It’s not always like that, though. She can look after herself perfectly well most of the time, she just gets a bit vague. She can’t do her work anymore, but she’s still interested in the world, still fascinated by what makes things tick, by aeroplanes and rivers and metals, the rudiments of creation. Those are her words, not mine—the rudiments of creation. Moolie used to be a physicist. Now she sounds more like one of those telly evangelists you see on the late-night news channels, all mystery and prophecy and lights in the sky. But when it comes down to it, she’s interested in the same things she’s always been interested in—who we are and how we came here and where the bloody hell we think we’re going.
If you didn’t know her how she was before, you wouldn’t necessarily spot that there’s anything wrong with her.
It’s all still inside, I know it—everything she was, everything she knows, still packed tight inside her head like old newspapers packed into the eaves of an old house. Yellowing and crumpled, yes, but still telling their stories.
For me, Moolie is a wonder and a nightmare, a sadness deep down in my gut like a splinter of bone. Always there, and always worrying away at the living flesh of me.
The doctors say there’s nothing to stop her living out a normal lifespan but I think that’s bollocks and I think the doctors know it’s bollocks, too. Moolie was fifty-two last birthday, but sometimes she’s bent double with back pain, as bad as a woman of eighty or even worse. Other times she burbles away to herself in a made-up language like a child of four. Her whole system is riddled with wrongness of every kind. The doctors won’t admit it, though, because they’re being paid not to. No one wants to be liable for the compensation. That’s why you won’t find any mention of the Galaxy air crash in Moolie’s medical file, or the sixteen lethal substances that were eventually identified at the crash site, substances that Moolie was hired to isolate and analyse.
There were theories about a dirty bomb, and it’s pretty much common knowledge now that some of the shit that came out of that plane was radioactive. But ten years on and the report Moolie helped to compile still hasn’t been made public. The authorities say the material is too sensitive, and they’re not kidding.
The medics have given Moolie a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s. If you believe that then I guess, well, you know how it goes.
When Moolie dies I’ll be free. Free to move away from the airport, free to look for another job, free to buy a one-way ticket to Australia and make a new life there. I lie awake at night sometimes, scheming and dreaming about these things, but in the morning I wonder how I’ll manage. Moolie is like a part of me, and I can’t imagine how the world will feel without her in it.
When she goes, all her stories will go with her, the ones she makes up as well as the ones that happen to be true.
Once she’s gone, I’ll never discover which were which.
* * *
I think about the astronauts a lot. Not the way Benny would like me to be thinking of them, I bet—with Benny it’s all about scanning the rooms for bugging devices, checking the kitchens for deadly pathogens, making sure the PA system in the press lounge hasn’t blown a gasket.
I know these things are important. If we cock up it won’t just be Benny who looks an idiot, and the last thing I want to see is some kid in the catering department getting fired because someone forgot to tell them to stock up on mixers. I check and recheck, not for Benny’s sake but because it’s my job, and my job is something I care about and want to do well. But every now and then I catch myself thinking how crazy it is really, all this preparation, all this fussing over things that don’t actually matter a damn. When you think about what Zhanna Sorokina and Vinnie Cameron and the rest of them are actually doing, everything else seems juvenile and pointless by comparison.
They’re going to Mars, and they won’t be coming back.
I wonder if they know they’re going to die. I mean, I know they know, but I wonder if they think about it, that every one of them is bound to cop it much sooner than they would have done otherwise, and probably in a horrible way. It’s inevitable, isn’t it, when you consider the facts? There’s no natural air on Mars, no water, no nothing. There’s a good chance the whole crew will wind up dead before they can even set up a base there, or a sealed habitat, or whatever it is they’re supposed to be doing when they arrive.
How do they cope with knowing that? How does anyone begin to come to terms with something that frightening? I can’t imagine it myself, and I have to admit I don’t try all that hard, because even the thought of it scares me, let alone the reality.
In interviews and articles I’ve read online, they say that learning to cope with high-risk situations is all part of the training, that anyone with insufficient mental stamina is weeded out of the selection process more or less straightaway. I’m still not sure I understand, though. Why would anyone volunteer for something like that in the first place?
Ludmilla Khan is especially upset because one of the women astronauts is a mother. We all know her name—Jocelyn Tooker. Her kids are five and three. They’ve gone to live in Atlanta, with their grandmother.
“How can she bear it? Knowing she’ll never see them grow up, that she’ll never hear their voices again, even?”
“I don’t know,” I say to Ludmilla. “Perhaps she thinks they’ll be proud of her.” The way Ludmilla talks, you’d think Jocelyn Tooker had murdered both her kids and chucked their bodies down a well. One of the male crew, Ken Toh, has an eight-year-old son, but people don’t go on about that nearly as much as they do about Jocelyn Tooker.
