The Falling Sky

by Pippa Goldschmidt

  On the first night of her observing run she walks up the dusty path to the telescope, where the telescope operator is already waiting. He’s not the same operator as the last time, and for that she’s grateful. But this one seems to hardly speak any English either, and she starts to realise how much she normally relies on Maggie to act as interpreter. This is going to be difficult. She conveys in sign language and a few brief technical words how she wants the telescope to be set up.

  Unlike all her previous observing runs, where each image taken by the telescope has contained galaxies or stars, now she is taking images where she hopes, if her initial work back home was correct, that there will be nothing to see. As predicted, the first image is dark and blank. The telescope operator turns to her questioningly but she nods, yes, this is right. We don’t want to see anything. The second image is the same. She thinks she notices the telescope operator rolling his eyes as he lines up the telescope for the third blank image and picks up his newspaper.

  As she can’t remember his name, she has to cough to get his attention every time she wants him to move the telescope to the next patch of sky. But even though they manage to get into a routine, there’s something not quite right. She can’t figure it out at first. The room is quiet, all she can hear is the rustle of the newspaper and the distant hum of the telescope motor. Everything should be peaceful. Then she realises that each time they start a new observation, the telescope operator picks up his newspaper and she gets a glimpse of a large photo taking up nearly the whole of the front page. This photo shows some long bundles of cloth lying on the ground somewhere, with people standing around them, looking at the camera. It feels like they’re looking directly at Jeanette. Their faces are serious, even accusing, although she doesn’t understand what it is they’re accusing her of. She can’t make any sense of it, there’s not enough information, so she looks away.

  Then the telescope finishes its observation and the next image is displayed on the screen. From time to time she thinks how odd it is that she should be the first person to see these images; it feels like an unveiling. But there are no fanfares here. They both eat a lot of biscuits.

  The next night is the same. The telescope operator is even reading the same newspaper, probably because nobody has come up the mountain since yesterday. She feels as if she’s trapped in a bubble of time. If she can’t move forward, how can she ever escape from Paula? From anything?

  She realises with a sinking heart that all her images will look identical. She has never taken such dull images in her life. How will she be able to tell them apart when she gets home?

  One of the images has a thin white line bisecting it. The operator points to it. ‘Satellite track,’ he says, looking faintly relieved that they have, at last, detected something. She tries to smile.

  ‘We are being watched,’ he continues.

  ‘Sorry?’

  But he just picks up his newspaper and falls silent again.

  The next day another astronomer sits down next to her in the canteen. ‘It will be cloudy tonight,’ he announces. His accent is German.

  ‘Really.’ She says this louder than she means to, but the sky is spotless and there is no wind. She hates the way some astronomers, usually the older ones, act as if they know more than anyone else. She doesn’t say anything more to him as they both watch the sky fade away over the empty landscape.

  That night the operator’s still reading the same newspaper and it’s driving her nuts. Surely someone’s been up the mountain from the nearest town with a more recent one?

  Cloud appears at midnight so they have to stop the observations and wait. Without the hum of the telescope or the whir of the dome, it is silent in the control room. She stares at her hands, cursing the German astronomer. The operator reads on. He must have read the newspaper cover to cover by now.

  She opens a few of the more recent images but when she looks at the screen all she can see is her own reflection. There is no point looking at these images. They are just images of herself. She will have to do it all by numbers.

  And her own reflection looks back at her, pale and frightened. It’s almost as bad as Paula’s blanked out version of her. Perhaps this is what she really looks like.

  ‘Biscuit?’ The telescope operator is offering her a stale wafer. She shakes her head and starts to cry.

  The next day she wants to avoid the German astronomer, so she goes out at lunchtime and wanders down the path. After a few hundred metres she finds a hollow in the ground, a convenient place to sit and watch the space around her. Peace. She feels the sun on her face, and leans back to rest against the earth. She shuts her eyes.

  She doesn’t know what has woken her up, only that she’s been jolted back into the real world. The blue has faded from the sky; it’s already sunset. She’s been out here far too long, she should be at the telescope, preparing for the night. She tries to stand up but then she notices something standing nearby, watching her.

  It’s a wild dog. Small and yellow, with its snout pointed directly at her. She’s too scared to shout. She tries moving her arm slowly but it snaps its teeth and so she has to lie still, just watching it. There’s a thick layer of dust on its fur, the same colour as the sandy rocks. It could have crawled out of this landscape; it would be invisible from twenty metres away.

  ‘Nice dog,’ she mutters and it growls. She’s close enough to note the utter blankness of its eyes, like a cloudy night sky. The sky is rapidly growing darker and she has to move; she can’t be out here at night, she’d never find her way back to the observatory.

  It starts slinking towards her, belly almost brushing against the ground. She fumbles around and finds a stone, hurls it at the dog. It misses but the dog springs away, kicking up a plume of dust before disappearing into the rocks.

  Somehow she manages to stagger back up the path to the telescopes, her shadow creeping alongside her.

