Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (12 page)

"I thought you'd never even notice the few pages …," with that
sidling smile of his.

And while I'm muttering, "I may have been in solitary confinement for
twenty years, Harvey, but it hasn't turned my brain to mush," he said, "So
maybe I'd better explain, first"—and the look on his face; oh, the
look on his face. "There's been a biomed breakthrough. If you were here on
Earth, you … well, your body's immune responses could be …
made normal …" And then he looked down, as though he could really
see the look on my own face.

Made normal. Made normal. It's all I can hear. I was born with no natural
immunities. No defense against disease. No help for it. No.
No, no, no,
that's all I ever heard, all my life on Earth. Through the plastic walls
of my sealed room; through the helmet of my sealed suit … And now
it's all changed. They could cure me. But I can't go home. I knew this
could happen; I knew it had to happen someday. But I chose to ignore that
fact, and now it's too late to do anything about it.

Then why can't I forget that I could have been f-free …

… I didn't answer Weems today. Screw Weems. There's nothing to say.
Nothing at all.

I'm so tired.

MONDAY, THE 9
^TH

Couldn't sleep. It kept playing over and over in my mind … Finally
took some pills. Slept all day, feel like hell. Stupid. And it didn't go
away. It was waiting for me, still waiting, when I woke up.

It isn't fair—!

I don't feel like talking about it.

TUESDAY, THE 10
^TH

Tuesday, already. I haven't done a thing for two days. I haven't even
started to check out the relay beacon, and that damn thing has to be
dropped off this week. I don't have any strength; I can't seem to move, I
just sit. But I have to get back to work. Have to …

Instead I read the printout of the article today. Hoping I'd find a flaw!
If that isn't the greatest irony of my entire life. For two decades I
prayed that somebody would find a cure for me. And for two more decades I
didn't care. Am I going to spend the next two decades hating it, now that
it's been found?

No … hating myself. I could have been free, they could have cured
me; if only I'd stayed on Earth. If only I'd been patient. But now it's
too late … by twenty
years.

I want to go home. I want to go home … But you can't go home again.
Did I really say that, so blithely, so recently?
You
can't: You,
Emmylou Stewart. You are in prison, just as you have always been in
prison.

It's all come back to me so strongly. Why me? Why must I be the ultimate
victim? In all my life I've never smelled the sea wind, or plucked berries
from a bush and eaten them, right there! Or felt my parents' kisses
against my skin, or a man's body … Because to me they were all
deadly things.

I remember when I was a little girl, and we still lived in Victoria—I
was just three or four, just at the brink of understanding that I was the
only prisoner in my world. I remember watching my father sit polishing his
shoes in the morning, before he left for the museum. And me smiling, so
deviously, "Daddy … I'll help you do that, if you let me come out—"

And he came to the wall of my bubble and put his arms into the hugging
gloves, and said, so gently, "No." And then he began to cry. And I began
to cry too, because I didn't know why I'd made him unhappy …

And all the children at school, with their "spaceman" jokes, pointing at
the freak; all the years of insensitive people asking the same stupid
questions every time I tried to go out anywhere … worst of all, the
ones who weren't stupid, or insensitive. Like Jeffrey … no, I will
not think about Jeffrey! I couldn't let myself think about him then. I
could never afford to get close to a man, because I'd never be able to
touch him …

And now it's too late. Was I controlling my fate, when I volunteered for
this one-way trip? Or was I just running away from a life where I was
always helpless; helpless to escape the things I hated, helpless to
embrace the things I loved?

I pretended this was different, and important … but was that really
what I believed? No! I just wanted to crawl into a hole I couldn't get out
of, because I was so afraid.

So afraid that one day I would unseal my plastic walls, or take off my
helmet and my suit; walk out freely to breathe the air, or wade in a
stream, or touch flesh against flesh … and die of it.

So now I've walled myself into this hermetically sealed tomb for a living
death. A perfectly sterile environment, in which my body will not even
decay when I die. Never having really lived, I shall never really die,
dust to dust. A perfectly sterile environment; in every sense of the word.

