Ian McDonald - Chaga

‘Shepard, in all those years, was there ever anyone else? Is there anyone else now?’

‘No one who it would break me to lose. You?’

It would be too complicated to explain about Faraway, and she had still not clarified her feelings about the thing with him. It had seemed like a breaking of something or a curing. A healing. A whole-ing.

‘No,’ she said.

The HORUS orbiter Robert A. Heinlein passed over the Starview Lodge, and the man and the woman treading water in the deep end of the pool, with a mighty rushing sound. It thumped down on the main runway across the lagoon. Gaby heard the space watchers at the back of the hotel cheer and clap. She wriggled herself close to Shepard, tucked her fingers into the waistband of his shorts.

‘All body hair?’ she asked, innocently.

‘Let’s find out,’ he said.

Gaby yelled with laughter. The wind gusted and boomed around the Starview Lodge’s many eaves, and the water of the pool became a dance of droplets as the rain came striking down.

Aaron came down from Minneapolis on the second day of the storm. He made it in an hour before they closed the airport. Gaby hardly recognized the lean, fit, almost-sixteener in a wheelchair. He remembered Gaby. He seemed glad to see her. His memories of her were all good; he happily shared them with Gaby as she drove the hire car through sheets of gusting rain to the Ramada where Shepard had reserved a room. She wondered how he would take the news that she was moving into the Ramada at the same time.

Tropical Storm Hilary’s visit to the coast would not be soon forgotten. She blew in to the south, moved north, thought about heading back out to sea for a day or two, then decided she liked the south and went down there again. She left behind her a litter of gutted trailer parks, snapped palm trees, felled billboards, roofless Pentecostal churches, de-awninged gas stations, shorted power lines, breached sea defences, scuttled pleasure cruisers, Pearl-Harbored marinas and thirty-foot yachts in supermarket parking lots. In the five days of her progress, she dumped three months’ rain on the dry coast.

Gaby McAslan never looked at a swizzle stick again without a prick of awe at the power eight inches of fluorescent plastic could wield.

As she had prayed, Hilary wrecked the HORUS launch program. When the wind dropped beneath forty, the occasional SSTO struggled toward the grey clouds, cheered on by space junkies in waterproofs and plastic rain sheets. The UNECTA hotels filled up with newspersons drinking out the storm and shaven-headed Final Frontiersmen moping nervously around the corridors in their UNECTA Space white sweats, like a convention of Bad Ass Buddhists. Gaby spent as much of the storm as she could in bed with Shepard. When she could not be there, she took Aaron to look at rockets in the rain, or view the launches with Rodrigo and The Man, or watch the figures in bulky white space suits way down in the deep water training tank, or moving in the Virtual Reality simulators like old men practising Tai Chi.

‘Quick Gab, infect me with something nasty but non-lethal,’ Shepard said as the television weather girl declared that tropical Storm Hilary had bottomed out and was filling from the south, wind speeds were dropping and the whole system was predicted to spin itself to nothing over Bermuda.

‘You’re right about Aaron,’ Gaby said, rolling herself up in Shepard’s sheet. ‘He tries too hard.’

‘You’ve noticed it,’ Shepard said from the bathroom. He was plastered from head to toe in UNECTA Space depilatory cream. Yellow storm light shone through the cracks in the racing grey rain clouds.

‘When I’ve been out with him, yes. Everything is too much. Nothing is relaxed, natural. Shepard, I don’t think it’s himself he’s doing it for. I think it’s you.’

‘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.