Empire Dreams (31 page)

Unresting, unhastening, and as silent as light,
Vivaldi
loops away from Nemesis. Half the control boards are a Picadilly Circus of malfunction lights. More hulk than spacecraft, Earth’s first starship puts distance between itself and the collapsar. It has survived. It has come through. It has beaten the black hole. The count stands at T + 45 seconds as champagne corks pop and glasses are raised and an international chorus of toasts proposed to the twin heroes of the Vivaldi Project.

Peep. Peep. Peep. Peep. Peep. Peep. Peep. Pee …
the emergency alarm. Controllers scatter to their posts, bulk-purchase snap-together plastic champagne glasses still in hands. All they can do is observe the destruction.

“Cometary head …”

“Blind side of the collapsar …”

“Impact estimated in …”

The Big Wall displays the destruction in computer-enhanced garishness: a cloud of electric-blue ice pellets, fragments of a shattered Oort comet.

“Proximity detectors still functional …”

“Emergency evasion programs being effected …”

“Small-maneuver thrusters firing …”

“Come on come on come on come on …”
Vivaldi
shifts slowly, slowly, so slowly. The staff of Mission Control Dharmstadt will it on: come on come on come on
come on
. Alone of all the people in the room, Dr. Hugh sees what must happen and cries,

“Stupid stupid stupid!”

So concerned is the radiation-seared onboard computer with the imminent danger that its lobotomized memory has forgotten all about Nemesis, all about the event horizon.
Vivaldi
is steering itself away from the ice cloud into the embrace of the collapsar.

“Time to event horizon, thirty-two seconds,” says Kirkby Scott dazedly, face lit blue and green in the reflected glow of Nemesis. “Time to event horizon, twenty-eight seconds …”
Vivaldi
rolls and points its cameras directly on the singularity. Dr. Hugh MacMichaels, standing faithful at his station as he has stood faithful for twenty years, beholds the heart of the black hole.

The heart of the darkness.

He whispers, face blue with Nemesis-shine and wonder, “Holy God, there’s some … thing in there.”

The darkness of the heart.

* * * *

Emotion had always terrified him. He could not bear to hear Moira’s sobbing. It made her vulnerable and human and he wanted her to be invulnerable, inhuman.

“It was for you, for us. God knows, we can never have another Gemma, and now she’s dead; what’s going to keep us together, what’s going to keep us going?”

Poor, naive Dr. Hugh had never understood the essential contradiction that lay close to Moira’s heart: that her treasured independence existed only because the stability of husband, child, and home lent it a firm foundation. He could only dimly comprehend that she feared being cast adrift on the sea of misfortune without haven or the sanctuary of a future assured through her children. And he could never understand that though she despised him, he was now all those things that she needed, and that if the marriage collapsed she would be irrevocably alone. And because he understood none of this, he could not understand why she had taken his daughter’s,
their
daughter’s, memories to Immortals Inc. for them to flesh out in plastic and metal. Yet comprehension, revelation, lay just beyond the roses browning in the acid rain, the desolate beans and the wilting brussels sprouts. And because twenty years older he was still really rather naive, he knew he would have to ask the oracle; the shape moving about its indecipherable businesses beyond the rain-streaked glass.

“Gemma.”

“Hi, Dad.”

The face was almost more than he could bear, yet he felt he must reach out a finger to touch the hand, the cheek, the brow, so he could satisfy himself it was not warm flesh. His fingers carried away her perfume,
Noches de Luna
, amateurishly smuggled out of airport duty-frees.

“They made me well, didn’t they, Dad?”

The voice, the inflections, the idioms, the lowered eyes, the slight smile: the
astonishing verisimilitude
. He tried to deny her to himself with coarse, hurtful questions.

“Where did they put them then?”

“The computers, Dad? Under the floorboards and up in the ceiling. You know, you had dry rot, death-watch beetle, and at least three colonies of mice down there.”

He almost let himself smile. The Gemmathing read the almost-smile with her camera-eyes and returned it wholly.

“Relax, Dad. Why don’t you just let me be what I’m supposed to be?”

Again the gentle invitation. Again the coarse, hurtful rejection.

“How much did she pay for you?”

“Twelve thousand five hundred pounds on a monthly direct-debit installment plan, for which she got a voice-recognition program capable of discriminating between sarcasm, irony, or any other form of rhetorical trickery, Dad. So stop trying to make me out to be a thing and let me help you. She did it because of you, Dad.”

