The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year. Volume 5

1.

In the long, hot, humid afternoon, Blackett obsessively paced off the outer dimensions of the Great Temple of Petra against the black asphalt of the deserted car parks, trying to recapture the pathway back to Venus. Faint rectangular lines still marked the empty spaces allocated to staff vehicles long gone from the campus, stretching on every side like the equations in some occult geometry of invocation. Later, as shadows stretched across the all-but-abandoned industrial park, he considered again the possibility that he was trapped in delusion, even psychosis. At the edge of an overgrown patch of dried lawn, he found a crushed Pepsi can, a bent yellow plastic straw protruding from it. He kicked it idly.

“Thus I refute Berkeley,” he muttered, with a half smile. The can twisted, fell back on the grass; he saw that a runner of bind weed wrapped its flattened waist.

He walked back to the sprawling house he had appropriated, formerly the residence of a wealthy CEO. Glancing at his IWC Flieger Chrono aviator’s watch, he noted that he should arrive there ten minutes before his daily appointment with the therapist.

2.

Cool in a chillingly expensive pale blue Mila Schön summer frock, her carmine toenails brightly painted in her open Ferragamo Penelope sandals, Clare regarded him: lovely, sly, professionally compassionate. She sat across from him on the front porch of the old house, rocking gently in the suspended glider.

“Your problem,” the psychiatrist told him, “is known in our trade as lack of affect. You have shut down and locked off your emotional responses. You must realize, Robert, that this isn’t healthy or sustainable.”

“Of course I know that,” he said, faintly irritated by her condescension. “Why else would I be consulting you? Not,” he said pointedly, “that it is doing me much good.”

“It takes time, Robert. As you know.”

3.

Later, when Clare was gone, Blackett sat beside his silent sound system and poured two fingers of Hennessy XO brandy. It was the best he had been able to find in the largely depleted supermarket, or at any rate the least untenable for drinking purposes. He took the spirits into his mouth and felt fire run down his throat. Months earlier, he had found a single bottle of Mendis Coconut brandy in the cellar of an enormous country house. Gone now. He sat a little longer, rose, cleaned his teeth and made his toilet, drank a full glass of faintly brackish water from the tap. He found a Philip Glass CD and placed it in the mouth of the player, then went to bed. Glass’s repetitions and minimal novelty eased him into sleep. He woke at 3 in the morning, heart thundering. Silence absolute. Blackett cursed himself for forgetting to press the automatic repeat key on the CD player. Glass had fallen silent, along with most of the rest of the human race. He touched his forehead. Sweat coated his fingers.

4.

In the morning, he drove in a stolen car to the industrial park’s air field, rolled the Cessna 182 out from the protection of its hangar, and refueled its tanks. Against the odds, the electrically powered pump and other systems remained active, drawing current from the black arrays of solar cells oriented to the south and east, swiveling during the daylight hours to follow the apparent track of the sun. He made his abstracted, expert run through the checklist, flicked on the radio by reflex. A hum of carrier signal, nothing more. The control tower was deserted. Blackett ran the Cessna onto the slightly cracked asphalt and took off into a brisk breeze.He flew across fields going to seed, visible through sparklingly clear air. Almost no traffic moved on the roads below him. Two or three vehicles threw up a haze of dust from the untended roadway, and one laden truck crossed his path, apparently cluttered to overflowing with furniture and bedding. It seemed the ultimate in pointlessness—why not appropriate a suitable house, as he had done, and make do with its appointments? Birds flew up occasionally in swooping flocks, careful to avoid his path.

Before noon, he was landing on the coast at the deserted Matagorda Island air force base a few hundred yards from the ocean. He sat for a moment, hearing his cooling engines ticking, and gazed at the two deteriorating Stearman biplanes that rested in the salty open air. They were at least a century old, at one time lovingly restored for air shows and aerobatic displays. Now their fabric sagged, striped red and green paint peeling from their fuselages and wings. They sagged into the hot tarmac, rubber tires rotted by the corrosive oceanfront air and the sun’s pitiless ultraviolet.

Blackett left his own plane in the open. He did not intend to remain here long. He strolled to the end of the runway and into the long grass stretching to the ocean. Socks and trouser legs were covered quickly in clinging burrs. He reached the sandy shore as the sun stood directly overhead. After he had walked for half a mile along the strand, wishing he had thought to bring a hat, a dog crossed the sand and paced alongside, keeping its distance.

“You’re Blackett,” the dog said.

“Speaking.”

“Figured it must have been you. Rare enough now to run into a human out here.”

Blackett said nothing. He glanced at the dog, feeling no enthusiasm for a conversation. The animal was healthy enough, and well fed, a red setter with long hair that fluffed up in the tangy air. His paws left a trail across the white sand, paralleling the tracks Blackett had made. Was there some occult meaning in this simplest of geometries? If so, it would be erased soon enough, as the ocean moved in, impelled by the solar tide, and lazily licked the beach clean.

