Empire Dreams (14 page)

* * * *

For a long time I moved without style or feeling, wearing simple homespun frocks and open sandals in cold weather. My hair I let grow into thick staring mats, my nails began to curl at the ends. When I washed (only when people complained of the smell), I did so in cold water, even though some mornings I would shiver uncontrollably and catch sight in the mirror of my hollow blue face. I permitted myself that one vanity, the mirror, as a record of my progress towards spirituality. When I saw those dull eyes following me I would hold their gaze and whisper, The mortification of the flesh, the denial of the body, until they looked away with an expression other than disgust.

I allowed myself only the simplest foods: uncooked, unprocessed, and as close to natural as I could take it—for the most part vegetable. Two meals a day: a breakfast, and in the evening a dinner, with a glass of water at midday. Cold, of course, but with the taste of Commissary chemicals to it.

Patrick fears that I am wasting to a ghost before his eyes. I reassure him that I am merely abolishing the excess and taking on a newer, purer form. Purity, I whisper, Spirituality.

Purity! he says, Spirituality! I’ll show you purity, I’ll show you spirituality! It’s us, Kathy; we are purity, we are spirituality, because of the life we share together. It’s the love that’s pure, the love that’s spiritual.

Poor Patrick. He cannot understand.

I’ve seen the needle and it said, This is purity. Some showed me the secret spaces of their bodies and said, Here is spirituality. Others held up the bottles for me to see: Look, purity: escape. And I’ve seen the books, the red books, the blue books, the great brown ones dusty with age which say, Come inside, many have gone this way to wisdom before you. What a pity the blue books contradict the red books and the brown books cannot be read because they are so old. And you, Patrick, you are the slave of the book. You call it freedom: I have another name for what you give the name of Political Expression.

I’ve seen a thousand altars and breathed a thousand incenses, sung a thousand hymns, chanted a thousand canticles to gods a thousand years dead, and been told, This is the way, the
only
way to spirituality. Dancing-dervish under the love-lasers till dawn with men so beautiful they can only be artificial, I’ve been to the heart of the music where they say purity lies. Lies lies lies lies. The paintings, the altered states, the loves, the hates, the relationships: lies of the degenerates we have become.

Someday I will have to make Patrick leave. For his own sake as much as for the sake of my path to purity.

But he is my conscience. He makes me constantly ask, Am I right, am I wrong? and he must be a strong man indeed to be able to sleep night after night with the stinking animal into which I am changing. But I will cast him off, on that day when I achieve purity, because then I won’t have any further need of my conscience.

In an age of decadence, I alone strive for purity. I saw it once, I saw spirituality in the face, and since that day I have sought in my own human way to embody it. But give Patrick his due: I am learning that perhaps my daily denials and asceticisms are not the best way to attain my goal. Perhaps the human way is not the way at all.

For the greatest spiritual experience (I would almost call it “Holy,” but I don’t believe in God) comes when I taphead into the ROTECH computers, in that instant when they cleave my personality away from my brain and spin it off through space.

To Mars.

I can’t explain to Patrick how it feels, like I couldn’t explain it to my colleagues on the terraform team how it felt that first time when I tapheaded into the orbital mirrors we were maneuvering into position to thaw the polar ice-caps.

I’ve tried to tell him (as I tried to tell them, hands dancing, eyes wide and bright) of the beauty of the freedom I felt—from the strangling stench of our decaying culture, from the vice of material things, from my body and the arbitrary dictates of its biology: eating, drinking, pissing, crapping, sleeping, screwing. He doesn’t understand.

Kathy, don’t deny your body, he says, touching it. Yours is a beautiful body.

No, Patrick, only spirit is beautiful, and the machine is beautiful, and only what is beautiful is real.

* * * *

“But was she real?” you ask, and your grandfather replies, “Oh, certainly. I tell you, she was as real as you or me, as real as any of us. What use is a saint who isn’t real?” So you look out through the screen at the blurred steel rail that stretches straight ahead as far as you can see, right over the rusty horizon, and you think, Real, real, real as steel, real as a rail, rail made from steel. It is easy to make up rhymes to the beat of the wheels: diddley-dum, diddley-dum, real, real, real as steel.

