Solaris Rising 1.5

by Ian Whates

  “You have got,” I said, “to be kidding me.”

  “I’ve been remonstrating with him all morning,” said Sleight. “He won’t tell me why’s he going, the Gallic galoomph. He’s as talkative as that feller in The Artist.”

  “You spoke to your friend Tessimond,” I said, panting a little from the exertion of having walked along the corridor to this office.

  “That’s right, he did. Is that what Noo-noo did?” Sleight asked.

  I nodded. I asked Prévert directly: “What did he say to you?”

  “It’s no good asking, boss,” Sleight told me. “I’ve been bending his ear an hour, he won’t cough up. Whatever it was Tessimond said, it can’t have taken more than ten minutes.”

  “The time-period was approximately that,” Prévert confirmed. He slid his right arm into the vacant tube of his coat-sleeve, thereby confirming that he was indeed putting the garment on and not taking it off.

  “Friend of yours?”

  “Tessimond?” replied Prévert, smoothly. “Yes. He used to be, many years ago. I was surprised to see him. I suggested we have breakfast—Sleight too, although he turned up late. As he always does.”

  “I was quarter of an hour late,” said Sleight. “Only that! Fifteen miniature minutes! That’s all! And that was long enough for the Tessimond geezer to persuade Jack to leave the project.”

  “He did not persuade me to leave. He made no reference to my being on the team, or collecting the Nobel Prize, or anything like that. He simply pointed out something—something rather obvious. Something I am ashamed I did not notice before.”

  “And this something overturns years of work, convinces you that you shouldn’t collect a Nobel prize?” I demanded, growing heated.

  Prévert shrugged. Then he spoke, addressing us both at once: “There is a woman who lives in Montpellier, called Suzanne. I am going to visit her.”

  “You’re crazy. Is it the citation? We’re not taking your name—listen, you Frenchman, your name will still be on the citation!” Sleight’s voice had a raspy, edge-of-hysteria quality. “We’re not taking your name off the citation.”

  “I have no preference one way or the other,” Prévert replied. “You must do as you please.”

  “Wait a sec’, Jack,” I said. “Please hold the horses that are yours.” Because he was eyeing the door, now, and I could see he was about to scarper. “Just tell us what he said to you.”

  “You may ask him yourself. He’s staying in the Holiday Inn. Sleight has his number.”

  “No, Jack, don’t—look, look, Jack, I’ve known you ten years. Jack, you’re my friend, for the love of the holy roller.” I put my hands together, a Namaste gesture. “Don’t play games with me, Jack. I’m asking you, as a friend. Tell me what is going on.”

  “What is going,” said Prévert, “is me. Goodbye.” He was always a little too proud of his little Anglophone word-games.

  “What did Tessimond tell you?”

  Prévert stopped at the door, looked not at me but at my bump, and said: “He only pointed out what is right in front of us. Us, in particular—you, Sleight, me. It should be more obvious to us than to anybody! Although it should be obvious to anyone who gives it more than a minute’s thought.”

  “Is it God?” I said. It was my parting shot. “Noo-noo’s going to Mecca. Is that what he is, this Tessimond, a preacher? Has he somehow converted you to religion and turned you into a—hell, what does it say in the Old, I mean, New Testament? About leaving your homes and families and becoming fishers of men?”

  Prévert smiled broadly enough to move his sideburns noticeably further apart from one another. “I am, Ana, you will be relieved to hear—I am precisely as atheistical as I have always been. There is no God. But there is a woman called Suzanne, and she lives in Montpellier.” And he walked out.

  I sat staring at Sleight, as if it were his fault. There was silence for the space of a minute.

  “So,” I said. “Are you pissing off too? Is my entire team deserting me?”

  “No, boss!” he said, looking genuinely hurt that I would say such a thing. “Never! Loyalty means something to me, at any rate. That and the fact that—you know. I fancy getting the Nobel prize.”

  “Is it a joke? Are Jack and Niu Jian in cahoots?”

  “In what?”

  “Cahoots. I mean, are they conspiring together to trick us, or something? An elaborate April fool?”

  “I know what cahoots means,” said Sleight. “I just didn’t quite hear you.” He sat back and began looking around Prévert’s office, as if the answer might lie there. “It’s not April,” he observed.

