Perihelion Summer Read online

  Yuki joined them. Matt gave her a questioning look.

  “My family’s heading out of Osaka,” she said. “They have relatives in a small village in the mountains. A lot of their neighbors will be doing the same.”

  “Will the villages cope?”

  Yuki shrugged. “Civil defense are doing something with ration packs and chemical toilets. I don’t know where they’ll put everyone, but at least they can melt snow for drinking water if they have to.”

  Arun appeared, beaming.

  “Someone waiting at the marina?” Matt asked hopefully.

  “No, but they’ve agreed to go inland. If you seriously thought my parents would ever set foot on this malodorous pool noodle, you clearly haven’t spent enough time with them.”

  Matt spread his arms resignedly. “And there I was ready to put chocolates on their pillows.”

  Jožka showed up, looking bemused. “They’re taking a holiday back to Brno,” she announced. “My whole family’s going to stay with my grandparents for a couple of months. They were begging me to join them!”

  “Well, Brno’s a long way from the sea,” Yuki conceded. “And the food’s sure to be nicer than ours.”

  “No love for the Mandjet anywhere,” Arun lamented.

  “Do you want me to talk to your parents?” Matt asked Aaron. “I’m no expert on black holes, but marine engineers know a lot about tides, and there’s a chance I can sell them on a holiday in the gold fields just by wearing them down with my extensive knowledge of the local amphidromic system.”

  Aaron nodded and raised his phone to call the number. As Matt prepared to make his pitch, he tried to damp down his own sense of the true scale of the problem. He needed to make the trip sound as unremarkable as leaving town to avoid an uncomfortable summer. No one waited for official directions to do that, or bogged down in a moral quagmire if their neighbors chose not to follow them. Disasters belonged to distant places, or bad movies, but maybe people could still be persuaded to act if it made them feel . . . not even safe—which raised the stakes too high by invoking thoughts of the opposite state—but merely prudent.

  6

  Matt lay awake for hours, floating in a haze of weariness and unwanted vigilance, willing his phone to beep to put an end to the waiting, then cursing his impatience and begging it to stay silent instead.

  When he did sleep, he dreamed of Einstein rings—and in the morning he woke to find them everywhere: in the stain left on the table by the bottom of his coffee mug, in the sunlight reflected from a can onto the wall. But not on the control room console. Not yet.

  There had to come a point when the sluggish motion of the Taraxippoi across the sky was replaced by a sudden rush, like a train rattling by—and the longer it took for this oncoming train to appear to veer sideways, the closer that placed the Earth to the tracks. If you were waiting for a sign that the headlights were no longer bearing down on you, no news was bad news.

  But when the train was invisible, the cues weren’t so easy to read. As the black holes swept past new stars whose light might fall under their sway, the chance of another lensing on any given day depended on the speed at which they crossed the sky now, not how far they’d come from the start—and while an object approaching almost head-on seemed frozen in place at first, by the time it shot past it could only appear faster, by virtue of its proximity, than if it had had more leeway. The quirks of the lensing process exacerbated the effect, switching the silence from ominous to auspicious even sooner—though like everything else, the actual timing depended on quantities still unknown.

  Matt had worked through all the calculations, but he still didn’t know what to wish for: an early detection to end the uncertainty, or one that came so late that the world was a quivering mess before the verdict arrived—declaring that everything had been fine all along.

  * * *

  Selena sent Matt a picture of their parents at a camping ground near Leonora. He couldn’t tell from the tight shot of the tent if the place was crowded or deserted, but he took Selena’s upbeat message at face value: “Having a great time out here. Phone coverage patchy, but can’t believe there are so many stars.”

