Chapter 10

Asteroid

Max’s fingers moved across the laptop keyboard with a soft, irregular clicking. On the screen, a page of data gave way to another, columns resolving into fields, reference numbers, the abbreviated language of people who needed to say something exact without spending half their lives saying it. Most of it would have looked meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the system. To Max it was orderly, even reassuring.

“Okay,” he said, keeping his eyes on the screen. “Read out the name of his asteroid for me.”

Beside him, Magnus turned in the old rotary chair. Its mechanism creaked beneath his slight weight, and one of the wheels complained against the floor.

The mahogany desk had come with the house, as had the chair and almost everything else in the room. It was an enormous piece of furniture, with drawers and cupboards fitted wherever its maker had found room for them, and a broad writing surface marked by generations of use. Someone had once pressed hard enough with a pen to leave the ghost of a sentence in the wood. Max could feel it beneath his wrist, although he had never managed to make out the words. He had bought the desk without wanting it, along with a library he had scarcely known what to do with, and had gradually discovered that both suited him. The former owner had apparently reached much the same conclusion. According to the staff, he had spent nearly all his time here, right up until they found him dead.

The outer library occupied a hexagonal chamber, its shelves rising towards a domed ceiling and continuing along a balcony that encircled the upper level. At floor height, the intersecting rows appeared almost haphazard: aisles opening at odd angles, bays concealed behind other bays, stretches of shelving that seemed to end where another began. Viewed from the balcony, the arrangement became clear. The shelves formed the branching arms of a snowflake, a repeating geometry organised around a six-sided glass enclosure at the centre. Within that enclosure stood another collection, older and considerably more fragile than the books outside it: scrolls, bound manuscripts and sheets of parchment held in a regulated atmosphere. Temperature, moisture and airborne contaminants could destroy such material slowly enough for the damage to go unnoticed until preservation was no longer possible. The enclosure kept those variables under control, provided its machinery continued to work.

Max had never been inside it. The previous owner had been the only person with the entry code, and whatever arrangements he had made for the collection’s survival had failed to include telling anybody else how to open the door. Through the glass, Max could see enough to know there were things worth examining. He had also seen enough old security systems to know that forcing one open without understanding its ancillary controls could make an expensive afternoon of it. For the time being, the manuscripts remained where their owner had left them, receiving better care than the man himself had apparently received.

There were no windows. Fluorescent tubes provided the light, keeping direct sunlight away from paper and parchment, and the heavy oak double doors in the southern wall admitted remarkably little sound when closed. Max’s desk stood against the northern wall, facing the central enclosure, which concealed the entrance from view. Once he sat down and the doors shut, the house might as well have been somewhere else. He had begun to appreciate that more than he liked to admit.

Magnus held the small leather-bound book open with one thumb, his other hand flattening the page. He read the passage carefully, then looked up to make sure his father had been listening. “B, six, one, two. Is that it?”

“That’s it.” Max entered the designation into the asteroid catalogue’s name field and waited. The search returned no match. He checked the field, tried the string again without the hyphen, then sat back slightly. Beside him, Magnus stopped turning the chair.

“Is it not there, Dad?”

Max knew that voice. It was the small, cautious voice children used when they suspected an adult was about to take something away from them and were hoping, by being good about it, to persuade him otherwise. He reached across and ruffled Magnus’s hair without looking away from the screen. “Hang on, Moonbeam. Give me a second.”

He was sure there was a real asteroid associated with the book. He could not remember its catalogue number, but the designation Magnus had given him did not look like the whole answer. Somewhere between a fictional address and an astronomical database, there would be a naming convention, a joke, a piece of information he had forgotten. He scratched his chin, then leaned forward and typed BE-SIX-ONE-TWO into the name field. Nothing. He stared at the result for a moment, as though the system might reconsider out of courtesy.

“Still nothing?” Magnus asked.

“It would appear that it’s not that either.”

Magnus turned back through the book. His finger travelled down a page, stopped, then returned to the beginning of a sentence. “Dad, it says it was discovered by a Turkish astronomer in 1909.”

