Frost Begins on the Lawn
By
Martyn
What I’m seeking here is the usual critique, plus a close look at how the two distinct voicings work. The idea is that Ayanda’s chapters are slow and leisurely to convey thoughtful academia, while Johnson’s chapters are faster to match the sense of impending doom.
Chapter 1
Professor Ayanda Nkosi would not have wanted the end of the world to be woven from the threads of her life’s work any more than she would have wanted it to be braided from the pattern of what she failed to do. She didn’t know it when she rose that Tuesday morning in May, but those would be her only choices.
At ten minutes past four, Ayanda reached out and touched the empty bed next to her. Wincing at the emptiness—both inside and out—she closed her eyes for a moment and allowed the memories to fade. Sipho.
She had woken before the alarm again; just as she did every Tuesday morning in term time. Tuesdays took her away from her work, or at least from what she considered her real work; an inconvenience that was becoming increasingly burdensome as she homed in on her goal.
That morning, her bedroom was cold enough for her breath to condense in the air, but her instinct to pull the covers over her nose gave way to necessity and a lifelong commitment to reliability. Ayanda, deep down in the core of her being, believed in herself, and herself alone. If she couldn’t be dependable, who could? This became even more the case after Sipho died, when a part of her decided that relying on others usually ended badly. So, she put herself on a path. One where every step was calculated, known in advance, and deliberate.
Swinging her legs over the side, she sat on the edge of the bed and did her stretches in the dark, hands to the ceiling, then forward over her knees, then a slow turn of her neck, left and right. There were a dozen more; she worked her way from the tips of her fingers to the ends of her toes. A daily routine since a visit to her physio in Rondebosch some years ago, Ayanda saw it as a bit of a Canute exercise, but one that slowed the tide of age, even if it couldn’t stop it.
Groaning audibly as the tautness of the night fought back, she sighed to the dark room, “I’m getting one degree stiffer every year.”
She did another stretch, exhaled, and murmured, “It’s starting to feel like a law of nature, girl.”
Getting ready by the light of the passage bulb, a single red LED, which was only visible when her bedroom door was ajar—she wasn’t ready for anything more than a whisper of light, enough to turn pitch dark into shadows and outlines—she let reality seep in. Only the sounds of the morning and the lingering cold of the night accompanying the attenuated visible spectrum felt comfortable. She had attuned to the slowness of it. There was, after all, enough time for the day to assault her senses later.
The clothes she had laid out the night before—a Monday night discipline, along with showering before bed, that she practised only on the eve of the drive—were her professorial uniform: tailored trousers, a pressed blouse, and a well-cut jacket that was loose enough for her to lecture in. At home she wore shweshwe and a doek. The two wardrobes shared a rail but had nothing else in common, except her as the interface between her two lives. Splashing spring water on her face from a ceramic bowl on her dressing table, she buttered herself with moisturiser, and worked hand cream around the wedding band she never removed. Then, running a towel over her short, wayward hair, which had been more black than white when Sipho died but was the reverse now, she acknowledged the change with wry amusement. Time passes even for someone who spends her days deep in its arcane branches. Sliding her gold bangles over her wrist, she went down to the kitchen. There, she filled the kettle, switched it on and made her porridge.
Her morning routine often comprised a series of self-imposed challenges. Games really. She told herself they were an efficiency-promoting method, but were actually her competitive nature coming through. She had lots of them: throwing empty shampoo bottles from the shower stall, across the bathroom, and into the bin. Her “world record” for this was nine consecutive slam-dunks, only broken by a slight slip of the mat—which brought her heart leaping into her mouth—last summer, which spoiled her aim. Another was unstacking the dishwasher in less than 180 seconds, and yet another was choosing a movie from her favourite streaming service in less than a minute. There were many more. Each challenge was designed to optimise the time she spent just staring at her whiteboard. Thinking.
In this morning’s game, the breakfast challenge, the rule was that the porridge had to be stirred, salted, sweetened, and on the hob before the kettle clicked off. If she won, she rewarded herself with a single chocolate biscuit from the battered old tin on the counter to have with her coffee. She won most mornings, since she also decided how full the kettle was. But a rule was a rule. And the biscuit had the flavour of victory irrespective of how much she tilted the playing field.
