The Falling Sky Read online

  The

  Falling Sky

  The

  Falling Sky

  Pippa Goldschmidt

  First published April 2013

  Freight Books

  49-53 Virginia Street

  Glasgow, G1 1TS

  www.freightbooks.co.uk

  Copyright © Pippa Goldschmidt 2013

  The moral right of Pippa Goldschmidt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without either prior permission in writing from the publisher or by licence, permitting restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

  A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-908754-14-1

  eISBN 978-1-908754-15-8

  Typeset by Freight in Garamond

  Printed and bound by Bell and Bain, Glasgow

  Contents

  Now

  Then

  Now

  Then

  Now

  Then

  Now

  Then

  Now

  Then

  Now

  Then

  Now

  Acknowledgements

  Pippa Goldschmidt grew up in London, and now lives in Edinburgh. She is a graduate of the renowned Masters course in creative writing at the University of Glasgow. She has a PhD in astronomy and worked as an astronomer for several years at Imperial College, followed by posts in the civil service including working in outer space policy.

  In 2012 Pippa was awarded a Scottish Book Trust/Creative Scotland New Writers Award. From 2008 to 2012 she was writer in residence at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum, based at the University of Edinburgh. The Falling Sky is her first novel.

  For my family

  Nothing is as certain as death.

  At first, the image is just a blur in the darkness, so Jeanette refocuses her telescope and the blob becomes clear and sharp. A young girl, twelve years old, in a blue and white gingham dress. She’s immobile, fixed against the blank, dark background.

  Now, and for ever more, she hovers just above the event horizon of the black hole. And when Jeanette tries to reach out to her, she’s not really there. All that’s left is this last photo of her, static on a summer’s day in the garden.

  Jeanette may as well be invisible. She’s standing on the stage in the auditorium in front of about two hundred other astronomers, presenting the results of her PhD work at the annual British conference. But she can tell no one’s listening.

  She doesn’t blame them. She wouldn’t listen either, if she didn’t have to. If she could only find a way of drowning out that slightly tremulous voice in her head, which is going on and on about dust in early galaxies. Still, not long now. She’s reached the final slide, showing the actual data. That may interest them more.

  She shines the red dot of the laser pointer onto the screen, wishing it didn’t betray her nervousness. She’s trying to show them the centre of a galaxy, the point where the contours on the map converge into the peak of intensity, and the dot is dancing around it, refusing to settle down. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. She’s only just finished her thesis, she’s expected to be young and overawed by the prospect of speaking at a conference.

  But they’re not interested in this slide either. Some of them are working on their laptops, others are talking to each other. Several people are fiddling with their phones, reading the conference programme, even reading newspapers. Her boss, the Death Star, is asleep. That’s to be expected, he always sits in the front row and sleeps, only waking up at the end to ask some horribly pertinent question. She wonders what he’ll ask today. Because it’s not enough to give the talk in a whisper and be ignored; the experience isn’t complete without the ritual of questions afterwards, to allow the (mostly male) audience to do the verbal equivalent of showing their tail feathers off to each other.

  She gets to the end, clicks off the laser, stands and waits. She doesn’t have to wait long.

  ‘Why haven’t you used visible wavelengths as well as infrared?’ from someone who appears to have been playing a game on his mobile phone and clearly hasn’t listened to the main point of her talk, which was the comparison of visible and infrared images.

  ‘Have you considered an alternative explanation of the results?’ This is from someone she fears, a Bright Young Thing not long arrived here from Harvard and keen to demolish all before him.

  ‘What sort of alternative explanation are you thinking of ?’ She certainly can’t think of any and he obviously wants to enlighten everyone. He sets off on an elaborate discussion, gargoyled with words she has never heard of. When he finally stops talking she can’t even summon the energy to reply to him, she just points silently to someone else who is waving his hand at her, as if summoning a waitress to remove his dirty plates.

  ‘Why haven’t you referenced my paper on this galaxy?’

  ‘I have.’ She hopes she sounds rude.

  The Death Star wakes up and stares at her as if he’s never seen her before. ‘What does it mean?’ he asks before his eyes snap shut again, not bothering to wait for her reply.

  What does it mean? It means what she has already explained to him and everyone else, that the peak of infrared emission from this galaxy is spatially offset from the peak at visible wavelengths, implying a large amount of dust must be present which is obscuring some of the stars, soaking up the light and re-emitting it at longer wavelengths. The dust is made by exploding stars come to the end of their lives, so this is an old galaxy, it’s already produced at least one generation of stars. Interesting enough, if you want to know the detail of how galaxies work.

  It means she has fulfilled the obligations of her PhD and carried out a suitably non-controversial (i.e. boring) project, proved herself capable of slogging away at a telescope night after night to gather data of dubious quality, writing software not obviously riddled with errors to reduce and analyse the data, and then copying the style of thousands of other equally boring academic papers to report what she has discovered, so that she can get a job and carry on doing this for the rest of her life. If she is lucky.

