5
Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. Sunday.
One week, then another.
The days passed in a whirl of hours spent revising his grant application, working with Dr. Kramer to showcase the Quantum group’s research for the Department of Energy during the Secretary’s visit, cleaning and analyzing the data from his lab time—and when he carved out a minute, centering himself through a round of sudoku or a sketch.
Despite his exhaustion, he was very careful with his ink. His hands remained clean, with no pigment stains to explain to his supervisor.
He was equally careful to avoid the twice-weekly calls from his parents.
Every Wednesday evening, his phone shrilled to rouse Bunsen from a nap and send the retriever racing to the entryway, barking at a nonexistent doorbell. It rang again on Sundays whenever he failed to make an appearance at the Meyers’ family meal—a requirement for model families.
Fortunately, his parents rarely left messages.
He called them back, but always when he could be certain of his father and Chase being at the hospital, or when his mother would be leading tours through one of the East Bay Garden Society’s estates.
You’ve reached Dr. Chase Meyer Sr. Leave a message.
You’ve reached Dr. Chase Meyer Jr. Leave a message.
Hello, you’ve reached Karen Meyer’s voicemail. If you’re inquiring about the East Bay Garden Society’s June fundraiser, please leave a message and I’ll return your call shortly. If you’re inquiring about scheduling a tour, please call the society’s office at—
On other nights, however, his condo was silent and peaceful. Only the occasional muffled thump of a door closing in an adjacent unit or the sough of water in the pipes disturbed him. He knew his neighbors’ schedules by their doors and their noisy plumbing; the tenants to his right were still watering the landscaped portion of their patio, despite the drought. They likely knew his schedule in the same way. But that was the extent of their acquaintance. Intimate and distant. His mother would’ve made herself known to every household in the Farm Hill Boulevard complex within a few days, but he’d lived here ever since he’d graduated from Berkeley and moved across the bay to the Peninsula, and he couldn’t remember the name of even one neighbor. That was preferable for privacy in such close quarters. His, and theirs.
But Erin Monaghan’s new, persistent silence was not peaceful. Twelve o’clock on Tuesdays came without the inconvenience of waiting for her to complete a data collection cycle or running into her as she left the research building. He sometimes spotted her bicycle parked at the door to the West Experimental Hall—locked up with a complicated combination cable, but ripe for switching its brake configurations, if he’d had the tools—but she was never near the control room when he arrived.
No coffee rings on the operator desks.
No Beatles songs.
Where was she?
What was she playing at?
Scheming for the Secretary of Energy’s visit, making strides on the Eischer-Langhoff application, solidifying her department takeover, bolting down her lunch in the cafeteria—when she wasn’t eating a sandwich at her desk, glasses smudged from impatient fingers pushing the frames back up her nose, shoulders hunched in focus toward her monitor—before rushing back to Modern Physics on a scooter.
On Thursday, Ethan got to the parking rack first. There was one scooter left.
Erin came striding out the door from the Science and Public Support building, aiming directly for it. He took hold of its handlebars at her approach. A familiar flush rose across her cheeks as she registered his presence. She caught her breath and hesitated for a moment, scanning the pavement around them—empty of turkeys, rattlesnakes, and alternative scooters—but then continued on in the direction of Ethan and the racks, hands fisted, scowling.
His stomach flipped in a victorious somersault. “Going somewhere in a hurry, Monaghan?”
“Yes.”
Her teeth snapped.
“You were. It seems like I got the last scooter.”
“Good for you.”
“Did you want it?”
“Obviously.”
He leaned back against the rack, fiddling with the handlebars. “So, we have a problem.”
“Really.”
Another flash of her teeth. Not a question. Then, unexpectedly, disconcertingly, she smiled. “No. You have a problem—”
—and she lunged forward to wrench the scooter out of his grip. His stomach flipped again, the loss of its ballast tilting him off the rack. Erin’s smile tilted, too. She sneered at his empty hands while she pivoted her purloined handlebars toward Ring Road, planting one sneaker on the scooter’s running board.
“Enjoy your walk back to Modern Physics.”
Somehow, he got a foot in front of her wheel. “You can’t just—”
“Don’t tell me what I can or can’t do!”
She pushed off against the pavement and left him by the racks with a rubber skid mark across the top of his shoe. She hadn’t eased back on her acceleration or swerved to avoid him—had he expected her to?—and he’d barely avoided a crushed ankle by tripping out of her way. Cursing under his breath, he watched her glide down the road. Only when she passed the Blue Bottle coffee stand and swung out of sight did he bend to probe his toes.
The damage to his sneaker was no worse than if Bunsen had chewed on it.
He walked back to the Modern Physics building and deflated Erin’s bicycle tires.
