'Maybe. If, if, if…' He looked at the videophone. The screen was blank. Schulz still hadn't switched through the live image from the Cape, and he'd no idea how long it was to the launch. Somehow he didn't want to know. That image from almost fifteen years ago still lived in his head: Challenger dying in a giant shower of flame. He stared back over the road, toward the valley that led to La Finca. It was a pretty spot, low orchards, a few smart villas that bespoke money. But on this side of the track it was all locaclass="underline" cheap tapas, terraced houses, old, beaten-up cars. There should have been kids playing soccer in the street. There should have been people.
'What a mess we've made of this,' he said. Swifts darted overhead, their chattering coming back in soft echoes from the stone walls.
'Is that of anything in particular?' the pilot asked.
'Everything in particular.'
Inside, in the dark interior, there was bottle upon bottle lined up against the bar. Brandy and vodka, gin and all manner of local stuff. A man could have a good time here, he thought. A man could bring the curtain down in style, talking to the sun god all the while.
And in the end, he thought, there really was just the one thing to decide: which sun god you happened to be addressing, which one was looking down on you from the burning sky and wondering who put these bugs on the face of the earth.
There were so many to fit the bill. Apollo and Hyperion, Helios and Ra, Mithras and Hiruko. Every race that ever lived seemed, at some stage of its mayfly existence, to have come up with its own particular solar deity. The sky must have been full of them, arguing over who got there first.
And, Lieberman thought, his gut going cold because this stirred some long-dead memory he didn't want to face, on a mere mortal scale there was Phaeton too. He couldn't remember why it took so long for that corpse to rise up from the dry and dusty dregs of his memory. There had been a time (when Charley was bright and healthy and optimistic and the world seemed young) this name ran through his head almost every day.
Poor, stupid, mortal Phaeton, son of Apollo and some passing nymph. Star-crossed Phaeton, who cornered his dumb, adoring dad and wheedled out a promise that, just this once, he could drive the chariot of the sun across the sky and keep the universe in balance. There was something so human in this nagging request. Hey, Dad, can I borrow the Jaguar? Aw, come on.
And something human in Apollo too, in letting the kid go, even though he knew this was fated. The horses and his impetuosity would betray him, the course would be wrong, the earth would catch fire, and, with a thunderbolt from Jupiter, Phaeton would, to use Annie's apt expression, be toast. Phaeton, who was warned not to fly too high or too low, to steer the middle path, to do as he was told, to ignore the basic rule of being human: I screw up, therefore I am. Hey, we've got to make progress somehow.
There were those who thought the myth stemmed from some real event, like a meteor, some cataclysm from the sky. The legend said that the Libyan desert was created when Phaeton crashed to earth, that the scorching heat of this encounter forced up the blood of the Ethiopians and made their skin pitch-black. The Euphrates and the Ganges boiled. The poles were on fire. It was only when the earth herself, Gaia, daughter of Chaos, a family Lieberman felt he was starting to know well, spoke to Jupiter and called in a few favours that someone sent out the celestial Uzi and delivered a touch of holy retribution.
This was crazy. You didn't need to rationalize a line. Phaeton was all of us. This foolish, ambitious fragment of the universe — child of the sun, child of the earth — was each of us, the very essence of humanity, all the stupidity, all the vanity, and that bright, sparking thing called ambition, that curiosity, that urge for the truth.
We were Phaeton all along, but the toys got bigger, and with them the stakes. Every culture had its sun god, and every one its cautionary tale too. Of the mortal who flew too close to the fire and paid with everything he had. And the funeral oratory that followed, the one that said: Dumb kid, hapless kid, stupid kid. But you got to hand it to him. The moron was a trier.
It lived inside every one of us. It was what made Rocky keep getting in the ring, remake after remake. It was what made you think you could shoot some souped-up chunk of metal into space and steal a little piece of that holy flame, make it all your own.
Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket.
Oh yeah? Bigger toys, bigger stakes, with the same dumb mammal flailing through the ancient ceremony. This was being human, having some insidious, endemic thing that lived inside your soul and never let you rest. The world was just some giant room filled with buttons marked 'Don't Press', all manner of hell and damnation sitting on the other side, and we couldn't even hear the dybbuks jabbering beyond the door. Bring on the celestial idiots. Send in the clowns. And leave the earth to clean up the mess.
'What are you thinking?' Annie asked. He was so lost in this reverie, the question seemed to come out of the sky.
'I was thinking of an old story I used to read when I was a kid. About this dumb little brat called Phaeton, who thought he was bigger and stronger than he really was. And found out the hard way what happens when you mess with things you don't understand.'
Mo nodded at the ground. 'I remember that story.'
'Shame a few more people didn't.'
'You don't mean that, Michael.'
'No?'
'No. You're as much a part of this as any of them.'
'Bullshit.' He hardly had enough energy to be angry. The sun seemed to have stolen it from his body during the long, exhausting day.
She was adamant. 'You don't think we should just sit in dark corners, never finding out about the world. You're saying that what that myth means is that we're small, we're powerless, we're insignificant, and we should know our place in the order of things? I don't think so and you don't think so. That's what Charley thinks and she's wrong.'
He was silent. She was right.
'And one more thing. You forgot the real point of that story.'
'Being?'
'The love that Zeus felt for Phaeton all along, even when he went bad. A human love. One that surprised, maybe even alarmed him. To be weak and mortal and still believe…'
'Well, that's gods for you. Stroke them with a little humanity and see where they wind up. Extinct.'
She cast him a sour look, reached over, and stole the remains of his beer. 'You really do sound like those people sometimes. And that isn't you.'
He peered into her lean, tanned face, no emotion on the surface there, some kind of brittle hardness, like an eggshell, between her and the world.
'They're coming,' the pilot said. Across the main road a jeep was kicking up dust.
Lieberman closed his eyes and shivered, trying to let these churning, feverish thoughts subside into something he could handle. Something scratched at his attention. It was the videophone coming suddenly to life, the small flat screen filling with a picture that seemed so familiar: the distant white gantry of the launch pad, the Shuttle there, hooked to the back of the booster rocket like a limpet trying to hitch a ride to the sun. But this Shuttle looked different. Bigger, like the old one on steroids. He recalled what he'd heard about the altitude requirements. Someone had strapped the mother of all engines on the side of this beast and now it was ready to blow. Smoke was billowing out from the base of this giant machine. Lieberman was trying to remember what Schulz had said about the envelope, how long it would take this vast hunk of metal, and the three small human beings inside it, to escape the gravity of the earth, to move beyond the point where Sundog and Charley could peer down from space, run out a thin, poisonous finger of power, and turn them into fiery atoms.