The comfort of distant s.., p.1
The Comfort of Distant Stars, page 1
Also by I.O. Echeruo
Expert in All Styles
First published in Great Britain in 2026
by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2026 by Canongate Books
Copyright © I.O. Echeruo, 2026
The right of I.O. Echeruo to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Extract from Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe published by Penguin Classics. Copyright © Chinua Achebe, 1958. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Limited.
Extract from On lifelong friend Michele Besso, in a letter of condolence to the Besso family, March 21, 1955, less than a month before his own death. Einstein Archive 7-245 © The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Reprinted with permission of the Albert Einstein Archives.
Extract from Our Sister Killjoy by Ama Ata Aidoo © Ama Ata Aidoo 1977, 2025. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
Canongate supports copyright, which exists to encourage creativity by making sure that authors, artists and other creative people can be fairly rewarded for their work. Copyright allows authors control over the use and reproduction of their work. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. Canongate expressly reserves this work from text and data mining (Article 4(3) Directive (EU) 2019/790). By buying books (as well as borrowing them from the library) you are supporting authors and publishers and making new and original work possible.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 83726 333 2
eISBN 978 1 83726 334 9
The manufacturer’s authorised representative in the EU for product safety is BGC
Sustainability & Compliance, 7 avenue du Général Leclerc, Paris 75014
(gpsr@baldwinglobalconsulting.com)
In Loving Memory
of My Brother:
Okechukwu Chima Echeruo
5 April 1971, Ibadan, Western State, Federal Republic of Nigeria
2 July 2015, Kent, Washington State, United States of America
People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Albert Einstein
Time by itself means nothing, no matter how fast it moves, unless we give it something to carry for us; something we value.
Ama Ata Aidoo
There is no story that is not true.
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
CONTENTS
PART I
1 The Importance of Eggs
2 If You Want to Know Me
3 The Appearance of the Maid
4 The Distinguished Professor
5 The Time I Still Had Friends
6 Fluid Dynamics
PART II
7 The Migrant Bird
8 Black Body Radiation
9 Sun Gods and White Girls
10 Our Friend Jesus
11 In Ordinary Time
12 Perpetual Perishing Presents
PART III
13 The Varieties of Marital Experience
14 Relativity and the Problem of Space
15 The Copenhagen Interpretation
16 The Speed of Causality (or the Permeability and Permittivity of Space)
17 Decoherence Time
18 The Burial of the Dead
PART I
1
THE IMPORTANCE OF EGGS
The Clearing
One cannot understand life without understanding time. Perhaps that is why the truly insightful child is eager to know which comes first – the chicken or the egg.
When I was barely three years old, I was plucked from my bed, taken to a clearing in a dense, lush forest and made a high chief. The title conferred upon me was the greatest, a title that would take an accomplished, brave, virtuous man a lifetime to obtain.
The rain came down in a cascade of pale beads that broke as they stung my skin and forced me to squint and then close my eyes. I could feel Anyanwu’s rough palms grab my hand, dragging me in the direction of his steps. The red, clayey soil, caught between my toes, made me feel that I would slip. I could barely make out shapes in the half-light of the storm. Everything was green and slicked with rain. The air smelt like burnt iron. I felt tired. But I responded to Anyanwu’s pull.
There were others on the path. They appeared to be following me. I could hear the voices. But their words were drowned by the kernels of rain falling hard on the leaves and the soft echo of that harsh sound off the wet, green foliage. The voices rose and fell, and I imagined that they were arguing among themselves. In one instant, as the voices dropped, I came to believe the argument was over how much money they would get when they sold me and the share each would receive. I was frightened. The thought had come to me clear and complete, in a manner that I would later learn to refer to as an epiphany.
My first instinct was to share this suspicion with Anyanwu. However, I immediately realised that, if they were going to sell me, Anyanwu would surely be in the conspiracy, since he was the one holding my hand and leading the way. While I was still digesting this thought, the voice patterns behind me changed and I heard what sounded like a woman’s voice rising and then falling. I was seized with the idea that the woman was telling the others that I was hungry and needed to be fed. And her concern was sincere, not to fatten me up for sale or slaughter.
Decades later, when I shared the story of this dawn with my wife, she would say the thing she found most remarkable was that at just three years old I had somehow internalised the concept that people could sell others. I reflected on her comment, but I could not understand why anyone would think this the most notable part of the story. This conversation took place in that season when she was taking hormone shots that would enable a technician to harvest eggs from her follicles, a necessary step in the production of the child we were both claiming we wanted. ‘Well, context is important. It’s West Africa after all,’ I responded. ‘For literally two centuries, high commerce consisted of kidnapping your neighbours and selling them off. Some of that must have still been lingering in the air.’ She would smile weakly and look away. Eighteen months after this conversation our only child, Njoku, conceived of a donated egg, would be delivered in a clean, white hospital room in New York City.
