by Jerry
“Space really caught you, didn’t it?” Halson asked.
“Yeah, you wouldn’t believe how matchless it is. No alternative, you’ve got to receive the memory firsthand to understand.”
“That’s good.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You’ll have something if she rejects you.” I tried to imagine that. Failed. It was a null zone, one whose edges were painful to probe. “You think she might?”
“Dunno. This is all beyond me. I can’t think how I’d react if some woman turned up with the memories of one of my former lovers, professing undying love. Maybe the New Puritans are right to keep their minds free of contamination, after all. We don’t seem to be doing so good out of it. Take Gilchrist, does bioware serve him, or him it? That’s the measure of technology, it ought to exist to lighten life’s load.”
“If you’re asking does it make him happy, then the answer is yes.”
Gilchrist’s happiness gathered cohesion all throughout that long week in Clumber Park, a function of expectation. Catherine was his grand prize, a sketch of total normality. The other player in his quintessential boy-meets-girl opera. A first love idyll that would rejuvenate the dreadfully jaded soul inside the youthful body. He could shadow the unique sweetness she’d experience, savouring it all year long, an emotional parasite.
She never knew how calculated his moves were. I could see the trust she placed in him, the value in which she held his words. At nights I would lie awake watching her succumb.
I remember her face, not beautiful, but pretty, a long nose, narrow eyes, thin lips. Looking through Gilchrist’s eyes I can see the interest he awakens, the delight, the insidious growth of dependence.
They walk together through the park, skirting the lake, finding the small mock-Hellenic temple opposite the ruined Christian chapel. A perfect setting for young lovers; the rain has left it clean and shining, droplets refracting a multitude of rainbow coronas.
I can feel the warmth of her hand in his, squeezing firmly as if she’s afraid he’ll break free. There’s her high voice confiding childhood’s secrets and more recent ambitions. Cautious at first, eyes alert for his mockery.
Then his thorax grumbles softly, and I hear his murmurs of encouragement, dredging up or inventing similar incidents of his own youth. Never telling her how far away they are. Each one superbly timed, reinforcing the bond of apparent similarity.
Bastard. A puppet master. Unequalled.
His eyes lingering on her breasts and legs. His heart quickening with excitement, a dryness in his throat, warmth in his belly. He’s so sure.
And all the time she falls deeper. She can’t see it. Nobody could, he’s that good. Even her parents take a shine to him.
When the New Puritans disperse, Gilchrist and Catherine are left behind in the centre of an empty glade of solemn elms and gilded gorse.
I rolled out my sleeping bag on Slowdancer’s deck around eleven o’clock. We were passing through Burton on Trent, not that there was much to see. Rectangles of light, and dark geometric shadows silhouetted against a nebulous horizon. The town had pretty much shut down for the night.
I couldn’t sleep, muscles knotted with high voltage dubiety, waiting for morning. I lay on my back. The sky was clear, leaving the Halo visible, a thin hoary arc stretching across the southern sky. Hazy tonight, there must’ve been a lot of high-altitude vapour. It isn’t a patch on Saturn’s rings, but as an inspiration for poets, dreamers and lovers, it’s unrivalled.
The Americans and Russians started it seventy years ago; thumping asteroids into Earth orbit with nukes, then fragmenting them into big chunks. They counted on the Kessler Syndrome to carry it from there.
The Kessler Syndrome: pack enough of those rock chunks in one orbit and engineer a collision between two; it’ll produce a hornet swarm of gravel and boulders, triggering a cascade of secondary collisions. Once it starts it’s a chain reaction. Unstoppable.
Theory had the original chunks being pulverised into sand, producing a broad, high-albedo shield, cutting down the solar infall. It was supposed to kill the Warming dead in its tracks.
They abandoned it fifty-five years ago. There were multiple factors the Currency Fold, Gulf Deluge, rickety central governments, but mainly it was the plants. Genetailoring had come into its own, and seeds were both cheap and self-replicating. They were an answer people could understand, blossoming all around them, seen to be working; not some remote macro-project solution. Earth’s last space programme went the way of all the others. Flawed by bright brash optimism, shot down by politicians.