Max glanced at him, smiling. There it was: another way into the problem. Whether it led anywhere was less important, for the moment, than the fact that Magnus had found it himself. “It certainly does, Moonbeam. And that might just be the key.” He gave the boy a light pat on the back and brought his hands over the keyboard, where he left them suspended for a moment. “I was going to try the name again. In Turkish.”

“What’s stopping you?”

“I can’t speak a word of Turkish.”

Magnus looked at him, then at the laptop, then back at him with an expression Max was beginning to encounter more frequently. It belonged to a child who had discovered that his father, despite having designed the world’s most powerful telescope, still required supervision. At eight years old, Magnus could make that discovery look like a considerable burden. Max had begun to suspect the boy was also growing wise to the little hurdles placed in front of him, and to the way his father waited to see whether he would jump.

“Dad,” he said, investing the word with all the patience he had left. “You’re on a laptop. Use a translation app.”

Max let out a snort before he could stop himself. Magnus shook his head and muttered something which, had it been louder, might have required a parental response. Max decided to reward the useful part. “Excellent idea, Moonbeam. Very quick resolution. Genius, in fact.” He winked and opened a new window while Magnus watched with the air of someone who had rescued a difficult project from incompetent management.

The translation took only a few seconds. The next search took less. Max rubbed his chin again.

“The Turkish one didn’t work, did it, Dad?”

“How did you know that?”

“Because I’ve worked out the name.” Magnus’s grin widened. “You were close, though, so don’t feel bad.”

Max took his hands away as his son reached across and drew the laptop towards himself. Magnus put the book on the desk and patted its cover. “It was there the whole time.”

Max looked down. The Little Prince. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. He read the two lines again, waiting for the association to present itself, and felt a brief, unfamiliar irritation when it did not. Magnus was watching him expectantly. For once, there was no performance in Max’s uncertainty.

“Can’t you see it? It’s right there.” Magnus tapped the author’s name, then turned to the keyboard. “Look. I’ll show you.”

His fingers moved slowly, searching for each letter. Max watched the search return nothing and saw the boy pause, examine what he had typed, then begin again. There was no collapse of confidence, no complaint that the machine was being unfair. Magnus merely adjusted the question. Still, Max felt his initial excitement falter. Children could be wonderfully certain of things that were not true. For a moment he had thought he was about to be shown something he had missed, and the prospect had pleased him more than it should. He wanted that for Magnus. He also wanted, selfishly, to know what it felt like.

“Don’t stress too much about—”

“Done it!” Magnus turned the laptop around, nearly catching the book with its corner. “There.”

Max leaned forward. In the centre of the screen sat the catalogue entry, its heading so obvious now that he could have laughed: Asteroid Ref: 46610 — BÉSIXDOUZE. He looked at the cover again, then at his son. “It’s French.”

“The author was French,” Magnus said. “So I thought the name would be in the language he wrote the book in. I tried BE-SIX-UN-DEUX first, but that didn’t work. Then I tried some other ways of putting it.”

He shrugged, as if that were all there was to it. Max felt the pride arrive before he had decided what to say. It was not simply that Magnus had guessed correctly. He had recognised a connection, followed it, and kept going when the first version failed. Max had spent his career around intelligent people who could do the first two parts and became remarkably childish about the third.

“Move over a little,” he said, drawing the laptop between them. “Let’s see what you’ve found.”

The catalogue view gave way to a star field crossed by fine white constellation lines. The display narrowed through successive scales, each adjustment replacing the previous field with a smaller region. It looked like a journey, although the software was performing something less romantic and more useful: matching the object’s predicted position against available observations, then locating an instrument with a suitable view. An asteroid’s orbital elements described where it ought to be; observations established how closely the prediction agreed with reality. Acquiring it meant putting the right sensor on the right patch of sky at the right time, rather than simply asking a camera to look for a rock.

Magnus leaned so close that Max could see his reflection in the screen. “Dad, is it finding the asteroid? Will we see the Little Prince? And his sheep?”

