There was never any easy way to do this. I took a deep breath, then: “Professor Maslankowski, your husband is dead.”
Her eyes went wide and she staggered back a half-step, bumping up against the smartboard that covered the wall behind her.
“I’m terribly sorry,” I said.
“What—what happened?” Marilyn asked at last, her voice reduced to a whisper.
I lifted my shoulders slightly. “He killed himself.”
“Killed himself?” repeated Marilyn, as if the words were ones she’d never heard before.
I nodded. “We’ll need you to positively identify the body, as next of kin, but the security guard says it’s him.”
“My God,” said Marilyn again. Her eyes were still wide. “My God …”
“I understand your husband was a physicist,” I said.
Marilyn didn’t seem to hear. “My poor Ethan …” she said softly. She looked like she might collapse. If I thought she was actually in danger of hurting herself with a fall, I could surge in and grab her; otherwise, regulations said I had to keep my distance. “My poor, poor Ethan …”
“Had your husband been showing signs of depression?” I asked.
Suddenly Marilyn’s tone was sharp. “Of course he had! Damn it, wouldn’t you?”
I didn’t say anything. I was used to this by now.
“Those aliens,” Marilyn said, closing her eyes. “Those goddamned aliens.”
Demand-Rebound Equilibrium: Although countless economic systems have been tried by various cultures, all but one prove inadequate in the face of the essentially limitless material resources made possible through low-cost reconfiguration of subatomic particles. The only successful system, commonly known as Demand-Rebound Equilibrium, although also occasionally called [Untranslatable proper name]’s Forge, after its principal chronicler, works because it responds to market forces that operate independently from individual psychology, thus …
By the time we returned to Ethans office, he’d been cut down and laid out on the floor, a sheet the coroner had brought covering his face and body. Marilyn had cried continuously as we’d made our way across the campus. It was early January, but global warming meant that the snowfalls I’d known as a boy didn’t occur much in Toronto anymore. Most of the ozone was gone, too, letting ultraviolet pound down. We weren’t even shielded against our own sun; how could we expect to be protected from stuff coming from the stars?
I knelt down and pulled back the sheet. Now that the noose was gone, we could see the severe bruising where Ethan’s neck had snapped. Marilyn made a sharp intake of breath, brought her hand to her mouth, closed her eyes tightly, and looked away.
“Is that your husband?” I asked, feeling like an ass for even having to pose the question.
She managed a small, almost imperceptible nod.
It was now well into the evening. I could come back tomorrow to ask Ethan McCharles’s colleagues the questions I needed answered for my report, but, well, Marilyn was right here, and, even though her field was literature rather than physics, she must have some sense of what her husband had been working on. I repositioned the sheet over his dead face and stood up. “Can you tell me what Ethan’s specialty was?”
Marilyn was clearly struggling to keep her composure. Her lower lip was trembling, and I could see by the rising and falling of her blouse—so sharply contrasting with the absolutely still sheet—that she was breathing rapidly. “His—he … Oh, my poor, poor Ethan …”
“Professor Maslankowski,” I said gently. “Your husband’s specialty …?”
She nodded, acknowledging that she’d heard me, but still unable to focus on answering the question. I let her take her time, and, at last, as if they were curse words, she spat out, “Loop quantum gravity.”
“Which is?”
“Which is a model of how subatomic particles are composed.” She shook her head. “Ethan spent his whole career trying to prove LQG was correct, and …”
“And?” I said gently.
“And yesterday they revealed the true nature of the fundamental structure of matter.”
“And this—what was it?—this ‘loop quantum gravity’ wasn’t right?”
Marilyn let out a heavy sigh. “Not even close. Not even in the ballpark.” She looked down at the covered form of her dead husband, then turned her gaze back to me. “Do you know what it’s like, being an academic?”
I actually did have some notion, but that wasn’t what she wanted to hear. I shook my head and let her talk.
Marilyn spread her arms. “You stake out your turf early on, and you spend your whole life defending it, trying to prove that your theory, or someone else’s theory you’re championing, is right. You take on all comers—in journals, at symposia, in the classroom—and if you’re lucky, in the end you’re vindicated. But if you’re unlucky …”
Her voice choked off, and tears welled in her eyes again as she looked down at the cold corpse lying on the floor.
[Untranslatable proper name] Award: Award given every [roughly 18 Earth years] for the finest musical compositions produced within the Allied Worlds. Although most species begin making music even prior to developing written language, [The same untranslatable proper name] argued that no truly sophisticated composition had ever been produced by a being with a lifespan of less than [roughly 1,100 Earth years], and since such lifespans only become possible with technological maturity, nothing predating a race’s overcoming of natural death is of any artistic consequence. Certainly, the winning compositions bear out her position: the work of composers who lived for [roughly 140 Earth years] or less seem little more than atonal noise when compared to …
It had begun just two years ago. Michael—that’s my son; he was thirteen then—and I got a call from a neighbor telling us we just had to put on the TV. We did so, and we sat side by side on the couch, watching the news conference taking place in Pasadena, and then the speeches by the U.S. President and the Canadian Prime Minister.
When it was over, I looked at Michael, and he looked at me. He was a good kid, and I loved him very much—and I wanted him to understand how special this all was. “Take note of where you are, Michael,” I said. “Take note of what you’re wearing, what I’m wearing, what the weather’s like outside. For the rest of your life, people will ask you what you were doing when you heard.”
He nodded, and I went on. “This is the kind of event that comes along only once in a great while. Each year, the anniversary of it will be marked; it’ll be in all the history books. It might even become a holiday. This is a date like …”
I looked round the living room, helplessly, trying to think of a date that this one was similar to. But I couldn’t, at least not from my lifetime, although my dad had talked about July 20, 1969, in much the same way.
“Well,” I said at last, “remember when you came home that day when you were little, saying Johnny Stevens had mentioned something called 9/11 to you, and you wanted to know what it was, and I told you, and you cried. This is like that, in that it’s significant … but … but 9/11 was such a bad memory, such an awful thing. And what’s happened today—it’s … it’s joyous, that’s what it is. Today, humanity has crossed a threshold. Everybody will be talking about nothing but this in the days and weeks ahead, because, as of right now”—my voice had actually cracked as I said the words—“we are not alone.”