A something—a figure—was walking up the track towards him. No, not a fluke, and not random data, and certainly not an ibex. Not Madame Brissac either, come to explain her pigeonholes and apologise for her years of rudeness. Part of Tom was watching the rest of Tom in quiet amazement as his addled mind and tired eyes slowly processed the fact that he wasn’t alone, and that the figure was probably female, and could almost have been, no looked like, in fact was, the woman in the dark blue dress he’d glimpsed down by the lace stalls in the market that morning. And she really did bear a remarkable resemblance to Terr, at least in the sole dim light which emanated from the monitors inside his hut. The way she walked. The way she was padding across the bare patch of ground in front of the tripwires. That same lightness. And then her face. And her voice.
“Why do you have to live so bloody far up here Tom? The woman I asked in the post office said it was just up the road…”
He shrugged. He was floating. His arms felt light, his hands empty. “That would be Madame Brissac.”
“Would it? Anyway, she was talking rubbish.”
“You should have tried asking in French.”
“I was speaking French. My poor feet. It’s taken me bloody hours.”
Tom had to smile. The stars were behind Terr, and they were shining on her once-blonde hair, which the years had silvered to the gleam of those tripwires, and touched the lines around her mouth as she smiled. He felt like crying and laughing. Terr. “Well, that’s Madame Brissac for you.”
“So? Are you going to invite me inside?”
“There isn’t much of an inside.”
Terr took another step forward on her bare feet. She was real. So close to him. He could smell the dust on her salt flesh. Feel and hear her breathing. She was Terr alright. He wasn’t drunk or dreaming, or at least not that drunk yet; he’d only had—what?—two bottles of wine so far all evening. And she had and hadn’t changed.
“Well,” she said, “that’s Tom Kelly for you, too, isn’t it?”
The idea of sitting in the hut was ridiculous on a night like this. And the place, as Tom stumbled around in it and slewed bottles off the table and shook rubbish of the chairs, was a dreadful, terrible mess. So he hauled two chairs out into the night for them to sit on, and the table to go between, and found unchipped glasses from somewhere, and gave them a wipe to get rid of the mould, and ferreted around in the depths of his boxes until he found the solitary bottle of Santernay le Chenay 2058 he’d been saving for First Contact—or at least until he felt too depressed—and lit one of the candles he kept for when the generator went down. Then he went searching for a corkscrew, ransacking cupboards and drawers and cursing under his breath at the ridiculousness of someone who got through as much wine as he did not being able to lay his hands upon one—but then the cheaper bottles were all screw-capped, and the really cheap plastic things had tops a blind child could pop off one-handed. He was breathless when he finally sat down. His heart ached. His face throbbed. His ears were singing.
“How did you find me, Terr?”
“I told you, I asked that woman in the post office. Madame Brissac.”
“I mean…” He used both hands to still the shaking as he sloshed wine from the bottle. “…here in France, in St. Hilaire, on this mountain.”
She chuckled. She sounded like the Terr of old speaking to him down the distance of an antique telephone line. “I did a search for you. One of those virtual things, where you send an ai out like a genie from a bottle. But would you believe I had to explain to it that SETI meant the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence? It didn’t have the phrase in its standard vocabulary. But it found you anyway, once I’d sorted that out. You have this old-fashioned website-thingy giving information on your project here and inviting new sponsors. You say it will be a day-by-day record of setbacks, surprises and achievements. You even offer tee-shirts. By the look of it, it was last updated about twenty years ago. You can virtually see the dust on it through the screen…”
Tom laughed. Sometimes, you to. “The tee-shirts never really took off…” He studied his glass, which also had a scum of dust floating on it, like most of his life. The taste of this good wine—sitting here—everything—was strange to him.
“Oh, and she sent me across the square to speak to this incredibly handsome waiter who works in this café. Apparently, you forgot these…” Terr reached into the top of her dress, and produced the cards he must have left on the table. They were warm when he took them, filled with a sense of life and vibrancy he doubted was contained in any of the messages. Terr. And her own personal filing system.
“And what about you, Terr?”
“What do you mean?”
“All these years, I mean I guess it’s pretty obvious what I’ve been doing—”
“—which was what you always said…”
“Yes. But you, Terr. I’ve thought about you once or twice. Just occasionally…”
“Mmmm.” She smiled at him over her glass, through the candlelight. “Let’s just talk about now for a while, shall we, Tom? That, is, if you’ll put up with me?”
“Fine.” His belly ached. His hands, as he took another long slug of this rich good wine, were still trembling.
“Tom, you haven’t said the obvious thing yet.”
“Which is?”
“That I’ve changed. Although we both have, I suppose. Time being time.”
“You look great.”
“You were always good at compliments.”
“That was because I always meant them.”
