Double Vision, page 21
“I’m sorry,” I said, all out of breath with the run and the embrace, “I didn’t hear you out there.”
He held my arms as the doors opened. “I wasn’t calling—I knew you’d let me in.”
Shaking the hair back out of his face and shrugging, he took his coat off. “All things considered, we’re in good shape” he said. “I’ve got news for you and for David too.”
The suite consists of several white rooms and a lounge. This is called, so I’ve heard from the staff, the terminal suite. Terminal phase. Words, phrases, they divorce you from meaning sometimes, they save you from hurt. David will be engaging in the Terminal Activity soon. He will die.
They are drugging him carefully; waking him when they know the family will be there, sedating him when we leave. They submerge him with drugs until he barely knows someone is there. I’d seen him that way before, twenty-five years ago. Sometimes he knows names and faces; like a cheap auto-receptionist he’s turned on only when the guests come.
No, I guess that’s not quite true, for we get reports on him; already we have reports on the journey to the stars. The doctors are constantly, cautiously hopeful. They will not give up, and David has will power. David also has plans. He will leave them all behind soon and go on to what he has been waiting for so long. Lucky man, at least he knows that this part of his dream will come through.
The rest of the suite, outside of the white rooms, maybe the lounge you could call it, is carpeted and quiet. The place is solemn, but not with that facile solemnity of a funeral home or a spirit palace; this feeling is closer to one of the Presidential waiting rooms.
“Come sit over here, Beth, and I’ll show you why I came.”
We sank deep into one of the comfortable couches and he placed his clipboard on the glass table in front of us, almost knocking the fake flowers on the floor. Maybe twenty-five or thirty feet from us, David was dying, and Michael was talking with him. Ignoring the flowers, John put the film into the clipboard’s viewer.
“There are several things for David to smile about today. For one, we have the final Companion built and tested.”
The clipboard showed us a spacecraft that looked like an elongated football. There were no panels of solar cells—of what use would they be in interstellar space? It was not a pretty craft with its odd shape and three extensions of crab-claw metal breaking the curves. “Now look at this shot.”
“Ah.” What else could I say?
The picture was of the same spacecraft from a distance of several miles. The main body was a tiny dot, around it was a flare of thin wires that made the whole thing look like a cosmic butterfly.
“We tested the communication webbing last week, and then reeled it down. It’s all set.”
He changed pictures, showing the same craft from several angles.
“The engineers have decided that we should have one of these trailing, once interstellar travel is attained, and the other should be leading after about four years—we’re sure that we can get the launch right from the Chariot.”
“And the monitors?’ I asked.
“The last eight eternal orbit probes have actually been monitors, and the next four are scheduled for eccentric orbits that will give us maximum coverage in case the Chariot passes through or near dust or gas. Two will be set up to receive only on the Companion frequency, the rest will be set for both. In case of any major problems we hope that the Companion closest will be able to maneuver enough to let us have a look at things.”
“Then the network?” I asked. John’s eyes were bright on mine—they are almost exactly the same color as David’s.
“Is almost ready,” he answered. “In fact, the net has taken over all the reception functions for Northstar. Which is something else David will want to know about.”
“Garmen will be the first true astronaut in about three weeks. We expect him to pass through the theoretical Pluto distance then. I know David arranged everything for Garmen, and even, I think, helped Garmen stay convinced right there near the end when he was in such pain. Now that his wife’s dead too I guess there’s no one but us and David to be glad for him.”
I shook my head in agreement. Northstar was the predecessor to the Chariot, not much more than a probe converted to carry a lightweight casket to the stars.
Eventually, in a million years or so, if the craft remained intact and the galaxy didn’t visit some odd happening upon it, Northstar will reach the general vicinity of Polaris, with Garmen’s body—surely ashes by then—the main cargo. The craft will broadcast information to us for a few years, descriptions of magnetic fields, ion and plasma counts, dust information... everything that we begin to need to know with the starships building. But the Northstar is passive, except for the radio; the Northstar has no onboard computer and engines, no ability to move itself out of the way of trouble, no helm to answer to at all.
When I glanced down at the board again, a new picture had taken its place on the screen; familiar and strange at once, the Chariot, as a finished ship and not a painting or model. The most impressive funeral chariot ever built, David had called it once; thereafter the name stuck, was taken to, and now is appropriate; the Chariot will take the remains of David far from this lonely place and me, horseless.
There it is, hanging in space, looking all unfinished, steel pipes and long dark boom—how different it is from the glitter machines NASA builds—how different from that gold-plated and gilt-edged machine that blew up on the pad. In the center of the device there is a small cargo area for the coffin, or the vial of ashes. If David will go as ashes we get more instrumentation. This whole thing makes me sound like an engineer, but I’ve been living with the dreams of stars for a long time. If David will go as ashes it might mean that I can go on the starship, or at least people of my children’s generation. So many things we still need to know about where we’re going from here...
