The Propagational Library (2): Kali

[Here by accident? You might want to first read the Introduction and Chapter 1.]

After his next hour with them, Gabe sincerely hoped the Lanes would tell him something to summon up his sense of humor. He wondered if he’d ever laugh again.

Still not moving beyond the entry hall, Gabe asked them to provide one good reason — “Two would be better” — not to show them the door. They looked back and forth at each other, and then quickly dispensed with the formalities of introduction: identifying themselves beyond mere names, and establishing their bona fides. Adrienne went first.

“I’m a trust-fund baby,” she said. “My surname before marrying Eldon was Burghar — yes, with an h and an a.”

“No way. You—”

“Yep. My dad was Matt Burghar. That Matt Burghar.” Like ninety percent of the rest of the world, Gabe didn’t need to be told who that Matt Burghar had been: founder and chief of research for MagBurg Labs. (The “Mag” came from magnetic, popular theory supposed. In fact, it came from Magaziner, the maiden name of Matt’s wife Dolly.) Thirty-some years ago, MagBurg had introduced the world to the MagDrive Engine. Everybody thought it would reverse or at least slow the effects of centuries of hydrocarbon-burning machinery. Everybody was proved wrong, but in the meantime Matt and Dolly and, evidently, little Adrienne had become almost ridiculously wealthy.

“I don’t suppose you can offer me more than just your word of honor on that.”

She smiled, and pulled from the pocket of her coat two laminated-plastic cards. The first was a simple photo ID: a security badge for MagBurg Labs, identifying her as employee number 000003. The second was a standard state-supplied RFID card. “Got a swiper?”

Gabe gestured at a small table against the wall, close to the door. “The vase with the fake flowers there.”

Adrienne waved the RFID past the vase and a display lit up alongside the door jamb. Adrienne Lane, it confirmed, née Burghar, husband Eldon, current address out on the mountainside at the far side of the city, current employer MagBurg Laboratories LLC, date of birth thirty-seven years ago. She moved the card up to her right eye, held it there for a beat, and re-swiped the vase. CONFIRMED, said the display.

Not quite wanting to accept yet that Matt Burghar’s freaking daughter stood before him in his foyer, Gabe tried one more test: “You’re kinda young to be MagBurg employee number 3, aren’t you?”

“Dad’s little joke. It was my seventh-birthday present.”

“‘It’ the card?”

“No, ‘it’ the employee number. The card’s legitimate, don’t worry. It’s always worked there. And so have I.”

“How about you?” Gabe said, turning to Eldon. “You with MagBurg, too?”

Eldon laughed again. “Oh, heck no. I don’t have a job at all, just ride around on my wife’s coattails. A wastrel and a dilettante.”

“Don’t take him seriously,” said Adrienne. “He won’t let you if you try. He’s not—”

“She’s right, I’m sorry, I need to take you seriously — no: I’m not a MagBurg employee. I’m an amateur astronomer. Or let’s say, well, technically not an astronomer. Not so much stars and planets, you know, but galaxies and universes. Nebulas. Quasars, pulsars, black holes. All that.”

He moved to the table and vase before Gabe could ask him. His RFID confirmed his identity, too. Current employer: N/A. His readout, however, included a supplemental affiliation: the International Amateur Cosmological Union.

Now Gabe was really stumped. His rational mind knew that you could find harmless (or not so harmless) nutcases even among the idle (or not so idle) wealthy. But that didn’t quite explain the presence of this couple in his home. He stalled for time.

“My RFID’s upstairs—”

“We don’t need it,” said Eldon. “Full name Gabriel Mazarin Naude, photographer, late wife Carolyn, et cetera, et cetera, am I right?”

Whoa. They could’ve dug up the stuff on photography and Caro from any of dozens of public sources. But the middle name — the Mazarin? That was documented nowhere, not even on the RFID. His family had passed that middle name down for centuries…

“Okay,” he said, “let’s just take it for granted that we’re all who we say we are. Let’s move into the living room and you can tell me what you’re really here for. ‘Cause for the life of me, I can’t imagine what ‘help’ people like you think you can get from a guy like me.”

