Empire Dreams

by Ian McDonald

  In so doing, Emily has made Dr. Desmond the laughing-stock of the astronomical fraternity: I hear that both he and the Marquis of Claremorris have been severely financially embarrassed by this episode; nevertheless, it is a fitting punishment for a daughter to visit upon an inadequate and inattentive father. As the saying goes, my dear Willie, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” and I feel that that small word, “woman,” lies at the heart of the whole Craigdarragh case. Emily wished to be a woman; now she is a woman, more woman, perhaps, than she desired. I am reminded of another proverb, one of our Chinese brethren’s sayings: “Beware what thou wishest, to thee it may be granted.” The power of the preconscious mind is too mighty, too lofty, too terrible a thing to indulge in irony, yet perhaps the saddest thing of all this sad chapter of events must be the child Emily Desmond carries in her womb. For be it mortal or be it god, it will forever stand before her as a haunting reminder of the Otherworld she glimpsed, just for a single, searing moment, and which she has lost forever.

  Yours sincerely,

  Hannibal Rooke, Esq.

  * * * *

  Craigdarragh

  Drumcliffe

  County Sligo

  September 5th 1909

  Dear Mother Superior,

  Just a brief note to inform you that Emily will not be returning to Cross and Passion School in future. Alas, the poor child has recently suffered a major breakdown of health, and, after a spell in Dr. Hubert Orr’s renowned Harcourt Street clinic, will be convalescing at some length here at home in Craigdarragh. It will be many months, I fear, before Emily regains her health fully. However, her education will not suffer; a governess is being hired to school her in a style I feel is more suited to her particular disposition. Therefore I take this opportunity to thank you, Mother Superior, for what you have done in the past for Emily: education truly is a gem beyond price in this modern world, and I know that Emily’s private tutor will build soundly upon the solid foundation you have laid at Cross and Passion. In parting then, I would ask for your prayers for Emily’s safe and full recovery; as ever, my own thoughts and prayers are all for my misfortunate daughter,

  sincerely,

  Caroline Desmond.

  THE CATHARINE WHEEL

  (OUR LADY OF THARSIS)

  “COME ON, LAD, come …” you hear a voice call, and, peering through the crowd for its source (so familiar, so familiar), you see him. There: past the sherbet sellers and the raucous pastry hawkers, past the crowds of hopeful Penitential Mendicants and Poor Sisters of Tharsis who press close to the dignitaries’ rostrum, past the psalm-singing Cathars and the vendors of religious curios; there, he is coming for you, Naon Asiim, with hand outstretched. Through steam and smoke and constables wielding shockstaves who try to keep the crowd away from the man of the moment, here he comes, just for you, your grandfather, Taam Engineer. You look at your mother and father, who swell with pride and say “Yes, Naon, go on, go with him.” So he takes your hand and leads you up through the pressing crowd and the people cheer and wave at you but you have not time to wave back or even make out their faces because your head is whirling with the shouts and the music and the cries of the vendors.

  The people part before Taam Engineer like grass before the scythe. Now you are on the rostrum beside him and every one of those thousands of thousands of people crushing into the station falls silent as the old man holds up the Summoner for all to see. There is a wonderful quiet for a moment, then a hiss of steam and the chunt-chunt of rumbling wheels, and like every last one of those thousands of thousands of people, you let your breath out in a great sigh because out from the pressure-shed doors comes the Greatest of the Great; the fabulous Catharine of Tharsis at the head of the last Ares Express.

  Do you see pride in Taam Engineer’s eye, or is that merely the light catching it as he winks to you and quick as a flash throws you into the control cab? He whispers something to you which is lost beneath the cheering and the music, but you hear the note of pride in it, and you think that is just right, for the Class 88 Catharine of Tharsis has never looked as well as she does on this her final run. The black-and-gold livery of Bethlehem-Ares glows with love and sacred cherry branches are crossed on the nose above the sun-bright polished relief of the Blessed Lady herself. Well-wishers have stuck holy medals and icons all over the inside of the cab too. Looking at them all leads you on to realize that the cab is much smaller than you had ever imagined. Then you see the scars where the computer modules have been torn out to make room for a human driver, and you remember that all those nights when you lay awake in bed pretending that the thunder of wheels was the Night Mail, the Lady was far away hauling hundred-car ore trains on the automated run from Iron Hills to Bessemer. Since before you were born Catharine of Tharsis has been making that slow pull up the kilometer-high Illawarra Bank. You have never seen her as she is today, the pride of Bethlehem-Ares, but your imagination has.

