At the Edge of the Game (3 page)

I leave the
bathroom and sit on the chair by the window, staring out. I study the cigarette
lighter for a few moments, turning it over. It is engraved with an elaborate
letter C. Some lights are on in the apartment building across the street. People
are going about their evening activities - cooking, eating, watching
television. I wonder what they are watching. I reason that a television
programme might stimulate my mind out of its strange lassitude, but looking
around I find that the apartment contains no television, nor a radio, nor a
newspaper.

My eye is drawn
to one particular window across the street. A tough-looking man is doing
chin-ups, gripping a bar that must be fixed to the wall over the window. He
holds a big army-style dagger in his teeth. He wears a vest and shorts, both
khaki. I count his chin-ups. He does twenty-five while I watch. Then he drops
to the floor, still gripping the knife in his teeth, and begins push-ups. Of
these he does a hundred. His face is red with exertion. He seems to have
noticed my scrutiny - he is drawing the curtains.

The sky is full
of chaotically shifting lights and bands of colour. The lights of the city are
brighter than the evening sky, but only just. I can see two helicopters hover
low-down, close to the rooftops. One of them casts a searchlight on the side of
a building. Far away, across the narrow tail end of the Terminal Sea, barely
visible from here, is a single building much wider and higher than any other in
the city. It extends high, so high that its lights become indistinguishable
from the lights in the sky. It is known as… why, it is the Dublin City
Cylinder. Of course. Thus a segment of my memory is recovered, a neural pathway
reactivated, a volume of brain matter revived – I recall now that this city, my
native city, is Dublin. Dublin Far City, to be precise.

The thought
occurs to me that perhaps I am dreaming. I look about me. I feel the texture of
the material on the arm of my chair and the touch on my face of the evening
breeze coming in through the window. No, it's too complete, too real for this
to be a dream. Unsettling as it is, this has to be reality. I sink back into
the chair and try to relax, waiting for my proper senses to return. As the
night-time advances I watch the dancing lights of the sky as they mock the
static, orderly lights of the city.

George, gave your life for mine. You gave
me a chance. I didn’t think you had it in you. I hope you made it back to
Waterford. I’m looking at your picture in the locket. You looked happy when
this photo was taken. I wish we could go back and do everything differently.

I know how
she felt. How I would like to undo the decision that brought me here.

I ended up
on this strange empty Earth not meant for human beings through folly. In my
desire for solitude I made it my fate to end up scrabble in the dirt for traces
of the life I had deliberately left behind.

I set out on
a very long voyage to the stars. Relativistic time dilation saw to it that many
millennia passed before my return. And when I did return, it was in the
realisation that I had made a terrible mistake. It was not solitude I desired
after all. There was no freedom out there for me among the stars. The freedom I
sought, I now knew, was freedom from inner shackles, not outer ones. I finished
in a situation in which those inner bonds became tighter than ever before.

Upon my
fiery arrival on earth in the Nine Hundred and Eighty-third Century, I set up
the domed habitat in a natural alcove in the rocky gradient between the beach and
the forest. It clamped itself so tightly to the rock, had such structural
integrity, that only the most improbably powerful tidal wave or storm could
conceivably breach its walls or dislodge it. Within its plastiform hull I was
as secure as technology could make me. The potential dangers around my home
seemed to be few in any case. There were no predators and the weather was
clement for the most part. The seasons were little distinguished from each
other. When I considered how hostile this place could have been I knew I had
been extremely lucky.

I got to
know my place of exile slowly. I made cautious exploratory forays along the
smooth, black-sanded beaches, and penetrated inland as far as the slopes where
the trees began to thin out. I had not had an opportunity to view the lie of
the land as my spacecraft, the Vicissitudinale, plunged through the atmosphere
during its final, disastrous planetary re-entry, and it was on those slopes
that I first realised that I was living on an island.

In the
final moments before the ship sank to the floor of the bay, it ejected both
myself, enveloped in a buoyant survival suit, and the plastiform sphere, which
contained a host of machines and supplies. The sphere later transformed itself
into my habitat. Thanks to the machines, I had little concern about keeping
myself fed. They synthesised a range of foodstuffs out of the air and the soil.
I supplemented my diet with shellfish, as well as with nuts and berries from
the forest. In my first weeks in the bay, I sustained myself on plump and
gullible sea parrots, an ideal target for an inexperienced hunter such as
myself. I soon decided to let them be because of the piteous shrieks they gave
out them snared. The flesh of the blue-legged lizards tasted better in any
case, and unlike the parrots the lizards showed no emotion on the point of
death.

