Matthew Mather's Compendium

by Matthew Mather

  Fear jangled again in Ben’s fingertips. He was hearing the full explanation for the first time, and he hadn’t been entirely convinced the night before.

  When measuring radial velocity to search for an exoplanet, only the wobble was of interest, not the constant effects. You subtracted the Earth’s rotation, the movement of an orbiting observatory, the motion of the Earth around the sun, the motion of the Sun around the galactic core—with everything pulled apart by gravity. And after that, they even allowed for the heating or cooling of the device itself, down to the tiniest of imperfections in the system. Each observation team had a long list of “fudge factors” they used for their own systems.

  The question Dr. Müller now posed: was there an overlooked factor they all shared?

  If so, what exactly was it?

  4

  Chianti, Italy

  celeste stared at her daughter.

  “Police?” Celeste’s shoulders dropped momentarily, then hitched back up. “What happened? Is that why you rushed me out here?”

  “The reason we’re here is to have a girls’ trip,” Jess said, which she knew to be a white lie. “And to find this long-lost cousin of yours.”

  A few weeks earlier, her mother had received a Facebook message from an Italian relative, asking her to come and visit. Totally unexpected. As far as her mother knew, none of their family still lived in Italy after moving to America generations ago.

  Celeste kept eye contact with her daughter. “Who, what, are you in trouble with?”

  “I need money.”

  “For what?”

  “A lawyer.”

  “For what?”

  Jess gritted her teeth. “This guy I was dating, Riccardo—”

  “The splitsville guy?”

  Jess picked at her thumbnail. Her nails were always a mess.

  “I’m still waiting to hear why?” Celeste’s expression changed to one Jess had seen a million times before. “Honey, it’s okay, just tell me.”

  Jess paused. “Riccardo and I got into a fight. He hit me. Enough is enough. I grabbed my things, took off. I sold some of my climbing gear to pay some debts. He got mad and called the police, said I’d stolen stuff from him, but that’s a huge lie. I didn’t. Honest.”

  A stupid fight that had spiraled out of control. She’d been living in Rome with Riccardo for the past two months. Nothing serious. Just fun. Convenient. Physical. Not serious then, but now it was. If she were being truthful, she’d admit to hitting him first, and really hard. Her anger always seemed to brim right under the surface of things; too often it darted out to taste the air, although it usually vanished as quickly.

  “Someone hit you?” Her mother didn’t seem so much concerned with her daughter getting hit, as amazed the offending party wasn’t in the hospital. “And they want to arrest you for that?”

  Jess shook her head. She knew she was being overly dramatic, something her mother seemed to bring out in her. “I’ve been working here illegally, okay, and Riccardo can be an asshole when it suits him. It was a lot of gear I sold. I don’t want to get stuck—”

  “Everyone,” Nico said loudly from the front of the room, “I’d like your attention, please.”

  Jess looked away from her mother’s eyes, glancing at the tour guide before feeling a presence behind her. The door to the room must have opened while they were talking, and someone had stepped in behind them.

  A man was staring at her. A deep scar creased his forehead under a mop of black hair. The man fixed Jess with penetrating brown eyes. Where had she seen him before? In the parking lot on the way in? That was it. She had almost run into him. Tattoos never impressed Jess, but scars were another matter. “Scusi,” she mumbled in Italian.

  “No, I apologize,” said tall-dark-and-scarred.

  At that moment, Jess noticed the man was holding the hand of a boy, who stared up at her. She stepped aside to let the two of them pass.

  “Today we have a very special honor,” Nico continued from the front of the room. “Baron Giovanni Ruspoli and little Hector are joining us. This is their castle—their home—we are visiting.”

  Baron Ruspoli walked forward between Jess and Celeste. He turned, bowed ever so slightly, and put forward his hand to Celeste. “Giovanni Ruspoli,” he said.

  “A pleasure. Celestina Tosetti,” Celeste replied, and shook his hand.

