“It’s all right, Dean,” Mikol was saying. “Look. It’s okay. A make-believe lizard. See. A plaything.”
Despite the threat of ear damage, I picked Dean up.
Meanwhile, Etsuko Endo, Thom Koon, and Sidonia Montoya came rushing in to us from the main polyped. A covey of children in bright paper tunics, muu-muus, dhotis, or jumpsuits crowded in behind the adults to satisfy their own curiosity. One little girl patted Dean’s rump and said, “Shhh, shhh,” as I also tried to shush him, but the others either flocked to the dinosaur or clamped their palms over their ears.
“Holy crow!” Dean screamed. “Mon-stuhrrr!”
“He could mean you,” I told Kazimierz Mikol.
Mikol moved one hand in a rapid back-and-forth arc to keep the kids from the fabriloon. “I’m sorry, Gwiazda. You can’t think I wanted this. I figured the instant manifestation of a dinosaur would, well, tickle him.” He slapped the knuckles of Danny Chung-Barnett, who had weaseled far enough into the corner to grab the effigy’s turquoise scrotum.
“Can’t you de-pop it?” Etsuko asked over Dean’s spookily modulating wail.
“Of course. See this.” Mikol pointed to a navy-blue spot behind the fabriloon’s left eye. “Watch.”
He jabbed the spot. With a flatulent keen, the Allosaurus collapsed, rekernelized itself, and began to hiss—so that we could find it again. Mikol grabbed up the tiny eye-eye before the Chung-Barnett kid could pounce on and flee with it.
Dean stopped wailing. Chagrined, Mikol told Etsuko, Thom, and Sidonia what had happened. Herding children before them, they went back to the polyped’s main activity area, leaving Mikol to struggle with the necessity of apologizing to Dean. To his credit, Mikol apologized.
Insofar as I had perceived him as an enemy, in the next few moments Kazimierz Mikol ceased to exist. The cynic who had viewed my son as a deadly obstacle to our colonizing mission to Epsilon Eridani vanished as suddenly as had the eye-eye dinosaur, leaving behind no speck of grit to flash-reconstitute his hostile persona.
“If carnivorous lizards are out,” he said, “what would make a good present for Dean?”
“Stars,” I said. “Try stars.”
* * *
After the debacle in the polyped, Mikol actually resolved to do as I had suggested. He would bestow upon Dean a gift of stars—not by escorting him to an observatory viewport, but instead by allowing Dean to accompany him to Helena Brodkorb’s last rites in D-Tower. This trip, over a fifteen-mile arc of the top side of Annie’s wheel, would take a good half hour and expose Dean to all the stars salted into the engulfing bowl of space. Seen from the bubbletop on our perimeter car, these stars would prickle, blaze, shimmer, dim, and flare out again: an unceasing festival of light. Dean would watch it all as if bewitched.
“I don’t know,” I said. “A ride in a perimeter car may terrify him as much as—”
“A fabriloon from the late Cretaceous?”
“Exactly.”
“He’s had a good look at stars before. You and his mother made sure of that on his birthday.”
“But he’s never set foot outside G-Tower.”
Mikol appealed to Dean. “You don’t want to spend the rest of your life in G-Tower. When we go into parking orbit around New Home, you don’t plan to nest in the polyped while everybody else is down exploring the planet. Do you?”
“No surh.” Puzzlement and hurt clouded Dean’s face. “Nod if … I doan huvh to.”
“Good for you. So. Would you like to go for a little ride in Peeter?”
Peeter was the name I’d given the perimeter car officially allotted to Towers G-H. Take rim from perimeter, and you have our magnetic conveyance’s pet monicker. It’s a silly sort of joke. We call Annie’s other three perimeter cars Pauli, MARE (Magnetic Arc-Ranging Elevated), and Albertina. In any case, Mikol spoke the name Peeter on purpose—to flatter me?—even though, as he later confessed, he could not decide if it were genuinely clever or only unbearably cute.
“Yez,” Dean said. “I wuhd like to ride.”
“But he doesn’t want to attend the funeral,” I said. “Just the sight of sleepers in bioracks—”
“Then he doesn’t have to,” Mikol cut in. “He can go to the polyped and virch with the other ankle biters.”
“Then I’ll ride along too.”