Ludmilla has two little ones of her own, Leila and Mehmet, so I can see how Jocelyn Tooker’s decision might weigh on her mind. I’ve thought about it over and over, and the only thing I can come up with that makes sense of it is that the crew of the Second Wind look upon going to Mars not as a one-way ticket to an early exit but as a way of cheating death altogether. I mean, everyone aboard that spacecraft is going to live forever—in our hearts and minds, in our books and stories and films, and in thousands of hours of news clips and documentaries. Even if they crash and burn like the crew of the New Dawn, we’ll never stop talking about them, and speculating, and remembering.
If you look at it that way it’s a straight trade: fifty years or so of real life now against immortality. I can see why some people might think that’s not such a bad deal.
In a way, the men and women who go into space are our superheroes. Ten years from now, some journalist will be asking Jocelyn Tooker’s children what it feels like to have a superhero for a mum.
Who is Ludmilla Khan, or me or anyone else for that matter, to try and guess at how those kids will judge her, or what they’ll say?
* * *
My name is Emily Clarah Starr. The Starr is just a coincidence. Clarah is for my grandmother, whom I can’t remember because she died when I was three. There’s a photo of us, Moolie and Clarah and me, out by the King George VI Reservoir before it was officially declared to be toxic and cordoned off. Moolie has me in one of those front-loading carry-pouch things—all you can see is the top of my head, a bunch of black curls. Grandma Clarah is wearing a hideous knitted blue bobble hat and a silver puffer jacket, even though it’s May in the photo and the sun is shining, reflecting itself off the oily water like electric light.
“Your grandma never got used to the climate,” Moolie told me once. “She always felt cold here, even though she came over with her aunts from Abuja when she was six.”
Moolie in the photograph is tall and thin, elegant and rather aloof, unrecognisable. She seems full of an inner purpose I cannot divine. She says it was my father who chose the name Emily for me. I don’t know if I should believe that story or not.
I have no idea who my father is, and Moolie’s account varies. I went through a phase of pestering her about him when I was younger, but she refused to tell me anything, or at least not anything I could rely on.
“Why should it matter who your dad is? What di
d fathers ever do for the world in any case, except saddle unsuspecting women with unwanted children?”
“Unwanted?” I gaped at her. The idea that Moolie might not have wanted me had never occurred to me. I simply was, an established fact, quod erat demonstrandum. But that’s the ego for you—an internalized life support system, and pretty much indestructible.
“Oh, Emily, of course I wanted you. You were a bit of a shock to the system, though, that’s all I’m saying.”
“What did Dad say, when he found out?”
“Don’t call him Dad, he doesn’t deserve it.”
“My father, then. And if the guy was such an arsehole why did you shag him?”
I was about fourteen then, and going through a stroppy phase. When rudeness didn’t get me anywhere I started hitting Moolie with psychological claptrap instead—all this stuff about how I had a right to know, that it would damage my self-esteem if she kept it from me. You know, the kind of rubbish you read in magazines. The situation stood at a stalemate for a while, then finally we had this massive row, a real window-shaker. It went on for hours. When we’d been round in circles one time too many, Moolie burst into tears and said the reason she wouldn’t tell me anything was that she didn’t know. She’d had several boyfriends back then. Any one of them could be my father.
“We can do a ring-round, if you want,” she said, still sniffing. “Drop a few bombshells? Destroy a few households? What do you reckon?”
What I reckoned was that it was time I shut up. For the first time in my life I was feeling another person’s pain like it was my own. For the first time ever I was seeing Moolie as a person in her own right, someone whose life could have taken a whole different path if little Emily hadn’t come along to mess things up.
It was a shock, to put it mildly. But it was good, too, in the long run, because it brought Moolie and me together and made us real friends. I stopped caring about who my dad was, for a long time. Then when Moolie started getting ill I didn’t want to make things worse by dragging it all up again.
Then Moolie said what she said about the book, and everything changed.
* * *
The book is called The Art of Space Travel by Victoria Segal. I remember the book from when I was a little kid because of the star maps. The maps fold out from between the normal pages in long, concertina-like strips. They’re printed in colour—dark blue and yellow—on smooth, glossy paper that squeaks slightly when you run your finger across it. I always thought the star maps were beautiful. Moolie would let me look at the book if I asked but she would never leave me alone with it—I suppose she thought I might accidentally damage it.
As I grew older I had a go at reading it every once in a while, but I always gave up after a chapter or two because it was way over my head, all the stuff about quasars and dark matter and the true speed of light. I would soldier on for a couple of pages, then realise I hadn’t actually understood a word of it.
As well as the star maps, the book is filled with beautiful and intricate diagrams, complicated line drawings of planetary orbits, and the trajectories of imaginary spacecraft, rockets that never existed but one day might. I always loved the thought of that, that they one day might.
The book’s shiny yellow cover is torn in three places.
The day Moolie drops the bombshell is a Tuesday. I don’t know why I remember that, but I do. I come in from work to find Moolie looking sheepish, the look she gets now when she’s lost something or broken something or forgotten who she is, just for the moment. I’ve learned it’s best not to question her when she gets like that because it makes her clam up, whereas if you leave her alone for a while she can’t resist sharing. So I pretend I haven’t noticed anything and we have supper as usual. Once we’ve finished eating, Moolie goes into the front room to watch TV and I go upstairs to do some stuff on my computer.
