Matthew Mather's Compendium

by Matthew Mather

  It was one thing to say you had the data, another to decode it. Never mind trying to figure out how to read the magnetic tapes or floppy disks Mrs. Brown was hunting for. Making sense of the compression algorithms and file formats of ten years ago was proving difficult. He’d bet the other teams were having the same problems. He had to confirm that apples were apples, and over the Grand Hotel’s feeble wireless connection, four thousand miles from the office, that was a challenge.

  “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 was a wizard at picking through Ben’s messes. “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.

  A valid point, one Roger would understand. One of the problems with searching through huge amounts of data was that, eventually, you could pretty much see what you wanted. If he told Roger what he was looking for, chances are, he’d find it. This was Ben’s principle apprehension with Müller’s hypothesis; so, Ben was having Roger comb through their radial velocity searches of stars to study the subtractive factors, to see if any were changing over time. To look in all directions at the celestial sphere to see how the solar system was moving, not just a snapshot, but over time, was a huge undertaking.

  “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’s nose crinkled. “What kind of changes in variability?”

  Time domain astronomy—seeing changes in objects over time—was still in its infancy. “Any significant deviations over the past decade,” Ben clarified.

  “Sure.” Roger raised his eyebrows, clearly not confident 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, who’d just popped a few pills from his pocket. Maybe he had a headache also? “I’ve got to go upstairs.”

  Ben walked down the carpeted hallway outside his room and took the elevator to the top floor. Although he was having Roger search through the data, he 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, but 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.

  Dr. Müller turned away from one of the whiteboards. “Dr. Rollins. Good. We were waiting for the Harvard-Smithsonian’s opinion.”

  Ben strode to the middle of the room. “My preliminary assessment indicates that a large mass could be moving toward the solar system. Nothing definitive. It’s a possibility.”

  “Five of the six teams have reported the same thing,” Dr. Muller said. He motioned toward the whiteboards.

  “Might be confirmation bias. We need more time.”

  “And yet, you must be seeing that something is there?”

  Ben didn’t want to be persuaded to say more than what he observed himself. “I won’t hazard a guess on how far or how fast. 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. 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. “Did he talk to you?”

  “Why would he?”

  “Erdogmus wasn’t expected. He’s a hard man to stop at the door, yes?” Müller seemed to be gauging Ben’s reaction, to see if he would agree or disagree. “The man has a collection of 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.”

  “That ship isn’t designed for years of life support en-route, is it?”

  “It’s already a suicide mission, no?”

  When Müller stroked his chin with his right hand, Ben noticed a signet ring designed with a yin-yang symbol. 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—only the signet ring was new. Ben didn’t remember him being Taoist, or religious in any way.

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

  Neptune was the closest planet right now.

  Any hope Ben had of this being an elaborate hoax or miscalculation was evaporating. Hard to argue with something as straightforward as measuring a planet against the background star field. The cigarette smoke in the air was burning his throat, his eyes were tearing up, and the temperature in the room was too warm, and yet the queasiness in his stomach had nothing to do with these external discomforts.

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

  “Not yet,” Dr. Müller told him. “Let’s decipher the data properly and figure out the path of Nomad. That’ll take days, or weeks. What is its mass, and how might it affect us? We need these answers first.”

  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.”

  “That’s what we’ve done already. That’s why you’re here.” Dr. Müller held up his hands. “But I know what you’re saying. We must be prudent. 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 into Müller’s eyes. Was it fear he saw in them? Resolve? “If this is as bad as it might be…” Ben whispered, his voice trailing off.

  “We are very far from that,” the German replied.

  Ben held his
gaze for another moment before looking away. No. It wasn’t fear he saw in those eyes. It seemed to be some kind of excitement.

  Ben was still lost in his thoughts when he slipped his keycard into the hotel room door. Before he could open it, it seemingly swung back 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. “Something big is heading this way, isn’t it?”

  No point in trying to lie now. “Yes.”

  “What do you know?”

  “Not much,” Ben answered honestly. “When I do find out, I’m expecting it to be bad.”

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

  “Keep on it. I need to make another phone call.” Even if Müller wasn’t ready to tell the world, Ben sure as hell needed to make sure his family knew.

  10

  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. Giovanni had invited them to dinner in the main dining room of the castle.

  “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.”

  “Thanks.” Even if it was only her mother saying it, the words were still nice to hear.

  Her mother’s smile receded. “Are you…” She hesitated. “Are you keeping up with your counseling?”

  Jess looked down. “I deal with it in other ways.”

  “But your doctors—”

  “Don’t know what they’re talking about. And Veterans’ Affairs doesn’t cover medical expenses out of country. I’m not even officially supposed to be—”

  “I could pay.”

  “I don’t want you to pay.” Jess kicked gravel from the path. “Not for that.”