  Tonight, there are too many layers of time in the control room. There is the distant past of the voids, brought to her in coded messages for her to unpick and explain. That is perhaps the easiest. Her own past has also taken up residence. It should have been left behind in Edinburgh, waiting for her when she gets home. Instead it’s on her back, weighing her down. Insistent memories of Paula, of the connected galaxies, even of the ice woman, start surfacing and she knows that behind these memories are more distant and much worse ones. The present seems the least immediate of all these layers, even though she knows that the dog is outside.

  ‘I saw a dog today,’ she tells the operator.

  ‘A dog?’ He puts down his newspaper. ‘Where?’

  ‘Out there.’ She waves her hand. How can anyone tell one part of this place from another? It all looks the same. Just one barren bit of sand after another.

  ‘Yes. We have wild dogs here. They are fed by the cooks in the canteen.’

  His English is much better than she thought. Perhaps he learns it from the astronomers. He folds his newspaper carefully into an old plastic bag, and she realises that this newspaper is important to him, for some reason. He looks expectantly at her, obviously waiting for her to say something.

  ‘How often do you get a newspaper here?’ It’s all she can think of, but he doesn’t seem surprised.

  ‘Not often.’ He pats the bag.

  She has to go to the canteen the next day, and the German sits down next to her again. He has heard about the dog.

  ‘Dangerous!’ He shakes his head.

  ‘I didn’t think there was anything out there. Anything living.’

  ‘The dogs have been here since the camp started.’

  ‘Camp? What camp?’ But she thinks of the photo on the front of the telescope operator’s newspaper. The long bundles of cloth. Perhaps this is what bodies look like before they are buried.

  ‘Chacabuco. It wasn’t far from here.’ He glares at her, but she’s never heard this name before. She only knows the road between Santiago and the observatory. Then she remembers the first time she
came here, years ago when she was a student, there was a roadblock manned by bored soldiers. They had inspected her passport, nothing more. But she remembers the excitement she had felt, coming from boring old democratic Britain. She had told people back home. Paula had been interested. Dear God, Paula. Had she used the tale of the roadblock to try and entice Paula, even at that stage in their friendship? How obscene.

  She blushes now, and doesn’t ask any more about the camp.

  That night, she’s staring at the latest image, and wondering if there are actually faint galaxies hidden in it, when the door to the control room bangs open and the German walks in. He doesn’t say anything to her, just walks over to the telescope operator and holds out a hand.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he says.

  The operator smiles and takes his outstretched hand. They stay like that for some time, their hands clasped together.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Jeanette asks.

  The German turns to her. ‘The bodies at Chacabuco. One of them is his uncle.’

  She stares at the operator. ‘Your uncle?’ She must sound stupid.

  The German continues, ‘People were sent to the concentration camp at Chacabuco when they challenged the regime, and they disappeared. Their relatives have been searching for them for years. The bodies have only just now been found.’

  She walks over to the operator and looks down at his newspaper. But, as before, the photo offers little information. She imagines the relatives out in the desert, picking through the sand and rocks to try and find something like a photo or a scrap of cloth. A shoe. Or bones and ashes. It’s too distressing to think of ashes.

  She hopes whatever’s wrapped up in the cloth is protected from the dogs.

  Above the three of them the telescope continues to whirr, a steady comforting sound. She wonders if the people trapped in the concentration camp could see it. Did they hope that it would discover them? But you can’t point a telescope at the ground; it would collapse under its own weight.

  She wants to say something to the operator, but she can’t think what. The telescope finishes its observation, and yet another blank image appears on the screen. They all stare at it in silence.

  The next day she looks at the desert and realises it isn’t empty anymore. The only emptiness is in her voids, her mind. Now that she knows what’s going on out there, she thinks she can almost see the tiny people making their way back and forth across the surface like farmers sowing seeds, but in reverse. They are harvesting their own grief, but she has been careless with hers. It’s lost, blown away, and she needs to find it again.

  She has to prepare a talk for this conference she’s been invited to, even though she’s got nothing to say. Nothing about the link between the galaxies, anyway. Since the rocket explosion, neither she nor anyone else has worked out another way of testing the initial result. Maggie is too busy in California to spend time on it. Jeanette’s colleagues seem happy not to mention it. She sometimes thinks she’s almost the only person still bothered by it.

  The conference is a small, prestigious affair, in an old house. It’s by invitation only. She and about twenty other astronomers will tell each other about the latest developments in cosmology and the results will be published in a book called ‘Frontiers of Modern Cosmology’ which will be distributed to new PhD students. She knows it’s an honour to be invited to contribute to this. It may even help her hang onto her lectureship. The Death Star pays attention to this sort of thing.

  When she arrives at the house, she still doesn’t know what she’s going to say. She’s got all the usual images of the linked galaxies, the ones that everyone’s seen. She’s got all the usual commentary down pat by now. She could just repeat herself. People repeat themselves all the time. They get one decent result, then they dine out on it for the rest of their careers. There’s no harm in it. But she wants to break out of that little bubble.

