The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 7

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Sleight, look…” I started, in my weariest voice.

  “I will report back,” he hissed. And hung up.

  M. rubbed my feet, whilst I ate a chocolate mousse straight from the plastic pot. Then I pulled myself slowly upstairs to face the great trial of my pregnancy. I mean: brushing my teeth. The mere thought of it made me want to vomit; actually performing the action was gag-provoking, intensely uncomfortable and unpleasant. But I didn’t want to just stop brushing my teeth altogether; that would be an admission of defeat. Quite apart from anything else, the teeth themselves were sitting looser in their sockets than before, and so clearly needed more not less hygienic attention. But the nightly brush had become my least favorite part of the day. I had just completed this disagreeable exercise, and was accordingly in no good mood, when Sleight rang back.

  “Sleight—what? Seriously: what?”

  “I said I would ring back,” he returned. “And so I have.” But his tone of voice had changed, and I immediately sensed something wrong.

  “What is it?”

  “Tessimond explained things. It really is desperately obvious, when you come to think of it. I’m really a bit ashamed of myself for not seeing it earlier.”

  “Sleight, you’re spooking me out. Don’t tell me you’re following Niu Jian and Jack and dropping out?”

  There was a long pause, in which I could faintly hear the background noises of the Elephant; the murmur of conversation, the clink of glasses. “Yes,” he said eventually.

  “No,” I returned.

  “I’m going to start smoking,” said Sleight.

  “If I have to listen to another non-sequitur from my team members I am going to scream,” I told him.

  “I used to love smoking,” Sleight explained. He didn’t sound very drunk, but there was a sway to his intonation that did not inspire confidence. “But I gave it up. You know, for health. It’s not good for your health. I didn’t want to get heart disease or canny, or canny, or cancer.” There was another long pause. “I’m sorry boss, I hate to let you down.”

  “Sleight,” I snapped at him. “What did he tell you?”

  He rang off. I was furious. I would have called Tessimond direct, but I didn’t have his number; and although I called Sleight back, and texted him, and @’d him on Twitter, he did not reply. It took M. a long time to calm me down, if I’m honest. In the end he assured me that Sleight was drunk, and that when he woke sober the following day he would see how foolish it all seemed.

  I slept fitfully. The morning brought no message from Sleight; and he didn’t turn up for work; and he still wasn’t answering his phone.

  I recalled that Tessimond was staying in the Holiday Inn and left a message with their front desk for him to call me, giving him my personal number. Then I met with the junior researche’s, or such of them as were still on campus—for the research part of the project was done and dusted, and we were all now just waiting on the announcement and the shaking of the world of science. None of them were about to leave the project; and their puppyish enthusiasm (after all a Nobel prize is a Nobel prize!) calmed me down a little. I did paperwork, and dipped my toe into the raging ocean of email that had long since swamped my computer. Then I googled Tessimond, and discovered that, yes, he had been Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics at City University of New York, for about two months, many years previously. I wasn’t surprised that I’d never heard of him, though. M. rang to check on me, and I told him I was fine. At 2pm, on the dot, Tessimond himself called. “Hello, Ana,” he said, pleasantly.

  “You’ve now suborned a third member of my team,” I told him, in as venomous a voice as I could manage, post-prandial as I was. “I don’t know why you’re doing it, but I want you to stop.”

  “I assure you, Ana, I intended nothing of the sort,” he said. “Dr Sleight called me, invited me for a drink. We were only talking. Only words were exchanged.”

  “Enough of this nonsense. What did you tell him?”

  “Are we still meeting, in person, later today? I’d be happy to explain everything then.”

  “You don’t want to say over the phone?”

  He sounded taken aback. I was being pretty hostile, I suppose. “No, I don’t mind saying over the phone. Do you want me to tell you, now, over the phone?”

  “No I don’t,” I said. “I don’t care what mind-game you’ve been playing. What con-trick you’re up to. I only care that you leave us all alone. Why are you even here?”