That evening, he gave the shoe to Bunsen.
At least the dog didn’t get sick from his gift or from anything in Stulsaft Park during their post-work run. He was grateful for the sake of the golden retriever’s gut, for the security deposit on his condo, and for his own schedule. Already stretching into dinnertime—a convenient excuse to miss the Meyers’ Sunday gatherings—his workday crept later over the next two weeks, first to ten o’clock, then eleven, before edging past midnight. But he wouldn’t have slept, anyhow. Not until both his grant and his funding pitch to the Secretary of Energy were perfect. Bunsen sprawled across his feet and Ted Chiang’s collection of science fiction short stories were good company in the silence. Whenever Tomasz Szymanski’s icon went live on SVLAC’s instant messaging system between eleven o’clock at night and three o’clock in the morning, however, he frequently found himself with questions about his colleague’s LED research. They were tangential to his own quantum measurement work at best, but still:
Dr. Ethan Meyer
Could LED infrared radiation potentially illuminate space and matter at micro-scales, if enough energy was applied?
Dr. Tomasz Szymanski
You are working at this time?
It was almost two thirty. Bunsen had given up hope of coercing Ethan into the bedroom, but had managed to get him from his desk to the couch and into a pair of flannel pajama pants. The dog twitched in his sleep on the cushions now, kicking Ethan in the kidneys.
Dr. Ethan Meyer
You’re working, too.
Dr. Tomasz Szymanski
Yes. But it is the middle of the morning in Poland.
Maybe Szymanski was talking with his family abroad while he cleaned his data. Maybe that was why he never seemed to mind graveyard shifts at the lab. Maybe it was easier to have parents and siblings halfway around the world, separated by a nine-hour time difference? His fingers hovered over his keyboard in a question, but then his colleague continued.
Dr. Tomasz Szymanski
No. Electroluminescence would not provide the brightness necessary for your work, and not for the duration or energy levels that you require. The life of an LED is short at high currents and temperatures. It is not practical for your voltaic needs.
That’s what their late-night messages were: practical and short.
If the brevity of Szymanski’s words and Ethan’s similarly terse responses were occasionally grating—well, he was just low on sleep. Any communication would’ve irritated him, even if he initiated it. Which he usually did.
But he didn’t ask Szymanski about his family in Central Europe, or if he had a spouse or children. He didn’t ask if Szymanski had read Ted Chiang’s Exhalation collection. He said nothing about Bunsen’s recent near-miss with a skunk in Stulsaft Park, either. Nothing personal.
Why introduce change to a stable system?
Several weeks later, he also said nothing when he received a singleton’s save-the-date for Chase Meyer Jr.’s wedding to Isabel Wright.
They made an attractive pair in their engagement picture, Chase handsome, broad, and smiling with a white grin even wider than his shoulders, Isabel all angles and icy blonde luminosity. The font and graphics on the card reflected Karen Meyer’s taste.
A frequent patron of Carmel’s art scene and a contributor to the de Young Museum’s annual Bouquets to Art installation, Ethan’s mother had an eye for design, but still had never taken any interest in his early forays into drawing; their refrigerator had been decorated with curated vacation magnets and posed family photographs, not the stick figures and brightly colored finger-paintings that other parents seemed to prize. His admiration for her undeniably elegant work on Chase’s save-the-date card was also undeniably bitter.
He tacked up the notice in his kitchen beside an appointment reminder from his dentist. At least he’d be numb for the root canal.
Friday brought a more welcome piece of mail. A copy of Galactica Magazine was waiting for him when he returned to Redwood City after another afternoon spent on the Eischer-Langhoff application in his office. Having dropped his bag, fleece, and shoes at the door, prodded his ancient air conditioner to life, and greeted Bunsen, he unfurled the issue. Behind the magazine’s glossy cover art of a human and an alien figure grasping hands and tentacles while admiring a firework display of planets and bolides in the night sky, his piece was in print.
He shuffled into the living room while thumbing through Galactica’s pages. Art… poems… a wall of short story text… and then, there it was: an explosion of ink, more sound than image in its visceral vibrancy. He could hear it in the quiet: “Hunger.”
He dropped down onto his Craigslist couch, smiling, and appraised his own abstract, geometric ink rendering of a black hole swallowing a sun. The strokes of his pen were broad at the margins and narrowed toward the center of a ravenous darkness, creating an optical illusion of gravity so that the viewer plummeted over the black hole’s event horizon with the star. It was unsettling and beautiful.
He, Ethan Meyer, had made this. He tore out his sheet and tacked it over Chase’s card on the refrigerator.
