by Jon Steele
EIGHT
i
Harper finished with Professor Peabody in the basement of Blue Brain HQ and came up for air. Standing under the palm tree in the atrium again, he didn’t know what to do next. He dug out the letter from the concierge to double-check he’d done all that was required of him.
“Sorted. Now what?”
He stuffed the letter back into the pocket of his mackintosh. He leaned to the side of the palm tree and saw Puur Innovation Café across the atrium. He checked his watch: 17:05.
“Happy hour it is.”
The joint was well packed. Harper cruised the buffet, grabbed a Gruyère and lettuce in a baguette. He cruised the wine bar, spotted a cinq of Swiss white among the bottles. A cinq held five glasses; a little more than a French half bottle, a little less than a full one. The Swiss were very sensible people, Harper thought. They always managed to provide him with solutions to complicated problems, like what to do next. When in doubt, grab a cinq. He found an empty table in the corner and sat down. Five seconds later the locals in the place forgot he was there.
Sipping through glass number one, he wondered if he should call Inspector Gobet and report in. Seemed the thing to be done; if nothing else, to prove he had completed his to-do list and was awaiting further orders. A thought fell into Harper’s head: In the years since he was awakened for the cathedral job . . . I’ve never called the cop; he calls me. He pulled his cell phone from his coat. I don’t even know his bloody number. Or mine.
He dropped the phone into his pocket and scanned the locals in the café. Professors, researchers, grad students working on PhDs. He wondered if one of them was working for Inspector Gobet. Someone planted in the crowd to point him in the general direction of what to do next. Had to be. There always was someone or something to guide him on. Two days ago, chasing Astruc and Goose across the south of France, Harper landed in Montségur. He arrived in the middle of the night with the same question: Now what? Then appeared a Great Pyrenees dog named Shiva. The huge slobbering animal took Harper for a walk through a forest, ending up at the Field of the Burned, where the last of the Cathars were slaughtered in 1244. The dog at the lead, sniffing along the path, pointing to clues that brought Harper to this very moment in space and time—sitting in a café with a cinq of Swiss white after having his brain stretched from here to the edge of the observable universe. An amusing moment it was. Harper raised his glass and offered a toast to the noble mutt.
“Good dog.”
As he sipped, another thought fell into his head. How the hell did we superior creatures of light survive two and a half million years in paradise while spending great swathes of time not knowing what to do next? Answer: If we’re being led around by the hands of locals, or the paws of dogs, maybe we’re not all that superior.
He finished his glass, poured number two, and took a healthy swig. He was thinking the wine had a pleasant grassy taste with a touch of effervescence when bursts of blue light raced through his eyes. Harper looked at his glass. The wine had been juiced, as if someone knew he would grab that particular bottle, someone who wished to help Harper focus his mind. He glanced at the wine bar. Bottles, bottles everywhere. Full bottles and half bottles . . . and you picked the only cinq on offer, boyo.
“Of course I did.”
He sipped the wine again, watched the bursts of blue light in his eyes. Each burst uploaded a point of information to augment his briefing on Blue Brain. Item: Lines of causality were constantly intersecting in paradise, like woof threads crossing warp threads at right angles once and again, once and again, weaving together the stuff of life on Earth. Item: Somewhere in the weave, one thread was deliberately introduced by Harper’s kind. They had been sent from somewhere two and a half million years ago, bearing the first fire of creation. No idea of who had sent them or why. Orders were orders. They waited tens of thousands of years atop the volcanic pluton at Montségur. One day, they saw a tribe of Homo ergaster humanoids emerge from the forest and settle on the plain far below. That’s when it happened: Some of Harper’s kind came down from the pluton and revealed the first fire of creation to the humanoids. Item: Soon after, those same humanoids mastered fire, made tools, observed the stars. Then the humanoids began to imagine questions: Who made this place? What is this place? Why does this place exist?