  Now the people are boarding: the dignitaries and the faithful and the train enthusiasts and the folk who just want to be there at the end of a little piece of history; there they are, filing into the twenty cars and taking their seats for the eight-hour journey.

  “Hurry up, hurry up,” Taam Engineer says, anxious to be off. He pours you a sherbet from the small coldchest and you sip it, feeling the cool grittiness of it on your tongue, counting the passengers, eighty, ninety, a hundred, still a bit dazed that you are one of them yourself. Then the doors seal, hsssss. Steam billows, the crowd stands back excited and expectant, but not as excited or expectant as you. Down the line a red light turns green. The old man grins and taps instructions into the computer.

  Behind you the drowsy djinn wakes and roars in fury, but it is tightly held in its magnetic bottle. Just as well, you think, because your grandfather has told you that it is as hot as the center of the sun back there.

  The crowds are really cheering now and the bands are playing for all they are worth and every loco in the yard, even the dirty old locals, are sounding their horns in salute as Catharine of Tharsis gathers speed. The constables are trying to keep back the crazy wheel-symboled Cathars who are throwing flower petals onto the track in front of you. Grandfather Taam is grinning from ear to ear and sounding the triple steam-horns like the trumpets of Judgment Day, as if to say, “Make way, make way, this is a real train!”

  The train picks up speed slowly, accelerating up the long upgrade called Jahar Incline under full throttle, up through the shantytowns and their thrown-together ramshackle stations whose names you have memorized like a mantra: Jashna, Purwani, Wagga-Wagga, Ben’s Town, Park-and-Bank, Llandyff, Acheson, Salt Beds, Mananga Loop.

  Now you are away from the stink and the press of the shanties out into the open fields and you cheer as Grandfather Taam opens up the engines and lets the Lady run. Catharine of Tharsis throws herself at the magical 300 km/hr speed barrier and in the walled fields by the side of the track men with oxen and autoplanters stop and look up from the soil to wave at the black-gold streak.

  “Faster, Grandfather, faster!” you shriek and Grandfather Taam smiles and orders “More speed, more speed!” The fusion engines reply with a howl of power, Catharine of Tharsis finds that time barrier effortlessly and shatters it, and at 355 km/hr the last ever Ares Express heads out into the Grand Valley.

  * * * *

  For a long time I moved without style or feeling, wearing simple homespun frocks and open sandals in cold weather. My hair I let grow into thick staring mats, my nails began to curl at the ends. When I washed (only when people complained of the smell), I did so in cold water, even though some mornings I would shiver uncontrollably and catch sight in the mirror of my hollow blue face. I permitted myself that one vanity, the mirror, as a record of my progress towards spirituality. When I saw those dull eyes following me I would hold their gaze and whisper, The mortification of the flesh, the denial of the body, until they looked away with an expression other than disgust.

  I allowed myself only the simplest foods: u
ncooked, unprocessed, and as close to natural as I could take it—for the most part vegetable. Two meals a day: a breakfast, and in the evening a dinner, with a glass of water at midday. Cold, of course, but with the taste of Commissary chemicals to it.

  Patrick fears that I am wasting to a ghost before his eyes. I reassure him that I am merely abolishing the excess and taking on a newer, purer form. Purity, I whisper, Spirituality.

  Purity! he says, Spirituality! I’ll show you purity, I’ll show you spirituality! It’s us, Kathy; we are purity, we are spirituality, because of the life we share together. It’s the love that’s pure, the love that’s spiritual.