  This is what it means right now. But she knows that it means other things too.

  It means she gets to spend time using real telescopes, ones large enough to see galaxies near the beginning of the Universe, or the edge of time, or whatever fancy phrase you want to use. Telescopes a long way away, in deserts and on the tops of mountains, in places so remote that they seem scarcely less odd than the galaxies themselves.

  It means she has knowledge. She knows how to unpick apparently simple statements such as ‘the sky is dark at night’ to get at the information contained inside. She knows about the past, present and future of stars, of galaxies, of the Universe itself. She knows how to decipher the light of the night sky.

  It means she has escaped. Escaped from home, the depression in the sofa, the radioactive glow of the TV, the outer space vacuum in the house, and the cigarette ash sprinkled over everything like earth on a coffin.

  The Death Star starts snoring again before she has finished answering him. Afterwards she realises he might have done her a favour, by getting her to repeat the main point of her talk. Perhaps he thought she hadn’t made it clear enough during he
r presentation and was giving her the opportunity to reiterate it. Or he may simply have missed it when she said it the first time. Or, and this is probably the most likely explanation, he’s just bloody-minded and enjoys trying to wrong-foot the speakers.

  She’s been working for him for a year now but she still hasn’t fathomed him. Nobody knows who first came up with his nickname or what its original meaning was, but it’s endured because it suits him in its neat combination of his main research interest; supernovae, those massive stars that die in a spectacular explosion of light, together with the fear he instils in other astronomers as he rumbles up and down the corridors at the Observatory.

  Later, as they’re going into the hall where the conference dinner is taking place, she sees Richard, the other post-doc at the Observatory, surrounded by a crowd of people she doesn’t know. Richard is laughing, an awful braying sound that’s much louder than the underlying burble of words in the hall. She knows what the laughter means, it is supposed to signify that Richard is comfortable talking with these people. She’s tempted to go over and join him, anyone can sit where they like at these things, and all it takes is a battle of nerves to go and sit next to the Astronomer Royal. Why shouldn’t she belong too?

  So she starts to work her way through the groups of people. A couple of people recognise her, maybe from the talk she gave that afternoon, and nod. Most people don’t pay any attention to her. As she reaches the table where Richard and the Astronomer Royal are sitting, she pauses for a moment, but nobody notices her. So she pulls out a chair and sits down in silence. She’s sitting beside two men she doesn’t recognise. She appears to have interrupted their conversation, because after a brief pause they start to talk to each other as if she isn’t there. She fights back the impulse to look down at her body to check she’s still visible. Opposite her, the Astronomer Royal is staring into his empty wine glass as Richard explains to him with equal amounts of enthusiasm and inaccuracy a new technique for imaging very faint objects.

  She glares at Richard but she knows she shouldn’t feel so cross; she’s partly responsible for him being here in the first place.

  It was just after they both started work as post-docs, about a year ago, after being students for so long. At lunch that day she found Richard sitting at the furthest table in the canteen, listening to a man in a dark suit who was unknown to her. The man was talking about galaxy surveys; large projects to gather information on thousands of galaxies to determine how they change and evolve with time. There were many such surveys going on at telescopes all over the world. The man was explaining that his survey was one of the largest, involving hundreds of nights of telescope time, and hundreds of astronomers working together. It sounded like a job advert, and Jeanette realised what was going on. He was part of the consortium, a shadowy group of top astronomers collaborating on a vast project running for years, slurping up time on telescopes and promising to answer all the remaining questions in cosmology. It sounded like he was trying to get Richard involved in this work. Superficially it sounded appealing; Richard would get his name on lots of papers. But Jeanette guessed that they wouldn’t actually let him do anything interesting on the project, all the big names would have divided the interesting analysis, the really sexy stuff, between them. They needed grunts like Richard to help out on the grindingly boring data reduction, to turn the computing handle and crank out zillions of images and spectra of galaxies.

  She glanced at Richard, at his glossy hair and pink cheeks. He reminded her of a well-bred dog, sitting there eagerly gazing at the man in the suit, as if he expected a pat on the head. She couldn’t be doing with this sort of work, the endless data collection where all the questions are pinned down in advance and all that’s left to do is the drudgery. And it’s not as if the consortium had actually published that much. They kept appearing at conferences, trailing their latest data like an advert for a future film that never got released. Rumour had it that they were sitting on thousands of images of galaxies. She would have liked to get her hands on that, but not at the cost of actually having to work with them. She’d leave that to the Richards of the world.

