Tinman

by Simon Fairhead

  “Thank fuck Kate’s not around to see this.”

  “There are no guarantees, Art. This has never been done before”, said Kyko.

  “We’re running a freakshow as it is, Halliday. One more won’t hurt.”

  “You’ll be taking Dawkins' brain, a cloned brain, and placing it in a cloned adult body? There shouldn’t be any tissue rejection problems, but psychologically…”

  “No, actually, I am cloning Dawkin’s brain, too. I don’t want to lose him.”

  Kyko rubbed his chin and fell silent. He paced the room a moment. “A copy of a copy? Definitely never been done before.”

  “But it will be implanted in its original body. Same blood pressure, same hormonal balances. We’re building its natural home. What better place to be?”

  Kyko nodded again, paced some more. He paced a lot, still taking great pleasure in his renewed mobility. Art had heard him, late at night, pounding along the ship’s corridors, running for the pure joy of being able to run. But his face was drawn and thoughtful.

  “But to what end?” he said, not raising his stare from the deck. “You are reviving Franco so he can spend his remaining years in this prison.”

  “We don’t know what’s out there, Halliday. If there is one breach, there may be others. Our scopes show nothing, but we don’t know what exotic materials may be out there our sensors can’t pick up.”

  Kyko adjusted his thick glasses. “We can’t land on exotic materials, or survive on a world orbiting a black sun we cannot see. And we cannot go back to the irradiated mess of the Luhrmann Breach. We need a star system fit for carbon-based organisms, but there is nothing out there for billions of light years. We are so far from other suns that their light has not yet reached us, and we are travelling at barely light speed ourselves. This ship will not survive for ever, Mr Parrish, and nor will we. We decay even now, as we are speaking, our telomeres inexorably unravelling, our cells dividing, picking up minute mutations each time. Decay, mutation, evolution. You and I, Mr Parrish, we have the skills to sculpt and mould and change our bodies and those around us as we see fit; but take a log of wood, carve it into a figurine, carve it again into a bowl, carve it once more into another object, and eventually you will end up with a toothpick, and then a short toothpick, and then a useless sliver of wood that we discard upon the forest floor. We cannot evade entropy, Mr Parrish.”

  Halliday turned then, slowly, and walked off in the direction of his cabin. Art leaned his head against the glass of the sealed medlab and sadly watched Franco’s skeleton bob gently to the rhythm of his heart. Halliday’s cabin door whooshed shut and after a moment, Art heard the mournful tremolo notes of his shakuhachi echoing along the corridor. Music was supposed to comfort you, thought Art, but the melody conjured up the empty spaces between the stars for him, and he shivered.

  He slept badly, and was wrenched awake only a few short hours later by a strident, high-pitched alarm. A proximity alert. Dawkins was already at his door. Art struggled into his trousers and a t-shirt. A short-circuit?

  Dawkins rolled back on his rubber treads as Art spilled out of his cabin.

  “Dawkins, turn that fucking alarm off now!”

  The robot sent a signal to Hiroto, and the ship fell as silent as it was able, leaving only the constant sigh of the life-support system.

  “What’s going on?”

  Dawkins’ oval face-screen broke up into squares of digital interference for a second. Then the familiar broad, reliable face returned. “The wide-beam sensors detected an object ahead of us, at a distance of 86.2 trillion miles on a heading of 0.231 degrees, at a speed of 2.5 L.”

  “Impossible. Is it still being tracked?”

  “Yes. We should get to the cockpit.”

  “Damn right.”

  Art, barefoot, ducked around Dawkins as the robot trundled up the central access corridor to the wide windows of the cockpit. There were red lights on every screen. Six was already there, manning the weapons array.

  “Captain, targeting locked on. Permission to fire?”

  Art rushed to the robot and pushed him back from the console. “No! Absolutely not!” He stepped back. “Monitor progress, soldier. Report any changes in course and speed.”

  “Aye aye, captain. Monitoring changes in course and speed.”

