by Octavia Cade
COULD HE HAVE BEEN so wrong, all along? Could there be more in the atom than prizes, more than electrons and protons and the miniaturisation of power?
What a thing to be responsible for. Ernest had no illusions: he was not immutable in his point of success, not so very individual a pivot. Had he never been, had he stayed in New Zealand, a professor at a frontier university, a smaller man than he had become, then another physicist would eventually have done what he had done. Another physicist would have opened the same door, would have done it in confidence and ignorance both. And had Ernest met that man, met that woman, he would have shaken their hand and told them it wasn’t their fault, what could arise, and that they should be congratulated for what they’d done – the expansion of knowledge, that tiny step towards the unravelling of the universe.
But it had been him. The knowledge of the atom, the dissection of its structure, had come to a man who had lived through one World War, who had contributed to the development of technology used in that war – when he had been able to, when the naval forces of his second country had allowed him, though that allowance was a thin one and short-sighted. But for all that, he’d never fought on the front line, never died there – as young Moseley had in Gallipoli, and what a waste of a mind that had been!
It had hurt, losing Harry, but there’d always been the comfort in the back of Ernest’s mind that the lads who were lost had at least not been his. None of the children had been his – he’d been safe that way, with his young daughter. The only child, the one he’d never have to give up to uniforms and parades and the distance between the trenches and his laboratories, the possibility of poison gas. He’d sympathised with the other parents, of course. That was only decent, and Ernest had felt for them as he’d felt for his own parents, long ago. But the compassion he’d been able to give had been a starveling thing, something still with little colour in it. Then Eileen had died, and he had understood.
‘I feel old,’ he said to Mary, after it happened, and he could see in the faces around him the belief that he was growing older faster than he’d done before. It was true, too. When he emerged from the fog that was her funeral and the first months of his life without her (and that absence was so different from life before her, the life with her) his joints seemed to ache easier, his hands to sink and quiver more rapidly.
The worst of it was his mind. Never quick, but he had prided himself on the long slow workings, of the ability to seize and hold and worry. Once, on a long night when he had lain awake, still and silent and trying not to picture his daughter’s face, he had overlaid her image with that of another woman – one distant to him, the connection made through pity and disgust and the horrified rising of guilt.
Fritz Haber had worked at a chemistry so different to Ernest’s – the chemistry of war and chlorine gas. While Ernest had spent his war research on underwater sounds and signalling, Haber had learned to kill at distance, to use science as a method of slaughter. Ernest had looked down on him for that. Turned his back, refused to shake his hand. Had refused to help the other man find work – and his contempt had been all the sharper for what Haber’s work had done to his wife. Clara Immerwahr had shot herself to death in her own garden – and that was too close to home, a wife who loved gardens – because she couldn’t stand what her husband had made of war. A deliberate act, to follow another deliberate act.
The analogy was not a complete one, Ernest knew. It was not fitting. If a weapon could be made from atoms then he had given the impetus all unsuspecting. Eileen, too, had died in a manner other than suicide. She hadn’t meant to die in the labour of her last child; there was nothing deliberate about her loss. And she was a daughter, not a wife. The analogy was flawed. But even so, once he had connected them the contamination was there, the comparison caught in his mind, rendered immobile: the father of chemical slaughter lost one woman to their mutual deliberation, and the man who had stumbled into fatherhood of another kind had lost another woman, quite by accident.
‘You’re a silly old fool,’ he said, staring at himself in the mirror one morning. The basin was full of cold water, clean where he had hoped somehow for salt. Then Mary had knocked on the door to call him to breakfast and Ernest did his best to pinch colour into his cheeks, to make himself look normal, as though he didn’t feel anything but. A fool, yes, but a fool with a wife who had her own grief and he would never have been so self-indulgent as to add to it with the spectres of his conscience, made over-sensitive with insomnia and sorrow.
There was no one he could tell.
Instead, he cornered Maurice Hankey at a committee meeting, spoke to him of the potential of atomic weapons, the ghosts of his nightmares. ‘Keep an eye on the matter,’ he said, as if he hadn’t said for years that such a thing was impossible, that such a device could never be made. ‘Keep an eye on the matter.’
‘You’ll likely know before I will,’ said Hankey.
‘Perhaps,’ said Ernest.
He was an old man, with grandchildren.
