Empire Dreams

by Ian McDonald

  “Mrs. Semple, Mrs. Semple.”

  Faces loom before her, changing size and distance as her eyes roll into focus.

  “Yes, Dr. Montgomery?”

  “We’d like your permission to try something we think will bring your son out of his coma.”

  “What is it you want to do?” The weariness in her voice surprises her.

  “Adapt the program parameters slightly. Ms. MacKenzie wants to inject new material into the dream simulation.”

  “You’ve tried that before. You tried switching off the machines altogether.”

  “I know, Mrs. Semple. It didn’t work.” The young doctor (how can anyone so young have the experience to mold people’s lives?) completes her thoughts for her. He is clever, but naive. She envies him that. “Thomas merely maintained the dream coma by exercise of his own imagination. No, what we want to do is inject something into the dream so unacceptable that his only escape is to come out of the deep-dream coma.”

  “And what is that something?”

  “I’d rather not say at the moment, Mrs. Semple, in case it doesn’t work.”

  “And if it doesn’t work?”

  “Then you and he are no worse off than you are now.”

  “And if it succeeds?”

  “Do I really need to answer that question, Mrs. Semple?”

  “Of course not. All right then. You have my permission, and my blessing.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Semple. Okay, Roz.”

  What long fingers the girl has! She cannot get over those long, slender fingers as she types on the computer keypad. They are more like tentacles than fingers. Her attention is torn between those dancing fingers and the words that float up on the green screen.

  PROGRAM “LUKE SKYWALKER”: INTERRUPTIVE MODE CHANGE: IRRAY 70432 GO. TO 70863 READ: KILL MAJOR TOM KILL MAJOR TOM

  At the peak of the entry, when the X15 bucked and bounced like a bad dream from which you couldn’t waken, and every bolt and rivet shuddered and your teeth shook loose in your head, the deflector shields glowed a violent blue and the fighter’s ionization trail plumed out behind you like a shooting star on an autumn night. There had been a moment (just a moment) when the fear had won, when your trust in Major Tom’s skill had not been its equal and you had seen your ship burst open like an egg and you hurled screaming and burning into three hundred miles of sky. The shriek had built in your chest and rattled the bars of your teeth and your brain had pounded pounded pounded against the dome of your helmet. Then you had come out and the air was smooth and the deflectors glowed a dull cherry red and your trusty fighter was dipping down through miles of airspace to the carpet of woolen piled clouds.

  Now there is fear again, not the fear of disintegration in the ionosphere, for that is only death and to die is to leave the self and join the others, but the fear of what waits for you below the cloud cover, for that is more terrible than death, for it denies the others and leaves you alone with only yourself.

  “Big Tom, we must go back! Excalibur has been calling and calling; Captain Zarkon, even the Emperor Geoffrey himself, have been ordering you to turn back. It’s too dangerous, you are forbidden to go any further alone!”

  Major Tom says nothing but thrusts your X15 Astrofighter lower, lower, lower. Clouds shred like tissue paper on your wingtips, the fog swirls and thins patchily, then you are but of the cloud-base and below you is the surface. The Montgomery/Blair engines thunder as Major Tom throttles back; he is coming in for a landing and your stomach, now gripped firmly by six billion billion billion tons’ worth of gravity, is doing flipflops, a sicky-lurchy feeling that overcomes you as he throws the X15 into a left-hand bank.

  The ground is tip-of-the-nose close beyond the canopy, a forbidden planet standing on edge in midbank: red-brick neo-Georgian bungalows in fifteen hundred square feet of white-chained garden, trailers in the drive, boats and hatchbacks parked outside, rosebeds flowering, children on BMXs stopping, pointing, gaping.

  “Commence landing sequence.”

  You do not want to. You cannot go down there. To go down there is dying and worse. A billion billion billion miles away Excalibur, the Imperial throneship, hangs poised on the lip of jumpspace but its stupendous bulk is as insubstantial as a cloud compared to the painful truth of this place, so pin-sharp that you can even read the street name: Clifton Road. Suddenly you are no longer Wee Major Tom, half of the greatest fighting team the Galaxy has ever known. Suddenly you are a small boy who is twelve years old and more frightened than he has ever been before.