The bursts of blue light faded, leaving ghostly contrails in Harper’s eyes. As his vision returned the contrails floated through the room, touching this local and that one, then every local in the café. Item: These were the descendants of those Homo ergaster humanoids, burning off steam after a hard day’s work. Rather amusing that, too, Harper thought. Homo ergaster was Latin for working man. More amusing was the objective of their day’s work. And not just this crowd; people like them all around the world—scientists, artists, philosophers. They all thought they were seeking answers to who?, what?, and why? What they were also doing was seeking the source of a spark of light the locals called a soul. They didn’t realize that’s what they were doing, but it was the truth nonetheless. Item: The soul had been implanted into the forms of their extinct ancestors by Harper’s kind. Item: A couple million years later, their descendants in nowtimes were at the point of “knowing all things.” Or so said Professor Peabody in the basement of Blue Brain HQ. Harper flashed the small man in the white coat, chattering away with more info.
“Simply put, sir, the photograph you are looking at now represents the ability of the descendants of Homo ergaster humanoids to imagine—”
Hang on, Professor.
Harper’s sense of time and space was out of sync. He stopped his timeline, drained glass number two, and poured number three. Between the bursts of blue light in his eyes and the trips between nowtimes and beforetimes, all while speeding through the universe at whatever megaparsecs it was per second, Harper felt the need for more of the whatever-it-was in the wine. He drank deep and settled . . . That’s better, boyo. He backed up his timeline and let the beforetimes roll.
Wham.
Back in the basement of Blue Brain HQ, the Stone Age computer on the desk still spilling triangulations of the Earth’s exact position in the universe. Professor Peabody lays a second photograph before Harper. Harper pulls his eyes from the triangulations, sees two funnels of luminous clouds rising in darkening sky and four brilliant stars hanging between the clouds.
“What’s this?”
“The gas pillars of the Eagle nebula in the constellation Serpens. This particular formation is known as the Pillars of Creation.”
Harper looked closer at the photo. Clouds of cosmic dust, hydrogen, helium, plasma.
“Taken by Voyager 1?”
“No, sir. It was from the Hubble Space Telescope launched in 1990 and still in service. The photograph was taken five years later.”
“Another one of Inspector Gobet’s toys, is it?”
“In fact, the Hubble telescope is a wholly human endeavor, and that is the point.”
“Because?”
“Simply put, sir, the photograph you are looking at now represents the ability of the descendants of Homo ergaster humanoids to imagine the mechanics of the universe and to make the necessary tools to see those imaginations, thereby pointing the entirety of the human race toward a new spatial-temporal reality.”
“Pointing. Like a Pyrenees mountain mutt?”
The small man lost his train of thought.
“I . . . I believe, sir, the Great Pyrenees is an agricultural breed used to guard flocks of sheep, whereas the pointer is a gun dog used for the flushing out of game birds and retrieving them.”
Harper realized the ability of his particular line of life-form to imagine the mechanics of a joke, and then tell it, were not up to human standards.
“My mistake.”
He looked again at the photograph of the Pillars of Creation. There were hundreds, thousands of smaller sparks of light hidden in the clouds of cosmic dust. Like wombs giving birth to stars.
“How old is this place?”
“A million and a half years old, sir.”
“And how far away from paradise?”
“Seven thousand light-years.”
The mechanics of distance were mind-boggling. Harper lost track at seven thousand light-years times 5.878625 trillion miles. Then it hit him: This photograph wasn’t about mechanics. It was about seeing the birth of stars as it happened long ago, and just now, all at the same time.
“Beforetimes. The locals are watching beforetimes.”
“Not in the same manner as your kind, sir, but in their own way, yes, that is exactly what they are doing.”
“How far back can the locals see?”
“To date Hubble has allowed humanity to see thirteen and a half billion years back in time. Another billion years back and they will see the Big Bang itself.”
