Unperturbed, Hadden continued. “Now some of the components will have been spun or dropped or something. But in any case they’ll have to pass the prescribed tests. I didn’t think that would be enough to scare you off. Personally, I mean.”
“Personally? What makes you think I’m going? Nobody’s asked me, for one thing, and there are a number of new factors.”
“The probability is very high that the Selection Committee will ask you, and the President will be for it enthusiastically. C’mon,” he said, grinning, “you wanna spend your whole life in the sticks?”
It was cloudy over Scandinavia and the North Sea, and the English Channel was covered with a lacy, almost transparent, cobweb of fog.
“Yes, you go.” Yamagishi was on his feet, his hands stiffly at his sides. He gave her a deep bow.
“Speaking for the twenty-two million employees of the corporations I control, very nice to meet you.”
She dozed fitfully in the sleeping cubicle they had assigned her. It was tethered loosely to two walls so she would not, in the course of turning over in zero g, propel herself against some obstacle. She awoke while everyone else seemed to be still asleep and pulled herself along a series of handholds until she found herself before the grand window. They were over the night side. The Earth was in darkness except for a patchwork and sprinkle of light, the plucky attempt of humans to compensate for the opacity of the Earth when their hemisphere was averted from the Sun. Twenty minutes later, at sunrise, she decided that, if they asked her, she would say yes.
Hadden came up behind her, and she started just a little. “It looks great, I admit. I’ve been up here for years and it still looks great. But doesn’t it bother you that there’s a spaceship around you? See, there’s an experience no one’s ever had yet. You’re in a space suit, there’s no tether, no spacecraft. Maybe the Sun is behind you, and you’re surrounded on all sides by stars. Maybe the Earth is below you. Or maybe some other planet. I kind of fancy Saturn myself. There you are, floating in space, like you really are one with the cosmos. Space suits nowadays have enough consumables to last you for hours. The spacecraft that dropped you off could be long gone. Maybe they’ll rendezvous with you in an hour. Maybe not.
“The best would be if the ship wasn’t coming back. Your last hours, surrounded by space and stars and worlds. If you had an incurable disease, or if you just wanted to give yourself a really nifty last indulgence, how could you top that?”
“You’re serious? You want to market this…scheme?”
“Well, too soon to market. Maybe it’s not exactly the right way to go about it. Let’s just say I’m thinking of feasibility testing.”
She decided that she would not tell Hadden of her decision, and he did not ask. Later, as the Narnia was beginning its rendezvous and docking with Methuselah, Hadden took her aside.
“We were saying that Yamagishi is the oldest person up here. Well, if you talk about permanently up here– I don’t mean staff and astronauts and dancing girls–I’m the youngest person up here. I’ve got a vested interest in the answer, I know, but it’s a definite medical possibility that zero g’ll keep me alive for centuries. See, I’m engaged in an experiment on immortality.
“Now, I’m not bringing this up so I can boast. I’m bringing it up for a practical reason. If we’re figuring out ways to extend our lifespans, think of what those creatures on Vega must have done. They probably are immortal, or close enough. I’m a practical person, and I’ve thought a lot now about immortality. I’ve probably thought longer and more seriously about it than anybody else. And I can tell you one thing for sure about immortals: They’re very careful. They don’t leave things to chance. They’ve invested too much effort in becoming immortal. I don’t know what they look like, I don’t know what they want from you, but if you ever get to see them, this is the only piece of practical advice I have for you: Something you think is dead cinch safe, they’ll consider an unacceptable risk. If there’s any negotiating you get to do up there, don’t forget what I’m telling you.”
CHAPTER 17 The Dream of the Ants
Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
-GUSTAVE FLAUBERT Madame Bovary (1857)
Popular theology…is a massive inconsistency derived from ignorance….The gods exist because nature herself has imprinted a conception of them on the minds of men.
-CICERO De Natura Deorum, I, 1
ELLIE WAS in the midst of packing notes, magnetic tapes, and a palm frond for shipment to Japan when she received word that her mother had suffered a stroke. Immediately afterward, she was brought a letter by project courier. It was from John Staughton, and there were no polite preliminaries:
Your mother and I would often discuss your deficiencies and shortcomings. It was always a difficult conversation. When I defended you (and, although you may not believe it, this happened often), she told me that I was putty in your hands. When I criticized you, she told me to mind my own business.
But I want you to know that your unwillingness to visit her in the last few years, since this Vega business, was a source of continuing pain to her. She would tell her cronies at that dreadful nursing home she insisted on going to that you’d be visiting her soon. For years she told them that. “Soon.” She planned how she would show her famous daughter around, in what order she’d introduce you to that decrepit bunch.
You probably won’t want to hear this, and I tell it to you with sorrow. But it’s for your own good. Your behavior was more painful to her than anything that ever happened to her, even your father’s death. You may be a big shot now, your hologram available all over the world, hobnobbing with politicians and so on, but as a human being, you haven’t learned anything since high school…
Her eyes welling with tears, she began to crumple the letter and its envelope, but discovered some stiff piece of paper inside, a partial hologram made from an old two-dimensional photograph by a computer extrapolation technique. You had a faint but satisfactory sense of being able to see around edges and corners. It was a photo she had never seen before. Her mother as a young woman, quite lovely, smiled out of the picture, her aim casually draped over the shoulder of Ellie’s father, who sported what seemed to be a day’s growth of beard. They both seemed radiantly happy. With a surge of anguish, guilt, fury at Staughton, and a little self-pity, Ellie weighed the evident reality that she would never see either of the people in that picture again.
Her mother lay immobile in the bed. Her expression was oddly neutral, registering neither joy nor regret, merely…a kind of waiting. Her only motion was an occasional blink of her eyes. Whether she could hear or understand what Ellie was saying was unclear. Ellie thought about communications schemes. She couldn’t help it; the thought arose unbidden: one blink for yes, two blinks for no. Or hook up an encephalograph with a cathode ray tube that her mother could see, and teach her to modulate her beta waves. But this was her mother, not Alpha Lyrae, and what was called for here was not decryption algorithms but feeling.
She held her mother’s hand and talked for hours. She rambled on about her mother and her father, her childhood. She recalled being a toddler among the newly washed sheets, being swept up to the sky. She talked about John Staughton. She apologized for many things. She cried a little.
Her mother’s hair was awry and, finding a brush, she prettified her. She examined the lined face and recognized her own. Her mother’s eyes, deep and moist, stared fixedly, with only an occasional blink into, it seemed, a great distance.
“I know where I come from,” Ellie told her softly. Almost imperceptibly, her mother shook her head from side to side, as though she were regretting all those years in which she and her daughter had been estranged. Ellie gave her mother’s hand a little squeeze and thought she felt one in return.
Her mother’s life was not in danger, she was told. If there was any change in her condition, they would call at once to her office in Wyoming. In a few days, they would be able to move her from the hospital back to the nursing home, where the facilities, she was assured, were adequate.
Staughton seemed subdued, but with a depth of feeling for her mother she had not guessed at. She would call often, she told him.