The modern Rose Earth and Space Center loomed beside the nineteenth-century American Museum of Natural History like an alien spaceship sent back in time. From his position on West Eighty-first Street, Theo could see straight through the six-story glass cube to the glowing white sphere of the planetarium. The entire building served as an orrery, a representation of the solar system. The planetarium’s sphere represented the sun, and models of the other planets hung in orbit around it. As he and Ruth drew closer, he could make out families streaming through the building, lining up for the last planetarium show of the day, and tromping down the Cosmic Pathway that spiraled from the sun to the ground, tracing the evolution of the universe from Big Bang to the present along the way.
Theo and Ruth entered the museum at the Earth and Space Center’s lower level. The museum was about to close, and most of the researchers had already gone home for the day, but Minh Loi stood waiting for them with arms crossed. She looked neat and professional, her long gray-streaked hair pulled back in a loose chignon. The welts on her face had faded to a light yellow, and her eyes snapped clear and sharp. Yet she seemed a woman suffering beneath a great weight that no one else could see. Selene and I were supposed to lift that burden from her, Theo thought. Instead, it looks like we made it all the heavier.
“I don’t know whether to thank you or report you,” Minh said without a hint of humor.
“How about I say ‘you’re welcome’ and ‘I’m sorry’ so you don’t have to decide?” Theo offered. “If it makes you feel better, the plan was never … amputation. It just sort of turned out that way.” He could feel Ruth’s eyes on him and prayed she would focus on one mystery at a time. Selene’s vigilantism was not something Ruth would understand.
Minh just stared at him a moment longer before saying, “I should never have asked Selene DiSilva for help.”
“Her methods can be”—he thought of the constellation myths—“punitive. But I’m not here on behalf of Selene. I’m helping the cops solve the mystery of the Charging Bull murder.”
She didn’t believe him at first, but with a little cajoling and a lot of begging, she finally agreed to answer their questions.
To Theo’s disappointment, the walls of Minh’s office contained no elegant star charts or brilliant photos of colorful nebulae. Nothing to satisfy the science fiction nerd in him, only spreadsheets of numbers and a whiteboard covered in equations. The only thing he found interesting was a picture of the Mayan zodiac that she must have gotten from Gabi as part of their joint astronomy project.
Ruth had transferred Theo’s photos of the crime scene to her own phone, along with a summary of their haruspicy findings. She handed the phone to Minh. “We think the liver might be a star chart, and the animals at the murder site represent five constellations. But we don’t know why.”
Minh leaned back in her chair, swiping through the phone with a look of intense concentration. After a long moment, she peered up at them. Her cheeks had regained some of their color, as if the workings of her brain had distracted her from the ache in her heart. Theo knew the feeling.
“I’m thinking this is an archeoastronomy reference,” she said. “Your whole crime scene—not just the liver—could be a star chart.” She handed the phone back to Ruth and turned her attention to her computer.
Ruth leaned toward Theo and whispered, “What’s archeoastronomy?”
“You look at ancient astronomical observations,” he replied, “and from that, you can date texts and artifacts.” He hoped she didn’t press him further because he’d just disclosed the full extent of his knowledge.
“The night sky has changed over the millennia as the position of the earth varies,” Minh explained without looking up from her computer. “So, if we know what someone sees in the stars, we know when they saw it.”
Theo quirked a smile at Ruth. “What she said.”
Minh flipped her monitor around so they could see it and pulled up a map of the night sky. “The bull is the central image of your crime scene, so we should start with the constellation Taurus.” She pointed to a V of stars. “We don’t think of it as anything special, not anymore, but the folks in the Age of Taurus would’ve thought differently.”
Ruth gave a skeptical frown. “Age of Taurus sounds like astrology, not astronomy.”
“It’s both. Astrology is just incomplete astronomy—with a bunch of other junk thrown in. The Age of Taurus is what astrologers and astronomers call the roughly two thousand years when the spring equinox lay in Taurus.”
Theo hadn’t felt so undereducated in years. “You’re going to have to explain that. I like science fiction for the fiction more than the science, I’m afraid.”
Minh stood, wiped a section of her whiteboard clean, and grabbed a red marker. “Okay, this is the sun,” she said, drawing a large ball. “Here’s the earth’s path around the sun.” She drew an ellipse around the ball. “In order to explain why we see the sun move, you have to understand the earth’s rotation and orbit.”
“Stop there.” Theo held up a hand. “The only thing I do know about astronomy is that the ancients didn’t believe in a heliocentric universe. They thought the sun orbited an unmoving earth instead.”
