Science Wow

Zero G Lindy Hop will continue. As you have no doubt noticed, the going has been a bit slow. I apologize. It's taking me longer than anticipated to fully plant my head inside this plot, and my attempts to do so have been thwarted by demands from my day job. The good news is they've finally hired me an assistant, and he starts next Monday. With luck, this will serve to mitigate my ball-bustingly insane workload.

In the meantime, I promised to try to keep things entertaining around here when the wait for new chapters is long. That's what this post is all about. If you're in the fiction-only crowd, feel free to skip this one. But if you enjoy the behind-the-scenes stuff (DVD extras, biographies, things written in washroom stalls), stick around for your bonus slice of Brownadelia.

Some of you may recall that I live in an old schoolhouse. Our steeple is the highest point in the village, as a matter of fact, as the church has no bell. And while it isn't uncommon for retired rural schoolhouses to become residences, ours is also a functional school of sorts. My wife -- as charming and sassy a milf as you'll ever meet -- teaches singing classes to local children, and our own two kids are homeschooled here by her, by me, and by their grandfather.

Among my responsibilities is science, primarily because of my personal passion for the subject rather my expertise, per se. My wife is the neurolinguist in the family, after all -- I'm just an art college dropout. But, at least at this point in the children's educations, it is my zeal that's key.

Do you remember the first time science blew your mind, and made the world feel bigger? I sure do.

I'm six years old, at the library with my mommy, and because I get to choose one of the books we borrow I choose I book with stars on the front because I'm sure this means it somehow concerns Star Wars. It doesn't, obviously, but in order to live down the fuss I've made insisting it is a book for kids like me I am determined to read it from stem to stern. I try. I fail. This is not a book for kids. I give up on the body text and focus instead on trying to decipher only the picture captions.

Through this I manage to glean only a single fact. Just one. But it's a doozy.

I grok that the sun is a star, and that all the other stars in the sky are, in a way, distant suns. "Holy smokes!"

Who wouldn't be impressed? I was so impressed that I remember it still, decades later, despite my inability to remember my social insurance number or even where I've parked the car when I go into a shop. I forget like nobody's business, but I'll never lose being six and recognizing that my view of the world had just been irreversibly embiggened by a book.

Anyway, since then I've pretty much felt that science is a gateway drug for mind-expanding wonder. I've always associated books with those epiphanous moments, so I suppose it's natural that I've arrived at science-fiction: stories where some of the plot-wow or character-wow is fuelled directly by science-wow.

At our homeschool, I head up the science-wow effort. With my daughter we've worked up to designing experiments to test our hypotheses (our current research project involves predicting the sequence in which different species of tree gain or lose their leaves) but with my boy we're still just trying to arrange those basic "holy smokes!" moments for him: that matter is composed of atoms, that the Earth has a place in the wider geography of the Milky Way galaxy, that space is stupendously big and time is stupendously long, that the intricacies of living systems are marvellous beyond imagination, et cetera.

Carl Sagan's justly renowned PBS series Cosmos had a profound impact for me as a kid, but my own children are still too young to get much from it. The ultimate damnation came from my daughter who, while watching the first installment, told me I wouldn't need to pause it while she went to the washroom. That's her version of the kiss of death.

In stark contrast is a new album called called Here Comes Science from the always creative American music combo They Might Be Giants. My boy (3) and girl (6) can't get enough of it. Each of the eighteen tracks is accompanied by its own animated video illustrating basic ideas about astronomy, palaeontology, the periodic table, the scientific method, photosynthesis, solar fusion, and so on. I highly recommend this for any parents whose kids think investigating the world is interesting and cool. The video/album set cost me $15 here in Ontario.

Finally, to close out a theme, I'd like to draw your attention to an interesting post on Darren Naish's Tetrapod Zoology blog. The headline article itself concerns the old scifi idea of dinosaurs evolving into sentient bipedal beings with technology (like Harry Harrison's Yilané) but the subsequent discussion in the comments section ranges more widely to the hypothetical morphologies of extra-terrestrials, a subject close to the heart of many readers here. Myself, I love seeing these kinds of scifi ideas bounced around by actual working scientists (as some of the commenters in this case are). Food for thought, and fodder for future stories.

