Angel City (30 page)

“I mean holy crap!”

Raised a question in Harper's head: Why was Leo the Astrophysicist being let into a world locals were never meant to know of? Just then one of the geeks at the Crypto Field Terminals spoke up.

“
Pardonnez-moi, Inspecteur.
According to the data, we will have visibility emanating from constellation Ursa Major in three minutes, thirty seconds.”

“Merci,”
the inspector replied, continuing his conversation with Dr. Mates. “So, in fact, would you describe what we are about to witness as a comet?”

“If you're asking me if the data says that what's supposed to appear is made of ice and has a cone-shaped tail, then yes, it's a comet. But it isn't possible.”

“For what reason?”

Dr. Mates pointed to the sky.

“Comets don't appear from thin air, they come from somewhere. I don't understand how the science community couldn't have picked this up, not with the array of radio telescopes we have around the world.”

“Perhaps,” the judge said, “no one had their telescope pointed in the right direction. And if I am not incorrect, the annual Draconid meteor shower has been known to offer a surprise now and again. Perhaps this is just a stray meteor.”

Dr. Mates shook his head.

“No, no. The Draconids aren't due to begin for another two days. Besides, Earth is passing through the tail end of the Draconids this year. There'll be twenty sightings per minute tops, nothing special. And you're wrong about the telescopes. We've got the entire deep space VLA grid in New Mexico pointed toward Draco right now, looking at a white dwarf binary called KL.”

“A white what?” asked the inspector.

Dr. Mates waved his hand dismissively.

“It's very complicated stuff for laymen. Point is, it's impossible one of those telescopes wouldn't have picked up this kind of activity. It's just impossible.”

The judge puffed at his pipe a moment.

“As you continually remind us, Doctor,” he said. “But you must agree, a meteor shower is not like a Swiss watch.”

The inspector enjoyed that line and chortled his approval. “I should say not.”

Dr. Mates stared at the policeman with disbelief.

“For heaven's sake, the Draconids aren't the point!”

“No? Then what is the point?”

“Look, the Draconids are made up of Giacobini-Zinner.”

There was a pause for Dr. Mates to consider no one knew what he was talking about, or at least pretended not to know. Harper would lay odds on the latter. He knew it to be a sure bet when he caught the tone in the inspector's next line.

“Could you elaborate, please, Dr. Mates? After all, I'm only a lowly Swiss policeman involved in a criminal investigation.”

“Okay. Let me try to explain it. Giacobini-Zinner is the parental comet of the Draconids. But I'm telling you, the Draconids and
this
aren't connected.”

“Again, why not?”

Dr. Mates pointed to the monitors. “For one, the data says this is a different comet from a different part of the galaxy. Two, it just can't happen. It's impossible.”

The two police considered the doctor's argument with blank expressions.

“Nevertheless, the Draconids meteor shower is imminent,” the judge said after four-point-two seconds.

“So fucking what?”

The inspector smiled.

“In police work, Dr. Mates, we never say ‘so fucking what?' to the facts.”

“No disrespect, gentlemen, but the fact is you keep missing the point. This comet has fuck-all to do with Giacobini-Zinner, or the Draconids.”

“Are you quite sure?” the inspector said.

Dr. Mates pulled at his hair.

“Look, try and keep up with me on this. There are four thousand, one hundred, eighty-five known comets on record. Some of them are short-period comets, some are long-period; I'm talking about their orbits. All those have been recorded through history and are predictable. Giacobini-Zinner is one of those, so is Halley's Comet. Then there are single apparition comets, such as Caesar's Comet in 44
BC
or Hale-Bopp in 1995. All recorded comets, whether predicted or single apparitions, were visible for days, weeks, months even. Hale-Bopp was visible to the naked eye for eighteen months. And all those comets appeared in graduating stages of luminance to a peak magnitude, then faded away.”

“Again, your point?” the inspector said.

