“Martin.”
“Yes?”
“Will you be eating Wookie steaks when you’re in space?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I said, will you be eating Wookiee steaks when you’re in space?”
“No. Wookiees aren’t real. And if they were, I wouldn’t eat one because it might be Chewie.”
“Chewy, you mean?” said Jenny, sniggering, triumphant. He had fallen into her trap.
“Chewie. As in Chewbacca. First mate of the
Millennium Falcon
.”
“But you can’t eat a steak if it’s too chewy.”
“No, you can’t. Oh, I see. A pun.”
“Duh.”
“You’re very juvenile, Jenny.”
“Come on. Give us a smile. It’s funny.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s facile,” said Martin irritably. “It relies on the inadvertent homophonic resemblance between the words Chewie and chewy. It’s not that clever. Why did you bother?”
“Because I knew it would bug you.”
“And what’s the point of that?”
“I dunno. Why not?”
“Well, in future, don’t.”
“Yeah.” And suddenly Jenny was sad. “Anyway, what future?” And morose. “We don’t have a future. Unlike you.”
“Jenny...” chided her mother.
“It isn’t fair. It just isn’t. How come Special Needs Martin gets a ticket to another planet and we don’t? Why can’t we go with him? We’re his bloody family!”
“Jenny, that’s enough,” I said.
“We ought to be allowed to go too. What if he gets lonely?”
“I don’t get lonely,” Martin pointed out.
Jenny burst into tears. Claire slid across the plush leather bench seat to cradle her. It was hard to say which upset Jenny more: losing her brother or being obliged to stay behind. All said and done, she did love Martin. And she didn’t want to die, any more than I did, or Claire, or anyone.
“There isn’t room on
Pandora
,” I said to Jenny as soothingly as I could. “They can’t take everybody. Just be grateful that one of us is going. Martin met the criteria. Be glad for him.”
“Why should I be glad,” my daughter pouted, “when he isn’t even glad himself?”
“He is,” I said. “I’m sure he is.”
Just not so as you would notice.
T
HERE’S THIS RUMOUR
going round that some of them are faking it. These parents, they’ve schooled their kids to, like, pretend they’ve got Asperger’s, or bribed a doctor to give them a certificate. To get them on board, yeah? It’s despicable. But then, if I had a kid, maybe I’d do the same. You never know
.
W
E PULLED UP
virtually on the runway. No need for customs, immigration, passports, check-in, baggage inspection, any of it. A smooth, first-class ride straight onto the tarmac, where a dozen similar limos were already parked. Families stood in knots. A throng of journalists jostled behind barriers, shouting out questions, begging for interviews, and not far from them stood a horde of onlookers, the public, some cheering, some jeering, held back by a line of police. The racket was tremendous. There was a podium with a microphone and a PA system. The prime minister was due to make a speech shortly, a tightly-scripted homily of hope and good wishes.
Martin got out of the car. It didn’t seem to faze him, the enormity of this moment, the significance of it, the irrevocability. He could have been just paying a visit to the local Games Workshop branch in town, for all the excitement he demonstrated. Perhaps that was just as well.
“Will there be Seven Up on board?” was all he said. It was the one, the only carbonated beverage he could stomach. Other than milk, it was the only thing he drank.
“I’m not sure there will be, Martin,” I said. “I think we were told it would be shakes, power smoothies, that sort of thing.”
“Oh. Yes. Well, I don’t like them much.”
“You won’t have a choice. It’s interstellar travel, not popping out for a picnic.”
“I know. I was only asking. I’ll manage.”
Claire fussed over him, finger-combing his hair. Jenny moped by the limo, disconsolate. A cold wind blew. The sky was overcast, the clouds low. The plane and its shuttle hitchhiker would be lost from view mere moments after takeoff.