It’s starting to break up now. Tides generating small whirlpool accretions of particles, which grow larger with each year. Solar wind blowing the dust motes out into interplanetary space.
The Halo hung low above Burton-on-
Trent, a handle you could lift the Earth with. It reminded me of the irregular F-ring.
The probe sank in towards Saturn, passing three hundred thousand kilometres inside Titan. I had the impression of a ball of amber mist hovering in space; the smoothness seemed malleable somehow. I wanted to reach out and stroke it, make it mine.
Was that why Gilchrist had sent the probe? Did he hold ambitions of terraforming it? The right elements were there, frozen—nitrogen in the atmosphere, ice in the rings—waiting fortechnology and determination to thaw them out, fuse them. My generation doesn’t have that kind of selfbelief. But Gilchrist, victor from an age where problems were solvable, he’d be drawn to the challenge. And he practised eternal patience, biding his time until his era returned.
I watched Titan fall behind, strangely attracted to the thought of what could be. My mind was free to roam, speculating, wishing with an uninhabited freshness I hadn’t exercised since I was a child. It was all part of the voyager’s magic. Out here nothing was impossible.
Approach phase. Months spent watching the planet expanding to dominate the probe optronics. With the particle sensors linked in I can feel the storm of ions sweeping out from the rings.
The electric breeze blows straight at me as I cruise inwards, swinging round towards the penumbra. Rings shimmer with auroral phosphorescence, starlight twinkling through. If I had eyes, I would cry.
The Halo above Clumber Park that first night was radiant with reflected moonlight. It was intense enough to dapple the grass on the floor of the glade, silver beams streaming through the leaves.
I remember how it painted Catherine’s pale skin with a platinum sheen. A gossamer silvan creature lying on Gilchrist’s air-mattress under the open night sky, shivering in delight beneath his skilful tender fingertips.
It was so grossly unfair. Sex with Gilchrist was exquisite. It couldn’t be anything else. A hundred and fifty seven years of experience, guile, and cunning, put into practise with all the vitality which came with a twenty-one year old body.
I try and forget, to smother it in a crust of guilt and shame. But it’s a temptation beyond my strength. I keep returning to spy on her. Safe in the heart of the forest, uninhibited, alone with her diabolically talented lover.
I can feel his lips parting in a triumphant smile. She doesn’t recognise it for what it is. Never guessing that her orgasm is a forgery, that it is simply a chapter in his Grand Romance. For it is a beautiful forgery, far superior to any original masterpiece. But, still, a forgery.
“Tea?” Lori asked.
I blinked awake. I’d missed the dawn. The Halo was a suggestion of a line in the pink watercolour sky. Venus stared out of the horizon. Tranquility was organic to the scene.
Lori stood over me, wearing a brown chunky wool sweater with worn elbows, and baggy olive-green trousers tucked into suede boots. First light had brought a wash of cool air with it, everything was coated in dew, even my sleeping bag. Her eyebrows arched inquiringly; there was a mug in her hand, steaming. The brew smelt slightly minty.
“Sure,” I croaked. I must’ve looked wrecked.
She smiled, a quick flicker of ivory teeth. “
Two hours, and we’ll be in Nottingham.”
“Great.” I struggled to a sitting position, and accepted the mug.
Lori pushed her hands in her trouser pockets and inhaled loudly, looking about. “Good day to be alive. Good omen.”
“I hope so.”
“Catherine really means that much to you?”
I ducked a nod and drank some more of the tea. Hot and bitter, just right. “You think I’m crazy?”
“No.” She shook her head, then sat next to me, looking out over the prow. “This devotion of yours. No girl is going to walk past that without a glance. I didn’t.”
“Halson?”
“That’s right.” She hugged her legs, smiling secretively. “I was drifting, just like you. Came on board Slowdancer at Skipton, on the Leeds and Liverpool canal. He said he wouldn’t let me off till we were married. Didn’t either.” Her eyes met mine, shining bright. She shrugged ruefully. “Small story. Lacks encouragement. Sorry.”