  Aaron’s mother turned out to have a welcoming cousin in Cobar, a small mining town in New South Wales six hundred kilometers from the coast, and from what Matt heard the place had hardly been besieged. Arun’s family had chosen Roma in Queensland, for reasons that weren’t entirely clear, and booked into a hotel. Yuki’s family reported crowding in the village, but no panic or privation, and in Brno the locals were apparently describing the influx as “no worse than the tourist season.” But footage from the wider world spanned everything from evacuees crowding into school gymnasiums to scenes of chaos and hostility at borders, desperation in makeshift displacement camps, and sheer fatalism where poverty and geography left people with no choice but to stay put.

  Matt walked past the empty cabins of his ark, ashamed at the waste but at a loss to find a remedy. He tried calling his friend Eduardo in Dili, just to be sure he’d had no trouble getting his family up into the hills, and the failure of the call to connect made him hopeful that they’d succeeded.

  He sent a message to Samira, the last in the line of ex-girlfriends who’d reached the conclusion that, between the rigs and the construction of the Mandjet, he had no time for anything else. He had expected to be rebuffed swiftly, so he took heart from the silence as he pictured her calmly weighing up her options. After two days, though, he realized that she wasn’t going to reply at all.

  “Did you ever think of inviting Carol?” he asked Arun.

  “I texted her last week,” Arun confessed. “She told me to fuck off and stop gloating.”

  “Were you gloating?”

  Arun took out his phone and read what he’d sent. “‘Hope you’re okay with all this craziness. Plenty of free berths here for you and your family if you want them.’”

  Matt shook his head reprovingly. “You monster.”

  Arun wasn’t taking it personally. “I guess when the world’s falling apart, the last thing anyone wants is to be stuck on a boat with their ex.”

  Matt said, “That’s probably true, but I’m starting to think it’s even simpler than that.”

  “Simpler how?”

  “When the world’s falling apart, the last thing anyone wants is to be stuck on a boat, period.”

  * * *

  Matt was still awake when the alert came through from Siding Spring, around midnight. He was first to the control room, but he wasn’t alone for long.

  The new lensing was by Taraxippus A, the heavier member of the pair. The radius of the ring was eight arc-seconds, almost four times bigger than at A’s last sighting—putting it sixteen times closer. Maybe twice the distance between the Earth and the sun.

  Jožka said, “I used to think the solar system was too small a target for anything to hit by chance.”

  “Until Taraxippus?” Aaron assumed.

  “No, until ’Oumuamua in 2017. That passed within twenty-four million kilometers of the Earth. One sixth the distance to the sun.”

  Aaron grunted with surprise; maybe he’d missed the news at the time. “What would happen if Taraxippus A came that close?”

  Yuki said, “Tides of maybe four or five meters. Not trivial, but not apocalyptic.”

  “Okay.” Aaron smiled, as if taking both the precedent and the hypothetical consequences to heart. Matt was tempted to point out that the tides themselves might turn out be the least of their worries, but he bit his tongue; there was no point quibbling over details until they knew what was actually in store.

  The Hubble reported a follow-up sighting, and though the parallax couldn’t really pin down the distance, it put it within the expected range, proving that at least things were making sense now without recourse to ever more epicycles.

  They waited for JPL to recompute the trajectories. Matt knew of a dozen other groups who might post their results earlier, but none of them had a rendezvous wi
th Pluto on their CV and, if anything, their haste inspired less confidence.

  When the analysis finally came through, the mound of possibilities had contracted at the edges, but it remained dismayingly broad.

  “Hooray, Venus is spared!” Jožka proclaimed sarcastically.

  “How can this not have helped?” Aaron protested.

  Matt said, “It’s helped, but they’ve still only had four observations in total. Give them a few more—”

  “A few?” Aaron looked around angrily, as if he’d been lured here under false pretenses.

  Yuki took his arm. “It won’t be much longer now. The lensings will come faster. Soon we’ll know exactly where these things are going, how heavy they are, and what the damage will be.”

  Aaron was not placated. “A month ago, no one even knew how many there were!”

  “Well, that’s progress right there,” Arun said amiably. “Seriously, they’re too close to hide now. They won’t be able to move without giving themselves away . . . and they don’t have any choice about moving.”