I looked up at the clouds and shivered in the chill of an unseasonably cold June day. The Incident, making its presence felt. The black blot of nanotech-gone-mad was already affecting weather patterns. It had altered the course of the Gulf Stream and the mean temperature of the Atlantic, which meant mild winters and rainy summers for Europe and beyond. The climate was destined only to get crazier. It was predicted that there would be terrible atmospheric disruption, thunderstorms of biblical proportions, hurricanes, tsunamis, the whole
Revelation
gamut of acts of God. Within five years, if not sooner, crop yields would go into steep decline, there would be mass starvation, death on an epic scale, followed by epidemics of typhus and cholera, and then, to add to the general cheery forecast, the planet itself would begin to wobble on its axis, its balance skewed by the relative density of the von Neumann replicators. Eventually things would arrive at a literal tipping point, when fully half of the world’s surface area was black, like a permanent eclipse, and the Earth would sheer from its orbital path, the whole delicate equilibrium of celestial mechanics utterly spannered. There was debate as to whether the planet would shoot off into outer space or be drawn in towards the sun, whether our mudball would freeze or burn. Either way, we, its inhabitants, were – what’s the technical term? – oh yes. Fucked. Well and truly fucked.
L
AST NIGHT, ANGELS
came to me. It wasn’t a dream, it was a vision. They told me everything is going to be fine. This is all part of God’s plan. If we just have enough faith, pray hard enough, the Incident will reverse itself. It will heal itself. The angels were beautiful. I’m so happy. I’m not making any of this up. It’s true. Don’t be afraid. Believe.
“T
HE LUCKY FEW,
” the prime minister said. “Chosen. Chosen not by committee, nor by lottery, but by natural selection. The fittest under the circumstances. A representative cross-section of a certain stratum of the population – pragmatic, efficient, dogged, regimented – who will take the human narrative on to the next chapter, continue our story elsewhere, on a distant world. I congratulate you, I envy you, I salute you...”
Blah, blah, blah. I tuned him out. There was only so much high-flown flannel you could endure, especially on the day you and your son were parting company for good.
“Martin,” I said. The time had come. “I love you. You know that.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“And you love me too, in your way. I’m sure of that.”
“If you say so.”
“I’m proud of you.”
“Thanks.”
“I couldn’t be happier for you. And if there’ve been times when I’ve been impatient with you, angry with you, lost my temper, then I’m sorry. I never meant to. It’s been difficult. We’ve tried our hardest, Mum and me. We’ve done everything we can to understand you and accept you.”
“Okay, Dad.”
“We’ll live on in you.”
“Genetically speaking, that’s true.”
“So remember us.”
“I imagine I will.”
I
JUST WANT
to say, I’m terrified. I don’t want to die. Everybody out there, do you hear me? I’m so scared. Johnny Nimbus? Is there an afterlife? Are we all going to heaven? Does anyone know? Please, someone, tell me.
A
ND THEN HE
was gone, strolling with his suitcase towards the mobile stairs that led to the shuttle entrance hatch. He was in a long line with all the other kids. Some were in their mid to late teens like him, the rest not much older than eleven or twelve. Yet all of them strangely adult, serious and sombre as they walked, here and there someone with an oddball gait, a peculiar hand twitch.
Clutching a sobbing Claire and Jenny, I waited for him to look back.
And waited.
All Martin had to do was turn, look at us, maybe raise a hand, possibly smile. That was all he had to do to prove he cared.
Not much.
He reached the stairs.
He climbed the stairs.
And I realised that the only option for me was to look away. So I did. I lowered my head. Turned my gaze aside. Concentrated on a spot on the tarmac to my left.
So that I would never have to know.
Because who wants posterity to deny them? Who can bear, not simply to be forgotten, but to be unacknowledged? Unrecognised? Dismissed as irrelevant by their most precious possession?
Seeing Martin go off to live was a kind of death.
K
EEP ’EM COMING
, Cloud Crowd! This is Johnny Nimbus, on the air, in the ether, wireless and tireless, your sentient social network, up all hours and hungry for chat. The shuttles are airborne, the pigeons are eagles, and the stars await, while down here we’ve got terminal cancer of the planet and the lights are going out one by one. So talk. Talk to each other. Talk to me. Tell my silicon soul your innermost secrets. I’m all heart and all ears. My hard drive is wide open to you, my memory stands at a petabyte and counting, and I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying right here to be your confidant and best friend to the end. To the very bitter end.
