Interstellar, page 12
“Why?” he asked.
“Gargantua, that’s why,” she said. She stepped over to the display. “Look at Miller’s world—hydrocarbons, organics, yes. But no life. Sterile. We’ll find the same thing on Dr. Mann’s.”
“Because of the black hole?” Romilly asked.
She nodded. “Murphy’s Law—whatever can happen will happen. Accident is the first building block of evolution—but if you’re orbiting a black hole not enough can happen. It sucks in asteroids and comets, random events that would otherwise reach you. We need to go further afield.”
Murphy’s Law. In an instant he was back home, leaning on the truck, explaining to Murph that her name wasn’t something bad, that it was really an affirmation that life brought surprises, both good and bad. That he and Erin were prepared to deal with things as they came.
He knew he needed to focus on the moment. He understood what Brand was trying to say, and it sounded like a good argument. But he also knew there was something else behind her words, and Edmunds’ planet was so much further away…
“You once referred to Dr. Mann as the ‘best of us,’” Cooper said. He felt a tickle of conscience—he knew he was setting her up. But this was too important to let it slide.
“He’s remarkable,” Brand agreed, without hesitation. “We’re only here because of him.”
“And he’s there on the ground, sending us an unambiguous message that we should go to that planet,” Cooper said.
Brand’s lips thinned, but she didn’t say anything.
Romilly looked back and forth between them. He looked a little uncomfortable, perhaps sensing there was something going on beneath the surface of the conversation—something to which he was not privy.
“Should we vote?” Romilly asked.
Cooper didn’t feel good about what he was about to do. But now wasn’t really the time to worry about anyone’s feelings.
“If we’re going to vote,” he said to Romilly, “there’s something you need to know.” He paused. “Brand?”
She didn’t take the bait, but remained silent.
“He has a right to know,” Cooper insisted.
“That has nothing to do with it,” she said.
“What does?” Romilly asked.
Cooper left her a pause, but when she didn’t fill it, he did.
“She’s in love with Wolf Edmunds,” Cooper told him.
Romilly’s brow went up.
“Is that true?” he asked.
Brand looked stricken.
“Yes,” she admitted. “And that makes me want to follow my heart. But maybe we’ve spent too long trying to figure all this with theory—”
“You’re a scientist, Brand—” Cooper cut in.
“I am,” she said. “So listen to me when I tell you that love isn’t something we invented. It’s observable, powerful. Why shouldn’t it mean something?”
“It means social utility,” Cooper said. “Child rearing, social bonding—”
“We love people who’ve died,” Brand objected. “Where’s the social utility in that? Maybe it means more—something we can’t understand yet. Maybe it’s some evidence, some artifact of higher dimensions that we can’t consciously perceive. I’m drawn across the universe to someone I haven’t seen for a decade, who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.
“Maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t yet understand it.” She sent a pleading look to Romilly, but he couldn’t meet her eyes. Cooper could guess what he was thinking—that Brand had probably lost it.
Or at least some of “it.”
She saw it, too, and so she brought her appeal back to him.
“Cooper, yes,” Brand conceded, wearily. “The tiniest possibility of seeing Wolf again excites me. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”
Cooper had a sudden sense of déjà vu, and remembered his conversation with Donald on the porch.
“I’m not gonna lie to you, Donald,” he’d said. “Heading out there is what I feel born to do, and it excites me. That doesn’t make it wrong.”
“Honestly, Amelia,” Cooper said gently, “it might.”
Brand seemed to wilt. She knew she had lost. He felt for her, but he had to do what made sense. What got this done most quickly and certainly.
“Tars,” he said, “set course for Dr. Mann.”
Before she turned away, Cooper saw the tears start in Brand’s eyes.
* * *
After they were out of orbit and on their new trajectory, he found her. She was checking on the population bomb.
“Brand, I’m sorry,” he said.
“Why?” she asked, but her voice was tight. “You’re just being objective—unless you’re punishing me for screwing up on Miller’s planet.”
“This wasn’t a personal decision for me,” he said.
She turned from the metal and glass contraption and looked him straight in the eye. He felt her hurt and anger like a heat lamp on his face. It was surprising, in a way, to see her usual detachment so thoroughly compromised.
“Well, if you’re wrong, you’ll have a very personal decision to make,” she told him, a good fraction of acid in her tone. “Your fuel calculations are based on a return journey. Strike out on Dr. Mann’s planet, and we’ll have to decide whether to return home, or push on to Edmunds’ planet with plan B. Starting a colony could save us from extinction.”
She closed the panel.
“You might have to decide between seeing your children again… and the future of the human race.” She smiled, but there was nothing happy or friendly about it.
“I trust you’ll be as objective then,” she finished.
* * *
Murph stood with Tom, watching the field burn. Or, rather, the corn. Because Murph suddenly saw that each plant was its own fire—an incandescent stalk giving itself, spark by spark, to the dark black boil above the light, driving the smoke pointlessly toward the heavens. For a moment she comprehended each of them as filaments in a bulb, flames in a lantern, superheated rods of metal, an alien forest on a distant world. Each plant the maker and center of its own immolation, each burning alone. To say the field was burning was to miss what was really happening. A field was an abstraction. A single plant was not.
