The Falling Sky Read online

  Now she’s travelling with the Universe itself, riding the back of it, surfing on its energy.

  She circles early galaxies, swoops into the sea of primordial hydrogen, photons streaming brilliant light from her fingertips.

  She finds her sister asleep, curled up at the bottom of the ocean. Kate dreams the world; its beginning and its end. She won’t stop dreaming as long as Jeanette obeys the Universe’s equations.

  The next week, Jeanette is back in Edinburgh, sitting in her small office at the top of the Observatory’s west tower, with the papers balanced on her lap because her desk is too cluttered with towers of books and data tapes. She’s supposed to be completing yet another job application form. She reads the question on the form, trying to concentrate on the meaning of the words as if this is the first time she has ever seen them; “Why should your research be funded?” and her mind stops.

  She stares at the posters on the walls. ‘3rd ESO-CERN conference on the early Universe,’ claims one. ‘4th Hawaii workshop on shrouded stars,’ states another and, oddly crammed in between these symbols of earnest work, is a small photo of a naked man with horns scribbled on his head in felt-tip pen. The graffitied photo has been in this office longer than she has. She refuses to take it down although she can observe her students gazing at it during tutorials, when they should be paying more attention to her. She likes having a piece of irrationality in this place which is a monument to science and logic. No one will ever know who the man is, or why there are horns drawn on his image.

  She wonders how long she can sit here without having a coherent thought. It is the privilege of the dusty academic, she muses, to be answerable to no one and so I can sit here not doing anything and not feel guilty. But she knows that’s not really true. She’s answerable to the grant funders, to the students and to the senior staff. She’s answerable to herself when she wakes up at three o’clock in the morning and lies in bed working out how many more months, weeks, and days she has left on her grant.

  Sometimes she feels like Alice in Wonderland, chasing rabbits down holes and falling for ever towards some unknown destination. Like Alice, she can read and talk as she falls, and speculate on what’s happening to her. She catches glimpses of galaxies as she whizzes past, their spiral arms reaching out to her like octopus tentacles. The faces of other astronomers slide by, elongated by gravity, their voices echoing down the hole.

  ‘It’s trivial to show that the Universe is closed so that every path in space-time loops back upon itself,’ says Tweedledum.

  ‘Nonsense, the Universe is expanding at an exponential rate. It’s hyperbolic so all paths lead to infinity,’ says Tweedledee.

  She tries to talk to them but her words can’t be heard. I wonder if I’m in a vacuum, she thinks. In space, no one can hear me argue. She sees herself reading books speculating on what caused the Big Bang and whether there will be a big crunch. She observes herself having apparently sensible arguments with apparently normal human beings about the precise number of galaxies in the Universe. She watches herself give a seminar, as if to the Queen of Hearts, at which her intellectual rivals stand up and shout at her that she must be wrong and that she should have her head cut off, or at least lose her allocation of observing time on telescopes.

  She decides to give up work for the day and leaves her office, going down the spiral staircase. At the bottom, as usual, she runs her fingers along the scar in the brickwork.

  The story of what caused the scar is hardly ever referred to, and when it is, the details are usually wrong. But Jeanette’s read the original newspaper cuttings, and knows what really happened.

  The standard story, usually told in a half-joking way, is that in 1913 a suffragette tried to bomb the Observatory, and failed, only causing a minor bit of damage to the library.

  But in fact the bomb went off at the base of this tower, and did considerable damage to its structure, as well as to the telescope housed in it, causing some of the optics to be smashed and the metal casing to shear apart.

  Jeanette wonders why the history is never told right, even though there’s plenty of evidence for what happened. The then Astronomer Royal’s apoplectic letters about the incident. The pale seam of newer bricks in the wall. Why do people here feel the need to dismiss their own history?

  She’s made an arrangement to go and meet her friend Paula. She walks down the steep hill away from the Observatory, through the streets of Marchmont, and into town. They always meet in the same pub, a basement dive off Rose Street.

  When she gets there, it takes a moment for her eyes to adjust to the gloom inside, and then she notices that Becca is there too. They’re both sitting at the usual little round table which is already covered with several empty glasses. They’ve clearly been there for some time.