  “Stephane invited me. I hadn’t seen him in many years. And since leaving my academic posting I have been pursuing an old dream of mine and… simply travelling. Travelling around the world. I thought how pleasant it would be to visit England, so I came.”

  “You came to Berkshire on a whim, or just to see an old friend or some paper-thin pretext like that, but now you’re here you just happen to be dismantling my entire physics team on the verge of our winning the Nobel prize?”

  He contemplated this for a moment. “I do love that you guys spell it burk and pronounce it bark. Does it have anything to do with the bark of trees?”

  “What?”

  “Berkshire,” he said.

  “I ought to call the police and have you arrested. Are you blackmailing them?”

  “Blackmailing who?” He sounded properly surprised at this.

  “Niu Jian and Jack and my dear, bald-headed Sleight, of course. Are you?”

  “No!”

  “Stay away from me and my team,” I said, and ended the call. I was fuming.

  Later that afternoon I finally got a text from Sleight. “Sorry boss,” it said. “Beeen dead drunk for 12 houors. Won’t be coming back, and o”—just that. I rang him immediately, but he did not answer. Forty-five minutes later I got another text. “Theres a sf shortstory called ‘Nittfall.’ It is like that. The ending of that sf, u know it? Chat with Tesimnd and afterwards I was like, WOH! ASIMOVIAN!” Since Sleight was forty-six and not usually given to speaking like a teenager, I deduce that he was still intoxicated when he sent those texts. I rang again, and texted him back, but he did not reply.

  My mood swung about again. I was probably overreacting. It was clearly all a big misunderstanding. It would get itself sorted out. My pregnancy hormones were a distorting mirror on the world. Tessimond was chicken-licken, and had somehow persuaded the otherwise level-headed members of my team that the world was ending—but the world wasn’t ending, and the sky would not fall, and I would soon prevail upon the foolish barnyard animals. I still didn’t have Tessimond’s number, so I called the Holiday Inn again and left him a second message, saying that I would be happy meet him in the Elephant at 6pm that evening.

  Google helpfully corrected Sleight’s incompetent spelling, and I quickly located the Isaac Asimov short story, called “Nightfall,” in an online venue. I read it in ten minutes and finished it none the wiser. Not that it was a bad story. On the contrary, it was a good story. But I couldn’t see how it had any bearing on the matter in hand. Something to do with stars.

  4

  That I never got to the Elephant was just one of those things. Mid-afternoon I went for a pee and noticed a constellation of little red spots on the inside of my knickers. You don’t want to take any chances with a thing like that. I rang M.; he left work and drove me straight to Casualty, and they admitted me at once. There was some worry that I was bleeding a little into my uterus, and that Phylogeny-Ontology-Recapitulator might be at risk. I lay on a hospital bed for hours, and they did tests, and scanned scans, and finally I was told I was alright and could go home. If there was more spotting I was to come straight back, but otherwise I was free to go.

  M. drove us home; and we picked up a pizza on the way, and Tessimond was propelled entirely from my mind. There were more important things to worry about than him and his crazy verbal-blit, or World’s-End-nigh, or “the stars are coming out!” or whatever his nonsense was. I took the next day off, and then it was the weekend. Tessimond popped into my head on the Sunda
y evening again (something on telly was the trigger, but I can’t remember what it was), and I felt a small quantity of shame that I had stood him up. But then I remembered that he’d been pouring some poison into my team-members’ ears, and persuading them to abandon me, and I grew angry with him. Then I decided to put him out of my mind. I told myself: Monday morning, all three of my core team would turn up for work, looking sheepish and apologizing profusely.

  They didn’t, though. None of them answered phone call, or text, or Twitter. A week later they hadn’t come back, and the university authorities expressed their dissatisfaction, and instituted suspension proceedings. I called Holiday Inn, cross that I hadn’t simply got Tessimond’s number when I’d had the chance; but I was told he’d checked out. My head of department persuaded the Vice Chancellor not to suspend the three of them until after the press conference. He saw that it could be awkward.