She had invented these rules in her first winter alone, reasoning that a woman living by herself in the Karoo required either discipline or ceremony, preferably both.
“Nobody sane is awake at this hour, Sipho,” she said to the ghost of her husband. She glanced through the kitchen window at the dark outline of the tree under which he lay. “Nobody sane, and me maybe. Well, definitely me, actually. Perhaps that’s why they call it stupid o’clock.”
Saying things aloud had become a habit, long before it became ballast. She would tell Sipho things. He would grunt. And she would nod in appreciation of his insights. She kept the habit when the grunts ceased, but over eleven years she narrowed it to the confines of the kitchen. Somewhere near him. Where his ghost, in her imagination, sat in his usual chair. Invisible to all but Ayanda.
While the porridge cooked, she took her torch from its hook and went out the back, across frost that broke under her boots with a crunch, to the chicken coop. The coop was electrically warmed. It drew its power from a series of salt batteries she’d constructed in the back of the barn, which fed a heat lamp on a thermostat. Her neighbour, Danie van Zyl, whose farm was just a few kilometres away, regarded this, and all her other automations, as the beginning of the end for the Karoo. He was a big block of a man, almost as wide as he was tall, a retired Springbok who thought of farming as a training ground for rugby. Ayanda often wondered if he was right, after all.
“You have to put your shoulder into it. It’s no coincidence the best rugby teams come from farming countries,” he’d say whenever he could. “Once you let the robots take over, where are we? Nowhere, that’s where we are. Ja-nee.”
Ayanda would nod and smile, then give him another tin of Darling Brew. She’d wonder how she would cope in a world of manual labour, despite her strong, squat frame. His wife, Wilna, would roll her twinkling green eyes at Ayanda, a signal of kinship crossing the slowly healing divide of South Africa, and they’d let Danie carry on with his monologue.
She lifted the lid of the automatic feeder, hoisted the feed sack without appreciable effort, and filled the drum to the top. Three days of feed, with an extra handful. More out of generosity than calculation: it covered her absence with a day in hand. The hens shifted on their perches and made low clucking sounds. Out of habit, she counted them by torchlight, six, just as there had been the night before.
“Still with us then, girls,” she told them, taking five eggs from the boxes, before she went back in.
Sitting at the long kitchen table, she ate her porridge with a spoonful of honey, drank her coffee, ate her biscuit, and hummed ‘Habanera’ to herself. She didn’t trust the power enough to believe it would complete the dishwasher’s cycle before she left, so she rinsed her dishes and left them to dry on the drainer. Then she walked around the farmhouse, checking everything was turned off, and all that could be locked was secure, a mental tick-box list—one of many—before pulling on her coat and lifting the stubborn kitchen door, which had slumped in its hinges, until it was free to open. As was her practice, she did not turn on the porch light; glancing up instead at Sipho’s unpolluted sky. Seeing its glimmering glory undiminished, she smiled with satisfaction, and sighed: “Are you out there?”
She had one thing left to do. Before she left, she stopped in the study, in front of her whiteboard. Three lines of mathematics ran across it in her cramped upright hand. She had spent twenty-three years building the proof that stood behind those lines. And the last two trying to write the fourth. The board looked exactly as it had looked at midnight. She had expected this. But she checked it every morning anyway, the way other people without mental lists go back to check that the stove is off when they leave home.
The fourth line would be the culmination of her lifetime’s work, and its publication, when it came, would change everything: the fundamental laws of physics, her status—a Nobel would almost certainly follow—and even the way people viewed the universe, in much the same way Einstein’s famous E=MC2 became public knowledge. A frequently quoted and little understood symbol of science. She expected all this. What she didn’t expect were the consequences resulting from her discovery. Nobody would.
Chapter 2
The message that signalled the end of the world was eleven weeks old before anyone read it.
It had been composed and sent by one of the ageing relics of the space age that still orbited the sun, seeking out errant interplanetary junk and other cosmic debris. Designed as a warning telescope, it was connected to a survey facility atop a mountain of ice in the Arctic tundra, whose remit was to monitor the entry points to Earth’s gravitational pull from orbits above the ecliptic plane.
