Bannister
A picture is worth a thousand words. But Pandora Rising could inspire a thousand pictures.
The artist had read and liked her story! And that would’ve been enough to please her, so much more than enough—but then another ellipsis appeared under their message.
Bannister
Hi Aaron, it’s good to meet you.
6
A notification appeared at the top of Ethan’s thread with the unknown number.
Aaron Forster (Maybe)—Create New Contact?
He ignored the prompt for the moment and opened a search tab.
A query for theGalacticawriter’s name in JSTOR and a few other digital libraries returned no academic papers or books attributed to Aaron Forster. Public accounts on social media sites were uninformative. No useful results populated from a more general web scan. Yes, an Aaron Forester had fought in World War II, but the odds of that centenarian and the author of “Pandora Rising” being the same person were slim. No criminal records were listed for the name, either. In fact, the only result anywhere online for Aaron Forster came fromGalactica Magazine’s June contributor credits.
Maybe Forster was just private with his digital life.
Or maybe he also wrote under a pseudonym?
Ethan had chosen “Bannister” during a required undergraduate humanities course at Berkeley: History of American Art, 1700– 1900. The pastoral livestock scenes weren’t to his taste. He’d preferred the psychological work of later artists like Sigmund Abeles and the sharp, monochromatic photographs of Ansel Adams. But the class had introduced him to Edward Mitchell Bannister, an oil painter of the American Barbizon school who shared his E.M. initials.
Bannister had seemed a convenient choice for an alias, obtuse enough for anonymity and also self-referential…
Create New Contact?
Yes.
Forster’s number began with a 650, he noticed now. It was an area code specific to the San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, divisions along the peninsula that ran south from San Francisco to the urban sprawl of San Jose. Maybe Forster was based in the Bay Area, or had attended college here? However, given how frequently people moved in and out of Silicon Valley, a 650 code was no guarantee that the writer still lived in the region.
Not that it mattered—Aaron Forster was a stranger.
But his message thread was also the only conversation not related to SVLAC or from the Meyer family on Ethan’s phone, and it was past eleven o’clock on a Friday. Even if Redwood City’s pedestrian street of restaurants and movie theaters in the town center was still active, its industrial sector had powered down for the night. His neighbors were quiet, doors closed and water off. Bunsen was snoring across his feet in front of the couch, drooling on his socks and twitching with dreams of frisbees. He had to admit that he’d reached his limit for working on the Eischer-Langhoff application, too. He’d never been a great writer, but he’d articulated his funding requirements coherently and his data was perfect. An exhale and a click sent his twice-revised draft to Dr. Kramer for review.
He closed his computer and picked up his phone again.
A typing notification had appeared on the screen.
Wherever and whoever Aaron Forster was, he was awake and writing to Bannister about his art—and not just to make a print order from his website, either. Not that he’d had many. Several earlier magazines had rejected his work, praising his technical skills while claiming that his visuals made viewers uncomfortable. OnlyGalacticahad been niche or desperate enough to publish “Hunger.” But this exchange wasn’t a transaction, or a rejection, or a last resort acceptance. Forster had felt so strongly—strongly, and positively—about “Hunger” that he’d reached out to Ethan directly. Forster, the mastermind behind “Pandora Rising,” who wrote both imaginatively and surprisingly accurately about astrophysics.
He’d read enough science fiction to know when a writer was bullshitting through explanations about time travel or quantum tunneling. Most did. He couldn’t even blame them for web-searching their way to plausible expertise. Physics was beautifully, brutally difficult.
Forster, though?
Forster knew his subject matter well enough to write simply. He understood his science—and Ethan’s art.
Ping.
Forster
Have you read any Ted Chiang? Your art reminds me of how he dissects mind and matter in Exhalation. Also, the symmetry from Story of Your Life.
Chiang’s story collection was bookmarked on his nightstand.
Of course, Forster read science fiction. That he’d name-dropped Ted Chiang wasn’t odd either, since Chiang was a prominent writer in the genre, and had won multiple Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards. His novellaArrivalhad even inspired a major Hollywood film. So the coincidence of Forster mentioning Chiang just when Ethan was readingExhalation: Storieswas easily explained by extant data.
