Especially when you're almost one thousand astronomical units out in space. Almost there, the first rung of the ladder. Next Thursday is the day. Oh, that bottle of champagne that's been waiting for so long. Oh, the parallax view! I have the equal of the best astronomical equipment in all of near-Earth space at my command, and a view of the universe that no one has ever had before; and using them has made me the only astrophysicist ever to win a Ph.D. in deep space. Talk about your fieldwork.
Strange to think that if the Forward Observatory had massed less than its thousand-plus tons, I would have been replaced by a machine. But because the installation is so large, I, in my infinite human flexibility, even with my infinite human appetite, become the most efficient legal tender. And the farther out I get, the more important my own ability to judge what happens, and respond to it, becomes. The first—and maybe the last—manned interstellar probe, on a one-way journey into infinity … into a universe unobscured by our own system's gases and dust … equipped with eyes that see everything from gamma to ultra-long wavelengths, and ears that listen to the music of the spheres.
And Emmylou Stewart, the captive audience. Adrift on a star … if you hold with the idea that all the bits of inert junk drifting through space, no matter how small, have star potential. Dark stars, with brilliance in their secret hearts, only kept back from letting it shine by Fate, which denied them the critical mass to reach their kindling point.
Speak of kindling: the laser beam just arrived to give me my daily boost, moving me a little faster, so I'll reach a little deeper into the universe. Blue sky at bedtime; I always was a night person. I'm sure they didn't design the solar sail to filter light like the sky … but I'm glad it happened to work out that way. Sky blue was always my passion—the color, texture, fluid purity of it. This color isn't exactly right; but it doesn't matter, because I can't remember how anymore. This sky is a sun-catcher. A big blue parasol. But so was the original, from where I used to stand. The sky is a blue parasol … did anyone ever say that before, I wonder? If anyone knows, speak up—
Is anyone even listening? Will anyone ever be?
("Who cares, anyway? Come on, Ozzie—climb aboard. Let's drop down to the observation porch while I do my meditation, and try to remember what days were like.")
Weems, damn it, I want satisfaction!
SUNDAY, THE 8TH
That idiot. That intolerable moron—how could he do that to me? After all this time, wouldn't you think he'd know me better than that? To keep me waiting for twelve days, wondering and afraid: twelve days of all the possible stupid paranoias I could weave with my idle hands and mind, making myself miserable, asking for trouble—
And then giving it to me. God, he must be some kind of sadist. If I could only reach him, and hurt him the way I've hurt these past hours—
Except that I know the news wasn't his fault, and that he didn't mean to hurt me … and so I can't even ease my pain by projecting it onto him.
I don't know what I would have done if his image hadn't been six days stale when it got here. What would I have done, if he'd been in earshot when I was listening; what would I have said? Maybe no more than I did say.
What can you say, when you realize you've thrown your whole life away?
He sat there behind his faded blotter, twiddling his pen, picking up his souvenir moon rocks and laying them down—looking for all the world like a man with a time bomb in his desk drawer—and said, "Now don't worry, Emmylou. There's no problem …" Went on saying it, one way or another, for five minutes; until I was shouting, "What's wrong, damn it?"
"I thought you'd never even notice the few pages …," with that sidling smile of his.
And while I'm muttering, "I may have been in solitary confinement for twenty years, Harvey, but it hasn't turned my brain to mush," he said, "So maybe I'd better explain, first"—and the look on his face; oh, the look on his face. "There's been a biomed breakthrough. If you were here on Earth, you … well, your body's immune responses could be … made normal …" And then he looked down, as though he could really see the look on my own face.
Made normal. Made normal. It's all I can hear. I was born with no natural immunities. No defense against disease. No help for it. No. No, no, no, that's all I ever heard, all my life on Earth. Through the plastic walls of my sealed room; through the helmet of my sealed suit … And now it's all changed. They could cure me. But I can't go home. I knew this could happen; I knew it had to happen someday. But I chose to ignore that fact, and now it's too late to do anything about it.