The message itself was written in the unadorned, scientific style of machines that did not think. It was a measurement that fell outside certain parameters and therefore warranted notification and nothing more. Had it been an intelligent machine, it may have ensured its alert was prioritised; a trained human would have raised hell. As it was, it did what its instructions required. Its observations were computed, compared, and reported; unfortunately, the last of these was to no one. Then it waited, with the patience of the dumb, for an acknowledgement that never came; ticking off the seconds to Armageddon with all the awareness and care of a wooden block.
It arrived at the largely automated jumble of electronic boxes still braving the winds and sub-zero temperatures of the shrinking ice continent, and was sorted and routed to the astronomy department of a university on the west coast of what used to be the United States of America. There were no astronomers to see it.
Johnso Packard found it. In a strange twist of fate, it was fortunate that budget cuts and a connection to the department’s administration meant a human acted as caretaker at the university rather than a more efficient yet more expensive automaton. Admittedly, he was a hundred dollars a day, two hamburgers and fries for lunch, an estranged wife and kids, repossessed car, and two pending assault charges of a human, but a human nevertheless. Equally fortuitous, Johnso had a Master’s degree in Astronomy, and sufficient neurodivergence to permit him to walk his own path irrespective of circumstance, hence his bitterness with life. Nothing was more worthless in an age when all of humanity, except perhaps Johnso, had retreated inward and had all but abandoned the universe beyond the atmosphere. The machines held that domain now: roving boxes of electronics that needed no maintenance, and just carried on carrying on. But it was why he took a job at the almost-defunct Astronomy Department; a job of little consequence, but, for Johnso, it put him there, right amongst the dreams he once held.
As time passed, Johnso would wander the halls that once begged questions about the universe—this universe—turning on computers to make sure they still worked, making the occasional observation to make sure he still worked too. And as the academic staff dwindled, and the offices turned dark, Johnso was overlooked. He became a line in a budget that shrank with each successive year. A tall, lonely figure, with a mop of dark curly hair, wandering the dark corridors of a forgotten department in a neglected university.
Before she left, his boss, Professor Gaynor Schlitz, said to him, “Are you sure you want to stay? Why don’t you join us in the Regard? That’s where all the excitement is. You could actually explore new worlds.” Then she laughed. “Seek out new life and civilisations, and go to places no one has gone before. Maybe even boldly. Isn’t that what you dreamed of?”
Johnso shook his head. “This is universe enough for me, Professor. I don’t want to spend my time under one of those damn Dreamwalker Hoods looking at possibilities we didn’t take.”
She looked at him with what might have been pity, but impatience got the better of her. She had felt the Dreamwalker worlds, and it was like intellectual heroin. Nothing was more important than getting back to it.
“Okay, your choice, Johnso. Have a great life,” she said. She touched his shoulder lightly. “But if you ever want to meet me there,” she handed him a card, “this is my number. I’ll have it routed.”
Johnso watched her go, a spring in her step, then picked up his broom and swept out her office. He’d been sweeping out the offices for four years when the message arrived.
Johnso was looking for a spare-parts requisition on the messaging noticeboard. The monitoring machine’s messages and the requisition replies to caretakers had a similar look: a string of alphanumeric characters in the subject line, a hidden “From:” field, and no salutation. A machine would have scanned the message board, matched the numbers, and read only the relevant post. A human had to do it the hard way.
“Hello, what’s this?” he said, enlarging the message to full screen. He read it, pulled out a tablet from his satchel, and tried to recall his orbital mechanics lessons. After half an hour of furious calculation, he blanched. “Oh fuck.”
Reading it a second time, he carefully traced his calculations until he was certain. Then he picked up his phone and with trembling hands tried to call Professor Schlitz. The call went to voicemail. So, he called the only people he knew that still cared about messages from outside.
This is how the end of the world came to the attention of the Society of Historians: second-hand, belated, and devastatingly incontrovertible.
The Society was neither large nor important. It was an anachronism. Its members kept the records of a civilisation that had long ago decided it preferred reflection to documentation. They were considered by the population at large to be harmless cranks; enthusiasts who failed to see the futility of record-keeping in a universe of proven-to-be-endless possibilities. They were lighthouse keepers in shipping lanes that were no longer used.
“Yah-ello,” said the voice on the end of the line. “This is the Society of Historians. How may I help you?”
