Cacophony of the Spheres
by Jeff Haas
part 1 of 2
I was buried in a virtual blonde when my editor buzzed me on the vid.
“This alien refugee problem is getting out of hand,” he said. “The DC police just arrested another thousand aliens for sleeping on the Washington Mall. They’re transporting them to the detention center tomorrow. We have to find out what’s going on.”
“Okay, I’ll head over to the detention center in the morning.”
“No, Teddy’s already on that. We need to get to the root of the problem. I want you to interview Borderline Bob.”
“The mathematician?”
“The bartender.”
“What’s he got to do with it?”
“All of the aliens are coming from that direction. If anybody knows about it, he will.”
“But isn’t he —”
“— at the edge of the galaxy.”
“Shit! Can I do it remotely?”
“No VR this time. You know the publisher doesn’t like remote interviews. We need verisimilitude on this one. Besides, nobody’s heard from Borderline Bob in over a year. His transceiver must be down.”
“Then how do you know he’s still out there?”
“I don’t. That’s your job.”
“Can’t you send Margie? I’m still knee deep in that Interpol investigation.”
“Margie’s on maternity leave. She’s giving birth to an android or something. And that so-called Interpol story’s been stone cold dead for weeks, and you know it.”
He had me there. Ever since Laura dumped me three weeks earlier — claiming that I was incapable of making a commitment and accusing me of “living in a fantasy world” — I just sat around the house moping. Maybe a long trip to the edge of the galaxy would help me forget about her.
“It’s the 25th anniversary of the bar,” he said. “If anybody asks, you can say you’re doing a human interest story.”
“As long as it’s not an alien interest story. I don’t have a great track record with aliens.”
“I’m well aware of that. We’re still paying for that Parmavian chandelier you destroyed. But you’re going out there to interview a human. Just try to stay out of trouble this time. We’ll pay you for every hour of the trip, including sleep time. Plus per diem.”
“Per diem? You got that approved?”
“Yup.”
“Hmm... maybe verisimilitude isn’t such a bad thing after all.”
“I knew I could count on you, Tim.”
* * *
I arrived at the Galaxy Post’s Tripplelite shuttle early the next morning, toothbrush, recorder, and backgrounder in hand. I gave the backgrounder to the attendant with specific instructions for downloading it through my implant once I attained cryonic stasis. Then I took the toothbrush and recorder with me into the sleep chamber and settled down for a long winter’s nap, visions of Borderline Bob dancing in my head.
Of course, I had heard about Borderline Bob before, but you could have fit what I really knew about the man into a thimble the size of a quark. The backgrounder explained that he had been a math professor at the University of Chicago in the mid-21st century. But he wasn’t known as Borderline Bob at that time. He was the very prestigious Professor Robert Z. Kinahan, Ph.D., winner of the first Nobel Prize in Mathematics.
Kinahan had won the prize for his pioneering work in mapping the actual size of the Milky Way galaxy. But after receiving the award, he devoted all of his time to proving that the universe was collapsing instead of expanding, research that was diametrically opposed to all serious inquiries since the late 20th century. Even the University of Chicago was starting to consider him a quack.
According to Kinahan’s theory, not only was the universe collapsing, but it was collapsing at an exponential rate. In fact, if Kinahan was right, the entire universe would implode in a colossal Big Crunch in the year 2081, roughly thirty-two years from the date of his calculations.
Nobody believed Kinahan, but neither could they dispute him. He was such a monumental genius that there were few people on Earth who could even understand his calculations, and those who could refused to support him publicly for fear of committing professional suicide. He was a Cassandra in a doctoral gown.
That’s when Professor Robert Z. Kinahan, Ph.D., became Borderline Bob. With a mere thirty-two years remaining for the universe, Kinahan resigned from the University of Chicago, bought a Tripplelite shuttle with his Nobel Prize money, and headed for the far end of the galaxy. Then he did the one thing he had always wanted to do — he opened a bar.
* * *
I awoke with a start from a nightmare about trying to reach Laura by crossing Antarctica in my underwear. Cryonic sleep chambers always make me feel claustrophobic and disoriented, not to mention cold as hell. I shivered a couple of times as the temperature rose, then started to relax as the pressure dissipated and the translucent hatch lifted.
I crawled out of the frozen sarcophagus as quickly as my aching body would let me. The inside of my mouth felt like I’d been gnawing on a dead possum for a week, so I grabbed my toothbrush from the sleep chamber and brushed my teeth while looking out the portal.
