Matthew Mather's Compendium

by Matthew Mather

  Giovanni clasped his hands together and looked at the stone floor. “And yet, some truth in what you said. No need to apologize.”

  Jess took in a deep lungful of Tuscan air. “I’m sorry, just the same.”

  Giovanni unclasped his hands. “Apology accepted.”

  “Thank you.”

  They were quiet a while, and she liked that Giovanni didn’t feel the need to constantly fill the air with words. She patted the telescope. “May I give it a try?”

  “Of course, be my guest.”

  Jess did a quick calculation. Early October. That meant Venus should be near Pisces. Looking up, she started by finding the Great Square, as her father taught her as a child. There, in the south, four bright stars glittered. Three formed the edge of Pegasus, and she traced the outline in her mind. Beside it was Pisces, and Venus, at this time of year, should be at its left tip. Unscrewing the stops on the telescope’s gimbals, she swung it around, first eyeballing the approximate direction, and then looking into the viewfinder.

  She found the tail of Pisces, and after slowly adjusting she found the bright yellow dot of Venus. Carefully, she focused. “Beautiful,” she whispered. Leaning away from the telescope, she turned to Giovanni.

  “Yes, beautiful,” he said, but he was watching her, not the night sky. He took hold of her hand.

  The door to the observatory swung open and bright light spilled in from the stairwell. Enzo’s head appeared through the crack in the door, his brown pork-pie hat casting a saucer-like shadow across the stone floor. For a second, Jess could have sworn she saw a flash of something in his eyes. She let go of Giovanni’s hand and stepped back.

  Giovanni frowned at Enzo. “Si? Chosa c'è?”

  “Many apologies.” Enzo grimaced. “A phone call for Ms. Jessica.”

  “Who is it?” Jess asked.

  “Suo padre, your father.”

  “My dad?”

  Enzo nodded, offering a phone. “Si, Dr. Ben Rollins. This is your father, yes?”

  Jess stepped across the platform and took the phone. It was a strange time for him to be returning her call. “Dad, what’s up? Are you okay?” She listened for a few seconds. “What? You want me to do what? Wait, slow down. You’re still at the Astronomical Union meeting, right?”

  “Is everything all right?” Giovanni asked.

  Jess listened to her father for thirty seconds, holding her hand up at Giovanni and Enzo. Then, setting down the receiver, she looked at both of them. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to go. My father. A problem. I must go to my room. Use the phone there. I’m very sorry, but my dad needs my help.” She pushed past Enzo and hopped down the stairs as quickly as she could.

  NOMAD

  Survivor testimony #GR14;

  Event +62hrs;

  Name: Ballie Booker;

  Reported location: England, undetermined

  My name’s Booker, engineer onboard the RNLB Jolly Roger out of Gravesend station, just south of London. Suppose I’m captain now. We lost Valentine, first mate Aubrey Leaming, too. Horrible. Did save eight civvies, got ’em secured down in the survivor room, for what that’s worth.

  When they ordered the evacuation of the city, we knew it was madness, but then the whole thing was madness, wasn’t it? Where d’they expect people to go? Me and the boys decided to hoof it into Tower station, see if we could pick up a few. I mean, we had the Jolly Roger—it’s a steel-carbon, Severn-class lifeboat of the RNLI, bastard can take anything—anyway, we race up the Thames as it empties out. Twenty feet of water gone in an hour. We make it as far as Canary Wharf before our keel hits mud.

  We know it’s coming, but people are standing there on the walls, just staring. Captain Valentine, God bless him, gets up there, convinces a few to trudge through the muck and we secure them, like I said. But then…we thought it was a cloud, mate. It was Aubrey who realized what it was. A wave, man, maybe a thousand foot high. Aubrey screamed at me to get inside, strap in while he battened down the hatches. The first sheet of water hit us like we’d been fired out of a cannon, cracked the superstructure and a starboard window on impact, but she held, our Jolly Roger, she did. Old Aubrey never strapped in…we were tossed around like socks in a washer, puke and blood everywhere. For best part of an hour we were submerged before popping to the surface and the Roger righted itself. Unbelievable, mate, absolute madness.

