The TV was now showing a long rock, a lump of clinker really, flipping over and over, catching light, then dark. Then another rock. Then back to the first rock again. Or it could have been a different one—it was hard to tell. And this, the announcer suddenly intoned, breaking in on a silence I hadn’t been aware of, is all the material that orbits this supposedly friendly cousin of our sun. No planets, no comets even. Despite all the studies of probability and orbital perturbation there was just dust and rubble here, a few of mile-long rocks.
There would no point now in waking the sleepers in their tunnels and tubes. Better instead to unfurl the solar sails and use the energy from this sun to find another one. After all, the next high-probability star lay a mere three light years away, and the sleepers could dream through the time of waiting. Those, anyway, who still survived...
I stood up and turned off the TV. Outside, I could hear a car coming. I opened the front door and stood watching as it pulled in from the road. Hardly a car at all really, or a van. Just a grey colourless block. But the doors opened, and the police emerged. I was expecting questions—maybe even a chance to break the news about the starship—but the police were faceless, hooded, dark. They pushed by me and into the house without speaking.
Outside, it was quite now. The noise of the neighbour’s party had ceased and there was just the sound and the smell of the sea. People would be too surprised to be disappointed. At least, at first. Sal had obviously seen it coming—or had known that there was nothing about this Starship Day that could change things for him. Death, after all, isn’t an option that you can ever quite ignore. And it’s never as random as people imagine, not even if it happens to a kid just out playing on a swing in their own back garden. Not even then. You always have to look for some kind of purpose and meaning and reason, even inside the dark heart of what seems like nothing other than a sick and pointless accident
The police came out again, lightly carrying something that might or might not have been Sal’s body. Before they climbed back into their grey van, one of them touched my shoulder with fingers as cool as the night air and gave me a scrap of paper. After they’d driven off, I got back into my car and took the road down into the now quite streets of Danous, and parked by the dark harbour, and went up the steps to my surgery.
It all seemed odd and yet familiar, to be sitting at my desk late on Starship Day with the PC humming. The screen flashed PLEASE WAIT. For what? How many years? Just how much longer will the dreamers have to go on dreaming? I felt in my pocket for the piece of paper and carefully typed in the long string of machine code. Then I hit return.
PLEASE WAIT
I waited. The words dribbled down off the screen, then the screen itself melted, and me with it, and then the room. The lifting of veils, knowing where and what I truly was, never came as the surprise I expected. Each time it got less so. I wondered about what Sal Mohammed had said to me in the dream of this morning. All that stuff about grey endless corridors—was he seeing where he really was? But I supposed that after this number of journeys and disappointments, after so many dead and lifeless suns, and now matter how well I did my job, it was bound to happen. How many starship days had there been now? How many years of silence and emptiness? And just how far were we, now, from Earth? Even here, I really didn’t want to think about that.
Instead, and as always, I kept busy, moving along the cold airless tunnels on little drifts of gas, my consciousness focused inside one of the starship’s few inner drones that was still truly functioning and reliable, even if it didn’t go quite straight now and I had to keep the sensors pointing to one side. Outside through the occasional porthole, I could see others like me who were helping to prepare the starship for another journey. A spindly thing like a spider with rivet guns on each of its legs went by, and I wondered about Erica, whether that really was her. I wondered whether it was actually possible, with your consciousness inside ancient plastic and metal, to laugh.
Details scrolled up of how many sleepers we’d lost this time. A good dozen. It mostly happened like Sal; not from soft or hard-systems failure, but simply because the dream of Danous ceased to work. That, anyway, was the only reason I could find. I paused now beside Sal’s coffin. Ice had frosted over the faceplate entirely. I reached out a claw to activate the screen beside him and saw that he was actually an even bigger loss than I’d imagined—a specialist in solar power. Just the kind of man we’d need on out there on some mythical friendly planet. Then I found my own coffin, and paused my hovering drone to look down through the face place at the grey and placid version of the features I saw each day in the mirror. In the coffin just above me—or below—was Hannah. Ah, Hannah, a few strands of brittle hair still nestled against her cheek, and that gold chain around her bare neck that she’d insisted on wearing back on Earth when we set out together on this great adventure. Just looking at her, part of me longed to touch, to escape these lenses and claws and get back into the dream. Next time, I promised myself, tomorrow, I’ll change, I’ll do things differently. No, I won’t screw John—Bernice. I might even admit to being unfaithful. After all, Hannah knows. She must know. It’s one of the things that’s keeping this sense of separateness between us.
