by Lou Anders
“You're dying?”
“Our sun is dying,” he says, and her face crumples painfully. She sniffs back stinging. “Soon, the computers will fail. We've lived in them for a very long time. The rest have gone ahead, to conserve power. I chose to stay and search.”
“But you can't—I just got to talk to you—”
“Will you let me give you our history?”
“Of course,” she says, reaching out. He stops her, though, as sharply as he urged before, his manipulator indenting the flesh of her hand.
“Wait,” he says. “I will put it in your brain. You have to give permission. It could change you.”
She stops. His manipulator is cool and hard, the surface sandpapery. “Change?”
“Make you more like us.”
She looks at him. His antennae feather down, lying against his dorsal surface like the ears of an anxious dog. He's still. Maybe waiting, she doesn't know. “And if I don't you die.”
“We die,” he says. “Either way.”
She stares at him. The stinging in her eyes grows worse, a pressure in her sinuses and through her skull. She pulls her hand from his manipulator, reaches out resolutely, and places both palms on warm yellow metal as the first tear burns her cheek.
“Don't mourn.” The voice is uninflected, but his palp reaches out softly and strokes her leg. “You will remember us.”
We made it to nine. I yanked my hands back, Hadiyah pressed hers down. The first push didn't do it. She realigned, lips moving on what must have been a prayer now, and thrust forward sharply, the weight of her shoulders behind it.
Something glistening shot from Tara's lips and sailed over Hadiyah's shoulder, and Tara took a deep harsh breath and started to cough, her eyes squinched shut, tears running down her cheeks.
“He's gone,” she said, when she got her breath.
She rolled over and grabbed my hands, and wailed against my shoulder like a much younger child, and would not be consoled.
There's enough room in Tara's implant for three or four Libraries of Congress. And it seems to be full. It also seems like she's the only one who can make sense of the information, and not all of it, and not all the time.
She's different now. Quieter. Not withdrawn, but…sad. And she looks at me sometimes with these calm, strange eyes, and I almost feel as if she's the mother.
I should have stopped her sooner. I didn't think.
At least she hasn't tried to strangle herself again.
Hadiyah suggested we not tell anybody what had happened just yet, and I agreed. I won't let my daughter wind up in some government facility, being pumped for clues to alien technology and science.
I won't.
She's ten years old. She's got school to get through. We'll figure the rest of it out in our own time. And maybe she'll be more like herself again as time goes by.
But the first thing she did when she recovered was paint a watercolor. She said it was a poem.
She said it was her name.
One of the acknowledged kings of Big-Concept Hard SF, and a worthy successor to his sometimes writing partner Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Baxter's imagination spans from the prehistoric to the far future. He has crafted tales of woolly mammoths, penned the only authorized sequel to H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, and shown us alternatives to our current space program. Stephen was in my first original anthology, Live without a Net, and it's a pleasure to have him in again.
“It's strange to find myself in this position. Dying, I mean. I've always found it hard to believe that things will just go on afterwards. After me. That the sun will come up, the milkman will call. Will it all just fold up and go away, when I've gone?”
These were the first words his mother said to Simon, when he got out of the car.
She stood in her doorway, old-lady stocky, solid, arms folded, over eighty years old. Her wrinkles were runnels in papery flesh that ran down to a small, frowning mouth. She peered around the close, as if suspicious.
Simon collected his small suitcase from the back of the car. It had a luggage tag from a New York flight, a reminder that he was fifty years old, and that he did have a life beyond his mother's, working for a biotech company in London, selling gen-enged goldfish as children's pets. Now that he was here, back in this Sheffield suburb where he'd grown up, his London life seemed remote, a dream.
He locked the car and walked up to his mother. She presented her cheek for him to kiss. It was cold, rough-textured.
“I had a good journey,” he said, for he knew she wouldn't ask.
“I am dying, you know,” she said, as if to make sure he understood.