  I was the only one still conscious, so I set the bilge pumps and went to check our position, radio for help. The electronics was down, the VHF antennae sheared off. Just this shortwave. Thank God for that. I went topside, took the sextant and charts. Didn’t know what to expect, but certainly not bloody blue skies. As if nothing had happened. Like we’d been transported into another world. I got latitude of 52.4 degrees north. Can’t measure longitude in daylight, but we started in London and were swept along, and that wave came from the south, near enough. So I was over Leicester. Or Birmingham. But nothing, just churning blue. No land visible at all and I was supposed to be in the middle of bloody England…

  Transmission ended signoff. Freq. 2182 kHz/USB.

  Subject reacquired pgs 16,24.

  OCTOBER 18th

  11

  Chianti, Italy

  In the morning, Jess found her mother waiting at one of the stone tables in the garden outside the western wall of the castle. Jess was up late but she hadn’t slept in. She hadn’t even slept. All night she’d been on the phone with her father, going over his information. About this thing called Nomad. An unknown anomaly approaching. When the others awoke, she hid in her room, needing to be alone, needing to think.

  “Did you have a nice evening with Giovanni?” Celeste asked, as Jess slid in beside her on the stone bench. She filled a coffee cup and passed it to Jess.

  Jess didn’t answer immediately. She stared down the valley, at the village of Saline far below, at the networks of roads and towns in the plains beyond that. Soon, in a matter of months, all of this could be gone. Wiped away, as if it had never been here. Or it could all be swallowed into some kind of rift in space. Nothing seemed real, as if a plastic sheet had been pulled over reality, insulating her from it.

  “This place is magical,” Celeste said, following Jess’s eyes. She reached across the table to hold her daughter’s hand. “You were right to drag me out here. It does feel like home. And your injury! What a silver lining!” She laughed. “Giovanni came by this morning, said we should stay the week. He invited us to go horseback riding through the vineyards. We can stop for lunch down—”

  “We have to go,” Jess said in a dead voice, still staring down the valley at the village.

  “Why?” Celeste squeezed her daughter’s hand. “Don’t be silly. Can you imagine? Giovanni’s grandfather was an astronomer, just like your dad—”

  Jess pulled away from staring at the village and put her coffee down. How could she even start to explain this? “We—have—to—go,” she repeated.

  Celeste’s brow furrowed as she caught the seriousness in her daughter’s tone. “Did something happen with Giovanni?”

  Jess shook her head.

  “You can’t always be running away—”

  “I talked to dad last night. He’s in Rome.”

  Celeste put down her cup. “Why is he in Rome?”

  “He’s at the Astronomical Union meeting.” Jess pressed her lips together. “I haven’t been entirely honest. I wanted some one-on-one time with you. Then, when you got that message from the Italian relative—”

  “Who we haven’t heard from since,” Celeste reminded her.

  “It seemed like a perfect opportunity to get you and Dad together with me here in Italy. I thought, I don’t know…”

  Celeste continued staring at her daughter. “Oh, baby, that’s what this has been about?”

  “But never mind that now. Something’s happened.”

  Celeste noticed that Jess required a deep breath before continuing.

  “Dad’s at th
is meeting, and they discovered something coming from deep space. It’s heading toward the Earth. He needs us to leave with him, get back to the States and go to the cabin in the Catskills—”

  “Didn’t he sell that years ago?”

  “I guess not. Did you hear what I said?”

  “Something about something coming from space?”

  “They don’t know what, but it’s not good.”

  Jess knew her mother, knew she wasn’t one to panic. She didn’t have to sugarcoat the report. Her mother had spent most of her life in the field as a geologist, exploring remote backcountry. Leaning across the table, Jess explained what her father told her the night before, and the look of disbelief on her mother’s face slowly turned to one of shock.

  “Are they sure?” Celeste wanted to know. “Shouldn’t we tell people?”