“Nice ending, though. That’s what counts.”
“Yeah. At least we wound up with Andria. It doesn’t come much better.”
“But Gilchrist dropped her from such a high place, Lori. I guess I’m a little bit frightened what I’m going to find. The shock of me appearing so soon after him. Catherine is hardly likely to be objective about me. It’s scary, instinct is going to rule. She might not give me a chance to explain. That’s all I want, just to talk to her, to set the record straight.”
Lori looked back down the river. “We all of us have our heart broken sometime. It hurts, hurts bad when it happens, but it isn’t lethal. In the long run it even helps. She’s young, she’ll do all right.”
“But she knows nothing that good will ever happen again. And the trouble is, she’s right. While they were together, it was magnificent. I’ve lived through each one of those days they had, and I can’t match Gilchrist. Education, class, style, humour, wisdom, he’s got them all, they’re intrinsic.”
“You’ve got something he hasn’t. Most important of all.”
“What?”
“Honesty.”
Gilchrist was clever taking Catherine to a city. She’d visited before, of course, dived in, skipped through markets and shops, then dived out before nightfall. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating. But the point is, she didn’t know the flip-side, didn’t even know it existed. To her, city houses were New Puritan caravans which didn’t move.
Gilchrist changed that, he gave her the diversity, the pace, the electric colours, the vices. Supported her through the giddiness as her senses were swamped by the intricacies and differences and dangers. He changed her. Inwardly, her perception, her outlook, was gradually warped away from that delighted acceptance of everything life threw at her. He taught her to recognise the shifty black currents below the thriving surface, the necromantic network of oiled politicians, traders and bureaucrats which branched down every street.
Even after that. After she’d learnt cynicism, and shrewdness, and self interest. After the roughcut country girl had been laid to rest. I still loved her. So did Gilchrist. She’d matured, blossomed, acquired poise and elegance, a hint of devilment. She was complete.
They set up home in a converted bookshop on the second floor of what used to be an arcade of exclusive shops. The long main room had a plate glass frontage, looking out over the arcade’s mock-Edwardian interior. Catherine filled it with big potted palms and Indian rugs and cane chairs; covered its bare plaster walls with charcoal prints of extinct animals, a long frieze of animated foxes and badgers and robins.
There was a storeroom at the back, with a tall vaulting window that gave the briefest glimpse of the river Trent to anyone standing on tiptoe. Gilchrist put their bed in there, king sized, with a battered tubular brass headboard. They’d wait until midnight, then make love for hours under the open window, letting the cool night airflow over their entangled bodies.
Catherine was slow to adapt to permanency. Gilchrist often watched her packing everything neatly away at the end of the day, ready to move on. Habit dying hard. She had to get used to neighbours, to people who didn’t vanish after a few fleeting hours. Friends. It was all so new and bold and exciting.
Gilchrist did what he does best, dealing, shuffling gear and knowledge. He established himself cautiously, developing contacts, dropping money in the right places. A fun game, a maestro running rings around first year apprentices. Winning, always winning. With a reverent Catherine at his side, high on the spice of exotica only he could provide.
While Gilchrist was consolidating his reign in Nottingham, the probe was gliding in towards Saturn.
Flyby phase. And I’m streaking into the penumbra, the ionosphere only five thousand miles below me. Continent-wide lightning webs sizzle across the dusky nightside cloudscape, terrifying wavefronts of white, purple-white, and blue-white discharges riding the pinnacles of supersonic typhoons, melding and ebbing.
It’s a supreme vindication of Gilchrist’s probe. Saturn is rich beyond my generation’s comprehension. Metal, water, minerals, energy, planets, it has them all within its gravity empire. One day he’ll see all this with his eyes. His destiny, I suppose. The future belonging to the past. Humiliation stabs at me. Catherine, all the Warmed Earth can offer; ephemeral, entertaining diversions to tide him over the current lull. Hibernation fodder.
