by Ian McDonald
62
The crab ran along the tide line, hunting. It scuttled in and out in time to the gentle run and flow of the foam-edged water. Its legs left little pin-point prints in the white sand. The sand was not native to this place. It had been brought, like the rest of the long, narrow peninsula, by truck from another place. It was part of the contract that the builders environmentally enhance the two-mile strip of land-fill trash. Between the white sand and the edge of the grass, you could see the bones of the thing: the cans and the cars and the twenty million black plastic refuse sacks. That was what made it such a good place for the crabs, and the gulls, and the waders in the shallow water between the peninsula and the shore.
Nothing on the tide today. Not even a rotting condom washed up from the resort hotels down the coast. The crab ran up the beach to clamber through the trash line. It was a big bastard; its shell was the size of your hand, and the colour of a hard dick. It wore its fighting claws the way a punch-drunk middleweight gone to fat wore his gloves. The crab gobbled with its feeding mandibles and tasted it. It darted sideways and tugged at something wedged under the creased black belly of a trash sack. A rat had died here and rotted. The crab tore and tore. It tore a leg right off with its battle claws.
The gull had been watching the big crab from a hover twenty feet up, waiting for its moment to swoop and steal. It saw the crab wave the rat leg in its claws. It dived. It crawked in its throat at the crab, flapped its wings, stabbed with its beak. It was bigger, smarter, meaner; all the crab had was a thick shell and dumb obstinacy. It held on. The gull danced after it, pecking. The crab backed all the way up on to the grass. The crab could go as easily backwards as forwards or sideways. The gull did not let up. The crab led the gull across the tough, salt grass. At the edge of the concrete it made its stand. The gull stabbed and weaved. The big crab held up its fighting claws and circled.
Suddenly all the birds in the tide water flew up at once in a clatter of wings. The crab fought his corner. The gull paused in its assault and put up its head. It sensed the disturbance that had made the others take to the wing. It gave a fuck-you caw and jumped into the air. The crab was too dumb and too greedy and too short on senses to learn from what had spooked the gull. It chewed its rotting rat leg. It was only when it felt the rumble through its legs that alarm penetrated the dumbness. It ran, chewed leg held high. It looked for crevices and crannies. There were none in the tough grass of the artificial peninsula that would hide a crab this big. It reversed on to the concrete. It was that dumb.
The wheels missed it, but the fire got it. Three thousand degrees of liquid hydrogen combining with liquid oxygen cindered it: the blast bowled the wisp of chitin ash down the runway.
The circling birds came down, flock by flock, into the shallow water in the lee of the peninsula. In the big trailer park a mile to the south, the people whooped and cheered and applauded as the vapour trail of the HORUS carrier body curved skyward.
‘Ten miles out, fifty thousand feet,’ said a fat man with a beard in an ugly hat and a T-shirt with Fort Lauderdale in ‘10: World SF Convention printed on the front. He was watching the sky with a pair of binoculars.
‘Carrier separation in mark twelve minutes,’ said an equally fat, bearded man wearing an equally ugly hat. His T-shirt had a picture of an old-style space shuttle and the words National Astronautics Society: Per Ardua Astra. He had a radio jacked into his ear.
The people followed the HORUS upward. There were five thousand of them in the trailer park this day. Thousands more watched from other approved viewing areas, or the beaches, or the off-shore pleasure cruisers. But the serious ones, the true BDO freaks, were at the trailer park. It was like a festival. There were licence plates from forty-eight states of the Union and beyond on the ass-ends of Winnebagos, RVs, trailers greater and lesser, station wagons, pickups with tents in the back, monster trucks, motorcycles. A nomad village of tents had grown up along the dune side of the park. Family-sized trailer tents, one man pup-tents. Folding gas barbecues, sterno stoves, camp-fires of scavenged driftwood carefully ringed with stones. Boots set outside for the night. Terracotta beer coolers evaporating in the shade. Awnings, wind breaks, sun-shades.