By the bye: yes, there will be a child-appropriate scifi Christmas story this year, with no hubba-hubba and no dirty swears. I promise to make up the deficit of hubba-hubba and dirty swears elsewhere.

Zero G Lindy Hop - Chapter 2

Zero G Lindy Hop is a science-fiction novella told in several parts, posted serially by me, your lavishly accommodated host, Cheeseburger Brown. This is the second installment.

Chapters: 1|2|...

Connected Stories: Simon of Space, The Christmas Robots

The story continues:


CHAPTER TWO

The last sounds of loading reverberate away. The cargo capsule settles with a sad creak and a little rain of rust. Once liberated the corroded granules hang in the air, slowly spinning.

Tas winds the clock and pops the hatch.

She slips out, pushing her hair out of her face so she can look around. The spaceliner's hold is vast. Her mere Class Four tube is dwarfed by the scale of the monstrous cargo capsules belted into deep berths on every side: giant plastic pills of bedsheets, potable water, edible yeast primaries, disinfectants both custodial and medical, blue barbicide, scented napkins, anti-nausea spores, seasonal lapel pins and festive epaulettes for the crew, and even an entire row devoted to the full panoply of reproductive contraceptives and leisure aids.

The engines are close by, their rumble loud. The air is thin and cold. Tas can see her breath.

"Some fancy accommodations," she snorts to no one in particular. "Same old familiar; I ought to rather it I reckon because go again I've gathered it." She listens to Pop's old words echo away, then barks: "Alpha! Beta!"

The alpha and beta robots swing into action to untie, unpack, unfold. The roving glow of their busy eyes reveals the flaked and faded paint on the side of her capsule: FLYING CORBITALS FAMILY CIRCUS. And beneath that, simply: 12.

The beta is holding pieces of Mr. Magnificent in place while the alpha fastens the joints. Tas executes a lazy somersault as she floats past. She shivers then draws her arms in to hug her shoulders, causing her to spin. The fog of her breath trails out behind her in a swirl.

She comes to rest against the largest container of shampoo she has ever seen. Her fingers find frost but, curiously, where the huge capsule curves away from her she can see condensation on its edge. She kicks off laterally, brow furrowed. Wither the warmth?

She's startled by a voice: "Are you cold?"

It's a Lagrangian loader peeking out between cargo capsules, his long, prehensile toes splayed out against the dewey side of the shampoo. Tas shrugs as she drifts. "Hunkered against worse," she says from behind a cloud of hair.

"You're a fixer? You look like a fixer."

"Nop," she replies amicably. "Here to mount a show."

"Unscheduled, berthless? Otherwise you wouldn't be holed up in the hold, I figure, nor coming aboard mid-leg."

She nods, hair swishing in the freefall. "You reckoned it, Lagranger."

He gestures over his shoulder, deeper into the hold. "Care for a milk?"

The cargo crew is all Lagrangian -- skinny, long-limbed and almost translucent in complexion. They warm themselves around a fire in a barrel while the barrel is rotated in an ingenious apparatus contrived from an unwinched grappling nipple and a strategically parked microgravity forklift whose windshield scraper has been jammed at intermittent. Via periodic jerks the tethered barrel is swung around just fast enough to keep the combustibles from tumbling free. Still, a cloud of winking embers orbits the men like trained fireflies.

Tas smiles, welling up with fond memories of the Lagrangian acrobats she knew as a kid: never setting foot on a solid planet, never having a notion of down -- only acceleration, a liquid sum of competing motions. When she is introduced the Lagrangian loaders toast her with their milk.

"Need to milk up?" they ask her. "How're your bones for being so long on the road, Miss Planet Toad?"

She laughs. "Been spins and spins since planetfall, skinnies. I'd take a hot milk as quick as break a leg for master."

A sack of milk is pinched off for her, then pegged with a straw. She draws on it, eyes closed as the spicy, fermented milk steam fills her nostrils from the back, making her nerves crackle. "Now that's a proper milk," she says, licking her tingling lips. The loaders laugh as they float upsidown around her in the lotus position like tall, stretched-out Buddhas.

"What kind of a show do you put on, Miss Weller Dweller? Tell us, for your milk."

"Is it pornography?"

"Is it presented in the round?"

"Is it narrow niche?"