Seaweed stretched along the edge of the sluggish water, dark green, stinking. Out of breath, he sat and look disconsolately across the slow, flat waves of the diminished tide. The dog trotted by, threw itself down in the sand a dozen feet away. Blackett knew he no longer dared sit here after nightfall, in a dark alive with thousands of brilliant pinpoint stars, a planet or two, and no Moon. Never again a Moon. Once he had ventured out here after the sun went down, and low in the deep indigo edging the horizon had seen the clear distinct blue disk of the evening star, and her two attendant satellites, one on each side of the planet. Ganymede, with its thin atmosphere still intact, remained palest brown. Luna, at that distance, was a bright pinpoint orb, her pockmarked face never again to be visible to the naked eye of an Earthly viewer beneath her new, immensely deep carbon dioxide atmosphere.

He noticed that the dog was creeping cautiously toward him, tail wagging, eyes averted except for the occasional swift glance.

“Look,” he said, “I’d rather be alone.”

The dog sat up and uttered a barking laugh. It swung its head from side to side, conspicuously observing the hot, empty strand.

“Well, bub, I’d say you’ve got your wish, in spades.”

“Nobody has swum here in years, apart from me. This is an old air force base, it’s been decommissioned for…”

He trailed off. It was no answer to the point the animal was making. Usually at this time of year, Blackett acknowledged to himself, other beaches, more accessible to the crowds, would be swarming with shouting or whining children, mothers waddling or slumped, baking in the sun under SP 50 lotions, fat men eating snacks from busy concession stands, vigorous swimmers bobbing in white-capped waves. Now the empty waves crept in, onto the tourist beaches as they did here, like the flattened, poisoned combers at the site of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, twenty years after men had first set foot on the now absent Moon.

“It wasn’t my idea,” he said. But the dog was right; this isolation was more congenial to him than otherwise. Yet the yearning to rejoin the rest of the human race on Venus burned in his chest like angina.

“Not like I’m blaming you, bub.” The dog tilted its handsome head. “Hey, should have said, I’m Sporky.”

Blackett inclined his own head in reply. After a time, Sporky said, “You think it’s a singularity excursion, right?”

He got to his feet, brushed sand from his legs and trousers. “I certainly don’t suspect the hand of Jesus. I don’t think I’ve been Left Behind.”

“Hey, don’t go away now.” The dog jumped up, followed him at a safe distance. “It could be aliens, you know.”

“You talk too much,” Blackett said.

5.

As he landed, later in the day, still feeling refreshed from his hour in the water, he saw through the heat curtains of rising air a rather dirty precinct vehicle drive through the unguarded gate and onto the runway near the hangars. He taxied in slowly, braked, opened the door. The sergeant climbed out of his Ford Crown Victoria, cap off, waving it to cool his florid face.

“Saw you coming in, Doc,” Jacobs called. “Figured you might like a lift back. Been damned hot out today, not the best walking weather.”

There was little point in arguing. Blackett clamped the red tow bar to the nose wheel, steered the Cessna backward into the hangar, heaved the metal doors closed with an echoing rumble. He climbed into the cold interior of the Ford. Jacobs had the air conditioning running at full bore, and a noxious country and western singer wailing from the sound system. Seeing his guest’s frown, the police officer grinned broadly and turned the hideous noise down.

“You have a visitor waiting,” he said. His grin verged on the lewd. Jacobs drove by the house twice a day, part of his self-imposed duty, checking on his brutally diminished constituency. For some reason he took a particular, avuncular interest in Blackett. Perhaps he feared for his own mental health in this terrible circumstance.

“She’s expected, Sergeant.” By seniority of available staff, the man was probably a captain or even police chief for the region, now, but Blackett declined to offer the honorary promotional title. “Drop me off at the top of the street, would you?”

“It’s no trouble to take you to the door.”

“I need to stretch my legs after the flight.”

In the failing light of dusk, he found Clare, almost in shadow, moving like a piece of beautiful driftwood stranded on a dying tide, backward and slowly forward, on his borrowed porch. She nodded, with her Gioconda smile, and said nothing. This evening she wore a broderie anglaise white-on-white embroidered blouse and 501s cut down almost to her crotch, bleached by the long summer sun. She sat rocking wordlessly, her knees parted, revealing the pale lanterns of her thighs.

“Once again, Doctor,” Blackett told her, “you’re trying to seduce me. What do you suppose this tells us both?”

“It tells us, Doctor, that yet again you have fallen prey to intellectualized over-interpreting.” She was clearly annoyed, but keeping her tone level. Her limbs remained disposed as they were. “You remember what they told us at school.”

“The worst patients are physicians, and the worst physician patients are psychiatrists.” He took the old woven cane seat, shifting it so that he sat at right angles to her, looking directly ahead at the heavy brass knocker on the missing CEO’s mahogany entrance door. It was serpentine, perhaps a Chinese dragon couchant. A faint headache pulsed behind his eyes; he closed them.

