Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 54

by John Joseph Adams

  “Nobody knows for sure, Terr. I wouldn’t be here if I did. The Drake Equation is still just a series of guesses.”

  “But we’re here on Earth, aren’t we, Tom? Us humans and apes and bugs and cockroaches and dolphins. We must have somehow got started.”

  He nodded. Even now. Terr was so right. “Exactly.”

  “And we’re still listening, and we want to hear …” She chuckled. “Or at least you’re still listening, Tom. So all you have to hope for is another Tom Kelly out in space, up there amid all those stars. It’s that simple, isn’t it?”

  “Can you imagine that?”

  Terr thought for a moment. She thought for a long time. The wine bottle was empty. The candle was guttering. “Does he have to have the same color skin, this alien Tom Kelly? Does he have to have four purple eyes and wings like a flyer?”

  “That’s up to you, Terr.”

  Then she stood up, and the waft of her passage towards him blew out the candle and brightened the stars and brought her scent, which was sweet and dusty and as utterly unchanged as the taste of her mouth as she leaned down out of the swarming night and kissed him.

  “I think you’ll do as you are,” she said, and traced her finger around his chin, just as she’d used to do, and down his nose and across his lips, as if he was clay, earth, and she was sculpting him. “One Tom Kelly …”

  • • • •

  In the years after he left Aston and split with Terr, Tom had found that he was able to put aside his inherent shyness, and go out in the big bad world of academic science, and smile and press the flesh with administrators and business suits and dinosaur heads-of-department, and develop a specialization of sorts which combined data analysis with radio astronomy. He knew he was able enough—somehow, his ability was the only thing about himself that he rarely doubted—and he found to his surprise that he was able to move from commercial development contracts to theoretical work to pure research without many of the problems of job security and unemployment which seemed to plague his colleagues. Or perhaps he just didn’t care. He was prepared to go anywhere, do anything. He lived entirely in his head, as a brief woman friend had said to him. Which was probably true, for Tom knew that he was never that sociable. Like the essential insecurity of research work, he simply didn’t let it worry him. It helped, often, that there was a ready supply of drinks at many of the conferences and seminars he attended—not, perhaps, in the actual lecture halls and conference suites, but afterwards, in the bars and rooms where the serious science of self-promotion went on. It helped, too, that at the back of it all, behind all the blind alleys and government cuts and flurries of spending, he had one goal.

  It had surprised Tom that that first Martian landing should have had such a depressing effect on SETI research, when any sensible interpretation of the Drake Equation had always allowed for the fact that Earth was the only planet likely to harbor life in this particular solar system. Even he was disappointed, though, when the Girouard probe finally put the kibosh on any idea of life existing in what had once seemed like the potentially warm and habitable waters of Jupiter’s satellite Europa. Still, the Principal of Mediocrity, which is that this sun, this solar system, this planet, and even the creatures which dwell upon it, are all common-or-garden variety phenomena, and thus likely to be repeated in similar form all over the galaxy, remained entirely undamaged by such discoveries, at least in Tom’s mind. But in the mind of the general public (in that the general public has a mind to care about such things) and in the minds of the politicians and administrators who controlled scientific funding (ditto), it was a turning point, and began to confirm the idea that there really wasn’t much out there in space apart from an endless vacuum punctuated by a few aggregations of rocks, searing temperatures, hostile chemicals.

