Nomad

by Matthew Mather

  Jess let her head sag to one side. “Well, it wasn’t just for that.” She pulled in two more feet of rope into the brake as Hector climbed. “And I don’t know anything about the old family. My mom says her dad refused to talk about it.”

  “You know nothing?” Nico turned to look at Jess.

  “Nothing at all.” Jess wagged her head, shrugging. “And you, do you have family here?”

  Nico’s jaw muscles rippled, but he smiled. “No, I have no family.”

  “You’re from Naples, though. Isn’t that what you said earlier?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And Giovanni’s father hired you to work here.”

  Nico nodded. “Seven years ago he took me in. He was like a father to me, and I did my best to look after him when he got sick, even when Giovanni left.” He let out a long sigh. “Ah, I forget myself. I really should not talk of the Baron’s family.”

  Where was Giovanni’s father now? In Florence, Jess guessed, but she didn’t want to pry, so she switched topics. “The police who were here this morning, did Giovanni really just shoo them away?”

  “Yes.”

  “He can do that?”

  Nico grinned at Jess. “This is not America. The Ruspolis, well…I wouldn’t worry, not while you are his guest.”

  “And Leone mentioned something about a controversia, what was that about?” Jess whispered.

  Glancing to his right, toward the cable car and the castello on the opposite side of the gorge, Nico replied, “I don’t know.” He shrugged and jerked the cord tight, earning a muffled complaint from Giovanni thirty feet overhead. “Of that, I have no idea.”

  8

  ROME, ITALY

  BEN PULLED BACK the curtains of his hotel room window and peeked out. Brilliant sunshine streamed in from a perfect blue sky. The traffic growled, and people shuffled by in the street, some shopping, some sipping coffees in the café.

  A beautiful day for predicting the end of the world.

  “Well, have a look in the back!” Ben shouted into his cell phone. Mrs. Brown, their seventy-eight-year-old administrative assistant, was going deaf. She refused to retire, and there was no way Ben would fire her. She’d been a part of his life longer than he could even remember now. “Yes, I know what time it is. I’m very sorry.”

  Almost ten at night in Boston. He’d dragged her out of bed to search his office, to dig through the mountains of papers and boxes he’d accumulated in his thirty years at Harvard-Smithsonian. He needed data, really old data. Spools of tape he’d collected that dated back to the 1970s, before he’d even started at Harvard as a student, along with magnetic tapes; floppy disks from the 80s; CDs from the 90s. Ben was a pack rat, his office the epitome of the disorganized professor, but he knew what he needed was in there.

  Ben let go of the curtain, casting the hotel room back into darkness. “Mrs. Brown, I know this is difficult, but please keep searching. This is an emergency.” He rubbed one temple to try to ease back a throbbing headache. The fate of the world might rest in the eyesight of Mrs. Brown, twice over a great-grandmother. “I’ll stay on the line while you look.”

  Pushing mute on his phone, he turned to Roger, his grad student, sitting cross-legged on the room’s double bed. Although the Grand Hotel was fancy, the rooms were tiny. Ben had installed himself at the sliver of a working desk near the window, so the only other place to work was on the bed.

  “Did you get the new data downloads?” Ben asked.

  “Just getting them now,” Roger replied. A nest of papers surrounded him, his face staring into his laptop screen. “The wireless in this hotel sucks. Even if I get it downloaded, it’s going to take time to unpack and normalize.”

  It was one thing to say you had the data, but another to decode it. Never mind trying to figure out how to read the magnetic tapes or floppy disks he had Mrs. Brown hunting for. Just trying to make sense of the compression algorithms and file formats of ten years ago was proving more difficult than Ben had imagined. He would bet the other teams were having the same problems. Making sure apples were apples wasn’t easy, especially over the Grand Hotel’s feeble wireless connection, four thousand miles from the office.

  “Just make it happen. This is important.” Ben clicked off the mute on his phone. “Yes, that’s right,” he yelled. “The one marked 'Red Shift 1977', that’s the one.” Mrs. Brown might be old, but she was a wizard at picking through Ben’s messes. “And you have a list of the others? Good.” He clicked mute on his phone again.

