Empire Dreams (30 page)

At the reception afterwards everyone wanted to shake Dr. Hugh’s hand and tell him how he reminded them of Sean Connery (the
only
James Bond), and Dr. Hugh, blurred and mellow from too much California Moselle, smiled and laughed and talked the veriest drivel with Respected Nobel Laureates and Sharp Young Men from NASA and Doyens of Astronautics and was just easing into conversation with an extremely attractive woman journalist from
New Scientist
(so sorry, his subscription had run out years ago) when the bellboy came round paging Dr. Hugh MacMichaels paging Dr. Hugh MacMichaels telephone call at reception telephone call at reception and he left the extremely attractive woman journalist holding his glass and went to answer the telephone and on the other end was Moira telling him that Gemma had been killed that morning in a car accident on the M62.

T – 10 7200 KM

Casual, fashionable, elegant in his yellow designer one-piece, Kirkby Scott skips down the steps and slips in beside Dr. Hugh.

“Sorry,” he whispers. “Stuck in a stack over Düsseldorf while they sorted out an air-traffic controllers’ dispute, would you believe? And would you believe that sitting up there in our coffee room is Carl Silverman, I mean, Carl Silverman …”

“I know,” says Dr. Hugh. “He interviewed me.”

“Interviewed you? Hey, ho … I’ll ask you about it later. Well, here I am. Okay, tell me what’s going on.”

Dr. Hugh nods at the Big Wall.

“Ten minutes.”

“Shoot, that close? How long to the impact probes?”

“They go at T-minus-four.”

“How’s
Vivaldi
bearing up to it?”

“Gravity shear and dust impact are causing her to wobble off optimum course.”

“Well, the onboard’s held up this long, it can hold another ten minutes.”

“Gravity shear approaching upper safety limits,” advises an unapproachable Swiss Fräulein at the telemetry board.

“Gravity shear? Gravity shear? We hadn’t figured on the gravity shear getting so strong so far out; here, let’s have a look, what kind of beast have we got out there?”

Kirkby Scott studies the facts and figures on Nemesis with hisses of increasing disbelief. Dr. Hugh studies the simulator display schematics on the Big Wall simulator. There is ugly, bucket-of-bolts
Vivaldi
, rolling and tumbling towards the Schwarzchild limit: safe, but Dr. Hugh’s imagination superimposes on the videoscreen the hundred alternative scenarios in which
Vivaldi
is reduced to glittering shards.

It wasn’t made for this. Not for this. He watches the simulated dust impacts peck away at
Vivaldi’s
dust shields

(each peck ten times the velocity of a rifle bullet: he remembers telling Carl Silverman that) and realizes that he is holding his breath.

Why?

Because I am scared. Scared that at any moment a piece of ice is going to destroy
Vivaldi
, scared of what is going on out there, out there at the edge of the solar system where all I can do is watch and I am helpless to act: out here is something I cannot control, something that defies me, mocks me, wishes to destroy me, and that scares me because since Gemma died
Vivaldi
has been the only thing in my life over which I have had any control. My daughter, my wife, my passions, my fears, all flew from my hands over the years as
Vivaldi
flew on and on and on and now here it is perched on the edge of chaos and what can this man do?

* * * *

The Chapel of Rest terrified Dr. Hugh. From its position on the hill it dominated the rows and plots of plinths and headstones and Dr. Hugh, turning through the wrought-iron gates in his battered red station wagon. Every funeral reminded him of other funerals. It had been raining the day of Ben Vorderman’s funeral, it was raining today, the same steady rain, and it was the same graveyard and the same chapel on the hill save that this time the hearse kept on up the hill to the chapel at the top, for a new law said that everyone must be cremated unless religious observance prohibited. Dr. Hugh could not say why the Chapel of Rest disturbed him. Perhaps the red-brick architecture which reminded him of the detested Forth River Primary School, perhaps the morbid Phantom-of-the-Opera organ program which stopped mid-bar when the coffin was placed on the dais, perhaps the chimney glimpsed through the-Resurrection-and-the-Life stained glass, stern sentinel of mortality. Man is but a puff of smoke, and quickly blown away.