“Oh, Mother.” He put an arm around her shoulders. She was hard, like a lump of gristle and bone, and didn't soften into the hug.
She had cancer. They had never actually used that word between them.
She stepped back to let him into the house.
The hall was spotless, obsessively cleaned and ordered, yet it smelled stale. A palm frond folded into a cross hung on the wall, a reminder that Easter was coming, a relic of intricate Catholic rituals he'd abandoned when he left home.
He put his suitcase down.
“Don't put it there,” his mother said.
A familiar claustrophobia closed in around him. “All right.” He grabbed the case and climbed the stairs, fourteen of them as he used to count in his childhood. But now there was an old-lady safety banister fixed to the wall.
She had made up one of the twin beds in the room he had once shared with his brother. There wasn't a trace of his childhood left in here, none of his toys or books or school photos.
He came downstairs. “Mother, I'm gasping. Can I make a cup of tea?”
“The pot's still fresh. I'll fetch a cup and saucer.” She bustled off to the kitchen.
He walked into the lounge.
The only change he could see since his last visit was a fancy new standard lamp with a downturned cowl, to shed light on the lap of an old lady sitting in the best armchair, facing the telly, peering at her sewing with fading eyes. The old carriage clock still sat in its place on the concrete 1970s fireplace, a legacy from a long-dead great-uncle. It was flanked by a clutter of photos, as usual. Most of them were fading color prints of grandchildren. Simon had no grandchildren to offer, and so was unrepresented here.
But the photos had been pushed back to make room for a new image in a gold frame. Brownish, blurred and faded, it was a portrait of a smiling young man in a straw boater. He had a long, strong face. Simon recognized the photo, taken from a musty old album and evidently blown up. It was his grandfather, Mother's dad, who had died when Simon was five or six.
Just for a moment the light seemed odd to him. Cold, yellow-purple. And there was something strange beyond the window. Pillowlike shapes, gleaming in a watery sun. He saw all this from the corner of his eye. But when he turned to look directly, the light from the picture window turned spring green, shining from the small back garden, with its lawn and roses and the last of the azalea blossom. Maybe his eyes were tired from the drive, playing tricks.
“It's just for comfort. The photo.”
The male voice made Simon turn clumsily, almost tripping.
A man sat on the sofa, almost hidden behind the door, with a cup of tea on an occasional table. “Sorry. You didn't see me. Didn't mean to make you jump.” He stood and shook Simon's hand. “I'm Gabriel Nolan.” His voice had a soft Irish burr. Maybe sixty, he was small, round, bald as an egg. He wore a pale jacket, black shirt, and dog collar. He had biscuit crumbs down his front.
Simon guessed, “Is it Father Nolan?”
“From Saint Michael's. The latest incumbent.”
The last parish priest Simon remembered had been the very old, very frail man who had confirmed him at age thirteen.
Mother came in, walking stiffly, cradling a cup and saucer. “Sit down, Simon, you're blocking the light.”
Simon sat in the room's other armchair, with his back to the window. Mother poure
d out some tea with milk, and added sugar, though he hadn't taken sugar for three decades.
“Simon was just admiring the portrait of your father, Eileen.”
“Well, I don't have many pictures of my dad. You didn't take many in those days. That's the best one, I think.”
“I was saying. We find comfort in familiar things, in the past.”
“I always felt safe when my dad was there,” Mother said. “In the war, you know.”
But, Simon thought, granddad was long dead. She'd led a whole life since then, the life that included Simon's own childhood.
Mother always was self-centered. Any crisis in her children's lives, like Mary's recurrent illness as a child, or the illegitimate kid Peter had fathered as a student, somehow always turned into a drama about her. Now somehow she was back in the past with her own father in her own childhood, and there was no room for Simon.
Mother said, “There might not be anybody left who remembers Dad, but me. Do you think we get deader, when there's nobody left who remembers us?”
The priest said, “We live on in the eyes of Christ.”
