The Falling Sky

by Pippa Goldschmidt

  ‘Are you going to publish it?’ asks the Death Star.

  ‘Why not? I’m neutral about it. I don’t know what the correct interpretation is, so the best thing to do is to publish it and then see what people think. That seems to be the most honest thing to do.’

  ‘Ludicrous! I don’t believe a word of it,’ exclaims the other emeritus professor and he gets up and walks out. The breeze from his departure causes the screen to flap and distort the galaxies. Jeanette reaches out to steady the screen, but realises that her hand is trembling.

  ‘So you think it could be wrong, but you’re going to publish it anyway?’ This is from Jon. ‘How is that honest? If you publish it, you should be prepared to defend it.’

  ‘But if you truly don’t know either way, how else can you let other people decide?’ she replies.

  ‘You can’t be neutral. Either it’s wrong or it isn’t. You need to make a decision.’ Typical Jon; he always sees everything in black and white. But these pixels, showing a link that shouldn’t exist, span a whole spectrum of colour. Suddenly he sits up a bit straighter. ‘How about Orion?’

  ‘Orion?’ What is he talking about? Orion is a useful constellation if you want to study star formation. That’s got nothing to do with what she’s been telling them. Then she realises; the instrument. Other people clearly realise at the same time, because a sort of rippling sigh goes round the room, some of the tension caused by her work has been lessened. There will be a test.

  ‘Is it going to be sensitive enough to see this sort of structure?’

  ‘Of course.’ He looks proud. The Death Star sits back in his chair and smiles, almost to himself.

  She thinks quickly. From what she knows of Orion, it should be able to get a much clearer image of this link than any ground-based instrument. If Orion can see it, maybe it’s real. If not, not. One way or another, they’ll know for sure. ‘But when will it be launched? How long do we have to wait?’

  She’s not aware of how impatient she sounds until Jon starts to laugh. ‘You’ll have to wait at least a year. First light isn’t scheduled until next Autumn, and that’s assuming it gets launched in the next available launch window. That’s a big “if”. ’

  ‘Oh.’ How can she wait that long? How can they all wait? The roomful of people looks back at her with varying expressions on their faces. She’s aware of more warmth towards her than earlier. Perhaps, in spite of themselves, they like a bit of humanity.

  Richard has the final word, ‘Just wait until the media get hold of this,’ and he raises an eyebrow. The Death Star smiles, and she wonders again what he’s thinking.

  Afterwards, when everyone’s standing around drinking the obligatory glass of cheap wine, the Death Star comes over to her and murmurs, ‘How’s the paper coming along?’

  ‘It’s almost ready to go.’ She swills the wine around her mouth before managing to swallow it.

  Richard joins them, clutching his glass. ‘Well done you,’ he says. ‘Talk about stirring things up.’

  ‘Richard.’ The Death Star glares at him. ‘It’s the science that counts at the end of the day. It’s really very unlikely that these galaxies are actually connected, but Jeanette’s right, she needs to let the scientific community see the images and decide.’ He waves his finger at Richard, who continues to drink, not looking at him or Jeanette.

  ‘Very honest of you,’ Richard mutters.

  ‘I’ve got nothing at stake here. It’d take more than this to bring down the Big Bang model.’

  ‘Much, much more,’ he agrees, and they all continue to drink their wine in silence.

  Some time later that evening Jeanette is back in her office. Now that she’s completed the seminar she wants to leave it all behind for the day, but she can’t stop gazing at the image of the galaxies on her monitor. She knows that none of them really believes it, she doesn’t fully believe it herself. But until there’s a definite reason to discount it, she might as well carry on. It’s a shame that publishing things makes them so definite; pins them like butterflies in glass boxes. It’s very difficult to remain neutral, but she wants to try.

  To get away from the galaxies, she swivels on her chair to look at the blackboard, which is one of those old-fashioned ones where a never-ending roll of black fabric loops round so that if her tutorials are long enough or enthusiastic enough, Jeanette can find herself confronted with her earlier work. When this happens it always feels a bit like travelling back in time, and meeting her earlier self.