  “Cold feet,” he said. “You know, I think they’re genuine, both of them, about leaving. Crazy though that sounds. I mean, I don’t think it’s a joke, boss. Who would joke about a thing like this? Do you think maybe the timing is the key—we’re so close to announcing? Maybe they’ve got cold feet.”

  “I could believe that of Niu Jian, but not Prévert,” I said. “He’s a million times too calm-’n’-controlled to get cold feet. And actually do you know what, now that I think of it, I couldn’t believe it of Noo-noo either.”

  “Then what, boss? Why would they both drop out—today?”

  “Ring up this Tessimond guy,” I instructed him. “Jack said you have his number. So call him, find out what he said. Better yet, tell him to unsay it. Tell him to get in touch with both of my boys and persuade them to come back. What does he think he’s playing at, anyway? Disassembling my team on the brink of our big announcement?”

  Sleight got out his phone, held it in his hand for a bit, and then balanced it on his head. It wasn’t an unusual thing for him to balance a mobile phone on his head. The peculiar shape of his bald cranium was such that above his twin-block eyebrows there was a sort of semi-indentation, a thirty-degree slope in amongst the phrenological landscape, and it so happened than an iPhone fitted snugly there. Sleight had started resting his device there for a joke, long ago; but by now he had done it so often that it had become an unremarkable gesture. “Maybe it would make sense for you to speak to him, boss?”

  “Scared?”

  “No!” he said, with a quickness and emphasis that strongly implied yes. “Only, you are the team leader.”

  I put my head to one side.

  “And I once read a story,” he added.

  “Science fiction story?”

  “Of course.” As if there were any other kind of story, for Sleight! “It was about a thing called a blit. You ever heard of a blit?”

  “If this is going to be a porn reference, I swear I’ll have you disciplined for sexual harassment.”

  “No, no! It’s science and its fiction, in one handy bundle. A blit is a thing, and once you’ve seen it—once it’s gone in your eyes—it starts to occupy your mind. You can’t stop thinking about it, and it expands fractally until it takes up all your thoughts and you go mad.”

  “And?”

  “And—what if this Tessimond is going to say something like a verbal blit?”

  I hid my face in my hands. There was a tussle between the laugh-aloud angel sitting on my right shoulder, and the burst-into-tears devil sitting on my left. I took control of myself. Pregnancy hormones have real, chemical effects upon even the strongest willpower. I rested my hands on my tummy. “Please never again say the phrase verbal blit in my hearing, Sleight. Call Tessimond.”

  Sleight, sheepishly, called. It was only a short time before he was saying, “Oh, hello, is that Mr Tessimond? Hello. Oh, Sleight, my name, and Stephane Prévert gave me your number.” Then a long pause, and Sleight’s eyes tracked left-to-right and right-to-left, and I felt a mild panic, as if he were indeed being hypnotised by this stranger. But then he said. “Anwyay, my team-leader, Professor Radonjić, is here, and she was wondering if she could—sure, sure.” Silence, an intense expression on Sleight’s face. Then: “Both of them have left the team, somewhat, eh, ah, somewhat abruptly you know. And they both spoke with you about the
—yes, yes.” Nodding. Why do people nod when they’re talking on the phone? It’s not as if their interlocutor can see them. “I see. I understand. We were just wondering what...”

  “Let me speak to him,” I said, holding out my hand. Sleight passed the phone straight over. “Hello, Mr Tessimond? This is Ana Radonjić.”

  “May I call you Ana?” Tessimond asked. He had a pleasant, low-slung voice; a mid-west American accent, a slight buzz in the consonants that suggested he might be a smoker. I was a little taken aback by it. “Alright. And what should I call you?”

  He hummed; a little, musical burr. “My name is Tessimond,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to speak to you, Ana. I’ve immense respect for what you’ve been doing.”

  “What do you know about what I’ve been doing?” I daresay I sounded slightly more aggressively paranoid than I intended.

  “I was Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics at CUNY for a while,” he said. “Years ago—before your time. I left the post decades ago.”

  “You were at CUNY? Why have I not heard of you?”

