Empire Dreams

by Ian McDonald

  How the thronging populace cheer and sing and fill the air with shouts of sacred delight as the golden reliquaries are processed past them! How they press forward against the protecting ranks of Civic Guards to touch finger to casket, jewel, tassel, or golden casket-cloth and so carry away some blessing, some healing, some prayer hastened into the presence of God the Panarchic.

  Yet, as God the Panarchic has, after His Own Unique Fashion, chosen to shine His Divine Light upon Great Theosophilus, so He has, according to His Will (which no man may discern, for to do so would be to become God Himself), also chosen to hide part of Himself from the rude gaze of humanity. This is the manner of God’s self-concealment.

  Over the City of Divine Love is suspended a cloud of permanent gray which hides the light of the sun so that for all the grace-bright lauds of the populace, the gilded domes and mosaicked architraves are dull and lifeless, the arcades of bronze saints dim with a dismal, green patina, and through the great rose windows and ancient lights no ray of sun ever shines to illumine the faithful at prayer within. The theologians and theosophists have a name for this cloud: the Cloud of Mystery. In the manner of theologians and theosophists, they consider it a metaphor for the Cloud of Transgression which separates the spirit of man from the Divine Primacy. The endless cycles of bells, prayers, and concelebrations are, in that same metaphor, the necessary tools whereby spiritual purity may be attained. Then the Cloud of Mystery will be penetrated, and as the true sun shines in the streets and upon the multitudinous temples of the Divine Presence, so will each heart be warmed by the undiluted Divine Affection when God the Panarchic is revealed face to face at last with man.

  However, a differing college of thought maintains a differing theology: The Cloud of Mystery does indeed conceal God from man (this much is agreed upon), but the cloud is of man’s making rather than Divine quarantine, being composed of nothing more (and nothing less) then the accumulation of year upon year, century upon century, of prayer, devotion, and bells. With every prayer, every grace, every vesper sent heavenward, the cloud grows denser and more impenetrable. The cloud will only be pierced, these scholars argue, when human voices cease and in the universal silence God’s own voice may be heard, speaking in still, small syllables.

  There is yet a third school of opinion. It too has a name for this cloud, a name not spoken aloud on the boulevards and avenues of Great Theosophilus. This name they have derived from close and careful study of the people of the city, their religious practices, their everyday pieties, their venerations of shrines and relics, and this, coupled with the scholars’ own knowledge of the nature of the Divine Self (as revealed uniquely in the Chapbooks of the Panarch), gives them their third name for the cloud. The name they have given it is Superstition.

  * * * *

  After a respectful silence the third traveler spoke. He was older than the others and wore his years of experience about his shoulders like a warm coat. He lifted his hands to the dancing flames and said, “In my years I have traveled further than any of you could imagine and I have seen so many cities that if I were to describe them to you we would be sitting here until the year’s turning. I could tell you of the City of Romantic Exiles, perhaps, its once-glorious avenues weed-choked and deserted, starved by mismanagement and famine so that today only a handful of civil servants and administrators remain on the principle that while the government persists the city will not be dead. Or perhaps the City of Persistent History, where every instant of the present is merely the past happening over and over and over again. But I will not, because those cities, though real, do not exist, no more than the cities you described; though real, they do not exist either.”

  “But I heard the words!” said the red-haired bear of a man who had traveled from out of the north, the Lands of Ever-Winter and the Great Northern Ice Sea.

  “And I smelled the black roses of corruption,” said he who had traveled out of the furthest place of the sunrise, from which the dead, it is said, will rise in place of the sun on the dawning day of Resurrection.

  “I saw the wax faces of the people of the City of Vibrant Souls,” said the pale man of illusions who had flown so many time zones eastward that he had been severely jet-lagged for many days.

  “And I touched the caskets of the holy saints,” said he who had passed out from beneath the Cloud of Mystery, out from the southernmost ends of the world.