It was a male voice; young, insouciant, and too high-pitched for comfort.
“Err, this is the Astronomy Department of Western-Tech,” Johnso said. “I have something here that you might want to see.”
“Western-Tech? Isn’t that the big, yellow building on Ocean Road?” the voice squeaked.
“Yes, that’s the one. I have a message…”
“The one with the pine trees, and the big metal wave structure outside?”
“Yes, but…”
“I heard it was closed,” the voice said. “In fact, my records show that Professor Schlitz left for the Regard four years ago.”
“That’s right. I’m the only one left.”
“And you have a message?”
“That’s right. It’s important.”
“Little green men?”
Johnso closed his eyes and drew his mouth into a tight line. He counted to five.
“No, it’s from a satellite,” Johnso said. He had an almost bottomless fund of patience, but this guy was getting near the end of it.
“What kind of satellite?”
“The kind that watches NEOs.”
“NEOs?”
“Near Earth Objects. It’s detected one, and it’s on a collision course with the planet.” The words came out in a tumble. Johnso took a breath to calm himself. “It’s big. Very big. If it hits the Earth, it will be bad. Very bad.”
“You don’t say,” the voice said. “How bad is very bad? Maybe we ought to open a file on this.”
“Extinction level bad,” Johnso said. He said this calmly, aware that excitable people are often ignored when they bring bad news, and, as news items go, this was about as bad as it got. “If this strikes the Earth, then we’re all dead. Well, nearly all.”
“What are the chances of it striking?” The high pitch had lowered a notch.
“As near to 100% as makes no difference.”
“I see, so can I have a name to put on the file?”
“Johnso. Johnso Packard.”
“And your position in the Astronomy Department?”
“I’m the caretaker,” Johnso answered. Despite his checkered past, Johnso was an honest person. He never lied, often to the point of getting himself in hot water as a consequence.
“The caretaker…” The voice trailed off.
“It’s a long story,” Johnso said.
“Well, I have all night,” the voice said. “Unless this NEO is imminent.”
“It’s not,” Johnso said. “I haven’t worked out the actual time of arrival, but it’s numbered in years, not hours.”
“And how would a caretaker know this?”
“I was meant to be a graduate researcher here. I have a Master’s degree in astronomy. Unfortunately, things went wrong in my life at the time, and then the Regard happened, so my Professor—Professor Schlitz—offered me a job until I could straighten things out with the police.”
“The police?”
“Yeah. I hit the guy who was banging my wife. Then I hit the guy who repossessed my car after he pushed me to the floor. The police charged me. Twice. But then the Regard happened, and all that stuff just seemed to go into abeyance.”
“So, a caretaker with two pending assault charges is saying that the world is about to end. And you want me to take this upstairs to the Historians?”
Johnso heaved a deep sigh. “Look, I know how it appears, but trust me, the science is sound.”
“Okay, I’ll run it by them. You don’t sound like a typical caretaker. Just send the message over to this address.”
He quoted a mailbox address. Johnso read it back, spelling out the names to be sure. Then he forwarded the message.
“Okay, that’s done.”
“Great. We’ll get back to you.”
The line went dead. Johnso stood there, looking at the ceiling, trying to see through it, across the miles, through the dark, to a big, tumbling rock on an inexorable course towards Earth.
He was still standing there, broom in hand, when his phone rang an hour and thirty-eight minutes later.
“Hello, is that Mister Packard?” said a voice. It was much lower than the one on the previous call; each word unruffled and measured.
“Johnso Packard,” Johnso said.
“Good. This is Historian Ver, of astronomical records,” Ver said. “I’ve discussed your message with Historian El, one of our mathematicians, and we’d very much like to meet with you to discuss it further. How soon can you get here?”
“Where is here?” Johnso said.
“New York. That’s a city on the East Coast of continental North America.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of it,” Johnso said. “How am I going to get there?”
“We’ve sent a conveyance. A bit presumptuous, I concede, but it should be there any moment now. We thought this was important enough not to waste any time.”
“No kidding?” Johnso said. As he said it, the sound of high-powered jets reached his ears. He looked out of one of the large windows bordering the office, onto the dark lawn at the front of the university, and there, landing between the front doors and the wave sculpture, was a military VTOL jet. “I think my carriage has arrived.”
