Empire Dreams

by Ian McDonald

  Grandfather Taam lifts you up the cab steps. Suddenly a question demands to be asked.

  “Grandfather, then why do the trains stop now if they only used to whistle?”

  He reaches for the flask of tea and pours you a scalding cup. Behind you the djinn rumbles into life again.

  “I’ll tell you for why. Because she is not a saint of people but a saint of machines. Remember that, because the day came when the last engineer was paid off this line and they turned it over to the machines and then they felt that they could honor their Lady as best they knew.”

  Lights blink red white green yellow blue all over the cab. The light glints off the holy medals and icons but somehow it is not as pretty as it once was.

  * * * *

  As if it was aware of my imminent escape into spirituality, the ugliness is drawing closer to me. Yesterday in the train I saw a licensed beggar kicked to death by three masked men. No one raised voice or hand in protest. For one of the masks held out a Political Activist Registry card for us all to see while the other two beat the old man to death in accordance with their political ideals. Everyone looked out of the windows or at the floor or at the advertisements for sunny holidays and personal-credit extensions. Anywhere but at the beggar or at each other.

  I am ashamed. I too looked away and did nothing.

  We left him on the floor of the car for others to take care of when we stepped off at our stop. A smart man I vaguely know with a highcaste tekmark glanced at me and whispered, We certainly must remember to respect people’s right to political expression, goodness knows what terrible things might happen if we don’t.

  Oh, Patrick, how many beggars have you killed in the name of political expression? Damn you, Patrick Byrne, for all the love I’ve wasted on a man who a hundred years ago would have been hunted down and torn apart for the common murderer he was. Dear God, though I know you aren’t there, what sort of a people are we when we call terrorists heroes and murder “political expression”? What sort of a person is it who would dare to say she loved one? A Kathy Haan, that’s what. But I will be rid of him.

  Escape is two lengths of twistlock monofiber wrapped up in my pouch, but have I the courage to use it? Cowardice is a virtue now, everyone has their Political Activist card to wave as justification for their fear. Be brave, Kathy.

  I like to think of myself as the first Martian at these times.

  It’s not the loneliness that scares me. I have been alone for twenty-four years now and there is no lonelier place than the inside of your skull. What terrifies me is the fear of gods.

  Deiophobia.

  Maybe you are an angel after all, maybe you are a saint, Patrick said. What I fear most is that I may become more than just a saint, that the ultimate blasphemy to all that the sacrifice of Kathy Haan stood for will be for me to become the Creator God of the world I am building: the Earth Mother, the Blessed Virgin Kathy, the Cherished and Adored Womb of the humanity I despise.

  I do not want to be God, I don’t even particularly want to be human. I only want to be free from the wheel.

  Smiles and leers greet me from friend and satyr alike.

  Morning, Kathy (thighs, Kathy); ‘day, Kathy (breasts, Kathy) …

  I take my chair, still warm from the flesh of its previous occupant whom I have never known and probably never will now. Warm-up drill: codes, ciphers, and calibrations. The sensor helmet meshes with my neural implants and nobody sees me slip the coils of monofiber from my pouch and throw a couple of loops around the armrests.

  Lightspeed will be the death of me. The monofiber is merely the charm I choose to invoke it.

  Okay, Kathy, taphead monitoring on …

  Needles slip into my brain and I slip my wrists through the loops, concealing the twistlock control studs in my palms. I had not thought death would be so easy.

  Brainscans worm across the ceiling.

  Listen: I have not much time to tell you this, so listen well. It takes two minutes for the oxygen level in the brain to fall to the critical point after which damage is irreversible. It is easy to do this. Damage to two major arteries will do very nicely, provided there is no rapid medical attention.

  But, it takes four minutes for the coded tadon pulse containing the soul of Kathy Haan to reach Mars. You can add: you know that if you add another four minutes’ return time from ROTECH to Earth, that leaves you with a brain so like shredded cabbage that there’s no way they’ll ever be able to pour poor Kathy back into it again. I shall be free and I shall live forever as a creature of pure spirit.