  Today it’s a palimpsest of ancient chalk markings from various tutorials. But at the bottom of it there is some fresh chalk, so she looks closer. Someone’s written ‘GAG’ in wobbly letters. And next to that is a tiny picture of a face in profile with an open mouth. It’s nothing more than a curved line and a dot, and it’s not recognisably her, but it is a face.

  How long has this been here? Did someone creep into her office during the seminar? Did one of her students get particularly bad marks lately? It could have been easily done; she never locks the door of this room. She stares at it for so long that when she finally looks away, the face is stamped onto her retina and printed on every part of the room wherever she looks.

  She’s looking at a star chart, a map of the sky. Beside each star and galaxy on the chart is its name in faint blue letters; Altair, Riga, Aldeberan, Vega… Eventually she finds what she’s looking for; the large off-centre triangle in the northern sky. But here in this version of the universe it’s not named ‘Andromeda’. Next to it is written her sister’s name.

  This gives her hope, and later that night when she takes her telescope outside, she does find her sister in the night sky. In the usual story, Andromeda is rescued from the sea monster by Perseus. But in this version, her sister is chained to the rocks as the sea rises, her mouth and nose filling with water, her hair streaked with foam. She never manages to break free.

  She’s scrolling through the abstracts of new papers published on one of the e-archives, when she notices a paper by the consortium. A long tedious-looking affair comparing the accuracy of different data reduction algorithms. The sort of paper she should read thoroughly and conscientiously, but never does. Skimming down the lengthy list of authors, she finds Richard. He’s buried about halfway down the list, so whenever the paper gets referenced in the future, he’ll be swallowed up in the et al. He’ll probably never see the light of day again, now that the consortium has shackled him to his computer. Partly out of pity, she prints off the paper and flips through it. The same boring galaxy analysed in a hundred subtly different ways. Spot the difference on the hundred images. A pixel here, a pixel there.

  ‘Saw your paper,’ she says to Richard at lunchtime, as the Death Star lurches towards them. ‘Looks absolutely fascinating.’

  He frowns at her sarcasm. ‘It’s useful. We needed that algorithm.’

  ‘Ah, the collective “we”. And are you going to be so high up in the list of authors on the actual science papers?’ She’s not sure why she’s being such a bitch to him, and then she remembers him and Paula, leaning towards each other in the kitchen while she waited outside in the cold.

  Later, the phone rings.

  ‘Jeanette?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s me. Mags.’

  ‘Oh… Hi…’

  But Maggie is too quick for her. ‘I’m not sure we should publish the galaxies.’

  ‘What? Why not?’ Something thumps in her chest. It’s difficult to speak.

  ‘Because. It’s too uncertain. I’m not sure it’s right, and even if it is, what does it mean? What are we really saying about all this? And even if we don’t say it outright in the paper are we really going to imply that redshifts aren’t cosmological? And…’ Maggie’s voice sounds as if she is spinning off into outer space. Curiously, that makes Jeanette feel a bit better. She is the one on the ground here. Tethered to reality.

  ‘Hang on. Let’s start at the beginning. Remember what we actually saw; two galaxies at different redsh
ifts that appear to be physically connected. That’s what goes into the paper. We don’t need any speculation about the implications, because that’s all it would be, just speculation. We just stick to the data.’

  ‘But we have to comment on it.’ Maggie’s voice is still thin, tremulous.

  ‘What’s the point? Everyone knows the implications. We say something like “this is an interesting finding, which we expect other people will want to examine more closely.”’ Jeanette looks at the blackboard again. ‘GAG’ is still there. ‘I can’t see anything wrong with that.’ She pauses before continuing, ‘There’s a job here. It would really help.’

  ‘Oh, Jeanette! You and your jobs!’

  ‘The Death Star thinks it’s interesting…’

  ‘You showed it to him?’ Maggie sounds incredulous.

  And the rest of the Observatory, Jeanette wants to confess, but doesn’t. Maggie carries on. ‘You should have asked me before you showed anyone else.’

  ‘Asked you? Why?’ She’s cross now.