Then why can't I forget that I could have been f-free …
… I didn't answer Weems today. Screw Weems. There's nothing to say. Nothing at all.
I'm so tired.
MONDAY, THE 9TH
Couldn't sleep. It kept playing over and over in my mind … Finally took some pills. Slept all day, feel like hell. Stupid. And it didn't go away. It was waiting for me, still waiting, when I woke up.
It isn't fair—!
I don't feel like talking about it.
TUESDAY, THE 10TH
Tuesday, already. I haven't done a thing for two days. I haven't even started to check out the relay beacon, and that damn thing has to be dropped off this week. I don't have any strength; I can't seem to move, I just sit. But I have to get back to work. Have to …
Instead I read the printout of the article today. Hoping I'd find a flaw! If that isn't the greatest irony of my entire life. For two decades I prayed that somebody would find a cure for me. And for two more decades I didn't care. Am I going to spend the next two decades hating it, now that it's been found?
No … hating myself. I could have been free, they could have cured me; if only I'd stayed on Earth. If only I'd been patient. But now it's too late … by twenty years.
I want to go home. I want to go home … But you can't go home again. Did I really say that, so blithely, so recently? You can't: You, Emmylou Stewart. You are in prison, just as you have always been in prison.
It's all come back to me so strongly. Why me? Why must I be the ultimate victim? In all my life I've never smelled the sea wind, or plucked berries from a bush and eaten them, right there! Or felt my parents' kisses against my skin, or a man's body … Because to me they were all deadly things.
I remember when I was a little girl, and we still lived in Victoria—I was just three or four, just at the brink of understanding that I was the only prisoner in my world. I remember watching my father sit polishing his shoes in the morning, before he left for the museum. And me smiling, so deviously, "Daddy … I'll help you do that, if you let me come out—"
And he came to the wall of my bubble and put his arms into the hugging gloves, and said, so gently, "No." And then he began to cry. And I began to cry too, because I didn't know why I'd made him unhappy …
And all the children at school, with their "spaceman" jokes, pointing at the freak; all the years of insensitive people asking the same stupid questions every time I tried to go out anywhere … worst of all, the ones who weren't stupid, or insensitive. Like Jeffrey … no, I will not think about Jeffrey! I couldn't let myself think about him then. I could never afford to get close to a man, because I'd never be able to touch him …
And now it's too late. Was I controlling my fate, when I volunteered for this one-way trip? Or was I just running away from a life where I was always helpless; helpless to escape the things I hated, helpless to embrace the things I loved?
I pretended this was different, and important … but was that really what I believed? No! I just wanted to crawl into a hole I couldn't get out of, because I was so afraid.
So afraid that one day I would unseal my plastic walls, or take off my helmet and my suit; walk out freely to breathe the air, or wade in a stream, or touch flesh against flesh … and die of it.
So now I've walled myself into this hermetically sealed tomb for a living death. A perfectly sterile environment, in which my body will not even decay when I die. Never having really lived, I
shall never really die, dust to dust. A perfectly sterile environment; in every sense of the word.
I often stand looking at my body in the mirror after I take a shower. Hazel eyes, brown hair in thick waves with hardly any gray … and a good figure; not exactly stacked, but not unattractive. And no one has ever seen it that way but me. Last night I had the Dream again … I haven't had it for such a long time … this time I was sitting on a carved wooden beast in the park beside the Provincial Museum in Victoria; but not as a child in my suit. As a college girl, in white shorts and a bright cotton shirt, feeling the sun on my shoulders, and—Jeffrey's arms around my waist … We stroll along the bayside hand in hand, under the Victorian lamp posts with their bright hanging flower-baskets, and everything I do is fresh and spontaneous and full of the moment. But always, always, just when he holds me in his arms at last, just as I'm about to … I wake up.