  Funnily enough, this recession of the tides in SETI funding worked in Tom’s favor. Like a collector of a type of object d’art which was suddenly no longer fashionable, he was able to mop up the data, airtime, and hardware of several abandoned projects at bargain prices, sometimes using his own money, sometimes by tapping the enthusiasm of the few remaining SETI freaks, sometimes by esoteric tricks of funding. Now that the big satellite telescopes could view and analyze stars and their orbital perturbation with a previously unheard of accuracy, a few other solar systems had come out of the woodwork, but they were astonishingly rare, and mostly seemed to consist either of swarms of asteroids and dust clouds or huge near-stellar aggregations of matter which would fuse and crush anything resembling organic life. So fp in the Drake Equation—the fraction of stars to likely have a planetary system—went down to something like 0.0001, and ne—the number of those planets which could bear life—fell to the even lower 0.0000-somethings, unless you happened to think that life was capable of developing using a different chemical basis to carbon, as Tom, reared as he was on a diet of incredible starbeasts, of course did. fl—the probability that life would then develop on a suitable planet—also took a downturn, thanks to lifeless Mars and dead Europa, and then as every other potential niche in solar system that some hopeful scientist had posited was probed and explored and spectrum analyzed out of existence. The stock of SETI was as low as it had ever been, and Tom really didn’t care. In fact, he relished it.

  He wrote a paper entitled “New Light On The Drake Equation,” and submitted it to Nature, and then, as the last SETI journal had recently folded, to the Radio Astronomy Bulletin and, without any more success, and with several gratuitously sneering remarks from referees, to all the other obvious and then the less obvious journals. In the paper, he analyzed each element of the equation in turn, and explained why what had become accepted as the average interpretation of it was in fact deeply pessimistic. Taking what he viewed as the true middle course of balance and reason, and pausing only to take a few telling swipes at the ridiculous idea that computer simulations could provide serious data on the likelihood of life spontaneously developing, and thus on fl, he concluded that the final N figure in the Drake Equation was, by any balanced interpretation, still in the region of 1,000-10,000, and that it was thus really only a matter of time before contact was made. That was, as long as people were still listening …

  He didn’t add it to the versions of the paper he submitted, but he also planned to ask whoever finally published the thing to place a dedication when it was printed: For Terr. That, at least, was the simplest variant of a text he spent many wall-staring hours expanding, cutting, revising. But the paper never did get published, although a much shortened work, stripped of its maths by Tom and then of a lot of its sense by the copy editor, finally did come out in a popular science comic, beside an article about a man who was growing a skein of his own nerve tissue to a length of several hundred feet so that he could bungee-jump with it from the Victoria Falls. Still, the response was good, even if many of the people who contacted Tom were of a kind he felt reluctant to give out his email, let alone his home, address to.

  The years passed. Through a slow process of hard work, networking, and less-than-self-aggrandizement, Tom became Mr. SETI. There always was, he tended to find, at least one member of the astronomy or the physics or even the biology faculty of most institutes of learning who harbored a soft spot for his topic. Just as Sally Normanton had done when he returned to Aston on that autumn when the air had smelled cleaner and different and yet was in so many ways the same, they found ways of getting him small amounts of funding. Slowly, Tom was able to bow out of his other commitments, although he couldn’t help noticing how few attempts were made to dissuade him. Perhaps he’d lost his youthful zest, perhaps it was the smell on his breath of whatever he’d drunk the night before, and which now seemed to carry over to the morning. He was getting surprisingly near to retirement age, in any case. And the thought, the ridiculous idea that he’d suddenly been on the planet for this long, scared him, and he needed something which would carry him though the years ahead. What scared him even more, though, like a lottery addict who’s terrified that thei
r number will come up on exactly the week that they stop buying the tickets, was what would happen to SETI if he stopped listening. Sometimes, looking up at the night sky as the computers at whatever faculty he was now at pounded their way through the small hours with his latest batch of star data, gazing at those taunting pinpricks with all their mystery and promise, he felt as if he was bearing the whole universe up by the effort of his mind, and that the stars themselves would go out, just as they did in that famous Clarke story, the moment he turned his back on them. It was about then that he generally thought about having another drink, just to see him through the night, just to keep up his spirits. It was no big deal. A drink was a drink. Everyone he knew did it.

