The Millennium Blues

by James Gunn

  “Come on, sweetheart, I've been very patient."

  He meant he was becoming impatient. “I've been chosen,” she said.

  “By me."

  “By God."

  “You're joking."

  “I've never been more serious. I don't know why I've been chosen or what I've been chosen for, but the finger of God has touched me, and my life will never be the same."

  “You've been born again,” he said sarcastically.

  “I suppose,” she said. “I was looking for a purpose and now I've found it. I've got to find out now what it's all about. I've got to tell other people how to feel the way I felt there for an instant. I've got to feel that way again."

  “A fucking missionary."

  “A missionary, anyway. You see, everything's changed."

  “Except me."

  “Let me change you, too,” she said, seizing him by the shoulders and holding him up from her with surprising strength. She looked into his face, into his dark eyes.

  “I don't want to change,” he said and levered her arms aside before he forced his way into her. “I've never screwed a missionary before,” he said.

  She could have hurt him and made him stop, but that didn't seem fair, and somehow being fair was more important than anything else. The feeling of being violated, of betraying and being betrayed, didn't last. He wouldn't last either; she had been wrong about him as she had been wrong about so many men. But the revelation would last. She would search for it, wherever it took her, and she would find it again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  July 4, 2000

  William S. Landis

  The shuttle dived into the atmosphere like a sparrow flying into a pane of glass. But then, as the delta wings found a purchase in the scattered molecules, the heavy craft leveled off and skittered across the pond of air. Landis felt the shock grab his insides and slam them against his backbone, and then he was thrown forward against the heavy belts that fastened him into the contoured flight chair.

  This is the way it ends, he thought, with a bang, not a whimper. Among the tens of thousands of switches and valves that served this craft as synapses and sphincters, one had malfunctioned and poured all the remaining fuel into a sustained rocket blast. Rather than slowing the shuttle down for a more gradual re-entry, the accident had virtually stopped the shuttle dead in orbit. Now the only control the crew on the flight deck could exert over their fate was through the limited influence of airfoil surfaces on thin air. It would not be enough, Landis thought calmly. After the buffeting would come the too-rapid aerodynamic heating that the tiles were not equipped to withstand, and even if the passengers did not cook and the shuttle did not melt or come apart, they could not reach the Kennedy or Vandenberg landing strips.

  After the first announcement to the mid-deck passengers, the flight deck had been silent. The crew was too busy to calm hysterical passengers.

  He noted his own reactions and felt pleased that he was facing the end without panic. He had seldom experienced situations that demanded courage, and he had never been sure how he would respond. The few occasions in his life that had called for action had elicited the fight-or-flight adrenaline response, but they were minor stuff to which the acceleration of his pulse, the cold sweat, and the shaking afterward could as easily be symptoms of weakness as of strength. But now he had nothing to do except to die, and he could face that without fear and without regret.

  Perhaps he was reconciled to his fate by the irony of the fact that he, like the world, had been anticipating final catastrophe at the end of this millennial year, and now his world was coming to an end in the next half hour. But that statement always was appropriate. Every minute the world ended for somebody, somewhere in the world. He did some rapid mental calculation. No, every second the world ended for somebody. What did it matter if it ended for everybody on December 31?

  Well, he thought, maybe it mattered to the species. People like to think that their existence has made a difference. But for most of humanity—and he considered himself, without false modesty, in that group—the only mark they left on the world was in the form of descendants, who in their turn might or might not make a difference. To the human species, however, to those creatures that had climbed up from the slime and down from the trees to look around and question why they were there and what it all meant, to the collective consciousness of the creatures that had been fashioned out of such an absurd mixture of primitive passions and wistful wonder, it mattered that the promise might remain only a promise.

  As for himself, he had no regrets. His parents would miss him, he thought, but he had given them fifty good years which is more than many parents get out of their offspring. He had not given them grandchildren, but he had given them more cause for pride in his accomplishments than concern about his welfare. A few readers knew his name; they might mourn him, but he would fade into their memories as the author who died a hero, and perhaps his literary reputation might benefit from a timely expiration. And although he felt that he had much left that he could do, much left that he might say and write, it would not be substantially different from what he had done already—even though he had not yet written the Great American Novel, or even a bestseller. Goodbye, mother and father, he thought. Goodbye, readers. Goodbye, cruel world.

  The others were not taking it as well.

  Eileen Simpson, the engineer who had been experimenting with construction methods for the U.S. space station yet to be started, was gripping her restraints with whitened hands, as if she could hold up the shuttle by adding her strength to that of the crew at the controls. But she was coping. She had been in dangerous situations before, clearly, and although her attractive face was set and her mouth was tight, she was free of tears or sounds.

  Jock McKenzie, the supervisor for the asteroid-protection installation, who had come out on the previous shuttle trip to inspect the latest addition to the space-based project, was grunting like a primitive steam engine. He was a big, rugged-looking man, but his teeth were clenched in a frozen grimace, and he seemed unaware that he was making a noise.