Closest approach. Transiting the ecliptic, a thousand miles above the ionosphere. The midnight equator is alive with light. Here, at the bottom of the rings and the extremity of the atmosphere, a necklace of shooting stars wraps the world. Ring particles in their death throes, dragged down from their precarious orbit by atmospheric friction, engulfed within coronas of dazzling plasma. They descend in long decay-curves which end in spectacular disintegrations, debris plumes expanding like photonic flower buds. I listen to their dying screams over the radio bands, plasma emissions blasting apart the fragile silence of the empty interplanetary medium.
Slingshot. Slaloming round the gas giant’s back. So low, so fast, details dissolve into carnival ride streaks. Round and up, flung away. The receding image suturing my gaps in human nature. Understanding Gilchrist’s motivations, his drives. Divined from the splinters of insight I’ve gained from his mind. Without him, I would’ve drifted for the rest of my life, no matter where I’d settled. He’s given me Catherine. Twice.
Saturn and all its sublime glory vanishes into night.
Nottingham’s outskirts sailed past Slowdancer. Old brick and concrete buildings mottled by the harlequin scales of modern life’s necessities, the black squares of solar panels, translucent emerald heart-shaped precipitator leaves.
“I’m taking Slowdancer down the Grand Union canal to Leicester,” said Halson. “Got a cargo of powerspheres to load once we get shot of the seed bales. So we won’t be leaving until this evening. There’s a berth for you, if things don’t work out between you and your lady.”
“Thanks, but however it turns out, Catherine and I aren’t going to settle this in a day.” Even through the growing dread I could work that out.
Halson shrugged lightly. “Okay.”
I’d been slumped on the prow all morning, staring ahead, watching Nottingham saddle the rucked skyline. New city, new daydream: drifter philosophy. Each city is going to be the one that connects, each commune has the ideology you’ve been hunting.
Last November it’d been Birmingham, a sprawl to rival either half of London. I’d worked round the fringes, picking up casual labour among the hundreds of orange groves dotted around the city. Open eyed for a coterie which suited my nature.
But there’d been nothing; the usual rag bag of cults eager to save my soul, communes keen to have my strength and youth toiling in their fields.
I was in a pub in Cannock, drinking away my disappointment, when Jilliane hooked me.
She was twenty-five, medium height, interesting oval face with bobbed ginger hair. Her clothes were smart and clean, brown leather jacket and black jeans, knee length boots. It wasn’t
the right pub for her, full of drifters and grove pickers, sun-hardened empty faces and little money. But she marched in, a queen of poise, and went straight up to the bar, buying herself a lager topped before anyone could make a play. They tried anyway, the local struts and some of the drifters. She turned them down flat; sometimes she didn’t even have to speak.
After her first drink she came over and sat next to me. It was kind of embarrassing, everyone looking at me, figuring what I’d got that they hadn’t. I didn’t know either.
I bought her another lager topped, which halved the number of shillings in my wallet. “Why me?” I asked.
She flashed me a roguish grin. I liked that, easygoing, but hard as iron underneath; I could tell that much.
“I have a proposition that might interest you,” she said.
“I’m all yours.”
“Not that. If I’d wanted you I would have had you by now.”
I opened my mouth to protest innocence. No sound came out, she was right.
“You’re quick. That’s good.” she said. “It’s a job, pays well. Two thousand pounds a month. You interested?”
“I’m a drifter. What do I have to do?”
She sipped her drink, tiny beads of condensation rolling off the glass onto her hands. “Just enjoy yourself.”
“Too good to be true. This kind of thing doesn’t happen to me.”
“I’ve recruited before. I recognise what my client wants. You fit the bill like you were born for it.”
“Client?”
The challenge went out of her grin, becoming warmer, conspiratorial even. “My great great grandfather.”
The one regret I have in discovering Catherine is that last memory of her, the morning Gilchrist left. He just upped and walked out.
I can see his hand on the door of the bookstore; dull chrome metal, cold and hard in his palm. I can hear muffled sobbing from the storeroom. The door closes behind him, banishing the sound. Raffia blinds are drawn behind the plate glass windows, he walks away from them at a brisk pace. There’s no looking back, not even a furtive flick of eyes to see if she’s watching him.