And they had listened, at least those who believed, those who wanted that number N at the end of the Drake Equation to be up in the tens or hundreds or thousands. They skived spare radiotelescopy and mainframe processing time and nagged their college principals and senators and fellow dreamers for SETI funding. Some, like a project at Arecibo, had even beamed out messages, although the message was going out in any cause, the whole babble of radio communications had been spreading out into space from Earth at the speed of light since Marconi’s first transmission…We are here. Earth is alive. And they listened. They listened for a reply. Back then, when he had met Terr, Tom had still believed in the Drake Equation with a near-religious vehemence, even if many others were beginning to doubt it and funding was getting harder to maintain. As he walked with her beneath the clocktower through the foggy lights of Birmingham’s other campus, his PC at his college digs in Erdington was chewing through the data he’d downloaded from a SETI website whilst his landlord’s cat slept on it. Tom was sure that, what with the processing technology that was becoming available, and then the wide-array radio satellites, it was only a matter of time and persistence before that first wonderful spike of First Contact came through. And it had stood him in good stead, now he came to think of it, had the Drake Equation, as he walked with Terr on that misty English autumn afternoon. One of the most convoluted chat-up lines in history. But, at least that once, it had worked.
They took the train back to the city and emerged onto New Street as the lights and the traffic fogged the evening and at some point on their return back past the big shops and the law courts to the campus Terr had leaned against him and he had put his arm around her. First contact, and the tension between them grew sweet and electric and a wonderful ache had swelled in his throat and belly until they stopped and kissed in the dank quietude of one of the old subways whilst the traffic swept overhead like a distant sea. Terr. The taste of her mouth, and at last he got to touch that space between her jaw and throat that he had been longing to touch all afternoon. Terr, who was dark and alive in his arms and womanly and English and alien. Terr, who closed her stormy eyes as he kissed her and then opened them again at looked at him with a thrilling candour. After that, everything was different.
Terr had a zest for life, an enthusiasm for everything. And she had an old car, a nondescript Japanese thing with leaky sills, a corrupted GPS and a badly botched hydrogen conversion. Tom often fiddled under the bonnet to get the thing started before they set out on one of their ambitious weekend trips across the cool and misty country of love and life called England he suddenly found himself in. South to the biscuit-coloured villages of the Cotswolds, north to the grey hills of the Peak District, and then further, further up the map as autumn—he could no longer think of it as fall—rattled her leaves and curled up her smoky clouds and faded, and winter set in, juddering for hours along the old public lanes of the motorways as the sleek new transports swept past outside them with their occupants teleconferencing or asleep. But Tom liked the sense of effort, the sense of getting there, the rumble of the tyres and the off-centre pull of the steering, swapping over with Terr every hour or two, and the way the hills rose and fell but always got bigger as they headed north. And finally stepping out, and seeing the snow and the sunlight on the high flanks, and feeling the clean bite of the wind. They climbed fells where the tracks had long-vanished and the sheep looked surprised at these humans who had invaded their territory. Hot and panting, they stopped in the lee of cols, and looked down at all the tiny details of the vast world they had made. By then, Terr had had changed options from SF to the early romantics, poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, and she would chant from the Prelude in her lovely voice as they clambered up Scafell and the snow and the lakes gleamed around them and Tom struggled, breathless, to keep up until they finally rested, sweating and freezing, and Terr sat down and smiled at him and pulled off her top layers of fleece and Gore-Tex and began to unlace her boots. It was ridiculous, the feel of her snow and her body intermingled, and the chant of her breath in his ear, urging him on as the wind and her fingers and the shadows of the clouds swept over his naked back. Dangerous, too, in the mid of winter—you’d probably die from exposure here if you lapsed into a post-coital sleep. But it was worth it. Everything. He’d never felt more alive.
