Tom withdrew his finger from the card for a moment, and dropped back into France. He’d only ever met the woman once. She’d been warm and lively and sympathetic, he remembered, and had moved about on autolegs because of the advanced arthritis which, in those days at least, the vials hadn’t been able to counteract. They’d sat under the mossy trees and statues in Birmingham’s Centenary Square, which for him had held other memories, and she’d sighed and smiled and explained how the basic policy of her institution had gone firmly against any positive figure to the Drake Equation several decades before, but Sally Normanton herself had always kept a soft spot for that kind of stuff, and she’d really got into physics in the first place on the back of reading Clarke and Asimov. Not that she imagined Tom had heard of them? But Tom had, of course. They were almost of the same generation. He’d developed a dust allergy from hunching over those thrilling, musty, analogue pages as a kid. They chatted merrily, and on the walk back to the campus Sally Normanton had confided, as she heaved and clicked on her legs, that she had control of a smallish fund. It was left over from some government work, and was his to have for as long as it took the accountants to notice. And that was more than twenty years ago. And now she was dead.
“. . . physicist. But in clearing out and revising her responsibilities, it’s come to my attention that monies have been allocated to your project which, I regret to say . . .”
Tom spun the thing forward until he came to the bit at the end when the young man, who had one eye green and one eye blue – and nails like talons, so perhaps he too was a flyer, although he didn’t look quite thin enough and seemed too easily scared – announced that he’d left a simulacrum AI of his business self on the card, which would be happy to answer any pertinent questions, although the decision to withdraw funds was, regrettably, quite irrevocable. The AI was there, of course, to save the chance that Tom might try to bother this man of business with feeble pleas. But Tom knew he was lucky to have got what he got from that source, and even luckier that they weren’t talking about suing him to take it all back.
Aston University. England. The smell of different air. Different trees. If there was one season that matched the place, a mood that always seemed to be hanging there in the background, even on the coldest or hottest or wettest of days, it had to be fall, autumn. How long had it been now? Tom tried not to think – that was one equation which even to him always came back as a recurring nothing. He noticed instead that the wineglass that the pretty, young girl had been drinking bore the red imprint of her lipstick, and was almost sad to see it go, and with it the better memories he’d been trying to conjure, when Jean-Benoît finally bustled up and plonked a glass of cloudy, yellow liquid, which Tom wasn’t really sure that he wanted any longer, down in front of him. Voilà. Merci. Pidgin French as he stared at the cards from Madame Brissac’s incomprehensible pigeonholes. But he drank it anyway, the pastis. Back in one. At least it got rid of the taste of the absinthe.
And the day was fine, the market was bustling. It would be a pity to spoil this frail, good mood he was building with messages which probably included the words regret, withdraw, or at the very least, must query . . . This square, it was baguettes and Edith Piaf writ large, it was the Eiffel Tower in miniature. The warm smells of garlic and slightly dodgy drains and fine, dark coffee. And those ridiculous little poodles dragged along by those long-legged women. The shouts and the gestures, the black, old widows, who by now were probably younger than he was, muttering to themselves and barging along with their stripy shopping bags like extras from the wrong film and scowling at this or that vial-induced wonder. And a priest in his cassock stepping from the church, pausing in the sunlight at the top of the steps to take in the scene, although he had wings behind him which he stretched as if to yawn, and his hair was scarlet. Another flyer. Tom smiled to think how he got on with his congregation, which was mostly those scowling old women, and thought about ordering – why not? – another pastis . . .
