“Hey, look…” Terr squirmed closer to him. “Roll over. I want to see. I was sure I could feel something just then…”
“I should hope so.”
Terr chuckled, and Tom rolled over. He stared at the face in the woodgrain of the old mahogany headboard. She drew back the sheets from him. The cold air. The rain at the window. The murmuring of the astronauts as they undocked and began the last slow glide. Her fingers on his bare shoulders, then on his spine. It hurt there. It felt as if her nails were digging.
“Hey!!!”
“No no no no no…” She pressed him there, her fingers tracing the source of the pain. A definite lump was rising. An outgrowth which, in another age, would have sent you haring to the doctor thinking, cancer…
“I’m jealous Tom. I thought I was going to be the first. It’s like when I was a kid, and I concentrated hard on growing breasts.”
“And it happened?”
“Obviously…Cheeky sod…A bit, anyway…” Slim and warm and womanly, she pressed a little closer. He felt her breath, her lips, down on his back where the quills were growing. She kissed him there. “I check in the mirror every morning. I try to feel there…” he felt her murmur. “It’s like a magic spell, isn’t it? Waiting for the vials to work. You haven’t noticed anything on me yet, have you, Tom?”
“No.” He turned his head and looked at Terr. She was lying on her front too, and the red light of rising Mars on the screen was shining on the perfect skin of her thighs, her buttocks, her spine, her shoulders.
“You must have been waiting for this to happen for a long time,” she said.
“What?”
Her blonde hair swayed as she tipped her head towards the screen. “Men landing on Mars.”
He nodded.
“Will it take much longer before they actually touch down?”
“I suppose a few minutes.”
“Well, that’s good news…” Terr’s hand travelled down his spine. Her knuckles brushed his buttocks, raising the goosebumps. Her fingers explored him there. “Isn’t it…?”
So they missed the actual instant when the lander kicked up the rusty dust of the surface, but were sharing a celebratory bottle of Asti Spumante an hour or so later when, after an interminable string of adverts, the first ever human being stepped onto the surface of another planet and claimed all its ores and energies and secrets for the benefit of the mission’s various sponsors. Another figure climbed out. Amid the many logos on this one’s suit there was a Honda one, which sent Tom’s mind skittering back towards the growing lump on his back which he could feel like a bad spot no matter how he laid the pillows now that Terr had mentioned it. How would he sleep from now on? How would they make love? Terr on top, fluttering her Honda wings like predator as she bowed down to eat him? It was almost a nice idea, but not quite. And the Mars astronauts, even in their suits, didn’t look quite right to Tom either. The suits themselves were okay—they were grey-white, and even had the sort of longer-at-the-top faceplates he associated with 2001 and Hal and Dave Poole and Kubrick’s incredible journey towards the alien monolith—but they were the wrong shape in the body; too long and thin. It was more like those bad old films; you half expected something horrible and inhuman to slither out of them once they got back into the lander, where it turned out to have crossed light years driven by nothing more than a simple desire to eat people’s brains…
Tom poured out the rest of the Asti into his glass.
“Hey!” Terr gave him a playful push. He slopped some of it. “What about me? You’ve had almost all of that…”
He ambled off into the cupboard which passed for his kitchen to get another bottle of something, and stroked the landlord’s cat and gave the keyboard of his PC a tweak on the way. It was processing a search in the region of Cygnus, and not on the usual waterhole wavelength. Somebody’s hunch. Not that the PC had found anything; even in those days, he had the bells and whistles rigged for that event. But what was the problem with him, he wondered, as he raked back the door of the fridge and studied its sparse contents? He was watching the first Mars landing, in bed with a naked, beautiful and sexually adventurous woman, whilst his PC diligently searched the stars for the crucial first sign of intelligent life. If this wasn’t his dream of the future, what on earth was? And even this flying gimmick which Terr was insisting they try together—that fitted in as well, didn’t it? In many ways, the technology that was causing his back to grow spines was a whole lot more impressive than the brute force and money and Newtonian physics which had driven that Martian lander from one planet to another across local space.