“Master Gwiazda, do you want your silver-tongued old man to go over to D-Tower with us?”
Solemnly, Dean nodded.
“Then it’s settled,” Mikol said. “To give ourselves plenty of time, we’ll leave at 0750 hours.”
* * *
Peeter, our magnetic bubbletop, tracked along the front top edge of Annie Jump’s breathtaking wheel of underslung hydrogen tanks. From our perches in the car, we could see Fritz Zwicky running parallel to us, a ring of diamonds twinkling beyond the silver Möbius strip of our own ark. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was an opalescent sheen somewhere off to port. The other two arks were dimly visible to us, of course, only because of their running lights and the mirrored glow from the exhausts of their braking rockets.
Three distinct motions had their common vectors in our rim car: the bubbletop’s tortoiselike crawl toward D-Tower, the gravity-producing circumvolution of Annie’s fuel ring, and the starward progress of our ark at point-ten c. It seemed to me that these countervailing forces should have ripped us from limb to limb, that our brains and entrails should have flown outward like loose meat in a centrifuge. Instead, we journeyed without incident, three casual travelers poking along the edge of a hurricane slingshot at high speed at infinity.
Dean couldn’t keep his eyes off the sky. Starlight sluiced over us like quinine water and guava punch. An alien vista of the Milky Way, familiar but wildly intense. Whorls of gas and dust, a trail of spun sugar crystal. Individual stars guttered and prickled, twinkled and blazed. Nearer to hand, across from us, the underside of Annie’s fuel wheel gleamed like the tracks of an archangelic railroad.
“All right, cowboy,” Mikol said. “Whaddaya think?”
Dean, his eyes aflicker, continued to gape into the sprawl of God’s candelabra.
“Mr. Mikol asked you a question, Dean.”
“My friends call me Kaz,” Mikol said.
“Kaz, that is,” I said.
(I’d wondered if he had any friends. Bao referred to him only as a professional colleague, and a nettlesomely frosty one at that.)
“Suhr?” Dean said, fuddled.
“Mr. Mikol—Kaz—wants to know what you think of all this.”
A second or two lapsed before Dean could find the words he wanted: “Priddy. Holy crow, very priddy.”
Kaz patted Dean’s knee and laughed.
Peeter inched ahead—in a steep, gleaming silence that held the three of us like prehistoric waterwalkers in a blister of see-through resin. The wheel turned as Peeter inched as Annie leapt gully after gully of the interstellar chasm.…
Then Kaz—our old nemesis, Kazimierz Mikol—began to talk, his hands in his lap, the methodical wheel of his mind dipping memories from the millstream of his boyhood:
“My grandfather was an immigrant from the liberated Warsaw Pact nations of eastern Europe. He settled in newly democratic Cuba and set up a small factory in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, manufacturing a vehicle of his own design that ran on a nonpolluting, replenishable fuel distilled from pig shit and sugar-cane fibers. Cuba had lots of pig shit and sugar cane. Grandfather Alexej’s oldest son, Milan, who attended university in Poland in the double-twenties, developed the Mikol Process, a type of nanomechanization that brought down the price of the Sabio, our most popular model, so that even streetcleaners in Havana could afford to buy and drive one. In fact, Milan Mikol, my father, stands in relation to my birth century, at least in Cuba, as Henry Ford stood to the twentieth century in North America.”
Kaz had apparently aimed this speech at me, for Dean had tuned him out right after the second mention of pig shit. In our bubbletop, Dean hung beneath the stars like an Earth ki
d on a midsummer swing.
“I grew up with a sister, Marisa, afflicted with a host of weaknesses that forced my mother to devote herself to her like a nurse. You or I would say that Marisa had cerebral palsy, with severe hemiplegia and ataxia. Mama denied this and said her disabilities stemmed not from brain trauma at birth, but from the influence of an individious toxin made in the States and sprayed relentlessly on the cane crops of our province. No matter. Marisa had many handicaps; at first, not even constant attention and coaxing enabled her to learn to speak.”
Kaz’s story had begun to make me uncomfortable. I looked past Dean, who sat between Kaz and me, and asked, “Why tell me all this?”
