Solaris Rising 1.5 Read Online Free PDF Page A

any more spotting I was to come straight back, but otherwise I was free to go.
    M. drove us both home; and we picked up a pizza on the way, and Tessimond was driven entirely from my mind. There were more important things to worry about, after all, than him and his crazy verbal-blit, or chicken-licken, or ‘the stars are coming out!’ or whatever his nonsense was. I took the next day off, and then it was the weekend. Tessimond popped into my head on the Sunday evening again (something on telly was the trigger, but I can’t remember what it was), and I felt a tiny amount of shame that I had stood him up. But then I remembered that he’d been pouring some poison into the ears of my team-members, persuading them to abandon me, and I grew angry with him. Then I decided to put him out of my mind and good riddance. I told myself: Monday morning, all three of my core team would turn up for work, looking sheepish and apologising profusely.
    They didn’t, though. None of them answered a phone call, or text, or Twitter. A week later they still hadn’t returned, and the university authorities expressed their dissatisfaction, and instituted suspension proceedings against them for breaching their contracts. My hands were tied. I called Holiday Inn, cross that I hadn’t simply got Tessimond’s number when I’d had the chance; but I was told he’d checked out. Then, after a full day of to-and-fro my head of department persuaded the Vice Chancellor not to suspend the three until after the press conference. He saw that it could be awkward.
    So we had the press-conference, and there was a great deal of excitement. It was widely reported in the press. A couple of online sci-geek sites picked up that of the original team of four, three had gone AWOL and were not present at the press conference. Several news outlets followed it up. We had a cover story ready: that I was team leader, and the others were taking a well-deserved break. The story died down. Who was interested in the particular scientists, when the theory itself was so cool?
    The expansion of the universe was speeding up. Given the mass of matter (including dark matter) it ought to have been slowing down—as a bone thrown into the sky slows down as it reaches its apogee, and for the same reason. But it wasn’t. Physicists had speculated about this before, of course, and had come up with a theoretical explanation for it, called dark energy . But ‘dark energy’ was tautological physics, really: just a way of saying ‘the something that is speeding up the inflation of the universe,’ which is not much of an answer to the question ‘what is speeding up the inflation of the universe?’ What my team had done was demonstrate that the increase in the rate of cosmic expansion was itself increasing, and in ways that necessitated that dark matter and dark energy be decoupled. Indeed, we showed that the geometry of the observable gradient of the acceleration of expansion would cause a three-dimensional asymptote, which in turn would cause a complex toroidal folding of spacetime on the very largest scale. There was no reason to think that this universal reconfiguration of spacetime geometry would have any perceptible effects on Earth. The scale on which homo sapiens subsisted was simply too small. But it was a thing, and it rewrote Einstein, and the data made our conclusions inescapable, and everybody was very excited.
    The next thing that happened was that I gave birth to an exquisite female infant, with a crumpled face and blue eyes and a wet brush of black hair on her head. We called her Marija Celeste Radonjić-Dalefield, and loved her intensely and instantly. The smell of the top of her little head! Two weeks after birth her head hair fell off, and she looked even more adorable with a bald bonce. And the following months whirled past, for truly do they say of having young children that the days are long and the years are short. She slept in our big bed, and though a fraction