Tas laughs again. "Nop. Rather, it's nothing but a little Old Timey All-Robot Tap."

The loaders are very impressed by this and, since every Lagrangian at every orbit of every star seems to know every other Lagrangian, soon they are swapping anecdotes. It's bittersweet, because as much as Tas gets to share in the delight the loaders feel in hearing about their famous acrobatic brethren's adventures in the spotlight, she must also ride down into the somber, slower stories of how many of them fell to self-destructive behaviour and ruin upon returning home to the outposts where they grew up -- and had once escaped from.

A dollop of milk from each of them is poured into the ventilators, in remembrance of the cherished dead. The white globules seem to seek each other out and combine as they are sucked away into the echoing darkness of the shaft.

"What of the circus now, Miss Ground Hugger? Tell us, for the warmth of our fire."

Tas shrugs, letting twisting locks of hair drift in front of her eyes. She ducks slightly as the flaming barrel swings by, a few loose embers flitting free. She tracks them, watching until they've all winked out. "Gone," she answers finally.

The barrel swings past again. The loaders wordlessly make an offering of a dollop.

"There's just me now," adds Tas, gaze distant. She blinks and looks at her hosts. "So I reckon it's not all really over til I am." She offers a glum smile. "The show stills goes on, skinnies. It ever do."

They cheer. Lagrangers love, above all, to be well entertained.

But suddenly their voices fail and their gazes drop. Confused, Tas turns her head to look where they refuse to. It's Mistress Glittervale and she looks aghast. "I'm amazingly aghast!" she cries. "I've been just freaking right out in search of you, Miz Corbital. Oh my accounts I'm so extraordinarily relieved to find you."

"Having some milk," explains Tasfoliana, holding up her sack.

"No no no, no no. You totally don't understand, Miz Corbital. Oh no. We're already two hundred percent behind schedule. I'm nothing but hugely obliged to so immediately show you to your cabin."

Tas blinks. "My what?"

"Your cabin, darling! You didn't think you were staying in the cargo hold, did you? Of course not? Naturally not? How hilarious would that be? We're not barbarians at Capsheaf."

"Wasn't reckoning on anything fancy. Don't go to trouble."

"Nonsense, don't be very stupid. I can't believe you're not and I wouldn't blame you at all if you were already calling the captain to complain about how fully appalling all this must be for you."

"...Usually just camp in my tube, see," finishes Tas awkwardly.

"Oh my accounts that would be just crazy! No no no, no no: you'll be insanely comfortable in one of our lavishly appointed cabins, Miz Corbital. You'll find yourself fully surprised and positively transported. We can and will match and exceed any comfort you might and certainly do long for. After all, you deserve it."

"Deserve what?"

Mistress Glittervale grins. "Why, anything at all!"

Tas frowns dubiously.

A trolley shuttles them through the airless, directionless spine of the spaceliner. Through the windows Tas catches glimpses of spidery engineering robots, their silhouettes and gleaming eyes plied briefly from the infrared gloom by the trolley's headlamp. Mistress Glittervale never stops speaking but, mercifully, much of it is lost beneath the engine's hum.

The trolley whines to a halt. "...And so that's why we were totally able to accommodate you in the finest fashion, comp cabin and so much more, by only jig-jogging the funeral ahead by simply a single rotation!"

Mistress Glittervale is grinning expectantly, so Tas says, "That's great."

She's whisked out of the trolley by her elbow, the walls of the tunnel sparkling with giant letters that say WELCOME TO THE FIESTA TORUS! in the Common Verbal Protocol with the translation in several popular dialects in smaller letters underneath. Tas can feel a weak gravity taking hold of her, drawing her down toward the letters. Her stomach lurches.

She copies Mistress Glittervale as she grabs a harness and lowers herself down to the carpeted platform of a lift poised over the mouth of a deep shaft -- a spoke, running from the spine of the ship out to one of its rotating rings. The lift begins to descend through the spoke, plunging Mistress Glittervale and Tas through shifting mosaics of glowing advertisements that gesture and wink and coo.

"Have you ever seen the Wonder optically, Miz Corbital?" Mistress Glittervale needs to know, touching Tas's arm urgently.

Tas shrugs from behind her hair. "Which wonder?"

