by Ian McDonald
‘It’s like a fire underground, Gaby, that’s been burning down there in the dark for years, that dies down in one place and you think maybe it’s gone out, but it’s just moved somewhere else. There are coal-mine fires in Pennsylvania that have burned down under the earth for whole lifetimes.’
‘I envy you that fire,’ Gaby said. ‘Really. Truly. My ovaries kick me every time you mention their names, Shepard. I goggle at babies in buggies. I linger in children’s clothing stores; the sad woman by the 0 to 6 months who’s too scared to pick up and feel that cute little red dress. My biological clock is saying “Hurry up now, it’s time.” Looming thirtysomethinghood. I always envied you your kids, did you know that, Shepard? I used to think I envied their claim over you; now I know it was that they were kids that I envied. I’m tired of having nothing outside of me to care about.’
The wind was blowing hard now, flapping their clothes, ruffling the surface of the pool into wavelets that swamped the whiskey glass and sent it to the bottom of the deep end.
‘Gaby,’ Shepard said, ‘come and swim with me.’ His voice was thick with want. He stood up, took off his Indian-style suit that did not really flatter him. His body was as hairless as his head. ‘It’s how we train for freefall. Swim with me, Gaby. I love to see women in water. Women swimming.’
Dizzy with anticipation, Gaby stripped down to her panties and followed Shepard into the pool. He was waiting for her in the deep water where the whiskey glass had sunk. She swam towards him, pleasuring herself in the slide of water past her body. So wet women do it, Shepard? She trod water beside him.
‘Shepard, in all those years, was there ever anyone else? Is there anyone else now?’
‘No one who it would break me to lose. You?’
It would be too complicated to explain about Faraway, and she had still not clarified her feelings about the thing with him. It had seemed like a breaking of something or a curing. A healing. A whole-ing.
‘No,’ she said.
The HORUS orbiter Robert A. Heinlein passed over the Starview Lodge, and the man and the woman treading water in the deep end of the pool, with a mighty rushing sound. It thumped down on the main runway across the lagoon. Gaby heard the space watchers at the back of the hotel cheer and clap. She wriggled herself close to Shepard, tucked her fingers into the waistband of his shorts.
‘All body hair?’ she asked, innocently.
‘Let’s find out,’ he said.
Gaby yelled with laughter. The wind gusted and boomed around the Starview Lodge’s many eaves, and the water of the pool became a dance of droplets as the rain came striking down.
~ * ~
65
Aaron came down from Minneapolis on the second day of the storm. He made it in an hour before they closed the airport. Gaby hardly recognized the lean, fit, almost-sixteener in a wheelchair. He remembered Gaby. He seemed glad to see her. His memories of her were all good; he happily shared them with Gaby as she drove the hire car through sheets of gusting rain to the Ramada where Shepard had reserved a room. She wondered how he would take the news that she was moving into the Ramada at the same time.
Tropical Storm Hilary’s visit to the coast would not be soon forgotten. She blew in to the south, moved north, thought about heading back out to sea for a day or two, then decided she liked the south and went down there again. She left behind her a litter of gutted trailer parks, snapped palm trees, felled billboards, roofless Pentecostal churches, de-awninged gas stations, shorted power lines, breached sea defences, scuttled pleasure cruisers, Pearl-Harbored marinas and thirty-foot yachts in supermarket parking lots. In the five days of her progress, she dumped three months’ rain on the dry coast.
Gaby McAslan never looked at a swizzle stick again without a prick of awe at the power eight inches of fluorescent plastic could wield.
As she had prayed, Hilary wrecked the HORUS launch program. When the wind dropped beneath forty, the occasional SSTO struggled toward the grey clouds, cheered on by space junkies in waterproofs and plastic rain sheets. The UNECTA hotels filled up with newspersons drinking out the storm and shaven-headed Final Frontiersmen moping nervously around the corridors in their UNECTASpace white sweats, like a convention of Bad Ass Buddhists. Gaby spent as much of the storm as she could in bed with Shepard. When she could not be there, she took Aaron to look at rockets in the rain, or view the launches with Rodrigo and The Man, or watch the figures in bulky white space suits way down in the deep water training tank, or moving in the Virtual Reality simulators like old men practising Tai Chi.
‘Quick Gab, infect me with something nasty but non-lethal,’ Shepard said as the television weather girl declared that tropical Storm Hilary had bottomed out and was filling from the south, wind speeds were dropping and the whole system was predicted to spin itself to nothing over Bermuda.
‘You’re right about Aaron,’ Gaby said, rolling herself up in Shepard’s sheet. ‘He tries too hard.’
‘You’ve noticed it,’ Shepard said from the bathroom. He was plastered from head to toe in UNECTASpace depilatory cream. Yellow storm light shone through the cracks in the racing grey rain clouds.
‘When I’ve been out with him, yes. Everything is too much. Nothing is relaxed, natural. Shepard, I don’t think it’s himself he’s doing it for. I think it’s you.’
