by Neil Clarke
Rob was dubious, then grew uncharacteristically cross when he learned that the publicity meme had already been released. To him, and despite the fact that I thought he’d been reading this kind of thing for years, the story was just another urban legend and would further alienate the scientific establishment when he desperately needed their help. In effect, what he had to obtain was time and bandwidth from every available gravitational observatory, both here on Earth and up in orbit, during a crucial observational window, and time was already short.
It was as the final hours ticked down in a fervid air of stop-go technical problems, last minute doubts, and sudden demands for more money, that I finally took the sub-orbital from Seoul to Frankfurt, then the skytrain on to Glasgow, and some thrumming, windy thing of string and carbon fiber along the Scottish west coast, and across the shining Minch. The craft landed in Stornoway harbor in the Isle of Lewis—the northern part of the long land-mass of which Harris forms the south—where I was rowed ashore, and eventually found a bubblebus to take me across purple moorland and past scattered white bungalows, then up amid ancient peaks.
Rob stood waiting on the far side of the road at the final stop, and we were both shivering as we hugged in the cold spring sunlight. But I was here, and so was he, and he’d done a great job at keeping back the rest of the world, and even I wouldn’t have had it any other way. It seemed as if most of the niggles and issues had finally been sorted. Even if a few of his planned sources had pulled out, he’d still have all the data he needed. Come tomorrow, Rob Holm would either be a prophet or a pariah.
7.
He still slept in the same narrow bed he’d had as a child in the rusty-roofed cottage down by the shore at Creagach, while his parents’ bedroom was now filled with expensive processing and monitoring equipment, along with a high-band, multiple-redundancy satellite feed. Downstairs, there was a parlor where Rob kept his small book collection in an alcove by the fire—I was surprised to see that it was almost entirely poetry; a scatter of Larkin, Eliot, Frost, Dickinson, Pope, Yeats, and Donne, beside a few lingering Asimovs, Le Guins, and Clarkes—with a low tartan divan where he sat to read these works. Which, I supposed, might also serve as a second bed, although he hadn’t yet made it up.
He took me out on his launch. Showed me his scallop beds and the glorious views of this ragged land with its impossibly wide and empty beaches. And there, just around the headland, was the stretch of bay where both Rob’s parents had been found, and I could almost hear the Blue Men of the Minch calling to us over the sigh of the sea. There were standing stones on the horizon, and an old whaling station at the head of a loch, and a hill topped by a medieval church filled with the bodies of the chieftains who had given these islands such a savage reputation though their bloody feuds. And meanwhile, the vast cosmic shudder of the collision of two black holes was traveling toward us at lightspeed.
There were scallops, of course, for dinner. Mixed in with some fried dab and chopped mushroom, bacon and a few leaves of wild garlic, all washed down with malt whisky, and with whey-buttered soda bread on the side, which was the Highland way. Then, up in the humming shrine of his parents’ old bedroom, Rob checked on the status of his precious sources again.
The black hole binaries had been spiraling toward each other for tens of thousands of years, and observed here on Earth for decades. In many ways, and despite their supposed mystery, black holes were apparently simple objects—nothing but sheer mass—and even though their collision was so far off it had actually happened when we humans were still learning how to use tools, it was possible to predict within hours, if not minutes, when the effects of this event would finally reach Earth.
There were gravitational observatories, vast-array laser interferometers, in deep space, and underground in terrestrial sites, all waiting to record this moment, and Rob was tapping into them. All everyone else expected to see—in fact, all the various institutes and faculties had tuned their devices to look for—was this . . . Leaning over me, Rob called up a display to show a sharp spike, a huge peak in the data, as the black holes swallowed each other and the shock of their collision flooded out in the asymmetrical pulse of a gravitational wave.
“But this isn’t what I want, Lita. Incredibly faint though that signal is—a mere ripple deep in the fabric of the cosmos—I’m looking to combine and filter all those results, and find something even fainter.
“This . . . ” He dragged up another screen, “is what I expect to see.” There was the same central peak, but this time it was surrounded by a fan of smaller, ever-decreasing, ripples eerily reminiscent of the display Rob had once shown me of the ghost-flicker of those photons all those years ago in Leeds. “These are echoes of the black hole collision in other universes.”
