And she probably did get there, and make the leap from the ridge on Catayatauri. It seemed like the most likely explanation, even though her body hadn’t been found. Terr had thrown herself from the precipice with the vials singing in her body, her bones twisting, the wings breaking out from her like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, although they would have been too damp and frail to do more than be torn to shreds in the brutal torrents of air. And then, finally, finally, she would have been buffeted the rocks. Terr, it seemed, had chosen the most extreme of all possible ways of dying…
Was it like her, to do this, Tom wondered? Terr plummeting, twisting and writhing? Had she meant to kill herself, or just wanted to take the risk, and lived the moment, and not really cared about the next? The man in the Moorish garden was as lost and puzzled by all these questions as Tom was himself. But the thing about Terr, as they both realised, was that she had always changed moment by moment, hour by hour, year by year. The thing about Terr was that you could never really know her. Tom, he had always been steady and purposeful; long ago, he had laid down the tracks of his life. Terr was different. Terr was always different. She’d never been troubled as Tom had been most of his life by that sense of missed appointments, unfinished business, time slipping by; of vital a message which he had never quite heard. Terr had always leapt without looking back.
The man gave a smile and signed off. The Moorish garden, the dense scent of the flowers, faded. Tom Kelly was back in the morning as the shadows raced the clouds over his mountain; and he was wondering, like a character in a fairy story, just where he been this previous night, and exactly what it was that he had witnessed. And if he could have been granted one wish—which was something that Terr, whatever she had been, hadn’t even offered to him—it would still be the thing for which he had always been hoping. He was nearly seventy, after all. He was Tom Kelly; Mr. SETI. No matter what happened to you, no matter what wonders you witnessed, people his age didn’t change. He was still sure of that, at least.
Tom Kelly, speeding down his mountain. The sun is blazing and the chairlifts are still and the flyers are resting as shadow lies down next to shadow for the long, slumberous afternoon. He parks in the near-empty Place de Revolution, and climbs out from his Citröen, and waves to Jean-Benoît wiping his tables, and then bangs on the door of the beureu de poste. The sign says fermé, but Madame Brissac slides back the bolts. She seems almost pleased to see him. She nearly gives him a smile. Then they spend their hour together, seated beside the counter as bluebottles buzz and circle by her pigeonholes in the warm, intensely odorous air. Tom’s got as far as transitive verbs, and here he’s struggling. But after all, French is a foreign language, and you don’t learn such things in a day—at least, not the way Tom’s learning. It will be some months, he reckons late autumn at least—l’automne, and perhaps even winter, whatever that’s called—before he’s got enough of a grip to ask her about how she sorts the mail in those pigeonholes. And he suspects she’ll think it’s a stupid question in any case. Madame Brissac is, after all, Madame Brissac. But who’d have thought that she was once a teacher, back in the days when people still actually needed to be taught things? For every person, it seems to Tom, who gains something in this future age, there’s someone else who makes a loss from it.
Things are just starting to reawaken when he emerges into the blazing Place de Revolution, and he has to move his Citröen and park it round the corner to make room for the evening’s festivities. It’s the Foire aux Sorcières tonight, which a few months ago would have nothing to him, and still means little enough. But the French like a good festival, he knows that much now at least. They have them here in St. Hilaire regularly—in fact, almost every week, seeing as there’s such a regular throughput of new flyers needing to have their francs taken from them. But this festival is special. Tom knows that, too.
Drinking sweet hot coffee at his usual table, he passes the necessary hour whilst the market stalls and the stage for the evening pageant assemble themselves to the attentions of robot crabs and the clang of poles and the shouts of a few largely unnecessary artisans. The town, meanwhile, stretches itself and scratches its belly emerges from its long meals and lovers’ slumbers. The girl with that Audrey Hepburn look, whom he now knows is called Jeannette, gives him a smile and goes over to say hi, bonjour. She thinks it’s sweet, that a mad old mountain goat like Tom should take the long way around to learning her language. And so does Michel, her boyfriend, who is as urbane and charming as anyone can be who’s got the muscles of a cartoon god and the green scaly skin of a reptile. They even help Tom carry his few boxes of stuff from the boot of his Citröen to the stall he’s booked, and wish him luck, and promise to come back and buy something later on in the evening, although Tom suspects they’ll be having too much fun by then to remember him.
