Empire Dreams (3 page)

(Overhead gantries bearing signs reading M1, City Center, M5, Carrickfergus, Newtownabbey, Bangor, Lisburn, appear above the car. MacKenzie slides the Vauxhall Cavalier into the lane marked City Center.)

* * * *

SHE WISHES THEY
would go. She resents their noisy feet, their busy bustle, their muted conversation over rustling sheets of computer printout, their polite-polite “Mrs. Semple, excuse me buts” and “Mrs. Semple, do you know ifs” and “Mrs. Semple, could you tell us whethers.” What are they doing that is so important that they must stamp around in their noisy shoes and remind her of the world beyond the swinging ward doors? She does not like them near her son, though the man is the doctor who invented the process and the woman is the one who developed the computers to which her son is wired from’ skull eyes ears throat. It worries her to see their hands near the machines; she fears that they might press buttons and throw switches and she would never know why they had done so. She hates not understanding, and there is so much she does not understand.

They are talking now, excited about something on a computer screen. She can see what it is that has excited them, though she cannot understand why. Who is this Major Tom? The empty coincidence of names does not fool her. Major Tom, Major Tom … she remembers a song she had once heard about Major Tom, the spaceman who never came down. Wasn’t that it, Major Tom, the spaceman, still orbiting round and round and round the world in his tin can? She never knew Major Tom. But she knew Sergeant Tom, Sergeant Tom tall and lovely in his bottle-green uniform, Sergeant Tom photographed in his swimming trunks on a Spanish beach, brown and smiling with that little Tom Selleck mustache, Sergeant Tom sitting at the breakfast table in shirtsleeves, shoulder holster, and police boots waiting for the phone call which would tell him today’s safe pickup point, Sergeant Tom putting on his jacket, kissing her on the lips and telling Wee Tom to have a good day at school and take care with his head-sums. Sergeant Tom walking out to the Ford Sierra, Sergeant Tom turning the key in the ignition—

“Mrs. Semple, Mrs. Semple.”

Faces loom before her, changing size and distance as her eyes roll into focus.

“Yes, Dr. Montgomery?”

“We’d like your permission to try something we think will bring your son out of his coma.”

“What is it you want to do?” The weariness in her voice surprises her.

“Adapt the program parameters slightly. Ms. MacKenzie wants to inject new material into the dream simulation.”

“You’ve tried that before. You tried switching off the machines altogether.”

“I know, Mrs. Semple. It didn’t work.” The young doctor (how can anyone so young have the experience to mold people’s lives?) completes her thoughts for her. He is clever, but naive. She envies him that. “Thomas merely maintained the dream coma by exercise of his own imagination. No, what we want to do is inject something into the dream so unacceptable that his only escape is to come out of the deep-dream coma.”

“And what is that something?”

“I’d rather not say at the moment, Mrs. Semple, in case it doesn’t work.”

“And if it doesn’t work?”

“Then you and he are no worse off than you are now.”

“And if it succeeds?”

“Do I really need to answer that question, Mrs. Semple?”

“Of course not. All right then. You have my permission, and my blessing.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Semple. Okay, Roz.”

What long fingers the girl has! She cannot get over those long, slender fingers as she types on the computer keypad. They are more like tentacles than fingers. Her attention is torn between those dancing fingers and the words that float up on the green screen.

PROGRAM “LUKE SKYWALKER”: INTERRUPTIVE MODE CHANGE: IRRAY 70432 GO. TO 70863 READ: KILL MAJOR TOM KILL MAJOR TOM

At the peak of the entry, when the X15 bucked and bounced like a bad dream from which you couldn’t waken, and every bolt and rivet shuddered and your teeth shook loose in your head, the deflector shields glowed a violent blue and the fighter’s ionization trail plumed out behind you like a shooting star on an autumn night. There had been a moment (just a moment) when the fear had won, when your trust in Major Tom’s skill had not been its equal and you had seen your ship burst open like an egg and you hurled screaming and burning into three hundred miles of sky. The shriek had built in your chest and rattled the bars of your teeth and your brain had pounded pounded pounded against the dome of your helmet. Then you had come out and the air was smooth and the deflectors glowed a dull cherry red and your trusty fighter was dipping down through miles of airspace to the carpet of woolen piled clouds.

