Boneland

‘Afternoon, Owen.’

‘Hi, Colin.’ The duty controller turned in his chair away from the encompassing desk, the monitors and computers and the clocks of other time. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I want to check the data.’

‘You’re a liability. You know that?’

‘Have you got the printouts?’

‘And R.T.’s after your head.’

‘Wellaway.’

‘He’s found you’re spending time on M45. Says you’re wasting the budget.’

‘Am I, now?’

‘Don’t push it. He thinks you’re not here.’

‘I can change that.’

‘Colin. You’re off sick.’

‘So I don’t feel sick.’

‘Listen. We worry about you. You’re irrational.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘M45 is not a priority.’

‘Not for you.’

‘Listen, Colin. I don’t give a corkscrew chuff box for the budget. It’s you I’m bothered about, my friend.’

‘Thanks, Owen. I appreciate that. Is R.T. in?’

‘Yes.’

‘Right. I’ll see whether he wants my head on a charger or as it comes.’

Colin left the control room and went to the Director’s office. He knocked on the door.

‘R.T.?’

‘Whisterfield. Come in; you already have. Take a seat. Aren’t you on sick leave?’

The Director was his calm self. He turned a stone paperweight under his hand: the only sign; and the blue of his eyes.

‘You’re not happy,’ said Colin.

‘Correct.’

‘M45.’

‘Precisely.’

‘Why?’

‘Look here, Whisterfield. You are an able fellow. You have the potential to expand our understanding of the cosmos. Yet you fritter the budget on a cluster of adjacent stellar trinkets that is more the stuff of students.’

‘And if it isn’t?’

‘What are you saying?’

‘The fact that M45 is a local phenomenon may be irrelevant.’

‘But it is science that others less creative could do.’

‘“Creative”? R.T. You built your contraption outside to look for something you never have found. Now it finds what wasn’t even guessed at and wouldn’t have been discovered without you. Was that only science?’

The Director’s hand on the paperweight was still.

‘All I ask is a chance,’ said Colin.

‘I hear you, my boy,’ said the Director. ‘Watch your back.’

‘Thanks,’ said Colin, and closed the door behind him.

‘And?’ said Owen.

‘He’s fine,’ said Colin. ‘He understood when I explained what I was doing.’

‘Well, I’d not have put money on it, choose what you say,’ said Owen. ‘Here are the printouts. And you’re still sick, lad. Go home.’

‘I shall. Oh, and by the bye. The chough, Pyrrhocorux pyrrhocorux, builds its nest of twigs, roots and plant stems, lined with grass on cliffs or in old buildings; Slater, Williams and Whisterfield, page 102. It would not, and could not, use a box.’

Colin wheeled his bicycle across the grass to the security fence and looked up at the white dish. It was parked in the zenith. He heard the wind among the struts. A klaxon sounded. The hum of the drive motors started, and the amber warning lights on the bogies flashed. The three thousand tonnes of steel began to move in azimuth and elevation and the red eye of the central focus mast tilted into view. The two towers that held the dish crept along their rails. The note of the wind changed, the stresses of the girders and of the dish made their own music as the telescope tracked, slowed to the measure of the Earth’s turning, and the motors died near to silence.

Colin checked. 15.15. He squinted. Azimuth 157·6°; Elevation 58° 20´; Right Ascension 3h. 46´; Declination +24° 11´. Good old Owen.

So the day shrank and night stretched. The clonter of the cobbles in the river was silent, and the river fell to sleep.

Then was the time when day and night were the same, and the sun tipped towards death. He went to the stack. The bones were clean and the wind had taken the hair to be found when birds built nests again; and the woman and the child were gone into life.

He brought the bones to Ludcruck. He eased them through the grit so they would not break. He reached to the nooks of the dead and lifted aside the old to make way for the new. And when they were quiet he left them.

The sun was dying, but hope would come. He counted as the cold gripped. If hope did not come, the sun would not turn, and there would be nothing but the wanderers, the curving of the stars, winter, and the moon.