Galaxias Page 2

  She no longer felt so existentially scared. I’m not blind, at least. But utterly bewildered. She realised that nobody on this bridge, across the city, could know what the hell was happening in these first seconds, minutes. Nobody. They all had to work it out, one way or another. Millions of sudden nightmares. And maybe it went much further, too.

  And she felt colder, suddenly, and gripped her lapels to close her overcoat tighter – but that was surely just a reflex, imagination. Or maybe not. Had some weather system rushed over? That was possible. Her father had always told her she was of a generation that had grown up blasé, used to freak climate events, of a frequency and severity that his own parents had never known.

  But the sky above looked deep black. Not the grey of a regular, thickly overcast morning. Like an overcast night.

  A streetlight came on, not far away from her on the bridge. Only one – some kind of emergency response? Somebody cheered raggedly. It dazzled her; she turned away.

  And more lights were coming on now, she saw, across either bank, across the twin conurbations: more streetlights, more lit-up doorways, and she imagined people fumbling in the sudden dark for switches. On the bridge itself, people were moving now, released from the stasis of shock, going one way or another. Some came running past her, some staring into phones, speaking into them. As if led by the phones’ light.

  But Tash stayed still, casting around, still trying to figure this out. The sky was what counted, not the ground, the people. Something wrong with the sky. The cloud cover had been breaking up to the south and east, she remembered; there had been clear blue sky before. Again she looked that way, beyond House, and to the horizon, the direction of the ocean. She saw no blue sky now. Her eyes, increasingly adapting, saw only a swathe of darker sky where the clouds had broken up.

  And she saw stars, scattered above that oceanic horizon.

  Stars? At this time in the morning?

  She still wasn’t scared. Not since that first shock had worn off. Just bewildered. Or – awed. Somehow it was all too big to be scary. Bigger than the river, she thought, as the river is bigger than me. You can’t hope to control it.

  But then, thinking about the sky and the stars, she had a really stupid idea about what was causing this, or at least a connection. Really stupid. But it was the only lead she had. And she knew who to call.

  She lifted her phone. Her father was calling, she saw. ‘Phone. Hold Dad,’ she said. ‘Get me Melissa . . .’

  A smiling face, a shock of strawberry-blond hair. This is Mel Kapur. If you need—

  ‘Hey, Mel. When you get this. I’m in Newcastle . . . Just out of the office. Look, it’s dark here. And – well, where the cloud is broken up I see stars. Stars! And it’s not yet ten in the morning, I think. Look – could it be something to do with the eclipse?’

  She had never seen a total solar eclipse herself. But she knew that one was in progress now. When the Sun’s light was blocked out by the Moon, if you were standing in the shadow cast by Moon on Earth, yes, there could be stars to be seen in a daytime sky, the planets. But she also knew that during any eclipse the shadow was confined to a narrow track across the Earth, depending on the relative positions of Sun, Moon, Earth. And today that narrow track was where Mel was, in the ocean somewhere south of Africa. Half a world away. Not over Newcastle.

  But she persisted. ‘I know this is really dumb. But this seems to have cut in just when the eclipse was due. Could something – shit, I don’t know how to frame the question – we shouldn’t even have a partial eclipse up here. Has something, well – gone wrong with the eclipse?’

  Mel Kapur’s face showed up on her phone now, just a two-dimensional image, but live. Red hair, blue eyes, against a dark background. That is really dumb. Hey, Tash. But, listen, I’m with the Astronomer Royal. If anybody can figure it out, she will.

  Tash tried to take this in. ‘So it’s – umm, it’s happening down there too.’

  Right. Well, if somebody turns the Sun off, it’s going to be a kind of widespread phenomenon.

  ‘Turned the Sun off? Do you think—’

  I don’t think anything just now, Tash. Not enough data. We’re only minutes into this – well, whatever this is. And, Tash. We ought to try to call Zhi.

  Just like Tash’s first impulse, to think of friends. ‘Yeah. In-Jokes together. He’s on the Lodestone. In space . . .’ She paged through her phone, hit a link that went through the international space agency, the NHSA, waited without much hope for a connection on a line meant for emergencies only.