  Six had been programmed by the marine corps. On board ship, his navy training had taken over. There were still many hours of work to be done inside his little metal messed up skull.

  “Don’t shoot anything,” he added, “unless I give you a direct order.”

  Dawkins rolled over to the navigation display.

  “Let’s see the HUD,” ordered Art, standing at the deck rail above Six’s station. Dawkins redirected the nav-computer readout to a holographic display that filled the cockpit’s windows with bright green and red graphics. The heads-up-display showed concentric green circles indicating distance markers, a red line for the horizon, and pale red lines for the sensor area. Also in red, moving swiftly across the sensor area, was a red dot with speed and distance read-outs trailing it.

  Halliday, wearing a dark red kimono and nursing a white bowl of green tea entered the cockpit. “Well, well, what have we here?”

  Art did not look at him. “There’s something out there moving at two and a half times the speed of light.”

  “Impossible.”

  “My thoughts exactly. Hiroto, analysis please.”

  “No changes in course or speed since we have been monitoring, Art san. Spectrographic readings indicate a heat source and a suggestion of some metallic composition.”

  “A spacecraft?” wondered Halliday. But nothing built by men was this fast.

  “Could it be debris from the supernova? Some metallic chunk of rock blasted off a planet?”

  “No. Even something heavily irradiated would have cooled down by now. We have been sleeping, Mr Parrish. The supernova was thousands of years ago.”

  “Object accelerating, captain,” Six informed them. Out of range in fifteen seconds.”

  Then it disappeared from their screens in a burst of acceleration so swift it was almost as if it had vanished.

  “Oh my God”, breathed Art, staring stupidly at the blank spot on the holographic display where the object had been.

  Hiroto spoke. “The object accelerated to 35 L before going out of range. A starship.”

  “Conjecture, Hiroto,” corrected Halliday.

  ‘“When we have eliminated the possible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.”

  Kyko turned to look at one of Hiroto’s monitor screens. “But are we so wise as to know when the possible has been eliminated?”

  They waited and watched for the remainder of their waking year, but saw nothing further. Franco was finished six weeks before hibernation. He patrolled the ship’s corridors in Halliday’s floating chair, talking to himself, shunning the company of others. They tried cognitive therapy, they worked his limbs to build up his muscles, but Franco remained distant. Art became depressed. Something was wrong. But time was running out. They had to go into stasis once more. Art laid Franco in his sleep chamber. Briefly, he thought about switching off the life support, but sleep could heal too, and 500 years was a long time to mend a broken mind.

  CHAPTER 15

  Franco Pirelli slept. He did not know he was Franco Pirelli. He did not know he was human. He dreamed a dream, assuming it was his life. He had a father. His name was Paolo. He and Paolo were swimming side by side under the water. They had streamlined helmets made of irrilium over their heads, and although the water was cold, and green with murk, they were dry, because they were wearing diving suits. On the ankles of their suits were little plastic motors with little plastic propellers in protective housings, which drove them through the water, sending up columns of very fine bubbles behind them, like champagne. They were swimming, but it felt like flying. Below them was a wide street, girdled by tall, squareish houses, most upright,
some leaning drunkenly, others collapsed in untidy piles on the sea floor. Then they came upon a ruined paved square. A tower with a pointed roof had collapsed diagonally across it, a disassembled jigsaw with a million rectangular pieces. His father knew the name of this tower. When he was a small boy, he told Franco, just the very tip of its spire protruded above the sea, and he and his friends would tie their electric-powered dinghy to it when they went swimming. It was, he said, the Campanile di San Marco, and it had once stood on the corner of Piazza di San Marco at the heart of what had once been one of world’s most beautiful cities: Venezia.

  Franco wondered what sort of aquatic creatures could build such a lovely place, put Paolo just laughed. It was a sad laugh. The sea is rising, he said. Venezia was built on a lagoon, on the coast of a land he knew as Republicca di Milano, but which had been known, when Venezia still stood above the waves, as Italia.