It was a festival of space. Like all the best festivals, it was free. The acts up on the big stage were the daily HORUS launches, but like any festival worth going to, it was down in the tent and trailer town, among the sex and drugs and booze and free philosophy and easy conversation, that the real action was found.
The people were moving away from the viewing stage. The chase planes were coming in to land on the two-mile artificial peninsula jutting out into the ocean. The hyperbola of smoke was blowing away on the breeze from off the sea. Clouds clung to the horizon; a tropical storm was moving out there in the Atlantic. The meteorological satellites were tracking its progress up the Gulf Stream. The odds were slightly over evens that it would come ashore. Heavy weather warnings were in force from Fort Lauderdale to Daytona Beach. If it hit Kennedy, it would shut down the HORUS launch program for days, and the free festival down in the trailer park. The name of the tropical storm was Hilary.
‘Launcher separation successful,’ the man with the ear radio said. ‘Isaac Asimov is climbing into transfer orbit. Unity rendezvous in twenty-seven minutes.’
His fat friend smiled and nodded sagely.
Gaby McAslan walked back to the SkyNet news van. It was a good angle; the incongruous fusion of Right Stuff and Hippy Chic. The guys in the van much preferred it to the hotels where the rest of the world news were bivouacked. But then, Gaby reckoned they got action every night, in the back of their SkyNet US van. Right now the men were comparing the tape unfavourably with those of previous launches.
‘Night ones are best,’ said the one who called himself Rodrigo. ‘Whole fucking place lights up like a fucking Christmas tree.’
‘Here’s that stuff you asked for,’ said the other, whom Rodrigo called The Man, though he was years younger. ‘What you doing with this anyway?’
‘My job,’ Gaby said, and took the minidisc recorder and pin-head mike. Pin-head Mike would be a better name for The Man than The Man. They were both jerks. Not for the first time since coming to cover the BDO story, Gaby wished she had her Kenya team with her. That could not be; both her men were prisoners of the Chaga; Faraway literally, Tembo in that he had been refused a visa to enter the United States. Potential biohazard threat from exposure to mutagenic substances, the Consulate in Zanzibar had said. You are a black African was the truth. The race and fear barriers were going up already. Gaby had been closer than Tembo to Chaga virons in the last days of Nairobi, but she was the right nationality, the right race, the right colour not to get turned back at the yellow line.
In her room in the Starview Lodge across the lagoon, Gaby wired up and pulled on the ugly uniform she had bribed from the chambermaid at the Kennedy Ramada. She checked herself in the mirror. The recorder was invisible. She had reception call her a taxi to the Ramada. The SkyNet car would have been dangerously obvious. The driver dropped her at the staff entrance.
UNECTA had come in force to Kennedy Space Centre to stage-manage humanity’s close encounter with the Big Dumb Object. They overwhelmed the capacity of NASA’s launch facility. A dozen hotels, motels and travel lodges as far south as Canaveral had been seconded to house the overspill of BDO people and their inevitable entourage of media and society hangers-on. The Kennedy Ramada was the hub of UNECTASpace’s operations. No press or celebrity sniffers here. The doormen and bell-boys had the scent of a journalist’s soul, and the men in suits they summoned had hard hands. Now that Ellen Prochnow - Chief Executive of UNECTASpace - had taken residence in the Presidential suite, the hard hands had been backed up with big guns. Which was the reason Gaby Mc Asian in her bribed chambermaid’s uniform was hurrying through the kitchens and store areas before someone realized they did not recognize her.
The material had been hard-picked - a hint, a clandestine meeting, a file copied, a database h
acked - and painstakingly assembled, but Gaby now had the evidence to put to Ellen Prochnow. UNECTASpace was part-funding Operation Final Frontier with pay-offs from biotech corporations and the armaments manufacturers, seduced by the prospect of developing weapons systems from Chaga biological packages. The humane bomb that destroys the enemy’s ability to wage war without harming humans. Winnable wars. All the letters, faxes, interviews, depositions, codes and passwords were on the disc in her breast pocket. Care to comment, Ms Prochnow?
Gaby nodded to Gloria, her inside woman, in the corridor to the service elevator.
