Ian McDonald - Chaga

Don’t smile at your own jokes, Ellen.

She rattled through the reports on the state of the Big Dumb Object. What little Gaia could photograph through the five slit windows that ran the length of the cylinder indicated that the ring mountain baffles had solidified into partition bulkheads five kilometres thick, though gravitometric analysis seemed to indicate the presence of large spaces up to three kilometres in diameter inside the walls. Gaia was being re-tasked for low-level passes over the window slits to attempt to map the interior prior to human exploration. Yes, alien intelligences were a possibility. Even the Chaga-makers themselves. So was Harvey the six-foot invisible white rabbit. Any more questions?

Not yet, Gaby thought. Wait until the Great White Major Toms are smiling for the cameras before you pull out your j’accuse.

‘You can pick up the latest releases from Gaia and the Hubble and Chandrasekahr telescopes at reception on the way out,’ Ellen Prochnow said.

‘I’d like now to introduce you the crew and mission team of the space plane Arthur C. Clarke. This will be Mission 88 of Operation Final Frontier, HORUS launch thirty-four from Kennedy Space Centre. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Commander Phillippa Gregory, orbiter pilot Damon Ruscoe, Flight Engineer McAuley Trudin of the Arthur C. Clarke, and her mission team.’

People applauded. Gaby expected them to come on in a high-kicking chorus line, but it was just another load of smiling, waving bald-headed astronauts in white coveralls with UNECTA Space ’s crescents-and-Earth logo on breast and back. The shaved heads were something to do with preventing hairs drifting around Unity, Gaby had heard. The station was already well over capacity, and Final Frontier people were being shipped up faster than the space engineers could bolt new sections on and fill them with air. Gaby liked the idea of the success or failure of First Contact hanging from a stray, free-floating pube. The hairlessness suited the blacks much better than the whites, who all looked grim and refugee-like. So which is the weapons expert? Gaby thought, leaning on her folded arms and watching the mission team shuffle out from the wing and form a semicircle behind Ellen Prochnow. You, big black man with the happy expression? You, little white woman with the look of naked terror on your face? You, Captain Lantern-jaw Marine-face with the much-too-nice-eyes that give it all away?

You?

You.

‘You,’ Gaby breathed at the twelfth coverall from the end. ‘You cannot do this to me, not here, not now.’

There was a launch that night. It was only an SSTO freighter -they barely gave the things mission numbers, they were that lacking in glamour – but it made a lot of noise and sent up a mighty impressive pillar of flame across the lagoon. The space-junkies and rocket-fetishists who had not gone across the causeway to Trailer Park were crowding around the Starview Lodges telescopes on the upper level to ooh and ah. Gaby had the terrace bar to herself. The other journalists derided her for her choice of the hippy, dippy, New-Agey Starview Lodge over less eclectic expense account hotels down the coast and across the lagoon. Gaby stayed here because Gaby liked the vibes and the clientele. It reminded her of Africa. It reminded her of the Watchhouse. Its keel had been laid the same year that Unity’s had been welded together in low orbit, and it had grown in symbiosis with the renascent space age. Nowhere else did they hold nightly BDO-viewing parties, as socially and aesthetically charged as any Japanese cherry-blossom-watching picnic. And there were no news people.

‘Expecting someone?’ Nice Eddie, the bar boy she did like, asked her.

‘Hoping someone,’ she said and sucked her piña colada and watched the faintly luminous pillar of cloud from the rocket launch blow away on the wind from the ocean. It was getting up; Tropical Storm Hilary must be dithering between strange attractors out in the Bahamas. Gaby waved her swizzle stick in the air. Come, storm, come. If a butterfly’s wings in Beijing could summon up a hurricane, surely a swizzle stick with a Saturn Five rocket on the end at the Starview Lodge could command Hilary to storm hard against this coast, rock this wooden ark of a hotel on its moorings, rage over all the HORUSes and launchers and SSTO over the water and press them to the ground, and blow Shepard back to me. Blow me hours, blow me days of him, before he gets into his rocket and flies away from me.

He was taking his time coming. But he was still politely late.

Gaby sought out the BDO in the sky. That bright star in the belly of Pisces, resting on the edge of the world. How would it look when it went into orbit? They were talking about a position half-way between the earth and the moon. She looked at that great light in the sky and tried to calculate apparent diameters. A bright blur. Maybe even a recognizable cylinder. It would go through phases, like the moon. It was a moon. Fourteen day orbit.

What will it look like to Shepard, in Unity, or on High Steel, that hair-raising surf-shack of girders, solar panels and environment tanks they had built out there the final stepping stone to the BDO. Too big to be a space ship; a planet on your doorstep. That was probably the only way to look at it and stay sane.

She ordered another piña colada from Constantin, the bar boy she did not like. He was impolitely late now. And he had managed to shaft her question to Ellen Prochnow. Stand up and play Wicked Witch of the Seventh Row in front of the man you begged to come and see you to tell him how sorry you are, how you’ve changed, how you’ve found him in your thoughts every day.

Bamboo wind chimes clocked against each other. Blow wind, come to me. Listen to me, I cannot lose him to cosmic irony.

Up on the telescope deck they were talking passionately about centrifugal gravity.

‘Any messages for me at reception?’ she asked Nice Eddie.

‘Not last time I looked.’

‘Could you look again?’

He looked again. There were still no messages.

‘He’s late,’ Nice Eddie said.

He is three piña coladas late, Gaby thought. Three piña coladas late is looking-like-he-isn’t-going-to-show late. It’s he-doesn’t-want-to-see-you late. It’s this-is-the-end-of-it-Gaby-McAslan-late. The fourth piña colada is the longest one, the one over which you work out what you are going to do with the rest of your life now. It would need to be the longest one Emilio at the bar ever shook. She did not have a plan if he did not come. It is a terrible universe, she thought, that such tiny moment, such atoms of decision, are the fulcrums on which whole lives and futures swing. Strange attractors of the soul; like that storm she had tried to charm with her swizzle stick.

He was not-going-to-show late now. He was never-going-to-show late.

‘He didn’t turn up,’ Nice Eddie said as she picked small change out of her purse to leave as a tip.

‘Doesn’t look like it, Eddie.’

She stood up to leave. And there he was, asking directions at reception. The girl was pointing right at her. The strength went out of her legs. She sat down, suddenly terrified. She realized that she did not know what to say to him.

She found herself scrabbling in her bag for cigarettes that had not been there for five years.

‘Gaby?’

‘Oh. Hi.’ Caught, flustering. ‘Sit down, oh sit down; Eddie, a Wild Turkey with branch water, isn’t that what it is? and I’ll have another piña colada, I did remember right, didn’t I? It is Wild Turkey?’

‘You remember right.’

She found she was doing anything but look at him. She forced her eyes towards him. He is not a man who suits having no hair, she thought. It made him look like an impostor of himself. He had bought a new outfit, one of those Indian-inspired two-pieces that were the fashion. It did not flatter him much either, but he looked comfortable in it.