Now there is fear again, not the fear of disintegration in the ionosphere, for that is only death and to die is to leave the self and join the others, but the fear of what waits for you below the cloud cover, for that is more terrible than death, for it denies the others and leaves you alone with only yourself.

“Big Tom, we must go back!
Excalibur
has been calling and calling; Captain Zarkon, even the Emperor Geoffrey himself, have been ordering you to turn back. It’s too dangerous, you are forbidden to go any further alone!”

Major Tom says nothing but thrusts your X15 Astrofighter lower, lower, lower. Clouds shred like tissue paper on your wingtips, the fog swirls and thins patchily, then you are but of the cloud-base and below you is the surface. The Montgomery/Blair engines thunder as Major Tom throttles back; he is coming in for a landing and your stomach, now gripped firmly by six billion billion billion tons’ worth of gravity, is doing flipflops, a sicky-lurchy feeling that overcomes you as he throws the X15 into a left-hand bank.

The ground is tip-of-the-nose close beyond the canopy, a forbidden planet standing on edge in midbank: red-brick neo-Georgian bungalows in fifteen hundred square feet of white-chained garden, trailers in the drive, boats and hatchbacks parked outside, rosebeds flowering, children on BMXs stopping, pointing, gaping.

“Commence landing sequence.”

You do not want to. You cannot go down there. To go down there is dying and worse. A billion billion billion miles away
Excalibur
, the Imperial throneship, hangs poised on the lip of jumpspace but its stupendous bulk is as insubstantial as a cloud compared to the painful truth of this place, so pin-sharp that you can even read the street name: Clifton Road. Suddenly you are no longer Wee Major Tom, half of the greatest fighting team the Galaxy has ever known. Suddenly you are a small boy who is twelve years old and more frightened than he has ever been before.

“Commence landing sequence,” orders Major Tom.

“No!” you wail, wanting beyond want to hear the words which will make it all right, the words which will make men glad to die in the hollowness of space. “I want to go back! Take me back!”

“Commence landing sequence,” says Major Tom, and there is nothing in his voice but determination and command.

“Landing sequence initiated,” you sob, touching heavy fingers to cold control panels. Landing shocks slide from their fairings and lock with a thump. The engine noise rises to a scream. Major Tom brings the X15 Astrofighter in low above the rooftops like Santa Claus on his sled and stops it dead in the air over the turning circle at the end of the street. Housewives’ morning coffees grow cold as their imbibers stand in their picture windows, babies in arms, to view the spectacle of the Astrofighter touching down. Whipped into tiny tornadoes, dust eddies chase down the street away from the downdraft. There is a gentle touch, as soft as a mother’s finger upon a nightmaresnared cheek: touchdown.

“Power down,” says Major Tom, but before the noise of the engines has whispered away to nothing his canopy is open, his harness unbuckled, and he is running down the street to a house with number thirty-two on the gatepost and a lovely tan-and-white hearth-rug dog lying on the front step. Behind that picture window, too, there is a woman, with a coffee cup in one hand and the head of a small boy of about twelve under the other.

Then the world folds up on itself like one of those origami fortune-tellers you used to make in school. Major Tom’s tight shiny uniform rips and shreds as he runs and the wind whips the scraps away to reveal a new uniform beneath, dark green with silver buttons. An X15 Astrofighter lifts into the air above Clifton Road on a pillar of light, canopy open, and climbs away into forever. Your uniform is gone, and the gentle pressure on your head is not the pressure of a helmet but the pressure of a small, slender hand and you realize that you are the boy in the picture window as the X15 dwindles into a shining dot and winks out. You are held, you are trapped under the gentle hand, marooned on the Planet of Nightmares.

Now Major Tom is at the car and he waves at you and all you can do is wave back at him, for the words you want to shout, the warnings you want to scream, rattle round and round and round in your head like pebbles in a wave and will not be cast out.

Now he has the door open. Now he is in the car. Door shut, belt on, key in the ignition—

This time you know the blast for what it is. This time you are prepared and can appreciate its every vital moment in dreadful action-replay.