Gemma had never been formally religious, so friends, relatives, and lovers (he did not doubt that they were there) read poems, placed flowers, sang songs, and spoke stumbling eulogies while Dr. Hugh sat beside his wife and could not believe that it was his daughter in that thing up there on the dais.

“Perhaps her father would like to say a few words? Mr. MacMichaels?”

It was the last thing he wanted to do, he would rather have done anything, anything at all than have to stand up there beside his daughter’s coffin, but Moira hissed something so vile and cutting that he went up to the lectern because it was the only place her contempt could not reach him. But the few words would not come to express what he wanted to say. Then all of a sudden he felt he wanted more than anything to shout at the friends, relatives, lovers, “What could you know about how it feels to lose your present and your future, your light, the woman you love most in all the world?” and tell them that no matter how many words he said they could never express one millionth part of what Gemma had been, but those words would not come to him as he braced himself against the lectern and two tears ran down his face and they said all the words he could not.

The funeral director said,

“Now, by special request, an extract from Gemma’s favorite music program, a piece of music that must have meant very much to her.” The pseudo-Venetian strings of the Vivaldi program filled the chapel, the funeral director pressed a discreet button, and as the computerized violins and harpsichords played, the coffin sank down down down out of sight and Dr. Hugh, desolate father, stood there as if his heart had melted to slag. And the coffin passed out of sight and he felt Moira’s reproachful, unforgiving eyes upon him.

After the signing of the Book of Remembrance he followed her to the car and his attention was snared by a flash of white on the wet black tarmac: a business card fallen from her bag. He picked up the card, read the address:

Immortals Inc
. somewhere in London.

“I think you dropped this.” She almost snatched the card back in her haste to hide it in the bowels of her handbag.

“Thank you, darling.”

As the smoke went up the chimney he tried to remember Gemma’s voice, Gemma’s face, Gemma’s laughter, and found he could no longer do so.

“Crossing plasma front; electrical activity increasing to within eight percent of safety margins.”

Go on, you tough little bastard.

“Radiation levels increasing markedly: damage monitors report soft fails in some attitude-control transputers.”

You’ve made it over twenty years to get this far. Only a few minutes left.

“Dust impacts maximizing, we mark penetration through numbers one and two dust-shields to the mylar impact-sensor layer.”

Go on go on go on go on.

“Counting down to impact-probe release … four … three … two … one …”

“Impact probes away!” sings Kirkby Scott. “Go for it, you little mothers!”

Three streaks of light fan away from the Looney-Toon
Vivaldi
on the Big Wall: cometary impact probes Harpo, Groucho, and Chico, their mission radically altered from their original intention. Once designed to test the density and composition of Oort comets, now they have been aimed down the gullet of the collapsar to shatter themselves against the impossible, to test the density and composition of the spinning collapsar known as Nemesis, the stuff and substance of that bead, that fetus of dark matter at its heart, and in the shattering, in the gasp of their destruction, become a revelation of the eschatology of the death of the universe.

Dark matter, heart matter, heavy matter, light matter, and upon the stuff and substance, the piss and puss of Nemesis, depends the shape of the end times, whether the Scattering will one day become the Gathering and the galaxies will be squeezed back into the primal Cosmic Egg once more, or whether they will fly outwards on their lonely courses forever, into the night, into the dark, the keening electron-whine of the panversal heat-death, chaos and cold at the rag end of time.

Dr. Hugh does not want there to be an end time. He does not care for the new Revelation. What is the death of the universe, majestic in its decline and finality, awesome in its scope and magnificence, compared to the death of his beloved daughter, one brief human life upon an insignificant fleck of filth at the edge of an unspectacular galaxy?

This is not real, he reminds himself. The lines, the graphics, the alphanumerals: imagination. This is the truth: six months ago, listen,
six months
, three lemon-sized impact probes with fanciful names fell past the Schwarzchild limit. And, by the express command of omnipotent relativity, they are falling still, frozen in time. And they will fall thus forever. Immortality. A relativistic shudder shakes Dr. Hugh.