  Jess thought she detected the faintest of shadows pass across the Baron’s smile, although it quickly vanished. She glanced at the boy, Hector, holding the Baron’s hand. Not more than five or six years old, he watched Jess with wide brown eyes under a mass of black hair. An image of children chasing each other through a snow-covered field flitted through her mind. She shook it off.

  “A pleasure.” The Baron turned to face Jess.

  “Oh, sorry.” Jess tore her eyes away from the little boy. The Baron’s hand hovered empty in the air between them. She took it. “Jess—”

  The Baron bowed and kissed her hand.

  “—ica.” She finished her name in barely more than a whisper, the Baron’s lips leaving her skin. His hand felt warm and soft against her calloused fingers. She let go quickly.

  “A pleasure,” repeated the Baron. He looked down. “This young man is Hector.”

  “Buongiorno,” little Hector said.

  “Buongiorno,” they both chimed back.

  The Baron leaned over and murmured, “Vieni, Hector, let’s greet our other guests.” He straightened up and smiled at Celeste. “I am trying to teach him English.” He turned and walked to the front of the room, holding his hand out to the other tourists. Hector trailed Giovanni, his eyes still glued to Jess.

  “I think he likes your hair,” whispered Celeste to her daughter.

  “Who? The Baron?”

  Celeste laughed. “Hector.” She reached to hold her daughter’s hand. “I think Baron Giovanni was interested in more than your hair.”

  “Mom!”

  “He kissed your hand, not mine.” Celeste smiled at her daughter playfully. “A barone.” She pronounced the word in Italian, baro-nay.

  Jess snorted. “I read online that he shows up for all the tour groups. Must need the money.”

  The Baron’s head turned ever so slightly.

  Her mother’s mouth dropped open at her impertinence, but then, this was her daughter. “Now how much money do you need for this lawyer business—”

  The door behind them swung open again. A grizzled face lined with deep creases poked its way in; above the furrowed brow, flyaway white hair sprouted in clumps from a deeply tanned scalp. The old man pulled a pipe out from between his teeth with stumpy fingers on a hand that resembled a meat hook. “Barone,” he growled, “Polizia all'ingresso.”

  The Baron turned from chatting with the tour guests. “Polizia?” he asked the pipe smoker. “Per la… controversia?”

  The old man shook his head. “Non la controversia.” He turned his eyes from the Baron to glance at Jess. “Qualcos'altro,” he grunted, frowning at her before closing the door.

  Even with Jess’s limited Italian, she understood: Police. At the entrance. The other part she didn’t understand, something about a controversy? That part didn’t seem to have anything to do with her, but from the old man’s body language—were these police here for her?

  Swearing under her breath, Jess remembered leaving an itinerary for this trip pinned to Riccardo’s fridge. Was he really that much of an asshole, to call the police out here? For a few thousand worth of climbing gear? “Mom, can we go?”

  The third floor of the museum was one large hall, sixty feet long, separated into three twenty-foot square rooms connected by a wide hallway down one side with large windows facing the courtyard. Jess and Celeste stood by the door to the main entrance, next to the windows, with the tour guide and the other couple standing on the other side of the room. Down the hallway, at the opposite end, another exit led onto a balcony.

  Jess gla
nced over her left shoulder, through one of the large lead-glass windows. Two police officers, in short-sleeve blue shirts with red-striped pants and peaked hats emblazoned with a golden eagle, stood at the closed iron gates of the castle.

  “I want to get out of here,” she whispered, flicking her chin at the back entrance down the hallway.

  Celeste gripped her daughter’s hand tighter.

  “Excuse me.” The Baron stood in front of them again.

  In an irrational burst, Jess thought he was going to grab hold of her, punish her for the snide remark and drag her outside to the police—that somehow the old man had communicated something to him. Instead, he eased himself between the two women and opened the door behind them.

  The Baron stopped and turned. “Please, watch Hector for a moment?” he asked them. “Nico is here, in all cases.”