“And you’re practical at the bottom of it, Tom. Or at least you were. I used to like that about you, too. Even if we didn’t always agree about it…”
With Tom it had always been one thing, one obsession. With Terr, it had to be everything. She’d wanted the whole world, the universe. And it was there even now, Tom could feel it quivering in the night between them, that division of objectives, a loss of contact, as if they were edging back towards the windy precipice which had driven them apart in the first place.
“Anyway,” he said stupidly, just to fill the silence, “if you don’t like how you look these days, all you do is take a vial.”
“What? And be ridiculous—like those women you see along Oxford Street and Fifth Avenue, with their fake furs, their fake smiles, their fake skins? Youth is for the young, Tom. Always was, and always will be. Give them their chance, is what I say. After all, we had ours. And they’re so much better at it than we are.”
Terr put down her glass on the rough table, leaned back and stretched on the rickety chair. Her hair sheened back from her shoulders, and looked almost blonde for a moment. Darkness hollowed in her throat. “When you get to my age, Tom—our age. It just seems…Looking back is more important than looking forward…”
“Is that why you’re here?”
A more minor stretch and shrug. Her flesh whispered and seemed to congeal around her throat in stringy clumps. He eyes hollowed, and the candlelight went out in them. Her arms thinned. Tom found himself wishing there was either more illumination, or less. He wanted to see Terr as she was, or cloaked in total darkness; not like this, twisting and changing like the ibex at the twilight waterhole. So perhaps candlelight was another thing that the young should reserve for themselves, like the vials, like flying, like love and faith and enthusiasm. Forget about romance—what you needed at his, at their, ages, was to know. You wanted certainty. And Tom himself looked, he knew, from his occasional forays in front of a mirror, like a particularly vicious cartoon caricature of the Tom Kelly that Terr remembered; the sort of thing that Gerald Scarfe had done to Reagan and Thatcher in the last century. The ruined veins in his cheeks and eyes. The bruises and swellings. Those damn age spots which had recently started appearing—gravestone marks, his grandmother had once called them. He was like Tom Kelly hungover after a fight in a bar, with a bout of influenza on top of that, and then a bad case of sunburn, and struggling against the influence of the gravit
y of a much larger planet. That was pretty much what ageing felt like, too, come to think of it.
Flu, and too much gravity.
He’d never been one for chat-up lines. He’d had the kind of natural not-quite regular looks when he was young which really didn’t need enhancing—which was good, because he’d never have bothered, or been able to afford it—but he had a shyness which came out mostly like vague disinterest when he talked to girls. The lovelier they were, the more vague and disinterested Tom became. But this woman or girl he happened to find himself walking beside along the canals of this old and once-industrial city called Birmingham after one of those parties when the new exchange students were supposed to meet up, she was different. She was English for a start, which to Tom, a little-travelled American on this foreign shore, seemed both familiar and alien. Everything she said, every gesture, had a slightly different slant to it, which he found strange, intriguing…
She’d taken him around the canals to Gas Street Basin, the slick waters sheened with antique petrol, antique fog, and along the towpath to the Sealife Centre, where deepsea creatures out of Lovecraft mouthed close to the tripleglass of their pressurised tanks. Then across the iron bridges of the Worcester and Birmingham Canal to a pub. Over her glass of wine, Terr had explained that an American president had once sat here in this pub and surprised the locals and drunk a pint of bitter during some world conference. Her hair was fine blonde. Her eyes were stormy green. She’d shrugged off the woollen coat with a collar that had brushed the exquisite line of her neck and jaw as she walked in a way that had made Tom envy it. Underneath, she was wearing a sleeveless dark blue dress which was tight around her hips and smallish breasts, and showed her fine legs. Of course, he envied that dress as well. There was a smudged red crescent at the rim of the glass made by her lipstick. Terr was studying literature then, an arcane enough subject in itself, and for good measure she’d chosen as her special field the kind of stories of the imaginary future which had been popular for decades until the real and often quite hard to believe present had finally extinguished them. Tom, who’d been immersed in such stuff for much of his teenage years, almost forgot his reticence as he recommend John Varley, of whom she hadn’t even heard, and that she avoid the late-period Heinlein, and then to list his own particular favourites, which had mostly been Golden Age writers (yes, yes, she knew the phrase) like Simak and Van Vogt and Wyndham and Sheckley. And then there was Lafferty, and Cordwainer Smith…
Eventually, sitting at a table in the top room that bar where an American president might once have sat and overlooking the canal where the long boats puttered past with their antique petrol motors, bleeding their colours into the mist, Terr had steered Tom away from science fiction, and nudged him into talking about himself. He found out later that the whole genre of SF was already starting to bore her in any case. And he discovered that Terr had already worked her way through half a dozen courses, and had grown bored with all of them. She was bright enough to get a feel of any subject very quickly, and in the process to convince some new senior lecturer that, contrary to all the evidence on file, she finally had found her true focus in medieval history or classics or economics. And she was quick—incredibly so, by Tom’s standards—at languages. That would have given her a decent career in any other age; even as she sat there in her blue dress in that Birmingham pub, he could picture her beside that faceless American president, whispering words in his ears. But by then it was already possible for any normally intelligent human to acquire any new language in a matter of days. Deep therapy. Bio-feedback. Nano-enhancement. Out in the real world, those technologies that Tom had spent his teenage years simply dreaming about as he wondered over those dusty analogue pages had been growing at an exponential rate.