  “I didn’t publish,” he replied. “What’s the point?”

  This piqued me, so I rattled off: “The point is that we have made a breakthrough with regard to dark energy, and I don’t think any physicists have ever been more sure of getting a Nobel citation, and two key members of my team have, this morning, walked away. That is the point.”

  “There seem to be several points, there, Ana,” he said, mildly. But his slow delivery only infuriated me further.

  “I don’t know what games you are playing,” I snapped. “This is serious. I don’t know what kind of hippy-dippy drop-out crap you’ve been injecting into the brains of my team. I only know you have to stop it. You have to undo the damage you’ve done. This is my career as a serious scientist, and it is the Nobel prize—not the, er, pigeon-fancier’s red rosette.” My gaze was through the window. A pigeon had arrived on the outside ledge of Prevért’s office windowsill, in a flurry of wings that sounded like a deck of cards being shuffled. Then it folded away its wings and hid them in its back, and then it stood looking, insolently, through the glass at us. It distracted me only momentarily. “This is the culmination of everything we have been working for.”

  “I was talking to Stephane about your research,” he said. “Your research does sound fascinating.”

  “Oh? You were talking to St—the same Stephane who has gone to catch a flight to Montpellier!” I snapped. “Perhaps you’ll enlighten me: why did he quit?”

  Tessimond released a small sigh at the other end of the phone line. “I’m afraid I’ve no idea, Ana.”

  “You said something to him, and it made him walk away from everything he has been working towards for years.”

  There was a silence. Then: “That wasn’t my intention, Ana.”

  “No? Well, that’s the mess you’ve made. Perhaps you’d like to help me clear it up?”

  “I very much doubt,” he said, sadly, “if there’s anything I can do.” Then he said: “The rate of expansion of the cosmos is accelerating.”

  “I—” I said. “Yes it is.”

  “That’s been known for a while. You’re going to announce that you know why this is happening?”

  “Professor Tessimond—” I said, but I couldn’t think of a way to finish the sentence.

  “Dark energy,” he said. Then: “Would you like to have lunch?”

  I bridled at this. Blame the hormones, I suppose. “I’m afraid I’m going to be far too busy today clearing up the mess you have made to be able to take time out for lunch!” For all the world as if he were listening in on my conversation, and objecting to the notion of skipping a meal, P-O-R chose that moment to stretch and squeeze my stomach painfully against my ribs. I grimaced, but kept going. “I’m going to have to explain to the university management why two key members of my team have jumped ship mere weeks before we go public with our research.”

  “Dinner, then,” he said. “Or drinks. With Dr Sleight too, of course. And bring along your senior managers, if you like. I really didn’t intend to cause any upheavals. I’d be very glad to explain myself.”

  “I might be able to find a window tomorrow,” I said. “You’re staying locally? There’s a bar. It’s called Bar Bar, for some peculiar reason. We call it the Elephant. Would it be agreeable for you to meet there tomorrow lunchtime?”

  After I’d hung up and given Sleight his phone back, I told him what had been arranged. “Why not meet him right now?” Sleight pressed.

  “I intend to spend today coaxing Niu Jian and Jack to come back to us. I don’t know what he told them, but I want to be able to present him with a unified front. Tomorrow, Sleight. Tomorrow.”

  :3:

  THE UNIVERSE HAS been expanding since the Big Bang. It is not that there was a vast empty space, into which the Big Bang burst, like a massive cave with a firecracker dangled in the middle of it. No: the Big Bang was the origin of spacetime, as well as of matter. We can calculate how forceful (long story short: very) the Big Bang must have been in order to propel so much matter and spacetime apart, and we can calculate how much mass there is in the cosmos. We used to think the gravity of the latter—a lot of gravity, aggregated from a lorra-lorra matter—would eventually slow the expansion, reverse it and bring everything back into a big crunch. Then we thought that the gravity would slow the expansion but not enough to reverse it, and all the galaxies would sail further and further apart forever, cooling to blackness. But now we know that, somehow, seemingly in contravention of the laws of physics, the rate of cosmic expansion is increasing. This was the problem upon which my team worked.

