Empire Dreams (28 page)

And the night was gone and the dawn was rising over the edge of the world. The stories were told, the brief fellowship of travelers could be dissolved. Red-hair, short dark-hair, pale sick-scarred, nervous rodent, took their leave of each other and returned to their camels, airbuses, Greyhounds, and caravels. The old one lingered awhile in the predawn glow, kicking at the embers of the fire so that the sparks fled upward into the sky. All around were the inaudible sounds of the City of Stories folding its insubstantial silks and canvases to sweep once more into the dream-time. He listened to the voices of the ghosts as they dissolved away like mist, and waited for a long time. Then he turned his back on fire and world, and followed them.

IN THE THISTLEDOWN
starship of the imagination, Dr. Carl Silverman approached the black hole. Golden light from the accretion disc flooded the cathedral-bridge of the mindship and the air rang with chimed warnings: beware gravity, beware gravity. Sprawled in front of the television, chin propped on knuckles, nearly-ten Hugh MacMichaels felt the infinite darkness of the black hole reach out and swallow his imagination. A willing stowaway on the Grand Tour of the Universe, he had seen supernovas burst like fireworks across the heavens, seen galaxies turning before him like fiery Catherine wheels, seen wonders until he thought he was numb to wonder, but the black hole called to him, the black hole reached for him, the black hole tied him to itself with threads of pure, unbreakable amazement. He was still whispering “Wow, oh wow, oh wow,” as the closing credits rolled up the screen and Dad harrumphed and rattled his newspaper (“That nonsense over for another week”), and Mam clickclacked at the Fair Isle sweaters of incomprehension. The fire coals collapsed releasing a gust of heat, the November rain beat against the window glass, and the
Ten O’clock News
prepared to disseminate its burden of despair across the land, but nearly-ten Hugh MacMichaels was far far away, sailing in the starship of the imagination with Dr. Carl Silverman at the edge of the universe.

VIVALDI CONTROL DHARMSTADT: WEST GERMANY 23:45 T – 200 144000 KM

As Dr. Hugh MacMichaels, beardy, balding, with a tendency towards paunchiness, strides through the swinging glass doors of Mission Control Dharmstadt, the many-headed beast MEDIA is waiting for him.

“Dr. MacMichaels, do you think that …”

“Dr. MacMichaels, is it true that …”

“Dr. MacMichaels, what …”

“Dr. MacMichaels, when …”

“Dr. MacMichaels, why …”

He raises his hands to pacify the beast.

“Has anyone seen Kirkby Scott yet?”

Hurrying down the corridor to rescue his project director, Alain Mercier answers Dr. Hugh’s question with an eloquent Gallic shrug that speaks of grounded shuttles and taxis caught in traffic.

“Holy God, what is going on here? We’re trying to run a space mission, you know …”

A microphone lunges dangerously at him.

“Dr. MacMichaels, Anne Prager NBCTV. You have an interview with Dr. Carl Silverman, remember?
New Frontiers
? Remember? It was arranged.”

New Frontiers?
Carl Silverman? Things are happening too fast. Twenty years to prepare himself and he is still somewhere up in the air over Holland. Ambitious, professional Anne Prager hustles poor confused Dr. Hugh into the Green Room for the interview with Dr. Carl Silverman, Captain of the Starship of the Imagination.

If only you could have seen this, Gemma. Face to face with the Legend Himself.

But the Legend is getting old and gray and tired. Too many years of too many wonders.

“Just some background for our viewers,” says the Legend Himself. “We’re going out live on a satellite linkup, so keep it simple, nothing too technical, just a bit about the history of the mission to the Oort Cloud and the subsequent discovery of Nemesis, then maybe something about what Vivaldi is hoping to achieve. Give everyone at home some kind of overview, all right?”

“Certainly,” says Dr. Hugh, feeling small and lost and intimidated by the lights cables directors sound-boys clipping on microphones testing testing two three four bored makeup girls puffing on powder combing hair over the bald patch do
something
love about those gray bits in the beard …

“Would you like a look at the questions while the bright young things get you wired up?”