It was a life, being sacrificed so that others might survive.
Then the stalks came apart like paper, the updraft shredding some into rising shards, others slumping and crumbling into glowing piles; then that illusion faded, too. Soon there would be no corn, no field. Only carbon and dust, inseparable in their lifelessness.
“We lost about a third this season,” Tom said. “But next year… I’m gonna start working Nelson’s fields. Should make it up.”
Murph wanted to shake him, to make him understand that it would never be “made up.” But what was the point?
“What happened to Nelson?” she asked.
The expression on his face suggested she probably didn’t want to know, so she didn’t press it. This place, its people, the house she had grown up in—it all seemed so remote, and a little unreal to her now.
Tom started for the house, so she followed him. Behind them, the field continued its cremation.
* * *
Murph tried to appear interested in her food that evening, as Tom and Lois made small talk about the farm, and their six-year-old, Coop, sent her grins and made faces at her. The little boy reminded her of his namesake, in a lot of ways. Maybe more than he reminded her of Tom.
“Will you stay the night?” Lois asked. “We left your room like it was. My sewing machine’s in there, but…”
Murph studied her plate, pushing the food around. She liked Lois well enough, and she was certainly a good partner for Tom—dependable, sturdy, compassionate. Beyond that, Murph didn’t know her that well. She kept her visits short, and beyond the subject of farming, they didn’t have a lot of common ground.
“No,” she said, preparing an excuse. “I need to…”
Her gaze wandered toward the upstairs, then back to Lois, and she knew she didn’t want to lie to her.
“Too many memories, Lois,” she said.
Lois nodded in understanding.
“We may have something for that,” Tom said, as he and Coop started to take the dishes into the kitchen. As Coop took Murph’s plate, he began coughing—an awful, deep-chested cough.
The boy must have seen the concern on her face, because he started grinning at her.
“The dust,” he told her. Like it was nothing. As if being sick was just part of it these days, like a stubbed toe or a bloody nose. Normal childhood stuff no one could do a thing about.
Was that how Tom saw things? He might. Otherwise he would have asked her if she could do anything. Even if he didn’t really understand what she did, he knew she had access to science and medicine that most folks didn’t.
“I have a friend who should have a look at his lungs, Lois,” she said, as Tom and Coop went into the kitchen.
Lois nodded, and seemed about to say something when Tom came back in with a bottle of whiskey and sat down. Murph frowned briefly, but didn’t say anything.
Outside, she saw clouds of dust, rolling across the twilight plain.
* * *
On the drive back, churning across the same battered road she traveled with her father all those years ago, Murph wondered about Lois’s reluctance to discuss the idea of Coop seeing a doctor. Was she afraid Tom would see it as some kind of concession—an admission that he couldn’t provide everything his son needed? Or worse, would it force him to admit—to himself as much as anyone else—that things were getting worse?
But it wasn’t just Coop. It was getting worse for everyone, she knew. More people were getting sick—and staying that way. What had happened to Nelson? It was Tom who didn’t want to talk about that.
Projections showed that respiratory ailments were on the rise both in number of the afflicted and the severity, and dust was only part of the problem. Elevated nitrogen levels were taking their toll on human health, as well—directly and indirectly. In the seas, excessive nitrogen was causing widespread algae blooms and huge pockets of hypoxic waters, especially in shallow environments where reefs had once thrived. That, added to the climatic changes that had shifted major currents, was driving the greatest marine extinction since the Permian period—which was to say in the history of the planet.
Once the seas were dead, or mostly so, it would only be a very brief matter of time before what was left of the terrestrial ecosystem crashed. Life itself wasn’t in danger—bacteria, for instance, would continue to thrive. But an environment capable of supporting human life? That could be numbered in less than a handful of decades. Maybe. If they were lucky.
Not that most people knew any of this. If you listened to the news, things were just about to turn around. “Any day now.” Only she and a relative few others knew the truth. Without plan A, everyone on Earth was going to be dead in a generation. Two, at best.
She had spent all of her adult life dealing with the big end of that, with trying to save the race. But here she was at the other end of things, watching her nephew hack up his lungs. What if Coop, like his brother Jesse, didn’t survive long enough for plan A to begin?
She didn’t have to let that happen, whatever Tom did or didn’t believe. She could do something about it.
Suddenly she was distracted by a noise, and realized that the radio was trying to get her attention.
* * *
Doctor Getty met her as soon as she arrived, and started hustling her down the corridor.
Getty was a pleasantly boyish fellow. She liked his eyes, and his smile was nice, too. He wasn’t smiling now, though. His eyes were full of concern—and worse, compassion. They said what he wasn’t quite willing to vocalize.