  Jess looked down. The boy stared up at her. Why was the Baron asking them to take care of his son? Why was a Baron even talking to them at all?

  “Of course,” Celeste replied. She took Hector’s hand with her free one, while still holding hands with her daughter. The Baron disappeared out the door.

  The women craned their necks to look out the window. Once he was down the two flights of exterior stairs, the old man crossed the gravel courtyard and stood by the gate. The police gesticulated, seemingly to convince him to open the gates, yet he only stared at them coolly and puffed his pipe.

  “Take care of the boy,” Jess said over the top of Hector to her mother. “I’m going out the back way. I’ll walk into town.”

  The thought of the humiliation of being arrested in front of her mother propelled Jess away. Not fear, but loss of control. Maybe they were here for her, maybe not, but she couldn’t take the chance. Get back to Rome, see that lawyer. Get this over with. She regretted not doing it sooner.

  That familiar look of parental concern returned to Celeste’s face. “Jessica…”

  “We’ll meet up later, okay?” Jess turned to stride off. She glanced through the windows. The Baron was talking to the police now. He glanced up at the museum.

  She reached the back door and grabbed and tried to turn the handle. Jammed. With both hands she gripped the door handle and wrenched it hard. This time it opened. She stepped outside onto a small deck leading down a rocky slope into a grove of fir trees lining that side of the castle. A pathway led down from there into the village below, through the woods. Jess and her mother had planned to walk down it later in the day.

  Stepping onto the slope, her left leg wobbled, alcohol and adrenaline competing to confuse her senses. Shouting erupted behind her. Jess glanced back at the entrance to see the Baron flicking his hands at the police. Her good ankle twisted on a loose stone, and she stumbled forward, losing her balance.

  She pitched sideways, but instead of tumbling down the rocky embankment, she automatically tucked into a forward roll, spotting a concrete ledge sticking out of the steepening incline she could swing her foot onto to stop her momentum.

  Spinning, she perfectly timed jamming her right foot against the ledge to bring herself upright, but halfway through the maneuver it gave way, sending her plummeting out of control. Putting her hand out, she tried to stop her fall, but her arm twisted back and her head slammed into the ground. Her world erupted in a flash of pain.

  5

  Rome, Italy

  “Quiet!” Dr. Müller yelled from the front of the room, trying to regain some control of his presentation. “Please, let me finish.”

  “Are you drawing this conclusion only from the Voyager data?” asked a voice from the back of the room.

  An excellent question. Several incredible discoveries had turned out to be of less-than-spectacular origin. One that came to Ben’s mind was faster-than-light neutrinos that ended up being nothing more than measurement error.

  “You haven’t been able to see the forest for the trees, so to speak,” replied Dr. Müller. “Let me explain.”

  The noise in the room died down.

  “For hundreds of years, our entire solar system has been falling toward this massive dark object. A part of the observed effect in the Pioneer Anomaly is due to thermal radiation, but the more important component is tidal effects.”

  “Tidal effects?” someone asked.

  “Exactly,” Dr. Müller said. “Tidal effects across the entire solar system.” Nodding, he crossed and uncrossed his arms before pointing at the graphic detailing the paths of the Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft into interstellar space. “Because the planets are bound tightly to the sun, as a whole we experience more or less the same gravity of the object approaching us. Everything in the solar system is falling toward it at the same rate.”

  He pointed outward, away from the cluster of planetary orbits at Voyager 1. “But here, at almost five times the distance to Neptune, the Voyager spacecraft are experiencing a slightly different gravity from this object. To begin with, the difference was small, within the limits of what we attributed to the Pioneer Anomaly, but with this object drawing closer, the effect is growing.”

  A new graphic appeared on the screen behind him, an image of the paths of Voyager and Pioneer. Instead of a view from the north polar axis of the solar system—looking down—it observed the orbits of the planets side-on. “As you can see, the Pioneer spacecraft both exited in the plane of the solar system, but Voyager 1 and 2 both left at fairly high angles.” He illuminated a laser pointer that traced their paths, at angles of about thirty degrees upward, for Voyager 1, and downward, for Voyager 2, from the plane of the planetary orbits.

