by Ian McDonald
* * * *
SHE HAD WISHED upon a star, the star around which her son orbits, a shooting star, fast and low and bright, diving down behind Divis Mountain. When you wish upon a star, doesn’t matter who you are, everything your heart desires will come to you: a cricket had sung that to her once upon a rainy Saturday afternoon in the sixties somewhen, but what if that star is a satellite or an Army helicopter, does that invalidate the wish, does that fold the heart’s desire back on itself and leave it staring at its reflection in the night-mirrored window? The night outside fills the reflection’s cheeks with shadows, and, in the desperate warmth of the hospital room heavy with the scent of sickness, she hugs herself and knows that she is the reflection and it the object. Every night the hollows fill up again with shadows from the shadowland outside where Army Saracens roar through the night and joyriders hot-wire Fords to cruise the wee small hours away round the neat gravel paths of the City Cemetery or stake their lives running the checkpoints manned by weary police reservists watching from the backs of steel-gray Landrovers with loaded rifles.
Stick them in neutral; he’d told her that once. We do that sometimes, stick the Landrovers in neutral and cruise for a couple of hundred yards, then shove them into second, and when they backfire it sounds like gunshots. Gets them ringing up the station: shots heard, Tennant Street, 1:15 A.M. Some of them make it sound like Custer’s Last Stand, he’d said. It had made her laugh, once. Last Stand in Shadowland.
Somewhere in the room is the soul of a twelve-year-old boy, somewhere among the piles of junk Dr. Montgomery had suggested might trigger some response from him. Sometimes she thinks she sees it, like an imp, or like one of the brownies her mother had convinced her had lived behind the dresser in the farmhouse’s kitchen: an imp, darting from under his American football helmet to hide behind his U2 poster, concealed like a lost chord in the strings of his guitar or looping endlessly through his computer like the ghost of an abandoned program. There are his favorite U2 albums, and the cassettes specially recorded for him by John Cleese to try and raise a smile on his face; there is the photograph of Horace, half-collie, half-greyhound, wall-eyed and wild-willed; there is the photograph of Tom senior.
Tom senior, who knew all about backfiring police Landrovers, and the room at the station with the ghettoblaster turned up loud outside it where they took the skinheads, and the twelve different routes to work each day: Tom, who had always been just Dad to him. No, the soul of a twelve-year-old boy, whatever its color, whatever its shape, is not something that can be captured by computer-assisted machinery or lured back to ground and trapped like a limed songbird by a junk-shop of emotional relics, not when it is out there in the night flying loops around Andromeda.
* * * *
As many as the stars in the sky or snowflakes in a blizzard or grains of sand upon a beach, that is how many the Zygon fleet is; wave upon wave of fighters and destroyers and scouts and cruisers and battleships and dreadnoughts and mobile battlestations and there at the heart of it, like the black aniseed at the center of a gobstopper, the Zygon flagship. The enemy is so huge that it takes your breath away and there is a beat of fear in your heart, for the Imperial throneship Excalibur is but one ship and Major Tom is but one man. Major Tom points his fighter’s nose dead into the densest part of the pack and leads Force Orange into the attack.
Is he totally without fear? you ask yourself, sweating under your helmet as the sudden acceleration pushes you deep into your padded seat, stamps all over your ribs, and stands forward on its head to become up.
“Where do they all come from?” you whisper to give your fear a name you can hold it by.
Major Tom hears you, for privacy is not a thing a fighting team with a Galaxy-wide reputation can be bothered with, and answers, “Survivors of the Empire’s destruction of their capital world, Carcinoma. Must have got the Zygon Prime Intelligence off before we blasted Carcinoma, and now they’re here, grouping for another murderous attack on the peaceful planets of the Empire. And we’ve got to stop them before they destroy the entire universe. A battlefleet could fight for a hundred years and still be no nearer the flagship of the Prime Intelligence, but a small force of two-man fighters might, just might, be able to slip past their defenses and attack the flagship with pulsar torpedoes.” And now he says into the relay channels you have opened for him,
“Orange Leader to Orange One through Five, accelerate to combat speed. Let’s go get ‘em, boys. The destiny of the Empire is ours today.”
How you wish you could make up lines like that, words to inspire men and send them into battle, words that wave the star-spangled banner of the Galactic Empire, words that make the hair prickle under your helmet and proud tears leak from the corners of rough-tough space-marine eyes. You think it might not be such a terrible thing to die with words like that ringing in your ears.
