After a few minutes they emerge from the cave and Den helps Bess up onto the bar.
“Welcome,” she says softly but it commands the attention of the room. “I’m excited.” She laughs and someone whoops. Winery staff circulate with trays of red wine and I grab a glass. This is the launch of the 2018 vintage which has been three years in the making. I do a mental calculation. Yesterday’s Vancouver event could have taken someone back to that harvest in a third of a second. That was a bad event by any standard, the kind that turns your flesh cold. Negative 315 million seconds per second. At that acceleration, it’d take four minutes to get back to the founding of the Roman republic. And the further back some hapless wanderer travels, exponentially greater is the potential for disaster. At least that’s the theory.
Bess knows nothing about my job, but at least she knows she knows nothing. My story to her is only a half-lie, yet still distant from truth. She stopped asking of course, but where there’s dishonesty between a couple, it can be tough to limit. As far as Bess and anyone else who asks is concerned, I work on an academic project to detect exotic fundamental particles. And that’s almost true. Just how exotic those particles are, and why I do it–those are the things within the wall of secrecy.
The particles are called tachyons. It turns out that when nature sits back and looks on gormlessly as time acceleration occurs, then these tachyons are emitted and at TMA we’re in the business of detecting them. Tachyons are the strangest little buggers but thank god they exist, because without them, and without our pinpointing where they came from, we’d be in a world of incoherence and chaos.
And when I say they’re exotic, I understate it. While the speed of light is the upper limit for all other things, for tachyons it’s the lower speed limit. That’s as slow as they can go. Einstein thought that nothing could travel faster than light, but these mad little things shoot through Einstein’s grave at warp speed.
“I love the color–it’s a deep ruby isn’t it?” Bess has started the tasting of the new Dog Star release and is holding her glass up to the fluorescent light. “There’s the usual blackcurrant, but do you get the herbal notes? Lavender? Some licorice, too?” There’s excited affirmation of her analysis, verging on the sycophantic. Den nods approvingly. He’s the one who makes this booze but she’s the one who sells it. I really don’t get any herbs at all.
We’re surrounded by twenty acres of Dog Star vineyards, lovingly tended and surgically harvested. Thirty miles north of here, buried below a shanty town of overgrown trailers is a 700-acre tachyon detection array. It sits silently, stirring only to send an electrical signal that illuminates a green light on a map half a mile above when a tachyon source is detected, triangulated, pinpointed, and analyzed. Then, when the director–the one in the Big Chair–so decides, the tachyon beam is reflected, phase-shifted, amplified, and beamed back to whence it came, destructively interfering with the source emission. This seems to do the trick. We’re not a hundred percent sure why, but the temporal acceleration is arrested and we’re saved. Saved from what is something we’re not entirely sure about. I’m comforted in my ignorance by the fact that throughout history, many inventions seemed to have worked long before anyone knew why. How long did it take after the invention of the transistor for a real understanding of semiconductors? I can’t remember because the Cabernet is kicking-in. Of course, at stake with transistors was tinny music and not the very fabric of space and time.
I think I do taste the lavender now but I reach for a second glass to be sure. Hearing my name yanks me out of my muddled thoughts. Bess is reaching for me from her elevated position and her audience is looking back at me, happy to be involved. I walk through the parting throng to hold Bess’s hand as she jumps down from the bar. This is why I’m here. The astrophysicist backstory is much more compelling with an actual, practicing physicist in the family.
“My wonderful hubby, the physicist” Bess announces and I grin uncomfortably as I receive a round of undeserved applause. “How do you like the Cab?” she asks in a stage whisper.
“Lavender. Licorice?” I say, holding the glass up to the light and swirling it. “Love it.” Den slaps me on the back and everyone laughs.
FOUR
My father looks back at me. Sometimes he’s there and sometimes he isn’t, but today there’s no mistaking the long jawline and wide handles of pre-combed hair trying to escape each temple. He picks the worst days to appear. I walk into the kitchen and Bess looks up from her tablet. I pick up the kettle, weigh it and plug it in.
“That bad?” Bess asks. She knows my hangovers require tea.
“You happy? Was it a success?” She nods without looking up. I lean on the counter and stare at the kettle.
“Den happy with it?” I ask. She looks up. I look back.
“Yes, thank you,” she says. “Very happy.”
“I’m sure,” I say and leave to get dressed. I can pick up tea on my way to work.
I liked Den at first. He was a savvy business partner for Bess. When she, like many new arrivals
