The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection

What Did Tessimond Tell You? ADAM ROBERTS

The Nobel was in the bag (not that I would ever want to hide it away in a bag—), and in fact we were only a fortnight from our public announcement, when Niu Jian told he was quitting. I assumed it was a joke. Niu Jian had never been much of a practical joker, but that’s what I assumed. Of course, he wasn’t kidding in the slightest. The sunlight picked out the grain of his tweed jacket. He was sitting in my office with his crescent back to the window, and I kept getting distracted by the light coming through the glass. Morning time, morning time, and all the possibilities of the day ahead of us. The chimney of the boiler house as white and straight as an unsmoked cigarette. The campus willow was dangling its green tentacles in the river, as if taking a drink. The students wandered the paths and dawdled on the grass with their arms around one another’s waists. Further down the hill, beyond the campus boundary, I could see the cars doing their crazy corpuscle impressions along the interchange and away along the dual carriageway. “You want to quit—now?” I pressed. “Now is the time you want to quit?”

He nodded, slowly, and picked at the skin of his knuckles.

“Two weeks, we present. You know the Nobel is—look, hey!” I said, the idea occurring suddenly to me like the spurt of a match lighting. “Is it that you think you won’t be sharing? You will! You, me, Prévert and Sleight, we will all be cited. Is that what you think?” It wouldn’t have been very characteristic of Niu Jian to storm out in like a prima donna, I have to say: a more stolidly dependable individual never walked the face of this, our rainy, stony earth. But, you see, I was struggling to understand why he was quitting.

“It is not that,” he said,

“Then—?” I made a grunting noise. Then I coughed. P-O-R didn’t like that; the unruly diaphragm. There was a scurry of motion inside, as she readjusted herself.

He looked at me, and then, briefly, he glanced at my belly—I had pushed my chair away from the desk, so my whole torso was on display, Phylogeny-Ontology-Recapitulator in all her bulging glory. Then he looked back at my face. For the strangest moment my heart knocked rat-tat at my ribs, like it wanted out, and I felt the adrenal flush along my neck and in my cheeks. But that passed. My belly had nothing to do with that.

Niu Jian said: “I have never been to Mecca.”

“The Bingo?” I said. I wasn’t trying to be facetious. I was genuinely wrong-footed by this.

“No,” he said.

“You mean, in—” I coughed, “like, Arabia?”

“There, yes.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“I want,” said Niu Jian, “to go.”

“OK,” I said. “Why not? It’s like the Taj Mahal, right? I’m sure it’s a sight to see. So go. Wait until the press conference, and then take the next available flying transport from Heathrow’s internationally renowned port-of-air.” But he was shaking his head, so I said: “Jesus, go now if you like. If you must. Miss the announcement. That doesn’t matter—or it only matters a little bit. But if it’s like, urgent, then go now. But you don’t have to quit! Why do you have to quit? You don’t have to quit.”

His nod, though wordless, was very clearly: I do.

“OK, Noo-noo, you’re really going to have to lay this out for me, step by baby-step,” I said. “Blame my baby-beshrunken brain. Walk me through it. Why do you want to go to Mecca?”

“To go before I die.”

“Wait—you’re not dying, are you? Jesus on a boson, are you ill?”

“I’m not ill,” said Niu Jian. “I’m in perfect health. So far as I know, anyway. Look: I’m not trying to be mysterious. All Muslims must visit Mecca once in their lives.”

I thought about this. “You’re a Muslim? I thought you were Chinese.”

“One can be both.”

“And that bottle of wine you shared with Prévert and myself last night, in the Godolfin?”

“Islam is perfect, individuals are not.” He picked more energetically at the skin on the back of his knuckles.

“I just never knew,” I said, feeling stupid. “I mean, I thought Muslims aren’t supposed to drink alcohol.”

“I thought pregnant women weren’t supposed to drink alcohol,” he returned, and for the first time in this whole strange conversation I got a glimpse of the old Niu Jian, the sly little flash of wit, the particular look he had. But then it was gone again. “Yesterday, in the Elephant, you were talking about the suit you would wear for the press conference. You were all, oh my mother will be watching the television, the whole world will be watching the—oh I must have a smart suit. Oh I must go to a London tailor. What happened to the London tailor?”

He said: “I spoke to Tessimond.”

I believe this was the first time I ever heard his name. Not the last; very much not the last time. “Who?”

“Prévert’s friend.”

“Oh—the doleful-countenance guy? The ex-professor guy from Oregon?”

“Yes.”

“You spoke to him—when?”

Niu Jian looked at the ceiling. “Half an hour ago.”

“And he told you to quit the team? C’mon, Noo-noo! Why listen to him?”

“He didn’t tell me to quit the team.”

“So he told you—what?”

“He told me about the expansion of the universe,” said Niu Jian. “And after he had done that, I realised that I had to quit the team and go to Mecca.”

“That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said. At that precise moment my little Phylogeny-Ontology-Recapitulator gave a little kick and thwunked my spleen—or whatever organ it is, down in there, that feels like a sack of fluid-swelled nerves. I grunted, shifted my position in my chair. “He told you about the expansion of the universe? You mean you told him! He’s not a shoo-in for the Nobel—you are.” When he didn’t reply, I started to lose my temper. “What did he tell you about the expansion of the universe, precisely?”

For the second time Niu Jian’s glance went to my belly. Then he stood up, his knees making drawn out little bleating noises as they were required to assume his weight. “Ana, good-bye,” he said. “You know how it is.”

“Do not.”

“I don’t want to give the wrong impression. You know, I wouldn’t even say he told me anything. He pointed out the obvious, really. You know how it is, Ana, when somebody says something that completely changes the way you see the cosmos, but that afterwards you think: that’s so obvious, how could I not have noticed it before?”

“That’s what he did?”

“Yes.”