Then he leafed back to the beginning of the magazine, making his way through the other artwork—hypothetical blueprints of an Eridian spacecraft from Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary, a calligraphic rendering of Neil Armstrong’s bungled quote on the moon—and then on to the poetry and short stories, nodding his appreciation for the better narratives, until:
Pandora Rising, by Aaron Forster
First came wonder.
How could it be otherwise?
Tumbling through a sea of stars, space and time passing as currents, unmoored and breathless, weightless, they watched while sky became earth and earth became sky. The way was vast and uncertain, but they were neither afraid nor lonely aboard the Pandora Rising on her final voyage, for they had the curiosity of all scientists, and around them were marvels beyond imagination: dwarf stars and meteors, the scattered fragments of stardust from the primordial Nothing and All.
On Earth-That-Was, they had often looked up and pondered:
When I raise my eyes from this bleak wasteland, when I seek answers from the emptiness above, who sees me in my supplication? Who hears my call?
They had this question to satisfy, and they had each other.
Their trajectory took them beyond the glimmering sprawl of the Milky Way, to the very edge of Alpha Centauri’s binary stars, past nameless astral supergiants burning brighter even than their Sun-That-Was, and onward still. Their years stretched long. The wonders of the universe stretched so much farther.
He stopped nodding. He stopped breathing.
He joined the crew of the Pandora Rising, following the ship past expanding galaxies and to the rippling edge of lightless space where its instruments swung into madness. He shadowed the astronauts through their approach to a black hole, and he waited with them when they could do nothing but observe the coming of their own end. The author sucked him deeply into the fears and fate of these hopeful, desperate people with a lyrical brutality and a gravity so fierce that he couldn’t look up from the text.
But the last page of the story was missing.
At its climactic moment, he flipped forward—but not to the end of “Pandora Rising.”
The next page in Galactica Magazine was an inane poetic tribute to the astronauts who’d died in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
Where was the rest of the story? He turned to the table of contents. “Pandora Rising”
spanned five pages across the magazine’s centerfold, and should have adjoined his own piece in the print layout—
—but he’d already extracted “Hunger”
from the issue.
He raced to the kitchen, ripped his drawing off its magnet on the refrigerator, and: yes. The missing page from “Pandora Rising”
was here, right here, paired beside his art.
He began to read again.
A thick block of text shone from Erin’s monitor: reams of verified data, justification, hope, journal citations (publication pending: September), and a request for four million research dollars from the Eischer-Langhoff Grant in Physics. She’d made her case for each cent and done all she could to enliven the logic of her numerical arguments, outlining the benefits that advancing the field’s knowledge of black hole behavior would provide to humanity—if only SVLAC’s LIGO branch ran for more than twelve hours per week, and wasn’t routinely missing astrophysical events in the lab’s quest to save on energy costs.
More accurate depictions of event horizons in science fiction, for one.
Implications for the future of space travel, for another.
The dry, terse application was as compelling as it could be. It might be enough… and her watch read five o’clock on Friday afternoon.
Click, and the grant was submitted.
Home run—hopefully.
She stretched backward away from her computer, rolling the kinks from her neck, anticipating the freedom of her weekend. Maybe she’d finish Weir’s Project Hail Mary, then pick up N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy from Kepler’s Books. She’d probably get in some sudoku practice, she reasoned, as she hopped a loose cable in the hall, waved goodbye to the interns waiting for their shuttle in the parking lot, and retrieved her bicycle. Its tires were at a normal pressure, taut in the heat and sealed without punctures; both her portable pump and a canister of repair slime remained in her backpack. She pedaled past a rack of abandoned scooters outside the Science and Public Support building and back to Menlo Park, thinking.
Maybe she’d start brainstorming her next short story. Her copy of Galactica Magazine was due any day, and with “Pandora Rising”
finally joining the ylem of the universe, it was time. She’d been considering something about circadian rhythms and astronaut ice cream, hadn’t she? No more shoehorning a narrative into her data. Just language and imagination.
Except that lately, Ethan Meyer had given her writer’s block.
Some sort of block, anyhow.
Newly aware of her colleagues’ stares whenever they jostled for lab time, for SVLAC’s scooters, or for the last serving of cafeteria curry, she’d done her best to avoid him in the office and in the experimental halls over the past few weeks. When she couldn’t help running into him publicly, however, she kept her elbows away from his stupid vest and bit back her usual retorts about data methodologies. She wouldn’t risk being labeled by her coworkers as emotional or reactive, as unable to handle the stresses of her field. These were gendered labels, ones that she’d been dodging for years. Very sticky labels.
Almost as sticky as the neural residue of… that… dream.
So she kept her distance to keep her sanity, too.
Damn him.