Then he noticed a particular figure wandering beside the stalls at the edge of the market where displays of lace billowed in the wind, which blew off the karst and squeezed in a warm, light breeze down between the washing-strung tenements. It couldn’t be, of course. Couldn’t be. It was just that lipstick on the edge of that glass which had prickled that particular memory. That, and getting a message from England, and that woman dying, and losing another income source, all of which, if he’d have let them, would have stirred up a happy-sad melange of memories. She was wearing a dark blue, sleeveless dress and was standing in a bright patch of sunlight which flamed on her blonde hair and made it hard for him to see her face. She could have been anyone, but in that moment, she could have been Terr, and Tom felt the strangely conflicting sensations of wanting to run over and embrace her, and also to dig a hole for himself where he could hide forever right here beneath this café paving. He blinked. His head swam. By the time he’d refocused, the girl, the woman, had moved on. A turn of bare arm, a flash of lovely calf. Why did they have to change themselves like they did now? Women were perfect as they were. Always had been, as far as Tom was concerned – or as best he could remember. Especially Terr. But then perhaps that had been an illusion, too.
Tom stood up and dropped a few francs on the table and blundered off between the market stalls. That dark blue, sleeveless dress, those legs, that hair. His heart was pounding as it hadn’t done in years from some strange inner exertion of memory. Even if it wasn’t her, which it obviously wasn’t, he still wanted to know, to see. But St. Hilaire was Thursday-busy. The teeming market swallowed him up and spat him out again downhill where the steps ran beside the old battlements and the river flashed under the willow trees, then uphill by the bright, expensive shops along the Rue de Commerce, which offered in their windows designer clothes, designer vials, designer lives. Fifteen different brands of colloquial French in bottles like costly perfumes and prices to match. Only you crushed them between your teeth and the glass tasted like spun sugar and tiny miracles of lavish engineering poured down your throat and through the walls of your belly and into your bloodstream where they shed their protective coating and made friends with your immune system and hitched a ride up to your brain. Lessons were still necessary (they played that down on the packaging) but only one or two, and they involved little more than sitting in flashing darkness in a Zenlike state of calm induced by various drug suppositories (this being France) whilst nanomolecules fiddled with your sites of language and cognition until you started parlez vous-ing like a native. Or you could grow wings, although the vials in the sports shops were even more expensive. But the dummies beyond the plateglass whispered and beckoned to Tom and fluttered about excitedly; Day-Glo fairies, urging him to make the investment in a fortnight’s experience that would last a lifetime.
Tom came to an old square at the far end of the shops. The Musée de Masque was just opening, and a group of people who looked like late revellers from the night before were sitting on its steps and sharing a bottle of neat Pernod. The women had decorated their wings with silks and jewels; although by now they looked like tired hatstands. The men, but for the pulsing tattoo-like adornments they’d woven into their flesh and the pouchlike g-strings around their crotches which spoke, so to speak, volumes, were virtually naked. Their skin was heliotrope. Tom guessed it was the colour for this season. To him, though, they looked like a clutch of malnourished, crash-landed gargoyles. He turned back along the street, and found his Citröen pretty much where he thought he’d left it by the alimentation générale where he’d already purchased next month’s supplies, and turned the old analogue key he’d left in the ignition, and puttered slowly out across the cobbles, supplies swishing and jingling in their boxes, then gave the throttle an angry shove, and roared out toward midday, the heat, the scattered olive trees, and the grey-white bulk of his mountain.
Dusk. The coming stars. His time. His mountain. Tom stood outside his sparse wooden hut, sipping coffee and willing the sun to unravel the last of
her glowing clouds from the horizon. Around him on the large, flat, mile-wide, slightly west-tilted slab of pavement limestone glittered the silver spiderweb of his tripwires, which were sheening with dew as the warmth of the day evaporated, catching the dying light as they and he waited for the stars.
He amazed himself sometimes, the fact that he was up here doing this, the fact that he was still searching for anything at all at the ripe, nearly old age of near-seventy, let alone for something as wild and extravagant as intelligent extra-terrestrial life. Where had it began? What had started him on this quest of his? Had it really been those SF stories – dropping through the Stargate with Dave Bowman, or staggering across the sandworm deserts of Arrakis with Paul Atreides? Was it under rocks in Eastport when he was a kid raising the tiny translucent crabs to the light, or was it down the wires on the few remaining SETI websites when he wasn’t that much older? Was it pouring through the library screens at college, or was it now as he stood looking up at the gathering stars from his lonely hut on this lonely French mountain? Or was it somewhere else? Somewhere out there, sweet and glorious and imponderable?
