The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year - Volume Eight (83 page)

"What do you want to know?" he said.

"Would you have gone?"

"Yes sir, I would."

"If the other lad hadn't flown, like?"

Dale drained his glass. "If Rodriguez had been pulled, I'd have taken his seat. If the programme had continued, I'd have had a flight of my own."

"And you'd have gone –"

"Wham, bam, straight to the Moon. That's where I was going. That's where Rodriguez went."

"Jasus," Regan said. "Tis a quare thing." He returned his attention to the pint in front of him. "You tell it well though, you tell it well."

Dale couldn't figure out if he was being serious or not. He stared at the empty glass in his hand, how it caught the light. "Rodriguez," he said at last.

Regan looked at him. "What's that now?"

"Rodriguez was a better pilot than I was. Christ, he flew that bird the whole way down without a pair of wings to carry him."

"This was the crash, it was?"

"Disintegration," Dale said. "
Aquarius
didn't crash, it disintegrated mid-flight." Around him, the regulars had grown quiet. No one had gotten this much out of Dale before.

"I thought they all died when it came apart," Regan said gently. "Tis what the papers said."

"They didn't die until they hit the water," Dale said. "Everything else came apart, but the crew module retained integrity until it hit the ocean. Which is more than I can say for those penny-pinchers in Congress, those smooth-talking Washington slicks scurrying to avoid the blame. 'Organisational causes,' they called it, 'Poor technical decision-making.' And after all the times we tried to warn them. Ah," he said, "I don't know." He slid his glass back to the bartender who looked quickly at Regan before refilling it.

"I was the CAPCOM," Dale said. "You know, in the movies, when they say,
Houston, we have a problem?
Well I was the guy they're talking to, I was Houston. They like to have the alternates wear that headset. The thinking is that we're best trained to understand what's going on up there."

"And what was?" Regan whispered. "Going on up there, I mean?"

"Rodriguez and the others were alive for two minutes, thirteen seconds," Dale said. "Thermal protection failure. Loss of RCS. He couldn't alter his approach, couldn't tip the capsule those vital few degrees. And all the while they knew exactly what was happening."

"What did they say?"

"All Rodriguez said was
uh-oh
." Dale emptied his glass again. "The downlink went dead then and that was it."

"And?"

Dale looked Regan in his hooded eyes. "And that was it," he said again. "
Aquarius
suffered what they call 'failure of vehicle with loss of human life.' I saw it myself, dozens of sources blossoming on the radar. I saw it again later on, laid out on the floor of a hangar at the Cape. Everything reduced to slag. We all understood the risks, but –"

"But you thought it'd never happen to someone that you knew?"

Dale shook his head. "No, I never knew how I was going to feel when it happened. God," he said, "when I could think about it clearly, when I could process it, you know, I was relieved."

"…"

"I thought to myself, that could have been me up there." His head sunk deep between his shoulders.

"Ole human beings are strange," Regan said.

Down the bar, a heavy, bovine man was listening intently. He nodded.

"You can't be expected to be rational," Regan went on. "Not with the likes of that going on around you."

But Dale wasn't paying any attention. "Rodriguez walked on the Moon," he said. "And he was alive the whole way down, I know it." He held up his glass to the bartender.

"Go home," was the reply.

"He's right," Regan said. "You'll pay no respects like this."

"Ah," said Dale, standing up. He missed Bartley and McGovern, and couldn't imagine where they might have got to. He thought of them as crewmates, strapped in beside him in the nose of some heavy-lifting firecracker and bickering about the running of the parish or talking about the weather like it was a new event. He laughed at that to himself all the way to the B&B, his mood darkening then in the vagueness of the empty room.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, he stared at the small black canister which stood upright on the dresser. "I bet you've got something smart to say," he muttered before he fell asleep.

M
orning. Scraping birdsong and the hot, fierce lantern of a disappointed sun. A dull halo of the night before hung crooked on Dale's skull when he woke, a liquordog, as Rodriguez would have said. It was not without cause that Dale seldom touched the hard stuff. With great, unshaven indignity he presented himself for breakfast but by some small mercy it was quiet, his hosts tuned obsessively to the conditions of their guests. They had seen it all before, of course.

