Phases of Gravity

by Dan Simmons

  Dave took the stalk of his grass out of his mouth and tossed it away. "I guess that's about as happy as I've ever been," said Dave. "Pop said he was mad at me for jumping in—he threatened to wallop me if I ever went swimming there again—but I knew that he was proud. Once when we went into Condon I was sitting in the truck and I heard him telling a couple of his friends about it, and I knew he was proud of me. But I don't think that was why I felt so happy about it. You know, Richard, I used to think about it when I was flying medevac in 'Nam and knew it was something more than just pleasing Pop. I hated being there in Vietnam. I was scared shitless almost all of the time and I knew it was going to kick the hell out of my career when they found out what I was doing. I hated the weather, the war, the bugs, everything. And I was happy. I thought about it then and I realized that it just made me damn happy to be saving things, saving people. It's like everything in the universe was conspiring to drag those poor sons of bitches

  down, drag them under, and I'd come along in that fucking chopper and grab on and we'd just refuse to let them go under."

  They walked back past the house, set up the grill next to the jeep, and cooked their dinner. The evening chill struck the instant the direct sunlight was gone. Baedecker could see two volcanic peaks catching the last light far to the north and east. They waited until the charcoal glowed white, singed the outside of their hamburger patties, added thick slices of onion, and ate ravenously, each opening a fresh beer with dinner.

  "Did you ever consider buying the ranch and rebuilding it?" asked Baedecker.

  Dave shook his head. "Too many ghosts."

  "Still, you came back to live nearby."

  "Yeah."

  "I have a friend," said Baedecker, "who said that there might be places of power. She thinks we could do worse than to spend our lives searching for them. What do you think?"

  "Places of power," said Dave. "Like Miz Callahan's magnetic lines of force, huh?"

  Baedecker nodded. The idea did sound absurd.

  "I think your friend is right," said Dave. He pulled another beer from the cooler and shook the ice off it. "But I bet it's more complicated than that. There're places of power—yeah—no doubt about that. But it's like we were talking about last night. You have to help make them. You have to be in the right place at the right time and know it."

  "How do you know it?" asked Baedecker.

  "By dreaming about it but not thinking about it," Dave said.

  Baedecker pulled the tab on another beer and put his feet up on the dash. The house was only a silhouette against a fading sky now. He zipped up his coat. "By dreaming about it but not thinking about it," he said.

  "Right. Have you ever practiced any Zen meditation?"

  "No," said Baedecker.

  "I did for a few years," said Dave. "The idea is to get rid of all the thinking so there's nothing between you and the thing. By not looking you're supposed to see clearly."

  "Did it work?"

  "Nope," said Dave, "not for me. I'd sit there chanting my mantra or whatever and think about every damned thing in the universe. Half the time I'd have a hard-on from erotic daydreams. But I did find something that worked."

  "What's that?"

  "Our training for the mission," said Dave. "The endless simulations worked pretty much the way meditation was supposed to and didn't."

  Baedecker shook his head. "I don't agree. That was just the opposite. The whole goddamn thing, when it finally happened, was just like the simulations. I didn't experience any of it because of all the preprogramming the simulations had stuck in me."

  "Yeah," Dave said and took the last bite of his hamburger, "that's the way I used to feel. Then I realized that that wasn't the case at all. What we did was turn those two days on the moon into a sacrament."

  "A sacrament?" Baedecker tugged his cap down low and frowned. "A sacrament?"

  "Joan was Catholic, wasn't she?" asked Dave. "I remember you used to go to Mass with her occasionally in Houston."

  "Yes."

  "Well, you know what I mean then, although it's not as well done these days as when I was a kid and used to go with Ma. The Latin helped."

  "Helped what?"

  "Helped the ritual," said Dave. "Just like the mission, the simulations helped. The more ritualized it is, the less thought gets in the way. You remember the first thing Buzz Aldrin did when they had a few minutes of personal time after Apollo 11 landed?"

