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A Hairy and Fiery Star

The Discovery

The astronomers, their eyes fixed on the distant stars and their nights sacrificed to the demands of their ethereal trade, were the first to report the comet's imminent arrival. As if the comet had come from below the plane of the solar system, or from behind the sun, it had caught them by surprise. That was clear in their rush to announce its discovery. Their press releases were full of statements about velocity and trajectory but the import was obvious. The comet would be passing close enough to Earth to be seen by the unaided eye.

From arcane reports in the back pages of academic journals to the news stories on slow days, the momentum of the discovery began to grow. The reactions were varied. Those whose research required intemperate heavens--such as astronomers and cosmologists--excitedly prepared for its arrival, but others--whose interpretation of the universe was dependent on magic--denounced the science which would interpret such spectacles. Drawing upon their considerable reading about the heavenly spheres, those trained in obscurity and denial claimed that merely human calculations were in error and that the night sky would go on shining in its dim glory like it had for millennia.

For the public at large, their lethargic blood only slowly stirred even by an immediate danger, the age-old fears took some time to boil to the surface. Some country people claimed that comets were the harbingers of disease and they cited the Spanish flu to support their case. Although only the vaguest shift in the stars was apparent when the flu was coughing out lungs in much of the European population, the association of illness with the comet was intuitive enough to become the source of rumours and quack medicinal remedies for a disease which had not yet arrived.

For others, steeped in a tradition older than the church itself, the comet was a sign of Jesus's imminent return. Shoving the confining scripture to one side, they gathered on street corners and talked about Jesus' coming. He would arrive in the same dirty robes he'd been wearing two millennia earlier, and his sandals would be nearly rotted off his feet. Others promised that if the faithful were gathered to listen to him preach he would appear on a fiery chariot pulled by two horses. The comet signified his robe, and its arrival heralded the end of days. Some said he already walked among them in the form of a child, albeit one who didn't yet recognize his high ancestry. Once the comet came, he would put aside the toys of childhood and take up the mantle of leadership. Regardless of how they imagined his return, they all agreed that he would collect the faithful even while the night sky was disrupted by the pale glory of the comet. The Christians would be called home, and they smacked their lips with delight as they described the Earth sown with darkness and dissension after their escape.

Those who listened sold their houses and pulled their money from the bank. They gave away the lawnmowers and barbeques which made their lives bearable, and waiting for the cleansing of the lord, they stopped bathing. Their children were kept home from school and forced into intensive pamphlet study. Their animals were given to the shelter. Where they were going they could not afford burdens. By all accounts those who fasted had it the worst. The kids cried about their stomachs' emptiness while their parents crept to the corner store in the night, all so Jesus could take them to where they would never eat a full meal again.

Even while the scientists prepared their instruments, set rockets to launch in case the visitor thought to be from the Kuiper Belt proved to be the once-in-a-million year comet from the far Oort Cloud, astronomers gazed eagerly into photographic plates sensitized by a toxic brew of chemicals. They were looking for an out-of-place star, for a glimmer in the sparkling reverse-colour splendor of the universe that would indicate that their career would either be established or disappear. They called each other, eager in the darkness beside huge telescopes scanning the night sky, and when woken from a sound sleep their first thought was of the comet.

"What news?" they would ask while spouses grumbled beneath the blankets. "Any change?"

Their profession was one of solitary card games in cold desert installations. It involved calculations so obscure that even their peers objected to the formulas used to obtain the results. They were a haunted people, their faces drawn by their discipline. The cherubic astronomer was an outcast, and many thought that those who were overly optimistic about certain signals should save their "Wows" for the public sphere. A serious astronomer expects the mundane, plans for the mundane, and keeps their wishes for the spectacular private. Secretly, not even admitting it to themselves, they wished for the phenomenon which would undermine everything they believed. Only in a complete denial of modern physics could their secret desire for disruption become reality, but they dared not whisper such heresy to anyone. They spoke of findings and expected results, instead of the dreams which had originally driven them to the blackboard and the photographic plate.

Although the initial announcement of the comet wasn't calculated to stir much public attention, it was picked up by Dander's doomsday cult, and within a few days it became a major news story. The Dander crew used abandoned cars and shopping carts to build massive non-functional radio telescopes in the desert, and the faithful ran around them with homemade stethoscopes, listening for messages that the comet was bringing on the solar wind.

Eager for fodder in their endless news cycles, the reporters circled their encampments like stray dogs, until the images were nightly news and millions of others, inspired by the nonsense, began to build mud piles in their back yards and to hoard their trash. Before long, Dander's cult had gone national and then international and he was asked to speak at press conferences and advise presidents and prime ministers.

"We are living in a time of wonders," Dander broadcast around the world. "As much as the internet and the television have brought us together, it has also divided us."

He spoke before an audience of a hundred thousand and more than a few confused looks greeted the statement.

"We are one people divided by the Tower of Babel. We are Babylonians waiting to get back to the hanging garden."

The lengthy diatribe which followed, concerning as it did garden centres and backyard flower baskets, was generally agreed to be more metaphorical than prescriptive, although potted plants flew off the shelves and many who grew tomatoes thought they were looking at the single worst mistake of their career.