  Celeste’s smile returned and she took a deep breath, sensing this wasn’t a battle she neither wanted to fight nor could win. “You seemed to have a nice time with Giovanni and Hector this afternoon.”

  “He’s a nice kid.” Jess stopped before the huge open doorway at the corner of the castle’s interior walls. “Is this the dining room?”

  They were given directions, but the room seemed empty. Pushing the door open, she peered inside. 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 caught sight of her and waved them over.

  “I guess it’s just us for dinner,” Jess whispered to her mother. As she came through the door she discovered the room to be huge, with at least forty tables all set in white linen and shining tableware. Twenty-foot-high arched windows lined the walls, with towering cathedral ceilings. Lit tea candles burned in the centers of each table.

  “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, then 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.

  “The hall is beautiful,” she said.

  At the table, Nico and Hector both stood. Nico also kissed the women on both cheeks, while the young boy waited 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.”

  The Italian smiled.

  “Please, sit.” He 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?”

  The women 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.

  “Those are pictures of you, Giovanni? On the mountaintops?” Celeste asked after the waiter finished his explanations.

  “My father put them up all around the house,” Giovanni explained. “I have been on many expeditions. In the Alps, also the Himalayas.”

  “Jess is an outdoor nut as well,” Celeste commented.

  “Your father?” Jess asked, ignoring her mother. “There are two Barons?” In the afternoon, she hadn’t pushed Nico on the topic of the Giovanni’s family, sensing his discomfort. She remained curious, though. “I’m not familiar with royalty conventions.”

  She detected a sadness in his smile.

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

  Her smile fell away. “I’m so sorry. My condolences.”

  “Thank you.” Giovanni took a sip from his wine. “I was on an expedition in Antarctica when my father passed. It took me a long time to return. Nico was here, however, caring for him.”

  “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. “Zio is ‘uncle’ in Italian. He is only visiting. I’m not married.”

  Jess knew her mother would be staring at her at that moment. She purposely avoided looking her way.

  “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.

  “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, to be independent, to explore. Like you are. Forgive me for saying so, but 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. “Of course, I love my mom and dad.” She glanced at Celeste, only now realizing that she’d been speaking with her mouth full. She swallowed the bread and washed it down with a gulp of wine. “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.”

  In past relationships, Jess had tried to be the doting girlfriend, had tried to put on the mantle of the wife role. But she couldn’t stand waiting on someone else, waiting for them to come home. She had no idea how someone could love a person like that. How someone could love her like that.

  “I have to disagree,” Giovanni countered gently. “I don’t think a person can become a true individual being alone. We only become unique and authentic by entering a community of two, by sharing our lives. Community, family, that is what is important.”

  “If family is so important, why were you off trekking Antarctica while your dad was sick?” Jess shot back before she could stop herself.

  “Jessica!” her mother exclaimed.

  “
Oh, my God, I didn’t mean to—”

  “No, no, it’s a fair question.” Giovanni took a deep breath. “Family is everything, but sometimes, family can be… complicated.”

  “I’m sure there was nothing you could have done.” Jess brought one hand to her mouth, grimacing. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”

  Giovanni forced a smile. “What a terrible host I am. Let’s change topics. I haven’t asked about your family.” He looked at Celeste. “Is there a Mr. Tosetti?”

  “Tosetti was my maiden name. I’m separated.”

  “But not divorced,” Jess added, looking at her mother and raising her eyebrows. “My dad’s an astronomer, works at Harvard. Dr. Ben Rollins.”

  “Of course, the famous Dr. Rollins. I have seen him on television.” The Italian’s eyes lit up. “On that topic, I have something very special to show you. After dinner perhaps?”

  Mentioning her father had a calming effect. “Sure. I’d like that.”

  The rest of dinner went smoothly. Giovanni proved to an attentive and gracious host, and the food and wine were spectacular. Afterward, Nico offered to take Celeste for a walk through the gardens, while a nanny ushered Hector off to bed just before the final round of grappa was served. Which left Giovanni and Jess alone.

  “It’s amazing.”

  Jess stood on a stepladder, admiring the mirror of a large reflecting telescope in the castle’s observatory. Similar in design to the one her father had taught her to use, back at their cottage in the Catskills, Jess had seen the dome-shaped roof on one of the castle turrets. She hadn’t thought anything of it. Giovanni clicked on a set of motors that winched back the covering, revealing a beautiful Tuscan night sky; the stars a carpet of diamonds thrown across the oil slick of blackness above.

  “It’s, what, a meter across?”

  “One point one,” Giovanni said. “My grandfather’s hobby, his passion, was astronomy. In the tradition of Galileo, yes? He lived not far from here.”

  “Amazing, and it’s in such excellent condition.” She stepped down. “At dinner…” She hesitated. “I want to apologize. What a terrible thing for me to say. I don’t know why I was so rude.”