With a
small radar apparatus I was compiling a detailed contour map of the Moon's
strange new face. On clear nights I sometimes concerned myself with the
identification of the stars in the sky. Nothing in the heavens was quite as it
had been. With the aid of my telescope I was able to determine that the nearby
system of Centauri now had a dim fourth member, a smouldering brown dwarf with
Saturn-like rings. The brightest star in the sky was still Sirius, but it was
now as blue as Vega. Vega itself was gone, and there was a nebula that was
probably the cold remains of Betelgeuse.

One clear
evening, strolling down the beach just after sunset, I spotted a new, brightening
object close to the zenith. It quickly outshone everything else in the twilit
sky except the Moon. I went back to the habitat to point the telescope towards
it. Expecting to see a close-by asteroid or a nova, I was alarmed to behold a
double cylinder twenty kilometres from end to end. The telescope informed me
that it was close to the earth, braking, making adjustments to enter a lunar
orbit.

I went into
the habitat and shut off the radar antenna, fearing that its signal would
attract the attention of the incoming craft. With dismay I realised that the
one misfortune I had never thought would befall me in this place now seemed
imminent. My solitary refuge was in danger of being breached. It occurred to me
that it would be sensible to move away from the habitat for a while, to avail
of the cover of the forest, to await further developments from a place of
safety. I did not move, however. I decided to stay where I was. The months of
ease, I think in retrospect, had dulled my survival instinct.

For four days
I waited for something to happen. The cylinders remained steadfastly brilliant
each night, circling the Moon. But I was awoken early on the fifth morning by a
deep, intensifying rumble. I went outside, blinking in the glare of the low,
orange sun. Little waves broke on the black sand, disturbing the gulls that
scoured the beach for early-morning sustenance. As my eyes grew accustomed to
the light, I spotted a vapour trail moving eastward across the sky. It was an
aircraft, too high up to be seen as anything more than a silver dot. It swooped
southwards and disappeared behind the hills.

A little
while after, the massive silver bulk of the aircraft appeared over the trees
and banked, roaring like a beast, over the bay waters. It was quite a
conventional looking vessel, about a hundred metres long and fifty wide, with
two short delta wings from which its engines hung. Its tail fins formed a
distinctive vertical V-shape that gave me the feeling I had seen the craft
before. When it drew closer, I recognised its anachronistic rocket exhaust, and
the rows of small square windows on each side of the fuselage. The craft's
identity was confirmed by the words stencilled in plain Roman script on the
fuselage. Hovering over the beach was a spacecraft that belonged to the pages
of the history books – a vessel that had left the earth sixty years before I
was born. It was the legendary Unquiet Spirit.

The
Unquiet Spirit
touched down in a rising cloud of black
sand, which blew inland and dispersed over the dense vegetative canopy. The
door below the cockpit window swung open slowly. A high metal stairway unfurled
and touched the ground. An old man stepped forth. He squinted in the brightness
of the daylight. He looked down at me from the top of the stairs.

‘Hello,’ he
said.

‘Hello,’ I
responded. The word came out as a half-cough. My throat was dry. I said it
again.

He seemed
to be as much at a loss as I was.

‘Are you
Dexter Innes?’ I called.

His
surprise was obvious. ‘Yes.’

He
descended the stairs with difficulty. He was far more infirm in those first
days than ever after as long as I knew him. He was bent over and so thin that I
could clearly see the structure of his skull beneath the sunken flesh of his
face. He had long white hair tied back carelessly in a way that very
misleadingly made him look bohemian. His eyes were dark and tired. I guessed he
was about eighty years old. Weeks later he looked the sixty-five he actually
was. The pictures I had seen of him had been taken in his late twenties, just
before he left Earth on his great expedition to the stars.

He stepped
onto the sand and bent in an ungainly fashion to touch it with his hands. I
resisted an impulse to step forward and support him. It was well that I did. I
was to learn later that Dexter would not have taken kindly to such a gesture. He
ran the fine grains through his fingers. I noticed how blotched his skin was,
how riven with burst capillaries.

‘It’s home,’
he said. ‘The smell, the feel of it. Like nothing else anywhere.’ He shook my
proffered hand. ‘What year is it... ah, what's your name?’

‘I am Xian
Chu. According to my equipment, it's 98,348.
Anno Domini
.’

He squinted
down the beach at the red dome of my distant habitat. He looked sad and
grotesque with his back hunched, his thick white eyebrows hooding his eyes. ‘My
ship says it's 98,351. Likewise,
Anno
Domini
. A discrepancy.’