Dr. Hugh takes the clipboard. Nothing new. He has been answering these same questions on behalf of his space probe for ten years. Anne Prager NBCTV poses herself in front of a camera, pushes at her hair, a harassed director announces,

“Okay, boys and girls, we’re going for a live linkup. Satellite comes on line in twenty seconds … give you a count, Anne, for the introduction, seventeen, sixteen, fifteen—”

“Wait!” cries Dr. Hugh in sudden panic. “I’m not ready! I’m not ready!”

“Thirteen, twelve, eleven …”

* * * *

Once there were two men. One was old and wise, with a face like bad bread and cabbage. The other was young and really rather naive and people told him that with his beard he looked a bit like Sean Connery. This pleased the young man because Sean Connery had been one of his boyhood heroes. These two men, the old and wise and the young and really rather naive, had many things in common. They were both astrophysicists. They were both doctors. And they both once had a dream of the far places, the far far places, farther than most people they knew could imagine: the Oort Cloud, the great shell of comets that enshrouded the solar system at a distance five hundred times that of the farthest planet. They dreamed of a spacecraft which might travel there and probe the secrets of that dark and remote place and they drew together plans and ideas, notions and fantasies, and in time they saw that their dream was not a dream at all but a real and practical project. So the two men, one old, one young, took their project to the university and the university took it to the European Space Agency and because the European Space Agency was riding gung-ho that year on the setbacks the Russian and American space programs had experienced they said yes, of course you can go to the Oort Cloud, when would you like to go?

As soon as possible, the two men said.

Good, said the European Space Agency. Now, if you would just go and find a name for your project, we’ll set aside an Ariane rocket to launch it.

So the two men went out and got very drunk that night and at three o’clock in the morning they were sitting in the young man’s front room listening to
The Four Seasons
when both of them, at the same time and with one voice, said,

“Aha! Vivaldi!”

The next day the old scientist told the young scientist a secret.

“Hugh, you know what this is really all about?” Cheese and onion pie and pint for lunch in the Three Cornered Hat; the old man’s breath smelled of beer and onions. “Don’t be gulled by all this cometary cloud stuff, that was just my ploy to get the project funded and launched. What Vivaldi is all about, what Vivaldi
is
, Hugh, is the first practical starship.”

Outside, the sweet September rain was falling down on Edinburgh; lukewarm, slightly acid, a never-ending drizzle that had been falling ever since the summers died in ‘87. Depressed by the acid rain, the younger man’s gray-gray eyes strayed to the desktop model, a diaphanous plastic Y with Vivaldi the spider acrouch at the center of her web.

“You’ve got it all worked out, you old goat. Alpha Centauri, here I come.”

“Silly old men have to do something between seminar groups to drive the young nubiles from their dirty old minds. Think about it, Hugh, powered starflight. Put that down on your CV.”

“Let me see, what kind of push can we get out of the ion-drive section, about a quarter-percent c?” The younger man calculated and the acid rain streamed down the windows. “Two hundred years? You can’t wait two hundred years, Ben, you’re too impatient. Better off with the Oort Cloud. At least you stand a chance of being there to see the results. Only twenty years.”

“Twenty years for you, Hugh. Matter of damn to me.”

Thirteen months later
Vivaldi
was launched from Arecaibo in French Guyana on an ESA Ariane booster. Dr. Hugh and Dr. Ben watched the launch by video linkup at twenty past two in the morning Edinburgh time, and as the last booster section fell away and
Vivaldi
opened its dragonfly wings to the sun they toasted each other in whisky and drank to the success of Earth’s First Starship.

The years passed. Dr. Hugh, young and really rather naive, fell in love with a fine, handsome, independent woman called Moira who cared not a bit for ion drives and cometary clouds; married, moved to a nice house in a nice area of Edinburgh, and in the dueness of time produced a child named Gemma who was the light of her parents’ life. And she was the only light of her parents’ life, for shortly after her birth Moira MacMichaels’s doctor called her to him and told her that she must never bear another child. So her womb was removed, though she was still a young woman, and in the empty place where her children had been something bitter and dark took root.

And all the while
Vivaldi
flew on, away from the earth, the trefoil of lightsails trapping the sunlight and transforming it into the electricity by which it accelerated, slowly, slowly, slowly, day by day, week by week, year by year, gaining speed, traveling to the Oort Cloud.