  I spent the morning haranguing both Niu Jian and Jack over the phone. Jack was a brick wall, and then he was on a flight and the signal vanished, so I didn’t get very far with him. I had longer to try and bend Niu Jian’s ear, but he was equally stubborn. No, he didn’t want to come back. Yes, he was going to Mecca. None of my threats had any purchase. I offered him financial inducements, I warned him his reputation as a serious scientist was on the line, I even said I was going to call his mother. Eventually I had to grasp the nettle and ring senior management. They were incredulous, at first; and then they were angry; and finally they were baffled.

  I’m not surprised. I was baffled myself.

  I went home that evening and lay on the sofa whilst M. cooked me linguini. I spooled the whole crazy narrative out to him, and he did his characteristically excellent supporting-pillar impression. It felt better having ranted about it for a while, and the linguini was washed down with a small glass of chianti, which I feel sure P-O-R enjoyed as much as I did, and the whole idiotic nonsense receded in my mind. So what if the two berks weren’t present at the press conference? I’d get senior management in. I’d have Sleight beside me. I could do it solus, if need be. That, I told myself, might even be preferable.

  M. and I watched an episode of Mad Men together. Then Sleight called me. “Boss? I’m in the Elephant.”

  “Sleight, I appreciate you not abandoning ship like Jack and Niu Jian,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean I require you to keep me informed of your every change of venue. I’ll get you electronically tagged if I want that.”

  “You don’t understand, boss. I’m here with Tessimond.” He sounded excited, like an undercover cop. “He’s at the bar. Getting a half for himself and a pint for me.”

  “Well,” I said. “Don’t let me keep you from your revels.”

  “I’m going to find out what he told Niu Jian and Jack,” said Sleight, whispering. “Will report back. I know you’re meeting him tomorrow, but I couldn’t wait! Curious! Too curious—that’s the problem with being a scientist, I guess.”

  “Sleight...” I started, in my weariest voice.

  “I will report back,” he hissed. And hung up.

  M. rubbed my feet, whilst I ate a chocolate mousse straight from the plastic pot. Then I pulled myself slowly upstairs to face the major trial of my pregnancy. I’m
talking about brushing my teeth. Keeping my teeth clean whilst pregnant: a nightmare. The mere thought of it made me want to vomit; actually performing the action was gag-provoking, intensely uncomfortable and unpleasant. But I didn’t want to just stop brushing my teeth altogether, for that would be an admission of defeat—and quite apart from anything else, the teeth themselves were sitting looser in their sockets than before, and so clearly needed more, not less hygienic attention. But the nightly brush had become my least favourite part of the day. I had just completed this disagreeable exercise, and was accordingly in no good mood, when Sleight rang back.

  “Sleight—what?” I was in super-cross, clipped voice mode. “Seriously: what?”

  “I said I would ring back,” he returned. “And so I have.” But his tone of voice had changed. Something was wrong.

  “What is it?”

  “Tessimond explained things. It really is desperately obvious, when you come to think of it. I’m really a bit ashamed of myself for not seeing it earlier.”

  “Sleight, you’re spooking me out, Sleight. Don’t tell me you’re following Niu Jian and Jack and dropping out?”

  There was a long pause, in which I could faintly hear the background noises from The Elephant; the murmur of conversation, the clink of glasses. “Yes,” he said eventually.

  “No,” I said.

  “I going to start smoking,” said Sleight.

  “If I have to listen to another non-sequitur I am going to scream,” I told him.

  “I used to love smoking,” Sleight explained. He didn’t sound very drunk, but there was a sway to his intonation that did not inspire confidence. “But I gave it up. You know, for health. It’s not good for your health. I didn’t want to get heart disease or canny, or canny, or cancer.” There was another long pause. “I’m sorry boss, I hate to let you down.”

  “Sleight,” I snapped at him. “What did he say to you?”

  He rang off. I was furious. I would have called Tessimond direct, but I didn’t have his number; and although I called Sleight back, and texted him, and @’d him on Twitter, he did not reply to me. It took M. a very long time to calm me down. In the end he assured me that Sleight was a combination of drunk and idiot, the precise ratio of those two terms to be decided at a later stage, and that when he woke sober the following day he would see how foolish he’d been and come crawling back to me.