“You’ve been to the coast again, Robert?”

“I met a dog on the beach,” he said, eyes still closed. A cooling breeze was moving into the porch, bringing a fragrance of the last pink mimosa blossoms in the garden bed beside the dry, dying lawn. “He suggested that we’ve experienced a singularity cataclysm.” He sat forward suddenly, turned, caught her regarding him with her blue eyes. “What do you think of that theory, Doctor? Does it arouse you?”

“You had a conversation with a dog,” she said, uninflected, nonjudgmental.

“One of the genetically up regulated animals,” he said, irritated. “Modified jaw and larynx, expanded cortex and Boca’s region.”

Clare shrugged. Her interiority admitted of no such novelties. “I’ve heard that singularity hypothesis before. The Mayans—”

“Not that new age crap.” He felt an unaccustomed jolt of anger. Why did he bother talking to this woman? Sexual interest? Granted, but remote; his indifference toward her rather surprised him, but it was so. Blackett glanced again at her thighs, but she had crossed her legs. He rose. “I need a drink. I think we should postpone this session, I’m not feeling at my best.”

She took a step forward, placed one cool hand lightly on his bare, sunburned arm.

“You’re still convinced the Moon has gone from the sky, Robert? You still maintain that everyone has gone to Venus?”

Not everyone,” he said brusquely, and removed her hand. He gestured at the darkened houses in the street. A mockingbird trilled from a tree, but there were no leaf blowers, no teenagers in sports cars passing with rap booming and thudding, no barbecue odors of smoke and burning steak, no TV displays flickering behind curtained windows. He found his key, went to the door, did not invite her in. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Clare.”

“Good night, Robert. Feel better.” The psychiatrist went down the steps with a light, almost childlike, skipping gait, and paused a moment at the end of the path, raising a hand in farewell or admonishment. “A suggestion, Robert. The almanac ordains a full moon tonight. It rises a little after eight. You should see it plainly from your back garden a few minutes later, once the disk clears the treetops.”

For a moment he watched her fade behind the overgrown, untended foliage fronting this opulent dwelling. He shook his head, and went inside. In recent months, since the theft of the Moon, Clare had erected ontological denial into the central principle of her world construction, her Weltbild . The woman, in her own mind supposedly his therapeutic guide, was hopelessly insane.

6.

After a scratch dinner of canned artichoke hearts, pineapple slices, pre-cooked baby potatoes, pickled eel from a jar, and rather dry, lightly salted wheaten thins, washed down with Californian Chablis from the refrigerator, Blackett dressed in slightly more formal clothing for his weekly visit to Kafele Massri. This massively obese bibliophile lived three streets over in the Baptist rectory across the street from the regional library. At intervals, while doing his own shopping, Blackett scavenged through accessible food stores for provender that he left in plastic bags beside Massri’s side gate, providing an incentive to get outside the walls of the house for a few minutes. The man slept all day, and barely budged from his musty bed even after the sun had gone down, scattering emptied cans and plastic bottles about on the uncarpeted floor. Massri had not yet taken to urinating in his squalid bedclothes, as far as Blackett could tell, but the weekly visits always began by emptying several jugs the fat man used at night in lieu of chamber pots, rinsing them under the trickle of water from the kitchen tap, and returning them to the bedroom, where he cleared away the empties into bags and tossed those into the weedy back yard where obnoxious scabby cats crawled or lay panting.

Kafele Massri was propped up against three or four pillows. “I have. New thoughts, Robert. The ontology grows. More tractable.” He spoke in a jerky sequence of emphysematic wheezing gasps, his swollen mass pressing relentlessly on the rupturing alveoli skeining his lungs. His fingers twitched, as if keying an invisible keyboard; his eyes shifting again and again to the dead computer. When he caught Blackett’s amused glance, he shrugged, causing one of the pillows to slip and fall. “Without my beloved internet, I am. Hamstrung. My preciiiouuus. ” His thick lips quirked. He foraged through the bed covers, found a battered Hewlett-Packard scientific calculator. Its green strip of display flickered as his fingers pressed keys. “Luckily. I still have. This. My slide rule. ” Wheezing, he burst into laughter, followed by an agonizing fit of coughing.

“Let me get you a glass of water, Massri.” Blackett returned with half a glass; any more, and the bibliophile would spill it down his vast soiled bathrobe front. It seemed to ease the coughing. They sat side by side for a time, as the Egyptian got his breath under control. Ceaselessly, under the impulse of his pudgy fingers, the small green numerals flickered in and out of existence, a Borgesian proof of the instability of reality.

“You realize. Venus is upside. Down?”

“They tipped it over?”