Max looked at the side of his son’s face. He had just solved the name with admirable logic and was now applying that logic to a sheep living on a distant rock. Both things could apparently occupy the same small head without troubling one another. Max envied him that. There were forms of certainty which, once lost, could not be rebuilt by understanding more.

“We’ll see the asteroid soon, Moonbeam,” he said.

The acquisition sequence continued. Somewhere in the organisation, resources intended for rather more defensible purposes were being reassigned to an afternoon with his son. If ARCHON’s board of directors knew precisely what he was doing, somebody would have a stroke, or at least compose a strongly worded email. Max was considering which of those outcomes was more likely when Magnus spoke again.

“And the prince?”

Max ran a hand over the boy’s hair. “No, Moonbeam. I doubt we’ll be seeing any little princes.” He let the answer settle before continuing. “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about that. Are you still interested in hearing my theory about the book?”

Magnus looked away from the screen. His mouth tightened, though he tried to hide it by lowering his head over the book. Max wondered how much of the prince and the sheep the boy had allowed himself to expect. After a moment Magnus nodded, and Max picked up the book, grateful that his son was still prepared to hear him out.

Its leather binding had softened with use, and he rested its lower edge on the desk, tapping it gently against the wood while he considered how to begin. “Sometimes people don’t see the wood for the trees,” he said. “And sometimes they read an idea often enough that they forget it was an idea in the first place. A theory becomes a fact in their head. Those aren’t the same thing.”

Magnus worried a loose thread on his sleeve and waited. Max recognised the expression: his son knew he was going somewhere with this, but would have preferred a shorter journey.

“We’ve read quite a lot already,” Max continued. “Can you remember why the narrator thinks the Little Prince comes from B-612?”

“Because the Turkish astronomer saw it through his telescope.” Magnus delivered the answer confidently, apparently recovering some of what the absent sheep had cost him.

Max made a quiet buzzer noise. “That tells him about the asteroid. It doesn’t tell him where the prince lives. Remember the passage you read to me? The narrator says he has reason to believe that’s where the prince came from. He’s telling us what he thinks.” He opened the book and held a page down with his thumb. “Think about what the prince himself tells him when they first meet. He says that everything is very small where he comes from, and that he can’t get very far by walking straight ahead. The narrator takes those things and builds an explanation around them.”

Magnus leaned closer to the page. Max turned through the book until he found the passage he wanted, then tapped it with his finger. “When the pilot asks whether he comes from another planet, the prince doesn’t answer. There are other places where the pilot makes an assumption and the prince leaves him to it. My theory is that we should be more careful about accepting the pilot’s explanations. There may be another story hidden in here, but, just as the book keeps reminding us, we need to stop reading it like grown-ups.”

Magnus frowned. “Then why are we looking at asteroids?”

“Because asteroids are cool.”

“They’re stupid space rocks. They don’t even have sheep.” Magnus folded his arms and began turning slowly in the chair, using the toe of one shoe to push himself around. Max watched the back of his head pass, followed by the aggrieved profile, then the full accusation again.

“No sheep,” Max agreed. “You’ve got me there. But I thought it might be interesting to track this one. We might even be able to use it for Daddy’s telescope. Its orbit looks promising for an intersection.”

Magnus continued rotating, apparently unimpressed by the possibility that somebody at his father’s work might enjoy the stupid rock.

“Look, I’m sorry,” Max said. “I thought you were excited about finding something out. I didn’t realise you’d made quite such specific arrangements about the livestock.” That earned the smallest movement at the corner of Magnus’s mouth, although he tried to hide it by looking down. “But if the pilot has got it wrong, then you’ve still got a mystery. Where does the Little Prince actually come from?”

The chair slowed. Magnus let his feet settle on the floor and looked at him. “Where?”

“For that, we’ll have to finish the book.” Max smiled and set it beside the laptop. “No shortcuts, I’m afraid.”