  "Celebrated communion," said Baedecker. "He brought the wine and stuff in his personal preference kit. He was . . . what . . .? Presbyterian?"

  "It doesn't matter," said Dave. "But what Buzz didn't realize is that the mission itself was already the ritual, the sacrament was already in place, just waiting for someone to celebrate it."

  "How so?" said Baedecker but already the truth of what Dave was saying had struck him on some internal level.

  "I saw the photograph you left there," Dave said. "The picture of you and Joan and Scott. By the seismic experiment package."

  Baedecker said nothing. He remembered kneeling there in the lunar dusk before the snapshot, the layers of pressurized moonsuit stiff and clumsy around him, the stark sunlight a benediction.

  "I left an old belt buckle of my father's," said Dave. "I set it right next to the laser reflecting mirrors."

  "You did?" said Baedecker, truly surprised. "When?"

  "When you were getting the Rover ready for the trip to Rill 2 on the first EVA," said Dave. "Hell, I'd be amazed if every one of the twelve of us who walked up there didn't do something like that."

  "I never thought of that," said Baedecker.

  "The rest of it was all preparation, just clearing away inconsequentials. Even places of power are useless unless you're prepared to bring something to them. And I don't mean just the things we brought—they're to the real sacrament what the lump of bread is to the Eucharist. Then, if you come away the same person you were, you know it wasn't really a place of power."

  "That's it then, that's the problem," said Baedecker. "Nothing changed."

  Dave laughed and grasped Baedecker's upper arm through the thick jacket. "Are you serious, Richard?" he said softly. "Do you remember who you were and have any idea who you are now?"

  Baedecker shook his head.

  Dave said nothing. He jumped out to dump the last of the embers, bury them carefully in the sand, and stow the gear in the back of the jeep. He came around to Baedecker's side. "Move over," he said. "You're driving. I'm too drunk."

  Baedecker, who had matched Dave beer for beer through the afternoon and evening, nodded and shifted to the driver's side.

  The jeep's headlights picked out sagebrush and scrub pines as they drove slowly back. Clouds obscured the stars and the full moon would not rise for hours yet.

  "Tom Gavin will never understand," said Dave. "The poor son of a bitch is so desperate for the sacramental element that he'll never find it. I've seen him on TV talking about being born again in lunar orbit. Shee-it. He talks about it and talks about it and doesn't have the least fucking idea of what being born again means. You were the one, Richard. I saw it."

  Baedecker shook his head slowly. "No," he said. "I didn't feel it. I don't know what any of it meant."

  "You think a newborn knows what it all means?" asked Dave. "It just happens and then you go about the mean business of being alive. Awareness comes later, if it comes at all."

  They emerged from the canyon and headed across the last ridge before the switchbacks. Baedecker shifted into first gear and crept along the narrow jeep trail as slowly as the vehicle would allow. He felt sober, but he kept seeing rattlesnakes wiggling at the edge of the headlight beams.

  "Being born again doesn't mean that you've arrived somewhere," said Dave. "It means you're ready to start the trip. The pilgrimage to more places of power, the doomed quest to keep the people and things you love from being caught by the weeds and dragged under. Stop here, please."

  Baedecker stopped and watched while Dave leaned over, wa
s quietly sick over the side of the jeep, and sat up to clean his mouth with water from an old canteen under the seat. Dave slumped back down, burped once, and pulled his cap low over his eyes. "Thus endeth the gospel according to Saint David. Drive on."

  Baedecker slowed the jeep on the ridge before the switchbacks leading to the last canyon. Lonerock was visible two miles below, a few lights glowing between dark trees.

  "Flick your headlights a few times," Dave said.

  Baedecker did.

  "Okay, drive on."

  "Does Miz Callahan think the aliens drive UFOs with headlights?" said Baedecker.

  Dave shrugged without lifting his cap. "Maybe they take EVAs."

  Baedecker shifted down, missed his shift, ground gears, shifted again.