“The data being analyzed by Blue Brain says this never-before-known comet will suddenly appear for sixty seconds at a magnitude of negative seven-point-five. That makes it one of the brightest comets ever, one of the brightest things in the entire night sky, from nowhere? I'm telling you, it's impossible.”

“But if I understand you correctly, unknown comets do appear now and again. Single apparitions, as you say.”

“Appear, yes; predicting it will appear, absolutely not. No one can predict a single apparition comet. We learn about them as they are observed, not before. You want facts, I'll give you one: Astronomy is science. We don't pull bunnies from hats.”

The policeman paused. He and the judge looked at each other to further consider the evidence. The judge spoke with his pipe clenched between his teeth.

“So what you're confirming to us is that what we are about to see is a comet, possibly emanating in the constellation Draco.”

Dr. Mates couldn't believe what he was hearing. If his jaw stretched open any farther, it would have fallen from his face.

“Excuse me?”

The judge shrugged. “I said, you are telling us that we will be viewing—”

The astrophysicist was fit to burst.

“I'm not telling you that! No way am I telling you that!”

The inspector sighed with frustration. “Oh goodness gracious, Dr. Mates, what are you telling us, then?”

Harper wanted to laugh. They were beating up on Leo the Astrophysicist pretty good. It was taking effect. Dr. Mates was rattled.

“Look! Someone is predicting a never-before-seen celestial event, unlike anything that has ever happened in recorded history! Someone has discovered something that looks like a comet but is something completely . . .”

The policeman leaned toward Dr. Mates, awaiting the completion of his thought. When it wasn't forthcoming, the inspector leaned even farther. “You were saying, Dr. Mates?”

“. . . different.”

Just then, light flickered in Harper's eyes and shadows appeared on the floor of the roof. Instinctively he matched the shadows to the men. All good. He raised his eyes to the men's faces. All of them looking to the sky, all their faces aglow—except for Dr. Mates with his binoculars pressed to his eyes. His face was in shadow, but the front lenses of his binoculars looked like warning lights from the far beyond. Harper looked up.

“Blimey.”

A great ball of silver light hovered and sparkled in the southeast quadrant of the sky, then a long shimmering tail took shape, curving across the night and stretching into the northwest, as if some lesser god had slashed open the firmament so the wondrous thing might be revealed. Harper mumbled to himself, “Something completely different. No shit.”

Watching it, Harper realized Paris had fallen quiet and still. Must have been the same all over a big chunk of Europe. Millions of people stopping cars and trams, rushing to windows and opening doors, all eyes turning to the strange light in the sky. Speechless, drifting through a wrinkle in time where one moment coupled to the next without a sense of passage. Then came a voice. Harper was relieved to realize it was only one of the inspector's computer geeks and not one from on high.

“The comet should fade from vision in five, four, three, two, one . . . now.”

And so it did.

Dr. Mates read the data now displayed on the monitors.

“Incredible,” he said.

The inspector adopted his I'm-very-sure-I-have-no-idea tone. “Is there something of interest, Dr. Mates?”

“Well, yes. I'm not sure how he did it, he only had one minute. Your hacker tracked the comet on a line beginning at Alpha UMi—that's Polaris—to Cassiopeia. He's calculated forty degrees, or 31.28 parsecs, exactly. That's a distance of over a hundred light-years.”

“Meaning what?”

“In and of itself, nothing. In astronomy, a hundred light-years is across the street. But it's exactly as he predicted it. And look at this: He's running a phenomenal number of triangulations from various points around the Earth, tens of thousands of them.”

“Again, Dr. Mates, I'm only a Swiss policeman,” Inspector Gobet said.

“He's plotting the exact distance from all these positions on Earth to the comet's transit.”

“To what end, would you say, given your expertise?” the judge said.

The doctor studied the monitors a minute. “It looks like he's using Blue Brain to configure a 3-D model of planet Earth's exact position in the galaxy, based on the Cartesian coordinate system.”

The last three words sent Harper ripping back through time. He saw the one-eyed priest, Astruc, at a side altar of l'Église de Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Entombed in the nearby wall was René Descartes. The great headless man who devised the Cartesian coordinate system. Harper blinked, called from the shadows.

