Ten Lee pulled off her helmet. She stared through the viewscreen in silent wonder, her open-mouthed regard unusually expressive. “Some scholars say that the void is the physical embodiment of the state to which we all aspire, Joshua.”
“Josh,” Mackendrick said from behind them. “If you and the Dalai Lama wouldn’t mind helping me to my unit…”
Bennett unfastened himself and moved over to Mackendrick. The old man looked pale, as if the stress of takeoff and phase-out had been too much. He could hardly stand, and it took Bennett and Ten Lee supporting each arm to assist him from the flight-deck. They moved down the corridor to the suspension chamber. The three suspension units—long silver containers resembling nothing so much as coffins—stood side by side in the centre of the room.
Mackendrick lay down in the form-shaped padding and sighed as sub-dermal capillaries eased themselves into his flesh. The transparent cover hummed shut over his unconscious body. In four months, when phase-out of the void was accomplished, he would be woken up.
Bennett was due to come out of suspension at the midpoint stage of the voyage, to assist Ten Lee in routine systems checks. Ten Lee had requested that she remain unsuspended for the duration of the flight. She wished to meditate. She had even brought along meagre rations to last her until landfall, vegetarian fare consisting of lentil bread and soya cakes, even though the ship was equipped with pre-packed food supplies.
Bennett left the suspension chamber and moved along the corridor to his berth. He lifted the simulated identity hologram from his bag and placed it on the bedside unit. He had never talked to Ella’s ghost anywhere other than the memorial garden; it was strange to think that he could commune with her so far from home. He moved around the small room, setting up the projectors and receivers at strategic positions. Then he sat on the narrow bunk and placed his finger-tips on the touch-sensitive module.
She appeared before him, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room, and his heart lurched. The SIH had assessed the passage of time and changed Ella’s style of dress accordingly. It must have been evening back on Earth, bedtime, for his sister was wearing her crimson pyjamas.
She leapt up and stared around the room. She looked at Bennett and beamed. “Hi, Josh.” A frown. “Where are we?” She ran to the viewscreen, reached up on tip-toe, leaned forward and peered out.
Bennett watched her, some unnameable emotion, poignant almost beyond endurance, swelling in his chest. The sight of her here, out of the usual context of the memorial garden, served to heighten the reality of her image and so emphasise the fact of her non-existence. Bennett was reminded of the many places she had never been, the many experiences she had never lived to enjoy.
She turned to him, a look of wonder transfixed on her pretty features. “Are we in space, Josh? Are we?”
“We’re aboard a Cobra lightship, Ella. You always said you wanted to go into space.”
“Hey!” she exclaimed, turning to the viewscreen and staring out at the flickering tracer of starlight streaming around the contours of the ship. “This is fantastic, Josh! Thanks a million times!”
She jumped on to the padded seat before the view-screen, turned so that she could stare out at the void and glance from time to time at Bennett. She hugged her legs and gave a conspiratorial grin. “Is this my birthday present, Josh?”
“Your birthday?”
He smiled, caught. Her birthday was on the twenty-seventh, tomorrow, and in the past he had always avoided communion with Ella on her birthday, the anniversary bringing to mind thoughts and memories too painful to relive. The SIH was programmed so that it would present a never-ageing Ella, an Ella forever ten years old and full of health. Shortly after her tenth birthday, more than twenty years ago, she had died.
Bennett remembered the birthday party at the hospital, the forced cheer of the occasion, the almost desperate desire of his mother and father to celebrate the day as if nothing was amiss. But Ella had been woozy with powerful sedatives, increasingly fraught from having to endure the protracted, almost desperate festivities of parents too scared to admit to themselves that this birthday would likely be her very last. Bennett had bought her a present, spent much of his savings on a small computer diary, perhaps with the subconscious hope that she would be able to complete the year’s entries. But she had been too tired to open it. A few days after her death, Bennett had walked out into the desert and buried it in the sand.
“This is the best birthday present I’ve ever had, Josh! Are we going to Mars?” Her eyes widened at another thought. “Are we going to Jupiter, Josh? All the way out to Jupiter!”
Bennett smiled. “Even further, Ella. We’re travelling faster than light towards the Rim of the galaxy.”
“Far out!” she breathed, fingering a strand of hair from her eyes and gazing out at the light show.
Bennett watched her, understanding now why he had summoned her.
“Ella.”
She turned, still smiling.
“The last time I spoke to you…” he began.
She frowned with the effort of recollection. “Oh, four days ago—you’d just got back from Redwood Station, hadn’t you? And you said Daddy wanted… euthanalia?”
“Euthanasia,” Bennett said. “I visited him that day at the hospital. I was with him when he died. I…” He knew why the admission was so hard to make. “I didn’t go to his funeral, Ella. It was today, the day we left Earth. Do you understand, Ella?”
She nodded, very serious. “Of course I do. It’s okay, Josh. Daddy would have understood.”
“Do you think it matters, if you miss a person’s funeral?”
She pulled her thinking-cap face. At last she smiled. “I don’t think so,” she said, and with what might have been little-girl logic or computer sophistry went on: “I mean, the person doesn’t know you weren’t there, do they?”
He stared at her. He recalled what had happened, all those years ago, when he had returned from the desert after burying her stupid, useless diary. His mother had given him a suit to change into and told him that they were to attend Ella’s funeral, which seemed to Bennett in his youthful ignorance an event that could only compound his sense of loss. How could he have known that the funerary ritual was a necessary part of the grieving process, a cathartic experience that had to be endured?
Now he reached out to the touch-pad. Ella, in the process of swinging down from the seat, froze in mid-leap, one leg pointing to the floor, her mouth open to speak to him.
He stared at her suspended image and, involuntarily, found himself telling her: “The day of your funeral, Ella… It was so hot. I still couldn’t believe you were dead. I mean, I knew, intellectually. I knew I’d never see you again, but something inside me just couldn’t accept the fact. I suppose it was too terrible an idea to grasp.” He paused. “It was so hot and the thought of you in that coffin… They were going to cremate you, and I couldn’t take it. I’m sorry, Ella. I’m sorry I didn’t go to your funeral.” He paused again, wondering why he had waited until now to admit the guilt he had kept buried for years.
They had driven to the grave garden in Mojave, and followed the procession as Ella’s coffin was carried on an electric bier to the crematorium. At the sight of the building, pumping out the smoke of the previous cremation, something had snapped within him and he had vomited down his suit. He had complained of stomach pains and doubled over for effect, anything to be spared the trial of experiencing the funeral, the scattering of his sister’s ashes in the pit where a tree would be planted in her name. It had worked: a family friend had rushed him to her nearby house, where he had washed himself and changed into clothes too big for him, and said that he needed to lie down. From the settee in the lounge of the stranger’s house he had watched the smoke rise above the tree-tops.