She took off her headphones and turned the tape on again, loud, letting the noise of the party fill the room. The material wasn’t very useful. The newbies and locals alike had been so disturbed by Britta’s outrageous behavior that…

Elizabeth remembered how Ben had lightly, but with emphasis, pushed that slut Britta away from him. She liked that.

She heard loud talking on the tape. Right here, Britta had gone up to the group of men and now Elizabeth heard her say again:

“What’re you guys talking about, hmm?”

And that was Sam’s voice, boisterous from whiskey, answering:

“Danny. We’re toasting Danny.”

Then she heard some confused, alcohol-fueled laughter from the group of men, and one of them said:

“Good riddance.”

She hadn’t heard that line before. How could he speak so coldly about Danny? Who was that? She pressed rewind and went back and heard again: “Good riddance.”

Then she heard faintly, in the background, “Yeah.” It sounded like a chorus. Perplexed, she shrugged and turned the tape off.

Her mood changed. She sat for a moment staring at the screensaver. Then she opened the file that had her journal in it. She wondered if there would ever be hope for her, and wrote:

Our children are our happiness

But they are gone tomorrow

Like meteors they fly

Brilliant in our sky

She was losing it. The rain no longer pleased her. At the stove, she lit a long brown Sherman’s cigarette on the burner, the heat of the gas fire hot on her lips. Crazy, she could set her hair on fire. Midnight. She should go to the gym in the morning. She could call Debbie in the morning to see if she wanted to have lunch.

Debbie never had any doubts about anything. She was immersed, local to the bone. Once Elizabeth had been a local. Now she was just-outside. Outside all of it. Outside life.

Turning to leave the kitchen, Elizabeth saw the snapshot on the refrigerator freshly, as if it hadn’t been there for a year. One moment May had been with her, a small warm companion who would share her time on the planet, then she had… been removed from the study. Yes. The mother-daughter study had been terminated for unknown reasons. And Jake. No time to work out their problems, just a disappearance, abrupt, irrevocable.

Viciously, she yanked open the door of the cabinet above the refrigerator, searching for the Courvoisier.

20

M IDNIGHT ON THIS SAME MAGNIFICENT TUESDAY night on Chews Ridge, ambient light low, skies crystalline. David Cowan saw the Trifid Nebula materialize on his screen as the thirty-six-inch reflector followed its computerized instructions. The light in the control room had been set as dimly as possible to see the detail. “Ray, you have to see this,” he said.

Ray, at the next table full of computer equipment, grunted and came over. A small astrophysicist with a beard, he worked at MIRA full-time.

“Beautiful,” he said.

“More than beautiful.” Rose, it was, shading from pale to brilliant pink and deepening to red on its three petals, shedding light below it, a rose. One new star seemed to shine from its center, though David knew that was a trick of the galaxy, the star was actually much closer.

He was peering forty-five hundred light years into space, and the grandness of it, the spectacularness of it, the knowledge of the vast energies roiling and twisting all around this pitiful planet where he existed, were so good for forgetting. He typed in the commands that would photograph the nebula but continued to stare at it.

“Sometimes, looking into it, always bright, always superb, I feel like I’m falling forward, leaving forever. There’s vertigo, movement as I leave my body,” he told Ray.

Ray didn’t answer. Beauty wasn’t visual to him, it was mathematical. His screen, showing window piled upon window of moving graphs, gave him the same kind of pleasure.

“Rain’s coming in from the coast,” David said. “I’d say an hour or so.”

“You ought to get back to work,” Ray said. “We have to get this mapping done by next Thursday or we lose the grant.”

“So what?” David said.

“We can’t keep volunteers who don’t care.”

“I’m thinking about building my own observatory.” But even Ray knew he wouldn’t. That would take an independent, motivated person, unlike David, who didn’t like doing things on his own.

David also knew that Ray didn’t like telling him what to do, because David had given MIRA over a hundred thousand dollars. All David asked for was access to the scopes.

For two years now he had watched the stars, bolstered by his connection to the universe, pretending to participate in the work. David didn’t care about the work. He just liked watching through the scope, falling into that endless blackness. They wouldn’t kick him out. He knew it and so did Ray.

David’s money had bought him salvation here, as it had brought him Britta at home.

The affairs she heaped on him didn’t matter. He understood and accepted her as you should accept a force of nature. Audacious, untamable, reckless, she burst into his life, a hot star-forming nursery at the center of his desolate universe. She threw her colorful clothes on the floor, onto the living-room chairs; she smelled of B.O. and perfume. She kept the air ionized with her angry chatter. She was very angry that he had made her move to Carmel Valley, land of hicks, but she did what he told her. He had the money, it was that simple.

He viewed her behavior with dispassion, because he viewed all natural things that way. That didn’t mean he didn’t have feelings. It didn’t mean he didn’t have passion for her and didn’t get jealous. He just recognized his emotions for what they were, impulses of the organism, and rejected them because he chose to tap into detachment.

After Sam had come Danny; perhaps Sam would come again-so what?

What mattered, the one thing he demanded of her, was that Britta had to sleep with him every night. Sleep, lay her head next to his and breathe next to him and dream. She had to allow him to grasp her hot body in the night, allow him to hold her by her solid hips, let him press his face against her backbone. Because without her, all that would be left would be the void.

His eye caressed the nebula. Pink, pulsing, living light came to him. Closing his eyes, he opened his mouth slightly and relaxed his face, as if the computer screen could allow him to bask in the heat he saw.

“Phone,” Ray said, yanking him back. He handed it to David.

“Britta?”

But it wasn’t Britta on the phone.

Ted came in from putting away the bicycles in the garage as Megan finished spritzing the salad with balsamic vinegar. They both still wore the black spandex shorts and tight shirts from the long bicycle tour they had taken that day-fifty miles along the foggy coast, dodging cars, pouring it on on the uphills, letting it all go on the downhills. They had had a long leg-stiffening trip home and she couldn’t believe the clock-after midnight! Oh, well, tomorrow was Wednesday. They could sleep and sleep. Neither of them was a rat-racer anymore.

“Pont Neuf,” she said, pointing to the glass of wine awaiting him. “For our fashionably late supper.”

“Good choice.” He took off his shoes and socks. Even his veins were carved; his legs looked like they had wires wound around them. Massaging his calf with one hand, Ted went on, “We were so fast at the Point Sur curve I thought we’d fly off the road.”

“Incredibly cool,” Megan agreed. She set cold shrimp on ice and shrimp sauce in front of him and sat down at the table, lit by candlelight. They both dug in and in five minutes the meal was over. Following the habit they had built up over their six years together, they went out in back to the hot tub, stripped, and stretched out in the hot water for a few minutes.