  Which this was. She supposed.

  Now Tash heard, from the Newcastle bank, what sounded like a crumpling crash, a wailing car alarm, a scream. And, elsewhere, laughter. A police siren howling.

  Still the darkness lingered.

  ‘I think I should go back to House,’ she said. ‘Whatever this is, I think the governments are going to be headless chickens for a while.’

  Mel smiled. So go find your flock. I have to call Jane. Mel’s daughter.

  ‘Tell her Auntie Tash says hi.’

  I’ll try Zhi as well. And if I find out more here, I’ll get back to you. Keep your phone on.

  Tash pushed a bud into her right ear. ‘Will do. And I should call my dad. Phone, do that now.’

  She hurried back over the bridge, watching her step, towards the still brightly illuminated Government House. Every step she took, she hoped the clouds would clear. That the Sun would turn back on. That this would just go away. It didn’t.

  ‘Mel. You still there?’

  Yeah. Mel sounded breathless, as if she was hurrying too.

  ‘This is going to change all our lives, isn’t it?’

  More than that, honey. More than that.

  Somewhere an ambulance wailed.

  And another burst of rain splashed over her face and hair. It felt as if it were getting colder, by the minute. The rain felt like sleet, in fact.

  She hurried on, through the disconcerting dark.

  3

  0948 GMT

  Melissa Kapur had had her own grandstand view of the event, in the minutes before she took Tash’s call.

  Although – even a professional astronomer, and though she was surrounded by other professional and celebrity eclipse-watchers – she had been distracted by the earthly view.

  What a view, though.

  Skythrust Two was a human-made island in the sky. And high in the sky too, twenty kilometres above the Southern Ocean: above the troposphere, with its clouds and murk. In fact the lower air itself looked like an ocean from this vantage, a deep blue ocean of the sky. Not a shred of cloud above to spoil her view of the Sun, as seen from inside this airtight bubble – a clear-walled observation lounge which sat on a sprawling, open deck – even as the shadow of the Moon had eaten its way across the disc, heading for that magic moment of totality, even as the overall light level subtly dropped, moment by moment.

  Nothing to distract her save the astounding bulk of Skythrust itself, an observing platform steady as a rock.

  This island in the sky was suspended between two hulls: equally immense cylinders each containing a power plant, the jet engines that controlled the craft’s positioning, and other infrastructure. And from everywhere fine carbon-fibre cables snaked further up into the sky to the craft’s upper level, the buoyancy farm. This wasn’t a sphere like a hot-air balloon, or a torpedo-shape like the old airships; it was a kind of translucent quilt that shone in the strange, dimming light cast by the partially eclipsed Sun – but its upper surface was a solar energy plant that captured some of that light.

  And the immense tanks of the farm were entirely empty.

  Skythrust was an airship held aloft, not by hot air, helium, or hydrogen – like the old Hindenburg, with which she had much in common in terms of fittings and expense – but by vacuum, the ultimate lighter-than-air buoyancy agent. A couple of days back, as the ship had travelled from Johannesburg to this eclipse-watching station, Mel had been taken for a theme-park tour around and inside the buoyancy farm, a cathedral built of ultra-light, ultra-strong materials strapped over struts set in octagonal arrays. Two of the ship’s designers had bragged their way through the tour, gleefully pointing out that the buoyancy farm was all of an English mile long, and you could have fit hundreds of Hindenburgs, whole, inside that mighty volume . . .

  Skythrust was an Anglo-Australian design, in fact, developed from immense aerial tankers designed to export hydrogen fuel: a principal product for Australia now, manufactured from water electrolysed by huge, sprawling solar energy farms. She knew that the Aussies liked to say they were exporting sunshine; what better way to carry that sunshine than in a craft built around nothing at all?

  But today the spectacular Skythrust was merely a platform from which to observe a greater vision yet. Mel’s observation blister was one of several set around the deck, each hosting more passengers, observers protected from an external atmosphere too thin to breathe. And, dominating the centre of the deck space, an array of instruments had been set up to study the unfolding event in the sky, all of them mutely tilted up at the same angle, facing the Sun – just like the faces of the people, Mel thought whimsically.