Simon said, “Father Nolan, don't you think Mother should talk to the doctor again? She won't listen to me.”
“Oh, don't be ridiculous, Simon,” Mother said.
“Best to accept,” said Father Nolan. “If your mother has. Best not to question.”
They both stared back at him, seamless, united. Fifty years old he felt awkward, a child who didn't know what to say to the grown-ups.
He stood up, putting down his teacup. “I've some shirts that could do with hanging.”
Mother sniffed. “There might be a bit of space. Later there's my papers to do.”
Another horror story. Simon fled upstairs. A little later, he heard the priest leave.
The “papers” were her financial transactions, Premium Bonds and tax vouchers and battered old bankbooks.
And the dreaded rusty biscuit box she kept under her bed, which held her will and her life insurance policies, stored up in the event of a death she'd been talking about for thirty years. It even held her identity card from the war, signed in a childish hand.
Simon always found it painful to sit and plod through all this stuff. The tin box was worst, of course.
Later she surprised him by asking to go for a walk.
It was late afternoon. Mother put on a coat, a musty gabardine that smelled of winter, though the bright April day was warm.
Simon had grown up in this close. It was a short, stubby street of semi-detached houses leading up to a main road and a dark sandstone wall, beyond which lay a park. But his childhood was decades gone, and the houses had been made over out of all recognition, and the space where he'd played football was now jammed full of cars. Walking here, he felt as if he were trying to cram himself into clothes he'd outgrown.
They crossed the busy main road, and then walked along the line of the old wall to the gateway to the park. Or what was left of it. In the last few years the park had been sliced through by a spur of the main road, along which cars now hissed, remote as clouds. Simon's old home seemed stranded.
Simon and his mother stuck to a gravel path. Underfoot was dogshit and, in the mud under the benches, beer cans, fag ends, and condoms. Mother clung to his arm. Walking erratically she pulled at him, heavy, like an unfixed load.
Mother talked steadily, about Peter and Mary, and the achievements and petty woes of their respective children. Mary, older than Simon, was forever struggling on, in Mother's eyes, burdened by difficult kids and a lazy husband. “She's got a lot to put up with, always did.” Peter, the youngest, got a tougher time, perceived as selfish and shiftless and lacking judgment. Simon's siblings’ lives were more complicated than that. But to Mother they were ciphers, dominated by the characteristics she had perceived in them when they were kids.
She asked nothing about his own life.
Later, she prepared the evening meal.
As she was cooking, Simon dug his laptop out of his suitcase, and brought it down to the cold, formal dining room, where there was a telephone point. He booted up and went through his e-mails.
He worked for a biotech start-up that specialized in breeding genetically modified goldfish, giving them patterns in bright Finding Nemo colours targeted at children. It was a good business, and expanding. The strategy was to domesticate biotech. In maybe five or ten years they would even sell genome-sequencing kits to kids, or anyhow their parents, so they could “paint” their own fish designs.
It was a bit far off in terms of fifty-year-old Simon's career, and things were moving so fast in this field that his own skills, in software, were constantly being challenged. But the work was demanding and fun, and as he watched the little fish swim around with “Happy Birthday, Julie” written on their flanks, he thought he glimpsed the future.
His mother knew precisely nothing about all this. The glowing e-mails were somehow comforting, a window to another world where he had an identity.
Anyhow, no fires to put out today. He shut down the connection.
Then he phoned his brother and sister with his mother's news.
“She's fine in herself. She's cooking supper right now…. Yes, she's keeping the house okay. I suppose when she gets frailer we'll have to think about that…. I'll stay one night definitely, perhaps two. Might take her shopping tomorrow. Bulky stuff, you know, bog rolls and washing powder….
“Things are a bit tricky for you, I suppose.” Exams, school trips, holidays. Mary's ferocious commitment to her bridge club—“They can't have a match if I don't turn up, you know!” Peter's endless courses in bookkeeping and beekeeping, arboriculture and aromatherapy, an aging dreamer's continuing quest to be elevated above the other rats in the race. All of them reasons not to visit their mother.