Most of the people he still knew, or at least maintained a sort of long-distance touch with, had given up with whatever had once bugged them some time ago; the ones, in fact, who seemed the happiest, the most settled, the most at ease with their lives – and thus generally had the least to do with him – had never really started worrying about such things in the first place. They took vacations in places like St. Hilaire, they grew wings or gills just like the kids did, and acquired fresh languages and outlooks as they swallowed their vials and flew or dived in their new element. He put down his cup of coffee, which was already skinned and cold, and then he smiled to himself – he still couldn’t help it – as he watched more of the night come in. Maybe it was that scene in Fantasia, watching it on video when he was little more than a baby. The one set to the music he recognised later as Beethoven’s Pastoral. Those cavorting cherubs and centaurs, and then at the end, after Zeus has packed away his thunderbolts, the sun sets, and over comes Morpheus in a glorious cloak of night. The idea of life amid the stars had already been with him then, filling him as he squatted entranced before the screen and the Baltimore traffic buzzed by outside unnoticed, filled with something that was like a sweet sickness, like his mother’s embrace when she thought he was sleeping, like the ache of cola and ice cream. That sweet ache had been with him, he decided as he looked up and smiled as the stars twinkled on and goosebumps rose on his flesh, ever since.
So Tom had become a nocturnal beast, a creature of twilights and dawns. He supposed that he’d become so used to his solitary life up here on this wide and empty mountain that he’d grown a little agora – or was it claustro? – phobic. Hence the need for the absinthe this morning – or at least the extra slug of it. The Wednesdays, the bustle of the town, had become quite incredible to him, a blast of light and smell and sound and contact, almost like those VR suites where you tumbled through huge fortresses on strange planets and fought and cannon-blasted those ever-imaginary aliens. Not that Tom had ever managed to bring himself to do such a thing. As the monsters glowered over him, jaws agape and fangs dripping, all he’d wanted to do was make friends and ask them about their customs and religions and mating habits. He’d never got through many levels on those VR games, the few times he’d tried them. Now he thought about it, he really hadn’t got through so very many levels of the huge VR game known as life, either.
Almost dark. A time for secrets and lovers and messages. A time for the clink of wineglasses and the soft puck of opening bottles. The west was a faint, red blush of clouds and mountains, which caught glimmering in a pool on the fading slope of the mountain. Faint, grey shapes were moving down there; from the little Tom could see now from up here, they could have been stray flares and impulses from the failing remaining rods and cones in his weary eyes – random scraps of data – but he knew from other nights and mornings that they were the shy ibex which grazed this plateau, and were drawn here from miles around along with many other creatures simply because most of the moisture that fell here in the winter rains and summer storms drained straight through the cave-riddled limestone. Sometimes, looking that way on especially clear nights, Tom would catch the glimmer of stars as if a few had fallen there, although on the rare occasions he’d trekked to the pool down across difficult slopes, he’d found that, close to, it was a disappointment. A foul, brown oval of thick amoebic fluid surrounded by cracked and caked mud, it was far away from the sweet oasis he’d imagined, where bright birds and predators and ruminants all bowed their heads to sip the silver, cool liquid and forget, in the brief moments of their parched and mutual need, their normal animosities. But it was undeniably a waterhole, and as such important to the local fauna. It had even been there on the map all those years ago, when he’d been looking for somewhere to begin what he was sure was to be the remainder of his life’s work. A blue full stop, a small ripple of hope and life. He’d taken it as a sign.