  “You people are full of shit,” Aaron muttered. He pulled free of Yuki and walked out.

  Jožka turned to Yuki. “What did we do?”

  Yuki shook her head. “Nothing. But we’ve been thinking about this stuff for years, and he hasn’t—so he’s coming at it with different expectations.”

  Matt pressed the heel of his palm against his eyes. “If we’re lucky, there’ll be sightings around the clock now, so we’d better make a habit of grabbing some sleep in between.”

  As they left the control room, Jožka had an idea. “Next time, let’s just say that it’s like an election night. When only four seats have been counted, no one really knows if it’s the end of civilization. If you want certainty, you have to wait for the numbers.”

  * * *

  Matt woke to find his stomach knotted and his body bent against a constant dull cramp. But he went through the motions of ordinary activities, glad of the work roster to tell him what to do. Shoveling maggots and spreading manure in the garden did nothing to occupy his mind, but despite the discomfort it still felt far better than lying on his bunk, half dreaming, juggling scenarios for the future that he had no power to summon into being or dispel.

  The next lensing came in the early afternoon, spotted first in Chile. The mound of uncertainty shrank a little more, almost ruling out a direct hit on the Earth. An actual collision had always been stupendously unlikely, but now that it lingered on the margins Matt couldn’t help feeling a compulsive need to see it decisively ruled out. Never mind that it would have been mercifully swift compared to the prolonged agony of any kind of near miss; the idea offended his whole sense of how the universe should work. If ’Oumuamua and its successors had made the solar system seem more like a full-sized dartboard than the eye of a needle, the Earth itself was still orders of magnitude smaller, to the point where a bull’s-eye could only imply either comic-book aliens using black holes as weapons—behavior so cheesy it would be embarrassing to share the galaxy with them—or the cruelest of coincidences for an event so improbable to befall, not a barren planet, but one bearing life.

  A day later, Mauna Kea granted him his wish, trimming the possibilities more than enough to guarantee that the Taraxippoi would not strike any planet. And in the wake of the sixth lensing, the crossing points for the two holes formed discernible peaks on the map, overlapping in the foothills but no longer merging into a single plateau.

  As Matt stared bleary-eyed at the console, he noticed a short line of text below the map. JPL had been making predictions for the next lensing event each time, usually with fairly low confidence levels, but the line now read: “Taraxippus A / HIP 33008 (magnitude 7), 6 Feb 15:37–15:52 UTC, R_E = 8.5 arc-seconds, likelihood 75%.”

  He pointed to the most unexpected feature. “Magnitude seven! Not naked eye, but bright enough for binoculars. Except . . . eight point five arc-seconds? That’s too small to see any kind of ring.”

  Jožka slapped him gently on the side of the head. “Is there anyone still in there, or have you left us completely?”

  “What?” Matt thought for a moment, then groaned at his stupidity. “Okay, sorry. We should still see the brightening. Assuming it’s dark here.” He cowed away from Jožka’s hand. “That’s really not helping.” He struggled to recall the time difference, then announced, “Tomorrow night, just before midnight.”

  * * *

  Matt lay down on his bunk without much hope of sleep, but he set an alarm anyway. He dreamed that he was back on the rig in the Timor Sea, roused by the shrill of a Klaxon—but he knew for a fact that it was only a drill, measuring the time it took for everyone to evacuate. As he clambered down the ladder, Eduardo, coming after him, checked his watch and called down amiably, “Hey Matt, didn’t your contract expire a year ago? You can’t use the lifeboats if you’re not on the payroll.”

  He staggered to his feet and shut off the alarm. His mouth was dry and his eyelids felt like sandpaper. He turned on the light, splashed water on his face, and forced himself to stand upright.

  Everyone was gathered on the deck outside the control room. Aaron had stayed away from the last few lensings, but Yuki must have talked him halfway out of his defensive sullenness. Matt was still feeling angry himself that waking life had reasserted its primacy, but this might be the closest any of them came to directly perceiving the Taraxippoi, and he wasn’t going to miss the chance to tell his grandchildren about it.