  So we had the press conference, and there was a great deal of excitement. It was widely reported in the press. One internet site picked up (God knows how) that of the original team of four three had gone AWOL and were not present at the press conference. Several news outlets followed it up. We had a cover story ready: that I was team leader, and the others were taking a well-deserved break. The story died down. Who was interested in the particular scientists, when the theory itself was so cool?

  The expansion of the universe was speeding up. Given the mass of matter (including dark matter) in the cosmos as a whole it ought to have been slowing down—as a bone thrown into the sky slows down as it reaches its apogee, and for the same reason: gravity. But it wasn’t slowing down. Physicists had speculated about this before, of course, and had come up with a theoretical explanation for it, called dark energy. But “dark energy” was tautological physics, really: just a way of saying “the something that is speeding up the inflation of the universe,” which is not much of an answer to the question: “What is speeding up the inflation of the universe?” What we had done was demonstrate that the increase in the rate of cosmic expansion was itself increasing, and in ways that necessitated that dark matter and dark energy be decoupled. Indeed, we showed that the geometry of the observable gradient of the acceleration of expansion would cause a three-dimensional asymptote, which in turn would cause a complex toroidal folded of spacetime on the very largest scale. There was no reason to think that this universal reconfiguration of spacetime geometry would have any perceptible effects on Earth. Our scale was simply too small. But it was a thing, and it rewrote Einstein, and the data made our conclusions inescapable, and everybody was very excited.

  The next thing that happened was that I gave birth to an exquisite female infant, with a crumpled face and blue eyes and a wet brush of black hair on her head. We called her Marija Celeste Radonjić-Dalefield, and loved her very much. Two weeks after birth her headhair fell off, and she looked even more adorable with a bald bonce. And the following months whirled past, for truly do they say of having young children that the days are long and the years are short. She slept in our big bed, and though a fraction of our size she somehow dominated that space, and forced us to the edges. We had her baptized at the Saint Peter’s Catholic Church, and all my family came, and even some of M.’s.

  The Nobel committee worked its slow work, and word came through the unofficial channels that a citation was on its way. I returned early from my maternity leave, and we all made new efforts to locate Niu Jian, Prévert and Sleight. Time had healed enough to make the whole thing seem silly rather than sinister. M. was of the opinion that they’d all been spooked by the proximity of the announcement of our research. “Working in the dark for years, then suddenly faced with the headlights of global interest—that sort of thing could spook a person in any number of ways.”

  “You make us sound like mole-people,” I said, but I wondered if he might be right.

  We reached none of them. Niu Jian’s family were easy enough to get hold of, and they were polite, assuring us Noo-noo was rejoicing in health and happiness, but not disclosing in which portion of the globe he was enjoying these things. They promised to pass on our messages, and I don’t doubt that they did; but he did not get back to me. Friends suggested that Sleight was in Las Vegas, but we could get no closer to him than that. I felt worst about Prévert—that elegant man, that brilliant mind, without whose input the breakthrough really wouldn’t have been possible. But there were no leads at all as far as he was concerned. I notified Montpellier police, even went so far as to hire a French private detective. It took ninety days before the agency reported back, to say that he and a woman called Suzanne Chahal had boarded a flight to the West Indies in the summer, but that it was not possible to know on which island they had ended up.

  I agreed with the University that I would collect the prize alone, but that all four of our names would be on the citation. They had lost their minds, the three of them; but that was no reason to punish them—and their contribution had been vital. “Have you had any better ideas as to why they dropped out, like that?” M. asked me, one night.

  “Not a clue,” I said. Then again, with a long-drawn-out “ü” sound at the end: “not a cluuue.”

  “I suppose we’ll never know,” he said. He was reading a novel, and glancing at me over his little slot-shaped spectacles from time to time, as if keeping an eye on me. Marija was in a cot beside the bed, and I was rocking her with a steady, strong motion, which was how she liked it.

  “I guess not,” I said.

  “Does it bother you?”