A sequence of chimes interrupted them. The central display cleared, then filled with a slowly rotating, irregular body, its surface broken by craters, ridges and deep-looking fissures. White measurement lines appeared across it, followed by red outlines and a changing grid. The system was combining new observations with data gathered on previous passes, constructing an estimated surface model and refining its dimensions as more information arrived. A faint scatter of material appeared beyond one edge of the body, catching the light intermittently as the reconstruction turned. Beside the image, figures accumulated in fields Magnus did not attempt to read.

He had stopped sulking. Max could tell by the way his hands had crept towards the desk, as though being closer might let him see more. For a while neither of them spoke. The rock turned through the instrument’s indifferent scrutiny, showing them an estimated landscape that had formed long before either of them existed.

“Maybe asteroids are a little bit cool,” Magnus conceded. He watched another red line trace a depression. “It would still be better with sheep, though.”

Max laughed. The sound carried between the shelves, larger than he had intended, and was followed almost immediately by the deep creak of the doors at the far end of the room. Both of them looked up. Beyond the central enclosure came a shuffle of footsteps and the rustle of clothing, but the shelves inside the glass prevented them from seeing who had entered. Magnus held the edge of the desk, waiting.

Beatrice appeared around the enclosure with a dusting cloth folded in her hands. Magnus left the chair so quickly that it rolled backwards, and she had just enough time to crouch before he threw himself at her. She caught him, cloth and all, and held him against her.

“Hello, Moonbeam. What a lovely hug.” She gave him an assessing squeeze. “You’ve been practising since the last one. This is at least a hundred times more huggy.” Over his shoulder, she nodded to Max. “Afternoon, sir.”

“Max,” he said.

“Of course, sir. Whatever you say.”

Magnus pulled back far enough to explain. “I have been practising on my foxy. You can borrow him if you want to get better.”

“Thank you. I might do that tomorrow while you’re at school and I’m making your bed.” She stood, smoothing a crease in her otherwise immaculate uniform. “Lunch is ready, sir—”

“Max.”

“—and if you’ve finished with Magnus, I’ll take him through to the dining room.”

“Thank you, Beatrice. I’ll be along in a minute. I just need to call the office.”

She took Magnus’s hand. As they disappeared into the aisle, he began telling her about the asteroid in the urgent, slightly breathless way he used when an explanation had become too large to keep inside him. “Me and Dad were looking at asteroids, and there aren’t any sheep on them, but they still look kind of cool.” Beatrice’s reply was lost as the doors closed.

Max smiled, then took out his phone and pressed the speed-dial entry for Thomas. While the call connected, he turned the laptop towards himself and expanded the data panels. A composition graph occupied one corner of the screen, showing estimated proportions of metals and minerals alongside the observational limits. Elsewhere, the orbital solution displayed position, velocity and the projected geometry of a possible interception. The interesting question was not merely whether a body contained useful material. Distance, relative velocity and timing determined the difficulty of reaching it, and a promising composition could become irrelevant if the cost of matching its motion exceeded the value of anything they hoped to do there.

“Hi, Thomas. I’ll get straight to it. I have a candidate for Argos.” He listened, smiling at the response. “Well, what’s the point of being the boss if I can’t choose my own toys?”

He sent the extracted data packet and returned to the model, letting it rotate while Thomas opened the attachment. “I’m looking at it now. Composition, location, trajectory. They all appear to fall within the parameters. You’ll need to check the estimates, obviously, but it looks very good.” He leaned back and listened again. “Excellent. Put a portfolio together for me, and we can pitch it to the committee at the next board meeting. Thanks, Thomas. Bye.”

He ended the call and closed the laptop. In the silence that followed, he heard footsteps on the far side of the glass enclosure.

Max looked up, expecting Beatrice to appear, perhaps with a reminder that making a quick call did not entitle him to let lunch go cold. The steps continued. He waited through several more, then frowned. Whoever it was should have reached the end of the aisle by now.

“Beatrice…?”

There was no reply. Max put the phone in his pocket and rose, listening as he came out from behind the desk. The footsteps remained unhurried. They had none of Beatrice’s small adjustments of pace. It was difficult to say what made them sound purposeful, except that each seemed to arrive exactly when the preceding one had taught him to expect it.