They was a placeholder for whatever force or entity or cosmic freak of nature had translated the two moons into orbit around the second planet, abstracting them from Earth and Jupiter and instantaneously replacing them in Venus space, as far as anyone could tell in the raging global internet hysteria before most of humanity was translated as well to the renovated world. Certainly Blackett had never noticed that the planet was turned on its head, but he had only been on Venus less than five days before he was recovered, against his will, to central Texas.

“ Au contraire. It has always. Spun. Retrograde. It rotates backwards. The northern or upper hemisphere turns. Clockwise.” Massri heaved a strangled breath, made twisted motions with his pudgy, blotched hands. “Nobody noticed that until late last. Century. The thick atmosphere, you know. And clouds. Impenetrable. High albedo. Gone now, of course.”

Was it even the same world? He and the Egyptian scholar had discussed this before; it seemed to Blackett that whatever force had prepared this new Venus as a suitable habitat for humankind must have done so long ago, in some parallel or superposed state of alternative reality. The books piled around this squalid bed seemed to support such a conjecture. Worlds echoing away into infinity, each slightly different from the world adjacent to it, in a myriad of different dimensions of change. Earth, he understood, had been struck in infancy by a raging proto-planet the size of Mars, smashing away the light outer crust and flinging it into an orbiting shell that settled, over millions of years of impacts, into the Moon now circling Venus. But if in some other prismatic history, Venus had also suffered interplanetary bombardment on that scale, blowing away its monstrous choking carbon dioxide atmosphere and churning up the magma, driving the plate tectonic upheavals unknown until then, where was the Venerean or Venusian moon? Had that one been transported away to yet another alternative reality? It made Blackett tired to consider these metaphysical landscapes radiating away into eternity even as they seemed to close oppressively upon him, a psychic null-point of suffocating extinction.

Shyly, Kafele Massri broke the silence. “Robert, I have never. Asked you this.” He paused, and the awkward moment extended. They heard the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall outside.

“If I want to go back there? Yes, Kafele, I do. With all my heart.”

“I know that. No. What was it. Like?” A sort of anguish tore the man’s words. He himself had never gone, not even for a moment. Perhaps, he had joked once, there was a weight limit, a baggage surcharge his account could not meet.

“You’re growing forgetful, my friend. Of course we’ve discussed this. The immense green-leaved trees, the crystal air, the strange fire-hued birds high in the canopies, the great rolling ocean—”

“No.”Massri agitated his heavy hands urgently. “Not that. Not the sci-fi movie. Images. No offense intended. I mean… The affect. The weight or lightness of. The heart. The rapture of. Being there. Or the. I don’t know. Dislocation? Despair?”

Blackett stood up. “Clare informs me I have damaged affect. ‘Flattened,’ she called it. Or did she say ‘diminished’? Typical diagnostic hand-waving. If she’d been in practice as long as I—”

“Oh, Robert, I meant no—”

“Of course you didn’t.” Stiffly, he bent over the mound of the old man’s supine body, patted his shoulder. “I’ll get us some supper. Then you can tell me your new discovery.”

7.

Tall cumulonimbus clouds moved in like a battlefleet of the sky, but the air remained hot and sticky. Lightning cracked in the distance, marching closer during the afternoon. When rain fell, it came suddenly, drenching the parched soil, sluicing the roadway, with a wind that blew discarded plastic bottles and bags about before dumping them at the edge of the road or piled against the fences and barred, spear-topped front gates. Blackett watched from the porch, the spray of rain blowing against his face in gusts. In the distance a stray dog howled and scurried.

On Venus, he recalled, under its doubled moons, the storms had been abrupt and hard, and the ocean tides surged in great rushes of blue-green water, spume like the head on a giant’s overflowing draught of beer. Ignoring the shrill warnings of displaced astronomers, the first settlers along one shoreline, he had been told, perished as they viewed the glory of a Ganymedean-Lunar eclipse of the sun, twice as hot, a third again as wide. The proxivenerean spring tide, tugged by both moons and the sun as well, heaped up the sea and hurled it at the land.

Here on Earth, at least, the Moon’s current absence somewhat calmed the weather. And without the endless barrage of particulate soot, inadequately scrubbed, exhaled into the air by a million factory chimneys and a billion fuel fires in the Third World, rain came more infrequently now. Perhaps, he wondered, it was time to move to a more salubrious climatic region. But what if that blocked his return to Venus? The very thought made the muscles at his jaw tighten painfully.