The problem with this manned Mars landing, as Tom had recently overheard someone remark in the university refectory, was that it had come at least four decades too late. Probably more, really. NASA could have gone pretty much straight from Apollo to a Mars project, back at the end of the delirious 1960s. Even then, the problems had been of money rather than of science. Compared to politics, compared to getting the right spin and grip on the public’s attention and then seeing the whole thing through Congress before something else took the headlines or the next recession or election came bounding along, the science and the engineering had been almost easy. But a first landing by 1995 at the latest, that had once seemed reasonable—just a few years after establishing the first permanent moonbase. And there really had been Mariner and Viking back in those days of hope and big-budget NASA: technically successful robot probes which had nevertheless demystified Mars and finished off H. G. Wells’ Martians and Edgar Rice Burrows’ princesses and Lowell’s canals in the popular mind, and which, despite Sagan’s brave talk about Martian giraffes wandering by when the camera wasn’t looking, had scuppered any realistic sense that there might be large and complex Martian lifeforms waiting to be fought against, interviewed, studied, dissected, argued over by theologians, or fallen in love with. Still, there were hints that life might exist on Mars at a microscopic level; those tantalisingly contradictory results from the early Viking landers, and the micro-bacteria supposedly found on Martian meteorites back on Earth. But, as the probes had got more advanced and the organic tests more accurate, even those possibilities had faded. Tom, he’d watched Mars become a dead planet both in the real world, and in the books he loved reading. The bulge-foreheaded Martians faded to primitive cave-dwellers, then to shy kangaroo-like creatures of the arid plains, until finally they became bugs dwelling around vents deep in the hostile Martian soil, then anaerobic algae, until they died out entirely.
Mars was a dead planet.
Tom unscrewed the bottle of slivovitz which was the only thing he could find, and went back to bed with Terr, and they watched the figures moving about on the Martian landscape between messages from their sponsors. They were half Martians already. Not that they could breathe the emaciated atmosphere, or survive without their suits on, but nevertheless they had been radically transformed before the launch. Up in space, in null gravity, their bones and their flesh and their nutritional requirements had been thinned down to reduce the payload, then boosted up just a little as they approached Mars a year and a half later so they could cope with the planet’s lesser pull. They were near-sexless creatures with the narrow heads and bulging eyes of a thyroid complaint, fingers as long and bony as ET’s. The way they looked, far worse than any flyers, Tom figured that you really didn’t need to search further than these telecasts to find aliens to Mars. Or Belsen victims.
The slivovitz and the whole thing got to him. He had a dim recollection of turning off the screen at some point, and of making love to Terr, and touching the hollow of her back and feeling a tiny sharp edge there sliding beneath her skin; although he wasn’t quite sure about that, or whether he’d said anything to her afterwards about growing bigger breasts, which had been a joke in any case. In the morning, when she had gone, he also discovered that he had broken up the Honda vials and flushed them down the communal toilet. Bits of the spun glass stuff were still floating there. He nearly forgot his slivovi
tz headache as he pissed them down. This was one thing he’d done when he was drunk he was sure he’d never regret.
The winter faded. Terr went flying. Tom didn’t. The spines on her back really weren’t so bad; the wings themselves were still inorganic in those days, carbon fibre and smart fabric, almost like the old microlights, except you bonded them to the quills with organic superglue just before you took the leap, and unbonded them again and stacked them on the roofrack of your car at the end of the day. Terr’s were sensitive enough when Tom touched them, licked them, risked brushing their sharp edges against his penis to briefly add a new and surprising spice to their love-making, although if he grew too rough, too energetic, both he and they were prone to bleed.