  “Of course you did, of course you did!” exclaimed the old traveler. “But what you saw, heard, smelled, touched, were only parts of the whole. Do you not see, gentlemen, that in describing these cities, each so different and alien, you are describing the same city? I tell you, there is only one city, there has only ever been one city, and that is the City of Man. This city, like all human institutions, is at its heart paradoxical, so that though there is only one City of Man, every city is the City of Man. In that city every pursuit devised by human wit may be found and a million million unique lives studied by he who has eyes to see. So immeasurably rich and varied is the stream of life that no one man can comprehend it all, therefore each traveler who visits there takes only what he can hold and sees only what he wants to see. Likewise you, gentlemen: out of the staggering variety and color of the City of Man you saw what you wanted to see and so thought you had seen the city entire. But the City of Man is so very much more than our perceptions of it that a man may return time and again and never visit the same city twice. Gentlemen, you have seen the part and called it the whole. Go back, again, I would say, and again, and again, until you have seen the whole. Then teach others what you have seen. But lest you should become too arrogant in your knowledge, consider this: if one city, all cities, hold such a multiplicity of other cities within them that a man may spend an entire lifetime in studying, how many more lifetimes must he spend before he comprehends one fingernail’s breadth of the infinite universe?”

  And the night was gone and the dawn was rising over the edge of the world. The stories were told, the brief fellowship of travelers could be dissolved. Red-hair, short dark-hair, pale sick-scarred, nervous rodent, took their leave of each other and returned to their camels, airbuses, Greyhounds, and caravels. The old one lingered awhile in the predawn glow, kicking at the embers of the fire so that the sparks fled upward into the sky. All around were the inaudible sounds of the City of Stories folding its insubstantial silks and canvases to sweep once more into the dream-time. He listened to the voices of the ghosts as they dissolved away like mist, and waited for a long time. Then he turned his back on fire and world, and followed them.

  VIVALDI

  IN THE THISTLEDOWN starship of the imagination, Dr. Carl Silverman approached the black hole. Golden light from the accretion disc flooded the cathedral-bridge of the mindship and the air rang with chimed warnings: beware gravity, beware gravity. Sprawled in front of the television, chin propped on knuckles, nearly-ten Hugh MacMichaels felt the infinite darkness of the black hole reach out and swallow his imagination. A willing stowaway on the Grand Tour of the Universe, he had seen supernovas burst like fireworks across the heavens, seen galaxies turning before him like fiery Catherine wheels, seen wonders until he thought he was numb to wonder, but the black hole called to him, the black hole reached for him, the black hole tied him to itself with threads of pure, unbreakable amazement. He was still whispering “Wow, oh wow, oh wow,” as the closing credits rolled up the screen and Dad harrumphed and rattled his newspaper (“That nonsense over for another week”), and Mam clickclacked at the Fair Isle sweaters of incomprehension. The fire coals collapsed releasing a gust of heat, the November rain beat against the window glass, and the Ten O’clock News prepared to disseminate its burden of despair across the land, but nearly-ten Hugh MacMichaels was far far away, sailing in the starship of the imagination with Dr. Carl Silverman at the edge of the universe.

  VIVALDI CONTROL DHARMSTADT: WEST GERMANY 23:45 T – 200 144000 KM

  As Dr. Hugh MacMichaels, beardy, balding, with a tendency towards paunchiness, strides throug
h the swinging glass doors of Mission Control Dharmstadt, the many-headed beast MEDIA is waiting for him.

  “Dr. MacMichaels, do you think that …”

  “Dr. MacMichaels, is it true that …”

  “Dr. MacMichaels, what …”

  “Dr. MacMichaels, when …”

  “Dr. MacMichaels, why …”

  He raises his hands to pacify the beast.

  “Has anyone seen Kirkby Scott yet?”

  Hurrying down the corridor to rescue his project director, Alain Mercier answers Dr. Hugh’s question with an eloquent Gallic shrug that speaks of grounded shuttles and taxis caught in traffic.

  “Holy God, what is going on here? We’re trying to run a space mission, you know …”

  A microphone lunges dangerously at him.

  “Dr. MacMichaels, Anne Prager NBCTV. You have an interview with Dr. Carl Silverman, remember? New Frontiers? Remember? It was arranged.”