  All the passengers shared a sound system with an optional if enthusiastic commentary. Mel had tuned that out, but she had heard the passengers’ gasps as the Moon’s leading limb had first slid across the Sun’s face – and more as the magic moment of totality approached. And even before totality, the dimming had got to the point where she thought she saw a first star low in the deep blue sky – no, that must be a planet, Venus. A magical sight.

  Now she tried to focus on her job. She had to make the most of the observing opportunities of the next few minutes, she knew.

  For her to be up here at all, to see the event with her naked eyes, was a kind of treat. Her nominal boss, Charlie Marlowe, England’s Astronomer Royal, was buried down in the bulk of the ship, in a big dining area called the Games Room. She would be watching the data feeds as they clattered in, measurements from a bank of instruments ranging from infra-red to X-ray – and, in parallel, providing a commentary for a number of global feeds. Another privileged position, but shut up in a basement, effectively, and hidden from the glorious sky itself. Unlike Mel.

  Concentrate, Mel, she told herself. Be here now, as her yoga teachers taught her. Such a moment might never come again.

  The light dimmed further. Now she was distracted by the unveiling of the corona, the bright, extended outer atmosphere of the Sun – a shining cloud with smooth gradations of brilliance spreading around that central, shocking darkness – a sculpture in the sky normally rendered invisible by sunlight. And then—

  Then, the final, perfect alignment of the discs of Sun and Moon. The moment of totality.

  And the intensity of the daylight itself dropped, suddenly, dramatically, an effect that extended to the horizon, where an eerie greenish twilight gathered. It was a huge, integrated phenomenon that seemed to shock her, viscerally, a global-scale change, leaving her feeling utterly dwarfed – and, she saw now, a phenomenon beyond the ability of any single instrument to capture.

  People gasped, whooped, even applauded. This was beyond her, beyond humanity, for all they tried to capture its fleeting scientific symptoms with eyes, brains, instruments. This was why people chased eclipses. And this, she thought, was why people were still sent into space, despite the sophistication of the robots. To see stuff like this. You had to be here.

  But that moment, as she would later remember it, was when everything changed. For now there was a sudden, shocking deepening of the darkness, all across the cloudless, eclipse-morning sky.

  It was as if somebody had turned down a dial on some mixing desk, the brilliant blue fading towards black, all the way to that greenish light on the horizon.

  For Mel – unlike Tash, it turned out – there was no sudden moment of pitch dark. Skythrust itself still glowed subtly, even in the daylight, even in the midst of a solar eclipse, a glare leaking from the windows of the cabins and halls. Venus shone as bright, just where it had been, she noticed, bewildered.

  And, around the position of the eclipsed Sun itself, that corona still shone – looking brighter than before, it seemed, against the darkened sky – and yet a kind of darkness was soon spreading there too, washing out from the black circle at the heart of it all, as if the overall structure were dispersing out into space. It took long seconds before the corona faded away entirely, seconds which she found herself counting out the astronomer’s way: ‘A thousand and fourteen, a thousand and fifteen . . .’

  When the corona was gone, the darkness only deepened further. Now Mel could see stars coming out, joining Venus.

  Still the ‘eclipse’ didn’t end.

  People began to mutter. Inside the observation bubbles, artificial lights sparked in the gathering dark. Through the shared sound system, she heard the voice of a woman asking plaintively, ‘Is that supposed to happen?’ Mel thought she recognised the voice – probably some astrological influencer, now utterly baffled.

  No. This wasn’t supposed to happen. This was very wrong.

  Her phone vibrated. She grabbed it, saw a call waiting for her from Tash, pressed it to her head. ‘Hold Tash. Call Jane.’

  No immediate reply from her eleven-year-old daughter.

  ‘Take Tash, then.’

  Hey, Mel. When you get this. I’m in Newcastle . . . Just out of the office. Look, it’s dark here . . .

  Mel tried Jane again. No reply. She tried Zhi. Then Jane again.

  And this time Jane answered. Hey, Mum. I was just going to call. We’re watching on TV. And it’s getting kind of dark outside.

