by Eric Brown
One minute before lift-off the main engines engaged. Control counted down. Bennett laid his head back against the rest and gripped the arms of the couch. He glanced back at Mackendrick, strapped into the engineer’s couch. The tycoon sketched a brief smile and gave a thumbs-up gesture.
Seconds later the Cobra surged from the blast-pad, the pressure of ascent pushing Bennett further into his seat. His head rattled with the vibration of the rapid climb, blurring his vision. He thought of the sightseers in the observation gallery, the kids gasping at the spectacular pyrotechnics of blast-off.
In his helmet the tinny voice of the controller signed off. ‘Good luck Bennett, Theneka. She’s all yours.’
They climbed and turned. Through the sidescreen Bennett made out the vast sweep of the western seaboard, and then the great ochre plain of the Mojave, punctuated with the verdant circles of a dozen townships and settlements. From this high it appeared so artificial, impossible to conceive that down below normal people were conducting normal, everyday lives.
He turned his head and smiled at Mackendrick. ‘You okay, Mack?’
It was all the old tycoon could do to lift a hand in silent assent. Bennett hoped Mackendrick would be equal to the stress of the take-off.
Ten Lee’s voice interrupted his thoughts. ‘Twenty seconds until phase-out.’
‘Check,’ he said, glancing at his screen. The system was running smoothly.
‘Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .’
They were almost at the altitude where it would be safe to effect the transfer. Then the Schulmann-Dearing would cut in, tearing the fabric of localised space with such concentrated energy that, had the phase-out been effected on the ground, the area of the port around the ship would have been destroyed.
Bennett felt a stab of apprehension. Hell, but in seconds he would be travelling faster than the speed of light, this tiny shell-like vehicle cancelling the laws of physics and hurtling three frail human beings to the very edge of the galaxy.
He thought of Julia. He almost wished he was with her now, suffering her barbed recriminations.
‘Two . . . one . . . transition,’ Ten Lee said.
The deafening rumble of the main engines cut out suddenly, to be replaced with an eerie almost-silence. As his hearing adjusted he was aware that the ship was ringing with a low, almost subliminal hum, like the constantly dying note of a struck tuning fork.
He peered through the viewscreen. Where the thin blue of the stratosphere should have been, or the familiar scatter of stars, the scene was unique and strange: the stars had turned to streamers and were hosing towards and around the ship like a bombardment of polychromatic flak. He was aware of a sensation of abstraction; he felt at several removes from the reality around him, like a patient in a post-operative daze.
Ten Lee pulled off her helmet. She stared through the viewscreen in silent wonder, her open-mouthed regard unusually expressive. ‘Some scholars say that the void is the physical embodiment of the state to which we all aspire, Joshua.’
‘Josh,’ Mackendrick said from behind them. ‘If you and the Dalai Lama wouldn’t mind helping me to my unit . . .’
Bennett unfastened himself and moved over to Mackendrick. The old man looked pale, as if the stress of takeoff and phase-out had been too much. He could hardly stand, and it took Bennett and Ten Lee supporting each arm to assist him from the flight-deck. They moved down the corridor to the suspension chamber. The three suspension units - long silver containers resembling nothing so much as coffins - stood side by side in the centre of the room.
Mackendrick lay down in the form-shaped padding and sighed as sub-dermal capillaries eased themselves into his flesh. The transparent cover hummed shut over his unconscious body. In four months, when phase-out of the void was accomplished, he would be woken up.
Bennett was due to come out of suspension at the midpoint stage of the voyage, to assist Ten Lee in routine systems checks. Ten Lee had requested that she remain unsuspended for the duration of the flight. She wished to meditate. She had even brought along meagre rations to last her until landfall, vegetarian fare consisting of lentil bread and soya cakes, even though the ship was equipped with pre-packed food supplies.
Bennett left the suspension chamber and moved along the corridor to his berth. He lifted the simulated identity hologram from his bag and placed it on the bedside unit. He had never talked to Ella’s ghost anywhere other than the memorial garden; it was strange to think that he could commune with her so far from home. He moved around the small room, setting up the projectors and receivers at strategic positions. Then he sat on the narrow bunk and placed his finger-tips on the touch-sensitive module.
She appeared before him, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room, and his heart lurched. The SIH had assessed the passage of time and changed Ella’s style of dress accordingly. It must have been evening back on Earth, bedtime, for his sister was wearing her crimson pyjamas.
She leapt up and stared around the room. She looked at Bennett and beamed. ‘Hi, Josh.’ A frown. ‘Where are we?’ She ran to the viewscreen, reached up on tip-toe, leaned forward and peered out.
Bennett watched her, some unnameable emotion, poignant almost beyond endurance, swelling in his chest. The sight of her here, out of the usual context of the memorial garden, served to heighten the reality of her image and so emphasise the fact of her non-existence. Bennett was reminded of the many places she had never been, the many experiences she had never lived to enjoy.
She turned to him, a look of wonder transfixed on her pretty features. ‘Are we in space, Josh? Are we?’