  Paolo was a scientist. He taught Franco many wonderful things, but his knowledge was precious, and he was often called away to other countries, leaving Franco and his brother Alesso alone with their mother. She was often away too, but Franco knew she was not a scientist. Perhaps she had a different, but no less precious gift to give.

  So Franco and young Alesso had the run of Paolo’s laboratory. They lived, like so many Italians then, on a giant zattera constructed from the hulls of boats or even ships, abutted by oil drums and tyres, decks filled several metres deep where possible with soil in which to grow fruit and vegetables. Paolo’s zattera had twelve olive trees. It was moored not far from Milano, in a calm bay. The winters were cold there, but the waters were safe. Paolo wished to sail further south, to give his olive trees the warmth they craved, but he was afraid. The south was now a handful of rocky islands, more like the Greece of old than Italia, and piracy was becoming commonplace. The fragile order of the world was falling apart like wet tissue paper.

  Franco’s father designed and built industrial robots. Most of his time now was taken up with the problems of undersea agriculture, building harvesters for kelp farms. So much agricultural land was under water now, they turned to the sea for sustenance. Paolo used to tell Franco about the wonderful submarine cities the government planned to build to house all the displaced people of Italia, and aquatic living pods were constructed and anchored to the sea floor, as a test facility. But the bottom of the sea might as well be on the surface of Mars. Scientists and volunteers spent a year in the complex, learning how to desalinate seawater, how to harvest seaweed and generate energy from algae. But no one wanted to be down there forever, and the zattera way of life, similar to the floating markets of the far east, grew of its own accord. Indeed, above the drowned canals of Venezia, a floating city had been growing ever since the canals began to inundate the piazzas and alleyways that threaded through behind the palazzo that lined the waterways. Boat was lashed to boat, zattera to zattera, and businesses carried on. People still needed things, and Paolo, who had lived upon his raft since he was born, considered his life a happy one.

  Franco recalled the day he and Alesso were called to his laboratory. They hadn’t seen their mother in nearly a month, and they were hoping she would be there when they got off the school boat. There had been a heavy swell all day, and neither had been able to concentrate on lessons. They were glad of the relative calm on board their own, much larger, raft.

  But their mother was not there. Their father was sitting at his desk with a big glass of whisky in one hand and the bottle in the other, as if he meant to finish it.

  “Franco, Alesso, my fine boys. Sit down. How was school?”

  Franco answered. “Papa, the sea was so rough, Alesso was sick.”

  “Are you okay now, Alesso? Franco, did you help him?”

  “Si, Papa.”

  He looked from one to the other. Alesso still looked pale. He still had his little leather satchel on his back, ready to travel. Good.

  “Ragazzi, we are leaving this place. We are leaving this planet and we are going to fly through space to another world.”

  The boys both sat upright in their chairs. Franco’s eyes were wide with excitement. “Papa! Are we going to Mioumu? The planet on the news?”

  “Yes. We leave in one week.”

  Alesso looked round behind him. “Where is mama? Is she coming with us? I want to see mama.”

  Paolo turned his head then and looked out of the window. Tears were dribbling down the side of his nose. He took a drink, but didn’t look back. “Mama is not coming with us. She is staying here on Earth with a friend.”

  Alesso began to cry. “I want to stay here with mama!”

  Franco put his arm around him. “Where is mama, papa?”

  Paolo met his son’s gaze momentarily, but it was too much. He refilled his glass and took another long drink. “She is with Signor Beretta, in Venezia. We will not be able to see her before we go. A storm is coming in from the Adriatic. I will arrange a face-call before lift-off. That is all I can do, Franco. Perhaps…perhaps she will come on a later spaceship.”

  Alesso stopped crying. “Si! Tell her to come on the next spaceship!”

  “I’ll do my best, Alesso. Now, both of you, go to your rooms and collect your clothes and toys and bring them to the lab. There is a strict weight limit and we can use the scales here to weigh our luggage. Off you go!”