“And it made you want to quit the team? Rather than wait a few weeks and receive the Nobel Prize for Physics?”

Nod.

“So what was it? What did he say? What could he possibly say that would provoke that reaction in you? You’re the least flaky of the whole team!”

For the third time, the glimpse towards Phylogeny-Ontology-Recapitulator, in his bag of fluid, swaddled by his sheath of my flesh. Just a little downward flick of the eyes, and then back to my face. And then he shook my hand with that weird manner he’d picked up from Jane Austen novels or, I don’t know what, and then he left. I saw him the following morning pulling his suitcase across the forty-metre sundial that looks like a giant manhole cover outside the Human Resources Building. I called to him, and waved; and he waved back, and then he got into the taxi he had called and was driven away, and I never saw him again.

Naturally I wanted to talk to this Tessimond geezer, to find out why he was spooking my horses. I had taken pains to assemble the very best team; intellectual thoroughbreds. I texted Prévert to come to my office, and when he neither replied nor came I hauled myself, balanced Phylogeny-Ontology-Recapitulator as well as I could over my hips and did my backward-leaning walk along the corridor to his office. I didn’t knock. I was the team leader, the ring-giver, the guardian of the treasure. Knocking wasn’t needful.

Prévert was inside, and so was Sleight, and the two of them were having a right old ding-dong. Prévert was standing straight up, and he was halfway through either putting on or taking off his coat.

“Niu Jian just quit the team,” I said, lowering myself into a chair with the cumbrous grace unique to people in my position. “He just came into my office and quit,”

“We know, boss,” said Sleight. “Prévert too.”

“He said it was your friend who persuaded him, Jack.” Prévert’s first name was not Jack; it was Stephane. But naturally we all called him Jack. “Why—wait a minute, what do you mean Prévert too?”

“He means, Ana,” Jack said, “that I too am leaving the team. I apologise. I apologise with a full heart. It is late in the day. If I had known earlier I would have not inconvenienced you in this fashion—and with your…” and like Niu Juan had done, he cast a significant look at the bump of P-O-R, and then returned his gaze to my face.

“You are kidding me,” I said.

“I regret to say, Ana, that I am not kidding you.”

“But we just got your ths to come out right.” Prévert’s English was more-or-less flawless, his accent somewhere in between David Niven and a BBC newsreader, but he had held stubbornly to that French trick of pronouncing “th’s” as “t” or “z,” variously.

“I’ve been remonstrating with him,” said Sleight. “He won’t tell me why.”

“You spoke to your friend Tessimond,” I said, panting a little from the exertion of walking along a corridor.

“That’s right—is that what Noo-noo did?” Sleight asked.

“What did he say to you?”

“It’s no good asking, boss,” Sleight told me. “I’ve been leaning on him for an hour, and he won’t cough up. Whatever it was it can’t have taken more than ten minutes.”

“The time period was approximately that,” Prévert confirmed. He slid his right arm into the vacant tube of his coat sleeve, thereby confirming that he was putting the garment on, not taking it off.

“He’s a friend of yours?”

“Tessimond? He used to be, many years ago. I was surprised to see him. I suggested we have breakfast—Sleight too, although he turned up late. As he always does.”

“I was quarter of an hour late,” said Sleight. “And that was long enough to the Tessimond geezer to persuade Jack to leave the project! One quarter hour!”

“He did not persuade me to leave. He made no reference to my being on the team, or collecting the Nobel Prize. He simply pointed out something—ah, how-to-say, something rather obvious. Something I am ashamed I did not notice before.”

“And this something overturns years of work, convinces you that you shouldn’t collect a Nobel Prize?”

Prévert shrugged. “There is a woman who lives in Montpellier, called Suzanne,” he announced. “I am going to visit her.”

“You’re crazy. You can’t take your name off the—your name will still be on the citation, you know!” Sleight’s voice had a raspy, edge-of-hysteria quality. “We’re not taking your name off the citation.”

“I have no preference one way or the other,” Prévert replied. “You must do as you please—as shall I.”

“Wait a sec, Jack,” I said. “Please.” Because he was eyeing the door, now, and I could see he was about to scarper. “At least tell us what he told you.”

“You may ask him yourself. He’s staying in the Holiday Inn. Sleight has his number.”

“Come, now, come alone, now, Jack, I’ve known you ten years. Jack, you’re a friend, for the love of Jesus, you’re my friend.” I ran the tip of my ring-finger across one eyebrow, then the other. I was trying to think how to do this. “Don’t play games with me, Jack. I’m asking you, as a friend. Tell me what is going on.”

“What is going,” said Prévert, “is me. Good-bye.” He was always a touch too proud of his little Anglophone word-games.

“What did Tessimond tell you?”

Prévert stopped at the door, looked not at me but at my bump, and said: “he only pointed out what is right in front of us. Us, in particular—you, Sleight, me. It should be more obvious to us than to anybody! Although it should be obvious to anyone who gives it more than a minute’s thought.”

“Don’t do this, Jack.”

“Good-bye, Ana, and—you too, Sleight.”

“Is it God?” I said. It was my parting shot. “Noo-noo is going to Mecca. Is that what he is, this Tessimond, a preacher? Has he somehow converted you to religion and turned you into a—Christ, what does it say in the Old, I mean, New Testament? About leaving your homes and families and becoming fishers of men.”

Prévert smiled, and his sideburns moved a little further apart from one another. A big beamy smile. “I am, Ana, you will be relieved to hear—I am precisely as atheistical as I have always been. There is no God. But there is a woman called Suzanne, and she lives in Montpellier.” And he walked out.

I sat staring at Sleight, as if it were his fault. He had been standing up, because Prévert had been standing up. Now that it was just the two of us, he sat down.

“So,” I said. “Are you pissing-off too? Is my entire team deserting me?”

