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CHAPTER 1
Sub Phase
A man said to the universe: "Sir I exist!" "However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation."
— Stephen Crane
The prayer books have always gotten it wrong.
If humanity were to give thanks where it was really due, we would have to first smash our idols and toss out those dreary hymnals and convert all the churches into something useful, like brothels and homeless shelters.
Fuck that noise, mankind would've said. From now on, I'm a giants fan.
Prayers to the gas giants — they wouldn't be heard any more than the others, all that begging for touchdowns and tumor relief, but at least they wouldn't be misplaced. Prayers to Jupiter most of all. We've only made it as far as we have by Jupiter's mercy. That huge striped gassy ball with the red spot may bear the name of a god that the Romans named only within the last 3,000 years, but it was our protector way before that, even before the first multi-celled organisms started paddling around in the soup of Earth's primordial seas.
Some astronomer who will never get the proper credit for being clever called Jupiter a cosmic vacuum cleaner. It does what you want in a Hoover, only on a celestial scale, exerting such gravitational oomph that it keeps the inner solar system safe by sucking in the comets and heavyweight asteroids that might have gotten through to keep knocking life back into the pond every time it tried to venture onto dry land.
Mostly. A few have slipped past to cause trouble. Anyone who's ever gone out hunting for dinosaurs knows it's not a perfect system. And something sure as shit came along to punch the hell out of Mars. Overall, though, it's worked out well for us so far.
That's why, if things were going to start deviating from the norms, it made sense to me that Jupiter would show the first unmissable signs. So often, throughout history, the omens of disaster made their first appearances in the outer provinces before hitting home.
You wouldn't think events happening years apart, at points in the solar system hundreds of millions of miles distant, would have anything to do with each other. You wouldn't think that the serial murders of children, and the one who got away, would have any connection with the strange fate of one of Jupiter's moons.
But it does. It's all connected. Everything's connected.
So when things start to unravel, it all starts to unravel.
Here's how it's supposed to go: When the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet broke apart and bombarded Jupiter's southern hemisphere, that gave us our first real-time look at its role as our protector, taking one for the team. This was our first look at anything of the sort, two celestial bodies on a collision course. I'd grown up seeing the motion of the cosmic spheres presented in a tranquil, clockwork model ... but this was just another lie. Liar, liar, planet on fire.
Not that I realized this at the time. The Shoemaker-Levy impact was the summer of 1994, when I was five years old. When you're five, Comet is a magic reindeer.
And I was still a summer away from ending up in the wrong toolshed.
Here's how it's not supposed to go: Whatever hit Jupiter sixteen years later, on June 3, 2010, nobody even saw it coming. Maybe another comet, maybe an asteroid. It disintegrated upon impact with the high-altitude clouds in the tippy-top of Jupiter's atmosphere, with an explosion bright enough to be seen through telescopes in attics and backyards. It was so unexpected, images of it were caught by just two people on Earth, both amateur astronomers, one in the Philippines, the other in Australia.
And then, nothing. There was no follow-up show for the latecomers who turned their lenses to Jupiter to watch the debris cloud. There was no debris cloud.
You'd expect one. There had always been one before. They're called bruises, a pureed blend of chemically mangled gasses and flash-fried dust churning among the cloud belts. After Shoemaker-Levy 9, Jupiter was as bruised as a boxer who's taken a twelve-round beating.
This time? Nada.
"It's as if Jupiter just swallowed the thing whole," the Aussie astronomer said.
But anomalies are easy to dismiss. So last year, when the Errington-Walters comet became the latest casualty of Jupiter's tidal forces and got pulled apart on the way in, like a cannonball fragmenting into a shotgun blast, the world's astronomers fell back to Shoemaker-Levy levels of expectation: Great, here we go again. Maybe it will be an even better show this time. We've got over twenty years of improvements in telescopes in our favor.
Only it didn't pan out as projected. The pieces hit Europa, instead.
It's not without precedent. Jupiter is greedy for moons. It's got sixty-seven of them, or did, and sometimes they get in the way of what its gravity ensnares. Only four of Jupiter's moons are the main ones, big enough to have been first observed by Galileo. Like all of us survivors, they have their scars. Ganymede has three chains of craters, like a strafed line of bullet holes fired from a fighter plane the size of a mountain. Poor Callisto has thirteen of them.
But for Europa to take the hit, that was sad. It wasn't just any ball of rock and metal like the others. It was a ball of rock and metal with a thick rind of ice around it, and liquid water underneath. An ocean world. If there was anyplace else in the solar system where we might find life, here was an ideal spot to start looking. With so much we don't yet know about our own oceans, imagine what could be waiting in this one.