  ‘It’s risky. We need to check it out more thoroughly before we do anything with it.’

  Jeanette sighs and looks at her screen, where the image of the galaxies is shown. The link is just a handful of pixels. Who knows whether it actually exists? Is publishing it the right thing to do? If they sit on it, nobody else will be able to see it for themselves, or make their own judgment. If only the image was better.

  ‘I think we should get more data. We could get time on the Hubble, maybe?’ Maggie sounds a bit more amenable now.

  ‘Could take at least another year to get Hubble time. We can’t sit on it, we need to get a move on. If we don’t publish it soon the image will be in the public domain and someone else will publish it. I think we’ve got about two months left before that happens.’

  ‘You really think someone else will publish it?’

  ‘Maggie! Don’t be naïve. Of course they will. You would, wouldn’t you? If you knew it was there and you could get your hands on it?’

  Pause.

  ‘Ok. But we damp down the discussion. Keep it sober. Avoid any discussion of how this may affect the standard model.’

  ‘Whatever.’ She feels impatient now. She flicks through Richard’s tedious paper, at all the countless images of this galaxy that nobody will ever look at, and has an idea.

  That night, Jeanette takes Paula up to the Observatory. It’s already dark by the time they reach the top of the hill, the city glittering beneath them.

  ‘Oof,’ says Paula. ‘I forgot it was so steep.’

  ‘Have you been up here before?’

  ‘When I was a kid.’ Paula stops to gulp air before continuing, ‘Sunday outing. With the dog.’

  There are two telescopes at the Observatory, the little modern one at the back which is used for teaching and public demonstrations, and the old one in the west dome. This telescope was built in the 1920s and is so huge that you cannot reach its eyepiece from the floor; you have to sit in a specially constructed chair that ramps up several feet in the air. The surrounding dome is enormous, all creaking iron and copper. When she takes Paula into the dome, the feeble light makes the space look melodramatic enough for a mad scientist to come leering out of the shadows.

  But no one comes in here anymore, the telescope hasn’t been used for forty years and the whole space feels shut off from the ordinary world. Nothing in here is ordinary after all. There has never been anything ordinary in here. This is a space where only extraordinary things are allowed to happen.

  ‘Wow’, says Paula, ‘This is incredible. You actually work in here?’ She’s wandering around, gazing at the chair, its seat even higher than Jeanette remembers.

  ‘No, no. This equipment is ancient. It’s all completely out of date.’ She pulls at an old rope tied to the wall and manages to winch the dome open, so a thin slot of sky appears overhead. But the cloudy sky has a lumpy, doughy appearance. It’s an everyday sky, nothing special, and it looks almost mundane compared to the rest of their surroundings.

  Paula rummages around in her bag. ‘This is just fantastic. It’s enormous in here, truly monumental. I want to make a few sketches.’ She fishes out a bundle of pencils and charcoal sticks, and then a notebook.

  Jeanette’s not sure what her role is, now. She has introduced Paula to this space, but is she supposed to disappear? Or is Paula sketching her too? Is she part of it, or separate?

  She makes her way across the wooden floor to the far wall. From here the telescope is in line with the sky outside. Briefly, the clouds blow away and she gets a glimpse of an anonymous star before it disappears again.

  ‘You know astronomers used to draw what they saw in the sky, before photography was invented?’ she tells Paula.

  ‘Really?’ Paula looks up. ‘No, don’t move. Stay there.’

  So she is in Paula’s picture. She feels pleased, and then wonders why.

  As they leave the Observatory and walk down the hill towards the bus stop, they pause to look back at the dark buildings behind them.

  ‘Do you get used to working at night?’ Paula asks. Jeanette can see why she’s asked this. The building looks forbidding now. The towers are just black shapes blocking out the sky, from this angle they seem more like an absence of something. How to explain that you do get used to the dark, that you shed the natural human instinct to be in the light, that you welcome a moonless night? That a sunlit day can make everything look flat and artificial, like stage lighting?