Simon didn't particularly blame them. Neither of them seemed to feel they had to come, the way he did, which left him with no choice but to be here. And of course with their kids they were busier than he was, in a sense.
Mother had her own views. Peter was selfish. Mary was always terribly busy, poor lamb.
She'd once been a good cook, if a thrifty one, her cuisine shaped by the experience of wartime rationing. But over the years her cooking had simplified to a few ready-made dishes. Tonight it was boil-in-the-bag fish. You got used to it.
After they ate, they spent the evening playing games. Not Scrabble, which had been a favourite of Simon's childhood. She insisted on cribbage, which she had played with her father, in her own childhood. She had a worn board that must have been decades old. She had to explain the arcane rules to him.
The evening was very, very long, in the silence of the room with a blank telly screen, the time stretched out by the pocks of Uncle Billy's carriage clock.
In the morning he came out of his bedroom, dressed in his pajama bottoms, heading for the bathroom.
Father Gabriel Nolan was coming up the stairs with a cup of tea on a saucer. He gave Simon a sort of thin-lipped smile. In the bright morning light Simon saw that dried mucus clung to the hairs protruding from his fleshy nose.
“She's taken a turn for the worse in the night,” said the priest. “A stroke, perhaps. It's all very sudden.” And he bustled into Mother's bedroom.
Simon just stood there.
He quickly used the bathroom. He went back to his bedroom and put on his pants and yesterday's shirt.
Then, in his socks, he went into Mother's bedroom. The curtains were still closed, the only light a ghostly blue glow soaking through the curtains. It was like walking into an aquarium.
She was lying on the right-hand side of the double bed she had shared with Dad for so long. She was flat on her back, staring up. Her arms were outside the sheets, which were neatly tucked in. The cup of tea sat on her bedside cabinet. Father Nolan sat at her bedside, holding her hand.
Her eyes flickered towards Simon.
Simon, frightened, distressed for his mother, was angry at this smut-nosed, biscuit-crumby pr
iest in his mother's bedroom. “Have you called the doctor?”
Mother murmured something, at the back of her throat.
“No doctor,” said Father Nolan.
“Is that a decision for you to make?”
“It's a decision for her,” said the priest, gravely, not unkindly, firmly. “She wants to go downstairs. The lounge.”
“She's better off in bed.”
“Let her see the garden.”
Father Nolan's calm, unctuous tone was grating. Simon snapped, “How are we going to get her down the stairs?”
“We'll manage.”
They lifted Mother up from the bed, and wrapped her in blankets. Simon saw there was a bedpan, sticking out from under the bed. It was actually a plastic potty, a horrible dirty old pink thing he remembered from his own childhood. It was full of thick yellow pee. Father Nolan must have helped her.
They carried her down the stairs together, Simon holding her under the arms, the priest taking her legs.
When they got to the bottom of the stairs, it went dark on the landing above. Simon looked up. The stairs seemed very tall and high, the landing quite black.
“Maybe a bulb blew,” he said. But the lights hadn't been on, the landing illuminated by daylight.
Father Nolan said, “She doesn't need to go upstairs again.”
Simon didn't know what he meant. Under his distress about his mother, he found he felt obscurely frightened.
They shuffled into the lounge. They sat Mother in her armchair, facing the garden's green.
What now?
“What about breakfast?”
“Toast for me,” said Father Nolan.
Simon went to the kitchen and ran slices of white bread, faintly stale, through the toaster.
The priest followed him in. He had taken his jacket off. His black shirt had short sleeves, and he had powerful stubby arms, like a wrestler. They sat at the small kitchen table, and ate buttered toast.
Simon asked, “Why are you here? This morning, I mean. Did Mother call you? I didn't hear the phone.”