About the Author
OCTAVIA CADE HAS JUST finished her doctorate in science communication. Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Aurealis, and Cosmos, amongst other places, and her short fiction is BSFA- and Vogel-nominated. A science poetry collection is currently in press. The Ghost of Matter is her fifth novella.
The SHORTCUTS Series
Interdimensional forests, atomic ghosts and future tech gone horribly wrong abound in SHORTCUTS, a serialised collection of novelettes which celebrate the diversity of genre fiction writing in New Zealand. Published by Wellington-based Paper Road Press, the first SHORTCUTS series features six stories of the future, the past, and the uncanny, all of which wind in some way back to the shores of Aotearoa New Zealand.
Read on to find out more about the first SHORTCUTS series.
MIKA
Lee Murray & Piper Mejia
MIKA TĀURA ARRIVES in New York in the middle of a storm, where she accidentally kills a motorist and lands herself with an injured child. What’s more, she’s missed her rendezvous.
Stan has problems of his own. Several of them just broke into his apartment and tried to kill him, which may explain why hitching a ride in Mika’s armoured waka seems like a good idea. Besides, her business is taking her across to the West Coast, and so – conveniently – is his.
On the run, Mika, Stan and the girl flee across the country to Stan’s reservation home, where they encounter a couple who may be the key to Mika’s mission. But time is running out, for the travellers and for those they leave behind them.
THE LAST
Grant Stone
FORTY YEARS AGO, KATHERINE St. John disappeared – briefly. Thirty years ago, she enacted a disappearance of another sort, stepping not just away from her music career but across the ocean to the other side of the world.
Yesterday, Rachel Mackenzie’s flight touched down in Auckland. She’s travelled to New Zealand to interview the reclusive musician Katherine St. John about her first album in nearly thirty years. But strange things are happening at St. John's farm and soon Rachel finds herself caught up in something far larger than the world of music.
BREE’S DINOSAUR
AC Buchanan
CAM’S AMBITIONS ARE straightforward: study Business English in Wellington for six months, then return to Vietnam to build a promising career. She doesn’t need any complications, least of all those created by Bree, her host-family’s secretive, troubled, teenage daughter. But when a dinosaur is being (very noisily) built in the bedroom next to yours, and a meteor-strike is threatening, it’s not always possible to avoid being sucked in – especially when there's an extinct animal in your own history. And one winter night in Karori, Bree's past resurfaces as well.
POCKET WIFE
IK Paterson-Harkness
CARL'S WORK REQUIRES him to travel extensively, but he and his wife Jenny stay connected through their Tinys – four-inch-tall replicas of themselves which, when turned on, transmit whatever sensory in
formation they are receiving directly into their living counterparts' minds. Through his Tiny, which Jenny keeps close beside her in Auckland, Carl can see his wife, speak to her, even feel her touch. But when Jenny's Tiny malfunctions and she can't turn herself off, Carl has a major problem. He’s having an affair, and he'd rather his wife wasn't around.
LANDFALL
Tim Jones
DESPERATION AND BETRAYAL on the border of a new life.
When the New Zealand navy torpedoes a Bangladeshi river ferry full of refugees fleeing their drowning country off the Manukau Heads, Nasimul Rahman is one of the few survivors. But even if he can reach shore alive, he then has to make it past the trigger-happy Shore Patrol set up to keep the world's poor and desperate at bay.
Donna is a new recruit to the Shore Patrol. She's signed on mainly because of her friend Mere, but also because it's good to feel she's doing something for her country. When word comes through that the Navy has sunk a ship full of infiltrators, and survivors may be trying to make their way ashore, it sounds like she might finally see some action.
THE GHOST OF MATTER
Octavia Cade
1886. TWO YOUNG BOYS DISAPPEAR in the Sounds. Their mother grieves, all the music cut out of her heart; their father wanders the coast for a year, wanting and not wanting to find any part of them left behind. And their brother Ern, faced with a problem to which no solution can be found, returns to his laboratory – and to the smell of salt, soft voices in his ear, wet footprints welling seawater in the darkness.
Octavia Cade weaves together time and memory, physics and mystery, in this story inspired by Ernest Rutherford’s life and research.
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PAPER ROAD PRESS
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Text copyright © Octavia Cade 2015
First published 2015
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the permission of the publisher. The author has asserted their moral rights. A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.
Cover illustration © Barbara Quinn
Cover design © Paper Road Press Ltd 2015.