—-

The Lanes had removed their overcoats and draped them over the center cushion at the back of the sofa. They sat at opposite ends of the sofa now. Eldon was to Gabe’s left — next to an end table, on which stood the tumbler of water he’d almost downed in one gulp. Adrienne sat at the other end, holding her hands around a steaming mug of ersatz tea, black. They looked at each other — a prelude which Gabe was beginning to recognize — and Adrienne nodded a little to her husband.

“Kali,” Eldon said. “K, A, L, I. You know Kali?”

Gabe nodded. “Indian deity. Goddess of destruction, right?”

“Something like that. The story goes that in a battle, Kali got so caught up in the frenzy that she started laying waste to everything in creation. The god Shiva saw it and, to stop her, threw himself on the ground. She stomped on him, too, then looked down, recognized him, and came to her senses.”

Gabe thought back to a college art-appreciation course. “Don’t they usually show her all bloody?”

“Yeah. That’s from the battle. Except for the blood on her foot, of course—”

Adrienne interrupted. “Can we stop talking about blood?”

She mock-grimaced and smiled, but Gabe wasn’t convinced the smile was genuine.

“So, Kali,” he said. “What? You collecting pictures of her or something?”

“No. This has nothing to do with what you might see, Gabe, if you looked through a camera lens. This has everything to do with what I’ve seen, looking up through a telescope. Kali. On her way.”

—-

He did not, of course, mean that he’d seen a giant multi-armed goddess in the heavens — not even as a constellation. In a way, he hadn’t seen anything. He’d seen an absence.

Eldon’s rich-man’s plaything was located on an Andean mountaintop in one of the driest regions on the planet. Not truly a telescope, nor even a radio telescope, but something— Well, he didn’t want to bore Gabe with details. And they didn’t have time, for that matter (a claim which Gabe would soon find much less figurative than he imagined at first). He invited Gabe to think of it as a super-telescope, and leave it at that: a giant, magnifying eye on the heavens.

“But it’s more than that,” he said, “because it’s got computing power out the wazoo.” Between the optics, the electronics, and the quantum-computing back end, Eldon’s telescope really performed only one function, but an extremely complex one: it didn’t simply observe stars and other massive celestial objects, it tracked their trajectories.

Gabe said, “Trajectories? Let me guess. You saw a comet, an asteroid—”

Once again, Eldon burst out laughing, and forced himself to stop. “No, sorry. Like I said, I don’t look at planets and moons and such. I look at the big stuff. Outside-the-solar-system stuff. Let me show you. This is what I saw when I first saw her. Kali.”

He removed from the jacket of his blazer a small, thick black disk, and placed it on the coffee table. On the disk’s exposed upper surface, Gabe saw once Eldon had slid back a little door, was something which looked very much like a lens.

“You need the room to be dark?”

“No, don’t worry about that.” He pressed a little switch at one side of the disk and a cone of solid darkness sprang up, blossoming almost at once to a black sphere about a meter across, hovering a couple meters in the air over Gabe’s coffee table.

But not quite black, either: within the sphere were sprinkled hundreds of tiny glittering lights.

“You’re looking up into the night sky from the top of that mountain in Chile,” Eldon said almost needlessly. “I want you to focus on one section of it in particular.” He raised both hands, like an orchestra conductor, placed them a little to the right and down from the center of the sphere, and swept them away from each other. Gabe’s breath caught for an instant as the view zoomed in, deep. At the center was a cluster of diffuse light, blotched here and there by what appeared to be giant dark stalks.

“This is called the Carina Nebula. It’s visible only from the southern hemisphere. You see the dark things? They’re referred to as the Pillars of Carina.”

“Kali’s arms?”

“Oooh. Nice guess. And yeah, sort of. But to see Kali herself, you’ve got to roll the movie back and forwards again. This is where all those computers come in handy — they made this possible.”

Eldon moved his right hand below the sphere but to one side, so as not to block the beam from the projector. The forefinger pointed up. He swung the hand from his right to his left, tracing the near edge of the sphere. The sphere did not rotate, as Gabe might have thought. It took him a few moments’ observation, as Eldon moved his finger back and repeated the action a few times, to see what Eldon obviously meant him to see: the sphere didn’t rotate in space, it rotated in time. He was watching a film, so to speak, in which the scene changed over time.