“Me? Oh no.” But he had let himself be trapped by the Gemmathing.

“She’s terrified of you leaving her all alone in the world, Dad. She may not love you but she needs you, needs someone, and if she can’t have you, then she’ll bring her only daughter back from the dead to fill her need. Me. Gemma, your daughter.”

Suddenly the dread was more than he could bear. He surged to his feet, whale-and-rainbow mobiles swinging away from his heavy animal shoulders, an angry, helpless bull-father.

“But you’re not Gemma, you are a thing, a pile of transputers and molecular gates, a mechanical puppet like something out of Madame Tussaud’s on the Royal Mile.” He remembered Gemma, age eight, clinging to his coat in real fear as the monsters, ogres, and body-snatchers of Scotland’s grim history reached out of the gloom for her. “You’re not real. I’ll tell you what’s real: the Gemma I remember, the Gemma in my heart, that’s the real Gemma.”

“Dad, I’m surprised.” The Gemmathing flashed its eyebrows. Where had it learned that? He had never been able to resist Gemma’s raised eyebrows.

“Tell me, Dad, what’s the difference between the Gemma in your head and the Gemma in the gazebo? We’re both memories, only the memories in your head will fade with time and eventually become just memories of memories of memories, but in me they have been given a body and will never fade. So, what’s so terrible about that? What’s so terrible about wanting to keep those memories, those things that were special about Gemma MacMichaels,
me
, fresh and imperishable? What’s the difference?”

He had no answer for the Gemmathing. That evening he flew off to Dharmstadt for the close encounter with Nemesis and he still had no answer. He knew there must be an answer to the Gemmathing’s question, a full and complete answer, but he did not have the first idea where he might hunt for that answer. He never suspected that his answer was waiting for him within the Einsteinian gullet of a black hole.

* * * *

Peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
…

“Crisis situation.”

“Termination of all telemetry data.”

“Cessation of all onboard monitoring systems.”

“We’re getting nothing but three-k static on the communications links.”

“No incoming intelligence.”

“All sensors nonfunctional.”

“All systems dead.”

The Big Wall is blank save for the tiny, mocking alphanumerals in the top left corner:

T + 150 1320 KM

The control room is filled with the penetrating keen of the alarm. Every head is turned on Dr. Hugh: What do we do now, leader? Dr. Hugh flips off the whistle and his voice seems very loud as he speaks into the deepspace radio hiss.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we must assume that
Vivaldi
has crossed the event horizon and that the mission is terminated. Thank you for your assistance, it was a pleasure to have worked with you. Thank you.”

Hissssssssss
. Good-bye, Starship of the Imagination.

Kirkby Scott bangs his desk displays in frustration but Dr. Hugh does not share his sense of failure. Rather, he glows with a peculiar elation, as if in the loss of twenty visionary years, by some universal law of conservation, he has gained some vital insight. The odds were always stacked against him. Now after twenty years he must take up his life again. As he leaves the control room he hears Alain Mercier’s measured syllables:

“The Vivaldi Mission count has been terminated at launch plus six point three times ten to the eighth seconds at 5:45 GMT, August twenty-seventh, 2008.”

Outside, the demon MEDIA has lain in wait for him, now it pounces.

“Dr. MacMichaels, tell me, will there now be a joint European/American mission to the Oort Cloud?”

“Dr. MacMichaels, what light does the Vivaldi mission throw upon the origins of the solar system?”

“Dr. MacMichaels, what bearing does the outcome of the Vivaldi mission have on the Orion probe?”

“Dr. MacMichaels, what would you say is the probability that a wave of comets has been dislodged from the Oort Cloud, and will you now be pressing for an international skywatch?”

“Dr. MacMichaels, does the revelation that Nemesis is composed of Hypothesis B dark matter imply in any way that the universe is reaching the limits of its expansion and that contraction to the point source will begin to occur within the next few million years?”

He stops for that one. All bits and parts of other things, the stained-glass demon MEDIA halts in a surge of boom-mikes, cameras, and handheld recorders.

“Quite frankly, sonny, I don’t give a shit. And neither should you.” The pimply-faced cub reporter in the bright red body-suit and inappropriately padded muscles blushes. And Dr. Hugh is suddenly angry. “How old are you? Nineteen, twenty? Less? Listen, sonny, get out of here, go and make love, make friends, make a big noise, see things, do things, be things, have fun, be good, be kind, be loved by everyone, live as full a life as you can so when the time comes for your own death you can go into it full and satisfied and at peace, because quite frankly, boy, the death of the universe is not worth a single tear. Not one damn tear.”

