Don’t bother trying to answer, because Li vetoed giving you access. She’s certain you’re lying. By the time you read this I’ll have removed the tunnel through the firewall.
Did you make up a story for me? Then it won’t matter that I analyzed both the old cores in the archives and the data I accessed on your servers. Laugh if you want.
And if your data are real? Then I hope to hell you can make sense of this.
The annotated globe holo attached to the message stopped Antonio cold.
And when he and Beth finally completed their chores and left the barn, the wailing, sticky-faced child—thumb in his mouth, seated amid the snowmelt puddles in the center of Main Street—was an even bigger surprise.
*
“Come to bed,” Dana called.
Aristophanes hung overhead, at almost full phase, mocking Antonio. “In a minute.”
Dana came out of the house to stand with him. “I know all about your minutes.”
He smiled. At, not near her. Not to the side of her. Not at her slippers. That he could—without effort, even—said something about them both. “And yet you joined me?”
“Sigh.” And she did. “What’s so interesting out here tonight?”
“The wind in the trees? The Broadway marquees?”
She laughed. “Okay. So there aren’t many options. What is it about Aristophanes, besides that it’s not an asteroid?”
“All three of them.”
“All three moons?”
“Right. And though they’re not asteroids, they still perplex me.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Astronomical puzzles went above and beyond spousal duty. Even on a normal day, and today had been far from that. “It’s on the esoteric side.”
Dana hugged herself against the cold. “If it will get you inside faster, tell me.”
“You silver-tongued smoothie,” he said. And proceeded to dump on her everything that had been driving him crazy.
Beginning with that none of Dark’s moons was tidally locked to Dark. The Moon showed one face to Earth. Phobos and Deimos were locked in the same manner to Mars. Eight inner moons of Jupiter were tidally locked. Fifteen of Saturn’s. Five of Uranus’s—
“What of the other planets in this system?” she interrupted his inventory. “Are their moons tidally locked?”
“Most of them are locked. As they should be.” He tipped back his head, staring in frustration at the world overhead. “Why not these?”
“I have no idea.”
Finally noticing that Dana was in pajamas and a thin robe, he removed his sweater and slipped it around her shoulders. Her attention kept wandering across the street to where Rikki and Blake still tried, and failed, to calm that poor, terrified little boy.
With a shiver, Dana turned back toward Antonio. “Sorry. That’s hard to listen to. About the moons, though. Could this be a young planetary system? Maybe it’s too early for everything to have tidally locked.”
“There’s no single time for locking to happen. It depends on the orbit and the original rate of rotation. But that said, we’re talking at most a few million…years.”
“Dark can’t be that young, can it?”
He shook his head. “I’ve radiometrically dated rock samples from asteroids. The oldest rocks go back four billion years. So this solar system is that old.”
Across the street, the uneven, heartrending weeping became a loud wail.
Dana looked ready to cry. She shook it off. “This system is that old? Then I don’t get it.”
“If you think that’s strange, here is another. The coastal-erosion rates in the geological record changed within the last millennium. Until then, the erosion was way too little for the tides we observe.”
“Changing when? About the time of the floods?”
“I think so.”
“I give up,” Dana said. “I can’t imagine any explanation.”
“I can.” But the answer he had found had left him stunned. “I believe that Dark’s three moons are…new. I think it was their arrival that triggered the tsunamis worldwide.”
*
Blake stopped pacing his living room long enough to ask, “You’re serious?”
Eyes kept shifting from Antonio to the wall common with Beth’s bedroom. He found that odd. Usually he was the one to look away from people.
“Maybe one of us should sit with them,” Rikki said, perching on the edge of the sofa. She had yet to examine the datasheet spread across the low table in front of her.
“We all must be in on this discussion,” Antonio insisted. “The kids will call if they need anything.” Except that Todd wouldn’t. Apart for Beth, everyone outside the fence terrified him. “I can’t explain why, but I don’t believe this can wait.”
“So,” Blake said. “New moons. Rocks four hundred or so klicks across. Seriously?”
From the other room: the synthesized tones of music played on a datasheet. Rikki relaxed a bit without leaning back.
Simple, direct sentences. “It’s surprising. I know.”
“One such would be surprising,” Blake said. “But three? Do you know how implausible that sounds?”
“Nevertheless.” Because, of course, he would never work with numbers. “It would explain a lot. Moons shifting orbits could tip Dark’s axis, could alter the Milankovitch cycles.”
“Uh-huh,” Blake said. “And do you have any idea how much energy tipping the planet takes?”
Rikki had finally taken notice of the annotated globe—and she shuddered.
“What?” Blake asked.
Rikki said, “If Carlos’s reconstruction is right, these waves were huge. Now ask yourself this. If the moons did this once, however that happened, what’s to say it can’t happen again?”
*
“I must have access to Marvin,” Antonio insisted, as Rikki vigorously nodded. “I can’t model the situation with just data sheets. And we’ll need to see Carlos’s full analysis, see what that tells us.”
Dana and Blake exchanged a long-suffering look. Or maybe it was a he’ll-never-get-it look. Blake said, “We can bring the matter up with Li, tell her what we think we found, but you know she’ll never go along. Carlos’s message has already told you as much.”
“But I wouldn’t know…how to invent such complex data…sets. Not in a way that hangs together.”
Rikki smiled sadly. “Convincing someone that you don’t know something will be hard.”
“With Marvin’s help, and…Carlos’s, maybe I…could. But without?”
Dana patted his knee. “We’ll have to find another way.”
What other way was there? Antonio
