Chaga

mounting. Gaby’s father bent to the eyepiece.

‘Perfect.’

‘You’d be much better off with the pictures from Hubble. All you’ll get on that is a white dot that suddenly vanishes when it drops below resolving power.’

‘Sometimes I’m ashamed to think I raised such an unromantic creature as you, Gabriel McAslan. If full occultation is tonight, I want to witness it with my own naked and bloodshot eyeball.’

‘So have they decided if it’s Interior Vulcanism or Black Snow?’

‘The money’s on Black Snow, but I don’t buy it. Where does this space-snow come from all of a sudden? How does it get round the trailing side of the satellite? And why is it building up symmetrically on all sides? If you read the bulletin boards you’ll get theories from alien redevelopment to God with a pot of cosmic black paint. Everything’s a racing certainty until the NASA probe gets there in 2008, no one’s going to have a clue.’

Gaby looked through the telescope. She hoped her father would not smell the woodsmoke in her hair. As a precaution, she had changed her T-shirt. It was the one with the masturbating nun on it. She loved it, though her father disapproved of her wearing it around younger and impressionable sisters. She adjusted the eyepiece. At the age of eighteen she could find her way around the solar system better than the capital of her own province. In the solar system you could not end up with the wrong name in the wrong district. No one sprayed Iochaid Ar La on the slopes of Olympus Mons or painted the edges of the craters on the moon red white and blue.

The enigma of Iapetus with its dark and light hemispheres had fascinated generations of astronomers, science fiction writers and lovers of mysteries. The Voyager missions had only deepened the mystery. Hubble had squinted Saturnwards and added a few more lightside features to the atlases of the solar system but nothing to the Casini Regio debate. The new generation of big orbital telescopes had turned away from planetary astronomy to the grandeur of star birth and star death among the glowing gas sheets of the inner galaxy. With them went the professional star-watchers. The celestial back yard was left for the amateurs to play in. It was an Italian postman and part-time planet-spotter who noticed that there seemed to be less of the brightside of Iapetus than the last time he had looked at it. He had logged his observations into the astronomy nets. They had lain gathering data-dust for almost a month; then, when they began to provoke gossip, had drawn professional ridicule until someone had the courage to sneak a peek with the Mauna Kea reflector at the Saturnian System.

While the professionals bickered and prevaricated, sixty per cent of Iapetus’s surface had turned black. This could not, now be ignored. Projects were cancelled, time slots reassigned, funding found. Hubble and her sisters were swung back to Saturn. What they saw out there made lead lines in every primetime news slot. It was not so much that Iapetus was turning black, it was how it was turning black. The dark was closing in equally on all sides: the circle of bright white ice was dwindling like a focused-down spotlight.

Ten days later, all that remained was a white dot fifty kilometres across, threatened on all sides by the dark. Someone had calculated that the black was advancing across Iapetus at ten kilometres per hour.

The upper monitor displayed the nature of the catastrophe. NASA had overlain the dark disc with a topographic map. Iapetus’s surface features were named after figures from the Song of Roland. Roland himself had been among the first to fall; his soul-friend Oliver and mighty King Charlemagne not long after. The battle-plain of Roncevaux was taken; only Hamon stood against the encircling dark. Soon he too would fall and there would be no heroes any more.

‘What is that stuff?’ Gaby whispered. The light from the Copeland Islands beamed across the room. She thought of Marky, out there in the night in his car with his friends and his fast food and his expensive stereo playing his cheap music. It is a poor kind of human who is not a little afraid of the powers in the sky. You can hide from them and pretend that they do not exist and limit your life by your ignorance or you can go out from your strong, safe house into the night and call them out and maybe make sense of them to yourself and to the world.

Her father replaced Gaby at the telescope. ‘Thirty kilometres to full occultation,’ he said, fiddling with the eyepiece.

The pictures from Hubble were being updated every thirty seconds. The upper screen abruptly blanked. A new message appeared. Gaby read it.

‘Dad. There’s something here I think you should see.’

‘I think we’re going to miss full occultation. It’ll just be below the horizon. Damn.’

‘Hyperion’s disappeared.’

He was there in an instant.

It was on the screen: a Net-wide bulletin. At 20:35 GM’I September 8 2002, researchers using the Miyama Small Object orbital observatory reported the disappearance of Saturn’s sixteenth moon, Hyperion, from their monitors. Instantly. Totally. Inexplicably.

‘Jesus,’ said Gaby’s father, reverently.

‘How can that happen?’ Gaby asked.

‘I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows.’

E-mail icons winked into existence along the top of the screen; the informational equivalent of the Irish Astronomical LocalNet shouting all at once.

‘The whole of the moon,’ Gaby said. Fresh information flooded downline from NASA. Voyager fly-by photographs and simulations of Hyperion: a blighted potato of a moonlet three hundred and fifty by two hundred and fifty by two hundred kilometres. Gone. The satellite’s final seconds came through image processing from Miyama control, frame by frame. For twenty frames nothing happened. On frame twenty-one Hyperion seemed to throw off its surface like the peel from an orange. Light glowed from the cracks, fanned from the torn open ridges and dorsae. Frames twenty-two to thirty-two were white. Pure white. Frame thirty-three was nothing. Just space and stars without any sign of the several trillion tons of rocky ice called Hyperion.

Total elapsed time of the moon’s destruction was four point three eight seconds.

The oak door to the Weather Room opened. The dogs came rushing in, running around and wagging their tails. Something had excited them. After them came Rebecca. She looked fearful.

‘It was on the news,’ she said. ‘They interrupted Spitting Image for it.’

‘Nothing left bigger than a hundred metres across,’ Dad read from the screen, ‘or the Small Object Array would have picked it up. They’re trying to tell us it was a cometary impact.’

‘And the next moon out goes black all over?’ Gaby said.

‘I think sensible people should be afraid of this,’ Reb said.

‘Sensible people are,’ her father said. On the monitor Hyperion’s final seconds were repeated, over and over.

They are trusting that they will find answers there, Gaby thought. They are trusting that those answers will make sense, that there are people who can explain why the world constantly surprises them. It does not have to be logical, forgivable or even sane, but eventually explicable in some way or other. That is why you must go away, because you want to be the person who has the answers to the question why?

It was easy now. It was surprising how little decision there was to be made when it came to it. A fire on the Point and the death of a moon had helped her, but she had always known, since she had posted off the application for the Network Journalism course, that in the end she would go. She wanted to tell them she was right and she was ready but her father was showing Reb what all the information coming through the Net meant.

Horace came and stood beside her, beseeching attention. She ruffled the fine, soft hair behind his ear. She pointed out to him the way she would be going; out there, past the lights of the ferry she had seen from the Point, far beyond the glow of the land, beyond even the reach of the lighthouses, to the open sea and the country on the other side of it. But he was only a big tan and white dog with a degenerative nervous disease, who understood nothing.

African Nightflight