An hour and a half out. Back down the train the passengers are having lunch; the dignitaries in the first-class restaurant, everyone else from packages and parcels on their laps. Taam Engineer is sharing his lunch with you, savory pancakes and tea, because you did not bring any lunch with you as you never expected to be riding high at the head of the Ares Express deep in the magic Forest of Chryse.

You have heard a lot about the Forest of Chryse, that it is under the special protection of the Lady herself, that travelers come back from it with tales of wonders and marvels, with unusual gifts and miraculous powers, that some come back with only half a mind and some do not come back at all. Look at the trees: giant redwoods older than man reaching up three hundred, four hundred, five hundred meters tall; it is easy to believe that the machines that built the world are still working under the shadow of the branches and that Catharine of Tharsis walks with them in the forest she planted a thousand years ago. Aboard her namesake, you hurtle past at 300 km/hr and wonder how Saint Catharine could possibly have built an entire world.

“Look, son.” Grandfather Taam nudges you and points to a place far up the valley where a great patch of brightness is sweeping across the Forest of Chryse towards you. You hold your breath as the huge disc of light passes slowly over you on its way to the distant rim walls. If you squint up through your fingers you can just about see the intensely bright dot of the sky-mirror way up there in orbit behind all the glare. Then you feel a blow to the back of your head … you see hundreds of intensely bright dots.

“How many times have you been told, boy, don’t stare at the sky-mirrors!” your grandfather bellows. “You can look at the light, but not at the mirror!”

But you treat yourself to one small extra peep anyway and you think of the men from ROTECH who are focusing all that light down on you, Naon Asiim.

“Remote Orbital Terraform and Environmental Control Headquarters.” You whisper the name like a charm to keep the wind and the storm at bay and you remember what your friends told you: that the men who move the sky-mirrors have grown so different from ordinary people up there that they can never ever come down. That makes you shiver. Then you pass out from under the light, but out of the rear screens you can see its progress over the valley to the plateau-lands beyond. In its wake you see a tiny silver bauble bowling across the sky.

“Look, Grandfather! A dronelighter!”

He gives it the barest glance, spits, and touches one of the tiny icons of Our Lady fastened above the driving desk. Then you realize what a mistake you have made, that it is the dronelighters and the ‘rigibles of the world that have made your grandfather the last to bear the proud name of Engineer, they are the reason why the museum sidings are waiting for the Lady just beyond the crowds at Pulaski Station.

“I’m sorry, Grandfather.” A hand ruffles your hair.

“Never mind, son, never worry. Look: see how that thing runs … It’s getting out from under the skirts of the storm, running as fast as it can … They can’t take the weather, they’re flimsy, plasticky things, like glorified Festival kites.”

“But we can take the weather.”

“Go through it like a fist through wet rice-paper, my boy! I tell you, Bethlehem-Ares never lost a day, not even one single hour, to the weather: rain, hail, blizzard, monsoon, none of it stops the Lady!” He reaches out to touch the metal window-frame and you feel like shouting “hooray!” Taam Engineer (what, you wonder, will he call himself when the Lady is gone?) stabs a finger at the sky-screen.

“See that? Because of those things cluttering up the sky they have to move the weather about to suit them. That’s what the mirror’s for; those ROTECH boys are moving the storm up onto the plateau where it can blow itself to glory and not harm one single, delicate dirigible. Puh!” He spits again. “I tell you, those things have no soul. Not like the Lady here, she’s got a soul you can hear and feel when you open those throttles up, she’s got a soul you can touch and smell like hot oil and steam. You don’t drive her, she lets you become a little part of her and then she drives you. Like all ladies. Soul, I tell you.” He hunts around for words but they evade him like butterflies. He waves his hands, trying to shape the ideas that mean so much to him, but the words will not come to him. “I tell you, how can you feel part of anything when you’re flying way up there above everything? You’re not part of anything up there like you’re a bit of the landscape down here. I tell you, they’ve no soul. You know, soon it will be just them and the robots on the freight runs and then one day even they’ll be gone, it’ll be just the lighter-than-airs. The only engines you’ll see’ll be in the museums and God forbid that I should ever come to see that day.” He looks at you like he wants you to back him up in what he has said, but you didn’t really understand what he said because the rumble of the engines and the sway of the cab as it leans into the curves and the drumming of the wheels saying
real, real, real as steel
is sending you off to sleep.