Minh stared at him. “But it doesn’t. I’m not going to teach you erroneous astronomy.”
“Please, let’s go with the simple—if scientifically false—explanation.”
She sighed, but erased her diagram. “Fine. Here’s our vantage point on earth.” She drew a flat line. “Here’s the path of the sun as it rises and sets at the equinoxes.” She drew an arc from east to west. “But in the northern hemisphere, the sun rises farther and farther to the south as the year progresses until it reaches its farthest point at the winter solstice on December twenty-first.”
“Tomorrow,” Theo said, suddenly sure they were on the right track.
“Very observant.” She drew another series of arcs beside the first. “Then the sun’s path travels backward until it rises at the farthest northward point six months later—at the summer solstice. Ancient astronomers kept track of the pattern by noting which constellation the sun rose in front of each day. They’d say ‘the sun is in Scorpius,’ for example. Over a whole year, the sun’s position moves through twelve constellations: That’s the zodiac.”
“The Babylonians figured out the constellations first,” Theo couldn’t help adding, “but it was the Greeks who named it the zodiakos kuklos—the circle of little animals.” He knew the interruption was pure pedantry—Gabi would’ve rolled her eyes. Selene would’ve been annoyed that he knew more about the ancient world than she did. But Ruth only nodded encouragingly and looked fascinated.
Minh drew a small horned circle—a stylized bull’s head—on the central arc. “From about 4000 BC to 2000 BC, the sun rose in front of the constellation Taurus at the spring equinox.” She tapped the symbol. “Hence the Age of Taurus.”
“Wait, what happened in 2000 BC?” asked Theo.
“The simple version?”
“Please.”
“Just like a spinning top, the earth wobbles on its axis very slowly. That motion changes our perspective on the stars, and thus the equinoxes themselves are drifting across the constellations. So every 2,160 years or so, we move into a different ‘age.’ Ancient astronomers figured out that the equinoxes were moving—they knew that they had already shifted from the Age of Taurus into the Age of Aries—but their geocentric model of the universe couldn’t explain why. It must’ve blown their minds.”
Ruth’s eyes lit up. “So is this where that hippie song comes from? This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius …” she sang in a surprisingly sweet alto.
“Yup. Depending on where you measure the borders of the constellations, today we’ve either already moved from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius—or we will soon. Astrologers think the shift of ages will herald some great world cataclysm or future utopia. It’s part of how the New Age movement got its name.” She smiled indulgently. “But now you’re beyond my area of expertise.”
“Cataclysm, huh?” Theo couldn’t share in her humor. “Societies that believe in a coming end times or apocalypse are usually perfect feeding grounds for cultic practice.” He grabbed a notepad from his satchel and started scribbling furiously. “What about the other symbols at the crime scene?”
“That’s where things get really interesting. In each different age, as the equinoxes shift, the celestial equator moves through the constellations as well.”
He stopped writing. “The celestial what now?”
Minh turned back to the whiteboard and drew a round ball in blue. “Here’s the earth. According to the ancients, the planets and stars existed on hollow ‘celestial spheres’ that surrounded it. Imagine the stars as holes poked through an eggshell, and the earth as the yolk floating inside.” She drew a large circle around the earth in black. “They thought the celestial sphere with the stars rotated, causing the constellations to move across the heavens. And it had an equator that mirrored the one on earth.” She drew the earth’s equator in blue, then a parallel arc onto the outer shell in black. She added a red ellipse that intersected the celestial equator in two places. “This is the circle of the zodiac constellations that trace the sun’s movement. Where the celestial equator and the zodiac intersect, you get the sun’s position at the equinoxes. And it just so happens that when the spring equinox is here in Taurus”—she drew the bull symbol on one intersection point—“the autumn one is here. In Scorpius.” She tapped her marker on the other intersection point. Around the curve of the celestial equator, she added three dots. “And the celestial equator also passes through …” She tapped each dot in turn. “Corvus, Hydra, and Canis Minor. Bird, snake, dog.”
Ruth clapped her hands. “Fantastic! There you go, Theo, it all fits together.”
Theo couldn’t celebrate; he was too busy trying to consider all the repercussions. “Okay, so the crime scene represents a star chart from somewhere between 4000 and 2000 BC.”
“Approximately. Again, it depends how you measure.”
He shook his head. “But that’s way before the Roman Empire! It’s before the Golden Age of Athens! We’re talking Neolithic or early Bronze Age here.”