* * * *

“Hi, hons, I’m home.” Home from Düsseldorf and the ESA conference, the sole tweed-jacketed pillar of academe on a city-hopper crammed with the industrial moguls of the New Scotland. On the flight he’d drunk too much, as usual, and then somewhere over Holland he’d remembered Gemma’s gentle chidings on the incompatibility of in-flight alcohol with aircraft pressurization. Then he’d realized, with devastating finality, that this time she would not be there to greet him at the arrivals gate with a Daddy-Bear hug and confiscate his yellow bag of duty-free drink and drive him home with some relaxing Handel (original, not some pseudo-program thing) on the car stereo and genuinely interested questions about what he had been doing. It would not be. It would never be again. He had burst into tears and wept all the way from Nord Zeeland to Edinburgh with the industrial moguls of the New Scotland staring at him. “Hons, I’m home …” But hons was out, busy with the do-gooderies that filled the place in her life where he should have been. No letters for him, but a shiny brochure for her from some Sassenach outfit calling itself
Immortals Inc
.

He saw a white card fluttering on the wet black tarmac of the municipal crematorium.

He took the shiny brochure into the living room and sat down to leaf through its glossy pages.

The hardest part of death is for those who remain
.

Our Counselors know only too well the ways in which grief can rip a family in two … Our computer simulacra reproduce
in every way
the personalities of the mourned departed … Working from the material manifestations of personality, the mementos, the souvenirs, the small personal possessions, voice tapes and photographs, our computers can reconstruct that personality with such astonishing verisimilitude …

Looking out of the window he saw something moving in the rotting summerhouse, something caught in the eigenblink of an eye: an arm.

Astonishing verisimilitude astonishing verisimilitude astonishing verisimilitude …

He approached the gazebo with trepidation. Through the vegetable garden, past the raspberry canes, Dr. Hugh went cat-careful, listening to the baroque strings of the Vivaldi program he’d bought her for her seventeenth birthday when she’d tired of the electronic ethnobeat programs which all sounded the same. He circled the summerhouse, anachronistic now the summers would not be coming back. Through the windows he saw the walls plastered with the plundered memorabilia of Gemma MacMichaels: the photographs of girlfriends, of cats, dogs, rabbits, hamsters, ponies, later of boyfriends; Gemma in ballet clothes, Gemma cast as Lady MacBeth in the school play, Gemma proud with her certificate of merit to the University of Edinburgh to study English, and the holiday, all the holiday snaps: him potbellied and grizzled in his swimming trunks in Corfu, him with a stupid expression coming off the shuttle at the airport, him tense and waiting in his hired Parsons and Parsons tux (red silk lining) waiting to hear the pronouncement of the Royal Institute Awards for 2006 … Moira had been thorough. Thoroughness was characteristic of her.

Something was sitting in a wicker chair with its back turned to him. He opened the door. Reconstructed Venetian strings swelled, “La Serenissima.” Ceiling-mounted cameras turned, focused, and an awful, sick puppet-thing with Gemma’s face had turned in Gemma’s wicker chair, smiled, and said,

“Hi, Dad.”

Hands to mouth to keep the horror from spewing out, he stepped back from the gazebo door.

“Dad, aren’t you coming in?” Camera-eyes tracked him as he backed away. “Dad, it’s me!” The puppet-thing lifted embracing arms. Hugh MacMichaels, father, husband, space explorer, vomited his Air Caledonian breakfast of porridge, bacon, eggs, oatcakes, marmalade, orange juice, and coffee into the brussels sprouts.

T – O NEMESIS

“T-zero. Distance zero. Event horizon. Doctor, the event horizon!”

The maelstrom of SonyColor on the Big Wall dwarfs Dr. Hugh. He closes his eyes so he does not have to see. T-zero. Distance zero.
Vivaldi
has kissed the lips of the nothing. The crackle of hard radiation drowns all voices in the control room save one, a cry, uplifted above the hiss and roar of Nemesis: Kirkby Scott.

“We got it! Oh, we got it! Positive electromagnetic halo readings from Harpo, Groucho, and Chico before contact was lost! Nemesis is a fourth-order minimum surface of Hypothesis B dark matter. Folks, it’s the fourth state of matter!” He turns, triumphant, arms Christ-wide. On his face, the beatific smile of the prophet of Doomsday. “Ladies and gentlemen, the missing mass is found! The Universe will contract to a point and be reborn!” Animal whoops, cheering, applause, fill the control room. In the center of the forest of arms reaching out to congratulate, Dr. Hugh and Dr. Kirkby embrace. Dr. Hugh cannot think why.