*
As if commanded, the rain abruptly stopped and the sun emerged from the clouds, its yellow rays badgering my half-closed eyelids. I opened my eyes. We had come into a clearing in the forest. In the centre stood the trunk of a huge Orji tree, sawed off at about the height of a man’s stomach and scraped and sanded till it was flat. I heard the trailing, arguing party enter the clearing and immediately stop speaking. As if they had had a sudden, collective, epiphany.
The tree trunk was alive. Even though the branches and leaves were gone, the roots reached into the earth and large mushrooms were growing low on its side. I was disturbed by the incongruous juxtaposition – that a thing could be alive when all its critical functions had been cut off. I stared, wondering how the tree reconciled itself to living when it had become a table. I stretched out my hand and touched one of the trunk’s large roots.
The people in the clearing started speaking again. Most of them were men and women I recognised. At their centre was my mother. She walked up and knelt to wrap her arms around me. Her perfume and its fragrance of fixed flowers filled my nose and comforted me. ‘How did you know this would be here?’ she asked. And it was then, following her hand, I noticed – sitting on the burnished trunk – white eggs in a clay bowl and a trussed cockerel.
I did not understand my mother’s question, nor did I have a clear sense of where I was or what I was doing. Before I could tell her, seventeen elderly men entered the clearing. I counted each one. Unlike the members of the first party, who were relatives and neighbours, these men were completely unknown to me. They wore identical checkered black, red and white cloth tied around their bodies with the loose end draped over one shoulder. Each had a bracelet of red beads wound around one wrist. Their feet were bare, like mine. No one remarked on their appearance. I looked around for Anyanwu. I didn’t see him.
A tall man with a greying beard and a hard, handsome face cleared his throat. ‘Today, we will make him a titled man.’ He raised his hand and pointed at me. ‘There were many who doubted. I will add myself to that count. But now, the child – by himself – has brought us all to this place.’
For the first time he looked at me. He smiled, then looked away as his face hardened. ‘Those that are still asking: “How can we confer the title Ezeani, the highest Ozo title, on a child that has just stopped sucking on his mother’s breasts?” Let Odukwe the Diviner speak. Let no one say they do not know why we, the Nze na Ozo, did this thing.’ He paused, pulled at his checkered cloth and threw it over his right shoulder.
The speaker’s gaze fell on a man with a bad eye – a pale blue disk floating in a white, cloudy fluid – and a large, bushy beard. The man’s clothes were dirty and tattered rags, and a large goatskin bag hung from his shoulders. His good eye darted from side to side as if he was sizing up the gathering. I concluded he was Odukwe, the Diviner.
‘This woman’s child will not sleep at night.’ Od ukwe raised his arm and pointed at my mother. ‘She says he wanders through the house muttering strange things. And from birth no month has gone by when he hasn’t fallen so sick that she has feared his death. Many of you here have witnessed it. They have taken him to the doctors that hang things around their necks at the hospital, but no one has been able to tell them what is wrong with the child.’ The Diviner paused. His face was fixed on my mother. My mother started to sob quietly.
‘She told me,’ he said, turning and pointing at me, ‘that this child told her, with his own mouth, that he will die if Umudim does not honour him for the greatness he has conferred on it. When she asked him why, the small child you see before you scolded her and said, “Do you not know how greatly I have honoured Umudim by being born here?”’
Suddenly, abruptly, the Diviner sat on the ground and straightened his legs. He reached into his bag and brought out a carved wooden circle and a piece of chalk. ‘She brought him to me, and I have consulted. And it is true. I asked the lizard, and the lizard asked me to ask the nza bird; I asked the bird, and it whispered to me that Anyanwu, the Sun God himself, was eager that this small boy should die so he and the child can converse freely in the spirit world. It was this whispering which made me know immediately that we must convince the child to stay by conferring on him an Ozo title. And not just any Ozo title, but the Ezeani. Why are we to give to a mere child a title which we don’t confer on even the most accomplished man? Because Anyanwu knows all things and the child knows something. Let him stay with his kinsmen and perhaps we too will know some of what he knows.’ As the Diviner spoke, he drew a horizontal line across the circle with the chalk. Then he drew a vertical line that bisected it in the middle. Then various intersecting diagonal lines, until the lines looked like a starburst.
As he spoke and drew, I stared at him. His story was vivid, but I couldn’t reconcile anything he said with the sense I had of myself. I certainly had no memory of any of these events. I had no memory of ever having seen the Diviner.
My first memory is of that walk in a thunderstorm to a clearing in the forest where I was acclaimed a titled lord of Umudim. An egg was broken on my head, the yolk and albumen running down my face – that came first. Then the cockerel’s neck was sliced; spurts of its blood showered on me and then the half-alive creature was cast aside, its body hopping in spasms until the blood stopped spurting and the mass of wet feathers stayed still. A few words were spoken, and the seventeen men bent their heads in supplication to me. ‘Ezeani! Ezeani!’ they hailed. When they came to greet me, they were amazed that I knew all their names and called each by his highest title.