I often stand looking at my body in the mirror after I take a shower.
Hazel eyes, brown hair in thick waves with hardly any gray … and a
good figure; not exactly stacked, but not unattractive. And no one has
ever seen it that way but me. Last night I had the Dream again … I
haven't had it for such a long time … this time I was sitting on a
carved wooden beast in the park beside the Provincial Museum in Victoria;
but not as a child in my suit. As a college girl, in white shorts and a
bright cotton shirt, feeling the sun on my shoulders, and—Jeffrey's
arms around my waist … We stroll along the bayside hand in hand,
under the Victorian lamp posts with their bright hanging flower-baskets,
and everything I do is fresh and spontaneous and full of the moment. But
always, always, just when he holds me in his arms at last, just as I'm
about to … I wake up.

When we die, do we wake out of reality at last, and all our dreams come
true? When I die … I will be carried on and on into the timeless
depths of uncharted space in this computerized tomb, unmourned and
unremembered. In time all the atmosphere will seep away; and my fair
corpse, lying like Snow White's in inviolate sleep, will be sucked dry of
moisture, until it is nothing but a mummified parchment of shriveled
leather and bulging bones …

(
"Hello? Hello, baby? Good night. Yes, no, maybe … Awk. Food
time!"
)

("Oh, Ozymandias! Yes, yes, I know … I haven't fed you, I'm sorry.
I know, I know …")

(
Clinks and rattles.
)

Why am I so selfish? Just because I can't eat, I expect him to fast, too
… No. I just forgot.

He doesn't understand, but he knows something's wrong; he climbs the lamp
pole like some tripodal bem, using both feet and his beak, and stares at
me with that glass-beady bird's eye, stares and stares and mumbles things.
Like a lunatic! Until I can hardly stand not to shut him in a cupboard, or
something. But then he sidles along my shoulder and kisses me—such a
tender caress against my cheek, with that hooked prehensile beak that
could crush a walnut like a grape—to let me know that he's worried,
and he cares. And I stroke his feathers to thank him, and tell him that
it's all right … but it's not. And he knows it.

Does he ever resent his life? Would he, if he could? Stolen away from his
own kind, raised in a sterile bubble to be a caged bird for a caged human
…

I'm only a bird in a gilded cage. I want to go home.

WEDNESDAY, THE 11
^TH

Why am I keeping this journal? Do I really believe that sometime some
alien being will find this, or some starship from Earth's glorious future
will catch up to me … glorious future, hell. Stupid, selfish,
short-sighted fools. They ripped the guts out of the space program after
they sent me away, no one will ever follow me now. I'll be lucky if they
don't declare me dead and forget about me.

As if anyone would care what a woman all alone on a lumbering space probe
thought about day after day for decades, anyway. What monstrous conceit.

I did lubricate the bearings on the big scope today. I did that much. I
did it so that I could turn it back toward Earth … toward the sun
… toward the whole damn system. Because I can't even see it. All
the planets out to Saturn, all the planets the ancients saw, are crammed
into the space of two moon diameters; and too dim and small and faraway
below me for my naked eyes, anyway. Even the sun is no more than a gaudy
star that doesn't even make me squint. So I looked for them with the scope
…

Isn't it funny how when you're a child you see all those drawings and
models of the solar system with big, lumpy planets and golden wakes
streaming around the sun? Somehow you never get over expecting it to look
that way in person. And here I am, one thousand astronomical units north
of the solar pole, gazing down from a great height … and it doesn't
look that way at all. It doesn't look like anything; even through the
scope. One great blot of light, and all the pale tiny diamond chips of
planets and moons around it, barely distinguishable from half a hundred
undistinguished stars trapped in the same arc of blackness. So
meaningless, so insignificant … so disappointing.

Five hours I spent, today, listening to my journal, looking back and
trying to find—something, I don't know, something I suddenly don't
have anymore.

I had it at the start. I was disgusting; Pollyanna Grad-student skipping
and singing through the rooms of my very own observatory. It seemed like
heaven, and a lifetime spent in it couldn't possibly be long enough for
all that I was going to accomplish, and discover. I'd never be bored, no,
not me …

And there was so much to learn about the potential of this place, before I
got out to where it supposedly would matter, and there would be new things
to turn my wonderful extended senses toward … while I could still
communicate easily with my dear mentor Dr. Weems, and the world. (Who'd
ever have thought, when the lecherous old goat was my thesis adviser at
Harvard, and making jokes to his other grad students about "the lengths
some women will go to protect their virginity," that we would have to
spend a lifetime together.)