“Oh good, they found you,” Ver said, enthusiasm leaking into his restrained tones. “We were worried the Mid-West Autarchy would attempt to shoot it down, but it seems they’ve all gone to the Regard too.”
“Will this flight be dangerous?”
“Not really,” Ver said. “We have a full load of countermeasures. Just a bit bumpy, that’s all. You don’t suffer from flight sickness, do you?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never flown,” Johnso said.
“Better take a plastic bag,” Ver said. “Just in case.”
“Noted,” Johnso said, hanging up. He rummaged around in his cupboard and found a roll of waste-basket liners. Pocketing them, he dashed down the stairs, fourteen floors to the bottom, and out into the searchlight-lit forecourt.
“Johnso Packard?” a squat figure in a flight suit called out. Johnso nodded. “Great. I’m Historian Gere. I’ll be your taxi driver this evening. Let’s get you suited up.”
The flight to New York was uneventful, in the sense that no one shot at them, but for Johnso it was the most wonderful thing he had ever experienced. He felt close to the stars as they streaked through the upper atmosphere at many times the speed of sound.
“How fast are we going?” he said over the comms.
“Mach 7,” Gere replied. His voice was clipped. “We’re being tracked, but I don’t think they have anything fast enough, or powerful enough to reach us.”
“You don’t think?”
“You can never tell. The warlords in the Midwest aren’t very sophisticated, but they’re completely nuts,” Gere said. “Anyway, most of them have their heads stuck in Dreamwalker Hoods. I don’t believe they’ll bother us.”
“Well, that’s reassuring.” Johnso wasn’t reassured.
“We’ll be landing in about twenty minutes. I’ll have to hard-brake over the Atlantic, swing round towards New York, and take us in at subsonic speeds. The neighbours go nuts if we boom all over their contemplation of infinity,” Gere said. “You might want to get your bags out. It’s going to get bumpy.”
“Gee, thanks,” Johnso said. “I enjoyed my lunch, but now I wish I hadn’t had it.”
“Don’t worry. If you’re lucky, you won’t get to enjoy it twice.”
Lunch was, the second time around, not nearly as enjoyable for Johnso.
When they landed, a ground car was waiting; a sleek, black sedan, hovering on an air cushion, eighteen inches above the pavement. A smartly dressed woman, who said her name was Historian Janes, opened the rear door and invited him to step inside. They drove off at speeds, Johnso estimated, that were a close approximation to the VTOL’s velocity, and slipped into a tunnel that led under a small tower block on the outskirts of an area she said was Manhattan. They pulled to a halt in a parking bay, surrounded by a dozen similar vehicles, lowered slowly onto struts, and waited for the fans to die down before Janes stepped out and opened Johnso’s door.
“Follow me,” she said and marched away at pace. Johnso scrambled after her, his unzipped flight suit flapping wildly as he struggled to keep pace.
Chapter 3
Ayanda’s VW Golf started on the second turn. It was a diesel, seventeen years old, that faded white of uncared-for cars, reminiscent of bone, but it probably knew the road better than she did, so it had earned her trust. Letting it idle while she opened the gate, she drove through, closed the gate behind her, and then sighed at the prospect of the forty kilometres of dirt between her and Sutherland. The road was corrugated in the usual places. The ruts of heavy farm vehicles. She took the best part of an hour, driving on the crown with her lights on full beam. Twice a pair of eyes came up out of the darkness at the verge and sank back—jackals, both times. Later, further down the trail, a steenbok’s eyes rose higher and held still for longer, frozen in place by the unnatural passer-by.
Eventually, Sutherland showed itself as a handful of lights below the ridge. On a hill east of the town, the observatory’s domes stood against the stars, the Southern African Large Telescope and its lesser siblings, all still shut.
The town existed for sheep and for the sky, in that order, according to the farmers, and the reverse, according to everyone else. At half past five in the morning, it existed just for itself.
