Solaris Rising 1.5 (3 page)

Sleight, sheepishly, called. It was only a short time before he was saying, “Oh, hello, is that Mr Tessimond? Hello. Oh, Sleight, my name, and Stephane Prévert gave me your number.” Then a long pause, and Sleight’s eyes tracked left-to-right and right-to-left, and I felt a mild panic, as if he were indeed being hypnotised by this stranger. But then he said. “Anwyay, my team-leader, Professor Radonjić, is here, and she was wondering if she could—sure, sure.” Silence, an intense expression on Sleight’s face. Then: “Both of them have left the team, somewhat, eh, ah, somewhat abruptly you know. And they both spoke with you about the—yes, yes.” Nodding. Why do people nod when they’re talking on the phone? It’s not as if their interlocutor can see them. “I see. I understand. We were just wondering what...”

“Let me speak to him,” I said, holding out my hand. Sleight passed the phone straight over. “Hello, Mr Tessimond? This is Ana Radonjić.”

“May I call you Ana?” Tessimond asked. He had a pleasant, low-slung voice; a mid-west American accent, a slight buzz in the consonants that suggested he might be a smoker. I was a little taken aback by it. “Alright. And what should I call you?”

He hummed; a little, musical burr. “My name is Tessimond,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to speak to you, Ana. I’ve immense respect for what you’ve been doing.”

“What do you know about what I’ve been doing?” I daresay I sounded slightly more aggressively paranoid than I intended.

“I was Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics at CUNY for a while,” he said. “Years ago—before your time. I left the post decades ago.”

“You were at CUNY? Why have I not heard of you?”

“I didn’t publish,” he replied. “What’s the point?”

This piqued me, so I rattled off: “The point is that
we
have made a breakthrough with regard to dark energy, and I don’t think any physicists have ever been more sure of getting a Nobel citation, and two key members of my team have, this morning, walked away.
That
is the point.”

“There seem to be several points, there, Ana,” he said, mildly. But his slow delivery only infuriated me further.

“I don’t know what games you are playing,” I snapped. “This is serious. I don’t know what kind of hippy-dippy drop-out crap you’ve been injecting into the brains of my team. I only know you have to stop it. You have to undo the damage you’ve done. This is my
career
as a serious scientist, and it is the Nobel prize—not the, er, pigeon-fancier’s red rosette.” My gaze was through the window. A pigeon had arrived on the outside ledge of Prevért’s office windowsill, in a flurry of wings that sounded like a deck of cards being shuffled. Then it folded away its wings and hid them in its back, and then it stood looking, insolently, through the glass at us. It distracted me only momentarily. “This is the culmination of everything we have been working for.”

“I was talking to Stephane about your research,” he said. “Your research does sound fascinating.”

“Oh? You were talking to St—the
same
Stephane who has gone to catch a flight to Montpellier!” I snapped. “Perhaps you’ll enlighten me: why did he quit?”

Tessimond released a small sigh at the other end of the phone line. “I’m afraid I’ve no idea, Ana.”

“You said something to him, and it made him walk away from everything he has been working towards for
years
.”

There was a silence. Then: “That wasn’t my intention, Ana.”

“No? Well, that’s the mess you’ve made. Perhaps you’d like to help me clear it up?”

“I very much doubt,” he said, sadly, “if there’s anything I can do.” Then he said: “The rate of expansion of the cosmos is accelerating.”

“I—” I said. “Yes it is.”

“That’s been known for a while. You’re going to announce that you know why this is happening?”

“Professor Tessimond—” I said, but I couldn’t think of a way to finish the sentence.

“Dark energy,” he said. Then: “Would you like to have lunch?”

I bridled at this. Blame the hormones, I suppose. “I’m afraid I’m going to be
far
too busy today clearing up the mess you have made to be able to take time out for lunch!” For all the world as if he were listening in on my conversation, and objecting to the notion of skipping a meal, P-O-R chose that moment to stretch and squeeze my stomach painfully against my ribs. I grimaced, but kept going. “I’m going to have to explain to the university management why two key members of my team have jumped ship mere
weeks
before we go public with our research.”

“Dinner, then,” he said. “Or drinks. With Dr Sleight too, of course. And bring along your senior managers, if you like. I really didn’t intend to cause any upheavals. I’d be very glad to explain myself.”

“I
might
be able to find a window tomorrow,” I said. “You’re staying locally? There’s a bar. It’s called Bar Bar, for some peculiar reason. We call it the Elephant. Would it be agreeable for you to meet there tomorrow lunchtime?”

After I’d hung up and given Sleight his phone back, I told him what had been arranged. “Why not meet him right now?” Sleight pressed.

