“What?”
“Berkshire,” he said.
Man
alive
I was angry then, in my tightly-reined-in way. “I ought,” I said, “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. Is that how you got them to quit?”
“No!”
“Who’s behind you? Or are you a lone gunman? Stay away from me and my team,” I said, and ended the call. Oh, 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 ‘Nitfall.’ It is like that. The ending of that sf, u know it? Chjat with Tesimnd and afterwards I was like, WOH! ASIMOVIAN!
Since Sleight was 46 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. 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.
The cosmos was getting bigger all the time, and at an accelerating rate. Plenty of space to live and let live.
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 twenty 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:
I
DID INTEND
to face-to-face Tessimond. 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 I experienced any more spotting I was to come straight back, but otherwise I was free to go.
M. drove us both home; and we picked up a pizza on the way, and Tessimond was driven entirely from my mind. There were more important things to worry about, after all, than him and his crazy verbal-blit, or chicken-licken, 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 Sunday evening again (something on telly was the trigger, but I can’t remember what it was), and I felt a tiny amount of shame that I had stood him up. But then I remembered that he’d been pouring some poison into the ears of my team-members, persuading them to abandon me, and I grew angry with him. Then I decided to put him out of my mind and good riddance. I told myself: Monday morning, all three of my core team would turn up for work, looking sheepish and apologising profusely.
They didn’t, though. None of them answered a phone call, or text, or Twitter. A week later they still hadn’t returned, and the university authorities expressed their dissatisfaction, and instituted suspension proceedings against them for breaching their contracts. My hands were tied. 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. Then, after a full day of to-and-fro my head of department persuaded the Vice Chancellor not to suspend the three 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. A couple of online sci-geek sites picked up 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) 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. But it wasn’t. 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 my team 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 folding 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. The scale on which
homo sapiens
subsisted 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 intensely and instantly. The smell of the top of her little head! Two weeks after birth her head hair 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 baptised 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 came back early from my maternity leave, and we all made new efforts to locate Niu Jian, Prévert and Sleight, to see whether their hotheads had cooled, and whether they’d like to come to Stockholm to collect the prize. And if I’m truthful, enough time had passed 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 them sound like mole-people,” I said, but I wondered if he might be right.
Niu Jian’s family were easy enough to get hold of, and they were polite, assuring us Noo-noo was healthy and well and happy, 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 us. 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 none of it would 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 to which island they had gone.
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 have 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 steady, broad strokes, 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 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. Brainstorm. 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:
W
E 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 express some milk, and M. would feed her that from a bottle, and we’d give her some formula, and everything would be fine. I would go, alone, and then I would come back.
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 and a five-star breakfast in bed.
You’re wondering: did I feel
bad
for my three colleagues—that they wouldn’t be there? Even though it was their choice?
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 the three-wheeled buggy. We strolled by the river, and back into town. Then I went into a Costa coffee shop, bought myself a hot chocolate. Then 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’d said and sent my boys vanishing like breath into the wind. He had struck then me 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 was aware of a heady, floaty feeling as I said it, boastful 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 Prevért 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.”
“Congratulations, indeed.”
We sat in silence for a little while. “You spoke to my three colleagues,” I said, shortly. “And then after that conversation they all left my team. What did you tell them?”
Tessimond looked at me for a long time, with blithe eyes. “Do you really want me to say?” he asked eventually, looking down to my sleeping child and then back up to me.
“No,” I said, feeling suddenly afraid. Then: “Yes, hell. Of course. Will it take long?”