  “Several months ago, the slight acceleration experienced by Voyager 1 changed from being an acceptable error to being some kind of system malfunction. Voyager 1 is over a billion kilometers farther out than Voyager 2, but within weeks the same thing began happening to it as well.” He moved his laser pointer to the image of Voyager 2. “At that point, both of the probes accelerated toward each other, and now they’ve reversed course and begun slowing down. We have one other probe out there, the New Horizons spacecraft that flew by Pluto, and we are getting measurements from it that are consistent with our Nomad hypothesis.”

  “What trajectory?” someone asked from near the front. “Is it going to enter the solar system?”

  “As I discussed last night with Dr. Rollins…” Müller pointed at Ben, by inference making him complicit in knowing about this beforehand, and making it seem that he agreed with him. “…that is exactly what we need your help with. By going through all of your collected radial velocity data, with the assumption that the solar system is falling toward some nearby massive object, we should be able to determine its path. Or better still, as we all hope, that this is somehow an error.”

  Or a hoax. It still seemed impossible.

  “We are also in the process of conducting a new round of measurements of planets against background star fields,” Dr. Müller added. “An object this massive, this close, should be perturbing their orbits.”

  And should have been perturbing them for a very long time already, Ben thought. Dr. Müller had a solid reputation as a careful researcher and was a respected member of the community, but too many loose ends were in the air.

  “You said Voyager 1 was affected, and then Voyager 2 a few weeks later,” said another voice in the crowd. “They’re more than a billion kilometers apart. How fast do you think this thing is moving?”

  Looking up from the podium he hung onto as if it was a life raft, Dr. Müller grimaced. “At hundreds of kilometers a second. Possibly thousands.”

  “That’s not possible,” someone said from the front row.

  Even the fastest hyper-velocity stars inside the Milky Way galaxy moved at only twelve hundred kilometers a second. Ben made the same objection the night before.

  Dr. Müller held his hands out. “We don’t have the answers right now; that’s why we need your help.”

  “What is it?” Ufuk Erdogmus asked. “Have you been able to ima
ge it?”

  The list of options was slim. Up to five solar masses, it might be a non-rotating neutron or quark star, but this would be no more than fifteen kilometers across. At twenty billion kilometers distant, it was probably impossible to see. Could it be a black hole? Or perhaps something more exotic, an encounter with dark matter?

  Astronomers typically stared at very specific areas of the sky. Few projects tried to take in wide swaths. Those that did, such as the Sloan and Catalina sky surveys, detected thousands of unknown objects that nobody had had a chance to fully examine yet. Ben had dabbled in the subject, ever since he had participated in the Red Shift survey in the 80s. He had his own collection of anomalous objects he researched as a hobby.

  Dr. Müller shook his head. “We haven’t been able to detect anything except the gravitational signature. Whatever Nomad is, right now it is almost directly behind the sun.” Which made Earth-based telescopes and orbiting platforms almost useless for trying to look at it, he didn’t have to explain.

  “Until we get confirmation,” Dr. Müller added, “secrecy is of the utmost importance. We don’t want to create panic.”

  Ben’s stomach fluttered. “Wait, you said it was coming from the direction of the sun. What exact direction?”

  “We’ve sent information packets to all of your emails, including our best guess at the right ascension and declination—but in general terms, from the direction of Gliese 445.” For a full second, Müller locked eyes with Ben, then looked sharply looked away.

  Ben felt the fluttering in his stomach rise to his throat.

  Gliese 445.

  6

  Chianti, Italy

  An image danced in front of Jess’s eyes of a black hole ringed in brilliant white, framing a small boy’s face. Two children played in a field of snow, laughing. The image faded, but the boy’s face remained. Jess blinked, fully opening her eyes, and the boy smiled.

  “Zio,” the boy said, turning away, “zio, è sveglia.”