VOYAGE
It’s a moonless
night, and the huge reddened whirlpool of the Milky Way lies below
the horizon. With only the blue-white pinprick glare of Lucifer for
illumination, it’s too dark to read a newspaper.
Maddy is old enough
to remember a time when night was something else: when darkness
stalked the heavens, the Milky Way a faded tatter spun across half
the sky. A time when ominous Soviet spheres bleeped and hummed
their way across a horizon that curved, when geometry was dominated
by pi, astronomy made sense, and serious men with horn-rimmed
glasses and German accents were going to the moon. October 2, 1962:
that’s when it all changed. That’s when life stopped making sense.
(Of course, it first stopped making sense a few days earlier, with
the U-2 flights over the concrete emplacements in Cuba, but there
was a difference between the lunacy of brinksmanship—Khrushchev’s
shoe banging on the table at the UN as he shouted, “We will bury
you!”—and the flat-Earth daydream that followed, shattering history
and plunging them all into this nightmare of revisionist
geography.)
But back to the here
and now: she’s sitting on the deck of an elderly ocean liner on her
way from somewhere to nowhere, and she’s annoyed because Bob is
getting drunk with the F-deck boys again and eating into their
precious grubstake. It’s too dark to read the ship’s daily news
sheet (mimeographed blurry headlines from a world already fading
into the ship’s wake), it’ll be at least two weeks before their
next landfall (a refueling depot somewhere in what the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration surveyors—in a fit of
uncharacteristic wit—named the Nether Ocean), and she’s half out of
her skull with boredom.
When they signed up
for the emigration-board tickets, Bob had joked: “A six-month
cruise? After a vacation like that we’ll be happy to get back to
work!” But somehow the sheer immensity of it all didn’t sink in
until the fourth week out of sight of land. In those four weeks
they’d crawled an expanse of ocean wider than the Pacific, pausing
to refuel twice from huge rust-colored barges: and still they were
only a sixth of the way to Continent F-204, New Iowa, immersed like
the ultimate non sequitur in the ocean that replaced the world’s
horizons on October 2, 1962. Two weeks later they passed The
Radiators. The Radiators thrust from the oceanic depths to the
stratosphere, Everest-high black fins finger-combing the watery
currents. Beyond them the tropical heat of the Pacific gave way to
the subarctic chill of the Nether Ocean. Sailing between them, the
ship was reduced to the proportions of a cockroach crawling along a
canyon between skyscrapers. Maddy had taken one look at these
guardians of the interplanetary ocean, shuddered, and retreated
into their cramped room for the two days it took to sail out from
between the slabs.
Bob kept going on
about how materials scientists from NOAA and the National
Institutes were still trying to understand what they were made of,
until Maddy snapped at him. He didn’t seem to understand that they
were the bars on a prison cell. He seemed to see a waterway as wide
as the English Channel, and a gateway to the future: but Maddy saw
them as a sign that her old life was over.
If only Bob and her
father hadn’t argued; or if Mum hadn’t tried to pick a fight with
her over Bob—Maddy leans on the railing and sighs, and a moment
later nearly jumps out of her skin as a strange man clears his
throat behind her.
“Excuse me, I didn’t
mean to disturb you.”
“That’s all right,”
Maddy replies, irritated and trying to conceal it. “I was just
going in.”
“A shame: it’s a
beautiful night,” says the stranger. He turns and puts down a large
briefcase next to the railing, fiddling with the latches. “Not a
cloud in sight, just right for stargazing.” She focuses on him,
seeing short hair, a small paunch, and a worried thirtysomething
face. He doesn’t look back, being preoccupied with something that
resembles a photographer’s tripod.
“Is that a
telescope?” she asks, eyeing the stubby cylindrical gadget in his
case.
“Yes.” An awkward
pause. “Name’s John Martin. Yourself ?”
“Maddy Holbright.”
Something about his diffident manner puts her at ease. “Are you
settling? I haven’t seen you around.”
He straightens up and
tightens joints on the tripod’s legs, screwing them into place.
“I’m not a settler, I’m a researcher. Five years, all expenses
paid, to go and explore a new continent.” He carefully lifts the
telescope body up and lowers it onto the platform, then begins
tightening screws. “And I’m supposed to point this thing at the sky
and make regular observations. I’m actually an entomologist, but
there are so many things to do that they want me to be a
jack-of-all-trades, I guess.”
“So they’ve got you
to carry a telescope, huh? I don’t think I’ve ever met an
entomologist before.”
“A bug-hunter with a
telescope,” he agrees: “kind of unexpected.”
Intrigued, Maddy
watches as he screws the viewfinder into place, then pulls out a
notebook and jots something down. “What are you looking
at?”
He shrugs. “There’s a
good view of S Doradus from here,” he says. “You know, Satan? And
his two little angels.”
Maddy glances up at
the violent pinprick of light, then looks away before it can burn
her eyes. It’s a star, but bright enough to cast shadows from half
a light-year’s distance. “The disks?”
“Them.” There’s a
camera body in his bag, a chunky old Bron ica from back before the
Soviets swallowed Switzerland and Germany whole. He carefully
screws it onto the telescope’s viewfinder. “The Institute wants me
to take a series of photographs of them—nothing fancy, just the
best this eight-inch reflector can do—over six months. Plot the
ship’s position on a map. There’s a bigger telescope in the hold,
for when I arrive, and they’re talking about sending a real
astronomer one of these days, but in the meantime they want
photographs from sixty thousand miles out across the disk. For
parallax, so they can work out how fast the other disks are
moving.”
“Disks.” They seem
like distant abstractions to her, but John’s enthusiasm is hard to
ignore. “Do you suppose they’re like, uh, here?” She doesn’t say
like Earth—everybody knows this isn’t Earth anymore. Not the way it
used to be.
“Maybe.” He busies
himself for a minute with a chunky film cartridge. “They’ve got
oxygen in their atmospheres, we know that. And they’re big enough.
But they’re most of a light-year away—far closer than the stars,
but still too far for telescopes.”
“Or moon rockets,”
she says, slightly wistfully. “Or sputniks.”
“If those things
worked anymore.” The film is in: he leans over the scope and brings
it round to bear on the first of the disks, a couple of degrees off
from Satan. (The disks are invisible to the naked eye; it takes a
telescope to see their reflected light.) He glances up at her. “Do
you remember the moon?”
Maddy shrugs. “I was
just a kid when it happened. But I saw the moon, some nights.
During the day, too.”
He nods. “Not like
some of the kids these days. Tell them we used to live on a big
spinning sphere, and they look at you like you’re
mad.”
“What do they think
the speed of the disks will tell them?” she asks.
“Whether they’re all
as massive as this one. What they could be made of. What that tells
us about who it was that made them.” He shrugs. “Don’t ask me, I’m
just a bug-hunter. This stuff is big, bigger than bugs.” He
chuckles. “It’s a new world out here.”
She nods very
seriously, then actually sees him for the first time: “I guess it
is.”