Terr huddled against him in a coll. Her skin was taut, freezing, as the sweat evaporated from between them. Another hour, and the sun would start to set. Already, it was sinking down through the clouds over Helvellyn with a beauty that Tom reckoned even old Wordsworth would have been hard put to describe. His fingers played over the hardness of Terr’s right nipple, another lovely peak Wordsworth might have struggled to get over in words. It was totally, absolutely, cold, but, to his pleasant surprise, Tom found that he, too, was getting hard. He pressed his mouth against Terr’s shoulder, ran his tongue around that lovely hollow beneath her ear. She was shivering already, but he felt her give a shiver within the shiver, and traced his fingers down her belly, and thought of the stars which would soon be coming, and perhaps of finding one of those abandoned farmhouses where they could spend the night, and of Terr’s sweet moisture, and of licking her there. She tensed and shivered again, which he took as encouragement, even though he was sure, as the coat slid a few inches from his shoulder, that he felt a snowflake settle on his bare back. Then, almost abruptly, she drew away.
“Look over there, Tom. Can you see them—those specks, those colours?”
Tom looked, and sure enough, across in the last blazing patch of sunlight, a few people were turning like birds. They could have been using microlights, but on a day like this, the sound of their engines would have cut through the frozen air. But Tom had a dim recollection of reading of a new craze, still regarded as incredibly dangerous, both physically and mentally, whereby you took a gene-twist in a vial, and grew wings, just like in a fairy tale, or an SF story.
Tom had dreamed, experienced, all the possibilities. He’d loved those creatures in Fantasia, half-human, half-faun; those beautiful winged horses. And not much later, he’d willed the green-eyed monsters and robots whom the cartoon superheroes battled with to put their evil plans into practise at least once. Then there were the old episodes of Star Trek—the older, the better—and all those other series where the crews of warp-driven starships calmly conversed around long florescent-lit tables with computer-generated aliens and men rubber masks. By the age of eight, he’d seen galaxy-wide empires rise and fall, and tunnelled though ice planets, he’d battled with the vast and still-sentient relics of ancient conflicts…And he found the pictures he could make in his head from the dusty books he discovered for sale in an old apple box when they were closing down the local library were better than anything billion dollar Hollywood could generate. And it seemed to him that the real technology which he had started to study at school and to mug up on in his spare time was always just a breakthrough or two away from achieving one or other of the technological feats which would get future, the real future for which he felt an almost physical craving, up and spinning. The starships would soon be ready to launch, even if NASA was running out of funding. The photon sails were spreading, although if most of the satellites spinning around the earth seemed to be broadcasting virtual shopping and porn. The wormholes through time and dimension were just a quantum leap away. And the marvellous worlds, teeming with emerald clouds and sentient crimson oceans, the vast diamond cities and the slow beasts of the gasclouds with their gaping mouths spanning fractions of a lightyear, were out there waiting to be found. So, bright kid that he was, walking the salt harbours of Baltimore with his mother and gazing at the strange star-creatures in their luminous tanks at the National Aquarium long before he met Terr, he’d gone to sleep at nights with the radio on, but tuned between the station to the billowing hiss of those radio waves, spreading out. We are here. Earth is alive. Tom was listening, and waiting for a reply.
Doing well enough at exams and aptitudes at school to get to th
e next level without really bothering, he toyed with the cool physics of cosmology and the logic of the stars, and followed the tangled paths of life through chemistry and biology, and listened to the radio waves, and tinkered with things mechanical and electrical and gained a competence at computing and engineering, and took his degree in Applied Physics at New Colombia, where he had an on-off thing with a psychology undergrad, during which he’d finally got around to losing his virginity before—as she herself put it the morning after; as if, despite all the endearments and promises, she was really just doing him a favour—it lost him.
