“Did you really get into flying? That was how I always pictured you, up in the skies. Like the kids you see now down in this valley.”
“Yes! I was a flyer, Tom. Not quite the way they are now—I’m sure they’d think the stuff we used then was uselessly heavy and clumsy. But it was great while it lasted. I made a lot of friends.”
“Did you ever go back to your studies?”
She gave that dry chuckle again; the rustle of wind though old telephone wires. “I don’t think I ever had studies, Tom. No, I got a job. Worked in public relations. Built up this company I was involved in very well for a while, sold other people’s projects and ideas, covered up other people’s mistakes—”
“—We could have used you for SETI.”
“I thought of that, Tom—or of you, at least. But you had your own life. I didn’t want to seem patronising. And then I got sick of being slick and enthusiastic about other people’s stuff, and I got involved in this project of my own. Basically, it was a gallery, a sort of art gallery, except the exhibits were people. I was…”
“You were one of them?”
“Of course I was, Tom! What do you expect? But it plays havoc with your immune system after a while. You hurt and ache and bleed. It’s something for the very fit, the very young, or the very dedicated. And then I tried being normal and got married and unmarried, and then married again.”
“Not to the same person?”
“Oh no. Although they made friends, funnily enough, did my two ex’s. Last time I heard from one of them, they were both still keeping in touch. Probably still are. Then I got interested in religion. Religions, being me…”
“Any kids?”
“Now never quite seemed the time. I wish there had been a now, though, but on the other hand perhaps I was always too selfish.”
“You were never selfish, Terr.”
“Too unfocussed then.”
“You weren’t that either.” Tom took another slug of absinthe, and topped up the glass. He could feel the bitter ease of it seeping into him. It was pleasant to sit talking like this. Sad, but pleasant. He realised he hadn’t just missed Terr. These last few years up on his mountain, he’d missed most kinds of human company. “But I know what you mean. Even when I used to dream about us staying together, I could never quite manage the idea of kids…”
“How can two people be so different, and so right for each other?”
“Is that what you really think?”
“I loved you more than I loved anyone, Tom. All the time since, I often got this feeling you were watching, listening. Like that afternoon when I jumped with my wings from that tower in Aston and then got arrested. And the body art. You were like a missing guest at the weddings. I was either going for or against you in whatever I did—and sort of wondering how you’d react. And then I went to the moon, and your ghost seemed to follow me there, too. Have you ever been off-planet?”
He shook his head. He hadn’t—or at least not in the obvious physical sense, although he’d travelled with Kubrick over the moon’s craters a thousand times to the thrilling music of Ligeti.
“Thought not. It was the most expensive thing I ever did.”
“What’s it like?”
“That’s just about it with the moon, Tom—it’s expensive. The place you stay in is like one of those cheap old Japanese hotels. Your room’s a pod you can’t even sit up in. Who’d ever have thought space could be so claustrophobic!”
“All these things you’ve done, Terr. They sound so fascinating.”