“No, boss!” he said, looking genuinely hurt that I would say such a thing. “Never! Loyalty means something to me, at any rate. That, and the fact that—you know. I fancy getting the Nobel Prize.”

“Is it a joke? Are Jack and Niu Jian in cahoots?”

“In what?”

“Cahoots. I mean, are they conspiring together to trick us, or something?”

“I know what cahoots means,” said Sleight. “I just didn’t quite hear you.” He sat back and began looking around Prévert’s office, as if the answer might lie there.

“Cold feet,” he said. “I think they’re genuine, both of them, about leaving. I mean, I don’t think it’s a joke, boss. Who would joke about a thing like this! But maybe the timing is the key—we’re so close to announcing. Maybe they’ve got cold feet.”

“I could maybe believe that of Niu Jian, but not Prévert,” I said. “And do you know what, now that I think of it, I couldn’t believe it of Noo-noo either. Cold feet?”

“Then what, boss? Why would they both drop out—today?”

“Ring up this Tessimond guy,” I instructed him. “Find out what he said. Better yet, tell him to unsay it. Tell him to get in touch with both of my boys and persuade them to come back. What does he think he’s playing at, anyway? Disassembling my team on the brink of our big announcement?”

Sleight got out his phone, held it in his hand for a bit, and then balanced it on his head. It wasn’t an unusual thing for him to balance a mobile phone on his head. The peculiar shape of his bald cranium was such that above his tassel-like eyebrows there was a sort of semi-indentation, a thirty-degree slope in amongst the phrenological landscape, and it so happened than an iPhone fitted snugly there. Sleight had started resting his device there for a joke, but he had done it so often that it had become an unremarkable gesture. “Maybe it would make sense for you to speak to him, boss?”

“Scared?”

“No!” he said, with a quickness and emphasis that strongly implied yes. “Only, you are the team leader.” I put my head to one side. “And I once read a story,” he added.

“Science fiction story?”

“Of course.” As if there were any other kind of story for Sleight! “It was about a thing called a blit. You ever heard of a blit?”

“If this is going to be a porn reference, I swear I’ll have you disciplined for sexual harassment, Sleight.”

“No, no! It’s science and it’s fiction, in one handy bundle. A blit is a thing, and once you’ve seen it—once it’s gone in your eyes—it starts to occupy your mind. You can’t stop thinking about it, and it expands fractally until it takes up all your thoughts and you go mad.”

“And?”

“And—what if this Tessimond is going to say something like a verbal blit?”

I hid my face in my hands. There was a tussle between the laugh-aloud angel sitting on my right shoulder, and the burst-into-tears devil sitting on my left. I took control of myself. Pregnancy hormones have real, chemical effects upon even the strongest will. I dropped my hands. “Please never again say the phrase verbal blit in my hearing. Call Tessimond.”

Sleight, sheepishly, called. He waited only a short time before saying, “Oh, hello, is that Mr. Tessimond, oh, hello, oh, my name is Sleight and Stephane Prévert gave me your number.” Then a long pause, and Sleight’s eyes tracked left-to-right and right-to-left, and I felt a mild panic, as if he were being Derren Brown-hypnotised by this stranger, and over the phone too. But then he said. “Anyway, my team leader, Professor Radonjić, is here and she was wondering if she could—sure, sure.” Silence, an intense expression on Sleight’s face. Then: “both of them have left the team, somewhat, eh, ah, somewhat abruptly, you know. And they both spoke with you about the—yes, yes.” Nodding. Why do people nod when they’re talking on the phone? It’s not as if their interlocutor can see them. “I see. I understand. We were just wondering what…”

“Let me speak to him,” I said, holding out my hand. Sleight passed the phone straight to me. “Hello, Mr. Tessimond? This is Ana Radonjić.”

“May I call you Ana?” Tessimond asked. He had a pleasant, low-slung voice; a Midwest American accent, a slight buzz in the consonants that suggested he might be a smoker. I was a little taken aback by this—a micron aback, or thereabouts. “All right. And what should I call you?”

He hummed; a little, musical burr. “My name is Tessimond,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to speak to you, Ana. I’ve immense respect for what you’ve been doing.”

“What do you know about what I’ve been doing?” I daresay I sounded slightly more paranoid than was warranted.

“I was Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics at CUNY for a number of years,” he said. “Years ago—before your time. I left that post decades ago.”

“You were at CUNY? Why have I not heard of you?”

“I didn’t publish,” he burred. “What’s the point?”

This piqued me, so I rattled off: “the point is that we have made a breakthrough with regard to dark energy, and I don’t think any physicists have ever been more sure of getting a Nobel citation, and two key members of my team have, this morning, walked away. That is the point.”

“There seem to be several points, there, Ana,” he said, mildly. But his slow delivery only infuriated me further.

“I don’t know what games you are playing,” I snapped. “This is serious. This is my career as a serious scientist, and the Nobel Prize—not the, er, pigeon-fancier’s red rosette.” I said this last thing because a pigeon arrived on the outside ledge of Prevért’s office windowsill, in a flurry of wings that sounded like a deck of cards being shuffled. Then it folded the wings into its back and stood looking, insolently, through the glass at us. “This is the culmination of everything we have been working for,” I said, apparently to the pigeon.

“I was talking to Stephane about this a couple of hours ago,” came Tessimond’s voice on the phone. “Your research truly sounds fascinating.”

“Stephane has gone to catch a flight to Montpellier!” I snapped. “Do you know why?”

Tessimond released a small sigh at the other end of the phone line. “I’m afraid I’ve no idea, Ana.”

“No? You said something to him, and it made him walk away from everything he has been working towards for years.”

There was a silence. Then: “that wasn’t my intention, Ana.”

“No? Well that’s the mess you’ve made. Perhaps you’d like to help me clear it up, mm?”