  “Commence landing sequence,” orders Major Tom.

  “No!” you wail, wanting beyond want to hear the words which will make it all right, the words which will make men glad to die in the hollowness of space. “I want to go back! Take me back!”

  “Commence landing sequence,” says Major Tom, and there is nothing in his voice but determination and command.

  “Landing sequence initiated,” you sob, touching heavy fingers to cold control panels. Landing shocks slide from their fairings and lock with a thump. The engine noise rises to a scream. Major Tom brings the X15 Astrofighter in low above the rooftops like Santa Claus on his sled and stops it dead in the air over the turning circle at the end of the street. Housewives’ morning coffees grow cold as their imbibers stand in their picture windows, babies in arms, to view the spectacle of the Astrofighter touching down. Whipped into tiny tornadoes, dust eddies chase down the street away from the downdraft. There is a gentle touch, as soft as a mother’s finger upon a nightmaresnared cheek: touchdown.

  “Power down,” says Major Tom, but before the noise of the engines has whispered away to nothing his canopy is open, his harness unbuckled, and he is running down the street to a house with number thirty-two on the gatepost and a lovely tan-and-white hearth-rug dog lying on the front step. Behind that picture window, too, there is a woman, with a coffee cup in one hand and the head of a small boy of about twelve under the other.

  Then the world folds up on itself like one of those origami fortune-tellers you used to make in school. Major Tom’s tight shiny uniform rips and shreds as he runs and the wind whips the scraps away to reveal a new uniform beneath, dark green with silver buttons. An X15 Astrofighter lifts into the air above Clifton Road on a pillar of light, canopy open, and climbs away into forever. Your uniform is gone, and the gentle pressure on your head is not the pressure of a helmet but the pressure of a small, slender hand and you realize that you are the boy in the picture window as the X15 dwindles into a shining dot and winks out. You are held, you are trapped under the gentle hand, marooned on the Planet of Nightmares.

  Now Major Tom is at the car and he waves at you and all you can do is wave back at him, for the words you want to shout, the warnings you want to scream, rattle round and round and round in your head like pebbles in a wave and will not be cast out.

  Now he has the door open. Now he is in the car. Door shut, belt on, key in the ignition—

  This time you know the blast for what it is. This time you are prepared and can appreciate its every vital moment in dreadful action-replay.

  The ball of light fills the interior of the Ford Sierra. An instant after, still twilit by the killing light, the roof swells up like a balloon and the doors bulge on their hinges. Another instant later the windows shatter into white sugar and then the picture window before you flies into shards, a gale of whirling knives carried on a white wind that blasts you from your feet and blows you across the room in a whirling jumble of glass and smashes you into the sofa. The skin of the car disintegrates and the pieces take flight. The hood follows through the window to join you on the sofa. The roof has blown clean away and is flying up to heaven, up to join God. The car roars into flames and within, behind the flames, a black puppet thing gibbers and dances for a few endless moments before it falls into crisp black ashes.

  A red rain has spattered the wallpaper. There is not a window intact on Clifton Road. Your mother is lying at a crazy angle against the door, her dressing
gown hitched around her waist. Out in the drive the pyre roars and trickles of burning fuel melt the tarmac. Smoke plumes into the sky, black oily smoke, and there at the place where your eyes are drawn, the place where the smoke can no longer be seen, there is a bird-bright white dot: an Imperial X15 Astrofighter coming in from space, and now you know that it must happen all over again, the landing, the running Major Tom, the strange transformations, the man in the green uniform stepping into his car, the explosion, the burning, the Astrofighter coming in for a landing, the changes, the blast, the burning, the Astrofighter, the blast, the burning, the landing, the blast, the burning, landing blast burning, blast burning blast burning blast burning, over and over and over.

  “Major Tom!” you cry, “Major Tom, don’t leave me! Daddy! Daddy!”