For an hour he watched the lowering sky for the glow pasted beneath distant clouds by a flash of electricity, then the tearing violence of lightning strikes as they came closer, passing by within miles. In an earlier dispensation, he would have pulled the plugs on his computers and other delicate equipment, unprepared to accept the dubious security of surge protectors. During one storm, years earlier, when the Moon still hung in the sky, his satellite dish and decoder burned out in a single nearby frightful clap of noise and light. On Venus, he reflected, the human race were yet to advance to the recovery of electronics. How many had died with the instant loss of infrastructure—sewerage, industrial food production, antibiotics, air conditioning? Deprived of television and music and books, how many had taken their own lives, unable to find footing in a world where they must fetch for themselves, work with neighbors they had found themselves flung amongst willy-nilly? Yes, many had been returned just long enough to ransack most of the medical supplies and haul away clothing, food, contraceptives, packs of toilet paper… Standing at the edge of the storm, on the elegant porch of his appropriated mansion, Blackett smiled, thinking of the piles of useless stereos, laptops and plasma TV screens he had seen dumped beside the immense Venusian trees. People were so stereotypical, unadaptive. No doubt driven to such stupidities, he reflected, by their lavish affect.

8.

Clare found him in the empty car park, pacing out the dimensions of Petra’s Great Temple. He looked at her when she repeated his name, shook his head, slightly disoriented.

“This is the Central Arch, with the Theatron,” he explained. “East and West corridors.” He gestured. “In the center, the Forecourt, beyond the Proneos, and then the great space of the Lower Temenos.”

“And all this,” she said, looking faintly interested, “is a kind of imaginal reconstruction of Petra.”

“Of its Temple, yes.”

“The rose-red city half as old as time?” Now a mocking note had entered her voice.

He took her roughly by the arm, drew her into the shade of the five-story brick and concrete structure where neuropharmaceutical researchers had formerly plied their arcane trade. “Clare, we don’t understand time. Look at this wall.” He smote it with one clenched fist. “Why didn’t it collapse when the Moon was removed? Why didn’t terrible earthquakes split the ground open? The earth used to flex every day with lunar tides, Clare. There should have been convulsions as it compensated for the changed stresses. Did they see to that as well?”

“The dinosaurs, you mean?” She sighed, adopted a patient expression.

Blackett stared. “The what?”

“Oh.” Today she was wearing deep red culottes and a green silk shirt, with a

bandit’s scarf holding back her heavy hair. Dark adaptive-optic sunglasses hid her eyes. “The professor hasn’t told you his latest theory? I’m relieved to hear it.

It isn’t healthy for you two to spend so much time together, Robert. Folie à deux is harder to budge than a simple defensive delusion.”

“You’ve been talking to Kafele Massri?” He was incredulous. “The man refuses to allow women into his house.”

“I know. We talk through the bedroom window. I bring him soup for lunch.”

“Good god.”

“He assures me that the dinosaurs turned the planet Venus upside down 65 million years ago. They were intelligent. Not all of them, of course.”

“No, you’ve misunderstood—”

“Probably. I must admit I wasn’t listening very carefully. I’m far more interested in the emotional undercurrents.”

“You would be. Oh, damn, damn.”

“What’s a Temenos?”

Blackett felt a momentary bubble of excitement. “At Petra, it was a beautiful sacred enclosure with hexagonal flooring, and three colonnades topped by sculptures of elephants’ heads. Water was carried throughout the temple by channels, you see—” He started pacing off the plan of the Temple again, convinced that this was the key to his return to Venus. Clare walked beside him, humming very softly.

9.

“I understand you’ve been talking to my patient.” Blackett took care to allow no trace of censure to color his words.

“Ha! It would be extremely uncivil, Robert. To drink her soup while maintaining. A surly silence. Incidentally, she maintains. You are her. Client.”

“A harmless variant on the transference, Massri. But you understand that I can’t discuss my patients, so I’m afraid we’ll have to drop that topic immediately.” He frowned at the Egyptian, who sipped tea from a half-filled mug. “I can say that Clare has a very garbled notion of your thinking about Venus.”

“She’s a delightful young woman, but doesn’t. Seem to pay close attention to much. Beyond her wardrobe. Ah well. But Robert, I had to tell somebody. You didn’t seem especially responsive. The other night.”

Blackett settled back with his own mug of black coffee, already cooling. He knew he should stop drinking caffeine; it made him jittery. “You know I’m uncomfortable with anything that smacks of so-called ‘Intelligent Design.’”

“Put your mind at. Rest, my boy. The design is plainly intelligent. Profoundly so, but. There’s nothing supernatural in it. To the contrary.”

“Still—dinosaurs? The dog I was talking to the other day favors what it called a ‘singularity excursion.’ In my view, six of one, half a dozen—”

“But don’t you see?” The obese bibliophile struggled to heave his great mass up against the wall, hauling a pillow with him. “Both are wings. Of the same argument.”

“Ah.” Blackett put down his mug, wanting to escape the musty room with its miasma of cranky desperation. “Not just dinosaurs, transcendental dinosaurs.”

Unruffled, Massri pursed his lips. “Probably. In effect.” His breathing seemed rather improved. Perhaps his exchanges with an attractive young woman, even through the half-open window, braced his spirits.

“You have evidence and impeccable logic for this argument, I imagine?”