When we die, do we wake out of reality at last, and all our dreams come true? When I die … I will be carried on and on into the timeless depths of uncharted space in this computerized tomb, unmourned and unremembered. In time all the atmosphere will seep away; and my fair corpse, lying like Snow White's in inviolate sleep, will be sucked dry of moisture, until it is nothing but a mummified parchment of shriveled leather and bulging bones …
("Hello? Hello, baby? Good night. Yes, no, maybe … Awk. Food time!")
("Oh, Ozymandias! Yes, yes, I know … I haven't fed you, I'm sorry. I know, I know …")
(Clinks and rattles.)
Why am I so selfish? Just because I can't eat, I expect him to fast, too … No. I just forgot.
He doesn't understand, but he knows something's wrong; he climbs the lamp pole like some tripodal bem, using both feet and his beak, and stares at me with that glass-beady bird's eye, stares and stares and mumbles things. Like a lunatic! Until I can hardly stand not to shut him in a cupboard, or something. But then he sidles along my shoulder and kisses me—such a tender caress against my cheek, with that hooked prehensile beak that could crush a walnut like a grape—to let me know that he's worried, and he cares. And I stroke his feathers to thank him, and tell him that it's all right … but it's not. And he knows it.
Does he ever resent his life? Would he, if he could? Stolen away from his own kind, raised in a sterile bubble to be a caged bird for a caged human …
I'm only a bird in a gilded cage. I want to go home.
WEDNESDAY, THE 11TH
Why am I keeping this journal? Do I really believe that sometime some alien being will find this, or some starship from Earth's glorious future will catch up to me … glorious future, hell. Stupid, selfish, short-sighted fools. They ripped the guts out of the space program after they sent me away, no one will ever follow me now. I'll be lucky if they don't declare me dead and forget about me.
As if anyone would care what a woman all alone on a lumbering space probe thought about day after day for decades, anyway. What monstrous conceit.
I did lubricate the bearings on the big scope today. I did that much. I did it so that I could turn it back toward Earth … toward the sun … toward the whole damn system. Because I can't even see it. All the planets out to Saturn, all the planets the ancients saw, are crammed into the space of two moon diameters; and too dim and small and faraway below me for my naked eyes, anyway. Even the sun is no more than a gaudy star that doesn't even make me squint. So I looked for them with the scope …
Isn't it funny how when you're a child you see all those drawings and models of the solar system with big, lumpy planets and golden wakes streaming around the sun? Somehow you never get over expecting it to look that way in person. And here I am, one thousand astronomical units north of the solar pole, gazing down from a great height … and it doesn't look that way at all. It doesn't look like anything; even through the scope. One great blot of light, and all the pale tiny diamond chips of planets and moons around it, barely distinguishable from half a hundred undistinguished stars trapped in the same arc of blackness. So meaningless, so insignificant … so disappointing.
Five hours I spent, today, listening to my journal, looking back and trying to find—something, I don't know, something I suddenly don't have anymore.
I had it at the start. I was disgusting; Pollyanna Grad-student skipping and singing through the rooms of my very own observatory. It seemed like heaven, and a lifetime spent in it couldn't possibly be long enough for all that I was going to accomplish, and discover. I'd never be bored, no, not me …
And there was so much to learn about the potential of this place, before I got out to where it supposedly would matter, and there would be new things to turn my wonderful extended senses toward … while I could still communicate easily with my dear mentor Dr. Weems, and the world. (Who'd ever have thought, when the lecherous old goat was my thesis adviser at Harvard, and making jokes to his other grad students about "the lengths some women will go to protect their virginity," that we would have to spend a lifetime together.)
