A Meeting With Medusa (40 page)

Surely even Captain Cook had made a little more fuss about his departure for the Pacific, in an earlier
Discovery
. And after all, this was the first journey to the stars…

But there wasn’t even a countdown. Forbes had simply to sit in his frame couch with the rest of the crew, a few rows behind the commander and his co-pilot—both women, incidentally—and listen to their brisk young voices working through checks with the ground crew at Port Lowell.

Even the setting was mundane, like the interior of a small aircraft, with fold-out equipment racks and miniaturised galleys and lavatories and zero-gravity up-down visual cues. Only the creased orange skin of Mars, visible through the windows, made for an element of the extraordinary, the ancient landscape now mottled by the green domes of the colonies which had provisioned
Discovery
after its shakedown interplanetary hop.

Humanity’s first starship was shaped something like a huge arrow. The habitable compartment—its interior, designed by Cunard, frankly luxurious—made a streamlined arrowhead, separated for safety from the NERVA 4 by the arrow’s ‘shaft’: a hundred yards of open scaffolding, crammed with shielding, antennae and liquid-hydrogen fuel tanks.

The streamlining amused Forbes, for it made the habitable compartment look like nothing so much as the V2-shaped spaceships that had rattled their way through the beloved Saturday morning specials of his youth—a shape which had become derided in the 1960s and 1970s, as insectile ships such as the
Endeavour
, adapted to airless space, had taken shape on the drafting boards.

But it turned out that the experts, not for the first time, were wrong. Interstellar space was not empty. There
was
gas and dust—desperately thin, only fifty or sixty bacterium-sized specks per cubic mile—but that was enough to give a respectable battering to the prow of any starship unwise enough to approach a decent fraction of the speed of light, as
Discovery
intended to achieve. So the ship was streamlined, and coated with a thick impact shield, and even mounted with a rather powerful dust-busting shortwave radiation generator in her nose.

A decent fraction of the speed of light
… Such velocities would be far beyond the capacity even of the NERVA 4—a huge, over-engineered American monstrosity, originally intended to take much smaller spacecraft no further than Mars—if not for the HRP effect.

HRP
: for Haisch, Rueda and Puthoff, as Max had explained to him, the physicists who had made the crucial quantum vacuum breakthrough. The ‘empty’ vacuum was not empty at all, it seemed, but a wash of seething energy, with ‘virtual’ particles popping in and out of existence constantly. This so-called ‘zero point field’ created an electromagnetic drag on any object which passed through it… and it was that drag which
created
the effect of mass and inertia, the reason it took so much effort to start anything moving.

The big Wire operators—immensely rich, with forty years’ expertise in quantum effects—had seized on the HRP results immediately. And
Discovery
was the result, rendered virtually massless by its inertial suppressors, and so capable of being driven to enormous velocities by a modest engine indeed…

And now, low-key or not, the pilots’ preparations were reaching a climax.

The rest of the crew, young and healthy and intelligent, seemed unconcerned. They simply sat in their couches in their couples—or breeding pairs, as Forbes sourly thought of them. They would tolerate this thirty-year voyage to Alpha Centauri, confined as they would be within the streamlined hull of
Discovery
, living their lives, studying quietly, maintaining their craft, even raising children. They wouldn’t even have to suffer the rigours of zero gravity—the manipulation of the HRP fields would see to
that
…

He tried to talk to them, of course.

Such as about the flap he’d got into in 1941 when he brought down a Heinkel 111 near St Abbs Head in Berwickshire. Circling overhead, he saw the crew scramble clear, and he realised they were going to set fire to their almost intact bomber, so he decided to land alongside and stop them. But the Spit hit a patch of mud as it rolled down the field and turned over onto its back. Forbes was unhurt, but had hung helplessly upside down in his straps until the Heinkel’s crew came to rescue him. Then, with Local Defence Volunteers approaching, the Germans surrendered to Forbes, handing him their Luger pistols, but the LDV boys had thought he was one of the enemy and promptly arrested
him
, and it was only when he produced an Inland Revenue tax return form from his pocket that he managed to extricate himself…

And so on. These youngsters, bound for the stars, listened politely. But to them, Forbes, with his stories of war and heroism and the Inland Revenue, was a figure from some impossibly remote Dark Age.