Postgrad time, and the cosmology weirdoes went one way, and the maths bods another, and the computer nerds went thataway, and physics freaks like Tom got jobs in the nano-technology companies which were then creating such a buzz on the World Stock Exchange. But Tom found the same problem at the interviews he went to that he still often found with girls, at least when he was sober—which was that people thought him vague and disinterested. But it was true in any case. His heart really wasn’t in it—whatever it was. So he did was most shiftless young academics with a good degree do when they can’t think of anything else. He took a postgrad course in another country, which, pin in a map time, really, happened to be at Aston in Birmingham, England. And there he got involved for the first time in the local SETI project, which of course was shoestring and voluntary, but had hooked on to some spare radio time that a fellow-sympathiser had made available down the wire from Jodrell Bank. Of course, he’d known about SETI all for ages; his memory of the Drake Equation went so far back into his childhood past that, like Snow White or the songs of the Beatles, he couldn’t recall when he had first stumbled across it. But to be involved at last, to be one of the ones who was listening. And then persuading his tutor that he could twist around his work on phase-shift data filtering to incorporate SETI work into his dissertation. He was with fellow dreamers at last. It all fitted. What Tom Kelly could do on this particular planet orbiting this common-or-garden sun, and what was actually possible. Even though people had already been listening for a message from the stars more than fifty years and the politicians and the bureaucrats and the funding bodies—even Tom’s ever-patient tutor—were shaking their heads and frowning, he was sure it was just a matter of time. One final push to get there.
There was a shop in Kendal, at the edge of the Lake District. It was on a corner where the cobbled road sloped back and down, and it had, not so many years before, specialised in selling rock-climbing and fell-walking gear, along with the mint cake for which the town was justly famous and which tasted, as Terr had memorably said to Tom when she’d first got him to try it, like frozen toothpaste. You still just about see the old name of the shop—Peak and Fell, with a picture of a couple of hikers—beneath the garish orange paintwork of the new name which had replaced it. EXTREME LAKES.
There were people going in and out, and stylish couples outside posing beneath the bubble hoods of their pristine limegreen balloon-tyred off-roaders. Even on this day of freezing rain, but there was no doubt that the new bodily-enhanced sports for which this shop was now catering were good for business. Stood to reason, really. Nobody simply looked up at one of those rounded snowy peaks and consulted an old edition of Wainwright and then put one booted foot in front of another and walked up them any longer. Nobody except Tom and Terr, scattering those surprised black-legged sheep across the frozen landscape, finding abandoned farmhouses, making sweet freezing love which was ice cream and agony on the crackling ice of those frozen cols. Until that moment, Tom had been entirely grateful for it.
The people themselves had an odd look about them. Tom, who had rarely done more than take the autotram to and from the campus and his digs in England until he met Terr, and since had noticed little other than her, was seeing things here he’d only read about; and barely that, seeing as he had little time for newspapers. Facial enhancements, not just the subtle kind which made you look handsomer or prettier, but things which turned your eyebrows into blue ridges, or widened your lips into pillowy creations which would had surprised Salvador Dali, let alone Mick Jagger. Breasts on the women like airbags, or nothing but roseate nipple, which of course they displayed teasingly beneath outfits which changed transparency according to the pheromones the smart fabrics detected. One creature, Tom was almost sure, had a threesome, a double-cleavage, although it was hard to tell just by glancing, and he really didn’t want to give her the full-bloodied stare she so obviously craved. But most of them were so thin. That was the thing which struck him the most strongly. They were thin as birds, and had stumpy quill-like appendages sticking from their backs. They were angles or devils, these people, creatures of myth whose wings God had clipped after they had committed some terrible theological crime, although the wings themselves could to be purchased once you went inside the shop. Nike and Reebok and Shark and Microsoft and Honda at quite incredible prices. Stacked in steel racks like ski-poles.
The assistant swooped on them from behind her glass counter. She had green hair, which even to Tom seemed reasonable enough, nothing more than a playful use of hair dye, but close-up it didn’t actually appear to be hair at all, but some sort of sleek curtain which reminded him of cellophane. It crackled when she touched it, which she did often, as if she couldn’t quite believe it was there, the way men do when they have just grown a moustache or beard. She and Terr were soon gabbling about brands and tensile strength and power-to-weight ratios and cold-down and thrillbiting and brute thermals and cloud virgins—which Tom guessed was them. But Terr was soaking it all up in the way that she soaked up anything that was new and fresh and exciting. He watched her in the mirror behind the counter, and caught the amazing flash of those storm green eyes. She looked so beautiful when she was like this; intent and surprised. And he longed to touch that meeting of her throat and jaw just beneath her ear, which was still damp from the rain and desperately needed kissing, although this was hardly the appropriate time. And those eyes. He loved the way Terr gazed right back at him when she was about to come; that look itself was enough to send him tumbling, falling into those gorgeous green nebulae, down into spreading dark core of her pupils which were like forming stars.