“I very much doubt,” he said, sadly, “if there’s anything I can do.” Then he said: “the rate of expansion of the cosmos is accelerating.”

“I,” I said. “Yes it is.”

“That’s been known for a while. You’re going to announce that you know why this is happening?”

“Professor Tessimond—” I said.

“Dark energy,” he said. Then: “would you like to have lunch?”

I bridled at this. Blame the hormones, I suppose. “I’m afraid I’m going to be far too busy today clearing up the mess you have made to be able to take time out for lunch!” For all the world as if he were listening in on my conversation, and objecting to the notion of skipping a meal, P-O-R chose that moment to stretch and squeeze my stomach painfully against my ribs. I grimaced, but kept going. “I’m going to have to explain to university management why not-one-but-two key members of my team have jumped ship mere weeks before we go public with our research.”

“Dinner then,” he said. “Or drinks. With Dr. Sleight too, of course. And bring along your senior managers, if you like. I really didn’t intend to cause any upheavals. I’d be very glad to explain myself.”

“I might be able to find a window tomorrow,” I said. “You’re staying locally? There’s a bar. It’s called the Bar Bar, for some peculiar reason. We call it the Elephant. Would it be agreeable for you to meet there tomorrow lunchtime?”

After I’d hung up and given Sleight his phone back, I told him what had been arranged. “Why not meet him right now?” Sleight pressed.

“I intend to spend today coaxing Niu Jian and Jack to come back to us. I don’t know what he told them, but I want to be able to present him with a unified front. Tomorrow, Sleight. Tomorrow.”

I spent the morning haranguing both Niu Jian and Jack on the phone. Jack was a brick wall, and then he was on a flight and the signal vanished, so I didn’t get very far with him. I had longer to try and bend Niu Jian’s ear, but he was equally stubborn. No, he didn’t want to come back. Yes, he was going to Mecca. None of my threats had any purchase. I offered him financial inducements, I warned him his reputation as a serious scientist was on the line, I even said I was going to call his mother. Nothing. Eventually I had to grasp the nettle and call senior management. They were incredulous, at first; and then they were angry; and finally they were baffled.

I’m not surprised. I was baffled myself.

I went home early evening, and lay on the sofa whilst M. cooked me linguini. I spooled the whole crazy narrative out to him, and he did his excellent supporting-pillar impression. It felt better ranting about it, and the linguini was washed down with a small glass of Chianti, which I feel sure P-O-R enjoyed as much as I did, and the whole idiotic nonsense receded in my mind. So what if the two berks weren’t present at the press conference? I’d get senior management in. I’d have Sleight beside me. I could do it solus. That might even be preferable.

M. and I watched an episode of Mad Men together. Then Sleight called. “Boss? I’m in the Elephant.”

“Sleight, I appreciate you not abandoning ship like Jack and Niu Jian,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean I require you to keep me informed of your every change of venue. I’ll get you electronically tagged if I want that.”

“You don’t understand, boss. I’m here with Tessimond.” He sounded excited, like an undercover cop. “He’s at the bar. Getting a half for himself and a pint for me.”

“Well,” I said. “Don’t let me keep you from your revels.”

“I’m going to find out what he told Niu Jian and Jack,” said Sleight, whispering. “Will report back. I know you’re meeting him tomorrow, but I couldn’t wait! Curious! Too curious—but that’s the problem with being a scientist.”

“Sleight, look…” I started, in my weariest voice.

“I will report back,” he hissed. And hung up.

M. rubbed my feet, whilst I ate a chocolate mousse straight from the plastic pot. Then I pulled myself slowly upstairs to face the great trial of my pregnancy. I mean: brushing my teeth. The mere thought of it made me want to vomit; actually performing the action was gag-provoking, intensely uncomfortable and unpleasant. But I didn’t want to just stop brushing my teeth altogether; that would be an admission of defeat. Quite apart from anything else, the teeth themselves were sitting looser in their sockets than before, and so clearly needed more not less hygienic attention. But the nightly brush had become my least favourite part of the day. I had just completed this disagreeable exercise, and was accordingly in no good mood, when Sleight rang back.

“Sleight—what? Seriously: what?”

“I said I would ring back,” he returned. “And so I have.” But his tone of voice had changed, and I immediately sensed something wrong.

“What is it?”

“Tessimond explained things. It really is desperately obvious, when you come to think of it. I’m really a bit ashamed of myself for not seeing it earlier.”

“Sleight, you’re spooking me out. Don’t tell me you’re following Niu Jian and Jack and dropping out?”

There was a long pause, in which I could faintly hear the background noises of the Elephant; the murmur of conversation, the clink of glasses. “Yes,” he said eventually.

“No,” I returned.

“I going to start smoking,” said Sleight.

“If I have to listen to another non sequitur from my team members I am going to scream,” I told him.

“I used to love smoking,” Sleight explained. He didn’t sound very drunk, but there was a sway to his intonation that did not inspire confidence. “But I gave it up. You know, for health. It’s not good for your health. I didn’t want to get heart disease or canny, or canny, or cancer.” There was another long pause. “I’m sorry boss, I hate to let you down.”

“Sleight,” I snapped at him. “What did he tell you?”

He rang off. I was furious. I would have called Tessimond direct, but I didn’t have his number; and although I called Sleight back, and texted him, and @’d him on Twitter, he did not reply. It took M. a long time to calm me down, if I’m honest. In the end, he assured me that Sleight was drunk, and that when he woke sober the following day he would see how foolish it all seemed.

I slept fitfully. The morning brought no message from Sleight; and he didn’t turn up for work; and he still wasn’t answering his phone.