Your targeting computer has located the cluster of Zygon dreadnoughts and fighters protecting the flagship of the Prime Intelligence. The first photon blasts from the battleships’ long-range zappers rock your X15 as the enemy fighters peel out of formation to intercept. Opaque spots appear on your visor to screen out the searing light of the photon blasts.
“Orange Leader to Force Orange,” says Major Tom, “I’m going in.”
“Tactical computer available,” you say.
“Forget it, son, Major Tom does his own shooting.” Your thumbs twitch on imaginary triggers as Major Tom locks a Zygon fighter in his sights and blasts it with his laser-zappers. The black alien spacecraft unfolds into a beautiful blossom of white flame. Already Major Tom has another in his sights. Swooping up, up, and away from the nuclear fireball, he rolls the X15 and downs another. And another, and another, and another …
On your tactical display a green grid-square flashes red.
“Big Tom, one on your tail.”
“I mark him. Orange Leader to Orange Two, Big Ian, I’ve a bogie on my tail. I’m going in for the big one, the flagship.” He throws the astrofighter into a rapid series of bounce-about evasive maneuvers. A sudden flare of fusion-light throws your shadow before you onto the astrogational equipment as the Zygon pursuit ship explodes in a billion billion sparkling fragments. Orange Two thunders in to parallel your course. The daring star-pilots exchange greeting signals, and Orange Two rolls effortlessly away into a billion billion cubic light-years of space. Ahead, the Zygon flagship is sowing fighters like demon seed and now its heavy-duty laser turrets are swinging to bear on you. Photon blasts fill the air like thistledown on a summer’s day.
“Hold on to your seat, kid, this calls for some tight flying,” shouts the voice of Major Tom in your helmet-radio earphones, and he twists, turns, spins, loops, somersaults, and handstands the X15 past the crisscrossing Zygon fighters and the laserfire of the Flagship. The immense metal bulk of the enemy ship swells up before you, so close that you can see the space-armored crews at their batteries.
“Arm pulsar torpedoes’ smart systems.”
Click switch, press button; green lights reflect in your visor.
“Pulsar torpedoes armed.” The infinitesimal white X15 Astrofighter hurtles over a crazy metal landscape bursting with laserfire. Before you loom the engine ports, ponderous as mountain ranges, vulnerable as free-range eggs. Your mouth is dry, your hands are wet, your eyeballs as desiccated as two round pebbles. Red lights …
“Squadron coming in behind us, fast.” The metal landscape blurs beneath you; this alien vessel is so huge …
“Damn. Orange Leader to Force Orange, what happened to the cover? Mark three bogies on my tail, take care of ‘em, I’m going for the engine ducts … five”—the iron mountains open like jaws—“four”—on your rear screen, three evil black Zygon pursuit ships slip into tight cover—“three”—you veer down a sudden valley in the huge geography of the flagship’s drive section—“two”—ahead is the white doomsday glow of the stardrives—“one … Fire.” Orange Leader climbs away from the engine pods. The pursuit ships come after you,
never seeing the tiny blob of light detach itself from your fighter at count zero and steer itself down the engine tubes into the miles-distant bowels of the enemy flagship. Major Tom loops twelve thousand miles high above the doomed starship and declares, “Detonation!”
At first there is nothing, as if it has taken time for Major Tom’s voice to travel across space and the torpedo to hear him, but then, as if by his express command, the Zygon flagship silently expands into a rainbow of glowing particles. The afterblast paints the cockpit pink, a beautiful bathroom pink. The glow takes a long time to fade, a man-made nova.
“Yahoo!” you shout. “Yahoo! We got him!”
“We sure did,” says Major Tom. “Son, we sure did.”
“What now?” you ask. “Take care of those pursuit ships and then back to Excalibur?”
“Not yet,” says Major Tom and there is a strange note in his voice that reminds you of something you have purposefully forgotten. “We’re pressing on, continuing the attack on our own, because there’s a planet out there beyond the lines of Zygon ships, a planet hidden for a million years away from Galactic knowledge, and we, and we alone, must go there to destroy Zygon power forever.”
PRESS RELEASE: DECEMBER 22, 1968 (EXTRACTS).