  Paula looks up at her and says, ‘Oh, hi,’ sounding surprised, as if they’re not expecting her, as if she’s interrupting them. Not for the first time, she wonders what they talk about when she’s not there.

  ‘Do you want a drink?’ Paula says, and without waiting for an answer, she goes to the bar.

  ‘She wants to ask you something,’ Becca says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Best wait until she gets back.’

  Again, that feeling of being shut out. Becca just fiddles with her cigarette lighter until Jeanette feels compelled to say something. ‘How was your day?’

  ‘Oh, alright. Nothing exciting.’

  They both watch Paula at the bar. Her head is thrown back and she’s laughing with the barman. Becca twists to look out of the window so that Jeanette can see the hair cut short against the skin. The back of her neck looks as though it’s not often exposed to the light, it looks pale and vulnerable.

  Years ago, Jeanette was friends with Becca at university. Almost as many years ago, Paula was one of Jeanette’s flatmates. Jeanette provides the official link between Paula and Becca, but sometimes when they both look at her, she feels like the odd one out.

  Becca turns back, still half silhouetted against the window and smiles slightly. ‘What mysteries of the universe have you uncovered today?’

  Jeanette feels the need to entertain. ‘I found a dead spider in my notebook. It probably smuggled itself into the country with me, when I came back from my last observing run in Chile.’

  Becca seems to find this amusing. ‘Perhaps it’s the smallest illegal immigrant ever.’

  ‘I can see the headlines now — “Eight-legged asylum seekers hidden in science notebooks”.’

  Becca snorts with laughter. ‘Perhaps it could sell its story to the press — “My fear of being flushed down the plughole”.’

  ‘It wasn’t a very successful bid for freedom though. It’s rather two-dimensional now.’

  But after this they fall silent again. Jeanette isn’t inclined to say anything more. She’s done her bit with Becca and now it’s Becca’s turn. Except it never is Becca’s turn. Always beautiful, always remote, she sits there politely and waits for other people to entertain her. So they watch Paula flirt with the barman, until finally she wanders back with Jeanette’s wine and rearranges herself on her chair.

  ‘This chair’s too short,’ she says, and straightens her legs out as if to demonstrate their inconvenient length. ‘How much rent do you pay each month, Jeanette?’

  Jeanette is taken aback by this non sequitur. ‘Um, a lot. Why?’

  Paula touches her arm and smiles, showing very white teeth. ‘Wouldn’t it be good if you only had to pay half ?’

  Jeanette’s still confused. Paula’s wearing bright lipstick this evening, even redder and shinier than usual. Why is she so dolled up? ‘Yes but no one’s offering to pay half my rent for me. Are they?’

  There’s a pause while Paula takes a swig of wine. ‘Well, I might,’ she says.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I need a place to live.’

  ‘But you’ve already got somewhere.’

  ‘It’s too damn expensive. It’s not easy changing career
s and going back to art college.’

  Becca says, ‘It’s not only the expense. You can’t actually carry on living in that flat now.’ She adds to Jeanette, ‘Sex-kitten shagged her landlord last month.’

  ‘He let me off the rent for a week.’

  ‘You mean he paid you?’ Jeanette almost spits a mouthful of wine across the table.

  Paula just twirls her wineglass. ‘It was fun when we lived together, wasn’t it?’

  Jeanette grins. ‘We had a lot of parties,’ she tells Becca. ‘We had a toga party and everyone else was draped in dirty white sheets, but Paula was Louise Brooks in this vampy black dress and a wig.’

  ‘Well, there you are. We’ll have fun again.’

  She can remember the way that Paula looked at them all on her first day in the house, when they were equably lined up on the sofa in front of the television eating their tea, and there was a motorbike disembowelled on the rug. She’d never minded the motorbike, but it soon disappeared after Paula moved in.

  The first one to get sucked in was Wayne. He lasted a month, before she found him crying in the kitchen one day, his fat little-boy face buckled with grief.