Terr was unbothered about his decision to stop taking the vials in any case. After all, it was his life. And why do something you don’t want to do just to please me? she’d said with her characteristic logic. But Terr was moving with a different set now, with the flyers, and their relationship, as spring began and the clean thermals started to rise on the flanks of Skiddaw and Helvellyn and Ben Nevis, began to have that ease and forgetfulness which Tom, little versed though he was in the ways of love, still recognised as signalling the beginning of the end. Terr had always been one for changing enthusiasms in any case. At university, she was now talking of studying creative writing, or perhaps dropping the literature thing entirely and swapping over to cultural studies, whatever the hell that was. It would be another one of Terr’s enthusiasms, just, as Tom was coming to realise, had been Tom Kelly.
He still saw plenty of Terr for a while, although it was more in often in groups. He enjoyed the jazz with her at Ronnie Scott’s and sat around florescent tables in the smart bars along Broad Street with people whose faces often reminded him of those rubber-masked creatures you used to get in Star Trek. The world was changing—just like Terr, it didn’t feel like it was quite his any longer, even though he could reach out and touch it, taste it, smell it. He drove up with her once or twice to the Lakes, and watched her make that first incredible leap from above the pines on Skiddaw and across the wind-rippled grey expanse of Bassenthwaite Lake. He felt nothing but joy and pride at that moment, and almost wished that he, too, could take to the air, but soon, Terr was just another coloured dot, swooping and circling in the lemony spring sunlight on her Honda-logoed wings, and no longer a cloud virgin. He could block her out with the finger of one hand.
So they drifted apart, Tom and Terr, and part of Tom accepted this fact—it seemed like a natural and organic process; you meet, you exchange signals of mutual interest, you fall in love and fuck each other brainless for a while and live in each other’s skin and hair, then you get to know your partner’s friends and foibles and settle into a warmer and easier affection as you explore new hobbies and positions and fetishes until the whole thing becomes just a little stale—and part of Tom screamed and hollered against the loss, and felt as if he was drowning as the sounds, the desperate, pleading signals he wanted to make, never quite seemed to reach the surface. He had, after all, always been shy and diffident with women. Especially the pretty ones. Especially, now, Terr.
At the end of the summer term, Tom got his postgrad diploma based around his SETI work and Terr didn’t get anything. Just as she’d done with Tom, she’d worn Aston University out as she explored its highways and byways and possibilities with that determination that was so uniquely Terr. Next year, if any would take her and she could gather up the money, she’d have to try another enthusiasm at another university. They hadn’t been lovers for months, which seemed to Tom like years, and had lost regular contact at the time, by pure chance, he last saw her. Tom, he needed to get on with his life, and had already booked a flight to spend some time at home with his parents in the States whilst he decided what getting on with life might actually involve for him.
It was after the official last day of term, and the wine bars around the top of the city were busy with departing students and the restaurants contained the oddly sombre family groups who had come up to bear a sibling and their possessions back home. The exams had been and gone, the fuss over the assessments and dissertations and oral hearings had faded. There was both a sense of excitement and anti-climax, and beneath that an edge of sorrow and bone-aching tiredness which came from too many—or not enough—nights spent revising, screwing, drinking…Many, many people had already left, and hallways in the North Wing rang hollow and the offices were mostly empty as Tom called in to pick up his provisional certificate, seeing as he wouldn’t be here for the award ceremonies in the autumn, and he didn’t attend such pompous occasions in any case.
There was no obvious reason for Terr to be around. Her friends by now were mostly flyers, non-students, and she hadn’t sat anything remotely resembling an exam. The season wasn’t a Terr season in Tom’s mind, either. A late afternoon, warm and humid as a dishrag, uncomfortable and un-English, when the tee-shirt clung to his back and a bluish smog which even the switch from petrol to hydrogen hadn’t been able to dissolve hung over the city. Put this many people together, he supposed, holding his brown envelope by the tips of this fingers so that he didn’t get sweat onto it, this much brick and industry, and you’d always get city air. Even now. In this future world. He caught a whiff of curry-house cooking, and of beer-infused carpets from the open doorways of the stifling Yate’s Wine Lodge, and of hot pavements, and of warm tar and of dogmess and rank canals, and thought of the packing he’d left half-finished in his room, and of the midnight flight he was taking back to the States, and of the last SETI download his PC would by now have probably finished processing, and decided he would probably miss this place.