Perhaps Max was right: that these patient, fearless youngsters—shaped in a Wire-connected world without frontiers or limits, growing richer and richer by the year—really were a different lot from their forefathers.

Even, said Max, a new species.

Perhaps. It often seemed absurd even to him that such an old fool as he was undertaking such a trip at all. It was just that payload costs, even on a starship, had been made invisibly low by the HRP effect. And besides, the
Martian Times
had put up rather a handsome advance for the observations he would be broadcasting back en route…

He was sure, though, he would not live to see the light of Alpha Centauri, and nor would he get to Wire-step back to Earth. But that was no cause for regret. For him, the escape from a baffling Earth was the thing.

Forbes, who remembered different days, had grown uncomfortable with some of the complacent assumptions of modern times. Was the Wire-delivered hegemony of the Western world really such a good idea? There had been the Gulf War, for instance, in which US marines had used a hidden Wire gateway to storm Saddam’s bunker, deposing him with scarcely a shot and then ‘liberating’ that country… There was no doubt that Saddam had been a monster. But Forbes recalled that rather similar schemes had been hatched by the Nazis. How must such actions look to the average Iraqi?

But such arguments were just excuses, Max said. Once again, she had told him, he was attempting to outrun the future. He really must let go at last, learn to trust the young people, not fear them… and so on. He had stopped listening to all that long ago.

But in the end, he was sorry to lose her. He could not say they were friends, and certainly no longer in love; she was, simply, Max. And increasingly her lined face was overlaid in his mind by images of a bright, excitable young redhead in khakis…

He was becoming, he decided, a sentimental old fool.

Forbes felt a low thrumming, transmitted to him through the frame of his couch. It was smooth, subdued, and yet it inevitably reminded him of the scream of a Spitfire’s Merlin engine, the subterranean rumble of a Mustard’s gigantic liquid-fuel rockets.

The cabin seemed to tip as acceleration built up. The autumn light of Mars faded.

Forbes felt a surge of exhilaration. Bugger old age. He was going to the stars!

2007: Oxford, England

…I go to the seminars when I can—after all, Wire travel is hardly a challenge, even for an old lady like me. In fact the last one I attended was at the University’s new Shaw Library—have you heard of it? A room in the Bodleian is connected, via Wired doors, to rooms on the Moon, Mars, Ganymede, Triton…

But though I religiously turn up, Henry, you probably won’t believe me when I say that the new ideas even leave me behind most of the time! Let me mention some of them to you:

First of all,
the Wiring of minds
. That may seem rather spooky to you—and to me!—but believe me, it’s a very real possibility, now that we understand the equations that govern consciousness processes—for consciousness itself, of course, is a quantum phenomenon. It’s all an outgrowth of quantum computing. I’m sure you know, Henry, your precious
Discovery
is guided by a million-quantum-dot Factorisation Engine, no matter how
spooky
you think it is! And because computational power is combinatorial—oh, dear Henry, I don’t think I have time to explain it all—suffice it to say that two minds are
much
better than one! And so are three, or four… or a billion. Some commentators feel we’re on the verge of the most dramatic leap in human evolution since
Homo Habilis
.

What else?

Well, you’ve probably read about the new
nanogates
—miniature Wire gates, which can transmit an atom at a time… There was a piece in the
Lancet
outlining medical applications. It would be possible to inject a patient with smart nanogates which could hunt out and radio-transport away toxins, or cancerous cells…! A little too late for me, unfortunately…

And then there is the possibility of
faster-than-light travel
—there, what do you think of that! It’s all based on something called quantum tunnelling. If you try to contain a photon by a barrier, there is a small but finite probability—because of quantum uncertainty—that you’ll suddenly find it on the far side of the barrier. And if you do, there is no appreciable delay… I’ve been following the theoretical research for decades, but the practical breakthrough came in the ’90s when an Austrian team transmitted a rather scratchy recording of Mozart’s 40th Symphony at 4.7 times the speed of light! And this year, Bell Labs are going to try to send a wooden cube across a few miles—just like our first experiments with the Wire.