But Terr, she fluttered from enthusiasm to enthusiasm, flower to flower, sipping its nectar, then once again spreading her wings and wafting off to some other faculty. And people, too. Terr brought that same incredible focus to bear on everyone she met as well—or at least those who interested her—understanding, absorbing, taking everything in.
She was even doing it now, Tom decided as they sat outside all these years later together his hut on this starlit French mountain. This Terr who changed and unchanged in the soft flood of candlelight across this battered table was reading him like a book. Every word, every gesture: the way this bottle of wine, good though it was, wouldn’t be anything like enough to see him through the rest of this night. She was feeling the tides of the world which had borne him here with all his hopes still somehow intact like Noah in his Ark, and then withdrawn and left him waiting, beached, dry and drowning.
“What are you thinking?”
He shrugged. But for once, the truth seemed easy. “That pub you took me to, the first time we met.”
“You mean the Malt House?”
Terr was bright, quick. Even now. Of course she remembered.
“And you went on and on about SF,” she added.
“Did I? I suppose I did…”
“Not really, Tom, but I’d sat through a whole bloody lecture of the stuff that morning, and I’d decided I’d had enough of it—of any kind of fiction. I realised I wanted something that was fabulous, but real.”
“That’s always been a tall order…” Terr had been so lovely back then. That blue coat, the shape of her lips on the wineglass she’d been drinking. Those stormy green eyes. Fabulous, but real. But it was like the couple he’d seen that morning. What had she ever seen in him?
“But then you told me you planned to prove that there was other intelligent life in the universe, Tom. Just like that. I don’t know why, but it just sounded so wonderful. Your dream, and then the way you could be so matter-of-fact about it…”
Tom gripped his glass a little tighter, and drank the last of it. His dream. He could feel it coming, the next obvious question.
“So did it ever happen?” Terr was now asking. “Did you ever find your little green men, Tom? But then I suppose I’d have heard. Remember, how you promised to tell me? Or at least it might have roused you to post some news on that poor old website of yours.” She chuckled with her changed voice, slightly slurring the words. But Terr, Tom remembered, could get drunk on half a glass of wine. She could get drunk on nothing. Anything. “I’m sorry, Tom. It’s your life, isn’t it? And what the hell do I know? It was one of the things I always liked about you, your ability to dream in that practical way of yours. Loved…”
Loved? Had she said that? Or was that another blip, stray data?
“So you must tell me, Tom. How’s it going? After I’ve come all this way. You and your dream.”
The candle was sinking. The stars were pouring down on him. And the wine wasn’t enough, he needed absinthe—but his dream. And where to begin? Where to begin?
“D’you remember the Drake Equation?” Tom asked.
“Yes, I remember,” Terr said. “I remember the Drake Equation. You told me all about the Drake Equation that first day on out walk from that pub…” She tilted her head to one side, studying the glimmer of Aries in the west as if she was trying to remember the words of some song they’d once shared. “Now, how exactly did it go?”
Until that moment, none of it had yet seemed quite real to Tom. This night, and Terr being here. And, as the candle flickered, she still seemed to twist and change from Terr as he remembered to the Terr she was now in each quickening pulse of the flame. But with the Drake Equation, with that Tom Kelly was anchored. And how did it go, in any case?
That long and misty afternoon. Walking beside the canal towpaths from that pub and beneath the dripping tunnels and bridges all the way past the old factories and the smart houses to the city’s other university out in Edgbaston as the streetlights came on. He’d told Terr about a radio astronomer named Frank Drake who—after all the usual false alarms and funding problems which, even in its embryonic stage back in the middle of the last century, had beset SETI—had tried to narrow the whole question down to a logical series of pa
rameters, which could then be brought together in an equation which, if calculated accurately, would neatly reveal a figure N which would represent a good estimate for the number of intelligent and communicating species currently in our galaxy. If the figure was found to be high, then space would be aswarm with the signals of sentient species anxious to talk to each other. If the figure was found to be 1, then we were, too all intents and purposes, alone in the universe. Drake’s equation involved the number of stars in our galaxy, and chances of those stars having habitable planets, and then those planets actually bearing life, and of that life evolving into intelligence, and of that intelligence wanting to communicate with other intelligences, and of that communication happening in an era in human history when we humans were capable of listening—which amounted to a microscopic now.
Snodgrass and Other Illusions: The Best Short Stories of Ian R. MacLeod Page 14