had constants, why equations had givens, or how the universal laws made things more or less predictable.

  But after everything that had happened, I found myself staring at a giant question mark.

  How did each bit know if it was meant to be a one or a zero? Electron or proton? Living or dead?

  “Hut, hut, hut!”

  The quarterback’s audible barely made its way to me from the television set. Who’s telling both the reds and the blacks how to play the game?

  I smiled, knowing what Torula would guess my answer to be. My god: Mathematics. My blackboard in the sky.

  Everything computes. Whatever the universe did could be translated into equations. Or was it the universe that recognized equations as commands? Just like . . .

  E=mc2

  So what did this equation hint at that people could mistake for god, and why?

  I sank into my chair.

  Energy and Matter controlled by . . .

  A third element?

  I sat up. It sounded like the perfect answer to a Deltoton riddle.

  E=mc2 relied on strict rules. Something told light to stick to its speed limit and made sure energy and mass regulated themselves by its square.

  The equation worked because the cosmos always cooperated.

  So what was the univer
se’s unnamed capacity to record, recognize, and repeat what worked? What allowed it to remember without a brain—and how did it resist anything and everything that went against its laws?

  I needed someone to bounce ideas around with. What better person to ask than the lunatic in my dream hollering Einstein’s equation at the top of his lungs?

  Despite the hour, I dialed Roy’s number, and the guy picked up even before the first ring ended.

  “Huh? Whuh—? Who? What?” Roy sounded exactly like a guilty man who’d fallen asleep on the job.

  “Sorry for waking you, mate. I thought you were still working at the Manor.”

  “I was. I am! What the hell? You checkin’ if we’ll make it by tomorrow? If I said we would, then we will.”

  “Actually, no. I was calling about something else. It’s about . . .” Bugger. I’m not going to make any sense. “. . . electrical resistance.”

  “In my setup?”

  “No, in general. It’s quantified in ohms, right?”

  “Yeah. So?” Roy asked.

  “What’s it quantifying?”

  “Resistance. And impedance.”

  “Yeah, but what’s it made of?”

  “Hell, I dunno. But if we can get this comm system with the afterlife to work, you can ask the ghost o’ Georg Ohm himself. He’s the one who thought o’ measuring it so he could make sense o’ his equations.”

  “So . . . what was he trying to measure?” Anything resembling some scientists in lingerie?

  “Say what?”

  I got up and paced. “What did Georg Ohm see in his equations that he needed to create a measurement for? I need the name of a force. An element. A principle or property that—”

  “Phew! It’s just like friction, man. It’s the force that resists motion. What’re you gonna ask me now? What’s friction made of?”

  “I’m tempted to.”

  “Shit. You know what, if this is for that deadline o’ yours for NASA, it’s not part o’ what I’m bein’ paid for. So what’s this all about?”

  I brushed a hand through my disheveled head. “It’s really nothing, mate. Either I’ve had too much coffee, or I need more of it. Sorry for bugging you.”