  “Dad said not to, that they don’t know all the details yet.” As she said this, a soccer ball bounced off her right leg. Hector came running over, and Jess leaned down to retrieve the ball and give it to him.

  “Grazie, Miss Jessica,” Hector said as he took the ball, smiling at her before turning to run back to Raffael and Lucca and Enzo.

  “Nobody?” Celeste stared at Jess, then looked in the direction of Hector. “If your father is telling you, then he must be certain enough.”

  Jess followed her eyes. “You’re right.” Enzo caught her eye and waved. She smiled, tight lipped, and waved back. Something about that guy was creepy. Nico was just coming out of the reception building behind them, leading another tour group. He waved, and she waved back.

  “Nico,” Jess called out. “Do you know where Baron Ruspoli is?”

  “Just out for five minutes,” Nico replied. “Down to the town.”

  “Please, can you get him to meet me up in the observatory when he gets back?”

  The view from the observatory tower was even more amazing during the day than it had been at night. Jess chose not to go in before Giovanni’s arrival, but opened the door as she heard him coming. His footsteps echoed as he came up the stone stairs.

  He appeared and stood on the landing, concern worrying his eyes. “Enzo said you wanted to see me? Are you all right? Is your father well?”

  She let out a long sigh and looked at the plains again, imagining them flooding, the oceans rushing over them.

  Giovanni took a tentative step forward. “What’s wrong? You’re upset. What has happened?”

  How could she bring this up without sounding ridiculous? “My father, he’s an astronomer.”

  “Yes?”

  “They found something, in space, that’s heading toward the Earth.”

  He took a second to process. “An asteroid? Is there danger?”

  “Not an asteroid, something else. They don’t know what yet.” Jess looked at the sky.

  “They think that this something might hit the Earth?”

  “That would be one in a million, whatever it is.”

  “So there’s little danger?” He cocked his head to one side.

  “You don’t understand.” Squinting, she shielded her eyes and looked up. “This thing has fifty, maybe a hundred times the mass of our Sun, and is coming from right behind it. It seems to be heading straight into the solar system.”

  “A hundred times the size of…” Giovanni’s jaw dropped open. “Will it destroy the sun?”

  “A hundred times the mass, not the size. Nomad is probably not more than thirty kilometers across if it’s compressed matter, but it’s traveling at more than a thousand kilometers a second. Even if it hits the sun, it’ll be like a bullet going through a ball of foam. It wouldn’t damage it, not much, but its gravity will drag the sun away from us, eject all of the planets into deep space. Including Earth.”

  “My God.” Giovanni sat down on a bench beside the telescope. “I didn’t hear anything on the news, the radio…”

  “Nobody knows yet. I’m not supposed to be telling you.”

  Giovanni stared at her. A gust of wind blew through the treetops, washing over the observatory turret. Jess shivered.

  “So, this is true?” he asked. “This is not some game…? Some false alarm? This is unbelievable!”

  “No game.” Jess shook her head. “I’d stay away from the big cities, move everything you can here. Get all your family and loved ones together.”

  “But can they stop this thing? I don’t know, fire nuclear weapons at it? Push it away?”

  “It’d be like a mote of dust in the path of a charging elephant, and it might not even be something we could push.”

  Giovanni rocked back and forth. “I see.”

  “My dad says he has evidence of detecting this thing, decades ago.”

  Giovanni steepled his hands together, elbows on his knees. “So then what is it?”

  “That’s the thing…” Jess felt helpless trying to describe it, and realized that she was speaking to him not only to maybe help save him, if that were even possible, but because she couldn’t contain the possibility of annihilation within herself. She had to tell someone, maybe as a way to come to grips with the reality herself—and that was hard to do.

  “They can’t see anything there,” she said finally. “So far they haven’t been able to detect anything directly, but something of this mass, coming undetected, there’re only a few options—or it’s some strange form of dark matter, a fold in space-time, something we don’t understand. It seems to have arrived out of nowhere.”

  “Dark matter?”

  “Ninety percent of the universe’s matter is invisible, what they call dark matter.”