Tom went inside his hut and spun the metal cap off one of the cheap but decent bottles of vin de table with which he generally started the evenings. He took a swig from it, looked around without much hope for a clean glass, then took another swig. One handed, he tapped up the keys of one of his bank of machines. Lights stuttered, cooling fans chirruped like crickets or groaned like wounded bears. It was hot in here from all this straining antique circuitry. There was the strong smell of singed dust and warm wires, and a new, dim, fizzing sound which could have been a spark which, although he turned his head this way and that, as sensitive to the changes in this room’s topography as a shepherd to the moods of his flock, Tom couldn’t quite locate. But no matter. He’d wasted most of last night fiddling and tweaking to deal with the results of a wine spillage, and didn’t want to waste this one doing the same. There was something about today, this not-Wednesday known as Thursday, which filled Tom with an extra sense of urgency. He’d grounded himself far too firmly on the side of science and logic to believe in such rubbish as premonitions, but still he couldn’t help but wonder if this wasn’t how they felt, the Hawkings and the Einsteins and the Newtons – the Cooks and the Columbuses, for that matter – in the moment before they made their Big Discovery, their final break. Of course, any such project, viewed with hindsight, could be no more than a gradual accumulation of knowledge, a hunch that a particular area of absent knowledge might be fruitfully explored, followed generally by years of arse-licking and fund-searching and peer-group head shaking and rejected papers and hard work during which a few extra scraps of information made that hunch seem more and more like a reasonably intelligent guess, even if everyone else was heading in the opposite direction and thought that you were, to coin a phrase once used by Tom’s cosmology professor, barking up the wrong fucking tree in the wrong fucking forest. In his bleaker moments, Tom sometimes wondered if there was a tree there at all.
But not now. The data, of course, was processed automatically, collected day and night according to parameters and wavelengths he’d predetermined but at a speed which, even with these processors, sieved and reamed out information by the gigabyte per second. He’d set up the search systems to flash and bleep and make whatever kind of electronic racket they were capable of if they ever came upon any kind of anomaly. Although he was routinely dragged from his bleary daytime slumbers by a surge in power or a speck of fly dirt or a rabbit gnawing the tripwires or a stray cosmic ray, it was still his greatest nightmare that they would blithely ignore the one spike, the one regularity or irregularity, that might actually mean something – or that he’d be so comatose he’d sleep through it. And then of course the computers couldn’t look everywhere. By definition, with the universe being as big as it was, they and Tom were always missing something. The something, in fact, was so large it was close to almost everything. Not only was there all the data collected for numerous other astronomical and non-astronomical purposes which he regularly downloaded from his satellite link an
d stored on the disks which, piled and waiting in one corner, made a silvery pillar almost to the ceiling, but the stars themselves were always out there, the stars and their inhabitants. Beaming down in real-time. Endlessly.
So how to sort, where to begin? Where was the best place on all the possible radio wavelengths to start looking for messages from little green men? It was a question which had first been asked more than a century before, and to which, of all the many, many guesses, one still stood out as the most reasonable. Tom turned to that frequency now, live through the tripwires out on the karst, and powered up the speakers and took another slug of vin de table and switched on the monitor and sat there listening, watching, drinking. That dim hissing of microwaves, the cool dip of interstellar quietude amid the babble of the stars and the gas clouds and the growl of the big bang and the spluttering quasars, not to mention all the racket that all the other humans on Earth and around the solar system put out. The space between the emissions of interstellar hydrogen and hydroxyl radical at round about 1420 MHz, which was known as the waterhole; a phrase which reflected not only the chemical composition of water, but also the idea of a place where, just as the shy ibex clustered to quench themselves at dusk and dawn, all the varied species of the universe might gather after a weary day to exchange wondrous tales.
Tom listened to the sound of the waterhole. What were the chances, with him sitting here, of anything happening right now? Bleep, bleep. Bip, bip. Greetings from the planet Zarg. Quite, quite impossible. But then, given all the possibilities in the universe, what were the chances of him, Tom Kelly, sitting here on this particular mountain at this particular moment with this particular bank of equipment and this particular near-empty bottle of vin de table listening to this frequency in the first place? That was pretty wild in itself. Wild enough, in fact – he still couldn’t help it – to give him goosebumps. Life itself was such an incredible miracle. In fact, probably unique, if one was to believe the figure which was assigned to it by the few eccentric souls who still bothered to tinker with the Drake Equation. That was the problem.
The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels Page 91