Penumbra (15 page)

Mackendrick lay on the engineer’s couch to the rear of the flight-deck, and carefully buckled his thin frame into the safety harness. Ten Lee was already strapped into her couch, the wraparound command console pulled close. Her face, surrounded by a bulging flight helmet with the visor screen down, was a study in emotionless concentration as she cycled through the pre-flight programs.

Bennett took his helmet from the pilot’s couch and pulled it down over his head, feeling the familiar comfort of its snug fit. The irritating chatter of a flight controller played in his right ear; he modulated the noise below the threshold of audibility. They were still one hour from liftoff. He would rather be alone with his thoughts until then.

He climbed into his couch, sinking into its padded depths. Everything about the Cobra, from major mechanical specifics right down to minor design features, was superior to anything else he’d flown over the years. Mackendrick had spared no expense when fitting and equipping the ship.

He pulled the horseshoe console towards him, locking it in place. He flipped down his visor and went through the running program with Ten Lee. This was, he realised, more a routine process to soothe his pre-flight nerves. During his fifteen years in space he had never flown trans-c. In fact, the furthest he had ever travelled was to Mars on a short vacation ten years ago. He had every confidence in his own ability to fly the Cobra, especially when they arrived at Penumbra and he had to take them through the storm-riven atmosphere - and he knew that he could not hope for a better ship or operating system. But the fact remained that they were embarking on a faster-than-light voyage through two thousand light years of unexplored space. He found it hard to grasp the enormity of what was about to happen. The fact of the flight alone was mind-numbing, without considering what they might find when they finally made landfall on Penumbra.

He raised his visor and glanced across at Ten Lee. She was reading off a string of equations with the calm of someone to whom this reality was nothing more than a passing illusion.

They reached the blast-pad and the tug disengaged. Hydraulic gantries took the weight of the ship and eased it to the vertical. Bennett tipped, staring up through the viewscreen at the bright blue sky.

He opened communications with the control tower and for the next half hour went through the process of program checks and data monitoring. Through the side-screen he noticed the bowsers and trucks carrying the mechanics and technicians beetling away across the tarmac. The sight filled him with a feeling of isolation he recalled from ten years ago, when he regularly piloted shuttles from ground to orbit.

One minute before lift-off the main engines engaged. Control counted down. Bennett laid his head back against the rest and gripped the arms of the couch. He glanced back at Mackendrick, strapped into the engineer’s couch. The tycoon sketched a brief smile and gave a thumbs-up gesture.

Seconds later the Cobra surged from the blast-pad, the pressure of ascent pushing Bennett further into his seat. His head rattled with the vibration of the rapid climb, blurring his vision. He thought of the sightseers in the observation gallery, the kids gasping at the spectacular pyrotechnics of blast-off.

In his helmet the tinny voice of the controller signed off. ‘Good luck Bennett, Theneka. She’s all yours.’

They climbed and turned. Through the sidescreen Bennett made out the vast sweep of the western seaboard, and then the great ochre plain of the Mojave, punctuated with the verdant circles of a dozen townships and settlements. From this high it appeared so artificial, impossible to conceive that down below normal people were conducting normal, everyday lives.

He turned his head and smiled at Mackendrick. ‘You okay, Mack?’

It was all the old tycoon could do to lift a hand in silent assent. Bennett hoped Mackendrick would be equal to the stress of the take-off.

Ten Lee’s voice interrupted his thoughts. ‘Twenty seconds until phase-out.’

‘Check,’ he said, glancing at his screen. The system was running smoothly.

‘Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .’

They were almost at the altitude where it would be safe to effect the transfer. Then the Schulmann-Dearing would cut in, tearing the fabric of localised space with such concentrated energy that, had the phase-out been effected on the ground, the area of the port around the ship would have been destroyed.

Bennett felt a stab of apprehension. Hell, but in seconds he would be travelling faster than the speed of light, this tiny shell-like vehicle cancelling the laws of physics and hurtling three frail human beings to the very edge of the galaxy.

He thought of Julia. He almost wished he was with her now, suffering her barbed recriminations.

‘Two . . . one . . . transition,’ Ten Lee said.

The deafening rumble of the main engines cut out suddenly, to be replaced with an eerie almost-silence. As his hearing adjusted he was aware that the ship was ringing with a low, almost subliminal hum, like the constantly dying note of a struck tuning fork.

He peered through the viewscreen. Where the thin blue of the stratosphere should have been, or the familiar scatter of stars, the scene was unique and strange: the stars had turned to streamers and were hosing towards and around the ship like a bombardment of polychromatic flak. He was aware of a sensation of abstraction; he felt at several removes from the reality around him, like a patient in a post-operative daze.

Ten Lee pulled off her helmet. She stared through the viewscreen in silent wonder, her open-mouthed regard unusually expressive. ‘Some scholars say that the void is the physical embodiment of the state to which we all aspire, Joshua.’

‘Josh,’ Mackendrick said from behind them. ‘If you and the Dalai Lama wouldn’t mind helping me to my unit . . .’

Bennett unfastened himself and moved over to Mackendrick. The old man looked pale, as if the stress of takeoff and phase-out had been too much. He could hardly stand, and it took Bennett and Ten Lee supporting each arm to assist him from the flight-deck. They moved down the corridor to the suspension chamber. The three suspension units - long silver containers resembling nothing so much as coffins - stood side by side in the centre of the room.

Mackendrick lay down in the form-shaped padding and sighed as sub-dermal capillaries eased themselves into his flesh. The transparent cover hummed shut over his unconscious body. In four months, when phase-out of the void was accomplished, he would be woken up.