So it was a dismal thing to see a string of impacts crack the ice apart and send up giant plumes of steam and ejecta, and wonder how much of the most pristine ocean ever known was boiling. We could've been watching our nearest neighbors get vaporized right in front of our telescopic eyes before we'd had a chance to say hello, even if they were just microbes or space squids.
Nothing good comes of comets — that was the position of our ancestors. Comets meant disease and famine and death and war. They were omens of disaster, signs of the wrath of the gods. Not one bit good for morale.
Which didn't go unremarked on over the weeks after Errington-Walters ended its multi-billion year run, when, for reasons nobody could explain, Europa appeared to shrink and disappear.
It hadn't been knocked out of orbit. It hadn't been pulverized into fragments. There wasn't even a lingering debris cloud — sound familiar? Europa simply began to diminish, like a balloon whose air was slowly leaking away.
It's as if Europa just swallowed itself, some Aussie astronomer might as well have said.
Most people didn't care. Most people hadn't noticed. Most people had never heard of Europa. Most people were doing good just to have heard of Jupiter. Because most people have no idea how deaf, blind, and ignorant they really are, with no desire to live any other way.
If you knew where to tune in, though, you could follow the baffled commentary.
I felt sorry for Neil deGrasse Tyson and Michio Kaku and the other talking heads like them. They were supposed to have the answers. They were supposed to be the go-to guys to explain what was happening in space. The best they could manage was to look circumspect and adorably humbled as they tried to reframe the mystery as an opportunity to learn from an event no one had observed before. What they were really doing was looking for different ways to avoid coming right out and saying, "Nope, sorry, not a fucking clue."
Plus they still had to endure all those lame jokes about the gods being angry.
It wasn't that. Definitely not that.
There are some things that even scare the shit out of the gods.
CHAPTER 2
Phase One
The religious myth is one of man's greatest and most significant achievements, giving him the security and inner strength not to be crushed by the monstrousness of the universe.
— Carl Jung
She'd been gone for edging on two days before he knew about it, Tanner getting the call from the latest contestant in Daphne's unbroken string of losers.
"Is she there with you?" the guy asked. "I like to let her have her space, but our rent's due when it's due. I've been calling, but all I ever get is voice mail."
This one's name was Val. Val Madigan, Val short for Valmont, and if that wasn't reason enough to hate him, he was a downsized sales manager who, after being made redundant in some tech company, had rebounded by hanging out a shingle as a life coach. Never mind the marriage that was supposed to have been over months ago but was still officially street-legal. Never mind another ex's restraining order.
That was Daphne for you. No garden variety losers for her. Alcoholics, weed dealers who smoked their supply, or terminally unemployed charmers oozing love for whatever woman they could squeeze for another month of subsidy — those weren't her style. Daphne picked her losers with finesse. It might take longer for the flaws to reveal themselves, but by god, once they did, they ran deep.
Daphne and Val had been sharing 1,800 square feet of split- level suburban anonymity northwest of Denver, in Broomfield, where Tanner caught up with him the morning after the call. A bright September Monday, his day off. You just have to be Val, he almost said to the guy who opened the door. Not because who else would it be; more that he looked like a Val, fifteen years Daphne's senior, going leathery and tight, with sandy hair in a jarringly different shade from his eyebrows and the tapering sideburns that poked halfway down his ears.
"I wasn't expecting you," Val said. "Do you need to come in?"
"I can't look through her stuff from out here."
"You came to look through her stuff? Why?"
"It's what brothers do when little sisters go missing."
"Did I say she was missing? No, I'm sorry if I gave the wrong impression. She's not missing ... she's just stepped away at an inconvenient time and I thought she might have gone to see you."
Tanner nodded. As if he cared about this guy's interpretations. "You've known her for how long?"
Val counted, trying not to show it, but his fingertips twitched at his side. "Seven months," he said. Then was quick to add, "And a half."
"That long, huh. Then how about we both agree that I'm more familiar with her patterns than you are." Tanner leaned to one side, to peer around Val's shoulder. "Are you going to let me in?"
The place was neat and clean, bright and sparse. Daphne had never lived in unkemptness, and neither of them appeared to have brought a lot of furniture to the merger.
"She likes a room of her own," Tanner said. "Where is it?"
Val pointed down the half-flight of stairs leading to the bottom level, into an oblong room that a family might have used for the kids' TV room, but held only a treadmill and framed wall hangings of motivational phrases. Off that, to the left, a smaller square room sat idle.
This would be Daphne's. It didn't matter where she bedded down each night — she still would've insisted on this, staking her claim like a kid taking the top bunk at camp. It wasn't for sleeping. She liked the option to feel safe. The three locks on the inside of the door looked new enough to have been added in the past seven months. And a half.
