Empire Dreams

by Ian McDonald

  Christian turns away. His eyes search for you, but you know that it is his foursight, though so blinded by the actions of other people that he was unable to avert any of this night’s tragedy, which finds and fixes you. He holds you with his gaze and you cannot look away. He raises his hands to his face. The men close in, hasty to act. He holds them back with a gesture. This is for you only. Then he will go.

  “Fraser, I can’t blame you though heaven knows I ought to. But does any snowflake in an avalanche feel responsible? No less you for your simple, good-hearted ignorance. Perhaps I’m still paying the price of the Pilot’s pride; if so, it was bought dearly.”

  He touches his hands to his cheeks in a curious motion. And his face falls into his hands.

  The men gasp and step back, reaching for weapons.

  Up on the dune you feel like your soul is being torn out by its roots.

  Delicate mechanisms ooze and pulse where Christian’s face once was. The gray eyes sunk in gray metal look into you.

  “You had to rush ahead and find the end of the story before I led you to it, didn’t you, Fraser? So now you know, and I hope you’re the wiser for it.

  “You see, if you’d listened I’d have told you how I had the surgeon on the transport make me into this unchanging thing, for otherwise how could I have borne all those years of waiting past and those yet to come? Mere flesh will be dust when she returns across the sky, so I must clothe the perishable in imperishability to be there for her. And, how else could I truly love a machine, unless I became one too?

  “But look at this face, Fraser, look at it and know that it is agony to be a machine, to be only the memory of flesh. Ask yourself, what could ever be worth that price? Only the certainty of her love. I have her promise that she will return, and unlike men, machines are bound by their word. I had that certainty, the only valid coin I possessed, and you took it from me, Fraser. Oh, the kite was pain enough, but even then I could still have hoped, but what if they now take me and try me and put me in a cell? I cannot fool myself. For that shadow across the face of the moon could be hers, or those footsteps passing beneath the bailey wall. And then my mortal soul in this immortal frame will die a little. You see, I’ll never be certain, and only the certainty made life bearable. Now I will never know. But you know, Fraser.”

  And he nods to the men with his machine head, and they reluctantly come and take him away.

  And that is the last part of Christian’s story.

  But his face still looks up from the sand into the dawning sky and you know you will never be able to meet the gaze of those empty eyes.

  * * * *

  Though the days no longer hold the frenzied heat of summer, there is still a lingering warmth as they dwindle towards the perpetual midnight of Darkwinter.

  The beach is still a good place for a boy to play on the short afternoons, when school is done and friends gone home, when Da is serving and Ma busy with mussel soup and soused gurnards, when Sister is reading in the weather room and Brother in town for a new set of strings and even Mr. Cat prefers the company of the bugs under the veranda. The Cannery is still there, though folk don’t go there so often now that they’ve chained it off and hung warning signs giving notice of its demolition, and the hulks remind you rather too much of things you would sooner forget. But there are always the games a boy can play with the sea.

  Thousands of games, some as old as the sea itself, others that swim up like new-hatched elvers out of your imagination. There are imaginary countries to be mapped, peopled, and invaded on the uncharted wastes of the shore. There are springs to be forded, bridged, dammed, and then blasted back into their original state. There are messages, some cryptic and coded, some just a hopeful call for a reply, to be sealed into bottles and re-addressed to the waves. There is never any want of things to do on the beach.

  And when he tires of games, a boy can always beachcomb along the tideline for whatever treasures the ocean chooses to release. Glass fishing floats, rusty chunks of metal that might once have been ship’s fittings, bottles (always empty) worn opaque by tumbling sand, lengths of rope, oddly shaped pieces of driftwood, sea-purses holding a fortune in grit, pieces of crumbled cork, feathers and bones …

  The sea casts up some funny things: you never know what a boy might find if he searches long enough.

  KING OF MORNING, QUEEN OF DAY

  DR. EDWARD GARRET DESMOND’S PERSONAL DIARY: APRIL 12, 1909.