T – 62 44640 KM

“Counting down to separation from ion-drive section … twenty … nineteen … eighteen …”

On the telephone to the airport to find out where the hell Kirkby Scott is, Dr. Hugh hears Alain Mercier start the count. The voice on the other end of the telephone is telling him yes, Flight TW359 from Los Angeles has landed and is coming through customs now, but Dr. Hugh does not hear it because he is half a light-year away in the starship of his imagination. In his mind’s eye he sees
Vivaldi
uncouple from the carrier body and drop towards Nemesis while the three-hundred meter trefoil of solar panels sails onwards into the dark, a three-petaled flower dropping its seed. He glances up from his desk, over the heads of the multinational Vivaldi team, to see the vision of his imagination computer-simulated in gaudy SonyColor on the Big Wall.

“Carrier-body separation complete, Hugh.”

So far so good. The onboard computer has not forgotten what to do since the last flight-program update a year ago. Things are going well. Have gone well. Surrounded by the glossolalia of telemetry, the
astonishing verisimilitude
conceals the truth that all this is past tense, six months past tense. Yet he still says, “Give me a count on the safe-distancing maneuvers, would you, Alain?”

“Certainly. Coming up on mark … now. Counting down for safe-distancing maneuvers … four … three … two … one … thrusters firing.”

Fifty-nine minutes from Nemesis,
Vivaldi
is falling free from the ion-drive section, tumbling through space unpowered, victim of gravity, tumbling towards the black hole.

* * * *

It rained the day of Ben Vorderman’s funeral, but the rain signified nothing, it rained every day.

Cerebral hemorrhage. That had been the verdict. The old man had dropped dead in midsentence five minutes into his lecture to his second-year astronomy class. He was not even cold in his coffin before the department drew bodkins in the quest for the crown of Vivaldi Project Director. Dr. Hugh wanted no part in that. It had disgusted him. Even on the day of the funeral, with the rain filling up the grave, Tom MacIvor and Barbara Caldwell had been lobbying whispered pledges of support from mackintoshed mourners as the minister read the psalms. Dr. Hugh was shocked. In many ways he was still really rather a naive man. When he told of his outrage to Moira, that was what she told him: She loved him but he was really rather naive. He did not look at her quite the same after that.

Dr. Hugh treasured the nights when Moira went out to her group-consciousness classes or aerobics sessions or women’s group seminars or Nationalist party meetings because they gave him an excuse to be all alone with his nearly-three-year-old daughter for a few hours. He loved to sprawl on the couch with Gemma in his arms and answer all her “Whazzat?” questions about the pictures she saw on the television. These were blessed, sacred hours, these evenings of father and daughter; it was a violation when the telephone rang in the middle of
Me and My Dog
(Gemma’s favorite, she loved the dogs though she could not comprehend the quiz aspect; he wanted a big fluffy dog for Gemma but Moira wouldn’t hear of it) and it was Mr. Cameron the department solicitor asking him to come to the will reading next morning.

Uncomfortable in too-tight collar he sat on the musty-smelling leather seats peculiar to solicitors’ offices and listened as Mr. Cameron ruefully and with great sorrow read out names, sums, and properties.

“And it is my desired wish that pending approval by the Faculty Board, Dr. Hugh MacMichaels should succeed me as Project Director of the Vivaldi mission. Because” —Mr. Cameron coughed solicitously—“unlike those other bastards in the department, Hugh actually gives a damn about the dream of reaching the stars.”

As Dr. Hugh sat on the peculiar leather chairs listening to the words that made him at twenty-seven director of a mission that would not bear fruit before his fortieth birthday (and made Tom Maclvor and Barbara Caldwell implacable enemies, which saddened him for he liked all men to be his friends),
Vivaldi
crossed the orbit of the asteroids and headed for Jupiter.

T–45 32400 KM

“We have simulations coming up on the screen … now.”

“Gravity sensors registering flux curve maximizing to exponential point-source. Nemesis is there, all right.”

“Course computer adjusting orbit to intercept trajectory.”

“Kirkby Scott’s limousine has left the airport and is on its way, ETA in twenty-five minutes.”

“Should have long-range images coming through false color enhancement any minute now.”

In the jingle-jangle of jargons and lingos—French accents, German accents, Italian accents, the accents of singsong Scandinavians and soft Irishmen, polyglot Beneluxers, anonymous Swiss and lisping Spaniards, Dr. Hugh’s Lowland Scots is almost swamped in the Babel.