Mistress Glittervale smacks her on the shoulder playfully and shrieks, "You're absolutely yanking my tether!"

Startled, Tas stares at her with wide eyes.

"Indi's Wonder, of course!" gushes Mistress Glittervale with her patented grin. "That's what this whole cruise is completely about: six years of mind-blowingly awesome anticipation out to the Wonder, then six years of fully unplugged celebration and all-go partying the total way home."

Tas falls off from absently rubbing at her smacked shoulder. "Did you say six years? This is a six year cruise?"

"No no," laughs Mistress Glittervale, waving her manicured fingernails dismissively. "No no no, completely not. Six year cruises went out with extended hips. This isn't a day-trip for also-rans, Miz Corbital: this is elite." She straightens proudly against her harness. "This cruise is all about no less than twelve full years in space, each of them more astonishingly superlative than the last. That's an iron-clad promise, and our barrister programme has certified that promise for liability purposes in most major jurisdictions."

Tas blinks. "But -- twelve years...what about their lives? And jobs?"

"Jobs?" sniffs Mistress Glittervale. "Oh Miz Corbital you are a card! Like I totally said, this is elite. Capsheaf passengers don't have jobs." She laughs.

"But they must get bored, nop?"

Mistress Glittervale shakes her head firmly, jewellery swishing and chiming. "They never, ever do," she tells Tas with utmost seriousness. "Never, ever. It can't be allowed. It could never be." She raises her sharp chin. "I fully am this cruise's Mistress Glittervale, and I didn't get all the way up here by allowing passengers to fall bored. Not ever."

"Oh," says Tas, furrowing her brow. She can detect a regular throb vibrating through her harness, getting gradually stronger.

"You don't totally believe me? Just you wait, Miz Corbital. Just you fully completely wait. I only ask that once you've experienced the positively award-winning fun of the Fiesta Torus you keep your head enough to highly remember that you've got a show to put on for me."

"I never forget the show," claims Tas.

"You say that now," replies Mistress Glittervale, watching her from the corner of her eye. "But you've never been distracted like this before."

The lift stops with a ding.

Doors yawn apart before them, admitting a booming pulse of music and a blinding sweep of coloured lights. "Welcome," shouts Mistress Glittervale with her arms spread wide, "to the Fiesta Torus!"

Tas has never seen the like. She stands beside Mistress Glittervale on a balcony overlooking a cavernous atrium nine storeys deep, a great oxygen tree standing in the core and surrounded on all sides by stacked decks of revelry -- in one quadrant passengers dance in a shifting mist of colour, in another quadrant they luxuriate naked in a gently swaying tidepool, in the next they cheer around a glittering wheel, clutching wager chits in their hands. Giant holographic displays flash and blink and spin, shining volumetric shafts through air that churns with the mingling of a dozen kinds of smoke. Passengers hoot and laugh and scream, a constant muddle of human noise peeking between blasts of overlapping musics.

Behind them, near the lift, a half-naked man is sprawled upon the intricately tiled floor. His clothes are torn rags, his body bruised. Between bouts of trying unsuccessfully to raise himself and sputtering wetly he looks up and catches sight of Mistress Glittervale, his eyes swollen and glassy and pink.

"Having a good time, sir?" she shouts.

He gives her the thumbs up and leers happily before collapsing, eyes rolling. A duo of white medical robots dashes over to crouch at his side. "You are safe," one assures him while the other prepares a stomach pump. "Do not panic."

With a shaking hand the man holds aloft an empty glass. "I was drinking whiskey," he coughs, wiping strings of bile from his mouth. "No ice."

He then goes into cardiac arrest. The medical robots dutifully resuscitate him.

Tas looks up to see that Mistress Glittervale is getting away from her. With an anxious scamper she catches up. When she looks over her shoulder the man and the medicals have vanished, replaced by a floor-to-ceiling holographic display and a garden of lewd statues. "The walls move?"

Mistress Glittervale nods without breaking pace. "Nothing keeps life fresh like everyday novelty." She points out one of her jewelled broches as Tas jogs abreast of her. "My staff signal is guiding us now, naturally, but for the passengers the ship is fully a perpetual maze. That's a standard Capsheaf anti-ennui feature."