  “They were my friends,” I said. Then: “Jack in particular. His desertion is the most baffling. The most hurtful.”

  “I’m sure,” M. said, licking his finger and turning the page of the book, “that it was nothing personal. Whatever Tessimond told them, I mean. I’m sure it wasn’t to do with you, personally.”

  “That prick,” I said, but without venom. “Whatever it was Tessimond told them.”

  “You know what I think?” M. asked. “I think, even if we found out what he said, it wouldn’t explain it. It’ll be something banal, or seeming-banal, like God Loves You, or Remember You Must Die, or Oh My God It’s Full Of Stars. Or—you know, whatever. Shall I tell you my theory?”

  “You’re going to, regardless of what I say,” I observed.

  M. gave me a Paddington Hard Stare over his glasses. Then he said: “I think it had nothing to do with this Tessimond chap. I think he’s a red herring.”

  “He was from Oregon,” I said, randomly.

  “It was something else. Virus. Pressure of work. Road to Tarsus. And in the final analysis, it doesn’t matter.”

  “You’re right, of course,” I said, and kissed him on his tall, lined forehead.

  5

  We agreed that I would travel to Stockholm alone. I was still breast-feeding, so I wasn’t over-delighted about it; but M. and I discussed it at length and it seemed best not to drag a baby onto an airplane, and then into a Swedish hotel and then back again for a ceremony she was much too young to even remember. I would go, alone, and then I would come back. I expressed milk like a cow, and we built up a store in the freezer.

  It was exciting and I was excited. Or I would have been, if I’d been less sleep deprived. If I’m completely honest the thing that had really persuaded me was the image of myself, solus, in a four-star hotel room—sleeping, sleeping all night long, sleeping uninterruptedly and luxuriously and waking with a newly refreshed and sparkling mind to the swift Stockholm sunrise.

  You’re wondering: did I feel bad for my three colleagues—that they wouldn’t be there? It was their choice. Would you feel bad, in my shoes?

  You’re wondering: so that’s all there is to it?

  No, that’s not all there is to it. The day before the flight I took Marija for a walk in her three-wheeled buggy. We strolled by the river, and then back into town. Then I went into a Costa coffee shop, had a hot chocolate for myself, and I fed her. After that she went to sleep, and I painstakingly reinserted her into her
buggy. Then I checked my phone, and tapped out a few brief answers to yet another interview about winning The Nobel Prize For Heaven’s Sake! Then I sat back, in the comfy chair, with my hands folded in my lap.

  “Hello, Ana,” said Tessimond. “Are you well?”

  I had seen him only once before, I think; when Jack had introduced him to everybody by the water cooler, all those months earlier—before he’d said whatever he said and sent my boys scurrying away from the prospect of the Nobel. He had struck me then as a tall, rather sad-faced old gent; clean shaven and with a good stack of white hair, carefully dressed, with polite, old-school manners. I remember Jack saying, “This is a friend of mine from Oregon, a professor no less.” I don’t remember if he passed on the man’s name, that first time.

  “You stalking me, Professor?” I said. I felt remarkably placid, seeing him standing there. “I googled you, you know.”

  “If Google suggests I have a history of stalking people, Ana, then I shall have to seek legal redress.”

  “Go on, sit down,” I instructed him. “You can’t do any more damage now. I’m—” I added, aware that it was boasting but not caring, “off to Stockholm tomorrow to collect the Nobel Prize for Physics.”

  Tessimond sat himself, slowly, down. “I’ve seen the media coverage of it all, of course. Many congratulations.”

  “It belongs to all four of us. Have you been in touch with the other three?”

  “You mean Professors Niu Jian and Prévert and Doctor Sleight? I have not. Why would you think I have?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” I took a sip of hot chocolate. “You want a drink?”

  “No thank you,” he said. He was peering into the buggy. “What a lovely infant! Is it a boy?”

  “She is a girl,” I said. “She is called Marija.”

  “I’m happy for you.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s been a big year. Childbirth and winning the Nobel Prize.”