“Naturally. Has it ever occurred to you. How extremely improbable it is. That the west coast of Africa. Would fit so snugly against. The east coast of South America?”

“I see your argument. Those continents were once joined, then broke apart. Plate tectonics drifted them thousands of miles apart. It’s obvious to the naked eye, but nobody believed it for centuries.”

The Egyptian nodded, evidently pleased with his apt student. “And how improbable is it that. The Moon’s apparent diameter varies from 29 degrees 23 minutes to 33 degrees 29 minutes. Apogee to perigee. While the sun’s apparent diameter varies. From 31 degrees 36 minutes to 32 degrees 3 minutes.”

The effort of this exposition plainly exhausted the old man; he sank back against his unpleasant pillows.

“So we got total solar eclipses by the Moon where one just covered the other. A coincidence, nothing more.”

“Really? And what of this equivalence? The Moon rotated every 27.32 days. The sun’s sidereal rotation. Allowing for current in the surface. Is 25.38 days.”

Blackett felt as if ants were crawling under his skin. He forced patience upon himself.

“Not all that close, Massri. What, some… eight percent difference?”

“Seven. But Robert, the Moon’s rotation has been slowing as it drifts away from Earth, because it is tidally locked. Was. Can you guess when the lunar day equaled the solar day?”

“Kafele, what are you going to tell me? 4 BC? 597AD?”

“Neither Christ’s birth nor Mohammed’s Hegira. Robert, near as I can calculate it, 65.5 million years ago.”

Blackett sat back, genuinely shocked, all his assurance draining away. The Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. The Chicxulub impact event that exterminated the dinosaurs. He struggled his way back to reason. Clare had not been mistaken, not about that.

“This is just… absurd, my friend. The slack in those numbers… But what if they are right? So?”

The old man hauled himself up by brute force, dragged his legs over the side of the bed. “I have to take care of business,” he said. “Leave the room, please, Robert.”

From the hall, where he paced in agitation, Blackett heard a torrent of urine splashing into one of the jugs he had emptied when he arrived. Night music, he thought, forcing a grin. That’s what James Joyce had called it. No, wait, that wasn’t it—Chamber music. But the argument banged against his brain. And so what? Nothing could be dismissed out of hand. The damned Moon had been picked up and moved, and given a vast deep carbon dioxide atmosphere, presumably hosed over from the old Venus through some higher dimension. Humanity had been relocated to the cleaned-up version of Venus, a world with a breathable atmosphere and oceans filled with strange but edible fish. How could anything be ruled out as preposterous, however ungainly or grotesque.

“You can come back in now.” There were thumps and thuds.

Instead, Blackett went back to the kitchen and made a new pot of coffee. He carried two mugs into the bedroom.

“Have I frightened you, my boy?”

“Everything frightens me these days, Professor Massri. You’re about to tell me that you’ve found a monolith in the back garden, along with the discarded cans and the mangy cats.”

The Egyptian laughed, phlegm shaking his chest. “Almost. Almost. The Moon is now on orbit a bit over. A million kilometers from Venus. Also retrograde. Exactly the same distance Ganymede. Used to be from Jupiter.”

“Well, okay, hardly a coincidence. And Ganymede is in the Moon’s old orbit.”

For a moment, Massri was silent. His face was drawn. He put down his coffee with a shaking hand.

“No. Ganymede orbits Venus some 434,000 kilometers out. According to the last data I could find before. The net went down for good.”

“Farther out than the Moon used to orbit Earth. And?”

“The Sun, from Venus, as you once told me. Looks brighter and larger. In fact, it subtends about 40 minutes of arc. And by the most convenient and. Interesting coincidence. Ganymede now just exactly looks…”

“…the same size as the Sun, from the surface of Venus.” Ice ran down Blackett’s back. “So it blocks the Sun exactly at total eclipse. That’s what you’re telling me?”

“Except for the corona, and bursts of solar flares. As the Moon used to do here.” Massri sent him a glare almost baleful in its intensity. “And you think that’s just a matter of chance? Do you think so, Dr. Blackett?”

10.

The thunderstorm on the previous day had left the air cooler. Blackett walked home slowly in the darkness, holding the HP calculator and two books the old man had perforce drawn upon for data, now the internet was expired. He did not recall having carried these particular volumes across the street from the empty library. Perhaps Clare or one of the other infrequent visitors had fetched them.

The stars hung clean and clear through the heavy branches extending from the gardens of most of the large houses in the neighborhood and across the old sidewalk. In the newer, outlying parts of the city, the nouveaux riches had considered it a mark of potent prosperity to run their well-watered lawns to the very verge of the roadway, never walking anywhere, driving to visit neighbors three doors distant. He wondered how they were managing on Venus. Perhaps the ratio of fit to obese and terminally inactive had improved, under the whip of necessity. Too late for poor Kafele, he thought, and made a mental note to stockpile another batch of pioglitazone, the old man’s diabetes drug, when next he made a foray into a pharmacy.

