The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year - Volume Eight (82 page)

"Gallivanting, was it?" Thomas asked, stirring from the shadows in the hallway.

"Only as far as the bar."

"How'd you find it?"

"Your directions were perfect."

The old man smiled patiently. His teeth were crooked and yellow. "I mean," he said softly, "how was it?"

"Ah… It was good. I enjoyed it. Met a man named Bartley, I'm sure you know him."

"Oh, Bartley's a cute one alright. Wily, like."

Dale rubbed the side of his head. "I gathered that."

"Fierce interested in you now, I'd say."

"He was. Though less forthcoming about himself. I wonder, what is it he does exactly?"

"His brother killed three Tans in that business with the British."

"Right. But Bartley?"

Thomas laughed as he began up the stairs, slapping Dale on the back. "Sure, isn't he his brother's keeper, Dale? His brother's keeper."

W
hen the downpours finally ended the little village came into its own. Stone walls caught the new light and turned it back upon the darkest corners of the place. The streets began to glow, and, on their outskirts, brave flowers sprang from a frugal soil. Everywhere became warm and the sky assumed a welcome, almost Texan hue.

"This is our summer now," Bartley announced in the bar that afternoon, wiping his hands on his thighs and standing up. His crooked frame drew nods of approval from the other patrons. It seemed an event of some importance.

"You going somewhere?" Dale asked. The half-full glass in front of Bartley was conspicuous.

"The Blue Pool," the old man said, "Come on, if you like and we'll stand you the line."

That was how it started.

"You seem awful content," Bartley said at the end of that first week's fishing.

"Must be the company."

"All the same," McGovern said, cocking his head towards the grey hills, "would you not see The Burren?"

"I've no interest."

"Tis a place of beauty."

"So I've heard."

"You're a strange man, Dale."

"I've been called worse."

Their lines hung heavy in the water. Nothing was biting.

"I heard once," Bartley said, "that spaceships were tiled, and that twas Irish students working over there that glued them on."

Dale smiled. "Sure, on the outside. Ceramics to survive re-entry, but I don't know who attached them."

"Pity," Bartley said. "Pity now."

Beside him, McGovern shrugged.

"Twould be nice," Bartley went on, "to think of the contribution, like."

"Twould a'course," said McGovern.

Dale looked at the two of them, this grizzled pair, then shook his head and smiled. He closed his eyes and raised his head towards the sun. So unremarkable, he thought, and still so great. Turning away, he opened his eyes and caught the ghost-face of the Moon in daylight peeking through the afternoon. He allowed himself a look of happiness.

"What's that now?" Bartley asked. He never took his eyes off his line.

"I remember he was on the radio," Dale said. "Loud and clear. His first words out of the lander were 'Man, that's beautiful'."

"Who was that, then?"

"A friend of mine," Dale said. "Rodriguez. One of the men who died."

Bartley nodded.

Beside him, McGovern asked what it was like. He too was looking at the Moon now, the withered veins on his unshaven neck coaxed back to elasticity by the tilt of his blunt chin.

"Rock," said Dale. "He went on and on about the rock, the mountains and the boulders and the dust."

"Rock?" McGovern said. "Mountains and dust?"

"Sure you could see that here," said Bartley.

Dale grinned. "Could you see the colours in the grey? The red and orange and the yellow tints from the sun?" He laughed. "God, he wouldn't shut up about that. We could hardly get him to carry out his orders."

The two old Irishmen exchanged a look. Dale couldn't read it.

"You'd get the most of it here anyway," Bartley said. "The sun on the stone and all that. No knowing what you'd see."

"Sure isn't it all they go on about above in them hills?" McGovern added. "And they don't need any of them helmets or big white suits to see it."

"They're lucky," Dale said.

"Terrible lucky," Bartley nodded.