But it turns out that business at his stall is surprisingly brisk in any case. It’s been this way for a couple of weeks now, and if it continues, Tom reckons he’ll have to order some new SETI tee-shirts and teatowels to replace his lost stock, although the teatowels in particular will be hard to replace after all these years, seeing as people don’t seem to have any proper use for them any longer. They ask him what they’re for, these big SETI handkerchiefs, and then tie them around their necks like flags. Who’d have thought it—that teatowels would be a casualty of this future he finds himself in? But bargaining, setting a price for something and then dropping it to make the sale; that’s no problem for Tom. The numbers of another language come almost easily to him; he supposes his brain dimly remembers it once had an aptitude for maths.
The Foire aux Sorcières seems an odd festival for summer, but, even before the darkness has settled, the children are out, dressed as witches, ghosts, goblins, and waving lanterns which cast, thought some technical trick Tom can’t even guess at, a night-murk across their faces. Still, the whole occasion, with those sweet and ghastly faces, the trailing sheets with cut eye-holes, the shrieking, cackling devices, has a pleasantly old-fashioned feel about it to Tom. Even the flyers, when they emerge, have done nothing more to change themselves than put on weird costumes and make-ups, although, to Tom’s mind at least, many of them had looked the part already. The scene, as the sun finally sinks behind the tenements and a semblance of cool settles over the hot and frenzied square, is incredible. Some of the people wandering the stalls have even dressed themselves up as old-fashioned aliens. He spots a bulge-headed Martian, then a cluster of those slim things with slanted eyes which were always abducting people in the Midwest, and even someone dressed as that slippery grey thing that used to explode out of people’s stomachs in the films, although the guy’s taken the head off and is mopping his face with one of Tom’s SETI teatowels because he’s so hot inside it. If you half-closed your eyes, Tom thinks, it really could be market day on the planet Zarg, or anywhere else of a million places in this universe which he suspects that humanity will eventually get around to colonising, when it stops having so much fun here on earth. Look at Columbus, look at Cook, look at Einstein, look at NASA. Look at Terr. We are, in the depths of our hearts, a questing, dreaming race.
Small demons, imps and several ghosts cluster around him now, and ask him what is SETI? which Tom attempts to explain in French. They nod and listen and gaze up at him with grave faces. He’s almost thinking he’s starting to get somewhere, when they all dissolve into gales of laughter and scatter off though the crowds. He watches them go, smiling, those ghosts, those flapping sheets. When he returns his gaze, Madame Brissac has materialised before him. She is dressed as an old-fashioned witch. But she seems awkward beneath her stick-on warts and green make-up, shorn of the usual wooden counter which, even now that they’re attempting to talk to each in the same language, still separates Tom and her. Still, she politely asks the price of his SETI paperweights, and rummages in her witchy bag and purchases one from him, and then comments on the warmth and the beauty of this evening, and how pretty and amusing the children are. And Tom agrees
with her in French, and offers Madame Brissac a SETI teatowel at no extra cost, which she declines. Wishing him a good evening, she turns and walks away. But Tom still feels proud of himself, and he knows that’s she’s proud of him too. It’s an achievement for them both, that they can talk to each other now in the same language, although, being Madame Brissac, she’ll never quite let it show.
The music rides over him. The crowds whoop and sing. The lanterns sway. Down the slope towards the river, the lace-draped stalls look almost cool in the soft breeze which plays down from the hills and over the tenements as Tom sweats in his SETI tee-shirt. Jean-Benoît’s down there, dressed red as fallen Lucifer and surrounded by lesser demons, and looking most strange and splendid for his evening off. There’s no sign, though, of the woman in the dark blue dress whom Tom glimpsed standing in the sunlight all those week ago. He knows that Terr’s dead now, although the thought still comes as a cold blunt shock to him. So how could there ever be any sign of Terr?