I recalled that Tessimond was staying in the Holiday Inn and left a message with their front desk for him to call me, giving him my personal number. Then I met with the junior researchers, or such of them as were still on campus—for the research part of the project was done and dusted, and we were all now just waiting on the announcement and the shaking of the world of science. None of them were about to leave the project; and their puppyish enthusiasm (after all; a Nobel Prize is a Nobel Prize!) calmed me down a little. I did paperwork, and dipped my toe into the raging ocean of e-mail that had long since swamped my computer. Then I googled Tessimond, and discovered that, yes, he had been Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics at City University of New York, for about two months, many years previously. I wasn’t surprised that I’d never heard of him, though. M. rang to check on me, and I told him I was fine. At 2 P.M., on the dot, Tessimond himself called. “Hello, Ana,” he said, pleasantly.

“You’ve now suborned a third member of my team,” I told him, in as venomous a voice as I could manage, post-prandial as I was. “I don’t know why you’re doing it, but I want you to stop.”

“I assure you, Ana, I intended nothing of the sort,” he said. “Dr. Sleight called me, invited me for a drink. We were only talking. Only words were exchanged.”

“Enough of this nonsense. What did you tell him?”

“Are we still meeting, in person, later today? I’d be happy to explain everything then.”

“You don’t want to say over the phone?”

He sounded taken aback. I was being pretty hostile, I suppose. “No, I don’t mind saying over the phone. Do you want me to tell you, now, over the phone?”

“No, I don’t,” I said. “I don’t care what mind-game you’ve been playing. What con-trick you’re up to. I only care that you leave us all alone. Why are you even here?”

“Stephane invited me. I hadn’t seen him in many years. And since leaving my academic posting I have been pursuing an old dream of mine and … simply travelling. Travelling around the world. I thought how pleasant it would be to visit England, so I came.”

“You came to Berkshire on a whim, or just to see an old friend or something paper-thin pretext like that, but now you’re here you just happen to be dismantling my entire physics team on the verge of our winning the Nobel Prize?”

He contemplated this for a moment. “I do love that you guys spell it burk and pronounce it bark. Does it have anything to do with the bark of trees?”

“What?”

“Berkshire,” he said.

“I ought to call the police and have you arrested. Are you blackmailing them?”

“Blackmailing who?” He sounded properly surprised at this.

“Niu Jian and Jack and my dear, bald-headed Sleight, of course. Are you?”

“No!”

“Stay away from me and my team,” I said, and ended the call. I was fuming.

Later that afternoon I finally got a text from Sleight. “Sorry boss,” it said. “Beeen dead drunk for 12 houors. Won’t be coming back, and o”—just that. I rang him immediately, but he did not answer. Forty five minutes later I got another text. “Theres a sf shortstory called ‘Nittfall.’ It is like that. The ending of that sf, u know it? Chat with Tesimnd and afterwards I was like, WOH! ASIMOVIAN!” Since Sleight was 46 and not usually given to speaking like a teenager, I deduce that he was still intoxicated when he sent those texts. I rang again, and texted him back, but he did not reply.

My mood swung about again. I was probably over-reacting. It was clearly all a big misunderstanding. It would get itself sorted out. My pregnancy hormones were a distorting mirror on the world. Tessimond was chicken-licken, and had somehow persuaded the otherwise level-headed members of my team that the world was ending—but the world wasn’t ending, and the sky would not fall, and I would soon prevail upon the foolish barnyard animals. I still didn’t have Tessimond’s number, so I called the Holiday Inn again and left him a second message, saying that I would be happy meet him in the Elephant at 6 P.M. that evening.

Google helpfully corrected Sleight’s incompetent spelling, and I quickly located the Isaac Asimov short story, called “Nightfall,” in an online venue. I read it in ten minutes and finished it none the wiser. Not that it was a bad story. On the contrary, it was a good story. But I couldn’t see how it had any bearing on the matter in hand. Something to do with stars.

That I never got to the Elephant was just one of those things. Midafternoon I went for a pee and noticed a constellation of little red spots on the inside of my knickers. You don’t want to take any chances with a thing like that. I rang M.; he left work and drove me straight to Casualty, and they admitted me at once. There was some worry that I was bleeding a little into my uterus, and that Phylogeny-Ontology-Recapitulator might be at risk. I lay on a hospital bed for hours, and they did tests, and scanned scans, and finally I was told I was alright and could go home. If there was more spotting I was to come straight back, but otherwise I was free to go.

M. drove us home; and we picked up a pizza on the way, and Tessimond was propelled entirely from my mind. There were more important things to worry about than him and his crazy verbal blit, or World’s-End-nigh, or “the stars are coming out!”, or whatever his nonsense was. I took the next day off, and then it was the weekend. Tessimond popped into my head on the Sunday evening again (something on telly was the trigger, but I can’t remember what it was), and I felt a small quantity of shame that I had stood him up. But then I remembered that he’d been pouring some poison into my team members’ ears, and persuading them to abandon me, and I grew angry with him. Then I decided to put him out of my mind. I told myself: Monday morning, all three of my core team would turn up for work, looking sheepish and apologising profusely.

They didn’t, though. None of them answered phone call, or text, or Twitter. A week later they hadn’t come back, and the university authorities expressed their dissatisfaction, and instituted suspension proceedings. I called Holiday Inn, cross that I hadn’t simply got Tessimond’s number when I’d had the chance; but I was told he’d checked out. My head of department persuaded the Vice Chancellor not to suspend the three of them until after the press conference. He saw that it could be awkward.

So we had the press conference, and there was a great deal of excitement. It was widely reported in the press. One internet site picked up (God knows how) that of the original team of four, three had gone AWOL and were not present at the press conference. Several news outlets followed it up. We had a cover story ready: that I was team leader, and the others were taking a well-deserved break. The story died down. Who was interested in the particular scientists, when the theory itself was so cool?