‘We’re aboard a Cobra lightship, Ella. You always said you wanted to go into space.’
‘Hey!’ she exclaimed, turning to the viewscreen and staring out at the flickering tracer of starlight streaming around the contours of the ship. ‘This is fantastic, Josh! Thanks a million times!’
She jumped on to the padded seat before the view-screen, turned so that she could stare out at the void and glance from time to time at Bennett. She hugged her legs and gave a conspiratorial grin. ‘Is this my birthday present, Josh?’
‘Your birthday?’
He smiled, caught. Her birthday was on the twenty-seventh, tomorrow, and in the past he had always avoided communion with Ella on her birthday, the anniversary bringing to mind thoughts and memories too painful to relive. The SIH was programmed so that it would present a never-ageing Ella, an Ella forever ten years old and full of health. Shortly after her tenth birthday, more than twenty years ago, she had died.
Bennett remembered the birthday party at the hospital, the forced cheer of the occasion, the almost desperate desire of his mother and father to celebrate the day as if nothing was amiss. But Ella had been woozy with powerful sedatives, increasingly fraught from having to endure the protracted, almost desperate festivities of parents too scared to admit to themselves that this birthday would likely be her very last. Bennett had bought her a present, spent much of his savings on a small computer diary, perhaps with the subconscious hope that she would be able to complete the year’s entries. But she had been too tired to open it. A few days after her death, Bennett had walked out into the desert and buried it in the sand.
‘This is the best birthday present I’ve ever had, Josh! Are we going to Mars?’ Her eyes widened at another thought. ‘Are we going to Jupiter, Josh? All the way out to Jupiter!’
Bennett smiled. ‘Even further, Ella. We’re travelling faster than light towards the Rim of the galaxy.’
‘Far out!’ she breathed, fingering a strand of hair from her eyes and gazing out at the light show.
Bennett watched her, understanding now why he had summoned her.
‘Ella.’
She turned, still smiling.
‘The last time I spoke to you . . .’ he began.
She frowned with the effort of recollection. ‘Oh, four days ago - you’d just got back from Redwood Station, hadn’t you? And you said Daddy wanted . . . euthanalia?�
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‘Euthanasia,’ Bennett said. ‘I visited him that day at the hospital. I was with him when he died. I . . .’ He knew why the admission was so hard to make. ‘I didn’t go to his funeral, Ella. It was today, the day we left Earth. Do you understand, Ella?’
She nodded, very serious. ‘Of course I do. It’s okay, Josh. Daddy would have understood.’
‘Do you think it matters, if you miss a person’s funeral?’
She pulled her thinking-cap face. At last she smiled. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, and with what might have been little-girl logic or computer sophistry went on: ‘I mean, the person doesn’t know you weren’t there, do they?’
He stared at her. He recalled what had happened, all those years ago, when he had returned from the desert after burying her stupid, useless diary. His mother had given him a suit to change into and told him that they were to attend Ella’s funeral, which seemed to Bennett in his youthful ignorance an event that could only compound his sense of loss. How could he have known that the funerary ritual was a necessary part of the grieving process, a cathartic experience that had to be endured?
Now he reached out to the touch-pad. Ella, in the process of swinging down from the seat, froze in mid-leap, one leg pointing to the floor, her mouth open to speak to him.
He stared at her suspended image and, involuntarily, found himself telling her: ‘The day of your funeral, Ella ... It was so hot. I still couldn’t believe you were dead. I mean, I knew, intellectually. I knew I’d never see you again, but something inside me just couldn’t accept the fact. I suppose it was too terrible an idea to grasp.’ He paused. ‘It was so hot and the thought of you in that coffin . . . They were going to cremate you, and I couldn’t take it. I’m sorry, Ella. I’m sorry I didn’t go to your funeral.’ He paused again, wondering why he had waited until now to admit the guilt he had kept buried for years.
They had driven to the grave garden in Mojave, and followed the procession as Ella’s coffin was carried on an electric bier to the crematorium. At the sight of the building, pumping out the smoke of the previous cremation, something had snapped within him and he had vomited down his suit. He had complained of stomach pains and doubled over for effect, anything to be spared the trial of experiencing the funeral, the scattering of his sister’s ashes in the pit where a tree would be planted in her name. It had worked: a family friend had rushed him to her nearby house, where he had washed himself and changed into clothes too big for him, and said that he needed to lie down. From the settee in the lounge of the stranger’s house he had watched the smoke rise above the tree-tops.
He looked up, suddenly aware of a presence. Ten Lee was standing in the open doorway, staring at him. He wondered how long she had been there, how much she had seen.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I was passing . . .’
‘It’s okay.’
With her diminutive stature and scarlet flight-suit, she was a strange mirror image of Ella in her bright red pyjamas.
Ten Lee was staring at the image of Ella, frozen mid-leap. ‘Who is this?’
Bennett stared at Ten Lee, challenging. ‘She was my sister, Ella.’
Ten Lee nodded, the composure of her features suggesting neither censure nor comprehension. ‘Was?’