‘She is in, I assure you,’ Gloria whispered.
Her husband has probably already snorted the two thousand dollars up his nose, Gaby thought. Was the makeup a little too heavy around the left eye? Cover. You need cover. She ducked into the laundry room and grabbed a hanger-trolley of clothes ready to be returned to their owners.
‘Next car, please,’ she told the room-valet waiting on the next floor up. All Irish people can do convincing American accents. The illuminated numbers blinked on and off above the door. Gaby amused herself by looking through the clothes on the rail.
She hit the emergency stop button.
Gaby took the hanger down and examined the garment closely. The print on the T-shirt was faded from years of washing, but it was clearly a teenage nun with her habit up, luxuriously masturbating.
Gaby sat in the corner of the elevator for a full minute, staring at the T-shirt while the call button lights flashed. She put the T-shirt back on the rail, went down to ground, pushed the trolley through the lobby to the reception desk and asked for a pen and paper.
‘Give that to Dr M. Shepard, please,’ she said. She left the trolley by the desk and went out the front door, past all the staring political-space-BDO-Chaga people. She had caught a glimpse of a television in the public lounge. A glimpse was enough to identify Ellen Prochnow’s unmistakable First Lady of Space styling, and the words Live Relay in the bottom right corner.
Thanks a lot, Gloria.
~ * ~
63
Another country, another press conference. So many amphitheatres of seats, so many tables and chairs and carafes of water and nervous scans of the seventh row and the clear of the throat before the ‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.’ Getting old, Gaby McAslan. Getting cynical. Getting weary. One last big miracle and wonder and that will do me, all right? Getting lonely, in your seventh seat of the seventh row, with all these faces around you that you know so well, but who never become more than faces.
Has he got that note yet?
No. Don’t think about that. Think about Rodrigo and The Man going to get her that contact with the Pink Underground. That would be a hell of a story to break. The symbs were breeding sub-cultures like clap in a brothel; it was politically inevitable that there would be gay communities springing up in the vast Chagas of Ecuador and southern Venezuela. Not surprising that there should be a secret underground railroad funnelling white norte homosexuals across terminum. No homophobia or persecution there. No fear of the Scourge.
Weeks could pass now without thinking about Jake Aarons.
She thought about Shepard again. It is only two hours since you left him that note. He probably hasn’t got it yet, yet alone meditated on his response. Just what is he doing down here anyway?
Ellen Prochnow was taking this press conference alone. She had never been shy about being seen on the pale blue screen. That was a Chanel suit. Style never goes out of fashion, Coco had said.
God, what if Shepard didn’t show?
Ellen Prochnow did the scan of the seventh row. Hi. It’s me, the one with the red hair, right? You don’t know me yet, but by the time Any Questions is over, we’ll be better acquainted. A whole lot better. Ellen Prochnow did not do the nervous throat-clear. She was a professional.
‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.’ The half-smile was very good. ‘Welcome to Kennedy Space Centre for the briefing on Operation Final Frontier Mission 88. Most of you probably know who I am—’ small laughter ‘—but for those who have been on some other planet than this or the Big Dumb Object, I am Ellen Prochnow, Chief Executive of UNECTASpace, and I’ll be introducing you later to the crew and expedition team of Mission 88, the HORUS Arthur C. Clarke.’
How many biotech salarypersons among them, Ellen? Gaby thought. How many weapons analysts?
‘First, the latest on our Big Buddy up there. As of 11:30 GMT September 18, the Big Dumb Object is in a trailing position to Earth at a range of seven hundred and twenty thousand kilometres, slightly under three times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. The Swarm has dropped into a trailing position 15,000 kilometres behind the BDO and we are assuming it has become dormant. Estimated Time To Earth Orbit is two hundred and fifteen hours thirty-eight minutes. Achieved Earth Orbit will be on Thursday September 27 at 10:22 GMT; that’s about twenty past five in the morning EST, or Last Jack Daniels and Then I’ll Get Some Sleep, Florida Journalists’ Time.’