"Fr. O'Grady's back," Thomas said, nose deep in his newspaper.

"Saw him last evening," Catherine said. "He's looking forward to meeting you." There were no sandwiches from her this morning. It was as though she knew his days of fishing were at an end. "He should be out of mass within the hour," she added.

"Thanks."

Outside a soft breeze rolled in from the Atlantic. Dale took his time walking through the village, stopping along the way to buy a bottle of water. When he reached the church he stood outside for almost twenty minutes. Clouds limped slowly through the sky and it felt wrong to go in so he walked on, circling around for many hours. Bartley and McGovern were nowhere to be found, not even by the shore.

At dusk, with a gold moon shining overhead, he returned to the limestone church and stood in the doorway as a young man in black fussed around the altar.

"Evening, Padre," Dale said.

O'Grady stared at him as if trying to place the countenance. "Yes," he said at last. "You must be the spaceman." His eyes had the smallest pupils Dale had ever seen, mere pinpricks, though with a curious, inviting depth. "Strange visitor from another planet, eh?" He waved the American inside. "Dale, isn't it?" He did not pause for a reply. "What can I do for you, Dale?"

"It's about Rodriguez," Dale said. "A friend of mine. He died in an accident."

"The, ah, the
Aquarius
pilot, yes?"

Dale nodded. He put his hands in his pockets. The air felt heavier in here. "This..." he said. "Well… This is where his people were from, I guess you'd say."

O'Grady moved down among the pews. He smelt faintly of the sacristy. "Rodriguez," he said carefully. "Not really many of them this side of the Shannon."

"Fitzpatricks," said Dale, "on his mother's side. Grandparents came out a long time ago. I don't know when."

"Well, how about that," O'Grady said. "An Irish astronaut. Now isn't that something?"

"He was hardly Irish," Dale said.

"If he could play for the soccer team he was Irish," the priest said firmly.

Dale couldn't help but smile at the man's excitement. "That's not really the point."

"That's always the point." He was back on the altar now, pottering around, adjusting the position of plates and candles and embroidery to suit his own baffling idiosyncrasies.

"No," said Dale, following to the edge of the marble steps. "The point is… I brought him home. It's what he wanted."

The priest's frantic motions ceased. His eyes drifted across the empty chapel and then back to Dale. "I didn't know there was a body," he said.

"There wasn't."

"Then –"

Dale allowed himself sit down in the front pew. "Most of what was recovered was unidentifiable," he said. "The temperatures, the impact. The undifferentiated remains were interned in Arlington."

"And those that were... differentiated?"

Dale removed the small black canister from his jacket and stood it on the seat beside him. "Identified remains were returned to family," he said. "But Rodriguez didn't have family."

O'Grady looked at the small metal can. He very gently picked it up, surprised at its weight. "And this –"

"The surviving remains of Commander Mike Rodriguez, USN. NASA Astronaut Group 19."

The priest blessed himself.

"We flew off the
Truman
together in the war," Dale said.

O'Grady frowned.

"That's what you do in a war, Padre. But wanting to go into space, that was different. We go in peace and all that?"

O'Grady was quiet for a long moment. "It occurs to me," he said at last, "that there's something I should show you." Still holding the canister, he led Dale back into a dark corner of the church, through an old low door with a gothic arch.

"Where are we going?"

"You'll see." The priest started on the tight spiral of the bell tower stairs and Dale trailed after him, his hand feeling the way along the undressed stone. It was dark and cold, the walls showing evidence of damp, and at the top was a cramped, shuttered room, the floor of which had been boarded out. There was no bell.

"We replaced it," O'Grady said, as if reading Dale's mind. He patted a fat loudspeaker affixed with brackets to the wall. "Bullhorn," he said, delighted with himself. "You'd never know the difference."

"Then what do you use this place for?"

"Ah…" O'Grady knelt by the far wall, beside a long bundle Dale had failed to notice. "I use it for this," the priest said, unwrapping the canvass and displaying its contents to the American.

"A telescope?"

O'Grady grinned.

