‘What do you mean?’ he shouted over the sound of showering.
‘Remember, back in the Mara, when you said that Fraser would be the one would make hearts and break hearts and everything would come to his fingertips, but Aaron would have to work hard for everything he wanted to achieve, but because of it, the world would know his name?’
‘You’ve got a long memory.’
‘I think living up to that expectation is the most important thing in his life. Everything he does is to prove to you that it is worthwhile for him to be alive while Fraser is not – that he can be not just Aaron, but Fraser too.’
Shepard stepped out of the bathroom. He looked more alien than ever, naked, smooth, wet.
‘Oh no, Gaby.’
‘It’s the damage that we do and never know, Shepard.’
He shook his head, and started to pull chin-ups on the shower rail.
On the television news, the anchorman reported that the Swarm’s new position fifteen thousand kilometres behind the BDO and inactive status were now confirmed. ETTEO was now one hundred and twenty-two hours twenty-seven minutes.
They ate that night at the Starview Lodge, because the food was great and undersubscribed and there was no better place to watch the Ursula K. Le Guin come down out of orbit. The space-junkies were soft people and gave Aaron a place right at the rail. As they watched the landing lights come on block by block, Shepard said, ‘I’m sorry about the Unit 12 thing, Gaby. I did my best.’
‘I know. T.P. told me that you’d leaked it to Dr Dan. You didn’t have to resign for me, though. It scared me. Shepard; that’s why I was so insane that night. For the first time, I was utterly helpless. I couldn’t do anything to stop them. I was disappeared. I was annihilated. I was an un-person. Nothing. It was like being dead, Shepard.’
The spectators all began to cheer as they caught sight of the black delta of the orbiter in the clear yellow evening sky that had come behind the storm.
She knew that would be the last evening. They called him at midnight for the pre-flight medicals, tests, briefings. Gaby and Aaron said all the goodbyes they needed to say in the hotel lobby. The mission co-ordinator was getting ratty because they were taking so long to say them.
‘Mind Aaron.’
‘Aaron can mind himself.’
‘I never asked; where do you go after AEO?’
‘Back to Tanzania. T.P. Costello has talked UNECTA into taking me on one of your deep patrols. I’m going in to see these Ten Thousand Tribes, meet the people of the future, get their faces on television.’
‘I’ll be in touch when I get back.’
‘And how long will that be?’
Shepard shrugged. ‘Ask the Evolvers. But when I do, I’d really like to see Ireland with you; the places you talk about; the Watchhouse, the Point, and your people too.’
‘Go with God, speed-skater.’
‘I’ll write.’
‘Ha ha.’
‘Watch me.’
The minibus door slammed.
Gaby and Aaron ate and drank and talked in the hotel bar until they could see dawn streak the sky outside the glass lobby. There was no Heineken, but Gaby reckoned Aaron would be all right on Miller. It was the right kind of drink for a kid whose father was about to rendezvous with an alien artifact. They found some time just before dawn that they got on fine for a son and a lover.
In the morning they talked with Shepard in the White Room on a videophone. Both agreed that he looked petrified. They did not repeat the farewells of the night before. Farewells did not carry over videophone, and anyway, to them he had already left the planet.
Shepard had got them complimentary passes to the Executive Viewing Area inside the Space Centre. Gaby fought with a NASA official about access for Aaron’s wheelchair and intimidated him into giving them seats next to the Presidential box, which today was occupied by Ellen Prochnow. Gaby noted this, and also the neat NASA binoculars everyone was given. She wondered how many pairs they expected to get back.
It was a good day for a launch, hot and clear. High pressure had come in on the tail of Hilary. Some pools of rainwater still stood on the grass beside the taxiway but the main strip had been dried during the night by special vehicles. Heat haze boiled off the concrete. The HORUS was a dark, predatory shadow, as improbably elongated as a hunting insect, moving within the shiver of the haze. It glided from the big hangar, along the taxiways to the end of the main runway and turned.
At ‘I minus sixty seconds on the big count-down display, the tractor unit disengaged and dashed like a photophobic beetle for its blast-proof bunker. The digits clicked down on the big counter. Everyone resisted the temptation to count along with the final five. This was not New Year. The clock reached zero.
A mile and a half down the runway, nothing happened in response to this.
Then Gaby screamed because it seemed to her as if the spaceship had exploded in a ball of smoke and flame. Then she saw a black shape hurtling out of the fire towards her. The tricks of the heat haze were dispelled. It was big. It was fast. It was riding on a tail of fire, coming right at her. Gaby’s heart leaped as the carrier body passed in front of the stand and, quite unexpectedly, quite improbably, quite magically, lifted into the air.
The noise was louder than anything she had ever heard in her life. She could scream her head off and no would know. She did. She watched, roaring in exuberance, the launcher go up, and keep going up, in a beautiful asymptotic curve, the HORUS orbiter clinging to its back like a thrilled child. The smoke blew away on the wind from the south, but the space ship kept climbing, over the artificial peninsula of the launch runway, over the tide water waders and the gulls and the big crabs, over the space-freaks and the rocket-fetishists down in Trailer Park, over the day-trippers in the jolly boats, over the green water of the Gulf Stream, still climbing. Nothing could bring it down now.
‘Ten miles out, fifty thousand feet,’ said the fat, bearded man with the ugly hat in the T-shirt with Fort Lauderdale in ‘10 on it.
‘Carrier body separation in mark twelve minutes,’ said the other fat bearded man, with the equally ugly hat and the T-shirt with the old-style shuttle on the front.
In the executive viewing stand the people who had seen all this before were leaving for their corporate hospitality suites, but Gaby McAslan’s face was still turned to the sky. She watched the brilliant speck of the rocket exhaust until it disappeared into the high blue.
‘Fucking hell!’ she shouted to Aaron. ‘Bloody fucking hell! Wasn’t that the greatest thing you ever saw?’
‘Are you crying?’ Aaron asked.
‘Of course I am,’ Gaby said. Then she saw Ellen Prochnow gather her entourage around her and head to the door of the presidential box. Fumbling in her handbag, Gaby ran along the row of seats, tried to get over the low partition wall.
‘Hey! Excuse me! Ms Prochnow! Could you spare me a wee minute of your time?’
The Tree Where Man Was Born
66
Hi Gab.
I said I’d write.
I’m sorry my face is so puffy – you’re going to be seeing a lot of it; there isn’t much to look at in this little confession booth they call the Personal Communications Space – that’s freefall for you. Everyone ends up looking like a Bond villain. Three hundred Ernst Stavro Blofelds, hurtling round in their mad space station eight hundred miles above the Earth.
This is Space, Day One. If I shift the camera a little, there, can you see it? Mother Earth, up there above us. That’s the orientation I seem to have chosen. Most others orient themselves the other way up; feet down toward the Earth. I’m probably heading for vertigo and even more nausea than I’m feeling right now: everything you eat sits right on the bottom of your oesophagus and won’t shift. Also, everyone else is metric and this down-home hayseed is still in yards and miles. I’m trying to adjust, but I just can’t feel a kilometre.