Most people call me Ezeani. They do not realise they have addressed me by my title and not my name. This has happened for practical and easily inferred reasons. My mother and siblings were compelled to refer to me by this title and not my name. A titled man could not be addressed in any other way by any he exceeded in rank. Everyone else, hearing my family refer to me in this way, assumed Ezeani was my name and so addressed me. This of course would have the ancillary, if unintended, effect of ensuring that they too complied with an edict that many of them would have laughed at, especially in application to a child as small as I was then. It is the reason that on my passports and official documents (except my birth certificate) my name is given as Ezeani Kobidi.
I was tired after the ceremony. My mother noticed and put me on her back to carry me on the path back to our home. I wore the red coral bead bracelet that signified my title on my right wrist. One of the seventeen elders could not help chuckling. ‘A titled man that rides on his mother’s back,’ he said, suppressing a smile. But I kept falling asleep and I did not hear or see anyone else’s response. Occasionally, I would be awoken by the voices of the party raised in some sort of argument. Once, the voices that woke me were aimed at my mother and me. They sought direction on the best path back to our village. I was irritated by the disturbance and wished only to get back to sleep. ‘Why don’t you ask Anyanwu?’ I muttered and nestled my head deeper against my mother’s back.
‘Which Anyanwu?’ my mother turned to the Diviner to ask. ‘The God or a man? Is anyone here called Anyanwu?’ The Diviner himself seemed confused, and there was uncertainty in his bad eye whose blue disk focused on me. I felt the bad eye was intent on conveying a slovenly insolence, but I ignored it. The Diviner’s good eye darted from one side of his face to the other. He raised his hand and pointed to a path on the right of us. ‘I recognise that tree. In a short time, we will be in the village.’
Before he had finished speaking, I had been carried off by the oblivion of sleep. My time stopped. Things happened that I did not see or hear. When I woke, I was lying on a hand-carved recliner chair in our sitting room and my brother Nnamdi was seated beside me, playing with the red Ozo bracelet on my wrist. My sister Obiageli sat on the floor beside the chair making clothes for her dolls with scraps of cloth and safety pins. ‘Where did they take you?’ she turned to ask me.
I had no clear idea of age then, but I understood that my sister was older than my brother, who was in turn – in some sense that I did not then comprehend – older than me. My brother was still playing with the red coral bead bracelet, sliding it up and down my arm. Suddenly, in a quick movement, he slipped it off my wrist and started to put it on his own. I could sense that he was about to run off and, instinctively, I grabbed the Ozo bracelet at the same time as his arm was moving away. The bracelet, pulled at two ends by forces greater than the tensile strength of the string that held its beads together, disintegrated, and the red coral scattered around the tiled floor. My brother looked stunned. I started shouting and then crying loudly.
The Family Portrait
My earliest memories were of this time when we lived in our village. Before my father’s return and the move from the village house in Umudim to the modern bungalow in the university campus at Ibadan. The things I remember, I recall vividly and clearly. But there is much that must have happened then of which I have no memory. My father had left us to go to Brown, a university in Providence, Rhode Island, to get his PhD. I heard all this later. At the time I did not actually understand who he was.
There was a picture in the house in Umudim, framed and positioned on the front wall of our living room, of my father, my mother and my elder brother and sister. My parents were seated, and my sister was standing in between my father’s legs with his right hand on her shoulder. My brother was sitting on my mother’s lap and her left hand was wrapped around his stomach. My brother had an enormous smile on his face. My mother’s smile was only slightly dimmer and there was joy in her eyes. My sister was not smiling but her eyes had a hopeful look. They were focused on the lens of the camera as if from this focus a smile could come. My father – the man who I didn’t know – had an enigmatic half-smile, like one who had still not made up his mind.
I looked at this picture often in my many comings and goings from that room and there was a quality about it that disturbed me greatly. One day I voiced my discontent: ‘Why am I not in that photo?’ I demanded, pointing at the photograph.
‘You weren’t born yet,’ my brother replied, chuckling.
‘It’s a picture of my whole family, and I am not in it,’ I continued, placing my hands on my hips to emphasise my displeasure.
‘But my dear Ezeani, you weren’t born when the picture was taken,’ my mother said. She was smiling quite pleasantly. I must tell you that I could not comprehend the point she was making.
‘Why did you take the picture without me?’ I asked. ‘Where was I when you were taking the photo?’
My sister Obiageli put her hand on my shoulder. ‘We couldn’t take the picture with you because you weren’t born,’ she whispered in my ear.
This was perhaps the first instance I can recall of the sense I had, for most of my life actually, of seeing less than others, comprehending less, understanding less. Things seemed to elude me. I couldn’t make sense of what seemed obvious to everyone else.
The realisation would come to me much later in life that this was almost the exact opposite of the case. When this realisation arrived, it was a surprise. It was in the three years when I earned my PhD in theoretical physics and published four of my best papers. Those years when the only words that came out of my mouth were ‘Yes’, ‘No’ and ‘Undetermined’.