  I have invented a totally new sin. Is it fitting then that I should become a saint?

  All I need do is press the buttons. The molecular kink in the monofiber will contract, neatly severing my wrists. A fifth of a second later they will dissolve completely. Lightspeed will do the rest. All I need do is press the buttons. They are hidden in my palms, slick with sweat.

  Okay, Kathy, counting down to persona transfer. Preliminary tadon scan on, transfer pulse in five seconds … four …

  The mortification of the flesh, I whisper. Behind me someone shouts. Too late.

  … one.

  I press the buttons.

  * * * *

  Green lights all the way down the line on the final run into Llangonnedd. Clear road: dirty freighters pulled into sidings blare their horns and ugly, ugly robot locals squawk their nasty klaxons as the Lady races by. Suburban passengers blink as she streaks by; by the time the shout reaches their lips she is around the next bend and leaning into the one after that like a pacehound.

  And all the lights are green. More magic. Grandfather Taam tells you that you never get a full run of greens coming into Llangonnedd, no, not even for the Ares Express. Never ever. It must be more magic, of the same kind that let the Lady reach the incredible 450 km/hr out there on the flats beyond Hundred Lakes. Grandfather Taam tells you that she never touched 450 before, never ever, not even 400. Why, the people who built her had told him themselves that she would blow apart if she went over 390.

  You reckon the engineers know nothing about engines and their special magic. After all, they are just engineers, but Grandfather Taam is an Engineer. Looking out of the side windows, even a leisurely 250 seems frighteningly fast in these crowded suburbs. Canal flash houses flash fields flash park flash factories flash: you can feel your eyes widening in apprehension as the stations and the signals hurl themselves out of the distance at you. And all the lights are green.

  That can mean only one thing.

  “She’s doing this, isn’t she, Grandfather?”

  A station packed with round-mouthed commuters zips by. Taam Engineer lights a cheroot.

  “Must be. I’ve hardly had to lay a finger on those buttons for the past hour or so.”

  Beneath you the brakes start to take hold, slowing you down from your mad rampage through outer Llangonnedd to a more civilized pace. You say, “She must really love this train very much.”

  Grandfather Taam looks straight ahead of him down the silver track.

  “After all, she did save it.”

  “But it wasn’t the people, was it, Grandfather? It was nothing to do with those five hundred souls; she saved the train because it was the train she wanted to save. All those people were extra, weren’t they?”

  “They didn’t matter to her one bit, boy.”

  “And you said she’s a saint of machines, didn’t you? Not a saint of people? That’s why she loves the train, why she loved it enough not to let it die, isn’t it? If there hadn’t been a single person there, she would still have saved the train, wouldn’t she? But, if that’s true, why do people love her?”

  “Love her? Who said anything about loving her? I tell you, boy, I have little love for Catharine of Tharsis. Respect, yes, love, no. And I’ll tell you why. Because if she hadn’t thought the train was worth saving, if she hadn’t loved the train, she would just have let it blow those five hundred people to bell without a single thought. That’s the kind of God tho
se crazy Cathars are worshiping, but as to why they love her, I don’t know. Do you have any idea why people would love someone like that?”

  He looks straight at you. You have been expecting this question. You know that he has never been able to answer it himself, and that it is the reason why he brought you along on this ride.

  “I don’t know what I think … If she’s really like that, then I think that most people must be very foolish most of the time, especially when they have to look for someone to help them when things go wrong and then put the blame on when things don’t happen like they want. People are like that. I think if I were a saint like Saint Catharine I would be a saint of machines, too. Then I wouldn’t care what people said about me or thought of me because I wouldn’t be doing anything for them and they could cry away and pray away all day like those silly Cathars and Penitential Mendicants and Poor Sisters of Tharsis and I wouldn’t care one bit, because machines are never foolish.”

  Catharine of Tharsis has slowed right down. The end of the journey is near now. Tomorrow Taam Engineer and you will be flying home on one of those dreadful dirigibles, and Catharine of Tharsis will be taken away to the museum for the foolish people to stare at and marvel over her record-breaking final run. And now you understand.