  "Mmm, smooth," said Dave. "What did you think of my book idea?"

  "Frontiers?" said Baedecker. "I liked it."

  "You think it's a worthwhile project?"

  "Definitely."

  "Good," said Dave. "I want you to help me write it."

  "Why, for chrissakes? You're doing fine."

  "No, I'm not," said Dave. "I can't write the parts about the people for shit. Even if my work on the Hill gave me time to travel and do the research—which it won't—I couldn't write that part."

  "The part about the Russian, Belyayev, was great," said Baedecker.

  "I picked up all that crap when I was over there for the ASTP," said Dave. "The most recent parts are ten years old. The important part of the book will be what the four American guys are up to. And I don't want any of that Reader's Digest pap either—'Lieutenant Colonel Brick Masterson has since left the Agency to pursue a successful career combining his Austin beer distributorship and his part ownership in a string of lesbian mud-wrestlers.' Uh-uh, Richard, I want to know what these suckers are feeling. I want to know what they don't tell their wives in the middle of the night when they can't sleep. I want to know what moves them right down to the seat of their meat. I don't care how inarticulate we poor ex—jet jockeys are, I expect you to get in there with your little epistemological proctoscope . . . damn, that's good . . . I can't be too drunk if I can say that, huh? I want you to get in there and find out what we need to know about ourselves, okay, Richard?"

  "I don't think so . . ." began Baedecker.

  "Shut up, please," said Dave. "Think about it. Let me know by, say, right after the baby's born. We're coming back out to Salem and Lonerock a few weeks after that. Think about it until then. That's an order, Baedecker."

  "Yassuh."

  "Jesus," said Dave. "You ran over that poor snake back there and it wasn't even a rattler."

  Lying on the sleeper sofa in Dave's study, Baedecker watches rectangles of light from passing cars move across the bookshelves and he thinks about things. He remembers Dave's comment, "I guess that's about as happy as I've ever been," and he tries to remember a comparable point in time for himself. Dozens of memories come to mind—from childhood, with Joan in the early years, the night Scott was born—but, as important and satisfying as each one is, it is ultimately rejected. Then he recalls a single, simple event that he has carried with him over the years like a well-worn snapshot, bringing it out in times of loneliness and displacement.

  It was a minor thing. A few minutes. He was flying back to Houston from the Cape some time during the last months of training. He was alone in his T-38—just as Dave had been a week ago—when, on an impulse, he overflew the sprawling subdivision in which he lived. Baedecker remembers the perfect timing of the emergence of his wife and seven-year-old child, the clarity with which he saw them from an altitude of eight hundred feet at five hundred miles per hour. He remembers the sunlight dancing on the Plexiglas canopy as he pulled the T-38 into a victory roll, and then another, celebrating the sky, the day, the coming mission, and his love for the two small figures seen so far below.

  Someone in the household coughs loudly and Baedecker starts from the edge of sleep, conditioned by years of listening for his son's labored breathing in the night. He watches a rectangle of white light moving across the dark line of books and tries to relax.

  Eventually he sleeps. And the dream comes.

  It is one of only two or three dreams that Baedecker has that he knows is not a dream. It is a memory. He has had it for years. When he comes awake, gasping and clutching at the headboard, he knows immediately that it has been the dream. And, sitting up in the darkness of Dave's study, feeling the sweat already drying on his face and body, he knows that this time—for the first time—the dream has been different.

