by Eric Brown
The checks over, Bennett pushed the wraparound console away and stretched. ‘Sure you’re okay here on your own, Ten?’
She blinked at him. ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’
‘I don’t know. Don’t you get lonely?’
She shook her head. ‘I never get lonely, Joshua. Loneliness is just another one of your strange Western concepts.’
‘You don’t need anyone?’
‘I am trying to go beyond need.’
Bennett thought of the times in the past when loneliness had suffocated him with a feeling of inescapability like claustrophobia. He recalled the years after Ella’s death, when there had been no one out there who understood or sympathised. He wondered how he had survived without going mad.
He stared at Ten Lee. ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ he said. ‘See you in six weeks.’
She made no response. Her gaze was fixed on the void.
He moved down the corridor to his room. He sat on his bunk, staring at the touch-pad. He would talk to Ella for a while, then catch some regular sleep for a few hours before returning to the suspension unit.
He reached out and pressed the touch-pad.
Ella appeared in the middle of the floor, lying on her back and staring up at the ceiling. She was wearing a pale green gown, which Bennett was slow to recognise. A hospital gown, he realised with bewilderment.
‘Joshua,’ she said in a small voice.
‘Ella?’
‘I don’t feel well.’
He stared at her. She was no longer the impossibly pretty, elfin-faced creature the hologram usually projected. Her face was pale and elongated, her eyes large, staring.
‘Joshua . . .’ she said, a note of appeal in her voice.
‘Ella, get up. Stop playing games.’
His mind was racing. The module had never done this before. Always Ella had been radiantly healthy, full of energy and optimism. Then he noticed her hair. It was thin, straggling. Her pale scalp showed through the threadbare tresses.
Bennett slipped off the bunk and sat on the floor beside her. More than anything he wanted to reach out, take her hand and comfort her. Emotion blocked his throat, hot and raw.
‘I know what’s happening, Joshua. We can’t live for ever, can we?’
‘Ella . ..’
‘I’ve enjoyed our times together. We’ve had some good fun, haven’t we? All those talks. Your stories of space. And coming here, for my birthday. That was really good.’
‘Ella. You’ll be fine, really. You’ll get better.’
She gave a weak smile. ‘Not this time, Joshua,’ she said, staring at him. ‘You see we all must accept death, our own, those of the people we love.’
Only then did he begin to understand. He stared at her, tried to protest.
‘You’ll soon be on your own, Josh. You must accept what is happening to me. Let go and lead your own life.’
She smiled and reached out, and Bennett lifted his own hand and reached for her, and their finger-tips met and meshed, and Bennett felt nothing.
As he watched, Ella’s narrow rib-cage ceased its steady rise and fall, and her mouth opened with a final sigh, and her head slipped to one side.
Bennett wanted to cry out, in anger and grief.
He stared. Something was appearing around the still, silent image of Ella. He made out the steady upward growth of plush pink padding, of polished rosewood. The hologram of the coffin soon enclosed the body of his sister, pale now in death.
As he watched, the coffin and the body burst into bright flame, which grew and flared and then died, and soon exhausted itself, guttering out to leave nothing.
He closed his eyes, too drained even to weep. He experienced a surge of anger, directed at the young boy he had been, the coward who had missed his sister’s funeral.
At last he stood, wondering how he might face Ten Lee, what he might say to her. He left his room and made his way down the corridor.
She sat on the floor of the flight-deck in the lotus position, the soiled soles of her feet upturned, thumbs and index fingers forming perfect circles. Her eyes were open, watching him.
He leaned against the wall, slid down and sat on his haunches. He felt unutterably weary, drained of all emotion. He tried to detect in Ten Lee’s pacific visage some trace of censure or compassion.
‘What now, Ten?’ he asked.
She lifted her shoulders in an expressive shrug, maintained her posture. ‘You have a choice, Joshua. We always have choices. It is the choices we make that determine how we regard ourselves.’
He shook his head wearily. ‘I don’t understand what the hell you’re talking about, Ten. What choice do I have?’
‘I made a copy of the old Ella program. You can have it, and resume your relationship with the hologram. Or you can leave it in my keeping to dispose of later. The choice is yours. I am saying nothing to persuade you one way or the other, and I will abide by your decision.’
He hung his head. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’
‘Then go, Joshua, and make your decision later,’ and she closed her eyes and resumed her meditation.
After perhaps a minute, Bennett pushed himself to his feet and hurried down the corridor to the suspension chamber. His thoughts rang with her words, the need to decide. He knew what he should do, he knew very well, but the spirit was weak and habit was hard to break.
He lay down in his unit and closed his eyes, and oblivion claimed him.
This time, upon awakening, he was beset by images of flames, and beyond the flames Ella’s face staring out at him and calling his name. He reached out for her, towards her illusory fingers, but as fast as he approached her she seemed to retreat, smiling sadly at him.
