Simple: I can’t.
Meanwhile, the metaphoric seedpods of Annie’s towers have begun to rattle and split. Our corridors ring. The children dance, wonder, explore, scuffle, and sing. Kazimierz Mikol, I feel sure, has taken both a powder and a double dose of refined and amplified bear’s blood: ursidormizine.
* * *
Our G-Tower mess is draped festively about with acetane banners. Through it drifted a smell like fried ozone and the piped-in strains of an old song called, if repetition of a single phrase means anything, “I’m So Dizzy.”
Thich Ngoc Bao, the astrophotographer Nita Sistrunk, and I sat at a table over our trays. Dean huddled in an obsolescent VidPed near the door, spinning the control ball with his palm. (He won’t use virch goggles; their simulated environments cut him off too thoroughly from me, and that scares him.) Hiller Nevels, a pilot and maintenance tech, swaggered over from the autodispenser to join us.
“… detected Eppie’s heliopause,” Bao was saying. “So we will in fact rendezvous with the system.”
“You doubted we would?” Nita said.
“Eppie’s heliopause?” Hiller said. “What’s that?”
“Did you never doubt, Nita?” Bao took a bite out of his steaming oystershell pasta and its garlic-spinach filling. He swallowed. “One downphase, I had a six-month-long nightmare, complete with sound and motion effects. Annie dropped like a stale doughnut into a Kerr singularity and whirled around its glowing mouth for about twelve eternities. Frame-dragging, you know. I mummified in my biorack. So did everybody else.”
“Cheerful talk,” Hiller said.
“Eppie’s heliopause is the very edge of the Epsilon Eridani system,” Nita told Hiller. “Where the star’s solar wind hits the charged particles in interstellar vacuum.”
“Isn’t the Barricado Stream the edge?” Hiller said.
A star’s energy influence, Bao explained, extends well beyond its farthest planet or cometary cloud. Low-frequency radio emissions can undulate a dozen billion miles into the obsidian emptiness surrounding a star.
As Bao spoke, I watched Dean swaying in the VidPed, slapping the control ball. I could see his virtual self—a chunky two-dimensional figure with a feathered spear—stalking a herd of electronic ostriches on a veldt whose real-world equivalent long ago turned into tourist hotels, tennis courts, and golf courses.
Dean didn’t care about that. The control ball was easy to spin; the figures on the screen made him laugh. His chuckle, along with the way his head lurched gleefully, warmed my heart, almost as if Lily had rubbed my chest with some sort of thermotherapeutic cream.
Without alerting the others, I picked a comppad off my tunic’s carrypatch and began to punch out some verses. I struggled, recasting each stanza three or four times before moving on. During this effort, Annie and my friends ceased to exist for me.
In the end, I had my entire effort almost, if not quite, the way I wanted it:
A starchild in a VidPed cage
Unwraps himself, with deadpan glee.
Such fragile tissues disengage,
Such guileless beauty in debris.
Bafflingly, he molts and fledges,
Unwrapping in order to dress.
By this divestment, he pledges
To put on a scarecrow success.
Never has he touched a bird:
A maypop, an eggling, a flame.
In the beginning cracked a word,
The broken promise of his name.
I hear lark song where my fellows
Discern but babble, vocal cheats.
Take away your amped-up cellos,
Leave me only DeBoy’s bleats.
With no ulterior intent,
He cocks and grins at every sign:
Litmus test or test-tube infant,
Telescope or Colombo twine.
So watch his palm atop the ball,
A misfit’s flesh on spinning chrome:
Just now a shade on spectral veldt,
But next my son on our New Home.
I looked up to find my friends eyeing me with amusement. How long had I occupied myself writing my poem? Even Hiller, the last of us to sit down, had polished off his meal and was staring at my comppad.
“Another poem?” Bao said. “Well, you have to let us see it. If it’s bad manners to tell secrets in front of one’s dinner companions, concealing a poem composed at table is also rude. Surely.”
“The rudeness is writing it in front of us,” Nita said. “He might as well’ve sat here picking his nose.”
Hiller guffawed. “That depends on the poem. Or the nose.”
Bao reached across the table. “Give.”