I reached out to touch the floating screen. Felt the incredible presence of the dark matter of other worlds.
“And all of this will happen tonight?”
He smiled.
8.
There was nothing else left to be done—the observatories Rob was tapping into were all remote, independent, autonomous devices—so we took out chairs into the dark, and drank some more whisky, and collected driftwood, and lit a fire on the shore.
We talked about books. Nothing new, but some shared favorites. Poe and Pasternak and Fitzgerald. And Rob confessed that he hadn’t got on anything like as well as he’d pretended with his first forays into literature. How he’d found the antique language and odd punctuation got in the way. It was even a while before he understood the obvious need for a physical bookmark. He’d have given up with the whole concept if it hadn’t been for my shining, evident faith.
“You know, it was Gulliver’s Travels that finally really turned it around for me. Swift was so clever and rude and funny and angry, yet he could also tell a great story. That bit about those Laputan astronomers studying the stars from down in their cave, and trying to harvest sunbeams from marrows. Well, that’s us right here, isn’t it?”
The fire settled. We poured ourselves some more whisky. And Rob recited a poem by Li Po about drinking with the Moon’s shadow, and then we remembered those days back in Leeds when we’d gone out onto the moors, and drank and ingested far more than was good for us, and danced like savages and, yes, there had even been that time he and I had gazed up at the stars.
We stood up now, and Rob led me away from the settling fire. The stars were so bright here, and the night sky was so black, that it felt like falling merely to look up. Over there in the west, Lita, is the Taurus Constellation. It’s where the Crab Nebula lies, the remains of a supernova the Chinese recorded back in 1054, and it’s in part of the Milky Way known as the Perseus Arm, which is where our dark binaries would soon end their fatal dance. I was leaning into him as he held his arms around me, and perhaps both of us were breathing a little faster than was entirely due to the wonders of the cosmos.
“What time is it now, Rob?”
“It’s . . . ” He checked his watch. “Just after midnight.”
“So there’s still time.”
“Time for what?”
We kissed, then crossed the shore and climbed the stairs to Rob’s single bed. It was sweet, and somewhat drunken, and quickly over. The Earth, the Universe, didn’t exactly move. But it felt far more like making love than merely having sex, and I curled up against Rob afterward, and breathed his cinnamon scent, and fell into a well of star-seeing contentment.
“Rob?”
The sky beyond the window was showing the first traces of dawn as I got up, telling myself that he’d be next door in his parents’ old room, or walking the shore as he and his avatar strove to deal with a torrent of interview requests. But I already sensed that something was wrong.
It wasn’t hard for me to pull up the right screen amid the humming machines in his parents’ room, proficient at mek as I now was. The event, the collision, had definitely occurred. The spike of its gravitational wave had been recorded by every observatory. But the next screen, the one wh
ere Rob had combined, filtered, and refined all the data, displayed no ripples, echoes, from other worlds.
I ran outside shouting Rob’s name. I checked the house feeds. I paced back and forth. I got my avatar to contact the authorities. I did all the things you do when someone you love suddenly goes missing, but a large part of me already knew it was far too late.
Helicopters chattered. Drones circled. Locals gathered. Fishermen arrived in trawlers and skiffs. Then came the bother of newsfeeds, all the publicity I could ever have wished for. But not like this.
I ended up sitting on the rocks of that bay around the headland from Creagach as the day progressed, waiting for the currents to bear Rob’s body to this place, where he could join his parents.
I’m still waiting.
9.
Few people actually remember Rob Holm these days, and if they do, it’s as that good-looking guy who used to present those slightly weird nature—or was it science?—feeds, and didn’t he die in some odd, sad kind of way? But I still remember him, and I still miss him, and I still often wonder what really happened on that night when he left the bed we briefly shared. The explanation given by the authorities, that he’d seen his theory dashed and then walked out into the freezing waters of the Minch, still isn’t something I can bring myself to accept. So maybe he really was like the Visitor from Taured and simply vanished from a universe that couldn’t support what he believed.