“Just listen, okay?” Annoyed, he resumed: “The year I was thirteen, Marisa turned eight, and my mother’s youngest sister, Helena, just then ten or eleven, jetted over with the Brodkorbs from Poznan—for a visit and a reunion. Helena spelled Mother with Marisa. She spelled me, too, because, hating the task, I now often found myself acting as a care provider. I may have welcomed little Helena to Ciudad Sabio even more vigorously than my mother had, because Helena’s presence freed me to swim, hike, and play beisbol.
“That same autumn, a movie company from Florida built an amusement park on Pico Torquino, the tallest mountain in Cuba, only a few kilometers from our Sabio factory. The jewel of this set was a Ferris wheel that the filmmakers erected as close to Torquino’s summit as they could safely get it. Then, once production had halted, the company’s publicity department let it be known, in and around the Sierra Maestra, that locals could ride the Ferris wheel for the equivalent of fifteen American dollars a person on the last three days of October. After the last ride, the company would dismantle the device and return Torquino to its more or less natural state, prior to production.
“Marisa heard of the Ferris wheel. By this time, she had a computer that gave her a voice—a lilting little girl’s voice—and she told Mama that she wanted to ride Vireo Films’ greatly ballyhooed amusement. She wanted this boon as a birthday gift, before Vireo’s roustabouts broke the wheel down and shipped it back to Florida. But, of course, if my parents granted Marisa this wish, they couldn’t allow her to ride the Ferris wheel’s gondola alone.
“I would have to go with her. I despised North American films and the nauseating hoopla that went with them, and so I absolutely hated this idea. In fact, I had a perverse nostalgia for the days of Fidel Castro, the sort of socialistic idealism that only the well-off son of a millionaire capitalist could afford to indulge. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to take Marisa.
“Helena intervened. She said she would ride with Marisa, if Diego, our household’s major-domo, drove the two of them up Pico Torquino to Vireo’s make-believe amusement park. (Even at thirteen, I heard this last phrase as an egregious bourgeois tautology.) She said it was fine if I chose to stay home, for the combined altitudes of the peak and the Ferris wheel would probably simply cause my snotty nose to bleed. This insult—reverse psychology?—worked, and I angrily offered myself up as Marisa’s guardian on this expedition after all. Two evenings later, Diego drove Marisa, Helena, and me up the mountain so we could ride in one of the bright gondolas of the film company’s Ferris wheel.”
I began to see—dimly, at least—where Kaz was going with this story.
“We rode the wheel—Marisa, Helena, and I. We rode it an hour after sunset. Marisa sat between me and her pretty young aunt from Poznan. What can I say? My nose didn’t bleed, but the combined heights of Torquino and that stately illuminated wheel made me tremble like a palmetto leaf in the salty October wind. Believe me, I shivered uncontrollably. Marisa, however, loved the entire experience.
“When our gondola stopped at the top of the wheel and swung back and forth in its gyros, with the south Cuba coast and the smoky mirror of the sea arrayed below us like glossy infrared photographs, Marisa barked her approval—a clipped, excited gasp; a call from the heart. The wheel itself blazed, and the stars of autumn … Dios mío, some of them seemed to swim in and out of view, shyly, like bronze or pewter carp.”
Kaz fell silent.
I laughed nervously. “Remind me never to challenge you to a duel of similes.”
“What I understand now,” Kaz finally went on, “is that in that Ferris wheel gondola, poised above the darkened island, I loved Marisa, I loved Helena, and I loved the simple day-to-day astonishments of living. Down from Pico Torquino, however, the world—my world, anyway—seemed to change. The Brodkorbs went back to Poland. My mother returned to fussing over Marisa and ignoring the rest of us.
“By the following February, my parents had divorced. Mama, taking Marisa with her, rejoined her sister’s family in Poznan, and my father immersed himself in design revisions, production goals, marketing strategies. He died four years later, on a business trip to New York, when Sashimi, a guild of militant Japanese whalers, exploded a pocket nuclear device in a subway tunnel under Grand Central Station. I was in my first year at Havana Tech, gearing up to study particle physics and vacuum propulsion systems.”
Even though it seemed that he had just begun another story, Kaz stopped.
“Is that all?” I asked.
“All my life, I blamed Marisa for the loss of my parents. Two days ago, upon learning of Helena’s death, I remembered something I couldn’t quite remember. Please don’t laugh. You see, this incomplete memory softened me. Only when we boarded Peeter and started crawling toward D-Tower did the memory come totally back to me. I have just told it to you, Dr. Gwiazda.”