I handed him the comppad. I had no qualms about showing around the product of my creative withdrawal. Keats need not fear even a partial eclipse of his immortality, but no other soul this far from home—with the self-proclaimed exception of the Pakistani sferics specialist Ghulam Sharif on U.N.S. Fritz Zwicky—can rival my versifying prowess. Other expedition members may scribble confessional, or hortatory, or occasional poems (if you look, you can find the results of their activity on toadstool units everywhere about), but I (humorously) regard my challengers as amateurs or hacks.
“Prepare to fall at my feet in veneration.”
“Cripes,” said Nita. “Self-praise is no praise at all.”
“I unequivocally agree, Ms. Sistrunk,” I said.
“You do?”
“Sure. But no praise is also no praise at all. I blow my own horn to add a little dressing to the silence.”
Bao began to scroll the comppad. He read each stanza aloud for the others. He did so with a pitch of feeling that humbled me: I could hear the hiccups in my poem’s flow, the off-speed diction, the bungled metrics—hiccups for which Bao’s sensitive reading almost compensated.
“What’s an eggling?” Hiller asked.
“A little egg,” Nita ventured. “What else?”
I said, “I don’t know. Something hard like a stone, dense like a black hole, and life-packed, potentially, like an ovum. See? Eggling.”
“What does it mean?” Hiller asked. “Not just eggling, the whole poem?”
“That he loves his son,” Bao said. “And looks forward to raising him to manhood on a brave new world.”
I could add nothing to that, and when Bao gave me back my comppad, Nita began talking about heliopause again, the savory immanence of planetfall.
* * *
Our fleet pulses onward, skimming at a modest moiety of light-speed the interpenetrating membranes of space-time. The Barricado Stream—inside the hard-to-mark heliopause, outside the orbit of a planetary iceball—rushes nearer.
Toward the end of the twentieth century, perturbations in Epsilon Eridani’s motion revealed that it most likely dragged planets, if not a gravity sink, around it. Observations made from the Infrared Lunar Astronomical Telescope (IRLAT) on Darkside in the 2030s, along with the fact that Eppie emits an infrared signal hinting at protoplanetary debris, led scientists to posit that the system had five planets, including one in Eppie’s zone of habitability, and possibly an outer dust band. We sent out an unmanned probe to confirm these hypotheses, but our armada—dispatched nearly thirty years later, when Ju Tong technology, multinational money, and worsening environmental/social conditions converged to make the launch seem practical if not imperative—has long since outrun the U.N. probe.
Fortunately, shipboard telescopes and Thich Ngoc Bao’s relativistic calculus have validated the presence of these worlds. Even more convincingly, so has a probe that we dropped over the side of Zwicky before commencing deceleration; as our arks slowed, this probe kept going, making a full-speed transit of the system and thereby detecting the cometary matter in the Barricado Stream by radar echoes.
In any case, New Home does exist, along with a fiery inner planet that a wag among us tagged Red Hot. Three outer planets received equally silly names: Jelly Belly, Jawbreaker, and Cold Cock. Moreover, spectroa-nalysis carried out on Chandrasekhar i
ndicates that New Home has water.
A couple of days ago, because Dean requires extra work and attention if I wish him to reach his full potential, I took him into the geology bay under Annie’s observatory deck. I planned not only to do some elementary professional review but also to show him a grabbag of tray specimens: a quartz crystal, a piece of obsidian, a leaf of limestone, a fossil imprint, a geode. Estsuko Endo, after all, has too much to do to spend her every waking moment amusing Dean or devising therapeutic games to educate him.
I don’t. My real work begins when our advance scientific teams set down on Epsilon Eridani II (even the hackneyed New Home seems a better name than that) to map, explore, sample, test, and catalogue. Besides, I’m Dean’s father: I insisted that this expedition permit him to be.
Dean handled each specimen with clumsy delight. Except for the collection’s lone geode, the specimens are small to the point of parody. In fact, many soil and mineral types exist on Annie only as wafer-thin cross sections on glass slides for microscope viewing.