There was Ozymandias' first word … and my first birthday in space, and my first anniversary … and my doctoral degree at last, printed out by the computer with scrolls made of little x's and taped up on the wall …
Then day and night and day and night, beating me black and blue with blue and black … my fifth anniversary, my eighth, my decade. I crossed the magnetopause, to become truly the first voyager in interstellar space … but by then there was no one left to talk to anymore, to really share the experience with. Even the radio and television broadcasts drifting out from Earth were diffuse and rare; there were fewer and fewer contacts with the reality outside. The plodding routines, the stupifying boredom—until sometimes I stood screaming down the halls just for something new; listening to the echoes that no one else would ever hear, and pretending they'd come to call; trying so hard to believe there was something to hear that wasn't my voice, my echo, or Ozymandias making a mockery of it.
("Hello, beautiful. That's a crock. Hello, hello?")
("Ozymandias, get away from me—")
But always I had that underlying belief in my mission: that I was here for a purpose, for more than my own selfish reasons, or NASA's (or whatever the hell they call it now), but for Humanity, and Science. Through meditation I learned the real value of inner silence, and thought that by creating an inner peace I had reached equilibrium with the outer silences. I thought that meditation had disciplined me, I was in touch with myself and with the soul of the cosmos … But I haven't been able to meditate since—it happened. The inner silence fills up with my own anger screaming at me, until I can't remember what peace sounds like.
And what have I really discovered, so far? Almost nothing. Nothing worth wasting my analysis or all my fine theories—or my freedom—on. Space is even emptier than anyone dreamed, you could count on both hands the bits of cold dust or worldlet I've passed in all this time, lost souls falling helplessly through near-perfect vacuum … all of us together. With my absurdly long astronomical tapemeasure I have fixed precisely the distance to NGC 2419 and a few other features, and from that made new estimates about a few more distant ones. But I have not detected a miniature black hole insatiably vacuuming up the vacuum; I have not pierced the invisible clouds that shroud the ultra-long wavelengths like fog; I have not discovered that life exists beyond the Earth in even the most tentative way. Looking back at the solar system I see nothing to show definitively that we even exist, anymore. All I hear anymore when I scan is electromagnetic noise, no coherent thought. Only Weems every twelfth night, like the last man alive … Christ, I still haven't answered him.
Why bother? Let him sweat. Why bother with any of it? Why waste my precious time?
Oh, my precious time … Half a lifetime left that could have been mine, on Earth.
Twenty years—I came through them all right. I thought I was safe. And after twenty years, my facade of discipline and self-control falls apart at a touch. What a self-deluded hypocrite I've been. Do you know that I said the sky was like a blue par
asol eighteen years ago? And probably said it again fifteen years ago, and ten, and five—
Tomorrow I pass 1000 AUs.
THURSDAY, THE 12TH
I burned out the scope. I burned out the scope. I left it pointing toward the Earth, and when the laser came on for the night it shone right down the scope's throat and burned it out. I'm so ashamed … Did I do it on purpose, subconsciously?
("Good night starlight. Arrk. Good night. Good …")
("Damn it, I want to hear another human voice—!")
(Echoing, "voice, voice, voice, voice, voice …")
When I found out what I'd done I ran away. I ran and ran through the halls … But I only ran in a circle: This observatory, my prison, myself … I can't escape. I'll always come back in the end, to this green-walled room with its desk and its terminals, its cupboards crammed with a hundred thousand dozens of everything, toilet paper and magnetic tape and oxygen tanks … And I can tell you exactly how many steps it is to my bedroom or how long it took me to crochet the afghan on the bed … how long I've sat in the dark and silence, setting up an exposure program or listening for the feeble pulse of a radio galaxy two billion light-years away. There will never be anything different, or anything more.
When I finally came back here, there was a message waiting. Weems, grinning out at me half-bombed from the screen— "Congratulations," he cried, "on this historic occasion! Emmylou, we're having a little celebration here at the lab; mind if we join you in yours, one thousand astronomical units from home—?" I've never seen him drunk. They really must have meant to do something nice for me, planning it all six days ahead …
To celebrate I shouted obscenities I didn't even know I knew at him, until my voice was broken and my throat was raw.
Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 Page 9
