Patrick pulled back from their embrace. “Glad you got up here okay.” His blue eyes gleamed beneath his eye shield, and blond hair framed his face. He wore the striped button-down Chel had given him last Christmas, and she wondered if he’d put it on for a reason. He rarely wore it when they were together; it was she who’d used it more, as a nightshirt. He’d liked taking it off her.
“I still can’t believe you were in there with patient zero,” he said. “Jesus.” He stepped back to look at her. “Pulling all-nighters again?”
“Something like that.”
“Hardly a first for you.”
Chel could hear the note of longing in his voice, his desire to remind her of what they once shared. “I really appreciate you coming up here,” she said. “I do.”
“All you had to do was ask,” he said. “A codex from the classic. Unbelievable.”
Chel looked back over the L.A. basin behind them. A gray haze of ash filled the sky. “Let’s go inside,” she said. “It’s eerie out here—and the clock is ticking.”
Patrick lingered behind her for a moment, squinting into the darkness. “Love the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night,” he said, paraphrasing his favorite epitaph.
The three-hundred-seat Oschin Planetarium dome rose seventy-five feet from ground to apex and gave visitors the feeling of standing inside a great unfinished work of art, a basilica ceiling yet to be painted. They stood in the dark, lit only by the glow of the two red exit signs and a laptop. While Patrick focused on the images of the codex on the computer, Chel studied the strange contours of the star projector in the middle of the room. It looked like a futuristic monster, a mechanical hydra that projected thousands of stars onto the aluminum ceiling through cratered hemispheres.
“Whoa, I’ve never seen this before in a codex, a reference to a star war timed to the evening star,” Patrick said. “It’s unbelievable.”
The images of the book had swiftly worked their magic on him too. He dimmed the lights, flipped a switch on the projector, and now the dome filled with stars jetting across the night sky, rotating through hundreds of positions, magically transforming. Chel had been here a dozen times in the year and a half they were together, but every time it felt new.
“There are dozens of astronomical references in what you’ve already translated,” Patrick said, pointing at the ceiling with a laser. “Not just the zodiac but positional references and other things we can use to anchor us.”
Chel had never paid enough attention to the details of his work, and now she was embarrassed by how little she knew.
“Come on,” he said. “You know this stuff. It’s a historical–astronomical GPS.”
He was teasing her.
“You’ll recall—Dr. Manu—that the earth rotates around the sun. And on its own axis. But it’s also oscillating back and forth with respect to inertial space, due to the moon’s tidal forces. It’s like a toy top that wobbles. So the sun’s path as we see it across the sky changes a little every year. Which is what 2012ers are all obsessed with, of course.”
“Galactic alignment?”
Patrick nodded. “The crazies think that because the moon, earth, and sun are lined up on the winter solstice, and we’re nearing the time when the sun will intersect with some imagined equator of the dark rift of the Milky Way, we’ll all be destroyed because of the tidal waves or the sun exploding. Depends who you ask. Never mind that the ‘equator’ they’re talking about is totally imagined.”
Projected stars moved in slow concentric circles above their heads. Chel sank down into one of the cloth- covered seats, tired of craning her neck.
“So the earth wobbles back and forth,” Patrick continued. “And not only does the sun’s path across the sky change as a result, but so do the stars’.”
“But even if they shift over time,” Chel asked, “the stars we see here in Los Angeles aren’t very different from the ones they see in Seattle, right? So how are we supposed to get a good location from that? The differences are pretty imperceptible.”
“Imperceptible to our eyes. We have too much light pollution. But the ancients’ naked-eye observations were more precise than ours could ever be.”
Patrick’s own love affair with the Maya began while he pursued a PhD in archaeoastronomy. He became obsessed with the analyses that the Maya astronomers were able to do from their temples: approximations of planetary cycles, understanding of the concept of galaxies, even a basic grasping of the idea of moons attached to other planets. The modern decline of stargazing was a tragedy, Patrick felt.
They both stared up at the frozen sky. “So let’s start at Tikal,” he said. “This is what it looked like there on the vernal equinox on the approximate date you got from the carbon dating and the iconography. Let’s say: March twentieth, A.D. 930” He used the laser to highlight a bright object in the western sky. “According to your scribe, on his vernal equinox, Venus was visible in the dead middle. So we rotate the coordinates of the star projector within the range of the Peten, until we get Venus in the right place.”
The stars spun above them until Venus was at the apex of the planetarium ceiling. “Looks like about fourteen to sixteen degrees north,” Patrick said finally.
But Chel knew enough to know that from fourteen to sixteen degrees north would span a range of more than two hundred miles wide. “That’s as close as we can get? We have to do better than that.”
Patrick began to shift stars. “That’s only the first constraint. From what you’ve already translated, we’ve got dozens more to parse. We’ll go as fast as we can.”
They worked side by side, with the projector and Patrick’s computerized star charts, the codex providing more inputs. Much of the work was done in silence, with Patrick entirely focused on the sky above.
It was after two a.m., during a long stretch of silence, when Chel found her thoughts drifting uncomfortably to Volcy and his deathbed.
To her relief, Patrick interrupted them. “So before this all started,” he said, “did you have a chance to take that trip to the Peten you wanted? Were you writing all the articles you’d hoped to?”
When she’d ended their relationship and he moved out of her house, these were the excuses she gave.
“I guess,” Chel said quietly.
“After this, you’ll be a keynote speaker for the rest of your life,” he said.
Patrick already seemed to have forgotten that she might be facing a jail term after this. Yet even now, in the midst of this catastrophe, Chel could hear the tinge of jealousy in his voice. Despite Patrick’s cutting-edge scholarship, there were few people who were interested in archaeoastronomy. He’d spent his career trying to convince the academy that what he did mattered. But he always found himself presenting at the ends of conferences, publishing in obscure journals, and having book proposals rejected.
Chel hadn’t really processed how deep his competitive streak ran until the night after she won the American Society of Linguistics’ most prestigious award. They’d gotten to the bottom of a second bottle of Sangiovese at their favorite Italian restaurant, and Patrick tilted his glass toward her.
“To you,” he’d said. “For picking the right specialty.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing,” he’d said, downing a long sip of wine. “I’m just happy epigraphy is well appreciated.”
He did his best to behave every time another of her articles was accepted or she received another award, but it was forced cheer. Eventually, Chel limited what she told him about work to the few frustrations she had with her job: students not doing their work or the politics of the Getty board. She shared every bad thing that happened and none of the good; it was easier. But with each little omission, Chel felt the distance growing between them.
Patrick again shifted the star pattern on the planetarium ceiling.
“I’ve been seeing someone,” he said.
Chel looked up. “You have?”
“Yeah. For a couple of months. Her name is Martha.”
“Is it real?”
“I think so. I’ve been staying at her place. She was anxious about me seeing you tonight, but she understood the urgency. Pretty weird excuse to get together with your ex in the middle of the night.”
“I didn’t know anyone under sixty was named Martha.”