Don’t smile at your own jokes, Ellen.
She rattled through the reports on the state of the Big Dumb Object. What little Gaia could photograph through the five slit windows that ran the length of the cylinder indicated that the ring mountain baffles had solidified into partition bulkheads five kilometres thick, though gravitometric analysis seemed to indicate the presence of large spaces up to three kilometres in diameter inside the walls. Gaia was being re-tasked for low-level passes over the window slits to attempt to map the interior prior to human exploration. Yes, alien intelligences were a possibility. Even the Chaga-makers themselves. So was Harvey the six-foot invisible white rabbit. Any more questions?
Not yet, Gaby thought. Wait until the Great White Major Toms are smiling for the cameras before you pull out your j’accuse.
‘You can pick up the latest releases from Gaia and the Hubble and Chandrasekahr telescopes at reception on the way out,’ Ellen Prochnow said.
‘I’d like now to introduce you the crew and mission team of the space plane Arthur C. Clarke. This will be Mission 88 of Operation Final Frontier, HORUS launch thirty-four from Kennedy Space Centre. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Commander Phillippa Gregory, orbiter pilot Damon Ruscoe, Flight Engineer McAuley Trudin of the Arthur C. Clarke, and her mission team.’
People applauded. Gaby expected them to come on in a high-kicking chorus line, but it was just another load of smiling, waving bald-headed astronauts in white coveralls with UNECTASpace’s crescents-and-Earth logo on breast and back. The shaved heads were something to do with preventing hairs drifting around Unity, Gaby had heard. The station was already well over capacity, and Final Frontier people were being shipped up faster than the space engineers could bolt new sections on and fill them with air. Gaby liked the idea of the success or failure of First Contact hanging from a stray, free-floating pube. The hairlessness suited the blacks much better than the whites, who all looked grim and refugee-like. So which is the weapons expert? Gaby thought, leaning on her folded arms and watching the mission team shuffle out from the wing and form a semicircle behind Ellen Prochnow. You, big black man with the happy expression? You, little white woman with the look of naked terror on your face? You, Captain Lantern-jaw Marine-face with the much-too-nice-eyes that give it all away?
You?
You.
‘You,’ Gaby breathed at the twelfth coverall from the end. ‘You cannot do this to me, not here, not now.’
~ * ~
64
There was a launch that night. It was only an SSTO freighter -they barely gave the things mission numbers, they were that lacking in glamour - but it made a lot of noise and sent up a mighty impressive pillar of flame across the lagoon. The space-junkies and rocket-fetishists who had not gone across the causeway to Trailer Park were crowding around the Starview Lodges telescopes on the upper level to ooh and ah. Gaby had the terrace bar to herself. The other journalists derided her for her choice of the hippy, dippy, New-Agey Starview Lodge ove
r less eclectic expense account hotels down the coast and across the lagoon. Gaby stayed here because Gaby liked the vibes and the clientele. It reminded her of Africa. It reminded her of the Watchhouse. Its keel had been laid the same year that Unity’s had been welded together in low orbit, and it had grown in symbiosis with the renascent space age. Nowhere else did they hold nightly BDO-viewing parties, as socially and aesthetically charged as any Japanese cherry-blossom-watching picnic. And there were no news people.
‘Expecting someone?’ Nice Eddie, the bar boy she did like, asked her.
‘Hoping someone,’ she said and sucked her piña colada and watched the faintly luminous pillar of cloud from the rocket launch blow away on the wind from the ocean. It was getting up; Tropical Storm Hilary must be dithering between strange attractors out in the Bahamas. Gaby waved her swizzle stick in the air. Come, storm, come. If a butterfly’s wings in Beijing could summon up a hurricane, surely a swizzle stick with a Saturn Five rocket on the end at the Starview Lodge could command Hilary to storm hard against this coast, rock this wooden ark of a hotel on its moorings, rage over all the HORUSes and launchers and SSTO over the water and press them to the ground, and blow Shepard back to me. Blow me hours, blow me days of him, before he gets into his rocket and flies away from me.