  LAST NIGHT, UPON the occasion of my daughter Emily’s sixteenth birthday, I took the liberty of drawing Lord Fitzgerald, a keen amateur astronomer and fellow of the Society, aside from the celebrations (such girlish things doubtless holding little appeal for the Marquis of Claremorris) and showed him through my telescope the object referred to by my philistine colleagues in the Royal Irish Astronomical Society as “Bell’s Comet.” Lord Fitzgerald I know to be a highly educated and intelligent man (a rare commodity in these days of inbred gentry and fossilised aristocracy) and a close friend who would receive openly and without prejudice my speculations upon the nature of “Bell’s Comet.”

  Whilst at the telescope the Marquis observed one of the object’s periodic flarings (which I have calculated to occur once every twenty-eight minutes) when, for a second or so, “Bell’s Comet” becomes as bright as a major planet. Lord Fitzgerald expressed a great and open curiosity in the phenomenon, and as he had previously intimated to me that he would be unable to attend the meeting of the Society which I am to address four days hence (due to a commitment in that great cauldron of muddy thought and confusion, the House of Lords in London), I explained my hypothesis briefly to Lord Fitzgerald, partly as a preparation for my lecture to my peers, partly, I must confess, to win a favorable ear. Here I must add that it is more than the Marquis of Claremorris’s ear I mean to win; I have need of his considerable fortune if “Project Pharos” is to be brought to fruition.

  On a personal note, how good it was to have Emily about the house again! She is like a beam of spring sunshine, flitting through the house like a faery brightening whatever she touches. Why, I had not realised what a dark and gloomy place Craigdarragh is without her until she arrived from Dublin and the Cross and Passion School this morning. I rather fear that I have grown engrossed in my work to the exclusion of all else, even my dearest daughter!

  Domestic memo: I must remind Mrs. O’Carolan to have a man up from the town to look at the electricals: last night’s current failure caused great distress to the young ladies at the party. Voltage fluctuations apart, the birthday tea was most successful; Emily was clearly delighted. Young girls are so easily pleased!

  * * * *

  EMILY’S DIARY: APRIL 13, 1909.

  HOW WONDERFUL IT is to be home again! All the dreary hours I spent in Sister Immaculata’s Latin 5th dreaming of home have not dulled Craigdarragh’s wonderfulness: for three days I have gone round hugging every wall, window, and door in the place! I almost hugged Mrs. O’Carolan when she met me off the train in Sligo town; oh, the look there would have been on her face! How good it is to see people who are round and plump and happy after the pinched black and white nuns. They are like magpies, the nuns, always miserable, always cackling and rubbing their black wings together. I hate them and I hate Cross and Passion, it is like a prison, old and grey, and it is always raining.

  I had forgotten the colors of Craigdarragh in the spring, the new greens of the hills and the woods, the blue of the sea and beyond it, purple Knocknarea, the red of the early rhododendrons, my father’s red cheeks and beard: it is funny how easily you forget the colors when there is only grey around you. But oh, nothing has changed, and that is so good; everything is as it was when I left after Christmas, Mrs. O’Carolan is fat and fusty and kind. Mama is Mama, pretending she is an artist and a poet and a tragic queen from a legend all rolled into one; Papa is Papa, worried and hurried and so busy with his telescopes and sums I’m sure he has already forgotten I’m here. And Craigdarragh is Craigdarragh: the woods, the mountain, the waterf
all. Today I revisited the Bridestone up above the woods on the slopes of Ben Bulben. How peaceful it is there with only the wind and the song of the blackbird for company. Peaceful, and, dare I say, magical? It is like nothing has changed for a thousand years, one can imagine Finn MacCumhall and his grim Fianna warriors hunting the leaping stag with his red-eared hounds through some woodland glade, or the sunlight glinting from the spearpoints of the Red Branch Heroes as they march to avenge some slaughtered comrade.

  Perhaps my imagination is too vigorous after months of confinement in that grey prison of Cross and Passion: I could have sworn that I was not alone as I came down through the woods from the Bridestone, that there were shadowy shapes flitting from tree to tree, unseen when I looked for them, giggling at my foolishness. Ah well, I did say it was an enchanted, faery place.

  * * * *

  EXCERPTS FROM DR. EDWARD GARRET DESMOND’S ECTURE TO THE ROYAL IRISH ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY, TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN, APRIL 16, 1909.