  Perhaps it was because she was a woman, she thought, as she watched the two men. Up until the early twentieth century, women were trained to be human computers in astronomical observatories, to do mechanical tasks that ostensibly required no intellectual ability. She’d seen photos of them, rows and rows of girls in white pinafores seated at desks examining glass plates, their expressions a mixture of boredom and earnestness. They were trained to look for variable stars by spotting minute differences between the plates. Perhaps it was better than anything else they could hope to do, but still she resented any notion that she might have something in common with them, and so she would avoid being the invisible cog in the wheel.

  After lunch when she was back in her new office thinking about her future research, Richard came in. She carried on staring at her computer screen, trying to look busy. She wasn’t desperately keen on having to talk to him about his plans. But he stood there, obviously waiting for her to finish what she was doing, so eventually she had to look at him.

  ‘So?’ she said, trying to sound cheerful, ‘did you succeed?’

  ‘Not yet,’ his smile was a bit lop-sided. ‘I really want it, though.’

  She looked back at her work, she wasn’t used to people being so obvious about what they wanted. It made him seem naked, somehow. It was unseemly. She was aware that she was blushing.

  He carried on. ‘They’ve asked me to do something. As a sort of test, I think.’ He was fiddling with his hands, and she realised that he was there because he needed her help.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I have to work out a strategy for observing galaxy images down to a certain surface brightness. To get the details.’ He paused, as if waiting for her to make the connection between this and her own work. This was the sort of calculation she did all the time. How long would it take a telescope to be able to detect a feature on a galaxy, such as a spiral arm?

  ‘I’ve done that,’ she said, surprised at the briskness in her voice. If he was hoping that she would be able to cover up the inadequacies in his ability to do his job, she needed to pretend, for both their sakes, that it was simply to save time. ‘No point in you doing it again.’ And she scrabbled around in the pile of papers that had accumulated on her desk to find what she needed, a table of numbers from her last observing trip. ‘This is for a four metre telescope, for a five sigma detection. This row shows surface brightness, and this shows length of time in seconds needed to achieve that level of statistical significance. Just scale it up or down for different sizes of telescopes.’

  ‘Thanks, Jeanette,’ he said, and she saw for the first time just how unnaturally white his teeth were. ‘You’re a star. Just give me a shout if you ever need my help. For anything.’

  Now, she realises that the two men she’s sitting next to are from the consortium. One of them might have been the man in the canteen that day, she can’t be sure. Sometimes she’s not so good with faces, galaxies are easier to remember. Perhaps it’s because they’re further away.

  The other face that keeps looming up from the past is the ice woman. She takes a slug of wine and tries not to think of the ice woman, hardly noticing someone sitting down next to her in the last empty chair left at their table. It’s an older man, old enough to be retired. Probably an emeritus professor. The conference is full of them, men who defined the subject forty or fifty years ago. Who set off like pioneers, with new telescopes to map the Universe, to chart its strange galaxies and different types of matter. She smiles shyly at the old chap next to her. These old geezers tend to be more courteous than the awful Bright Young Things, and as expected, this one smiles shyly back.

  ‘Are you an open-minded young woman?’ he says, so quietly it’s almost a whisper.

  Not again. God knows it’s not the first time this has happened, but they’re usually drunk and this one looks quite sober. She doesn’t kn
ow if that makes it better or worse.

  ‘I heard your talk and I thought you might want to see this,’ and he looks around him, before he starts fumbling around theatrically in his trouser pockets. The whole table falls silent as he finally manages to produce a stained and crumpled roll of papers and slaps it down next to her soup bowl, so that the roll unfurls and she can read the title; ‘An enquiry into the effects of the planets on the human psyche.’

  ‘So what did you do then?’ Later, in the bar with her collaborator, Maggie. Maggie’s snorting with laughter.

  ‘I had to politely listen to him talk about astrology for the rest of the entire bloody meal, didn’t I?’

  ‘Astrology! How embarrassing…Maggie purses her lips in disgust.

  She just shrugs, not really wanting to talk about it any more, not wanting to consider why she seems to attract the freaks and nutters at conferences. Perhaps she looks too sympathetic. She sneaks a look at Maggie standing there, one arm balanced on the bar, nursing her first and only glass of wine that evening. There’s no clutter about Maggie. Nothing to distract her from her purpose in life.

  She’s been collaborating with Maggie for a few years now, has watched Maggie’s fingers patter precisely over computer keyboards, has interrupted her quiet voice explaining the intricacies of galaxy formation, and has spilled coffee over her neatly annotated charts on countless observing trips at countless telescopes. Maggie’s a comrade in arms.

  ‘Let’s talk about our next trip,’ she says now to Maggie, who’s pushed her wine to one side and is ordering an orange juice. ‘We need to have a battle plan.’

  Jeanette sets off on her journey to fetch her sister back from the dead. She dives down into the blue night, beyond the surface layer of planets and their moons, far below the Sun and the bubbles of comets at the edge of the solar system. There is still a long way to go, before she reaches the midnight depths.