The Astronomer

by Charmaine Pauls

  She knew what he was referring to. It wasn’t her general wellbeing. “I’m coping. I had to increase the hormone dosage.”

  He frowned. “Did you consult Marguerite about it?”

  “No. I didn’t alter the dosage that much.”

  “When is your next appointment?”

  “She said to meet with her next month when I’m in Santiago. She’ll do a general check-up and administer another birth control shot.”

  Emilio drummed his fingers on the table, seemingly in thought.

  “For how long are you staying?” Fraya said, wanting to change the subject.

  “The weekend.” The disappointment must have shown on her face, because he added quickly, “I couldn’t get away for longer. But I hope to return sooner, next time.”

  She managed a bright tone. “In that case, I suppose it would be wise to make every minute count.”

  His smile was lopsided. “Is that a way of ordering me to bed?” The gesture bloomed into a full curve when she felt the blood rushing to her face. “I made dessert. Chocolate mousse. I’d better serve it right away, unless you’re offering to be my dessert.”

  She made a face. “That’s corny.”

  “Maybe so, but can I help that I turn all ‘corny’ around you, Dr. Riber? I’m addicted to you.”

  She bit her lip and stared at him from under her eyelashes. “Maybe your dessert could become breakfast?”

  He got up slowly, the mere intention in his movement taking away her breath.

  “Come here,” he demanded. When she rounded the table, he said, “Undress.”

  Fraya felt a tinge of disappointment. She didn’t want to go back to their state of him commanding and she obeying. She wanted their lovemaking to be a mutual act of participation. Emilio’s hands went to her shoulders, starting the task for her when he pushed her robe open, brushing the fabric over her arms and down her back. She completed the action, letting it fall to the deck, enjoying his reaction, knowing that for that one moment, he was completely in her power. He undressed slowly until they were separated with nothing but the night air. Instead of embracing her like she expected, he took her hand and led her to the pool. He took the steps in the shallow end, turning on the last one to lift her down with his hands around her hips. He settled on the bench with his back against the side, holding her to him, draping her legs around him. Fraya leaned into him, brushing her breasts over the hardness of his chest, letting his desire fill her. She could feel it growing by the way his breathing became faster, and by the way he moaned as her hands brushed over his arms and his sides. His fingers tangled in the strands of her hair, bringing her mouth up to catch the sigh of ecstasy that escaped her lips. He kissed her softly, for a long time, until she broke the kiss.

  “I can’t wait, Emilio,” she said, pressing closer.

  “Not yet. We need to talk first.”

  “Talk? About what?”

  “I don’t want to spend weeks without hearing from you again. It drove me insane.”

  “Fair enough. I’ll call you on the sat phone. Anything else you want to talk about?”

  “Yes. We need to talk about you endangering your life.”

  “I told you, it was nothing.”

  “It wasn’t nothing to me.”

  “Emilio, it’s my job. Please let’s not fight about it now.”

  “I don’t want to fight. I want you safe. I want you to promise me that you’ll never let anything happen to you.”

  “Nothing is going to happen to me.” She smiled up at him. “Now, take me.”

  “Soon, baby,” he said, bringing his lips to her ear. “Soon. We have the whole night.”

  “Did you come to me, or did I come to you?” she asked slyly.

  He grinned. “Is that a way of asking who’s deciding on the position?”

  “Maybe.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “Or is that my little wildcat’s way of asking me to tie her up and make her come in ten different ways?”

  Her breath caught audibly. “It’s not fair to torture me with graphic descriptions.”

  “You know I get graphic when I make love, baby. But nothing turns me on more than how you talk to me when I’m deep inside of you.”

  Fraya was glad for the darkness that hid her flush. “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “I think we came to each other,” he said, hugging her tight.

  Fraya put her face in his neck and closed her eyes. He was right. Tonight, they were both demanding, and both would be giving.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  It was with a heavy heart that Fraya returned to the excavation site two days later. This time she returned with Al Shain to keep her company. There was no reason for her to stay at the Paranal Observatory. She had handed in her reports and Emilio had left. For the first time, Fraya did not enjoy her job wholeheartedly. If Andrews undermined her, or belittled her by small actions intended to damage her credibility, she acted as if she didn’t care. And she didn’t. Tim was the first one who picked up on her lovesickness and mistook it for desert fever. He begged with her to take a break, to go back to her condo, but the only place Fraya would consider going was Santiago, and that would be pointless, as Emilio was in some zone or another on a business trip.

  She performed her work with the same diligence as before, but her obsession had gone. Mason accused her of having gone soft and was worried that the men would see it as a weakness, but despite her gentler attitude and calmer assessment of their difficult and dangerous tasks, the project rolled along, ahead of schedule, and if the absence of expressed confrontation could be considered as peace, then peace finally dawned on the camp.

  They had been working in shifts around the clock, day and night, and during the hours that she was off duty, Fraya lay on her stretcher in her tent, Al perched on his peg next to her, and thought about Emilio. She wondered about Gene, where he was, and how he was going to take the news of her mating to Emilio when he finally decided to surface to her world again. Most of all, she thought about the months that had gone by, and how little time was left before the year would come to an end. If it wasn’t for Al’s watchful company, Fraya thought she probably would have gone stark raving mad. Having the falcon with her was her way of clinging to a part of Emilio.