“Do, don’t they—saying them like I’m saying them now? But it was always like someone else’s life that I seemed to be stuck in. Like wearing the wrong clothes. I was always looking for my own. And then you get older—God, you know what it’s like! And there are so many choices nowadays. So many different ways of stretching things out, extending the years, but the more you stretch them, the thinner they get. I always knew that I never wanted to live to some great age. These one-and-a-half centenarians you see, they seem to be there just to prove a point. Tortoises in an endless race. Or animals in a grotty zoo. Minds in twisted rusty cages…”
“I’d never really thought—”
“—You’ll just go on until the bang, won’t you Tom? Until the booze finally wreaks some crucial organ or busts a capillary in your head. Or until the Vesuvians land over there on those funny wires in a flying saucer and take you away with them. Although you’d probably say no because they aren’t quite the aliens you expected.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing, Tom. It’s just the way you are. And you’ve been lucky, really, to have managed to keep your dream intact, despite all the evidence. I read that article you did, years ago in that funny little paper with all the flashing adverts for body-changing. New Light on the Drake Equation. I had to smile. You still sounded so positive. But don’t you think we’d have heard from them by now, if they really were out there? Think of all the millions of stars, all these millions of years, and all those galactic civilisations you used to read about. It wouldn’t be a whisper, would it, Tom, something you needed all this fiddly technology to pick up on? It would be all around us, and unavoidable. If the aliens wanted us to hear from them, it would be an almighty roar…”
The stars were just starting to fade now at the edge of the east; winking out one by one in the way that Tom had always feared. Taurus, Orion…The first hint of light as this part of the planet edged its face towards the sun was always grey up here on the karst, oddly wan and depressing. It was the colour, he often felt as the night diluted and the optimism that the booze inspired drained out of him in torrents of piss and the occasional worrying hawk of bloody vomit, that his whole world would become—if he lost SETI. And the argument which Terr had so cannily absorbed, was, he knew, the most damning of all the arguments against his dream. The odd thing was, it lay outside the Drake Equation entirely, which was probably why that dumb article of his had avoided mentioning it. What Terr was saying was a version of a question that the founding father of the nuclear chain reaction Enrico Fermi had once asked in the course of a debate about the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence nearly a century and half—and how time flew!—ago. The question was simply this: “Where are they?”
There were these things called von Neumann machines; perhaps Terr knew that as well. They’d once been a theory, and stalwarts of the old tales of the future Tom had loved reading, but now they were out working in the asteroid belt and on Jupiter’s lesser moons, and down in deep mines on earth and the sea trenches and on Terr’s moon and any other place where mankind wanted something but didn’t want to risk its own skin by getting it. They were robots, really, but they were able to manufacture new versions of themselves—reproduce, if you wanted to make the obvious biological comparison—using the available local materials. They were smart, too. They could travel and adapt to new environments. They could do pretty much anything you wanted of them. So surely, went the argument which sometimes crept along with the depression and the morning hangover into Tom’s head, any other intelligent lifeform would have come up with a similar invention? Even with the staggering distance involved in travel between the stars, all you had to do was launch some into space, wait a few million years—a mere twitch of God’s eye, by any cosmological timescale—and the things would be colonising this entire galaxy. So where were they?
The answer was as simple as Fermi’s question: They aren’t here. And humankind was a freak; they and his planet were a fascinating outrage against all the laws of probability. The rest of the universe was either empty, or any other dim glimmerings of life were so distant and faint as to be unreachable in all the time remaining until the whole shebang collapsed again. Better luck next time, perhaps. Or the time after that. By one calculation of the Drake Equation Tom had read, life of some kind was likely to appear somewhere in the entire universe once in every 1010 big bangs, and even that was assuming the physical laws remained unchanged. The guy hadn’t
bothered to put the extra spin on the figure which would involve two communicating intelligences arising at the same time and in the same corner of the same galaxy. Probably hadn’t wanted to wreck his computer.
Half the sky was greying out now. Star by star by star. At least he’d soon get a proper look at Terr, and she’d get a proper look at him, although he wasn’t sure that that was what either of them wanted. Perhaps there was something to be said for the grey mists of uncertainty, after all.
“I always said—didn’t I, Tom?—that I’d bring you a message.”
“And this is it? You saying I should give up on the one thing that means something to me?”
“Don’t look at it like that, Tom. Think of it as…” A faint breeze had sprung up, the start of the wind that would soon lift the flyers as the temperature gradients hit the valley. Tom thought for a moment that they must still have a candle burning on the table between them, the way Terr seemed to flicker and sway beyond it. She was like smoke. Her hair, her face. He poured himself some more absinthe, which he decided against drinking. “The thing is, Tom, that you’ve got yourself into this state when you imagine that whether or not you listen in itself proves something. It doesn’t, Tom. They’re out there—they’re not out there. Either way, it’s a fact already isn’t it? It’s just one we don’t happen to know the answer to…And wouldn’t it be a pity, if we knew the answer to everything? Where would your dreams be then?”