After about half an hour, Moolie appears in the doorway. She’s holding The Art of Space Travel, clasping it to her chest with both arms as if she’s afraid it might try to get away from her. Then she dumps it down on my bed like a brick. It makes a soft, plump sound as it hits the duvet. A small puff of air comes up.
“This belonged to your father,” Moolie says. “He left it here when he went.”
“When he went where?” I say. I’m trying to keep my voice low and steady, as if we’re just having a normal conversation about nothing in particular.
My heart is thumping like a road drill, like it wants to escape me. It’s almost painful, like the stitch in your side you get from running too far and too fast.
“Your dad was an astronaut,” Moolie says. “He was part of the New Dawn mission.”
My hands are shaking, just a bit, but I’m trying to ignore that. “Moolie,” I say to her. Moolie is what I called her when I was first learning to talk, apparently. It made her and Grandma Clarah laugh so much they never tried to correct me. Moolie’s actual name is Della—Della Starr. She was once one of the most highly qualified metallurgists in the British aerospace industry. “What on Earth are you talking about?”
“He knew I was pregnant,” Moolie says. “He wanted to be involved—to be a father to you—but I said no. I didn’t want to be tied to him, or to anyone. Not then. I’ve never been able to make up my mind if I did the right thing or not.”
She nods at me, as if she’s satisfied with herself for having said something clever, and then she leaves the room. I stay where I am, sitting at my desk and staring at the open doorway Moolie just walked out of, wondering if I should go after her and what I’m going to say to her if I do.
When I finally go downstairs, I find Moolie back in the living room, curled up on the sofa, watching one of her soaps. When I ask her if she was telling the truth about my dad being an astronaut she looks at me as if she thinks I’ve gone insane.
“Your father wasted his dreams, Emily,” she says. “He gave up too soon. That’s one of the reasons I told him to go. Life’s hard enough as it is. The last thing you want is to be tied to someone who’s always wishing he’d chosen a different path.”
When a couple of days later I ask her again about The Art of Space Travel, she says she doesn’t have a clue where it came from. “It was here in the house when we moved in, I think,” she says. “I found it in the built-in wardrobe in your bedroom, covered in dust.”
I’ve been through the book perhaps a thousand times, searching for a sign of my father—a name on the flyleaf, a careless note, scribbled comments in the margin, underlinings in the text, even. There’s nothing, though, not even a random inkblot. Aside from being yellowed and a bit musty-smelling, the pages are clean. There’s nothing to show who owned the book, who brought it to this house, that it was ever even opened before we had it.
I want to find Dad. I tell myself it’s because Moolie is dying, that whoever the man is and whatever he’s done, he has a right to know the facts of his own life. I know it’s more than that, though, if I’m honest. I want to find him because I’m curious, because I’ve always been curious, and because I’m afraid that once Moolie is gone I’ll have nobody else.
* * *
Our house is on Sipson Lane, in the borough of Hillingdon. It was built in the 1970s, almost a hundred years ago now to the year. It’s a shoddy little place, one of a row of twenty-two identical boxes flung up to generate maximum profit for the developer with a minimum of outlay. It’s a wonder it’s lasted this long, actually. Some of the other houses in the row are in a terrible state—the metal window frames rusted and buckling, the lower floors patchy with mildew. The previous owner put in replacement windows and a new damp-proof course, so ours isn’t as bad as some. It’s dry inside, at least, and I used some of the extra cash from Benny to put up solar panels, which means we can afford to keep the central heating on all the time.
Moolie’s like Clarah now—she can’t stand the cold.
Sipson is a weird place. Five hundred years ago it was a tiny hamlet, surrounded by farmland. Since then it’s evolved into a scr
uffy housing estate less than half a mile from the end of the second runway at Heathrow Airport. Moolie bought the Sipson Lane house because it was cheap and because it was close to her job, and the best thing about it is that it’s close to my job too, now. It takes me less than half an hour to walk into work, which not only cuts down on expenses, it also means I can get home quickly if there’s an emergency.
The traffic on the perimeter road is a constant nightmare. In the summer, the petrol and diesel fumes settle over the airport like a heavy tarpaulin, a yellowish blanket of chemical effluent that is like heat haze, only thicker, and a lot more smelly.
When you walk home in the evenings, though, or on those very rare winter mornings when there’s still a hard frost, you could take the turning into Sipson Lane and mistake it for the entrance to another world: The quiet street, with its rustling plane trees, the long grass sprouting between the kerbstones at the side of the road. The drawn curtains of the houses, like gently closed eyelids, the soft glow behind. Someone riding past on a bicycle. The red pillar box opposite the Sipson Arms. You’d barely know the airport even existed.
It’s like an oasis in time, if there is such a thing. If you stand still and listen to the sound of the blackbirds singing, high up in the dusty branches of those plane trees, you might almost imagine you’re in a universe where the Galaxy air crash never happened.
The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection Page 55