"The leaders of all nations know that the comet presages the end of times, but they have kept that from you. You are rudderless in the storm, and they cannot guide you anymore. I am here--"

When the broadcast truncated his speech many thought his message had troubled those who wanted to remain in power. Like the acceptance of currency, faith in authority was largely a matter of trust, and with Dander diverting that trust to himself, people hit the street to burn cars and disrupt traffic. Dander was about to divulge what he knew about their future, and they would not rest until they found out what had been lost.

The Dander cult, as it came to be called, was disbanded once the sexual assault charges were laid, and by the time he went to prison, only a few of his more fanatical followers were present at the courthouse. The cult had come and gone as quickly as a comet, although the comet which was such a large part of his way of thinking about world government and apocalypse was still weeks away.

Once the cult stirred up interest in the comet and then disappeared, people became curious about what had inspired Dander and his group. They were less interested in psychological evaluations of cults or weak-minded people than they were the comet itself, and before long the news services were pursuing the scientists responsible for the announcement.

The attention turned out to be a mixed blessing. More funding was suddenly available, and most governments diverted the waste stream of their public purse to astronomical work and scientific research. Unfortunately, the renewed interest meant that astronomers had to make public statements. Blinking like moles suddenly exposed to the daylight, the astronomers found themselves pulled away from their work by department heads eager for publicity. As quickly became apparent, synthesizing mounds of data for the public wasn't their best skill. They laboured far into the night--deeply resentful that they weren't crunching data or poring over photographic plates--to cut down complex papers into the bite-sized slogans the media companies wanted. They were forced to make scientific-sounding statements about the comet that a layperson could understand. Stripping away their knowledge of velocity and trajectory, apogee and gravitational perturbations, they spoke in terms of hours and days. They assured the fearful that the excitement was purely intellectual. Although it pained them to answer such questions, they said that the monstrous tail of the comet, illuminated by the sun even though the sky was dark, was harmless. Despite partnerships which had endured academic rivalry, they fought with each other over catchy names for the comet and other visible phenomenon which were more accurately described by mathematics.

Beckoned into their offices and laboratories, the public relations machines took over where the scientists had faltered. Men and women who'd spent their career using the accomplishments of others for their own gain rallied their buzzwords. The camera's glass eye was their friend, and they fancied it winked at them as they wrapped the obscure multisyllabics of the scholars in the soft blanket of platitudes and funding requests.

For most people going to and fro on their daily rounds the comet didn't register as important. Car insurance had climbed steeply for the third year in a row, the vacuum cleaner needed a part that could only be sourced on the other side of the city, and their boy was complaining about his stomach and the nearest clinic a twenty-minute drive. Their attention was already held by more plebeian concerns, and they cared little about the rest of the universe, the rest of the world, and even their own country. They could be relied upon to keep their garage painted, to comment on the length of grass in the neighbours' yard, but didn't feel that they should be asked to care about something as meaningless as a passing comet.

The globe continued to turn as it had for billions of years, its orbit slightly decaying as the tidal drag made its minute effect felt over millennia, but on the surface of the planet few were those who cared to look past the city lights enough to care about the impending doom, delight, or evidence, depending on who was watching.

The scientists, fooled a hundred times by their eagerness for rarity, made cautious assessments. They watched their peers' faces while they explored the routine march of the heavens, even while their bones cried out for the bizarre. The fear-mongers--who could turn on a dime to take advantage of the crowd's trepidation--prepared their speeches. They dusted off placards left over from the end of the Mayan calendar, the turn of the millennia, and the computer scares of the year two thousand bug. They adapted the stories they'd been telling for half a century. The immigrants, who some blamed for the virus, sighed with relief as those who capitalized on public fear turned their attention to the heavens. Old prophesies were revived and bearded recluses interviewed. "Read my book about the coming disaster. Watch my speech. Listen to my broadcast." Believing in media saturation as though that were their scientific verity, they choked the bandwidth with anxiety and curses, with cures and sacred psalms, and promised relief was only as far away as the donation button.

The fundamentalist preachers, like Reverend Dander, whose talking points required the denial of impermanence, dreaded the night of the comet's appearance. Although such scenes had been as regular as clockwork since biblical times, the preachers had been telling a different story for so long that they woke sweating to images of a mass exodus. They feared their congregation would seek out the long arm of the Catholics, whose embrace of scientific consensus meant they were more evil than those who sought to uncover god's handiwork. Even if their parishioners left for the comforting stories of the fear-mongers, Dander would have been happier. Even a child might be inspired by the comet to seek out a more convincing explanation that he offered from the pulpit. Thinking about his audience turning to evil was also heresy, Dander reminded himself as he flopped over in his cell, and could be punished by excommunication or murder.

Although much of the world reacted to the comet's coming with a mixture of scholarly excitement and doom-laden trepidation, the small town of Boltzman was at first largely unaware that the incomprehensible clockwork of the heavens was throwing a cog. Carrying on with their lives as they had through several wars, an attempted genocide, and multiple invasions, the townspeople relied on stolid good sense as though it were both a shield and a meal.

 
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