The ball of light fills the interior of the Ford Sierra. An instant after, still twilit by the killing light, the roof swells up like a balloon and the doors bulge on their hinges. Another instant later the windows shatter into white sugar and then the picture window before you flies into shards, a gale of whirling knives carried on a white wind that blasts you from your feet and blows you across the room in a whirling jumble of glass and smashes you into the sofa. The skin of the car disintegrates and the pieces take flight. The hood follows through the window to join you on the sofa. The roof has blown clean away and is flying up to heaven, up to join God. The car roars into flames and within, behind the flames, a black puppet thing gibbers and dances for a few endless moments before it falls into crisp black ashes.

A red rain has spattered the wallpaper. There is not a window intact on Clifton Road. Your mother is lying at a crazy angle against the door, her dressing gown hitched around her waist. Out in the drive the pyre roars and trickles of burning fuel melt the tarmac. Smoke plumes into the sky, black oily smoke, and there at the place where your eyes are drawn, the place where the smoke can no longer be seen, there is a bird-bright white dot: an Imperial X15 Astrofighter coming in from space, and now you know that it must happen all over again, the landing, the running Major Tom, the strange transformations, the man in the green uniform stepping into his car, the explosion, the burning, the Astrofighter coming in for a landing, the changes, the blast, the burning, the Astrofighter, the blast, the burning, the landing, the blast, the burning, landing blast burning, blast burning blast burning blast burning, over and over and over.

“Major Tom!” you cry, “Major Tom, don’t leave me! Daddy! Daddy!”

* * * *

When the alarms had sounded, when the flashing lights had thrown their thin red flickering shadows across the floor, she had said to herself, He’s dead, they have lost him, and though the world had ended she could not bear any hatred in her heart for those who had killed her son. They had acted in good faith. She had consented. All responsibility was hers. She could forgive them, but never herself. God might forgive Catherine Semple, but she never would.

Gone, she thought, and had risen from her chair to leave. Empty coffee cups and women’s magazines covered the table. She would slip away quietly while the alarms were still ringing and the lights still flashing. Nurses’ running footsteps had come chasing down the corridors, but at the door the sudden, terrifying quiet had stopped her like ice in the heart. Then, after the storm had come, the still, small voice, pitifully frail and poignant.

“Major Tom! Major Tom! Don’t leave me! Daddy! Daddy!”

“I won’t,” she had whispered. “I won’t leave you,” and everything had stopped then. It was as if the whole city had fallen silent to hear the cries of the new nativity, and then with a shudder the world had restarted. Lines had danced and chased across the oscilloscopes, rubber bladders had breathed their ersatz breaths, valves had hissed, and the electronic blip of the pulsebeat had counted out time. But even she had known the difference. The red lights which had been red so long she could not remember them being any other color were now defiantly green, and though she could not read the traces she had known that they were the normal signs of a twelve-year-old boy waking gently from a troubled, healthy sleep. She could feel the warmth from his bed upon her skin and smell the smell that was not the reek of sickness but the smell of sickness purged, disease healed.

She remembers all this, she remembers the nurses, she remembers the handshakes and the hugs and the hankies, she remembers Dr. Montgomery’s lips moving, but the words escape her, for time has been jumbled up and nurses, reporters, doctors, photographers, are all stacked next to each other without meaningful order, like a box of antique photographs found in an attic. She remembers flashguns and journalists, video cameramen trailing leads and sound engineers, television news reporters; she remembers their questions but none of her answers.

Now she sits by the bedside. There is a cold cup of coffee on the arm which the friendly nurse from County Monaghan had brought her. Dr. Montgomery and the MacKenzie woman, the one with the look of computers behind her eyes, answer questions. She does not pretend to understand what they have done but she knows what it might have been. Ignored for a while she can sit and watch her son watch her back. Unseen by any cameras, eyes meet and smile. There has been pain, there will be pain again, but here, now, there is goodness.

Outside it seems to have stopped snowing, but by the cast of the darkening sky she knows that it will not be for long. The lights of an Army Lynx helicopter pass high over West Belfast, and if she squeezes her eyes half shut she can make herself believe that they are not the lights of a helicopter at all but the rocket trail of Major Tom, flying home from Andromeda.