“Why the fuck would he do that?”

Dr. Mates turned to the voice. “Excuse me?”

“The Cartesian coordinate system. Why?”

“Who's asking?”

Harper stepped into the glow of the monitors. “Me.”

Maybe it was the tone in Harper's voice, maybe it was connecting the voice to a physical presence that looked as if it had stepped from the hard end of a battlefield. Combined with Harper's Brit accent, Dr. Mates was thrown off balance.

“Who . . . who are you?”

Harper nodded toward the inspector and the judge. “I'm with them.”

“The police?”

“That's right, and answer the question.”

Dr. Mates looked nervously at Inspector Gobet. “If you don't mind my asking,” Mates said, “what sort of crime are these hackers involved in?”

The inspector cleared his throat. “At present, let's just say it would be best if we asked the questions and you did the answering.”

The line was perfectly placed for maximum effect. The doctor surrendered. He looked at Harper.

“What was your question again?”

“What does the mathematical formula of a dead man from the seventeenth century have to do with building a 3-D model of planet Earth?”

The doctor swallowed, cleared his throat.

“It's how you build an algorithm that supports a digitized structure in three dimensions. All modern computer animation, 2-D or 3-D, is based on Descartes's mathematical formulae.”

Harper thought about it. Made sense, maybe.

“You telling me he's trying to make a globe, or a map?”

“Yes. But if he is, he's wasting his time.”

“Sorry?”

“There's nothing new in creating a 3-D image of Earth or the universe as we know it. We do this sort of imaging all the time. In fact, the whole process has gone Hollywood. James Cameron did it in
Avatar
.”

“Who?”

“The American movie director. He created an entire planet, Pandora, using the Cartesian coordinate system. I was a consultant on the film, actually.”

Harper looked at the inspector. The inspector's gaze read,
By all means, Mr. Harper, do make yourself useful and give him a nudge.
Harper walked straight toward Dr. Mates.

“Congrats on your brilliant career, Doc, but let me tell you what I think. The one who hacked into Blue Brain, the one running these calculations, kills people. So I doubt he's trying to make it big in Hollywood. What do you think?”

Dr. Mates got a whiff of the foul stink from Harper's filthy clothes. Harper checked the man's eyes, saw the most primitive part of the man's brain kick in. Reptilian brain it was. Millions of years old on the evolutionary chain, and just now it recognized the smell of death and was screaming “Run away!” back up the chain. Dr. Mates reversed slowly, bumped into the table. He surrendered again.

“All I can tell you is he's building an incredibly complex algorithm to figure Earth's exact position in the galaxy.”

“Why?”

“I don't know.”

“Sure you do, you're from bloody Oxford, three PhD's, got your own TV show on the bloody Beeb. Makes you a right genius.”

Harper saw something go
boing
in the man's eyes.

“What?”

“It's a clock. He's using Descartes's formulae to make a clock.”

“A clock?”

“It has to be. I mean, I know it sounds crazy, until you realize space and time are the same thing. Measuring the expansion of the universe and telling the time are both done by triangulating and calculating the relative distance between three or more separate points. A map and a clock serve the same purpose. They tell you where you are in the universe at any particular moment.”

“Keep talking, Doc.”

“Well . . . it's like the grandfather clock in the hallway of my house is only the triangulation of a big hand, little hand, and the seconds pendulum in relation to the clock face. That's what he's doing, it must be. All these reference points on the planet, those are the seconds. The minutes were the comet's path. Presto, it's a clock.”

Harper flashed that before the cathedral job, he'd been in stasis since 1917. He took a second to ask himself how these creatures of free will had discovered time and space were the same thing in less than a hundred years. He blinked, snapped himself to nowtimes.

“What about the little hand, Doc?”

“What?”

“The hand marking the hour, where is it?”

“I don't know, but it must be somewhere on the Earth. A horizon of some kind, from wherever he's watching the sky.”