Borderline Bob’s was a human-run bar inside an alien-built space station. The space station was an enormous black disk with multi-colored blinking lights and numerous docking ports. It was smack dab in the middle of nowhere, situated somewhere between two dying red dwarfs. The combination of its unusual shape and the eerie crimson glow made it look like the Frisbee from hell.
The aliens who built the space station were the Beechers, an ancient race of tall, brooding bipeds who had since developed a technology for transcending their physical bodies. They had painstakingly constructed the space station three thousand years earlier, but abruptly abandoned it when they no longer needed a material home. Kinahan had to buy out several squatter species before he could secure a place for his bar.
The docking ports were chockfull of human and alien spacecraft. Kinahan’s bar had been a tremendous success ever since its inception twenty-five years earlier. People and non-people came from all over the galaxy to get their fill of exotic intoxicants.
But the space station was a mere speck against the oblivion behind it. A massive cosmic maelstrom was slowly but incessantly moving toward the tiny space station, gobbling up stars and nebulae in its path. The red dwarfs looked like a couple of gumballs about to be swallowed whole. It seemed as if the maelstrom would engulf the space station at any moment, transforming it into dark matter like everything else. But it never did. Instead, the space station continuously inched away from oblivion. Kinahan had reprogrammed its navigation system based on his calculations of the collapsing universe. As the maelstrom approached, the space station moved away from it and toward the Galactic Center, escaping inevitability at every moment.
I stood dumbfounded in the face of the maelstrom. Although I’d heard of Kinahan’s crazy ideas about the universe collapsing and his quixotic quest to find happiness at the edge of the galaxy, I didn’t think about it too much over the years and pretty soon forgot about it. I mean, that was just one guy’s theory, and none of the experts gave it any credence. But it’s one thing to hear about something like that, and quite another to be confronted with it. Here was all the evidence I needed that Kinahan’s theory was correct.
Why on Earth did no one on Earth believe him?
* * *
The shuttle docked with a thud. I dressed quickly as I waited for the air pressure to equalize and the door to open. When it finally did, I grabbed my recorder and stepped into an empty reception area with three corridors leading in different directions. The walls were made from a sleek ebony material and the ceilings were very high, most likely to accommodate the Beechers before they transcended. The whole place had an eerie feel to it, like it had been there for eons. And maybe it had.
Not knowing what else to do, I headed over to an abandoned reception desk and was bathed in a red scanning light. Suddenly, a hologram of a brunette appeared seated behind the desk, looking like a beautiful ghost.
“Welcome to Borderline Bob’s,” she said. “Is English your preferred language?”
“Yes.”
She got up, revealing an ethereal white gown, and sashayed over to the middle corridor.
“Follow me to the main bar.”
“My pleasure.”
Blinking white running lights appeared on the floor, lighting the way as we walked down the corridor side by side.
“Is this your first visit?”
“Yes. Um... who are you?”
“I’m Holly, your virtual guide. I don’t really exist. But I’m sure you’ll find some willing human females at the main bar.”
“I wasn’t implying —”
“— But if I was a human female I’d go after you in a heartbeat. Would you like to pre-order a drink?”
“No, thanks.”
“Studies show that the human male is 23% more successful in the mating ritual if he consumes two 60-milliliter alcoholic beverages before approaching the human female. The alcohol lowers the male’s inhibitions, allowing him to reveal his secret libidinal desires.”
“I don’t want a drink.”
“Of course, that theory reaches a point of diminishing returns. After four 60-milliliter alcoholic beverages, the human male may still be successful in wooing the human female, but then he might not be able to perform due to erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation, or merely falling asleep. So it only stands to reason that you should drink in moderation.”
“Actually, I’m looking for Borderline Bob.”
“This is Borderline Bob’s.”
“No, I mean Bob Kinahan, the human male.”
“Bob Kinahan is at the main bar. Is he expecting you?”
“No, I couldn’t make an appointment. Your transceiver isn’t working.”
“Are you from Earth?”
“Yes.”
“We no longer accept transmissions from Earth.”
“You don’t? Why not?”
“Bob Kinahan reprogrammed me to ignore them. He said quote No news is good news endquote.”
“Great.”
“Do you mean great as in large or great as in distinguished?”