* * * *

When I wake the sight disgusts me. Gap-toothed crack-skinned filth-haired hag holding splintered nails up to the mirror whining, The mortification of the flesh, the denial of the body. Hideous. Futile.

Sleep came hard to me last night. Lying beside Patrick, staring at the ceiling, I had time and plenty to think. Letting the pieces tumble through my head, I saw how I was wrong, so wrong, so magnificently wrong. The mortification of the flesh is empty. It only serves to focus the mind more closely on the body it seeks to deny. Disciplining the body does not discipline the mind, for the greater the denial the greater the attention the body must be given. This is not the way to spirituality.

So before Patrick wakes I shower. I wash my hair, I trim my nails, I depilate, I deodorize, I even repaint the tekmark on my forehead and dress in the most nearly fashionable outfit I own. On the train downtown I just sit and watch the people. They do not know that I was the girl with the sunken eyes and the stinking hair they were so careful not to be seen staring at. Now I am just another face on a train. By denying the body I only drew more attention to it. The only way to achieve purity is to escape totally from the body. But that is impossible while we are on this earth. Not so on Mars.

Tapheading, for me, is like waking from a dream into a new morning. Eyes click open to the vast redscapes of Mars. You can hear it shouting, Real, real! with the voice of the polar wind. Let me tell you about the polar wind. For a hundred thousand years it blew cold and dry from the ice itself, but we have moved our orbital mirrors in over the pole and are thawing the cap. So now the winds have reversed direction and great thunderheads of cloud are piling up, layer upon layer, in the north. Someday it will rain, the first rain on Mars for fifty thousand years. I will rejoice at the feel of it on my plastic skin, I will laugh as it fills the ditches and dikes of our irrigation systems and I shall doubtless cry on the day when it touches the seeds of the Black Tulips I have planted and quickens them to life. But that is in the future. Maybe this year, maybe next year, maybe five years from now.

For the present I take joy in lifting my head from the planting and seeing the rows of Johnny Appleseeds digging and dropping and filling and moving on. They are mine. No. They are
me
. I can be any one of them I choose to be, from Number Eleven busily spraying organic mulch over the seedbeds to Number Thirty-five trundling back to base with a damaged tread.

But I can be much more than that. If I blink back through the ROTECH computer network I can be a dronelighter blowing tailored bacteria into the air, or a flock of orbital mirrors bending light from round the far side of the sky, or an automated hatchery growing millions of heat-producing oxygen-generating Black Tulip seeds for the Johnny Appleseeds, or a channel cutter building the fabulous Martian canals after all these millennia, or a Seeker searching deep beneath the volcanic shield of Tharsis for a magma core to tap for geothermal energy, or an aviopter flying condor patrol high over the Mare Boreum, which will one day indeed be a Sea of Trees …

I can be whatever I want to be. I am free. I am pure spirit, unbound to any body. And this is my vision of purity, of spirituality: to be forever free from this body, from earth and its decadence, to fly on into a pure future and build a new world as it ought to be built; as a thing of spirit, pure and untainted by human lusts and ambitions. This is a future that stretches far beyond my human lifespan. They say it will be eight hundred years before a man can walk naked in the forests we are growing in Chryse. Two hundred years will pass after that before the first settlers arrive on the plains of Deuteronomy. A thousand years, then, to build a whole world in. That will give me enough time to make it a proper world.

This is my vision, this is my dream. I am only now beginning to realize how I may achieve it …

But first I must dream again….

* * * *

It is not the rattle of the rain that has woken you, nor the slam of a passing ore train on the slow up-line; it is something far less tangible than that, it is something you feel like the crick in your neck and the dryness in your mouth and the gumminess around your eyes that you get from having fallen asleep against the side window. So knuckle your eyes open, sniff the air. You can smell the rain, but you can smell something else too, like electricity, like excitement, like something waiting to happen.