She assumed Blackford Hill was José’s idea but apparently Olivia had suggested it and he’d jumped at it. Hannah had helped out at memorials before with the Skelfs but nothing like this. Usually they were in the chapel at the house or a church or cemetery. But a memorial was about remembering someone, so you could do it anywhere.
The setting sun threw long shadows over the nooks and crannies of the hill, mottling the city in front of them, swathes of darkness creeping east behind the castle, Calton Hill and Arthur’s Seat, inky fingers reaching towards the Forth.
Hannah wore a pale-blue blouse and black skirt. Olivia and José had also changed their clothes and she wondered briefly what difference it made. Olivia looked uncomfortable in a black dress, kept touching her belly, which was still flat. José nodded to himself like he was agreeing with something in his head, but his eyes were clearer than Hannah had seen them recently. He’d washed his hair and looked like he knew where he was. He looked at the view then up at the sky. It was evening, stars just starting to emerge in the long gloaming, Venus and Mars already low and bright, early sentinels of the cosmic display. The sky west was the colour of orange peel, leeching to dark blue above their heads.
Hannah thought about José’s messages. He’d hired her to disprove them, then as the investigation went on he clearly wanted her to confirm them. She’d done neither. Maybe it was unsolvable, unless you uncover the biggest revelation in the history of humankind, that we’re not alone in the universe. The great silence of Fermi’s paradox was just that, a big fat silence. Either we’re alone amongst the billions of stars or we’re not. Either answer is terrifying.
But Rose said we’re asking the wrong questions and that sent Hannah somewhere else. José had presented it as either/or. Either someone is playing a prank or he was really getting messages from aliens. But those weren’t the only options. Maybe we want the signals to be true, maybe we want to stop feeling so lonely, maybe we want to think we’re not alone so we make messages happen. Maybe we’re so lost after the death of an unborn child that we look for solace in the only place we know.
Hannah looked up. She couldn’t see the stars yet but she knew they were there. Sometimes you just have to have faith.
They were standing at the trig point on the top of the hill, the city spread between them and the sea. Olivia and José looked at each other and smiled. Olivia had a small bag at her feet. They leaned in and kissed each other, and Hannah felt electricity go through her. They were obviously in love, she hoped she and Indy looked like that when they kissed.
Hannah saw movement out the corner of her eye and turned. For a moment she thought it was the jaguar, four legs, black, but it was just a Labrador out for a walk with its owner. She looked beyond at the Pentlands, imagined Whiskers hunting out there, surviving however she could.
José and Olivia looked at Hannah and cleared their throats, and she turned and took out her phone, read from the screen.
‘We’re here this evening to remember Rebecca, who was taken from us too soon, before we had a chance to know her, before we got a chance to see what she could become. But that doesn’t mean Olivia and José love her any less.’
The couple pulled each other closer.
‘The first law of thermodynamics tells us that energy is conserved,’ Hannah continued. ‘That might seem like a dry scientific fact but it has profound consequences. For billions of years since the big bang, planets and stars have formed and died, galaxies have travelled countless distances, but all the energy in that first moment is still with us.’
She swallowed hard.
‘Rebecca’s energy is still with us. She was always with José and Olivia, before they even met each other, in their future, and she will always be with them in their past. Long after all this has gone.’
She waved a hand at Edinburgh, just a blink of the universe’s eye.
‘We’re all connected, that’s what physics tell us. There are billions of neutrinos passing through our bodies right now. Countless particles reacting with us, changing their paths because of us, heading towards new destinies because of their interactions with the rest of the universe. If a single particle changes us, imagine what a person can do. Rebecca had a huge impact on José and Olivia and that will never fade, never be lost. The conservation of her energy is guaranteed by the laws of physics.’
Hannah glanced at José, who nodded to himself.
‘We all need connection in our lives,’ she said. ‘Luckily none of us are alone in the universe. We are connected all the time, by the photons that travel from your face to my eyes, by a billion other ways, from subatomic to galactic. There are signals all around us. We don’t always understand those messages, maybe we can’t decode them, but the messages connect us to each other in a way that is deeper than any words can express.’
Olivia was crying gently, José had his arm around her.
‘Rebecca is sadly gone but her energy lives on,’ Hannah said. ‘And we remember that energy, we celebrate it. Her energy lives in us all.’
She lowered her phone and stood with her hands clasped together.
‘Goodbye Rebecca,’ Olivia said.
‘Goodbye,’ José said.
He crouched and went into Olivia’s bag, took out a trowel and a stone with ‘Rebecca’ written on it. He scooped a couple of handfuls of dirt from the ground, kissed the stone and placed it in the earth, covered it over. He was focused, clear. He stood and hugged Olivia, and Hannah watched them for a while, the sky darkening, one or two stars starting to glimmer. She tried to see a pattern in the shimmer, thought about Morse code, but it was just light, just ancient photons streaming across unimaginable distances of space and time, straight into her eyes.