THE DOPPLER EFFECT

THE DOPPLER EFFECT

A quasar pulses red at the plane’s tail; together they move slowly across the night sky. I am still; the centre. Horizontally the plane’s fixed course unwinds, barring disaster. We travel together as gravity’s skin bag of air holds us to the earth.

The plane recedes from view. The dull engine hum falls in pitch: a shift towards the red.

I step out into space. The earth is distant as any star, flashing in the blackness.

I cannot judge distances. Injustices advance and recede, turning as slowly as planets. It is the year’s last day and it is dark. Nothing comes. I move outward like a star.

On each point of light, far, uncounted, a Floristan succumbs to a Pizarro.

There is no trumpet call. All three are slaughtered. Pizarro rules like a secular god. Nations recede, advance, moving as slowly as injustice. So many. I had not thought life had repressed so many. Released from jail in their mid-fifties harder than the quick kind shots of Murat’s cavalry on Príncipe Pío; impossible to paint their slow decline; or the exile in Cuba of those who limp to death, far from their belovéd Quebec. Heroic songs are born of tanks in the street, of sudden, bloody wars; not the tedious aftermath, the grinding of the years, the systematic repression of half a continent, half

a planet, half a star. Space is cold. The lights are distant. Everything is so far. Impossible to detect any motion. Yet the universe is silently expanding. Motionless together, we are moving towards something on our capsule of earth, this insignificant terminal brightness. I gaze into dark; find a point of light. The earth? A star? Or something else? It does not matter. All that does matter:

its motion relative to mine. Newton hands me his fire-born prism. Herschel and Ritter lean at my shoulder. My pulse beats faster.

The hum in my ears changes its pitch. Does it rise or fall?

Colours burst from the prism across my face: the Doppler shift from violet to red? or from red to violet? I cannot tell.

The spectrum blurs. Recession or approach? Does it move, or do I?

The equation, n = n (1 + v over c), should work, but it doesn’t.

The distance of the star is paramount. If too near, or far, or if I, in my haste, storm it with a charge, or back away too soon, too late, taking up sword or pen, in artificial fury of the brain too long delayed, then everything would be lost.

It is cold. I close my eyes. Black yields to violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red morning. Overhead the stars are gone. The planes that cross their horizontal course are black against the sun. The quasar’s lost, its spectral lines displaced towards the red.