The expansion of the universe was speeding up. Given the mass of matter (including dark matter) in the cosmos as a whole it ought to have been slowing down—as a bone thrown into the sky slows down as it reaches its apogee, and for the same reason: gravity. But it wasn’t slowing down. Physicists had speculated about this before, of course, and had come up with a theoretical explanation for it, called dark energy. But “dark energy” was tautological physics, really; just a way of saying “the something that is speeding up the inflation of the universe,” which is not much of an answer to the question. “What is speeding up the inflation of the universe?” What we had done was demonstrate that the increase in the rate of cosmic expansion was itself increasing, and in ways that necessitated that dark matter and dark energy be decoupled. Indeed, we showed that the geometry of the observable gradient of the acceleration of expansion would cause a three-dimensional asymptote, which in turn would cause a complex toroidal folded of spacetime on the very largest scale. There was no reason to think that this universal reconfiguration of spacetime geometry would have any perceptible effects on Earth. Our scale was simply too small. But it was a thing, and it rewrote Einstein, and the data made our conclusions inescapable, and everybody was very excited.

The next thing that happened was that I gave birth to an exquisite female infant, with a crumpled face and blue eyes and a wet brush of black hair on her head. We called her Marija Celeste Radonjić-Dalefield, and loved her very much. Two weeks after birth her head hair fell off, and she looked even more adorable with a bald bonce. And the following months whirled past, for truly do they say of having young children that the days are long and the years are short. She slept in our big bed, and though a fraction of our size she somehow dominated that space, and forced us to the edges. We had her baptised at the Saint Peter’s Catholic Church, and all my family came, and even some of M.’s.

The Nobel committee worked its slow work, and word came through the unofficial channels that a citation was on its way. I returned early from my maternity leave, and we all made new efforts to locate Niu Jian, Prévert and Sleight. Time had healed enough to make the whole thing seem silly rather than sinister. M. was of the opinion that they’d all been spooked by the proximity of the announcement of our research. “Working in the dark for years, then suddenly faced with the headlights of global interest—that sort of thing could spook a person in any number of ways.”

“You make us sound like mole-people,” I said, but I wondered if he might be right.

We reached none of them. Niu Jian’s family were easy enough to get hold of, and they were polite, assuring us Noo-noo was rejoicing in health and happiness, but not disclosing in which portion of the globe he was enjoying these things. They promised to pass on our messages, and I don’t doubt that they did; but he did not get back to me. Friends suggested that Sleight was in Las Vegas, but we could get no closer to him than that. I felt worst about Prévert—that elegant man, that brilliant mind, without whose input the breakthrough really wouldn’t have been possible. But there were no leads at all as far as he was concerned. I notified Montpellier police, even went so far as to hire a French private detective. It took ninety days before the agency reported back, to say that he and a woman called Suzanne Chahal had boarded a flight to the West Indes in the summer, but that it was not possible to know on which island they had ended up.

I agreed with the university that I would collect the prize alone, but that all four of our names would be on the citation. They had lost their minds, the three of them; but that was no reason to punish them—and their contribution had been vital. “Have you have had any better ideas as to why they dropped out, like that?” M. asked me, one night.

“Not a clue,” I said. Then again, with a long-drawn-out “ü” sound at the end: “not a cluuue.”

“I suppose we’ll never know,” he said. He was reading a novel, and glancing at me over his little slot-shaped spectacles from time to time, as if keeping an eye on me. Marija was in a cot beside the bed, and I was rocking her with a steady, strong motion, which was how she liked it.

“I guess not,” I said.

“Does it bother you?”

“They were my friends,” I said. Then: “Jack in particular. His desertion is the most baffling. The most hurtful.”

“I’m sure,” M. said, licking his finger and turning the page of the book, “that it was nothing personal. Whatever Tessimond told them, I mean. I’m sure it wasn’t to do with you, personally.”

“That prick,” I said, but without venom. “Whatever it was Tessimond told them.”

“You know what I think?” M. asked. “I think, even if we found out what he said, it wouldn’t explain it. It’ll be something banal, or seeming-banal, like God Loves You, or Remember You Must Die, or Oh My God It’s Full Of Stars. Or—you know, whatever. Shall I tell you my theory?”

“You’re going to, regardless of what I say,” I observed.

M. gave me a Paddington hard stare over his glasses. Then he said: “I think it had nothing to do with this Tessimond chap. I think he’s a red herring.”

“He was from Oregon,” I said, randomly.

“It was something else. Virus. Pressure of work. Road to Tarsus. And in the final analysis, it doesn’t matter.”

“You’re right, of course,” I said, and kissed him on his tall, lined forehead.

We agreed that I would travel to Stockholm alone. I was still breast-feeding, so I wasn’t over-delighted about it; but M. and I discussed it at length and it seemed best not to drag a baby onto an airplane, and then into a Swedish hotel and then back again for a ceremony she was much too young to even remember. I would go, alone, and then I would come back. I expressed milk like a cow, and we built up a store in the freezer.

It was exciting and I was excited. Or I would have been, if I’d been less sleep deprived. If I’m completely honest the thing that had really persuaded me was the image of myself, solus, in a four-star hotel room—sleeping, sleeping all night long, sleeping uninterruptedly and luxuriously and waking with a newly refreshed and sparkling mind to the swift Stockholm sunrise.

You’re wondering: did I feel bad for my three colleagues—that they wouldn’t be there? It was their choice. Would you feel bad, in my shoes?

You’re wondering: so that’s all there is to it?

No, that’s not all there is to it. The day before the flight I took Marija for a walk in her three-wheeled buggy. We strolled by the river, and then back into town. Then I went into a Costa coffee shop, had a hot chocolate for myself, and I fed her. After that she went to sleep, and I painstakingly reinserted her into her buggy. Then I checked my phone, and tapped out a few brief answers to yet another interview about winning The Nobel Prize For Heaven’s Sake! Then I sat back, in the comfy chair, with my hands folded in my lap.

“Hello, Ana,” said Tessimond. “Are you well?”