I half feared that Dean would slice himself on the crystal. (His fingers have the nimbleness of porcelain.) Or would drop the trilobite fragilely preserved in Ordovician clay. Or would lose the stalagmite tip that rested on his single-creased palm like a Lilliputian dagger.
But, chortling, goggle-eyed, Dean managed to hold on to, examine, and return to me every item. He was as respectful of them as, on his sixth birthday, he’d been of the glittery stars in the observatory’s viewport.
“Whuh’s thiz?”
“Schist.”
“Durdy word?”
“No. Schist. A flaky, stress-formed rock. Be careful, you’ll peel away a mica layer.”
“Sch-schid?”
I started to say, “No, schist,” when I heard a man behind us laughing, just inside the bay’s entrance. I looked over my shoulder to see (for the first time since Dean’s visit to the observatory) Kazimierz Mikol.
My gut clenched, a spasm of déjà vu. What was Mikol doing in a work-and-study laboratory authorized for, if not expressly limited to, Annie’s geology contingent? Would he argue that my six-year-old retardate had no business here? No business, for that matter, anywhere?
“He does like rocks, doesn’t he?” Mikol said.
That remark instantly soured the look I turned on him. “My sweet Jesus,” I murmured.
“You mistake me for someone else,” Mikol said. “Look. I came up here at Ms. Endo’s request. She wanted me to tell a man in here—identity then unknown to me—that his son—ditto—would have a therapy session with her tomorrow at ten-hundred hours.”
“Why didn’t she intercom?”
“A whole tribe of ankle biters had her occupied. Besides, your sanctorum was on my way. I need to eyeball the harp strings sweeping down from the arc opposite G-Tower. That all right with you?”
Harp strings meant fuel spokes. I stared hard at Mikol.
“Consider yourself duly messaged, Dr.—?”
“Gwiazda.”
“As you like.” He pivoted on his heel.
“Wade,” Dean said. He meant wait, and Mikol turned back to face him.
Dean held up the geode in our collection. He tilted this queer, split rock so that Mikol had to look directly into its crystal-laced cavity. Its hollow glittered like an in-fallen spiderweb in a splash of sunlight, and Mikol stared into it as if hypnotized.
“Spokes,” Dean said. “Fyool spokes.”
Those words seemed to stun Mikol. He looked from the reflective cavity of the geode to the dull, flat face of the boy that Lily and I, in his view, had selfishly inflicted on the limited resources of our ark.
“He means the crystals,” I said. “They must remind him of the spokes to our matter-antimatter rocket.”
“I know what he meant.”
“He saw those spokes only once,” I insisted. “The same day Lily and I gave him the stars.”
“There’s a mobile of the Annie in the polyped. He’s seen that dozens of times, surely.”
“Its spokes don’t glow like the real ones. In the glare of the exhaust stream, the real ones are … magical.”
“That doesn’t make his equating the two a wonderwork.”
Mikol refused to look away from me. And, out of atavistic machismo or scientific curiosity, I refused to look away from him. “But he’s just linked you, a fuel-systems specialist, to the ‘spokes’ in the geode.”
“He has ears. He heard me say fuel spokes. So he has a bare-assed modicum of motherwit. Hallelujah.”
“What about the associative leap he just made? Not, by the way, from your words to you, but from the geode’s crystals to Annie’s weblike fuel lines?”
Dean kept pointing the geode. The way he was gripping it, it reminded me of some sort of exotic weapon. I imagined a burst of energy flashing from it and splitting Mikol’s chest cavity open, to reveal … what? The gemlike perdurability of his heart? The flowing rubies of his blood? The hard-edged latticework of his myocardia?
“Do you think that on that basis I should declare the kid a genius?” he asked me.
“Human would do. Just human.”
“Tiglathpileser was human, it’s rumored. And Caligula. So were a whole host of twentieth-century tyrants. So presumably were the brain-dead idiots who turned the Earth into a treeless detention camp. Being human, I’m afraid, doesn’t automatically confer demigod status on anyone.”
“Human beings made these arks.”
“Praise Noah for that irrefutable insight! Which onboard system did your genius offspring invent?”
This retort shut my mouth; it also had a spirit-dampening effect on Dean. He lowered the geode and made a queer, gargling moan in his throat.