Another episode from the History Channel flashed through Harper’s eyes. In the Beginning it was. Black screen; nothingness; a mighty explosion. Suddenly, all the universe is, and all it will be, exists.
“Assuming humanity knows where to look, of course,” Harper said.
“Sir?”
“My kind have been here for two and a half million years watching the same stars, and we sure as hell don’t know where to look.”
“Yes, well, human scientists imagined that problem and developed the mechanics to resolve it, too.”
“You must be joking.”
“No, sir.”
“How?”
“A radio telescope at the South Pole called BICEP2 is searching for PGWs emanating from the most dense quadrant of the universe.”
“That’s a lot of letters, professor.”
“In the first instance the letters stand for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization. PGWs are primordial gravitational waves.”
“Primordial gravitational waves,” Harper said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Professor, I’m afraid PGWs are like Voyager 1—they never made my History Channel feed.”
“Well, the universe is flat in shape, like a disc. If you imagine it to have an aqueous surface onto which a pebble is tossed, concentric circles would emanate outward from the point of impact.”
“Ripples. Echoes.”
“Precisely, sir. PGWs are the ripples and echoes of the Big Bang somewhere in the range of 10–36 to 10–32 of a second after it happened.”
The numbers popped hot. If the locals found PGWs, the locals would be within an infinitesimal fraction of a Planck unit in seeing the moment of creation.
“Rather big news then,” Harper said.
“Well, actually, sir . . .”
The really big news was a deep-space telescope nicknamed JWST that would be launched in 2018. It would travel through the solar system and park itself one and a half million miles away from paradise. It was fitted with eighteen hexagonal mirror segments forming a reflective surface nearly twenty feet in diameter. Each segment would be turned in such a way as to search the cosmic dust and target those primordial gravitational waves; the telescope would then focus its mirrors into the densest part of the observable universe. Meaning the descendants of a tribe of Homo ergaster humanoids who once gathered under the volcanic pluton at Montségur would witness the creation of the universe as it happened fourteen and a half billion bloody years ago, and in the here and now at the same time. It was quite the trick, and Harper let it sink in. In searching for secrets of the universe, the locals had found a way to travel through beforetimes. They were on a cosmic trip to the Big Bang.
“And in finding it mankind would reach the point of knowing,” the professor said.
“Knowing what?”
“All things, sir.”
Harper thought about it. Sounded swell. Too bad about the second thread woven into the stuff of life on Earth by Harper’s kind, the one where two hundred traitors of the creation took the forms of men and bred fear and greed into paradise. He looked at the triangulations of Earth’s position in the universe dripping down the screen of the Stone Age computer in front of him, info now heading into interstellar space on the back of Voyager 1. An SOS, Professor Peabody explained. No shit, Harper thought, now seeing the message buried in the triangulations. SOS: paradise heading for a mass extinction event.
“Non est ad astra mollis e terris via,” Harper said.
“Sir?”
“There is no easy way from the earth to the stars.”
ii
He blinked himself back to Puur Innovation Café.
He was staring into the bottom of an empty glass, feeling dizzy as hell. He looked up, saw the happy hour crowd still at it. He also saw he wasn’t alone at his table in the shadows. Krinkle was sitting opposite him, spinning his own empty glass by the stem.
“Hi there. Mind if I join you?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Nope.”
Harper shoved the cinq the roadie’s way. “Be forewarned, it’s juiced.”
“Yeah, they told me. I was ordered to have a glass.”
Krinkle poured out the last of the Swiss white into both glasses. He patted the bottom of the carafe to get out the final drop.
“I could get another one,” Harper said. “A real one, just to wash down the cinq.”
Krinkle sipped. “No, that’s all right,” he said. “We’re on a schedule.”
“What kind of a schedule?”
“A tight one.”
“So maybe we should drink up and get going.”
Krinkle leaned across the table. “Relax, brother. Just because the schedule is tight doesn’t mean there isn’t room to move. Oh, great track. I need to get it on tonight’s broadcast.”