Dale smiled. "But can they see the Earth rising over the horizon the way the moon does here? That's what Rodriguez saw. He told us he was standing there, looking up at planet Earth, this great, blue oasis in the black velvet sky, and he said it was just too beautiful to have happened by accident…"

They were listening to him now, he saw, Bartley and McGovern with their grey heads cocked, though Dale didn't know what else to tell them. Technical particulars and numbers and dry facts would only spoil it, and Rodriguez only shared so much that anyone would call poetic. Instead, he reeled in his line and watched ripples echo all across the surface as his bait broke through from underneath. Earth, he realised, was covered mostly in water. A blue pool in the night of space. Its name was suddenly inadequate, powerless to convey its sheer, inexplicable abundance. Staring into the water, he found himself speaking without realizing.

"Rodriguez was talking to us afterwards," he said, "when he was back aboard
Aquarius
, and he told me he'd seen the whole world, all of it, all at once. Imagine that, every human being in existence, everything we are, all of it a size that if he reached out he could have plucked it from the sky. I'll never forget that," he said. "It was almost as good as being there."

"Almost?"

"Almost." Dale laughed again. He wasn't sure which one of them had said it, but it didn't matter. "We're explorers," he said. "Or at least we were; we should be. And no explorer ever knows exactly what he's going to find when he gets to where he's going, but every time we fly we add to what's known. Rodriguez, he helped me to learn something, you understand? About the grand scheme of things. Perspective, that's what I learned from him."

"Aye," McGovern said, licking his lips, "but what have you learned from us, I wonder?"

"I've learnt," Dale said slowly, "that there aren't any fish in this pond, are there?" He looked from McGovern to Bartley and back again, but the two old men had already started laughing.

B
lue skies and bright light. It was outdoors that Dale felt most at home in. All Irish people seemed to regard the world through doors and windows, he had noticed. Their view was blinkered, like the drawhorses in the etchings which hung on the walls of Catherine's dining room. When people here spoke of the land they did not mean the country or the state, they meant the field, some small enclosure within which they were snared by circumstance or greed. Whole lives here were bounded by the whitewashed sovereignties of dated bungalows or played out in discontent behind the cobweb-covered lens of guilty window panes.

And yet Dale surprised himself with what he loved about them, their history, their rancour hardening around them into flakes or scales, of all things their certainty in what cannot be seen. For everyone he had met here, a palm's rough lines were no less truthful than the dotted contours of a map. Myth and fact were interchangeable, reality a personal affliction.

"What was it like," he asked McGovern, "growing up around here?"

They sat with Bartley by the Blue Pool again, the sun baking all of them.

"I suppose it was the same as anywhere," the old man said. "We chased girls and went to matches and swam in the sea."

"Aye," said Bartley, "going round with your tongue hanging out."

"We played hurling," McGovern added. "Fastest field game in the world."

Dale squinted at him. "Is that a fact?"

"Oh yeah. But don't think we didn't know what it was ye were up to."

"Ye…?"

"Oh, he's been workin' on this one," Bartley said.

"Twas before my sister was married," McGovern began. "And she was still living with us, which is a long time ago now. I'd just started inside at Callaghan's and I was driving in and out of the city every day."

Dale turned to Bartley. "What's he talking about?"

"Your friends," the old man said, raising his eyebrows. "The men above."

"We'd to go to the neighbours," McGovern went on. "We'd still no TV ourselves."

Dale smiled. "The Moon landings," he said, getting it.

"Momentous!" McGovern was in full flight now. "No thought of course to the risks involved. Just those two lads bouncing around the place, like kangaroos the pair of them. The boys were all trying it at work the next day. I swear, old Roddy Callaghan himself, leppin' around the yard…" He looked at Dale.

"I'm sorry," the American said. "I don't know who that is."

"Ah," McGovern said sadly, "sure it doesn't… Never mind."

Between them, Bartley was shaking his head. "There was no television where I was. Had to see it in the papers next day. Yer lad Aldrin like the Michelin Man, setting up the flag as if he owned the damn place." He laughed. "I have to hand it to ye, that was a good one." He laid a hand on Dale's arm and nodded. A livery of age adorned his skin. McGovern's too, and Dale suddenly felt out of place.

"Why is it," the American asked, "that everyone's so old here?"

"Say what?"

"I mean," Dale said, "where are all the young people?"