FEAST AND FAMINE
ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY
Adrian Tchaikovsky was born in Lincolnshire, studied and trained in Reading and now lives in Leeds. He is known for the Shadows of the Apt fantasy series starting with
Empire in Black and Gold
and currently up to Book 8,
The Air War
. His hobbies include medieval combat, and tabletop, live and online role-playing. More information and short stories can be found at
www.shadowsoftheapt.com
“M
OTHER,
P
RODIGAL, CONFIRM
crew and cargo secured, ready to depart. Telemetry incoming. Initial course mapped, confirm check on our exit solution. Prodigal out.”
(eleven minute pause)
“Prodigal, Mother. Telemetry confirmed flight path clear. Come on in. Mother out.”
(eleven minute pause)
“Mother, Prodigal. Commencing countdown, separation from Oregon in one minute.
“Twenty seconds.
“Ten... nine...”
C
OUNTING DOWN TO
oblivion, the final transmission of Doctor Astrid Veighl, as she patiently numbered the last seconds of her crew’s lives down to zero. And then she died.
There was a general conspiracy, back at Mother, to pretend that there might just be a radio glitch. Even as we made our approach towards her last known location – a course plotted to more decimal places than even God normally bothers with – there was a vacuous suggestion that Veighl would have passed us in the night, would reach Mother
any moment now
, and our four day investigatory flight would turn out just to be a criminal waste of fuel and resources.
After the abrupt cessation of any transmission from Veighl a swift decision had been made to send us out after her. ‘Swift’ meant a seven-hour prep for departure: that a returning, radio-mute Veighl would have arrived at Mother long before we reached her take-off point was the sort of maths that needed no computer. It was a subject that neither we nor Mother touched on when we checked in, as though to point it out would be to look in the box and kill a cat that we all knew was stone dead already.
Syrenka, to whose song everything danced, was an ugly green-purple bruise to starboard as we came in: a gas giant with twenty-one variously barren moons and enough of a debris ring to suggest the demise of at least five more. And in that ring, a secret, like the oyster’s pearl.
The computers back at Mother, our own Onboard, and Pelovska’s Expert System, had all put their heads together at our launch to plot out the sort of four-dimensional map that no unaugmented human mind could conceive of, so that when we kicked off from Mother on our fact-finder (nobody had ever said ‘rescue mission’ in the briefing) our course would keep us clear of each piece of the great field of murdered moon clutter that was Syrenka’s waist. Oregon, our destination, was one of the larger pieces of rock, too small for a moon, but making a large asteroid. Very loosely comparable in length and breadth to Oregon USA, in fact. Eventually some peeved astronomer would throw something from the classics at it, but for now it proudly carried the monicker of the Beaver State because someone back on Mother was homesick for Astoria.
“There’s another beauty.” Osman was designated pilot, which meant that, unless someone had dropped a decimal back at Mother, he was here to sightsee. He was referring to a rock tumbling past, less than half the size of Oregon and a hundred kilometres away: he had magnified the image to show the blue starburst flower of Anchorite. Or an Anchorite. Or some Anchorites. Veighl, the departed, had been working on the answer to that problem of nomenclature. Pelovska, our geologist and Expert System, had reviewed the raw data Veighl had sent before her decision to return home, and subsequent abrupt silence. The question had remained unanswered.
Gliese 876 had been the second extrasolar system reached by human technology. The supposed ‘earth-like planet’ present had been a bust, but the probe, programmed for pattern-recognition, had sent back one picture, just one, that sparked a furore back home. Passing through this very debris field within the shadow of Syrenka (then just Gliese 876f) – and minutes before becoming several billion dollars of metal pizza that must exist still on the side of some moonlet somewhere – it sent out an image very similar to what we were seeing now. There were plenty of them, in fact, throughout the debris ring and on some of the smaller moons – geometrically irregular crystal formations like sea-urchins clinging on in the vacuum of space.
Life!
had gone the cry, back home – the first indication that we might not be alone, and life within reach, just about, for a team that was willing to be severed from the planet of their genesis for decades. We liked to think that everyone back there hung on our every years-old word. Possibly nobody cared.