  She tells Becca, ‘She slept with all the other flatmates, that’s why she had to move out.’

  ‘Oh for Gods sake! Not all of them.’ Paula laughs, clearly delighted that Jeanette is making her out to be such a femme fatale. ‘I didn’t sleep with you!’

  ‘You’re not a lezzer.’

  ‘Do you have to use that word?’ Becca glares at Jeanette.

  ‘I like it,’ says Jeanette. ‘I’m reclaiming it from nasty school kids and men’s mags.’

  After Wayne the details are a bit hazy, but she can remember gradually becoming aware of the night-time noises coming from Paula’s room next door. The noises were muffled, as though underwater, and Jeanette used to imagine Paula enticing men under the sea, wrapping her arms around them in the turquoise water and making love to them until they drowned.

  ‘Isn’t your flat awfully small for two people? Where is she going to sleep?’ asks Becca.

  ‘It’s big enough.’ She wonders why Becca seems so against the idea. It will be a squeeze if Paula’s camping in the living room. But if she can’t get a new job, some more money coming into the flat will be essential.

  Becca doesn’t say anything else, just taps her fingers on the table in a sharp staccato rhythm like Morse code.

  ‘Hang on, is your sofa bed a double?’ Paula looks thoughtful.

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘That should be alright. Mr. Landlord was so awful in bed it’s put me right off. It was about as sexy as inserting a tampon.’

  Jeanette laughs and even Becca smiles, but Jeanette is surprised to see that her smile is as thin and sour as a slice of lemon.

  The next day she goes to visit Jon, one of the lecturers. Unlike most of the other scientists at the Observatory, Jon wears a proper white coat and works in a proper lab, tucked away in the basement of the newest building on the site. She enjoys watching Jon at work because everything seems so physical in the lab. He has dirt under his fingernails, and pieces of duct tape stuck to his sleeves. His biros are neatly lined up in his chest pocket. The wires on the lab bench are soldered together at junctions made by old tobacco tins. She thinks of Jon as an alchemist, transforming these physical components into pure knowledge.

  Sometimes when she visits him in the lab, he tells her about the instrument he is building. This instrument is going to be part of a satellite, and once it’s in space it will carry out detailed measurements of galaxies and transmit the data back to Earth. He’s nicknamed the instrument Orion, the hunter. Its real name is the slightly more prosaic OIRS, short for ‘optical and infrared spectrometer’.

  This won’t happen for at least another year. The instrument has to be shipped out to the satellite control centre, then bolted onto the satellite which will go the launch pad to be loaded onto the rocket that will be launched into outer space. It will fly until it reaches the right spot far above them, and then release the satellite.

  She likes the sense of order in the lab; more than that, there is a sense that everything has a purpose. She’s all too aware of her own slapdash approach to work, the ideas not followed through, the half written papers never finished. But Jon’s instrument requires meticulous planning and teamwork if it is going to change from a sketch on a page to a piece of glass and metal, and then back again into more knowledge about galaxies.

  Recently he’s been running calibration tests on one of the components of the instrument. This component will capture light from galaxies, and then smear out the light into spectra; long ribbons of rainbow colours. With these spectra you can measure how much light is emitted by different chemical elements at different wavelengths. It’s an old concept, a reliable method of studying stars and galaxies. But the instrument that Jon is building will be the most sensitive ever; it will look at the most distant galaxies in the Universe.

  Jon used to be a chemist and has a chemist’s love of matter that goes beyond words and symbols into something material. He likes to talk about the differences between the two forms of carbon. One is soft and malleable, and the other is hard diamond. They’re the same carbon atoms, but the differences are due to the way that the electrons are arranged around their cores. It always amazes Jeanette that electrons; particles whose masses are thousands of times smaller than those of the atoms, can have such a profound effect on the physical nature of substances.

  But today, Jon doesn’t talk about his work, he tells her about his family. ‘My great-grandfather was an astronomer too. He was the other man on Eddington’s 1919 expedition.’ As he talks, the pair of spectacles perched high on his head catch the light and glint at Jeanette. It’s as if he has an extra pair of eyes.