  New Frontiers? Carl Silverman? Things are happening too fast. Twenty years to prepare himself and he is still somewhere up in the air over Holland. Ambitious, professional Anne Prager hustles poor confused Dr. Hugh into the Green Room for the interview with Dr. Carl Silverman, Captain of the Starship of the Imagination.

  If only you could have seen this, Gemma. Face to face with the Legend Himself.

  But the Legend is getting old and gray and tired. Too many years of too many wonders.

  “Just some background for our viewers,” says the Legend Himself. “We’re going out live on a satellite linkup, so keep it simple, nothing too technical, just a bit about the history of the mission to the Oort Cloud and the subsequent discovery of Nemesis, then maybe something about what Vivaldi is hoping to achieve. Give everyone at home some kind of overview, all right?”

  “Certainly,” says Dr. Hugh, feeling small and lost and intimidated by the lights cables directors sound-boys clipping on microphones testing testing two three four bored makeup girls puffing on powder combing hair over the bald patch do something love about those gray bits in the beard …

  “Would you like a look at the questions while the bright young things get you wired up?”

  Dr. Hugh takes the clipboard. Nothing new. He has been answering these same questions on behalf of his space probe for ten years. Anne Prager NBCTV poses herself in front of a camera, pushes at her hair, a harassed director announces,

  “Okay, boys and girls, we’re going for a live linkup. Satellite comes on line in twenty seconds … give you a count, Anne, for the introduction, seventeen, sixteen, fifteen—”

  “Wait!” cries Dr. Hugh in sudden panic. “I’m not ready! I’m not ready!”

  “Thirteen, twelve, eleven …”

  * * * *

  Once there were two men. One was old and wise, with a face like bad bread and cabbage. The other was young and really rather naive and people told him that with his beard he looked a bit like Sean Connery. This pleased the young man because Sean Connery had been one of his boyhood heroes. These two men, the old and wise and the young and really rather naive, had many things in common. They were both astrophysicists. They were both doctors. And they both once had a dream of the far places, the far far places, farther than most people they knew could imagine: the Oort Cloud, the great shell of comets that enshrouded the solar system at a distance five hundred times that of the farthest planet. They dreamed of a spacecraft which might travel there and probe the secrets of that dark and remote place and they drew together plans and ideas, notions and fantasies, and in time they saw that their dream was not a dream at all but a real and practical project. So the two men, one old, one young, took their project to the university and the university took it to the European Space Agency and because the European Space Agency was riding gung-ho that year on the setbacks the Russian and American space programs had experienced they said yes, of course you can go to the Oort Cloud, when would you like to go?

  As soon as possible, the two men said.

  Good, said the European Space Agency. Now, if you would just go and find a name for your project, we’ll set aside an Ariane rocket to launch it.

  So the two men went out and got very drunk that night and at three o’clock in the morning they were sitting in the young man’s front room listening to The Four Seasons when both of them, at the same time and with one voice, said,

  “Aha! Vivaldi!”

  The next day the old scientist told the young scientist a secret.

  “Hugh, you know what this is really all about?” Cheese and onion pie and pint for lunch in the Three Cornered Hat; the old man’s breath smelled of beer and onions. “Don’t be gulled by all this cometary cloud stuff, that was just my ploy to get the project funded and launched. What Vivaldi is all about, what Vivaldi is, Hugh, is the first practical starship.”

  Outside, the sweet September rain was falling down on Edinburgh; lukewarm, slightly acid, a never-ending drizzle that had been falling ever since the summers died in ‘87. Depressed by the acid rain, the younger man’s gray-gray eyes strayed to the desktop model, a diaphanous plastic Y with Vivaldi the spider acrouch at the center of her web.

  “You’ve got it all worked out, you old goat. Alpha Centauri, here I come.”

  “Silly old men have to do something between seminar groups to drive the young nubiles from their dirty old minds. Think about it, Hugh, powered starflight. Put that down on your CV.”

  “Let me see, what kind of push can we get out of the ion-drive section, about a quarter-percent c?” The younger man calculated and the acid rain streamed down the windows. “Two hundred years? You can’t wait two hundred years, Ben, you’re too impatient. Better off with the Oort Cloud. At least you stand a chance of being there to see the results. Only twenty years.”

  “Twenty years for you, Hugh. Matter of damn to me.”

