She blinks, and it’s a freezing February morning two days after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Mūsavi Khomeini ousted the Shah and seized control of Iran. Six days ago, Pluto moved inside the orbit of Neptune. Eleven days ago, Sid Vicious died of a heroin overdose. Immacolata Sexton dog-ears the hour. Tomorrow, the American ambassador to Afghanistan will be kidnapped by Muslim extremists. She bookmarks the minutes and sets out signposts at each and every millisecond. It wouldn’t do to get lost in here.
The sky is the color of lead.
She’s walking slowly across the frozen Scituate Reservoir, a few miles west of Providence, Rhode Island. An inch or so of fresh snow crunches beneath her boots, and the sheriff’s deputy has mentioned twice now that she isn’t dressed for the weather. Not far from the Route 14 Causeway, there’s a hole punched through the ice. Cracks extend out from it like the radial strands of a spiderweb. The wind across the reservoir sounds lost.
“Where is the man who saw it?” she asks. The deputy stares at her a moment before answering, “We sent him home, but it’s not far from here,” he tells her.
He looks frightened.
“I’ll need to speak with him,” she says.
“Of course, ma’am. That shouldn’t be a problem.”
He thinks that she’s NSA, and that story should hold just long enough for her to see what she needs to see. A little farther south, a clever bit of misdirection from London has the two agents from Albany chasing their tails round and round the mulberry bush. By the time they shake it off and get their bearings, she’ll be long gone. It’s a violation of three different interagency accords, but these things happen. With luck, everyone will be grown-ups about it.
“He figured maybe it was a satellite,” says the deputy.
“Is that what he told you?”
“Yes, ma’am. He said it sorta slowed down and leveled off just before it hit the ice, like maybe it was aiming to make it to those trees over there,” and the deputy points a gloved finger towards the line of oaks and maples on the eastern bank. “But I told him that didn’t make a lot of sense. Not like a satellite’s gonna have a pilot inside or anything, right? He also wondered if maybe it might be some sort of airplane, but that hole’s just too small. For an airplane, I mean.”
The hole is roughly teardrop shaped, slightly more that twelve feet across at its widest point, with the narrow end oriented towards the north, the direction from which the witness said the thing that fell from the sky came.
He said that it fell burning.
He said that it screamed.
There are odd marks on the ice, partly obscured by the light snow that’s still falling, marks that suggest the object may have skidded a hundred yards or so before breaking through and sinking to the muddy bottom of the reservoir fifty feet below.
The deputy says, “The man we talked with at Brown, the astronomer, he thinks it was most likely nothing but a meteorite.”
“Most likely,” she says.
The object was picked up by air traffic controllers at Logan and T. F. Green and was briefly tracked from Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, Massachusetts. The latter estimated it was moving at about two thousand miles an hour, several times slower than any meteor’s descent. The fireball was seen all across New England and Upstate New York.
The wind rearranges Immacolata’s black hair and ruffles her blouse. She checks her wristwatch, then glances at the gray sky. She pulls up the collar of her coat, just for show.
“But I’m figuring,” the deputy says, “no way the government’s gonna bother sending someone out just for a falling star. More like, and I’m just guessing here, mind you, it’s something the Soviets or the Red Chinese put up there. Something the Commies made for spying on us.”
“You mean a reconnaissance satellite,” she says, then glances at him, her expression neither encouraging nor discouraging his speculation. He’s talking so much because he’s scared, and better he talk than stare at her and start asking himself those questions. “You read a lot, Officer?” she asks.
“Not especially,” he replies. “Who’s got the time, right? But I got a pretty good idea what the Commies are up to overhead. I mean, Reagan’s always warning us. And I just figure that’s why you’re here. Otherwise, well, it would be someone like that professor at Brown. Or no one at all. Not if it was just a rock. You think maybe it’s radioactive?”
She doesn’t answer him. Instead, she squats down and brushes away the snow, then presses a naked palm flat against the ice.
“I swear to God,” says the deputy, “you must be freezing half to death.”
“I’m fine,” she assures him. And she shuts her eyes.
Thirty-six years later, on a jet above the North Atlantic, the pilot’s voice comes over the intercom, letting her know to expect a little turbulence up ahead and that she should probably fasten her seat belt.
She blinks.
Deep below the frozen surface of the Scituate Reservoir, something is waking up. It’s come a very long way only to crash and find itself mired at the bottom of a lake, but something went wrong in orbit, some slight miscalculation or malfunction. Everyone makes mistakes; nothing is foolproof. Immacolata senses anger, confusion, impatience. Then the deputy’s radio crackles, breaking her concentration.
You are who you are . . .
The thing beneath the ice speaks with a voice like angry bees.
. . . until you aren’t anymore.
It knows she’s there.
And then the day slips away from her, and for a while there’s nothing but the view from the Gulfstream’s window, only clouds and the shimmering bluish suggestion of the ocean so very far below. She waits to fall, not from the sky, but from the tenuous strands of Now. Falling is the easiest thing in the world.
It’s only a matter of remembering not to hold on.
All things are alone in time.
That is the Second Law.
And here it is a brilliantly sunny November day in southern Vermont, hardly a month after the Mexican government ended the rebellion in Veracruz and only four days before Stalin will become the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union. She spent the night in a dingy boardinghouse in Townshend, not sleeping, reading Wordsworth by lantern light, and waiting for sunrise. The night was alive with new ghosts. A week before she arrived, the West River flooded, the worst flood in Vermont history. Eighty-four people are known dead. More than twelve hundred bridges were swept away. Fuck only knows how many miles of road and railway were destroyed, how many houses and businesses, sawmills and farms. Immacolata had to make the trip over the mountains on horseback, following muddy deer paths and steep, winding hunting trails all the way up from Brattleboro. She’s always been good with horses.
At eight o’clock, she pulls on her coat and felt cloche and leaves the boardinghouse with her leather Gladstone satchel. A constable accompanies Immacolata to the tin-roofed redbrick shed behind the volunteer fire department on Grafton Road, where a surly man in overalls shows her the ugly pink-skinned thing that’s been pulled out of the angry, swollen waters of the West River. There’s no way of knowing how far it traveled before snagging up in a jackstraw tangle of fallen logs, barbed wire, and other debris just north of town. Two teenage boys—a farrier’s sons—came upon the body and told their story all about Townshend until someone had at last gone to see what it was they’d found. And what they’d found turned out to be this.