  On the morning of the fourth excruciating week of hard work and tedious labor, Stix stormed into the campsite, threw his UV goggles on the ground and kicked up a noise that would have frightened a rooster.

  Fraya stormed from her tent, still dressed in the white stretch pants and top she had slept in. Andrews exited from his, his face covered with shaving cream, a razor in one hand.

  “We’ve found it!” Stix shouted. “We’ve found it!”

  Fraya’s heart stopped beating. Andrews stood frozen.

  It was Smit who took Stix by the arm. “Found what?”

  “We found it!” Stix said, looking wildly at them each in turn.

  Smit shook him lightly. “Found what?”

  “A foundation.”

  Fraya closed her eyes and said a prayer. It was one of the biggest moments of her life, and her only thought was that Emilio wasn’t there to share it.

  Andrews wiped his face on a towel he grabbed from the washing line and moved to Fraya’s side. “Come. Hurry.”

  She let herself be led by Andrews, too overwhelmed to act or to speak. A short while later they secured their gasmasks and parked the desert beetle at the site. Mason came running when he spotted their vehicle.

  “The men opened a square section of rock. Looks like a man-made construction.”

  Andrews was the first to jump from the vehicle. He looked at Fraya as he switched his communication system to speak mode. “Could it be the temple?”

  She nodded, still battling to find her voice. That’s where they started digging, where she calculated the temple to be. The stars were right, after all.

  When they got to the mouth of the excavated cave, Mason handed her and Andrews each a torchlight. Andr
ews took the lead, taking command of the situation, but Fraya didn’t protest. She was too baffled to think of anything, too exhilarated to argue.

  It was a short walk in the dark to the area buried under the rock and sand before the tunnel extended into a small, man-made cave. And then, appearing in the beam of her light, there it was, a flat, smooth slab of rock protruding from the sand. It now made sense why previous expeditions didn’t locate the lost city. They had searched for topical remains instead of going underground, and in all the wrong places. It had been there, on the seventy-two degree longitude, just as it should have been, according to the star map, but it had been constructed in a natural chamber of caves, a city buried underneath the surface of the earth. Suddenly Fraya understood. The pyramids weren’t constructed with vertical height like at their sister sites, but with matching horizontal dimensions. The people who inhabited them, lived underground, for reasons yet to be argued and theorized. The geographical area had not yet been a desert in the era of the construction. The theories would be based on whatever archeological evidence could be excavated, but that would another project, maybe one of a lifetime, one for a man like Andrews, Fraya realized. She was an astronomer, not an archeologist, but her knowledge of the stars had led her here, and like the civilization who had built the city, she believed that astronomy and geology weren’t all together as different a science as many purists thought.

  Andrews inspected the formation and the uncovered foundation, taking photos with an infrared camera and instructing Mason to cordon the area off until a plan of action had been approved. The men turned back, but Fraya was only faintly aware of them as they made their way to the exit. It was Andrews’s hand on her arm that pulled her back to the present. He motioned for her to follow, but then waited until she had stepped in front, and he was the one who fell in behind her, as if he wanted to be sure that she was going to walk back into the sunlight.

  Fraya still didn’t speak all the way back to the camp. She had, like the others, removed her gasmask when they reached clean air, letting the wind whip through her hair as the vehicle sped forward, wishing the hot movement of the air would ground her. She felt like she was floating on a cloud, and everything real seemed like a dream. At the camp the men who had heard the news were waiting with a bottle of champagne, but did not pop the cork until Andrews nodded, the confirmation they had been waiting for. Cups filled and ran over, men slapped each other and Fraya on the back. She took one of the paper cups that were handed around and drank when everyone else did, hearing the cheers and the joyous chatter, but not registering anything of what was said until Andrews blocked her vision with his tall body.

  “Well done, Doctor. You did it.”

  She looked up at him. He seemed genuinely pleased. It was the first time that he didn’t seem to indicate a hidden agenda through his words.

  “You didn’t think I could do, did you?” she said, slowly coming back to life.

  “Nah,” he shook his head and smiled, “I always knew you’d crack it. How did you know to go underground? All of your predecessors have overlooked the possibility.”

  “The stars,” she said. “Like I said, if you follow the map, it was there. It had to be. It couldn’t be the only location with those coordinates without anything. And there were the myths to support the theory.”

  He clinked his cup to hers. “We’re having a party, right here, in the camp tonight. We’re using our rations for the whole damn week. I’m ordering a barbeque. This calls for meat, the real kind.”

  “What’s next?” she said, thinking ahead of herself.

  “I’m going to radio Saunders. He’d want to inform Welser and the World Council for Conservation. From there, it’s pretty much what the World Organization for Archeology can fund.”

  She nodded. Andrews were shouting orders for a celebration around the camp, but now that the first cornerstone of the site had been revealed, Fraya only wanted to go home.