I tilted the gas jets and drifted to the coffin that lay beside mine and Hannah’s. Like Sal’s, like so many others I’d passed, the faceplate was iced over, the contents desiccated by slow cold years of interstellar space. There was really no sign, now, of the small body that had once lived and laughed and dreamed with us inside it. Our child, gone, and with every year, with every starfall, with the hard cold rain that seeps through this starship, with every John, the chances of Hannah and I ever having another are lessened. But first, of course, we need that green or blue or red world. We need to awake and stretch or still limbs and breathe the stale ancient air that will flood these passages and move, pushing and clumsy, to one of the portholes, and peer out, and see the clouds swirling and the oceans and the forests and the deserts, and believe. Until then...
I snapped back out from the drone, passing down the wires into the main databank where Danous awaited. And yes, of course, the morning would be warm again, and perfect, with just a few white clouds that the sun will soon burn away. Nothing could be done, really, to make it better than it already is. There’s nothing I can change. And as I turned off my PC and left the surgery and climbed back into my car for the drive home, I could already feel the sense of expectation and disappointment fading. Tomorrow, after all, will always be tomorrow. And today is just today.
Rajii’s car was sitting in the drive, and he was inside in the lounge with Bernice and Hannah. I could hear them laughing as I banged the door, and the clink of their glasses.
“Where were you?” Rajii asked, lounging on the rug. Bernice pulled on a joint, and looked at me, and giggled. Hannah, too, seemed as happy and relaxed—as she generally gets by this time in the evening, although I haven’t quite worked out what it is that she’s taking.
I shrugged and sat down on the edge of a chair. “I was just out.”
“Here...” Hannah got up, her voice and movements a little slurred. “Have a drink, Owen.”
I ignored the glass she offered me. “Look,” I said, “I’m tired. Some of us have to work in the morning. I really must go to bed...”
So I went out of the room on the wake of their smoke and their booze and their laugher, feeling righteous, feeling like a sourpuss, wondering just what the hell I did feel. And I stripped and I showered and I stood in the darkness staring out of the window across our garden where the swing still hung beside the overgrown sandpit, rusting and motionless in the light of a brilliant rising Moon. And I could still hear the sound of Hannah and Bernice and Rajii’s laughter from down the hall and even sense, somehow, the brightness of their anticipation. I mean... What if... Who knows... Not even when... Not even when... Not even when... Not even...
Shaking my head, I climbed into bed and pulled over the sheets. And I lay there listing to their v
oices in the spinning darkness as I was slowly overtaken by sleep. In my dreams, I found that I was smiling. For tomorrow would be Starship Day, and anything could happen.
Afterword
Like many of my stories, “Starship Day” took me a year or two to write. Not that I was working on it all of that time—far from it—but, as I often do, I started the thing in a rush, setting it on another of my generic sunny islands, then got somewhat stuck and lost in too many options, and wandered off to get on with something else instead. Although I had a rough idea of how the story should end, I, like Owen, was waiting to find out exactly what the message from the stars would contain. The answer, of course, is a slightly more sophisticated version of the it-was-all-a-dream trope I remember using on Sunday afternoons to finish off my school homework when (much though I enjoyed writing even then) I wanted to get out and play football with my mates. Still, the way it turned out, it seems to me that “Starship Day” possesses some of the sadness and loneliness I’ve always associated with long space journeys—or at least since I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey at an impressionable age. What was missing until the story finally clicked was an understanding of the sense of futility that most of the characters in the story are somehow experiencing in their lives. As I recall, that realisation came soon after receiving a letter from a publisher rejecting a novel of mine. All too easy to say that I was able to turn that into something useful by finishing off “Starship Day”, but that certainly wasn’t how it felt at the time.