  Yuki had brought the binoculars; Matt waited his turn for a prelensing inspection. Sirius was easy to find, almost directly overhead, and Matt knew the star they wanted was about ten degrees south, but it took a while for him to steady the view by counter-swaying his body, and then a minute or two more talking it over with his crewmates—comparing memories of the map they didn’t dare consult again, lest they lose their dark-adaptation—before he was sure he knew what he was looking at, and would notice if it changed. HIP 33008 was an insignificant gray speck, invisible to all the old civilizations that might have given it a more memorable label, and the only way Matt could fix his attention on it was through its relationships with half a dozen more luminous neighbors.

  Arun said, “There’s got to be at least a hundred million people watching this.” He gestured to the north. “Most of east Asia, if the skies are clear and the city lights don’t ruin it.”

  “They’re switching off the streetlights in Shanghai,” Aaron replied.

  “There had better be a show, then,” Matt decided. If this one prediction was borne out, verified firsthand by millions of witnesses, the astronomers would win back a lot of confidence with the public—and once the trajectories were completely nailed down there would be a lot less room for random idiots to insist that they knew better than any so-called expert.

  “Eleven thirty-seven P.M.,” a bland synthetic voice intoned. Jožka had set her phone to speak the time on the minute.

  Yuki had the binoculars; she raised them and stood swaying for ten or fifteen seconds, then announced, “No change yet,” before passing them on to Aaron. Matt hadn’t expected anything so soon; even if the prediction was perfect, the brightness would only rise slowly at first, as Taraxippus A came closer to the line of sight to the star.

  Five minutes into the nominal lensing period, Jožka said, “Okay, that’s different. It’s almost as bright now as the one to the west of it.” By the time Matt got his hands on the binoculars, her claim seemed like an understatement; HIP 33008 was outshining that guide star. And he was sure that the speck had grown enlarged and distorted, even if its detailed shape was beyond the limits of his acuity.

  He passed the binoculars to Arun, who muttered something so softly that Matt couldn’t make out the words, but the tone came so close to echoing his own tentative mixture of delight and terror that it made the hair stand up on his arms. They were standing here joined by nothing but light and glass to a black hole. No billion-dollar telescopes with their arrays of sensors, no intern
et, no screens. There it was, right above them, closer than Jupiter ever came, closer than Mars when it was far.

  Matt’s chest tightened. He wanted to weep, but he felt too self-conscious, and he was afraid of smearing the lenses when the binoculars came back to him. When they did, his eyes were clear, but the star seemed to blur and shimmer as it outshone all the drab neighbors he’d once needed as landmarks just to find it.

  When he passed the binoculars to Arun again, and glanced up unaided, he realized that he could now see the star easily with his naked eye. Or rather, the curved space around the black hole was acting as a better lens than the glass ones he’d set aside, and what it lacked in sharpness of focus it more than made up for in size.

  The five of them stood in silence, listening to the waves and the machinery of the Mandjet, watching the star brighten and fade. When it disappeared from view, no one felt the need to use the binoculars again.

  Jožka said, “Maybe in a few years we can send a probe to chase after them, and finally test all the theories to our hearts’ content.”

  Yuki smiled. “That would be wonderful.”

  “I think this trumps my father seeing Halley’s Comet,” Arun decided. “He always made a big deal about that.”

  Matt said, “Time for the lensing party.” Whatever the event might turn out to have revealed about their future, he wanted to hold on a little longer to the thing itself.

  Aaron and Yuki had brought a case of beer with them when they came on board, but apparently that was long gone, so everyone went to the mess and gorged themselves on the last of the jalebi, washing it down with strong, unsweetened black tea until they were bloated.

  Jožka sighed contentedly and massaged the side of her jaw. “That’s two cavities at least, but it was worth it.”