“Abel.”
“Abel, then.”
Peeter docked with the observatory complex at the summit of D-Tower. Dean had a crick from staring heavenward during our crossing—so, while ambling through the docking connector, he bemusedly rubbed his neck.
* * *
In D-Tower, despite my misgivings, I believe it gratified Kaz—oddly gratified him—when Dean insisted on going with us to Helena’s memorial service: the voiding. (This last term offends me even more than does ejection, but, over our trip’s past quarter century, it has gained currency and a certain cachet; the puns it embodies are, if nothing else, vivid and expressive.) Kaz realized that Dean wanted more to keep him, his newfound friend, in sight than to attend the funeral of a stranger, but I set aside my objections, and all three of us turned up on part of the observatory deck given over to, well, voidings.
To Kaz’s obvious surprise, thirteen people, including our party from G-Tower, had come to honor Helena, who lay, just as promised, on the lingula of the ejector tube.
Commander Stefan Odenwald himself, looking distinguished but gaunt, headed this group of mourners, which also comprised Chaplain Mother Sevier and eight of Helena’s friends and colleagues. The service, which I thought dignified and painfully moving, featured brief prayer readings by Odenwald and Chaplain Mother Sevier, a few words by a fellow geneticist, and a holovid of fifteen-year-old Helena singing “Dona Nobis Pacem” in a soprano as clear and chilling as ice water.
The holovid scared Dean, but didn’t send him careening away from the ceremony. He grabbed my arm and held to it like Quasimodo clinging to a bell rope, his gaze shifting back and forth between the shimmering image of young Helena crooning like an angel and her aged-looking corpse, recognizable even to Dean as a transfigured but silent version of the beautiful hologhost. Adding to the eeriness of this experience was the fact that young Helena sang her part in rounds with an unseen orpianoogla and an invisible mixed choir. Indeed, their anthem echoed hauntingly throughout the deck.
At its conclusion, Odenwald said, “Mr. Mikol, as Helena Brodkorb’s only living relative aboard Annie Jump Cannon, you have—if you wish it—the privilege of eulogizing her.”
Kaz walked to the lingula, to stand in almost exactly the spot where the hologhost had sung. Bending, he kissed Helena’s cold temple.
“From Pico Torquino to Epsilon Eridani,” he said, standing erect again, “Helena Brodkorb was not afraid of heights. She dwelt on them. Like Harry Marti
nson, she knew that ‘space can be more cruel than man, / more than its match is human callousness.’ And so, unlike me, she was never cruel.”
Which was all Kaz could steady himself to say. He put a hand over his mouth and stared at Helena’s sunken eyes and lovely complexion. Meanwhile, Dean threaded a path through the other mourners to stand next to Kaz in mute condolence.
Odenwald said, “Shall we commend her now to the stars?”
Kaz nodded.
The lingula on which Helena Brodkorb lay retracted into its tube. A maintenance tech among the mourners used a remote to seal the tube and activate its plunger. Although no one on the deck could see her go, Kaz’s dead aunt hurtled outward like a torpedo—far beyond the gravitational attraction of any of the armada’s wheelships.
“Because we’re decelerating,” Commander Odenwald observed, “Helena Brodkorb will reach Epsilon Eridani before us.”
“And eventually pass on out of the system into interstellar space again,” said a colleague.
The company fell silent again. No one appeared to want to move.
After a time, I said: “May I speak?”
When Chaplain Mother Sevier nodded, I recited:
“So very human,
To grieve and to entomb.
This ardent woman
We cremate in the cold.
No longer may we hold
Her from her spacious home.”
“Amen,” said Chaplain Mother Sevier, crossing herself.
Finally, we funeral goers broke up and departed.
Back in G-Tower, Kaz opted to remain up-phase for the remainder of our armada’s voyage. He has been spelling me with Dean as once, years ago, Helena Brodkorb spelled his mother and him with his handicapped sister, Marisa.
* * *
We have entered the Barricado Stream, a region a good deal less clogged with debris than a few of our astronomers had earlier supposed. The probe dropped by Zwicky has determined recently that the Stream hosts only one substantial cometary mass per each sphere the approximate size of the Earth’s orbit around Sol. Good news. Very good news.
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 67