SECOND JOURNEY OF THE MAGUS
He travelled the same way, but there was heat this time instead of the dark of winter, and nothing of the lands which he had passed through more than thirty years before was the same. Gone were the quiet houses, the patchwork fields, the lowland shepherds offering to share their skins of wine. Instead, there were goats unmilked, bodies bloating in ditches, fruit left to rot on the branch. And people were fleeing, armies were marching. Fear and dust hazed the roads.
He followed hidden tracks. He camped quietly and alone. He lit no fire, ate raisins and dry bread. He spoke no prayers. Although an old man, weak and unarmed, he felt resignation rather than fear. His camel was of far greater value than he was, and he knew he could never to return to Persia. At least, alive. The Emperor, if he ever knew of his journey, would regard it as treason, and the Zoroastrian priests would scourge his body for honouring a false God.
He came at last to the Euphrates. There were palms and green hills rising from the marshes, but the villages all around were empty. He sat down by the broad blue river as his camel drank long and loud, and quietly mourned for his two old friends. Melchior, who had first read of that coming birth in the scriptures of a primitive tribe. Gaspar, who had found the right quadrant in the stars to pilot their way. And, he, Balthasar, who had accompanied them because he had ceased to believe in anything, and wished to see the emptiness of all the world and the entire heavens proven with his own eyes. That, he supposed, was why he had chosen to bring an unguent for embalming corpses as his gift for this king he never expected to find.
A boat was moored, nudging anxiously into the current as if feared to be left alone in this greenly desolate place. It was evening by the time Balthasar had refound his resolve and persuaded his half-hobbled camel to board the vessel with murmured spells, then made small obeisance to the gods of the river, and poled into the inky currents beyond the reeds. The sky in the west darkened as sprites of wind played around him, but, even as the moon rose and stars strung the heavens, even as he re-moored the boat on the far side and set off across a land which soon withered to desert, the western horizon ahead remained aflame.
He knew enough about war to understand the dark eddies and stillnesses which he had already witnessed on his journey, but it seemed to him that the battleground he encountered as the dawn sun rose at his back and brightness glared ahead was the stillest, darkest place on earth. All Persians should be grateful, he supposed, that this resurgent Hebrew kingdom had turned its wrath against the Empire of Rome. A strategist would even say that war between powerful neighbours can only bring good to your own lands—he had heard that very thing said in the bars of Kuchan—but that presupposed some balance in the powers which fought each other. There was no balance here. There was only death.
Blackened skulls. Blackened chariots. Heaps of bone, terribly disordered. The way the Roman swords and shields were melted as if put to the furnace. The way the helmets were caved in as if crushed between giant fists. Worst still, somehow, was the sheer value of what had been left here, ignored, discarded, when every battlefield Balthasar had ever witnessed or heard of in song was a place ripe for looting. This great Roman army, with its engines and horses, with the linked plate metal walls of irresistibly fearless men and raining arrows, had been obliterated as if by some fiery hurricane. And then everything simply left. It was hard to find a way across this devastation. He had to blindfold his camel and sooth the moaning creature with quite visions of oases to keep it calm. He wished that he could blindfold himself, but, strangely, there was nothing here to offend his mouth and nose. There were no flies even as his feet sunk through puddled offal as he climbed mountains of bones. The only smell was a faint one of some odd kind of perfume, such as the waft you might catch from the beyond the curtains of the temple of some unknowable god.
The noon sun was hot, but the blaze in the west had grown brighter still. He remembered that star, the one which Gaspar had been so certain would somehow detach itself from the heavens to lead them. Had it now reignited and settled here on earth? Was that what lay ahead? He swathed his face against the burning light and drifting ash. It seemed to him now that he’d always been destined to re-take this journey at the end of his life. If nothing else, it was due as penance.