There were a few people and vehicles about: a single bakkie parked up at the co-op, and a light on in the bakery, but the garage was open, because she was expected. They had an arrangement. The boy at the pump wore two jerseys, the collar of the inner one folded neatly over the outer, and while the tank filled he went back to the counter, where his study guides lay open beside the till. He was reading accountancy this year. Last year it had been business economics. He was working through a correspondence degree at a rate of two subjects a year, which meant he had three years left, and she doubted the garage would keep him half that long. She expected he would move to Worcester, where there were enough opportunities to satisfy a lively mind like his, or maybe Cape Town would attract him. It depended on how far from his family he wanted to wander. The garage owner, a white-haired man with more wrinkles than face, and a laugh that could wake the dead, would replace him with another matriculant, just as he had replaced the last one, and the study guides beside the till would change subject and another bright young person would sit in the kiosk studying, when they weren’t filling tanks.
“Full, Professor,” the boy said, pronouncing all three syllables. “It’s a cold one this morning, neh?”
“Minus four at the farm,” she said. “How is the accounting going?”
“Depreciation,” he said. He said it as if he were mentioning the deceased. Then he smiled. “But I’m getting the hang of it. Just got to keep plugging away.”
“Good for you,” she said and patted him on the shoulder. “Let me know when you’re on the move.”
He nodded and looked at her conspiratorially. “Don’t tell the boss.”
“I think he already knows and I’m pretty certain he approves,” she replied, squeezing his shoulder.
She paid and pulled out onto the tar.
The R-354 swept south off the plateau through the Verlatekloof, dropping in long arcs as the dark retreated on the eastern rims. She drove down to Matjiesfontein, where the turreted Lord Milner hotel stood behind its white wrought iron enclosure, a repurposed Leyland London bus parked outside, ready for its tour after breakfast. Reputedly, the ghost of a Boer War nurse called Kate wandered its halls. But at this time of year, she would have been lonely.
The village had been built as a health resort more than a century ago, and preserved as a hopeful attraction ever since. The local authorities kept it painted for the tourists who usually arrived on Saturdays and rarely stayed more than a single night. At seven a.m. on a Tuesday it could have been a stage set between performances. She slowed—even the police here rarely ventured above walking pace—until she joined the N1 and turned west, the sun rising behind her.
At Laingsburg the road crossed the dry bed of the Buffels River. She passed a pole near the bridge, on which the town had marked the height the waters reached in 1981, when the river rose in the night and took the lives of a hundred and four people, most of whom were never found. The mark stood higher than the surrounding roofs. She passed the pole every week, but every time she found her eyes drawn to it, and even now, after all these years, it brought a small stab of sadness.
She switched on the radio, tuned to an easy-listening station, and diverted her attention with Abba and the Carpenters.
Beyond the town, the Anysberg ranges stood off to the south, dry folded mountains with a nature reserve lying behind them. The road ran over level ground as it followed the perimeter of the ranges in the distance. Invariably, this was the stretch of road where the same two thoughts arrived.
The first was the car, which drank diesel and rattled at idle. She contemplated an electric car, many of which now had a greater range than the whole journey required. Ayanda had read the reviews and done her calculations more than once. The figures always came out the same way: even though it was a five-hundred-kilometre trip on paper, she found herself dealing with imponderables: paper did not include the dirt, cold, or the fact that the nearest fast charger to the farm was in Worcester, three hours away, and that Sutherland’s electricity gave up too frequently for comfort. An electric car was a city animal. As much as she liked the idea—not just for the lighter ecological impact, but also because of the sheer modernity of it—it was impractical, simply because of where she lived.
This always led her to her second line of thought. She dwelt on this for some time, partly because of the impact it would have on her life, but mostly because a decision of this magnitude deserved greater consideration. She’d been thinking about it for months, years even; once a week, as she drove and muscle memory of the route took over. Should she sell up? There would be no shortage of bidders. And she could take the money, buy something small in Rondebosch with a view of the mountain, walk to the lecture theatre, walk to the shops. She’d be five minutes from her PhD students; five minutes from a decent library and all the other clever minds. Importantly, she could stop driving nine hundred onerous kilometres a week like a sales rep on their rounds. It was, on every measurable criteria, the rational course to take, and, after all, she was a rational woman. And every week she turned it over and found the same thing lying below the arguments: Sipho lay under the camelthorn on the rise. Graves do not commute, and love lingers in places and on things that cannot be transported.