“Science is all about finding out the truth—”
“—And this life of yours Tom! I mean, why on earth do you have to go down to the village to pick up those messages? Can’t you communicate with people from up here? It’s looks like you’ve got enough equipment in that hut to speak to the entire world if you wanted to. But I suppose that doesn’t interest you.”
“I find personal messages…” He gazed as the hills in the east as a questing spear of light rose over them, then down at the cards she’d brought up to him. “I find them distracting.”
“I’m sorry, Tom. I don’t want to distract you.”
“I didn’t mean…” There he went again. Terr in tears, just the way she’d been, in a memory he’d suppressed for so long, in his bed in Erdington on that night of the Mars landing when the booze first started to get the better of him. But this was different. Terr was different. She was twisting, writhing. And the wind, the dawn, was rising.
“And I always felt responsible for you in a way, Tom. It was probably just a sort of vanity, but I felt as if I’d given you some final push along a path down which you might not otherwise have taken. You were charming, Tom. You were handsome and intelligent. You could have made a fortune and had a happy life doing anything other than SETI. Is that true Tom? Does that make any sense to you?”
He didn’t reply, which he knew in itself was a positive answer. The truth was always out there in any case, with or without him. What was the point in denying anything?
“And that promise I made you make, that last day when we were standing outside the law courts with all those stupid flyer friends of mine. It seemed clever, somehow. I knew how much you still loved me and I wanted to leave my mark on you, just to prove it. I’m sorry, Tom. It was another one of my stupid, stupid projects…”
“You can’t hold yourself responsible for someone else’s life, Terr.”
“I know, Tom. It didn’t even feel like I was responsible for my own.”
Tom looked away from Terr, and back at his ragged hut. But for the fine-spun silver of his field of tripwires, but for the faint glow of his computers, but for the bottle-filled skip and the old Citröen beside it, it could have been the dwelling of a medieval hermit. He sighed and looked down the slope of his mountain. In this gathering light, the whole world looked frail as a spiderweb. And down there—he could just see it—lay his waterhole, and the flickering movement of the shy mountain ibex who gathered dawn and dusk to drink there.
“The sun’s coming up, Tom. I’ll have to be going soon…”
“But you haven’t…” The words froze in his mouth as he looked back at Terr. Even as the light strengthened, the substance was draining from her. “…can’t you stay…?”
“I’m sorry, Tom. I’ve said all there is to be said…”
She stood up and moved, floated, towards him. Changed and not changed. Terr and not Terr. What few stars remained in the west were now shining right through her. But Tom felt no fear as she approached him. All he felt, welling up in his heart, was that childhood ache, that dark sweetness which was cola and ice cream and his mother’s embrace. All he felt was a glorious, exquisite, sense of wonder.
The rim of the sun gilded the edge of those ranged peaks. Terr broke and shimmered. She was like her eyes now; a beautiful swarming nebula. But the sun was brightening, the wind was still rising. She was fading, fading. Tom stretched out a hand to touch whatever it was she had become, and found only morning coolness, the air on his flesh.
Remember, Tom.
Terr had no voice now, no substance. She was just a feeling, little more than the sad and happy memory he had carried with him through all these years into this dim and distant age. But he felt also that she was moving, turning away from him, and he smiled as he watched her in that dark blue dress, as beautiful as she had always been, walking away down the silvered turf of his mountain towards the waterhole. Terr with her blonde hair. Terr with her beautiful eyes. Terr with the mist on her flesh in that place where he jaw met her throat beneath her earlobe. She turned and gave him a smile and a wave as the sun sent a clear spine of light up from the cleft between two mountains. Terr in her dark blue dress, heading down towards that waterhole where all the shy creatures of the universe might gather at the beginning or end of the longest of days. Then she was gone.