The doors are close; beyond the glass, the waiting car, the neatly planted trees, the east-is-red sunrise. Something to do with the Ruhr, the redness of the sunrise. An hour and a half from now he can be arriving in yawning Edinburgh. When he gets there, there is something he must do.

T + 200

And now Dr. Hugh’s battered red Ford station wagon is driving through the five-o’clock-empty streets of Edinburgh. A time zone westward, he has beaten the sun. Under the yellow streetlights the city is the possession of the milk-floats, the newspaper vans, the ambulances and their dark brothers the night police, and Dr. Hugh, driving fast, driving home. 5:05, he turns into the driveway with a crunch of gravel: it is early, not a blind open, not a carton of milk on a doorstep, not a jogger defiling the tranquility in designer jogging suit and shoes. Dr. Hugh watches the sun rise over Milicent Crescent: no rain today, amazing. He opens the trunk of the car and takes out not an overnight case but a red metal can. And he does not enter his house by the front door but by the side gate into the back garden. A neighbor’s dog barks as Dr. Hugh crosses the garden: across the lawn, past the dying roses and the brussels sprouts and the raspberry canes—they look green, perhaps we shall have jam this year—to the gazebo.

The Gemmathing is awake and alert the instant he opens the door but Dr. Hugh knows that machines can go as long as twenty years without sleep.

“Dad! Do you know what time it is?”

“I do.”

“So, how did things go?”

“Things went fine.”

He unscrews the lid from the red metal can. Camera-eyes roll and focus. He sloshes the contents over the walls, the floor, the wicker chair. The Gemmathing shrieks and raises its hands in panic as the liquid slosh-sloshes over her flowery print frock. The stench of gasoline chokes the gazebo.

“Dad! What are you doing! Do you know what you’re doing?”

“I do,” says Dr. Hugh. “Oh I do.” And as he sloshes the gasoline over the Gemmathing he explains. “You see, I worked out the answer to your question. What’s the difference between you and my memories of Gemma? Answer, nothing. Both were wrong. Both are wrong. It’s wrong to cling to memories, to make them the justification for my failure to escape from your death. But at least my memories will change and fade with time. That’s why it’s wrong to give them form and shape, enshrine them; it’s giving death the victory. I realized that when
Vivaldi
was lost: it had gone to where I could never reach it, twenty years of my life, gone for good. I realized that no amount of wishing or hoping or praying could bring it back from the black hole, or you, Gemma, from the wrecked car. I had to lose you, Gemma, I had to let you pass over the event horizon. Memories are no substitute for living and we have to live, Gemma. We have to.”

And standing by the door of the gazebo he takes a match from an Air Caledonian matchbook, strikes it, and tosses it into the Gemmathing’s lap.

The blossom of flame knocks him backwards into the raspberry canes. The intense heat has seared away his eyebrows and scorched his beard. He backs away, shielding raw face with hands, yet curious to see the destruction he has wrought. In the burning gazebo he sees the plastic features of the Gemmathing melting, flowing onto the blazing print frock. The windows shatter, twelve thousand five hundred pounds’ worth of transputer modules crack and fuse and all the photographs, all the trapped memories, take wing and fly away on the burning wind like black crows. The flames roar and lick around the melting, burning Gemmathing.

“God, I’m sorry,” he whispers.

Alarmed by the explosions, neighbors are leaning out of open windows, fearful sheep-faces gaping at the suburban nightmare in MacMichaels’s garden. Slippered and dressing-gowned, Moira is running across the lawn to the pyre.

“It’s you and me now!” Dr. Hugh shouts. “Just you and me. No Gemma to hold us together. We work it out on our own or not at all. We’re adult, mature humans, dear God, we have our own lives to live.” Moira is on her knees amidst the brussels sprouts, hands held imploringly to the blazing summerhouse. Tears stream down her cheeks. The oily black smoke plumes into the sky. Dr. Hugh hears in the distance the wail of the fire brigade’s red engines. He watches his wife weep and kneels beside her to comfort her. As he places his hand on her shoulder he notices the little buds of color amidst the thorns and acid-browned leaves. Maybe there will be roses this year after all.