Fiddle and Drums

[Tuinor]

Prologue

It was a typical night at the observatory for Caitlyn. She had finally nabbed a time slot to use the observatory’s largest telescope to observe and photograph her senior thesis’ topic, the volcanic moon of Io, and its orbital path around the jovial planet, Jupiter. The sky was clear, and though there was some light pollution, it was the best she was going to get for a while, and her thesis wouldn’t wait.

Still, photographing the Galilean moon didn’t promise to be very stimulating, and, knowing herself, she acknowledged that she would probably doze off accidentally if given half a chance to. Realizing this earlier in the evening, she had decided to bring in with her a bit of music to make the next twelve hours go by as painlessly as possible. However, her playlist on the little 8g mp3 player was only about four hours in length(and, regrettably, still managed to hold on to several songs as regrettable remnants of a formerly dissolved relationship), and even with the shuffle on it wasn’t long until she began to feel like the night would drag on forever.

After hearing a particularly annoying song, which had so disastrously been a big hit in the late 90’s (and, unfortunately, in her recent ex-boyfriend as well) for practically the tenth time she concluded that the demonic digital device had it out for her sanity. Shutting it off (only after she’d deleted that song!), she decided to sit in silence as she watched with morbid concentration the little moon as it crossed the face of Jupiter with a drudging slowness that only a glacier could ever hope to match.

It wasn’t long before she started to find it a bit strenuous to keep her eyelids up. Worse still, the chair she was in was undoubtedly designed with the evil intention of being perhaps the most comfortable one on the whole of the campus. “Why does this night have it in for me?” she thought to herself mournfully as she reluctantly forced herself up out of the black leather office chair.

She decided it was probably time for a cup of coffee to help push her through the last couple hours of the evening. Leaving the telescope to do its thing, she walked out of the domed observation room, down the hallway to the student lounge. As she passed through the dimmed hall, she glanced up at a clock hanging just a few doors away from the lounge’s entry. “Fifteen till three? Oh, god, what am I doing here? All I can manage to think about anymore is a cup of hot chocolate and my favorite fleece blanket."

So detached with her thoughts Caitlyn was that she failed to notice a certain redheaded man leaning against the far wall to her right as she came in.

“Well, evening, Caity!” he said in a loud, overly enthusiastic voice that made her start as she was jolted from her sweet daydreams.

“Oh, god!” she said with a gulp, “Doug! You scared me to- oh never mind! It’s Caitlyn to you, anyway.” Doug was a fellow peer in the astronomy department, and she shared many classes with him. However, he had a rather obnoxious personality at times, and tended to be much too immature for her to tolerate for any great amount of time. Needless to say, they rarely conversed much, but regardless of the fact, he still addressed her with that tone of familiarity which only served to further her dislike of him.

“Oh, c’mon, Caity,” he said with a chuckle, “we’ve been in the same classes for, what? nearly three years now. I think I deserve to get to shorten your name just a little bit.”

“Caitlyn’s too hard for you to say?” she asked with annoyance, “It’s got the same number of syllables as ‘Caity!’”

“Hmm,” said Doug, “I guess that’s one point for you.”

“Well, what are you doing out here this late at night anyway?” she asked.

“Oh, I work here part times,” he answered, "it's for the work study program."

"I tried to get into that program!" Caitlyn was screaming in her mind, but what came out was“It doesn’t matter, eitherway. Is there any coffee put out tonight?”

“Ugh, you mean you trust the staff to serve coffee?” Doug asked with a sneer.

“I’m sure they don’t poison it or anything,” she answered.

“You never know,” said Doug just as Caitlyn found the coffee pot on its heater and the cups right beside it, “all it takes is one disgruntled janitor…”

“You’re full of it,” Caitlyn retorted as she poured herself a small cup and began to add her cream.

“Maybe so,” he replied. “Maybe I’ve had one too many bad encounters with our dear Max. Still, even for a janitor the guy is a bit of a gloom-and-doom personality, wouldn’t you say?”

“He’s never unkind to me,” Caitlyn carelessly replied as she turned to head back to her telescope.

“B- hey! Wait!” called Doug as he followed her out of the room, “What is it you’re working on anyway? Your senior thesis?”

“Is there anything else?” Caitlyn asked with renewed annoyance upon realizing the twerp was going to follow her.

“Hmm, I guess not at this point,” he replied. “So, what’s it on?”

“What? My thesis?” she asked as she reentered the observation room. “It’s on that bright little dot right there,” she said as she pointed to the telescope’s computer monitor. “And if you don’t know what it is, then there’s no reason to talk with you about it.”

“That’s Io,” Doug said, matter-of-factly. “Uh, but, wait a minute! What’s that there?”

He pounced forward and stuck a long freckled finger on the monitor’s screen were a small yet brilliant light had suddenly ignited just down and to the right of Io.

“I… don’t know,” Caitlyn said, “there aren’t supposed to be any other moons or anything...”

“Hey! Maybe it's something to do with Io,” Doug said with enthusiasm, “you could write your report on it!”

“Maybe, but I don’t see how- oh my…” Caitlyn said, suddenly struck speechless by what she saw. Several lights, just like the first, suddenly blipped in out of nowhere. They speckled the face of Jupiter, but even as they appeared, they slowly fizzed out.

“What on earth is going on…?” Caitlyn asked.

“No idea,” Doug replied. “Hey! What’s happening to Jupiter!?”