He awoke in a sweat, her words ringing in his ears. He swung himself upright and sat on the side of the unit, massaging sensation back into his arms. As the minutes elapsed, so the images faded, became nebulous and increasingly more difficult to recall. He was left, as he made his way to the showers, with an elusive sensation of loss somewhere deep within him.
After showering he moved to the flight-deck, expecting to find Ten Lee there and not relishing the encounter. He found only Mackendrick, lying on the engineer’s couch. He looked frail; the months in the suspension unit seemed to have aged him, even though Bennett knew that the tycoon had aged not one second during the flight.
‘Where’s Ten?’ Bennett asked.
‘In her room.’
Mackendrick eased himself into a sitting position and Bennett sat down on the end of the couch.
‘How do you feel?’
Bennett shook his head. ‘I never realised how much suspension takes out of you. I feel like I’ve just had major surgery.’
‘What happened to your body was even more radical than surgery, Josh. We were cryogenically suspended, maintained on a sophisticated life-support system for almost four months, and then revived. No wonder we feel like shit.’
Bennett smiled. ‘You okay?’
‘I’ll live.’ Mackendrick glanced at him and laughed. ‘For a little longer, anyway.’
Bennett saw that the old man was holding a pix; he’d been staring at it in silence when Bennett entered. Now Mackendrick passed it to him. The pix showed Mackendrick’s wife, Naheed, sitting on the porch of a big colonial house, smiling at the camera. Bennett passed it back.
‘I miss her, Bennett. Even after twelve years. When we knew there was nothing we could do, I financed research into how the suspension units might be utilised to preserve life. Sustain terminally ill people indefinitely, until a cure was found. Of course it can’t be done. Oh, my scientists pushed the boundaries back a bit - the units can be used on trans-c flight for up to a year now, before living tissue starts to corrupt. Twelve years ago it was only six month, but that was a small gain. Nothing could be done to help Naheed, or the millions like her.’
‘You never remarried?’
‘Too busy, Bennett. Threw myself into my work. Never met the right woman. No one could rep
lace Naheed. I suppose I shouldn’t have compared, but . . .’
Bennett found himself saying, ‘We can’t hold on to the past, Mack.’
‘Suppose you’re right, but sometimes it’s the only thing to hold on to. Sita, my daughter . . .’
Bennett glanced at the old man. He was pulling something from the breast pocket of his flight-suit. He passed a second pix to Bennett. This one showed the head and shoulders of a young woman, presumably Sita, very much like her mother.
Bennett recalled that Mackendrick had said he was no longer in contact with his daughter.
Mackendrick was shaking his head. ‘When I said that the past is the only thing to hold on to, I meant that sometimes things happen, things that are hard to understand or believe. They leave you wishing that it might have happened somehow differently. You hold on to the past you knew before it happened.’
Bennett waited, not wanting to force the old man to talk of things so obviously a source of pain and regret. Filled with a sense of foreboding, he returned the pix of the young woman.
Mackendrick smiled. ‘This isn’t an actual image of a real person, Bennett. It’s computer-generated, taken from pix of Sita when she was nine. It’s how she probably would look now.’
Bennett found his voice. ‘You mean, your daughter died?’
He wondered why Mackendrick had kept computer-aged images of Sita. Perhaps, he thought, for the same reason that I rely on the hologram of Ella.
Mackendrick was shaking his head. ‘It was thirteen years ago, a year before Naheed passed on. I was working at my offices in Calcutta. Putting in a lot of time. Looking back I realise I neglected Sita. I hardly saw her during that period. She was looked after by a nanny. She was just ten at the time.’
Mackendrick paused there, staring through the view-screen at the flickering void.
‘I was at the office when the break-in happened. Sita was in her room, her nanny asleep in another part of the house.’ He paused again. ‘They took some things from the safe in my study - nothing that valuable, as it happened. The shortest way from my study to the grounds of the house was through Sita’s room. They broke in through her bedroom window on the first floor. We don’t know what happened exactly . . .
‘When I got back early that morning I found the safe opened and Sita missing. I ... I couldn’t live through that discovery again, Josh. Finding evidence of robbery, thinking only of my daughter. Rushing to her room . . . There was evidence of a struggle. Things thrown around the room. But there was no trace of ... no sign that she’d been injured. We think they took her because she saw them, might’ve been able to identify the intruders. Rather than kill her they took her and . . .
‘At first we assumed she was dead, killed and dumped somewhere. It was a nightmare period, Bennett. I couldn’t help but think of the worst, that they’d sold Sita to surgeons for medical experiments, or for spare parts surgery, or to other evil bastards. Then, a month or so later, sightings of a young girl fitting Sita’s description started coming in. I was filled with hope, convinced that she was still alive, living on the street, unable to find her way home. I thought perhaps she’d lost her memory.’ He shook his head. ‘That was thirteen years ago. The terrible thing is not knowing. I keep having these pix updated, in the hope that some day . . .’
