LITMIR.BIZ

      My name is Dr Naomi Buthelezi. The date is December 2, 2043. I am of sound mind and constitution and do not compose this account under duress. In a previous life, I worked as an author and writing instructor at the creative writing department of the University of Cape Town, where my career persisted on the strength of my having once been awarded both the Hugo and Nebula. I was a once-known/now-obscure science fiction writer, in other words, and assigned to this case through the office of Dr Hessler—an admirer I didn’t know I had.

      The two of us met at the beginning of 2040, at a quiet soiree on campus. The astronomers in the department next to ours had installed a new 16-inch telescope in the observatory north of the grounds, and a few of us in English had been invited to celebrate with them before their doors opened.

      Dr Hessler, or Joseph, as I came to know him, was the night’s guest of honor. He served as the chair and director of the South African National Space Agency, and had been asked to prepare a page for the evening’s opening remarks. He was well known. Having contributed to our space project for a decade and a half with committed service, he’d earned a place among the nation’s leaders in the field.

      The gathering was modest, owing to the closed invitation. As the night wore on, I drank champagne out of a flute fashioned from a test tube and listened to my colleagues complain about ceaseless departmental meetings. I felt the same, but that didn’t make it less dull. My daughter was spending the weekend at a friend’s and I had a husband who was out of town for work—our relationship now openly at an impasse.

      The speech was brief. After a second round of applause, I turned from my colleagues and found him smiling over the stage lights. His photograph was projected onto the walls. Then his hand was shuffled from the Head of Department’s to the Dean’s.

      As he dismounted the podium, I realized I hadn’t heard a word the man had said—which made it all the stranger when he tapped me on the shoulder and told me he was an admirer.

      “It’s a remarkable oeuvre,” he said, refreshing my test tube.

      He asked me join him at his table. Sitting across from him, I took slow sips of champagne and tried to tell him what he wanted to know about the profession—about the novels I’d published and the ones I’d abandoned. The latter seemed to surprise him. The more we spoke, the more I understood that he viewed writers as both admirable and pitiful mammals—cubs that had been separated from the pack too soon and were now frail and prone to neurasthenia; feckless neurotics, to be blunt, ruined for a life among other people, but also, because of their wandering, gifted with more sights and smells and insights than was average.

      Not that he was average. From the beginning, Hessler insisted on presenting himself as a sensitive, strong man—an adventurer, able to explore those same sights and smells and insights without the writer’s requisite softness; indeed, with hard science.

      He told me he had one last question. “No, this one isn’t about writing,” he smiled. “It’s simpler. I want to know if life exists in other galaxies.”

      I was caught off guard by the question and told him as much.

      “I suppose that’s fair,” he sighed. He allowed a moment to pass. Then he said, “Two months ago, at our office in Hermanus, we received an unmarked package at our front desk. It was delivered by an anonymous courier, and inside, there was a locked drive containing audio recordings and printed manuscripts.”

      “Manuscripts?”

      Hessler nodded. “Two of them. In the beginning, we tried to dismiss it, of course. There’s nothing unusual about finding an eccentric in our mail haul. But from the beginning, this felt different. For one, an enormous amount of effort had gone into the materials. That much was clear. That’s why I didn’t mind them making the rounds in our office. Each of us engaged with them at one point or another, swapping the pages for the recordings and vice versa. I indulged it—a harmless morale booster, I thought.

      “Then a narrative began to emerge and I paid closer attention. Right from the start, I’d been fascinated with how it presented itself as fact even as it veered into the fantastic.” Hessler paused to drain his test tube. “Until last week, that is, which is when it stopped being an entertainment.”

      The room had grown louder. I leaned in. “What happened?”

      “It predicted the present,” he said. “Now it might be a threat.”

      I asked him what it had predicted and he took a moment to answer. “Last week’s bombing.”

      I knew what he meant. An explosion had gone off on the face of Table Mountain, above the city bowl—that wide semi-oval that spread itself between Bo-Kaap and Devil’s Peak. The explosion had set off a minor two-day dust storm, powdering the streets in Tamboerskloof and Gardens below. So far, the authorities had no leads.

      I decided to indulge him, and asked him to explain.

      Hessler reached into his jacket pocket for his cell phone and showed me an image of the explosion site—four gouges in the cliff face. “This is a pattern. The explosions were detonated to form an insignia that’s referred to in the text.”

      I studied the photograph. “It could be a coincidence.”

      “I know, but it goes one better. It describes when and where the explosives were planted.”

      I searched his face and he didn’t falter. Which is how I got involved.

      Joseph confessed to having insisted on my invitation to the telescope opening, having planned on the two of us meeting. More details followed.

      I waited a week as he gathered the pages and the recordings. When he drove up to campus to deliver them to me in person, he looked older, I thought, and more stooped under the merciless sunlight on Jammie Plaza. He declined an offer to cool down in the Arts Block, citing exhaustion, which from the look of him I couldn’t argue with. I took the materials and drove home.