Yet it didn’t quite change, for the most part. Everything stayed the same, from start to finish — everything except what appeared to be a small, narrow black rod which winked on and then off, across a few degrees of arc in the sphere’s lower half.

“Okay,” he said, “I can see that little black streak down there. Kali?”

“Kali,” Eldon confirmed. “Something big, gigantic in fact, something dark, and — although it may not be obvious — something moving very, very fast, almost light-speed.”

“What is it?”

“I have no idea. And I haven’t found any other reference to it, or anything like it, in that part of the sky or, well, anywhere else.”

“How’d you find it, then? How do you know we’re not looking at, who knows, a speck of dust on your lens or something?”

“Because what we’re looking at wasn’t recorded from direct observation. No one’s ever seen it because until I started messing around, no one could see it. What you’re looking at here is a projection, backwards, into a time about eight thousand years ago.”

Gabe wasn’t buying it, and shook his head. “Now hold on, damn it. I may not know galaxies, nebulas, all that, but I know something about images taken over time. This should be a sphere full of streaks of light. Even though the stars and other stuff look like they’re fixed in the sky—”

“They actually move. I know. What my ‘telescope’ does” — he sketched air quotes around the word, and the lights in the sphere bounced in and back again — “is, it freezes the known objects in place, and looks for unexpected deviations in their movements around those expected paths. The deviations mean something previously unrecorded is passing by. And it can also work backwards from them, which is what we’re seeing here: given certain unexpected little flutters in the objects in this area of the sky, at this distance, in observable timeframes, we can project backwards to a time when those little flutters must’ve been set off. You know — if you can feel a big wind today, and can record everything currently in place, you should be able to find the butterfly flapping its wings last week.” He picked up the glass of water and drank what was left. “I always thought I’d find other galaxies, stars, whatever — big shiny things which weren’t where they once had been. I didn’t expect to find something dark.”

Gabe still didn’t get it. “I hope you don’t think this is a rude question, but so what? I mean, this is all very cool and everything — but why should I give a darn about Kali?”

Eldon looked aside at Adrienne, who had sat with her lips drawn tight during the whole conversation. “Because,” she said now, “whatever Kali is, she’s on her way here.”

While Eldon shut down the projector and returned it to his pocket, while they all got up for beverage refills and returned to the living room, the Lanes took turns describing what Kali’s on her way here meant.

For starters, Eldon had tracked her movements through other areas of the sky, through ever more recent timeframes. She’d blitzed through galactic clusters, brushing aside whole galaxies and binary and individual stars like they were annoying gnats. And if stars and galaxies and nebulae didn’t move her, even slow her down, she had to be one big honking runaway freight train of something.

“We’ve got six months, maybe five, maybe as much as eight,” Eldon said.

“Before?”

“What do you think? She doesn’t even have to hit us dead center, just blow by a light year or so away.”

Gabe slumped in his chair. “Jesus. I mean, just… Jesus. Somebody should be able to do something — can’t they launch, like, an ark, or—”

“I wish we could think of something like that,” said Adrienne. “A pretty picture, isn’t it? But even if all the governments on Earth agreed on the need, agreed on the solution and the logistics — even then, there’s just not enough time.”

Eldon added, “And where’s the ark gonna go anyhow? Nowhere in this whole neighborhood of space is going to be safe. We can’t launch it fast enough, and it can’t move fast enough, to get out of the way.”

“But they could dig underground—”

“Gabe, come on. Ade and I’ve been around and around in circles about this. There’s nothing. Even if we decided to release the news to the rest of the world — even if we could convince them — all we’d do is make everybody’s life hell for the next few months. There’s nothing, I’m telling you.”

“Except,” Adrienne said. “Or unless. It’s a long, long, long, really long shot. One chance in a million million of working. But it’s the only response to Kali we think we can pull together fast enough. Worst-case scenario? Well, in the worst-case scenario… you’ll live through it.”