  “Grandfather, of course I’d be a saint of machines! Because I could fly with the aviopters and the sky-mirrors and even the great SkyWheel herself and I could burrow with the Seekers and swim with the ‘Mersibles, but most of all I could run with the Lady of Tharsis faster than she ever ran before and show off to everyone what a wonderful engine she is before they put her away for good in a museum. People are always moaning and complaining about their troubles and their problems; they won’t let you run and be free from them, people won’t let you do things like that!”

  “Ah, the ways of saints and children,” Taam Engineer says as the Lady rumbles over the Raj Canal into the glassite dome of Pulaski Station. Already you can hear the roars and the cheers of the crowds and every loco in the yards is sounding its horn in salute.

  “Here, button three,” Grandfather Taam says and you reply to the people with the wonderful blare of the steam horns.

  You press and press and press that button and the trumpets sound and sound and sound until the notes shatter against the glass roof of the station. And how the crowds cheer! Taam Engineer is hanging out of the window waving to the mobs of petal-throwing Cathars as Catharine of Tharsis glides in to Platform Three as smooth as smooth. You are sliding the other side window open, ready to cheer, when something stops you. An odd feeling, like a persistent itch in the nose that suddenly stops, or a noise in your ears that you never hear until it goes away. A kind of click. You shake your head but it is gone and you shout and wave for all you are worth to the excited people. They wave and call back to you, but you do not see them because you are really thinking about that click. For a second or so it puzzles you. Then you realize that it is nothing very important, it is only the empty space filling in where once there might have been a saint.

  UNFINISHED PORTRAIT OF THE KING OF PAIN BY VAN GOGH

  VINCENT: THAT IS how he signs all his paintings; just his name, “Vincent,” in the bottom left corner. Sometimes, if the day has been good and the yellow sun of Provence has been warm and kind to him, splashing a paint-pot of color across the fields swept bare and clean by the cold wind from the north, then he will date it: Spring 1888, so that he will remember for always the good day when the sun was kind to him. The sun, the sun, he writes in his letters to his brother, I am a servant of the sun, and on the walls of his bedroom he hangs six paintings of sunflowers to remind him always of the sun. Yellow is the color of the sun, yellow is the color of friendship: “The House of Friends,” he christens his little yellow house on the corner of place Lamartine and dreams through the hot Provençal nights of the friends with whom he might fill its walls: a brotherhood of visionaries, a painters’ colony dedicated to the service of the sun.

  Every other day he writes to his brother Theo in Paris. He asks for more yellow; Send me more yellow, and begs Theo to once again try and persuade Paul, implore Paul, go down on his knees and beg Paul, to come south to Aries to lead the artists’ colony. Letter after letter after letter he writes, letter after letter after letter arrives, brought to him by his friend the postman Roulin (who he will paint someday soon, he thinks), letters saying Not yet and In a little while and Patience, patience, my dear Vincent. Vincent sits late, very late, too late, in the Cafe L’Alcazar, writing letter after letter after letter to his brother.

  “Monsieur, we are closing, monsieur, you must go now, we are taking the tables in; monsieur, have you no home to go to?” say the waiters in their white aprons and Vincent, who drinks too much and eats too little and sleeps hardly at all, crosses the square and climbs the stairs to his Yellow House. In his blue-walled bedroom, under six paintings of sunflowers, he dreams. He dreams of a brotherhood of artists, he dreams of the arch-backed bridges of Japan under needles of rain, but most of all he dreams of the boiling solar disk of the sun.

  In these dreams the sun speaks to him. It calls him its child touched with divine madness, and shows him its paintings: a hat caught in a tall treetop; a rose pierced by a silver thorn; a king upon a burning throne; a raven with a cherry in its beak; a crown in a cornfield, the sky dark with birds of ill-omen.

  See, Vincent, says the sun, these are my paintings of you. Are they not fine, works of note and merit?