‘What do you mean?’ he shouted over the sound of showering.
‘Remember, back in the Mara, when you said that Fraser would be the one would make hearts and break hearts and everything would come to his fingertips, but Aaron would have to work hard for everything he wanted to achieve, but because of it, the world would know his name?’
‘You’ve got a long memory.’
‘I think living up to that expectation is the most important thing in his life. Everything he does is to prove to you that it is worthwhile for him to be alive while Fraser is not - that he can be not just Aaron, but Fraser too.’
Shepard stepped out of the bathroom. He looked more alien than ever, naked, smooth, wet.
‘Oh no, Gaby.’
‘It’s the damage that we do and never know, Shepard.’
He shook his head, and started to pull chin-ups on the shower rail.
On the television news, the anchorman reported that the Swarm’s new position fifteen thousand kilometres behind the BDO and inactive status were now confirmed. ETTEO was now one hundred and twenty-two hours twenty-seven minutes.
They ate that night at the Starview Lodge, because the food was great and undersubscribed and there was no better place to watch the Ursula K. Le Guin come down out of orbit. The space-junkies were soft people and gave Aaron a place right at the rail. As they watched the landing lights come on block by block, Shepard said, ‘I’m sorry about the Unit 12 thing, Gaby. I did my best.’
‘I know. T.P. told me that you’d leaked it to Dr Dan. You didn’t have to resign for me, though. It scared me. Shepard; that’s why I was so insane that night. For the first time, I was utterly helpless. I couldn’t do anything to stop them. I was disappeared. I was annihilated. I was an un-person. Nothing. It was like being dead, Shepard.’
The spectators all began to cheer as they caught sight of the black delta of the orbiter in the clear yellow evening sky that had come behind the storm.
She knew that would be the last evening. They called him at midnight for the pre-flight medicals, tests, briefings. Gaby and Aaron said all the goodbyes they needed to say in the hotel lobby. The mission co-ordinator was getting ratty because they were taking so long to say them.
‘Mind Aaron.’
‘Aaron can mind himself.’
‘I never asked; where do you go after AEO?’
‘Back to Tanzania. T.P. Costello has talked UNECTA into taking me on one of your deep patrols. I’m going in to see these Ten Thousand Tribes, meet the people of the future, get their faces on television.’
‘I’ll be in touch when I get back.’
‘And how long will that be?’
Shepa
rd shrugged. ‘Ask the Evolvers. But when I do, I’d really like to see Ireland with you; the places you talk about; the Watchhouse, the Point, and your people too.’
‘Go with God, speed-skater.’
‘I’ll write.’
‘Ha ha.’
‘Watch me.’
The minibus door slammed.
Gaby and Aaron ate and drank and talked in the hotel bar until they could see dawn streak the sky outside the glass lobby. There was no Heineken, but Gaby reckoned Aaron would be all right on Miller. It was the right kind of drink for a kid whose father was about to rendezvous with an alien artifact. They found some time just before dawn that they got on fine for a son and a lover.
In the morning they talked with Shepard in the White Room on a videophone. Both agreed that he looked petrified. They did not repeat the farewells of the night before. Farewells did not carry over videophone, and anyway, to them he had already left the planet.
Shepard had got them complimentary passes to the Executive Viewing Area inside the Space Centre. Gaby fought with a NASA official about access for Aaron’s wheelchair and intimidated him into giving them seats next to the Presidential box, which today was occupied by Ellen Prochnow. Gaby noted this, and also the neat NASA binoculars everyone was given. She wondered how many pairs they expected to get back.
It was a good day for a launch, hot and clear. High pressure had come in on the tail of Hilary. Some pools of rainwater still stood on the grass beside the taxiway but the main strip had been dried during the night by special vehicles. Heat haze boiled off the concrete. The HORUS was a dark, predatory shadow, as improbably elongated as a hunting insect, moving within the shiver of the haze. It glided from the big hangar, along the taxiways to the end of the main runway and turned.
At ‘I minus sixty seconds on the big count-down display, the tractor unit disengaged and dashed like a photophobic beetle for its blast-proof bunker. The digits clicked down on the big counter. Everyone resisted the temptation to count along with the final five. This was not New Year. The clock reached zero.
A mile and a half down the runway, nothing happened in response to this.
Then Gaby screamed because it seemed to her as if the spaceship had exploded in a ball of smoke and flame. Then she saw a black shape hurtling out of the fire towards her. The tricks of the heat haze were dispelled. It was big. It was fast. It was riding on a tail of fire, coming right at her. Gaby’s heart leaped as the carrier body passed in front of the stand and, quite unexpectedly, quite improbably, quite magically, lifted into the air.
The noise was louder than anything she had ever heard in her life. She could scream her head off and no would know. She did. She watched, roaring in exuberance, the launcher go up, and keep going up, in a beautiful asymptotic curve, the HORUS orbiter clinging to its back like a thrilled child. The smoke blew away on the wind from the south, but the space ship kept climbing, over the artificial peninsula of the launch runway, over the tide water waders and the gulls and the big crabs, over the space-freaks and the rocket-fetishists down in Trailer Park, over the day-trippers in the jolly boats, over the green water of the Gulf Stream, still climbing. Nothing could bring it down now.