  She’s also brought along the blank images of her voids from the last observing run, and after dinner on the first night, when she’s left the rest of them downstairs in some old oak-panelled room selfconsciously pouring each other glasses of port, she goes upstairs to her cold little bedroom and sits on the edge of the bed, looking at the voids. The absence of any galaxies in these little squares of darkness seems more real than her previous work on the linked galaxies. Nobody will question this absence. Although she’s surprised at just how dark these images are. Her analysis shows that there is no hint of starlight, nor faint dust. Nothing at all, but emptiness.

  The next morning she eats her breakfast by herself in the dining room. The others are complaining about their headaches. She slips away while they’re still munching toast, and walks around outside for a bit. For some reason she’s not bothered about having nothing to say. It seems more real than endlessly speaking, justifying, arguing.

  They’re due to give their lectures in the library so she goes there and waits.

  She stares out of the window during the first lecture, on gamma ray bursters, and the second, which is on brown dwarfs. She doesn’t get entangled in the inevitable argument on the possible contribution of brown dwarfs to dark matter. She bides her time.

  After the coffee break she moves. She walks to the front of the room and, looking out of the window, she stands and waits. She’s just not sure what she’s waiting for. Then she realises that if the voids are as flawless as she thinks they are, they won’t be able to transmit any sort of sound whatsoever. The void around her is perfect. It is cutting her off from the rest of the Universe. Even if she tries to speak to them, nobody will be able to hear her. She thinks about this for a bit, and then realises that she can still show her images. Sound can’t be transmitted through a vacuum, but light can. So, in silence, she plugs her memory stick into the laptop and projects the images of the voids onto the screen.

  It takes forty minutes to work her way through the entire set. During this time nobody else says anything either. They move around in their seats and look at each other, but they don’t speak. She realises they are all lightyears away from her.

  Although she can’t speak, she can write. In her office, her hands wait above the keyboard as she tries to frame her thoughts and turn them into a logical narrative. That is how scientific papers are constructed. You present your initial idea, the hypothesis you want to test, and then you show the results of the data or the theory you’ve developed. On the page it is all supposed to come across as if the result is inevitable, as if nothing else could have happened. No satellites were harmed in the making of this experiment.

  Reality is messier, of course. Reality intrudes with its unfocused images, equations that can’t be solved, and diagrams that don’t make sense. You don’t know what’s real and what isn’t until you try to write it down and explain it all.

  She knows that she has to start with a clear statement of her aims;

  In this paper a set of images of voids has been analysed to give estimates of their diameters.

  She pauses. There is something wrong with that sentence but she can’t work out what it is. She carries on;

  These diameters are used to calculate the volume of the voids, and hence upper limits to the star formation rates in these volumes.

  It feels like she can see something out of the corner of her eye, but when she turns to look, there’s nothing there.

  In this paper the voids’ size distribution has been used to put a constraint on the cosmological expansion history.

  Now she realises what is wrong. Her paper is about her work but she’s invisible in it. It’s all written in the passive tense. Because, of course, that is the way that scientific papers are written. The use of the passive tense is deliberate to make the results appear objective and impartial. If you write out the woman with the messy hair and stained check shirt who actually did the work, other scientists may trust it more. That’s the idea and she’s usually happy to go along with it.

  Her name is at the beginning of the paper, and she has to resist the urg
e to check if it’s still there. She’s written umpteen other papers, she should be used to the grammar of the universal scientist. But now, it feels as if she’s disappeared into the white of the computer screen or the black of the voids. She twists in her chair to glance at the shelf of books behind her so she can see her thesis, with her name stamped in gold lettering down its black cloth spine. She takes a deep breath, lays her fingers gently on the keyboard and tries to think about the voids.

  I stole the photo of Kate

  She blinks at the screen. She didn’t mean to write that, she wasn’t even thinking it.

  I stole the photo of Kate from their bedroom. The first time I’ve seen her for so many years. There’s nothing left of her — nothing physical. Just memories and I don’t even know if those are real or made up or dreamt or what.

  She’s not deliberately thinking any of this, it’s just flowing out of her.

  She appears in my head, in mirrors and then she disappears. How do I keep hold of her?

  She doesn’t know the answer to this.

  No galaxies were detected in these voids, down to a central surface brightness of R=25. Nothing was detected at all.

  And nothing will be detected in the future, no matter how hard you look.

  Why did they keep the photo upstairs? Why wasn’t it downstairs? Why did they keep it from me? Kate is invisible and now so am I.

  She’s crying now, tears dripping from her cheeks onto the keyboard, but she manages to carry on typing.

  What I don’t know about my sister’s death:

  She remembers the hospital. A room with peach coloured walls and her parents’ faces wiped dumb and smooth. They don’t see Kate.

  They see her body, but it’s not her. Kate’s body is a bluish grey, the same colour as her finger nails. Her eyes are shut. There’s no injury, no mark on her skin.