They pass a massage parlour that appears to be rotating away behind new sections of wall descending from the deck above. The sections lock together with clamps shaped like filigreed vines, then the entire assembly begins to slowly move back while an aquarium of people swimming with sharks takes its place.

Tas and Mistress Glittervale step over a shear in two moving floor plates and then turn down a spiral staircase, weaving their way around the bodies. The lower they proceed the stronger the feeling of apparent gravity becomes. On the eighth level they cross a square surrounded by alternating instances of restaurant venues and vomitoria. On the seventh level it's snowing.

"Marvellous, isn't it?" croons Mistress Glittervale.

Tas shivers. "I reckon you never know what's next around here."

"And that, Miz Corbital, is precisely the point."

The sixth level will give Tasfoliana nightmares, and the fifth level is worse. "Everything's fully consensual, of course," narrates Mistress Glittervale blandly. "The screaming woman is wholly a member of my staff, and the blood is not only scrubbed and potable but it's actually alcoholized."

Tas can't bear to look where Mistress Glittervale is pointing. She concentrates on her boots, and her effort not to step into anything awful or trip over a custodial robot's roving appendage, often hard to discern in the shifting, strobing lights. She chases Mistress Glittervale's hem down the next staircase, looking up only when a deafening boom concusses across the fourth level.

Tas cowers as glass balconies and storefronts shatter. Emergency klaxons wail just seconds before a second series of booms rocks the torus followed by the sound of shrieking metal. The floor bucks beneath her.

"Emergency! Emergency! All hands: the hull has been compromised by a rogue asteroid!"

A catwalk crumples, dashing falling passengers against the oxygen tree amid a slurry of debris both architectural and organic. A fireball roils out of a corridor, people screeching as they're scorched. The lights stutter. Medical robots are trampled in the chaos. The air turns black with greasy smoke and ash. Tas covers her mouth, hacking.

A man with a badly mangled arm staggers over to the stairs, leaning heavily on the railing as his wound splatters on the decking. Mistress Glittervale gives him a knowing nod. "How's the new pain working out for you, Tom?"

"Ah, Mistress Glittervale," he groans between gritted teeth, "it's excellent -- really, really excellent. Has a real bite! My nerves are positively on fire. Top notch -- just top notch!"

She grins. "I'm so glad you're totally enjoying things."

"This is just superb," he adds, gesturing at the destruction around him with the ragged remains of his splintered forearm. "I'd love to know where you get your ideas."

"Trade secret," she giggles, miming the act of zipping her lips closed and then tossing away an imaginary key.

"Fair enough," he agrees then adds more pensively, "I think I'm about to pass out from blood loss."

"Oooh!" smiles Mistress Glittervale. "Tunnel vision and everything? That's always a lark, isn't it?"

He nods wearily, skin turning grey. "See you on the other side," he mumbles, then drops into the rapidly spreading pool of his own blood. His leg gives a little kick and then he's still. A cadre of medical robots gather around him and set to work.

Mistress Glittervale looks over at Tas' shocked expression. "I completely know what you're thinking," she confesses. "And you're fully right. All things being equal I would've saved something with this kind of blammo for the return leg, but issues being as they are I've been absolutely forced to, you know, improvise."

Tas coughs. "It's not real?"

Mistress Glittervale rolls her eyes. "It's a distraction, Miz Corbital. It's entertainment."

Tas watches a swarm of desperate people clogging a gallery of escape pod hatches, beating away those would block the doors as they iris shut and prepare to blast free. Tas turns back to Mistress Glittervale. "But -- do they know? Do they know it's not real?"

"Darling, they don't want to know. That would completely spoil the thrill."

A succession of pops sound as the escape pods shoot away into space. In less than a minute there is no one left but those being tended by the medical teams. The fire suppression system douses the flames. The lights come back on. A robot with a carapace of yellow and black stripes strings up a line of fluorescent tape with words on it that read: THIS SECTION CLOSED FOR JANITORIAL SERVICE. He then proceeds to mop the floor.

Mistress Glittervale flashes her smile. "Come, Miz Corbital. Your cabin is this way."

Numbly, Tas follows.

Interlude VII

As is traditional on this blog, when I can't deliver up a steaming helping of fresh fiction to continue the current serial, I like to occasionally offer instead a brief window into the state of the author's life -- as harried as story-free, and there's usually a meaningful correlation there.

