by Ian McDonald
The people were moving away from the viewing stage. The chase planes were coming in to land on the two-mile artificial peninsula jutting out into the ocean. The hyperbola of smoke was blowing away on the breeze from off the sea. Clouds clung to the horizon; a tropical storm was moving out there in the Atlantic. The meteorological satellites were tracking its progress up the Gulf Stream. The odds were slightly over evens that it would come ashore. Heavy weather warnings were in force from Fort Lauderdale to Daytona Beach. If it hit Kennedy, it would shut down the HORUS launch program for days, and the free festival down in the trailer park. The name of the tropical storm was Hilary.
‘Launcher separation successful,’ the man with the ear radio said. ‘Isaac Asimov is climbing into transfer orbit. Unity rendezvous in twenty-seven minutes.’
His fat friend smiled and nodded sagely.
Gaby McAslan walked back to the SkyNet news van. It was a good angle; the incongruous fusion of Right Stuff and Hippy Chic. The guys in the van much preferred it to the hotels where the rest of the world news were bivouacked. But then, Gaby reckoned they got action every night, in the back of their SkyNet US van. Right now the men were comparing the tape unfavourably with those of previous launches.
‘Night ones are best,’ said the one who called himself Rodrigo. ‘Whole fucking place lights up like a fucking Christmas tree.’
‘Here’s that stuff you asked for,’ said the other, whom Rodrigo called The Man, though he was years younger. ‘What you doing with this anyway?’
‘My job,’ Gaby said, and took the minidisc recorder and pin-head mike. Pin-head Mike would be a better name for The Man than The Man. They were both jerks. Not for the first time since coming to cover the BDO story, Gaby wished she had her Kenya team with her. That could not be; both her men were prisoners of the Chaga; Faraway literally, Tembo in that he had been refused a visa to enter the United States. Potential biohazard threat from exposure to mutagenic substances, the Consulate in Zanzibar had said. You are a black African was the truth. The race and fear barriers were going up already. Gaby had been closer than Tembo to Chaga virons in the last days of Nairobi, but she was the right nationality, the right race, the right colour not to get turned back at the yellow line.
In her room in the Starview Lodge across the lagoon, Gaby wired up and pulled on the ugly uniform she had bribed from the chambermaid at the Kennedy Ramada. She checked herself in the mirror. The recorder was invisible. She had reception call her a taxi to the Ramada. The SkyNet car would have been dangerously obvious. The driver dropped her at the staff entrance.
UNECTA had come in force to Kennedy Space Centre to stage-manage humanity’s close encounter with the Big Dumb Object. They overwhelmed the capacity of NASA’s launch facility. A dozen hotels, motels and travel lodges as far south as Canaveral had been seconded to house the overspill of BDO people and their inevitable entourage of media and society hangers-on. The Kennedy Ramada was the hub of UNECTASpace’s operations. No press or celebrity sniffers here. The doormen and bell-boys had the scent of a journalist’s soul, and the men in suits they summoned had hard hands. Now that Ellen Prochnow—Chief Executive of UNECTASpace—had taken residence in the Presidential suite, the hard hands had been backed up with big guns. Which was the reason Gaby Mc Asian in her bribed chambermaid’s uniform was hurrying through the kitchens and store areas before someone realized they did not recognize her.
The material had been hard-picked—a hint, a clandestine meeting, a file copied, a database hacked—and painstakingly assembled, but Gaby now had the evidence to put to Ellen Prochnow. UNECTASpace was part-funding Operation Final Frontier with pay-offs from biotech corporations and the armaments manufacturers, seduced by the prospect of developing weapons systems from Chaga biological packages. The humane bomb that destroys the enemy’s ability to wage war without harming humans. Winnable wars. All the letters, faxes, interviews, depositions, codes and passwords were on the disc in her breast pocket. Care to comment, Ms Prochnow?
Gaby nodded to Gloria, her inside woman, in the corridor to the service elevator.
‘She is in, I assure you,’ Gloria whispered.
Her husband has probably already snorted the two thousand dollars up his nose, Gaby thought. Was the makeup a little too heavy around the left eye? Cover. You need cover. She ducked into the laundry room and grabbed a hanger-trolley of clothes ready to be returned to their owners.