‘I saw your
ship manoeuvring into lunar orbit. Where have you come from?’

‘From the
Betelgeuse nebula and a dozen star systems between here and there. Let me ask you
the same question.’

‘I was also
an interstellar traveller. I left Earth in the year 2342 on a voyage to a
globular cluster in the Fornax constellation.’

‘So you
left Earth decades in my future. You obviously know who I am.’

‘Of course.
You and your wife, you went down in history as the first interstellar
colonists, the first to leave for the stars on a one-way trip.’

‘A one-way
trip. That’s not the way it turned out, is it?’ He looked back up the stairway
of the Unquiet Spirit, then paused. ‘Mr Xian, can you come aboard? I may need
some help with my wife.’

His wife. Brinnilla
Innes. The beautiful Brinnilla Innes, whose exceptional beauty had survived to
my time in the form of photographs and video archives.

I followed
Dexter up the steps to the entrance to the spacecraft.

Through the
spare room window I am watching the rain splash and steam on a glowing street
lamp. Is it really happening? It’s been months since it last rained in Dublin.
Now that it has returned, it is torrential, thunderous, relentless. So much for
the experts. We have a moist weather system and new fresher air that tastes
different and feels different, evokes a host of forgotten sensations. The TV
today showed rain pelting down in Mayo, even while Dublin still baked under a
hot sun. They said that by evening the storm would reach the city, and they
were right.

Now the cars are
crawling past in low visibility. Wide, ever-widening streams fill the gutters.

Helen’s standing
at the door. She’s dressed in a light nightgown. There’s something about her,
the look in her eyes, or the way she’s moving, or perhaps it’s something else,
but she seems different. I want to touch her, taken by an old feeling revived,
a memory of a feeling, a state I had forgotten.

‘I need to tell
you something.’ Her mood does not match mine. She sounds serious.

‘What is it?’

‘I’m sorry. I
should have told you before. I’m pregnant.’

I bump against
the window, find myself sitting on the sill looking up into her face.

‘I’ve known for
a while. I didn’t tell you because… I don’t know.’

Did I suspect?
Did I not discern something, trace alterations in body chemistry feeding back,
small disturbances in established causal patterns, modulated indications in
spreading thought waveforms?

Not a good time
materially, nor in many other ways. Still… I think we were both hoping this
would happen. And – unexpected, this – all of a sudden I perceive the certainty
of my own death. Another human station reached. No doubt that the ultimate one
lays ahead. No matter. As long as this child is born and lives well I think I
will have lived an adequately human life.

‘I was hoping
you’d be happy,’ she says.

Do I look
unhappy? ‘I am. Of course I am.’

‘Do you mind
that I didn’t tell you?’

I stand up and
put my arms around her.

She’s crying. ‘What
is it?’

‘You’ll be a
good father, won’t you, George?’

‘Of course I
will.’

She clutches me.

‘I’ll find work.
Don’t worry.’

‘There’s an
appointment with the consultant next week. Will you go with me?’

A strange and
vaguely troubling question. ‘Of course I’ll go.’

Through the open
window come two refugees from the deluge - flitting moths, autumn-dwellers that
live and die in a time of decline. They sense the change, heed the body-urge to
seed some cranny if they can. Soon they’ll be hollow keratin shells mixing with
the soil, dissolved well before any of their offspring stir and emerge weak
into a fresh world.

In the bedroom
we lie down together, watching undulations of rain make patterns of windowpane
distortion on the wall opposite. The rhythmic drumming is soothing, and she
falls asleep. I kiss her cool forehead and ease away, crossing the room to draw
the curtains together. Father. I try and fail to comprehend the word. To that
end, best instead to aim for emptiness, be right in the now. Perceive
surroundings. The room is seen through a distorting lens. The raindrops tap on
the glass and roll downwards. The sky-luminescence penetrates through the
clouds out over the Terminal Sea, casting lights of different colours on the
water. It also casts milky light along one side of the Cylinder, revealing how
the structure extends high up into the clouds and touches the solid ceiling of
the sky. The wind strengthens and the rain strikes the glass with greater force
and frequency. I can no longer see anything of the outside except streaks of
colour on a dark background. I shiver, though the room is warm.

I think I
remember that my name is Leo. I pick up the cigarette lighter on the coffee
table. It's Helen's lighter - her initial is engraved on one side. I gave it to
her… when, I can't recall. Neither can I recall her face. She's my wife - that
much I know. But I don't know where she is or how long she’s been gone. It's as
likely a few minutes as a few days.