"You have a telescope?"

"Help me set it up." He passed Dale the tripod and then the mount as he went about inspecting the reflector.

Dale stood the tripod in the centre of the floor and began locking it into place.

"A little higher," the priest said. "Yes, there. Perfect." He handed Dale the telescope itself. "Here," he said. "You know how to do this?"

"Uh-huh."

"Great." He stood back and began to open up the wooden shutters.

The bright night streamed in, and beneath the colour of the moon Dale could see the grey hills rolling off above the village. O'Grady caught him staring and took over assembly of the telescope.

"The Burren," the priest said. "Bare stone for as far as you can see. No soil only in the cracks between the rocks, no rivers or lakes. Not enough water to drown a man, not enough wood to hang him –"

"And not enough flat ground for him to land his aircraft." Dale shook his head and smiled. "Rock and mountains and boulders and dust."

"Sorry?"

"Something Rodriguez told me once."

"You know," O'Grady said quietly, "you can't wear the armband forever."

"Copy that." Dale thought about the hearings, the investigation, the names cut into the granite wall at Kennedy. He thought about those pieces of
Aquarius
laid out across the hangar floor, little more than scrap and garbage. Rodriguez, the tone of his voice; no worry or no anger, just surprise.
Uh-oh.

There was nothing anybody could have done.

"Here," O'Grady said, stepping back from the telescope. The American took his place above the instrument, turned the focus slightly and watched another world jump sharply into view. The Moon, itself a great mirror bathing in the sun; its soft mountains rising off romantic maria, the Ocean of Storms, the Sea of Rains, the Lakes of Excellence and Perseverance…

"Man," Dale said, "that's beautiful."

O'Grady took a turn and murmured his agreement while Dale stood back and looked up at the sky. Mark-one eyeball, they called it in flight school. Sometimes there's just no substitute.

"There," he said suddenly, raising his arm to the southern sky where a new star bloomed and flew in a short arc before fading back again into the darkness. "The Space Station," Dale said. "Will you look at that."

The priest peered up just in time. "Impressive," he said.

Dale laughed. "I could have gone there once, you know."

"You can't still go?"

"I suppose. Take a ride with the Russians. Ah, but it wouldn't be the same. I'm a pilot, an explorer. I'm not a hitchhiker."

O'Grady nodded.

"You know," Dale said, "I can still remember going to the Space Centre as a kid and asking my mom if I could stay up all night when they landed the first man on Mars." He laughed. "I really thought they'd do it too. Hell, I thought
I'd
get to do it once I joined the programme."

"Could happen yet."

"Maybe," said Dale, "but then again maybe it's as well I'm out. Space is hungry, Padre. This business, it devours people. I've been devoured by it. It mightn't hurt to take the time to…" He trailed off. "I don't know."

"Yes you do."

The astronaut smiled. "To consider it, I suppose. To get my head around it."

O'Grady leaned back against the wall. "You know," he said, "I'll bury your friend here if you like. But are you sure that's what he wanted?"

Dale stared at the canister where the priest had placed it on the floor and wondered at the sad strange journey which had brought it here, all the questions which surrounded it. He looked out through the open shutters, across the otherworldly hills. Nothing was certain anymore, nothing at all.

Rodriguez, if he could have seen him, would have laughed his ass off.

S
oon after that he left O'Grady in the tower. There'd been a chaplain of the same mould aboard the
Truman
, he recalled; could get inside your head like nobody's business. It was not a shock to find another here; priests were all of a kind, Dale thought, though even so there was something very likeable about O'Grady. Not the astronomy or even the rudimentary philosophy. No, it was completely separate. He dared to call it enthusiasm and immediately felt bad.

Making his way down the narrow stairs and out through the church, Dale found Bartley and McGovern waiting outside for him, the latter with the palm of his hand pressed firm against the wall.

"Heard you'd finally gone to see the priest," McGovern said.

"This one was worried for ya," Bartley added, shaking his head.

McGovern shrugged. "Civility never broke a man's jaw."

"Clearly you've never been in a pilots' ready room," Dale said. "But thank you, Gerry. I appreciate it."