Caitlyn had no words to reply. She watched in bewilderment as the high altitude gases began twist and leap off the planet’s surface like threads on a ball of yarn suddenly unraveling. Suddenly, the planet’s poles caved in, and the two hemispheres began to twist and contort like a blob of wax in a lava lamp. Then, slowly at first but gaining momentum, the now amorphous blob that was once Jupiter began to spin apart. Slowly but surely it gained momentum as yellow trails of helium and hydrogen spun out into the blackness of space. For a moment the two students stood in horrified amazement at what they’d just witnessed. Doug was the first to say anything at all.

“It… it just…” he stammered.

“…disappeared,” whispered Caitlyn in terror.

[Nautipus]

European Space Research and Technology Center, Noordwijk, Netherlands

Andre Hasbrouck shifted contentedly before his monitor. The relayed data from the Herschel space telescope never ceased to amaze and arouse him. The cold beauty of nebulae, the creeping, unseen power of a black hole, it was all wondrously magical to him. As fond as he was of the panoramic drama unfolding slowly in the cosmos, this passion shared its space with another: drawing. Andre would sit for hours, sketching anything that came to mind. As a boy, it was a way of escaping into a world untroubled by the inhibitions of responsibility, and perhaps working by looking through the lens of one of the greatest human endeavors to date, at least in Andre’s mind, he could escape even more efficiently.
This night, however, was special. Tonight he was to supervise the first eight hour video session of the Herschel, and the star of this show tonight was great, mighty Jupiter. The telescope had been re-tasked, temporarily and at great expense, to photograph Jupiter and its faint rings. These rings were perhaps the most understated and humbly beautiful structures occupying this solar system. While not as gaudy, are strikingly beautiful as Saturn’s, their ghostly grace lent them an uncharacteristic and singular loveliness. As such, it was his great honor to spearhead this project. There had been no great fan-fare, no accolades yet, but soon. This was the first of twelve such sessions to be recorded for later enhancement and study. After the video was parsed and scrutinized, the telescope may have an extended stay in its current configuration. Who knew? Certainly not Andre, not yet.
His feet were now upon the desk, sketchpad in lap, coffee within easy reach. With a contented sigh, he leaned back in the chair, his long frame causing it to creak and groan at the exercise. He opened the sketchpad, skipping past a few of his earlier drawings, several studies and striking portraits flipping by. His avocation was the pencil, and she was a delightful mistress with whom to share these evenings. The recording session had begun some three hours before, and the large screen before him showed Jupiter, hung enormous and gibbous , skeins of color draping its form. Io was just visible in the lower center.
“Proud Jupiter,” Thought Andre to himself, “How divine it is to spend the evening with such company as you.” He tilted his coffee cup to the screen, and then took a sip.
Several minutes into the first skeletal renderings of his next work, Andre’s head snapped up. He thought he had seen something out of the corner of his eye, a flicker on the monitor. He waited a moment, and saw another, then yet another. Flashes of light with startling brilliance, suddenly there, then gone. He leaned in closer. Lights continued to dance and jitter across the screen, pocketing themselves in what was, to his view, Jupiter’s southeastern flank. He waited a moment, wishing he could somehow control the telescope, when he noticed small pockmarks beginning to dimple the surface of the molten, silken flow that was Jupiter’s atmosphere. They were appearing with more frequency; squarely around the area the lights had been seen. Andre sucked air through his teeth in surprise, a feral, wounded sound.
Jupiter’s southeastern quadrant was disintegrating, the atmosphere around the entire planet unraveling itself from its core. Slowly, it was progressing slowly, as if a hungry god were devouring it, savoring every drop. An area roughly the same size as the famous Red Dot had now been gouged from the planet, and more holes were appearing over its surface. Andre, sketchpad forgotten and resting in a spreading stain of coffee, took his legs from the desk and leaned toward the screen, mouth agape. Suddenly, more lights began flashing. More tiny dots of incandescing brilliance lit up the cold space. Somehow these lights were slowly taking on a more sinister meaning, something seemed simply too bright, too unnatural about them. Light again danced across his screen, but this light seemed to scream. It seemed not only cold, but deadly. Great curving ropes of light, and brilliantine darkness squirmed across his screen. A singularly sinister aura pervaded the scene. As though he was witnessing not an act simply of violence, but of hatred, the lights seemed dead, a vacuum of life. A spectator watching a suicide bombing from afar might feel the same, were he far enough away.
Soon enough, the event was over. Jupiter’s final death throes were rapid and violent, culminating with its pitifully small solid core spinning itself into oblivion. This was six hours into the session, and finally Andre stirred. Carefully, cognitively, he manipulated the controls of the computer, bringing up a control tab for viewing and enhancing the video that had already been recorded. Andre was not able to actively control the telescope, but he could do something almost as good. Using super-high numbers of pixels, the telescope was able to transmit video that s able to be magnified and enhanced while still retaining a stunning amount of clarity. Andre set to work.
Exactly one hour later, with activity beginning to shake lose the sleep from its course pelt in deeper parts of the facility, Andre sat, pale, before his screen. His hands were shaking and useless, and lay in his lap like two ensnared spiders, his lips twitched down at the corners and tears threatened in his eyes. His mind was in awe, but his body was in a state of terror. He had just seen a planet, a planet, destroyed. But what he had seen in the enhancements was even more frightening. He shook his head slowly, eyes never leaving the frozen image before him. The image showed a close up of the light show that had preceded Jupiter’s death, and it was not encouraging. Not at all. He raised his trembling hands to his face, and slumped against his desk. He was weeping when the supervisor for the next session walked in and saw what was on the screen.