She put the thought back in its box, as yet unresolved, and drove on. The dismissal felt less like a defeat each time she did it. As age and comforting familiarity rounded the sharp edges of her logic, the debate felt less adversarial, and more like a fireside chat with an old friend. Not yet, not until her struggle with the fourth line of her equation was resolved one way or the other, and then maybe she would think differently.
The Karoo gave way gradually, then all at once, as the road climbed into the Matroosberg mountains. It threaded through the Hex River Pass, and below her the valley floor lay ruled into vineyards, table grapes, thousands of hectares of them, with the peaks above blanketed with their first snow of the winter. At the De Doorns crossing, a small group of women stood waiting for a transport lorry, muddy brown and red blankets over their shoulders, flasks in their hands, and each of them carrying pruning shears.
She slowed, her eyes meeting theirs. They looked back at her with something she couldn’t quite determine.
Reflexively, she started humming a Xhosa gwijo, doing both the call and response parts in different voices, the call pitched high and clear, the response down in her own register, where the rasp lived. Each was a mournful expression of regret while conveying strength through resilience.
Picking ended in April; the crews that remained through winter were the pruning crews, who were paid by the row. It was back-breaking work, and mostly carried out by women who were paid a pittance.
That could have been her: carrying shears that symbolised the changing of the seasons. Ironically, she had the body for the work: wide hips; short, sturdy legs; and a back made for carrying. A farm body, Sipho used to say, approvingly, and he meant it as the compliment it was. The quirk of genetics that spared her was not the frame but what sat above it—a strong mind, and a sense of determination that would not allow her to give up. Without those, she might have been carrying some other agricultural implement that scarred her hands and drilled the muscles in her arms until they were ropes.
The lorry had not come, but the women were not looking up the road for it. Ayanda concluded that the lorry must have been late every morning, and that its tardiness was no longer worth the trouble of getting agitated. Time is cheap for the owners when they pay by the row. The women, they just had to accept it.
Acceptance, she thought. That’s what she saw in their eyes. Acceptance.
In a way, Ayanda envied the women. Accepting the inevitability of events brought with it a peace of mind that she and most members of modern society could never achieve. And she wondered if it might be a better way to live your life.
Chapter 4
The Society kept their rooms quiet, like traditional libraries; footsteps and whispers the only sign of life. Johnso, who was used to the silence of empty corridors, felt at home. Even the furniture had a dilapidated familiarity. Embarrassingly low levels of funding, which, like the Astronomy Department at Western-Tech, were mostly renewed out of habit rather than a commitment to the mission, were just enough to pay for their Rearview Screens—Dreamwalker Hoods were banned by the Society, partly because of the need to be planted in this world while viewing other worlds, so the Historians could record what they were viewing, but mostly because Dreamwalking was addictive on a level that made opiates seem like aspirin. The distinction was fine, but crucial. With Dreamwalker Hoods, you went there, wherever there might be. The traveller was physically present in the world they travelled to. With Rearview Screens, the Historians just saw what was happening in the immediate surroundings of a branching. Saw, and recorded it.
The Historians themselves were unpaid, almost a monastic order, whose business of cataloguing everything important that ever happened was regarded by everyone as nothing even closely approximating the real life of the universe: seeing and interacting with the limitless possibilities all around them. Barring just a few, the entire world had decided to devote its time to cosmic tourism.
Johnso was led to a room. Seated around a long walnut table, which once might have been grand but had obviously not been polished in a long time and now came with coffee cup rings, scratches, and chips out of its edges, was a small group, one of whom stood and held out his hand. He was a tall, thin man with a goatee and sad eyes, wearing a plain, black suit with a Mandarin collar.
“Hello, Johnso, we spoke earlier. Historian Ver,” he said. “Please have a seat.”
Johnso sat. Clasping his hands together, elbows on the table, he eyed the small group. “You got the message?”
“Yes,” said another man; portly, sharp eyes, a thin moustache and an identical suit to Ver. “I’m Historian El. Please go through your calculations with me.”
He slid a pad across the table, and a screen lit up at the far end of the room. On one side of the screen was the message: a bare set of tagged numbers, with an alphanumeric designation prominent amongst them. On the other was the pad’s surface.
As Johnso wrote, he said: “The mathematics aren’t that difficult. But I had to check them before calling you, because they’re old knowledge, and I’m not in the habit of calculating orbits any more. I’m pretty certain I’m right, though.”