He returned the pix to his breast pocket.
‘We live in hope, Bennett, and I don’t know whether that’s an admirable thing or not. Perhaps I should have reconciled myself to the worst-case scenario long ago, and tried to forget.’
A silence came between the two men. Bennett wanted to say something, to find words of consolation. Instead, inadequately, he just nodded.
Footsteps sounded along the corridor. Ten Lee entered the flight-deck.
‘We’re due to phase from the void in one hour,’ she said. ‘Will you run through the systems with me, Joshua?’
Bennett nodded, relieved that she didn’t mention the SIH. He needed time to think about what she had said.
He left Mackendrick on the engineer’s couch, strapped himself into the pilot’s couch and for the next hour concentrated on the familiar routine of checks and analyses. He felt a tension tight within him. Soon, in a matter of minutes, he would be experiencing for the first time the light of another sun.
Ten Lee nodded. ‘That’s it, Joshua. Phase-out in two minutes and counting . . .’
Bennett looked up from the control console and through the viewscreen, ready for the first sight of the star system.
‘One minute . . .’
The void seemed to coagulate around the ship, the stars no longer streaming in towards them. The scene stilled, became a static slab of grey marble.
‘Three . . . two . . . one . . .’
They phased out.
The void was replaced by a regular spacescape: a scatter of distant stars, the sun in the mid-ground and the orbiting planets diminishing in perspective. They were coming in on a ten-degree angle to the plane of the ecliptic, the sound of the ion-drive like an explosion after the relative quiet of trans-c flight.
He transferred the Cobra to the program system Mackendrick had written for the approach to Penumbra, and the ship accelerated through space.
‘Estimated arrival time, four minutes and twenty seconds,’ Ten Lee said.
Bennett concentrated on the read-outs scrolling down his visor screen, only occasionally looking through them to admire the view. The gas giant, which shielded Penumbra from the direct light of the sun, swelled alarmingly, a vast rolling orb of pastel green and ochre gas bands. Bennett made out the coin-like disc of Penumbra against the upper hemisphere of the giant, minuscule by comparison. The Cobra swooped ever closer and Penumbra grew, took on definition as a separate planet.
Ten Lee said, ‘Entry into planetary atmosphere in ten seconds . . . eight . . .’
From his position on the engineer’s couch, Mackendrick said, ‘My God, it’s beautiful . . .’
The planet became a broad, curved bow that spanned the width of the viewscreen, purple land showing through swirls of mauve cloud. The Cobra bucked as they hit the troposphere. Bennett slowed their descent, trimmed the angle of entry. Rags of cloud beat against the viewscreen. The ship rumbled like a toboggan, Bennett and Ten Lee swaying in their couches. In a split second they dropped through the floor of the cloud, from a realm of muffling opacity to a brighter scene of rearing purple mountains and vein-like rivers. They hit another stratum of cloud, this one the periphery of a storm front. Bennett disengaged from the pre-programmed flight-plan and took control of the Cobra, trying to veer around the edge of the storm pattern.
‘We’re three degrees off course if we want to come down in the vicinity of the geographical features,’ Ten Lee reported with calm efficiency. ‘Three-and-a-half degrees and increasing . . .’
‘There’s nothing I can do about that,’ Bennett said. ‘I’m not taking us through the storm, Ten. This is bad enough.’
Even as he spoke the Cobra was batted about the sky like a storm-tossed leaf. Bennett accelerated, trying to outrun the storm front. The vibration increased as the storm chased them and caught up, rattling Bennett and Ten Lee in their couches. He had no time to check how Mackendrick was coping. He fought with the controls, feeling the weight of the craft responding sluggishly.
At one point he gave a manic laugh, and earned a quick glance from Ten Lee. ‘What, Joshua?’
‘It’s like . . . it’s like the craziest roller-coaster ride in all creation!’ he yelled.
‘This is nothing compared to Bhao Khet,’ she responded.
Cloud ripped against the screen as the Cobra dived through the storm. Ten Lee called out a constant string of co-ordinates, her anticipation lightning quick. If anything, the storm seemed to be getting worse. To get this far, he thought with increasing dread, only to crash-land and ... He grunted as he wrestled with the controls, the ship responding like a reluctant animal.
At one point, as if sensing that he was losing control, Ten Lee took ove
r. Something seemed to side-swipe at the Cobra, and Bennett yelled in sudden fear as he felt himself losing control.
‘It’s okay, Josh!’ Ten Lee shouted.
She sequenced a flight-pattern through the high-pressure area and took them through. Then, without a word, she disengaged and handed the ship back.
Bennett smiled to himself. ‘Thanks, Ten. Where’d you learn to sequence like that?’
She just smiled to herself and stared at the figures scrolling down her visor screen.