  THEREFORE, GENTLEMEN, IT is clearly impossible for these fluctuations in luminosity from Bell’s Comet to be due to the differing albedos of its spinning surfaces, as my mathematical proofs have demonstrated. The only explanation for this unprecedented phenomenon is that these emissions of light are artificial in origin.

  (General consternation among the learned fellows.)

  If artificial, then we must address ourselves to the disturbing truth that they must, must, gentlemen, be works of intellects: minds, learned fellows, as great as, if not greater than, our own. It has long been held that we are not the unique handiwork of our Creator; the possibility of great civilizations upon the planets Mars and Venus and even beneath the forbidding surface of our own moon has been many times mooted by respected men of science and learning.

  (Heckler: “Intoxicated men of absinthe and bourbon!” Laughter.)

  What I am now proposing, if I may, gentlemen, is a concept of a whole order of magnitude greater than these speculations. I am proposing that this artifact, for artificial it must be, is evidence of a mighty civilization beyond our solar system, upon a world of the star Wolfe 359, for it is from the direction of this star that the object called Bell’s Comet originates. Having ascertained that the object was indeed no mere lifeless comet, I attempted to ascertain its velocity. As the learned fellows are doubtless too aware, it is difficult in the extreme to calculate the velocity of astronomical phenomena; nevertheless, I estimated the object’s velocity to be three hundred and fifty miles per second.

  (Murmurs of amazement from the learned fellows.)

  However, over the four-week period during which I kept the object under daily observation, weather permitting, the velocity decreased from three hundred and fifty miles per second to one hundred and twenty miles per second. Clearly, the object is decelerating, and from this information only one conclusion is possible—that the object is a spatial vehicle of some form, despatched by the inhabitants of Wolfe 359 to establish contact with the inhabitants of our earth.

  (Heckler: “Oh come now.”)

  While the exact design of such a spatial vehicle is beyond my conception, I have some tentative suggestions as to its motive power. Our French colleague, M. Verne has written most imaginatively (Heckler: “Not as imaginatively as you, sir.”) of how a great space-gun might propel a capsule around the moon. Intriguing though this notion is, it is quite impractical for a journey from Wolfe 359 to our earth. The velocity imparted by such a space-gun would not be sufficient for the journey to be completed within the lifetimes of its voyagers. (Heckler: “Will this lecture be completed within the lifetimes of its audience?” Laughter.) Therefore I suggest, if I may do so without interruption, learned fellows, that the vehicle accelerates and decelerates through a series of self-generated explosions, of titantic force, which propel the vehicle through transtellar space at colossal velocities. Of course, such star-crossing velocities must be shed to rendezvous with our earth at the completion of the journey, and I would submit that the immense flarings of light we are witnessing are the explosions by which the vehicle slows its headlong flight.

  (Heckler: “Are we in any seriousness meant to accept these fanciful vaporings over the Astronomer Royal’s reasoned arguments?”)

  Gentlemen, I cannot say with any measure of scientific certainty (Catcalls, booing. Heckler: “What scientific certainty?”) what such a propulsive explosive might be, certainly no earthly explosive would possess sufficient power for its weight to be a practical fuel for such a transtellar flight. (Heckler: “Oh certainly!” Laughter.) However, I have conducted a spectral analysis of the light from Bell’s Comet and found it to be identical to the light of our own familiar sun. (Heckler: “Of course, it’s reflected sunlight!” Laughter.) Could it be that the extrasolar stellanauts of Wolfe 359 have learned to duplicate artificially the force that kindles the sun itself and tamed it to power their space vehicles? (Heckler: “Could it be that the Member from Drumcliffe has learned to duplicate artificially the spirit of the mountain dew and used it to fuel his somewhat active imagination?” Uproarious laughter.)

  Learned fellows … gentlemen, please, if I might have your attention; since it is now clear that we are not unique in God’s Universe, it is therefore of paramount importance, even urgency, that we communicate with these representatives of intelligences immeasurably superior to our own. Therefore, in the August of this year, when Bell’s Comet makes its closest approach to earth (Heckler: “I don’t believe it! Gentlemen, a fact! A cold, hard fact!”) I will attempt to signal the presence of intelligent life on this world (Laughter grows louder.) to the extrasolar intelligences…. (General laughter: cries of “Poppycock,” “Shame,” “Withdraw.” A rain of pamphlets falls upon the platform. The President calls for order; there being none, he declares the meeting adjourned.)

