Nowhere: Volume II of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod by Ian R. MacLeod

Author:Ian R. MacLeod [MacLeod, Ian R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781625674425
Publisher: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc
Published: 2019-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

7

He still slept in the same narrow bed he’d had as a child in the rusty-roofed cottage down by the shore at Creagach, while his parents’ bedroom was now filled with expensive processing and monitoring equipment, along with a high-band, multiple-redundancy satellite feed. Downstairs, there was a parlour where Rob kept his small book collection in an alcove by the fire―I was surprised to see that it was almost entirely poetry; a scatter of Larkin, Eliot, Frost, Dickinson, Pope, Yeats and Donne and standard collections amid a few Asimovs, Clarkes and Le Guins―with a low tartan divan where he sat to read these works. Which, I supposed, might also serve as a second bed, although he hadn’t yet made it up.

He took me out on his launch. Showed me his scallop beds, and the glorious views of this ragged land with its impossibly wide and empty beaches, and there, just around the headland, was the stretch of bay where both Rob’s parents had been found, and I almost hear the Blue Men of the Minch calling to us over the sigh of the sea. There were standing stones on the horizon, and an old whaling station at the head of a loch, and hill topped by a medieval church filled with the bodies of the chieftains who had given these islands such a savage reputation through their bloody feuds. And meanwhile, the vast cosmic shudder of the collision of two black holes was travelling toward us at lightspeed.

There were scallops, of course, for dinner. Mixed in with some fried dab and chopped mushroom, bacon and a few leaves of wild garlic, all washed down with malt whisky, and with whey-buttered soda bread on the side, which was the Highland way. Then, up in a humming shrine of his parents’ old bedroom, Rob checked on the status of his precious sources again.

The black hole binaries had been spiralling toward each other for tens of thousands of years, and observed here on earth for decades. In many ways, and despite their supposed mystery, black holes were apparently simple objects―nothing but sheer mass―and even though their collision was so far off it had actually happened when we humans were still learning how to use tools, it was possible to predict within hours, if not minutes, when the effects of this event would finally reach Earth.

There were gravitational observatories, vast-array laser interferometers, in deep space, and underground in terrestrial sites, all waiting to record this moment, and Rob was tapping into them. All everyone else expected to see―in fact, all the various institutes and faculties had tuned their devices to look for―was this… Leaning over me, Rob called up a display to show a sharp spike, a huge peak in the data, as the black holes swallowed each other and the shock of their collision flooded out in the asymmetrical pulse of a gravitational wave.

“But this isn’t what I want, Lita. Incredibly faint though that signal is―a mere ripple deep in the fabric of the cosmos―I’m looking to combine and filter all those results, and find something even fainter.

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