He approached the enclosure and tried to look through. Reflections of the outer shelves lay over the collection within, and the glass altered the angles just enough to make the room beyond difficult to read. He could distinguish parchment, the dark edges of shelving, a strip of floor on the other side. No person. He moved to his left, following the enclosure’s perimeter, and the footsteps continued somewhere beyond it.

By the time he had come halfway around, the southern doors were visible. The aisle in front of them was empty. He stood looking at it, waiting for someone to emerge from one of the branching rows.

The lights flickered. A tube above the balcony flashed twice, and the illumination settled briefly into an unpleasant yellow cast. Max looked up. Failing lamps, an ageing ballast, a connection that needed attention. He had been meaning to have the old fittings replaced with LEDs. There were a number of things in this house he had been meaning to have checked, and the list had begun to feel like a criticism.

The footsteps sounded again, but now they seemed to come from the corridor beyond the closed doors. “Hello…?” he called. There was no answer. The shift in location ought to have reassured him; it suggested someone outside, moving through the house, and acoustics had made a fool of him. He walked through the aisle and towards the doors.

The tubes flickered again, this time in a rapid sequence that broke the shelves into separate glimpses. Then the main lighting failed. Max stopped. From the enclosure behind him came the faint green light of its indicators: the keypad, the air-treatment controls, the temperature-regulation system. Those remained powered. Their glow reached a little way across the floor, insufficient to show him much beyond the nearest shelves.

He waited for his eyes to adjust. The house had made small noises around him for years. He had called some of them mice without ever seeing a mouse. Now he wondered whether he had mistaken an explanation for a fact.

The steps continued outside the doors. He moved towards them, keeping one hand close to the shelving, and reached for the handles just as the sound stopped. Whoever had been walking was immediately on the other side.

Max’s fingers hovered above the metal. One handle moved before his fingers had made contact, and he quickly retracted his hand.

It was a slight movement, enough to disturb its reflection in the green light. He stared at it. The second handle twitched, then both began to rattle, softly at first and with increasing force. They shook in their mountings as though somebody were working them back and forth with both hands. Nobody spoke. Nobody knocked.

He remembered Magnus in bed, the duvet pulled high, his small fingers gathered in its edge. The nightlight had caught the whites of his eyes while he watched his father rather than the dark place he was frightened of. “Dad, what if they’re always there, but you can only see them when you’re scared?” Max could not remember his own answer. He remembered wanting to give a good one, and the more immediate need to give one that would let his son sleep.

The handles rattled against the wood. Max inhaled, took hold of both and pulled the doors open hard enough to feel the weight in his shoulders.

There was nobody there.

The library lights came back on behind him. He stood between the open doors, listening to their hinges settle, then stepped into the corridor and looked left and right. Empty. There was no retreating figure, no quick footfall, no sound from an adjoining room. Behind him the library had resumed its usual pale illumination, the enclosure and the shelves restored to the places his eyes expected them to occupy.

He let his breath out slowly. Idiot, he thought, although he was uncertain which part of his behaviour the word was meant to address. He returned to the library and closed the doors with care, as if a quiet movement might persuade the house to remain quiet too.

Almost immediately, the sound of footsteps came towards him again. These were quicker, brisk and unmistakable. A handle turned and the door began opening. His heart struck so hard that he felt it in his throat. Daphne shouldered the door aside and came through carrying a tray of sandwiches and two cans of soda.

“You scared the hell out of me,” he said, attempting a laugh. He rubbed the back of his neck while she surveyed him with mild amusement.

“Lunch.” She raised the tray a little. “Let’s have it in the garden.”

“Yes. Good idea.” He looked past her into the corridor, then back towards the enclosure. “I need to get out of this damn house. Mice in the walls, lights flickering, a glass library nobody can get into.” He could hear himself talking too much and continued anyway. “The staff joke about ghosts. I’m beginning to think they might have a point.”

Daphne smiled, and the sight eased something in him that reasoning had failed to reach. There was a softness about her which made the room look needlessly severe.