‘Next car, please,’ she told the room-valet waiting on the next floor up. All Irish people can do convincing American accents. The illuminated numbers blinked on and off above the door. Gaby amused herself by looking through the clothes on the rail.
She hit the emergency stop button.
Gaby took the hanger down and examined the garment closely. The print on the T-shirt was faded from years of washing, but it was clearly a teenage nun with her habit up, luxuriously masturbating.
Gaby sat in the corner of the elevator for a full minute, staring at the T-shirt while the call button lights flashed. She put the T-shirt back on the rail, went down to ground, pushed the trolley through the lobby to the reception desk and asked for a pen and paper.
‘Give that to Dr M. Shepard, please,’ she said. She left the trolley by the desk and went out the front door, past all the staring political-space-BDO-Chaga people. She had caught a glimpse of a television in the public lounge. A glimpse was enough to identify Ellen Prochnow’s unmistakable First Lady of Space styling, and the words Live Relay in the bottom right corner.
Thanks a lot, Gloria.
63
Another country, another press conference. So many amphitheatres of seats, so many tables and chairs and carafes of water and nervous scans of the seventh row and the clear of the throat before the ‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.’ Getting old, Gaby McAslan. Getting cynical. Getting weary. One last big miracle and wonder and that will do me, all right? Getting lonely, in your seventh seat of the seventh row, with all these faces around you that you know so well, but who never become more than faces.
Has he got that note yet?
No. Don’t think about that. Think about Rodrigo and The Man going to get her that contact with the Pink Underground. That would be a hell of a story to break. The symbs were breeding sub-cultures like clap in a brothel; it was politically inevitable that there would be gay communities springing up in the vast Chagas of Ecuador and southern Venezuela. Not surprising that there should be a secret underground railroad funnelling white norte homosexuals across terminum. No homophobia or persecution there. No fear of the Scourge.
Weeks could pass now without thinking about Jake Aarons.
She thought about Shepard again. It is only two hours since you left him that note. He probably hasn’t got it yet, yet alone meditated on his response. Just what is he doing down here anyway?
Ellen Prochnow was taking this press conference alone. She had never been shy about being seen on the pale blue screen. That was a Chanel suit. Style never goes out of fashion, Coco had said.
God, what if Shepard didn’t show?
Ellen Prochnow did the scan of the seventh row. Hi. It’s me, the one with the red hair, right? You don’t know me yet, but by the time Any Questions is over, we’ll be better acquainted. A whole lot better. Ellen Prochnow did not do the nervous throat-clear. She was a professional.
‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.’ The half-smile was very good. ‘Welcome to Kennedy Space Centre for the briefing on Operation Final Frontier Mission 88. Most of you probably know who I am—’ small laughter ‘—but for those who have been on some other planet than this or the Big Dumb Object, I am Ellen Prochnow, Chief Executive of UNECTASpace, and I’ll be introducing you later to the crew and expedition team of Mission 88, the HORUS Arthur C. Clarke.’
How many biotech salarypersons among them, Ellen? Gaby thought. How many weapons analysts?
‘First, the latest on our Big Buddy up there. As of 11:30 GMT September 18, the Big Dumb Object is in a trailing position to Earth
at a range of seven hundred and twenty thousand kilometres, slightly under three times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. The Swarm has dropped into a trailing position 15,000 kilometres behind the BDO and we are assuming it has become dormant. Estimated Time To Earth Orbit is two hundred and fifteen hours thirty-eight minutes. Achieved Earth Orbit will be on Thursday September 27 at 10:22 GMT; that’s about twenty past five in the morning EST, or Last Jack Daniels and Then I’ll Get Some Sleep, Florida Journalists’ Time.’
Don’t smile at your own jokes, Ellen.
She rattled through the reports on the state of the Big Dumb Object. What little Gaia could photograph through the five slit windows that ran the length of the cylinder indicated that the ring mountain baffles had solidified into partition bulkheads five kilometres thick, though gravitometric analysis seemed to indicate the presence of large spaces up to three kilometres in diameter inside the walls. Gaia was being re-tasked for low-level passes over the window slits to attempt to map the interior prior to human exploration. Yes, alien intelligences were a possibility. Even the Chaga-makers themselves. So was Harvey the six-foot invisible white rabbit. Any more questions?