  Poor Patrick. He cannot understand.

  I’ve seen the needle and it said, This is purity. Some showed me the secret spaces of their bodies and said, Here is spirituality. Others held up the bottles for me to see: Look, purity: escape. And I’ve seen the books, the red books, the blue books, the great brown ones dusty with age which say, Come inside, many have gone this way to wisdom before you. What a pity the blue books contradict the red books and the brown books cannot be read because they are so old. And you, Patrick, you are the slave of the book. You call it freedom: I have another name for what you give the name of Political Expression.

  I’ve seen a thousand altars and breathed a thousand incenses, sung a thousand hymns, chanted a thousand canticles to gods a thousand years dead, and been told, This is the way, the only way to spirituality. Dancing-dervish under the love-lasers till dawn with men so beautiful they can only be artificial, I’ve been to the heart of the music where they say purity lies. Lies lies lies lies. The paintings, the altered states, the loves, the hates, the relationships: lies of the degenerates we have become.

  Someday I will have to make Patrick leave. For his own sake as much as for the sake of my path to purity.

  But he is my conscience. He makes me constantly ask, Am I right, am I wrong? and he must be a strong man indeed to be able to sleep night after night with the stinking animal into which I am changing. But I will cast him off, on that day when I achieve purity, because then I won’t have any further need of my conscience.

  In an age of decadence, I alone strive for purity. I saw it once, I saw spirituality in the face, and since that day I have sought in my own human way to embody it. But give Patrick his due: I am learning that perhaps my daily denials and asceticisms are not the best way to attain my goal. Perhaps the human way is not the way at all.

  For the greatest spiritual experience (I would almost call it “Holy,” but I don’t believe in God) comes when I taphead into the ROTECH computers, in that instant when they cleave my personality away from my brain and spin it off through space.

  To Mars.

  I can’t explain to Patrick how it feels, like I couldn’t explain it to my colleagues on the terraform team how it felt that first time when I tapheaded into the orbital mirrors we were maneuvering into position to thaw the polar ice-caps.

  I’ve tried to tell him (as I tried to tell them, hands dancing, eyes wide and bright) of the beauty of the freedom I felt—from the strangling stench of our decaying culture, from the vice of material things, from my body and the arbitrary dictates of its biology: eating, drinking, pissing, crapping, sleeping, screwing. He doesn’t understand.

  Kathy, don’t deny your body, he says, touching it. Yours is a beautiful body.

  No, Patrick, only spirit is beautiful, and the machine is beautiful, and only what is beautiful is real.

  * * * *

  “But was she real?” you ask, and your grandfather replies, “Oh, certainly. I tell you, she was as real as you or me, as real as any of us. What use is a saint who isn’t real?” So you look out through the screen at the blurred steel rail that stretches straight ahead as far as you can see, right over the rusty horizon, and you think, Real, real, real as steel, real as a rail, rail made from steel. It is easy to make up rhymes to the beat of the wheels: diddley-dum, diddley-dum, real, real, real as steel.

  An hour and a half out. Back down the train the passengers are having lunch; the dignitaries in the first-class restaurant, everyone else from packages and parcels on their laps. Taam Engineer is sharing his lunch with you, savory pancakes and tea, because you did not bring any lunch with you as you never expected to be riding high at the head of the Ares Express deep in the magic Forest of Chryse.

  You have heard a lot about the Forest of Chryse, that it is under the special protection of the Lady herself, that travelers come back from it with tales of wonders and marvels, with unusual gifts and miraculous powers, that some come back with only half a mind and some do not come back at all. Look at the trees: giant redwoods older than man reaching up three hundred, four hundred, five hundred meters tall; it is easy to believe that the machines that built the world are still working under the shadow of the branches and that Catharine of Tharsis walks with them in the forest she planted a thousand years ago. Aboard her namesake, you hurtle past at 300 km/hr and wonder how Saint Catharine could possibly have built an entire world.