  * * * *

  When the alarms had sounded, when the flashing lights had thrown their thin red flickering shadows across the floor, she had said to herself, He’s dead, they have lost him, and though the world had ended she could not bear any hatred in her heart for those who had killed her son. They had acted in good faith. She had consented. All responsibility was hers. She could forgive them, but never herself. God might forgive Catherine Semple, but she never would.

  Gone, she thought, and had risen from her chair to leave. Empty coffee cups and women’s magazines covered the table. She would slip away quietly while the alarms were still ringing and the lights still flashing. Nurses’ running footsteps had come chasing down the corridors, but at the door the sudden, terrifying quiet had stopped her like ice in the heart. Then, after the storm had come, the still, small voice, pitifully frail and poignant.

  “Major Tom! Major Tom! Don’t leave me! Daddy! Daddy!”

  “I won’t,” she had whispered. “I won’t leave you,” and everything had stopped then. It was as if the whole city had fallen silent to hear the cries of the new nativity, and then with a shudder the world had restarted. Lines had danced and chased across the oscilloscopes, rubber bladders had breathed their ersatz breaths, valves had hissed, and the electronic blip of the pulsebeat had counted out time. But even she had known the difference. The red lights which had been red so long she could not remember them being any other color were now defiantly green, and though she could not read the traces she had known that they were the normal signs of a twelve-year-old boy waking gently from a troubled, healthy sleep. She could feel the warmth from his bed upon her skin and smell the smell that was not the reek of sickness but the smell of sickness purged, disease healed.

  She remembers all this, she remembers the nurses, she remembers the handshakes and the hugs and the hankies, she remembers Dr. Montgomery’s lips moving, but the words escape her, for time has been jumbled up and nurses, reporters, doctors, photographers, are all stacked next to each other without meaningful order, like a box of antique photographs found in an attic. She remembers flashguns and journalists, video cameramen trailing leads and sound engineers, television news reporters; she remembers their questions but none of her answers.

  Now she sits by the bedside. There is a cold cup of coffee on the arm which the friendly nurse from County Monaghan had brought her. Dr. Montgomery and the MacKenzie woman, the one with the look of computers behind her eyes, answer questions. She does not pretend to understand what they have done but she knows what it might have been. Ignored for a while she can sit and watch her son watch her back. Unseen by any cameras, eyes meet and smile. There has been pain, there will be pain again, but here, now, there is goodness.

  Outside it seems to have stopped snowing, but by the cast of the darkening sky she knows that it will not be for long. The lights of an Army Lynx helicopter pass high over West Belfast, and if she squeezes her eyes half shut she can make herself believe that they are not the lights of a helicopter at all but the rocket trail of Major Tom, flying home from Andromeda.

  SCENES FROM A SHADOWPLAY

  OH, BUT THE Infanta Serenade is graceful and the Infanta Serenade is fair and when Dom Perellen sees her descending the grand staircase on the arm of the host, his ex-patron, the night of the pageant at the House Merreveth, he knows someone will have to die. For but two weeks previously his had been the arm she had taken descending his grand staircase to greet his guests, his the halls which had rung to her gay golden laughter, his the divan she had graced with her long, languid huntress’s limbs. Fury rising in his gorge like bitter bile, Dom Perellen departs from the ball as early as propriety permits and orders his gondola to return him home without delay or detour. He sits like a dull cold stone, wrapped in his mantle and street mask as the boat steals down dark canals lined with yellow-windowed walls and low bridges. Deafened by the imagined laughter of Dom Merreveth and all the Gracious Castes of the city, he cannot hear the desperate playing of the ensemble of mechanicals in the bow (a selection of his own most celebrated quintets, no less), nor the terrible distant cries of the Ragers as the night’s madness claims them again, nor the erosive slop of dark water against the stones of the City of Man. Without his knowing, the chill of autumn rises like fog from Elder Sea and steals through his street gown into his soul. Upon arrival at the House Perellen he locks himself in the music room and meets his servitors’ well-intentioned inquiries with a tantrum of temper that sends both human and mechanical scurrying for their quarters.