John put the clipboard through its paces for me, showing the Chariot from several directions, zooming in to point out the extra engines—the free engines donated to the trip by Space Resources—and the experimental engine that might also make the difference.
Look. There are things about this that David doesn’t know, things we haven’t said to him. Instead of one engine, which he paid for, there are four. Three of them are identical. Any one of the three can boost the Chariot up to .2 lights within a few years. With the three of them and the boost they’ll get from the strap-on rockets waiting in Mars orbit, the Chariot will be moving at about .47 lights four years after it leaves the solar system. Almost fast enough for a manned crew to make a round trip if they weren’t worried about the long trip back and the fact that they would be ancient by the time they managed to find enough material to build a return vehicle.
But if the fourth engine works, if the experiment comes off, then the Chariot will get up to .77 lights, and at that speed the time dilation becomes significant—allowing for acceleration and deceleration, a round trip to Alpha Centauri could be made in under twelve years ship-time.
If the engine doesn’t work, either the Chariot will continue on at .47 lights or it will be a cloud of dust somewhere outside Pluto’s orbit.
“This,” John told me, “is the progress we’ve had on the Spine. It hasn’t been going quite as fast as we’d hoped it would, but everything has been on crash priority for the Chariot so I guess we can’t complain about that.”
The Spine is the start of the manned starship. We’re really not sure what
it will look like when it gets done—that will depend on the engines, and which ones work. We can start though, knowing how many people we want to send and how much acceleration they can take.
“Tell him, tell him that they’ve been doing a lot of engineering on it,” I said, “because he wants it to be built right. He’ll appreciate that.”
***
JOHN WAS ABOUT to go when the door opened to the white room, and Michael walked out, talking to the doctor.
He nodded curtly in our direction as the doctor finished his say and then he bore down upon us.
“Mr. Farrarego. Mother.” He was pale in the face and quiet.
John motioned him to be seated.
“No thanks, I’ll have to be going soon.” He worked his face around to a defiant look.
“Mother, I spoke with Father about the funeral.” Of course he had. Stones have no soul at all.
“Both of you will want to know that Father told me that he absolutely refuses to cancel this launch thing. He said it would disappoint the pair of you too much, if he wanted to change his mind.” There was hate there somehow, but why? I know he doesn’t love his Father anymore; how could he, being so weak and arrogant?
“But he told me to tell you that he would think about the cremation thing. I pointed out that if he was going to go to the stars he might just as well still look like a man when he got there. I think he will tell you what he wants to do when you go in now.”
Michael was gone, his small triumph buoying his walk.
We went to speak to David. David and the machines, actually, for there were so many things connected with him, the dials and the controls looked like a space ship cabin.
For ten minutes we talked of nothing with the nurses and the doctors hovering over the bed and us while the technicians in the other room peered through the glass window that looked over David’s bed. He was the act and they the audience: they were just waiting for him to happen.
John told of the Russian probes that snooped the Chariot and the Spine.
David grinned. “Did they tell anyone yet that they are building a starship?” His breath was short, raspy.
John shook his head. “Not that I know of.”
“Well, I guess they must know that with the monitors and probes we’ve got all over the place that they can’t keep a secret if they talk about us...” David broke off for a few moments before beginning on Michael’s visit.
“Michael asked me to be buried,’ he said bluntly. “I told him no.” He smiled up at both of us.
“However,” he said in a way that reminded me of all the televised speeches, and the cartoons, too, “however, I told him I would think on the idea of not being cremated. He has a point there, I think. Suppose, well, suppose I get there and someone’s waiting for me, or something. What will they know about me from a pile of dust in a bottle? If I go as dust why should I go at all? It would be just as well then to add another instrument or another pound of fuel.”
He coughed for a moment, causing the technicians to glance at their instruments and the doctors to glance to the technicians. One of the doctors listened intently to his intercom, looking for all the world like the Victrola dog listening for his master’s voice. David grinned again.
“I do that once in a while to keep them on their toes. I told one of the nurses earlier that I know what happens around here whenever they sedate me—they all relax again until I wake up.”
David reached for my hand. His hand felt withered and cold. His grasp was light for all of the obvious effort he put into it.
“Beth, tell me, is that asking too much, that I should want to be me when I get there? I want them, whoever finds me, to know that it was my spaceship, and that I owned it, and that I caused it to be built, and that I made the trip myself!” He almost pleaded.
“Isn’t that pretty much the way we’ve always planned it?” I asked. “When you told me the idea that night you first got back from the hospital, when you found out you’d missed Chang’s funeral, isn’t that what you told me you were going to do one day?”
He smiled and nodded. Coughing again, he caused another flurry among the doctors and their watchmen.
“John, come here.”
John leaned close by David to receive a whispered word or two and nodded a serious assent.
One of the watchmen and a nurse came toward us making the usual motions of dismissal out of David’s range of vision. We small-talked our way out of the room. The last thing I saw in that room was a nurse with a needle, injecting David into sleep.