  Mel knew that Jane was in a rented cottage close to the observatory at Bouldershaw Fell, in Yorkshire, England, Charlie Marlowe’s current base of operations and therefore Mel’s too.

  ‘Stay indoors, honey.’

  I will. I—

  ‘Is Sarah with you?’ A second cousin, occasional house-sitter.

  Yeah. You want to speak to her?

  ‘No. Just close the doors, tell her to lock up.’

  Are you OK, Mum? You’re right under it.

  Whatever it was. Still the sky stayed dark. Many stars were visible now, she saw, in the sky around that blank black disc, as her eyes dark-adapted. How long was totality supposed to be? The number had fled from her mind. Also she ought to be timing this. She was behaving as naively as the baffled influencer in the other bubble. Not like a scientist at all.

  But then, this was no ordinary totality.

  ‘Honey, I’ll keep in touch. We’ll figure out what’s going on. Just stay indoors, OK?’

  I will. Love you.

  ‘Love you.’ She flicked off the connection, made to call Marlowe – but the Astronomer Royal was already trying to get hold of her. ‘Charlie, it’s Mel, you got me. I’m on my way down—’

  No. Don’t. Stay up there. A bluff Manchester accent.

  On the phone’s screen, Charlie Marlowe was a gaudy splash of colour. Sixty years old, she was not tall, heavy-set, and habitually wore loudly colourful trouser suits. Her hair, cropped short, was dyed silver grey. Tash’s dad always said she reminded him of Judi Dench as M in the vintage James Bond films. She stood out in any gathering, and, peering into her phone, Mel thought she fit in well against the garish, somewhat ridiculous backdrop of Skythrust’s Games Room, a fancy lounge with a chessboard floor and huge playing cards on the walls.

  Marlowe said now, We have enough eyes staring at screens down here. I want a naked-eye view too. Well, give or take an airtight dome. Stay up there as long as it’s safe.

  ‘Safe from what?’

  How the hell do I know, on this ridiculous blimp? Atmospheric turbulence? Loss of buoyancy as the heat goes? I wish I was up there with you. Damn it, I’m the Astronomer Royal, and here is the most significant astronomical event in human history, probably, and I missed it. But I need to start making calls.

  ‘Who to?’

  Well, the federal English who are paying for this jaunt . . . Or maybe I’ll cut a few corners and go straight to the FIS. As once I would have called the old UN Security Council. Of course they will soon start calling me. Who else would they call? Hey. Was I the first person you called?

  ‘No. My daughter. When I couldn’t get her, a friend—’

  Good choices. Listen, Mel. I want you to stay close to me in the days to come. As all this unravels. You aren’t the sharpest blade in the box, but you may have the biggest heart. I have a feeling that’s going to be important. Because this is going to affect everybody on the planet.

  Tash was bewildered by that. Marlowe was capable of enormous leaps of intuition, Mel knew. Only minutes into this – event – she seemed to be seeing global implications. ‘I’m flattered. I think. OK, I’ll stand watch.’

  Good. All, we can do now is watch. Measure.

  ‘Measure what?’ And she bit her tongue; Marlowe wasn’t too kind about dumb questions.

  Whatever you can think of.

  Mel thought that over, looked for the non-obvious. ‘Gravity waves?’

  Marlowe skipped a beat. Yes. OK. Good thought. So we can’t see the Sun. If this isn’t just some optical effect – a radiation effect, hell, I don’t know – if the Sun itself has somehow been disturbed – we ought to be detecting that particular death rattle. I’ll put in a call to Bouldershaw. Somebody will be making the measurements; make sure we get hold of them.

  Let’s just do what we can while we can. I’m going to be relying on you, Mel. Oh, and watch Venus.

  ‘Venus?’

  I . . . Voices clamouring in the background. Who’s calling? Already? Oh, hell, I’m coming. Keep safe, Mel.

  And she was gone.

  Mel turned back to the sky.

  Still that eerie midnight darkness. Stars coming out in numbers now. A big black hole where the eclipse was – the Moon, of course, now occluding the distant stars, as it had been blocking the Sun. But the eclipse should have been long over by now. The Sun peeking around the body of the Moon.