‘She died a long time ago, when she was ten.’
He reached out to the touch-pad. Ella completed her leap and landed on the floor before him. She saw Ten Lee and smiled. ‘Hi there. Who are you?’
Ten Lee regarded Ella, considering her response. She looked past the image at Bennett. ‘Joshua, please turn it off.’
‘Ella,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you later, okay?’ He reached out and touched the pad and the image of his sister winked out of existence.
‘What?’ he said to Ten Lee, his aggression anticipating her criticism.
She gestured at the SIH unit. ‘Why, Joshua?’
‘It helps,’ he told her. ‘We were close when we were kids. Ella was a good friend. When she died . . .’ He paused, gathering his thoughts. ‘I know she isn’t really Ella, but she’s the next best thing. Over the years we’ve developed a relationship that I value.’
‘Even now?’
Bennett nodded. ‘Even now. She reminds me of the times we had together.’
‘Joshua, we all live in the shadow of the fact of death. It is the purpose of one’s life to come to some acceptance of its inevitability, so that the idea of it does not destroy us. We must come to some accommodation of the fact of our own mortality.’ She paused, her tipped eyes regarding him. ‘Joshua, you can’t accept the idea of your own death if you fail to accept the death of loved ones, if you cling to this . . . this fantasy.’
‘It’s all I have,’ he whispered, staring at her.
‘It is all you have because you have never given it up.’
Seconds elapsed, and when next Bennett looked up he saw that Ten Lee had slipped from the room, leaving him to contemplate the meaning of her words, as a disciple tries to unravel the conundrum of a koan. In the past he would have wished for sleep to claim him, the refuge from contemplation of his failings and weakness. Aboard the Cobra there was a means of oblivion far more effective than mere sleep.
He quickly left the room and moved to the chamber containing the suspension units. At his touch the lid slipped open and he lay down inside. His flesh crept to the touch of the sub-dermals. He might have felt apprehension had he given himself time to contemplate the fact of this, his first time in suspension, but all he sought was peace from his thoughts, and in seconds he was unconscious.
Later he thought that he had dreamed, but in suspension dreams were impossible. The workings of the mind were effectively stopped, metabolic processes halted. What he did recall were the memories and images that flooded his mind once the unit returned him to semiconsciousness; the dreams that filled the hours as he slowly became aware of himself, some two months later.
In this waking period he experienced a series of fractured images: his father, bizarrely dressed in the grey VR suit, walking through the grave garden behind Ella’s coffin; then Ella herself, in pyjamas, running into the desert and frantically scrabbling through the hot sand in search of her buried diary. The pain of this final image tore a scream from his throat. He sat up quickly, shrugging the massage pads from his arms. He swung his legs free of their soothing ministrations and sat on the edge of the unit, holding his head in his hands and breathing deeply.
Two months had elapsed, he knew, but it seemed no more than minutes since he had left his room and given himself to the suspension unit. He felt an ache in his bones and he was overcome with a terrible weariness.
He stood, reaching for the wall to support himself. His vision swam and his head pounded with a severe, persistent throbbing, like migraine. He staggered from the room and crossed the corridor to the shower units.
Hot needles of water restored sensation to his body. He stretched, easing the pain from his muscles. He became aware that he was hungry and thirsty. After standing below the drier, he dressed in a fresh flight-suit and fetched a self-heating tray of food from storage He ate in his room, wanting the reassuring company of Ella, but telling himself that he would appreciate her more if he waited until he had run through the checks with Ten Lee.
After eating, feeling better for the shower and the meal, he made his way to the flight-deck. Ten Lee was seated in the lotus position before the viewscreen, staring out at the streaming stars.
He tried to detect any change in the void surrounding the ship; he wondered if perhaps the elongated lights of the stars were less tightly packed here, the multi-colours fainter. It was hard to tell. The almost inaudible bass note still filled the ship, noticeable more in his solar plexus as a constant low vibration.
Ten Lee saw his reflection in the viewscreen and without turning said, ‘Joshua.’
It seemed just two minutes since they had spoken in his room; he wondered if she would mention his reliance on the holographic Ella. Then he reminded himself
that for Ten Lee two months had elapsed. She would have had much more to occupy her mind during that time.
‘I checked on Mack from time to time, Joshua.’
‘How is he?’
She smiled. ‘Sleeping peacefully.’
She unfolded her knotted legs, stood and climbed into the co-pilot’s couch. ‘We’re over halfway to the Rim, Joshua.’
‘How’s it been?’
‘Peaceful. I have learnt much. I think the practice of meditating in the void can be recommended. I seemed to attain a greater appreciation of sunyata.’
‘I’m pleased for you,’ Bennett muttered. ‘Shall we get this over with?’
For the next hour they cycled through the series of checks, calling off figures and read-outs to each other. Everything was going according to plan: they were on course, ahead of schedule, and the Schulmann-Dearing propulsion unit was performing at optimum. They were due to phase into the G5/13 star system in a little under six weeks.