He sat for half an hour in the silence of the large kitchen, scratching down data points and recalculating the professor’s estimates. It was apparent that Massri thought the accepted extinction date of the great reptiles, coinciding as it did with the perfect overlap of the greater and lesser lights in the heavens, was no such thing—that it was, in fact, a time-stamp for Creation. The notion chilled Blackett’s blood. Might the world, after all (fashionable speculation!), be no more than a virtual simulation? A calculational contrivance on a colossal scale? But not truly colossal, perhaps no more than a billion lines of code and a prodigiously accurate physics engine. Nothing else so easily explained the wholesale revision of the inner solar system. The idea did not appeal; it stank in Blackett’s nostrils. Thus I refute, he thought again, and tapped a calculator key sharply. But that was a feeble refutation; one might as well, in a lucid dream, deny that any reality existed, forgetting the ground state or brute physical substrate needed to sustain the dream.

The numbers made no sense. He ran the calculations again. It was true that Ganymede’s new orbit placed the former Jovian moon in just the right place, from time to time, to occult the sun’s disk precisely. That was a disturbing datum. The dinosaur element was far less convincing. According to the authors of these astronomy books, Earth had started out, after the tremendous shock of the X-body impact that birthed the Moon, with a dizzying 5.5 or perhaps 8-hour day. It seemed impossibly swift, but the hugely larger gas giant Jupiter, Ganymede’s former primary, turned completely around in just 10 hours.

The blazing young Earth spun like a mad top, its almost fatal impact wound subsiding, sucked away into subduction zones created by the impact itself. Venus—the old Venus, at least—lacked tectonic plates; the crust was resurfaced at half-billion-year intervals, as the boiling magma burst up through the rigid rocks, but not enough to carry down and away the appalling mass of carbon dioxide that had crushed the surface with a hundred times the pressure of Earth’s oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. Now, though, the renovated planet had a breathable atmosphere. Just add air and water, Blackett thought. Presumably the crust crept slowly over the face of the world, sucked down and spat back up over glacial epochs. But the numbers—

The Moon had been receding from Earth at a sluggish rate of 38 kilometers every million years—one part in 10,000 of its final orbital distance, before its removal to Venus. Kepler’s Third Law, Blackett noted, established the orbital equivalence of time squared with distance cubed. So those 65.5 million years ago, when the great saurians were slain by a falling star, Luna had been only 2500 km closer to the Earth. But to match the sun’s sidereal rotation exactly, the Moon needed to be more than 18,000 km nearer. That was the case no more recently than 485 million years ago.

Massri’s dinosaur fantasy was off by a factor of at least 7.4.

Then how had the Egyptian reached his numerological conclusion? And where did all this lead? Nowhere useful that Blackett could see.

It was all sheer wishful thinking. Kafele Massri was as delusional as Clare, his thought processes utterly unsound. Blackett groaned and put his head on the table. Perhaps, he had to admit, his own reflections were no more reliable.

11.

“I’m flying down to the coast for a swim,” Blackett told Clare. “There’s room in the plane.”

“A long way to go for a dip.”

“A change of scenery,” he said. “Bring your bathing suit if you like. I never bother, myself.”

She gave him a long, cool look. “A nude beach? All right. I’ll bring some lunch.”

They drove together to the small airfield to one side of the industrial park in a serviceable SUV he found abandoned outside a 7-Eleven. Clare had averted her eyes as he hot-wired the engine. She wore sensible hiking boots, dark gray shorts, a white wife-beater that showed off her small breasts to advantage. Seated and strapped in, she laid her broad-brimmed straw hat on her knees. Blackett was mildly concerned by the slowly deteriorating condition of the plane. It had not be serviced in many months. He felt confident, though, that it would carry him where he needed to go, and back again.

During the 90-minute flight, he tried to explain the Egyptian’s reasoning. The young psychiatrist responded with indifference that became palpable anxiety. Her hands tightened on the seat belt cinched at her waist. Blackett abandoned his efforts.

As they landed at Matagorda Island, she regained her animation. “Oh, look at those lovely biplanes! A shame they’re in such deplorable condition. Why would anyone leave them out in the open weather like that?” She insisted on crossing to the sagging Stearmans for a closer look. Were those tears in her eyes?

Laden with towels and a basket of food, drink, paper plates and two glasses, Blackett summoned her sharply. “Come along, Clare, we’ll miss the good waves if we loiter.” If she heard bitter irony in his tone, she gave no sign of it. A gust of wind carried away his own boater, and she dashed after it, brought it back, jammed it rakishly on his balding head. “Thank you. I should tie the damned thing on with a leather thong, like the cowboys used to do, and cinch it with a… a…”

“A woggle,” she said, unexpectedly.

It made Blackett laugh out loud. “Good god, woman! Wherever did you get a word like that?”