  Thirteen months later Vivaldi was launched from Arecaibo in French Guyana on an ESA Ariane booster. Dr. Hugh and Dr. Ben watched the launch by video linkup at twenty past two in the morning Edinburgh time, and as the last booster section fell away and Vivaldi opened its dragonfly wings to the sun they toasted each other in whisky and drank to the success of Earth’s First Starship.

  The years passed. Dr. Hugh, young and really rather naive, fell in love with a fine, handsome, independent woman called Moira who cared not a bit for ion drives and cometary clouds; married, moved to a nice house in a nice area of Edinburgh, and in the dueness of time produced a child named Gemma who was the light of her parents’ life. And she was the only light of her parents’ life, for shortly after her birth Moira MacMichaels’s doctor called her to him and told her that she must never bear another child. So her womb was removed, though she was still a young woman, and in the empty place where her children had been something bitter and dark took root.

  And all the while Vivaldi flew on, away from the earth, the trefoil of lightsails trapping the sunlight and transforming it into the electricity by which it accelerated, slowly, slowly, slowly, day by day, week by week, year by year, gaining speed, traveling to the Oort Cloud.

  T – 62 44640 KM

  “Counting down to separation from ion-drive section … twenty … nineteen … eighteen …”

  On the telephone to the airport to find out where the hell Kirkby Scott is, Dr. Hugh hears Alain Mercier start the count. The voice on the other end of the telephone is telling him yes, Flight TW359 from Los Angeles has landed and is coming through customs now, but Dr. Hugh does not hear it because he is half a light-year away in the starship of his imagination. In his mind’s eye he sees Vivaldi uncouple from the carrier body and drop towards Nemesis while the three-hundred meter trefoil of solar panels sails onwards into the dark, a three-petaled flower dropping its seed. He glances up from his desk, over the heads of the multinational Vivaldi team, to see the vision of his imagination computer-simulated in gaudy SonyColor on the Big Wall.

  “Carrier-body separation complete, Hugh.”

  So far so good. The onboard computer has not forgotten what to do si
nce the last flight-program update a year ago. Things are going well. Have gone well. Surrounded by the glossolalia of telemetry, the astonishing verisimilitude conceals the truth that all this is past tense, six months past tense. Yet he still says, “Give me a count on the safe-distancing maneuvers, would you, Alain?”

  “Certainly. Coming up on mark … now. Counting down for safe-distancing maneuvers … four … three … two … one … thrusters firing.”

  Fifty-nine minutes from Nemesis, Vivaldi is falling free from the ion-drive section, tumbling through space unpowered, victim of gravity, tumbling towards the black hole.

  * * * *

  It rained the day of Ben Vorderman’s funeral, but the rain signified nothing, it rained every day.

  Cerebral hemorrhage. That had been the verdict. The old man had dropped dead in midsentence five minutes into his lecture to his second-year astronomy class. He was not even cold in his coffin before the department drew bodkins in the quest for the crown of Vivaldi Project Director. Dr. Hugh wanted no part in that. It had disgusted him. Even on the day of the funeral, with the rain filling up the grave, Tom MacIvor and Barbara Caldwell had been lobbying whispered pledges of support from mackintoshed mourners as the minister read the psalms. Dr. Hugh was shocked. In many ways he was still really rather a naive man. When he told of his outrage to Moira, that was what she told him: She loved him but he was really rather naive. He did not look at her quite the same after that.

  Dr. Hugh treasured the nights when Moira went out to her group-consciousness classes or aerobics sessions or women’s group seminars or Nationalist party meetings because they gave him an excuse to be all alone with his nearly-three-year-old daughter for a few hours. He loved to sprawl on the couch with Gemma in his arms and answer all her “Whazzat?” questions about the pictures she saw on the television. These were blessed, sacred hours, these evenings of father and daughter; it was a violation when the telephone rang in the middle of Me and My Dog (Gemma’s favorite, she loved the dogs though she could not comprehend the quiz aspect; he wanted a big fluffy dog for Gemma but Moira wouldn’t hear of it) and it was Mr. Cameron the department solicitor asking him to come to the will reading next morning.