“I intend to spend today coaxing Niu Jian and Jack to come back to us. I don’t know what he told them, but I want to be able to present him with a unified front. Tomorrow, Sleight. Tomorrow.”

:3:

T
HE UNIVERSE HAS
been expanding since the Big Bang. It is not that there was a vast empty space, into which the Big Bang burst, like a massive cave with a firecracker dangled in the middle of it. No: the Big Bang
was
the origin of spacetime, as well as of matter. We can calculate how forceful (long story short:
very
) the Big Bang must have been in order to propel so much matter and spacetime apart, and we can calculate how much mass there is in the cosmos. We used to think the gravity of the latter—a lot of gravity, aggregated from a lorra-lorra matter—would eventually slow the expansion, reverse it and bring everything back into a big crunch. Then we thought that the gravity would slow the expansion but not enough to reverse it, and all the galaxies would sail further and further apart forever, cooling to blackness. But now we know that, somehow, seemingly in contravention of the laws of physics, the rate of cosmic expansion is increasing. This was the problem upon which my team worked.

I spent the morning haranguing both Niu Jian and Jack over the phone. Jack was a brick wall, and then he was on a flight and the signal vanished, so I didn’t get very far with him. I had longer to try and bend Niu Jian’s ear, but he was equally stubborn. No, he didn’t want to come back. Yes, he was going to Mecca. None of my threats had any purchase. I offered him financial inducements, I warned him his reputation as a serious scientist was on the line, I even said I was going to call his mother. Eventually I had to grasp the nettle and ring senior management. They were incredulous, at first; and then they were angry; and finally they were baffled.

I’m not surprised. I was baffled myself.

I went home that evening and lay on the sofa whilst M. cooked me linguini. I spooled the whole crazy narrative out to him, and he did his characteristically excellent supporting-pillar impression. It felt better having ranted about it for a while, and the linguini was washed down with a small glass of chianti, which I feel sure P-O-R enjoyed as much as I did, and the whole idiotic nonsense receded in my mind. So what if the two berks weren’t present at the press conference? I’d get senior management in. I’d have Sleight beside me. I could do it
solus
, if need be. That, I told myself, might even be preferable.

M. and I watched an episode of
Mad Men
together. Then Sleight called me. “Boss? I’m in the Elephant.”

“Sleight, I appreciate you not abandoning ship like Jack and Niu Jian,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean I require you to keep me informed of your every change of venue. I’ll get you electronically tagged if I want that.”

“You don’t understand, boss. I’m here with Tessimond.” He sounded excited, like an undercover cop. “He’s at the bar. Getting a half for himself and a pint for me.”

“Well,” I said. “Don’t let me keep you from your revels.”

“I’m going to find out what he told Niu Jian and Jack,” said Sleight, whispering. “Will report back. I know you’re meeting him tomorrow, but I couldn’t wait! Curious! Too curious—that’s the problem with being a scientist, I guess.”

“Sleight...” 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 major trial of my pregnancy. I’m talking about brushing my teeth. Keeping my teeth clean whilst pregnant:
a nightmare
. 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, for that would be an admission of defeat—and 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 favourite part of the day. I had just completed this disagreeable exercise, and was accordingly in no good mood, when Sleight rang back.

“Sleight—what?” I was in super-cross, clipped voice mode. “Seriously: what?”

“I said I would ring back,” he returned. “And so I have.” But his tone of voice had changed. Something was 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, Sleight.
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 from The Elephant; the murmur of conversation, the clink of glasses. “Yes,” he said eventually.

“No,” I said.

“I going to start smoking,” said Sleight.

“If I have to listen to another non-sequitur 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
say
to 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 to me. It took M. a very long time to calm me down. In the end he assured me that Sleight was a combination of drunk and idiot, the precise ratio of those two terms to be decided at a later stage, and that when he woke sober the following day he would see how foolish he’d been and come crawling back to me.

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. In sum: no crawling was observable.

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 researches, 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 reverberations through the world of science that would ensue. None of the junior people 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 overwhelmed by 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; he’d walked away from the job, he had no major publications to his name, such papers I could pull up were all mediocre or worse.

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 though I was. “I don’t know why you’re doing it, but I want you to stop.”

“I assure you, Ana, I intended to suborn nobody,” 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 tell you 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 hotly. “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 re-established contact with him via Facebook, actually, and when I told him I was spending my time travelling, he suggested I drop by. 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 something paper-thin pretext like that. I hear you. But now that 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
berk
and pronounce it
bark
. Does it have anything to do with the bark of trees?”