“My brother was a boy scout,” she said.

They crossed the unkempt grass, made their way with some difficulty down to the shoreline. Blue ocean stretched south, almost flat, sparkling in the cloudless light. Blackett set down his burden, stripped his clothing efficiently, strode into the water. The salt stung his nostrils and eyes. He swam strongly out toward Mexico, thinking of the laughable scene in the movie Gattaca. He turned back, and saw Clare’s head bobbing, sun-bleached hair plastered against her well-shaped scalp.

They lay side by side in the sun, odors of sun-block hanging on the unmoving air. After a time, Blackett saw the red setter approaching from the seaward side. The animal sat on its haunches, mouth open and tongue lolling, saying nothing.

“Hello, Sporky,” Blackett said. “Beach patrol duties?”

“Howdy, Doc. Saw the Cessna coming in. Who’s the babe?”

“This is Dr. Clare Laing. She’s a psychiatrist, so show some respect.”

Light glistened on her nearly naked body, reflected from sweat and a scattering of mica clinging to her torso. She turned her head away, affected to be sleeping. No, not sleeping. He realized that her attention was now fixed on a rusty bicycle wheel half-buried in the sand. It seemed she might be trying to work out the absolute essence of the relationship between them, with the rim and broken spokes of this piece of sea drift serving as some kind of spinal metaphor.

Respectful of her privacy, Blackett sat up and began explaining to the dog the bibliophile’s absurd miscalculation. Sporky interrupted his halting exposition.

“You’re saying the angular width of the sun, then and now, is about 32 arc minutes.”

“Yes, 0.00925 radians.”

“And the Moon last matched this some 485 million years ago.”

“No, no. Well, it was a slightly better match than it is now, but that’s not Massri’s point.”

“Which is?”

“Which is that the sun’s rotational period and the Moon’s were the same in that epoch. Can’t you see how damnably unlikely that is? He thinks it’s something like… I don’t know, God’s thumbprint on the solar system. The true date of Creation, maybe. Then he tried to show that it coincides with the extinction of the dinosaurs, but that’s just wrong, they went extinct—”

“You do know that there was a major catastrophic extinction event at the Cambrian-Ordovician transition 488 million years ago?”

Dumbfounded, Blackett said, “What?”

“Given your sloppy math, what do you say the chances are that your Moon-Sun rotation equivalence bracketed the Cambrian-Ordovician extinction? Knocked the living hell out of the trilobites, Doc.” A surreal quality had entered the conversation. Blackett found it hard to accept that the dog could be a student of ancient geomorphisms. A spinal tremor shook him. So the creature was no ordinary genetically upgraded dog but some manifestation of the entity, the force, the ontological dislocation that had torn away the Moon and the world’s inhabitants, most of them.

Detesting the note of pleading in his own voice, Blackett uttered a cry of heartfelt petition. He saw Clare roll over, waken from her sun-warmed drowse. “How can I get back there?” he cried. “Send me back! Send us both!”

Sporky stood up, shook sand from his fur, spraying Blackett with stinging mica.

“Go on as you began,” the animal said, “and let the Lord be all in all to you.”

Clouds of uncertainty cleared from Blackett’s mind, as the caustic, acid clouds of Venus had been sucked away and transposed to the relocated Moon. He jumped up, bent, seized the psychiatrist’s hand, hauled her blinking and protesting to her feet.

“Clare! We must trace out the ceremony of the Great Temple! Here, at the edge of the ocean. I’ve been wasting my time trying this ritual inland. Venus is now a world of great oceans!”

“Damn it, Robert, let me go, you’re hurting—”

But he was hauling her down to the brackish, brine-stinking sea shore. Their parallel footprints wavered, inscribing a semiotics of deliverance. He began to tread out the Petran temple perimeter, starting at the Propylecum, turned a right angle, marched them to the East Excedra and to the very foot of the ancient Cistern. He was traveling backward into archeopsychic time, deeper into those remote, somber half-worlds he had glimpsed in the recuperative paintings of his mad patients.

“Robert! Robert!”

They entered the water, which lapped sluggishly at their ankles and calves like the articulate tongue of a dog as large as the world. Blackett gaped. At the edge of sea and sand, great three-lobed arthropods shed water from their shells, moving slowly like enormous wood lice.

“Trilobites!” Blackett cried. He stared about, hand still firmly clamped on Clare Laing’s. Great green rolling breakers, in the distance, rushed toward shore, broke, foamed and frothed, lifting the ancient animals and tugging at Blackett’s limbs. He tottered forward into the drag of the Venusian ocean, caught himself. He stared over his shoulder at the vast, towering green canopy of trees. Overhead, bracketing the sun, twin crescent moons shone faintly against the purple sky. He looked wildly at his companion and laughed, joyously, then flung his arms about her.

“Clare,” he cried, alive on Venus, “Clare, we made it!”