“Neither. I mean great as in goddamn-it-all-to-hell.”
“I wasn’t aware of that definition.”
* * *
We reached the entrance to the bar and Holly pixilated without so much as a goodbye, reminding me of Laura. The corridor opened up into a cavernous breezeway made of the same ebony material. At the far end were two tall double doors with an anachronistic neon sign above them that read “Borderline Bob’s” in English script. I negotiated the breezeway, my footsteps echoing in the ebony silence, and walked through the double doors as they opened inward automatically.
The place wasn’t as large as I expected. It had a retro-futuristic art deco feel to it, all geometric shapes in black, white, and silver. Small circular tables were peppered around the room, with a main bar toward the back made of polished mahogany. A long, curved horizontal window looked out onto the maelstrom, with a banner proclaiming “Happy 25th Anniversary” partially obscuring the view. It reminded me of the bars back on Earth, and I felt right at home.
I had made a point of arriving before happy hour, and the bar was almost empty. A small group of Parmavians, with their ugly grey tentacles and bloodshot eyes, chortled amiably in the corner. After my disastrous chandelier incident, I went out of my way to avoid them. Three human males, gruff space traders by their appearance, drank straight from the bottle at another table.
A bearded repairman wearing safety goggles was behind the bar working on a nanobox, his long hair tied back in a ponytail. He had the box disassembled on the bar’s counter. I walked up to him but he just kept right on working, using a laser soldering gun to fix something inside the box.
“I’m looking for Bob Kinahan.”
He didn’t bother to look up. “Yeah? Are you a cop?”
“No, a reporter.”
“Good, because what I’m doing is highly illegal.”
He continued soldering.
“What exactly are you doing?”
“I’m converting this nanobox into a still.”
“A still?”
“Well, kind of. A normal still can only manufacture one type of alcohol. But this still can manufacture any type of alcohol you want — human or alien.”
He finished soldering and put the nanobox back together. Then he swiveled it around until it faced me. It looked like a glorified microwave oven.
“There! Now let’s test it out. What are you drinking?”
“I’m not. I’m looking for —”
“— Come on, don’t be a spoilsport.”
“Okay, a Scotch.”
“What kind of Scotch?”
“Um... a single malt. Glenmorangie.”
“Speak directly into the microphone.”
I leaned into the nanobox. “Glen-mor-an-gie.”
The nanobox hummed for a minute, then dinged. The repairman popped open the door and pulled out a glass filled with a rich amber liquid.
“That’s the tricky part. Not only does it manufacture the alcohol, but it manufactures the glass. If you had ordered a Martini, it would’ve created a Martini glass.”
He handed me the Scotch. “Give it a try.”
I tentatively put the glass to my lips and took a sip. “Not bad.” I took another. “Actually, this is pretty good. What was the nanobox originally used for?”
“Condoms.”
I spit the Scotch back into the glass.
He laughed and yanked off his goggles. “Just kidding.” Then he reached over the bar to shake my hand. “Bob Kinahan, at your service.”
I did a double-take. “You’re Bob Kinahan?” But when I studied his features I realized it was true. The ponytail and beard had me fooled; he was clean-shaven in all of the backgrounder photos. But it was hard to mistake those emerald green eyes once he removed the goggles.
“Not what you expected?”
“Actually, no. I’m Tim Godfrey from the Galaxy Post.”
“An actual Terran. That’s a long way to come for a drink. Did they close down all the bars back on Earth?”
“No, my paper sent me here to interview you about the alien refugee problem. I would’ve set up an appointment but — why aren’t you accepting transmissions from Earth anymore?”
“You know what they say: no news —”
“— is good news. Yeah, but if we believed that back at the Post we’d go out of business.”
He spoke into the nanobox. “Long Island Iced Tea.” The nanobox hummed and he pulled out a tall glass containing a murky brown liquid.
“Nobody was listening on the other end,” he said. “It was like talking to a brick wall, so I reprogrammed the transceiver.” He raised his glass in a toast. “Here’s to the terminally deaf,” he said, and we clinked glasses.
I pulled out the recorder and placed it on the bar. It was a Verisim 360, designed to capture all images and sounds within a twenty foot radius.
“Mind if I record this?”
“No, but we’ll probably be interrupted. I’m working the bar this afternoon. It’s not easy finding good help at the edge of the galaxy, you know.”
Copyright © 2005 by Jeff Haas