[THIS IS] THE concept of the “Mind Box,” the baggage of beliefs and values which determine the individual’s response to the events of his life. Research into depression has shown the relationship between psychosomatic symptoms and the state of the individual’s “Mind Box.” Dr. Montgomery hypothesized in his doctoral thesis that this Mind Box concept might account for many of the more severe medical cases which are never diagnosed as psychosomatic but which otherwise have no medical reason for their lack of response to conventional treatment.
[The concept of] “deep dreaming” [was developed] from Luzerski and Baum’s work on lucid dreams, dreams in which the dreamer exerts conscious control over the content of his dream. It is a highly refined version of Luzerski and Baum’s dream techniques whereby an individual enters a state of interactive dreaming through a hypnotically and chemically induced process and effects the necessary repairs to his damaged Mind Box, thus relieving the psychological pressures that have led to his deteriorating medical condition. It could be said that he literally dreams himself into a state of self-healing. Dr. Blair has related this effect to the Nobel Prize–winning Stoppard/Lowe theories of molecular iso-informational fields: zones of order generated by individual protein molecules which stabilize genetic material against interference and mutation from electromagnetic and gravitic fields. He argues the analogy of deep dreaming, returning the body’s iso-informational fields to a state of biological and psychological metastasis, or harmony, which renders the patient—at the cellular level, at least—responsive to conventional treatment.
Thomas Semple, Jr., is the process’s pilot case. The patient, a twelve-year-old boy, contracted leukemia shortly after the death of his father, a police sergeant. He was admitted to hospital but did not respond to conventional chemotherapy.
… Doctors Montgomery and Blair have created a deep-dream scenario for young Thomas analogous to the computer games of which he is very fond. In this dream simulation he plays the hero of a space-war arcade game shooting down invaders which are representations of the cancerous cells within him. He spends fifteen hours per day in this deep-dream suspension, during which normal chemotherapy is administered. His dream state is constantly monitored by state-of-the-art computer technology which also maintains his illusion of deep dreaming by direct stimulation (in sensory deprivation) of the neurons, both chemically and electrically …
… [D]uring his waking periods he talks constantly about how exciting he finds his space-war dream and Doctors Montgomery and Blair are confident that their first case using this orthohealing process will be a complete success.
* * * *
(The front seat of a Vauxhall Cavalier, somewhere on the motorway between Belfast Airport and the Royal Victoria Hospital.)
DR. MONTGOMERY: How was the press conference, then?
MACKENZIE: Don’t ask.
DR.MONTGOMERY: That bad? Oh come on, things haven’t gotten any worse, the kid’s stable, there’s no cause for media panic, is there? Never was.
MACKENZIE: If you really want to know, they’re trying a human-interest angle on the mother— you know, tragically widowed policeman’s wife, her son struck down by you-know-what, can’t mention cancer in the tabloids, hurts circulation; well, now, to compound her suffering, this ancy-fancy untested medical experiment goes sour on her. That’s what they were trying to get me to say at the press conference. Never again. Do your own next time.
DR. MONTGOMERY: Bastards. I take it you didn’t … say anything, that is …
MACKENZIE: Not a word.
DR. MONTGOMERY: Good girl yourself. Which papers?
MACKENZIE: As I said, tabloids: Mirror, Sun, Star, Mail, Express.
DR. MONTGOMERY: Bastards.
MACKENZIE: Mrs. Semple’s keeping them all at bay at the moment, but it’s only a question of how long it is before some hack cons his way past the ward sister and waves a checkbook under her nose.
DR. MONTGOMERY: Damn. Why all the sudden interest?
MACKENZIE: Don’t know. Some local must have picked up on the story and now the crusaders are waiting to take you apart the moment you get back there, Saladin. Gave me a rough enough time of it.
DR. MONTGOMERY: And drag the hospital’s name through the mire. You didn’t, ah—
MACKENZIE: Let them know that I was in charge of simulation software and the computer
DR. MONTGOMERY: systems? Think I’m stupid? Not a breath. Thank God. (Looks at the snow and is silent for a while.) Roz, tell me, do you think children ever forgive their parents for dying?
MACKENZIE: Wouldn’t know. Mine are both disgustingly healthy. Better shape than I am.
DR. MONTGOMERY: You tell me what you think of this, then. I’ll review some facts about the case and you say what you think. One: Thomas Semple junior’s leukemia is cured but he still remains in the orthohealing coma which cured him. We assume he’s still deep dreaming because there’s been no change in his vital signs between the two situations.