Tom’s got his days better sorted now. He’s never got so drunk as to lose one whole day and imagine Thursday is Wednesday. In fact, nowadays, Tom never has a drink at all. It would be nice that say that he’s managed it through pure willpower. But he’s old, and a creature of habit, even when the habits are the wrong ones. And this is the future, after all. So Tom’s taken a vial, just as he had done several times before, and the need, the desire, the welling emptiness, faded so completely that he found himself wondering for the first few days what all the trouble and fuss had been about. But that was two months ago, and he still rarely entertains the previous stupid thoughts about how a social drink, a sip and a glass here and there, would be quite safe for someone like him. Even on a night such as this, when the air smells of wine and sweat and Pernod and coffee and Gitanes, and he can hear bottles popping and glasses clinking and liquid choruses of laughter all around the square, he doesn’t feel the usual emptiness. Or barely. Or at least he’s stopped kidding himself that it’s something the alcohol will ever fill, and decided to get on with the rest of his life unaided.
He sometimes wonders during the long hot afternoons of his lessons with Madame Brissac whether a woman in a blue dress and grey or blonde hair really did enter the bureau de post to enquire about an elderly American called Tom Kelly on that magical Thursday. Sometimes, he’s almost on the brink of interrupting her as she forces him through the endless twists and turns of French grammar, although he knows she’d probably regard it as an unnecessary distraction. He’s thought of asking Jean-Benoît, too—at least, when he’s not dressed up as Lucifer—if he remembers a woman who could have been old or might have been young coming to his café, and who undertook to pass on the message cards he’d forgotten to take with him. Would they remember Terr? Would they deny that they’d ever seen her at all? More likely, Tom has decided, they’ll have long forgotten such a trivial incident amid the stream of faces and incidents which populate their lives.
Tom glances up from the bright Place de Revolution at the few faint stars which have managed to gather over the rooftops and spires of St. Hilaire. Like the Terr—or the ghost of her—he suspects they’ll remain a mystery that he’ll have carry to his grave. But there’s nothing so terrible about mysteries. It was mystery, after all, which drew him to the stars in the first place. Wonder and mystery. He smiles to himself, and waves to Jeannette and Michel as they pass through the crowds. Then Jean-Benoît, amid great cheers, flaps his crimson wings and rises over the stalls and hovers floodlit above the church spire to announce the real beginning of the night’s festivities, which will involve fireworks, amazing pageants, dancing…
This Foire aux Sorcières will probably still be going on at sunrise, but Tom Kelly knows it will be too much for him. He’s getting too old for this world he finds himself in. He can barely keep pace. But he permits himself another smile as he starts to pack up his stall of SETI memorabilia, the tee shirts and paperweights, the lapel pins embossed with a tiny representations of the Drake Equation which not a single person who’s bought one of the things has ever asked him to explain. He’s looking forward to the midnight drive back up his mountain in his old Citroën, and the way the stars will blossom on when he finally turns off the headlights and steps into the cool darkness outside his hut, with the glitter of his tripwires, the hum and glow of his machines. Who knows what messages might be up there?
He’s Tom Kelly, after all.
And this might be the night.
He’s still listening, waiting.
Afterword
New Light On the Drake Equation has one of the longest gestation periods of all my stories. At least, to date. It must have been twenty years from the time I first toyed with the idea of a lonely man searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence to coming up with the finished piece. The step up the story needed came from my actually making the effort to find out a bit more about SETI, and then choosing to set the piece, for no reason I can explain, on the Central Massif of southern France. Another example of my alienation theme, I think, as I’m a useless linguist, but found myself teaching French-speaking students for a while in the Languages Department at Aston University; the coincidence of somewhere so real having a significant place in a story is unusual for me. I hadn’t pictured Tom as needing to be old until I started to write, and even now part of me thinks he isn’t. Perhaps that’s because he probably sees himself, as most elderly people do, as a young, hopeful person trapped in a newly pessimistic age in a annoyingly aged body. Terr, of course, will never be old. At least, not in my and Tom’s memory.
Snodgrass
I’VE GOT ME WHOLE life worked out. Today, give up smoking. Tomorrow, quit drinking. The day after, give up smoking again.