“He started asking for you after he came to,” Getty explained apologetically, “but we couldn’t raise you…”
When they reached the room, she felt a little faint. Even bound to his wheelchair, there had always been something robust about Professor Brand, an energy that kept him going. You could see it in his eyes, hear it in his voice.
Now, shockingly, she saw that it was gone, or almost so. He seemed tiny in the hospital bed, dwarfed by the machines monitoring him and keeping him alive. When she reached his bedside, she could barely hear his breathing.
“Murph? Murph,” he murmured.
She took his hand.
This isn’t happening, she thought. I’m not ready for this.
“I’m here, Professor,” she said.
“I don’t have much life…” He gasped for another breath. “I have to tell you…”
“Try to take it easy,” Murph said.
“All these… years. All these people… counted on me.”
“It’s okay, Professor,” she reassured him.
“I let… you all… down.”
“No,” Murph said, close to crying. “I’ll finish what you started.”
He looked up at her, tears welling over the failing light in his eyes.
“Murph,” he said. “Good, good, Murph. I told you to have faith… to believe…”
“I do believe,” Murph told him.
“I needed you to believe your father was coming back,” he said.
“I do, Professor,” she said.
“Forgive me, Murph,” he said.
“There’s nothing to forgive,” she said. But there was such anguish on his face, such abject shame. After all he had done, how could he feel like this? It wasn’t fair that he should die feeling as if he was a failure.
“I lied, Murph,” he sighed.
She blinked, wondering what the hell he could mean. Lied about what?
“I lied to you,” he went on. “There’s no reason to come back… no way to help us…”
“But plan A,” she said, confused. “All this—all these people—the equation!”
He slowly turned his head from side to side, tears streaming down his face. Then he sighed again, and his eyes weren’t looking at her anymore. His breath ebbed out slowly, and when it was time to draw another, his chest hardly moved.
“Did he know?” she whispered, desperately. “Did my dad know? Did he abandon me?”
His lips moved as he tried to say something else.
She leaned closer.
“Do… not… go… gentle… into…
“Into…”
“No!” she shouted. “No! Professor, stay! You can’t. You can’t leave!”
Getty was suddenly there.
“You can’t,” she said. “You can’t, you…”
Getty put his hand gently on her shoulder, and together they watched the life leave Professor Brand. Her question still floated around her, with no answer coming.
TWENTY-THREE
By the time Murph got up the nerve to send a message to Professor Brand’s daughter, her grief and confusion had become something else altogether.
“Dr. Brand,” she began, trying to stay in control, to keep her voice even and professional. “I’m sorry to tell you that your father died today. He had no pain and was… at peace.” She paused and added, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
She reached for the switch, to leave the lie where it lay. Odds were Brand would never hear the message, and if she did—well, she was in space, far from home. She would need comfort, and…
Murph pulled her hand back.
Amelia was his daughter. His daughter, part of the whole thing. She had trusted her father, and he had betrayed her so completely—her father had left her. Who and what was there left for her to trust?
Professor Brand had been a liar. She was not.
At peace, my ass, she thought bitterly. He died in agony for what he had done. And if when he stopped breathing he did find some sort of peace, he didn’t deserve it.
And he hadn’t answered her goddamn question, hadn’t given her the only answer she cared about. No, he had used his last freaking breath to freaking quote Dylan Thomas one last freaking time.
“Did you know, Brand?” she shouted. “Did he tell you? Did you know that plan A was a sham? You knew, didn’t you? You left us here. To die.
“Never coming back…”
* * *
On the Endurance, Case registered Murph’s angry message as he watched the Ranger dwindle, carrying the others to the white world beyond the cockpit glass.
TWENTY-FOUR
Cooper studied Mann’s world as they approached the cloud cover, which looked for all the world like the fluffy cumulonimbus clouds of Earth—majestic and white, with high, curved peaks and deep, shadowy valleys. That seemed like a good sign, although they were so thick that he couldn’t see anything beneath them.
As they drew even nearer, he began to worry. What the heads-up display was telling him about the density of these clouds seemed… unreasonable. Nevertheless, he killed most of their downward velocity, hoping the instruments were wrong, yet unwilling to take chances.
Not after Miller’s world.
He banked, cutting through one of the clouds, which to his relief seemed to be entirely normal. Maybe it was the instruments that were screwy.
But as they entered the next one, a horrible shudder went through the Ranger. There was a terrible scraping sound as they lost some of the thermo panels on the wing.
Goddammit, he thought. Why can’t anything just be what it seems to be? Just as the mountains on Miller’s world hadn’t been mountains, most of these clouds weren’t just clouds. They were formations of frozen carbon dioxide—dry ice—sublimating to create a deceptively delicate sheath of vapor around them.
Grateful that he had trusted his gut, and not gone plowing straight into them, he banked again. He picked his way gingerly, proceeding as if through a frozen minefield, taking direction from Tars. And always following the beacon.
As a kid he’d once flown cross-country on a commercial airliner. Back then, as they passed through and above a wonderland of clouds, he had fantasized about being able to walk on them, ride them across the sky.
It looked like he would get his chance.