John turned to me as we walked toward the elevator. “David told me that you shouldn’t come too often anymore—he says you look at him the way you did after the accident—when you thought he was going to die.”
***
MICHAEL WILL NOT come to me today at noon as I sit at my desk. He and Lori are at the hospital, waiting. Sometime soon David will cease being my man.
I wait for the phone to ring. The first call will be Michael—somehow I didn’t expect him to be there at a time like this, but he wanted to go. I will stay here, because I’ve already seen David die once or twice. I know what it’s like. I will wait for the second phone call.
When John calls he will ask me a question. Just a few words. And I will sit in this room where David lived, look out at the sky, be it day or night, and see stars.
Neither David nor Michael nor Lori will be here when I say, “Ashes, John, it has to be ashes.”
John will say yes, and send me some sand and ashes to put in the fourth bottle, the one David scribbled Alpha Centauri on.
I don’t think I’ll let Michael see the bottle. Lori, at least, understands about loyalty.
First published in Amazing Science Fiction, May 1978
Stormshelter
Sharon Lee
THE WAR REACHED the much-talked-about Turning Point, hesitated, decided in the Enemy’s favor.
I, long-distance scout, mind encased in chromium; light years away from home, family, body; less than an analogue; less—more—than a man; rationality borrowed from the same machine body; beyond emotion—I ran.
Ran. Broke contact with the others, dropped out of the Grid under cover of a too-close eruption. Cut my losses. Deserted my duty. Fled.
Full of a sickness that belonged to that body—safe—buried beneath the mountains of my home, I fled. Whirled my craft—myself— away and outward; sensors sensing, scanners scanning; seeking life. Life that made no wars.
The chromium body has no sight; the computer processes its data, feeds it to a brain used to outward seeing. Compensation, protection from insanity—the brain forms pictures for itself to scan. Thus, space whipped by in swirls of ice blue, flares of orange, pinpricks—too distant—of white. And cold. Filled with a wailing, lonely wind, torturing ears long years behind me. No life, no life— Warmth.
The briefest flicker, almost lost in the howling of the Wind. I formed the command, slowed my body’s running. Paused, almost. And looked about.
The flashing blue and orange trembled as I slowed. My computer swallowed data wholesale—I recoiled; pictures faded as my brain stuttered— blind! Before I could panic—sight: A house loomed in the distance; coolly white; Greek-columned; smoke curling from each of the three chimneys, warmly.
The door stood open, so I went in.
The foyer was an expanse of white marble reaching to the horizon; the ceiling vaulted out of sight; the scent of jasmine came from the tiles in the floor; the light was sourceless yellow. I stood, unbreathing in my shell; unbreathing beneath the mountains.
The door at my back slid shut, soundless, and latched itself with a solemn click.
My mind wondered at the pictures it painted itself. My computer hummed through its data, disregarded. We waited for the owner of the house to come.
To make us welcome.
Waited, we—I—and wondered at the warmth, at the stillness, at the peace.
And I was content to wait, though the waiting was a hundred years of being still in the midst of such quietude.
My non-ears detected a step. I pivoted to the right as a heretofore unperceived door swung open and my hostess came to sight. I don’t know how I must have appeared to her—ugly, pitted lump of dull metal; fused in some places, cracked in others—a meteorite crouching in the center of her miraculously unshattered hall.
But she. She—long red hair entangling the blossoms that scented the hallway; slender arms circled with silver; long full dress a deep, cool green. And she moved like a ripple across a storm-stilled pond.
She stopped and regarded me—whatever was my seeming—her eyes a depthless and shimmering green.
“My Lady—” voiceless, I spoke to her. She did not seem to hear.
She only stood and looked at me, the line of a frown between her brows. She moved, in that effortless gliding, and walked around me, studying.
One circuit she made, leisurely. Then she stopped and addressed me, in a manner that my earless self could hear.
“Whence came you? Why come here? Speak, and tell me truth.”
So compelled, I spoke to her, my soundless voice filling the marble hall. I spoke of the War and the horror of it, the lives blown away and wasted years out from their homes and their loves. Of myself and my mates, bodies frozen, minds alive and knowing, prisoned in our separate metal cans. And how we endured all this for dominion among the stars. I spoke and she listened—to more than my words—and when my words finally ran to nothing, she closed her shining green eyes and left me.
Within my metal skin, in the safety of her hallway, I waited.
She returned after a time that my computer measured in days, the flowers in her hair unwilted, her dress a smooth fall of green from her shoulders to the bright tiled floor.
She stood before me as she had before; and behind me I heard the outer door unlatch itself.
“You will go now,” she said to me. “It has been undone. You will return to your living body, forsaking this shell forever.” And she turned to go.
“Lady—”
Frowning, she turned back. Waiting.
“Lady, what has happened? The War has been years in the making and in the fighting—how is it ended?”
She shrugged; gestured with one silver circled arm. “Each army is safe, one from the other. They can see no more cause for warring.” She gestured again, turning away, “Go home. And kill no more.”