“You’re the one who insisted on living next to your lab,” she said. “And apparently the only way you could legally store fifteen thousand litres of liquid hydrogen and oxygen outside a government facility was to find some obscure zoning loophole.” She shifted the tray against her chest. “God knows what else you’ve got over there.”

“Oh, yes. That does sound like me.” His laugh came more easily this time. “How do you put up with me?”

“Because you built me a massive pool house and a spa, honey. Remember?”

He watched her free one hand and open the door. Such an ordinary act, and he could not have said why it affected him. Perhaps it was simply that she did it without pausing to listen first. He followed her out, grateful for the sandwiches, the garden, the casual certainty of her presence. For a moment he allowed himself to believe that his life had still left room for something good.

They settled on the old two-seater swing overlooking the estate. Its floral cushions were thick enough to keep the iron frame from pressing into their backs, and the seat moved gently whenever either of them shifted. The lawn had recently been cut. In the distance, the gardener worked along a hedge with slow, careful strokes, pausing now and then to inspect the line.

Daphne passed Max a can and opened her own. He took a drink, cold enough to hurt a tooth, and let the fizz settle before swallowing. Beyond the garden, the estate continued into stretches of green that still occasionally surprised him. Owning so much ground had not made it feel entirely his. There were corners he had scarcely visited, paths the staff used more often than he did, trees that had outlived several arrangements of ownership and seemed likely to outlive his.

“I don’t like him,” Daphne said.

Max followed her gaze to the gardener. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t.”

“He’s harmless. He’s been here for years.” Max turned the can between his hands. “He and the maid and the chef all came with the house. I kept them on.”

“Don’t get me started on the chef.”

He smiled, but she continued watching the gardener, and the conversation subsided. Birds called from the hedge. The swing moved beneath them with a faint metal complaint, then slowed until Max pushed it again with one foot.

He looked at her. “I love you, Flower.”

Daphne turned towards him and smiled for a moment. He waited for some affectionate objection, something about the quality of his botany. Instead, she looked away. He saw the expression leave her face before he understood that it had gone. She set her drink down and gathered a small fold of her dress between her fingers. “You don’t miss me,” she said.

A rhythmic beeping interrupted the birdsong. Max took his phone from his pocket. On the screen, a trace rose and fell in jagged peaks, resetting at the edge and travelling across again. A heart monitor. He watched it for several beats. The sound belonged to somewhere else, although it was perfectly audible here.

Daphne was looking at him. Max put the phone down and took another drink.

“Do you realise this is a dream?” she asked. “An old memory?”

He held the can against his knee. The gardener was still trimming the hedge. A short burst of birdsong came from somewhere beyond him, and Max found himself waiting for the next one, wanting the garden to continue performing its small, dependable actions. “Yes,” he said at last.

She took his free hand and rested her head against his shoulder. Her hair brushed his neck. He knew the weight of her there, the particular adjustment he made to accommodate it. Knowing that none of it was happening did not diminish his need to sit still. “You don’t miss me,” she said.

“I do.”

Her fingers tightened around his. “No, you don’t.” She spoke gently, as though correcting a misunderstanding he ought to have resolved by himself. “If you really missed me, you would have died.”

Max raised the can. It met something before it reached his mouth. He tried to turn his head, but there was a tube between his lips and a pressure in his throat which did not belong to the garden. His chest tightened. He attempted a breath and felt another breath being given to him, arriving at the wrong moment, indifferent to his effort.

Daphne held his hand more firmly. “Don’t be scared,” she whispered. “Especially when you see them. They’ll leave you alone if they don’t know.”

Max opened his eyes to a white hospital ceiling. The ventilator drew and released beside him with a mechanical rhythm, and the beeping continued, freed now from the small impossible screen in his hand. There was pain, there was the tube, and there was the immediate business of trying to let the machine breathe without fighting it. Beneath all of that, Daphne’s last words remained as clear as if she had spoken them beside the bed. They would leave him alone if they did not know.

Know what?