No longer in the geode’s sights, Mikol backed out of the workroom. I followed him.
In the corridor, Mikol pointed a finger at me to hold me at bay. “Two run-ins with Gwiazda and his hairless baboon,” he said. “Well, this second run-in was a lot less amusing than the first. A third meeting may result in the total overthrow of my antihostility training, the blanket neutralization of my daily serenotil boosters.”
“What’s the matter with you, anyway?”
“Nothing. I dislike mongoloids. In my view, an entirely rational prejudice.”
“You’ve overstepped yourself there,” I said.
“Well, so what? I’ll go down-phase again after solving my hydrogen-flow problem. And stay zonked until Annie enters the Barricado Stream. With any luck, I won’t collide with Gwiazda and Son ever again, either aboard this ark or down on New Home, where I plan to homestead a small farm off limits to fat little mongoloids and their selfish Sambo daddies.”
“You bastard,” I said.
“Check out the little bastard in your lab,” Mikol replied. “More than likely, he’s accidentally swallowed a rock.”
Once again, he strode away before I could seize his arm or mount a reply. Under my breath, though, I murmured, “Honky,” not knowing where the word had come from; even so, it seemed a crass betrayal of the Gwiazdas, who, in innocence and love, had bought my life and raised me.
* * *
“Whurh’s Lily?” Dean asked.
“You know as well as I. Asleep. She’s always asleep. It’s her calling.”
“I wand to see her.”
“Uh-uh. You only think you do. We’ve done this before, Dean. The damned bioracks spook you.”
“I want to see her,” Dean said, struggling to enunciate.
“No you don’t.”
“Yez. Yez I do. Take me to see her.”
Dean and I had long since retired to our mezzanine-level quarters. The hour was nearly midnight (as if you could not legitimately say the same of any hour of our arkboard journey), and I wanted Dean to go as soundly asleep as his mother. But an afternoon birthday party in the polyped, and then an evening of restored and colorized Our Gang comedies over our link to Heraclitus’s vidfiles, had left him wrought up and obstinate. I could tell that an all-out battle now wo
uld snap my brittle self-control faster than would appeasement, even with a visit to the bioracks thrown in as Dean’s unwarranted spoils.
(Spoils. Evocative word.)
Actually, Dean seldom tries to stand his ground against me or anyone else. Agreeableness and conciliation define him the way stealth and curiosity define a cat. Better for harmony’s sake, I rationalized, to indulge him tonight in this unusual display of resoluteness than to shatter my peace of mind—what peace of mind?—by playing the tyrant.
Ten minutes after midnight, then, we dropped to the lowest level in G-Tower, a fluorescent dungeon of computer monitors and foam-lined ursidormizine pods, and asked the security tech Greta Agostos to pass us through the barred entrance of Annie’s hibernaculum.
“On what business?” Greta asked.
“Guess. Dean wants to see his mother.”
Greta rubbed her knuckles furiously—but not hard—over Dean’s head. “She won’t be very talkative, DeBoy. And you and your dad will have to submit to a search. You know, a ticklish patting down.”
“The only reason I came,” I said.
But that “patting down” remark was a standard security-tech joke. In fact, without even touching us, Greta ran an aural fod—foreign-object detector—around our entire bodies with the impersonal deftness the very opposite of sensual. Her fod, by the way, absolved us of trying to smuggle into the hibernaculum any sort of weapon, drug, or softdrink IV-drip.
The security bars retracted upward, and Dean and I passed into the eerie twilight mausoleum of the bioracks. The air in this circular hibernaculum has a wintry blue tinge and a biting regulated chill. You can identify our quasi-corpses, by the way, either by reading their nameplates or by looking through the pods’ frost-traced visors.
We walked the hibernaculum’s perimeter—tap-tap-tapping on its naked metal floor—until we had reached the biorack of Lily Aliosi-Stark. Her pod rests on the chamber’s third strata, not quite two meters up, and I always have to lift Dean so that he can gaze through the rime-crazed faceplate at his mother’s pale but lovely profile.
“Sleebin beaudy,” Dean whispered, full of awe. “My mama’s jes like sleebin beaudy.”
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 65