I read few novels or short stories now. The plots, the pages, seem over-involved. Murals rather than elegant miniatures. Rough-hewn rocks instead of jewels. But the funny thing is that, as my interest in them has dwindled, books have become popular again. There are new publishers, even new writers, and you’ll find pop-up bookstores in every city. Thousands now flock to my library in Seoul every year, and I upset the conservators by allowing them to take my precious volumes down from their shelves. After all, isn’t that exactly what books are for? But I rarely go there myself. In fact, I hardly ever leave the Isle of Harris, or even Creagach, which Rob, with typical consideration and foresight, left me in his will. I do my best to keep the scallop farm going, pottering about in the launch and trying to keep the crabs and the starfish at bay, although the business barely turns a profit, and probably never did.
What I do keep returning to is Rob’s small collection of poetry. I have lingered with Eliot’s Prufrock amid the chains of the sea, wondered with Hardy what might have happened if he and that woman had sheltered from the rain a minute more, and watched as Sylvia Plath’s children burst those final balloons. I just wish that Rob was here to share these precious words and moments with me. But all that’s left is you and I, dear, faithful reader, and the Blue Men of the Minch calling to the waves.
Rich Larson was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in Spain, and now writes from Ottawa, Canada. His short work has been featured on io9, translated into Polish and Italian, and appears in numerous Year’s Best anthologies as well as in magazines such as Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Apex. He was the most prolific author of short science fiction in 2015 and 2016.
EXTRACTION REQUEST
Rich Larson
When they finally shift the transport’s still-smoldering wing enough to drag Beasley out from where he was pinioned, for a moment all Elliot can do, all anyone can do, is stare. Beasley’s wiry arm with its bioluminescent tattoos is near sheared from its socket, and below his hips he’s nothing but pulped meat and splinters of bone.
He’s still alive, still mumbling, maybe about the woman Elliot saw in a little holo with her arms thrown around his neck, back before Beasley’s dread-locked mane was shaved off and a conscript clamp was implanted at the top of his spine.
“His impact kit never triggered,” someone says, as if that’s not fucking obvious, as if he could have been ragdolled out of the transport otherwise.
“Is the autosurgeon trashed?” someone else, maybe Tolliver, says. Elliot’s ears are still ringing from the crash and his head swimming from what he was doing before it and all the voices seem to blend. He knows, dimly, that he should be giving orders by now.
“An autosurgeon can’t do shit for him. What’s it going to do, cauterize him at the waist?”
“Get him some paineaters at least. Numb him up.”
“Shock’s done that already.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I fucking hope that.”
Beasley is still trying to talk, but it’s all a choking wet burble from the blood in his mouth. The nudge, though, comes through. It slides into the corner of Elliot’s optic implant, blinking poisonous yellow. A little ripple goes through the rest of the squad, which means they got it, too. A couple of them reflexively clap their hands to the backs of their necks, where the caked scar tissue is still fresh enough to itch.
Elliot realizes that down here in the bog, cut off from command, the clamp at the top of Beasley’s spine no longer needs official permission to trigger its nanobomb. All it needs is consensus.
“I’d want it done for me,” Tolliver says, wiping a glisten of sweat off his face. His upvote floats into the digital queue. He chews at his lip, shoots Elliot a look that Elliot carefully ignores.
“Yeah,” Santos from the lunar colony says, which is as much as she’s ever said. “Trigger him.” Another upvote appears, then another, then three more in a cascade. Elliot sees that he has a veto option—something they didn’t tell him when they stuck him as squad leader. He looks into Beasley’s glazed eyes and completes the consensus, floating his vote to the queue.
The nanobomb goes off, punching a precise hole through the brainstem and cutting every string at once. Beasley slumps.
Apart from that, injuries are minimal. Everyone else’s kits went off properly, as evidenced by the gritty orange impact gel still slathering their uniforms. Elliot picks it off himself in clumps while he surveys damage to the R12 Heron transport settling in its crater at the end of a steaming furrow of crushed flora and shed metal. The anti-air smartmine shredded their primary rotor when it detonated, and the crash itself did the rest of the work. The Heron’s not going to fly again.