“Of course, it’ll take several weeks, just to make the basic bodily adjustments…”
Was the assistant talking to him? Tom didn’t know or care. He edged slightly closer to the counter to hide the awkward bulge of his erection, and studied the Kendal Mint Cake, which they still had for sale. The brown and the chocolate-coated, and the standard white blocks, which did indeed taste like frozen toothpaste, but much, much sweeter. A man with jade skin and dreadfully thin arms excused-me past Tom to select a big bar, and then another. Tom found it encouraging, to think that Kendal Mint Cake was still thriving in this new age. There were medals and awards on the old-fashioned wrapping, which commemorated expeditions and treks from back in the times when people surmounted physical challenges with their unaided bodies because, as Mallory had said before he disappeared into the mists of the last ridge of Everest, they were there. But it stood to reason that you needed a lot of carbohydrate if your body was to fuel the changes which were necessary which would allow you to, as the adverts claimed, fly like a bird. Or at least flap around like a kite. Pretty much, anyway.
This was the new world of extreme sports, where, if wanted to do something that your body wasn’t up to, you simply had your body changed. Buzzing between channels a while back in search of a site which offered Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, which to Tom, when he was feeling a bit down, was the equivalent of a warm malt whisky, he’d stumbled across a basketball match, and had paused the search engine, imagining for a moment he’d stumbled across a new version of Fantasia, then wondering at the extraordinary sight of these ten and twelve foot giants swaying between each other on their spindly legs, clumsy and graceful as new-born fauns. But this, after all, was the future. It was the world he was in. And Terr was right when she urged him to accept it, and with it this whole idea of flying,
and then offered to help with the money, which Tom declined, ridiculously excessive though the cost of it was. He lived cheaply enough most of the time, and the bank was always happy to add more to his student loan so that he could spend the rest of his life repaying it. And not that he and Terr were going the whole way, in any case. They were on the nursery slopes, they were ugly chicks still trembling in their nest, they were Dumbo teetering atop that huge ladder in the circus tent. They were cloud virgins. So the heart and circulatory enhancements, and the bone-thinning and the flesh-wasting and the new growth crystals which sent spiderwebs of carbon fibre teasing their way up through your bone marrow, the Kevlar skin which the rapids surfers used, all the stuff which came stacked with health warnings and disclaimers which would have made the Surgeon General’s warning on a packet of full-strength Camels look like a nursery tale: all of that they passed on. They simply went for the bog-standard Honda starter kits of vials and Classic (Classic meant boring and ordinary; even Tom had seen enough adverts to know that) wings. That would do—at least for a beginning, Terr said ominously, between humming to herself and swinging the elegant little bag which contained the first instalment of their vials as they headed out from the shop into the driving winter rain.
It was January already, and the weather remained consistently foul for weeks in its own unsettled English way, which was cold and damp, and billows and squalls, and chortling gutters and rainswept parks, and old leaves and dog mess on the slippery Birmingham pavements. The Nissan packed up again too, but in a way which was beyond Tom’s skill to repair, and a part was sent off for which might as well have been borne over from China on a none-too fast sea-clipper, the time it took to come. Days and weekends, they were grounded, and sort-of living together in Tom’s digs, or the pounding smoky Rastafarian fug of Terr’s shared house in Handsworth. But Tom liked the Rastas; they took old-fashioned chemicals, they worshipped an old-fashioned God, and talked in their blurred and rambling way of a mythic Africa which would never exist beyond the haze their dreams. Tom did a little ganja himself, and he did a fair amount of wine, and he lay in bed with Terr back in his digs in Erdington one night when the first men landed on Mars, and they watched the big screen on the wall from the rucked and damp sheets whilst the landlord’s cat slept on the purring computer.
Snodgrass and Other Illusions: The Best Short Stories of Ian R. MacLeod Page 15