"Sure here's one now," McGovern said, elbowing Dale gently in the ribs and indicating the path from the road where a meek spectre with a Methuselan gait tottered in their direction. It was Regan, a venal leprechaun of a man whom Dale had seen around the village.

"Is it yourself?" Bartley asked without looking away from the water.

"It is," Regan said, standing above them as if in judgment. "And tell me, gentlemen, how's the fishing?"

"Could be worse," McGovern said beneath his breath. "Could be better too."

Regan glowered at him. He stood crooked, with his weight resting on a walking stick. One eye, Dale saw, was perpetually narrower than the other. "We've never really had the chance to talk," he said to the American, "and I've been meaning to ask you, what was it like up there?"

Dale clinched his jaw. Someone must have told him. "I don't know," he said at last.

Regan leaned closer. "Sure, how could you forget a thing like that?"

"I was an alternate," he said. "A backup. I've never been up there."

"Some other lad went?"

"Yeah, some other lad."

Regan licked his lips. "So you never flew?"

"I flew combat over Iraq. I flew experimental planes to the edge of space. I earned my wings."

"But not... up there?"

"No."

"They told me," Regan said slowly, "you were an Astronaut."

"That's right."

"But then–"

"The criteria," Dale said, "is altitude." He held Regan's stare.

"Ah now," McGovern said, "would you ever leave the man alone."

"I'll not be told what to do," the interloper snapped back.

"The fish," Bartley said quietly, "are finally biting."

Dale ignored him and turned to the newcomer. "And you are?"

"He's a Peace Commissioner," McGovern said, spitting the words. "It's nothing what you think."

"The criteria," Regan said, "is good character."

"The criteria is arse-licking," McGovern said. "And no better man for it."

"I take offence to that."

"Tis a pity you won't take it somewhere else."

Twisted over his line, Bartley cackled quietly and Dale turned his gaze back out to sea. Regan drew himself away from three fishermen, as if to say well then, so be it.

"I might see you later," he declared to no one in particular, and gradually he shuffled off until he disappeared into the middle distance.

McGovern shook his head. "Thinks he's lord and master, that man does." He leaned in close to the American. "You should fight him."

"Fight him?" It was Bartley, cackling so loud that the pipe nearly left his lips. "Tis not a movie, Gerry."

McGovern folded his arms. "Twould still be right."

"I'm not here to start fights," Dale said.

"Sure twas that begrudger started it." He raised an arm and pointed after Regan.

"There're guys like that all over," Dale said.

"The Man on the Moon," Bartley said, rocking back and forth, and laughing to himself. He stabbed at the sky with his pipe.

"Would you ever put that thing away?" McGovern said.

The old man grinned at him through yellow teeth. "Sure, why would I?" he asked. "Don't I like my poison neat?"

R
egan was a troublemaker, but there was no denying he was good at it. What he said had stuck in the American's craw and the rest of the day hadn't shaken it. To most of these people, Dale realised, he was just the astronaut –
the
astronaut – and he had gotten used to that even though it wasn't true. To have had it called out unsettled him because Rodriguez had been the astronaut, a number one aviator with nothing ruffled but his hair. Beside him Dale was only competent, next on the rotation for sure, but not flying at anything like that altitude. Regan had shown him up, and Dale felt sick that it had taken someone like that to bring him back to Earth. He shook his head. Ego was a part of his job but he had let it run amuck here. Where was his control, the better part of being a pilot?

When he walked back into the village he was angry, angry about Regan, angry about the priest's continued absence; he was angry at himself, at how quickly he had succumbed to his own tacit celebrity. He sat in the bar until it was dark outside and thought of that damn newspaper lying in his room. He resolved to burn it and called for another whiskey.

Regan, when he arrived hours later, quickly smelt his opportunity on the American's breath. "Well now," he said, "we can finally have that chat."

"I'm not really in the mood."

"Ah, we'll have none of that," Regan motioned to the bartender for a pint.

Dale sighed deeply. He hunkered over his drink and resigned himself to Regan's company. Sometimes in flight you go into a spin; nothing to do but throttle down, flatten out your surfaces, turn your rudder the opposite way and hold. He readjusted himself to face the old man.