  “Want to tell me what this is all about, Bernie?” Roger asked from the bed.

  Bernie. Ben’s old college nickname. His students liked to use it to rile him up. “I can’t tell you. I need to see if you find it for yourself,” Ben said.

  It was a valid point, one Roger would understand. A problem with searching through huge amounts of data was that, eventually, you could see almost anything you wanted. If he told Roger what he was looking for, he’d probably find it. That was Ben’s main misgiving with Dr. Müller’s hypothesis. So Ben was having Roger comb through their radial velocity searches of stars to look at the subtractive factors, see if any of them were changing significantly over time. It was a big undertaking, looking in all directions at the celestial sphere to see how the solar system was moving, and not just a snapshot, but over time.

  “Okay, boss, but you owe me,” Roger said, his face bathed in the glow from his laptop screen.

  Ben smiled. “Next conference in Hawaii.”

  Roger’s face brightened. “Deal.”

  “Oh, and could you email Susan and ask her if she could check the Red Shift, Sloan, Catalina surveys for any changes in variability of stars in vicinity of Gliese 445?”

  Roger frowned, his face still glued to the laptop screen. “Changes in variability?”

  Time domain astronomy—seeing changes in objects over time—was still in its infancy. “Yes, not regular variability, but any significant changes over the past decade.”

  “Sure.” Roger raised his eyebrows, clearly not confident that it would be possible. “Anything for a trip to Hawaii.”

  Ben pressed his ear back to the phone, clicking mute back off. “Yes!” he shouted into the phone. “Overnight the boxes to the hotel, under my name. Thank you, Mrs. Brown.”

  Taking a deep breath, he hung up and looked at Roger. “I’ve got to go upstairs.”

  Ben walked down the carpeted hallway outside his room and took the elevator to the top floor. He was having Roger search through the data, but Ben already had a good idea of what he’d find. He’d checked a few data points himself, in the direction suggested by Dr. Müller, and could see a growing acceleration factor. It was one that they’d fudged over as a mass of dark matter in the nearby spiral arm of the galaxy, just as Dr. Müller had described.

  When the elevator door pinged at the top floor and the door opened, two large security men greeted him and repeated the biometric routine. Ben was used to it now. Fourth time today. They weren’t meeting in the ballroom anymore.

  “Dr. Müller’s room?” Ben asked.

  One of the gorillas pointed down the hallway. “Last door at the end.”

  Most of the other teams had already moved up here, but Ben wanted to keep a little distance. He wasn’t sure who was paying for all this security. Walking to the end of the hallway, he opened the door, revealing an opulent suite with marble floors and period-piece 19th-Century furniture, the chairs and couches filled with people slouched over, staring into laptop screens. A wall of whiteboards, filled with sketches and numbers, obscured the windows looking out over Rome. The air was thick with cigarette smoke.

  “Ah, Dr. Rollins,” Dr. Müller said, turning from one of the whiteboards. “Good. We were waiting for the Harvard-Smithsonian’s opinion.”

  Ben strode forward into the middle of the room. “It’s not official, but yes, from my preliminary assessment, it is possible that a large mass is moving toward the solar system.”

  Dr. Müller pur
sed his lips and nodded. “Five of the six teams have reported the same thing.” He motioned at the whiteboards.

  “Might be confirmation bias,” Ben pointed out. “We need more time.”

  “I agree, but you must see that there is something there?”

  “Yes, I think something is there,” Ben agreed. “But how far, how fast, I don’t know. What else are we doing?” Something of this magnitude needed proof beyond a doubt.

  “The European Space Agency, NASA and the Russians, Japanese and Chinese have begun re-aligning their orbiting and ground-based observatories to look in the direction of Nomad. But if it’s there, it’s coming from almost exactly behind the sun. Our best hope is the Gaia observatory. It’s the only space-based observatory not immediately near Earth.”

  Ben nodded. Gaia’s Lagrange 2 location was a point about 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth, in a direction away from the sun. The Gaia observatory was the most sophisticated exoplanet-hunting tool they had. If anything could spot this thing, Gaia was their best hope.