Tom sat there for a long while. It was, after all, his time of day for doing nothing. And the sun rose up, brightening the world, corkscrewing the spirals beside the limestone crags. He thought he caught the flash of wings, but the light, his whole world and mountain, was smeared and rainbowed. He thought that he had probably been crying.
The cards on the table before him had lost most of their glow. And they were cold and slickly damp when he turned them over. He selected the one card he didn’t recognise, the one which was blue and almost plain, with a pattern on its surface like rippled water. He was sure now that it was more than just spam, junk mail. He ran his finger across the message strip to activate it, and closed his eyes, and saw a man standing before him in a fountained garden which was warm and afternoon-bright and almost Moorish; it could have been Morocco, Los Angeles, Spain. The man was good-looking, but no longer young. He had allowed the wrinkles to spread over his face, his hair to grey and recede. There was something, Tom found himself thinking, of himself about his face, or at least the self he thought he remembered once seeing in a mirror. But the man was standing with the fixedness of someone preparing for a difficult moment. His face was beyond ordinary sadness. His eyes were grave.
Tom waited patiently through the you-don’t-know-me-and-I-don’t-know-you part of the message, and the birds sang and the bees fumbled for pollen amid deep red and purple tropic flowers as the man gave Tom his name, and explained the one thing about their backgrounds which they had in common, which was that they had both loved Terr. They’d loved Terr, and then of course they’d lost her, because Terr was impossible to keep—it was in her nature; it was why they’d made the glorious leap of loving her in the first place. But this man was aware of Tom Kelly in a way that Tom wasn’t aware of him. Not that Terr had ever said much about her past because she lived so much in the present, but he’d known that Tom was there, and in a way he’d envied him, because love for Terr was a first and only thing, glorious in its moment, then impossible to ever quite recapture in the same way. So he and Terr had eventually parted, and their marriage—which was her second, in any case—had ended as, although he’d hoped against hope, he’d always known it would. And Terr had gone on with her life, and he’d got on with
his, and he’d followed her sometimes through the ether, her new friends, her new discoveries and fresh obsessions, until he heard this recent news, which was terrible, and yet for him, not quite unexpected, Terr being Terr.
There was a ridge on a peak in the Andes known as Catayatauri. It sounded like a newly discovered star to Tom, and was almost as distant and as hostile. The ridge leading up to it was incredible; in the east, it dropped nearly ten thousand sheer feet, and it took a week of hard walking and another week of hard climbing to reach it, that was, if the winds and the treacherous séracs let you get there at all. But it had acquired a near-mythic reputation amongst a certain kind of flyer, a reputation which went back to the time of the Incas, when human sacrifices were thrown from that ridge to placate Viracocha, the old man of the sky.
So picture Terr making that climb alone in the brutal cold, no longer as young or as fit as she might once have been, but still as determined. She left messages in the village which lay in Catayatauri’s permanent shadow. If she didn’t come back, she didn’t want anyone risking their lives trying to find her. The Incas had felt Catayatauri with a deep, religious, intensity, and so had the climbers who came after, and so must Terr, alone up in those godly mountains. She climbed unaided; no wings, no muscle or lung enhancements, no crampon claws on her feet or hands, no ropes, and no oxygen. The fact that she made it there at all was incredible, clinging to that ridge at the roof of the world. From Catayatauri, from that drop, nothing else was comparable. And Terr had stood there alone, a nearly-old woman at the edge of everything. She’d brought vials at a shop in Lima. She’d emptied what little she had left her accounts to get hold of them. These weren’t like the vials they sold along the Rue de Commerce in St. Hilaire. Scarcely legal, they were the quickest acting, the most radical, the most expensive. They tore through your blood and veins by the nanosecond, they burned you up and twisted your body inside out like a storm-wrecked umbrella. And Terr had purchased three times the usual dosage.
Snodgrass and Other Illusions: The Best Short Stories of Ian R. MacLeod Page 18