It’s morning. Light me cig. Pick the fluff off me feet. Drag the curtain back, and the night’s left everything in the same mess outside. Bin sacks by the kitchen door that Cal never gets around to taking out front. The garden jungleland gone brown with autumn. Houses this way and that, terraces queuing for something that’ll never happen.
It’s early. Daren’t look at the clock. The stair carpet works greasegrit between me toes. Downstairs in the freezing kitchen, pull the cupboard where the handle’s dropped off.
“Hey, Mother Hubbard,” I shout up the stairs to Cal. “Why no fucking cornflakes?”
The lav flushes. Cal lumbers down in a grey nightie. “What’s all this about cornflakes? Since when do you have breakfast, John?”
“Since John got a job.”
“You? A job?”
“I wouldn’t piss yer around about this, Cal.”
“You owe me four weeks rent,” she says. “Plus I don’t know how much for bog roll and soap. Then there’s the TV licence.”
“Don’t tell me yer buy a TV licence.”
“I don’t, but I’m the householder. It’s me who’d get sent to gaol.”
“Every Wednesday, I’ll visit yer,” I say, rummaging in the bread bin.
“What’s this job anyway?”
“I told yer on Saturday when you and Kevin came back from the Chinese. Must have been too pissed to notice.” I hold up a stiff green slice of Mighty White. “Think this is edible?”
“Eat it and find out. And stop calling Steve Kevin. He’s upstairs asleep right at this moment.”
“Well there’s a surprise. Rip Van and his tiny winkle.”
“I wish you wouldn’t say things like that. You know what Steve’s like if you give him an excuse.”
“Yeah, but at least I don’t have to sleep with him.”
Cal sits down to watch me struggle through breakfast. Before Kevin, it was another Kevin, and a million other Kevins before that, all with grazed knuckles from the way they walk. Cal says she needs the protection even if it means the odd bruise.
I paste freckled marge over ye Mighty White. It tastes just like the doormat, and I should know.
“Why don’t yer tell our Kev to stuff it?” I say.
She smiles and leans forward.
; “Snuggle up to Doctor Winston here,” I wheedle.
“You’d be too old to look after me with the clients, John,” she says, as though I’m being serious. Which I am.
“For what I’d charge to let them prod yer, Cal, yer wouldn’t have any clients. Onassis couldn’t afford yer.”
“Onassis is dead, unless you mean the woman.” She stands up, turning away, shaking the knots from her hair. She stares out of the window over the mess in the sink. Cal hates to talk about her work. “It’s past eight, John,” she says without looking at any clock. It’s a knack she has. “Hadn’t you better get ready for this job?”
Yeah, ye job. The people at the Jobbie are always on the look out for something fresh for Doctor Winston. They think of him as a challenge. Miss Nikki was behind ye spit-splattered perspex last week. She’s an old hand—been there for at least three months.
“Name’s Doctor Winston O’Boogie,” I drooled, doing me hunchback when I reached the front of ye queue.
“We’ve got something for you, Mister Lennon,” she says. They always call yer Mister or Sir here, just like the fucking police. “How would you like to work in a government department?”
“Well, wow,” I say, letting the hunchback slip. “You mean like a spy?”
That makes her smile. I hate it when they don’t smile.
She passes me ye chit. Name, age, address. Skills, qualifications—none. That bit always kills me. Stapled to it we have details of something clerical.
“It’s a new scheme, Mr Lennon,” Nikki says. “The government is committed to helping the long-term unemployed. You can start Monday.”
So here’s Doctor Winston O’Boogie at the bus stop in the weird morning light. I’ve got on me best jacket, socks that match, even remembered me glasses so I can see what’s happening. Cars are crawling. Men in suits are tapping fingers on the steering wheel as they groove to Katie Boyle. None of them live around here—they’re all from Solihull—and this is just a place to complain about the traffic. And Monday’s a drag cos daughter Celia has to back the Mini off the drive and be a darling and shift Mummy’s Citroen too so yer poor hard working Dad can get to the Sierra.
Snodgrass and Other Illusions: The Best Short Stories of Ian R. MacLeod Page 19