  When she sees Paula’s sketches, she’s a bit confused; they’re difficult to understand. The paper is mostly blank with a few cryptic marks here and there. She can’t see herself in them at all.

  ‘I was trying to draw the space,’ says Paula. ‘Indicate an absence of things. But the actual painting won’t be like this at all. I’m thinking it’s going to be more like a portrait. I want to get across that sinister element with the fact that this is where people actually work…’

  ‘But they don’t, not anymore,’ Jeanette interrupts.

  ‘Stop being so pedantic. They used to work there. So I want something real, ordinary, almost superimposed on the space. Like it’s been cut out and pasted on.’

  ‘A portrait?’ asks Jeanette.

  ‘Yes,’ says Paula, and now she’s grinning. ‘I’m going to paint a portrait of you.’

  There’s not enough room in Jeanette’s flat for Paula to paint and so they go to her studio at the art college. It’s a muddled, fusty space with piles of papers and rags scattered around on the floor. Two plastic chairs lean against each other.

  ‘You’ll need to stand for a bit, so make yourself comfortable. You have to maintain the pose for some time; make sure it feels ok.’

  She watches Paula prepare, moving precisely and surely around the grot in her studio. She seems to know which pile of rags hides tubes of paint, and where the box of charcoal might be lurking. Various colours are squeezed onto an old china plate, and some brushes are laid out in a neat row. Jeanette is reminded of scalpels, and begins to feel as if this is an operating theatre. What’s going to happen here? Will she be opened up and inspected?

  Paula has asked her to wear her usual work clothes so she’s wearing jeans and a t-shirt that says ‘British Cosmology Summer School 98’ in faded blue letters across her chest.

  ‘Could you unfold your arms? That pose looks a bit defensive.’

  But now her arms are hanging uselessly by her side and she’s not sure what to do with them.

  ‘Try not to fidget with your hands.’

  Silence. She can hear Paula drawing. The pencil makes a scratching sound, as if a small animal were feeling its way across the paper. She could be using this time to think about work, but her mind feels oddly numb, almost cauterised in this new environment.

  Paula’s not talking and it takes Jeanette a while to realise this is unusual. She experimentally makes a comment about the large windows, but gets no response.

  After a bit she realises there’s a rhythm to wh
at Paula is doing. Paula looks up at Jeanette for a few seconds and then down at the canvas. It’s as if she’s soaking up information about Jeanette in those few seconds before depositing it on the canvas. Or, Jeanette realises, there’s a similarity to how a telescope observes a distant object before downloading the image.

  Never before has she been the subject. She feels caught, trapped in a spider’s web of Paula’s gaze, rendered immobile. Usually she’s good at judging how time passes, but now she realises she has no idea how long she’s been sitting here. Ten minutes? Half an hour?

  Again Paula’s gaze is on her. This time she looks back and their eyes meet. Jeanette’s head jolts back as if an electric shock has just gone through her. Paula’s gaze is entirely, nakedly, neutral. It simply wants to know Jeanette. She feels Paula’s eyes travel over each aspect of her face as surely as if she is touching her. The eyes take in her eyebrows, cheeks, lips, chin, and then dip down to observe her neck and strands of hair lying against her chest.

  And Jeanette in turn sees Paula for the first time. Usually she only sees the brightly made-up, loudly laughing Paula. The one who does that exaggerated film star thing of asking men for a light and then half closes her eyes and sucks in air deeply, ecstatically, as it’s being lit for her. Paula always acts like she’s on display, even in private. When she’s drunk, it’s an exaggerated impersonation of being drunk.

  She’s a beautiful apple, Jeanette has often thought, but you never see the colour of the flesh inside.

  But here in the studio, she isn’t doing the act. Jeanette knows that Paula is no longer aware of her own appearance as she seeks to understand Jeanette’s. I’m privileged, she realises. No one else has seen her like this. She watches as Paula tucks a strand of hair out of the way behind one ear. Except maybe her lovers. What do they see?

  Only now is Jeanette aware of the colossal tension building up in her neck as a result of keeping still. The tightness is spreading down her back and into the base of her spine. She has to move.