He described trajectories, a gravitational window, a large rock—the asteroid—the inevitability of its capture, a brief orbit, an impact, and a terminal velocity. He took them through the calculations line by line until they closed like a slammed door. El took the pad and made his own notes. Verification only took him about fifteen minutes, and by the time he’d finished, his face was pallid.
“What does it say?” Ver asked.
“In a nutshell,” El replied, “a large rock, an asteroid, several, perhaps dozens of kilometres wide, is headed towards a narrow point in the sky, no larger than the footprint of a typical parking lot. When it reaches it, the gig is up. Nothing in heaven nor on Earth will prevent its orbit from intersecting the surface of the planet. When it does, it will impact with the force of nearly all the nuclear bombs we have ever built and decommissioned in the history of humanity.”
“Worst likely outcome?” said a small, fragile-looking woman, dressed in a suit similar to the two men, but grey rather than black.
“Complete extinction of all life on the planet, ma’am,” said El. “And before you ask, the best-case scenario is complete extinction of all but the roaches.”
She turned to Johnso. “I’m sorry, I should have introduced myself. I’m Director Historian Reen.” She turned to a young, handsome man in a pale blue uniform, sitting beside her. “And this is my assistant, Trainee Historian Verel.”
“Ver and El. Verel,” Johnso said.
“Very good,” El said. “He’s our son.” He smiled at Ver. “At least, he’s a composite personality—the two of us combined in a C-netorg body. How did you work out the relationship?”
“It’s part of my condition. I see patterns,” Johnso replied. “That’s how I knew there was a problem as soon as I saw the numbers on the message. I just needed to work out how much of a problem.”
“How did this asteroid get there?” Ver asked. “According to the catalogues, it shouldn’t be anywhere near Earth.”
“It’s my guess, and I should stress that this is only a guess,” said Johnso, pushing the pad away—an unconscious signal that he was done with the figures and had moved on to conjecture. “That somewhere out there in space, there are a number of autonomous spacecraft designed to alter the orbits of these rocks. When they were programmed, they had a data set that largely agreed with reality. But—,” he sighed, “as time has passed, reality has shifted, and the data set hasn’t been updated. So…”
“Instead of pushing the asteroid out of harm’s way, they’ve guided it onto a collision course?” El finished the sentence for Johnso. “They’ve probably spent decades making small corrections, walking this rock towards a lock in the orbit of Earth. And in this case, the only exit route for it is splashdown.”
“How long?” Ver asked. His face was still. “How long do we have left? And what can we do?”
“I’m not sure,” Johnso answered. “I haven’t run the numbers.”
“I have,” Verel said in a steady, almost monotonous voice. It was the first time he had spoken since Johnso entered the room. He lifted his head from his pad, where he’d been scribbling figures and glanced at each person around the table. “Fifteen years, thirty-six days, and a few hours.”
“Fifteen years,” said Reen. “That seems like enough time to do something about it.”
“I’m afraid not,” Ver said. “We no longer have the industrial, technological, and scientific capacity to build anything that matters.”
“What about nukes?” Reen said. “I happen to know that the stub US Government still has an arsenal of nuclear weapons tucked away somewhere in the Dakota enclave. I’m pretty certain we could access them given the circumstances.”
“They’d be no good,” Verel said, shaking his head. “For one, we don’t have a delivery system, and we don’t have the means to build the whole industrial infrastructure to make one. Not in fifteen years, anyway. And for two, even if we got enough nukes up close enough to shatter the rock, it would just mean debris raining down on us, with similar results, maybe even more devastating. We couldn’t even deflect it now; it’s locked in. We couldn’t build enough nukes to overcome Earth’s gravitational pull. Anyway, the results would be unpredictable.”
“What about the satellites that sent it here?” Reen asked. “Couldn’t we reprogramme them to nudge it away?”
“Quite apart from the fact it would take about fifteen years for them to get here, we have no idea how to communicate with them,” Verel said. “I’ve done a quick scan of the archive; there isn’t any mention of them, other than in passing. Certainly nothing dealing with their control mechanisms.”
“So, we’re fucked,” Johnso said.
“In a manner of speaking,” Ver replied. “Nothing can stop it.”
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