  Screaming and yelling, the boys ran off to their bedrooms across the open deck from Paolo’s laboratory building. It had started to rain. The edge of the storm. It would brush by them and head north to ravage the coast of places once known as Croatia and Slovenia.

  Paolo watched them go, their spritely young forms shivering and dissolving through his tears. “Sophia! You idiot! You stupid, stupid fool!”

  Sophia had taken a lover in Venezia, Stephano Beretta, the safety officer on his dive team. Early that morning, a call had come in: a terrible storm had sunk ninety percent of the Venezia zattera. His robotic dive factory had been destroyed and she and Stephano were dead. So, too, were many of his colleagues at the facility. He had not been there because his hypersonic flight from Terra Nevada had been delayed. And that was where he, Franco and Alesso were to fly from within the week.

  He had been toying with the idea of leaving for the best part of a year. He was a scientist, one of Italia’s best, and an offer of a place, for himself and his family and his team had been on the table for many months. He knew Earth was doomed. Every news channel was full of disasters around the world. Low-lying areas in Indonesia, the Far East, Africa and elsewhere had gone quiet. They no longer existed. Even London, the metropolis that had grown to twenty-five million inhabitants by the end of the twenty-second century, sent only sporadic newscasts. The sea had risen by sixty-five feet in a little over two hundred years. But it had reached its limit. The rising waters had extinguished much of the world's industry, as if the Earth itself had taken a painkiller to ease its suffering. But could mankind adapt? He had often stayed up late at night with three or four of his senior staff, his best friends in all the world, debating the future of the planet. Could they make this new ‘water world’ work? And always a similar conclusion: they were Italians. They could probably survive into the foreseeable future, but where was ‘la dolce vita?’

  CHAPTER 16

  Terra Nevada was high in the Sierra Nevada mountains, near the bay of Los Angeles. The United States of the Americas had built a sprawling new city there, levelling, with explosives, vast tracts of the mountain peaks to build its new launch site far from its drowned facilities in Cape Canaveral Three hundred and fifty miles above it, reached by the astonishing German built Weltraumfahrstuhl, 'the space elevator', a fleet of eighty-three craft had been assembled in orbit.

  This was to be the colonisation ‘push’ demanded by governments around the world, but let us take a moment here to be utterly frank. Colonisation is a noble word, suggesting the departure of the best and brightest minds of the planet setting out on a voyage of enterprise and discovery. This was to be the ‘fuck you, I’m savin
g my immediate family and anyone able to pay me an enormous amount of money for a seat’ exodus.

  The passenger list was crammed with politicians, millionaires, their families, occasionally favoured members of their staff, and in several outrageous incidences, their pets.

  But the government of the Americas, united north and south in crisis, to their credit, had bled these desperate souls of everything they had. They saw the greed, they saw the arrogance borne of privilege, and they milked them. They inflated seat prices and the cost of luggage allowances, they picked fuel costs out of the air and invented non-existent insurance premiums. They added visa payments, visa processing payments and visa validation payments. The planet’s super-rich wanted to get to the Luhrmann Breach by any means possible, and they were prepared to pay anything for it. And so the US government made sure that they did. Demand was so great, they were able to secure the construction of another fifty-five spacecraft, and to save the lives of another two million people.

  Paolo, Franco and Alesso stepped down the landing steps from the hypersonic airliner at Terra Nevada into blinding mountain sunshine and freezing winds. All three scrambled to get their sunglasses on. They found themselves on a wide, fenced-in airstrip. A six-lane highway led off to the horizon in one direction, flanked by billboards, neon store signs and low-rise shops. At the far end, amongst the jumble of buildings, but still clear in the pure mountain air, the great thick shaft of the Weltraumfahrstuhl rose up into the sky through the fine cloud-cover, eventually trailing away to nothing through sheer distance.

  Alesso was beside himself with excitement. “Are we going up in that all the way to space?”