  So Tom finally got sufficient funds and bluff together to set up his own specialized SETI project, and then settled on France for reasons he couldn’t now quite remember, except that it was a place he hadn’t been to where they still spoke a language which wasn’t English, and then chose the karst area of the Massif Central because it gave the sort of wide flat planes which fitted with the technology of his tripwire receivers, and was high up and well away from the radio babble of the cities. The choice was semi-symbolic—as well as the tripwires, he planned to borrow and buy-in as much useful data as he could from all possible sources, and process it there with whatever equipment he could borrow or cannibalize. Then he saw the waterhole, a tiny blue dot on the map of this otherwise desolate mountain-plateau above a small place called St. Hilaire, and that settled it. He hadn’t even known that the place was a flying resort, until he’d signed all the necessary legal papers and hitched his life to it. And even that, in its way—those rainbow butterflies and beetles, those prismatic famine victims clustering around their smart bars and expensive shops, queuing with their wings whispering to take the cable lifts to the high peaks in the sunstruck south each morning—seemed appropriate. It made him think of Terr, and how her life had been, and it reminded him—as if he’d ever forgotten—of his, of their promise.

  But it had never happened. There’d never been a reason to let her know.

  • • • •

  Tom wrestled with the memories, the feelings, as Terr touched him, and closed her hands around his with fingers which seemed to have lost all their flesh. She was tunneling down the years to him, kissing him from the wide sweep of some incredible distance. He tried closing his eyes, and felt the jagged rim of teeth and bone beneath her lips. He tried opening them, and he saw her flesh streaked and lined against the stars, as if the Terr of old was wearing a mask made of paper. And her eyes had gone out. All the storms had faded. She touched him, briefly, intimately, but he knew that it was useless.

  She stood back from him and sighed, scarecrow figure in her scarecrow dress, long hair in cobwebs around her thin and witchy face.

  “I’m sorry, Tom—”

  “—No, it isn’t—”

  “—I was making presumptions.”

  But Tom knew who and what was to blame. Too many years of searching, too many years of drink. He sat outside his hut, frozen in his chair with his tripwires glimmering, and watched as Terr wandered off. He heard the clink of bottles as she inspected his dumpster. He heard the shuffle of rubbish as she picked her way around indoors. He should have felt ashamed, but he didn’t. He was past that, just as he was past, he realized, any approximation of the act of love.

  When Terr came out again into the starlight, she was carrying a bottle. It was the absinthe.

  “Is this what you want?” she said, and unstoppered it. She poured a slug of the stuff out into her own empty wineglass, and raised it to her thin lips, and sipped. Even under this starlight, her face grew wrinkled, ugly. “God, it’s so bitter …”

  “Perhaps that’s why I like it.”

  “You know, you could get rid of this habit, Tom. It’s like you said to me—if there’s something about yourself you don’t like, all you need do is take a vial.”

  Tom shrugged, wondering whether she was going to pour some absinthe out into his glass or just stand there, waving the bottle at him. Was he being deliberately taunted? But Terr was right, of course. You took a vial, and you were clean. The addiction was gone. Everything about you was renewed, apart from the fact that you were who you were, and still driven by the same needs and contradictions which had given you the craving in the first place. So you went back to the odd drink, because you knew you were clean now, you were safe. And the odd drink became a regular habit again, and you were back where you started again, only poorer and older, and filled with an even deeper self-contempt. And worse headaches. Yes, Tom had been there.

  “It’s like you say, Terr. We are as we are. A few clever chemicals won’t change that.”

  “You’re going to be telling me next that you’re an addictive personality.”

  “I wouldn’t be here otherwise, would I, doing this?”

  She nodded and sat down again. She tipped some absinthe into his glass, and Tom stared at it, and at the faintly glowing message cards, which he still hadn’t read, which lay beside it on the table, allowing a slight pause to elapse before he drank the absinthe, just to show her that he could wait. Then the taste of anise and wormwood, which was the name of the star, as he recalled, which had fallen from the heavens and seared the rivers and fountains in the Book of Revelation. It had all just been a matter of belief, back then.

