‘Where is everybody?’ Hannah said.
She looked around the shared reception area for the funeral business and the PI stuff. There were even two doors, one at the front, one at the side, which led to the same desk, Indy cute as ever behind it, laptop and phone, filing cabinets behind her. There was a vase of lilies on the desk, sticky with pollen.
Indy smiled. ‘Who were you expecting?’
It had never happened that two clients, one for each business, had entered at the same time. Hannah wondered what the probability was. Given the data she could work it out, she loved that kind of puzzle. She looked at the doors, imagined them opening at once. Maybe it was a Heisenberg uncertainty thing, a client couldn’t be in both places at the same time, they only resolved their position once the doors were opened.
Hannah waved her hands, indicating more than just the house. ‘No, I mean the Fermi paradox.’
Indy rolled her eyes at another of Hannah’s weird physics things. Hannah laughed, she loved that they had this understanding.
‘Enrico Fermi, smart guy,’ she said. ‘He was at lunch in Los Alamos discussing aliens with colleagues, and came up with it. It’s the contradiction in the numbers of the universe.’
Indy rolled her fingers, go on, you have the floor.
‘There are billions of stars in our galaxy, each one probably with planets around it. Then there are billions of galaxies in the universe. So that’s trillions of planets. If life is not unique to Earth, where are the aliens? Why haven’t we detected them?’
‘Some people think we have already,’ Indy said. She’d got used to playing devil’s advocate.
‘Not credibly,’ Hannah said. ‘But that’s one possible solution, aliens are here but unacknowledged.’
‘One solution?’ Indy said. ‘How many are there?’
Hannah shook her head. ‘About fifty.’
Indy pointed at her laptop. ‘I’m kind of busy, Han.’
Hannah laughed. ‘Given the timescales, other civilisations could’ve been going for billions of years longer than humans, so why aren’t they at least sending signals?’
‘Is this to do with your case?’
Hannah perched on the edge of the desk. She was about to speak when the muffled thud of drums came from two floors up. Abi was practising. It sometimes felt odd that Gran had brought another stray into the house. Maybe she needed a project, something to keep her busy. Same with the foot, another mystery to solve, it stopped her thinking about the fact Grandpa wasn’t around anymore.
Hannah glanced at the ceiling. The drumming was a groovy shuffle, and she moved her hips in time. Indy raised her eyebrows. Hannah wasn’t sure if it was at the drumming or Hannah’s hips.
‘Background for the case, yeah,’ Hannah said. ‘But also my postgrad. I’ll be looking at data, classifying exoplanets. What if one of them contained alien life?’
‘But that’s not your PhD,’ Indy said.
‘No, but just imagine.’ Hannah waved her hands. ‘SETI are looking for signals.’
‘SETI?’
‘The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.’
‘And that’s what your postgrad guy is doing?’
‘Kind of.’
Indy pressed her lips together. ‘I’m regretting this already, but you mentioned fifty solutions?’
Hannah looked at her girlfriend, damn, fiancé. That seemed weird.
‘One group of solutions involves no alien life ever, which is crazy, or no sufficiently advanced life. Or self-destruction or natural disasters, or the water-world hypothesis.’
Indy nodded like she understood.
‘Then there’s the other end of the spectrum. Aliens know about us but haven’t made contact, like Earth is a zoo.’
‘Sounds unlikely.’
Hannah nodded. ‘I think it’s partly that we’re not looking right, alien intelligences could be so weird that we’d have no idea how they communicate. Looking for radio signals seems archaic. Plus humanity has only been around for the blink of an eye. What if aliens existed aeons ago, or live millions of years after we’re gone.’
‘Cheery.’
Hannah shrugged.
Indy ran her hand through her bob. ‘So what’s your postgrad saying?’
Hannah ran her tongue around her teeth. ‘He’s getting messages, but they can’t be right.’
‘Why not?’
‘You think he could be getting a real alien signal?’
‘I’m not saying that.’
‘I’m going to chat to his colleagues, friends, family, I’m sure something will get flagged up.’
They fell silent, Hannah running out of steam. She was still churning Fermi’s paradox over, but she could see Indy had something on her mind. ‘You OK?’
Indy looked at her laptop then stared at the phone as if trying to make it ring.
‘Is this about Whiskers?’ Hannah said.
‘Something else.’
Hannah waited, tried to tune out the drums.
‘I told Nana and Pappa about getting engaged,’ Indy said. Her dad’s parents back in Kolkata. They were the only family Indy had left, although she didn’t stay in contact. They’d fallen out over the funeral for Indy’s parents five years ago, before Hannah knew her.
‘Were they cool?’ Hannah knew they were much stricter Hindus than Indy, which wasn’t hard.
Indy’s shoulders slumped. ‘They’re fine about the lesbian thing.’
She said this with air quotes, making a joke. Of course it seemed like nothing to the two of them, natural as breathing, and Hannah never had pushback from her family. But that wasn’t true for others.
‘In fact they want to come to the wedding.’
‘Great.’
‘But they have a condition.’
Hannah had a bad feeling.
‘They want me to cremate Mum and Dad.’
Hannah frowned. ‘But they’re already buried.’
Indy nodded. ‘They want them disinterred.’
‘You’re not seriously thinking of it?’
Abi’s drums stopped and the silence was overpowering. Indy sat with her hands in her lap. ‘I don’t know, maybe. They’re all I have left. They never agreed with burial in the first place.’
‘Why didn’t you just cremate them?’
Indy had tears in her eyes. ‘I wasn’t thinking straight. I was alone over here. Maybe I wanted to punish Nana and Pappa. Or I wanted to punish Mum and Dad. Maybe I just lost my mind.’
‘Babes.’
Hannah moved round the desk and hugged her, felt tears on her shoulder. As usual, Hannah had been so involved in her own stuff she failed to see what Indy was going through.
‘We can sort this out,’ she whispered.
Indy nodded through the tears as muffled drumming came from upstairs, thumping through the house like a stuttering heartbeat.