(If this sort of aside doesn't appeal to you, click away without another thought. The next installation of our current tale will be posted before too long. Check back soon. Meanwhile:)

The eldest and least wed of my she-siblings was married away on Talk Like A Pirate Day, 2009. Arrr!

The ceremony was distinguished by an extended reading of Hugh Grant from the Anglican officiant, which may well go down in my memory as the most savage internal struggle I have ever had to wage in order to stop myself from bursting out laughing in a house of worship. The officiant drew his quotation from a British romantic comedy in which Mr. Grant, playing the Prime Minister, muses on the twin classic evidences of love: reunions at airport gates and the way people tend not to take the time to send out hate mail when they've been caught in a nightmare of terrorist violence.

The officiant did not at any point talk like a pirate. It may have been his understanding that pirates were Catholics. I'm not sure. Keeping track of what's properly Anglican (or Episcopal, or whatnot) is a moving target these days. First it was that business with divorce five hundred years ago, and now they have deacons with boobs. What comes next is anybody's guess, but given recent evidence my money's on the unofficial beatification of Hugh Grant.

Also, I was chagrined at the desecration of the chancel.

For those of you who aren't deeply into the architecture of churches, the chancel is the bit at the end where all the really holy stuff goes on. The congregation seated in the nave faces the chancel, characterized by a platform or stage for the altar with a cavernous space over top of it. The back wall of the chancel is often decorated with stained glass, so that shafts of coloured volumetric light can penetrate the chancel and look very beautiful.

The very point of a chancel is that only ephemeral things like light can occupy that yawning space up there. It is space which, symbolically and psychologically, belongs to the divinity being addressed in the church. It is a contemplative aid, if nothing else. It is an architectural manifestation of the congregation's relationship to what the building embodies. Above the altar, the chancel is reserved for God.

And, apparently, microphone cables.

That's right: some technophilic lug had reckoned the best way to capture service audio for amplification was to hang black XLR cabling from the tip of the chancel to dangle over the platform, thereby bissecting the space vertically at random intervals and occluding the stained glass. Why, why, why would anyone disrespect a three hundred year old piece of architecture like that? There are so many creative ways to hide cables!

You see, North America? That's why we can't have nice stuff like Europe. We don't know how to treat it right.

Afterwards, standing on the boulevard at St. Clair, I smoked cigars with my kin and chatted, at which point it came to light that the groomsmen had received some special attention from the deacon before the ceremony. He had apparently subjected them to an extended reading from Four Weddings and a Funeral, pausing periodically to remark upon his admiration for Hugh Grant and also the purity of Christian matrimony.

"Where does this guy research his sermons?" exclaimed one of my brothers; "Blockbuster Video?"

The wedding photographer was a Nazi. She shouted at everyone until they did as they were told. She shouted at anyone else with a photographic device that they weren't allowed to take any pictures in her vicinity while she was taking pictures. She shouted at anyone with a flash that flashes weren't allowed. She shouted at people who stood too close to her, or who asked her any questions. She shouted at us all to look happy, so we did. Snap!

A priceless simulation of a happy moment, captured.

The crowd outside the church buzzed with the fake shutter snap sound bytes of photograhic telephones and walkmen. I'm pretty sure a lot of those people missed the entire ceremony on account of their squinting at the smeary, pixelated displays of their viewfinders rather than watching what was happening in real life. They might have had some engaging conversations with infrequently seen kin outside if they hadn't been so obsessed with photographing them, instead. In lieu of real memories, we all walk away with a thousand blurry pictures.

One of my young cousins is the spitting image of Matt Smith, the next star of Doctor Who, right down to the emo-hair. I gave him a cigar, but it failed to light his hanging bangs on fire. "I'm not sure I like the white framing on the windows of the new TARDIS," I told him.

"What?"

We took the children downtown to my other sister's house, because there was a height minimum for admittance to the reception for some reason, then drove back to midtown in time for supper at the Eglinton Grand, which is a small private events venue renovated from an art-deco era cinema. It was strange to physically be within a space I had done stage design for so many times -- I maintain a virtual model of the venue's architecture on my computer at work, but had not personally been inside since the renovation. I immediately started mentally cataloguing all of the errors in my model.

