Back to ‘A Note on Flicker Drive’:
Now in 2053 Corporation ships flicker out from Nova Central, from Daedopolis, and from Hubble Straits to the planets of seven galaxies; in them go our deep-spacers whose daring is a bright flame in the darkness all around us, on their shoulders the Deep Space Command emblem with our motto: ‘SEMPER LONGIUS’, ‘ALWAYS FARTHER’.
*
Puts a lump in your throat, doesn’t it. Those of us who made a living being sent here and there as maximum-probability (but not dead-certainty) waves sometimes wondered what sort of effect flicker drive might have on us. Potency and fertility were major concerns but those fears proved groundless. Cynics like me, pondering the high pay and the easy life, wondered sometimes if there might not be some kind of a catch to the whole thing and I was not terribly surprised one evening towards the end of October 2052 when, as I sat in The Black Hole in London Central refreshing my solitude with Glenfiddich, a colleague stuck a copy of Nature under my nose and pointed to a little item headed Tempus Fugit:
Drs Melissa Chundera and Ernestine Morrison of the Daedalus Institute have published the results of a five-year study of deep-space personnel travelling on flicker drive. Their controversial report establishes a definite connection between flicker travel and accelerated cellular and neuronal decay; they estimate that a half-second Earth-Elapsed-Time flicker jump to the Second Galaxy might consume as much as two months of life expectancy. A second study now under way is expected to show a comparable effect on metals and other substances.
As the Financial Timesfax reported a plunge in the value of deep-space shares, Corporation Top Exec have, not surprisingly, challenged the Chundera-Morrison life-expectancy findings, claiming that coincidental data have been transmuted by statistical alchemy into apparent cause and effect. As to the deterioration of metal and other substances, they say that constant monitoring and safety checks have shown this to be no greater than in conventional spacecraft.
The colleague who brought this to my attention had done twelve more flicker jumps than I had so we both had a few more drinks and told each other that Drs Chundera and Morrison hadn’t taken into consideration the preservative effects of alcohol.
7
Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh: …
I wonder if others have, as I do, the little tribunal of the dusk. The twelve of them don’t require the physical twilight — they’ll sit whenever there’s twilight in the soul and the bat wings of memory and guilt come flittering through the crepuscule. The look of them varies with the occasion: sometimes they’re human; sometimes they’re owls.
Judith had long black hair, brown eyes of sybilline intensity, a melancholy face and a sinuous figure. I met her at a Camera Obscura recital in the Thames Concordia Dome. It was summer, the river lights and those of the Raft City slums seemed magical in the luminous dusk, and I was alone. She was in the seat next to mine and halfway through the Adagio of the Schubert C Major String Quintet I noticed that she was crying. The sight of a good-looking woman being sad made me lust for entry to the privacy of her sadness. She began to look through her bag with no apparent success so I handed her a tissue and she smiled her thanks.
In the interval I asked if I could buy her a drink. She said yes and we went to the Overlook Bar. ‘Does Schubert always make you cry?’ I said.
‘Sometimes everything makes me cry,’ she said: ‘the lights on the water, the sound of the wirecars coming into the platform, the look of the sky.’
We ended up at my place that evening and in no time at all we were talking fragic. ‘Moony, moony glimmers,’ she said. ‘Lost and treasure found so deep and sleeping birds.’ It was only a matter of weeks before I told her that I loved her.
‘Are you part of my reality now?’ she said.
‘Always.’
‘You’ll leave me one day.’
There flashed into my mind Elijah on Carmel, face between his knees. ‘Why do you say that?’ I said.
‘I just know.’
I was twenty-two, just made Second Navigator. She was twenty-eight, a stage designer. On my next downtime in London we hoppered up to Dundee, got a surface hirecar permit, and drove up through Recreation Reserve 7 to the Moray Firth. At the RR7 checkpoint we paid our toll and had a Rescue 2-Way plugged into the dashboard. An electronic sign said:
CORPORATION RECREATION RESERVE 7
TODAY’S AIR CONTENT IS GREEN 3.
OZONE READING RED 1.
U-V PROTECTION MUST BE WORN!
24-HR PATROLS ON DUTY.
IF YOU ARE TRAVELLING WITH
A CLONE OR A ROBOT
YOU MUST HAVE A PERMIT.
REPORT ALL DANGER SIGHTINGS ON D1.
FOR RESCUE CALL R1
AND SPECIFY TYPE OF EMERGENCY.
The sky over the Cairn o’Mount Road through the Grampians was immense and complex: it had a foreground, a middle distance, and a background receding to the beginning of time under vast architectures of cumulonimbus and stratocumulus clouds roofed over with a magisterial darkness. At first there’d been sunshine but up ahead a curtain of rain hung over the mountains and we drove into it. Judith turned on the car radio and got Number One on the charts, Dark Matter with ‘Planetary Fade’:
Flick flick, flick and fade, John,
flick and fade.
Flick flick, flick and fade, John,
on the planet where you are.
After the rain came sleet and snow, then a clear grey light like the first day of the world and a tawny owl low over the heather. Neither of us had ever seen an owl before: there it was, astonishingly real with its flat face and the grey distance receding behind it. ‘Look!’ we both said at once. ‘An owl!’ and I felt that with those words we were vowing never to forget that moment, vowing to be faithful to it and each other for ever.
We reached the Moray Firth without sighting any dangers or needing to be rescued and found ourselves a hotel in Portknockie, a sometime herring port with its brown-sailed luggers long gone: a steadfast and enduring harbour with empty arms, thick flakes of rust in the shape of big ring-bolts, a silence full of the ghost shouts of departed fishermen, gulls crying, and the wind moaning to itself on Green Castle, Bow Fiddle, Port Hill.
‘The luggers and the herring are gone,’ said Judith.
‘But not us,’ I said. ‘Rings and ropes and baskets.’
‘So many voices,’ said Judith. ‘So many stars beneath the sea,’ and we held each other close. In those three days everything that we did, everything that I saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched imprinted itself vividly on my memory so that later I was able to identify that time in the same way that one names, with the help of a book, the rare bird only briefly seen: yes, it had this and this and this. That was what it was, then: happiness.