  * * * *

  EMILY’S DIARY: APRIL 22, 1909.

  I DO BELIEVE there are strange and magical things in Bridestone Wood! Real magic, magic of sky and stone and sea, the magic of the Old People, the Good People who live in the halls beneath the hills. Oh, this sounds foolish, this sounds like whimsy, but last night I looked out of my bedroom window and saw lights up there on Ben Bulben, like the lights of many lanterns there on the slopes of the hill, like there were folk dancing by lantern light in a ring around the Bridestone. Mrs. O’Carolan used to tell me stories of the faery lords who would take their mortal brides by the joining of hands through the hole in the middle of the Bridestone. Could this have been such a faery wedding? For as the hour of midnight struck the dancing lights lifted from under the shadow of Ben Bulben and flew through the air into the west; over Craigdarragh, over this very roof! As I leaned out to watch I imagined I could hear the whinnying of the faery horses and the laughter of the host of the air and the playing of the faery harpers.

  Oh diary, it was such a wonder! My heart would still be full to the brim with it but for the shadow that has fallen across both it and Craigdarragh. Ever since Papa’s return from Dublin there has been the most horrid atmosphere in the house. I wanted to tell him all about the wonderful things I have seen, but Mama warned me not to disturb him, for he has locked himself up in his observatory and works like a man possessed by demons, growling like an angry dog at the least annoyance. Whatever has happened in Dublin has so soured the atmosphere that my Easter has been quite spoiled, and now there is another shadow hanging over me; in two days I must return to Cross and Passion. That horrible place … oh, come quickly, summer! Even now I am counting the hours until I am home again, in Craigdarragh, beneath the shadow of Ben Bulben, where the faery folk are waiting for me …

  * * * *

  Craigdarragh

  Drumcliffe

  County Sligo

  April 26th

  My dear Lord Fitzgerald,

  I am deeply, deeply grateful for your letter dated April 24th in which Your Lordship expressed an interest in, and indeed pledged support for, my project to communicate with the transtellar vehicle from the star Wolfe 359. I a
m glad that Your Lordship was spared the humiliation of my embarrassment before the Society; would that I had been spared it myself. Christians to the lions, my dear Claremorris, were none such as I in that lecture hall. Yet like those early martyrs, my faith is undiminished, my zeal for the successful pursuance of Project Pharos is greater than ever: we shall teach these arrogant pedagogues a thing or two when the star-folk come! And I am delighted, no less honored, to hear that Your Lordship has submitted a letter of support for my propositions to the Chairman of the Society, though I regret that, for all Your Lordship’s cogent arguments, it will achieve little: the gentlemen of Dublin are not as open-minded to revolutionary concepts as we men of the West.

  Now ensured of support, we may proceed apace with “Project Pharos,” and I enclose blue-prints for the signalling device. Nevertheless, I will here summarise in my own hand the principles of the signalling device, lest my enthusiasm in draughting the designs has rendered my diagrams a trifle incomprehensible.

  The device takes the form of a cross of floating pontoons supporting electrically powered lanterns. The cross must necessarily be of immense size: I have estimated that to be visible from astronomical distances the arms will have to be five miles in diameter. This of course necessitates the use of the pontoons; an artifact of such size could not be accommodated on land, but on sea it is a relatively simple task to construct, and possesses the additional benefit of being clearly distinguishable from the humbler lamps of civilization, namely, those of Sligo town. The electrical supply for the pontoons can be cheaply supplied by my brother-in-law, Mr. Michael Barry, of the Sligo, Leitrim, Fermanagh and South Donegal Electrical Supply Company. How useful it is to have relations in places of influence! Indeed, he has successfully influenced the recent disruptions of Craigdarragh’s electrical supply, which Your Lordship will recall from the night of my daughter’s birthday. The man he personally despatched, a Mr. MacAteer of Enniskillen, a dour Presbyterian but quite the man with the electricals, has eradicated the power failures which plagued us that night and indeed for most of the Easter time.