  Barry Risebad, the fundamentalist minister sitting next to Landis, was whimpering. Between whimpers he said, “My God! My God!” It was not a prayer. He was face to face with the eternity for which he had been preparing himself and others for twenty years, and he was terrified.

  Fear had not been apparent when the shuttle took off, although Landis had thought he could see sweat on Risebad's forehead.

  The shuttle trip had seemed like a public relations masterstroke when he suggested it to the committee. NASA had muffed its previous opportunity to become the vehicle of romance. On its way to the moon it had opted for an air of everyday reality: The astronauts were depicted as the boys next door, the trips were marvels of complexity but as commonplace as a jaunt to the nearest shopping center, and the language for describing it all was the jargon of engineers not the poetry of science fiction. Now the asteroid-protection system was taking shape in the sky. The Star Wars project had been dusted off and its supporters hauled on board for a system that might possibly take care of accidental missile firings or isolated terrorist attacks but was really aimed at the random violence of the heavens. After many delays, a space station was nearing reality. People were talking seriously about a permanent moon base. The off-again on-again plans for a joint Mars mission with the Russians apparently were on-again. Now NASA had another opportunity to put the poets in charge instead of the engineers. Perhaps they would not again misread the mood of the public.

  Landis himself had made the suggestion to the committee on Public Attitudes Toward Space, the group that NASA had put together to consider the growing opposition of fundamentalist groups toward space programs. Offer one of the fundamentalists a place on the next shuttle flight. Everybody but Landis was surprised when Barry Risebad accepted the invitation. Risebad, Landis pointed out, had been an enthusiasts for Star Wars and reluctantly had supported the asteroid-protection system, and he could bring back
to his worldwide congregation a personal report on its glorious defensive potential. Although he opposed the lunar base and the manned trip to Mars, as well as construction of the space station, he might return from space with greater appreciation for the challenges of space, or able to press an attack on those projects with the enhanced authority of somebody who had seen them personally. It was worth the risk.

  Landis had laid it out for the committee. But he had also volunteered to go along to guide Risebad's perceptions and, if necessary, to refute criticisms, and the committee had thrown its weight behind that, as well. If getting himself a ride into space had been part of Landis's agenda from the beginning, no one seemed to care. Part of the support for Star Wars had come from space enthusiasts who saw it as the 21st century equivalent of Wernher von Braun's V-2 rockets; technological advances in mass killing were regrettable, but they often meant progress in other fields. The committee was more interested in the future of humanity in space—which might mean the future of humanity if something happened to the Earth or to the sanity of its inhabitants—and that future might be determined in the next few years. People who thought like that were in the mood to gamble.

  Landis, strapped tightly into his contoured chair, had leaned as far as he could toward the minister and asked, “Are you all right?"

  “Certainly,” Risebad had said. His voice had been steady.

  Landis had sunk back. It would not do to be sitting crooked when the blastoff occurred. “Don't worry,” he had said. “It's only a minute or two away.” Actually it was forty-six seconds and counting.

  “I'm not worried,” Risebad had said. “The Lord has told me to go on this journey and he has assured me that his arm would be around me the entire time. You're the one who should be concerned."

  “Not as long as I stick with you,” Landis had said dryly.

  Risebad had looked at him sharply, and Landis had reminded himself that the minister might be misguided but he wasn't stupid, and that he should not be antagonized unnecessarily. Then the big solid-fuel boosters had kicked in and there had been no time, or breath, for talk. His weight had increased under the acceleration until he was not his normal one hundred sixty-five but more than four hundred pounds, and he had been crushed back into resilient pads until he thought he never again would draw an easy breath. He had had no time to worry about the booster rockets or the Challenger explosion or how they would get out if something happened; he had been too busy worrying about whether he would breathe and move again.

  Then as suddenly as it had begun the pressure had released and he had weighed nothing at all. His stomach had rebounded into his throat and he had almost vomited before he thought about the mess that would float around the mid-deck and swallowed hard and swallowed again, and noticed that two of his companions were doing the same thing while Risebad was smiling beatifically.

  The son-of-a-bitch has a sailor's stomach, Landis had thought.

  Then the acceleration pressures had begun again and built to their previous levels. The solid-fuel booster rockets had been used up and had been jettisoned. Now the external tank was the sole source of fuel for the shuttle, and they were arching higher, out of the atmosphere now, into space itself, on the white-hot fury of combining liquid hydrogen and oxygen.

  When the pressure had let up again, Landis had vomited, but this time he had prepared himself with a plastic bag. When he had looked up from his misery, Risebad had been grinning at him. Soon, however, Landis's mind had been diverted from the state of his body to the maneuvers of the shuttle and the conversations of the crew as their vehicle had caught up with the Russian space station, the linked Salyut 7 and 8, and prepared to dock. In their windowless mid-deck area, the progress of the shuttle could be tracked only by the laconic interchanges of the crew and by the creaks and groans of the shuttle and the brief roar of control rocket jets until they ended with a jar and a snap that echoed through the craft before silence fell.