MACKENZIE: Fair enough assumption. Two.
DR. MONTGOMERY: Two: In such a state of lucid dreaming, he can be anything he wants to be, anytime, anywhere—subjectively speaking, he exists in his own private universe where everything is exactly as he wishes it to be.
MACKENZIE: Within the program parameters.
DR. MONTGOMERY: Well, that’s your field of competence, not mine. Three: His father, a sergeant in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, was killed before his eyes by a bomb planted under his car.
MACKENZIE: Deduced by yourself to be the neuropsychological basis of the leukemia.
DR. MONTGOMERY: And his lack of response to conventional therapy, yes. Hell, twelve-year-olds shouldn’t have death wishes, should they?
MACKENZIE: You were the one thought it was displaced punishment behavior.
DR. MONTGOMERY: Every other Tuesday I think the moon is made of green cheese and life is not a futile, worthless waste of time and energy after all. Listen to this: I think we have given Thomas Semple junior the perfect environment to re-create his father. Now he doesn’t have to die to join him, he has him all the time, all to himself, in that dream world of his. The kid can’t face a world where his father was blown to bits by an I.N.L.A. bomb, he can’t face the reality of his father’s death—and now he doesn’t have to, when he can be with his father, his perfect, idealized father, forever, in the deep-dream state.
MACKENZIE: That’s spooky.
DR. MONTGOMERY: That’s it. What do you think?
MACKENZIE: Did you think all this up on the plane over?
DR. MONTGOMERY: I got into conversation with the woman next to me—talk about strange bedfellows, airline booking computers have it down to a fine art—she had cancer, one of those six-months-to-live cases, and she was a talker, as t
hey often are, it makes it easier for them if they can talk about it; well, anyway, in the middle of this conversation she mentioned that she feared her children would never forgive her for dying and leaving them alone in the world. Paranoid maybe, but it started me thinking.
MACKENZIE: It fits. It all fits beautifully.
DR. MONTGOMERY: Doesn’t it? I reckon if we go through the printouts on the dream monitors we’ll find Thomas Semple senior in there as large as life and twice as handsome, because his son cannot forgive him for being fallible, and mortal, and human, and so is driving him to prove his … godhead, I suppose, over and over and over again.
MACKENZIE: And what then? You going to exorcise his ghost?
DR. MONTGOMERY: Yes, I am.
(Overhead gantries bearing signs reading M1, City Center, M5, Carrickfergus, Newtownabbey, Bangor, Lisburn, appear above the car. MacKenzie slides the Vauxhall Cavalier into the lane marked City Center.)
* * * *
SHE WISHES THEY would go. She resents their noisy feet, their busy bustle, their muted conversation over rustling sheets of computer printout, their polite-polite “Mrs. Semple, excuse me buts” and “Mrs. Semple, do you know ifs” and “Mrs. Semple, could you tell us whethers.” What are they doing that is so important that they must stamp around in their noisy shoes and remind her of the world beyond the swinging ward doors? She does not like them near her son, though the man is the doctor who invented the process and the woman is the one who developed the computers to which her son is wired from’ skull eyes ears throat. It worries her to see their hands near the machines; she fears that they might press buttons and throw switches and she would never know why they had done so. She hates not understanding, and there is so much she does not understand.
They are talking now, excited about something on a computer screen. She can see what it is that has excited them, though she cannot understand why. Who is this Major Tom? The empty coincidence of names does not fool her. Major Tom, Major Tom … she remembers a song she had once heard about Major Tom, the spaceman who never came down. Wasn’t that it, Major Tom, the spaceman, still orbiting round and round and round the world in his tin can? She never knew Major Tom. But she knew Sergeant Tom, Sergeant Tom tall and lovely in his bottle-green uniform, Sergeant Tom photographed in his swimming trunks on a Spanish beach, brown and smiling with that little Tom Selleck mustache, Sergeant Tom sitting at the breakfast table in shirtsleeves, shoulder holster, and police boots waiting for the phone call which would tell him today’s safe pickup point, Sergeant Tom putting on his jacket, kissing her on the lips and telling Wee Tom to have a good day at school and take care with his head-sums. Sergeant Tom walking out to the Ford Sierra, Sergeant Tom turning the key in the ignition—