  “What was Ufuk Erdogmus doing at the meeting? I thought you only wanted astronomers.”

  Dr. Müller slipped his hands into his pockets and lifted his chin. “Why? Did he talk to you?”

  “No. Why would he?”

  “I don’t know.” Dr. Müller rocked back on his heels. “Erdogmus wasn’t expected, but it’s hard to stop a man such as this, yes?” He licked his lips. “And the man has eight frozen human popsicles halfway from here to Mars. He offered to wake some of them up, to try and use the Mars First ship-board instrumentation to look at Nomad’s location.”

  “Wouldn’t that be a death sentence? That ship isn’t designed for years of life support en-route, is it?”

  “It’s already a suicide mission, no?” Müller stroked his chin with his right hand, and Ben noticed a signet ring.

  The ring looked like it had a yin-yang symbol on it. In the twenty-odd years since Ben had seen him last, Müller hadn’t changed much—a few extra pounds, a little less hair, a little more wrinkled and gray—but the signet ring was new. Ben didn’t remember him being Taoist, or even religious in any way. Müller pulled his hand away and slid it back into his pocket.

  “In any case, we declined his help as ridiculous,” Dr. Müller said. “It’s a foregone conclusion that something is there. We’re already seeing a shift in Neptune’s orbit.”

  And Neptune was the closest planet right now.

  Any hope Ben had of this being an elaborate hoax or miscalculation was evaporating. It would be hard to argue with something as straightforward as measuring a planet against the background star field. The cigarette smoke in the air burned his throat, his eyes teared, and the temperature in the room seemed to rise.

  “Are you going to make an announcement?” Ben asked. But where would people go? There was no way to escape the planet.

  “Of course,” Dr. Müller agreed. “Not yet, though. It will take days, weeks, for us to decipher the data properly and figure out the path of Nomad, what its mass is, and how it might affect us.”

  Weeks? By then it might be too late. But too late for what? What were the options? “I think we should bring in a larger community of scientists, at least.”

  Dr. Müller held up his hands. “We don’t want to be alarmist. We don’t even know if it will come close to the inner solar system yet. This thing is, what, twenty billion kilometers away?”

  Ben looked Dr. Müller in the eye. “I need to get back to my data.”

  Ben was still lost in his thoughts when he slipped his keycard into the hotel room door. Before he could open it, it swung back by itself. Not really by itself—Roger stood in front of him, his face ashen.

  “Gliese 445?” Roger said slowly. “Variability? Microlensing, is that what you’re looking for?”

  Ben pushed his way inside and closed the door. “What did you find?”

  Roger pushed the papers on the bed aside and sat down. “Something big is heading this way, isn’t it?”

  There was no point in trying to lie. “Yes,” Ben replied simply.

  “What do you know?”

  “Not too much yet,” Ben answered honestly. “But I have a feeling it’s not going to be good when we do find out.”

  “Do you want me to keep looking through the data?”

  Ben nodded. “And I need to make another phone call.”

  9

  CHIANTI, ITALY

  CELESTE AND JESS walked along a gravel path through the gardens outside the west walls of the castle, underneath huge oak trees, with a view down the mountain to the twinkling lights of the village far below.

  “You look nice,” Jess said, admiring her mother’s calf-length black dress and heels with envy. Rarely, if ever, would Jess wear anything but jeans in casual company, and she always wore flats or sneakers. High heels didn’t work well with a prosthetic foot. In sports, she’d wear shorts or Spandex pants, but only when she was mostly alone. She wouldn’t admit it, but it was probably the reason she enjoyed hiding on cliff faces and mountaintops.

  “Thank you.” Celeste looked at her daughter. “And you’re stunning, Jessica.” She smiled. “You seemed to have a nice time with Giovanni and Hector this afternoon.”

  “He’s a nice kid.”

  Giovanni had invited them to dinner in the main dining room of the castle. Stopping in front of a huge open doorway at the corner of the interior walls, Jess asked her mother, “Is this the dining room?”

  They were given directions, but the room seemed empty. Pushing the door open, she peered inside. No, not empty. In the far corner people sat at a table, light spilling onto them from an open kitchen where she saw a chef in a white hat. Giovanni saw her and waved them over.