  Jeanette’s puzzled. Eddington carried out an expedition just after the First World War to measure the curvature of light rays around the sun during a solar eclipse, and prove that Einstein’s theory of general relativity was correct. She isn’t aware that any other astronomers were involved.

  Jon carries on, ‘There were actually two expeditions to carry out the experiment, on separate islands. Eddington was in charge of one of the trips, and my great-grandfather led the other one. His name was Crommelyn.’

  Still no recognition from Jeanette. Jon rolls his eyes. ‘Don’t you know anything? It was famous.’

  ‘So, is it in your blood then? Did you learn how to use a telescope at your great-grandfather’s knee?’

  ‘Don’t be daft, he died years before I was born. But I was intrigued by him. He took part in this world-famous experiment, in fact it was his data and not Eddington’s that were actually used. And he’s forgotten now. He just went straight back to his country house and spent the rest of his life there. I’m not sure he was even particularly interested in general relativity. He was more interested in the practicalities of doing the experiment. You know, they had to lug a huge telescope halfway up a mountain on a tropical island off the north coast of Brazil. It was an amazing thing to do. It took them months and months. Eddington’s expedition had bad luck, it was cloudy where they were, and they only got a few usable photographs. But Crommelyn struck gold. And then when it all became public it was Eddington who got the glory, even though it was Crommelyn’s photographs that were used.’

  ‘Didn’t he want any of the glory?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so. From what we can tell, he seems to have been quite happy to slip away. He spent the rest of his life hunting for comets.’

  Jeanette remembers something else. ‘Wasn’t there something odd about that experiment? Didn’t Eddington just find what he wanted to find? The data were pretty poor.’

  ‘He had great — intuition. He discarded the data that he didn’t like, without explaining why.’

  ‘That’s terrible. You’d never get away with that nowadays.’

  Jon laughs at her. ‘Of course not, Miss Morality.’

  The speed of light is
a constant. This is so amazing Jeanette can’t stop grinning whenever she thinks about it. Speeds of ordinary things like people, cars, or trains, are not constant. They vary depending on how they’re measured. A train whizzing past a station at eighty miles an hour appears to be stationary to the people travelling in it. But light isn’t like that. It’s always moving, always the same.

  Sometimes when she’s whirring around the universe, trying to decide where to live, what to eat, and who to sleep with, she forgets about the constancy of light. She can only see the fireworks around her, and hear the boom boom boom of her heart. But when things are still and quiet, there is a flash of torchlight, and she detects it, and is grateful.

  On the first evening of her week-long observing run in Chile, Jeanette stands on the mountaintop, examining her reflection in the metal dome. There’s nothing else here. No people, apart from the astronomers and the support staff. No buildings, apart from telescopes where they work at night and the residential lodge where they sleep during the day in a curious inversion of normal life, like a photographic negative.

  As the light drains from the sky, she hurries back inside to the control room to continue working with Maggie. Sunset is a precariously narrow time trapped between the fat certainties of day and night. Each evening they compete against the darkening sky to ensure that the telescope is set up correctly, so that none of the precious night is wasted.

  At this telescope, the control room is off to one side, curved around the edge of the dome which houses the telescope. The astronomers and the telescope operator sit in this room all night, sending instructions to the telescope and scrutinising the resulting images.

  There are no windows in the control room, so it feels small and claustrophobic. There is no way of actually looking at the night sky unless you go outside. She couldn’t believe this on her first observing run. It seemed nonsensical, to cross the world to use a telescope and not even be able to look through it. Now she is resigned to the fact that the only way of understanding the world is to see it displayed in rectangles on the computer screen. She still wishes they could actually work inside the dome, but this hasn’t happened in Chile for several years now. The heat from their bodies would make the air shiver and distort the images formed by the telescope mirrors, so they’re hidden away. There’s still one telescope in Australia where the astronomer has to sit in a small metal cage behind the primary mirror. She did that once, when she was a student, and remembers the view of the sky with the stars flashing past as she swooped around the dome, and the exhilarating feeling of being on a fairground ride in the dark, with the cage rattling around her.