  Until now the dream had always been the same. It is August of 1962 and he is taking off from Whiting Field near Pensacola, Florida. It is a sickeningly hot day, muggy beyond belief, and it is a relief when he is sealed into the cockpit of the F-104 Starfighter and begins breathing cool oxygen. He is not involved in flight-testing. There is nothing untested about this F-104; the chrome-alloyed aircraft is all stock-block equipment, scheduled to join an Air Force squadron at Homestead Air Force Base south of Miami. Baedecker has spent two weeks ferrying it cross-country on an "interservice courtesy call," his first political job for NASA, giving rides to Navy and Army VIPs curious about the new first-line fighter. A retired admiral here at Pensacola—a hulk of a man too fat for his flight suit and almost too fat for the rear seat—had patted Baedecker on the back after his joyride and proclaimed, "Absolutely first-rate flying machine." Like most pilots who had flown the F-104, Baedecker did not totally agree. The aircraft was impressive for its power and brute force—indeed, it was used out at Edwards as a proficiency trainer for the X-15 that Baedecker had flown for the first time earlier that summer—but it was not a first-rate flying machine; it was an engine with an ejection seat attached, two seats in this case, and two stubby wings offering about as much lift surface as fins on an arrow.

  Sitting in the cockpit on this particularly hot August day, Baedecker is glad that the tour is over; he has a ten-minute solo flight to Homestead and then he will be heading back to California by C-130 transport. He does not envy the Air Force pilots who will be flying the F-104 on a daily basis.

  Heat waves rise in rippling billows and distort the runway and line of mangrove trees beyond. Baedecker taxis into position, radios the tower for clearance, and sets the brakes on while he brings the engine up to full power. He can feel that everything is copacetic even before the dials register their proper readings. The machine strains at its mechanical tether like a half-mad thoroughbred pushing at the starting gate.

  Baedecker radios the tower again and releases the brakes. The machine leaps forward, slamming him back into his seat while the runway centerline blurs together under the nose of the aircraft. Still, the monster uses an ungainly amount of runway before it reaches rotation speed. Baedecker lifts the nose sharply onto an invisible line twenty degrees above the advancing wall of trees, feels the aircraft solidly off the ground, pulls the gear up, and kicks in the afterburner.

  Things happen simultaneously then. Power drops to ten percent of what is needed, Baedecker's board goes red, he knows without thinking that the flanges around the afterburner have popped open and that thrust is spilling uselessly in a blazing fountain behind him, and the stall buzzer screams in panic. Baedecker instinctively throws the nose down, sees he has neither time nor altitude for this, and pulls back sharply on the stick at precisely the same instant the first branches snap off under the belly of the dying F-104. Baedecker hunches in a near fetal position, pulls the D-ring, sees the canopy fly off in a strangely silent act of levitation and waits a full eternity of 1.75 seconds before the charge in his ejection seat fires and he is following the canopy up but too late, the plane is striking heavy branches now, is shearing off entire trunks of pine trees, and the cartwheeling tail section slams into the base of the rising ejection seat, not a solid hit but a foul tip that sends the seat spinning ass-over-tail, Baedecker flying out of it upside down, his spring-loaded chute deploying toward the foliage forty feet below, both of his ankle
s already broken by the impact, his head ringing. Then the main chute is opening, Baedecker's feet tug toward the sky like a child swinging too high, the impact is too strong, breaking his left shoulder upon opening and his right shoulder after swinging him almost completely around, the main chute side-slipping below him now, an inverted, orange umbrella trying to close in on itself, no reason for it not to close and drop him to the flame and flying carnage below, but it does not and he swings forward in another full arc, his broken feet almost striking the upper branches and flowers of flaming aviation fuel this time, his lungs already breathing in the unbreathable vapors and heat. And then, for two endless seconds, he is hanging under the silk canopy the way God and man had meant, drifting forward like a tourist under a para-glide chute being towed by a KrisKraft, but it is not water under him but half an acre of jagged stumps and branches, ten thousand punji stakes created in three seconds of violent aircraft impact, and flame as far as he can see, flame rising around him and above him, already licking razor-tongues at his suit and shroudlines and pain-dead feet hanging at impossible angles beneath him, and in two more seconds he will land in that conflagration of sharpened stakes and flesh-melting fuel fire, he will land on those broken ankles, bones splintering, body and parachute sputtering into flame in the heat, skin broiling like a mantis boiling and popping through its own shell in the flames.