Henry, I hope you don’t find that by the time you reach Centauri in your rather lumbering inertial-drive Sopwith Camel, you haven’t been overtaken by a faster-than-light Spitfire!…

So my work continues to absorb me. And, Henry, you must believe me when I say—and I know I repeat myself—these young people are wonderful, so much better than we were, if sometimes a little scary. Do you know, the new Prime Minister wasn’t even born when the first Wire service was opened up! Do you remember that ridiculous affair with the flag? It seems hardly yesterday…
Prime Minister
: foolish me, I meant the Governor, of course. Dates me, doesn’t it!

They say that for the young in the schools now, even the concept of
nation
seems absurd. They can’t believe that a mere half-century ago we’d just come out of a war—it seems to them like a hideous human sacrifice… It makes us old folk uncomfortable sometimes, but it’s hard to deny the logic! Our young live in a rich, clean world, and there’s no reason why anyone should go short of the fundamentals of life, not until the Solar System itself starts to run dry—and even then we’ll have the stars, thanks to you and
Discovery
…

I know it’s hard to accept change. This new world often seems very strange to me, and I sometimes wonder where humanity will be in ten, or twenty, or thirty years time, when even human thought has been Wired. In a way I understand why you’ve continued to flee, my dear—at last, all the way to the stars! But there was nothing to fear. Perhaps if you had had a child of your own, or if we had had one, you might be able to see it…

Now, you mustn’t be distressed by my little bit of news, Henry my dear. I’m not in any pain or discomfort. I’ve been involved in a lot of wizard japes in my time, which is just the sort of thing your old RAF pals used to say, so you see I was paying attention to you after all, even all those years ago! My only regret is I won’t get to see any more of the wonderful future that’s opening up—and I won’t see you again, and, yes, that is important to me…

2017: Between Stars

He lay in his cabin, an old mechanical clock softly ticking. He could smell nothing, taste nothing, every breath hurt, and all he could see was a series of vague blurs. He was a crock and no mistake, and he’d really had enough of this caper…

Somehow he knew today was the day.

It didn’t seem so tragic to Forbes. It was rather like the elephants, he thought. He once knew a chap who had been to India—and this was before the Empire broke up, before the war—and this chap came back with stories of the elephants, and how they would know when it was their time. They would leave their herds and seek out a quiet place, without any fuss…

Perhaps it was true. And perhaps humans shared the same instinct, and if so, it was a remarkable comfort. After all, he’d had a good innings; he might have bought it at any time in the ’40s, and a lot of good men had done just that.

His breath was scratching in his throat. It was a blithering nuisance—

The walls dissolved around him.

He felt a stab of shock—and irritation. He was
scared
. But what on Earth was the point of
his
being frightened
now
?

…But he was suspended in stars, stars above and below and all around him. Ahead, they were tinged the subtlest blue.

…
You shouldn’t fear us
.

A uniform light came up—just a little, leaving the sky a deep midnight blue, but enough to wash out the stars.

A cramped cabin. A stick in his hand. Something in his ears—he lifted his hand—it was cotton wool…

Good God. He was back in a Vampire, its duck-egg-green hull all around him. There was even a fresh carnation in his buttonhole.

You didn’t have to flee into the dark
.

The nose of the Vampire dipped, and the Earth itself was spread out beneath him, curving gently, glowing with a network of light, a Wire continuum.

We are you. You are us. Because of your courage, mankind will live forever. We honour you. We want you to join us
.

So they, the young people—or whatever ruddy thing they had become—had brought him all the way home, from the stars. To be able to do such a thing, they were like gods. It occurred to him he ought to be frightened of them, as he always had been, a little.

But they were human children, all the same.

Perhaps Max had been right. Perhaps it was time, at last, for him to place his destiny in other hands.

There was no Max down there, though. Even
they
couldn’t reach beyond the grave. Not yet, anyhow.