  “You still haven’t told me how things have been for you, Terr.”

  “They’ve been okay. On and off …” Terr considered, her head in shade and edged with starlight. Tom told himself that the skull he could now see had always been there, down beneath Terr’s skin that he had once so loved to touch and taste. Nothing was really that different. “With a few regrets.”

  “Did you really get into flying? That was how I always pictured you, up in the skies. Like the kids you see now down in this valley.”

  “Yes! I was a flyer, Tom. Not quite the way they are now—I’m sure they’d think the stuff we used then was uselessly heavy and clumsy. But it was great while it lasted. I made a lot of friends.”

  “Did you ever go back to your studies?”

  She gave that dry chuckle again; the rustle of wind though old telephone wires. “I don’t think I ever had studies, Tom. No, I got a job. Worked in public relations. Built up this company I was involved in very well for a while, sold other people’s projects and ideas, covered up other people’s mistakes—”

  “—We could have used you for SETI.”

  “I thought of that, Tom—or of you, at least. But you had your own life. I didn’t want to seem patronizing. And then I got sick of being slick and enthusiastic about other people’s stuff, and I got involved in this project of my own. Basically, it was a gallery, a sort of art gallery, except the exhibits were people. I was …”

  “You were one of them?”

  “Of course I was, Tom! What do you expect? But it plays havoc with your immune system after a while. You hurt and ache and bleed. It’s something for the very fit, the very young, or the very dedicated. And then I tried being normal and got married and unmarried, and then married again.”

  “Not to the same person?”

  “Oh, no. Although they made friends, funnily enough, did my two exes. Last time I heard from one of them, they were both still keeping in touch. Probably still are. Then I got interested in religion. Religions, being me …”

  “Any kids?”

  “Now never quite seemed the time. I wish there had been a now, though, but on the other hand, perhaps I was always too selfish.”

  “You were never selfish, Terr.”

  “Too unfocussed, then.”

  “You weren’t that, either.” Tom took another slug of absinthe, and topped up the glass. He could feel the bitter ease of it seeping into him. It was pleasant to sit talking like this. Sad, but pleasant. He realized he hadn’t just missed Terr. These last few years up on his mountain, he’d missed most kinds of human company. “But I know what you mean. Even when I used to dream abo
ut us staying together, I could never quite manage the idea of kids …”

  “How can two people be so different, and so right for each other?”

  “Is that what you really think?”

  “I loved you more than I loved anyone, Tom. All the time since, I often got this feeling you were watching, listening. Like that afternoon when I jumped with my wings from that tower in Aston and then got arrested. And the body art. You were like a missing guest at the weddings. I was either going for or against you in whatever I did—and sort of wondering how you’d react. And then I went to the Moon, and your ghost seemed to follow me there, too. Have you ever been off-planet?”

  He shook his head. He hadn’t—or at least not in the obvious physical sense, although he’d traveled with Kubrick over the Moon’s craters a thousand times to the thrilling music of Ligeti.

  “Thought not. It was the most expensive thing I ever did.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “That’s just about it with the Moon, Tom—it’s expensive. The place you stay in is like one of those cheap old Japanese hotels. Your room’s a pod you can’t even sit up in. Who’d ever have thought space could be so claustrophobic!”

  “All these things you’ve done, Terr. They sound so fascinating.”

  “Do, don’t they—saying them like I’m saying them now? But it was always like someone else’s life that I seemed to be stuck in. Like wearing the wrong clothes. I was always looking for my own. And then you get older—God, you know what it’s like! And there are so many choices nowadays. So many different ways of stretching things out, extending the years, but the more you stretch them, the thinner they get. I always knew that I never wanted to live to some great age. These one-and-a-half centenarians you see, they seem to be there just to prove a point. Tortoises in an endless race. Or animals in a grotty zoo. Minds in twisted, rusty cages …”