Shortest Day (35 page)

It was four o'clock. The bell in the steeple of Memorial Church clanged for sixty seconds to mark the hour. Within the hundred buildings scattered around the Yard and along Oxford Street and Kirkland, Francis Avenue and Divinity, scores of men and women labored, free for the moment from the task of lecturing to classrooms full of students. In a hundred scholarly disciplines they bowed over books or crouched in front of computer monitors, exploring their individual jeweled caves.

On the eighth floor of the Science Center, Arlo Field gazed at the solar image cast by the spectrohelioscope on the observing table. In the last week the sun had moved away from Supernova 1995K, and therefore there was no bright speck beside it. Astronomers everywhere were monitoring from hour to hour the extraordinary changes in the optical and radio emissions of Field's Star, but here in Arlo's teaching lab there was only the sun, this middle-range ordinary star, dependable and stable, replacing the lost energy of its shining by nuclear fusion deep within its core. It was not about to blow up.

The tremendous heat of the interior was not visible in this light, nor the spicules and flares thrown up from gigantic electromagnetic storms. It was strange, thought Arlo, how innocent the sun looked when you saw it in the sky, that friendly and necessary companion glowing through the branches of trees, sending down its basking heat—and how alarming it was really, enlarged in an X-ray image with all the wild splendor of its coronal holes.

Arlo shrugged himself into his coat and went out on the terrace. As usual, the universe expanded around him in all directions. Most of it was invisible at the moment, but it was there all the same. His childhood cosmos was still part of it, the far-flung planets rolling around the sun, the Milky Way arching overhead, and the Orion nebula flinging out its veils of gauze. Now his vision stretched to the vast cluster of galaxies within the constellation Hydra, to quasars emitting more energy than the Milky Way, to black holes warping space and time, to the fringe of galaxies on the edges of the perceivable universe.

Looking over the railing on the south side of the terrace, he could see the overpass with its half-dismantled campsite, and a number of little figures pulling down the remaining tents and walking away, their problems still unsolved. A woman in a purple hat was doing something strange, but he couldn't see what it was.

From here they all looked very small. The earth itself was small, with its squirming surface of organic life, all those struggling creatures taking themselves so seriously, as if it mattered what happened on this small piece of rock wobbling around a minor star so undistinguished that it was right in the middle of the main stellar sequence. These hectic lives, these squabbling nations, these tiny destinies working themselves out on this microscopic planet, how could they matter in a universe so complex and so vast? Once again he asked himself which was the more real, the more important.

Arlo watched one of the homeless women trying to push a grocery cart over the rough snow, and told himself that misery was important. Surely it was at least as important as the explosion of Supernova 1995K; in fact, it stank to high heaven. Then he looked east in the direction of Maple Avenue, where he had just left Sarah sleeping, drowsy and smiling, content with the drumming inside her, the lively motions of the child that was to be born in April. Love too was important, as important as the black hole in Cygnus X-l or the Cepheid variables in the Magellanic Clouds.

D
own on the overpass, Dr. Box ignored the departing residents of Harvard Towers and the people passing between the Science Center and the Yard. She had an agenda of her own. She was delaying the sunset, holding it back by a method employed by the wizards of New Caledonia. Scraping a few inches of the walk clear of snow with her shoe, she put down a bundle of well-chosen charms, struck a match, and set the bundle on fire. As a wisp of smoke rose into the cold air, she invoked her ancestors in Cornish, New Hampshire, and addressed the western horizon. “Sun! I do this mat you may be burning hot and eat up all the clouds in the sky.”

F
rom his high vantage point at the railing of the balcony on the eighth floor of the Science Center, Arlo had forgotten the woman in the purple hat. He was watching the winter sun go down over the Charles River and Harvard Stadium and the cities of Allston and Brighton. It was taking too long. Feeling the cold, he went inside and closed the door. He could keep track of the sunset on the observation table. There now, at last the image was flattening and trembling at the edges. As he watched, it grew faint and fainter, then darkened and disappeared.

Arlo looked at his wristwatch and smiled. It must be running a little fast. It said four-twenty-four, as though the sun were setting even later than the almanac's prediction. But of course his watch was wrong in the right direction. The lengthening of the hours of sunlight was inexorable. Once again the Northern Hemisphere had passed through the shortest day. The earth was roving closer and closer to the vernal equinox, spinning and turning without end.

Spring would come. There was no way of stopping it. The dance would go on.

Our play is done; we must be gone
.

We stay no longer here
.

We wish you all, both great and small
,

A happy, bright New Year!

Saint George and the Dragon

AFTERWORD

The performance of the Revels in this work of fiction is modeled after the Christmas Revels celebrated each year at Sanders Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The gifted creators of that annual festival of course know a different and deeper Revels, and so do the hundreds of volunteer participants. My outsider's interpretation is not the fault of the generous people who answered my questions.

A principal sourcebook for this story was John Langstaff's
Saint George and the Dragon: A Mummer's Play
. Another was
The Christmas Revels Songbook
, compiled by Nancy and John Langstaff. Many carol verses were taken from
The Oxford Book of Carols
.

With her kind permission the title of this book comes from Susan Cooper's poem, “The Shortest Day.” I have also used passages from her dramatized version of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” as well as her words for the song about the donkey, “Orientis Partibus,” and the carol “Sing We Noël.”

A number of the chapter epigraphs are taken from Alex Helm's book,
The English Mummers' Play
, which gives verbatim many similar local versions of a few traditional original types.

Astronomer Alan Hirshfeld of the University of Massachusetts introduced me to the mysteries of the analemma, and figured out the coordinates of the supernova. I had friendly help, too, from Harvard astronomers Robert Kirshner, Josh Grindlay, and Robert Noyes.

Tremendous thanks are due also to the Reverend Stewart Guernsey, that witty and compassionate friend of the homeless.

The view given here of Memorial Hall is the last glimpse of an old friend. The interior is currently being rehabilitated to serve Harvard students in new ways. In an earlier novel I high-handedly restored the pyramidal roof of the tower, which had been destroyed by fire in 1956. The actual living tower has remained ever since uncrowned, unpinnacled, and unclocked, a sad stump rising on the Cambridge horizon. There are rumors—whispered, fading, whispered again—that the tall summit is to rise once more, with or without its fabled clocks and pinnacles.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Homer Kelly Mysteries

C
HAPTER 1

My Dear Hooker
,

The hawks have behaved like gentlemen, and have cast up pellets with lots of seeds in them; and I have just had a parcel of partridge's feet well caked with mud!!! Adios
,

Your insane and perverse friend
,

C. Darwin

(1856) 

W
hen Homer and Mary Kelly came to Oxford that October, they were not the only new arrivals.

As their bus from the airport began nosing through the suburbs, a swarm of goldfinches landed on the oak trees in the Botanic Gardens, pausing on the way to their winter quarters in Cornwall. Chattering and calling, they rose from one tree, came down on another, and fluttered up again to change places.