Not yet, Gaby thought. Wait until the Great White Major Toms are smiling for the cameras before you pull out your j’accuse.
‘You can pick up the latest releases from Gaia and the Hubble and Chandrasekahr telescopes at reception on the way out,’ Ellen Prochnow said.
‘I’d like now to introduce you the crew and mission team of the space plane Arthur C. Clarke. This will be Mission 88 of Operation Final Frontier, HORUS launch thirty-four from Kennedy Space Centre. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Commander Phillippa Gregory, orbiter pilot Damon Ruscoe, Flight Engineer McAuley Trudin of the Arthur C. Clarke, and her mission team.’
People applauded. Gaby expected them to come on in a high-kicking chorus line, but it was just another load of smiling, waving bald-headed astronauts in white coveralls with UNECTASpace’s crescents-and-Earth logo on breast and back. The shaved heads were something to do with preventing hairs drifting around Unity, Gaby had heard. The station was already well over capacity, and Final Frontier people were being shipped up faster than the space engineers could bolt new sections on and fill them with air. Gaby liked the idea of the success or failure of First Contact hanging from a stray, free-floating pube. The hairlessness suited the blacks much better than the whites, who all looked grim and refugee-like. So which is the weapons expert? Gaby thought, leaning on her folded arms and watching the mission team shuffle out from the wing and form a semicircle behind Ellen Prochnow. You, big black man with the happy expression? You, little white woman with the look of naked terror on your face? You, Captain Lantern-jaw Marine-face with the much-too-nice-eyes that give it all away?
You?
You.
‘You,’ Gaby breathed at the twelfth coverall from the end. ‘You cannot do this to me, not here, not now.’
64
There was a launch that night. It was only an SSTO freighter—they barely gave the things mission numbers, they were that lacking in glamour—but it made a lot of noise and sent up a mighty impressive pillar of flame across the lagoon. The space-junkies and rocket-fetishists who had not gone across the causeway to Trailer Park were crowding around the Starview Lodges telescopes on the upper level to ooh and ah. Gaby had the terrace bar to herself. The other journalists derided her for her choice of the hippy, dippy, New-Agey Starview Lodge over less eclectic expense account hotels down the coast and across the lagoon. Gaby stayed here because Gaby liked the vibes and the clientele. It reminded her of Africa. It reminded her of the Watchhouse. Its keel had been laid the same year that Unity’s had been welded together in low orbit, and it had grown in symbiosis with the renascent space age. Nowhere else did they hold nightly BDO-viewing parties, as socially and aesthetically charged as any Japanese cherry-blossom-watching picnic. And there were no news people.
‘Expecting someone?’ Nice Eddie, the bar boy she did like, asked her.
‘Hoping someone,’ she said and sucked her piña colada and watched the faintly luminous pillar of cloud from the rocket launch blow away on the wind from the ocean. It was getting up; Tropical Storm Hilary must be dithering between strange attractors out in the Bahamas. Gaby waved her swizzle stick in the air. Come, storm, come. If a butterfly’s wings in Beijing could summon up a hurricane, surely a swizzle stick with a Saturn Five rocket on the end at the Starview Lodge could command Hilary to storm hard against this coast, rock this wooden ark of a hotel on its moorings, rage over all the HORUSes and launchers and SSTO over the water and press them to the ground, and blow Shepard back to me. Blow me hours, blow me days of him, before he gets into his rocket and flies away from me.
He was taking his time coming. But he was still politely late.
Gaby sought out the BDO in the sky. That bright star in the belly of Pisces, resting on the edge of the world. How would it look when it went into orbit? They were talking about a position half-way between the earth and the moon. She looked at that great light in the sky and tried to calculate apparent diameters. A bright blur. Maybe even a recognizable cylinder. It would go through phases, like the moon. It was a moon. Fourteen day orbit.
What will it look like to Shepard, in Unity, or on High Steel, that hair-raising surf-shack of girders, solar panels and environment tanks they had built out there the final stepping stone to the BDO. Too big to be a space ship; a planet on your doorstep. That was probably the only way to look at it and stay sane.