  When Vincent awakes, the canvases of the night are still with him and he packs them up with his own canvases and brushes, his oils and easel, and takes them out with him onto the roads of Provence, into the heat and the dust and the scent of wild thyme and the yellow sun. When he has walked quite far enough he sets up his easel and his canvas and paints until the shadows grow long. He paints until the images of the night are emptied out of him, for he fears that to nurture them in his imagination will surely bring the black birds of madness flocking round his soul. When he is drained, as empty as a summer well, he looks at what he has done and sees his bold colors, his solid brushstrokes of red and green, his beloved blues and yellows. He sees the sun captured on canvas and remembers his teacher at the Academy in Paris. “Who are you,” the man had asked, incredulous before potato-faced peasants and Bible-black skies of Borinage. “I am Vincent the Dutchman!” Vincent had replied, and remembering that in the evening-shadowed byways of Provence, Vincent the Dutchman smiles and signs his name in the bottom left-hand corner.

  One night, having surrendered to exhaustion, an image comes out of the heart of the sun like none he has ever seen before. He stands upon an endless shingle beach by the side of a silver sea. The air is filled with the knocking of the rolling pebbles and the cry of unseen seabirds. Beyond the silver sea a haze of sick yellow smoke clouds the air, as if the billion belching chimneys of some world-encompassing city, some universal Borinage, were pouring a blanket of filth to hide the sun. In the far distance, along the beach, is a tree springing from the sterile shore and as Vincent begins to walk towards it he sees that it bears both blossom and ripe fruit, and its leaves are both summer-green and withered brown. Beneath this tree a man is seated. His face cannot be distinguished, so great is the glare reflected from the glass sea, but from his posture he seems absorbed in musings. But as Vincent draws closer the man looks up and Vincent is shocked to see that it is not who he thought it would be. It is not himself.

  * * * *

  And then there are the days when the mistral blows from the north. It bows the trees to the ground before it and ruffles the cornfields like cat’s fur and dries up Vincent’s soul, sending him a little crazy so that he puts big rocks on the corners of his canvases to hold them to the ground. When the mistral blows, the brown-leather people of Provence clap their hats to their heads and wonder at this crazy foreigner who paints when the wind is in the north and who is always, always, peering into the sun as if looking for something hidden in its glare that no one else can see. He is loo
king for the windswept hat and the pierced rose, the king, the crown, and the raven. He is looking for the beach by the shining silver sea. He is looking to see if the dark freckles on the sun’s face are only the birds of madness diving down for him.

  Oh, Vincent is crazy, yes, Vincent is mad, and Vincent fears the madness around which the round earth rolls more than he fears the black realisms of death. He fears his sanity blowing away on the mistral wind like an unweighted canvas, like a hat snatched up into the branches of a high tree—his hat! his hat! his favorite straw hat, snatched from his head by the cold, dry wind from the north and whisked teasingly along just above the grasp of his reaching fingers. It hurdles hedges, leaps stone walls and whitewashed pickets. All the brown-leather people crease up into wrinkles of laughter at the crazy Dutchman chasing after his jumbling, tumbling hat. Then a final wintery breath from out of the Low Countries whips it straight up, high beyond his snatching fingers, and sweeps it along above a line of flowering walnut trees until it capriciously fails and deposits bis hat in the topmost branches of the tallest tree.

  “Damn,” says Vincent, and with a Dutchman’s stubborn single-mindedness he sets about the recovery of his hat. He can see it there, held tantalizingly in the branches of the last tree in the row. How long since Vincent last climbed a tree? He cannot remember, but climb this one he must. The yellow sun beats down upon his head, and standing in the middle of the lane Vincent thinks he hears the mewling of white gulls—yes, and the crashing of surf upon a shore, how can this be? and instead of the hard-packed provincial earth beneath his feet he is sure he feels rolling, sliding pebbles. He is running down the lane, he is running down the beach; he breathes harder now and with each breath he inhales the fragrance of wild thyme, yes, but also the great salt of the ocean. Before him he sees not a row of tall walnuts, but a single tree, impossibly both blossoming and bearing fruit, its leaves both green and brown. In the branches of the tree is his hat. Beneath it sits a man who rises to greet him.