  “I think we're here,” Landis had said.

  “By the grace of God,” Risebad had added.

  “And the skill of people,” Landis had said.

  Even with the two Russian stations linked by the combined efforts of the U.S. and Russian space programs financed almost entirely by the U.S., the space habitat still was primitive. The U.S. project, if it ever got past the budget-cutters, would look like a Tinker Toy model of metal cylinders held together by lattices of flimsy girders, but it would be spacious by comparison. The Salyuts looked like space bugs with metal wings, two dark panels of solar cells, two heat radiators, white on one side, black on the other.

  The cylindrical living quarters had seemed tiny until they got inside, but, Landis had told himself, a cylinder offers a great deal of surface area when one can use every square foot. Life inside this overgrown hot-water heater had been pleasant enough, with moments of excitement, after Landis's stomach settled down and he had got used to the smell of fuel, sweat, food, and body wastes that no filters could ever scrub from the air and no amount of deodorizing could conceal.

  Eating had been a problem until one got the hang of it, the art of spearing solid food so that it did not escape to float in the air, of smearing softer foods around a fork so that they did not disintegrate before they reached the mouth, of sucking and swallowing liquids with lips tightly closed—and never, never sneezing or coughing with one's mouth full. Sleeping cocooned inside netting, on the other hand, he never got used to, and he had awakened periodically from a dream of falling in which he never reached the ground. He remembered reading somewhere a superstition that the dreamer who hit the ground would die. He also remembered the speculation that the dream was an ancestral memory of falling from the trees and that dreamers never hit the ground because if they had their ancestors would have been killed before becoming progenitors, or that they hit the ground but survived.

  He finally had accepted frequent wakefulness as the price for the experience.

  Much of his time he had spent simply staring out the portholes at the stars, like bright holes pierced in the black velvet of space, at the men and women in white spacesuits checking out the exterior, performing experiments in space, or putting flimsy additions into place, at the clean, cold disc of the moon or the big, fertile, blue, green, and white globe of the Earth as they floated past.

  Up here some four hundred miles above the atmosphere the planet below looked peaceful and almost untouched by humanity except when the station passed into Earth's shadow and he saw the scattered brilliance of its cities. He could not see the pollution that despoiled the air and oceans. He could not see the armies or the tanks and guns or the missiles. He could not see the dangers that threatened the survival of humanity—from the perils that swam in the great emptiness of outer space to the turmoil of plate tectonics and the mysteries of matter that lay beneath the surface of this peaceful globe. Most of all, he could not see the fears, hatreds, and suspicions that led people to gamble the planet itself against their momentary victories.

  Risebad had seen him at the porthole once and glancing briefly at the globe of the Earth had said, “Can you imagine how that will look on Judgment Day?"

  The rest of his time Landis had spent recording his impressions on his laptop computer, talking to the other passengers in the visitors’ quarters, or, occasionally, visiting with the station personnel whose living space was in the other cylinder.

  Risebad had disliked everything about life on the station and had complained continually. “If God had wanted man to be out here in space, he'd have made the atmosphere extend clear to the moon,” he had said, more than half seriously.

  “If you had been around a century ago, you'd have said that if God had wanted man to fly he'd have given him wings,” Landis had joked, “like your pious predecessors."

  “There's nothing wrong with flying,” Risebad had said, “or with television, or with anything else that God has inspired Christians to invent that helps spread the word of God."

  “Maybe God inspired the mak
ers of spaceships so that you and your colleagues could spread His word throughout the galaxy."

  “You're making a joke,” Risebad had said. “To whom would we take God's word?"

  “To the benighted aliens, of course, or, if there aren't any, to the humans who will colonize planets and moons or even build space habitats."

  “If God had wanted people to inhabit other planets, he'd have put them there."

  “Maybe this is God's way of putting them there."

  “There's nothing about that in the Bible."

  “There is the injunction to be fruitful and multiply. With a universe to expand into, humanity could multiply indefinitely. Besides, I'm sure you can find something that authorizes it if you look hard enough,” Landis had said. “Airplanes and television aren't mentioned either."

  “There have always been birds that fly, and prayers that are transmitted instantly. But there's something unnatural about being in space, without God's friendly embrace to hold you gently to the Earth.” Risebad had shivered. The movement made him twist gently in the air, looking like a lost cherub as he searched for something to stop his spin. He was a man of substantial flesh who should have enjoyed the evaporation of his weight, but his dignity had dwindled with it, and his presence had diminished with his mass.

  Landis had reached out a hand to the minister and pulled him to one of the pipes that held magnetic tables, velcroed chairs, and webbed bunks. “By the time we get back, God's embrace might not seem so friendly."

  Risebad had looked so woeful that Landis almost felt sorry for him. “I will never complain again about my weight,” he had said.