  From the walls of the music room portraits of the Doms and Infantas of the House Perellen, separated forever by a long, narrow strip of parquet floor, gaze upward into the tinkling chandelier, or wistfully toward the great oriel window with its commanding views of the Grand Canal and the Lagoon beyond. On a dais beneath this window stands the current Dom Perellen, thirty-fifth of his line, looking out toward the unseen sea. For a long time he stands thus and the retinue of the House hush each other in their duties and wait. Then as the uncounted campaniles and carillons of the City Imperishable ring out the Third Hour he turns to the device beside him. This is the Instrument, the wonderful contrivance of keys and stops, tabs and levers (capable of the faithful mimicry of any sound animate or inanimate) upon which he creates his compositions. Seating himself before the complex manuals, he touches a key here, a tab there, and swells the long room with music. He plays for many hours, filling the House with towering toccatas of dizzying virtuosity, intricate fugues, and moody sonatas until at dawn he emerges, his fury spent, and announces to his household that all is well, he will retire to his rooms for a short rest. As the doors close behind him the servitors all notice that the portraits of the Exalted Ancestors Beneath the Sea seem to be smiling the same smile.

  * * * *

  Now we see a strange thing, for, since those of the Gracious Castes seldom visit those older parts of the city given over to the commonalty and the artisiers, there is a certain unseemliness in Dom Perellen’s stealthy passage down branching waterways which grow out of each other, increasingly narrow and overshadowed by crumbling mansions. Slipping past sludge-boats and fishing-cogs, between the baroque barges of the transtellar merchants and the vigilant dark launches of the St. Charl Guards, he comes upon a quiet, deserted water alley enclosed by sheer walls of rusting iron balconies and peeling wooden shutters, overhung by the pale banners of fresh laundry. At the water-steps of St. Audeon’s Place, he leaves his gondola and proceeds with two wardens (one fleshly, one mechanical) into the labyrinth of lanes and entries where he finds a place he knows well but has never seen.

  Brothers Ho, says the sign above the door, Importers and Purveyors of Exotic Creatures: Taxidermists. Behind the latticed window a patchy stuffed padishant bows and curtsies to the passersby. Kittens in pinafores caper about a table in parody of a nursery tea-party, birds sing and display, gorgodrills rise up upon their hind legs and open their ruffs, fritillaries flitter and fret, and the imported exotics lurk within their protective glass environments.

  “Lo, Brothers Ho,” whispers Dom Perellen, “a moment of your time for a dear sibling, a favor given, a favor taken?” The door pays no heed. There are no sounds of motion from within. �
�Lo, siblings, if you will not open the door to your dear brother, will you open it to good custom?” After a long time oiled bolts are drawn back and the door opens. Quick as thought, Dom Perellen is through it. He finds himself in a well-appointed parlor, low-ceilinged and lit by warm yellow gaslight. Every available inch of wall space is taken by some stuffed and mounted creature, every part of the room subjected to the scrutiny of their black glass eyeballs. Behind him the window displays perform their mechanical pantomimes for the amusement of the lanes and alleys. Before him stand two men, tall for the artisan castes, dissimilar in age but in every other way as alike as two peas in a pod.

  “Which are you?” asks Dom Perellen. Both men answer together, “We are Adam Beth and Adam He,” which is no answer at all. “So few?” asks Dom Perellen. One of the brothers shrugs, the other replies, “Brother Adam Zayin is in the workship, patron; the other four brothers are out among the Known Worlds procuring stock, thanks entirely to your continued patronage, Grace, in obtaining visas for us.”

  “It was the least I could do. We look after our own, even the discredited sons of our father. But I have some business for you; a matter of some delicacy which demands your particular skills and customary discretion. Now, if I may make myself comfortable?” Chagrined by their lapse of common etiquette, one of the brothers hurries to prepare tea while the other takes Dom Perellen’s mantle and street mask. It is then that we see that the faces of Dom Perellen and Adam Ho are like one face reflected in a mirror. After tea has been served Dom Perellen leans forward confidentially across the low table. The swiveling glass eyes of the stuffed animals follow every motion from their high perches.