“Should get them fuel cells out of her,” says Snell, who is scarecrow skinny with a mouth full of metal, and dark enough so his shaved scalp seems to gleam blue-black. “In case there’s leakage.” Aside from Beasley, who’s being wrestled into a body bag, Snell is the only one who knows flyers worth a damn. They conscripted him for smuggling human cargo on a sub-orbital.
“You do that,” Elliot says, when he realizes Snell is waiting for go-ahead. “Get one of the Prentii to help. They’re digging.”
“You mean one of the twins?” Snell asks, with a grin that makes his metallic teeth gnash and scrape. Elliot did mean the twins, Privates Prentiss and Prentiss. The nickname slipped out, something Tolliver calls them the same way he calls Snell “The Smell” and Mirotic “Miroglitch.” If he has one for Elliot, too, he doesn’t use it when they’re together.
“Yeah,” Elliot says. “Get one of the twins.”
Snell pulls on a diagnostic glove and clambers into the Heron carcass; Elliot turns to check on the perimeter. If they hadn’t gone down over swampland, where the rubbery blue-purple ferns and dense-packed sponge trees provided a cushion, the crash might have been a lot worse. Their impact cleared a swathe on one side of the transport. On the other, Mirotic is calibrating the cyclops.
Elliot watches the red-lit sensory bulb strain on its spindly neck and spin in a slow circle. “What’s it see?” he asks.
Mirotic is tapped in, with his optic implant glowing the same red as the surveillance unit. “Nothing hot and moving but us. Bog gets denser to the east and south. Lots of those sponge trees, lots of subterranean fungi. No radio communications. Could be more anti-air mines sitting masked, though.”
His English is airtight, but still carries a Serbian lilt. Before they clamped him, he was upper-level enforcement in a Neo-European crime
block on Kettleburn. He once personally executed three men and two women in an abandoned granary and had their corpses put through a thresher. Only Elliot has access to that back-record. To everyone else, Mirotic is a jovial giant with a bristly black beard and high-grade neural plugs.
Prentiss, Jan, trundles past, having received Snell’s nudge for a hand with the fuel cells. He wipes wet dirt off on his tree-trunk thighs. Both he and his sister are nearly tall as Mirotic, and both are broader.
“Soil’s no good for graves,” Prentiss rumbles over his shoulder. “He’s going to get churned up again. Watch.”
“How many drones came out intact?” Elliot asks Mirotic, trying to sound sharp, trying not to imagine Beasley’s body heaved back to the surface.
“Two,” Mirotic says. “I can fix a third, maybe.”
“Send one up,” Elliot says, scratching his arm. “Get a proper map going.”
Mirotic hesitates. “If I send up a drone, we might trigger another smart-mine.”
Elliot hadn’t thought of that. He hasn’t thought of a lot of things, but rescinding the order would make him look off, make him look shook, maybe even remind Mirotic of the night he saw him with the syringe.
“That’s why you keep it low,” Elliot says. “Scrape the tree line, no higher. And keep it brief.”
Mirotic takes a battered drone from its casing and unfolds it in his lap, sitting cross-legged on the damp earth. As it rises into the air, whirring and buzzing, his eyes turn bright sensory blue.
“It’s strange there’s no animal life,” Mirotic says. “Nothing motile on the sensor but insects. Could be a disease came through. Bioweapon, even. Seen it in the woods around New Warsaw, dead and empty just like this.” He rests his thick hands on his knees. “We could have everyone jack up their immunity boosters.”
Elliot takes the hint and sends a widecast order to dial up immunity and use filtration, at least for the time being. Then he goes to where Tolliver and Santos are vacuum-sealing Beasley’s body bag, the filmy material wrapping him tight like a shroud. Tolliver looks up at his approach, flicking dark lashes. He has smooth brown skin and sly smiles and a plastic-capped flay a skin artist did for him on leave that shows off the muscle and tendon of his arm in a graceful gash. Elliot has felt it under his fingertips, cool and hard. He knows Tolliver is fucking at least one other squadmate, but he doesn’t think it’s Santos.