Peter said hesitantly, “But there’s still time. Have you seen this?” He held up his cell phone. It was a complex new toy from Nokia or Sony or Casio. I didn’t recognize it; I’ve no interest in such gadgets. But the screen was glowing with a bright image, a kind of triangle. “Just came in. The latest on the Kuiper Belt. The Anomaly.”
Two days after the discovery, everybody on Earth within reach of a TV probably knew that the Kuiper Belt is a loose cloud of comets and ice worlds that surrounds the solar system, stretching all the way from Pluto halfway out to the nearest star. And a bunch of astronomers, probing that chill region with radars or some such, had found something unusual.
Peter was explaining earnestly that the image on his screen wasn’t a true image but had been reconstructed from complicated radar echoes. “It’s the way you can reconstruct the structure of DNA from X-ray diffraction echoes—”
The little screen gleamed brightly in the dark of the loft. “It’s a triangle.”
“No, it’s three-dimensional.” He tapped a key and the image turned.
“A pyramid,” I said. “No — four sides, all of them triangles. What do you call it?”
“A tetrahedron,” Peter said. “But it’s the size of a small moon.”
I shivered in the cold gloom, feeling oddly superstitious. It was an awful enough time for me already, and now there were strange lights in the sky … “Something artificial?”
“What else could it be? The astronomers got excited just from their detection of straight-line edges. Now they’re seeing this.” His pale eyes were bright, reflecting the blue glow of the little screen. “Of course not everybody agrees; some say this is just an artifact of the signal processing, and there’s nothing there but echoes … There’s talk of sending a probe. Like the Pluto Express. But it might take decades to get there.”
I looked down at the comics. “They should send Fireball,” I said. “Steve Zodiac would be there in a couple of hours.” Suddenly my vision misted, and a big heavy drop of liquid splashed from my nose onto a colored panel. I wiped it off hastily. “Shit. Sorry.” But now my shoulders were shaking.
“It’s okay,” Peter said evenly.
I fought for control. “I hadn’t expected to fucking cry. Not over a fucking comic.”
He took my mug, still full, and headed down the stairs. “Take as long as you want.”
“Oh, fuck off,” I said, and so he did.
When I got over my spasm I clambered down out of the loft, bringing only the slide rule and log tables with me. I’d intended to head back to my city-center hotel, comforted that at least I’d pushed through the barrier, at least I’d been inside the house, and whatever else I turned up couldn’t distress me as much as today.
But Peter had one more surprise for me. As I came down the stairs I saw he was hurrying out of the door carrying what looked like a cookie tin, a deep one.
“Hey,” I snapped.
He stopped, looking comically guilty, and actually tried to hide the damn tin behind his back.
“Where are you going with that?”
“George, I’m sorry. I just—”
Instantly my innate suspicion of Peter the school weirdo was revived. Or maybe I just wanted to act tough after crying in front of him. “You said you wouldn’t touch anything personal. What’s this, theft?”
He seemed to be trembling. “George, for Christ’s sake—”
I pushed past him and snatched the box out of his hands. He just watched as I pulled the lid off.
Inside was a stash of porn magazines. They were yellowed, and of the jolly skin-and-sunshine Health and Efficiency variety. I leafed through them quickly; some were twenty years old, but most of them postdated my mother’s death.
“Oh, shit,” I said.
“I wanted to spare you.”
“He hid them in the kitchen ?”
Peter shrugged. “Who would have thought to look there? He always was smart, your dad.”
I dug deeper into the box. “Smart, but a randy old bugger. It’s porn all the way down — wait.”
Right at the bottom of the tin was a picture in a frame. It was a color photograph, very old, cheap enough for its colors to have faded. It showed two children, age three or four, standing side by side, grinning at the camera from out of a long-gone sunny day. The frame was a cheap wooden affair, the kind you can still pick up in Woolworth’s.
Peter came to see. “That’s the house. I mean, this house.”
He was right. And the faces of the kids were unmistakable. “That’s me.” The girl was a female version of me — the same features, the blond hair and smoky gray eyes, but more delicate, prettier.
Peter asked, “So who’s that?”
“I don’t know.”
“How old did you say your sister was?”
“Ten years older than me. Whoever this is, it isn’t Gina.” I carried the photograph toward the daylight, and peered at it long and hard.
Peter’s voice had an edge to it. Perhaps he was taking a subtle revenge for my accusation of theft. “Then I think your father was hiding more from you than your comics.”
A click sounded from the living room. It was the video recorder. The machinery of my father’s home continued to work, clocks and timers clicking and whirring mindlessly, an animated shell around the empty space where Dad had been.
Chapter 3
Everything started to go wrong for Regina on the night the strange light flared in the sky. Looking back, she would often wonder at how the great events of the silent sky were so linked to the business of the Earth, the blood and the dirt of life. Her grandfather would have understood the meaning of such an omen, she thought. But she was too young to comprehend.
And the evening had started so well, so brightly.
Regina was just seven years old.
When she heard that her mother was getting dressed for her birthday party, Regina abandoned her dolls and ran whooping through the villa. She scampered all the way around three sides of the courtyard, from the little temple with the lararium — where her father, looking exasperated, was making his daily tribute of wine and food to the three matres, the family gods — and through the main building with the old burned-out bathhouse she was forbidden ever to enter, and then to her mother’s bedroom.
When she got there Julia was already sitting on her couch, holding a silver mirror before her face. Julia brushed a lock of pale hair from her forehead and murmured irritably at Cartumandua, who stepped back from her mistress, combs and pins in her hands. The slave was fifteen years old, thin as a reed, with black hair, deep brown eyes, and broad, dark features. Today, though, her face was a sickly white and slick with sweat. There were two other slave women here, standing by with colored bottles of perfume and oils, but Regina didn’t know their names and ignored them.
Regina ran forward. “Mother! Mother! Let me fix your hair!”
Cartumandua held back the comb, murmuring in her thick country accent, “No, child. You’ll spoil it. And there is no time—”
It was just as she had spoken to Regina when she was a little girl, when Cartumandua had been given to her as her companion and guardian. But Regina didn’t have to take orders like that from a slave. “No!” she snapped. “Give me the comb, Cartumandua. Give it to me!”
“Sh, sh.” Julia turned and took her daughter’s small hands in her delicate, manicured fingers. She was wearing a simple white tunic, soon to be replaced by the evening’s elaborate garments. “What a noise you’re making! Do you want to frighten all our guests away?”