I had seen him only once before, I think; when Jack had introduced him to everybody by the water cooler, all those months earlier—before he’d said whatever he said and sent my boys scurrying away from the prospect of the Nobel. He had struck me then as a tall, rather sad-faced old gent; clean shaven and with a good stack of white hair, carefully dressed, with polite, old-school manners. I remember Jack saying “this is a friend of mine from Oregon, a professor no less.” I don’t remember if he passed on the man’s name, that first time.

“You stalking me, Professor?” I said. I felt remarkably placid, seeing him standing there. “I googled you, you know.”

“If google suggests I have a history of stalking people, Ana, then I shall have to seek legal redress.”

“Go on, sit down,” I instructed him. “You can’t do any more damage now. I’m—” I added, aware that it was boasting but not caring, “off to Stockholm tomorrow to collect the Nobel Prize for Physics.”

Tessimond sat himself, slowly, down. “I’ve seen the media coverage of it all, of course. Many congratulations.”

“It belongs to all four of us. Have you been in touch with the other three?”

“You mean Professors Niu Jian and Prevért and Doctor Sleight? I have not. Why would you think I have?”

“It doesn’t matter.” I took a sip of hot chocolate. “You want a drink?”

“No thank you,” he said. He was peering into the buggy. “What a lovely infant! Is it a boy?”

“She is a girl,” I said. “She is called Marija.”

“I’m happy for you.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s been a big year. Childbirth and winning the Nobel Prize.”

“Congratulations indeed.”

We sat in silence for a little while. “You spoke to my three colleagues,” I said, shortly. “And then after that conversation they all left my team. What did you tell them?”

Tessimond looked at me for a long time, with blithe eyes. “Do you really want me to tell you?” he asked eventually, looking down to my sleeping child and then back up to me.

“No,” I said, feeling suddenly afraid. Then: “Yes, hell. Of course. Will it take long?”

“Five minutes.”

“Will you then leave me alone and not bother me any more?”

“By all means.”

“No, don’t tell me. I’ve changed my mind. What are you anyway? Some kind of Ancient Mariner figure, going around telling people this thing personally? Why not publish it—post it to your blog. Or put it on a T-shirt.”

“It has crossed my mind to publish it,” Tessimond said. “It emerged from my academic research. We usually publish our academic research, don’t we.”

“So you didn’t, because?”

“I didn’t see the point. Not just in publication, but in academia. Really, I realised, what I wanted to do was: travel.” He looked through the wide glass windows of the coffee shop at the shoppers traversing and retraversing the esplanade. Markets, temples, warehouses and wise paved streets. Tree-shaded squares where the bombastic statues of dead magnates and generals waited, quietly. Two clouds closed upon one another, shutting in front of the sun like a lizard’s horizontal eyelids. What is it the poet said? Dark dark dark, they all go into the dark. He said: “I read your work. It’s very elegantly done. Very elegant solutions to the dark energy problem; a real … I was going to say intuitive sense of the geometry of the cosmos.”

“Were going to say?”

“Well it’s—I’m afraid it’s wrong. So your intuition has led you astray. But it’s a very bold attempt at…”

I interrupted him with: “wrong?”

“I’m afraid so. I’m afraid you’re coming at the question from the wrong angle. Not just you, of course. The whole scientific community.”

I laughed at this, but, I hope, not unkindly. Marija stirred, twitched her little mitten-clad hands like she was boxing in her sleep, and fell motionless again. “You’d better let the Nobel Committee know,” I said. “Before it’s too late!” It was all too absurd. Really it was.

The late autumn sky was as blue as water, and as cold.

“Five minutes, you said,” I told him, nodding in the direction of the shop clock. “And you’ve had more than one of those five already.”

He breathed in, and out, calmly enough. Then he said: “why is the universe so big?”

“Why questions rarely lead physicists anywhere good. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why was there a big bang? Who knows? Not a well-formulated question.”

He put his head on one side, and tried again. “How did the universe get so big?”

“That’s better,” I said, indulgently. “It got so big because fourteen billion years ago the big bang happened, and one consequence of that event was the expansion of spacetime—on a massive scale.”

“All these galaxies and stars moving apart from one another like dots on an inflating balloon,” he said. “Only the surface of the balloon is 2D and we have to make the conceptual leap to imagining a 3D surface.”

“Exactly,” I told him. “As every schoolkid knows.”

“Still: why expansion? Why should the big bang result in the dilation of space?”

I took another sip from my chocolate. “Three minutes to go, and you’ve tripped yourself into another why question.”

“Let me ask you about time,” he said, unruffled. “We appear to be moving through time. We go in one direction. We cannot go backwards, we can only go forwards.”

I shrugged. “According to maths we can do backwards. The equations of physics are reversible. It just so happens that we go in one direction only. It’s no big deal.”

“Quite right,” he said, nodding. “The science says we ought to be able to go in any direction. Yet we never,” he said stroking his own cheek, “actually do. That’s strange, isn’t it?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I can’t say it bothers me.”

“Time is a manifold, like space. We can move in any direction in space. But we can only move in one direction in time.”

“This really is kindergarten stuff,” I said. “And much as I have enjoyed our little chat…”

“What moves an object through the manifold of space?”

After a moment, I said: “force.”

“Impulse. Gravity. Those two things only. You can push an object to give it kinetic energy, or you can draw it towards you. You fire your rocket up; Earth pulls your rocket down. Kinetic energy is always relative, not absolute. The driver of a car passing by a pedestrian has kinetic energy from the pedestrian’s point of view; but from the point of view of the person in the passenger seat that same drive has zero kinetic energy.”

It was, in a strange sort of way, soothing to hear him elucidate elementary physics in this way. “All well and good,” I said.

“That’s how things go in the physical manifold, which we call spacetime. Relocate the model to the temporal manifold—let’s call it timespace.”