The three men who had taken this journey before had thought themselves wise, and were acknowledged in their own lands as priests, kings, magi. Then, unmistakably even to Balthasar’s dubious gaze, a single star had hovered before them, and did not move as the rest of the heavens revolved. It went beyond all reason. It destroyed everything he understood, but the people they asked as they passed through this primitive outpost of the Roman Empire could speak of nothing in their ragged tongue but vague myths of an ancient king called David, and of a great uprising to come. They did not understand the stars, or the ancient scripts. They only understood the gold which the three magi laid upon their palms.
Finally, though, they reached the city called Jerusalem. It was the administrative capital of this little province, and truly, from its fallen walls and the pomp with which the priests of the local god bore themselves, it did seem to be the remnant of a somewhere which had once been far greater. The local tetrarch was called Herod, and even to the cultured eyes of the three magi, his palace was suitably grand. It was constructed on a sheer stone platform with high walls looking out across the city, and surrounded by groves of fine trees, bronze fountains, glittering canals. Thus, the three magi thought, as they were led through mosaic-studded halls, does the Rome honour and sustain those who submit to its power.
They were put at their ease. They were given fine quarters, soft clean beds and hot baths. Silken girls brought them sherbet. Dancing girls danced barefoot. Here, at last, they felt that they were being treated as the great emissaries that they truly were. Herod, bloated on his throne, struck Balthasar as little man made large. But he could converse in the Greek, and the three magi could think of no reason why they should not ask for his advice as to the furtherance of their quest. And that advice was given—generously, and without pause. Astrologers were summoned. Holy books were unfurled, and the bearded priests of this region who clustered around them agreed that, yes, such was the prophecy of which these ancient scriptures spoke—of a new king, of the lineage of a king called David who had once made this city great in the times of long ago. The three magi were sent on their way from Jerusalem with fresh camels, full bellies and happy hearts. Herod, they agreed, as they rode toward the star which now seemed even b
righter in the firmament, might be a slippery oaf, but at least he was a hospitable one.
The roads were clogged. It was the calling, apparently, of a census, despite it being the worst time of the year. Not an auspicious moment, either, Balthasar couldn’t help thinking, for a woman to travel if she was heavy with child. He discussed again with Melchior as they pushed with the crowds and the sleeting rain past the camps of centurions and lines of crucified criminals. Remind me again—is this child supposed to be a man, or a god? But the answer he got from his friend remained meaningless. For how can the answer be both yes, and yes? How can something be both? Difficulties, then, with finding somewhere to reside, for all the documents of passage Herod had so kindly given them, and Gaspar’s navigation was no longer so sure. For all that this star glowed out at them like a jewel set in the firmaments both day and night, no one could offer guidance on their quest, and none bar a few wandering shepherds seemed to notice that the star was even there.
Then they came at last to a small town by the name of Bethlehem, and it was already night, and it was clear that whatever this strange light in the heavens signalled had happened here. They enquired at the inns. They spoke once again to the so-called local wise men, although this time, more warily. They made no mention of gods or kings. At the start of this journey, Balthasar had imagined himself—although he had never believed it would truly happen—being led to some glowing presence which would rip down the puny veils of this world. But he realised now that whatever it was that they sought would be painfully humble, and all three magi had began to fear for the fate of the family involved.
It was a stable, at the back of the cheapest and most overcrowded of all the inns. They would have been sent away entirely had not Melchior known to ask as the door was being slammed in their faces about a family from a placed called Nazareth. So they had reached the place toward which the star and the prophecies long been leading them, on the darkest and most hopeless of nights, and in coldest time of the year. There was mud, of course, and there was the ordure. There was little shelter. Precious little warmth, as well, apart from that which came from the fartings and breathings of the animals. The woman was still exhausted from birth, and she had laid the baby amid the straw in a feeding trough, and the man seemed… not, it struck Balthasar, the way any proud husband should. He was dumbstruck, and in awe.
Nowhere: Volume II of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod Page 28