  * * * *

  Welser himself was waiting for Fraya in Saunders’s office when she got back to the observatory the following day. Andrews had stayed behind to ensure that security and protocol were executed correctly. Fraya had gone to the condo to leave Al, shower and change into a black suit before returning to the office to write and file her final report. Tracy had intercepted her on the way, bringing her to Saunders’s office instead, where she found the two men smoking cigars and drinking whiskey.

  They got to their feet when she entered. Saunders rounded the desk and slapped her on the back. “Well done, Dr. Riber. Whiskey?”

  She shook her head.

  Welser studied her, his expression pleased. “You promised me a miracle and delivered nothing short of it. I’m impressed. And pleased. Mighty pleased. And it takes a lot to please me, Doctor.”

  “I take it Andrews is taking over now?”

  Welser said, “Yes. But, thanks to you, the SWO will take all the credit.”

  “This will change the way the world looks at the SWO, Fraya,” Saunders said. He pulled a chair out for her. “Please,” he said, motioning to the seat.

  Saunders took the chair behind his desk, while Welser made himself comfortable on the sofa, his Italian designer shoe resting on his knee. The two men exchanged a look.

  Welser blew a puff of smoke into the air. “We’ve been discussing your future at SWO, Fraya.”

  She looked at Saunders in alarm. Did she work herself out of a job, now that the project under her leadership had been concluded?

  “I’m still staying on as astronomer, aren’t I?”

  Welser tilted his head, and she had the impression that he was reading her like a book, seeing into her very soul, knowing that her heart wasn’t in her job as much as it had once been. Her heart was with her mate.

  It was Saunders who said, “In fact, we have a proposition for you.”

  Fraya’s head moved in Saunders’s direction. There was a pause during which neither of the men said anything, the atmosphere in the room heavy with expectation.

  “We want you to head up a similar program in Zone 78, Peru,” Saunders finally said.

  Fraya’s heart came to a heavy stop. She was aware of the two pairs of eyes resting on her, measuring her carefully, and watching her reaction. She took her time to digest the information, and then she said to Saunders, “I’ll have that whiskey, now.”

  He obliged, handing her a glass.

  “We want you to think about it,” Welser said. “We don’t need an answer immediately. It will change the course and direction of your career, Doctor. And I don’t need to tell you that it’s the opportunity of a lifetime.”

  “Peru?” she echoed like a parrot.

  “We’re aware of your theory and we have funding from an undisclosed source to put it to the test. You’ll be working from our Peruvian observatory in collaboration with the Peruvian government.”

  “And you’ve already gotten permission for all of this?” Fraya said, her eyes wide.

  “I understand your astonishment,” Welser said, smiling. “We couldn’t put anything in motion until we had a more solid footing to stand on, but I’ve been working on it for a while. Of course, it was all confidential until approved. Now that you’ve proven yourself with the lost city, we’ve got government’s green light to go ahead.”

  Fraya thought about living and working in a different zone. She thought about Emilio.

  “How long?” she asked Welser.

  “The contract is for two years,” Welser said.

  “And after that?” Fraya said.

  “If you succeed,” Welser said, “pretty much any job you want after that will be yours.”

  Fraya nodded. She understood the opportunity presented to her. It was a once in a lifetime chance. It would never come along again.

  “By when do you need my answer?”

  “We’ll give you two weeks,” Welser said. “Now, go home and take a well-deserved break.” He looked at Saunders. “I assume you will want to discuss your future with yo
ur mate.”

  * * * *

  Fraya arrived to find Emilio’s house in disorder and chaos. Emilio was hosting a reception in her honor, to celebrate her success, and over two hundred people had been invited. Isabella had the doors that led from the lounge to the patio opened and cocktail tables arranged under colored paper lanterns hanging from the trees. Mushroom gas heaters were placed around the lawn, because the weather was turning cold. Imported potted jasmine creepers perfumed the air.

  Fraya found Emilio in the kitchen, overseeing the wine. When he spotted her, he handed the list to the cellar master and moved to her side.

  He kissed her in front of everyone like no one should be kissed, unless behind closed doors, and released her with an air of ‘I-don’t-care-who-looks’.

  “Dr. Riber, congratulations. I’m so proud of you.”

  She was still flushed from the kiss and felt her cheeks burning brighter from his praise. “Thank you. All the fuss wasn’t necessary.”

  “Are you joking? Would I ever let something of such significant importance go uncelebrated?”

  “We could have had a dinner with your family.”

  “My wife is famous. I want to savor the moment,” he said with a teasing smile.

  “A hotel hall would have been just fine.”

  “My mother was obstinate about having it at home. She wanted an intimate event for you.”

  “Two hundred people are hardly intimate.”

  He kissed her cheek. “She had to cut down from four hundred, so don’t complain.”

  “Who’s coming, anyway?”

  “Every influential person in the city. If she had her way, the queen of England would have attended.”

  Fraya rolled her eyes. “Now we’re only missing the president.”

  Emilio cleared his throat. “He’ll be here.”

  Fraya’s eyes widened. “You’re joking, I hope.”

  “This is an important accomplishment, Fraya. What you did is going to change history, and politics.”

  “Politics?”

  “International funding for similar expeditions. Historic seminars. Books published. Films made. Need I say more?”