She ordered another piña colada from Constantin, the bar boy she did not like. He was impolitely late now. And he had managed to shaft her question to Ellen Prochnow. Stand up and play Wicked Witch of the Seventh Row in front of the man you begged to come and see you to tell him how sorry you are, how you’ve changed, how you’ve found him in your thoughts every day.
Bamboo wind chimes clocked against each other. Blow wind, come to me. Listen to me, I cannot lose him to cosmic irony.
Up on the telescope deck they were talking passionately about centrifugal gravity.
‘Any messages for me at reception?’ she asked Nice Eddie.
‘Not last time I looked.’
‘Could you look again?’
He looked again. There were still no messages.
‘He’s late,’ Nice Eddie said.
He is three piña coladas late, Gaby thought. Three piña coladas late is looking-like-he-isn’t-going-to-show late. It’s he-doesn’t-want-to-see-you late. It’s this-is-the-end-of-it-Gaby-McAslan-late. The fourth piña colada is the longest one, the one over which you work out what you are going to do with the rest of your life now. It would need to be the longest one Emilio at the bar ever shook. She did not have a plan if he did not come. It is a terrible universe, she thought, that such tiny moment, such atoms of decision, are the fulcrums on which whole lives and futures swing. Strange attractors of the soul; like that storm she had tried to charm with her swizzle stick.
He was not-going-to-show late now. He was never-going-to-show late.
‘He didn’t turn up,’ Nice Eddie said as she picked small change out of her purse to leave as a tip.
‘Doesn’t look like it, Eddie.’
She stood up to leave. And there he was, asking directions at reception. The girl was pointing right at her. The strength went out of her legs. She sat down, suddenly terrified. She realized that she did not know what to say to him.
She found herself scrabbling in her bag for cigarettes that had not been there for five years.
‘Gaby?’
‘Oh. Hi.’ Caught, flustering. ‘Sit down, oh sit down; Eddie, a Wild Turkey with branch water, isn’t that what it is? and I’ll have another piña colada, I did remember right, didn’t I? It is Wild Turkey?’
‘You remember right.’
She found she was doing anything but look at him. She forced her eyes towards him. He is not a man who suits having no hair, she thought. It made him look like an impostor of him
self. He had bought a new outfit, one of those Indian-inspired two-pieces that were the fashion. It did not flatter him much either, but he looked comfortable in it.
The hideous idea that a woman had bought it for him froze her heart.
‘I like what you’ve done with your hair,’ Gaby said, trying to restart.
Shepard ran his hand over his scalp.
‘Still a bit grey and scaly. I like what you’ve done with yours.’
Gaby smiled self-consciously and touched the soft curls.
‘Got fed up with the old Joni-Mitchell-sings-Big-Yellow-Taxi look.’
‘Shorter suits you,’ Shepard said. ‘I’m sorry I’m so late, I’m sure you thought I wasn’t coming. They sprang a surprise meeting on us. Seems Hilary out there has decided she’d like a vacation on the coast and they wanted to warn us in case they had to push the launch date forward.’
‘Can they do that?’ Nice Eddie brought the drinks. Shepard paid for them in Space Centre scrip.
‘Personally, I don’t think so. They’ve rescheduled the Gene Roddenberry launch, which is Mission 86, for oh-nine-thirty tomorrow but the speed this storm’s coming, I don’t think they’ll even make that. Forecast says it’s due to hit about twenty miles south of Canaveral around oh-seven-hundred.’
Oh, Shepard, they’ve got you talking like them, Gaby thought.
‘You weren’t on the flight roster,’ she said. ‘It was a hell of surprise finding you in the line-up at the press conference.’
‘Hell of a surprise finding myself in that line-up.’ Shepard took a long draw from his drink. The wind was stronger now, lifting the paper coasters, rattling the paper lanterns. It is blowing in from Africa, Gaby thought. ‘Every mission specialist has a back-up. Day before yesterday, Carl Freyer went down with some mystery virus he caught off a hotel air-conditioning system—that’s the risk you run when you exceed the capacity of your quarantine accommodation—and they need someone with specialisms in Chaga nanochemistry and in-field experience. They gave me five days to get my stomach muscles up to high-gee lift-off standard. Four hours a day in the gym, the rest in centrifuge training, practising suit manoeuvres in the water tank, or team building. I can hardly move, I am so stiff and sore.’