“Track?”
“‘Room to Move.’ John Mayall. Recorded live at Fillmore East, July 12, 1969. I did gigs there with the Dead in February of the same year.”
“Which dead?”
“The Grateful Dead. I told you before, my form was one of their roadies. He overdosed on bad smack. Anyways, Mayall left the Bluesbreakers and gave up on electric instruments for a while. He teamed up with Jon Mark and Johnny Almond. ‘Room to Move’ is an acoustic rock classic, and Mayall blows a mean harp, almost as good as Boz—I mean, Inspector Gobet. Anyway, Mark and Almond formed their own band and went into a whole jazz-rock riff. They recorded this thing called ‘The City.’ Eleven minutes, forty-nine seconds of headphone bliss, especially the last two minutes and twenty-six seconds. See, this guy is sleeping out in the woods under a redwood tree and—”
“What the bloody hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about a song. See, this guy is sleeping in the woods. And he doesn’t want to go back to the city because it’s nothing but a long taxi ride.”
“The drive back, you mean.”
“No, the city, the perception of it. It’s steel and concrete and nothing but a long taxi ride going nowhere.”
“So we’re talking philosophy.”
Krinkle gulped at his glass. He wiped a dribble of wine from his long gray beard. “Dude, I know you’ve just had your head stretched—”
“You know?”
“Yeah, I had the same briefing last week.”
“I have questions.”
“Dude! I know you have questions, but right now we’re talking about a friggin’ song.”
“Got it.”
They sipped again. Krinkle continued.
“Okay. This guy doesn’t want to go back, but he hears the taxi coming and he keeps singing I hear the taxi coming, I hear the taxi coming, and the music gets quiet and drifts, then out of the left speaker, from far away, comes this twelve-string acoustic guitar. It grows and it swells and pumps up the volume. Then from left of center comes a bongo laying down this Latin thing, then from the right speaker comes someone tapping a wood block in counter time, then way out there, from somewhere, come these rattles and zills. Then dead center of the headphones this Fender fretless bass explodes like the voice of God and it melts into your consciousness and you are held
in awe. Then you’re carried away in the taxi, heading back to the city because you have no choice. Fade out.”
Krinkle sipped, Harper scanned his eyes.
“Are you on some new tea?”
“No, but I got a booster shot for something or other in Vevey this morning, so things are a little racy at the moment. That’s why they ordered me to have a glass of this shit. Fizzy, isn’t it?”
“Wait for the bursts of light in your eyes.”
“Yeah, what color?”
“Blue.”
“Cool.”
Harper looked over the tables, studied the faces of the locals. “Do they realize how close they are to the point of knowing?”
Krinkle shrugged. “A few of them, the sensitive ones, sure. But ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of the locals don’t. Life is hard in paradise, brother. Most people are just trying to get through it one day at a time. No time to consider the big picture. What’s in the baguette?”
“Gruyère, lettuce, butter.”
“No ham?”
“No.”
“Good on you.”
A disembodied voice entered the conversation.
“You have a message.”
Krinkle fumbled in the front pouch of his overalls for his cell phone.
“You have a message.”
“Yeah, yeah. I heard you the first time.” He pulled out the phone, tapped the screen, and read through the message. He tapped at the screen, traced a few circles, typed numbers and letters. He hit send and returned the phone to the pouch.
“Where were we?” he said.
Harper sipped at his glass while talking. “It’s the same for you then? One-way phone calls, handwritten notes telling you what to do? Watching the History Channel or drinking a cinq to gather intel? Waiting in joints like this for someone to tell you what to do next?”
“Yes and no,” Krinkle said.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning yes, it’s the same. And no, not exactly.”
“What?”
“I’m in communications and public relations, you’re a killer of bad guys.”
“A minor point, surely, given you practically beat Astruc to a pulp in the cathedral last night.”