There was Ozymandias' first word … and my first birthday in space,
and my first anniversary … and my doctoral degree at last, printed
out by the computer with scrolls made of little
x
's and taped up on
the wall …

Then day and night and day and night, beating me black and blue with blue
and black … my fifth anniversary, my eighth, my decade. I crossed
the magnetopause, to become truly the first voyager in interstellar space
… but by then there was no one left to
talk
to anymore, to
really share the experience with. Even the radio and television broadcasts
drifting out from Earth were diffuse and rare; there were fewer and fewer
contacts with the reality outside. The plodding routines, the stupifying
boredom—until sometimes I stood screaming down the halls just for
something new; listening to the echoes that no one else would ever hear,
and pretending they'd come to call; trying so hard to believe there was
something to hear that wasn't
my
voice,
my
echo, or
Ozymandias making a mockery of it.

(
"Hello, beautiful. That's a crock. Hello, hello?"
)

("Ozymandias, get
away
from me—")

But always I had that underlying belief in my mission: that I was here for
a purpose, for more than my own selfish reasons, or NASA's (or whatever
the hell they call it now), but for Humanity, and Science. Through
meditation I learned the real value of inner silence, and thought that by
creating an inner peace I had reached equilibrium with the outer silences.
I thought that meditation had disciplined me, I was in touch with myself
and with the soul of the cosmos … But I haven't been able to
meditate since—it happened. The inner silence fills up with my own
anger screaming at me, until I can't remember what peace sounds like.

And what have I really discovered, so far? Almost nothing. Nothing worth
wasting my analysis or all my fine theories—or my freedom—on.
Space is even emptier than anyone dreamed, you could count on both hands
the bits of cold dust or worldlet I've passed in all this time, lost souls
falling helplessly through near-perfect vacuum … all of us
together. With my absurdly long astronomical tapemeasure I have fixed
precisely the distance to NGC 2419 and a few other features, and from that
made new estimates about a few more distant ones. But I have not detected
a miniature black hole insatiably vacuuming up the vacuum; I have not
pierced the invisible clouds that shroud the ultra-long wavelengths like
fog; I have not discovered that life exists beyond the Earth in even the
most tentative way. Looking back at the solar system I see nothing to show
definitively that we even exist, anymore. All I hear anymore when I scan
is electromagnetic noise, no coherent thought. Only Weems every twelfth
night, like the last man alive … Christ, I still haven't answered
him.

Why bother? Let him sweat. Why bother with any of it? Why waste my
precious time?

Oh, my precious time … Half a lifetime left that could have been
mine, on Earth.

Twenty years—I came through them all right. I thought I was safe.
And after twenty years, my facade of discipline and self-control falls
apart at a touch. What a self-deluded hypocrite I've been. Do you know
that I said the sky was like a blue parasol eighteen years ago? And
probably said it again fifteen years ago, and ten, and five—

Tomorrow I pass 1000 AUs.

THURSDAY, THE 12
^TH

I burned out the scope. I burned out the scope. I left it pointing toward
the Earth, and when the laser came on for the night it shone right down
the scope's throat and burned it out. I'm so ashamed … Did I do it
on purpose, subconsciously?

(
"Good night starlight. Arrk. Good night. Good …"
)

("Damn it, I want to hear another human voice—!")

(
Echoing, "voice, voice, voice, voice, voice …"
)

When I found out what I'd done I ran away. I ran and ran through the halls
… But I only ran in a circle: This observatory, my prison, myself
… I can't escape. I'll always come back in the end, to this
green-walled room with its desk and its terminals, its cupboards crammed
with a hundred thousand dozens of everything, toilet paper and magnetic
tape and oxygen tanks … And I can tell you exactly how many steps
it is to my bedroom or how long it took me to crochet the afghan on the
bed … how long I've sat in the dark and silence, setting up an
exposure program or listening for the feeble pulse of a radio galaxy two
billion light-years away. There will never be anything different, or
anything more.