This was when the fizzing started in my stomach. “For the sake of argument, why not,” I said. I couldn’t prevent a defensive tone creeping into my voice. “Although it’ll be nothing but a thought experiment.”

“Why do you say that?” he asked, blandly.

“We’ve centuries of experimental data about the actual manifold, the spacetime manifold. Your ‘timespace’ manifold is pure speculation.”

“Is it? I would say we move through it every day of our lives. I’d say we’ve a lifetime’s experience of it. The question is—no, the two questions are: why are we moving through it, and why can we only move through it in one direction.”

There was a blurry rim to my vision. My heart had picked up the pace. “More why questions.”

“If you prefer: what is drawing us towards it, through timespace?”

“You’re saying the reason we feel time as a kind of motion, one hour per hour, is because something is drawing us, with its gravitational pull—is that it? Because it seems to me that we might just as well have been launched forward by some initial impulse. Don’t you agree?”

“The reason I don’t agree is the fact that we’re stuck moving in one temporal direction.” I saw, then, where he was going; but I sat quietly as he spelled it out. “Think of the analogue from the physical manifold. There’s no force that could propel an object, let alone a whole cosmos, so rapidly that it was locked into a single trajectory. But there is a force in the universe that can draw an object in with such a force—draw it such that it has no option but to move in one direction, towards the centre of the object.”

“A black hole.”

He nodded.

“Your theory,” I said, in a just-so-as-we’re-clear voice, “is that the reason we move along the arrow of time the way we do is that we’re being drawn towards a supermassive temporal black hole?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” I said, with an insouciance I did not feel. “It’s an interesting theory, although it is only a theory.”

“Not at all. Consider the data.”

“What data?”

“I understand your resistance, Ana,” he said, gently. “But you can do better than this. Who knows the data better than you? What happens as a physical object approaches the event horizon of a physical black hole?”

“Time,” I said, “dilates.”

“So what must happen as a temporal object approaches the event horizon of a temporal black hole? Physics dilates. Space expands—until it approaches an asymptote of reality. From the point of view of an observer not present at the event horizon itself space would seem to expand until it appeared infinite.” He looked through the big glass again. “What else do we see, when we look around?”

“So we’re still,” I said, my voice gravelly, “outside the event horizon?”

“If we were outside the event horizon, the rate of apparent expansion of space would be an asymptote approaching a fixed rate—a simple acceleration. And until a few decades ago that was what the data showed. But then the data starting showing that the rate of apparent expansion of the universe is speeding up. That can only mean that we’re approaching the event horizon itself. That also explains why we locked into the one direction of time. In the timespace manifold generally speaking we ought to be able to go forwards, backwards, whatever we wanted. But we’re not in the manifold generally; we’re in a very particular place. Like an object falling into a black hole, we’re locked into a single vector.”

I thought about it. Well, I say I thought about it; but the truth is I didn’t need to think very hard. It fell into place in my mind; like the others I found myself thinking how could I not see this before? It is so very obvious. “But if you’re right—wait,” I said. “Wait a moment.”

I pulled out my phone, and jabbed up the calculus app. It took me a few moments to work through the crucial equations. Of course everything fitted. Of course it was true.

Of course it was right.

I looked at him, feeling removed from myself. “When we reach the actual temporal event horizon,” I said, “tidal forces will rip us apart.”

“Will rip time apart,” he said, nodding slowly. “Yes. Of course that amounts to the same thing.”

“When?”

“You’ve got the equations there,” he said, looking at my phone as it lay, like a miniature 2001-monolith, flat on the table. “But it’s hard to be precise. The scale is fourteen billion years; the tolerances are not seconds, or even days. Years. I worked a seven years plus or minus. That was a decade ago.”

I shook my head, the way a dog shakes water of its pelt; but there was no way this idea could be shaken out of my mind. It was true; it was there. “It could be—literally—any day now,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Not for you, so much, as for the fact of you having a small kid.”

“That’s why Noo-noo was so circumspect with me,” I said. “I see. But what difference does it make? And, yes, alright I see why you haven’t published this. It’d be wandering the highways with an End Is Nigh sandwich board.”

“Not that,” he said, his glittering eye meeting mine. “More that it’s so obvious. When you think about it, how could the expanding universe be anything other than this? Travelling near the ultimate spatial speed makes time dilate; so obviously travelling near the ultimate temporal speed will make space dilate. We should—all of us, we should just … see it.”

“I’m going home now,” I told him. But I embraced him before I left, and felt the sharkskin roughness of his unshaved cheek against my own. Then I wheeled Marija home. I called M. and told him to leave work and join me. He was puzzled, but acquiesced.

He hasn’t gone back.

The equations depend upon precision over prodigious lengths of time—since the big bang, or (rather) since the dilation effect first affected what until then must have been a stable cosmos existing within an open temporal manifold. But I’ve done my best. Tessimond’s +/-7 years was, I suspect, deliberately vague; erring on the side of generosity. I think the timescale is much shorter. Download the data on the rate of acceleration of cosmic expansion, and you can do your own sums.

Of course I never flew to Stockholm. Why would I waste three days away from my child? None of that matters anyway. We realised what money we could, and bought a small place by the sea. I won’t say what sea. That doesn’t matter either; except that, when the dusk comes each day, and the net curtains are sucked against the open windows and go momentary starch-stiff; and when the moths congregate to worship their electric sun-gods; and when the moon lies carelessly in the sky over the purple marine horizon like a pearl of great price—when Marija is fed and happy and M. and I take our turns holding her, and then lay her down and hold one another—there is a contentment spun from finitude that my previous, open-ended existence could not comprehend. I have busied myself writing this account, although only a little every day, for there is no rush, or else there is too much rush and I don’t wish to be troubled by the latter. And as for everything else, it helps to know what is really important.