‘Ten miles out, fifty thousand feet,’ said the fat, bearded man with the ugly hat in the T-shirt with Fort Lauderdale in ‘10 on it.
‘Carrier body separation in mark twelve minutes,’ said the other fat bearded man, with the equally ugly hat and the T-shirt with the old-style shuttle on the front.
In the executive viewing stand the people who had seen all this before were leaving for their corporate hospitality suites, but Gaby McAslan’s face was still turned to the sky. She watched the brilliant speck of the rocket exhaust until it disappeared into the high blue.
‘Fucking hell!’ she shouted to Aaron. ‘Bloody fucking hell! Wasn’t that the greatest thing you ever saw?’
‘Are you crying?’ Aaron asked.
‘Of course I am,’ Gaby said. Then she saw Ellen Prochnow gather her entourage around her and head to the door of the presidential box. Fumbling in her handbag, Gaby ran along the row of seats, tried to get over the low partition wall.
‘Hey! Excuse me! Ms Prochnow! Could you spare me a wee minute of your time?’
~ * ~
The Tree Where Man Was Born
66
Hi Gab.
I said I’d write.
I’m sorry my face is so puffy - you’re going to be seeing a lot of it; there isn’t much to look at in this little confession booth they call the Personal Communications Space - that’s freefall for you. Everyone ends up looking like a Bond villain. Three hundred Ernst Stavro Blofelds, hurtling round in their mad space station eight hundred miles above the Earth.
This is Space, Day One. If I shift the camera a little, there, can you see it? Mother Earth, up there above us. That’s the orientation I seem to have chosen. Most others orient themselves the other way up; feet down toward the Earth. I’m probably heading for vertigo and even more nausea than I’m feeling right now: everything you eat sits right on the bottom of your oesophagus and won’t shift. Also, everyone else is metric and this down-home hayseed is still in yards and miles. I’m trying to adjust, but I just can’t feel a kilometre.
See that? There goes Baja California. It’s always Baja California, isn’t it? I could watch the planet turn above me all day, which is why they limit you to ten minutes in here. It’s a major recreation, Earth-watching. They’ve got a fully-equipped Gaiaist contemplarium out in number two hydroponics tube. Hover in lotus, listen to whale song and watch the great green mother of us all spin before you. A Jodo Tendai chanting group time-shares it with a freefall yoga class. I promised myself before I left that I would not turn into one of these astronaut-mystics who find being beyond the envelope of atmosphere and gravity a religious revelation, but it would be very easy to succumb to a Zen state of disconnectedness with worldly things. Never could manage lotus, though. Something wrong with my left shin.
What you once told me about airline booking computers is doubly true for space shuttles. They put me next to a cetologist - God knows why they think they need a whale expert at the BDO; I suppose they want to cover every possibility - who was even more shit-scared than me but was damned if he was going to show it. He talked all the way through the pre-launch checks about how mutations were appearing in the whale populations that had responded to the Foa Mulaku call and that this was clear evidence that the cetaceans were at least as intelligent and worthy of species-vastening as humanity. When they actually lit the engines, he put his hands over his head and yelled all the way up to carrier body separation. His exact words to me were, ‘Well, that was more fun than Magic Mountain.’ I don’t think he meant the Thomas Mann novel.
The real story, according to Shepard. It was like being strapped into a windowless tube that suddenly accelerates and doesn’t stop and all those things they teach you about puffing your breath and not fully collapsing your lungs and pulling your belly muscles and tightening your sphincters all go straight out of your head because you cannot see where you are going, you have no idea where you are, you don’t have a clue what the hell is happening and you want it to be over like you’ve never wanted anything else to be over but at the same time you don’t because what happens next may well be worse. It seems like forever until carrier body separation, and that is like the bottom falling out of an express elevator leaving you clinging to the walls. The gees drop off a little, so it’s only a linebacker sitting on your chest and not a sumo wrestler, but that’s worse, because you feel underpowered, that you don’t have the speed to make it, that at any minute this blacked-out bus on wings is going to fall out of the sky.
And that’s exactly what it does. The words ‘throttle back’ do not appear in the HORUS pilot manuals. They give it full thrust until they’ve burned every drop of fuel in the tanks, and then they switch to glide. You go from multi-gees through HESO to freefall. Emphasis here is on the word ‘fall’. Everyone screa
med. We all thought the engines had failed and we were plummeting to earth. Burn and crash. Quite a lot of barfing. Some had already shat themselves in fear when Clarkie launched. You’re sitting strapped into your seat trying to dodge globes of floating puke with the place smelling like a sewage pit and the pilot tells you that Arthur C. Clarke has achieved earth orbit and is moving into a transfer trajectory that will bring it to Space Station Unity in forty-nine minutes.