At least she found Galactica Magazine in her mailbox that evening. Tucking it under her arm, she hefted her bicycle up the apartment stairs. Her phone vibrated while she dropped her sneakers on the mat.
Wes
I’ve lost track of the days out here on the Quest V. But something tells me it’s a special one…
She tapped into the Monaghan chat, which was pinging enthusiastically.
Mom
Congratulations, sweetheart!
Erin
Thanks, Mom.
Adrian
All words present and accounted for?
Erin
I just got home and grabbed the magazine. And I want to see Wes’s latest marine iguana photos and hear about your infrastructure deal in Austin—but right now, I’m going to read my story.
Then, leaving her family to Galápagos wildlife and Texas negotiations, she swapped her plain gray sweater and jeans for loungewear—glad to wiggle out of her bra, since its underwire had sprung loose earlier in the week and was jabbing her ribs—and settled down on the couch under a fan. She smoothed the fluttering pages of her magazine. Her hands were suddenly shaky. She’d read “Pandora Rising”
many, many times, but that had always been in the privacy of her room, within the privacy of her own head.
Now, though?
Now, other people would read her fable about a skeleton crew of astronauts as they took their final voyage away from a ravaged Earth. When the Pandora Rising’s propulsion mechanisms failed and she fell past the event horizon of a black hole—accurately described as a lightless, featureless space, rather than Star Trek’s visible, energetic implosion—her team despaired. However, upon asking themselves what it was that they’d leave behind in death, they discovered that their losses weren’t so terrible. They’d already given up their Earth-That-Was, made desolate by a changing climate and human destruction. They’d just intended to drift to the edges of their understanding and consciousness… though they’d hoped for one last miracle in the expanse, of course.
They’d found that miracle in their black hole.
It wasn’t the miracle of salvation, but of curiosity in the face of the unknown. Their fall was a careening dance toward mystery, toward something that, out of all humanity, only they would experience. They found their peace and their excitement even while they vanished, because without the dull downward drag of earthly gravity, the Pandora Rising wasn’t falling into the black hole at all. She could just as easily be ascending toward it; if gravity was still a law of mutual attraction in space, it was also free from any planet’s upward or downward binary. They fell, or they rose, and they would see what no other eyes had seen. They would bear witness to each other’s awe.
There is tremendous power in a black hole, in darkness and in fear.
But there is no match for the power of human curiosity.
Their wonder was the last thing to leave them.
The words surged to meet her, thrilling and somehow new again, and when she turned over the last page, smiling and breathless with a wonder of her own—
A pen and ink illustration of a black hole.
Immediate, irresistible—it drew and held her focus. The geometric darkness had ensnared a sun, sucking it close to swallow the light, and its pull compelled her forward, too, tilting her into its nothingness, daring her to brave the secrets beyond its event horizon. The lines of the piece were angular. The demarcation between light and shadow was so stark as to be almost painful. The compulsion to let herself be devoured by this mesmerizing menace was overpowering.
“Hunger.”
It wasn’t an illustration for “Pandora Rising.”
But it might as well have been. And though the piece had no relationship to her research paper on the consumption of stars by black holes, still…
So she stared, tracing the sun’s final orbit until she fetched up against a miniscule word in the bottom right corner of the page, half-hidden under the staples in Galactica’s spine.
Bannister.
The artist.
She flipped to the contributor credits at the end of the magazine.
Bannister: “Hunger”
(medium—pen and ink). Contact at www.bannisterart.com.
Nothing else.
Her listing as Aaron Forster was similarly brief.
Maybe Bannister was a pseudonym, too?
Fumbling for her phone and ignoring the flood of Monaghan messages continuing to chirp in the chat, she located Bannister’s website. It was as spartan as the artist’s credit, with just two screens: abstract prints for sale and a contact page. No headshot, no full name. But it listed a phone number and an email address for purchase inquiries.
Erin watched her hands move.
She muted the Monaghan thread.
She tapped Bannister’s number into a new message.
Erin
Hi, I saw your illustration in Galactica Magazine. (I have a short story published in the same issue: Pandora Rising.) You’ve captured in a single visual what I’ve spent months trying to articulate with words. It’s extraordinary. I’m honored to share page space with Hunger.
Her thumb was steady now and didn’t hesitate to press Send.
Ping.
Before she could second-guess the wisdom of messaging a random person through a number she’d found on the internet, a typing notification bubbled up on her screen.
Bannister
A picture is worth a thousand words. But Pandora Rising could inspire a thousand pictures.
The artist had read and liked her story! And that would’ve been enough to please her, so much more than enough—but then another ellipsis appeared under their message.
Bannister
Hi Aaron, it’s good to meet you.