Val had been dogging his footsteps until now, but hung back a few steps from the doorway. She'd trained him well. My space. Mine. You don't come in here.
A desk that had spent its best years in some office sat with one end against a wall, facing the door. An Epson printer took up the wall end, its USB cable connected to nothing. He found spiral-bound notebooks, half their pages torn away to leave only the blanks. One drawer rattled with castoff phones and accessories. For no reason she had ever shared, Daphne changed them often. New phones, new numbers, different carriers. Not always, just within the last three years or so.
Tanner had done his best to make sure the issue wasn't a stalker. He knew how these things could go. Once wounded, always scarred. Predators could smell it. It didn't matter how much work you'd put in to get past the trauma, how much healing you'd done. There were guys who could always find something to pick up on, the drop of blood in the ocean that brought the sharks from five miles away.
No, I don't have a stalker, I just like to stay a moving target, she'd insisted with a little laugh. But thanks for being ready to beat the balls off someone, just the same.
Once wounded, always scarred — for all he knew, this was Daphne's appeal to the guy lurking past the door. Maybe he even meant well, fancied himself a healer. But it was often incompetents who meant well that did the most gratuitous harm. Tanner had lost track of how many times he'd seen it play out that way in the mountains.
Near the desk, a pair of corkboards hung on the wall, studded with pushpins but otherwise empty. Interesting. She'd had so much to pin up that she'd added a second board. All vacant now. He found a sadness to it that scraped inside his heart. Every place she'd lived had the look of a home for someone who always knew she was only passing through.
"What did she have pinned up here?"
"Printouts, mostly." Val pointed at the Epson. "She'd get online and find these news stories. She liked to print them out so she could read them wherever. She was really interested in that Jupiter thing last year. And that other thing this winter, was it Alpha Centauri? She didn't really seem to be into astronomy overall, just those." He gave a go-figure shrug. "I tried getting her a telescope for her birthday. She took it back unopened."
Tanner had never known Daphne to spare much interest for the night skies, either, other than lying on their backs and looking at the stars years ago, back when it was something to do while getting philosophical or stoned or both.
"How come? Did she say why?"
"After some pressing to face up to her negative associations, yes." Val seemed proud of that, as if he'd engineered a breakthrough. "She said she didn't want to risk seeing what was really out there."
"What was that supposed to mean?"
"It doesn't have to mean anything. People will say silly things to end a conversation they don't want to have."
It felt like a safe bet that Val might have a lot of experience with this. Tanner zeroed in on the corkboard again. "Anything else she had up there?"
"A few articles about killings. Unsolved murders, I think. A few others about ... I don't know what you'd even call it. Eco- terrorism in reverse, maybe? Natural features getting destroyed instead of despoilers being targeted. I didn't pick up on much more of these than what I could see from the headlines. It wasn't anything she wanted to talk about. There didn't seem to be any connection between them, so I don't know what it all meant to her. I just didn't think they were healthy things for her to indulge in, all things considered. But my opinion and expertise were not wanted on the matter."
Healthy, he'd said. All things considered. So yes, Val must have known about Wade Shavers. Or as much as Daphne was ready for him to know. Just couldn't resist a tall, blonde fixer-upper with hauntings in her ice-blue eyes, and enough of a flaw on one cheek to make her self-conscious, take her down a peg.
"You know ... come to think of it ... I wonder if she might've gone back to the guy she was seeing before we met." Val had the quizzical expression of someone trying too hard to sell the appearance of having just had a spontaneous idea. "Attila ...? Did you know about Attila?"
He hated being blindsided, but wasn't going to pretend. "Daphne must've forgotten to mention him." Sidestep, jab: "There have been so many, you know."
Attila, though. She'd shacked up with someone named Attila. Ten bucks said this was Val's agenda all along. He'd set this up and played it like a man with an advanced degree in Weasel. He'd known Tanner was going to show up. It was just a matter of dropping the right crumbs, letting him take the bait. Would you mind terribly checking to see if she's gone back with Attila? I'd do it myself, but my cowardly inner core has been flaring up again lately, the darned thing.
"I overheard her on the phone Saturday morning, it sounded like she was talking about some sort of meet-up," Val went on. "I thought it was something to do with her yoga class. She's really taken to that the past several months, you know. I thought it was a healthy thing for her. But now, thinking back, twenty-twenty hindsight and all, I'm not sure that's what the call was about at all. It was her tone of voice."
"What about it?"
"Her tone was ..." He pretended to claw for the right word. "Regretful. She sounded regretful."
If Daphne understood anything, it was regrets. She collected regrets like trading cards. She was wired that way. No — had been rewired.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Immaculate Void"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Brian Hodge.
Excerpted by permission of ChiZine Publications.
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