The master of ceremonies was an obnoxious English disc jockey. Surprisingly, he failed to reference Hugh Grant.

For some unfathomable reason a significant minority of the younger guests thought it would be appropriate to attend the reception dressed as Russian prostitutes, which I suppose more than anything else simply speaks to my being out of touch with today's standards. Who am I to say when it is or is not appropriate for a lady to expose underwear whose very construction threatens the sanctity of her labia? Thankfully, all of our senior kin made it through the evening without a single incidence of cardiac arrest.

One young man had a very fashionable hat -- almost as nice as mine -- but spoiled the effect of class by failing to doff said hat indoors or when being introduced. Don't they teach kids anything in school these days?

The wait staff wore advertisements for the catering company on their lapels. Crass, in my estimation, but I suppose business is business. Their overlord had to hiss them into silence when they muttered during the speeches, threatening to besmirch the profundity of my sister's blonde stick-figure friends sobbing into the microphone as they extolled the virtues of their BFF. My other sister, who owes more allegiance to counter-culture than to the mainstream, wore an expression throughout that suggested the ingestion of a lemon, or the suppression of bile.

"BFFs forever!"

"That's a tautology."

"Shhh!"

My lovely wife and I could not stay on to dance into the night, however, as we were obliged to retrieve our children from my sister's sitter to begin the long drive out of the megalopolis and back to the countryside, with midnight as our goal. This goal seemed threatened as we drew into the neighbourhood of Little India, our destination, only to find the streets positively clogged from stem to stern with crawling cars and hooting people. The traffic signals were being ignored, crowds swelling into the road. Street performers were executing some sort of acrobatic derring-do at the curb, the sidewalks packed cheek by jowl with all manner of wallahs -- food and jewellery and trinkets and fashions. Various musics competed to shake the air.

We were jammed into the middle of Little India on Eid ul-Fitr, a night of celebration and revelry marking the end of Ramadan. I frowned. "Parking...may be a problem."

We got lucky with a spot, leaving the car perched on the apex of a speed bump and then slowly picking our way through the throng on foot. My wife was cold so I bought her a green pashmina with lovely, detailed embroidery from one of the wallahs (who had to call out his young daughter to operate the debit machine for him), and then we ran right into my sister. Her husband was still trying to find a parking spot, somewhere out in the sea merriment the road had devolved into. Together we inched our way to her door and then slipped inside to retrieve the children, both still awake. The sitter, charging city rates, was handed a modest dowry in cash.

"Is it a party outside?" asked my daughter, eyes wide.

My wife and I each took a child's hand and squeezed down the narrow stairway to the clogged streets once more. We were a matching quartet of black-and-white formalwear in an ocean of colourful saris and sequins and dishdashas. Everybody smiled at us. We watched henna artists paint intricate floral designs and arabesques on teenage girls' arms, and dodged a giant group portrait in the making of bearded gentlemen in robes and fez-like hats. The photographer kept imploring them to squeeze closer together and as I led my son around the scene they wanted to know how it looked to the camera. I gave them the A-OK, and then a bunch of the robed gentlemen gave me the A-OK back. The shutter tripped and the flash flashed, immortalizing our moment of cultural exchange.

I tipped my hat and moved on.

On the drive home my wife and I held hands. We discussed how we would compress a weekend's worth of chores into tomorrow. We're both involved in a museum exhibit going live in less than two weeks, and that's just one of the things jockeying for our attention and energies over the same span. Nobody's doing the dishes but we're each pulling off more than our share of little miracles to keep various sets of balls in the air...

In the rearview mirror the children's heads are slumped on their shoulders. Cherubs. Soon there are no more streetlights, and I can see Jupiter again.

"Where's the honeymoon?"

"Honolulu."

"Keen."

We cross the lawn to the Old Schoolhouse each saddled with a sleeping child. The air is crisp and autumnal. My wife remarks that she can see her breath and also Orion's Belt. Our steeple cuts the galaxy, the bell at Baade's Window.

"Are you going to write your chapter tomorrow?" whispers my wife, watching me watching the sky.

"Well, I'm going to write something."

And I have. Feeling the love of Hugh Grant shining down upon me, so help me I have.