light was eerie. Not part of the natural order. This is bad news, she felt instinctively.
‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘A planet?’
‘Too bright.’
‘A satellite?’
‘Not moving quickly enough.’
‘A star, then,’ he said. ‘It would have to be a nova. Or a supernova.’ He frowned. ‘I don’t like it.’
‘In case it’s a supernova?’
‘Even if not. It shouldn’t be there.’ He glanced at her. ‘Don’t you feel it?’
‘Yes,’ she said reluctantly. ‘I guess I do.’ Bad news. ‘What would a supernova do to Earth?’
He shrugged. ‘Depends how close. Supernovas are candidates for causing extinction events in the past. The radiation burst, the heavy particles … A massive star exploding within a hundred light years might give the planet a dose of five hundred roentgens.’
‘Enough to kill.’
‘Oh, yes. Even the trees. Did you know that? Trees are about as sensitive to radiation as humans. Also, all that ultraviolet hitting the atmosphere – disassociated nitrogen will oxidize to form nitrous oxide, which will react with the ozone and deplete it –’
‘Just as well we destroyed the ozone layer already, then,’ she said drily. ‘But maybe it isn’t a supernova.’
She couldn’t identify what part of the sky this lamp hung in. Her astronomy wasn’t so good, considering her career choice. But then it didn’t need to be, if you planned to spend your working life in low Earth orbit. ‘What else could it be?’
He leaned forward, resting his hands on the window ledge, and looked around the sky. ‘I wish they’d clean these windows. Kind of a poor observing platform we have here … Oh.’
‘What?’
‘I think it’s Venus.’
She frowned. ‘Venus, the planet?’
He said heavily, ‘What other Venus? It’s right where Venus is supposed to be, tonight. And I don’t see any bright object nearby that could be Venus. So, it’s Venus.’
‘But how can it suddenly become so bright?’ She remembered an old science fiction story. ‘Oh. Venus is closer to the sun than Earth. What if the sun has flared? Or even gone nova? And the reflected light –’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s near superior conjunction right now. Which means it’s on the far side of the sun, so showing us a full face. So if you think about it, by the time the increased sunlight reflected off Venus and crossed space to get here –’
‘The sunlight would have reached us direct, already.’ A suppressed sigh of relief. ‘So Venus itself must have gotten brighter.’
‘Which is impossible.’
‘Is it? Maybe it’s some kind of volcanic thing.’
‘What kind of volcanic thing?’
She was used to his sarcasm. ‘You’re the geologist. Think of something.’
He went to the back of the office, and came back with a scuffed pair of binoculars. He raised them and focused them briskly.
He whistled.
‘What?’
He passed her the binoculars, leaving the strap around his neck, so she had to lean towards him to use them. She scanned around the sky, seeking the glare.
The binoculars resolved the distant, fixed stars to points. The glasses were too weak, she realized, to resolve Venus – on normal nights – to anything better than a minute disc, or crescent, at best.
But this wasn’t a normal night.
Where Venus ought to have been there was a bright, smudged disc, not quite symmetrical.
‘Holy God,’ she said.
‘I think,’ Henry said, ‘that Venus has exploded.’
The call didn’t wake Monica Beus, for the simple reason that she hadn’t been asleep.
‘Yes?’
Monica. It’s me. Alfred.
Alfred Synge: astronomer, colleague, lover back when they and the world were young.
‘Where are you?’
Kitts Peak. The observatory. Have you seen it yet?
‘What?’
Take a look out the window.
She lay for a minute in the stale warmth of her bed. The insomnia was the worst thing, for her, about the diagnosis.
Breast cancer. What the hell kind of thing was that for her to contract? Her breasts had gotten her nothing but unwelcome attention when she was younger; she was of a generation that had been encouraged to use them as little as possible for what they were intended, which was to suckle children; and now some cosmic ray, a random piece of debris from some long-gone supernova explosion, had come whizzing across space in order to zap her just so …
If any of it made sense, it might be acceptable. But it didn’t. If she had no stake in the world – if her son, Garry, and his family, didn’t exist – it might be reasonable. But she did have.
She missed the ability to sleep, though. She longed for the ability to turn off her mind, the constant thinking, like a camera watching the world that never let up.
But sleepless or not she was warm and comfortable here, her aches and pains fooled into silence for a while, and she felt reluctant to climb out into the harshness of the cold, vertical world. And for what?
‘What is it, Alfred? A lunar eclipse? A meteor shower?’ Alfred did get a little carried away with his profession at times. It was enviable, a man whose job was his hobby, his passion. Also a little irritating.
Uncharacteristically, he hesitated. I think you ought to see for yourself.
‘Why?’
You might want to think about waking the President.
Not a lunar eclipse, then.
She got out of bed, and her body set up a chorus of aches. She pulled on a housecoat, picked up the phone handset, and walked to the window.
She pulled back the heavy drapes and looked out over Aspen.
Dawn was coming, she saw, and the leaves of the trademark aspen trees were already glowing with the pearl light,