“So?” Ruth looked at him quizzically. “What’s the problem with that?”
“First off, there are no written records describing cults that old, so we’ll be completely in the dark. And it doesn’t explain why the cult calls their leader ‘Pater.’ Why use Latin if it’s not a Roman cult?”
“How do you know what they called their leader?” asked Ruth. “Was it written somewhere at the crime scene?”
Actually, I overheard it from a man in supernatural headgear as he flew toward me with a gun, Theo thought. He couldn’t tell his friend the truth, but he was damn tired of lying. He settled for, “Selene and I had a few extracurricular adventures. I’ll explain later, I promise.”
Ruth let the matter drop, and Theo hoped her habitual circumspection would save him from ever having to make good on his vow.
An hour later, they left the museum, replete with more astronomical information than Theo ever imagined he’d need. As they reached the street, he reached compulsively for his phone, then let his hand drop. He wanted to call Selene and warn her that she might be on the wrong track, but what would he say? That the cult was re-creating some incomprehensible ritual from six thousand years ago? How was that helpful?
Beside him, Ruth suddenly stopped walking, hummed softly as if searching for the right words, and said, “What are you not telling me?”
So many things, Theo thought, that I don’t know where to start.
“You know I hate to pry, and you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” she continued in a rush. “I just don’t know how to help if I don’t know the whole story.”
“You’re helping just by wanting to help,” Theo assured her. “It’s nice to have someone on my side for once.”
“Selene’s not on your side?”
“She’s … well, sides are sometimes irrelevant when you’re on a whole different plane of existence.” He gave her a wry smile and tried to keep walking, but she put a hand on his arm. And left it there.
“I think I know what you mean.” Her expression made him suddenly uncomfortable. She wasn’t nagging, or curious, or even worried. She was terrified. For him. “I didn’t mean to look, but the video got transferred over to my phone along with the liver photos.”
“What video—”
She held up her screen to him. Selene amid the twilit trees in the Catskills, the wound on her forehead miraculously healing with the touch of creek water. “Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?”
“That my girlfriend is disturbingly unconcerned about drinking water that’s likely contaminated with giardia parasites?” He tried to sound completely nonchalant.
Ruth just looked at him steadily. “Is she holding something over you? Are you keeping her secrets? Is that why you can’t tell me the truth?” Her grip on his arm tightened and she took a hesitant step closer to him.
“I don’t know what you think you saw—that video’s so dark she could have bat wings and I wouldn’t be able to tell. Really, Ruth, you’re overreacting.” He tried to sound good-natured, but from his friend’s reaction, he knew she took it as a criticism. She released him immediately, nodding to herself as if disappointed—but unsurprised—by his evasions. He instinctively put his hands to her face so she would meet his eyes once more.
“Hey. Without you, I never would’ve figured out the truth behind this cult, and then I really would be in danger. Now at least I have a hint of what I’m dealing with.” She looked at him with too bright eyes, and he wondered for the first time if her feelings for him went beyond the platonic. He dropped his hands, suddenly realizing that he might be unintentionally leading her on. What am I doing caressing her face like an asshole?
He tried to sound casual. “I’m going to stop by my office and see what I can dig up on cults from the Bronze Age, okay? And would you delete that video and the photos from your phone? Selene’s a pretty private person, and the cops wouldn’t want me sharing the official crime scene pictures.”
Ruth gave him a noncommittal hum that would have to do.
“Thanks. I’ll stop by your apartment later and get my stuff.”
“You don’t need to stay tonight?” Her voice had grown so soft he could barely hear her. He resisted the urge to joke with her, to hug her, to remind her how much he cared. He didn’t want to do any more damage than he already had.
“Nope, Selene’s house is probably habitable again,” he lied. “And I need to see her tonight.” That part was the truth. “Thanks again,” he said, chucking his friend on the shoulder and feeling like a jerk. “I owe you one.”
He hailed a passing cab and sank back in the seat with an audible groan. If he had inadvertently played with Ruth’s heart, how could he blame Selene for playing with his? Did he really expect a relationship with a woman who’d clung to her virginity for three thousand years to be easy? Here he was trying to help her, and instead he’d nearly spilled the secret she’d spent millennia trying to protect. He didn’t know where she was or what dangers she faced. He didn’t know how his new information would help. But he couldn’t bear the idea that she might think he didn’t care. He looked over his shoulder, to where Ruth stood by the subway entrance, staring after him. Then he pulled out his phone and texted Selene. He’d let down one woman he cared about already today. He refused to do it to another.