Bennett was due to come out of suspension at the midpoint stage of the voyage, to assist Ten Lee in routine systems checks. Ten Lee had requested that she remain unsuspended for the duration of the flight. She wished to meditate. She had even brought along meagre rations to last her until landfall, vegetarian fare consisting of lentil bread and soya cakes, even though the ship was equipped with pre-packed food supplies.

Bennett left the suspension chamber and moved along the corridor to his berth. He lifted the simulated identity hologram from his bag and placed it on the bedside unit. He had never talked to Ella’s ghost anywhere other than the memorial garden; it was strange to think that he could commune with her so far from home. He moved around the small room, setting up the projectors and receivers at strategic positions. Then he sat on the narrow bunk and placed his finger-tips on the touch-sensitive module.

She appeared before him, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room, and his heart lurched. The SIH had assessed the passage of time and changed Ella’s style of dress accordingly. It must have been evening back on Earth, bedtime, for his sister was wearing her crimson pyjamas.

She leapt up and stared around the room. She looked at Bennett and beamed. ‘Hi, Josh.’ A frown. ‘Where are we?’ She ran to the viewscreen, reached up on tip-toe, leaned forward and peered out.

Bennett watched her, some unnameable emotion, poignant almost beyond endurance, swelling in his chest. The sight of her here, out of the usual context of the memorial garden, served to heighten the reality of her image and so emphasise the fact of her non-existence. Bennett was reminded of the many places she had never been, the many experiences she had never lived to enjoy.

She turned to him, a look of wonder transfixed on her pretty features. ‘Are we in space, Josh? Are we?’

‘We’re aboard a Cobra lightship, Ella. You always said you wanted to go into space.’

‘Hey!’ she exclaimed, turning to the viewscreen and staring out at the flickering tracer of starlight streaming around the contours of the ship. ‘This is fantastic, Josh! Thanks a million times!’

She jumped on to the padded seat before the view-screen, turned so that she could stare out at the void and glance from time to time at Bennett. She hugged her legs and gave a conspiratorial grin. ‘Is this my birthday present, Josh?’

‘Your birthday?’

He smiled, caught. Her birthday was on the twenty-seventh, tomorrow, and in the past he had always avoided communion with Ella on her birthday, the anniversary bringing to mind thoughts and memories too painful to relive. The SIH was programmed so that it would present a never-ageing Ella, an Ella forever ten years old and full of health. Shortly after her tenth birthday, more than twenty years ago, she had died.

Bennett remembered the birthday party at the hospital, the forced cheer of the occasion, the almost desperate desire of his mother and father to celebrate the day as if nothing was amiss. But Ella had been woozy with powerful sedatives, increasingly fraught from having to endure the protracted, almost desperate festivities of parents too scared to admit to themselves that this birthday would likely be her very last. Bennett had bought her a present, spent much of his savings on a small computer diary, perhaps with the subconscious hope that she would be able to complete the year’s entries. But she had been too tired to open it. A few days after her death, Bennett had walked out into the desert and buried it in the sand.

‘This is the best birthday present I’ve ever had, Josh! Are we going to Mars?’ Her eyes widened at another thought. ‘Are we going to Jupiter, Josh? All the way out to Jupiter!’

Bennett smiled. ‘Even further, Ella. We’re travelling faster than light towards the Rim of the galaxy.’

‘Far out!’ she breathed, fingering a strand of hair from her eyes and gazing out at the light show.

Bennett watched her, understanding now why he had summoned her.

‘Ella.’

She turned, still smiling.

‘The last time I spoke to you . . .’ he began.

She frowned with the effort of recollection. ‘Oh, four days ago - you’d just got back from Redwood Station, hadn’t you? And you said Daddy wanted . . . euthanalia?’

‘Euthanasia,’ Bennett said. ‘I visited him that day at the hospital. I was with him when he died. I . . .’ He knew why the admission was so hard to make. ‘I didn’t go to his funeral, Ella. It was today, the day we left Earth. Do you understand, Ella?’

She nodded, very serious. ‘Of course I do. It’s okay, Josh. Daddy would have understood.’

‘Do you think it matters, if you miss a person’s funeral?’

She pulled her thinking-cap face. At last she smiled. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, and with what might have been little-girl logic or computer sophistry went on: ‘I mean, the person doesn’t know you weren’t there, do they?’

He stared at her. He recalled what had happened, all those years ago, when he had returned from the desert after burying her stupid, useless diary. His mother had given him a suit to change into and told him that they were to attend Ella’s funeral, which seemed to Bennett in his youthful ignorance an event that could only compound his sense of loss. How could he have known that the funerary ritual was a necessary part of the grieving process, a cathartic experience that had to be endured?

Now he reached out to the touch-pad. Ella, in the process of swinging down from the seat, froze in mid-leap, one leg pointing to the floor, her mouth open to speak to him.

He stared at her suspended image and, involuntarily, found himself telling her: ‘The day of your funeral, Ella ... It was so hot. I still couldn’t believe you were dead. I mean, I knew, intellectually. I knew I’d never see you again, but something inside me just couldn’t accept the fact. I suppose it was too terrible an idea to grasp.’ He paused. ‘It was so hot and the thought of you in that coffin . . . They were going to cremate you, and I couldn’t take it. I’m sorry, Ella. I’m sorry I didn’t go to your funeral.’ He paused again, wondering why he had waited until now to admit the guilt he had kept buried for years.