  Jess turned to Celeste and shrugged. “I guess it’s just us for dinner.” She opened the door and walked in—a huge room, with at least forty tables all set in white linen and shining tableware. Twenty-foot high arched windows lined the walls, with even higher cathedral ceilings. Lit tea candles burned in the centers of all the empty tables.

  “Sorry,” apologized Giovanni as they approached, standing to greet them. “This dining hall was built in a different era. We still use it to host weddings from time to time. I wanted it to feel, well, lived in.” He hung back, seeming awkward, but stepped forward to kiss Celeste on both cheeks.

  He turned to Jess, leaned in, and she felt his warmth and the stubble of his cheeks on hers as he kissed both sides. “The hall is beautiful,” she said. “And please, stop apologizing.”

  At the table, Nico and Hector both stood. Nico kissed Celeste and Jess on both cheeks, while Hector stood at attention.

  “Good evening, Madame Tosetti,” Hector said when they all looked at him. “And Mistress Jessica, you look lovely.”

  Jess rolled her eyes and looked at Giovanni. “You taught him that.”

  Giovanni shrugged and smiled. They all laughed politely.

  “Please, sit.” Giovanni pulled back a chair for Jess, while Nico did the same for Celeste. “I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty of ordering a set course from the chef. I hope there are no vegetarians?”

  Celeste and Jess shook their heads.

  “Good.”

  A waiter swooped in and arranged napkins in their laps. Another appeared with a heaping plate of antipasto to place in the middle of the table, poured glasses of wine for everyone, then described the elements of the antipasto plate.

  “So are those all pictures of you, Giovanni? All the mountaintops?” Celeste asked after the waiter finished his explanations.

  “Yes, those are of me,” Giovanni admitted, almost sheepishly. “My father put them up all around the house. The family wealth afforded me a certain”—he paused to carefully choose his words—“lifestyle. I have been on many expeditions. Of course in the Alps, but also the Himalaya.”

  “Jess is an outdoor nut as well.” Celeste grinned at Giovanni and then Jess while picking up her glass of wine.

  “Your father?
” Jess asked, ignoring her mother. “So there are two Barons? You’re very young to be a Baron, aren’t you?” In the afternoon, she hadn’t pushed Nico, sensing his discomfort, but she was curious. “Sorry, I’m not familiar with royalty conventions.”

  Giovanni smiled sadly. “My father died recently, after a protracted illness. My mother, she died when I was young.”

  Jess’s smile slid from her face. “I’m sorry. My condolences.”

  “Thank you.” Giovanni took a sip from his wine. “I was on an expedition in Antarctica. It took me a long time to return,” Giovanni added. “Nico was here, however, caring for him.” He smiled at Nico, who nodded and smiled a tight-lipped smile in return.

  “And what about little Hector?” Jess asked, looking at her mother, then at Giovanni. “Does Mrs. Ruspoli take care of him while you’re away? He calls you ‘Zio’…is that short for Giovanni?”

  Giovanni put down his glass of wine before laughing. “No, zio is ‘uncle’ in Italian. He is only visiting. I’m not married.”

  Jess had to purposely avoid her mother’s eyes at that revelation.

  “Little Hector’s mother and father are on holiday in Zambia, on safari,” Giovanni continued. “Hector is staying with me for two weeks, a small adventure for the both of us.” He paused to smile at Jess. “Family is the most important thing in life, no?”

  “I guess.” Jess picked a piece of bread and tore it in half.

  “No, you don’t think so?”

  “I don’t want a family, not of my own, if that’s what you mean.” Jess stuffed the bread into her mouth. “I think what’s important in life is to be free, be independent, to explore.” She swallowed the bread. “Like you. If I had your money, I’d do what you’re doing.”

  Everyone at the table stared at her, and Jess felt her cheeks burn. “I mean, I love my mom and dad.” She glanced at Celeste, only now realizing that she’d been speaking with her mouth full. “But most people I know, they’re in a relationship because they can’t stand being alone. It’s a form of co-dependency. I want to be an individual, not half of some compromise.”