  “Look, son.” Grandfather Taam nudges you and points to a place far up the valley where a great patch of brightness is sweeping across the Forest of Chryse towards you. You hold your breath as the huge disc of light passes slowly over you on its way to the distant rim walls. If you squint up through your fingers you can just about see the intensely bright dot of the sky-mirror way up there in orbit behind all the glare. Then you feel a blow to the back of your head … you see hundreds of intensely bright dots.

  “How many times have you been told, boy, don’t stare at the sky-mirrors!” your grandfather bellows. “You can look at the light, but not at the mirror!”

  But you treat yourself to one small extra peep anyway and you think of the men from ROTECH who are focusing all that light down on you, Naon Asiim.

  “Remote Orbital Terraform and Environmental Control Headquarters.” You whisper the name like a charm to keep the wind and the storm at bay and you remember what your friends told you: that the men who move the sky-mirrors have grown so different from ordinary people up there that they can never ever come down. That makes you shiver. Then you pass out from under the light, but out of the rear screens you can see its progress over the valley to the plateau-lands beyond. In its wake you see a tiny silver bauble bowling across the sky.

  “Look, Grandfather! A dronelighter!”

  He gives it the barest glance, spits, and touches one of the tiny icons of Our Lady fastened above the driving desk. Then you realize what a mistake you have made, that it is the dronelighters and the ‘rigibles of the world that have made your grandfather the last to bear the proud name of Engineer, they are the reason why the museum sidings are waiting for the Lady just beyond the crowds at Pulaski Station.

  “I’m sorry, Grandfather.” A hand ruffles your hair.

  “Never mind, son, never worry. Look: see how that thing runs … It’s getting out from under the skirts of the storm, running as fast as it can … They can’t take the weather, they’re flimsy, plasticky things, like glorified Festival kites.”

  “But we can take the weather.”

  “Go through it like a fist through wet rice-paper, my boy! I tell you, Bethlehem-Ares never lost a day, not even one single hour, to the weather: rain, hail, blizzard, monsoon, none of it stops the Lady!” He reaches out to touch the metal window-frame and you feel like shouting “hooray!” Taam Engineer (what, you wonder, will he call himself when the Lady is gone?) stabs a finger at the sky-screen.

  “See that? Because of those things cluttering up the sky they have to move the weather about to suit them. That’s what the mirror’s for; those ROTECH boys are moving the storm up onto the plateau where it can blow itself to glory and not harm one single, delicate dirigible. Puh!” He spits again. “I tell you, those things have no soul. Not like the Lady here, she’s got a soul you can hear and feel when you open those throttles up, she’s got a soul you can touch and smell like hot oil and steam. You don’t drive her, she lets you become
a little part of her and then she drives you. Like all ladies. Soul, I tell you.” He hunts around for words but they evade him like butterflies. He waves his hands, trying to shape the ideas that mean so much to him, but the words will not come to him. “I tell you, how can you feel part of anything when you’re flying way up there above everything? You’re not part of anything up there like you’re a bit of the landscape down here. I tell you, they’ve no soul. You know, soon it will be just them and the robots on the freight runs and then one day even they’ll be gone, it’ll be just the lighter-than-airs. The only engines you’ll see’ll be in the museums and God forbid that I should ever come to see that day.” He looks at you like he wants you to back him up in what he has said, but you didn’t really understand what he said because the rumble of the engines and the sway of the cab as it leans into the curves and the drumming of the wheels saying real, real, real as steel is sending you off to sleep.

  * * * *

  When I wake the sight disgusts me. Gap-toothed crack-skinned filth-haired hag holding splintered nails up to the mirror whining, The mortification of the flesh, the denial of the body. Hideous. Futile.

  Sleep came hard to me last night. Lying beside Patrick, staring at the ceiling, I had time and plenty to think. Letting the pieces tumble through my head, I saw how I was wrong, so wrong, so magnificently wrong. The mortification of the flesh is empty. It only serves to focus the mind more closely on the body it seeks to deny. Disciplining the body does not discipline the mind, for the greater the denial the greater the attention the body must be given. This is not the way to spirituality.