Characteristically, Terr was walking one way up New Street and Tom as heading the other. Characteristically, Terr was with a group of gaudy fashion victims; frail waifs and wasp-waisted freaks. Many of them looked Japanese, although Tom knew not to read too much into that, when a racial look was as easy to change as last season’s shoes if you had the inclination and the money. In fact, Terr rather stood out, in that she really hadn’t done anything that freakish to herself, although the clothes she wore—and sensibly enough, really, in this weather—were bare-backed and scanty, to display the quills of those wings. And her hair was red; not the red of a natural redhead, or even the red of someone who had dyed it that colour in the old-fashioned way. But crimson; for a moment, she almost looked to Tom as if her head was bleeding. But he recognised her instantly. And Terr, Tom being Tom and thus unchanged, probably even down to his tee-shirt, instantly recognised him.
She peeled off from the arm-in-arm group she was swaying along with, and he stopped and faced her as they stood in the shadow of the law courts whilst the pigeons cluttered up around them and the bypass traffic swept by beyond the tall buildings like the roar of the sea. He’d given a moment such as this much thought and preparation. He could have been sitting an exam. A thousand different scenarios, but none of them now quite seemed to fit. Terr had always been hard to keep up with, the things she talked about, the way she dressed. And those stormgreen eyes, which where the one thing about her which he hoped she would never change, they were a shock to him now as well.
They always had been.
“I thought you weren’t going to notice, Tom. You looked in such a hurry…”
“Just this…” He waved the limp brown envelope as if it was the reason for everything. “And I’ve got a plane to catch.”
She nodded, gazing at him. Tom gazed back—those green nebulae—and instantly he was falling. “I’d heard that you were leaving.”
“What about you, Terr?”
She shrugged. The people behind her were chattering in a language Tom didn’t recognise. His eyes travelled quickly over them, wondering which of them was now screwing Terr, and which were male—as if that would matter, Terr being Terr…
“Well, actually, it’s a bit of a secret, and quite illegal probably, but we’re going to try to get onto the roof of one of the big halls of resid
ence and—”
“—fly?”
She grinned. Her irises were wide. Those dark stars. She was high on something. Perhaps it was life. “Obviously. Can you imagine what the drift will be like, up there, with all these cliff-face buildings, on an afternoon like this?”
“Drift?”
“The thermals.”
He smiled. “Sounds great.”
One of those pauses, a slow roaring beat of city silence, as one human being gazes at another and wonders what to say to them next. How to make contact—or how to regain it. That was always the secret, the thing for which Tom was searching. And he had a vision, ridiculous in these circumstances, of clear winter daylight on a high fell. He and Terr…
“That dress you used to wear,” he heard himself saying, “the blue one—”
“—Have you had any luck yet, Tom?” It was a relief, really, that she cut across his rambling. “With that SETI work you were doing? All that stuff about…” She paused. Her hands touched her hair, which didn’t seem like hair at all, not curtains of blood, but of cellophane. It whispered and rustled in her fingers, and then parted, and he glimpsed in the crimson shade beneath that space at the join of her jaw and neck, just beneath her ear, before she lowered her hand and it was gone again. He wondered if he would ever see it again; that place which—of all the glories in the universe, the dark light years and the sentient oceans and the ice planets and the great beasts of the stellar void—was the one he now most longed to visit. Then she remembered the phrase for which she’d been searching, which was one Tom had explained, when they’d walked that first day by the canals in fall, in English autumn. “…the Drake Equation.”
Snodgrass and Other Illusions: The Best Short Stories of Ian R. MacLeod Page 16