  “How do they know it’s there if they can’t see it?”

  “Same way they know this thing is there. Gravitational influence. Like an invisible bowling ball thrown onto the plastic sheet of space.” Jess dragged a hand through her hair.

  “I see.”

  But she could see he didn’t. Jess understood his reticence. Dark matter wasn’t even something the experts understood. If she didn’t have a father who was an astrophysicist, she wouldn’t believe a word of this herself. “I’m sorry, I need to get to the airport. I wanted you to know. All I can tell you is—this thing is coming. Trust me, because I trust my dad. He knows his stuff.”

  Jess saw something behind his eyes. Something hidden. Something he wasn’t telling her, but she didn’t have the patience. Or the time.

  “How long do we have?” he asked after a pause.

  “If it’s going to enter the solar system, which we don’t know for certain yet”—she wagged one finger back and forth to make the point—“a few months. My dad said they’ll make an announcement in three days when they know. Celeste and I are going to meet him at a hotel next to the airport this afternoon, to take a flight back to the States tomorrow.”

  Giovanni rolled forward onto his feet. “I will have Nico drive you—”

  Jess opened her mouth to object, but Giovanni held up one hand. “I insist. Please, stay in touch with an email or text. Update me if you hear anything more.”

  “Of course.” She stared at Giovanni, then looked away, her shoulders slumping. “I need to go.”

  “Of course.”

  Jess smiled weakly and turned for the staircase. Getting to the top of it, she found Enzo staring up at her, his pork pie hat cocked back at an angle.

  “Your mother wants to see you,” Enzo said, hovering.

  “Thank you.” She jumped down the stairs, pushing past him but keeping her distance.

  NOMAD

  Survivor testimony #GR4;

  Event +47hrs;

  Survivor name: Daly James;

  Reported location: Alice Springs, Australia

  What the hell happened, mate? Christ, you’re the first person I’ve talked to in weeks.

  Okay, okay, I’ll start. I was on my walkabout, mate, spring, every year I piss off into the outback. A month by myself, you know, keeps the head straight. Anyway, two weeks out of Alic
e Springs and I’m taking a nap when a stampede of wallabies going like batshit tears into my tent. Never seen anything like it. Maybe ten in the morning, and when I’ve finished yelling at the bastards I look up. Blue skies, but these snakes of white light are coiling around the sun, all around it. Had to rub my eyes, thought I was losing it, too much grog the night before, yeah? I decide that that’s enough and pack up, start heading back.

  About mid-afternoon, these rivers of light in the sky are almost touching the ground, the fear of God rising up in me, and it shakes. The ground, I mean. Knocked me clear off my feet, had to be ten minutes before I could stand, it shook that long. When it stopped, I damn started running. Nowhere to go but I just wanted to run. But big cracks opened in the ground, everywhere, like chopped up with a mountain-sized meat cleaver, the ground shaking again. So I got back into Alice Springs, and the place is a ghost town. Nobody here. And the skies, they’re getting dark. Not clouds, mind you, but just dark, like God pulling the shades. Temperature’s dropped twenty degrees in a day. Found this shortwave in the postal station, so I turned it on, and there you are, mate. Now can you tell me what the hell is going on? (laughs nervously) Is this it, mate? Armageddon? Where is everyone? What happened?

  pgs 112-114 for complete transcript.

  Freq. 7652 kHz./LSB/USB

  OCTOBER 19th

  12

  Fiumicino Airport, Italy

  “They announced the boarding gate.”

  Jess acknowledged her mother and looked up at the departures board: New York 10:00 AA1465 - Go to Gate C23. She checked her phone again.

  The man sitting beside them studied the board as well, then folded his newspaper and stood, briefly smiling at the two women. As he walked off, a young woman in heels and a short skirt immediately took his place. The food court waiting area of the International Terminal of Fiumicino Airport was packed with people buzzing around. In front of the empty Gucci store, the sales staff waited at attention, idly chatting. The recycled air smelled of carpets and coffee, the same as airport terminals the world over.